It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival

Abstract

the various synagogues, one of which provides temporary shelter for its “wandering and exiled God” (p. 175). No previous scholar has shown Der Nister’s clear fascination with the built environment. Krutikov situates the novel in an impressive array of contexts, including Soviet–Polish relations, Jewish economic history, the history of socialist realism, Yiddish literary history, Jewish religious history, the novel’s reception, and its tangled publication history. This chapter will be the touchstone for any future work on Der Nister’s novel. To be sure, too much emphasis on context canundermine the cohesiveness of an argument, but not here. As Krutikov shows consistently throughout his study, there ismore continuity in Der Nister’s oeuvre than not, and all the various themes andmodalities ofDerNister’swriting come together in The FamilyMashber, “creating a fusion of Jewish religious mysticism, Yiddish modernism, and secular communist messianism” (p. 199). An example of the solution that Der Nister found in reconciling these conflicting ideas and styles, according to Krutikov, is the value he gave to the Bratslav hasidim, despised as the lowest of the lowby themoremainstreamJewish religious groups. In this novel, the Bratslaver contain the potential for protest against the reigning order, and thus for a better future. Readers interested in the least well-known period of Der Nister’s creativity will be especially drawn to the final chapter of Krutikov’s study, which explores both published and unpublished work from the last decade of Der Nister’s life. This includes his collection Korbones (which means both “victims” and “sacrifices”), as well as stories in which Jewish characters appear less as Hitler’s victims and more as Soviet victors. Krutikov’s analysis of these largely neglected works lays out Der Nister’s creative process, which included the combination of stories he heard from others with a rich symbolic set of references and a recognizable historical setting. Krutikov shows that Der Nister achieved a synthesis of the major strands of his artistry: symbolism, Jewish history and its catastrophes, and Soviet history. Birobidzhan particularly drew the author’s imagination as the place where Jewish wandering could come to an end: “Der Nister outlined a grand vision for the new Jewish homeland in the Soviet Far East” (p. 254). Der Nister’s grand narrative of the Jewish people, and Der Nister himself, were deeply engaged with the Soviet project. Der Nister’s own final tragedy — his arrest in 1949 and his death the following year in a labor camp —should not obscure this crucial dimension of his life and work. As argued by Krutikov with skill and erudition, this point could well serve as the point of departure for any number of studies of Soviet Yiddish writers and their work.