"White Challah" by Lamed Shapiro (1919, translated by Norbert Guterman)

The short stories of Lamed Shapiro (see my prior posts on his work for background information) are among the most powerful I have ever read.  They provide a vivid, at times horrifying look at the hatred and mindless cruelty with which Jewish people were treated in the Ukraine in the first decades of the 20th century.  Horrible vicious pathological anti-Jewish tendencies in the European psyche hardly originated with the Nazis.  Shapiro's stories about the pogroms of Russia are terribly violent, deeply felt works.   If I taught a course on the short story I would assign his most famous story "The Cross" as part of the required readings.  I urge all those who dismiss the short story as "trivial" to read his stories.  

"The White Challah", named for a traditional served on religious holidays bread of Eastern European Jews, is told from the point of a young man drafted to fight in an army in Russia.  Maybe it was the army of the Czar, maybe the communists.  He does not seem to really know.  To him all of the troubles of Russia, the only world he knows, are caused by the Jews.  He repeats over and over that the Jews deserve any cruelty done to them because they sold Christ.   He repeats this over and over.

Conditions in the army are terrible.  He endures trench warfare, sadistic officers, dehumanizing violence, near starvation and through it out he and almost all his fellow soldiers blame the Jews.

Shapiro does as good a job of showing the horrors of war from the point of view of the foot soldier as any author I have read.  Anyone who sees glory in wars needs to read this story.  There is so much in this story.  In one incredible scene, the starving soldier breaks into the house of a Yiddish family.  He demands food, but he cannot speak their language.  He sees a loaf of white challah and he marvels at its wonderful taste.  The encounter ends in an act of unspeakable cruelty in which we see how the war had transformed a young country boy into a vicious animal.  Under the surface, we see how the rulers of the culture use Jews as a way to hide their own greed and failures and focus the hatred of their citizens away from them.