Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries 9780812204360

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Intersections and Boundaries in Modern Jewish Literary Study
Chapter 1. Literary Culture and Jewish Space around 1800: The Berlin Salons Revisited
Chapter 2. Joseph Salvador’s Jerusalem Lost and Jerusalem Regained
Chapter 3. The Merchant at the Threshold: Rashel Khin, Osip Mandelstam, and the Poetics of Apostasy
Chapter 4. Shmuel Saadi Halevy/Sam Le´vy Between Ladino and French: Reconstructing a Writer’s Social Identity
Chapter 5. I. L. Peretz’s ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’: Neo-Hasidism and Jewish Literary Modernity
Chapter 6. Neither Here nor There: The Critique of Ideological Progress in Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke Stories
Chapter 7. Brenner: Between Hebrew and Yiddish
Chapter 8. Eisig Silberschlag and the Persistence of the Erotic in American Hebrew Poetry
Chapter 9. The Art of Sex in Yiddish Poems: Celia Dropkin and Her Contemporaries
Chapter 10. Ethnopoetics in the Works of Malkah Shapiro and Ita Kalish: Gender, Popular Ethnography, and the Literary Face of Jewish Eastern Europe
Chapter 11. Eternal Jews and Dead Dogs: The Diasporic Other in Natan Alterman’s The Seventh Column
Chapter 12. Inserted Notes: David Boder’s DP Interview Project and the Languages of the Holocaust
Chapter 13. Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore
Chapter 14. The Art of Assimilation: Ironies, Ambiguities, Aesthetics
Chapter 15. Hebraism and Yiddishism: Paradigms of Modern Jewish Literary History
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Modern Jewish Literatures

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania David B. Ruderman, Series Editor Advisory Board Richard I. Cohen Moshe Idel Alan Mintz Deborah Dash Moore Ada Rapoport-Albert Michael D. Swartz A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Modern Jewish Literatures Intersections and Boundaries

edited by

Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the publication fund of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Copyright 䉷 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Modern Jewish literatures : intersections and boundaries / edited by Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner. p. cm. — (Jewish culture and contexts) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4272-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Jewish literature—History and criticism. 2. Hebrew literature—History and criticism. 3. Yiddish literature— History and criticism. 4. Jews—Identity. 5. Judaism and literature. 6. Judaism in literature. 7. Jews in literature. I. Jelen, Sheila E. II. Kramer, Michael P., 1952–. III. Lerner, L. Scott. PN842.M63 2011 809⬘.88924—dc22 2010022112

CONTENTS

Preface D avid B . R uderman

vii

Introduction: Intersections and Boundaries in Modern Jewish Literary Study Sh e i l a E. Je l e n, Michael P. K ramer, L. S cott Le r n e r

1

Chapter 1. Literary Culture and Jewish Space around 1800: The Berlin Salons Revisited L i l i a n e W eissberg

24

Chapter 2. Joseph Salvador’s Jerusalem Lost and Jerusalem Regained L . S cott Lerner

44

Chapter 3. The Merchant at the Threshold: Rashel Khin, Osip Mandelstam, and the Poetics of Apostasy A melia Glaser

66

Chapter 4. Shmuel Saadi Halevy/Sam Le´vy Between Ladino and French: Reconstructing a Writer’s Social Identity O lga B orovaya

83

Chapter 5. I. L. Peretz’s ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’: Neo-Hasidism and Jewish Literary Modernity Ni c h a m R oss

104

Chapter 6. Neither Here nor There: The Critique of Ideological Progress in Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke Stories M arc Ca pl an

127

vi

Contents

Chapter 7. Brenner: Between Hebrew and Yiddish An i t a Sha pir a

147

Chapter 8. Eisig Silberschlag and the Persistence of the Erotic in American Hebrew Poetry Al a n Min tz

169

Chapter 9. The Art of Sex in Yiddish Poems: Celia Dropkin and Her Contemporaries Ka t h r y n H ell erstein

189

Chapter 10. Ethnopoetics in the Works of Malkah Shapiro and Ita Kalish: Gender, Popular Ethnography, and the Literary Face of Jewish Eastern Europe Sheila E. J elen

213

Chapter 11. Eternal Jews and Dead Dogs: The Diasporic Other in Natan Alterman’s The Seventh Column Gi d e o n Nevo

237

Chapter 12. Inserted Notes: David Boder’s DP Interview Project and the Languages of the Holocaust Al a n R osen

263

Chapter 13. Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore Laurence R oth

280

Chapter 14. The Art of Assimilation: Ironies, Ambiguities, Aesthetics Michael P. K ra mer

303

Chapter 15. Hebraism and Yiddishism: Paradigms of Modern Jewish Literary History An i t a Nor ic h

327

List of Contributors

343

Index

347

PREFACE

This book emerges from the yearlong project at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania on the topic ‘‘Modern Jewish Literatures: Language, Identity, Writing.’’ This was the first seminar at the Center devoted exclusively to literary studies, and it brought together some twenty scholars of literature, as well as one distinguished historian working on a literary topic, during the academic year 2004–5. What was unique about the group, I think, was its wide diversity: experts in Yiddish, modern Hebrew, and Ladino literatures mixed with scholars of French, German, Arabic, Russian, English, and American writing, all grappling with the elusive subject of what Jewish literature might be if it were not necessarily defined by language or geography. While the group had been carefully selected to include a strong representation of specialists in Hebrew and Yiddish, the voices of those who worked in other traditions were highly audible. In so heterogeneous a group, there were often strong disagreement and heated exchange, and it was clear that the critics of Israeli literature felt that Diasporic literary production had challenged the privileged place they had assumed for Hebrew studies. But the members of the seminar were always courteous and respectful of their colleagues, even when strongly disagreeing with one another. What ultimately united the participants was a shared sense of the importance of literary studies for our understanding of the creativity of Jews over time and space. This volume has been skillfully shaped by three thoughtful and industrious editors: Sheila Jelen, who works primarily in Hebrew literature; Scott Lerner, a scholar of French and Italian; and Michael Kramer, whose area of specialization is American Jewish literature. I am grateful to them for their hard work, for their conceptualization of the volume, and for their eloquent introduction, which not only contextualizes the variegated essays historically and thematically but also offers an important intervention in its own right on the perplexing question of what is Jewish literature. And of course,

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Preface

I wish to thank everyone, whether included in this volume or not, who participated in a glorious year of research, dialogue, and learning at the Katz Center. D avid B . R uderman Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History Ella Darivoff Director, Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies University of Pennsylvania

INTRODUCTION

Intersections and Boundaries in Modern Jewish Literary Study Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner

A Wall-Less Ghetto The act of defining, circumscribing, and demarcating has long been a principal activity of modern Jewish literary scholarship, yet the boundaries have proved elusive. While many definitions of Jewish literature have been offered, none has been universally accepted, and questions about who is and who is not a Jewish writer, what is and what is not a Jewish book, remain unsettled.1 So vexed has the enterprise been, that Hana Wirth-Nesher has wondered whether the only thing that unifies the field is the question itself: What is Jewish literature?2 Modern Jewish literature lacks the basic markers of national literatures: it has neither a shared language nor a common geography, though some have tried to limit it in these ways.3 Indeed, the field is so diverse—written in so many languages and so many places, embodying so many intersecting literary traditions and cultural influences—that Dan Miron has suggested that it cannot be contained within the bounds of one literary category but that we must refer to multiple Jewish literatures, a suggestion that we have adopted for this volume.4 Instead of seeking to define modern Jewish literature in lockstep with fixed categories or rigid binary oppositions, Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries examines sets of relations, adopting the perspective, broadly conceived, of modern Jewish writing moving back and forth between and through categories, of intersections and boundaries as

2

Introduction

mutually inclusive by way of continual movement across borders, of separations and syntheses.5 This perspective is emblematized for us—in a figurative sense—by a unique institution in modern Jewish history: the ghetto. We have in mind not the isolated Jewish world as described by Heinrich Graetz that long pervaded the Jewish imaginary: squalid, backward, impervious to outside influence. Nor are we thinking of the idea of the ghetto as conceived by its founders in Venice as an ‘‘urban condom,’’ in the image made familiar by Richard Sennett.6 The figure we wish to evoke is something more like the culturally complex, vibrant, and fluid Italian ghettos described by historians Robert Bonfil and David Ruderman: closed off from the surrounding Gentile society yet an integral part of it, traditional yet in flux, deeply Jewish yet receptive to external ways.7 Indeed, a particular example we have in mind is the ghetto of Rome in the period immediately before the unification of the city in 1870 with the rest of the fledgling Italian nation. For more than three centuries, the Roman ghetto constituted both a physical space and a legal institution, separating Jews from Gentiles and Gentiles from Jews. Contiguous residential buildings bereft of external doors and windows, along with a single, freestanding wall, divided the ghetto from the rest of the city, while five iron gates controlled entries and exits. On the eve of the Revolution of 1848, Pius IX ordered the gates and wall torn down but stopped short of ending the institution of the ghetto, such that movements in and out, while freer, continued to be regulated by law if not by iron. With the revolution, the pope went into exile, a republic was proclaimed, and the situation was reversed: although no law obligated them to do so, most Jews, either too poor to move or reluctant to leave their community, continued to inhabit the ghetto space, whose physical boundaries, rendered permeable by the elimination of the gates and wall, nonetheless remained largely intact, thanks to the buildings along its perimeter. A short time later, the pope returned to power, reinstituted the ghetto, and ordered all Jews back inside, though he did not rebuild the gates and wall. For the next twenty years, the last of Europe’s historic ghettos continued to operate, circumscribed by a combination of real and imaginary boundaries, with century-old structures still intended to separate and invisible gates promoting movement in and out. We have in mind, too, a modern wall-less ghetto of a different kind: the Lower East Side of New York, which, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, became, in Abraham Cahan’s words, ‘‘the Ghetto of the

Introduction

3

American metropolis, and, indeed, the metropolis of the Ghettos of the world.’’ What kept the Jews in this wall-less ghetto was neither physical nor legal but the immigrants’ inner need—with the familiar boundaries of their lives breached—for stability and mutual support. But little remained unchanged. In the ‘‘social cauldron’’ of the Lower East Side, Cahan explained, Jews from all over Eastern and Central Europe interacted— among themselves and with the culture at large—and every tenement ‘‘harbor[ed] in its bosom specimens of all the whimsical metamorphoses wrought upon the children of Israel . . . by the vicissitudes of life in this their new Promised Land of today.’’ In the wall-less ghetto of New York, Cahan’s friend and colleague Hutchins Hapgood explained, ‘‘the Jews [were] at once tenacious of their character and susceptible to their Gentile environment’’; they underwent ‘‘rapid transformation though retaining much that [was] distinctive.’’8 These wall-less, gateless ghettos serve as a trope for the project of delimiting modern Jewish literature—not because of any external imposition to stand apart but because modernity (let alone postmodernity) is incompatible with the manning of the gates. The figure provides an alternative perspective to the impulse, for example, to define a distinctly Jewish sense of humor, aesthetic, voice, or book—an impulse that, according to Anita Norich, belies a ‘‘profound anxiety about gatekeeping and permeability.’’9 As in a ‘‘wall-less ghetto,’’ the boundaries still exist, but the intersections forged between those boundaries—the cultural osmosis, as it were—foster something new that exemplifies modern Jewish literary experience. Each writer treated in this volume understood that he or she was located at a time and place of transformation, from a premodern time constituted by a relatively constant and relatively insulated Jewish past—of the ghetto or the shtetl, conceived in real or symbolic terms—and the commencement of Jewish life, or the life of Jews, in the modern world. The period in which, collectively, they wrote, is demarcated by the Enlightenment, the Haskalah, the French Revolution, and Emancipation, on one end, and the early decades of the State of Israel on the other. The particular terms of the encounter between a Jewish past and a present and future for modern Jews varied greatly, by continent, country, and village, by language, and by social standing, among other things. What unites the subjects of these studies is not a common history in any other than a very general sense, but rather a shared

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Introduction

response: to use literary production and writing in general as the laboratory in which to explore and represent Jewish experience in the modern world. The contributors to this volume were among a group of scholars invited to the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss modern Jewish literature. We had come across many different geographic boundaries—from Europe and Israel, as well as from all across North America—and represented diverse academic fields: clusters of scholars of Hebrew and Yiddish writing were joined by specialists in Arabic, English (Anglo and American), French, German, Italian, Ladino, and Russian literatures. Our research interests were markedly disparate as well, ranging from Israel’s nationalist poet Natan Alterman to Russian apostate poet Osip Mandelstam; from turn-of-the-century Ottoman Jewish journalism to wire-recorded Holocaust testimonies, from the intellectual salons of eighteenth-century Berlin to the shelves of a Jewish bookstore in twentiethcentury Los Angeles. The net had been deliberately cast wide, and we could not always discern where our distinct interests intersected or where our disparate fields overlapped. In part, the openness and the eclectic nature of our interests are signs of our scholarly times, echoing the progressive impulses that lay behind the contributions to David Biale’s landmark Cultures of the Jews (2002): to set aside the restrictive definitions and distinctions that had characterized the field and to expand the scope of Jewish cultural studies ‘‘to include what has been neglected.’’10 But we also consider Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries to be a reflection of the multifarious field at large and a response to the complex character of the literature being studied and the historiography that accompanied it over the last two centuries. In the early nineteenth century, when Leopold Zunz founded the Verein fu¨r Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden and first set out to limn the contours of Jewish literary history, he conceived his academic endeavor explicitly as a response to the cultural crisis that we now conceptualize as modernity. Zunz observed that the boundaries separating Jews from (in his case) German culture were crumbling and that Jews were embracing the new opportunities. As ‘‘the [richer and more congenial] intellectual products of their own country began to capture their minds and stimulate their emotions,’’ he wrote, Hebrew literacy declined.11 Zunz feared that Jewish literature—namely, the postbiblical (he called it ‘‘neo-Hebraic’’) literary tradition that had embodied the volksgeist of the Jews for two millennia— would be abandoned and soon become extinct. So he set out to rebuild the

Introduction

5

walls around Jewish culture, to preserve from oblivion neo-Hebraic literature and the spirit of Judaism that informed it, creating the new academic ghetto of Jewish studies. The Jewish studies that flourish today owe their origins, in large part, to the academic enterprise that Zunz initiated. But something unexpected also happened: Jewish literary activity experienced an extraordinary renaissance. Numerous talented Jews were indeed attracted to the national literary scenes of their respective countries, including Zunz’s friend and onetime member of the Verein fu¨r Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, Heinrich Heine, and the salon hostesses in eighteenth-century Berlin, such as Henriette Herz and Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, whom Liliane Weissberg discusses in this volume. But Jews also began to produce as well a self-consciously Jewish-oriented literature in non-Jewish languages. Over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, Jewish newspapers and periodicals in European languages were established, wall-less literary ghettos addressing the intellectual and social needs of the acculturated, modernized Jewish public with essays, stories, and poems: the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (1837) in Germany, Les Archives Israe´lites (1840) in France, The Jewish Chronicle (1841) in England, and The Israelite (1854) in America, among many others. By the mid-nineteenth century, Jewishthemed novels and romances clearly utilizing European genres, such as Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza: Ein Denkerleben (1837), had appeared in Germany; Euge´nie Foa’s Le Kidouschim (1830) and La Juive (1835) in France;12 Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars (1850) in England; and Isaac Mayer Wise’s The First of the Maccabees (1860) in America—each dealing in its own way with the crisis of Jewish modernity that Zunz had acknowledged. Not all these works were of equal quality, to be sure, but the groundwork for modern Jewish literature in European languages had been laid. Even more startling to Zunz would have been the fascinating renaissance experienced by Yiddish and Hebrew. Yiddish, the language of the Eastern European masses, had been a demotic literary language of sorts since premodern times, a venue for popular religious translations, digests, and ethical treatises. During the Jewish Enlightenment, it was used against itself, as a tool to satirize the Hasidic community and to galvanize social change. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, a sophisticated modern literature began to develop in Yiddish that paralleled and borrowed from developments in European literatures: Isaac Meir Dick inaugurated his popular series of novellas in 1864, the same year that Mendele Moykher-

6

Introduction

Sforim (S. Y. Abramovitsh) published Dos kleyne mentshele, considered by most to be the first modern Yiddish novel. At the same time, Hebrew asserted itself and, after serving for several millennia as the formal language of Jewish religio-literary production, emerged as a secular, Europeaninfluenced literary language. The language that Zunz believed would die came back to life: the first modern Hebrew novel, Abraham Mapu’s Ahavat Tsiyon, was published in 1853, and the first three daily Hebrew-language newspapers in Eastern Europe were published in 1886. No matter what the language, the self-consciously Jewish literature produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries bore the marks of the wallless ghetto. While Zunz wanted to define the boundaries between Jewish and Gentile cultures, the boundaries had already been traversed, and the ghetto wall could not be rebuilt. The circumstances of modernity complicated the relation of modern Jews to their literary heritage, and the complexity—indeed, the irony—is even inscribed in the pages that Zunz wrote: although the literature he sought to reclaim—medieval and Renaissance liturgical writing—was composed in Hebrew, Zunz himself wrote in German, and his German prose envelops the Hebrew passages he quotes. For all the attraction of Zunz and his cohort to the Jewish past, theirs was not the Judaism of their ancestors. Their subject was foreign to them, but it was the very foreignness that at once generated the desire to reclaim and repossess and to reinvent. Their relation to the Jewish literature they studied and their impulse to maintain its linguistic integrity were defined by their modernity and their Germanness. By the early twentieth century, there were not only burgeoning bodies of modern Jewish writing in various Jewish and non-Jewish languages— along with a growing body of writing by Jewish writers who chose to participate in other literary communities—but also competing schools of literary thought and scholarly and polemical writing that chronicled and promoted Jewish literary activity. Broadly speaking, two distinct schools emerged. On the one hand, a particularist school, based in Eastern Europe and then in Israel, insisted upon setting specific linguistic boundaries for Jewish literature (restricting it primarily to Hebrew or Yiddish). On the other hand, an inclusivist school, with its center first in Germany and then in America, promoted the view that Jewish literature was a literature without geographic or linguistic boundaries.13 Together, these two schools embody the countertendencies of modern Jewish literary study. The circumstances of modernity complicated the relation of modern

Introduction

7

Jews to the artifacts of their collective past, and they also problematized their connection to other Jews around the world. Jews have always borrowed culturally from their neighbors, conquerors, and hosts, but the onset of modernity, with its refigured relation to the past and the increasing openness of host cultures, accelerated and augmented the process. So it seemed, at least, to Ahad Ha‘am at the end of the nineteenth century. While the Hebraist critic believed that a certain type of strong cultural borrowing—what he called hikui shel hitharut, or competitive imitation— constituted a source of vitality for Jewish culture wherever and whenever it occurred, continually reinvigorating and reconfiguring it, he also feared that this borrowing might lead to the eventual fragmentation and disintegration of the Jewish nation (as if the nation were not already significantly fragmented). The boundaries that had once separated Jews from their host cultures would now divide Jews from one another. Jews in Germany would become German Jews; Jews in France, French Jews; Jews in England, English Jews. Each would constitute a separate and unique island of Jewish culture that had more in common with its surrounding culture than with other Jewish cultures around the world.14 What was needed, Ahad Ha‘am argued, was something to ensure that the boundaries of Jewish culture, the wall-less ghetto, as it were, be maintained even as foreign influences were being absorbed—a modern cultural force to counter the centrifuge of modernity. He thus advocated the creation of a spiritual homeland in Palestine, along with the cultivation of Hebrew as the language of the Jews. Following Ahad Ha‘am, drawing upon the scholarly initiative of Zunz, and fueled by the nationalist ideologies that would lead to the founding of the State of Israel, a school of Jewish literary historiography developed that sought to define Jewish literature in terms of language and land. For Joseph Klausner, dean of Zionist literary historians, it was Hebrew literature, and Hebrew literature alone, that embodied the Jewish national spirit. He acknowledged that the ‘‘People of the Book’’ had ‘‘created literature in the languages of the Gentiles among whom it lives’’ but argued that only ‘‘in its national language’’ does the Jewish people ‘‘continue . . . the creative work that covers thousands of years from Bible times to the present day.’’15 Simon Halkin, who succeeded Joseph Klausner as professor of modern Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, continued in this vein, articulating the literary-historical equivalent of Ahad Ha‘am’s argument, maintaining that ‘‘every linguistic unit in the polyglot Jewish literature of this modern era . . . shows an almost complete

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Introduction

and parochial absorption in the life of the Jew in a given country alone, with relatively little interest in Jewry as a whole.’’ He insisted, counterintuitively, that modern Hebrew literature, even as it saw its center in the State of Israel, nevertheless ‘‘persistently refused to become parochial, territorially exclusive in its Jewish interest.’’16 But even as they looked narrowly at Hebrew literature as the authentic Jewish literature, drawing direct lines of filiation from the Bible to the Talmud and medieval literature to the modern Hebrew renaissance, these Hebraists could not dismiss the significant intersections between foreign literatures and the Hebrew. ‘‘It is impossible for a people living among other people not to be influenced by them,’’ Klausner wrote, ‘‘especially during the Haskalah period, when the desire to leave the ghetto and to be more or less like all peoples prevailed.’’ It was thus incumbent upon the literary historian ‘‘to pay close attention to the general literary movements among the nations within which the Jews created their own modern literature.’’17 Moreover, Hebrew literary expression itself was, dramatically, bursting onto the scene of European modernism in its profusion of apostasy narratives, modern sexual angst, and hyper meta-textuality. Even as it cultivated the new national language, it seemed unfazed by the literary criticism that attempted to channel it into the proper nationalist directions. Nationalist ideologies, in other words, came to be expected from a literature that was, to a large extent, less concerned with territorialism than with affiliating itself with avant-garde European styles that could catapult the ancient language, via the modern literature it produced, into the twentieth century. Nationalistically overdetermined critical readings of Hebrew literature were doomed to oblivion because the Hebrew writers who made their way onto the world’s stage, who became early participants in the discourse of modernism and modernity, problematized nationalist narratives in their styles, their subject matter, and their disregard for the popular truisms of their moment. While the particularists in Eastern Europe and Palestine were struggling to mend the ghetto wall of Jewish literary history, cultural and literary critics in Western Europe and America, also in the wake of Zunz, were promoting a different view in wide-ranging histories and anthologies, transforming the lack of a shared language and a common geography into a source of strength. Late nineteenth-century German literary historian Gustav Karpeles reveled in the notion that Jewish literature was ‘‘the ‘wandering Jew’ among the world’s literatures,’’ marveling how ‘‘a people without a land,

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9

living under repression and persecution, could produce so great a literature.’’18 Decades later in the United States, literary chronicler Meyer Waxman boasted that Jewish literature was ‘‘a literature without geographic boundaries, one which grew luxuriously on the shores of the rivers of Babylon, on the banks of the Jordan, bloomed most beautifully by the rivers Tagus and Guadalquivir, and flourished with equal vigor on the Rhine, the Vistula, and the Dnieper.’’19 Karpeles and Waxman celebrated the diversity that Klausner and Halkin bemoaned, arguing that Jewish literature had always thrived at cultural intersections, ‘‘assimilating Persian doctrines, Greek wisdom, and Roman law; later, Arabic poetry and philosophy, and finally, the whole of European science in all its ramifications.’’ Just as the Jews sang the songs of God by the rivers of Babylon, Karpeles wrote, so now could modern Jewish poets ‘‘sing the songs of Zion in the tongue of the German,’’ or, for that matter, in all languages.20 It is important not to misconstrue this Romantic quest for comprehensiveness as a postmodern acceptance of boundlessness or a valorization of intersections over boundaries. For, while they dismissed the need for geographic boundaries, Karpeles and Waxman believed that an abiding spiritual center already existed within the soul of each and every Jew. Whereas Zunz (however ambivalently) turned from the embrace of German culture to search for the unique Jewish spirit in earlier Hebrew writing, these historians believed that a polyglot Jewish volksgeist informed all cultural work performed by each and every Jew. While both Zunz and Ahad Ha‘am saw modernity as an eroding force in Jewish history, the inclusionists looked through the differences that defined modern Jewish life and found that the spirit of Maimonides shone in Spinoza’s Latin, and the fire of Isaiah burned in Marx’s German.21 However they tried to resist it, each of these schools betrays the countertendencies of the wall-less ghetto, implicitly embodying the intersections and boundaries of modern Jewish literary study. So construed, they form the intellectual prehistory of this volume. The strategy that we have adopted is to confront these histories in their complexities—not to resolve the issues that they grappled with or to dismiss them but to explore the sets of relations that produced and underlay them. We have thus placed the essays in a chronological order that both reflects and challenges traditional histories of modern Jewish literature, following a similar trajectory—from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century—but moving in and out of countries and languages. Similarly, the essays collected here embrace rather

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Introduction

than avoid the categories and dichotomies that have shaped and dogged modern Jewish literary study since its inception—Jewish and non-Jewish languages, exile and homeland—but tend to approach them as porous rather than rigid, kinetic rather than stationary. The essays participate in a common discourse of boundary crossings, describing movements across linguistic or geographic frontiers, never fully entrenched on one side or the other but productively bringing different domains together; not unifying them, but enlarging them in the process. Questions of language and geography remain, transfigured as loci for the interplay of intersections and boundaries, as multilingualism and figures of space.

Multilingualism The question of modern Jewish literature’s linguistic identity has always been more about what Jews should write than what they do write. Putting aside linguistic prescriptions, we take it as a given that, as Shmuel Niger famously observed, ‘‘one language has never been enough for the Jewish people’’ and that, as Ilan Stavans has remarked, ‘‘the mere existence of a multilingual Jewish people implies, by definition, a heterogeneous bookshelf.’’22 Indeed, a critical mass of the writers discussed in these essays were themselves bilingual or even multilingual, and we might say, following Niger, that one language has sometimes not been enough even for one Jewish writer. What interests us in this volume, however, is not simply the diversity or multiplicity of the languages in which Jews (or a particular Jew) wrote but the significance of their language choices and the relation between and among those languages. In ‘‘Shmuel Saadi Halevy / Sam Le´vy Between Ladino and French: Reconstructing a Writer’s Social Identity,’’ for instance, Olga Borovaya shows how one Ottoman Jewish writer was equally accomplished in adopting the literary forms of journalistic French and Ladino. For Borovaya, the significance of Halevy/ Le´vy lies not simply in the language switching itself but in the stylistic and programmatic shifts that accompanied writing in a particular language. When writing on Jewish themes for Le Journal de Salonique, Sam Le´vy (as he was known in French) sought to entertain a highly educated and Westernized readership and, in the style of Pierre Loti’s Moroccan travelogue, was apt to create a dark, distant, orientalized picture of unmodernized Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire. When aiming to promote the Alliance Israe´lite Universelle–style modernization of the Jewish

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11

masses, Shmuel Saadi Halevy (as he was known in Ladino) contributed to his Ladino-language newspaper, La Epoka, adopting the encouraging didacticism of a Jewish educator. Borovaya stresses that the ‘‘social identity’’ of poly-lingual Sephardic literati such as Le´vy/Halevy lies between these generic and linguistic forms, with their corresponding, contrasting, and deeply ambivalent attitudes toward the Jews and Ottoman Jewish culture. Among Ashkenazic writers, bilingualism often involved two ‘‘Jewish’’ languages, Hebrew and Yiddish, but their relation was often equally complex and no less charged. Such was the case of Hebrew novelist, essayist, and Zionist ideologue Joseph Hayyim Brenner. In his promotion of Hebrew, Brenner is generally thought to have utterly rejected Yiddish; yet, as Anita Shapira documents in ‘‘Brenner: Between Hebrew and Yiddish,’’ the Zionist writer did not abandon Yiddish, but rather wrote prolifically in Yiddish as well as in Hebrew. Shapira pointedly observes that Brenner’s ‘‘composite attitude’’ toward Hebrew and Yiddish ‘‘raises questions about the dichotomy sketched by scholars of Israeli culture between the Yishuv and the Diaspora, between Yiddish and Hebrew.’’ Moreover, much like Sam Le´vy, Brenner rigorously separated his writing linguistically according to genre and purpose. For Brenner, political culture and daily life were the legitimate domain of Yiddish and the Yiddish press, but only Hebrew could be the language of high culture. Brenner’s identity as a Jewish writer emerges, in other words, not in one or the other language but in the tenuous, hierarchical relation he posited between Hebrew and Yiddish. For many Ashkenazic writers, unlike for Brenner, Yiddish and Hebrew were equally important vehicles of high culture, and the tension between the two Jewish languages played itself out in different, but nevertheless significant, ways. The career of I. L. Peretz, for example, like that of the most important Hebrew and Yiddish writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can be traced in parallel linguistic arcs: Peretz produced equally rich Hebrew and Yiddish bodies of literary output. Yet his composition of specifically Hebrew neo-Hasidic writings is particularly significant. Along with others of his generation at the turn of the twentieth century, Peretz sought literary and linguistic correlatives to the paradoxes that had come to characterize their Jewish existence, bifurcated between the urban and the rural, the sacred and the secular, the subversive and the nostalgic. As Nicham Ross explains in ‘‘I. L. Peretz’s ‘Between Two Mountains’: Neo-Hasidism and Jewish Literary Modernity,’’ ‘‘classic neo-Hasidism does not represent the simple desire of the repentant to return to the

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Introduction

fold. On the contrary, it represents the attempt to induce tradition itself to return to the fold.’’ Peretz embodied the paradox of Jewish modernity in his Hebrew neo-Hasidic tales, bringing together Hasidic stories, generally written in popular Yiddish and associated with tradition; and modern Jewish secular literature, generally associated with Hebrew. He expanded the generic possibilities of modern Hebrew by attempting a conciliation between Hebrew and Yiddish. The case of I. L. Peretz demonstrates that, while bilingualism sometimes resulted in bifurcation, as in Le´vy and Brenner, it also produced a different kind of writing between languages: a dynamic process not simply of translating from one language to another, or from one culture to another, but of allowing languages and cultures in contact through the medium of the uniquely situated author or text to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, a language that transcends its constituent languages. Characteristic of this phenomenon is S. Y. Abramovitsh’s Hebrew nusah style, thus coined by the first Hebrew national poet, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, which brought together different layers of various Jewish languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic) and Jewish literatures (biblical, rabbinic, and Enlightenment pastiche) into a new flexible Hebrew style that could serve as a model and a sustainable basis for modern Hebrew literary production. This nusah, as Bialik describes it, functions as a kind of ‘‘writing between languages,’’ between biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, between Hebrew and Aramaic, between Hebrew and Yiddish, between textual and oral modes, that revolutionized Hebrew’s literary vernacular possibilities and laid the foundation for modern literary Hebrew as we know it today. Created out of the relationships between different linguistic-historical strata, this style articulates faith in the synergism inherent in the deployment of many different languages and many different cultural discourses simultaneously.23 It is against the background of writing between languages—a background of both difference and cross-fertilization, between Jewish and nonJewish languages and between different Jewish languages—that we need to understand Anita Norich’s abstraction of Hebrew and Yiddish in ‘‘Hebraism and Yiddishism: Paradigms of Modern Jewish Literary History,’’ into general tendencies toward the affirmation of Jewish distinctiveness or the embrace of cultural cross-fertilization with other cultures. Instead of seeking to define boundaries, Norich identifies opposing forces within Jewish literature and culture: on the one hand, the tendency to preserve the partic-

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ularism of Jewish cultural identity under the sign of autonomy and independence with respect to other cultures; on the other hand, the positioning of Jewish literary culture in synergetic relation with other cultures, ‘‘embracing its own openness, adaptability, and multicultural perspective.’’ The first perspective she calls ‘‘Hebraism,’’ and the second, ‘‘Yiddishism’’: ‘‘under the sign of Hebraism, the impact of the non-Jewish world is more masked; diverse sources are made to appear seamless, indistinguishable, part of one organic, continuing whole. Under the sign of Yiddishism, the traces of these sources remain clearer; they create something new, but they leave clearly discernible elements.’’ Rather than entering the discussion that Moshe Rosman takes up with David Biale, for example, over whether there exists ‘‘a common Jewish culture at some basic level,’’24 Norich shifts the debate from the essential nature of Jewish literature to the tendencies toward literary and cultural self-affirmation and autonomy (the boundary builders) and the pursuers of openness and cross-fertilization (the intersectors). Norich introduces her linguistic-literary paradigms with an account of Yiddish poet Malka Heifetz Tussman, whom she describes as ‘‘paradigmatic of the cosmopolitan, multilingual nature of modern Jewish literature.’’ In ‘‘The Art of Sex in Yiddish Poems: Celia Dropkin and Her Contemporaries,’’ Kathryn Hellerstein turns to another Yiddish poet to highlight another tension in the relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish letters, which has to do with culture and with gender: Hebrew was long perceived as a ‘‘male’’ language, associated with ‘‘serious’’ literary genres, such as poetry, while Yiddish, the vernacular language, was considered ‘‘female,’’ lowbrow, and antiliterary. Given this gendering of Yiddish as female, it would seem unnecessary to have to justify women’s inclusion in a Yiddish poetic canon. But Hellerstein points to an expected phenomenon—women writers of modern Yiddish poetry were considered by their male peers to be lyrical though uninspired, minuscule in their interests, and limited in their formal scope. Thus Yiddish poetry, ironically, came to be understood as ‘‘poetically’’ significant only when authored by a man, who could recuperate the poetic qualities of poetry written even in Yiddish, while female authorship relegated it to not only a noncanonic status but a nongeneric one as well. Hellerstein reads the eroticism inherent in the work of Celia Dropkin, Fradl Shtok, and Berta Kling as a rejoinder to the place granted them on the margins of the male canon. Certainly the most poignant example of Jewish multilingualism and of

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modern Jewish literatures between languages appears in the case of David Boder, the Latvian-born American psychologist who completed more than a hundred interviews of Holocaust survivors in the displaced-person camps of Western Europe. In an effort to ensure that his subjects could speak ‘‘in their own language,’’ Boder conducted the interviews in multiple languages: Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and German, as well as occasional English. In ‘‘Inserted Notes: David Boder’s DP Interview Project and the Languages of the Holocaust,’’ Alan Rosen recounts how Boder’s interviews took place as well between languages—when, for example, one of his subjects, a native speaker of Polish, offered her intended American audience a concluding reflection, first in English, and then, quite differently, in Polish. Boder attributes this disparity to an understandable desire to express strong feelings in her mother tongue. Rosen, for his part, stresses a gap on the level of community and audience. Rosen also depicts another kind of linguistic inbetweenness when commenting on the work of Boder’s translator, who, as a survivor himself, could, besides translating from one language to another, add a different level of authenticity to certain accounts. Indeed, Rosen reads the translator’s gloss as though it were a poetic verse that, inserted between the language of the interviewer and that of his subject, ‘‘tells an epic story in hauntingly shapely form.’’

Figures of Space Akin to the hybrid or ‘‘relational’’ genres that grew out of Jewish modernity, and like the unique styles that developed at the interstices of different languages within a highly self-conscious modern Jewish multilingual universe, migration, as both a state of mind and a physical movement, generated a dramatically new locus of modern Jewish literary discourse: ‘‘figures of space.’’ The Hebrew narratives of tlishut, or ‘‘uprootedness,’’ at the turn of the twentieth century, the Yiddish accounts of luftmenshen, or the later Jewish American accounts of alienated intellectuals—all these describe the psychic effects of movement from shtetl to metropolis, from country to country, and, in some cases, from faith to faith. These figures can be said to constitute ‘‘figures of space’’ insofar as they hover between places, finding their voice in their sense of displacement, like the classic modernist figures they were. A second cluster of essays describes literary figures or movements driven by a sense of their own ‘‘in-betweenness,’’ bridging geographic centers or spaces. Like the talush, the luftmensh, or the alienated

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intellectual, the figures of space presented here do not simply present themselves as homeless. Rather, they create something dynamic and new, between spaces or places, out of the impulse to bridge, to construct, and to reimagine. For Joseph Salvador, born in France on the heels of the Revolution of 1789, modernity itself presented the prospect that one such space, ‘‘Jerusalem’’—conceived as a trope for Jewish culture—could be ‘‘lost.’’ To this new threat of supersessionism, ostensibly denying the Jews any significant role in the future of humanity, Salvador responded with a body of writing that charted the path of Moses and the Hebrew people within universal history. As L. Scott Lerner argues in ‘‘Joseph Salvador’s Jerusalem Lost and Jerusalem Regained,’’ Salvador’s mode of historical understanding became increasingly reliant on ‘‘literary vocabulary, genres, and techniques,’’ which he used, ironically at times, to produce counter-histories. Salvador’s final work, Paris, Rome, Jerusalem, introduced an eschatological approach to universal history, predicting what he called a ‘‘total renewal of spirit.’’ In order to give expression to such a novel reality, Lerner claims, Salvador invented a new genre, ‘‘epistolary history,’’ and he relied on ‘‘Paris,’’ ‘‘Rome,’’ and ‘‘Jerusalem’’ as ‘‘symbolic sites of meaning in the forward march of civilizations.’’ Paris was the principle of political change; Rome signified the ‘‘spirit of reaction’’ of the Catholic Church and all established religions; and Jerusalem, where the Hebrews had been doubly vanquished, by Christians and Romans, would return to universal history for the de´nouement, guaranteeing that the ideal Mosaic republic would become the basis for world civilization. Paris and Jerusalem, as ‘‘figures of space’’ in which Salvador attempted to write the Jews back into universal history, can be contrasted with the figures of space that came into play during the period of the modern Hebrew revival. Those figures of space were largely construed not in universal or mythical terms, as in Salvador’s writings, but within a discourse of homecoming where Hebrew writing became intimately interconnected with the land in which it was written. While we ordinarily associate the emergence of modern Hebrew writing first with Europe and then primarily with Palestine, a coterie of writers in the decades following World War I set up an ambitious, if unlikely, ghetto encampment of Hebrew poetry on the periphery, in the United States. These Hebrew poets in America saw themselves as aesthetically alienated from the avant-garde excesses of symbolism and expressionism that had taken over poetry in the Yishuv, perceiving

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themselves as defenders of the purity and simplicity of the greatest modern Hebrew poets, Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky, against the ‘‘nouveau’’ Hebrew in use by the newer Palestinian poets. One of these poets, Alan Mintz explains in ‘‘Eisig Silberschlag and the Persistence of the Erotic in American Hebrew Poetry,’’ felt himself alienated even among his cohort in America. Many of the other American Hebrew poets allowed their Hebrew classicism to intersect with American influences, writing long epic poems about Native Americans and the Gold Rush and lyric poems about the shores of Santa Barbara. But Silberschlag was schooled in Eastern Galicia, and later on the streets of Vienna and Paris, before coming to America. His intellectual world was elsewhere—in the ancient world more than in the palpable present—and his lyrics, as Mintz writes, ‘‘take place in no recognizable locale so much as in the poetic state of young manhood.’’ Another salient example of imaginative displacement and reconfigured space, within an American Jewish literary context, can be found in Michael P. Kramer’s essay on immigration and assimilation. All immigrant writers find themselves writing between languages and cultures. Indeed, negotiating the psychic distance traveled between worlds and imagining their place in their new home become the very subject and substance of their writing. In ‘‘The Art of Assimilation: Ironies, Ambiguities, Aesthetics,’’ Kramer reviews the terms under which that negotiation and reimagining took place in America by scrutinizing the polysemous nature of the charged term ‘‘assimilation.’’ Although literary critics in the age of multiculturalism have tended to denigrate assimilation as a betrayal of ethnicity, Kramer insists that assimilation needs to be recognized as the complex creative source and major genre of ethnic writing. By exceeding the bounds of definition, the term generates a host of intersecting political, narrative, and poetic possibilities through which immigrant writers (or those writing about immigrants) can make sense of ‘‘all the hopes and fears, the achievements and disappointments of immigrant experience.’’ Turning to Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting-Pot as one of the most prominent examples of the genre of assimilation writing, Kramer shows how the symbol of the melting pot is ‘‘the aesthetic analog of the multivalence of the term ‘assimilation’ ’’ and how the Anglo Jewish writer uses it to portray America as a place of flux in which, ironically, an assimilating Jew takes on the mantle of the Puritan fathers, displacing their Anglo-Saxon descendant as the quintessential American. Moving out of an American context and into an early Israeli one, Gid-

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eon Nevo negotiates the spatial boundaries between life in the Jewish homeland and life in the Diaspora in the poetry of Natan Alterman. In his examination of the Zionist discourse of the ‘‘negation of the Diaspora’’ in Alterman’s polemical poetry, Nevo points out that Alterman, while highly critical of the American Jewish Diaspora, was surprisingly compassionate in his approach to the Judenrat, the Jewish administrative bodies in the Nazi-formed ghettos. While Alterman is unsparing in his assertion of the early Zionist truism that Diaspora existence is not merely distasteful but self-destructive, in his ‘‘Seventh Column,’’ written for the Hebrew daily Davar (1943–67), he withholds judgment of those victims of the Nazi system who thought that their leadership among the Jewish populations of the modern European ghettos would save them from the brunt of Hitler’s horrors. In ‘‘Eternal Jews and Dead Dogs: The Diasporic Other in Natan Alterman’s ‘The Seventh Column,’ ’’ Nevo reveals the ‘‘negation of the Diaspora’’ ideology to be less rigid than is generally assumed and shows that one of its major proponents judged some Diasporic experiences as more worthy of disdain than others. Alterman’s critical role in the highly ideologically charged nature of literary production and reception during the early years of the State of Israel can also be viewed from a different perspective. While Alterman concerned himself with the poetics of the negation of the Diaspora in unexpected ways, particularly as a response to the Holocaust, a generation of writers—specifically, women writers of Eastern European origin—struggled during the 1960s to resist the obliterating force of the negation of the Diaspora in their own writings on Diasporic life. In ‘‘Ethnopoetics in the Works of Malkah Shapiro and Ita Kalish: Gender, Popular Ethnography, and the Literary Face of Jewish Eastern Europe,’’ Sheila Jelen considers the popular ethnographic reception of literary representations of pre-Holocaust life in post-Holocaust memoirs by women writers born into Hasidic families in Eastern Europe and writing in Israel in the 1960s. Malkah Shapiro and Ita Kalish, born into prominent Hasidic dynasties at the turn of the twentieth century in the environs of Warsaw, traverse time, geography, and historical cataclysm in their respective memoirs of their experiences growing up as ‘‘intimate outsiders’’ within the patriarchal and hierarchical milieu of their fathers’ Hasidic courts. In her analysis of the popular reception of Shapiro’s Hebrew and Kalish’s Yiddish texts, Jelen examines the ‘‘ethnopoetic’’ style of women writers who wrote, after the Holocaust, about the world of Eastern European Jewry before the war, specifically in Israel. Ethnopoetics, as

18

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used here, is a hybrid of ethnography and poetics, of anthropological and literary aspirations. The writer of an ethnopoetic text responds to cultural obligations imposed by historical cataclysm to expand her literary texts beyond the literary. She employs a rhetoric that may even undermine the literary identity of her work. Ethnopoetics are born from within literary texts as a response to critical and cultural forces that place those works, because of the narrators’ geographical, temporal, and historical distance from the world therein depicted, within an ethnographic, as opposed to a literary, trajectory. Jelen calls for recognition of a generic middle state, one that does not deny the ethnographic value of these women’s texts but demands recognition of their literary value as well. Much as Jelen focuses on the popular need to read Kalish’s and Shapiro’s work as an extension of the ‘‘mythical shtetl’’ forged in the popular ethnographic imagination, Marc Caplan shows how Sholem Aleichem depicts Kasrilevke as a ‘‘mythical shtetl’’ in order to highlight the ‘‘absence of a unified temporality’’ in the Eastern European Jewish culture of his day, in which there lacked ‘‘historical synchronicity’’ between Jews and nonJews and between modern and traditional Jews. Against a backdrop of political ideologies whose central concern was the control of territory, Sholem Aleichem de-territorializes the shtetl. As Caplan explains in ‘‘Neither Here nor There: The Critique of Ideological Progress in Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke Stories,’’ Sholem Aleichem creates a metaphysical space that serves to mythologize Jewish space, making it appear to be ‘‘everywhere and nowhere.’’ Through the use of de-territorialized settings, the writer critiques ‘‘the power-based ideologies seeking to control territories, as well as the desire of Jews, even of himself, to attach themselves to a homeland that, at least a hundred years ago, seemed as spectral as Kasrilevke itself.’’ The Jewish salons of late eighteenth-century Berlin, described by Liliane Weissberg, constitute liminal spaces that are strangely similar to the mythical space of Kasrilevke. Both the fictional ghetto and the historic salons served as places in which home and homelessness converged. As Weissberg observes, in ‘‘Literary Culture and Jewish Space around 1800: The Berlin Salons Revisited,’’ the Jewish women of late eighteenth-century Berlin who welcomed non-Jews into their living rooms lacked citizenship and, legally and philosophically, were not at home in the host culture. The salons formed part of the Jews’ houses, yet their occupants enjoyed limited access to the political and cultural life of the city. As Jews and as women, the hostesses were subject to a ‘‘double exclusion’’ and could not take part in

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the social lives of many of their guests beyond the limits of the salon. It was also thanks to their marginality, and the oddly de-territorialized spaces they provided, however, that they were able to ‘‘negotiate meetings of people from diverse social backgrounds; mediate between groups in a society that depended on clear stratification; and offer a meeting place that was not public and could thus acquire, paradoxically, public fame.’’ For Russian authors Rashel Khin and Osip Mandelstam, who wrote in the liminal space between Jewish and Russian culture, Jewish life, as they knew it, assumed the valence not of a homeland or a home, but rather a ‘‘Judaic chaos.’’ In their writing, the latter inhabits the marketplace, in opposition to the rigorously ordered, bounded space of the cathedral, which functions as a ‘‘protective architecture’’ of Russian culture and a generalized, European aesthetic standard. In ‘‘The Merchant at the Threshold: Rashel Khin, Osip Mandelstam, and the Poetics of Apostasy,’’ Amelia Glaser describes Mandelstam’s ‘‘symbolic representation of the church as the structure of civilization, which is diametrically opposed to the marketlike chaos of origin.’’ In his early poetry, the Russian poet started to ‘‘replicate’’ Christian art as a ‘‘universal form for catharsis.’’ Later, he succeeded in integrating Jewish culture into the broad scheme, ‘‘mapping fertile Judaic chaos beside an artistically redeeming Western art.’’ Glaser depicts both writers as ‘‘poised on the borderline between the outside and inside of Russian culture’’; the cathedral and the marketplace function as ‘‘metaphorical locations’’ that enable the Jewish writers to determine their position in relation to this culture. In mapping out the contours of the Jewish bookstore, Laurence Roth similarly focuses on a space that is both physical and metaphorical. He reflects not on liminal spaces in literature but rather on modern Jewish literature as a liminal space. In ‘‘Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore,’’ Roth shows how aisles and shelves resemble canons, and vice versa, as the readerconsumer treads the well-worn historical, generic, and disciplinary map of Jewish literature according to the spatial-intellectual floor plan imposed not by the theorist-critic but by the theorist-bookseller. At the same time that it is embodied in place, Jewish literature also fills the airiness of commercial activity, revealing modern Jewish literature as ‘‘a network of human behaviors, transactions, and deeds in and of their time, and . . . bookstores as places where ideas and capital collide as literal bodies.’’ Roth thus aims to direct debate away from Jewishness, as a quality of writing, and toward a conception of modern Jewish literature ‘‘as a historically contingent collec-

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tion belonging, like all property, to those diverse individuals and communities wealthy and passionate enough to claim ownership.’’ In this way, each generation, through the activities of unpacking and arranging it on shelves of its own making, gives the appearance of order to what is essentially an inherited disorder. Taken together, the essays in this volume speak to a significant redirecting of modern Jewish literary study. Many of the writers explored here —Joseph Salvador, Sam Le´vy, Rashel Khin, Malkah Shapiro, Eisig Silberschlag, Celia Dropkin, and David Boder, for example—have been marginal to modern Jewish literary study. They have existed in the interstices of discourses that have tried to limit Jewish literature in terms of Jewish languages or predominantly Jewish thematics or locales: our contributors have brought the figures forward, allowing the interstices to become the focus, along with the nexus of boundaries and intersections that they represent. In the case of more canonic writers, such as Sholem Aleichem and Peretz, we have tended to complicate their place in Jewish literary history by revealing the underbelly of questions that have long dominated and restricted discussions of modern Jewish literature. The essays here revisit the negation of the Diaspora in Alterman, for instance, and reexamine the relation of Yiddish to Hebrew in Brenner. And rather than fretting about the place of narratives and figures of assimilation or apostasy in modern Jewish literary history—think of Herz, Zangwill, or Mandelstam—we consider how these literary formations complicate our sense of the modern Jewish literary experience. In many ways, the writers discussed here introduce innovations in form that relate to changes in Jewish experience catalyzed by modernity: multiple languages are suffused, and bounded spaces are interpenetrated. Our concern, in editing this volume, has not been to advocate for new categories in place of old ones but rather to open the gates of an eclectic literary production to new perspectives, contiguities, and relations. These literatures are the productive site of multiple intersections. Without abandoning the questions and concerns that animated previous generations of scholars— questions of language and land, creed and culture, gender and genre—the contributors refused to be confined by them. Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries maintains the category of modern Jewish literature by opening it up to multifarious forms and possibilities. And so we return to the image of the wall-less, gateless ghetto: Jewish literatures bound to one another not by language but by languages, not by space but by

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figures of space. Most important, this volume offers a view of Jewish literatures understood always ‘‘in relation,’’ as a tightly bound imaginary body always on the verge of breaking free, yet holding back, imperceptibly and powerfully. Notes 1. For a recent example of the debates, see Michael P. Kramer, ‘‘Race, Literary History, and the ‘Jewish’ Question,’’ Prooftexts 21 (2001): 231–65, and the critiques by Bryan Cheyette, Morris Dickstein, Anne Golomb Hoffman, Hannah Naveh, and Gershon Shaked that follow, 322–49. For a further consideration of Kramer’s essay and the debate that ensued, see Benjamin Schreier, ‘‘Jew Historicism: Delmore Schwartz and Overdetermination,’’ Prooftexts 27 (2007): 500–530. For an early example, see S. Levy, ‘‘Is There a Jewish Literature?,’’ Jewish Quarterly Review 15 (1903): 583–603, and the debate that it inspired in W. Bacher, A. Wolf, and S. Levy, ‘‘What Is Jewish Literature?,’’ Jewish Quarterly Review 16 (1903): 300–329. 2. See Hana Wirth-Nesher, ‘‘Defining the Indefinable: What Is Jewish Literature?,’’ in idem (ed.), What Is Jewish Literature? (Philadelphia, 1994), 3–12. 3. For early examples, see Bacher, Wolf, and Levy, ‘‘What Is Jewish Literature?,’’ as well as Baal Makhshoves, ‘‘One Literature in Two Languages,’’ in Wirth-Nesher (ed.), What Is Jewish Literature?, 69–77. 4. See Dan Miron, ‘‘From Continuity to Contiguity: Thoughts on the Theory of Jewish Literature,’’ in Anita Norich and Yaron Z. Eliav (eds.), Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext (Providence, R.I., 2008), 9–36. 5. David Biale describes the extent to which Jewish culture has always consisted of such ‘‘centripetal and centrifugal forces to the point where the very opposition between them appears artificial and overly simplistic.’’ He has in mind pairs such as unity versus diversity, textual continuity versus cultural ruptures, isolation versus assimilation, elite versus popular, and the idea of a unified culture versus a history of multiple communities and cultures. He and his fellow contributors to Cultures of the Jews challenge the reliance of scholars on dichotomies like these. A few years earlier— and several years before joining us at the Center—Bryan Cheyette, along with Laura Marcus, took aim at a different set of ‘‘reductive oppositions,’’ which they claimed had impeded the serious examination of ‘‘the question of Jewishness.’’ They were referring to the tendency to subsume Jewish difference within the so-called JudeoChristian tradition in a manner that emptied it of its distinctiveness, on the one hand, and to the appropriation—and evacuation—of Jewishness as the site of the universal other by ‘‘apologists for the efficacy of western modernity,’’ such as Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, on the other. See Biale, ‘‘Toward a Cultural History of the Jews,’’ in idem (ed.), Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York, 2002), xvii–xxxiii; and Cheyette and Marcus, ‘‘Some Methodological Anxieties,’’ in idem (eds.), Modernity, Culture, and ‘the Jew’ (Stanford, Calif., 1998), 3, 12–13.

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6. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York, 1994), 228–37. 7. See, especially, Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); and David B. Ruderman, ‘‘The Ghetto in Jewish Cultural Formation in Early Modern Europe: Towards a New Interpretation,’’ in Norich and Eliav (eds.), Jewish Literatures and Cultures, 117–27. 8. Abraham Cahan, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (New York, 1896), 28–29; and Hutchins Hapgood, The New York Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter of New York (New York, 1902), 9–10. 9. See Anita Norich, ‘‘Hebraism and Yiddishism: Paradigms of Modern Jewish Literary History,’’ in this volume, 327–342. 10. Biale, ‘‘Toward a Cultural History of the Jews,’’ xxvii. 11. Leopold Zunz, ‘‘On Rabbinic Literature,’’ trans. Alfred Jospe and Eva Jospe, in Alfred Jospe (ed.), Studies in Jewish Thought: An Anthology of German Jewish Scholarship (Detroit, 1981), 20. 12. See Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in NineteenthCentury France (Stanford, Calif., 2009). Samuels would have been a contributor to this volume with an essay on Euge´nie Foa had this book not appeared before the volume. 13. In the selective sketch that follows, we have focused, for reasons of economy, on Hebraist literary historians as representatives of what we have called the ‘‘particularist school.’’ Like the Hebraist school, Yiddishist scholarship—from Leo Weiner’s English-language History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1899) to later works by Baal Makhshoves, Shmuel Niger, Ber Borochov, and Nokhem Shtif—also tended, albeit in a different way, to view modern Jewish literary history from a particularist perspective, being ‘‘motivated,’’ according to Marc Caplan, ‘‘to demonstrate for a mass audience that Yiddish could function as an autonomous vehicle of modern, secular, artistic culture’’ (personal correspondence June 8, 2009). For a broader account and critique of Hebraist and Yiddishist schools of Jewish literary theory, see Miron, ‘‘From Continuity to Contiguity: Thoughts on the Theory of Jewish Literature.’’ (See also Miron’s Hebrew monograph, Harpiya letsorekh negiah [Tel Aviv, 2005]. The English essay is a condensed translation of the monograph.) On the Euro-American school, see Kramer, ‘‘Race, Literary History, and the ‘Jewish’ Question.’’ 14. See Ahad Ha‘am, ‘‘Imitation and Assimilation,’’ in Leon Simon (ed. and trans.), Selected Essays of Ahad Ha‘am (New York, 1970), 107–24. 15. Joseph Klausner, A History of Modern Hebrew Literature, trans. Herbert Danby, ed. Leon Simon (London, 1932), v. 16. Simon Halkin, Modern Hebrew Literature, from the Enlightenment to the Birth of the State of Israel: Trends and Values (New York, 1970), 18–19. 17. Joseph Klausner, Historiya shel hasifrut ha’ivrit hahadasha (Jerusalem, 1930), 1:vi–vii. 18. Gustav Karpeles, Jewish Literature and Other Essays (Philadelphia, 1895), 38, 10. 19. Meyer Waxman, A History of Jewish Literature, 5 vols. (New York, 1960), 1:xvi.

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20. Karpeles, Jewish Literature and Other Essays, 51, 49. It is interesting to note that in The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1899), Leo Weiner castigates the inclusivist, multilingualist Karpeles for his neglect of modern Yiddish writing. ‘‘Karpeles devotes, in his history of Jewish literatures, almost thirty pages to the medieval form of it,’’ he writes, ‘‘but to the rich modern development of it only two lines’’ (9). 21. Joseph Jacobs, Jewish Contributions of Civilization: An Estimate (Philadelphia, 1919), 45–46. 22. Shmuel Niger, Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature, trans. Joshua A. Fogel (Lanham, Md., 1990), 11; and Ilan Stavans, The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (New York, 1998), 4. 23. For an interesting account of multilingualism in Jewish American literature, see Hana Wirth-Nesher, Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (Princeton, N.J., 2005). 24. Moshe Rosman, ‘‘Hybrid with What? The Variable Contexts of Polish Jewish Culture: Their Implications for Jewish Cultural History and Jewish Studies,’’ in Norich and Eliav (eds.), Jewish Literatures and Cultures, 152.

CHAPTER 1

Literary Culture and Jewish Space around 1800: The Berlin Salons Revisited Liliane Weissberg

Breaking News An article in the ‘‘Style and Entertaining’’ section of the New York Times Magazine, dated October 6, 2002, offers a glimpse of present-day New York. Titled ‘‘Whiskey a` Go-Go,’’ it features Hope Atherton, a young and stylish woman, who has undertaken to ‘‘reinvent the salon.’’ ‘‘To understand why, as people say, ‘it’s all about’ Hope Atherton this season, let us try to explain how so-called New York society is constituted’’ (119), journalist William Norwich writes as he compares the social scenes of ‘‘uptown,’’ ‘‘downtown,’’ and everything ‘‘in between’’ to competitive athletics: As in sports, nothing energizes a team like new blood. . . . Enter Hope Atherton, 27, an artist who studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, born and reared on a 400-acre working farm in Warrenton, Ca., where, she says, ‘‘as far as you could see you never saw a light at night.’’ She has the doe eyes of an Edie Sedgwick and the gamine qualities of Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly, but she also has the true grit and intellect, well, a young Elizabeth Hardwick comes to mind. At 27, Hopey, as her friends call her, certainly likes ‘‘the life,’’ and ‘‘the life,’’ the neo-bohemian life, that is—the team she and her friends play on—likes her right back.

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Hopey even entertains at home—on Wednesdays, about once a month, in a sort of easy, breezy salon she calls Whiskey Wednesday. Simple stuff: a few bottles of whiskey, small groups of chums and if there is enough money or everyone chips in, some take-away food from Rice, by her friend David Selig, on Mott Street nearby. ‘‘My only entertaining tip,’’ Hopey says, preparing for a recent get-together, ‘‘is to not entertain—it’s just to be.’’1 In a box next to the article and its accompanying pictures of this New York set, Norwich names other ‘‘great salonistas’’ that form Hopey’s ancestral line of entertaining women. Among them, he lists a Jewish salonnie`re from eighteenth-century Berlin, Henriette Herz. Herz’s tea parties and Hopey’s whiskey a` go-go may be separated by centuries and continents. But the weekly Berlin meetings and the monthly New York gatherings are both depicted here as evidence of style, featuring desirable places where one should be, or should have been, ‘‘just to be.’’ The earlier Berlin salon that featured its own doe-eyed hostess was, indeed, described as an important way station in Friedrich Nicolai’s late eighteenth-century description of Berlin.2 Nicolai’s account was popular with many visitors and tourists to this city. As many soon learned, Herz gathered philosophers and actresses at her home, and Jewish women and the Prussian landed aristocracy met for regular conversation and tea. In Norwich’s account, Hopey’s salon seems to override the question of class; important instead are style (that of the guests) and location (that of the salon). Those who are affluent in looks and style, however, do not necessarily need spare cash for a meal. The salon, in any case, is not for the lovers of food but for the gourmands of the mind. Norwich’s celebration of the reinvented salon implies a celebration of its predecessors. In that, he agrees with most social and literary critics who view the Berlin salon, for example, as an ideal meeting place. Studies of contemporary Berlin praise Berlin’s early Jewish salons as well, and books with titles such as Das gesellige Canape (The hospitable sofa) celebrate its renewed interest among Berlin’s present and non-Jewish population.3 But while this renewal is taking place, important questions remain. Did Berlin Jewish hostesses like Henriette Herz view their tea a` go-go as such desirable places? And how about their Jewish friends? Should one really take these early Berlin gatherings to be models for social life in the twenty-first century?

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Establishing a Home Eighteenth-century Berlin was no metropolis, although it was a fast-growing town of soldiers, bureaucrats, and tradespeople, many of whom were immigrants. If present-day New York is teeming with new residents from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean Islands (none of them stylish enough, perhaps, to enter Hopey’s salon), Berlin featured settlers from across Europe, among them large minorities of Huguenots and Jews. Most of these Jews had already lived in Berlin for a generation or two, and many had recently abandoned their native Western Yiddish or Judendeutsch for the German language of their Gentile surroundings. For most of them, German was a second language and the Latin alphabet a second script. Rahel Levin, a friend of Henriette Herz, would equate those letters with Prussian soldiers.4 The educated Jewish elite began to read German books. Jewish women read German novels, and soon began to write them while asking male friends and native speakers to offer corrections of their texts. Brendel Veit, Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter, was married to a banker and student of Mendelssohn, Simon Veit. She would later divorce him. Brendel changed her name to Dorothea and anonymously published a novel, Florentin, in 1801. Florentin tells the story of a young man who does not know his parents and who travels to find a proper home; it is a Bildungsroman about homelessness.5 Early critics believed the novel to be the work of Friedrich Schlegel, with whom she lived and whom she would marry soon after the book’s completion. Veit had met him at one of Herz’s social gatherings. Wealthy Jewish families educated their daughters well, providing them with dance masters and French-language tutors. Veit was thus able to translate a novel by Germaine de Stae¨l, a French woman who visited Germany and reported on that country.6 Herz translated travel books such as Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa: Performed under the Direction and Patronage of the African Association, in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (Mungo Parks Reisen in das innere Afrikas, 1799) and Isaac Weld’s Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, During the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (Isaac Welds Reise in die Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika, 1800).7 Deprived of citizenship and a proper homeland, this translator was limited in her travels both as a woman and as a Jew, who was taxed even at the borders of German states. Which, then, was familiar territory, and which was a new discovery? Henriette Herz pursued her own geographic explorations with the study of languages and books.

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The philosopher and Protestant minister Friedrich Schleiermacher would view it thus: Jewish women were beautiful, well educated, and interesting, whereas Jewish men were nothing of this sort; they were drafted to become businessmen much too early in their lives.8 Schleiermacher’s close friend Henriette Herz, for one, was the daughter not of a businessman but of a physician, Benjamin de Lemos, head of the Jewish hospital in Berlin. Henriette knew many languages besides French and English, including Italian and Sanskrit, and was married to a prominent physician, Marcus Herz, who was also a philosopher and a former student of Kant.9 But members of the Herz family, like other Berlin Jews, were deprived of civic rights. And they did not own a farm from which to escape the city. Indeed, their sense of place was much harder to define. In contrast to German cities like Frankfurt, Berlin did not have a geographically restricted Jewish residential space, a ghetto. Jews lived in various areas across the old town, although predominantly close to the old synagogue.10 Still, one would be hard-pressed to define their midtown houses as their homes. At a time of increasingly national sentiment, it was precisely this sense of home that was denied to them. When Johann Gottfried Herder tried to define the new German nation, he defined ‘‘Jews’’ first. Jews were a wandering people, he insisted, and one that had lost its proper home. The loss of home, and, indeed, the loss of a proper sense of home, defined a Heimatlosigkeit that both characterized Jews and contrasted them with their German surroundings. Herder’s notion of the Jewish ‘‘parasite,’’ of a being that occupied a territory or body not his own, has to be understood within this framework.11 Herder did not use the term in a derogatory way; he wanted to describe the visiting status of a people whose sense of belonging had suffered long ago.12 Indeed, in Herder’s writings, particularly in his brief essay ‘‘Conversion of Jews’’ (‘‘Bekehrung der Juden,’’ 1804), Germany itself is depicted as a kind of salon that offered restrictive invitations to its Jewish guests. Thus, Berlin Jews were recipients of letters of protection, Schutzbriefe, that spelled out the conditions of their erstwhile stay, while a larger number of Berlin Jews were even deprived of those documents. A generation later, Heinrich Heine would view religious conversion as an updated version of such an invitation, and view it as a billet d’entre´e to German society.13 In the late eighteenth century, Jews were defined as homeless, in both a philosophical and legal sense. Many Berlin Jews quickly internalized this notion. To be without a proper place, to lack any sense of home as well as

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definite location would not only define the image of the Wandering Jew and become a theme of anti-Semitic propaganda, but also serve as a Jewish complaint. Indeed, as the letters of Rahel Levin, another Jewish so-called salonnie`re, would show, Jews were even unable to find a home in their very bodies. To her medical student friend David Veit,14 Rahel (who was mostly known by her first name) would relate a ‘‘fantasy’’ she had, as if an extraterrestrial [außerirdisch Wesen], while I was forced into this world, had stabbed with a dagger these words into my heart: ‘‘Yes, have sensations, see the world, as only a few can see it, be great and noble, an eternal thinking I cannot take from you. One thing, however, was forgotten: Be a Jewess!’’And now my whole life is a bleeding to death; if I keep still, it can last a while; each movement, made to stop the bleeding, is a new death; and immobility is only possible for me in death itself.15 In all probability, Rahel suffered from a form of gout, and in this and other letters, she complained about a pain in her leg that would often make it difficult for her to move. In her ‘‘fantasy,’’ however, the occasional physical lack of mobility relates to her status as a Jewish woman and to her feeling of being tied to a place, and out of place as well: ‘‘Yes, the lame person would say, if it were not necessary for me to walk; but I do not have it in me to live, and each step that I want to make, and cannot make, does not remind me of the general calamity of men, against which I want to take steps, but I feel my special misfortune still, and twice and ten times, and one is always heightening the other.’’16 But where would Rahel want to walk from, and walk to? Can a lame person be a Wandering Jew—and can a Wandering Jew be a woman? In 1794, Rahel sketches another, ‘‘modern’’ human being that would be defined not according to her religion but according to her proper body and her sense of place—though she herself lacked both. Instead, Rahel noted down her admirations of Livonians, who not only were able to own land but had blue eyes, blond hair, and an upright posture.17 ‘‘I am just observing the world,’’ Rahel writes, and she does not write as a woman who had lost her place but as a woman who had never owned one and could not even properly be called a woman. Instead, she views herself as a voyeur of the world: ‘‘Life and nature are there for me. Thus, calculate the lutte in my life, the brief, bitter moments. With the sharpest conviction that I should

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have been queen (no reigning one) or a mother: I experience that I am nothing. No daughter, no sister, no lover, no woman, not even a citizen.’’18 To be ‘‘nothing’’ means to lack a place and to lack history as well. What would be the history of ‘‘nothing,’’ one may ask; and could there be a history devoid of proper place? Jews themselves had not claimed a history for themselves. Until the late eighteenth century, their Diasporic existence was not bound to any sequence of events but relied on the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures—on a text that would in itself assume a sense of place despite, or because of, its portability. But the Bible was a place that Germans like Herder would not recognize as a particularly Jewish one. According to Herder, not even the Old Testament belonged to the Jews. Modern Jews had to be distinguished from the Hebrews. His Old Testament was written by the Hebrews who were the forebears of Christians and thus his fellow Germans.19 When Mendelssohn finally wanted to contemplate the possibility of Jewish history, which history was he to choose? ‘‘What kind of history!’’ Rahel would exclaim at the end of her life, and describe herself neither as a German nor as a Berlin salonnie`re, but as a refugee from Palestine.20 From Palestine? Could Rahel really be from there? Is history to be imagined in this way? Despite the fact that Berlin was not, and could not be, home, eighteenth-century Jewish philosophers like Salomon Maimon came to view Berlin as a new Jerusalem,21 a city where learning—and this meant Jewish learning—was encouraged, a learning that was simultaneously threatened by the fragility of one’s own existence as well as by divergent, assimilationist views. These views were made possible because of Jewish/Gentile interactions encouraged by the lack of formal ghetto confines. By venturing ‘‘out,’’ by reading and discussing the new Enlightenment philosophy, a specifically Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, was born and thrived. This was the domain of Jewish men. For Jewish women, Berlin was less of a Jerusalem. But a further paradox has to be considered. Precisely at a time when Jews were trying to view Berlin as a new home, they were publicly denied having a home. Although their place in society was contested, Jewish women, in search of their own emancipatory venture, would create a place that was, paradoxically, celebrated as their home. These women offered their own letters of protection: they wrote billets as Schutzbriefe and issued invitations to their homes. They addressed diplomats as well as aristocrats, even a

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Prussian prince, who responded, and followed up with visits to this newly constructed space.22 How was this possible? The positive conditions for trade that drew Jews to Berlin in the late seventeenth century and the academic discourse of Enlightenment philosophy that provoked a discussion of Jewish emancipation in the late eighteenth century were all part of a male realm. But this male realm was the fundament of Jewish social hospitality as well. Again, it was a matter of space and place and of location. Rahel’s father, Levin Marcus, was a banker and diamond dealer who lent money to aristocrats as well as to actors. After her father’s death, Rahel would establish her first social gatherings in her parental home, and her father’s customers constituted its first visitors. Regarding Henriette Herz’s earlier parties, we have the following report by the artist Johann Gottfried Schadow, who would eventually marry a Jewish woman, Marianne Davidel, whom he met in the Herz house: Marcus Herz, a physician-practitioner and the author of the work on dizziness, also a witty person, was well regarded in general, also among his medical colleagues. He was then very much taken by the discoveries by Lavoisier, so he acquired expensive instruments to reenact experiments in the afternoon. As an ardent smoker of tobacco, he remained the master of his room. Here, he welcomed young doctors in the social evening hours and traveling scholars— among them one has only to mention the Privy Counselor Selle, the Royal Physician; N. Kunth, the tutor of the famous brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt; Klaproth, State Council Karsten, etc. In the room of the housewife next door, several young men met at the same time—they were admirers of German poetry and contributed what was newly published, reviewed it, recited it, criticized it. Among the many names, I remember only a few: the Swede Brinckmann, who had just published some poetry; Woltman, also a historian; a man named Meyer, Almanach versifax; Meyering; von Kleist and the brothers Counts Dohna; the older count became secretary of state, the younger held several positions as an ambassador. The famous Schleiermacher joined only several years later.23 Thus, the so-called Berlin Jewish salons emerged as a division of labor, as an undertaking following, or parallel to, business transactions or the scientific

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pursuits of men. And they demanded rooms of their own. These were not luxurious rooms, by any means. In Herz’s apartment, it was a room ‘‘next door’’ (nebenan), and although we suspect Rahel to have used her parents’ living room for her social gatherings, she referred in letters to her own personal room and was eager to talk about her ‘‘truths of the attic’’ (Dachstubenwahrheiten),24 named after her private space to which she would afterward withdraw. To become important, the social gathering place had to be subordinate to the meeting space of men, and perhaps even incidental.

