Writer Esther Kreitman’s well-known brothers were authors I.J. Singer and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
In 1947, when the editors of the Biographical Dictionary of Modern Yiddish Literature asked her to describe her life and work, she began: “I come from a famous rabbinic and literary family.”
Kreitman died in London in 1954, unwell and largely unread outside Yiddish circles, her second novel still untranslated, and most of her short stories available only in the Yiddish press. She knew what she was, and she knew, with equal precision, what she was not. Her younger brother, Isaac Bashevis, was to go on to win the Nobel Prize in 1978.
She was born Hinde Ester Singer in 1891 in Bilgoray, Congress Poland, eldest child of a hassidic rabbi and a mother from a family of misnagdim (opposers of hassidut). Her parents were, in every sense, a mismatch. So was her marriage. In 1912, a union was arranged with Avram Kreitman, a diamond cutter. The couple moved to Antwerp, Belgium, where Avram’s father supported them until he cut them off without a penny after they shed their wigs and beards in revolt against tradition.
They were poor all the rest of their lives. Avram fixed clasps on handbags. Esther did embroidery, took in translation work, and at one point opened a small grocery shop. This hurt her pride. When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1914, she and her husband and their infant son fled to London. She never returned to Poland. She died there in 1954 at age 63. Within the Singer family, she was regarded, as Anita Norich puts it, with restraint, as “something of an embarrassment.”
Kreitman’s son, Maurice Carr, translated her first novel into English. Her second was not translated until 2010. Most of her short stories reached English readers only now. Her brothers left for New York in 1934 and 1935. She stayed in London.
The Collected Works of Esther Kreitman, edited and largely translated by Norich, published by The Library of the Jewish People, an imprint of Koren Publishers Jerusalem, gathers everything that survives: two novels, a story collection, newly translated stories and essays, autobiographical notes, family remembrances from her son and granddaughter, and letters from Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and George Bernard Shaw. At 900 pages, the book is an act of sustained scholarly labor. The case it makes, assembled in full, is that Kreitman belonged not in the footnotes of her brothers’ careers but alongside them.
Her first novel, Der sheydim tants (“the devils dance”), published in Yiddish in 1936 and appearing in Maurice Carr’s 1946 English version as The Dance of the Demons, traces a rabbi’s daughter named Deborah who is denied education, married off young to a hapless man, and slowly consumed by poverty and collapse.
The novel opens on a Shabbat afternoon in a Polish village. Deborah is sitting beside the stove, reading psalms, while her brother skates on the river outside. She asks her father what she is going to be one day. He has been praising the boy’s Talmud studies. “What are you going to be one day? Nothing, of course!” The reply lands like a stone, and the novel builds everything on top of it.
Kreitman refuses to let Deborah be simply a victim, which is the harder thing to do. Deborah reads whatever she can find, psalms and grammar books and Karl Marx, hiding the Russian grammar book on top of the tiled stove where her father cannot reach it.
Kreitman rebels against the Talmudic injunction her father cites, that teaching a daughter Torah is like teaching her frivolity. She also fails. She marries the diamond cutter and does not escape him. The novel ends with WW I breaking out around Deborah while she lies in an Antwerp apartment, drinking cup after cup of coffee she cannot afford, drifting in and out of hallucination. “She was past caring.” There is no rescue here, no political awakening, no moment of clarity that redeems the suffering. Only exhaustion.
Kreitman’s novel Diamonds, published in 1944, shifts the lens to Gedaliah Berman, a diamond merchant whose contempt for those below him runs through every transaction. The trade is organized on rigid hierarchy: polishers at the bottom, cutters above them, then brokers, then merchants at the pinnacle. Kreitman maps that structure onto every other institution her characters encounter.
The Jewish charitable organizations that assist wartime refugees discriminate between the rich and the poor, exactly as the diamond exchange does.
'If you have little, you’ll lose the little that you had before'
One woman dispensing aid reminds a refugee: “If you have much, you’ll get much more. If you have little, you’ll lose the little that you had before.”
In Diamonds, the rebellion is already over. Berman chose money over community long before the novel opens, and his father’s slow disappearance into a London old-age home is the cost he has not yet been asked to pay.
