The Other Great Yiddish Novelist Named I. Singer, and His Lesson for Our Time

No Yiddish writer is as well known to today’s English-reading public as Isaac Bashevis Singer, but his entrance into the Yiddish literary scene was preceded by that of his elder brother Israel Jacob Singer, whom Dara Horn and many others believe to have been the greater talent. In his 1935 novel The Brothers Ashkenazi, I.J. Singer tells the story of the titular twin brothers, Simcha Meyer and Jacob Bunim; the former is brilliant and ruthless, the latter dull but charming and handsome. At the book’s end, set in the aftermath of World War I, the brothers return from Russia to their native Poland, which has recently gained its independence. Horn finds in the final scene wisdom for the Jews of today:

Polish border police welcome them by forcing Simcha Meyer, at gunpoint, to perform what Polish Jews knew as a mayofes tants. This was a degrading song-and-dance routine, mocking a traditional Jewish melody that begins with the words mah yofis (“how beautiful,” describing the Sabbath), that non-Jews forced Jews to perform for their entertainment. It was a brand of humiliation common enough that it spawned a Yiddish expression, mayofes yid, a term akin to “Uncle Tom” among African Americans. When asked to debase himself this way, Simcha Meyer, goal-oriented to a fault, instantly complies. Jacob Bunim refuses, and is instantly shot dead.

This ending disturbed me when I first read the novel years ago, as it has surely disturbed all its readers since 1935. By invalidating 600 pages of storytelling via a two-bit hater’s whim, Singer essentially enacted on his readers what was already happening to Polish Jews, trapped well before the Holocaust in a society that refused them dignity.

But as I reread this novel in 2019, when anti-Semitic trolling of every variety has resurfaced for the first time in my personal memory, I was startled to find myself anticipating that ending with a profound sense of dread—not for Jacob Bunim’s death, but for the choice presented to the brothers, the demand for a demonstration of loyalty, the request that one participate in one’s own humiliation.

The starkness of the Ashkenazis’ lives, thankfully, remains utterly unfamiliar. But the most basic version of the brothers’ final choice surfaces each time one decides how to respond to that newly familiar and relentless trolling, in whatever form it takes.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Anti-Semitism, I.J. Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, 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