In the last five years, the Arab-American Association of New York, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in December, has quintupled its budget to a half-million dollars, drawn from individual donations and foundation support from the likes of the New York Foundation, the Union Square Awards, and the Brooklyn Community Foundation. It is the front line of American acculturation, if not integration, for tens of thousands of ESL-hungry Arab immigrants from Palestine, Morocco, Algeria, and beyond. The organization plays more or less the role that Abraham Cahan’s Forward played for the immigrants of Eastern Europe a century ago.

The executive director of the organization is Linda Sarsour, 31, a Palestinian-American mother of three who wears the hijab and plans to become the first Arab-American on the New York City Council when she runs in 2017, after the local seat opens up. Sarsour, who took over the organization in 2005 and has raised its profile tremendously—she was honored in December as one of 10 Champions of Change by the White House—travels a lot on behalf of the association. The young woman who runs the association day to day, juggling budget memos, the census, and calls from the BBC is all of 24 years old. Her name is Jennie Goldstein, and she is a Jew from the Upper West Side.

“Everything without precedent, or controversial—it lands on my desk,” Goldstein explained when we met. “When Linda’s out, I’m the last answer. I make it rain.”

***

Goldstein has blue eyes and dirty blonde hair, a startling sight among the hijabs worn by the other female staffers. The organization occupies what was once an obstetrician’s office, which explains the waiting area out front and its maze of small, fluorescent-lit rooms. Goldstein’s office is festooned with a poster of a Palestinian hip-hop band and a sign from a protest of the NYPD earlier this month. (“#wtfnypd,” she scrawled on it in Magic Marker as I stood there.)

Goldstein joined the Arab-American Association in 2009 through AmeriCorps after graduating from Middlebury, where she studied international economics. “When I was offered the position, I thought, ‘hell yes,’ ” she told me. “I had seen the posting on the Middlebury career services site, and I just knew that it was my job. I didn’t speak Arabic, but I could wrangle large groups of people. I didn’t come here because I’m a rabble-rousing activist. My interest was in community building. In college, I had to persuade you to come see the band. Here, people are bursting through the door asking for services. It was a real mandate. But it’s been scary to build services you’re not a part of.”

Goldstein’s father is Jewish and her mother is Protestant. Growing up on the Upper West Side, she lit candles for Shabbat on Fridays; she went to church with her mother on Sundays. Being raised by parents of different faiths never confused her because she was never asked to keep anything straight. She accompanied her mother on Sundays because she liked being with her, and she memorized the Lord’s Prayer as a 6-year-old because it “was part of the vernacular of educated people that I wanted to know.”

But she was given enough to go on: The family split what she called “the three major Jewish holidays”—Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Thanksgiving, she explained with a laugh—between her father’s brothers. On Yom Kippur, Goldstein would fast with her best friend, who was also half-Jewish. “School was closed, so we’d go to Macy’s and try on clothes because we felt skinny because we were fasting,” she said. “And then we’d go to a Jewish deli on the Upper West Side and eat dinner.” Her mother was usually the one who harassed her father to light candles on Friday night. “For my mother, the point of religious tradition is tradition. That’s more important than which exact code of ethics it is. As a kid, I saw the church as a community center.”

Continue reading: Smoking shisha in Queens

For me, the news served as a doleful affirmation: The alleged criminals seem to have had the same thought I did when I filled out my now-deceased grandmother’s application for reparations years ago. The details of her story were true: She spent 26 months incarcerated in the Minsk ghetto, managing to escape a month before it was liquidated and her parents and maternal grandparents were murdered. But as I considered the application’s thin verification requirements, I thought: How easy this would be to fake.

So I did.

For the last year, I have been inventing stories of Holocaust suffering: a mother suffocating her wailing child to save the other Jews hiding in a cellar; a ghetto work detail sorting the blood-spattered clothes of murdered Jews; Belarussian Nazi collaborators pausing between executions at street tables loaded with chicken and beer. But rather than feeding some criminal scheme, these stories are at the heart of a novel I’ve been writing—the story of a young writer, a failure in New York magazine journalism, who, in frustration, takes to forging Holocaust restitution claims at the prompting of old Soviet Jews in Brighton Beach and other parts of Soviet Brooklyn.

In the book, as in real life, these are people who have suffered unimaginably—as Red Army soldiers in World War II; as Jews in the Soviet Union; as immigrants in the United States—but not in the way the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany specifies they need to have suffered to qualify for the reparations the German government has been making to Holocaust victims since 1952.

Slava Gelman, my fictionalized letter-writer, wants to resist the logic of these old immigrants even as his heart breaks at their misery. He, too, is a Soviet émigré; his elders brought him to America so he wouldn’t have to live by the deception that they did. In the Soviet Union, Jews were kept out of elite institutions and posts; Jewish veterans who had lost limbs at the front were taunted for having sat out World War II; a Jewish woman could hardly touch a loaf of stale bread at the food store without having her “grubby Jewish fingers” berated by the cashier. Soviet Jews lived in an inconceivable limbo of unfairness and hypocrisy. Many would have been too happy to forget their faith, but their countrymen never allowed them to.

I was also born in the Soviet Union, where Jews like my grandfather had no choice but to live by the black market. Ostensibly a barber, my grandfather developed a clandestine barter network that would impress a CIA station chief. A haircut on the side for a stick of salami; salami for free Aeroflot tickets; free tickets for the ear of a powerful person in case trouble comes. The only way to get by was to cheat the system—there simply wasn’t enough to go around fairly. It’s hard to think of a regime that claimed to do as much in the name of its people while impoverishing them more—materially, physically, morally. It’s hard to fault an ex-Soviet person for feeling owed. But, as a character in the novel says, “the Soviets aren’t offering restitution. The Germans are offering.”

***

The low burden of proof required by the reparations program wouldn’t tempt the average American: The law is the law here. That is the wonder of this country, for all its flaws: There’s enough to go around. Connections, pedigree, and money all help, but so many ordinary people can achieve what they’d like simply by working fairly and honestly. You can afford to be decent here.

Had the defrauded funds been American rather than German, it isn’t hard to imagine the news sticking in some immigration-obsessed Tea Party congressman’s craw, with its easy iconography of interlopers illegally sucking down precious native resources. The law is the law; the Holocaust-fund suspects should be prosecuted. So should, for that matter, those who cross the border illegally. But what should find no tolerance is the nativist demonology that so often accompanies news of malfeasance by a small portion of a minority group. The Russians have gotten off easy, their persecution limited to movies like Red Dawn and Gary Shteyngart’s novels. But what of more hideous gestures, such as Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s video of faceless Mexican marauders scaling the walls of our innocent land? The vast majority of illegal Mexican immigrants are here to make money to put clothes on the backs of children in Puebla—money earned doing work most Americans won’t deign to do, and for a pittance. Since so much modern journalism seems to have squandered its traditional mandate to force primitive instinct to contend with nuance, perhaps fiction has to step in.

The poison inside the people who allegedly defrauded the Holocaust fund would be inside you, too, if you had lived as Jews in the Soviet Union. Whatever their sins, these people are heroes, too, for having survived it. The struggle to defeat its legacy requires a daily application of conscience and will, even for members of my generation. I actually envy Slava, my own fictionalized protagonist, for the way in which he chooses America at the end of the book. Fiction is freeing that way; that’s one of its limiting seductions. For some, in real life, it’s simply too late.

Nothing is more uplifting than the American gospel of self-reinvention, but America forgets that human nature sometimes has a limit. That is part of America’s vital, ferocious, oblivious beauty. But it’s too late for those who traded their complimentary American synagogue memberships for cash; for those who sign for imaginary pills and massages to split profits with doctors who file for Medicare reimbursement; for those for whom it’s still 1977 in Minsk.

Slava spends only the 400 pages of my book arguing with his grandfather about the meaning of justice; I have spent more than a decade arguing with mine. In this time, I have achieved things I never imagined, but I have changed nothing about what men like our grandfathers see in the world. That creates one kind of conundrum for the American legal system, and another for Russian-Americans of my age. Our grandparents are our shame, but they are also our wisdom, courage, and tenderness. They gave up everything so we could have more. But in the United States, they remain Soviet—that singular cocktail of cunning, fear, paranoia, ambition, materialism, anti-intellectual refinement, tribalism, prudery, soul. It is the lasting curse of our magical, hideous birthplace. How do you forgive and revere these people at once? How do you honor someone whose definition of honor is entirely different from yours?

I found my only answer in fiction: Consider them individually, as the idiosyncratic, reduction-imploding human beings that they—that we all—are.