Social Interactions The seemingly incidental space marked the hostess’s double exclusion. The room ‘‘next door’’ was part of the Jewish house; it was therefore placed in a building inhabited by people who were not citizens and were hardly able to participate in the political or cultural life of the city. Certainly, Jewish hostesses were unable to participate in the social life of many of their visitors outside their circumscribed space. As social outsiders, however, Jews assumed a particular role. Because of their marginality and, indeed, lack of proper space, they could negotiate meetings of people from diverse social backgrounds; mediate between groups in a society that depended on clear stratification; and offer a meeting place that was not public and could thus acquire, paradoxically, public fame. In Rahel’s dreams, the attic room of her Dachstubenwahrheiten contrasts with the space of a castle that she would like to enter, but can do so only invisibly. She describes that other space thus: ‘‘But also the large room I had to look at a lot, and I could not understand the light; it was very friendly in its decoration, above, and with its pointed arches; and the many colors, of the many people and pictures, the colors of the room even above, the very light yellowish reddish light, all of this seemed to produce a crowd before the eyes, and gave the whole no cut-up or petty look, but the impression remained large and joyful.’’25 Rahel’s and Henriette Herz’s rooms had more modest properties, and the guests entering them were visible, indeed, even if some of them were excluded from public view otherwise. Actors were hardly acceptable in ‘‘good society,’’ for example, and mistresses were set up in apartments of their own. All were able to enter Jewish houses, though, and attend social gatherings there where they would meet aristocrats, writers, and even theologians. Could these events be viewed as socially avant-garde? Many historians of German Jewish culture, including Jacob Katz and Michael Meyer,

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have insisted on this fact; both insisted on the transformative power of these social institutions as well, marginal as they may have seemed, while historians of the Jewish Enlightenment, such as David Sorkin, were more hesitant to discuss this female initiative.26 Nobody greeted this new Jewish social life more enthusiastically than Hannah Arendt, who dedicated her first book to Rahel Levin’s life.27 ‘‘The charm of the early Berlin salons was that nothing really mattered but personality and the uniqueness of character, talent, and expression,’’ Arendt would later write in her Origins of Totalitarianism,28 thus providing an early echo of Hopey Atherton’s stylish wish ‘‘just to be.’’ In Origins, Arendt focuses on Rahel’s ‘‘salon’’ as well and describes it as a utopia turned into short-lived reality. Utopias, of course, have no history, but despite the salon’s uniqueness—and the uniqueness of its visitors—there is a difference between a denial of history and a shortlived phenomenon. While Arendt does not elaborate on this paradox, she notes the ‘‘amusing’’ similarities between the Jewish salon and the Bildungsroman. For her, the Jewish salon was an attempt in acculturation that would parallel Wilhelm Meister’s education, and was thus not only short-lived, but a lived fiction as well. But do these two utopias—the Berlin salon and Wilhelm Meister’s Bildung—have that much in common? The Jewish salon did not want to question existing society or propose a social testing ground; it was a very limited and controlled experiment. But could one really find any social equality in these private rooms? The gatherings in Henriette’s and Rahel’s homes produced their own form of social hierarchy. Each meeting had its stars—the handsome prince, the wellknown philosopher—and each evening stressed witty conversation or intelligent texts that would never remain anonymous. After each evening, the guests returned home, and the Gentiles returned to houses whose doors they would be able to close firmly. These gatherings did not rest on any model of reciprocity. If a guest would visit, he or she did not have to invite the hostess in return—quite the contrary. The ‘‘salon’’ celebrated a social one-way street; it privileged visitors whose own living rooms would remain off-limits to Jews. Instead of providing a glimpse of utopia, it provided a clearly circumscribed amusement as a parlor game, the rules of which had to be understood. And the hostess’s outsider status was guaranteed: after all, she was not only Jewish; she was a woman as well. The hostess’s gender provided her with a special tradition. In seventeenth-century France, aristocratic women would host salons that were counter-models to the gatherings at court. Even the word ‘‘salon’’ derives

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from the French; it appeared first in 1664, marking the reception room of a castle. In 1737, its meaning changed to designate a room in the Royal Louvre, in which art exhibitions were held. Denis Diderot used it as a literary term for a series of essays that appeared in mid-century.29 French culture influenced Berlin. For late eighteenth-century Berliners, Paris had succeeded Vienna in importance and was seen as the cultural capital of Europe. Huguenots lived in Berlin and influenced its social life as well. At court, one spoke French, and even Frederick the Great, a hero of many Jews, as he had proclaimed tolerance (in word if not in deed), had known only little German. Jewish women of Berlin were ambitious in wanting to learn French and acquire French fashion. To be able to claim a certain independence and to be able to play a role as women who could be taken seriously (to a certain point), they opened their homes on a certain day, at a certain time and served tea, a beverage that had just become slightly cheaper than the accompanying sugar, which also was imported from colonial territories and which would measure a family’s wealth.30 Some of these women’s fathers or husbands were trading in these spices or refining the sugar in buildings adjacent to their homes.31 For the popular, imported coffee, men could visit the newly founded coffeehouses, of which Mendelssohn was quite fond.32 The tea table was the woman’s realm. To create a Jewish salon would have been a feat of high ambition and aspiration at this time. But even with the women’s fondness for French fashion and culture, it is unclear whether hostesses like Rahel or Henriette Herz were defining themselves within this tradition. Indeed, none of the Jewish women in Berlin described their social gatherings as salons. According to their own letters and testimonies, they were simply opening their living rooms to visitors and offering tea—an antidote to the chocolate favored at court or to the men’s visits to coffeehouses. For social gatherings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the notion of the ‘‘salon’’ was introduced belatedly, in the late nineteenth century. It is interesting to consider when the notion of the ‘‘Jewish salon’’ entered historical literature. In 1870–71, German states were discussing a new merger under the Prussian guidance of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and a new discussion about Jewish emancipation took place. With Wilhelm Marr’s new coinage of a notion of ‘‘anti-Semitism’’ (Antisemitismus), the discussion of the ‘‘Jewish question’’ moved into the racial sphere. Would Jews, who were emancipated in Prussia in 1812, ever be able to be proper citizens of a new German Reich, patriots, and soldiers? This discussion,

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specifically the new political coinage of ‘‘anti-Semitism,’’ coincided with the new notion of the turn-of-the-century ‘‘Jewish salon.’’33 For those who were hoping for a full social integration of German Jews, these salons gave evidence of a German Jewish symbiosis that seemed to have succeeded in the past. Thus, from the very beginning, the Jewish salon was defined as a locus of nostalgia and as a political notion, as well. Nostalgia means nothing but a longing for a home—now shared by former Jewish hostesses and by historians and literary critics themselves.

Emancipation What were these hostesses’ aspirations? What did they want to leave behind, and what did they want to acculturate to? If Rahel insisted that she was ‘‘nothing’’ and that she knew ‘‘nothing,’’ what would this actually mean? The study of Hebrew, as well as the study of the new texts of the Jewish Enlightenment, was reserved for men. Jewish women were excluded from their Gentile surroundings but did not really take part in the Jewish tradition of learning. Henriette Herz describes Jewish Berlin girls and her youth in the de Lemos household: The children, but especially girls, were not really instructed in the faith of their parents but were asked to observe the formal rituals [Formen], i.e., they had to observe innumerable customs that the rabbis prescribe. The girl had to pray in the Hebrew language without understanding what she was praying. I remember well to have prayed thus, with devotion and dedication—and much, at times, especially when there was a thunderstorm, which always made me very anxious. At those times, I said many, just any prayers very quickly, one after the other.34 Herz may have exaggerated this point. We assume that she knew Hebrew well. Indeed, she was Wilhelm von Humboldt’s teacher of this language.35 But the exclusion from Jewish intellectual tradition and the absence of religious education were strongly felt, and these women’s secular education furthered a sense of alienation. Petra Wilhelmy describes the Berlin salon as a ‘‘dress rehearsal for women’s emancipation.’’36 It was a dress rehearsal for the emancipation not of Judaism but from Judaism as well. Issues concerning Jews were hardly ever discussed in these salons. A reading of a new

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drama by Ludwig Robert, Rahel’s brother, could be viewed as shocking, simply because it featured protagonists who used Yiddish words.37 Mendelssohn was not the hero of these tea parties; Goethe was.38 And if Goethe provided one center of discussion, the new Romantic literature provided another. In German Romantic literature, there was no place for any Jews.39 Jews may have audited Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s lectures or followed Friedrich Schlegel’s literary career—indeed, Mendelssohn’s daughter Brendel married this impoverished Romantic writer. But the Romantic worldview was decidedly Christian, and even while discussing these writings, Jewish hostesses and Jewish visitors were struggling hard to relate to it. Conversion to Protestantism, and perhaps even to Catholicism, was the only feasible option for many. As the salon provided a strongly gendered sphere—Jewish women were hostesses, and many of their male visitors were Gentile—it offered a meeting ground where a final escape, by the traditional form of marriage, became a concrete possibility. The eroticism of these social meetings cannot be denied, with its own division of gender and its insistence on traditional gender roles despite the Jewish women’s outward drive for education. Thus, history entered the salon and provoked a peculiar marriage politics. Jewish women, often regarded as beautiful and exotic, would find Gentile admirers. As Deborah Hertz has shown, the marriage scene flourished, leading many representatives of the impoverished landed gentry to court wealthier Jewish women who hoped to find entry to a higher social class.40 Although the rise of the bourgeoisie would contribute to the aristocrats’ decline that made these Jewish women all the more desirable, these women had no ambition to be viewed as bourgeois. They aspired to join the aristocratic sphere, and newly acquired titles were viewed as social successes. To step into the future no longer meant a historical standstill but a historical reversal. The Jewish hostesses did not want to be emancipated women. They wanted to become baronesses or countesses and influential spouses of government secretaries and diplomats.41 This transition from Judaism to aristocracy was performed by many women with the help of conversation and tea. It would be wrong to say that these Jewish hostesses fought for Jewish emancipation. Humboldt, a supporter of Jewish emancipation, would remark that he loved Jews only en masse but tried to avoid them en de´tail.42 Jewish hostesses and many of their guests did not really want Jews to

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achieve a higher social standing; they wanted out, and to achieve emancipation en de´tail, just for themselves. Thus, Rahel advised her friend David Veit to avoid the Jews in Jena (where he was a student) and leave ‘‘the desert dust’’ behind: In Berlin, one can come to terms with the Jews [Judenheit] with each person in his own way, although not as a whole, and one seldom or ever risks discussions; otherwise, one would encounter harshness. In Jena, though, everything is still ‘‘clad in desert dust (where they have led Moses through).’’ One has always to be afraid of the first shaking off there; and you feel that this would be the most unpleasant thing, and you are afraid of this; what one is afraid of, of this one thinks a lot, without conscious intention by the object that is giving us this fear. Well, bon soir.43 And she notes right away: ‘‘I congratulate you sincerely on the fact that there are no Jewish students in Jena. I appreciate, by the way, what you have said about the nation, and one has to leave it nevertheless.’’44 Rahel and her Jewish friends attended Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation (Lectures to the German nation, 1807–8) instead, and provided the peculiar core of his adoring (and paying) audience, listening to his own utopian longing for a new and German—not simply Prussian—Christian state.45 Whom did Fichte envision as his addressees? What did he make of these Jewish auditors who attended his lectures and paid tuition to do so? Quite clearly, Fichte was no friend of the Jews who studied his work on their path to assimilation. Ludwig Robert, Rahel’s brother and an ardent attendee of Fichte’s lectures, dedicated a volume of his poetry to this philosopher.46 But after his move to Karlsruhe, he would write to his sister: That one has to live apart is truly a great misfortune; and it writes [schreibt] its origin from the great deep birth defect, not to have a fatherland; but if one does not have it, only climate, area, and mainly the strange country [Fremde] must be sufficient; because to feel like a stranger at home, this is the homelessness that is really not to bear. Because of this—and because I feel financially poor in Berlin—I cannot stand being there. But as everything—even misfortune—has its good side, this birth defect does again prove to be the basis of my individuality; and I cannot ignore it therefore, or even

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miss it, without destroying myself. This was the content of the talk that I just had with [Eduard] Gans; and we thought that the baptized Jews’ hatred of the non-baptized Jews was abominable.47 The women who attended Fichte’s lectures and discussed his ideas did not write treatises themselves. They hardly wrote poetry.48 A couple of them wrote novels, but almost all wrote letters. These were continuations of their social meetings and conversations that tried to transfer their fragile oral performance to the written realm. Herein, they imitated their French predecessors. Authors like Rahel, however, attempted to invent a language of their own that would provide the room for them that a simple house could not offer. Thus, we learn about a further paradox. Even though the salons relied on oral conversation, hardly another eighteenth-century social event is as well documented as the Berlin Jewish salon. Letters written by its hostesses and guests describe the conversations and visits. While the women’s letters and testimonies dominate the documents about their social life, their writings do not stand alone. Karl August Varnhagen, Rahel’s husband, for example, was more than a William Norwich of his time. He not only attended social gatherings and reported on them; he became the official historian of Rahel’s own gatherings. He was a collector as well. With amazing diligence, Varnhagen gathered reports and letters and archived them; his own home became the gathering place not of people but of material.49 While this may have been the special role of a male guest, Varnhagen was able to give evidence of another view of the so-called salons. Thus, he describes Rahel’s friend Regina Frohberg, ne´e Rebecca Salomon, a hostess who had just published a roman a` clef about Rahel’s social world, titled Schmerz der Liebe (Pain of love): She lived all alone now and spent her time in elegant society, possessed a diligent drive for education, and was concerned nearly constantly with her bad health. Her seizures did not disturb her wellmannered appearance and interfered rarely with the social tasks and events that she had taken up at any given time. Similarly, no nervous irritation hindered her from sitting attired in a stiff collar and tailored suit, nor did she ever suffer from the sun’s heat or from wind or rain when riding. But what was whispered confidence in regard to the real origin of her suffering, and easily guessed from casually

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mentioned words or covert hints, led not only the doctor but also other visiting friends and acquaintances to express their sympathy; and each thought himself man enough to offer help here, or at least to follow this particular case with interest. One was allowed to believe that one was facing the victim of a relationship entered too early and of too unsatisfactory a nature, who was now tormented by unfulfilled wishes that in turn led to a continuously renewed struggle against the demands of morality and virtue. Under this noble name a lot of other things were included, which had little to do with it, or really belonged to the opposite altogether [mit Haut und Haar].50 Described as prudish only in situations where her reputation may have been at stake, Frohberg seems to have been torn, according to Varnhagen, between her sexual desires and the social role that she was assigned, and had assigned to herself. By mid-century, the diagnosis of Frohberg’s ailment, of her fainting spells, floods of words or tears, inexplicable movements and gestures, seemed obvious to the male chronicler as well as other male observers. Frohberg had become a striking example of a case of hysteria. Varnhagen uses the word ‘‘hysteria’’ as early as 1812. This is one of the earliest uses of the term, and he applies it to a Jewish hostess of his time. In his review of Frohberg’s fiction, he gives the reader a general account of a woman writer who shows little evidence of talent: ‘‘A weak bodily constitution, much like a hysteric state of mind, distinguishes her efforts to her disadvantage from similarly failed attempts by men.’’51 If Jewish hostesses viewed themselves as social facilitators, and later historians saw them as politically significant, Varnhagen brings the phenomenon back to a notion of emancipation that stresses their gender over their Judaism—and medicalizes the salon as a condition. The history of hysteria is very much linked to the female body. The word itself derives from the Greek word for uterus, usterus, and the verb form usterein means to come behind, to fall short, or to be inferior. It has its origin in the female anatomy, as usteria designated the placenta or afterbirth first, but soon lent its name to the womb itself.52 The uterus was thought not to be firmly placed in a woman’s body, but to wander about, just like the Jews in Frohberg’s time. Thus, it could produce various illnesses and had to become settled, if only temporarily so. If Jews had no proper place, women’s bodies exemplified a similar physical unsettlement.

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The diagnosis of hysteria was both the designation of an illness and a device of social control, issued from a male doctor’s pen. Doubly marked by social position and by gender, Frohberg, in Varnhagen’s analysis, becomes a predecessor of later Jewish hysterics, such as Sigmund Freud’s patient Anna O. But Varnhagen does not end his description with a reference to Frohberg’s body, dress, or sexuality. He relates her office of hosting a ‘‘half elegant, half literary tea society and multilingual entertainment,’’ which he finds reflected in her novels as well.53 Indeed, he compares her literary work to fake coffee, made of surrogate beans that cannot taste of real life. Instead of real coffee, moreover, Frohberg’s protagonists are serving tea: ‘‘Especially the tea, however, seems to play a decisive role (in this book), like a liquid of life it flows instead of healthy blood through these corpses; one can feel the pulse at the veins thus filled as well as if they would have been filled with blood. And if the tea turns cold in someone’s cup, the reader can be assured that things are not well with him.’’54 For Varnhagen, these tea parties become an emblem for Frohberg’s writing and reflect Frohberg’s ‘‘real’’ life as well. In her novels, tea becomes an artificial liquid of life; in her life, tea parties become a social fiction. For Frohberg, stiff and restrained in her constricting dress, resembles none other than her novelistic corpses whose ‘‘aesthetic teas’’ would fail critical judgment at once. Far from being a social success, Frohberg’s parties, her Teetisch, become additional symptoms of her ailment as well as a means of her ailment’s temporary relief. Thus, the tea party itself appears as pathological symptom as well as displacement. Frohberg’s contemporaries (as well as Freud later) had an answer for the hysteric’s suffering. Her ultimate treatment was a fulfilled sexuality. She had to marry. Social aspirations (on the Jewish hostess’s part) and medical prescription (on the male critic’s part) agree. But Frohberg’s diagnosis could, indeed, be taken for a general analysis of the parties themselves, which proved to be such a promising marriage ground. Far from being desired, the salons and their hostesses would call for treatment. The hostesses had to be put on stable ground. Interestingly, this is not all that different from Schleiermacher’s philosophical concept of sociability, although his desire focuses on the ‘‘hysteric’’ side. He praises conversation as a situation in which the partners were able to ‘‘float’’ (schweben) between two poles without the need of firm local anchoring.55 Indeed, social conversation should lack firm ground in order

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to be successful, to move forth with ease. Only in this way can conversation put the partners on equal terms. Floating can only exist if there is a definition of a stable ground. For the Jewish hostesses of Berlin, doing without this stable ground was not a matter of choice but of necessity. Perhaps the Berlin Jewish salons were not emancipatory at all but expressions of a desire for emancipation: the ideal conception of what was otherwise known as a Luftgescha¨ft. Notes An earlier version of this essay appeared in German: ‘‘Kein Ort, nirgends: Gedanken zum ju¨dischen Salon,’’ Jahrbuch fu¨r Historische Bildungsforschung 9 (2003): 119–44. If not otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 1. William Norwich, ‘‘Whiskey a` Go-Go,’’ New York Times Magazine (October 6, 2002), 119–20. 2. See Friedrich Nicolai, Beschreibung der ko¨niglichen Residenzsta¨dte Berlin und Potsdam (1786), reprinted in Sa¨mtliche Werke, Briefe, Dokumente I–VIII, Historische Schriften 8, 1, ed. P. M. Mitchell, Hans-Gert Roloff, and Erhard Weidl (Berlin, 1991–95). 3. Cornelia Saxe, Das gesellige Canape: Die Renaissance des Berliner Salons (Berlin, 1999). 4. Rahel Levin, letter to Friedrich de la Motte Fouque´, December 31, 1811. In Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens fu¨r ihre Freunde, 3 vols., ed. Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (Berlin, 1834), 1:585. This as well as the other collections of Rahel’s letters cited in this essay are reprinted in Rahel-Bibliothek, ed. Konrad Feilchenfeldt, Uwe Schweikert, and Rahel E. Steiner, 10 vols. (Munich, 1983). 5. See the new publication under the name Dorothea Schlegel, Florentin: Roman, Fragmente, Varianten, ed. with an afterword by Liliane Weissberg (Frankfurt am Main, 1986). An American translation appeared as Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, Florentin: A Novel, trans. Edwina Lawler and Ruth Richardson (Lewiston, N.Y., 1988). 6. Dorothea Veit’s translation of Germaine de Stae¨l, Corinna oder Italien, was published under Friedrich Schlegel’s name, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1807). 7. Most of Henriette Herz’s writings (including her letters and translations) did not survive. 8. Friedrich Schleiermacher, letter to his sister Charlotte, August 4, 1798, cited in Henriette Herz in Erinnerungen: Briefen und Zeugnissen, ed. Rainer Schmitz (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 269. 9. Regarding Henriette Herz, see Liliane Weissberg, Life as a Goddess: Henriette Herz Writes Her Autobiography (Ramat Gan, 2001); regarding Marcus Herz, see Martin L. Davies, Identity or History?: Marcus Herz and the End of the Enlightenment (Detroit, 1995). 10. Steven M. Lowenstein, ‘‘Jewish Residential Concentration in Post-Emancipation Germany,’’ Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 28 (1983): 471–95; see also idem, The

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Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family and Crisis, 1770–1830 (New York, 1994). 11. Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘‘Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit,’’ in idem, Sa¨mmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin, 1877–1913), 14:67. 12. See Liliane Weissberg, ‘‘Juden oder Hebra¨er? Religio¨se und politische Bekehrung bei Herder,’’ in Johann Gottfried Herder: Geschichte und Kultur, ed. Martin Bollacher (Wu¨rzburg, 1994), 191–211. ¨ ber Juden und Juden13. See the discussion in Heinrich Heine, Prinzessin Sabbat: U tum, ed. Paul Peters (Bodenheim, 1997), 7. 14. David Veit was a nephew of Brendel/Dorothea Mendelssohn’s first husband, Simon Veit. 15. Rahel, letter to David Veit, March 22, 1795, in Varnhagen, Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens, 1:133. 16. Varnhagen, Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens, 1:134. 17. Rahel, letter to David Veit, December 12, 1794, in ibid., 1:126. 18. Rahel, letter to Fouque´, July 26, 1809, in Varnhagen, Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens, 1:436. 19. See the discussion in Weissberg, ‘‘Juden oder Hebra¨er?.’’ 20. Varnhagen, introduction to Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens, 1:43. 21. Salomon Maimon, Lebensgeschichte: Von ihm selbst geschrieben und herausgegeben von Karl Philipp Moritz, ed. Zwi Batscha (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), and the English abbreviated translation, An Autobiography, trans. J. Clark Murray with an introduction by Michael Shapiro (Urbana, Ill., 2001). Cf. also Liliane Weissberg, ‘‘Erfahrungsseelenkunde als Akkulturation: Philosophie, Wissenschaft und Lebensgeschichte bei Salomon Maimon,’’ in Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literaturwissenschaft im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Ju¨rgen Schings (Stuttgart, 1994), 298–328. 22. See Hans Wahl, ed., Prinz Louis Ferdinand von Preussen: Ein Bild seines Lebens in Briefen, Tagebuchbla¨ttern und zeitgeno¨ssischen Zeugnissen (Weimar, 1917). 23. Johann Gottfried Schadow, Kunst-Werke und Kunst-Ansichten (Berlin, 1849), 19–20. According to Schadow, Marcus and Henriette Herz received guests twice a week. Schadow himself met his future wife, Marianne Davidel, at one of these gatherings; Davidel was the daughter of a Jewish jeweler from Vienna. 24. Rahel, letter to Gustav von Brinckmann, late May 1800, in Varnhagen, Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens, 1:200. 25. Ursula Isselstein, ‘‘ ‘Daß ich kein Tra¨umender allein hier bin!’: Zwei unbekannte Tra¨ume Rahel Levins,’’ MLN 102 (1987): 651. 26. Michael Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit, 1967), esp. 85–115. Cf. David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry 1780–1840 (New York, 1987). 27. See Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. Liliane Weissberg (Baltimore, 1997).

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28. Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism, part 1 of The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, 1985), 60. 29. See the extensive discussion in Petra Wilhelmy, Der Berliner Salon im 19. Jahrhundert: 1780–1914 (Berlin, 1989), 16–32; and Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore, 2004). See also Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art, ed. and trans. John Goodman (New Haven, 1995). 30. See, for example, Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge, 2000). 31. Sugar refineries, silk cloth factories, army supplies, and royal coin foundries were businesses open to Jews, and businesses in which a few Berlin families gained early wealth, particularly during the Seven Years’ War. See Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community. 32. See Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London, 2004); Ulla Heise, Kaffee und Kaffeehaus: Eine Kulturgeschichte (Hildesheim, 1987); and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (New York, 1992). 33. Cf. also Barbara Hahn, Die Ju¨din Pallas Athene: Auch eine Theorie der Moderne (Berlin, 2002), 75–98. 34. Henriette Herz, ‘‘Jugenderinnerungen von Henriette Herz,’’ in Mitteilungen aus dem Literaturarchiv Berlin, ed. Heinrich Hahn (1896), 1:147. 35. See the early correspondence of Wilhelm von Humboldt with Henriette Herz and others; Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Ko¨niglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 17 vols. (Berlin, 1968 ff.), vol. 16. 36. Cf. Wilhelmy, Der Berliner Salon, 39–40. 37. Ludwig Robert, letter to Rahel, September 23, 1822, in Miriam Sambursky, ‘‘Ludwig Roberts Lebensgang: Die Briefe,’’ Leo Baeck Institute Bulletin 15/52, n.s. (1976): 42. Robert’s play Kassius und Phantasus oder der Paradiesvogel: Eine erzromantische Komo¨die mit Musik, Tanz, Schicksal und Verwandlungen; in drei großen und drei kleinen Aufzu¨gen appeared in 1825 (Berlin). See also Liliane Weissberg, ‘‘Dramatic History: Notes on a Biblical Play by Ludwig Robert,’’ in Studies in Contemporary Jewish History, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (Oxford, 1996), 3–20. 38. Regarding later Jewish writers’ and critics’ work on Goethe, see Hope Hague, Brenda Machosky, and Marcel Rotter, ‘‘Waiting for Goethe: Goethe Biographies from Ludwig Geiger to Friedrich Gundolf,’’ in Goethe in German-Jewish Culture, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Jost Hermand (Rochester, N.Y., 1001), 84–103. 39. Cf. Liliane Weissberg, ‘‘Kann ein Jude Romantiker sein?,’’ in Romantische Religiosita¨t, ed. Alexander von Bormann (Wu¨rzburg, 2005), 265–83. 40. Deborah S. Hertz, Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (New Haven, Conn., 1988). 41. Rahel’s cousin Mariane Meyer, for example, married a duke and became Frau

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von Eybenberg; her sister Sarah became Baroness von Grotthus. For a more extensive discussion of these marriages, see Hertz, Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin. 42. Wilhelm von Humboldt, letter to Caroline von Humboldt, September 19, 1809, in Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in ihren Briefen, ed. Anna von Sydow, 7 vols. (Berlin, 1906–16), 5:236. See also Jeffrey Grossman, ‘‘Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Linguistic Ideology: The Problem of Pluralism and the Absolute Difference of National Character: Or, Where Do the Jews Fit In?,’’ German Studies Review 20/1 (1997): 23–47. 43. Rahel, letter to David Veit, November 16, 1794, Briefwechsel zwischen Rahel und David Veit, ed. Karl August von Varnhagen, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1861), 2:15–16. 44. Rahel, letter to David Veit, October 31, 1794, Briefwechsel zwischen Rahel und David Veit, 2:263. 45. Fichte’s lectures were offered in private subscription during the French occupation of Berlin, and published in that city in 1808. 46. Robert, Ka¨mpfe der Zeit: Zwo¨lf Gedichte (Stuttgart, 1817). 47. Idem, letter to Rahel, May 27, 1820 (?), reprinted in Sambursky, ed., ‘‘Ludwig Roberts Lebensgang/ Die Briefe,’’ 41. Eduard Gans (1797–1839), a law scholar specializing in comparative and property law, was president of the Association for the Culture and Science of the Jews (Kultur und Wissenschaft des Judentums). He converted to Christianity in 1825. 48. Dorothea Veit included poems in her novel Florentin. 49. The extensive archive of letters and manuscripts collected by Varnhagen was housed at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and relocated to Silesia during World War II; it is currently housed at the Jagellonian Library in Krako´w. 50. Varnhagen, Denkwu¨rdigkeiten des eignen Lebens, ed. Konrad Feilchenfeldt, 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), 1:533. 51. Varnhagen, ‘‘Romane von Regina Frohberg rezensiert von August Becker,’’ Die Musen 2 (1812): 179. 52. Martha Noe¨l Evans, Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), 4. 53. Varnhagen, Denkwu¨rdigkeiten, 1:534. 54. Idem, ‘‘Romane von Regina Frohberg,’’ 182–83. 55. See Norbert Altenhofer, ‘‘Geselligkeit als Utopie: Rahel und Schleiermacher,’’ in Berlin zwischen 1789 und 1848: Facetten einer Epoche (Berlin, 1981), 37–42.

CHAPTER 2

Joseph Salvador’s Jerusalem Lost and Jerusalem Regained L. Scott Lerner

In the summer of 1819, Joseph Salvador, then a young doctor in Paris, happened upon a newspaper account of a bloody attack on the Jews of a small town in Germany. The dispatch deeply affected him, especially the ‘‘war cry’’—Hep! Hep!—uttered by the assailants. The author of the article had glossed Hep as an acronym for the Latin phrase Hierosolyma est perdita, which Salvador understood to mean ‘‘Jerusalem is forever annihilated.’’1 To judge by Salvador’s writing over the four decades following the incident, this threat of annihilation presented itself in psychic, no less than political and social, terms. In spite of the violent character of the incident, he did not fear mostly for the physical security of the Jews; at stake was ‘‘Jerusalem,’’ which symbolized the modern legacy of the Jewish past. Lifting the phrase from its local context, he asked himself: What if the attackers were right? What if Jerusalem were ‘‘lost’’ not at the hands of its historical foes but because, in the drama of human history, the Jews had already exited the stage for the last time? Born in Montpellier in 1796, Salvador, who was the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother and who identified as a Jew, was keenly aware that he counted among the first Jews in history to possess from birth equal rights in a modern state. For all the tumultuousness of the years between 1789 and 1819, he was no less certain that the Revolution had opened the door to modernity. The Hep! Hep! riots impelled him to examine whether the Jewish contribution to the world had played its course—whether, as he

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put it, ‘‘Jerusalem is annihilated on the basis of truth and right.’’ If such were the case, the implication was clear: ‘‘the Synagogue should dissolve itself and be buried, if not with honor, at least without violence.’’2 Here is how he describes the task he faced: It was important to concern myself with the best path to choose, the best plan, in order to obtain or at least prepare for the solution. It was inevitable to drink from the common source of our three established and rival religions, inevitable to return to the foundation of things ex imis fundamentis, as Bacon used to say. In short, only procedures based on the most methodical observations and the surest rules of analysis could enable me to undertake, with some advantage, a new theoretical and practical act of confrontation between Jerusalem and Rome, between Judaism, Christianity and philosophy, between the principles of religion, politics and science.3 Rejecting the idea of intervening directly in the legal and political arena, as his coreligionist from nearby Nıˆmes, Adolphe Cre´mieux, would do, Salvador states his intention to apply a scholar’s ability to probe deeply into things. His declaration is notable for his explicit commitment to the scientific methodology—observation and analysis—on which his medical training depended. Ultimately, he did not conclude in favor of the dissolution of the synagogue, but rather devoted the rest of his life to this counterthesis: ‘‘The role of the Hebrew people in the history of humanity that has been subject to a state of war is immense. An inevitable character in this complicated drama, it appeared in all the acts, and we may be certain of the necessity of its presence for the de´nouement.’’4 Salvador wrote four major, multi-tome works over four decades. The first, published in 1822 and reworked and republished in 1828, is a History of the Institutions of Moses and of the Hebrew People.5 Here, Salvador highlights the central role of Moses the legislator, describing ‘‘Hebrew’’ society as a model republican civilization. Ten years later, in 1838, he published Jesus Christ and His Doctrine, in which he argued that the trial of Jesus had been legal and consistent with the law of the land.6 He also showed the extent to which Jesus’ teachings had their source in Judaism. Salvador’s third work, of 1847, History of the Roman Domination in Judea, and of the Ruin of Jerusalem, is a retelling of the Josephus narrative in a mode more sympathetic to the Jews.7 As James Darmesteter put it, it is the story of

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how, in the Temple fire, the Pantheon burned;8 the decline of pagan Roman civilization was well under way. Having heretofore vanquished with brute force, however, Rome would now take up the arm of thought (Catholicism) that it had borrowed from Jerusalem. Salvador underscored the importance of the fall of Jerusalem in universal history, looking ahead to the day when Christianity, which he conceived as paganized Judaism, having defeated paganism, would find itself again in the presence of the pure Judaism from which it originated. This line of thinking led Salvador to his final scholarly project, Paris, Rome, Jerusalem; or, the Religious Question in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1860. This work is a sweeping universal history in its own right, focusing on the meaning in history of the French Revolution; of the decline of Rome, which had served for centuries as the union of pagan power and Christian thought but was on the brink of collapse as a temporal empire; and of Jerusalem, which Salvador associated with an apocalyptic return of pure monotheism to the land in which it had originated. Most contemporary readers of Paris, Rome, Jerusalem could hardly have failed to hear the echo of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, or, on Religious Power and Judaism (1783) in Salvador’s title. Whereas both Mendelssohn and Salvador maintained that the Mosaic constitution was not a theocracy, and used ‘‘Jerusalem’’ as a title word in order to affirm the significance of Judaism in the modern world, the similarities between these two works were not profound. In Mendelssohn’s treatise, Jerusalem symbolizes the Jewish religion: ‘‘Jerusalem, though destroyed and bereft of power, was still the symbol of the true worship of God.’’9 Salvador largely followed Mendelssohn in conceiving Judaism as a religion based on reason, and rejected miracles and revealed religion, but he did not accept Mendelssohn’s respect for ceremonial laws. Rather, he judged rabbinic Judaism as a degraded form of Mosaic monotheism and ultimately envisaged a new religion that would build upon and transcend both Judaism and Christianity. In order to distinguish the ‘‘institutions of Moses’’ from Judaism as it had evolved in the hands of the rabbis and during the Middle Ages, Salvador consistently employed the term ‘‘Hebrew,’’ as opposed to ‘‘Jewish,’’ viewing modern Jews as synonymous with the ‘‘Hebrew people’’ insofar as they served as carriers of the Mosaic tradition. The German Jewish philosopher would not have recognized nor would he have approved the conception that Salvador developed of a superior religion to come: ‘‘a third-formation Jerusalem that, without destroying either the Jerusalem of antiquity or the Jerusalem

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of the middle period, or Rome, rises above one and the other and completes them [les accomplisse].’’10 This essay is about Salvador’s response to the prospect of modernity as a threat of Jewish annihilation, in historical-narrative rather than existential terms. First, I situate Salvador in relation to the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) movement that arose at approximately the same time. Then, I present him in relation to the dominant mode of representing Jews in France during and immediately following the French Revolution: the ideology of regeneration. Next, I show how Salvador assumed a nearly unprecedented and forceful voice in the debate over universal history that took place in French intellectual circles from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Finally, I describe the writerly and literary modes that Salvador adopted in his historiographic work, which enabled him to conceive and represent what he called the contribution of the Hebrew people to the drama of universal history. The innovative formal qualities of his final work, in particular, mirror his vision of human history in a state of radical transformation, headed toward the wholesale renewal of a new Jerusalem. The declaration of intention to bring scientific rigor—‘‘the most methodical observations and the surest rules of analysis’’—to the study of Jewish history, combined with the date on which this enterprise was undertaken, meant that Salvador had a great deal in common with the scholars who formed the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement across the Rhine. The Wissenschaft movement, in fact, was launched in the wake of the same Hep! Hep! Riots of 1819.11 In one of the first published writings by a member of this group, Leopold Zunz represents the Old Testament from a Jewish perspective, as the ‘‘venerable literary remains from the efflorescence of the ancient Hebrews.’’ In no doubt one of the earliest instances of what Susannah Heschel calls the Jewish historian’s act of ‘‘reversing the gaze’’ of the Christian master narrative,12 Zunz continues: ‘‘The revolutions which began among the Jewish people, and which influenced them no less than the entire world, cast these ruins, called the Hebrew canon, as the foundation of Christian states.’’13 This perspective, which portrays ‘‘revolutions’’ originating with the Jews and the Hebrew Bible as protagonists rather than objects of supersession, was remarkably similar to the one Salvador adopted independently in France. Indeed, this characterization of Zunz’s intellectual point of departure could apply verbatim to Salvador: ‘‘Jews, according to Zunz, are

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depicted either as witnesses or opponents of a victorious Christianity, but always as representatives of disputed principles, never as subjects of their own, self-defined historical narratives.’’14 Like many Wissenschaft scholars in Germany, Salvador would devote his life to rectifying this imbalance, seizing the opportunity to participate fully in the public discourse of the nation. By providing alternative master narratives of the role of Jews in Western and world history, he would become a major practitioner of what Heschel, following David Biale and Amos Funkenstein, has called ‘‘counterhistory.’’15 Yet he would undertake this project in a very different fashion from his German Jewish counterparts, and in the very different context of France. Like the Wissenschaft historians in Germany, Salvador turned to Jewish history as a means of influencing the culture and mentalite´ of contemporary society; like them, he viewed history as the ‘‘arena for resolving dilemmas that wracked the present.’’16 In Germany, a central aim of the movement was to advance the goal of political integration. In France, where Jews had already obtained citizenship, the focus was on the social rather than the legal sphere.17 Toward the end of his career, Salvador explained that ‘‘while great histories were admirably teaching the nineteenth century to know itself [se connaıˆtre],’’ he set out to uncover the ‘‘historical meaning’’ of his century in another light and with a different aim: to lay forth ‘‘the theoretical and practical ties that connect our era to the most remote religious past.’’18 In spite of his declared commitment to scientific methodology, Salvador fell short of the scientific standards on which the practitioners of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, and the subsequent French Science du Judaı¨sme, prided themselves. The fact that he lacked their philological training and based much of his work on Latin translations severely restricted his ability to practice the science of Judaism as it was conceived in his day. These limitations also restricted the influence that Salvador could have over other scholars, both inside and outside of the Wissenschaft. Ernest Renan, the best-known Hebraicist and one of the most influential thinkers of nineteenth-century France, made the point unambiguously in La revue des deux mondes: ‘‘If, as some think, our shared affliction today is that we are all too much historians [d’eˆtre trop historiens], Monsieur Salvador is exempt from this common defect of his contemporaries.’’19 Salvador’s methodology may not have been in sync with the historiographic practices of his day, but the divergence was purposeful. Explaining

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his approach to the major, inherited texts of the West, including the Bible, he wrote: Whether written by a single man or by many, several centuries earlier or later, the Pentateuch offers an imposing whole, whose most minute details have long exerted a great practical influence. To me, [the Pentateuch] is Moses or the Legislator, just as the Iliad is Homer, just as the Works of Hippocrates are Hippocrates himself, even though traces of subsequent cooperation have been shown to exist, even though the very existence of these great men has been placed in doubt. . . . In all these cases, we have before us a Code that dates for everyone several thousand years, books that have been disseminated around the globe, a nation whose revolutions are attested in the annals of others peoples, and whose debris and acts of testimony live on: here is a point of departure that is just as positive as any historical basis one can find.20 This is a remarkable declaration for a historian of ancient civilization writing in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, and it shows there to be some truth in Renan’s claim that his ‘‘place should have been in the sixteenth century, in Holland, next to the Spinozas and the Acostas.’’21 Should we ask whether Salvador was really a historian at all? To be sure, it was as a historian that he was commonly known in his day, and in this capacity he has survived in the small body of scholarship devoted to his work.22 It seems clear, however, that he was no less a literary scholar and a political philosopher—and later, also a religious thinker—than he was a modern historian. At a time when, for Zunz, ‘‘midrash would no longer be allowed to pass for history,’’ Salvador embraced the texts of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament just as they had been handed down through the ages. Without questioning their authorship or authenticity, without seeking to re-situate them in their historical context, he relied on them as sources of human history. He did so proudly and unapologetically, and he would treat recent and contemporary historical events in exactly the same way.23 For this reason most of all, Renan could dismiss him as a ‘‘sterile apparition.’’24 In order to do so, however, Renan felt the need to devote a long article in one of France’s most respected periodicals to Salvador’s most recent work, a fact that all but proved that Salvador had succeeded in defining the terms of an important intellectual debate. What Salvador

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lacked in historiographic methodology he gained by the sheer scope and ambition of his enterprise. By and large, the Wissenschaft scholars set their sights on Jewish history, whether by recounting in nine volumes, as Isaak Jost had done, the history of the Israelites from the Second Commonwealth to the Haskalah,25 or, like Zunz, by bringing philological analysis to bear on the rabbinic and medieval corpus. In contrast, Salvador placed Jewish history on a far broader canvas, as a part of universal history in the French tradition. In the context of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France, the integration of Jews into modern history was generally conceived in terms of the ideology of regeneration. The concept of Jewish regeneration arose during the waning years of the Old Regime in opposition to the traditional Christian narrative of Jewish history after the coming of Christ. As articulated by the Abbe´ Henri Gre´goire, especially, it held that the Jews were morally degraded as a result of centuries of restrictions and persecutions by Christians, yet they were men before they were Jews and would reform if exposed to modern learning and if granted the same rights and freedoms as others.26 With ‘‘regeneration,’’ Gre´goire had launched an idea with great power and resonance. The term would be widely adopted by Jewish as well as non-Jewish participants in the public discourse on the status of Jews in France in the Revolutionary period.27 Indeed, it would become a central trope of the Revolution in its own right, without regard to the Jews in particular but to the nation in general. In 1789, it abounded in the pamphlet literature of the Third Estate; subsequently, the king himself adopted the term and was hailed as the roi re´ge´ne´rateur; in 1793, the painter-politician Jacques-Louis David built a Fountain of Regeneration on the site of the former Bastille. ‘‘Regeneration’’ thus came to encompass a seemingly unlimited moral, political, social, and physical program whose ultimate goal was the creation of a ‘‘new people.’’28 The concept, moreover, had originated in association with the redemptive power of baptism and had served as a signifier of the Christian narrative of salvation.29 Not all who used the term with regard to the Jews intended this meaning; Gre´goire associated regeneration with the hope that Jews would one day convert, but he opposed proselytization and coercion. It nonetheless remains a fact that the meta-narrative of Jewish emancipation emerged from the vocabulary of Christian theology, as an extension of a Christian story line.30 There had been a few isolated attempts, on the part of contemporary Jews, to propose alternatives to the regeneration paradigm. In Jewish pam-

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phlet literature of the Revolution, one occasionally emphasized the Jewish origins of moral standards desired of all citizens—the fact, for example, that the command familiar to Christians from the Gospel, to love your neighbor as yourself, came to Christianity from Judaism. Or a Hebrew poet would portray the Revolution through allusions to the Hebrew Bible, ostensibly making of it a sacred event in Jewish terms. Not surprisingly, as liberator of Jews in foreign lands, and as legislator, Napoleon was also portrayed by Jews as a new Moses, and there was speculation about the onset of a messianic age. Napoleon, moreover, went a long way toward bridging the contemporary French and traditional Jewish narratives when he convened a Great Sanhedrin in 1807, thus reviving a quintessentially Jewish institution that had been defunct since the destruction of the Second Temple. When he underscored the need for civic morality, the Jews he convened not only approved, but once again sought to claim these values as originating in the Hebrew Bible. In however modest a way, they thus reconceived Napoleon, who aimed to undertake regeneration on a pan-European scale, as the modern agent of ancient Hebrew moral culture.31 However creative these attempts to reconcile contemporary historical events with a traditional Jewish narrative scheme, either by allusion or through an implicit claim of divine intervention in the present day, they were not systematic, sustained, or comprehensive enough to constitute a viable alternative to the dominant narrative of regeneration as it was applied to the Jews. That role would fall to Salvador, who would not only remain outside the conceptual frame of regeneration but would provide a powerful alternative to it in the form of a universal history centered on the legacy of Mosaic monotheism. Salvador could hardly have avoided the concept of regeneration, and it is likely that he gave it serious consideration but then rejected it—perhaps because it implied a return of Jews to history. Whether or not conceived as a Christian rebirth, such a return implied that Jews had earlier departed from history. The notion that Jews had ever ceased to be historical is fundamentally incompatible with Salvador’s perspective on universal history. Whatever its strictly scientific value, the genre of universal history retained a formidable purchase on public opinion and the national imaginary in nineteenth-century France at the same time as it was firmly grounded in French intellectual discourse from Louis XIV through the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Even Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews, devoted to ancient and medieval Jewry in its Jewish and non-Jewish

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contexts, appears narrow in scope in comparison with Salvador’s engagement with universal history. When Salvador was criticized for falling short of the standards of contemporary historiography, he admitted as much and made no apologies. History as it might one day be revealed from the archives or archaeology interested him less than the enduring influence of history as preserved and disseminated by the Bible, and interpreted by classical Jewish and Christian commentators and French maıˆtres-a`-penser whose influence on both sides of the ‘‘religious question’’ remained formidable. In particular, the latter included Jacques Be´nigne Bossuet, for the Christian perspective on universal history, and Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Bossuet’s main rival a half-century later. In his Discourse on Universal History (1681), Bossuet seeks to relate all particular histories, times, and places in one holistic account, to present at a glance ‘‘the whole order of time.’’ The first part of the work demarcates twelve epochs that will become central to the narrative of Christianity in the history, ranging from ‘‘Adam, or Creation’’ to ‘‘Charlemagne, or the establishment of the new Empire.’’32 Among the persons and events contained in this universal history, one figure emerges as the major protagonist in the first half of the Discourse, and this is Moses, whom Bossuet calls ‘‘the most ancient of historians, the most sublime of philosophers and the most wise of legislators.’’33 Whether in his capacity as ‘‘author’’ of the Pentateuch, or as the main prophet and leader of the Israelites, Moses appears on stage more than anyone else, from Creation to the conquest of the land, and is consistently painted in respectful and celebratory tones. As prophet, legislator, and historian, as well as leader, Moses exercises his role in universal history in a uniquely wide-ranging way: by directly shaping historical events, by laying the complex legal and moral groundwork for society, and by recording the history of the universe within the narrative of the history of his people. In a theological and moral, as much as historical, sense, and apart from the ‘‘epochs’’ mentioned above, Bossuet divides history into three ‘‘times,’’ corresponding to the law of nature, the Written Law, and the evangelical law.34 He moves easily from the law of nature to the Written Law, but the eclipse of the Written Law, of Moses, is another matter. Bossuet had to account not only for the advent of Jesus Christ and his doctrine but also for the demise of Moses and the Written Law. Although the time of the Gospel, of Jesus Christ, must supersede that of Moses and the Written Law, Bossuet is loath to mitigate his praise for the divine gift of the law and the

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divine vocation of Moses. Instead, he describes a change that comes over Israel: the sin of pride, the assumption that they are the only ones worthy of knowing God. Here the narrative takes an abrupt turn with regard to Moses. Bossuet’s task is to arrive at the point where he can convincingly say: ‘‘In this manner, the mission of Jesus Christ rose infinitely above that of Moses.’’35 Voltaire intended his Philosophy of History (1766) as a rebuttal of Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History. Where Bossuet commences with Creation, Voltaire describes ‘‘changes in the globe’’ from the detached perspective of a scientific observer, painting history as a ‘‘rough sea.’’36 Where Bossuet focuses on the line of Adam, Noah, and Abraham, Voltaire describes the many races of humanity, the antiquity of nations, and the gradual emergence of a great society with the same laws and a single language. He details the various religious beliefs in which there existed knowledge of the soul. As part of this implicit refutation of the unique hold on history, religion, and morality claimed by Bossuet for Moses and the law and for the institution of the Church, Voltaire asserts that the name ‘‘Abram’’ was common throughout antiquity; that circumcision—the sign of the Covenant—was originally an Egyptian rite; that Moses was a simple chief of a nation; that the Jews received instruction from other peoples rather than disseminated it to them; that their God was a national god no greater and no less great than the myriad national gods of antiquity. From the point of view of narrative structure, Bossuet’s universal history is organized into two irreconcilable parts: a kind of Moses in History or Moses as History, followed by Moses Superseded. With Voltaire—at least as Salvador read him—we have instead the systematic eradication of Moses as a part of universal history.37 Salvador took it upon himself to correct both accounts, declaring that the Revolution and modernization had exposed the enduring significance of Moses in history. He took pains to show that even under the Israelite monarchy, the law wielded greater authority than the king or the priests; he stressed that the caste system characteristic of other societies of the era had been eliminated; and he described Mosaic law as a precursor to the Napoleonic Code. In a word, modern systems of government were profoundly indebted to Mosaic law, which was also the source of all the great principles of politics and morality. In this view, the institutions of Moses emerged as the original font of the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, while the Decalogue, by establishing a free and classless society, had inspired the Declaration of the

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Rights of Man and Citizen. Christianity and Islam, moreover, ‘‘owe[d] to Mosaism their principal elements.’’38 Unlike Bossuet, for whom Moses must be eliminated midway, or Voltaire, for whom Moses never existed as a protagonist of history, Salvador thus returned Moses and the Jews to history by arguing, in effect, that they had never left. Despite Renan’s charge that Salvador’s approach to history doomed him to the status of an outmoded thinker, Salvador’s bold entrance into the broad debates in France over religion and universal history placed him in excellent company. A short time earlier, Franc¸ois Rene´ de Chateaubriand had devoted an enormously influential book, The Genius of Christianity (1802), to just these questions, and had done so as an explicit refutation of Voltaire’s own refutation of Bossuet.39 Writing from exile in London during the 1790s, Chateaubriand acknowledged that, after Bossuet, Voltaire was perhaps the greatest French historian, but he took pleasure in quoting Montesquieu’s quip that Voltaire had ‘‘written for his convent’’ when he set out, in his introduction to Philosophy of History, to refute Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History.40 It was in Bossuet’s history, Chateaubriand argued, that one could admire ‘‘the influence of the genius of Christianity on the genius of history.’’ Indeed, Salvador must have delighted in the manner in which Chateaubriand described Bossuet as a universal historian, in contrast to Voltaire: ‘‘Bossuet is more than a historian. He is a Church Father, an inspired priest, who often has a ray of fire on his forehead like the Legislator of the Hebrews.’’41 Writing just a few years after the Terror, Chateaubriand celebrated Christianity as a living force of unrivaled influence in contemporary culture, and he not only defended its dogmas and moral laws, but also exposed the ways in which its ‘‘genius’’ had inspired the greatest human achievements, in poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, and history. More than any other, his book provided inspiration to Romanticism in France and contributed to an important renewal within French Catholicism. First and foremost, Chateaubriand stressed, modern historians had to be sensitive to the role of Christianity in shaping the ‘‘social order’’ and modifying ‘‘the character of nations’’ from opinions to governments, customs, sciences, and arts.42 Salvador sought to demonstrate that ‘‘Jerusalem,’’ or the living legacy of the laws and institutions of Moses, exerted no less profound an influence on human history. Like Chateaubriand, he adapted a worldview in which history and literature operated in close proximity. Unlike Chateaubriand,

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however, Salvador looked to literature not as a subject but rather as a method of cultural analysis; the perspective he brought to world history was profoundly shaped by his literary sensibility. Without actually writing literature per se, Salvador drank so deeply of its well that his ‘‘way of seeing,’’43 in the broadest sense, his modes of conceptualization, were utterly dependent on literary vocabulary, genres, and techniques. It was this French tradition of historian-litte´rateurs, rather than the new generation of scientific historiographers, to which Salvador belonged and which enabled him to attain a breadth of engagement with the main intellectual perspectives and thinkers from the seventeenth century to his own day. This is certainly not to suggest that his specific understanding of the evolution of religions in world history produced as many converts as adversaries. Salvador was hardly in a position to exert a major influence over what Chateaubriand called the ‘‘social order.’’ The simple fact of making his ‘‘Mosaic’’ perspective so forceful a voice in what had for centuries been a FrancoChristian discussion, however, went a long way toward redrawing the bounds of the discourse itself, opening it to radically different conceptions of its ‘‘own’’ universal history. Salvador’s characterization of the ‘‘history of humanity’’ as a ‘‘complicated drama,’’ in the declaration quoted at the beginning of this essay, is more than rhetorical. His choice of subject for his four major studies directly corresponds to this conception of human history as a dramatic structure—as comprising a five-act play, written from the perspective of the fourth act. A believer in both progress and providence, his methodology consisted in revealing ‘‘meaning in history’’ in the tradition, broadly conceived, of the Jews.44 This was the sense in which his studies of Moses, Jesus Christ, the Roman conquest of Judea, and the modern period—the last seen retrospectively from the Revolution and prospectively to the reestablishment of Jerusalem—constituted a single, coherent narrative of human history. It is noteworthy that Salvador, in his implicit correction of Bossuet’s view of Moses as superseded by Jesus Christ in human history, should refer not to Moses but to the Jewish people as a principal ‘‘character’’ in this drama. In fact, the idea of the Jewish people as a character emerges directly from the ‘‘character’’ Moses, who, having proclaimed the existence of a ‘‘universal Being,’’ portrayed the people as a ‘‘living being, named Israel, which includes all the citizens, which is all the citizens.’’45 The drama that Salvador uncovers in history is thus enacted in human terms, almost wholly

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to the exclusion of the divine. Salvador’s Moses is a character in a human comedy, a leader and legislator of the people, a creator of an ideal human society. The role of the biblical Moses in revealing the word of God is all but absent in Salvador’s account, and Salvador takes pains to show that the government formed on the basis of Mosaic law was not a theocracy but a republican democracy, in which the will of the people was sovereign: no person, including Moses, could stand above the law.46 The result is an implicit overturning not only of the Christian account (Bossuet) but also of the traditional Jewish emphasis on Moses as an agent of God. In support of this view of Moses as a character in an essentially human drama, Salvador is only too happy to cite Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract: ‘‘The generous soul of the legislator is the real miracle that must prove his mission.’’47 Similarly, Salvador claims that Rousseau understood what Voltaire had not, namely, that Moses made of ‘‘a wandering troupe a free people’’ and that this was the principal ‘‘genius’’ of Moses behind Judaic law.48 In a chapter on Jesus in the section on the judiciary in History of the Institutions of Moses, Salvador argued that Jesus had not been treated as above the law any more than Moses had. Introducing a forceful counterhistory to the traditional Christian account of deicide, Salvador attempted to demonstrate that the trial of Jesus was conducted entirely within the strictures of existing laws. Not surprisingly, this small piece of his study ended up attracting more attention than all the other parts combined, inspiring Salvador to write a separate book on this topic and setting him on the road toward the production of a full-fledged universal history. Salvador’s portrait of Moses had gone a long way toward making Moses into an allegorical figure who symbolized just rule according to ideal laws enacted by a sovereign people. Jesus Christ, in turn, was the extension of ‘‘the principle of Moses among the Hebrews.’’ He represented a subsequent character in the world drama whose role consisted in transporting Mosaic monotheism to the rest of humanity. The ‘‘new Jews’’ (juifs novateurs) who followed Jesus built upon the idea that Moses had defined the people as a single living being whose members were individual citizens, and they extended the idea beyond Israel so that all of humanity comprised a single man, Jesus. Eventually, the Christian revolution in Jerusalem would enact a marriage of Mosaism with paganism, which would enable Mosaic monotheism to take root and spread throughout the pagan world, but not without having been severely compromised by the encounter with paganism. In this way, Christianity would play a

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crucial role in world history by providing the ‘‘real seed’’ of a truly new form suited to the future of modern civilization, where rivalries among the principal religions would eventually disappear.49 Jerusalem thus became the site in which the Hebrews were doubly vanquished: by the Christians in the realm of spiritual influence, and by the Romans in the political order. Whereas the defeat by Christianity was due to the Hebrews’ lack of fidelity to their own ‘‘principle’’—their ‘‘blindness and corruption’’—the fall of Jerusalem resulted from just the opposite, from the people’s faithfulness to its ‘‘earlier and later destinies.’’50 Salvador could insist that the history of the fall of the Hebrews to Rome was an epic, despite the defeat of his protagonist, the Hebrew people, for two reasons. First, Jerusalem fell, but ‘‘with glory,’’ and unlike other peoples who surrendered without resisting, the Hebrews kept alive the ‘‘perpetual hope of freedom.’’51 Its anticipated return to center stage for the de´nouement of this drama was thus assured. Second, the fall of Jerusalem, like the rise of Christianity, allowed the drama to advance toward the modern age; the defeat to the Romans played a crucial role in establishing the transition from antiquity to the common era. This advance toward the modern period was a crucial component of Salvador’s reading of human history because the society of Moses, however ideal it may have been, was both necessarily limited in influence—only a somewhat paganized Christianity could spread the word effectively—and suited, ultimately, for an earlier era. In this way, running counter to the classical association of the epic with the founding, rather than destruction, of a new civilization, Salvador could point to the fall of Rome as heralding long-term victory through short-term defeat. By the time that Salvador set out to write his final work, he was convinced that his generation would be witness to some of the most significant changes in the evolution of humanity, to a political revolution of unprecedented proportion, and an imminent religious transformation on an equal scale. He took as a matter of course the wild oscillations in the world of politics—in France, especially—that had followed the Revolution of 1789: the excesses of the Terror, the bizarre blend of republican ideals and autocratic methods under Napoleon; the restoration of the royal family of the Old Regime monarch who had perished under the guillotine; the ‘‘bourgeois’’ revolution of July 1830 and the constitutional monarchy it brought; and the short-lived Second Republic that came on the heels of yet another revolution in 1848. All these radical changes in government and politics appeared to Salvador as the inevitable aftermath of the one truly great

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upheaval of 1789. For eight years beginning in 1848, the year Pope Pius IX went into exile as the Italian revolutionaries instituted a republic in Rome, Salvador brought the gaze of a historian-litte´rateur to bear on events as they unfolded before him. Already in the 1830s, as Salvador was writing his study Jesus Christ and His Doctrine,52 he had convinced himself that the centuries-old alliance of Christianity and world dominion, in Roman Catholicism, having served its purpose midway in the drama of human history, would eventually give way to a new, superior religion, centrally inspired by Mosaic monotheism and able to bring into harmony the competing religions of the world. By 1861, when he wrote a preface for the third edition of his History of the Institutions of Moses and the Hebrew People, events on the world stage had, it seemed, indubitably conspired to prove this thesis. Pius IX, having returned to power in 1851, was again threatened, this time no longer by a group of hardscrabble revolutionaries but by the official army of the new Italian state. World powers were vigorously negotiating the future location of the papacy, and the newspapers spoke of little else. Who could now fail to see that Rome, after fifteen centuries of unrivaled religious and political dominion, was on the verge of collapse? ‘‘Let us admit,’’ Salvador had written in Jesus Christ and His Doctrine and now quoted in the new preface, ‘‘that it had belonged to the name of Jesus Christ to carry Hebrew thought to its final end, to create a single family out of the multitude of the children of Adam, to reconcile among them the people of the Eastern and Western worlds! In that case, the position of Rome, which had been among the best placed, in a particular era, to unite the peoples of the West, would have faced insurmountable difficulties because of its distance from the point of contact of the two worlds.’’ Now, in 1861, he argued, these words, which had seemed incredible to readers more than twenty-five years earlier, had acquired a new degree of persuasiveness: ‘‘What a difference today! How events have marched forward! Among politicians and even religious leaders, there is talk of carrying the pope out of Rome, of transporting him even to Jerusalem; such talk is made with an ease and abandon that amaze me, as though this were an ordinary displacement.’’53 In his first three works, as we have seen, Salvador applied various literary superstructures to his readings of history: viewing Moses, the Hebrew people, Jesus, and the peoples converted to Christianity as dramatis personae; conceiving universal history as a single, multi-act drama; and describing the Judeo-Roman war as an epic transition within the larger drama of

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human progress. In each case, the literary template served as more than a rhetorical device. It supplied a mode of cognition, of apprehending and interpreting history, for a historian who sought to understand the place of the Jews in history just as his counterparts in the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement did, but with sharply distinct modes and perspectives. In the tradition of Bossuet, Voltaire, and also Maimonides, whom he quotes extensively, Salvador read and interpreted history, its most authoritative texts, as though they were works of literature, as a biblical scholar does exegesis or a literary scholar performs a close, interpretive reading. To a large degree, it was this literary methodology applied to the craft of the historian that placed him at odds with the main historiographic currents of his day and enabled him to engage the intellectual discourse and debates, from Bossuet to Voltaire and Chateaubriand, that had shaped French culture and identity. He stressed that the Jewish contribution to human progress, represented by the laws and institutions of its greatest leader, and carried forward by the emancipated Jews of his own day, could be reconciled with the rest of post-Christian and post-Revolutionary world history and still had an essential role to play in the de´nouement of this story. And so it naturally followed, even if Salvador never made the point explicitly, that, at a time when ‘‘certain moments of crisis imposed by providence’’ give rise to a ‘‘total renewal of spirit,’’ his own practice of historical writing should reflect, in formal terms, this novel reality. In Paris, Rome, Jerusalem, as in his previous works, Salvador purported to uncover within history a formal literary structure—a trilogy—but rather than continuing to write in the expository fashion of the interpretive historian, he now produced what can only be called ‘‘epistolary history,’’ inspired by the epistolary novels of the French tradition. Paris, Rome, Jerusalem consists of a long series of letters composed by the author between 1848 and 1856 and ostensibly intended for an unnamed—fictitious—correspondent familiar with universal history (l’histoire ge´ne´rale) and the mores of nations.54 The correspondent is a stand-in for the contemporary educated Frenchman who is familiar with contemporary politics, steeped in French intellectual culture, and holds strong opinions while remaining receptive to new ideas—even those that could ‘‘unexpectedly shatter these opinions or modify them in one of their essential terms.’’55 Thus construed, Salvador’s epistolary history constitutes a mise en abyme of his situation as an (emancipated) Jewish historian engaged in a debate with the shapers of public opinion over the significance of particular

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religious traditions in relation to contemporary history and the providential evolution of humanity. In a particularly modern gesture, Salvador openly acknowledges what we would call today his subject position as a writer, as someone who has personally descended from different ‘‘branches’’ of the monotheistic religions,56 and he defends its appropriateness for the task at hand: ‘‘I would certainly have abstained from the project had I not felt in myself the impartiality necessary to attack or defend, as the situation demanded, friends and foes; if I had not seen a kind of poetry, and a great utility, in bringing back together the vanquishers and the vanquished, those who took themselves for the only enlightened ones, for the only strong ones, and those who it was generally agreed could be rejected without reserve among the ranks of the blind and the feeble.’’57 Finally, he emphasizes the suitability of his letters as a ‘‘way of seeing’’ and a means of explaining the ‘‘singularity’’ of events and the ‘‘growing confusion’’ in the minds of individuals in ‘‘our nineteenth century.’’58 It is midway through the second volume of Paris, Rome, Jerusalem that Salvador recounts the incident related at the beginning of this essay, in which, as a young man undertaking advanced training in medicine, he happens upon a newspaper article describing one of the Hep! Hep! riots in Germany. Here, in the only chapter in all his work in which autobiography is paramount, he asks, blending the language of psychology with a metaphor of the self at sea: ‘‘From where does the idea, the impulsion, the billow come, which pushes us onto one shore rather than another?’’59 On one level, the impetus came from events in Germany, but the impulsion it provoked was wholly dependent on Salvador’s situation within French and Franco-Jewish culture. Even the language he adopts—the image of the waves (le flot) and the shore (la rive), the vessel at sea—evoke the famous poem ‘‘Le lac,’’ by Alphonse de Lamartine, Salvador’s contemporary and a Romantic poet and politician.60 To reflect on the Jews in history from the vantage point of early nineteenth-century France necessarily meant confronting both the country’s philosophical and literary tradition and its history and representation of Jews. And it meant reflecting, finally, on Paris, Rome, and, most of all, Jerusalem, not only as cities and capitals of the world but as symbolic sites of meaning in the forward march of civilizations, as figures that loomed large in the human drama to whose narration Salvador had dedicated his life. In a complex exposition extending over a thousand pages, he showed how ‘‘Paris’’ contained the very principle of revolutionary change in the political

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domain; how ‘‘Rome,’’ the ‘‘spirit of reaction’’ and illegitimacy, comprised the Roman Catholic Church but also all the major world religions, none of which, in its present form, had the ‘‘necessary authority’’ to fulfill the ‘‘social and practical role which originally belongs to religion’’;61 and, finally, how the ‘‘Jerusalem’’ of the new era, the city not yet built, would introduce the spirit of universal re-edification and renewal.62 In Salvador’s vision, the new Jerusalem would be founded on the basis of the Jerusalem of antiquity—the Mosaic republic of the Hebrews—but also on the Jerusalem of the ‘‘middle time’’—Rome.63 In explaining how the Jerusalem of antiquity would become a foundation of the new Jerusalem, Salvador evoked and ironically overturned the Christian concept of the Jewish witness, according to which the only reason that the ‘‘debris of the Jewish city [cite´]’’ maintained a ‘‘shadow of life’’ was to preserve its role as ‘‘witness.’’ The Jews themselves, he added, had always claimed to play a universal role of witnessing. Whereas, until the French Revolution, witnesses were threatened with torture, now, as both a free citizen and as a bold new literary voice in Salvador’s multiform epistolary history, ‘‘the witness is free’’: Thus, one says to him: ‘‘Step forward and state your name.’’ ‘‘My name? While this is not my surname, I am called Jew, which means he who praises, who invariably celebrates the Being, the Unique One, the Eternal.’’ ‘‘Your age?’’ ‘‘My age? Two thousand years older than Jesus Christ.’’ ‘‘Your profession?’’ ‘‘I will leave aside the sad professions that have been imposed upon me. . . . My traditional profession is this: I guarantee the holy imprescriptibility of the name of the Law, and I am the living preserver of the ancient nobility and of the legitimacy attached by divine right to the name, to the proper name of People.’’ ‘‘Raise your hand and promise to speak without hatred and without fear, to tell the truth, all the truth.’’ ‘‘I so pledge with heart and mind. I swear this before the Eternal and before men.’’ ‘‘Express yourself with the concision of your fathers and confess to us what you know.’’

