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OONLIGHT STORIES of the OLD-TIME LITHUANIAN JEWS

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OONLIGHT STORIES of the OLD-TIME LITHUANIAN JEWS HE City In The OONLIGHT STORIES of the OLD-TIME LITHUANIAN JEWS _ ‘ -'L i ' f t I,..,. -r - Al *■ .1 ^ X t \ ■'■ \ —. — • ■ *1* t Ti - . S^' D ovid K atz TRANSLATED by BARNETT ZUMOEE THE CITY IN THE MOONLIGHT Stories of the Old-Time Lithuanian Jews THE CITY IN THE MOONLIGHT Stories of the Old-Time Lithuanian Jews by Dovid Katz Translated by Barnett Zumoff KTAV Publishing House, Inc. Jersey City, NJ The City in the Moonlight Copyright © 2012 by Barnett ZumofF ISBN 978-1-60280-198-1 Cover art by Gary Jefferson Distributed by KTAV Publishing House, Inc. 888 Newark Avenue Jersey City, N J. 07306 Email: [email protected] www.ktav.com 4 Table of Contents Filling a Gap in Modern Yiddish Fiction: Introducing the Misnagdic (Litvak) Tale (by Barnett ZumofF)........................................................ 7 The Idol-Worshiper..................................................................................11 Rivtshe of the Tanye...............................................................................25 If Not Even Wiser....................................................................................29 The Einstein of Svir.................................................................................37 The Golem of Glubok.............................................................................. 46 The Apostate of Klushan........................................................................ 54 The Flat Peak............................................................................................ 62 The Trial of the Angel of Death.............................................................84 Rabeynu Gershom of Shumsk...............................................................93 Noah-Anshel From the Next World................................................... 104 The City in the Moonlight.................................................................... 113 Abba-Ella’s Mission...............................................................................119 Zalmora of The Prophets...................................................................... 130 Filling A Gap In Modern Yiddish Fiction: Introducing the Misnagdic (Litvak) Tale by Barnett Zumoff Dovid Katz, one of the most prolific writers of Yiddish belletristic prose today, was born in New York into a deeply literary family: his father, Menke Katz, was a noted poet in both Yiddish and English, and his sister, Troim Katz Han­ dler, is also a poet and translator. He received a yeshiva education and became steeped in the history, mores, religion, and languages of the Eastern European Jewish communities, particularly his own Lithuanian Jewish heritage. He has published dozens of linguistic studies on the origins, dialects, and stylistics of the Yiddish language, as well as a massive folio volume titled Lithuanian Jewish Culture (Revised edition, 2010). For two decades, he has been crisscrossing the lands of his ancestors in search of the last survivors, whom he records and for whom he has become a noted advocate. With this background, and his own literary talent, he has been able to re-create, with remarkable accuracy, the by­ gone world of the Jews of his great-great-grandparents time and place through his fascinating, charmingly wrought short stories, written in the language of those Jews, Yiddish, in the specific rich hearty dialect that they spoke. The cur­ rent volume comprises my translations of thirteen stories selected from this oeuvre. The English subtitle of this book, “Stories of the Old-Time Lithuanian Jews,” has been substituted for the original Yiddish title, “Tales of the Misnagdirn' in order to make the subJect matter understandable to contemporary readers who may not be knowledgeable about Jewish religious history; the English title locates the subJects of the stories in time and space while the Yiddish title lo­ cates them in the spectrum of Judaic religious observance. In reality, however, the title change represents a distinction without a difference, for the misnagdim were largely to be found in the geographical area formerly known as Lite, liter­ ally Lithuania, corresponding to various stages of the political evolution of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and now encompassing modern-day Lat­ via, Lithuania, northeastern Poland, Belarus, parts of northern and western Ukraine, and western Russia. Who were the misnagdiml The word means “opponents,” but opponents of what? They were opponents of the widespread Jewish religious movement called khasidizm, which arose in the early 18th century. The thrust of khasi- dizm, as formulated by its founder, the Bal Shem Tov (Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer [c. 1700-1760]) was to supplement, or