Margaret Birstein

A novel about a working-class Hassidic Jewish family in Poland sometime in the early 20th century, as narrated by twelve-year-old Mendl. There isn't really a plot, just a slice of life from that time and place. The book becomes all the more significant because it was published in 1935 and the modern reader knows that way of life is about to be destroyed forever: hence the subtitle, "Scenes from a Vanished Life." The author himself died in Auschwitz.

Although the narrator of "Everyday Jews" is a child, this book isn't a children's book by any means. Everyone is sleeping with everyone else, and it's not strictly married couples or even girlfriends and boyfriends who are doing this. Mendl has half-siblings from both parents, and at one point in the story his mother's son tries to seduce his father's daughter. (Or maybe it was the other way around, I don't remember.) One of his half-sisters becomes pregnant by her employer and then miscarries. A maid and a neighbor girl both try to seduce Mendl himself, though he hasn't even had his bar mitzvah yet. The Polish Jewry of the 1930s was shocked by this book when it came out, though it all seems pretty tame to me, not graphic at all.

I would recommend this book to people interested in Hassidic and/or pre-Holocaust Jewry. It has a few footnotes for clarification and also defines some terms for the Gentile reader. It's a slow-moving story without a lot of action, but beautifully written with some lovely similes, and it really taught me a lot about the prewar Polish Jews.… (més)