This volume brings together, for the first time, the two major novels and collected short stories of Esther Kreitman (1891 – 1954), known in Yiddish as Hinde Ester Singer Kreytman, the older sister of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Israel Joshua Singer. Until relatively recently, Kreitman’s work was at best considered a footnote to the work of her more acclaimed brothers, especially I. B. Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize. The development of feminist scholarship has done much to resurrect Kreitman’s fiction and to place it in the context of a rich literary heritage both in Yiddish and European literature.
Kreitman’s two novels emerge from the circumstances of her own life. Born in the shtetl world described in her brothers’ fiction and memoirs, she was sent off to an arranged marriage to an Antwerp diamond cutter. The outbreak of World War I sent the couple to England, where Kreitman lived for the better part of the rest of her life. By all accounts, hers was not a happy marriage and neither she nor her husband made an adequate living. She contributed short stories to Yiddish publications in England and Poland and published her two novels without attaining much recognition. The first translations of her work began to appear in the years after World War II.
Her first novel, The Dance of the Demons (Der Sheydim Tants; originally titled Devoyrele) tells a story that in outline mirrors Kreitman’s early life. Deborah (Devoyrele) is the daughter of a small-town rabbi and his educated but sickly wife. The grinding poverty of the Polish shtetl and the limited horizons set before a young Jewish girl of the early twentieth century are laid out in blistering detail. The family moves several times before winding up in Warsaw, where their prospects don’t improve significantly. Deborah attempts to escape from the trap of her life by dabbling in Socialism, and then when that fails to liberate her, she agrees to an arranged marriage to an Antwerp diamond cutter. That marriage turns out to be another trap and the novel ends with Deborah and her husband facing the imminent German invasion of Belgium.
The second novel, Diamonds (Brilyantn), set in the Antwerp Jewish community of diamond merchants and workers, draws a broader portrait of Jewish life. Centered on the family of a wealthy and somewhat unscrupulous merchant named Gedaliah Berman, the novel describes the tensions between Berman and his children, the machinations of the diamond market, and the poverty and exploitation of many of the workers. The German invasion of 1914 sends Berman and family to seek refuge in England, where Berman tries to reestablish his business and keep his family together. While he succeeds materially, he is left at the end of the novel with his personal relations shattered. HIs wife (whom he regularly disparaged) dies, his son rejects him, and his father leaves behind a damning note repudiating him.
Influenced to some extent by the fiction of Charles Dickens, Kreitman is at her strongest depicting the social forces affecting the characters, especially the women. Deborah’s limited horizons are mirrored to some extent in the plight of Gitele, a young girl in Diamonds, who has a child out of wedlock with Berman’s son and lives a life of grinding poverty with her common-law husband, a socialist organizer. Berman’s daughter Jeannette is pushed into an arranged marriage with an older man when she becomes pregnant with the child of a non-Jewish lover. Mrs. Berman is a sad character living under the thumb of her imperious husband.
Kreitman’s plot development isn’t always sure-footed. Scenes in both novels occasionally go on longer than they need to or are sometimes heavy-handed in their satire of social pretensions (especially in Diamonds). But the accumulation of detail and the emotional underpinnings make their impact felt and the novels hold their own as social portraits of a lost world.
