Customer Reviews

The Brothers Ashkenazi (Twentieth-Century Classics)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Excellent story about the rise and fall of the Ashkenazi family, which covers different historical stages like the Industrial Revolution, rise of Capitalism and Communism, World War I, etc. But above all the novel deals with the issue of the nature of the Jewish identity, and it is here where it really succeeds. Singer enforces the fact that for every hardship endured, the Jewish community always ends up being the scapegoat.

What also struck me is the angry and pessimistic tone that Singer employs throughout the story. Most characters are mean and selfish, inflicting continuous suffering to others. As the preface points out (at least in the Spanish edition), Singer seems to have a premonition concerning the fate of the Jewish community in the years following the novel.

This is a fantastic historical saga, very educational and thought-provoking.

The story begins at the beginning, prior to the nearly simultaneous birth of two brothers. Not quite Cain and Abel, the brothers grow apart and together, mixing people,places,positions. With verve and breadth, it tells how each individual becomes his own choices, with the help and the hindrance of the Jewish community in Poland in the early 20th century. What a story!

I.J. Singer's Brothers is a compendium of the Jewish experience in 20th century Europe. The full compliment of elements are here that we have come to expect in a Yiddish novel that deals with the breakdown of traditional Jewish life. Very similar to Buddenbrooks and other novels of a family's decline, the Brothers seems to view history as essentially degenerating; in the end, we are left without a way out of the morass of modernity.

This book is an amazing piece of work. You can really see the struggles that the Jewish population in Poland had to endure in the decades before WWII. Some of the characters are truly detestable at, other times they are to be pitied. All in all, a very tragic book.

I.J. Singer's work is a large-scale novel, with a multitude of characters and plots, the first attempt of a Yiddish writer to break away from the traditional short fiction depicting life in the shtelt. It is the result of exposure to European literature late in the 19th century, and reflects the dilemma of Jewish milieu torn apart from its traditional roots and having to face the rise of capitalism and communism. The main character, Max Ashkenazi is despicable by all means, obsessed by money and power, with a Machiavellian mind, and despite all his success has a sad end in life. Considering the conflicting time in which the novel takes place (first four decades of the 20th century), the main plot reflects the author's pessimistic and skeptic view of the place the Jew might have in modern society: be it amongst the capitalists or the communists, the Jew will always be misplaced and will never loose his stigma as scapegoat in times of trouble. The reader familiar with wthe work of Joshua's younger brother (Isaac Bashevis Singer) will certainly realize that the brothers share little in terms of literary production, each one with his own merits, albeit I.B. Singer surpasses in magnitude and depth.

This sweeping novel is as much social and cultural criticism as a work of literature. Ostensibly the saga of a family in 19th-20th century Lodz (pronounced "wooch" -- so now you know), it really serves as a window inside the fissures and tensions of Polish and Jewish culture during that time.

Singer swung for the fences with this work, and for the most part, he succeeded. We tend now to put on rose-colored glasses when recalling Yiddish culture during this period, in no small part due to the mystical and aesthetic works from Israel Joshua Singer's little brother Isaac Bashevis. (Bashevis' works certainly were not ALL nostalgic, not in the least; but his focus on mysticism and childrens' stories did its part). The older Singer had no time for nostalgia. The central character of the Brothers Ashkenazi is not a person but an industrial city: Lodz, and its myriad conflicts: between religion and secularism, labor and capital, modernity and tradition, Russia and Germany, Poles and Jews, and only incidentally between the Brothers themselves. Quite often I felt as if I were reading a work of history written like a novel rather than a novel itself. But that is the power of the book: through characters, we can see social classes and forces. There is the Orthodox Jewish family patriarch who negotiates with the Gentiles but adheres strictly to the Talmud; the brilliant son who rejects his heritage to become King of Lodz; the loutish children of sterm industrialists, concerned only with aristocratic titles; the Prussian Junker landowner who contemptuously rules the city during World War I; the dutiful daughter forced to marry against her will; a series of Jewish bureaucratic fixers who can get what they need or want from hostile Poles, Russians, and Germans; idealistic socialist revolutionaries whose hopes are, of course, dashed against the true brutality of Bolshevism and anti-Semitism. There is an unforgettable portrait of Lenin himself; Singer understood this man before hundreds of western intellectuals did. Singer even can write about masses of people, whether they are worshippers at the "Love of Friends" syangogue, a group of striking workers, or a horde of Poles on a pogrom, and you feel like you are there.

I must say that this awesome strength also presents the book's greatest weakness: the characters are not so much characters as TYPES. Only toward the end do we get any complexity or three-dimensionality out of them. When Singer decided to write an internal monologue he did it brilliantly. But he didn't do it very much. This is particularly true for the female characters. I suppose that this too is part of the work's social-cultural criticism: none of the characters is particularly attractive although a couple are at least somewhat sympathetic.

But in a novel of this scope, such a criticism pales before the awesome merits of the work. In my case, its value was augmented by a powerful and sensitive reading by Stefan Rudnicki, who took the time to properly pronounce the sometimes-forbidding names.

Israel Joshua Singer died tragically young of a heart attack at age 50, and now is known mostly through his younger brother. The re-release of The Brothers Ashkenazi, I hope, will remedy this condition. I have already ordered several of Israel's other books, and you should, too. But read this one first.

I found this book a tremendous pleasure to read. It is filled with interesting characters and hard realistic depictions of an industrializing, urbanizing Polish- Lithuanian Jewish world at the outset of the twentieth century. The story of the two brothers Ashkenazi, the physically strong and life- loving Jacob Bunem, and the physically weak and mentally brilliant Simha Meir is a panoramic chronicle that charts the development of Jewish religious and business life of the time. Singer looks with a hard, critical and often humorous eye on most of his characters. He is masterful in exploring the excess and hypocrisy of the religious world, and of the world of assimilationists alike. He depicts characters and conflicts that are still part of the Jewish world today. He is a masterful storyteller and there is for the reader the constant suspense of wishing to know what will happen next to his characters. He does not seem however so strong on sympathy and his tone is harsh and judging.
Yet his analyses of the worlds of business, of religion, of social and family life are powerful and accurate Reading this book of what happened in the Jewish world one hundred years ago I felt I was understanding a good deal of what is happening in it today.
This is a masterwork and one which its readers will greatly enjoy.

I read this a few years ago, but I will read it again. Lodz, which as another reviewer said, is both a setting and a character in the novel, is an industrial city, not an impoverished, backwards shtetl that is the common image of prewar Poland.
The novel revolves around two brothers, both very different personalities, one brilliant, the other charming and handsome.The competition for both affection and money that fuels much of the plot, is well done. But it's a larger story and covers swaths of history, explores labor issues, political philosophies, traditionalism versus modernism, family conflict, industrialism, so many things. You can get a great education in European History, but it is also a touching story. It's written with an omniscient narrator, which is out of fashion in modern novels, and yet I found it riveting.
I recently wrote a novel where I took just one aspect of the period and that was a challenge. The Brothers Ashkenazi is the product of a truly brilliant mind.