Steve Stern. A Fool's Kabbalah. Melville House, 2025 [Paperback].
A stunning twinned tale of two men struggling to comprehend and deal with the Holocaust and its aftermath. One, Menke, is a consummate fool; in fact, he is his shtetl's joker and is faced with the arrival of the deathly serious Nazi death squads during the war. The other, Gershom Scholem, a real-life Kabbalah scholar and researcher of Jewish mysticism, is a post-war agent hunting down important stolen Jewish books. The novel is rich in the ideas and symbolism of Yiddish folklore, poorly understood and misperceived as they are by this gentile, but moving and thrilling nonetheless (I was frequently looking up terms and references). The wordplay is extraordinary to me, or maybe common in this culture. I am quite fond of the questioning nature of this thinking/culture. It made my mind race as I retraced certain sections. Extremely important in Menke's tale is his out-of-reach heart's desire, the radiant rabbi's daughter Blume, as well as his shadow, the waifish albino outcast Tsippe-Itsl whose long silences are punctuated by intermittent spells of logorrhea and whose strangeness is countered by a resolute capability to keep things together. Gershom's story is haunted by the ghost of the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, by memories of Hannah Arendt, and by discussions with Martin Buber, as well as a range of postwar personages.
The writing swept me away from the beginning. It should be obvious that this is not an easy read due to the events/eras covered and the struggles faced by both protagonists. However, do not let that dissuade you from reading this book if it seems of interest. I felt uplifted by this novel. It worked a certain magic upon me, especially because I have long been fascinated by the archetypes of the fool and the mystic. Menke's foolish resistance and Gershom's mystic questioning (that last chapter!) feed my own troubled spirit in our perilous times.
