Around 1977, my mother Beth inherited a collection of novels her grandfather had written. The assumption had been that as a published, award-winning writer, she would appreciate his work and know what to do with it. However, she looked at a couple of the novels, dismissed them as amateur works, and resealed the box.
After a few years, she asked me whether I wanted to take custody of the manuscripts. Despite the fact that my own basement was already stuffed, collector that I am, I jumped at the chance.
Almost all I knew of the Blumenfelds had been received through my mother’s memories and the one book of his I knew she owned, which had been vanity-published in the 1950s, Greed for Power. I had not entirely read even that.
I knew that David and his wife Lena Blumenfeld were Jewish but I didn’t know to what extent; my grandparents Helen Blumenfeld and Arthur Singer, who was also a Russian Jew, were not observant. My family, my mother included, had been nominally Episcopalian as long as I’d been around; however, I was entirely nonreligious. My sister and I were basically ignorant of Judaic customs though recognizing that we in theory had “Jewish blood.” I had a family tree provided by Helen, and I knew David had hailed from Tukums, or Tuckum, in Courland, Latvia.
Even so, upon receiving David’s writings more than 30 years ago, I had much the same reaction as my mother: I thumbed through a few volumes, and resealed the box as a curiosity that someday I would delve into further.
Dissolve to 2008. We were in the process of moving, and I was triaging boxes the basement. I was done going through my late father’s papers, and figured I would keep up the momentum and take a look at the Blumenfeld cache. The titles (such as A Torn Family Reunited, A Woman’s Grit, and The Tigress-Hearted Mother) and the opening paragraphs sounded very old-fashioned. They read like treatments of silent movies, with broad characters (the wicked shiksa, the humble Jewish peasant who rises to be a New World captain of industry, the betrayed spouse, the wise rabbi) and they had melodramatic, wildly improbable plots of biblical convolution and moralization.
Suddenly I did a double-take — the title of the next manuscript read simply Diary.
In the last several years I had become a genealogy buff, and this was just the thing to jolt me awake. Was it really a diary, or was it just an uncharacteristically short title for another novel? From the first, it did not take diary form or tone, but read like an historical novel. I was suspicious but intrigued: while not recognizing any of the names, slowly I realized that many details matched what I knew:
"One bright spring morning when the sun was benevolently smiling on all nature, Leah was sitting on the veranda of her two-story dwelling overlooking the great ‘Parade Platz’ market place, in her native town of Tuckums, Courland."
I soon found that no one — not David’s immediate family, nor any living descendents — had had any inkling of the existence of the diary. My mother had not gotten that far in the box. Neither Beth’s late cousin Belle nor her husband Abe had mentioned it. It was like I had uncovered the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Did David really intend to publish Diary as he did his novels? Who was his imagined audience? Details of the family spats, the ups and downs of his business, the growing up and marrying of his children, and finally the deaths of his parents in 1920 — these are not intrinsically unique or riveting fare for a mass market, especially of his contemporary society, to whom these scenarios were probably somewhat familiar.
He does not speak of showing his work to his family, though he eventually did send his novels unsuccessfully to various publishers. Did he fictionalize to distance his story from reality and “protect the innocent,” or did he use third person for more compelling reading?
His wife could not have been the intended audience, as she could not read English, which might be just as well, since she does not fare too well in the narrative:
"Lena’s constant tormented agitation and mortal terror David tried to read as the expression of a taciturn self-centered neurotic who demanded as a natural right everything in exchange for nothing. David excused her because he was one who would chew whatever he bit off."
Several of his children and their spouses also fare badly — his son Al as a luckless entrepreneur, and Helen, my grandmother, as a mercurial thing who marries a frivolous Communist. Their names were not changed. Were they ever intended to read about themselves? Certainly David could not have imagined that his grandchildren and great-grandchildren would turn out to be the most appreciative readers.
Considering that he probably did not revise his journals until 20 years or so after writing the later entries, perhaps he did not regard the material as hurtful anymore — if he ever did; perhaps he simply wanted to depict his experiences, as his Introduction puts it, “true to life, unvarnished and without any sugarcoating, described by an eyewitness.”
This withholding of sugar might be construed as callous. Perhaps David regarded his family and acquaintances the way countless authors have, as viable fodder for their stories, ultimately more interesting as characters than as human beings.
David refers to himself in Diary as “Nate” while most around him sort of thaw back to their true identities. By the time he was 70, in the 1930s, he was referring to himself in his diaries as “Pa” and his wife as “Ma.” This seems to show a disassociation from reality that might explain the schisms he seemed to have with those around him. He would be hard to live with if he were forever observing life as the slowly turning pages of an epic story.
David’s Diary is a nearly unremitting depiction of physical struggle, emotional turmoil, economic hardship, car accidents, lawsuits, burglaries, family squabbles, religious grumbling, and serial illnesses. Despite this, David’s sense of storytelling occasionally seems peculiar. For example, arguably the most exciting and interesting part of the story (dramatically as well as genealogically), starts with his flight from the Russians:
"They then journeyed to Plungyan [Lithuania], thence to Gorzd [Lithuania], where she left the two boys in care of trusted smugglers who were to get them across the Russian frontier, an operation run hand in hand with great risk and difficulty. Running the gauntlet of the Russian frontier was an adventure for the Jews of that period. The Jewish community on the German side of the border operated the underground railroad system so silently that its romantic story is still to be written."
This is followed, with only slightly more detail, by the stormy, squalid sea voyage to America, and his impromptu journey from New York to Ludington Michigan, with little money and presumably no English — all in a matter of a few pages. It merely sets the scene for what really interests David, 200 pages documenting the life of an immigrant shopkeeper’s family.
David was up early every morning to write, continuing for hours in the back room of the menswear store he owned. He never mentions working on eight novels, four novellas, and 900 pages of rhyming couplets based on the Bible.
His “real life” as a writer seemed to be disrupted by the day-to-day business of actually living, though ironically this was what he documented in hindsight in the Diary. The inner drive of a Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams, both professional men as well as poets, was present in David but he did not have their education, their facility with English, nor their abundant income as insurance executive and doctor. But David did do wonders, considering his hardships of birth and later circumstance.
One wonder is that so many thousands with similar experiences did not write about their lives; David is telling their stories as well, perhaps especially to those who are unfamiliar with Jewish history and culture in the Midwestern world he inhabited.
It is ironic that finally David’s writing has literally seen the light of day, fifty-plus years after his death, as his descendents deconstruct it as though brushing the dust of the millennia off a fossil.
Diary turned out to have an almost alchemical effect on its readers, depending on how well or whether we knew him, what generation we were, and our own interests. From it we all found our own kind of gold.
This artifact, this time capsule diary, thrice rescued from oblivion over the generations— inspired each of us to think not only about the writer and our ancestors’ lives, but to get to know each other after far too long. A good part of its value lies in its showing how our lives illuminate each other, and how we emerge from our family’s past.
We all are thus placed in history. As Thomas Cahill says, in The Gifts of the Jews:
"The past is no longer important just because it can be mined for exemplars but because it has brought us to the present: — it is the first part of our journey, the journey of our ancestors. So in retelling their life stories, we have a serious obligation to get their histories straight. We are not merely creating literature. We are retelling a personal story that really happened and that has helped make us the people that we are."