800 Words: A Boring Fantasy Part 1 3/5 of 8

It was around this time that I began to get bored. Not with Warsaw, but with the story, and I decided to smash it up somewhat. As with most things in my life, my imagination seems to tire easily from the pressure of sustained concentration. Spontaneous combustion seems the only way to kickstart my imagination into gear.

So with that in mind, my editor Yankl Musernik died in a fire that destroyed Der Trakhtner and every member of its staff except for myself and Shaya, who were visiting Gizl for the first time since our respective departures. It was the day after Simchas Torah 1896 when Shaya and I learned that we were without jobs and nearly friendless - it is a new beginning for us in this enormous city which seemed so small only a month earlier.

We temporarily move into Rivke’s apartment. But she cannot support us on her salary and the first day she comes home she sees us reading on the courch she immediately screams at us to get off. In spite of some newfound Communist agitator friends, Shaya decides that it would behoove him to find a good living by becoming a kosher butcher. I, on the other hand, am teaching myself the rudiments of French so that I can make my way to Paris.

Rivke is abusing me nightly when she comes home from work. She’s correct to do so, as I’ve refused to get a new job and have no plans to do so in the near future. I nightly tell her that tomorrow shall be the day, and then I spend the days reading in Praga Park, which is nearly empty since the opening of Ujazdow. These days, she seems to be far more comfortable with Shaya than she does with me. I know what’s coming, if it hasn’t happened already. All the same, I’d be curiously fine with it. My future is not here, and if I am still in Warsaw when they tell me what’s transpired, I will have far larger problems than Rivke.

I am utterly disgusted with Warsaw; the threats of violence and coarse laughter of drunk Poles in the streets, the constant smell of sausage and dogshit, the French fashions of the upper class, the presence of the Russian police at every establishment. It feels like a city trying to deny the precariousness of its position, and failing miserably.

Shortly after my expulsion from the self-proclaimed paradise of Der Trakhtner, a letter came from me with a French stamp and a return address in Paris. I eagerly tear it open to read the following letter:

Herr Charlap,

I apologize for my poor Yiddish, a language for which my use is purely scholastic. However, I must tell you that I was utterly heartened to finally read a reviewer who understands me. I warmed greatly to all your praise and your critiques of the book mirrored my own perfectly. While I realize that inferring the moral character of writers from their output is a groundless pursuit, I still felt that the offense which writers such as Nietzsche and Ibsen give to common sense merits a sufficient rebuttal which not a single writer in Europe is yet willing to offer. In this quest, ad hominem attacks are unfortunately necessary. I hope that through my example, others will become similarly brave so that we may stop a civilization from falling into terrible morass. Criticism must always be personal, or nothing worth.

Furthermore, it is quite telling that much of the Yiddish world is so receptive to influences like Schopenhauer and Marx who personify the very egocentricity of which I warn. I fled Budapest nearly a quarter-century ago because it is a city, much like Warsaw, which wishes nothing more than to be accepted as the equal of a culture which has no greater desire than to destroy everything it has built. To be accepted by these people would mean to be destroyed with them.

Please write back and let me know some of your own projects. Surely you must have them. You have enormous potential as a thinker in your own right and I would be happy to aid your progress in any way I can.

Sincerely Yours,

Dr. Max Nordau

For nine months, Dr. Nordau and I have maintained a voluminous correspondance. Barely a day goes by without a fifteen page letter from him. I try to answer back as often as possible, but even in my current state of inertia I get at least two letters from him for every one I write back, and all of them far longer than any response.

Nordau is a keen mind possessing a hair-raising erudition in volumes both Jewish and Gentile, and contempt for nearly all of both. There is not a single book which escapes his attention, and barely a single book of which he seems fond. For a man so devoted to the life of the mind, he seems to see little value in what he does. Instead, he professes a fanatical devotion to the most time-honored notions: family, marriage, community, small pleasures, common good, common persistence, the necessity of compromise and the acceptance of what fate bequeaths. So devoted is he to tradition that I can’t help but wonder why he devotes so much energy to the new intellectual trends he loathes (though I don’t dare put that in a letter).

