Sophia Shoulson in her introduction to this really marvelous story, characterized it as a perfect fable for 2020 when many feel a sense of dread, a fear of the future in a world out of control. Once again I see the great depth and breadth of the culture of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to America. This post is in observation of Jewish American Heritage Month. Arn Mayzl did not begin his literary work until he moved to America.
This story could easily be a fable from Kafka or Robert Walser. It Is about a polar bear trapped on an ice flow in surrounded by near blinding whiteness. She feels a desperate sense of isolation. She longs to escape but is terrified of the world beyond her isolation.
“ Everything else was endless, white and endless. A vicious dread would overcome the white bear, her blood boiling with a fervent desire to blast through the maelstrom and run far away. Through the blinding whiteness of the blizzard, through the mountains and along distant trails, far from her solitude, from her colorless melancholy, from the dead stillness, from her frozen kingdom of ice, and into another world.
And one day, on just such a stormy night of pandemonium, the white bear did not resist: she leapt up, unthinking, from her lonely ice floe and let herself run—chased, suddenly, by her fear and pain into the wide, wide world . .”
This is a very powerful work. Maybe it is how millions feel about their lives now.
“The White Bear” is the eponymous first story in Arn Mayzl’s 1927 anthology titled Der vayser ber un andere dertseylungen (The White Bear and Other Stories). Arn Mayzl, or Aaron Meisel, was born in the Minsk region of Belorussia in 1890. He immigrated to the United States in 1911, where he became a teacher for the Workmen’s Circle schools and, along with publishing several of his own books, contributed writing to numerous periodicals, including Morgn-frayhayt and Der hamer.
Sophia Shoulson is the 2019–2020 Richard S. Herman Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, where she has worked in bibliography for the past two years. Sophia graduated from Wesleyan University in 2018 and is an alumna of the Center’s 2017 Steiner Summer Yiddish Program. At Wesleyan, she double majored in German studies and Wesleyan’s interdisciplinary College of Letters, and she completed a senior thesis on the Yiddish folklore collected by Y. L. Cahan and Shmuel Lehman. Sophia discovered Yiddish by roundabout way of a Jewish day school education followed by her German studies and a semester abroad in Hamburg. She didn’t begin to study Yiddish formally until the summer of 2017, but has been making up for lost time ever since.
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