THE GLORY AND THE PAIN
Tarcov, Edith H.
The Glory and the Pain Reviewed by EDITH H. TARCOV jggSPIRIT RETVRNETH. By Selma SUrn. Philadelphia: The Jewuh Publics* tion Society of America. 265 pages. $3.00. f<SanS bosk, th* first novel by...
...The innumerable characters, patricians, guilds pap!*, bishop* and princes, and the Jews, serve well to establish the political and IsWfepal strife of their tine...
...The wise monk comes to mourn for the Jew's murdered kin and for the guilt of thj murderers...
...The conflict between Jewish and Christian culture, as well as the ties be- t tween them are projected into the problems of the individual characters...
...Tho fourteenth century scene is established simply, leaving room for symbolic extension to modern man, though much of the wider complexity of human life does not enter the book...
...Many of the problems that have shaken the contemporary European Jew are avoided by the choice of the fourteenth century...
...The horror of these Jews' fate becomes real, yet that faith should render this fate painless is hard to accept...
...So the family, the Jew, lives on, and the novel ends on the note of survival, hope, and religious gratitude...
...The book ia written within the frame of a full Jewish tradition that, uncontrivedly, is its meat and core...
...They die almost happily as martyas to their faith, in glory sod hope...
...Both glory and pain must exist: it is understandable that it would be hard and painful to acknowledge both testacy and physical despair in the last bears of the martyred lives...
...Th*y expiate their sins...
...however, aa fictional characters none is fully developed...
...f<SanS bosk, th* first novel by the German-Jewish historian Selma Stem, known I in Germany for her biography of Jnd Sues* Oppenheimer, the eighteenth century . * court Jew, and for her study of tho Jews in the Prussian State, is a courageous ,n« dignified symbolic treatment of the fate of the Jews...
...Miss Stern did not shy away from describing her characters' sufferings...
...yet because of their rreat faith they seem, miraculously, to infer little...
...I.udwig l-evvisuhn raptures this quality very well in his translation...
...Jewish culture and concepts were not as rich among our contemporaries, the issues were not as clear, nor was death a matter of heroic choice...
...They pas* from well-being, often splendor, ta uncertainty'and then to certain death...
...Miss Stern has chosen for ber book: the time of the Black Plague, the middle of the fourteenth century, when BOit of tho Jewish communities in the Khineland (and saasy others in Europe) were jjped out The Jews were blamed for causing the plague and infecting the Christian world, a world that was in revolt and upheaval...
...The writing conveys elements of the rhythms of the sturdy wooden old German and of biblical language, and is almost lyrical in places...
...To her characters, the spirit of faith and the vision of the Messiah, retorn in the hour of their great need...
...The righteous Christian servant girl saves the infant and under hardships brings it to its grandfather...
...Yet by simplification, tbe religious and folklore qualities become more evident, and just these give the book its dignified, beautiful simplicity...
...The novel is written in six chapters, of which four are almost separate narratives describing the life and death of members of on* Jewish family and the destruction of tbe greatest ghettos on the Rhine...
...courageously she takes them to the torture chamber, to the stake, to the burning ghetto...
...The mass fate of the Jews, their trials and deaths, despite the absence of vivid characterizations, are compellingly described...
...very few escape...
...Rut if this had been accomplished the author would liave surreeded in interweaving tho .Meaningful and the meaningless into tbe whole that she tried so courageously to create...
...The life of tbe Jews of contemporary Europe had all the elements treated hi this book, but also others that made their world larger...
...Mia* Stern's conceptions are deeply religious, rooted within Jewish tradition of which she obviously has great knowledge...
...The struggle to give meaning to their life and death is more complex, and because of this the novel cannot be considered fully symbolic of the condition of the European Jews of today, and of the condition of all men, all life, which might have been symbolized on the highest l»vel of such a novel...
Vol. 30 • February 1947 • No. 6
