Jewish Short Fiction

Introduction

Jewish short fiction was oral before it was written; it is firmly established that the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) were transmitted orally before they were compiled into a readable format. The most widely known section of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, is the Hebrew term for the Five Books of Moses, also called the Pentateuch. It comprises a great variety of material, including narratives, folk tales, myths, and legends. While myths deal with the interaction between divine powers and human beings, later Jewish folktales and short stories often show the intervention of divine powers.

Hebrew, a branch of the Semitic languages, is one of the world’s oldest living languages, dating earlier than 2000 BCE. The conquest of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE made Greek the most widely spoken language in the Mediterranean area, which led to the Hebrew Bible’s translation into Greek for the benefit of Jews who did not speak Hebrew. This Greek translation is called the Septuagint, and tradition holds that it was translated by seventy or seventy-two Jewish scholars. Most of the stories that Jewish children learn today in religious school date from this era, and many, such as the tale of Adam and Eve or Noah and the Ark, are known throughout Western civilization. The story of Balaam, found in the Book of Numbers, has a dreamlike quality that includes many elements of a fairy tale—a talking animal, repetition to heighten suspense, and use of an angel to guide Balaam. It is a story of great charm, humor, and literary quality.

The problems of translation remain. Jewish short fiction represents the cultural continuum of Jewish experience, yet it is written in the languages of the host countries of Jews whose Diaspora lasted longer than their residence in Israel. Jews made a virtue of adaptation, which included learning other languages and creating some new ones, such as Yiddish and Ladino. The Jewish diaspora created a multilingual literature unlike that of any other modern people.

The Medieval Period

In the immediate postbiblical period, Jewish literature copied biblical prototypes. Short fiction was mostly considered a teaching tool for children, full of moralistic tales modeled on the Hebrew Bible stories. It is common knowledge that the Semitic aesthetic transformed the West in the Middle Ages. Even in France, Italy, and Germany, Jews did not escape the influence of Arabic forms, even though they favored narrative poetry in which history and legend mixed, with blurred boundaries. The banishment of Jews from Spain in 1492 was a loss to Iberia. Hebrew literature shifted to the far reaches of Eastern Europe, America, and Palestine. Modern Hebrew literature had its beginnings in different countries in different times.

Throughout Jewish history, there has been a continuous reciprocal relationship between stories communicated by word of mouth and stories in writing. The stories told orally in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, which covered a vast territory during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were passed down by mothers and grandmothers around the winter stove, entertainers at weddings, teachers and rabbis, and common working people at their sewing machines, wagons, and market stalls. As diverse and decentralized as the ideologies and Jewish communities were, East European Jewry was united by a mother tongue, Yiddish, also called mame-loshn. Although many Yiddish speakers could, and usually did, speak a variety of other languages, the vernacularor language of daily lifewas Yiddish. An intensive oral and written literature, religious as well as secular, was created in this language.

In the decades before and between World War I and World War II, many folklorists, scholars, and amateur collectors wrote down thousands of legends, fables, and stories as they heard them from hundreds of gifted storytellers. Although collected for the most part in the twentieth century, these stories embody a much older heritage of Jewish narrative art. For example, a pious story, “The Trustees,” appears in Yiddish Folktales, edited by Beatrice Silverman Weinreich, and published in 1988. It tells of a religious couple whose two children died when the father was praying at the temple on Shabbat. Although the father starts to tear his hair when he discovers the deaths, the mother, by carefully questioning her husband about religious law, reveals an explanation that the father is able to accept. Yet “The Trustees” is a retelling of a story that appears in a collection of moral literature published in 1707 in Yiddish (Simkhes Hanefesh), and an even earlier version is found in a Hebrew book published in Salonica in 1521. Other tales included in this particular collection, Yiddish Folktales, can be traced to stories from the Jewish oral tradition, which the sages of the Talmud wrote down about fifteen hundred years ago in Babylonia and Judea.

