“What exactly is the famous ‘flesh of History’? […] It is the fantasy of an instantaneous grasp of the reality lived by the people of a given time, to which the texts that remain from that time seem able to give access.” Christian Jouhaud, Dinah Ribard, N. Schapira, Histoire Littérature Témoignage (History Literature Testimony), Folio Histoire, Gallimard, 2009.
1
At the home of mutual friends I make the acquaintance of a psychoanalyst and sociologist, A. S. He leaves tomorrow for Latin America, where he has a conference. His father died a few days ago, more than a centenarian. The date of his birth was uncertain; he was from Zhytomyr in Ukraine. The grandfather had been killed in 1919 or 1920 in a Petliura pogrom. A. S. is in the process of making a book out of his father’s stories, of his origins in general, for his children and grandchildren. I bring up the two volumes of Mendel Osherovitsh, Shtet un shtetelekh fun ukrayne.1 There is in there a chapter on Zhytomyr. I will translate it for him.
Why does one make a family book? In the case of A. S., as in general, it is probably not a matter of bequeathing to one’s children the most objective possible account; but the wonder of an exotic origin; a family legend, and first of all the figure of the grandfather, his brutal death; then the emigration, the successful integration into a new society, to which the author’s successes bear witness. I myself questioned my father; I transcribed from the tape recorder, with religious care, his precise French.
Rereading these accounts of my father for my own sake, I truly hear the sound of his voice. At the start of the recording there is the departure of his grandfather, Avrom Lewi. “My father’s father,” says my father. “I don’t know exactly what he was up to, what he was scheming, but the result was that he left, he left Poland, he took with him his wife (not my father’s mother, she had been dead for some time, but his second wife), he took his whole family except my father. And my father, from what he told me, went to his grandmother’s. My great-grandmother. I knew her, because she lived to a good age; at the beginning of every Rosh Hashanah and at Yom Kippur, my father and I would go there to wish her shana tova. She lived in Lodz. She was staying with someone — I couldn’t say whether it was her son, a brother of my grandfather, her son-in-law perhaps, more likely her son-in-law. My grandfather came to France, the children went to French schools; he lived on the rue des Écouffes.”
Of course, the voice of the teller is not the absolute truth of the past, the flesh of History. And yet it is like an ultra-sensitive index; in particular, it restores, in the nascent state, doubts, uncertainties that have a positivity, that are themselves traces. My father’s great-grandmother, with whom did she live in Lodz, with a son or a son-in-law? His grandfather, in America, in his extreme old age, also lived with his children. And why, why did he leave Poland? What venial fault, or otherwise, drove him to it, that my grandfather did not want to recount to my father? It was, after all, a Hasidic, even rabbinic family; my father had two uncles who were rabbis in towns near Lodz. The patriarch himself was probably not a rabbi; the whole family stayed in Poland, he alone left, with his close family.
“He died very old, almost a hundred,” my father says further, “he looked exactly like my father… When I read his letters — he wrote to my father, my father answered him too — he always wrote in the rabbinic manner. He began with barukh hashem, his whole letter was full of Torah, of psukim, of meshalim, all those stories. My father answered the same way. And he himself, when he wrote letters to me, when I was in France, he wrote the same way. He wrote to me in Yiddish, of course. (His father too wrote in Yiddish.) Always barukh hashem, and he ended in an elegant way with a mashal2 from the Torah…”
There follows the story of Aunt Rose, one of my grandfather’s three American sisters. He, much later, from Lodz, tried to get her married. “He in Poland, she in America, how to manage it, you couldn’t marry by correspondence, he arranged to find a young man; this one was ten, fifteen, or even twenty years younger than Aunt Rose — an American woman, the dollars, that counts for something. We have the photograph, I’ll show you the couple. He was interested, she wasn’t so ugly, she may even have been pretty. He was perhaps twenty, she perhaps thirty-five. So she came to Poland, and in exchange for dollars, he married her. In his mind it was a good deal; all those little Jews in Poland at the time thought of nothing but emigrating, and America was the land of white bread, you eat white bread there during the week, that’s what people said. It was in ’22 or ’23. (In 1928 I left Poland.) Poland had barely been born, it had obtained its independence in 1918… These young people got married. Religiously, not officially, not at the town hall. I attended the wedding; not at the shul, you weren’t obliged to go to the shul, a rabbi came to the house, he gave them the nuptial blessing, khupat kidushin… The khupa, I remember, it took place at my father’s, in Lodz… That’s how I came to know Rose, and very well. She stayed in Lodz for a while, maybe three or four months, with her husband. She had taken a liking to me, I was already a young man mature enough to know how things go in life, she told me everything.”
