Book review: Shtetl Love Song By Grigory Kanovich

What was life like for Lithuanian Jews before genocide wiped out nearly an entire people? Happily, a Russian-language book by Grigory Kanovich, now in English translation, provides a vivid view of that time, providing invaluable answers, especially  to families — like my own — of Litvak origin.

Kanovich fled the Nazi invasion as a child, saved by his mother, who hid him in a haystack. After time spent in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, he returned to largely Jew-free Lithuania. The resultant part-memoir, Shtetl Love Song, is poignant, informative and lyrical with “indestructible and imperishable memories”.

Central to its cast of characters is Kanovich’s beloved grandmother, the formidable Rokha Kanovich, dubbed “the Samurai”, who had an opinion on everything and everyone. Fierce on the surface but soft and loving underneath, she met her match in the unlettered but fiercely intelligent Hennie, the author’s mother, who in turn married Shleimke, a tailor devoted to “riding” his (to him hypermodern) Singer sewing machine. Earlier, he rode a real horse, due to the equal rarity in the shtetl of Jonava of his conscription as a Jew into the Lithuanian cavalry.

For her part, Hennie discovers a new world of French and fine food and clothes as au pair to the saintly, Polish-born Esther. Grigory himself doesn’t arrive on the scene until halfway through the book —under his Yiddish name, Hirshke — Hennie and Shleimke’s first surviving child. Other characters include Uncle Shmulik, a Marxist dreamer who is sprung from prison when the Soviets swallow up Lithuania in 1939 and appointed Jonava’s local point-man for the secret police, and Avigdor Perelman, a talmudic genius who loses his faith and ends up as the community shnorrer.