The Lost Daughters of Ukraine by Erin Litteken- 2023- 410 Pages

 The Lost Daughters of Ukraine by Erin Litteken- 2023- 410 Pages

This is the second marvelously done work of historical fictuon, set in Ukraine, by Erin Litteken I have had the pleasure of reading.

The Lost Daughters of Ukraine takes us into the World War Two and after years in the Ukraine. It tells a story of the barbaric treatment of people who just wanted to live in peace. The Ukraine was a battle ground for the Germans and the Russians.

The Germans begin to select Ukrainians, ultimately any healthy person over ten, for shipping to work camps. We see their anguish knowing the weapons they make will be used to kill other Ukrainians.

A person's ethnic background was of prime importance.

As the two sisters are driven from their home they are separated from their loved ones, trying to keep hope alive.

There are many exciting events. (The depiction of the bombing of Dresden, where they were living, reminded me of Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut)

This is the best treatment of life in a displaced person's camp I have ever read.

The ending is very gratifying. The characters are perfectly done.  

The Lost Daughters of Ukraine is included in The Kindle Unlimited Program.

note from the author

"It’s been one year since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In that time, countless war crimes have been committed. Throughout it all, the world has witnessed the strength and tenacity of Ukrainians battling for their right to exist. But Ukraine’s earth is soaked in the blood of generations of its brave defenders.

The Lost Daughters of Ukraine — combines history, fiction, and my own family’s experiences in Ukraine and as refugees to create the story of a family ripped apart by World War II. I’m honored to share this deeply personal novel with you, but I am, sadly, once again releasing a book about a past attack on Ukraine during the current invasion.

Keep Ukraine in your hearts. Listen to and elevate the voices of people living through this horror. Learn about their culture and the tragic and beautiful parts of their history to understand why they fight so valiantly for their country. And please continue to support Ukraine in every way you can.

Slava Ukrayini!

Erin"

The Lost Daughters of Ukraine is a great edition to World War Two literature. Litteken provides a list of non-fiction works on the war in Ukraine for which I am grateful.

Mel Ulm

War Diary by Yevgenia Beloruset - 2022- translated from the German by Gregg Nissan 2023

 War Diary by Yevgenia Beloruset - 2022- translated from the German by Gregg Nissan 2023

The Publisher of The War Diary, Pushkin Press, elegantly offers an explication of this deeply moving memoir of the first 41 days of Russia's attack on The Ukraine.

"The young artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets was in her hometown of Kyiv when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began on the morning of February 24, 2022. For her and millions of Ukrainians, reality changed overnight. With urgency and clarity, she set out to document the devastation and its effects on the ordinary residents of Ukraine: the relentless presence of sirens and gunfire; moments of intense connection and solidarity with strangers; the struggle to make sense of a good mood on a spring day.

Published in the German newspaper Der Spiegel and then translated and released each day online by ISOLARII with Artforum, War Diary had an immediate impact worldwide. Issued here with a new preface and later entries by the author, it is a powerfully lucid account of the surreal reality of life in a country under siege." Pushkin Press

Over the past ten years or so I have posted upon a number of authors originally from what is now known as the Ukraine. These include Gogol, Clarice Lispector and Josepth Roth as well as Yiddish Language authors. All of them left the Ukraine as soon as they could, most to escape pervasive Anti-Semitic pograms. Of course they are long since deceased. 

Early this month I posted upon my first reading of a work by a contemporary Ukrainian writer,Sweet Darusya:A Tale of Two Villages by Maria Matios -2003- 159 pages- translated from the Ukrainian by Michael M. Naylan and Tytarenko-2016.  

Prompted by the News of Russian war crimes in the Ukraine, I have begun seeking out works by contemporary Ukrainian writers. War Diary by Yevgenia Beloruset reminded me somehow of Elizabeth Bowen's memoirs of London during the Blitz as well as Irene Némirovsky works on Paris during the war. Kyiv like London and Paris is an ancient near holy city to those who love it. I saw how through the Reflections of Yevgenia Beloruset that the deliberate destruction of buildings 100s of years old, with no military utility, was on a par with the destruction of ancient statues of the Budda by Isis, a crime against humanity.

I will just remark on some of the things that deeply reverberated with me. The author saw as her mission to photograph the destruction in the Ukraine. To do this she had to leave her apartment and walk through the streets with her camera. People talked to each other, often wondering why others were staying. Some took care of handicapped family who could not easily be moved. One Woman had six cats she refused to abandon. Others stayed to help their neighbours or just had no where to which to evacuate. Some food store owners stayed open giving away food to those without money. One wonderful lady made it her job to feed abandoned pets.

 Young Russian soldiers broke into apartments looking for liquor to steal. Children and old people were shot for sport. Everyday the death toll builds up. A numbness develops in some.

Some of the people the author encounters are highly educated, elegantly dressed others are poor pensioners. Many just refused to leave the Ukraine. Wherever she walks she begins to see bodies. She tells us what it was like living in an apartment house, with blackout curtains, wondering if you should seek shelter in a basement.  

Of course the war still persists long after War Diary ends.

"Yevgenia Belorusets is a Ukrainian artist, writer, and photographer born in Kyiv in 1980. In her works, she calls attention to the most vulnerable sections of Ukrainian society.

Yevgenia is co-founder of the journal Prostory, member of the interdisciplinary curatorial collective Hudrada, author of the photo series Victories of the Defeated and books Lucky Breaks (International Literature Award by Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2020), Series of Lectures on the Modern Life of Animals and Anfang des Krieges (Horst Bingel Prize for Literature 2022). Twice her work was presented in the Ukrainian program at the Venice Biennale — in 2015 with Victories of the Defeated and in 2022 with A Wartime Diary. 

Her works meet at the intersection of visual art, literature, journalism, and activism making a solid connection between document and artistic language. The most recent work is a multidisciplinary exhibition Nebenan / Close by taking place in German Bundestag" from Belorusets.com

https://www.dw.com/en/most-stayed-ukrainian-artist-yevgenia-belorusets-in-kyiv/a-60987270  

a very informative interview with the author

Mel Ulm

Sweet Darusya:A Tale of Two Villages by Maria Matios -2003- 159 pages- translated from the Ukrainian by Michael M. Naylan and Tytarenko-2016

 Sweet Darusya:A Tale of Two Villages by Maria Matios -2003- 159 pages- translated from the Ukrainian by Michael M. Naylan and Tytarenko-2016

Over the past ten years or so I have posted upon a number of authors originally from what is now known as the Ukraine. These include Gogol, Clarice Lispector and Josepth Roth as well as Yiddish Language authors. All of them left the Ukraine as soon as they could, most to escape pervasive Anti-Semitic pograms. Of course they are long since deceased. Today I will post upon an author many consider the best contemporary Ukrainian author,Maria Matios, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament since 2012.

The Guardian has a very insightful and elegant post on this work. I suggest those considering buying it, which I personally strongly endorse for anyone wanting to get into post independence Ukrainian literature, read The Guardian's review. I will just make a few observations on what struck me.

The linchpin character is Darusya, she is a deaf mute, a holy fool.In the Eastern Slavic tradition holy fools are considered to be touched by God and sacred. Their seeming insanity is a mask in the world of human beings where they must dwell, while they are believed to be privy to higher truths in the spiritual realm. Darusya is also part dervish with her penchant for dancing alone in a circular motion in her need to escape the world of reality that causes her pain. Much of the plot turns on her involvement with men.The story line proceeds backwards in time, starting in the early 1960s and going back to the World War Two period.

The setting is Bukovina (sometimes rendered as Bukovyna).Most of the action in the novel occurs in two neighboring villages called Cheremoshne in the mysterious Carpathian Mountains on opposite sides of the Cheremosh River. Educated Ukrainian readers would be familiar with the complex history of this region. My understanding of the events and attitudes depicted in the novel were greatly enhanced by an article in The Internet Enclopedia of the Ukraine. The region then as now is divided between Romania and the Ukraine. The residents have little sense of political identity other than to their villages. Jews and Roma were quite common before the Germans entered the area. We see them being deported.  

 A fascinating view of the reliance of people on magic thinking emerges. If your cow will not give milk or a woman is baren it is from a curse. In the prevailing ethos, if a woman is raped she is either denigrated as a whore or her husband has come home drunk. No one has any education beyond minimal literacy. They cannot really speak with Germans or Russians. They speak their own dialect.

