Opening Paragraph:
What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is or where to look or where we'll find it, but the material who, the how and the whither, the warp and weft, the length width depth and time, the dwelling foundations splendor and even eternity, are mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space between space, where exists possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap, a place of the world of no end that by wrestling to realize, we seem to bring tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific and small indeed finite time, if only in a specific and small indeed definite place. It is that land that within all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much in that brief instant even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we see it, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land.
Prologue: Reb Yaakov, Bransk, 1894
Suggested Reading (completely optional):
Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
Collected Stories and Tevye the Milkman by Sholem Aleichem
Tales of Rabbi Nachman
We begin in Bransk, 'every-shtetl' Northeast Poland of six-thousand inhabitants who are mostly farmers, half-Jewish, half-Christian, a place of Jewish hicks where nobody of particular distinction ever hailed from, except for the author's grandfather, Morris Tucker, formerly Meishel Tecoczki, and formerly before that Moshe Kharlap.
The name Kharlap is an acronym for 'Khiya, Rosh-l'Galut L'Polin', in Hebrew letters Khet-Reysh-Lamed-Pey, and translates to Khiya, head of the exiles in Poland; which means that the patrilineal line of the author's family is either descended from the first chief Rabbi of Poland, or some medieval Polish-Jewish merchant-grifter who realized he could mark up his prices if he lied about the eminence of his family lineage (his 'Yichus' as we say in Yiddish).
Kharlap shall be the name of the fictionalized family to which we subject the ordeal of this book. It is a family that incarnates in somewhat mythical circumstances, akin to a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer (for those of you not familiar with Singer, think of a Jewish Gabriel Garcia Marquez if he accepted editors' suggestions).
The year is 1894, it's just before Christmas, and Rebbe Yaakov Kharlap is a small town Rabbi, not even the synagogue rabbi for his town but merely a Kheder instructor - Kheder being the elementary school through which shtetl children are first taught their Hebrew letters, how to pray, how to read, how to memorize pages at a time of the Torah and Talmudic tractate. He is an alte mensch (old man )of the alte shul (old school), very free with the ruler upon the knuckles, and extremely proud, to the point of denial, about the brood of his twelve adolescent children: Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulun, Dinah (a daughter), and Yoseph.
You may recognize these names as the exact names of Jacob(Yaakov)'s children in the Old Testament or Tanakh. The reason for these names was because when the already middle aged Reb Yaakov was told that after he and his not particularly young wife's difficult years of conceiving, an angel appeared to Reb Yaakov in a dream, and in response to Reb Yaakov's insistent demand for a blessing, announced to Reb Yaakov that his wife would bear him twelve sons, which Reb Yaakov must in turn name after the twelve tribes of Israel.
The children come in six sets of twins of absurdly quick succession over five years between 1876-1880. All of whom, like the miracle Reb Yaakov knew would happen that everyone else doubted, survive into adulthood, albeit with many illnesses along the way that were meant to test the unbreakable faith of Reb Yaakov. All eleven of his sons are now Bar Mitzvahed, and the septuagenerian Reb Yaakov eagerly awaits the birth any day now which his unnamed sexagenarian wife will give to what he absolutely knows will be his twelfth son, who shall be named Benyamin.
Of course, Reb Yaakov has a twin brother himself, Ezra. Unlike Reb Yaakov who cannot make more money on his own than a small town teacher's salary can afford, Ezra is a wealthy man in Bialystok who the nearest Polish city. He has by and large abandoned Judaism, and Reb Yaakov is well aware that Ezra's much more 'enlightened' (re: assimilated) wife Ada has nothing but contempt for Reb Yaakov and through her perhaps correct pressure, Ezra is forced to consistently cut the sums he sends Reb Yaakov to feed his children, who now are old enough to work on their own.
