A Fool’s Kabbalah review: ‘Is comedy a valid response the Shoah?’

Steve Stern, an American author, has been writing fiction since the 1980s, often drawing on sources in Jewish history, mysticism and myth. He has received critical acclaim, especially for his 2005 novel The Angel of Forgetfulness, while popularity has eluded him. Will A Fool’s Kabbalah, his latest book, change the status quo?

The novel has two narrative lines. One concerns a real-life individual, Gershom Scholem, the celebrated 20th-century scholar whose work in cataloguing and interpreting kabbalistic and other sacred writings from the Middle Ages effectively reinvented Jewish mysticism as a subject of serious academic study. A Fool’s Kabbalah focuses on his role in “Otzrot HaGolah”, a 1946 mission on behalf of the Hebrew University to salvage Jewish texts plundered by the Nazis in the Second World War.

Feted scholar: Gershom Scholem, in 1935Alamy Stock Photo

By contrast, the second strand concerns Menke Klepfisch, a prankster and ne’er-do-well living in a shtetl called Zyldzce, somewhere on the moveable borders between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus. Through Menke’s eyes we see Jewish Zyldzce overrun and ultimately destroyed by Hitler’s forces.

Gershom (as Stern likes to call Scholem) and Menke never meet, but their respective paths intertwine in subtle and sometimes poignant ways.

For example, they are connected by books. Passing through Zyldzce, Gershom discovers a cache of Yiddish potboilers and romances containing a mystical text; both the text and the romances figure in Menke’s story, the latter to devastating effect.

The deepest link is a character trait: humour. An indefatigable knack for tomfoolery becomes key to Menke’s survival under the Nazis, not so much because he is taken up by the German commanding officer as a kind of jester (an obvious Faustian bargain), but because it is a means to navigate the extreme cruelty and absurdity of the regime. Meanwhile, after something of a crisis at the end of Otzrot HaGolah, Gershom also comes to acknowledge a form of laughter as a necessity in the face of cosmic indifference. His inspiration is Kafka, whom his friend, the literary critic Walter Benjamin, interprets as a comic writer and a secular kabbalist.

The tone can lurch wildly. Broad gags and vulgar yiddishisms sit next to recondite literary and philosophical references

Art that affirms comedy in the face of the Shoah is hardly unprecedented (cinematic examples include Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful or Quentin Tarrantino’s Inglourious Basterds), but it is risky. Stern testifies vividly to the horrific immensity of Jewish suffering: the challenge he sets himself is to show that his version of kabbalistic comedy provides a valid response to the nihilism inherent in the Shoah and other cases of violence and cruelty.

Readers must decide for themselves whether Stern succeeds. He does not help his audience. The tone can lurch wildly. Broad gags and vulgar yiddishisms sit next to recondite literary and philosophical references. The breadth of his vocabulary alone requires frequent visits to Google. It won’t all work for everyone, but Stern surely does enough to deserve wider consideration.

A Fool’s Kabbalah

by Steve Stern

Melville House, £16.99