A Fool's Kabbalah

Through the ruins of postwar Europe, the world's leading expert on the Kabbalah is sent on a sacred and profane journey to recover precious Jewish books stolen by the Nazis...

At the end of the Second World War Gershom Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism, is commissioned by the Hebrew University in what was then British-ruled Palestine to retrieve a lost world. He is sent to sift through the rubble of Europe in search of precious Jewish books stolen by the Nazis or hidden by the Jews themselves in secret places throughout the ravaged continent.

The search takes him far from the security of the library that has been his natural habitat, into ruined cities and alien wastelands. The terrible irony of salvaging books that had outlasted the people for whom they’d been written breaks Dr. Scholem’s heart, and leaves him longing for the kind of magic that had been the merely theoretical subject of his lamplit studies.

Steve Stern's new novel, A Fool’s Kabbalah, reimagines Gershom Scholem’s quest and how it sparked in him the desire to realize the legacy of his bosom friend, the brilliant philosopher Walter Benjamin, who died prematurely by his own hand.

At the heart of that legacy was the idea that humor is an essential tool of redemption. Hence, the notion of the clown as redeemer. In a parallel narrative, a fable really, Menke Klepfisch, self-styled jester and incorrigible scamp, attempts to subvert, through his antic behavior, the cruelties of the Nazi occupation of his native village. As Menke’s efforts, fueled by his love for Blume, the rabbi’s beautiful daughter, collide with the monstrous reality of the Holocaust, we see—in another place and time--evidence that Dr. Scholem, in defiance of his austere reputation, has begun to develop the anarchic characteristics of a clown.

A Fool’s Kabbalah intertwines the stories of these 2 quixotic characters, who, though poles apart, complement one another in their tragicomic struggles to oppose the supreme evil of history, using only the weapons of humor and a little magic.