The Brothers Ashkenazi

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You can sense that Israel Singer was a pragmatic man also from his deep understanding of commerce, economics and politics. And as an experienced journalist, he was. I think it's almost impossible to write at this level without infusing your work with your own emotional and ideological bias, and Israel Singer did that as well, of course. However, what allowed him to write without a specific political bias here (that would have given his novel a different bent) is that his heart was fully with the Jewish people, and for anything else it was pretty much out of the way. Partiamo negli anni in cui la rivoluzione industriale portava al fiorire delle fabbriche tessili e ne seguiamo l’evoluzione con i telai a vapore che vanno a soppiantare i metodi produttivi obsoleti, guardando da spettatori ciò che questo comportava per le famiglie di operai, costretti a turni sfiancanti ma comunque sempre più poveri e affamati perché non adeguatamente ricompensati, e gli effetti della miseria in cui erano costretti a vivere. Sono i tessitori che, attirati dai benefici governativi volti a sviluppare il territorio, accorrono per aprire le fabbriche tessili.

The story of the two brothers helps only to outline the historical time: when the first Germans started to arrive in Poland bringing work, the huge Jewish community that was at first very orthodox but slowly started to change while changing the period. So, from one side we have the orthodox Jews, bound to customs and tradition, and the younger Jews that started to be more openminded. E nel corso di tutto il romanzo, un'intolleranza verso gli ebrei, accusati ingiustamente, ingiuriati, indesiderati. Devo invece fare i miei complimenti per la realizzazione del formato audio. la scelta di Moni Ovadia come lettore è stata decisiva. Stiamo parlando di un ebreo milanese di origine sefardita, nato a Plovdiv in Bulgaria, un intellettuale di altissimo livello che ha dedicato tutta la sua vita al (Wikipedia) "recupero e alla rielaborazione del patrimonio artistico, letterario, religioso e musicale degli ebrei dell'Europa orientale."

The beauty of 'The Brothers Ashkenazi' lies in its ambitious purpose. I.J. Singer here draws an excellent and ever-detailed picture of Lodz between the end of the 19th century and the end of World War I. Among the forces at work in town to shape it as an industrial Sodom and Gomorrah there is a thriving Jewish community and a prosperous German enclave.

The dilemmas faced by I.B. Singer's characters - who are often torn between faith and secularism, superstition and progress, Europe and the US - are all too clear but, in a way, bred in their bones not influenced by the times and the society they live in.La conclusione per tutti è stata per me dura da accettare, e questo probabilmente perché, nonostante non sia sempre così ma dipenda dal genere, preferisco vedere trionfare i buoni, almeno nei libri in cui si descrivono storie vere. Un'intolleranza comune a tutti: tedeschi, polacchi, russi, quando non sanno con chi prendersela, utilizzano gli ebrei come capro espiatorio. I due fratelli Ashkenazi nascono e vivono in questo contesto. Simcha Meyer e Yacob Bunim, figli dell’osservante Reb Abraham Hirsch Ashkenazi, diventano ricchissimi dal nulla. Simcha Meyer diventa uno dei più grandi industriali di Lodz per la sua intelligenza, per il suo intuito per gli affari e per il suo cinismo. Jacob Bunim si fa strada per la sua fortuna, perché è bello, simpatico e capace di trattare con le persone. La storia seppur romanzata, delle lotte della classe operaia e delle prime organizzazioni sindacali (figure indimenticabili e nobili quelle di Nissan e di Teveyeh, i pensatori idealisti, fondatori delle prime organizzazioni sindacali, indomiti, inesauribili, infaticabili ed indimenticabile pure l’immagine della figlia di Teveyeh sulle barricate).

For me this book was OK. It provides a detailed description of Jewish life in today the third largest city of Poland, Łódź. The story begins with the birth of the town and then the birth of twins. The life of the town and the life of twins through to their death. It is about life of “a Jewish family” in Poland. It is equally much about the life of the city itself rising from German immigrants who brought knowledge of textile production. Weaving and looms and soon steam factories. The time frame is the 1800s through to the end of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It is the story of Jewish life in Poland and Russia. Rife antisemitism. The growth of unions and changes in the textile industry. One family, two brothers and a large number of supporting characters. I didn't know anything about the eldest Singer before reading the following line at the opening of 'The Family Moskat', my favourite novel by I.B. Singer: Singer gave us a broad view in Brothers. This is a family saga but it is also a saga of the economics, history and the culture of the Jewish community in Lodz, Poland. There is a constant march of conquerors and the conquered through this city. I am no scholar and there are no dates in Brothers so I am best guessing the timeline. I think the novel runs from roughly 20 or so years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the 1920's. There are a couple special guest star moments when Lenin and Nicholas and Alexandria appear which help to place a date to the action but other than that let your knowledge and a good history book be your guides. Attorno a questi due fratelli sono descritti i dilemmi degli ebrei dell’epoca: su che valori basare la propria vita? Dedicarsi agli affari e dimenticarsi delle tradizioni religiose dei padri o restare legati alla tradizione? Nel romanzo il flusso narrativo è inarrestabile: il vecchio sostituisce il nuovo, Marx prende il posto del Talmud; la giacca corta e le guance rasate sostituiscono la gabbana e i cernecchi. Si trova il modo di aggirare la legge religiosa che impedisce agli ebrei di lavorare il sabato. Trionfa l’individualismo assoluto.This book is very much a retelling of the industrial revolution’s effect on the textile manufacturing industry and the ways in which mechanization and steam power was able to replace hand labor. Consequently the rise in worker unrest is part of the story, and this book carries the story through the Russian Revolution of 1917 and on to the creation of the Second Polish Republic after WWI. Un grande affresco è quello dipinto da Singer, che si muove nell’arco temporale della vita dei due fratelli Ashkenazi, che danno il titolo al romanzo. In 1983, Joseph Mlotek gave the lecture, “ Fun di brider zinger biz itzik manger” (“From the Brothers Singer to Itzik Manger”) at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal. And so we return to the irony of introducing I.J. Singer by identifying him as the older brother of I.B. Singer, and most especially in the context of The Brothers Ashkenazi . The large-scale ambitions of this novel not only brought a new scope into Yiddish literature, its fluid plotlines carrying the heft of massive social and political forces, the collisions of its characters deftly tracing turbulent dynamics of history. Fraternal rivalry is itself—irony of ironies—one of the novel’s major themes. It is the competitiveness between two brothers, twins separated not by nine years but five minutes, that fuels the outsize ambition. The implacable need that drives the central character, Simha Meir Ashkenazi, to leave his mark on the world is his habit of compulsively comparing himself to his brother, Jacob Bunem, the more physically prepossessing and charming of the two.”