Every one of his letters to me includes obsessive diatribes about some element of contemporary perversion. I’ve gotten pages long denunciations of famous artists, many of whom I know less than nothing about. In these letters I count lacerations of Tolstoy, Liszt, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Lessing, Fichte, Marx, Feuerbach, Stirner, Kierkegaard, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Mallarme, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Hugo, Gautier, Dumas, Maupassant, Whitman, Blake, Ruskin, Swinburne, Wilde and the Rosettis that go on for at least seven or eight pages each. I read long, multi-letter denunciations of how Jews have betrayed the Haskalah, how Jews want nothing more than to live as slovenly as Goyim, how the Yiddish revival is an embarrassing joke perpetrated by quacks afraid of the larger world, how contemporary Paris is a disgusting corruption of the French Revolution’s ideals, how contemporary art is an excuse for voyeurism, how the very concept of fashion is an idea grounded upon a vicious lie, how alcohol and drugs are destroying the minds of youth, how pseudo-oriental mysticism is corrupting the minds of students, how the sociopaths of society masquerade as artists and convince the world to honor them for their sins, and how mass suicide will be the end result of an epoch whose torpor remains unchecked. But then there were his derogations of Wagner, Ibsen, Zola and Nietzsche which go on for forty pages each; with not a single repeated insight or citation one can find in ‘Degeneration.’

He details his loves just as obsessively; discussing his interpretations of Goethe, Heine and Shakespeare at length and the finer points of Schlegel’s German mistranslations of Hamlet. He copies out his favorite passages from Dostoevsky and Turgenev for me by hand in the original Russian and personally translates his favorite excerpts of Voltaire, Diderot, Racine, Stendhal, Montaigne, Flaubert, Balzac, Cervantes, Dante, Tasso, Spencer, Milton, Richardson, Fielding, Thackeray, Darwin, Mill and Locke into German. He sends me postcard prints of Leonardo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Valdez, Callot, Zurbaran, and Breughel. He sent me piano reductions of some Beethoven and Mozart. One day a package arrived with a vocal score of a new Italian opera called ‘Cavalleria Rusticana.’ In my next letter I finally summoned the courage to tell him that I neither learned to read music nor played the piano. A package arrived three days afterward, inside lay a textbook of music notation.

His discourse can turn to other humane subjects as well. As a doctor he clearly has a particular interest in biology which he details all too lovingly. He writes me that he has grown particularly obsessed with neurology and occupies himself with the idea that the stimuli of the modern world is rotting our brains.

I’ve grown both fascinated and exhausted by his regular stream of opinions. Every one of them seems a masterpiece of categorical resentment. Pronouncement after pronouncement he issues in a way that is utterly predictable at the same time that one has to marvel that he has stayed so consistent in his refusal to deviate an inch from his belief system. This man is a magnificent tyrant of thought from whom there is as much to learn as fear.

Shortly before has invited me to stay with him in Paris for as long as I like and assures me that a Jew in Paris can get by perfectly well speaking German. I can’t say that I’m overwhelmed with excitement. Nordau is hardly an idiot, but the very presence of his letters feels suffocating. He is hardly a man without humor but his beliefs are so intense that it would seem impossible to think independently in his presence. Sometimes I wonder if he’s aware that other people have the capacity for thought. Clearly, he has a far greater interest in telling you what he thinks than in listening to you. Even so, much of his own thought is powerful indeed. He is only in his mid-40’s and I very much believe in the potential for him to be a thinker who can lay the foundations of twentieth-century philosophy as powerfully as Kant did for the nineteenth. I have nothing better to do than to learn at the feet of a master, and even if Nordau flatters me to gratify himself, he clearly sees enough promise to think me a potential disciple.

Nordau’s coachman picks me up at Gare D’Austerlitz train station brings me to Nordau’s house in Le Marais. This driver can’t be more than fifteen and he speaks to me in an extremely plush Viennese German. He issues me into the car, and I am far too exhausted to even look out the window.

When we stop, he wakes me up and insists upon unloading my bags as though I am a proper French gentleman. As he unloads, I get out of the coach and another adolescent opens the door to tell me that Herr Doktor Nordau is making a house call and shall return momentarily. He beckons me over to the door and tells me to have a seat in the parlour room before Herr Doktor returns

As I walk from a plusher hallway than I’ve ever seen into the parlour room, I quickly realize that there is nowhere to sit. There are four children who are dusting the floors, sofas, frames, and walls. Frankly, I can barely breathe and since I left Warsaw I’ve found myself fitfully coughing as I’d only ever seen my Uncle Herman do.

