On Maurice Samuel's twenty-fifth Yahrzeit - death anniversary of Jewish author

Judaism, Fall, 1997 by Louis Kaplan

During a recent visit to Israel, my wife Mindell and I entered the Old City of Jerusalem through the Zion Gate. A short walk brought us to Rechov Ha-Yehudim (Jewish Quarter Road). At the beginning of a row of businesses on our left - the entrance to the famous Cardo, the now-underground street of stores dating from Roman times is located less than a block away - we saw a book shop. We had gone inside that book shop at least once in previous visits to Israel. But this time when we entered I asked the man tending the place if he were Maurice Samuel's son. (Mindell had read somewhere that Maurice Samuel's son owned a bookstore in the Old City.) "My wife and I are fans of your father," I added. "We like his books."

The man, of somewhat less than average height and slightly overweight, white-haired and of round face, seemed about 75 years old. He acknowledged that Maurice Samuel was his father and told us his own name is Gershon.

So began a conversation that lasted approximately 45 minutes, interrupted only by one man who purchased an English-language volume and several persons who wanted pages duplicated on the copier. We thanked him for taking so much time to speak with us. He responded, "I enjoyed talking with people who know my father's works. The young people today don't know him."

Before leaving, I purchased a book that, actually, we already owned: Forward From Exile: The Autobiography of Shmarya Levin. Maurice Samuel, the volume's editor and translator from the Yiddish, had inscribed the book, "To Gretel, with love." At my request, Gershon Samuel added a few words of his own. Mindell snapped a picture of Gershon and me. We then said our goodbyes and left.

It is the sad truth that most of today's young American Jews, and even a high percentage in the over-65 category, know neither the name nor lifework of Maurice Samuel. And that is to be regretted for at least three reasons. One, he played a major role in re-Judaizing American Jewry from the 1920s to his death in 1972. Two, he still has much to teach us. Three, his books - informative, delightfully literate, and witty - make excellent reading.

Who was Maurice Samuel?

He was born in Macin, Rumania, on February 5, 1895. When he was five, his family moved to Paris and, about a year later, to the Rumanian:Jewish section of Manchester, England.

His father, who had left cheder when only eight, earned a very meager living most of his life as a shoemaker. But he was extremely charitable for one existing on the poverty level. A fond memory that Maurice carried into adulthood was his father's evening practice of reading to the family in Yiddish (the language of the home) from the writings of the great triad of Yiddish literature - Mendele Mocher Seforim, Y. L. Peretz, and Sholom Aleichem - as well as from the works of Yiddish writers of much less talent. Overall, however, father and son did not get along well, although they reconciled when Maurice was in his late 20s.

In her youth, Maurice's mother was a lively, sweet-voiced, intelligent woman who enjoyed going to plays and operas by Abraham Goldladen, father of the modern Yiddish theater. But she changed as an adult. Village life in Rumania, giving birth to nine children (three of whom died as infants), home chores, and poor health wore her down. She continued to possess a sensitive understanding of right and wrong, and her son Maurice liked chatting with her.

All food in the Samuel home was kosher; however, there were no separate dishes for dairy and meat products, although meat and milk were not eaten at the same meal. Maurice's father neither worked nor smoked on Shabbes. Candles were lit, a special Shabbes meal was eaten, and on Shabbes afternoon Maurice received his weekly half-penny allowance.

Maurice attended what we would call public school until 4:30 P.M. on weekdays. He went to cheder those days from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M., plus Shabbes afternoon and part of Sunday. He was an indifferent, low-achieving student in both schools.

In August 1929, when 34 years of age, Samuel was in Palestine. He was accompanying Colonel Frederick Kisch, Palestine Chairman of the Jewish Agency, in an investigation of that year's anti-Jewish riots. In Safed, the two of them made time to seek out Samuel's old rebbe, his Manchester cheder teacher, now retired. Here is what happened:

We found him in one of the narrow, crooked, sloping alleys on whose gray, crumbling walls centuries of Jewish learning, piety, poverty, and Messianic conjuration are almost visibly encrusted. When he came to the door I recognized him at once, though his beard was now completely snow white. He stared at me, puzzled, until I said, in my recently acquired Sephardic Hebrew - a pronunciation he would associate with Christian priests: "Rebbe, eincha makir oti - don't you recognize me?" Then his eyes brimmed over, he uttered a loud cry, and answered in Yiddish (for like all religious Jews in those days he reserved Hebrew only for prayer and study): "Moishe! Redst takke loshen koidesh, ober fort vi a goy - you do indeed speak Hebrew, but it's still like a gentile!"(1)