I. J. Singer's bloodlands novel The Brothers Ashkenazi - the whole world was drenched in blood

I. J. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi (1934-5 serialized in Yiddish, 1936 in English) is a big-sweep historical novel that begins with the takeoff of the weaving industry in Lodz and ends with the Russian Revolution and independence of Poland.  

Some features of the novel: textile factories, assimilating Hasidic Jews, possibly literature’s first depiction of a PowerPoint presentation (“Director Ashkenazi pointed to a chart which revealed that since his sinecure, the factory work force had grown from 3,000 to 8,000 men and women,” 301, tr. Joseph Singer).  One character spends his time “read[ing] Hasidic storybooks about squire who assumed the guise of werewolves in order to harm Jews and about the saints who used sacred blessings to frustrate these wizards and transform them into dogs and tomcats” (100).

But that stuff is not in this novel, which is also full of strikes, revolution, pogroms, and prison.  It is a real “bloodlands” novel, an account of the beginning of the 20th century Eastern European nightmare, especially in the second half, when “[t]he whole world was drenched in blood” (333).  And when the blood starts flowing, for any reason, the Jews suffer the worst.

The Brothers Ashkenazi is surprisingly Russian, not that it is much like any particular Russian novel.  Lodz is, at this time, ruled by Russia.  Revolutionaries get sent to Russian prisons, and German and Polish strikers are murdered by Cossacks.  A good chunk of the novel is set in Petersburg, in order to cover the Russian Revolution, with a few pages from the point of view of Lenin and another that of Czar Nicholas II:  

For a while he did nothing at all.  He followed his usual routine – played patience and dominoes, noted down the weather in his diary, and dined with his retinue.  When the telegrams grew too demanding, he behaved like any henpecked husband and took the advice of his wife, whom he considered his mental superior.  (339, Ch. 53)

A number of chapters essentially abandon the novel’s characters, replacing them with “the soldiers” and “ the rebels” and “the poor housewives.”  That’s pulled from the same chapter; when “the soldiers” refuse to fire on “the poor housewives,” that’s it for hapless Nicolas.  It’s the Russian Revolution in six pages.

It has been so long since I read James Michener that I fear I am wrong, but The Brothers Ashkenazi reminded me of Michener.  I don’t know who a contemporary equivalent might be.  I am expected to be similarly interested in the big history and the little, the true history and the fictional, which serves as something of an exemplar or vehicle, so what does it matter if the characters are one-dimensional and the writing full of clichés.

“Yes, true.  It’s all the Jews’ fault.  They started the was to make money….”

“They ought to be beaten.”

“We Ukrainians know how to handle Jews,” a lame soldier interposed.  “The rope is the only cure for a Jew.”

The others nodded in solemn agreement.

The wagon seemed to throb with blind hatred, ignorance, animal passions.  It choked Yakub like a poison gas, but it didn’t deter him from his mission.  The trains crawled along like a snail.  (394)

What I am trying to say is that this is not the kind of novel where I fuss too much over slow trains being like snails.

Now, that other simile.  I have wondered about this.  The Brothers Ashkenazi was a popular* novel in the United States, with a popular stage adaptation.  Readers of Singer’s novel were well prepared for what they would read in the newspaper over the next ten years.  There are numerous episodes which might lead the newspaper reader of 1940 or 1946 to think “Why, I read about exactly this, in that novel.”  A “poison gas” metaphor borrowed from a World War I battlefield turns into prophecy.  I think part of the power of the novel is that although in some sense a historical novel, it is about a history that is ongoing.

I would not mind reading a book or essay about how fiction had mentally prepared (well or badly) people for the events of World War II.

*  Rebecca Goldstein, introducing the 2010 edition of The Brothers Ashkenazi, writes that “published by Knopf in 1936, it went to the top of the New York Times best seller list, lingering there together with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind” (p. xi).  Adam Hirsch makes much of the connection: “In 1936, two novels dominated the New York Times bestseller list.”  Except it is not true; Singer’s novel was never, as far as I can find, on the best seller list at all, and certainly did not “top” or “dominate” it (number two behind Mitchell was George Santayana's The Last Puritan).  I do not entirely trust this strange old website with the best seller lists, and I certainly did not check every week.  Still: false.  Popular but not that popular.

I. J. Singer's wandering Yoshe Kalb - “Name the cities you visited.” “They cannot be enumerated.”

I. J. Singer’s Yoshe Kalb (1932, tr. from the Yiddish by Maurice Samuel) is another novel about wandering, contemporary with Narcissus and Goldmund.  Goldmund’s wandering was personal, more about finding what is best in life, while poor Yoshe Kalb is expiating a crime, or so he thinks.  He begins as Nahum, a fourteen year-old rabbinical scholar who is married off to the fourteen year-old daughter of a powerful rabbi, and –

I want to interrupt myself.  The world of the novel is that of the Galician Hassidim, by no means representative of other Jewish communities – unrepresentative, even – what I am saying is never marry off fourteen year-olds, to each other or to anyone.  I suppose most of us knew this.

So even the brilliant, well-meaning, pious, but still only fourteen years-old Nahum gets into trouble when jerked out of his home and plunged into what is practically a different culture.  Stricken by his sin, his crime, his mistake, his completely understandable weakness, if it is even that, he wanders Galicia, stripping himself of his identity, becoming the fool Yoshe Kalb.  First half of the novel; second half.  Scholar versus fool, or is it saint, and what is the difference, really?

“Why did you abandon your wife?”

“I had to do that.”

“Where were you?”

“Out in the world.”

“Name the cities you visited.”

“They cannot be enumerated.” (Book 3, 241)

Yoshe Kalb is answering the questions.  Or Nahum is.  Who knows.  He is on trial here, again, near the end of the novel.

I thought the best part of the novel, easily, was the complex satirical depiction of Galician Hassidic life.  It is hopelessly corrupt, with powerful rabbis creating empires based on monetizing the superstitions of their followers, and the sons of the rabbis turned into Machiavellis in their attempt to take over the empire.

