A Yiddish Masterpiece Uncovers the Lives of Ordinary Jews in the Soviet Union

In his own day, Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) was best known for his poetry; today he is known mostly to specialists. His literary masterpiece may be his novel The Zelmenyaners, written and published in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and lately available in an English translation by Hillel Halkin. The novel tells the story of a Jewish extended family living around a courtyard in a Belarusian city, and their experience of the Russian revolution and Soviet rule. Madeleine Cohen writes in her review:

The brilliance of Kulbak’s novel . . . is that it is not a simple or propagandistic satire of the older, counterrevolutionary, backward Jews corrected by their Bolshevik children. In fact, these children are the butt of Kulbak’s satire as often as their parents are. And much of the novel’s empathy is focused on what might be lost in this period of rapid change. The novel mourns old shadows dispelled by electricity at least as much as it celebrates, [for instance], an uncle’s late-in-life friendship with a non-Jewish potter he meets on a kolkhoz (collective farm). . . .

The happiness this uncle finds at the kolkhoz might be the only happy ending in the novel; one old Jew is able to adapt enough to find his place in the new world, minding chickens on a collective farm. But not even this will prove to be a lasting peace. While reading The Zelmenyaners, one must marvel at the fine line between Kulbak’s love for Jewish folkways and his engagement in a revolutionary project, whose promises were already starting to break. Just two years after Kulbak finished the novel, he was murdered in Stalin’s first wave of purges of minority cultural figures.

Read more at In Geveb

More about: Arts & Culture, Jewish literature, Joseph Stalin, Moyshe Kulbak, Soviet Jewry, Yiddish literature

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society