Never-Ending Tales: Stories from the Golden Age of Jewish Literature Edited by Jack Zipes (Princeton University Press)

”We tell ourselves stories in order to live” So, famously, opens Joan Didion’s 1979 book, The White Album, written while she was examining hippie-era California. This is also the core message of Jack Zipes’s new anthology, Never-Ending Tales: Stories from the Golden Age of Jewish Literature. For this is, on the most fundamental level, Zipes’s thesis: at times when simply living while Jewish was perilous, Jews told Jewish stories in order to assert their right to exist. He writes, “Storytelling and the publishing of stories became a means through which Jews could share their problems among themselves.” It’s a book about storytelling as a communal survival strategy.

Zipes, an emeritus professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota specializing in folklore, uses the anthology’s brief introduction to explain how the stories that follow “formed a resistance to the antisemites.” The purpose of sharing these stories with contemporary readers is to demonstrate “how Jews, whether religious or secular, found ways to survive and to find hope.” While the stories may already be known from previous translations, Zipes has newly anthologized them in order “to demonstrate how Jewish folk tales and fantasy writing can help us comprehend how deeply the Jewish Question is entwined in cultural history.”

This is not the first time Zipes, who is Jewish and originally from New York, has covered this type of source material. In a 1991 book called The Operated Jew and the Operated Goy: Two Tales of Anti-Semitism,* *Zipes had the brilliant idea to juxtapose an antisemitic 1893 short story (Oskar Panizza’s “The Operated Jew”) with a Jewish author’s 1922 satirical retort (Salomo Friedlaender, “The Operated Goy”). The first is about a Jewish man — effectively an anti-Jewish caricature — who gets himself cosmetically turned into a German gentile, culminating in a wedding scene with a Christian bride, whereupon the groom reverts to his natural state. The second has a German gentile surgically Judaizing himself in order to snag a beautiful Jewess. (There are countless beautiful Jewess trope stories that have been written over the years, courtesy of both Jewish and gentile authors. This is the only one, to my knowledge, in which Sigmund Freud himself makes a cameo.)

“The Operated Goy,” unlike its inspiration, ends with the operation taking hold: “Now Mr. and Mrs. Moishe Kosher are living today as committed Zionists in a country villa near Jerusalem.” And the reason I know this is that Never-Ending Tales begins with a reprint of those two stories in translation. The purpose of the book is twofold: to put together a larger collection of texts in the same vein as Friedlaender’s, and to do so in 2025. Every history book is about both the time of its focus and that of its writing, and this, though not a history book in the disciplinary sense, is no exception.

The anthology’s focus — the “golden age” in question — mainly spans the 1870s to the 1930s in Central and Eastern Europe, with occasional appearances of England and the United States. The chronology and geography thus go from the era of pogroms to the rise of Nazism. It’s possible to argue, as this book does, that this stretch constitutes the peak period of Jewish literature (Marcel Proust was active at the time), but it’s an unusual interpretation. It’s certainly a bold assertion when one considers the familiar canon of postwar English-language authors like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, and Mordecai Richler. It’s not that big-name writers are absent from the era Zipes is interested in: Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz are in the mix. But this feels more like a claim about the sociopolitical importance of the stories themselves than a dispassionate assessment of their merits.

And that’s fine. As a matter of strict critical assessment, maybe “golden age” is a bit strong, but those years were crucial for the emergence of Jewish modernity. Questions about what it meant to be Jewish — questions that would have made no sense to ask in previous eras — emerged, were debated within the community and beyond, and swiftly took on life-or-death urgency. While these matters got debated in the political sphere, in governments and newspapers, they were also the subtext to much of Jewish fiction, which is where this anthology enters the picture.

Zipes defines “the Jewish question” as follows: “After the so-called emancipation of Jews in Europe and elsewhere, should Jews be accepted as full citizens and allowed to live as they wish in different nation-states throughout the world, or should they be eliminated, or confined to monitored regions?” That’s a fine definition, but the most important thing about the Jewish question was that there was — and still is — a “Jewish question.” Consider who it is who would ask this, as a question. Jews do not ask “the Jewish question.” We contemplate and argue about what it means to be Jewish, but that is not what “the Jewish question” refers to.