As promised, Herr Doktor breezes into the room. The children immediately stand at attention, he puts a finger over each wall, each frame, each sofa, and the floor. He whispers a comment to one of the boys and tells them all to leave the room - which they do immediately.

Nordau turns his attention to me and smiles wistfully,

“Children...They’re like small criminals unless ruled with an iron hand.”
“You never mentioned any opinions on children in your letters.”
“You’re exactly as I imagined you Herr Charlap. A ball of intellectual energy waiting to be unleashed. In these walls you shall find the liberation for which you have searched.”

It was at this moment that I felt a wave of exhaustion overcome me. Dr. Nordau must immediately perceive the water in my eyes.

“Oh no. You cannot be tired. I have a wonderful evening planned for us. We shall be dining at the Braunsteins tonight. Your attire is upstairs. Please be ready in forty-five minutes."

800 Words: A Boring Fantasy Part 1 1/2 of 8

It is around Pesach of 1895 that I begin to grow dis-enamored of our tiny pond of a Yid-lit scene. By the High Holidays, my disaffection can clearly be seen by everyone. Here we are, at the very center of the Haskalah. I'm breaking bread at regular intervals with the two great Yiddish writers of our time, three if you must count Shaya. At one point, Shaya only let me read select passages of Tatiana. It turned out to be a very good book, but he achieved nowhere close the success Shalom and Yitzhok led him to believe was his. For all intents, Shaya wrote a roman a clef biography of Galina's family before she came to Warsaw. There were astute observations on every page about the Russian serf system, the civil service bureaucracy, the Orthodox church and the effect of vodka on the Russian peasant. Except for some casual anti-semetism, Jews, Jewishness and the Jewish condition are nowhere to be found. It is a fact that had not escaped the eagle eyes of Yiddish critics even if it had escaped Shalom Aleichem. The critics were led by Shalom and Yitzhok to expect a volume full of insight into Russia’s relationship to its Jews. Even if their priorities are misplaced, I can't say that I blame the critics for their disappointment that the book is about something else entirely. Yet it was Shaya taken to task for ignoring the plight of his own people, not his promoters. That's just unfair.

And it's from Shaya’s shabby treatment that I begin to perceive the rot in this new attempt at civilization which we’ve mistakenly undertaken, even if Shaya doesn't. We did not leave 2000 years of Rabbinic tradition behind to be a cog in the wheel of other people’s agendas. For all we know, neither Shalom nor Yitzhok even read the book. They simply needed a new work to rally people for the Dreyfus trial. Shalom must have had Shaya’s manuscript siting on his desk in Odessa for a year. Yet it remained untouched until it served his purposes to use it.

To be sure, Shalom and Yitzhok are fine writers. But my initial enthusiasm for Shalom’s work has been replaced by utter frustration at its repetition. His work is genuinely funny, sometimes hysterically so, and sometimes even moving. Yet I feel as though the jokes and stories have become numbingly repetitive, as though I’m watching a reliable but uninspired sitcom (though I have no idea what a sitcom is). Yitzhok’s work can be quite inspired, but the candle in the wind flame of his work does not hold up next to the incandescent bonfires of our Russian competitors - not that they’re much aware of our competition. Next to the great passages of our Bible, their work gathers all the inspiration you can derive from a wet match. It's an unspoken truth of which everyone seems aware yet no one dares to mention. Even as I begin to voice a small sliver these concerns, and I can feel a dread distance growing between me and my comrades for the capital crime of uttering them at all. `

Shaya seems perfectly content to be accepted as a second-tier Yiddish writer. He is hard at work on his new novel - this one about the transition of a young man from the world of the shtetl to the world of assimilation. He tells me he has no time for women anymore. All he wants is to be known as the Yiddish Shakespeare. I don’t dare tell him how misplaced an expectation that would be for anyone.

Rivke wants to get married. In every conceivable way, I am not ready. She was always controlling, and in a previous lifetime I found that incredibly attractive. But her overbearing manner is turning me sour. I’m paid to write, I have a steady job as a journalist in Warsaw with many chances for promotion, soon I’ll be expected to write books that will be published and reviewed. And according to Rivke I should be satisfied with this. How dare she.