When the Soviets invade, we see the impact of their imposition of collective farming on the residents. Petty Government officials of all sorts are looking for bribes, exhorting sex for food for resident's families. Both the Germans and the Russians engage in horrifying torture to find out where partisans are hiding. Then the partisans show up at your door demand food or torture you to see if you gave out any information on them.

"Sweet Darusya” (Solodka Darusya) was awarded the Ukrainian Book of the Year Award in 2004, and in 2005 Ms. Matios received the Taras Shevchenko Prize for the novel, the highest national literary honor in Ukraine. Prior to this English translation, “Sweet Darusya” appeared in eight other languages, including German, Italian and French. It is being made into a feature film in Ukraine.

Ms. Matios, a native of the Bukovyna region of Ukraine, lives in Kyiv, where she continues to write. She is the author of 19 volumes of fiction and poetry. Since 2012, she has been a national deputy in the Ukrainian Parliament." From the Ukrainian Weekly 

 https://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/internationally-acclaimed-ukrainian-novel-now-available-in-english-translation/

I hope she is safe.

Mel u

"The Jewish Regime" by Lamed Shapiro (1919, translated by Heather Valencia)

Yesterday the Chief Rabbi in the city of Kiev in the Ukraine advised the Jewish residents of the area to be prepared to have to leave their homes and flee the area to avoid directed mob violence against them.   Acts of Atrocity have been reported by the BBC and CNN.   I think somewhere Lamed Shapiro said "never again".

Lately I have been read short stories by Lamed Shapiro some of which center on the pogroms against Jews carried out in the area of Kiev, Shapiro's home until he emigrated to the USA. Short stories like "The Cross" and "The Kiss" take us inside pogroms and let us see the terrible violence against Jews.  In one sustained pogrom, over 200,000 people were killed.  The Cossacks were the arm of the government, the conservatives. 

"The Jewish Regime", sometimes translated as "The Jewish Government"  is a story that almost is a prophecy of what might happen again in the Kiev area.  As the story opens more and more violence by Gentiles is wrought on Jews.  Many Gentiles use it as an excuse to steal, some take delight in killing.  Then the Cossacks arrive and the Jews of Kiev are ordered to leave the city. Many are packed in railroad cars, thousands take to the road carrying what they can. Cossacks whip or use their sabers on stragglers.  It is unclear, of course, who gave the direct order to the Cossacks, that way the Tsarist authorities can always deny involvement.  

"The Jewish Regime" is very vivid description of the horrors of anti-Semitic violence in the Ukraine in the opening decades of the last century.

Let us hope no one ever needs to right a similar story about Kiev in this century.  

Mel u

Motl, the Cantor's Son by Sholem Aleichem (1907, translated by Hillel Hinkin)

Sholem Aleichem (1859 to 1916, Ukraine) is, through his creation of the character Trevor the Dairyman on whom Fiddler's Roof is based, by far the best known of writes from the Yiddish literary tradition.  I loved his epistolary novel The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl.  These letters between husband and wife are just flat out hilarious and provide a wonderful look at life in Eastern Europe and Yiddish culture.  Included with this work by Yale University Press is a first person account coming of age story of a young man, Motl, The Cantor's Son, the son of a recently deceased cantor (a singer of traditional songs) and his family.  It starts in the Ukraine and ends in New York City after the family passes through what the narrator keeps calling "Ella's Island".  

Aleichem starts with a child's view of Yiddish life.  We see the families struggle to survive, their relationships with their neighbors, Jewish and Christian, the family relationships, the growing maturity of the narrator, and have a lot of fun along the way.  About half way through, the family begins preparations to go to the promised land, America.  We see their difficulties in securing tickets (there were also sorts of scammers ready to prey on those hopeful to move to America) and we are along on the ten day voyage to the holiest of cities where the streets are paved with gold, no one goes hungry, and there are no Cossacks or secret police.  Everyone knows of someone who went to America with nothing and now is rich.  The biggest fear the family has is that the mother will not pass the physical at Ellis Island.  

Once in America, the younger family members soon master street English, play stick ball and are experts in dealing with the new challenges and opportunities New York City provides.  Aleichem lets us see the development of a hybrid argot combining  the slang of the tenements of New York City and Yiddish.  You can see the narrator is forgetting to a large extent his Yiddish heritage as he becomes more and more Americanized. 

