1rocketjk
I just finished this amazing and saddening novel. Thought I'd just post my rather lengthy review here.
The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer
A note that this review is different from my normal reviews, as it is long (not that unusual for me these days, now that I think about it) and relies much more heavily than is common for me on quotations. There was so much in this book that I made note of during the reading that I had a hard time coming up with a better way of introducing the book here than to just let Singer speak for himself.
The Family Moskat is Isaac Singer’s second novel, published originally in 1950, or approximately 15 years after Singer’s immigration from Poland to the U.S. As with all Singer novels, it was written in Yiddish and translated into English. The novel portrays the at first gradual and eventually rapid collapse of the Jewish community of Warsaw in particular and of Poland in general, from the early years of the 20th century through the German invasion in 1939. The novel ends with bombs falling over the city.
The book is alive with detail and movement. Life, fear, lust, squalor, crowds, noise and smells. Near the beginning of the narrative, Singer propels us into the midst of a marketplace in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw as if ejecting us from a carriage with a boot to the small of the back. In an instant we are in the midst of a rousing blast of striving and clamor.
The tale is told through the lense of the life of the titular family. As the book opens, Menshulam Moskat is the late-middle aged financially successful patriarch of a sprawling family. Adult children, in-laws and grandchildren abound, though Menshulam’s right-hand man in business is not a family member at all, but a retainer named Koppel Berman. The family is a mixed bag. Some are still pious Jews, even Chassidim, while others have become more secular, gradually or entirely turning their backs on the old religious ways. At the beginning, the tale of the feuding, fractious but insular family is told in almost comic fashion. And into the mix comes young Asa Heshel Bennett, who comes to Warsaw to get away from the smothering Jewish culture of a small shtetl town on the Polish-Belorusse border and instantly falls in with Abram Moskat, Menshulam’s most ne’er do well son who takes the young newcomer under his wing.
As the decades go by, the family’s fortunes deteriorate, as does the coherent nature of Polish Jewry, as younger generations increasingly (but certainly not entirely) turn their back on old ways. Many become socialists, Communists, Zionists, hedonists, academics . . . the whole range within the whirlpool of European intellectual life in the 20s and 30s.
Singer looks at these phenomena with a complex mix of understanding, criticism and sadness. In his own life, Singer was the son of a Warsaw rabbi and saw these developments at first-hand, himself turning from the religious to the secular/intellectual. For example, a crucial aspect of the story is the romance carried out between Asa Hesel and Hadassah, a Moskat granddaughter, Abram’s niece, who has actually been promised by her family to Fishel, a successful businessman. Says Abram to Asa Heshel:
She doesn’t want him, that Fishel, with the whole business of the mikvah, and wearing a matron’s wig, and his grandfather, and his lousy oil business, and the whole stinking mess. The damn fools. First they send their daughters to decent, modern schools and then they expect them to forget everything they’ve learned and suddenly become old-fashioned, orthodox, meek Jewish housewives. From the twentieth century straight back to the Middle Ages. Tell me about yourself. Is your health all right?”
At the same time, Singer is clearly looking back with affection. Thinks Abram at one point, as he reflects on his own life as a schemer and carouser:
“There was only one thing that wasn’t worth a plague: death. Why should he, Abram, have angina pectoris? What would he be doing through the long winter nights over there in the Gensha cemetery? And even admitting that there as such a thing as paradise, what good would it be to him? He’d rather have the Warsaw streets than all the wisdom of a Jewish paradise.”
And there is gentle humor running throughout, mostly put by Singer into the mouths of his characters. At one point, a rich man’s shiva (wake) is overrun by curious strangers. “Look at that mob,” Naomi complained. “A person would imagine someone sent for them.”
An ever-present theme, of course, is the endless current of tragedy that has stalked the community for centuries and shows signs, now of accelerating rather than abating. In the period just after the First World War, a new mother looks at aunt and observes:
“A sort of pious melancholy flowed from her, the generations-old dolor of the Jewish mother, the mothers who bled and suffered so that murderers should have victims for their knives. And was she any different? What would happen to her child? Who could say that in another twenty years there wouldn’t be another war?”
