Moyshe Kulbak, The Zelmenyaners: A Family Saga, Trans. by Hillel Halkin, The New Yiddish Library, 2013.
read it at Google Books
A “masterpiece” of a comic novel following four generations of a Jewish family in Minsk torn asunder by the new Soviet reality (Forward).
This is the first complete English-language translation of a classic of Yiddish literature, one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century. The Zelmenyaners describes the travails of a Jewish family in Minsk that is torn asunder by the new Soviet reality. Four generations are depicted in riveting and often uproarious detail as they face the profound changes brought on by the demands of the Soviet regime and its collectivist, radical secularism. The resultant intergenerational showdowns—including disputes over the introduction of electricity, radio, or electric trolley—are rendered with humor, pathos, and a finely controlled satiric pen. Moyshe Kulbak, a contemporary of the Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel, picks up where Sholem Aleichem left off a generation before, exploring in this book the transformation of Jewish life.
“A masterpiece…[Kulbak’s] characters are funny and pathetic, his prose delicate and inventive.”—Ezra Glinter, The Forward
“The Zelmenyaners is always more sweet than sour. Kulbak brings a poignancy to his observations of a family, and a place, for which he clearly feels much affection.”—The Jewish Book Council
"The book is full of humour, and this well translated edition is carefully footnoted for the modern reader."—Ross Bradshaw
Written (and serialized in the Minsk-based Yiddish monthly Shtern) between 1929 and 1935, Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zelmenyaners: A Family Saga, is the funniest Yiddish novel about Soviet central planning you'll read this year.
As Sasha Senderovich writes in his excellent foreword to Hillel Halkin’s new translation, The Zelmenyaners was "conceived, published, and circulated in an era of unprecedented social transformation." Kulbak depicts that transformation through the conflicts which arise between the generations of the (extremely fertile) Zelmenyaner family, all of whom live together in a traditional style hoyf or courtyard.
Even the hoyf isn’t immune from change. In a characteristically poetic move, Kulbak has the body of the hoyf grow (and age) just as the family does. For example, when Soviet electrification (and electric light) comes to the Zelmenyaner family, everyone is touched, none more so than the buildings of the hoyf, through which the power lines bring light, and a radio antenna atop the roof brings glimpses of a changing world.
Though it’s definitely comic satire (and laugh out loud funny), the tone of The Zelmenyaners is always more sweet than sour. Kulbak brings a poignancy to his observations of a family, and a place, for which he clearly feels much affection. - Rokhl Kafrissen
http://jewishbooks.businesscatalyst.com/book/the-zelmenyaners
Near the end of “The Zelmenyaners,” a novel by Soviet Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak, one of the younger characters takes the stand to denounce her family. The proceedings are officially about her uncle Folye’s horsehide theft, but in reality the entire clan is on trial for its insular ways. “Their benightedness is so great that reality is transformed by them into a dream, while conversely, rumors and tall tales come to life in the yard as though they were real,” Tonke says in disgust. “If truth be told,” the narrator goes on, “there were workers who doubted whether, so near their factory, there could exist a yard whose residents lived as though in an enchanted castle.”
“The Zelmenyaners,” now translated into English by Hillel Halkin, was itself a subversive work. Although the novel takes place in a specific historical and political context — Minsk, in the late 1920s and early ’30s — its experimental structure and gossamer prose give it an otherworldly aura, keeping with the Zelmenyaners’ self-mythologizing impulse. After being serialized in the Soviet Yiddish journal Shtern, “The Zelmenyaners” (or just “Zelmenyaner” in Yiddish) was published as a book in two volumes, the first in 1931 and the second in 1935. Two years later, Kulbak was arrested on charges of spying for Poland and was executed on October 29, 1937, at the age of 41.
Like much Yiddish literature, “The Zelmenyaners” derives its humor and its pathos from characters’ hapless negotiation between old and new. (The translation flattens some of the comedy; though in other respects, Halkin succeeds at conveying Kulbak’s style and voice.) The older generation of Zelmenyaners watches in bewilderment as its children abandon religion and tradition, intermarry and espouse Communist doctrine. Parents and grandparents bicker over whether to call a baby Zalmen — after the Zelmenyaners’ patriarch, Reb Zelmele — or Marat, after French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. When Aunt Gita holds a Passover Seder, the rest of the yard isn’t sure what the strange ritual is. Later, Gita’s daughter Tonke holds a party at the very same table, complete with vodka and a whole roast suckling pig.
Kulbak’s sense of humor contributed to the book’s political problems. His jabs at Bolsheviks were hardly kosher, and his mockery of their maladjusted parents was suspect, as well. Zelmenyaners may be ridiculous, critic Shmuel Niger argued in his 1958 study, “Yiddish Writers in Soviet Russia,” but they are also harmless, which was no way to portray the bloodthirsty forces of the artisanal lower-middle class. Worse, according to Soviet critics, in “The Zelmenyaners,” family bonds trump political consciousness. It isn’t class that matters most, but blood.
Indeed, the power of family to be a self-enclosed, self-perpetuating unit emerges from Kulbak’s depiction of the Zelmenyaners as a tribe of their own, possessing unique physical and social traits. Zelmenyaners have dark complexions, low brows and fleshy noses, and are often compared to animals and other natural things. They are “solid as an oak tree,” “simple as a slice of bread” and “brainless as sheep.” They have a characteristic sound, like “a soft snuffle of content such as is heard only among horses munching oats in a stable,” and even their own smell: “a faint odor of musty hay, mixed with something else.” They are, in a sense, their own breed of people.
