Cozy Horrors
From Celia Dropkin to Sholem Aleichem, Yiddish writers weren’t afraid to scare readers

Tablet Magazine

Tablet Magazine
Tablet Magazine
Tablet Magazine
Vos di erd dekt tsu muz fargesn vern
[that which the earth covers must be forgotten]
—old Yiddish saying
“… sometimes dead is better.”
—Jud Crandall [Fred Gwynne] in Pet Sematary (1989)
I grew up thinking I hated horror movies. I was a child of the 1980s, the “golden era” of the slasher film. Jason, Michael, and Freddy ruled the screens with their endless sequels. And I loathed them all, passionately. I hated seeing people murdered, hated all the screaming. I was happiest among the cinephiles at Film Forum or Lincoln Center. Agnes Varda and Chantal Akerman became my own comfort viewing.
Then came the brief moment in my adult life when I had cable TV. One late night, I returned home, flopped on my couch, and started flipping through the channels. As fate would have it, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors was just starting; five short horror tales wrapped in a cozy, strangers-on-a-train framing device. Peter Cushing’s “Dr. Schreck” sets up the tales by reading tarot cards for his fellow passengers, including a scoffing Christopher Lee and a baby-faced Donald Sutherland. I was instantly hooked. The stories weren’t terribly scary, but that was part of the charm. Rather than a gang of interchangeable teens there to be slaughtered, Dr. Terror had real characters I was interested in: architects, doctors, and artists. Lee plays a haughty art critic who gets his comeuppance. Roy Castle is a foolish and racist jazz musician who travels to the West Indies for an ill-fated residency.
Dr. Terror opened up new cinematic horizons for me. Horror didn’t have to be mindless murder. Indeed, horror could be darkly funny. It fed my Anglophile soul. For every awful slasher out there, I uncovered another gem that went heavy on fog, atmosphere, and general Gothic goodness. In short, I became obsessed with the pursuit of cozy horrors.
I began to joke that the terror of real life was already enough for me; I now only watched movies about aliens and vampires. Even so, real life horror did creep in, and when mingled with the fantastic, provided some of the most satisfying viewing pleasures.
What could be more of a real-life horror than the loss of a child? Such a loss is the inciting incident in 2011’s deliciously eerie village folk horror Wake Wood, while 1989’s campy classic Pet Sematary hinges on the (heavily foreshadowed) death and resurrection of toddler Gage, to name just a few.
Almost 10 years after he played the doctor with a new vampire bride in the (wonderfully silly) Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Sutherland played husband to a very human Julie Christie in the seriously haunting Daphne du Maurier adaptation Don’t Look Now. Sutherland and Christie are a couple who have just lost their daughter in a freak accident at their home. They relocate to damp, chilly Venice in the off season, hoping to put the tragedy behind them. Rather than escaping death, of course, they are pursued by it.
Exactly 90 years ago, in 1934, the Forverts ran 68 installments of a novel by the poet Celia Dropkin. Originally titled Di tsvey gefiln (Two Feelings) in Yiddish, it has recently appeared in a new translation by Anita Norich, now titled Desires. The novel opens with the sudden illness and death of a beloved only child, 5-year-old Izzaleh. His American parents, Shirley and Sam Elkin, are understandably devastated. However, the real drama of the story is driven not by Izzaleh’s death, but by something that happens moments before.
Overcome with emotion, Shirley decides to reveal a secret she has been carrying for the last five years: Izzaleh is not Sam’s biological son. He is the product of an affair she had while Sam was away on business: “If she were to tell him the truth now, and if he forgave her, God would also forgive her grievous transgression.” Shirley goes ahead and tells Sam the awful truth. But rather than saving Izzaleh’s life, she loses both her child and her marriage.
I’m not really spoiling anything here, as the loss and big reveal happen in the first few pages of the novel. The rest of the story takes place during the year after Izzaleh’s death, in which Shirley bounces between mad desire for her married lover, Harry Kroll, and guilt and longing for her husband, Sam. The novel was originally published serially, and that serial origin is palpable on the page, giving the narrative an episodic, almost soap opera quality. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be jarring if you are already familiar with Dropkin as the author of some of the most original, breathtaking works of modernist Yiddish poetry.
