Steve Stern’s new novel, A Fool’s Kabbalah, is a comedy about tragedy and a tragedy about comedy. It is a mystical fable of real events and a realistic account of mysticism. There are Jewish jokes and Jewish jokesters and Nazis who torture and kill the jokesters. Kafka, Kabbalah, Zionism, and the shtetl of Zyldzce (pronounced, perhaps, as “zilch”); Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, love for a rabbi’s beautiful daughter, and an occult midnight marriage to an unearthly albino girl in a white gauze dress; shit jokes, fart jokes, raw misery, deep philosophy, brutal history and brutal fantasy, broken hearts and heartfelt joy—these exuberantly disparate topics are somehow, improbably, made to cohere.

This is Stern’s seventh novel. His previous book, The Village Idiot (2022), explored the historical reality of the early-twentieth-century School of Paris artists from the dreamlike perspective of the expressionist painter Chaïm Soutine, who trudges beneath the Seine in a diving suit. Stern has also published four collections of stories, four novellas, and two children’s books, all of them steeped in Jewish folklore. He is, on the face of it, an unlikely successor to Sholem Aleichem.

Stern grew up in a secular family. He once described his Reform congregation in Memphis, Tennesee, as “so divested of tradition I might as well have been a Methodist. We had a choir, a pipe organ, and a rabbi in ecclesiastical robes.” It’s the kind of experience that many of us mid-twentieth-century suburban Reform Jews recognize. His journey into magical mystery Jewish folktales began when he returned to Memphis, unemployed at thirty-one after a few years of hippie wandering, and landed a job at the local folklore center. That journey continued in books like The Pinch (2015), about the long-lost Jewish neighborhood in his hometown. Like the adolescent protagonist of his novel The Frozen Rabbi (2010), who finds and befriends a rabbi from nineteenth-century Poland preserved in a freezer in the family’s basement rec room, Stern has stumbled on a tradition, befriended it, and made it his own.

Stern writes with a manic whirl of comic images and sentences and ideas that are disturbing and hilarious and sometimes grim, all of the madness carefully, delicately constructed. In “The Sin of Elijah,” a story from his collection The Wedding Jester (1999), which won a National Jewish Book Award, the prophet Elijah hangs out on the Lower East Side primarily to watch Feyvush and Gitl Fefer, a married couple whose love and sexual passion are so strong that one day their deliriously energetic fornication bumps them all the way up to heaven. It is a Jewish joke writ large, as formal and traditional in its structure as an O. Henry story, for they find the good life of heaven quite dull, manage to get back to earth, then think better of their choice and try to return, their previously joyful lovemaking devolving into a desperate, passionless, angry attempt to repeat their earlier journey.

A Fool’s Kabbalah has the breathless momentum of Stern’s earlier work as well as all the Yiddishkeit and delicious nonsense that makes him so much fun to read. But there is a new gentleness, too. He loves these characters, and not just for their volley of predicaments and pronouncements, but for their imperfect humanity as well. The novel’s intimacy serves as an emotional call to the reader and propels the story as much as the goings-on do. And such goings-on! Through its parallel plots of love and guilt and plunder and destruction and rescue, one particular idea, one particular love, runs like a mighty stream: the passionate ties between Jews and books.

The novel follows the great historian of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, on a real journey he took to Europe in 1946. Sent by the fledgling Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he was the school’s first professor of Jewish mysticism, on a sacred and anguished treasure hunt, the esteemed scholar of Kabbalah must gather up the remains of a vanished civilization—the books looted from Jewish synagogues, study houses, attics, cellars—from wherever their owners, now murdered, could hide them.

Stern begins in Prague—the city of Kafka and the golem—where Scholem has just arrived after a harrowing journey through the charred remains of postwar Europe. It was Scholem, Stern reminds us, who recovered from obscurity the Kabbalistic tradition that Jewish historians had neglected for centuries “in their eagerness to present to the Gentiles an eminently reasonable and unthreatening version of their religion.” Having “single-handedly (as he liked to think) resurrected that tradition, with all its dangerous, heterodox, and anarchic reverberations,” Scholem felt “as if he’d raised a lost continent from beneath the sea.” Who better to rescue another lost literature and culture, to salvage “what was left of a world” on this newly ravaged continent?

Across Germany, Austria, and Poland, across sections of Eastern Europe that have only just learned their postwar national designations, Scholem travels to hostile libraries and museums unwilling to give up their Judaica collections to this emissary from a nation that does not yet exist. He rescues damp and moldy manuscripts hidden in “airless cellars, attics festooned in cobwebs; antiquities of inestimable value were immured in dank catacombs, buried in forests.” The books “were as palpable as flesh and blood.”