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‘‘I know by certain knowledge that, despite its grandeur, Rome is a usurper, that she is not the real Jerusalem.’’64 Notes Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the University of Nantes, at a conference on Francophone Jewish writers at Stanford University, at a conference on Jews in France at the University of Pennsylvania, and at a fellows workshop at the Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. I thank all those who provided comments and suggestions, and I offer special thanks to David Ruderman, Adam Sutcliffe, Matthew Hoffman, Michel Feith, Olga Borovaya, Aron Rodrigue, Maurice Samuels, Kristen Stromberg-Childers, Anita Norich, Deborah Dash Moore, Amanda Axsom, Laura Abernathy, and Nathalie Danier, along with my coeditors of this volume. 1. Joseph Salvador, Paris, Rome, Je´rusalem; ou, La question religieuse au XIXe sie`cle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1860), 1:244. Here and throughout this essay, translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 246. 4. Joseph Salvador , ‘‘Pre´face (1828),’’ in Histoire des institutions de Moı¨se et du peuple he´breu, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1862), 1:2–3. 5. Joseph Salvador, Loi de Moı¨se ou syste`me religieux et politique des He´breux (Paris, 1822); and Histoire des institutions de Moı¨se et du peuple he´breu (Paris, 1828). 6. Joseph Salvador, Je´sus-Christ et sa doctrine. Histoire de la naissance de l’E´glise et de ses progre`s pendant le premier sie`cle (Paris, 1838). 7. Joseph Salvador, Histoire de la domination romaine en Jude´e, et de la ruine de Je´rusalem (Paris, 1847). 8. James Darmesteter, ‘‘Joseph Salvador,’’ Annuaire de la Socie´te´ des Etudes juives 1 (1881): 45. 9. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, Ala., 1973), 514. 10. Salvador, Paris, Rome, Je´rusalem, 2:209. 11. Zunz, with Eduard Gans and Moses Moser, founded the Verein fu¨r Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for Jewish Culture and Science) in Berlin in 1819. 12. Susannah Heschel, ‘‘Reversing the Gaze,’’ in Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago, 1998), 1–22. 13. Leopold Zunz, ‘‘On Rabbinic Literature’’ (1818), in The Jew in the Modern World, ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1995), 221. 14. Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 7–8. 15. On the notion of counter-history, see David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), and ‘‘Counter-History and Jewish Polemics Against Christianity: The Sefer Toldot Yeshu and the Sefer Zerubavel,’’ Jewish Social Studies 6/1 (1999): 130–45; Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History

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(Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 36–37; Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 14–15, and ‘‘Jewish Studies as Counterhistory,’’ in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 101–15. 16. Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H., 1994), 275. 17. Michael Graetz, who has written the most complete assessment of Salvador’s writing, emphasizes the theme of the ‘‘return of politics/the political’’ in Salvador’s work, as a kind of counter-history to the view that the significance of the Jewish contribution to world history ended with the fall of Jerusalem and the rise of Christianity as a revisionist theology and worldly power. Graetz accurately represents Salvador’s point of view in this respect. The distinction I am making here is a different one; it concerns the emancipation-era goal of obtaining equal political and legal status for Jews, as opposed to viewing the relevance of Jewish history to the development of modern forms of government. See Graetz, ‘‘Du ‘religieux’ au ‘politique’ ou la Re´publique des He´breux,’’ in Les Juifs en France au XIXe sie`cle: De la Re´volution franc¸aise a` l’Alliance israe´lite universelle, trans. Salomon Malka (Paris, 1989), 220–58. 18. Joseph Salvador, ‘‘Ide´e sur l’avenir de la question religieuse: Introduction aux ouvrages de l’auteur,’’ iii–iv, in idem, Histoire des institutions de Moı¨se. 19. Ernest Renan, ‘‘De l’avenir religieux des socie´te´s modernes,’’ La revue des deux mondes 30/29 (1860): 764. 20. J. Salvador, ‘‘Pre´face (1828),’’ Histoire des institutions de Moı¨se, 6–7. 21. Renan, ‘‘De l’avenir religieux des socie´te´s modernes,’’ 764. 22. In addition to Graetz, Les Juifs en France au XIXe sie`cle, see Paula Hyman, ‘‘Joseph Salvador: Proto-Zionist or Apologist for Assimilation?’’ Jewish Social Studies 34 (1972): 1–22; Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 134; and Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford, Calif., 2007). 23. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 2. In contrast to that of Salvador, Zunz’s method consisted, as Schorsch observes, of ‘‘the quest for critical editions, the practice of philological exegesis, and finally, the need for contextual and comparative analysis.’’ 24. Renan, ‘‘De l’avenir religieux des socie´te´s modernes,’’ 764. 25. Isaak M. Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten seit der Zeit der Maccaba¨er bis auf unsre Tage, 9 vols. (Berlin, 1820–28). 26. Henri Gre´goire, Essai sur la re´ge´ne´ration physique, morale et politique des Juifs, reprinted in La Re´volution franc¸aise et l’e´mancipation des Juifs, vol. 3. 27. See Jay R. Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit, 1989). 28. Mona Ozouf, ‘‘Regeneration,’’ in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. Franc¸ois Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 373. 29. A seventeenth-century dictionary, for example, defined ‘‘regeneration’’ as

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‘‘accomplished through baptism, when a pagan converts.’’ In the Encyclope´die (1751), Denis Diderot and Jean-le-Rond d’Alembert further described it as ‘‘the act by which one is reborn for a new life,’’ tracing the idea to the New Testament both in relation to spiritual rebirth at baptism and ‘‘general resurrection’’ associated with the Second Coming. Dictionnaire Universel d’Antoine Furetie`re (Paris, 1690), quoted in Martine Lemalet, ‘‘L’e´mancipation des Juifs de Lorraine a` travers l’œuvre de Berr Isaac Berr (1788–1806),’’ in Les Juifs en France, ed. Bernard Blumenkranz (Paris, 1994), 155. 30. According to Berkovitz, ‘‘regeneration’’ became ‘‘virtually synonymous with modernization.’’ The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France, 14. 31. See Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley, Calif., 2003). 32. Here is the complete list of ‘‘epochs’’: ‘‘Adam, or Creation; Noah, or the Flood; the vocation of Abraham, or the beginning of the Covenant between God and men; Moses, or the Written Law; the taking of Troy; Solomon, or the founding of the Temple; Romulus, or the building of Rome; Cyrus, or the People of God delivered from Babylonian captivity; Scipion, or Carthage vanquished; the birth of Jesus Christ; Constantine, or the peace of the Church; Charlemagne, or the establishment of the new Empire.’’ Bossuet already struggles, it seems, to reconcile biblical history with the history of Rome. Jacques Be´nigne Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle, 1681 (Paris, 1803), 41. 33. Ibid., 47. 34. These appear as the principal ‘‘times,’’ although he will add to the list when describing the ‘‘different states of the people of God.’’ Ibid., 54, 149. 35. Ibid., 236. 36. Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Philosophie de l’histoire, 1766, rpt., Introduction, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, Oeuvres de Voltaire, 72 vols. (Paris, 1829), vol. 15. 37. I have attributed this understanding of Voltaire to Salvador, rather than making the claim categorically, after discussion with Adam Sutcliffe, who believes that, for Voltaire, ‘‘it proves impossible, despite all his efforts, to purge Moses from history; Voltaire’s frustration over this is . . . the central driver of his aggressive preoccupation with Judaism’’ (personal correspondence). 38. Salvador, ‘‘Pre´face (1828),’’ in Histoire des institutions de Moı¨se, 3. 39. [Franc¸ois Rene´] de Chateaubriand, ‘‘De´fense du Ge´nie du Christianisme par l’auteur,’’ in Le Ge´nie du Christianisme, 1802, 2 vols. (Paris, 1852), 2:287–88. 40. Chateaubriand, Le Ge´nie du Christianisme, 2:14. 41. Ibid., 17. 42. Ibid., 12. 43. Salvador, Paris, Rome, Je´rusalem, 1:2. 44. See Yosef Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982), 8. 45. J. Salvador, Je´sus-Christ et sa doctrine, xviii.

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46. In a polemic with Louis Bonald regarding the democratic versus theocratic nature of Mosaic law, Salvador declared that the law was not only a ‘‘rule’’ but a ‘‘rule clothed in the consensus of all’’ (Histoire des institutions de Moı¨se, 113). For a discussion of Enlightenment notions of the ‘‘Republic of the Hebrews,’’ and for a superb examination of Enlightenment-era discourse regarding Jews, see Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2003). 47. Salvador, Histoire des institutions de Moı¨se, 39. 48. Ibid., 63. 49. Salvador, Je´sus-Christ et sa doctrine, ii. 50. Salvador, ‘‘Ide´e sur l’avenir de la question religieuse,’’ xiii–xiv. 51. Salvador, Histoire des institutions de Moı¨se, 540. 52. The title is borrowed from a chapter heading of Bossuet’s Discourse (Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle, 226, 435). 53. Salvador, ‘‘Ide´e sur l’avenir de la question religieuse,’’ vi–vii. 54. The implication is that he is familiar with Bossuet—author of the most-read French universal history—and Voltaire—whose response to Bossuet bore the title ‘‘Essay on the Mores and the Spirit of Nations.’’ 55. Salvador, Paris, Rome, Je´rusalem, 1:2. 56. Ibid., 245. 57. Ibid., 37. 58. Ibid., 2. 59. Ibid., 240. 60. Alphonse de Lamartine, ‘‘Treizie`me me´ditation: Le lac,’’ in Oeuvres d’Alphonse de Lamartine, 2 vols. (Paris, 1826), 1:85–89. 61. Salvador, ‘‘Ide´e sur l’avenir de la question religieuse,’’ xv. 62. Ibid., xvi; Salvador, Paris, Rome, Je´rusalem, 1:7. 63. Salvador, Paris, Rome, Je´rusalem, 1:209. 64. Ibid., 210.

CHAPTER 3

The Merchant at the Threshold: Rashel Khin, Osip Mandelstam, and the Poetics of Apostasy Amelia Glaser

And Jesus . . . made a scourge of small cords [and] drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables; and said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise. —John 2:13–17, King James version

The entrance to the Trinity Church in the Kiev Cave Monastery is bordered by a peculiar eighteenth-century fresco, illustrating the above passage from the Gospel According to John. In case there is any doubt as to the saved and condemned in the scene, Jesus has a full face, reminiscent of the holy figures of Orthodox icons, whereas most of the moneychangers show only one eye, an iconographic symbol of evil.1 The latter are depicted in swarthy baroque colors; their fleshy arms shield their heads and their spilling wares as they make haste to leave. What is striking about this particular fresco is that beyond the theological relationship between Jesus and the moneychangers, it displays a tension between the Christian majority and Jewish minority in the Russian Empire. At least two of the merchants wear yarmulkes; others have beards and hats characteristic of the Jews of the czarist empire in the eighteenth century. With his raised arms and two scourges (more evocative of a pogrom than an act of Christ), this Jesus appears to

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be driving the group of Jewish merchants downward, out the actual church door. I have chosen this fresco to begin my discussion of two early twentiethcentury Russian Jewish writers, Rashel Khin (1861–1928) and Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), not as a means of historicizing the place of Jews in the Russian Empire. Rather, the New Testament dichotomy between the vendor and the church sheds light on the choice of a number of assimilating Jewish writers to depict the church and the marketplace as symbols of the desirable Russian high culture and the undesirable Jewish place of origin. As Efraim Sicher has observed in his study of Jews in Russian literature after the Revolution, ‘‘[I]nherent in the systematic ordering of artistic space is the tension between the rejected svoi (one’s own) of the home and the rejecting chuzhoi (other, alien) of the outside. Each area is designated as bounded or nonbounded by evaluative markers, while the border (doors, windows, courtyards, walls) between them is a crossing point of plot action.’’2 Rashel Khin and Osip Mandelstam schematize the entrance of the Jewish writer into the bounded space of culture’s cathedral, and the subsequent rejection of the unbounded landscapes of lower-class, Pale of Settlement Jewish culture.3 Rashel Khin and Osip Mandelstam were deeply engaged in the literary inner circle of their respective ages, Khin in Moscow and Mandelstam in Petersburg. Both, significantly, had fathers who had made their way to these Russian cities as merchants. Both Mandelstam and Khin underwent quick conversions to Christianity, primarily for pragmatic reasons, but nonetheless, in their writing exhibit a deep fascination with Christian aesthetics. Both address the influence of certain specters of Jewish culture on the assimilated Jew’s identity.4 Whereas Khin presents a character who is sacrificed at the irreconcilable intersection of her Jewish heritage and her Christian milieu, Mandelstam presents this intersection as part of the unchangeable flow of Western history. The daughter of a successful Jewish merchant, Rashel Khin grew up in Moscow.5 In 1884, the Russian Jewish journal Voskhod began to serialize The Misfit (Ne ko dvoru), a novella by the then little-known Khin (a second edition was completed in 1895). The Misfit portrays a young woman, torn between her Christian upper-class schoolmates and her secular Jewish family, struggling to make sense of a Jewish identity that she knows little about. Khin, in her neo-Romantic novel, offers us a fictional heroine with the kind of marginal existence that would soon come to fascinate Russian high modernists, Jewish and Christian alike.

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Born in Warsaw to an assimilated mother and an assimilating father, Osip Mandelstam was raised in Petersburg. Mandelstam was, along with Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, a founding member of Acmeism, a Russian high-modernist poetic movement with a belief that poetry can bridge classical art forms, Hellenism, and biblical figures with the modern world. Of Osip Mandelstam’s works, I will look in particular at his discussion of Judaism in his 1925 autobiographical The Noise of Time (Shum vremeni). Mandelstam wrote The Noise of Time at the request of the editor of the journal Rossiia, Isai Lezhnev, who then turned it down, according to Osip’s wife, Nadezhda, because Lezhnev ‘‘had expected a . . . story of a Jewish boy from the shtetl who discovers Marxism.’’6 Rather than writing a narrative of political awakening, Mandelstam, in his autobiography, posits his own mixed cultural heritage as the epitome of his discordant Revolutionary epoch. Both Mandelstam and Khin are fascinated by the encounter between the world of shtetl-Jewishness and that of Russianness, but they can access the former only through caricatured portraits and metaphor. Together, the two writers offer a glimpse at the reasons for a Jew just before, and just after, the turn of the century in Russia to embrace Christian aesthetics. Khin, in her novel, depicts a Russian Jewish woman trapped between a vague sense of Jewish pride and a Christian world that will not accept her without conversion; Mandelstam, writing a generation after Khin, shows us the convergence of his Jewish background and a Christian aesthetic sensibility. Significantly, cultural and spiritual Judaism appears, in both writers’ work, as a nebulous state of being, with little bearing on the Russian environment within which both protagonists come of age. Even for Jews born to assimilating parents, government quotas and social Judeophobia necessitated continual proof of one’s distance from provincial Jewish life.7 At the same time, a certain level of social enlightenment within the Russian intelligentsia allowed modern writers to define themselves based on their own ongoing negotiation between their Jewish heritage and their place in Russian culture. Significantly, both Khin and Mandelstam engage with the cultural memory of shtetl-Jewishness by depicting the shunned image of the marketplace Jew or Jewess. It is worth noting that both writers also pause to contemplate the marginal role of the still-assimilating Jewish father who must, against his own education and background, deliver his child into a culturally non-Jewish world. Khin’s novella opens with a confrontation between the Jewish protago-

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nist, Sara, who is home from her Catholic boarding school, and her father, Piotr Berg, who complains, ‘‘It isn’t enough that I run around morning to night, toiling, making money, wearing myself ragged; I also have to take care that my children don’t grow up to be market women [torgovkami].’’8 Piotr’s language is laden with intergenerational guilt, which rests upon his prime concern that his daughter not grow up to embody the stereotyped image of the Jew in Russia. The torgovka, which can be read as a Russian translation for the derogatory Yiddish term mark-yidene (market-Jewess), signifies a lower-class woman. In order to understand the negative implications of this epithet, we must assume that the speaker is of, or has pretensions toward, the upwardly mobile class of Jewish professionals whose family has left the shtetl for one of the major cities in Eastern Europe. The female Jewish merchant—the mark-yidene—had an especially negative connotation in nineteenth-century imperial Russian culture. In traditional Eastern European Jewish families, a man would move into the home of his wife’s parents, where he would ideally pursue a life of Jewish scholarship while the woman would often support the family financially by tending a shop or stand. A woman who traded produce or sundries in the open marketplace belonged to the lowest class. This mode of operation was something that came under increasing critique in the late czarist empire. The literary critic Sara Rabinovich writes in a 1912 article, ‘‘So as to better free the Jew from material cares, traditional Judaism, more often and willfully than not, called upon women for the practice of trade. . . . For the wife, concern for material good lay at the bazaar; for the husband, service to material good was in the Torah.’’9 Due to her crucial function as breadwinner, the mark-yidene was drawn closer to the world of non-Jews, and was therefore further distanced from the world of Torah. However, it was often precisely this kind of exposure to non-Jewish languages that gave Jewish women access to world literature. Sara’s father is compelled to reject all that Judaism in Russia had traditionally represented, including traditional Jewish literacy, in order to complete his family’s entrance into European society. ‘‘I want her to be able to speak languages fluently, to have the best manners. She won’t acquire that at home.’’10 Piotr is forced to confront the gap between his own upperclass ambitions and his Jewish identity when young Sara infuriates him by announcing that she has learned that Jews are dirty and drink Christian blood with their Passover matzo. In Khin’s novel, the conflict is resolved quickly and somewhat unsatisfactorily: Sara is sent to her room, and a few

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paragraphs (and four years) later, both her parents die. Sara, who has inherited her father’s assimilationist values but not his Jewish sensibility, is left to forge her own sense of identity, with little more than the internalized anti-Semitic images of the torgovka and Christ-killer to represent her Jewish background. Mandelstam’s autobiographical The Noise of Time, while generically and generationally distinct from Khin’s coming-of-age novel, displays the formation of a Jewish child’s consciousness between Christian high culture and the less desirable world of Russian Jewry. Prerevolutionary Petersburg emerges early in the memoir through the visceral impressions of a very young child. The three-year-old Osip Mandelstam is brought to see the burial of the late czar Alexander III in 1894. Amid the child’s world of French governesses, Italian chocolate shops, and military demonstrations, the poet senses a fundamental disorder. It is here that he first makes reference to what he terms ‘‘the Judaic chaos’’ (khaos iudeiskii). ‘‘The whole well-built mirage of Petersburg was but a dream, a gleaming cover thrown over the abyss, but extending in every direction was a Judaic chaos, not a homeland, not a home, not a hearth, but precisely a chaos, the unfamiliar world of a womb from which I had emerged, which I feared, which I vaguely sensed—and from which I escaped, I always escaped.’’11 The young protagonist’s escape into the protective architecture of Russian culture is mirrored in his description of his family’s bookcase; on the bottom shelf, ‘‘cast into the dust was the Judaic chaos. My biblical Hebrew alphabet, which I never learned, quickly landed here.’’12 On the next shelf were Osip’s father’s German books, and still higher, his mother’s Russian books, including the Isakov edition of Pushkin from 1876, without commentary. The poet grew up aware of biblical Hebrew, indecipherable to him; German, the language of idealism and Romanticism (and of the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the Haskalah); and finally Russian—the literary tradition in its purest state—that is to say, unaffected by the idiosyncrasies of Jewish language. The direction: up, and up means more Russian, more intellectual, and less dusty. In Khin’s novel, Piotr Berg’s insistence that his daughter attend a Catholic boarding school in order to ‘‘speak languages fluently’’ directly equates this upward trajectory, at the end of the nineteenth century, with fluency in non-Jewish subjects. For Sara’s assimilationist father, the torgovka represents an aspect of Jewish culture considered profane; for the protagonist

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Sara, the church is the purified space whose presence offers an escape from the world of the corporeal. The newly orphaned Sara, still in Catholic school, finds an analogy for her suffering in a copy of the Gospels given to her by a classmate. Sara’s near conversion involves a nightly ritual prostration on the floor of the school’s chapel and a self-written prayer for truth. The church provides a European aesthetic standard, which offers Khin’s heroine a rite of passage into womanhood, clean of the gritty reality and proximity to products inherent in the typical Jewish quotidian. Through her lack of sleep and refusal of food, which eventually lands her in the infirmary, Sara emulates the early Christian ascetics. Khin’s fictional character thus mirrors a contemporary Catholic phenomenon. As Carolyn Bynum reminds us, ‘‘In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both medical doctors and Catholic theologians were deeply interested in the phenomenon of women (usually adolescent girls) who claimed to live without eating.’’13 Anorexia and asceticism, by literally resisting consumption, are the opposite of the plentiful, and dirty, marketplace. Not unlike Simone Weil, who starved herself to repent for the sins of woman’s greed,14 Sara banishes her internalized Jewish and female ‘‘exploiter’’ (eksploatator), a common name for those presumed to swindle others in sales, which was often indiscriminately attributed to Jews. For Khin’s protagonist, entrance into the cathedral of Russian culture requires adherence to religious prohibitions and exclusions, which mark a social and aesthetic rite of passage. For Mandelstam, we may consider the symbolic representation of the church as the structure of civilization, which is diametrically opposed to the market-like chaos of origin. Mandelstam’s interest in churches is combined with his fascination with architecture, and he incorporates descriptions of churches into a number of poems, including his 1912 ‘‘Notre Dame.’’15 Despite its name ‘‘Dame,’’ in French, and even its female gendering as a stronghold (tverdynia), Mandelstam refigures the church’s outer structure as a masculine body, making a point of comparing it to ‘‘Adam’’ and, by extension, to himself. (Indeed, the title and author’s name, Mandelstam and Notre Dame, create a rhyming couplet, a coincidence that would not have been lost on a writer so absorbed by rhythm and sound.) Mandelstam likens the difficult construction of the church to divine creation. ‘‘Like Adam, long ago, spreading out his nerves / the vaulting light flexes its muscles.’’16 It is the final stanza of the poem, however,

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that attests to the poet’s identification between his own part in history and poetry, and the miraculous cathedral. But, stronghold Notre Dame, the more attentively I studied your monstrous ribs, the oftener I thought: from unhappy weight I, too, someday, will create beauty. (No chem vnimatel’nei, tverdynia Notre Dame, Ia izuchal tvoi chudovishchnye rebra, Tem chashche dumal ia: iz tiazhesti nedobroi I ia kogda-nibud’ prekrasnoe sozdam.) The ribbed, masculine outer buttressing on the cathedral, which again evokes the biblical Adam, gives birth to the Dame: the beautiful, feminine interior, as though to Eve. What exactly does Mandelstam mean by tiazhesti nedobroi (unhappy weight) in this final stanza? In keeping with his tendency to recast Christianity into an aesthetic form privileging redemption through art, in this poem the beautiful new redeems the heavy old, that is to say, the upward-striving church redeems Christianity’s weighty, unforgiving Judaic origin. Mandelstam views Notre Dame with the gaze of one whose own chaotic, preformed Jewish origin can, in an aesthetic version of the imitation of Christ, be redeemed through Christian structure. In 1902—a decade before Mandelstam wrote this poem—Max Weber had hailed Western art, from concert music to church architecture: ‘‘[T]he rational use of the Gothic vault as a means of distributing pressure and of roofing spaces of all forms, and above all as the constructive principle of great monumental buildings and the foundation of a style extending to sculpture and painting, such as that created by our Middle Ages, does not occur elsewhere.’’17 What both Mandelstam and Weber suggest, with their admiration of Christian art and music as rational forms, is that the spiritual and artistic development of the West is heading away from chaos and toward structure. For Mandelstam, this marked his departure not only from his own (pre-Christian and therefore pre-rational) Jewish origins but also from the mystical impulses of the symbolist poets.18 The interplay between interior and exterior recalls the merchants and moneychangers, poised both inside and outside the temple. Notre Dame, as Mandelstam was well aware, was designed to invite the curious outsider

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in. Speaking about the front of the church (as opposed to its arched ribs), Richard Sennett, in his analysis of urban space, states: ‘‘a fac¸ade like the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris conveys the sense that the interior mass of the building has generated the exterior fac¸ade.’’19 It is Mandelstam’s ability to recognize this play of surfaces that allows him to gaze at the structure with a mind to Western history. Mandelstam writes about Notre Dame not as a Jew looking at the church from the outside, but with the gaze of one passionate about Western art. Still, the idea that an art form is capable of bearing the weight of the past, as in ‘‘Notre Dame,’’ is part of what attracts Mandelstam to architecture. Like Khin, Mandelstam is ultimately compelled to juxtapose what he views as the artistic structure of Christianity with a less structurally stable Jewish past. Whereas Khin, a generation older than Mandelstam, demonstrates a perceived irreconcilability between a young woman’s Jewish origins and Russian society as a means of critiquing the social and legal status of Jews in the Russian Empire, Mandelstam describes Judaism in terms of chaos in order to better illustrate his own decisive movement toward structure. Conversion was often the pragmatic means to move from the shtetl to a city, marry a non-Jew, or have a better chance at employment or university enrollment. However, not unlike Mandelstam, what Khin’s character initially flees, with her immersion in Catholic ritual, is not religious Judaism but the figure of the torgovka that lurks just outside the threshold of Russian high culture. With her anorectic episodes, the yet unenlightened school-age Sara seeks a means of eliminating the body of the Jewish market woman, which is not only dirty and uncultured but, as the unwanted occupier of market space, represents capitalism in its least civilized form. For Khin, the space of the cathedral merely functions as a symbolic stage on which the protagonist first rejects her Jewish origins. Gradually, our heroine Sara, with the help of a freethinking French teacher, grows out of her self-destructive cycle and replaces her interest in Catholicism with social activism. She marries a fellow Jewish humanist whose name, Nord, resonates with the freezing imperial capital, Saint Petersburg, where Sara confronts a new kind of suffering. Jews were not allowed to live in Saint Petersburg without rare permits. Lacking such permits, she and her husband are refused work. Nord leaves Sara alone with a child, who starves to death because of her mother’s inability to provide for her, either as a torgovka or as a legal member of Russia’s capital. Unlike the privileged writer

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Khin, who is able to live in Moscow because of her father’s status, or the even more privileged Osip Mandelstam, who grows up in Saint Petersburg, Sara is left on the margins of the closed, rejecting structure of the capital city. Forced out of the forbidding capital, Sara must, quite literally, enter the marketplace. After several households, unwilling to hire a Jewish woman, reject her services as tutor or maid, Sara finds work as a governess in the provinces. Before she arrives, one of her future charges comments, ‘‘You know, maman, it’s better that she is a ‘Yid’ (zhidovka): She will, at least, know her place and won’t put on airs.’’20 While living with this family, Sara falls in love with a Christian suitor; but, since by Russian imperial law, marriage would require her to convert, she rejects him and dies soon after of a weak heart. This coming-of-age tragedy chronicles a young woman’s struggle with her civilizing identity. Sara ultimately gathers the perspective necessary to battle stereotypes of the zhidovka, but she is unable to create harmony between a solid Jewish identity, a healthy Jewish body, and Russian society. Tony Tanner, in his study of adultery and the novel, makes an intriguing comparison between the novel and the walls of society: ‘‘We could . . . see the bourgeois novel as a kind of secondary temple attempting to contain, dramatize, and analyze the city-field-temple tensions discernible in the society to which it addresses itself, thus attempting to become the better conscience of that society (or, in some cases colluding with its false conscience, or unconscience). In that temple there is sympathy for the antinomian impulses of the socially condemned, plus a recognition of the necessary structurings of laws of all kinds. This provides the necessary structural tensions.’’21 Just as the nineteenth-century novel allows for the transgression of the adulterous Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary into the home of the bourgeois reader, Khin’s turn-of-the-century Russian novel provides a structurally stable space for the Jewish protagonist to remain within her socially unstable role between her Jewish past and Russian society. It would have been far more difficult for the author to remain in such an unstable cultural space. While the fictional Sara resists the temptation to convert, the author Rashel Khin did convert to Catholicism in the early 1880s, probably to escape marriage to her first husband, since by imperial Russian law, a Jew could not remain married to a Christian. Still, as Khin’s biographer Carole Balin notes, Khin never refers to Catholicism in her memoirs.22 When Khin was married a second time, her new husband, a Jew

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by birth, was legally obliged to convert to Christianity. For the author, as for many assimilated Jews of Russia, baptism had little to do with belief. Khin’s conversion, in addition to her close friendships with Ivan Turgenev, Vladimir Solov’ev, Leonid Andreev, and Maksim Gorky, aided her in devoting her artistic efforts to the psychological and spiritual problems facing Russian Jewish women. Similarly, Mandelstam traveled to Finland for a Lutheran conversion, probably to avoid university quotas on Jewish students. Both writers therefore notably eschew the closer-to-home Eastern Orthodox Christian option.23 That Khin’s Sara is never baptized might be viewed as a subversive act within the narrative, a veering from a cultural urge toward Christianity to identification with ethnic Jewishness. One night, Sara, who has just begun working as a governess, is visited by visions of the Wandering Jew, and hears voices carrying anti-Semitic epithets: ‘‘Whose pale face is that? Ah, it’s the unlucky, ragamuffin Yid, tormented, everywhere cast out; his poor hut is beaten in, his daughter has been dishonored, his wife injured, his pitiful possessions left to the wind. . . . He is dirty, bloody. . . . ‘Christseller,’ cackles the crowd. . . . ‘Exploiter’. . . . ‘Off with you!’ ’’24 Having entered, if with tentative status, the halls of high society, Sara must confront her own image of the eternally wandering torgovka. She has opted for cultural Judaism over cultural Christianity, but she cannot rid herself of the reality that she may be viewed as a hyper-corporeal exploiter, and seller of Christ, an image that threatens her with an immoral marketplace. Clearly, the singleness of Sarah’s ethnic identity, alone, is not enough. She is left in the ultimate modernist space—a borderland that is neither market nor church. While Sara is sacrificed on this cultural paradox, Khin, the author, is freed to pursue her own art, calling into question the shortcomings of both Jewish and Christian society. Just as the Gospels condemn those who have been expelled from the temple, Jewish teaching condemns approaching the door to the church, for fear of the temptation of conversion and assimilation. This liminal architectural space is suggested in the title of the novel, Ne ko dvoru. Dvor can mean ‘‘court,’’ in either its rustic sense (yard or farmyard) or in its high-cultural sense (a royal court). Something that is ne ko dvoru—not fit for the dvor—is an outcast: unwanted, unsuitable, inappropriate, for high- or low-class Russians. The idiom brings to mind our Kiev fresco, which appears on the wall just above the door to the Trinity Church but depicts merchants being cast

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out of a courtyard or gated city. Sara, a product of Christian culture and a Jewish past, is shut out of cultural thresholds on all sides. If Khin’s novel presents a character shut outside the walls of society’s cathedral, Osip Mandelstam’s high-modernist poetics not only positions him at the entrance to many a church; it likens him, as a poet, to the architects of Western civilization. In ‘‘Morning of Acmeism,’’ he writes: ‘‘The architect says: I build; that indicates I am right.’’25 Mandelstam’s fascination with Christian art centered on a lifelong study of Western European architecture and music. Nikolai Gumilev, in his 1912 review of Mandelstam’s first book of poetry, Kamen (Stone), explained that Mandelstam ‘‘loves buildings the way other poets love mountains or the sea. He describes them with precision. He also discovers parallels between them and himself and on the basis of their lines he creates a vision of the world.’’26 In his chapter titled ‘‘Judaic Chaos,’’ Mandelstam describes Jewish architecture. He endows the Saint Petersburg synagogue with a mixture of mystery and contradiction. ‘‘Once or twice in my life I was taken to the synagogue, as though to a concert, with long preparations, practically to the point of having to procure tickets from scalpers; and from all that I’d seen and heard there, I would return in a heavy fog [v tiazhelom chadu].’’27 This ‘‘heavy fog’’ represents the confusion of a realm that lacks the defining lines of a comprehensible cultural structure, since the young Mandelstam had had no Jewish instruction. The young protagonist’s mind cannot accommodate this Jewish world, with its mystifying rituals and language. The closest comparison of the probably complicated process of arranging for seats, presumably at a High Holy Day service, is a hunt for the last tickets to a concert. Moreover, he is aesthetically unable to connect the synagogue liturgy and the rabbi’s stiff speech: ‘‘The cantor, like mighty Samson, brought down the leonine building—the velvet kamilavkion responded, and the wondrous equilibrium of vowels and consonants, in clearly enunciated words, gave an unbreakable force to the incantations.’’ Describing the synagogue within the same poetic system with which he wrote his church poems, Mandelstam is able to incorporate Judaism into his complete system of architecture and sound. Thus the cantor’s performance is inducted as an aesthetic precursor to a higher form of music, which Mandelstam terms ‘‘harmonic architectonics.’’ The rabbi’s message, however, does not interest Mandelstam in the least. He continues: ‘‘But what an insult—the rabbi’s banal, albeit literate, speech. What cliche´, when he

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pronounces ‘His Majesty the Emperor,’ how commonplace is everything he says!’’28 The commonality between the marketplace and the synagogue, with their commonplace speech and chaotic structure, begins with the kinship between the supposed scalpers of High Holy Day tickets and the actual scalpers at the Mariinsky Theatre (situated near the synagogue in Saint Petersburg), but it does not end there. In a single opening paragraph, which includes anecdotes about Jewish guests in Saint Petersburg and a visit to the synagogue and the marketplace, Mandelstam connects the architectural framework of the synagogue with the anti-architectural space of the nearby market. Throughout the book, an interpoetic conversation emerges, which exposes the significance of the chaos underlying civilization. For Mandelstam’s generation, the ultimate chaotic moment was the overturning associated with revolution, first in 1905 and later in 1917.29 Without explicitly linking Jews to the Revolution, Mandelstam describes his personal Judaic chaos as a discombobulated heritage undermining the order, tradition, and brilliance of the imperial capital. It is the non sequitur of Saint Petersburg taste ruined by ‘‘the hat of a provincial guest in a room’’ and by ‘‘the hooked calligraphy of the illegible books of Genesis, cast into the dust on the bottom bookshelf, below Goethe and Schiller, and with the scraps of the ritual black-and-yellow.’’30 As Gregory Freidin has pointed out, blackand-yellow was not only a recurrent symbol of Judaism, because of the colors of the prayer shawl; it also signifies the old Russian imperial flag.31 Mandelstam connects the changes of his epoch to Christ’s revolutionizing of Judaism and claims a personal familiarity to both because of his own journey, as an artist, from Judaism toward Christianity. Mandelstam’s juxtaposition of the overwhelming luster of Saint Petersburg with Jewish smell, Jewish chaos, and the Jewish marketplace is not unlike the discomfort that Khin’s character Sara has for the specters of her imagined Jewish vendor. Being a member of the comfortable merchant class in Saint Petersburg, however, Mandelstam is able to project his negative associations onto lower-class Jews. The unsuccessful Hebrew lessons inflicted on him bother the young Mandelstam, who dislikes his tutor’s particular aura of market-class Jewishness: ‘‘He used to come from his Market street [On prishel so svoei Torgovoi ulitsy] and teach, without taking his hat off, which embarrassed me. Grammatically correct Russian speech sounded false.’’32 The entry of this ‘‘authentically’’ Jewish (and therefore

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not authentically Russian) character offended the cultured, aesthetic sensibilities of the pupil. The tutor enters Mandelstam’s more assimilated Russian presence as one might enter a cathedral from a marketplace. Mandelstam ultimately redeems the noise of his time aesthetically by associating it with his own myth of origin and by raising it to a structured equilibrium.33 He closes his essay with a comparison of the German and Jewish symphony orchestras near his grandparents’ home on the Latvian coast. Somehow, through the combined chaos and structure of his childhood, Mandelstam learns to appreciate the symphonic: ‘‘I don’t remember how I learned to appreciate the symphonic orchestra, but I think that I correctly understood Tchaikovsky, having fathomed in him a particular concert feeling [kontsertnoe chuvstvo].’’34 The music of the poet’s epoch, which might be represented by a harmonization of the Judaism of his grandparents’ generation and the Russianness of his own Saint Petersburg / Petrograd upbringing, is an audible version of the grand architecture of a cathedral, which he himself has built throughout his memoirs. For Mandelstam, it is the job of the artist (as it is for the architect and composer) to build structure out of chaos. He begins, in his early poetry, to replicate Christian art as a universal form for catharsis. He manages to integrate Jewish culture into this structure when he writes The Noise of Time in 1925, mapping fertile Judaic chaos beside an artistically redeeming Western art. Homi Bhabha writes, in the context of colonial literature, ‘‘The contour of difference is agonistic, shifting, splitting, rather like Freud’s description of the system of consciousness which occupies a position in space lying on the border-line between outside and inside, a surface of protection, reception and projection.’’35 The writers I have examined in this paper, like the merchants depicted in the fresco, are similarly poised on the borderline between the outside and inside of Russian culture. We have seen that the structured cathedral and unstructured market space function as metaphorical locations that allow the Jewish writer to locate his or her difference within Russian culture. For the modern Jewish writer, religious marginality provides, strangely enough, a degree of cultural freedom. Mandelstam enlightens his generation about the art inherent in Christianity. The tragic fate of Khin’s heroine would help to define a state of being ‘‘on the outskirts,’’ which, in addition to challenging many Russian Jews, would come to define the modernist literary identity that led the Christian Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva to write in her ‘‘Poema kontsa’’ (Poem of the End), ‘‘all poets are Yids’’ (vse poety zhidy). What was, according to the institutions of

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the Russian Empire, a marginal identity had, in the grammar of literary modernism, the advantage of a decentered viewpoint. Like the moneychangers at the entrance to Kiev’s Trinity Church, those writers who build a poetics between the Jewish world and (Christian) Russian culture exist on a vulnerable, if artistically exemplary, margin.36 While the acculturated Jewish writer was free to enter the metaphorical church of Russian culture, the threshold of that structure became a liminal space between the new world of culture and the old world of marketplace, chaos, and Judaism. Moreover, as we have seen, the trope of entrance into the church can be viewed as a litmus test of the success of a Russian Jew’s acquisition of social fluency. Mandelstam crosses this threshold, shedding his family’s marketplace past in his birth as a poet, but, much like the Trinity fresco artists, whose Jewish merchants are depicted on their way out the church door, Mandelstam portrays his heritage as a means of emphasizing his own location in Russian high culture. Khin’s character, after glimpsing the Christian realm, chooses to remain at the threshold of both Judaism and Christianity, unable to fully enter either world. In the internalized Christendom of Russian society, an internalized Christ continues to inflict expulsion on the Jewish interlopers. Notes Parts of this essay appear in my article ‘‘Rashel Mironovna Khin i begstvo ot ‘Torgovki,’ ’’ in Gendernye issledovanie (Kharkiv, Ukraine, 2003). 1. A series of frescos in the Trinity (Troitska) Church, including the Expulsion, was painted in the 1730s and 1740s by a group of artists from the Kiev monastery’s icon school. 2. Efraim Sicher, ‘‘The ‘Colour’ of Judaism: Mandelstam’s ‘Noise of Time,’ ’’ in idem, Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution (Cambridge, 1995), 113. 3. David Roskies and Efraim Sicher have applied the use of Christian imagery by modern Jewish writers to the context of early twentieth-century Russia and Eastern Europe. See David G. Roskies, ‘‘Jews on the Cross,’’ in idem, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984); and Efraim Sicher, ‘‘Modernist Responses to War and Revolution: The Jewish Jesus,’’ in idem, Jews in Russian Literature. 4. Benjamin Nathans, in his study of Jews in late imperial Russia, contrasts ‘‘identificational assimilation,’’ by which a foreign individual adopts the politics and culture of one’s host country with acculturation, which ‘‘signifies a form of adaptation to the surrounding society that alters rather than erases the criteria of difference.’’ Both Khin and Mandelstam represent a point on this spectrum of assimilation that lies between these two tendencies. Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with

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Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 11. Milton Gordon, in his study Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York, 1964), lays important groundwork for the study of how individual ethnic groups view assimilation and pluralism in the United States. 5. For an excellent discussion of Khin’s life and an introduction to her novella, see Carole B. Balin, To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia (Cincinnati, 2000). 6. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (New York, 1978), 241. 7. For a detailed discussion of assimilation, acculturation, and modernization, see also Gabriella Safran, Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Stanford, Calif., 2000). For a discussion of Western European Jewish acculturation, see Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770– 1870 (Cambridge, 1973). 8. Rashel Mironovna Khin, Ne ko dvoru, in Siluety (Saint Petersburg, 1902), 203. In an earlier version of the novel Piotr is named ‘‘Pavel.’’ 9. Sara Rabinovich, ‘‘Zhizn torgovykh i trudiashchikhsia klassov v izobrazhenii Peretsa,’’ Evreiskii mir (June 1912): 51. 10. Khin, Ne ko dvoru, 210. 11. Osip Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1991), 2:55. The ‘‘gleaming cover thrown over the abyss’’ (blistatel’nyi pokrov, nakinutyi nad bezdnoi) conjures the Russian poet Fiodor Tiutchev (1808–73), an observation that Efraim Sicher has noted: ‘‘Pushkin’s ‘Feast During the Plague’ offers a model aesthetic conscience for dealing with a new winter of Russian history, and Kautsky and Tiutchev throw a cover over the ‘abyss.’ ’’ Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature, 115. Of this passage, Clare Cavanagh has suggested that Mandelstam is self-consciously echoing Petr Chaadaev’s flight from ‘‘ ‘the formless paradise’ of his homeland.’’ Certainly Mandelstam, in his attention to Revolutionary France and nineteenth-century Russia, is interested in the process of European enlightenment, broadly speaking, and is comparing his own experience as an assimilated Russian Jew to the flow of European history. See Clare Cavanagh, ‘‘Synthetic Nationality: Mandel’shtam and Chaadaev,’’ Slavic Review 49/4 (winter 1990): 597–610, 601. 12. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 63. 13. Carolyn Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), 74. 14. Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (London, 1993), 46. 15. Peter Steiner has called this poem Mandelstam’s ‘‘poetic manifesto.’’ Peter Steiner, ‘‘Poem as Manifesto: Mandel’stam’s ‘Notre Dame,’ ’’ Russian Literature 3 (July 1977). 16. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:24: Kak nekogda Adam, rasplastyvaia nervy,/ Igraet myshtsami krestovyi legkii svod.

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17. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Mineola, N.Y., 2003), 15. 18. I am grateful to Gregory Freidin for his help in drawing these connections between Mandelstam and Weber. 19. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone (New York, 1994), 39. 20. Khin, Ne ko dvoru, 284. 21. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore, 1981), 23–24. 22. Balin, To Reveal Our Hearts, 101. 23. Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), 30. 24. Khin, Ne ko dvoru, 286. 25. Osip Mandelstam, ‘‘Morning of Acmeism,’’ in Osip Mandelstam, Mandelstam: The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor, 1979), 62. 26. In Nikolai Gumilev, Pol’noe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1998), 4:327. 27. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 65. 28. Ibid. The traditional prayer for the government would have been particularly stilted on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Benjamin Nathans shows that a degree of paradox existed even under the more socially liberal Alexander II: ‘‘The cantor recited the ‘El male rahamim’ (‘God full of compassion,’ a prayer for the departed) on behalf of Alexander II, presumably in his capacity as ‘tsar liberator’ rather than as critic of the original plans for the synagogue’s construction’’ (Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 161). 29. Mandelstam was fourteen at the time of the 1905 October Manifesto and the riots that surrounded it. The manifesto, which led to greatly increased freedom for Russian Jews, was accompanied by revolutionary student riots in the capital and immediately led to anti-revolutionary and anti-Semitic pogroms throughout the Pale of Settlement. Jews were the beneficiaries of the 1905 reforms and the victims of the ensuing pogroms. Jewish students and intellectuals also made up around 15 percent of the Socialist revolutionaries, who were partly credited for the revolt, and even more in the top ranks, and thus were widely implicated for much of the revolutionary upheaval in Petersburg at the time. O. V. Budnitskii, Evrei i russkaia revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1999), 4. 30. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 55. 31. Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors, 78. Efraim Sicher has also discussed the significance of yellow in Mandelstam’s evocations of both Judaism and Petersburg. Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature, 118. 32. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 57. 33. As Efraim Sicher has written, ‘‘The negative colour of Judaism could not weigh down—to use Mandelstam’s Acmeist adaptation of Hugo’s geological and architectural metaphor or writing in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame—the soaring cathedral of his poetic thought: ‘out of heavy weight,’ he wrote in ‘Notre-Dame’ (in ‘Stone’), ‘I too will create the sublime.’ Nowhere is there more eloquent expression of this than in Noise of Time.’’ Not only does Judaism fail to weigh down the cathedral; it ultimately

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contributes to its construction. Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature, 138. See also Clare Cavanagh’s excellent discussion of cathedrals. Clare Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princeton, 1995), 66–102. 34. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 70. 35. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘‘Signs Taken for Wonders,’’ in idem, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 156. 36. For a discussion of marginality as a defining feature for modernist Jewish literature, see Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley, Calif., 1996).

CHAPTER 4

Shmuel Saadi Halevy/Sam Le´vy Between Ladino and French: Reconstructing a Writer’s Social Identity Olga Borovaya

By the turn of the twentieth century, the life of Ottoman Sephardim had undergone dramatic political, social, and cultural transformations as a result of modernizing and secularizing processes under way in the empire. Consequently, Ottoman Jewish identity had been redefined by a number of factors and had assumed a new form. Indisputably, the most significant factor was the Westernizing activity of European Jewry, particularly the Alliance Israe´lite Universelle (AIU). The Westernizing ideology introduced by the French Jews did not imply a rupture with the Jewish tradition, which is reflected in the curricula of the AIU schools, which attached great importance to teaching Judaism. Within a few years of the establishment of the schools, French became the main language of instruction, but other languages were also taught or used for teaching.1 Hebrew was learned as a dead language and as an element of religious education, Ladino was spoken in spite of being officially banned, and efforts were made to teach Ottoman Turkish. Although the status of Hebrew was never challenged directly, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the process of secularization affected the prestige of the culture it represented, so that in the end its functions became limited to religion, and it was essentially replaced by French as the language of high, secular culture, the only culture in which

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graduates of the Alliance schools in Salonica and within the borders of present-day Turkey could productively participate. These four (and sometimes more) languages used or taught in Alliance schools corresponded to various aspects of the new Sephardic identity and served as conduits of various kinds of knowledge. Ideally, the modern Sephardic Jew, as the Alliance wanted to see him, was an enlightened person with a thorough knowledge of Jewish history and tradition, a fluent speaker of French or Italian who received his education from an AIU school or another institution of the European type, and a loyal Ottoman citizen. On top of this, he was dedicated to the emancipation of his coreligionists and hence participated in the community’s social life or even made his living by teaching at an AIU school or writing for a Sephardic newspaper. Shmuel Saadi Halevy (1870–1959), better known as Sam Le´vy, epitomizes this new Sephardic type, which is why I chose his writings for my study. This article will attempt to show how language choices in the polyglossic situation faced by Ottoman Sephardim reveal multiple facets of a writer’s social identity. I will examine two accounts of the observance of Jewish holidays published in two periodicals, in two languages, and signed by two different names, but authored by one journalist, Shmuel Saadi Halevy. Not only are there no contradictions between the two texts, but their seemingly incompatible perspectives reveal two sides of the same multipart social identity. As for the evident disparity between them, it is fully explained by the target audiences that determined the writer’s choice of language, social role, and therefore, the newspaper genres available to him in each language. Hence, the use of two languages enables him to realize various facets of a social identity molded by the panoply of cultural patterns available to Ottoman Jews at the turn of the twentieth century. The Ladino newspaper La Epoka (1875–1911) and the French-language Le Journal de Salonique (1895–1911) were founded by Salonican publisher Bezalel Saadi Halevy and later run by his sons. In 1898, Saadi’s youngest son, Sam, who was then taking classes at the Sorbonne, interrupted his studies and returned to Salonica to help his father and brothers manage Le Journal. He soon became its editor in chief and assumed the same position at La Epoka the following year. La Epoka was intended for all the Sephardim of Salonica and nearby Macedonian towns, most of whom in 1875 did not read any other language. Retrospectively, Le´vy ascribed to the paper mainly didactic functions, claiming that it was ‘‘an organ of the enlightened class of the Jewish community of Salonica . . . that greatly contributed to the

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awakening of the masses from their lethargy.’’2 The paper stated its goals: ‘‘We Jews, are very backward. . . . It is our obligation as Jewish journalists to take upon ourselves the duty of propagating noble ideas in all classes of our nation’’ (October 20, 1875). Ironically, the best proof of La Epoka’s educational achievement was the emergence of a rival, a new Ladino pro-Zionist periodical, El Avenir (1897–1916). The intellectual level and linguistic quality of El Avenir’s materials were significantly superior to those of La Epoka and no doubt attracted the latter’s advanced readers who were no longer satisfied with La Epoka’s didactic emphasis. Le Journal de Salonique’s first issue (November 7, 1895) promises to provide readers with ‘‘intellectual nourishment’’ and reliable information on foreign politics, commerce, and social life in the city, which would include updates on salons and clubs, as well as theater reviews. What is striking here is the absence of the word ‘‘Jews’’ or ‘‘Jewish’’ not only in the statement but also in the entire issue and the paper’s masthead. Moreover, in a short note under ‘‘Local News,’’ one reads that the new periodical was born on the day of Saint Ernest, Saint Florint, and Sainte Thessalonica. The director’s message was unambiguous: Le Journal de Salonique was going to be a non-communitarian periodical meant for all ‘‘our populations,’’ all residents and guests of the city literate in French, including Jews, Francos,3 Greeks, Turks, Serbs, and Bulgarians. By late 1900, the newspaper’s contents and perspective had changed; it had not only begun to write about Jews but often used the same materials as La Epoka, albeit presenting them differently and often in different newspaper genres. No doubt, the reason for this transformation was Le Journal’s inability to survive as a non-communitarian periodical. During the first four and a half years of its existence, it was the only local Francophone newspaper, hence the only local newspaper available to foreign visitors and members of minority groups who did not have a local press in their native languages but were able to read French. In March 1900, a new paper appeared—Le Progre`s de Salonique (1900– 1913?)4 —which became a second source of local news in French.5 Like Le Journal, it was a biweekly, but its subscription rate and the price of one issue were significantly lower. Since it is unlikely that many Salonicans would have subscribed to both papers, in mid-1900 Le Journal’s circulation no doubt dropped.6 Though later Le Progre`s, too, became a Jewish periodical, it started as a non-communitarian one, and readers uninterested in Jewish matters may have preferred it as their local paper.

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At first, Le´vy welcomed the emergence of Le Progre`s de Salonique, either because he had some hope of cooperation or simply because he wanted to put on a good face. But a few weeks later, he published a couple of notes on the benefits of competition that clearly reflected his growing concern. Soon afterward, he entered an unrelenting war with his rival that continued for many years. It is evident that in about three months, Le´vy decided that Le Journal’s survival would be facilitated if it became a French newspaper for educated Jews open to non-Jewish topics. Consequently, the readerships of Le Journal and La Epoka now overlapped much more; it is quite likely that with time, this overlap grew larger, as more Sephardim were learning French. In August 1900, Sam Le´vy took a trip ‘‘toward the Danube’’ (‘‘Vers le Danube’’), as he referred to it, which included a visit to Adrianople (Edirne). He spent the first half of August there and wrote two dispatches for Le Journal de Salonique (August 6 and 16) and one for La Epoka (August 17). The French excerpt that I am going to discuss is taken from Le´vy’s article that appeared in Le Journal on August 16 and depicts the observance of the Ninth of Av in Adrianople. In the Ladino dispatch, Le´vy did not mention the Ninth of Av but instead presented a detailed account of all the expenses of the AIU school, the state of local industry, and a few similar matters, and called upon Adrianople’s Jews to work harder to achieve progress in their community. I have therefore chosen for comparative analysis Levy’s description, published the next year in La Epoka, of another Jewish observance, the Yom Kippur commemoration in Vienna, where Le´vy spent a few days on his way to Paris. This excerpt is taken from a long article in which the journalist talks about his trip from Salonica to Paris through Serbia and Austria. Shmuel Saadi Halevy (La Epoka, October 11, 1901) The day of our arrival was the Sabbath. I was assured that the number of Jews who feel obliged to say the morning and afternoon prayers is incalculable. The majority of them even close their banks. But that is not what made me feel proud. Far from it. Everyone knows that at some point, the city of Vienna was the center of Austrian anti-Semitism. The episodes of anti-Jewish actions that took place in the Austrian capital were extremely upsetting. And on Monday, 10 Tishrei, Yom Kippur, the best streets and the most fashion-

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able boulevards of the city, which had seen so many scandalous incidents, seemed to be in mourning. The most important shops, the main commercial companies, the big banks, and even the treasury were closed. And why? Because the Jews could not work that day. How can one not feel proud seeing the important place the Jews occupy in one of the world’s most active centers! On the contrary, the temples were full of people, and they all prayed! What peace! What serenity! One could hear a fly buzz. And the cantor’s voice accompanied by the choir produced a very profound impression on all listeners without exception. Such sights should be seen by everyone in the world, even by nonbelievers and non-Jews. S. Le´vy (Le Journal de Salonique, August 16, 1900) Every year on the Ninth of Av, Jews observe the anniversary of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. On that day, crowds of believers go to the synagogue, sit on the ground as a sign of mourning, and read the Book of Lamentations, so gripping and sad that it rends the heart. In Adrianople, these rituals take on a particular form. Usually, the streets are almost empty in the evening. At nightfall, everyone goes home, and after one o’clock Turkish time,7 one rarely hears the harried steps of a late passerby. On the eve of the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple, the Jews do not light their lamps but remain in utter darkness. Unaccustomed to going to bed early, they sit before their houses or walk in the street in wool slippers. These shadows moving in the dark, talking in low voices, gesticulating, give a strange appearance to the whole Jewish quarter. From time to time, a plaintive voice rises, bitterly chanting a chapter from Lamentations. This causes quite an impression. A stranger passing through these darkened streets full of people would be frightened, imagining himself surrounded by ghosts and nocturnal apparitions, and would flee in bewilderment. It so happened that the first time I came to Adrianople also fell around this gloomy commemoration. It made a powerful impression on me. That year, too, I experienced an intense sensation walk-

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ing alone through a colorful crowd in large dark coats, their gestures evoking kabbalistic signs worthy of Victor Hugo’s pen. Oh! What an immense role is played in life by such religious rituals born of absurd imaginations and mysticism! What influence they have on the mind of a credulous and impressionable crowd! One almost wishes to see all these customs disappear. Yet, one dares not wish for this openly, not out of fear of fanatics, but lest sensitive souls be deprived of the mysticism that has such appeal for them. As the author emphasizes a few times, his essay is written from the ‘‘Jewish point of view,’’ meaning that he will talk only about Jews. At the beginning of the article, Le´vy formulates his aim as editor in chief of his Ladino periodical: ‘‘The most important thing for me with regard to La Epoka is looking for the Jewish news that would interest all my readers.’’ The purpose of this text is to make clear to the readers that they can and should feel proud of being Jews only if they assume an important position in the larger society, which will eventually earn them the respect of non-Jews and thus help fight anti-Semitism. Le´vy praises the piety of Viennese Jews who pray twice a day and lead a commendable life and whose synagogues are places of orderly prayer and admirable calm. Le´vy is proud of being a Jew because his European coreligionists demonstrate the ability to be respected citizens of their countries and at the same time lead a Jewish life in a ‘‘civilized’’ manner. It seems that he first feels proud during his visit to Belgrade, which is described earlier in the same dispatch. He explains that Serbian Jews are as much Serbs as Serbian Christians are. They speak the same language as everyone else, they have the same customs as the rest of the population, and some even hold positions in the state administration. Yet they maintain their confessional particularity. Le´vy concludes by contending that this lifestyle is the right choice for all Jews and that it proves their ability to adjust to the country where they are settled. Though the writer does not mention which synagogue he attended in Vienna, one can be almost certain that it was the neologist Stadttempel on Seitenstettengasse, built in 1826, whose first rabbi was Isaac Mannheimer.8 It was probably one of those ‘‘civilized’’ neological services that so impressed the Sephardic journalist. It is unlikely that Sam Le´vy was particularly interested in Reform Judaism or that he was trying to advertise it to his Orthodox coreligionists. Rather, like all Westernized Sephardic literati,

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he would have liked to have seen religious ceremonies administered in a civilized way that would ensure Sephardim the respect of non-Jews, by which he meant potentially anti-Semitic Europeans. Though most French Jews favored reforms, the majority of the innovations adopted by the consistory were of ‘‘a ceremonial nature: increased orderliness, dignity, and standardization of ceremonies, French sermons in the synagogues, and methodical religious instruction.’’9 The Alliance committees in the Ottoman Empire tried to introduce some of those changes by means of education, but they never even vaguely criticized Sephardic Orthodox liturgy or rites. Sam Le´vy was always willing to imitate the new ways of French Jews and, in the spirit of the discussions of Jewish burials in France, he used Chopin’s and Beethoven’s funeral marches at his father’s funeral in January 1903. When asked about this by an astonished fellow citizen, he explained that it was not prohibited by religion and that in Europe this was done ‘‘every day.’’ He added that his father had founded La Epoka to promote liberalization and reforms, which should include funeral processions (Le Journal de Salonique, January 22, 1903). In terms of its narrative structure, this essay presents a simple account, the author of which is ‘‘in’’ the text and explicitly identifies himself with his Ottoman coreligionists. Like all didactic literature, it presupposes a certain pedagogical distance between the author, who knows what is right, and the readers, who are expected to learn from him. As always in his Ladino writings, Le´vy assumes the role of a teacher and tells his readers what they should do. To illustrate his style of writing for La Epoka, I will cite a few examples from his Adrianople dispatch of August 17. From the first sentence, it is clear that the author is unhappy with the local Jews for not organizing their communal life as he sees fit. Here is his first suggestion to the Jews of Adrianople: ‘‘These [rich] people who share modern ideas must concentrate their efforts and create industrial enterprises that would help the country. . . . It would be useful if the capitalists thought about creating a textile factory that would bring great benefits. . . . Enough sleeping. . . . So, get to work, coreligionists.’’ Le´vy then explains to his readers that he offered to publish a small newspaper for the local Jews if they guaranteed a certain number of subscriptions, but they said that they needed to think about it. The author is evidently displeased and says with sarcasm: ‘‘Let them think.’’ The remarkable feature of this text is its predominantly imperative mode, which—

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along with the numbers and facts cited by the author—makes the article sound like a lesson. The reason Le´vy visited Adrianople was indeed to give a lecture to the local Jews, and its main idea is the same as that expressed in the Viennese piece: Jews must work to change the economic situation of the city and become indispensable to the larger community. The French text differs from the Ladino one on several levels. The account of the Yom Kippur observance in Vienna is presented only from the narrator’s point of view in the first person (Ich-Erza¨hlung), whereas the subject structure of the French passage is rather complex. Thus, the author begins by producing an objective report of what happens in Adrianople every year on the eve of the ‘‘gloomy commemoration’’: the Jews do not light their lamps but sit in front of their houses in the dark or walk in the street in wool slippers. But then the author tries to defamiliarize the city by making it look mysterious and even frightening. To achieve this effect, he introduces an external point of view by suggesting that a stranger—if there were one— would find the Jews so scary that he would take them for ghosts or nocturnal apparitions and would flee in terror. From the next paragraph, we learn that the hypothetical stranger frightened by those bizarre shadows was the author himself during his earlier visit to Adrianople. He increases the sinister mood by switching the narration from his own internal point of view to the external one of a stranger and then back to the internal one. This transposition of viewpoints, according to Boris Uspensky, is often achieved by the use of modal expressions such as ‘‘he seemed to think’’ and ‘‘it was as if he wanted.’’ These modal expressions function as special operators to translate the description of an internal state into an objective description; they make possible the transposition of the description from ‘‘within’’ to ‘‘without.’’10 In our case, the function of the operator is assigned to the ‘‘stranger who would. . . .’’ This transposition of viewpoints allows the author to convert a newspaper dispatch, which presumably reports on real events rather than the journalist’s mood, into a higher literary genre, that of the travelogue. This conversion is performed also on the syntactic level. In terms of verb usage, newspaper reports mostly employ ‘‘action tenses’’ for the narration of events and ‘‘visualizing tenses’’ for a description.11 The Ladino article predominantly uses the simple past to inform readers about what the journalist has seen during his trip. The French text uses the passe´ simple and the passe´ compose´ only in one sentence referring to the narrator’s previ-

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ous visit to Adrianople; everywhere else, one finds verbs in the present, so that readers’ first impression is of co-temporaneity with the speaker’s point in time, which is what one expects to find in the press. Yet in reality, what is being described is a habitual present-time situation, and the piece does not offer any information that would have required a trip to Adrianople. In other words, those very limited explanations about the observance could have been gathered from books. The author of the Ladino article, in contrast, wants to inform Sephardim about the changes in the lives of their coreligionists in Vienna, which a few years earlier was the most anti-Semitic city. In this way, he hopes to persuade Salonicans to imitate European Jews. To be sure, Le´vy would not have been able to produce this piece without visiting Austria in August 1901. The most striking discrepancy between our two texts is that they seem to be written by different people. The author of the Ladino report is a Jewish educator whose goal is to indoctrinate his readers about proper Jewish life, whereas the French essay appears to belong to a European traveler who, in this particular excerpt, does not even seem to be Jewish. His readers will come to the latter conclusion based on how he represents the Ninth of Av commemoration in Adrianople. This observance, honored by Ottoman Sephardim as well as by all other Orthodox Jews, is presented as a strange practice and is referred to by the author as ‘‘this gloomy commemoration’’ and ‘‘religious rituals born of absurd imaginations.’’ Furthermore, the writer refers to the Jews observing the Ninth of Av as ‘‘Jews,’’ ‘‘believers,’’ ‘‘a colorful crowd,’’ and ‘‘a credulous and impressionable crowd.’’ These referring expressions indicate that the author does not include himself in this religious community or chooses to detach himself from it, which is why he never uses inclusive pronominal elements, such as nous or notre (‘‘we/us,’’ ‘‘our’’). This assumption is corroborated by his comparison of the gestures made by Jews on the Ninth of Av to kabbalistic signs. At night, the narrator finds himself surrounded by a ‘‘colorful crowd in large dark coats, their gestures evoking kabbalistic signs worthy of Victor Hugo’s pen.’’ A Jew would hardly use this expression to refer to his coreligionists, especially because at the turn of the twentieth century the words ‘‘kabbalistic’’ and ‘‘kabbalah’’ still had pejorative connotations.12 Regardless of their later idiomatic meanings, these words originally were used by Christians to express their hostility toward Jews. Thus, the narrator describes Jews not only from

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the viewpoint of an outsider but even in terms of a potentially hostile culture. Undoubtedly, the social identity of the author of ‘‘Vers la Danube’’ to a large degree mirrors that of Le Journal’s readership in the summer of 1900. Here, the relationship between the writer and his readers is evidently not the same as in the case of La Epoka because, as I will argue below, the functions of the two periodicals in Sam Le´vy’s social life were different. But it is impossible to establish these functions, the intended audience, or the true purpose of the French account until one determines how the author identifies himself in the text. The two French dispatches sent from Adrianople (August 6 and 16) offer what, at first glance, seems to be a contradictory picture of his sociocultural world. Thus, in the description of the Ninth of Av mourning, Le´vy appears to be a non-Jew with a vague knowledge of Judaism, which he regards as one of those obsolete religious practices that should already have disappeared along with all other mystic rites. Yet, as a tolerant European and a sophisticated traveler, he does not wish to deprive the naı¨ve ‘‘sensitive souls’’ of the mysticism so important in their lives. The author is obviously writing for the people of the same persuasion whom he addresses directly in the paragraph following our fragment: ‘‘Have you noticed that one gets attached to things and people at the moment of departure? Being an experienced traveler, I am always moved to tenderness when I depart a place where, willingly or not, I spent some time, if only a few days. You will ask me whether I was crazy enough to like Adrianople. And why not? Adrianople is not as ugly as ill-tempered travelers and even its residents would have it.’’ Nevertheless, in many passages of his two Adrianople dispatches, he himself turns out to be an ill-tempered and arrogant traveler making forced and unfriendly jokes about everyone he meets. Clearly, this is not the Sam Le´vy familiar to the readers of La Epoka. Yet these dispatches also reveal that this bored traveler is visiting Adrianople on an invitation from the local Alliance club, which asked him to give a lecture on work solidarity. He is thus a Jewish activist concerned about the life of his coreligionists. Moreover, in this perplexing French text, one finds an instance where the author unambiguously identifies himself as a Salonican Jew alarmed by the insufficiency of Jewish education in Adrianople: ‘‘I will not make a big mistake if I say that the average educational level among the children of Abraham is twice as low here as in our city [chez nous].’’ Thus, on the one hand, Sam Le´vy explicitly calls the Jewish community

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of Salonica his home, but on the other, refers to Jews as ‘‘sons of Abraham,’’ thus creating a certain cultural distance between himself and the masses, which he would never do in La Epoka. The expression fils d’Abraham apparently emerged in French as a euphemism and was initially used by Christians but was later adopted by Jews also as a euphemism, allowing one to avoid the crude ‘‘Jew’’ as well as to distance oneself from one’s ‘‘parochial’’ coreligionists. This is indeed how Le´vy saw himself—certainly as a Jew but superior to the Jewish masses who needed him to enlighten them. He finds Adrianople’s Jews ‘‘extremely poor and insufficiently cultivated’’ but at the same time makes ironic comments about them and even confesses, without much regret, that during his previous visit, he offended these people with his sarcastic observations. As we see, the narrators of the Ladino and French essays have much in common but differ in the degree to which they identify themselves with the Sephardic masses. What is more important is that they seem to have different, if not opposite, attitudes toward religion, which is what leads one to assume that Sam Le´vy radically changed or even betrayed his ideas. Thus, the author of the French article would like to see all religious practices disappear, whereas the author of the Ladino piece praises Viennese Jews for their disciplined commemoration of Yom Kippur. One might wonder, whether as a ‘‘progressive’’ Jew, Le´vy represents the Ninth of Av commemoration as obsolete, replicating the perspective of Reform Judaism, which, in the nineteenth century, did not observe this ritual. In 1856, a Reform leader, David Einhorn, declared that only the destruction of the Temple created the fundamental condition under which Jews could fulfill their mission among mankind. Sephardim did not share this view. Sam Le´vy, who almost never mentioned Jewish holidays, published in El Luzero13 —his Ladino periodical addressed to the intellectuals who were also reading Le Journal de Salonique—an article titled ‘‘Tisha b’Av and Russian Jews,’’ signed ‘‘A Pole’’ (August 16, 1905). While I cannot establish the author’s real name, the piece must have expressed the editor’s perspective, as it was the lead item on the paper’s front page. The piece begins with a rhetorical question: Do Russian Jews need to mourn on Tisha b’Av? Having summarized the terrible events of 1905 in the lives of Russian Jews, the author concludes that all days are like Tisha b’Av for them. Moreover, their sufferings ‘‘will never end, they will always drink me hammarim [the water of bitterness, Num. 5:18f., 23f.], and their lives will be a perpetual Tisha

