[In the following essay, Howe assesses Leonard Wolf's English translation of The Family Mashber, likening Der Nister's difficulty with narrative in the novel form to that of Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago, and praising Der Nister's realistic characterizations.]

"Here one has to turn one's soul upside down"—so, in 1935, wrote a Yiddish writer in the Soviet Union to his brother in Paris. The writer, who went by the pen name of Der Nister (Yiddish for "The Hidden One"), had long been drawn to the mysteries and nuances of literary symbolism, making forays into esoteric knowledge that derived in part from cabalistic and Hasidic sources. But, as he told his brother, "what I have written until now aroused strong opposition [from the Communist literary bureaucrats] … Symbolism has no place in Soviet Russia." Nor, in the years of Stalin's terror, did any other freespirited literary approach.

Der Nister, whose real name was Pinhas Kahanovitch (1884-1950), had come to be recognized in Yiddish cultural circles as part of a lively gathering of modern novelists and poets centered in Kiev a few years before the First World War. He was a man with an austere, if not always accessible, spiritual life, the kind of writer who could never make large noises or reach large audiences. He kept a skeptical distance from both the ideological debates within the Jewish milieu and, later on, the politics of the young Soviet regime. But by the mid-thirties—when all writers in Russia, no matter what their language or style, felt the heavy hand of the commissars—Der Nister had decided to abandon (or perhaps hide?) his literary symbolism, if only to protect himself and his family. He started to compose a large-scale, seemingly traditional family chronicle, the sort of spacious and transparent novel that had been popular in Europe during the early years of this century.

The first volume of The Family Mashber appeared in Soviet Russia in 1939; the second could be published, nine years later, only in New York. Word filtered out from Soviet Russia that Der Nister left a third, concluding volume, but if so, it has disappeared. Perhaps it lies buried in the vaults of the Soviet secret police, together with a good many other works proscribed during the Stalin years.…

Over the years a few attempts have been made to bring Der Nister's novel to an audience beyond the shrinking and aging Yiddish readership; the book has been translated into Hebrew and French, and now, because of the devoted skill of Leonard Wolf, we have a very readable English version, one that captures much of the range and color of the original text.

The Family Mashber hasn't a word directly referring to the situation of Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union, but for anyone familiar with the circumstances of its origin, it seems stained with the bloody marks of history. The book deals with Eastern European Jewish life in the 1870s, but as I read, images of the 1930s crossed my line of vision: censors brutalizing, writers suffering, prisoners shot. Critics, I suppose, must try to be dispassionate, and so I will offer a straight literary judgment: this is a work of major interest, gripping in its frequent pictorial brilliance, deeply serious in thought, yet finally elusive. It's a book to engage with and ponder over, even if it's not quite the masterpiece its translator takes it to be.

Der Nister locates the action of his novel in a moment when Eastern European Jewish life, no longer unified by a firm religious world view, is simultaneously falling apart and renewing itself. For the novelist, such a moment seems made to order. "The perfect literary situation," the poet-critic Allen Tate once wrote, is when "a spiritual community is breaking up." Such situations are rich in drama and consciousness: the interplay between tradition and rebellion, the crumbling old and the unshaped new.

In the earlier years of this century novelists often grappled with this theme by focusing on a single family, making it the central field of tension, while behind it the larger community provided a shifting, precarious background. In turning to this kind of novel, Der Nister was following the lead of Yiddish writers who had begun edging their way into European literature by imitating those sprawling family chronicles through which European writers both mirrored and assaulted bourgeois values.

The Family Mashber is set in the western Ukrainian town of Berditchev, once under Polish rule and now with a growing Jewish population. Cultures meet and clash. In the distance is the Russian autocracy, powerful and feared; nearby, the Polish nobility, sulking after its defeat in the 1863 rebellion against czarism and, at least as Der Nister portrays it, slipping into paths of decadence. And in the foreground is the thickly populated Jewish community, now fragmented into an enfeebled orthodoxy, an ambitious commercial class, a seething underclass of laborers and toughs, and the germ of what will soon become the powerful movement of Jewish secularism. Writing with a curious detachment, as if this world were not the very source of his being, Der Nister shows neither partisanship nor enmity. The calm, mildly ironic voice we hear throughout the book is that of a man surfeited with, perhaps nauseated by, historical experience.

Now, if we read The Family Mashber in a spirit of acquiescence, as we might read Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks or I. J. Singer's The Brothers Ashkenazi—that is, as a socio-historical panorama reflecting the crisis of a culture—the novel can be extremely satisfying. More so, probably, than if it is read in the way I propose. Plot, setting, characters, all seem to signal that this is essentially another family chronicle—all except the writer's voice as it keeps emerging in self-reflexive casuistries and ironies.

