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Flames from the Earth
 n o rt h w est e r n wo r l d c l a ssi cs

Northwestern World Classics brings readers

the world’s greatest literature. The series features
essential new editions of well-known works,
lesser-known books that merit reconsideration,
and lost classics of fiction, drama, and poetry.
Insightful commentary and compelling new translations
help readers discover the joy of outstanding writing
from all regions of the world.
 Isaiah Spiegel

Flames from
the Earth
A Novel from the Łódź Ghetto

Translated from the Yiddish by Julian Levinson

Northwestern University Press ✦ Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
English translation copyright © 2023 by Northwestern University Press.
Originally published in Yiddish in 1966 under the title Flamen fun der erd.
Copyright © 1966 by Israel-Book Publishing House. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Spiegel, Isaiah, 1906–1990, author. | Levinson, Julian, translator.
Title: Flames from the earth : a novel from the Łódź ghetto / Isaiah
Spiegel ; translated from the Yiddish by Julian Levinson.
Other titles: Flamen fun der erd. English | Northwestern world classics.
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2023. |
Series: Northwestern world classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2022041769 | ISBN 9780810145573 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780810145580 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810145597 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Fiction. | Jews—
Poland—Łódź—History—20th century—Fiction. | Litzmannstadt–
Getto (Łódź, Poland)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Jewish |
LITERARY CRITICISM / European / Eastern (see also Russian &
Former Soviet Union) | LCGFT: Novels. | Fiction.
Classification: LCC PJ5129.S6812 F513 2023 | DDC 839/.134—dc23/
eng/20221104
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041769
 To my parents, Sarah-Gitel and Moshe,
My sisters Clara, Miriam, and Iske,
Murdered in Chelmno, Auschwitz, and Shtuthof
1941–1944
Martyred
—I.S.

In memory of Maimon Obermayer (1916–1939)

—J.L.
 c ont e n ts

Translator’s Introduction ix

Flames from the Earth

1 A Meeting in Snow 3

2 At the Bedside of the Dying 13

3 The Dead Stradivarius 19

4 Last Will and Testament 25

5 In the Darkness 33

6 On the Other Side 37

7 The Bell Ringer 45

8 The Stranger 51

9 In the Cellar 59

10 Black Birds 67

11 Purifying the Dead 75

12 Piles of Clothes 81

13 The Tower 89

14 The Rope 97
15 Secrets of the Mound 107

16 Bones 115

17 The Decree 121

18 Flames from the Earth 129

Translator’s Afterword 133

Translator’s Acknowledgments 147
Books by Isaiah Spiegel 150
 tr a nsl ator’s i nt ro d u ct io n

As a writer, I have never really left the ghetto. I still see

the people, the faces, the suffering crowd . . . That whole
period still lives inside of me like a dybbuk.
—Isaiah Spiegel (1973)

Isaiah Spiegel (1906–1990) was one of the most beloved Yiddish

writers to emerge from the Holocaust experience. He won nearly
every major prize awarded to Yiddish writers, including the Inter-
national Culture Congress Prize (1955), the Itsik Manger Prize for
Yiddish Literature (1972), the Yankev Glatshteyn Prize (1977), and
the Yiddish Writers Union Prize (1981). A two-volume collection of
essays about his work was published to commemorate his eightieth
birthday. His most devoted readers came from the global commu-
nity we might call Yiddishland, with centers in Tel Aviv, Paris, New
York, Johannesburg, Melbourne, and Buenos Aires. Nearly every-
one in this dispersed world had been directly affected by the Nazi
nightmare. Nearly all had restarted their lives in unfamiliar places
after unimaginable losses, and for many, the Yiddish language itself
had become their only true home. These readers turned to Spie-
gel’s writing to revisit the traumatic scenes of the Hitler years in
the company of a trustworthy guide, someone who survived more
than four years in the Łódź Ghetto, Auschwitz, and a work camp in
Saxony—and who managed to transform his experiences into com-
pelling works of literature. His writings are infused with symbolism,
ornate metaphors, subtle irony, and beauty. As one of his earliest
reviewers put it, “Spiegel is perhaps the only one who has given us
the precious gift of the true ghetto-tale, because he has solved the
problem of organically combining the authenticity of facts with the
power of a great tapestry.”1 Spiegel was embraced by his readers not
so much because he told them things they did not know, but be-
cause there was something reassuring, even uplifting, in the way he
shaped traumatic experiences into art.