It is the flesh and blood of the books’ owners and readers and daveners that is not palpable, of course. Indeed, the rescued bits of a once thriving culture seem to mimic the fate of those exterminated by the Nazis. “The alps of books” that Scholem is able to salvage are then stored in the Offenbach Archival Depot, a factory building requisitioned from the I.G. Farben Corporation, which had “manufactured the cyanide-based pesticide used,” Stern notes in an eerily deadpan tone, “to exterminate lice and the inmates of concentration camps,” letting the punch line end the joke, so to speak. Stern is a master of both the understated and the overstated, using either one for humor or for horror, depending on the moment in this story that insists on both.

On one leg of his journey, Scholem is driven in a rickety car by a surly man named Yitz. Even when he sees the number tattooed on Yitz’s arm, Scholem cannot help but find him an unsympathetic character. Yitz greets him disdainfully as “the book collector.” Scholem, who has long been an ardent bibliophile, thinks, “As a line of work, it sounded like a venerable complement to book peddler, which was the humble trade the grandfather of Yiddish literature had chosen to assign to his pseudonym: Mendele Mocher Seforim, Mendel the Book Peddler.” But this comforting link to the glories of Yiddish literature past is quickly snapped in two when Yitz adds, “Books are drek.”

How, Scholem wonders, can a Jew say such a thing? “Books form the soul of the Jewish people,” he replies. “Like I said,” Yitz responds, “drek. I prefer a nice glass schnapps,” and he goes on to extoll the virtues of “oyseh mukem,” “hoomentush,” or, in case Scholem didn’t understand, “pussy.” Seeing his passenger’s discomfort, Yitz says, “Nu,…you don’t want to talk pussy?… So we’ll talk scripture,” and he begins arguing Talmud with the revered scholar:

It tells us in Deuteronomy…is prohibited from plowing a field, a farmer with a ox and a donkey yoked together. But in Talmud, the tractate Bava Kama, Rav Ashi asks, “What is the law if the farmer drives his wagon with a goat and a fish?”…

Rav Pappa asks in Tractate Nedarim…“What is the law if you find sitting on a person’s head a bird’s nest? Must you send away the mama bird before you take the chicks?”

The absurdity of the world’s greatest scholar of Kabbalah engaging in pilpul with an aggressively cynical concentration camp survivor in a rattling car somewhere in what may or may not be Poland is interrupted by a flat tire outside the “clustered provincial eyesore” of Zyldzce.

While Yitz fixes the flat, Scholem decides to take a walk through the shtetl of Zyldzce (though you cannot have a shtetl without Jews, Stern notes). It is here that he meets Nachum ben Henich Aishishkin, a grotesquely ragged hunchback, “his whisk broom–bearded jaw in constant motion, chewing either a plug of tobacco or his toothless gums.” He greets Scholem with the words “Vos macht a yid?,” a phrase meaning “What’s up?” But its literal translation is: “What does a Jew make?”—a question Stern has been asking all his literary life.

Nachum, who styles himself a “merchant of fine and rare books,” beckons Scholem to come with him into a cave. “You followed such figures at your peril,” Scholem tells himself, thinking of Alice’s White Rabbit and Treasure Island’s Ben Gunn. Nachum addresses Scholem as “Mayn dear Reb Fellow Book Maven,” as if they were equals, and it turns out that there in the cave he has his own alp of books, a collection of cookbooks and Yiddish trash novels like Glatt Kosher Murder, Velvele Eats Compote, and Feyge, Tear Off Your Blouse, in addition to worthless tomes of medieval witchcraft like The Book of Raziel, “a so-called magical grimoire…a standard text among crackpot occultists for centuries.” Out of pity and a desire to escape the strange cave and its stranger occupant, Scholem agrees to buy The Book of Raziel for an absurdly bloated price, then impulsively hands the “misshapen, old fossil” twice as much again. “If this much,” Nachum observes with irrefutable logic, “why not more?”

In chapters that alternate with Scholem’s haunted postwar experience, Stern takes us back to the busy, muddy streets of pre-war Zyldzce, a living, fanciful shtetl full of romance and mystics and rivalries. Scampering through these streets is Menke Klepfisch, the village prankster, “the shtetl scapegrace.” Menke is in love with Blume, the rabbi’s dignified and beautiful daughter, as are all the other young men in the shtetl. Menke and Blume have been friends since childhood, but he knows he has no romantic standing with her. His goal in life is now to make her laugh—whether at his jokes or at himself is irrelevant. He is irreverent, vulgar, and plays unfriendly practical jokes even on Blume’s father, even after the Germans invade the little village.

Old Rabbi Vaynipl, hoping to find a way out of the horrors (which Stern describes with an almost merciless exactitude) of the Nazi occupation, holds an occult ceremony gleaned from the same Book of Raziel that Scholem will end up buying after the war. Vaynipl and his gullible, increasingly desperate disciples chant and wait for the miraculous appearance of the Messiah. But instead it is Menke Klepfisch who appears, jumping out at them from a cupboard, terrifying the circle of scholars, then offering his now trembling audience a joke:

Pogroms, we got…. Cholera we got, and gout, blood libel, idolaters, Nazis, apikorsim…Oy, maybe it’s better we were never born. But who is so lucky, I ask you?… Not one in fifty thousand.

Even after this blustery interruption scares and humiliates the old rabbi, Menke continues his hapless courtship, following a now frosty Blume around and proffering off-color jokes. Has she heard of the time Reb Shepske Szcuczynski complained to his doctor that he couldn’t pish?

“How old are you?” asks the doctor…. “Ninety-three years, thanks God,” Reb Shepske proudly announces. “Hmm,” says the good doctor, stroking his beard, “you already pished enough.”

Blume, needless to say, is not impressed.

Scholem, on the other hand, sees great depth in humor. In one of his many youthful conversations with his friend Walter Benjamin, decades before Hitler takes power, when Gershom was still called Gerhard, he explains that

no punitive action could follow the self-accusation inherent in Jewish comedy. “An age-old Jewish legal principle maintains that someone who accuses himself cannot be condemned. Laughter, you see, is the acoustical resonance of adjournment. There’s an adage: Aggadah, which as you know is the narrative dimension of Talmud; Aggadah has a laughing face.”

Benjamin steers the conversation to Kafka, with whom both are obsessed, saying, “More and more the essential feature in Kafka seems to me to be humor…. Kafka was finally a holy schlemiel, Gerhard—a Svejk, a Sancho Panza, a clown!” In response, Scholem’s thoughts turn to mysticism: “Wasn’t the clown, the jester, the shkotz—wasn’t he the ideal archetype to mediate between religion and nihilism, which Gershom regarded as the opposing poles of the mysticism that was his principal concern?”

Benjamin’s final pronouncement on the subject is that “one must be a fool if he is to help…. In fact, only a fool’s help is a real help.’’ How to help is one of the novel’s unanswered questions. Scholem replies, “Help for what?” The reader knows exactly what kind of help will be needed and where none will come.

When the Wehrmacht troops first invade Zyldzce, Menke the comedian reflexively makes a joke to the Obersturmführer. It is Menke’s way of being in the world. But he now becomes the Obersturmführer’s performing pet Jew, expected to tell jokes whenever his master demands. Mass hangings (a minyan at a time), grotesque and innovative torture, and always starvation are the reality of this new world of wartime Zyldzce, and “there were scarcely any gaps left in the general terror wherein one might play the fool. But who in such a climate would have been inclined to do so?” Menke Klepfisch, that’s who. Though even he comes to question his antics. Is his buffoonery an act of sabotage diverting the oppressors’ attention from his fellow Jews? Is he simply pandering to the invaders? Or is his joking just a lifelong effort to “elude the truth”?

As the German soldiers and their Gestapo and SS fellows grow in number and brutality, the residents of Zyldzce turn more and more to folk magic. Rabbi Vaynipl tries to fashion a golem out of dirt while the rest of the population decides to stage a “black wedding,” a ceremony that takes place at night in a graveyard, usually performed during a plague, to ask God for help. The bridegroom is, inevitably, Menke; the bride a coral-eyed, whispering, white-shrouded albino girl named Tsippe-Itsl. But no help arrives from God or the golem, nor does love bloom between the newlyweds in an occupied ghetto where people fight for the green, fly-specked flesh of a horse collapsed in the street.

Yet the progress of this blighted marriage, though steeped in the stink of cruelty, in the anguish of the shrinking world around it, and further blighted by Menke’s physical revulsion for his bizarre bride, becomes almost impossibly moving. Tsippe-Itsl turns out to be a brilliant forager and housekeeper. She reveres Menke with a “slavish adoration. He’d done nothing to earn it and could do nothing, it seemed, to get shed of it.” It is only when a vindictive German officer locks the couple together for a night in a cold, reeking privy that Menke begins to feel something more than resentment toward the “clinging, misbegotten” Tsippe-Itsl. He finds himself “as touched as he was unnerved by the girl’s devotion. Naturally there was no question of returning it in kind, but…Menke had developed a tender spot, like an ulcer of the mind, for the chimerical creature.”

