Where is the rabbi? In heaven, no doubt - the neo-Hasidic I. L. Peretz

I. L. Peretz was expert with the sort of story I wrote about yesterday, detailed, small-scale. See not just his stories, but the remarkable Impressions of a Journey through the Tomaszow Region in the Year 1890 (1891), supposedly the record of an actual research expedition on the condition of rural Jews, but who are we kidding.

His signature pieces, though, are a series of neo-Hasidic fables or folk tales. Peretz himself was not a Hasid, and not at all a mystic, and in general the more secular, rationalistic Jews saw the Hasidism as misguided and its followers as superstitious gulls. That's what makes Peretz's fables so surprising. They are not satirical, or not merely so.

In "If Not Higher," all three pages of it, a Hasidic rabbi vanishes every Friday morning. Where is he? "In heaven, no doubt," his followers say.

"But a Litvak came, and he laughed. You know the Litvaks. They think little of the holy books but stuff themselves with Talmud and law. So this Litvak points to a passage in the Gemara - it sticks in your eyes - where it is written that even Moses our Teacher did not ascend to heaven during his lifetime but remained suspended two and a half feet below. Go argue with a Litvak!"

The rationalist outsider, the Litvak, decides to debunk the miracle. He conceals himself and follows the rabbi secretly engages in charitable acts. The Litvak becomes a disciple of the rabbi. Whenever anyone claims that the rabbi ascends to heaven, he no longer laughs, but "only adds quietly, 'if not higher'."

So the Hasidic believers in fact are superstitious and ignorant. Except that they are correct, the rabbi is a miracle worker. Except the miracle is the result of acts, not divine intervention. Except the acts are directed from where, exactly? Who wins the argument, the Hasids or the rationalists?

That's how Peretz's fables work. Ironies follow ironies. Meanings unfold one after the other. The Hasids are fools, but so is the Litvak, so are the secularists. So is Peretz, maybe. That's something else he shares with Chekhov - they're both modest writers, not pronouncers of grand doctrines.

My library has an illustrated, slightly simplified, children's' version of "If Not Higher," as well of a few other Peretz tales. I read the version in The I. L. Peretz Reader, a remarkable book. I think I said that yesterday, too. Don't miss "Yom Kippur in Hell."

Got any stories for me? - Yes, I have - I. L. Peretz and "Stories"

This week, God willing, I wrap up the Yiddish project. More on that later. Now I want to look at a great writer I somehow never wrote about, I. L. Peretz,* an exact contemporary of Sholem Aleichem's. His foil, in a way. Save that for later as well, please.

One lesson I have learned: Yiddish fiction is unusually concerned with story-telling. Yiddish writers did not need postmodernism to learn about meta-fiction. Self-reference is embedded in the culture. In modern Yiddish literature, two traditions come together: oral culture and the folktale, and the written, learned culture of the Torah and the Talmud, of commentary on commentary. Actually, these traditions joined in early 19th century Hasidic literature as well, and probably many times before that.

So the result is Sholem Aleichem's masterful monologues, and Mendele Mocher Sforim's narrative frames, S. Anski's use of folklore, and the two modes of I. L. Peretz's short stories, one the neo-Hasidic fable or parable (tomorrow for those) and the other more Chekhovian, stories about educated, secularized Jews like himself.

A superb one is actually called "Stories" (1903). A young writer, struggling, not quite literally starving, has fallen in love with a Polish girl who wants the stories he tells, symbolic folk tales with princesses and heroes. The stories become the writer's weapon, or perhaps offering, in a frustrated sexual struggle with the girl.

"She opens the door, and asks from the doorway, 'Got any stories for me?'

'Yes, I have.'

If he hasn't, she turns back. She doesn't like him, she says. In fact she's frightened of Jews. But she loves his stories."

We follow the writer around the city as he tries to come up with a new story for the girl. He discovers that it is Passover. Although a non-believer, his story, his imagination, is invaded by Passover stories, some about his own family, some horrible ones about blood libel ("Not for me," he thinks after a grisly one, "that needs a stronger pen than mine.")

Perhaps it is useful to know that holiday stories for newspapers, particularly Passover stories, were important sources of income for Yiddish writers. So the Peretz story is at once a parody of the modern Passover story, and a brilliant example of it.

"Stories" is about the different types of stories in our lives, and their different kinds of power. I think it's really an all-time great short story. I read it in The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. Ruth Wisse, tr. (this story) by Maurice Samuel.

* Actually, he made a brief appearance with a brief tale during Golem Week.

What made me supplement the endless series of symbols with one more? - Borges and the creative golem, Peretz and the destructive golem

The golem, it really is everywhere. I certainly did not expect it to see its clayey head pop up in Abdourahman A. Waberi's In the United States of Africa (2006), a short, clever alternate history by a novelist from Djibouti, the premise of which is in the title. The progtagonist is a sculptor; sculpture imitates divine creation, see Golem, Legend of - that's the link.

