Leonid Tsypkin is arguably the most important unsung Jewish writer of the twentieth century. A refusenik who encountered anti-Semitism his whole life, Tsypkin was forced to smuggle his literary works out of Soviet Russia and did not live to see his books crowned as masterpieces. Susan Sontag discovered his novel, Summer in Baden Baden, in the ‘90s, but the book only made it to the American literary scene in 2002 with the publication of Bridge Over the Neroch and Other Works, which contains two novellas bursting with genius and a smattering of his collected short stories. As in his novel, anti-Semitism and the nature of Jewish identity occupies a central place in his works. Summer in Baden Baden is an imaginative work of empathy that depicts Dostoevsky, the wondrous author and drunken gambler, in Germany with his wife. Tsypkin wonders, “Why was I so strangely attracted and enticed by the life of this man who despised me and my kind?” and ponders this throughout the book. He brings the same sensitivity and sensibility to his novellas. The first novella explores four generations of a Russian Jewish family who live through Nazism and Stalinism. The second novella, “Norartakir,” is a brilliant and in hindsight hugely important exploration of the effects and frustrations of anti-Semitism in the later twentieth century. Tsypkin’s prose glows with ingenuity and experimentation as he creates a chaotic, raging river of consciousness in which present, past, and future; dream, reality, and memory all collide within the same paragraph, even within the same sentence. At one point, the narrator brings together the crucifixion of Christ and the massacres of the Crusades with the gas chambers of Auschwitz in a sort of twisted ecstasy that should be regarded as one of the most arresting passages in modern literature.
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