In the Time of the Russias by Stella Zamvil
1 No one has read this book and you shouldn’t either.
In the Time of the Russias is not a great book. It is a good book. Though, not so good that you wouldn’t find a better one by picking at random in a library. It is a good-enough book.
It is definitely not a Great Book - one of those books that, whether they are any good or not, is read widely and is part of the foundation upon which later literature is built. None of your friends have read this slim anthology of short stories. Only one person has read this book according to Goodreads - me. It has never been critically reviewed. It has not been made into an e-book, and never will be. Once all the paper copies have rotted away, there will be only the snippet view on Google Books. ChatGPT “couldn’t find any information” on this book. If a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
This review would have been much easier if this was a Great Book. I could have read other books by the author, and perhaps also the author’s own opinions on their work. I could have read critical reviews of the book, essays about it, and blog posts about it. And I would feel confident in doing you, the reader, a service by introducing you to a book that is as important as it is entertaining. Shakespeare is entertaining, but better is that the reader of Shakespeare becomes erudite - and showing off what you know is at least half the fun of knowing anything. If I had picked a Great Book, it would have been your fault for not liking it. Alas, this book is not one.
This review would also have been easier if this was a lowercase great book - a work of literature so excellent that my passion for it would carry you away. Is this book, then, the best thing I’ve ever read, the above “you could find a better one in the library” statement notwithstanding? No. Some of my favorite novels are the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, Toilers of the Sea and others by Victor Hugo, and Knausgard’s six volumes about nothing. Any of those would also have been well justified as subjects of a book review. I could have written passionately about a book that many people, but not all, have discovered. Surely some other fans of the book would have supported me in the comments section. Nope, not this book. If anyone in the comments section claims to have read this book, they are lying.
So now we come to where I surprise you with why this book is actually great. Well, these short stories are actually bedtime stories Alsatian crows tell their baby crows, available now through AI translation of their caws. No, but it is a collection of recently discovered short stories told by ancient Sumerians to their fellow Sumerians, even before they started writing about grain shipments. No, but this book was found in its fully published form on the moon in 1969. Maybe it was written by Cleopatra, or Secretariat, or literally 10,000 monkeys. Perhaps, decades, centuries, or millenia after it was written it predicted some recent thing - the forced sale of TikTok, or that so many girls would be named after olives. That would be a great reason to exhort you to read this book. But I don’t have a hook like that.
It really is a book that you would have no reason to read if you came across it. Don’t worry, because you won’t. And yet this was the book that came immediately to mind when I saw a post about the 2024 book review contest. At least it might benefit from affirmative action.
2 In the Time of the Russias.
In the Time of the Russias is a collection of 17 short stories by Stella Zamvil. It was published in 1985. Ms. Zamvil published a couple of other books after this. She has also since died. Z’’L.
The stories are depictions of poor, rural Jews in Eastern Europe. To the extent that it forms a genre, these are stories of the shtetl, the small villages in which many Jews then lived. No story depicts any actual historical event, but they are generally set in the late nineteenth century and do reflect current events - pogroms, early-stage Zionism, tension between identity and assimilation, etc. The book is only 115 pages long, and the stories are short.
Shtetls, or shtetlach if you want to be a super-Ashkenaz, don’t exist anymore. They disappeared at exactly the same time all of their inhabitants did, sometime around the mid-twentieth century. In spite of that, they retain an outsized cultural salience among many Jews. Most American Jews are Ashkenazi, and most again are within a few generations removed from those that emigrated directly from the shtetl. Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of a Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in Yiddish about them. And I would be remiss to omit Fiddler on the Roof, which is set there.
I came across this book in 2015 in the Aloha Jewish Chapel, the synagogue that serves the Pearl Harbor, Hawaii naval base. I like browsing the libraries in synagogues in part because no one else ever does. Many are depressingly untouched. I don’t think that’s a uniquely Jewish phenomenon, of course, but I wouldn’t have found In the Time of the Russias anywhere else.