I’ll sum up the end: Rose went back, not without having imprudently satisfied the young man’s curiosity: why had she come to marry in Poland? Over there, she said, she lived with a man, but the affair was practically over. The young man said nothing. He had himself supported as long as possible by his American wife, until she understood that he would never join her.
Stories of rupture. In my Génération du déluge (Generation of the Flood), there is this repetitive and ambiguous leitmotiv: one must leave Poland, departure and point of departure, toward the future and the past. It is as if the departures of my great-grandfather, then of my father (this photo on a station platform, probably in Lodz, where my father’s whole family came to put him on the train to Paris), then of my grandfather, still resonate within me. Stories of continuity too: Yiddish mixed with rabbinic Hebrew in the letters that came from America, like that of the letters that came later from Poland, from my grandfather to my father, before the latter brought him to live near him in France, in the thirties; the circulation of Aunt Rose, of the money orders in dollars. Yiddish at that time, like the dollars, ignored borders, even the Atlantic itself. My grandfather too died fairly old; some time before, he had taken a plane to go visit his sisters in the United States, and two of them came one day to see us in France. One of them revealed to me that we descended from Judah Halevi; exiled from Toledo, we had passed through Provence and Germany before settling in Poland; everything was written in black and white in papers that had unfortunately burned, at one moment or another of the journey. On their way, they went to see their school, in the Pletsl.3
I find America at my first awakening, in the comics my mother brought me back, returning from her errands. It was Red Ryder, Mandrake, Pecos Bill: a masked rider, the Law west of the Pecos, made his horse rear at the summit of a canyon, against a backdrop of rising sun. The big Donald issues were full of riders, Indians, magicians.
As a child, I read and reread The Last of the Mohicans. Old Chingachgook addresses his dead son, decked out in all his feathers, seated on a kind of throne. He will hunt the great bison in the prairies of the other world, among the gods. The tribe will die out. I sometimes thought that these Mohicans were for me, in a hazy way, the last Polish Jews, those who surrounded me; but no, the world of the American forests, of America in general, existed for itself. I loved the Indians, the gauchos, the red uniforms of the Canadian mounted police; the silent Leatherstocking, his unerring carbine; with the little troop he shepherded I entered behind the waterfall to escape the Hurons, in the same way that I followed Bibi Fricotin into the caverns of Fontainebleau or the Mousquetaires du maquis in their exploits against the krauts; the Musketeers plain and simple. At the same time a part of myself bathed in other languages, another history. I was not surprised, coming home from school, to find my father arguing in Yiddish with his uncle or his father, in Polish with my mother. Many things had happened before and elsewhere, which interested me no more than that. My maternal uncle had arrived one day, coming from Russia. At family meals he would suddenly tell stories that made everyone uncomfortable: in forests partisans fired on German soldiers guarding deportees, people were gassed in trucks; hidden in a hole with Ivan, his Russian buddy, he had escaped the methodical murder of all the camp’s prisoners.
Sometimes I accompanied my father to my grandfather’s town, where he went on business. My grandfather was there, already aged; he was deaf and spoke almost nothing but Yiddish. I am not sure that in Poland he had ever spoken Polish. He had returned to religious observance, which astonished my father. At the shul, they would come to fetch him. An atheist and an anticlerical, he nonetheless lent himself to the rites. Waiting for his return, I was petrified with anxiety: weren’t they going to come and fetch me too? You’re not rich enough, my father told me to reassure me.
