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Rating: Despite the geographical and historical distance, the role of the family in the tradition of Yiddish culture evokes the importance of this institution in our civilization and Mediterranean cultures in general. The Moskat family, consisting of a patriarch, Reb Meshulam, many children, and just as many grandchildren, expands with successive marriages, separations, illegitimate children, and new unions. It extends beyond Nalewka Street, the heart of the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw, and welcomes, amidst grudges, quarrels, and reconciliations, new characters and stories.
For three decades, from the last remnants of the Belle Époque to the brink of the abyss that will swallow it in the Nazi Holocaust, the genealogy of a wealthy Polish Jewish family offers a glimpse into the Ostjudentum, the life of Ashkenazi communities, and narrates their history, traditions, customs, and changes in a lively and colorful fresco, spirited and nostalgic, tinged with a deep posthumous sadness and at the same time an inexhaustible vitality.
The main narrative thread follows the arrival of a student from a rabbinical family, Asa Heshel Bannet, in Warsaw and his entry into the wealthy Moskat family through his acquaintance with Abram Shapiro, a bon vivant son-in-law of patriarch Meshulam Moskat, and his love story, opposed by the family, with one of Meshulam's granddaughters, Hadassah, after an escape to Switzerland and an unhappy marriage with Adele, Rosa Frumetl's daughter from her first marriage, the patriarch's last wife.
Around this emotional affair gather the love and existential anxieties of the various branches of the family and the related or nearby families, such as that of Koppel, the intriguing factotum and administrator of the Moskat's assets, married with children but in love with one of his employer's daughters.
The story indeed involves the destinies of an entire culture and language, Yiddish, in the midst of the wave of antisemitism spreading from Nazi Germany to Stalin's USSR and also overwhelming Poland, previously welcoming to the chosen people, with the contagion of nationalism and plutocratic Jewish conspiracy theories.
Singer himself is a descendant and living witness of this incredibly rich and powerful tradition in all fields of art and literature and leaves us - not only in this novel - an extremely faithful portrait of his roots, having himself escaped the flood of the Shoah. The author condenses in the decline of this family a paradigm of the entire historical reality made of traditions, the orthodoxy of the Chassidim, a rigidly formal moral, the traditionalism of wigged wives and men with gabardine, long beards, and phylacteries, and at the same time the unstoppable push exerted by modernity to rebel against this way of life stubbornly anchored to a prescriptive and rigorous view of morality.
Almost all, if not all, characters experience in a dilemmatic manner this opposition between a way of living that represents a certainty - one of the few amid persecutions and wanderings of the tribes of Israel - made of an attachment, even to misfortunes, such that they see a danger even in nationalist Zionism urging the young to seek a true homeland and hopes for the future in Palestine, and the sirens of modernity in the forms of homogenization that aims to blend with the Gentiles by eliminating the outward signs of ethnic and religious belonging, which constitute both a strong identity call and an equally easy target.
The search for normality and the pain of loss run through the two central generations of the Moskat family: the first, Meshulam's, does not witness the changes due to age limits, and the last, Asa Heshel's children, will not have time to fully experience the tradition. The two central ones, those of Abram Shapiro and Asa Heshel himself, suffer the tearing tension between the burden of the overwhelming legacy of Yiddish Judaism, which permeates life down to the way of dressing and eating, and the desire to pursue a path, even an individual one, to happiness, rebelling against arranged marriages and repetitive and devoted rituals.
In all the contrite and effervescent stories that Singer - awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978 as a singer of Yiddish civilization - gathers in 'The Family Moskat,' there is a faithful and impartial portrayal of the vitality of this people, accustomed to pogroms and diasporas but ever reactive, ready to leave the land of their fathers and then return out of nostalgia: such is the case with Lia, Meshulam's daughter, who goes to America to marry Koppel, the administrator of her father's assets, against the wishes of the whole family fearful of public opinion. Lia, now an emancipated Yankee citizen, returns to visit Warsaw shortly before the outbreak of the war with Nazi Germany with her husband and children and cannot resist the ancestral call of her origins, even when it becomes clear what will soon happen with the Danzig crisis. In fact, almost in a sort of 'cupio dissolvi,' she remains in Warsaw until nearly the arrival of the Nazi troops, while the bombings reduce the ghetto neighborhood around Krochmalna Street to rubble.
The story stops here, on the threshold of the chronicle, which is about to take on the grim outlines of the Hitlerian final solution, the total extermination of the Jewish race, when it is clear that escape is no longer possible, with the stunned awareness that the only messianic prospect is destruction, that: "Death is the true Messiah, this is the truth."
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