Hey, is there a plague in this novel?  There sure is, more or less in the middle, and poor Yoshe Kalb becomes the scapegoat for it.

I. J.’s kid brother wrote an amusing, loving, informative introduction to the 1965 edition of Yoshe Kalb, in which he says that New York’s Galician Jews were thrilled to see themselves depicted in the Forward, where the novel was first published, since the fiction had previously been about the Litvaks, the Lithuanian Jews.  I found this pretty funny, since the picture of Galician Jewish life is so horrible.  I can imagine a reader of the Forward saying to me “Exactly, why do you think I’m in New York now?”

Words take on sadder and purer tones - Jacob Glatstein and Moishe-Leib Halpern, American poets

I needed to refresh myself in the other great line of Modernist American poets, the ones who did not write in English.  So I poked around in Benjamin and Barbara Harshav’s American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (1986), which has substantial selections from Jacob Glatstein, Moishe-Leib Halpern, H. Leivick, and four other interesting but lesser poets.  I was really just looking for Leivick, but the book was too interesting.  The poets – the ones I named – all published their first books circa 1920; they’re all immigrants (from Poland, Galicia, and Russia, respectively); they’re all New Yorkers; they’re all secularists but deeply Jewish, working millennia of traditions, stories, and Hebrew literature into their poems.

Glatstein was the language Modernist, writing poems like “If Joyce Had Written in Yiddish,” not included here because it is all multi-language puns, and hardly translatable.

from “We the Wordproletariat” (1937)

The sky, the blue hazard, went out.
You still sit and seek the shadows of a word
And scrape the mold off meanings.
Words take on sadder and purer tones.

The cursed night has got into your bones.

Soon this would become all too true, and events in Europe worsened Glatstein moved to a more directly expressive language suitable for mourning, anger, and despair:

from “Without Jews” (1946)

Without Jews there will be no Jewish God.
If we go away from the world,
The light will go out in your poor tent…
The last Jewish hour flickers.
Jewish God, soon you are no more.

I would love to read more of this later poem – only Part I is in this anthology:

from “Dostoevksy” (1953)

Dostoevsky put God
on his table
Like a bottle of vodka
And guzzled.
He retched and vomited,
Sobered up
And was drawn again to God
As to the bottle.

Moishe-Leib Halpern had more of a journalistic spirit.  His poems are full of characters, slang, politics, and New York.  Energy.

from “My Restlessness Is of a Wolf” (1919)

My restlessness is of a wolf, and of a bear my rest,
Riot shouts in me, and boredom listens.
I am not what I want, I am not what I think,
I am the magician and I’m the magic-trick.

The poem just continues as a list, with no resolution.  Any finish, any settled point, would go against his restlessness.

Halpern’s posthumous poems, published in 1934, include a number of poems – rants – addressed to his son.  They are a perfect form for him – conversational, emotional, digressive.

from “My Only Son”

I tell him: Son,
Nowadays even a prince
Has to learn how to do something.
And you – touch wood – you’re already a year-and-a-half
And what will become of you?

The world-weary baby, asked to say the Kaddish for his dead father, says “To hel vit it – dats right.”  In another poem, Halpern worries his son will not have a choice of profession:

from “This I Said to My Only Son at Play – and to Nobody Else”

But it’s not to send you a crate of chocolate
That they register your birthday with precision!
Somewhere a tailorboy – one of the Thirty-Six Just, like you –
Already bends over your soldier’s tunic –
And may his hump accuse him for singing at his work!
Anyway, they are already melting lead for rifles…

Maybe I’ll save H. Leivick for tomorrow.

About a third of Moishe-Leib Halpern’s first book has been translated as In New York: A Selection (1982), which is why I did not think I would revisit him here, but he is so much fun in the later poems.  Halpern is also one of the dual subjects of Ruth Wisse’s Little Love in Big Manhattan (1988), a real plunge into the world of these poets, and a great book.  There are a couple of collections of Glatstein in translation, too.  Maybe I will come across one someday.  In the presence of their poems, these seem to be vital American poets, worthy of far more attention than they get, but the Yiddish, their dying language, has kept them in another, minor, category.  They could use new collections.  I doubt they’ll get them.

As good as it'll ever be - Moishe Leib Halpern, Ruth Wisse, and why translation really, really matters

Sanskrit, or Classical Greek, or Gilgamesh, are sufficiently distant from us, and the scholarship in the languages so well developed, that I perhaps take the role of translation in their survival for granted.  I know there are people out there, and have been, for hundreds of years, laboring as caretakers of the language and literature.

Yiddish, though, Yiddish is merely dying, not dead.  I was just reading Ruth Wisse’s Little Love in Big Manhattan (1988), her recreation of the world of the young hotshot Jewish immigrant poets of the turn of the 20th century.  Cool aesthetes or tricky satirists, shoemakers or bohemians, socialists or communists or Communists.  What fun to be young, and in New York, and a poet – was there ever a time when that was not true?

The Manhattan of the ‘00s and ‘10s, though, was unusual, because the city was the entry-point for the largest wave of immigration in American history.  All of these immigrants arrived as young men, and whatever their theories or politics, between their new world of tenements and Yiddish newspapers and sweatshops and their old world of villages and pogroms, they certainly had plenty to write about.  Every poet Wisse mentions was a secularist, but Jewish literature and history is everywhere in their poems.

Wisse keeps her attention on two poets, the best ones, she argues, Moishe Leib Halpern and Mani Leib (no last name, there).  Wisse provides generous excerpts from their work, which is essential, because as far as I can tell, there is only one collection of Halpern in English, and, for Mani Leib, none.  None.  I also read a few of their poems in an anthology of Hebrew and Yiddish poems, the name of which I have forgotten, which is slick work, kid.

Wisse’s title comes from Halpern, a poem about lovers finding privacy in the tenement:

There in the shadowy, dank hall
Right alongside the ground-floor stair –
A weeping girl, attended by
A grimy hand in the mussed-up hair.
- A little love in big Manhattan.

