The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  Other Press edition 2010

  Yiddish edition copyright I. J. Singer, 1937

  Copyright renewed Joseph Singer, 1965

  English translation copyright © Joseph Singer, 1980

  Originally published in Yiddish under the title Di brider Ashkenazi.

  This translation first published in the United States of America

  by Atheneum Publishers 1980

  Published by Penguin Books 1993

  Foreword copyright © 2010 Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the introduction by Irving Howe to The Brothers Ashkenazi by I. J. Singer Copyright © 1980 by Bantam, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PRINTED EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Singer, Israel Joshua, 1893–1944.

  [Brider Ashkenazi. English]

  The brothers Ashkenazi / I. J. Singer ; with a foreword by Rebecca Newberger

  Goldstein; and an introduction by Irving Howe; translated by Joseph Singer.—

  Other Press ed.

  p. cm.—(Originally published in Yiddish under the title Di brider Ashkenazi.)

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-402-3

  1. Jews—Poland—Fiction. 2. Jewish families—Poland—Fiction. 2. Brothers—

  Fiction. 4. Successful people—Family relationships—Fiction. 5. Lódz (Poland)—

  Fiction. I. Singer, Joseph. II. Title.

  PJ5129.S5B713 2010

  839′.0933—dc22 2010037520

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  Dedicated to

  the memory of my son

  YASHA

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Part I - Birth Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Part II - Chimneys in the Sky Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Part III - Cobwebs Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  About the Author

  Foreword

  REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN

  It is all but required, when introducing the Yiddish writer I(srael) J(oshua) Singer, to identify him as the older brother of the Yiddish writer I(saac) B(ashevis) 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 ever to be broken). The reputational asymmetry between the brothers Singer is more than a little ironic; while the two brothers lived, it was Israel Joshua (1893–1944) who was famous, while Isaac (1902–1991) languished darkly in his internal contradictions and 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.

  It had been Israel Joshua, a forceful and bold personality, who had been the trailblazer, preparing the way for the more passive and self-conscious Isaac. It was Israel Joshua who first broke, and more irrevocably than his brother, with the Orthodox insularity of the family—their father, mystical and impractical, a rabbi from a Hasidic line; their mother, the daughter of a non-Hasidic rabbi and the so-called rationalist of the couple. The contrasting flavors of their parents’ religiosity is amusingly caught in a story from I. B. Singer’s autobiographical In My Father’s Court. An alarmed woman brings two slaughtered geese to the father for poskening, the rabbinical decision-making that has the force of Jewish law. Though headless, the geese shriek when struck together. Can the rabbi decree them kosher, or are they possessed by unclean spirits? The father is ready to confer on the geese definitive proof of the supernatural, but the skeptical mother, probing deeper, reaches in and yanks out the windpipes of both birds, who then behave as dead geese do. “Father’s face turned white, calm, a little disappointed. He knew what had happened here: logic, cold logic, was again tearing down faith, mocking it, holding it up to ridicule and scorn.” Isaac, a child watching, longs that the geese will still shriek, “so loud that people in the street will hear and come running.”

  As the eldest boy, Israel Joshua was destined for the rabbinate, but he rebelled at the age of seventeen, precociously motivated by the ideas of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which aimed to turn Jews around from staring fixedly back at Babylonia, the era of the Talmud, and orient them instead so that they were facing Western civilization, while still retaining their essential identity as Jews. Israel Joshua, who severely interrogates so many presuppositions, does not question Jewish essentialism. For him, a Jew is essentially a Jew, not only in the eyes of the world, which characteristically manifests its perc
eptions in outbursts of barbarism, but in the core of his being, whether he wills it or not. I. J. Singer’s assimilation-aspiring characters betray their Jewish essence despite themselves, in telling details that are often among the most brilliant of the author’s characterological brushstrokes. So, for example, in The Brothers Ashkenazi, Max Ashkenazi, né Simha Meir Ashkenazi, tries to shed his Hasidic origins as he propels himself into bourgeois preeminence. Nevertheless “[t]he checked English suits he now favored in order to lend his figure dignity and elegance quickly assumed the shape of a Hasidic gabardine upon his stooped shoulders.” Likewise Nissan, the Lodz Communist agitator who is one of Simha Meir’s nemeses, and who, like him, is a former Talmudic prodigy who seeks to escape the claustrophobic confines represented by his father, cannot elude the Jewishness that seeps out of him. Nissan argues the finer points of Marxist doctrine with his finger twirling in the air, as boys bent over the Talmud do, and his messianism has only been displaced from one conception of improbable redemption to another.