✦ ix ✦
 As with most Yiddish writing after World War II, Spiegel’s work
has been marginalized on the map of Holocaust literature familiar to
most English speakers. Although Yiddish was the primary language
of the majority of those who perished in or survived the Holocaust,
the number of works available in English translation hardly reflects
the intensity and quality of post-Holocaust literary activity in Yid-
dish.2 Yiddish writing about the Holocaust provides a precious
record of the unique ways Jews steeped in East European cultural
and religious traditions responded to the catastrophe. It also offers
indispensable insight into life in the Nazi ghettos, where Yiddish-
speaking Jews were by far the majority and where many, like Spie-
gel, endured the most abject conditions for as many as four years. In
the English-speaking world, only a handful of Spiegel’s stories are
known. His most widely read work, “A Ghetto Dog” (“Niki” in Yid-
dish), had the benefit of being including in Irving Howe and Eliezer
Greenberg’s widely reprinted A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954)
and in a series on National Public Radio in 1995, for which it was
narrated by Lauren Bacall.3
But Spiegel’s work deserves to be recovered not merely because
it was written in Yiddish nor because he found devoted readers
throughout the Yiddish diaspora. His works call for a wide reader-
ship today because the conditions under which he wrote, coupled
with his rare sensitivity and insight, lend his work a unique author-
ity and power.
At the time of Spiegel’s birth, the city of Łódź had already devel-
oped from a small town into an industrial powerhouse to become
Poland’s second largest city. Spiegel grew up in a section of the city
known as Bałuty (Balut in Yiddish), a neighborhood on the northern
edge of the city, where more than half of its Jewish population of
170,000 lived (by World War II, the number would grow to 230,000).4
A majority of Bałuty’s Jews were steeped in traditional Judaism; most
were Hasidic, though an influx of “Litvaks” from Lithuania, Belarus,
and Ukraine in the late nineteenth century brought opponents of
Hasidism into the city as well. While the city of Łódź was home to
the most opulent Jewish bourgeoisie in Poland, nearly all of the Jews
in Bałuty were exceedingly poor. Few of the ramshackle wooden
houses in the area had electricity, sewage, gas, or waterlines. Spie-

x ✦ translator’s introduction
gel’s parents both worked as weavers
in sweatshops connected to the city’s
booming textile industry.5
The eldest of eight children, Spie-
gel received a traditional Jewish edu-
cation in a cheder and Talmud Torah.
Nevertheless, the religious culture
of his family reflected the modern-
izing ethos of Poland’s urban Jews.
His maternal grandparents had been
Hasidim, followers of the Aleksander
Rebbe, like most of the local Hasidim;
but throughout Spiegel’s childhood,
his parents were moving away from
strict orthodoxy. As he later put it to Isaiah Spiegel in 1955.
an interviewer, “My father was not an Photograph from
observant Jew [keyn frumer yid], he Yeshayahu Shpigl, Vint
was a cultural Jew [a folks-yid]” (249). un vortslen, noveln [Wind
His father’s outlook was epitomized and Roots: Stories] (New
by the fact that on Sabbath he would York: World Jewish Cul-
read aloud from a Yiddish translation ture Congress, 1955), v.
of the great German Jewish historian
Heinrich Graetz’s multivolume History of the Jews. Spiegel gleaned
from Graetz’s sweeping history a model of Jewish peoplehood
rooted in a collective memory punctuated by persecution and
perseverance. These themes resonated powerfully with Spiegel’s
everyday experience on the streets of Bałuty, and they would later
provide a larger context for the Jewish tragedy in World War II. At
the same time, Spiegel’s early exposure to synagogue rituals left a
deep sediment of felt experience from which he later drew in his
writing. He would continue to employ symbols and images from
traditional Jewish practice, as in the image of his father’s tefillin
wandering lost down the highways in a poem entitled “1945” or the
image in Flames from the Earth of a cadaver whose splayed toes re-
call the gestures made in the Priestly Blessing.
Spiegel’s early life was also shaped by wider Polish and German
cultural currents. During the years of World War I, he attended a

translator’s introduction ✦ xi
public school for Jews and Poles modeled on the curriculum of the
occupying German forces. He later attended a Polish secondary
school (The Royal Gymnasium of Engineer Rusak), where he stud-
ied Polish literature and wrote his first essays and literary experi-
ments in Polish. He later recalled a period when he wore his hair
long in emulation of a portrait of Adam Mickiewicz, the national
poet of Poland. He also recalled trying to capture the image of a
setting sun in a style derived from Mickiewicz’s renowned epic,
Pan Tadeusz.6 Although the Jews of Bałuty were socially separated
from the Poles, Spiegel also recalled that a few Polish families lived
in his family’s apartment building, and that one family had assisted
him in carrying out a “secret beautiful affair” (259) with a Roman
Catholic girl that lasted more than a year. These interactions with
Poles and with Polish culture help to explain the deep current of
romanticism that runs through his work as well as the complex, of-
ten sympathetic representations of Poles in his writing, epitomized
in Flames from the Earth by the heroic Catholic bell ringer, Niko-
dem Załucki.
In the early 1920s, Spiegel completed a teacher-training program
and found work in a Yiddish-language school in the Tsisho network
(Central Jewish School Organization). The Tsisho schools were or-
ganized under the auspices of the Jewish Labor Bund, but despite
the socialist ethos of the Bund, Spiegel himself was less commit-
ted to revolutionary politics than to the world of art. “I never be-
longed to any political party and still don’t,” he told an interviewer
in 1973. “People naturally assumed I followed the Bundist line, but
my only party is literature” (347). During this period, he began as-
sociating with literary circles surrounding prominent local figures
Moyshe Broderzon (1890–1956) and Itzhak Katzenelson (1886–
1944), who had helped to make Łódź a center for Yiddish cultural
experimentation in the interwar years. The avant-garde literary and
artistic movement known as Yung-yidish (Young Yiddish) had al-
ready begun to disperse by the time Spiegel arrived on the scene,
but the Łódź literary community—and Katzenelson’s house in
particular—continued to offer a vibrant, supportive environment
for aspiring writers.7 Other writers in Spiegel’s orbit included Mir-
iam Ulinover, Yitskhak Berliner, Israel Rabon, Rikuda Potash, and

