1. Howard, what is your recently
published book, The Last Dekrepitzer, about? The book is about a man found
fiddling blues and Hasidic melodies, niggunim, in a New York subway station in
the early 1960s. A young man begins a discussion with him. The man speaks Black
English. He is the Dekrepitzer Rebbe, the sole member of his sect to survive
the Holocaust, living anonymously. The book describes his odyssey—from pre-war
Poland, through the war, to rural Mississippi to the streets of Manhattan—his
marriage to a Black woman, and his confrontation with God, whose existence he
never doubts, over what He did to the Jews. It recounts the journey of a man
who has lost everything—his family, his people, his mission, and his faith in
his tradition—who lost one world and is lost in another. He is the spiritual
leader of a community that has been wiped out, who fashions an identity from
the shards of his broken life.
2. What inspired you to write it? I
began writing The Last Dekrepitzer when I was seventy. A lifetime of
disparate anxieties were roiling inside me: issues of faith, purpose, the
struggle with my Judaism, mortality, God, America, the treatment of Blacks, the
tensions between Blacks and Jews and, of course, the Holocaust magnifying them
all. With age came a certain frankness of observation and a frightening clarity
of mortality. So, I began with the story of this rabbi cut-off from his lost
community. A man brought up with a mission and destiny that could no longer be
fulfilled. Not just a foreign Jew alone in New York but one often mistaken for
a Black because of his speech. He carries a relic—the ancestral fiddle of his
forebears and their niggunim, their tunes, that he plays on it. I had no idea
when I began writing how this man who shared my core angsts, but also bore
vastly greater ones, ended up busking a New York subway station, but was driven
to learn his story. I knew that story would express what was roiling within me.
Each day I was drawn more and more deeply into the life of this man I was
discovering, I guess creating.
3. Your story explores how one loses
their faith but regains it in the aftermath of the Holocaust, but you convey it
in an unusual way. Why is a Hasidic
rabbi posing as a Black street-fiddler in the South? He isn’t posing. He is saved by
Black soldiers and, believing his entire Jewish world has been destroyed, he
finds comfort in his years alone among the rural Blacks in Mississippi. His
introduction to America is entirely to that rural Black America. He learns
their English, their music and even preaches in their church. As a device,
speaking Black English and playing Black music underscores his isolation. In
Mississippi he is a white Jewish rabbi among Blacks. In New York he seems much
a Black man among whites. His Black wife mirrors his experience becoming a Jew
among Blacks and, in the North, as a Black woman among Jews.
4. What is the spiritual journey of
your main character like, given he lost all belief and hope during what he
suffered and witnessed during World War II? The protagonist, Shmuel Meir, is brought up to be the
“Rebbe,” the leader of his sect—an intermediary between his followers and God.
He can never escape that role, even though all of his sect has been killed. He
never loses his belief that there is a God—indeed he has a revelation leaving
no doubt. He believes that God has broken His covenant so he has lost faith in
the covenant between God and His people—all that he was brought up to believe.
His fiddling is a constant confrontation of God with what He has done. In a
sense, it is because he has such a firm belief in what Divine justice is
supposed to be, that he confronts God with his wordless fiddling which he
describes as his reproach to God.
5. How did anyone find the will to
live in the shadows of the Holocaust’s blinding destruction? A question I find difficult to
answer. Many did not. My family had been in America for generations before the
Holocaust and my father had been in the Navy during the war. But I have friends
who are the offspring of second families of their parents who lost their wives
and children in the Holocaust. For many, they were just human beings and had to
go on, just had to go on, and found different pathways. Some were irreligious
before the war and became religious, others were religious and lost their faith
and the most interesting may be those who were religious before the war and
maintained their religion after. These different people are explored in the
book.
6. What role does music play in your
inventive story? For
the protagonist there are no longer true words of prayer to God only the pure
emotion of his music which he plays religiously three times a day at the times
of Jewish prayer. But in the course of the book, he encounters different people
with different music. The African Americans in their rural church for whom
music is an essential part of their service;
a sixteen year old Jerry Lee Lewis, a devout fundamentalist, who has
just been expelled from a seminary for playing “My God is Real” boogie woogie
style; the Reverend Gary Davis who plays on the streets of New York to bring
people to Jesus; and the character Sonneblick whom he meets in Washington
Square who attempts to restore words to the Dekrepitzer’s niggunim. All these
different musics reflect on each other.
7. The rabbi takes a black woman for
his wife. Interracial marriage in the 1960s South was not exactly embraced by
either race. Have we come a long way since then? Yes, we have. It was illegal then
in many states. It certainly isn’t now. People don’t turn their heads today to
look at an interracial couple as they would have in 1950s New York. We could
certainly go a great deal further. The child of that couple will face a very
different life if he or she is born with black or white skin. But look, just a
few weeks ago Senator Booker married a very Black Jewish woman, the child of an
interracial marriage. I don’t think anybody winced or would have winced had she
been white skinned. Nor do I think a Black person in a synagogue would be quite
the anomaly that person would have been in the 1950s. Curiously, I read that in
the early 1930s the first valedictorian of the synagogue school of the
congregation the wife visits in my book, which was then located in Harlem, was
Black.