Isaac Leib Peretz and Sholem Aleichem

Isaac Leib Peretz and Sholom Aleichem, born in 1852 and 1859, respectively, are considered classic Yiddish writers. Peretz, a Polish Jew born in a shtetl, believed his work as a writer was to express Jewish ideals as they were worked out in Jewish tradition. His first Yiddish work was a long ballad, Monish (1888), which first appeared in a landmark anthology, Folksbibliotek, edited by Aleichem. The ballad uses one of Peretz’s common themes—the temptations to the senses that are abundant in the world—and draws on the legend of Lilith as temptress. This use of folk or legendary figures is also seen in Peretz’s short stories, such as “The Golem,” a figure that became quite popular during the fifteenth century. In this version of the legend, Rabbi Loeb of Prague creates the Golem of clay when the Jewish ghetto of Prague is under siege. When the rabbi blows into the Golem’s nose and whispers the Name (of God) into its ear, the Golem comes to life and begins a mass slaughter of the Jews’ attackers. When concern arises that there will not be a single Gentile left, the rabbi sings a hymn, and the Golem returns to the ghetto, transformed back into a figure of clay. However, while the clay Golem remains hidden in the attic of the Prague synagogue to the present day; the Name, which might have called the Golem back to life in a time of need, has been forgotten

Aleichem, which means “peace” or “hello,” is the pen name of Sholom Naumovich Rabinovitz, a Yiddish author of short stories, novels, and plays. His short stories centered on life in a Russian shtetl, where he was born. He started out writing in Russian and Hebrew, but from 1883 on he limited himself to writing in Yiddish and became a major figure in Yiddish literature. His stories were notable for the natural dialogue of his character’s speech and for his perceptive treatment of life in the shtetl.

Tevye the Dairyman is the protagonist of several of Aleichem’s short tales, written in Yiddish and first published in 1894. Adapted for a few stage productions and a film that won three Academy Awards, the stories were rewritten as an American musical play titled “Fiddler on the Roof” in 1964 and became an international hit. The plot is about a pious dairyman and his wife, who hire a matchmaker to find husbands for their five daughters. The three eldest daughters break with tradition and marry for love, and at the end, a pogrom and increasing anti-Semitism force Tevye and his neighbors to leave the shtetl and find homes in other countries. Another group, “The Railroad Stories,” are twenty-one tales that examine the clash of traditional Jewish life with the modernity that a group of Jewish people observe while riding on trains from shtetl to shtetl. Both the Tevye stories and the railroad stories deal with the anxieties that were central to Jewish life at the turn of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.

Aleichem’s characters, who usually narrate their own stories, are both unique personalities and recognizable, traditional types. They use transformative, almost magical language to interpret and control their own experiences, even when their lives are out of control. Although Aleichem is now considered one of the greatest Yiddish writers, his work was not critically acclaimed during his lifetime.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon and Isaac Bashevis Singer

Shmuel Yosef Agnon and Isaac Bashevis Singer are distinctly modern writers. Each chose to write in the language of his heritage: Hebrew and Yiddish in the case of Agnon and Yiddish in the case of Singer. The are both Nobel Laureates in Literature: Agnon shared the Nobel Prize with the poet Nelly Sachs in 1996, and Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his narrative art, which brought universal human concerns to a wide audience.

Agnon was born in Galicia, today part of Ukraine, under the name Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in 1888, and he immigrated to Jaffa, Israel, in 1908. His first story that appeared in Israel was titled “Agunot,” which means “forsaken wives,” and he adopted the pen name “Agnon,” which is derived from it, in 1924. He wrote more than two hundred stories, many of which appeared first in periodicals. In the 1930s and 1940s, he wrote about fifty stories, and many of these appeared in Sefer hama’asim (1932). These are surrealistic, dreamlike tales, told with a clarity and precision that remind some of Franz Kafka’s style. The content is modernan is lonely, homeless, in exile, and religious faith is a matter of the past while the present forms of religion are full of paradox and decay.

One of his best-known stories is “The Fable of the Goat.” An old man purchases a goat for its milk, but the goat disappears at intervals and then reappears. The man’s son attaches a rope to the goat and follows her when she starts to wander. They go through a cave and emerge in an enchanted land, the land of Israel. The lad writes a note of his whereabouts to his father and tucks it in the goat’s ear, thinking his father will find it and follow him. The old man does not find the note and has the goat slaughtered, thus severing his link with salvation. After the slaughter, the man finds the note and bewails his fate, suffering out his days in exile. On the surface a simple folktale, the story also reveals the tension between faith and disbelief, youth versus age, and the realm of spirituality versus the visible world.

Singer, a Polish-born American short-story writer and novelist, moved to the United States in 1935, but he wrote almost exclusively in Yiddish. World War II was destroying the world he had left behind, and the move to a new world was distressing. Singer gave up writing for seven years, but in the middle of the war, he began to write again, maintaining a large output for the rest of his life. He published most of his works first in Forward, New York’s leading Yiddish newspaper. In 1953, “Gimpel the Fool,” Singer’s classic tale of innocence and faith, was translated by the American Jewish writer Saul Bellow and appeared in the Partisan Review. Bellow’s translation brought the story to the attention of the American public, and with the help of Bellow and Irving Howe, Singer achieved an international audience in the 1950s.