  Israel Joshua’s Jewish essentialism coexisted with an utter distaste for the superstitions of religion, which remained pronounced and lifelong. Unlike Isaac, he would not have desired the shriek of dead geese. On the contrary, in his memoir, Of A World That Is No More, he wrote with self-revealing disgust of the “stench of religion” that hung heavily over his beginnings. Of the two brothers, Israel Joshua is the rationalist, his intellectual passions a testament to the urgency with which he left religion firmly behind. It was through him that the Haskalah reached Isaac, though its values never took so firm a hold on him as on Israel Joshua. For Isaac, the choice between the old ways and the new is often starkly rendered as a choice between innocent piety and antinomian licentiousness. Israel Joshua’s position was, if equally tormented, a good deal more complicated (which is not to say that it produced the finer fiction. Literary valuations are not measured in philosophical sophistications).

  Progressive politics also made a claim on Israel Joshua, who was by far the more politically engaged of the two brothers, and 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 when 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.

  Most importantly, it was Israel Joshua who paved the way for Isaac’s literary career. Israel Joshua published his first collection of short stories, “Pearls and Other Stories,” soon after his return to Warsaw, and quickly became a member of a group of avant-garde writers that was dubbed Di Khaliastre, or the Gang. Meanwhile Isaac had followed in his brother’s footsteps of dropping out of rabbinical seminary and had returned to live with his parents in the backwater Galician shtetl of Bilgoray, where his father had found a temporary position as rabbi. Isaac was giving desultory Hebrew lessons to village children, worrying about being conscripted into the army, so ready to give up that he almost accepted his parents’ plans to find him a bride with a father wealthy enough to ransom him out of the army (autobiographical details he uses in his short story “Three Encounters.” His stay in Bilgoray yielded him many literary gems). In the nick of time, Israel Joshua, who had become coeditor of the literary journal, Literasche Bletter, or Literary Pages, arranged for Isaac to come to Warsaw to be a proofreader. He even promised his brother publication, if his stories merited it.

  Israel Joshua’s brand of harshly unsentimental realism soon caught the attention of an influential figure across the ocean, Abraham Cahan, who was the editor of New York’s leading Yiddish newspaper, Forverts, or The Forward, which in those days had a circulation of more than a quarter of a million readers. Cahan hired Israel Joshua as his Warsaw correspondent, eventually sending him back to the Soviet Union to record his impressions, which were serialized in The Forward and published as a book, Nay-Rusland, or New Russia, in 1928. Singer’s sojourns had only confirmed the grim conclusions he had drawn of the Bolshevik paradise. Warsaw’s Jewish intelligentsia found his animadversions intolerable, which, in turn, so embittered him that he eventually accepted Cahan’s invitation to emigrate to New York, where he became a full-time senior staff member of The Forward, which listed heavily toward Socialism rather than Communism. By this time he had published another collection of short stories, On Alien Soil, which chronicled the viciousness of both the Red Army’s predations and the Jew-hatred endemic in Poland, as well as two novels, the second of which, Yoshe Kalb, focuses his unforgiving gaze on the corruptions at the heart of a Hasidic court. Israel Joshua was always the sort of writer whose literary fire was stoked as much by moral fury as by more tranquil aesthetic ideals, a novelist whose passionate stake in the moral progress of the world seethes beneath his sentences. Yoshe Kalb enjoyed a healthy success, both as a novel and in a theatrical adaptation mounted by the great Yiddish actor and impresario, Maurice Schwartz.

  Israel Joshua thus arrived in New York, in 1934, as having already established himself as a powerful voice in Yiddish literature. By the next year he had arranged to bring his younger brother over to New York, presenting him, on his arrival, with an old Yiddish typewriter on which I. B. Singer would write all his life, though it took him a while to get started on it. Of course, the true gift Israel Joshua had given Isaac, in facilitating his removal from Poland, was life itself. Their mother and younger brother, who was following through on the rabbinical path abandoned by the older brothers, died during the war.

  In I. B. Singer’s Lost in America, he describes the paralysis of will that gripped him in his first years as an immigrant. He lived a precarious existence, both practically and emotionally, writing the occasional piece for The Forward, assignments that, once again, his older brother had wangled for him. Isaac had written a superb book while still in Poland, Satan in Goray, set in a shtetl much like Bilgoray, though transposed to the seventeenth century—which, in the case of Bilgoray, made little difference. The novel, dramatizing the lawlessness that seizes followers of the false messiah Sabbatai Zvi, spins the stark dualism between Orthodox adherence and moral anarchy that I. B. Singer would continue to work to such brilliant effect in so much of his fiction. But Satan in Goray had not received its due, and he, the still-obscure author, had not even been presented with his author’s copies. In America, even more than in Warsaw, Isaac’s literary identity was largely defined in terms of “brother of,” and the effect on his writing voice was devastating, muting it to the point of extinction.

