Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zelmenyaners first appeared in English translation in 2013, but it escaped my attention. It has now appeared in a new edition from White Goat Press, an imprint of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass.
Who was Moyshe Kulbak? His short life (1896-1937)—“shortened” would be more to the point—was nevertheless a highly productive one. He wrote in his beloved Yiddish language, as a poet whose lyrics found their way into popular songs, a playwright and novelist. He also taught in the Yiddish school system. At different periods of his life he lived in Minsk, Vilnius (Vilna in Yiddish), and Berlin. Like many Jews, and others who lived in Eastern Europe, he was fluent in several languages.
The story of this novel is noteworthy. Kulbak published it in serial form in the Yiddish press. The first chapters appeared in 1929-1930, and the rest waited until 1933-1935, akin to the way Dickens and even Tolstoy released some of their novels. It’s impossible to read this novel—translated by Hillel Harkin with an introduction and notes by Sasha Senderovich—without some understanding of the time period. Fortunately this edition is generous with its helpful “apparatus”—a historical essay and numerous footnotes translating Kulbak’s many citations of German poetry (Heine in particular), Biblical texts in Hebrew which many if not most of his original readers would have recognized, description of Jewish holidays and customs, and the terminology of the new Soviet regime as it spooled out its various programs and plans.
When the first tranche of chapters appeared in the late 1920s, Stalin was still consolidating his power and preparing to eliminate all opposition to his emerging cult of personality. I remember when I was producing City of the Future: Yiddish Songs from the Former Soviet Union, a complete collection of songs by composer Shmuel Polonski set to prominent Yiddish poets of his day, all gathered in a 1931 songbook called Far Yugnt (For Youth), not a single song, nor a single mention in the foreword, referred to Stalin. Within a year or so, I doubt that would have been possible any longer.
The year 1929 was dubbed “the year of the great breakthrough,” starting with the first of the young socialist nation’s Five-Year Plans in 1928. Any Soviet writer who wanted to continue getting published and read had to show awareness and support of the overriding goals. Kulbak’s idea was to take the well established tradition of the family history in Yiddish literature, and apply it to the rapidly changing society as it affected Jews. Starting with a Reb Zemele (a Yiddish variation on the name Zalman) and his wife Bashe, who founded a hoyf not far from the Minsk city center, a group of connected buildings with a common courtyard for his growing family to occupy, Kulbak introduces his sons and daughters, grandchildren and respective spouses and partners, all with their distinctive Zelmenyaner character stemming from Zemele, yet all, too, differentiating themselves in profession, habits, interests, and in the manner in which they react and respond to the changing times. Step by step, religious observance fades, and integration into the model of the “new Soviet man”—and woman, of course—runs apace. Following their new professions and assignments, some of them go far away to places as remote as Vladivostok, have affairs with non-Jews, and even bear out-of-wedlock children.
By the time of the second serialization, Part 2, much has changed in the USSR, and Kulbak’s style has of necessity shifted in tone. As of the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, taking place in Moscow in 1934, writers were obliged to adopt Socialist Realism. The latter half of the book reflects this new literary overlay, with positive characters forced to make difficult decisions and choices in the interest of the greater Soviet good. Even without the residents’ consent, electrical wires are brought into the hoyf to light up rooms at night, radio is introduced to keep citizens abreast of the news, a new crop of movies brings images and ideas to the people, literacy teachers give the written word to millions, new tramways facilitate movement about the city, old trades such as tailoring, watchmaking, carpentry and tanning give way to industrialization and mass production. In short, modernity has come to the shtetl.
As in Sholem Aleikhem’s body of work, Jews of the static, stagnant past are forced to confront a fast-paced, ever-evolving transition to the future, giving rise to conflict, irony, and ample opportunity to poke fun at human foibles.
