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| R. Yitzchak Nachum Twersky of Shpikov (1888-1942) |
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Introduction
R. Yitzchak Nachum Twersky of Shpikov (1888-1942) from the Chassidic lineage of Chernobyl, had an unusual critical perspective of the Chassidic world during the early 20th century. Shpikov is now known as Shpykiv, in present-day Ukraine. I have drawn extensively from the work of Professor David Asaf[1] who has researched a letter written by R. Yitzchak Nachum Twersky, which has become a most compelling document in Chassidic history.
This letter, or “confession” by
the author’s own admission, was sent from Shpikov, in 1910 (when Yitzchak Nachum
was 22 years old), to the Yiddish writer Jacob Dineson (1856-1919) in Warsaw.
It comprised 27 pages and was handwritten in perfect Hebrew almost without a
single erasure.[2]
The young Yitzchak Nachum was weary of his life within the Chassidic court and
felt that his talents had been wasted. He was also weary of what the future
held for him if he decided to make a change.
Background
The Chernobyl Chassidic dynasty
with its many offshoots, was established by the well-known Twersky family. The
branch of Shpikov was started in 1885, by Yitzchak Nachum’s grandfather R.
Menachem Nahum after the passing of his father who was known as the ‘Tzadic’
Yitzhak of Skvira. Yitzchak Nachum’s father was R. Mordechai of Shpikov.
Around April 1910, soon after
writing this letter, Yitzchak Nachum married Batsheva the daughter of R.
Issachar Dov Rokeach (1854-1926), the revered Admor or Rebbe of
Belz. The Belzer Rebbe was a staunch opponent of anything to do with modernity.
He had admired the Chernobyl chassidim and considered it a great
privilege that his daughter had married into this family. Yitzchak Nachum had
his wife, Batsheva, chosen for him six years earlier when they were engaged,
but he had not yet seen her until the marriage. In his writing, Yitzchak Nachum
expressed great anxiety about the fact that his wife had been chosen without
his consent and was dreading being confined to the Chassidic court. After the
wedding, the new groom and bride moved in, as was customary, to the house of
the bride’s father, the Belzer Rebbe:
“The Belz court was famous for its
fortified walls made up of the thousands of Hasidim who flocked to it, and we
can only guess how Yitzhak Nahum endured his first days within the Hasidic
court of which he had been so wary” (Asaf 2006:3).
According to records and accounts,
Yitzchak Nachum was very much revered in the court of Belz, and was admired
for:
“his nobility and his sensitivity,
the beauty of his features and the cleanliness of his clothes, his moderated
speech, his respect of others and his hospitality.”[3]
According to another account, Yitzchak
Nachum was apparently a refreshing scholarly counterweight to the general ‘chassidism’
prevalent in Belz at that time:
“Rabbis who are not from among us,
who come to Belz, are met with by R. Yitzhak Nahum, in order to show them that
besides Hasidism, there is also Torah scholarship in Belz.”[4]
In 1914, after four years in the
court of Belz, Yitzchak Nachum returned to visit Shpikov, and when his father
passed away, the chassidim refused to allow him to return to his wife in
Belz, and he became the next Rebbe of Shpikov. Meanwhile, the First World War
had broken out. The Russian army conquered Austrian Belz, destroyed the town
and burned down the Belzer Rebbe’s court. Batsheva had to flee together with
her father as well as her young children. Yitzchak Nachum was only able to
reunite with his family after the war. In 1925, The Belzer chassidim
returned to Belz to rebuild the court, and the Belzer Rebbe placed his
son-in-law, Yitzchak Nachum, in Rawa Ruska, about 35 km from Belz, a town with
a large proportion of Belzer chassidim. He served as a Rebbe in that
town. Eventually, in 1942, Rebbe Yitzchak Nachum
Twersky was killed, together with his family, by the Germans in the Belzec
death camp. He was given the option to escape but he chose to remain with his people.
Yitzchak Nachum’s sisters
Yitzchak
Nachum had four older sisters. His eldest sister, Feige, married the Rebbe
of Ruzhin, and he set his court in Shpikov (in peaceful co-existence with her
father’s court also in the same town).
