By JOSEPH EPSTEIN
Robert Lowell called Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier" the best French novel in the English language. So, similarly, might one call I.J. Singer's "The Brothers Ashkenazi" the best Russian novel ever written in Yiddish. The book has the grand sweep of Tolstoy, with a vast and wide-ranging cast of characters, a strong feeling for the movement of history, and, playing throughout, the drama of men and women trapped in the machinery of forces much greater than themselves.
I(srael). J(oshua). Singer, born in Bilgorai, Poland, in 1893, was the older brother by nine years of I(saac). B(ashevis). Singer. The Singers' father was a Hasidic rabbi, their mother the daughter of a long line of famous misnagid (or non-Hasidic) rabbis. I.J. Singer spent his early years in the shtetl of Leoncin and his adolescent years in Warsaw, where he became caught up in the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment, movement. As a young man he worked as a journalist in Kiev, where his early attraction to socialism was punctured by the brute realities of the Russian Revolution. In 1934 he to moved to the U.S., where he worked for the Jewish Daily Forward. He published seven books in all, of which "The Brothers Ashkenazi" (1936) is the best known.
The tension between religious and secular life among Jews born into orthodoxy gave both Singer brothers an inexhaustible literary subject. In much of Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction his characters stray from religion and then, after leading lives of dissipation, degradation and disappointment, return to it, where they find a measure of contentment.
Ryan Inzana - The Brothers Ashkenazi
For I.J. Singer things are more complicated. He did not think much of either traditional religion or the secular life of his time, which didn't leave him, as a novelist, a great deal of room to negotiate. Politics taught I.J. the bitter lesson that, however much the extreme left and the extreme right might disagree, the one common ground upon which they met comfortably was anti-Semitism. The Jew as scapegoat in the dark world of Eastern Europe is more than a leitmotif in "The Brothers Ashkenazi"; it is the underlying moral of the novel. "Don't you know," the wives of the striking Jewish workers cry out to their husbands during a bitter strike in Lodz, "it always ends up with Jewish heads bleeding."
"The Brothers Ashkenazi" begins not long after the Napoleonic wars, with the arrival of German and Moravian weavers in the Polish town of Lodz. At first excluded, the Jews gradually insinuate themselves into the town. They began as small-time entrepreneurs, setting up minor factories or sometimes working in their homes with handlooms, putting in long hours and grinding out a living. A handful of Jews worked for large-scale German factory owners, as agents, buyers, managers.
One such is Abraham Hersh Ashkenazi, who, soon after the novel begins, is presented by his wife with twin sons, Simha Meir and Jacob Bunem. Abraham Hersh hears the prophecy from his rabbi that his sons will both know great wealth. This prophecy, which will come true, is a disappointment to their father, who would have preferred they be pious and learned.
The brothers turn out very differently, in talent and in temperament. Simha Meir, the first born by a few minutes, is from an early age clever, conniving, a boy and then man concentrated on the main chance. His brother is physically more gifted -- strong, handsome, charming -- a cynosure. Simha Meir is aflame with ambition; Jacob Bunem, less concentrated, is dedicated to easy living.
At the center of "The Brothers Ashkenazi" is the climb of Simha Meir -- who later abandons his religion and becomes Max Ashkenazi -- to dominance over the weaving industry of Lodz. The machinations behind his climb are set out in impressive detail. In the background plays the subsidiary story of the rivalry and estrangement between the two brothers: Simha Meir, in an arranged marriage, is betrothed and marries the love of his brother's life. Later Jacob Bunem marries into a family of vast wealth, a cause of consternation to Simha Meir.
Conflict is the order of the day in Lodz: between brothers, between owners and workers, between rabbis and miscreants, between Russians and Poles, between Gentiles and Jews, between Polish and Lithuanian Jews. Under capitalism man exploits man, an old saying had it, while under communism just the reverse obtains. So it is in Lodz; no matter who is in command, the city is breeding ground for exploitation, with every kind of hatred polluting the air.
"Simha Meir had the guts of a pickpocket," Singer writes. "In Lodz this was the highest compliment." We learn that "justice isn't a commodity in Lodz," and that "Lodz admired nothing more than wealth." With hundred of dab touches Singer personifies the city as the sinkhole of men set loose without any guiding principles or goals apart from that of gain: "Lodz knew that with money you could buy anything." When credit dries up and inflation hits Lodz, Singer notes that "even the whores in brothels and the doctors who later treated their venereal diseases were paid off with IOUs."
Such idealism as Singer allows in the novel is given to the few revolutionaries who appear in its pages, but theirs turns out to be a naïve revolutionism. Nissan, the son of a poor rabbi, exchanges his father's devotion to Torah for his own to Marxism, into which he invests the same unshakeable faith. He lives to see the revolution he fought for turn into a pogrom, with the corpses of Jews hanging from trees. At one point, Nissan thinks: "Maybe man was essentially evil. Maybe it wasn't the fault of economic circumstances, as he had been taught, but the deficiencies of human character."
Strikes, World War I, the Russian Revolution, the invasion of Lodz first by the Germans, then by the Russians -- all are described by Singer, with pitch perfect artistry and pace. Lenin makes a cameo appearance in the novel, as Napoleon does in "War and Peace," and so do the hapless Czar Nicholas and his Czarina Alexandra. The world turns topsy-turvy, with only Max Ashkenazi's dream of industrial and financial dominance remaining constant, until it, too, is blasted, when, having earlier moved his factory to Russia, he is imprisoned in the new Soviet Union, from which he is saved by his long-despised brother. On the brothers' return to Poland, reconciled at last, Jacob Bunem is killed, in an act of anti-Semitic bullying, by an ignorant Polish officer.
"The Brothers Ashkenazi" ends on a pogrom, which sends all the city's Jews fleeing: to America, to the new Zion recently created in Palestine, to less cruel countries than Poland. "Lodz," Singer writes, "was like a limb torn from a body that no longer sustained it. It quivered momentarily in its death throes as maggots crawled over it, draining its remaining juices." Max Ashkenazi, intent on personal reform, which he is unable to attain, dies soon afterward.
Masterly, pitiless, this great novel forgoes a happy ending to render instead a just one: The city of Lodz and the characters it spawned get all they deserve.
Mr. Epstein is the author of "Fred Astaire" (Yale University Press).
* MASTERPIECE
* FEBRUARY 7, 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment