Curt Leviant

Enthralling must-read

We Are Here! We Are Alive! The Diary of Alfredo Sarano, with historical commentary by Roberto Mazzoli and translated from the Italian by Avigayil Diana Kelman, is a book of double magnitude.

We Are Here! We Are Alive! is a riveting diary, with fiction-like suspense and drama, written in northern Italy during the Second World War under Mussolini’s fascist regime and Nazi German occupation, combined with an outside scholar’s comments, which set the diary into its day-to-day historical events. To make the reading easier, the diary is astutely printed as though typewritten, while the commentary is in regular book font.

Originally published in 2017 by noted Italian publishing house Edizioni San Paolo, in Milan, We Are Here! We Are Alive! garnered wide praise in Italy’s general press and from the country’s leading officials and public figures.

It must be accented that first-person Holocaust memoirs were usually written after the war, and the memoirist had to choose from past events and sort them out in the calm of peace time. A diary like this, composed in situ, while in hiding, is rather rare – and likely more reliable than one written with the fluidity of memory after events.

“This is the story of how this chapter of the history of Italian Jewry unfolded, which I experienced day by day,” writes Sarano. Kept for more than 70 years in a drawer by his daughters Matilde, Vittoria and Miriam, Sarano’s diary reemerges from the past, adding new, precious pages of history to the record of the genocide of the Jewish people.

We Are Here! We Are Alive! is the result of Mazzoli’s research, the Italian literary scholar who brought Sarano’s diary to light, placing it in the historical context of the time. The book accents the heroism of Sarano, who portrays himself humbly and with modesty. Yet, he was the farsighted secretary of the Milan Jewish community, the man who saved thousands of lives by hiding from the occupying Germans the lists of community members. The fact that he knew the entire list by heart, names and addresses, bore heavily on Sarano, and he realized he would have to escape detection by the Germans for the safety of the entire community.

The Germans relied thoroughly on these communal lists in various cities for their roundups and deportation of all known Jews to the death camps.

One tragic incident revolves around the Venice list. When the Germans came, they ordered the president of the Jewish community, Giuseppe Jona, to hand over the list. He quickly found a secure place to hide it and then committed suicide before the Germans could get to him.

In Sarano’s diary, we also learn about, and take joy with, the Jewish soldiers from the Land of Israel who fought the Germans in Italy during the Second World War as members of the Jewish Brigade, and helped save countless Jewish lives.

In his introduction, Mazzoli describes the fascinating background as to how this remarkable book came to be written. It is the combination of persistence, good luck and serendipity.

Mazzoli had been looking for information about a good-hearted Nazi officer, Erich Eder, who, in 1944, when the German army had already occupied northern Italy, had at great risk disobeyed orders and helped save local refugees, including Jews, from deportation. Mazzoli had read a few details in a memoir written by an Italian friar and wanted to contact Eder, but in vain.

Then, through a series of coincidences, he ran across the three Sarano sisters and learned about their father’s diary. It is here that Mazzoli learned more about the humane German officer, whose family back home in Bavaria had also saved a Jewish woman by hiding her in their house.

When the Sarano sisters became acquainted with Mazzoli, they entrusted him with their father’s precious manuscript with the touching words, “These pages have been waiting for you.” And then Mazzoli spent several years reading and notating the diary.

In We Are Here! We Are Alive!, we learn how ordinary peasants and kindly friars in the small town of Mambroccio and other places were able to thwart the Nazi plan of total annihilation of the Jews by hiding them in remote villages and sustaining them until liberation. There is even a moving description of how the Sarano family, with the help of the villagers, was able to celebrate a seder while in hiding.

Sarano served for decades as the secretary of the Milan Jewish community, until he made aliyah in 1969. That year, some 25 years after the events, in the town of Bnei Brak (near Tel Aviv), a memorable, emotional reunion took place, when Padre Sante Raffaelli, the friar who was instrumental in saving the family, visited the Saranos.

We Are Here! We Are Alive! is a must-read, enthralling book. It is so beautifully translated from the Italian by Kelman that one would think this diary was originally written in English.

Curt Leviant’s most recent novels are Tinocchia: The Adventures of a Jewish Puppetta and The Woman Who Looked Like Sophia L.

For new generation

The marvelous children’s stories in Ilse Weber’s Mendel Rosenbusch: Tales for Jewish Children (illustrated by P. John Burden) are fascinating in their own right, as is translator Hans Fisher’s discovery of this book. He and his wife, Ruth, have brought Weber’s book, first published in 1929, from the original German to English.

Let’s get to stories first; then we’ll talk about how this book was discovered.

Ilse Herlinger Weber was born 1903 in Witkowitz, now in Czechia, and, after a period of time in Theresienstadt with her husband and son, was deported to and murdered in Auschwitz in October 1944. She was a Czech poet and writer who, like Kafka, wrote in German, and is best known for Mendel Rosenbusch: Tales for Jewish Children.

The title character is an older man (pictured with a white beard and wearing a black yarmulke) who gets a coin that enables him to become invisible whenever he wishes, and he uses this gift to help his neighbours anonymously. Mendel plays a beneficent role in most of the stories, including magically arranging that a stubborn father permits his son to marry the girl of his choice, and is beloved by all the children in Weber’s stories.

One of my favourites – perhaps because he reminds me of a combination of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, with a blend of some of the rascals in Sholem Aleichem’s stories – is “Uri, the Rascal.” Uri is a lad who always gets into trouble, always plays pranks. But, when a poor, sickly boy, the son of a needy widow, becomes his seatmate in school, Uri does his best to help and defend him, and even comes up with an idea on Purim to help the mother and son.

Another charming tale is “Simcha, the Liar,” about a boy who cannot stop telling fibs – until, one day, he suffers a punishment (purple patches on his face) for his uninterrupted stream of untruths. But, here again, Mendel Rosenbusch comes to the rescue and Simcha never tells another lie again.

These are typical of the heart-warming, ethically pointed stories in this book. Now to its (re)discovery.

