No Star Too Beautiful: A Treasury of Yiddish Stories

by Joachim Neugroschel (Editor)

A unique and rich anthology of Yiddish stories from the beginning of Yiddish literature through Isaac Bashevis Singer. First developed and written in medieval Germany, Yiddish eventually became the everyday speech of Jews all over Europe and later globally. Yiddish was a hybrid language crafted from German, mixed with Hebrew, Judeo-Aramaic, and blended with Italian and French as well as the Slavic languages. It gave rise to a literature that reflected not only Jewish life but also the culture of the lands in which the Jews lived. A descriptive and flavorful language, it was used for genres as diverse as religious tales, fables, humor, social realism, surrealism, and the literary experiments of modern times. No Star Too Beautiful is a bountiful anthology that brings together the masterpieces of this now-vanishing tongue. Joachim Neugroschel has chosen stories emblematic of the people and their times, and this volume chronicles both the literary tradition and the history of the people who created it. Indeed, the collection contains the first English translation of medieval Yiddish fiction. Many of the early tales like "Virtuous Joseph" and "Abraham's Childhood" had Biblical roots. But there were also the fables of Moshe Vallikh and such wonder-filled folk tales as "The Princess and the Seven Geese." In the later periods, the stories reflect the varying currents of thought within the Jewish community as well as echoing the changes in Europe. Comic or tragic, Yiddish literature underwent a flowering of writers: Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Yitsik Leybesh Peretz, S. Ansky, Sholem Asch, Y.Y. and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and many others. Compiling and newly translating almost all the stories, Neugroschel has created a seamless effect rarely approached in a work filled with so many voices. This astounding anthology is a lasting gift for generations.

Genres: Jewish, Short Stories, Fiction, Judaism

732 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Joachim Neugroschel (1938-2011) was the translator of some two hundred books, including works by Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann. He won three PEN translation awards and a French-American Foundation Translation Prize.

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Antisemitism is a disease. Politics stands at its sickbed like a stupid quack who tries to prolong the illness.
-Yitsik Leybesh Peretz, 'On the Stagecoach' (1891)

I sometimes get myself into trouble with my book purchases. If a book's weighty, pretty, and promises to tell the tales of an area of knowledge, especially in the realm of literature, that I have little to no awareness of, I'd be tempted regardless of the price tag. And when the latter is on the level of the cost for this particular work, which cost me a mere buck. A buck! A single dollar for 700+ pages of nearly 700 years of writing translated from a language with one of the most convoluted histories in the world? Never mind that I've only a single Yiddish work to my readerly name and not the faintest know-how regarding Old Yiddish, Hadism & anti-Hadism, the Haskala, Yiddish Modernism, evocations of the Torah, intimations of proto-Hamlet, tsadiks, dybbuks, and only the slightest hint of awareness of cabalists, pogroms, and the only Yiddish writer to have ever won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Of course, this is easier said than done, and this beautiful book ended up waiting on my shelves for a good five years before the transition period between my regular literature focus and Women in Translation Month brought to my attention that anthologies such as this one were the perfect bridge for the gap. Now that I'm finished, while I'll admit to my eyes glazing over at more than one point before Modernism hit, I'm happy with my three additions to my TBR, my expanded historical/literary/Jewish-related awareness, and the knowledge that, yes, there were women writers in Yiddish in all periods, some with plenty that remains to be translated into a wider consciousness.

The world is gorged now with pogroms,
With slaughter, with a death commandment—
Why should I be an exception?
Why shouldn't I fulfill the death commandment
Like everybody else?
-The speaker Jesus, H. Leivick (Leivick Halper), 'He' (1918)

It's anthologies like these that make me realize that the diversity I seek in my reading material has little to no impact on the uniform stubbornness of how I actually read said material. Dip in every once and a while? Pick one or another author/period for an extended sampling, leaving enough time between entries to track down the full edition of the referenced work so as to holistically engage with each piece in its own right? Ha! 95% of what I read is best suited for a straightshooting beginning to end, and so that is what I do, all the way from the anonymous biblical derivatives hailing from the year 1382 to a Jewish-Canadian novel written by an award-winning woman writer and published in 2000. This way is hugely prone to cognitive overload and other side effects of information-flood fatigue, so unless you have a lot of experience with non-Anglo works that make 700 pages look like a corgi, you should probably pick and choose. Authors I took especial note of include:

Glikl bas Yuda Leib (Glückel of Hameln) (1646-1724)
Fradel Shtok(/Stock) (1890-1942+)
Rokhl(/Rachel) Korn (1898-1982)

the first two largely for their place in history and the third for future reading that I would more fully commit to were Anglo translations of her two short story volumes, nine poetry collections, and autobiography were more in evidence. In terms of further reading, I've added:

The Dybbuk by S. Ansky
The Empire of Kalman the Cripple by Yehuda Elberg
Bociany by Chawa Rosenfarb

to the ever growing TBR: the first for being the most popular work by an author with a couple of excerpted tales of unclear collection origin, the latter two for the intriguing excerpts provided of each novel. I didn't go as much for the esoteric supernaturalisms, graphic descriptions of pogroms, intricate satires, pulp fiction, naturalist expeditions, grotesquely subversive poetry, morality tales, and a host of other genres featured in this collection beyond my picking and choosing of some of the quotes, but they're there for anyone interested in expanding their repertoire in a less commonplace direction.

If not for our misfortunes, we would never have come in contact with one another like human beings.
-Chava Rosenfarb, 'Bociany' (2000)

This work ended up lasting me almost as long as did Women in Translation Month, and while it'll only be fourth longest work on my shelf, it feels as if I'm leaving a world behind. While I probably take more note of secularized Jewish literature in my shelves than most non-Jewish readers do, it's something else entirely to spend a month following a timeline of writing, of which the Holocaust is a bookend for the last ten percent, that pays almost as little due to the mainstream view of 'literature' as that does to it. If the wider world had read all the works of the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Shoah would not have been such a surprise: but, if the wider world were capable of reading Yiddish, what was the point of the language in the first place, and was it even Yiddish anymore? Questions that are almost useless in their asking, and yet, I have to wonder. In any case, it's good to know that Yiddish is on the rise in the 21st century, to the point that mainstream aspects of the Internet such as Google Translate, Wikipedia, and alphabet keyboards are all, to various extents, Yiddish friendly. In light of that, there really is no excuse for the relative dearth of talk about Yiddish writing in this corner of the Internet, is there? I'm sure plenty of people have read I.B. Singer as part of their rote Nobel/1001/generic mainstream literature prize pursuit, but one book does not make for hundreds of years of published writing. So, yet another project involving underread works that I could probably devote the remainder of my life to. However, to make use of yet another Jewish concept, I'll leave that to the hedgehogs who have actual academic credibility in the realm of Yiddish and its cultural output: with more than eighty other languages on my shelves and a number of years ahead of me, I still have quite a bit more foxing to do.

A pious Jew died, leaving many wonderful books, which the heirs sold to strangers. And when the other pious Jews saw this, they were pained that the children should be selling off their father's books. Now in the same town there was a great sage, and he said to the pious people: "Don't feel bad that the books are coming into strange hands. Let me tell you why this is happening and how he sinned. That man never wanted to lend a book to anyone. For he said he was an old man and his books might confuse him and he couldn't see very well. 'Others might ruin my books. So I won't lend my books to anyone.' But a man should not act like that. And since he never lent his books to anyone, they are now coming into strange hands."

-Jacob Ben Abraham of Mezritch, 'The Mayse Book' (1602)