The hair – a whiff of some cheap rinse
The hand – hard, stiff and leathery
Two equal lovers, for whom this is
As good as it’ll ever be.
- A little love in big Manhattan. (Wisse, p. 169)

That’s a bit of “Song: Weekend’s Over,” originally published in 1923 (I think).  Wisse gives a few more stanzas, but not the whole thing.  It’s slangy, the tone jerks around, and it’s obviously a headache to translate well.  I’d love to read the whole thing.

The one Halpern book, In New York: A Selection*, gives me about a third of Halpern’s first book, In Nyu York (1919).  “In a Foreign World” is a poem about the voyage to America – every poet wrote one of these. “Our Garden” – “It takes a magnifying glass \ Just to see a little grass” – is typical of Halpern’s cheery pessimism about New York.  Contrast to the old country, though: the fragments of the long vision of a pogrom, “A Night ,” are sufficiently strong to truly puzzle me.  Why on earth is this not all in English?

“A Night” is in the same tradition as H. Bialik’s “In the City of Slaughter”, or Jeremiah’s “Lamentations.”  Paul Celan knew it.  The poet is a schoolboy in Galicia, but also Moses, and Christ, although Christians bring only violence and terror.  This poem is not cheery, or sardonic, just a nightmare.

They stop on a snowy field
And leave me alone.
On crutches, his head bandaged,
The little man hobbles again.

He calls me king. He kneels.
He asks me my desire.
I say, “It’s clear that I’m alone
And can’t move anymore.”

He winks. A naked skeleton –
Soldiers after it – runs from afar.
It lifts its legs like a hussy
Among the drunks in a bar.

It skips and dances around me,
Roaring and singing,
“May death forever spin
Around you – an eternal ring!” (XX, p. 151)

Dang hard poem to excerpt.  Soon enough – not for a long time, but too soon – the poems of Moishe Leib Halpern will only be available to readers with advanced degrees in Yiddish, or to readers of translations.  Without translations, this literature disappears.  In the long run, no language is immune.  Translators keep culture alive.  Maybe that’s too obvious a point.  Reading Halpern and Mani Leib, I can hardly stop thinking about it.

* Moishe Leib Halpern, In New York: A Selection, ed. and tr. Kathryn Hellerstein, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982.

Wrapping up the 19th century Yiddish literature project

I read most of the Yiddish books I meant to read, almost as many more that I found along the way, and now have an even longer list of books I want to read. A successful project, then. All right.

What am I likely to read next, when I am ready for more? I'll make a list.

1. More Mendele Mocher Sforim / S. Y. Abramovitch. The forefather of Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz is, compared to them, second rate. But I just finished his 1888 version of Fishke the Lame, in which Abramovitch extended an earlier story to novel length. He adds a little bit of plot filler, which is mostly useless, and a lot of, of, of everything - two hundred pages of digressions and descriptions about bath houses and piles of garbage and confidence schemes and country inns and horses and sunsets over the woods. Life, the book is packed with so much life. I'll read more.

2. Yiddish poetry. The poets considered to be the best - Jacob Glatstein, Mani Leib, Moishe Halpern - are all a little too late for the project. Ruth Wisse's Little Love in Big Manhattan, though, about Mani Leib and Halpern, is very tempting.

3. Hebrew. My impression is that "literary" Hebrew literature is rarer than Yiddish during the 19th century. But it exists. H. Bialik is a writer whose name kept showing up. I want to try him, at least.

4. The genuine Hasidic tradition: In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov, and the strange, strange oral tales of Rabbi Nahman. I. L. Peretz knew these inside and out. I've read a bit of this in anthologies. It's wild, not what I expected.

5. More names: Itzik Manger, Y. Y. Trunk, Rakhel Feygenberg, I. J. Singer, (more) I. B. Singer, Chaim Grade, all too late for the project. Isaac Meier Dik and more S. Ansky, in the right period but insufficiently translated. Abraham Cahan and Isaac Babel, contemporaries who chose languages other than Yiddish for their literary works. While I'm at it, why not Cynthia Ozick, Steve Stern, Max Apple, on and on into the 20th century.

Along these lines, the National Yiddish Book Center has an annotated list of 100 great Jewish books that I recommend to anyone wanting to pursue this idea into the 20th century, or away from Yiddish (the list includes Kafka, H. Roth and P. Roth, Isaac Babel and Anne Frank). When I was doing my research, I found only their irritating non-annotated list. Why do they have both on their site? Never mind. It's a good resource. I read and read, and I've still read only twenty of those books.

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions, criticism, and comments. I learned so much. A sheynem dank.

In Praise of Sholem Aleichem

“We have no desire to make extravagant claims: Yiddish literature can boast no Shakespeares, no Dantes, no Tolstois.” That's from the introduction to The Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954), edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, p. 2.

Last year, Harold Bloom echoed this fifty year-old judgment: "There is no Proust or Kafka in this panoply; that is an impossible standard to apply." Actually, there is a Kafka, the same one who wrote about the bug and so on - the fact that he wrote in German, not Yiddish, is just a detail. But that's not my point.

These eminences are right. I know what they mean. Still, Yiddish literature does have Sholem Aleichem, who turns out to be a much bigger figure than I had guessed. His stories contain so much variety of character, so much Jewish life. They range across classes and occupation and education, and across Europe, from Kiev and Odessa to London and even New York City.

Sholem Aleichem's greatest achievement can be found in his monologues and his related first person narrations that imitate speech. In his more conventional novels and other stories, there is a distinct Sholem Aleichem voice, clever, jokey. In the monologues, though, there's a cacophony. Occasionally, when a story turned a new corner or I met a new character, I would compare Sholem Aleichem to Charles Dickens, and then draw back. No, no, Sholem Aleichem's world is not that big. Except in the monologues - there he's the equal of anyone.

