The cover of 18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages displays a multicoloured mosaic that fits this multilingual fiction from the Jewish Diaspora. In his “Foreword” to this volume, Josh Lambert highlights multilingualism from the Tower of Babel, while Nora Gold’s “Introduction” builds on his multilingual model. With editorial aplomb and resourcefulness, Gold has selected a wide variety of stories culled from the Jewish Diaspora. To shift the Biblical paradigm, one could also imagine the multicoloured mosaic on the cover as a Joseph’s coat of many colours whose fabric is on display in each of these stories. That garment may be torn or mended – stitched together and stretched across the linguistic spectrum of the Diaspora.
Elie Wiesel’s “Hostage” leads off Gold’s selection. Excerpted from a novel, “Hostage” is further subdivided into several sections that range from a contemporary depiction of Israeli-Palestinian politics to an earlier Yiddish immigrant experience. A kabbalistic fable hangs over the hostage’s harsh predicament, as the story begins in medias res, in a quotidian time frame that is overseen by a mystical world: “So from one day to the next, Shaltiel Feigenberg and his family became famous.” His Hebrew given name means “I asked God,” while his Germanic or Yiddish surname refers to a cowardly person. The family’s fame combines the mundane with the mystical. As their names and faces appear on the front pages of newspapers, one headline is The Mysterious Disappearance of a Jewish Storyteller – (in contradistinction to the appearance of Jewish storytellers throughout this collection). “Hostage” combines mystical elements with action narrative. One of Shaltiel’s short stories is published in an Israeli newspaper: “It was hardly characteristic of his oeuvre …. It lacked the intellectual, let alone mystical, preoccupations of his other writings. This one was an action narrative.”
“Hostage”’s patchwork quilt moves from Israel to New York, from “the great … legendary” Dan Ramati to a “great mystic” who spends an entire night in silence while Feigenberg languishes in a basement guarded by an Arab, Ahmed, and an Italian, Luigi. Shaltiel is ambushed while carrying an eighteenth-century Sabbatean text filled with calculations sketched in concentric circles. Filled with shadows, his incarceration seems unreal to him, as he sublimates the circumstances into a tale replete with diasporic and mosaic rhetoric: “I’m somewhere else. I live in another city, another world. In another body, another story, another mystery, another person.” In short, the rhetoric of otherness from which the reader may infer Wiesel’s own tortured past in concentration camps. This rhetoric is soon projected onto his victimizer: “Everything about him spreads anger and hatred: hatred toward the Jewish state, the Jewish people, the Jewish past, the Jewish religion, Jewish money, Jewish power.”
In the same breath Shaltiel invokes Ecclesiastes and Dostoyevsky. “Ideas and images overlap, become distorted, diverted, disassociated.” The centrifugal fiction ends in italics, in a story for children: “Let’s listen, children.” Wiesel imprisons his listener through spellbinding tales of “the beggar who keeps silent and the blind man who sings of dusk and the tramp who sings of his thirst.” The hostage’s song rings through the generations.
If “Hostage” highlights spatial dimensions of the Diaspora, then Varda Fiszbein’s “The Guest” emphasizes temporal aspects in its setting of a Passover Seder. The drama of the present moment at the table plays out against a future tense and a backdrop of historical settings from the Bible. Jacob and Moses sit alongside the patriarchal grandfather in the story, which begins with a rhetorical question, “Intuition or luck?” Both the guest and grandfather remain nameless, as if to imply the mystery of their identities within a tradition where one hidden matza serves as the afikoman to be redeemed for a reward. Costumes and customs intertwine during the ritual where the “glorious saga will be read from the Haggadah.” The use of the future tense in this story from the past creates an aura of timelessness. Midway through the story, time appears: “At that dinner in the year 1940, I, like everyone else, thought that the invariable ritual would be repeated. However, neither I nor anyone else had anticipated that the guest would take it upon himself to make a change.” While this Seder takes place in Buenos Aires, the year serves as an ominous marker of the plight of European Jewry under the Nazis. An almost otherworldly spirit hovers above the story: “That night a rift opened up in the tradition.” If the Prophet Elijah is the customary guest at a Seder, the guest in this story is the successful suitor of the narrator’s Aunt Raquel, the youngest child of the grandfather. Just as Kafka’s animals become part of the ancient and modern ceremony, so “The Guest” opens a rift in the tradition.
Fiszbein’s story has an Agnonesque quality about it, and Agnon’s excerpt, “And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight,” follows her story. Agnon’s prose renders the crooked straight and the straight crooked in its Biblical echoes and borrowings from ancient rabbinic sages and more recent Hasidic masters. The opening sentence appears straight: “Not so many years ago, in the town of Buczacz (may His city be rebuilt, amen), there lived a fine, upright Jew by the name of Menashe Chaim Hakohen, a native of the holy community of Yazlivitz.” The time frame is straight and crooked, an indefinite recent past set against centuries of Biblical tradition, the immediacy of current events against a backdrop of history that renders the tale timeless. Similarly, place is crooked and straight: Buczacz’s geography is bent by the parenthetical need for it (or Jerusalem) to be rebuilt. Upright Menashe becomes downtrodden through the course of the story, which ends bitterly and ironically with his wife, Kreyndl Tsharne, “bolted upright,” while the locks of their depleted shop, “dangling down,” underscore a pattern of falling imagery within the crooked-straight parameters. What is morally upright may be at odds with physical reality.
The secular city is qualified by “may His city be rebuilt, amen” and the “holy community of Yazlivitz,” where religion and materialism clash. Agnon balances his sentences in a manner that incorporates Talmudic debate and Yiddish fatalistic irony. Balanced phrases and clauses indicate the balancing of business accounts as well as moral balance on the scales of justice: “While he could hardly have been counted among the world’s rich and mighty, nor have found his place among the nation’s notables, still the income he earned from his general store was ample rather than meager.” His prosperity is short-lived, however – as brief as this excerpt about him and his wife, who runs the shop with him. “He truly embodied the maxim of the sages of blessed memory …. At least partially embodied – for the man was childless.” This embodiment is twofold, encompassing moral and physical needs. The maxim of the sages “among the scattered communities of Israel in those days” is a feature of the Diaspora that straightens and bends their general store. From “not so many years ago” to “in those days,” the time frame hovers between centuries and a lost past that is simultaneously real and mythical.
Ordinary and extraordinary play out in this story where holiness interferes with the workaday in Menashe’s life. “Ordinarily, such a man expects to dwell with his wife in peace and tranquility, to spend his days pleasurably enjoying the good of the earth, and when the appointed time comes, after a hundred and twenty years, to behold the splendor of the Lord.” Chagall floats these characters above rooftops; Isaac Bashevis Singer engages them under the roof; Agnon penetrates the roof from above and below, piercing his interiors with Biblical inflections. Agnon grounds fantasies with religious fatalism: “Alas, when it pleases God to subvert a man’s ways, good fortune swiftly takes wing, and the Omnipresent has many emissaries to fling a man down upon the dunghill of need.” Agnon shrinks the distance between heaven and hell; his subversion changes time in fate’s crucible.
Before long, Adam and Eve in Buczacz fall: “rumor spread through the town that a demon from Hell turned the grindstone, the devils danced upon it, and other such calumnies that are best not committed to writing.” The reverse of a deus ex machina, the grindstone grinds Menashe Chaim and his wife to the ground. Agnon’s narrative subversion includes what is not committed to writing, as the unsaid competes with his overdetermined allusiveness of Talmudic sayings and Hasidic stories. These allusions and intrusions serve as commentary for his depiction of life in Buczacz, providing a broader frame for his story. As the couple’s stock dwindles, the narrator sideswipes their shelves: “as the Talmud says, the breach in the wall was greater than what remained standing.” Agnon’s breach makes crooked what is straight, and vice versa, for he bolsters the standing remnants with another reference to Hasidism: “as we are told in Kehal Hasidim, nothing stands in the way of faith.” Agnon’s subversive stance veers sideways before the fall, for he indulges in an inset story about the Hasidic Master, the Baal Shem Tov “(may his merit shield us all).” This inset story acts as a commentary on Menashe Chaim’s plot, yet it fails to shield the fate of the characters in the main story.
In an aside Agnon alerts us to the (mis)application of one tale to another. “Dear reader, please do not be angry with me for going off to tell of the tavern-keeper’s triumph and abandoning Menashe Chaim and his wife to their sighs.” The narrator’s apology and digression derive from a novelistic tradition, while the Hebraic tradition balances the narrative impulse: “As God is my witness, my sole purpose is to illustrate the principle of ma’aseh avot siman le-vanim, that what happened to God’s servants in earlier times may happen to His faithful in latter days.” In Menashe Chaim’s case the Hebrew deeds of the fathers are not a sign for the children, and despite the warning that “Even with a sharp sword at his throat, a man should not lose his faith,” we witness the sword’s damage. Moreover, that plunge to the throat is further undercut by the narrative intrusion, “But let us return to our tale.”
The story winds up and down with invocations to a golem, a blackened kettle, and the Mishnah – Agnon’s domestic and mythic paraphernalia. The illusion of the Garden of Eden comes full circle in the final simile, “like a snake’s tooth whose venom had already dripped out.” Agnon’s straight and crooked garment covers a cross-section of the Diaspora, and even in this brief excerpt, one gets a glimpse of why he won the Nobel Prize, and why Gold includes him in her richly colourful anthology.
(This concludes Part One of Michael Greenstein’s review of 18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages. Part Two will follow shortly – Editor)
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Dr. Nora Gold, previously an Associate Professor, is currently the Founder and Editor of the prestigious online literary journal Jewish Fiction.net. She is also the prize-winning author of three books of fiction, as well as the recipient of two Canadian Jewish Book/Literary Awards and praise from Alice Munro.
- Publisher : Cherry Orchard Books (Nov. 21 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 300 pages
- ISBN-13 : 979-8887192062
