Moyshe Kulbak - Zelmenyaners

New Yiddish Library

The New Yiddish Library is a joint project of the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature and the National Yiddish Book Center.

Additional support comes from The Kaplen Foundation, the Felix Posen Fund for the Translation of Modern Yiddish Literature, and Ben and Sarah Torchinsky.

DAVID G. ROSKIES, SERIES EDITOR

Translated by Hillel Halkin
Introduction and Notes by Sasha Senderovich

Yale University Press

New Haven and London

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2013 by the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature and the National Yiddish Book Center.

Yale University Press
P.O. Box 209040
New Haven, Connecticut
http://yalepress.yale.edu

Distributed by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com

The December 1929 issue of the Star (Shtern), one of the Yiddish-language monthlies in the Soviet Union, opened with a full-page photographic portrait of Joseph Stalin, placed opposite the journals table of contents. Congratulatory remarks on the occasion of the fiftieth birthday of Stalin, the general secretary of the Communist Party and the leader of the Soviet Union, were printed above the portrait, with the collective signatures of the journals editorial board underneath. Listed in the table of contents were a few poems and short stories, an article about the work of proletarian writers in capitalist countries, and something entitled From the Book The Zelmenyaners Family (Chapters from a Novel) by the writer Moyshe Kulbak.

The Zelmenyaners first appeared in serial form:

Similarly, the Soviet Union where Kulbak first set out to work on The Zelmenyaners in 1929 was hardly the same country once the serialization of the novel was finished in 1935. Many momentous things happened in those years, and these changes were palpable in the pages of the Star. The issue containing the first installment of The Zelmenyaners appeared just one month after Stalins famous speech calling 1929 the year of the great breakthrough. The first Five-Year Plan, announced in 1928, was beginning to yield noticeable results as the Soviet Union started its transition to a planned economy propelled by the modernization of its industrial complex and infrastructure and the collectivization of the agricultural sector. After potential opposition to Stalins leadership was squelched, the year 1929 also marked the appearance of what would eventually come to be known as Stalins cult of personality.

The novel, announced in the table of contents opposite Stalins portrait, was thus conceived, published, and circulated in an era of unprecedented social transformation. A product of its authors creative meditation on the paradoxes of political, cultural, and technological developments and their impact on a Jewish family in the late 1920s and the early to mid-1930s, Kulbaks The Zelmenyaners is a novel enmeshed with the heady epoch that began a decade and a half earlier in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 with its project of remaking human society and human nature itself. The Zelmenyaners focuses on the incongruities and disjunctions between Soviet rhetoric and the prerevolutionary cultural and religious mentalities that were transformed under its weight. It exploits those incongruities for comic potential unmatched in Yiddish literature since Sholem Aleichem but contemporaneous with similar literary efforts, some comic and others not, by such Russian-language writers as Mikhail Zoshchenko, Isaac Babel, and Andrey Platonov. Kulbaks novel is a masterpiece of both Yiddish and early Soviet literature simultaneously.

The Zelmenyaners is set in a specific geographic location. Though that location remains unnamed throughout

More precisely, the setting of The Zelmenyaners is the courtyard of one Jewish family somewhere on the outskirts of Minsk. Though also a place where one would hang laundry out to dryas in an ordinary yard or backyardan Eastern European courtyard is primarily a space enclosed by houses along most or all of its perimeter. Courtyard refers both to the space between houses, where the inhabitants of the surrounding dwellings interact with each other, and, collectively, to the surrounding structures themselves together with the space between them. Hoyf, the word for courtyard in Yiddish, has a number of connotations. Isaac Bashevis Singers Der hoyf has been translated to English as The Estate; in that novel about several generations of a single family, the word points to an aristocratic abode.

Prominent in Soviet culture, the courtyard figures particularly large in Soviet Jewish culture. Kulbaks hoyf emerged at the same time as Isaac Babel was setting his Odessa Stories in some of that citys famed courtyards. Kulbaks novel centers on Reb Zelmeles courtyardboth the physical structures and the family institution established by the patriarch Reb Zelmele when he arrived in the vicinity of Minsk and put down roots there. (In Yiddish, reb is an honorific meaning Mister; Zelmele is a diminutive of the first name Zalman.)

As the novel opens, Reb Zelmeles widow, Bashe, still resides in her deceased husbands courtyardwhere she has remained much longer than anyone could have expected. The four sons of Reb ZelmeleUncle Itshe the tailor, Uncle Folye the tanner, Uncle Yuda the carpenter (and amateur violinist), and Uncle Zishe the watchmakerare now the four pillars of the family, but these pillars are crumbling under the weight of the new zeitgeist despite the uncles effort to adjust to it. The three daughters of Reb Zelmele, mentioned at the beginning, never turn up as characters: Kulbak, guided by Sholem Aleichems use of only five of the seven daughters of Tevye the dairyman, must have concocted these three extra children in case more plot lines became necessary as the serialization went on.

Much of the comic plot in The Zelmenyaners derives from challenges to the authority of the uncles generation from the generation of their children (Reb Zelmeles grandchildren), who have grown up after the Bolshevik Revolution and the entrenchment of Soviet power in Belorussia. The inhabitants of the courtyard are all known collectively as Zelmenyaners even though the familys surname is actually Khvost (which in Russian means tail and in Soviet-speak of those days referred to those individuals and groups of people accused of being in the rearguard of social and political changesthose literally at the tail end of the revolution). The Zelmenyaners, as it were, are at once Jews who are becoming Soviet citizens and a unique species of humans whose comically exaggerated reactions shed light on the incongruities inherent in the Soviet project of modernization.

Kulbak was born in 1896 in Smorgon (present-day Smarhon, Belarus), a small town in the Russian Empire situated between Vilna and Minsk, about a hundred kilometers from either city.and nineteenth centuries the town was the site of a so-called academy where bears were trained for performances in marketplaces around much of Europe. Though the academy was effectively defunct by 1870, when bear shows were banned in the Russian Empire, the fame of the towns peculiar trade was felt around Belorussia as late as the 1930s, when the occasional wandering Roma with a bear in tow would still be called, jokingly, Smorgon teacher and his student.