The autobiographicalnovelRingen oyf der neshome was written by Eli Schechtman in Israel in two stages. The first two books were printed in 1981. Then Eli Schechtman had completed work on the 7-volume novel Erev, published in 1983. Only after that, the following two books were written and published in 1988. The first volume of novel was translated by into Hebrew and was published twice: the first part was published in 1981 under name Tabaot beneshema, the second one – in 1983 under name Leilot shel kohavim kvuim, and whole volume – in the Classic series in 1992 under name Tabaot beneshema. The novel was translated into Russian by. The first volume was published under the name Кольца на душе in 2001. The second volume was published under the name Вспахать бездну in 2012.
Plot summary
Depicts the life of the Yiddish writer Eli Schechtman from his childhood until his arrival to Jerusalem. Through this autobiographical account, themes of Jewish identity, life under the Soviet regime, as well as culture war between Yiddish and Hebrew are depicted. The novel ends with the words:
"I stand between two worlds and generations, beth the old wound and the new pain. Alone, Completely alone."
This autobiographical novel was not noticed by the authors of the book A Thousand Years of Ashkenazi Culture, which commented about the "inability of the Yiddish culture as a whole... to write a real autobiography, to reveal your "I" in historical time. Rose Waldman wrote: "Discovering a Yiddish novel I hadn't known about is always a thrill, but sometimes I find it hard to get into the story. Not so with Ringn Oyf Der Neshome. The moment I started reading it, I was captivated. Stylistically, the novel is a beauty. It's written in a mesmerizing stream-of-consciousness voice with long Proustian sentences that stretch on breathlessly. Each time I came to the end of the page, I found myself hungry for the next. And it wasn't just the gorgeous prose. The story itself is historically fascinating and important—half a century of Jewish life under Soviet rule encapsulated in a novel and written by someone who'd personally experienced it. I don't know of another Yiddish novel that covers this material." In 1980, Ehud Ben-Ezer had published in the Israeli newspaper Maariv the article about Eli Schechtman under name "Rings of fire in a Jewish soul".