But our biggest fight had nothing to do with career matters. It occurred on a day I returned home to find her brandishing a letter from my mother. I knew that this is a letter I should have burned immediately. But my mother and father write me almost daily with entreaties to come back to Gizl. How could she have found this one if she didn't read them all? In this letter, my mother not only assures me that the Rabbi’s daughter is happily married to my cousin Beryl, and not only expecting her third child, but also that her first child was Beryl’s with whom she’d been carrying on simultaneous to me.

Rivke can hardly be a new hand in this sort of situation, but she swears she always knew better than to ever be put in the family way. I suppose I believe her. Even if I didn't, what choice do I have? But to describe her as livid would be akin to describing King Saul as proud. She refuses to hear any explanation that the child was not mine, and in an atypical moment tells me that we have tempted evil and God shall punish us for living as we do in such sin.

And so I long to escape from under the thumb of Rivke, Shaya, Shalom, Der Trakhtner and Warsaw altogether. But even with this piece of news, Gizl is the only place in the world whose name strikes more terror in my kishkes than Warsaw. I know all that there will be for me to know about this city for a long time yet, and surely the world is a larger place than this.

It is now Shaya who is the toast of our social circle and I who've withdrawn into our lodgings. Everything about our friends, our neighborhood, our society, our city seems not a mere sour taste but an idiotic mistake. No doubt, somebody exactly like me dreamed of exactly this day a millenium ago. But he could never have forseen what I see. A Jewish neighborhood in which Jews dare comport themselves as the goyim's equal; as my Zaydie would say, das ist nicht azai vi Got hot gehaysen.

For all the drab awfulness of the Shtetl, at least we knew who we were. We are no longer a people with a mission. Shalom, Yitzhok and their ilk try to drum up a meaning for us that simply does not exist. Without purpose, we are adrift in a world that wants nothing more than for our existence to cease. And we well may oblige them. I fear our liberation has set something terrible in motion that cannot be undone. Judaism has always been nothing more than civilization upon a razor’s edge. But our civilization was built upon the service of God through the obeyance of his commandments. Perhaps Yahweh has retribution in store for us just as he has for all who have forgotten him.

As I have in moments of crisis since I was three years old, I’ve retreated into books. I chant Ecclesiastes every evening as I relieve myself. I recite a Psalm every morning as I revive myself. The editor of Der Trakhtner, Yankl Musernik, has a fantastic library and lends me books of Hebrew Poetry from the Andalusian period. Poets like Shmuel HaNagid, Ibn Gvirol, Ibn Ezra, HaSalah, Yehuda HaLevi, Yehuda Alharizi and Todros Abulafia have become my life of late. Here, finally, is something to learn from; a poetry that rivals scripture in its magnificence. This is a poetry can only come from free minds in a liberated, protected Jewish community who lived among their coevals for half a millennium without molestation. This is the liberated civilization for which we strive in vain. Here was a community of doctors, lawyers and businessmen who participated in political life of Spain as any Christian or Muslim would. Yet they still have time left over to create great art. Here in this poetry, there is nothing of the dolorous which permeates everything we touch. These, finally, are modern Jews who write with the measure of existence’s enormity. Just read this passage - The Ruined Citadel by Shmuel HaNagid:

“I billeted a strong force overnight in a citadel laid waste in former days by other generals. There we slept upon its back and flanks, while under us its landlords slept. And I said to my heart: Where are the many people who once lived here? Where are the builders and vandals, the rulers and paupers, the slaves and masters? Where are the begetters and the bereaved, the fathers and the sons, the mourners and the bridegrooms? And where are the many people born after the others had died, in days gone by, after other days and years? Once they lodged upon the earth; now they are lodged within it. They passed from their palaces to the grave, from pleasant courts to dust.”

Or this excerpt from HaSalah, which stung me to the bone:

Let it set the sun as a crown on my head,
or make the moon my golden crescent—
Orion a bracelet around my wrist,
its glowing children about me my necklace,
I will not come to desire its power,
not for a home beyond the stars.
My longing instead is to lay my threshold
near the threshold of learned men:
all I want is to move toward them,
although my iniquity holds me back
among a people that does not know me;
with whom I have no part or ease—
for when I greet them with kisses of peace,
they say I hurt them with my teeth.

