“On the Shores of the Black Sea”, a short story by I. Singer set in Odessa, exploring the Zionist dream and the Jewish tragedy

To give away the ending of "On the Shores of the Black Sea", Israel J. Singer’s brief yet intense novella, would be a crime against literature. But it would also be – and this is no small matter – a crime against history. For the story and fate of the young Pinkhas Fradkin, son of the rabbi of a village in the Kherson region, are part of ancient history, set between the Great War and the Russian Revolution – or civil war – which also ravaged Ukraine; yet they are a tale that tragically evokes recent days as well, and how that sea, the Black Sea, has once again become an inexorable force of division. The ending itself—ironic precisely because it is painful and tragic—bears a striking resemblance to these times and to the fate of the new nation that Pinkhas would have wished to build. An enchanted dream in the verses of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi that is ever repeated: ‘I am in the West, but my heart is in the East’. Israel Singer wrote this short novel, recently published by Adelphi in its ‘Piccola biblioteca’ series (ten years ago it had been included alongside other stories by Passigli), in 1942, after emigrating to the United States in 1934. It was serialised in the New York Yiddish daily Forverts: the prestigious magazine of New York’s Jewish community, which in 1926 had sent him to the Soviet Union to report on the living conditions of Jews following the Revolution (it was published by Adelphi in 2024 under the title The New Russia). In 1942, the extermination of Eastern European Jews was underway, while the new homeland to be built in the British Protectorate remained a dream.

It is the same dream as that of the young son of the country rabbi, stockier and sturdier than might be expected for a young man destined for scholarship and the Scriptures and to follow in his father’s footsteps, who saves up his pocket money for his great sea voyage to the Middle East by giving private Hebrew lessons to secondary school pupils, ‘for the fabulous sum of 15 kopecks an hour’. Yet as soon as he can, he rushes to the port of Odessa, fascinated by sailors of all races and nations, and dreams of setting sail for the East to work as a farmer where one day the new, free country of the Zionists will be born. From tragedy to tragedy, from the upheaval of history to catastrophe, amidst the frenzied succession of ever-new armies and massacres, Pinkhas Fradkin’s dream slips further away each time, as in a picaresque tale told with disenchantment and irony. First he becomes a soldier, tormented more by the anti-Jewish hatred of his fellow soldiers than even by the enemy’s bullets; then, back home, he is threatened with a wealthy marriage to the plump daughter of the village’s wealthiest rabbi; then on the run again, in Odessa, ravaged by gangs flying the yellow and blue flag, by the shouting youths of the Red Army, and then again by the White troops. Finally, news reached him that Cossack gangs in the Kherson region—who hated Jews more than Reds—had carried out a massacre in his village as well.

The destiny described by Rabbi Yehuda Halevi – ‘I am in the West, but my heart is in the East’ – never leaves the young Jew’s mind. He is the great poet and philosopher of medieval Spain who also features repeatedly in the melancholic and impassioned discussions of the Jews of the first wave of emigration to Jerusalem, and in Amos Oz’s childhood memories in A Tale of Love and Darkness. The intractable and tormented dilemma between the dream of Zion cherished by the Jews of Europe and Odessa and the harsh realities of the new homeland, which still lay entirely to be built.

Pinkhas Fradkin will join the Red Army, driven by no other motive than the mission to avenge his people. He will become a ruthless warlord, enlisting in his ramshackle International Regiment all the Jewish men from the villages in the region where he grew up: “‘‘Jewish brothers,’ he told them in words as dry, heavy and fiery as red-hot stones, ‘I am addressing those of you who have served in the army, those who know how to hold a rifle: come with me to fight our tormentors, our executioners’”. These words are not the conclusion of “On the Shores of the Black Sea” – that would be a crime – but they convey just how relevant Singer’s Ukrainian tale remains even to these times in Israel, and to the assessment of its crucial day yesterday: “Jews, we ourselves shall avenge the blood that has been shed.”