His second sister Chaya, married
her relative, R. Menachem Nahum Twersky, the son of R. Mordechai of Chernobyl.
Chaya, however, was attracted to the Enlightenment and to modernity and was
known for her erudition. Her chassidic husband, however, was not
comfortable with her free spirit. Eventually, they divorced, and Chaya got
custody of the children. She moved to Warsaw and there became acquainted with
the authors Y.L. Peretz and Jacob Dineson (to whom her brother was later to
send his letter).
His youngest sister, Mirl, was
married to the son of the Stoliner Rebbe, Asher Perlow. He never became a
Rebbe, although he served as a ‘tzadic’. But she was also attracted to
the Enlightenment and was well connected to Jacob Dineson, to whom she had sent
some of her poems. Dineson encouraged her to continue writing. These brushes
with the Haskalah or Enlightenment and with secular thinking were very
much seen as an anathema to the Chassidic way of life. Her husband was also
attracted to his wife’s way, and, having a talent for music, he broke from the chassidic
norm and went to study musicology in Berlin, without permission from the
family. This was regarded as scandalous. Eventually, they too divorced and Asher
returned home to his father and remarried. On return home, his father threw
away Asher’s violin, the source of all the trouble, and from then on, according
to chassidic lore, the Melaveh Malka ceremonies on Saturday
nights were accompanied only by singing without musical instruments.
In a letter that the now divorced
Mirl wrote to her sister Chaya, who finally also received her bill of divorce,
they celebrated their divorces from their chassidic husbands:
“Hurrah! You have won, my dearest!
Who would have seen even in their dreams that this happy and good moment would
arrive? Freedom, freedom! Praises for your bravery, that you have traversed
this dark hell with your head high!”[5]
Yitzchak Nachum’s love of
books
It was through his sisters that Yitzchak Nachum Twersky made his connection with Jacob
Dineson, and their brother was clearly trying to make a statement because:
“[p]rior to sending his
confession, Twersky sent Dineson his photograph, so that the famous writer
might see the terrible disparity between his external appearance and his internal
world” (Asaf 2006:6).
Yitzchak Nachum was very close to
his sisters because he wrote that it was in his sisters’ rooms that he could be
exposed to “life and literature” and escape from what he considered the
claustrophobic Chassidic world around him.
Evidently, Yitzchak Nachum was not
very good at hiding his thirst for secular wisdom because while growing up,
rumours began to spread that together with his profound Torah studies he was
also engaging in secular literature.
Yitzchak Nachum knew his way
around books because, in Shpikov, there was a private library of 40 000
books that had been left as an inheritance by R. Yitzchak of Skvira, which
included manuscripts on Kabbalah as well as philosophy. As a youngster,
Yitzchak Nachum had professionally catalogued all these books.
He once visited his sister Chaya
in Berlin, where her son Yochanan was studying philosophy and psychology at the
University of Berlin, and he showed deep interest in his nephew’s studies which
included works by Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Kurt Lewin.
Rebbe Yitzchak Nachum’s sharp criticism
of Chassidim
Yitzchak Nachum’s criticism of
Chassidim is very intense. He writes against what he describes as their vulgar
fanaticism, conservatism, constant haggling and laziness. Assaf suggests that
this may have been the result of the “sharpened pen” from his association with maskilim
and members of the Enlightenment, who often portrayed Chassidim in such a
fashion:
“Even the terminology Twersky
uses—“the idiotic costume,” “hallucinations and nonsense,” “wild motions and
customs,” “degeneration,” “atrophy”—is taken from the vocabulary of the
maskilic and anti-Hasidic critical lexicon” (Asaf 2006:8).
Either way, Yitzchak Nachum hates
their dress code, their mannerisms and he highlights this against the beauty he
sees in nature in the world around him which he claims the Chassidim ignore. We
must remember, though, that he was writing when he was 22 years old. He does
not seem to have any issues with chassidism in general because he writes
against what he considers a breakdown in the Chassidic movement that occurred
towards the end of the nineteenth century:
“Since then, the light of Hasidism
has dimmed and its glory has gone into exile, and it has atrophied […], until
now it is little more than a debased coin, a name devoid of real content… My
ancestors did not leave after them sons like themselves, men of understanding
and intelligence, who might influence and impart of their spirit to the
congregation of Hasidim.”