Poetry like this is solace at a time when solace is in surprisingly short supply. I can't deny, if my situation is the hell on earth of which Christianity speaks, it’s a refreshingly comfortable hell. Yet I dread every moment of it.

But just when I’m on my lowest ebb, Musernik bequeaths me a book worth its weight in zloty. One day in the office, Musernik storms in and loudly announces that Degeneration by Max Nordau has finally been translated into Yiddish. He proceeds to declare it the most abominable, lie-ridden book written by a Jew in our time. He will assign it every day to a different staff memeber, and the first member of Der Trakhtner who can make his way through this book without having to stop from taking such offense is hereby commissioned to write a 5,000 word review of it for a 50 zloty bonus.

Needless to say, Shaya is among the first allowed to take it home. He returns it the next day with a slam of the tome onto Musernik’s desk. Musernik is clearly deligthed. After two weeks of deskmates screaming about how pernicious this book is, my curiosity is ablaze. Apparently, the main crux of Nordau’s argument is that art and culture have achieved such pride of place in the society of our time that it has brought us to the brink of ruin. I can’t say that I completely disagree.

Finally, it is my turn. I open the book after I come home from work and do not stop for food until the next morning. At seven the next morning, Shaya informs me that it’s time to eat breakfast and get ready for work. I tell him to go in without me. Musernik will understand. By breakfast the next day I’ve read the whole book in both Yiddish and German, some passages as many as six times. Rivke pops in to ask if I’m ready to go to work today. I tell her not to worry. I will be at the office tomorrow with all 5,000 words in tow. I sleep through the workday and work all through the night.

According to Nordau, we are a society hidebound by ideology. We're so utterly restricted by it that we cannot see the world without its prisms. And so the power of thought possessed by anyone with curiosity is squelched in a storm of Symbolism, Tolstoyism, Wagnerism, Ibsenism, Nietzscheism, Aesthetism, Socialism, Communism, Diabolism, even Realism. Reality has become something to be explained, not experienced.

Even if I don’t agree with it, I can’t say I disagree with any of it. When Nordau says that Modern Europe has abandoned the drive to succeed at all cost for paralyzing narcissism which subjugates men to whims of whatever fashionable ideology they bound themselves, he’s absolutely right. When he says that laziness of thought and skill creates decadence in art, I at least can’t say I disagree. But when he says that the decadence of art provokes still more decadence in people, I feel the urge to stand and applaud. I've become a new kind of conservative reactionary in my youth. Embracing a new ideology that purports to be non-ideology.

It would seem that the goyishe world has lost all the same confidence in their old ways as we people of the Book have in ours. Our old institutions, however antique and restrictive, are the best we have until a better idea reveals itself. My problem remains that the old ways seem little better to me, if better at all, than what follows it.

All of this and much, much more is what I put into my review. The whole thing is written in white heat, as though all the energy of the last three years is funnelled into this one night. Finally, something to write that gives me excitement. I turn in my review the next day, knowing that if it’s printed at all, the article will cause at least as much trouble at Der Trakhtner as the book itself.

Musernik emerged from his office around ten-thirty with a red face. He announces to the office that the Shtetl never left Avraham. The progress of modern life is apparently good enough for him, so he thinks we should all go back to the cheder where Torah can give us all the answers we can’t find in reality.

One bad mood from Musernik is all it takes. I’m an outcast at Der Trakhtner who can’t take my seat without being called ‘Der Gleyber’ (the believer). People were impatient with me at Der Trakhtner long before the review. But after Musernik published it, we all knew my time was limited. Fortunately, it’s only another week before I get a letter from...who else?....Max Nordau.

800 Words: A Boring Fantasy Part 1 1/3 of 8

It is now January of 1894. I’m reading lots of Polski and rendering word-for-word plagarisms for our broadsheet, Der Trakhtner. At home, Shaya and I speak nothing but Russian, which is ok because Shaya is as often as not coming home with a Russian girl who loses her temper every time Shaya has to run out for an errand orwork on the proofs for his novel. I invariably have to calm her down, and since she knows only a little Polish, it’s good practice.

Her name is Galina. She’s from a small town that sounds not unlike ours, only hers is a fishing village 50 kilometers east of Petersburg. She is blonde, with a ruddy complexion, terrible teeth and pleasantly pneumatic features. She is Christian, but assures us she never goes to church. She does, however, wear a series of byzantine ikons for each day of the week and seems particularly sensitive about any statement that sounds like a curse.

