In The Odyssey of an Apple Thief, Moishe Rozenbaumas
(1922-2016) recounts his fascinating life, from his Lithuanian
boyhood, to the fraught experiences that take him across Europe and
Central Asia ...and back again, to his daring escape from Soviet
Russia to build a new life in Paris. Along the way, we get a rarely
seen portrait of the lives of working-class Jewish youth in
Telz/Telsiai, a religious town renowned for its yeshiva. We hear of
the games children played, the theft of apples from a Catholic
orchard, and Rozenbaumas's early apprenticeship as a tailor once
his father leaves the country. The war breaks out and the teenaged
Rozenbaumas flees Lithuania alone, unable to convince his mother
and sibling to go with him. We learn of his life as a starved
refugee in an Uzbek kolkhoz, his escape into the Red Army, and his
unlikely work in the reconnaissance unit of the Soviet Army. After
the war, Rozenbaumas is drafted into the Marxist-Leninist
university and as a cadre of the Communist Party, ultimately
escaping in 1956 with his family to Paris, where he and his wife
give an openly Jewish education to their children. In the vast
literature of memory written by Jewish witnesses before, during,
and after WWII, Rozenbaumas's account stands out for the
singularity of his experience and for his deft narration of events
of mythological dimension from a personal perspective. The
Odyssey of an Apple Thief offers not only invaluable testimony
of this historical moment but also an illuminating and original
portrait of Lithuanian Jews in the twentieth century.
Between 1994 and 1997 my father wrote his memoirs in Yiddish. The idea that I would translate them into French seemed natural to us, as it seemed to be self-evident that this task was incumbent upon ...me rather than any other translator. It was during an interruption of my first forward momentum that my father himself, tired of waiting, himself began a translation of his own book. In a French that was his and belonged to no one else.
The Yiddish manuscript had been written in black pencil, almost without any punctuation, which is to say in a language without
The present paper explores the range of meanings associated with the Jewish beard in Europe, the Mediterranean countries, and the Middle East between the ninth and eighteenth centuries, and the ...processes through which those meanings were constructed. Although classical Jewish law prohibited shaving with a razor, it did not require that the Jew wears his beard conspicuously long or untrimmed. Where Jews cultivated such an appearance, such as in the Maghreb and the Muslim or Byzantine East, it was due no less to the cultural values of the surrounding environment, in which the beard functioned as a badge of masculine honor, than to the demands of Jewish tradition. In those same areas the kabbalists were able to endow the beard with an additional dimension of mystical meaning, regarding it as a symbol of divine splendor which was not to be tampered with in any way. Not surprisingly, where the beard was most venerated, it was also most subject to violent attack or punitive removal. In medieval Christian Europe, by contrast, most Jews opted not to grow their beards in a pronounced manner. This did not prevent Christians from making use of the beard as a symbol of the Jew and his otherness. Jews (and Christians) travelling to the East or the Holy Land would sometimes grow their beards there but remove them upon returning to Europe, apparently so as not to be perceived as an alien Other. The meanings of the Jewish beard were never determined by the Jews alone, nor by the cultures in which they lived, but through dynamic interactions on both the social and discursive levels.
