Nine Gates to the Chasidic Mysteries

In 1913, at the age of nineteen, Jiri Langer, a Czech Jew from a Europeanized Jewish household, journeyed to the region of Eastern Europe once known as Galicia, deciding to immerse himself in the timeless spiritual world of Chasidism. His destination was Belz, one of the many small villages, towns, hamlets, and cities where Chasidism lived almost untouched by the modern world. After a time, he returned to the city of Prague and to his assimilated family, yet continued to wear traditional chasidic garb and lead a religiously observant life. As his older brother, the playwright Frantisek Langer, writes, "My brother had not come back from Belz, to home and civilization; he had brought Belz with him". Part autobiography, part anthology of tales and anecdotes, Nine Gates to the Chasidic Mysteries is Jiri Langer's lyrical, exquisitely written memoir and exploration of the world of mystical faith that he encountered during his experiences among the chasidim of eastern Galicia. A remarkable piece of self-revelation and self-analysis, Nine Gates to the Chasidic Mysteries was almost instantly praised as a literary masterpiece upon its publication in 1937. Eighteen months after it was published, it was banned by the Nazis, who had occupied the region and labeled the book a monstrosity of art, copies being confiscated as a result of house-to-house searches. Yet, this exceptional example of spiritual autobiography continues to live, having since been translated into several languages, including Italian and German. Part of the special quality of Nine Gates to the Chasidic Mysteries is that despite its being deeply rooted in the world of mystical Judaism, the sketches of chasidic life and thefolktales that Langer learned during his life among the chasidim are written for the reader who is not familiar with the esoteric theology of Kabbalah. As the author's brother remarks in his insightful and revealing foreword to the book, "Their purpose was to tell . . . something different about the Jews from that which Nazi anti-Semitism was endeavoring to smuggle across the Czechoslovak frontier". Jiri Langer was indeed a remarkable individual. A friend of Franz Kafka (he taught Kafka Hebrew) and Max Brod (who writes in his own autobiography that some of his work would never have been written without Langer's help), he was also one of Sigmund Freud's earliest admirers, and he wrote a number of studies of Jewish ritual and literature, applying Freud's ideas along the way. During the past several years, many Jews have witnessed family members from nontraditional homes making the decision to pursue a religious life-style. Such an individual is known as a baal teshuvah, literally "master of return", and the number of people who fit this description has grown to the point where it is considered to be a phenomenon; it has been called the "baal teshuvah movement". Nine Gates to the Chasidic Mysteries is a document from another time and place, and yet it captures the same spirit of religious longing and exploration that we see today among a growing number of seekers.Langer, Jiri is the author of 'Nine Gates to the Chasidic Mysteries', published 1976 under ISBN 9780874412413 and ISBN 0874412412.