When Hans Fisher, who taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey for many years, visited Santiago, Chile, for his mother-law’s funeral, he discovered in her vast library a book of children’s stories in German that he had read as a child in Germany 60 years earlier, before immigrating to the United States to escape the Nazi slaughter of Jews. Like Proust’s biscuit, which brings a flood of memories to the author as he remembers the past, so with Fisher. Seeing this old, torn book brought back memories of wonderful, gentle stories that, in Fisher’s words, “transported me to my own boyhood in Breslau.”

It is with love and devotion and the translators’ writerly skills that Ruth and Hans Fisher have restored these wonderful tales and made them accessible to a new generation of readers.

Curt Leviant also recently made a literary discovery of his own. He found a neglected novel by the famous Yiddish humourist Sholem Aleichem, Moshkeleh the Thief, which he translated into English: for a review, see jewishindependent.ca/a-rediscovered-novella. Leviant’s 12th novel, Me, Mo, Mu, Ma & Mod; Or Which Will It Be, Me and Mazal or Gila and Me?, was published in 2021.

Heart-felt and pain-filled memoir

From the page before the opening of Moishe Rozenbaumas’s incisive, heart-felt memoir, we already feel the pain that will inhere in much of his story. Even before we begin reading this autobiography, we see a photocopy of the author’s dedication, handwritten in Yiddish, to the memory of his mother and three brothers, with the dates they were murdered by the Germans’ Lithuanian collaborators in August 1941, in Telz, where Rozenbaumas (1922-2016) was born.

Many people know Telz as the name of the famous yeshivah that was located there, but The Odyssey of an Apple Thief (Syracuse University Press, 2019) by Rozenbaumas – translated from the French by Jonathan Layton and edited by Isabelle Rozenbaumas – takes us into the city, depicting a vibrant Jewish culture, zeroing in on housing, way of life, learning and sports. The title comes from little Moishe’s sneaking into the bishop’s orchard next door and nabbing apples, and the author gives us an historian’s sweep of an area, with a memoirist’s penchant for detail.

For instance, his description of a middle-class household’s Sabbath meal. Although Jews lived “in poverty, hand to mouth,” middle-class Jews had munificent Sabbath meals. Typical to Eastern European towns, the housewife prepared the cholent pot at home, then brought it to the baker, whose oven was heated all Friday night long throughout the Sabbath. Then, around noon on Shabbat, the woman would go and pick up her cholent. Most Jews didn’t have the sort of meals that Rozenbaumas describes, which are at odds with the reigning poverty in Telz.

When the Germans occupy Lithuania, Rosenbaumas accents the avid cooperation between the Lithuanians and the Germans, who murdered 90% of Lithuania’s Jews. He writes that the situation of the Jews in Lithuania was no worse than in other countries; they weren’t loved but they were tolerated. However, in the very next sentence, we read that once, when the president of Lithuania addressed an antisemitic rally, he said that nobody should be stupid enough to slaughter a productive cow while it’s still giving milk.

Rozenbaumas provides what he considers a needed reassessment of the yizkor bikher, the memorial books that survivors of various towns assembled after the Holocaust, which always accented the people’s “piety, purity and morality,” even though there were all kinds of individuals. What is often omitted from these yizkor bikher, Rosenbaumas states, is the miserable poverty of Jews who lived in lightless cellars, had only black bread dipped in powdered sugar for food, froze in winter, and dressed in rags.

During the financial crisis in the late 1920s, his father’s successful fabric shop began slipping. Rather than declaring bankruptcy, the father ran away to Paris, where he had sisters. Despite continuing promises, the father never sent any support to his wife and children, and was unaware of what happened to his family until after the war.

Without a father, the author’s mother and her four boys slowly sank into poverty and hunger. Rozenbaumas becomes an apprentice to a poor tailor with 10 children who live in squalid quarters. Soon, he is the sole breadwinner for his family. But, when the Germans invade, he flees eastward to the Soviet Union, just like his father had fled westward. But the author doesn’t notice the irony of the breadwinner again fleeing alone. True, Rozenbaumas asks his mother to come, but she refuses; he doesn’t ask any of his brothers to join him in his flight.

In the Soviet Union, life wasn’t easy. First, Rozenbaumas served four years on the front, undertaking dangerous reconnaissance missions; he was wounded and decorated several times. He regrets that Jewish former soldiers from other lands never mention the half million Jews who fought with the Red Army, including hundreds of Jewish generals and other high-ranking officers.

When Rozenbaumas’s unit liberates Lithuania, first thing he does is go to his house in Telz, where he finds Lithuanians occupying his now-emptied home. He learns where his family was massacred and longs for revenge, which soon comes. After volunteering as a translator for the Russians, he gets the satisfaction of hunting for the Lithuanian murderers, finding them, watching their trials and immediate executions. He even found the murderer of his youngest brother, Leybe, “who may have been,” Rozenbaumas adds, “his playmate.”

When Rozenbaumas finally decides to leave communist-controlled Lithuania, he describes the nightmare of leaving, taking the great risk of paying an exorbitant fee for forged papers that would guarantee his exit. He makes it, finally, across the border into Poland, with suspense and fright accompanying him like a second skin. It was not until he got to Vienna that he could breathe freely.

One day, Rozenbaumas met a man who knew about his father in Paris and thus was able to find him. But the father-son relationship was uneasy. The father never expressed a word of emotion regarding the murder of his wife and his three sons.

Coincidence also plays another crucial role. Rozenbaumas, by chance, bumps into his old girlfriend, Roza, and later marries her.

Rosenbaumas concludes his touching narrative with the hope that the stories of the European Jewish civilization that was brutally erased from the face of the earth will not be forgotten.

Curt Leviant’s most recent novel is Katz or Cats; Or, How Jesus Became My Rival in Love.

Sandler a superb storyteller

Red Shoes for Rachel: Three Novellas, and its author, Boris Sandler. (photo from Syracuse University Press)

When I read and valued the unique style and flavour of Boris Sandler’s story “Studies in Solfege,” in Ezra Glinter’s anthology of short stories, Have I Got a Story for You, gathered from the Yiddish Forward, I wondered if there were any other fictions available in English by this talented, inventive writer. It was heartening and encouraging to see that, in the parentheses where age is given, there was no other number besides his year of birth. To my delight, I soon learned that Syracuse University Press was planning to issue Red Shoes for Rachel.