America was an entirely imaginary world. When one day in my childhood my great-uncle left, with my aunt, leaving us all sorts of shmattès4 that cluttered my mother’s cupboards, I did not realize for an instant that they were leaving for a real country from which came to me Donald, Little Nemo, and The Last of the Mohicans.
They came back a few years later. While waiting for my father to find them an apartment, they stayed too long at my parents’, in an empty room on the ground floor, with their big suitcases full of precious objects, some broken — crystal dishware, souvenirs of Poland, over which they were inconsolable. Suitcases too had been lost on the way. They watched television, whole days at a time. My great-uncle played solitaire. He sometimes managed to get my father to play belote. Sometimes, as they played, my aunt, who was watching television, would let out a cry: Maurice, hosti gehert? Chicago!5 We did not know what they had done over there, where exactly they had lived, how they had earned their living, amassed enough to fill those big suitcases. The memory I have of them is cluttered with suitcases. I don’t know how many times my younger brother and I carried theirs, to the station and back, so as not to take a taxi. They were first cousins and had no children. A murmur of anecdotes floated around them; in America (we had learned) they had quarreled with all their cousins and relatives, for taking as natural everything that was done for them. In the end they also quarreled with my father and my uncle. My great-aunt was the talk of the town. From the United States she had brought back a taste for extravagant clothing; early in the morning, on summer days, she circulated through our little town in Bermuda shorts. I no longer remember when I recovered my great-uncle’s Harkavy dictionary, Yiddish-Hebrew-English; perhaps after his death. It had served him so much, in America, that the bible paper was coming apart in tatters.
Three years ago, I went to see the town of my origins, Zduńska Wola, the one where my grandfather, to satisfy his grandmother’s wish, came to study in a yeshiva; where he married; where my father was born. We came from Warsaw, where we had visited the cemetery and the old Jewish quarter, making a pilgrimage also to the Umschlagplatz and to the monument to the dead of the ghetto; where we had taken a noisy room at the Hotel Metropol; where the station, alone perhaps in the Polish city, had seemed to us real, like any ordinary Central European station where one can wait for one’s train while eating a sandwich, herring, or a hot soup. We had reserved at Zduńska Wola a hotel named Hades — perhaps it was the name of the owner; or else that of a place; or perhaps this word Hades has another meaning in Polish. In any case it had made us hesitate; and in the end we had telephoned and taken a room.
The cemetery of Zduńska Wola must resemble many Jewish cemeteries of Poland: the brush has overrun it, most of the gravestones are toppled and broken. A few Poles, a heroic Madame Bartsch, have devoted themselves to this cemetery; they have erected a fine gate, undertaken to clean the place. She showed me the gravestone of my great-grandmother, perfectly intact amid the ruins. It is a double stone, where are inscribed not only the name of my great-grandmother Hentshé but that of her sister Pessé-Baylé, married name Khabelak; they died not long apart, well before the war of ’39. Beside the name of Hentshé are also the name of her father, Itshélé Pik, and that of her husband, Hersh Shpigel, whom my father particularly loved and whom one sees in some photos he had kept: a tall old man with a white beard and a cap, such was the balébos6 who received at his table the yeshiva student, my future grandfather, and took him as a son-in-law. I bear his first name, which is also that of a brother of my mother, murdered in the Lodz ghetto. Pik, Shpigel, Khabelak — these names inscribed in stone made my father’s accounts escape the imaginary, the nit gefloygn, nit geshtoygn,7 the uncertain of the tale.
