Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist

1. 1893–1916: From a Galician Shtetl to Columbia University

1 1893–1916 From a Galician Shtetl to Columbia University The air in late September is mild in the western Ukraine, and the sunset is unhurried. “The earth darkens slowly,” recalls the writer who would assume the name Samuel Roth in America; his Hebrew name was Mishillim (the name may refer to one of the builders of the Second Temple, or may connote “peace-bringer”).1 The manuscript in which the phrase appears is Roth’s unpublished autobiography, “Count Me among the Missing” (“CMAM”), which is a source of vivid details about Jewish life in eastern Europe.2 Before World War I’s ravages and realignments, which destroyed 50 percent of Roth’s shtetl, the area was part of the province of Galicia, an economically backward place under the control of the Austrian empire. Mishillim’s hometown was called Nuszcze. Jews had inhabited this small crossroads community on the banks of the River Seret for centuries, together with Polish Roman Catholics and Ukrainian Greek Catholics.3 In Polish or Ukrainian shtetls, a visitor might experience what was less ubiquitous in reality than in Yiddish fiction: muddy streets and floors, rubble, leaky roofs, ill-lit and twisting streets, slop pails, rickety furniture, ramshackle prayer houses, and people on the verge of starvation. These features did not apply in all shtetls, at least not in all sections of the Jewish quarters, despite rampant Jewish poverty in the late decades of the nineteenth century.4 Many Polish small towns were carefully laid out, and administered by a Polish lord and Catholic bishop. Jews and Christians lived in proximity to each other, their places of worship not far apart. Jews wished to live near the market square, whether or not Christians c h a P t e r 1 2 Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist lived there too.5 In Nuszcze the ruins of a Catholic monastery towered on a hill, and the town house of the Polish lord, or puretz, was another landmark. Dark roads wound though forests beyond which stood the brick, mortar, and stone of golden cities. About fifteen years after he left what in his poems he called “Nustscha,” with Galician earth the scene of battles and ethnic violence, Roth wrote a tender, elegiac sonnet sequence to his birthplace. It marked the apex of his career as a young poet. To dream away a Sabbath afternoon Upon the hillside shadowing the lake Wherein dim palaces of crystal wake To view and stay and do not vanish soon6 These poems depict, as do the stories of Sholem Aleichem, S. Y. Agnon, I. L. Peretz, and other writers, a place of collective Jewish myth. From archetypical narrow lanes where people share not only space but a communal togetherness, immigration takes shtetl dwellers not to Jerusalem but to where their souls, as Roth puts it, “cry lonely through the lofty towers.” They left, as Roth shows in Figure 1. Drawing of Ustcha, Galician shtetl where Samuel Roth was born. Roth Archive, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. By permission of the Roth estate. 3 1 8 9 3 – 19 1 6 the early chapters of “Count Me among the Missing,” not only because of the heavy hands of the Polish lords, but also because their own rabbis, teachers, and wealthy merchants were compliant with the lords of the manor and the status quo.7 “The Strangest Things Happen on Yom Kippur” One Day of Atonement eve at the turn of the twentieth century, Mishillim watched “black, mournful groups of men, women, and children, on foot and on horseback, in buggies, and in wagons” gather at the synagogue steps. Jews had come to Nuszcze for the Day of Dread: sorrow, humility, and submission. Mishillim witnessed the adult men prostrating themselves in humiliation at the synagogue steps, allowing other male congregants to flagellate and walk on them. Whatever else it signified, this acquiescence was a gesture of trust in the willing victim’s fellow Jews.8 Inside, the voice of Yussef Leib (the word connotes “Lion” in Yiddish and German), Mishillim’s father, personified holiness to the congregation he led in the rising and falling Jewish “soul-breath,” Kol Nidre. Mishillim, his mother, Hudl, and his sister, Soori, told their father that it was as if they had never seen him before, so awesome did he appear in the glow of the candles with the congregation spread before him. This was an evening...