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b’Av, until the pasuq is fulfilled: ‘Your disaster is coming, too: you, too, will stagger naked in shame.’ ’’ This verse (Lam. 4:21b) is obviously meant to be a warning to the Russian anti-Semites and possibly even to the Russian state.14 It follows from the article—which is written in a high style and, most uncharacteristically for Le´vy’s periodicals, quotes the Bible—that only Russian Jews do not have to observe the Ninth of Av, while everyone else should. It is clear from this publication that the Ninth of Av was a meaningful day for Le´vy and his peers regardless of how strictly they might have observed it. Nonetheless, he finds it socially permissible to ridicule the archaic aspects of the ritual in his French travelogue. The author of the ‘‘Vers le Danube’’ series evidently resents religion because it was born at the time of absurd beliefs incompatible with the modern age, a fact manifest in its public expression. He acknowledges that it is still needed by sentimental souls, which he and his readers are certainly not. The two narrators essentially agree about the functions of religion, which corresponds to Le´vy’s views expressed in his other texts and in his periodicals. In 1904, in a letter to Angel Pulido, Le´vy wrote: ‘‘I do not practice religion; quite the contrary. My socialist and even somewhat evolutionistidealistic views keep me far away from all religious practices to which I am opposed. That is why I am very happy to see religious boundaries, which divided peoples like the Chinese wall, collapse.’’15 Pulido was a Spanish senator who, at the turn of the twentieth century, became interested in the Sephardim and began a campaign to promote Spanish-Sephardic rapprochement. Le´vy obviously wanted to impress his addressee and to demonstrate that he, too, was a European with progressive social views. We also know from other documents, including his memoir, that he was always proud of his father, who had been excommunicated for his liberal ideas; both father and son used every opportunity to decry backward and superstitious rabbis. On the other hand, aware of the role of religion in the public sphere and the importance of teaching Judaism to Sephardic students, Le´vy supported the Alliance’s efforts in this direction. On August 2, 1905, in El Luzero, one finds an article titled ‘‘Schools in the Orient and Religion.’’ Its author, a frequent contributor to Le´vy’s periodicals, complains about the lack of religiosity in the AIU schools and suggests that the teachers should incorporate religion not only in teaching but also in everyday life. He does

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not insist that the teachers have to believe in God, but they should not speak negatively about religion, so as not to transmit their doubts to children because for Jews, religion and nationhood are inseparable. Another aspect of the AIU’s program of teaching religion dear to Sam Le´vy was its claim that religion has nothing to do with superstitions, and so there was no contradiction between science and religion. The Alliance’s educational project explicitly distinguished between superstitions and religion and aspired to purge the former from the latter. In his speech on teaching Judaism in AIU schools (February 6, 1900) published in El Avenir on May 2,16 Secretary-General Jacques Bigart declares that the Alliance’s goal is to ‘‘strengthen and purify’’ the religious feelings of its students in the Orient and Africa. He then explains that ‘‘some backward or too advanced minds confuse religion with superstitions (false beliefs) and accuse us of destroying religious feelings in our students,’’ which is contrary to the AIU’s purpose. Le´vy is convinced that children and the masses require religion to remain Jewish but also because it satisfies their need for mysticism. However, he would like to see religious ceremonies purged of superstitions and practiced in a civilized way ‘‘in serenity.’’ As for educated Sephardim, not all of them need religion and can even refute it in their private lives because they have other ways of being faithful to their nation. As an educator of the Sephardic masses, Le´vy supports religion in the public sphere, while as the author of French travel accounts, he is free to express his personal views, which, not coincidentally, also reflect the AIU’s ideology. But, as I will demonstrate below, the limits of his self-expression are largely set by the rules of this genre adopted by many Sephardic literati writing in French. It is evident that the Vienna account was written mainly for educational purposes, though it had obvious polemical overtones. But why did Le´vy produce the Adrianople essay for his French periodical? To answer this question, I will examine this piece in the context of contemporaneous literary production in French and briefly examine a few other texts belonging to the same genre. Here is a description of the service in a mosque in Constantinople attended by the imperial army: Just below me, the superb army, ever immobile and meditative, silently follows the prayers being sung in the shining mosque before them. It seems as though the soul of Islam were at this moment concentrated within this white sanctuary. Oh, those chants vibrating

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beneath the dome, as monotonous as magical incantations and possessed of such rare sonorous beauty! Are they the voices of children? Of angels? One cannot say. There is also something very Oriental: the tones, exceedingly high, are held on to tirelessly, with the inalterable freshness of oboes. They go on and on, ever renewed; they are sweet, they lull you, and yet they express with infinite sadness human nothingness. One feels dizzy, as before a great abyss.17 This description is a fragment of Pierre Loti’s travelogue in the Ottoman Empire (1890). Evidently, the narrator, a European, describes a Muslim service in terms that would not be used by an insider. Thus, he perceives the prayers as magical incantations and finds in them the ‘‘soul of Islam.’’ The similarities between Loti’s piece and Le´vy’s French essay are evident, and the main difference between the two descriptions of a religious ceremony is that the Jewish one is represented in negative tones and appears quite somber while the Muslim liturgy is seen as luminous and blissful. Now let us examine two excerpts produced in French by Sephardic writers. The first one is taken from a description of Salonica published in Le Journal de Salonique about ten weeks earlier (May 28, 1900) than the Adrianople dispatch and is signed by J. Kohn: ‘‘First of all, I would tell my friends that, if they want to know what impression is left by their beloved city of Salonica, all they need to do is ask the many strangers who come here from Europe. By ‘‘strangers,’’ I mean those who visit an Oriental city for the first time. . . . Being an admirer of everything beautiful, I must mention in particular the Salonican women and girls: they are beautiful, most of them are very graceful, very elegant, and dressed simply but in very good taste. They resemble Viennese women somewhat, and many of these Jewish women, their delicate faces marked by a certain melancholy, could serve as a lovely model for the Madonna.’’ Quite remarkably, Kohn begins by stating that this Oriental city can best be described from the viewpoint of a European traveler and directly assumes this role. This author, too, exoticizes the inhabitants of the city, presenting them from an outsider’s viewpoint, by suggesting, for instance, that Jewish women could be models for a picture of the Madonna, although most Sephardic women would have been insulted by this comparison. Another Sephardic author, Moı¨se Franco, an Alliance teacher in Adrianople and Demotica and author of a well-known history of the Ottoman

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Jewry, describes, in these terms, the local customs in a letter to the AIU Central Committee in Paris: Finally, there is another custom here, as curious as it is moving. Nowhere in the East would any Jewish woman dare set foot in a cemetery. This is not the case in Adrianople. On the first two Sundays of the month, young Jewish widows, either alone or accompanied by their daughters, go in throngs to the cemetery, some in carriages, others on foot. There, not only do they grieve at the tombs of their deceased husbands and give alms to the beggars and poor rabbis, but they also confide touchingly and naı¨vely in their departed relatives. They share their domestic joys, talk about the hardships in their lives, tell them which religious feast days are approaching and how sad they feel to see an empty place at the family hearth.18 As we see, Franco sets a distance between himself and the local Jews by adopting the viewpoint of an ethnographer and, as such, perceives local customs as ‘‘naı¨ve’’ and ‘‘touching.’’ Even a brief overview of these examples shows that Sephardic authors internalized the European view of their culture19 and by means of exotization and defamiliarization produced texts belonging to the French genre of travelogue in the Orient. This genre is characterized by quasi-ethnographic representation of local peoples and by appropriation (i.e., interpretation in European terms) of their culture as undeveloped or moribund. This is especially evident in descriptions of local religions, which, naturally, are always seen from the Christian perspective. For instance, Loti presents a black Muslim man he meets in Morocco as a mummy with dead eyes on a white horse, thus suggesting that he is the last survivor of a dead civilization.20 Sam Le´vy’s representation of the Ninth of Av observance belongs to the same genre. In his travel journal, as in all the French texts cited above, the outsider whose perspective dominates the account is a European traveler, if only because the narrator’s cultural references are those of a European. For instance, he states that some monuments in the city make the trip worthwhile, compares Jews to Hugo’s images, and even declares that ‘‘in the Orient, work is not valued.’’ Furthermore, Le´vy represents the Jewish ritual and dress from an ethnographic perspective and sees mourning Jews as shadows and specters belonging to the half-dead world of an obsolete

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religion. As a result, he creates a dark picture of Judaism similar to that found in Loti’s travelogue in Morocco. After describing the dirty and smelly streets of Meknes inhabited by gloomy Jews, the French writer arrives at the conclusion: ‘‘For a moment, I understand and am horrified by what may be the lives of these Jews, confined to observe the law of Moses in fear, buried in their narrow quarter, in the middle of this mummified city cut off from the whole world.’’21 The striking similarity between these two representations of Jewish religious life is a result of Le´vy’s uncritical adoption of the French Oriental discourse, which, among other things, is a product of Christian triumphalism. Consequently, instead of the intended ironic description of a Jewish ritual, the Sephardic journalist produces a xenophobic portrayal of his coreligionists. Obviously, this is a literary exercise rather than an attempt to ridicule Judaism, but it reveals Le´vy’s eagerness to identify himself with Europeans even though this sometimes implies identification with European Christian culture. The same is true for J. Kohn, who compares Jewish women to the Madonna. Speaking about the first generation of graduates of the AIU schools, He´le`ne Guillon notes: ‘‘Like the provincial bourgeoisie in France, it tries to re-create in its mores and cultural references an idealized Parisian ambience.’’22 As if to confirm this observation, Sam Le´vy proudly asserts in his memoir that Le Journal de Salonique was the ‘‘most Parisian publication in Turkey and the Balkans.’’23 Indeed, Le Journal advertised French fashions and trips to Paris and sometimes even published weather reports for France. While the two social groups described by Guillon wanted to distance themselves from their environment, the Sephardic Westernizers’ selfidentification with French intellectuals served yet another purpose. Producing a French-language travelogue in the Orient was, for Le´vy, a means of social (rather than literary) self-expression that allowed him to see himself as a European intellectual culturally superior to his Oriental coreligionists.24 This, he obviously felt, legitimized the pedagogical distance between him and the audience of La Epoka justified his speaking in an imperative mode. Because of its particular history and functions, Ladino literature, at least starting in the eighteenth century, was didactic par excellence and lacked many modern genres. Among the letters written by Sephardic literati to Angel Pulido around 1904,25 one finds a few descriptions of Sephardic life in Ottoman cities, but none of these letters contains anything comparable with what we see in French travelogues or those published in Le Journal de

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Salonique. The authors often want to show the most attractive sides of their community life, but they only cite facts and numbers or discuss ideas, without mentioning the beautiful local sites. It is noteworthy that in his account of the trip to Paris through Vienna, Le´vy never speaks about the landscapes or cities he sees but simply notes that ‘‘even the finest pen would not be able to describe them.’’ This has to do with the fact that Sephardic readers were mainly interested in action rather than in descriptions, which is particularly evident from the Ladino adaptations of European novels. The rewriters would always cut out everything but the basic plot.26 One of the most common genres of the Ladino press was ‘‘A Letter from X,’’ which would be written either by a local correspondent or by a journalist whom the periodical would send to an Ottoman city with a Jewish community. Like Le´vy’s Ladino account from Adrianople, these articles never included descriptions of the place and presented everything from the ‘‘Jewish point of view.’’ An article in El Avenir (January 9, 1901) titled ‘‘A Letter from Sheres’’ talks about the cold and snow in this city but only as it affects the poor Jews who cannot afford to heat their houses. The travelogue as a genre of modern European literature was meant to entertain the public as well as to offer information about other countries, mostly those in the Orient. The Ladino press also had a genre that fulfilled these functions, but it usually served didactic purposes. When editors of Ladino newspapers wanted to publish entertaining stories about faraway countries, they would either translate them from the foreign press or simply combine excerpts from various, often obscure, publications. Typically, these would be fantastic accounts of Jewish communities in Japan, China, Ethiopia, and other exotic places.27 In January–February 1908, La Epoka published a series of essays on Falashas, which told about tens of millions of Abyssinian Jews with ‘‘intelligent eyes’’ and strange customs. Most of the time, such stories claimed to be based on the latest scholarship and imitated encyclopedia entries rather than travel journals and almost always contained an educational message. Sam Le´vy would travel to any place where there was at least a tiny Jewish community and report on its life in La Epoka. Most of the time, he would also write an article for Le Journal de Salonique that would drastically differ from the Ladino one. Not only did his accounts of the same place speak about different things, depending on the newspaper; he often even talked about different places that he passed through. In Le Journal’s account

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of Le´vy’s trip to Paris in October 1901, Vienna is mentioned only as a place where the travelers spent a couple of nights. In turn, while La Epoka does not say much about his stay in Paris, Le Journal published a long account of it that discusses at length the play at La Come´die Franc¸aise that he attended and even includes reminiscences of his student years at the Sorbonne. From Adrianople, Le´vy sent a programmatic article for La Epoka and two entertaining essays for Le Journal de Salonique. One can take a random travel account from either periodical and almost always find its counterpart in the other one, the two articles invariably differing on the ideological level. In La Epoka, Le´vy expresses his social views and tries to inculcate them in the readers’ minds, while in Le Journal, one usually finds a travelogue meant to entertain the public. Since educating the Sephardic masses by means of the Ladino press was undoubtedly Le´vy’s main calling in life, one can say that his French travelogues were a by-product of his work for La Epoka. Publishing a Francophone periodical fulfilled his other passionate aspiration: to participate in the intellectual life of France, which for him was not just any European country but rather the symbol of European civilization. In his memoir, Le´vy refers to France as a ‘‘second motherland of all intellectuals’’ and ‘‘the country of the Rights of Man, Hugo, Lamartine, the encyclopedists, and all the classics.’’28 The notion of France as a sanctuary that one must always revere was part of Le´vy’s upbringing. As early as 1877, his father sent his eldest daughter to study in Paris, which was an uncommon practice at the time and required substantial financial sacrifice. Saadi Halevy was instrumental in establishing the first Alliance schools in Salonica and, despite the fact that he himself did not know French, founded a French paper, Le Journal de Salonique, the longest-lived Francophone Sephardic periodical in the Ottoman Empire. Many years later, his son Sam recalls how French was taught in AIU schools: ‘‘The first page of the first book for reading distributed among students, Le Petit Franc¸ais . . . began with the following magical words: ‘France, our fatherland, is a beautiful country.’ Our Fatherland! Oh, yes! Wasn’t France indeed a second fatherland of all free men?’’29 As a consequence of Westernization and European-style schooling, one of the idiosyncratic features of Sephardic press, particularly prominent in Salonica, was the use of two languages—Ladino and French—in a single periodical or in different periodicals directed by the same journalist. Throughout his career, Sam Le´vy—a passionate advocate of Ladino as the

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legitimate language of Eastern Sephardim—not only published two Ladino and two French newspapers but also translated a few books into Ladino, produced a Ladino compilation of several French novels, wrote a memoir and a few historical accounts in French, and edited a French journal in Paris dedicated to the life of various Sephardic communities. As a bilingual writer, Le´vy appeared before the Sephardic public in two guises—that of an Ottoman educator and that of a European intellectual— and both fit him most naturally. The fact that Le´vy’s Salonican audiences partly overlapped and many readers would see two versions of his stories suggests that they accepted the rules of this sociolinguistic game and actually participated in it by changing their own guises attached to the respective language, as they opened La Epoka or Le Journal de Salonique. Indeed, the comparison of Jewish gesticulation to kabbalistic signs was not offensive only because readers understood that it was a sociocultural convention. I suggest that the two articles examined in this essay, despite their many obvious differences, do not contradict each other but rather reflect Sam Le´vy’s complex social identity, which was characteristic of Sephardic intellectuals of his generation who saw themselves as Europeans and for whom French had largely replaced Hebrew as a language of high culture. Notes I am grateful to Alan Astro, Julia Cohen, Scott Lerner, Sergey Lyosov, Kenneth Moss, Aron Rodrigue, and Maurice Samuels for their invaluable help and thoughtful comments on this article. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. 1. On the AIU schools in the Ottoman Empire, see Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: Alliance Israe´lite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington, Ind., 1990). 2. Sam Le´vy, Salonique a` la fin du XIXe sie`cle: Me´moires (Istanbul, 2000), 101. 3. Europeans, both Jews and non-Jews, who lived in the Ottoman Empire but were protected by their respective governments. 4. On this periodical, see Borovaya, Ladino Print Culture in Modern Times: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire (1845–1908) (Bloomington, Ind., forthcoming), ch. 2, sec. 5. 5. Paul Dumont claims that in 1900 in Salonica, there were four Francophone periodicals: Le Journal de Salonique, Le Progre`s de Salonique, L’Independant, and L’Ecole et la Famille. He does not offer any information on the latter two to show that they lasted long or had any influence in the city. Paul Dumont, ‘‘Le franc¸ais d’abord,’’ in Salonique 1850–1918: La ville des Juifs et le re´veil des Balkans, ed. Gilles Weinstein (Paris, 1992), 217. Groc and C¸aglar do not list L’Independant and offer no information except for the place, on L’Ecole et la Famille. G. Groc and I. C¸aglar, La Presse franc¸aise de

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Turquie de 1795 a` nos jours: Histoire et catalogue (Istanbul, 1985). I did not see any mention of these periodicals in Le Journal de Salonique or other Salonican publications, except a reference to an article published in L’Independant in 1927. Even if they came out for some time at the turn of the twentieth century, it is certain that they did not compete with Le Journal or Le Progre`s. 6. It is impossible to establish exact numbers, as they were never indicated in the Ottoman periodicals. According to Groc and C¸aglar’s catalog, which does not cite its sources, Le Progre`s’s (no. 402) circulation was 700 copies and that of Le Journal de Salonique (no. 272), 1,000. Even if the former is an accurate figure for a certain period, we do not have the dates. The latter figure appears in Sam Le´vy’s memoir and refers to the late 1890s. Given the nature of the source, it is likely an exaggeration. A rough estimate based on the number of Salonicans potentially able to read French-language press in the early 1900s makes it clear that the total circulation of 1,700 copies of local Francophone periodicals is a highly unrealistic figure. 7. I.e., one hour after sunset. 8. I thank Michael Silber for helping me identify this synagogue. Isaac Mannheimer (1793–1865) was a Reform rabbi in Germany. In Vienna, he had to tone down his radical views, which is why he conducted services in Hebrew, retained the messianic prayers, and did not allow an organ to be played during services. 9. Phyllis Cohen Albert, The Modernization of French Jewry: Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Hanover, N.H., 1977), 53. 10. Boris Uspensky, The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form, trans. Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig (Los Angeles, 1973), 85. 11. See Suzanne Fleischman, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction (Austin, Tex., 1990), 34. 12. See Dictionnaire de l’acade´mie franc¸aise, 6th ed. (1832–35); 7th ed. (1932–35). 13. It came out in Zemun (now Serbia) in summer 1905. On El Luzero, see Borovaya, Ladino Print Culture, ch. 2, sec. 5. 14. Lam. 4:21a is ‘‘Laugh on, people of Edom and Uz; be glad while you can.’’ Jeremiah speaks about a catastrophe awaiting the enemies of the Jewish people that will put an end to Israel’s oppression. 15. El Liberal (Madrid), July 18, 1904. I thank Julia Cohen for bringing this text to my attention. 16. This speech is published in conjunction with the AIU’s circular for teachers (January 1896), a fragment of which can be found in Rodrigue, French Jews, 80. 17. Pierre Loti, Voyages 1872–1913 (Paris, 1991), 329. This excerpt is translated from French by Alan Astro. 18. Quoted in Aron Rodrigue, Jews and Muslims: Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Modern Times (Seattle, 2003), 144. 19. On ‘‘orientalizing’’ in the Ladino press, see Sarah Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington, Ind., 2003), 137–38.

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20. Loti, Voyages, 235–36. 21. Ibid., 316. 22. He´le`ne Guillon, ‘‘Les Feuilletons dans Le Journal de Salonique,’’ in Les Se´pharades en litte´rature: Un parcours mille´naire, ed. Esther Benbassa (Paris, 2005), 120. 23. Le´vy, Salonique, 76. 24. On this subject, see Borovaya, Ladino Print Culture, introduction. 25. See Angel Pulido Ferna´ndez, Espan˜oles sin patria y la raza sefardı´ (Madrid, 1905). 26. See Borovaya, ‘‘The Serialized Novel as Rewriting: The Case of the Ladino Belles Lettres,’’ Jewish Social Studies 10 (2003): 1, 30–68. 27. On this genre, see Borovaya, ‘‘Jews of Three Colors: The Map of the Jewish World in the Pages of the Ladino Press at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,’’ Jewish Social Studies 15 (fall 2008): 1. 28. Le´vy, Salonique, 95. 29. Ibid., 105.

CHAPTER 5

I. L. Peretz’s ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’: Neo-Hasidism and Jewish Literary Modernity Nicham Ross

I. L. Peretz’s writing can be said to represent an entire literary corpus: the Hasidic writing of other modern writers of his time. Most of the prevailing studies dealing with Peretz’s literary and personal approach to the Hasidic heritage tend to stress the opposite, arguing that Peretz’s work is an anomaly and not to be read in conjunction with other writings in dialogue with Hasidism from the same period. Thus, the important and comprehensive studies of Shmuel Niger or Yehuda Friedlander place great emphasis on the claim that one ought to distinguish between the sincere neo-Hasidic romanticism characterizing the approach of other novelists and thinkers who drew upon Hasidic resources and the attitude adopted by Peretz. According to this view, Peretz’s attraction to the Hasidic movement stems from purely aesthetic considerations and does not reflect any true appreciation or empathy for Hasidism.1 In the course of this article, I would like to demonstrate that Peretz’s Hasidic work should, on the contrary, be viewed as of a piece with the general neo-Hasidic trend of his period and even as one of its most influential instigators. Indeed, in terms of the stereotypical image of Hasidism generated by this literature and its modern implications, there is no substantial difference between Peretz’s literary efforts and the tendentious portrayals of his contemporary neo-Hasidic writers and their followers. Shmuel Niger and David Roskies, as well as many other critics, were correct in distinguishing between Peretz’s aesthetic attraction to a distorted

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‘‘Hasidism,’’ the product of his unbridled artistic imagination, and his true attitude toward the ‘‘genuine article.’’2 This, however, does not warrant a categorical division between Peretz and other neo-Hasidic writers at the turn of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, many of these authors— like Peretz—did not seriously believe that historical Hasidism suited their modernist sensibilities. They, too, chose to appropriate the blatantly artificial and stereotypical caricature of this movement, which I will now present and analyze. On the other hand, and contrary to the impression that could be gleaned from the studies of some of the most important critics of Peretz’s Hasidic tales (e.g., Niger, Roskies, Friedlander, and Wisse), I will argue that Peretz’s attraction to the historical legacy of Hasidism cannot be described as totally cynical and instrumental, devoid of any empathy for its inner world and spiritual values. Hasidism was indeed perceived by Peretz, as by his colleagues, as a promising spiritual reservoir, containing a subversive element that might serve as a precursor for a truly contemporary approach to Jewish identity, an approach that bore potential for anchoring and even inspiring the soul of the modern Jew. With the publication of his celebrated Yiddish story ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’3 I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) was accused of misrepresenting the Hasidic movement and its values. Agnon claims: ‘‘The ideas that lend color to [Peretz’s] descriptions, as well as the descriptions that include these ideas, have nothing in common with Hasidim or Hasidism. Even if you were to investigate all the places where Hasidim were located from the time of the Besht [the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism] until the present and you were to hear what the Hasidim say, you would find nothing remotely similar to what the Hasid described in ‘Between Two Mountains’ has to say.’’4 How exactly was authentic Hasidism misrepresented in the plot of ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’? What prompted a secular, post-traditional writer like Peretz to devote many other works to reviving the memory of Hasidism and to create a literary distortion of its image? And why should Peretz or his modern critics be concerned regarding the degree to which a work of art and fiction corresponds with the actual claims and ideological positions of the Hasidic movement in real life? In what follows, I shall attempt to present ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ as an especially useful and decisive test case, one that facilitates discussion regarding the ideological aspects of a broader literary phenomenon— namely, neo-Hasidic writing around the beginning of the twentieth cen-

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tury. My focus on ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ will serve as one select and especially instructive illustration of a far broader tendency to appropriate the Hasidic movement by reconstructing its image in an effort to formulate a message that is relevant and useful for the modern Jew. ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ focuses on the charming and paternal image of a Hasidic zaddik (master/saint), Reb Noah’ke of Biale. Reb Noah’ke, an outstanding student, runs away from his yeshiva, in principled objection to its spiritual path, after he comes to view its traditional manner of learning under the guidance of the Gaon of Brisk as producing ‘‘dry Torah,’’ frozen and dead. The Gaon of Brisk is clearly a Mitnaged, an opponent of the Hasidic movement. (‘‘Mitnaged’’ is derived from the Hebrew root neged, which means ‘‘against.’’) As a staunch Mitnaged, the Gaon of Brisk is portrayed here not only as the antithesis of the Hasidic rebbe but also as undermining the very legitimacy of Hasidism. Faithful to the history of the controversy, Peretz tells us that the gaon used to actively oppress Hasidim, purportedly ‘‘for the sake of heaven.’’ Before his escape from the yeshiva of the gaon, Reb Noah’ke dreams that a grand heaven does indeed await devoted learners who follow the path of the Gaon of Brisk, but it is an empty place, detached from the destiny and company of the rank and file of Israel. Years later, the escaped prodigy becomes a Hasidic zaddik, the Rebbe of Biale. His next encounter with the strict and forbidding gaon occurs in tragic circumstances, when the latter arrives in Biale to visit his daughter-in-law (or his daughter, according to the Yiddish version), who is undergoing difficulty in giving birth and is in mortal danger. The frightened storyteller describes the dramatic new encounter between the zealous rosh yeshiva and his former student, the current Hasidic rebbe. The Mitnagedic gaon demands an explanation from his runaway student, and the Zaddik of Biale answers him with humility but with firmness and courage: The world of the yeshiva lacks fresh air! The Torah of the gaon is cold. It represents justice but offers no mercy, joy, or love. The Hasidic rebbe depicts the demanding ethos of Torah study as ignoring the interests of those simple Jews who constitute the bulk of the Jewish people. Reb Noah’ke’s conclusion is that such study is merely the dead body of the living Torah and should be abandoned, for it has no soul. The climax of the story occurs in its last scene, when the rebbe points to the Hasidic alternative. He leads the Mitnagedic rosh yeshiva to look upon the

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circles of joyous Hasidim dancing in the fields surrounding the town of Biale during Simhat Torah.5 The singing and dancing of the Hasidim and their spiritual bond to one another, to their zaddik, and to nature at large cast a sublime light upon the scene, which the Hasidic zaddik identifies as ‘‘the soul of Torah.’’ The coldness and estrangement of yeshiva learning contrast sharply with the poetic and aesthetic power of the Hasidic spiritual experience. But the Gaon of Brisk is not impressed, and, at the end of the story, he returns, unconvinced, to his former dry world of learning. This famous story by Peretz raises several questions. Aside from its artistic value as fiction, the ideological and polemical aspects of the story are striking. Peretz’s creative license is no less evident here than in his other stories. Yet he goes to great lengths to lace each level of detail in the plot with authentic and historical features that are anchored in the living reality and folklore of Eastern European Hasidism. It would seem that Peretz sought to offer us his view of the nature of the gap between Hasidism and Mitnagedism. If so, both protagonists of the tale, the Gaon of Brisk and the Rebbe of Biale, are nothing but archetypal models, representing Mitnagedism versus Hasidism in general. But if Peretz did wish to create a true connection between his fictional work and the attitude of his readers toward these two movements, one might ask whether the comparison is accurate and trustworthy. It appears to be no coincidence that Peretz specifically chose the image of the Gaon of Brisk as characteristic of the Mitnagedic version of Judaism. Due to the genius of Rabbi Joseph Baer Soloveitchik of Brisk (1820–92) and his son, Rabbi Hayyim Soloveitchik of Brisk (1853–1918), the Brisk method achieved great acclaim in the learned world of the Lithuanian yeshivot, successfully embodying the sharp analytic profundity that has become the hallmark of intellectual achievement in the Lithuanian style of Torah study. It seems that the choice of Brisk served Peretz well in his attempt to typify the Mitnagedic camp by its great emphasis on intellectual genius, dedication to study, and halakhic strictness.6 Why was the specific court of Biale chosen to serve as the archetypal representative of Hasidic ideology? It seems that Peretz was referring to Biale-Podlaska, a town near the Lithuanian city of Brisk.7 The proximity of these two sites is demonstrated in the tale itself, when the journey to Brisk of the storyteller, Shmaye the Melamed (along with the coachman and horses), on the first intermediate day of Sukkot, ends with Shmaye’s return

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to Biale with the Gaon of Brisk after only a week, on Hoshanah Rabbah, the seventh day of Sukkot. (The proximity of these sites grants the title ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ additional geographic meaning.) Elsewhere, Peretz has testified to the fact that the only Hasidic zaddik he ever met was indeed the Zaddik of Biale.8 But Peretz’s description of the actual zaddik was not particularly flattering and contradicts what is related in ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’; noteworthy is Peretz’s remark that ‘‘the Bialer’’ was not ‘‘a great learner’’ of the type that could properly qualify to serve as rabbi.9 It is possible that Peretz’s fictional image in ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ relied on a rival tradition, which depicted Biale as a Hasidic court of great learning.10 If there is any point in deducing the historical reality from a fictional work like ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ the credibility of the central character of this tale is questionable. Was Peretz being faithful to the truth in depicting the cold and detached nature of yeshiva learning as the chief source of the great divide between Hasidism and Mitnagedism? Was ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ accurate in presenting Hasidism as a movement born to address the spiritual needs of the masses, and in identifying the Hasidic ‘‘soul of Torah’’ with a sense of harmony and poetic connection with the natural world? Would a typical real-life Hasid also formulate such a sharp and sweeping principled attack against the very ethos of the traditional rabbinic world of learning? If we must decide which of the two central characters in ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ more faithfully represents the camp that he is meant to represent, the image of the Gaon of Brisk is undoubtedly the more authentic.11 As for the specific grievances attributed by Peretz to Reb Noah’ke of Biale, these do not sound like the positions taken by authentic Hasidism, as corroborated by Agnon’s remark, cited above. M. J. Berdyczewski, in his later period, after he had abandoned the neoromantic manner of writing about Hasidism, voiced skepticism regarding the authenticity of Hasidism in Peretz’s works in general, and ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ in particular: These are not conversations in the authentic language of the Hasidim themselves but rather reflect much more the views of the writer in response to the events described, which he does not know how to keep to himself . . . and lets in the aesthetics of his art in place of innocence and simplicity. One portion is retained, which is com-

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posed of fragments of Hasidism, but nine measures of other ingredients are introduced, which serve to disguise the gifts he brings in his hand. . . . It is not the Hasid who speaks but only Peretz. . . . The zaddik, while standing before his teacher, replies, ‘‘I could not breathe the air, my teacher. There was no breath of air for my soul.’’ But it was the Haskalah that sought air to breathe, not Hasidism. Hasidism sought life. And may I be estranged from all the poetry in the world if a zaddik, a Hasidic rebbe, would speak in such a manner before his teacher!12 Berdyczewski and Agnon were certainly correct in their allegations that the image of Hasidism in Peretz’s works in general, and especially in ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ was actually a misrepresentation of the original message of this movement.13 It is clear, however, that we are not dealing here with a factual mistake on the part of Peretz. As Peretz explicitly testified, he had encountered true Hasidism, as well as the Biale Rebbe himself, through firsthand experience. While a real Hasid would have been much closer to the traditional positions of the Mitnagedic Gaon of Brisk and, at the very least, would not have formulated his criticism regarding Torah study or halakhic formalism in such a principled and radical manner, Peretz deliberately took the attitudes of the Hasid and the nature of his criticism of Mitnagedism to an extreme. The question, of course, is why? Here, Shmuel Niger, one of Peretz’s greatest commentators, coined a successful slogan. As he put it, ‘‘Peretz has Peretzized the image of Hasidism’’—which is to say that Peretz sketched an image of Hasidism in accordance with his own ideological preferences.14 We should therefore go back to our original question and rephrase it in reverse: if Peretz was interested in giving voice to his own ideology, in the form of a radical attack against the suffocating aspects of the Mitnagedic world of learning, why did he choose to present it in Hasidic garb? Our query regarding this particular tale of Peretz can be extended to all his Hasidic writing, and indeed to a long line of additional writers, poets, and essayists of the same period. In the years between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, expressions of empathy with Hasidism and its legacy emerged as a new literary trend in the works of several modern Jewish writers and thinkers. On the threshold of the twentieth century, we come upon instances, one after another, of belletristic writings (I. L. Peretz and Yehuda Steinberg), historical and hist-

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oriosophical surveys (young Simeon Dubnow, Mordecai ben Yehezkel, Shmuel Aba Horodecky) and anthologies of adaptations or translations of selected Hasidic works, preceded by excited words of introduction that express personal identification with Hasidic values from a clearly modern perspective (M. J. Berdyczewski and Martin Buber). This literary trend appeared against the background of a contrary literary precedent in which modern Enlightenment writers deliberately perpetuated their own distorted and negative view of Hasidism.15 As a youngster, Peretz initially began writing about Hasidism in this vein, publishing antiHasidic satires. In 1875, he published an anti-Hasidic poem, ‘‘The Partnership’’ in Hashahar,16 which mocked the exaggerated enthusiasm of Hasidim during their prayers, their fondness for liquor, and the gullibility of their belief in the supernatural. After ten years of literary silence, Peretz returned to the literary podium still maintaining his negative attitude toward Hasidism. His story ‘‘The Kaddish’’ (1886) is laced with a mocking anti-Hasidic critique.17 Against the background of the dramatic clash between the stringent Mitnagedic gaon and his rebellious disciple in ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ an earlier work of Peretz, ‘‘The Kabbalists’’ (1891), deserves special notice. The affinity between the two works relates to the protagonists of the plot and to the contrasting ideological worlds that they represent. In ‘‘The Kabbalists,’’ Peretz already placed the image of a rosh yeshiva and his cherished student at the center of a plot in which the student eventually exceeds his master. This enabled Peretz, as a modernist author, to present his ideological criticism of the traditional worldview of the rabbi. As in his description of the uncompromising religious zealousness of the Gaon of Brisk in ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ Peretz focused in ‘‘The Kabbalists’’ on the negative outcome of extreme religious devotion in order to express his ironic view of tradition. Beneath the fac¸ade of a moral message urging religious dedication, Peretz strove to transmit a different message: the ascetic rosh yeshiva was actually starving his last student to death.18 In the Yiddish version of ‘‘The Kabbalists,’’ Peretz identified both the rabbi and the student as Hasidic kabbalists, of the Habad variety. In ‘‘The Kabbalists’’ of the early 1890s, Hasidism was an integral element in the decay of the old traditional shtetl; by the end of the decade, Peretz distinguished between two ‘‘mountains’’ and presented Hasidism as a rebellion against the traditional conventions of the Mitnagedic yeshiva world, bearing the type of fresh poetic promise that could appeal to an artistic modernist such

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as Peretz himself. How are we to explain this change in Peretz, who chose to abandon the conventional stereotypes of Enlightenment literature after initially adopting such tendencies himself? At the turn of the twentieth century, it became clear that Peretz was not the only writer to chart this new path. Peretz, Berdyczewski, Horodecky, and Buber all shared a strong national Jewish consciousness. As writers, they saw themselves as part of a contemporary educational trend calling for a literary and cultural awakening of Jewish identity and awareness. Their intended audience was first and foremost modern, and the nationalist motivation of the writers themselves is evidenced both explicitly and implicitly in their writings. These were writers and thinkers who were personally far removed from genuine identification with the Hasidic movement even if they knew it firsthand from childhood or were raised within its ranks. The words of praise and empathy heaped upon Hasidism were written by people who also wrote sharp, bitter criticisms against traditional Judaism as a whole, or against elements central and vital to its world. Their attraction to Hasidism was that of the outside observer and was not meant to advocate a return to the fold of the tradition in general or the Hasidic movement in particular on a practical level. So what was the point of these literary expressions of empathy, even longing, for Hasidism? One might suggest several converging factors prompting this new literary wave. A neoromantic approach to Hasidism went hand in hand with more general European literary trends in that period.19 Furthermore, most modernist writers and many of their readers were moved by simple nostalgia for the world of their parents and their traditional origins. Over and above these forces, however, I would argue that in the context of the national Jewish renaissance of the time, empathetic literary portrayals of Hasidism were also the product of ideological interest in appropriating this movement as a spiritual model and source of inspiration. It is no coincidence that ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ attributes ideological attitudes to the Hasidic Zaddik of Biale that meshed well with the personal ideology of the modern Jew. Horodecky was not necessarily the most profound, original, or sophisticated among the neo-Hasidic writers; on the contrary, one might contend that the opposite was true. Arguably, it is precisely for this reason that he was the one to reveal and transparently formulate the tendentious interests of this nostalgia. In his essay ‘‘Hasidism as It Is,’’ Horodecky wrote that even in a Zionist and liberated vision of the future, Hasidism would have a

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critical role, serving as the foundation for a new religious model.20 Hasidism was thus uprooted from its original setting, which served the interests of a closed inner circle and transplanted it in a new modernist and post-traditional context. What, exactly, was the role of Hasidism in this new context? As early as 1908, S. Y. Ish-Horovitz stated: ‘‘When a modern post-traditional Jew writes about the inner world of Hasidism, it is not only Hasidism that he is approaching from his external vantage point, but rather the old Jewish tradition as a whole.’’21 Such a literary involvement with the Hasidic world is therefore connected with an attempt to tackle the larger questions arising in this context: As a modern Jew, what is my personal attitude toward Jewish tradition at large? How, exactly, do I wish to form my identity as a Jew? Against the background of this personal quest, the literary appropriation of Hasidism should be understood as the attempt to posit a particular set of answers to these key questions. The purpose of the following discussion is to revisit neo-Hasidic writings afresh, in light of the new ideological context that I have described. Rather than trying to glean from them the original Hasidic existence that ostensibly stands at their center, we must focus on the contemporary interest in the background. How do these writings address how modern Jews can continue to maintain their personal Jewish identity and their connection with Jewish tradition in general? Such a reading leads us to understand the literary appropriation of Hasidism as no less an attempt to make a statement regarding modern Judaism than an attempt to accurately depict historical Hasidism. In adopting this new approach to understanding neo-Hasidic writing, the reading strategy I suggest is to focus on the specific qualities attributed to Hasidism by the writers involved. These stereotypical images should be understood as a circumspect literary method for confronting contemporary questions characterizing the identity crisis of the modern Jewish writers concerned. My methodological assumption is that the stereotype of the Hasid constructed by such authors is actually offered as an ideal Jewish model meant to serve the interests of Judaism in the modern age. This leads us to understand the ideological confrontation between the dry and rigid Torah of the Mitnagedic gaon and the Hasidic message of Reb Noah’ke of Biale in ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ in a modernist, neo-romanticized vein. Peretz’s interest in replacing what he regarded as an outmoded rabbinic form of Judaism with a friendlier, more attractive version suited to the

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broader horizons of modernity is camouflaged by presenting the latter as if it were the original Hasidic message. Listing and analyzing the characteristics of the image of the Hasid in neo-Hasidic literature will enable us to formulate the answers of these modern writers to the big questions at the center of the identity crisis in this era of Jewish nationalist revival at the turn of the twentieth century. For this purpose, we will be especially interested in simplistic, one-dimensional, exaggerated, and even totally specious descriptions that do not faithfully reflect the image of the real Hasid but that repeatedly occur at the core of various neo-Hasidic works. It is precisely such caricatures that reveal the interests of the modern writer and provide us the key to reconstructing the image of the ideal Jew as conceived by this general literary trend and offered to its modern readers. In ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ if we examine the manner in which Peretz sets up the stereotypical image of the Zaddik of Biale as a stark representative of Hasidism’s uniqueness, we are immediately struck by the fact that Peretz confronts the reader simultaneously with two images: that of the Hasid; and that of his mirror negative, the Mitnaged. If the Mitnaged is characterized in ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ (as in other works) by his extreme devotion to rabbinic tradition and its values, the Hasid turns out to be the opposite. In other words, the first point that Peretz makes, in offering his particular image of the Hasid, is that this image differs markedly from that of the typical rabbinic Jew. Peretz also indicates that active, ideological, and principled opposition toward the rival camp is not the exclusive preserve of the Mitnaged. The Hasid, too, is presented as a vigorous protagonist. His preference for Hasidism is an act of rebellion against the traditionalist rabbinic path of the Mitnagedic Jew. This point is made possible by neo-Hasidic compliance with the premise that Mitnagedism was indeed a faithful representation of rabbinic Judaism as a whole. To express his personal sympathy for the Hasidic cause, the neo-Hasidic author is prepared to go along with the Mitnagedic allegation that Hasidism is a deviation not only from the Mitnagedic version of Judaism but from the spirit and principles of the entire body of rabbinic tradition, the Talmud and halakhic Judaism. In the spirit of Agnon’s critique, one should at this point ask: Is this understanding of the nature of Hasidism an invention of Peretz, or was principled opposition to rabbinic Judaism indeed a major thrust of genuine Hasidim as well? In his book on the historical and literary image of the

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Gaon of Vilna, Immanuel Etkes shows how latter-day Hasidim and Orthodox harmonistic writers have attempted to blur the sharp differences between the Mitnagedim and nascent Hasidic opposition.22 When such writers nevertheless referred to that historical episode, they attempted to present it as an unfortunate error, a mere misunderstanding on the part of the Mitnagedim, who unjustly accused Hasidism of frightful allegations. Hasidic writers highlighted their movement’s love of peace and portrayed the dispute as persecution stemming exclusively from the Mitnagedim. In contrast to such tendencies of the internal Hasidic circle, modern neoHasidic writers stressed the opposite, sharply delineating the contrast between the Hasid and the Mitnaged and presenting it as a deep divide between two diametrically opposed views that simply cannot be bridged. It is not only the Mitnaged who questions the legitimacy of the Hasid; the latter is equally opposed in principle to the path of the Mitnaged. While the vast majority of other writers carefully avoided any expressions of disrespect for the Vilna Gaon, Horodecky chose to publish a provocative essay that revolves entirely—as does ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’—around a sharp contrast between the gaon and the Baal Shem Tov: the rabbinic, insular, forbidding image of the gaon as the unmistakable representative of the Mitnagedim, the men of books, emerges in striking opposition with the paternal humane image of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, who does not find his God in the synagogue or in the beit midrash and believes that the Shekhinah does not dwell among scholars or rabbis. The similarity between Horodecky’s ‘‘The Gra and the Besht’’ and Peretz’s ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ lies not only in their mutual attempt to draw an ideological comparison between a Mitnagedic gaon and a Hasidic rebbe but also in the specific characteristics ascribed to these two archetypal images.23 Another pervasive tendency of neo-Hasidic writing is to link Hasidism with the masses. Particular attention should be drawn to a neo-Hasidic suggestion that Hasidism, from its inception, strove to adapt the Torah to the spiritual needs and cultural capacities of the general public. Here, too, Hasidism is portrayed as antithetical to the elitism of the traditional rabbinic scholar, who stands aloof and remote from the community at large. In ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ Peretz chose to present the ideological clash between Hasidism and Mitnagedism as a class conflict between the gaon, the alienated representative of the intellectual rabbinic elite, and the paternal and popular image of the Rebbe from Biale, who attacks the Torah of

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the rabbis as unsuited to the needs of ordinary people. In Reb Noah’ke’s symbolic dream prior to his escape from the yeshiva, it is notable that a simple coachman transports him from the Mitnagedic heaven and its values to the alternative spiritual world of the Hasidim.24 Of all neo-Hasidic writings of his generation, Peretz’s stories appear to be unique in their emphasis upon this particular difference between the two movements: the conflict between Hasidism and Mitnagedism is portrayed as a socialist class struggle, with Hasidism representing the proletariat. In ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ Peretz chooses to present this social tension in scholarly rather than economic terms, contrasting the strong intellectual capacity of the erudite scholar with the limited literacy of the unlearned Jew, who is incapable of traditional talmudic study. As the specter of Bolshevik Communism began to overshadow Eastern Europe, the legitimacy of many Jewish writings was undermined, except for a few works that bore a decidedly socialist slant. At that time, debates arose regarding Peretz’s Hasidic tales. Are these tales an expression of a baseless romanticism that unacceptably clings to an outdated religious clericalism? Should not emphasis be placed instead on the socialist aspect of these Hasidic stories, which would appeal to the Communist reader? Below is a sample of such complaints: As much as we would like to lend a democratic interpretation to ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ and as much as we would like to believe that the Bialer Rebbe represents the common man, the lumberjack, the butcher, the craftsman, the fact is that the entire struggle between the Rebbe of Brisk and the Rebbe of Biale is purely a struggle between two clerical circles . . . and the workingman must acknowledge the profound reactionary nature of the Rebbe of Biale’s plans when he posits that ‘‘the Torah was given to the people of Israel because the Torah is the soul of Israel.’’ Anyone who fails to view the Torah in this manner must perceive all works of this nature as a defense of the Jewish religion, a defense of clericalism.25 From a Bolshevik perspective, the conscientious critic was correct on all counts. Favoring Hasidism, Peretz combined popular messages with religious spirituality, which was hardly compatible with antireligious materialism. Nevertheless, in ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ as in most of his Hasidic tales, Peretz has deliberately chosen to tell his story through the narrative

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of an unsophisticated Hasid, whose admiration of the rebbe is not based on any deep understanding of his teachings but rather on simple devotion and spiritual loyalty. The stereotypical image attributed to the Gaon of Brisk includes judgmentalism, fastidiousness, cold rationalism, and rigid halakhic formalism. This image appears in other neo-Hasidic writings, which portray the Mitnaged as the quintessential rabbinic Jew. In contrast, the Hasidic rebbe is described as being loving, warm, and compassionate. Any apprehension felt by the narrator-Hasid before facing the Gaon of Brisk is alleviated by the genial calm of the Rebbe of Biale, whose very name (Noah) reflects his amiable manner. The ‘‘ke’’ suffix attached to his name (Noah’ke) is a term of endearment. The narrator explicitly focuses on the differences in mentality and personality exhibited by the two protagonists. When first introduced to the solemn Gaon of Brisk, the narrator immediately compares him with the contrasting personality of the Hasidic rebbe: ‘‘Such eyes! Such a look! Such a voice! He was altogether different from anything I was used to. The Bialer Rebbe’s eyes shone with such kindness and such mildness . . . and his sweet voice—God in heaven!—it caught at your heart and caressed it so tenderly, so soothingly. . . . But the Brisker Rav was fear and trepidation’’ (‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ 191). For the rebbe, a warm and friendly attitude is not merely a matter of personality but also an ideology. People must be treated humanely, their sins forgiven. The formality and rigidity of the tradition must be avoided. A natural derivative of Hasidic compassion is the ability to discern between major and minor obligations of tradition. Attacking the gaon’s style of Torah study, the Hasidic rebbe describes it as ‘‘the body of Torah,’’ viewing his alternative rendition of Torah as its soul. The soul does not contribute new information to ‘‘the body of Torah’’ but rather diverts attention from its prosaic technicalities and focuses instead upon its internal spiritual message. The Hasid (or ideal Jew) progresses to a poetic, emotional plane that transcends the reality of everyday life. Hence it is not surprising that the Hasidic rebbe of ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ is described as a child constantly dreaming or caught up in profound thoughts. In the story’s final scene, Peretz takes great pains to underscore the impoverished state of the Hasidim, who dance in their tattered clothes under the open skies, near the meadows where the animals graze. The gaon is quick to perceive this lowly aspect of the Hasidic experience but is oblivious to its more sublime features. These are not evident in the earthly reality of the Hasidim but rather in their poetic ability to detach

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themselves from their meager surroundings and achieve a state of spiritual transcendence. For the mesmerized Hasid, even the fields dance and sing. The blades of grass ‘‘swing and sway in rapturous joy, embracing and kissing one another.’’ Peretz unmistakably refers here to the words of Reb Nahman of Bratslav, who spoke of ‘‘the song of the grass.’’26 The blindness of the Gaon of Brisk to the more elevated experiences of the dancing Hasidim in this scene relates to the famous Hasidic parable of the Baal Shem Tov recounted in Degel mahane Ephraim, a work written by his grandson, the Zaddik of Sadilikow: One musician would play an instrument with such exquisite sweetness that anyone who heard the music could not help but dance. People who approached to hear the musician play derived even greater joy from the music and would dance to the point of ecstasy. One deaf man who could only witness the people dancing in rapture, without actually hearing the music, approached and believed them to be mad. He whispered to himself: ‘‘How does this add to the festivities?’’ Had he been able to hear and grasp the enormity of the pleasure and the beauty of the instrument’s sound, he, too, would have begun dancing.27 Like the original parable that describes the receiving of the Torah at Sinai, Peretz links his allegory to Simhat Torah. Just as the Hasidic original focused upon the cryptic verse ‘‘And the entire nation saw the sounds,’’ Peretz speculates regarding the Mitnagedic gaon: How does one perceive or ‘‘see’’ the Hasidic Torah? The Hasidic source refers to a ‘‘great joy.’’ Peretz, too, stresses the ‘‘sweetness’’ that characterizes the sublime nature of the special event. Although Degel mahane Ephraim makes no specific reference to the rift between Mitnagedim and Hasidim, Peretz appears not to have been the first to use this parable to convey its nature. Derogatory remarks regarding the Hasidic practice of dancing and singing during prayers did figure prominently in early written curses and bans instituted by the Mitnagedim against the new sect.28 In keeping with this, here we see a Hasidic response to these accusations: the Mitnaged who accuses Hasidim of insanity is portrayed in this parable as a deaf person, oblivious to the true spiritual and metaphysical meaning of the Hasidic dancing before him. The neo-Hasidic portrayal of Hasidism as differentiating between the

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concept of ‘‘Torah’’ as a body of data and the spiritualized ‘‘voices’’ of Torah is grounded in original Hasidic thought. Several Hasidic thinkers equated this existential experience of Torah (as opposed to cognitive activity) with its ‘‘soul.’’29 This typical neo-Hasidic emphasis strives to present Hasidism as the embodiment of feeling, holding purity of heart and the emotional sphere in the highest esteem, even when this collides with traditional values of intellectual achievement in the study of Torah, or even with strict adherence to halakhah. Horodecky’s simplistic formulation becomes evident in his attempt to sharply differentiate between ‘‘Judaism of the mind,’’ represented by the rabbinic Jew, and ‘‘Judaism of the heart,’’ as exemplified in Hasidism30 —as if these stand for two contradictory strains of Judaism throughout the generations. Exaggerated contrast between the Mitnaged and the Hasid reappears in the neo-Hasidic reworking of the conventional and widespread distinction of the maskilim between ‘‘the book’’ and ‘‘life’’ itself. In contrast with negative perceptions of the rabbinic Jew as immersed in the book, the Hasid is presented as being directly involved with life, as evident in his openness to the people around him, in his joie de vivre, in his willingness to participate in mundane pleasures, and in his direct affinity with nature. The Rebbe of Biale locates the authentic ‘‘soul of Torah’’ among the Hasidim dancing in fields on the outskirts of town, in the spiritual joy and brotherhood that envelops them during Simhat Torah. Spiritual as these experiences may be, they are directly associated with life and celebrate its charm. The antithesis is personified by the stereotypical Mitnaged, who confines life to the study of holy texts. Unlike the Hasidim, who directly absorb the splendor of nature and the beauty of their harmonious dance, the Gaon of Brisk is busy translating the scene into dry halakhic (or legalistic) terms. The golden rays of the sun that flit over the clothes of the dancing Hasidim fail to arouse any poetic feelings in his heart. Instead, these simply remind him that the time for the Mincha prayer has arrived. Reb Noah’ke openly declares that it is at this point that the Hasid entertains reservations regarding rabbinic Judaism. Reb Noah’ke is unwilling to accept the detachment of Torah from life.31 A distinction between existential religious values and the formal influence of halakhah is perceptible in the conclusion of ‘‘Between Two Mountains.’’ The Mitnagedic gaon demonstrates his adherence to formal halakhah in his concern for conducting the Mincha prayer on time. In contrast, Peretz describes the Hasidim as being totally absorbed in a sponta-

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neous spiritual experience that, while powerful and personal, is not bound by any formal halakhic prescription. Here, Peretz clearly alludes to a specific Mitnagedic criticism of the classic Hasidic lack of respect for halakhic requirements regarding fixed times of prayer, relying on authentic trends in Hasidic history, at least during its early stages. Despite this historical basis, Peretz avoids portraying Hasidism as undermining the very ‘‘yoke of the halakhah’’ and its requisite authority. ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ opens with a careful description of Reb Noah’ke’s precise complaint against the theoretical study of rabbinic halakhah: ‘‘When X or Y petitions for a ruling, or a servant comes to ask a question, or a woman comes with a problem, it is then that the Scripture comes alive, bursting into life and revealing its authority in the world. Without these questions, the Torah—that is, the revealed part of the Law—is barren’’ (‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ 184). Peretz is careful not to grant any basis for delegitimizing Hasidism by depicting the movement as a heretic rebellion against the authority of halakhah and its obligatory nature. Several neo-Hasidic works seem to contain no attempt to remove Hasidism from its classical traditional context but rather portray Hasidism as a faithful, authentic, and legitimate movement in traditional Judaism. Many neo-Hasidic writers were not interested in transforming the classical spiritual character of Hasidism but wished to characterize the Hasidic revolution against the rabbinic Judaism of their era as a movement bent on elevating Jewish traditional practice to a higher spiritual and religious plane. Peretz’s ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ can serve as a prime example. Reb Noah’ke of Biale presents his rebellion against what he has hitherto been taught as representing the true soul of the Torah. The literary convention of the maskilim depicts Enlightenment criticism of the traditional world as a reflection of the struggle between a realistic and secular life, on the one hand, and a way of life dominated by the holy traditional books, on the other. In contrast, neo-Hasidic literature portrays the rebellion against the rabbinic ethos as motivated by a more profound religious sensibility. Despite literary efforts to radicalize the divide between traditional stances of ancient rabbinic Judaism and the boldness and originality of the new Hasidic message, neo-Hasidism emphasizes the fundamental adherence of Hasidism to continuity of the tradition from generation to generation. This is a more accurate expression of contrasting aspects in the selfimage of neo-Hasidism as a renaissance movement. Here, too, Peretz distinguishes himself from other writers in his extreme care not to push the

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envelope. In ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ he includes statements by Reb Noah’ke that imply not only an ideological attack on the rabbinic way but also Hasidic recognition and respect for the glory of Torah of the Mitnagedic Gaon of Brisk. The great emphasis placed upon a sharp and principled distinction between the Hasid and the rabbinic Jew suggests that the choice to write about Hasidism indicates a positive attitude toward Jewish tradition on the part of neo-Hasidic writers; but it also reflects their reservations regarding the negative elements that they find in the old world of tradition—those values and traits embodied by the image and values of the Mitnaged. The entire legacy of Jewish tradition appears in a literary neo-Hasidic recollection in terms of a sharp binary distinction: a beloved tradition, on the one hand, and a hated tradition, on the other. The dual image of Mitnaged versus Hasid is designed to resolve the dissonance that tradition poses for the modern Jew and to provide him with a simplistic prescription for construction of his own stance toward this legacy. Instead of accepting a single composite of Judaism that combines aspects of light and darkness in one problematic mix, he is now presented with ‘‘two strains of Judaism,’’ one entirely positive (the Hasidic version) and the other entirely negative (the halakhic-rabbinic tradition). The contemporary appeal of this stereotypical division is clear: defecting from the inner world of tradition and shedding the yoke of mitzvot and halakhah no longer pose a threat to one’s Jewish identity; the rebellion is now limited to the negative aspects of Judaism, which relate to its rabbinic version. Introducing the Hasidic rendition of Judaism inspires the modern Jew to develop alternative means for connecting with tradition. Reb Noah’ke of Biale is not the only one who runs away from the yeshiva of Brisk. The real runaway hiding behind the figure of Reb Noah’ke is the modern Jew. The reconstructed memory of Hasidism enables the new Jew to don a Hasidic fur cap (shtreimel) and sidelocks when registering his own claims and complaints against the halakhah and the Talmud. In the final scene of ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ the modern dissenter of the early twentieth century discovers that, although he might have deserted the ‘‘body of Torah,’’ he can still see himself as maintaining the essence of Judaism, as he is still faithful to the Torah’s inner soul. I stated earlier that classic neo-Hasidism does not represent the simple desire of the repentant to return to the fold. On the contrary, it represents the attempt to induce tradition itself to return to the fold, as it were, identi-

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fying elements within tradition that can counteract current feelings of alienation on the part of the post-traditional Jew. Accordingly, one can understand the emphasis on images that reveal some affinity between the Hasid and the modern Jew who is remote from the world of Torah. The Hasid is portrayed as a warm and friendly person who maintains a positive approach toward real life and is ready to forgive the masses for their laxity in adhering to the intricate, minute details of ritual. In this contemporary context, Peretz’s literary indecision regarding the final lines of ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ is striking: Will the traditional Jew admit that his son, the modernist, nonetheless continues Jewish tradition, despite his transformation and departure from the world of beliefs of his ancestors? Is there sufficient Jewish feeling or enough of the ephemeral ‘‘soul of Torah’’ buried deep within his Jewish psyche? Will even the Gaon of Brisk admit that the student who runs away and rebels against him and his path is nonetheless worthy of Jewish legitimacy? The historical reality of Mitnagedic-Hasidic relations at the end of the nineteenth century enabled Peretz to carefully consider two plot endings. In the original version, Peretz chose a pessimistic ending: the Mitnagedic halakhic giant refused to be seduced by the charm of Hasidic innovation, stubbornly adhering to his initial opposition.32 Peretz’s picture of the Gaon of Vilna may possibly have been an actual personification of this image, but, of course, there were others like him even later in the nineteenth century. In the second, later, version, Peretz chose a slightly more optimistic ending, and this one also included references to actual developments in the later stages of Mitnagedic-Hasidic relations; although the Gaon of Brisk remains unconvinced and does not become a Hasid, he no longer harasses them.33 Given the procession of distorted caricatures throughout this tale, this may be the first faithful description not necessarily of Hasidism but of the turmoil in the soul of the modern Jew struggling between his attachment to Jewish tradition and his new, modern worldview. Peretz rebelled against the hallowed tradition and suggested an alternative poetic model of Jewish identity. Tradition itself did not change for Peretz. However, deep within his soul, it ceased to haunt him and no longer threatened his peace of mind. Did such a literary memory of Hasidism similarly assist others wrestling with tradition? Does the outcome of the renewed encounter between the gaon and the Hasidic rebbe tell us something about the outcome of the encounter between Peretz and his readers and the traditional way of life?

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Did the authoritative shadow of rabbinic tradition cease to haunt the new Jew from this point on? Assisted by the literary memory of Hasidism, the painful rift between tradition and modernity remained, but a way was found to cloak tradition in the garb of modern romanticism and adapt the Torah, as Reb Noah’ke demanded, to the needs of Jews who, like Peretz, were now far removed from the religious atmosphere of the traditional beit midrash. Notes My main conclusions in this article are discussed in detail in my ‘‘A Love/Hate Relationship with Tradition: Neo-Hasidic Writing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’’ (Hebrew) (Ph.D. diss., Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2004). 1. Shmuel Niger, I. L. Peretz and His Writing (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv, 1961), 141–50; and Yehuda Friedlander, Existence and Experience in the Hebrew Writings of I. L. Peretz (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv, 1974). 2. David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 115–25. Roskies is more accurate than his predecessors in viewing Peretz’s Hasidic writings against the background and parallels of other neo-Hasidic writers such as young Simeon Dubnow and Micha Josef Berdyczewski (115). 3. I. L. Peretz, ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ in The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. Ruth Wisse (New Haven, Conn., 2002), 184–95. ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ originally appeared in a Yiddish version in Der Yud 2/40–41 (1900): 16–20, which was reprinted in his anthology Hasidish (Vilna, 1903), 168–84, and also in his collected Yiddish works, 4:103–7. The Hebrew version was published in Ketavim (Warsaw, 1901), sec. 4, bk. 10, 163–75, and reprinted in his collected works, Kol kitvei I. L. Peretz (Tel Aviv, 1962), 2:11–24. 4. S. Y. Agnon, From Myself to Myself (Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1976), 262. 5. The insertion of this dramatic scene specifically against the backdrop of Simhat Torah should be interpreted as being connected with the occasion of its first appearance, in the Simhat Torah volume of Der Yud (1900), as stated in the subtitle of the tale. Nonetheless, Peretz cleverly enlisted the holiday to relay the message of the tale, for on Simhat Torah, the Hasidim in the final scene manifested the ‘‘soul of Torah,’’ as the rebbe explicitly explains in the tale itself. 6. See Moshe Krone, Morai verabotai ahai vere’ai: Pirkei zikhronot (Tel Aviv, 1987), 342, who writes that in Warsaw in the first decades of the twentieth century, Brisk was considered ‘‘the closest symbol and expression of the world of the Gra [the Gaon of Vilna] and the Mitnagedic way.’’ However, Krone wrote this remark after ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ had already become well known and possibly had its own share in forming this image of Brisk. Avraham Chani (albaruthenia.by.ru/art/eng/brisk.htm) thinks that when Peretz wrote about the Gaon of Brisk, he was referring to Reb Hayyim of Brisk. Although we may wish to accept this assumption, there is good reason

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to reject Chani’s statement that the dispute between Reb Hayyim of Brisk and the Rebbe of Biale was a ‘‘famous fact’’ based on historical reality. It seems to me that this ‘‘fact’’ was famous only in Peretz’s fictional tale. 7. See Tzvi Ginat (Grynberg), ‘‘Rabbinical Judges and Torah Sages,’’ in Brest Lit(owsk), The Encyclopaedia of the Jewish Diaspora (Belarus), ed. E. Steinman, vol. 2. Hebrew edition: Brisk de-Lita: Encyclopedia shel galuyot (Jerusalem, 1958). English Internet edition: http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Brest2/Brest2.html噛TOC407. 8. I. L. Peretz, ‘‘A Letter to Zinberg’’ (Hebrew), in Kol kitvei, 10:282. His actual encounter with the Rebbe of Biale occurred during a survey trip that Peretz had conducted in the Tomaszow region in 1890, a decade before the publication of ‘‘Between Two Mountains.’’ 9. I. L. Peretz, ‘‘Shtet und Shtetlech,’’ Der Yud, June 10, 1902. There is nonetheless one similarity to the literary Biale in ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’: the physical description of the court of Biale, located in the middle of a beautiful garden. 10. Regarding the reputation of the Hasidic court in Biale as being ‘‘scholarly,’’ cf. Meir Eydelbaum, ‘‘History of Biale Hasidism,’’ Sinai 63 (1968). Eydelbaum provides an additional detail: the court was criticized for its massive collection of money from the Hasidim and the use of this money by the zaddik’s family for private purposes. The Rebbe of Biale was forced to issue an ‘‘open letter’’ to his followers that justified the court’s management of finances and detailed where these sums were spent. In ‘‘Between Two Mountains,’’ Peretz also inserts words of apology regarding the Bialer’s custom of taking money from those who came to visit him. 11. Nonetheless, Getzl Kressel is indisputably correct in questioning the credibility of the literary image of the Gaon of Brisk in ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ as a faithful archetype reflecting a real Mitnaged and his typical character (Getzl Kressel, Lexicon of Hebrew Literature [1967], 2:698). Also see S. Y. Ish-Horovitz on the emotive side in the Mitnagedic mentality, in response to this neo-Hasidic allegation regarding the dichotomy between Hasidic emotionality and tenderness, on the one hand, and the Mitnagedic rationality, coldness, and apathy, on the other. S. Y. Ish-Horovitz, ‘‘Hasidism and Haskalah,’’ in Me’ayin Ule’an (Berlin, 1914), 181–264. 12. M. J. Berdyczewski, ‘‘Hasidism,’’ Bisdeh sefer, 3: Divrei bikoret, ma’amarim 1 (Tel Aviv, 1936). Cf. Joseph Hayyim Brenner, ‘‘I. L. Peretz: Aharei mitato,’’ in Kol kitvei, 105. 13. For more on the extent of the distortion of facts and the distortion of the image of historical Hasidism in various neo-Hasidic writings, cf. Neal Rose, ‘‘The Principles of Selectivity and Distortion in the Early Hasidic Writings of Martin Buber,’’ thesis, Hebrew Union College, 1975; Stanley L. Nash, In Search of Hebraism: Shai Hurwitz and His Polemics in the Hebrew Press (Leiden, 1980); Steven T. Katz, ‘‘Buber’s Misuse of Hasidic Sources,’’ in idem, Post-Holocaust Dialogues (New York, 1983); Robert M. Seltzer, ‘‘The Secular Appropriation of Hasidism by an East European Jewish Intellectual: Dubnow, Renan, and the Besht,’’ Polin 1 (1986): 151–62; C. David Jacobson, Modern Midrash: The Retelling of Traditional Jewish Narratives by Twentieth-Century

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Hebrew Writers (Albany, N.Y., 1987); Joseph Dan, ‘‘A Bow to Frumkinian Hasidism,’’ Modern Judaism 11 (1991): 175–93; Roskies, A Bridge of Longing; and idem, ‘‘Rabbis, Rebbes, and Other Humanists: The Search for a Usable Past in Modern Yiddish Literature,’’ Studies in Contemporary Jewry 12 (1996): 55–77. 14. Niger, I. L. Peretz and His Writing, 141. Besides the radical expression attributed to the Hasidic criticism against rabbinic scholastics, we can occasionally detect Peretz’s maskilic intervention even in minor details in the tale, e.g., when the rebbe says, ‘‘Anything to help the woman in her labor, a charm, a coin, a talisman . . . without faith, such things can do harm.’’ 15. For more on the attitude toward Hasidism in the literature of Haskalah, cf. Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn (Cleveland, 1957); David Patterson, ‘‘The Portrait of Hasidism in the Nineteenth-Century Hebrew Novel,’’ Journal of Semitic Studies 5/4 (1960): 359–77; idem, A Phoenix in Fetters (Savage, Md., 1988), 66–78; S. Pinsker, ‘‘Mendele Mocher Seforim: Hasidic Tradition and the Individual Artist,’’ MLQ 30 (1969): 234–47; Eisig Silberschlag, ‘‘Interpretations and Reinterpretations of Hasidism in Hebrew Literature,’’ Anagogic Qualities of Literature, ed. Joseph P. Sterlk, Yearbook of Comparative Criticism 4 (1971): 218–58; Yehuda Friedlander, ‘‘Hasidism as the Image of Demonism: The Satiric Writings of Judah Leib Mises,’’ in From Ancient Israel to Modern Judaism, 4 vols., ed. Jacob Neusner, Ernset S. Frerichs, and Nahum M. Sarna (Atlanta,1989), 3:159–77; Israel Bartal, ‘‘The Imprint of Haskalah Literature on the Historiography of Hasidism,’’ Hasidism Reappraised (1996): 376–88. 16. I. L. Peretz, ‘‘The Partnership,’’ Hashahar 5 (1874/75): 551–52. Lachover wrote that this poem was the first of all Peretz’s publications. Fischel Lachover, History of Modern Hebrew Literature (Hebrew), 3 (sec. 2):45. 17. I. L. Peretz, ‘‘The Kaddish,’’ in Kol kitvei, vol. 4: Shlom bayit, A, 51–55. 18. Idem, ‘‘Kabbalists,’’ in The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. Wisse, 152–54; Yeshaya Rabinowitz, Yetser veyetsira (Jerusalem, 1952), 213–14; Ziv Fridan, ‘‘Parody and Hagiography: Alleged Hasidic Stories of I. L. Peretz’’ (Hebrew), Huliot 7 (2002): 47ff.; and Haim Katilinski, ‘‘Der inyan negina bye Peretzn,’’ Yiddishe Kultur 3–4 (1945): 118–20. 19. On the influence of literary fashion on the neo-Hasidic writing of young Buber, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, ‘‘Fin-de-Sie`cle Orientalism: The Ostjuden and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self-Affirmation,’’ in idem, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit, 1991), 77–132. On the influence of contemporary literary fashions on the neo-Hasidic writings of Berdyczewski, Peretz, and others, see Hamutal Bar-Yosef’s various works: ‘‘Berdyczewski in Light of Decadence in Hebrew and European Literature,’’ Proceedings of the Eleventh World Congress of Jewish Studies, Division C, 3 (1994): 114–20; Decadent Trends in Hebrew Literature: Bialik, Berdyczewski, Brenner (Hebrew) (Beersheva, 1997); ‘‘Romanticism and Decadence in the Literature of Hebrew Revival,’’ Jerusalem Research in Hebrew Literature 13 (1992): 171–210; Symbolism in Modern Poetry (Tel Aviv, 2000); and ‘‘Mysticism in Modern Hebrew Literature: Foreword,’’ Kabbalah 11 (2004): 369–99. See also Ortsion Bartana, Tlushim ve Halutzim: Formation of the Neo-Romantic Trend in Hebrew Literature (Jerusalem,

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1983); and Avraham Novershtern, ‘‘Literature and Life: The Growth of the New Yiddish Literature,’’ in Le’an: New Streams in Eastern European Jewry (Tel Aviv, 2000). 20. S. A. Horodecky, ‘‘Hasidism as It Is,’’ Hasidism and Hasidim 4 (1951): 117–29. 21. Ish-Horovitz, ‘‘Hasidism and Haskalah,’’ Me’ayin uLean (Berlin, 1914): 200, 224. 22. Immanuel Etkes, The Gaon of Vilna: The Man and His Image (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 96–150. 23. S. A. Horodecky, ‘‘The Gra and the Baal Shem Tov’’ (Hebrew), Hashilo’ah 17 (1907): 348–56. Also see idem, ‘‘Rabbanut vehasidut,’’ Hasidism and Hasidim 4 (1951): 35–53. 24. The description in the dream seems to indicate Hasidism’s relation to the simple man of the lower class in the Jewish community and also a biblical association of the image and dress of Elijah (2 Kings 1), the revolutionary and brave prophet who rebels against the ruling establishment. Indeed, as Orinovski states, it is apparent in ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ that Peretz combined several legends from the early days of Hasidism and its battle with Mitnagedism. These include a typical legend about the prophet Elijah who reveals himself in the image of a coach owner and orders to prepare for exile; the familiar motifs of a Mitnagedic mother who needs the blessing of the Hasidic rebbe; and the zaddikim’s curse on the Mitnagedic gaon, which ultimately cannot harm him but afflicts his offspring instead. Added to this should be the allusion (at the end of the tale) to the specific historical dispute between Hasidim and Mitnagedim regarding the Hasidic disregard for the fixed times of prayers. See Aharon Ben-Or (Orinovski), History of Hebrew Literature in Our Generation (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv, 1955), 2:116–18. 25. M. Olgin, in Morgen Freiheit, March 4, 1935, quoted in Niger, I. L. Peretz and His Writing, 139–40. For more on the socialists’ attitude toward Peretz’s stories and Hasidic tales, see Ruth Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle, 1991), 51–52; and Anna Shternshis, ‘‘Use of Hasidic Tales in Soviet Propaganda,’’ paper presented at conference on Hasidism at Queens University, Kingston, Canada, October 17, 2004. 26. R. Nahman of Bratslav, Likutei moharan, part 2, Torah 63. 27. Degel mahane Ephraim, Yitro, on the verse ‘‘And the entire nation saw the sounds’’ (Exod. 20:15). 28. See, for example, the description of the Hasidim in a copy of the excommunication of Vilna, as it was found in the archives of ‘‘Kehila Naah ve Hasuda Kehilat Kodesh Brisk D’lita’’: ‘‘A cult of suspicious people associated with one another as a member of a group, with voices as torches . . . all their days as holidays, purifying and sanctifying in the gardens . . . revealing different voices,’’ in Mordecai Wilensky, Hasidim and Mitnagedim (Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1970), 1:58–61. 29. Such a conceptual direction was particularly apparent in the Hasidic branches affiliated with Pshische-Kotzk-Izbicza—for example, in the emphatic distinction between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, with the Oral Torah being interpreted

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in new, open, and especially broad terms. Cf. R. Judah Aryeh Leib Alter, Sefat emet, Dvarim 5:4, on ‘‘Panim be panim diber hashem imhem’’; R. Zadok haCohen miLublin, Pri-Zaddik, Bamidbar, for Shavuot, B (on the midrash on sleeping during the night of Shavuot). But even outside the special world of Pshische, Hasidim often identify the special message of Hasidism not in the sphere of ideas that contain new data but on the spiritual plane of passion, taste, or excitement. 30. S. A. Horodecky, ‘‘Intellect and Emotion in the History of Judaism,’’ in idem, Judaism of the Intellect and Judaism of Emotion (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv, 1947), 13–36. The very attempt to make an ideological distinction between ‘‘two versions of Judaism’’ also appears in young Martin Buber (e.g., in his ‘‘Judaism and Humanity,’’ in Te’uda veyi’ud [Jerusalem, 1963], 1:30–37; and idem, ‘‘Judaism and Humanism,’’ in idem, The Jew and His Judaism: Collected Essays and Speeches [Gerlingen, 1993]: 25ff.). In contrast, Peretz’s essays emphasized the common Jewish elements of various streams in Judaism, including Hasidism and rabbinic Judaism. Cf. I. L. Peretz, ‘‘Paths That Lead Away from Jewishness,’’ in Kol kitvei, vol. 8, ch. 2: Milestones, 285–88; and idem, ‘‘What Is Lacking in Our Literature,’’ ch. 5, ibid., 280–81. 31. Shmuel Niger commented on this point: ‘‘It is as if the zaddik of Biale read ‘Religion and Life’ of the maskil Reuven Asher Broides!’’ (Niger, I. L. Peretz and His Writing, 142). 32. This ending features in the original Yiddish and also in the first Hebrew version of the story: I. L. Peretz, Ketavim (Warsaw, 1901(, vol. 4, bk. 10. This Hebrew version was also preserved in several later editions of Peretz’s collected writings: Kol kitvei (Tel Aviv, 1962 and 1966), 24. 33. This ending appears, for example, in Peretz, Ale verk (Warsaw/New York, n.d.), vol. 5: Hasidish, 215, or the New York, 1920 ed., 6:23, or the Kleckina ed. (Vilna, 1921), 5:184, as well as in other later Hebrew editions: Hasidut (Tel Aviv, 1953), 25, or Kitvei (Tel Aviv, 1960), 61.

