In his own day, Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) was best known for his poetry; today he is known mostly to specialists. His literary masterpiece may be his novel The Zelmenyaners, written and published in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and lately available in an English translation by Hillel Halkin. The novel tells the story of a Jewish extended family living around a courtyard in a Belarusian city, and their experience of the Russian revolution and Soviet rule. Madeleine Cohen writes in her review:
The brilliance of Kulbak’s novel . . . is that it is not a simple or propagandistic satire of the older, counterrevolutionary, backward Jews corrected by their Bolshevik children. In fact, these children are the butt of Kulbak’s satire as often as their parents are. And much of the novel’s empathy is focused on what might be lost in this period of rapid change. The novel mourns old shadows dispelled by electricity at least as much as it celebrates, [for instance], an uncle’s late-in-life friendship with a non-Jewish potter he meets on a kolkhoz (collective farm). . . .
The happiness this uncle finds at the kolkhoz might be the only happy ending in the novel; one old Jew is able to adapt enough to find his place in the new world, minding chickens on a collective farm. But not even this will prove to be a lasting peace. While reading The Zelmenyaners, one must marvel at the fine line between Kulbak’s love for Jewish folkways and his engagement in a revolutionary project, whose promises were already starting to break. Just two years after Kulbak finished the novel, he was murdered in Stalin’s first wave of purges of minority cultural figures.
Read more on In Geveb: http://ingeveb.org/articles/to-what-might-the-yard-have-been-compared