Here are 700 pages on Jewish life in Poland. The cover tells me it’s considered the last great Yiddish novel. It has a plot, kind of, or more like multiple plots, not all of which overlap. It also has a truly vast array of characters. Particularly I noted how much he liked to describe people, even minor ones. And then I realized we were in the 1930s, and started to wonder: is the description of the people the point of the book?
The introduction tells me this is indeed the case. This poor guy grew up in 1930s Vilna, where there were 70,000 Jews. After the war, there were only a few hundred. He was extremely fortunate to escape, and when he returned I’m sorry to tell you he found his mother and first wife were in the same mass grave. Here he is in a letter to friend:
“I’ve always found it strange that I have so little faith and yet believe, with complete faith, that Providence saved me and allowed me to live, in order to immortalize the great that generation that I knew”
It was an odd book. At first it was kind of boring, I kept thinking I was going to quit, but the more I got into it, the more I got into it. I felt kind of bereft once it was over, and really weirdly close to Polish Jews of the1930s. I guess that was his goal. For what it’s worth, they live for me.