We would have known, even if Job hadn’t told us: the good suffer, while “the evil man is spared on the day of calamity” (Job 21:30). Chicken Soup for the Jewish Soul, like its three dozen predecessors in this inspirational series, is a collection of brief stories that offer a better grade of comfort than Job’s friends offered him. Soliciting material via word of mouth and internet, the Editors have deftly assembled a collection of warm and warming stories, some written by their protagonists, others taken down by a friend, daughter, employer, or physician.
Now that series originators Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen serve up volumes of chicken soup for very specific sorts of souls — nurses’ souls, gardeners’ souls, even prisoners’ souls each get their own flavor — one wonders exactly what recipe they have followed for the Jewish soul.
Clearly one crucial ingredient is their co-editor, Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins, whose gift for finding succinct but imposing narratives serves this volume very well. Other ingredients are added to please Jewish tastes: the cherished bonds of family and home, the values of spiritual endurance and faith, and the celebration of life. If these are ingredients that would please many other types of souls as well, here they are stirred with an extra measure of tears, for in so many of these stories we encounter the central Jewish ordeal of the last century: the Holocaust.
Though various in their settings — Berlin, Poland, New York, Tel Aviv — these Holocaust stories comprise a couple of persistent themes. One is the notion that loss and rupture can be answered, if not healed, by unforeseen, remarkable reunions. In the opening story, Sonya, a traumatized refugee in New York, reluctantly agrees to take in two orphaned children, only to discover that they are her own niece and nephew. In “The Rimonim,” a gallery owner in Jaffa agrees to buy a single rimon — a silver Torah ornament— from a man who rescued it from his synagogue during Kristallnacht. When, years later, a woman enters his shop with an identical rimon, he reunites two siblings separated by years of war and displacement. In “The Last Four Digits,” an American-born Israeli tour guide notices that the number tattooed on a tourist’s arm is one digit different from that on the arm of a carpenter he had known years before on a kibbutz; wordlessly, he drives all the way to Afula to bring brother to brother. (How had he remembered the carpenter’s number? By a strange coincidence, it matched his own childhood phone number, which by a coincidence just as strange, matched his social security number.) In still another story, a family of poor refugees in Seattle prepares to use a potato for a Channukah menorah when the doorbell rings; miraculously, the mailman delivers a package containing the silver menorah they had left behind in Vienna, along with a letter tracing its journey from Vienna to Palestine and on to America; a special delivery indeed. The cumulative force of these stories is to move the reader beyond coincidence to the realm of what is bashert; that is, to reveal the shadow of a divine hand in the lives of Jews. A few stories speak to us more forcefully for their singularity. Tom Veres’s “The Story of Raoul Wallenberg” gives us a rare first-hand account of this brave Swedish architect who, like the firefighters who ran toward, not away from, the World Trade Center, headed for the heart of darkness and never returned. Norman Jaffe’s refreshing “The Day Hitler Touched Me” captures the confusion, loneliness and ambivalence with which a young Jewish teenager watches his peers catch the fever of Hitler Youth — with the most unexpected of consequences.
Another important theme of the Holocaust stories is the righteousness of gentiles, some of whom risked their lives to save Jews. A young Polish priest declines to baptize a Jewish child taken in by a gentile family until an attempt is made to locate Jewish relatives; that priest, it turns out, is now Pope John Paul II. In several stories, a Jew reunited after decade with his gentile Frania or Verutka, attempts to repay the priceless debt of life itself. In fact, “Our Common Humanity” is the rubric under which this theme of the righteous gentile is extended well beyond the Holocaust. We glimpse such righteousness not only in wartorn Sarajevo and Lithuania, but also in Billings, Montana, where residents protest an antisemitic hate crime by pasting menorahs in their windows; in Oxford, England, where students organize to wrest from a Soviet official a visa for a young Russian refusenik; in Sacramento, where nearly 5000 people of diverse ethnicities and religions gathered to protest the firebombing of a synagogue.
If there is a more insistent theme in this book than those of divine succor and heroic human righteousness, it is the importance of small-scale, homegrown, unnoticed acts of lovingkindess— gemilut chasadim. Typically, we learn about these acts second-hand, for nothing inspires like a story of someone else’s inspiration. Whether it is a young woman, inspired by a doctor’s fatal heroism, vowing to become a doctor herself; a child who watches a rare book dealer giving a poor “pretzel lady” an exorbitant sum for worthless books; or a long-distance jogger returning— literally and figuratively — to his neglected wife, our capacity to be inspired is itself awakened by these stories. The volume bears an arresting dedication: “to all those who have kept the Jewish people alive for four thousand years by telling stories.” What we wouldn’t give to have those four thousand years of stories in our hands.
Esther Schor is the author of the biography Emma Lazarus, Bearing the Dead, the memoir My Last J‑Date, and the poetry collection The Hills of Holland. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and The Forward, among other publications. A professor of English at Princeton University, Schor lives in Princeton, NJ.
