Ilan Sheinfeld, Shedletse . Tel Aviv: Hotza at Shufra lesifrut Yafah. 234 pp., NIS 59.
He was as tall as a person, with a big belly that extended below his waist, beneath which there dangled a circumcised male organ. This is the beginning and essence of the strangest Jewish saga to have been written about modern Jewish-Israeli identity, a wonderful and gripping tale that is not connected to anything that we know, but which it is impossible to detach from the very sinew of our life.
The back page of the book declares that: This is a quest for a lost personal past… for the spiritual home toward which the author turns his imagination and longings. Yet, surprisingly, the book contains hardly any direct personal statement that might help us to identify the strange hero of its tale with Ilan Sheinfeld. And yet, it is nevertheless impossible to escape the constant presence of a tortured soul, which took from Cyclon B a work filled with creatures and impulses not of this world.
The hero of the story is a frog: a swamp denizen, half frog and half Jew, who has lived for centuries in the swamps of the Polish town of Shedletse (a real town which used to be, and is no more).
His entire life he carries on exciting interactions with the Jews of the neighboring town with the rabbi of that period, or with the Jewish women of the town, whom he desires because More than anything else, he was sad because he had no wife. The female frogs who court him by croaking and puffing out their chests do not arouse his desire because he, with his circumcised male organ, a kind of sealed duct of abundance, was not at all drawn towards female frogs, but toward Jewish women.
Sheinfeld delicately weaves a series of short tales that tell the story of several key figures in the life of the village over the ages: Rabbi Achtziger ( achtzig = eighty in Yiddish, who lived two and a half times that age), Havah Gittl, the owner of the gold, Yentl the inn keeper, Yosl Hershl the slaughterer, and more.
All of his stories are fantastic folk tales, containing strange creatures that have no significance in the normal world but which, in Shedletse s abnormal world of demons and clowns, make definite sense. There is a Jewish frog and there is a 200-year-old rabbi, there is a woman who weeps pearls, and there is a washwoman who removes gold from the edges of her laundry. There is a Polish queen who mates with frogs, and a wondrous fiddle that transforms blossoms into apples in the course of one heart-rending melody.
There is no orderly progression of time in the events that occur in Shedletse. There are a few allusive hints to the distant days when the village first emerged in a magical, almost enchanted manner; since then, the spirit of enchantment has not left it, nor has the presence of witches and magicians. It is impossible at any given moment to know of what time period is being spoken whether a hundred or a thousand years ago, yesterday or a generation ago. The stories are like the yellowing photographs in an album of ones grandparents. The people there are always the same age, their situation has not changed, only we get older, until the moment comes when we too will end up in other people s albums.
Sheinfeld relates his story in a very special language. My first reaction was: he is writing like Agnon. But this impression is s a mistaken. His language and its contents don t have the same midrashic depth or exegetical daring as Agnon. Sheinfeld is a master of European Hebrew of the Haskalah period. His language is interwoven with prayers and sayings, philosophy and humor, melancholy, anger and wisdom. He writes about the point at which everything is connected together, floating along on the infinity that is beyond the material, while in nearly the same breath he smiles and asks whether, this being so, what benefit was there in the frogs edicts [a parody of the Rabbinic phrase, what benefit was there in the Sages edicts ].
The language is a Jewish language, reminiscent of the style of Martin Buber s Tales of the Hasidim, the Jewish stratum in the writings of Droyanov, or the other Orthodox stories written in shteitel Hebrew. For those familiar with the secrets of the 19 th century linguistic-literary world through the destruction of European Jewry, the book will be reminiscent of the thin and wonderful booklet by Hayyim Chemerinsky (Reb Mordkele), My Village Mottele.
But the style and wording are not merely external wrapping, but are the depth vehicles of the contents of the book. Suddenly, towards the end, everything changes. Progress arrives at the God-forsaken town. The first automobile appears in the village and removes us from the darkness of eternal Exile to modernity, to the poisonous presence of the Nazi conquest, and to the destruction of the Holocaust. In four pages of blood-chilling and painful description, European Jewry is destroyed.
