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o c t o b e r 2005 u w ww.j e w i s h r e a d er.o r g
The Angel of Forgetfulness
by Steve Stern (Viking 2005)
E
S
S
AY
 BY
 DARA
 HORN
T
wo years ago in the pages of Pakn Tr e g e r, t h e
Book Center’s maga z i n e , UCLA Yi d d i s h
p r o fessor Janet Hadda asked the perennial question
about where Yiddish was headed in America
in the twenty-first century, and who was taking it there.
While her dismissal of e f forts to continue the spoken language
raised hackles in some quarters, her answer to who
really holds the future of Yiddish was both intriguing and
i n s p i r i n g : c o n t e m p o ra ry American Jewish novel i s t s , w h o
write in English while drawing upon the legacy of t h e
Yiddish litera ry tra d i t i o n . O f these writers, Hadda claimed,
“Their existence is a comfo r t, a n e k h o m e, not to be
demeaned or denied, but to be hera l d e d, c h e r i s h e d, a n d
a d m i r e d.Through their work, the culture – and with it, t h e
soul – of A s h ke n a z,o f Jewish Eastern Europe,will continue
to breathe fire and light.” It sounds encoura g i n g, o f c o u r s e ,
but a few too many American Jewish novels have confused
l e gacy with kitsch.W h a t’s often missing from these works is
a real k n o w l e d g e o f the Yiddish litera ry legacy – not just of
the “a t m o s p h e r e” of Yiddish culture, but its actual content.
Fortunately for readers on the hunt, a new novel has
just proven that some are still breathing fire and light.
Steve Stern’s The Angel of Fo r g e t f u l n e s s is proof positive
that it is possible to write a “Yiddish novel in English” –
one that doesn’t derive its y i d i s h k a y t from phony o y’s or
imagined shtetls, but from a profound knowledge of
Yiddish litera t u r e , with all its intellectual and
imaginative powers. If that weren’t enough of a feat, T h e
Angel of Forgetfulness is incidentally a magnificent story
by any standard: original, captivating, utterly brilliant –
a bridge between the living and the dead.
The Angel of Fo r g e t f u l n e s s is written as three stories in one.
On the outermost layer we find Saul, a Jewish
teenager from Memphis who has just arrived in
college at New Yo rk University in 196 9. While his
fellow freshmen immerse themselves in the
p r o v e rbial sex, d r u g s , and rock’n’r o l l , Saul finds
h i m s el f d rawn in a different direction: toward the
h i s t o ry of the Lower East Side neighborhood just
outside his dorm, where the epicenter of the new
counterculture has been constructed on the fo r-
gotten ruins of a Yiddish-speaking past.R eluctantly meeting
with an el d e rly aunt in the neighborh o o d, Saul soon discovers
that his aunt’s memory is a vast vault of a buried
w o rld from which he cannot separate himsel f.
The second layer of the novel is told by Nathan, a n o t h e r
Jewish teenager Saul’s age living in Saul’s neighborh o o d.A l l
that separates them is a language – and about sixty years.
L i ke Saul, Nathan is a lost and lonely new immigrant in the
b i zarre world of New Yo rk ’s Lower East Side. His search fo r
a livelihood leads him to a job as a proofreader at the
Yiddish Daily Fo rw a r d; m e a n w h i l e , his search for a life leads
him to Saul’s aunt. But theirs is no ordinary love story – or
e v e n , at times, a love story at all. N a t h a n’s obsession with
the young woman melds with another obsession of h i s :
a tale he has been creating in his mind, during his long and
l o n ely nights, about an angel who descends to earth and
falls in love with a mortal woman. Eventually the tale outgrows
the confines of N a t h a n’s imagination, spilling into
N a t h a n’s life in devastating ways.
The novel ’s innermost layer is both its simplest and its
most profo u n d.It is the story that Nathan has been writing
(or is it) about Mocky, the Angel of Fo rgetfulness – the
unnamed angel described in the Talmud as striking each
child below its nose before birth, to cause each one to fo rg e t
his former life in para d i s e . On one fateful trip to earth back
in the 164 0 s , en route to a day’s work of smacking a baby’s
fa c e , M o c ky lingers on earth a bit too long and falls in love
with a mortal woman. Passing himsel f o f f as a human,

M o c ky marries the woman and fathers a half-angel baby.
