THE LAST DEKREPITZER

The last survivor of a small Jewish sect comes to America after World War II to live in a Black community in Mississippi in Langer’s novel.

Long ago, Reb Shmuel Meir Lichtbencher (also called Sam Lightup) was born in Dekrepitz, a small Polish shtetl. Shmuel, the grandson of the Rebbe (Rabbi), knows little of the outside world. At the outset of World War II, a Russian officer witnesses Shmuel’s fiddle playing and sends him to a conservatory in Moscow. Shmuel survives the war, but everyone who remained in Dekreptiz, including his young wife and baby, is gone. Somehow, he ends up in Naples, and some Black American soldiers he’d been playing music with smuggle him aboard their ship. In America, at the home of his new friend, everyone wonders what this strange man, who doesn’t speak English, is doing in Leesboro, Mississippi. Shmuel knows how to raise and slaughter chickens, so they set him up with a place in the woods to do just that. A local woman, Lula Curtin, comes by to help him learn English and becomes interested in his religion. Shmuel, now known as Sam Lightup, begins talking like a Mississippi bluesman (“Ain’t no Dekrepitzers since the war”). Sam and Lula eventually marry, but, as an interracial couple, they face danger in Mississippi. Langer’s musical protagonist travels between worlds in a tremendously authentic way—the cross-cultural story is as at home in Europe as it is in the Mississippi Delta. The connections made, whether personal or musical (such as the relationship of Jewish vocal music to American blues), illustrate the commonalities between survivors in hostile environments. Perhaps the affinity portrayed between dispossessed Jews and American Blacks is a bit optimistic here, but the rural southern setting makes the story work.

A unique, musical novel that highlights the cultural riches people can offer one another in difficult circumstances.