CHAPTER 6

Neither Here nor There: The Critique of Ideological Progress in Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke Stories Marc Caplan

At the center of Sholem Aleichem’s voluminous and enduringly popular creativity stands his semi-mythical, semi-satirical shtetl, Kasrilevke. Although contemporary critical scrutiny has focused primarily on canonical works such as the Tevye monologues, the Menakhem-Mendl letters, and the adventures of Motl the Cantor Peyse’s son, the particular typology and topography of Sholem Aleichem’s central fictional locus has received comparatively little attention.1 More generally, most modern commentators have concentrated on Sholem Aleichem’s most dynamic narratives, those works that dramatize a process of mobility and transformation to illustrate the momentum away from the shtetl and into the modern metropolis, whereas the Kasrilevke stories reiterate exhaustively, often to considerable comic effect, the essentially immobile, atemporal aspects of small-town Jewish life. This discussion, by contrast, will consider the Kasrilevke stories as a genre within the Sholem Aleichem canon, comparable to, but distinct from, such series as the monologues, the narratives involving Tevye or Menakhem-Mendl, the novels, or his many stories set in childhood. What emerges from this analysis is a location, Kasrilevke, around which all of Sholem Aleichem’s better-known and more peripatetic narratives revolve, but also a negative presence, a refutation of the dynamism that characterizes Jewish modernity, and Sholem Aleichem’s own ideological convictions. In these stories, among others, Sholem Aleichem presents an inverted

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ideological critique of the political ferment of early twentieth-century Eastern European life, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. A conceptualization of space in the shtetl thus becomes essential to the poetics of this critique because precisely the control of space—territory—is the central preoccupation of the ideologies to which these stories obliquely and subversively respond. Intimately connected to the problem of space, in these stories as elsewhere in Yiddish literature, is the problem of temporality, the means by which time is inhabited culturally and historically; the Kasrilevke stories underscore more acutely than any other genre within Sholem Aleichem’s work the absence of a unified temporality in the Eastern European Jewish culture of his day—the lack of historical synchronicity between Jews and non-Jews as well as among traditional and modern Jews.2 Out of the absence of a unified temporality, Kasrilevke emerges, like other narrative spaces had for previous Yiddish authors, as a mythical shtetl; yet here the notion of the shtetl as myth, which suggests a nonlinear and therefore antimodern conceptualization of time, serves to anticipate the appropriation of myth undertaken by modernism as a critique of bourgeois ideals of progress.3 By way of introduction, one can begin an investigation of Kasrilevke in comparison with analogously imaginary locales in contemporaneous Yiddish fiction. In 1895, for example, I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) published ‘‘Di toyte shtot’’ (The dead town), a story structured essentially as a monologue told by a traditional Jew to an increasingly bewildered modern narrator. In referring to his home as a ‘‘dead town,’’ the traditional speaker does not evoke a specific, geographically situated shtetl but rather a ‘‘no-place,’’ an absence on the map of the Pale of Settlement. As he tells the narrator, ‘‘Although the other nations of the world don’t know about it, and haven’t yet given it a gentile name, it’s a Jewish, a real Jewish city! . . . You’ve studied geography and believe that everything is written down on a map, but that’s all heresy! We Jews live without geography!’’4 At the beginning of the exchange, the narrator guesses that the traditional Jew is describing Tsiakhnovke, a town that he has ostensibly visited.5 The reader, however, understands before the narrator that the traditional Jew is not speaking of a physical location but about a metaphysical space: the ‘‘dead town’’ is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The notion of the shtetl as a deterritorialized space seldom recurs in Peretz’s later stories—which often mythologize Jewish life in real towns such as Chelm, Nemirov, and Biale,

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and thus map, if only symbolically, a territory for Polish Jewry—but it is characteristic of Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke stories. The first story to consider on this Kasrilevke itinerary—and rest assured that the Kasrilevke ‘‘genre’’ consists of dozens of works, far too many to be discussed here—is the 1901 narrative ‘‘Di shtot fun di kleyne mentshelekh’’ (The city of the little people).6 Sholem Aleichem begins this extended typological description by writing, ‘‘The city of the little people to which I will introduce you, gentle reader, finds itself in the middle of the blessed ‘Pale’ in which Jews have been settled, one on top of another, like herring in a barrel, putting them on notice that they should be fruitful and multiply— and the name of this famous city is Kasrilevke’’ (3:9). Despite the conventionally ironic designation of Kasrilevke as a shtot (city or large town) rather than a shtetl (small town),7 Sholem Aleichem suggests its prototypical character by locating it ‘‘in the middle of the Pale of Settlement’’ and ascribes to it an ostensibly divine provenance to ‘‘be fruitful and multiply.’’ At the same time, however, he conveys the dehumanizing oppression of shtetl life as a consequence of the man-made decree confining Jews to the overpopulated Western corridor of the Russian empire by equating Jews with fish in a barrel or, more tellingly, corpses in a graveyard. Thus the author further describes Kasrilevke in this story by writing, ‘‘You’ll want to know, of course, what Kasrilevke looks like. Beautiful like gold! . . . From a distance, the city looks like . . . a sunflower, full with seeds, or a cutting board covered with noodles. . . . The city stands on a hill . . . and many houses sit under the hill, one on top of the other, like graves in an old cemetery, like old, black, sunken gravestones’’ (3:14). Dan Miron writes of this passage, ‘‘Sholem Aleichem says that Kasrilevke . . . seen from a distance, looks like a Jewish cemetery—its houses, weather-beaten and squeezed up against one another, resemble blackened tombstones. But then, he goes on to say, it also looks like a large sunflower, chock-full of ripe, well-dried, black seeds. Thus, the author pits the deathlike visage of the town against a symbol of fecundity, nutrition, growth, and plenitude.’’8 Miron then connects the image of the Kasrilevke cemetery with the Kasrilevke mikveh, two institutions that encapsulate Jewish space as a cycle of birth, death, and renewal: synecdoches of an organic, even idyllic, landscape. For the purposes of his general typology, Miron’s reading is insightful, but upon reconsidering this particular citation, it is apparent that he has misread Kasrilevke’s stasis as circularity; his reading is, in fact, over-mythologized. For,

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rather than leading from the static imagery of death to the regenerating metaphor of the sunflower, the passage suggests the opposite of what he contends—what from a distance resembles a sunflower on closer inspection comes more definitively to resemble a graveyard. This metaphor becomes literal at the end of the story, when Sholem Aleichem states, ‘‘Most of all, the little people of Kasrilevke take pride in their old cemetery. This old cemetery of theirs, even though it’s already overgrown with grass and bushes and is almost without a single unbroken tombstone, is nonetheless for them a jewel, a thing of beauty, a treasure, and they cherish it like the apple of their eye. . . . This ‘holy ground’ is the only real plot of earth that truly belongs to them’’ (3:16). Readers of Yiddish literature are, of course, prepared to see the shtetl as a moribund social space for which any number of lachrymose metonymies—of disease, superstition, lethargy, waste, mud, poverty, etc—can serve as illustrations. Certainly, in subsequent Kasrilevke stories, Sholem Aleichem makes clear that this is not his only intention in depicting the shtetl, and already in this story there is ample evidence that Kasrilevke signifies something new not only for the author but for Yiddish literature generally. In contrasting Kasrilevke, conventionally, with ‘‘the outside world,’’ the author writes, ‘‘Kasrilevke doesn’t yet know anything about building canals, plumbing, electricity, or other such luxury items; but who cares? ‘You’re going to die, you know, wherever you go, and you can only die once, and you’re going to be buried in one grave and patted down, you know, with your own shovel!’ ’’ (3:16). The modern world is indistinguishable from Kasrilevke insofar as the universality of death is concerned. More to the point, the evocation of the modern world, which is a general feature of the Kasrilevke stories, suggests that the real target of these stories is not so much traditional Jewish life, which, already in 1901, was becoming less and less of a hegemonic presence in the Pale of Settlement, as the emerging modern ideologies and social trends that both demanded and generated the impetus for social reform, and seemingly presumed to deny the ultimate truth represented by the Kasrilevke cemetery. Considered provisionally, because Sholem Aleichem’s work is too voluminous and diffuse to have been systematically collected, the Kasrilevke genre, as defined here, is a development of the author’s later career—an exclusively twentieth-century phenomenon.9 As such, its primary function is not to satirize the tradition but to offer an inverted ideological critique

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of modernity. This critique is inverted because it lacks a polemical undercurrent to advocate an alternative ideology—what Erik criticizes, didactically, as Sholem Aleichem’s inability ‘‘to show a way out’’ from the failure of capitalism10 —and because the ideologies and social trends that receive the most elaborate parodic treatment in these stories are precisely the ones that Sholem Aleichem himself participated in: Sholem Rabinovitch (1859– 1916), the creator of the Sholem Aleichem persona, was a public supporter of Zionism11 as well as anti-czarist political reform in Russia. Moreover, he raised his own children in a Russian-speaking household12 and carried on correspondence with many Russian intellectuals, most notably the revolutionary writer Maksim Gorky.13 He was, in short, an acculturated, fully modern Jew and an ideological intellectual. The origins of Sholem Aleichem’s inverted ideological critique can be found in the author’s ambivalence toward writing in Yiddish generally,14 and writing in the genres that dominate his output in particular. Although his depiction of Jewish life is generally more sympathetic than that of his predecessors, particularly the brilliant but brutal satirist Mendele MoykherSforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, c. 1835–1917),15 Sholem Aleichem nonetheless participated in a liberal-bourgeois, Russian-speaking milieu that regarded Yiddish, as most modern Jews had, as a primitive and parochial zhargon; in spite of this prejudice, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century Sholem Aleichem’s ambition, as both a belletrist and a critic, was to create realist conventions for the Yiddish novel along the lines of Honore´ de Balzac’s Come´die humaine.16 This project reflects a progressive agenda: to modernize Yiddish culture, to allow its literature to command a place among other European literatures, and to provide a deficient tradition with an intellectual apparatus that it lacked. Among the stumbling blocks to this achievement, as the author noted in his critical writings, was the absence of the social institutions—particularly, modern customs in love and marriage—necessary to sustain the plot of a modern novel.17 This absence of the social criteria essential to the realist novel reinforces the problem of temporality in Sholem Aleichem’s work because realism depends on a unified temporality to project its depiction of a social panorama. Sholem Aleichem’s focus on the temporal contradictions of Eastern European Jewish modernity, the seeming incapacity of Ashkenazic Jews to modernize, inspires the formulation of the Kasrilevke genre, a fragmentary narrative form in which temporality is suspended.

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The novels that Sholem Aleichem produced early in his career fail not only from an artistic viewpoint but also in the programmatic aims that the author set for them; the characters able to marry for love in traditional Jewish society, such as the klezmer musicians of the 1888 novel Stempenyu,18 were too marginal to be significant of the culture as a whole. The unsuccessful experiments with the novel form, to which he returned throughout his career, underscore the incompatibility for Sholem Aleichem between Yiddish culture and modernity, for which the novel form is, of course, the literary exposition and representation par excellence. The Kasrilevke stories invert and subvert all the conventions of the modern novel: they are static, drama-less descriptions, focused on a spatial collectivity, possessing neither individualized characters, other than the author’s own modern yet folksy narrative persona, nor internal psychology; they are generally short, and even relatively longer examples from the genre, such as Kasrilevke progres19 or the parodic anti-novel Zumerdike romanen,20 fragment into discrete episodes, instead of developing a thoroughly dramatized plot. The Kasrilevke genre as such divides its ambivalence between a satire of the traditional life that resists the modernizing institutions that would have made Sholem Aleichem’s vocation as novelist possible, and a parody of modern norms that fail in their promises of liberation and that stigmatize the inability or resistance of Jews who refuse to comport to modernity’s new cultural and social hegemonies. Moreover, as a rejection of nineteenth-century realism, these narratives use the consciously obsolescent conventions of Yiddish satire to anticipate the emerging possibilities of an anti-mimetic, self-referential, proto-modernist aesthetic. Beyond the aesthetic categorization of these stories as ‘‘proto-modernist,’’ one should consider that the image of the traditional shtetl invested in the larger currents of the outside world already distinguishes the new yet obsolescent Kasrilevke genre from the treatment of the shtetl by Mendele, the later Peretz, or even Sholem Aleichem in other stories, which depict the shtetl, whether positively or negatively, as an all-Jewish enclave isolated from the wider world. Kasrilevke is not the idyllic inverse of the wider world but a parodic microcosm of it; this is why Kasrilevke must be the setting out of which Menakhem-Mendl and Motl come into the modern world. For the same reason, it cannot be the home of Tevye, who never leaves the Pale or the tradition.21 The Kasrilevke genre therefore does not serve to repudiate modernity on behalf of a conservative or sentimentally nostalgic embrace of tradition; rather, these stories signify a modernist

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ideological critique—of modernity, according to the terms of modernity— conveyed through the self-referential terms of the new genre itself. Kasrilevke can function as a parodic inversion of modernity because, as seen in Di shtot fun di kleyne mentshelekh, it is a dead town and therefore a phantom, a specter. In its stasis, however, Kasrilevke enables Sholem Aleichem’s readers to see modernity for what it is, by exposing the illusory nature of modernity as a self-contradictory myth of progress. Kasrilevke is thus significant to Sholem Aleichem’s work as a whole because as an alternative to novelistic realism, it functions as a variant of realism—one that offers a critique of realism, while at the same time performing the work of realism as social critique. Kasrilevke, moreover, provides a mask for the author to superimpose on contemporary reality, just as he places the mask of Sholem Aleichem on himself: ‘‘Sholem Aleichem’’ and Kasrilevke are inseparable from each other, and each fills an analogous role in the larger scheme of the author’s universe. Indeed, given the transparency of Sholem Aleichem’s literary persona—a persona more frequently addressed than speaking, one that lacks a fixed physical description or permanent locale— one can argue that Kasrilevke is a phantom collectivity that occupies the blank space left by its creator’s rhetorical absence. Kasrilevke’s function in these stories is to freeze the shtetl landscape in the instant of modernization. To invoke again the title of a later story, ‘‘Kasrilevke progress’’ is always an oxymoron because Kasrilevke can neither move forward nor back. As an illustration of Kasrilevke’s inverted ideological critique, one can note the 1902 story Farbenkt aheym (‘‘Longing for home’’),22 which narrates the efforts of a group in Kasrilevke to invest in the Zionist movement by purchasing stock in a London-based Zionist bank. The story reaches a climax when the Kasrilevke Zionists’ corresponding secretary goes to mail the money, raised with considerable effort, to purchase a single share in the London firm. At the post office, the secretary responds to the suspicions of the anti-Semitic postmaster, a synecdoche for the anti-Semitism of the Russian government generally, by boasting that his letter includes money headed for the largest and wealthiest bank in the world. The postmaster responds, ‘‘You know, I have the right to arrest [arestirn] your package with you and your entire kahal altogether, to prevent you from sending our money to London! We slave and keep our nose to the grindstone, and the Jews aren’t content to exploit and devour our money; they want to pack our gold off now to God knows where, in their zhidovske bank!’’ (3:123). The effort to invest in the Zionist firm connects Kasrilevke to a system

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of circulation, involving currency, borders, bureaucracies, colonization—in short, the entire economic apparatus of modern politics. Yet at this moment, the money that serves as a link to this system is suspended within a conflict between Kasrilevke Jews and a Kasrilevke anti-Semite. The money is neither in London nor in Kasrilevke; it is nowhere. Its de-territorialization serves to dismantle the opposition between the two temporalities in which it is suspended. The money thus serves as an objective correlative for the inverted ideological critique itself, which suspends the dialectic upon which ideology as such is premised. Within the Russian empire as well as a larger, extraterritorial economy, Kasrilevke represents an inassimilable, non-circulating element. Despite the efforts of the Kasrilevke Zionists, Kasrilevke cannot be integrated politically or economically into these competing, concentric systems, and the shtetl thus throws into relief the arbitrariness and dysfunctionality—the dislocation—between modernity and empire. Yet just for this reason, Kasrilevke is inextricably bound to both, precisely through the frustrated desire of its inhabitants to achieve an autonomous modernity via their investment in the fledgling Zionist movement. In order to implicate Kasrilevke in the competing, interdependent systems that it indicts, the characters’ desire must be at least provisionally fulfilled. So after a delay of several months, the share of stock eventually arrives, making a considerable emotional impression on its investors. It is at this moment that the title of the story is explained, paradoxically: the Kasrilevke Zionists, like all Jews in the Diaspora, long for home even when they are already there. Indeed, Zionism itself begins as a spatial repudiation of the contradictions between European nationalism and liberal civic culture: it enunciates a negative relationship to the spaces and societies in which it was conceived and, it contended, that had failed European Jewry. So perhaps inevitably, Zionism becomes a dislocated and intensified reformulation of liberal European nationalism.23 As Sholem Aleichem illustrates in Farbenkt aheym, the space between exile and Zion must, of necessity, collapse under the weight of the Zionist’s paradoxical desire to create a home so radically dislocated from the territory to which he or she is born; Kasrilevke, in this instance, therefore becomes home and exile at the same time—it is nowhere and everywhere at once. Yet Kasrilevke’s ‘‘no place’’ is categorically different from the no place of Peretz’s toyte shtot or Aksenfeld’s Loyhoyopoli, precisely because of its connection with the overlapping

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political and economic systems that create for everyone a disconnection from, and therefore a longing for, home. A similar structure of dislocation, juxtaposition, and frustrated desire appears more ambitiously in what is perhaps the most famous Kasrilevke story, ‘‘Dreyfus in Kasrilevke’’ (1902), which links the hostility and repression that Jews face at the Kasrilevke post office to the riots convulsing late nineteenth-century France: inasmuch as the shtetl encapsulates the limitations placed on Jewish mobility, freedom, and autonomy, the whole world for Sholem Aleichem and other Yiddish writers can be figured as a shtetl. Tellingly, this story begins not in Kasrilevke but in Paris:24 ‘‘In Paris, it is said, the Dreyfus affair was also hot stuff [as it was in Kasrilevke]. Newspapers wrote, generals shot themselves, and rowdy youths ran wild in the streets, like madmen, throwing hats and raising a ruckus. One would shout ‘Vive Dreyfus!’ and another would shout ‘Vive Esterhazy!’ and the Jews meanwhile were smeared with mud, as usual’’ (3:61).25 On one level, particularly in translation, this reads as a relatively straightforward account of the tumult surrounding the Dreyfus affair. But when read in Yiddish, the references to vayse khevrenikes (rowdy youths), mishegoyim (madmen), and blote (mud) serve to characterize Paris as a transposed shtetl, particularly given the suggestion that the reaction in Paris is just an echo of the way the story resonated in Kasrilevke itself! At one and the same time, Sholem Aleichem overturns the relation of center to periphery and superimposes the peripheral shtetl onto the modern metropolis,26 in effect rendering the subsequent actions of the story’s Kasrilevke protagonists into an allegory for the global events invoked by the narrative and deflating the tragicomic events of the Dreyfus affair by equating them with the absurdity of shtetl farce. The story’s double-voiced parody—which simultaneously undermines the mythical status of Kasrilevke and Paris, while doing the work of myth by dismantling the opposition between these temporalities—therefore cancels out its potential polemical implications by playing its chosen structural contrasts against each other, to the ridicule of both. The moment of suspension that this double-voicing enacts throws into relief, for a modern yet unassimilated and unemancipated Ashkenazic readership, the ways in which the Dreyfus affair signifies the failure of a nineteenth-century myth of progress upon which Jewish emancipation and assimilation had been premised.27 Similarly, the Dreyfus affair was the ostensible impetus for Theodor Herzl to found the modern Zionist movement, as well as one of the recurring motifs

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` la recherche du temps perdu, the great high-modernist in Marcel Proust’s A vivisection of Third Republic French society. Proust’s literary modernism, like Herzl’s Zionism, can therefore be read as a critique of liberal modernity.,28 And ‘‘Dreyfus in Kasrilevke’’—which focuses on the efforts of the Kasrilevke Jews to follow the developments of the Dreyfus affair, the details of which they cull belatedly from a Hebrew newspaper that they do not fully understand—though neither polemically Zionist nor formally modernist, nonetheless partakes through its undoing of modern political and aesthetic categories in a critique of modernity common to both Zionism and modernism, offering a sardonic commentary on the inability of these Jews to enter into modern history. Its satire is therefore directed toward the vanity of ideological thinking as a means of determining the direction of history; the Jews of Kasrilevke are vindicated in their incomprehension of the Dreyfus affair because the event itself defies logical understanding. Their irrationality is ultimately far more benign than the irrationality of the modern politics that they struggle to understand. This, in turn, confirms the larger purpose of using Kasrilevke as an inversion of Paris. Kasrilevke can be superimposed on Paris, and vice versa, because the notion of progress that Paris is said to embody and Kasrilevke is intended to ridicule is equally illusory in both locales. As with Farbenkt aheym, the organizing metaphor of ‘‘Dreyfus in Kasrilevke’’ is an agent of circulation, exchange, and mobility: in this instance, the press, which, like currency in Farbenkt aheym, serves to connect the supposedly ahistorical residents of the shtetl to, as well as estrange them from, the ‘‘historical’’ world. Zionism’s origins, in the historical world as well as Kasrilevke, can be traced to a conflict in reportage; when Theodor Herzl covered the Dreyfus trial for the Neue Freie Presse, the Viennese paper bowdlerized his observation of the anti-Semitic aspects of the controversy, substituting the riotous calls for ‘‘death to the Jews’’ with ‘‘death to the traitor’’—indicating that in its pursuit of liberal decorum, the victims of anti-Semitism could be rhetorically equated with the crime that they were accused of.29 In ‘‘Dreyfus in Kasrilevke,’’ similarly, the incredulousness of the Viennese liberal press is transferred to the Jews of Kasrilevke, whose analogous misreading is situated not between French and German but between two Jewish languages, Hebrew and Yiddish. Nonetheless, at the climax of the story, the Jews of Kasrilevke, like the (Jewish) editors of the Neue Freie Presse, as well as the Parisian mobs with which they had been implicitly equated in the story’s opening paragraph, blame the outrage of

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the Dreyfus affair not on its perpetrators but on the Jew, Zeydl, who has been reading the press accounts to them (3:68)! The problem of circulation is further dramatized in ‘‘Dreyfus in Kasrilevke’’ when the Jews of the shtetl mobilize to pursue their engagement with the scandal more vigorously. Sholem Aleichem thus writes, ‘‘As the case dragged on they stopped waiting for Zeydl to arrive finally at the synagogue to let them know the news about Captain Dreyfus; they started going to him at home. When they lost patience with visiting him at home, they began going with him directly to the post office to pick up the paper’’ (3:63–64). The decision to leave the synagogue—the traditional setting for storytelling among men—stands as a figure for an effort to engage in the world beyond the tradition, culminating at the post office, which represents in the Kasrilevke stories the point of transit between the traditional shtetl and modernity but also the outer limit of where their mobility can lead them under the czarist regime. To the extent, therefore, that ‘‘Dreyfus in Kasrilevke’’ dramatizes a process of mobility, it forecloses this dynamic in a closed circle. Moreover, even in the post office, the Jews of Kasrilevke bring their stereotypical mode of communication with them: ‘‘and there they read and reread, and chewed over the story some more, all of them yelling and raising a ruckus and disputing with one another, as usual’’ (3:64). This description demonstrates how closely they remain bound to the habits of the synagogue and how out of place they seem in a ‘‘civil’’ setting; it also recycles, to comic effect, the old Enlightenment stereotype of Yiddish discourse as purposeless, noisy, vulgar chatter. This image is nonetheless matched here, as it seldom had been in earlier Yiddish satires, with the figure of the postmaster, who again signifies the surveillance that holds Jewish behavior under scrutiny, as well as the prejudices that expose the inability of the incompletely modern Russian empire to emancipate itself from its own parochialism and repressiveness. He thus explains to the Jews assembled at the post office, in untranslated Ukrainian, ‘‘You mangy Jews, this is no Jewish synagogue, no meeting place for crooked dealings.’’30 At the same time that he exposes the limits of Jewish autonomy in the shtetl, his insults reiterate the outrage to which they are directing their attention. His Ukrainian serves, moreover, to underscore the mutual incomprehensibility of the various nationalities within the Russian empire, in a story about misreading, as well as the hierarchy of oppression operative in the political economy: a Ukrainian, like a Jew, is a stateless, ‘‘colonized’’ subject of the empire; but, unlike the Jew, he is capable both

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of serving in the civil service and identifying with the most conspicuous prejudice of imperial culture.31 The response to the postmaster carries these paradoxes further still: ‘‘They heard him like Haman hears a noisemaker; he insulted them, and they read Tsifiro32 and spoke of Dreyfus’’ (3:64). Though ostensibly a moment of mutual incomprehensibility, conveyed through incompatible languages as well as a conflict between speaking and reading, the disconnections between the postmaster and the Jews ultimately reinforce the story’s overarching theme: the Dreyfus story, the insults of the postmaster, and the story of Purim invoked in the folk idiom that negatively links Kasrilevke Jews and non-Jews are all examples in a larger litany of oppression and hatred. The formal principle of reiteration, expressed in ‘‘Dreyfus in Kasrilevke’’ through the rhetoric of anti-Semitism that links the postmaster and the Parisian mobs described in the press with a longer history of exile and persecution, is indeed characteristic of the means by which Sholem Aleichem articulates his inverted ideological critique: a critique that operates not through the allegorical exposition of an ideological vision— allegories in Kasrilevke, like every other conveyance, inevitably lead nowhere—but rather through the working out of generic rules governing parody, satire, and the discourse of the joke itself. In the later story Kasrilevke progres, for example, the author describes the rival newspapers that have sprung up in town, Di Yarmulke and Der Kapelyush. Though the former ostensibly represents the conservative, religious establishment and the latter the workers’ cause, every feature of the two journals is interchangeable, down to the serialized novels that they each run, Der farbotener kush fun der geganveter kale (The forbidden kiss from the stolen bride) and Der geganveter kush fun der farbotener kale (The stolen kiss from the forbidden bride).33 Zumerdike romanen similarly begins with a parody of the Second Aliyah, in which the residents of Kasrilevke establish two rival summer colonies on the outskirts of town,34 named Eretz Israel and Palestine (19:87–91). These repetitions establish a neurotic structure of proliferation rather than dialectic. Through the rhythms of repetition, Sholem Aleichem finds a means of using satire—one of the oldest narrative genres and certainly the most representative genre of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature—to convey the temporal paradoxes that emerge when an irresistible modernity collides with the unmovable shtetl.

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By way of conclusion, one should return, more briefly than the subject demands, to the ambivalent role of Yiddish in articulating Kasrilevke’s desire and its dislocation. This question is essential, of course, because Sholem Aleichem is the best stylist in all of Yiddish literature; to a great degree, his mastery of Yiddish discourse is connected with his ability to mimic in writing—through idiom, proverb, and what the Soviet Yiddish critic Meyer Viner (1893–1941) referred to as shprakh-folklor35 —the traditional, oral character of Yiddish. What happens, therefore, to Yiddish at the moment of modernization? Perhaps the most telling answer to this question appears in the 1901 story Dos naye kasrilevke (The new Kasrilevke),36 which depicts the efforts of Kasrilevke to institute such innovations as the tramway, the hotel, the restaurant, and the theater. In the narrative’s fourth episode, Kasrilevke vayn un kasrilevke shikurim (Kasrilevke wine and Kasrilevke drunks), Sholem Aleichem describes ‘‘various Jews wearing all types of coats and helmets, sitting together at a single table and all speaking at once, as if their words all came out at once, sounding like a mishmash of business, politics, oldfashioned raisin wine, today’s children, doctors, trolley cars, taxes, the goddamned rich folks—it was difficult to capture on paper all that was spoken there’’ (4:97). This description calls attention to the inadequacy of writing to convey the immediacy of speech, and yet the associative connections among the topics listed in this inventory underscore a feature of Yiddish discourse as well as the social uses of the tavern as a site where everyone and everything can be brought together in a zone of free and familiar contact ephemerally established against the hierarchies and formalities of the larger world. It is significant that instead of celebrating the intimacy of the tavern, the author here complains about the incomprehensibility of the discussions he overhears. This confusion becomes more palpable a page later, when he records a song sung by the Jews there: Avremenyu! Avremenyu! Ovinu ti nash! Tshemu ti ne prosish Aloheynu nash! Albo nas vikopit, Albo nas viprosit— L’aretseynu nashu, L’zemliyu nashu?! (4:98)

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(Abraham! Dear Abraham! Dearest father ours! Why don’t you request of our God Or dig us out, Or plead for us— In that land of ours, In our land?!)37 The song, clearly, is a mixture of Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian: that is, all the languages co-territorial to Yiddish but without the Yiddish to connect these words or make them comprehensible. The incoherent and inscrutable nature of the song thus presents Yiddish as a spectral, deterritorialized presence, in a song about territory. The negative presence of Yiddish in this song functions analogously to the failed realism of Sholem Aleichem’s early novels; both reflect the absence of a mediating form to make sense of the contradictions in Eastern European society at the turn of the century. Sholem Aleichem here, as elsewhere,38 prefigures the intensification and fragmentation of Yiddish that will become characteristic among the next generation of Yiddish modernists such as Yankev Glatshteyn and Moyshe Kulbak, who extend the expressive range of Yiddish to the verge of atonality by increasing the degree and prominence of co-territorial loan words in their Yiddish. For all these writers, including Sholem Aleichem here, Yiddish at the moment of modernization loses its historical function of mediating between a specifically Jewish culture and the co-territorial languages around it; the failure of mediation, in turn, signifies a failure of narration, whereby language devolves into incomprehensible sound, a representatively modernist deformation of aesthetic decorum to which Yiddish poetry was particularly well suited.39 When faced with the loss of this mediating function, in an epoch of linguistically and ethnically exclusive nationalisms, Yiddish itself faces the risk of dissipating among the languages that constitute its unique fusion. Here the ideological implications of this linguistic proliferation become quite suggestive: songs about land can be sung in Hebrew, Ukrainian, Polish, or Russian but, at least in the world of the Kasrilevke stories, not Yiddish. Yet are these languages not ultimately interchangeable insofar as they seek to fulfill mutually exclusive national functions? Or when people sing these songs, do they always become incoherent because of the spatial prox-

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imity of these languages, the fact that all these groups ultimately share the same land? Or is nationalism itself finally just another pastime for drunks in a bar—neither more dignified, nor more practical, nor more Jewish than that? For Sholem Aleichem, as for any Eastern European writer in the moment of modernization at the turn of the last century, the problem of space and the problem of language are bound up with the question of political power. He is distinctive, however, to the extent that he creates deterritorialized literary settings and a de-territorialized language to critique the power-based ideologies seeking to control territories, as well as the desire of Jews, even of himself, to attach themselves to a homeland that, at least a hundred years ago, seemed as spectral as Kasrilevke itself. Notes This article was researched and written under the auspices of consecutive fellowships at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University; both of these institutions have my gratitude for their generous financial and intellectual support of my work. Additional thanks are due to Professor Sidra Ezrahi for her comments on an early version of this paper, as well as to Dr. Brukhe Lang Caplan for her helpful suggestions regarding my translations from the Yiddish. Thanks especially to Professor Benyomin Moss and Professor Sara Nadal-Melsio´ for their engaged and thoughtful reading of my work in draft form. 1. The notable exception to this trend occurs not among contemporary scholars but in the work of the Soviet Yiddishist Max Erik (1898–1937), who writes, ‘‘together with Menakhem-Mendl and Tevye the Dairyman, Kasrilevke is the third great universal figure that Sholem Aleichem created.’’ See his Kasrilevke in Farmest: Literarishkinstlerisher, un kritish-bibliografisher zhurnal 5–6 (May–June 1935): 153. Translations from this article are my own. My reading of the Kasrilevke genre—which was first formulated before I had access to Erik’s essay—is intended not to refute Erik’s insightful interpretation but rather to consider in greater detail, and freedom, the precise relationship of the Kasrilevke stories to contemporaneous ideological and social developments affecting Jewish, particularly Yiddish, literature of the early twentieth century. 2. Temporality is simultaneously a narrative category—the way in which time functions within a story—and a historical category, the means by which social modes such as tradition and modernity interact and compete with one another. Taking the D train from Manhattan to Borough Park, for example, confronts the passenger with a mix of temporalities, which the Hasidic residents of Borough Park negotiate in their everyday life. Similarly, the film critic John Baxter writes of the nineteenth-century ambience in the film Der blaue Engel, ‘‘There are no cars in The Blue Angel, no radios or cinemas, and the lamps that hang in almost every shot are gas-burning. Except for a short sequence showing Rath peeling leaves from a calendar that begins at 1923 and

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ends at 1929, the film is exclusively an image of the Europe in which [director Josef] Sternberg grew up’’ (John Baxter, The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg [London, 1971], 70). The montage of the burned calendar pages provides a visual shorthand for the passage of time within the film and also illustrates the underlying historical motif affecting the work as a whole: the passing, dramatized in the relationship between Professor Rath and Lola Lola as a collision, of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Of necessity, the term ‘‘temporality’’ will perform a similar double function in the discussion of Kasrilevke here. 3. My thinking on the mobilization of myth to critique the contradictions of modernity reflects the ideas of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who describe a dialectical relationship between myth and enlightenment, the latter represented originally by the epic poem, in which myth must be repressed via rationality to serve the conceptual subordination of nature—and its consequent transformation into usevalue—to the will of man; despite the demand of civilization that mythical thinking be marginalized geographically, culturally, and psychologically, repressed myth continually returns to expose the contradictions of reason and the limitations of rationality as a system of culture. See, particularly, their ‘‘Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,’’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif., 2002), 35–62. 4. I. L. Peretz, Ale verk (New York, 1947), 3:75. The I. L. Peretz Reader, trans. Hillel Halkin, ed. Ruth R. Wisse (New York, 1990), 162. 5. In my research for this article, I was unable to find either an actual shtetl by the name of Tsiakhnovke, or a Polish-language equivalent for the name that would enable me to locate such a town on a contemporary map of Poland. 6. Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem, vol. 3 (Kleyne mentshelekh mit kleyne hasoges) [New York, 1937], 9–17; all subsequent citations from Sholem Aleichem’s work in Yiddish will be taken from this edition. Translations, for better or worse, will be my own. Among the various and typically haphazard collections of Sholem Aleichem’s stories into English, a translation of this story by Julius and Frances Butwin can be found in Selected Stories of Sholom Aleichem, ed. Alfred Kazin (New York, 1956), 28–34. 7. Already in the first modern Yiddish novel, Dos shterntikhl (The headband), published in 1861 but written at least two decades earlier, the author Yisroel Aksenfeld generates much comic energy from the insistence by the residents of the main site of the narrative’s action, the invented town Loyhoyopoli (‘‘the city that never was’’), that theirs is a shtot and not a shtetl. For the only readily available edition of the novel in Yiddish, see Israel Aksenfeld, Dos shterntichl, der ershter idisher rekrut: Musterverk serye (Buenos Aires, 1971), vol. 47. In English, see Joachim Neugroschel, The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe (Woodstock, N.Y., 1979; 1989), 49–172. 8. Dan Miron, ‘‘The Literary Image of the Shtetl,’’ in idem, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse, N.Y., 2000), 39. 9. Erik, likewise, dates the Kasrilevke genre to the last fifteen years of Sholem Aleichem’s career, 1901–16: see Erik, ‘‘Kasrilevke,’’ 153.

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10. Ibid., 162. 11. For a selection of Sholem Aleichem’s Zionist polemics, as well as his fiction on Zionistic themes, see Af vos badarfn yidn a land? (Tel Aviv, 1978); Why Do the Jews Need a Land of Their Own?, trans. Joseph Leftwich and Mordecai S. Chertoff (New York, 1984). 12. On the acculturated and relatively cosmopolitan (but also thoroughly bourgeois) milieu of Sholem Aleichem’s household, David Roskies quotes Sholem Aleichem’s daughter as referring to her father’s ‘‘Gobelin tapestries, Chinese porcelain, Irish linen, Viennese living room pieces, and a large black concert grand’’; see Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 148. For Roskies’s source, see Marie Waife-Goldberg, My Father, Sholem Aleichem (New York, 1968), 92–111. 13. On Sholem Aleichem’s correspondence with Russian writers, see Ken Frieden’s Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz (Albany, N.Y., 1995), 100. 14. The specific sources and manifestations of Sholem Aleichem’s ambivalence, which in any event was significantly milder than that of almost any other Yiddish writer of his generation, are discussed in Dan Miron’s A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Syracuse, N.Y., 1996), 17–21. 15. The concept of the inverted ideological critique, in addition to explaining the function of the Kasrilevke stories in Sholem Aleichem’s work, differentiates Sholem Aleichem from Mendele; in Mendele’s writing, everything serves an explicit didactic and ideological function—even his translations of Psalms were intended to provide a model for subsequent Yiddish prosody. Connected intimately with the larger ideological project of Mendele’s writing is his formal ambition to establish through satire and parody the narrative conventions by which the Yiddish (and Hebrew) novel could sustain itself. Sholem Aleichem, by contrast, was unable to make meaningful aesthetic use of the novel form: his most significant artistic structures are short, diffuse, and fragmentary, just as his ideological project, to the extent that it is explicitly articulated at all, is most compellingly conveyed by deformation rather than formation. 16. See, on this score, Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction, 113. 17. For an insightful summary of Sholem Aleichem’s early career and his problematic relationship with the novel as literary form, see Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, 147–60; the primary point of contrast to the early novels in Roskies’s discussion is the Tevye stories. 18. See Stempenyu, in Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem, 21:123–254. From a programmatic standpoint, Stempenyu further exemplifies Sholem Aleichem’s ambitions to create ex nihilo a literary tradition for Yiddish—complete with canons, hierarchies, and genealogies—through its dedication to mayn libhartsikn zeydn Mendele MoykherSforim (my beloved grandfather Mendele Moykher-Sforim) (21:123). For an imaginative and oddly compelling English translation, see Neugroschel, The Shtetl, 287–375. 19. See Kasrilevke progres (1914–15), in Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem, 19:11–84.

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20. See Zumerdike romanen (1914–15), in Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem, 19:87–144. 21. Indeed, Erik points out that the origin of Menakhem-Mendl in Kasrilevke, for example, is actually backdated in later editions of Sholem Aleichem’s work to underscore the centrality of this locus to his character typology; originally, MenakhemMendl’s letters home were addressed to Sheyne-Sheyndl in Mazepevke. See Erik, ‘‘Kasrilevke,’’ 153. 22. For a (not particularly good) translation into English, see ‘‘Homesick,’’ included in Sholom Aleichem, Why Do the Jews Need a Land of Their Own?, 125–30. 23. This formulation might explain in psychological terms some of the antipathy that Zionism has inspired in liberal European societies in recent decades, particularly—though not exclusively—at the ideological extremes of the left and right: in attacking Zionism, these ideologues have projected a criticism of what they dislike most about their own national politics onto Israel. Understanding anti-Zionism in these terms, of course, provides moral justification to neither the anti-Zionists themselves nor the Israeli policies they fulminate against. 24. The correspondence between Kasrilevke and Paris—and, in this regard, one should recall Walter Benjamin’s insights into the role that Paris plays in the mythologies of nineteenth-century modernity, analogous to Kasrilevke’s status in Sholem Aleichem’s writing as the prototypical and therefore mythological shtetl—already figures in Di shtot fun di kleyne mentshelekh, in which Sholem Aleichem, one of world literature’s great comedians, relates one of his best jokes: an impoverished Kasrilevke householder makes his way to Paris to meet with Rothschild; when he finally finagles an audience with the illustrious magnate, he offers to sell him the secret of eternal life for a mere 300 rubles. The secret, he reveals after receiving his payment, is for Rothschild to move from Paris to Kasrilevke, where he will never die, ‘‘because since Kasrilevke came into being, no rich man has ever died there’’ (3:13–14). 25. For what must suffice as the standard version in English, see ‘‘Dreyfus in Kasrilevke,’’ trans. Hilde Abel, in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (1953; New York, 1990), 187–92. 26. For a brief but illuminating conceptualization of the interdependent relationship between center and periphery, in social spaces as well as narrative ones, see Sara Nadal, ‘‘Introduction: Around . . . Peripheries/Propositions,’’ in idem and Carles Puig, Around: Planning the Periphery (Barcelona, 2002), 7–13. 27. Of course, as my friend Scott Lerner has pointed out to me, a contrary reading of the Dreyfus affair could also be offered, since in the end Dreyfus was exonerated and the Third Republic was able to affirm its status as a defender of truth, freedom, and the rule of law. This is clearly not the conclusion that Sholem Aleichem drew in 1902, midway between Dreyfus’s pardon (1899) and exhoneration (1906). 28. In this context, consider the rueful intersection of Proust’s high modernism and Herzl’s politics in a seemingly offhand comment by the former: ‘‘I have thought it as well to utter here a provisional warning against the lamentable error of proposing (just as people have encouraged a Zionist movement) to create a Sodomist movement

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and to rebuild Sodom’’ (on a voulu provisoirement pre´venir l’erreur funeste qui consisterait, de meme qu’on a encourage un mouvement sioniste, a` cre´er un mouvement sodomiste et a` rebaˆtir Sodome). See Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 4, Sodom and ` la recherche du temps perdu, 2, Sodome et Gomorrhe Gomorrah (New York, 1993), 44; A (Paris, 1954), 632. Far from casual, however, this comment introduces a strategy of continual entanglement, both literally and figuratively, of Jewish and homosexual motifs throughout this volume—a significant juxtaposition, considering the ambivalence of the author toward both. 29. Consider in this regard John Murray Cuddihy’s account: ‘‘Theodore [sic] Herzl’s Zionism really began on January 5, 1895, when, as correspondent for the Vienna Neue Freie Presse covering the public degradation in Paris of Captain Dreyfus, he heard ` mort! A ` mort les juifs!]. The liberal Jewish the mob scream ‘Death to the Jews!’ [A editors of the Neue Freie Presse altered the text of Herzl’s dispatch . . . universalizing, that is, euphemizing it to read: ‘Death to the traitor! . . .’ Politeness, perhaps even more than fear, motivated the excision and the resulting euphemism.’’ See Cuddihy’s problematic yet fascinating study, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Le´vi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York, 1974), 150. Contemporary historians have since challenged the centrality of Herzl’s coverage of the Dreyfus trial to his subsequent Zionism; see, for example, Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Sie`cle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley, Calif., 2001), 13–14. It is nevertheless significant in this context that Dreyfus figures at the rhetorical origins of Zionist ideology by the time Sholem Aleichem is writing his Dreyfus satire. 30. In the original, Tut ne zhidivska shkola, zhidi parhatye, tut ne kahal shakhermakheri. My translation of the Ukrainian follows the notes and subsequent online discussion of an April 13, 2001, posting prepared by Professor Leonard Prager of the University of Haifa on ‘‘The Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and Language’’ webpage devoted to this story. See http://www2.trincoll.edu/⬃mendele/tmr/tmr05004.htm and http://www2.trincoll.edu/⬃mendele/vol10/vol10055.txt. 31. As Erik points out more generally, figures such as the postmaster embody the anti-Semitism of the Russian empire and also serve to blunt its danger and indignity by confining the presence of the larger power structure to a single, ultimately ineffectual and absurd, individual. See Erik, ‘‘Kasrilevke’’ 161. 32. Hatsefirah, a Hebrew-language daily published in Warsaw by Nakhum Sokolow (1859–1936). 33. See Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem, 19:21–24. Like a return of the repressed, Sholem Aleichem’s late satire tellingly recalls the polemical writing of his earlier career, which criticized the cheaply sensational serial novels of the popular press and advocated a serious, socially engaged realism in their stead. Once again, satire as a genre fulfills the work of polemic and the modern novel, at the same time as it ridicules both; satire is the definitive genre of the inverted ideological critique because it appro-

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priates the extra-rational simultaneity of myth to provide a reconfigured mode of critical realism. 34. See Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem, 19:87–91. Significantly, Sholem Aleichem describes the location of these colonies as the Kasrilevke slobodke; the word slobodke derives from an early Slavic word meaning ‘‘freedom,’’ and although the slobodke is the location of Kasrilevke’s imitation of Zionism, it is nevertheless a part of the Pale from which Jews are officially prohibited from settling. See http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Sloboda. My thanks to Dr. Khane Eakin Moss for her clarification of this word, which is included in none of the Yiddish dictionaries to which I have access. 35. See Meyer Viner, Di rol fun shablonisher frazeologye in der literatur fun der haskole (The role of cliche´d phraseology in the literature of the Jewish Enlightenment), in Di Yidishe literatur in nayntsetn yorhundert: Zamlung fun yidisher literatur-forshung un kritik in ratn farband (Yiddish literature in the nineteenth century: A collection of Yiddish literary research and criticism in the Soviet Union), ed. Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem, 1993), 71–110. 36. See Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem, 4:63–128. 37. My thanks to Professor Amelia Glaser of the University of San Diego and Dr. Hershl Glasser of the YIVO Institute, New York, for their help in translating this song. 38. Thus in ‘‘Dreyfus in Kasrilevke,’’ an exchange transpires among the Kasrilevke Jews regarding Dreyfus’s seemingly hopeless fate: Gehert. Farshikt af eybik.‘‘Vetshni poselenye.’’ Umzist-umnisht! A bilbul! (3:63) (Did you hear? / I heard. / Sent away forever. / ‘‘Eternal exile.’’ / All for nothing! / Sheer libel!) In the final three lines of this exchange, Sholem Aleichem presents the three major language components constituting Yiddish—Slavic (Russian), Germanic, then Hebraic—in an unintegrated profusion; the dialogue as such functions as a shorthand of diffusion and fragmentation. 39. As Benjamin Harshav writes, in an essay on the artist Marc Chagall, ‘‘Like the ideal of ‘pure poetry,’ pure art to the avant-garde meant the acceptance of one language that dominated each work. . . . For them, at any given moment, the poetics of their art was like a spoken language: one speaks either French or English or Russian, but not all in the same sentence. In Yiddish, however, one can speak several languages in the same sentence.’’ See Harshav, ‘‘Chagall: Postmodernism and Fictional Worlds in Painting,’’ in Marc Chagall and the Jewish Theater (New York, 1992), 18.

CHAPTER 7

Brenner: Between Hebrew and Yiddish Anita Shapira

We had to betray Yiddish, even though we paid for it as for every betrayal. —Rachel Katznelson1

In the research on Zionism and Hebrew culture, it is common to posit a dichotomy between the Land of Israel and the Diaspora, between Hebrew culture and Yiddish culture.2 The Eretz Israel identity crystallized in conscious antithesis to, and negation of, Jewish culture in the Diaspora. One of the icons of Hebrew culture was Joseph Hayyim Brenner (1881–1921). At the hour of crisis for Hebrew culture, when the language seemed to have no future, a rallying call came from foggy London, declaring: ‘‘We cannot do without writing Hebrew because the divine spark within us emanates naturally only from this flame, because this ember cannot be fanned, cannot fully fire, except in this language and no other.’’3 This call was considered emblematic in the history of the revival of the Hebrew language, a declaration of fealty to a tongue in crisis, a culture on the verge of extinction. It was considered the ultimate expression of Hebrew zealotry. It was Brenner who made this call. A close examination of Brenner’s attitude toward Hebrew and Yiddish, however, reveals an ambivalence that bares his concurrent love for the popular mother tongue (Yiddish) and his inclusive conception of secular Jewish culture as a single culture with two languages of expression. I would like to look at Brenner as a case study of the complicated attitude of the Jewish

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intelligentsia, the class that spawned the Second Aliyah, toward Hebrew and Yiddish and, more broadly, of the dominant attitude toward Eretz Israel and the Diaspora. The figure of J. H. Brenner, founder of the Hebrew journal Hame’orer, was clearly etched in the literary imagination of the generation raised in the Land of Israel. In the wake of the failed revolution of 1905 in Russia, the wave of pogroms and oppression launched by czarist authorities against democratic forces, the foundations of Hebrew literature were severely shaken: one after another, Hebrew publications were shut down. The prospects of Hebrew literature appeared dim, but Brenner would not accept its extinction: ‘‘We shall never nor on any account resign ourselves to this evil. . . . We shall man the wall to the last.’’4 This impassioned pathos struck a chord with generations of youth-movement graduates in Palestine and the Diaspora, who waved their banner and hung it in their kinnim (clubhouses) alongside ‘‘Masada shall not fall again.’’ It is doubtful whether they knew that it referred neither to the Land of Israel nor even to Zionism, but to the Hebrew language and Hebrew literature, and that it was said in opposition to that ‘‘other’’ language, ‘‘that beloved, hybrid language, our mother tongue, on our lips.’’5 Brenner’s approach to Hebrew at that time was captured in a metaphor by the Yiddish writer and poet Lamed Shapira (1878–1948), who befriended him in London: ‘‘We are lost, but we shall die in our boots and standing tall.’’6 In Brenner’s novel Misaviv lanekuda (Around the dot), fidelity to Hebrew is presented as the defining trait of Abramson, the protagonist. Abramson is incapable of cutting himself off from Hebrew even if it means risking his relationship with Yeva Isakovna (in Hebrew, Hava Blumin), who, in the story, symbolizes life, harmony, and love. When, in a moment of inner turmoil, Abramson decides to start writing in Russian, he feels as though his creativity has been stifled: ‘‘I can no longer hear the holy voice from Mount Horev.’’7 It may be argued, of course, that Brenner’s attitude toward Hebrew should not be confused with Abramson’s, his hero’s: Abramson is a fictional character, albeit embedded with autobiographical elements. But the same cannot be said of Hame’orer: here, Brenner formally, publicly set down his personal credo. Hame’orer’s declaration projects onto Misaviv lanekuda, reinforcing the identification between author and protagonist. Brenner’s extreme commitment to Hebrew came to the fore at a time when he abandoned Zionism and abdicated territorialism. In vain did jour-

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nalist Ya’acov Rabinowitz chastise him: ‘‘I was greatly angered by you and your kind,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I despise those who seek a historical land yet not a historical language. But I am angered, too, by those who are committed to the language and distract attention from the land. All of you ignore the Hebrew soul and bow to reality, and this is the cause of your torn souls.’’8 Rabinowitz held that the Jewish languages, Hebrew and Yiddish, had no future in Russia; the attraction of the state language was such that it would triumph over any aspirations to sustain Jewish cultural distinctiveness in one form or another. ‘‘The ruins of our temple are being totally destroyed, and a Hebrew world is being built in only one corner—Eretz Israel,’’ Rabinowitz argued. ‘‘The child of Eretz Israel is stronger than you and me both,’’ he informed Brenner. He tried to persuade him to transplant Hame’orer in Palestine. ‘‘My dear man, you possess a soul without a body, a Torah scroll without a holy ark. What does your Hame’orer have to do with London?’’9 Brenner brushed off the moralizing or, at least, was insufficiently impressed to take any action. Brenner’s separation of the Hebrew language from Zionism and the Land of Israel highlights the dichotomy and ambivalence prevalent in the Diaspora at that time: language and literature were one thing; political conceptions, another. His bond to Hebrew remained anchored in culture, and, to his mind, there was nothing inevitable about a marriage of language and culture to a political agenda. His firm and constant commitment was to Hebrew literature. When it came to Zionism, he vacillated between adherence and skeptical adherence, or even complete skepticism. A rudimentary, general definition would be that Brenner seems to have regarded himself as a patriot of the Jewish people—from his perspective, a nationalist Jew. The ‘‘people’’ to him meant primarily the Jewish community in Eastern Europe, as well as its branches in Western Europe, in the United States, and in Palestine. He identified with the populist currents on the Jewish street, such as the Bund or Po’alei Zion and the many sub-streams between, and he deprecated the ideologies that divided them.10 This Jewish patriotism can be traced in his cultural conception. Two Jewish national literatures emerged in Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century: modern Hebrew and modern Yiddish. Neither was totally new; scholars have sketched their growth from the eighteenth century, if not earlier. Nonetheless, secular belles lettres written by Jews—as a sociocultural phenomenon rather than a curiosity—appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. It was apparently connected with the increasing

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exposure of Jews to world literatures, chiefly German and Russian, and the development of a class of young Jewish intellectuals, a ‘‘polu-intelligentsia,’’ consisting largely of autodidacts. They were marked by an insatiable thirst for literature and reading, and they derived emotional and intellectual gratification from the written word. This, more than the visual arts or music, was the medium that had an impact on them; like Ariadne’s ball of thread, it led them through the labyrinth of modernism to what the young Brenner called ‘‘knowledge.’’ On the whole, the polu-intelligentsia belonged to the Jewish lower middle class and did not attend Russian high school (gymnasium), where those above them on the social ladder obtained an education. Though they sprouted from the system of traditional Jewish education, they were exposed to secular culture and aspired to higher learning. Most failed to achieve it. In the process of integration into local culture (Russian, Polish, or German), which was spurned by Zionists as ‘‘assimilation,’’ they made it only halfway, falling short of inclusion. This status of semi-intelligentsia, in which individuals were severed from the traditional Jewish way of life yet lacked a trade or the means to support themselves in the non-Jewish world, formed the base of social and political movements on the Jewish street. The members of the semi-intelligentsia were the main consumers of the national culture in two languages—Hebrew and Yiddish. The two Jewish literatures emerged almost simultaneously. Most authors wrote in both languages: Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, c. 1835–1917), I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), and Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovitch, 1859–1916), the three Yiddish greats, hoped to assure themselves a place in the Hebrew canon as well. Mendele rewrote much of his Yiddish canon in Hebrew, and then went back and crafted the Yiddish volumes according to the Hebrew version. Bialik crowned him yotser hanusah (the crafter of the style), for having created a flexible Hebrew language that drew on mishnaic and talmudic layers and liberated it from the chains of flowery biblical phraseology characteristic of nineteenthcentury Hebrew literature. Yiddish grew wings: from a spoken tongue disparaged as ‘‘jargon,’’ it became the language of the enlightened. Exiting the orbit of low literature (schund) meant, for women and children, that Yiddish writers now set their sights on generating a lofty literary corpus in the people’s tongue. Until the end of the nineteenth century, according to Berl Katznelson, a major socialist Zionist leader in Palestine and the most important one in the area of

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culture, the developing Yiddish culture was supported by Zionists who regarded it as a national asset to be cherished. Y. H. Rawnitzki and Joseph Luria, for example, two champions of Hebrew, founded the first Zionist newspaper in Yiddish, Der Yud, in which Yiddish writers debuted early works.11 Rachel Katznelson related that ‘‘the awakening to Hebrew coincided with the awakening to Yiddish.’’12 This cultural awakening was part of an expanding political consciousness. Political parties soon rose, each envisioning the future of the Jewish people differently: the Zionist movement predicted disintegration and disruption of Jewish life in the Diaspora and the relocation of the Jewish center of gravity to the Land of Israel; movements such as the Bund, the S.S. (the Zionist Socialist Workers Party, composed of territorialists), and the Autonomists believed that Jewish communities could continue to exist in the Diaspora as equal citizens and maintain their national distinctiveness via a cultural tapestry woven around a mother tongue—Yiddish. Yiddish was also a valuable instrument in the definition of Jewish national identity in countries where the government granted the status of cultural autonomy to national minorities (the Hapsburg Empire). As the common spoken language of Jews, it served as a key argument in the demand for autonomy. In this field, Hebrew was not even a player; it remained a sacred tongue for traditional Jews, or the language of literature and writing for Jews who had shed religion. But it was not spoken.13 At the turn of the twentieth century, until World War I, educated Jews knew Hebrew, Yiddish, and at least one state language, whether Russian, German, or Polish. The rivalry between Yiddish and Hebrew had already begun and was to grow fiercer as Yiddishists called for the upgrading of the mother tongue to the status of Hebrew. But it was not yet bolstered by powerful, extra-cultural frameworks, as was to happen after World War I. Authors and poets, like journalists, wrote in both languages. A handful, such as Ahad Ha‘am (Asher Zvi Ginzberg, 1856–1927) and Joseph Klausner (1874–1958), were zealous Hebraists, predicting Yiddish’s impending demise and extinction within a generation or two as the effects of assimilation grew stronger and obliged Jews to adopt the languages of their countries of residence. Across the divide, zealous Yiddishists such as Bundists regarded Hebrew as a ‘‘dead language’’ and waged all-out war against it as the vehicle of the conservative and clerical, educated Jewish bourgeoisie who patronized the Yiddish-speaking masses. Most writers, though, were situated between these two poles. The

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important journalist Israel Isidor Eliashev (1873–1924), who wrote mostly in Yiddish under the pen name Baal Makhshoves (The Thinker), said it in a nutshell: ‘‘Two languages—a single literature.’’ Following the passage of writers from language to language, periodical to periodical, and country to country, he identified a cultural continuity despite changing publishers and linguistic vessels.14 These discussions all took place in the Diaspora, then the focus of both Hebrew and Yiddish culture. The Land of Israel still played only a marginal role. From his yeshiva days and early attempts to compose for the newspaper that he copublished with his friend Uri Nissan Gnessin (1879–1913), Brenner wrote in Hebrew. It was the language, too, of the long confessions he wrote Gnessin—drafts, as it were—for his subsequent novel Bahoref (In winter, 1903). But Yiddish was his spoken language and the hidden layer beneath his written word, especially when attempting to craft dialogue. There was very little spoken Hebrew before World War I. Only in Palestine did it slowly take root, among the young, who were born and raised in the Land of Israel. It was certainly not common currency among mature immigrants, whether on the individual or public levels: in fact, the council meetings of Hapo‘el Hatsa‘ir, a party that championed Hebrew as one of its causes, were initially conducted in Yiddish, since most of its members could not speak Hebrew.15 Brenner attempted to create literary dialogue even though he did not hear spoken Hebrew. To do so, he invoked Mendele’s nusah but reworked it, taking it much further. His play Me’ever ligvulin (Beyond the boundaries, 1907) is a case in point: its dialogues were clearly translated from Yiddish. As Dov Sadan detected, Brenner embedded dozens of popular, colorful Yiddish idioms in his Hebrew works.16 Brenner’s heartfelt, intuitive bond to Hebrew did not keep him from writing pamphlets and propagandist stories for the Bund, aimed at promoting socialism and class consciousness among the Jewish masses. During his stay in Homel at the turn of the century, he edited the Bund’s underground magazine, Der Kamf. One issue is extant, produced in the calligraphy of a Torah scribe and carrying a simplistic tale with the message of class struggle, the odiousness of exploiters, and the importance of the proletarian brotherhood.17 The dualism makes one wonder why the Yiddish organ for the antireligious Bund was written in scribal letters, of all things.18 Years later, Brenner explained, allegedly in the name of a friend and Hebrew writer ‘‘who had embarked on literary work even before 1899,’’ that ‘‘during the Bund’s blossoming, when a holy spirit reigned among party

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members,’’ he had been ‘‘the writer of manifestos in Yiddish and of portraits of the impoverished masses in Hebrew, and that he had been ashamed of his Hebrew before party comrades.’’19 Brenner draws a sharp distinction here between Hebrew and Yiddish: belles lettres belonged to Hebrew; and political propaganda belonged to Yiddish. His literary talents were reserved for Hebrew; in Yiddish, he permitted himself to churn out writings that he did not regard as ‘‘creative.’’ Thus, he did not hesitate to edit, rewrite, and translate Yiddish works; but only in Hebrew did he hear the ‘‘holy voice from Mount Horev.’’ Until his London days, he seems to have clung to a functional division between the two languages. According to other testimonies, however, while working with Abraham-Zvi Kotik (1867–1933, a Yiddish cultural activist in Bialystok), he did write a good deal in Yiddish, including feuilletons and even stories (1901). But if he did write belletristic works in Yiddish in this period, none were published.20 The ambivalence and nuance of Brenner’s kinship to the two languages surfaces in his London period (1904–8). On the one hand, he takes pains to quickly rewrite the Hebrew novel Misaviv lanekuda, having twice lost the manuscript. In it, fidelity to Hebrew is depicted as the test of remaining true to the author’s soul, to his inner voice. The story’s polarity, however, is not between Yiddish and Hebrew but between Russian and Hebrew: between loyalty to one’s people and the embrace of another identity via a ‘‘foreign’’ language. To be sure, in a letter to Bialik at the time, he refers to the job he was forced to take at a Yiddish newspaper as ‘‘killing work.’’ Yet, at the same time, he enters into negotiations with the Bund’s head office in Geneva about writing for it, mainly translating from Russian to Yiddish. The Bund referred him to its man in London, which may be how he landed the newspaper job at Die Naye Tsayt, their organ there.21 His duties entailed translating, writing news, and proofreading. He explains to Bialik that the work is nonliterary and therefore his soul is intact, ‘‘for even though I am hired for my bread, it is not my pen I lend them but my hand.’’22 Yet before the month is out, we find him complaining that the job at the Yiddish newspaper ‘‘robs the divine spirit in me as well,’’ for he is exhausted from the hard work and has no time for Hebrew writing.23 Moreover, he is roped into writing serious articles in Yiddish, blurring the barrier that he had erected between Yiddish and Hebrew. Even after his initial hard times in London, Brenner continued to work for social-democratic and anarchist periodicals, advocating views with which he did not identify. For instance, he translated brochures from Rus-