This book was a great pleasure to read.  

I thank Yale University Press for a very generous gift of books.

"White Challah" by Lamed Shapiro (1919, translated by Norbert Guterman)

The short stories of Lamed Shapiro (see my prior posts on his work for background information) are among the most powerful I have ever read.  They provide a vivid, at times horrifying look at the hatred and mindless cruelty with which Jewish people were treated in the Ukraine in the first decades of the 20th century.  Horrible vicious pathological anti-Jewish tendencies in the European psyche hardly originated with the Nazis.  Shapiro's stories about the pogroms of Russia are terribly violent, deeply felt works.   If I taught a course on the short story I would assign his most famous story "The Cross" as part of the required readings.  I urge all those who dismiss the short story as "trivial" to read his stories.  

"The White Challah", named for a traditional served on religious holidays bread of Eastern European Jews, is told from the point of a young man drafted to fight in an army in Russia.  Maybe it was the army of the Czar, maybe the communists.  He does not seem to really know.  To him all of the troubles of Russia, the only world he knows, are caused by the Jews.  He repeats over and over that the Jews deserve any cruelty done to them because they sold Christ.   He repeats this over and over.

Conditions in the army are terrible.  He endures trench warfare, sadistic officers, dehumanizing violence, near starvation and through it out he and almost all his fellow soldiers blame the Jews.

Shapiro does as good a job of showing the horrors of war from the point of view of the foot soldier as any author I have read.  Anyone who sees glory in wars needs to read this story.  There is so much in this story.  In one incredible scene, the starving soldier breaks into the house of a Yiddish family.  He demands food, but he cannot speak their language.  He sees a loaf of white challah and he marvels at its wonderful taste.  The encounter ends in an act of unspeakable cruelty in which we see how the war had transformed a young country boy into a vicious animal.  Under the surface, we see how the rulers of the culture use Jews as a way to hide their own greed and failures and focus the hatred of their citizens away from them. 

"The Man and His Servant" by Lamed Shapiro (1910, ten pages, translated by Heather Valencia)

Lamed Shapiro (there is background information on him in my prior posts) is one of the great short story writers of the early 20th century.  He is a superb chronicler of Yiddish culture, both in the Ukraine 

and in New York City.  He was born in the Ukraine and died in Los Angeles, California.  There is great pain in his stories, a hatred of senseless ignorant violence.  "The Cross", about a pogrom in the Ukraine, is his most famous story.  His "The Kiss" is a terrible, harsh story, stark in its violence and hatred.  You won't easily forget these stories.

"The Man and his Servant" is set, I believe based on details, in the Central Park area of New York City. It is more of a "modern" story than the two I mentioned.  No one speaks, there is little plotting, and we are left with a difficult question when we try to understand the ending.  A man is being rolled through the park by his servant, the man is very old, his servant is a young blond man.  They almost never talk, the man just gives a barely perceptible nod in the direction he wants to go.  The park is full of lovers, cavorting in the bushes in various combinations (Lamed was pretty explicit about sex for 1910).  A young woman sees him and says he a disgusting old wreck of a man.  They approach a canon, from it seems The American Revolution.  The old man begins to think, maybe of a different canon in another place.

  

Please share your favorite Yiddish works with us.

Mel u

"The Kiss" by Lamed Shapiro (1907)

Lamed Shapiro (born 1878 in the Ukraine, died 1948 in Los Angeles, California) is best now know for his short stories dealing with the violence and cruelty of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine.  I have previously posted on the most famous of Shapiro's pogrom stories, "The Cross" and on two other of his short stories, "At Sea" and "New Yorkish".  This morning I read another of his pogrom stories, "The Kiss" (translated by Jeremy Dauber).

As this story opens Reb Shakhne has just left his store, not even locking it up, to run home to check on his family as a pogrom had just begun.  His wife and children are not there, he prays they have found a safe place to hide. 

A group of young toughs charges into his house and begin to smash up everything they don't want to steal.  Among them is the son of one of his old employees.  Shakhne pleads for mercy but the son initiates terrible violence on him.  The thug tells him if he will remove his shoes and kiss his feet he will call off the attack.  Shakhne instead savagely bites the man's foot.  The resulting violence is horrific and graphically described.

They depart smashing every thing in the house they don't want to take with them.

"The Kiss" is a harsh, vivid account of the terrible cruelty toward Jewish people in the Ukraine in the first decade of the 20th century.  

I offer my thanks to Yale University Press for a very generous gift of books.  Yiddish literature is a world class literary treasure of the highest level.  

There is some background information on Shapiro and Yiddish literature in my prior posts on his work.

Please share your experience with Yiddish literature with us.

Mel u

 

The End of Everything by David Bergelson (1913) The Reading Life Yale Yiddish Project

The End of Everything by David Bergelson (1913) is considered one of the masterworks of Yiddish literature.   It centers on the lives of newly rich Russian Jews trying to preserve their cultural identity in a country in great turmoil, Tsarist Russia.  Bergelson's title is itself a chilling prophecy of what was to happen to most of the people the novel is about.  

The central character is Mirel Hurvits, a beautiful educated woman who tries to rebel against an arranged marriage while staying within the confines of her culture.  The novel goes deeply into social and marriage customs, economic realities, family life and sex roles of the period.   Mirel is more or less forced by her parents into a marriage of convenience to a man that revolts her.  We see her disintegration as the story line progresses.

This is a depressing and at times predictable storyline but it is essentially reading for anyone into Yiddish Literature or with an interest in Soviet Jews.   

From the web page of The Yale University Press

Originally published in 1913, When All Is Said and Done is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Considered David Bergelson’s masterpiece, it was written in Yiddish and until now has been unavailable in a complete and accurate English translation. This version by acclaimed translator Joseph Sherman finally brings the novel to a wide English-speaking audience.

 

Bergelson depicts the lives of upwardly mobile, self-aware nouveaux riche Jews in the waning years of the Russian Empire. The central character, Mirel Hurvits, is an educated, beautiful woman who embodies the conflict between tradition and progress, aristocracy and enterprise. A forced marriage of convenience results in Mirel’s emotional disintegration and provokes a confrontation with the expectations of her pious family and with Jewish tradition. In a unique prose style of unsurpassable range and beauty, Bergelson reduces language to its bare essentials, punctuated by silences that heighten the sense of alienation in the story.

A Russian Yiddish novelist and a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, David Bergelson (1884–1952) was one of the thirteen defendants at the infamous trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee held in Moscow in May 1952.   

I have decided to participate in The Russian Literature Challenge.  I am currently rereading  War and Peace and intend to read more Russian born Yiddish writers.  I have a collection of new translations of short stories by Tolstoy and also hope to get to that in 2014.  

The challenge is being hosted by Behold the Stars.  There are various degrees of commitment.  I hope to read at least six.

If you have any suggestions for Russian Yiddish writers, including Ukrainians, please let us know.

http://beholdthestars.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/russian-literature-2014.html

Mel u

The Dybbuk by S Ansky (1914). A Drama in Four Acts - The Yale Yiddish Literature Project

A very important work in the canon of Yiddish literature. 

This project was made possible by a generous gift from The Yale University Press.

S. Ansky (1863 to 1920, Ukraine) is one of the most famous of Yiddish language dramatist.  

In Jewish mythology, a dybbuk (Yiddish: דיבוק, from Hebrew adhere or cling) is a malicious possessing spirit believed to be the dislocated soul of deceased person.  S. Ansky dramatized just such a possession in his famous play, The Dybbuk.  (The play is considered the immediate cultural source for movies like The Exorcist.)  Normally a dybbuk will enter the soul of a living person because it is dissatisfied with the course of events after its (their) death and are seeking to bend the will of the living as the price for releasing the possessed individual.   This is exactly what happens in the play.  The Dybbuk deals with deep matters of the teachings in writings of the tradition of the Kabbalah.  There are speeches by learned Rabbis that go into great details concerning spirit possession and its remedies.  