In addition to the schisms developed by the tensions and changes in Jewish life as the years and generations proceed comes the ever-tightening vise of rising anti-Semitism in post-World War One Poland, described here in a relatively early passage:
The saloonkeeper rubbed his forehead. That’s the way it always was. Let one Jew into the place and they’d draw a thousand others, like flies, and the place gets to be a madhouse. The plate of soup was standing untouched. The cat was gnawing at the sausages. A pack of devils, these Jews, with their stylish clothes. The newspapers were right; that gang would eat up Poland like a flock of locusts, worse than the Muscovites and the Swabians.
As time goes by, things get worse, and as the 30s progress boycotts against Jewish businesses commence and Polish ruffians begin aping their German Nazi neighbors in beating up Jews on the street. Toward the end of the book another Moskat family member, Yanovar, after being falsely accused of being a Communist and arrested, has an ominous conversation with the police officer who, while releasing him, warns about the ubiquity of Jews within the Polish Communist movement.
Yanovar replies, “That, sir, is the unfortunate situation the Jew finds himself in. We are not permitted in the civil service, nor are we permitted to take posts in factories. Anti-Semitism creates Communism.”
“Well, assuming that this is so, do the Jewish leaders realize the Communism among the Jewish masses evokes an anti-Semitism tenfold, a hundred-fold, more intense?”
“We know that, too. It’s a vicious circle.”
“Mr. Yanovar, I don’t want to frighten you, but the situation is unbearable. Today the Jews are the spreaders of Bolshevism throughout the face of the earth. I’m not exaggerating. This puts the very existence of the Jewish race in danger.”
After the policeman dismisses the idea of a Jewish homeland, suggesting that Zionism is another source of anti-Semitism within Poland, the conversation ends on an ominous note. The policeman recommends that Yanovar acquaint himself with a book called The Twilight of Israel,* and concludes the conversation with the chilling pronouncement, “Time solves all problems. One way or another. Adieu.”
* (A note that while I could not find any reference to this book online, my guess is that it was never published in English and, more importantly, that it is an anti-Semitic tract and probably a vicious one.)
Elsewhere, Asa Heshel looks out of a tram window and sees this: “Along Marshalkovska Street women loitered. Their shadowed eyes shone with the gloomy lust of those who have lost all fear of peering into the abyss.”
The book represents a time commitment. As with many multi-generational family novels, The Family Moskat is relatively lengthy, checking in at just over 600 pages. Not every segment flows along exceptionally well, but most do. Also, I felt that the ending was rushed, the final 20 pages or so not as satisfying as the rest of the novel. But those flaws didn’t seriously detract from the overall power of this book for me. Also, on reading back over this review, I feel that I've emphasized a bit too much the sociological/cultural/historic themes of this novel. So to be clear, if you've stuck with me this long, this is a novel about people, with the loves, struggles, disappointments fears and joys. The characters are not always likeable, goodness knows, but quite a few are memorable.
So I guess since this has become a review of quotes, I’ll finish up with one more lengthy one that in many ways sums up the sadness that, understandably, runs through The Family Moskat. Here, Asa Heshel has returned to his hometown village to visit his mother:
After the meal . . . Asa Hershel walked off through the village. For a while he stopped at the study house. Near the door, at a long bare table, a few old men bent over open volumes dimly illuminated with flickering candles. From the shul Asa Hershel turned into the Lublin Road. He halted for a moment at a water pump with a broken handle. There was a legend current in Tereshpol Minor that although the well underneath had long since dried up, once during a fire water had begun to pour from the spout, and the synagogue and the houses around it had been saved from destruction.
He turned to the road that led to the woods. It was lined with great trees, chestnut and oak. Some of them had huge gashes torn in their sides by bolts of lightning. The holes looked dark and mysterious, like the caves of robbers. Some of the older trees inclined their tops down toward the ground, as though they were ready to tumble over, tearing up with them the tangled thickness of their centuries-old roots.
The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer
A note that this review is different from my normal reviews, as it is long (not that unusual for me these days, now that I think about it) and relies much more heavily than is common for me on quotations. There was so much in this book that I made note of during the reading that I had a hard time coming up with a better way of introducing the book here than to just let Singer speak for himself.
The Family Moskat is Isaac Singer’s second novel, published originally in 1950, or approximately 15 years after Singer’s immigration from Poland to the U.S. As with all Singer novels, it was written in Yiddish and translated into English. The novel portrays the at first gradual and eventually rapid collapse of the Jewish community of Warsaw in particular and of Poland in general, from the early years of the 20th century through the German invasion in 1939. The novel ends with bombs falling over the city.
The book is alive with detail and movement. Life, fear, lust, squalor, crowds, noise and smells. Near the beginning of the narrative, Singer propels us into the midst of a marketplace in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw as if ejecting us from a carriage with a boot to the small of the back. In an instant we are in the midst of a rousing blast of striving and clamor.
The tale is told through the lense of the life of the titular family. As the book opens, Menshulam Moskat is the late-middle aged financially successful patriarch of a sprawling family. Adult children, in-laws and grandchildren abound, though Menshulam’s right-hand man in business is not a family member at all, but a retainer named Koppel Berman. The family is a mixed bag. Some are still pious Jews, even Chassidim, while others have become more secular, gradually or entirely turning their backs on the old religious ways. At the beginning, the tale of the feuding, fractious but insular family is told in almost comic fashion. And into the mix comes young Asa Heshel Bennett, who comes to Warsaw to get away from the smothering Jewish culture of a small shtetl town on the Polish-Belorusse border and instantly falls in with Abram Moskat, Menshulam’s most ne’er do well son who takes the young newcomer under his wing.
As the decades go by, the family’s fortunes deteriorate, as does the coherent nature of Polish Jewry, as younger generations increasingly (but certainly not entirely) turn their back on old ways. Many become socialists, Communists, Zionists, hedonists, academics . . . the whole range within the whirlpool of European intellectual life in the 20s and 30s.
Singer looks at these phenomena with a complex mix of understanding, criticism and sadness. In his own life, Singer was the son of a Warsaw rabbi and saw these developments at first-hand, himself turning from the religious to the secular/intellectual. For example, a crucial aspect of the story is the romance carried out between Asa Hesel and Hadassah, a Moskat granddaughter, Abram’s niece, who has actually been promised by her family to Fishel, a successful businessman. Says Abram to Asa Heshel:
She doesn’t want him, that Fishel, with the whole business of the mikvah, and wearing a matron’s wig, and his grandfather, and his lousy oil business, and the whole stinking mess. The damn fools. First they send their daughters to decent, modern schools and then they expect them to forget everything they’ve learned and suddenly become old-fashioned, orthodox, meek Jewish housewives. From the twentieth century straight back to the Middle Ages. Tell me about yourself. Is your health all right?”
At the same time, Singer is clearly looking back with affection. Thinks Abram at one point, as he reflects on his own life as a schemer and carouser:
“There was only one thing that wasn’t worth a plague: death. Why should he, Abram, have angina pectoris? What would he be doing through the long winter nights over there in the Gensha cemetery? And even admitting that there as such a thing as paradise, what good would it be to him? He’d rather have the Warsaw streets than all the wisdom of a Jewish paradise.”
And there is gentle humor running throughout, mostly put by Singer into the mouths of his characters. At one point, a rich man’s shiva (wake) is overrun by curious strangers. “Look at that mob,” Naomi complained. “A person would imagine someone sent for them.”
An ever-present theme, of course, is the endless current of tragedy that has stalked the community for centuries and shows signs, now of accelerating rather than abating. In the period just after the First World War, a new mother looks at aunt and observes:
“A sort of pious melancholy flowed from her, the generations-old dolor of the Jewish mother, the mothers who bled and suffered so that murderers should have victims for their knives. And was she any different? What would happen to her child? Who could say that in another twenty years there wouldn’t be another war?”
In addition to the schisms developed by the tensions and changes in Jewish life as the years and generations proceed comes the ever-tightening vise of rising anti-Semitism in post-World War One Poland, described here in a relatively early passage:
The saloonkeeper rubbed his forehead. That’s the way it always was. Let one Jew into the place and they’d draw a thousand others, like flies, and the place gets to be a madhouse. The plate of soup was standing untouched. The cat was gnawing at the sausages. A pack of devils, these Jews, with their stylish clothes. The newspapers were right; that gang would eat up Poland like a flock of locusts, worse than the Muscovites and the Swabians.
