Yenta Mash

"We were slaves in Egypt, my mother said, and today we're slaves of Stalin, exiled to hard labor in the Siberian taiga, without rights and without the slightest hope of rescue."

"Isn't it remarkable, my mother said, what people can take pleasure in, what they can believe in, in times of need?"

"Well, well—you escape from hell and here’s the devil in your face."

"If this wasn’t the good life, what was?"

"1943. The height of World War II. A howl of lamentation resounds from one end of Russia to the other. Death knocks ceaselessly at our doors, delivering brown envelopes with official stamps bringing news that a father or son has “fallen heroically on the battlefield in fulfillment of his duty to the Fatherland.” The bereaved wail to the heavens, split the skies with their cries, writhe in pain—and early the next morning they take their place in the ochered, the breadline. Bread—bread is holy! Bread waits for no man. Bread rhymes with dead. In those years, the last thing likely to appear before a person’s eyes as he takes his final breath is a slice of bread."

"No one moves until all the bread has been distributed. Only then do you swallow—not noticing, or at least pretending not to notice, that the very last portion, the one Mother has left for herself, is smaller than anyone else’s. No one mentions it—that’s the way it is with mothers."

"In those bitter days, we’d been scattered to the ends of the earth, exiled to Siberia for our own or our parents’ supposed transgressions. We were the lost tribe, the deportees. Once upon a time, we’d been lovely brides and schoolgirls, shielded from the slightest breath of wind. After two years of hard labor, it was hard to recognize us as those same young ladies. We spent all day in the forest dressed in rags, our trousers held up with twine, faces covered with masks against mosquitoes, buckets and shovels in our hands. Starving, exhausted, isolated from all human contact, we had the feeling that the Lord Himself had gotten lost somewhere up in the tall, dense crowns of the pine trees and completely abandoned us."

"Some worried that the man's recklessness was going to get him into big trouble. They begged him to watch his step, stop his flapping and jabbering. But reasoning with him was tough. He believed he was God's messenger. It was up to him to create peace and unity in the world, to persuade the lost flock to stop following the false messiah-that is, the Soviet regime. Yes, he went that far."

"In the first years after the war, Jews began returning from the evacuation. First we wept over the ashes of our ruined towns, and then we moved to the cities and looked around for a place to live-a corner, a room under a leaky roof, anywhere we could settle down and unpack our troubles. New to the big city, we were hungry for something familiar to nourish our souls, something to call our own."

"Then the concert would begin. Fool or not, Mona Bubbe knew exactly how to behave when she felt accepted rather than pushed away."

"All in all, it was a magnificent city project, which provided the starving population with cultural activities to consume along with our miserable crusts of postwar bread."

"The cities and towns were so much alike, it was as if they'd been born of the same mother. Even in the tiniest town you could find everything a Jewish community needed: a rabbi, a judge, a mohel-and more kosher butchers and study houses than you could count."

"The community scrimped and saved and sacrificed to build this magnificent temple of learning. And then came the Lord with a fiery tempest that annihilated the Jews. The town was no more. Where the finest houses had stood-nothing but craters of ash. Here and there, the conflagration missed a house or two, leaving traces that made it impossible to deny that Jewish life had once flowered in these parts. Who can understand God's plan, His ways of punishing one and sparing another?"

"Among the few buildings that miraculously remained intact after the great destruction were the synagogue and the school. They stand there still-upon their foundations, but no longer upon the pedestals we put them on. They've lost their splendor, their power to awe and inspire. Alas, the synagogue is now a grain warehouse, the Tarbut School an ordinary middle school. The blessing that used to close the Sabbath, separating the sacred from the profane, is long since forgotten in the town. Today the sacred is no more; only the profane remains. Time passes unmarked by the Jewish calendar, the age-old order that had ruled the days and weeks and months of the year from generation to generation."

"Every day, it seemed, something new came along that she'd never get the hang of, but she consoled herself with what she did keep up with-and even more with all that she knew about a vanished world. She was a living witness to a time and place that today even the most highly educated people could learn about only in books."

"Don't worry, it's nothing," the woman said soothingly. "Someday we'll learn to get along and live together as one. The young people are better at it than we are."

"What a country this is, she couldn't stop thinking, where as a new chapter of life begins, the children are teaching their elders how to be Jewish."

"Yenta Mash has left us rich images and complex responses to human betrayal and God's indifference in stories that are compelling and memorable."

"Yenta Mash and her stories will be remembered because they have rare and masterful elegance, uncanny insight into vast prairie-like swaths of human nature, and unusual heart."

"an inspiring survivor who brings humanity to underrepresented history"