  Meanwhile Israel Joshua, though he had suffered the tragic loss of his eldest son, Yasha, continued to flourish creatively. The vast horizons of the New World suited him very well, and the first novel he published in America, The Brothers Ashkenazi, reflects the sense of expansiveness. Its ambition and range were unprecedented in Yiddish literature—how exhilaratingly impudent to pull even Czar Nicholas II into its pages, rendering his embarrassing inanities in the language of the despised Jews—and it called forth comparisons to Tolstoy. The critic Joseph Epstein has wittily described it as the greatest Russian novel ever written in Yiddish. Translated into English and published by Knopf in 1936, it went to the top of the New York Times best seller list, lingering there together with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. I. J. Singer’s reputation had reached its zenith, and fans began to fantasize that the committee in Stockholm might cast its gaze on this Yiddish writer, who had made good on the Haskalah’s dream of cross-pollinat
ion between Jewish and secular cultures.

  There was to be one more novel, The Family Carnovsky, tracing three generations of a Jewish family living in Berlin. The Carnovsky family originally hails from Lithuania. The father, David Carnovsky, is so ardent a devotee of the Haskalah that he must relocate in order to inhabit the city of Moses Mendelssohn, the spiritual father of the Haskalah (and, of course, the grandfather of composer Felix Mendelssohn). Singer presents each generation of the family defining themselves less as Jews and more as Germans, an evolution that replicates not only the history of the Mendelssohns but also of countless other German-Jewish families. It is a subtle and complicated work, one which, like The Brothers Ashkenazi, is long overdue for reappraisal. Some have charged that it appears, appallingly, to blame the German Jews for the disaster that befell them, the Nazi vengeance meted out as a punishment for assimilationist excesses, but this is, quite frankly, an absurd misreading. Granted it was written in the early forties, before the full facts of the unthinkable were in, but the work is, if anything, a prescient deconstruction of the myth of race as it defines the stereotype of the Jew. The novel was published in 1943, with Maurice Schwartz once again producing an adaptation for the stage. And then, in 1944, Israel Joshua was dead, the victim of a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-one. Of A World That Is No More, which had been running in installments in The Forward, was published posthumously.

  And with the death of the elder brother, the mysterious languor that had held the younger’s literary talent in thrall was suddenly, miraculously, dispelled. Isaac was launched into a period of spectacular productivity that persisted unbroken until almost the very end of his four score and eight. In fact, since some of his works, first appearing in Yiddish, were only posthumously published in their English translations, some joked that I. B. Singer was more prolific in death than are many breathing authors.

  The first book to emerge was The Family Moskat, first serialized—as I. J. Singer’s books had been—in The Forward and then published as a Yiddish book in 1945. Its English translation came out in 1950 and was enthusiastically received. By 1950, of course, the completeness of the destruction of European Jewry was on the record, and I. B. Singer’s novel was read—as, to a certain extent, the remainder of his career would be—through the lenses of that enormity. Richard Plant, reviewing The Family Moskat in the New York Times, wrote, “The scene he depicts is gone forever, and his novel may well be one of its monuments. Still, the novel, reminiscent of Turgenev and Balzac, stands because of its narrative qualities, its completely credible characters, its throbbing vitality.” Thomas Mann was also frequently cited as a literary forebear, and all this is true, even though the most salient literary presence is profoundly obvious. The Family Moskat is in such close literary dialogue with The Brothers Ashkenazi that, as the late I. B. Singer scholar and translator, Joseph Sherman, wrote in a tribute to I. B. Singer published in the journal Midstream, you must compare the two books closely “to see exactly what he is doing.” Sherman’s tribute underscores that way in which I. B. Singer, in carving out his unique standing as a Yiddish writer in world literature, would systematically minimize his indebtedness to the Yiddish tradition out of which he had arisen, issuing many statements emphasizing “the provincial and backward” writing of all Yiddish writers who had come before him, the sentimentality that precluded genuine artistry. “He got away with his facile disparagements,” Joseph Sherman writes, “because he was speaking to English readers who generally knew little about the Yiddish language and less about its literature.”