The Novelist of Jewish Unity

This essay is the third in a series of fresh looks by Hillel Halkin at seminal Hebrew writers and thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The first two essays, on the proto-Zionist novelists Joseph Perl and Abraham Mapu, are available here and here.

In Peretz Smolenskin’s first Hebrew novel, Simḥat Ḥanef, a title taken from the book of Job and translatable as “The Humbug’s Happiness,” there is an account, set in the 1850s or 60s, of a stagecoach journey from Berdichev, a heavily Jewish town in central Ukraine, to the Black Sea port of Odessa. (Like other East European writers of Hebrew fiction, Smolenskin gave his Russian or Polish towns and cities imaginary and sometimes comic Hebrew names, generally formed by inverting or rearranging their letters. Thus, the Berdichev of The Humbug’s Happiness is Toshavey-Ba’ar—roughly, “Inhabitants of Ignorance”—while Odessa is Ashadot, “Waterfalls.”) The passage starts with an introductory reflection of the kind that Smolenskin (ca. 1840-1885), a prolific essayist as well as a writer of fiction, was fond of: in this case, a brief discourse on the spread of Russian railroads, the consequent demise of stagecoach travel, and the author’s obligation to memorialize the old means of transportation “so that posterity may recall the cumbersome ways of its ancestors.” Once the technologically transformative 19th century will have succeeded in changing everything, the narrator of The Humbug’s Happiness asks, who will believe that stagecoaches ever existed? “It’s all a figment of your imagination,” future historians who unearth such relics from the darkness of the past will be told.

The Odessa coach is about to depart. Despite having promised his passengers a comfortable trip with plenty of leg room, the coachman has packed as many of them into his vehicle as can fit. In addition to a father and daughter returning from a trip to Berdichev, they are: