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idea to juxtapose an antisemitic 1893 short story (Oskar Panizza’s “The Oper- ated Jew”) with a Jewish author’s 1922 satirical retort (Salomo Friedlaender, “The Operated Goy”). The first is about a Jewish man — effectively an anti- Jewish caricature—who gets himself cosmetically turned into a German gen- tile, culminating in a wedding scene with a Christian bride, whereupon the groom reverts to his natural state. The second has a German gentile surgical- ly Judaizing himself in order to snag a beautiful Jewess. (There are countless beautiful Jewess trope stories that have been written over the years, courtesy of both Jewish and gentile authors. This is the only one, to my knowledge, in which Sigmund Freud himself makes a cameo.) “The Operated Goy,” unlike its in- spiration, ends with the operation tak- ing hold: “Now Mr. and Mrs. Moishe Kosher are living today as committed Zionists in a country villa near Jeru- salem.” And the reason I know this is that Never-Ending Tales begins with a reprint of those two stories in trans- lation. The purpose of the book is twofold: to put together a larger collection of texts in the same vein as Friedlaender’s, and to do so in 2025. Every history book is about both the time of its focus and that of its writing, and this, though not a history book in the disciplinary sense, is no exception. The anthology’s focus — the “gold- en age” in question — mainly spans the 1870s to the 1930s in Central and Eastern Europe, with occasional ap- pearances of England and the United States. The chronology and geography thus go from the era of pogroms to the rise of Nazism. It’s possible to argue, as this book does, that this stretch con- stitutes the peak period of Jewish lit- erature (Marcel Proust was active at the time), but it’s an unusual interpre- tation. It’s certainly a bold assertion when one considers the familiar canon
of postwar English-language authors like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, and Mordecai Richler. It’s not that big-name writers are absent from the era Zipes is interested in: Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz are in the mix. But this feels more like a claim about the sociopolitical importance of the stories themselves than a dispas- sionate assessment of their merits. And that’s fine. As a matter of strict critical assessment, maybe “golden age” is a bit strong, but those years were crucial for the emergence of Jewish modernity. Questions about what it meant to be Jewish — ques- tions that would have made no sense to ask in previous eras — emerged, were debated within the community and beyond, and swiftly took on life-or- death urgency. While these matters got debated in the political sphere, in governments and newspapers, they were also the subtext to much of Jew- ish fiction, which is where this anthol- ogy enters the picture. Zipes’s thesis: at times when simply living while Jewish was perilous, Jews told Jewish stories in order to assert their right to exist. It’s a book about storytelling as a communal survival strategy.
Zipes defines “the Jewish ques- tion” as follows: “After the so-called emancipation of Jews in Europe and elsewhere, should Jews be accepted as full citizens and allowed to live as they wish in different nation-states throughout the world, or should they be eliminated, or confined to moni- tored regions?” That’s a fine definition, but the most important thing about the Jewish question was that there was — and still is — a “Jewish ques- tion.” Consider who it is who would ask this, as a question. Jews do not ask “the Jewish question.” We contemplate and argue about what it means to be Jewish, but that is not what “the Jew- ish question” refers to. To speak of a “Jewish question” is to speak of a Jewish problem. It’s a vantage point that rejects just letting Jews be. Rather than allowing Jews to adhere strongly to Judaism or to mix fully with the mainstream population depending on any individual Jew’s inclinations, askers of the Jewish question view this as a matter to be determined externally. And some- times, historically, the answer to the Jewish question has been a simple no. At its extreme, maybe even its core, the Jewish question is about Jews’ humanity. Are Jews people like others, or humanoid infiltrators? Chances are that you, a reader of Scribe Quarterly , don’t need convincing. Chances are that you know nice Jews and not-so- nice Jews, the gamut. There’s a decent chance you’re Jewish yourself, and would find it inconceivable to doubt that Jews are human beings. But others have not always been so sure. NEVER-ENDING TALES puts the tales themselves front and centre—which is to say, it doesn’t include a lot of in- formation about the stories, the plac- es and times in which they are set, and their original publication. A section at
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