A giant without mazel

Mazel plays a central role in the life of human beings. Some who are conspicuously ungifted are carried to the pinnacle of fame. Some others who have teemed with talent lie moldering in the depths of obscurity. The difference is the element of mazel

Take the case of Peretz Smolenskin, whose works I have been rereading these past few weeks. “Peretz who?” most of you would surely ask. Nor can anyone be blamed for asking. At what Federation meeting or from what synagogue pulpit or from what Judaic studies lecture was the name Smolenskin last mentioned?

Peretz who? The Peretz who conceived and propagated political Zionism decades before Leon Pinsker and Theodore Herzl. That is who. Peretz who? The Peretz who is one of the revivers of the Hebrew language, persisting in what seemed a fanatic conviction that Hebrew language would be spoken again on the soil which had given birth to it that’s who. Peretz who? The Peretz who wrote half a dozen best-selling novels in Hebrew, demonstrating thereby that a language long considered archaic was vibrant and vibrating, that’s who.
Smolenskin was a creative genius, a scion of the prophetic tradition, a single-handed editor of the most widely read Hebrew periodical of the 19th century, and a savage critic of assimilationism among the Jews of his day. His profound analysis of anti-Semitism and his dire predictions of its genocidal goal make for astonishing reading in the light of horrors that have befallen the Jewish people in the 20th century.

Smolenskin wrote two essays “Am Olam” and Ait La’taat” (“An Eternal People” and “A Time to Plant,” both masterpieces whose meaning and validity have remained solid down to this very day. In the first essay he developed the thesis that the indestructibility of the Jewish people was the result of their religion — national spirit. In the second — written 25 years before Herzl’s electrifying “Das Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”) — Smolenskin argued that only the return of the Jews to Zion offers continued confidence for their survival in the face of what he diagnosed as cataclysmic disaster.

Peretz Smolenskin died at the age of 44of tuberculosis and heartbreak. He had been reviled in his time for being a prophet of doom and for wielding a barbed pen. And when all his prophecies were fulfilled, he has been doomed to forgetfulness. “If one has no mazel,” says a Yiddish proverb, “it is better not to have been born.”

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