Austrophobic

I freely admit I am totally, utterly fascinated with the story behind Sam Apple’s new book Schlepping Through the Alps — mostly because I met Hans Breuer, the Yiddish-singing shepherd, during his first trip to North America in 2000, back in my klezmer scenester days (stop giggling.) Apple recently chatted with Nextbook’s Boris Fishman about what prompted him to tell Hans’s story:

How did you learn about him?

I was mostly just curious when I first heard Hans sing during a visit to New York. But then I interviewed him for the Forward, and when he told me about his mother being tortured as a Communist by the Gestapo, I realized his story was a way into a larger story about European anti-Semitism and Yiddish.

My mother got sick when I was really young, so I ended up spending lots of time with my grandmother, Bashy. She was from a Lithuanian shtetl, and one of her central beliefs, which I absorbed, was that Jews and Gentiles don’t go well together. Plus our household was always full of these Yiddish expressions—I don’t think I ever went to sleep without hearing Shlof gezunt, shtey af gezunt, ("Sleep in health, wake up in health"). Going to Austria was a chance to make sense of all these different feelings.

The book deals with larger issues about anti-Semitism in Europe and whether there’s a "fetishization" of Jewish culture in European countries:

Does being Jewish feel different in Europe than it does in the States?

In America today it is a choice in a way it’s not in Europe. American Jews, for the most part, can fully separate themselves from their Jewish identity. And the Holocaust happened on European soil, so to live in Europe after the Holocaust is to feel a little like a ghost.

For Jews, this murderous burden, perversely, has been enriching. We have made tragedy and comedy out of it. To tweak Gary Shteyngart, would you rather be Dostoevsky—the tortured soul saddled with an inspiring burden—or, quite plainly, happy?

I’d say "happiness before art," but I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. I think that there’s more than enough pain in the everyday drama of human relationships to provide the raw materials for great art. For my part, I get my best work done when I’m not in a deeply neurotic and unhappy state. It’s hard to write and examine your body for tumors at the same time.

I’ll definitely be reading this book as soon as I get a copy.