“Lublin”

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. 

‘Kishkas,’ cries Ziv. 

‘Gehakter herring on rye bread.’ 

‘Gefilte fish and chrain.’ 

‘Latkes.’ 

‘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

Blume Lempel

“Blume Lempel used stream-of-consciousness, flashback, and free association in her writing to create unique stories with themes rarely seen in Yiddish literature: eroticism, incest, and rape. Born in Galicia, Lempel began to write while living in Paris between 1929 and 1939. — https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lempel-blume

Blume Lempel (1907 -  1999) was a Yiddish author of stories about life in Paris, Ukraine, and New York. Translations of some of her stories only appeared recently, in particular the volume Oedipus in Brooklyn, published in 2016. In this collection many stories depict escapees from the Holocaust, often agonizingly haunted by what happened to them, or mainly what they witnessed happening to their family or fellow villagers. 

The individuals in Blume Lempel’s stories are distinct in many ways, but they all remember. In the last story of the collection — though perhaps the order is made by the translators — she summarizes:

“Each according to his ability must convey what he saw, what he lived through, what he thought, what he felt. You did not survive simply to eat blintzes with sour cream. You survived to bring back those who were annihilated. You must speak in their tongue, point with their fingers.”

Elsewhere she describes the life and then the death of a young woman:

“A German put a bullet in her belly and left her lying in the street with her guts spilling out. The sight was so unsettling that the peasants crossed themselves in fear on their way to church that Sunday. In my mind I lift her up and carry her far away from human eyes. Surely if a wolf came upon her in the forest he would devour her. A cannibal would make a feast of her. Yet her ultra-civilized murderer left her lying in the street to show the world what he could do.”

“Through the skylight of my Parisian garret I used to look up at the tiny rectangle of heaven that fortune had allotted me and conjure up Zosye’s lush, slumbering garden. How I cursed the fate that had stranded me in Paris on my way to Israel! Zosye did not want to go to Israel, nor did she need to. For her, the vine was abloom with all the brilliant hues of the bejeweled peacock that resides in the dreams of every young woman. How could she have known, as she played the piano, that the civilization of those magical notes was even then writing her people’s death sentence? How could she have known that form and harmony were but the seductive song of the Lorelei, the façade behind which the cannibal sharpened his crooked teeth?”

The book is also full of life, of the life before and after the death camps, the obliterated villages, the tormented Jewish villagers. Here’s a description about a family, an aunt and a grandmother and how they make a living:

“She and my grandmother run a one-day restaurant for the market folk. Each customer receives a bowl of soup containing a quarter of a roast chicken with parsnip, dill, and other delicious things whose fragrance fills the house and wafts out into the market square.”

And the torment of the experience: “Zoesye picks up a stalk of straw …. She thinks mostly about eating. Not about the wild strawberries with sweet cream that her mother used to serve, but about bread with salt, perhaps with a clove of garlic.”

What’s even more fascinating, the book is full of evidence of a totally modern intellectual writer, with characters who read Madam Bovary, Anna Karenina, the poems of T.S.Eliot, the Greek tragedies (including Oedipus, the parallel to the title story). One character goes on a trip to Yosemite with “a pair of binoculars, a warm coat, some candy for energy, and the inevitable camera.” Another volunteers with the residents of a home:  “Dressed in black, I go often to the old age home. Once a week I read aloud from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Stories from Behind the Stove in Yiddish. After I read, the audience peppers me with questions having nothing to do with the book.” These characters seem to be versions of the author herself, but as a reader one never knows. But they live in a present that is very familiar. One story begins:

“Lying under my apple tree, I make a conscious effort to detach myself from the outside world. Eyes closed, I attempt to follow the teachings of Zen Buddhism and rise above the stifling heat, the children’s racket, and the airplanes swooping overhead like birds of prey. It’s the middle of July. Apollo 11 has landed safely on the moon, a great human achievement that leaves a strange taste in my mouth, a taste I can neither swallow nor spit out.”

