About this title: First time in Paperback "The Family Mashber" is a protean work: a tale of a divided family and divided souls, a panoramic picture of an Eastern European town, a social satire, a kabbalistic allegory, an innovative fusion of modernist art and traditional storytelling, a tale of weird humor and mounting tragic power, embellished with a host of uncanny and fantastical figures drawn from daily life and the depths of the unconscious. Above all, the book is an account of a world in crisis (in Hebrew, mashber means crisis), torn between the competing claims of family, community, business, ...
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Binding: Paperback
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Date Published: 2008-05-20
ISBN-13:9781590172797ISBN:1590172795
Description: New. Book is new, never used! Book will be packaged with care for a safe journey! *** 13 Years of online selling experience! ! **** Customer satisfaction guaranteed! read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Date Published: 2008-05-20
ISBN-13:9781590172797ISBN:1590172795
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9781590172797. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Random House Inc
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9781590172797ISBN:1590172795
Description: New. First time in Paperback "The Family Mashber" is a protean work: a tale of a family divided a la "Brothers Karamazov, " a detailed and panoramic picture of an Eastern European town and its people, a social satire, a kabbalistic allegory, a brilliantly... read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Summit Books, Hardcover in dustjacket, 688pp, lge8vo, New York
Date Published: 1987
Description: A Novel. Translated from the Yiddish by Leonard Wolf. Very good in very good lightly marked dj, light rubbing to ends of spine & edges of covers, prelims & edges lightly foxed. protected in mylar jacket. read more
"Imagine a trilogy written in Yiddish in the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalinist Era, a trilogy whose final third disappeared with the author, Pinhas Kahanovich (1884-1950) being arrested and dying in a prison hospital. Imagine a saga of Dostoyevskian proportions, and also filled with Kabbalistic imagery, foretastes of magic realism, and Socialist Realism (both to placate the censors and to throw them off).
Kahanovich adopted Der Nister as his pen-name early in his career, a calque of Yiddish and Hebrew that translates as "the Hidden One."
Mashber means "crisis" in Hebrew, and in Kahanovich's novel it is the name of a well-to-do family in "N," a provincial Ukrainian town (probably modeled after his native Berdichev) circa 1870. The novel begins with the family's business affairs at their best but then takes a nasty turn until Moshe Mashber, the pater familias, is bankrupted and thrown into prison.
"N" is a town filled with rich Jews and poor (mostly poor), with Ukrainian peasants, Russian officials, and Polish nobility fallen on hard times.
The family's saga is told against a broad spectrum that made up Jewish society in the Ukraine 125 years ago, from the scholarly to the ignoramus, the virtuous to the scoundrel, the pious to the freethinker.
Put aside any romantic notions a la Fiddler on the Roof. (An aside: forty years ago my wife and their sister took their father to see the movie Fiddler on the Roof because they thought it might remind him of his childhood in the Ukraine at the beginning of the last century. Minutes after the movie began he walked out. He told me that the movie omitted the mud, the dirt, the stench, and the grinding poverty. Kahanovich missed none of it.)
Leonard Wolf (not to be confounded with Virginia's husband) has prepared an elegant and flowing translation of the original Yiddish. (I confess to having stolen glances at the original from time to time to see what the author had originally written.)
I now intend to go back and try my hand at the original, knowing full well in advance that I may get the denotation but miss a good deal of the connotation.
This English translation first appeared twenty years ago. The New York Review of Books merits thanks for having brought it back into print in its Classics series."
"When I worked with Steven on a Yiddish Lit class, this was the gem. Of all the writing on shtetl life that we discussed, this was, perhaps, the best. Der Nister adds a mystical touch to his religious characters as well as a harsh examination of desperate people in an unforgiving world."
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