In talking about Yiddish writers, we usually are dealing with those long gone, like Sholem Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, Avraham Reisen or Chaim Grade – it is a distinct pleasure to review a book by a living Yiddish writer.

In Red Shoes for Rachel, we meet Sandler’s fellow Jews from Bessarabia. During the Second World War, the Jews there suffered under the Germans and the pro-German Romanian fascists. But then, soon after being liberated by the Red Army, they fell under the rule of rigorous Soviet dictatorship. In these three novellas, we meet perceptively drawn men, women and children as they live their bumpy lives and dream their hopes in the Soviet Union, in Israel and in the goldeneh medineh (golden land), Brooklyn, more specifically, Brighton Beach.

Sandler’s style, unlike that of most other writers in the Yiddish literary canon – almost all of whom write in the late 19th-, early-20th-century realistic style – hovers between realism and magic realism (think of writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Mario Vargas Llosa) with surprising effect. Time zones elide. Scenes shift, via recall, from years past to the present. Arching over this are believable, vibrant human beings who are vivified through description, dialogue and interior monologue.

From the first line of “Karolina-Bugaz” – “Bella woke from sleep as if she had been driven out of it” – one sees at once a writer who uses his tools – words – with verve and imagination. On the 30th anniversary of her marriage, Bella goes to a bakery to pick up a special cake she has ordered. But she comes home to find a note that her husband, Mark, has left her. He is now on a cruise, alone, and, on an island near where the ship has docked, he meets a young woman who has the same name as his wife.

In realism, a reader knows where he is, and which character is breathing in his presence. In magic realism, the borders between true and make believe are blurred and the reader is never really sure. Reality in such fiction is a slippery slope.

In the beginning of “Halfway Down the Road Back to You,” we see an 80-year-old woman in Israel preparing dozens of slices of dried white bread, which are scattered all over her apartment – she considers this an obligatory present when visiting.

The woman had spent 73 of her years in Beltsy, Bessarabia. For the past seven, she has lived in her small apartment in Nazareth, where there is a windowless security room stored with food, “just in case.” Both her children are abroad; there is no indication she has any friends, except for a twice-a-week aide. Via memories, we relive her days in the Romanian ghetto during the Second World War, where she risked being shot by slipping out once in awhile to beg for food for her family. It is only toward the end of the tale that we suspect she might be bringing all those crusts she has prepared into that security room, though we can’t be sure.

Red Shoes for Rachel contains one of the most beautiful and moving stories of middle-aged love I’ve ever read. Rachel, the only American-born protagonist in the collection, lives near the Coney Island boardwalk and selflessly tends to her wheelchair-bound mother. One day, when she bumps into Yasha, a divorced immigrant from Moldavia, her life turns around and achieves a spark. In separate chapters, we learn of Yasha’s Holocaust experiences and also those of Rachel’s parents. With delicacy and warmth, the relationship develops. By the end, the two lonely souls have formed a bond.

Occasionally, in translations of Yiddish literature, there is a wide gap between knowledge of Yiddish and knowledge of Yiddishkeit (Judaism), with errors regarding some obvious points in the latter. One story depicts “a Sabbath lunch with songs and putting on of phylacteries” (tefillin), which is done during morning prayers on weekdays and certainly not during lunch. Another has a mistranslation of the Hebrew/Yiddish exclamation, “Borukh Hashem,” which does not mean, “blessed be His name,” but “blessed be God” or, actually, “thank God.” Elsewhere, a woman “blesses the Sabbath candles.” Jewish women do not bless objects and, in this case, would recite a blessing to God over the candles. These comments aside, Barnet Zumoff’s translation is splendid, natural and effortless. It meets the gold standard of translation – reading this book one assumes the stories in it were written in English.

Read Red Shoes for Rachel and you will discover a superb storyteller, a modern master of prose.

Curt Leviant’s most recent books are the critically acclaimed novels King of Yiddish and Kafka’s Son.

Charleston’s southern charm

The Orthodox synagogue Brith Sholom Beth Israel. (photo from jsilverman.weebly.com/synagogues-in-charleston.html)

Charleston, S.C., is one of the most popular travel destinations in the United States. With its perfectly preserved old mansions, Charleston has charm and grace, in addition to genuine human warmth. Just walk along any of its streets and the first person you meet will surely give you a friendly hello.

Jews have resided in Charleston since 1695, attracted by economic opportunities and its proclamation of religious liberty for all. In 1749, there were enough Jewish pioneers in town to organize a congregation, Beth Elohim, the second-oldest synagogue in the country (now Reform) and the oldest in continuous use. Its imposing colonnaded neo-classical structure on Hasell Street was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1980.

The congregation’s small museum features the historic 1790 letter that George Washington wrote in response to the synagogue’s good wishes upon his becoming president: “May the same temporal and eternal blessing which you implore for me rest upon your congregation.”

This letter is emblematic of the spirit of friendship between the gentile establishment and Jews – and the acceptance, even early on, of Jews into the American mainstream, especially in the South. (More than 20 Jews from Charleston fought in the American Revolution and one, Francis Salvador, was a delegate to several Provisional Congresses. This may explain the friendly link between George Washington and the Charleston Jewish community. And, besides, Washington was known as a decent and courtly man.)

During the first decade of the 1800s, Charleston, with its 500 Jews, almost all of them Sephardi, was considered the largest, most cultured and wealthiest Jewish community in America. But, because of the destruction of the city during the Civil War, the city and its Jews became impoverished, and the waves of Jewish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries passed it by. However, after the Second World War, the city prospered, as did its Jews. Today, the nearly 2,000 Jews in the city are in the professions, trade and business, teaching, politics and the arts. In the 1920s through the early 1950s, the city’s main street, King Street, was virtually shut down on Saturday. Walk along King Street today and you will still see many Jewish names on the shops.

photo - Congregation Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (now Reform) — Congregation Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (now Reform). *(photo from charlestonsmuseummile.org)*

In addition to three synagogues, one each from the major branches of American Jewry, there are a number of Jewish philanthropic and communal organizations, a Jewish community centre and a well-established day school.

