The Publisher Says: A major literary figure and frequent contributor to the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts from the 1920s to the mid-1930s, Jonah Rosenfeld was recognized during and after his lifetime as an explorer of human psychology. His work foregrounds loneliness, social anxiety, and people's frustrated longing for meaningful relationships—themes just as relevant to today's Western society as they were during his era.

The Rivals and Other Stories introduces nineteen of Rosenfeld's short stories to an English-reading audience for the first time. Unlike much of Yiddish literature that offers a sentimentalized view of the tight knit communities of early twentieth-century Jewish life, Rosenfeld's stories portray an entirely different view of pre-war Jewish families. His stories are urban, domestic dramas that probe the often painful disjunctions between men and women, parents and children, rich and poor, Jews and Gentiles, self and society. They explore eroticism and family dysfunction in narratives that were often shocking to readers at the time they were published.

Following the Modernist tradition, Rosenfeld rejected many established norms, such as religion and the assumption of absolute truth. Rather, his work is rooted in psychological realism, portraying the inner lives of alienated individuals who struggle to construct a world in which they can live. These deeply moving, empathetic stories provide a counterbalance to the prevailing idealized portrait of shtetl life and enrich our understanding of Yiddish literature.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll bet good hard cash, my own United States dollars, that you've never heard of Jonah Rosenfeld. Yiddish-language literature is, to be frank, a specialist taste; a lot of it is what we used to call "schmaltzy," that is to say greased down with lots and lots of chicken fat. The implication being that Yiddish-speaking people, or Jews as we call them now, were all about Mammele and her iron grip on her boychik the melamed. (Not Rabbi, that's the Everest of stereotypical Jewish Motherhood.) Old-fashioned stuff meant to amuse the Old Country immigrant audience that New York City had in abundance while Rosenfeld was writing here (1921–1944).

Are you still here? Did you click away already? Because that's not what Jonah Rosenfeld delivers (mostly)! Lost in a haze of his largely forgotten mother tongue compounded with increasing assimilationist pressures on the now-third-generation immigrants after World War II and the Holocaust, Author Rosenfeld fell into an unjust desuetude. He was wildly popular among his direct contemporaries because he was emphatically not going to feed you pap, as Translator Miner tells us:

In his search for psychological veracity, Rosenfeld does not flinch from the darker side of human nature. Indeed, the psyche's darkest corners are central to his writing. He is, according to Harry (Hillel) Rogoff:
"{A} painter of sadness, grief, fear and horror...a portrayer of love, passion and lust in their decadent stages, when they approach degeneracy...but the keynote of realism is never missing."

His stories are every bit as tough to read as the much-younger Simenon's romans durs, or Erskine Caldwell's realism by way of rage and misery. The pace of interwar societal change informs the need in these (among so many others) writers' careers to explore the rough edges that more mainstream writers don't touch, or don't grab hold of at least, in order to elicit something in a reader that she doesn't necessarily want to offer: Empathy.

{Rosenfeld's} writings, like those of many of his contemporaries, are set in the context of rapidly changing Jewish culture. Urbanization, emigration, increasing social mobility, and pressures to assimilate provide the locus of conflict for many of his characters, whose personal isolation "becomes a metaphor for the rupture and dislocation resulting from the breakup of traditional Jewish values." (footnoted to Schwartz, "The Trials of a Yiddish Writer in America," 196.) Even religion provides little comfort in many of Rosenfeld's stories, whose characters practice rituals devoid of meaning, Jews are caught in a no-man's-land, not truly sustained by Judaism, yet not in harmony and ease with their Gentile neighbors either.

Like his age cohort of writers, the Modernists like Ford Madox Ford (his near contemporary in age) and Ernest Hemingway, the joys of sentimentalism are foregone in Rosenfeld's work. He spares no thought for the warm glow of a loving, crowded hearth; I suspect the fact that he was ejected from his family, essentially sold into slavery (well, apprenticeship anyway) at thirteen, plays some part in his career-spanning unwillingness to write cheery little vignettes of The Old Country:

It is true {writes Translator Miner} that Rosenfeld neglects or subverts much of what was positive in Jewish life, especially in his treatment of family relationships. His domestic dramas, however, serve as a corrective to the tendency of American {Yiddish-language} readers to sentimentalize a Jewish world that no longer exists.

And please note that the audience Author Rosenfeld wrote for was not a small one: Twenty (20!) volumes of short stories; two full-length novels; a dozen plays. This was a culture that was intensely literary, and spawned a lot of theatrical legends, arguably reaching apotheosis on Broadway with 1960s shows like Fiddler on the Roof and Milk and Honey. As Author Rosenfeld's plays are as yet untranslated, I can't state this as fact, but I strongly suspect that his plays show clearly he'd've shuddered at those sentimental shows. This was a man whose first forty years were spent in places that hated him for what he was born as, a Jew. He was a deeply unhappy man. He had no illusions about the comforts of home or the love of family. He was, in short, me! This is why I enjoyed reading these stories so much. I was communing with my bygone, cynical, angry self. And it felt just fine, thanks.

***THE STORY REVIEWS ARE AVAILABLE ON MY BLOG AS OF 5 MAY 2020.*** ( )