A Bintel Brief, by Liana Finck

A Bintel Brief, by Liana Finck. Published by Harper Collins Books, 2014.
$17.99 paperback. ISBN 978-0-06-229161-5.

Liana Finck is a cartoonist and illustrator. She published A Bintel Brief as an illustrated book, in 2014.

What does the phrase mean? It is Yiddish for ‘a collection of letters.’ A Bintel Brief, the book as we have it here, is in fact a taster, an introduction to the earlier and more complete publication of the collection of letters that were originally published in the Yiddish newspaper Der Forverts/The Forward, from 1906 onwards.

Liana Finck’s book is subtitled Love and Longing in Old New York. The newspaper the letters are taken from was the main Yiddish newspaper for the European diaspora of Jewish and others from Europe at the turn of the 20thCentury. The letters are an important part of the history of New York.
There are many current books exploring the periods of early 20th Century New York. This is an important addition.

Liana Finck’s book also plays with perspectives.
She frames her book with the illustrated story of her relationship with the letter-page creator, editor of the newspaper, Abraham Cahan. It opens with the discovery of a notebook of newspaper clippings in Yiddish, which she could not read, at her grandparents’s house. She was later sent the notebook.
Abraham Cahan rises into her modern world from the letters; he tries on new clothes’ styles.
Which is he, now?

We read here the questioning of what the letters could mean to our modern sensibilities.
She gives six letters from the collection.
Read and discover.

The Watch, for example – this is the door-opener.
A poor Jewish family in a run-down apartment block in 1900s New York. They scrimp and save, go without, in order to buy… a watch. A watch? ‘From now on,’ the mother says, we will not starve again. We will have something to pawn to buy food, when the times are hard.’

And then the watch goes missing.  She swears, she writes in her letter, she can hear it ticking in her neighbour’s room. But they are worse off than they are. They had no watch to pawn.
What should she do?

In a way the answer Abraham Cahan gives does not matter, what matters is the humanity of the woman: they are worse off… what should she do ie that does not leave them even more worse off?
That is what we get from the letters: the humanity of people.

Liana Fink suggests we go to the collected letters and read and read. 
Here, humanity is wide open to us.

Maybe she should have reported her neighbor to the police? If you think so, then read The Former Assistant Detective.
A young man, trainee detective. His boss is very pleased with his progress. He would earn his badge soon.
How about this little job? He has to trap a certain restaurant owner selling liquor. He poses as a customer, orders a meal and Scnapps. It is all delivered. As he goes to confront the owner; he looks around: there are the owner’s wife and children, emaciated. They were barely paying their way. How could he possibly report them? It would have broken them.
He confronted the ex-waiter not paid his wages, who reported them. He got the man his money, and he in turn dropped the case.
If this was to be his job, though….
The editor replied to this letter, saying guard against… ‘sinking into the corruption of immoral police practices.’

The downtrodden always bear the brunt of institutionalised corrupt practices.
And so it still goes on.

You could say that his mode of conduct there was proper policing, real policing, community policing. Ah, but that was 1906/7.

So what of humour? Try Nasye Frug, and the wedding presents. 
Every letter has its own wide range of emotions.

Liana Finck’s illustrations really bring it all to life. Her illustrations are clear, atmospheric, succinct.  
As we read we picture bits, get impressions. Liana Fink has researched properly; through her illustrations we get authentic detail, we actually ‘see’ properly what we read.

I mentioned earlier that perspectives shift.
Here we have six letters from a whole collection. Of these six Liana Fink has edited and shaped their content and style to the book’s format.
And then she tops it all by having the editor, Abraham Cahan, say that he actually wrote some of the letters.
What! 
He needed to fill space, maybe. But he used actual life incidents, lost experiences, unresolved cases.

In this connection she has him say, one day, in The Bobalink when asked what the bird had taught him:
‘For the first time in my life I knew who I was (and who I wasn’t): 
I was not an advice-giver, not really; 
I was not a newspaper editor, either; 
I was not a story-writer. I was not a novel-writer. 
I was not a socialist. I was not a capitalist. I was not a Yiddishist. I was not an American or Lithuanian or a Jew. 
I was a birdwatcher!’

That is, he was an obsessive, and yet meticulous in his observations. He was avid, compulsive, and revelled in all the varieties of life before him.
But this was fiction. 
Or is it the fact on which fiction is based?

I became so enthused about this book, I now have had to stop myself saying: you must read The Melancholy Cantor! Or, the illustrations to Father? are outsTANding.

All I can say is the humanity of the people shines out of their letters, even now.
No matter what clothes they wear.

Not only that, but you also get a traditional soup recipe!

For more on Liana Finck, see:

https://lianafinck.com

Leather Money

Alexander Del Mar, in his book, Money and Civilisation (Burt Franklin, 1969), makes the suggestion that in the reign of King Edward 1 of England, the state of the coinage was so bad that he had to resort at one point to issuing leather money. The debasement of the currency prior to this was due to the inheritance of the bad practices and abuses of coin under the previous monarch, Henry 111. Coin-clipping was rife, and consequently many coins were found to be lower in value per weight of precious metals than their actual value in cash.

The leather money probably took the form of lozenges of cured leather, stamped or branded with the royal insignia. This was suggested to be the chief form of payment for the labourers who built the Welsh castles in the 1290s: Caernarfon, Conwy and Beaumaris.

I have this vision of cattle from the Welsh Marches driven to London markets, and their hides returned to Wales as money.

Why this huge castle-building programme, in a period of already rocky finances? Following the prolonged disturbances and shifting alliances of the last Welsh princes, and particularly the rebellion of Llywelyn the Great, these castles were strategic to the suppression of the North Welsh stronghold of supporters. Immediately prior to this were the extensive campaigns in Ireland under the previous monarch to further establish an English hegemony; and later on were the Scottish campaigns against William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. All the participants were played off against each: Wales was used as a base for English expeditions into Ireland; and Welsh interests were exploited to weaken support for Scottish independence. These long campaigns were, of course, enormously expensive.

And then, in 1290, he finally expelled the Jewish population from England. This followed over a century of sporadic but intensifying hostility. The Jewish people were only allowed to work in the fields of money lending and finance schemes; although Crown Princes and Kings used their expertise. And then Edward banned them from that, and tried to force them to work only as traders, artisans, farmers. Ten years later they were forbidden to work as merchants.

Moneylending, along with interest payments: usury, was considered a highly unchristian occupation (Jesus ejecting the money-lenders from the temple etc) and so only suitable for non Christians. In later years banks, for instance the Medici Bank, manipulated accounts through foreign exchanges in highly complex schemes, in order to gain the best rates. These schemes were used knowingly on the accounts of archbishops and even a Pope. It was all to avoid being labelled as ‘usurers’. The end product was virtually the same, of course.

By expelling the Jewish citizens Edward 1 hoped to recoup more cash by seizing their assets. In effect he further crippled the economy. And the tight reins he held on import and export licenses prevented expansion of markets; it held Britain in stagnation.
Nice one, Edward One!

The use of leather money was a practice borrowed initially from Russia; it was also known in China, India, Venice, and even France in later centuries.