How can I relate to these stories? 

Dara Horn (in the book People Love Dead Jews, blogged here) observed that stories told by those who actually lived through the torments of destruction of their way of life were very different from the fake feel-good Holocaust stories that are so popular now. It’s much more agonizing to read Blume Lempel’s characters’ actual memories, of horrors too great to grasp and events so brutal that the hardly seem real to the teller. Occasionally there’s a story of revenge, which is also satisfying and unusual. In the entire collection, there’s never a story of redemption through some good deed by some exceptional gentile like the current fictional renditions often present. In real life this may have happened, but not here.

Blume Lempel’s hometown was a traditional Eastern European shtetl, such as is often idealized by the vivid film of Fiddler on the Roof (and by the many amateur productions of the musical). Blume Lempel escaped in 1929, intending to go to Palestine; on the way she stopped in Paris, where she lived for a decade;  then in New York for the remainder of her life. During her stay in Paris, she started to write stories and novels in Yiddish, her native language. She was first published in the 1940s in various Yiddish publications. 

Lempel’s characters often have early memories in their village homes, which at times seem to be her own first-person story, but these are stories mainly of their current lives in New York or Paris, the memories form a painful background to their subsequent lives and relationships. Being survivors and witnesses is in the background of their experience. Above all, Blume Lempel was a wonderful writer, creating characters and short histories that spark to life as one reads. I’m glad that a recent message from the Yiddish Book Center reminded me finally to read this book.

Review © 2023 mae sander

Moshkeleh the Thief

Moshkeleh Ganev wished that his fellow Jews in the village of Mazepevke would be more respectful of him, and call him Moshke, the way the non-Jewish residents did. He wished they would skip the word Ganev, which meant thief — even though being a thief was in fact how he made a living. 

In a few short chapters, Moshkeleh and his fellow villagers are introduced: vivid and highly individual. The innkeeper and his very beautiful daughters, Moshkeleh’s fellow Jewish horse thieves and pickpockets, the very handsome visiting government official (not Jewish, of course), and Moshkeleh’s own father, also a petty criminal. Moshkeleh himself is a handsome and appealing man, but no girl would have him because of his profession. Then Moshkeleh saves the girl he secretly loves from converting and running away with the non-Jewish official. He does so in a resourceful and surprising way, as is always the case in stories by Sholom Aleichem.

The character Moshkeleh and the Ukrainian village Mazepevke reflect the humor and creativity of Sholom Aleichem, perhaps the most famous Yiddish author. He wrote the novella Moshkeleh the Thief in 1903, when it was published serially. Somehow, this story did not appear in the author’s collected works, and was recently translated into English for the first time. What fun to read it!

Who isn’t thinking about the current state of Ukraine right now, as the Ukrainians fight the invasion of their country by their much bigger neighbor Russia? My mother’s family came from a village in Ukraine, which of course I’ve always thought would have resembled the villages in Sholom Aleichem’s stories. I think my great grandmother even made bootleg liquor which was probably sold in a tavern like the one in the story. Sholem Aleichem created a vision of these villages, which have nothing at all to do with the current situation. We know why there were 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine in 1939 and today there are less than 10% as many. But Sholem Aleichem allows us to imagine what was once a world in itself.

Review © 2022 mae sander

 

Making a Prosperous Country into a Wasteland

"Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Tuesday called the Russian attacks on civilians in Kharkiv a 'war crime' and 'state terrorism.' On Wednesday, the International Criminal Court said it would 'immediately proceed' to begin an investigation into Russian military war crimes in Ukraine after 39 countries petitioned it to do so. There are credible reports of cluster bombs being used in civilian areas." (Washington Post: "Opinion: Ukrainians in Kharkiv won’t let Putin break their will") 

Near Odessa, Ukraine, March 2, 2022. Odessa was a cultural center in Tsarist Russia.
(New York Times: "Anxiety Grows in Odessa as Russians Advance in Southern Ukraine")

As we all know, the Russians are waging a criminal war of destruction on the cities of their neighbor Ukraine. Watching this horror show unfold, I've been trying, as I read the news reports, to think about the accomplishments of people from Ukraine. Unfortunately, Ukrainians had little opportunity during the long era when the region was dominated by Russia until it achieved independence 30 years ago. And even more unfortunately, the Russians seem hell-bent on returning it to its unequal and unfavorable status again – after destroying the cities and productive capacity of the country.