On the train from Warsaw, returning from Zduńska Wola, we met an American man of the theater who had come to Poland to mount a show about Bruno Schulz. Hasidic tales feed on such chance encounters. In Paris, we received an email from an unknown woman; she is the daughter of a first cousin of my father, who was deported from Zduńska Wola to Auschwitz and went into exile in Australia after the war. Questioned from afar, the old lady remembers well our great-grandmother Hentshé: her cooking was delicious. Kreplekh, knaydelekh. The Khabelaks too came forward, their American descendants. I translated for them the article from the yisker bukh (book of remembrance) of Zduńska Wola concerning their most famous ancestor. (A purely local renown.)
2
Was A. S.’s grandfather killed in Zhytomyr itself? In the chapter I am rereading on Zhytomyr, besides a pogrom in 1905 that left forty dead and two hundred wounded, and the German soldiers in 1918 killing many people, Osherovitsh signals two great pogroms in 1919, during the civil war: the first in January, the second in March; this latter was “one of the most terrible and bloodiest in the history of the Jews of Ukraine. In the four days the massacre lasted, no fewer than three hundred and seventy Jews were killed.”
Curiously, the author recounts at far greater length the events of 1905 than those of 1919. In 1905, a self-defense organization was created, which all the young Jews of the city joined. “The self-defense organization,” it is written, “fought heroically against the pogromists, and where the police did not help the murderers, the armed young men of the self-defense pushed them back; without their heroism the number of Jewish victims would have been far greater. Looking death in the face, ready to sacrifice their lives, the young men of Zhytomyr — artisans, workers, and students — confronted the bands of Christian thugs, arms in hand, wherever they appeared. They stood in their way, and in certain places put them entirely to flight; fifteen of these young heroes were killed.”
On the pogroms of 1919 in Zhytomyr, by contrast, Osherovitsh gives nothing more than the figures; but he recounts at full length what happened in a neighboring city, Novograd-Volynsk. It is true that Jewish suffering, in that city, lasted a whole year, from July 1919 to the end of the summer of 1920, from one occupation to the next, and that one counted one thousand eight hundred dead, not counting the hundreds of dead in the surrounding countryside.
“When the Bolsheviks [of Novograd-Volynsk],” says Mendel Osherovitsh, “introduced the new order and a revkom [revolutionary committee] was founded, it turned out at once that the secretary of the revkom was a young Jew named Itsik, already previously active in the revolutionary movement; when Church and State were separated, the antisemites used this fact and turned against the Jews the city’s peasants and also those in the surrounding villages, saying that no one but Itsik was guilty of the fact that all power had been taken from the Orthodox Church. […] When Itsik was told, one Sunday during the day, that a mass of peasants had gathered near the church, and that among them were also some educated Christians of the city, and that all were shouting that the Jews were guilty of everything and that the Soviet power had to be thrown down, Itsik leapt at once onto his horse to be there, and before anyone had made a move the crash of machine guns was heard. It was the Soviet artillery firing on the crowd massed there for the insurrection, and at once the square emptied entirely. Everyone fled as far as possible.” After which, the Whites having taken the city, under pretext of searches, interrogations, and cross-interrogations, the whole of the Jewish youth was methodically murdered. The dead piled up in the streets, mothers searched for their missing children. In the end, all the surviving Jews were gathered in the church, says Osherovitsh, with the rabbis and the Hasidic rebbes. There was a sermon by the priest, who shamed them: they had badly guided their community, brought down divine punishment upon it. Then the hetman gathered the same people in the synagogue and likewise made a speech. They, the victims of the atrocities, were the guilty ones. “He did not blush to say that the Jews had been everywhere and always guilty of everything, and this since the times of Abraham, of Moses, and of King David; wherever a misfortune occurred it was the Jews who were guilty of it, because a curse weighs upon them that infects their spirit; but he, the Ukrainian hetman, would destroy this infection, nothing of it would remain. Thus spoke this descendant of Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the great synagogue of Novograd-Volynsk; then the Jews had to swear that they would serve him faithfully. And those who had to swear thus were fathers whose sons this hetman’s men-at-arms had murdered, whose corpses were still piling up in the streets…”
“The flesh of History,” says Christian Jouhaud again,8 “does it designate anything other than a desire for literature in the historian’s work? A desire to recount, a desire to provoke emotion, to make the evocation of the past become the sensation of a contact.” A fantasy of direct knowledge of the past, as if one could, through the voice of the witnesses, touch the thing itself — so be it; but one would also find in the historian, in Jouhaud himself, a dream just as utopian, of escaping literature. Apropos of Restif de la Bretonne, a certain book by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, he says, is not reliable: too well written, it borrows from literature its force, its dynamism, its totalizing ambition; the pure historian resigns himself to writing badly, but he is worthy of approaching the truth, thanks to humility, to method, by asking himself at every instant: who profits from the text? Literature and ulterior motives, it’s all one. Every interesting text is interested. It matters, in any account, to spot and decipher models or procedures of writing, repetitions of striking episodes; thus, in the documents of the famine in France, in 1651, then in 1661, the people grazing on grass, the women still nursing dead children. “Their identification leads immediately to that of their aim: efficacy.”
