Books: Songs in Exile

For nearly 500 years, the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe led a narrow, closed-in existence. The only escape lay inward—in wild frenzies of Hasidic worship or in equally wild flights of the imagination. In this kind of life, the storytellers became the soul’s best physicians; drawing on their tradition, later writers such as Russia’s Sholom Aleichem created a whole literature in which pain and happiness, the worldly and the supernatural come together under a canopy of wry humor. Two books, written by exiles from Eastern Europe, have much of Aleichem’s rewarding piety and wit.

GIMPEL THE FOOL, by Isaac Bashevis Singer (205 pp.; Noonday; $3.50) is a collection of twelve tales about Polish Jews who are important to nobody except themselves, God and the devil. In these pages Satan and all his imps lope through the swamps and forests of Galicia. tempting a vain girl with an enchanted mirror, destroying a placid marriage, debauching the entire village of Frampol with dancing, vodka and banknotes. God comes slowly after, not to punish Satan for his mischief, but to apply his lash to the backs of sinful Jews.

Polish-born Author Singer, 53, a columnist on Manhattan’s Jewish Daily Forward, takes a Manichaean view of God and an ironic view of man. In Joy, the Lord of Hosts finally justifies his stern ways to a modern Job. In The Wife Killer, Author Singer touches on a recurrent theme, that vengeance is God’s business, not man’s. The book’s best tale is the title story about Gimpel. who has seven names in all: ‘Imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny and fool. The last name stuck.” Gimpel the Fool is the butt of all cruel, mindless jokesters. He will believe anything: that the dead have arisen, that the Czar is visiting Frampol, even that his wife is faithful. In the first place, he believes because, after all, anything is possible. In the second place, he believes because if he does not, everyone shouts at him, his termagant wife loudest of all. Only Satan takes pity and whispers to Gimpel that he could be avenged on the world by deceiving it in turn. Gimpel tries, but it is not in him: he is too much the fool even to be evil. The worldly-wise (including the reader) are sharply reproached by Gimpel’s foolishness and yet they are also apt to envy it, for it is illuminated by the saintly simpleton’s strange, special kind of dignity. Unpretentiously, almost crudely sketched, Gimpel is an unforgettable character, deeply moving in his gentle submission to all blows, his dogged love of a worthless wife, his quiet expectation of the end: “When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.”

THE FERTILE PLAIN, by Esfher Sola-man (344 pp.; Abelard-Schuman; $3.50), deals with Russian Jews, more urbane, polished and aware than Singer’s woebegone Galizianer. Little Rissia grows up in Vladimirsk, a fictional town near Kiev, in the early years of the 20th century. All Russia seems wrapped in a dream, like a mountain village in the instant before the avalanche. While, outside, the wind is rising, at home Rissia is borne along on the immemorial patterns of Jewish tradition in which there is a complex law for every occasion and a cryptic Talmudic proverb for every problem.

Her friends often seem to have stepped from the pages of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, with their doom writ large on their foreheads. There is Alexander, the perennial student, pompously lecturing the girls on the Hellenic past, and Madame Edlinsky. who likes Jews yet loves an anti-Semite. And there is the wide-horizoned land itself: “We knew without thinking that it was a great, rich country, and a great people. Evil was organized and directed, but the good sprang from the heart and mind of man, and ran like a river between its natural banks. The word ‘duty’ was slight, but ‘conscience’ was laden with meaning.”

Like her big-eyed heroine. Author Salaman, who now lives in London, was born and raised in the Ukraine. Her re-creation of childhood is movingly written and preserves the old Russia—with its endless talk, fumbling aspirations and comfortable inefficiency—like a giant in amber. The final chapter tells of the coming of the 1917 Revolution, when all the earnest, high-flown talkers pour into the streets with visions of a newly created heaven on earth. The last lines of the novel make a heartbreakingly ironic point: “We were outside our front door. Father took off his bowler hat and handed it to mother. He folded his arms, turned to Grabovsky and said: ‘Imagine, freedom.’ “