In Tuesday’s post about Aaron Lansky and the Yiddish Book Center, I promised to follow up by writing about a pair of books I got at the Center’s nice little gift shop: Binele, by B. J. Bialostotzky; and Moshkeleh the Thief, by Sholom Aleichem. Both are novels, but they are very short—you could easily read either one of them in a single sitting.
Aleichem is the best-known of all Yiddish writers and probably needs little introduction. His most famous creation, Tevye, was immortalized in the beloved adaptation for stage and screen, Fiddler on the Roof, and I have written previously about his novel Stempenyu.
Bialostotzky, by contrast, is largely forgotten. (I had never heard of him.) Originally from what is now Lithuania (and was then part of the Russian Empire), he eventually made his way to New York City. There he was active in a range of Yiddish cultural organizations and published collections of songs, poems, and folktales.
Binele is a fantasy fairy-tale for children. The title character, “a young boy, around ten or twelve years old,” dreams one night about a distant country, the Land of Endless Holiday. It is a land with “no sadness, no hunger; everyone is well-fed and happy. No one is bowed down, no one is worn out, no one is afflicted. A land without want, and a land without death!” The next day, as he remembers his dream, the world around him “begins to disappear before his eyes,” and he suddenly finds himself alone, in a new world.
As he sets off walking, Binele encounters a peasant and a beggar who assure him that there is no such land as the Land of Endless Holiday. But a surprising figure appears to help Binele, “a tall man with a staff in his hand, and a gartel, a pious man’s belt, around his waist.” It is the prophet Elijah, who encourages the boy not to give up and promises him assistance on his journey before disappearing again.
Binele encounters various obstacles on his way. First he must cross the River of Tears, “the secret river in which are gathered all the salt tears of all who are unhappy, from all lands.” Next he must pass over the Goblet of Blood, a vast pit filled with “the blood of all the people in the world who were killed without reason.” Finally he comes to the Mountain of Bones, composed of the “heaped bones [of] the people who have fallen in wars.” Because “the mountain grows ever higher,” no one can go over or through it; instead, Elijah leads Binele under it to the other side.
Along the way, Binele also meets other people, “failed seekers” who had also set off on a quest but who had failed to reach their goal and now remain trapped in a kind of eternal limbo. There is an old man who had sought the cave of Moschiach (the Messiah), hoping to wake him from his slumber and help him return. There is also an old woman who had sought the Spring of Eternal Youth. With her are four children, two brother-sister pairs. One had sought a wishing-ring that would grant its wearer whatever he desired; the other had chased after the Blue Bird of Happiness. All had failed in their quests, though none of them understands why. Elijah explains to Binele the reason: “People don’t recognize the sin they commit and the mistake they make, so they look at it all as a riddle…. [I]n order to attain to such a wonder as the Spring of Eternal Youth”—or, by implication, the Land of Endless Holiday—“one must be noble and pure oneself.” The fate of these characters is thus a cautionary warning for Binele.
With Elijah’s help, however, the faithful Binele finally arrives at his destination. He receives a joyous welcome and is admitted to the city with one condition: he may stay for three days, observing all the happy wonders that await him, but after that he must return to his own country, “the Land of the Workaday World.” Binele agrees, promising, “I’ll go back and tell everyone about it.” And in he goes.
The Land of Endless Holiday turns out to be a kind of early twentieth-century socialist utopia, inspired by a vision of reason and technological progess in the service of human prosperity and flourishing. Binele visits the immense palace of work, filled with endless rooms in which smiling people operate countless machines that grind flour, weave and knit cloth, or make shoes.
Next he enters the Palace of Machines, where he sees a “large assemblage of machines, each hooked to the next. Here is a tractor, and here is a construction machine, a crane, a threshing machine, a weaving machine, an excavating machine, a machine to pump water, a harvester, a sawmill, a steam engine, a furnace. And in the middle of the vast machine palace stands an enormous locomotive: a giant, huge and mighty and very tall.” In this enthusiasm for science and the cooperative organization of work, one hears echoes of a techno-Marxist vision that inspired at least some segments of the Zionist movement.
The children in the Land of Endless Holiday live together in a collectivist children’s home. They treat each other kindly, never fight, and “learn … how to be good Jews.” Binele sees the law courts, where no one ever lies and all matters are decided fairly. He sees the Garden of Happiness, with its beautiful fruits and flowers. He sees the city’s industrial center with its factories but no smoke-belching chimneys, where clean, cheerful workers lay roads, drain swamps, and change the course of rivers. He is “entranced by all the marvels that he sees” and is equally impressed by what he does not see: “not a single tramp, not a single beggar, not a single homeless wanderer.”
Intriguing though this version of utopia is, however, the most interesting part of Binele is its conclusion. When Binele leaves the Land of Endless Holiday, eagerly anticipating a reunion with his parents and imagining all the wonders he has to tell them, Elijah once more rejoins him. They again pass the Mountain of Bones, which in the meantime has grown even higher; the Goblet of Blood, to which more blood has been added; and the River of Tears, which has become “more violent, swifter, and wider.”
Finally, the two reach a hut, where Elijah proposes to leave the boy. But the old “wonder-man” has an unexpected and even unwelcome surprise for him: Binele may not yet return home. The world is not yet ready to hear his message. Instead, he must wait there until, one day, he will receive a sign that the time is ripe: a young girl will emerge from the rising sun, run across the earth to him, take his hand, and cry out, “Happy holiday!” Then and only then can Binele return home with his news of the Land of Endless Holiday.
Elijah’s words to the disappointed young boy are sobering:
Have patience still. Don’t be upset…. You must wait for the day when the people of your land themselves truly long for holiday, when they are ready for that. Now, though, it is still too soon. Were you to go home now with your greeting from the Land of Endless Holiday, people would point their fingers at you and tell each other that you’re crazy. But there will come a time when everyone there will be ready for it. Everyone will long for Endless Holiday. Then you will go there with your greeting. But meanwhile, wait.
So Binele waits—and, as the book ends, is still waiting, waiting and dreaming of the day when the little girl will surely come.
Moshkeleh the Thief also borrows its title from its protagonist, but in most other respects it is quite different from Binele. Its hero is not a young boy yearning for a land free from sorrow and death but rather a rough, brawling, scheming horse thief. This short, rediscovered novel, of which its author appears to have thought highly, does not appear in the standard editions of Sholom Aleichem’s collected works—perhaps because its portrayal of a Jewish criminal underclass and of complicated Jewish-Christian relations was too much for conservative editors.
In twenty short, fast-moving chapters, Aleichem spins a tale of romance, adventure, and intrigue within the Russian Pale of Settlement. The opening chapters quickly introduce us to our hero: Moshkeleh ganev, Moshkeleh the thief. Moshkeleh is not only skilled with horses, he is also famous for his “feats of strength” and “at fisticuffs … [he is] a genius.” When a local peasant, “tall and robust, a latter-day Goliath the Philistine,” gets drunk and beats the female owner of a tavern, Moshkeleh shows up and thrashes him with a single blow. All the Jews in town knows that when they are in need of certain, shall we say, specialized services, Moshkeleh is their man. But they also look down on him, and he especially resents the fact that no one is willing to marry him or offer him their daughter in marriage.
Things become interesting when we meet Chaim Chosid, one of the local notables, at whose wine cellar the other local notables routinely meet for drinks. They do so not only because the wine is good, but also because Chaim Chosid has an attractive wife and several lovely daughters. And as everyone knows, “drinking a fresh glass of wine just drawn from the barrel was quite delicious when a beautiful woman served you and pretty girls were always in sight.”
Most beautiful of all is the youngest daughter, Tsireleh. One day—alas!—she disgraces the family by succumbing to the repeated protestations of love from one Maxim Tchubinski, the town liquor tax collector and, worse, a Christian. To keep her safe from her family’s grasp, the two of them run off to a local monastery, where they plan to get married.
Under such circumstances, there is only one person who can help the unhappy family: Moshkeleh ganev. With some embarrassment, they summon him and explain the situation. Immediately, he hatches a plan. He heads to the monastery himself, claiming a desire to convert and be baptized. In this way, he arranges to meet Tsireleh, who is beginning to feel regrets at having abandoned her Jewish family.