But when the pogromist Chmielnicki comes to town,
M o c ky decides that “earth was no place to raise a kid,” and
smuggles the baby back to para d i s e . O f c o u r s e , o n c e
touched by this worl d, the child has no hope of staying in
the world to come, and returns to earth as fast as he can –
turning up, as it happens, on the Lower East Side.
Steve Stern’s novel fits so seamlessly into the legacy of
Yiddish literature that one almost feels as though one
were reading in tra n s l a t i o n . For those familiar with
Yiddish fiction, poetry and drama, the references to every
writer from H. Leyvik to Itsik Manger are as dizzyingly
exciting as the novel’s expert depiction of everything
from 1910s Yiddish theater to 1970s counterculture,
along with their respective sentimentalism and nihilism
– and the moral questions raised by each.
Yet there is something very American and particularl y
Southern about his work as wel l , evocative of the great
Southern writers who have also braided together memory
and myth: the haze of old ruins, the lost grandeur of t h e
p a s t, the sense of living in a world populated by ghosts.
S a u l ’s trav els through his prolonged adolescence, i n c l u d i n g
pit stops everywhere from a commune in the Oza rks to
P ra g u e’s Jewish quarter under Soviet rule, become a picaresque
tale reminiscent of many an American on-the-road
n o v el , and a haunting suicide at the center of the book
reads more like Faulkner than Pe r e t z. The connections
between these worlds comes bra c i n g l y, in surprising overlapping
images and symbols: a painting reappears at unexpected
moments; two young men, g e n e rations apart, l i v e
alone in book-filled rooms where women struggle to break
through the walls of books surrounding the young men’s
h e a r t s ; a treehouse Saul lives in on the commune fuses
eerily with the Tree of L i fe connecting heaven and earth.
What is astounding about Stern’s work is how easily he
intertwines these settings and styles,as though this material
were made to work in tandem. I t’s the kind of p e r fect layering
that has reigned supreme in Yiddish literature since
M e n d ele combined medieval Jewish legends with Don
Q u i x o t e , and the kind that English readers ra r ely have the
treat of e x p e r i e n c i n g . But it is also the kind of n o v el that
ra r ely comes along at all, especially today: the kind of n o v el
that immerses you deep into a well of legend and then ra i s e s
you up refreshed and cleansed and newly aware of how little
s e p a rates this world from both the prior world and the next.
I f that isn’t the ability to breathe fire and light,what is JR
E
XCERPTS
“‘My son, N a c h m a n , as you know,’” she began reading,
her eyes at once starting to wander while her crooke d
fingers brushed over the words like bra i l l e , “‘was reared
in para d i s e…’” Lowering the pages, she informed me,
“This is for us the ideal story”…a wheeze and a burb l e
“…since it don’t matter should I croak before we finish.
Nathan didn’t never finish the writing of it anyw a y.”
T h e n , prey to a sudden considera t i o n , she gazed at me
o p a q u ely over the book, s a y i n g , “So , N e p h e w…w h y
d o n’t you” ( page 38)
“S a c ked from every position he held for an
incompetence that confirmed his worst fe a r s , N a t h a n
succumbed to a crippling despondency. Had fear not
outweighed his desolation, he might have followed the
grimy caftan who invited him to audition for a local
p i c k p o c keting academy. This was his situation when he
d u c ked out of an afternoon rain shower into the
d o o rway of the Jewish Daily Fo rw a r d in its new tens
t o ry tower on East Broadway and diffidently peeke d
inside.…Nathan stood on the threshold, too tra n s f i x e d
by the chaos to flee, when a tall, b u s h y - h a i r e d
gentleman in leather suspenders emerged from an
office to hand him a sheaf o f handwritten pages.
‘Ta ke this, m a ch shnel, to the compositor!’
‘What is it’ asked Nathan.
‘Holy writ,’ the man barke d, peering muddy-eyed over
his spectacles at the former shlepper. ‘ I t ’s newspaper
c o p y, what el s e ’
‘But I don’t work here.’
