This question is raised in very concrete terms by the appearance of What We Talk About When Talk About Anne Frank, the new volume of short stories by Nathan Englander, at the same time as the New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, which features Englander’s translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic text. The story collection declares its quandaries in its title, an allusion to the famous Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Englander’s story of that name copies Carver’s basic situation—two couples in conversation, getting gradually more intoxicated and more dangerously honest. By putting Anne Frank in the title, Englander marks his story as Jewish, but in a particular way: The juxtaposition of Carver and the Holocaust is both a declaration of his own fictional territory and a blatantly bad joke.

The big question about Englander’s work, since his sensational debut collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges appeared in 1999, is whether his stories transcend their jokey premises to achieve some higher meaning, or simply offer a kind of Jewish minstrelsy. Englander himself is aware of this danger, as he made clear in the story “The Tumblers,” in his first book. This story imagines the fate of the holy fools of Chelm, the town celebrated in Jewish folklore, during the Holocaust. Englander has them escaping deportation to a concentration camp by boarding a train full of circus performers, then posing as a tumbling act in order to survive. The story climaxes with the Chelmites, dressed in pitiful costumes, putting on an incompetent show in front of an audience of Nazis.

The story strives to be a parable, but, as with much of Englander’s work, the more closely you read it, the less coherent the parable seems to be. After all, the crime of the Nazis was not primarily to humiliate Jews; nor can the Jews during the Holocaust be thought of as performers. And if the idea is to show what happens when folktale innocence meets human evil, that was already done supremely well by Isaac Bashevis Singer; inevitably, one reads Englander’s tale as a pale imitation of Singer.

What is distinctive about the Englander story is its sentimentality, which is another way of saying its failure to trust the subject and the reader, its insistence on underscoring the tragedy of the situation with cues and nudges. One such nudge comes when a young Jewish girl is shot by a German soldier: “The bullet left a ruby hole that resembled a charm an immodest girl might wear.” Another comes when the Holocaust is described as “unmatched feats of magic performed with the trains. They go away full … and come back empty, as if never before used.” (This kind of mock-naiveté has more in common with Roberto Benigni than with Singer.)

Where “The Tumblers” makes sense, however, is as an interrogation of Englander’s own treatment of the Holocaust and of Jews. Is writing about these things the way he does equivalent to forcing the innocent Jews of Chelm to dress up and play tricks for a hostile world? For there is indeed something potentially exploitive about the high-concept premises of Englander’s stories about Hasidic and Orthodox Jews. In “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” a moneyed WASP suddenly decides that he has a Jewish soul, and begins to live Jewishly, to the outrage of his disbelieving wife. In “Reb Kringle,” a Hasid with a big belly and beard makes his living as a department-store Santa. In the title story, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” a Hasid is told by his rebbe to go to a prostitute when his wife won’t sleep with him.

The wager of each of these stories is that the comic premise will build and topple over into liberating outrage—as Roth does in early stories like “The Defender of the Faith” or “Eli, the Fanatic”—or else deepen into a Malamud-style magical realism. But the truth is that Englander’s talent is not perfectly suited to either of these purposes, and his stories often seem to end where they begin, with the punchline of their premise. That is when the threat of minstrelsy appears—the possibility that readers will laugh at these stories only as familiar Jewish shtick.

Englander is at his best in a more familiar and old-fashioned kind of realism, in which he simply explores the common humanity behind the surface unfamiliarity of Hasidic or Orthodox life. Englander, who was raised Orthodox on Long Island, is well-situated to do this, just as Sherwood Anderson did it for the inhabitants of his invented Winesburg, Ohio; and a story like Englander’s “The Wig”—in which a Hasidic matron’s disappointed sexual feelings are sensitively imagined—puts the reader in mind of Anderson’s compassionate realism.

Thirteen years later, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, the same impulses are still at war in Englander’s fiction. Once again, he is prone to high-concept stories that trade on the obvious incongruity of Jews—especially old or Orthodox Jews—doing profane things. In the title story, two couples—one pair of assimilated American Jews, one pair of baalei tshuvah from Israel—smoke a lot of pot and get the munchies, and the sight of black hats getting high is a large part of the story’s point. In “Camp Sundown,” a group of Holocaust survivors, convinced that another elderly man is really a concentration camp guard in disguise, murder him in a bout of senile revenge.

Worst of all is “Peep Show,” a story about a former Orthodox Jew who goes into a Times Square peep show and, instead of a stripper, is greeted by his therapist, his mother, and his childhood rabbi. The book’s high-powered blurbs describe Englander as “edgy” and “audacious,” but this fantasia on Jewish guilt is like something Woody Allen would have rejected for being too broad around the year Englander was born. (There are even shrink jokes: “I think it would be best if you paid for my peep. Thus far in your therapy, we’ve constructed a relationship based partly on financial remuneration.”)

Both the shtick and the psychology here are so contrived that it brings home one of the dilemmas Englander faces as a writer: simple belatedness. To rebel against a puritanical Jewish household in the year 2012 is inevitably to repeat the gestures of those who did the same thing in 1932 and 1952 and 1972, and it would take a writer of genius to give that rebellion a genuinely new fictional form.

Even then, the rebellion itself would not speak to today’s young Jews in the way that Roth’s did a half-century ago. If postmodernism, in the 1960s and 1970s, gleefully exposed the nullity of traditional authority and the corrupt partiality of every account of the past, then the post-postmodernism of the writers who emerged in the 1990s is an attempt to rescue the concept of authority and to regain contact with an authentic past. The literary standard-bearer for this generation was, of course, David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s achievement was truly dialectical: Instead of simply rejecting postmodern fictional techniques and returning to an outworn mode of realism (à la Jonathan Franzen), Wallace pushed through the artificiality and self-consciousness of postmodernism to create a new, self-critical sincerity. His achievement, one might say, was to make sentimentality legitimate again.

Continue reading: The chains of tradition

It is tempting to say that Judaism has always been a religion of stories. After all, what stories are more familiar or beloved than the ones in the Hebrew Bible: Adam and Eve, the binding of Isaac, Joseph and his brothers, Daniel in the lion’s den? These stories are certainly Judaism’s greatest legacy to the world; adopted by Christianity, they have been told in every language, not to mention painted, acted, and set to music. Even in a post-biblical culture like our own, they remain the closest things we have to universal myths.

Yet the truth is that for most of the history of Judaism it would have been an insult to reduce the religion to its narratives. Until the destruction of the Second Temple, in the first century C.E., cultic worship and sacrifice were the heart of Judaism. After that trauma, for the next 1,800 years, it was the interpretation and practice of law that defined a Jewish life. It is only in the modern, secular world that narrative, the simple fact of storytelling, could be considered the supreme human method for making meaning, including Jewish meaning.

That is because, for modern people of all faiths, stories are often the only part of religious heritage that still seems valid. We no longer believe in laws dictated from heaven, or even in heaven itself; but we allow ourselves to feel that ancient religious stories have a numinous power, if only as a residue of the faith that so many generations invested in them. For many Jews today, reading biblical stories, or retelling them on Passover or Hanukkah, is the only part of Jewish tradition that still seems available, or necessary.

This new focus on story as the heart of Jewish experience can be dated to the beginning of the 20th century. Chaim Nachman Bialik mined the Talmud for its legends and tales and published them as Sefer Ha-Aggadah in 1911; Louis Ginzberg’s even more broadly based collection of midrashic tales, The Legends of the Jews, began to appear in 1909; Martin Buber performed a similar task for Hasidic stories, publishing Legend of the Baal-Shem in 1908. All these works reflected a growing tendency to divorce law from literature, halakhah from aggadah, in keeping with the positivist spirit of the 20th century.

Despite his contribution to this movement, Bialik, in a landmark essay called “Halakhah and Aggadah in Jewish History,” expressed a fear that aggadah—the inner, spiritual, narrative legacy of Judaism—could not survive in the world without halakhah—the outer, material, legal practice of Judaism. Depending on how you look at it, this fear has either been justified or refuted by the course of Jewish life in the post-Holocaust world. There’s no denying that rabbinic Judaism as it was lived for 18 centuries is no longer part of the lives of the large majority of Jews. Yet this secularizing process is not peculiar to Judaism: The vast majority of Western Christians, too, no longer lead lives as defined by ritual practice as they were two or 10 centuries ago.

To the extent that there is a Jewish culture or identity that cuts across national boundaries, it is defined largely by storytelling. Just as many Jews now consider scripture to be what Wallace Stevens called a “supreme fiction,” so fiction has become our contemporary scripture—a body of texts that creates Jewishness in a post-religious age. When we read the major Jewish writers of the last 60 years, we inevitably think about what they have in common and what we have in common with them, as Jews and interpreters of Jewish experience.

These are the questions I will explore in this space over the next year, in a monthly series on postwar Jewish fiction. Some of the writers I will discuss are well-known to American Jewish readers—Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick—while others may be new discoveries—France’s Romain Gary (born Roman Katsav), Brazil’s Moacyr Scliar. They write in a half a dozen languages (though I am reading them in English), and they occupy every point on the spectrum of Jewish identification. By reading them together, it may be possible to get a new sense—less authoritative but more intimate than those offered by politics and religion—of what it means to belong to the Jewish people today.

***

In the postwar world, it has hardly been possible to think about that question without thinking about Zionism and the State of Israel. In fact, if you wanted to name the most influential Jewish novel of the last 65 years, a good case could be made for picking Leon Uris’ pulp epic about the founding of the Jewish State, Exodus. Published in 1958, it has sold 7 million copies in the United States alone, and the movie version has reached millions more around the world. Samizdat copies of Exodus helped inspire the first refuseniks with the dream of going to Israel. That was exactly the kind of reaction Uris must have hoped for. As David Ben-Gurion put it when the book came out, “As a literary work it isn’t much. But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the best thing ever written about Israel.”

Uris engineers the book according to familiar Hollywood formulas, in particular the formula of the Western. Ari Ben Canaan, the novel’s hero, is a classic cowboy—ultra-masculine, brave, and taciturn, he defends civilization without quite joining it. To be complete he needs the love of a good woman—in this case, Kitty Fremont, an American Gentile who gets caught up in the Zionist movement largely out of unadmitted love (and lust) for Ari. And of course in a Western there must be Indians, the savage enemies of civilization. This role is played in Exodus by the Arabs, and the novel is never more propagandistic than in its unapologetically hostile caricature of “the Arab world”: “unspeakable disease, illiteracy, and poverty were universal. There was little song or laughter or joy in Arab life. It was a constant struggle to survive. In this atmosphere cunning, treachery, murder, feuds, and jealousies became a way of life.” The message Uris wanted the American reader to take from the book is unmistakable. Kitty Fremont states it on the last page: “Israel stands with its back to the wall. It has always stood that way and it always will … with savages trying to destroy you.”

But it would be too easy to say that the message, or the battles and love scenes, is what explains the success of Exodus. In fact, Uris, like Dan Brown today, is so popular because he delivers something like an education—or at least, great heaps of more or less accurate historical information. In Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, it’s the history of Christianity and the Catholic Church; in Exodus, it’s the history of Eastern European Jewry, from the rise of Zionism in the 1880s through the Holocaust and the birth of Israel in the 1940s. And reading Exodus is not the worst way to get an introduction to this period. It teaches the reader about Bilu and Hovevei Zion and kibbutzim and the Haganah—and about the Nuremberg Laws and the Warsaw Ghetto and the postwar DP camps. This is one of the most fascinating and tragic periods in modern history, and millions of people, including many Jews, got their first introduction to it from Leon Uris.

The problem with Uris’ history is not inaccuracy, though of course there are errors. It is that he can find in all of it only a single meaning: the importance of Jewish toughness. This is not a value to be scorned, and it is true that it inspired much of the urgency and success of the Zionist movement. But with Uris, it becomes something monomaniacal and amoral—an obsession with proving that Jews can and will use violence. Take the scene where the young Ari, having been robbed by Arabs, is instructed by his father Barak in the use of a bull whip, Indiana Jones-style. “The son of Barak Ben Canaan is a free man! He shall never be a ghetto Jew,” he bellows.

Inna Grade died last year. In the ensuing months, Yiddishists have thrilled to the possibility that they will finally gain access to her husband’s extensive archive and perhaps come upon an unpublished gem of a manuscript. For now, though, the hunt is on hold, as the public administrator of the Bronx has yet to determine which of six competing institutions will inherit Grade’s papers. Meanwhile, the archive is in the provisional custody of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the reasons for Chaim Grade’s relative obscurity, the ghosts lurking in the volumes he left behind, and his towering significance as a writer—Grade is to Vilna, Brent says, as William Faulkner is to the American South. [Running time: 26:21.]

The Commentary archive contains correspondence and galleys related to the journal, which was for most of its life funded by the American Jewish Committee (though it no longer is), from its 1945 founding through 1995. Authors include Isaac Babel, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Mailer, Malamud, Saul Bellow, William F. Buckley, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Philip Roth, according to the center. “Even George Orwell,” added Oram, “although he belongs to the early, pre-Norman Podhoretz era—unfortunately for that era, there’s very little or no correspondence.”

Oram said that the Ransom Center’s involvement with Jewish-American literature began in earnest with the 1993 acquisition of the Singer archive.

Last year in Tablet Magazine, Benjamin Balint, author of a history of the journal, traced how it served in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s as a crucial incubator for distinctly Jewish-American literature, publishing, among many other things, two of the stories that appeared in Roth’s seminal 1959 collection, Goodbye, Columbus.

And in 2003 in the Forward, Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse traced Commentary’s arc from cozy literary journal to major political power player to, well, cozy political journal (with, might I add, a scrappy, essential online presence!).

Related: Imaginative Assault [Tablet Magazine]
When ‘All the Rest’ Was the Rage [Forward]

Ezra Jack Keats was born Jacob Ezra Katz in 1916. The author-illustrator of 22 books and the illustrator of more than 80, Keats created his lush scenes of beauty through his use of collage and color. His pioneering The Snowy Day is a quiet, gorgeous jewel of a book that lovingly chronicles a young African-American child’s solitary adventure during a big snowfall in the city.