Asaf (2006:10) describes Yitzchak
Nachum as not rejecting traditional Judaism at all, but rather only reacting to
its Chassidic interpretation as he knew it:
”He chooses to remain in the world
of traditional society but wishes to break free from the constraints of Hasidic
society, which he believes no longer fit his needs…[he felt][6] trapped
in the confines of the compulsory Hasidic togetherness, from which it is so
difficult for the individual to break away and redeem his own identity.”
In a sense, Yitzchak Nachum is
saying that some of the noble ideas of Chassidism in general are quite
romantic, “so long as he doesn’t have to live with them” (Asaf 2006:11). Yitzchak
Nachum writes:
“Well I remember what I read in
Dr. Berdyczhewski’s book The Hasidim, where, after heaping copious praises on
the Hasidic theory, he concludes with a heartfelt cry, “May I be so lucky as to
share their portion!” […] And, recalling that exclamation, I cannot hold back
my laughter. Indeed, Herr Doktor! How right you are! But how convenient it was
for you to utter this exclamation, on your lofty chair at Heidelberg
University, far removed from the Hasidim and their masses. But what would you
say if it really fell to your lot to be among them always? Methinks you would
have spoken differently then, a very different call would have issued from your
heart, and together with me you would have cried, “May I be so lucky as not to
share their portion.””
……………………………………………………………………………………………
THE LETTER:
Extracts from R. Yitzchak
Nachum’s letter to Jacob Dineson
What follows are some excerpts
from this heartfelt letter from a nascent Rebbe to a lay secular author. The
translation from Hebrew into English is by David Louvish. It is a very long
letter but it offers a unique internal glimpse into some profound issues
within the Chassidic movement that are often ignored and hardly ever spoken
about. More importantly, this letter is a journey right into the soul of a man
who was not afraid to be human:
“Sunday, [the week of parashat]
Terumah January 24, 1910, Shpikov
Dear friend and beloved author,
Mr. Jacob Dineson!
For a whole year now I have been
endeavoring with all my will and strength to write your honor a letter. For
there is none other to whom I can lay bare my mind and reveal the secrets of my
life or, better, the gloomy life of my environment; and there is none other who
possesses a warm, sensitive, feeling heart, that might fittingly resonate to
all the spasms and tremors of my soul…
I have sent you my portrait… I
wished you to see and recognize all the duality and two-facedness of my world,
to apprehend the great difference and distance between my inner world and my
outer world…see all the wretchedness and ugliness in my clothing, and conclude
therefrom by logical analogy as to the whole picture, all the external
trappings of my life. I wished you to recognize all the darkness and gloom
around me, to inspect at once my external appearance, in all its fearful
darkness…
[M]y own world is not good and
not beautiful…there is another, more beautiful world, more fascinating and
appealing. Like a man sitting in the dark, having never seen light in his life,
the thought having never occurred to him that darkness is not good but harmful,
and suddenly another person appears and opens up for him a window into the
light, to show him its goodness and beauty— would he ever be able to reconcile
himself to his darkness?
Never have I been content with my
narrow, dark, gloomy world, and always am I aware of the contrast between the
great, beautiful world and my tiny, ugly world. And always I say, ‘The place is
too crowded for me.’
Perhaps your honor is familiar
with the state of Hasidism in the early days of its flowering and its growth,
in the time of the Besht and his disciples, and later too, in its heyday, in
the previous generation, when Hasidism itself was still a kind of “system,” and
the Zaddikim who bore its banner aloft were still imbued with the spirit of
Hasidism…Surely your honor has personally perused the books of Hasidism and
extracted the precious pearls scattered here and there in that literature,
among the heaps of ashes of hallucinations and nonsense.
