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the end provides short biographies of the authors and editors whose work appears, and there is a modest array of footnotes, but the background infor- mation is limited. If the book is used in an educational context with a teacher filling in the blanks (it’s published by an academic press), this is not a prob- lem. But for a reader picking up the book outside that setting, the absence of context has the effect of gesturing at a unified Jewish past. You might be in Poland or England, in the eighteenth or twentieth century, given the range of where stories were either written or set. It’s a portrait of a civilization at a crossroads. What sort of portrait do we get? One in which, notably, the lure of the outside world always coexists with its dangers. Several of the stories touch on interfaith romance, with central or side characters converting for the purpose of marriage. This may seem shock- ingly modern for that time— or not, depending on one’s familiarity with the plot of The Fiddler on the Roof (based on stories by Sholem Aleichem set in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russia), in which one of Tevye’s daugh- ters marries out. S. Ansky’s “The Pentinent” is about a Jewish man who abandons his Jewish wife and child, takes up with (and big- amously marries) a Christian woman, only to have end-of-life regrets about abandoning the Jewish people. (As a Jew, I’m perhaps meant to be moved by this, but I am wondering why he expressed no remorse at ditching his family, or rather, why the story doesn’t concern itself with that aspect of his trajectory.) Along similar lines, Dovid Bergelson’s “The Convert” tells of an unpleasant Jewish woman who be- comes a Christian to wed and henpeck the man she loves, who happens to be of that faith. Hugo Bettauer’s 1922
wildly different entities, what was to be made of the fact that they sometimes coupled off and had kids? For so many reasons, intermarriage works as a lens for understanding how Jews and non- Jews understood the boundaries of Jewishness. AS A COURSE READER, Never-Ending Tales would be fantastic. As a stand- alone book for someone interested in Jewish fiction or folklore, however, it might have benefitted from a narrow- er focus, either thematic (free idea: intermarriage!) or in terms of the num- ber of stories included. There is no shortage of worthy material. The two operation stories at the start are crucial, and The City Without Jews is a piece I’d never heard of and now cannot stop thinking about. It’s both intensely anti- antisemitic, defending Jews’ presence in Vienna, and at times so pro-Jewish it veers into promoting antisemitic stereotypes. Jews, in the story, are the people who keep cultural institutions and luxury shops in business. A mixed honour. Paul Schlesinger’s “The En- emies” (ca. 1920), about two Jewish soldiers, one French and one Ger- man, dying side by side during the First World War, has no shortage of contemporary relevance, as well as an epic punchline. There were other stories that, while worthy, seemed less distinct. I—someone who has unusually high stamina for this sort of thing — got bogged down in the stories of rabbis and golems, which started to blend to- gether. In the aggregate they do, how- ever, evoke the pogrom era, and how it felt for Jews to live as prey. There are a couple of moments in the book that come across as well- intended inclusivity efforts that, each for their own reasons, don’t quite work. First, the inclusion of a “ca. 1950– 1960” story about a sorcerer, as “Told
NEVER-ENDING TALES: STORIES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF JEWISH LITERATURE Edited by Jack Zipes Princeton University Press December 2
The City Without Jews , a short satirical novel about Vienna expelling its Jews and then experiencing expeller’s re- morse, includes an ongoing romance between a young Christian woman and a now-exiled Jewish artist, who poses as a Christian Frenchman to return to Vienna and be with her. The unifying element in this collection of short stories is thus an intermarriage plot. There is also an eerily later-twentieth-century- seeming passage about how the gentile women of Vienna had outright preferred Jewish men for their sobri- ety and talents in the bedroom. You could be in a Philip Roth novel or a Woody Allen movie or a Seinfeld epi- sode. Or more recent still: the hit Net- flix series Nobody Wants This , about a “shiksa” who falls in love with a rabbi, launched in 2024 but exists in the same symbolic universe. Intermarriage was always at the core of the so-called Jewish question, and also a challenge to essentialism. If Jew and gentile were meant to be these
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