Mann Seeds in the Desert

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7343872-4-7
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Reihe: Seeds in the Desert

Available for the first time in translation, Mendel Mann's stories follow his life in reverse, from Israel in the 1950s to his experiences in the post-War Soviet Union and his childhood in Poland. With psychological insight and a focus on the tension between remembrance and reinvention, Mann provides indelible portraits of survivors as they confront the past and struggle to create a meaningful existence in the fledgling state of Israel.

Heather Valencia was a lecturer in German language and literature at the University of Stirling, Scotland. She began studying Yiddish in the 1980s, wrote her doctoral thesis on the poetry of Avrom Sutzkever, has published widely on Sutzkever and other writers, and has translated a wealth of modern Yiddish literature. Her published translations include Shmuel Harendorf's play The King of Lampedusa (2003), stories by Lamed Shapiro in The Cross and Other Stories (2007), the novel Diamonds by Esther Kreitman (2010), and a bilingual edition of Sutzkever's poetry, Still My Word Sings (2018). She has taught at Yiddish summer programs and teaches a Yiddish class in Edinburgh.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mann, Mendel

Leseproben

Introduction The Writer Mendel Mann (1916–1975) Mendel Mann was one of the last Yiddish writers to have grown up in the Jewish society of eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Even among his generation, Mann is unusual: although he started writing in Warsaw in 1938, the majority of his creative work was done after the war in the two countries where he made his postwar home, Israel and France. His oeuvre reflects the three phases of his own life: childhood and youth in the now-disappeared traditional Jewish environment, the horrors of war and persecution, and the experience of exile and rebuilding. The struggle for a new and meaningful existence in the fledgling state of Israel is a major focus of his work, and he confronts the ethical and emotional problems of the state with penetrating insight and psychological realism. Mann was born in Warsaw, Poland, but he grew up in the village of Kuchary, near Plock. His father, an adherent of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, believed in the importance of a secular European education, and Mann was educated in a Polish-language school, where his talent for painting developed. He was admitted to the Academy of Arts in Warsaw to study painting in 1938, just before war was declared. He escaped to Russia, where he worked as an educator in Tin’geshi, a remote village in Chuvashia, before enlisting in the Red Army, in which he served for the duration of the war. He took part in the battle against the Germans during the siege of Moscow and in the fall of Berlin, events that gave rise to his Milkhome trilogye (War Trilogy). Returning to Poland after the war, he discovered that his whole family had perished during the Holocaust. He had started writing poetry before the war, and his first collection of poems, eloquently entitled Di shtilkeyt mont (Silence Cries Out), appeared in 1946. It was the first book in Yiddish to be published in postwar Poland. During the short period he spent in Lódz´, Mann worked to help Jewish orphans emigrate to Israel, but soon found, especially in the wake of the pogrom of Kielce in 1946, that he could no longer bear to live in Poland. He left with his wife, Sonia, and their four-year-old son. A short period of wandering ended when they arrived in the German city of Regensburg, where they stayed until 1948. During this period they were lodged under the protection of the American military authorities in a huge empty castle, Schloss Sulzbach, probably because Mann was in possession of sensitive information about the Soviet army. His son Zvi has vividly described the isolation he felt as a four-year-old child wandering around the huge rooms with only two hunting dogs for company. “When my father was at home in the castle, he shut himself in one room […] Whenever I went in there he was very angry. He spent many hours in this room. I hated that. Writing prevented him from playing with me.” In addition to his fiction and poetry, Mann produced editorials and other articles for Regensburg’s Yiddish weekly. Der nayer moment (The New Moment)—later Undzer moment (Our Moment)—ran from March 1946 until November 1947. It was printed in Hebrew characters on an old Linotype machine dating from 1886. The title echoed the major Warsaw Yiddish paper Der moment and symbolized the survival and renewal of Jewish life in Europe. Mann’s editorials confronted the burning questions of this turbulent time: the pogroms that forced many Jews to leave Poland in 1946, the horrors of the Holocaust, the complex relationship of Jews with postwar Germany, and the hope of new life in Israel, which he saw as the only possible solution for “our homelessness, our nomadic existence” (editorial of April 3, 1947). For this reason, he bitterly castigated the shocking treatment of would-be immigrants to Palestine by the British, who turned back three ships, including the Exodus, in July 1947. The other nations, he lamented, remained silent at this injustice, “just as they were silent while the crematoriums were burning” (editorial