The Last Dekrepitzer
By Howard Langer
Cresheim Press, 262 pp.
I confess the first thing that grabbed me about Howard Langer’s debut novel was the homophone “decrepit” embedded in the title. The Dekrepitzers, it turns out, are a fictional Hasidic sect wiped out by the Nazis, except for their dynastic lone survivor Rebbe Shmuel Meir Lichtbencher, the novel’s protagonist, who is captured by the Russians and forced to serve in the Russian army for three years. When he returns to his shtetl in the southern mountains of Poland, all he finds is Shoah-wrought death and destruction. He has become a Hasidic rabbi with no Hasids, no relatives and nothing but an old family violin, which he plays remarkably well—though in a most unusual manner.
Eventually, the rebbe finds his way to Naples, Italy, where he plays music with Black American soldiers who rescue him from the chaos of postwar Europe by dressing him in a U.S. Army uniform and the dog tags of an AWOL soldier and smuggling him onto a troop ship that is taking them home to the (segregated) United States. An iluy, or Talmudic prodigy, who memorized the entire Talmud word for word as a boy, Shmuel winds up as part of a blues band called the Brown Sugar Ramblers and lives for some years among the Black inhabitants of the rural Mississippi Delta, where he goes by the name of Sam Lightup.
Langer, a Philadelphia lawyer and law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, establishes the novel’s major motifs early on: They revolve around the question of faith in light of the anger his protagonist feels, despite unshakeable belief in the Almighty, at God’s abandonment of his decimated people. The novel is also anchored in the spiritual and mystical powers of music, not only the Hasidic niggunim, or melodies, played by Rebbe Shmuel but the Black music—gospel and the blues—that the rebbe learns to play.
With the success of James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, we may be seeing something of an upsurge in nostalgia for what is now viewed as a better era and stronger alliance between Blacks and Jews. The same phenomenon is apparent in nonfiction books such as Larry Tye’s The Jazzmen, which celebrates the closeness between Louis Armstrong and a Lithuanian Jewish family. Sometimes this can amount to a paternal role for Jews, complete with philanthropic largesse: Langer’s novel mentions Julius Rosenwald, founder and president of Sears Roebuck, who gave large and unrivaled sums of money for what were then called “schools for colored children.”
But Langer’s novel also conjures up the rebbe’s odyssey in the America of the late 1940s and 1950s. He falls in love with a Black woman named Lula, who embraces Judaism and, under Jewish law, which he himself administers, marries her, though the marriage is illegal under Mississippi law. Klansmen come after Sam and Lula with a burning cross, while Sam, trained in arms by the Russians, fires rifle shots above their hooded heads. Sam flees alone to New York, lives in Harlem and plays his violin at the Columbus Circle subway station. Through various contacts, he becomes friends with the leading Hasidic Bobover rabbi and also with the Reverend Gary Davis, a blind Black acoustic guitarist well-known as a musical genius and would-be saver of souls who was an actual historical figure. Sam also goes to work for Brill, a Jew who specializes in repairing musical instruments and who trains the rebbe to be a luthier, a maker of stringed instruments. Brill has a crate of fiddles salvaged from the Shoah in need of repair, which he wants fixed and given to children in Harlem schools.
It takes a year for Sam and Lula, now a Jew and a rebbetzin, and their son Moses to be reunited. (Langer’s characters remind us of the biblical Moses and his dark-skinned wife Zipporah.) We see New York in that time period through their eyes as Sam marvels in disbelief at a modern dentist’s office, a kosher deli with out-of-this-world-tasting rolls, a grand and ornate Manhattan synagogue and Carnegie Hall. But we also see the iciness and racial animus toward Lula as she enters alone into the world of gender-separate shul seating.
I don’t know why Langer chose a variant of “decrepit” as the name of the violinist’s sect. (In real life, there’s a death metal band by that name.) Or why he provided such detailed descriptions of a seder and a bris, making me wonder if he had gentile or very secular Jewish readers in mind. It’s not clear why the JFK assassination is mentioned (though only briefly). But those minor issues notwithstanding, there is much to be charmed by in this novel and even more to learn from it—especially of the soulful Hasidic niggunim and the Black gospel and blues music and lyrics that Langer knows so well.
Michael Krasny is an award-winning journalist and the former host of the talk show Forum for public radio station KQED in San Francisco.
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