A young Talmudic scholar has fallen madly in love with the daughter of a wealthy man who has another son of a rich man picked out for his daughter. There wedding had been promised long ago.    The man in love dies from shock.  The woman goes to the cemetery to invite her deceased mother to the wedding ceremony, set for that morning.  She stops by the grave of the man who died from love for her and somehow she leaves "changed".  At the wedding ceremony she shouts out when she sees the man she is to marry, "you are not my bridegroom" and refuses to marry him.   She returns the cemetery, where she had stopped at the grave of a murdered couple the night before, and is followed by many from the wedding party.  In a male voice she announces that that her true love has returned to claim her as his bride. The Rabbi says she has been possessed by a dybbuk.  The rest of the play deals with the various attempts to exorcise this malicious spirit from the woman.   

The Dybbuk was to me of greatest value for its incorporation of Yiddish lore and customs into the play. 

It will only take you at most two hours to read it and I am defiantly glad I did.  I would enjoy seeing it preformed but there is not a big demand for Yiddish drama where I live so I guess I probably won't.

There was a Polish Yiddish language movie based on the play released in 1939.  

There is some background information on Ansky and Yiddish literature in my post on his short story "Go Talk to a Goy".  I will, I hope, post on additional short stories in the beautifully done Yale Collection  of his works. 

Mel u

The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl by Sholem Aleichem (1905)

Sholem Aleichem (1859 to 1916, Ukraine) is by far, based on my limited knowledge, the most known to the wider world of Yiddish language writers.  His work is the basis for one of the most popular movies of all time Fiddler on the Roof.  I wish he would have lived to become hugely rich from the movie's success.  

The Letters of Menakhem - Mendel & Sheyne - Sheyndl , an epistolary novel, is my first exposure to the work of Sholem Aleichem.  The letters that make up the novel are between a man and wife in early 20th century Ukraine.   It is just so funny I laughed out loud as I read it.   The man has left home to make money to send home for the support of his long suffering wife and their many children.   The woman is a conservative stay at home grounded in folk wisdom and the family wife and mother where the husband is bolder and though he probably loves his wife, finds his home life a bit boring.  He ,tries six different occupations from stock broker, writer,real estate sales, loan factoring and insurance sales man to match maker.  He starts each new occupation with a letter to his wife saying how he was cheated in his previous occupation but the new venture he had undertaken will bring the family riches. His wife writes back, with each letter starting with a loving greeting, and tells him how terrible things are at home, how her mother tells her she married a fool, and how he is an idiot with a bloated ego.  As I read this I could not help but see myself getting letters like this had this been me and my wife.  I felt it  when she kept calling him "your highness".  I found the ending terribly sad.  

The Letters of Menakhem - Mendel & Sheyne - Sheyndl is only about 100 pages.  In addition to being Mel Brooks funny it gives a brilliant portrait of a marriage and a look at Jewish life in the Ukraine.  I am looking forward to reading soon Motl, The Cantor's Son, a much longer work.  The volume contains a very good introduction. 

Mel u 

"The Tales of Hershel Summerwind" by Itzik Manger. 1935

A very generous gift of books from Yale University Press is making this project possible.  

Yiddish, German, and Austro-Hungarian literature are interrelated in many complex ways.  In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt takes as one of her central themes the idea that modern totalitarian forms of government developed as a result of vicious anti-Semiticism. If she is right, then it was the development of Nazism partially as a hatred from European Jewish culture that ended up destroying Viennese culture that produced  so many great writers and murdered most of the original readers of Yiddish literature.  Stefan Zweig moved to Brazil to escape the destruction of the culture he loved and shortly afterwards he and his wife committed suicide.

Itzik Magner's life mirrors the movements of many other Jewish writers attempting to escape from their Nazi controlled homelands.   Magnar was born in Czernonitz in the Ukraine in 1901, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (as was Gregor Von Rezzori).  He moved to Warsaw in 1928 as it afforded him more publishing and theatrical opportunities for his dramas.  He was very successful but in 1938 to escape the Nazis he moved to Paris (as did Josesph Roth in 1933).  In 1940 he moved to London and became an English citizen.  In the mean time the Nazis burned all of works they could find and murdered a large percent of his readers.  In 1958 he moved to Isreal.  He was a tremendous success as a playwright there and when he died there in 1969 he was declared an Isreali National Poet with hundreds of mourners at his funeral.  Leonard Wolf's introduction to the Yale collection presents a marvelous portrait not just of Manger but of the era.

