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Tag Archives: Yiddish

The Old Lie: The Fifth Servant

12 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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anti-Semitism, bigotry, blood libel, book review, historical fiction, humor, Jews, Kenneth Wishnia, literary fiction, Passover, Prague, sixteenth century, Talmudic logic, Yiddish

Review: The Fifth Servant, by Kenneth Wishnia
Morrow, 2010. 387 pp. $26

On Good Friday, a young girl in Prague is found murdered, her throat cut. Since the year is 1592, suspicion automatically falls on the Jews, and since that evening also marks the start of Passover, why, that settles it. Whoever killed her must have used her blood to bake matzoh. Never mind that by Jewish law, blood is ritually impure, literally untouchable, or that matzoh must be made of flour and water. The infamous blood libel has had a long, sturdy life, and in late sixteenth-century Prague, just about every Christian believes in it implicitly.

In taking this ancient lie as its premise, The Fifth Servant pushes its characters (and the reader) to look closely at bigotry and hatred while also inviting laughter. To explain that, I could say that oppressed people need humor to survive, and that Jewish humor, especially of the ghetto or shtetl variety, is well known. But that’s only half the story. This remarkable novel promises a wild ride even in the front matter, which compares the word shamus, or private detective, with its Yiddish ancestor, shammes, or sexton of a synagogue.

Benyamin Ben-Akiva, a Talmudic scholar newly arrived from Poland, is the shammes in question, the fifth of his calling in a ghetto with four synagogues. This makes him literally a fifth wheel, and he’s easily the squeakiest in town. Benyamin has three days to solve the crime, or the ghetto will pay, probably with its destruction. This doesn’t exactly come as a shock to him.

Holy Week and Eastertide were especially risky, and a gambling man would say that we were long overdue for some old-fashioned Jew-hatred. Every year the Jews got thrown out of somewhere. The lucky ones merely got beaten up, had their property stolen, and escaped with their books and the clothes they happened to be wearing at the time. But one Easter a while back, a mob of enraged Christians had practically burned down the entire Jewish Town, leaving only the black and stone shul and a few crummy houses that refused to fall over. Three thousand people murdered in one weekend, all because some idiot said that a Jewish boy had thrown a handful of mud at a passing priest.

Still, how can Benyamin do anything when Friday evening is not only the first Passover seder but the Sabbath, and he may undertake no labor? Moreover, since the crime took place outside the ghetto, and the authorities have closed the gates to Jewish traffic, how can he possibly gather clues or question witnesses? Finally, how can Benyamin carry out his investigation when several rabbinical authorities oppose him and his rationalist methods? It’s that heretical way of thinking, they believe, that caused the trouble in the first place. If everyone were properly devout, they argue, there’d be no blood libel.

Rabbi Judah Loew’s tombstone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague (courtesy MKPiekarska, via Wikimedia Commons)

But Benyamin has one respected ally, Rabbi Judah Loew, a rationalist himself (and a historical figure, incidentally). Between the two of them, using Talmudic logic and wisdom from the Torah and other texts, they try, little by little, to crack the mystery surrounding the girl’s murder. But the odds are heavily against them, and you won’t be surprised to hear that “no; and furthermore” greets them at every turn — excuse me, neyn; un noch, since Yiddish is the key language, here.

Along the way, Wishnia re-creates sixteenth-century Prague, Jewish life of that era, and a world of intellectual ferment alongside brute superstition. I’ve never read a mystery in which the sleuths are Talmudic scholars, quoting references from sacred writings to support the inferences they draw from observed facts. (For that matter, even the ghetto’s whores are learned enough to enter the debate.) That can be very funny, especially when they have to explain themselves to Christians, who believe that drawing inferences from anything must be an example of Jewish witchcraft. Such humor carries a dangerous edge, of course. But even among his fellow Jews, Benyamin has to overcome suspicion of his origins, scholastic pedigree, and ways of reasoning. For instance, when one skeptic asks, “How come I haven’t heard of you?,” he replies, “Because the angels who sing my praises do it beyond the range of normal hearing.”

