The Puppet Theatre

To the right, the moon was still visible and Reb Mordecai Meir looked up at it, the lesser light which, according to the Talmud, begrudged the greater light, and as compensation was given the stars.

     – Isaac Bashevis Singer, Grandfather and Grandson

Hershel Lévi left Warsaw for Paris in the summer of 1935, taking with him only his miniature theatre, its troupe of carefully hand-crafted puppets, and the small cart on which it traveled. He spoke almost no French, and at first he performed his puppet shows in Yiddish—assuming, mistakenly, that this linguistic passport would lead him deep into the ghettoes of the French capital. When he realized that nobody could understand him and that he was as far away from his community as ever, he developed an imaginary language for the puppets to obscure his lack of fluency. It was a singsong, nonsense tongue with a rich emotional vocabulary, accepted immediately and without question by the children in his audience. In fact, they delighted in this grammelot that was so much stranger and more permissive than the state-regulated French of their school workbooks. He easily slipped his own kind of irony, some light violence, and even a little harmless carnality into this made-up language. The adults—parents, nursemaids, and minders of the young insurgents in his audience—simply ignored what they presumed was a sort of baby-talk, unworthy of mature attention. Hershel found that here, as at home, it was far easier to peddle nonsense than truth.

During the occupation, Hershel hid out in...