On our meager salaries, we save up and manage to move into a tenement on Market Street. I soon afterward meet a non-religious Jewish girl from across the street named Rivke. Rivke is a maid by profession, she is tall and slender, not unattractive, but has a beak of a hooked nose. She’s an excellent cook, quite funny and very licentious. Without her we would be lost in our effort to keep an orderly apartment. Galina is insanely jealous of Rivke’s abilities and pours an entire salt-shaker into Rivke’s soup a day after Shaya complemented her cooking too effusively. Later that night, Shaya orders her out in a door-slamming end to their affair.

It was just as well, since Shaya’s book was being published. As it happens, Shalom is back in town on another reading tour and one night comes calling on us with a friend who has thick black hair and an even bushier mustache. Rivke and I were just sitting down to dinner when they come into our kitchen.

‘Yitzhok, you know Shaya of course. But this here is the illui I was telling about.’
‘Ah yes. Avram the khokhom. All Warsaw knows of your great feats of Torah.’
‘But all I did was ans...’
(Rivka kicks me from under our dining room table while Shalom interjects)
‘A true melamed this one. He will make Yiddish a light unto languages.’
‘Until that day, we have Shaya.’ Yitzhok answers and immediately afterward puts Shaya into a headlock. While unsuccessfully escaping from the headlock, Shaya manages to say...
‘Avram, allow me to present Yitzhok Loyb Peretz. The Yiddish Dostoevsky.’
‘Indeed. Zol gotter pitten we don’t want you not to realize when you’re in the presence of greatness again.’ Shalom quickly intejects.
‘Oh no. I read the complete works of you both last month.’
‘Clearly you’re not being worked hard enough’ says Peretz.
‘Reading your books is work enough.’ Rivke interjects to Peretz.
‘Ah. So we have a ballebooster here.’ Shalom says.
‘I’ve known Rivke since she came up to my knee and brought us cigars while we played cards at her father’s house. But yes, she’s a complete balleboos. Just like her mother. How is that meshugoyim heuse of theirs?’
‘Tate’s doing well enough. My brother Elazar is getting married next week.’
‘Ah. Mazel tov. He’s not a chassid I hope.’ says Shalom.
‘Yes. He’s gone back.’
‘Such is the life of the wise.’ observes Peretz. ‘The Jewish world stands on three things: Torah, docility and the acts of morons.’
‘Sha!’ Rivke grows agitated. ‘You’ll tempt the ayin horah.’
‘So Shaya. You know why we’re here.’

Shalom and Shaya go back into Shaya’s room, followed by Yitzhok. They emerge with an enormous manuscript and a bottle of champagne which seems to have materialized from nowhere.

‘Rivke!’ Shalom barks. ‘Their five best glasses please!’

‘“Tatiana” will be the book to announce Yiddish to the world!’ Shalom announces as he pops open the bottle and pours the champagne. ‘Your brother is the greatest talent the Yiddish language has ever seen Avram. Rabelais, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, Charlap!’

‘L’Chaim’ We all say and clink our glasses then down our champagne. Shalom and Yitzhok leave quickly thereafter with the manuscript.

We see neither Shalom nor Yitzhok for an entire year. Shaya despairs that his manuscript is completely lost. By Pesach he stops going out to see friends. By Tisha b’Av he has quit his job at Der Takhtner. Half our nights he never leaves his room. Half our nights he stays out late, yet no one we know knows where he goes. I begin to worry for his health and safety. He is no longer my impetuous, happily confrontational older brother who teaches me everything I ever knew about the world. He is a sullen, withdrawn and despairing person who has lost his exuberance for life.

It is the eve of Holy Sylvester 1895 and the sixth night of Hannukah. We are staying in to keep Shaya company, as we’ve come to do nearly every night since the High Holidays. Rivke and I are, per usual, trying to keep Shaya from thinking about the manuscript. We’ve long since stopped taking his violent moodswings personally, particularly since any shouting is inevitably followed by a tearful apology. We’re worried that Shaya will be in a particularly low state tonight. He comes into the common room, and per usual he’s complaining. But this time he seems a bit more accepting of things. He says that 1894 was the year he realized he was nothing more than a toy to those more privileged than he. Shalom and Yitzhok simply lost interest. He almost seems accepting of the fact that he was not meant for great things.

