'Our Little Histories': A Jewish family saga - review

The words “history” and “story” come from the same Latin root, but their meanings have diverged. “History” summons up dusty tomes, formality, key dates, and major events. A “story” denotes something more private and informal, not necessarily true but somehow truthful and capable of conveying truths.

Family histories are an intimate blend of the two: Major events affect families as they do nations, and reverberate through the generations. Yet quarrels and reconciliations intertwine just as wars and treaties do on a bigger stage, and intimate decisions have far-reaching consequences.

Janice Weizman’s Our Little Histories is an ambitiously crafted novel which acts on one level as a blending of world events with the experiences of a typical Eastern European Jewish family saga, starting in the middle of the 19th century and culminating with its descendants flourishing in present-day Israel and in the United States. 

What lifts this out of the ordinary, though, is that at the historical and emotional center of the book is a mysterious poem, written in Yiddish and published in a journal just before the outbreak of World War I. The secret it contains, though, is kept from the reader until the end of the book.

A compelling story with a secret twist

Weizman, a contributing reviewer to The Jerusalem Report book pages whose first novel, The Wayward Moon, was recently reissued by Toby Press, does this by constructing the novel in reverse chronological order in the form of seven self-contained yet interlocking short stories, the “little histories,” each one shedding further light on the poem and its origin as we travel back in time.

The opening story is centered on an assimilated American Jewish atheist and museologist who is asked to create a “living installation” (a recreated shtetl dwelling) in Belarus of a typical 19th-century Jewish household. The idea comes from a wealthy local businessman who has some slight Jewish ancestry. Inspired by the Israeli reality show Big Brother, the idea is “for Belarus people to be able to watch the family and see how Jewish people make their religion, and so they will know about the Jews who used to live right here, in the town and all over the country of Belarus.”

Drafting in a relative and his family from Israel “so distant that I wasn’t sure exactly how we were related” to act as if they were typical religious Jews, in front of a curious, mostly baffled local audience whose ancestors had no regrets about getting rid of them in the first place, doesn’t go that well. The fake dwelling has been meticulously reconstructed, and the actors (with unexpected cast changes) play their parts well, yet in this reality show reality is lacking.

What is real, and what forges a sudden connection between the museologist and her Israeli relative, is the Yiddish literary journal which she has brought to Belarus after it has lain neglected in an attic for years. The Israeli remembers that a poem in it was written by a common ancestor, but the Yiddish, in the past a language that united Ashkenazi Jews, serves only to sever its meaning from both of them.

The subsequent stories trace the history of the poem back through the generations as the family is brought further back to its roots. We witness meetings in Tel Aviv cafés and on kibbutz on the eve of the creation of Israel, the world of literary Yiddish Europe on the brink of destruction, and immigrants in the safety of Chicago. Antisemitism, socialism Zionism, and assimilation challenge the family and help shape the relationships of its members with one another Finally, we are returned to the true reality of Belarus of 1850, when the poem finally yields its secret, one that has set the family on its course, yet has gone beyond memory’s recall. 

Each story animates a world, but unlike the make-believe shtetl hut, it is rendered real not just by a faithfulness to wider historical trends and forces but also by the people who inhabit these worlds, and by their decisions which cause themselves and their descendants to spin these worlds in different directions.

Throughout, Weizman displays superb authorial control and imagination in maintaining the difficult literary balance between the twin poles of “history” and “little histories.” The first is a product of careful historical research, and the second is a reflection of her acute and rich insight into character and motivation. All this is conveyed in richly layered yet readable prose.

For me, the stand-out story in the book is the delicately told and convincing revelation of emotion as a married kibbutznik woman finds herself confessing to her affair with a German Jewish refugee, later murdered by the Nazis, to his bourgeois aunt, who is visiting Mandatory Palestine soon after the war. As she narrates: “Like a child I have tried to hide, vainly hoping to avoid this moment when I find myself standing before a judge who is not this woman but me, myself. Or to recall Alterman, I am the sin and I am the judge.”

Other regrets unify the disparate stories: the diminution of Yiddish to become a “language of museums;” the crumbling of Jewish identity both inside and outside Israel, albeit tempered by hints of its revival; the interplay of literature and history; and the gradual generational loss of memory even of “little histories,” and the way the various characters react to this loss.

In the last story, the poem’s secret, a moving tale of tragedy and bittersweet triumph so expressive of life in the Pale of Settlement, is revealed, and its piercing light illuminates all that has gone before. Literature, a form of “little history,” at its best also contains truths. In the loss of literature, we don’t just lose stories but truth itself.

Let the words of one of Weizman’s characters, a literature teacher and Yiddish writer, sum up her achievement. “There are quite a few who can write well, and of those perhaps a fraction show mastery, but only the smallest fraction of those have an inborn sense of how to balance the elements into a cohesive, satisfying whole, while disguising the great effort of creation to make it seem simple and natural.”■

• Our Little Histories
• Janice Weizman
• Toby Press 
• 223 pages; $17.95