I've read five Sholem Aleichem books that I can recommend very highly. The sad-sap schemer and his put-upon wife of The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl; the cheerful nine year-old, Motl, the Cantor's Son; the commercial travelers, third class of The Railroad Stories; the little bit of everything in the collection of monologues Nineteen to the Dozen. That's four.

And then there's Tevye the Dairyman. I'm now convinced that this book, this character, really is a world-class creation. No, not King Lear or Don Quixote, fine, but something much more complex than The Fiddler on the Roof would suggest. I hate to throw around words like proto-existentialist, since I don't know what I'm talking about, but that's the idea. The stories are much more than funny tales of a traditional father's conflicts with his modern daughters (though his warmth and intelligence are certainly appealing). We only hear Tevye's voice, his jokes and endless quotations and family troubles, but somehow that's enough to depict his endless struggle to understand himself, his place in the world, and his ongoing argument with his God.

A day or two ago I called I. L. Peretz the foil of Sholem Aleichem. Peretz was small and deep, Sholem Aleichem big and shallow. More or less. Tevye's an exception.

These five short books fill maybe 900 pages, less. I've read a couple of Sholem Aleichem's novels as well. They have problems, structural mostly. It's not a good thing that The Nightingale (1889) doesn't really take off until the last quarter or so, in a long section about a young woman's wedding and its consequences, although that last part is pretty great. Wandering Stars (1909) is a sprawling, overstuffed mess, but the sprawl and stuffing are themselves quite enjoyable. I plan to read more of his novels, but I'm not expecting to find another Tevye.

Anyway, if I were to recommend a single Yiddish author, among the batch I have read, it would be Sholem Aleichem; Tevye the Dairyman would be the single book. Number two would be Peretz and The I. L. Peretz Reader. Number three - oh, there's too much.

Yiddish and West African literatures - a topic for a Comparative Literature dissertation

Meaning, not for me. For someone else. One thing I've noticed reading Yiddish literature is its similarity to Senegalese literature, to West African literature. Saving the difference, as they say.

My little insight sometime last winter was that 19th century Yiddish literature was a colonial literature. The colonized people were the Jews of the Pale of Settlement; the colonized lands are, now, Byelorussia, Ukraine, and part of Poland. The colonizer, the empire, was Russia. The rule of the imperial power was heavy (the draft, especially), inefficient, bizarre, and at times murderous.

Just as an example, the reason that Yiddish stories concentrate so much on town life is that almost no Jews were allowed to be farmers.* Tevye the Dairyman was unusual in that he worked in agriculture, but if he wanted to buy a field and grow some wheat, he would have had to apply for a special permit, for which there were strict quotas.

The cultural similarities are so striking. In Senegal and in the shtetl, boys went to religious schools and spent hours memorizing ancient passages of Arabic or Hebrew. The pious life of study and prayer was or is a male ideal. Underemployment is rampant - hence the number of middlemen, peddlers, and matchmakers. Beggars are treated with surprising respect, since charity is a pious act. Some of these similarities go back, I presume, to common roots in the Near East.

Someone has to make dinner, though. That's for the women, who have to earn a living while their husbands and sons pray in the study house. The abandoned wife is a central theme of both literatures. The social details differ - in Senegal, the mechanism is not just divorce but polygamy - but the underlying problems are so similar.

Another similarity, of central importance to readers - both literatures, at least in their earlier stages , consist almost entirely of short books, because of the constraints of publishing and the low literacy level of the population. I would hypothesize that this pattern would repeat itself in many "early" literatures. Pushkin and Gogol and Lermontov wrote short books, too, come to think of it.

So I asked ma femme, I asked her "Why hasn't anyone done this?" to which she replied "Who needs the grief?" A good point. But look, here's one Professor Marc Caplan, a Johns Hopkins professor who specializes in both Yiddish and West African literatures. What do you know? Here we see him in action, running a conference panel titled "Deterritorialization After Deleuze." Um. His own paper is “The ‘Minor’ as Methodology: Deterritorialization in Yiddish and African Narrative.” This is not exactly what I had in mind, but I guess that's the way things are done now.

* One of the Yiddish plays I read, Peretz Hirschbein's "Green Fields," was about a little cluster of Jewish farmers. It was written for people living in Lower East Side tenements who had immigrated from the shtetl, and had never set foot on a farm.

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.

Golem! sings about The Railroad Stories

I feel so bad. I forgot, last week, when writing about Sholem Aleichem's The Railroad Stories, to mention the song "Train Across Ukraine," which is actually about The Railroad Stories. This is a new song, from earlier this year, found on the album Citizen Boris by the neo-klezmer band Golem!

The lyrics are little more than a summary of the premise of the stories - the traveler, third-class, tells us that he rides the train. He introduces himself as both Sholem Aleichem and as Hello, How Are You. Come to think of it, that's not correct, since The Railroad Stories are not narrated by Sholem Aleichem. Well, it's creative license, compression. Some of the lyrics are in Yiddish, but I'll bet they just repeat the English.

The link to Sholem Aleichem is in part a memorial and cultural celebration. But it's also an excuse to play a klezmer train song, with whistles and hoots and steam-engine like drumming. Great song. I wish I could link to it, but all I could find was a Youtube video with terrible sound that's not worth anyone's time.

You can go to Golem!'s Myspace page (warning:PLAYS LOUD MUSIC), though, and hear another of their best songs from the same record, "Citizen Boris," the lyrics of which are nothing but the citizenship oath and questions and answers from the citizenship test ("What is the 4th of July? Independence Day"). The song captures both the absurdity and the patriotic wonder of asking a Ukranian grandmother to swear an oath to die for her new country if called to service.

Perhaps I should have mentioned Golem! during Golem Week, but to my knowledge they have never recorded a song about the golem, although there is a golem-like fellow on the cover of their 2006 album Fresh Off Boat (left), which I think is marginally superior to Citizen Boris. If you know where to listen to such things, try the "Golem Hora," or the brilliant "Warsaw Is Khelm." The fools of Khelm, the most stupid people on earth, that's a whole 'nother set of Yiddish folk tales and jokes that I don't believe I've ever mentioned.

