On the Landing. Stories by Yenta Mash

Born in what was once called Bessarabia in Romania, before this territory was took over the Russia (Soviet Union), nowadays the territory of the Republic of Moldova, Yenta Mash wrote and told stories in Yiddish. Either in her native country or in Israel, where she lived in Haifa since the 1970s until her death in 2013, the life she is talking about is always 'on the landing'.  I've read the short stories in translation - by Ellen Cassidy who also excellently translated Blume Lempel - but was able to listen to her voice reading stories in Yiddish. It is a rare occurrence nowadays, as those who are reading and writing in the language of the shtetl are mostly people with a religious background. At the very specific time when Yenta Mash started to write, Yiddish was the language of the rebels Zionists who broke with the religious tradition to embrace the secular ideas. Those people were 'on the landing' too.

You rarely find anything about the life of the Jews in Bessarabia/Republic of Moldova nowadays, unless it is not about Avigdor Lieberman. As in the Romanian part of Moldova, the Jewish life in the villages and settlements in the area was thriving, with a network of religious and educational institutions, besides their everyday life as such. They were a presence that you hardly notice nowadays, with full Jewish villages that were completely destroyed during the times of the Soviet Union. 

This is the world that Yenta Mash unfolds in the front of the reader's eyes. The first part of the stories are dramatic and focused on the times when Jews were sent to Siberia, as happened to the author herself who was deported for seven years and condemned to forced work. It is a reality that it is not often mentioned in historical accounts about the life of Jews in the Soviet Union. Life in Siberia was a slow death where humanity was dismissed and people were reduced to their basic needs, seldom meet. Jews never ceased to be the eternal enemy and only the fact that they belonged together was a reason serious enough for NKVD to deport full villages to far away frozen North with slight chances if return. Hence, the scream of desperation expressed by the woman in Alone: 'God! Again she screams: what have You done? The echo comes: Done? Why do You persecute us? she demands. Whose side are You on, and who is Your enemy? Some by fire and some by water it says in the Bible - is that no longer enough for You? Now you demand some by ice, too?'

This is how Gd actually appears in Yenta Mash stories, as a revengeful force which never leave us alone to leave. She questions this Gd, although there is nothing to be done against the cumulative cycle of terrible ordeals always occuring against the Jewish people. A never ending Had Gadya, the song introduced into the order of the Pesach since the 19th century, with no redemption in sight, when every single element of the creation can easily turn against us.  

And then there is Israel, the land of feareless young men and women, teaching their parents and grandparents how to be religious. A land of people who left their roots in their old countries to finish being a victim. A land which, at the time when Yenta Mash moved to, was still puzzled by its own diversity of its people, which come together so chaotically in that colourful market from Kibbutz Galuyot street in Haifa. I used myself to stroll old markets and stores in Haifa finding small fragments from my own childhood, like the old hand coffee machine, one of those small memories people brought from their old life.

Although the stories included in the second part of the story are light and the dramatism from the first part is not so pungent, there is a sense of universality and shared belonging among the characters. People survived Gulags and camps to be completely unhelpful against the Israeli bureaucracy and intricacies of the halacha put into practice, like in the case of religious divorces and marriages (as there are no civil marriages in Israel). It is like after the emotional turmoil of the first part of her life, Yenta Mash is just used with the adversities and just retreats into her own world in order to extract the resources to keep writing. 

The world Yenta Mash was writing about is long gone and with it a different kind of sensibility and approach to life. Jews do have a different life nowadays, but the shadow of Had Gadya is always staying. We are living in different times, we are different but the limits within which our life is taking place are almost the same. And so our humanity.