Rivke is cooking dinner while I’m setting the table. We suddenly hear a gaggle of voices coming closer to our door and then, a very insistent knock. The stove is closer to the door than the table, so Rivke answers. She opens it to a huge wave of shouts.

‘Grupe fun Schmucks! That’s not Shaya. Where is the writer of Tatiana? We demand the presence of the Yiddish Shakespeare!’

Shaya has come to the door. The moment they see Shaya, an even bigger wall of cheers erupts. I look out and see the entire staff of Der Takhtner whom Shaya curses nightly as hacks. Half the men are holding bottles of vodka in their hands. With their free hands, the men hoist Shaya onto their shoulders, walk down our tenements three flights of stairs where Shalom and Yitzhok are waiting for them.

They’ve broken out into song long before the bottom flight, but Shalom immediately asks for silence. For two minutes, the staff of Der Trakhtner shush’s each other without actually stopping the song.

‘Gentlemen. I’ve asked you to come before us today to witness the birth of a great Yiddish writer (applause and cheers). Perhaps he is the greatest of us all. In these last weeks of 1894, we have seen the dark forces of Europe gather before us. In France, a man named Dreyfus is tried for the treason of being a Jewish army officer. The world does not merely chant ‘Down with Dreyfus.’ The world chants, ‘Down with the Jews!’ We are thought of through the world as vermin who attach ourselves to other cultures and produce nothing of our own. But here is one of our own, Shaya Charlap (big cheer), who has produced one of the great works of our time! Here is a man who has nothing to fear in comparison with Tolstoy and Hamsun. Never in the history of our people has our plight been stated with such eloquence (cheer)! Such divine inspiration (cheer)! Such utter passion (big cheer). The world will read Tatiana and finally understand the senseless cruelty which Jews have endured for so many thousands of years. This is the book that shall banish anti-semitism from our world! It is in a book like Tatiana that we shall announce to the world that we are our own culture (cheer)! Our own people (cheer)! A light unto nations (big cheer)! Let us parade through Warsaw and announce the birth of a new Yiddish writer!’

And with that, Shaya is hoisted onto a chair and paraded around Warsaw’s Jewish quarter. They begin to sing nigunim. Whenever someone opens a window to ask what’s going on, someone from Der Trakhtner’s staff announces: ‘Behold, the great new Jewish writer! Behold, our Shakespeare, Shaya Charlap!’

At one point during the parade, I beckon Rivke aside and say quietly into her ear:
‘Rivke. I’m pretty sure Tatiana’s not about Jews or anti-semitism at all. It’s about a goyish fishing village in Russia.’
‘SHA Avraham!’

800 Words: A Boring Fantasy Part 1 of 8

We all have our fantasy places - not the childhood fantasies of occupations in which each of us is a great rock star or conductor or garbageman - though I’d have been a damn good garbageman. We all have a place, whether in fantasy or history, which we go to when we’re alone and tell ourselves “This is where I really belong. I should have been born here and then.” For some people that place is Rivendell, for some people it’s at Yankee Stadium in ‘27, for some it’s Haight-Ashbury in ‘68, for some it’s the Rome of Augustus, for some it’s at the top of Mount Olympus. Each of us invents a world for ourselves that probably never existed anywhere but in our mind’s eye. And we imagine how much better, more glamorous, more suitable our lives would be for us.

Personally, I imagine myself Arthur Meister - born in 1877 and given the name Avraham Charlap to a family of kindly Jewish booksellers in a shtetl 40 kilometers outside Warsaw. I’m the youngest in our family of twelve children. My father quickly discovers my amazing precocity and brings me to the local rabbi. By the age of eight I have memorized the entire Talmud and can give Rabbinical interpretations which learned scholars travel a hundred miles from every direction to hear. In my spare time I practice the fiddle and play every week after Shabbos with my father’s Klezmerspiel. In secret, my sisters and I go every Tuesday to visit a band of gypsies who live down the road and play music with them. My rebellious older brother, Shaya, teaches me German in secret and brings me books of secular learning. I learn the work of Goethe, Heine, Lichtenberg and Herder in the original. I read idealists like Hegel and Schopenhauer too, but to Shaya's disappointment I don’t like them nearly as much. By the time I’m finished Cheder and have my bar-mitzvah, my parents are ready to give me up to the Rabbi’s care so that I might become the great scholar of the age. I live in the Rabbi’s house for a time, taking up with both his daughter and their Polish cook. But my rebellious older brother has gone to seek his fortunes in Warsaw, where he has left Orthodox Judaism to become a journalist for a local Yiddish paper. He writes me every week, telling me stories of his adventures in the big city. He tells me about an exciting new movement to grant Jews a state in the Holy Land, ‘Zionism’ he calls it. He tells me he has become a disciple of Herr Herzl, whom he assures me is greater than any Rabbi of whom I've ever heard.