of August 29, 1947). The publication of this and a number of other Yiddish journals in Germany just after the Holocaust is an extraordinary phenomenon in the history of the Yiddish press. Mann’s second book of poetry, Yerushe (Heritage/Inheritance), was published in Regensburg in 1947. The title is deeply symbolic: the poems mourn the lost heritage of Jewish life in Poland but also evoke continuity and a future inheritance for the Jewish people. For Mendel Mann this future lay in a Jewish homeland, and when the new state was declared in 1948, he and his family emigrated to Israel. It is well known that the policy of the fledgling state was to suppress Yiddish, or mame-loshn (mother tongue). Yiddish was perceived as being stained with the humiliation and hopelessness of the Diaspora; modern Hebrew, the virile old-new language, represented the rebirth in freedom of a Jewish homeland. This hostility caused great distress among large numbers of Holocaust survivors, who after losing their European homes and, in most cases, many or all of their family members, now faced the extinction of their language. Like the poet Avrom Sutzkever, who had also settled in Israel, Mendel Mann had the courage and determination to pursue his creative life in Yiddish. When Sutzkever established the literary journal Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) in 1949, Mann became Sutzkever’s colleague—as the journal’s secretary and as a contributor. Mann’s literary career flourished. Despite the privations of life in the early years of the state, he was extremely productive from his arrival until his early death. He produced ten novels and a great many short stories, as well as several plays. His most ambitious work of the 1950s draws on his experiences as a Red Army officer during the war. The three volumes of his war trilogy, Bay di toyern fun Moskve (At the Gates of Moscow), Bay der Vaysl (At the Vistula), and Dos faln fun Berlin (The Fall of Berlin), were published between 1956 and 1960. (The first volume of the trilogy was published in English translation by St. Martin’s Press, New York, in 1963.) The central character of the trilogy, Menakhem Issakovitsh, is, like many of the lonely individuals who people Mann’s work, an alter ego of the writer himself. Through his eyes, Mann creates a vivid and broad panorama of the war, focusing on events the author himself experienced: the defense of Moscow and the terrible destruction of Warsaw, including the Jewish ghetto, during which the Red Army took no action to aid the city—an unbearable situation for a Polish Jew like Mann and his protagonist. The third volume depicts the march of the Red Army on Berlin. Mann participated in all these events and does not shrink from depicting the cruelty of the victors as well as the human misery of the defeated. In 1961, Mann moved to Paris to work for the Yiddish newspaper Undzer vort (Our Word). There he continued writing and returned to his first love, painting, producing a large number of delicate watercolor landscapes. He became a friend of Mark Chagall, whose 1969 picture Der dikhter Mendl Man in zayn dorf (The Poet Mendel Mann in His Village) depicts the writer as a tall figure dressed in black, holding an open book and bending like a tree over a typical Chagallian village. Flames spurt from one of the houses, while a small figure with two children appears to be fleeing. In the dark, threatening sky, a couple hovers. Although the setting of this picture is reminiscent of Chagall’s idyllic shtetl paintings, its darker mood reflects the recent trauma of the Jewish people. The man stares in apprehension, rather than rapture, at the viewer; the woman peers anxiously at the village below. Mann resided in Paris until his death in 1975, though he traveled widely, giving rise to stories set in locations as diverse as Texas and Australia. (See, for example, “Laughter from the Skies” on p. 96 of this collection.) Mendel Mann’s work draws on all the experiences of his adventurous life, but it cannot be pigeonholed as purely autobiographical. In all his settings—the Poland of his childhood, the war-torn cities of Moscow and Berlin, the desolate desert places of Israel—he depicts a wide diversity of human individuals, animals, and landscapes. He evokes the essential strangeness and mystery of the relationships between human beings and between human beings and the natural world. The volume Kerner in midber (Seeds in the Desert), published in Paris in 1966, consists of forty short stories that move backward in time through the landscapes of the writer’s life; the first sixteen are set in the early years of the state of Israel. Mann does not present the reader with a romanticized image but rather a subtle and nuanced view of the new nation; he depicts the fragmented, precarious nature of early Israeli society, where each person deals with his or her own personal exile, never free of the past, which continues in their lives as a living presence. He evokes the struggles of individuals to conquer the inhospitable earth and to settle in the ancient, mythic landscape that threatens to overwhelm them. He is unique among Yiddish writers in depicting with great empathy the Arabs, whose lives were irrevocably changed by the establishment of the new state. The next twelve stories journey through Russia, Germany, America, and Australia during the last days and in the wake...