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.

• 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:

Israel Joshua Singer Appreciation Society [Facebook]

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.”