In Janice Weizman’s novel, “Our Little Histories,” a short, cryptic Yiddish poem continues to intrigue and puzzle members of one far-flung Jewish family for more than 150 years. When family ancestress Raizel Shulman wrote the poem in a shtetl in Belarus in 1850, she carefully tore its three stanzas into three strips of paper, giving one stanza each to her three sons. This mysterious poem becomes the connecting point linking six generations of her descendants.
Moving back in time from 2015 to 1850, each chapter serves up one family member’s personal history. These stories reflect both geographic and philosophical migration, from shtetl life in eastern Europe to turn-of-the-century Minsk; pre-WWII Vilna; socialist kibbutz life in pre-Independence Israel; assimilated life in pre-WWII Chicago; and modern Tel Aviv. Only when readers reach the final chapter, set in Belarus in 1850, do we finally understand the heartrending meaning of the poem and the wrenching circumstances that motivated Raizel to put these words to paper.
The opening history centers on Jennifer Greenberg-Wu, traveling in 2015 from Chicago to a small town in Belarus, where she has been hired by a Belarusian tycoon to create a “living installation” of traditional Jewish life. Jennifer’s observant Israeli cousins will enact authentic Jewish living behind glass in front of a live audience. An atheist married to a non-Jew, Jennifer recognizes the irony of her challenge. Despite months of meticulous research, she realizes that it’s impossible to recreate this past with authenticity. Looking at the copy of the family’s dusty old copy of the Yiddish journal with her ancestor’s poem published in it, she says, “The only thing that’s true are the words set down on the pages of this journal, this remnant of the world as it appeared to those who lived in it.” Unexpectedly, Jennifer’s moody, goth-inspired teenaged daughter, Cassie, finds herself drawn to the novelty of the Jewish ideas she encounters through the installation. When she learns that Judaism highlights the distinction between the sacred and the profane through the Havdalah service, she says, “It’s so cool, Mom.”
Each story illustrates trendlines in recent Jewish history. In the chapter “Comrades,” set on a kibbutz in 1946, we meet a great-aunt of Jennifer’s named Tamar, who left her family in Minsk in 1927 to help build the Zionist dream. Tamar’s family never escaped the European inferno, and she is haunted by the terrible knowledge of what must have happened to them:
“I cannot think about what happened. There is no other way to carry on. I must lock away all thoughts of my father, my mother, my jokey brothers, the courtyard of our apartment near the market in Minsk that always smelled of cabbage and onions, the view from our window, the bustling street below.” Tamar embraces her identity as part of “the new generation of Jewish socialists, building a new reality which would be a light to others … showing how Jews could live as a modern people, creating a society unburdened by the outdated laws and rules that had kept us in the dark and prevented us from being part of the modern world.”
Meanwhile, in Vilna in 1939, Tamar’s cousin, a literature instructor named Gabriel, can no longer deny the increasing peril of the Jews. After he and a good friend are attacked by drunken antisemitic thugs and his friend is permanently, horribly disabled, Gabriel finally agrees to Tamar’s prodding to write to another cousin in Chicago, the up-and-coming newspaper editor Nat, as a first step toward trying to emigrate. When Gabriel’s father shows him the journal with his great-grandmother’s poem in it, along with other stories, Gabriel muses, “It struck me that they were like forgotten snapshots, glimpses into a world that was fading into oblivion.”
Weizman does an excellent job of painting characters who reflect their time and place. In 1938 Chicago, Nat worries from afar about the Jews still stuck in Europe but worries more directly about introducing his wealthy, fashion-forward, “south-side snob” girlfriend Sally to his dowdy, Yiddish-speaking immigrant mother. Nat and Sally’s Jewish friends understand that Hitler is crazy but don’t see what it has to do with them, and during dinner they quickly revert to more pleasant talk of upcoming parties.
In these personal histories, nearly every family member has cast off whatever connections to Jewish religion they had. Gabriel’s father stopped believing after losing a son to World War I. Yoyne, a very young, devout, newly married man in rural Belarus in 1896, is shocked at how quickly he is drawn to the wider, more cosmopolitan, unrestrained world he encounters on a trip to Minsk, where his ailing father has sent him to meet with his uncles. It is there that the meaning of the poem, written by Yoyne’s grandmother, becomes clear.
In these personal histories, nearly every family member has cast off whatever connections to Jewish religion they had.
These portrayals are all completely believable, the characters well drawn, but it was disappointing not to meet a single character who stood fast to faith. They were part of our personal histories, too, including religious Zionists who left Europe and took up farming on religious kibbutzim in the early 20th century, and some who kept the faith even in America, despite the temptations to discard it for an easier life. Still, each chapter is captivating, and the writing is outstanding.
Weizman, who made Aliyah at 19 from Toronto, teaches fiction writing in Israel and is also the author of “The Wayward Moon,” originally published in 2012 and reprinted by The Toby Press in 2023. Weizman told The Journal that “Our Little Histories” is all about questions of Jewish identity. “More specifically, it’s about the process in which the impoverished, persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe emerged from the shtetls and into the wider world. They were coming out of a communal, religious way of life, and had to negotiate their way into modernity, and that meant redefining their identity as Jews. The book traces that process, and shows what happened to their ancestors. The question of Jewish identity continues to be urgent and important in the lives of young Jews today, and it is something every Jew has to wrestle with.”
Judy Gruen is the author of “Bylines and Blessings,” “The Skeptic and the Rabbi,” and several other books. She is also a book editor and writing coach.
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