In Osherovitsh too there is much literature, suspect intentions. In the account of the pogroms of 1905, heroes and martyrs have a tonality more hagiographic than historical. From one chapter to the next, the dreadful episodes repeat themselves, as in the texts on the Cossack hordes of Khmelnytsky the cats sewn into the bellies of pregnant women.9 Here, it is the axe of the Ukrainian peasants. And yet the concern for objectivity is not absent: the priest does not agree to the murders, the gendarmes do not want the killings to fall back on them; above all, Osherovitsh shows it well, these flow almost entirely from rumor, as if by an autonomous process, an ungovernable chain of events. These peasants among whom had spread the rumor (put about by an agent of the tsar, by a few provocateurs of the Black Hundreds) that the Jews were arming themselves, that they were practicing firing at portraits of the tsar, that they were arriving in force — they had reasons to react, to take fright. But Osherovitsh, it’s true, never questions the account of the pogrom itself in its finality. The militants of the existing parties — Zionists, Bundists, socialists — also had an interest in pouring oil on the fire: some to provoke departures for Palestine, others to incite the Jews to political combat. After the exile, the account of the pogrom aimed at least to justify the exile.
In the account of the Jewish sufferings at Novograd-Volynsk, in 1919–1920, apart from the figures, the concern for scientific truth is less perceptible. One would say that, faced precisely with terrifying figures, such a concern could be understood as a way of going against the mourning of one’s own, as a form of betrayal. These are Lamentations in the old style, full of grief and indignation. And yet, as if of their own accord, elements of explanation present themselves here. What accounts for the relentlessness of the murderers is a barbarism that is a family legacy: are the pogromists of 1919 not the grandsons of Bohdan Khmelnytsky? It is also a retrograde clerical ideology, the same as in the accusations of ritual crime: a Christianity that sees in the Jews the murderers of Christ, a race damned from all eternity. At the same time, in what Osherovitsh says, the religious is not on one side only: a certain Bolshevik was the son of the rebbe of Makarov and apparently saw no contradiction between Judaism and Bolshevism; all those young Jews who paced the streets of Novograd-Volynsk, before the war, whether they were socialists, Bundists, Zionists, or territorialists, “they all sought a redemption for the Jewish people and for all the poor and oppressed.” Across these pages, one in fact witnesses a war of religion; the Whites accuse the Jews of having armed themselves “to massacre the Orthodox Christians down to the last one”; the hetman and the priest summon the rabbis and the rebbes to the synagogue and the church to bring them back to a just relation with God. “One would have said,” says Osherovitsh with stupefaction, “that the guilty ones were the Jews.” But for the Ukrainians, that was indeed the case: guilty, abandoned by God, since massacred…
The most objective core, minimal in a sense, of the affair is an explanation by the circumstances, a situation of war: the gunfire near the church, ordered by a Jewish Bolshevik, put all the Jews in the other camp. Among those led off to cross-interrogations was the son of a pious ritual slaughterer, who was known as a fervent Hasid: “Before each band I have to justify myself,” he recounts, “to recount that I did not fire on the church, that I am not responsible for the deposition of the tsar, that I do not consort with the communists, and that I never hung the portraits of the two yids, Lenin and Trotsky, in a church.”