Thus your honor surely knows
about the origin of Hasidism and its state in the first and second period [of
its existence], although your knowledge is not perfect but involves some errors
and misconceptions; for hearsay is quite different from eyewitness evidence,
and a person who has been reared and educated in the innermost circle of Hasidism,
with masters of the movement all around him, familiar with the development of
the movement from its beginnings to this day, with all its faults and merits,
cannot be compared with a person born and reared in an environment foreign to
Hasidism, all of whose knowledge is derived from books alone, from legends, not
from life itself… [But] through popular legends which are mostly very beautiful
but far from the truth…
Your honor resides in Warsaw, the
capital of Poland, where Hasidism still has all its power and its influence is
still tremendous. So let me describe to you, quite briefly, the state of
Hasidism here, in our province, the province of Ukraine. In saying here
“Hasidism,” I use a metaphorical name, for that name is entirely inappropriate
to present-day Hasidism….
[T]he light of Hasidism has
dimmed and its glory has gone into exile, and it has atrophied, continually
declining, continually diminishing from day to day…
In the last twenty years, our
part of the world has taken such enormous steps forward that it has almost
overtaken even Lithuania. A new generation has arisen, a generation that knows
not—and does not want to know— its old ancestral traditions, a generation that
thirsts for [secular] education and longs for freedom…
Instead, a new Hasidism, which
might more precisely be termed “wheeling and dealing,” has appeared. For the
new Hasidism is little more than shop-keeping. A Jew who enters the Rebbe’s
house does not come to be admonished, to learn some virtue, to hear a good
word, for such Hasidim are no more; they come to the Rebbe in his capacity as a
wonder-worker, begging him to demonstrate his miracles for them, to save them
from misfortune, in exchange for the money they pay him for the miracle. And it
is self-evident that such people are most brutish people, whose very
boorishness is their Hasidism…
I imbibed piety with my mother’s
milk, I was reared on the wellsprings of Torah and Hasidism, and no foreign
spirit penetrated our home to dislodge me, God forbid, from my place. But
nevertheless, since the day I attained maturity I was imbued with a different
spirit, I was different from all around me. Of course, that was within the
hidden depths of my mind; outwardly—the less said, the better.
I felt that my world was small
and tiny, constricted, choking and strangling me; and in my innermost being I
longed so much for a different world, a beautiful, wide world, that would give
me enough air to breathe. I despised the people around me, loathed their way of
life, and was drawn upward as if by a hidden force. There, in the infinite
expanse, above the swamp in which I was immersed…
But one thing I do know: I have a…yearning
soul, that could never reconcile itself to its gloomy, dark condition, but has
always longed and pined for another life, more beautiful and far more
interesting. I remember the impression made upon me by my frequent hikes, when
in my youth I would go out in the summer, with my teacher, to the forest
outside the town, along a path meandering between green meadows. Leaving the
house, with its all-pervading stifling air and stifling spiritual atmosphere,
and my encounter with nature…I felt drunk, intoxicated with life and its joy,
intoxicated by the magnificence and magic of nature…I remembered how far I am
from nature—the very opposite, I am far removed from free, honest, and simple
nature, which knows no cunning or falsehood…
Such sorrowful thoughts and
bitter feelings filled my mind as I ended my outdoor walks, returning home
always with pain in my heart to discharge my “duties” and to live my “life.”
Much Torah have I studied in my
life. Much have I racked my brains over weighty volumes of Talmud and legal
codes. I have also pondered books of our philosophers, kabbalists, and Hasidim.
Thereby have I earned a place of honor among the Torah scholars of my town, and
acquired a reputation throughout my neighborhood. And all the Torah scholars
and the Hasidim—of the old type, proficient in the books of the early Hasidim,
who served under the old Zaddikim—come daily to visit me…
My ideas are ideas of life, and
my ambitions, ambitions of life. But my bitter, harsh fate forces me to spend
most of my days among old men— whether old in years or in attitudes, what
matter?—mummified, dismal, whose God is not my God, their views not my views,
all their thoughts, goals, and desires foreign to me. In such circles am I
obliged to spend my days, to partake of their rejoicing, to sympathize with
them in their sorrow and grief, to be considered as one of them…
Thus I sit pining and dreaming,
my imagination bearing me on its wings to the farthest reaches. Suddenly—a
knock at the door. I open, and there before me stands the local rabbi... He
wishes to delight me with a novel point that he has made in his Torah studies.
And immediately I am torn away from my pleasant dreams. It is as if I had
fallen all of a sudden from the heights of magical imagination to the depths of
bitter, black reality. And then the sharp, hair-splitting, discussion begins,
objections and solutions flying back and forth. An onlooker might believe me
wholly engrossed in this give and take; but how bitterly is my heart weeping in
secret, for the ruin of my world, for the theft of my youth’s dreams, that I am
forced to exercise the best of my powers and talents in empty, dry, casuistry
about the minutiae of the dietary laws, in conversation with Hasidim about the
Divine Presence in exile—by God! Do they understand, feel, the meaning of
“Divine Presence?”
[O]r about so-and-so the Zaddik
who performed such-and such a miracle, and some Rebbe or another who worked
some kind of wonder…
I constantly have free thoughts,
but I am obliged to observe my ancestors’ most minute stringencies of
observance; I have good taste and love beauty, but I am obliged to wear the
clothing of the uncivilized: a long silk kapota down to my feet, a shtrayml of
fur tails—that is the “badge of shame” imposed upon us by our haters for
generations, which has become holy to us Jews, enamored of the hand that beats
us—with a skull-cap beneath it, and other such “ornaments” as well…
What would your honor say, were
you to come suddenly, not knowing me, and see me standing among the praying
congregation, clad in this tawdry finery, swaying and praying, what would you
think of me then? Surely you would hold me to be ultra-Orthodox, a devout
fanatic. Never would it occur to you that I am different from all around me,
and that under this showy trumpery of clothes hides a beautiful soul, dreaming,
longing, and pining, just as it would never occur to any of those who know
me—with the exception of those of my young friends of like mind—and who
consider me to be a Haredi.
What is this? What am I? Is it
possible that I am naught but a hypocrite, a sham? Am I permitted thus to
deceive people? Thus do I live out my life here, a dark, gloomy life, without a
spark of light, without a shadow of hope, all darkness about me.
At times of leisure, free of my
environment and its obligations, I repair to the “left wing” of our home, to my
sisters. Then does a new world open up to me. I cast off the dust covering me,
distance myself from the filth, from the grime in which I am immersed all day…There
I meet young friends and acquaintances, and we read and speak of life and
literature. In brief, there I live my real life, there I remove the mask from
my face, to be what I really am…
But what a terrible thought, to
think now where I am going. To the blessed town of Belz in Galicia! For I have
to settle there, in their “harem.” I underline that word to emphasize my
intention, that I am being married by coercion, against my will. For me [to
marry] a woman from there—my gloomy life here, with all its black darkness,
will pale in comparison with the life awaiting me there. First, I am marrying a
woman from there, a woman who has been destined these six years to be my bride,
but even so I have never ever had sight of her face and I have not the
slightest idea of her, her beauty, intelligence, and understanding. And with
such a maid, of whom I know absolutely nothing, I am now being led to the
bridal canopy! Can your honor, a cultured person, living in the twentieth
century, possibly understand and conceive of this?
At best, however, what might I
expect of a “Belzian” maid? What spiritual development could she have had in
such an environment, in such an atmosphere, where such a simple, innocent thing
as learning to write is a serious offense in a young maid, at most a luxury. “A
woman’s wisdom is confined to the spindle”...!
If ten measures of extreme
religious fanaticism, ignorance, and vulgar stupidity came down to the world,
Belz has received nine, and one the rest of the world….
