In graduate school, of course, we quickly left Kermode and his contemporaries behind and continued on to structuralism, deconstruction, and other more adventurous schools of thought. But as a writer rather than a scholar, I found that Kermode’s idea stayed with me, because it felt true to the expectations of ordinary readers—including my own. The more I considered it, the more I realized just how pervasive, and how accurate, Kermode’s idea of literature actually is for English-language readers. Think about what we expect from the endings of stories—not just Denise, but all of us. We expect the good guys to be “saved.” If that doesn’t happen, we at least expect the main character to have an “epiphany.” And if that doesn’t happen, then at least the author ought to give us a “moment of grace.” All three are Christian terms. So many of our expectations of literature are based on Christianity—and not just Christianity, but the precise points at which Christianity and Judaism diverge. And then I noticed something else: the canonical works by authors in Jewish languages almost never give their readers any of those things.

  I was studying modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and I began to see that the major works in these Jewish languages almost never involved characters getting saved, or having epiphanies, or experiencing moments of grace. In fact, as I read my way through the foundational works in these literatures, I saw that many of the canonical stories and novels in modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature actually didn’t have endings at all.

  One major point of entry for modern Jewish literature is the early-nineteenth-century fiction of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, a religious leader whose homiletic tales became a baseline inspiration for secular and religious Jewish writers alike. Nachman’s stories were important enough to later secular Jewish writers that there are even plays and poems written about them, well into the twentieth century; even Franz Kafka was inspired by them and adapted them in his own work. Nachman’s stories are fairy tales of a sort, written very much like the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, which Nachman reportedly read in German with enormous interest. They have many of the same princes and knights and quests and magical agents. What Nachman’s stories don’t have, though, are happy endings—or any endings at all.

  Nachman’s story “The Loss of the Princess,” for instance, has all the elements of a fairy tale: a banished princess hidden away in an inaccessible castle, a noble knight who sets out on a quest to rescue her, and plenty of riddles to solve and giants to battle on the way. But here’s how Nachman’s story, narrated aloud to his scribe, ends: “And how he freed her, Nachman did not tell. But he did free her.” Another story of Nachman’s, “Tale of the Seven Beggars,” likewise has all the right fairy-tale elements: spunky orphans who get lost in a forest, and then seven roving beggars with stylized disabilities, a sort of Seven Dwarves, who offer the orphans generosity and wisdom. When the spunky orphans grow up and (of course) get married, each of the poetically disabled beggars provides his own Canterbury Tales–style story-within-a-story at their wedding feast. It’s all rather conventionally satisfying—except that after the sixth beggar, the story simply stops. The seventh beggar never shows up. These missing endings seem like storytelling failures, but they’re entirely deliberate. Nachman was making a religious point about living in a broken and unredeemed world.

  As I read my way through modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, I kept running into this pattern. Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman stories are familiar to English-language audiences from their Broadway adaptation as Fiddler on the Roof. But Fiddler on the Roof left out a few details, including Tevye’s wife, Golde, dropping dead; Tevye’s son-in-law Motl dropping dead; and Tevye’s daughter Shprintze drowning herself, none of which would have played well on Broadway. What’s even less “uplifting” about the Tevye stories is their structure. They’re like a TV series where each of Tevye’s daughters’ marriages is a different episode, and each one is more devastating than the last. But as the series progresses and twenty years pass, Tevye himself never changes. He never learns anything; he never realizes anything; he never has an epiphany or a moment of grace. And he’s certainly never rescued or saved. Instead he just keeps enduring, which feels achingly realistic. His great power is that he remains exactly who he always was.

  No matter whose work I read among these major Jewish-language writers, I kept running into this problem. The Hebrew Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon wrote amazing novels that built entire worlds out of centuries of ancient Jewish texts that he brought to life in new and ironic ways, but the best ending you can get from him is that maybe after six hundred pages, somebody dies. The foundational nineteenth-century author Mendele Moykher Seforim wrote novels that essentially introduced stylistic literary sophistication to both Hebrew and Yiddish—but his most famous book, full of surreal and world-altering adventures, ends with the protagonist essentially saying, “And then I woke up.” The Yiddish Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer ended almost every one of his novels not with a resolution but with the protagonist disappearing, whether by running away or by literally locking himself into a closet for the rest of his life. My favorite Hebrew novel of all time, A. B. Yehoshua’s 1989 masterpiece Mr. Mani, is a fantastically inventive story that moves backwards in time through six generations of a Jerusalem family while tracing the family’s recurring suicidal gene—until you get to the end, which is really the beginning, when the enduring mystery of the family’s self-destruction “resolves” not with an answer, but with a question, one that casts new light over everything that came before, but which remains unanswered.

  These stories, I came to understand, were presenting a challenge to the Western idea of the purpose of creativity. Stories with definitive endings don’t necessarily reflect a belief that the world makes sense, but they do reflect a belief in the power of art to make sense of it. What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world. These are stories without conclusions, but full of endurance and resilience. They are about human limitations, which means that the stories are not endings but beginnings, the beginning of the search for meaning rather than the end—and the power of resilience and endurance to carry one through to that meaning. Tevye, after grieving for his wife, daughter, and son-in-law and being expelled from his home, finally leaves the reader with a line that would never work on Broadway: “Tell all our Jews everywhere that they shouldn’t worry: our old God still lives!”