When Josie was born, I received The Snowy Day as a gift. I opened it and was immediately rocketed back to my own childhood. I had loved the book’s evocation of the silence of a new snowfall, of the thrill of dragging a stick through untouched snow, the hilarity of a wad of snow falling—plop—on someone’s head. I’d loved the pattern on the protagonist Peter’s pajamas and the fact that his family seemed to have a pink bathtub. The Snowy Day was my first experience of loving art.

I’d surely noticed that Peter was black. But I easily projected myself into his experience, into the red snowsuit, into the tenement world so different from my own. When the book was published during the civil rights movement that matter-of-fact depiction of Peter as African-American was nothing short of revolutionary. It’s thought to be the first non-caricatured black hero in mainstream American children’s literature.

Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Adventures of a Part-Time Indian, wrote of his vivid recollection of reading The Snowy Day as a child: “It was the first time I looked at a book and saw a brown, black, beige character—a character who resembled me physically and spiritually, in all his gorgeous loneliness and splendid isolation.”

“Gorgeous loneliness and splendid isolation” describe Keats’ work perfectly. Sadly, they also described his own experiences.

The artist’s parents were poor Polish immigrants who struggled to make ends meet in the hardscrabble Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. They had little energy left for their children; Keats wrote of “walking around like a shadow,” feeling invisible.

His art became his ticket out. He received a number of scholarships, and during the Depression he found work as a muralist for the WPA. For a time he was employed as a background artist on Captain Marvel comics, and, after a stint in the Air Force, he studied painting in Paris under the GI Bill.

Keats’ work is full of African-American, Latino, and Asian characters, but he generally shied away from addressing Judaism. At first, I thought this fact made Keats an unlikely candidate for a Jewish Museum retrospective. But curator Claudia Nahson does a fine job of showing how Keats’ upbringing affected his work and his interest in social justice. Still, what I find more interesting than what’s in the show is what isn’t. Reading the exhibit’s catalog I got a fuller portrait of a man who seemed to wrestle with his ambivalence about being Jewish, projecting his experiences of poverty and discrimination onto children of other races.

He experienced a great deal of anti-Semitism—from a teacher in school, a girlfriend in Paris, and perhaps would-be employers. In the late 1940s, when he sought work as a commercial illustrator, he changed his name. His brother posited that he renamed himself because he was a fan of the poet John Keats, but his friend Esther Hautzig, author of The Endless Steppe, is quoted in the exhibit offering another explanation: “At Readers’ Digest he was advised that Keats would look better on the credits.” As to what motivated Keats, we don’t know; he never addressed his name change publicly.

Keats was friendly with Isaac Bashevis Singer, and this show includes a 1971 letter to the famed author. Keats reworded and re-edited it obsessively, marking it up with pencil, illustrating just how much he sweated over this relationship, striving to hit a relaxed but slightly obsequious tone. The letter invites Singer to consider Keats’ then-most autobiographical book, Apt. 3, a tale of brothers in a dingy, dark tenement whose world comes alive with color when they hear the music of a blind man. “It’s important to me,” Keats wrote plaintively to Singer of the book. Years later, he created illustrations for Singer’s short story “The Slave,” which focuses on Tobias, a poor Torah scribe, and his wife, Peninah. But the final result was never published, for reasons unknown. Eventually fantasy author Lloyd Alexander saw and loved Keats’ paintings and wrote a new, completely non-Jewish story for them, The King’s Fountain.

When Keats did write about religion, he sought universality rather than Jewish specificity. In 1966 he illustrated a book called God Is in the Mountain, for which he created paintings to accompany a wide array of religious quotations from the Bhagavad-Gita and the Quran to Lao-tzu to Rabbi Hillel. “I am in every religion as a thread through a string of pearls,” was one of his Hindu selections.

Universality characterizes most of Keats’ work, a development some critics found problematic, most notably in his depiction of Peter, who became a recurring character for Keats. These critics felt that Peter had little African-American identity beyond the color of his skin. Keats’ response in 1965 in a letter to the editor of the Saturday Review addressing one critic: “Might I suggest armbands?”

Keats’ books flirted with autobiography more often as he got older. His other recurring protagonist was a white boy named Louie. An artistic, socially awkward, and lonely child, Louie yearns to hold a puppet that Keats called Gussie, giving her the same name as his own emotionally distant mother, whom he recalled never giving him a hug.

Keats went to Israel in 1982, shortly before his death. In his diary, included in the exhibit, he wrote about how moved he was to place a note in the Western Wall. “I felt a strange state coming over me. … This is the city where God came to life. I felt I stood before a strange eternity.”

When Keats died in 1983, he was working on a story called “Where is God?” in which two children look everywhere for a higher being. According to the exhibit, the unpublished book concluded with one child saying, “I guess He’s everywhere.” The other child replies, “What makes you so sure God’s a He?”

Many people came to help Susannah, along with her good-natured husband, Jim, the day I stopped by. It felt strange to be in the house where my hero had lived and worked so many years, to see the books (thousands of them, lining every room) that now Susannah had to painstakingly comb through, making a decision about each and every volume. Scholars (Rabbi Sol Berman, for instance, and Elliott Wolfson) dropped by to give Susannah opinions about the collection. Her mother’s housekeeper worked untiringly at Susannah’s side and made us a frittata lunch.

Late in the afternoon, Susannah asked Jim and me to take a big load of clothes to the Goodwill store. We staggered down to their car with boxes of Mrs. Heschel’s dresses as well as two complete suits belonging to her husband. I handled these gingerly and with an accelerated heartbeat. Heschel’s suits! Susannah has written that her father always dressed carefully and somewhat formally, and these suits did seem, even more than 30 years after his death, to retain something of his dignity.

Jim and I found a parking spot, only to discover that the Goodwill store proprietor had stepped out briefly. What to do? We couldn’t take all those clothes back to the house. We decided to leave them on the sidewalk in front of the entrance. As I looked at Heschel’s two suits, I experienced a painful pang. The physical frame of the theologian I admired so much was so clearly implied by those neat jackets and trousers, I found it hard to walk away and abandon them.

“Jim,” I said. “I’m not sure I can leave these suits here. It feels wrong, somehow.” Jim smiled and said, “Good thinking, Gibby! I tell you what: You take one and I’ll take one. And I hope you got the one he walked to Selma in, and you’ll hope I got the one he walked to Selma in!”

So, we each draped a suit over our arms and took them home.

That evening, I hung mine up on the wall, still on its hanger. There it remains to this day. Of course, I tried the jacket on, but it doesn’t remotely fit, not even in an Annie Hall-ish way. A couple of times I’ve wanted to put it on to comfort me, or to use as a kind of tallit on High Holy Days, but I haven’t. It just doesn’t work.

That first night I discovered, while getting ready for bed, that I was physically incapable of undressing in front of the suit. I laughed at myself and then gave up and went into the bathroom to put on my nightgown.

Magic Keys

The Singers had been family friends since I was 10 years old, when my mother interviewed Isaac for an article in the Washington Post. He and I struck up a friendship, and subsequent invitations for tea and living-room chocolates in his apartment in Surfside in Miami Beach became one of the highlights of my Jewish education. I remember one afternoon in particular, when I brought along my Torah portion to rehearse for him and his wife, Alma. Isaac recited his own Torah portion along with mine—as if it were a Jewish opera or a call and response prayer. I remember being impressed that more than six decades after his own bar mitzvah, Isaac was able to recite every word from memory.

My mother and I regularly met Isaac at a drug store soda fountain in Surfside, for his favorite food—grits, which probably reminded him of kasha—while I had a grilled cheese and fries that he and I would share. “I think we merge with the life of the universe,” he once told me, during a conversation about life after death. “When a bubble bursts over the ocean, the water in the bubble falls back into the sea. It goes back to its source. It really does not disappear.”

Several years after Isaac has passed, I received a call from Alma—we both lived in Manhattan by then, she as a widow and me as a graduate student—asking for help. She needed someone to sort through all the clothes she still kept in their apartment at Broadway and 86th Street. As compensation, she offered to give me one of her husband’s typewriters—a gift of extraordinary meaning to an aspiring young writer who had learned so much about life at a young age from his books. What might it be like to roll Rodin’s sculpting tools in your hands, or to hold Marc Chagall’s surviving brushes over a blank canvas? Wouldn’t it be inspirational to play a few bars on Larry Adler’s favorite harmonica, or forcefully connect with a strong chord or passage on Rachmaninoff’s writing piano?

“There are three,” Alma said matter-of-factly of the typewriters. “One of them you can take with you after we’re done.”

It occurred to me that it might make more sense for her to donate them to a museum or a university library, but I knew I’d be an excellent caretaker. And admittedly, I hoped having Isaac’s typewriter in my modest apartment on West 113th Street might serve as a sort of talisman or magnet to draw some of the complicated, mysterious women he had written about so vividly in Enemies, A Love Story and The Magician of Lublin.

***

I passed through the massive gated archway on the Belnord’s south entrance and went up to her apartment. Alma came to the door slowly and didn’t smile as she greeted me. She was older than I had remembered, and her face seemed frozen in a frown of resignation and loneliness. A pang of guilt reminded me of the other reason I had volunteered for this assignment. I had walked past this enormous stone building on West 86th Street nearly every day on my way to what I still called “the 1/9” and had often seen Alma pulling a wire cart full of groceries and other sundries as I rushed to catch the subway. Had I not been habitually racing to wherever I needed to be in those days, I would have stopped to help, I reasoned.

But this Saturday would be different. I would be there for as long as Alma needed me. After an obligatory plate of prune pastry and marzipan, she explained that this was going to be a disposal operation, rather than a sorting-and-packing job or prep work for a charitable donation.

“You don’t want to save everything?” I asked, puzzled.

“I did save everything,” she replied flatly. “How much longer must I keep it?”

Several people had apparently made promises to stop by and cart off whatever she had left to various organizations, but they never arrived, and Alma had gotten tired of waiting; she wanted everything out.

“You can take whatever we don’t throw away,” she said.

She then beckoned me to follow her into a room that was already piled high with turquoise seersucker jackets, blue rubber tennis shoes, and old, worn straw hats. Ah, the straw hats with turquoise blue bands! They seemed a part of a blue-and-white uniform Isaac wore in his days of walking in the ocean breezes of Surfside. Could a man’s life be reduced to this? A stack of hats, a pile of socks, and some frayed undershirts?

“You should try this jacket,” Alma said, attempting to drape one of his seersuckers over my shoulders. Alma seemed to want to believe that his jackets would fit like the proverbial father’s hand-me-downs but, alas, it was at least two sizes too small. The jacket, along with everything else that didn’t fit—shoes, slacks, belts, and even his undershirts—went into the trash bags unsorted, in armful after armful for the garbage truck.

As I helped gather everything for the garbage collectors I thought about happier days with Isaac and Alma in their sunny Florida living room, where he and I would ponder the meaning of the universe, Spinoza’s teachings, and ghosts. But on this lonely Saturday afternoon in the New York present, there were no philosophical discussions of metaphysical reality. Only the sad and halting “yes” or a “no” in regard to what should stay and what should go among the remnants of a man who regaled millions with stories of Old World dybbuks, malevolent spirits, and often rakish protagonists visiting their complicated, passionate mistresses.

In that room a passage from The Cafeteria, one of Isaac’s short stories, came to me:

“I have been moving around in this neighborhood for over thirty years—as long as I lived in Poland,” he had written. “I know each block, each house. There has been little building here on uptown Broadway in the last decades, and I have the illusion of having put down roots here. I have spoken in most of the synagogues. They know me in some of the stores and in the vegetarian restaurants. Women with whom I have had affairs live on the side streets. Even the pigeons know me; the moment I come out with a bag of feed, they begin to fly toward me from blocks away.”

“What would they think of him now, reduced to a pile of undershirts?” I thought, as I glanced around the room for the typewriters.

As the afternoon wore on, I wondered if the belongings of someone whose work had been translated into so many languages and whose visage had been memorialized in enormous caricature on a wall of the Barnes & Noble on 82nd Street should be better preserved—or at least acknowledged with a prayer for such things. Was there a yizkor I could say after tying up the twist-tie on each bag?

Had his spirit been present in the room that day, Isaac might’ve simply shrugged. He had told me many times in my youth that “women are the only people who take life seriously. Men know it’s a joke.” The day’s purge was the wish of his widow, who had certainly earned the right to make such decisions. Alma had supported Isaac in the early days when they were first married by working as a salesgirl at Lord & Taylor while Isaac stayed home to write. She had also stayed with him over the years despite his detachment while writing and in defiance of his other romances. “Ours is a real marriage,” I remembered him once telling my mother.

Alma interrupted my reverie: “Do you want some lemonade?”

“Sure,” I said.

***

Several hours later, I finally stumbled across the typewriters in a closet. There was an old Royal with many of its keys mashed down and its teeth all jumbled and seemingly fused together. There was a second, white plastic manual typewriter that looked like it might be a starter toy or somebody’s idea of a “portable” device back in the 1970s. And finally, there was a beige IBM Selectric that used a center-strike ball.

Noticing my lingering fascination, Alma sighed heavily and told me that the typewriters had already been promised to others and that she was sorry she could not let me have one after all. I was unable to hide a twinge of surprise.

“Really?” I asked. “Not even the mangled old Royal with its snarled keys?”

I stared at the typewriters half-expecting them to emanate shafts of light and spiritual energy, like the lost Ark of the Covenant. Without possessing one of them, how would I ever be empowered by Isaac’s mystical literary powers and be energized with whatever charisma had made him such an intriguing figure to so many people?