As time goes by, things get worse, and as the 30s progress boycotts against Jewish businesses commence and Polish ruffians begin aping their German Nazi neighbors in beating up Jews on the street. Toward the end of the book another Moskat family member, Yanovar, after being falsely accused of being a Communist and arrested, has an ominous conversation with the police officer who, while releasing him, warns about the ubiquity of Jews within the Polish Communist movement.
Yanovar replies, “That, sir, is the unfortunate situation the Jew finds himself in. We are not permitted in the civil service, nor are we permitted to take posts in factories. Anti-Semitism creates Communism.”
“Well, assuming that this is so, do the Jewish leaders realize the Communism among the Jewish masses evokes an anti-Semitism tenfold, a hundred-fold, more intense?”
“We know that, too. It’s a vicious circle.”
“Mr. Yanovar, I don’t want to frighten you, but the situation is unbearable. Today the Jews are the spreaders of Bolshevism throughout the face of the earth. I’m not exaggerating. This puts the very existence of the Jewish race in danger.”
After the policeman dismisses the idea of a Jewish homeland, suggesting that Zionism is another source of anti-Semitism within Poland, the conversation ends on an ominous note. The policeman recommends that Yanovar acquaint himself with a book called The Twilight of Israel,* and concludes the conversation with the chilling pronouncement, “Time solves all problems. One way or another. Adieu.”
* (A note that while I could not find any reference to this book online, my guess is that it was never published in English and, more importantly, that it is an anti-Semitic tract and probably a vicious one.)
Elsewhere, Asa Heshel looks out of a tram window and sees this: “Along Marshalkovska Street women loitered. Their shadowed eyes shone with the gloomy lust of those who have lost all fear of peering into the abyss.”
The book represents a time commitment. As with many multi-generational family novels, The Family Moskat is relatively lengthy, checking in at just over 600 pages. Not every segment flows along exceptionally well, but most do. Also, I felt that the ending was rushed, the final 20 pages or so not as satisfying as the rest of the novel. But those flaws didn’t seriously detract from the overall power of this book for me. Also, on reading back over this review, I feel that I've emphasized a bit too much the sociological/cultural/historic themes of this novel. So to be clear, if you've stuck with me this long, this is a novel about people, with the loves, struggles, disappointments fears and joys. The characters are not always likeable, goodness knows, but quite a few are memorable.
So I guess since this has become a review of quotes, I’ll finish up with one more lengthy one that in many ways sums up the sadness that, understandably, runs through The Family Moskat. Here, Asa Heshel has returned to his hometown village to visit his mother:
After the meal . . . Asa Hershel walked off through the village. For a while he stopped at the study house. Near the door, at a long bare table, a few old men bent over open volumes dimly illuminated with flickering candles. From the shul Asa Hershel turned into the Lublin Road. He halted for a moment at a water pump with a broken handle. There was a legend current in Tereshpol Minor that although the well underneath had long since dried up, once during a fire water had begun to pour from the spout, and the synagogue and the houses around it had been saved from destruction.
He turned to the road that led to the woods. It was lined with great trees, chestnut and oak. Some of them had huge gashes torn in their sides by bolts of lightning. The holes looked dark and mysterious, like the caves of robbers. Some of the older trees inclined their tops down toward the ground, as though they were ready to tumble over, tearing up with them the tangled thickness of their centuries-old roots.
2SRB5729
Its been a bit since this review was posted but I stumbled upon this lovingly done review and hope to add my own comments.
I went into reading The Family Moskat unknowing how much it had within. I had a naive hope that this might bring perhaps a bit of melancholy but not too much and be a great story of people as the prior review notes.
I will not repeat the prior review but highly suggest this as a read to be pondered and entered into with foreknowledge that one is going back into time to observe and something special but at the same time laden with sadness in varying degrees.
Many pine for the "old world", and transition from that are difficult. Read and enjoy the process.
I went into reading The Family Moskat unknowing how much it had within. I had a naive hope that this might bring perhaps a bit of melancholy but not too much and be a great story of people as the prior review notes.
I will not repeat the prior review but highly suggest this as a read to be pondered and entered into with foreknowledge that one is going back into time to observe and something special but at the same time laden with sadness in varying degrees.
Many pine for the "old world", and transition from that are difficult. Read and enjoy the process.