  I eventually came to understand the profound insult inherent in the messages I was receiving, both directly and indirectly, from readers expecting uplifting Jewish literature full of moments of grace—not to me as a novelist, but to my ancestors who endured experiences like those I gave to my characters, and in a sense, to all those who have endured the most atrocious moments of Jewish history. Readers who demanded that “coherence” from literature about the modern Jewish experience were essentially insisting that Jewish suffering was only worth examining if it provided, in the words of my reader’s memorable message, “a service to mankind.” In retrospect I am stunned by how long it took me to understand just how hateful this was. Consider, as I only very slowly did, what this demand really entails. Dead Jews are supposed to teach us about the beauty of the world and the wonders of redemption—otherwise, what was the point of killing them in the first place? That’s what dead Jews are for! If people were going to read about dead Jews, where was the service to mankind I owed them?

  This is far from a fringe attitude among contemporary readers, as just about every bestselling Holocaust novel of our current century makes fantastically clear. Holocaust novels that have sold millions of copies both in the United States and overseas in recent years are all “uplifting,” even when they include the odd dead kid. The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a recent international mega-bestseller touted for its “true story,” manages to present an Auschwitz that involves a heartwarming romance. Sarah’s Key, The Book Thief, The Boy in Striped Pajamas, and many other bestsellers, some of which have even become required reading in schools, all involve non-Jewish rescuers who risk or sacrifice their own lives to save hapless Jews, thus inspiring us all. (For the record, the number of actual “righteous Gentiles” officially recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum and research center, for their efforts in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust is under 30,000 people, out of a European population at the time of nearly 300 million—or .001 percent. Even if we were to assume that the official recognition is an undercount by a factor of ten thousand, such people remain essentially a rounding error.) In addition to their wonderful non-Jewish characters, these books are almost invariably populated by the sort of relatable dead Jews whom readers can really get behind: the mostly non-religious, mostly non-Yiddish-speaking ones whom noble people tried to save, and whose deaths therefore teach us something beautiful about our shared and universal humanity, replete with epiphanies and moments of grace. Statistically speaking, this was not the experience of almost any Jews who endured the Holocaust. But for literature in non-Jewish languages, that grim reality is both inconvenient and irrelevant.

  What does a novel about the horrors of Jewish history in a Jewish language look like?

  For English-language readers drowning in uplifting Holocaust fiction, here is one novel, among many, that demonstrates a more honest way to write fiction about atrocity: Chava Rosenfarb’s The Tree of Life, a panoramic Yiddish-language trilogy about the Łódz´ Ghetto. To call it a masterpiece would be an understatement. It is the sort of work—long, immersive, engrossing, exquisite—that feels less like reading a book than living a life.

  Make that ten lives. That’s about how many major characters we come to know intimately in Rosenfarb’s sweeping epic, and we meet them all in vivid detail before the war begins, so we know who they are before sadists take over their lives. Some are sadists themselves, like Mordechai-Chaim Rumkowski, the infamous Nazi-selected “King of the Jews” who ruled the Łódz´ Ghetto with an iron fist; we first meet him before the war, as an orphanage director who sucks up to rich donors while sexually molesting his young female wards. Most are “ordinary” people—except there’s no such thing as ordinary, as the vast variety of the Jews of Łódz´ makes clear. Prewar Łódz´ was one-third Jewish, and Rosenfarb brilliantly unfolds a panorama of the city in all its diversity by intertwining her complex characters’ lives. The wealthy industrialist Samuel Zuckerman is obsessed with the history of the Jews of Łódz´, an interest he shares with Itche Mayer, a poor Jewish carpenter in his employ—and into whose slum neighborhood Zuckerman himself moves when that slum becomes the ghetto. Zuckerman’s family-man civility is disdained by Adam Rosenberg, another wealthy industrialist in his circle who thrives on cruelty and sexual conquest. We meet rationalists like the doctor Michal Levine, proud Polish patriots like the spinster teacher Dora Diamant, passionate Communists like the orphaned Esther, Socialists and Zionists among Itche Mayer’s sons, and the slightly surreal “Toffee Man,” a religious father of nine who periodically appears unbidden, offering other characters unexpected moments of hope. Nor are these characters reducible to representatives of a type or class. They are each embedded, as real people are, in networks of families, lovers, friends, and enemies; each is inspired by their own commitments and also plagued by private doubts. The integrity of these characters depends, as it does for all of us, on their inherent adulthood, their agency in their own choices. In the ghetto, none of that disappears; each character remains exactly who he or she was before, just in inhuman circumstances. The Holocaust was not a morality play, except perhaps for its perpetrators. And that’s exactly what makes the ghetto’s horrors real.

  I would have thought these horrors would be impossible to convey, except that Rosenfarb brings you there. Despite our own culture’s saturation in violent imagery, The Tree of Life is extremely difficult to read. There is no ruminating about God here, no contrived conversations with Nazis that show their humanity, nor even any brave rebellion—at least, not until the very end. Instead there is confusion, starvation, denial, and sheer sadistic horror. As you read, you are shocked to realize that no one in the book knows what you know. Instead they believe, when imprisonment and forced labor commence at the start of Volume Two, that this slavery and starvation is the central atrocity they are enduring. When deportations begin, some even opt in, reasoning that things cannot possibly be worse. It is only when familiar and sometimes bloodstained clothing begins returning to the slave-labor processing centers (in some cases with family photographs still in the pockets) that some characters realize what is happening—yet even they are quickly (and gladly) silenced by the forces of denial. Meanwhile, German soldiers shoot children in the streets for fun. Power politics among “influential” Jews quickly becomes a blood sport, with people stopping at nothing, including sexual servitude, to protect themselves and those they love—all, of course, to no avail. Soon characters we care about begin falling like dominoes, whether deported, starved, diseased, shot, or tortured; one major character winds up castrated. By Volume Three, the Germans demand that the Jews hand over all children under ten.

  Rosenfarb herself (1923–2011), a renowned Yiddish poet who lived most of her life in Canada, survived the Łódz´ Ghetto and subsequently Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The Tree of Life, published in Yiddish in 1971 and in English translation in 1985, could be mistaken for a survivor’s testimony. The extreme detail with which Rosenfarb brings to life Jewish Łódz´, its people and its passions, is itself an enormous achievement, a monument and a memorial to a destroyed community, written in the great (and alas, very long) tradition of Jewish literary lament. Yet The Tree of Life is not a work of testimony but a work of art. One character, the aspiring teenage poet Rachel Eibushitz, most closely resembles Rosenfarb herself, but this character is simply one of many and hardly the most important. Instead of memoir, Rosenfarb offers true imagination, bringing us into the minds of many different people and rendering even the most despicable figures with the utmost imaginative empathy.

  Yet the greatest miracle for the reader is the chance to meet the city’s artists, who come to life in Rosenfarb’s words. One of the novel’s most vivid characters is the poet Simkha Bunim Berkovitch, Rosenfarb’s stand-in for her own poetic mentor Simkha Bunim Shayevitch, who was murdered at Dachau after the murders of his wife and two young children. Berkovitch comes from a large Hasidic family, but loses his faith as he discovers his poetic talent. A poor factory worker, Berkovitch is a true artist, living only to create; his life means nothing to him without the ability to produce his poetry, and his only fortune in the ghetto is a menial job he obtains (with help) that allows him time and space to write. It’s a drive all writers can understand. One of the book’s most affecting early scenes involves Berkovitch’s marriage to a woman who ultimately can’t appreciate his art. A lesser novelist would play up this conflict, but Rosenfarb knows that artists are humans who live with contradictions. The uncompromised beauty of Berkovitch’s family life is among the startling wonders of this novel—and its sudden destruction is among its most devastating.

  Amid the unrelenting horror, Rosenfarb’s characters render miracles. In one of the book’s most astonishing scenes, a group of young people and another poet gather in the street, drawn by the poet’s humming of a classical symphony; the poet leads them to the tiny room of Vladimir Winter, a middle-aged hunchback introduced as “the Rembrandt of the ghetto.” The young people crowd the room, its walls covered with brown paper, as Winter orders the poet to recite his work. As he recites, Winter takes a box of crayons and begins illustrating the words, covering the walls with surreal drawings that incorporate the men and women in the room, imposing their faces on animals, casting their bodies into open meadows, dipping their hands into pools of water, winding their hair into clouds. When the poet finishes reciting, Winter continues drawing as the light fades outside, and one young woman begins to sing, continuing the creative trance. When all four walls are covered, the poet turns on the electric light and the visitors rise from the floor, looking around as if “falling into a dream. There was a land surrounding them, a land of painful beauty, of light and shadows, which enveloped them with the perfume of an unknown life.” Winter then passes out from tubercular fever. The book’s last volume ends—or rather, stops—at the gates of Auschwitz. It does not provide an inspirational quote.

  That “unknown life,” of course, was the creative worlds lost by the murders of these artists; Rosenfarb’s work itself, for all its power, can only hint at their destroyed potential. For them there is no redemption except in this novel’s pages—a redemption only possible through us, the readers. But we as readers cannot ask the book to uplift us, the way we expect, obscenely, for every other book about atrocity. Reading this monumental work requires an active commitment. It provides, one might say, a service to mankind: it broadens your life beyond your own imagining, allowing your life to include many other lives within it. It brings you down to the deepest level of existence, and offers what Rosenfarb herself describes in a poem called “Praise”:

  When the light fades

  And the end approaches

  And abruptly you see yourself standing

  In a deep dark gate

  Look back one more time

  At that bubble of reality,

  And praise it, that day

  That drips out from being—

  Unnoticed,

  Vanished,

  In the night of forgetting.