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sian to Yiddish for social revolutionaries. Kalman Marmor (1879–1956), his friend and comrade in the newly formed Po’alei Zion Party at the time, deemed the occupation unworthy because it showed disloyalty to the party and to Hebrew. At Marmor’s reproach, Brenner defended himself, claiming that it was merely a question of making a living.24 Populist activists had no qualms about using Yiddish to spread their message and convert the masses, just as the Bund did: while active alongside Marmor in Po’alei Zion, Brenner translated into Yiddish and freely reworked Vladimir Jabotinsky’s (1880–1940) pamphlet on the preference of the Land of Israel over any other territory in the world (Far vos villn mir dafke Eretz Israel un nit glat a territoria in der velt arein), signing it ‘‘Y. Mehaber.’’ He translated into Yiddish a story by Gershon Shofman, ‘‘Nokhn pogrom’’ (After the pogrom), which appeared in Marmor’s monthly, Die Yudishe Freiheit. Later, when Marmor edited the Zionist periodical Der Yidisher Kemfer in the United States, Brenner sent him Yiddish articles that he had written for publication. None of this struck Brenner as crossing any sort of line between the various writing forms he reserved for the two languages. Invited, along with Marmor, to the United States to write for Der Yidisher Kemfer, he turned down the offer on the grounds that ‘‘I do not write stories in jargon nor am I a journalist.’’25 In other words, as he saw it, whatever he did in Yiddish did not affect his primary commitment to Hebrew literature. Thus, when Gnessin informed him that Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942), Brenner’s close friend and one of his greatest influences, intended to publish Yiddish literary anthologies, he recoiled as if burned: ‘‘Brothers, I received your letter this morning and buried my face in the pillow, realizing that we are lost,’’ he replied furiously to Gnessin and Zeitlin, adding sarcastically, ‘‘May the God of Vilna jargon be with you.’’26 In a letter to his friend Simeon Bikhowsky (1865–1932), Hame’orer’s distributor in Russia, he notes: ‘‘I finally received a letter from U. Gn[essin], which, after perusing, hob ikh oif zikh gerrissen die hor fun kop [I tore the hair out of my head]: The Hebrew anthology has turned into ‘jargonese’ collections? We are lost.’’27 Brenner’s outburst exposed a raw nerve, his hypersensitivity to the sad state of Hebrew; perhaps he also realized how fragile and mobile was the line that he had drawn between the two languages. The year 1906 was one of crisis for Hebrew periodicals. Publications were shut down, whether because of financial difficulties or czarist censorship. Writers were hard-pressed to earn a living from Hebrew and swung

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between the two languages. Peretz Hirschbein (1880–1948) ultimately moved over to Yiddish. Zalman Shneour (1886–1959) vacillated. Zalman Yitzhak Anokhi (1878–1947) switched over to Yiddish, as did Yitzhak Dov Berkowitz (1885–1967). When Brenner rebuked him for deserting to the ‘‘jargonist’’ camp, Berkowitz replied that he had not moved over completely but wrote in both languages: ‘‘I write also in jargon,’’ he explained to Brenner, ‘‘out of necessity. And because ‘both are the words of the living God.’ ’’28 The last point was difficult for Brenner to rebut since he felt similarly. Only his despair at the state of Hebrew literature in the troubled year of 1906 could have made a zealot of him, though it did not last. When Yitzhak Wilkansky (A. Zioni, 1880–1955) sought to publish a head-on attack on Yiddish writers in Hame’orer, Brenner weeded out the blunt and the militant opinions, explaining that many of the writers whose works he hoped to publish in Hame’orer wrote in Yiddish as well and that he had no desire to alienate them.29 This points to the bilingualism of Hebrew writers at the time and shows that there was no clear division between the two literatures. Brenner, infuriated by the idea of Yiddish anthologies, nevertheless saw no reason to ban writers who probably would have written both for those collections and for Hame’orer. It is impossible to find anything in the latter’s pages that is clearly either for or against Yiddish, though the preference for Hebrew as the language of culture is crystal clear and was a basic tenet of Brenner’s credo. But when it came to spoken Hebrew, his attitude was totally different. Brenner spoke Yiddish, thought Yiddish, and wrote Yiddish, albeit not belles lettres. His Yiddish writings, as compared with his Hebrew output, were neither prolific nor of great worth.30 Writing, however, was one thing and speaking was another: Hebrew occupied an exalted plane, removed from domestic and family life, from the marketplace. In day-to-day life, Jews relied on Yiddish—that warm, beloved mameloshn, soft and supple. This is so much an accepted wisdom in the writings of the period that it does not need qualification. Hebrew’s image was masculine, rigid, unyielding even to its lovers; Yiddish was feminine. This division was later attributed by Yitzhak Tabenkin to the fact that acerbic castigations of Diaspora Jewish society were written in Hebrew, while gentle, indulgent nostalgia was produced in Yiddish. But this differentiation does not necessarily hold water.31 Hebrew’s hard, male image possibly stemmed from the objective difficulty of Hebrew expressiveness, seeing

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as there was still no spoken language, and from the stiffness of Sephardic pronunciation. Sephardic Hebrew in the mouths of Ashkenazic Jews sounded forced and artificial; ‘‘they gave the impression of walking on stilts, of a mouth full of gravel.’’32 Even many years later, Berl Katznelson commented: ‘‘Not a day goes by that I don’t struggle with a Hebrew word whose instruction I don’t know or with a foreign word that I don’t know how to translate into Hebrew.’’33 Brenner was not an adherent of spoken Hebrew. Writing Hebrew came naturally to him because of his background in Jewish sources and his bond to Hebrew literature and the Hebrew press, which he read avidly. But he found spoken Hebrew strange and foreign. He felt no empathy for the exertions of Hebrew lovers either in Homel or in London to speak the language. He saw no particular value in adopting a stammering Hebrew when one could acquit oneself in a rich, fluent, idiomatic, and expressive Yiddish. For this reason, he was opposed to the teaching of Hebrew in Hebrew. His mind had been fixed on this point since his Homel youth: in Misaviv lanekuda, Brenner takes a sarcastic pen to the ‘‘reformed heder’’ that becomes a school for ‘‘Hebrew in Hebrew.’’ Haspanik, the teacher introducing the method, is a negative character portrayed with derision.34 In letters to Bialik soon after reaching London, Brenner makes it plain that he cannot undertake Hebrew teaching;35 he refused to teach Hebrew on principle. According to Marmor, he turned down a job at a Jewish school, where Hebrew was taught in Hebrew.36 Visiting Reuben Brainin (1862– 1940) on his way to Lvov (1908), he rejected a similar offer, preferring instead the exhausting physical work of typesetting.37 He was prepared to earn a livelihood in the Yiddish press, even to translate brochures of anarchists and others with whom he disagreed; yet the very same motive could not bring him to teach Hebrew. His attitude toward spoken Hebrew led to confrontations in London with Hebrew teachers banded together in the Hug‘Ivriya (Hebrew circle). They would address him in Hebrew, and he would answer in Yiddish.38 Nevertheless, they were part of the group supporting Hame’orer’s establishment, and, without their backing, it might never have seen the light of day. In its first year, the title page of the periodical stated: ‘‘Founded by the Society of ‘Hebrew Speakers’ in London.’’ Its sister society in New York was one of Hame’orer’s pillars of support. Hebrew speakers were the active component of the community’s ‘‘Hebrophiles.’’ Theirs was a concrete mission: to pass on the language to the next generation and ensure, among

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other things, a future readership for Hebrew literature. Their enthusiasm and devotion were contagious, imbuing pupils with a love of Hebrew, though until World War II they remained a small movement, composed of confirmed zealots.39 Brenner related to Hebrew with the discomfort of a man deprived of his natural means of expression and forced to stutter along in a language foreign to him.40 He may also have resented the breakdown of the traditional ‘‘division of labor’’ between Yiddish and Hebrew: just as he clung to producing literature in Hebrew—ever the exalted language—so he wished, too, to preserve the function of Yiddish as the spoken tongue of the people, as it had been for centuries. Now, Yiddish had taken a leap forward while Hebrew had descended to the realm of the mundane. Brenner associated Hebrew speaking with making aliyah to the Land of Israel: there was no sense in speaking Hebrew in the Diaspora. Indeed, the various Hug‘Ivriya groups often served as incubators for aliyah.41 Brenner’s attitude toward spoken Hebrew was bound up with his attitude toward the Land of Israel: in the autumn of 1906, when aliyah seemed to him a real option, he changed his approach to spoken Hebrew. His preparations for the journey to Palestine were reported to Marmor in the United States by a member of Po’alei Zion in London: ‘‘For several weeks now, Brenner has conversed with his friends in no language but Hebrew.’’ To ensure that Marmor did not miss the significance, he added: ‘‘As you know, Brenner did not believe in the revival of the spoken language.’’42 This testimony is our only indication from this period of Brenner’s stance on spoken Hebrew (other testimonies were written by Yiddishists after his death). His anxiety about not mastering the spoken language was divulged in a letter to Menachem Gnessin (1882–1951, brother of Uri Nissan), then in Palestine. He questions Gnessin about conditions in the country and asks whether ‘‘you speak only in Hebrew among yourselves and according to which pronunciation.’’43 The question of Sephardic pronunciation was daunting: for Eastern European Jews, it was a vexing innovation. Brenner’s Eretz Israel tales reveal their lack of familiarity with the new accentual syllabic system and the drop in status felt by educated people from the Diaspora, including teachers, when called on to adopt the Sephardic speech pattern used in Palestine.44 Most members of the Second Aliyah (1904–14) could not speak Hebrew prior to their aliyah. As a boy in Plonsk, Ben-Gurion had insisted on speaking Hebrew, together with several other young enthusiasts. When he visited

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Warsaw at the age of eighteen, he was astounded to discover that Sokolow, editor of Hatsefirah, could answer him only haltingly: this, from a man whose Hebrew articles aroused the admiration of Ben-Gurion and his friends.45 Berl Katznelson, however, testified that during his territorialist period, he had been ‘‘most attached to Yiddish; I considered Yiddish a positive factor in the life of the people.’’46 Katznelson’s attitude is highly reminiscent of Brenner’s: as an educator at a school affiliated with the Jewish Society for the Propagation of Enlightenment in Russia, Katznelson was meant to teach Hebrew and Jewish studies to girls from poor homes. But, Hebrew notwithstanding, he chose to teach them in Yiddish, the language they knew, in order to impart a basic knowledge of Jewish history and literature.47 As for spoken Hebrew, he noted; ‘‘I regarded spoken Hebrew as unnatural.’’ If a teacher of his addressed him in Hebrew, he would answer in Yiddish. When Katznelson arrived in Palestine, he could not put together a natural phrase in Hebrew. He sentenced himself to a ten-day silence until he learned to speak the language.48 Katznelson’s case was more common than Ben-Gurion’s. Most of the men could read and write Hebrew. The women, who had not attended heder, knew less. Very few could speak it. Only upon the interwar establishment of a Hebrew school network in the Diaspora was a bridge built between spoken and written Hebrew. Brenner seems to have been the most courted Hebrew writer by Yiddish authors cajoling him to write in Yiddish. It is worth mentioning the especially warm relations he formed with poets Lamed Shapira, whom he met in London, and Abraham Reisen (1875–1953), whose acquaintance dated back to the start of the century in Warsaw and was renewed several years later in Lvov. These relationships reveal hidden chords in Brenner as a member of the populist Jewish intelligentsia. Sociologically, there was no difference between Yiddish and Hebrew writers—they all belonged to the same cultural and social world. Shapira stayed in touch with Brenner even after immigrating to the United States. He invited Brenner to come to America and was prepared to send him the fare for the maritime crossing. Assuring him that in New York, he would be able to publish the Hebrew Hame’orer under better conditions, he nevertheless inserted his secret hope into the last two lines: Schreibt Yiddish! (Write Yiddish!).49 Reisen, too, invoked his persuasive powers. Hebrew writing, he argued, targeted a small minority of intellectuals, ‘‘the Klausners and Ahad Ha‘ams.’’ If Brenner were to write in Yiddish, Reisen claimed, he would

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win the recognition of the Jewish masses. When Brenner again raised the option of moving to America, Reisen responded enthusiastically, promising to roll out the red carpet in New York, where the million-and-a-half-strong Jewish community awaited his arrival. Reisen was willing and eager to translate Brenner’s great stories into Yiddish, which would fetch the latter a handsome income; still, as a stalwart warrior in the cause of the language that had recently risen to the level of high culture, he would like Brenner to write something original in Yiddish. Brenner apparently reworked a short story into Yiddish but did not write original literature in Yiddish. Reisen’s letters to Brenner are examples of both men’s bilingualism: not only does Reisen interlace his Yiddish with Hebrew verses and sayings, but, as an act of friendship toward Brenner, he even writes him a letter in pure Hebrew, though he claims to find the task arduous.50 Berl Katznelson contended that the second generation of Yiddish writers, such as Reisen and Sholem Asch (1880–1957), were opposed to Hebrew because they had not mastered it. Some contemporaries even interpreted the antipathy of Yiddish writers to Hebrew in terms of the hostility of the uneducated masses toward talmidei hakhamim (Torah scholars).51 But in the case of Reisen, Hirsch David Nomberg (1876–1927), and Lamed Shapira, this accusation is baseless: they all knew Hebrew very well, they read it, and at times also wrote it, even though Shapira and Reisen had a better command of Yiddish.52 On the twentieth anniversary of Brenner’s death, a volume of his letters and memoirs about him was published in Yiddish, under the editorship of Solomon Grodzinski (1904–72). Reisen had now come full circle, writing a warm, affectionate critique of the man and of his work and its renderings into Yiddish, which, he said, were as readable as if they had been written in Yiddish originally.53 From a temporal distance, the Czernowitz conference (1908), which proclaimed Yiddish a national language of the Jewish people and relegated Hebrew to the individual writer’s private domain, appears to be a defining moment in the history of the two languages and literatures. The shock waves it aroused in the form of press controversies continued unabated, creating layers of fanaticism and animosity. The two camps became widely polarized.54 As more and more people took an interest in politics and in the politics of culture in this highly ideological era, the language dispute became a key element of the conflicting visions of the future of the Jews. Brenner consistently avoided taking sides in the controversy between Hebraists and Yiddishists. He rejected the extreme Yiddishism that

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demanded seniority for Yiddish as the national language. ‘‘There can be no fertile national language in the full sense without lofty ancient traditions, and deep roots in the nation’s soul, and national assets accrued from earlier generations,’’ he held.55 ‘‘For more than fifty generations, our intellectual life has been embodied in this unspoken language.’’56 Yiddish has a present, but it does not connect to the Jewish past, and its future is in doubt. But both are Jewish national languages: one must belittle neither Yiddish nor Hebrew creativity. His grasp of both languages reflected his sense of existential angst: so long as the Jewish people lived in the Diaspora, so long as the Zionist project in the Land of Israel was shaky and its success uncertain, neither national language could be abandoned. Both battled against assimilation, and both enriched the Jewish soul and the people’s creative force.57 Brenner adamantly rejected the demand of Klausner’s school of Hebraists to choose between the two languages, ‘‘so long as we are what we are.’’ At the same time, he was repulsed by extreme Yiddishists who wished to sever Yiddish from Jewish tradition by replacing its Hebrew script with a Latin alphabet.58 Brenner’s Palestine period somewhat modified his attitude toward spoken Hebrew. He still did not believe it possible or necessary to demand that the Jewish masses in the Diaspora speak Hebrew, continuing to regard Yiddish as the language of Diaspora Jews. When Hebraist Samuel Leib Gordon (1865–1933), who lived in Warsaw, suggested that candidates with a knowledge of Hebrew be accorded priority in immigrating to Palestine, Brenner was appalled at the very thought.59 He was well aware of how few adults in Palestine spoke Hebrew and how widespread the use of spoken Russian was, not to mention Yiddish. He himself in his first year in Palestine spoke Yiddish: whenever Agnon describes a conversation with Brenner, he quotes Brenner in Yiddish, within his Hebrew text.60 Brenner now did believe that spoken Hebrew had a future in the Land of Israel: that the Hebrew school would raise a generation of Hebrewspeaking children who would ensure its continuity: ‘‘a language that possesses Bialik in its old age and in which tens of thousands of children . . . are educated . . . shall not die.’’61 His teaching experience at the Gymnasia Herzliya during World War I convinced him that youngsters raised in the Land of Israel regarded Hebrew as their natural tongue. Contrary to his previous refusals, in 1920 he was engaged to teach Hebrew at the camp of the Trumpeldor Labor Battalion in Migdal, an act that lends itself to two interpretations: either he was now more optimistic about spoken Hebrew

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in Palestine; or he sought to counter Russian, the tongue commonly used by battalion members. The fanaticism on both sides of the language fence was not to his liking. He fiercely denied Yiddishist charges of Yiddish press persecution in Palestine.62 At the same time, he staunchly defied any attempt to slight Yiddish speakers in the country. In Mikan umikan (his novel about the Second Aliyah), zealous Hebraists obstruct the efforts of the protagonist, Diasporin, to establish a Yiddish theater in Palestine. The Russian-speaking Diasporin fails to comprehend what is wrong with Yiddish, the mother tongue. This is Brenner’s way of presenting the absurdity of the resistance to Yiddish. Further on, the other protagonist, who presumably personifies Brenner (‘‘the confused’’), quotes an article summing up Brenner’s position on the language issue: ‘‘In general, no fanaticism of invalidation or suppression and no weakening of the [national] camp from within by wasting energy on a petty war.’’63 In 1920, when young hotheads created a ruckus at a closed session of the Socialist Workers Party (the future Communist Party) conducted in Yiddish, Brenner lambasted them: ‘‘It would be fitting to explain to our young Hebraists and non-Hebraists that violent protests or acts of coercion are never to be used in affairs of culture. . . . When it comes to matters touching on faith and culture—let every coercer be banished.’’64 Brenner’s stand in the language war reflected the concept that Jews constituted a single people, whether in the Diaspora or in the Land of Israel. This unity, to his mind, demanded the gathering of forces and shunning of internal strife, which saps the nation’s vitality and ability to survive. He did not believe that the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe and in the United States, struggling to eke out a living, would become proficient in spoken Hebrew. On the other hand, he regarded Yiddish—and even the Yiddish press and all its faults, which he freely criticized—as an expression of Jewish identity and as an instrument of Jewish continuity in an era in which migration and assimilation were disrupting the sense of Jewish togetherness. To this end, he wrote reviews and commentaries in Hebrew periodicals about Yiddish literature and journals. It was an expression of his inclusive approach to the two literatures as one. Up until his death, he was skeptical about the prospects of the Zionist project in the Land of Israel, whether because of his doubts about Jews being able to change—what he defined as ‘‘how are we to be not-we’’65 —or because of the existential angst he felt in the country, in view of the Arab presence. He asserted that no essential difference existed between the Yishuv

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in Palestine and other Jewish communities. So long as the realities in the country remained unaltered—that is, Jews being an unproductive minority there—Palestine was just an additional Diaspora, he held.66 The language war thus struck him as a waste of time and energy that could be put to more productive use. To his mind, it was far more important to establish a self-sustaining Yishuv living off its own labor than that Hebrew be spoken in Tel Aviv.67 In this, he remained true to himself, continuing to spurn the concept of Ahad Ha‘am’s ‘‘spiritual center.’’ He must have been gratified to read in one of the last letters he received from Reisen, one of the architects of the Czernowitz conference, the following statement: ‘‘The whole question of language is more appropriate for non-Jews than for Jews. I, in any case, have already outgrown it’’ (Die gantze shprakh fragge past zikh mer far goyim, vi far yidn. Ikh, allenfals bin zie aribbergevaksn).68 Brenner was murdered in May 1921, at the start of the British mandate in Palestine and of Bolshevik rule in Russia. He did not envisage the total suppression of Hebrew in the USSR or the use made by Yiddishists of the Soviet government apparatus against Hebraists. He did not foresee the collapse of the attempts to attain Jewish cultural autonomy in Eastern Europe or the intensification of assimilationist trends there. Nor did he predict the interwar blossoming of Yiddish literature and the Yiddish press in the United States or their subsequent waning. Certainly, he could not have foretold the Holocaust, which, in a single stroke, destroyed Eastern European Jewry and Jewish culture. He would have been surprised, too, by the amazing changes that Hebrew underwent as a spoken and literary language. Today, in an era of reconciliation and multicultural openness, Brenner should be remembered not only because of Hame’orer’s akhronim nisha’er al hahoma (‘‘we shall man the wall to the last’’) but also because of his championship of the two Jewish literatures. His composite attitude toward the two languages, like Berl Katznelson’s, Tabenkin’s, and Rachel Katznelson’s, raises questions about the dichotomy sketched by scholars of Israeli culture between the Yishuv and the Diaspora, between Yiddish and Hebrew, highlighting the contrasts and presenting Palestinian Jewish culture as fashioned in antithesis to the Diaspora. In numerous studies, the ‘‘negation of exile’’ features as the grindstone on which Eretz Israel’s self-image was sharpened. I myself plead mea culpa. This portrayal seems exaggerated. It has two origins: random and extreme utterances from members of the founding generation; and ‘‘native’’ attitudes of the generation born and raised in the country. Indeed, local reali-

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ties fostered a ‘‘nativeness’’ contemptuous of everything and anything from ‘‘over there,’’ that is, from the Diaspora, and exalting the ‘‘here.’’ However, this is not what the founding fathers had had in mind, especially the Laborites, who remained in close touch with Diaspora Jewry, the fount of most of their strength. It is no accident that by the 1930s, there was audible disappointment at the ‘‘product’’ of Eretz Israel education, notably the attitude toward the Jewish people. The founding fathers were part of the world of the Jewish intelligentsia. It was a nationalist intelligentsia, committed to the Jewish people. Within it, opinions diverged as to the desirable and possible Jewish future, and there was no lack of controversy or stormy times. But this all took place within the Jewish family fighting to preserve its identity against the lure of surrounding local cultures. This intelligentsia identified profoundly, emotionally, with basic social and cultural axioms, which, to a large degree, were shared by all, over and above political differences. Ben-Gurion’s voiced distaste in 1945 for Roz’ka Korczak’s spoken Yiddish became legendary, obscuring the fact that he himself, the extreme Hebraist, counted in Yiddish his whole life, resorted to Yiddish on his trips to Poland in the 1930s, and even spiced his addresses before the Mapai executive board with expressions in his mother tongue. On the other hand, Bundist survivors, grieving the loss of their people and culture in the Holocaust, searched for a guilty party to blame. They hit upon zealous utterances made in the Land of Israel to paint the Yishuv, as a whole, contemptuous of and hostile toward Yiddish, glossing over the fact that in prewar cultural clashes, their side had been at least as aggressive as the Zionists, and ignoring the shades and sub-shades of the Yishuv’s cultural spectrum on the issue. The time has come to reexamine the preHolocaust relationship between the Diaspora and the Land of Israel as one of mutual interaction rather than of opposing orders. Notes I would like to thank Nurit Levinovsky for her help in collecting material for this article. 1. Rachel Katznelson, ‘‘Nedudei lashon’’ (Language ramblings), in idem, Masot ureshimot (Tel Aviv, 1946), 10, printed originally in Ba’avoda (Jaffa, 1918). 2. See, for instance, Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘‘The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882–1948,’’ in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.), Essential Papers in Zionism (New York, 1996), 727–44. The same idea is implied by many postZionist works that emphasize the ideology ‘‘negation of exile.’’ See my ‘‘Whatever

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Became of ‘Negating Exile’?,’’ in Anita Shapira (ed.), Israeli Identity in Transition (London, 2004), 69–108, esp. nn. 2–3. 3. Joseph Hayyim Brenner, ‘‘Dapim: mipinkaso shel sofer ivri (Pages, from the Notebook of a Hebrew Writer),’’ Hameorer, January 1906, in Ktavim (Tel Aviv, 1978), 3:104–9. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Lamed Shapira, Der shreiber geyt in heder (The writer goes to school) (Los Angeles, 1945), 100. 7. Joseph Hayyim Brenner, Misaviv lanekuda (Around the dot), in Ktavim (Tel Aviv, 1978), 1:518. 8. Ya’acov Rabinowitz to Brenner, Volkovysk, 12 Tishrei 5667 (October 1, 1906), Genazim, A-20/18702. 9. Rabinowitz, Volkovysk. 10. The Bund (General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), established in 1897, was a Marxist socialist Jewish party that believed in class struggle and socialist revolution as the solution to the ‘‘Jewish problem’’ in czarist Russia. It became Yiddishist, as the language of the Jewish masses, and deplored Hebrew as a ‘‘dead language’’ and the Land of Israel as a ‘‘dead country,’’ and clashed with the Zionist socialists. The Po’alei Zion Party, a socialist Zionist party, was established around 1904 and in Palestine in 1906. It was headed by Ber Borochov, who incorporated Marxist ideology into Zionism. Po’alei Zion members were split on the question of language, vacillating between Hebrew in Palestine and Yiddish in the Diaspora. 11. Berl Katznelson, ‘‘Prakim letoldot tnuat hapoalim’’ (Chapters in the history of the Labor movement), in Ktavim (Tel Aviv, 1953), 11:7–80. 12. R. Katznelson, ‘‘Nedudei lashon,’’ 10. 13. For purposes of this article, I read and reread a number of valuable works, notably Dan Miron, Bodedim bemo’adam (When loners come together) (Tel Aviv, 1987); idem, Harpaya lezorekh negiya (From continuity to contiguity) (Tel Aviv, 2005); Shmuel Verses, Milashon el lashon (From language to language) (Jerusalem, 1995); Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘‘Aspektim shel harav ma’arekhet ivrit-yiddish’’ (Aspects of the Hebrew-Yiddish megasystem), Hasifrut 3–4 (1986): 35–36; Benjamin Harshav, ‘‘Massa al tehiyat halashon ha’ivrit’’ (Essay on the revival of the Hebrew language), Alpayim 2 (1990): 9–55; idem, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley, 1990); and articles by Yaacov Shavit, Avner Holtzman, Rachel Elboim-Dror, and Michael Greenzweig, in Israel Bartal (ed.), Ha’aliya hashniya: Mehkarim (The Second Aliyah: Studies) (Jerusalem, 1997), 343–415. 14. Baal Makhshoves ( Israel Eliashev), ‘‘Zvey shprakhn: Eyneyntsike literatur’’ (Two languages: A single literature), in idem, Geklibene shriften (Warsaw, 1929), 2:57–65. 15. B. Katznelson, ‘‘Prakim letoldot tnuat hapo’alim,’’ 11:17–18. 16. Dov Sadan (D. S.), ‘‘Gargirim’’ (Grains), Davar supplement, May 1, 1931.

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17. See H. Zeitlin, ‘‘Values and Memories,’’ in J. H. Brenner, Selected Memoirs, ed. Mordechai Kushnir (Tel Aviv, 1971), 24; Haim Dan, ‘‘The Evidence of Virgili-Cohen,’’ in Yitzhak Kafkafi and Uri Brenner (eds.), Al J. H. Brenner: Od zikhronot (On J. H. Brenner: More memoirs) (Tel Aviv, 1991), 29–30; Yitzhak Bacon, J. H. Brenner: Haktavim hayidiim (The Yiddish writings) (Jerusalem, 1985), 57; and idem, Brenner hatsa’ir (The young Brenner) (Tel Aviv, 1975), 58–91. A copy of the story can be found at YIVO, New York, and Bacon included it in Haktavim hayidiim, 57–73. 18. It is reminiscent of Berl Katznelson’s dualism; the letter he wrote to the Zionist Socialist Workers Party (a territorialist, non-Zionist party) to inform them that he was becoming a member was written in Hebrew. B. Katznelson, ‘‘Darkhi la’aretz’’ (My way to the Land of Israel), in Ktavim (Tel Aviv, 1953), 5:311. 19. Joseph Hayyim Brenner, ‘‘Rishmei sifrut’’ (Literary impressions), Ha’ahdut (February 1912), in Ktavim, 3:749. And see Bacon (ed.), J. H. Brenner: Haktavim hayidiim, 14–15. 20. Abraham Reisen says that he wrote a great deal in Yiddish at the time and that he does not understand why the Zionist periodical Der Yud did not publish any of it. Abraham Reisen, ‘‘J. H. Brenner, der heiliger martyrer undzerer’’ (Brenner, our holy martyr), Zukunft (June 1921): 375–76. Kalman Marmor, Brenner’s London friend, then a member of Po’alei Zion and later a Communist in the United States, said that Brenner had told him that he used to write a lot for the Bund in Yiddish and even wrote several skits and plays, which he lost when conscripted. Kalman Marmor, ‘‘Hadayar sheli, J. H. Brenner’’ (My tenant, J.H. Brenner), in Kafkafi and Brenner (eds.), Al J. H. Brenner, 32. 21. In the Brenner collection at the Labor Archives (L.A.), there are four letters to Brenner from the Bund’s head office in Geneva. The first is dated April 15, 1904, and the last, August 30, 1904. L.A. 104/4, folder 88. They are clear evidence that Brenner saw nothing untoward about editing and writing for the Bund in Yiddish. 22. Brenner to Bialik, May 8, 1905, in Iggrot (Letters), in Kol kitvei Brenner (Brenner’s complete works) (Tel Aviv, 1967), 3:231. 23. Brenner to Bialik, June 4, 1904, in Iggrot, 232. 24. Marmor, ‘‘Hadayar sheli,’’ 33–34. Also see Marmor’s letter to Poznanski, April 29, 1932, Genazim 1/15400/75. See also YIVO, RG205/280, letter from April 22, 1932, no. 22429. 25. Brenner to Kalman Marmor, apparently autumn 1905, YIVO, RG 205/108, no. 8783. 26. Gnessin’s letter to Brenner, Vilna, April 23, 1906, in Iggrot Gnessin, Ktavim (1946), 3:102. Brenner to Zeitlin and Gnessin, May 9, 1906, in Iggrot, 250. 27. Brenner to Bikhowsky, May 12, 1906, in Iggrot, 251. 28. Y. D. Berkowitz to Brenner, July 9, 1906, Brenner archive, Genazim (no catalog number). 29. Brenner to Yitzhak Wilkansky (A. Zioni), June 5, 1906, 254–55. 30. Yitzhak Bacon, with a display of detective talents and endless effort, collected

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and published Brenner’s Yiddish writings, both in the original and in Hebrew translation, in J. H. Brenner: Haktavim hayiddiim, Die yidishe schriften. 31. See the fascinating essay by Yitzhak Tabenkin, ‘‘Hamekorot’’ (The sources), in Brakha Habas (ed.), Sefer ha’aliyah hashniya (The Second Aliyah book) (Tel Aviv, 1947), 23–30 and esp. 28–29. A related opinion using different images (of a language containing revolutionary, critical substance as opposed to a language cherishing the status quo) may be found in R. Katznelson, ‘‘Nedudei lashon,’’ 9–22. 32. B. Katznelson, ‘‘Prakim letoldot tnuat hapoalim,’’ 11:78. See also R. Katznelson, ‘‘It never occurred to us to speak Hebrew. Would we really have abandoned the natural, and chosen the artificial?,’’ ‘‘Nedudei lashon,’’ 10. 33. Berl Katznelson, ‘‘Hotza’at sefarim shel hahistadrut’’ (Histadrut book publishing house), in Ktavim (Tel Aviv, 1953), 5:133. 34. Brenner, Misaviv lanekuda, 1:425–35. 35. Brenner to Bialik, June 4, 1904, in Iggrot, 232. 36. Marmor, ‘‘Hadayar sheli,’’ 32. 37. Reuben Brainin, ‘‘Brenner bedarkho milondon legalicia’’ (Brenner on his way from London to Galicia), in Kafkafi and Brenner (eds.), Al J. H. Brenner, 51. 38. L. Shapira, Der shreiber geyt in heder, 97–100; and Marmor, ‘‘Hadayar sheli,’’ 32. 39. A hint of Brenner’s attitude and of the ‘Ivriya circle may be found in a letter written to him by his friend Asher Beilin, from London to Lvov, describing the sadness that had overtaken him after Brenner left London. He drifted from anarchist to socialist clubs, and ‘‘things went so far that I took part in the ball organized in honor of Belkind, who left for Eretz Israel, and I spoke in the holy tongue under the liberation of ‘Carmel wine’—I also promised the ‘Hebrew speakers’ to attend their gatherings.’’ But on his way home, he had second thoughts and broke down. Beilin to Brenner, London, February 12, 1908, Genazim I-20/18161. 40. Berl Katznelson claimed that precisely those steeped in Hebrew culture could not accept the artificial spoken Hebrew invented by Ben Yehuda at the time. He mentions Lilienblum’s and Ahad Ha‘am’s reservations about spoken Hebrew, though not Brenner’s; he may have been overawed by Hame’orer’s mythos. B. Katznelson, ‘‘Prakim letoldot tnuat hapoalim,’’ 11:77–78. 41. Research is yet to be done on the topic of fostering spoken Hebrew before and after World War II. 42. Bogadin to Kalman Marmor, undated, apparently October 1906, YIVO RG205/108, letter no. 8788. 43. Brenner to Menachem Gnessin, October 13, 1906, in Iggrot, 275. 44. See, e.g., the assertions by Joseph Hefetz in Shkhol vekishalon (Bereavement and failure), Brenner, Ktavim, 2:1482–83. 45. David Ben-Gurion, Zikhronot (Tel Aviv, 1971), 1:8. 46. B. Katznelson, ‘‘Darkhi la’aretz,’’ 5:311. 47. Ibid., 5:315.

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48. Ibid., 5:325. 49. L. Shapira to Brenner, July 27, 1906, Genazim, I-20/18860. 50. The Labor Archive contains some ten letters from Reisen to Brenner, undated but covering 1908–20. Brenner’s letters to Reisen have not been preserved. L.A. 104/ 4–37–104. 51. Asher Beilin thus explains Reisen’s sudden affection for Sholem Asch at the Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference. Beilin to Brenner, September 14, 1908, Genazim I-20/18165. 52. B. Katznelson, ‘‘Prakim letoldot tnuat hapoalim,’’ 11:79. 53. Abraham Reisen, ‘‘Joseph Hayyim Brenner un zein lebn’’ (Joseph Hayyim Brenner and his life), in Die Feder (New York, 1942). 54. A great deal has been written on the Czernowitz conference, notably: Shmuel Verses, ‘‘Ve’idat czernowitz bire’i ha’itonut ha’ivrit (The Czernowitz conference as mirrored in the Hebrew press), in idem, Milashon el lashon, 453–87; Yehiel Scheintuch, ‘‘Ve’idat czernowitz vetarbut yiddish’’ (The Czernowitz conference and Yiddish culture), Huliot 6 (2000): 255–85; Israel Bartal, ‘‘Midu leshoni’ut masortit lehad leshoni’ut le’umit’’ (From traditional bilingualism to national unilingualism), in Cossack and Bedouin, Land and People in Jewish Nationalism (Tel Aviv, 2007), 30–40; Matityahu Mintz, ‘‘Zionim upo’alei zion beshprakh konferentz beczernowitz, 1908’’ (Zionists and Po’alei Zion at the language conference in Czernowitz, 1908), Shvut 15 (1992): 135–47; idem, ‘‘Te’uda she’ekhara umisaviv la’’ (A belated document and about it), Iyunim Bitkumat Yisrael 2 (1992): 368–77; and ‘‘Ve’idat czernowitz be’aspaklariat Sharfshtein hatza’ir’’ (The Czernowitz conference from the young Sharfshtein’s viewpoint), in Zevulun Ravid (ed.), Sefer Sharfshtein (Tel Aviv, 1960), 5–13. An interesting summation and historical appraisal by a contemporary can be found in Zvi Vislavski, ‘‘Esrim shanah leczernowitz’’ (Twenty years after Czernowitz), Hatekufah 25 (1939): 613–20. 55. Brenner ‘‘Rishmei sha’ah’’ (Current impressions), in Ktavim (Tel Aviv, 1985), 3:40. 56. Brenner, ‘‘Min hasifrut ha’ivrit’’ (From Hebrew literature), published in Polish in the Hamoriyah monthly (March 1908); in Ktavim, 3:187–89. 57. This is reiterated. See, e.g., Brenner, ‘‘Mitokh hapinkas’’ (From the notebook), Hed hazeman (June 1908), in Ktavim, 3:232–36. 58. Brenner, ‘‘Rishmei sifrut’’ (February 1912), Ktavim, 3:756–57. 59. Brenner, ‘‘Ziunim’’ (Notations), Ha’adama 5 (January 1920); Ktavim, 4:1738. 60. Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Al Berl Katznelson (On Berl Katznelson) (Tel Aviv, 1970), 6. 61. Brenner, ‘‘Ziunim,’’ Ha’adama 5 (January 1920); Ktavim, 4:1688. 62. Ibid., 1739. 63. Brenner, Mikan umikan, in Ktavim, 2:1434. 64. Idem, ‘‘Ziunim,’’ Ha’adama 8 (May 1920); Ktavim, 4:1774. 65. Idem, ‘‘Ha’rakhat atsmenu bishloshet hakrakhim’’ (Self-appraisal in three volumes), Revivim 5; Ktavim, 4:1296.

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66. This remark reoccurs in Mikan umikan and in ‘‘Bein mayim lemayim’’ (Between waters). It is quoted by Reisen in his necrologue to Brenner (Zukunft [June 1921]: 375) as a saying included in his letter to Reisen. 67. Brenner, ‘‘Instead of a Speech,’’ posthumous collection, Ktavim, 4:1797. 68. Reisen to Brenner, apparently 1921, L.A. 104/4–37–104.

CHAPTER 8

Eisig Silberschlag and the Persistence of the Erotic in American Hebrew Poetry Alan Mintz

The Hebrew poetry that flourished in America between the two world wars of the previous century can be understood in part as a struggle to negotiate the influence of Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky, the two great forces in Hebrew poetry at the turn of that century.1 Unfolding at the same time in the emerging literary center in Palestine is a very different dynamic: an outright revolt against these two leonine precursors in the name of Russian and French symbolism and German expressionism. Yet for the Americans, who were brought up in the public schools on the flowers of late romanticism, the ascendancy of the avant-garde in Tel Aviv seemed like the triumph of barbarism, and they wanted little to do with it. To Israeli critics, this stance of principled refusal has often been taken as reactionary, as if the Americans sought to preserve in amber the norms of their predecessors.2 A truer account, I would argue, would examine how the Americans took this inheritance apart and reassembled it in ways that domesticated it within the American milieu. Speaking of the inheritance of Bialik and Tchernichovsky together, as we often do, presumes a symmetry that is not really there. In the case of the Americans, the influence of Bialik was preponderant, and it is not difficult to see why. They saw themselves in the autobiographical persona developed in Bialik’s poetry: the banishment from nature, the benightedness of the heder, the world of faith shaken to its core, loneliness in love, rage at the failure of the people to deliver itself from ignorance and passivity. Each

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of these essential experiences was conveyed in poetic forms that were adopted, cultivated, and refined by the Americans. The figure of Tchernichovsky, by contrast, offered a more robust and less conflicted model for the embrace of the possibilities opened up by a Jewish national renaissance. Transposed through the Hebrew language, the Hellenic appreciation of beauty and sensuality (the ‘‘delights of Japhet’’) could happily expand the ken of Jewish culture (the ‘‘tents of Shem’’). The project of bringing the classics of world literature into Hebrew, rather than the ‘‘ingathering’’ of internal classical Judaic sources, became the essential cultural work of the new age. Tchernichovsky’s poetic achievement and the wealth of his translations were widely respected by the American Hebrew poets, but there was only one among them, Eisig Silberschlag, who saw Tchernichovsky as the paragon and as the way out of the sterile overrefinement in which Hebrew poetry in America had encased itself. As a poet, to be sure, Silberschlag was his own man, and he declined to emulate his precursor in many things, especially in the writing of such long narrative poems as Tchernichovsky’s famed idylls. Yet the elder poet remained a paragon. As with Tchernichovsky, the formative moment in Silberschlag’s cultural formation was decidedly not the break with religious tradition, and the movement outward toward the discovery of many nonJewish literatures in their original languages was similarly not fraught with angst. When it came to some of the central themes of his poetry—erotic desire, embodied beauty, nature, and art—Silberschlag was happy to accept their Greek provenance rather than fret about their absence from classical Judaism. At the height of his career, Silberschlag heeded the Tchernichovskian imperative and devoted the lion’s share of his creative energies to translating the eleven comedies of Aristophanes from Greek into Hebrew, for which he was awarded the Tchernichovsky Prize in Israel in 1951. His monograph Saul Tchernichowsky: Poet of Revolt (1968) has served as the major presentation of the poet’s work in English.3 Silberschlag’s biography differs from the collective portrait of American Hebrew poets in two ways. Born in 1903, he was somewhat younger than most and arrived in America later than they. (On the consequences of this difference in a moment.) And rather than hailing from czarist Russia, he grew up in Galicia within the sphere of German cultural influences. Satri in Eastern Galicia, where Silberschlag was born, had long been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But because of war and revolution, during Silberschlag’s youth the city changed hands several times between the Austri-

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ans, Russian, Ukrainians, and Poles. In our best source of knowledge about his life, Arnold Band posits that Silberschlag’s cosmopolitanism, so much his hallmark within the confines of American Hebrew letters, was first shaped by the exposure to the succession of these cultures and languages in Satri well before he strode the boulevards of Vienna and Paris.4 The gymnasium in Satri, where Silberschlag studied, had a classical curriculum, and it was there that he began to study Greek and Latin. An important formative influence, Band argues, was Silberschlag’s participation in the Hashomer Hatza’ir Zionist youth movement in the years before it took on a Marxist outlook. The ethos of the movement stressed the promise of youth, the importance of a connection to nature, the centrality of love and solidarity, and the goal of self-realization in addition to the primacy of the Land of Israel, where these values could be fulfilled. All these can be recognized as themes in Silberschlag’s poetic work. Silberschlag arrived in New York City in 1920, at the age of seventeen. He worked in rough labor to support himself and presumably studied at the City College of New York (CCNY), although we have little information about him during these years. The early 1920s were the heyday of Hebraist activity, and optimism, in America: the daily Hado’ar was started, Hebrew colleges were founded, and Hebrew-focused boards of Jewish education were organized in major cities. In the contemporary accounts and memoirs of this time, Silberschlag’s name is not mentioned; he seems to have stood apart. The matter of age and date of immigration is significant here. Most of his somewhat older fellow nascent Hebrew writers had come to America before World War I. In addition to knowing one another in the Hebrew clubs of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side, their literary tastes were often fixed by the canon of American and British literature taught to them in the public schools of those years. Silberschlag, by contrast, arrived in America already as a graduate of the Satri gymnasium, whose orientation toward European literature—not to mention the classics of antiquity—was already formed. Whereas many American Hebrew poets were drawn to the American landscape, its preindustrial mythologies, and the lore of its oppressed minorities, Silberschlag remained largely insensible to these attractions and used the American scene mostly as a butt of satire. In 1925, Silberschlag returned to Europe, where he spent two years obtaining a doctorate from the University of Vienna for a thesis on economic relations between England and Russia during the reign of Catherine II. Although his academic focus may have been history, he read and studied

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European literature voraciously. Vienna, as a kind of capital of continental modernism, was the ideal place for a youth from the Galician provinces, especially after a sojourn within the vulgar immigrant culture of New York, to pursue his artistic and sentimental education. His immersion in European literature is reflected in his Tehiyah uteh.iyah bashirah (Astonishment and renewal in poetry), a collection of essays handsomely put out by Shtybel in 1938, which includes pieces on Baudelaire, Vale´ry, Eliot, Yeats, Hofmannsthal, and Rilke. In American Hebrew letters at the time, there was nothing like it. After several months in Paris, Silberschlag returned to New York. Between 1930 and 1932, he had teaching stints at the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary and at the Jewish Institute of Religion, before moving to Boston to accept a position teaching Hebrew literature and Bible at the Hebrew Teachers College. Rising to become dean and then president, Silberschlag remained at the school, which is now called the Boston Hebrew College, until his retirement in 1970. Despite his long tenure, he never struck deep roots in the Boston community and returned frequently to New York to visit family and friends. The figure Silberschlag cut at the college, according to Band, who worked under him for many years, was aristocratic and aloof. A handsome man sporting a mustache and a bow tie, he retained something of the bohemian panache of his student years. His relationship to Eretz Israel was complicated. He was mentioned to succeed Klausner in the chair of modern Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University in the late 1940s, but when Simon Halkin was tapped for the position, he stayed in America and did not join other American Hebrew writers, such as Israel Efros and Abraham Regelson, in moving to the newly established state. Although all of Silberschlag’s work as a teacher, translator, critic, and poet took place in Hebrew, he keenly felt his distance from the literary center in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and he remained critical of Israeli slang, linguistic innovations, and contemporary literary trends. The hallmark of his intellectual world remained the classical, whether ancient Greece or ancient Israel or the ‘‘classic’’ modern literary idiom forged by Hebrew writers at the turn of the twentieth century. Silberschlag’s longevity allowed his life a colorful and far from abbreviated final act. After retiring from the presidency of the Hebrew College and after the death of his wife, Milkah, he leaped over the barrier separating the older Hebraist institutions from the newly energized world of Jewish studies in the universities. He moved to Austin and accepted a position as professor

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of Hebrew literature at the University of Texas, where he taught from 1973 to 1978 and remained until his death in 1988. He served as president of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew, and in his seventies and eighties he cut a romantic, even amorous, swath through the groves of academe. Although he wrote wise and witty poetry until the very end, he became best known to the non-Hebraist world, alas, for his synoptic account in English of the history of Hebrew literature, From Renaissance to Renaissance, a work that displays great erudition and enthusiasm but remains uninformed by modern literary critical methods.5 Silberschlag was a lyric poet, and, unlike many other American Hebrew poets, he never reached a point at which he experienced the lyric as inadequate for his ambitions. This is not to say that those ambitions were modest or narrow but rather that his temperament was well served by a form that privileged shorter utterances expressing heightened moments of awareness. Although in mid-career, he did compose a number of extended poems— dramatic monologues, narratives, folk re-creation, each very different from the other—this mode never became Silberschlag’s me´tier. In fact, as he got older, his poems became even shorter and were published in a succession of volumes whose small physical size made them resemble chapbooks. Three reasons suggest themselves for Silberschlag’s allegiance to the lyric. To begin with, the epistemology of the lyric locates the source of truth and knowledge in the perception of the speaker; and the conventions of the lyric, moreover, invite the reader to make no distinction between the poet and the poem’s speaker. This makes the lyric ‘‘I’’ that utters the poem potent and authoritative, and it would seem that this premise accorded with Silberschlag’s sense of himself quite comfortably. He did not feel hemmed in by the constrictions of the lyric premise that led others to seek to escape the orbit of the ego by inhabiting other minds and imagining other climes and times. In this connection, secondly, Silberschlag’s poetry exhibits next to no romantic attraction to the American landscape, to the lore of the American past, or to its aboriginal inhabitants. It was the largeness and extensiveness of American stories and the ample vistas in which they unfolded that drew other poets toward narrative and furnished them with a way to break out of the lyric enclosure. Although Silberschlag had much to say about America in his verse, it was decidedly not a subject that called upon him to unfurl extended wings of song. Finally, in the economy of his artistic life, the Aristophanes translations

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must have functioned as his epic undertaking. Throughout the 1940s, with all that was happening in the world and to the Jewish people, Silberschlag continued to devote an enormous amount of his imaginative energy to translating Greek classics into Hebrew. He did not turn his back on America, nor did he turn his back on the struggles taking place in Europe and Palestine; yet in his capacity as a man of Hebrew letters, he turned his fullest attention to constructing a bridge between two great classical cultures. The appearance in 1931 of Silberschlag’s first book of poetry, Bishevilim bodedim (On solitary paths), was a surprising arrival in the world of American Hebrew literature.6 Most of the early work of American Hebrew poets, observes the preeminent commentator Avraham Epstein, was caught between two sources of anguish: ‘‘As immigrants, their first steps [as poets] were fraught with uncertainty, false steps, and struggle, which resulted, on the one hand, from the burden of the patrimony they brought with them from abroad, and, on the other, from the painful adjustment to new and alien modes of behavior and thought.’’7 The poems in Silberschlag’s debut volume, by contrast, evinced no signs of tortured ambivalence about Judaism or the nervous insecurity of newcomers to America. Bishevilim bodedim is nothing less than a collection of ecstatic love poems, and, as such, it is indeed an astonishing and significant curiosity within American Hebrew letters, which is notable for its absence of erotic themes. The reasons for this absence have to do with conventions of modesty inherent in the literary systems, both Hebrew and American, in which these young poets were working, as well as with the depressioninducing mix of immigrant angst delineated by Epstein.8 Silberschlag’s preoccupation with the erotic modulates significantly throughout his long career. Here at the beginning, love is represented as a generalized state of sensual arousal rather than an exchange of feelings between differentiated objects. ‘‘It is not wine but spring / that has caused the storm in my soul,’’ avers the lyric speaker. ‘‘I kissed every flower, / I desired every girl.’’9 In the intoxication of youth, the sweetness of flowers and girls comes from the same source of wonderment. These poems are filled with the natural symbols of streams, birds, villages, trees, and stars, creating a timeless and placeless quality that approaches the world of folk tales. They take place in no recognizable locale so much as in the poetic state of young manhood. The central trope, as in the case with flowers and

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the girls, is the correspondence between the natural world and the female object of desire.

(How marvelous you are since I discovered On my solitary rambles The similarity between your soul And the blue nights of spring. The moon is proud like your head, The tree like your erect stature, And the grass tender like your breast In blue nights of spring.)10 It is the discovery of this correspondence, dramatized as a serendipitous revelation, which endows the female addressee with such wonder. What is most surprising in this surprising volume is its opening, a sequence of seventeen short poems titled ‘‘Shirei na’arah’’ (Songs of a young woman). The speaker is the beloved of an unseen man who has dressed her in silk and installed her in a palace, where she awaits him and sings of their love. She describes how her body comes into bloom—yes, flowers are everywhere here, too—in response to her lover’s desire, and her songs construct imaginary realms that they traverse as a golden couple. The first line of poem 4, for example, reads: anakhnu ma’avirim ‘alufei lehavah / kishenei meteorim (We take wing, suffused by flame like two meteors).11

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The word ma’avirim (with an alef), ‘‘we take wing,’’ ‘‘we take flight,’’ is comprehensible from our familiarity with ever as wing; but Silberschlag, of course, had recourse to many commoner choices to convey flight. The choice of ma’avirim, which is attested only one place in Scripture (Job 39:26), is another instance of Silberschlag’s critical deploying of Hebraic erudition in a poetic discourse that is otherwise committed to a rich but communicative and transparent semantics. The next phrase in the line, ‘alufei lehavah, takes nice advantage of the dual meaning of ‘a.l.f. (with an ‘ayin) as both ‘‘to cloak’’ and ‘‘to faint’’; the lovers blaze through the firmament either covered in fire or having swooned into it. Finally, the la’az (European loan word) of meteorim astutely balances the exotic Biblicism of ma’avirim. Taken as a whole, it is a beautiful line, and it exemplifies the lyric inventiveness and lyric purity that Silberschlag is capable of in his early poems. What is most astonishing is Silberschlag’s choice to place in the first position in his first book a series of poems in which he ventriloquizes, quite successfully, the voice of a woman. Although it is not a subject position he returns to often, this opening move makes a strong statement about how fundamental to his poetic world is the experience of desire, whether viewed from one side of the gender divide or from the other. There is a discernible shift in Bishevilim bodedim, as Epstein has pointed out, from sensual intoxication to an awareness of temporality.12 The delirium of stars and flowers and first love gives way to an awareness of experience as finite and irretrievable. We hear of love not just as a rush of the senses but as episodes of happiness that can end with misunderstanding and disappointment (‘‘Lydia,’’ 39–40; and ‘‘Harishonah’’ [First love], 56– 60). For the first time, connection to a parent is mentioned in a poem dedicated to the speaker’s mother, which contrasts love as such, the romantic love of youth that permeates these pages, with the ‘‘pure waves of grace’’ that emanate from a mother’s love (‘‘Ahavah ve’ahavat em’’ [Love and mother love], 85). Finally, Silberschlag is able to step outside of the enclosure of his own intense experience to consider the institution of poetry and the strong practitioners who preceded him. His debut volume of poetry comes to a close with a wonderful ode to Shlomo Ibn Gabirol, the great poet of the Judeo-Spanish Golden Age (88– 91). The poem is notable for the opportunity that it wisely declines to take advantage of: crudely appropriating the magisterial medieval poet for the aggrandizement of a belated offspring. In any case, Silberschlag accomplishes something of this effect—drawing a line between himself and the

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great precursor—simply by offering sincere praise and keeping himself, as poet, out of the poem. The poem’s speaker finds many things to extol in Ibn Gabirol’s verse: the wonder of a Hebrew poetry that remains engagingly fresh after so many centuries, the spiritual courage of this ‘‘wondrous eagle’’ to beat its wings against the Divine Throne without being burned alive, the commitment to explore the ways of love and wisdom despite the inevitability of pain. Yet the greatest empathic admiration is reserved for Ibn Gabirol as an exemplar of the true vocation of poetry, which is nothing less than to redeem humanity through vicarious suffering. Although poor, wandering, and unrecognized by the world, Ibn Gabirol nevertheless wielded his supernal powers on behalf of the world by distilling moments of divine and human beauty from the afflictions of terrestrial experience.13 Bishevilim bodedim, in sum, lives up to its title of charting a singular path for American Hebrew poetry. It is worth recalling the polemical claims made by the young Simon Halkin in the pages of Hado’ar in defense of American Hebrew poetry against its detractors in Palestine. The Americans, Halkin argued, were saving Hebrew poetry from the stylistic barbarism of symbolism and expressionism by remaining true to the classical simplicity and purity of the greatest modern Hebrew verse, while at the same time jettisoning the cumbersome intertextual allusiveness of the previous generation. Although he adduced Efros’s poetry as his example—Silberschlag was younger and unknown at the time—the best poems of Bishevilim bodedim would have, in fact, served as better evidence. In these, Silberschlag achieved a pure and limpid lyric precision, a quality missed by the similar efforts of many other American Hebrew poets. Unburdened by some of the conflicts that weighed down others, Silberschlag could let his verse warble plangently but within a tight register. This was the trade-off; deeper and more serious explorations would require the exertion of greater force. That force, in the form of poetic authority, was gained during the sixteen long years that intervened between Silberschlag’s first collection and the publication in 1947 of his next book, ‘Aleh, olam, beshir (Ascend, oh world, in song), which became the canonical presentation of his poetry in the world of American Hebrew letters.14 Although the intoxication with love, nature, and the lush artifice of language survives in places, this simple song has largely given way to the construction of a more formal aesthetic stance anchored in the authority of the poet as much as in the institution of poetry. Ascend, Oh World, in Song: the imperative mood of the title implies the existence of a Shelleyan poet-legislator commanding the world

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to transmute itself into the truer realm of poetry. Everything about this volume bespeaks the consolidation of a poetic identity. In Bishevilim bodedim, the table of contents, tucked away at the end of the volume, simply offered a list of the poems; in Silberschlag’s second volume, the table of contents, placed directly following the title page, groups the poems under categories according to subject and genre, as if to say that before us is not just a collection of poetry ad quem but the presentation of a poetic career in which deliberate choices have been made to create poetry in the various modes appropriate to a major Hebrew poet. In this formal arrangement, the first section, titled ‘‘Kavim ledemuti’’ (Perspectives on my identity), is a group of sixteen poems that lays out the components of Silberschlag’s mature poetic persona. In the first place in this first section is the poem ‘‘Sevel yerushah’’ (Anguished inheritance, 3–4), in which the speaker tells us from where he hails and what his origins mean to him. Prompted by its placement and its declarative tone, many readers have, not surprisingly, taken the poem as the anthem of Silberschlag’s creative identity. Like the volume as a whole, this presentation of self is highly organized. The three equal sections—each nine unrhymed lines with a singleline refrain—are devoted, respectively, to the patrimony of his male ancestors, the inheritance from his female ancestors, and himself as the wayward product of these influences. His male ancestors were Jewish merchants who went about their business in the birch and pine forests of the Carpathian foothills until their life was transformed by the advent of Hasidism. The Baal Shem Tov went up into those mountains on a spiritual quest and ‘‘found his soul in the form of a pure, young bride / Who lavished her playfulness upon his days and nights.’’ When the Founder came down to propagate his teaching through the medium of melody and dance, the speaker’s ancestors embraced the new truth, clung to it, and transmitted its fire to their offspring. In the refrain that distills this, the male portion of his inheritance, the speaker states: Raz hah.asidut ran bedami, raz h.asidut ran beshiri (The secret of Hasidism sings in my blood, the secret of Hasidism sings in my song). This line has often been taken simply as a noble homage on the part of the poet to his Galician Hasidic roots. But a shrewder understanding of the refrain would underscore the implication that in a secular age, it is the poet’s verse that is the true—and perhaps the last—beneficiary of this oncegreat spiritual enterprise. The mothers are the transmitters of a different and more subversive force. They were possessors of a beauty that is hidden from view in the way

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in which the delicate violets in the foothills are obscured by the taller grasses of the meadows. Yet the fragrance of their beauty could not be concealed, and its very repute had the power to unleash the desires of young men and women and thereby disturb the neat boundaries of traditional society. As a boy, the speaker heard tales of a Polish grandee who seduced a Jewess with the snares of love and made her betray her religion. The refrain that distills the inheritance from the ancestral mothers is more oblique than in the case of the fathers: Neh.ash hasafek na‘ bedami, neh.ash hasafek na‘ beshiri (The serpent of doubt moves in my blood, the serpent of doubt moves in my song). Although the precise kind of doubt that has been bequeathed is left vague, its source could not be clearer, as is the link between female sexuality and the serpent. It is the real, if unintended, sexual radiance of the mothers that unhinges and tampers and disturbs. When the last third of the poem comes around to the poet-speaker himself, we encounter an unexpected disjunction rather than a programmatic synthesis of the paternal and maternal influences. The stanza is built around repetitions of two similar-sounding roots: t.h.h., ‘‘to be amazed and bewildered,’’ and r.h.h., ‘‘to be afraid and to move without self-confidence.’’ With his blond hair and blue eyes, he is puzzled by the fact that, despite being the heir to their patrimony, he does not resemble his ancestors. He is further confused by his inner life: ‘‘My heart is the meeting place for myriads of conflicts, yet I was not provoked by them, / For myriads of desires, yet I did not seek them out. Like a stranger I have passed through the lands of my heart.’’ The inability to abandon himself either to ideas or to desires seems to be the ‘‘anguished inheritance’’ of the poem’s title. His forebears have ineluctably put their mark on his poetry, and it is that poetry that has opened up fissures within himself and between him and his people. Because he is a Hebrew poet, his fate has a double knot, which returns to the gender distinctions of the first two stanzas. The women never understood my song because they never knew Hebrew, and the men, in the desolation of their troubles, forgot the language of poetry. Thus the third of the poem’s refrains: Ani sharti li et shiri tah.at shah.akei nekhar nugim (I sang my song under cheerless alien skies). (By virtue of the juxtaposition of this poem with the one that follows, which will be discussed next, the phrase ‘‘cheerless alien skies’’ refers not just to the disenchantment of modernity but specifically to America.) Taken as a whole, then, ‘‘Sevel yerushah’’ is a self-inverting artifact. Placed at the head of the poet’s new book and opening with a self-confident

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claim to the poetic legacy of Hasidism, the poem leads us to expect an arspoetic anthem celebrating the poet’s vital transformation of the received wisdom of his origins. Instead, the poem regresses from the Hasidic song to doubt-provoking sexuality and finally to inner and outer alienation. The source of that alienation for Silberschlag is close at hand. In the second poem of self-presentation in the volume, ‘‘Mipolin ‘ad amerikah’’ (From Poland to America, 5–8), the speaker declares that at age forty, half his life has been spent in Poland and half in America. Dear to him sevenfold in the throes of its destruction—the year must be 1943—Poland nurtured him from three sources: the melodies of its inhabitants and its hills, the scientific learning that came by way of its German-speaking overlords, and the faith that flowed from Zionism and the connection to Eretz Israel. Despite the deprivation and constriction of Jewish life there, it was an existence grounded in a yearning for transcendental meaning. America, the scene of the second half of his life so far, would seem to promise an antidote to the disintegration and persecution of European Jewish life. Here there is room to spread out, infinite reserves of youthful energy, and the talent for pragmatic accomplishment. Yet notwithstanding these apparent riches, the opposite has taken place. ‘‘Indeed, my heart has been broken by the pangs of the move / From the culture of longing to the culture of money’’ (6). Silberschlag builds his contrast on the near identity between kosef, ‘‘yearning,’’ and kesef, ‘‘money.’’ The abundance of the latter inevitably extinguishes the former. The indictment of America is unsparing. Rabbis resemble peddlers whose merchandise is a debased Torah made up of vacuous, inflated homilies. Educators, who are charged with teaching Torah, lack the slightest notion of what they are about. Together they care only about their salaries and are so preoccupied with their material well-being that they are insensible to the wholesale slaughter of European Jewry. At the same time as Jewish bodies are being murdered abroad, on the free shores of America the Jewish people is condemning itself to spiritual death and killing of all that is majestic in its soul. There is but one hope, declares the speaker in conclusion, and it lies in the Land of Israel. ‘‘Mipolin ‘ad amerikah’’ is the foundational text in what becomes a broad genre in Silberschlag’s poetic career: vicious, and viciously amusing, satires on American Jewish life. This is something of a singular phenomenon in the corpus of American Hebrew poetry. It is taken for granted that all American Hebraists were sharply critical of the American Jewish community. But most of the poets observed a kind of separation of modes; they

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regarded prose as the proper venue for this satirical project, which was, in fact, taken up by writers such as Arieli-Orloff, Halkin, and Blank. In the poets’ romantic conception of poetry, the synagogue, the Jewish school, and the immigrant neighborhood are not fertile ground for Hebrew verse. They made their own bargain with America by turning away from what was most familiar and most fallen and turning toward an idealized rural American landscape that, more often than not, contained no people whatsoever, whether Jews or Gentiles, or at most, figures like Bavli’s Mrs. Woods, who represent an older, even biblical, order of values or American Indians and African Americans, whose lore similarly stood at an exotic distance from contemporary society. None of these vistas or folkways apparently held much charm for Silberschlag, or at least not enough to be adduced as a counterweight to the savaging of American Jewish institutions.15 Among many other purposes, poetry could serve him well as a weapon. What his satirical poems lack in nuance of feeling is made up for by a wicked and efficacious display of wit.16 The American polemic is part of a larger program in Silberschlag’s major second book to put behind him the image of the sensitive, lyric poetaster and instead to inhabit the figure of a poet of substance, gravity, and range. Because the dreamy, intoxicated lover was so very much part of his early work, there is a felt urgency in his effort to portray himself as a lover of a different sort. Silberschlag seizes his chance in a long poem about an affair with a married woman, titled ‘‘Yesh yif’ah ‘atsumah beh.okhmah’’ (There is enormous beauty in wisdom, 27–41). The remaking of his selfconception as a lover is dramatized in the opening stanza of the poem not simply as a further station in his self-realization but rather as a crisis that challenged him to expand his poetic self.

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(There is enormous beauty in wisdom; your beauty is in your enormous wisdom. And my song that with exceeding affection knew well how to extol The charms of the female form: the hair that flows like lava Down the back and like a parted kerchief down the front, the pale breast And the nipple gleaming like a roseate star in the night’s darkness,— Proceeds with extreme caution like a wide river on the plain, When it comes to praising your soulful beauty, which animates and articulates your body.) Note, to begin with, the ample and solid architecture of this stanza, which, like the forty-two others in the poem, has seven unrhymed lines, each with six amphibrachs. The tone is expository; and the opening line is classificatory and almost syllogistic in tone (‘‘There is enormous beauty in wisdom; your beauty is in your enormous wisdom’’), and this opening betokens a poetry that eschews lyric expressiveness in favor of making observations and distilling wisdom. The fact that it is precisely the attribute of wisdom that proves so powerfully seductive in this poem is therefore no coincidence. Although the speaker’s ostensible purpose is to praise his lover, the lion’s share of the stanza is given over to a characterization—bragging, really—of his own poetry, whose distinguishing theme has been female sensuality. The speaker presents himself as part troubadour and part lothario, whose me´tier, whose very stock-in-trade, has the business of praising the female body. The descriptions of hair and breast in lines 3–5 move in two directions at the same time. One the one hand, they provide a sampling of the speaker-poet’s talent in producing figurative language. The nipple ‘‘gleaming like a roseate star in the night’s darkness’’ is supposed to arrest our attention not just for its sensual daring but also for its performative achievement as metaphor making. On the other hand, these lush tropes also suggest an overripe quality of self-parody. The erotic poetry of the world abounds in such chestnuts of arousal, and even his belated contributions to the genre run the risk of labeling him as a poet who is capable of appreciating only the superficial charms of women’s beauty. Hence the speaker’s revisionist declaration that beauty rooted in intelligence and soulfulness can carry an erotic charge and that these qualities, as he asserts in the last line of the stanza, are anterior to the body, animating and articulating it. The problem with this realization is that it unmans his

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confidence as a poet. Once a mountain torrent, his poetry has now been reduced to a flaccid flow that seeks a new channel. He has prided himself in being a connoisseur of women’s beauty, only to find himself up against a greater force that challenges his mastery and compels him to proceed with caution while he hastens to improvise a new poetics adequate to the task. The poetry that follows this opening, the procession of solid, long-lined stanzas that constitute ‘‘Yesh yif’ah ‘atsumah beh.okhmah,’’ provides strong evidence for the will to measure up to this task and write a love poetry of greater range and maturity. Yet to accomplish this, Silberschlag feels compelled to abandon the lyric entirely and to adopt a more cerebral, novelistic exposition that tells the story of the doomed affair rather than instantiating the feelings that it aroused. It is a style, moreover, to which he never returned in his later poetry. It is Silberschlag’s particular charm never to have entirely outgrown his ‘‘immaturity’’ and suppressed the rush of desire that continues to surprise him as he ages. Far more characteristic than his treatise on the beauty of wisdom and far more wise in its own way is a short poem located in the autobiographical section of ‘Aleh, ‘olam, bashir titled ‘‘Me’alumai ‘ad ziknati’’ (From my youth to my old age, 17). In very simple language, the speaker reflects on how, when he was ten years younger, his heart would pound when he would meet his girlfriend by the edge of a pine grove. Yet now, despite the fact that his youth is over, his heart still races in the same way at the prospect of meeting his lover. But there is a difference, which is spelled out in the poem’s closing lines: ‘‘Even in my old age, even in my old age / I will silently bow down before a young woman, / But she will give her heart to the young man, / And leave me to make poems.’’ The substitution of writing about love for the consummation of love is an old trope, but Silberschlag gives it a fresh poignancy with the artless admission that he has never truly outgrown the excited anticipation of an amorous encounter. Now, rather than waiting by the edge of the woods for his lover, he makes a courtly gesture of obeisance before a beautiful young woman, but the desire and the adoration persist. There is, moreover, something gently self-mocking in the readiness of the speaker to regard himself as having entered the zone of old age, whereas we know from other poems in this autobiographical gathering that the persona of the speaker is not much past forty. The poem, then, represents a kind of arrangement that Silberschlag has arrived at with himself. Although I will not and I cannot give up desiring, I will cease striving to make my poems describe that experience

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from within; instead, I will write poems that observe myself in the act of desiring.17 A slight but beguilingly provocative poem, ‘‘In Pagan Footsteps,’’ is at once a gesture toward Tchernichovsky’s literary paganism and an anatomy of the desire that is so central to Silberschlag’s poetry:

(In Pagan Footsteps Sun, wind and sea And your burning body on the sand, Sun, wind and sea And your body wordlessly demanding, Sun, wind and sea And your body overpowering everything, Sun, wind and sea— Ah, life without God and without yoke.)18 The poem is built around an alternation between a fixed, mantra-like refrain (shemesh veruah veyam [sun, wind, and sea]) and a reference in the second person to the female companion’s body on the beach. The alternating lines also have fixed elements: gufeikh (your body) at the beginning of each line, the nearly identical end rhymes, and the repetitive syntax. Working against the lulling torpor of these repetitions is the changing state of

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the companion’s body, which moves from burning (lohet) to demanding (tove’a) to overpowering (h.olesh ‘al). The climax of this movement in line 6 (vegufeikh hah.olesh ‘al hakol [And your body overpowering everything]) is conveyed by the rare word h.olesh ‘al, which is known to us only from an obscure passage in Isaiah (14:12; the reference is to overpowering the Gentile nations). Using this term is a canny stroke, because even for the erudite Hebraist reader who might pick up on the meaning of h.olesh‘al as ‘‘overpower,’’ the common meaning of verb, ‘‘to become weakened,’’ can be counted on not to vanish. And so Silberschlag has found a single word that invokes both the conquest of the speaker by the companion’s body and his swooning submission to that conquest. One also hears in this unusual phrase, h.olesh ‘al hakol, an echo of the familiar poetic introduction to the Jewish wedding service under the canopy that invokes God’s blessing on the union about to be solemnized: Mi adir ‘al hakol, mi barukh ‘al hakol (who is mighty above all, who is blessed upon all), and so forth. The association enacts a nicely wicked contrast between sanctified wedded bliss and the carnal hunger radiating on the beach blanket in our poem. The poem’s last line is the zinger. When we think that the mounting erotic tension has nowhere to go, the poem’s speaker suddenly breaks off and switches to another kind of discourse entirely. He turns away from the overheated scene of sun, sand, and desire and utters a kind of historiosophical ejaculation whose import is not so clear. Hah, h.ayyim beli el uveli ‘ol (Ah, life without God and without yoke). Is the speaker’s hah the nonverbal sound of a man who is savoring a delicious freedom from God the judge and from the yoke of the commandments? Is it a kind of Mediterranean erasure of moral categories under the sun on the sandy verge of the ocean? Could it be the sound made by a man who has just discovered what the pagan life of the senses must really have been like and is pulling up short before he crosses that line? The concluding line brings us back directly to the poem’s title, which, in the end, does tantalizingly little to resolve these questions. Akum, an acronym for ‘ovdei kokhavim umazalot, literally, ‘‘worshipers of stars and heavenly bodies,’’ is the familiar epithet in rabbinic literature for pagans. Be‘ikvot can mean ‘‘in the footsteps of,’’ or, literally, ‘‘in the footprints of’’; more figuratively, the phrase denotes causality (‘‘as a result of’’) or imitation (‘‘in the manner of’’). Putting the components of the title together offers a number of interpretive options. As a title, Be‘ikvot ‘akum can therefore function as a cultural frame for the experience described in the poem.

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The semi-naked bodies radiating desire on the shore far away from the gaze of society can be described as precipitating a pagan moment. The speaker of the poem, whom the reader will inevitably associate with the distinguished translator of Aristophanes and the proponent of Tchernichovsky, is caught in an act of discovery. The idealized classical culture that he has so long researched and admired has suddenly, if but for a moment, become flesh, and he now experiences what he has only read about. The experience, by its nature, must be evanescent, as indicated by the footprints in the sand left by the ancients that have been long washed away. Finally, the title invokes the painterly or curatorial practice of indicating that a work of art has been executed after the manner of a grand master or his school. Writing in Hebrew within a long Hebraic tradition, Silberschlag wishes both to label and to contain the transgressive content of his poem by offering a token of homage and belatedness to the great pagans, whose true descendant he can never be. Silberschlag was given over forty more years to write poetry, and he did not squander his chance. He published four more books of verse: Kimron yamai (The arc of my days), Igerotai el dorot ah.erim (Letters to other generations), Yesh reshit lekhol ah.arit (Each end has a beginning), and Bein alimut uvein adishut (Between violence and indifference).19 In these collections, Silberschlag carries over lines of development from earlier volumes. There are many fine poems here, and this is a body of work that deserves exploration on its own terms. In the best of these, Silberschlag fashioned what might be called a ‘‘wisdom lyric.’’ Like his earliest verse, there are many very short poems that evince an aspiration toward lapidary concision and toward the appearance of simplicity. They are lyric in form, in that the author and the speaker are assumed to be the same and the discourse of the poems is presented as overheard speech. What is different is the stance of the speaker, who is now positioned less within experience than at a remove observing it. He observes the world and its desires and follies, and he observes himself and his desires and follies. The goal is truth rather than expressiveness, and the essential medium is a finely honed verbal wit. The self doing the observing is ever and always a poet and, for that matter, a Hebrew poet living in America. Being a Hebrew poet is a great gift, despite the loneliness that necessarily attends this high calling; but being a Hebrew poet in America entails a depth of exile and humiliation that is a bitter fate. It is a fate visited upon him in part by the upheavals of Jewish history and in part by the imperatives of his own temperament. He

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is reconciled and unreconciled. In one of the final poems in the final collection published the year before he died, Silberschlag reflected on this situation.20 If I lived in Israel, the speaker opines, I would be an Israeli poet. My books would be published without my having to pay for them and I would even receive royalties, and my poetry would be part of the civic culture of the state and quoted by officials at the dedication of public buildings. But the reality is otherwise. I am a ‘‘poet of Israel but not in the Land of Israel.’’ This makes him a ‘‘curious creature,’’ the speaker admits, but not an unprecedented one or one lacking a distinguished pedigree. In the history of the Jewish people, there have been others who have forged paths for Hebrew poetry in the Diaspora and across the sea, and so, the poem concludes, shall there be in the future. Of the fact that Silberschlag was a proud exemplar of this outsider tradition there is no question. Whether his prophecy for the future will come true is less certain. Notes 1. The salient figures in American Hebrew poetry include Benjamin Silkiner, Ephraim E. Lisitzky, Israel Efros, Hillel Bavli, Abraham Schwartz, Shimon Ginzburg, H. A. Friedland, Moshe Feinstein, Eisig Silberschlag, Simon Halkin, Abraham Regelson, and Gavriel Preil. This group is the subject of my forthcoming study Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry (Stanford, Calif., 2011). 2. See Nurit Guvrin, ‘‘The Demand for ‘Americanness’ and Its Fulfillment in Hebrew Literature in America’’ (Hebrew), in Stanley Nash (ed.), Migvan: Meh.karim besifrut ha‘ivrit uvegiluyeha ha’amerikani’im le Yaakov Kabakoff (Spectrum: Studies in Hebrew literature and its American manifestations presented to Jacob Kabakoff) (Lod, 1988), 81–98. 3. Eisig Silberschlag, Saul Tschernichowsky: Poet of Revolt, trans. Sholom J. Kahn et al. (London, 1968). 4. Arnold Band, ‘‘The Lonely Paths of Eisig Silberschlag’’ (Hebrew), Hado’ar (December 30, 1988): 13–15. This thoughtful article by a scholar who taught under Silberschlag for many years at the Boston Hebrew College is the source of much of the biographical information presented here. 5. Eisig Silberschlag, From Renaissance to Renaissance (New York, 1973). 6. Eisig Silberschlag, Bishevilim bodedim (On solitary paths) (New York, 1931). 7. Avraham Epstein, Sofrim ivrim be’amerikah (Tel Aviv, 1953), 209. 8. As young Jewish intellectuals who had left the traditional world of faith in which they had been reared, the American Hebrew writers were enmeshed in the same psycho-social syndromes as such writers as J. H. Brenner and M. J. Berdyczewski, who were older than they by only half a generation. I have described these issues in my

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Banished from Their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), esp. ch. 4. 9. Silberschlag, Bishevilim bodedim, 18. 10. Ibid., 38. 11. Ibid., 6. 12. Epstein, Sofrim ivrim be’amerikah, 211. 13. Yehuda Halevi is the other medieval master whom Silberschlag takes as precursor in two poems that are far more ambitious but less successful than the Ibn Gabirol poem. See ‘‘Ruh.o shel Halevi’’ (The spirit of Halevi) and ‘‘Yehudah Halevi,’’ in Eisig Silberschlag, ‘Aleh, ‘olam, beshir (Ascend, oh world, in song) (New York, 1947), 63–81. 14. Silberschlag, ‘Aleh, ‘olam, beshir. 15. ‘Aleh, ‘olam, beshir does contain one sequence of poems (‘‘Mipi khushim,’’ 107–22) that is devoted to African American materials, but it pales in comparison with Lisitzky’s far more successful inventions. 16. In Kimron yamai (Jerusalem, 1959), see poems on 31 and 60–62. In Igerotai el dorot ah.erim (Jerusalem, 1971), the first section of the book (‘‘ ‘Al admat amerikah,’’ 19–46) is devoted to satirical poems about American Jewish life. The epitome of this genre, to my taste, is the poem ‘‘Sam, Sy and Sol’’ (24–32), whose title plays with archetypal second-generation American Jewish names. 17. Silberschlag’s relationship to the representation of women and sexuality should also be examined in reference to a very interesting play he wrote with a Palestinian setting, titled Shev’a panim leh.avah (Seven faces of Eve); it was published as a supplement to the journal Gilyonot 7/2 (1938). In addition, see his translations from the Greek of the erotic verse of a fifth-century c.e. Byzantine poet named Paulus Silentarius, Shirei ahavah (Love poems) (Tel Aviv, 1962). 18. Silberschlag, ‘‘In Pagan Footsteps,’’ in‘Aleh, olam, beshir, 45. It is worth noting that this poem, with its playfully erotic tone, is the poem that directly follows ‘‘Yesh yif’ah ‘atsumah beh.okhmah’’ in the volume. It is also one of the poems designated with an asterisk in the table of contents, which are meant to be read in the new Eretz Israel accent. 19. Eisig Silberschlag, Kimron yamai (The arc of my days) (Jerusalem, 1959); Igerotai el dorot ah.erim (Letters to other generations) (Jerusalem, 1971); Yesh reshit lekhol ah.arit (Each end has a beginning) (Jerusalem, 1976); and Bein alimut uvein adishut (Between violence and indifference) (Jerusalem, 1982). 20. Silberschlag, ‘‘Meshorer shel yisrael velo be’erets yisrael,’’ in idem, Bein alimut uvein adishut, 93.

CHAPTER 9

The Art of Sex in Yiddish Poems: Celia Dropkin and Her Contemporaries Kathryn Hellerstein

Is there such a thing as ‘‘women’s poetry’’? The Yiddish critics in the first half of the twentieth century thought so, and the women who wrote poetry in Yiddish in those years were constantly challenged as they tried to write against the parameters that their male contemporaries set. In this chapter, I will examine some assumptions held in the 1920s and 1930s about women poets in Yiddish and consider how these writers and their works fit into Yiddish literary tradition by concentrating on one of the most unusual of these poets, Celia Dropkin (1887–1956), whose erotic and explicitly sexual poems exemplify an extreme case of how a woman poet carved out her place in Yiddish literary tradition. In the new, contentious, secular Yiddish literature that established its modern, worldly, yet Jewish presence beginning around 1910, the Yiddish critics—almost all male—placed poetry by women in a separate category. In daily papers and literary weeklies, in both Europe and America, the critics grouped women poets together and characterized their work as instinctual, emotional, sentimental, and ultimately anonymous. In an editorial in New York, in 1915, Aron Glants urged women to enrich an overly cerebral Yiddish poetry by men with their intuitive and emotional talents.1 In Warsaw, in 1927, Melekh Ravitsh published a group review of books of poems by women that attacked them for not being the peacemakers and homebodies of Yiddish literature that he thought they should be.2 And in Warsaw, in a 1928 review essay, the New York writer Shmuel Niger discussed froyen

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lirik (women’s lyrical poetry). With faint praise, Niger characterized ‘‘the many gifted Yiddish women poets,’’ as those whose ‘‘chief virtue’’ is that they ‘‘are women in their poetry,’’ expressing not individuality but rather the ‘‘feminine disposition’’ and called what they wrote froyen-lirik, ‘‘a group poetry, a type of folklore of the female sex.’’3 Niger derived (or misappropriated) his phrase, froyen-lirik, from Kadya Molodowsky’s 1927 sequence of poems, Froyen-lider (Women-poems). In these poems, Molodowsky challenged the roles expected of women by traditional Jewish law and culture, as well as the kinds of poems that women ‘‘should’’ write. Here Molodowsky took on one of the tenets applied to women in traditional Jewish culture—that of tsnies (tsniut, in Hebrew), which can be translated as modesty, sexual virtue, or propriety. The observance of tsnies derived from such talmudic assertions as ‘‘a woman’s voice is a sexual enticement, as is her hair and her leg’’ (Ber. 24a),4 and from biblical verses in which ‘‘the unveiling of a woman’s hair was considered a humiliation and punishment’’ (Isa 3:17; Num. 5:18, on the loosening of the hair of a woman suspected of adultery; 3 Macc. 4:6; and Sus. 32).5 From such rabbinic and biblical writings, the customs that evolved among Jews in Eastern Europe obliged married women to cover their hair, their bodies, and their limbs, to comport themselves modestly, and to keep their voices unheard in synagogue. A tsniesdike froy, an appropriately modest women, would never speak of sex. Molodowsky’s ‘‘Women-Poems’’ set up a dialogue between the sexually proper ‘‘women of our family’’ and the poem’s improper speaker: The women of our family will come to me in dreams at night and say: In modesty [tsnies] we carried a pure blood through generations. We brought it to you, like a cherished wine From the kosher cellars of our hearts.6 While her ancestors lived in tsnies and ‘‘carried a pure blood across generations,’’ the speaker is a modern young woman of Warsaw in the 1920s. She has an extramarital affair, dresses immodestly, and rebels against traditional expectations for a Jewish woman and a Yiddish poet.7 As much as she rebels, though, this speaker finds that the essence of her self and her art is bound into and explodes from the words and phrases of Jewish religious tradition. During a night of insomnia, the speaker, who dresses in ‘‘brown

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silk’’ and goes about with her ‘‘head bare’’ and ‘‘throat naked,’’ recalls her mother’s ‘‘emaciated hands / Wrapped in modest nightgown sleeves’’ (in tsniesdike arbl) and compares them to ‘‘a God-fearing script on white scrolls’’ (vi a gotsforkhtike shrift in vayse gvilim).8 Early in the sequence, this speaker has demanded to know: And why should this blood without blemish Be my conscience, like a silken thread Bound upon my brain, And my life, a page plucked from a holy book, The first line torn?9 In the final poem, the speaker answers her own question by describing how, weeping like her mother, she prays her ‘‘quiet, simple / Plea to God,’’ with her hands thrown helter-skelter above her head, instead of piously shielding her eyes, like her mother. The laws of ritual purity and of customary modesty governing the sexual conduct of Jewish women defined the lives of ‘‘the women of our family.’’ Although the modern speaker rebels against these laws and customs and her immodest ways desecrate the holy texts, she still needs to pray. Molodowsky’s ‘‘Women-Poems’’ established a link between tsnies, women’s prayers, and the modern woman poet’s struggle to find her voice. Celia Dropkin, publishing in New York at the same time as Molodowsky in Warsaw, wrote a different kind of poem to challenge the tsnies of the previous generation. In ‘‘Mayn mame’’ (My mother), Dropkin named her mother’s modesty as tsniesdik:

(Twenty-two years old, A widow with two small children,

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My mother decided In modesty [tsniesdik] never again to become anyone’s wife.)10 This fourth line is the only place that the word tsnies appears in all of Dropkin’s poems. Its appearance here is significant because what the poem’s speaker says that she received from her mother is not the code of modesty handed down by generations of Jewish women but rather the shpritsn (spurting out) of tif-farbahaltener bager (deeply hidden lust) (19). With this naming of bager (lust), Dropkin presents an explicit sexuality, the innate desire of an individual woman, which contrasts with Molodowsky’s descriptions of a sexual rebellion expressed through a woman’s disruption of her place within society. While Molodowsky’s speaker repents for her indiscretions, Dropkin’s persona rejoices as the mother’s repressed desire emerges through the daughter’s body. Molodowsky’s Froyen-lider assert the entanglement of a modern woman’s sexuality in the cultural tenets of traditional modesty; a woman can reconfigure but cannot erase her inheritance. In contrast, Dropkin’s ‘‘Mayn mame’’ transforms a woman’s heritage by freeing desire from culture. Dropkin’s celebration of sexuality challenges the male critics’ domesticating assessments of poetry by women. It also signals an unacknowledged but pervasive theme in Yiddish poetry published in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. Born in Bobruisk, White Russia, in 1887,11 Celia Levine Dropkin was raised in a Russian-speaking, middle-class home, graduated from a Russian gymnasium in the neighboring city of Novosybko, and then taught in Warsaw. At age ten, she was writing poetry in Russian. At seventeen, in Kiev, she was encouraged by the Hebrew novelist Uri Nissan Gnessin (1879–1913) to continue writing. When the passionate friendship between the two was curtailed by Gnessin’s ill health,12 Celia married Shmaye Dropkin, a Bund activist. Before their first child was born, in February 1910, he fled to New York. In 1912, Celia and their son joined him and, moving from Harlem to Brooklyn to Bloomfield, Virginia, to Fall River, Massachusetts, and back to Brooklyn, raised their five children. In New York, Dropkin continued to write poems in Russian. But because she was unable to publish these poems in Russian, she decided, in 1917, to translate them into Yiddish and published them in the avant-garde miscellanies of the Yunge and the Introspectivists and in the more estab-

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lished Tsukunft and Forverts.13 Despite her acclaim as a leading woman poet, only one book of Dropkin’s poems appeared in her lifetime: In heysn vint (In the hot wind), in 1935. After her death in 1956, Dropkin’s children published an expanded edition of her poetry, along with her fiction and even her art.14 The poems in Dropkin’s 1935 volume fall into overlapping thematic categories: nature poems infused with sexual tension; sexual poems infused with the voices of children and natural imagery; poems about her children that are sharpened by a sexual edge. It is this sexual expression in Dropkin’s poems that readers then and now have most remarked upon, and what is most notable is how Dropkin’s dramatic monologues convey the sexual experience of a woman with unabashed subjectivity and sensuality. Take, for example, what is probably Dropkin’s most famous poem—certainly the one most translated and anthologized—‘‘Di tsirkus dame’’:15

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(I am a circus lady And dance among the daggers Set in the arena With their points erect. My swaying, lissome body Avoids a death-by-falling, Touching, barely touching the dagger blades. Holding their breaths, the people are staring at my dancing, And someone sends a prayer to God for me. Before my eyes, the dagger points Gleam fiery, in a circle, And no one knows how the falling calls to me. I grow tired, dancing between you, Daggers of cold steel. I want my blood to heat you through and through. You, unsheathed points, I want to fall on you.) The speaker of this dramatic monologue states at the outset that she is a tsirkus dame, a circus lady. Significantly, Dropkin does not name this speaker with any of the conventional Yiddish terms for a female—froy (woman), vayb (wife), meydl (girl)—nor does the title make explicit her profession—tantser (dancer). Rather, the word dame (lady), connoting both French and German, conveys a sense of class and culture other than what one would expect of a typical Jewish woman. Pairing dame with tsirkus (circus),17 with its connotations of disrepute, Dropkin places this speaker as far from Jewish tsnies as possible.18

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Indeed, the action that the circus lady describes is not what a reader would assume to be typical of Niger’s froyen-lirik. Dropkin’s character might shock even Molodowsky’s adulteress, who ‘‘one night laid my head down near’’ a man other than her husband, and later, in penance, drops to her knees ‘‘like the petrifaction of Sodom.’’19 While Molodowsky’s character transgresses a marriage, Dropkin’s circus lady performs her sexuality for an audience of many. She dances ‘‘among the daggers / Set in the arena / With their points erect’’ (tsvishn kinzshaln, / Vos zaynen oyfgeshtelt af der arene / Mit di shpitsn aroyf, 2–4). Directing the reader at once to experience the speaker’s point of view and to observe it lasciviously, the speaker characterizes her activity as both dangerous and seductive: Mayn boygzam laykhter guf / Maydt oys dem toyt fun faln, / Barirndik koym, koym dem sharf fun di kinzshaln (My swaying, lissome body/ Avoids a death-by-falling, / Touching, barely touching the dagger blades, 5–7). Referring to her body (guf) as swaying (boygzam) and lissome (laykhter), the speaker evinces selfconsciousness of how she appears to an observer and thus displaces her subjective point of view outside herself. At the same time, the verb maydt oys (avoids), the repetition of koym, koym (barely), and the noun sharf (blade, edge), which is also an adjective meaning ‘‘sharp,’’ emphasize the precariousness of the speaker’s actions from the inside. The second stanza further develops the tension between the outside and the inside perspectives of the speaker. The speaker juxtaposes a description of what the people dort (there, 9) in the audience are doing, Mit a farkhaptn otem (holding their breaths, 8), staring at her dancing, and beseeching God for her sake, with what she sees far mayne oygn (before my eyes, 10)—Di shpitsn in a fayerdikn rod (the points in a fiery circle, 11). Line 12 deepens the inside point of view, shifting the danger of that fiery circle into desire: Un keyner veys nit, vi mir vilt zikh faln (And no one knows how I want to fall). The final stanza complicates her self-destructive desire with worldweariness and exhaustion: Mid bin ikh fun tantsn tsvishn aykh, / kalte shtolene kinzshaln (I grow tired, dancing between you, / Daggers of cold steel, 13–14). One would expect that when the dancer grows tired, she would stop dancing. But the final lines of the poem dictate otherwise: Ikh vil mayn blut zol aykh derhitsn, / Af ayere antbloyzte shpitsn / Vil ikh faln (I want my blood to heat you through and through. / You, unsheathed points, / I want to fall on you, 15–17). Instead of bowing off the stage, this dancer will eviscerate herself on the stage props. The dance leads the dancer to destroy herself.

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The repetition of ikh vil (I want) in these closing lines articulates a desire that will lead to an action ambivalently desired. These lines echo the indirect construction of line 12, vi mir vilt zikh faln, an idiomatic variant that also means ‘‘I want to fall’’ but that suggests the passivity of desire by placing the ‘‘I’’ in the dative, as the indirect object of the verb (mir). The sentence thus suggests not that ‘‘I want to fall’’ but that some unstated force wants to make me fall. Thus, the speaker expresses a desire in language, syntax, and phrasing that resist the enactment of that desire. This resistance in the poem’s grammar points out the tension between tsnies and sensual desire, between how custom decrees a woman should comport herself and what she may want to do, between what custom decrees a woman should say and what a poet wants to write. Dropkin’s poem depicts a woman’s sexual expression as a public performance—a cross between a striptease and Salome’s dance.20 In fact, Salome, whose dance allowed her to request the head of John the Baptist, was an object of fascination for immigrant Jewish writers, such as MoysheLeyb Halpern in a 1919 love poem, ‘‘Salome’’; Anzia Yezierska, in a 1923 novel in English, Salome of the Tenements; and Yiddish poet Fradl Shtok (1890–c. 1930).21 Shtok was the only woman poet, besides Dropkin, included by Zishe Landau in the 1919 Yunge anthology of Yiddish poetry in America, a fact that reveals the limited place that women modernists were given by their male contemporaries.22 Preceding Halpern and Yezierska, Shtok wrote a sonnet in 1914, in which the speaker models herself on the character Salome.

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(My friend, my terrible friend, how you are evil, And proudly chaste as any saintly John Who gave the king’s step-daughter restless nights. And as she hated him, I now hate you. Your face is not as pale and cool as ivory, Your hair does not curl, writhingly, like snakes, Your boy-heart’s not as pure as his heart was So why am I engulfed by burning hate? I hate you. I reiterate it now: And as I dance the sinful dance once more, I do so at the bidding of the devil. And for my dance he’ll show his gratitude With pay well-worthy of a sinful heart: He’ll give me what I crave—your lilac tongue.)23 The speaker of the poem addresses her ‘‘evil,’’ ‘‘terrible friend,’’ who is as ‘‘proudly chaste’’ as yener yokhanon (that one, John), vos hot geroybt baym

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kenigs-kind di ru (who robbed the king’s child of her rest, 1–3). At the end of the first quatrain, the speaker compares herself to an unnamed ‘‘she’’: Un punkt vi zi, hob ikh dikh itster faynt (And as she hated him, I now hate you, 4). The enigma of these lines is explained when we see their source, which was not the New Testament story in Mark 6:21–29. Rather, in Oscar Wilde’s 1893 scandalous French play, Salome (translated into English with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley in 1894), the New Testament heroine, stepdaughter of King Herod, lusts after the imprisoned prophet John the Baptist, whose hoarse preaching against incest has disturbed her sleep. It seems likely that Shtok had read or seen Wilde’s play performed in its 1909 Yiddish translation,24 for she borrows its similes and grotesque sexual imagery for her sonnet. Shtok’s speaker describes her would-be lover in figurative language that echoes yet negates the imagery with which Wilde’s Salome speaks to John; unlike the play’s John the Baptist, the poem’s lover has a face that is not as white as ivory and hair that does not writhe like snakes.25 Moreover, his bokher-harts (boy-heart) is not klor (clear or pure), unlike that of Wilde’s John, who vehemently rejects Salome’s seduction (5–7). Despite these differences, Shtok’s speaker again likens herself to Wilde’s Salome, when, at the end of the second quatrain, she asks why, if her lover is not like John the Baptist, she is ‘‘engulfed by burning hate’’ (8). In the sestet of Shtok’s Petrarchan sonnet, the speaker restates her feelings, Ikh hob dikh faynt (I hate you), comments on this reiteration, Ikh zog es dir atsind (I say it to you now), and describes what she is doing: dancing dem tants fun zind (the dance of sin) at the bidding of the devil. Again, Shtok draws a parallel between her speaker and Wilde’s Salome, who danced, reluctantly and enraged, for her stepfather, King Herod. And while Wilde’s Salome requests, ‘‘for mine own pleasure,’’ John’s severed head as payment for her dance,26 Shtok’s speaker seeks a different payoff. Wilde’s Salome declares that she will kiss and bite the beheaded John’s mouth, with its tongue ‘‘like a red snake,’’ ‘‘as one bites a ripe fruit.’’27 In contrast to this necrophiliac desire for the red and the ripe, Shtok’s speaker demands what she most craves: not the lover’s head, but his beze tsung (lilac tongue, 14). She wants the ‘‘devil’’ she dances for to murder her chaste lover. If she cannot silence his moralizing tongue with her kiss, she will have it cut out of his mouth. By juxtaposing a statement about the act of speaking (‘‘I reiterate it now,’’ 9) to a line that narrates the act of dancing (‘‘And as I dance the sinful dance once more,’’ 10), the poem draws our attention to the dancer’s

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ability to articulate the emotion and the intention that drive her art. Moreover, the internal rhyme between the adjectives beyz (angry, evil), describing the male listener (1), and beze (lilac), describing his tongue (14), links the male lover’s self-righteous chastity to the female speaker’s vengeful enactment of her desire. This image of oral castration turns the reader to consider the poet’s voice,28 a woman’s sexual voice that screams into the face of traditional Jewish tsnies. Creating such a voice in Yiddish, Shtok reduced the fin-de-sie`cle adaptation of a New Testament story into a personal love poem and poured this concoction into a medieval Italian stanza, in order to undo the expectations of what a Jewish woman poet could write. In ‘‘The Circus Lady,’’ Dropkin freed this sexual voice from Shtok’s scaffolding of Western culture. Dropkin’s exotic dancer is a detextualized Salome, who performs not at the king’s or devil’s bidding, but for an audience at the circus, for her own pleasure. Dropkin erases the king (or devil) and the prophet from Fradl Shtok’s version of Oscar Wilde’s version of the New Testament story. She breaks the link that Shtok’s Petrarchan sonnet had made between modern Yiddish poetry and European literary tradition with its irregularly rhymed, unmetered seventeen-line form. The sword of Herod’s executioner becomes, in Dropkin’s poem, the daggers on a stage; they aim not at the prophet’s neck but at the dancer’s own body, not by the king’s command but by the dancer’s desire. Like her dancer, Dropkin removes the female sexual voice from the contexts of both Jewish and European culture. If the dancer wants to impale herself, she does so to shock her audience and to pleasure herself. If the dancer falls on the daggers, she will silence herself either in death or in consummation, or both. One could read in this desire to fall a capitulation to the male. However, in the poem, the lady does not fall; rather, she says what she wants. It is this articulation of desire that allows the lady to keep on dancing. Such an exhausting exhibition, such a skillful show of sex, Dropkin seems to say, is the only way that a woman artist has to command the attention of her audience.29 In this fraught sensual subjectivity of ‘‘The Circus Lady,’’ Dropkin created a daring new voice in Yiddish poetry. Her frank eroticism asserted the pleasure and pain of sexual experience from a woman’s point of view. It also served as a response to depictions of women as objects of desire by her male contemporaries, whose sexually provocative poetry was one aspect of their modernist agendas in the 1920s. Poems by the no-longer young poets

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of the Yunge, her associates Zishe Landau and Reuven Iceland, depicted the alluring physicality of women’s bodies, as in these lines from Landau’s ‘‘The Pleasures of the Soul,’’ here in a translation by Edward Field: What gives me pleasure now is: . . . women in their thirties or older who have been through the mill and know how to make love with a man. They used to be active in the movement but now begin to get heavy and start squeezing themselves into corsets. They don’t always remember to take precautions and get caught sometimes but their men know how to get it taken care of.30 In another poem, ‘‘In el’’ (On the El), Landau evoked the pleasure aroused on the speeding train by the women passengers—grobe vayber zitsn azoy fray / un breyt tsushpreyt di fis (Fat women sitting so freely / their legs spread wide) and un andere—eyn fus tsum tsveytn tsugedrikt / un di lipn azoy din (And others—leg pressed tightly against leg / and lips so thin), whose reyakh, vos zikh trogt fun zey (scent, that comes from them) makes him sleepy, like freshly mowed hay and wakeful, like the cry of a child at night.31 Yet Landau undermined such democratic, public eroticism with ‘‘In kinematograf’’ (In the cinematograph), where he depicted a man distracted from the jumpy images on the silent screen by his fidgety neighbor, with her slender fingers and tiny feet. As he gingerly embraces her, s’vern nokhgibik azoy di runde glider, her plump limbs yield, her hair falls across his face, and he murmurs, not words of love, but a derisive line from ‘‘my friend’s poem’’ (mayn khavers lid): vi eybik narish zaynen dos di froyen (how eternally foolish women are).32 This khaver, author of the poem from which Landau takes his epigraph, was Reuven Iceland, whose 1922 poem ‘‘Still Lifes—II’’ equates disembodied sexual parts with fruit:

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Like cool, full breasts, with a hidden fire, Heavy grapes lie near long, Brown, manly pears. Womanly, wanton, devoured by redness, Two apples cling to a cold Orange shining full of wisdom. Dull as golems, two bananas stare. Greedy as a girl after a first kiss, A cherry rips itself red from the stem.33 Iceland dedicated this book to his lover and future wife, Anna Margolin— ‘‘To Rosa Lebensboym, to whose influence I owe most of the poems in this collection’’—yet his clever depiction of sexuality distances the players from the play in stark contrast to Margolin’s anguished poems.34 And how different are Landau’s sensual voyeurism and Iceland’s objectified passion from Dropkin’s circus lady. Landau and Iceland depict a sexual consumerism, sexuality without danger, while Dropkin’s protagonist risks her life. In contrast to Landau’s and Iceland’s erotic objectification of women’s bodies, another contemporary, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, wrote an ironic poem, ‘‘Di hayrat’’ (Marriage), about the female body as an object of a man’s art: When I look at the naked woman With her minuscule head And with her awkward, fat hips and with her huge masculine feet,— I turn to the dabbler And I ask him

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What on earth made him Dream up such a thing on the canvas. So he strikes a match And sticks his pipe in his mouth And answers.— Turns out, as follows: He—puff . He himself—puff. Had wedded her—puff. In Paris, no less—puff.35 Written after 1924 and published posthumously in 1934, ‘‘Di hayrat’’ (Marriage) multiplies the objectification of a woman in a sexual situation. First, she is naked (der naketer froy). Second, in her unclothed state, the woman is the subject of a painting, and her body, an object of art. Third, her nudity and the way the painting represents it come under scrutiny by the speaker in the poem, who, instead of responding sensually to the image of her body, analyzes its proportions and then doubts its veracity. The speaker’s criticism, addressed to the farbn-kinstler, literally, ‘‘color artist’’ or ‘‘dabbler,’’ judges both the painting and its subject. In the first half of the poem, the speaker assumes that the painter has invented this image of the nude and that the disproportionate female body reflects the dubious quality of his art. When the painter responds in the second half of the poem, his words, punctuated by the nonsense syllable pu, to dramatize his pretentious pipe-puffing, reveal that the woman he painted was once his wife, in Paris, no less, that international testing ground for modern artists. A send-up of a bad artist, his bad art, and his bad taste in wives, Halpern’s poem ridicules the conventions of art as well as modernist revisions of those conventions. It is no accident, as well, that Halpern’s critique of aesthetics mocks the conventions of female sensuality, sexual relations, and marriage. By locating the problem of art in a man’s objectification and misrepresentation of a woman’s body, Halpern points out how art in an imperfect world abuses intimacy and subjectivity.36 While the wife in Halpern’s poem is a badly rendered, passive object of art, the dancer in Dropkin’s poem moves and speaks—an agent, as well as an object, of her own art.37 The agency of the female speaker in a poem is expressed in a very different voice by the now-forgotten Berta Kling, Dropkin’s close friend and contemporary, who published a slender volume of tiny, free-verse, untitled

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poems in 1935 (and several other later books). Despite the diminutive forms and effacing lack of titles, many of these poems are charged through with sexuality. In one, Kling depicts the physical pain and pleasure inflicted by a man upon a woman:

(You pressed me To you And didn’t know That a button on your sleeve Snarled my hair And tore. I closed my eyes, In joy and pain Bit my lips, And kept quiet.)38 Without Shtok’s homicidal energy or Dropkin’s phallic daggers, Kling’s poem conveys its sexual theme through the understated metaphor of a

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shirt-sleeve button and a woman’s hair. Such domestic imagery tells a woman’s erotic story: sex hurts her, but she remains silent, and he clueless. However, only because she does not protest, can this woman write her poem. Her silence in the drama of sex enables the woman to find her voice in the poem on the page. Kling’s poem suggests that without pain in sex, there would be no love, and without the sexual politics that keep a woman quiet, there would be no poem. Unlike Shtok’s and Dropkin’s poems, which use performative sex as a metaphor for the creative act, Kling’s button poem reverses the vehicle and the tenor, depicting sex through the metaphor of the thwarted creative act. The sex poems by Dropkin, Shtok, and Kling reversed the convention in American Yiddish poetry of the 1920s and 1930s that depicted women as voiceless objects of sex and art. When they dance, Dropkin’s circus lady and Shtok’s Salome create art with their bodies as the medium for an audience that they imply is male. However, unlike the heavy women on the El or the girl in the movie theater in Landau’s poems, the erotic fruit in Iceland’s, or the painted image of the former wife in Halpern’s poem—all female objects in the male artist’s gaze—the dancers in Dropkin’s and Shtok’s poems are not silent. Within her poem, each speaks out to say what she wants (to fall on daggers, to possess a lover’s tongue). These characters give agency to the female in sex and in art—most subtly, Kling’s woman in the painful embrace, who bites her lips to keep from speaking. In the last two poems I will discuss here, Dropkin depicts the tension between thwarted language and thwarted sex. Long after his death in 1913 and her marriage and children, Dropkin dedicated ‘‘A libe briv’’ (A love letter) to her first love, the Hebrew novelist Uri Nissan Gnessin, who first encouraged her to write poetry in Russian in Kiev and Warsaw between 1904 and 1908:

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(To U. N. Gnessin I would want to write somebody A love letter, a love letter. The roots of the plant, ‘‘Love,’’ Grow deep in my heart. A wild and thorny plant, Sown by the autumn wind.

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Ach, it’s no plant, my love, It’s a little creature, naked and blind. With blood and with life, a plant, How it thrashes, how it cries and how it shouts, Seeking mercifully with its little mouth The breast, which is empty or distant. This hungry little creature, love, Struggles and cries, until it turns black. Who sowed it and bore it? Who gnaws it and tears out my heart? I would want to write to somebody A love letter, a love letter.)39 The speaker of this poem begins and ends it with a statement of an unconsummated desire—not to have sex but simply to write: Ikh volt veln tsu emetsn shraybn A libe briv, a libe briv. (I would want to write somebody A love letter, a love letter.) (lines 1–2, 17–18) Although she first figures the ‘‘Love’’ that grows in her heart as ‘‘A wild and thorny plant, / Sown by the autumn wind,’’ the speaker quickly revises the metaphor from a romantic landscape to the biological innerscape of a woman’s body. The conditional verb, ikh volt veln shraybn (I would want to write), renders the performance of art, as well as sex, hypothetical. Poetic metaphors—love as a plant, the heart as its soil, the autumn wind—morph into the grotesque hybrid fetus-planting whose little mouth seeks a disembodied breast, empty and distant. Through this poem’s interwoven metaphors—of an unwritten love letter, of the sexual love of a woman for a man, of the fetus that would result from that love, and of an agricultural and seasonal landscape, Dropkin connects the art of sex in Yiddish poetry to the larger context of Judaism’s laws that control the sexual and reproductive lives of women. It is worth noting, though, that Dropkin’s poem leaves

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out the Jewishness. In this poem, written in the conditional mood to a recipient who is long dead, both the love and the writing are miscarried (or mis-born) creatures that the poet cannot nurture in this world. Finally, Dropkin presented this essential connection between a woman’s sexual experience and her writing of poetry in one of her most direct poems, ‘‘Tsu a yunger dikhterin’’ (To a young poetess). In this poem, Dropkin made explicit her ars poetica, that only painful sexual love entitles one to write poems: So what, that you look deep into things: Your heart, your heart sleeps, So what that he came, And that you, with clear eyes, Glanced at him like a son/a sun So what? You need to burn in hell three times, like me, To burn long, slowly In a fire of love. Three times, like me, you need To be purified in hell, You need to love without sense, without pride, Love unto death! Only when you recognize Death in love, Write love poems!40 Designating her listener as the grammatically feminine dikhterin (poetess), Dropkin’s speaker dismisses the poem that this young poet has attempted to write, with the refrain voz iz derfun? (So what?) (lines 1 and 6). In a voice that both shares and scorns, the speaker initiates her younger colleague into the secret of writing libe lider (love poems) with a second refrain: darfst dray mol (you must three times) (lines 7, 10), which is echoed a third time (line 12). She commands the younger poet to be ‘‘like me’’: suffer, burn, relinquish sense and pride, love to the point of self-destruction. Only with these extreme experiences of sexual love, when the hyperbole of love as death and the force of death within love penetrate her consciousness and cognition, will the young woman be qualified to attempt to write love poems.

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The kind of mentorship that Dropkin offered the younger woman poet in this poem hardly complied with the image of froyen-lirik that the male critics had put forth in the Yiddish press. In this poem of poetic example, Dropkin challenged her colleague’s ability to write by questioning both her ability to feel and her life’s experience. The poem defined the experience essential to a woman poet’s ability to write poetry as one as far from the tsniesdik, traditional roles for women as possible. For Dropkin, a woman writes poetry not from or against the sacred Jewish texts, as in Kadya Molodowsky’s Froyen-lider, but from a woman’s ability to give herself over to the emotions and physicality of sex. This poem undoes the values and limitations inherent in the traditional definitions of how women’s lives should be circumscribed by and dedicated to Jewish law, family, and God. According to Dropkin’s concept of poetry, the forces of nature that work in a woman’s body are not those created and governed by divine power and harnessed by Jewish culture into a devotional calendar of reproduction. Rather, for Dropkin, a woman who writes poetry in Yiddish will find words in a body purified by a knowledge of ‘‘death in love.’’ If women poets were supposed to write according to their intuitive and emotional talents, according to Aron Glants, and thus act as the peacemakers and homebodies of Yiddish literature, according to Melekh Ravitsh, and write ‘‘a group poetry, a type of folklore of the female sex,’’ according to Shmuel Niger, we must ask whether Dropkin and her contemporaries, Shtok and Kling, were inadvertently complying by bringing the art and sex together in their poems. Were they thus, in Niger’s phrase, proving themselves to be ‘‘women in their poems’’? I have argued to the contrary, that these poems whose speakers expose sexual acts in words broke down the distinction between what should be kept private, modest, and tsniesdik and the public performance that a poem is. Their exposure tore open the culture’s assumptions about women as poets. Where we notice repeated tropes within these poems, such as the erotic dancer, we must also acknowledge how the poems subvert the expected dynamic. They make art out of sex. They articulate the subjectivity of the object of desire. Notes I am grateful to the following colleagues for their comments and suggestions when I presented this essay in earlier forms: Chana Bloch, Amelia Glaser, Lori Lefkovitz, Anita Shapira, and David Stern. 1. Aron Glants, ‘‘Kultur un di froy’’ (Culture and woman), Di fraye arbiter shtime (October 30, 1915): 4–5.

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2. Melekh Ravitsh, ‘‘Meydlekh, froyen, vayber: Yidishe dikhterins’’ (Girls, women, wives: Yiddish women poets), Literarishe bleter 4 (May 27, 1927): 395–96. 3. Shmuel Niger, ‘‘Froyen lirik’’ (Women’s lyrics), Literarishe bleter 5/46 (November 16, 1928): 909–10. 4. Quoted in ‘‘Woman,’’ Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1972, 1978), 16:627. 5. Quoted in ‘‘Head, Covering of the,’’ ‘‘Women,’’ Judith R. Baskin, Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed. (Detroit, 2007), 8:506–7. 6. Kadya Molodowsky, ‘‘Froyen-lider’’ 1 (Women-poems 1), in Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky, trans. and ed. Kathryn Hellerstein (Detroit, 1999), 69. 7. Molodowsky, ‘‘Froyen-lider’’ 2–4, in Paper Bridges, 70–77. 8. Molodowsky, ‘‘Froyen-lider’’ 8, in Paper Bridges, 84–85. 9. Molodowsky, ‘‘Froyen-lider’’ 1, in Paper Bridges, 68–69. 10. Celia Dropkin, ‘‘Mayn mame,’’ in In heysn vint: Lider (New York, 1935), 48; 2nd ed. (New York, 1959), 11. This poem and all other translations in this chapter are by Kathryn Hellerstein, unless otherwise noted. 11. The date of Dropkin’s birth is disputed. John and Ruth Dropkin, her son and daughter-in-law, found a certificate of graduation from gymnasium (which is now in the YIVO Dropkin archive), which stated the date of her birth (Tsile Levin) as December 5, 1887, on the Julian calendar. According to John Dropkin, that would translate to December 18, 1887, on the Gregorian calendar. However, in an autobiographical manuscript note, probably written around 1952 and preserved in the Genazim Archive in Tel Aviv, Dropkin writes, ‘‘I was born on December 18, 1888.’’ Kathryn Hellerstein, interview with John Dropkin, Brooklyn, N.Y., March 9, 2005. 12. Gnessin (1879–1913) died at age thirty-four of a heart attack in Warsaw. See http://www.ithl.org.il/author_info.asp?id⳱96, Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. 13. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Dropkin’s poems appeared in Di Naye Velt and Inzikh (1920), Onheyb, Poezye, Shriftn, and Tsukunft (ed. Avraham Liessin). Her stories and some installments of a serialized novel came out in Abraham Cahan’s daily Forverts. 14. Celia Dropkin, In heysn vint (transliterated as In haisen vint: Poems, Stories, Pictures), 2nd ed. (New York, 1959). 15. Translations of ‘‘Di tsirkus dame’’ appear in Joseph Leftwich (ed. and trans.), The Golden Peacock: An Anthology of Yiddish Poetry (London, 1939; reissued 1944), 761; Grace Shulman, trans., in Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk (eds.), Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New York,1987), 242; Ruth Whitman (ed. and trans.), An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry (Detroit, 1995), 29; Howard Schwartz, trans., in Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf (eds.), Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets (New York, 1980), 252; and Kathryn Hellerstein (trans.), in Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein (eds.), Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (New York, 2001). Interestingly, ‘‘Di tsirkus

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dame’’ was not included in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (eds.), A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York, 1969). 16. Celia Dropkin, ‘‘Di tsirkus dame,’’ in In heysn vint (1935), 49; 2nd ed. (1959), 12. 17. ‘‘Circus,’’ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2005. The circus (a traveling show) first came to both Russia and the United States in 1793. 18. Is it a coincidence that the title’s words tsirkes and dame alliterate with the poet’s name, Tsilye Drapkin. Pointed out to me by Amelia Glaser, Gruss Colloquium, Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, May 4, 2005. 19. Molodowsky, ‘‘Froyen-lider’’ 2, in Paper Bridges, 70–71. 20. Salome, stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, danced before Herod and her mother, Herodias, on Herod’s birthday and caused John the Baptist to be beheaded because he had complained that Herod’s marriage to Herodias was adulterous. After the dance, Herodias instructed Salome to ask Herod to execute John the Baptist. The name ‘‘Salome’’ is preserved in Josephus Flavius, Jewish Antiquities (bk. 18, ch. 5, 4), and the story of her dance is told in Mark 6:21–29 and in Matthew 14. ‘‘Salome,’’ Wikipedia. 21. Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, ‘‘Salome,’’ in In nyu york (New York, 1919), 149–51. Anzia Yezierska, Salome of the Tenements (New York, 1923). Yezierska’s novel was made into a silent film in 1926. See J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds (New York, 1991), 105–6, re. Salome of the Tenements. 22. Zishe Landau (ed.), Antologye: Di yidishe dikhtung in amerike biz yor 1919, illus. Z. Maud (New York, 1919). The anthology included Dropkin’s poem ‘‘Mayn vayse shney printsesin,’’ 51–52; and Shtok’s ‘‘Du trogst dos harts,’’ 172. 23. Fradl Shtok, ‘‘Sonnet 1’’ (‘‘Vi beyz du bist, mayn fraynd—mayn shlekhter fraynd’’). Shtok’s sonnet, one of a cycle of eight, was first published as ‘‘Sonnet 8,’’ in Di naye heym: Ershtes zamlbukh (New York, 1914), 7 (in the 6th sec. of the vol.), and later reprinted in Ezra Korman (ed.), Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye (Chicago, 1928), 98. 24. Wilde’s Salome, first published in French in 1893 and translated into English in 1894, was translated into Yiddish by Avraham Frumkin (1873–1940) and published in London in 1909. Oscar Wilde, Salome´; Yiddish Salome, trans. Avraham Frumkin (London, 1909); ‘‘Frumkin, Avraham,’’ in Leksikon fun yidishn teater, ed. Zalman Zilbertsvayg (New York, 1963), 4:2632–33. 25. Oscar Wilde, Salome: A Tragedy in One Act, trans. Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, illus. Aubrey Beardsley (London, 1894), 21–24. Electronic version: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengW.browse.html (prepared for the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center). Although the New Testament story of John the Baptist and Herodias’s daughter reveals no trace of this line, Oscar Wilde devotes much dialogue in his drama to Salome’s repulsion from and sexual attraction to the imprisoned prophet, whom she orders to be brought forth. Wilde’s Salome declares her love for John’s corporeal being and comments on the whiteness of his body. Wilde, Salome, 56.

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Ibid., 64. 26. Ibid., 56. ‘‘It is not my mother’s voice that I heed. It is for mine own pleasure that I ask the head of Jokanaan in a silver charger. You have sworn an oath, Herod. Forget not that you have sworn an oath.’’ 27. Ibid., 64. 28. Casting into Yiddish the European lyric form of the sonnet and a New Testament story’s decadent, fin-de-sie`cle adaptation, Shtok unleashes a woman’s sexual voice into the face of traditional Jewish tsnies. 29. It’s interesting to note that Shtok’s direct assault on the male lover fails and that she, too, soon failed literarily: her brilliant 1919 book of short stories, Ertseylungen, was badly received, as was her 1927 novel in English, For Musicians Only. Soon she vanished from public view. 30. Zishe Landau, ‘‘The Pleasures of the Soul,’’ trans. Edward Field, in Howe and Greenberg (eds.), A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, 99–100. 31. Zishe Landau, ‘‘In el,’’ in idem (ed.), Antologye: Di yidishe dikhtung in amerike biz yor 1919, 84–85, trans. Kathryn Hellerstein. Also trans. Edward Field, ‘‘On the El,’’ in Howe and Greenberg (eds.), A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, 100–101. 32. Zishe Landau, ‘‘In kinematograf,’’ in Lider (New York, 1937), 134, trans. Kathryn Hellerstein. Also trans. Edward Field, ‘‘At the Silent Movies,’’ in Howe and Greenberg (eds.), A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, 101. 33. Reuven Iceland, ‘‘Shtil-leben,’’ in Fun mayn zumer (New York and Vienna, 1922). 34. One might consider another translation: Reuven Iceland, ‘‘Still Lifes—I,’’ trans. Etta Blum, in Howe and Greenberg (eds.), A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, 115. 35. Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, ‘‘Di heyrat’’ [Marriage], Moyshe-leyb halpern (1934), vol. 1, 135. This translation by Kathryn Hellerstein. Also see Halpern, ‘‘Di hayrat’’ [Married], trans. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, in American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (1986), 458–459. 36. This is a theme that arises in many of Halpern’s poems of the late 1920s and early 1930s, especially the monologues such as ‘‘Mayn eyntsiker zun’’ (My only son), ‘‘In tsentral park’’ (In Central Park), and ‘‘Fun mayn Royzeles tog-bukh’’ (From my Royzele’s diary), in American Yiddish Poetry, ed. Harshav and Harshav, 440–43, 460–65. 37. Beyond this violation of Jewish mores for women, though, Dropkin’s poem reverses the power of gender by objectifying the male body as a thing of pleasure, pain, and art. She expands the image of the ‘‘red viper tongue’’ from Wilde’s Salome and the ‘‘lilac tongue’’ from Shtok’s sonnet. Along with these phallic daggers, in other poems Dropkin figures the male physiognomy as ‘‘a filthy, red worm’’ (‘‘I play with a long, filthy red worm’’); as a ‘‘stone-cold idol’’ (‘‘The Song of an Idol Worshiper’’), and, in ‘‘Adam,’’ as the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, bitten many times, by many women’s teeth. In doing so, Dropkin unsettles our culture’s conventions of art, in which the artist is assumed to be male and the object of his art, the

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female body. In this reversal of the genders, Dropkin’s ‘‘Circus Lady’’ addresses the problem of a woman making art in a man’s world. 38. Berta Kling, ‘‘Host mikh tsugedrikt,’’ in Lider (New York, 1935), 14. Trans. Kathryn Hellerstein. 39. Dropkin, ‘‘A libe briv,’’ in In heysn vint (1935), 25; 2nd ed. (1959), 59. 40. Celia Dropkin, ‘‘Tsu a yunger dikhterin’’ (To a young poetess), in In heysn vint (1935), 72; 2nd ed. (1959), 72.

CHAPTER 10

Ethnopoetics in the Works of Malkah Shapiro and Ita Kalish: Gender, Popular Ethnography, and the Literary Face of Jewish Eastern Europe Sheila E. Jelen

In ‘‘Thank God for His Daily Blessings,’’ Amos Oz describes a walk through Geulah, the neighborhood in Jerusalem where he grew up among Labor Zionists but that has since evolved into an ultraorthodox enclave: ‘‘The Orthodox Eastern European Jewish world continues as though nothing had happened, but the fathers of modern Hebrew literature, Mendele and Berdyczewski, Bialik, and Brenner and the others, would have banished this reality from the world around them and from within their souls. In an eruption of rebellion and loathing, they portrayed this world as a swamp, a heap of dead words and extinguished souls. They reviled it and at the same time immortalized it in their books.’’1 Oz concludes by apostrophizing his reader: ‘‘However, you cannot afford to loathe this reality because between then and now it was choked and burned, exterminated by Hitler.’’2 In this statement, Oz eloquently articulates the notion that those seeking to understand a destroyed world will begin by looking to the literature of that world, written by its native sons and daughters, whether in a satiric or sincere light. My goal here is to identify, define, and analyze what I would call an ‘‘ethnopoetic’’ style in writers who wrote, after the Holocaust, about the world of Eastern European Jewry before the war. Ethnopoetics, in the sense that I employ it, is a hybrid of ethnography and poetics, of anthropological and literary aspirations. Writers of ethnopoetic texts respond to cultural

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obligations imposed by historical cataclysm to expand their literary texts beyond the literary. They employ a rhetoric that may even undermine the literary identity of their work. Ethnopoetics is born in literary texts as a response to critical and cultural forces that place those works, because of their subject matter, within an ethnographic, as opposed to a literary, trajectory.3 To probe the subtle balance between literary and ethnographic impulses in post-Holocaust depictions of pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jewish life, I will focus on two memoiristic works by two Eastern European–born Israeli authors and daughters of prestigious Hasidic rebbes: Malkah Shapiro (1894–1970) and Ita Kalish (1903–94). The term ‘‘ethnopoetics’’ has been used in a number of ways in literary theory over the past century.4 My sense of ethnopoetics is conceived partly in keeping with the notion of ethnopoetry, as introduced in 1908 by author and ethnographer S. An-sky (Semyon Akimovitch or Solomon Rappaport).5 According to An-sky, ethnopoetry represents a synthesis of different levels of literary discourse: the popular and the elite, the historical and the contemporary, the secular and the sacred, taking on the valence of a new ‘‘Torah’’ for Eastern European Jewish culture at the turn of the twentieth century.6 In order to arrest the inevitable losses entailed in the breakdown of traditional Jewish life during that period, An-sky called for the collection of folklore and its transformation into ethnopoetry by up-and-coming young Jewish artists who could redeploy it for posterity and through it could create inspiration, Jewish cultural fervor, and historical consciousness in generations to come. Thus, ethnopoetry in An-sky’s view was fundamentally an act of cultural salvage. As David Roskies points out, however, before Ansky initiated his 1912–14 Jewish ethnographic expedition in Eastern Europe, his primary source for folk artifacts was limited primarily to ‘‘Yiddish and Hasidic storybooks.’’7 This dependence on literature for ethnographic materials by the father of modern Jewish ethnography himself anticipates the dependence for ethnographic materials on literary texts, within modern Jewish culture.8 Just as An-sky calls on ethnographically trained literary authors to combine their skills and to inscribe traditional ethnographically valuable Jewish literary forms into modern literature, thus preserving them for posterity, in the cases to be analyzed here, the work of literary memoirists is also viewed as a hybrid between the literary and the ethnographic. In An-sky’s conception of ethnopoetry, writers used literary expression in service to ethno-

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graphic salvage; in the cases discussed below, writers’ literary expressions were deployed as works of auto-ethnographic witness.9 There is one major difference, however, between An-sky’s notion of ethnopoetry and my sense of ethnopoetics, as derived from post-Holocaust memoiristic works about pre-Holocaust Eastern European life. An-sky’s artists were consciously redeploying literary and other artistic artifacts in the formation of a modern style that was meant to preserve the old forms while rendering them palatable for a new generation and thus immortalizing them for posterity. Kalish and Shapiro, on the other hand, may have been conscious of the ethnographic value of their work because of the specific memoiristic quality of their writings and the fact that the worlds they were describing had, in the intervening years, been destroyed. But they were not necessarily invested, as an ethnographer-cum-artist would be, in preserving particular aesthetic forms for posterity. Rather, they self-consciously set out to describe a milieu to which they were intimate witnesses, and they employed poetics that sought to authenticate and legitimate their point of view, particularly as women within a male-dominated Hasidic milieu. Through the lens of Shapiro’s and Kalish’s work, I examine the ethnographic aspirations of literary writers who are called upon by history to modify or reconsider their own poetics. To what extent are these writers, who have stylized their texts with the literary trappings of ethnographic observation, responsible for the popular ethnographic reception of their work? In the last several decades, ethnography as a discipline has become conscious of and conversant with the literary aspects of its own generation of texts, and a reciprocal awareness within literary studies has developed to acknowledge the usefulness of ethnographic discourse in making sense of a literary-critical quest for broad cultural relevance.10 In the late 1980s, New Historicism, for example, drew from ethnographic terminology in order to lend credence to literary criticism’s own quest to wed the practice of close readings to historical and cultural breadth.11 Thus, literary texts, with the help of ethnographic discourse, were deemed ‘‘artifacts’’ or ‘‘thick descriptions’’ of particular cultures. Post-Holocaust literature focused on a pre-Holocaust Jewish Eastern European milieu raises the question of whether ethnographic consciousness and literary style can be said to have formed a new kind of union. If we move beyond the usefulness of critical ethnographic discourse in the apprehension of literary relevance, as was accomplished in New Historicism, can we detect ethnographic impulses within literary texts that deal explicitly

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with loss, with memory, and with cultural salvage while still maintaining our focus on the literariness of the texts in question? I am suggesting here that a new style needs to be identified and analyzed in works such as those produced by Kalish and Shapiro, within an Israeli context, but also in American literary texts by Jonathan Safran Foer and Allen Hoffman, for example. What is the unique blend of ethnographic consciousness and literary artistry that populates these texts, and how can this style best be classified and understood? Recognition of the fundamental literariness of the texts in question takes place, despite their ethnographic resonance and relevance, when these texts are analyzed in light of the literary traditions that inspired their production. Early twentieth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literary traditions that Kalish and Shapiro seem to have been emulating were overtly concerned with representing things ‘‘as they are.’’12 This preference for realist mimeticism was a reaction, at the turn of the twentieth century, to the stylistics of pastiche (in Hebrew) and didacticism and satire (in Yiddish) that had dominated Jewish literary production during the Jewish Enlightenment of the previous century. The notion that literature could be used not to teach the masses or to forge a new idiom but to reflect the world of the Jewish people in their daily existence was integral to the vernacularization and popularization of Jewish literary forms. In contrast to the commitment to realist mimeticism, which can be seen in Hebrew and Yiddish literary production at the turn of the twentieth century, what we view in the formation of a post-Holocaust ethnopoetic idiom is an interest in representing things as they were, not things as they are. Producing and reading a text that purportedly represented things as they were was thus an act of cultural salvage that drew upon the literary ideologies of a previous generation. It expanded those ideologies into a broader cultural engagement that did not preclude literariness and incorporated a sense of historical obligation. The Hebrew and Yiddish literary ethnopoetics that represents Eastern European Jewry is the continuation of a legacy that began in Hebrew letters following not World War II but World War I. David Frischmann (1859– 1922) was among the first Hebrew critics to employ an ethnographic idiom in reference to literary representations of Eastern European Jewish life. In an essay titled ‘‘Mendele Moykher-Sforim,’’ Frischmann wrote: How accurately he has depicted our life in exile. He took the street life of the Jews of the shtetl throughout the nineteenth century and

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gave us a broad portrait of it in all its minutest details. Even if we had already grown away from that milieu, he forced us back into the horrible reality of it. Let’s imagine, for example, that some terrible deluge came and erased every bit of that world from the earth, along with the memory of that world, until there was not one single sign of that life left; and by chance, all we were left with was ‘‘The Book of Beggars,’’ ‘‘The Vale of Tears,’’ ‘‘The Travels of R. Benjamin the Third,’’ and ‘‘Of Bygone Days,’’ along with his small sketches and stories. Then there is no doubt that on the basis of these sketches, the critic could re-create the street life of the Jews in the Russian shtetl in the first half of the nineteenth century totally accurately.13 Referring to the internal Jewish process of urbanization, assimilation, and emigration as well as to the shifting national boundaries and forced internal migrations that took place during and after World War I, Frischmann’s ‘‘deluge’’ created ethnographic witnesses out of a generation of writers who had left that world behind, satirizing and critiquing it in their writing. While both Oz and Frischmann read the literature written by male writers of the modern Hebrew renaissance ethnographically, I will examine here a phenomenon in Hebrew letters of the mid-twentieth century in which Eastern European–born women’s writing in Hebrew was received, in Israel, as primarily of ethnographic, but not literary, value. In the case of Mendele and Bialik, Berdyczewski and Brenner, their ethnographic reception was motivated by the disappearance of the world they depicted; the ethnographic reception of Hebrew literary works by Eastern European–born woman writers, I argue, is inspired by more than the destruction of a world. Responding to the same cataclysmic decline of the orthodox Eastern European world that inspired ethnographic misprisions of the works of canonic Hebrew writers at the turn of the twentieth century, writers such as Malkah Shapiro and Ita Kalish wrote their texts in the mid-twentieth century in a moment in Israeli history when women’s writing and the memory of the Holocaust were both relatively taboo; women were writing, and the Holocaust was discussed, but both were contained and controlled by an ethnographic rhetoric.14 As in the discourse of women and regionalism in nineteenth-century American letters, the depiction of specific geographic locales in women’s texts, particularly nonurban or marginalized locales, came to be associated in Israel in the 1960s with the perceived

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inability of women to write into the center of literary traditions. Rather, just as their subject matter is marginalized, so, too, does their work resonate not in a literary way but in a kind of social-historical (as in the case of regionalism) or ethnographic one (as here).15 In trying to understand how the rhetoric of ethnography came to be imposed on literary depictions of Eastern European Jewish life by women writers of Hebrew, we find a fascinating text inspired by Frischmann’s in which the publication of Dvora Baron’s 1939 ‘‘Trifles’’ is reviewed by S. Y. Pinless: ‘‘If one day the painful image presented by David Frischmann should come to pass, and a massive deluge should eradicate Eastern European Jewry, and our nation should want to preserve in a museum an artistic reproduction of that lost world, it won’t be enough simply to include the works of Mendele alone. . . . Dvora Baron’s trifles, the details that she depicts, are needed to complete the portrait.’’16 Indeed, the intersection of two distinct discourses is evident here: the discourse of realism within literary parlance, or ethnography within broader cultural parlance; and that of gender within the world of modern Jewish letters. Dvora Baron’s ‘‘trifles’’ refers to a collection of short stories by that same name (Ketanot) and also to the general notion of what constituted her poetics. As a woman writer, she was said by her critics to have written about trifles, about the inconsequential domestic aspects of daily existence, which served to complement what had, until that point, been made readily available by the more canonic writers of the modern Hebrew renaissance. As articulated above by Pinless, Baron’s trifles, operating in tandem with Mendele’s street life, would preserve a vanished world as if in a museum dedicated just to that purpose.17 At what point did appreciation for those trifles constitute a trivialization of the work of Baron and her natural literary inheritors in Israel several decades later? Eastern European–born women writers of Hebrew depicting Eastern Europe were also understood to be providing a portrait of trifles that were necessary for the preservation of Jewish cultural memory after the cataclysmic destruction of European Jewry. But were they ever able to move beyond their trifles? To what extent did women writers see themselves as the natural conservators of the memory of life in Eastern Europe, and how did that influence the nature and genre of the works they produced? What I hope will become clear in this exposition is the relationship between ethnographic expectations, ethnographic production, and ethnographic reception in literary works that depict a culture either in decline or dead. A

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symbiosis emerges between literature and ethnography in the Hebrew writings of Eastern European–born women writers in the mid-twentieth century that is imposed from within and without—from within the writings themselves and from the community of their readership. Malkah Shapiro and Ita Kalish wrote during the 1960s in Israel among a cohort of other female memoirists who spanned the forties and the eighties, including Shoshana Ushensky, Zelda Edelstein, Sheyna Korngold, Bilhah Dinur, Bella Fogelman, Rivka Guber, Zehava Berman, Malkah Heineman, and Tova Berlin Papish.18 Shapiro and Kalish are the best known, in part because their memoirs, or excerpts from them, have been translated into English. Translation narratives, indeed, are an important consideration in understanding the birth of an ethnographic discourse in the critical reception of Hebrew (and Yiddish, as we will see) literary texts featuring preHolocaust life in Eastern Europe. Most important, Shapiro and Kalish both develop an ethnopoetic idiom, which illuminates the particularly dynamic relationship between ethnographic obligations and literary aspirations. These ethnopoetics, to a large degree, support ethnographic classification, but they also, if scrutinized closely, lay claim to the literary aspirations behind the ethnographic trappings—the artistic intentions undergirding the historical and cultural value of the texts at hand. Shapiro’s and Kalish’s texts were identified primarily as witnesses to the inner workings and personalities of particular Hasidic courts near Warsaw (the court of the Kozienice Rebbe and that of the Otwock dynasty) and were translated as such. Moving from Hebrew (in Shapiro’s case) to English, and from Yiddish to Hebrew and finally to English (in Kalish’s case), each of their memoirs has been framed, primarily through their translations, as ethnographically, although not particularly literarily, valuable. Translation, as used here, is not strictly a matter of rendering a text from one language to another. Rather, translation can be viewed as cultural or historical mediation. Although I focus here on how translations of Shapiro’s and Kalish’s memoirs into English overdetermined their ethnographic reception for an English-reading audience, it is important to keep in mind that literary criticism, such as that performed by Frischmann on Mendele or by Pinless on Baron, is also a form of translation. In their readings of these literary works featuring the shtetl, Frischmann and Pinless translated these works from literature to ethnography. I would call this dynamic process of translation from one genre to another and from one discipline to another ‘‘cross-disciplinary translation,’’ and I would argue

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that minor voices (such as women’s) within minor literatures (such as modern Hebrew or Yiddish) are particularly vulnerable to cross-disciplinary translation because of their palpable absence in cultural discourse.19 Malkah Shapiro was the fifth of seven children born to Brachah Twersky and her husband, Rabbi Yerahmiel Moshe Hapstein (1860–1909), the incumbent rebbe of Kozienice. From 1955 to 1971, she published five books of Hebrew poetry and prose in Israel, where she had settled in 1926.20 Shapiro’s 1969 publication Midin lerahamim: Sipurim mehatserot ha-admorim (From justice to mercy: Tales from Hasidic courts) was her most ambitious and generically most ambiguous book. Midin lerahamim is presented by Nehemia Polen in his English introduction to the book as an astonishing insider’s perspective on the Hasidic court of Kozienice, a community fifty miles southeast of Warsaw. It encompasses the eleventh and twelfth years of its young protagonist’s life, as she prepares for her betrothal and marriage to her first cousin. In The Rebbe’s Daughter, we observe the cycle of prayer, ritual observances, holiday preparations, and meditations that punctuate life in a small, wealthy Hasidic court at a watershed moment in Eastern European Jewish history, on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Polen argues, in a section of his introduction designated ‘‘Is The Rebbe’s Daughter Autobiographical?,’’ that the primary argument for reading the text as such is the startling change in voice during the last two chapters— from third person to first person. According to Polen, this indicates a breaking down of the fictional pretense and surrender to the autobiographical backbone of the story. But the fact that Shapiro gestures belatedly to herself as the first-person narrator of a world long gone is hardly an indication that her work is exclusively autobiographical. On the contrary, this is a classic literary trope—one that is well documented in Dvora Baron’s fiction but that can also be found frequently in the works of Joseph Hayyim Brenner, M. J. Berdyczewski, Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher-Sforim), Sholem Rabinovitch (Sholem Aleichem), and countless other writers whose works Shapiro surely read. I am not arguing that there are no autobiographical elements to Shapiro’s story. On the contrary, I heartily agree with Polen that The Rebbe’s Daughter is a very valuable witness to the insular world of European Hasidism and the particular court of the Kozienice Rebbe from the perspective of what has been called elsewhere an ‘‘intimate outsider,’’ or a young girl in a highly rarefied and highly gendered milieu. I argue, rather, for a new orientation toward the work of Malkah Shapiro, one that does not auto-

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matically situate her in the camp of Hasidic memoirs or ethnographic testimony, but one that situates her in a trajectory of Eastern European–born writers of Hebrew. What formal aspects of The Rebbe’s Daughter create a resemblance between Shapiro’s work and the more canonic works of modern Hebrew literature, written by Eastern European-born writers of Hebrew? Modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concerned itself with its own justification. The bestknown examples of this can be found in the figures of Mendele and Sholem Aleichem. Mendele’s identity, as we know, changes throughout S. J. Abramovitsh’s corpus, but in most cases, he is a book peddler whose itinerant lifestyle creates the occasion and justification for his encounter with Jews of all types throughout the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Mendele appears in Abramovitsh’s corpus as a character, a narrator, an interlocutor, and a writer. He addresses his readers through sometimes lengthy introductory prefaces and simultaneously implicates himself within, and distances himself from, the world being represented through his elaborate attempts to document the genesis of the stories within which he is featured. In a similar, though not quite as complex fashion, the figure of Sholem Aleichem is woven by Sholem Rabinovitch into his stories in order to contextualize the conversations and confrontations out of which his famous monologues evolve. In ‘‘Tevye der milkhiker,’’ for example, Sholem Aleichem provides an audience for Tevye to hold forth in monologic fashion about his children, life, culture, and beliefs. Sholem Aleichem himself has no voice in the stories and is simply apostrophized by Tevye as he speaks on and on. However, when the rhetorical device of Sholem Aleichem disappears in the stage and film adaptation of Tevye, his centrality to Rabinovitch’s vision of the culture that he is representing becomes fairly obvious. Sholem Aleichem is, to Rabinovitch, the figure of the modern Jewish writer, entering the swamp of the traditional Jewish shtetl, wielding his pen to give voice to the literarily voiceless. Tevye has no trouble speaking his mind; but without Sholem Aleichem, he would never have been immortalized in literature. Of course, as has been amply discussed by Dan Miron, Benjamin Harshav, and Robert Alter, among others, the framing devices presented by Abramovitsh and Rabinovitch in the figures of Mendele Moykher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem help to create a ‘‘skaz’’ effect, an effect of conversational encounters with real folk in live environments.21 The literary work

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framed by bathetic literary figures who pose as the excuse for a monologue, or as the speaking protagonist himself, all contribute to a poetics, described by Hebrew critics such as Menachem Brinker as one of kenut (‘‘sincerity’’ or ‘‘authenticity’’).22 For our purposes, this stylistic choice reflects the seeds of an ethnographic reception, insofar as the effect that these authors create is exactly commensurate with the effect sought out by those who were trying to reconstruct a lost way of life. For Abramovitsh and Rabinovitch, this framing effect was a way to yoke literary expression with vernacular voices; for critics such as Frischmann, this was an opportunity to read rhetorical effect as cultural artifact. In the work of J. H. Brenner, we find a later variation on a rhetoric of sincerity, in the form of stream-of-consciousness narratives, some framed, some not, as the anxious ramblings of disturbed individuals. Conceived in keeping with modernist trends that favored intimate glimpses into the consciousness of individual protagonists, Brenner was nodding, as well, to a tradition of modern Jewish anxiety over tracking the genesis of narrative. I would argue that the primary reason for this rhetorical framing device is the desire to express the tension experienced when the enlightened author and the unenlightened literary subject confront each other on the pages of a literary text. Concern over the appearance of a shtetl within the literary corpus of an enlightened writer may have motivated the framing devices described above. In the case of Malkah Shapiro’s narrative, we find constant, complex negotiations of the position of the narrator within the narrative, as eyewitness and as author. The gap between the world being depicted and the world inhabited by the author in the present moment, far off in the future of the text at hand, is also palpably felt through certain narrative choices made by Shapiro. Shapiro’s poetics squarely situates her alongside the great writers of the modern Jewish literary tradition—if not in quality, at least in affiliation. Furthermore, her awkward position as a self-appointed ethnographer, and as a creative writer at the same time, situates her work at a crossroads in post-Holocaust modern Jewish literary consciousness. As a Hasidic woman writer, one could argue, Shapiro is well entrenched in the world that she writes of. But the Holocaust creates the same effect that World War I created in the reception of Mendele’s work. Shapiro writes across a geographic distance, a temporal gap, and a cataclysmic history that forces a constant reevaluation, in her own mind and work, of the generic identity of her writing. She is both of the world she writes about, and not

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of that world. She positions her protagonist (and later, narrator) Bat-Zion as both an insider and an outsider to the literary world being presented. Keep in mind that Shapiro’s text is a look into a Hasidic court from the point of view of a young girl. While Shapiro certainly spends time depicting the women’s world of the Hasidic court, she also finds ways to see into the darkest recesses of the rebbe’s tisch, or the room where her brothers study Talmud—both of which are generally closed to girls.23 Shapiro’s frequent articulations of the protagonist’s location within, or unusual access to the scenes depicted, resonate within the tradition of Hebrew and Yiddish texts of sincerity. At the same time, the ability of a young female protagonist in a gender-stratified milieu to access a world to which she would not normally be permitted reflects an ethnographic sensibility. Why else would it be so important for her to demonstrate the authenticity of her narrative? Even so, the elaborate justifications of Bat-Zion’s unprecedented access to the world of her brothers and her father reveal some ambivalence over the raw sense of ethnographic obligation that appears to be motivating the unrealistic perspective represented in the book. Gender, in effect, serves as the crucible for the meeting of different systems of meaning here—the ethnographic and the realist—and an ethnopoetic idiom results. In considering the conventional modern Hebrew literary rhetoric of sincerity alongside ethnopoetics in the work of Shapiro, the question arises as to whether the classic Eastern European–born male writers of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature themselves employed an ethnopoetic idiom. It was, perhaps, that very idiom that lent itself to ethnographically overdetermined critical readings by Frischmann and Pinless. However, the rhetoric of sincerity employed by Sholem Aleichem, Mendele, and Brenner does not reveal ethnopoetic aspirations as much as their placement at the heart of a transitional point in modern Hebrew and Yiddish literary expression. In other words, their struggle to frame their narratives and to inject into them a voice and an aura of credibility and authenticity has more to do with the challenges that they faced as realists in a non-vernacular language (Hebrew) and of stylists in what was considered a wholly vernacular language (Yiddish) than with the burden of history and gender, as is palpable in Shapiro’s work. Whereas Shapiro struggles with what I earlier called ‘‘historical exigency,’’ Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and Brenner struggle more with ‘‘generic exigency’’; in reinventing Yiddish literature as folksy and Hebrew literature as vernacular, they feel called upon to create an effect of sincerity in their work.