I connected with this book because it caught me at the right time, in the middle of a growing desire to reconnect with my religious and family background. Although it would be more poetic, this book didn’t start me on that journey. I had started it long before then, attending Shabbat and holiday services since I gained a driver’s license at 17. By the time I came across this book I could learn from it, understand it, and absorb it. I could live the stories in a way I wouldn’t have been able to a few years before. At this point I had known that my father’s family had come from the shtetls, but knowing a fact is different than an experience. Though this book may not be of Nobel Prize caliber (alright, it isn’t), reading it has meant a lot to me.
3 In which the stories and their main themes are explored.
The writing is simple and never overwrought. If anything the book is underwritten, in that the stories could be fluffed and lengthened and still not be too long. That is not why I formed such a strong connection with this book when I first read it, but it enabled it. Reading Crime and Punishment is a pleasure and I do recommend it, but attention span aside - who can connect emotionally with Raskolnikov? Who has the time? The characters in these stories are accessible in the way they are in fables and fairy tales, without much nuance.
How does one organize a review of 17 short stories? As follows.
Note: If you are not particularly interested in the subject matter at this point, you can just skip this section. Go to Section 4 and save yourself a few minutes. Use them to be thankful you don’t live in a shtetl.
Spoilers ahead.
3.1 Life in the Shtetl
The stories in the book are set in small villages that are rural and poor, which in Yiddish are shtetls. It’s therefore not surprising that the most abundant theme across the stories is the character of life in a pre-modern, agricultural environment. The stories seem like they take place in the late nineteenth century, but that is in part only due to the absence of markers of later times. For the most part, life in the shtetl, no different than life in non-Jewish villages, changed little for centuries. References to external figures, like the Rothchilds, help define the stories as taking place in a relatively recent world.
The stories vividly describe the precariousness of everyday life in the shtetl. Scarcity figures prominently, as does vulnerability to weather.
Because the book was written by an American in the late twentieth century (and for the same demographic), the stories belie a respect and even reverence for the poverty the characters lived in. In On Going to Jerusalem, the main character packs his “few belongings” in a rag to be carried over his shoulder as he walks to Jerusalem from Ukraine. In Summer’s Idyll, Malke’s husband “never … made enough money to keep worry away. The years of her life had crept away.” Two stories, Out of Egypt and Schmiel Pinhas, describe the dissatisfaction of a wife with a husband who cannot adequately provide.
Schmiel Pinhas takes place in the winter, when “the frost hung on the trees and clung on the ground, making the earth stone hard”. Schmiel is happy to get out of “such painful cold” and revels in the light and warmth of his small home. But the end of the story forces him outside once more, into the “cold, dark silence”. After losing his horse between villages he becomes progressively colder, until “he no longer felt the cold, nor did his chest ache as he breathed”. He, of course, dies. In another story, Nissun’s Dawn, Nissun is a young man returning to his home “through open dead fields … as the withered winter ground stretched before him”. Times are hard there, but relatives in another village are unwilling to take him in. His mother reacts less warmly to his return than he hoped: “cold light swept the spring back and winter sat in his stomach”.
3.2 Romance
The second main theme across the many short stories is not romance. That would be uplifting and joyous, which Jewish history is decidedly not. No, the second main theme is pogroms and violence. But I like to think the author would rather have had me organize the review this way.
Petrashka deals with the loneliness inherent in life in a small village (exacerbated by a tradition that relies on matchmaking). Petrashka was overlooked during her best years and now cannot find a husband. The matchmaker, Ruchel, calmly informs her that the three options she had previously advertised were now all unavailable - dead, moved away, and conscripted. The matchmaker ends their meeting by giving back the large sum of money intended to be her payment, thereby giving up. Even the local beggar “feels a wife would be too much responsibility”. As is true for the rest of these stories, the writing is relatively simple and short. But unwritten is the certainty that an unmarried woman entering middle age was an unmitigable calamity.
In Summer’s Idyll, the focus is on illicit romance. Sonya is married to Max but is unhappy and neglected. She begins an affair with another in the village, Peter, but only consummates it once before he is drafted into the army and killed. She resolves to teach their child “to say the kaddish, the prayer for the dead, for his father”.