Chapter 1:
As I said, we begin in the Kheder class of Reb Yaakov, who is very free with the ruler and constantly berating his luftmenschen (idler) charges for their lack of attention and refusal to sit still. He sits there and goes through the lesson, we'll decide which bible story it is later, but it should be a metaphor for the whole story, and therefore must be chosen well into the final drafts. But at witnessing, yet again, his students' obviously willful inability to retain the information he relates, he hits one student with the ruler shouting NIBZEH L'AZAZEL KHALERIYA! (basically untranslatable...), and shouts insult after insult at their stupid questions: their naarishkeit (simplemindedness/stupidity) and their skhok v'kalos rosh (light-mindedness). "Is Dreyfus going through all this just so you mamzerim (bastards) can dishonor his sacrifice!"
Incidentally to the story, the narration will be entirely in English, but the characters speak in a kind of Yid-lish patois which gives the character of the language while still being intelligible to the average American reader.
Reb Yaakov then goes through a 'nervous breakdown of exposition' in which he tells his story as related above, and then tells the story of being passed over as the new town Rabbi, and then compares these naarisher pischers ('bedwetters') to his model Yiddisher Kops (Jewish heads) whom he raised correctly to be menschen (good people) and tzaddikim (righteous). And how Hashem has finally rewarded him for his greyceh tzuris (great troubles) with a final child, whom he knows will be a son he shall name Benyamin.
Chapter 2:
We immediately cut to four of the brothers smoking cigarettes in the Jewish cemetery: Shimon, Asher, Naftali, and Z'vulun, the last of which is pissing (pishing) on the headstone of the old Bransker Rebbe. They're standing around a copy of a Yiddish newspaper, reading about the injustices done to some guy named Dreyfus in France, and making fun of how much the alter kockers ('old shitters') seem to care about this guy who, as far as anybody knows for sure, might not even be Jewish. They make fun of Dreyfus's very 19th century military uniform with its ridiculous plumage. One of them swears he heard that the French uniform is red white and blue, another disbelieves him "How did the zelners (soldiers) not know where to shoot from a hectare (hundred acres) away?" (which was the French army's biggest problem all through the 19th century until the first few months of World War I.). They say that with a fancy mustache like that he can't be Jewish "What the schtup is that mustache? No Yid, NOT even a Feinschmeker (meaning roughly gourmand) would walk into a barber and say MAKE MY MUSTACHE LOOK LIKE THE HAIR OVER MY PUTZ!" They make fun of their father's sermonizing about Dreyfus, they make fun of the new Rebbitzin (Rabbi's wife) who cries at the name of Dreyfus, and they make fun of the synagogue Hazzan (cantor) who's now including a prayer for Dreyfus. Ends with "Why the fuck do a bunch of alte trombeniks (old blowhards) give a fuck about some French faygaleh?"
Chapter 3:
A pack of Polish shaget (male 'shiksa', derogatory terms for gentiles) hoodlums advance on them, seemingly from nowhere. The Polish kids speak in a Polish/English patois similar to the Yiddish kids'. They're much larger than the Jewish kids. The Poles make fun of the Jewish boys' ability to read, make fun of their dress, even make fun of the way they have fun. They snatch away the newspaper and tell the Jewish kids that these letters are probably where they learn the spells that killed one of their sisters. The Poles then say 'Tak, we heard about your family, a rodzina where all the kids live? That's fucking czarny (black) magic! You're probably here so nobody can hear your plans to poison our blyading (fucking) wells." Finally, Shimon, whom it's established early in scene 2 is a hothead, can't take it anymore: "Well maybe if your kind cleaned their shtupping wells once in a while your kid sister wouldn't get sick and die!"
Everything goes silent, "What are you saying? That you fucking mordecas (murderers) of Christ have the solution to not getting chory (sick) this whole time and you've been keeping it from us?"
Shimon's brothers try to talk him down but it's too late:
"Go back to your shtupping Boyars and Preists, they knew it this whole time and they kept it from you to keep you stupid!"
"Are you calling our Holy Fathers liars!"
