Published 5.20.2008. New York Review of Books Classics. 704 pages. Translated by Leonard Wolf.

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It can be difficult to remember what Yiddish once was. While today Yiddish is thought of as a dying language, a charming Eastern European patois spoken only in broken snatches by dwindling numbers of bubbes and zaydes across America—though no one told the Hasidim in Brooklyn, New Square, and Monroe apparently—it is difficult to wrap one’s mind around the fact that Yiddish was once not just a language, but a whole culture, and one in fact that was growing until the great catastrophes of the early to mid 20^th century brought that growth to a screeching halt. Yiddish was the language of millions of Ashkenazi Jews living in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria and Germany, enough people to contain many subdialects and great disparities of lifestyle, a reality reflected in how even today in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, home of the Lubavitcher sect of Russian extraction, they pronounce the suffix of many Hebrew words as -aynu while a dozen blocks down the road in Williamsburg, home to a sect of Hungarian Jews, the Satmar, they pronounce the same suffixes –inee.

The experience of the Jews living in these countries was in some ways similar, but in many ways vastly different from the experience of Jews who emigrated to America. In the introduction to the momentous new anthology, Have I Got A Story For You: More Than a Century of Fiction From The Forward, Dara Horn describes the Jewish immigrant readers of the paper as “people whose entire world has disappeared while they still live and breath,” an experience she colorfully equates to “surviving a zombie apocalypse.” Under such circumstances, the old life begins to disappear. Those who lived through it die out, and those of us who are third- or fourth-generation Jewish immigrants often are too far removed by time to have either the inclination or the wherewithal to learn what this old life constituted, what the “old world” really was—the day-to-day life, the sounds and odors of the streets, the characters you saw when you walked to school or visited the marketplace or went to the shul on a Shabbos morning. Digging this world out of its shallow grave and recreating its rhythms in convincing detail is work that could only be carried out by a writer schooled in literary Naturalism and motivated by a profound moral purpose.

Pinchus Kahanovitsh (1884 – 1950)—whose pseudonym Der Nister means “The Hidden One”—began his career as a follower of the Russian Symbolists, writing very abstract, allegorical works which puzzled critics. He became acquainted as a young writer with other Jewish-Ukrainian artists and writers such as Marc Chagall, David Hofstein, and Dovid Bergelson, and attracted the attention of the older Yiddish story writer, I.L. Peretz, who encouraged Kahanovich to continue writing. But though he imitated the style of Russian symbolism, Der Nister lived in isolation from the center of Soviet literary life. He spent most of his adult years in the Ukrainian town of Berdychiv, which was to become the model for the marvelously-realized town of N in his novel The Family Mashber. In the early 19th century, when the novel takes place, Berdychiv had a population that was primarily Jewish, with Jews at one point totaling over 80% of the town’s population. For the Jews of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth’s America, this is an unheard of experience: a town in which Jews own all the shops, where there’s a shul (as opposed to a church) on every corner, where the rich men are Jewish, the servants are Jewish, the farmers are Jewish, the tavern-keepers and brothel-owners are Jewish–heck, even the thieves and thugs are Jews! In short, for every possible role a person could fill in society (even the nefarious ones) there was some Jewish person filling it. Berdychiv was also a center of Jewish learning, being the resting site of the Berdichever Rebbe, Levi Yitzchak, a renowned 18th century sage.

Der Nister’s unfinished novel The Family Mashber—originally Di mishpokhe Mashber, published in two parts in 1939 and 1948—is a masterpiece of Yiddish literature because it convincingly resurrects a lost world with a memorable cast of characters, and shows how it transformed from a place where Jews like Moshe Mashber could believe they controlled their own destiny to one where those ideas are shattered by repeated misfortunes. Though the novel has its moments of prophecy and foreboding, it is a largely realistic novel, but the uncommon novel that lives on the Old World-side of the schism in Jewish literature, that takes it as a given that there is a Yiddishe/Hasidic world in which Yiddishe people do Yiddishe things, whether or not non-Hasidic Jews understand the significance of those things. Leonard Wolf, the translator, occasionally makes accommodations for readers who are unfamiliar with the tenets of Hasidicism by awkwardly translating some terms an Orthodox Jew might fairly guess at; the effect, for an Orthodox (or former-Orthodox) reader, is to turn parts of Wolf’s translation into a fun game of Guess What Der Nister Actually Said. Though the translation is a little halting at times, one gets the sense from the ebb and flow of the sentences that Der Nister’s Yiddish is probably as spectacular in the original as Andrei Bely or Nikolai Gogol’s Russian.[note]An artificer of externally-responsive sentence structures is unlikely to be unpoetic in word sounds; though in fairness to the translator, the text is hardly irritating and contains many insuppressible virtues in translation.[/note]

