Zalman Shneour-s inaugural novel: a story of suicide in the form of a diary
In a Yiddish take on Notes from Underground, a dark love affair develops in an unnamed Eastern European city between the young, impoverished, violently self-loathing teacher, Shloyme-and a hungry, spiteful and unsettlingly sensual revolver. Ostensibly purchased to protect Shloyme from the pogroms sweeping the empire, the weapon instead opens a portal to his innermost demons, and through it he begins his methodical mission to eradicate any remnants of life and humanity in him and pave the way for his self-destruction. A Death takes the form of a diary that follows the Jewish calendar.
Written in Yiddish in 1905 and published with immediate success in Warsaw in 1909, A Death utilizes the influences of Dostoyevsky and Schopenhauer to depict a distinctly Jewish experience of uprooted modernity, and presents a lesser-known strand of Jewish decadent literature. Th
