Blitz and other stories     by Esther Kreitman, Translated by Dorothee Van Tendeloo Original title: Yikhes Original language: Yiddish Original year: 1950 Country: Poland   Published by David Paul Pub. Date: February 2004 Format: 180 pages ISBN: 0954054253 List Price: £9.99 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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One family, the rather amazing Singers of Bilgoray, (Poland), produced three writers; the Nobel-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, his older brother Israel Joshua Singer, whose major novels The Brothers Ashkenazi and The Family Carnovski have remained in print in all major languages since the 1940s when he wrote them, and Esther Hinde Singer, whose married name and nom de plume was Esther Kreitman.

If she has been the Ugly Duckling of this family of Yiddish stars until now then perhaps this very important translation of a book that first appeared in London in 1950 only a few years before her death will groom her for literary swandom.

Kreitman, as her highly autobiographical work lets us know, lived her life under a bad star. Essentially rejected by her domineering mother — who would have favoured another son — she nevertheless seems to have inherited mother Bathsheve’s steely intelligence, an intelligence that prompted her grandson to claim that she would have easily assumed the position of Chief Rabbi in Warsaw if such a thing had not been impossible for a woman of her era.

The stories here fall into two halves; those like ‘A Silk Gabardine’ or ‘Reb Meyerl’ that evoke the ambience of a Holy Jewish Poland made so distant from us through space and catastrophic history that it seems unbelievable to imagine it still existing a single century ago, and another set of stories that, rather than looking back to klayn-shtetlekh* Poland, describe in a elemental and brilliant way the world of the London Jewish poor in the 1930s and 1940s. The Polish stories such as ‘Reb Meyerl’ (based on her father’s life) mix nostalgia and deep love of place with an unsentimental view of the hierarchical nature of the old Jewish world. Kreitman’s stories set in London, like ‘Dogs’ where the happy glare of the floodlit dogtrack offers a holiday from toil and trouble and grim bombed out terraces or ‘Jim’ whose sweatstained namesake lives in a single room on chips and cups of tea have a heartbreaking intensity.

Of course the short-sighted, grumpy and awkward Esther Hinde, writing in that language that even her rich and successful brother the Nobel-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer could only describe as ‘dying—but not dead’, of course her amazing, stark picture of wartime London — in the Chekhovian ‘Clocks’ for example — has lain under the rubble of time ever since it was written.

But, underneath the rubble that has now been so carefully cleared away by an inspired trio of translator Dora Van Tendeloo, editor Sylvia Paskin and tyro publisher David Paul, it is clear was, all the time, well — those who understand will understand — another Singer!

*the world of little Jewish-inhabited towns (‘shtetl’, pl. ‘shtetlekh’) in Eastern Europe.

‘The barges lie burning on the Thames, like low mountains on fire— Night was falling. The sun was going down, enflamed and glowing red. The heavens were left to bleed. Two fires lit up the sky: one in the east and one in the west.

The Nazi aeroplanes were still there. Just like the spiders who once brought fire to the Temple, they flew in more and more bombs to drop on the Jewish alleyways, where nothing was left to destroy.’ pp. 134-135 Blitz

Esther Kreitman was the elder sister of Isaac Bashevis and Israel Joshua Singer. She inspired her brothers to write and was the inspiration for IB Singer's story "Yentl." She had to overcome the prejudices of her orthodox Hassidic family before she gained recognition as a writer. These stories are set in London and Poland before and around the time of the Second World War. Originally published as Yikhes (Lineage) in Yiddish in 1950 this is the first time the work has been translated into English. The translator is Dorothee Van Tendeloo.