His plan was to write a trilogy that would encompass “more than forty years of Polish Jewish life” and would do for Yiddish letters what Gorky had done for the Russian. Where other writers might have faltered along the way, he brought this hugely ambitious work to completion, even while holding down a full-time job for thirty years. And when a night of terror descended on the world, he evaded death—first under Stalin, then under Hitler—long enough to report on Polish Jewry’s last chapter, as well as to write his own requiem. What survived was a timeless masterpiece, part of a trilogy without a known ending; two ferocious chronicles from out of the whirlwind; and a life story that unfolds as a three-act drama.
Act I sets forth the rise of a poor Jewish lad from the Polish provinces. Yehoshue Perle (pronounced PEHR-leh), known as Shiye, was born in 1888 in Radom, a typical multiethnic Polish town, then still under Russian rule, 43 percent of whose roughly nineteen thousand inhabitants were Yiddish-speaking, observant Jews. Polish Catholics, Protestant Evangelicals, and Eastern Orthodox Ukrainians completed the mosaic. Measured by the three indicia of family pedigree, rabbinic learning, and wealth, which determined one’s standing in Jewish society, the Perle family was deficient on all counts. Home was a wooden hut with an earthen floor near the New Mill, where his father, Leyzer, eked out a living selling hay. On Fridays, in preparation for the Sabbath, the floor was sprinkled with fresh sand bought at Khane-Beyle’s store on Synagogue Street, located in the old part of town.1
Both parents had grown children from previous marriages, but Shiye, by most accounts, was the only surviving offspring of their life together. Father expected each child to fend for himself. So when Mother left for Siberia to serve as a nanny for the child of her beautiful daughter Rukhtshe, Shiye was taken out of school and sent to work as a clerk in Yosl Green’s dry goods store, where his tenure was exceedingly brief. Nor did he last very long at his next job, as a locksmith. Thus Shiye’s formal Jewish (and smattering of Russian) education came to an end when he was twelve years old, just shy of his bar mitzvah.
However, his mother, remembering better times, had great ambitions for her young son. After returning home from Siberia, she scraped together enough money to hire a private tutor, with whose help Shiye completed the full four-year curriculum of the local Russian gymnasium in two. On the occasion of the death of the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, the sixteen-year-old extern composed his first poem, in Russian, which he declaimed before a group of bona-fide gymnasium students decked out in their military-style uniforms.
His mother also saw to it that Shiye learn a useful profession to take him out of poverty—accounting.2 A year later, the fateful year 1905, when tsarist Russia was torn between anarchy and democracy, hope and fear, the seventeen-year-old Shiye boarded the horse-drawn omnibus bound for the metropolis of Warsaw. (Some say he left home in the wake of a romantic debacle.) There, and for the next thirty years, he would lead a double life, working from nine to five in a starched collar and speaking perfect Polish, first as an assistant bookkeeper in a bank, then as chief accountant in a large mill. As bookkeepers go, he cut an impressive figure, his dark blue eyes framed by steel-rimmed glasses and his mustache neatly trimmed. Accustomed to frugal living, he rented a modest apartment on Orlo Street. Rumor later had it that Perle had vowed not to quit his job at the mill until he reached two “fifties”: fifty years of age and fifty thousand zlotys put away in his savings account.3
Then there was the other Perle, jovial and ebullient, salt of the Jewish earth, who spoke his broad, superidiomatic Polish Yiddish for all the world to hear at public readings presided over by the Olympian I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), or at the more intimate literary salon of the ethnographer and cultural activist Noah Prylucki (1887–1941). Peretz, at a rehearsal of the Yiddish Drama Circle, introduced Perle to the beautiful and talented Sarah, the gravedigger’s daughter, and Prylucki launched Perle’s literary career by publishing his first, neo-romantic sketch on the Sabbath, after it was turned down by the editor of the Yiddish daily Haynt for being too “literary.”4
Sarah was the love of his life. They married, moved to more spacious quarters on Nowolipie Street, in the heart of the Jewish district, and a son, known as Lolek in Polish and Israel on his birth certificate, was born to them in 1919.5
These were heady years both for Poland, recently freed from tsarist domination, and for its Jews, newly liberated from the shtetl. Two of Poland’s native sons, Henryk Sienkiewicz in 1905 and Wladyslaw Reymont in 1924, were awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. By the end of World War I, Warsaw had also become the new center of Yiddish cultural activity; even before Armistice Day in November 1918, the Union of Yiddish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw had moved into permanent quarters on Tłomackie 13, next door to the Great Synagogue. There, Yehoshue Perle felt very much at home.6
Politically, too, Warsaw was a congenial place for a budding Yiddish writer with leftist leanings. Warsaw was fast becoming a bastion of the Jewish Labor Bund of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which represented the interests of the Jewish working class within the Social Democratic movement. Despite his starched collar and steel-rimmed glasses, Perle shared with the Bund an anti-bourgeois, anti-Zionist, and pro-Yiddish eschatology. He broke ranks with the Left over its radical secularism. Throughout his life, Perle maintained a deep interest in traditional forms of Jewish behavior and remained respectful of them. As a member of the honor guard at the grave of the prominent Yiddish and Hebrew writer Hirsh-Dovid Nomberg (1876–1927), Perle, almost alone among his fellow writers, insisted on wearing a skullcap.7
