The Brothers Ashkenazi: A Novel

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The conquest of Dinele, who becomes Diana as her husband becomes Max, partly explains the rivalry of the brothers. Dinele had hoped that the arranged marriage forced upon her by her wealthy Hasidic parents would yield her the romantic figure of Jacob Bunem as a husband rather than his obnoxious brother. Like many Polish girls, even from Hasidic households, Dinele had been sent to study at a secular Gymnasium, where she had been a great favorite of her Gentile friends, and she finds the ways of the Hasidic men, even her own father and brothers, boorish, degrading, and alarming.(I remember my own father telling me how this rift in the sensibilities of Jewish girls and boys, brought about by their very different educations, was creating societal difficulties in the Poland he had grown up in, the worldly girls turning up their noses at the relatively uncouth yeshiva boys their fathers chose for them.Ironically, it was precisely because, as girls, their education mattered so little that the comparatively affluent among them were shunted off to Gymnasia, the smattering of kultur meant to make them more marriageable.) Israel Joshua Singer’s Yiddish books are available through our Digital Library. Di Brider Ashkenazi was published in three volumes: one, two, three. A very powerful story has been seized upon by a very powerful story-teller...Singer has a stirring gift of narrative; he always writes with verve, sometimes with intensity; his book has magnitude and color and, as it were, a consciousness of its weighty theme.” The story of the two brothers helps only to outline the historical time: when the first Germans started to arrive in Poland bringing work, the huge Jewish community that was at first very orthodox but slowly started to change while changing the period. So, from one side we have the orthodox Jews, bound to customs and tradition, and the younger Jews that started to be more openminded. Singer è riuscito bene a render l’idea della chiusura del mondo ortodosso con delle figure femminili molto differenti tra loro ma accomunate da una condizione che le rende prigioniere del ruolo di genere a loro assegnato.

At the contrary, Israel Joshua Singer (formerly a journalist) was very aware of the importance of politics and economics - intertwined with history and religion - in shaping the mentality of his characters. Quali medicine avrebbero potuto sanare una vita sprecata e mal spesa? In che cosa poteva trovar rifugio per consolarsi di un completo fallimento?" Shtol un Ayzn (1927); translated into English as Blood Harvest (1935) [1] and as Steel and Iron (1969)The Brothers Ashkenazi is breathtaking -- in scope, pace, and characterization -- from the start when German refugees of the Napoleonic wars (not Jews, Germans) settled in Lodz, through the Industrial Revolution, the rise of unionism and socialism, economic ups and downs, the German occupation during the first World War, the Russian Revolution, and the outburst of extremely virulent and violent anti-Semitism after the war that had rarely occurred prior to then. Thanks to his skills (and the grit coming from being born with clear physical disadvantages, especially when compared to his tall, strong and handsome twin brother) , Max manages to go very far as he lives through industrialization, socialism, and all the turmoil of the turn of the century. There are three main characters in Brothers: twins Simha Meir and Jacob, and the city of Lodz. Simha and Jacob are a kind of Cain and Able in the story and Lodz is the catalyst for constant change. From birth Simha is clever and grasping. A boy with a businessman's brain and a conman's heart. Jacob is handsome and popular but a bit dim and unfocused compared to his brother. Their father is a hard working and deeply religious man. He lives his life for God and his Rabbi. His only wish is for his sons to value piety over prosperity but the family fortune mirrors the secular fortunes of Lodz. I don't think it's a coincidence that I.B. Singer's first published novel ('Satan in Goray') is set in 17th century Poland and revolves around religion while I.J. Singer's debut ('Steel and Iron') is set in 20th century Russia and very political.

The scenes where Nissan and Max collide are among the best in the book. Nissan is the only person who can honestly tell Max where to get off. Even when Max talks sense about the economic realities of capitalism (e.g. the profit motive as a driver of innovation and investment), Nissan knows just how to reject him. When Max tries to make nice to Nissan (in his own self-interest, of course), Nissan's rejoinder is devastating in its directness and simplicity. There is an interesting epilog about the two brothers – how the elder helped the younger, lending him a guiding hand into the writing career. The older being more politically oriented the youger more religious. It is all but required, when introducing the Yiddish writer Israel Joshua Singer, to identify him as the older brother of the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. It was, of course the younger Singer brother who would go on to garner the first and only Nobel Prize awarded to a Yiddish writer (a record not likely to be broken). The reputational asymmetry between the brothers Singer is more than a little ironic: while they lived, it was Israel Joshua (1893-1944) who was famous, while Isaac (1902-1991) languished darkly in his internal contradictions and his older brother’s shadow.The irony is heightened when the occasion for the introduction is the welcome reissue of I. J. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi. This business of choice and will is at the heart of this complex novel. A tyranny of determinism pushes the characters along, excising the possibility of autonomy, even at those moments when the characters seem to be most forcefully asserting themselves as free agents.This determinism issues both from innate character, announcing itself from the moment of birth—the twins emerge from the womb crying in voices that prophesize their contrasting personalities—and from the larger historical forces relentlessly at work.Simha Meir, in particular, drawing from inexhaustible reserves of ingenuity and drive, serves only to demonstrate, by the very indefatigability of his exertions, the awful fatality and futility of human efforts in a world so thoroughly deformed by injustice–which he is eager to turn to his advantage. The brothers Ashkenazi" is the story of two twin brothers and of the Jewish community where they were born, in the Polish city of Lodz at the end of 19th century. The plot follows a huge cast of characters, but mainly the fiercely intelligent Simca Meier (later called Max), who in his greed and ruthlessness could very well have been painted as "the bad guy" in a lesser novel, while in the hands of Israel Singer he becomes a fully-fleshed and extremely real human being, with darkness and light, who tries to live his life as best as he can despite his weaknesses and addictions.

