SOURCE: "Moshe and His Brothers," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIV, No. 14, September 24, 1987, pp. 38-40.

Malouf is an Australian poet, short story writer, novelist, memoirist, editor, and critic. In the following review of The Family Mashber, he praises Der Nister's capacity for creating a starkly realistic and intriguing portrait of Russia in the 1870s.

There are points on the earth, some of them disconcertingly close, that seem forever blank. We cannot imagine that life goes on there in the ordinary way; we cannot imagine good weather there or any of the settled existence in time that belongs to London or Paris or even to newer places like Boston or Sydney. This is partly a matter of ignorance—who would have guessed that there is a city in the Ukraine, called Berdichev, that even in 1865 had two hundred thousand inhabitants? It is also a matter of...