When the one-legged, one-eyed rags peddler Lazar Malkin left
on his journeys into the Mississippi hinterland to find customers for
his collection of “shmattes and tools,” he liked to remind his fellow Jews on
Memphis’ North Main Street, “The Pinch ain’t the world.”
Old Malkin was right, but he was wrong, too. The Pinch, the
former Jewish quarter of Memphis, Tenn., located along North Main between
Downtown and Uptown, was, after all, a world unto itself. Along with its “jewelers,
tailors, and watchmakers,” its Hasidim, rabbis, meshuggener and various
luftmensch, were Klotwog’s Feed Store, Rosen’s Delicatessen, Ridblatt’s Bakery,
Hekkie’s Hardware, the Neighborhood House, and the Anshei Sphard Synagogue.
It’s the world you enter in writer Steve Stern’s wonderful
collection of short-stories The Book of
Mischief (Graywolf Press, 2012), a lost world, that perennial of Yiddish
literature, that existed in a little corner of a Deep South city, a threatened
world where “at night rabid animals stalked the perimeter … with now and then a
werewolf among them; and never mind the marauding Klansmen” who’d taken the
place of the Cossack troops that tormented these Jews back in Russia and
Poland’s Carpathian Mountains.
Stern, a winner of the National Jewish Book Award and
teacher at Skidmore College in upstate New York, spent formative years in Memphis and
found in the Pinch District—now largely blighted but possibly facing a
rebirth--a bottomless source of inspiration.
(To the right is an abandoned synagogue in today's Pinch District)
The Pinch is Memphis’ oldest neighborhood. It was here where
Davy Crockett and Sam Houston caroused at the old Bell Tavern in the early
1800s, where waves of Irish and German immigrants came and worked along the
nearby levees of the Mississippi River, where many of them perished or fled
during the 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic that nearly destroyed Memphis.
Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia settled in the Pinch
after the epidemic. They came here just as they came to New York’s Lower East
Side and other places of refuge to escape the pogroms launched against them
after Czar Alexander’s assassination in St. Petersburg in 1881.
This collection of Stern stories also includes tales from New
York’s Lower East Side, the Catskills Mountains, and Eastern Europe, those shtetl
and city ghettoes we know mainly today through “Fiddler on the Roof”, the
paintings of Marc Chagall, the haunting pre-World War II photographs of
Roman Vishniac, and the tales of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Stern revisits the
horrible last moments of the immigrant women at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
in New York just before it goes up in flames in
1911. He juxtaposes the world destroyed at Auschwitz and Treblinka with
today’s Prague, where that most iconic of Jewish writers, Franz Kafka, has
become “Elvis”. His “jug ears stretched to satanic points … the forehead
receding to a vampirish widow’s peak,” Kafka is everywhere—in the windows of
bookstores and cafés, on T-shirts and coffee mugs.
Stern quotes Kafka to get to the heart of things Jewish: “In us
all still lives—the dark rooms, secret alleys, squalid courtyards, and sinister
inns. The fetid old Jewish town within us is more real than the hygienic town
around us. With our eyes wide-open we walk through a dream, ourselves only a
ghost of a vanished age … ”
(An alley today in Memphis' Pinch District)
And one “old Jewish town” was to become the Pinch District
of Memphis, Tenn. Here along its alleys and narrow streets were refugees from a
distant and hostile world, eternal wanderers it seemed, who now must contend
with “a river … awash with dead men and snakes. Beyond our neighborhood the
poor people married their own mothers and had two-headed children. For sport
they wrestled pigs and cut the private parts off Negroes, which they framed and
hung up in the barbershops. The South beyond the Pinch was Gehinnom, it was
Sichra Achra, the other side.”
(To the right is another back street in today's Pinch District)
As is obvious here, Stern has a Jewish sense of humor, and it’s no
accident he spends some time in this book in the Catskills amid the ghosts of
“Sophie Tucker ... Fat Jackie Leonard, Danny Kaye né
David Daniel Kaminsky.” In his story “The Wedding Jester”, his character Saul Bozoff
may be Stern himself, a curious Jewish Southern writer who discovered in the
Pinch a haunting of ghosts--“immigrants crying hockfleish and irregular pants,
pumping their sewing machines like swarming hornets in the tenement lofts,
braiding Yiddish curses into their yellow challah bread.”
Or preparing for the occasional visits of Memphis’ political
czar, Edward H. “Boss” Crump, who would boast “Our sheenies are good sheenies”
with just the hint of a threat behind that frozen smile and “rakish straw
skimmer.”
These stories are filled with golem, dybbuks, tzaddik, and
there's even a daughter of Lilith, the original “femme fatale,” Jewish, of course, a succubus as dangerous as she
is seductive. Stern takes you to fantastical heights that require the
suspension of Gentile logic and practicality. You fly in the air with Rabbi
Shmelke “above the telephone lines and trolley lines” of the Pinch. You
accompany Zelik Rifkin into a dream world of Pinch District doppelgängers
who exist just above the tallest oak in the quarter. You swing with Felix
Meltzer over the rooftops of Prague as he escapes the golem.
Stern tells us Saul Bozoff, the writer in “The Wedding
Jester”, was never to be a bestselling author, lost as he was in “the place where
history and myth intersected,” a writer “saturated in Jewish arcana” whose
books are “catalogued as Fiction/Judaica.”
As literary critics Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg once
wrote, the writers of Yiddish or Yiddish World literature, “virtually unknown
to Americans,” navigate a world that is
“internally a community, a spiritual kingdom,” and “externally a society in
peril, a society on the margin.”
Indeed, by and large, these are poor immigrants, dealers in
rags and legends, refugees from oppression defiantly true to their faith and
culture yet also fearful of those outside their world, the holders of power in
whose smiles lies an ever-present threat of bad things to come. Yet what stories
these lost world denizens have to tell.
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