READINGS Underground Man: The Curious Case of Mark Zborowski and the Writing of a Modern Jewish Classic BY STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN he most in!uential of all popular render- Eastern Wall,” in Fiddler on the Roof, he is actually Trotsky’s son, Lev, along with many others, was ings of Eastern European Jewry in the versifying a passage from the second chapter of Life is dead, his GPU handlers tried to get him to Trotsky’s English language and, arguably, the book with People: “the men who sit along the Eastern Wall lair in Coyoacan, Mexico in order “to get to the that Jewish historians of the region loathe are pre-eminently the learned and the rabbi . .” Later OLD MAN.” Zborowski, however, appears to have Tmore than any other, is Life is with People. Few books editions of the Schocken paperback featured a blurb preferred to continue his anthropological studies at written in the last half-century have more resolutely the Sorbonne, and contrived to remain in Paris. In enveloped the Eastern European Jewish past in nos- When Tevye sings “If I were Richard Lourie’s 1999 !e Autobiography of Joseph talgic amber. It was, to be sure, only one of a cascade Stalin: A Novel, Stalin muses about his gratitude to of books, some of them translated from Yiddish, that a rich man …,” he is actually Zborowski whose reports, he says, are “concise, to sought to do much the same thing in the midst or the the point without a wasted word.” In the 1956 Sen- immediate wake of Hitler’s war, among them Mau- versifying a passage from ate subcommittee hearing which would eventually rice Samuel’s !e World of Shalom Aleichem, Bella lead to his conviction and imprisonment for per- Chagall’s memoir Burning Lights, Abraham Joshua Life is with People. jury, Zborowski acknowledged that he was aware Heschel’s elegy !e Earth is the Lord’s, and Roman that Stalin took special interest in his work: “I heard Vishniac’s book of photographs Polish Jews. But Life from Fiddler’s lyricist Sheldon Harnick. “Life Is with about it, yes,” he admitted, laconically. is with People was the most ambitious of the lot. Pub- People told us about the life in Jewish villages as no What, if anything, does Zborowski’s biography lished in 1952, it sought to capture an entire civiliza- other book.” Indeed, Schocken also marketed it as imply with regard to how one now reads his reassur- tion from cradle to grave in 400-odd pages of acces- part of a box-set of a half-dozen books that were ing account of the Jewish past in Life is with People? sible, even buoyant prose. "e world it explored was, necessary reading for every literate Jew. Bernard True, books should not be con!ated with the biogra- it insisted, continuous with—but also distinct from— Malamud consulted the book when he was writing phies of their authors, and it would be a mistake sim- everything around it, not quite part of Russia or Po- his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1967 novel about a blood ply to collapse the activities of Zborowski as spy and land yet inside both, a kind of island of unadulterated libel case in Tsarist Russia, !e Fixer. anthropologist, even if their skill-sets overlap. None- Yiddishkayt before it was diluted, then destroyed. "e study that culminated in Life is with People theless, it remains striking how similar his “#eld-re- "e book—originally subtitled “"e Jewish was part of the Columbia University Research in ports” to both Stalin and Trotsky (o%en giving drasti- Little-Town in Eastern Europe” and altered once it Contemporary Cultures project, headed up by the cally di&erent accounts of the very same events) are appeared in paperback in the early 1960s to “"e two leading cultural anthropologists of the period, in texture to his ethnographic work on the shtetl. Culture of the Shtetl”— concentrates on the essence Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and funded, Scholars, most prominently anthropologist Bar- of this culture, which, as it sees it, was the “shtetl.” oddly enough, by the O$ce of Naval Research. bara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, have written insight- Shtetl is Yiddish for small market-town, and Life is But its co-author and central intellectual #gure was fully about the evolution of Life is with People, its with People examines shtetls not in their consider- Mark Zborowski. Mead appears to have thought of ethnographic failures and its place in mid-century able variety but as instances of a single ideal type Zborowski as the perfect insider-outsider: someone American anthropology. But when the book is re- presented in the present tense, as if it still existed. “who combined . the living experience of shtetl read with an eye #xed on Zborowski’s own life, it "e book’s enduring appeal (it went through sev- culture . and the disciplines of history and an- emerges as a di&erent, more intriguing text, a work eral editions, sold more than 100,000 copies, and is thropology.” "e book, she added in the Preface, infused with not inconsiderable feeling and occa- out of print now for the #rst time in almost 60 years) was “the realization of a plan [he had] cherished sionally startling insight, indeed with insights that can probably be traced to its sweetness; its blend of for many years.” "is was true, or almost true, but cut against the grain of the book. collective genealogy and ethnographic Jewish lore. it also omitted a great deal, most of which Mead It is the rare commemoration that leaves the reader didn’t know. Zborowski was not really from a shtetl uch of Zborowski’s life was conducted be- feeling good, even though the world it depicts has but from Uman, a Ukranian town of 28,000, and Mhind curtains. Yet, it can now be described been obliterated. Its tone is conversational, and it though he might, conceivably, have cherished the in some detail, despite major gaps, because of new- takes the reader through the rhythms, the sounds idea of writing an ethnology of Eastern European ly accessible Russian sources, declassi#ed FBI data, of the Jewish week starting with the Sabbath, and Jewry, it was not a culture that he himself held dear. and Margaret Mead’s papers, housed in the Library on to schooldays, workdays (depicted, despite In fact, he had been estranged from it since adoles- of Congress. Mead’s project, Columbia University the pervasive poverty of Eastern European Jewry, cence, and his most signi#cant professional experi- Research in Contemporary Cultures, was launched mostly in cheery tones), marriages, circumcisions, ence was not as an anthropologist (he never really in 1946 to examine cultures touched, in one way and deaths. It is an ethnography that is also a “how- received a doctorate, as he sometimes claimed, from or another, by the Second World War (Russian, to” book (“Prayers are accompanied by a rocking the Sorbonne), but as a Soviet spy. Polish, Czech, Chinese, Japanese, and so on). Jews movement, from the waist to the toes”), and yet one Zborowski, whose GPU codenames included were added to the mix rather late, and the tran- that understands how to satisfy its readers by doing Mack, Max, Tulip, Kant, and Etienne, in#ltrated the scripts of the researchers’ meetings on the “Jewish little more than nudge them toward an unobtrusive Trotskyist circle in Paris in the 1930s, and—though Book” involve leading anthropologists, including voyeurism. he probably never murdered anyone personally— Mead, Conrad Arensberg, and Ruth Landes, and When Tevye sings the famous lines “If I were several of his anti-Stalinist acquaintances died sud- o&er a vivid glimpse into Zborowski’s central role a rich man, I’d have the time I lack / To sit in the den, violent, and mysterious deaths. Indeed, when in the project. synagogue and pray / And maybe have a seat by the Zborowoski’s work was done in Paris and Leon Unsurprisingly, Zborowski was not given to 38 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Summer 2010 self-revelation. But amidst the huge body of mate- members of Jewish society. “We boys were standing rial about Jews collected for Mead’s project—more in the doors and windows of the [synagogue], pull- than 100 transcripts of interviews with Eastern Eu- ing them by their clothes, spitting in their faces, and JULY/AUGUSTJULY/AUGUST 20092009 ropean Jews, summaries of memoirs and works of throwing stones and dirt, while they were dancing Yiddish literature, translated bits and pieces from and singing their prayers.” DAVID contemporaneous memorial books (yizker bikher) A%er the revolution, Zborowski volunteered at BILLET published by survivors, meticulously sketched maps a communist library, and when his father learned of towns, transcripts of jokes, depictions of local of his work, he beat him with his mother watching deviants, saints, and others—is an interview with closely, insisting only that he not be hit on the head. THE Of Sabbath and festivals—the subject of glowing de- ON PHILANTHROPYWAR µ pictions in Life is with People (“Sabbath brings joy Commentary A MARKET FAILURE? JOHN H. MAKIN DECEMBER 2009 THE of the future into the shtetl. On no point is there -8/<$8*86792/80(180%(5 DEMOCRACYDEMOCRACY ABANDONEDABA JOSHUA MURAVCHIK HIPSTER more unanimity . .”)—he describes only countless, A CRITIC TAKETAKESS A BOW CURSE TERRY TEACHOUT oppressive rules, and warnings that “if we weren’t $5.95 US : $7.00 CANADA JOSEPH EPSTEIN : MIDGE DECTER FREDERIC RAPHAEL : STEPHEN HUNTER STEVEN GOLDMAN : ELLIOT JAGER good we would be torn to pieces by the devil.” CHRISTINE JAMIE M.