But the situation itself was the prize—a turn of events straight out of one of Isaac’s own short stories: A young man, a writer even, is crushed to learn that some things are forever out of reach, that promising ventures often have disappointing outcomes, and that so many journeys that should lead on to fortune take the brave and fearless down winding roads to unhappy endings. I had wanted to take possession of a mystical object that would afford temporal (and possibly libidinous) benefits by mere ownership, but, at the end of the day, I saw much more clearly how our experiences and setbacks inform truly great works of art.

“I see,” I said, trailing. “No problem.”

What else could I say to the widow who had been through so much?

As I walked east along Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard toward Central Park, it occurred to me that I would have to seek out experiences to generate my own stories, buy my own seersucker jacket—one that fit—and be on the lookout for the mysterious women living along the side streets. I reflected also that, in any event, Isaac had actually composed many of his best fables and universal allegories while sitting on a couch, writing longhand in pencil.

Reed Martin is the author of The Reel Truth: Everything You Didn’t Know You Need to Know About Making an Independent Film and a former business case writer in the Global Research Group at Harvard Business School.

Jamie Schiff, Jason Sperling [NYT]

• The Triteuch

• Isaiah Thomas

• A Guide for the Clear-Minded

• Quiet Evenings of Augie March

• Civilization and Its Benefits

• The Diary of Anne Roiphe

• “Gimpel the Sage”

• Tevye the Actuary

• The Clothed and the Dead

And your special Philip Roth section:

• Portnoy’s Compliment

• Goodbye, Toledo

• A Lesser American Novel

• French Pastoral

• I Married A Liberal

• The Human Smudge

Irving came to me out of need, which put us on an even footing. This was unexpected, since I owed him a considerable professional debt: In 1969, when I was completing my doctorate at McGill University and teaching sections of the English literature survey course, I petitioned the English Department for permission to introduce courses on Yiddish literature under its aegis. When my colleagues asked how they could justify the inclusion of a subject with no obvious connection to theirs, I pointed out that not a single course in the university dealt with any aspect of Jewish history or culture. Jewish studies would have to start somehow and somewhere: Did they think I’d do better in the German Department? Invited to supply a syllabus, I proposed a course on the Yiddish short story that was based largely on Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s Treasury of Yiddish Stories; almost entirely on its own, it won over my department.

Howe describes in his memoirs the emotional-political pressures of the early 1950s that prompted him to seek refuge in this project of Yiddish translation. Because he read his native language only haltingly, he partnered with a Yiddish poet called “Leyzer” Greenberg, who selected the authors and read his choice of stories aloud until Irving hit on the ones that he liked. In this way, he later quipped, he got to know the lesser Yiddish writers much better than the great ones. As the “outside man” on the project, he conscripted translators from among fellow writers who still knew some Yiddish from home. When Saul Bellow agreed to translate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” Leyzer likewise read the story aloud to him, and Saul sat at the typewriter, translating it sentence by sentence as if taking dictation. The result was so good (if slightly bowdlerized) that Bashevis Singer never allowed Bellow to translate another story, lest Saul be credited for any share of his achievement.

But I digress: I was making the point that Howe and Greenberg’s anthology allowed me to introduce Yiddish literature at McGill. The two men published several more anthologies of Yiddish poetry, essays and stories, until Leyzer’s death in 1977 left Irving without a partner on a project he had come to depend on as the link to his Jewishness.

The most ideologically rigid of the New York Intellectuals, Irving did not change his affiliation over a lifetime. As his fellow leftists turned neo-conservative and their publications edged rightward, he alone remained a socialist, conflating his socialism with what he called Yiddishkayt (Jewishness), so that he could not abandon one without appearing to betray the other. When Jewishness began to matter more to him, he looked for ways to become part of it without compromising his socialist faith, and he’d found a highly creative avenue for this linkage in the transposition of Yiddish literary treasures into English. Leyzer’s death forced him to find a new collaborator on the Yiddish projects that constituted the Jewish portion of his life, and that was how he came to me.

Our first joint venture, The Best of Sholem Aleichem, was conceived when Marty Peretz approached Irving with the idea for this collection to be published by New Republic Books, and Irving—the one with experience—got us to sign away all the rights for $2,000. Irving had composed the introductions to the books he co-edited with Leyzer, but he and I decided to do ours in the form of letters, which we sent back and forth in the days when mail took several days for delivery. Leon Wieseltier, who saw the proofs of the book, asked me whether I noticed that whereas my letters responded to Irving’s by incorporating his comments, his never referred to anything I said. I had noticed it, but it was beneath my pride to show Irving that I cared. And I felt beholden to him. It was his reputation, not mine and not Sholem Aleichem’s, that got our book frontpage coverage in the New York Times Book Review.

We began work on the Sholem Aleichem anthology just as Irving’s most ambitious book, World of Our Fathers, was about to appear. Irving worried that the Times would assign the review of it to Harry Golden, whose work he had panned. Instead, he won the National Book Award, made the best-seller list, and got to tour the country for respectable fees. But fate seemed to conspire against his triumph. His marriage to Ariel Mack, to whom he dedicated this book, was then coming apart. When we started working on the book, he lived with her in a spacious apartment on Riverside Drive; by the time we began our second project, he was in a smaller apartment on the Upper East Side.

Domestic matters apart, I was under the impression that Irving felt more comfortable in smaller spaces. He seemed attracted to socialism because he considered it a losing cause in America, and to Yiddish for the same reason, interpreting it as the culture of what he called the “little man.” When he toured to promote his book, he complained that the well-heeled audiences at synagogues and Jewish community centers were nothing like the garment workers and union organizers whom he had so lovingly portrayed in his book. I pointed out that he had memorialized only those parts of the Lower East Side that had not endured in America. His audiences were made up of the synagogue-goers, Zionists, and immigrants who had made good. The ironies of this ought to have been cause for celebration, but, for Irving, they were instigators of regret.

***

I don’t think Irving would have dignified me as a “political adversary” in the first years that we worked together. Feminists may snigger, but I sensed that he felt protective toward me, trying to shield me from the battles he had been fighting since his teens and to which he now seemed condemned. He obviously enjoyed writing and teaching about literature more than duking it out politically, and he may have wanted to grant me the respite he could not allow himself. “Try to understand that I genuinely did not wish to get into a fight with you,” he wrote after he had treated me to a public putdown at a nasty conference on Jewish literature we had both attended in Berkeley, Calif.:

[This] was not because I dismissed you. It was … in part because I know that polemics exact a heavy price from you in pain and suffering, and I keep saying to myself that it would be best to avoid them. But also, to be honest, I don’t think you’re very good at political polemics, certainly not as good as you are in literary discussions; I feel it’s not your métier, that you force yourself to do it out of a sense of obligation (with attendant anxiety). But I don’t want [to] make it seem that it has been only my goodness of heart—though it’s there—which prompted me to refrain from public argument with you. I think you have no idea how aggressive and combative and provoking you can be, indeed were in San Francisco, and that this elicits strong responses in turn.

Admitting to “contradictory feelings in the matter,” he expressed satisfaction in our ability to remain collaborators and friends, “perhaps the best that can be done under the circumstances.” This was seductive. But though I shared some of his contradictory feelings, he did not have my number. His description of the anxious polemicist, including of her abrasiveness, seemed (then and now) truer of him than of me. In wanting to attain for the Jews the political unexceptionalism to which they were entitled, I was anxious about the outcome, not the process. As between the two of us, he was the one more often accused of harshness, while people were always saying (to my irritation) how nice I was despite my out-of-favor views.

Indeed, Irving and I drew very different conclusions from the Yiddish culture with which we were engaged together. Yiddish wit once observed that Jews had turned links (left) because they were denied their recht (rights). Irving saw some such connection between political weakness and moral strength. I, who was spared the fate of European Jewry by parents who brought me to Canada in 1940, could not romanticize the politics that had allowed my cohort to be turned into fertilizer. While I would not have chosen to be anything but a Jew, it was precisely the study of Yiddish that had taught me not only the dangers but also the corrupting potential of powerlessness. Whereas Sholem Aleichem fully recognized the deformities that poverty bred, and loved Jews despite the humiliation to which they were subject, some of his contemporaries considered weakness a sign of distinction and decried achievement and prosperity as such. I was also aware, from studying Yiddish, that prolonged repression had produced a rash of informers and converts to other faiths, who often outdid gentiles in malignity. Although Irving and I both admired Jewish resiliency, I had come to recognize Jewish political dependency—a corollary of exile—as a deeply flawed political ideal.

***

On November 10, 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, defining Zionism as a form of racism. I was convinced that this charge, lifted straight from the Communist playbook of the 1930s, would greatly advance the Arab war against Israel. By transposing their rhetoric from “We will crush the Jewish State” to “The imperialist Jews are despoiling us,” Arab rulers had forged an anti-liberal alliance among despotisms, autocracies, and dictatorial regimes across the political spectrum. European anti-Semitism in the 1870s had cast the Jews, the beneficiaries of liberal democracy, as its conspiratorial exploiters, so that destroying them became a necessary defense against their alleged domination. By adding the trendy indictment of “racism” to the toxicology of anti-Jewishness, Arabs and Muslims would henceforth rally to their cause Marxists who picked up Stalin’s charge of Zionist-imperialism, internationalists who insisted that Jews should transcend their particularism, and rightists who could now turn the Holocaust indictment of racism against its victims. Talk about a big tent.

Continue reading: an editorial spat, anti-Jewish ammunition, and Robert Frost. Or view as a single page.

Coney Island and the Jews have a long history together. “Nathan’s Famous” hot dog founder, Polish-Jewish immigrant Nathan Handwerker, set up his first shop on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues, practically introducing the European sausage to New York society. The strip’s growing industry attracted rising Jewish entertainers such as Harry Houdini and the Marx brothers, and even Irving Berlin worked there as a singing waiter.

Jews also frequented Coney Island as guests and audience members, clamoring in the bath houses and dominating the busy handball courts. Famous Jewish criminal Abe Reles was kept under constant guard by six policemen at the Half Moon Hotel in the early 1940s.

The area has made a dent on Jewish literary and film culture: The All-of-a-Kind Family book series paints a picture of life on the shore in the summers, people looking for a brief respite from hot city life. Joseph Heller (Now and Then, 1998), Neil Simon (Brighton Beach Memoirs, 1983) and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Enemies: A Love Story, 1972) all grew up in or visited the local neighborhoods, and detail what the everyday looked like by the amusement park’s shows and the consequent social milieus. Recent Oscar-nominee Darren Aronofsky shows the area’s more sordid side in his Requiem for a Dream (2001).

Which brings us to the present: In 2009, Jewish mayor Bloomberg and his administration rezoned the 19-block Coney Island strip and bought seven more acres with the goal of developing more hotels, amusement parks, and housing units. We’ll see what cultural gems this Jewish-Coney Island history chapter produces.

Former Coney Island Roller Coaster Is For Sale [WSJ]

Singer’s novel is considerably more literary than Mitchell’s, but it is surprising how well the adjectives that apply to Gone with the Wind also suit The Brothers Ashkenazi. Singer’s book, too, is a sweeping historical novel, covering several generations in the life of a family and leading them through world-changing events. And Singer, too, is more interested in big, impressive set-pieces than in characterization—the major figures in The Brothers Ashkenazi tend to be forcefully one-dimensional, with little interior life or capacity to change.

The reason for the different fates of these bestsellers, of course, has to do with the particular histories they bring to mythic life. In writing about the Civil War and Reconstruction, Mitchell tackled the central American experience, and despite her racist sentimentalizing of the antebellum South—or, perhaps, because of it—she has never stopped appealing to American readers. Singer, on the other hand, wrote in Yiddish about the central modern experience of Eastern European Jewry: the violent transformation of Jewish civilization, from 1880 to 1920, under the pressures of secularism, industrialism, nationalism, and Communism. It is no coincidence that the family at the center of the book is called Ashkenazi; Singer set out to write the archetypal story of Ashkenazi Jews, on the same scale as epic novels like War and Peace and Les Misérables.

The novel’s vantage point on this crisis is the city of Lodz, sometimes called the Manchester of Poland. In the late 19th century, Lodz was transformed from a small village to an international capital of the textile industry—an industry dominated by Jewish manufacturers, merchants, and laborers. Singer captures this reckless, explosive growth in a cinematic sequence in the novel’s first pages: “Seemingly overnight the houses already standing sprouted additional stories, annexes, wings, extensions, ells, attics, and garrets to accommodate the flow of newcomers … like a torrent overflowing its banks, the Jews smashed down all barriers set up to exclude them.” Singer’s method in The Brothers Ashkenazi is to drop his protagonists into this bubbling cauldron and document the changes that result.

The patriarch of the Ashkenazi dynasty, Abraham Hersh, gets rich as the chief salesman for the Gentile-owned manufacturing firm of Huntze. Just as he is an employee of capitalists rather than a capitalist himself, he seems to be in the new Lodz without being of it: He remains a traditional Hasid, spending as much time as possible at the court of his rebbe. He uses his wealth to do mitzvot like buying Passover supplies for the poor and ransoming Jewish prisoners.

Yet Singer is by no means an admirer of this traditional Hasidic culture, and he blasts it with all the standard criticisms that enlightened Jewish writers had been making since the days of Haskalah. Abraham Hersh’s piety, though sincere, is shown to be harsh and superstitious, and it entails a total contempt for women, especially his own wife. “If he loved her in his own fashion, he showed it only in their bed, as the Law prescribed. Otherwise, he was quite rigid about a woman’s role in life. She was to bear children, rear them, observe the laws of Jewishness, run a household, and obey her husband for life.”

Abraham Hersh’s priorities are made quite clear when he leaves his wife alone, even though she is about to give birth, while he makes his usual Passover pilgrimage to his rebbe. She ends up having twin boys—Simha Meir and Jacob Bunem, the brothers of the title. Singer does not waste time setting up the temperamental and physical contrast that will define these characters for the rest of the book, and end up determining their fates. Simha Meir, the older by five minutes, is small and frail, bites the nipple while nursing, and turns into a solitary, clever, manipulative boy. Jacob Bunem, a vigorous baby, is also his brother’s opposite in every other way: athletic, charismatic, and not too bright.

