The Great Depression

By BEZALEL STERN

TALES OF THE TEN LOST TRIBES
By Tamar Yellin
200 pages. The Toby Press. $22.95

Zach Braff, the actor who wrote and directed Garden State, has his film’s main character, Andrew Largeman, say this about the loss of home: “It just sort of happens one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist.” This, in short, is the theme of Tamar Yellin’s book of interconnected stories, Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes. The book, to be blunt, is a thing of beauty. Nearly all of the novel’s sentences are crisp and vibrant. Each phrase, each word feels as if it were placed with the utmost attention and care. And yet, if not for my contractual obligation to write this review, I would almost certainly not have finished reading it.

This is because Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes is not only a beautiful book; it is also an incredibly and unremittingly depressing one. After the first story, admittedly bleak but also beautiful, I felt as if I had found the next great author. After the second, I was ready for a little sunshine. By the 10th, I felt as though my capacity for joy had been somehow diminished. This is not to say that the book is a bad one. In fact, Yellin’s book is, in a sense, a masterpiece of depression, of loss, of the endless search for home. It is just that that search, if enlightening, is not in any sense pleasurable, especially when one considers that home may no longer exist.

In all of the novel's 10 chapters—each named after one of the fabled ten lost tribes, who, in the Bible, were dispersed and lost during the first temple period—the narrator, nameless, sexless, but still very, painfully, real, interacts with another lost soul. Each of these individuals, like the narrator him or her self, has lost something, real or imaginary. And each tries to get that thing back. That they fail, all of them (narrator included) should not be much of a surprise. The 10 tribes remain lost, even now, with the whole world discovered, don’t they? That is, they no longer exist. There is no hope of finding them. And just like the hopelessness of the 10 lost tribes, the characters in this book, all of them, every single one, are hopeless.

The narrator begins this story a child, who is beguiled by his or her uncle’s many talismans. The uncle, who claims to be a world traveler only happy when he is on the road, bargains with his young relative to trade the each of the talismans for a series of increasingly valuable possessions. Finally, the narrator achieves his or her wish of the most cherished talisman of all—a lemur’s foot. All the narrator trades in return for it is the narrator’s mother's wedding ring. “Poor kid,” the uncle says after the bargain. “Looks like you’re going to take after your worthless uncle.”

The uncle, of course, is right. The next nine chapters detail the narrator’s descent into ever more states of decrepitude, traveling from what seems to be England (precious little in this book is defined) to the East, then to the West, then to the South. Terms that mean nothing, of course, because when you don’t know where you’re going, each and every direction is interchangeable. In his or her quest, the narrator meets and interacts with all sorts of people—a girl who is so lost she is invisible; a boy-prince who is either a prophet or insane; a fastidious novelist whose final, sole attempt at a finished work is an abysmal failure—people who are so lost that they make the narrator, whose wanderlust never slackens, look almost sane.

But the narrator is not sane, the narrator is obsessed with finding that invisible and irretrievable home that all of us have lost and no one can regain, and the reader must understand this if he or she wishes to cope with the book’s painfully beautiful (and, let us be honest, altogether painful) prose. We understand, you want to scream at Yellin, after scores of pages of this stuff, we are lost, we cannot go home. But do we have to harp on it again and again?

To which the inner Yellin inside of us (or inside of me, anyway) responds: Yes. Yes we do. Because if we do not remember we are lost how can we ever be found?

She has a point.

Tamar Yellin is not, of course, the first writer, or the first Jewish writer, to make a novel out of the simple point of loneliness and loss and the absence of home. Her most obvious progenitor, and the writer to whom she owes the most obvious debt, is, of course, Franz Kafka (Yellin’s first book of short stories is entitled Kafka in Bronteland). And, like Kafka’s, her stories can be unremittingly bleak. But they are also, in a sense, necessary. In novels like The Trial and The Castle, Kafka showed that intense loneliness, intense loss of identity and lack of a home to return to that appear in Yellin’s tales. In Kafka’s stories, as in Yellin’s novel, the nameless narrators have no idea how they have gotten to where they are, and how they will ever escape their predicament. In all three works, in fact, there is ultimately no escape. Both Kafka’s novels are cut off abruptly, and Yellin’s work closes with her narrator in the midst of a deep jungle, alone and lost, becoming the manifestation of the lost tribes that obsess her novel.

Zach Braff’s vision is not so dire. Continuing his monologue about the loss of home, Largeman, Garden State’s hero, exclaims, “I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.” And that’s the problem, I guess, as well as the solution. Imaginary places can sustain you, or they can destroy you. Sometimes, they can do both.