Also jarring are some of the absences in the novel. Sam and Shirley are well off, assimilated, American Jews. Though they are ostensibly speaking Yiddish, and live in a bilingual, Yiddish-English milieu, their lives are largely untouched by traditional Jewish obligation. Until the very end of the novel, no mention is ever made of traditional mourning practices for Izzaleh, nor does Sam ever say Kaddish for him. Shirley herself is something of a cipher, a blank character described as being like a child or a doll, without education, culture or any kind of aspirations for herself. Even in the midst of the Great Depression, she is a pampered housewife, with a large house, devoted maid, and nothing to occupy her days except for charity meetings, bridge games, and shopping. And, of course, meetings with her no-goodnik lover, Harry.
Again, being familiar with Dropkin’s daring and erotic poetry, work that centers a woman’s subjectivity, I was surprised by the frankly anti-feminist tones struck by the text. Shirley’s only worth seems to lie in her exquisite good looks, something affirmed both by Shirley herself and by the men around her. Shirley is proud of her youthful glow and slender figure, and when she senses that value slipping away, it is almost as much of a tragedy as the loss of her child.
One of the novel’s minor characters, Mrs. Rubin, is an accomplished concert pianist. Rather than taking pride in her art, however, Mrs. Rubin longs to be seen as a woman, to be desired and cared for by a man. It doesn’t help that she is married to another of the novel’s male scoundrels, an orchestral conductor who leeches off her in between his many affairs. Dropkin seems to underline a belief (her belief?) that the two things, being a respected artist in the world and being a woman who is loved and desired by a man at home, are mutually exclusive. Mrs. Rubin is ready to give it all up for the love of a good, solid man like Sam Elkin. But Sam cannot love such a woman. Indeed, Sam is aroused and awakened by Mrs. Rubin, but only in her capacity as an artist whose music moves him, not as a woman to be cherished by a man.
It’s also possible to read Desires’ emotional-psychological binaries not as expressions of internalized misogyny, but reflections of her own Freudian view of the world. Shirley is torn between the life-affirming, if boring, love for solid Sam, and the wild, animal lust evoked in her by hateful Harry Kroll. The two men represent Freud’s theory of the forces driving us forward: Eros and Thanatos, the conflicting instincts toward life and death. In this reading, Shirley’s affair is not so much about sex with a man she doesn’t even like, but the innate drive pushing her to chaos and self-destruction.
Perhaps Shirley’s curiously blank character and her eagerness to surrender to the men around her is an expression of Dropkin’s own attraction to eroticized self-abnegation. This reading comports better with our understanding of Dropkin the poet, author of starkly masochistic-erotic works such as “The Kiss,” here in translation by Faith Jones with Anita Norich and David Mazower.
I will meet him with flowers
When he comes to my city
…
I will creep to him like a mouse
…
I will have him, there at his rest
Pull off his covers, kiss his chest
Thirstily drink down his blood
And feel so suddenly light and good
My sickly, my lonely love thirsts for his blood
But it is not just the Freudian drives pushing Shirley forward. Underneath Sam and Shirley’s assimilated way of life, the tension between Jewish tradition and American comforts still vibrates, threatening to crack apart their neat and tidy American life. This is subtly but distinctly drawn by Dropkin, most starkly in the opening scene of death and revelation.
Indeed, as Izzaleh approaches death, “a hysterical condition, a superstitious fantasy grew in her as she sat beside her son’s sickbed, a wild, religious fear … Shirley fixed on the idea that God was punishing her for the mistaken belief in which she had kept her husband for the last six years. That’s why God was taking her child away.” Of course, such an idea is understandable for anyone in Shirley’s position. But it also partakes of specific Jewish beliefs, which even American-born Shirley would be aware. Marek Tuszewicki succinctly describes this belief system in his indispensable book Frog Under the Tongue: Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe: “… the death of a child … was interpreted as a divine punishment for the sins of its parents, and as such, the parents and other members of the immediate family were expected to undertake propitiatory action.”
Child mortality was a sad reality of life in Eastern Europe, in response to which an array of folk magic practices arose. My friend, the folklorist Itzik Gottesman, recently posted an anecdote from the life of poet Bernard Louis. Being the “first healthy baby boy to be born in his family … his mother never addressed him as ‘mayn zun,’ ‘my son,’ to make sure the forces of evil would not find him.” Then there’s the ritual of opkoyfn a kind, selling a sick child, as described by folklorist Avrom Rekhtman. It flows from this belief that children may be made to pay for the sins of the parent. If a child is dangerously ill, Rekhtman writes, they may be symbolically sold to a family with many healthy children.