even replace, what the khosids consid­ ered the sterile over-intellectualism of the rabbinic Judaism of the time, which emphasized Torah and Talmud study and more or less disparaged unlettered Jews, with a Judaism of Joy, direct engagement of the individual Jew with God, and equality of all the Jews in the community, whether learned or not; they 7 The City in the Moonlight also incorporated certain pantheistic tendencies and changed certain prayers and practices. Khasidizm also introduced a feature new to Judaism: the devel­ opment of more or less autonomous localized Jewish communities headed by hereditary, dynastic spiritual leaders known as rebbes, sometimes referred to as tsadikim\ who ruled as virtual kings in their communities, were considered infallible (in the religious sense), and were often credited with magical powers, especially for healing. The new doctrine had great appeal to the masses of ordinary Jews, and it spread rapidly, especially in Poland, Galicia, and Hungary. However, many religious Jews, especially those living “up north” in the area of L/te, were vigor­ ously opposed to the movement, particularly to its de-emphasis of study of the Holy Books and its near-deification of the rebbes. They feared that the institu­ tion of the rebbes might evolve into a messianic movement, the idea of which was anathema to them, especially in light of the previous widespread cult of the false messiah Sabbetai Tsvi a century earlier. So strong was their opposition to khasidizm that their great spiritual leader, the Vilna Gaon (Rabbi EliJah ben Shlomo - Zalmen [1720-1797]), excommunicated the khasidim in 1772 and urged other rabbis to do the same. Despite the condemnation, the khasidic movement spread and flourished throughout the central and southwestern parts of the Eastern European Jew­ ish world. Perhaps because they were considered colorful and interesting, the khasidim became celebrated in song and story, to the point that many Jews equated them with all Orthodox ]ews—misnagdim virtually disappeared from the popular imagination. It was partly to remedy this disproportionate empha­ sis on khasidim that Dovid Katz set out on his mission of writing stories about the lives, customs, and beliefs of the misnagdim. All of the stories I have translated in this volume transport us almost magi­ cally to a world of long ago and far away in which the misnagdic com m unity was the norm, and depict various aspects of their lives, loves, and struggles. Five of the stories touch directly, to a greater or lesser degree, on diflferences and conflicts between misnagdim and khasidim. In the title story. The City in the Moonlight^ the originally misnagdic residents of a village are beset by the importunities of proselytizing khasidim (and also mwsr-niks, a sort of puritanical “ethical” movement that arose in nineteenth century western Lithuania). To solve the problem, the rabbi organizes an exo­ dus of his followers to a distant site where they build a new village that is il­ luminated at night by beautiful moonlight that creates a scene of transcendent beauty. There the transplanted Jews live peacefully and productively, studying the Scriptures and making candles. The story If Not Even Wiser is a respectful reverse takeoff on I.L. Peretzs famous story If Not Even Higher, in which a skeptical litvak^ visits a khasidic 1. Saints or saintly persons 2. Lithuanian Jew— a misnagid, of course Introduction village that boasts that its rebbe rises to Heaven on days when he disappears from the village; the litvak discovers that the rebbes disappearances are to per­ form anonymous charity to the sick and needy; after that, when the khosids say that the rebbe rises to Heaven, the litvak murmurs: “If not even higher”, and he remains in the village as a khosid. In Katzs story, a khosid visits a litvak village, is charmed by the friendly rabbi s patient explanation of the Holy Scriptures, which the khosid had never studied or understood before, and observes the rabbi secretly visiting an old, paralyzed woman to bring her joy by reading her the weekly Torah portion; overcome, he remains in the village as a misnagid, and when the local Jews say that their rabbi is as wise as King Solomon, the former khosid murmurs: “If not even wiser” In the story The Idol-Worshiper^ an old rabbi dies and the community disre­ gards his wish that his son be designated to replace him. The son goes insane with grief, is invaded by a dybbuk^, and turns to idol-worship. The community imports several khasidic rebbes to exorcise his dybbuk but they fail; they then bring in a distinguished misnagdic rabbi who succeeds, by getting the commu­ nity to adhere to its moral duty to appoint the old rabbi s son as its new rabbi. In Abba Ellas Mission^ a reclusive Torah scholar in a village is summoned by the community to a public mission: to resolve a roiling conflict
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