Der Nister - The Family Mashber

THE FAMILY MASHBER

DER NISTER

('The Hidden One')

Translated from the Yiddish by Leonard Wolf

English language translation copyright 1987 by Leonard Wolf

ISBN-10: 9780671527686

ISBN-13: 978-3887037055

CONTENTS

Introduction

By Leonard Wolf

'I burned and illuminated the circus for a long time.'

- Der Nister, 'Under a Fence'

Cyril Connolly, writing in Enemies of Promise, says, 'The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the function of the writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.' For us, who are readers, a corollary task is to see to it that lost masterpieces are restored to their place in the world's literary pantheon.

The Family Mashber, a lost masterpiece written in Yiddish by Der Nister, a Soviet writer who died in a Russian prison hospital in 1950, has begun slowly to emerge from the obscurity into which it was cast when its author, along with scores of other Yiddish-writing contemporaries in the Soviet Union, fell victim to Stalin's paranoia. This unfinished novel, of which volumes 1 and 2 were published in 1939 and in 1948, has refused to disappear. In the Soviet Union, where Der Nister has been rehabilitated, a truncated Yiddish version of the book is available. In 1962 a Hebrew translation appeared in Israel. A French translation was published in 1984 and an Italian edition is in the offing. Now here is The Family Mashber in English.

It is phenomenal how this book, written by an author whose name is hardly a household word even to the dwindling number of those who can read Yiddish... how this book, armed with its own excellence, has so tenaciously asserted its presence. The reader holding it now in his or her hand, will soon discover why.

Who is Der Nister?

Der Nister is a pseudonym that means 'the hidden one' and it was the name Pinhas Kahanovitch used when he published his first slim volume. Gedanken un Motiven: Lider in Prosa (Thoughts and Motifs: Poems in Prose), in Vilna in 1907.

Der Nister was born in Berdichev, Russia, on November 1, 1885, the third in a family of four children: Aaron, Hannah, Pinhas (Der Nister) and Motl. Der Nister's father, Menakhem Mendl Kahanovitch, who made a living as a smoked fish merchant, was an Orthodox Jew with ties to the Korshev sect of Hasidim. His wife Leah was evidently the one who encouraged their children to get a secular as well as a religious education. Of their four children, three would have secular careers: Hannah became a physician, Motl, who later settled in France, became a sculptor and Der Nister became our writer. Aaron, the oldest son, was drawn early to mystical experience and as an adult joined the sect that followed the teachings of Rabbi Nakhman of Bratslav (1772-1810). Aaron and the Bratslaver sect were to have a profound influence on Der Nister's imagination, especially on The Family Mashber.

Der Nister left Berdichev in 1904 hoping to evade service in the czar's army. Indeed it was the need for secrecy related to that evasion that seems to have been his first reason for acquiring his pseudonym. He moved then as a young man to Zhitomir, not far from Kiev, where he earned his living as a teacher of Hebrew.

Kiev, in those years, was hardly a literary center, but it did have a small cadre of young men who, as 'the Kiev group,' were to make a major impression on Soviet Yiddish literature. The Kiev group included the novelist Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister and the poet Peretz Markish, as well as the poets Layb Kvitko and Dovid Hofshteyn. They were a lively vibrant crowd, cultivated and literate, keenly aware of the winds of literary change blowing from the west and anxious to strike out in new directions of their own.

Nakhman Meisel, an early friend of Der Nister's who was instrumental in getting the young poet published, describes Der Nister's entry into the tiny literary world of Kiev in 1908:

Here, in gentile Kiev, far from the literary marketplaces, lived Dovid Bergelson ... and myself, Nakhman Meisel... Asher Shvartsman ... S. S. Saymovtses... The Kiev group which, for the time being, had not been fortunate enough to attract the attention of Warsaw and Vilna...

And it was then that the charming Nister from Zhitomir or Berdichev slipped in among us ('slipped in,' not 'came in,' boldly, directly). We knew, though not from him, that in Vilna he had published a strange little book with a strange title and strange contents called Gedanken un Motiven: Lider in Prosa (Thoughts and Motifs: Poems in Prose) ... But neither we, nor Der Nister himself, took that first work very seriously.

... He was then twenty-four years old. He had delicate, refined manners and a modest way of walking and talking. He looked smaller than he was. His handsome head with its fine shock of hair was tucked between his shoulders as if he was ashamed to hold it up high. He seemed to be walking on tiptoe and as if on side paths rather than on the King's Highway. He had, too, another characteristic: he walked softly and was very silent a ruble a word and what he did say was cryptic, ambiguous and, moreover, spoken without stress or resonance ...'

He was silent and indeed secretive about his personal life and work. On the other hand, he was by no means a recluse nor was his silence a negative comment on the behavior of others. He enjoyed being in company where he was always an attentive and friendly listener.

Gedanken un Motiven (Thoughts and Motifs) was followed by Hekher Fun Der Erd (Higher Than the Earth) (1910). While these books rather quickly established him as a presence among his peers, his work revealed a mystical cast of thought, a fascination with folklore and fantasy, with riddling speech and symbols that identified him as a difficult writer. In 1913, Sh. Niger, who years later would write a warm appreciation of The Family Mashber, was not happy with the early work. He complained that it was 'not only without form, but without content.' And Sh. Rosenfeld, writing in the New York Yiddish journal Tsukunft in June 1914, was harsher still. He wrote:

It is no coincidence that there should appear in our time such a clumsy, obtuse, absolutely opaque writer as Der Nister ... It is a mistake to think, as some critics do, that Der Nister intends to be unclear, and so does not find the words that would clarify his meaning. He intends to be as clear as it is generally possible to be given the confused conceptions and mystical ideas and images that swim before his eyes.

Despite his 'uniqueness,' which was the one characteristic on which the critics agreed and which should have marked him as rebellious to tradition, Der Nister's relationship to the classical writers of Yiddish literature, Mendele Mokher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem and Y. L. Peretz, was profoundly respectful. For Peretz he had a respect that bordered on the reverential. He writes:

When I compared him with his contemporaries, with those who laid the foundations of Yiddish literature, he seemed to me always to be the sun over them: Mendele was the black, plowed earth,

Sholom Aleichem, the grown ears of grain, and he [Peretz] was the sun that warmed, illuminated, blessed and made things grow.'

Peretz was living in Warsaw in the years when Der Nister was taking his first tentative steps toward fame in Kiev and there is a delicious story (told by Der Nister) about a visit he once paid him.

Peretz received Der Nister graciously and after seating him, he offered him a cigar. And here the fledgling writer experienced a cruel dilemma. He could not hurt Peretz's feelings by not smoking the cigar, and yet he desperately wanted to have the cigar as a memento of his visit.

And so I pretended that I was smoking the cigar. But secretly I did what I could to extinguish it, my aim being to keep it so I could hide it somewhere. When I thought it was altogether out, and that Peretz wasn't looking, I slipped it into my vest pocket. Suddenly there was the smell of smoke and I saw my mistake: the cigar was still burning as was my vest pocket. Peretz, seeing this, understood at once what had happened, wanted to laugh, but unwilling to embarrass me, he turned his head away; and then, to give me a chance to extricate myself from my doleful situation, he pretended he needed something from the next room... Had the earth opened under me and swallowed me whole just then I would have been grateful."