Boris Fishman is a 2010-2011 fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

I am a purist. I’ve taken care to preserve my Russian—I was 9 when my family arrived in America, in 1988—and go out of my way not to pollute it with Runglish (parkovat’, affordat’, spellat’). In the past, this notion has held especially true for Judaism. Unable to see past what Marx said about all religions, I steered scrupulously clear. I was kosher in my abstainment. I even managed to date a Modern Orthodox girl for six years—a yeshiva graduate who kept a kosher home—without adopting her rituals. I wasn’t going to do things piecemeal or in the improvised, dabbling way of my parents.

Several months ago, my parents and I were having dinner when the conversation turned to their upcoming 35th wedding anniversary. My mother, a schemer who would use Canadian Boxing Day as an excuse for a bash if it meant someone south of Montreal would show, proposed caterers. And table linens. And seating at separate round tables, wedding-style.

“I’ve got it—we’re going to renew our vows!” she exclaimed. My father choked on his pasta. “Under a chuppah,” she added.

In 1975, they had been married by the government of the city of Minsk, Belarus. This time, my mother wanted a figure closer to her faith to officiate. The only problem was that the last rabbi we had engaged, a bearded mumbler in Orthodox garb who whispered something over my grandmother’s grave, pocketed the white envelope from my grandfather’s hand, and slipped off into the night, did not leave us with the most inspired feeling toward the clergymen of our faith.

My mother’s conviction that there’s no such thing as a bad party pales only before her conviction that her son can do anything. (And what’s the harm if doing it will require him to make a couple of extra calls to his mother?)

“You should do it,” my mother said, turning to me. “Please. A present for us.”

I had numbed myself to Mom’s guilting long ago. So, a mechanical refusal was nearly out of my mouth before I realized I wasn’t sure I wanted to refuse. For some reason, my mother’s request did not provoke the same intimidation that my ex-girlfriend’s hopes of interesting me in Judaism had. Judaism had felt inapproachably general. This—the wedding ceremony—felt finite, digestible. My curiosity stirred.

That my mother would ask me to officiate under the chuppah should indicate how symbolically she regarded the religious portion of the proceedings. If I limited my role to a series of non-denominational bromides of the sort we traded at every other family-and-relatives gathering—“May you live with happiness and health”—no one would have thought twice. But I didn’t want this ceremony to be like other gatherings. I had observed with envious resentment the tenderness and passion with which my ex-girlfriend connected to religion. Here was my chance to find out more.

A Google-explorer venturing to find out how to officiate a Jewish wedding discovers a smorgasbord of options in his very first screen of hits: Reform? Hasidic? Messianic? You might expect that this Yom Kippur face-stuffer would choose Reform. The one-page explication of the Reform ceremony I came across did include the lovely revelation that the chuppah symbolizes the home that the bride and groom will build together. This had literal meaning for our family. My father is a superlative craftsman who has built most of the things inside our homes with his own hands.

In the end, however, the brief Reform primer felt like a gloss. I found myself drawn instead to the far more detailed explication of the ritual in another link. This one didn’t specify the provenance but seemed to draw heavily on Hasidic philosophy. On first read, the document was a jumble of incomprehensible dictates, suggestions, and caveats. But I pressed on. After the third read, the ideas behind the rules began to come into relief, like hills taking pale shape at dawn.

****

My parents’ vow-renewal ceremony took place in the backyard of their suburban New Jersey home on one of those heavenly early-September days that makes you think of Cézanne. The guests were resplendent in white, black, and coral, the color of the traditional gift for a 35th wedding anniversary. (The dress code was requested by my mother in the handwritten invitations that she had me—natch—write out.) The chuppah, a sheet imprinted with photographs from our lives on both sides of the ocean, rested on four trunks of young birch, the ubiquitous tree in Belarus.

I had sent my parents my script for the ceremony only the previous evening. We hadn’t had a chance to talk since. A little nervously, I searched out my mother’s face as she wrangled with the caterer. Soviet Jews tend to be as aggressively skeptical of Judaism as they are guilelessly sentimental about Jewishness. But when I finally pinned her down, my mother had few corrections. The flipside of her blind faith in her son is more blind faith; she would follow me anywhere. You can say I’m her religion.

The traditional Jewish wedding ceremony is as loaded with high-minded symbolism as an avant-garde Russian novel of the early 20th century. Prior to the ceremony, all knots on the groom’s clothing must be untied, symbolizing the breaking of all other bonds except for the one he is about to forge with his bride. The bride and her father must circle the groom seven times, to symbolize the bond that will exist between the families of the bride and the groom, the seven-day period during which the earth was created, and the seven times men wrap tefillin around their arms. The breaking of the glass symbolizes the breaking of our hearts in commemoration of the destruction of the Temple; that love, like glass, is fragile and must be protected because, once broken, it’s hard to put back together again.

The sound of the breaking glass is supposed to travel through time and space to share the newlyweds’ joy with all who have loved them. This sense of community, including those individuals no longer with us, permeates the ceremony. The bride and groom enact rituals that have their roots in the lives of the Patriarchs. Hasidic philosophy says that three generations of deceased on both sides of the wedding aisle are present, looking on and conferring their blessing. And when the ceremony has concluded, the rabbi informs the assembled that it is their duty to entertain the bride and groom, to perform a dance around them to indicate the community’s intention to stand by them as a couple. “As a part of the Jewish people,” I had read in my Hasidic primer, “they should never fear facing life alone.” In a sometimes lonely place, these are invaluable sentiments.

It wasn’t only what was in the ritual that enchanted me. It was also the freedom I felt to reshape and leave out. It’s funny the way scrupulousness works. Regarding the monolith of my faith from a distance, armed with nothing other than a generic all-or-nothing compulsion, I couldn’t imagine engaging with it selectively. This felt unserious and inauthentic. (Take it from this immigrant: There is no insecurity like the insecurity of an interloper.) But once I’d actually taken the dive, a blessed equanimity descended from somewhere. Pick and choose, it said. It’s OK—you’re forgiven. In a laboriously intellectual way, I had ended up where my parents had found their way by instinct long ago.

So, when I came across the instruction that a Kohen should bless the newlyweds, I modified it, there being no Kohens in our heathen midst. Instead, I decided to ask one member of each family in attendance to share a story about the newlyweds. “You are our Kohens,” I told them when the moment came during the ceremony. I said it in Russian, the language in which I conducted the ceremony (with a couple of assists from the audience), save for the Hebrew blessings.

And when the time came to read the promises made to the bride by the groom in the ketubah, I revised again, asking my parents to also prepare messages for each other. Under the chuppah, my mother told a story about a recent weekend trip to a department store with my father, where they split to shop separately. When they met by the register an hour later, each held the same decorative miniature three-legged stool. They thought the other would like it. My father played my mother two songs—his first on the guitar in about 35 years. The first was a famous Russian poem set to music. The second he had written for her himself.

That afternoon, my father smiled bashfully as he reached over his belly to untie the knots in his shoelaces. My grandfather completed his seven-times circuit of the groom with eyebrows lifted in mystification at this otherworldly ritual. When the time came to tell stories, I told the one about how, as a 13-year-old given the fresh opportunity of a self-reinvention in the suburban town to which my parents had moved me from Brooklyn, I had tried to pass myself off as a Bobby instead of a Boris, only to be returned to the hirsute, sweaty splendor of my original name when my parents came to pick me up from a tennis match and began shouting my real name up and down the hard court. They were early harbingers of the reconnection I would have with my heritage in several years, after a decade of strenuously trying to discard it.

Not everyone in attendance—or under the chuppah—understood every aspect of the ceremony; not everyone made their way successfully through the Hebrew blessings. But in the end, everyone confessed to a transforming experience. Some friends of my mother’s had a niece about to get married; they asked: Was I available to officiate?

My study of the Jewish wedding tradition had revealed it to me as a ritual of symbolism, remembrance, and poetry. Indeed, it was the last quality that struck me the most: the notion that marriage returns man and woman to the ideal state of togetherness in which they began history, Eve having been created from Adam’s rib; the idea that the wedding day is a personal Yom Kippur during which the bride and groom forgive the other past sins; that on this day, they are referred to as King and Queen; that the sixth—and longest—of the concluding sheva b’rachot “expresses the hope that the bride and groom grow in their love for each other, focusing their love as exclusively as Adam and Eve, when there was no one else in the world.” To love each other as if there was no one else in the world—that is a definition of love I can get behind.

The tradition got my attention as an exile from a land where I was less wanted but felt more at home; as the grandson of a remarkable woman who would be the first person in our family line to die in America; and as someone who tries to make art. It was the last thing I expected, but its intelligence, longevity, and sense of community gave me solace. And an itch to find out what comes next.

Boris Fishman is a 2010-11 Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.

Which explains why it was such a relief to leave New York for a month in New Orleans, where I needed to do research for a novel. And the Jewish issue was only a part of it. The things that Jews, and everyone else, seem to find inspiring about New York—the intensity, the pace, the crowds, the expense—leave me feeling roughly the way clannishness does.