Famous Writers Born in Ukraine

Sholem Aleichem's Ukrainian Village as interpreted by Hollywood:
"Fiddler on the Roof"

I must admit that I am not familiar with any literature that was originally written in the Ukrainian language. However, several writers who were born in Ukraine and wrote in Russian or Yiddish have made a big impression on me, and I'm thinking about them as I watch this week's devastating news. These are:

• Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) was a Yiddish humorist and story-teller. He was born in a Ukrainian shtetl named Pereiaslay. He us most famous for the tales of Tevye the Dairyman. The Tevye stories are the basis for the musical "Fiddler on the Roof."
• Isaac Babel (1894-1940), a writer, was born in Odessa. His first language was Yiddish, but his literary work was in Russian. He is known for stories of the Russian Revolution and colorful tales of the criminal underground in Odessa.
• Nikolai Gogol (1819-1898), was a Russian writer born in the Ukrainian Cossak town of Sorochyntsi. His family were minor Russian nobles with an estate in that region. His famous works are the novel Dead Souls and several short story collections.
• Yevgeny Petrov (1902-1942) and Ilya Ilf (1897-1937) were both born in Odessa. They were journalists and collaborators on two novels: Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf. Their writing is in Russian.
• Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) was born in Kyiv. He wrote a novel, The White Guard, about Ukraine. I very much enjoyed his more famous novel, The Master and Margarita.

I haven't read the works of Kiev-born novelist Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967); Odessa-born poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966); or Nobel-Prize winning journalist Svetlana Alexievich (b. 1948) who lives in Belarus but was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. And there may be others.

Please tell me if I have missed out on reading any other important Ukrainian writers! I have already added Bulgakov to the list.

Other Famous Ukrainian-Born People

Quite a few people from Ukraine emigrated to the US or to Israel during the twentieth century. Among them are many highly accomplished individuals, both those who were educated in Ukraine, and those who received their educations elsewhere. 

Famous scientists who were born in Ukraine include the physicist George Gamow (1904-1968), born in Odessa, and aviation inventor Igor Sikorsky (1889-1972), born in Kyiv. 

A number of well-known Zionists and Israeli politicians were born in Ukraine, notably Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), Golda Meir (1898-1978), and Natan Sharansky (b. 1948). The port of Odessa was the starting point for many of the earliest Israeli pioneers from Ukraine and Russia in the pre-World-War I era. In the 1980s and later, Israel was a refuge for many persecuted Jews from the Soviet Union including Ukraine.

Several famous economists were born in Ukraine. Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), was born in Lviv, Ukraine. He was a leader of the Austrian school of economics, but fled the Nazis in 1940 and spent the rest of his career in American universities. Jacob Marshak (1898-1977) was born in Kyiv. He participated in the Russian Revolution, was later educated in Germany, fled to England to escape the Nazis, and finally became a prominent American academic.

What Next?

I have tried to think positively. That is crazy in these crazy times! As I write this, a Ukrainian nuclear power plant is on fire, a result of shelling by the Russian troops. Firefighters can't reach it. If the fire is not contained, the resulting disaster could be ten times as bad as Chernobyl, a Ukrainian site that the Russians already hold. I can't fathom how any humans could do this.

