Author’s note: “Weekend Short” is a recurring column profiling short stories. Analysis from the readership is encouraged in the comments section.
Welcome to the weekend!
Today’s short, published in 1915, considers an adult immigrant’s sacrificial love (with an Abrahamic twist) and the heartbreaking reality of generational transience, as well as the danger of not letting go of one’s former nationality. This “Zelig” by Benjamin Rosenblatt is an ugly story, but appropriately so. Our protagonist, stupefied and built as if formed in a “cast-iron mold,” is “Old Zelig,” who wished to spend the rest of his days in his beloved “Little Russia,” what is now Ukraine. But his boy moved to the States with his grandson, and Old Zelig was eventually called upon to move to New York with his wife. The story finds him working with a monomaniacal passion at an ossified job to return to a homeland that no longer exists as he remembers it.
Rosenblatt begins:
Old Zelig was eyed askance by his brethren. No one deigned to call him “Reb” Zelig, nor to prefix to his name the American equivalent–“Mr.” “The old one is a barrel with a stave missing,” knowingly declared his neighbors. “He never spends a cent; and he belongs nowheres.” For “to belong,” on New York’s East Side, is of no slight importance. It means being a member in one of the numberless congregations. Every decent Jew must join “A Society for Burying Its Members,” to be provided at least with a narrow cell at the end of the long road. Zelig was not even a member of one of these. “Alone, like a stone,” his wife often sighed.
In the cloakshop where Zelig worked he stood daily, brandishing his heavy iron on the sizzling cloth, hardly ever glancing about him. The workmen despised him, for during a strike he returned to work after two days’ absence. He could not be idle, and thought with dread of the Saturday that would bring him no pay envelope.
You can read the rest here, listen to it here (AI narration, unfortunately), and purchase a copy here.
That last paragraph, with Old Zelig shredded to his core as he accepts he will never return home so that his grandson might attend a secular American school, is enough to spring a leak in even a crusty fellow’s eyedrains. This is the immigrant’s dilemma: moving to where one knows is best for him — even as the timbre of his soul wants nothing more than to match that of the lands of his youth.
Reading through this fictional account, I thought every other sentence of my maternal great-grandfather Otto, a trained baker who left Germany after the turn of the century and made his way to Sheboygan, working for a time in the Kohler plants before making enough to make a modest living as a baker in Fond du Lac. Two fruit crates of his from American Fruit Growers Inc. (Product U.S.A.) now labor as bookshelves in my office after having comprised my grandmother’s childhood wardrobe. There was no waste among these necessarily parsimonious forebears of ours, and while Otto grew to love his daughters’, grandchildren’s, and great-grandchildren’s homeland, he would speak and sing in German to himself while resting after lunch at the nursing home.
While Old Zelig’s reaction to his son’s death and this grandson’s wishes is jarring and deadly, many who have known that home is unreachable (either physically or spiritually) can sympathize with his despair. Zelig understands at the end that his role is to lay down and die so that his descendants may succeed in a place that allows people like him to achieve what his old country would no longer abide.
It’s back to cold after that fleeting few days of 60-degree summer that tantalizes the Midwest every Spring. I’m always amazed at how many dogs spring out of the ground for a walk once it warms up — there was a constant parade of huffing, whuffing mutts in our neighborhood while I was out shooting hoops and inspecting the rabbit warrens that the melt revealed. Today, I’m meeting with my maternal grandpa at his woodshop — he and I are to discuss some bookshelves I want to add to the office here. One never has too many books, only an insufficient amount of storage . . . is what we’re told not to say at bookmongers anonymous.
The case for extricating ourselves from the table re: Ukraine and Russia.
Made in America . . . pretty great so long as one can afford/maintain it.
Author’s note: If there’s a short story you’d like to see discussed in the coming weeks, please send your suggestion to label@nationalreview.com.