2024-10-21 13:21:00
In Max Gross’s novel “The Forgotten Shtetl,” Jews survived the Holocaust in the Polish forests. Because the idea of thinking of a Jewish village as a “Gallic village” made brilliant reading.
Somewhere in the Polish forests there is a shtetl where time stood still around 1800. So there are several synagogues there along with rabbis, a kosher butcher, a baker, a tailor, geese and cows, housewives who turn on the house lights Shabbat on Friday evening – but no paved roads and no running water, let alone electricity. This shtetl is so well hidden that the Germans never found it.
Its inhabitants, just over 1,700 souls, were not shot in the pit by the SS task forces nor deported to the gas chambers of Treblinka. Even the shtetl, called Kreskol, simply slept through communism and the Cold War. With no ringing phones and flickering internet, the residents of Kreskol don’t even know what they’ve been missing. They also have no idea that a state called Israel was founded in the Middle East.
This is the basic idea of “The Forgotten Shtetl,” the debut novel by American business journalist Max Gross, much of it quite good. It tells a picaresque novel and a love story at the same time: one day the beautiful Pescha Lindauer disappears, and then her husband Ismael leaves too. The suspicion is that he killed her. Terrible! So the young Jankel Lewinkopf is sent to ask the Polish goyim for help. The rest is essentially his story: how the young man becomes lost in the modern world and through him the shtetl is discovered by tourists, politicians and TV crews. The comic effect of the novel arises from the fact that Max Gross takes his basic idea seriously: he realizes his absurd scenario with a Buster Keaton expression.
Take for example the scene in which Jankel Lewinkopf, now in a Polish mental hospital, is introduced by doctors to classical and modern music. He thinks Mozart is, sorry, too non-Jewish, but the Rolling Stones aren’t as good as Mozart. He gets really emotional with Ray Charles: “He laughed, clapped and even got up to dance. It might seem strange, since the only dance Jankel knew was the Hora, but it seemed as sincere as in Dr. There was a rumor in Meslowski’s office that the doctor didn’t have the courage to laugh at him.” It sounds like a klezmer tune, says Jankel, and of course he is right. (Incidentally, we owe it to Daniel Beskos, who translated the book, that we can hear the klezmer melody of American prose so well in German.)
Max Gross’s shtetl is no idyll
The shtetl, as Max Gross describes it, is not an idyll; That would be kitsch. Almost exactly halfway through the novel, the reality of the genocide bursts into the plot: we learn that a rabbi knew what the Nazis did to the Jews and that he kept this knowledge secret from the inhabitants of the shtetl because otherwise they would lose their minds.
After this surprising publicity, the Polish shtetl begins to resemble more and more the small and well-known Gallic village resisting the Roman invaders: the question seriously arises whether the forces of modernity will succeed in what the Nazis failed to do, namely to destroy the shtetl.
Max Gross makes two serious mistakes. First, at the end of the novel it distorts its narrative perspective: suddenly the narrator’s voice (which belongs to an anonymous inhabitant of the shtetl) knows things that only God could have seen and heard. Secondly, the novel is completely far-fetched in one interesting point: the inhabitants of Kreskol do not want to know anything about Israel – they do not even want to travel to Jerusalem as tourists. But Max Gross’s narrative strength is so great that such errors are almost imperceptible while reading. It was a great debut. When will the next novel arrive?
Maximum gross: The Forgotten Shtetl. Translated from English by Daniel Beskos. Catapult, 400 pages, 25 euros.
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