Just as the Zelmenyaners seem to exist in their own anthropological category, Kulbak’s literary technique elevates their world into its own aesthetic realm. While living in Vilna and Berlin in the 1920s, he had written several expressionist prose works distinguished by their mystical flair. “The Messiah of the House of Ephraim,” from 1924, depicts a group of messianic peasants living in a fantastical rural landscape. In one scene, Benye the miller rides his cow to the edge of the world, where he confronts the demon, Samael. In Kulbak’s 1926 novella, “Monday,” the main character espouses a spiritual identification with beggars and a philosophy of absolute passivity, despite the outbreak of the Russian Revolution.
While “The Zelmenyaners” marked a thematic departure from these books, taking domestic comedy as its tonic note, its methods were consistent with Kulbak’s earlier work. Unlike a traditional realist “Family Saga” (the subtitle of the current translation), “The Zelmenyaners” does not proceed in linear fashion. Instead, it is constructed from a patchwork of observations, descriptions and stories that create a more-or-less complete portrait. There are chapters that are one sentence long, and one that consists entirely of a telegram that reads, “The Bikhov Shoemakers Cooperative has fulfilled its first-quarter plan in its entirety.”
Repetition and variation also feature prominently in the novel, giving it a fluid, surreal quality that is enhanced by Kulbak’s hallucinatory prose. When electricity is installed in the yard, cables lie on the ground “like strips of bandage,“ and the electric light shines in “the sickly gold window panes like a patient breathing through an oxygen mask.” The passage of seasons is a major atmospheric element, and Kulbak depicts beautifully the feeling of a hot summer day, a chilly spring morning or a winter night with frost “as green as old glass.” One of the most impressive displays of Kulbak’s fertile imagery is his virtuoso description of workers constructing the urban rail network in Minsk:
The slanting sun glanced off the burnished mirrors of their strong backs. Two hundred tanned torsos, brown shoulders forming a dark mural, moved to the easy rhythm of the work. Their muscles rippled like living creatures in a wave that ran down the street as though in a strange brown sea.
Here, workers’ bodies are compared to mirrors, a mural and a wave of living creatures, nearly in the same breath. Everything seems connected to everything else, forging the Zelmenyaners’ world into a single mystical whole.
Like many Soviet Yiddishists, Kulbak made a conscious decision to live in the Soviet Union, and as a writer he benefited from state support, working in the Jewish section of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences. Like most of his peers, Kulbak also saw the Soviet Union turn on Yiddish culture, and he was among the first Yiddish writers to fall victim to Stalin’s paranoia and anti-Semitism.
Yet, as Sasha Senderovich points out in his introduction to the current translation, “The Zelmenyaners” enjoyed a curious afterlife in the Soviet Union. Kulbak was posthumously rehabilitated in the 1950s, and the novel was republished in Russian translation in 1960, though by that time the political implications of the book had surely changed. Now, in English, they are hardly recognizable without the explanatory introduction and notes. Yet Kulbak’s work is a masterpiece for reasons that have little to do with its context. His characters are funny and pathetic, his prose delicate and inventive. His novel ushers the reader not into Soviet Belorussia, but into a world entirely its own. Like a Zelmenyaner itself, it turns reality into dream. - Ezra Glinter
https://forward.com/culture/171114/a-family-like-no-other/
A carful of Soviet officials pulls into a large, rundown courtyard on the outskirts of Minsk. The officials, accompanied by a young woman whose family lives in the houses that form this heyf (courtyard), start tapping around the structures, examining. The young woman’s elderly aunts and uncles look at her, confused. “It looks like they’ll knock down the yard,” she matter-of-factly tells them. The family is understandably distraught at the news that their homes, where they have all grown up, will be demolished to make way for a new factory. The women grab brooms and start sweeping, as if cleaning up a bit will dissuade the officials from planning their demolition. One uncle becomes enraged, crying for his older brother and swearing to take the matter personally to Mikhail Kalinin. Mikhail Kalinin (1875–1946), a Bolshevik revolutionary and the nominal head of state in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1946. His son attempts to put things in perspective: “Papa, calm down. Capitalism has been abolished” (222-23).
The plot of Moyshe Kulbak’s sole novel, The Zelmenyaners, is in many ways encapsulated by the above scene. Four generations of a Jewish family known as the Zelmenyaners (after their patriarch, Reb Zelmele) have lived in this courtyard, the quintessential residential unit of so many Central European cities. The novel begins with a description of the courtyard, where most of the novel takes place:
An ancient, two-story brick building with peeling plaster and two rows of low houses filled with little Zelmenyaners. Plus stables, attics, and cellars. It looks more like a narrow street. On summer days, Reb Zelmele is the first to appear at the crack of dawn in his long underwear. Sometimes he carries a brick or furiously shovels manure. (3)
The satirical and episodic novel takes place—and was written—between 1929 and 1935, and it chronicles the ups and downs of this family as it faces the changing realities of Soviet life. The older generation, the aunts and uncles above, is often resistant to change, enacting small rebellions against things like electric light. But they also find themselves occasionally delighted by innovations: a tramline to the city center, for example, or their first trip to a movie. Some even find themselves coming around to industrialization. One uncle, a tailor, first rails against the horrors of constructing a jacket on an assembly line, but later finds himself appreciating the efficiency of the factory:
Uncle Itshe took a deep breath, as if trying to collect his thoughts. “Ach, the things a poor tailor has lived to see! We live in times when the coats go around making themselves. It’s a whole new world…To think of the years I spent sitting at that old piece of junk, rattling away from morning till night…” (199)
The younger generation is, for the most part, better suited to the changing world. One son is a Soviet police officer; a young woman has attended university and writes reports on economic development; another son returns from the far edges of Russia, tattooed and supporting a child that isn’t his own (and likely has a non-Jewish father); another daughter marries a Belorussian. Kulbak dubs the enthusiastic revolutionaries among this younger generation the shilyue, translated as whippersnaps:
The (young) whippersnaps like to go around with peasant blouses and tousled hair. They like to carry revolvers in their back pockets. They like to stuff their mouths with bread and sausage and sit around the table poking fun. (80)
The brilliance of Kulbak’s novel, however, is that it is not a simple or propagandistic satire of the older, counterrevolutionary, backwards Jews, corrected by their Bolshevik children. In fact, these children are the butt of Kulbak’s satire as often as their parents are. And much of the novel’s empathy is focused on what might be lost in this period of rapid change. The novel mourns old shadows dispelled by electricity at least as much as it celebrates an uncle’s late-in-life friendship with a non-Jewish potter he meets on a kolkhoz (collective farm):
Uncle Yuda and the potter are like two radishes wintering under the snow. They’re frightfully fond of each other. Sometimes the potter visits Uncle Yuda. They sit in the henhouse, petting the hens. It’s a good way to relax. In general, Uncle Yuda is feeling chipper these days. He gives the potter a big smile when he comes to visit… . You can tell by his smile that Uncle Yuda is finally at peace. (115)
The happiness this uncle finds at the kolkhoz might be the only happy ending in the novel; one old Jew is able to adapt enough to find his place in the new world, minding chickens on a collective farm. But not even this will prove to be a lasting peace. While reading The Zelmenyaners, one must marvel at the fine line between Kulbak’s love for Jewish folkways and his engagement in a revolutionary project, whose promises were already starting to break. Just two years after Kulbak finished the novel, he was murdered in Stalin’s first wave of purges of minority cultural figures.
Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937) is best known for his poetry, and it was poems like Shterndl (“Little Star”) and Di shtot (“The City”) that made him pop star famous in his day. For biographical information on Kulbak see Sasha Senderovich’s introduction to the translation as well as Peckerar and Rubinstein, “Moishe Kulbak,” in Writers in Yiddish, edited by Joseph Sherman, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 333 (Detroit: Gale, 2007). But considering the fame he once had, he is generally not remembered or read enough today, which makes this new translation of his only novel all the more exciting. Kulbak was born in Smorgon, today in Belarus, a city that was once well-known for a circus bear training academy (remembered in his poem Asore dibraye [“Ten Commandments”]). He lived in Smorgon and nearby Minsk until the string of chaos that was World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, and the Polish-Soviet War forced him away. (Minsk was on or near the front line of all of these conflicts.) During those years he taught in Kovno (Kaunas, Lithuania). In the early 1920s he moved to Berlin, where he spent a penniless few years learning at lectures, in museums, and especially in the cafes. He immortalized his time in Berlin in the mock epic poem, Dizner Tshayld Harold (Childe Harold of Disna), which satirizes the decadence of Berlin from Kulbak’s vantage point in the late 1920s. For a discussion and complete translation of Dizner Tshald Harold, see Peckerar The Allure of Germanness in Modern Ashkenazi Literature 1833-1933 (dissertation), University of California, Berkeley, 2009. When he could no longer stand his poverty, he moved to Wilno (Vilnius, Lithuania), where he became a popular teacher in the city’s esteemed Yiddish schools and his reputation as a poet truly took off. Yet despite steady work and popularity, in late 1928 Kulbak decided to return to Minsk, which by that time had become the capital of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. In Minsk he held various positions at the Institute of Belarusian Culture (which had a Yiddish department) and continued to write. The first chapters of The Zelmenyaners were published in December 1929 in the Minsk monthly Shtern (Star), barely a year after Kulbak’s return to the city.
The new translation of The Zelmenyaners—the first complete translation of the novel into English—by Hillel Halkin and with a critical introduction and notes by Sasha Senderovich is both thoroughly enjoyable to read and invaluable on many levels. This translation is the first complete volume of Kulbak’s work to appear in English. His poetry, novellas, and plays, can be found only in anthologies or have yet to be translated. The novel offers a rare view of Jewish life in the early Soviet period in Belarus, a place that briefly offered exciting opportunities for Yiddish culture. On Soviet Minsk see Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) and Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Yiddish was an official language of the BSSR and people like Kulbak worked for a state-supported institute for the study of all aspects of Yiddish culture, paralleling and rivaling the work of YIVO across the border in independent Poland. The introduction by Senderovich frames the novel historically, culturally, and in the context of Kulbak’s career. Senderovich’s notes offer explanation of the intricacies of Soviet culture of the time, and illuminate the novel’s linguistic diversity (Soviet Yiddish acronyms, Belorussian folksongs, and the code-switching between Russian and heavily Hebraized Yiddish that members of the family strategically employ). For lovers of Kulbak’s poetry, the novel features many moments of his unique descriptions of nature, often poignantly contrasted with encroaching industrialization. The scene of a young couple in love (well, having an affair, at least), demonstrates the constant tension of Kulbak’s writing:
He took her rowing on the Svisloch River. They ate pastries from a paper wrapper and floated with the current. Behind the Communard Factory, they kissed and promised to be true…The Svisloch breathed heavily with the rotted bodies of dead cats on its bottom. The rainbow-colored water had a thin crust. On the sandy hills on the far bank were cottages surrounded by gardens. Red poppies bloomed there. A train flew by on a bridge. Off to the left rose the high chimneys of the factory, belching spirals of black smoke. (226)
The river cannot be separated from the factory, nor the poppy-covered hills from the train tracks, not even for the sake of a love scene. In fact these contrasts are at the heart of Kulbak’s satire. Every sentiment seems to include its opposite in this novel that has been criticized as both kowtowing to Soviet policy and as dangerously opposing it. Luckily for the reader of this translation, Halkin conveys much of the biting humor, as well as the moving poetry of Kulbak’s pen.
