Overview

An interrogation cell in Stalinist Russia; a cattle car bound for Treblinka in Nazi-occupied Poland--there's an eerie symmetry in Allen Hoffman's third installment in his Small Worlds series, the continuing story of a community of Jews living in Poland during the first half of the 20th century. The first novel, Small Worlds, started in 1903 and revolved around the rabbi of the village of Krimsk, while the second, Big League Dreams, followed some characters from the previous book to St. Louis, circa 1920. Two for the Devil is set in darker times, however; the first half of the novel takes place in Russia during the Stalinist purges of the mid-1930s. The main character, Colonel Grisha Shwartzmann, is a member of the Soviet secret police and charged with fitting unusual crimes to the Soviet criminal code. A staunch Bolshevik and apostate Jew, Shwartzmann finds himself confronted with a man who confesses to recurring dreams in which he has anal sex with Stalin-with the great leader always on the bottom. As Shwartzmann struggles to fit this square legal peg into the appropriate penal hole, he gradually becomes aware that the very system he serves will eventually turn on him, as well. Fast forward a few years . On Yom Kippur in 1942, Yechiel Katzman, late of the Warsaw Ghetto, finds himself in a cattle car bound for the death camp of Treblinka. During a brief stop along the route, Katzman is reunited with a fellow Jew from Krimsk, a retarded giant whom the Nazis are using to further their own genocidal aims. In such a time and place, there can be no reprieve, but there is a possibility for redemption, as Katzman's subsequent actions suggest. The gentle charm of the previous two books gives way to a blacker humor here, but the feeling that this is a world of wonders--however terrible--still remains. The related tales in Two for the Devil prove that, even in the midst of unspeakable evil, with faith there can be transcendence.

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Reviews

First-rate fiction: reminiscent . . . of such precursors as Sholem Aleichem, but possessed of distinctive individual strengths and firmly rooted in its characters strange new land and even stranger adventures. -- Kirkus Reviews

"""First-rate fiction: reminiscent ... of such precursors as Sholem Aleichem, but possessed of distinctive individual strengths and firmly rooted in its characters strange new land and even stranger adventures."" -- Kirkus Reviews"

Hoffman's latest and bleakest work - the third in his Small Worlds cycle (Small Worlds, 1996; Big League Dreams, 1997) - continues the saga of the disciples of the Krimsker Rebbe in the darkening years of the '30s and '40s. The duo of the title are a pair of offstage characters whose depredations can spell only disaster for the now-scattered Jews of Krimsk. In the first of the novel's two parts, it is Rosh Hashanah 1936, and Rabbi Finebaum's own son-in-law, Hershel Shwartzman, is a worker in the sinister arts, a colonel in the NKVD whose primary duty is the torturing of political prisoners. But Grisha, as he's known, begins to suffer his own loss of faith as it dawns on him that the wheels of death he helps to run will inevitably grind him up also. As fear displaces zeal, he is drawn into the kind of self-examination that can't help but lead to his demise. The second (and shorter) narrative is set on Yom Kippur 1942 and reintroduces two of the major characters from Small Worlds: Yechiel Katzman, once the Rebbe's prize pupil, banished for apparent heresy, and Itzik Dribble, the sweet-natured retarded boy who was an integral part of that earlier novel's climax. Now, both are in the clutches of the Nazi killing machine: Katzman, an inhabitant of the Warsaw Ghetto, is on a train to Treblinka; Itzik, who has grown to immense size and strength, is an uncomprehending tool of the SS. A master of the art of getting into his characters' heads, Hoffman creates intricate and thoroughly convincing monologues. And he hasn't lost his taste for the miraculous nature of the everyday, a fascination that makes him one of the logical heirs to the legacy of Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Kirkus Reviews)

First-rate fiction: reminiscent ... of such precursors as Sholem Aleichem, but possessed of distinctive individual strengths and firmly rooted in its characters strange new land and even stranger adventures. -- Kirkus Reviews

Author Information

Allen Hoffman, award-winning author of the novels Small Worlds and Big League Dreams, and of the collection Kagans Superfecta and Other Stories, was born in St. Louis and received his B.A. in American history from Harvard University. He studied the Talmud in yeshivas in New York and Jerusalem, and has taught in New York City schools. He and his wife and four children live in Jerusalem. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Bar-Ilan University.

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