‘Romance of a Horse Thief’
Recently I have been interested in a few interrelated questions: how to write historical fiction about the shtetl, how lawlessness and anarchy were understood by Yiddish speakers who lived typically in very strict observance of the law, and how horses were treated in the shtetl. I came with all of these questions to read Joseph Opatoshu’s novella “Romance of a Horse Thief,” which did offer some answers.
This novella is the story of Zanvl, whose romances are thwarted by his degraded social status as a ganev, a thief. He loves Rachel, the daughter of a farmer who is absent, trading every day except Shabbat, and he can only visit her at night when they share tender conversation. At his sister’s wedding, he sees Rachel, but gets distracted by a friend from the kretshme (bar or pub) and his lascivious wife. Zanvl cannot keep his eyes set on what he wants because he feels he is not deserving. Despite Rachel’s love for him, at the end of the story Zanvl has returned, over and over again, to drinking at the kretshme with the other wanton and criminal shtetlites, unable to escape from the place in the underworld that his work and his family have granted him.
These are relatable characters. The misunderstandings and mistranslated emotions between Rachel, Zanvl, and the others are paradigmatic of young lovers throughout time and literature. One example arises on a day after Zanvl drank himself into oblivion at the kretshme, after which he ended up at the house of a girl he often sees there. In the morning, he wants to write a letter to Rachel explaining how he feels, but then he remembers he doesn’t know how to write. He asks Manke, the girl whose bed he’s lying in, to write it for him while he dictates. He stops being able to think of anything to say and so he tears up the letter and tells her, “To hell with it! I’m not doing any more. If I can’t write myself, then it’s no use at all.” The letter is an interesting object in the story, because it represents the possibility of Zanvl expressing how he really feels. Not only is he unable to produce the letter himself, because he can’t write, but he can’t even do it with the help of an intermediary. Ultimately, Zanvl surrenders to the fact that he’s not a respectable husband for Rachel and he is not able to explain himself.
And what of the horses? They are an important part of the story, even if they never speak. Zanvl feels the most like himself when he is heroically crossing borders in the dead of night, seizing horses from goyish traders, or when he’s walking through the stalls of horses at the fair, discussing his next schemes with his horse-trader friends. He feels at home among them, and in the forest. At one point, he plans an elaborate heist so that he will pass by Rachel’s house on horseback at night, and he tells her to look out for him. “Like the storybook prince, he would lift her onto his horse, draw her close, and whisk her off.” He does pass by her house on the way to conduct his theft in the forest, where he fears he could be caught, and they share a tender moment. Ultimately, his closeness with her is in moments of gallant self-ownership, not hiding his work or his status but rather embodying it with passion and bravery.
In her preface to the translation of this text, Ruth Wisse writes that literature about the underbelly of a culture typically arises as a “claim to greater honesty and a rejection of stilted fictional modes.” Since the novella was a relatively new form in Yiddish literature in Opatoshu’s day, as was the concept of Yiddish literature in general for a group of people that typically only considered things worth writing down if they were written in Hebrew, the rejection of stilted modes comes with the territory in this case. What I find most notable about this depiction of the lawless, criminal community of shtetl dwellers is Zanvl’s psychology, his raw desire and the many ways it goes unsatisfied, or transforms into confusion. Zanvl, as a representative of the criminal tendency of the historical shtetl, was born into this life. Since his father is a professional horse thief, being a criminal is his inheritance, the way he follows the footsteps of those who came before. He participates in the community through his life as a criminal.
In the future, I hope to learn more about the horses that were the backbone of shtetl life as vehicles, power, and captive workers. Like the criminals of a place, they tell us about the dynamics of what life was like there from the perspective of the non-sovereign, immoral or amoral dwellers, the ones subject to life there with little say over how life should be.
