Invented Jewish Folktales

This is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 41: Truth. Become a member or subscribe today to get this issue plus the next four issues of the LARB Quarterly.

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IN THE ABSENCE of inherited stories, the following are what a father invents to tell his child before bed. Cobbled together from eradicated histories, from a family line that ends one generation back with a drunk, these stories needle in the space between truth and fact, between the authenticity of feeling and the fiction of history.

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In a town called Zloknovia, in what is modern day Kaunas, there was a baby born unlike any child the town had ever seen. His hair was white as a clean sheet of paper against the dark features of his face. All the child seemed to do was eat. How sweet, his parents first thought. What a strange child we’ve got! It was only after sucking his mother dry of milk within the first weeks that they grew concerned. She ached with the weight of being emptied too quick, and they moved him on to solid foods, which he, too, devoured with abandon. One hundred mashed figs a day. Then on to root vegetables, a barrel of turnips and radishes he gummed to an ugly pulp. By his second month, he’d bankrupted the family, and they began begging the surrounding towns for donations, which he promptly demolished under his appetite. Goats began disappearing from fields. Whole families of crows vanished from the sky. Upon the boy’s first birthday, the region fell into a great famine. After starving themselves for a year, his parents, not knowing what else to do, sent their boy on a ship to America, and it is unclear whether he made it or not.

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In a small village formally known as Bhlikovta, men in uniforms came to tell the people their village wasn’t a village anymore. The men used fire to make this point and, from out of the village, a writer was cast into the winter roads alongside the rest of his neighbors. As they walked through unending darkness, his neighbors asked him to recount their life in Bhlikovta, to build it back for them in words. They said, tell us about the creek where we used to pretend we were spawning fish, tell us about the fields where we buried our dogs. I’m a writer, the writer replied, I can’t speak back to you what was as if it is, but rather can only record it for you once it is gone, to offer an isness that isn’t is anymore, do you understand? At this reply, his neighbors found themselves quite annoyed, wanting only their dinner tables back, the floors they birthed their children on, the places they sang in joy and in pain. They wanted the writer to write a reprieve for their suffering, to take them away from the stabbing cold in their feet. After weeks of journeying, when eventually the whole village abandoned the writer to his walking, scattering across neighboring towns that had yet to be unpersoned, the writer sat down at a child’s desk in a bombed-out primary school and began writing. He recorded first all the particulars of a life in objects, no ideas, only things, pages and pages of cutlery, of scarves, and of shovels, and one by one each common noun appeared around him. After building this blueprint of his gone village, in a shaky hand, he followed with this: I did not have a home, until it was gone from me.

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This happened in a small town outside of what is now Minsk. There was a boy who moved to study at yeshiva and spent all his days reading. All his days, the boy was in deep conversation with dead scholars; all his days, he transcribed only what had previously been said. Word for word, their language moved through his hand. He surrounded himself with the words of only the holiest men. He was, after all, apprenticing himself to holiness. Every day, between his dormitory and the school, he’d pass a boy around his age begging for food. The boy was just like him, aside from being bedraggled and gallowed by hunger that left him with no time for the study of language. Every day, the learned boy passed by the other, offering the occasional crust of bread. This story doesn’t end how you’d like it to. The begging boy wasn’t god, waiting to impart a critical lesson, or to allocate a station. No. One day on his way to school, the begging boy took a knife and slit the learned boy’s throat from ear to ear, escaping with his little money and his satchel of food. The dead boy’s papers caught the wind and were carried off into the rivers and waved there in the branches like new leaves. Holier than scripture, this lesson tells of what any lord will not do when some have not.