Such a vulgar act of old fashioned magic would probably be too much for the refined Shirley. However, she falls back on another powerful set of beliefs: the deathbed confession, or Vidui. Tuszewicki writes, “The Talmud taught that anyone who fell ill or found themselves in mortal peril should confess as if they were a prisoner sentenced to die.” Tuszewicki goes on to discuss the Yom Kippur public confession, the al kheyt, and its accompanying breast-beating: “In popular understanding, the dying person’s confession was an act of redemption not so much of the soul as of the body, racked by agonal torment.” Indeed, Dropkin describes the otherwise decorous, very American Shirley at Izzaleh’s bedside, crying out, “‘I am a deceitful person, a lowly being!’ And she began to beat her breast.”
In the months after Izzaleh’s death, Shirley is urged by her friends to get out of the house, move on, and try for another baby. In 2024, this reads as shockingly callous. Her good friend, Vicky Kroll, comes upon Shirley sobbing over the loss of Izzaleh. Rather than offering comfort, she scolds Shirley. She and Sam should try for another baby, Vicky says. Moving on is imperative. To that end, Vicky offers a Yiddish maxim, vos di erd dekt tsu muz fargesn vern: “What the earth swallows up must be forgotten.”
Vicky’s words may ring as hard-hearted, but are they so shocking? In his autobiographical novel The Great Fair: Scenes from My Childhood, Sholem Aleichem touches on this very thing within the first few pages, describing the common sight of families with a dozen or more children: “Generally speaking, no one paid much attention to this host. They had not been greatly wanted and, had they failed to enter this world, it would not have been considered a misfortune … The child who did not escape the thousand-eyed monster [i.e., the angel of death] which devours fledglings returned whence it had come. Then mirrors were draped; parents sat on the floor as a sign of mourning, their shoes off, weeping bitterly. They wept until … until they stopped weeping. They quoted the usual passages … dried their eyes, rose from the ground, and—forgot …. In the constant noise and bustle made by more than a dozen children … it could not have been otherwise.”
It’s no coincidence that the horror movies I mentioned earlier, Pet Sematary, Wake Wood, and Don’t Look Now all center on families with one or two children, much like Shirley and Sam. The loss of one of those children happens not among Sholem Aleichem’s noise and bustle, but in the crushing, comfortable quiet of modern life. It is within the luxury of that stillness where their inability to forget drives men and women to their own kinds of horrors.
ALSO: My friend Merle Bachman, a poet-translator-scholar, has been writing about Yiddish poetry for decades. Her Recovering Yiddishland: Threshold Moments in American Literature was one of the first books about Yiddish poetry I ever reviewed. On Nov. 3, she will be talking about her newest work, So Many Warm Words: Selections from the Poetry of Rosa Nevadovska, a bilingual edition. More information here … If you happen to be in Europe, the Klezmore Festival in Vienna will take place Nov. 9-17. More information here … On Nov. 10, the CYCO Yiddish Book Center (in Long Island City) will host a book-warming party for the publication of Arun Viswanath’s new Yiddish translation of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Viswanath will be in conversation with Jordan Kutzik, followed by a musical program with singer Sarah Myerson. This event will be in Yiddish. More information here … On Nov. 11, I will have the honor of being in conversation with historian Marek Tuszewicki, celebrating the paperback edition of his indispensable book on Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, Frog Under the Tongue: Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe. More information here … On Nov. 13, the New York Public Library will present “WEVD and the Sounds of Jewish New York,” with live musical performances and a panel conversation to celebrate the library’s acquisition of original sheet music from the WEVD radio station. Featuring Zalmen Mlotek, Hankus Netsky, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. In person and via livestream. More information here … I’ve recently fallen in love with They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust. Though I admired Mayer Kirshenblatt’s work when I saw it exhibited in 2009 in New York, it’s only in the last year that I’ve been using the book’s vivid, charming memoir text and richly detailed paintings to teach about various aspects of life in prewar Poland. On Nov. 21, Kirshenblatt’s daughter, and co-author, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will discuss her father’s legacy and recent exhibitions of his work. Click here for details about this virtual program from the Yiddish Book Center … Finally, if you didn’t get a chance to see it last year, you will have a chance to hear the first orchestral presentation of Tevye’s Daughters, the new opera by Alex Weiser and Stephanie Fleischmann. (I wrote about this beautiful, tkhine-infused opera last year.) Nov. 20 at New York’s DiMenna Center for Classical Music. Make sure you get your tickets soon.
Rokhl Kafrissen is a New York-based cultural critic and playwright.