Near the novel’s end, after Berman’s wife has died and his sons have broken with him, he is searching through his father’s effects from that home. He finds a crumpled note. The handwriting is shaky, some letters big and clumsy, others tiny and round. “I ask you to respect my last wish. In God’s name, do not put up a tombstone for me. I rue the day when I came to live with you.” Berman paces his renovated dining room all night, the note on the polished table, staring at his every step. In the morning, it is still there.
The story collection Blitz and Other Stories, originally published as Yikhes in 1949, is where Kreitman’s range becomes fully visible. The stories move between Polish towns and working-class London without strain. The short story “The New World” is narrated by a girl from before her birth, already aware in the womb that a boy was expected and that her arrival will disappoint. “Clocks” follows a London woman who refuses to shelter during the bombing raids until she sees her office clock still ticking on a bombed-out wall, the one wall left standing after the building is destroyed. She goes home and asks her mother to take her to the shelter. She is afraid, she says, of the clocks.
The title story, “Blitz,” describes London’s East End on a Shabbat afternoon as German planes begin their run. Jewish women and men sit outside in the September sun discussing the war, the sons who will be called up, and a Jewish boxer named Simon makes a fist. Then the bombs fall. By the end, the Nazi airplanes are described “like the spiders who once brought fire to the Temple.” In eight words, the bombing of a London Jewish neighborhood is placed inside a longer Jewish history of destruction. Kreitman does not explain the comparison. She leaves it to work on its own.
Norich’s introductions are careful and scholarly without being remote.
She documents the significant differences between the Yiddish original of The Dance of the Demons and Carr’s 1946 English translation: German cultural references are erased, Deborah’s inner voice is softened, and a sign warning “Jews Wearing Gaberdines and Dogs Not Admitted” is inserted in the English text to mark the post-Holocaust moment. In Yiddish, Deborah and her brother recite Goethe from memory. In English, the German is gone and replaced with Pushkin. These are not errors. They are records of how a text changes under historical pressure; of how the audience of 1946 required a different novel than the one Kreitman had written in 1936. The volume also includes two variant translations of “The New World” and two of “A Silk Gaberdine,” letting the reader see directly how different translators in different eras produce different Kreitmans.
One question the book raises, without quite resolving it, is why Kreitman received so little recognition in her lifetime and so little in the decades following.
The easiest answer is that it was due to the shadow of her famous brothers and the machinery of literary reputation. But Norich offers a more precise diagnosis.
When the male Yiddish modernists declared independence from traditional Jewish life, they were heralded as modern men creating new literary forms. Kreitman responded to the same influences and refused the same constraints, but as a woman she was labeled neurotic, difficult, and hysteric.
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote that she was “ill” and either mad or epileptic or possessed by a dybbuk.
What her son said, in the Yiddish obituary reprinted in the book, was that she had a “tremendously rare sensitivity.”
He was writing in grief, and it should be read accordingly. But something in it holds. Her characters break down, but their breakdowns are historically located. They break down while watching capitalism operate, watching traditional Jewish life dissolve, watching the poor be ground down by indifference. Kreitman does not separate the psychological from the economic.
The Zweig and Shaw letters tell the rest of the story.
Zweig wrote in June 1939 that English publishers were reluctant to take on books about Jews because Jewish readers themselves were tired of Jewish problems. Shaw, writing in February 1940, directed her to British publisher Victor Gollancz and wished her well. Both letters are courteous, brisk, and ultimately unhelpful. Together, they amount to a record of a writer who had produced serious, original fiction, found readers who admired it, and could not get it into English in her lifetime. Diamonds was published in Yiddish in 1944. It appeared in English 66 years later.
Kreitman does not offer uplift. She offers observation. Her characters are poor and rich and foolish and shrewd and frightened and brave, and she watches all of them with the same steady attention. The East End under bombs; a diamond merchant pacing his renovated dining room; a girl in a Polish village hiding a Russian grammar book on top of the stove so she can climb up and retrieve it when her father is not watching.
Kreitman looked at these things carefully. That was enough. And as it turns out, it was more than enough.
THE COLLECTED WORKS
OF ESTHER KREITMAN
Edited by Anita Norich
The Library of the
Jewish People and Koren Publishers Jerusalem
900 pages; $45