A Lonely Girl in New York

Every day, the unnamed narrator of Miriam Karpilove's novel Diary of a Lonely Girl writes in her diary about her struggle with her current lover. In sequence, the lovers are named A., B., C. (for Cheek), Davis, Eshkin, and F. Almost, but not quite interchangeable. They all want the same thing. They refer to it as "happiness" but she can tell what's really in their minds, and she resists, refuses, rejects them, and even insults them, despite their eloquent pleas that cite all sorts of intellectual and political reasons why she should give in to them. Sometimes they suggest marriage or living together, but she either doesn't trust them or doesn't love or even like them. Other times she says she doesn't believe in marriage. She always says she doesn't believe in "free love." She and her prospective lovers constantly talk about the nature of women, of men, and of love. And it all takes place in New York of course.

As a reader, I found Karpilove's novel a little repetitive, but repetition seems inevitable when I think about the fact that it was published one diary-entry at a time over the course of a couple of years. It reads a little like a blog – but in fact, it dates from 1916 to 1918, and was published serially in Yiddish in a newspaper called Di varhayt. The translation that I read was the first English-language version: published in 2020.

Most of the episodes of the novel take place in a sequence of rented rooms in the households of various, mostly busy-body landladies. The poor furnishings, floor coverings, threadbare blankets, poor heating, and dim gas lights in each room are described in some detail, but we learn absolutely nothing about what the narrator does to earn a living, where she eats her meals (though it seems to be assumed that they are provided by the landlady), or other details of her daily life. Just once, a landlady offers her some borscht and teygkhts (kugel). Once there were some refreshments at a party. Sometimes she goes to a coffee shop. 

The narrator's age is never specified, except that she is embarrassed by it, which suggests it's somewhere near 30. She has a few woman friends, who are also her rivals for the love of A., B., C, and D. She evidently left all of her family behind in Minsk when she emigrated to New York, but she maintains her Jewish identity along with speaking and writing in Yiddish. Language is a topic of discussion with her friends and lovers, who sometimes say a few words in English or German or Russian.

A single woman in the narrator's position in that era had to worry that the landlady would accuse her of immorality because she sometimes has innocent conversations with these lovers that last the entire night. The laws on the books allowed a policeman (who could be called by the landlady) to arrest a woman accused of what the characters in the book called free love. And send her to "the Tombs," which was a big prison (a predecessor to the prison called the Tombs today). In sum -- there's lots of drama, but not much action.

A recent article about this and other neglected Yiddish books by early 20th century women brought this interesting book to my attention, and so I bought and read it. The article describes the novel thus:

"In 'Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love,' a sendup of the socialists, anarchists and intellectuals who populated New York’s Lower East Side in the early 20th century, Miriam Karpilove writes from the perspective of a sardonic young woman frustrated by the men’s advocacy of unrestrained sexuality and their lack of concern about the consequences for her."

The article quotes Yiddish scholar Anita Norich, who has translated another of the forgotten women's novels:

"'This literature has been hiding in plain sight, but we all assumed it wasn’t there,' said Norich, a professor emeritus of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. 'Novels were written by men while women wrote poetry or memoirs and diaries but didn’t have access to the broad worldview that men did. If you’ve always heard that women didn’t write novels in Yiddish, why go looking for it?'" (source)

I think I'll read another one of these newly accessible novels soon.

Blog post © mae sander 2022. 

Two Yiddish Books

Photo of the Yiddish Book Center (https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/) in Amherst, Massachusetts. (2003).
The architecture echoes the look of Eastern European shtetls of a century or more in the past.

A few days ago, the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, sent me two recently published books as a bonus for a recent contribution to their efforts. Publications of newly translated books are part of the center's mission to make available lost or ignored but worthy representatives of Yiddish literature. The smaller work, Radiant Jargon, contains a small selection of poems about Yiddish and translation: some of these poems are by classic Yiddish authors from the early 20th century, and others, and also translations, by modern poets, some of whom have been interns at the center.

The more substantial book, Seeds in the Desert by Mendel Mann (1916-1975), contains a selection of short stories and sketches about the early days of Israel, the lives of Jews in Eastern Europe during World War II, and other vignettes about Jewish life in the mid-20th century. The introduction also provides an interesting summary of the life of the author, whose name and work were entirely unfamiliar to me up until now.

