The Nazarene     by Sholem Asch, Translated by M Samuel Original title: Der man fun Naceret Original language: Yiddish Published by Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: December 1996 Format: Paperback, 698 pages Dimensions: 2.04 x 8.24 x 5.55 in. ISBN: 0786703792 List Price: $15.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.13 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.17 Published by NY Pub. Date: 1939 Not available for ordering Published by Pocket Books Pub. Date: 1958 Not available for ordering Published by Carroll & Graf: NY Pub. Date: 1996 Not available for ordering

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Asch burst on to the literary scene in 1907 with his play God of Vengeance, a lesbian love story set in a brothel, with a sharp attack on the hypocrisy of religious piety, a play which today would probably provoke riots amongst the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn’s Crown Heights or Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim. It was immediately translated into German, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, English, Italian, Czech and Norwegian, and performed in most of them. In 1923 the play was banned in New York as obscene. Asch sought controversy, indeed he wished to be that very modern thing, the celebrity, about whom everybody would talk and who kept up public interest by constant surprise. Criticism spurred him on. When, for example his novel about Jesus — The Nazarene — provoked hysterical hostility amongst Jews on its publication in 1939 (significantly in the English translation alone) he went on to write not one, but two sequels. Asch was bitterly attacked for what has now become a literary and academic commonplace — the depiction of Jesus as a Jew.

Asch’s own upbringing was to provide the two staple motifs for his work. The youngest of ten children, his own brothers were fervently religious in an enclosed Jewish world, whilst his stepbrothers and his father moved in the outer world of the market place and the Polish peasantry. When his parents suspected that he was no longer religious he had to flee from the first to the second. This conflict became dramatised in the clash between earthly desire and heavenly purity, which so often figured in his work.

Though he strove for realism in his writing, and went to great pains to research the background of his subject, he could not stop himself writing in a romantic manner. Hence his writing veered between romantic nostalgia and gritty realism. The former predominated in The Shtetl (1904) where he distilled memories of his childhood, producing a portrait of small town Jewish life, that was unusually positive for that time. The negative view predominated however in Mottke the Thief (1916) where he was unstinting in his depiction of the brutality of the Warsaw Jewish criminal underworld. Still, he could not resist the happy ending. The villain is finally saved from damnation by the love of a pure woman. This kind of thing was probably what made him so eminently popular, carrying the reader along with him, even if the reader didn’t always stop to think too much. Sometimes his novels are reminiscent of Hollywood screenplays of the 1930s and 1940s.

Although Asch probably thought of himself in the literary tradition of Tolstoy or Thomas Mann, his style was closer to that of James Mitchener or Leon Uris with a touch of Boris Pasternak... Asch was very definitely however the first Yiddish writer to write a ’great European novel’. Ancestry (1909) was his first attempt and the culmination was Three Cities, the trilogy of Petersburg, Warsaw and Moscow, published between 1929 and 1931. Here, he looked at the Jewish nouveaux riches striving desperately for recognition in the anti-Semitic world of Tsarist Russia. He depicted poverty and unrest, despair and hope, with the people ground down by a corrupt and oppressive officialdom. Finally, he looked at the outcome of war and revolution, analysing the social forces unleashed in 1917 and the clash between personal integrity and party discipline in the Bolshevik regime. There are few works which give such a vivid portrait of the social history of the period and of the intellectual ferment, but whether it is effective as literature is another matter. It has been said that the unity of the novels is artificial, that the character who links the parts, Gregory Mirkin is weakly drawn, that the dramatic changes he undergoes in order to figure prominently in all three are not convincing. This, indeed, was an accusation frequently made against Asch, that his novels were too contrived, that they stretched the reader’s credibility, that monstrous figures all too easily and unexpectedly become saints. Mirkin starts off as the son of a rich industrialist. He flees from an arranged marriage, only to discover that his former fiancee has married his father. In anger, he retreats into the working classes of Jewish Warsaw and emerges as a leader of the proletariat. After the revolution, he falls foul of the Party in Moscow, escaping to the reborn Poland, with no power or resources, but with his soul intact.

If any Yiddish writer could be said to have made a great noise in the wider world, such was the case of Sholem Asch, that is until the later success of Isaac Bashevis Singer from the 1960s onwards. In that sense, Asch achieved what he wanted in his own lifetime. ’I am not a Jewish artist, I am a universal artist’ he declared and his non-Jewish readership was immeasurably larger than his Jewish one. Yet it was his fate to be much read in his lifetime, but neglected afterwards. Not such an unhappy one though, since he was at least able to benefit personally from his book royalties.

’The autumn nights in Poland are pitch-black. Sky and earth are wrapped in a close embrace within which broods the mystery of creation.

With the first glimmer of dawn the sky lifts from the earth and, receding upwards, leaves a fresh, untrodden layer of white frost on the fields and meadows. The earth lies silent. no animal is yet astir. Nobody as yet owns this earth, new-born under the ascending sky: like a foundling it lies outstretched with a bloom of dew upon it...

From beyond the fields comes a metallic clinking like the trickle of single water-drops from some invisible gutter; out of the gray half-light, the first milk-cans resound far and wide in the pure, clear emptiness and rouses the sleeping world.

When these have gone past, the gray half-light gives up other wagons; over the stone bridge appear high loads of cabbages and potatoes, carts packed with egg-boxes, with fowl-crates, with jars of plums, baskets of pears, casks of cranberries; all brought by Jews and peasants from the small towns and villages into the great city of Warsaw. The wet dew of the night-fields is still thick upon the wagons. >From the lofty bales of hay, from hollows in the straw, there peer fresh, round-cheeked country girls, peasant women with weather-beaten red faces under bright head-shawls, shivering Jews muffled to the ears, dripping peasants in steaming sheepskins.

Weary, with hanging heads, drops of sweat frozen on their flanks, the horses set their hoofs on the hard stones of the bridge.’ (p277 Warsaw in the trilogy Three Cities)