Israël à New-York

First edition, one of 50 numbered copies on alfa, only deluxe copies. Some light foxing, mainly on the endpapers.

Rare signed presentation copy in French: “To my friend René Jasinski, in token of gratitude and friendship, these few scenes of Jewish life in New York. T. Twersky”, with a sentence in Hebrew translated by the author in French on a laid-in leaf: “Translation of the Hebrew inscription: sixth day of the week ‘Pekoudè’, year 5692 since the creation of the world, in the holy community of Paris”, (Friday, 4 March 1932 according to our calculation).

Twersky was the main informant of the Tharaud brothers, unknowingly and much to his dismay becoming the source of the “Jewish information channel” (filon juif) exploited by the two writers, who transformed the “picturesque” recollections of this son of a Ukrainian rabbi into the raw material for their antisemitic narratives.

Born in Ukraine around 1880, Moïse Twersky was the son of a Hasidic rabbi of the Tzadik line, “miracle-working rabbis” who exercised spiritual and judicial authority over vast Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. His father, regarded as a descendant of King David, owned a silver throne and presided every Sabbath over banquets of 250 guests. Unwilling to follow in his father’s footsteps, the young Moïse developed a passion for forbidden books and discovered modern science. Rejecting what he came to see as an exploitation of popular credulity, he resolved to become a chemist. At sixteen, he was married without his consent  according to tradition to a thirteen-year-old daughter of a Romanian rabbi. Against all odds, he fell in love with her and was forcibly separated from her when his in-laws discovered his heretical readings.

Twersky studied chemistry in Brussels, then emigrated to the United States, where he lived in dire poverty. He worked for a time in a canning factory where he burned his hands from the salt from the intestines he handled daily. The circumstances of his return to Europe remain obscure.

Inspired by his American experience, Israël à New York offers a rare and valuable record of his life in America and of the living conditions of Jewish immigrants. Upon his arrival in Paris, he befriended the Tharaud brothers and, through his erudition and generous sharing of the “folklore” of his origins, became the unwitting instrument of their antisemitic propaganda - on which he cast both a critical and affectionate gaze.

In 1940, devastated by the victory of Nazi Germany and on the very day the Germans entered Paris, Moïse Twersky took his own life in his apartment on rue Oudry.

The recipient of Israël à New York, the literary historian René Jasinski was a Polish immigrant who had fled the repression following the “Springtime of Nations" and had become professor at the Sorbonne.  He did not make the same tragic choice as his friend. He again chose to resist the oppressor, fighting with the FFI during the Liberation of Paris. In 1953, he was appointed to Harvard University and returned to the United States and spent the rest of his life in Cambridge.

A highly desirable deluxe presentation copy of this rare philosemitic work from the interwar period by a colourful author who might have stepped straight out of an Albert Cohen novel. Almost no documentation survives about this Solal, son of a Mangeclou, unknowingly at the heart of the literary stigmatization of French Jews before becoming one of the first victims of Nazi Occupation.