Though it is far from his only virtue, Der Nister excels—and is perhaps almost the equal of such naturalistic forebears as Tolstoy, Mann, and Bely—in orchestrating set-piece scenes such as the scandalous episode with the Polish nobles during the Market Fair chapter of the book, or the dramatic confrontations that take place at the book’s end. The genius of the novel’s sumptuous opening chapter—which offers a sweeping, sensually-rich introduction for the reader to the town of N—is in how Der Nister appropriates the grandeur of the Russian Symbolists, and their spiritual predecessor, the exuberant (albeit anti-semitic) Gogol, and repurposes them to celebrate this center of Jewish life.[note]The opening of Gogol’s classic story, “Nevsky Prospect,” is an obvious inspiration.[/note] Here Der Nister waxes in full parallel-izing splendor on the merchants in the Noble Market:

There, the customers are landowners, rich nobility, prosperous small-town Jews. There, the clerks are more neatly dressed. There, too, customers are received and treated differently. There, flattery and chicanery are of a higher order. There the shopkeepers move about before their shops in skunk coats, forming little clusters in which they carry on serious business conversations, while inside the shops, the sly-tongued, persuasive chief clerks bustle about displaying their goods so skillfully that it is a rare customer who can escape them.

The high cadence of Gogol and Andrei Bely are fully in evidence, along with a grim realism that shows us the Jewish drifters, roughnecks, beggars, prostitutes, thieves, and child-snatchers living in the city’s hardscrabble outer ring. But around the edges of this splendid portrait Der Nister sounds a prophetic note of the future.

Those who belong, those who are part of the market—shopkeepers, brokers, merchants who derive their livelihood from it, as their parents and grandparents derived theirs—have neither the time nor the inclination to wonder about its composition, or to doubt its permanence. On the contrary, they take it for granted that the mezuzahs nailed to the doorjambs of the shops and rusty horseshoes nailed to the thresholds of the meaner little stores are the guardians of their bit of luck. . . . That’s how it’s supposed to be, how it has always been, from the beginning to eternity, and how it will be to the end of time, so ordered by God’s law from generation to generation, a heritage decreed by fathers for their children.

Der Nister wants the reader to understand that the people of this world were innocent of any premonition of the disaster that would befall their community a century later. The problems of this world are not, in the main, conflicts between Jews and non-Jews or worries about whether this or that group of people are trying to annihilate them. The Jews of the town of N are mainly concerned about disputes among Jews, whether it’s the struggle between religious orthodoxy and the reform which is implied by the Biblical-sounding paraphrase of Rebbe-speak at the tail end of that paragraph, or the struggle to stay in business and be prosperous as shown in the trevails of Moshe Mashber, one of the novel’s three main protagonists.

At the beginning of the novel, we find Moshe Mashber—for little discernible reason—worried about the prospect of an early death. Moshe is a wealthy businessman living in the distinguished merchant’s quarter of the town with his wife, Gitl, his two daughters Yehudis and Nekhamke, and their husbands, Nakhum and Yankele, who help Moshe run his business empire. Without telling his wife, he goes to the town cemetery early one morning to arrange a burial plot and purchase robes to be buried in. Neither Moshe nor the reader can be certain what’s giving him these nightmares and premonitions of imminent doom, aside from the return of his long-absent brother, Luzi. This gentleman, it is explained, has always had something more solemn and profound in his appearance than his brother Moshe. Long ago, the brothers took wildly divergent paths: Moshe becoming a business success and eschewing all but the formalities of his Jewish faith, while Luzi went abroad on a spiritual quest, seeking to remove the curse placed on the family caused by an ancestor who had sinned by following the 18^th century messianic pretender, Shabbatai Tzvi. Luzi eventually found a spiritual home with the notorious Bretslover sect, ecstatic followers of the early 19^th century mystic sage, Rabbi Nachman.[note]Who, incidentally, inspired the most ear-wormy song of all time. :D[/note] Moshe, whose house is a congregating place for any number of business partners and people of the mainstream Hasidicism of the town, is uncomfortable having so conspicuous a follower of the Bretslovers living in his house. The brothers have a terrible falling out, and Luzi leaves to join the reviled local Bretslovers in the meanest, most poverty-stricken area of the city.