The College of Charleston, the oldest municipal college in the United States, also has a broad-ranging and ever-growing Jewish studies program under the devoted and imaginative direction of Prof. Martin Perlmutter – now with its own building, thanks to the generosity of Henry and Sylvia Yaschik. The 800 Jewish students make up a significant minority of the college population. In addition to an active Hillel, the array of courses includes Hebrew language, Jewish culture and history and Israel- and Holocaust-related courses.

What makes Charleston especially attractive is its visible Jewish history, coupled with the world-class arts festival Spoleto USA, which runs for about two-and-a-half weeks every year, from the end of May to early June. The festival is an all-encompassing cultural experience: opera, dance, theatre, jazz and classical music, popular music, even acrobatics. The twice-daily chamber concerts, at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., hosted with humour and panache by first violinist of the St. Lawrence Quartet, Geoff Nuttall, are considered the musical anchor of the festival.

But there is more. The Piccolo Spoleto Festival, sponsored by the City of Charleston, which runs during the same two-and-a-half weeks, offers a dizzying array of classical music, plays, cabaret and comedy acts, jazz cruises and much, much more. The College of Charleston’s Jewish studies unit also sponsors several events during the festival, including A World of Jewish Culture.

This year, the Orthodox synagogue Brith Sholom Beth Israel, on Rutledge Avenue, hosted four evenings of chamber music, featuring Jewish composers like Kurt Weill, George Gershwin, Paul Ben-Haim, Ernest Bloch and Eric Korngold, and non-Jewish composers who wrote Jewish music, like Ravel’s “Kaddish” and Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidrei.”

In Charleston, too, lived the people who inspired Porgy and Bess, by George and Ira Gershwin. The Gershwins resided temporarily on James Island, just outside the city, while writing their opera. They purposely came to Charleston to get a feel of the city, its ambience and its people. One of the great tunes in Porgy, of course, is “Summertime,” with its Yiddish-sounding melody in a minor key.

Charleston also has a Conservative congregation, and the three Charleston congregations – Reform, Conservative and Orthodox – are unique in that their rabbis cooperate for the greater good of the community and even meet once a month for lunch and a study session. Another fascinating crossover is that many Jews in the community belong to more than one shul – a kind of anti to the old joke about the Jew on the desert island who builds two shuls. When asked why, he responds, “That one, I daven in; the other, I wouldn’t be seen dead in.”

One longtime Jewish resident, a spry and active octogenarian agnostic proudly and only half-facetiously remarked, “I belong to all three shuls, thank God, but you won’t catch me praying in any of them.” And when he was indeed caught one Sabbath morning davening in the Orthodox shul, one of his pals came up to him and joked, “What are you doing here? Today’s not Yom Kippur.” In response, the 80-year-old quipped in his slight Carolina drawl, “Well, then I hope God forgives me for coming today.”

At the College of Charleston during the academic year, there is a kosher dairy cafeteria, Marty’s Place. And Chabad has pre-packaged prepared meat meals that are available at the famous Hyman’s Fish Market on King Street. For delicious vegetarian meals at reasonable prices, go to Jon York’s Gnome Cafe, at 109 President St.

Be sure to also take a horse-and-buggy ride in the historic district. The knowledgeable guides will take you through the residential part of town, focusing on the homes and the history of their occupants. Then stroll along the quiet streets, in the famous covered market, and tour the nearby plantations.

Two useful telephone numbers are those of the Charleston Visitors Bureau, 1-800-774-0006, and Spoleto’s, 1-843-579-3100 or spoletousa.org.

Curt Leviant’s most recent books are the critically acclaimed novels King of Yiddish and Kafka’s Son.

3,000 years of a language

Let’s say it at the outset: this book is a gem. Every page of The Story of Hebrew by Lewis Glinert (Princeton University Press, 2017) is packed with information about the language, from its beginnings through post-1948 Israel. In addition to this longitudinal approach, Glinert, a professor of Hebrew and linguistics at Dartmouth, also approaches his subject laterally, focusing on various lands where Jewish/Hebrew life and culture thrived, like early Palestine, Babylonia, North Africa, Spain, Europe and Russia, the United States and Israel.

The book shows us how living under Greek and Roman domination affected Hebrew and how vocabulary from those occupiers seeped into the language. Two examples, the first mine, the second Glinert’s: the simple word for shoemaker in Hebrew, sandlar, which comes from the Latin sandalrius; and Sanhedrin, the Jewish High Court, which stems from the Greek synedrion. Jews did not shy away from these foreign influences; their Hebrew language embraced them.

book cover - The Story of Hebrew by Lewis Glinert Glinert also traces the changes in the use of the language from biblical times through the Mishnah (before and after 200 CE), where the Hebrew of that period was more direct and seemingly more colloquial, as can be seen by comparing a text from the Mishnah with any chapter in the Bible. During the next two or three hundred years, written Hebrew then moved on from the Hebrew-only Mishnah to the two-language Talmud, with its mix of mostly Aramaic and much less Hebrew. (In all of this, of course, we only have written texts to go by.)

With sacred books passing from generation to generation orally, correct pronunciation might be lost or distorted. Along came the Masoretes (from the Hebrew word, masorah, tradition), who, by the year 1000, had created above- and below-the-letters signs that ingeniously indicated pronunciation, melody, accent and phrasing.

Jews also contributed to scientific learning by writing about medicine in Hebrew. I am sure it will surprise many readers, as it did me, that in Italy’s first medical school, in Salerno, founded in the ninth century, the languages of instruction were Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Arabic. And, in southern France, in Arles, Narbonne and Montpellier, the official language of instruction in these medical schools was Hebrew.