In recent years, the world of Soviet Yiddish that was so long ignored by American academics and laypeople alike has been opening up, both through new scholarly work and translation. This translation joins scholarship by Harriet Murav, David Shneer, Anna Shternshis, Senderovich, Mikhail Krutikov, and Gennady Estraikh, among others. Collectively, these scholars are returning attention to accomplished and important writers like Peretz Markish, Dovid Bergelson, Izi Kharik, and Kulbak.7 7 See for example: Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia; David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture; Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union 1923-1939; Sasha Senderovich, Seekers of Happiness: Mobility, Culture, and the Creation of the Soviet Jew, 1917-1939 (forthcoming); Mikhail Krutikov and Gennady Estraikh, A Captive of the Dawn: The Life and Work of Peretz Markish (1895-1952) and David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism. Through this work, we can expand our understanding of the great blossoming of interwar Yiddish culture beyond what was happening in Warsaw and New York. Minsk and Moscow were the places where so many writers and cultural and political figures continued their work despite the growing restrictions and dangers of Stalinism. With the availability of The Zelmenyaners in English, we can only hope that interest in translations of Kulbak and his Soviet peers will increase, and that more of their work will become available soon.
At the close of the novel, no intervention from Kalinin arrives to save the courtyard from being demolished. The family instead attempts to salvage everything it can from the rubble. In the mock-ethnographic tone that the novel often takes, we are given a list of what the yard, and by extension the family, are reduced to:
This is what was salvaged at the last moment from Reb Zelmele’s demolished yard: Twelve copper pans, eight large copper pots, sixteen cast-iron pots, three copper jugs… . Uncle Folye ripped from a wall a porcelain electric fixture, and Aunt Gita, a mezuzah from a door. Perhaps, in the new apartments that awaited them, there would be a place for it. (266)
In his introduction, Senderovich interprets these items, removed from their context and placed into a new transitory state, as “displaced markers of a family that is becoming both Soviet and Jewish… . the remnants of the Zelmenyaners’ courtyard await their reinterpretation and recontextualization in the family members’ new apartments, persisting beyond the old home’s physical disappearance but with their final meaning deferred.”
We might also see these two items, the mezuzah and the electric fixture—electricity symbolizing Soviet innovation throughout the novel—as being changed by the comparison that is set up between the two. The electric fixture becomes a kind of symbol of a Soviet home, the way the mezuzah, lehavdl, symbolizes a Jewish home. It’s a juxtaposition the novel has made in other places. Early on in the novel, when electricity had just arrived in the yard, a comparison is made between the way the family strings up the new electric wiring, “as if they were building—pardon the comparison [lehavdl]—a holiday sukkah” (41). The novel comically points out the sacrilegious crossover as the Zelmenyaners’ Jewish traditions find ways to change and incorporate the new Soviet modernity. While the Zelmenyaners are certainly changed—sometimes with great difficulty and hardship—they also manage to inscribe their own meaning on the new world around them.
The mezuzah and the electric fixture, highlighted in the final scene of the novel, parallel the contest that exists between traditional Jewish life and Soviet power throughout The Zelmenyaners. But here at the end the electric fixture is taken, lehavdl, in the same spirit as the mezuzah. We know there is room for electricity in the Zelmenyaners’ new apartments, but Aunt Gita hopes there will be room for what the mezuzah represents as well. The comparison suggests that there might even be room for breaking down the divisions between what had been seen as irreconcilable systems. Throughout the novel, the care and attention Kulbak takes in presenting both the idiosyncrasies of the Zelmenyaners and the innovations surrounding them might be read as expressing a hope that the newly created spaces of the Soviet Union will have room both for the transformative and liberatory power of revolution and for cultural heritage. The two need not be opposed. Unfortunately, Kulbak’s vision of a revolution with room for culture and history, critique and ambivalence, did not fit his time and place. The new translation of The Zelmenyaners offers an important opportunity to encounter the work Kulbak and other Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union did to offer critique and synthesis, and question the direction of their culture and society from within.
https://ingeveb.org/articles/to-what-might-the-yard-have-been-compared
Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zelmenyaners is many things: a family saga; a sometimes-earnest, sometimes-ironic portrait of the formative years of the Soviet Union and the Soviet pioneers; and a chronicle of modernity’s uneven arrival in Eastern Europe. For the first time, tramlines, movie theaters, and heavy industry begin to appear in the lives of Kulbak’s Jews—but many customs and patterns of Jewish life also begin to disappear. Kulbak, known primarily as a poet, is a brilliant storyteller, and the book manages the delicate act of being both serious and funny.
As Sasha Senderovich writes in his excellent foreword to Hillel Halkin’s new translation, The Zelmenyaners was "conceived, published, and circulated in an era of unprecedented social transformation." Kulbak depicts that transformation through the conflicts which arise between the generations of the (extremely fertile) Zelmenyaner family, all of whom live together in a traditional style hoyf or courtyard.
Even the hoyf isn’t immune from change. In a characteristically poetic move, Kulbak has the body of the hoyf grow (and age) just as the family does. For example, when Soviet electrification (and electric light) comes to the Zelmenyaner family, everyone is touched, none more so than the buildings of the hoyf, through which the power lines bring light, and a radio antenna atop the roof brings glimpses of a changing world.
Though it’s definitely comic satire (and laugh out loud funny), the tone of The Zelmenyaners is always more sweet than sour. Kulbak brings a poignancy to his observations of a family, and a place, for which he clearly feels much affection. - Rokhl Kafrissen
http://jewishbooks.businesscatalyst.com/book/the-zelmenyaners
Near the end of “The Zelmenyaners,” a novel by Soviet Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak, one of the younger characters takes the stand to denounce her family. The proceedings are officially about her uncle Folye’s horsehide theft, but in reality the entire clan is on trial for its insular ways. “Their benightedness is so great that reality is transformed by them into a dream, while conversely, rumors and tall tales come to life in the yard as though they were real,” Tonke says in disgust. “If truth be told,” the narrator goes on, “there were workers who doubted whether, so near their factory, there could exist a yard whose residents lived as though in an enchanted castle.”