Oh look, Golem! gives away "Warsaw Is Khelm." So download it, and see a fragment of the cute video.

Now I feel that I have done my duty to Golem!

Talking is far better, because you never know what may come of it - what make a railroad story a Railroad Story?

I thought I was going to pin down a couple of my favorites among Sholem Aleichem's Railroad Stories, but I'm having trouble doing that, and not because they're all my favorites. I mean, there's some of this, and there's some of that. But I can't stop looking at the frames of the stories.*

Sholem Aleichem could have published all but a few of these stories as pure monologues, like the examples collected in the superb Nineteen to the Dozen: Monologues and Bits and Bobs of Other Things. The monologues in that books are pure - they are uninterrupted, and the reader has to infer the identity of the auditor. In The Railroad Stories, the narrator, the commercial traveler, is always present, but so, potentially, are a train car full of other people.

So in "Baranovich Station," it's important that the teller of the fascinating but unfinished story is in a full car with dozens of listeners. The pain of never hearing the end is that much greater than if there were an audience of just one, and the reader can share his own pain with the fictional crowd. Although, presumably, the reader also has some distance and can appreciate the joke in a way that the audience cannot.

"A Game of Sixty-Six," by contrast, has to be one on one (with the reader looking over the traveler's shoulder). A man relates to the narrator, confidentially, and at length, being cleaned out by card sharks, before suggesting a little game of their own. Our traveler may not be the sharpest card in the deck himself, but:

"I watched him cut the deck; he did it a little too skillfully, a little too fast. And his hands were a little too white. Too white and too soft. Suddenly I had a most unpleasant thought..."

The con man's story wouldn't work in public. The creepy gangster's story in "The Man from Buenos Aires" works the same way. It requires intimacy.

But sometimes, as in two stories told about an unimportant branch line called the Slowpoke Express, the railroad car provides a stage, even for an audience of one:

"And since we were on the Slowpoke Express, which I described in the last chapter - where, being the only passengers in our car, we had all the time and space in the world - he sprawled out as comfortably as if he were in his own living room and gave his narrative talents free rein, turning each polished phrase carefully and grinning with pleasure at his own story while stroking his ample belly with one hand." ("The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah")

The plots of the two Slowpoke Express stories depend on the actual characteristics of locomotives (an engine running out of coal, for instance), which is not generally the case. What makes a story a Railroad Story? It's the train car as a public space, where strangers can impart their stories to each other. From the narrator's farewell, "Third Class":

"When you travel third class, on the other hand, you feel right at home. In fact, if you happen to be in a car whose passengers are exclusively Jews, you may feel a bit too much at home... At night you can save yourself the bother of having to fall asleep, because there's always someone to talk to - and if you're not in the mood to talk, someone else will be glad to do it for you. Who expects to sleep on a train ride anyway? Talking is far better, because you never know what may come of it."

Translation by Hillel Halkin.

* Prompted by D.G. Myers, a bit, perhaps.

What's a writer after all? Anyone can be one - Sholem Aleichem's Railroad Stories

"My goodness, the things one sees traveling! It's a pity I'm not a writer. And yet come to think of it, what makes me say I'm not? What's a writer, after all? Anyone can be one, and especially in a hodgepodge like our Yiddish. What's the big fuss about? You pick up a pen and you write!"

That's the commercial traveler, third class, who narrates Sholem Aleichem's The Railroad Stories (1902-10, 1911). The traveler mostly just gives us other people's stories, in their own words, with a bit of framing. So most of The Railroad Stories are monologues, Sholem Aleichem's perfect form. Not everyone is a writer, but everyone traveling in a third class Ukrainian train car has a story to tell.

Some of the stories are jokes with punchlines, some are character sketches or social observations or commentary. "A Game of Sixty-Six" is a good con man story. A number are, almost inevitably, stories about story-telling. In "Baranovich Station," a passenger promises a great story. A village bands together to prevent a fellow-citizen's flogging. The story gets more and more complicated and compelling, but then the storyteller reaches his station and disembarks, before the end. "What end? It's barely begun. Let go of me!"

I don't want to say that every one of these stories is more consequential than those in Inside Kasrilevke, but the range of stories is important. There's more varied life here than in any other Sholem Aleichem book I've read. And the comedy is tinged with - sometimes about - some darker matter. Prostitution, suicide, pogroms, discrimination.

I'll pick out one or two of my favorites for tomorrow.

"Come to think of it again, though, writing is not for everyone. We should all stick to what we work at for a living, that's my opinion, because each of us has to make one. And if you don't work at anything, that's work too."

Oh, you want some socks? - The Rough Guide to Sholem Aleichem

Lamed Shapiro was probably a pretty darkly hued fellow to begin with, but he was also rejecting some of what he saw as the sentimentality or lack of seriousness of older writers like Sholem Aleichem.

For example, the odd little volume of Sholem Aleichem published in 1948 as Inside Kasrilevke, which contains two longish stories, "The Poor and the Rich" and "A Guide to Kasrilevke."* Both are comic tales of life in Sholem Aleichem's fictional representative shtetl. They're comic, light-hearted, but with, just barely, touches of seriousness.

The "Guide to Kasrilevke" is mostly shtick. Each chapter has a travel guide title ("Hotels," "Restaurants," "Theater," "Bandits"), but it's really the story of Sholem Aleichem's own visit to Kasrilevke, the town where nothing functions. He just works through some good comic pieces - the tram that won't move; the restaurant that says you can have anything you want, but then doesn't seem to have any specific dish; the thieves who are disgusted by their victim's poverty. The scene that made me laugh the most was where the author, having barely set foot in his hotel room, is assailed by a string of sock vendors:

"Another individual stepped in; this one had a cap on.

'Buy my socks, mister, good and cheap!'