I arrived at the apartment I was renting—in the Marigny neighborhood, full of old-time New Orleanians of moderate means, white hipster imports, and random cast-offs—to find an African-American repairman at work. The landlady had sent him to fix the kitchen fan.

“Nolan,” he introduced himself. I reciprocated. I asked him if he was from New Orleans.

“No,” he said. “I’m from Israel.”

When Nolan—Yehuda to his Israeli friends—was 8, his mother had what he calls a “religious stroke” and decided to move to the Holy Land. Nolan spent the next 17 years in Israel, where he learned fluent Hebrew. His younger siblings are still there, one married to a Jewish woman from the former Soviet Union.

“We should go out for some Middle Eastern food sometime,” Nolan said. “I know a couple good spots.”

***

Cake Café and Bakery in New Orleans
CREDIT: Kyle Petrozza

After unpacking, I went to find lunch. One of the charms—I guess you’d have to call it—of New Orleans is the modest place of commerce in the city’s life outside the French Quarter. Initially, this felt like a liberation from the manic din of New York, as did the general ease of getting around: New Orleans is small, and still too large for its population.

Eventually, though, it would become clear that, say, buying a six-pack en route to a friend’s house was going to feel trickier than a weekend navigating subway-route changes in New York. The busiest stretch of the city contains no more than a handful of grocery stores. And Verti Marte, you see, burned down recently. And Royal Street Grocery & Deli decided to do away with the Grocery part a year ago. Meanwhile, nowhere but in the dark recesses of its cooler does the Quartermaster Deli betray that it is also, in fact, a grocery. (“New Orleanians would find it pretty funny that you found it tough to find a place to buy beer,” a friend pointed out. Accustomed to New York’s ubiquitous bodegas, I had no idea any bar—and New Orleans has bars—would sell me what I needed.)

So, that first afternoon searching for lunch, my options were limited. I’d heard good things about Cake Café, five blocks from my apartment. In line, I was preceded by a specimen of the Hipster Army that has the Marigny and neighboring Bywater in a pincer grip. He was straw-haired, stringy, baroquely tattooed.

“I’ll have an everything bagel with that lox stuff on it,” he said.

I had to sit down. Jews, everywhere Jews! Cake Café is owned by Steve Himmelfarb, a music executive turned cake specialist. In addition to the standard New Orleans delicacies, the menu is loudly Jewish, its lodestar what Himmelfarb calls “the best bagel south of the Mason-Dixon line.”

I wasn’t going to get got so easily. “Pork boudin and eggs,” I announced—imperiously, scornfully—to the counter-woman.

***

My resistance was no use. Driving later that day, I saw a bumper sticker: “New Orleans. Oy! Such a home.” (A play, by the Mardi Gras club Krewe du Jieux, on the city’s ubiquitous “New Orleans—Proud to call it home” bumper stickers.) Google hits promising information about music shows led me instead to interviews with people like Abram Shalom Himmelstein, the co-founder of the Neighborhood Story Project. The park benefactor prominently celebrated on the entry plaque at New Orleans’s lovely City Park, which is larger than Central Park (and considerably less crowded) is Samuel Zemurray, a Russian Jew who made his fortune in South American bananas. (His former mansion on St. Charles Avenue is now home to the president of Tulane University.) By this point, it was no surprise to learn that the program director for Growing Home, a landscape-improvement program where I volunteered one afternoon, was Abigail Feldman, or that the CEO of the St. Bernard Project, where I spent several days painting and mudding drywall, was Zack Rosenburg.

The next time I visited Steve Himmelfarb’s Cake Café, the cake virtuoso—and Jewish boy made good—Duff Goldman was, natch, at the next table. By now, my defenses were shredded. Not only by the Jewish onslaught, but by how poorly I was fitting into New Orleans at large. It is, indeed, a charmed town: friendly, easy-going, full of sweet surprises and coincidences. But, especially to a big-city newcomer untutored in how wonder works in New Orleans, the city can quickly come to feel small. Claims to the city’s singularity are more justified in some departments (music, culture) than others (politics), the grating arrogance of its defenders notwithstanding. Since Hurricane Katrina, the city has drawn a tremendous amount of grassroots, enterprising talent, but just as much down-on-its-luck flotsam hiding out from reality. And the flipside of that easygoing friendliness is an equally easygoing outlook on commitments. You make plans with people, and they just don’t show up.

I didn’t come to New Orleans to find myself, so none of this should have mattered much. But my difficulty finding fluency in the freewheeling nonchalance that makes New Orleans tick (or stop ticking) made me feel as apart as my difficulty ratcheting up in New York. I felt too wound up, too intense, too searching for the place. Jews don’t have a monopoly on those qualities, but I associate them immediately with Jews—and with New York, the Jew of America. Over the course of the month—invisibly, forgivingly—Jewishness came to feel like a metaphysical refuge, a portable homeland, in lonely New Orleans.

On that second visit to Cake Café, I ordered the everything bagel with cream cheese. It was—no contest—the best bagel I’ve ever tasted. (Yes, yes, I’ve been to Montreal, too.) A cake in a bagel—the dough moist and chewy, the crust bronze and crisp, the onion filings as redolent as a grandmother’s latke. Steve Himmelfarb was being too modest in his assessment of it as the best bagel of merely the South. Even in New Orleans, regarded as a chosen place by so many of its inhabitants, people tend to defer to New York. Scarfing down the bagel, jazzed from that tiny pride of association that we feel when we come across a Jewish achievement, I thought: Maybe there’s something to that.

Boris Fishman is a writer in New York.

More than six decades later, Theodor Adorno’s claim that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” still dominates arguments about the proper means of Holocaust commemoration. Take last year’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, Daniel Mendelsohn’s affecting memoir of his research into the lives and deaths of six family members who perished in the Holocaust. Overcome by his findings, Mendelsohn argues that fiction must await the death of the last survivor:

[The victims] were, once, themselves, specific, the subjects of their own lives and deaths, and not simply puppets to be manipulated for the purposes of a good story, for the memoirs and magical-realist novels and movies. There will be time enough for that, once I and everyone who ever knew anyone who ever knew them dies. 

Literary critic and New Republic editor Ruth Franklin took Mendelsohn to task in the online magazine Slate: “What is more important,” she asked, “that we know what happened during the Holocaust (whether [Mendelsohn's family members] were shot or gassed, for instance), or that we try, in whatever hopelessly limited way, to understand what occurred? …Such understanding cannot be achieved without an act of imaginative empathy on the part of the reader.”

Several weeks later, as if in response, Leslie Epstein published The Eighth Wonder of the World, a messy novel about a Fascist American architect and his assistant, an American Jew, in Rome to build an ill-fated monument to Mussolini’s megalomania. Eighth Wonder overreaches to such a degree—Mussolini is a buffoonish presence; the Rabbi of Rome and Pius XII trade cant about the unlucky fate of the Jews—as to make a mockery of Franklin’s counterargument. In transforming these forbidding figures from historical icons to ordinary mortals, Epstein unleashes such zaniness that the plight of Italian Jews—the novel’s ostensible subject—comes to seem like little more than a plot contrivance.

This was disappointing. After all, Epstein’s first novel, King of the Jews, published in 1979, may have done more than any other to demonstrate that imaginative literature was equal to the task of Holocaust commemoration. The novel reinvents Chaim Rumkowski, controversial Judenrat chairman of the Lodz ghetto, as I.C. Trumpelman, a prosperous doctor with dubious ethics, who connives his way into the chairmanship after the Germans invade. As Jews freeze, starve, or disappear, Trumpelman gets around on a white stallion or in a limousine and issues currency emblazoned with his own image.

But he also manages to extract concessions from the Nazis that improve ghetto conditions, as part of a plan to turn his Jews into workers of such indispensable productivity for the German war effort as to guarantee the survival of most until liberation. “Someday an important official from Berlin—…maybe even the Big Man himself—will come to inspect our streets,” he tells his charges. “When he sees workers…he will say, Live! Live!” As Trumpelman executes deportation orders—on the grounds that he is saving more Jews than the Nazis would have spared had they committed the round-ups themselves—he defends himself as a martyr who will shed Jewish blood to save Jewish blood:

I, Trumpelman, took you by the hand and led you to death. It’s Trumpelman who made you work until your hearts explode…. [But] we are in the same cage together!… In this same cage with us there is a hungry lion! He wants to devour us all!…. I am the lion tamer. I stuff his mouth with meat. It’s the flesh of my own brothers and sisters!…. Thus with ten Jews, I save a hundred. With a hundred, I save a thousand…. My hands are bloody…. If your hands are clean, it’s because mine are dirty! 

Epstein’s portrait is so nuanced that it’s hard to tell whether Trumpelman is earnestly deluded or purposefully misleading his wards, and, if the latter, whether his goal is to ease their demise or merely to preserve his hold on power.

Those wards are equally complex: scheming, impious, heroic, and despairing all at once. Some—like the former liveryman who turns the ghetto’s best business (death) into a monopoly on funerals—profiteer. Others risk life to resist by running a clandestine maternity ward (new Jewish births are forbidden), or covertly record evidence of genocide in photographs.

Whether describing courage or graft, Epstein maintains a verist tone. In a typical scene, the Judenrat members bargain down a German quota for a hundred new deportees with tractors and timepieces. Given until sundown, they tortuously debate ways to select the remainder, though not without asides for self-pity and exoneration. They come across as full-bodied humans, as imperfectly true as the world that created them. Eventually, their nobler impulses win out and they resolve to commit mass suicide rather than turn over their own. But they go somewhat less than epically. As the group begins to nod off, Verble, the former ragpicker, asks Margolies, a former waiter, to once again tell the story of serving the legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt:

Gladly. It was at the Scotch Hotel. Bialystok. 1900. The curls of my hair, all on one side. She motioned for me. Forward I glided. A pot of hot milk, a pot of hot coffee, the saucer and cup. Now the cup is before her. Now with both hands I grip the silver: skillfully I pour out an equal measure of coffee and milk. A three-star hotel. A cigarette in a holder. 

But the hapless group is denied even the dignity of death; Trumpelman sweeps in and, like a charlatan savior, raises them all—the “cyanide” he had given them turns out to have been sleeping potion.

Somber tragedy this is not. If previous Holocaust literature—Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947), Elie Wiesel’s Night (1956), Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (1965)—tended to be solemn and chaste, Epstein’s first novel made room for farce and absurdism. And while few Holocaust works had directly interrogated the commonplace notion of Jews as fallen angels, Epstein had the audacity to propose that the Jews deserved to live not because they were saints, but because they were sinners, and therefore as human as the rest of the world.

Critical reaction to the book was divided. In The New York Times Book Review, Robert Alter defended it as audacious and exuberant. A few days later, Anatole Broyard savaged it in the daily Times: “What is one to make of 350 pages of tummeling? Of indistinguishable characters speaking indistinguishable lines?” Ruth Wisse seconded him in Commentary, deriding Epstein’s dialogue as a collection of “snappy one-liners” and his focus on Jewish complicity as a heretical suggestion that the Holocaust was an “internal Jewish matter.” With hindsight, the book seems to lie somewhere between Alter’s and Broyard’s critiques: Epstein’s approach was legitimate, but his artistry may have been too feeble—nuanced portrait of Trumpelman and fellow Jews notwithstanding—to lift the narrative above gutter farce, however much Epstein intended to elevate his material. (It’s the same handicap that hampers Eighth Wonder.)

Epstein’s background hardly suggests an appetite for such provocation. Born in 1938, he spent the war years in California. The son of legendary Hollywood screenwriter Philip G. Epstein, who co-wrote such blockbusters as Casablanca and Arsenic and Old Lace with his twin brother Julius, the younger Epstein grew up almost as a converso, his family so intent on assimilating that they staged Easter egg hunts.

As Epstein suggested in a 2003 NPR interview, his curiosity about his own Jewishness was a way of rejecting an uneasy home life: His father died early, leaving him with a mother who was “quite distant and all too close.” His initial intention, during a year of archival research at YIVO, the Yiddish institute in New York City, was to write as dutiful a novel as his outsider status required.

But the testimonies of ghetto life he encountered were so debilitating that he had to invent a new approach. “I think I must have sensed soon after I arrived at the library that if I were to get through such material at all, to say nothing of being able to think about it and shape it, I would have to draw a psychic shutter, thick as iron, between myself and these accounts,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay in The New York Times Book Review in 1982.

This detachment may have permitted Epstein to glimpse the less tragic—though no less true—aspects of ghetto life, such as its humor, and to consider Jews as something other than victims. Still aiming for sobriety as he began to write, he was unnerved to discover a disconcerting jauntiness in the narrative voice: “High seriousness I wanted—not high spirits. Yet no matter which way I turned it, the material kept coming out in a tone so lighthearted and glad-to-be-alive.”

The critical outrage—mixed, though it was, with praise—seemed to confirm for Epstein that he had been on the right course, and he vigorously defended the book. King of the Jews‘ unvarnished inquiry, he argued in a paper presented at a 1987 conference on literature and the Holocaust, was far preferable to the “grand guignol” of novels like Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, which follows a Polish boy as he wanders through the decimated countryside during and after the war. That novel, Epstein suggested, is filled with such concentrated terror as to vault it into the realm of myth. In Epstein’s view, this departure from realism toward the surreal encouraged the illusion that the Nazis were equally atypical—an aberration of history rather than a perfectly rational epilogue to a millennium of Christian anti-Semitism that could easily repeat itself. “This…horror show,” Epstein said, referring to Kosinski, “meant to divert us from what the actual atrocity—most unbearable in its monotony, its regularity, its unobtrusiveness—was like.” Kosinski was venerated for the reverent piety of his book even though it was, in Epstein’s view, far less true to what occurred than his own.

He also argued that imagination was a critical ingredient of Holocaust commemoration because Jews essentially invented imagination when they conjured God from nothingness in the desert. “[The Jews] took the greatest imaginative leap of all, that of comprehending, out of nothingness, a burning bush, an empty whirlwind, the ‘I am that I am.’” For Epstein, the attack on Jews was an attack on imagination itself.

He could have added that his alleged vice—his lack of first-hand experience of the Holocaust or its survivors—may have been the book’s greatest virtue, an inspiration in the broadest terms. Epstein had paid his dues in the archives, transforming an incipient curiosity about his faith into a tremendously moving, deeply informed testimonial about the Holocaust. To survivors, fiction writers, and just about anyone else, his considerable achievement said: You are not your past. You have free will. So invent.

King of the Jews is no longer the shocker it used to be. From Alain Finkielkraut’s Le Juif Imaginaire (1983) to Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986) to Melvin Jules Bukiet’s After (1996) on the page, and Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (2000) to Dani Levy’s My Fuhrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler (2007) on the screen, non-idealized and comic treatments of the Holocaust have edged nearer to the mainstream. King itself may be headed for a revival, as evidenced by a theatrical adaptation of the book, which has just begun a three-week run at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre.

But the main reason Epstein’s novel continues to be relevant is because its foundational plea—that imagination is critical to Holocaust response—remains controversial, as the Mendelsohn debate shows. And it will until the critics and watchdogs understand that the finest translation preserves the spirit above all. After all, in many cases, the lives of the perished were made extraordinary only by the nature of their deaths; too many of the details are unavailable, requiring invention. Only a fool would set out to write a Holocaust novel before learning its facts, but only a miser could think that facts could tell the whole story.

Golutvin, like Everything‘s Trachimbrod, no longer exists, having been wiped out by the Nazis. In a nod to his countryman Gogol, the enterprising Edik fixes the problem by recruiting residents from nearby Golotvin to play relatives who supposedly survived. This cow is less sacred to those who lived through the tragedy, and the low register permits Lounguine, who was born in Moscow but now lives mainly in France, to go higher as well. He has the restraint to depict the vanished Golutvin as just that: an empty field. (Apparently unable to bear the implications, Liev Schreiber, the director of Everything, gave us ex-Trachimbrod as a beatific field of sunflowers.)

Lounguine’s forged reunions cleverly recall the Soviet government’s designation of Jewish immigration to Israel in the 1970s and 1980s as “family reunions” to rationalize this embarrassing flight from the socialist utopia. Similarly, the locals’ invention of Jewish roots subtly evokes the rush by Soviet gentiles to discover even a trace of Jewish blood in order to qualify for an emigration permit. Otherwise, the film offers a fairly clichéd picture of post-Soviet provincial life, both Jewish and gentile—lots of shouting and unnecessary violence, and the Jewish grandmother only wants you to finish your food.

More regrettably, the tantalizing implication that the sacred cow has turned into a cash cow—that, in newly capitalist Ukraine, Jewishness has passed from stigma to marketable commodity—remains unexplored. The Ukrainian hosts are so grateful to have a profit opportunity that they happily fabricate the past that Grandfather, a gentile wartime collaborator who guided the narrator through Everything, wished to suppress. In that film, the young but righteous narrator, Jonathan Safran Foer, teaches the savage Ukrainians to value the difficult truth about their history. In Roots, Lounguine shows up the promise of the West; his heritage tourists—a Russian-Jewish émigré who lives in Israel, a gentile Ukrainian-Canadian—nurse clandestine agendas that put Edik’s fabrications to shame. One wants to reconnect with a certain “relative” only to murder him, for a wartime betrayal.

But the East’s promise may be empty as well, certainly more than Everything was willing to acknowledge. For Lounguine, the truth is only sometimes desirable, if only because it’s quite easy to invent. This is the greater truth, in fact. This isn’t to suggest that expatriates and their descendants have no business going home. But as Lounguine himself has suggested, they return in deference to an implacable, quasi-physiological impulse, not from any hope of making things better, for anyone.

In the late 1980s, klezmer music was making a comeback in the United States, but also on the festival circuit in Europe. It even caught on in Italy, which struck Francesco Spagnolo as strange; klezmer had nothing to do with Italian Jewish culture, a venerable and singular blend of Ashkenazic and Sephardic influences.

Back in Italy, Spagnolo hosted a Jewish music program in Milan, and later, a nightly program on Italian National Radio. He talks about why Italians were more drawn to klezmer than to native Jewish music, and how he worked to introduce other sounds. With traditional music from Livorno performed by Simone Sacerdoti, and a liturgical remix by Enrico Fink.

Editor’s note: Since he spoke to us last year, Spagnolo has moved to New York City and taken a new job as executive director of the American Sephardi Federation at the Center for Jewish History.

Of course, there’s no reason Gere and Binoche couldn’t inhabit Jewish characters. Gene Kelly and Natalie Wood did it in Marjorie Morningstar half a century ago, when American-Jewish life was much more of a mystery to mainstream America. But in the screen adaptation of Bee Season, out tomorrow, the characters themselves are no longer very Jewish.

Myla Goldberg’s 2000 novel was mainly about families, their myths of harmony, and what happens when those fantasies unravel. In the book, Eliza, the family underachiever, wins her school spelling bee, revealing an aptitude for a heightened experience of language described by Jewish mystics as a path to God. Saul, a lifelong student of mysticism who never discovered such a capacity within himself, begins to train her, unwittingly neglecting his once-favored son Aaron. Meanwhile, Miriam, who steals trinkets from random homes in an abstract effort to restore a world shattered by her parents’ early deaths, begins to lose interest in concealing her habit. Saul is as oblivious to her deterioration as he is to his son’s resentment.

The context for this story of family dysfunction was explicitly Jewish. Saul was a slightly disheveled hippie-turned-cantor at a suburban synagogue, his congregation consisting of the Mr. and Mrs. Schwartzes who rush the oneg tables at such places. Saul, we learned, had had a convoluted journey to his calling, from early years as the son of a deracinated Jewish father to college experiments with acid to the rejection of drugs for the levitations of Jewish mysticism.

In the film, Saul becomes a polished religious-studies professor and Miriam a convert from Catholicism. Though screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and the directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel retain the book’s enchantment with Jewish mysticism, they have leached it almost entirely of its context. “We didn’t want the religious side of Judaism to overwhelm the spiritual side of the story,” the directors told me before the film’s release. In the film’s production notes, they explain, “We wanted to explore a more universal and accessible vision of what an internal spiritual quest of any kind might be like.”

For those who have read Bee Season, the resulting film may recall an earlier era when Jewish source materials made for distinctly non-Jewish films, when Jewish writers and producers shied away from overtly Jewish content either as a bid for assimilation or to avoid antagonizing isolationists in the World War II era. This is how both The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) proceeded without references to the protagonist’s Jewish identity or to the fate of European Jewry, respectively; how The Life of Emile Zola (1937), which focuses on Alfred Dreyfus’ trial for treason, managed to fail to mention the Frenchman’s religion.

The directors of Bee Season suggest that this kind of cinematic departure may mean something different today. “Thirty years ago, you couldn’t tell this story this way,” Siegel says. “You couldn’t call attention to Judaism without being focused on the Jewish identity of the characters.” For Siegel and McGehee, America’s acceptance of Jews has turned them into such an unexceptional ingredients in the melting pot that artistic works no longer carry the obligation to double as referenda on what it means to be Jewish in America.

Indeed, the Jewish relationship with America has never seemed as symbiotic as it has in recent years, and the only seeming challenge to Jewish films these days is how busy Steven Spielberg and Mel Brooks are. On the other hand, when was the last time Hollywood gave us a film that truly engaged with what it means to be an American Jew today, a “Jewish” film that is neither a Holocaust drama nor a coy, loving send-up of ethnic stereotype? When Peter Riegert, the respected actor who appeared in Crossing Delancey, adapted a short story from Gerald Shapiro’s collection Bad Jews into the 2004 film King of the Corner (featuring Isabellla Rossellini, Eli Wallach, and Eric Bogosian), the film garnered more attention for Riegert having to take it to theaters across the country himself rather than for its sensitive portrayal of a secular Jewish family.

Gyllenhaal, Siegel, and McGehee claim to have made changes for no reason other than to amplify the story, and many are imaginative. For instance, the novel comes to suggest that Saul never developed his daughter’s mystical gift because he perceives the world with his head instead of his heart. “Saul’s transformation into a professor—which was Naomi’s idea—made sense because he has this very intellectual relationship with religion,” Siegel says. For similar reasons, Miriam, who has restrained herself to allow Saul to feel like the leader of the family, has been made a convert. “It’s a nice shorthand for how she gave up something to be with Saul,” Siegel explains.

On the other hand, these alterations leave the Naumanns’ preoccupations without persuasive antecedents. When Aaron, who in the novel would “enter the synagogue at his father’s side feeling like a prince beholding the kingdom he stood to inherit,” rebels against his father, his defiance—a tour of other faiths that culminates in a fascination with Hare Krishna—makes sense only as a reaction to the communal Jewish life his cantor father had imposed. For viewers who haven’t read the book, Aaron’s spiritual sampling will seem like generic adolescent defiance.

Similarly, in the book, Saul’s stewardship of an ordinary congregation implicitly explained his obsession with mysticism; in the film, the avocation comes across as random and weird. These are certainly spiritual times in America, but it may be premature to assume that kabbalist aspirations require no more explanation than a gardening habit. A more specifically Jewish setting might have had a clarifying effect, making the material easier to relate to for non-Jews. Indeed, if Siegel and McGehee are right and Jews have become thoroughly integrated, non-Jews shouldn’t find that backstory too difficult to absorb.

The film does pose an intriguing, if inadvertent, question absent from Goldberg’s novel: Does anything indivisibly Jewish remain after the traditional markers of American “Jewishness”—the stock characters, the rituals of the shul—have been removed? Is there something uniquely Jewish about this story, or is the Jewish teaching it portrays so universally applicable because it’s so unspecific? As American culture performs on Jewish tradition the loving evisceration to which it subjects other cultures before they can join its mainstream, what remains?

A film hardly requires explicit Jewish content to become a compelling portrayal of the Jewish experience. The principals in King of the Corner are only nominally Jewish; their humorous but despairing preoccupations with family and death are not. Sometimes, there are no Jews in the film at all; arguably, one of the most “Jewish” films of recent years was Vadim Perelman’s House of Sand and Fog (based on the Andre Dubus III novel), about a family of Iranian immigrants destroyed by exile and family catastrophe.

This was the sense of what it meant to be Jewish that invisibly pollinated those early Hollywood films, films that Jewish studio heads assiduously kept free of explicit references to Jewishness. There is little of this diffuse, emotional sense in Bee Season. The argument has been made that early Hollywood birthed the very idea of the American dream by withholding ethnically specific context while imparting abstract Jewish values. Bee Season withholds both.

The cinematic version of the book, directed by the stage and film actor Liev Schreiber and out in theaters today, also wants to emphasize that, in the end, this is a Ukrainian story. Easily half the film is in Russian and Ukrainian, and Schreiber even takes care to distinguish among regional accents. He is fastidious in his efforts toward verisimilitude; the hand soap on a train and a flask of vodka in a rural restaurant are local brands. Schreiber pushes Ukraine (and the Eastern Europe for which it stands) to the forefront of the story, but the place he discovers is completely different from the Ukraine of Foer’s novel.

In addition to doing away with the magical-realist chronicle of a shtetl that consumed half of the book, the film makes another crucial departure. (Caveat lector: the following is a spoiler for those who haven’t seen the film.) In the book, Grandfather, a gentile, is an anti-Semite who turns out to have sent his best friend, a Jew, to his death during a Nazi raid on their village when forced to choose between him and his own family. His journey with the novel’s protagonist to what turns out to be the scene of his act of complicity forces his acknowledgment and repentance of his sins.

In the film, too, Grandfather begins as a virulent anti-Semite, but the identity concealed beneath the sting of his bigotry isn’t that of a gentile accomplice; Grandfather, it turns out, is a Jewish survivor. Having inadvertently survived an execution squad in his hometown, he casts off his yellow-starred jacket and absconds into a new life as a gentile. His transformation is so resolute that we meet him as someone who knows no way to refer to Jews except as “zhidy,” or “kikes.” (In fact, the film’s only failure of veracity comes when the American informs his guides that he knows very well what their constant references to him as a zhid mean—”Jew.” It’s worse. Much worse.)

