“As the Story Goes: Funny, Strange and Serious Stories of Yiddishland’s Jews” Compiled by Mordekhai Lipson Translated and edited by Jonathan Boyarin and Jonah Sampson Boyarin Ben Yehuda Press
Leyzer Yashinovker, Nisn Rozental’s father, was known as the biggest heretic in all Lithuania.
When he was on his deathbed, he summoned his son and said, “Listen to me, Nisn. Your older brother has converted, so he won’t say kaddish for me. Your sisters have no obligation to say kaddish.
“You are the only one left. I’m begging you—don’t you say kaddish either!”
I wouldn’t be surprised if that joke survived in some assimilated form on the Borscht Belt. Still, the Jewish world depicted in “As the Story Goes: Funny, Strange and Serious Stories of Yiddishland’s Jews” disappeared in the Holocaust, taking a third of the Jewish people with it.
Compiled from stories and anecdotes published in Yiddish by Mordekhai Lipson in the 1920s — the language’s last fully living decade— and translated into English a century later by father and son Jonathan Boyarin and Jonah Sampson Boyarin, the book barely acknowledges America and looks only occasionally to Zion, now the Jews’ two surviving major communities.
Yiddishland is the Eastern Europe many of our immigrant ancestors came from — home to great poverty and also conspicuous wealth, modern only in patches, ruled by tradition and hierarchy. Although these Jews left by the millions largely for one reason — gentiles — there’s barely a non-Jew in these pages. (The last Austrian emperor, Franz Josef II, is one exception. One story describes him as “a kindly ruler and fond of Jews.” A cousin of mine once said much the same thing.)
Segregated and isolated during much of the 18th and 19th centuries, when these stories take place, the Jews of Yiddishland were left to themselves, if they were lucky. And so, all the roles in this book — the good, the bad, the scholars, the children, the worldly, the saintly, spies for the government, thieves, the wealthy and the destitute — are played by Jews.
Yiddishland is not a term that I’d heard before. But it fits a dreamy world whose towns and cities have names that sound fanciful today— Grodno, Lodz, Ponevezh, Vitebsk, Zhitomir, Bilgoraj, Lublin, Brody and Sambur, where my father was born.
The stories range from a couple of paragraphs to two or three pages. The structures are loose and baggy. Many times, the main character will launch into a story himself, finishing in just enough time to end with a moral.
The protagonists are rabbis, mostly. Rabbis were central to the community. Not for chuckle-raising blessings like, “May the lord keep the czar… far away from us!” More important for the survival of a poor community, the rabbi could tell you if your food was kosher.
On the day before Passover, Reb Yoysef Shoyel Nathanson was called away while people were lined up to ask him questions about kashrut. Just then, his friend Reb Moyshe Bernfeld arrived. So Reb Yoysef Shoyel asked Reb Moyshe to take his place until he returned.
Reb Moyshe agreed, and said if he was ever in doubt, he would rule that the food was not kosher.
“Heaven forfend,” Reb Yoysef Shoyel said. “If you’re in doubt, rule that it’s kosher. Making something kosher treyf is a worse sin than making something trey kosher.”
This is one of several stories that pits leniency versus strictness. The takeaway: If in doubt, better to allow a family to eat than deprive them of a meal.
Other stories walk the fault line between modern and old-fashioned Jews, Chasidim and misnagdim (those Jews who opposed Chasidism), pious versus worldly — nearly all are Jews we would call haredim today.
Some rabbis are regulars in these stories. We see them in one tale just starting as a rabbi in one story and as an old man in the next.
Some put their wisdom and powers of perception to work as a detective. , when a mystery arises, they play detective. In what could be called “The Mystery of the Missing Promissory Note,” Reb Moyshe Savraner promises God’s help in discovering which of two merchants — one from the town of Brody, the other from Balta — owes the other man 1,000 rubles.
In the reveal scene, in the presence of the two merchants and a crowd of onlookers, the rabbi orders that no one leave the room while he announces his ruling.
“My ruling is that you are to return the 1,000 rubles to this man,” he tells the merchant from Balta, who had written a promissory note to the merchant from Brody, who had sent it back to Balta by mistake.
“On a Friday night you burned that note in the flames of the very candles that your wife had blessed in honor of the Sabbath!”
Reb Moyshe adds: “You see, I’ve just shown you that there is a God in the world who sees everything and does not abandon the just.”
I won’t spoil the ending by revealing how Reb Moyshe solved the mystery.
Most people, if they have any idea at all about Yiddishland, know about Anatevka, the doomed Jewish community in “Fiddler on the Roof,” and Chelm, the town of fools.
Yiddishland, as it becomes clearer in story after story, is Chelm, but with wisdom rather than foolishness.
Each Jewish community, it seems, had a government informer in its midst. No cause for outrage in a police state. The Jews just worked the system.
“There was a government informer among the Jews of Slonim,” one story explains. “Anytime something came up the authorities didn’t need to know, the community would pay the informer hush money.”
Once, the informer demanded an exorbitant 300 rubles for his silence. Reb Ayzl Kharif tried to bargain, but the informer wouldn’t budge.
“Take 50,” Reb Ayzl said angrily. “And if not, the community will go find another informer who’ll keep quiet for 25!”
I had planned to read the book by skipping around, but I ended up starting with the introduction by father and son editors/translators Jonathan Boyarin and Jonah Sampson Boyarin, and reading straight through.
The material was collected and published in 1928 by a journalist named Mordekhai Lipson. Jonathan Boyarin wrote that they chose to translate it “because it manages to value the traditional Jewish world of Eastern Europe without flattening its affects into hagiography, shallow nostalgia or … something primitive, backward and contemptible,” Jonathan Boyarin writes.
That it does. “As the Story Goes,” is unadorned, but it is not flat or nostalgic. You don’t want to go back in time to live there. If anything, you want to keep its lessons with you.
Ben Yehuda Press publishes Jewish books that aren’t “sufficiently pareve” for other publishers, as the copy reads on its About Us page.
Am I making it up or did we read a short story in Yiddish in class? Maybe Sholom Aleichem or Singer? I have a vague recollection of going around the room and each kid reading / sounding out a paragraph.