Berezina (Sylvain Tesson, 2015)

A wild-eyed Frenchman comes up with the idea of traveling from Moscow to Paris, retracing the steps of the Napoleonic army as they retreat from the failed invasion of Russia in 1812 – 200 years later to the day, on a motorbike with a sidecar.

This is exactly the kind of idea that appeals to me, although I’m not sure why that is. I guess I have an adventurous streak that is fed somewhat by imbibing travel writing of trips done by others. I also like it when there are references to history mixed with current development – which is exactly what Tesson does in this short book. It retells the 13 days it took him and his friends to traverse a big stretch of continental Europe in old Soviet-era motorcycles (called Urals..).

Tesson, ever the adventurer, had ten years prior to this trip undertaken a ride on horseback from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan, and on foot from Yakutsk to Calcutta, so he is well acquianted with Russian and Russian-adjacent milieux. He is accompanied by Cédric, Thomas and two Russian guys, Vassily and Vitaly. There are some monuments for the fallen French along the way, but not much. The names of the towns they passed reminded me of the ravages of King Charles XII in the roughly the same area about a century before Napoleon. There is yet another connection between the two kings, or at least their countries, as strange coincidence had it that Napoleon’s brother-in-law became the king of Sweden in the early 19th century. The original wish of the Swedish ruling class was that Napoleon’s own brother would be sworn in, but he was deemed unfit. By the perspicacious efforts of a single Swedish nobleman, who nominated one of Napoleon’s generals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte – who in the Swedish succession became king Charles XIV John. This idea was of course a move to geopolitically safeguard Sweden from invasion, and to proffer allegiance to the mighty Napoleon. Funnily enough, his great-grandchildren are at the top of Swedish nobility to this day, and Jean-Baptiste’s great-great-grandson has held the title of King of Sweden for nearly fifty years.

Digressions to questions of royal lineage in the Nordics aside, this little adventure was a fun read. Tesson muses on Russian customs, memorial culture, European road infrastructure. One of his companions is a geologist and mentions a theory of black soil that is interesting.

What if someone would do a similar journey following in the footsteps of the Carolingian army? It would probably be accused of being xenophobic, somehow. Or maybe it has already been done, in a way, by historian Peter Englund, I don’t know.

The Book of Paradise: The Wonderful Adventures of Shmuel-Aba Abervo (Itzik Manger, 1939)

This is what Itzik Manger (1901-1969) looked like in 1928.

Original title (transliterated from Yiddish): Di vunderleche lebnsbashraybung vun Shmuel Abe Abervo: Dos buch fun Gan-Eden

Itzik Manger was a poet and all-round man about town in the thirties. This is his only foray into writing a longer piece. It is a fantastic tale about mr. Abervo, whose angelic soul is reborn into a little baby – who for some reason can talk and for an audience of three “wise men” (a rabbi, a judge and a rich merchant) tells his tales from his previous life in the Jewish Paradise. This paradise bears a lot of similarities with “The Pale of Settlement” and the combination of biblical imagery and old world Jewish culture is pretty funny. Normally, this kind of stories are written from a Christian perspective – but this is decidedly Yiddish.

The grand story is about angels Shmuel-Aba and Pischerl (a name that also appears in Cannetti‘s Auto-da-fé, from 1934) who spend time in the paradisiacal court of King David. The second half of the book concerns the rescue and return of a ox which escaped to the Christian Paradise – which, in this story, lies in direct proximity to the Jewish Paradise – kind of like the borderlands between the Pale and the surrounding areas. This part deals a lot with Jewish-Christian interaction, and brings up love between a Christian woman and Pischerl. It is not seen as suitable by the community. The story is filled with details and flavors of traditional Yiddish culture – some of which are explained in a glossary at the end (at least in the edition I read).

I liked the bits about the drunkard angels, the Ottoman magicians, the weird idea of the talking baby. It is quite an unusual mix of different ingredients. The Paradise of the book is not a Messianic utopia, but rather an afterworldly version of earthly life. There are poor angels (who only have one pair of wings per family that they have to share) and there are drunks, loner rabbis that noone wants to listen to, matrimonial strife and even problems with antisemitism. It seems Manger wanted to comment on the present day in his own way.

Here is a list of the towns mentioned in the book:
Lemberg
Krakow
Sadgora
Apt
Horodenk
Kozhenitz
Schpole
Berdychev
Sasov
Dubne
Chortkov
Lublin
…and Manger himself was from Czernovitz
(I only know about half of these place names)

Reading this book also brought to me some sadness, for two reasons. One, that this world is vanished and two, that I don’t have any element of this world in my life (although I feel that I should). The only thing originally Yiddish I’ve read before this has been Bashevis and Babel, I think – so I’m very much a novice. I’ve seen some of the Yiddish language movies from the 20s and 30s, though (notably Yidl mitn Fidl, Dybbuk and Yidishe glikn). I saw Nurith Aviv‘s recent and terrific documentary on Yiddish enthusiasts, which I recommend. But my grandparents didn’t speak Yiddish, so I don’t have any visceral connection to the language in that sense.