Trigger warnings for rape and many Nazi atrocities.
Gershom Scholem has arrived in Offenbach am Main to take on an impossible quest. This professor of Jewish mysticism wants to bring back as many of the books that formerly belonged to Jewish people murdered by the Nazis to Israel, where they can be kept safe for use by scholars. In the years after the war, the Offenbach Archival Depot held millions of books stolen by the Nazis while people tried to figure out what should be done with them. It wasn’t always possible to find the original owners or their descendants. Some books were repatriated to their countries of origin; others were sent to the US Library of Congress and other libraries around the world. A Fool’s Kabbalah, by Steve Stern, follows Gershom as he combs through the mountains of books in Offenbach am Main and travels around Germany, Czechia, and Poland to recover yet more Jewish books for his university in Israel. A Fool’s Kabbalah also contains the story of Menke Klepfisch, a man who cannot resist a joke or a prank even when his quest for a laugh gets people killed.
In the first chapters of A Fool’s Kabbalah, Gershom and Menke could not be more different. Gershom is a buttoned-up member of academia. He is deeply learned about the Torah and mystical Kabbalist texts. Before the war, he used to have endless discussions with renowned critic Walter Benjamin about everything under the sun. Menke, on the other hand, never held a job for longer than a few months. He is far from learned. Religion deeply bores him and he holds nothing sacred, not even his unrequited love for a rabbi’s daughter. Gershom is used to the finer things in life. Menke spends most of his life in a shtetl called Zyldzce in the countryside of what is sometimes Poland, Lithuania, or Belarus that the outside world barely touches until World War II and the Holocaust crashes down on them. Gershom is always very correct in his behavior. Menke is clearly afflicted with an imp of the perverse.
Though these characters could hardly be different—and they never actually meet—Gershom’s slow descent into a kind of holy madness brings him closer to Menke’s irrepressible foolish. Humor plays a huge role in A Fool’s Kabbalah, though not in the way we might expect. I laughed at a few of Menke and Gershom’s jokes. I love a good joke that punches up. But the role of humor in this book isn’t necessarily to make anyone laugh. Rather, humor more often seems to serve as a way to highlight the ghastly absurdity of Menke and Gershom’s worlds. The insanity of the world is a colossal joke because what else could it be? Relatedly, Gershom often thinks and talks about holy foolishness and Jews who were so close to the divine that it knocked them out of step with the rest of the world. They say and do things that make no sense to the rest of us. Their connection to the divine protects them while violence happens all around them.
By following these ideas about the role of humor and holy fools, I started to read Gershom’s quest to gather stolen and lost books for his university as a form of tikkun olam. Tikkun olam (in an oversimplified nutshell) is an attempt to restore a broken world to what it was before everything shattered. Gershom’s problem is that not only is it impossible to gather all of the broken shards of the pre-Holocaust world of European Jews, there is nowhere to assemble them. Arguments with librarians in Czechia and Germany are met with implacable refusals to hand over so much as a single volume. An attempt to smuggle books into the Palestinian Mandate ends in disaster. And even if Gershom did manage to bring back as many books as he liked to Jerusalem, who would read them? So many people who could read and use them were no longer alive.
A Fool’s Kabbalah is one of the bleakest books I’ve ever read, despite the fact that humor is such an important theme. Some of the violence described here turned my stomach. I’m glad I read it, however. This book is unlike any other work of Holocaust literature I’ve ever read. I was fascinated by the way that Stern explored kabbalistic ideas, especially tikkun olam, in Gershom and Menke’s stories.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
