Nearly 90 years after its original publication, this ahead-of-its-time novel by one of the best-known Yiddish writers of his...
Bergelson's politically charged novel, first published in Yiddish in 1929, reflects on the dark absurdities of life along the Ukraine-Poland border circa 1920.
Set at the height of the Russian civil war, the book features an outsize cast of characters, Jewish and non-Jewish, struggling for survival as the Bolsheviks consolidate power. It's a time and place where everything is up for grabs—allegiances, ethnic identities, basic values—and madness reigns. Inhabitants of the (fictional) shtetl of Golikhovke survive by smuggling goods—as well as people and anti-Bolshevik propaganda—across the border. A seductive schemer known only as "the blonde" who considers herself a "devout Christian" will sleep with anyone—even let her body be "defiled by a dirty Jew"—to facilitate her trips back and forth. In a former monastery outside of town, people are interrogated and locked up at the whim of Filipov, an enigmatic, ailing enforcer for the Bolshevik secret police. For all the horrific truths at its foundations, this boldly modernist novel entertains with its bleak, coolly ironic humor. Among the memorable bit players are Bunem the Red and Hatskel Shpak, coachmen who take advantage of smugglers desperate to get out of town: "Jews fleecing Jews!" The initial chapters of Bergelson's book were published on the heels of Kafka's The Trial, to which it has fascinating ties.
Nearly 90 years after its original publication, this ahead-of-its-time novel by one of the best-known Yiddish writers of his era proves powerfully relevant in its first English translation.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3591-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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