What share of truth was there, at that moment and later, in the Polish, Ukrainian, etc., accusations, in all the hearsay that the Jews refer back to antisemitism? In the family book that A. S. is preparing, will he put all the versions at a distance? I know nothing of the grandfather killed in 1929. Was he a communist, a Zionist, a Bundist? Was Petliura the monster of the Yiddish chronicles? It would seem that he too had a leftward sensibility.
The objective gaze itself evolves. All of a sudden the guillotine and the September massacres cast a shadow over the French Revolution; and the Huguenots of the sixteenth century, with their factious and cynical great lords, no longer have all our sympathy. All sorts of things have happened since Osherovitsh’s book. The young Itsik arriving on horseback with his soldiers and his machine gun to disperse a demonstration of people who did not want the dictatorship of the proletariat no longer makes our hearts beat, any more than Eisenstein’s propaganda films; the Ukrainian peasants, as much as the Jews, perhaps had a presentiment of what awaited them under the new regime.
3
In the Coen brothers’ film A Serious Man, there is at the beginning the story of this old man met on the road and invited home; but perhaps he is a living-dead man? The hostess plunges a knife into his body. The blood spreads across his shirt. At first he makes nothing of it, then he acknowledges that he is not entirely himself; he’ll have a little soup; or rather no, he leaves — one must sometimes sense that one is in the way. This takes place in the old Yiddish world, somewhere in the East of old Europe, in der alter heym;10 but what follows is in America, even in deep America, the American provinces, those of the sixties; and the commentators ask themselves: what relation between the living-dead man from before America and the indecisive mathematician of what follows, Larry Gopnik?11 That the latter listens again and again to mayn shtètelé Belz attests at least to a continuity; the Yiddish of so long a history does not erase itself so easily; one must not, however, exclude the hypothesis of transmigration. Perhaps, says a shrewd internet user, the knife blow of the Yiddish story tells a curse similar to that of the House of Atreus. A divine wrath seems to pursue the Gopnik family from one generation to the next, without anyone being able to know what the original fault was. Gopnik has done nothing wrong (and neither has his wife), why must he divorce, why all these troubles? But one can be guilty without having done anything, because one has done nothing. Thus not having returned the proposal to buy the record Abraxas is an act of purchase, one must pay. Acts or non-acts, the world is strictly governed by karma. When you try to buy a professor, Gopnik tells the Korean student, you have to expect serious consequences. That said, keeping the money is a strong temptation. Gopnik’s dreams lay bare the depths of his soul: in them he sleeps with his new neighbor, the one who takes mud baths in the sun; his wife’s lover, though dead, appears in them in the lecture hall where he himself teaches, at the end of class, exactly like the old man of the Yiddish prologue: is he dead, is he alive?
There is obviously something folkloric in all this; the living-dead man resembles the Jewish innkeeper of The Fearless Vampire Killers who is always rubbing his hands, both before having become a vampire himself and after; his gestures and his inflections come out of the Yiddish theater or cinema of before the war. But I was moved by this subtitled Yiddish at the beginning of an American film, by this way of going back beneath — not only beneath the exile in America but beneath the European Enlightenment and modernity. Like Pi, another Jewish film, A Serious Man brings together the irrationality of the old Jewish traditions and Western science in its new speculations, incomprehensible, vertiginous. The dead-life of the dibbouk is there superimposed on that of Schrödinger’s cat. It is the nature of the real itself that poses a problem. What exactly does the grimoire glimpsed here and there recount — the work of a strange brother, parasitic, perhaps exhibitionist and sodomite, in which the numbers neighbor the Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton? A mathematical or kabbalistic synthesis of genius, an infallible martingale — the doubt remains. The mathematician sees his brother persecuted by the police, tracked and shot like a stag by his goy neighbor: he too, what then has he done wrong? Despite appearances one is always in the old world; who said that the Jews were safe in America? From where will the final typhoon come? From the shvartse of the ghettos, from the Arabs of Al-Qaeda? After the eleventh of September, where will one go? To Australia? To Israel, to join the Russian emigrants, to colonize the territories?
