In this timely anthology, Zipes gathers twenty-five memorable short stories and folktales, one novella, and two essays, all of which offer different Jewish perspectives on the “Jewish Question.” Written between the 1870s and 1930s, these works open a dialogue on identity and antisemitism during a period of assimilation for Jews in European society. The writers confronted hatred and fear with satire, fantasy, and earnestness. They blamed both Jews and non-Jews, in the hope that things would change.
Zipes has dug deep. He includes a few tales by well-known authors like Sholom Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, Israel Zangwill, and S. Ansky, but also introduces many voices who will be previously unknown to most readers. Stories here take place in Prague, Vienna, Germany, Romania, Odessa, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Prussian Silesia, Lithuania, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and even, in a story by I. L. Peretz, the folkloric Chelm — where the rabbi’s ultimate decision when Yankele insists the Shabbes Goy who comes to light his fires on the Sabbath is a murderer is to send Yankele away and give the Shabbes Goy a raise.
Most of the humor in this book is ironic, even bitter. Zipes opens with two stories which he shared in 1991: “The Operated Jew,” where a man grotesquely attempts to transform from Jew to Christian, both physically and in manner; answered twenty-nine years later by another author in“The Operated Goy,” where a Christian more successfully becomes a Jew, which helps dampen blood prejudice for other races, too. In a story by Sholom Aleichem, one traveling Jewish salesman on a train recognizes another when the antisemitic newspaper he is trying to hide under slides off his semitic nose as he lies sleeping. He purchases his own copy, and, once awake, without exchanging any words about identity, both salesmen end up whistling a well-known Yiddish folk song together.
With cleverness and sometimes miracles, recognized Hasidic rabbis, such as the Rebbe of Apte and the Ba’al Shem Tov, turn the tables on antisemites, sometimes with their cleverness and sometimes with miracles. Zipes includes the story of the famous golem that Rabbi Loeb brings to life to defend the Jews of Prague. Villains include Tsar Nicholas I and Godfrey de Bouillion as well as generic kings, a pope, count, and other Christians officials who hold the power. It is an artist who alone manages to reverse the situation, however, in the novella The City Without Jews, in which Vienna suffers economic and cultural humiliation after electing a chancellor who banishes the entire Jewish population from the city.
The tales in this book have eerie relevance once again.
Sharon Elswit, author of The Jewish Story Finder and a school librarian for forty years in NYC, now resides in San Francisco, where she shares tales aloud in a local JCC preschool and volunteers with 826 Valencia to help students write their own stories and poems.
