ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that Nister's symbolist attitude extends not only to the plot and the metaphors, but is inherent in the author's use of narrative perspectives, his concept of narrative space and time. It focuses on the composition of the characters of the novel in order to unfold the outlines of Der Nister's tragic and highly ambivalent vision of human life and the world as well has his latest confessions as a Yiddish symbolist. The chapter presents an analysis which is based on the authorized ikuf edition, which comes closer to what Der Nister might have envisioned as the 'definitive' version of the novel than those editions issued in the Soviet Union. Der Nister's novel The Family Mitshber was universally and enthusiastically praised. The concrete aesthetic and narrative devices and other elements of composition employed in novel, their relation to what might be called Der Nister's symbolist world view in the shape it took in late 1930s, still remain a largely unexplored field.
