The Brothers Ashkenazi: A Novel

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Shtol un Ayzn (1927); translated into English as Blood Harvest (1935) [1] and as Steel and Iron (1969) The Brothers Ashkenazi presages the Holocaust without knowing that it was about to happen. But more importantly, it is a complete examination of what life was like for Jews in Lodz without being tempered in its honesty by the subsequent advent of the Lodz Ghetto and its brutal dissolution by the Nazis (my father was forced into the Lodz Ghetto as a teenager, then deported to Auschwitz). Questo sarebbe il titolo che darei alla fine a quest’opera che non avrei mai immaginato mi riuscisse a prendere e a far riflettere tanto. Partiamo negli anni in cui la rivoluzione industriale portava al fiorire delle fabbriche tessili e ne seguiamo l’evoluzione con i telai a vapore che vanno a soppiantare i metodi produttivi obsoleti, guardando da spettatori ciò che questo comportava per le famiglie di operai, costretti a turni sfiancanti ma comunque sempre più poveri e affamati perché non adeguatamente ricompensati, e gli effetti della miseria in cui erano costretti a vivere. This predicament is at the center of Joshua’s The Brothers Ashkenazi and The Family Carnovsky and of Bashevis’s The Family Moskat and The Manor (first published in English in two volumes as The Manor and The Estate), all of which describe the breakup of traditional Jewish family life over several generations as it falls under the influence of modern ideas. The difference, as Sinclair and others have pointed out, is that Joshua is more interested in portraying the social and political milieu, and in characters who act out the drama of vast impersonal forces of history. Bashevis, more concerned with the individual’s internal dilemmas, depicts characters torn between Orthodoxy and what they regard as its only alternative, a life of sinful licentiousness. (Thus in Bashevis’s novel The Magician of Lublin, Yasha Mazur is literally and figuratively a tightrope walker, spanning both the Jewish and Gentile worlds; when finally forced to choose, he abandons his profligate ways and immures himself as a penitent, becoming a kind of holy man to visiting pilgrims.)

Though I.B Singer, in his later attempts to distinguish himself from all previous Yiddish writers, often derided their sentimentality, his brother’s work is so starkly unsentimental as to run the risk of contracting a deadly aesthetic chill. A masterful rendering of the sweep of history, animated by indignation at its senseless cruelties, is all well and good; but a novelist must also swoop down into the living vulnerabilities of his characters and tear out our hearts.A novelist knows what utopians often forget: that human tragedies, no matter their scope, are suffered one life at a time and their ultimate meaning is irreducibly singular.Jewish philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein used the occasion of the novel’s reissue to offer a more extensive meditation on the different political, religious, and cultural sensibilities embedded in the brothers’ fictions. She presents I.J. Singer as a “harshly unsentimental realis[t]” in contrast to Isaac Bashevis Singer, the nostalgic idealist, even suggesting that I.J.’s pessimism was the driving force behind his choice to immigrate to America (although she frames I.J.’s youthful political choices as naïve and idealistic). She also argues that The Brothers Ashkenazi’s thematic treatment of fraternal rivalry makes it ironic for scholars to compare the two brothers’ work. Well, first and foremost by being more modern and less tied to the traditional Jewish canons and models than his younger brother. Dramatic change has hit Łódź. As in other cities of the period, the industrial renaissance threatens the traditional shtetl life of its Jewish inhabitants. Uncertainty and threats from secularization, capitalism, greed and other ‘European' influences are brought to the city. From the start, The Brothers Ashkenazi is really about how society copes during overwhelming tensions created by an ever-changing historical tide, one that Singer's Jewish characters in particular are suffocated by:

The more one compares these two writers, the more one sees in each of them. From this perspective Clive Sinclair’s book has many useful things to say. It is especially good in the first chapter, which recounts the early life of the Singer family by collating the accounts of Bashevis and Joshua, in their respective memoirs, with the forgotten autobiographical novel by their sister Esther Kreitman, entitled Deborah. (Sinclair has recently written an introduction for a new English edition of this book.) The author elegantly traces the autobiographical roots of characters, situations, and themes in each of the brothers’ work, and in later chapters points to the abiding concerns of each by comparing telling details of their fiction.Un'intolleranza comune a tutti: tedeschi, polacchi, russi, quando non sanno con chi prendersela, utilizzano gli ebrei come capro espiatorio.

In the Polish city of Lodz, the Brothers Ashkenazi grew up very differently in talent and in temperament. Max, the firstborn, is fiercely intelligent and conniving, determined to succeed financially by any means necessary. Slower-witted Jacob is strong, handsome, and charming but without great purpose in life. While Max is driven by ambition and greed to be more successful than his brother, Jacob is drawn to easy living and decadence. The Brothers Ashkenazi is breathtaking -- in scope, pace, and characterization -- from the start when German refugees of the Napoleonic wars (not Jews, Germans) settled in Lodz, through the Industrial Revolution, the rise of unionism and socialism, economic ups and downs, the German occupation during the first World War, the Russian Revolution, and the outburst of extremely virulent and violent anti-Semitism after the war that had rarely occurred prior to then. Israel Joshua Singer’s Yiddish books are available through our Digital Library. Di Brider Ashkenazi was published in three volumes: one, two, three.Israel Joshua arrived in New York in 1934, already established as a powerful voice in Yiddish literature. By the following 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. Israel Joshua Singer has been the subject of numerous English scholarly articles. In 2006, Delphine Bechtel offered a comparative view of Singer’s representation of the Jews of Łódź in The Brothers Ashkenazi. The dilemmas faced by I.B. Singer's characters - who are often torn between faith and secularism, superstition and progress, Europe and the US - are all too clear but, in a way, bred in their bones not influenced by the times and the society they live in.

V’era una sola categoria che non aveva scampo, una categoria che non conosceva nessun trucco, non appiccava incendi, non dava bustarelle, non aveva nulla a cui votarsi: la categoria dei lavoratori. Non potevano far altro che chinare la testa e lasciare che la tempesta si abbattesse su di loro. Una cantilena antica quanto il mondo, che fa parte di quello che siamo, che nasce sia dalla penna di Israel Yehoshua che dalla roca ed invecchiata voce di Moni. Even though he was born in Poland and spent most of his life in the US, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in Yiddish, his mother tongue. He died at the impressive age of 88 and gained all the honours and the fame he deserved.Yes, he hated his father, and along with his father, he hated his holy books that spoke only of pain and were steeped in morals and melancholy; his Torah, so complex and convoluted that it defied all understanding; his whole Jewishness that oppressed the human soul and loaded it down with guilt and remorse.But most of all Nissan hated his father’s God, that cruel and vengeful being who demanded total obeisance, eternal service, mental and physical self-torture and privation, and the surrender of all choice and will. Unlike Max, Nissan devotes himself selflessly to the cause of the working class, enduring beatings and prison sentences and humiliation in pursuit of that cause. How these contrasting characters fare in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution is (trying to avoid spoilers) yet another contrast in just desserts (or not). Based on the afterword, Nissan's experience in rejecting his rabbinical father's Orthodox Judaism early in life and communism in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution mirrors that of the author. It is all but required, when introducing the Yiddish writer Israel Joshua Singer, to identify him as the older brother of the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis 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 to be broken). The reputational asymmetry between the brothers Singer is more than a little ironic: while they lived, it was Israel Joshua (1893-1944) who was famous, while Isaac (1902-1991) languished darkly in his internal contradictions and his 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.