I’m now so bored with life in our town - named Gizl - that I can no longer concentrate on my studies, but it’s just as well because the Rebbitzn (rabbi’s wife) catches me in bed with the cook, which of course causes the daughter to blurt out in desparation that she’s pregnant. I’m told by the Rabbi that it is my obligation as a righteous man to marry his daughter as soon as possible. That night, I abscond from my hometown, never to return.

I’m now sixteen years old, and I go to my brother in Warsaw. We live together in a 100 square meter apartment and I pay the bills by working in a local delicatessen. A bit more than a week after starting work, a wiry bespectacled gentleman with wavy hair and a bushy mustache comes in followed by a giant entourage. He greets the owner warmly and the owner orders me to bring them plates of herring on the house.

When I come to the table, the man grabs my arm and says ‘Nu? You’re Shaya’s brother. Je?’
‘I am’
‘There are stars who’s light only reaches the earth long after they have fallen apart. There are people who’s remembrance gives light in this world, long after they have passed away.’
He motions for me to finish...
‘This light shines in our darkest nights on the road we must follow.’
Everybody laughs.
‘Have I done something wrong?’
‘Did he tell you or did he tell you? The boy’s an illui! Here boychik, sit down. Shaya will be here in a moment.’
‘But my job.’
‘Velvel will understand. My name is Solomon Rabinovich. But please, call me Shalom.’

So I sit at his side. Some conversations take place around the table but attention is fundamentally focused on us. He asks me about my feelings on Zionism, and I repeat a few stock phrases from Shaya’s letters. He then asks if I have read anything by Tolstoy. I reply that I haven’t. He asks if I’ve read any of the old pamphlets by Herzen, I have to reply that I’ve never heard of him. He then starts waxing eloquently on the glories a fantastic writer of our generation named Chekhov. I finally summon the courage tell him I’m unable to read or speak Russian.

‘Well, you must change that right away! Shaya’s obviously an excellent teacher.’
‘Yes he is. But he taught me German.’
‘Ach. Nothing but a bastardized form of Yiddish. (the table erupts with laughter) Do you speak Polish at least?’
‘Fluently.’
‘Yaakov, give him a job in your paper reading the Polish wires. If he learns Russian as quickly as Talmud, this khokham will have a glorious career ahead of him.’

And thus ends my career as a delicatician. Finally, Shaya makes his appearance. The men at the table are on their fourth bottle of vodka and every one of them greets him as though it were they who were his long lost brothers. Somebody pulls out an accordion, there’s singing at the table and after midnight we leave the deli, stuffed and drunk.

After we get home, Shaya lies on his bed and says to me:
'You know, that was Shalom Aleichem who got you that job.'
'What?'
'Shalom Aleichem. The writer.'
'Who?'
'Shalom Aleichem. The Yiddish Tolstoy. The greatest Jew of our age.'
'The writer?'
'Yes, Shalom Aleichem.'
'I thought the greatest Jew was Herzl.'
'Herzl doesn’t get us jobs.'
'But Herzl believes in the Holy Land.'
'So does Shalom Aleichem.'
'Have you talked about it with him?'
'No.'
'And wouldn’t it make more sense for it to be Sholem Asch? Shalom Aleichem’s from Odessa.'
'Avraham you’re questioning the believability of this fantasy.'
'Sorry.'
'Have a good night.'
'But does Shalom Aleichem or Asch or whoever believe in establishing a state in the Holy Land?'
'Who cares. Go to bed Avraham.'
'But I’m watching Jimmy Fallon.'
'What do I say to that?'
'Nothing. Good night Shaya.'