Journey To Dubno

In Dubno, in the old centre of the town, I pass under a sagging arcade and through a courtyard. Suddenly, here I am: in the old Jewish shtetl. Here, alleyways and leaning houses are just the way I’d pictured them. It’s how things must have looked back when Avrom Ber Gotlober lived here with his daughter.

Gotlober, poet, prolific writer, founder and editor of the Hebrew monthly Ha-Boker Or, an excellent collection of contemporary poems, articles, and stories, was a proponent of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment. As such, he was spurned by the religious community. When he introduced his first wife to modern thought, his-father-in-law, pressured by a Hasidic rabbi, forced his daughter to return home and divorce her renegade husband.

This contempt of the religious community (mixed with respect) is well described by Leo Wiener in, The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Here is what the young writer Solomon Jacob Abramovitsch, (better known as Mendele Moïkher Sforim, or Mendele the Bookseller) was told before going to meet Gotlober:

One of his friends advised him to make the acquaintance of the poet Gotlober, who, at that time, was teaching in one of the local Jewish schools. The old man who was giving him that counsel added: “Go to see him some evening when no one will notice you, and make his acquaintance. He is an apostate who shaves his beard, and he does not enjoy the confidence of our community. Nor do we permit young men to cultivate an acquaintance with him; but you are a learned man, and you will know how to meet the statements of that heretic. He is a fine Hebrew scholar, and it might do you good to meet him. Remember the words of Rabbi Meier: ‘Eat the wholesome fruit, and cast away the rind.’ I'll tell the beadle to show you the way to the apostate.”

I continue along the complicated lanes of a former shtetl where, now, only Jews are missing. Then I see, soaring over the rooftops, the synagogue. Circumventing more rotting houses, I reach it — or what’s left of it: huge, shattered, bombed-out, as if the destruction happened only yesterday. Yet it retains a proud waiting dignity.

“Shalom,” I say.

The resident pigeons coo.