Not surprisingly, romance and lyricism were the stuff of his early writing—a martyrological “Legend,” as retold by a grandmother (1920); In the Land of the Vistula (1921), a prose poem about a Jewish beauty seduced by a Polish nobleman; contemporary tales of seduction set among the Polish-speaking, rising middle class, like the novella Mirl (1921); a prose poem about the beautiful “Ruta” (1921); and the collection of short stories provocatively titled Sins (1923). Perle’s lyricism, unfortunately, marked his work as derivative. “His whole manner of writing,” complained Shmuel Niger, the preeminent Yiddish critic of the day, “is a patchwork: a piece from here, a piece from there.”8
Niger expected writers of the postwar generation to speak in the voice of Naturalism, the writing school that laid bare all of life’s passions, mendacity, and social evils. In Polish-Yiddish letters, the particular mode was aggressively promoted by I. M. Weissenberg (1881–1937), who failed to recognize Perle’s talent, even when twenty-five Yiddish prose writers and poets made their collective voice heard in the Warsaw Almanac of 1923, with Perle prominently among them. Alongside the critical realism of I. J. Singer (1893–1944), A. M. Fuks (1890–1974), and Leyb Olitsky (1894–1973), Perle’s novella Numbers gave Yiddish readers a slice-of-life portrayal they had never before encountered: the dreary, deracinated life of Polish Jews working in a bank owned by two pfennig-pinching Jewish brothers. At a leisurely pace, Perle takes us through fifteen identical years in the life of Jakub Winkler, a Jewish Bartleby the Scrivener—the exemplar of emptiness, thwarted desire, and total isolation; the modern, marginal man, as suggested by his very name, vinkl meaning “corner.”9 Linguistically transparent, the novella might have been written in Polish and is perhaps indebted to the great Polish realist Boleslaw Prus (1847–1912). In that same year of 1923, militant Yiddishists, with Melekh Ravitch (1893–1976) at the helm, took over the Yiddish Writers’ Club, and Perle was elected to the new board.10 Economic security, true love, and literary success—by the age of thirty-eight, Perle seemed to be firmly established.
Act II began and ended with catastrophe. One day in 1926, as Melekh Ravitch, his colleague, neighbor, and fellow accountant, would recall, the Warsaw Yiddish literati came running to Perle’s apartment and found him lying on the floor in a paroxysm of grief. In a corner hung the lifeless body of his wife, her long braids askew. Sarah had left no suicide note. For months on end, the bereaved husband would cry out to anyone who listened: “Why did she do it? Why did she do it?”11
Following this tragedy, Perle resolved never to remarry and to dedicate his efforts to Lolek. Hoping to augment his income—he would now need a full-time housekeeper for his son—Perle turned to the fastest-growing literary commodity, the market for shund, trashy, serialized novels. Writing under the pseudonym of three asterisks, laid out just so—
—Perle began churning out sensational serializations for the Yiddish daily Moment with such titles as: Jewish Blood, Downhill, Behind Seven Locks, Reviled and Rebuked, Gold and Bread. Each installment was avidly awaited by a new mass market of Yiddish readers potentially numbering in the millions, young and old, male and female, pious and freethinking. Perle, of course, was not alone in exploiting this lucrative sideline. Even serious writers of respectable backgrounds, like Yitskhok Bashevis (I. B. Singer; 1904–1991) and Aaron Zeitlin (1889–1973), were guilty of the practice, not to mention Israel Rabon (1900–1942), from the rough-and-tumble city of Lodz, the Manchester of Poland.12 For some reason, however, it was Perle who bore the brunt of the acrimony. The “Three Asterisks” became synonymous with the sellout of Yiddish culture to “the bourgeois yellow-sheet press.” Perle was blamed for corrupting the morals of Jewish youth. Itzik Manger even demanded that Perle (and Rabon) be hauled before a literary tribunal,13 and Perle was publicly rebuked by Kadia Molodowski at the General Assembly of the Yiddish P.E.N. Club on November 1, 1933.14 But the cruelest blow came at a special “Day of Yiddish Literature” in August 1935, observed at the World Gathering of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Over eight hundred people were in attendance at the Vilna Conservatory of Music. When Perle began reading from his work, some younger members of the audience shouted, “Get down from the stage, you pornographer!” Perle was visibly crushed, and the festive day came to an abrupt end.15
Since 1930, Perle had been hard at work on something entirely different. “I am writing a book in three parts,” he told a reporter, “about the bygone generation … thirty years of Jewish life. I couldn’t find the form, the tone, until Gorky showed me the way with his My Universities.”16 At about the same time as Henry Roth in New York procured a copy of Joyce’s banned Ulysses and realized that “you didn’t have to move out of your environment, out of an urban slum, to get all the material you wanted—convertible into great literature,” Perle discovered the key to his own childhood and youth. “A writer has no secrets,” Gorky revealed to him. “He must expose with absolute honesty.”17 Just as Gorky began his autobiographical trilogy with a death, so too would Perle; poverty, ignorance, and cruelty rounded out the curriculum as taught by life’s universities.
Yidn fun a gants yor: a bukh fun a fargangen lebn—Everyday Jews: Scenes from a Vanished Life—was published in the spring of 1935 to mixed reviews. The official Bundist press was scandalized by the sex scenes, a sad legacy, it claimed, of Perle’s career as a pornographer. Yitskhok Bashevis (Singer), recently arrived in America, complained that the novel was too bleak to be psychologically credible, its autobiographical hero (whom Perle had even neglected to describe) coming from a home at once “gray and impoverished” and “umheymlekh, forbidding.” Niger, too, took issue with the novel’s bleakness, while noting that Mendl, the novel’s young narrator, was a close cousin of Sholem Aleichem’s antic orphan Motl, the cantor’s son. In the last (perfunctory) analysis, however, according to Niger, Perle’s novel “lacked an idea.”18
Rachel Auerbach (1903–1976) finally rose to Perle’s defense in the leading Yiddish literary review. She cautioned against reading Perle’s realism too naively, pointing to the novel’s analogical structure as a measure of its subtle modernist design. True to the dictates of a Bildungsroman, Everyday Jews followed a loose chronology, its individual episodes and the fate of its protagonists obeying a “spiral” pattern, a constant ebb and flow that mimicked the rhythm of its young hero’s life. So too the flow of ethnographic detail, never fetishized; the treatment of Jewish-Christian relations, which can so often deteriorate into kitsch; and the remarkable richness of the Yiddish, worthy of independent study. All told, Auerbach proclaimed, there was a truthfulness to this work, an existential honesty almost absent from the rest of contemporary Yiddish fiction.19 Gorky’s example, in other words, had been faithfully upheld.
On the strength of Everyday Jews Perle was accepted back into the fold. Dramatic changes followed. The mill where he had been employed burned down; he gave up his career as a purveyor of shund in the pages of Moment; he joined the full-time staff of the Bundist Folkstsaytung; and he was elected to the Warsaw branch of the Yiddish P.E.N. Club, which in turn conferred upon Everyday Jews one of three I. L. Peretz Awards for the best original Yiddish works to appear in recent years. Blackballed and humiliated at the YIVO gathering in Vilna, Perle was definitively rehabilitated in Warsaw as part of the fortieth anniversary celebration of the Bund, held in the Nowości Theater on November 15, 1937. Two one-time literary awards were conferred at this occasion: the best-writer award to the thirty-six-year-old Itzik Manger, and the best-novel award to the forty-nine-year-old Perle.20
If the Bund now claimed to be the standard-bearer of Yiddish culture and sought to enlist all Yiddish writers under its banner, some Yiddish writers resisted and voted with their feet. Melekh Ravitch was the first to leave Poland—for Melbourne and, later, for other exotic destinations—followed by Kadia Molodowski and Yitskhok Bashevis, who settled in New York. (“How sad it is without him,” Perle wrote to Ravitch, a sentiment that Bashevis never reciprocated.21)
By this time, Polish Jewry was under siege. “We’re being slaughtered,” he reported to Ravitch. “In the small towns”—referring to the recent pogroms in Przytyk and Minsk Mazowiecki—“Jews won’t go to bed, for fear they’ll be murdered in their sleep.” As if in direct response, Perle’s literary ambitions expanded. His projected trilogy was now to encompass “over forty years of Jewish life in Poland,” from the 1880s to the 1920s.22 Moving from the narrow, psychologically defined, autobiographical perspective of Everyday Jews, its sequel, Di gildene pave (1937)—The Golden Peacock: A Novel in Two Parts—assumed a completely unexpected form, as Perle reverted to the sensational plot devices, moral dichotomies, broad geographic-historical canvas, and sentimentality of his earlier shund production. In a note, Perle urged readers to find “traces” of Everyday Jews in the sequel.23
The hope was in vain. Except for the theme of marital deception, a rambling plot driven by the inchoate longings of a woman, and cameo appearances by minor characters from Everyday Jews, the two works have little in common. Instead of an older Mendl, as one would have expected, occupying the center of consciousness, The Golden Peacock stars Perle’s beautiful half-sister, called by her real name, Rukhtshe, who vies with the virtuous Sheyndl (“the beautiful one”) for the affections of a man known as “the second Paganini,” the virtuoso folk fiddler Kaddish. Even though Sheyndl dies in childbirth midway through The Golden Peacock, by the end of the third work in the series, titled Gilgulim (1939)—Metamorphoses—we still don’t know whether Rukhtshe and Kaddish will ever get together again—and we may never find out. The one extant copy of the volume—the sequel to the sequel, so to speak—deposited in the National Library of Poland on the very eve of the Nazi invasion, is missing its last pages.24
Act III of the Perle life story is nothing less than the tragic fate of Polish Jewry. There were two escape routes, and Perle attempted them both. In September 1939, he joined tens of thousands of refugees fleeing eastward to the Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union as part of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Sometime in November, along with his son Lolek and new daughter-in-law Yudis, he reached Lwów/Lemberg, where the newlyweds found work as engineers. Twenty-one-year-old Lolek, a member of the (illegal) Polish Communist Party, no longer had reason to fear; not so Perle senior. The moment a Soviet Writers’ Union was established in a requisitioned palace on Copernicus Street, embracing three nationalities—Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews—the family of Polish-Yiddish writers turned against itself. Writers once united in the Warsaw Almanac began denouncing one another; as a prominent Bundist (and thus anathema to their traditional Communist antagonists), Perle was especially vulnerable. However, the Polish Communist poet Elżbieta Szemplińska came to Perle’s defense, and he was admitted into the Union.25 The delegations of Soviet-Yiddish writers from Moscow and Kiev, eager to reunite with their Polish brethren after a terrible decade of separation, also came to his rescue. Peretz Markish (1895–1952), who had spent his salad days in Warsaw, was especially welcoming. A 1940 group photo of the Yiddish writers’ colony in Lwów shows Perle seated second from the left, looking at Markish. This photo became one of Perle’s most cherished possessions. The Soviet regime showered Perle with all the usual rewards—public readings before factory workers; translation into Russian; a trip to Kiev as an honored guest; and lucrative book contracts, provided that he submit his work to censorship, which he willingly did.26
The other escape route was to America, where two of his half-siblings had settled. Through Ravitch, now in Montreal, Perle located his long-lost half-brother, Leybl (Louis) Pearl, of Brooklyn, who sent him the necessary affidavits. But Louis never heard from his kinsman, for once Perle had thrown in his lot with the Soviet Union there was no turning back—except to Warsaw.27
In the wake of the German conquest, Lwów and environs became the site of a massive pogrom carried out by local Ukrainians, followed by the more systematic mobile killing units of the Germans. The Warsaw ghetto, in its second year by the time the Perle family returned, was a haven by comparison, a city-within-a-city made up of three parts: the Judenrat, or official community, operating under the rapacious eyes of the Nazis; the Jewish Self-Help, a vast network of social services funded mostly by the Joint Distribution Committee in America; and a political underground, mimicking the prewar welter of parties. Perle was at home in all three, where writers and intellectuals formed a protected class. Rather than join the ranks of the 150,000 refugees crowded into the typhus-ridden section of the ghetto, the Perle family returned to its old haunts, on Nowolipie Street, and Perle found immediate employment in the Judenrat under the patronage of the munificent Shmuel Winter (1891–1943). More important, Perle was recruited by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum (1900–1944), the director of the Jewish Self-Help, to write for the underground Oyneg Shabes Archive. Perle’s first assignment was to produce a detailed report on the Soviet occupation of Lwów.28
What Perle had seen in the Soviet workers’ paradise, and what he now observed among the living remnant of Polish Jewry, changed the tone and substance of his writing. It became ever darker. A “comicsatiric” novel, apparently titled Our Bread of Affliction and describing ghetto life, featured such real people as the ghetto comedian Rubinshteyn.29 Perhaps Perle was trying to document the perseverance of the Jewish collective in extremis. But by the spring of 1942, when Oyneg Shabes asked him to participate in a survey of Jewish intellectuals about the fate of Polish Jewry after the war, he could envisage no viable future—neither for its “bourgeoisie,” riddled with informers, lacking in national pride, nor for its Yiddish-speaking ordinary folk. The Jews, he angrily concluded, “hate the Yiddish language.” Even in the Soviet Union, where the regime lavished support on Yiddish literature and theater, “even there Jews don’t want to speak Yiddish.” The sole hope for postwar Jewry, he maintained, lay in a Communist-Jewish state, in Palestine or, more plausibly, within the Soviet Union proper.30
Then came the last chapter of Warsaw Jewry, the Great Deportation. In a six-week span during the summer of 1942, 235,741 Jews were rounded up at the notorious assembly point, the Umschlagplatz, and shipped off to die in Treblinka. During a surprise nighttime blockade, when the Germans appeared in his courtyard and shouted for everyone to come down, Perle ignored the order, stayed put, and survived.31
Amid the daily roundups, in the brief respite between August 27 and September 5, 1942, Perle began to chronicle “The Expulsion of Jewish Warsaw.” He completed it three weeks later, having changed the title to “Khurbn Varshe”—“The Destruction of Warsaw”—to indicate a calamity as shattering as that of the ancient Destruction (khurbn) of the Jerusalem Temple.32 Even as he asserted that “of Hitler, of this antediluvian beast, it is possible to believe anything; the sadistic methods that he employs surpass all human understanding,” most of Perle’s moral outrage was directed inward. He railed at the Jewish police, who “dragged their tortured victims up from beneath the ground and down from the sky; from all the cellars, from all the holes, from all the chimneys”; at the Judenrat, whose members deserved to be hanged from lampposts; and ultimately, at the entire ghetto population. “Three times 100,000 people,” he thundered with prophetic rage, “lacked the courage to say: NO. Each one of them was intent upon saving his own skin. Each one was ready to sacrifice even his own father, his own mother, his own wife and children.” Why was there no resistance, even among the mighty Jewish proletariat? Perle’s final indictment was this: “If a community of 300,000 Jews did not try to resist, if it exposed its own throat to the slaughterer’s knife, if it did not kill one German or one Jewish collaborator—then maybe this was a generation that deserved its bitter fate!”
While Perle was documenting “The Destruction of Warsaw,” Shmuel Winter secured him a job in the artificial-honey factory on Franciszkanska 30. Now only Jews with numbers hung around their necks like dog tags had the right to live, working for slave wages under labor-camp conditions. “Number 4580”—also the title of Perle’s last-known work—was Yehoshue Perle himself, a once proud Polish Jew transformed into a faceless, historyless set of digits.33 In this account, Perle’s tone turned heavily ironic, his style more idiomatic than ever, and the main target of his invective became the narrator himself, whose number was “chosen” in a diabolical perversion of the biblical promise and in an absurd inversion of statistical probability. “Of three times 100,000 Jewish souls it was granted that some 30,000 ciphers of the Chosen People be left.”
“Number 4580” is part meditation on the meaning of a person’s name, part last will and testament, a summation of its author’s life and literary career, and part self-indictment. Here Perle recalls his beloved Sarah. Here he alludes to the rescue of his good name by abandoning the writing of shund. And here he admits, “In order to become a number, my fifty-three years had to be jabbed at until they bled. Jabbed at, mocked, raped.” Those chosen to survive carried an unbearable burden of guilt toward those who did not. And of all the available archetypes of mourning and lamentation in the treasure trove of Jewish texts, the one that still spoke to the present moment was none other than Motl, the Cantor’s Son, Sholem Aleichem’s tale of the lively and lovable orphan boy. Playing on Motl’s tragicomic slogan, “I’m alright, I’m an orphan,” familiar to every reader of Yiddish, Perle signed off with the bitter words, “I’m alright, I’m a number!”
From this point on, every rescue effort was doomed. The typed and edited manuscript of the true sequel to Everyday Jews, a novel written in the first person, completed in 1939, hidden with friends, retrieved upon its author’s return from Lwów, and kept in a valise under his bed—that huge manuscript was lost in January 1943 in the chaos of renewed deportations. Perle reacted stoically to the loss.34 In March, father and son secured Aryan papers provided by a friend of Lolek’s. (What happened to Yudis is not known.) Since Sarah’s suicide, Perle had never let Lolek out of his sight, and both of them might have beaten the odds, Perle hiding under the alias of “Pan Stefan,” were it not that the Germans had one more card to play. To flush out Jews in hiding, the Germans offered to sell Latin and Central American passports, and the “lucky ones” were assembled at the Hotel Polski—from whence they were to be sent to transit camps in Germany and France on the first lap of a journey to freedom.35
Father and son arrived in Bergen Belsen, where for three months they did enjoy privileged status. Perle attended lectures on the Bible, had happy opportunity to exercise his Yiddish, and spoke lovingly about those who had perished. Apocalyptic rage had given way to sorrow and silent grief. Party loyalists, meanwhile, his son Lolek among them, convened a makeshift court to settle old scores. Those convicted of collaborating with the enemy were punished with social ostracism.36
On October 21, 1943, 1,800 Polish-Jewish inmates boarded a sealed train that was supposed to take them to Bergau, near Dresden, en route to Switzerland. As always, Perle was nattily dressed. He seemed hopeful—perhaps still so when at destination’s end they were greeted by an SS officer posing as a representative of the German Foreign Office, who explained that the Swiss authorities demanded that all tourists undergo a delousing process before being admitted. The roll call was in alphabetical order. From the disrobing chamber the group was led straight to the gas. “Bergau” was actually the yard of the crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau.37
As the writer, so was his consummate work: at once open and accessible, graced with sophistication and subtle design. The idiomatic title, Yidn fun a gants yor, denotes the simple folk, salt of the earth. The novel focuses on an impoverished Jewish family in a nameless Polish provincial town at the end of the nineteenth century, and offers through them a cross-section of Jews, Christian Poles, and a few Russians struggling to hold body and soul together. Perhaps the “bleakness” that so bothered the critics is of a piece with the proletarian Zeitgeist of the 1930s.
The title also may be read as Jews the Whole Year Through, and delivers on its ethnographic promise by covering the entire Jewish liturgical calendar—the weeklong Passover observance, complete with a seder (Chapters 9–11); the performance of a traditional Purim play on the Sale of Joseph (19) and the observance of Purim itself (20); the gathering of rushes for the Shavuoth festival (21); the celebration of the High Holidays (26); and the last day of the winter festival of Hanukkah (33). Sabbaths, in various settings, loom particularly large. (Christian observances also put in an appearance.)
Then there is Mendl, the first-person narrator, who bears such a striking resemblance to the young Shiye Perle. The family is dirt poor. The father, Leyzer, shares his name with Perle’s own father, and, like him, ekes out a living from the sale of hay. The anonymous town is so transparently Radom that whole passages from the novel were excerpted in the Radom Memorial Book of 1961, following the commemoration of the town’s rabbis, scholars, philanthropists, and prominent Zionists. Perhaps the novel was Perle’s revenge against the shtetl’s ruling class—those “well-fed Jews who wore top hats on the Sabbath” and who “always stayed clear of my father’s impoverished home”—counterpoising a gallery of folk types arranged into loosely connected “scenes.”38
Everyday Jews tracks in meticulous detail the sexual initiation, moral struggle, and psychological maturation of its young and impressionable hero. Mendl, the twelve-year-old narrator, is born into a world at war with itself. But the battle is being waged not along lines of class, ethnicity, or ideology. These “everyday Jews” are engaged in a relentless and open-ended battle of the sexes.39 With each holiday and passing season, the casualty figures keep mounting. Mendl’s own sense of himself as a male will be forged between the hammer of his father’s stubborn silence and the anvil of his mother’s longing.
Frimet, the mother (whose name resonates with frume, the pious one), pines for the spacious rooms with brass-handled doors that she inhabited during her first marriage, just as Mendl’s father longs to return to nature, to the simple life of the rural village where he grew up. As someone who can both read and write, Frimet enjoys an obvious advantage over Leyzer, who, apart from some liturgical competence, can do neither, and she plays her hand even at the seder table. Leyzer’s main defense is his studied deafness, and only rarely does he blow his cover. The household is further divided between Father’s grown children from his first marriage and Mother’s from hers.
Knowing who belongs to whom is Mendl’s—and the reader’s—first item of business. Mendl’s rude awakening into articulated memory occurs with the sudden and traumatic death of Frimet’s favorite son, Moyshe, the only one of her four older children living at home. He was everyone’s favorite, including Jusza, the live-in Polish maid-boarder. The visits home by any one of Father’s five children from his first marriage—daughters Khane-Sore, Beyle, Toybe, and Ite, and a son, Leybke, now serving the Tsar in the Russian interior—can be as fraught as Moyshe’s death and Mendl’s subsequent near-fatal illness. Is this because there is not enough food and affection to go around, and never enough beds? Is it because romantically inclined girls are easy prey to cynical young men? This would explain why Ite, a cook in a wealthy house in Warsaw, who comes home to spend Passover with the family, is so easily seduced by her stepbrother Yoyne, an upholstered-furniture salesman visiting from Lodz. Why then does Leybke, arriving unexpectedly just before Yom Kippur, having been released from his military duty, fail to seduce his stepsister, Tsipele, a salesgirl in a fancy Warsaw shop, who joins the crowded household for the Sukkoth festival, flaunting her big-city airs? Is it because each grown child is really a proxy in the power struggle between Mendl’s parents?
On the next level of separation, that of Mendl’s uncles and aunts, the battle lines are redrawn. Mother has the larger family—two sisters and two brothers—but only one, Aunt Miriam, lives in town, and she is called in only for family emergencies. Father’s two sisters—wealthy Aunt Naomi and impoverished Aunt Khane—play far larger roles, and it is they who stretch allegiances to the limit. For Father basks in the exalted status of his insufferably self-important rich brother-in-law, Bentsien (husband of Naomi), and touts the musical talents of the couple’s son, the other Mendl, while Mother identifies with the hapless but ever-optimistic Mordkhe-Mendl (husband of Khane), a sort of Yiddish Mr. Micawber. His success—which he achieves, albeit fleetingly—paradoxically would shift the balance of power into Frimet’s camp.
Mendl’s sole refuge from the ruthless battleground of his parents’ misery is to be found in the house of his maternal grandparents, the happy-go-lucky, nip-taking tailor Dovid-Froyke and his indulgent, pleasantly sarcastic wife, Rokhl. Here Mendl is miraculously nursed back to health after nearly freezing to death in a snowdrift. It is they who effect the reconciliation of his parents following a domestic crisis. And it is Grandfather’s death at the novel’s end that signals the uncertain road ahead.
At the heart of the novel’s conflict is the archetypal plot of mutual misrepresentation. Pieced together from adult conversation and recalled in a flashback (Chapter 16), the deception involves two mismatched people, worlds apart, whose marriage was predicated on a lie. The distance between their beds is much greater than that mandated by Jewish law. At times, however, when Leyzer maintains that a bed is “like a wife, the touch of a strange man could defile it,” or when he casts a “dreamy look” in her direction, there is possibility of a truce. It takes the provocation of Hodl, their troublemaking boarder, to sow the seeds of jealousy in Frimet’s heart.
The natural realm has much to teach Mendl as well. From his half-sister Ite he learns of the tender coupling of pigeons, noiselessly pairing off on the rooftops, and is induced by his neighbor Yankl into witnessing the wild mating habits of domesticated horses. He discovers that everyone engages in romantic pursuit, from Yarme the coachman to the doddering Sime-Yoysef, his Bible teacher. Crazy Wladek, the Polish peasant who is an habitué in the grandparents’ house, talks of nothing else. There is even a wooden shack in the lane, behind the prison, next to the family’s latest residence, where the prostitute Big Juszke holds sway, entertaining Russian soldiers, whose shouts echo through the night, though Father somehow manages to block out the cries.
Mendl’s own attempts at love are hopelessly inept. “What could Janinka and I talk about?” he laments about his first love, a pretty, blonde Polish girl who lives in the same courtyard. “I knew little more than some bits of Bible with Rashi’s commentary.” But in fact, Mendl is supremely intelligent, having learned from the university of life how to mix and match the human and natural, the sublime and ridiculous, the mysterious with the mundane. In the opening chapter alone, there are many examples of his remarkable descriptive powers, his profound grasp of physical reality.40“The windowpanes frosted over with a tracery of white pine trees,” he notes. “Sometimes the trees took on the shape of a ship at sea, sometimes that of a little old Jew in a nightcap, with a pointy beard.” Nor does he shy away from the sight of his ailing brother, whose body, as he was being taken to the hospital, was propelled forward “slowly, step by step, as one would sometimes shift a heavy wardrobe,” then laid flat on a wide sleigh, “like a narrow, dead fish, his wrapped face looking up to the sky.” And here is Mendl’s still life of what Moyshe left behind, a composite of metonymic details that tell of a sensual life cut down in its prime:
Back in the house, Moyshe’s unmade iron bed, its rumpled bedclothes still warm, stood forlorn. Damp wisps of straw littered the floor. The medicine bottles along the window sill seemed to have moved closer together, their necks inclining toward each other in a fraternal nod, and one of Moyshe’s mother-of-pearl cufflinks peeked out from under the table, like a white, dead eye.
Complementing Mendl’s realism is Perle’s modernism, the subtle and sophisticated way in which the plot unfolds both in “spiral” fashion and analogically, as Auerbach suggested and as Dan Miron has demonstrated.41 In one such spiral, Yoyne, whose name (in Hebrew) means “dove,” and whose rapacious gold teeth contrast with Father’s healthy white choppers, seduces Leyzer’s youngest daughter, Ite. Several twists of the spiral later, Toybe, whose name (in Yiddish) also means “dove,” will be seduced and abandoned—with horrific consequences—in contrast to the joyous unions of the pigeons as earlier observed.42
What drives the plot is Frimet’s restless nature, her unrequited longing, her yearning to move from one set of quarters to another. For Perle’s great theme is the existential condition, a world in which most ordinary people long to be somewhere—or someone—else. The provincial town where Mendl is born and bred remains nameless, the better to underscore the irresistible pull to a score of other named places—another neighborhood, another street, or away from the city to a country estate or to a primitive nearby village; not to speak of the allure of Warsaw, reachable by horse-drawn omnibus, or Saint Petersburg and Ekaterinoslav, deep inside Russia, where only soldiers of the Tsar are free to travel. Mendl learns, without ever leaving home, that those who try to make good the dream of changing their fate will be utterly crushed. Those few who are satisfied with their lot—and their spouses—are the unsung heroes of this earth.
In Perle’s reconstructed past, everyday Jews live, dream, struggle, and make love among everyday Poles and Russians.43 While the grown-ups are at his half-brother Moyshe’s funeral, and as a way of working through her grief, Jusza the Polish Christian maid-boarder initiates the pubescent Mendl into the mysteries of sex. Later, the biblical romance of Ruth and Boaz is reenacted by Mendl’s young friends and neighbors, the precocious Yankl and the pretty Janinka. On a family visit to Uncle Mordkhe-Mendl’s (temporarily) acquired country estate, Mendl and his cousin Reyzl are so alive to the stimuli of nature that they are instinctively drawn to the Polish gardener, who speaks lovingly of his flowers. Indeed, almost the only reprieve from the constant upheavals, the prolonged silences, and the grinding poverty are two lyrical intermezzos in the heart of nature.
The Judaism of these everyday Jews is as natural, unselfconscious, and debased as all other aspects of their lives. Here, too, the moments of reprieve and self-transcendence are few and far between—enjoying the performance of a visiting “Litvak” cantor on the High Holidays; celebrating a Sabbath out of doors, in the heat of the harvest season; studying the Prophets from a truly inspired, soon-to-die teacher. Perle captures the interplay between the ever-shifting human landscape and the fixed cycle of religious law and ritual—between “Jews” and the “everyday”—in the novel’s closing paragraph, Mendl’s final observation:
It may have been Father’s quiet voice, which, ever since I could remember, had never been so quiet. Or it may have been Mother’s tear-filled eyes, when, on a certain weekday, Father helped me into my coat and went with me to the study house, where a pale Jew with green whiskers began to instruct me in the laws of tefillin, the donning of the phylacteries that would mark my entry into manhood.
These are the very tefillin that kindhearted Ite had brought as a gift from Warsaw the year before. Pristine and glistening, they might someday become as desiccated as the phylacteries, stiff from frost, that Father placed on his arm and forehead at the very outset of Mendl’s journey into maturity. It is doubtful whether the “pale Jew with green whiskers” will have anything of lasting spiritual value to impart to the thirteen-year-old boy. But such a boy, armed with a heightened visual sensibility and an uncompromising view of human relations, a boy who combines within his psyche both his father’s quiet voice and his mother’s tear-filled eyes, might someday escape his provincial fate by becoming a great Yiddish writer.
On March 17, 1952, the revered Yiddish poet H. Leivick (1888–1962) published a lengthy article in the New York daily Der tog about two wartime documents that had recently come to light. One was an anonymous chronicle from the Warsaw ghetto, an eyewitness report of the Great Deportation. Leivick was so scandalized by this chronicle, printed in the Warsaw-based Bleter far geshikhte, that he pronounced it a forgery, a product of the Jew-hating Polish Communist regime.
The very next issue of Bleter far geshikhte carried a fierce rebuttal by the editor, Ber Mark (1908–1966), accompanied by a facsimile of the heretofore anonymous manuscript, the identity of its author having just been established—none other than Yehoshue Perle.44 The manuscript was “Khurbn Varshe,” Perle’s anguished account from 1942. His fierce denunciation of his own people, his excruciatingly accurate day-by- day depiction of Warsaw Jewry in its death throes, was morally unassimilable to the postwar reader, for whom all the victims, the blameless and the bad, were shrouded in sanctity. Perle’s ghetto writings are known today only to specialists.
Thus Yehoshue Perle’s reputation as a writer rests on Everyday Jews alone, which has gone through five Yiddish editions: two in Warsaw, one in Moscow (typeset but never published), one in Buenos Aires, and one in Tel Aviv. Through the Yiddish original, readers have communed with a “vanished” Jewish life. When a Hebrew translation appeared in 1992, Israeli readers, in marked contrast, were enthralled by the book’s modernity and unabashed sexuality.
We now offer Everyday Jews to the English reader in Maier Deshell’s masterful translation, based on an earlier draft by Margaret Birstein. To obviate the need of a glossary of foreign terms and thus enable a smoother reading, the translator has incorporated the elucidation of Judaic and Slavic terms into the body of the text. Otherwise, the translation renders Perle’s distinctive diction and cadences with the utmost fidelity. Whether looking for vanished Jews or for a window into the everyday, the English reader will here—for the first time—discover a modern master. This is no everyday occurrence.