Two for the Devil (Small Worlds)
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
It is Rosh Hashanah — the Jewish New Year and Day of Judgment — in Moscow during the Stalinist purges of 1936. In the Lubyanka secret police prison, senior investigator Grisha Shwartzman masterfully pursues the rigorous logic and obsessive legalism of the Soviet witch-hunt. Facing an extraordinary prisoner, Grisha realizes that the Soviet system he has faithfully served is murderously corrupt and that he himself will be the next victim — but not an innocent one. In despair, he flees to his home, where his deranged wife and an unexpected Rosh Hashanah letter from his father-in-law, the enigmatic Krimsker Rebbe in America, await him. The Day of Judgment proves to be a startling experience as Grisha, the once idealistic radical, judges himself, accepts his responsibilities, and is guided to sublime passion and possible redemption by his mad wife, who for twenty years has been patiently awaiting him in a closed wardrobe.
In 1942 a train of imprisoned Jews leaves the Warsaw ghetto for "resettlement in the East." It is Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish year. In a crowded cattle car stands a lonely, defeated individual who is ashamed that he cannot even remember his own name. During the tortuous journey Yechiel Katzman will overhear a talmudic debate and meet a dull-witted giant who turns out to be none other than Itzik Dribble, also from Krimsk. As they arrive in the death camp of Treblinka, Yechiel remembers not only his name but also the Krimsker Rebbe's prophetic curse that exiled him from Krimsk forty years earlier. Yet as death approaches, that curse will prove a blessing.
Stalin and Hitler decree certain death, but Grisha and Yechiel discover Jewish fates. The devil incites loneliness, degradation, despair, and even complicity; through memory, the victims elicit community, dignity, and the awareness of sanctity. Grisha's "Soviet" Rosh Hashanah and Yechiel's "Nazi" Yom Kippur are truly "Days of Awe." Even when death is certain, life can be lived.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The third volume in Hoffman's Small World series (after Big League Dreams) implicitly emphasizes the trilogy's theme: that the far-flung former residents of the tiny Polish shetl of Krimsk are forever connected via their religion, their shared past and the intuition of the Krimsker rebbe. When a letter written by the rebbe in St. Louis is received in Moscow on Rosh Hashanah, 1936, it is a death warrant for Grisha Shwartzman, the character in Small Worlds who rescued the Torah from the burning synagogue and was rewarded with marriage to the rebbe's daughter. The then-idealistic Grisha returned to Russia and an unquestioning devotion to the Revolution. Now an NKVD colonel in the Lubyanka secret police prison, Grisha finds himself, on the first day of the Jewish New Year, brought to judgment for the crimes he has committed in Stalin's name. Grisha's painful moral awakening is a mordant depiction of a man without scruples in a society where morality and truth have been subverted by political tyranny. In the book's second section, a man being deported from the Warsaw ghetto on Yom Kippur, 1942, has another terrifying problem: he can't remember his name, though he can remember having been expelled from Krimsk as a heretic. When he meets another former resident of Krimsk, a gentle giant who needs protection, Yechiel Katzman's memory spontaneously returns, and the rebbe's prophecy that he would never leave Krimsk proves true. Unlike its two predecessors, this is an unrelievedly dark and painful work, its gallows humor swallowed in the tragic enormity of the events it describes. The tortured examination of Talmudic logic and Communist illogic may be more erudite and specific than readers desire. Yet the overriding message of these linked novellas is redemptive. Though the "two devils," Stalin and Hitler, claim two more lives, the morality and humanistic principles of Judaism prevail in an implied rebirth of the children of Israel. Editor, Sally Arteseros.
