The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1950)
Five years after the defeat of the Nazis, there had only been a few attempts to treat the Holocaust in literary fiction. The subject perhaps seemed better suited to non-fiction, be it history, memoir (such as Primo Levi’s work) or found documentary sources (the diaries and journals of victims—Anne Frank’s being the most widely read example). 1950 brought two epic novels attempting to reconstruct the world of the Polish Jews as it existed just before its destruction. John Hersey’s “The Wall” was a depiction the Warsaw ghetto in the years before and during the war. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Family Moskat” also is set in Warsaw, but it ends (at least in its U.S. translation) just as the Germans invade Poland, leaving the fate of its characters to our and history’s imaginations. In the original Yiddish version, Singer included an epilogue in which some surviving characters make their way to Palestine after the war, but this was cut from the English version. I don’t know if this was a decision made by the publisher.
Anti-Semitism and Hitler are kept in the background for much of the book, which concerns a wealthy Jewish family and its various love triangles and financial difficulties. It’s comparable to a family saga, like John Galsworthy’s “Forsythe” books, though in this case the reader knows that the world being described will eventually be eviscerated, not by time or changing values but by evil itself.
Asa Heshel, a young scholar, could be said to be the book’s main character, though other characters receive extended focus. He comes to Warsaw and meets Abram Shapiro Moskat, who takes him under his wing. Asa falls for Haddasah, one of Abram’s nieces. She is already engaged, to a man she does not love. Haddasah runs away with Asa, but she falls ill, comes home and marries her fiancé. Asa ends up marrying Adele, the step-daughter of the Moskat family patriarch Meshulam.
Already there are enough names to scare away a reader, but I found the book engrossing throughout its 608 pages, though admittedly not all that much happens. The descriptions of Jewish life in Poland are well rendered but not sentimental. The wealthy characters are at a remove from the street life, and are often subjects of gossip and scorn from the lower classes.
Asa is as unromantic a romantic lead as I can imagine. He pines for Haddasah for years, treating his own wife like dirt. But when the paths are cleared and he can marry Haddasah he soon throws her over for another woman.
Singer went on to write works he is more well known for, particularly his nearly magical realist short fiction. This work, though it contains no hints of the supernatural, still stands as a powerful evocation of a time and way of life that far too few lived to remember.