What did Schreiber, who adapted the screenplay in addition to directing, intend by this single but tremendous transformation of a major character? Why turn the film’s main anti-Semite from a philo-Semitic gentile to an anti-Semitic Jew? Does the change hint at a possible reconciliation, a symbiosis of suffering of the we-are-all-Jews variety? Or is Schreiber letting Ukrainians off the hook when he allows his camera to focus on a Jew instead of a gentile accomplice?

Schreiber claims to have had something else in mind. “Whenever we memorialize the Jews who died in the Holocaust as heroes, I believe we overlook the impact that it has on those who have survived,” Schreiber told me in an email. “At the very least, they were required to deny their identity and faith…. For me making the most vehemently anti-Semitic character in the film Jewish was a way to articulate the burden of guilt and shame that so many survivors live with today.”

What Schreiber, the grandson of a 1916 refugee from Eastern European pogroms, seems to be saying is that only a second-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors could dare to re-imagine Jewish death—and life—during World War II through such a complicated, nuanced, eminently unheroic perspective on survival. Their elders are inclined either to put the tragedy behind them or to insist on an unadulterated worship of survivors as heroes. Cleverly, Schreiber is using a youth-oriented film—Everything Is Iluminated was wildly popular among younger readers, and the film works to feel kinetic and hip—to press its youthful viewers to think in less preconceived ways about what it means to have survived the Holocaust. This way, Schreiber appears to be arguing, is a more difficult confrontation with the legacy of that tragedy, but for all that also a more sincere veneration. True empathy, after all, comes from appropriation and identification, not bequeathed dogma.

There is a chuckling commonplace in the literary world that Jonathan Safran Foer, who was 25 when he published his novel, which brims with sagelike inquiries into and pronouncements on the meaning of it all, writes like an old man. The film only underscores this. The novel’s notion of Eastern Europe, after all, was a fairly traditionalist American Jewish view: the Ukrainian gentiles were the killers and the Jews were the victims. Foer’s wishful, personal innovation was that it took the visit of a young American Jew named Jonathan Safran Foer to call out the hibernating guilt and shame of the former.

Schreiber offers an entirely different picture. He hardly avoids the Holocaust, but he wants to expand our notion of what it meant to survive it. Survival, after all, takes place mostly after the tragedy. And the great tragedy of Eastern Europe was not only that it helped to kill Jews during the Holocaust, but also that it refused to acknowledge their suffering and honor their true identities after it.

It’s hard to blame Grandfather for his self-denial during the war, but it’s more difficult to exculpate him for his postwar self-rejections and devolution into an anti-Semite, Ukraine’s inhospitable postwar terrain for Jews notwithstanding. The unpleasant aftertaste of Schreiber’s film is that survivors were not only heroes.

It’s not an argument Schreiber could have advanced with an American Jewish character. If Grandfather had emigrated to America instead of remaining in Ukraine, of course, he would have become a “hero.” And by choosing to focus on an anti-Semitic Jew rather than a philo-Semitic gentile, Schreiber returns a kind of agency to Jews themselves—an agency missing from Foer’s novel—although at the enormous cost of complicating their wartime and postwar identities.

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In 1907, a 23-year-old writer from Kiev named Dovid Bergelson decided to send fragments of his latest work, an impressionistic account of shtetl life titled At the Depot,” to I.L. Peretz, the eminence grise of Yiddish letters. Peretz did not respond, so Bergelson boarded a train for Warsaw, where he sought out Peretz and regaled him with the story in person. Peretz was impressed.

Bergelson did not lack for confidence. Born into a wealthy family in rural Ukraine, he spent his youth studying Hebrew religious works and Russian literature, dabbling as a writer in both languages before taking up Yiddish. I would prefer to be first in Yiddish than second in Russian,” he confided to Shmuel Niger, an eminent Yiddish literary critic.

Yiddish was the right instrument for Bergelson, who plied it to become its greatest modernist. The Shadows of Berlin, a collection of short stories Bergelson wrote about his voluntary exile in the city in the 1920s, and published this month by City Lights Books in a translation by Joachim Neugroschel, confirms that status. A product of the backward, clannish shtetl, Bergelson believed it had no place in the rapidly modernizing world of pre-revolutionary Russia, but he was equally doubtful of the unsavory spectrum of radical revolutionaries who wanted to replace the monarchy. Bergelson’s skepticism of ideology served him poorly in life (it claimed his life, in fact) but sublimely in art. Bergelson’s constitutional pessimism made for a literary style acutely attuned to the psychological dislocations of the modern age.

No language was better suited to this endeavor than Yiddish, as no language’s literature was less burdened by history. A pedestrian counterpart to Hebrew, the sacred language of Scripture scrupulously defended from contamination, Yiddish lived on the street, a ductile argot unguided by precedent. It graduated to literary maturity only in the 1880s, a mere generation before Bergelson’s arrival on the scene.

It had been long enough for him to reject the prevailing literary style, the folksy, forgiving emotionalism of Mendele Moykher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem, as well as the tendency of Yiddish literature in general to heroize the old shtetl’s resignation, endurance, and woe. The shtetl had changed.

Soon after assuming the throne in 1855, Czar Alexander II had eased restrictions on Jewish residence, schooling, and commerce in the Pale of Settlement, generating significant economic opportunity for the Jewish community, but his assassination in 1881 reversed many of the reforms. Battered by pogroms and economic stagnation, the shtetls of the Pale languished.

This atrophy was the lifeblood of Bergelson’s fiction. He portrayed it like no Yiddish writer before him. His language was Yiddish, but his style was Russian. Like the nouveau riche Jews of the period, their social climbing arrested by the new repression, Bergelson looked beyond rather than within; his writing recalled Tolstoy’s plotting, Chekhov’s introspection, and Andrei Bely’s Symbolist experiments of perspective. The result was a modernist style informed by an anxiety about the degeneration of the familiar world. He was ‘gray’ Bergelson,” says Seth Wolitz, a Bergelson specialist and professor of Yiddish literature at the University of Texas at Austin, invoking Moshe Kulbak, a Yiddish poet who coined the moniker. He saw only ruins.”

After meeting Peretz, Bergelson published several short works to increasing acclaim, but it was his novel After All Is Said and Done (1913) that anointed him the vanguard voice of Yiddish fiction. The story of well-educated and independent Mirel Hurvitz, who is stymied by her disorientation in a Jewish society now governed by the self-interest and decadence of the parvenus who benefited from Alexander II’s economic reforms, it gave Bergelson’s programmatic skepticism its most resonant expression. Mirel, Yiddish literature’s first emancipated woman, is an emblem of Jewish society unmoored. She tries to determine a path in life and establish her feelings for a variety of suitors, but stumbles in a fog of indecision.

Lionized by the petit-bourgeois strivers he savaged in the novel—Bergelson was as worldly as they wished to become—the work perfected his trademark style, a psychological impressionism that subordinated meaning to mood. In a world where the significance of events and behavior is impossible to determine or control, his characters function according to half-understood motivations, which they communicate in half-spoken words. The narrator appears to know no more than they do.

The Revolution seemed to usher in a more benign period than gray Bergelson” had anticipated. The Ukrainian Parliament committed significant funds to Yiddish education, and Bergelson became a leader of the Yiddish Kultur-lige, a powerful institution devoted to promoting Yiddish culture. The Russian Civil War soured that goodwill, however, and pogroms proliferated. Bergelson barely survived one himself, though an unpublished manuscript of his perished. In 1921, he moved to Berlin, following in the footsteps of many fellow Yiddishists sympathetic to the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution but wary of its violence.

Despite Berlin’s hyperinflation, Bergelson lived comfortably, thanks in part to the hard currency he received from contributions to American publications such as the Jewish Daily Forward, but he felt disconnected from the disintegrating culture that informed his work back home. Bergelson, who had never visited Western Europe, was awestruck by Berlin’s energy and sophistication, but also found it impersonal and foreign, a place where, in the words of the Yiddish mystical writer Der Nister, the Jewish intellectuals are left without roots, [and] rot.”

In The Shadows of Berlin, the city is oppressively busy, at once enslaved by capitalist routine and self-interest and released into decadence by the abandon of the interwar years. In For 12,000 Bucks He Fasts Forty Days,” for instance, depraved Berliners turn an act of atonement into a carnival amusement, taunting an emaciated boy under glass with sausages and beer.

Stylistically, the stories recall After All Is Said and Done. In Among the Refugees,” a perturbed young émigré, his whole body [like] the gray dust on the far roads of small towns,” reels from the dislocation of exile until he decides to murder a notorious Ukrainian pogromist hiding in Berlin. For unexplained reasons, however, the only life the young man can end is his own. In Blindness,” another émigré, burdened by the dispossessions of exile, succumbs to grief, the concrete causes of her decline as unspecified as the way she dies.