Let me tell you now a little of
their capers, a drop in the sea of their deplorable ways of life, for my feeble
pen is powerless to provide a faithful, complete picture of their doings…and
you will think that I am leading you far, far away, from the cultured lands of
Europe to the uncivilized lands of China or India, for there, only there, can
one view other pictures like these. In addition to the stringent and
precautionary measures that every Jew has around him, Belz have adopted further
such restrictions that have no sanctified source, nor have they issued from the
legal decisors, they originate solely in “ancestral” customs. Left and right,
upon one’s every step, one finds and stumbles over a custom established by “the
ancestors.” So uncivilized, so obstructing and disturbing the free course of
life are these customs, that one cannot imagine how a person…could survive in
such a stifling atmosphere…
Here are some examples. The
bridegroom on his wedding day must shave his head with a razor. And the bride?
That goes without saying, for all women there have shaved heads, for that has
been decreed by custom. And a wig…is considered there a greater abomination
than swine. In all the town of Belz you will not find even one woman wearing a
wig on her head, but all wrap their shaved heads in a kerchief. And on Sabbath
days and festivals they wear a kind of old-fashioned veil…
Picture, your honor, if you will,
the following scene. Imagine that myself and my “intended” are being pictured.
A young couple—“He” has his head shaven, and “She” has her head shaven. He
wears a shtrayml and a skull-cap on his head, with all the other finery…and she
wears a magnificent scarf on her head with all other female trumpery from
Chmielnitzki’s times. A nice caricature! Good candidates for a museum of
antiquities! Were it not that this matter concerns myself, I could laugh most
heartily at the sight of such a picture.
Unfortunately, however, the
matter is so close to me, so relevant to me, that it may arouse in me not
laughter but only tears, tears over my ill fortune, the fortune that fate has
declared for me in this inhospitable land. Trousers are now fashionable, but
anything fashionable is strictly forbidden there. So the men wear long kapotas
down to their feet…And their ear locks are long, O how long— down to the navel
and more, for that is an immutable decree: “It is forbidden to cut the ear
locks of the head and to shorten them, from day of birth till day of death!”
And those long, thick, ear locks, spread over the face and swaying here and
there, wherever the wind blows them, and they seem as if attached by glue to
the white, shaven, head—and why is that?—To mar man’s handsome visage, “God’s
image.” And in this beautiful costume one has to go about all day, not only
during prayers, girded with a sash.
No lamp will you find in their
houses, only candlelight to illuminate the dark. Now in this generation of
ours, a generation of great technical discoveries, a generation served by
electricity day by day, when the human spirit, unsatiated, is blazing new
trails and new paths, striving hard to find new inventions. In this generation,
at this time, there is a dark corner, in the heart of Europe, where even a
simple lamp is not yet used, even one that might today be considered an
antique, and the dark light of a tallow candle satisfies them…
A mirror is considered as leaven [on
Passover], to be banished from the house…A newspaper, even in Hebrew, or in
Yiddish—not to speak of a volume of the new literature—is condemned to be
removed and banished…
And these customs are supervised
by my future father-in-law, the Grand Inquisitor, who watches over the
slightest move of the members of his family, his town, and his Hasidim in
general. And woe betide any person who dares to infringe even one of all these
“customs,” who deliberately disregards one of them. He will be pursued and beaten
with cruel wrath, with all their burning, wild, fanaticism. They have one
refrain: “Eat and drink, study and sleep,” for that is the whole man! They are
far from the world and from life…
They are frozen, fossilized,
standing constantly on the same level as our ancestors in Poland three hundred
years ago. And if they have developed, if they have taken a step forward and
gone farther than their ancestors, they have done so only in the sense that
they have heaped more restrictions on their ancestors’ restrictions and added
stupidity to their stupidity. That is the blessed Belz, such is its visage…In
that Belz, in that locality, am I to settle now…
Even now I drown in mud up to my
neck, and now I am being dragged to drown entirely in mire, in a pool of
sewage. Indeed, a terrible idea, and the reality is seven times worse!