To speak of a “Jewish question” is to speak of a Jewish problem. It’s a vantage point that rejects just letting Jews be. Rather than allowing Jews to adhere strongly to Judaism or to mix fully with the mainstream population depending on any individual Jew’s inclinations, askers of the Jewish question view this as a matter to be determined externally. And sometimes, historically, the answer to the Jewish question has been a simple* no. *

At its extreme, maybe even its core, the Jewish question is about Jews’ humanity. Are Jews people like others, or humanoid infiltrators? Chances are that you, a reader of Scribe Quarterly, don’t need convincing. Chances are that you know nice Jews and not-so-nice Jews, the gamut. There’s a decent chance you’re Jewish yourself, and would find it inconceivable to doubt that Jews are human beings. But others have not always been so sure.

Never-Ending Tales puts the tales themselves front and centre — which is to say, it doesn’t include a lot of information about the stories, the places and times in which they are set, and their original publication. A section at the end provides short biographies of the authors and editors whose work appears, and there is a modest array of footnotes, but the background information is limited. If the book is used in an educational context with a teacher filling in the blanks (it’s published by an academic press), this is not a problem. But for a reader picking up the book outside that setting, the absence of context has the effect of gesturing at a unified Jewish past. You might be in Poland or England, in the eighteenth or twentieth century, given the range of where stories were either written or set. It’s a portrait of a civilization at a crossroads.

What sort of portrait do we get? One in which, notably, the lure of the outside world always coexists with its dangers.

Several of the stories touch on interfaith romance, with central or side characters converting for the purpose of marriage. This may seem shockingly modern for that time — or not, depending on one’s familiarity with the plot of The Fiddler on the Roof (based on stories by Sholem Aleichem set in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russia), in which one of Tevye’s daughters marries out.

S. Ansky’s “The Pentinent” is about a Jewish man who abandons his Jewish wife and child, takes up with (and bigamously marries) a Christian woman, only to have end-of-life regrets about abandoning the Jewish people. (As a Jew, I’m perhaps meant to be moved by this, but I am wondering why he expressed no remorse at ditching his family, or rather, why the story doesn’t concern itself with that aspect of his trajectory.) Along similar lines, Dovid Bergelson’s “The Convert” tells of an unpleasant Jewish woman who becomes a Christian to wed and henpeck the man she loves, who happens to be of that faith. Hugo Bettauer’s 1922 The City Without Jews, a short satirical novel about Vienna expelling its Jews and then experiencing expeller’s remorse, includes an ongoing romance between a young Christian woman and a now-exiled Jewish artist, who poses as a Christian Frenchman to return to Vienna and be with her.

The unifying element in this collection of short stories is thus an intermarriage plot. There is also an eerily later-twentieth-century-seeming passage about how the gentile women of Vienna had outright preferred Jewish men for their sobriety and talents in the bedroom. You could be in a Philip Roth novel or a Woody Allen movie or a Seinfeld episode. Or more recent still: the hit Netflix series Nobody Wants This, about a “shiksa” who falls in love with a rabbi, launched in 2024 but exists in the same symbolic universe.

Intermarriage was always at the core of the so-called Jewish question, and also a challenge to essentialism. If Jew and gentile were meant to be these wildly different entities, what was to be made of the fact that they sometimes coupled off and had kids? For so many reasons, intermarriage works as a lens for understanding how Jews and non-Jews understood the boundaries of Jewishness.

As a course reader, Never-Ending Tales would be fantastic. As a standalone book for someone interested in Jewish fiction or folklore, however, it might have benefitted from a narrower focus, either thematic (free idea: intermarriage!) or in terms of the number of stories included. There is no shortage of worthy material. The two operation stories at the start are crucial, and The City Without Jews is a piece I’d never heard of and now cannot stop thinking about. It’s both intensely anti-antisemitic, defending Jews’ presence in Vienna, and at times so pro-Jewish it veers into promoting antisemitic stereotypes. Jews, in the story, are the people who keep cultural institutions and luxury shops in business. A mixed honour. Paul Schlesinger’s “The Enemies” (ca. 1920), about two Jewish soldiers, one French and one German, dying side by side during the First World War, has no shortage of contemporary relevance, as well as an epic punchline.