At times, Benyamin’s commentary wears thin; a little less archness would have worked a lot better. And the reader unfamiliar with Hebrew or Yiddish may feel at sea, though the text explains the many quotations and expressions. (There’s also a glossary at the back.) But such is the draw of The Fifth Servant that it pulls you into its world and doesn’t let go – for laughs and heartache, both.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Love and Guilt: Modern Girls

12 Thursday May 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1930s, anti-Semitism, feminism, historical fiction, Jennifer S. Brown, Jews, literary fiction, Lower East Side, schmaltz, shtetl, social snobbery, Socialism, Yiddish

Review: Modern Girls, by Jennifer S. Brown
Penguin, 2016. 363 p. $15

There’s an old joke about how a wedding differs in the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jewish sects, which turns on who’s pregnant–the bride, the bride’s mother, or the rabbi. In the Orthodox case, it’s the bride and her mother.

Lower East Side tenements as they appeared in 2004 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Lower East Side tenements as they appeared in 2004 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

In Brown’s terrific debut novel, however, which depicts Orthodox life on New York’s Lower East Side in 1935, it’s no joke. Both Rose Krasinsky and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Dottie, are pregnant, and neither planned it nor wish it. Rose has four surviving children, having lost one to polio and others in miscarriages, Dottie being her eldest. Rose has spent her life caring for them and her husband, Ben–worn herself out, in fact, to the point that she hoped she’d changed her last diaper. More importantly, she wants, above all, to have the time to devote herself to causes she believes in, such as helping European Jews escape Hitler’s menace. Her brother’s one of them.

Meanwhile, Dottie dreams of escaping the Lower East Side and the shtetl mentality to which Rose was born. She has a good job at an uptown insurance firm and has just been promoted to head bookkeeper. She has a fiancé, Abe, a solid, stolid type. Trouble is, Dottie’s baby isn’t his–and he’s in no hurry to get married, even resists her attempts at seduction, on religious grounds. Sooner or later, though, he has to find out, and so does her mother.

From this intriguing premise, Brown derives a morality tale, a mother-daughter story, a romance that’s satisfyingly hard-edged, a cultural exploration for a young woman divided between two worlds, and a feminist argument that makes its point without a soapbox. It’s unusual to find a first novel with such breadth, especially one that doesn’t compromise reality to ease the pain.

I know something of the world Brown describes, because my paternal grandparents, like Rose, worked in a so-called needle trade (though their profession was making hats, not lace trimmings). The Krasinskys are Socialists, as my grandfather was; I remember seeing Karl Marx in Yiddish on his bookshelf, though I was too young to know what that meant. So the inflections, idioms, and ways of thought feel familiar, and Brown sets her scene well in Dottie’s narration:

The smells of home–the ever-present reek of liver, of schmaltz, of carp boiling on the stove–caused an uproar in my stomach, immediately deflating my mood, reminding me of my misfortunes. Always the smells permeated, overwhelming even the sweet scent of baking challah and roasting tzimmes. Ma never escaped them, but I went to great extremes before leaving the apartment to douse myself in the cheap toilet water I bought at Ohrbach’s so as not to bring the stink of the East Side into my Midtown office.

(Translations: Schmaltz, when not referring to intensely Romantic music or melodrama, is rendered chicken fat, the secret to tzimmes, carrots stewed with fruit. There are less arterially threatening ways of cooking this dish, but Rose wouldn’t have known them, and even if she did, she wouldn’t have changed her recipe. The phrase, Why are you making such a tzimmes?, meaning, “such a big deal,” derives from the length of time it takes to turn the carrots practically molten.)

The novel vividly captures the fear of arousing scandal (and how neighbors tune their ears to it), the casual anti-Semitism of Dottie’s coworkers, the ways in which men assume their superiority over women, how only their ideas or desires count. Despite these riches, however, I hear false notes. If Abe keeps Dottie at arm’s length for religious reasons, why is he willing to go to the theater on Friday night after the Shabbat candles have been lit? More importantly, though the author draws Rose as a full portrait, I think she’s too modern and flexible about certain matters. If you read Modern Girls–and I recommend that you do–you’ll know what I mean, even if you disagree with me. And in a rare foray into schmaltz, Brown’s depictions of a wealthy, assimilated Jewish couple seem over the top, straw villains unworthy of this novel.

But still, Modern Girls is a fine accomplishment.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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