I know that…your honor will think
of many questions…[such as]: “If you are so remote from and abominate the life
that you live… who is it, what is it, that forces you to persist in that
miserable life? Sever, in one blow, the bond that binds you to it, break out
into the great, wide, world, that you so love, for which you so yearn and
pine!”… That is the question I am asked by many of my young friends, who cannot
understand my mind, to whom my psychology is foreign, who only see the terrors
of my outer life…But before your honor I shall bare my soul…With my last
remaining strength I would cast off these shackles, abandon my home, my family,
my place of birth, all the habits I have accumulated since my youth, and travel
to a big city, to study there, complete my education, to live another life…Nothing
would prevent me—save just one hidden power in my soul which is stronger than
all these combined, which holds me back with tremendous force and will not
loosen its grip—the power of compassion….my compassion for my beloved mother…
This wretched soul, who has had
nothing in her life, all of whose life is one terrible tragedy, and I, I alone,
am her only hope, her heart’s desire, I am her comforting salve. My sisters
have never given her much pleasure, only in me does she put her trust, I am her
sole support in her life.
Why do I have to settle there [in
Belz], of all places? Why can I not live here even after my marriage? For a
very simple reason: My parents lack the means to support me, to sustain me and
my wife in their home, to supply all our needs. So I have no choice but to live
there…
[T]here are only two roads open
to me: To be a [Hasidic] rebbe, or to be a rabbi…to be a rabbi I would need
authorization from my future father-in-law— who by then would be my
father-in-law—[But] he is stronger and more influential than I, and no community
would accept me against his will. But I would never receive such authorization,
because he wishes to keep me under his wing for a few years, who knows how
many? And even were he to grant me authorization, I would then have to be a
“rabbi” according to the Belz style, so what would I gain? Once again the same
slavery, the same wretchedness and the same ugliness. So I have absolutely
nothing to hope for, there is not a single glimmer to light my way, the way of
my future, only darkness, awful darkness, profound gloom await me...
My mother herself knows and
senses the great difference between myself and Belz, and however much she does
not know me in all respects, she knows me more than others and is therefore
aware, how different I am from Belz and its life. Moreover, she is worried lest
I dislike my bride, since she is not very good-looking and may also not be to
my taste in other respects, and so think many other townspeople as well[7]…
I have been writing… [this letter]
for a very long time, one quarter-hour each day, and upon beginning to write I
have been forced to stop midway, obliged to hide the letter for fear it might
be seen by someone. Your honor will realize from my unclear writing in what
state it has been written. A word here, a word there, page put together with
page, until the letter was complete. Were I able to write my letter with the
requisite peace of mind, it would be different, more solid and coherent, from
beginning to end, one continuous narrative. But since I have not been able to
do so, it consists only of disconnected ideas, fragments, convulsions of my
mind.
And now, if your honor should
wish to reply, I beg you to reply quickly, to reach me immediately during the
first week of my wedding. You may send the letter care of my sisters, and they
will send it on to me. With admiration and respect, hoping against hope for
your answer,
Yitzhak Nahum Twersky.”
Further reading
For more on R. Asher Perlow, the musicologist, see Kotzk Blog: 307) SEFER HATZOREF AND THE STORY OF THE ‘LOST’ STOLIN GENIZA:
See also the references to the more
recent R. Isadore Twersky, a Rebbe and a Harvard professor, in Kotzk
Blog: 068) Outspoken Rabbinical Views Claiming That The Torah Recorded
Superstitions Of Its Day: (Footnote 3.)
[1]
Assaf, D., 2006, ‘‘My tiny, ugly world:’ The confession of Rabbi Yitzhak Nahum
Twersky of Shpikov’, Contemporary Jewry, vol. 26, 1–34.
[2]
Dineson collection at the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem,
Department of Manuscripts, V.879/ 17.
[3] Meir
Wunder, Meorei Galicia, III, Jerusalem, 1986, 14-16; Isaac Lewin (ed.),
Eleh Ezkerah, IV, New York, 1961, 133.
[4] Sefer
Zikaron le-Kehilat Rawa-Ruska ve-ha-Sevivah, Tel Aviv, 1973, 79.
[5]
Yochanan Twersky, heChatzer haPnimit, Tel Aviv, 1954, 234. Yohanan
Twersky (1900-1967) was Yitzchak Nachum’s nephew.
[6]
Parenthesis is mine.
[7]
Asaf points out that, “in complete opposition to his expectations, the match
was a success; he was fond of his bride and she was of him.”
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