In other stories, romance is less a plot device than part of the (author’s intended) description of the shtetl. In The Novitiate, the happy marriage between Lev and Marya is a consolation for his poverty and lack of opportunity. It also sets up the story for a more emotionally-charged conclusion. In Village of the Maimed, the village is conspicuous for its lack of it, which adds to that story’s horror. In The Match, a young woman conceals her romantic interest - as would be expected in a patriarchal world in which relationships are often arranged. And in Out of Egypt, a lonely woman courts a young widower while restraining herself from coming on too strong.
The author clearly intended that romance be seen as something extraordinary, given its potential as a source of happiness in a difficult time and place, and as something necessary, based on its effect on those who do not have access to it.
3.3 Pogroms
I respect the fact that readers of this review may be sensitive to violence. Skip this part if that is true for you - go to Section 4.4.
Right, so pogroms and violence towards Jews is the second main theme. Insofar as shtetl life is a setting, and not necessarily a subject, violence is the main theme of this book. Nine of the stories feature violence prominently. In that proportion the anthology is not quite historically accurate - it is not true that most Jews lost their lives this way - but the unpredictable possibility of a group of your neighbors hacking you to pieces to celebrate Easter makes this emotionally accurate. I might also add that, for post-Holocaust Jewry, the idea that so many died violently but are not remembered or celebrated makes this type of event especially salient. The calculated and industrial violence of the Holocaust is difficult to imagine, but pogroms are unfortunately easier.
In most of the stories, as in real life, Jews didn’t do anything to merit being killed. But in Lyuba a politically active young woman, Lyuba, defies her parents to join an unspecified rebellion against the czar. Her sister, Fanya, is more pragmatic and insists on loyalty. Though it is not written, the reader is led to believe that Fanya shoots and kills Lyuba to prevent her from bringing retribution on her family. This is also the only instance of Jew-on-Jew violence in the book.
In some stories, violence against Jews is a plot device all the more horrific for its banality. A Jew in these stories might meet a violent end the same way your or I might get a flat tire - an unwelcome surprise, but it happens. In On Going to Jerusalem, an old man walks from Europe to Jerusalem unscathed while “all the Jews - men, women, and children” back home are killed. In Village of the Maimed (what a title), a subdued few pages about the aftermath of a pogrom, motivation for the attack is simply assumed. In Dunya’s Dybbuk a young woman is having a day in which “nothing was right”, which gets worse in the final paragraph when a drunk cossack kills her for no apparent reason at all. And in And Next Year a rabbi awaits a coming pogrom, certain of what will happen.
Yet other stories explore the violence in a more graphic and emotionally-charged way. In the Time of the Russias, the eponymous story, depicts a group of cossacks forcing a farmer to kill all of his livestock, one by one. Then his horse. And then, though unspecified, he is made to choose between killing his family himself or allowing them to do it. In The Doctor, a converted Jew risks his life to warn the Jewish quarter of an impending pogrom. Somewhat inexplicably, the man he warns chooses to kill his daughters before the peasants arrive. When they do, every Jew within reach is slaughtered. For his trouble, the doctor is as well.
The most violent story of the book has stayed with me for years. The Novitiate. Lev, a Jew, and Vasha, a Christian, were boyhood friends. Vasha is a new priest and has come back to their village, only to find that a pogrom is in the offing. He attempts to stop it and is, of course, unsuccessful. He passes the peasants returning, “bespattered with blood, clutching uncleaned wet sabers”. A baby is killed in its crib, beheaded. Lev’s wife is raped, killed, and disembowled. Lev himself is alive, but without eyes or arms. The story ends with Lev’s death, which is clearly a mercy.
The violence in this book is, unfortunately, necessary to narrate the experiences of Jews in Eastern Europe - even if the author does, at times, employ it almost gratuitously. A book of peaceful and happy shtetl stories would be about a different people entirely.