In the story, the orphan Gimpel is teased for being too gullible. As he grows up and becomes a baker, he is seen as a fool in his fictitious village of Frampol. The residents find Gimpel a wife, the town slut who abuses him and is unfaithful, but he falls in love with her and accepts her faults. She has seven children, none of them Gimpel’s, and on her deathbed she confesses her guilt to her husband, who experiences a loss of faith. Prodded by the devil, Gimpel starts to go bad, but his wife appears in a dream and warns him not to be evil, as she was. He leaves Frampol, gives away his money, and wanders the countryside, telling fantastic stories. In old age, he is at peace and happily anticipates death, a state of being without betrayal or deception.

Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow

Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow were both born to immigrant parents: Malamud in Brooklyn in 1914 and Bellow in Quebec in 1915, soon after his parents emigrated from Russia. They both knew Yiddish, but Malamud’s work is more overtly Jewish in tone, themes, and settings. He wrote slowly, and although he wrote only fifty-four short stories, he is known for them as well as his novels. There are many appealing elements in Malamud’s storytelling: a folkloric touch of fable or fantasy, as in The Magic Barrel (1958); an ear for Yiddish-inflected speech; and a wry sense of humor. The Magic Barrel, his first collection of short stories, won a National Book Award for fiction in 1959.

Malamud establishes his territory in the Lower East Side of New York, where the reader imagines his story, “The Loan,” takes place. An old friend of the baker, Lieb, comes to visit him at his bakery. Lieb is delighted to see him until the friend, Kobotsky, asks him for two hundred dollars. Lieb is willing to give Kobtosky the money, but Lieb’s wife Bessie is reluctant. As the dialogue heats up, it comes out that Kobotsky needs the money to complete work on a gravestone for his wife, who has been dead for five years. Although there are hints that Lieb and his wife have some money tucked away, and although Bessie is clearly moved, she cannot give away any money because of the horrors of her past in Europe, which haunt her life. The story ends with an image of burnt loaves of bread in the oven, charred corpses that Bessie has left to bake too long.

Bellow is one of the major writers of the twentieth century; he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. In his short stories, Bellow delights in uniting opposites, such as gutter vividness with educated rhetoric, the poor who outwit the socially advantaged, and family relationships that explode traditional roles. His characters struggle with these ironies. He has published several collections of short stories: Mosby’s Memoirs, and Other Stories (1968), Him With His Foot in His Mouth, and Other Stories (1984), Something to Remember Me By (1991), and Collected Stories in 2001. One of his most remarkable stories, “A Silver Dish,” first appeared in The New Yorker in 1978 and won an O. Henry Award in 1980.

In “A Silver Dish,” the narrator, Woody Selbst, a well-traveled and educated tile contractor in Chicago, mourns the death of his vulgar, scheming Jewish father Morris. Morris had left Woody’s mother, a Christian convert, when Woody was fourteen and lived a common-law marriage with the Polish woman, Halina, for more than forty years. A wealthy benefactor, Mrs. Skoglund, had paid for Woody’s two years in a Christian seminary. In the midst of the Great Depression, Morris tells Woody they must go to Mrs. Skoglund and ask her for fifty dollars to get Halina out of trouble. They go to the Skoglund house, and the appeal is made. When Mrs. Skoglund retires to pray for guidance, Woody’s father steals a silver dish from a shelf and hides it under his clothes. Woody begs his father to return it, then wrestles with him physically, all to no avail. Mrs. Skoglund returns and gives Morris the check. Within the week the theft is discovered, and Woody’s Christian family gathers and denounces him as a crook, demanding he leave the seminary.

Woody and his father debate the matter of the dish for forty years as their relationship develops and matures, and Woody continues to believe that life is good. Morris finally tells his son that he stole the dish for him because he was on the wrong track; the Christians wanted him to convert only so that he might proselytize among the Jews. Woody slowly recognizes that his own lying, criminal father has more devotion to the old values of love and loyalty than do the pious Christians.

Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick

Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick were both born in the 1920s in different sections of Brooklyn, New York. Although their work is notably different in tone, subject matter, and style, both writers first made their mark with their short stories.