xii ✦ translator’s introduction

Yosef Okrutni—many of whom he would associate with throughout
the years he spent in the ghetto (272).
Spiegel’s first poems and stories soon began appearing in news-
papers such as the Lodzer Folkblat in Łódź, the Folktsaytung in War-
saw, and the Communist-oriented Frayhayt in New York. In 1930,
he published his first collection of poems, entitled Mitn ponem tsu
der zun (Facing the Sun). The influence of European romanticism
pervades these early works, as in the initial poem in the collection,
where Spiegel announces in the first stanza the power of art simul-
taneously to construct and to reveal: “O, zet! Ikh boy a velt oyf vays
farshvigene papir / Un shtey far aykh a yunger lets farshempt, far-
klemt” (“Behold! I build a world on this silent white sheet / I stand
before you as a foolish clown, ashamed and choked with passion”).8
The poet’s private life takes center stage in this early collection, even
as his personal longings come to reflect a collective desire, shared
by many of his contemporaries, to place Yiddish literature on the
map of world culture.
Two important texts for Spiegel during his twenties were Os-
car Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and Lord Byron’s play
Cain, both of which he initially encountered in Polish translation.
The appeal of Cain lay in the thrill of discovering a wildly hetero-
dox, indeed a heroic, reading of a quintessential biblical antihero.
Spiegel was so moved by Byron’s reimagining of the figure of Cain
that he resolved to translate the work into Yiddish. With the help of
Alexander Harkavy’s Yiddish-English Dictionary, a German transla-
tion, and David Frishman’s Hebrew translation, Spiegel completed
his Yiddish rendering of Cain in the late 1930s; the press of Literar-
ishe bleter had even announced the imminent publication of it in the
journal’s August 1939 edition.9 However, to Spiegel’s lasting sorrow,
the manuscript of the translation was lost during the German inva-
sion in September. His Yiddish version of an English romantic text
about a biblical character, read through Polish, German, and mod-
ern Hebrew translations, never saw the light of day. Nevertheless,
the tale of its construction itself bears witness to Spiegel’s polyglot
literary influences during the 1930s, his lofty aspirations for Yid-
dish, and the ways the Nazi invasion interrupted this international-
ist moment in Yiddish literary history.

translator’s introduction ✦ xiii

 A few months prior to the outbreak of the war, Spiegel married
Rebeka Ungier, a graduate of Warsaw University (260). He found
work as an assistant accountant, and the young couple settled in
an apartment near the center of Łódź. In July 1939, their daughter,
Ewa, was born. During this period, he was also hard at work on a
collection of prose narratives about the lives of impoverished Jew-
ish weavers in Bałuty. Like his Cain manuscript, these writings were
lost during the Nazi invasion.
The occupation of Łódź began on September 8, 1939, a week
after the Germans launched the Blitzkrieg assault that marked the
official beginning of World War II. Nazi troops rolled into Łódź and
almost immediately subdued the local population. Ethnic Germans
(Volksdeutsche), who comprised roughly 10 percent of the city,
welcomed the Nazis as their liberators; they cheered as the high
command enacted policies with the aim of thoroughly Germanizing
Łódź. By the end of the year, the city would be incorporated into
the new German province of Warthegau, the city’s name would be
changed to Litzmannstadt (after a German hero from World War I),
thousands of “repatriated” ethnic Germans would be moved in, and
plans would be finalized to de-Judaize the city by forcing all Jews
into a ghetto.10 The push toward ghettoization was led by the Ger-
man medical establishment, who relentlessly cast the Jews as a ra-
cial enemy and bearers of dangerous illnesses, from tuberculosis to
lice to dysentery. Ghettoization was portrayed as a necessary “hy-
gienic measure,” a mass quarantine that would save the city from
contagion and pave the way to a brave new Judenrein German future
(Horwitz, Ghettostadt, 37).
Created in the northeast part of the city, the ghetto spanned
parts of the Old Town and most of Bałuty, where the poorest Jews
already lived. Soon it also included the semirural Marysin quarter,
where the Jewish cemetery was located along with the train station
and Umschlagplatz (collection point), where Jews would later be
forced to assemble before deportation. To enable the continued
use of busy thoroughfares by the non-Jewish population, the ghetto
administration built three wooden footbridges connecting the
Marysin section to the rest of the ghetto. The ghetto comprised 4.13
square kilometers (later reduced to 3.82), small enough for a horse-

xiv ✦ translator’s introduction

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