Overview

This searing third novel in the critically acclaimed Small Worlds series records the cruel fate of the villagers of Krimsk as they encounter the twentieth century's greatest agents of evil: Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler. In Moscow at the height of the 1936 Stalinist purges, Grisha Shwartzman discovers on Rosh Hashanah-the Jewish New Year and Day of Judgment-that he is in danger of liquidation by the secret police he serves. In 1942, Yechiel Katzman finds himself on a train of imprisoned Jews as it leaves the Warsaw ghetto on Yom Kippur-the Day of Atonement-for ""resettlement in the East."" Stalin and Hitler decree certain death, but in the course of their experiences Grisha and Yechiel discover Jewish fates. Through memory, both men gain community, dignity, and the awareness of sanctity, Grisha's ""Soviet"" Rosh Hashanah and Yechiel's ""Nazi"" Yom Kippur are truly ""Days of Awe.""

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9780789203977

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Praise for Two for the Devil: Vividly chronicles the extraordinary daily lives of the citizens of Krimsk...[Mr. Hoffman's] sympathetic presentation of these characters reveals much about the tension between human desire and belief, about the complexities of conscience and commitment. - New York Times Book Review 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 fashions a haunting, bittersweet story of exile, dislocation and redemption in the Promised Land...Robust humor, insight into human nature and an absence of sentimentality augment Hoffman's storytelling skills. - Publishers Weekly, starred review

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)

Author Information

Allen Hoffman, an award-winning author of short stories and screenplays, 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, where he teaches English literature and creative writing at Bar Ilan University.

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