These Bretslovers are among the most whimsically-drawn casts of characters you’ll meet—Avreml the Three-Yard Tailor and his starving children, the hapless Moyshe-Menakhem, the giant Sholem the porter, the shoemaker Yankle Eclipse, a pair of pencil-thin shadows called “The Couple,”—people who have been drawn away from their previous prosperity to join the sect, and whose long-suffering wives and children now struggle to maintain them. Their leader, the rationalist Mikhl Bukyer, is a troubled man whose early encounters with the works of Rabbi Judah ha-Levi and Maimonides cause him to have repeated crises of faith that evolve in surprising ways over the course of the novel. In the midst of these wrecks of humanity, Luzi takes his place as their spiritual leader. He is a man of great wisdom as well as tremendous empathy for his fellow man; towards the end of the novel, Luzi comes into conflict with other spiritual leaders of the town, and he finds his empathy and his loyalty to his religion to be at war with each other. These conflicts within Luzi illustrate the sorts of moral conflicts that Jews of the 19^th century had to reckon with between their traditional values and the new spirit of humanism that was in the air, and that were ultimately reflected in the schism that occurred between the orthodox and reform movements.

There is a more than a little of Dickens in the abundance of minor, two-dimensional characters who make appearances in the novel, though there are at least two remarkable supporting characters whose histories alone mark them as notable creations. The first of these is Alter, who can be heard screaming in the attic when we are first introduced to him. The paragraph of authorial intrusion whereby Der Nister introduces the story of Alter is a masterful subversion of storytelling conventions:

It may be said that this is not the place for [Alter], and it may be that generally speaking there ought not to be a place here for someone like him who does not–who cannot–take an active part in the narrative, and we might simply have passed him over or mentioned him only occasionally here and there. But we have not done that, and after much consideration we have introduced him here and we mean to occupy ourselves with him for a little while longer because, though he does not play an active role, still, it is a role, if only because he existed and because he existed in the household about which we have been speaking, and since blood is thicker than water, and because we have in mind the researcher who two or three generations from now may find in later members of the family a tiny kernel of that sickly inheritance which in the generation being discussed here was unhappily Alter’s portion.

Alter is the third of the Mashber brothers, but at one point was considered the most brilliant. Then, when he was an adolescent, he began to have terrible seizures that no doctor could find any explanation for. He lost his memory and his sanity, and Moshe Mashber keeps him locked in the attic, where day and night he suffers seizures and produces “a leopard’s cries, so ghastly that it seemed that at any moment his intestines would spew from his throat. So awful that people who knew him were perpetually amazed that such inhuman sounds could emanate from him.” Yet this tragic figure, even with his crippling malady, has the most profoundly humanizing effect on his two feuding brothers over the course of the book, and the scenes where he is befriended by Moshe’s grandson, little Mayerl, are equally affecting.

Perhaps the most unique of the novel’s characters, however, is Sruli Gol. Outwardly, Sruli is one of the strangest figures in the town. A rancorous man in a peaked cap and brown caftan, he sits down at the table of the town’s wealthiest, most powerful men and harangues them for their greed and hypocrisy. He lives by bullying the powerful, but has the utmost compassion for the weak and poverty-stricken. Then he disappears into the countryside for months at a time, lives among the farmers. Mysteriously, he reveals himself to be flush with cash, just in time to help Moshe out as his business is failing. When he gets drunk in a tavern one day, he spout nonsensical words and almost reveals the guilty secret of his past. When Sruli and Luzi finally meet, it is as though two sages have come together, one educated in the hard school of life’s cruelties, the other invested with preternatural calm and mystical wisdom. It is one of the odder pairings of two characters in literature, and I am curious to understand it better.

Therein lies a tragedy: For Part II of The Family Mashber ends with Sruli and Luzi leaving the town and going off on new adventures together—a satisfying end point of the story, but apparently not the endpoint. In 1950, when the author was reportedly working on Part III of the novel, Joseph Stalin’s secret police came to arrest him. Translator Leonard Wolf states in his introduction that they asked him to hand over his manuscripts, and he replied, “Forgive me gentlemen, that matter is none of your concern. It was not for you that I wrote them, and my manuscripts remain in a safe place.” Like Wolf, I would very much like to read part III of The Family Mashber if in some hidden box of papers or KGB archive it is one day found. The novel as it is, even if incomplete, fulfills a need in Yiddish literature for a grand fiction that recreates this world that in many aspects would otherwise have been lost.