A Forgotten Man
October 10, 2008
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(1 comments)
By Larry Kaufman
Raise your hand if you can identify Maurice Samuel.
Maybe a little prompt will help. Choose the right identifier from the list below:
- American author of a novel about the Borgias
- Radio partner of Mark Van Doren in discussing the Hebrew Bible
- Translator of Erika Mann from the German
- Translator of Edmond Fleg from the French
- Translator of Sholem Asch and I.J. Singer from the Yiddish
- Executive of the Zionist Organization of America
- Polemicist/critic of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History
Actually this fascinating personality was all of the above - author of six novels and twenty works of non-fiction, translator into English of 22 books from the French, German, Hebrew and Yiddish, popular lecturer, investigative journalist, aide to Henry Morgenthau Sr. in his investigation of Polish pogroms, aide to Chaim Weizmann in the writing of his autobiography. You can learn more about him in an article written eleven years ago by Louis Kaplan to commemorate Maurice Samuel's 25th yahrtzeit.
I just "rediscovered" Maurice Samuel when I sought out his essay, "The Manager: Rebekah," in the preparation of a dvar Torah on Chayei Sarah. (My teacher Rabbi Fred Schwartz is a big fan of Samuel's Biblical commentary, and, in fact, many of the Samuel titles in my personal library were gifts from Rabbi Schwartz.) The Rebekah essay, to stay with Samuel's spelling, first appeared in his 1955 Certain People of the Book, and is reprinted in the posthumous 1977 JPS collection, edited by Milton Hindus, The Worlds of Maurice Samuel: Selected Writing.
The title applied to the Selected Writings is a clever play on what is arguably Samuel's most popular (and influential) book, The World of Sholom Aleichem, a 1943 publication whose title itself, Samuel tells us, has a double meaning -- the author's world, and the world he re-created in his stories. This work is credited with having re-awakened American Jewish interest in the vanished world of the shtetl. Hindus suggests that, without The World of Sholom Aleichem and two additional books that followed it, Prince of the Ghetto and In Praise of Yiddish, we might not have had Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish, nor Fiddler on the Roof, nor countless other volumes that have helped make the Pale vivid for us.
Whether or not Hindus and Kaplan exaggerate Samuel's influence, I credit him with awakening my own interest in Yiddish and its literature, in the problems of translation, and in providing a perspective on the milieu that said Lech Lecha, go forth, to my grandparents and sent them from Kiev and Kobrin to Cleveland (or should I follow Maurice Samuel's Rebekah orthography and say Kleveland?). And now that I have taken his books down from my shelf, I'll delve more deeply particularly into those I have not previously read, to see whether the oblivion he predicted for what was once one of the best-known names in American Jewish life is justified - or reversible.
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::Raising hand::
I have a hard cover, I think the first edition of "The World of Sholem Aleichem". Not only a lovely text, but a lovely book, designed by the great book designer and illustrator, and a type designer W. A. Dwiggins.
I got it from my Grandfather's library. He died before I was born. I used the book in a video for one of my Parent-Teen workshops on Jewish Values, "Passionate Decisions". I had "Yente" come back to life, springing out of the book, and talk about love and marriage in the days of Sholem Aleichem, vs now.
So long as libraries--and now electronic scanning--and people live, books don't die.
That's a comfort to a writer.