A Fool’s Kabbalah

Stern (The Village Idiot) delivers a droll dual narrative of a real-life Israeli historian tasked with salvaging the literature hidden from and seized by the Nazis during WWII and a man attempting to make light of his Polish village’s occupation by the Germans. Gershom Sholem (1897–1982) returns from Israel to his native Germany in 1946 to sift through a warehouse of Jewish books and ephemera collected by Allied forces during the liberation. Sholem’s literary excavation is alternated with chapters devoted to fictional “shtetl scapegrace” Menke Klepfisch. As Sholem becomes progressively disheartened by the bizarre evidence of the war’s horrors, Stern recounts episodes in the life of the resilient Klepfisch, who takes on the role of clown for the German commandant after the invasion and spends a “noxious night” in an outhouse with his lover as a means to keep warm. The juxtaposition of Klepfisch’s absurd antics with Sholem’s methodical seriousness gives the novel an intriguing frisson, and the intellectual complexity is shrewdly leavened by the author’s sardonic wit and pithy observations. Stern demonstates his literary finesse with this life-affirming tale. (Feb.)