BARBARA E. MANN “ Good to Think With” : The Work of Objects in Three Novels of Modern Jewish Life E ARLY IN DOVID BERGELSON’ S Nokh alemen ( The End of Everything , 1913), a modernist Yiddish novel set in a provincial town outside Kiev, Reb Gedalya, the shtetl’ s aging and increasingly outdated patriarch, encounters his daughter Mirel, his most precious possession: “Reb Gedalye had already returned from the Sada- gura study house with his prayer shawl and phylacteries, and with Gitele absent, felt very lonely in the empty house. He found Mirel standing all alone in her room, and once again distractedly began fiddling with the knick-knacks on her dressing table” (86/187). 1 The passage’ s symmetry, its juxtaposition of religious and profane objects, is ironically tethered to a sense of a physical void: the house feels empty and Mirel is “standing all alone in her room. ” This perceived isolation is bracketed by a pair of object sets: the prayer shawl and phylacteries, on the one hand, and the knick-knacks or “trifles ” ( kleynekeiten) on Mirel’ s dressing table, on the other. Her father then tells her, in a “distracted” manner, that “the bailiff might call here today, ” to which Mirel responds by donning “her jacket and black scarf ” and leav- ing the house. The narrative equivalence between the accoutrements of religious observance and the “knick-knacks ” of Mirel’ s vanity seems to render them both equally unreliable as objects of comfort or sustenance: the prayer shawl and phylac- teries should be handled with intention and devotion, the opposite of “distracted fiddling” ( arumtapn), yet neither set of possessions will withstand the demands of the baili ff, who may or may not “call here today. ” The family is approaching bank- ruptcy, and, within the provincial backwater that is the shtetl, financial concerns shape traditional religious observance as well as the most mundane possessions. The movement from religious objects to knick-knacks suggests that the former have been stripped of their functional value, while the latter appear to soothe or I would like to thank Rachel Mesch, Laura Arnold Leibman, and Naomi Seidman for their comments on this essay. 1 Parenthetical references to the novel cite the page number of the English translation The End of Every- thing followed by the page number of the Yiddish edition Nokh alemen . Comparative Literature 70:4 DOI 10.1215/00104124 -7215495 © 2018 by University of Oregon Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/comparative-literature/article-pdf/70/4/444/550720/444mann.pdf by COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY user on 28 November 2018