“The Zelmenyaners,” now translated into English by Hillel Halkin, was itself a subversive work. Although the novel takes place in a specific historical and political context — Minsk, in the late 1920s and early ’30s — its experimental structure and gossamer prose give it an otherworldly aura, keeping with the Zelmenyaners’ self-mythologizing impulse. After being serialized in the Soviet Yiddish journal Shtern, “The Zelmenyaners” (or just “Zelmenyaner” in Yiddish) was published as a book in two volumes, the first in 1931 and the second in 1935. Two years later, Kulbak was arrested on charges of spying for Poland and was executed on October 29, 1937, at the age of 41.
Like much Yiddish literature, “The Zelmenyaners” derives its humor and its pathos from characters’ hapless negotiation between old and new. (The translation flattens some of the comedy; though in other respects, Halkin succeeds at conveying Kulbak’s style and voice.) The older generation of Zelmenyaners watches in bewilderment as its children abandon religion and tradition, intermarry and espouse Communist doctrine. Parents and grandparents bicker over whether to call a baby Zalmen — after the Zelmenyaners’ patriarch, Reb Zelmele — or Marat, after French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. When Aunt Gita holds a Passover Seder, the rest of the yard isn’t sure what the strange ritual is. Later, Gita’s daughter Tonke holds a party at the very same table, complete with vodka and a whole roast suckling pig.
Kulbak’s sense of humor contributed to the book’s political problems. His jabs at Bolsheviks were hardly kosher, and his mockery of their maladjusted parents was suspect, as well. Zelmenyaners may be ridiculous, critic Shmuel Niger argued in his 1958 study, “Yiddish Writers in Soviet Russia,” but they are also harmless, which was no way to portray the bloodthirsty forces of the artisanal lower-middle class. Worse, according to Soviet critics, in “The Zelmenyaners,” family bonds trump political consciousness. It isn’t class that matters most, but blood.
Indeed, the power of family to be a self-enclosed, self-perpetuating unit emerges from Kulbak’s depiction of the Zelmenyaners as a tribe of their own, possessing unique physical and social traits. Zelmenyaners have dark complexions, low brows and fleshy noses, and are often compared to animals and other natural things. They are “solid as an oak tree,” “simple as a slice of bread” and “brainless as sheep.” They have a characteristic sound, like “a soft snuffle of content such as is heard only among horses munching oats in a stable,” and even their own smell: “a faint odor of musty hay, mixed with something else.” They are, in a sense, their own breed of people.
Just as the Zelmenyaners seem to exist in their own anthropological category, Kulbak’s literary technique elevates their world into its own aesthetic realm. While living in Vilna and Berlin in the 1920s, he had written several expressionist prose works distinguished by their mystical flair. “The Messiah of the House of Ephraim,” from 1924, depicts a group of messianic peasants living in a fantastical rural landscape. In one scene, Benye the miller rides his cow to the edge of the world, where he confronts the demon, Samael. In Kulbak’s 1926 novella, “Monday,” the main character espouses a spiritual identification with beggars and a philosophy of absolute passivity, despite the outbreak of the Russian Revolution.
While “The Zelmenyaners” marked a thematic departure from these books, taking domestic comedy as its tonic note, its methods were consistent with Kulbak’s earlier work. Unlike a traditional realist “Family Saga” (the subtitle of the current translation), “The Zelmenyaners” does not proceed in linear fashion. Instead, it is constructed from a patchwork of observations, descriptions and stories that create a more-or-less complete portrait. There are chapters that are one sentence long, and one that consists entirely of a telegram that reads, “The Bikhov Shoemakers Cooperative has fulfilled its first-quarter plan in its entirety.”
Repetition and variation also feature prominently in the novel, giving it a fluid, surreal quality that is enhanced by Kulbak’s hallucinatory prose. When electricity is installed in the yard, cables lie on the ground “like strips of bandage,“ and the electric light shines in “the sickly gold window panes like a patient breathing through an oxygen mask.” The passage of seasons is a major atmospheric element, and Kulbak depicts beautifully the feeling of a hot summer day, a chilly spring morning or a winter night with frost “as green as old glass.” One of the most impressive displays of Kulbak’s fertile imagery is his virtuoso description of workers constructing the urban rail network in Minsk:
The slanting sun glanced off the burnished mirrors of their strong backs. Two hundred tanned torsos, brown shoulders forming a dark mural, moved to the easy rhythm of the work. Their muscles rippled like living creatures in a wave that ran down the street as though in a strange brown sea.
Here, workers’ bodies are compared to mirrors, a mural and a wave of living creatures, nearly in the same breath. Everything seems connected to everything else, forging the Zelmenyaners’ world into a single mystical whole.
Like many Soviet Yiddishists, Kulbak made a conscious decision to live in the Soviet Union, and as a writer he benefited from state support, working in the Jewish section of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences. Like most of his peers, Kulbak also saw the Soviet Union turn on Yiddish culture, and he was among the first Yiddish writers to fall victim to Stalin’s paranoia and anti-Semitism.