Thus the Coen brothers’ film brings us back to the original zone of residence, Ukraine or Poland, to inexplicable massacres, an incomprehensible guilt, a suspense between life and death. In the stories of Bashevis Singer, dead people walk about who are unaware that they are dead; others suddenly suspect it and take fright: to which world do they belong, world of the living, world of the dead, or this world of chaos, oylem hatoye, which is between the two, like the last hallucination of the dying?12 My father had the same anguish. The sonorous, dialectal, incomprehensible Yiddish he spoke with his uncle and aunt returned from America seemed to have lost all echo, just as the characters of The Fearless Vampire Killers had lost their reflection. A world vanished into smoke, he said.
What does A Serious Man bring that is not in Herzog or in Crimes and Misdemeanors? But every great work speaks for a very precise present at the same time as it exceeds it, forward and backward. A Serious Man is like an up to date state of American Ashkenazi consciousness; one would have to compare it in this respect to Radio Days. Here and there one is in an American Jewish family, the surrounding society envelops it and penetrates it on all sides; at the same time the origin does not dilute itself there, even communism there has a Jewish color;13 completely carried off by the radiophonic flow, Woody Allen’s characters observe Yom Kippur in their own way, those of the Coen brothers have their rabbis, their schools, their synagogue where the boy becomes bar mitzvah. On divine justice, the innocence of the executioners, the guilt of the victims, the fragility of Jewish existence, what have the American rabbis to say today? What meaning can this bar mitzvah ceremony have, which puts God at the center of all of life, as in the old days, in Poland, before the Shoah? The rabbis of the new generation no longer even understand Hebrew words as essential as get or aguna.14
Notes
Mendel Osherovitsh, Shtet un shtetelekh fun ukrayne (Cities and Towns of Ukraine), volume 1, N.Y. 1948. This book presents itself as a commented circuit of Ukrainian Judaism, with here and there personal recollections of the author (1884 Trostyanets, Podolia — 1965 New York).↩︎
Barukh hashem (Heb.): blessed be His name! Mashal, pl. meshalim: parable drawn from the Talmud or a commentary. Pasuk, pl. pesukim: biblical verse.↩︎
The Pletsl (Yiddish): the Jewish quarter of Paris, in the Marais.↩︎
Shmattès (Yiddish): rags, clothes (worn-out).↩︎
Yiddish: “Did you hear that, Maurice?”↩︎
Balebos (Yiddish): head of the family.↩︎
Nit gefloygn, nit geshtoygn (Yidd.): imaginary, made up.↩︎
Christian Jouhaud et al., op. cit.↩︎
See Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron, Les temps de la fin (The Times of the End), ed. Honoré Champion, Paris 2006, on messianic readings of History in Eastern Europe, whether the pogroms of Khmelnytsky or the civil war in Ukraine.↩︎
(Yiddish) in the land of origin, in Eastern Europe.↩︎
Whose name evokes the simpletons of Mendele or of Sholem Aleykhem.↩︎
See I. B. Singer, A Wedding in Brownsville and In the World of Chaos. I study this theme at length in a forthcoming book, Le prophète et son scribe (The Prophet and His Scribe). Singer took a great interest in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in occultism in general.↩︎
In another Coen brothers film, Barton Fink, one sees a young progressive American Jew engaged in Hollywood, committing himself to a producer, also Jewish, to write the screenplay of a boxing film.↩︎
Gopnik’s wife wants to obtain from him a get, a deed of divorce, in order to be able to remarry religiously; otherwise she is aguna.↩︎