Paley studied with W. H. Auden at the New School in New York and wrote only poetry until her thirties. A good part of her life was devoted to the social activism rooted deeply in the Jewish socialism of her childhood, and her stories reflect this. They portray New Yorkers in all their loneliness, lust, fatigue, and selfishness in dialogue that seems to come straight from the streets of the city. Her female characters especially have a Yiddish cadence to their speech: Paley was one of the first popular writers to portray women’s lives honestly. Paley’s output was small, limited to forty-eight short stories, yet her Collected Stories, which came out in 1994, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

In “The Loudest Voice,” a girl, Shirley, is chosen to tell the story of Jesus in the school Christmas play, while her mother agonizes over the appropriateness of a Jewish girl playing the part. However, her father gives permission, and her mother is won over by Shirley’s performance during the play. The mother proudly emphasizes the fact that Shirley’s voice, the loudest in the play, was certainly the reason she was chosen for the part.

Ozick’s main preoccupation in numerous collections of short stories, essays, and novels is what it means to be a Jew in contemporary America. Her work is informed by Jewish history, religion, and culture; most of it centered on the moral distinctions prescribed by Hebrew law. The title story of her first collection of stories, The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories (1971), grows from an ethical teaching from Talmudic literature, Ethics of the Fathers, that sets sacred study above the love of nature. In this story, a brilliant young New York rabbi struggles between the attractions of religious learning and the allure of nature. Increasingly drawn by the charms of nature, the rabbi couples with a wood nymph, loses his soul and the nymph, and ends up hanging himself from a tree in the park.

After the publication of The Pagan Rabbi, Ozick’s reputation bloomed. Three of her short stories have won the O. Henry Award, and five have been republished in annual collections of Best American Short Stories. The editor of the 1984 anthology claimed that Ozick was one of the three greatest American short story writers working at that time. Her work has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates, and she was the first recipient of the Michael Rea Award for career contributions to the short story.

Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in New Jersey in 1933 to a housewife and an Orthodox Yiddish-speaking father. Although Roth has denied the title of “Jewish writer,” his stories and novels leave no doubt that his work is grounded in Jewish experience. A critically acclaimed New York Times best-selling author, Roth has won countless awards and recognitions for his contributions to American literature. The collection of stories that launched his career, Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories (1959), which consisted of the title novella and five short stories that were empathetically satiric, was the first short-story collection to win the National Book Award in 1960. Roth’s refusal to idealize his Jewish characters drew derision from Jewish critics who feared that it would promote anti-Semitism. Although Roth has stated that the characters in his stories face the same problems everyone else does, he also avers that he never for a moment imagined them as anyone but Jews. One of the stories, “Defender of the Faith,” about a wartime recruit exploiting the Jewish sympathies of his sergeant, drew particular criticism, yet the Jewish characters are necessary to sharpen the tensions in the story.

In “Defender of the Faith,” Sheldon Grossbart, a wartime recruit, exploits the Jewish sympathies of his sergeant, Nathan Marx, the protagonist. Sheldon, also Jewish, lies, flatters, and uses cunning on the sympathies of Sergeant Marx in order to gain privileges. Marx, who is always in a state of uncertainty in his encounters with Grossbart, finally catches him lying, and Marx’s sympathy starts to dry up. The last straw for the sergeant is when Grossbart returns from a supposed family dinner with an egg roll rather than the promised gefilte fish, thus shattering the Jewish tie between him and his sergeant. Marx finally realizes that Grossbart has no respect for either his religion or the military, and has him sent to the Pacific battlefield.

Aside from his short fiction, Roth had multiple recurring figures and series, such as the Zucerkman, Kepesh, and Nemese series, as well as other standalone novels. Roth gave a voice to Jewish middle-class Americans growing up in the suburbs of New York City. He was highly lauded for these contributions, including receiving the 2010 National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama at the White House, and the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction on the world stage, the fourth winner of the biennial prize in 2011.

Iddo Gefen

Iddo Gefen was born in Israel in 1992. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he studied cognitive psychology at Columbia University and eventually began writing short stories about the Jewish experience. Jerusalem Beach (2023), his debut collection of short stories, has given a voice to twenty-first century Jews and focuses on the small but important aspects of everyday life in Israel. Gefen believes that storytelling is a powerful tool that can be used to better understand human action and instinct, and Jerusalem Beach is the brainchild of his studies at Columbia, his experience growing up in Israel, and his personal credos. The collection was awarded the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2023 and has been translated into numerous languages.

Bibliography

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