Amongst the greatest European novels of the century is Norwegian Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, the gripping story of a man struggling from one day to the next in a world that grudges him his merest existence. Israel Rabon’s book was influenced by the widely-translated Hamsun and is no mean tribute to it. It is the highly-readable story of an unemployed ex-soldier in 1920s Poland, at that time the heartland of Yiddish literature. The Poland Rabon presents us with is largely his home town of dreary industrial Lodz, a textile centre with important Jewish and German populations. He shows us Lodz as a wasteland badly affected by World War One and inhabited by despair and fierce mutual enmity between its Polish, German and Jewish citizens.

The classic experiences of 1920s Depression literature are all here; sleeping in damp basements, being recruited as a strike-breaker, parading the streets clothed in advertising boards, ending up in the municipal poor house... Like Hamsun’s Hunger Rabon’s The Street has the desperate authenticity of lived — and long and tiresomely lived — direct experience. The Street is a book giving us the unvarnished truth, the smell and texture of the Poland of the badly-off. The scenes in the poor house (’Beggar’s House’) are familiar from George Orwell’s masterpiece of vagabondage Down and Out in Paris and London; the outcastes, the elusive stories of work available, the rumours of plenty in the next town or the one after that, the ways of getting around ’the system’ so as to obtain extra soup or be able to keep out of the cold for a little longer...

The picture fills out with descriptions of Rabon’s experiences in the Russo-Polish war of 1921-22, also described by another Jewish writer, Isaac Babel, but from the Russian side, while another of the book’s characters — a circus strongman — has lived and fought through Bela Kuhn’s Hungarian Revolution, a short lived Communist regime of 1919, and provides a fascinating coda of both romantic adventure and political savagery.

The Street is not yet an established Yiddish classic and has only quite recently (1985) been translated into English. It’s subject matter is very far from the sentimental Yiddishkeit (Yiddish Jewishness) or the Chagall-painted ’Shtetl-land’ Yiddish literature is assumed to contain. In fact it demonstrates that there was by 1928 an emerging urban, fully modern and complete literature only snuffed out, as was Rabon’s life, by the German war criminals.

’As a matter of fact, Fabianik was German.

His mother, Stepha, had lived with a German noncommissioned officer during the occupation of Poland, and it was he who had fathered the boy.

The poor child was hated by everyone. But he was most particularly detested by the old shoemaker.

Fabianik, a weak child with a narrow chest and a large round head perched on a long slender neck, was the butt of the children’s most casual anger. They cursed him, tormented him and beat him. It was a dreadful sight to see the children or the old man mauling him with hands, fists, belts, sticks — anything within reach. Always he was called the Schwab — the Swabian — rather than Fabianik. If something was lost, it was the Schwab who had taken it. If something was broken, it was the Schwab who had done it. By the time he was three Fabianik had learned not to cry, as if he understood that tears would do him no good. Child though he was, he accepted that it was his destiny to be beaten, cursed, and tormented for no better reason than he was a Schwab, a German. The boy endured silently and calmly the blows that came his way and though his eyes might plead for compassion, there was never a trace — not so much as a gleam — of a single tear in them.

Because the children were ashamed to play with him, he acquired the habit of being alone. Isolated from them all, he had his secret dark corners where he made dolls out of bits of dough, where he kneaded animals and people out of clay. If the children intruded on his hiding places and disturbed him or stole his nests of animals, he pretended to ignore them and, without scowling, went quietly off to find some other hiding place where he began again to collect dough and clay with which to make his collection of lions, horses, people, and cats. Not the slightest trace of pain or sorrow in his dull, immobile face; in his soul every impulse of protest, of resistance against torment, had been uprooted.

I had occasion to notice that Fabianik avoided sunlight. He was drawn to the dark. To shadows. To whatever was veiled and obscure. He avoided the clear light of the day, as if he feared he might be noticed—seen. And Fabianik was not supposed to be seen. Was supposed to keep his distance. Because he was a Schwab.’ p13-14