The language is brilliant—Shmuel Niger compared Bergelson’s words to pearls strung on a silken thread,” according to scholar Joseph Sherman—but the stories are a distinctly cerebral pleasure, their mood a greater priority for the author than storytelling or character development.

By the mid-1920s, Bergelson was beginning to realize that he would have to act on his disenchantment with Berlin. The Deutschmark was stabilized in 1924, greatly increasing the cost of living, and right-wing extremism grew more menacing. Bergelson considered leaving, but his options were limited. Yiddish culture in Poland, for which he always maintained a tribalist disdain, was, in his view, conservative and obscurantist, its literature compromised by commercial considerations. Palestine was a Zionist pipe dream where Yiddish was a lingua non grata. America was the land of assimilation, where Yiddish was destined to fade.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, on the other hand, Yiddish seemed to be flourishing, with theaters, schools, and publications subsidized by the state. It was mainstream to go back to Russia in the mid-1920s,” Gennady Estraikh, author of the recently published In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism, says. To become pro-Soviet in the 1920s didn’t mean you had to be a Communist.” At the same time, according to Seth Wolitz, the rise of Stalin meant that exiles had to come home, or become suspect.” Bergelson, who still loved to be liked,” in Estraikh’s words, was assured that he would be received like a legend, with a lavish apartment and income. His lingering anxiety about the Bolsheviks’ unscrupulous rule notwithstanding, he decided to yoke himself to the Soviets.

On March 2, 1926, Bergelson published a letter in the Moscow Yiddish daily Der Emes (The Truth) declaring himself a pro-Soviet writer who had sinned by abandoning the Soviet Union. For all its bombast, this was a cautious confederacy—Bergelson was still uncertain and wanted to buy time. In the letter, he added that his betrayal meant that he had to serve a penitential sentence abroad before receiving the privilege of return. He spent the next seven years casting around for destinations, visiting Denmark and the United States and ultimately dismissing the former as a poor incubator of Jewish culture and the latter as a variation on the capitalism of Berlin.

He returned to the Soviet Union in 1934; the decision would soon come to seem like a tragic miscalculation. By the early 1930s, ideological calcification had established socialist realism as the only acceptable method of Soviet literature. In the purges toward the end of the decade, Yiddishists made natural victims—their devotion to Jewish culture made their loyalty to the Soviet Union suspect.

Initially the troubles did not directly affect Bergelson. He was celebrated, his writing regularly reissued. The price he paid was his integrity. Bergelson’s pro-Soviet work, which tended to explore the nexus of Jewishness and Soviet Communism, never lost the equivocality and pensiveness of his earlier output, but, having had to make room for propaganda, never fully resembled it either. The Revolution discredited the petit bourgeoisie, whom Bergelson skewered with such skill and which constituted his core audience, and he didn’t really know how to depict the smiling worker. But he tried. He regularly revised his output to accord with Stalin’s ever changing dictates, made all the customary denunciations of the West and bourgeois Yiddishists in Poland and the United States, and sang the glories of the proletariat. As Shmuel Niger put it in a 1934 review of Birebidzhaner, a boosterish evaluation of the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Far East, Bergelson, whose previous work was usually an act of hatred,” in this novel, learns to love.”

Bergelson couldn’t love enough. Though World War II postponed the campaign to suppress Soviet Yiddish culture, it was revived soon afterward. In January 1949, Bergelson was arrested on trumped-up charges, as were dozens of other Yiddishists. After a show trial in the summer of 1952, Bergelson was shot, along with 12 others, in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. Execution day, August 12, was his 68th birthday.

What drew Hans to Yiddish folk songs? And why does he perform them?

The initial connection to Yiddish came largely through his leftist politics. As a product of the radical upheavals of 1968, Hans was drawn to people that were victims of fascism, capitalism, imperialism. And the Jews of Europe were the greatest victims of all.

Yiddish singing came into the picture only because these political currents also pushed many young Germans to talk about the crimes of the Nazis, which got a lot of them interested in Yiddish music in the early 1970s. Hans was traveling in Germany at the time, and it was these Germans who introduced him to it. He loved the raw emotion of the Yiddish language. He’s become more curious about Judaism over the years partly because he wants to understand the world that produced these songs.

Where does he perform, and who is he singing for?

Hans’s first performances were in Vienna, and the crowds were mostly friends or sympathetic leftists. But he realized he was in this unique position to bring Yiddish music to Austrian audiences in the countryside that wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to Jewish culture. As he said to me, he wanted to introduce them to a culture their fathers and uncles helped to destroy. To draw them in, he would integrate the songs into a program about being a wandering shepherd. Now he’s done this program in most of the small towns where he passes with the flock each year.

How did you learn about him?

I was mostly just curious when I first heard Hans sing during a visit to New York. But then I interviewed him for the Forward, and when he told me about his mother being tortured as a Communist by the Gestapo, I realized his story was a way into a larger story about European anti-Semitism and Yiddish.

My mother got sick when I was really young, so I ended up spending lots of time with my grandmother, Bashy. She was from a Lithuanian shtetl, and one of her central beliefs, which I absorbed, was that Jews and Gentiles don’t go well together. Plus our household was always full of these Yiddish expressions—I don’t think I ever went to sleep without hearing Shlof gezunt, shtey af gezunt, (“Sleep in health, wake up in health”). Going to Austria was a chance to make sense of all these different feelings.

You write that you went to Austria looking for anti-Semites. Why did you want Bashy’s anxieties confirmed rather than undermined?

Part of it, I think, is a longing for a place to direct even a little bit of the pent-up Nazi hatred that comes with learning about the Holocaust as an adolescent. More broadly, it’s probably a reflection of this almost primal sense I have that the rest of the world is out to get the Jews. This is so deeply ingrained that for me to have gone to Austria, the capital of anti-Semitism in my imagination, and to have not found anti-Semitism would have posed a threat to my very sense of myself.

This kind of paranoia has the potential to skew your moral reasoning, and I’d prefer that my Jewish identity was rooted in positive associations. Still, it can be tricky to avoid, not only because anti-Semitism still exists, but also because even some Jewish traditions reinforce the notion of Jews as potential victims—the Purim story comes to mind, or the whole idea of Amalek. The challenge is to reconcile this mindset with the reality that Jews in America today face little anti-Semitism. I grew up with all the pathos of anti-Semitism but with no real exposure to it. Austria was my big chance to make good on all my paranoia, and shy of encountering storm troopers in the streets of Vienna, I’m not sure anything would have quite lived up to my neurotic imaginings.

Does being Jewish feel different in Europe than it does in the States?

In America today it is a choice in a way it’s not in Europe. American Jews, for the most part, can fully separate themselves from their Jewish identity. And the Holocaust happened on European soil, so to live in Europe after the Holocaust is to feel a little like a ghost.

For Jews, this murderous burden, perversely, has been enriching. We have made tragedy and comedy out of it. To tweak Gary Shteyngart, would you rather be Dostoevsky—the tortured soul saddled with an inspiring burden—or, quite plainly, happy?

I’d say “happiness before art,” but I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. I think that there’s more than enough pain in the everyday drama of human relationships to provide the raw materials for great art. For my part, I get my best work done when I’m not in a deeply neurotic and unhappy state. It’s hard to write and examine your body for tumors at the same time.

The Germans seem to have engaged in a sincere soul-searching that has combined openness about the crimes of the Nazis and German society with aggressive suppression of that period’s legacy—sale of Nazi paraphernalia is banned, for example. How does Austria’s reckoning compare?

It took Austria until the 1990s to begin to look at its past in a way the Germans had for at least several decades. Partly this was due to the anti-Semitism of Austrian leaders or politicians who were trying to secure the votes of former Nazis. But the primary reason is that the Austrians were able to declare themselves “the first victims of the Nazis” almost as soon as the war ended. And the Allies were complicit in this. They allowed politicians to insert the clause that Austria had been Hitler’s “first victim” into the founding document of modern Austria, the State Treaty of 1955. The Allies even removed a clause from the earlier Moscow Declaration that said that Austria shared some of the responsibility for fighting on the side of the Nazis. Not all Austrians supported the Nazis, but, overall, they were shockingly receptive to the Nazi program, and for a real reckoning to take place that truth needs to be internalized. In 1999, a quarter of the country voted for Jörg Haider’s Freedom party. Not all or even most of its supporters are anti-Semitic, but it’s amazing that more than 50 years after the war a party founded by and for former Nazis could still garner that kind of support. It’s not something that could have happened in Germany. In dealings with West Germany, the Allies made it clear that Germany would have to take de-Nazification and restitution seriously if it was going to regain a place on the world stage. The same pressure simply wasn’t put on Austria.

What’s your sense of how individual Austrians feel toward Jews, publicly and privately?

Things have changed since the 1980s and the Waldheim affair. Initially, it exacerbated public anti-Semitism, but in the long run, it probably diminished it by shining a spotlight on Austria’s Nazi problem and putting Austrian politicians on the defensive. You’re now much less likely to hear public attacks against “international Jewish organizations.”

