Leyb Rashkin was the pen name of Shol Fridman (1903–1939), a bank and hardware store manager from the eastern Polish town of Kazimierz Dolny nad Wisłą (in Yiddish, Kuzmir). In 1936, he published an enormous Yiddish novel about Godlbozhits, a fictional town much like Kuzmir. Rashkin shared a PEN club prize in 1938 and was killed by the Nazis in 1939. In an 1943 essay, Isaac Bashevis Singer described Rashkin as a “genuine talent,” part of a generation that used a difficult Yiddish, “thickened with provincialisms,” to show what made each Polish Jewish community distinctive (“Concerning Yiddish Literature in Poland” (1943), trans. Robert Wolf, 122). Singer, who belonged to the same generation, had written his own provincial novel, the 1935 Satan in Goray, a grotesque chronicle of the destruction of a Jewish community first by Cossacks and then by mass religious psychosis.

Singer oversaw the transformation of his difficult prose into a digestible English that smooths out geographical difference and gives his American oeuvre the elegiac accent of his 1943 essay, not the harsh tone of Satan in Goray. Rashkin had no such control, but his novel has been served arguably even better by Jordan Finkin. A prolific scholar at the intersection of literature and linguistics, Finkin describes the vocabulary of Rashkin's characters, who throw around liturgical Hebrew, Talmudic Aramaic, Russian, Polish, and underworld Yiddish, as “the kind of succulent language that makes a translator cry with delight and frustration” (xviii). His translation, appropriately, uses an edgy English that makes little allowance for Gentile conventions. Take Mirele, the wife of an upstart businessman, ambitious for her children, eager to Polonize. Finkin renders the narrator's sarcastic comment, “zi iz… . shoyn gepokt un gemozlt” (Rashkin, Di menshn fun godlbozhits, 92) as “she is… . pocked and measled” (75), with a note explaining that the Yiddish expression means that a person, having survived the inevitable childhood illnesses, is ready for anything—one of the many footnotes for which language students will thank him.

Mirele returns in the novel only a few times; she ends, we can assume, badly. It is hard to feel sorry for her, because we have not gotten to know her, or any other characters. The only exception is the bank bookkeeper Shimen Shifris, who moves from losing his parents, through multiple love affairs, to an ambivalent relationship with a Socialist organizer and her convictions. She is certain that the bourgeoisie is doomed and salvation will come only from the workers and peasants; it is not clear from the novel whether Rashkin agreed.

The strongest impression is of the town itself, experienced through its bodily effluvia. Whenever anything happens to the pharmacist, he is wracked with diarrhea. A skilled worker's hand is crushed in a machine the day he hears the tannery is closing. The fat doctor gives his hunchbacked wife repeated home abortions, over her objections. Poor people stand in the snow hoping for handouts of food or coal, jumping up and down to keep their bare feet from freezing off. A woman and her lover tell her drunk husband to sleep in the kitchen; later he is found strangled on the synagogue floor. The bank collapses, the factory closes, the policeman ignores murders and fines shopkeepers for trivial infractions. Everyone takes bribes. The novel reads like an amalgamation of the seamy newspaper stories in Eddy Portnoy's 2017 Bad Rabbi. If you need to learn that the shtetl was not idyllic, this is the book for you.

The jacket cover identifies Godlbozhits as “a Yiddish Yoknapatawpha in all its tragic absurdity,” and Rashkin resembles William Faulkner, who wrote a whole novel, As I Lay Dying, about the transportation of a corpse, as well as Sherwood Anderson, whose Winesburg, Ohio stories reveal provincial town life as simultaneously, as in Godlbozhits, tedious and frightening. Singer compared Rashkin's generation to earlier Yiddish writers who made a provincial town with a speaking name—such as Mendele Moycher Sforim's Tuneyadevke (“Spongertown”)—the target of their political satire; in the interwar period, he argued, this kind of purely negative satire was passé. While Rashkin may not have succeeded in making readers feel in Godlbozhits the sense of unbearable moral loss that suffuses Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and Singer's Goray, or the piercing isolation of Anderson's Winesburg, he created a disturbing, memorable text, and English readers are lucky that Finkin has made it accessible.