'I don't need any socks,' I told him. 'Thank you.'

'What do you mean, you don't need any?' he protested. 'Didn't you just buy half a dozen socks from the other fellow?'"

That's what we call logic. After a few more sock sellers:

"'Who's 'me'?' I asked. I was afraid to open the door for fear someone might be offering me more socks.

'Dovid,' came the reply.

'Dovid who?'

'Dovid Shpan.'

'Who's Dovid Shpan?'

'Dovid Shpan the agent.'

'What have you got?' I asked. 'Maybe more socks?'

'Oh, you want some socks?' he replied. 'Just wait a minute. I'll run out to the stores and bring you some!'"

Simple Chico Marx stuff, I guess, but I liked it. The other story is a little different - a delegation of Kasrilevke elders travel to the big city to raise money to fix up their burned out town - but the shtick isn't that different. A good running gag, for example: the dignified rabbi always replies to questions with a parable, a very wise and beautiful one, which the narrator always somehow avoids relating: "But since I am telling you a story, I'd rather not interrupt it with another one."

Minor Sholem Aleichem, I suppose. But after the horrors of Lamed Shapiro, a great relief.

* First published when? She don't say. "This book contains the stories Dos Naye Kasrilevke, Kasrilevke Nisrofim, Kasrilevke Moshav Z'kenim, translated from the Yiddish by Isidore Goldstick." That's it. I know; looks like three stories, not two. The third is attached to the second as an epilogue. Both stories mention airplanes, so publication must be after 1908. From their tiny chapters, I would guess that both were originally serialized in Yiddish newspapers.

The less violent Lamed Shapiro - And now let me think.

A couple of examples of Lamed Shapiro's mostly unhappy world that aren't so directly about violence. Indirectly, yes.

In "Before the Storm" (1906), the narrator hires a boat to row him across a river harbor. We read about the sky, the ships, the boat owner and his son. The owner asks the narrator a surprising question, about his belief in immortality, which is an opening for his own story, about his oldest son. He did everything he could for his son, educated him, and the result was that the boy became a revolutionary. Here's there last meeting; the father has just rowed his son across the same river:

"'I no longer knew what I was saying. The tears poured out of me. He only smiled at my words and embraced me in such a way that, honestly, I felt as if he were the father and I the son... Then he kissed his brother and left.'

The old man suddenly fell silent. After while he said, 'Two months later I got his things and a letter from a little town in Lithuania. The letter said that my son was dead.'"

So the story is about the father's endless love for his son, and his complete failure to understand him. But then the narrator disembarks, just as the son did, but "just in time," since "the far-off, angry sounds of a storm were heard." Is the narrator, about whom we know nothing, moving toward the same fate as the son?

The long "Eating Days" (1926-7) works entirely differently. The narrator is a student at a down-on-its-luck yeshiva, a teenager worn to a frazzle by his sexual desires and, maybe the same thing, a new sense of the wonders of life. He's restless and intense, he feels everything to much.

This narrator uses metaphorical language far more than either of the narrators in "Before the Storm": shop owners look out of their shops "like mice out of their holes," and another has "small round hen's eyes" that never shut, like a corpse. A strudel "crackled softly and faintly, as though someone were breaking matchsticks." The voices in the winter market "rang in the ears, like the roar of water in one's head after a dive in the river."

The student's restlessness finally drives him out of school, out of the town, in pursuit of a woman, possibly, or simply of more life. I love the ending ("hosts" refers to the families who fed the yeshiva students on a rotating basis):

"The sun was behind us and the clear dark shadow of the pier played on the water. Further on, the water was as yellow as oil, and over the entire length of the river the fat, thick waters, like huge and endless hosts, stretched on and on, from one end of the world to another.

And now let me think."

The violent stories of Lamed Shapiro

Now here's a tricky writer to recommend. Lamed Shapiro wrote some of the most graphically violent stories I have ever encountered. A lot of terrible things happen in his stories, and he wants to make sure you see them, up close, in sufficient detail. Don't look away, he says, not yet.

The anti-Jewish violence of the Russian pogroms was his great subject. They seem to have left him a little cracked, even. Word War I was, as I found in S. Ansky's non-fictional The Destruction of Galicia, even worse. Shapiro wrote about the war's violence, too.

The Shapiro collection I read was an older one, The Jewish Government and Other Stories (1971), translated by Curt Leviant, who also translated several volumes of Sholem Aleichem stories. There's now a new collection from Yale University Press, The Cross and Other Jewish Stories (2007), which has a lot of overlap with Leviant. The title story, "The Cross" (1909) is easily Shapiro's most famous, a terrifying pogrom tale that asks, what limits are there on the evil a decent person can do, and answers, none.

Fortunately, for this reader's peace of mind, at least, not every story in this collection is a tale of horror and bloodshed. Some are more ordinary pictures of Jewish life in the Pale. Shapiro's world is never too happy, but it is, at times, at least normal. In "A Guest" (1904) for example, a woman's son, a young doctor, returns home to the village for the first time, and deeply hurts his mother by not having lunch with her. That's the story. Or how about "Smoke" (1916), the life story of a good-humored smoker, whose last words are a sort of secret message to his wife about their good life together.

But then there's "The Jewish Government" (1918), a forty page epic of wartime destruction and murder, and "White Challa" (1918), where we get the Russian soldier's point of view, which is just a nightmare, and "The Kiss" (1909), which I don't even want to describe. Don't trust that title. "Ironic" is not the right word for the title - "cruel mockery of all that's decent," maybe.

The violence infected my reading of the stories. The short "Tiger" (1904) is a ten pager about a boy and a dog. Two pages in, I thought, oh no, what horrible thing is going to happen to this dog. After five pages, I was relieved - with such a light tone, this can't possibly be one of the brutal stories. On page eight, though, here it comes, cover your eyes. But no, it could be a lot worse. What a relief to watch the dog run off, never to return. Obviously, if I had read this story first, my expectations would have been entirely different.

