Deborah     by Esther Kreitman, Translated by Maurice Carr Original language: Yiddish Country: Poland   Published by David Paul Pub. Date: December 2004 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 384 pages Dimensions: 140x216 mm ISBN: 095405427X List Price: $31.00, £14.99 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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Perhaps the greatest literary family ever, the Singers of Bilgoray Poland, counting Nobel-winner Isaac Bashevis, elder brother Israel Joshua (who died young but after producing four of five great works) was rivalled in spread of family literary achievement perhaps only by the Mann family with novelist brothers Heinrich and Thomas, Thomas’ son Klaus (who wrote Mephisto) and daughter Monika. The other one of the Polish trio was Esther Kreitman née Singer who, although suffering from many of the ills and disadvantages that Jewish women of her generation bore in terms of expectations, education, the stress of choosing an artistic career over the expected minor feminine role etc., etc., produced her own distinctive literary contribution. After growing up in Poland and marrying into the Polish-Jewish community of Belgium, she settled in London and became one of the few major Yiddish writers to have lived at length in the UK. Her heart though seems to have been for ever in the rather alien (to us) world of klayn-shtelekh* Poland, a place according to the highly autobiographical Deborah beset with ‘everlasting loneliness and dreariness’ and from where she brings us a fascinating insider-anthropology view; on the tsadikkim or ‘wonder-workers’ of the Hasid tradition for instance ‘ridiculing in her quiet way the possibility of any man being holy by profession’. The novel starts in fact with a set-piece bit of ‘piety business’ (both ‘Big’ and ‘Little’ Mendel, keystones of the kelillah* are present) concerning a rabbinical beneficence, accompanied by the presence of a go-between furiously chalking ‘various sums on the table.’ Kreitman gives us a sense of family life lived in the intimacy (read oppressive claustrophobia) of a one-room cabin but, as the family leave for the town of Radzymir, they realize what a verdant pastorale they have been dwelling in, a verdance beautifully evoked by Kreitman up to and including country ways such as when their waggoneer Abbish ‘wiped the sweat off himself and off his horses with the same dirty piece of cloth’. Generally one of the pleasures of Deborah is fascinating domestic detail absent in the mostly male-written Yiddish repertoire. Although her father was a Rabbi Kreitman didn’t have much time for the religious establishment in its various Jewish forms. We encounter in some detail a gross red-faced Tsadik who is a sort of ‘spiritual skinflint’ who starves both his students at the yeshiva by giving them a soup that ‘grew thinner from mealtime to mealtime’ and the protagonist’s father by withholding his pay as teacher there. Reading this sort of thing one realises how little brother Isaac Bashevis, literary genius or not, sometimes sentimentalised the world of ‘Holy Jewish Poland’. In Deborah by contrast we find a fairly schematic but to-the-point enlightenment critique of traditional ways: ‘Some of the old students returned to the yeshiva. New ones were recruited, especially among young married men of the upper middle class, eager to escape the black looks of angry fathers-in-law, whose hospitality they enjoyed. Having been given wives at a very early age, in accordance with ancient tradition, and then carefully looked after until such time as they might be able to support themselves, when they came of age they often resisted strongly any attempts to be converted into responsible husbands, and large numbers of such young men flocked to the yeshiva...to continue their leisure...’ (86-87) For the many readers more familiar with the works of the male Singers it’s fascinating to read the intermittent portrait of the young Israel Yehoshua Singer (‘I.J.Singer’ brother of the Nobel-winning I.B.Singer), who here is shown as both spirited and secular. There is also a kind of ‘emotional background’ to the brothers’ work provided by Esther Kreitman, of the profound family divisions and feeling that resonates very strongly but perhaps less consciously in I.B.’s works, his own literary tensions between secular and spiritual seem to be prefigured here in the guileless spiritual enthusiasm of the father and the austere and disappointed mother Raizel who lives on her couch sardonically observing the world over the top of a book. Although both brothers became very successful writers sister Esther’s book (and in fact her life) is permeated by a general odour of poverty. Deborah is too poor to buy a hat so has to stay indoors for three weeks when the family move to Warsaw (which is characterised as ‘a thoroughly Jewish city, if ever there was one.’). Also in the capital ‘an old beggar woman might enter and burst into song like a nightingale. She would be followed by more beggars, who all warbled the same melancholy Yiddish songs. and only varied their chanted appeals for charity’. While Isaac Bashevis wrote famously about the life and mores of Yiddish authors kvetching and drinking tea in their club on Krochmalny Street, Esther has a more modest, ground-level viewpoint on the city, noting that on a holiday: ‘The unorthodox were heading for the magnificent Saxon Gardens, where a notice "JEWS WEARING GABERDINES AND DOGS NOT ADMITTED" barred the way for the others. Only the chosen subjects of the Czar could enter there.’ (169) Currently this book is being celebrated more and more as a Feminist, modernist classic, and for the university literary specialists it is indeed a discovery, good grist for their whirring mills, but a true work of literature is many things and Deborah’s main value for this reader is how it lifts another corner of the heavy curtain of forgetting that has fallen, from grief, from dislocation, from naked destruction on the rich, complex, fraught and rather glorious (considering the difficulties) national life of ‘Jewish Poland’. This new (2004) library-standard edition includes essays by Ilan Stavans and Anita Norich. *adj: ‘appertaining to a small Jewish town’ *yeshiva: a Jewish academy for youth to study Torah and Talmud *kellilah: a Jewish community (The eve of yom kippur) ‘in all its fearfulness’ and ‘The family had partaken of the ritual supper, drinking their fill of tea, soda water and tap water to tide them over the fast. And evening was coming on. Worshippers began to arrive with their praying shawls and prayer books, handkerchiefs and slippers, smelling salts and sins. Every man had his own bundle and every woman had hers...’ 183 (A lugubrious wintertime Warsaw) : ‘The strips of greenish wet light that came tumbling on to the pavements from the square windows of green-walled soda-fountain parlours, which now in the winter were given up for the sale of galoshes, only emphasised the general gloom.’ 227