I recently read the remarkable first novel by journalist Max Gross, The Lost Shtetl. I came across the book when perusing the list of winners of this year’s National Jewish Book Awards; it also garnered the Jewish Fiction Award from the National Association of Jewish Libraries. The book begins in the “what if” genre: What if a Jewish shtetl had somehow escaped the Shoah? The premise gives Gross the artistic license to portray a modern-day replica of the shtetl a la Sholom Aleichem, S. Ansky and other literary purveyors of a folkloristic, nostalgic picture of small-town Eastern European life before the modern world changed traditional patterns, even well before the Nazis. Gross applies the paint fairly thickly, and readers who imbibed the Yiddish classics in their youth will quickly recognize and enjoy his expert depiction and storytelling, laced with a gentle undercurrent of irony like the best of the old masters.
The second half of the novel, which finds a couple of the lead characters in the first part transported to present-day Warsaw, takes a turn towards another old Yiddish author, Sholom Asch. Banished from their Eden, they wind up lost, adrift, manipulated and abused. A divorcee, fleeing a brief, unhappy marriage, becomes a prostitute; an orphan, pursuing the divorcee and his own fate, is beaten by roughnecks. They begin as media curios but are unable to capitalize on their new fame. Ill-equipped for contemporary life, neither character finds success, with each trapped in a no-man’s-land between the Jewish past and the Polish present.
By the end, I came to realize that the book was more than a what-if or an exercise in Yiddish narration, as much as I enjoyed those aspects. Instead, it becomes a meditation on our past, both our historical and literary pasts, on what we make of them and how they inform our present lives as Jews and our Jewish communities. The author brings the focus back to the lost shtetl, and we see the townsfolk engaged in an argument of how they should react to the new encounter with the outside world that suddenly impinges on their lives. Some embrace the outside, looking for commerce, an escape or a notion of freedom; others try to ban it and remain in the traditional ways. In other words, the folks in the shtetl become us.
The novel brings to mind many of the thoughts and feelings I have as we enter Yom HaShoah. We want to be faithful, first and foremost, to the memory of the Jews who perished–but how? How do we not view them primarily as victims but as individuals, as singular Jews who lived in extraordinary, awful times? Do we look to recreate the ways of small Jewish life before the Shoah–the lives that many Jews had fled or altered, whether they moved to the big cities or stayed in smaller communities? How do we find the right balance between our past, present and future, between “parochialism” and “cosmopolitanism,” “tradition” and “modernity,” or whatever polarities we think are the ones between which we need to steer?
These questions are ones that provoke me but which I find hard to answer. As often is the case, I wonder if being aware of the questions, of meditating upon them regularly, is enough.