My Literary Lingua Franca

I think every reader has a writer or two who is their 'lingua franca' and speaks to them from the first reading as though they knew these books all their life.

For me, those writers are 'The Brothers Singer', Yiddish writers and along with the Naipauls perhaps the most eminent literary siblings since the Brontes. Like the brothers Naipaul, one seems to overshadow the other, and while the Nobel winning Isaac Bashevis Singer is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, his older brother is very nearly that. Israel Joshua Singer's most famous work, The Brothers Ashkenazi, was such a Yiddish bestseller that apparently it outsold every book in the US in the year of its release except Gone With the Wind.

...or so I've read.

Both Yitzhak Bashevis and Yisroel Yehoshua dip their pen into the same alchemical solution whose ingredients are a family secret, but while Yitzhak turned his pen inward toward the soul, Yisroel turned it outward toward the world. Yitzhak writes about sinners and ghosts, and God and the Devil. Yisroel writes about money and corruption, betrayal and hatred. If Yitzhak sounds like Dostoevsky and Poe if they were books in the Tanakh, then Yisroel sounds like Tolstoy and Balzac if they were edited by Kafka.

Excepting “War and Peace,” it is difficult to think of a novel that gives the same epic sense of the world as a giant machine that constantly expands and contracts, that whirls itself into events beyond the control of any person and then comes to rest at its own caprice, having crushed millions of lives in its gears. Having lived through the last seven years, this tale of Lodz and Petrograd a century ago is all too vivid a warning of what may yet come.

Like so much in Bashevis, “The Brothers Ashkenazi” contains passages disturbing enough to be in “Game of Thrones.” Nevertheless, what stays with the reader is not the broken taboos but the cruelty of the characters. It shows that World War may have been inevitable because every member of a society was focused on his or her own advancement. In the process, characters betray fathers and wives, brothers and daughters, nieces and inlaws. Every character seeks to control their own destiny, only for destiny to control them.

It’s both a medieval morality tale, and an accurate rendering of how history happens. The less humility and generosity we have to those for whom contempt comes naturally, the more likely we pay for our contempt with cataclysm. We may be living “The Brothers Ashkenazi,” thinking that we can all control our lives, only for life to control us. We are not all separate bodies, but symptoms of a diseased body that can only cleanse itself by killing off millions of cells — a body for which Jews are always accused of being the parasite.