Yiddish literature gets new ‘Angel’

The Angel of Forgetfulness

A Novel

Steve Stern

Viking: 406 pp., $24.95

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Many people assume that Yiddish literature is dead, a tragic example of a creative universe aborted by history, leaving us to wonder what could have been while enjoying the last wisps of musty shtetl air it gives off. “The Angel of Forgetfulness” by Steve Stern proves that Yiddish literature for a mainstream audience lives; it’s just not being written in Yiddish anymore.

Stern, a Memphis native who first received critical acclaim in 1986 with a collection of short stories titled “Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven,” has been compared to Isaac Bashevis Singer and Cynthia Ozick. He can be as racy and nostalgic as Singer, and his gorgeous sentences approach Ozickian proportions (though mercifully for most readers, they don’t get there). But Stern’s true legacy is to the three forefathers of Yiddish literature: I.L. Peretz, S.Y. Abramovitsh and Sholem Aleichem. They were the first to write stories about Jewish folklife in a sophisticated literary style (beginning an arc that ultimately led, through numerous intermediaries, to Woody Allen and Philip Roth). With this novel, Stern has tapped a direct bloodline, creating an important work of deep themes, soaring language and serious implications that is also unceasingly entertaining.

The book opens in 1969, as Saul Bozoff, an awkward 19-year-old failing New York University student, decides to look up a distant relative, Aunt Keni. She educates Saul in the consummately Jewish culture that emerged from the Lower East Side, steeping him in its sensibility, language and humor. “We wasn’t married six months when there comes one night a knock at the door,” Keni tells Saul about her first husband. It was an anarchist who tells her “ ‘he threw a bomb in Mulberry Street; your husband lays in Bellevue on a slab.’ But when I go and see, no husband: they got there instead only a foot, a ear, an unmentionable item which I recognize it’s his, but there ain’t nothing he can’t get along without. To this day I’m wondering is the rest of him somewhere alive and well.”

This is wickedly funny stuff, but it’s no cheap ethnic thrill. As Saul soon learns, he has stumbled into the barbed embrace of a mystery.

It begins around the turn of the century, when a copy editor for the Jewish Daily Forward named Nathan Hart meets Keni Freischutz, “a young lady with an alabaster complexion, lightly freckled like a sprinkling of cinnamon in milk.” To keep her attention and win her love, Nathan begins to spin a tale about Mocky, a fallen angel who has abandoned his half-mortal child in heaven. Keni submits -- to the tale and the affair -- and becomes a sort of reverse Scheherazade, keeping Nathan vibrant by letting him tell his story.

As Nathan relates, Mocky descends into a life of adventurous iniquity that soon leads him into a confrontation with his long-lost son. But the creation begins to overtake its creator; Nathan descends into this dark world too, drawn away even from his muse to stalk a story that has begun to obsess him.

Nathan leaves Keni his unfinished manuscript, which she bequeaths to Saul, who abandons it to embark on his own odyssey. But the story of the fallen angel lures Saul back, charging him with the task of its completion.

Chapters alternate between the stories of the three main characters, yanking the reader from one thread to the next in an exhilarating flouting of boundaries -- temporal, linguistic and emotional. In this, Stern’s work is joyously reminiscent of the classic Yiddish tales, whose characters trespassed from one world to the next, from high society to the shtetl, from slang to sophisticated language. Like his literary ancestors, he dares to write serious literature driven by average folk, people who are funny and vulnerable and just happen to be natural philosophers.

For the Yiddish masters, fiction was a vehicle for change, a roundabout way to better the lives of shtetl-minded readers. Stern is an adherent to the belief in its power, but he sees more truthfully: Stories can inspire and uplift, but they can also obsess and destroy. At the very least, he seems to say, they must entertain.

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Alana Newhouse is the arts and culture editor at the Forward.