It is hard to decide whether such blunt dualism is simple, like a myth—Singer clearly wants us to think of Jacob and Esau—or simplistic, a melodramatic convention. In any case, the reader never has to wonder what Simha and Jacob will do in any given situation, and one reason The Brothers Ashkenazi is so easy to read is that its complications are all sociological, seldom psychological. For instance, it is fated that Simha, the prodigy, will end up claiming the desirable Dineleh as his wife, even though she loves Jacob; and it is equally fated that the marriage will be full of mutual contempt and sexual coldness, since Simha’s defining trait is that he is impossible to love.

Likewise, we see enough of Simha as a greedy boy, cheating at cards and loansharking to his friends, to predict that he will grow up to be a ruthless and successful businessman. The rise and rise of Simha Meir—who in time drops his Yiddish name and becomes simply Max—dominates the first half of the novel. Singer, knowing he has a great villain on his hands, clearly relishes the scenes in which the young Simha coldly bankrupts his father-in-law, in order to take control of his business, and then gets his own father fired, so that he can take over his job. Eventually Max Ashkenazi gains control of the Huntze factory and achieves his dream of becoming “King of Lodz.”

But the cost of his ambition is not merely personal. All along, Singer shows that the rise of Lodz’s Jewish bourgeoisie takes place at the expense of the Jewish workers, who spend endless shifts at their factory looms and still don’t earn enough to support their families. The Brothers Ashkenazi never quite manages to become a great realist novel, in the tradition of Balzac or Zola, because Singer doesn’t write concretely enough about the realities of labor and commerce—he tends to offer emotive formulas in place of precise observation. But these are enough to keep the reader on the side of the proletariat against the bosses:

The more agile among the workers managed to filch some bread from the pantry, but those less bold starved. A piece of meat was never seen; the chicory substituting for coffee was served with a mere lick of sugar. The work went on all through the night by the dim light of oil lamps and smoking wicks. The smoke from the stoves irritated the eyes; the boss’s children cried; the women cursed and bickered. When the red eyelids could no longer be held open, the men stretched out on the dirty floor with a piece of goods as a pillow and dozed off, freezing in the winter, steaming in the summer, eaten alive by fleas, flies, and bedbugs.

Yet even as he mounts this Marxist critique of Lodz-style capitalism, Singer is convinced that Communism, too, is a dead end for Eastern European Jews. If Abraham Hersh shows the bankruptcy of tradition and Simha Meir the bankruptcy of capitalism, the bankruptcy of socialism appears in the character of Nissan, a rabbi’s son who becomes a strike-leader and revolutionary conspirator. Nissan earns the nickname “the depraved” for his open rejection of everything his puritanical, pious father believes in. Yet as Singer shows, with blunt irony, Nissan’s own longing for revolution is the mirror image of his father’s messianism, and he annotates the margins of Das Kapital just as his father annotated volumes of the Talmud.

Jewishness, Singer insists, is inescapable, and it makes any real comradeship with Polish workers impossible. When Nissan launches a strike against Lodz’s factory owners, it quickly degenerates into a pogrom. “Didn’t you know it always ends up with Jewish heads bleeding?” the townspeople reproach him, and while Nissan can’t accept this truth, Singer clearly does. The Brothers Ashkenazi takes its characters through all kinds of social upheaval, culminating in World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. But anti-Semitism never changes, and it makes a mockery of every attempt to break the impasse of Eastern European Jewish society. In the novel’s very last chapter, the funeral liturgy—“Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return”—is echoed in the hopeless refrain of Lodz’s Jews: “Everything we built here we built on sand.”

This somber, trapped, helpless conclusion now seems horribly prescient. A few years after The Brothers Ashkenazi was published, the thousand-year-old Ashkenazi civilization would be annihilated in the Holocaust. Lodz itself became the second-largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, with some 250,000 residents, most of whom were murdered at Chelmno and Auschwitz. In some ways, the world of the Lodz ghetto can be seen as a nightmare sequel to the world of The Brothers Ashkenazi, with sweatshops transformed into labor camps and Simha Meir, the “king of Lodz,” giving up his throne to Chaim Rumkowski, the infamous head of the Lodz Judenrat, who was derisively known as “King Chaim.”

I.J. Singer himself left Poland for America in 1934, taking a job at the Forward, New York’s socialist Yiddish daily. The following year he brought over his brother Isaac Bashevis Singer, then a fledgling writer. Emigration saved their lives—their mother and younger brother were killed in the Holocaust. Yet as Rebecca Goldstein points out in her introduction, it was not until Israel Joshua died of a heart attack, in 1944, that Isaac Bashevis began to flourish as a writer: “it was only the death of the one brother that brought the genius of the other to life.” And the prodigious success of the younger Singer, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature, has cast a retrospective shadow over the older brother whom he idolized: “To me, he was not only the older brother, but a spiritual father and master as well.” The Brothers Ashkenazi does not, I think, have the same literary power as the best of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work, but it remains a powerful and indispensable document of Yiddish civilization.

• The Shteyngart Shandy: Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout and lemon seltzah (thanks to Bambi Shlomovich on that one).

• HTMLGIANT provides the recipe for Roth’s Gin n’ Jews (gin, orange juice, and grapefruit juice), but executive editor Jesse Oxfeld notes that his cocktail would contain liver, crushed.

• Here are Dan Klein’s “Instructions” for the Guri-tonic War: Gin, tonic and penny served in a balloon. Understand you hold a drink.

• And Dan’s Dreyfus Affair: Equal parts Champagne, Bordeux, Chartreuse, Jewish parents. Shake drink while accusing it of treachery. Let sit locked in cabinet for a decade. Unlock and serve with an olive.

• The Icy Bashevis Singer has cold slivovitz and pickled beets.

• The Eggnog Ferber is imbibed on Hanukkah, not Christmas.

• The Jonathan Saffron Foer is a Sephardic spirit, a sangria featuring Spanish wine and enticing spices.

You know what the comments are for!

“16 mm Postcards,” a new exhibition produced by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Yeshiva University Museum, at the Center for Jewish History, demonstrates how different things were in the early 20th century, when the ancestors of most American Jews came here from Eastern Europe. This extraordinary show consists of home movies—all silent, mostly fragmentary—taken by American Jews who visited their relatives in Poland in the 1930s. (Many of the films can be seen at the exhibition’s website.) What makes these films so powerful is their extreme rarity: It was only a small handful of Jews who had the wherewithal, and the desire, to go back to the villages they had left behind decades earlier. And the encounters they document show how drastically the fates of American and Polish Jewry had diverged by the 1930s. In many films, we see the American cousin, prosperous and dressed in a Western suit, standing next to his poor, bearded, caftanned relatives; and it is impossible not to wonder what must have been going on in their minds and hearts.

Did the American cousin, clutching his camera like a badge of modernity, give thanks that he had been rescued from ancestral poverty and anti-Semitism—or did he feel nostalgia for the Jewish world from which he was cut off? Did the Polish cousin envy his American relative, or resent his intrusion, or long for his help? The pathos is infinitely greater, of course, because the viewer knows that all these Polish Jews—old and young, men and women and children—are just a few years away from the Holocaust. Virtually none of the people we see in these home movies was alive 10 years later. Because of the Holocaust, the natural growing-apart of the Old Country and the New World became an irreparable break, and a source of permanent guilt. Jews who came to America lived and flourished, while those who remained behind suffered and died: How can such a gulf ever be crossed?

The questions that “16 mm Postcards” raises, silently and by implication, are addressed head-on in a new book that might serve as a companion to the exhibition: The Glatstein Chronicles (Yale University Press). This is the title given by the volume’s editor, Ruth Wisse, to two novellas published by the great Yiddish writer Jacob Glatstein in the late 1930s, based on his own pilgrimage to the Alte Heym. Glatstein was born in Lublin in 1896 and came to New York in 1914. After working for a time in sweatshops, he established himself as a Yiddish journalist, while writing poetry that brought the influence of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound to bear on Yiddish literature. “The term experimentation,” Wisse writes in her introduction, “hardly suffices to describe the many subjects that Glatstein addresses, the poses he adopts, and the poetic variations he attempts.”

In 1934, Glatstein received word that his mother was dying in Poland and booked passage across the Atlantic to see her one last time. This journey provided the subject matter for two books that he published after his return to New York. The first, whose Yiddish title literally means “When Yash set out” (Yash is a nickname for Yankev, or Jacob), is rendered here as Homeward Bound; the second, “When Yash arrived,” is made into Homecoming at Twilight. A third volume was announced, but never written: “the ‘Yash’ scheme was conceived as filial homage to Polish Jews,” Wisse writes, “and did not survive their destruction.”

In fact, as the word “twilight” in the English title suggests, Glatstein was very conscious of writing about a Jewish community in decline. Homeward Bound opens on board the ship taking Yash and a motley group of fellow-passengers to France, and the first sentence speaks of the narrator’s sense of liberation: “No sooner did the ship pull away from the dock than I instantly felt myself subject to maritime law.” Yet it is clear that this freedom is only a temporary escape from the crises and factionalism of Jewish life: “But these past few years my mind is mired in the bloodstained world of politics. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is no longer enough. Am what? One must legitimate oneself by announcing a political creed: I am a liberal, a Fascist, a Social-Fascist, or a Communist, a Trotstkyite, a Lovestonite, a Zionist.”

In fact, politics quickly intrudes on the floating world of the ship, when the narrator reads in “the ship’s newspaper that Hitler had done away with his closest associates in the so-called Night of Long Knives.” (This infamous purge of the Nazi Party took place on June 30, 1934, allowing the story to be precisely dated.) The news reveals a fault line among the ship’s passengers, Glatstein observes. To the non-Jews, it is merely another news item, to be casually regretted or dismissed (“Hitler’s a damn fool!”). To the Jews, on the other hand, it is a terrible portent, and it drives Glatstein to seek the company of people who will understand his own sense of dread: “The casual reaction of my Gentile fellow passengers to the Hitler news was the first slap in the face I had received as a Jew on this floating international paradise.”

Cannily, Glatstein uses this minor episode to suggest the organizing principle of Homeward Bound. There is almost no plot, simply a series of encounters with his fellow passengers, in which he allows them to hold forth about their experiences and ideas; and in the course of these interviews (in this story, Glatstein the journalist dominates), we are given a panorama of Jewish existence at a historical turning point. We meet an assimilated Dutch Jew, who goes on and on about how he is a Dutchman first, a Jew second, and complains about the bad image of poor Jewish immigrants in Amsterdam. (“I swear, I turn red in the face whenever I see a Polish Jew. Why must they always attract attention to themselves …?”)

Then there is a hard-living Jew from Bogota, who complains about the difficulty of finding a Jewish wife there, even as he brags about his beautiful Colombian mistress. (Here, as throughout The Glatstein Chronicles, the sexual frankness is surprising: “The truth is that these gorgeous women are useless in bed, cold as icebergs. They just lie there, like royalty.”) And there is a Soviet Jewish engineer, who is embarrassed when Glatstein compliments him on his “Yevreskaya golova, a Jewish head!”: This kind of ethnocentrism is taboo in the worker’s motherland. Ironically, the Soviet Jew’s socialist universalism makes him a mirror image of the Dutchman who shuns his Jewishness. “Aboard ship it’s easier to appreciate the individual’s worth,” Glatstein writes, and he creates a wonderfully vivid gallery of eccentric portraits. Taken together, however, they show the inescapability of “the Jewish question,” the way it turns individual Jews, even against their wills, into a collective.

Homeward Bound ends with Yash’s train arriving in his hometown, as the conductor cries, “Lu-u-blin!” But when Homecoming at Twilight begins, we are surprised to find that the key event—the deathbed reunion with his mother, the whole reason for the trip—has been skipped over. Such a disorienting elision signals that, in the second novella, Glatstein the modernist will preside: The straightforward interviews of the first story give way to a collage of dreams, memories, and parables. The setting this time is a resort hotel, where sick and exhausted Jews (including a few mental patients) come to recuperate. It is, as Wisse points out, a parody of the Alpine sanitarium in The Magic Mountain (which was translated into Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer); and there are so many echoes of The Castle that it seems Glatstein must have been reading Kafka as well.

Once again, Glatstein’s subject is the state of Jewry, as seen through conversations with different types of Jews. But this time his focus is strictly on Poland, and the people he meets seem like archetypes of Polish Jewish experience. There is the dying Steinman, a charismatic Zionist who knew Herzl: “I burst into tears when I was face to face with him. I’m not ashamed to admit that I kissed his hand.” There is the brilliant young son of a Hasidic rebbe, who seems destined to become a new Nachman of Bratslav: “Some day I’ll read you some of my new ideas, and you’ll see for yourself that they are simply extraordinary,” he says.

But in a montage-like series of interviews with Polish Jews, all asking Glatstein to carry messages home to their American relatives, we are shown how the whole Jewish community is caught in an insoluble tangle of poverty, anti-Semitism, and sheer despair. And America, now mired in the Depression and closed to new immigrants, can no longer offer them hope. All the supplicants are in the same position as the unemployed rabbi who shows Glatstein a yellowed letter he once received from Herbert Hoover, which he imagines will help him get to America. In fact, Glatstein and the reader realize, it is merely a meaningless form letter; the old promise of the New World can no longer be claimed.

By the time old Steinman dies, in a moving scene at the end of the book, he seems to foreshadow the death, spiritual or even physical, of Polish Jewry itself. “It seemed to me now, in the twilight, that I had reached the autumn of my life,” Glatstein reflects. “Even my mother’s death seemed to coincide oddly with the downward movement of my own life, and all this was in step with Jewish life as a whole, maybe even with the twilight now settling down over the whole world.” The Glatstein Chronicles is a remarkable portrait of that twilight moment—not just an invaluable historical document, but a literary work of great subtlety and power.

The Nobel Committee’s official biography of Singer, who won the literature prize in 1978, sums up this view perfectly: He wrote about “the world and life of East European Jewry, such as it was lived in cities and villages, in poverty and persecution, and imbued with sincere piety and rites combined with blind faith and superstition.” One commenter recommending Singer’s stories in a web forum puts the basic idea more naively: “If I could have chosen a grandfather, I would have chosen this man for the stories alone.”

Look a little closer, however, and it becomes clear that Singer, far from being gentle and grandfatherly, was as shockingly modern a writer as Dostoevsky. He is a chronicler of spiritual disintegration, exploring the devastating effects of appetite and passion—even of thought itself—on souls unprotected by faith. When devils appear in his work—as in the great story “The Gentleman From Cracow”—they are not quaint folk-devils, but figures of genuine, terrifying evil. And in his post-Holocaust ghost stories, like “A Wedding in Brownsville” and “The Cafeteria,” he seems to transcend parable, as if only the literally incredible—a party full of murdered Jews who don’t know they are dead, the appearance of Hitler in a Broadway café—could be adequate to the unbelievable truth.

The Magician of Lublin may not exactly be “a lost classic,” as the cover of the new paperback claims—it went through several editions in the 1960s and 1970s and was even made into a movie in 1979, starring Alan Arkin. But its republication is still very welcome, because the novel is one of the clearest examples of the ways this urban, intellectual, 20th-century writer makes use of the materials of the Jewish past. Take the title, which sounds like it could be a Hasidic folk tale about a wonder-working rabbi. In fact, Yasha Mazur, the title character, is a magician in the sense that Harry Houdini was a magician; he is an acrobat, contortionist, and escape artist, who performs at theaters around Poland while he dreams of making it big in Western Europe. Another way of putting it is that he is an impostor, using sleight-of-hand to show people the kinds of miracles they so desperately want to believe in.

In this way, Singer makes clear, the magician is a stand-in for the novelist, whose powers of imagination are also a kind of secular enchantment. And Yasha serves Singer in much the same way that Moses Herzog served Saul Bellow in Herzog, a novel published a few years later: as a surrogate self, a way of turning his own experiences and reveries into fiction. Certainly the plot of The Magician of Lublin is one that must have resonated personally for Singer, since it is substantially the same as those of Enemies: A Love Story and Shadows on the Hudson: A man suffers a spiritual crisis as he juggles love affairs with three different women.

When we first meet Yasha, he is at home with his wife, the pious Esther, who “wore the customary kerchief and kept a kosher kitchen; she observed the Sabbath and all the laws.” But, crucially, she is unable to have children, and Singer makes much of the fact that Yasha has never assumed a father’s stake in the community. He remains a kind of overgrown child himself, only dropping in on Esther for a few days between performing tours. And once he is back on the road, his assistant Magda, a Polish Gentile, doubles as a common-law wife—so much so that her mother treats Yasha as practically a son-in-law.

As the novel opens, however, we learn that this comfortable quasi-bigamy has been upset by Yasha’s love for a new woman, Emilia, a professor’s widow who lives a precariously genteel life in Warsaw. It is clear, in the way of a fairy tale, that each of these women also represents a fate: If Esther is Jewish tradition and Magda is artistic bohemia, Emilia represents bourgeois striving. Unlike Yasha’s other lovers, she will not sleep with him until they are married, and she will not marry him unless he converts to Catholicism, takes her away to Italy, and works toward becoming famous and respectable.

The plot, which unfolds over a few days, is driven by Yasha’s uncertainty about which woman, and which life, he wants. There is also the further complication that, to make Emilia’s dreams come true, he will need to get his hands on a large sum of money. For the most part, the book consists simply of Yasha’s restless roaming through the city as he tries to make up his mind. This gives Singer the chance to imagine the Polish capital in the 1870s, in the process of transforming itself into a metropolis:

In Warsaw, wooden sidewalks were ripped up, interior plumbing installed, rails for horse trolleys laid, tall buildings erected, as well as entire courtyards and markets. The theaters offered a new season of drama, comedy, operas, and concerts. … The bookstores featured newly published novels, as well as scientific works, encyclopedias, lexicons, and dictionaries.

As he goes from apartment to tavern to synagogue, Yasha also keeps up a frenetic internal debate. Like Bellow, his contemporary and sometime translator, Singer makes a middle-aged man’s joyless womanizing a symptom of a deeper spiritual crisis. In the first few pages, he contrasts Esther’s piety with her husband’s skepticism: “Yasha spent his Sabbath talking and smoking cigarettes among musicians. To the earnest moralists who attempted to get him to mend his ways, he would always answer: ‘When were you in heaven, and what did God look like?’ ” It is a mocking question, but also, as the book unfolds, a deadly serious one. For it becomes clear that Yasha’s lusts are the product of boredom and despair: “Like a drunkard who drowns his sorrow in alcohol, he thought. He could never understand how people managed to live in one place and spend their entire lives with one woman without becoming melancholy. He, Yasha, was forever at the point of depression.”

But if Yasha is unable to commit to Esther, or to his ancestors’ beliefs and way of living, he is unequally unable to commit to Emilia and break with his inherited conscience. He changes his mind about God and Judaism literally from one page to the next. When he stumbles into a prayerhouse and puts on tefillin for the first time since adolescence, he is filled with a sudden sense of God’s presence: “Yes, that there were other worlds, Yasha had always felt. He could almost see them. I must be a Jew! he said to himself. A Jew like all the others!” So ends chapter six; as chapter seven begins, he starts to wonder, “Why all the excitement? What proof is there that a God exists who hears your prayers? There are innumerable religions in the world, and each contradicts the other.”

Yasha’s ambivalence finally takes a concrete toll. In a rush of manic self-confidence, he decides to break into a miser’s apartment, where he knows there is a fortune hidden. But whether it is a sign from heaven or the revenge of his superego, all his dexterity deserts him. Not only does he fail to get the money, he breaks his leg jumping from the second-story balcony. The last part of the novel is colored by Yasha’s increasing pain, and his reckless refusal to get the leg treated—as if he is half-consciously willing himself to die, as the only possible escape from his quandary. “His fingers had become white and shrunken, the tips shriveled like those of a mortally ill person, or of a corpse. It was as if his heart were being crushed by a giant fist,” Singer writes.

As it turns out, the novel has a different ending in store for Yasha. His sins will be punished by death, but not his own; and the guilt of this culminating tragedy will drive him into an act of penitence that recalls both the legends of the Baal Shem Tov and the stories of Kafka. The dark power of The Magician of Lublin is nowhere clearer than in its concluding message—that, for a modern man, to return to God may require a decision as violent and frightening as any crime.

• Elif Batuman examines what is to become of Franz Kafka’s papers? [NYT Magazine]

• A private Israeli security guard shot a Palestinian dead in a predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Clashes have since ensued. Gulp. [LAT]

• Russia is nixing the planned sale of sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles to Iran in deference to the U.N. sanctions. [JPost]

• J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami calls on Prime Minister Netanyahu to extend the freeze (and J Street is running a whole bunch of print ads backing him up). [JTA]

• American Jews’ outsize political influence runs headlong into disproportionately un-Jewish Iowa’s outsize political influence. [Jewish Week]

• Yesterday, former President Clinton fingered not only settlements but also Russian immigrants in Israel as obstacles to peace. [Foreign Policy]

• Harold Bloom on Isaac Bashevis Singer. [NYRB]

• President Abdullah Gul talks Turkey … and Israel and Iran. [WP]

• Matt Duss compares what Helen Thomas and Martin Peretz said, and contrasts their fates. [Boston Globe]

• A profile of JDub Records artist Clare Burson, whose new album is Holocaust-inspired. [NYT]

• Barry Gewen situates the Park51 controversy in the broader American historical context. [Entanglements]

• Support the (Jewish) troops! While there are plenty of military rabbis, there is a severe shortage of Torahs. [Arutz Sheva/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Israeli know-how + Chinese manufacturing = a lot of money for one Israeli private-equity fund (maybe). [WSJ]

• Fascinating first-person essay from a Jewish U.S. Marine. Reminded me of “Defender of the Faith”. [Commentary]

• A Serious Man lead Michael Stuhlbarg plays Arnold Rothstein in HBO’s new Boardwalk Empire. [Jewish Journal]

Lead with acknowledgment that everyone knows and writes about the fact that Yiddish is dying: Check.

Superimpose cultural connotations of Yiddish onto subject of article, with a phrase like “flinty Yiddish contrarianism”: Check.

Name-drop Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer: Check.

Note that language is actually on the rise in Hasidic communities: Check.

Name-drop a Gentile Yiddish enthusiast (in this case, Shane Baker, whom Tablet Magazine has profiled): Check.

Mention the Lower East Side and a particular Brooklyn neighborhood (Brownsville, in this instance): Check.

End on mournful note: Check.

I’ll be honest: I could read a new one every week.

Shop That Speaks Yiddish Needs a Rich Man’s Help [NYT]
Related: The Ventriloquist [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Amid Dying Languages, Yiddish Lives On

• British Prime Minister David Cameron called Gaza “a prison camp” and advocated an end to the blockade while addressing a group of Turkish businessmen. [Haaretz]

• Six Israeli and one Romanian solder died in a helicopter crash in central Romania, where they were participating in joint military drills. [JTA]

• Oliver Stone apologized for his remarks yesterday about Jewish control of the media and clarified that the Holocaust was—indeed—“an atrocity.” [NYT]

• Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (author of Nextbook Press’ Betraying Spinoza) has a great essay on the brothers Singer (yup, there was another!). [The Book]

• Ian Buruma accuses Israel’s critics of holding it to a double standard. [Project Syndicate]

Nice song for a summer day:

Grade was a highly educated woman who wrote poetry and spoke several languages, but she was mostly known for her intense protectiveness of her husband, his work, and his legacy, which led her into battle with many Yiddish literary figures. Since his death in 1982, she blocked many from publishing or translating the work he left behind—and now that she is gone, speculation over the fate of his literary estate has begun.

Inna Grade’s most public battle began in 1978, when Isaac Bashevis Singer became the first (and only) Yiddish writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Many of his peers, including, reportedly, Chaim Grade, greeted the news with despair: Singer, who was by far the most successful Yiddish writer in America, was also criticized as presenting a patronizing fairy-tale version of Eastern Europe. What Inna Grade saw as a slight against her more-deserving husband became the central fight of her lifetime. In 2004, the centennial of Singer’s birth, she was interviewed in the New York Times. ”I despise [Singer] especially because he is dragging the Jewish literature, Judaism, American literature, American culture back to the land of Moab,” she told Alana Newhouse, now Tablet Magazine’s editor-in-chief, referring to the biblical region where Lot and his daughters began an incestuous affair. ”I profoundly despise all those who eat the bread into which the blasphemous buffoon has urinated.”

But Singer was only the first on Grade’s list of enemies, which was long even by the standards of the often-acrimonious Yiddish world. “She really had hatred for the entire Yiddish establishment,” said Allan Nadler, a professor of religion at Drew University who studied with Chaim Grade as a graduate student at Harvard. And in turn, he said, “she was hated in the Yiddish literary establishment.” According to Nadler, Inna Grade first alienated her husband’s friends and students during his lifetime and continued to stand between the writer and his admirers after his death. “She would not let anyone near his literary bequest,” Nadler said. “The more you loved him, the more impossible she became.”

One person who encountered Inna Grade’s wrath—and her litigiousness—was David Brandes, a producer and screenwriter who adapted Chaim Grade’s short story “My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner” into the 1991 feature film The Quarrel. According to Brandes, Grade had signed a contract and production was underway when she became suspicious of the filmmaker’s motives; she later threatened him with lawsuits and made harassing phone calls to his home. “She made my life just miserable, and for no reason at all,” Brandes said.

According to observers, what most outraged people in the Yiddish world about Grade is that many of them loved her late husband’s work and wanted as much as she did for it to reach a wider audience. But her strategy was different from theirs. Grade was apparently more afraid of poor translations and bad adaptations (which she thought had already diminished her husband’s reputation) than she was of no translations or adaptations at all. One of the few people she trusted at the end of her life, a Bronx psychiatrist named Ralph Speken, said, “In order to translate Chaim Grade you have to be at his level, and only Inna was.” Grade translated two of her husband’s books on her own, but Speken and others believe that an untold number of untranslated manuscripts are likely sitting in her apartment.

News of Grade’s death, then, has resulted in barely suppressed expressions of glee from Yiddish scholars dying to get their hands on those manuscripts. “‘My first thought was, ‘Now that she’s dead, someone will be able to get into that damn apartment in the Bronx,’ ” Nadler admitted. “Unless she put it to flames.” Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard, put it more gently. “Now that Grade’s wife has passed away,” she said in an email, “students may have access to his papers, potential translators and publishers to his works.”

Inna Grade, born Inna Hecker, grew up in Russia in a sophisticated family and married Chaim Grade—whose first wife had died in the Holocaust—while still a teenager. According to Speken, Grade had told him that her father, whom he believed was not Jewish, was a physician who ran a field hospital for the Soviet Army during World War II and was executed by the Nazis. In the late 1940s, Grade and her husband immigrated to New York; she told Speken that she later studied literature with the critic Lionel Trilling at Columbia and had two Master’s degrees from that university.

Grade’s mother, also a physician, apparently made it to New York as well—though Grade’s funeral guests reported discovering this only last week as they buried their friend and found the gravestone of Marie Heifetz-Hecker—Grade’s mother—next to her own. This seemingly solves another mystery as well: One rumor long circulated by her detractors was that she was not Jewish. But Heifetz-Hecker’s gravestone, Speken and other guests said, included her name, and her own mother’s name, in Yiddish. Chaim and Inna Grade had no children, and Inna has no known living relatives.

One of Grade’s unforgivable sins, according to her detractors, was her decision to bury her husband in a private ceremony, closed to them, when he died in 1982. Her own funeral last Friday was not much larger. Grade died penniless, apparently without a will, and her funeral costs were paid by the Public Administrator of Bronx County—which also now has authority over the much-desired papers in her apartment. The public administrator tapped Noach Valley, a local rabbi who had never met Grade (but had, as it happened, once presented a plaque to Singer honoring him on behalf of the Jewish Vegetarians of North America) to officiate.

One of the four people in attendance was Brad Silver, a longtime neighbor of Grade’s and the executive vice president of the Bronx Jewish Community Council, which took care of Grade as she became increasingly unable to pay her bills. This week, Silver said, he has been fielding the phone calls from Wisse and from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research wondering about the plans for Grade’s papers. Last year, when Grade was threatened with eviction, Speken was appointed her psychiatrist under the county’s Adult Protective Services program. The two bonded over their shared interests in Maimonides and Jung.

As her health deteriorated, Speken said, Grade became increasingly concerned about what would become of her husband’s papers. Grade and Speken discussed sending them to the University of Krakow, where Grade had contacts, or to an adult education institute at Hebrew University in Jerusalem named for Martin Buber (Grade felt an affinity with the philosopher). About a week before she died, Speken added, Grade related an epiphany that seemed to suggest she had reached a private understanding with her life’s leading antagonist.

“Ralph, my work is done. I was wrong,” Speken said Grade told him. “Singer was not trying to take us back to the land of Moab. The fact is, we never left. All he did was to capitalize on it.”

***

Elisa Albert, “When You Say You’re a Jew,” from the collection How This Night Is Different?

“Services?” Debra says, waiting for that moment when it becomes clear to the woman that she should envelop Debra in some sort of embrace. “Shabbat?” She fingers the phrase book but knows that nothing in it will be of any help. It is broken down into five sections: Conversation, Food, Transportation, Hospitality, Emergencies. There are things she wants, to communicate that are not included in these basics. Were there a Religion-Seeking section, perhaps things would be easier. “I have come for Shabbat services,” Debra would say. “I am a Jew.” And then, ritually, defensively, to explain her visage: “My mother converted.” Then she would flip over to the Food section: “What’s for dinner?”

The woman crosses her arms over her chest. They face off in monolingual obtuseness.

Okay, Debra thinks. It is Friday night; there must be Shabbat services. There are certain immutable rules involved with religion. Just because she is in a borderline second-world country (bastard child of Europe)—a place where she had, the day before, for complete lack of alternative, cuisine, been forced to eat tripe, for fuck’s sake—does not mean that she should feel stupid for having shown up, unannounced, at Lisbon’s only synagogue, sans a way back, at dusk on Shabbat. A Jew could do that, find a home anywhere in the world with other Jews. Wasn’t that the point of the entire freakin’ deal? Covenant, whatever?

***

Shalom Auslander,  Foreskin’s Lament

It was one thing to use the pay phone on Sabbath—doctors did it all the time. But getting into a car? Going to the mall? That was pretty serious. —Violating the Sabbath, I heard Rabbi Blowfeld say, —was like violating all 613 commandments. Moses had committed one sin in his whole life, and because of it, God killed him before he could reach the Promised Land. One sin. Sarah laughed—she chuckled— and, knowing that one day she would, God had made her barren.

I stood in the vestibule of the synagogue, waiting for my taxi, and wondered how God might punish me for 613 sins. Would He make me barren? Was there a Promised Land I would never reach? Maybe God had already punished me and I didn’t know it. Maybe He had killed my family. Maybe He burned down the house while I was walking here. Hadn’t I heard sirens earlier? Did killers break in after I had left? Were they in my house right now? Maybe they were tying my family up at this very moment, guns pressed to the side of their heads, and maybe God was waiting to see what I would do—if I left right now, He would make the kidnappers leave. But the moment I got in the cab. He would…

I jumped as the cabdriver leaned on his horn. I grabbed my bag, ran outside, dove into the backseat, and slammed the car door shut behind me.

Bam, 613 sins.

***

David Bezmozgis, “Minyan,” from the collection Natasha

Three Russians who didn’t understand Hebrew sat in the back of the synagogue. One was missing an arm. Two Polish Jews sat in front of them. One had his place by the partition so that he could stretch his bad leg, the other kept his walker near for emergency trips to the washroom. I was between them and the front row where my grandfather sat with two other men. Herschel, a Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, sat beside my grandfather, and Itzik, a taxi driver from Odessa, sat beside Herschel. Zalman was at a small table beside the ark. On the other side of the partition were half a dozen women. There was no rabbi and so the responsibilities for the service were divided between Zalman, my grandfather, and Herschel. The task of lifting the heavy scrolls fell to me, as I was the only one with the strength to do it. The Saturday morning services started at nine and lasted for three hours. Most of the old Jews came because they were drawn by the nostalgia for ancient cadences, I came because I was drawn by the nostalgia for old Jews. In each case, the motivation was not tradition but history.

After services everyone went to the common room for a kiddush. Zalman brought a bottle of kosher sweet wine and a honey cake. The Russian man with one arm contributed a mickey of cheap vodka. It takes only one arm to pour and only one arm to drink. Thank God, he said, this is one thing where it is no disadvantage to be a one-armed man.

One of the women distributed the wine in small paper cups and also circulated a dish with the slices of cake. When everyone had drunk their wine and munched their cake, they wished one another a gut Shabbos and wandered alone or in small groups back to their particular lives.

***

Nathan Englander, from the title story of the collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

“You are pure,” Dov Binyamin said to the back of his wife, who—heightening his frustration—slept facing the wall.

“I am impure.”

“This is not true, Chava Bayla. It’s an impossibility. And I know myself the last time you went to the ritual bath. A woman does not have her thing—”

“Her thing?” Chava said. She laughed, as if she had caught him in a lie, and turned to face the room.

“A woman doesn’t menstruate for so long without even a single week of clean days. And a wife does not for so long ignore her husband. It is Shabbos, a double mitzvah tonight—an obligation to make love.”

Chava Bayla turned back again to face her wall. She tightened her arms around herself as if in an embrace.

“You are my wife!” Dov Binyamin said.

“That was God’s choice, not mine. I might also have been put on this earth as a bar of soap or a kugel. Better,” she said, “better it should have been one of those.”

***

Tova Mirvis, The Outside World

Their shul in Laurelwood was the largest of five. In the past ten years, it had expanded twice. A capital campaign was under way to raise money for yet another expansion, though there was no space left on this lot for one more inch of building. They already stretched to the curb. The parking lot had long ago been turned into the youth wing.

The men came first, filling the main section of the shul. The women came later. When shul was more than half over, it became the mommy hour. Hoping to arrive at the end of services, they walked slowly, laden with double strollers. The walkway that led to the front door had been transformed into a parking lot of Peg Peregos.

In the sanctuary, children roamed the aisles, while the men and women whispered in their respective sections. They spent so much time at shul that they knew how to make themselves at home. The service was like a show they had seen before. They knew all the words. They knew exactly what would happen. Sometimes they paid attention. Other times the prayers became the background noise to their whispered conversation.

***

Lev Raphael, “Another Life,” from the collection Secret Anniversaries of the Heart

Even at services, alone with the other men, trying to stay deep in prayer; his thoughts sometimes wandered: to a barefoot guy in cutoffs hosing down his car across the street, who’d glanced at him one morning as Nat entered the building; or two wide-backed, tanned bikers damp with sweat and exhaustion shouting to each other as they cut down the street; or even Italian looking Clark, who helped run the minyan, Clark whose weight lifting had left him as bulging and tight as a tufted leather sofa. Nat’s private gallery. He felt then lonelier than ever, tracing the path of his unquenched thirst for men, to be a man (was that different? the same?) back to childhood. When he had not felt this way? And what would it be like never to look at men but only see them: pure registration without excitement, interest, pain? He was always feeling helpless, like turning a corner in town and almost bumping into a guy in sweatpants with those seductive gray folds, whose belly seemed harder, flatter over the shifting, jock-rounded crotch, or watching someone’s tight, jutting ass in the locker room at the gym as he bent over to pull up his shorts.

Still, he could lose himself in prayer often enough, long enough. And then his sister, Brenda, finishing her Ph.D. at State, began to join him at services after he’d learned the cantillation for reading the Torah. With her, he felt more anchored, sure this might be an answer if only he waited. Brenda wasn’t pleased with sitting on the women’s side at first, but she respected what he’d learned, or at least all the weeks of practicing at her apartment with a tape recording, chanting to himself there because It drove neighbors at the dorm crazy. And he was pleased that his pretty sister drew attention from the men, as if her presence made him less of a shadow or a blank, less suspiciously alone. With Brenda at services, he felt he could be normal—or seem that way—and sometimes it was easier to concentrate. Thoughts of men were not so intense; she was like a powerful signal jamming pirate broadcasts.

***

Jonathan Rosen, Joy Comes in the Morning

That night was Shabbat. Deborah felt almost drugged as she stood up on the bimah of Temple Emunah in front of the congregation. The peaceful blue rug and the giant vases of white and yellow flowers, the rainbow light from the stained-glass windows as the sun set through the western exposure, the organ tones rising from their high, hidden pipes, the congregants dressed and expectant and spread out like a sea before her, usually filled Deborah with peaceful joy. But she felt like someone in a dream, naked and conspicuous and out of place. What was she doing up there? What was anyone doing there?

But that was her voice singing, “You shall love the Lord your God,” and that was her head bowed, adoring the “ever-living God.” And now Rabbi Zwieback was blessing the congregation, his stubby cloven like hooves, raised in benediction. She lifted her own hands mechanically. Cantor Baumwald sang “Shabbat Shalom” and it was over.

***

Philip Roth, “Defender of the Faith,” from Goodbye Columbus

I turned to Grossbart. “It’s five after seven. What time are services?”

“Shul,” he said, smiling, “is in ten minutes. I want you to meet Mickey Halpern, This is Nathan Marx, our sergeant.”

The third boy hopped forward. “Private Michael Halpern.” He saluted.

“Salute officers, Halpern,” I said. The boy dropped his hand, and, on its way down, in his nervousness, checked to see if his shirt pockets were buttoned.

“Shall I march them over, sir?” Grossbart asked. “Or are you coming along?”

From behind Grossbart, Fishbein piped up. “Afterward, they’re having refreshments. A ladies’ auxiliary from St. Louis, the rabbi told us last week.”

“The chaplain,” Halpern whispered.

“You’re welcome to come along,” Grossbart said.

To avoid his plea, I looked away, and saw, in the windows of the barracks, a cloud of faces staring out at the four of us. “Hurry along, Grossbart,” I said.

“O.K., then,” he said. He turned to the others. “Double time, march!”

They started off, but ten feet away Grossbart spun around, and, running backward, called to me, “Good shabbus, sir!” And then the three of them were swallowed into the Missouri dusk.

***

Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Wager,” from A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories

The Friday evening meal was over, but the candles were still burning in the silver candlesticks. A cricket chirped behind the stove, and the wick in the lamp made a slight sucking sound as it drew up the kerosene. On the covered table stood a crystal decanter with wine and a silver benediction cup, an engraving of the Wailing Wall upon it; near them lay a bread knife with a mother-of-pearl handle and a challah napkin, embroidered in golden thread.

The master of the house, still young, had blue eyes and a small yellow beard. His Sabbath caftan was not made of satin, as was the custom with the Hasidim, but of silk. He also wore a crisp collar around his neck and a ribbon that served as a tie. The mistress wore a dress with a design of arabesques and a blond wig adorned with combs. She had the face of a young girl: round, without a wrinkle, with a small nose and light-colored eyes.

Outside, the snow lay in great drifts, gleaming under the full moon. The frost was forever trying to paint a tree, a flower, a palm leaf, or a bush upon the windowpanes, but in the warmth of the room the patterns quickly melted away.

Israel Joshua Singer Appreciation Society [Facebook]

You’ll be sitting in the Pain Quotidien café enjoying a cup of hot apple cider. A reporter seated across from you will consult her notepad.

“So, how does it feel to be a Jewish writer?” she’ll ask.

You’ll sip your cider, then say you’ve never thought too hard about that. You’ll offer that you were born Jewish and you’ve been a writer for eons, so sure, you’re a Jewish writer by definition, but that’s just one fact of your life. Like you’re five-foot-eight or you moved out of Chicago but still enjoy double cheese dogs from Wolfy’s Red Hots.

If you’re feeling erudite, you’ll quote Saul Bellow, an author you don’t enjoy as much as people sometimes assume: “I’m well aware of being Jewish and also of being American and of being a writer. But I’m also a hockey fan, a fact which nobody ever mentions.”

You’ll say when you were a kid, you liked hockey too.

Or you’ll crack wise about Dave Parker, the Pittsburgh Pirate who wore a Star of David because he was a star named David.

Finally you’ll admit you just don’t feel comfortable being labeled in general. And when someone calls you “Jewish writer” specifically, you sense they’re categorizing, ghettoizing, marginalizing, perhaps even circumcising. When you’re reading your favorite writers, you tend to forget they’re Jewish or gentile or anti-Semitic (though when you’re reading D.H. Lawrence or Jose Saramago, that last one’s hard to forget).

“You seem ambivalent,” the reporter will say.

Exactly, you’ll answer, because the thing is, you’re really not all that Jewish. Well, yes, when you were a child, your favorite movie was The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, about an anti-Semite who passes himself off as a Jew by answering questions with questions. And yes, during puberty, you felt betrayed by Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity. And true, you graduated from K.I.N.S. Hebrew School and won a Hebrew high school scholarship, which you passed up in favor of a public school that a rabbi said used to be good, but now there were too many schvartzes. And now you’re proud your daughter says she wants to learn how to make matzo balls when she grows up.

But are you really a Jewish writer? What does that mean to you?

Well, on the one hand, being a Jewish writer means having the same label as Mordecai Richler, S.J. Perelman, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who left you starstruck at age five when he signed your copy of When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw, “Love, I.B. Singer.”

And being a Jewish writer means Jews listen to you speak, then argue with you because Judaism is an argumentative religion, one that answers questions with questions.

And it means you’ve read at a synagogue where a familiar-looking woman told you how sorry she was you didn’t know each other better in high school. And you considered saying the reason you didn’t is because back then she was a mean girl who dated thugs who checked other kids hard in floor hockey. But instead you shut up and signed her book, briefly feeling like a Jewish Elvis.

And it means the daughter-in-law of the couple who owned Knopov’s, your favorite kosher bakery, thanked you for writing about her in-laws’ cupcakes. And that the rabbi next door to your mom’s house said he’s read only two novels lately—The DaVinci Code and yours.

And it means you asked Gary Shteyngart whether he minded the label “Jewish writer” and he said nope, being a Jewish writer meant ka-ching! at the cash register, and you knew what he meant.

But as a Jewish writer, you don’t always like the assumptions people make about you or the company you sometimes keep.

Being a Jewish writer means you’ve read at a bookstore where a woman asked how you chose your Jewish characters’ surnames. And after you said you liked unusual names with thematic resonances, she asked why you chose the name of her daughter-in-law who works at a Jewish library and certainly isn’t a slut.

Being a Jewish writer means you wrote a book about assimilated Jews that was translated into different languages, one of whose publishers commissioned a cover photo of someone with a tallis, streimel, and payes.

And it means you had lunch with Jewish studies prof at a Big 10 school who asked how religious you were, then announced he’d published an essay excoriating assimilated Jews like you.

And it means you’ve hobnobbed with other Jewish writers, such as a purportedly tender, sensitive bloke who described with lurid anatomical detail how his pal seduced a U.S. president’s daughter. And when you met another Jewish writer, she asked you to set her up with the sensitive writer who then asked you to estimate the size of the other Jewish writer’s chest.

And it means you got invited to teach at a Jewish writers’ retreat where you slept on a rubber mattress normally reserved for adolescents at sleepaway camp. And at a Q-and-A, someone asked, “What does it mean to be a Jewish writer,” and the poet beside you declared it meant nothing to him; he was only here for the money. And you wished you had the guts to say something so honest.

And it means you spoke at the Holy Grail of Jewish author venues, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. But not in the auditorium; when you arrived, the events coordinator led you to a continuing-education room where someone barged in on your reading and asked, “Is this the recovery meeting?”

And it means you appeared on a panel with a young, female Jewish writer and some geezer asked whether you were married to each other. And when you said no, he asked if at least your spouses were Jewish. And then a man who resembled your father asked, “Do you really expect to make a living from this?”

And it means you spoke at a Jewish singles’ event where a woman asked if the ferociously masturbating Zionist musician in your first novel was autobiographical.

And it means you started writing a discursive essay about being a Jewish writer, and sent a draft to your closest Jewish writer friend, Jennifer Gilmore, who advised you not to write it all in the second person, then asked if the writer who related that lurid incident about a U.S. president’s daughter was Gary Shteyngart. And you said no.

And it means you considered editing an anthology of essays about being a Jewish writer only to learn that someone had already edited Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, which you considered adding to your Amazon.com shopping cart, before deciding you’d rather buy Monkey, a Chinese folk tale, than read 29 essays about being a Jewish writer.

But as the reporter at Pain Quotidien keeps looking at you, you’ll still wonder whether you are a Jewish writer, or just a writer who happens to be Jewish. Or whether you should just be glad to have any label at all. And you’ll realize you haven’t come up with any conclusions; you’ve just answered questions with questions.

Which means, of course, that you must be a Jewish writer after all.

Adam Langer is the author of Crossing California, The Washington Story, and Ellington Boulevard. His next book, a memoir titled My Father’s Bonus March, will be published this fall by Spiegel & Grau.

Howe was wrong, however, on one major count. There was a third Singer, Hinde Esther, oldest of the Orthodox clan that spent its formative years in the Polish shtetls immortalized in Bashevis’s oeuvre. She, in fact, was the first of her family to set her ideas down on paper, but her early work is lost—she burned it not long after she was married—and only two novels (Der Sheydim Tants and Brilyantn) and a short story collection (Yikhes, published in English as Blitz and Other Stories) from later in life, survive as testament to her talents.

Hinde Esther’s neglect began at birth, when her parents, wishing for a boy, sent her to live with a wet nurse for the first three years of her life. She returned to her family (and new younger brother Israel Joshua) with damaged eyes, a fear of enclosed spaces, and the epileptic symptoms that persisted until her death at age 63 in 1954. A miserable arranged marriage gave her the name Kreitman, and spurred her to wander back and forth between her home country, Poland, and the more modern Jewish communities of Antwerp and London, where she finally settled. Her brothers thought her difficult, if they thought of her at all; Isaac Bashevis’s erroneous dedication of The Séance to “Minda” Esther seems emblematic of how he regarded his much older sister. Every few years an article lamenting Kreitman’s literary neglect results in a small flurry of attention, but its eventual fading returns Kreitman to the afterthought status she knew in life.

Kreitman’s sense of her own obscurity is most prominent in Der Shaydim Tants, originally published in 1936 and loosely translated as The Dance of the Demons (the title of its paperback republication this spring by the Feminist Press). Tants tells the stark, tragic story of Deborah, who dreams of a future in which she is more than the “nobody” her father calls her. She wants to break free of the desultory household duties ordered by her possibly jealous mother and to be worthy enough to study Talmud like her insolent, less intelligent brother. Deborah evokes the thinly-veiled envy Kreitman felt for Israel Joshua (nicknamed “Shiya”) and is gutsy enough to strive for freedom that’s never within visible range.

Der Sheydim Tants takes time to find its raging voice, moving first through fragmented slices of shtetl life and withering descriptions of the religious inequity between the “cult of Hassidism” subscribed to by Deborah’s father, and her mother’s misnagdish skepticism. The slow start owes less to Kreitman’s structure than to the 1946 translation by her son Maurice Carr, a literary critic and editor. Carr changed the title to Deborah—suggestive of domestic drama instead of roiling tension—and peppered the narrative with jarring Britishisms (tzitzis becomes “Orthodox gabardine”; young men are “fellers” or “blokes”; and, at one point, Deborah’s mother yells, “Hark at all that shouting down below,” like a refugee from A Christmas Carol). Carr also de-emphasized references to German literature and added exposition for less discerning British readers, such as the opening declaration, “It was the Sabbath. And even the wind and snow rested from their labours.”

Thankfully, Carr’s clunky translation does not extinguish his mother’s fury at how the dreams and desires of intelligent young women are thwarted. The second half in particular teems with the author’s barely suppressed rage at her stand-in’s misfortune. A flirtation with socialism in the guise of a budding romance with the worldly Simon, a handsome rebel who sheds his payot for underground meetings, falls apart when Deborah is deemed too innocent to understand the ideological argument for terrorism. She agrees to marry Beirish, a young diamond cutter based in Antwerp, “as a means of escape from a home which was only a home in name, and which she hated like poison” only to discover, with revulsion upon meeting him, that she has leaped into another kind of personal hell. As matters worsen, Kreitman shows with devastating clarity the helplessness Deborah feels at watching her options fall away:

[What] folly, what madness had possessed her to do all she had done so far? Why had she run away from home in the first place? She had been blind not to foresee the crushing loneliness that lay in store for her when all her ties with the past were broken. Life here was meaningless: it had no content, it was empty, quite empty. How fascinating her life had been! Even her sufferings had not been bereft of a deep inner relish. Now she was face to face with nothingness. She was all alone with a stranger whose presence she could not endure. Why could she not endure him? That she did not know.

When World War I breaks out, downtrodden, defeated Deborah takes in the awful news by sipping her tea in silence, past caring about the war’s impact. In her mind she is nearly dead, tormented by the demonic gyrations she believes she sees demonstrated by an anonymous celebrant at her own wedding (adding a whiff of the supernatural to the narrative) and the cloudy, migraine-like auras that foreshadow Kreitman’s own undiagnosed grand mal seizures. But here fiction and reality diverge, for Kreitman, despite her unhappy life, lived long enough to see her work published, even if recognition was scarce. Now it is time for Carr’s well-meaning work to cede its place to a fresh translation of Der Sheydim Tants that finally puts Irving Howe’s incomplete assertion to rest.

Sarah Weinman writes “Dark Passages,” the Los Angeles Times’s monthly online crime fiction column, and contributes to numerous print and online outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and New Hampshire Public Radio’s “Word of Mouth.”

This winter, however, this winter of wind and recession, of job loss and housing loss—this winter when Coney Island has been almost entirely dismantled—I was depressed, I was angry and so, ventured into the forbidden: I was going to keep a winter diary, recording what it was like to live and read and write in New York’s favorite summery playplace when even that fantasy was vulgarly dying. I was going to record every razed lot and shuttered business, noting the neighborhood’s daily despoiling, as Thor Equities, LLC, which had already bought most of Coney’s most prominent properties, effectively evicted, through exorbitantly raising rents, their longtime tenants, leaving the neighborhood barren until the city approved Thor’s plans for redevelopment, though redevelopment funds were becoming, in the phrase of one local newspaper, “increasingly scarce.”

My Coney diary was begun just after Labor Day, off-season’s official beginning: September 7. That was the bright breezy Sunday that Astroland, Coney’s largest amusement park, a late heir to the defunct Dreamland, Luna, and Steeplechase Parks, closed its gates forever. Astroland’s owner, Carol Albert, had sold her property to Thor in 2006 for $30 million; in 2007, she was denied the renewal of her park’s lease for the two years she’d requested, so Astroland had to shut down. The Alberts are, or were, a venerable neighborhood presence: West 10th Street at the boardwalk is named for Dewey Albert, who founded Astroland in 1962; ever since Thor began buying up Coney almost five winters ago, daughter-in-law Carol has served as an unofficial spokesperson for local businesses.

Thor is headed by Joseph Sitt, a local boy made good (he’s from Gravesend, the neighborhood just north), and a developer who’s always talked big plans: over the past two years, he’s been inundating the mayor’s office and media with plans for Coney retail, a megamall with restaurants, high-rise condos and hotels and, of course, “an improved amusement district.” But such optimism is as old as the Atlantic. Even before the market collapsed and banks began faltering, naysayers held their naysayings at city council meetings, in rallies and open letters, and over the Internet. Skeptics maintain that Sitt has always intended to sit on his Coney properties, waiting for them to appreciate before flipping them for profit. And he appeared to do just that with the Gallery mall at Fulton Street: in 2001 he bought that Brooklyn property for $24 million, launched a PR campaign touting redevelopment, persuaded the city to rezone the area to permit the necessary construction, then sold the plot in 2007 for $125 million without realizing a single plan.

But now that our economy has gone runaway rollercoaster, what might have been a nefarious plot—sitting/flipping—is turning into incontrovertible reality: call it Sitt’s sit without the flip.

Thor has lately hung banners on its properties—on the facade of Ruby’s Bar on the boardwalk, along the chainlinked fences that once perimetered the demolished batting cages and go-cart track—advertising them available, and urging prospective lessees to call “Sam Sabin,” (212) 529-7413. I have called this number three times, two while drunk, and left appropriate messages: “Hello, Uncle Sam, this is Coney calling. Can I rent a room in your conscience?”

Besides the scripts of prank calls, my diary records: the prices of the Astroland amusements Albert was hoping to liquidate (the Astrotower, that shaky white space needle, was listed at $99K; the carousel came with a tag of $95K, while the Tilt-A-Whirl seemed a steal at only $29K); the early January removal of the iconic Astroland rocket from the top of Gregory & Paul’s boardwalk concession; the later January announcement of a city plan to “demap” Coney’s streets, essentially retaking a number of the neighborhood’s unsafe properties through condemnation.

As I conceived it, this Coney diary of mine would be aggressively particularistic. Nothing would matter except the local. There would be no Manhattan. No Iraq, no Israel either. There would be no Obama. New condo construction in neighboring Brighton Beach stopped the week of the election; the partly finished buildings stand emptily windowless, while local homeless have moved in. On Inauguration Day, I counted 10 used condoms on the beach at Ocean Parkway, prophylactics in every cheap color and design (not the “Coney Island Whitefish” of yore so much as ribbed jellyfish, tickler jellyfish, and that most beautiful species of condom that, with love, glows in the dark, which brings to mind a favorite term from high-school biology, “bioluminescence”). Somewhere between election and inauguration—symbolically, during the transition—my across-the-hall-neighbor died; she left me a plastic bag of silver dollars.

My diary was going to be that and more—journalistic, but literary, a way to survive a cool apartment in a neighborhood just entering its blight—but it wasn’t to be. Its discipline faded when rent needed to be paid, and the dark days felt too short for sadness. Failure, taking the form of a low cloudbank, hangs over this island (to wit: Coney’s not even an island; it used to be, but then Manhattan landfill was poured into the creek and paved over, making Brighton Beach Avenue). My diary’s first paragraph was, in fact, an inversion of this essay’s: “People write about Coney Island to avoid living in Coney Island. People live in Coney Island to avoid visiting Coney Island. And what of the people who visit Coney Island? They visit Coney Island to avoid reading about Coney Island.” Indeed, doesn’t it seem, nowadays, that reading is the most dangerous, ill-advised thing one can do?

Fearlessly, then, wrapped in blankets in bed, I read everything I could of and about Coney, particularly its literature, its fiction, because anything—even the false, even the fake, the sentimental, the nostalgically kitsch—was better than outside.

Here’s my hawk: no other New York neighborhood boasts Coney’s literary history. America’s best writers coupled its locus to raucous themes, spanning genres from Beat poetry to beat reportage, in languages from English to German, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish. As Coney was once a vacation spot—back in the original-recipe Depression, in the days before kids’ television and Disney parks, before widespread car ownership and inexpensive air travel—its literature has always been one of writers on-leave, basking in the childhood fantastic by noon, and the libidinous by dusk. Coney’s appearance in the chapters of novels and in the stanzas of poems especially represents an intrusion of magic into worldweary realism—just as the actual neighborhood once indulged not only the practical urban escapist, but also the malevolently playful surreal, or irreal. When a writer machinates his or her characters to Coney, it’s no mere journey by subway, or quaint streetcar: it’s a regressus, as the page becomes an unlimited admission ticket to subconscious Guignol.

I read: Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift and Joseph Heller’s memoir Now and Then; the journalism of Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman (Crane’s Coney Island’s Failing Days tells us that New Yorkers thought Coney was going to hell as early as 1892); Djuna Barnes; Edward Dahlberg; Henry Miller; Kenneth Fearing; Lawrence Ferlinghetti (whose poetry collection A Coney Island of the Mind approaches the place not physically, but as glittering metaphor); Richard Fox’s “Coney Island Frolics”, a report about Coney bathing, appearing in the Police Gazette in 1883; accounts of Sigmund Freud’s Coney tour in 1909; an illuminative treatment of Coney as capitalist grotesque, in Boredom, an essay by Maxim Gorky from 1907; Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, an architectural manifesto positing Coney as imaginative testing ground for Manhattan’s later skyline reality; Wallace Markfield, who wrote about Brighton’s argumentative Jews; José Martí’s Spanish crónica, Coney Island; O. Henry’s Brickdust Row; Upton Sinclar and Theodore Dreiser; Grace Paley (Enormous Changes at the Last Minute) and Delmore Schwartz (In Dreams Begin Responsibilities), Hubert Selby, Jr. and Gilbert Sorrentino; Harvey Swados and Sol Yurick; and Yiddish’s Isaac Bashevis Singer, onetime resident of Coney’s furthest neighborhood, Seagate.

I wrote this list down in the diary notebook, which soon became just another notebook—ocean-gray, seagullishly shabby—as I began copying excerpts from these selections into it, too. It is revealing that Coney’s literature shares a similar technique: Much of it is made of lists, of breathless listings as long as the boardwalk. It is as if writers about Coney were agape with wonder at how much of the world could be found in one neighborhood, and, overwhelmed, could only try to note down, telegraphically, or in shorthand, the variety of what attracted their senses. In this, and in the notion that a democratic multitude used to come together all in one place, time-encapsulated in its prime—the essential meaning of “A Coney Island of the Mind”—Coney’s literature can also seem diaristic; though its diary is a daybook of a collective ideal, and, too, of an idealistic summertime, to be read by the light of the sun that, these days, feels so distant.

Here, then, is a refresher of this neighborhood’s never-was perfection, from that most perfect of Coney stories, Bashevis Singer’s “A Day in Coney Island”(1970):

I had been in America for eighteen months, but Coney Island still surprised me. The sun poured down like fire. From the beach came a roar even louder than the ocean. On the boardwalk, an Italian watermelon vendor pounded on a sheet of tin with his knife and called for the customers in a wild voice. Everyone bellowed in his own way: sellers of popcorn and hot dogs, ice cream and peanuts, cotton candy and corn on the cob. I passed a sideshow displaying a creature that was half woman, half fish; a wax museum with figures of Marie Antoinette, Buffalo Bill, and John Wilkes Booth; a store where a turbaned astrologer sat in the dark surrounded by maps and globes of the heavenly constellations, casting horoscopes. Pygmies danced in front of a little circus, their black faces painted white, all of them bound loosely with a long rope. A mechanical ape puffed its belly like a bellows and laughed with raucous laughter. Negro boys aimed guns at metal ducklings. A half-naked man with a black beard and hair to his shoulders hawked potions that strengthened the muscles, beautified the skin, and brought back lost potency. He tore heavy chains with his hands and bent coins between his fingers. A little farther along, a medium advertised that she was calling back spirits from the dead, prophesying the future, and giving advice on love and marriage.

We should no longer read this passage wistfully. Not dwelling amid yesteryear’s warmth, we should instead be jolted by the cold Coney of today. We might repeat, each in our own disappointed voice, the sentence that ends Singer’s paragraph: “I wasted my days with dreams, worries, empty fantasies, and locked myself in affairs that had no future.”

The clique’s reverence, however, provided little insurance for Der Nister in the Soviet Union of the mid-1930s. The Soviet government looked suspiciously on any group that set itself apart from the main social body. Though the government officially acknowledged Yiddish—mainly to show a peaceable face to the international community—as the language of a Jewish minority, libraries were throwing out Yiddish books, Yiddish schools and institutes were being shuttered, and newspaper presses stopped. In 1934, Der Nister explained to his brother in a letter, “The writing of my book is a necessity; otherwise I am nothing; otherwise I am erased from literature and from life.”

The book Der Nister labored over would not be a revolt against the modern Yiddish literary tradition, but revolutionary in its adherence to that tradition during a time when Yiddish culture was under attack. That book, The Family Mashber, was conceived as an epic tale of at least three volumes, relating how a generally happy, successful Jewish family in the Polish-Ukrainian town of N (actually Der Nister’s hometown, Berdichev) lost that happiness completely within one short year in the 1870s.

At least that is how the book ends now.

The modern Yiddish literary movement had been flourishing since 1864, when S.Y. Abramovitsh published the first installment of his very popular “The Little Person” in the Yiddish newspaper supplement Kol Mevasser. The novella, enjoying the wide Eastern European circulation of the paper, offered a witty, masked social critique of corruption within the Polish and Russian power centers and the Jewish community itself. Yiddish fiction found its most famous voice in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who published his first stories in a Polish literary journal before immigrating to the United States in 1935. Book One of The Family Mashber appeared in Russia in 1939.

(Book Two would be printed in the United States, also in Yiddish, in 1948.) The completed third volume disappeared when Kahanovitch did, on a Saturday in February 1949. Kahanovitch received the Soviet secret police at his door in Moscow with a smile. “Thank God you came at last,” he is reported to have said, “I have waited for you for so long.” When one of the arresting officers asked about the whereabouts of his manuscripts, he replied: “Forgive me, gentlemen, that matter is none of your concern. It was not for you that I wrote my manuscripts and they remain in a safe place.” He was charged with conducting “hostile nationalistic activity” and thrown into Lefortovo prison. The following year he died, at age sixty-seven, of bleeding hemorrhoids in a labor camp.

In his lifetime, Kahanovitch had witnessed the worst of human nature. As a young man, he hid under assumed names to avoid czarist military service. In 1921 he escaped to Germany, but was lured back in 1927 by Stalin’s false promises that Yiddish culture would be celebrated in the Soviet states. In Moscow, he lived and taught with a group of Yiddish artists, including his good friend Marc Chagall, at the Malakhovka children’s colony, a school for orphans of the pogroms. There he tried to synthesize lessons in Jewish culture with Communist propaganda. In 1949, during Stalin’s campaign against “Cosmopolitans,” he saw many of his artist friends hauled away to prisons and labor camps, where they perished. In the months before his arrest he waited at home with his wife for the tragic ending he had imagined for himself to come to pass, and which indeed he had committed to paper—in a symbolic way—in the last pages of the second volume of The Family Mashber.

The first two volumes of The Family Mashber have just been reprinted in English, as a single paperback, by New York Review of Books Classics. (This translation, by Leonard Wolf, first appeared in 1987 as a Summit Books hardcover; in The New York Times Book Review, Ruth Wisse called it “a large, sprawling historical novel reminiscent of Dostoyevsky in its concentration on the human soul.”) Although Kahanovitch fought for Yiddish works to be published in Yiddish, he might have been pleased to know that the memories he struggled to preserve would be carried forth in the minds of new American readers. In his preface to The Family Mashber, he writes, “The world depicted in this book—the economic base on which it rested, its social and ideological conflicts and interests—disappeared long ago. . . . In depicting those people, who are physically and spiritually extinct, I have taken pains not to contend with them, not to cry out that they are doomed. Rather, I have let them proceed quietly on their historically necessitated way toward the abyss.”

The key character approaching the abyss in the novel is Moshe Mashber, a successful and seemingly humane businessman. Moshe boasts a devoted wife, a loving family of married daughters, and two brothers: Alter, who suffers from epilepsy, and Luzi, revered for his absolute piety. In Yiddish, Mashber means “crisis,” and one may suspect that Moshe, as a rich man intimately connected to characters who shun material wealth (particularly Luzi, his most beloved sibling), will be served his crisis owing to overweening pride or avarice. But such is not the case. One of the region’s noblemen refuses to pay back massive loans owed to Moshe, threatening the stability of Moshe’s whole business. When another drunken nobleman shoots a portrait of the czar in a Jewish inn, the Jews must find hush money to avoid persecution from the capital. The two financial strains cause Moshe’s crash. The collapse is more than financial; under strain, Moshe proves to be selfish. The fall of its most successful citizen brings down the whole tightly intertwined community.

Meanwhile, Moshe’s brother Luzi moves deeper into his faith, ultimately joining the Bratslaver sect of Hasidim. The Bratslaver never chose a successor when their founding rabbi, Nachman of Bratslav, a famous Yiddish storyteller in his own right, died in 1810. For this, they are considered radical in breaking from the tradition of powerful rabbinical dynasties. Rebbe Nachman preached that his followers should speak to God without intermediaries, pay no heed to money, and spend their time in joyous singing and dancing. “Their days were spent in prayer, and their nights lying on the graves of the town’s holy men,” writes Der Nister. “As for doing something for the world or for themselves or for their families—they ignored all that to a criminal degree.” The culture of this bedraggled sect—absolutely devoted to God—must have been the one Der Nister most wanted to preserve for posterity. His own brother, Aaron, was a Bratslaver, and given everything Der Nister witnessed of religious and political persecution during his lifetime, he must have been certain that this sect would vanish for good, forever to be misunderstood. In the 1920s, the mainstream Jewish community had even turned on its own religious sects in the Soviet states, echoing the government’s pogroms, and Der Nister’s novel reflects that internal feud. As Book Two ends, the town seeks to drive out the sect, suspecting that somehow the group’s strange habits have brought the curse of financial ruin upon everyone.

If this abundance of crises makes the book sound humorless, it’s not. Der Nister’s love for his characters allows him to enjoy their affections for each other, their gaiety in celebrations. But he reveres the transformative power of pain above all else and liberally doles out trials to everyone. When Moshe is imprisoned, Luzi writes to him, “In times past a man who did not have sufficient sorrows of his own used to go in search of them, wandering an exile through the world. . . . You ought to consider yourself worthy to have received the precious gift of suffering in your own home.”

Those sentences might once have described the goal of literature in general, and of religious texts in particular: bringing the stories of suffering into one’s own home, so one can be transformed by pain in proxy. I doubt this idea of tragedy as a blessing is as valued today. I kept wondering, reading The Family Mashber, how this book would be received by twenty-first-century American readers, trained to enjoy filmic storytelling and dazzling style. Der Nister is at his best detailing the quirks of his characters’ physiques, passions, and flaws, in sketching his doomed society. Isolated passages astound with their grace, the enormity of the philosophical ideas presented. In narrative arc, Mashber is not unlike the thoroughly gentile It’s a Wonderful Life—a relatively decent businessman is brought down by an act beyond his control. But in Mashber, one watches the strands unravel slowly, as if by gravity, and the spiritual struggle is not simply to understand the worth of one’s self, but to reckon with the worth of the universe. Moshe and his immediate family are spared no agony, so perhaps the book is too lifelike for pleasure. We tend to want our authors to serve as just gods, doling out the rewards to the worthy. But there is no happy ending in Mashber, at least not at the end of Book Two.

The great enemy in Mashber is society itself—the organizational forces of neighborhood, town, and nation that swamp the decency of the individual and the personal quest for spiritual ecstasy. Moving through The Family Mashber, anonymously righting wrongs and preserving the righteous, is the odd character of Sruli, a curmudgeon of mysterious origins, believed to be rotten by most of the town’s inhabitants and yet, by secret deed, the most holy. As Book Two ends, he is leading Luzi off on his pilgrimage—the journey in search of suffering. Reaching a wedding party before dawn, the two outcasts are invited in with great honors, their knapsacks stuffed with “sponge cakes, honey cakes, fruitcakes as well as roasted meats enough to last our travelers for a day or longer.” Luzi’s departure feels like victory.

In his 2004 book In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism, Gennady J. Estraikh writes that, in 1924, Moshe Litvakov—the editor of Der emes, a Yiddish daily—called Der Nister the “only existing model for a revolutionary Yiddish writer.” According to Litvakov, Der Nister “was the only established writer who never went through a crisis and always wanted to write for a mass reader.” When I read this, the word “crisis” jumped out at me. There is little possibility Der Nister would have missed this call to arms in a prominent Yiddish paper. Ten years later, Der Nister was writing his “crisis” about Moshe—a book boldly describing a separate society, a story of individuals shunning the social body, in effect shunning socialism—bringing the crisis to his own doorstep with the arrival of the secret police. Did he finally decide that the only way to be a mentsh was to clarify his break with the government?

In the absence of the third volume of Mashber, Kahanovitch’s life almost serves our need for narrative closure. Luzi breaks all his ties—to family, to sect—to set off with only his own strength to guide him. It’s impossible to read The Family Mashber without thinking of the fate that befell its creator. On the day he was arrested, he promised the officer that his manuscript was safe. Is it still? Does it exist somewhere in Russia, hidden under floorboards, in the pages of other books, untouched by fire, flood? It could.

Or we could accept the only resolution for the novel we currently possess: The victory of the solitary artist, independent of state or mentor. Kahanovitch also told the officer he did not write his books for the police, implying he wrote them for people who read for pleasure and enlightenment. Which of course would be anyone who reads this new edition of the novel.

Elizabeth Mitchell is the author of Three Strides Before the Wire: The Dark and Beautiful World of Horseracing and W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty. She recently completed a novel set in the third century of the Roman Empire.