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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
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