8. Your book is the recipient of a
National Jewish Book Award but it seems like it has a wider appeal beyond
Jewish readers. You believe your book is
not just for Jews, but for the Black community as well. Why? The book clearly has broader
appeal. It was a finalist for the Athenaeum Award, which has nothing
particularly Jewish about it. My goal was, in part, to explain each society to
the other. Also, the Black community has deeply religious elements to whom the
protagonist’s struggle with God would resonate. I don’t think Blacks realize the
fundamental aspect that slavery plays in Judaism, that the people were
basically born in slavery and the nation began upon leaving Egypt. Conversely,
I don’t think Jews understand what slavery really is. I certainly didn’t until
I read certain Black slave narratives and Frederick Douglas. So there is seder
in the book in which the Rebbe leads the meal with a table made up entirely of
children and grandchildren of slaves. Similarly, I know from presentations I’ve
given to Black groups that they neither have a real understanding of the
Holocaust or that before the Holocaust Jews in Europe experienced very similar
oppression to that which Blacks experience in America.
9. The last remaining survivors of the
Holocaust are dwindling in number by the day. How important is it, especially
in these times, to advocate against anti-Semitism and to find a way to heal the
wounds of hate and prejudice? I
don’t know. I grew up in an era in America which was probably the most secure
for Jews in their entire history. Then suddenly the last few years….It has
shaken me. The entire nature of our society and what is considered acceptable
discourse has been terribly compromised. Things that were
unacceptable—antisemitism being just one of them—are now bruited everywhere.
I’ve not wanted to accept what people tell me, that my book couldn’t be
published because of attitudes in the publishing industry having nothing to do
with the merits of my book…It won a major award and was a finalist for another
and yet nobody would publish it…agents were so sure of that they wouldn’t
represent me. I’ve heard it repeated a thousand times—it begins with
antisemitism—and if that’s true, everyone best be concerned with what’s next.
10. The main character is in a
perpetual argument with God while trying to find a way back to believe again.
He is also feeling like he has no home, torn between an unsafe Mississippi and
Jim Crow Laws and a Harlem that is conditional and a reminder of his displacement
in the world. How does one find their place in a world that seems upside down
to them? Without
sounding corny, I believe it is all between individuals. The main character
finds love in his wife and then in his child. He discovers two dear friends. I
have done much pro bono law work among African Americans and, while we speak so
often about the “crisis of the Black family,” I see often wonderful large
families, even if broken, and tight communities under very adverse conditions.
We can’t let God, or concepts of God, ruin the limited lives we’ve been
granted.
11. How does the reader grapple with a
story where its main character grapples with how evil had become so ordinary? Actually, people tell me that there
are no evil characters in my book. Everybody is “good.” But,, of course the big
evils are always lurking—the Holocaust, the Klan, the quiet prejudice. The
reader sees all these good folks making their way through it. It’s an old
story. A great teacher once asked a Shakespeare class I was in to summarize in
a sentence the moral of King Lear. “Virtue
is its own reward,” he said. We were astonished. He went on. “The good
daughter, Cordelia, …the virtuous characters get done in. They have solace in
their virtue when they are alive. The evil daughters and son, Goneril, Regan,
Edmund, no matter what they achieve, they’re never happy, never have enough.”
12. Where are Black and Jewish
relationships and cultures today, compared to the Civil Rights Movement era of
the 1960s? Now it
is terrible. My uncle, who was a prominent rabbi, marched with Dr. King.
Certainly, it was much better in the fifties and early sixties. Black power,
the Panthers, Black Muslims, were overtly antisemitic and it deeply affected
the subsequent generations. They gave license to voice antisemitism. There are
some reasons for that antisemitism. But one could say the same thing for other
racisms. Because some landlord exploited Black tenants is no more reason to
hate the Jewish public interest lawyer fighting him than there is to hate a
Black schoolteacher because a Black thief may have held up your aunt. It’s very
bad now. Yet Jews were with the Blacks in the fifties and sixties. Jack
Greenberg was the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The entire strategy
followed to reach Brown v. Board of Education was devised by a forgotten
Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, Nathan R, Margold. On Memorial Day weekend two
years ago, someone stuck a Black Lives Matter lawn sign in which they’d spray
painted “Jews.” I wrote an article puzzling what to make of it.
About
The Author: The Last Dekrepitzer is
Howard Langer's debut novel and his first work of fiction in 50 years and it
received the National Jewish Book Award. His book was featured in
numerous publications, including: Times of Israel, Hadassah Magazine,
Moments, Kirkus Reviews, The Philadelphia Bar Reporter, and The Reporter.
He was also awarded, a half-century ago, the Theodore Goodman
Award for Short Fiction
He
teaches law at the University of Pennsylvania and practices law in
Philadelphia. He founded Langer Grogan & Diver, PC a quarter-century ago. He
has obtained several of the largest recoveries for consumers (several were over
$100 million) in class actions brought under both the antitrust laws and the
RICO statute. He is the author of a treatise on antitrust law, The
Competition Law of the United States, which has gone through four editions.
Langer, who has spoken about his book at numerous Jewish Community Centers, synagogues,
the Jewish Theological Seminary, African American seniors Groups. a federal
judges’ book group, and University of Pennsylvania, resides in Philadelphia. For more information, please consult: www.howardlanger.com and https://www.facebook.com/howardlangerauthor/.
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