SOURCE: "Lured by the Messiah," in The New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987, pp. 15-16.

Wisse is a Romanian-born Canadian educator, translator, essayist, novella writer, and critic. In the following laudatory review of The Family Mashber, she notes Der Nister's tendency to obscure his own opinion of characters and messianic ideas in the novel by providing several justifications for every action and introducing "objective" characters to view the events.

In 1928, shortly after his return from western Europe to the Soviet Union, and before the campaign of public denunciation forced artists into line, the Yiddish writer Pinhas Kahanovitch, who wrote under the pseudonym Der Nister, published a characteristically opaque story called "In My Estates." In it an impoverished student comes upon a story book by Der Nister ("the hidden man"), who is portrayed on the book jacket as an institutionalized madman. The story within the story is about a...