Religious attitude also influenced how Hebrew was used. Glinert delves into this divide by showing that, during the 11th and 12th centuries in Ashkenaz (in northern France and the Rhineland), the accent was on liturgy and Torah scholarship – the works of Rashi, for instance – while in Sepharad (Spain) and Italy secular Hebrew poetry flourished, influenced by Arabic poetry, exemplified by Yehuda Halevi and other poets.

The book devotes two remarkable chapters to the interaction of Christians with Hebrew.

In one of these unholy intersections, two of the noted translators of the Bible from Hebrew, the church father Jerome (fourth century) and Martin Luther (1534), respected Hebrew but disparaged Jews and Judaism. In his notorious 1542 book On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther asserts, “Jews should be expelled before they poison more wells and ritually abuse more children.”

A better relationship ensued with English translators. William Tyndale was the first to render the Five Books of Moses (1530) into English directly from the Hebrew. In so doing, he defied a bishop’s ban on a translation other than the Latin Vulgate. Tyndale’s translation led to the classic 1611 King James version of the complete Bible, whose English rhythms, cadences and even sentence structure enormously affected English.

As Glinert elegantly puts it: these two translations would “inject a Hebraic quality into the syntax and phraseology of English literary usage without parallel in any other European culture.” The author further adds that echoes of this biblical English can be seen from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass poetry collection to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Hebrew also made its mark in the early history of the United States. The Pilgrims saw themselves as the New Israelites, giving their towns name like New Canaan and Salem – even their Thanksgiving was a belated Sukkot to celebrate a bountiful harvest. And Hebrew was at one time ensconced as a mandatory subject in the Ivy League colleges. I recently read that at graduation ceremonies students would deliver orations in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and university presidents, like Ezra Stiles of Yale, would also occasionally give their commencement talks in Hebrew.

Glinert writes that the door to modernity in Europe was opened in 1780 by two books published on different sides of Europe. One, in Germany, was Moses Mendelssohn’s Biur, the first volume of his translation of the Torah into German; the other, in a small town in the Ukraine, was a book in Hebrew about Chassidic thought.

Slowly, from the advent of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement, through newspapers, magazines and books, modern Hebrew was being reshaped, culminating with Jews resettling Palestine in the late 19th century, along with Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s call, at the turn of the 20th century, for Jews to speak only Hebrew. Glinert shows us how the thrust for Hebraization continued once the British got the Mandate for Palestine in 1922 from the League of Nations. They recognized Hebrew as the language of instruction for public schools, broadcasting, the courts and civil regulations. With the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 and mass immigration, Hebrew – which throughout the centuries had always been read, studied and written, and only occasionally spoken – reached its efflorescence.

The Story of Hebrew is a superb book, meticulously researched and beautifully written. Two of my favourites among the many text-enhancing illustrations and photographs are a photo of a page from one of Sir Isaac Newton’s notebooks, where he has a phrase in Hebrew written in his neat printed script; and a page from Franz Kafka’s Hebrew notebook, with two columns of nicely calligraphed Hebrew words on one side with their German translation (in longhand) on the other.

Read this marvelous study – perhaps, if you don’t know Hebrew, it will inspire you to learn it and become part of a more than 3,000-year tradition of transmission.

Curt Leviant’s most recent books are the novels King of Yiddish and Kafka’s Son.

Great editor, great memoir

Robert Gottlieb is the most renowned American book editor and publisher in the latter half of the 20th century, much as was the legendary Max Perkins in the first half. And in his riveting memoir – Avid Reader: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) – Gottlieb traces the trajectory of his long and productive life with books and reading.

Gottlieb was born in New York in 1931 to a middle-class Jewish family. His mother was a public school teacher; his father, a lawyer. Little Bobby grew up listening to radio and devouring books. As he asserts in Avid Reader, he didn’t care much for nature or sports. It was reading he loved and this love is summed up in one memorable line: “From the start words were more real to me than real life, and certainly more interesting.”

Since the family was atheistic, Judaism played no role in his life. Yet he considered himself a New York Jew, a terse, self-identifying phrase that occurs like a leitmotif a number of times in his memoir.

Gottlieb went to a private school in Manhattan, whose students were mostly Jewish. “On the High Holy Days,” he writes, “out of my class of 39 only the four gentiles and atheistical me would be in attendance.” When one teacher wondered why so many students were absent, she was told, “It’s Yom Kippur.” Which prompted her to say, “Ridiculous. This isn’t a Jewish school.”

Gottlieb’s parents wanted him to go to Harvard. He applies but flunks the interview. And then, he adds, “there was the notorious Jewish quota. And I was the worst kind of Jew – a New York Jew.”

He attends Columbia, majors in English literature and edits the school’s literary magazine. Later, he gets a yearlong fellowship to Cambridge, where, for the first time in his life, he gets a whiff of antisemitism. He is aware of the “casual antisemitism that punctuates English literature,” but that’s in books and here was real life. The English Jews he met, Gottlieb notes, considered themselves “the other,” and he, too, senses the English disdain of foreigners and Jews.

Later, when he’s an established editor, he has an encounter with children’s book author Roald Dahl, one of whose many nasty anti-Jewish remarks was: “There is always a reason why anti-anything crops up; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” He also has an incident with John le Carré. With both English authors, he briefly recalls what he had felt in England.

Back in the United States, Gottlieb gets his first job as an editor with Simon and Schuster, where he would stay 11 years and publish amazing books, including one of my all-time favourite novels, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. That unique title deserves mention. Heller had called his manuscript Catch-18, until Gottlieb saw that a new novel by Exodus author Leon Uris would be called Mila 18. The number in Heller’s title would have to be changed. Heller suggested 14, but that number was nixed as flavourless. In the middle of the night, Gottlieb had a revelation: 22. He called Heller: “I got it. 22. It’s even funnier than 18.” The book went on to sell millions of copies.

With his success at Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb was invited to head Knopf. He was only 36 and looked years younger. By this time, he was so famous that his move to Knopf was front-page news in the New York Times.