Many of the stories offer just a very small episode from life in Israel or elsewhere; however most of them inform the reader of how these new Israelis had survived and escaped their past. Some stories are set far from Israel, for example, the story "Laughter from the Skies" (p. 96-103) takes place in the Australian outback about a Jew who takes revenge on a former Nazi who had murdered  his family. Another story, "Cain Laments at Night" (p. 114-119), set during World War II, is about a Jewish boy named Emmanuel. He was hiding in a shtetl from which he was to travel to the larger town of Rovno (also called Rivne), but he was unable to keep up his pretense of being a partner with some Ukrainian soldiers. The problem occurs when he encounters a market woman wrapping her goods in pages of the Talmud, which he takes away and pockets. With the soldiers, he consumes "pork, black bread, eggs, and bottles of vodka," but despite this un-Jewish act, they notice him respectfully holding the scrap of paper, and torment him. Emmanuel, too, takes his revenge.

A very typical story in this collection is titled "The Encounter in Ramat Gan" (p. 59-64) It begins with these words: "'Excuse me...' I said. 'I think I know you... we've met somewhere before...'" The narrator was speaking to a woman on the street, walking with a small child. He describes a hot day in Ramat Gan, where he was waiting for a bus. He tries to explain to her what he remembers: "I traveled across Ukraine with the Soviet army, and somewhere in a shtetl in Volhynia I met you. It was  a strange encounter. Don't you remember the Russian soldier who talked to you in Yiddish? Have you forgotten a night journey in a truck with two armed soldiers?" She denies this: "I don't want to know you!" she shouted.

The narrator thinks about her all night. In the morning he sees her again, while waiting for his bus, and follows her. Angrily she says "The woman you met is dead. She doesn't exist any more." She calls their former meeting a surreal dream. She accuses him of trying to make a legend of his past. Then she produces a long story of how they met during her ordeal during the war, her abuse by peasants, her encounters with Russian officers, and more war stories. The narrator, she recalled, had been a Jew in disguise as a Russian soldier -- obviously hoping himself to evade the murderous Ukrainian and Nazi troops. She describes how he helped her get to the Rovno where there were "thirty Jewish families," and he could leave her with an elderly Jewish women who would protect her. But after telling her detailed memories, the woman concluded: "Everything I have told you was invented, a lie, a mistake. My life has started now, here, with my husband and children. Forget, and let me forget."

A majority of the stories in the book have a certain similarity with this encounter and with the woman's wish to erase her past. The new country of Israel, where most of the stories take place, offers a new life for the former victims of European persecutions. The sun burns hot, it's difficult to earn a living, and many of the characters struggle to adapt and to earn their bread. But it's all new and full of promise. I've made it sound simplistic, which it isn't -- it's a very interesting book of stories about a few moments in the lives and memories of a variety of characters.

Now, about Rovno, which is mentioned in several of the stories, along with a few other nearby locations in a region of Ukraine. These references were especially interesting to me because my mother's parents and other relatives came from the Rovno shtetl in the early 20th century. I've never known much about it other than generalizations about shtetl life. I suspect that some distant relatives were still in Rovno during World War II, but I don't know anything about them, and I was fascinated (when I looked it up after reading Mendel Mann's stories) to learn that Rovno was important during the early days of the war. In looking for information, I was also astonished to learn that the mother of Israeli author Amos Oz was a native of Rovno (source).

I also learned of the end of the Jewish community of Rovno, which the author of the stories must also have known. I read this: "The majority of the Jews of western Ukraine town of Rovno, around 23,000 people, had been murdered shortly after the Germans invaded in June 1941. Between 5,000 and 7,000 Jews remained in the ghetto that was established there." In July of 1942, the remainder of the Jews were murdered in a cooperative act by the SS Nazi soldiers and the Ukrainian militia, which supported the invaders. (source)

A street in Rovno before the war. From the JewishGen Website. (link)