But let's turn to the story itself, following it along the path of the family chronicle. Moshe Mashber, an intelligent if rather limited merchant, finances the Polish nobles in their escapades, and when, through sheer fecklessness, they sink into hopeless debt, he sinks with them, into bankruptcy and then imprisonment. Moshe is a decent bourgeois, still somewhat attached to the old pieties but increasingly absorbed in the pursuit of gain.

Set off against Moshe is his brother, Luzi, "a man of interior disturbances," an imperious and aristocratic searcher for spiritual transcendence who becomes the local head of an extremist Hasidic sect, one that follows the call to ecstasy, contemplation, and otherworldliness of Nakhman of Bratslav, a great Hasidic teacher. Luzi's house becomes "a gathering point to which young people, whispering stealthily, came." I find myself wondering whether Der Nister's description of this religious sect is meant, however faintly, to invoke another sect, the kind that a few decades later would draw young people, "whispering stealthily," to the Luzis of Marxism. And there's the further note, gently struck by Der Nister, that in this sect of fundamentalist pietism there may be echoes of the false messianism of Sabbatai Zevi, which two centuries earlier had created havoc among European Jews.

Surrounding the Mashber brothers are the toughs and thugs, "enforcers" and arm-breakers, at the base of Jewish life, shown here sharply etched in their heaving brawn and mindless loyalty to rabbinic authority. These figures lend the novel a grittiness of texture that helps save it from sentimentalism, a besetting weakness of Yiddish fiction.

One other character demands notice, a surly and enigmatic fellow named Sruli, at odds with every segment of the Jewish community yet also serving as a connective link between the segments. Sruli is the most interesting kind of fictional character, indisputably "there" but never fully accessible to our rational understanding. Sometimes he does good deeds, sometimes he sinks into moral degradation, and at the end, a self-appointed Sancho Panza, he joins Luzi on a journey of spiritual wandering. One follows this Sruli with puzzled fascination, and as far as I can make out, he represents the current of anarchic energy coursing through a community too long pent up by repressive rituals.

So, if we wish, we can certainly read with pleasure and absorption, contenting ourselves with the familiar patterns of the family chronicle and even concluding, with the inexpensive piety of the worldly, that Moshe Mashber's grubby materialism is trumped by Luzi's elevated spirituality. But it will not do: Der Nister is too serious, perhaps too sly, for this sort of stock response. When Moshe, on the edge of disaster, asks Luzi to help save his firm, Luzi turns coldly away, declaring a superior disdain for "mere" material concerns. Quester of spirit Luzi may be, but his brother's keeper he is not.

Something of the keenest literary interest is happening here: a mature writer who is not by nature or training a realistic novelist is writing a realistic novel, yet as it proceeds, the book turns and twists into something else, as if the writer's deeper, "better" nature cannot fully be suppressed. The book breaks into a number of panels of representation: the clashes between the brothers Mashber, the journeys of Sruli into the town's lower depths, the frenetic rituals of the Hasidic sect. There occurs a tensing of rhythms, with Der Nister's calm giving way to prose that approaches the vibrations of expressionism and scenes that take on a grotesque cast. Especially vivid are those scenes devoted to Luzi's sect (with the stately Luzi dancing himself into abandonment, as if he were "a winged creature waking at sunrise who, in sheer joy …, flung himself off into space").

Der Nister's struggle with the novel as a form has a certain similarity to Boris Pasternak's struggle in Doctor Zhivago. Gifted writers inclined by training and temperament to nonrealistic genres can find themselves driven by historical pressures to undertake straight realism. The risks are large, and surely, as they enter the treacherous precincts of the novel, they know it. Neither Pasternak nor Der Nister quite mastered the art of narrative movement, that blessing of craft by which a novelist creates the illusion that depicted events are progressing through time. These writers are masters of the "still," the grotesque episode and lyrical moment; yet the paradox of their creativity is that it's precisely through their "inexpertness" with the novel that, in Doctor Zhivago and The Family Mashber, they best realize their talents.

What, finally, can one say about the implied significance, the thematic intentions, of Der Nister's book? Nothing with any certainty, for we don't have the third volume, which might bring everything into a coherent scheme of symbolism. But as I read the book, it does bear the marks of the historical moment in which it was written. Listening to this writer from a lost time, a wretched place, I hear a weary skepticism about all claims to a unified grasp of the world, all modes of moral or ideological single-mindedness.

The Mashber brothers go their separate ways, and no doubt there's something to be said for each of them: the decency of ordinary aims, the exaltation of spiritual quest. But each also has major flaws: the moral carelessness of the worldly, the zealot's ruthlessness in imposing joy. And there seems no way of blending or linking these two ways of life. The disunities of our age are beyond repair, and they cannot be removed by either will or program. Or so I tentatively conclude, as one Mashber brother is lowered into the earth and the other grasps for ways to rise above it.