”The Invented Brother“ - A Short Story by Blume Lempel

“What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.”. Irem Kertész

Blume Lempel

Born 1907 in The Ukraine

Moved to Paris in 1929, to be near her brother who lived there.

1939- having married and had two children, her Family moved to New York State, out of concern over rising anti-Semiticism.  (Many in her extended Family died in The Holocaust as would she and her Family had they not left.) Lempel came to love Paris and was fluent in French, along with Russia, Yiddish and English.  Shortly after she left, her brother was killed by Germans as a resistance fighter.

1943- begins to publish with a Short Story, all her writings were in Yiddish.  In part this was her way of defying those who wanted the magnifcient Yiddish Cultural tradition destroyed.

In 1950 the Family locates permanently in Long Island.

1999 passes away.

The popular image of Yiddish fiction is that is that all  Yiddish literature is connected to some kind of shtetl schmaltz, to defeatism and an exile mentality manifested in the movie Fiddler on the Roof.  This lingering prejudice has made it hard for modernist writers like Blume Lempel to gain an audience.  Blume Lempel’s work is very far from this vision.  The Holocaust changed everything for Yiddish writers and readers of their work.  Much of post World War Two Yiddish Literature is an attempt by survivors, mostly writing in New York City, Toronto, or Montréal to deal with this.  Blume Lempel was one of the Last real writers of Yiddish literature.  My impression from four years reading now is that most seriously interested in Yiddish literature, largely highly educated, do so in pursuit of greater knowledge of their heritage.  For this The Reading Life Honors them.  I take as my heritage, i understand the arrogance of this, all literature of the world.  To me the Holocaust was aimed at destroying all literature and insuring there would be no more to disturb those blissful in their ignorance and hatred of all those not just like them.  That is the heritage i seek to do what little i can to preserve.  It is very much Under assult now.

Today’s story “The Invented Brother” is told my a young woman, we dont know where exactly it is set only after The Holocaust.  Based on her other work, probably in the New York City area.

I see it as the narrator reconstructing elements of her memory to tell a Holocaust story about what seems to be the experiences of a brother she imagined to help her make sense of things. They are attacked in a Pogram, she is shocked to see her neighbors turn against her and her brother.  Her brother spends the war hiding in bakery attic by day and working by night in the shop.  I don’t know how much of this we are to see as real life history and how much is a story to give pattern the horror of the Holocaust.

How the Holocaust shaped Literature is a huge very important question.  My quick answer is more than you and I know.

This story was published in a collection of her work, Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories, named for one of the stories, translated and introduced by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Taub, assembled from two Yiddish language collections published by Lempel.  In my prior posts on Lempel there are links  to two very good lectures by the translators. I thank them for bringing Lempel to the Yiddish lacking literary world.

Mel u