The Story of The Lost Shtetl

 

Try to figure out: a shtetl called Kreskol tucked in the middle of the forest, somewhere in Poland, a ´happy peaceful town´ protected against all the terrible catastrophies and events of the last century. There were no memories of Shoah, and not the post-war anti-Semitism, the ardent communists did not tried to change the sould of its inhabitants and afterwards accuse them for being anti-nationals either. It´s only a absurd occurence which has to do with some unexpected unhappy ending of a marriage that will take the shtetl out of its a-historicity.

Wait, wait, wait....but such an event and therefore  is practically impossible. Let´s say that living without indoor plumbing for such an impressive amount of time it is real, but not connecting with the outside world for so many decades and still surviving it´s a logical unlikelihood. It´s what an academic, later in the story of The Lost Shtetl, the debut of Max Gross, will haughty assess at a scholarly conference, echoing my unbeliver´ mind of someone who tried to kill the story - any fiction story actually - with cold reasonable arguments. This academic echoed my own mind at the very beginning of the book, when I was trying to figure out the pace of the novel and maybe get in sync with its story. After all, they may need to get from somewhere those materials to process thoaw sheep skin for the handwritten notes, isn´t it?

Being Jewish means at a very great extent being a storyteller as telling stories - some of them happy, many sad though - and I am happy to discover lately a couple of good (and very good) Jewish novels that confirm those skills while using the historical format of the old maizes in a modern, secular context. 

I had access to The Lost Shtetl in audio format, narrated by Steven Jay Cohen, which made the literary experience even more interesting as it requested an additional focus and made the dialogues between the many characters even more lively and real in their world created for them by the author. 

It is a woman, Pesha - ´a woman of peculiar appetites´ - that will take over the veil over 100 years of a-history in Kreskol, but in fact every chapter can be read as a story in itself. And how else is history made if not of many disparate stories of people, some but not all of them intertwined. As in the case of any good story, there is love, greed, hope, friendship and a bit of suspense. Kreskol is like a portal to another world which - I am very relieved to inform my readers - is not at all a perfect, idyllic world, a projection of a superficial assumption about how Jewish life used to be in a shtetl, a replication of a simplified anti-historical reality. 

The writing is so fresh and the story is taking so many unexpected, often hilarious turns, that I hardly want it to finish. It´s the magic that a good story can always achieve, including by taking even the more skeptical reader out of his/her average predictable and logically understandable world with a promise of pure adventure. Most probably I can spare some time to listen to the book once again.

As for the ending, is one of the best I´ve read in a very long time...but I will not let my fingers share anything about it.

A short note on the cover which is both ironic and mysterious in its simplicity. 

Something is going on lately in the world of Jewish literature and it looks like there are many good good books out lately with a very intelligent creative touch.

Rating: 5 stars