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But still, there's something missing in what Isaac Bashevis left us: insight. Which stands for the capacity to pinpoint and - to some extent - foresee some of the causes leading to the effects he wrote about. Dramatic change has hit Łódź. As in other cities of the period, the industrial renaissance threatens the traditional shtetl life of its Jewish inhabitants. Uncertainty and threats from secularization, capitalism, greed and other ‘European' influences are brought to the city. From the start, The Brothers Ashkenazi is really about how society copes during overwhelming tensions created by an ever-changing historical tide, one that Singer's Jewish characters in particular are suffocated by:

Odiando il padre, odiava anche tutto ciò che il padre teneva per sacro: i libri, le leggi, le usanze, il rituale, il concetto stesso di ebraismo, che il padre aveva trasformato in un tormento da cui non v’era scampo, tanti erano i comandamenti e le proibizioni, le preghiere e le adorazioni. Odiava il Dio di suo padre, un Dio selvaggiamente vendicativo, che esigeva da un uomo sacrifici insensati, inflessibile adorazione, digiuni, prostrazioni, lodi sviscerate, un’aspra disciplina e una divozione senza fine, senza pause né remissioni. Questo era il Dio nel cui nome e per amor del quale sua madre e le sue sorelle andavano in giro vestite di cenci, la sua casa era tetra e dilapidata, il suo gabbano da pochi soldi tutto costellato di toppe.” As waves of industrialism and capitalism flood the city, the brothers and their families are torn apart by the clashing impulses of old piety and new skepticism, traditional ways and burgeoning appetites, and the hatred that grows between faiths, citizens, and classes. Despite all attempts to control their destinies, the brothers are caught up by forces of history, love, and fate, which shape and, ultimately, break them.

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Dieci giorni fa ripongo il libro della Segal nello scaffale e subito di fianco c'è Singer. Siccome la sera prima avevo giusto rivisto – per la milionesima volta – Schindler's List, decido che è proprio quello di cui ho voglia: non tanto, o comunque non soltanto, leggere delle persecuzioni nei confronti degli ebrei nell'Europa orientale, ma leggere qualcosa ambientato un passo prima, un attimo prima che tutto inizi a precipitare (laddove "attimo" è da intendersi nel significato dal punto di vista della Storia, direi un "attimo" quasi geologico): sbirciare nella vita di quelle famiglie, nelle loro tradizioni e nei loro borghesi e a volte lussuosi appartamenti, prima che ne venissero scacciate con la forza e scaraventate nel ghetto, e quelle case dalle ampie stanze perfettamente arredate venissero occupate dagli ufficiali delle SS oppure da personaggi senza scrupoli come inizialmente era lo stesso Schindler (e qui si veda la scena con Liam Neeson che si corica vestito nel letto e dice "non poteva andare meglio"). I suoi calcoli erano stati abbastanza logici, ma a che cosa serve la logica in un mondo che ha perduto la testa? In mezzo ai mentecatti il sano di mente è uno scemo."

I.J. Singer was born in 1893 in Bilgoraj, Poland, where he received a traditional Jewish education before his family moved to Warsaw. There he studied painting and worked as a proofreader. He briefly moved to Moscow, where he was inspired by Soviet Yiddish writing. Disappointment with the political climate led Singer to return to Warsaw. He joined the Yiddish avant-garde movement, Di Khalyastre, and contributed to their journals. His writing caught the attention of Abraham Cahan, the editor of the Forverts. Singer became a correspondent for the Forverts, and travelled extensively on behalf of the paper before he settled in the United States. His mature family sagas ( The Brothers Ashkenazi and The Family Carnovsky) were both written in the United States, as was another novel, Khaver Nakhmen. A fuller biography, written by Anita Norich, is available from the YIVO Encyclopedia.The River Breaks Up, stories published by Alfred A. Knopf (1938); republished by Vanguard Press, NY (1966) Due to this reason, I believed that the famous I.B. rather than the forgotten I.J. was the one who modernised the Yiddish literature by elevating it to a cosmopolitan status and by letting it get an international appeal. After all, the literary standards set by I.B. Singer were so high that my assumption was reasonable enough. Well, I was wrong. Fun a velt vos iz nishto mer (English: Of a World That is No More (1946)). This was published posthumously, with an English translation published by Vanguard Press in 1971. Progressive politics also made a claim on Israel Joshua, who was by far the more politically engaged of the two brothers. In 1918 he left for Kiev, to witness for himself what he believed was the dawning of the age of political redemption, the secular Eden in which the proletarian brotherhood would eliminate a major proportion of the world’s injustices, most especially as experienced by European Jewry.He spent four years in Russia, growing ever more disgusted with the general level of savagery and, most excruciatingly, with the robust survival of anti-Semitism. He returned to Warsaw with a jaundiced attitude toward the revolution that would make life difficult for him among the left-wing thinkers in his milieu. Isaac got inoculated against the ideology by proxy, without having to go through the process of disillusionment firsthand, though one suspects that he would never have delivered himself over to such impersonally idealist strivings in the first place.He was, if anything, a conservative by temperament, and inveterately self-protective. Lettura scorrevole ed affatto faticosa, si incontrano tantissimi personaggi e tantissime situazioni, ma per il tempo necessario, mai una parola di troppo viene spesa, mai una descrizione si dilunga più dello stretto necessario, e questo senza perdita di efficacia. Le pennellate con cui Singer delinea i personaggi, le comparse pure , sono talmente azzeccate che ti pare di vedere un fotogramma.