Shapiro's violence is perhaps no more graphic than that of his contemporary Isaac Babel - see Red Cavalry, for instance - although Babel's style is more distant, for example filtered through a journalist who witnesses terrible acts. Shapiro sometimes seems to be after something more direct, more visceral (at times, I'm afraid, literally). I've only read one Cormac McCarthy novel, the 1974 Child of God, which may be unrepresentative, but Shapiro's violence reminded me, again and again, of McCarthy. And the worlds of both writers are worlds with absent gods.

So, come to think of it, maybe I should recommend Lamed Shapiro to everyone, without reservation. Look how popular McCarthy is now. People love that stuff.

Tomorrow I'll try to look past the blood and write a little about the art of Lamed Shapiro. Because he was a real writer, cracked or not.

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.

Golem Week! Golem Week!

It's Golem Week! Why? Because Joachim Neugroschel put together a collection of Yiddish golem stories (The Golem, 2006) and I read it. And one book led to another, as always seems to happen.

The 16th century Rabbi Leyb (or Loew) wants to save the Jews of Prague from the blood libel, or some other peril, or he has wood that needs chopping, so he creates a man out of clay and animates him by writing God's name on the golem's forehead, or on a piece of paper which he puts in his mouth, or perhaps he whispers the name in the golem's ear. At some point, the golem goes out of control and has to be destroyed. Or it doesn't. There are a lot of variations.

I've never been to Prague. My understanding is that it is now crammed with golems. See left, see right, see everywhere. Actually, the image on the right is from the 1920 movie The Golem. I've been scrounging golem photos from the internet. Some of the little Prague golem souvenirs are pretty cute.

How strange to finally read a golem story, then, and find that the golem looks perfectly human. His name is Joseph. He has a beard. He eats and sleeps. If you prick him, does he not bleed? He does. That's in Yudl Rosenberg's The Golem or the Miraculous Deeds of Rabbi Leyb (1909), at least.

The Rosenberg book is sort of like a dime novel. It's clumsy, pulpy. A bunch of folktales about Rabbi Leyb are strung together in a more or less logical order, the language is standardized, and Joseph the golem is shoehorned into every adventure whether he is needed or not. In one familiar story, the Rabbi's wife plays Mickey Mouse and the golem plays the water-carrying broom. I see why the book is important - it's a lot of golem stuff in one place - and I enjoyed it, even if it's not exactly good.

What's coming up this week? H. Leivick's golem-in-crisis; Dovid Frishman's golem-in-love; I. L. Peretz and Jorge Luis Borges; and one of the craziest novels I've ever read (or will read, inshallah, since it's in process). And more golem pictures, pilfered from the internet.

Lucky me - I'm an orphan! - Sholem Aleichem's cheeriest creation

"I've never been so important. How is that? Because my father, Peysi the cantor, died on the first day of Shavuos. That make me an orphan." (p. 116)

This sounds like it might be another sad story, but it's not. Sad for some of the characters, but not for Motl, the cantor's son.

"Lucky me!" says Motl, the cantor's son, "I'm an orphan!" And it turns out that he's right, sort of. Motl is - well, it's not quite clear - eight years old to start, let's say. His mother is still alive, and always weeping. He has an older brother, a worrier, and an entrepreneur. So when Motl loses his father at the beginning of Motl, the Cantor's Son (1907-8, 1916), he enters a world of surprising freedom. "I've stopped going to school and am no longer in Hirsh-Ber's choir. Orphans are excused. Lucky me!"

I wonder if Motl will pay for this in the long run. But try telling that to an eight year old. They are so irresponsible.

The novel really gets going when Motl's family decides to emigrate. They wander through Europe, and end up in New York. For Motl, it's all a great lark. A third-class train car, a third-class ocean liner cabin, Ellis Island, Antwerp, Vienna - it's all so much fun. It's the grown-ups who have the worries, not Motl.

Motl, the Cantor's Son does not seem especially sophisticated to me. It's the voice of the boy, and his way of seeing, that are the heart of the novel. Sholem Aleichem's version is wonderful, but hardly unique. But there's something about Motl's spirit, his irrepressibility, that I find very appealing:

"The ride through New York was pretty awful. The worst part was changing from the stritkah to the eleveydeh. That's a stritkah that runs on a long, narrow bridge above the ground. It flies like a bullet. You're sure you're going to die.

You think that's all? Wait, I'm not through. You crawl out of the eleveydeh and walk down some stairs to a cellar an get into another stritkah called a tsobvey. The tsbobvey rushes through the cellar until you feel faint... Brokheh swears she's never taking either again. She'd rather walk than ride through the clouds or the earth like a lunatic. 'Spare me your ups and you can have your downs,' she says.

She's a weird one, my sister-in-law. If I had my druthers, I'd ride the eleveydeh and the tsobvey all day long." (p. 264)

One can see the Yinglish intruding. Noospeypehz, eiskrim, haht dawgz at the Hibru Neshnel Delikatesn. Sholem Aleichem seems to have felt ambivalently about America, but he lets Motl love it.

Tevye the Dairyman is cheerful, too, always cheerful. His cheerfulness, though, is a weapon in his ongoing argument with God. Motl is just a kid. That's what I mean when I say Motl, the Cantor's Son is less sophisticated. The meaning of the Motl stories is less internal to the central character, more about what happens around him.

Still, there's a lot more to this charming book that I'm omitting. But I wanted to write about something sunny before devoting the rest of the week to:

The Golem!

Quotations are from the Hillel Halkin translation, packaged with The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl & Sheyne-Sheyndl. Penguin Classics also has a new translation from Aliza Shevrin, packaged with Tevye the Dairyman.

They hate scholars, ridicule of scholars would give them pleasure, it was sure to be a success - the tragic dream-world of Der Nister

A month or two ago, I had not heard of David Bergelson. No, I had, because I had read about him as a victim of Stalin's final attempt to destroy Soviet Yiddish culture. But as a writer, his name meant nothing to me.