"They're fucking thieves, rapists and murderers."
By this time, two of the brothers have fled and the only one left is Asher, Shimon starts getting roughed up by the Pollacks, and he calls out for help from Asher but Asher hesitates and then runs away like his brothers.
Shimon has to defend himself alone. he gets beaten to a pulp by the Russians who taunt him "Your brothers have left you!", eventually they leave him for dead.
Chapter 4:
We're right outside a barn where Reuven and Levi are working for a Shokhet (Kosher butcher). They are shovelling hay for the butcher's prize lamb which he is keeping for the Bransker Rebbe to eat on the eighth day of Hanukkah.
Levi is telling Reuven about his dreams again, about how like Tateh (Dad), he thinks he is being visited by angels, and Reuven, a very practical sort, tells him he's fertummelt (onomatopoetic term meaning confused/mixed up). "But you don't understand how vivid they are. They have to be real! They're as real as you right here."
Reuven is half making fun of him "Are they emesdikker (really) real or are they 'falshen' real.
Levi takes it more seriously: 'Well it's not real the way you and I are, it's like you can see them completely, but you can also see through them."
Reuven: "So your mind is falling for your own schvindle (swindle)?"
"Feh! (untranslatable) It's not a schvindle!"
"What do you know from schvindles..."
"I know what these malakhim (angels) tell me."
"And what do they tell?"
"You obviously wouldn't believe them."
"No I wouldn't, but I want to hear them anyway."
"That this will be the Great Age of our people. That we will all be destroyed, and then we will all be saved."
"You mean like Moshiach (the Messiah) coming?"
"I don't know... they haven't said. I just know that we're about to live through the most important time in thousands of years."
(beat)
"Feh!"
"That's what they said!"
"Levi I'm getting worried, has anyone ever told you you have a Lokhen Kop? (hole in the head)"
"You asked so I'm telling you!"
"Just don't you dare tell Tateh this! You used to be such a mensch! But you're getting really tschudne (weird)! If he knew this it would break his heart.
They're interrupted by the butcher's wife who's coming out of the house: "Stop shtupping kibbitzing and get back to arbeit (work)!"
(both of them) "We're working!"
"You're schreking so much I can hear it from the bodroom, if you worked more you'd get angry less, it'll set you free!"
Chapter 5:
Reuven goes inside, Levi goes about his work plucking the chickens for the butcher to kill, and suddenly the chickens start talking to Reuven. Their clucks sound like passages of Torah, "shalkheni ki alah hashakhar" ("Let me go for the dawn is breaking!" what the angel says to Jacob when they wrestle). One chicken says it, then another, then a third, and finally a giant chorus of chickens speaking Hebrew.
The prize lamb speaks directly to Levi. "I am a descendent of the sheep slaughtered by Avel (Abel) and Avraham (Abraham). The yichus (lineage) of my bloodline was used on the slave doors of Mitzraim (Egypt). My ancestors were present at the death of Shmuel (Samuel) and were given to the Melech of Eretz Yisroel by Meesha the Moabite. And I must die immediately. There is so little time to explain, but a fault in how we say the khakham harazim brakha (it's a long story....) means that as many as 600,000 Jews will soon die if you do not kill me right now, terrible things are happening, and if you do not act, a calamity will befall the the entire people of Israel!"
"But!"
"Hurry! It may already be too late!"
Levi panics and immediately slits the lamb's throat and is covered in blood.
Chapter 6:
Reuven goes inside the shokhet's house for a long narrative in which the many expensive wears of the schokhet are described, a foreshadowing of Reuven's future. While this is far from the first time, he finally works up the nerve to steal yet another candlestick. He is however discovered by the schokhet's wife: old, fat, sickly, who makes the price for her silence abundantly clear. She says "Oh, no, you didn't take it. Don't you remember I gave it to you as a geshank." And as she says it, she begins to unbutton Reuven's belt buckle.
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