Jorge Luis Borges follows the same thread in his poem "The Golem" (1964), except he's interested in writing, not sculpture:

"Thirsty to know things only known to God,
Judah Léon shuffled letters endlessly,
trying them out in subtle combinations
till at last he uttered the Name that is the Key"*

The resulting golem is a pathetic everyman, mute and uncanny, it's eyes "less human than doglike." It scares the rabbi's cat. Borges admits that he has no textual authority for the cat, "but across the gulf of time I make one out."

This sounds like a parable about creation, the writer's (and in the end, God's) ongoing failure to get things right:

"What made me supplement the endless series
of symbols with one more? Why add in vain
to the knotty skein always unraveling
another cause and effect, with not one gain?"

Sort of an unpleasant question.


I. L. Peretz's tiny story "The Golem" (1893), barely a page, is about destruction, not creation. "Great men were once able to perform great miracles," it begins. No more. Rabbi Loew creates the golem to save the Jews of Prague, and it goes to work:

"Prague filled with corpses. They say it went on like this right through Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, with the clock striking noon, the golem was still intent on its labors."

The Rabbi, a pious man, has in the mean time been studying. His congregation finally requests that he stop the golem's slaughter, because "[s]oon there won't be any Gentiles left to heat the Sabbath ovens or to take down the Sabbath lamps." That's signature Peretz irony, as is the sterile end, where the Rabbi's grandson, long after the golem's deanimation, "still deliberates whether it is proper to include such a golem in a minyan or in a company for the saying of grace."

I mentioned that this story is only a page long, right? One of Peretz's modes is to add layer after layer of meaning to seemingly simple stories. His golem is stored in The I. L. Peretz Reader, a great, great book, which I have not yet written about, probably because it is difficult and slippery.

* The Borges poem is from Selected Poems, pp.192-7. In this stanza, "only," "endlessly," and "trying them out" are inventions of the translator; not a hint of them in the Spanish. Here's a vers libre alternative by blogger James Honzik.

A 19th century Yiddish reading list, pt. 2 - Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholom Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz

Three authors are at the core of early Yiddish literature: S. Y. Abramovitsh aka Mendele Mocher Sforim (1836-1917), Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916), and I. L. Peretz (1852-1915).

Mendele Mocher Sforim* / S. Y. Abramovitsh is the inventor of modern Yiddish literature. He wanted to write for ordinary Jews in their own language. Abramovitsh published his first Yiddish novel, The Little Man serially in late 1864 to 1865. It is narrated by Mendele Mocher Sforim, Mendele the Book Peddler. I don't think he meant it as a pen name, but Abramovitsh brought Mendele back again and again, and the name stuck.

A number of Sforim novels have made it into English at one time or another. The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third (1869) is a must, as well as Fishke the Lame. Other titles: The Wishing-Ring, The Nag aka The Mare, and The Parasite. My library has an anthology, Selected Works of Mendele Moykher-Sfarim, so I'll see what's in that.

Sholom Aleichem's Yiddish collected works fills 28 volumes, mostly short stories, mostly monologues, mostly about rural Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Aleichem is a sort of Yiddish culture hero, and is almost famous because of The Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye the Dairyman (1894-1914) is the source for Fiddler, eight stories in which Tevye tells us about his troubles with his daughters. "Maybe you can tell me, though, why it is that whenever something goes wrong in this world, it's Tevye it goes wrong with?" That's the tone, always comical, or tragicomic, or comitragic.

The Railroad Stories (1902-1910) are also high on my list. This time, it's railroad passengers telling us their stories. After that, what? I have a little Dover collection, Happy New Year! and Other Stories, selected from the 1959 Stories and Satires. I've counted up at least ten other story collections in English, with who knows how much overlap. There's a lot out there.

Aleichem wrote a fake travel guide for the town he used in many stories, Inside Kasrilevke. Chapters include "Hotels", "Theaters", "Fires", "and "Bandits." I can't pass that up. There are at least a couple of novels to try, as well: The Nightingale, Or the Saga of Yosele Solovey the Cantor (1886), and Mottel the Cantor's Son (1916), which takes us to America, along with the author himself, who left Europe for New York City in 1914. Aleichem's funeral was attended by 150,000 mourners, and was covered on the front page of the New York Times.

Aleichem's contemporary I. L. Peretz is a little easier to deal with because of The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. Ruth Wisse. Peretz mostly wrote short stories, as well, but this volume also includes some poetry, travel writing, and a memoir. I've come across at least six other collections as well. My understanding is that Peretz is more of a modernist than Aleichem or Sforim.

The anthology Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, edited by Ken Frieden, is just what it says, and is meant as an accompaniment to Frieden's study Classic Yiddish Fiction, which would be a logical place to continue my research.

Tomorrow, I'll continue my list with everyone who is not named Sforim, Aleichem, or Peretz. I encourage readers to leave any suggestions they might have.

* Or Seforim, or Sefarim.