[Liptzin is an accomplished Russian-born American editor, translator, critic, and noted scholar of German and Yiddish literature. In the following excerpt, he offers a survey ofDer Nister's career, focusing particularly on The Family Mashber.]

The Yiddish-Hebrew pseudonym, Der Nister, which may be translated as the Hidden One or the Occult Person, is an apt characterization of the outstanding representative of Neo-romanticism among the Yiddish writers of the Ukraine.

Der Nister began in 1907 with prose poems, dream images, in which Jewish, Christian and Olympian supernatural creatures were intermingled. He continued in 1912 and 1918 with songs, odes, versified prayers, allegories of God and Satan, mystic visions that spanned heaven and earth and dissolved in nebulous melancholy, ballads which were meant to delight children but which also hinted at meanings beyond their grasp. Thus, the tree that resists the peasant's axe and is as reluctant to die as the horse pursued by the bear, the white goat that lulls the infant to sleep, the sprites that dwell in abandoned ruins, the gnome that bestows wealth, the cat that feeds its playmate the mouse, the rooster that is the sole companion and nurse of the sick grandmother—all have traits and feelings not unlike those of human beings and yet they are at the same time symbols of abstractions and qualities. What Marc Chagall sought to express in color, Der Nister attempted in verse and poetic prose.

As the translator into Yiddish of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales and as a student of cabalistic lore, Der Nister succeeded in combining European and Hebraic elements in his tales. He also felt strongly the influence of Rabbi Nachman Bratslaver, the most talented of the Hassidic weavers of stories. Forests alternate with deserts, enchanters and witches with angels, demons and Nazarites, bears of the north with lions of the South. Amidst the whirl of events that traverse earth and moon and starry constellations, the loneliness of the individual peers through as he roams far and wide in search of holiness and ultimate wisdom. Unhappy with his own age and powerless to change it, such a person attempts to break out of it. He wanders on and on beyond any specific time or clearly defined realm. Now and then he encounters a hermit or a graybeard who is even further removed from normal pleasures and mundane pursuits and therefore closer to the source of essential insight. They help him to overcome demonic temptations. They find for him a track through seemingly trackless wastes. They accompany him for a while through the darkest mazes of forests. They weave their tales into his tales.

Der Nister's reputation as a leading member of the Kiev Group was already well established when the Russian Revolution broke out. As a non-political writer, he felt ever more and more isolated amidst the contending ideological coteries and left for Berlin. There he published two volumes of Contemplations (Gedakht, 1922), stories that followed the model of Nachman Bratslaver. In one story, he made a beggar the savior of kings. In others, he introduced magic stones, a healing mirror, a wolf that travelled faster than the wind. Transported on the back of the wolf, the hero of the Bovo-Maisse could quickly reach the remote land where his betrothed, a paralyzed princess, was awaiting his coming to bring about her recovery from a baneful spell.

After returning to the Ukraine, Der Nister was silent for several years and, when he resumed publishing in 1929, his volume From My Treasures (Fun Meine Giter) betrayed a pessimism not evident earlier. The opening narrative was put in the mouth of a madman in a madhouse. This madman related his experiences in converting mud to gold until he became the supreme lord of the land and arrogant beyond all mortals. Then Der Nister sketched the downfall and degradation of this plutocrat, who, in his final extremity, after exhausting all other means of feeding ten hungry bears, had to offer them his own ten fingers and his heart to gnaw at. Beyond the apparent meaning of these changes of fortune, the reader senses the author's hints of intense anguish and spiritual distress but hints so deeply veiled that their true import still defies clarification. Perhaps such labyrinthean mystification was necessary if the romantic writer wished to remain true to his inner self and yet to survive at a time when anti-Romanticism and Socialist Realism were the prescribed slogans for literature.

A decade later, however, the pressure upon Der Nister was too great to be successfully resisted. In his major work Family Masbber, the first volume of which appeared in 1939, he adopted the realistic style of writing demanded of all Soviet novelists. However, he applied it not to contemporary life, but to an era which was already historic and to a social order of which only vestiges remained: Berdichev of the 1870's.

Caught between his sympathy for his tradition-rooted characters and the necessity of following the anti-religious Communist party line, he added an apologetic preface. In it, he explained that he deemed it artistically more desirable not to pronounce the doom of his characters in advance but rather to portray them proceeding slowly and inevitably to their historic destiny, the abyss. He wanted to let them unfold their glamorous traits no less than their ugly ones and then to show how the logic of their further inner development would drive them unalterably to decay and damnation. He promised that, together with the still uncompleted later volumes, his work would put the finishing touches to an old generation which was steeped in medievalism and would also trace the tragic beginning of a more enlightened way of life which would gradually ripen into revolutionary activities and sweep away the accumulated rot of centuries.

The city depicted by Der Nister developed in the form of three concentric circles. The innermost circle, the market district, was the heart of all business activities. The second circle embraced the residential area, in which were concentrated the religious and cultural activities of the Jewish community. The third circle, suburbia, was inhabited by the poorest of the poor, criminals, cranks, prostitutes, the subversive and revolutionary elements that would later topple the entire social edifice.