There were other stories that, while worthy, seemed less distinct. I — someone who has unusually high stamina for this sort of thing — got bogged down in the stories of rabbis and golems, which started to blend together. In the aggregate they do, however, evoke the pogrom era, and how it felt for Jews to live as prey.

There are a couple of moments in the book that come across as well-intended inclusivity efforts that, each for their own reasons, don’t quite work. First, the inclusion of a “ca. 1950–1960” story about a sorcerer, as “Told by a Yemenite Jew to Rachel Seri,” adds chronological, geographic, and gender diversity, with Seri one of two women presented in the book as authors of the stories. But I’m not sure what bringing in the postwar Mizrachi experience in such a limited manner adds to a project very much about something else. It feels out of place, and invites questions about what wasn’t included: Why not Ethiopian Jews? Why not short fiction from 2011? Precisely because there’s no monolithic thing, no such thing as theJewish experience, parameters help spell out what a project is and isn’t covering. Including 1870 and 1930, England and Russia, is already quite a lot.

The second such concern pertains to the other female author, or maybe-author, Helena Frank, to whom Zipes attributes the book’s epigraph: “Jews will be Jews while the world lasts, and they will become, through suffering, better Jews with more Jewish hearts.” This is taken from Frank’s entry in the anthology, the 1912 story “The Clever Rabbi.” In the introduction, Zipes lists Frank among the anthology’s “less well-known writers.” But her bio in the book describes her as “a British translator [who] was not Jewish,” which got me curious about this fascinating-sounding woman I had never heard of. I looked her up and soon enough found (via Project Gutenberg) an edition of Yiddish Tales, one of her books of translation mentioned in that bio. There, she is listed as the translator of an author-unknown Yiddish story, “The Clever Rabbi.”

Why does any of this matter? It’s not that I object to crediting translators, or to non-Jews translating from Yiddish. Rather, it’s that Frank is presented as this obscure Jewish woman author — bearing the same surname as perhaps the best-known female Jewish author of all time — finally getting her due.

The inclusion of two pieces of non-fiction, notably Theodor Herzl’s 1896 “The Jewish Question,” an essay-length excerpt of the beginning of The Jewish State, struck me at first as an odd choice. Anyone in Jewish Studies will probably have already encountered this text. And anyone who happens to have picked up a book of anti-antisemitic fables will be wondering why a polemic is in the mix.

But by the time I got to it, I saw that it was a clever wink of a choice in light of all the literal fairy tales that precede it. For if you didn’t know that the state of Israel existed, if you really were reading all these materials in a context-free space-and-time vacuum, you would naturally assume that it was yet another galaxy-brained musing by a Central European Jew. Indeed, “If you will it, it is no fairy tale,” on the title page of Herzl’s classic Zionist novel, Old-New Land (Altneuland), is easily the most famous Zionist literary quotation. Only the section heading word “Essays” announces that this is the realm of non-fiction. Coming on the heels of the mythic creatures and improbable coincidences of the short stories that precede it, Herzl’s depiction of a Jewish state in the land of Israel seems equally bonkers. Yet Israel exists.

With Herzl out of the way, the American Jewish scholar Leo W. Schwarz’s essay, “The Essence of Survival,” a contemporary-seeming-for-1935 musing on post-emancipation Jewish history, brings Never-Ending Tales to its conclusion. It’s a thought-provoking analysis of Jewish modernity, but has the air of a top-notch lecture in a survey course. It functions mainly as a way of avoiding the charged historical personage of Theodor Herzl from having the last word. A book ending with Herzl might seem to be presenting Zionism as the end point of Jewish history. And since a Jewish state did not wind up demolishing antisemitism, perhaps it seemed correct to wrap up the anthology on a more ambivalent, detached note. Detached, that is, because Schwarz was a scholar, but also because he was American, a lucky thing for a Jew to be in 1935.

But ending with Herzl would have been the more provocative (in a good sense) way to go. It was my first time reading Herzl since the events of October 7, 2023. First, too, of course, since the Gaza war, and Israel’s unprecedented ostracization. What struck me now was how thoroughly Herzl was writing from within his own context, that of a Europe unwilling to fully accept its own Jewish population. His naïveté regarding how the local Arab population would come to regard a Jewish state in Palestine is as striking as the clear-eyed precision with which he described the predicament of his own people, which would only get more dire. (Herzl died in 1904.) It’s a strange experience, reading someone at once so right and so wrong, for reasons he could not have anticipated. To read Herzl in the mid-2020s is to emerge with more questions than answers. That Herzl did not simply solve the “Jewish question” is maybe the strongest evidence that this was never a question that Jews had the power to solve.

