The Last Dekrepitzer

 The book for this month’s review, The Last Dekrepitzer, by author Howard Langer, is not only the winner of the National Jewish Book Awards’ Book Club prize, it is a fascinating novel to read.

The  Last Dekrepitzer is a young man who was taken from his Polish Hasidic village during World War II by a Russian officer who hears him playing the fiddle.  The officer thinks there is a great future for Shumel Meir Lichtbencher as a violinist. But when the war gets in the way of his studies and he is drafted into the Russian army.  At the end of the war he returns to the Dekrepitzer village to find everyone has been killed. He buries the bodies of his family and townspeople and travels without direction.  He finds himself , a rebbe without a congregation, wandering through the chaos of postwar Europe.  A master fiddler whose niggunim—wordless Hasidic melodies—capture the attention of Black G.I.s in Naples, Italy, who bring him back with them to Mississippi.

He is welcomed in Mississippi by the community, learns English with a Southern Black dialect. Known in America as Sam Lighup, he has a full beard and wears a hat low on his face.  People are not sure if he is a black or white man. He plays his fiddle with the Brown Street Ramblers and preaches Jewish sermons in the local church. He raises chickens and like a  shochet, kills the chickens according to kosher laws. But he refuses to utter Jewish prayers anymore.  He is in an argument with GD.  He plays niggunim  as a rebuke to the higher power. 

He finds love with a black woman, Lula Curtain, and after he converts her to Judaism they marry and have a son, Moses. Lula becomes the strength behind Shumel. She encourages him to continue and not give up. When neighbors come with burning torches to scare them he leaves for New York City.

He is always searching for people from his village that may have escaped the Holocaust and still be alive, so he plays niggunim on his fiddle, hoping someone will recognize the tunes. In  New York City he plays in the subway and on the streets. He meets the Reverend Gary Davis, a blind Black acoustic guitarist well-known as a musical genius and would-be saver of souls who was an actual historical figure and plays with him on the street corners. 

He learns to repair violins and becomes friends with Schiff , a violin restorer, who employs him in a music shop. Schiff has a crate of fiddles salvaged from the Shoah in need of repair, which he wants fixed and given to children in Harlem schools.

Shumel also befriends the Bobover Rebbe who helps him and his family negotiate the prejudice that is evident in 1960s America.   The book also shows how Jews and Blacks found common ground in their respective struggles, during these divisive times, at this period in history. Using real people and created characters, Langer paints an incredibly realistic view of life in post Holocaust America.