The Mashbers belong to the patricians of the city. Luzi, the oldest brother, faces a spiritual crisis when the Hassidic rabbi in whom he found sustenance and guidance passes away. Ultimately he discovers the genuineness he seeks; he joins the despised, poor, ardent Bratslaver Hassidim. Among them, he comes to understand and to appreciate the true humanity in the town's third circle.

Moshe Mashber, the second brother, puts his faith solely in business and lives primarily in order to accumulate wealth. By experiencing a business crisis and a decline of fortune, he is humbled in his pride and is saved from despair by a saintly pseudo-beggar, a Lamedvovnik

Alter Mashber, the youngest brother, has to overcome pain and illness. When his clouded mind recovers, he accepts the equality of all human beings and is happy to marry the maid of the Mashber household. The stratified social structure, as exemplified by this well-to-do family, begins to show fissures and its ultimate collapse can be predicted.

This collapse occurs in the second volume, which was published in 1948 in the United States but not in Russia: in that year all Yiddish publications ceased in the Soviet Union, not to be resumed until after Stalin's death. Moshe Mashber's wealth disintegrates, he is forced into bankruptcy, he is imprisoned for fraud, and on his release he dies a broken man. Meanwhile, Luzi Mashber continues his quiet acts of kindness and love in behalf of the despised and oppressed members of the Jewish community, as befits an adherent of Bratslav Hassidism. He is joined by Sruli, a saint in tatters, and by Michael Bukier, whose eternal questioning leads to excessive skepticism and, as a result, to unmerited persecution on the part of the town's religious fanatics. In these three characters, but especially in Luzi Mashber, the author depicts himself and his kind, silent, self-effacing approach.

Only once does Luzi break out in eloquence. Then he expresses his undying hope and unshakable faith in his Jewish people. His words spring from the heart of the author, who otherwise had to masquerade his feelings:

"Israel is beloved. Neither the pains of Galut nor his expulsion from his father's table stops him from feeling himself to be God's child, chosen to reign in the future. Let not the nations of the earth rejoice in the rich portion allotted to them now and let them not look down upon Israel, which is now black as are the tents of Kedar. Israel is indeed divided and left at the mercy of many swords which hang above his head and compel him to beg for life's sustenance of all the cruel murderers in this world. Let not the nations rejoice and mock Israel, who appears strange, disunited, an outcast stepchild among them. The curse upon Israel is only temporary, no matter how long it lasts. His lot, to be an unhappy beggar on accursed roads, will ultimately end. He will be the light and salvation predicted and promised by the Prophets. Yet even now and in all generations when catastrophes overwhelm Israel, saints arise who fathom the meaning of Israel's destiny, who accompany him on his thorny road with love and compassion, and who gladly receive the arrows meant for him. They and their followers are fortunate enough to feel Israel's sublime pain, the pain of the insulted, injured and tortured heart of the world. Israel is God's beloved, an example to mankind of the fortitude and dignity with which one bears suffering even when the knife is at one's throat. Beloved is Israel, who even in darkest moments still retains a shimmer of hope in salvation, salvation not alone for himself but for all mankind, for whom he is the blessed victim and also herald of the Messianic promise of a time when all tears will be wiped away from all faces. Yes, a time will come when to the Holy Mountain there will troop, as to a wedding, sages and crowned lightbearing saints with the Anointed One in their midst and the whole world following them—man, woman and child, not only of the human species but also of beasts and cattle and birds, all of whom will be lifted up and ifiled with knowledge of that day of universal rejoicing, every sage with his admirers, every prophet with his followers, every saint with his disciples, everyone who guarded the Holy Flame amidst storms and prevented its extinction. My brothers, guard this Flame bequeathed to you, guard it until the Messianic era when all knees will bend before the Savior and all heads of all living creatures in which there is a living soul will ask His blessing. Guard the Flame, my brothers!"

Luzi's ardent words of hope and comfort were rudely interrupted by a stone hurled at him through a window. Even so was this valedictory of Der Nister, upon which he worked for more than a decade, rudely interrupted by the Soviet secret police who came to arrest him. His first words on that occasion are reported to have been: "Thank God, you came at last. I have waited for you so long." Thereafter silence engulfed him and he died in prison on June 4, 1950.

Premonitions of his end filled the second volume of Der Nister's masterpiece, upon which he continued to work while one after another of his friends, colleagues and followers were vanishing from the public eye and terror stalked the survivors. The final chapters, therefore, overemphasized scenes of dying and bared the long hidden suffering of a tortured soul.

The author was expected to revile a people and a tradition which he loved so fervently in his heart of hearts and he had no way of knowing whether this love, concealed beneath an outer veneer of apparent dislike and locked up in not easily decipherable symbolic language, would ever penetrate to readers in later years or be intelligible to them. In the morass in which he was forced to move in his last years, he remained a hidden saint, the noblest personality among the Soviet Yiddish writers.