Remembering a Soviet Author and His Paeans to the Lost Jewish World of Eastern Europe

Born in the Lithuanian shtetl of Jonava in 1929, the Jewish writer Grigory Kanovich spent most of his life in the Soviet Union, although he settled in Israel in 1993. He began his literary career in the 1950s, and kept writing until the end of his life, producing a series of memoiristic novels about his family, the Holocaust, and Lithuanian Jewry. Kanovich died on January 20. Elena Guritanu and Elie Petit consider his life and work:

Like Faulkner, Kanovich created his own imaginary territory, . . . populating it with characters from his own childhood—mainly ordinary Jews, but also Lithuanians, Poles, Belarussians, and Russians. Published in 2010, “Poor Rothschild,” [one of his final works], set in a shtetl, is a testament to a part of this world that unfolds in a dozen novels. Together they form an epic saga, haunted by the Shoah, dealing with the vicissitudes of East European Jewish history from the 19th century to the present day.

On the eve of the German breakthrough in Lithuania [in 1941], at only ten years old, Kanovich fled to Kazakhstan and the Ural Mountains where he spent several years with his parents. When Grigory Kanovich, the future author of the Lithuanian Jewish saga, returned to Vilnius, he was sixteen years old. Wilno [as it was called before World War II]—the Jerusalem of Lithuania which he had left in a hurry in 1939—took up all the more space in his adolescent imagination as it was nourished during those years of painful separation by the stories of his relatives and their memories; their uprooting gave it an air of legend.

But it is no longer the storytelling town of his childhood that he finds, following in his mother’s footsteps with fear. There is an absence. The ruins of a Jerusalem that hides under heaps of snow the tragedy of a murdered people. Kanovich will never cease to reconstitute the memory of these beings who disappeared in the earthquake of the Shoah, not to offer them a burial but to inspire them again with a breath of life and, with them, to rebuild with fiction the pre-war Lithuania and its Jerusalem.

Read more at K. Revue

More about: Holocaust, Jewish literature, Literature, Lithuania, Soviet Jewry

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