Privately, anti-Semitism is fairly widespread. Almost everyone I spoke to had stories of awful comments in the street. That said, I don’t think the situation is worse than elsewhere in Europe. The difference is that in England or France, much of the anti-Semitism is interwoven with Middle East politics. In 2001 there were polls that had nearly half of the respondents agreeing with the idea that Jews were exploiting the Holocaust. At the same time, even more people said that the Holocaust should be remembered. When I interviewed Austrians in the Freedom Party stronghold of Carinthia, there seemed to be little denial that Austria played a role in Nazi crimes. The response was usually some version of, “Terrible things happened, but it was a long time ago, and Austria must look to the future.”

Non-Jewish interest in prewar Yiddish culture can come off as an unsettling fetish, but Hans seems too guileless for this kind of subconscious agenda. What exactly is his psychological relationship to this extinguished culture?

He probably does idealize the shtetl world—I think we all do. But whereas for me, it’s this place where my ancestors come from, his idealization has to do with the politics of 1968, and his worldview at that time, which, to a large extent, is his worldview today. Jews were the symbolic victims of everything he grew up fighting against.

So, to put it in a radically reductive way, it’s not so much about Jews as it is about victims, and his choice of Yiddish songs rather than Communist march songs is to some degree incidental.

Right—at least that’s how it started. Since then, he’s become interested in the world that these songs came from. It wasn’t until his first trip to North America in 2000 that he got a taste of what a real Jewish community might look like. He kept saying things like, “People really understood me for the first time.” He’s never articulated it in this way, but I think he found a certain argumentativeness, a certain intellectual vigor, that he hadn’t had among his peers back home. I mean, he’s aware that some of this is a classic stereotype—he once told me he saw these “Jewish” hands on these old women he met in Canada, the hands of intellectuals—it’s ridiculous, but he was clearly at a point in his life when he was craving a connection to Judaism, maybe even manufacturing it.

How did you first come across Nussimbaum?

I discovered Lev when I went to Azerbaijan to do a magazine story about the Caspian oil boom. There were no guidebooks available in English at the time, but several people recommended instead a short novel set in Baku before the Russian Revolution: Ali and Nino by Kurban Said. It’s a Romeo-and-Juliet story about a Christian girl and a Muslim boy—really a wonderful novel, with all kinds of rich detail about the city.

When I tried to find out more about the author, I found that nobody had any idea. There were all sorts of theories, all very contradictory. But by chance, while I was in Baku, I was introduced to a very old woman who suggested an answer. She had been at school with a Jewish boy, the son of an oil millionaire, who had left the city during the Revolution and never been heard of again. I decided to find out what had happened to him. And six years later, I think I finally have, though the story was stranger than anything in the novel—anything that I could have imagined, in fact.
Did the turbulence of the late 1910s and early 1920s somehow factor into Lev’s freewheeling self-reinvention?

Very much so. He refused to behave normally in the face of danger. He refused to acknowledge normal reactions, that you as an individual were supposed to be cowed and run away and hide. One definition of assimilation—a negative definition—is that individuals were supposed to cower and lose themselves to the machine, whereas Lev said, “I’m going to assimilate as a kind of weapon. You can’t define me, I will define myself. If I need to, I will become you even as you attack me.” Even as he’s becoming a victim, he insists on becoming the persecutor, so he becomes a Fascist. Which is when he becomes a disturbing character.

If he had a flaw as a person—which made him very hard to be friends or intimate with—it is that he saw himself as a historical actor, channeling these big historical forces—the languorous Eastern force, the dying monarchical force, the dynamic fascist force.

So he was a product of the times?

Lev would say no. He’d say, “I clash with the age. I love old people, and this is an age that worships young people. I love the desert against a world that loves modernity and progress.” He’s very much a child of the age, in that he sees himself as having to embody one of these massive forces. But that’s also why he’s not a child of the age, because he has this Byronic attitude, this Napoleonic attitude, as though he as an individual will be decisive, will affect reality. But the reality of the 20th century is the opposite: The forces control the individuals.

Lev dwells on Islam and the Orient, but he treats his Jewishness more obliquely, if at all. Did it occur to him that his fate, as much as he imagined himself in control of it, was the classic tale of the exiled, wandering Jew?

You could look at Lev in terms of other Jewish Orientalists. That was a way of faking and embodying a Gentile Western heroic pose—rediscovering the East—yet turning it on its head, because you were becoming a hero riding back to the East, but when you got there, you found out you were actually the son of the place you were invading. It’s the classic Jewish paradox: Where do I belong? This is the positive way of seeing the modern Jewish dilemma: I am from everywhere. The negative way is: No matter where you go, you find out that you’re a victim, that you’re unwanted and don’t belong.

What was it about Lev’s Jewishness that allowed him to wear it so lightly?

The Caucasus was a place where it wasn’t bad to be a Jew. I don’t think he grew up with a feeling of Jewish self-hatred. Any rational person would use his assumed identity to either hide or escape, but he uses it to hide in plain sight in such a flamboyant and ridiculous way that it almost becomes an open secret. It’s all a bit off, because he’s not trying to make it right. There are too many jokes in it, the pose is too ironic. And all his friends were Jewish.

So posing as Essad Bey didn’t mean abandoning his Jewishness, the way it might today?

Certainly to his friends, Lev as a Muslim prince was a profoundly Jewish character. The more he became Essad Bey, the more he became their friend Lev Nussimbaum playing Essad Bey. That became an expression of Jewishness, an expression of this idea of extreme elasticity, of the cultural personality that only a Jew could bring off.

Lev defied the strict classifications of anthropology in his romanticized studies of Caucasian peoples. Yet there’s a moment in the book, as the Gestapo is trying to get Lev deported from Italy, when he begs for an anthropologist to certify him as not Jewish.

Anthropology seems so bland and friendly now, but in the early 20th century, Jews could only be dissected badly by these fields. The Jews were extremely assimilated, it’s a different world than now. My definition of Jewishness, which may be stuck in the past, is these Jews who were assimilated, before the Holocaust and Israel—a kind of extreme assimilation. When you start to dissect it, the Jewish identity falls apart. When Lev used to fool around with his fake anthropology, there was a fundamental disrespect for that kind of investigation into people. I identified with that so deeply in Lev: Who the hell are you to put everything in a genre? Why does everything have to be so compartmentalized? We’re talking about human beings.

What about Lev’s own family?

Lev and his father lost everything. These Baku millionaire oil refugees that I have great sympathy for, they built everything, and it was undone and used against them. Lev had a lifelong identification with the collapsing old world. When he and his wife visited America and went to the Waldorf, there was always a sense that the father was brought along and given a lot of money to buy his dark suits and keep living like a millionaire. There was a fantasy that the son was giving to the father: Old Baku had never collapsed and he had never become a penniless refugee. No evidence remained that the father had to face that.

Did your research undermine your own assumptions about the era?

Lev’s life gave me a chance to work out through investigation all the mysteries that had been bothering me since I was a kid, the question, basically, of the Jew in the modern world. My particular pain is that the world of Jewishness that I identify with—the extremely assimilated, educated European and Russian Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries—is lost, and is not mourned enough.

All the anti-Semitic clichés are actually enormous compliments. There’s nothing better than to be rootless cosmopolitans who seamlessly merge into whatever society. That’s the greatest thing human beings can aspire to. Whether forced by duress, Jews became perfect modern human beings. After the Holocaust, one doesn’t really mourn for that—it’s too disturbing, seems like a mistake. And it’s hard to mourn for mistakes.

Lev’s self-reinventions probably seem like a mistake, too. What other “mistakes” did you try to rescue?

The liberal Fascists in Italy, who are probably the strangest, most obnoxious version of that. Who wants to bother with them? Why would you look at people who made such a mistake as to be Fascists and then think they could be liberal about it? What bastards. They shouldn’t even have a place in history. Well, my family are refugees from the Holocaust, and like many refugees, they have a surprisingly good view of Mussolini’s Italy. Yes, they were thugs, but my two great-aunts who escaped concentration camps were hidden in Italy. Italian Fascism almost divided into two halves, with a liberal strain that was almost philo-Semitic. They’re exactly the people that I want to give a place to in history.
So is The Orientalist in a sense a reclamation of your own family history?

My great-aunt just died, and that was the last link to this European past that in some ways I’ve been spending my whole life trying to get back to. It started through my great-uncle Lolek, to whom I dedicate the book—my great-uncle and his friends, these old Austro-Hungarian Jews that I used to hang out with, a generation of assimilated Jews that will never come back. I think about him every day. I wear his clothes because I like having him near. When I saw pictures of Lev, I saw my uncle, because temporally, psychologically, historically, he’s a Jewish man of that time.