The Human Touch

IOWE to my good friend, Max Levy, of 910 Riverside Drive, the pleasure of discovering the art of Isaac Leibush Peretz, one of the great trio of Jewish story tellers, for Mr. Levy urged me to read, and then lent me, his copy of twenty-five of the stories of Peretz, in the translation of Dr. A. S. Rappoport and bearing the title of “Bontshe the Silent,” the title also of one of the most poignant of the Peretz stories.

This does not mean that, up to the time I opened the pages of “Bontshe the Silent,” I had heard no word of Peretz. I had heard many words, but Mr. Levy’s reproach-tinged word was the stray that broke the camel’s back of indifference and by the time this is written I shall have heard no less than eight of these stories and by the time you, dear reader, light upon this column I hope to have read at least another four.

Maybe these stories, as Dr. Rappoport contends in his preface, have a universal appeal in spite of their concern with Jewish themes and Jewish people. It must be admitted that they have lost little of their humanity in translation from Yiddish to English, but they are Jewish stories, in the sense that a Jewish heart dictated them. And by a Jewish heart I mean a heart somewhat more sympathetic to the sufferings of his fellow-men than a non-Jewish heart might be.

NEITHER MAUDLIN NOR INDIGNANT

Peretz does not wax either maudlin or indignant at the sufferings of his fellow-Jews; at the same time he does not hint too subtly at the tragedy, not, perhaps, with the subtlety of a Chekhov, with whose work his comes closest in theme and manner. It seems a pity that so few of these stories are susceptible to translation without reference to glossary or footnote and that even among the eight I have read, two–“What Is the Soul?” and “The Repudiated Daughter”–have so little sense in translation.

But “Bontshe the Silent” makes up for many such, for its is a story which cannot fail to touch the human heart, no matter what its race, nationality or previous condition of intelligence or culture. Bontshe is the last word in obscurity.

No human being could be more obscure, and live. No human being could be more lonely, less missed, more humble, than Bont-she. He is simply the last human terminus of nonentity. He is a burden bearer, in the literal and figurative senses. He bears more burdens than he is paid to carry. No offense, no injustice done him can elicit from him a muttered reproach, or even the hint of a glare, for Bontshe spends his life with his eyes to the ground. Peretz’s Bontshe is the epitome, the epic, the ne plus ultra, of human suffering and human uncomplainingness.

But the cream of the jest is whipped up for the reader’s understanding delight when Bontshe reaches Heaven, which he had never dreamed himself worthy of, and is adjudged, in effect, a saint, and told to command Heaven. And in a modest voice, expecting to be refused for so bold a request, he asks that every morning he may have a hot roll with butter, the height of human or angelic felicity imaginable by a Bontshe.

IN THE SAME VEIN

“The Messenger” is a story in the same vein, of the same type of uncomplaining burden-bearer, of the death in are snow of an old man, one who had suffered deeply and had been deserted in his declining years. It wrings the heart, this story, but, I venture to suggest, even a little more subtly than the Bontshe tale.

The subject of “Married” is as old as the hills–the sacrifice of a young girl in marriage to a man old enough to be her grandfather, but rich, rich enough to give her mother and her father ease and security and her younger brother’s education and the possibility of careers. It is a story of blighted love, the kind of a story that I can imagine our grandmothers reading in Yiddish, with streaming eyes and loud sniffies, but even such a story can be literature.

“Domestic Peace” is a little treasure. It is the story of the love of two humble people, the man, again, occupying that most humble of roles, a carrier. He is a good man and a devout man, but thoroughly unlettered, who obtains relief from an oppressive doubt that he isn’t good enough to go to Heaven when he is told that only by doing a certain daily chore for the synagogue may he win admittance, not only for himself but for his wife also. But he assures her that whereas the learned man at the synagogue told him she could sit only at his feet, he would raise her up to his side, where she belonged.

A DOUBTING LITVACK PERSUADED

But perhaps the best known of these stories is the one entitled “If Not Higher,” that in which a doubting Litvack is finally persuaded that the rabbi at whose sanctity he had mocked was in truth a saint in disguise, by implication a “lamed vovnik,” meaning one of those thirty-six good men because of whose sanctity God has refrained from destroying this sinful earth.

This is perhaps not an inappropriate season of the year in which to recall the stories of Peretz to the readers of the Jewish Daily Bulletin, for shortly Jewry will be marking the anniversary of his death. Peretz died on the fifth day of Passover, 1915, in Warsaw. He was a poet and dramatist as well as a story teller, but his poetry is implicit in his stories. It is possible to tell some poets by their prose, even their translated prose.