Lublin by Manya Wilkinson is a tragedy with jokes. Old jokes: some good, some bad. All of them are Jewish jokes. Mostly adolescent jokes because they are told by an adolescent. The preoccupations of the novel’s three characters are adolescent preoccupations: sex, food, jokes, mothers, the future, sex, money, food, sex…
It’s a road story. Some time in 1906, the three boys set out from their little shtetl town in Poland with the destination of the big city: Lublin. They have a map that someone gave them: hand-drawn showing important villages like Prune Town where they are promised prune pastry, and Lake Town where they will find water to refill their canteens. They each have a pack with a sleeping bag for camping by the roadside. One has a special silver coin that his mother gave him. One has a purse with money for emergencies. Their most important piece of baggage is a large suitcase full of brushes made by the rich uncle in his factory: they are expecting to sell these brushes and begin their lives as successful merchants.
Nothing goes as planned. They are lost from the beginning, and they don’t realize that they have gone the wrong direction until they turn up at the Russian border. They don’t know Russian, In fact they don’t really know Polish: they really speak only Yiddish. And the novel is full of Yiddish of the cliche type, words that you probablaby know even if you don’t know the language. Although there are vivid observations about the lives and relationships of the three boys, the book includes too many cliches about life in the shtetls of pre-World War I Poland. For example, this passage with its list of tried and true Yiddish foods and predicable shtetl memories:
“They huddle together for warmth.‘We’re all going to die,’ Kiva sobs. Will he never smell pastry baking again, or hear his mother with a mortar and pestle crushing almonds and raisins? …
Ziv’s affected too, imagining no more inky pamphlets, workers’ songs and slogans, or women tempting him to madness. He even recalls his poor home fondly, the remains of a herring on the table, lamps burning the cheapest kerosene and giving off the blackest smoke, his sisters bickering.
‘Kreplach,’ cries Ziv, remembering his favourite small dumplings.
‘Gudgeon in a blanket,’ cries Kiva, recalling the battered fish everyone loves to eat.
‘Gehakter herring on rye bread.’
‘Gefilte fish and chrain.’
‘Kugel!’ They both look at Elya.
‘Soup,’ he says. He could show more enthusiasm. He tries to conjure up a bowl filled with borscht, the ewe’s cheese he likes….” (Lublin, p. 164-165)
Lublin is an interesting attempt to recreate a lost past. The emotions and ambitions of the three boys on the road are often depicted vividly, including one who is religious, one who believes in a radical political future, and one who just wants to survive. As a reader, I’m not really convinced that it has new insights about that part of the lost world before the Holocaust. Maybe it’s supposed to be an allegory, but I don’t really find that it reads that way.
“Laughter through tears” is a traditional description of Yiddish literature. Lublin doesn’t qualify — this expression doesn’t mean just interspersing jokes. Frankly, I’d rather read a book by Sholem Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer, who combine tragedy and comedy by using original humor, irony, human weaknesses, and especially their own lived experiences; Jews in these stories face a hostile world where they can be both victims and heroes. I’d even rather read the book Old Jews Telling Jokes by Sam Hoffman (where I first encountered many of the jokes from Lublin).
Wilkinson’s novel was just published in February, 2024, but it’s trying to sound old. Didn’t work.
Review © 2024 mae sander