For Gottlieb, this was a dream job. For him, Knopf was the great literary house of the century. He had been nurtured on the great novelists Knopf was respected for Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, D.H. Lawrence. Under his leadership, the house brought in celebrities like Katherine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham to write their memoirs, all of which, with Gottlieb’s magic touch, became bestsellers. Also added to the Knopf list were writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Milan Kundera.

For Gottlieb, editing is not shaping a book according to the editor’s wishes but making it the best book the writer can write. The key to Gottlieb’s success is his constant devotion to his writers, often spending days with them to help them with their books.

Other famous Americans of Jewish origin who are adamantly secular have tried to hide their Jewishness. Gottlieb does not. It bubbles throughout his entire career. Even when he is coaxed into going to Marlene Dietrich’s funeral in Paris and to Berlin by a fellow editor, who is editing a book about the famous German entertainer, his Jewish sensibility is engaged and his trip to Berlin is full of qualms: “I’d never been to Berlin – a child of World War Two, and Jewish, I’d never got past my resistance to everything German (except the music) and had stayed away.” He notes that the Germans had mixed feelings about Dietrich. “On the one hand, she was probably the most famous and admired woman in their history; on the other, she had vehemently sided with the Allies against them during the war.”

Another one of the blockbuster books – two million copies sold – Gottlieb edited at Knopf was Bill Clinton’s autobiography. From the outset of their meetings, he decided to call him Bill. “I couldn’t envisage myself saying things like, ‘I think we need a semicolon here, Mr. President.’” And, when Clinton describes himself as very easy to work for, Gottlieb feels “that was the moment of truth.” In his view, if equality and balance between writer and editor is not established, the relationship will fail. And so, Gottlieb “cheekily” tells Clinton, much to the shock of Clinton’s aides, “Actually, I have to point out that, in this instance, I’m not working for you, you’re working for me.”

What is most revealing about Gottlieb’s irresistible personality and talent for friendship is that he goes on to form personal relationships with the writers he’s met that last for decades.

From Knopf, Gottlieb was appointed editor of The New Yorker (again front-page news in the Times), where he stayed for five years before finally retiring.

In the dozen or so years since, Gottlieb has nurtured another of his passions, classical ballet. “Dance liberated me,” he writes, “from the bondage of language, and balanced my life.”

After writing a biography of his hero, the great choreographer Georges Balanchine, Yale University Press lured Gottlieb to write the first biography in their new series, Jewish Lives. His assignment, Sarah Bernhardt, whom he calls “the most famous of all French women other than Joan of Arc.” Although this book is the bestselling short biography of that series, in typical Gottlieb self-denigration, he asserts that its success is not so much about him as it is about the book’s heroine.

Only a great editor like Gottlieb would have the sensitivity to list in the acknowledgments pages all the editors and assistants, friends and colleagues who helped him with Avid Reader.

It’s hard to believe that Gottlieb is 86 years old; he doesn’t look it, and his energy and creative spirit belies that advanced number. Some people are just fated to remain 44 – or 22 – forever.

Curt Leviant’s most recent books are the novels King of Yiddish and Kafka’s Son.

Beautifully produced book

It must have been a prodigious effort by editor Ezra Glinter to look through countless Yiddish Forward microfilms going back more than 100 years and come up with the superb collection of short fiction Have I Got a Story for You: More than a Century of Fiction from the Forward (W.W. Norton, 2016).

Unlike contemporary American newspapers, Yiddish papers, both here and in Europe, published fiction. Readers looked forward to the weekend editions, where they could find stories by their old favourite authors and newly emerging writers.

This new variegated collection, which begins with 1907 and ends in 2015, with contributions by 20 talented translators, including Glinter, has many of the famous names in 20th-century Yiddish belles lettres – Sholem Asch, David Bergelson, Avraham Reyzen, Israel Joshua Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Chaim Grade. And, though even the lesser-known names were familiar for decades to the loyal Forward audience, they may not be so anymore, and the volume contains cogent and insightful introductions to each writer.

Have I Got a Story for You is a beautifully produced book, from the stunning, colourful cover, the fine introductions by Glinter and novelist Dara Horn and, of course, the lively fiction. Even the clever title, Have I Got a Story for You, resonates with Yiddish braggadocio.

The anthology begins with a story by Rokhl Brokhes, Golde’s Lament, published in 1907, about a woman who is tormented with jealousy because her husband has sailed to America with another woman posing as his wife, and concludes with a 2015 story, Studies in Solfege, by the current Yiddish Forward editor, Boris Sandler, about which I’ll tell you later.

First, we read stories about the immigrant experience, including one by Abe Cahan himself, the guiding spirit of the Forward (known in Yiddish as the Forverts) from 1903 to 1946, and humorous sketches by B. Kovner, who wrote for the paper for nearly 70 years of his 100-year life (1874-1974).

Some of the book’s most powerful pages, whose sheer force of imaginative and vivid prose overwhelms the reader, were written in Russia under wartime circumstances. Here we see gripping stories by Asch, Bergelson and I.J. Singer. Obviously, tales with such stress and suspense make New York-based fiction about collecting rent or about a lovelorn seamstress pale by comparison.

It is also noteworthy that, whereas stories by Yiddish masters like Peretz, Sholem Aleichem and Reyzen invariably pertained to Jewish life, in this collection, Yiddishkeit is at a minimum. One story by the very secular daughter of Aleichem, Lyala Kaufman, speaks of a woman who prays daily but doesn’t particularly like her assimilated son and daughter-in-law. She closes her morning prayer with a wish that “they die a horrible death.” Another story, by Zalman Schneour, tells of a little youngster who is tempted and finally succumbs to tasting pig meat.

In their Eastern European shtetls or cities, the rhythms of Jewish life were central to Jews’ existence. In the United States, with many of the early immigrants not committed to Jewish observance, the secularly minded Yiddish writers writing for a socialist-leaning paper like the Forward did not have Yiddishkeit at the forefront of their creative imagination.

Noteworthy, too, is that not one of the writers included in Have I Got a Story for You was born in the United States. One can understand that, early in the 20th century, the Yiddish writers would be European-born, but, as the decades progressed toward the mid-20th century, one would have expected at least one American-born Yiddish writer to emerge. But none did.