It was while reading around in Joachim Neugroschel's anthology of Yiddish fiction, No Star Too Beautiful that Bergelson's stories caught my attention - Bergelson stood out. So I started looking around, and one book followed another. He wasn't the only one, although most of the writers I liked best were predictable - I. B. Singer and so on.

A writer who I don't exactly like but who definitely stood out - who is in his own category - is Der Nister, The Hidden One. The Neugroschel book includes the story "Beheaded" (1920), which I will try to summarize:

Adam taps his head. It opens, and his Comedian emerges. Another Comedian comes along, with Adam's double. Adam drives them all away - he has to wait for the Master. The Master arrives, and leads Adam and his disciples to the giant ladder with rungs made of heads and skulls. Everyone has his head chopped off, so it can be added to the ladder. The headless Master then tells the story of the living bridge, which served faithfully but succumbed to despair in its old age. An angel came to the bridge, and told it the story of the Universal Bridge, and how it was tempted by Satan, and how later bridges suffer for the weakness of the Universal Bridge. The End.

I don't have the story handy, and have probably made some mistakes. It's hard to remember how it goes, because it makes no sense. I mean, it's completely crazy. It's not an allegory, with an X=Y correspondence, but rather an attempt to create a new and original symbolic structure. Der Nister's visions have links to the Kabbalah and Hasidic mysticism, but they're not derivative. What, then, is a reader supposed to do with something so strange and private?

I've read only one other story by Der Nister, "Under a Fence: A Revue" (1929), from the Ashes Out of Hope collection. It's one of the saddest things I've ever read, Der Nister's farewell to his art. Like David Bergelson, Der Nister willingly returned to the Soviet Union to be a writer, to serve the state. That he thought his esoteric work would be welcome seems so naïve, but this was just before Socialist Realism became doctrine.

In "Under a Fence" - well, I won't try to summarize it, quite. There is a scholar who is in love with a circus rider. In a dream-like sequence, the "dustman" appears to the scholar, and drags him and his straw-daughter around town and to the circus, where the scholar becomes a performer himself, staging mock trials of his pupils and former teacher:

"'And,' the dustman said, 'the clowns would have plenty of opportunity for humor and ridicule. The theme was current, and the people would love it. They hate scholars, ridicule of scholars would give them pleasure, it was sure to be a success.'"

In the end, though, the scholar himself is on trial, and the dream-world is replaced by the real-world, I guess, the scholar broken, his life emptied of meaning.

This was published in a Soviet Yiddish periodical! The amazing thing is that Der Nister survived until 1950 (he died in a prison hospital). Der Nister apparently abandoned his symbolist work after this story, and turned to approved forms of realism. I've read good things about his later novel, The Family Mashber, which does not sound especially realistic. Maybe he pulled one over on the Soviets. Or maybe he really did work his way to a new artistic voice.

I'm not going to pursue the issue, though, not now. I have read all but two of the Yiddish books that I had originally planned to read way back in January, yet somehow my list of interesting Yiddish books is just as long as ever. So I have to start drawing some lines, retreating back to the 19th century a bit. So this may be it for Der Nister, and who else - the Singers, I. I. Trunk, Itzik Manger, and many others. If anyone wants to do a Yiddish Modernism project, I beg you, let me know. I'm avidly interested, even if, as with Der Nister, I barely understand it.

With great sadness, with longing - the Berlin stories of David Bergelson

The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (2005) is an attractive little City Lights collection of eight stories. The indefatigable Joachim Neugroschel is the translator and anthologizer. It's a tiny book - 116 petite pages - and a fine collection of Bergelson, with a bit more variety of mood then some of the other sources of Bergelson stories.

"The Boarding House of the Three Sisters" is, for example, a wry comedy. Three young women run a Berlin boarding house. Two have husbands who are, um, elsewhere. All three are, frankly, hotties. Dang fool men pay excessive rent because, because, you know, what if -. One boarder even confides to another that it's all a trick, that the husbands are here in Berlin.

"By now it is late. The two boarders separate and go to bed very sadly, but with latent hopes that perhaps... yes... perhaps... perhaps they are wrong. The two men draw up their accounts of how much the boarding house can cost them so far, and both of them muse about who will do something either now or later on..."

Mostly, I criticize writers for vagueness, but here it is psychologically acute. Those poor fools.

"For 12,000 Bucks He Fasts Forty Days: Scenes of Berlin" is a response or recasting, or, really, a Judaizing, of Kafka's "The Hunger Artist" (1922). It's all in good humor, too, except for the part about the destruction of Europe. Weird thing, this is the second Yiddish relative of "The Hunger Artist" I've read recently. I'll save the other for tomorrow.

The catastrophe of World War I and the Russian Revolution is in the background of every story in the collection. That's why Bergelson's characters (and Bergelson) are in Berlin. They're mostly refugees. These stories are the Jewish cousins of Nabokov's Berlin stories, set amongst the exiled Russians, except that Bergelson is not such a happy fellow.

"Two Murderers," for example. One murderer is a landlady's dog, one is a Cossack leader. They have both done horrible things. At the end of the story, they reach an understanding:

"Now the two of them were alone in the kitchen - Zarembo and Tell. One sat on a chair at the table, the other lay on the small throw rug, resting his head on his extended front paws. There was silence all around them. Both of them were peering into each other's eyes with great sadness, with longing."

Maybe that doesn't seem like much on its own. Knowing what the murderers have done, though - it's chilling.

The longest, and perhaps best, story is "Among Refugees." A young man discovers that the Russian officer who killed his grandfather, and many others, is living in the same boarding house, across the hall from him. He appeals to other Berlin Jews to help him acquire a gun, so he can assassinate the officer. They refuse, but because they lack will, not out of principle. This is a common problem in Bergelson stories - even when people do the right thing, it's for the wrong reason. So this story goes in the "bleak" pile.

The Shadows of Berlin is, I think, the best place to get to know this difficult, rewarding writer.