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This happened in a town called Shoflet. The town lay just south of a lake where every day the people would make the several-mile-long pilgrimage to water, lower their heads to drink, and then struggle back with filled buckets. The water was still clear then—god had not yet seen what humans were capable of. The villagers lived where they lived and loved their neighbors. They would share the food they grew, share the animals they butchered, and all was well. Only one day, when it was hot as tehom, the knife used to slice the goat’s throat had not been properly blessed, and the animal cried out in such excruciating pain when it died that the blood of everyone in the surrounding towns began to curdle inside them. There was a meeting to determine what was to be done to the butcher, to the rabbi who slept through his blessing, to the knife itself; and all the while, the goat meat rotted out in the field, so slowly did the bureaucracy of law move. Eventually they buried the knife, desanctified the rabbi, and fined the butcher. Even so, where the goat died, a darkness spread over the land, and all the grasses turned bleach-white, its sacrifice for naught. The blood fed back into the soil and made the soil die. Death soon spread to the sea and the families invented a system of money by which to trade their goods. God so wept when he saw this, he cursed the water to salt. When the villagers came back to drink, their throats pickled, their children learned to float.

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At the edge of a wood that lay between two ragged settlements on what is the modern Iberian Peninsula, there was a well. But the well drew only brackish water, as the elders would tell it, so the children of the town were instructed not to drop a bucket down below, and were warned of the kind of sickness that would spread inside the bodies of those who drank. One day, there was a young boy from a farther-off town traveling through the wood, carrying a stack of books for Rabbi Moyshanka in a shoddy wagon behind him. He was traversing the tough terrain through the woods, rightly assuming this would be a shorter path between villages, when he came upon the well. Not knowing the stories, he lowered the bucket and pulled up the most crystalline cold water he’d ever seen. Water they write poems about. Water so clear it might as well be sky. It was only after he brought the bucket to his lips that he noticed how dark it had grown around him, how the trees appeared to be stone, how his feet were deep in mud and the only light was a thin coin suspended above him. Though it was dark, the boy could tell he was not alone. His body moved as if it were below water. There were thousands of boys there, skin bloated and no longer opaque. All looking up, waiting for someone to lower the bucket into their open mouths, so thirsty to be brought back up into the light.

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This happened in a village near what is today Utena. Every winter, the nights would grow longer than a sentence spoken by a grandmother turning soup. It wasn’t clear whether time had lost its sense or if god had simply fled the village for better weather. The temperature dropped low as a field mouse trembling in the undergrowth, hiding from owls. Every winter, the village boys, one by one, would stand guard with a lantern on the high wooden outpost, beside them a bell and a knife. Each boy’s mother would wrap a cooked fish in newsprint for him to eat. Were he to see anything coming from the wood, he was meant to ring the bell and cast his blade into the darkness to keep the darkness at bay. Most nights, nothing. But every awful once in a while would come a ringing from the blackness followed by a scream, and this heaviness would drag its muttering lashes and sobbing wind past their windows. The village would wake the next day to an empty outpost as the next boy would be asked to step into that covenant. Some winters, no boys were taken. Other years, six. Come spring, the town would assemble to etch the names of children into the walls of their synagogue, and for a time these names protected those who prayed inside. And this is how it was, season after season, until one spring soldiers came from the capital with their railroad. The village became a place between cities. The railroad brought milk, and wool, and strangers. The strangers came with computing machines, with crucifixes carved from pig bone, with novel illnesses, and with knives shaped like genitals. And all was good, as the people of the village marveled at their new prosperity, drinking thick bone broth at every meal. Many winters passed without incident beneath their new electric lamps. And under this illumination, the boys grew proud and cruel, gathering in packs like dogs. They were blood clotting in the streets. Everyone suffered when they passed. It wasn’t until the government collapsed and the railroad failed and there wasn’t enough to eat that blame came back hungry to the village. When winter returned, it remained dark all year. Dark as the inside of a crow’s egg. Dark as stones in the place of eyes. Amphibious dark. Rat-jizz dark. Cataclysm dark. When daylight finally returned, it found the village empty as a bell with its tongue cut out. The grounds were covered in fish bones. The synagogue, knifed through with our names.

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Excerpt of Yr Dead, forthcoming from McSweeney’s and Daunt in 2024.