LUBLIN by Manya Wilkinson

It’s 1907 and three young Jewish teens set off from their little Polish village to sell a carton of paintbrushes in the big smoke. There’s Elya, the entrepreneur, Kiva, the scholar, and Ziv, the wannabe revolutionary. If that sounds like the set-up to some bad joke you might have heard in the Catskills, you’re sort of right. In fact, there are bad jokes a-plenty in Lublin, but they serve a strangely sublime purpose. Equally disturbing and annoying, they make the reader easy targets for Wilkinson’s punishing narrative blows. It’s the Pale of Settlement, after all. During a very precarious time for that area’s Jews.

What sets Lublin apart from many of the recent throwbacks to Yiddish literature’s golden era, is just how dark and obtuse it is. Sure, there are echoes of Sholem Aleichem, but Wilkinson owes equal pay to Samuel Beckett. As the boys become hopelessly lost, and travel in loops and tangents, their situation grows ever more dire. The jokes come thick and fast, as does the violence. And when Wilkinson delivers the final punchline… well… think the discomfort of Gilbert Gottfried’s rendition of the The Aristocrats but with pogroms. I guess we live for God’s entertainment.

Lublin by Manya Wilkinson
And Other Stories, 2024
196 pages