Yet, as Sasha Senderovich points out in his introduction to the current translation, “The Zelmenyaners” enjoyed a curious afterlife in the Soviet Union. Kulbak was posthumously rehabilitated in the 1950s, and the novel was republished in Russian translation in 1960, though by that time the political implications of the book had surely changed. Now, in English, they are hardly recognizable without the explanatory introduction and notes. Yet Kulbak’s work is a masterpiece for reasons that have little to do with its context. His characters are funny and pathetic, his prose delicate and inventive. His novel ushers the reader not into Soviet Belorussia, but into a world entirely its own. Like a Zelmenyaner itself, it turns reality into dream. - Ezra Glinter
https://forward.com/culture/171114/a-family-like-no-other/
A carful of Soviet officials pulls into a large, rundown courtyard on the outskirts of Minsk. The officials, accompanied by a young woman whose family lives in the houses that form this heyf (courtyard), start tapping around the structures, examining. The young woman’s elderly aunts and uncles look at her, confused. “It looks like they’ll knock down the yard,” she matter-of-factly tells them. The family is understandably distraught at the news that their homes, where they have all grown up, will be demolished to make way for a new factory. The women grab brooms and start sweeping, as if cleaning up a bit will dissuade the officials from planning their demolition. One uncle becomes enraged, crying for his older brother and swearing to take the matter personally to Mikhail Kalinin. Mikhail Kalinin (1875–1946), a Bolshevik revolutionary and the nominal head of state in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1946. His son attempts to put things in perspective: “Papa, calm down. Capitalism has been abolished” (222-23).
The plot of Moyshe Kulbak’s sole novel, The Zelmenyaners, is in many ways encapsulated by the above scene. Four generations of a Jewish family known as the Zelmenyaners (after their patriarch, Reb Zelmele) have lived in this courtyard, the quintessential residential unit of so many Central European cities. The novel begins with a description of the courtyard, where most of the novel takes place:
An ancient, two-story brick building with peeling plaster and two rows of low houses filled with little Zelmenyaners. Plus stables, attics, and cellars. It looks more like a narrow street. On summer days, Reb Zelmele is the first to appear at the crack of dawn in his long underwear. Sometimes he carries a brick or furiously shovels manure. (3)
The satirical and episodic novel takes place—and was written—between 1929 and 1935, and it chronicles the ups and downs of this family as it faces the changing realities of Soviet life. The older generation, the aunts and uncles above, is often resistant to change, enacting small rebellions against things like electric light. But they also find themselves occasionally delighted by innovations: a tramline to the city center, for example, or their first trip to a movie. Some even find themselves coming around to industrialization. One uncle, a tailor, first rails against the horrors of constructing a jacket on an assembly line, but later finds himself appreciating the efficiency of the factory:
Uncle Itshe took a deep breath, as if trying to collect his thoughts. “Ach, the things a poor tailor has lived to see! We live in times when the coats go around making themselves. It’s a whole new world…To think of the years I spent sitting at that old piece of junk, rattling away from morning till night…” (199)
The younger generation is, for the most part, better suited to the changing world. One son is a Soviet police officer; a young woman has attended university and writes reports on economic development; another son returns from the far edges of Russia, tattooed and supporting a child that isn’t his own (and likely has a non-Jewish father); another daughter marries a Belorussian. Kulbak dubs the enthusiastic revolutionaries among this younger generation the shilyue, translated as whippersnaps:
The (young) whippersnaps like to go around with peasant blouses and tousled hair. They like to carry revolvers in their back pockets. They like to stuff their mouths with bread and sausage and sit around the table poking fun. (80)
The brilliance of Kulbak’s novel, however, is that it is not a simple or propagandistic satire of the older, counterrevolutionary, backwards Jews, corrected by their Bolshevik children. In fact, these children are the butt of Kulbak’s satire as often as their parents are. And much of the novel’s empathy is focused on what might be lost in this period of rapid change. The novel mourns old shadows dispelled by electricity at least as much as it celebrates an uncle’s late-in-life friendship with a non-Jewish potter he meets on a kolkhoz (collective farm):
Uncle Yuda and the potter are like two radishes wintering under the snow. They’re frightfully fond of each other. Sometimes the potter visits Uncle Yuda. They sit in the henhouse, petting the hens. It’s a good way to relax. In general, Uncle Yuda is feeling chipper these days. He gives the potter a big smile when he comes to visit… . You can tell by his smile that Uncle Yuda is finally at peace. (115)
The happiness this uncle finds at the kolkhoz might be the only happy ending in the novel; one old Jew is able to adapt enough to find his place in the new world, minding chickens on a collective farm. But not even this will prove to be a lasting peace. While reading The Zelmenyaners, one must marvel at the fine line between Kulbak’s love for Jewish folkways and his engagement in a revolutionary project, whose promises were already starting to break. Just two years after Kulbak finished the novel, he was murdered in Stalin’s first wave of purges of minority cultural figures.
Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937) is best known for his poetry, and it was poems like Shterndl (“Little Star”) and Di shtot (“The City”) that made him pop star famous in his day. For biographical information on Kulbak see Sasha Senderovich’s introduction to the translation as well as Peckerar and Rubinstein, “Moishe Kulbak,” in Writers in Yiddish, edited by Joseph Sherman, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 333 (Detroit: Gale, 2007). But considering the fame he once had, he is generally not remembered or read enough today, which makes this new translation of his only novel all the more exciting. Kulbak was born in Smorgon, today in Belarus, a city that was once well-known for a circus bear training academy (remembered in his poem Asore dibraye [“Ten Commandments”]). He lived in Smorgon and nearby Minsk until the string of chaos that was World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, and the Polish-Soviet War forced him away. (Minsk was on or near the front line of all of these conflicts.) During those years he taught in Kovno (Kaunas, Lithuania). In the early 1920s he moved to Berlin, where he spent a penniless few years learning at lectures, in museums, and especially in the cafes. He immortalized his time in Berlin in the mock epic poem, Dizner Tshayld Harold (Childe Harold of Disna), which satirizes the decadence of Berlin from Kulbak’s vantage point in the late 1920s. For a discussion and complete translation of Dizner Tshald Harold, see Peckerar The Allure of Germanness in Modern Ashkenazi Literature 1833-1933 (dissertation), University of California, Berkeley, 2009. When he could no longer stand his poverty, he moved to Wilno (Vilnius, Lithuania), where he became a popular teacher in the city’s esteemed Yiddish schools and his reputation as a poet truly took off. Yet despite steady work and popularity, in late 1928 Kulbak decided to return to Minsk, which by that time had become the capital of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. In Minsk he held various positions at the Institute of Belarusian Culture (which had a Yiddish department) and continued to write. The first chapters of The Zelmenyaners were published in December 1929 in the Minsk monthly Shtern (Star), barely a year after Kulbak’s return to the city.