Moshkeleh is not without ulterior motives of his own. He has admired Tsireleh himself, and in fact he is passionately, if secretly, in love with her. Her family’s predicament is thus a convenient one for him. He sweeps her off her feet, takes her into his arms, and leaps with her over a garden wall to his waiting horse. A few days later, Chaim Chosid receives a letter: “I have gotten married to Moshke, who back home was called Moshkele Ganev. And I am happy, maybe even happier than all my sisters…. And I want to let you know, dear father and mother, that we will never come back to Mazepevke. We don’t want to witness your humiliation and grief.”
That would be a natural and appropriate conclusion, and the generational tension between Tsireleh and her parents would echo a theme familiar to readers of Aleichem’s Tevye stories. But like Binele, Moshkeleh the Thief ends unexpectedly. After a chapter insisting that his story is true, Aleichem—who often, in the guise of storyteller, addresses his readers directly—quickly relates the later fate of Chosid’s family, in particular the fact that his “daughters and sons-in-law have sailed, one by one, to America” (another small indication that Aleichem, for all his jovial good humor, deals with important questions about the fortunes of east European Jewry).
We then return to Moshkeleh, but from an entirely different perspective. Several years later, on a dark, overcast day, a slaughterer and cantor named Henekh is traveling. He sees “a group of men marching in a prisoners’ transport convoy, chained in pairs, their irons rattling,” followed by a wagon filled with women and children. One of the prisoners looks familiar to Henekh, but he cannot place him. He then sees a beautiful woman in the wagon, holding a child. She too looks strangely familiar.
Suddenly, someone calls his name: “Reb Henekh!” Surprised, he looks again, and the beautiful woman addresses him:
Don’t you recognize me? I’m Tsireleh, Chaim Chosid’s daughter, Chaim Chosid’s youngest daughter. Once you’re back home in Mazepevke, please send my warm greetings to my father and mother and everyone in the family. And please be sure to tell them that we are on our way to Irkutsk, in Siberia. Please, please don’t forget to send warm greetings to my father.
Henekh is astounded by what has happened, so surprised at the strange coincidence that he cannot even explain the incident to his companions. As the novel ends, he can only mutter to himself, “What a story! What a tale!”—as “a wind came and light rain began to fall.”
What a tale, indeed—Aleichem has given us an abrupt and even shocking surprise ending. The story has nodded in the direction of realism with its depiction of a Jewish underclass, but it has nevertheless—until now—been a humorous and romantic tale, with a lovable criminal as its hero. We root for Moshkeleh the way we root for Robin Hood or hope that a clever and likable thief might outwit the police.
But suddenly we are no longer in the realm of romance. Instead, we are very much back in the Pale, in an era when Jews faced discrimation and even pogroms. Tsireleh’s cheerful message—please send warm greetings—only highlights the reality of what is happening. She doesn’t even bother to explain it. She doesn’t need to. Everything that must be said is contained in that short half-sentence: “We are on our way to Irkutsk, in Siberia.” Sholom Aleichem has pulled the rug out from under us: a story that appeared to be heading safely toward a humorous victory for its underdog hero has ended in tragedy.
Moshkeleh the Thief first appeared in 1903, when it was serialized in a Warsaw newspaper. Binele was published in 1940, in New York. The humorous tale of a thief and the utopian fantasy for children are very different kinds of stories. Yet they share an important sensibility that reflects deeply rooted elements of Jewish experience.
B. J. Bialostotzky and Sholom Aleichem both end by reminding us that the world is not as it should be. We must “wait for the day when the people of [our[ land themselves truly long for holiday, when they are ready for that. Now, though, it is still too soon.” Now, we could all too easily find ourselves on the way to Irkutsk, in Siberia.
Binele, despite its markedly Jewish overtones, with Elijah coming to the young hero’s aid, casts its realistic message in more universal terms. It is not only Jews who are not yet ready to enter the Land of Endless Holiday; the world as a whole remains mired in competition, exploitation, and war. Moshkeleh the Thief, with its story of generational conflict and Tsireleh’s desire for a life of greater equality than she sees in her sisters’ marriages, seems to take up universal themes, but it ends with a very specific image of Jewish suffering in the Russian Pale. Both novels, however, move toward the same conclusion: it is still too soon.
Meanwhile, we wait.
As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time for another installment From My Bookshelf.
Thank you so much, Dr. Meilaender, for your kind discussion of our book! It is very much appreciated, and I'm so glad that you liked it. It is an extraordinary story. Mit vareme grusn un dankshaft, Ruth Murphy (Translator).