[ … ] For a long time now, it seemed, they’d known that love wasn’t the most essential concern in life. [ … ] But then where was the most essential concern in life? Did life perhaps offer some hidden corner where a few words about it might be heard?” (2.11).

Seemingly indifferent to her own life, she struggles to establish a connection with others whom she believes to be suffering as she does, seeing reflections of her own situation in trains and their assorted passengers (2.2). Yet she is fully conscious of “the alluring power of her graceful figure” (2.6), which attracts even the Burnes family’s callow young tutor, who is “captivated” by her voice, “modulated by the enervated tones of one who’d lived through a great deal yet remained stubbornly loyal to some private ideal and paid no mind to the opinions of others” (4.4). Mirel never hesitates to use her beauty to attract those she feels can assist her in some way. Thus where Heler provides her with the opportunity to explore her sexuality, Herz offers her the possibility of acquiring some intellectual insight. Setting out to capture his interest, she sees in him only what she wants to see—another directionless soul suffering in solitude. Herz’s response to life is the detached cynicism of an outsider, however. He wanders about questioning the peasants like an anthropologist (2.3), yet he tends to view the world of the shtetl with neoromantic idealization: one Sabbath eve he interprets the lassitude of twilight as a manifestation of what has been identified as “historical Jewishness,”30 an affectation undercut by Mirel’s realistic awareness of its quotidian tedium (2.15).

Detached from social engagement, perhaps through disappointment at past failure, Herz withdraws completely from any practical commitment to life by writing poetry in Hebrew, an activity that embarrasses him by its futile evasion of reality at a time of revolutionary change: “Two years ago he’d poked fun at himself and told her: To write during the day was a disgrace to him personally, as well as to the entire Jewish population of the shtetl who had no need of it, so he wrote only at night, when people were asleep. At night, he said, everyone’s sense of shame was diminished. And then he’d smiled and held his peace. Nothing else was left to him, he said, except this smiling silence” (2.3). His helpless disillusionment finds vivid expression in his symbolic evocation, in his “Dead City” prose poem, of “bodies clutching stones tightly in their fists. Before their deaths they had, it seemed, desired to hurl these stones at someone” (2.3). Poseur and cynic that he is, he keeps the needy Mirel at an emotional distance by ignoring her letters for a long time, so that when he eventually does respond—twice (3.16 and 4.4)—to her desperate summons, he is no longer able to help her, even if he wanted to.

For all his devotion, Mirel’s husband Shmulik is the most pitiable of the men with whom she has a relationship. Though Mirel tells him frankly that, despite their betrothal, she can never love him and will always treat him badly (2.12), he nevertheless insists on going through with the marriage and then suffers bitter consequences he could easily have avoided. Emotionally immature, prepared to accept any degradation at Mirel’s hands only to keep her, he lacks the dignified stoicism of Velvl Burnes, who loves Mirel just as deeply and tracks her doings with just as close an interest, but who accepts the inevitable. Mirel is vaguely aware of how badly she treats both of them but is too self-absorbed to consider their feelings. She continually pursues illusions so that, when Shmulik agrees to give her a divorce, she feels free, seemingly “recogniz[ing] on the horizon the important new life she sought” and fleetingly believing that “there was only one small thing she still needed to grasp [ … ] and the essence of her life, that which she’d been seeking for so long, from the time she’d been a child, would be clear to her” (3.10).

Shmulik’s cousin Montchik, the last of the six men in the novel infatuated with Mirel, is the one with the most balanced awareness of what she is and the dead-end into which any relationship with her must lead. Fascinated by her beauty and her ever-present “sadness”—a key word almost always attached to any description of her—Montchik understands her need for “something” that no one can provide for her, but is honorably clear that, because she is the wife of another man—and one of whom he is very fond—he can be nothing more to her than a good friend, an office he loyally performs.

3.

The novel develops its theme through contrasts and parallels between the social worlds of the shtetl on one hand and the metropolis on the other. Mirel is the force that disrupts the settled rhythm of life in both, leaving no one with whom she comes into contact untouched or unchanged. Her most resolute enemy is finally not her dull-witted, self-satisfied mother-in-law but her namesake, the former student radical turned bourgeois homemaker, Miriam Lyubashits. Where Herz’s frustration sluices away in mocking indifference, Miriam’s thwarted zeal channels itself into the maintenance of the domestic status quo which insists that the only acceptable way of life for a woman is marriage and child-rearing, conditions that stand in total opposition to the personal autonomy Mirel demands. Having chosen the option Mirel is determined to avoid, Miriam speaks for the established social order in judging Mirel as “no longer a normal person” (3.8).31

The values of an all-embracing bourgeois society and the all-pervasive reach of its limited provincialism are also bodied forth in such fleetingly marginal figures as Heler’s bachelor uncle who speaks Russian badly “like a dentist” and “sat on interminably in the salon with Mirel and, in the big-city manner, bored her until nightfall” (2.8); the rabbi’s mother, who has a sixth finger and is mortified by this divergence from the norm (2.9); or one of the guests at a late-night drinking party in Schatz’s cottage, “some teacher or other from a nearby shtetl, a shabby thirty-eight-year-old fellow in a blue peasant blouse who’d once had rabbinical ordination and the daughter of a ritual slaughterer for a wife, but was now in love with a prosperous shopkeeper’s daughter not yet seventeen years of age” (2.14).

Often these subsidiary figures serve as a kind of chorus, commenting obliquely on the main action: the cutting remark of Schatz’s aged grandmother; for example—“Whoever talks less about herself talks less foolishness” (2.3)—makes a sharp comment on the unremitting solipsism of both Schatz and Mirel. Similarly, a group of boisterous young tailors’ apprentices undercut Mirel’s pretensions by mocking her (2.5), and stress the irrevocable passing of the old order by accidentally breaking some windows in her father’s abandoned house (4.2). Members of the small-town intelligentsia that surround Mirel, like the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan, the student from Paris, Esther Finkel, and the local Hebrew teacher Shabad (2.11), are all indifferent to her besetting preoccupations, while her search for independence identifies her to the shtetl’s young bachelors merely as a woman of easy virtue and thus exposes her to lewd insults like that offered by the lascivious polytechnic student at Tarabay’s party (2.6). In the city, her beauty is objectified—on a streetcar it reminds an officer of his lost first love and his present unsatisfactory marriage (3.1)—and simply makes her conscious of what seems to be near-universal promiscuity (3.1).

Characters are largely identified by recurring and judgmental epithets marking their distinguishing characteristics. For instance, Velvl—like Mirel’s father—always thinks of her in the affectionate diminutive as “Mirele,” Reb Gedalye is always presented as a pointed nose and gold-rimmed glasses, and Montchik has huge black eyes. Shmulik’s mother, whose personal name, Mindel, is mentioned only once (2.4), is always designated “the mother-in-law” regardless of the different relationship in which she stands to other characters. Themes, too, are developed through descriptions of the physical world that consistently reflect psychological interiority. Mirel’s horror of the frozenness of life in the shtetl, for example, is powerfully inferred from the anthropomorphism of the narrative’s presentation of its winter landscapes:

Like great beasts, houses hunkered down ponderously under their heavy, snow-covered roofs and dozed in an unending reverie.

It seemed:

These houses had ears, hidden, highly attentive ears, continually listening to the great silence that bore down on everything around both from close by and from far away.

It seemed:

They were ready, in response to the slightest, most remote rustle from the fields, to spring up and in great rage and haste rush to confront it, like those starving dogs that race forward to challenge some alien intruder of their own species, an unwelcome guest.