In a farṿorlozṭn dorf

The novel, translated into Hebrew soon after its 1954 publication in Yiddish, tells the story of newly arrived Jewish immigrants placed in the transit camp of Azur, hastily built atop the ruins of the Palestinian town of Yazur, south-east of Jaffa. The plot of Mann’s novel bounces back and forth between the present (1949-1950) and the period before World War II and 1948. Its focus is the character Monye—a man from a small town in Poland, forced to flee the Nazi occupation of his country—and his attempt to find a new place in the transit camp, and in Israel. The daily life of Moyne and the other refugees in the transit camp is interrupted one day, when they meet a Palestinian man, who has returned to what was once his village. The responses of the refugees, Yiddish-speaking eastern Europeans, to his presence range from confusion and suspicion, to the clear understanding that they might be living in a house that belonged to the Palestinian not long ago. The story also employs the narrative device of a “yellow dog,” which wanders back and forth into the village. Through the dog’s eyes, the reader gains access to the lives of Yazur’s Palestinian inhabitants, before and after the traumatic moment of occupation and expulsion. There is a parallel, in Monye’s memory, with his Polish life before the War, and his attempts to imagine what life in Poland could be after the Holocaust. What is unique about Mann’s Yiddish novel is the extent to which the encounter with the deserted village and with the former inhabitants is shaped by an analogy with the trauma of the Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba

(Shachar Pinsker, www.tarb.co.il/reading-lolita-in-tel-aviv-we-must-not-assimilate-into-israel-we-must-assimilate-israel-into-ourselves/ )