Stern has a way of distancing his characters from one another that brings the need for intimacy and its beauty throbbing to life. Love does not flourish in this novel. Menke’s love for the unattainable Blume is as catastrophic as his marriage. And the characters do not escape their terrible fate. Death, here, is gruesome and detailed. There is no dignity in an entire village being burned alive. But Stern sees another kind of dignity—the dignity of the people themselves. The tenderness he shows them is almost unbearable, it is so true and so sad.

As a book collector in the cemetery Jewish Europe has become, Scholem, too, must question his youthful clever pronouncements on humor in his discussions and correspondence with Benjamin, that “thrusting and parrying in what seemed to them a heroic effort to salvage some necessary truths from the world before it toppled into the abyss.” One world has already toppled, and Scholem’s home in Jerusalem is soon wracked by a different war, Arabs killing Jews, Jews killing Arabs. Benjamin is dead, and Scholem feels he might as well be:

And the abyss had swallowed up, well, everything. How inadequate and self-congratulatory seemed their fateful dialogues now. Gershom writhed at the memory of how implicitly he’d come to embrace Walter’s assertion that Kafka had “plucked from the center of dread the possibility of humor.”

He’s worried about the books he’s gathered, that “if the archive wasn’t redistributed with prompt dispatch to the places it now belonged (and he knew precisely where it belonged), it was in danger of suffering the fate of its former proprietors.” He had been a Zionist since the age of fourteen to the dismay of his patriotic, assimilated father, who kicked him out of the house for his radically anti-German views in 1917, when Gershom was about twenty. Now he must get the books to safety in the Holy Land:

Gershom had seen, in the ruined streets of Frankfurt, fish for sale wrapped in the pages of Talmud; Jewish gravestones were sold for building materials, illuminated Torah parchments clipped by stenographers for typewriter covers and some even made into carpet slippers.

The books that avoided this fate must be rescued not just from the antagonistic librarians and museum directors, but from the well-meaning, ignorant, shortsighted Americans who have concocted a plan to melt down silver goblets, Seder plates, Torah crowns, and menorahs “in a process that echoed the crematoria” and use the proceeds from the ingots for welfare programs for immigrants. Concerned depot staffers have already made off with some of the loot to protect it from the misguided do-gooders by burying it with full liturgical rights on the banks of the Main. Again, Stern suggests, the books mimic their former owners, and Scholem identifies “with the contents of the depository to the point of fellowship.”

The situation inspires a caper of sorts. Scholem, Yitz, an American rabbi, a gruff Jewish American sergeant, and a refined Jewish American captain decide to steal a truckload of books and get them to Mandatory Palestine on one of the ships smuggling immigrant Jews past the British gunboats:

Caught up as well in the initial enthusiasm, Gershom nevertheless felt called upon to remind his colleagues that the distinction between books and people was finally moot, since each depended on the other for their ultimate redemption.

The caper is, not surprisingly, a complete failure. British troops send this unlikely gang back with their crates of books on the same ship with the same immigrants, back to the continent that has no use for any of them.

There is no success in A Fool’s Kabbalah. No one rises to heaven or escapes, frozen in a block of ice, to a freezer full of TV dinners in a suburban rec room in Memphis, Tennessee. This is a book about strength, not escape or even survival. Humor dances through it like an uplifting breeze—not an answer, but its own kind of strength, a necessity like the air itself. The only survivors are books, books that tie the present to both the past and the future.

Perhaps that long literary lineage, still alive, that link to the future, is what endows this extraordinary novel with its improbable buoyancy, the buoyancy of hope. The book ends with Scholem back in Jerusalem, a mordant and inscrutable scholar, disappointed by the events around him, the wars, the territorial, nationalistic Zionism so different from the spiritual ideal he once held. He is walking through the city, its archaeological layers exposed by the recent fighting. He passes an old bookseller, hunchbacked, his jaw whiskered and incessantly chewing. The man stands by an old cart that

contained a disordered heap of back-numbered Yiddish romances and the odd handbook of spells and incantations once so popular among the uneducated Ostjuden. How, wondered Gershom, could such a throwback of a shelf-worn luftmensch survive in this unsentimental climate?…

“There are only miracles,” Gershom said to himself, quoting Kafka, and shrugged.