The new translation of The Zelmenyaners—the first complete translation of the novel into English—by Hillel Halkin and with a critical introduction and notes by Sasha Senderovich is both thoroughly enjoyable to read and invaluable on many levels. This translation is the first complete volume of Kulbak’s work to appear in English. His poetry, novellas, and plays, can be found only in anthologies or have yet to be translated. The novel offers a rare view of Jewish life in the early Soviet period in Belarus, a place that briefly offered exciting opportunities for Yiddish culture. On Soviet Minsk see Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) and Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Yiddish was an official language of the BSSR and people like Kulbak worked for a state-supported institute for the study of all aspects of Yiddish culture, paralleling and rivaling the work of YIVO across the border in independent Poland. The introduction by Senderovich frames the novel historically, culturally, and in the context of Kulbak’s career. Senderovich’s notes offer explanation of the intricacies of Soviet culture of the time, and illuminate the novel’s linguistic diversity (Soviet Yiddish acronyms, Belorussian folksongs, and the code-switching between Russian and heavily Hebraized Yiddish that members of the family strategically employ). For lovers of Kulbak’s poetry, the novel features many moments of his unique descriptions of nature, often poignantly contrasted with encroaching industrialization. The scene of a young couple in love (well, having an affair, at least), demonstrates the constant tension of Kulbak’s writing:
He took her rowing on the Svisloch River. They ate pastries from a paper wrapper and floated with the current. Behind the Communard Factory, they kissed and promised to be true…The Svisloch breathed heavily with the rotted bodies of dead cats on its bottom. The rainbow-colored water had a thin crust. On the sandy hills on the far bank were cottages surrounded by gardens. Red poppies bloomed there. A train flew by on a bridge. Off to the left rose the high chimneys of the factory, belching spirals of black smoke. (226)
The river cannot be separated from the factory, nor the poppy-covered hills from the train tracks, not even for the sake of a love scene. In fact these contrasts are at the heart of Kulbak’s satire. Every sentiment seems to include its opposite in this novel that has been criticized as both kowtowing to Soviet policy and as dangerously opposing it. Luckily for the reader of this translation, Halkin conveys much of the biting humor, as well as the moving poetry of Kulbak’s pen.
In recent years, the world of Soviet Yiddish that was so long ignored by American academics and laypeople alike has been opening up, both through new scholarly work and translation. This translation joins scholarship by Harriet Murav, David Shneer, Anna Shternshis, Senderovich, Mikhail Krutikov, and Gennady Estraikh, among others. Collectively, these scholars are returning attention to accomplished and important writers like Peretz Markish, Dovid Bergelson, Izi Kharik, and Kulbak.7 7 See for example: Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia; David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture; Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union 1923-1939; Sasha Senderovich, Seekers of Happiness: Mobility, Culture, and the Creation of the Soviet Jew, 1917-1939 (forthcoming); Mikhail Krutikov and Gennady Estraikh, A Captive of the Dawn: The Life and Work of Peretz Markish (1895-1952) and David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism. Through this work, we can expand our understanding of the great blossoming of interwar Yiddish culture beyond what was happening in Warsaw and New York. Minsk and Moscow were the places where so many writers and cultural and political figures continued their work despite the growing restrictions and dangers of Stalinism. With the availability of The Zelmenyaners in English, we can only hope that interest in translations of Kulbak and his Soviet peers will increase, and that more of their work will become available soon.
At the close of the novel, no intervention from Kalinin arrives to save the courtyard from being demolished. The family instead attempts to salvage everything it can from the rubble. In the mock-ethnographic tone that the novel often takes, we are given a list of what the yard, and by extension the family, are reduced to:
This is what was salvaged at the last moment from Reb Zelmele’s demolished yard: Twelve copper pans, eight large copper pots, sixteen cast-iron pots, three copper jugs… . Uncle Folye ripped from a wall a porcelain electric fixture, and Aunt Gita, a mezuzah from a door. Perhaps, in the new apartments that awaited them, there would be a place for it. (266)
In his introduction, Senderovich interprets these items, removed from their context and placed into a new transitory state, as “displaced markers of a family that is becoming both Soviet and Jewish… . the remnants of the Zelmenyaners’ courtyard await their reinterpretation and recontextualization in the family members’ new apartments, persisting beyond the old home’s physical disappearance but with their final meaning deferred.”
We might also see these two items, the mezuzah and the electric fixture—electricity symbolizing Soviet innovation throughout the novel—as being changed by the comparison that is set up between the two. The electric fixture becomes a kind of symbol of a Soviet home, the way the mezuzah, lehavdl, symbolizes a Jewish home. It’s a juxtaposition the novel has made in other places. Early on in the novel, when electricity had just arrived in the yard, a comparison is made between the way the family strings up the new electric wiring, “as if they were building—pardon the comparison [lehavdl]—a holiday sukkah” (41). The novel comically points out the sacrilegious crossover as the Zelmenyaners’ Jewish traditions find ways to change and incorporate the new Soviet modernity. While the Zelmenyaners are certainly changed—sometimes with great difficulty and hardship—they also manage to inscribe their own meaning on the new world around them.