3.4 Salvation
You might expect to find plenty of references to salvation or deliverance in this book. It is, after all, about a people defined by their religious beliefs. Moreover, these people live in a time of constant poverty and threats to their existence. Well, it isn’t like that. These shtetl dwellers were pretty used to all that by then. Nobody was coming to save them.
But there are always optimists. The old man who decides one day to (and does!) walk to Jerusalem from Lvov in On Going to Jerusalem. The father in Lyuba, who prays so fervently and incessantly that he is unaware of a loud argument in the same room. The dying man in The Novitiate, already witness to his family’s deaths, who cries “Build us the temple in Jerusalem … Make us free!”. One of the surviving inhabitants of the Village of the Maimed, watching a small flame and seeing within it “hope, hope deeply buried with the shoots under the earth waiting to come forth”. And the rabbi in And Next Year, who prays as he faces his impending death.
It is painfully ironic that in most of the stories, requests for salvation are contrasted against past or present tragedy.
3.5 Identity and Practice
So far, most of the themes I’ve described are religion-neutral. A collection of stories about rural villagers in a past century, alternately experiencing joy and terror, might look similar if it took place in Africa, Southeast Asia, or Latin America.
Rest assured, here be Jews.
Jewish practice forms plot points in many of the stories. Observance of Shabbat defines characters in many stories, including The Wedding and Summer’s Idyll. In Out of Egypt, Yentel’s pursuit of Hershel takes place amidst the first and second nights of Passover. And Next Year describes the reverence a rabbi has for his synagogue and its Torah. Many characters across the stories have symbols of Jewish observance, such as a tallis or a siddur (I assume if you’re still reading you have a basic facility with Judaism, so no definitions are necessary).
In The Match, a rebbetzin prods her husband into taking on a new student that she thinks would make a good son-in-law. He presents as an oblivious, intensely religious person - much like the father in Lyuba. He is tricked when the rebbetzin tells him, untruthfully, that a famous rabbi speaks highly of the boy. Though short, this story spares little in describing what such a hasidic household would have felt like.
The depictions of Jewish practice are deftly applied, such that the Jewishness of the stories is apparent while not crowding out everything else. That may not be important for a book of such limited readership, but it’s a nice touch.
3.6 ???
“On three things does the world stand: on justice, on truth, and on peace.” - Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel. So, I’ll be honest. Some of these stories made no sense to me.
Lemish’s Wife. A woman roams around, much to the consternation of her husband, is somehow kidnapped by an old woman, and then falls asleep under a bed with her naked ass in the air. Ms. Zamvil… what?
A Dybbuk in the Soup. Frimme is narrating to herself the uselessness of children who are too smart for their own good, and cannot adjust to the few opportunities available to them. Then she throws a pot of soup out the door. There must be symbolism to the soup… right?
And two of the stories seem unfinished. The Wedding describes preparations for a nice village wedding, which will be well attended. Until most of the guest list backs out the morning of. The two most respected members of the village go anyway, and so most everyone else does too. Which is nice, but there isn’t much more to the story beyond that. And Next Year could use a lot more detail, especially as to why the rabbi elects to leave the Torah’s safety to chance (predictably, he loses).
Is the lesson that, just as the divine is inscrutable, sometimes stories are too? Could be.
4 Maybe you should read this book, then?
Not in so many words. I think few people would benefit from reading this book in the way that I did. It stayed with me for years after I read it - in large part because of where I was in life when I read it. Not only would most people think it unremarkable, but so would I if I had read it at a different time. What hope does this book have of finding a similar reception with you?
To end the review here is to fail to drive home the point, and would make for a very unsatisfying book review. And yet, I’m going to. There is no need to write a few hundred words exhorting you to find a book you connect with, thereby insulting your intelligence in the assumption you needed to hear it. If you’ve read this far, you’ve clearly understood that the content of the book was irrelevant. Not irrelevant to me, of course, but irrelevant to you. If there is an important part of this review, it is that the most meaningful book to you is probably not the one everyone else is reading.
I liked this book a great deal, it is important to me, and yet I am not recommending it.
Good luck finding your next read!