The bushy-haired man seemed incapable of g ra s p i n g
the concept. ‘Then why are you holding my copy’
Rather than return them, h o w e v e r, Nathan clutched the
pages to his chest and answered experimentally,
‘ Because I need a job’” ( page 45)
“What they schooled us in, in our angelic cheder, w a s
the wisdom we were supposed to impart to unborn
s o u l s . There was a pointlessness to this opera t i o n , s i n c e
why would you fill a vessel with learning in one worl d
only to empty it in another It was a cruel and unusual
p r o c e s s , which made your immortal souls reluctant to
assume their mortality, just as later, h aving fo rg o t t e n
on earth what they’d learned in heav e n , they were
the jewish reader / october 2005 / page 2

unwilling to return to para d i s e . The whole program was
enough to make you wonder: Why heaven and earth in
the first place What was so remarkable about the lower
w o rld that the upper should be mindful of i t, and vice
v e r s a ” ( page 110)
“It passes through an assortment of p a t r i a r c h s ,
p r o p h e t s , and fo o l s , A d a m’s soul, entering and exiting
bodies with the frequency of Ka f ka changing rental
u n i t s , bodies that perish from fire, w a t e r, h u n g e r,
h e a r t b r e a k, and fright. It escapes through the teeth of a
captured Zealot as the Romans flay his skin with iron
c o m b s , only to inhabit a bride snatched by crusaders
from under her marriage canopy and violated
u n s p e a ka b l y. …The soul of Adam resides eventually in
Isaac Lu r i a , the Ari, magician of s i x t e e n t h - c e n t u ry
S a fed…it occupies as well the earth vessel of N a c h m a n
o f B ra t s l av, who hides the secret of summoning the
Messiah in his beautiful stories.…For a time Adam’s
soul resides in the slippery instrument of H e r s h el
O s t r o p o l i e r, jester to the court of the Medzibozer
r eb b e , who explains on his deathbed, ‘Not dying,
dieting – I’m trying to get back to my original weight of
seven pounds.’” ( page 312) JR
Q
U
E
STIONS
 FOR
 DISCUSSION
1) Jewish fiction dealing with American history, such as
immigrant life in New York or even the more recent
history of the 1960s, tends to focus on the social and
political aspects of the settings it explores. Stern’s novel,
by contrast, chooses to examine these settings by
blending them with legend, via the experiences of his
highly imaginative characters. How does this affect our
understanding of the cultural past he presents
2) We often imagine that the problems we face in
defining ourselves in the modern era are unique to our
times. What are the connections between Saul’s search
for his own identity and those of his predecessors in the
novel
3) One of the novel’s major themes is the breaking of
sexual conventions, from Nathan and Keni’s
untraditional love affair in the 1910s to Saul’s virginity
in the free-love atmosphere of the 1970s to Mocky’s love
for a mortal woman. Is there something about breaking
rules that makes love more likely or more possible, or is
that idea itself one of the myths that lead these
characters to stumble
4) Jewish culture has always emphasized the life of the
mind, especially through reading and writing, but many
of the characters in The Angel of Fo r g e t f u l n e s s find that
their literary imaginations are stronger than the world
can accommodate. What are the powers of literature
within the novel, and what are its limitations
5) The novel takes place in a series of constantly
changing ad-hoc settings, from an agricultural
commune to an immigrant neighborhood to an
inconsistent “paradise.” What do these worlds have in
common How possible is it to create a new world on
the ruins of an old one
6) In the novel’s ad-hoc worlds, one aspect of life that is
noticeably absent is one of the staples of Jewish
literature: families. Instead, we find characters separated
from their families, whether by force or by choice. What
do these characters’ lonely paths suggest about the way
life must be lived when generations can no longer
communicate
7) What is the power of the supernatural in this book
Are there sources of mystical power available in the
modern world
8) What is the difference between heaven and earth
Dara Horn, a doctoral candidate in Hebrew and Yi d d i s h
literature at Harvard, is the author of two novels: In the
I m a g e , w h i ch received a National Jewish Book Award in
2003, and The Wo rld to Co m e , w h i ch will be published in
J a n u a ry 2006.
the
Jewish Reader is a publication of the
National Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, MA.
E d i t o r: Nancy Sherman
w w w.j e w i s h r e a d e r. o r g
JR
the jewish reader / october 2005 / page 3