A Fool’s Kabbalah
A Fool’s Kabbalah takes place in two times and places: in a Polish shtetl (Jewish village) occupied by Nazis, and in Europe about a year after the Nazi surrender. The Nazis subject the people of the shtetl to forced labor and torture, including sexual violence. Menke, a gawky young man, tries to keep the Nazis at bay by playing the fool. Despite his status as a sort of village idiot, Menke has more innate wisdom and folkish erudition than most of the people around him put together.
The chaos of postwar Europe is wandered by real-life Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), a scholar of the Jewish mystical school of thought, the Kabbalah. Scholem’s mission is to gather, preserve, and archive what he can of Jewish texts dispersed by the Holocaust. He, too, can be seen as a fool, on a fool’s errand, when so much of Jewish culture has been irretrievably scattered, if not destroyed.
A renowned scholar seeking texts and an impoverished buffoon: two seemingly opposite characters (who never meet each other), whose quests yet intertwine. Both seek to preserve their people—their words and their lives—against seemingly inescapable destruction and loss.
A Fool’s Kabbalah is by no means an easy book to read. Stern does not spare on scenes of heartbreaking cruelty and degradation. The prose is dense, congested with the internal lives of the characters and the complexity of their lives. Yet if you’re willing to brave it, you may find in A Fool’s Kabbalah the light that leads us fools, against all odds and even fate itself, to try to redeem and rebuild our world again and again, throughout history.