Leonard Wolf says under a surface simplicity Yiddish fiction and poetry is among the most complex and sophisticated in the world.  The authors were almost all very erudite, learned men (no female Yiddish writers of repute as far as I can see).  Manger intended to complete a book of ten short stories modeled on Bocaccio's Decameron.  He planned it to be told by Jews from ten different countries terrorized by the Nazis.  It was to be set in an undergroud bunger where they were all hiding out from the horrors of the Nazis.  Each person was going to tell the group a story to help pass the time.  Sadly he only competed two of the stories.  Wolf has thankfully included them both in the Yale Collection. One is "The Story of Hershell Summerwind" and the other is "The Story of the Nobleman's Mustach".  I shall post on both of these short stories and another unrelated story in the collection.  

Hershel Summerwind is eighteen.   His story draws on childhood memories and the very wide spread folk tale of a boy whose father remarries when the boy's  beloved mother dies.  The step mother treats him with great cruelly. His father wants him to "grow up".  The step-mother has a pet rooster who she thinks is the reincarnation of her first husband.  Hershel and the rooster hate each other and a lot of the fun of the story is seeing them battle it out.  On the day of his sister's wedding, his father sends him in a wagon to the father's best friend's house to get a barrel of twenty year old wine, a wedding gift.  Hershel has some great adventures and misadventures on this errand.  A flock of drunken birds takes him for a long flight in one hilarious segment.  This is a very good totally fun to read story.  

 

"The Legend of the Holy Drinker" by Joseph Roth 1939 - Roth's Final Fiction

Joseph Roth (1894 to 1939) - The Stages of a Life

Thirty days ago I had never heard of Joseph Roth.  After now having read five of his works I regard him as one of my favorite writers, it feels like I should have been rereading him from decades ago.  One of the very sad facts of The Reading Life is I know I will die never having even heard of 100s of wonderful writers.  I am just thankful on this Thanksgiving Day that Joseph  Roth is not among them.  

In the translator's after note to Three Novellas by Joseph Roth Michael Hoffman tells us that "The Legend of the Holy Drinker" was Roth's last work of fiction.   He knew he did not have long to live, he was terribly addicted to alcohol and living, as he did for many years, in a cheap hotel.  Hoffman tells us that Roth was at this point in his life writing at a frantic pace for money but he slowed down and took the last four of five months of his life to prefect "The Legend of the Holy Drinker".  Hoffman says Roth knew he was producing his final masterwork and took great pride in its construction. 

"The Legend of the Holy Drinker" is about the final days of a vagrant living in Paris under the bridges of the Seine.   He came to Paris long ago when he heard in his native Ukraine that France needed coal miners (I flashed to Germinal).  He worked for a while at this until he killed the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair.  When he emerged from two years in prison, a bit of a light sentence but maybe normal or maybe Roth is making a point about the value of life, he was a broken man.  He lived from what ever day work he could find.  One day a well dressed stranger approaches him and asks him if he needs money.  The Holy Drinker is not without integrity and he hesitates telling the man he can make no clear plans to pay him back.  The man tells him he too has had troubles.  All he asks is that if he ever has the two hundred francs to spare he gave him he is to give it to a priest at St. Teresa's Cathedral to aid the poor. This money changed the drinkers life. He did not become a saint.   He drank with it, he hired prostitutes from cheap bars (I admit I wondered if this story was partially autobiographical as it is clearly a scene Roth would have known well).  We follow along as his live changes and we are there when he dies.  I will leave much of the marvelous story untold.

There is deep wisdom and terrible sadness in "The Legend of the Holy Drinker".   Hoffman tells us Roth died from suicide by alcohol.

There is an excellent essay by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker that gives a very good overview of Roth's life and writings.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/01/19/040119crbo_books?printable=true¤tPage=all

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The Leviathan by Joseph Roth -1940- translated by Michael Hoffman in 2011)

When November began I had never heard of Joseph Roth (born 1894 in the Ukraine, died 1939).  Now after reading three of his works and learning what I could about his life I consider him one of my most cherished writers.  For sure I plan to read all of his work available in English in Kindle Format.  There is no biography of Roth available in English but there is very valuable and deeply felt remarks on him by his award winning translator Michael Hoffman to be found in some of the works he translated.  Roth life was dominated in the last decades by alcohol.  Hoffman and others call his death at 45 suicide by alcohol.   He lived the last 12 years of his life in near poverty in hotels.  He loved living in hotels.  He was partially supported for a number of years by Stefan Zweig.  Even when destitute, whenever he got any money, he gave much of it away to those less fortunate than himself.  He left his beloved Vienna the day the Austrians opted for unity with Nazi Germany and never returned.  He loved the cultural depth of Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was deeply hurt by its destruction.  

                 

           Mrs Joseph Roth

Leviathan, (to me it feels like a short story but it seems to be called a novella so I will accept that) seems to be his last published work of fiction, first coming out the year after he died.

Michael Hoffman says Leviathan is kind of a cross between a short story, a fable and a parable. He says it feels like something Tolstoy might have written.  

It is the story of a coral merchant deep in the interior of Russia in a small town beyond whose borders he had never traveled.    Coral was very desired as decorative jewelry and he cherished his corals thinking of himself as almost a great leviathan protecting them.  He longs to see the ocean and when a sailor from Odessa comes to town on a visit he befriends him and the sailor invites him to visit his ship. The merchant, Progrody Nissan is married, childless to his regret and no longer has much interest in his lost her looks wife.  He never cheats on her but he enjoys having 12 beautiful girls working for him in his coral shop.  He goes away for three weeks and a disaster occurs while he is gone. A merchant opens a shop in the neighboring town selling beautiful but artificial  coral at a price well below his offerings.  I want to leave it open for people to discover what happens in this work for themselves so I won't relate the fascinating and ultimately horrible events that follow.

 

"Elijah the Prophet" by Shalom Aleicham Project 196 Ukraine

"Elijah the Prophet" by Shalom Aleicham (1910 in translation 1922, 12 pages)

Project 196

Country 8 of 196

Ukraine
Shalom Aleichem

1. Georgia 
2. Canada
3. U. S. A.
4. The Republic of Korea
5. Antigua and Barbuda 
6. Haiti
7. Trinidad and Tobag 
8. Ukraine

f you are an author and want to represent your country, please contact me.  If you want to do a guest post on your favorite story for the feature please contact me also.  

If you are a publisher that has an anthology that is done in the 196 spirit, please contact me as I will be spotlighting appropriate collections.  

At first I thought I was setting myself an impossible task but a bit of research has made me optimistic  that I can find a short story from all 196 countries in the world.   I feel this part of the project will be completed.   In a much more challenging perhaps impossible project, I also want to publish on my blog a contemporary short story from an author from each of the 196 countries.  

Shalom Aleichem (pen name of Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich, Ukraine 1859 to 1916) is the most famous writer in Yiddish.  (Yiddish is started as a language in what is now Germany when elements of Hebrew and Aramaic were added to the German dialects of the time. It evolved into a trans-national language for Eastern European Jews).  He is most remembered now for his creation of a character on which the father in Fiddler in the Roof is based.    (There is a good article on his life and importance in Wikipedia)   He left the Ukraine to escape the pogroms directed against Jews but his huge body of work is devoted to cherishing and keeping alive the cultural traditions of the Jewish communities of the Ukraine and Russian.

Shalom Aleicham is very much an old fashioned story teller, his work contains no traces of modernism and it will probably be cherished long after many of the modern masters are relegated to academia.  "Elijah the Prophet" is based on the folklore of the Eastern European Jewish culture.  The story is told by the only son of a wealthy man-his parents had seven children but they all died so he is completely doted over and way overprotected, or at least he thinks so.   His father is a money changer, swapping the currency of one country for another.   The worse thing a boy can do is to fall asleep during Seder, a feast that marks the start of the holiday of Passover.   Children are told that if they fall asleep during Seder then Elijah the Prophet will come and take you away forever in a large bag he carries just for that purpose.  Our narrator does fall asleep and Elijah shows up just like the legends says he will.   The story ends in a very open ended way and the boy is left with a moral dilemma.

You can find this story and others by Shalom Aleicham at Project Gutenberg.  

The Ukraine, with a population of 45 million has a long history of being controlled by stronger neighbors.  The country has long been under the domination of Russia from which it declared independence in 1990.  During WWII there were vicious enthusiastically  supported by the Ukrainians extermination programs aimed at Jews and Roma.



I think Project 196 will next stop in West Africa, in the Cameroons.