My post on “The Ghetto Dog” by Isaiah Spiegel includes a link to a marvelous reading of the story by Laureen Becall
Prussia, the ruler of Germany, was always an enemy of the intellect, of books, of the Book of Books—that is, the Bible—of Jews and Christians, of humanism and Europe. Hitler’s Third Reich is only so alarming to the rest of Europe because it sets itself to put into action what was always the Prussian project anyway: to burn the books, to murder the Jews, and to revise Christianity." Joseph Roth, 1933"
There is, for me at least, a huge elephant in the room when one talks of the very real glories of German Culture, from Goethe, the great novels and music and Ulm Cathedral. That elephant is the Holocaust. Some will say every culture has a dark side and try to rationalise things. Others, as does Joseph Roth and I, see it as more than that. There are strange connections in history. Not long ago I read a very scholarly biography of the German Emperor Frederick the Great, worshiped by the Nazis for his military bravado. The main thesis of the book was that Frederick became a warrior king to prove his father, who rightly saw that Frederick was a homosexual, was wrong. From this the Prussian ethic developed and the Nazis state was derivative from Frederick’s trying to show his father he was not gay.
. Jews were treated as sexual deviants and homosexuality was criminal, though of course many Nazis were homosexuals. Hitler raved about the decadence of the Weimar Republic.
Yiddish literature derives from a thousand year old culture based in Eastern Europe and Russia. No culture that I’m familiar with cherished the Reading Life more. The Holocaust was in part a war on those who loved books, knowledge and Reading. Germans tried very hard to destroy this culture, it was not an aberation. Joseph Roth is right.
Of the over three thousand works about which I have posted upon on The Reading Life none are more emotionally powerful than “The Ghetto Dog” by Isaiah Spiegel. Set in the Łódź Ghetto in Poland (second in size to Warsaw), the story is a great Masterpiece. Seeking to read more by Spiegel, i recently acquired a second hand copy of his collection of Short Stories, Ghetto Kingdom : Tales of The Lodz Ghetto. (Translated from the Yiddish by David and Barbara Hirsch, with an introduction by David Hirsch, Northwestern University Press, 1998. As of today a new copy on Amazon is $14.44, used $1.94. I admit I was surprised “Ghetto Dog” was not in the collection.)
As “Earth” opens a stream of peasants is in a rush out of Lodz. The couple the story centers on are told they are fleeing just arrived Germans. The older childless couple does not want to leave the home they have occupied for years, plus they have cows and dogs they Love. The man, a Jew, ventures into town. Young German soldiers force him to dance, stabbing his feet with bayonets.
The ending is tragic.
From The Publisher.
Ghetto Kingdom
Tales of the Lodz Ghetto
ISAIAH SPIEGEL
Isaiah Spiegel was an inmate of the Lodz Ghetto from its inception in 1940 until its liquidation in 1944. While there, he wrote short stories depicting Jewish life in the ghetto and managed to hide them before he was deported to Auschwitz. After being freed, he returned to Lodz to retrieve and publish his stories.
The stories examine the relationship between inmates and their families, their friends, their Christian former neighbors, the German soldiers, and, ultimately, the world of hopelessness and desperation that surrounded them. In using his creative powers to transform the suffering and death of his people into stories that preserve their memory, Spiegel succeeds in affirming the humanity and dignity the Germans were so intent on destroying.
About the Author
Isaiah Spiegel was born in the industrial city of Lódz in 1906. After surviving Auschwitz, he immigrated to Israel, where he continued to write stories, novels, poems, and essays.
David H. Hirsch, Professor Emeritus of English and American literature and Judaic studies at Brown University, has translated a variety of Yiddish and Polish texts with Roslyn Hirsch, who escaped the ghetto with her mother in 1943 and remained in hiding until liberation in 1945. She immigrated to the United States in 1949 and is currently working on several translations of Holocaust writers.
Mel u
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