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The inclusion of two pieces of non-fiction, notably Theodor Her- zl’s 1896 “The Jewish Question,” an essay-length excerpt of the beginning of The Jewish State , struck me at first as an odd choice. Anyone in Jewish Studies will probably have already en- countered this text. And anyone who happens to have picked up a book of anti-antisemitic fables will be wonder- ing why a polemic is in the mix. But by the time I got to it, I saw that it was a clever wink of a choice in light of all the literal fairy tales that precede it. For if you didn’t know that the state of Israel existed, if you real- ly were reading all these materials in a context-free space-and-time vacu- um, you would naturally assume that it was yet another galaxy-brained mus- ing by a Central European Jew. Indeed, “If you will it, it is no fairy tale,” on the title page of Herzl’s classic Zionist novel, Old-New Land (Altneuland) , is easily the most famous Zionist liter- ary quotation. Only the section head- ing word “Essays” announces that this of antisemitism. The Jews in these stories were not all-powerful, far from it. But antisemites saw them as a menace. The anthology helps illustrate continuities within the history
by a Yemenite Jew to Rachel Seri,” adds chronological, geographic, and gender diversity, with Seri one of two women presented in the book as authors of the stories. But I’m not sure what bringing in the postwar Mizrachi experience in such a limited manner adds to a proj- ect very much about something else. It feels out of place, and invites questions about what wasn’t included: Why not Ethiopian Jews? Why not short fiction from 2011? Precisely because there’s no monolithic thing, no such thing as the Jewish experience, parameters help spell out what a project is and isn’t covering. Including 1870 and 1930, En- gland and Russia, is already quite a lot. The second such concern pertains to the other female author, or maybe- author, Helena Frank, to whom Zipes attributes the book’s epigraph: “Jews will be Jews while the world lasts, and they will become, through suffering, better Jews with more Jewish hearts.” This is taken from Frank’s entry in the anthology, the 1912 story “The Clever Rabbi.” In the introduction, Zipes lists Frank among the anthol- ogy’s “less well-known writers.” But her bio in the book describes her as “a British translator [who] was not Jew- ish,” which got me curious about this fascinating-sounding woman I had never heard of. I looked her up and soon enough found (via Project Guten- berg) an edition of Yiddish Tales , one of her books of translation mentioned in that bio. There, she is listed as the translator of an author-unknown Yid- dish story, “The Clever Rabbi.” Why does any of this matter? It’s not that I object to crediting transla- tors, or to non-Jews translating from Yiddish. Rather, it’s that Frank is pre- sented as this obscure Jewish woman author—bearing the same surname as perhaps the best-known female Jew- ish author of all time — finally getting her due.
is the realm of non-fiction. Coming on the heels of the mythic creatures and improbable coincidences of the short stories that precede it, Herzl’s depiction of a Jewish state in the land of Israel seems equally bonkers. Yet Israel exists. With Herzl out of the way, the Amer- ican Jewish scholar Leo W. Schwarz’s essay,“The Essence of Survival,” a con- temporary-seeming-for-1935 musing on post-emancipation Jewish history, brings Never-Ending Tales to its conclu- sion. It’s a thought-provoking analysis of Jewish modernity, but has the air of a top-notch lecture in a survey course. It functions mainly as a way of avoid- ing the charged historical personage of Theodor Herzl from having the last word. A book ending with Herzl might seem to be presenting Zionism as the end point of Jewish history. And since a Jewish state did not wind up demol- ishing antisemitism, perhaps it seemed correct to wrap up the anthology on a more ambivalent, detached note. De- tached, that is, because Schwarz was a scholar, but also because he was Ameri- can, a lucky thing for a Jew to be in 1935. But ending with Herzl would have been the more provocative (in a good sense) way to go. It was my first time reading Herzl since the events of Octo- ber 7, 2023. First, too, of course, since the Gaza war, and Israel’s unprece- dented ostracization. What struck me now was how thoroughly Herzl was writing from within his own context, that of a Europe unwilling to fully ac- cept its own Jewish population. His naïveté regarding how the local Arab population would come to regard a Jewish state in Palestine is as strik- ing as the clear-eyed precision with which he described the predicament of his own people, which would only get more dire. (Herzl died in 1904.) It’s a strange experience, reading some- one at once so right and so wrong,
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