As Zipes conveys in his introduction, the so-called Jewish question is still with us. But the stakes and dynamics have changed with world events: “Now the Palestinians seem to occupy the role of oppressed, while Israel appears to be the oppressor. This is one of the sad paradoxes of post-Holocaust history. What is a Jew to do when roles are reversed?”

The way the existence of Israel changed Jewishness is obviously not something a book about Europe from 1870 to 1930 can address head-on. What it can do, helpfully, is remind us in the here and now exactly how foreign Jews were viewed as being in Europe for much of that period. Antisemitism was about eliminating the “Semitic” or “Oriental” presence from European lands.

There is a subtext one sees in some anti-Zionist rhetoric that Jews had lovely lives in the diaspora, outside the odd microaggression, cheerily existing as Germans, etc., of the Jewish faith, until a fascist madman took power. The creation of Israel, therefore, would seem like an overreaction to a historical discontinuity. The takeaway from Never-Ending Tales is not that Israel’s creation was the end-of-history capstone to Jewish modernity. Rather, it’s that Jews’ status as full Europeans was new, tenuous, and continuously under attack well before Nazism.

More broadly, Never-Ending Tales offers models for resisting oppressive regimes. No, Trumpism is not Nazism; I leave it to the political scientists to decide how they wish to classify Trumpism with respect to fascism. But it is hard not to think of the 1938 remarks of Yale Divinity School professor Halford E. Luccock: “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’”

Whatever Trumpism is, and however unsettling it is to Canadian Jews as Canadians, it is not an anti-Jewish eliminationist movement. That does not mean contemporary resonances are absent. The City Without Jews is most notable for being a Jewish writer’s 1922 dystopian description of what would in fact soon happen: Vienna (and not just Vienna) expelling (and not just expelling) its Jews. A 2004 film, A Day Without a Mexican, has basically the same plot as The City Without Jews, but with a different minority group set in a different locale (modern-day Los Angeles). In 2025, The New York Timesrevisited this movie because some of the events described were playing out in real life, in the form of immigration enforcement raids.

That said, Never-Ending Tales is also relevant for the obvious reason: antisemitism is back, if it ever went away. Antisemitic incidents regularly outpace other forms of hate crime, despite our small numbers. Hateful speech on social media, whether by humans or bots, has it in for Jews disproportionately. Anti-Jewish sentiment remains a way of revving up all manner of crowds. With that in mind, the anthology helps illustrate continuities within the history of antisemitism. Antisemites of yore may not have been reacting to the actions of the not-yet-existent Jewish state, but they absolutely saw themselves as fighting their oppressors. The Jews in these stories were not all-powerful, far from it. But antisemites saw them as a menace.

When I came across the concept of the Jewish question in the early 2000s, as a graduate student learning about European Jews’ emancipation, it seemed a thing of another time. Surely today’s modern societies were simply too heterogeneous to view Jews as The Other. That way of seeing things had to be specific to European environments where most everyone was the same thing apart from this handful of people who were another one, namely Jewish. Or, fine, maybe WASPy postwar country clubs. But in contexts where all sorts of religions and physical features abound, and overlap, how could “Jewish” not just be one category among many? How could we still be a question, let alone of interest to anyone other than ourselves? Zipes does not answer this, nor would I expect that of him. Never-Ending Tales offers the uninitiated, as well as the initiated, an excellent survey of where we ourselves are coming from.

Author

Phoebe is the opinion editor for The Canadian Jewish News and a contributor editor of The CJN’s *Scribe Quarterly *print magazine. She is also a contributor columnist for the Globe and Mail, co-host of the podcast Feminine Chaos with Kat Rosenfield, and the author of the book *The Perils of “Privilege”. *Her second book, The Last Straight Woman, will be published by the Signal imprint of Penguin Random House Canada in May 2026. Follow her on Bluesky @phoebebovy.bsky.social and X @bovymaltz.

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