THE TEARS AND PRAYERS OF FOOLS, Russian translation of Pale-of-Settlement historical novel

THE TEARS AND PRAYERS OF FOOLS
GRIGORY KANOVICH (tr. Mary Ann Szporluk)
Syracuse University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$39.95 all editions, available now

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Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This extraordinary novel is part of Grigory Kanovich’s “Litvak saga,” his tribute to Jewish life before the Holocaust. Set in a small Lithuanian town in the late nineteenth century, the story begins with the arrival of a stranger who sets everyone on edge and seems to know their secrets. Is he a messenger from God, a long-lost son, a saint, or a madman?


As the stranger in the velvet yarmulke makes his rounds, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters—Rabbi Uri, the aged rabbi; Itsik Magid, the strapping young woodcutter; Golda, the resourceful widow; Markus Fradkin, the wealthy timber merchant, and his beautiful daughter Zelda; Yeshua Mandel, the tavern keeper, his troubled son Simeon, and Morta, their devoted servant girl. A work of realism as well as a parable, Kanovich’s novel illuminates the most intimate fears, dreams, and longings of the shtetl’s inhabitants.

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

My Review: I feel utterly inadequate to the task of reviewing this book, after reading this on Edelweiss+: "‘Shtetl noir’ meets Hasidic legend in this deeply philosophical work. In a word, this novel is the work of an exceptional writer with a unique voice.—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Professor Emerita, New York University". That is it, she's said it all, go get you one.

"Shtetl noir" is a term I've never heard before, but the instant I read it crystallized the affect of this story. I'm not all the way sure about the realism angle the publisher trumpets in the synopsis because I was never there in 1880s Imperial Russia, and after reading the story do not feel as though I've been there. It's the usual problem with historical fiction. It's enough removed from my life that I'm not adept at putting myself into the place; 1880s Pale-of-Settlement Russian Empire life is not in my 1960s-Sunbelt American worldview.

I'm astonished that the author lived to know, though I don't think see, this favorite of his ten novels appear at long last in English. He died at 93 in 2023, a life lived during the waning days of the Yiddish culture of Eastern European Jewry, through to Soviet times before he emigrated to Israel.

This novel feels much like I'd expect it to, knowing all that. There are bits and snatches of memory, scenes I was sure were utterly clear before his eyes as he wrote them. Maybe it's telling, though I can't know on whom, that the most clearly limned scenes and characters in my reading were Simeon Mandel the...troubled...son of the innkeeper and that man himself.

I loved the way I felt included in the read as we moved from scene to scene and place to place. In part that's because the book has a map in the front. I so appreciate that when the story takes place in several locations. I'm also grateful for the glossary (and please note the transliterations are not the usual ones, but reflect Lithuanian pronunciation) and dramatis personae, though that last is in the back of the book which strikes me as odd.

The author's grandson made art for the chapter opens that I found pitch-perfect. The images are human and yet caught in moments of almost Mannerist...distortion, contortion, well incongruity with the geometry of consensus reality. In many ways that is the "noir" I noted above as crystalizing the read for me. I found all the multivarious problems the characters face almost absurd, they bend and twist the sense of right and reason, all applied from the outside in. As in all noir tales, it's the unseen and faceless threats that unsettle and unnerve.

A story I don't know how to summarize because it is so deep but so deft with it; so dense with meanings we're not in daily contact with; so rife with assumptions we don't make in the twenty-first century, that I'm overwhelmed with the need to explain. It's not clear to me why you'll read this story. I wish you would. It's a world-view opener.