The mezuzah and the electric fixture, highlighted in the final scene of the novel, parallel the contest that exists between traditional Jewish life and Soviet power throughout The Zelmenyaners. But here at the end the electric fixture is taken, lehavdl, in the same spirit as the mezuzah. We know there is room for electricity in the Zelmenyaners’ new apartments, but Aunt Gita hopes there will be room for what the mezuzah represents as well. The comparison suggests that there might even be room for breaking down the divisions between what had been seen as irreconcilable systems. Throughout the novel, the care and attention Kulbak takes in presenting both the idiosyncrasies of the Zelmenyaners and the innovations surrounding them might be read as expressing a hope that the newly created spaces of the Soviet Union will have room both for the transformative and liberatory power of revolution and for cultural heritage. The two need not be opposed. Unfortunately, Kulbak’s vision of a revolution with room for culture and history, critique and ambivalence, did not fit his time and place. The new translation of The Zelmenyaners offers an important opportunity to encounter the work Kulbak and other Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union did to offer critique and synthesis, and question the direction of their culture and society from within.
https://ingeveb.org/articles/to-what-might-the-yard-have-been-compared
Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zelmenyaners is many things: a family saga; a sometimes-earnest, sometimes-ironic portrait of the formative years of the Soviet Union and the Soviet pioneers; and a chronicle of modernity’s uneven arrival in Eastern Europe. For the first time, tramlines, movie theaters, and heavy industry begin to appear in the lives of Kulbak’s Jews—but many customs and patterns of Jewish life also begin to disappear. Kulbak, known primarily as a poet, is a brilliant storyteller, and the book manages the delicate act of being both serious and funny.
There are many interesting guides to The Zelmenyaners, reviews of the novel, and supporting materials of all kinds around the web. The original Yiddish novel is available in two volumes on our website: volume 1; volume 2. (A complete list of Kulbak’s books is available here. ) The Yiddish original is also available as an audiobook from our Sami Rohr Library of Recorded Yiddish Books.
In February 1975, an evening in honor of Moshe Kulbak was held at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal. The event, which was held in Yiddish and which you can listen to in our Frances Brandt Online Yiddish Audio Library, offers a comprehensive overview of Kulbak’s life and work.
Today this sheet of paper is most interesting as ephemera. The most comprehensive English biography of Kulbak is his entry in the YIVO Encyclopedia. The Yiddish newspaper the Forverts (Forward) also made this short biographical video about Kulbak. The video is narrated by the former editor of the Forverts, Boris Sandler, in his beautiful Besserabian Yiddish. It features English subtitles:
Moshe Kulbak
Moshe Kulbak
A more intimate view of Kulbak appears in our Wexler Oral History Project. In this excerpt, the renowned scholar of Yiddish literature Benjamin Harshav describes what it was like to have Kulbak as a teacher:
Moyshe Kulbak Taught at My School
Moyshe Kulbak Taught at My School
The entire interview with Harshav is a treasure, and a brilliant introduction to the city Kulbak is most associated with, Vilna.
Although not explicitly about Kulbak, this clip from the Wexler Oral History Project provides added context. Kulbak was killed during Stalin's "great purges." Here, Ina Lancman, the daughter of a Soviet Yiddish author, shares her family's experiences during the purge:
Great Purges & Yiddish Writer Naftali Herts Kon's First Gulag Experience
Great Purges & Yiddish Writer Naftali Herts Kon's First Gulag Experience
But to return to The Zelmenyaners, several thoughtful reviews appeared at the time of the book’s publication. In a short, perceptive review, Rokhl Kafrissen called the novel “the funniest Yiddish novel about Soviet central planning you'll read this year.” At In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, Madeleine Cohen reflects on the novel’s stage: the hoyf, or courtyard, which served as the primary type of residence in Eastern and Central Europe for decades and which inspired much classic Yiddish fiction.
Also at In geveb, Sasha Senderovich (who edited the volume and wrote its introduction and notes) writes about the characters who make up the book’s central family, and the conversations between family members: “Instead of one Tevye confronting modernity during the waning years of Imperial Russia through encounters with his recalcitrant daughters, Kulbak creates four Tevye-like figures in the guise of the four ‘uncles’ in The Zelmenyaners.”
The article is accompanied by a fantastic illustration of the family tree sketched by one of Senderovich’s students.
Finally, we invite readers to listen to a conversation about the book between Senderovich and Sebastian Schulman, then-manager of the Yiddish Book Center’s translation programs, on the Center's podcast, The Shmooze:
On Translating "The Zelmenyaners"
Sasha Senderovich: Critical Introduction to Moyshe Kulbak's "The Zelmenyaners: A Family Saga"
Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937) was a Yiddish poet, novelist, and dramatist. Born in Smorgon near Vilna, he received a traditional Jewish education. At the age of twenty-three, he published his first book of poems in Vilna, then settled in Berlin where he became familiar with contemporary currents in European literature, particularly Expressionism. In 1923, Kulbak returned to Vilna to become one of the most popular figures in Yiddish cultural life, appointed to, among other positions, the chairmanship of the newly founded Yiddish PEN Club. Despite his great popularity as a teacher, writer, and lecturer, in 1928, Kulbak moved to Soviet Minsk, lured by the presence of much of his family and by the state sponsorship of Yiddish culture. The Zelmenyaners was written and published in Minsk between 1929 and 1935, the heyday of short-lived cultural renaissance. Arrested in 1937 in the wave of Stalinist repression that hit the Minsk Yiddish writers and cultural activists with particular vehemence, and given a perfunctory show trial, Kulbak was shot on October 29 at the age of 41.
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