Love & Death in Poland
Everyday Jews: Scenes from a Vanished Life
by Yehoshue Perle
Edited by David G. Roskies
Translated by Maier Deshell
and Margaret Birstein
Yale. 350 pp. $38.00

In 1935, the Second Polish Republic, despite its accelerating drift toward authoritarianism and the massive revival of anti-Semitism, was still the freest country in Europe for the kind of political, religious, and artistic expression that had its roots in Yiddish culture. Warsaw, its capital city, was second to none in the intensity and quality of its Yiddish journalism, literature, and theater.

Warsaw’s Yiddish writers had no doubt that they were working in a mature medium for a discerning, lively readership that was ready to consume both world-class shlock, serialized in mass newspapers, and rarefied modernist experiments published in the first issue of avant-garde journals that would never see a second. The ferment that was 1930’s Poland yielded a slew of literary masterpieces. One of them, Yehoshue Perle’s semi-autobiographical Everyday Jews: Scenes from a Vanished Life, has now been published in an excellent English translation as a volume in the New Yiddish Library.

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Appearing in the spring of 1935, Everyday Jews befuddled the Yiddish literary establishment. The prissy left-wing press denounced its sex scenes as retrograde bourgeois elements. Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose depressing, sexually-charged masterpiece, Satan in Goray, was also published in book form in 1935, ironically found Perle’s novel too bleak to be credible. Shmuel Niger, the doyen of Yiddish critics, complained that the novel “lacked an idea.” What stood in the way of a level-headed assessment of the novel’s stature was undoubtedly Perle’s prominence as a purveyor of erotic potboilers (a genre in which Singer had shown himself equally proficient).

Perle (pronounced PEHR-leh) was born in 1888 in Radom, 65 miles south of Warsaw. His father dealt in hay. His mother at one point left the family abruptly to take care of her infant granddaughter in Siberia, returning in time to pressure her son to complete the four-year curriculum of the Russian gymnasium in two years and to find a profession—accounting—that would enable him to earn his keep.

In 1905, Perle took off for Warsaw. There, as David Roskies writes in his fine introduction to this volume, “he would lead a double life, working from nine to five in a starched collar and speaking perfect Polish, first as an assistant bookkeeper in a bank, then as chief accountant in a large mill.” After hours, now speaking “his broad, superidiomatic Polish Yiddish,” he participated in readings under the auspices of Warsaw’s literary godhead I.L. Peretz, or held forth in the salon run by the founders of Der Moment, which would become Jewish Warsaw’s second largest newspaper. It was in Der Moment that Perle would serialize his tantalizing shund (“trash”)—novels with titles like Jewish Blood, Downhill, and Reviled and Rebuked—and murder his own literary reputation.

But that was later. In the early 1920’s, Perle was writing neoromantic prose poems and short fiction and venturing into realism; his 1923 novella “Numbers” profiled the empty existence of a bank clerk suffocated by loneliness and suppressed desire. That year, Perle was elected to the board of the Yiddish Writer’s Club. By his late thirties he was married with a young son, financially secure, and a rising literary star.

Then, one day in 1926, his beautiful wife Sarah inexplicably hanged herself. Shattered, Perle vowed never to remarry but to dedicate himself to his son. It was in order to pay for a full-time housekeeper that he anonymously churned out shund for the ravenous mass market. The three asterisks with which he signed his works became, as Roskies puts it, “synonymous with the sellout of [high] Yiddish culture to the ‘bourgeois yellow-sheet press,’” and they fooled no one. In November 1933 he was publicly rebuked by the poet Kadia Molodowsky at an assembly of the Yiddish P.E.N. Club, and in August 1935, at a gathering of the YIVO Institute in Vilna, he was booed off the stage as a pornographer.

It took another two years (and Perle’s remorseful resignation from Moment) for his literary colleagues to recognize that what they had in Everyday Jews was a meticulously constructed meditation on the social constraints of love, the destructive force of desire, and the finality of death. In November 1937, Perle, by now elected to the Warsaw branch of the Yiddish P.E.N. Club, received a best-novel award for Everyday Jews.

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Spanning two years in the life of a pre-adolescent boy named Mendl, Everyday Jews is set in a sizable town (probably Radom) a day’s trip from Warsaw. The novel opens with the sudden death of Mendl’s older half-brother Moyshe. The event compels his mother to move the family to another apartment, thus establishing the first of several rhythms that underlie the novel’s structure. After each death, Mendl’s mother is compelled to move. Melancholy and depression express themselves as physical unrest and a flight from memory.

Both of Mendl’s parents have several children from marriages with beloved first spouses, whereas Mendl, from whose perspective as an adult the novel is told, is the only child of a second marriage forged by necessity. Slowly, Perle unfolds this small family’s complicated social structure. In fact, it might help to read the novel with pen and paper to record the names of the 30 minor characters who make up the extended family tree. The result is a wide-branched picture of secularizing, petit-bourgeois Jewish Poland. As in an intellectual laboratory, Perle proceeds to combine brothers- and sisters-by-marriage into desire-driven couples whose relationships founder on their shared social and economic circumstances.

These couplings and de-couplings are noticed with special keenness by the impressionable Mendl because, right after Moyshe’s death, while the family is away at the funeral, his own sexual initiation takes place through the ministrations of an older Polish servant girl in the bed he shares with his father at night. As Mendl’s sexual impulses become stronger and more clearly defined, they serve him as an instrument for decoding the bizarre goings-on in the adult world.

But Perle is after bigger game than a run-of-the mill modernist fiction about the shaping of a sensitive hero. Where Everyday Jews differs, brilliantly, is in the sympathies of its protagonist Mendl. These lie not so much with his own needs as with those of his parents: his father Leyzer, a hay dealer, and his mother Frimet, a homemaker.

Mendl notices every hurt and insult suffered by his parents, not least at the hands of the children from their first marriages. They include Leyzer’s adored, Russified son Leybke, who has just been released from the czar’s army, and Frimet’s beautiful daughter Tsipele, senior sales girl in a women’s fashion shop in Warsaw who, during a rare visit home, allows her mother to scrub the pots while she primps before a mirror. They also include Frimet’s son Yoyne (Jonah), whose mouth gives the impression that it holds “no more than a single tooth, a gold tooth, big and prominent.” At the Passover seder Yoyne mocks Leyzer for confusing two words while reciting the Haggadah:

I can’t say for certain, but that may have been the precise moment when I began to dislike my brother Yoyne, when I caught sight of his gold tooth just as father was stumbling over maka and kama. I thought to myself that Yoyne’s sin, smirking at Father’s innocent mistake, was greater than my own sin of not having burned the khometz [leavened foodstuff] that morning.

By making his young narrator Mendl not rebel against his parents but empathize with them, Perle shows himself to be the heir of the great Sholem Aleichem, who in Tevye the Milkman recorded from the viewpoint of a sorrowing father the difficulties of match-making for five daughters in troubled times. Match-making is, indeed, the great theme of classic Yiddish fiction, and Perle plays it here as comedy, tragedy, melodrama, and modernist farce. But his perspective is that of Tevye and the parent generation, a perspective now perversely shared by a twelve-year-old boy who wisely doubts that the temporary and rootless quenching of desire can satisfy a fully realized human being.

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Alongside the rhythms established by death and desire, the novel’s third, hesitantly unfolding motif is the seasonal flow of the Jewish holidays. This becomes more pronounced as the novel progresses and as Mendl, who is not himself particularly pious, takes the measure of how well his visiting relatives acquit themselves of their social and ritual obligations. Fundamentally, though, it is not piety but loyalty he is looking for, expressed as respect for what and who has gone before. This he finds wanting outside his core family of his parents and himself.

The novel ends not, as such novels usually do, with the hero’s liberation and release from home, but rather with a further confinement:

[O]n a certain weekday, Father helped me into my coat and went with me to the study house, where a pale Jew with green whiskers began to instruct me in the laws of tefillin, the donning of the phylacteries that would mark my entry into manhood.

Instead of escaping into freedom, Mendl accepts the yoke of the law, his parental legacy, and the community of the Jews.

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This was Perle’s own commitment, too, and he paid for it with his life. In 1942, while Isaac Bashevis Singer was safely ensconced in New York and suffering from writer’s block, Perle was still in the Warsaw ghetto contributing to the last and most poignant flowering of Yiddish literature by working for Emanuel Ringelblum’s underground Oyneg Shabes archive, the painstaking chronicle of the last days of Warsaw Jewry.

Perle and his son secured Aryan papers in March 1943. Tricked by the Germans into giving themselves up, they were deported to Bergen-Belsen. On October 21, Perle was put on a train to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered on arrival. This artistically thrilling and morally uncompromising novel, a great testament of his commitment to the Jewish people, survived him in Yiddish and now lives on in English.

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