Also, if you look at the years of birth of the contributing writers, only one was born in the 1920s and none was born in the 1930s or 1940s. The two writers who were born in the early 1950s were Russians. This means that most of the writers who contributed to the Forward, at least those selected for this anthology, were born prior to 1910.

In A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1953), edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, Grade, born in 1910, was the youngest author. And so it is curious to see in this anthology, published in 2016 – 53 years later – that Grade is still among the youngest. There are only three younger than he, Yente Mash (1922), Mikhoel Felsenbaum (1951) and Sandler (1950). Certainly the decimation of Jewry during the Holocaust and the repressive Stalinist regime in Russia had something to do with this gap.

(I should add, if only parenthetically, that in the magazine Afn Shvel, published by the League for Yiddish, one can read American-born Yiddish writers, in their 20s and 30s, publishing fiction and non-fiction.)

Full of Yiddishkeit, however, is the masterful novella by Grade, Grandfathers and Grandchildren. Set in an old Vilna shul between the two world wars, it tells of a group of old men whose children have assimilated. Their lives perk up when little boys come into the shul in the winter to warm up, and the old men start giving them private lessons. During summer, the boys disappear but their lives take on new meaning again when two yeshivah bokhers come into the shul to look for old texts and take on the oldsters as their students.

The last two stories in the anthology are by Russian Yiddish writers. Felsenbaum, now living in Israel, depicts a married Israeli Yiddish writer who goes to a Basel book fair, where he meets and falls in love with a beautiful woman. In the book’s last tale, Sandler focuses on a teenage boy who describes taking singing lessons from a slightly older girl; she also introduces him to the Indian love guidebook, Kama Sutra.

I have resisted quoting delectable lines from this anthology till now, but can resist no longer. When the girl asks the boy if he knows what Kama Sutra is, he says the first thing that comes into his head: “Of course. It’s a type of Japanese wrestling.”

Curt Leviant is the author of two recent novels, King of Yiddish and Kafka’s Son.

A Yiddish writer resurrected

Tekhiyas ha-meysim, resurrection of the dead, is not an everyday occurrence. But it happens in literature when attention is once again focused on long-neglected authors. Scott Davis, editor and publisher of Storyteller Press, is one of those resurrectors. He has rediscovered the prolific and bestselling 19th-century Yiddish writer, Jacob Dinezon, who was friendly with “the Big Three,” the founding fathers of modern Yiddish literature – Mendele Mocher Seforim, Sholem Aleichem and Y.L. Peretz – and has brought him back.

So far, four works by or pertaining to Dinezon have been published by Storyteller Press: Memories and Scenes, a collection of stories and reminiscences (2014); two novels, Yosele (2015) and Hershele (2016); and, now, the 1956 biography Jacob Dinezon: The Mother Among Our Classical Yiddish Writers by Argentine Yiddish writer Shmuel Rozhanski, translated by Miri Koral.

I must confess that, even though I took an advanced degree in Yiddish literature at Columbia University, I had never once heard mention of Dinezon – until Davis came along a couple of years ago and resurrected him. But now, when one scrolls through an internet site for Peretz, one sees not one but two photos of Dinezon; one with Aleichem and Peretz, the other, with Peretz alone.

Dinezon was friendly with Peretz for a quarter of century. In 1890, he published, at his own expense, Peretz’s first book, Bekante Bilder (Familiar Pictures), when it was rejected by all other publishers, and he presented the entire printing to his friend.

Rozhanski’s book is not exactly a biography in the classical sense. In fact, he doesn’t even tell us in what year Dinezon was born. Rather, the author focuses on Dinezon’s books and the interaction between them and the author’s life. It may more properly be called a literary biography, with a summary and gentle analysis and evaluation of Dinezon’s works.

Dinezon, who was born near Kovno, Lithuania, and died in Warsaw in 1919, was one of the most popular Yiddish writers during the 19th century, when Yiddish literature flourished in Eastern Europe. His novel The Dark Young Man sold more than 200,000 copies. Every Jewish household had his books but, because of the sentimental nature of his work, his reputation has fallen into neglect. He was considered passé because critics felt he pandered too much to women readers and other lovers of romances. Today, he might be considered the author of soap operas or pulp fiction. And yet, a respected Yiddish writer placed Dinezon and Aleichem on the same plane, calling the former lachrymose and the latter funny – and both writers of the folk.

In Rozhanski’s book, we learn of the spiritual and linguistic struggle that Yiddish works had to undergo from the middle through late 19th century, when proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, sought to highlight Hebrew belles lettres and diminish Yiddish. Among these maskilim were Mendele, who wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish, and Aleichem, who began in Hebrew but then switched to Yiddish.

Dinezon, too, was torn between the two languages, and this inner battle is aptly depicted in one of his letters. There, he states that when he writes in Hebrew and uses phrases from Isaiah or Ezekiel, he feels that the prophets are speaking for him. But, when he writes in Yiddish, he feels that he is speaking for himself and that his protagonists are speaking in their own authentic voices.

This is perhaps the best description of the inner conflict that 19th-century writers who knew both Hebrew and Yiddish had to face. The usual explanation for dropping Hebrew and returning to Yiddish – this was Aleichem’s position, for instance – was the more practical one that the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe knew Yiddish far better than Hebrew and, hence, the readership was very limited. But Dinezon’s literary explanation penetrates the heart of the artistic problem of choosing one or the other of two Jewish languages.

Rozhanski calls Dinezon “mother” for his gentle nature. Once, when Peretz devastated a young writer whose short story he had read by telling him, “Enough! You have no talent,” Dinezon, who was present, called the young man aside and told him to try again; perhaps his next effort would be better.

But Dinezon had the courage to criticize Mendele, whom Aleichem called the “zayde,” the grandfather, of Yiddish literature. Dinezon called Mendele too much of a purist regarding use of the Yiddish lanuage. He felt the language of the plain folk should be used. And Rozhanski claims that Dinezon’s goals were more moralistic than artistic; hence, Dinezon criticized Mendele’s satires, regarding them as humor without any moral lesson.

