I wanted to follow up my recent note about Stefan Zweig and The Post-Office Girl with a few words about Der Nister’s The Family Mashber, written around the same time as Zweig’s novel. Leonard Wolf’s wonderful translation from the original Yiddish came out some twenty years ago, but the NYRB Classics edition marks the first time this unclassifiable masterpiece—a message in a bottle from another world, or even, you might at times feel tempted to say, the otherworld—has appeared in paperback.

Der Nister and Stefan Zweig were contemporaries, but the two writers’ worlds were worlds apart, though both were to be destroyed. Der Nister, which means “the hidden one,” was the pen name of Pinhas Kahanovitch, who grew up in the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, a city of nearly half-a-million people, most of them Jews, that in the nineteenth century was famous both as a center of Russian finance and of Jewish mysticism. Kabbalistic fables were among the sources of Der Nister’s early short stories, which came out during the 1910s and ‘20s, and which bear a certain resemblance to the paintings of his good friend Marc Chagall. (You might also describe these stories as magical realist, and it is striking that quite a number of turn-of-century works of literature from regions that, like García Márquez’s Colombia, existed at a remove from the major centers of cultural and political power have a magical realist air: the piquant stew of the mythic and the erotic and the satirical that is Gyula Krúdy’s Sunflower, from 1918, comes to mind.) In any case, though some of the mysticism of Der Nister’s early work also makes its way into The Family Mashber, here it is worked like an iridescent thread into the fabric of a fully realistic novel, one in which the conflicting communities of nineteenth-century Berdichev—Polish nobles, Russian imperial officials, and above all the tightly knit, but also deeply divided, Jewish community, its businessmen, rabbis, unbelievers, timeservers, loansharks, hitmen, and holy fools—all come spectacularly alive.

But The Family Mashber is not just a brilliant depiction of a vanished world. It is a major modern novel, and what makes it so is the utterly original voice that Der Nister gives to its narrator. It is a voice out of the oral tradition, that of a storyteller, pulling his stories together (pulling them out of a hat), stepping back to see how they look, disclaiming knowledge of some details, picking up almost arbitrarily on others, a voice that is variously confiding, contradictory, cajoling, insinuating, prickly, probing, and hypnotic. Sometimes the voice seems medieval—which is to say almost naively digressive—sometimes as supremely self-conscious as that of the highest of high modernists. It becomes, in any case, a living presence on the pages of the book, a vagrant solitary voice, endlessly inquisitive, consistently skeptical of received wisdom, but at the same time a collective one in which the town’s many different voices are blended as in a chorus. (This equivocal voice is in a sense incarnated in one of the most remarkable figures in The Family Mashber, Sruli Gol, an outcast, beggar, and scamp who is secretly fantastically rich and manages somehow to be completely in the know about everything that is going on in the world of the novel.) In the end, the voice of Der Nister’s narrator is the voice of someone making it up as he goes along, while also, like Scheherezade, holding destruction at bay, a voice for which storytelling becomes a way of forever delaying an inevitable end.

The first volume of The Family Mashber was published in the Soviet Union in 1939, and volumes one and two, which tell the story of the downfall of the businessman Moshe Mashber, came out in Yiddish in the United States in 1948. After the Second World War, Der Nister was arrested by the Soviet secret police and sent to the Gulag, where he died. He is supposed to have completed the third volume of The Family Mashber before his arrest. Perhaps, like The Post-Office Girl, it will someday come to light.

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

June is the month of Reading the World, a program in which publishers and independent booksellers team up to promote literature in translation throughout the country. NYRB is a happy participant in Reading the World, and this letter gives me a chance both to plug the whole endeavor and to write about Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl, one of two NYRB Reading the World selections. (The other is Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years.) Thanks to translator Joel Rotenberg, The Post-Office Girl is at last available in English. It’s no less striking than Beware of Pity and Chess Story, the two other Zweigs we’ve published, but it couldn’t be more different. It’s a book that should change how people think about Stefan Zweig.

The Post-Office Girl is fastpaced and hardboiled—as if Zweig, normally the most mannerly of writers, had fortified himself with some stiff shots of Dashiell Hammett. It’s the story of Christine, a nice girl from a poor provincial family who gets a taste of the good life only to have it snatched away; and of Ferdinand, an unemployed World War I veteran and ex-POW with whom she then links up. It’s a story, you could say, of two essentially respectable middle-class souls who wake up to find themselves miscast as outcasts, but what it’s really about, beyond economic and psychological collapse, is social death. Set during the period of devastating hyper-inflation that followed Austria’s defeat in 1918, Zweig’s novel depicts a country grotesquely divided between the rich and poor, so much so that it has effectively reverted to a state of nature. Christine and Ferdinand and Austria have been hollowed out (even if the country is still decked out in the pomp, circumstance, and pointless bureaucratic regulations of its bygone imperial heyday). They exist in a Hobbesian state of terminal desperation from which—the discovery arrives with mounting horror and excitement—the only hope of escape or redemption lies in violence.

Zweig wrote The Post-Office Girl in the early 1930s, working on it during years that Hitler rose to power and that saw Zweig, as a Jew, forced into exile. He appears to have considered the book finished, and yet he left it untitled and made no effort to publish. Why? My own hunch is that it was just too close to the bone. Zweig was famous all over the world as a writer of fiction and non-fiction and as a public intellectual. He was, you could say, the standard bearer for a certain liberal ideal of civilization, for a way of life that is worldly, compassionate, cultivated, tolerant, sensitive, self-aware, and reflexively touched with irony; the life of, as he considered himself, a man of taste and judgment. In the face of Nazism, such an ideal may have come to seem so much wishful thinking, and certainly Zweig, in exile, found his whole reason for living undercut. This, it seems to me, is the trauma that The Post-Office Girl registers. It accounts for the raw power and relentlessness of the book, for its difference from his other work, and also, I imagine, for Zweig’s uneasiness about it. He couldn’t put it or the reality it describes in perspective. I don’t think that it’s an accident that The Post-Office Girl, though finished in the mid-30s, finds Zweig rehearsing a scenario for suicide that clearly anticipates his and his wife’s deaths in Brazil in 1942.

Found among Zweig’s papers after his death, The Post-Office Girl did not appear in German until 1982, when it was published as Rausch der Verwandlung (a phrase taken from a crucial early episode in the novel, translatable as “the intoxication of metamorphosis”). Zweig’s letters refer to his “post-office girl book,” and we have chosen to follow this lead. An equally good title, also true to the book, it strikes me now, would have been “State of Shock.”

In two weeks I’ll be writing again—about Der Nister’s The Family Mashber, a masterpiece of Yiddish literature.

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics