Stories Told on the Way to Night and Fog

By SANFORD PINSKER

THE NORTH OF GOD
By Steve Stern
108 pages. Melville House. $13.

According to “one ghoul of a rebbe,” the place dedicated to the manufacture of fear was located “to the north of God, where his jurisdiction no longer held sway.” Steve Stern knows such rebbes not only because his lively imagination invents them but also because he has incorporated them, and other Yiddishland types, into the very marrow of his bones. His previous fictions so blended anthropological expertise (Stern began his career as a folklorist) with a fabulist’s comic inventiveness that the critic Harold Bloom calls him a “throwback to the Yiddish sublime.”

Stern’s fingerprints smear and grace every page of The North of God, but because the novella pits the power of storytelling against the death-dealing of the Holocaust, the result is a work that raises the already high bar Stern’s work has set. His brand of magical realism is wonder, and it makes me continue to wonder, book after book, when he will get the wide readership he deserves.

The North of God begins with this wonderfully evocative sentence: “Before he became a dissolute wanderer and corrupter of children, Hershel Khevreman was a devout student of Talmud.” Destined to marry a rich merchant’s daughter—and thus to live as a pampered scholar whose every whim, whether for a book or for a fat whitefish, would be instantly satisfied—Hershel throws away his future to chase Salka, a spawn of the demon Lillith. Long trapped behind the mirror of the rebbe’s hall tree, Salka escapes and seduces Hershel during the moments before his marriage is to take place.

Hershel’s obsessive love turns Velvl Spfarb into the village storyteller. He, after all, is the only one who actually saw the eerie seduction and therefore, he is the only one who can rightfully embellish on Hershel’s growing legend. And what Velvl saw was this:

...how the paralyzed scholar had submitted to the woman’s toying with his ritual fringes, her unfastening of his suspender buttons, the stroking of his chest; how she’d hunched her shoulders to let the shift slither down her tawny length, pooling like fog at her feet; after which they’d admired each other in the glass.

My hunch is that I. B. Singer would have much enjoyed Stern’s portrait of a sedentary scholar seduced by a succubus because the juxtaposition of religion and sexuality was one of Singer’s abiding subjects. Moreover, Singer knew how to elbow imps and devils, demons and sprites, into the fabric of our humdrum quotidian world. Stern also shares this inclination as his storyteller-mouthpiece Vevl Spfarb puts it:

“In his youth,” said Vevl Spfarb, raising his voice to compete with the rattling of the cattle car and the caterwauling of its occupants, “The Talmud prodigy Hershel Kheverman fell in love with a lady demon. He chased her through a looking glass to Sitra Achra, the Other Side, where he lost her, and when he returned to this world, nothing was over the same for him again.”

When the Jews of his shtetl are rounded up and placed in box cars headed toward the extermination camps, Velvl “found himself developing a certain resistance.... As long as he continued to tell Hershel’s story... he [Velvl] was himself a sanctuary for the wandering scholar’s furtive soul.” His fantastical stories of Hershel the former scholar and would-be lover were ammunition against unspeakable evil and an object lesson in  man’s enduring humanity.

Stern’s ambition is a tall order, not only because he did not experience the Holocaust first hand but also because his fiction requires a delicate balancing of social realism and fabulist invention. Few Jewish-America writers can match his expertise and confidence regarding matters Yiddish, and even fewer can infuse a work with insider jokes, puns, and a wide range of allusions. The fact that Hershel, in Velvl’s words, “chased her [Salka] through a looking glass” reminds us of Alice in Wonderland, however much their respective worlds differ.

Stern knows how to give his characters appropriately Old World names--Menachem Mendl, Shloyme Aba, Mehitabel, and Sarah haZad—but also how to be playful about the enterprise. I am thinking, of course, about the last item, Sarah haZad, better known to us as Scheherazade, the indefatigable storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights. In Sir Richard F. Burton’s translation of Nights... he describes Scheherazade as one who “had perused books, annals, and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples, and instances of by gone men and things.”

Velvl is not such a personage but Steve Stern certainly is—and this is particularly true when Velvl teams up with with Elihu Hanover, “impesario and director of the Pishtipl Players Touring Company.” A ragtag bunch, the Pishtipl Players come armed with slapsticks and bits and-pieces of world theater. They can, for example, conflate the Purim story with tales about Russian nobility before the Revolution. Everything can, and does, get thrown into Vevl’s mix because what matters is story itself.

Fiction about the Holocaust must assiduously avoid the traps of sentimentality, trivialization, and melodrama if it hopes to be serious art. For all its playfulness and stylistic excess, The North of God is, at bottom, a profoundly understated work: we know, without being told directly, that Velvl is probably being carried to his death although Salka returns to insist that he go to America where “Yiddish theater, she had him to know, was all the rage.” What we do know is that The North of God ends with sentences as chilling as was the infectiousness of the novella’s first volley. Here is a snippet:

... she [Salka] leaned over the dead soldier... [and] removed the cold pistol from his hand, closed his lids with her fingers, and pressed a pellet of unleavened dough against his brow. This last was to plug up the hole in his head, lest some vagabond soul enter there to disturb his rest.

I was enormously moved by The North of God and glad that Melville House included the work in its estimable The Contemporary Art of the Novella series. Too often publishers show novellas the door, arguing that they are too long to be short stories and too short to be novels. The North of God is exhibit A in why such reasoning is terribly short sighted. To my mind, Steve Stern’s novella is destined to become a Jewish-American classic. It’s that good.