SOURCE: "A Major Discovery," in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 259, No. 6, June, 1987, pp. 80-2.

In the following essay, Howe assesses Leonard Wolf's English translation of The Family Mashber, likening Der Nister's difficulty with narrative in the novel form to that of Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago, and praising Der Nister's realistic characterizations.

"Here one has to turn one's soul upside down"—so, in 1935, wrote a Yiddish writer in the Soviet Union to his brother in Paris. The writer, who went by the pen name of Der Nister (Yiddish for "The Hidden One"), had long been drawn to the mysteries and nuances of literary symbolism, making forays into esoteric knowledge that derived in part from cabalistic and Hasidic sources. But, as he told his brother, "what I have written until now aroused strong opposition [from the Communist literary bureaucrats] … Symbolism has no place in Soviet Russia." Nor, in the years...