In his obituary of Ludovic Bruckstein, published in Viața Noastră [Our Life] on 12 August 1988, Jewish-Romanian literary critic Eugen Luca (1923–1997) was to write that like the protagonist of ‘The Fate of Yaakov Maggid’, Bruckstein himself accepted ‘the condition of the maggid’, the vocation of storyteller within the East-European Jewish tradition of Hassidism that was particularly strong among the Jews of Maramuresch. The maggid, says Luca, is a storyteller not for the sake of fame or fortune, but in fulfilment of a mitzva, a solemn, divinely ordained obligation towards his fellow man. In Bruckstein’s tales, there is also a strong sense that the maggid is a homeless wanderer between this world and the next, perhaps even a heavenly messenger in disguise, like the angel in the Book of Tobit. In Hebrew, the word also carries the meaning of daemon, a denizen of the interval between the celestial and the mundane planes, such as the maggid that conveyed messages regarding the divine mysteries to Rabbi Joseph Karo (1488–1575) during a series of nocturnal visitations stretching over five decades, recorded in Maggid Mesharim [Preacher of Righteousness] (Lublin, 1646). The Hassidic maggidim can be distinguished from the earlier, widespread tradition of the maggid as wandering preacher, in that rather than admonishing their listeners for their sins and holding out the prospect of divine retribution—the Tocheichah, or the list of terrifying punishments laid out in the fifth book of Moses—they emphasised the indwelling divine holiness to be found in the simplicity of everyday communal life, the joy of prayer and celebration of the Sabbath and Pesach. In particular, they told hagiographic tales of the life of the movement’s founder, Israel ben Eliezer (1698–1760), a tzaddik, or holy man, who was to gain the title of Baal Shem Tov, abbreviated as ‘Der BeShT’, or ‘Master of the Good Name’.[ . . . ]A gezerah (Hebrew) or gzar (Yiddish), meaning ‘(evil) decree’, often features in the Hassidic tales told by the maggidim and is typically circumvented by the tzaddik protagonist, often by means of a miracle. In the Russian Empire, for example, any law, regulation or decree that specifically named the Jews was automatically a gezerah in that it inevitably brought anti-Semitic persecution in one or another degree. ‘Rabbi, Tsar and Faith’ is typically Hassidic in its tale of the Rabbi of Rizhin, who disguises himself as the tsar and goes to the Kremlin in order to avert a pogrom, fooling the tsar’s ministers into signing an act rescinding the order. Even the scientific-minded Dr Iserovitch, a descendant of the Rizhiner Rebbe, who recounts the episode, is forced to conclude that the story must be true: there is simply no other reasonable explanation, given that the appointed pogrom did not take place. In ‘The Good Oil’, another scientist descended from rabbis, Professor Johann-Josef Moellin, is likewise forced to recognise the existence of the miraculous, in the form of the otherwise inexplicable cures effected by Rabbi Moishe-Leib Sassower using ordinary sunflower oil. And this, ultimately, is what Ludovic Bruckstein invites his readers to do in short stories that draw deeply from the wellsprings of his ancestral Hassidism and the lost cultural milieu of Unterlander Jewry: to recognise and reacquaint themselves with the miraculous that exists in the pious simplicity of humble everyday life.
(from the Introduction)