Indeed, it was the moral lesson and a practical uplift of society that Dinezon had in mind when he published Yosele. In this short novel, he criticized the cruel educational methods used by teachers in the small-town cheders. This novel prompted calls for reform, helped modernize pedagogy and led to the inception of more secularly minded schools for youngsters.

The biographer contends that Dinezon’s creativity shouldn’t be measured by his books alone. His work for orphans, his translation of Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews from German into Yiddish, even though Graetz didn’t want his work “desecrated” by having it in jargon, and his thousands of letters to writers and social activists – all of these Rozhanski considers part of Dinezon’s creative accomplishments.

So modest a man was Dinezon that, once, at a literary event in honor of Peretz, Peretz pointed to Dinezon in the audience and said, ”My holy soul is this man … this man.” At this, Dinezon rose and denied Peretz’s kind remark by saying that the inspiration comes from within Peretz himself.

Dinezon was a lifelong bachelor. At one point in his life, he was, like Aleichem, a tutor to the daughter of a wealthy man.

Like Aleichem, he fell in love with the girl and the girl’s love was reciprocated. But, whereas Aleichem ended up marrying his pupil, Dinezon was denied his love.

Nevertheless, despite this setback, he continued to serve the wealthy man in other trusted capacities.

In 1913, when Aleichem was ill in Europe – he would immigrate to the United States in 1914 – Dinezon wrote him a letter revealing a plan. When Aleichem would feel better, he would join Peretz and Dinezon and all three writers would go to Palestine and walk the land and write a book about their adventures. “So get well soon,” Dinezon concludes.

This dream was never realized.

For this slim in-depth literary biography, Rozhanski assiduously mined letters, newspapers, magazines, Yiddish writers’ memoirs, critical evaluations, as well as all of Dinezon’s published works, to draw information about the writer, in his own words and in the estimation of others.

Curt Leviant’s most recent books are the novels King of Yiddish and Kafka’s Son.

A fine collection of poems

When I saw the table of contents of The Poems of H. Leivick and Others: Yiddish Poetry in Translation by Leon H. Gildin (Finishing Line Press), a lovely little book of translated Yiddish poems by Leivick and other noted poets, two images came immediately to mind. One was a scene with Leivick, a slight figure with a beautiful etched face and a halo of white hair, sitting alone on a circular stone ledge in front of the Hebrew University library, in Jerusalem, seemingly lost in thought. The other, and this goes back decades, is a gathering of Yiddish poets, including almost all the ones collected in this book, in a meeting hall in New York. What a thrill it was for a college boy to be at such a meeting and seeing face-to-face the famous poets he had known before only by name.

book cover - The Poems of H. Leivick and Others The poems of Leivick (1886-1962) range in subject matter: a poem about a very small poem “no longer than an epitaph”; the recollection of a birch rod beating given by his father; a prisoner in a cell at night “swallowing as if it were wine the moon’s bright light”; a man looking for work without success. Leivick was a paperhanger when he came to the United States. He was also a noted playwright; his most famous is The Golem, originally produced by Habima Theatre when it was still in Moscow, and later translated into other languages.

Here, too, admirably rendered into English by Gildin, are the voices of other famous American Yiddish poets – all born in Eastern Europe – singing songs of longing, love and the Sabbath. About half the poems are by Leivick: the rest are by luminaries like Chaim Grade, Yakov Glatstein, Avraham Reisen, Itzik Manger, A. Leyeles, Mani Leib and Avraham Sutzkever. Most of the poems here have a modernist lilt regarding imagery and tone, yet all have traditional rhymes.

My only caveat with this fine ingathering of poems is that too much space is devoted to a relatively minor but good poet, Anna Margolin. Where Grade has only one, why six for Margolin? Additional poems by the other poets would have been welcome.

My favorite poems here are those that have a Jewish core. Hence, Grade’s loving poem “The Sabbath,” recalling his war- and postwar-years wanderings in Russia and Europe, resonates, as does Ephraim Auerbach’s prayer-poem “God of Abraham,” which begins with the opening lines of Havdalah – the prayer for the departing of the Sabbath – and takes wing from there.

In his short introduction, Gildin accents the secular aspects of Yiddish poetry but, by so doing, he puts an artificial divide between religiosity and secularism. He says that, while Yiddish was the street language of the Orthodox, the secular Yiddish created a culture. But Gildin neglects to note that Yiddish was used far beyond the street for Orthodox Jews. Religious Jews also used Yiddish in shul, in studying and in translating Chumash and Talmud, and in creating commentaries and translations of the siddur and the machzor, the daily and the holiday prayer books, respectively. Women created their own prayers in Yiddish, which were collected into separate volumes. This same “street language” was used by the secular poet Yehoash in creating his masterpiece: his magnificent translation of the entire Bible into Yiddish.

In Grade’s “The Sabbath” and Auerbach’s “God of Abraham,” the boundaries between piety and secularity are blurred. The distinctions are not as separate as they appear to be. In a classic photo of Yiddish poets sitting at a long dinner table at a wedding, one can see secular poets like Leivick, Grade, Glatstein, Reisen and noted critic Shmuel Niger, all wearing either fedoras or yarmulkes.

Sholom Aleichem was thoroughly secular. He was not observant and did not keep a kosher home. In fact, he spoke Russian, not Yiddish, to his family. Yet, when his son died in Denmark, he went to shul to say Kaddish every day in New York. And, in his will, he asked those who are willing, to say Kaddish for him, too.

Most significantly, the obviously secular translator of this volume, Gildin, along with his brother, founded a university Yiddish department, not in the secular Hebrew University, Haifa University or Tel Aviv University, but at Bar-Ilan University, the only religious-sponsored university in Israel.

For those who know Yiddish poetry, The Poems of H. Leivick and Others revisits old friends; for newcomers, it is a cogent introduction.

Curt Leviant’s most recent books are the novels King of Yiddish and Kafka’s Son.