I have never read a sparser and yet exact and inclusive description of those years of darkness and impurity. Women and children cry out tearfully, and men turn in prayer to the Master of the Universe, that He hear them and save them. Yet deep in their hearts they already suspect, that even the hiddenness of the Divine face has already removed itself to the kingdom of darkness, but they dare not say it. Instead, they continue to lift their voices in petitions to their God, and travel on. They go through village and valley, pass through a flower-covered prairie, go through a mountain pass and past birds of prey. They cross forests and traverse rivers, until they come to a certain place. And as for that place one who never saw it and never looked at it, will certainly not believe that such a place can exist on the face of the earth.
Afterwards, after the plague of darkness of our century, everything is different: language and culture, the individual people and the national collective. Their roots have been overturned, and the new plantings of identity have not yet taken hold in the soil of memory. Suddenly, from this point on, Sheinfeld no longer writes Jewish; he writes Hebrew standard, journalistic Hebrew, sharp and biting. Once, miracles only happened in Shedletse, while the Land of Israel is free of miracles. The Hasidic holy tongue gives way to the Hebrew of independent Tel Aviv. A deep and profound change.
Just as the first two parts of the book, Early Days and Days of Destruction, deal with that world that is no more, so does the last section, Redemption and Rebirth, deal with us new Jews, the Israelis, and with our life. These chapters are harsh and violent. Israelis like us, who deny the Holocaust, but are unable to free themselves from it. The frog was saved from there and immigrates to Israel. He marries a pregnant survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, and their son grows up to become a tough and vulgar Army officer. The son Binyamin is released from the IDF and turns his parents enterprise of Holocaust commemoration into Shoah business modern, profitable, and lacking in feeling.
Sheinfeld evidently criticizes us that the transition from there to here, from the Holy Tongue of Hasidism to spoken Hebrew, has been a transition of uprooting and cutting off. An end that has no continuity. A literary protest against the Israeli opaqueness that is alienated and flees from the burden of its heritage and the inheritance. So many of us went to sleep at night with a father who cried out in his nightmarish sleep and a depressed mother who was immersed in her sorrow, and we never knew why, because they never talked with us about what was there. The result was people with distorted feelings, an unfeeling society.
And against that, the minority, the members of the second generation who seek to plunge into the dark well, into the swamp of themselves, don t have a frog to guide them in their way through life. They wander about as if lost, torn by the separation between the world of day and the world of night; between the hours of light in the depths of Jewish memory, and the hours of night along the dark paths of Independence Garden.
Only in recent years have the black flowers started to open their petals, allowing us to hum into them . Parents talk, grandchildren listen, people travel to seek roots slowly, slowly, by virtue of the victims of the second generation (thus, specifically. In my eyes, the Holocaust did not end when the crematoria were extinguished, but they continued to burn and to destroy the hearts of the survivors and, in more than one case, the tortured hearts of their children, who were born into a reality of national independence from without, but of continued fears of destruction within). Thanks to the second generation, Israel has become a listening society, and not just a society of conquest and giving orders.
What Yehudah Polikor and Ya akov Gilead did for the music of the second generation, what Spielberg did for the commemoration of that generation, Sheinfeld is doing for its literature. Sheinfeld, a sensitive poet, a children s author, an occasional publicist, who has published many books and edited many others, has become the frog of all of us. A frog of memory, who takes us on his back and carries us over the waters of bitterness and quicksand that threaten to sweep away and sink our identity. An identity that still refuses to become connected to its roots, that were disconnected with the creation of the State and the destruction of the Jewish communities.
I will take the risk of prophesying that Ilan Sheinfeld s Shedletse will be seen as a breakthrough of excursion and seeking, that will bring in its wake the externalization of many demons and of many clowns, who are still shut away in the closet of the trauma of Modern Jewry.
thegaymomdad 