But already the daggers had come out. The emancipatory blush of the first decade of the Revolution had passed. Now came the conservative backlash, the consolidation, the end to free expression. To the Stalin regime and its acolytes, Kulbak’s writing reflected just a pinch too much empathy with his superannuated Old World characters, too much identification with the hesitation of their step toward a whole new way of life. What can be made of a baggage-laden passage like this one, coming from one of Zemele’s sons, Yuda:
“You think I have a low opinion of them? Look here, that isn’t so. The Tsar had to go, that’s for sure. He was one big nothing. A man like that isn’t fit to be an emperor. But for them to begrudge us the little Jewishness we have left—it isn’t right, it isn’t right at all! In fact, it’s downright nasty. Look here, a Jewish wedding should be a Jewish wedding, a circumcision should be a circumcision; a Jew should pray now and then, too. Why not? What’s so wonderful about not praying? What harm did prayer ever do them? Listen, Tsalel. If only I could have a word with them, I’d straighten things out. They’re modern types, they even know foreign languages, but they’re missing the point. Am I right or not? And the way they pick on the rich—between you and me, it’s plain foolish. It’s the rich, after all, that let a man earn a living. You don’t make any money from tailors and shoemakers. Look here, if they had any sense, they’d patch it up with them. There are some fine rich people in this world, always good for a bit of advice or a friendly word. Am I right or not?” (p. 61)
Surely, large numbers of people thought and privately mumbled like that. But for the good of the state, did an author have to publish such drivel, even if his intent was sarcasm?
Kulbak was deemed a counter-revolutionary (on formal charges of spying for Poland) and was summarily executed on October 29, 1937, in Stalin’s “Great Purge” meant to terrorize the population into blind submission. Similar liquidations took place among the military, among the old revolutionaries of Lenin’s era, and among the other national language groups in the USSR, all in the presumptive project of developing a culture “national in form, socialist in content.”
Being a born poet, Kulbak cannot miss an opportunity to introduce a lyrical gloss to almost anything, especially to natural phenomena. Here is the hoyf on a winter’s night:
“That night, the moon came out. The blizzard was over. The moon swam out from soft, feathery clouds, that shone with a far-off light.
“The houses of the yard slumbered, their low shadows huddled on the bluish snow. Here and there a gouge in the snow testified to the gale winds that had passed over it. The yard was sunk in that deep, second stage of sleep, from which it is impossible to be woken.”
The translator, Hillel Halkin, also renders Hebrew fiction into English. I sometimes wish he had kept his modern Hebrew pronunciation separate from his renderings of Yiddish, giving us Sukkot instead of Sukkes for the autumn festival, bat instead of bas for daughter, but I admit this is a minor complaint.
Owing to the particular circumstances of the publication for this novel—serialized, then printed in two parts separated by half a dozen years, then another later edition, carefully redacted by the Soviets in 1971 to sanitize the now “rehabilitated” author—what Kulbak might have made of a final, definitive version under less repressive conditions will sadly be forever unknown. Grateful as we are, and should be, for this seminal novel, a foundation stone for Soviet Yiddish writing, I can’t help feeling that it’s missing a final, comprehensive revision. Still, what’s here is golden. And you don’t have to be Jewish to let this novel’s charms affect and inform you about this transitional time in history and the way tradition dies away in transformation to the new.
A more intimate view of Kulbak appears in the Wexler Oral History Project. In this excerpt, the renowned scholar of Yiddish literature Benjamin Harshav of Yale University describes an amusing incident from his childhood in Vilna with Kulbak as a teacher. For those who wish to probe deeper into the world of Kulbak, the entire interview with Harshav is a more than two-hour-long treasure, and a brilliant introduction to the city of Vilna that Kulbak is most associated with. If you know some Yiddish and would like to hear the original, it is available as an audiobook from the Sami Rohr Library of Recorded Yiddish Books.
A conversation about the book between Senderovich and Sebastian Schulman, then-manager of the Yiddish Book Center’s translation programs, can be heard here.
The most comprehensive English biography of Kulbak is his entry in the YIVO Encyclopedia. The Yiddish newspaper Forverts (Forward) also made a short biographical video about Kulbak. The video is narrated by the former editor of the Forverts, Boris Sandler, in Yiddish, with English subtitles and a rendering of Kulbak’s best-known song Shterndl (Little Star): Watch it here.
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