I had to travel from schmaltzy New York to white-bread Gulf Coast Florida to discover the great Yiddish writer Sholem Asch. I was visiting my parents and had run out of things to read when my father handed me Asch’s novel Three Cities. “Try this,” he said. “It’s a masterpiece.”
 As I read over Asch’s bio page, I was surprised I’d never heard of the guy, given all the success and notoriety he achieved during his lifetime, from 1880 to 1957. His first major work, a play called God of Vengeance (1907), about a lesbian affair between prostitutes, was considered so shocking, even for Broadway, that it was forced to close. In 1933, his best-selling epic novel of the Russian Revolution, Three Cities, was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize, and in 1936 was named in the New York Times as one of the world’s ten greatest living Jews, the only writer on a list that included Einstein and Freud.
Today when we think of Yiddish writers, the first name that pops up is Isaac Bashevis Singer, who actually won the Nobel and whose short stories fit the general preconception of Yiddish literature: quaint magical realist fables set in backwater villages.
By contrast, Asch’s Three Cities is a grand historical epic in the vein of his heroes, Dickens and Tolstoy. Most of the book’s characters are Jews, yet they think and behave in ways atypical of the usual folksy Yiddish archetypes. They’re thoroughly modern, grappling with problems of psychology, philosophy, and politics. They wage war, indulge in kinky sex, and interact with the world of goyim as equals.
What struck me most about Three Cities was its core philosophy, that anti-Semitism is a non-Jewish problem. “In every drop of the ocean all the attributes of the whole ocean are contained, for the ocean consists of drops,” says one of the novel’s characters, alluding to a Talmudic saying. Similarly, for Asch, the fate of the lowest tier of Russian society, the Jews, becomes a barometer for the viability of an entire nation. Time and time again, by screwing the Jews, Russia’s leaders end up screwing themselves.
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Forget the folksy Yiddish archetypes 