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Shapiro, on the other hand, as the daughter of a Hasidic scion in postHolocaust Israel, is probably not concerned with the linguistic or generic identity of her text as much as she is concerned with the place of her text within the historical abyss between the world that she depicts and the world in which she writes. Because she is a woman, her access to the worlds that she feels compelled to memorialize is tenuous. She must find some kind of middle ground, and that middle ground is a literary one, in her rhetoric of sincerity, but also an ethnographic one. The result is an ethnopoetic literary idiom. The motif of slipping into inner sanctums, of folding oneself into drapes, of falling asleep on chairs in the corners of rooms and witnessing conversations and interactions that were generally closed off to children, especially girls, is reiterated throughout the book and serves as a sign of the text’s ethnopoetics. In quoting her grandmother’s account of having heard an important conversation as a child, we hear, in her grandmother’s words: I was a little girl then, just five year old. I was standing in the corridor at the entrance to the wooden shed, which was lit with oil lamps. As I listened to the story, I watched Bereleh, a shriveled fellow who was sitting next to the narrator, his head resting on his knees as if he were fast asleep, not hearing a word. Just then, a door to one of the inner rooms opened in the corridor, and my holy grandfather appeared at the threshold and called out, ‘‘Bereleh.’’ The members of the group rose hastily, respectfully moving toward the open door, stretching out their hands to greet my holy grandfather. But only Bereleh was ushered inside. I slipped in along with this fellow. . . . That simple room, with its lone armchair, its canopy bed, and its many books, its mysteries attracted me. I saw the souls of our holy ancestors hiding in that room. I hid myself behind the armchair and, trembling, listened in on the conversation. Trying not to attract attention, I didn’t move from that spot, even though the tone of my grandfather’s hushed voice, his face shining like an angel of God, struck terror in me.24 The elaborate way in which the old rebbetzin feels the need to justify having witnessed an important conversation between a rebbe and his disciple when she was just a five-year-old girl plays itself out in myriad ways throughout Shapiro’s text. There is a constant jockeying for authenticity. This story,

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from the grandmother’s mouth, is witnessed by Bat-Zion (the name of Shapiro’s protagonist) herself as she hides in her mother’s room: ‘‘Bat-Zion had followed the conversation with intense anxiety as she sat behind the curtain in her mother’s darkened bedroom. . . . She went out the back door without anyone noticing and ran around for a long time in the dark courtyard without a coat, until her teeth chattered from the cold of the night.’’25 Like the figures of Mendele and Sholem Aleichem who present themselves as the literary vehicles for the shtetls of Kasrilevke, Boiberik, and Anatevka, so, too, perhaps, does Bat-Zion take on the role of literary bridge between the world of her father’s court and the world of modern Hebrew literature. Her position here as a creative writer, betraying neither world in the process of writing about it, is quite a departure from the generally ambivalent sentiments expressed in the figures of Mendele and Sholem Aleichem vis-a`-vis the worlds that they represent. The ambivalence expressed here takes on a different form: the ambivalence of a female outsider to patriarchal culture being designated the inside informant of that culture in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Shapiro’s struggle to define her position as a literary artist bridging the Hasidic world and the secular world of modern Jewish letters can be seen in a fascinating moment in the eighth chapter of The Rebbe’s Daughter. Here, Shapiro’s protagonist Bat-Zion is asked by her tutor to copy, by hand, an essay on Maimonides from the modern Hebrew journal Hama’sef. The essay that she copies, by a scholar named Slonimsky, deals with Maimonides’ formula for the intercalation of years that is necessary to fix the dates of Rosh Hodesh, or the new moon, as the Jewish calendar is lunar and not solar. The depiction of Bat-Zion’s process of transcription is described: Enchanted figures overwhelmed Bat-Zion’s imagination. She saw the crescent moon in conjunction, there by the pond in the pine forest or there, far away in Eretz Israel between the mountains where the Sanhedrin sat. She wrote diligently until she encountered numbers and calculations, which she despised. She began to feel dizzy; and as much as she attempted to be careful about her penmanship, the letters did not come out rounded as always. And, in particular, when she reached Slonimsky’s commentary, she nearly twisted the words around. As Aharon the melamed began examining the manuscript, a dark cloud seemed to sweep over his bluish face. He pulled impatiently

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on his scraggly beard, speaking in bitterness, as if to himself, ‘‘This is not what I expected! I had a different opinion of you! You can’t say this is bad handwriting, but when writing is of the greatest importance, you should have been more careful. You ought to understand, my pupil, that these are the words of the Great Eagle, Maimonides; and the contemporary scholar Slonimsky is also not an ignoramus. Even though he is one of the maskilim, he should not be dismissed with a stroke of the hand.’’ . . . Rebbetzin Leahnu approached Bat-Zion, who stood before the melamed like an accused in the dock, tears gathering in her eyes. Her aunt gave her cheek, already red, a light pinch. Wanting to let her off the hook, she said, in a consoling tone: ‘‘There is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of, sweetheart. The handwriting is absolutely fine.’’ ‘‘You’re right, sister,’’ responded Rebbetzin Feigenu as she peered at the tablet. ‘‘The writing isn’t bad at all. It’s not as precise as Bat-Zion’s hand when she wove my name and the name of my husband—your honored uncle, long may he live—into verses accompanying her Purim gift, but this is nice, too.’’26 The dilemma of Bat-Zion’s artistry, her role in this narrative as a creative force, or merely as a cipher, is laid out here. Interestingly, the text she is asked to copy out by her melamed is the work of a maskil, and his scholarship, in turn, focuses on Maimonides, the greatest rationalist in Jewish history. Bat-Zion, the daughter of a Hasidic rebbe, ensconced in a household with clearly delineated non-rationalistic beliefs and practices, appears to be at a particular crossroads in this passage. She negotiates here between the expectation that she transcribe a tradition that is rather alien to her own, and the internal need to create her own texts. In this case, the creative texts that are alluded to are poems attached to the gift of mishlo’ah manot that are distributed to the rebbe’s family and friends on Purim. But in a more general sense, the presentation of this conflict with her melamed communicates an intellectual struggle with authorship similar to the conventional literary struggles that we have come to expect in the canon of modern Hebrew literature. Bat-Zion, it seems, is content to find her creative outlet within the closed world of her tradition and her father’s household, even though it is within that household that she is introduced to Enlightenment models. In

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fact, in her limited critical reception, Shapiro is described as admorit hasoferet and meshoreret hahasidut (‘‘the female rebbe writer’’ and ‘‘the Hasidic poet’’).27 Because Shapiro’s creative impulse is deployed within the closed world of a Hasidic milieu, it is tempting to identify her work wholly ethnographically, particularly given the dearth of historical resources on Hasidic women. It is important to recognize, in Shapiro’s work, however, a creative literary penchant, not to be downplayed for strictly ethnographic purposes but to be understood within a modern Hebrew ethnopoetic tradition. In a footnote to an essay he wrote about Shapiro’s text, Polen refers to a translated excerpt of Ita Kalish’s memoir that came out in 1965, in the thirteenth volume of the YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science.28 Titled ‘‘Life in a Hasidic Court in Russian Poland toward the End of the 19th and the Early 20th Centuries,’’ this ‘‘translation’’ of Kalish’s Yiddish A rebishe heim in amolikn poyln is a gleaning of what were apparently deemed ethnographically relevant details of the Hasidic milieu depicted in Kalish’s memoir.29 The lineage of her Hasidic forebears, the idiosyncratic behavior of her rebbe grandfather before his emigration to the Land of Israel, and the personalities and life tragedies of some of her closest relatives within the confines of the Hasidic court culminate in Kalish’s final lament about the destruction of this world during World War II: ‘‘The site of grandfather’s villa and its large synagogue, which stood for nearly eighty years in Otwock, is now a field cultivated by a Polish peasant. O earth, cover not thou their blood!’’30 This moment in the text is one of the clearest indications of the ethnopoetic intentions that govern it—the sense of ethnographic obligation as the result of historical exigency. At the same time, My Yesterday is a cleverly drawn, broad-ranging apostasy narrative—beginning in the world of a young girl in a Hasidic enclave and encompassing forbidden reading, the abandonment of a marriage, and the kidnapping of a child.31 Kalish, in this memoir, introduces us to important figures in twentieth-century Hebrew and Yiddish letters, including Dovid Bergelson, David Fogel, and Yehiel Yishayahu Trunk and, in so doing, expresses a desire to number among them. Ita Kalish, born into the Otwock Hasidic dynasty in Maciejowice, Poland, wrote her memoirs about growing up within her Hasidic enclave and then breaking from it in 1919, after her marriage, the birth of a daughter, and her father’s death. Moving from Warsaw to Berlin to Paris, and finally to Palestine in 1933, Kalish worked first for the Jewish Agency and then for the newly formed Israeli civil service from 1948 until her retirement in 1967. First published in 1963, in Yiddish, as A Rebbe’s Home in Long-Ago

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Poland, in 1970 Kalish expanded and translated her memoirs into Hebrew under the title My Yesterday. Alluded to in several recent historical publications on women in Eastern Europe, Kalish’s memoir has mostly been considered a valuable historical and ethnographic voice about women’s education within traditional Hasidism as well as Hasidism in Poland in the early part of the twentieth century.32 The memoir, lyrically and economically written, is also a reflection on Kalish’s apostasy—her break from the ways of her family and her exploration of Jewish women’s options in Europe and Israel just before World War II and in the early years of the Jewish state. The very title of Kalish’s book, Etmoli (My yesterday), distinguishes it from the generic, ethnographic way in which its English title presents it: ‘‘Life in a Hasidic Court in Russian Poland. . . .’’ The artfulness of Kalish’s book, however, is best illustrated by the way in which it transitions from the Hasidic world to the secular world of Warsaw between the two world wars. In her depiction of her own marriage and her subsequent departure for broader, more secular, climes, Kalish deliberately plays with the identification of the subject of the text: World War I and its terrors disrupted our way of life. The marriage of the oldest daughter of the Rabbi of Otwock was delayed. Occupied Poland became German and Austrian territory, and movement from one district to another required a special license from the occupiers. The process of obtaining one was arduous and exhausting. My brother strongly believed that his oldest sister’s wedding should take place as planned, and wanted to bring the bride herself before the military court in order to obtain a travel license for the groom and his parents. When Father heard of this plan, he stood to his fullest height and cried: ‘‘God forbid you should bring my daughter before the court of the German occupiers!’’ And in the end, not too long after that, Father succeeded, despite the bureaucracy caused by the military occupation, in overcoming the obstacles, and his first daughter’s wedding was celebrated in Warsaw, in the sumptuous wedding hall on what used to be Moranovsky Street. Thousands of invited and uninvited guests came to witness the Rabbi of Otwock’s celebration, and the hall was too small. Because of all the pushing and shoving, the sequins and seed pearls on the bride’s wedding dress scattered all over the floor. The food and

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drink remained in the storage closets because it was impossible to push through the crowds to get to them. When the headwaiter was finally able to make his way through the crown, waving a silver tray above the guests’ heads with ‘‘golden soup’’ for the bride and groom who had fasted the whole day, excited cries were suddenly heard: The Rebbe is Coming! The Rebbe is Coming! The young groom jumped out of his place, ran outside, and was pulled away in a tide of Gerer Hasidim, who threw over tables, burst through barriers, jumped from balconies, and ran to greet their rebbe. As a keepsake of the two long braids that hung to my knees and that were cut off the day after the huppah, I have a photograph taken by Alter Kacyzne, the Yiddish author and playwright from Warsaw. Kacyzne was a photographic artist who made a living in photography, into which he poured all his artistic ability. He was a simple man, prone to fantasy. When he was asked to name a price for his work, he would remove his spectacles, shrug his broad shoulders, turn his dark well-cultivated head of hair toward his wife, murmur, ‘‘those are Hannah’s affairs,’’ and sneak out of the room. We, his friends, saw this as a sign of overindulgence, but we didn’t hold it against him. Alter Kacyzne, and his wife, Hannah, were killed by Nazi murderers during the Holocaust. Their only daughter lives in Italy and perpetuates the memory of her father by publishing his works in Israel. Father had high hopes for his young, faithful son-in-law because he thought the young, pure man would know how to quiet his daughter’s longing to sneak out of the reality surrounding her and to forge a different way of life. But his hopes were quickly dashed. It hadn’t occurred to my father that his daughter had already broken out of the narrow confines of her father’s house; Father had not surmised that his daughter was learning foreign languages and reading ‘‘apocryphal’’ books as she put her young daughter, born about that time, down to sleep. The day finally came when his last vestiges of hope disappeared: he came to visit me in the apartment that was a satellite of his own at 14 Dzelna Street—and he saw before his very eyes, to his great shock, a stack of books in Yiddish and Polish. He was affronted and offended to his very core. He ordered them burned.33

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Although the winds of secularization have been obliquely alluded to throughout the memoir to this point, they have not been presented as being of particular personal importance to the first-person narrator—Kalish herself. Here, calling herself ‘‘the rebbe’s oldest daughter’’ in the generic third person, Kalish brings to mind Mary Antin’s singular digression from a firstperson to an omniscient third-person voice in her 1912 autobiographical novel, The Promised Land. In Mary Antin’s account of her childhood rupture with Jewish tradition, she deliberately carries a handkerchief over the threshold of her home into the public domain to see if there are any consequences to breaking the Sabbath. Dropping her first-person ‘‘I’’ to narrate the scene, she presents herself here as an unnamed ‘‘young pious child,’’ even as she depicts her intellectual transformation into a nonbeliever.34 In a similar fashion, Kalish obscures our vision of the young bride in the narrative as the same figure who has been narrating the story. In her details about the bride’s dress being torn apart and the young groom upending tables in his haste, along with his compatriots, to see the Gerer Rebbe, she creates a nightmarish scene. But strangely, she distances herself from it, rendering it in a completely objective, omniscient manner, without any emotional valence. Only when Kalish turns to Kacyzne, best known for the photographs of Polish Jewish life in the interwar period that he took for HIAS and the Forverts, does she resume her first-person narration. She says that her braids, cut off the day after the wedding, were memorialized by Kacyzne in a photograph he took of her from that time. Her reference to the snapshot functions as an irrefutable record of the continuity between the oldest daughter of the Otwock Rebbe and the young woman who abandoned her husband, her daughter, and her father’s court to become a salon hostess to the itinerant literati of the post-Hasidic crowd in Warsaw. Perhaps the photograph’s narrative position as the first acknowledgment of Kalish’s return to the first person marks her irreversible break from the world that she left behind. Her voice is insufficient to capture it; it must be done in a realist artifact, which can be brought out, if need be, to prove the existence of that girl with the long braids but can also be stowed away from the curious eye. This assertion of the ethnographic artifact, the photograph, alongside its immediate sublimation by the return to the first-person narrative voice encapsulates the tension between ethnographic and literary aspirations evident in this, and other, women’s narratives about prewar Eastern European Jewish life in Hebrew.

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Figure 10.1 From the Jewish Daily Forward, June 10, 1923. Original caption read ‘‘Rokhl Kalish, the daughter of the Otwock Rabbi, who eloped to Palestine with her lover.’’ The photograph of the girl with the long luxurious hair matches Ita’s description of her own photograph taken by Kacyzne on the eve of her wedding. It seems likely that the original caption was incorrect and should have referred to ‘‘Ita’’ and not ‘‘Rokhl.’’ From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

It is, to my mind, not coincidental that the shift back to the first person occurs not only in the course of a discussion about a photograph but also in the course of a discussion about a photographer killed in the Holocaust. In reflecting on Kacyzne’s character, Kalish is naturally led to refer to his murder on July 7, 1941, outside the Polish city of Tarnopol in a massacre perpetrated by Nazi-sponsored killing squads. The death of the photographer Kacyzne in the Holocaust appears to be essential to the process of the

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text’s very transformation from an omniscient third-person account of a wedding, to a first-person account of apostasy and betrayal. The photograph outlives its artist, which perhaps posits a new kind of art—an ethnopoetic art—built on the back of the war that made ethnographers of so many artists and that created the impulse to document where before the impulse may have been strictly to create. It is as if, along with Kacyzne, the ‘‘indulged’’ artist who left price negotiations up to his wife and his clients the practice of art for art’s sake died in a massacre during World War II. Hence the punctuation of Kalish’s text with moments such as this one, documenting Kacyzne’s life and death, changes the nature of the text, creating ethnographic moments where before there would have been omniscient narration, turning the third person into the first person and emphasizing the intimate, personal dimension of the genesis of this text.35 The artfulness with which Kalish transforms her narrative from being about her upbringing within a Hasidic enclave to being about her rebellion against that enclave distinguishes her book not simply as an autoethnographic portrait from an insider’s perspective but renders it classifiable within other narratives of apostasy and rebellion in the modern Jewish literary tradition. As Alan Mintz has discussed, the literature of the modern Hebrew renaissance grew out of an autobiographical tradition in which the story of individual spiritual and intellectual rupture from the sphere of traditional Judaism came to be understood over time as the story of a generation.36 As such, autobiography evolved into fiction, and the concrete individual came to be understood as the concrete universal. The talush, as is well known, is the transitional figure from the personal to the collective, from the autobiographical to the fictional. His gender exclusivity as a male figure of Jewish modernity has posed an important obstacle to allowing women’s Hebrew and Yiddish memoirs, like men’s, to take the leap into the realm, if not of fiction, then of belles lettres. In other words, why has Ita Kalish’s Etmoli been preserved as an important ethnographic essay and nothing more, while Brenner’s Bahoref, to name just one text from that period, has been preserved as a novel? The process of translating Hebrew male autobiographical voices into fictional tropes, which took place at the turn of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe, should also have taken place in the mid-twentieth century in Palestine for Eastern European–born women. The sheer number of women’s memoirs being written during that period about the Eastern European worlds left behind earlier in the century marks not only a zeitgeist

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but the birth of a literary trend. When looking closely at works such as Shapiro’s Midin lerahamim and Kalish’s Etmoli, their literary aspirations and literary value becomes apparent. Their translations into English have, interestingly, overemphasized their ethnographic identity, undermining their literary one, and failed altogether to recognize the ethnopoetics that brought the two elements together. Notes 1. Amos Oz, ‘‘Thank God for His Daily Blessings,’’ in Michael Gluzman and Naomi Seidman (eds.), Israel: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (San Francisco, 1996), 77. 2. Ibid. 3. When considering the reasonable disciplinary question of why I think the texts at hand have been read, belatedly, through an ethnographic lens as opposed to a historical one, I contend that history, literature, and ethnography coexist and intersect within a complex constellation of discourses that are mutually informative and mutually enriching. The concern in my particular formulation of ethnopoetics is that texts by writers such as Mendele Moykher-Sforim and Sholem Aleichem, or Malkah Shapiro and Ita Kalish, become windows not simply into the specific worlds they describe but into the entire lost world of Eastern European Jewry. This is precisely where history (i.e., genocide and cataclysm) dictates the terms of ethnography and literature bears its burden. Historians and literary scholars have long struggled with the relationship between their different yet interconnected disciplines. In fact, John Klier, in an essay titled ‘‘From Little Man to Milkman: Does Jewish Art Reflect Jewish Life?,’’ sets out ‘‘to explore the value of the classics of prerevolutionary Jewish fiction as wondrously realistic social history.’’ In Leonard J. Greenspoon, Ronald A. Simkins, and Brian J. Horowitz (eds.), Studies in Jewish Civilization: The Jews of Eastern Europe (Omaha, Nebr., 2003), 227–28. 4. In contemporary literary critical discourse, the term ‘‘ethnopoetics’’ was introduced by the poet, translator, and anthologist Jerome Rothenberg, in a 1968 volume titled Technicians of the Sacred. There, he called for recognition of ‘‘ethnic’’ poetics, particularly oral and visual ones, that pushed the boundaries of those poetics conventionally understood to be appropriate for inclusion in the Western canon. ‘‘Ethnocriticism,’’ a related term, was introduced by critic of Native American literature Arnold Krupat in the late 1980s, to gesture toward the frontier between literary studies and ethnography in work on Native American literature. Krupat, like Rothenberg, dwells on the need to expand the American literary canon and the notion of ‘‘literary form,’’ in order to include alternative voices and genres, such as Native American oral storytelling, in the mainstream American literary canon. Krupat calls for literary recognition of ethnographically valuable texts. See Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetry from Africa, America, Asia and Oceania (New York, 1968);

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Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg, Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics (Berkeley, Calif., 1983); Arnold Krupat, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley, Calif., 1992); idem, ‘‘Native American Literature and the Canon,’’ Critical Inquiry 10/1 (September 1983): 145–71; and idem, ‘‘American Histories, Native American Narratives,’’ Early American Literature 30 (1995): 165–74. 5. See S. An-sky, ‘‘Der kharakter un di eygnshaftn fun der yiddisher folks-poetisher shafung,’’ in Folklor un etnografye: Gezamelte shriftn (Warsaw, 1925), 15:33–95. For a discussion of this programmatic essay, see David Roskies, The Dybbuk and Other Writings (New York, 1992), xxii. 6. Interestingly, An-sky’s ethnographic project is referred to as a new ‘‘oral’’ as well as ‘‘written’’ Torah. See Roskies, The Dybbuk and Other Writings, xxii and xxiv. 7. Ibid., xxiii. 8. On An-sky’s place within the field of modern Jewish ethnography, see Jack Kugelmass, ‘‘The Father of Jewish Ethnography?,’’ in Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein (eds.), The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (Stanford, Calif., 2006), 346–59. 9. Auto-ethnography, the practice of performing ethnography on one’s own culture and one’s own self, has been linked to the practices of narrative, popular, and meta ethnography. For a discussion of auto-ethnography within the context of narrative ethnography, see Barbara Tedlock, ‘‘From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography,’’ Journal of Anthropological Research 47 (1): 69–94. In this essay, Tedlock discusses the highly acclaimed 1945 ethnography A Chinese Village, by Martin Yang, who did his field research in the village in which he grew up. On meta-ethnography and popular ethnography, see Yiorgos Anagnostou, ‘‘Meta-ethnography in the Age of Popular Folklore,’’ Journal of American Folklore 119 (474): 381–412. In this essay, Anagnostou points to the contemporary phenomenon of laypeople contributing to the professional folkloristic discourse. He argues that ‘‘the metaethnographic perspective calls on ethnographic practitioners to expand their reading repertoire beyond the literatures of academic ethnographies and to engage with the vast textual field of diverse genres of social representation’’ (382). 10. On the application of literary consciousness to ethnographic writings and on the identification of ethnographic terminology, which can be useful to literary thought, see Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, Calif., 1988), 147–53. Also see his ‘‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,’’ in idem, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 3–32. 11. See Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, 2000). 12. For a discussion of this movement in modern Hebrew literature, see Sheila Jelen, ‘‘Things as They Are: The Mimetic Imperative,’’ in idem, Intimations of Difference: Dvora Baron in the Modern Hebrew Renaissance (Syracuse, N.Y., 2007), 51–78.

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13. David Frischmann, ‘‘Mendele Moykher-Sforim’’ (Hebrew), in Collected Works of David Frischmann (Warsaw, 1938), 76. 14. On Israel’s attitude toward representations of Eastern European Jewish culture from the 1950s to the present, see Mordekhai Zalkin, ‘‘From the Armchair to the Archives: Transformations in the Image of the Shtetl During Fifty Years of Collective Memory in the State of Israel,’’ Studia Judaica 8 (1999): 255–56. On the place of women in Israeli literary culture, see Amalya Kahana-Carmon, ‘‘The Song of the Bats in Flight,’’ in Naomi Sokoloff, Anne Lapidus Lerner, and Anita Norich (eds.), Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (New York, 1992). 15. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Urbana, Ill., 2003). 16. S. Y. Pinless, ‘‘Mah shehayah,’’ Gilyonot 1 (1939): 59. 17. For more on Baron’s reception and its place within a discourse of ethnography, see Jelen, Intimations of Difference. In the preface to the book, I discuss ‘‘the tension that can be found throughout Baron’s mature work between the author’s impulse to represent a world that had, by the middle of the twentieth century, disappeared and her impulse to write fiction with no obligation toward historical ethnographic memory’’ (ibid., xix). 18. Karen Auerbach, ‘‘Bibliography: Jewish Women in Eastern Europe,’’ in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 18, Jewish Women in Eastern Europe, ed. Chaeran Freeze, Paula Hyman, and Antony Polonsky (Oxford, 2005). 19. For a fuller discussion of ‘‘cross-disciplinary translation’’ in Polen’s translation of Shapiro, see Sheila Jelen, ‘‘From an Old World to a New Language: Eastern European Born Israeli Women’s Writing in Hebrew,’’ Jewish Quarterly Review 96/4 (2006): 591–602. 20. Malkah Shapiro, Mitokh hase’arah (1943), Belev hamistorin: Sipurim ufo’emot (1955), Yeladim bigevulot: Perek mishenot hahafalah (1964), Midin lerahamim: Sipurim mehatserot ha’admorim (1969), and Shiri li bat ami: Shirim, sonetot ufo’emot (1971). 21. Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century (Syracuse, N.Y., 1996); Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1993); and Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose (Seattle, 1988). 22. Menachem Brinker, Ad hasimtah hateveryianit: Ma’amar ‘al sipur vemahshavah beyetsirat Brenner (Tel Aviv, 1990). 23. The Rebbe’s Tisch is a gathering of Hasidim with their rebbe, usually on Sabbath or holidays, to partake of a meal and Torah study. It is generally accessible to the community at large, but men alone sit with the rebbe at his ‘‘tisch’’ or table, while women look on from a distance. 24. Shapiro, The Rebbe’s Daughter, 108. 25. Ibid., 115. 26. Ibid., 97–98.

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27. S. Avidor, ‘‘Admorit hasoferet,’’ Panim el panim (November 12, 1971): 13; and M. Ungerfeld, ‘‘Lezikhra shel meshoreret hahasidut,’’ Hado’ar (March 17, 1972): 293. 28. Nehemia Polen, ‘‘Coming of Age in Kozienice: Malkah Shapiro’s Memoir of Youth in the Sacred Space of a Hasidic Zaddik,’’ in Alan Rosen (ed.), Celebrating Elie Wiesel: Stories, Essays, Reflections (Notre Dame, Ind., 1998), 123–40. 29. Ita Kalish, ‘‘Life in a Hasidic Court in Russian Poland toward the End of the 19th and the Early 20th Centuries,’’ YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 13 (1965): 264–78. 30. Ibid., 278. 31. Ita Kalish, Etmoli (Tel Aviv, 1970); and idem, A rebishe heim in amolikn poyln (Tel Aviv, 1963). 32. Gershon Bacon, ‘‘Kalish, Ita (1903–1994),’’ in Paula Hyman and Dalia Ofer (eds.), Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia (electronic resource) (Jerusalem, 2006). 33. Kalish, Etmoli, 83–85. 34. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (New York, 1912), 122–25. 35. Kacyzne was S. An-sky’s literary executor. He translated into Yiddish An-sky’s originally Russian The Dybbuk, an ethnographic showpiece for some of the findings gleaned from his 1912–14 ethnographic expedition. In addition to his photography, Kacyzne aspired to become a well-known Yiddish author. Though Abraham Cahan of the Forverts chose Israel Joshua Singer as his Warsaw stringer instead of Kacyzne, and thus spoiled, in part, Kacyzne’s ambitions for literary recognition in Yiddish communities across the Atlantic, Kacyzne was known in European Yiddishist circles as an accomplished writer. Through his affiliation with An-sky, as well as the juncture of his talents as a photographer and a literary writer, Kacyzne is brilliantly situated to illustrate, from another perspective, the nature of ethnopoetics in the post-Holocaust period. Kacyzne’s photography and his writings have all been subsumed, in recent reception, by Kacyzne’s relationship with An-sky as an ethnographer. His photographs have been published and republished in art volumes on the life of Eastern European Jews and have been juxtaposed with the photographs, most notably, of his friend and colleague Menachem Kipnis, who was also a photographer but more importantly an ethno-musicologist. At the same time, Kacyzne’s literary writings, with the exception of work he completed on behalf of An-sky, have fallen by the wayside. On Kacyzne’s involvement with the Jewish Daily Forward, see Alter Kacyzne, Poyln: Jewish Life in the Old Country, ed. Marek Web (New York, 1999), xviv. On Kipnis, see Itzik Nakhmen Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish Folklorists of Poland (Detroit, 2003), 56–65. 36. Alan Mintz, Banished from Their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington, Ind., 1989).

CHAPTER 11

Eternal Jews and Dead Dogs: The Diasporic Other in Natan Alterman’s The Seventh Column Gideon Nevo

The Seventh Column comprises Natan Alterman’s main body of journalistic verse.1 It was published regularly on Fridays as the seventh column of the second page of the widespread daily Davar from 1943 to 1967, and was avidly read and received. Dealing with all things public, large or small, written with brilliantly lucid poetic diction, deftly combining wit and pathos, seriousness and jest, empathy and humor, it earned Alterman unprecedented popularity and prestige among the Jewish population in pre-state Palestine (the Yishuv) and in the early decades of the Israeli state. Alterman’s stance vis-a`-vis the Diasporic Jew in The Seventh Column is at once representative and unique within the context of Labor Zionism, in which he was deeply entrenched and of which he became the main poetic voice. This stance found expression in two discernible thematic clusters: one dealing with world Jewry and institutionalized world Zionism (and especially with American Jewry and American Zionism); and the other with the Judenrat, the administrative bodies that the Germans required Jews to form in each ghetto on the Nazi-occupied territory of Poland and later in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. The two clusters—one embittered and acrimonious, the second unflaggingly compassionate—seem starkly at odds with each other. It is the object of this article to elucidate each individual cluster and to trace the line that might possibly connect them. This will amount to delineating (at

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least some aspects of) the moral and spiritual portrait of a writer who, in the realm of Hebrew letters, was the central poetic figure of his time and a major influence on the emergent Israeli poetry and culture of the day. In the years closely preceding the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in May 1948, and during the state’s early years, Natan Alterman, the national poet of the Yishuv, wrote some two dozen poems (and two articles) dealing with the Jewish communities in the Western world and their relation to the newly established state (or state-in-the-making). The poems focus mainly on the Jewish community in America, as this was, and still is, the largest, strongest, most affluent, and most influential of the Jewish communities outside of Israel. The poems concern themselves with both Zionist and non-Zionist Jews in these communities, making for the obliteration of the ideological line dividing these two groups. They were published in Alterman’s widely popular column, The Seventh Column, in the daily newspaper Davar. Some of the poems were carefully selected by Alterman to appear in his second selection of poems from The Seventh Column,2 in a separate thematic section titled (after one of the poems included in the section) ‘‘New Pumbedita.’’ Other poems appeared in other sections of Alterman’s various collections.3 Still others did not appear in any volume during Alterman’s lifetime, and had to wait for the posthumous volumes of The Seventh Column, published after the poet’s death.4 All the poems, without exception, reflect an attitude of critical reproach, of ressentiment. All are imbued with irony and sarcasm, sometimes quite bitter and caustic. They are all cast in the idiom of Alterman’s satirical mode, one of the central modes of his journalistic/political verse; more often than not, however, they shift gears and, disposing of the stinging mock-innocent irony, rise toward the high pathos of the prophetic mode or turn to the discursive/polemical one (or to a combination of the two).5 Alterman’s critical stance is an exemplification of the concept of the negation of the galut, which is one of the constitutive elements of Zionism and one of its deepest and most powerful emotional engines. Eliezer Shweid6 claims that rather than being a uniform version of a generalized and simplistic set of ideas, ‘‘negation of the galut’’ is a complex and involved conceptual conglomerate, a tangled mass of varied and even contrary positions. He goes on to propose a twofold division for the categorization of the panoply of perspectives and standpoints included under this umbrella concept. His principle of differentiation: the attitude adopted

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toward ‘‘the Jewish historical legacy in its continuity.’’ On the one side of the demarcation line will be approaches that reject this legacy (or at least those parts of it that were created in the galut or under conditions of national dependence), maintaining that no positive value can be salvaged from this legacy and that it should be bundled up in its entirety and thrown onto the garbage heap of history. On the other side will be approaches that, while also desiring to place Jewish exilic history on a totally different track and, essentially, to end it, reflect a positive attitude toward this long-standing tradition and the unique creativity to which it gave rise.7 As representatives of the first, more extreme, position (also held by people such as Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, S. Y. Ish-Horovitz, Ya’akov Klatzkin, and Nachman Sirkin), Shweid cites the writer Joseph Hayyim Brenner (1881–1921) and the philosopher and biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann (1889–1963). For Brenner, the galut is encapsulated in the distorted mental, moral, and spiritual conditions obtaining in the Pale of Settlement: degrading poverty, uprootedness from primal life sources, pogroms and humiliation by the non-Jewish society and the authorities, disintegration of communal organization, and weakening of the foundations of the traditional way of life. All these factors, according to Brenner, undermine the mental stability of the Pale of Settlement Jew, rendering him panic-stricken, anxious, and helplessly ineffectual. In Brenner’s eyes, the exilic Jew is a downtrodden and grotesque individual, divorced from reality, living as if in a delirium, and suffering from extreme fluctuations of mood: inferiority, submission, and obsequiousness before all sorts of persons of wealth and power, on the one hand; and feelings of superiority deriving from the notion of ‘‘the chosen people,’’ on the other; dark despair followed abruptly by fervent hope, and so on. The outcome: much commotion with no real action, constant scampering around to no end—the notorious Jewish idleness (batlanut). The galut, for Brenner, is sickness. And the malady affects all aspects of life. On the ethical plane, galut produces cowardice and faintheartedness, lack of self-respect, lack of willingness to stand up against violence, lack of trust in human beings, and pettiness, especially in relation to livelihood. On the aesthetic plane, it manifests itself in slovenliness and filth in the home, in the synagogue, in the house of learning, and with regard to one’s own attire. It results in general disorderliness, tastelessness, and dulling of any sense of beauty. The Jew does not respect his surroundings and does not respect himself in his surroundings—a clear sign of his uprootedness.

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On the spiritual plane, it makes itself felt in the narrow-mindedness and the claustrophobic nature of Jewish education in the heder and in the yeshiva, which is based on a culture that withdraws from contact with the land and from honest, productive work. Brenner negates the galut not only as a totality of living conditions that militate against any proper national life while exposing the people to persecution, discrimination, and calamity, but also as a negative form of existence. Galutiut (diasporism) is the distillation of a distorted human image, an undignified, unaesthetic, and intellectually perverse way of life. It is imprinted on everything that the Jewish people fashions or performs while living outside of the Land of Israel. To be delivered from the galut is to be delivered from all its inherited misery. For Kaufmann, the social-cultural existence of the ghetto is a strange middle entity, fascinating and repugnant at the same time. Its most prominent symbol is the Jewish language, or rather the Jewish languages, which are all hybrid concoctions that have come into being from a mixture of the Jewish people’s original language—Hebrew—with the vernacular of the host people. According to Kaufmann, this hybrid concoction, or jargon, testifies to a defective and warped social-cultural reality. It is never a complete language, not only because of the arbitrary blend of two alien linguistic codes but because of the necessary impoverishment of its combining elements: the Hebrew is stunted, unable to express whole realms of human culture, and the vernacular is taken mostly from the lower linguistic strata. Impoverishment, inferiority, deficiency, and bastardry are the qualities of the jargon that reflect the foreignness (neikhar) of cultural life in the ghetto. Kaufmann presents a picture of a people that has neither the will nor the ability to develop a full national culture. The Jewish people does not shape its surroundings as other peoples do, according to their singular styles and values. Only his immediate environs (the house, the street) are shaped by the Jew, in the characteristically haphazard, indiscriminate, and desultory style that reflects the unresolvable contradictions of his life. Hence the shabbiness, the slipshod dinginess, and tastelessness of ghetto culture. According to Kaufmann, modern times heralded no relief, let alone a cure, for this predicament. On the contrary, they worsened it. The emancipation process had started but was stopped short. European society resisted the absorption of Jews, and this resistance blossomed into an organized movement of hatred against the Jews—modern anti-Semitism. The poor

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ghetto home had been irreversibly destroyed, while the promised European home, which, according to the ideals of emancipation, should have become the haven of the (assimilated) Jews, did not really accept them. The resultant situation was (and still is) one of total alienation, both externally and internally. It involves insult, humiliation, social discrimination, and even instances of violent, murderous hatred endangering the very existence of the Jewish people. For Kaufmann, this constitutes an intolerable situation. It is a humiliation that desecrates human dignity. Whoever accepts such conditions, whoever is willing to pay this price in return for assimilation is not even worthy of pity; he is worthy of contempt and disgrace.8 A representative of the second approach in Shweid’s taxonomy is Ahad Ha‘am (alongside Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Aharon David Gordon). According to Shweid, Ahad Ha‘am, despite his theory of the spiritual center (later adopted by American Zionists),9 held consistent anti-galuti positions. With regard to Pale of Settlement Jewry, his position was not far from Brenner’s. This Jewry is described as subsisting suspended between intolerable living conditions from the outside and social and cultural disintegration from within. Ahad Ha‘am’s views regarding Western emancipated Jewry reach their most crystallized form in his essay ‘‘Slavery in Freedom.’’10 For Ahad Ha‘am, assimilation is a phenomenon that distorts the individual’s original personality. He believes that the sense of belonging to a people is based upon the continuity of genealogical ties and that the ego-consciousness of the individual is anchored in the ego-consciousness of the people, which, being the natural expansion of the family and the tribe, serves as the essential matrix that the individual is born into and is destined to continue. Therefore, it is only within his people that man can bring to a comprehensive and unconfined expression his unique human qualities. The assimilated Jew, anxious to prove how much he has internalized the majority culture and how much he has uprooted from himself everything that is alien to that culture, thus distorts his original self, defacing and nullifying it in return for the enticing reward of citizen’s rights. This is a new form of the situation of the conversos, Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism and had to hide their Jewish identity and become crypto-Jews. Ahad Ha‘am viewed this phenomenon as depressing, humiliating, and morally reprehensible. Under Western conditions, you cannot win emancipation without paying the price of obsequiousness and self-abnegation. If we were to place Alterman in the twofold division suggested by

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Shweid, I suppose we would put him along with the second group. His attitude lacks the virulence found in the writings of the extreme denouncers of the galut. His critique of Western Diasporic Jewry broadly follows the lines set forth by Ahad Ha‘am. In Alterman’s poems relating to American Jewry as a whole, there is one recurring motif. In these poems, Alterman does his rhetorical best to undermine the sense of Jewish identity fostered by American Jewry, to belittle it, to sully it. Above all, he seeks to refute the American Jew’s sense of having attained a new positive constructive identity, one that is able to heal the debilitating rupture between its Jewish aspect, its affiliation with the Jewish people (Judaism being not only a religion but a nation), and its civic or Diasporic aspect (its connection to whatever nation-state it happens to find itself in)—that irresolvable fault line that had plagued the life of the old exilic Jew, was the source of his pathology, his deficiency, his depravity, and that, inevitably, tragically, led to his horrible destruction. All along, Alterman’s unshaken underlying belief is that full authentic Jewish identity can be achieved only in a Jewish state. The alternative to Jewish national existence, the existence of Jews as emancipated citizens who hold equal rights in the liberal democratic Western states, he portrays— following Ahad Ha‘am—as a split and depraved existence, inherently inferior to Jewish national existence. The desperate wish for integration, never to be completely realized, will inevitably compromise the Diasporic Jew’s authentic, full-blown Jewish (and human) identity; in fact, it is destined to cripple it. Alterman will constantly ‘‘remind’’ these Jews, disregarding their numerous, persistent claims to the contrary, that they live in exile, that they will never be a natural part of their environment, that there will always be a thin, transparent film separating them from the rest of (Gentile) society, that they are a continuation of, and not a break with, their forefathers—the old exilic Jews of the Eastern European shtetl. In ‘‘Kabalat panim beboston ve’ehad hayehudim’’ (Reception in Boston and one of the Jews),11 he conjures up a portrait of what is supposed to be a typical American Jew, a portrait that harps upon all the sensitive spots in the American Jewish consciousness (imminent assimilation, lurking anti-Semitism). The portrait is steeped with disparaging vocational, spiritual, and physical attributes, recalling stereotypical images of the shtetl Jew (which resonate with stereotypical anti-Semitic images of the Jew in general). The Jew in the poem is a tailor (of women’s clothing), a classical if not the classical Jewish exilic

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vocation, the stuff of folklore and legend as well as high literature.12 His Jewishness is shallow, decorative, sentimental, whining, devoid of any depth or grandeur (‘‘He loves cantors/ and their beautiful embellishments / What are we—he intones—/ and Oh, what are our lives?’’); his gait is the physical expression of a warped and malformed personality (‘‘His gait, in any case, was a little wobbly. Straight but a little crooked, erect but a little bent— which completely destroys bodily posture’’). The covert leaning on (internalized) anti-Semitic stereotypes and myths in Alterman’s anti-Diasporic rhetoric seeps to the fore in the poem ‘‘Hanima hameyuhedet’’ (The special thread). The poem, dealing with the American presidential campaign of 1952, sets itself the task of finding some crack in the seemingly harmonious picture of an ethnically and religiously blind society—in which equal political rights are given to all, Jews and non-Jews alike—as it revels in the greatest of all democratic festivities: election. In order to rupture this idyllic picture, Alterman will look for some peculiar Jewish difference, be it the most subtle or imperceptible trait, that will set the Jews apart and separate them from the rest of the social body. Outwardly, it seems, there is no difference between the Jew and all the other citizens. When the American citizen goes to the polls He chooses his slogan without much ado. If Taft’s party is his choice he declares ‘‘I Like Ike.’’ If a Democrat, Adlai he loves. That is the way of the goy, but now Stands the Jew at the same crossroads. In these laden times Shall he a governor or a general choose? The debate takes place For him as for all On the air, on the page, The media is the message And the media is for all.13

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But with the penetrating eye of a meticulous forensic investigator, Alterman is able to find what he’s looking for. Nevertheless, if we listen with care We can find a thin thread Of a difference, a dread something sad, a bit orphaned, And irremediably alone . . . The Jew doesn’t say that he likes Ike. That, for him is not the point at all. The heart of the matter, through all the din, Is whether Ike has any love for him. And if his decision’s not already made And he is still trying to add up the score, He will not ask which of the two is the better, But only which of them loves him more. Thus the required difference is found, and the ideal of complete and true integration and equality for the Jew in a Gentile society, however enlightened, is shown to be unattainable and fraught with inherent humiliation. Rounding off the poem, driving the message home, Alterman makes use of the Christian legend of the Wandering (or Eternal) Jew. This is a rather horrifying tale about an old curse (put by Jesus on a Jerusalem shoemaker who had taunted him on the way to the Crucifixion), about eternal damnation and the doom-laden fate of a man, never to die, forced to ceaselessly, endlessly, wander the face of the earth in the guise of an ancient old man—a form of living that is worse than death. The legend had been widely popular in European culture since the early seventeenth century, and was later appropriated by the Nazi regime to serve as the title of the ‘‘documentary’’ film, The Eternal Jew, which signals the height of Nazi propaganda and stands out as one of the most vicious and invidious anti-Semitic documents ever devised. On election day he runs to the square With a flag in his hand and a cardboard hat And a whistle to blow . . . Ahasuerus he’s not,

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But is still very like an old graybeard in a kinderschule . . . And although an American citizen, yessir, Something’s amiss with the style and the tune. It’s the little old difference, rusty by now That wakes up again in the course of time, And its taste is no other than the taste of galut . . . But America’s no exile—Diaspora now is its name and repute. Alterman takes care to note that the Jew is not Ahasuerus,14 but the very evocation of the name, together with his insistence that the American Jew is like an old man in a kindergarten (a rather effective metaphorical extension of the myth), suggestively brings in its wake the whole web of connotations connected with the myth. It seems that Alterman will never miss an opportunity to correlate the modern American Jew with the old Jew of the shtetl. This is, as was mentioned above, in order to undercut the American Jew’s claim to the possession of a new proud Jewish identity purged of the maladies, the deformities, and the pathologies that have maimed and distorted the soul and physique of the Eastern European Jew.15 The poems adopt the same condescending attitude already expressed in Ahad Ha‘am. The Western Jew has won his rights, but the price is high. The price is inauthentic, undignified existence. What the Jews get in terms of civil rights they lose in terms of human dignity. According to both Ahad Ha‘am and Alterman, the deal is flawed and not worthwhile. Some of Alterman’s anti-Diasporic critique seems to derive more from an affirmation of Zionism than from the negation of the galut per se. In order to better elucidate it, we should place it in the context of his conception of Zionism. More specifically, it might be stated that Alterman’s critical and denigrating stance draws upon two sources: his conception of Zionism as the consummation of Jewish life in modern history; and the dominance of the personal-territorial dimension in his political worldview. The first of these is the basis for his critique of all Jews in the Western free countries; and the second, the ground for his much more focused attack on the Zionist Jews in these countries. Alterman’s Zionism might be defined as a kind of elitist, secular messianism or eschatology, a total redemptive project. Zionism is the answer to the problems facing the Jewish people in the modern era, to its trials and tribulations, to rampant anti-Semitism, and, above

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all, to the shattering outcome of its continued exilic existence—the Holocaust. Zionism is an answer to all of these, and, moreover, it is the only viable answer. More than merely a political idea or an ideological party, Zionism is conceived almost as a religious order. According to this vision, the accomplishment of the Zionist program has a far-reaching effect over all the Jews, be they Zionist or not. The establishment of a sovereign Jewish state constitutes a cataclysmic event in Jewish history. The reverberations of this metahistoric event traverse the whole world and reach every Jew wherever he lives, whether in New York, Chicago, Cape Town, or some remote, secluded mountain village in the Caucasus. When these rejuvenating, beneficent waves touch the Jews in exile, a certain miraculous process takes place, whereby the bent posture of the exilic Jew straightens and becomes proudly erect. The State of Israel, the ultimate fruit of Zionism, gives every Jew all over the world a national anchor, a spiritual and moral uplift. This places every Jew in constant debt to Zionism, a debt that can never be fully converted into financial terms, a debt that will be canceled only by complete immersion in the Zionist project and full acceptance of the Zionist order’s tenets. In the poem ‘‘Kabalat panim beboston ve’ehad hayehudim,’’ mentioned above, this miraculous transformation befalls the stooped American Jewish tailor when some golden, shimmering flecks from the new Jewish national sovereignty land on his shoulders as he watches the grand welcoming ceremony—an army and navy parade, a salvo of cannon shots—for the prime minister of Israel come to address the two houses of the Massachusetts State Legislature. They drive, they ride, they march, A squadron roars above, The soldiers and sailors salute. Clapping and clamor of hooves— And the tailor’s life is upturned. The regalia doesn’t matter, He whispers to his mate, But nevertheless a tremor (the truth has got to be told)

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Goes through you when up front The Parliament to you bows. The needle in your hand Even the needle, brother, Becomes more sure of itself, And the seams run cheerfully, When cannons in your honor fire. . . . Perhaps it isn’t of any import But nevertheless it changes Your feeling of self in the world. And even the body becomes A little more robust. . . . Different you sit, Different you rise, Different you stand, Different are the skies, Even in the neighborhood for some reason Different are the eyes. Alterman uses this picture to recast the ‘‘mercantile’’ balance—the balance of payments—between the State of Israel and American Jewry: —Three million overnight Donations at Boston have turned. . . . And will continue to turn. Yet, above we have pointed out What Israel gives Boston In return. What Israel gives, while economically unquantifiable, is nonetheless morally and spiritually invaluable.16 An increased bitterness of tone can be detected in ‘‘Hovot hamedina’’ (The debts of the state),17 written on the occasion of the declaration of Independence Loan (Israel bonds) in the Knesset. The final rhetorical gesture of this sarcastic poem pits one against the other, ‘‘The Jews in New

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York, the Jews in Chicago, / In Panama, in Chile,’’ who, by buying Israel bonds, have become the state’s creditors, and the Jews to whom the state owes nothing because all they gave her was their lives. Compared with the hallowed glow of the ultimate sacrifice, economic assistance to the state (which, as promised, will be returned to the last penny) dwindles and pales, becomes puny and irredeemably tainted by mercenary and pecuniary considerations. The poems that Alterman directed at American Jewry reflect a unilineal view of modern Jewish history. This view sees modern Jewish exilic existence, despite a few isolated patches of warmth and wisdom, as a morass of moral and national degeneration from which Zionism is a historical, or even meta-historical, leap into redemption, into sovereign nationality, an unbelievably bold (and eventually successful) attempt to save a whole people from decay and extinction (whether through assimilation or physical extermination by a murderous anti-Semitism, ever present and lurking even behind the apparently still waters of Western liberalism). Everything that is not Zionism, everything that was left behind by Zionism is deemed inferior and misguided, if not corrupt. Zionism is perceived as the only ideological trend that proved itself historically valid,18 the only one that had the courage and the acumen to face the grim reality without fantasy, without mauvais fois, without delusion but also without despair, to analyze it mercilessly and accurately, drawing the only right conclusion. Facing the terrible truth, the dead end of Jewish exilic existence, with unbending resolution and determination against what seemed to be insurmountable geo-political obstacles; saddled by the crushing force of hundreds of years of exilic existence that had systematically weakened, softened, and emasculated the body and soul of the Jew; confronting a stingy and dry land and a harsh climate; having from the very outset to engage in bloody battles with the local Arab population and, later, with the neighboring Arab states—Zionism was able to overcome and change the whole course of Jewish history.19 Alterman’s more focused attack on the Zionists among Diasporic Jewry, as on the World Zionist Federation as a whole, stems from the dominance or primacy of the personal-territorial dimension in his conception of Zionism. Alterman understands Zionism as a movement that entails a certain personal spatial (re-)positioning. Zionism is about creating a Zionist locus (that is, a Jewish national place), and, according to Alterman, you cannot be a true Zionist if you are not part of this place (or don’t become part of

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this place), if you don’t put your body and soul in proximity with other individual bodies to create one large collective body. In order to be called a Zionist, you must belong to the Zionist locus and cannot be a remote entity, floating somewhere in the stratosphere of that locus, and belonging, in fact, to another social body with all the obligations and interactions entailed by this other belongingness. To be a Zionist, one must sever completely the ties that connect one to one’s original social body and plant oneself in the Zionist body—live the life of its multiple daily transactions and interactions, be immersed in its ecological system, drenched in its fluids, nurtured by the blood flowing through its system of veins and arteries—and, in turn, contribute to this life-giving flow—take part in the constant process of its building, its thriving, the flexing of its muscles, feel in oneself every throb of the collective body, the tremors of its huge efforts, the convulsions of its sorrows and joys, its pains and exaltations. For Alterman (as for Ben-Gurion),20 the term ‘‘Zionist’’ is similar to the term ‘‘kibbutznik’’ or (today) mitnahel (settler). You can’t be a kibbutznik or a settler without actually living on a kibbutz or in a settlement. The terms have a spatio-social dimension ingrained in them. One must differentiate, though, between two distinct phases: the period preceding the establishment of the State of Israel and the period following it. In the period before the (formal) establishment of the Jewish state, anyone who worked for the Zionist cause could properly be defined as a Zionist, independent of the whereabouts of his concrete living place. The Zionist place was in the process of becoming, so it was conceivable, even natural, that some of the movement’s members were furthering the cause of its coming into being from outside it, while others were already settling in the territory. Even then, a hierarchy is still established between the pioneering elite who venture into the as-yet-unknown place, into the wild, to prepare the ground for future settlement, and between those who back them from behind. For those who believe, as Alterman did, that being a part of the Zionist order means being a part of the Zionist place and for those who believe that the term ‘‘Zionist’’ entails a decisive spatial positioning of the individual self over and above a devotion to the Zionist ‘‘idea’’ or a supporting and subscribing to the Zionist plan, the establishment of the State of Israel is the moment when the full force of the tenet of aliyah—the crucial act of going ‘‘up’’ to the homeland—comes into play. When the gates of aliyah

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are flung wide open, there is no excuse for any Zionist to evade this crucial step. And if he does, he must sustain the loss of his right to membership in the movement, to the privilege of being called a true Zionist. There is nothing now to differentiate him from any other Diasporic Jew with a soft spot for Israel. The World Zionist Federation, now that the goal of its heroic efforts has been achieved, rather than ambling along with no real purpose, no clear direction or orientation, propelled by the residual inertia of its original project that has come to completion, should basically be dismantled—or if not dismantled, then entrusted, for a limited period of time, with restricted, specified missions designed exclusively to facilitate and encourage aliyah. In any event, the grudgingly conceded continued existence of the World Zionist Federation (based on the sober recognition that there are some urgent Zionist missions that no other Jewish organization is able or willing to perform) should by no means be construed as a license for individual Zionist Jews in the galut to stay where they are. According to the view propounded by Alterman and Ben-Gurion (and here, perhaps, the order should be reversed: Ben-Gurion and Alterman), after the establishment of the state the denominations ‘‘Zionist’’ and ‘‘Zionism’’ should become obsolete and be supplanted, through the liberating and transforming act of aliyah, by the terms ‘‘Israeli’’ and ‘‘Israeliness.’’ To them, the logical and moral corollary of the establishment of a Jewish state is the convergence upon the state of all those Jews who declare themselves Zionists. If they dodge or refuse to accept this logical corollary, then their Zionist identity is seriously undermined. Finding themselves in direct contradiction with one of the central dogmas of the very ideology they profess to adhere to, their Zionist identity becomes dubious, if not vacuous and hypocritical. In ‘‘New Pumbedita,’’21 the poem that gave its name to the whole section, Alterman ridicules the idea, cited in the motto to the poem, that ‘‘American Jewry’s mission and function is to be a second center for the nation, outside the State of Israel, like the Babylonian Diaspora in its time.’’ Alterman makes a total mockery of this idea, turning the poem into a feast of bantering, sarcastic humor: The mission and function of American Jewry is to be a second center outside the State of Israel, like the Babylonian Exile in its day. —from Zionist Thought in America

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It may be so, as the soothsayer says, that we need two centers for Israel to flourish. In Israel will sit the sages of Tiberias, Tunis, and Morocco While the rest of the wise ones enlighten Ohio. Thus Brooklyn will be home to the chosen people, And they: the citizens of New Pumbedita. And without losing citizenship and passport, They will compose the Mishnah. They’ll compose the Mishnah, the Babylonian complete, Isn’t it neat? It happened like that once (the wheel comes round) There were then, my friend, no great losses— And look what was found! For double the nation will prosper and thrive, If we furnish it with centers two and branches five. —Perhaps. Especially since justifications abound, philosophical, historical . . . nearly profound. Praise be, anyway, that intellectual ferment breaks out in the United Zionist States! Their brains are alert, they are strong in perception. Every minute they bring forth a brand-new conception. Peculiar though is the one-way track That their sharp wits take and never turn back: The track of discovering reasons galore For never setting foot upon Israel’s shore. A similar sarcastic tone is to be found in the poems ‘‘Tsioney All Right, 1945’’ (All right Zionists, 1945),22 one of the very first poems in the series,

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‘‘Svara mufrehet’’ (A baseless supposition),23 and ‘‘Plitat hapeh hanora’ah’’ (The terrible slip of the tongue)24 —two poems that blur completely the dividing line between Zionist and non-Zionist Diasporic Jews—‘‘Sakanat hatsioni hanitshi’’ (The danger of the eternal Zionist)25 (once more obliquely invoking the injurious myth of the Eternal Jew), and ‘‘Sihat shlomei emunim’’ (A conversation of the faithful).26 In other poems, such as ‘‘Netsigut o sohnut musmehet’’ (A representative or an authorized agency),27 the tone is replaced by the tone of rational, staid public debate, which, by and large, steers clear of irony and avoids the double-layer semantic structure typical of that trope. But the conclusions are the same. In 1954–55, against the background of the Kastner and capo trials,28 Alterman wrote a series of poems concerning the Judenrat29 and the question of the morally justified and humanly dignified path that the Jews in occupied Europe should or could have taken during the Holocaust. While in his poems on American Jewry and American Zionism, Alterman, as we have seen, was the poetic voice of an unwavering, strictly orthodox Zionism, characterized by a haughty, sometimes condescending, and always judgmental and derogatory Palestinocentric attitude toward Diasporic Jewry, the poems concerning the Judenrat place Alterman at the furthest point possible from haughtiness, high-handedness, and obtuseness. The poems constitute a concentrated, conscientious effort at empathy and understanding, an extremely charged site of strenuous endeavor on the part of Alterman to hurl himself into the black abyss of the Holocaust, to place himself not above but at the same level as his fellow Jews, to beware as far as possible of judgmental, critical attitude, comfortably based on post-factum knowledge and hindsight. Alterman adamantly avoids easy conclusions that are based on superficially glossing a complex tragic reality—caught in a mire of conflicting and equally exigent moral commitments—and reducing it to a simple binary opposition between the path of rebellion, honor, and glory on the one side, and the path of cowardly, vile submission and cooperation with the forces of evil on the other. Alterman obdurately refuses to judge and condemn the despised, the humiliated, to abide by accepted wisdom and ideology. He does so in the face of growing public criticism and dismay. At the time, the first years of the nascent state, holding fast to its ethos of heroism and sacrifice, of never giving up without a fight, the young Israel found it all but impossible to take in the full scope of the trauma of the Holocaust and to deal with it compassionately.

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The young state instinctively recoiled from what it grasped as the horrendous vision of millions, weak or weakened to the point of helplessness, harassed, molested, maltreated in a multitude of ways, starved, tortured, butchered, and offering virtually no resistance, led like lambs to the slaughter. This massive helpless impotence, as the young state perceived it, was too much for it to embrace. It distanced itself, blocked itself, made itself impervious to this unbearable vision. The memorial day for the Holocaust was officially called Yom Hazikaron Lashoa Velagvura (Remembrance Day of the Holocaust and Heroism).30 Throughout the fifties, the emphasis was put on gvura (heroism), and the Shoah (Holocaust) component was largely suppressed. Attention was paid almost exclusively to the relatively meager and largely unsuccessful acts of uprising and revolt, such as the uprisings in the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos and the operations of the Jewish partisans. The date of the remembrance day was set on the twenty-seventh of Nisan in order to tie it to the doomed Warsaw ghetto uprising.31 Desperately, stubbornly, the young state clung to the memory of the heroic moments, glittering like a few live coals in a sea of burned ash. Against this background, the Judenrat was perceived as an institution that facilitated the annihilation, that oiled the wheels of the German destruction machine, that took part in the systematic murder of its own people. The heaviest accusation leveled against the Judenrat leaders was that they turned over tens of thousands of their own brothers to the Nazi Moloch. Some of them were accused of personal corruption, of sacrificing others in order to save their own—people who were close to them or enjoyed some privileged status. In any case, the Judenrat leaders were contaminated by close, much too close proximity or cooperation with the devil and were thrown together with the Jewish capos in the same reviled and loathsome category. They personified the most hateful aspects of Jewish exilic existence in their most virulent form. Zionist ideology shrouded the concept with a thick, almost impenetrable, veil of scorn and disgust. The very name became an anathema in Zionist discourse. Alterman invested tremendous amounts of his poetical and intellectual energy in a fervent effort to dismantle or modify this thick set of emotionally charged ideological and moral sentiments. He tried to cast a different light upon that dark period. He filled three notebooks with notes and fragments connected to this moral and intellectual struggle.32 Alterman’s Judenrat poems are written in what I call his ‘‘polemical/discursive mode,’’

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characterized by adherence to the conventions of rational public debate: arguments and counterarguments, buttressing one’s case with supporting material (evidence), finding factual or logical faults in the argumentation of the (intellectual) rivals from the other side of the debate, and so on. The polemical/discursive mode is a middle ground between the satiricalhumoristic-witty mode, which dominated the early phases of Alterman’s journalistic poetry, and the high drama of his solemn, prophetic mode, suffused with thundering national pathos. The poems, while primarily following the logic and decorum of the discursive mode, are highly charged emotionally. The first poem in the series, ‘‘Yom hazikaron vehamordim’’ (Remembrance day and the rebels),33 is indeed a combination or a grafting upon the discursive mode of some of Alterman’s typical prophetic tropes, such as the grand address or apostrophe;34 heroic, ‘‘sublime’’ metaphors;35 populating the ‘‘world’’ of the poem with aggrandized symbolic figures, a` la the poem ‘‘Magash hakesef’’ (The silver platter),36 as well as with personified abstract entities;37 cosmological participation of the planets in the human sphere;38 and the use of high biblical diction. Alterman’s main concern throughout the series is to shatter, or at least to problematize, the separation between the ghetto fighters, on the one hand, and the rest of the people, led by the Judenrat into the maw of the Nazi death machine, on the other. As the debate that ensued came to be termed ‘‘The Debate of the Two Paths’’ (pulmus shtei hadrakhim),39 Alterman insisted that there were no two paths. There was only one path, and on that path were forced to walk the leaders of the Judenrat and the members of the underground. This, I believe, is Alterman’s deepest insight into that dark era, into the very mechanism of darkness, into what enabled and defined it: there were no two paths. This encapsulates for Alterman the essential tragedy of the time. In order to bring the two apparently diametrically opposed poles together, Alterman cites two kinds of evidence, both from the writings of members of the underground whom he deeply admires. The first kind testifies to the fact that the question whether to take or not to take the course of active resistance did not divide the rebels from the Judenrat but cut through the rebels themselves. The rebels asked themselves whether they were entitled to take responsibility over all the Jews, to endanger their lives, and to actively assist in the process of annihilation, as would be the case in the event of their failure. On the threshold of the Warsaw ghetto uprising,

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they had asked themselves whether they were entitled to shorten the lives of the Jews of the ghetto by half a year—half a year during which no one knew for certain what would happen. Furthermore, in the preface to the poem ‘‘Al shtei hadrahim’’ (On the two paths),40 Alterman quotes from the notes of the commander of the Bialystok ghetto, Mordechai Tennenbaum: ‘‘If the [Nazi] operation is on the aforementioned scale—we are not responding. We are sacrificing 6,300 Jews in order to save the remaining 35,000. The situation at the front is such that a radical turn of events can occur any day.’’ All this material supports Alterman’s claim that the line between revolt and (grinding) submission, between active resistance and suppression of action, was much more jagged and blurred, much less clear than we were led to believe. The second kind of evidence Alterman uses is excerpts from the rebels’ writings that illuminate the figures of some of the Judenrat leaders in a much more complex and favorable light than we are used to expect. In these excerpts, they are presented not as abject and menial degenerates who had lost any shred of human dignity but as proud Jewish leaders who do not bow to the Germans, as resourceful and shrewd men who had run the ghetto life with authority and talent (sometimes, admittedly—but, given the context, understandably—resorting to strict, almost dictatorial methods), doing their best to keep as many of the ghetto’s inhabitants alive as they could, believing that it was possible to save the majority of the ghetto’s Jews through negotiating with the Germans and through turning the ghetto, by dint of its inhabitants’ hard labor, into an indispensable part of the German armament industry, and who were ready indeed, if all else failed, to sacrifice 70,000 or 100,000 Jews in order to save the rest, and so to keep the body of Polish Jewry maimed, but alive. The testimonies cited by Alterman portray the leaders of the Judenrat, at least some of them, as humane people who treated the members of the underground, their bitter ideological rivals, with consideration and compassion.41 Alterman ends the last poem of the series, ‘‘Ule’inyan ‘halekah lador’ ’’ (And to the issue of ‘‘the moral for the generation’’),42 with a telling gesture. When the personified figure of Time hears what the public has to say about the issue, how its shrill voice rises to distort justice and to adopt a moral fit for a slogan, he slowly withdraws. He withdraws from the crowd, from the preachings of speeches and pamphlets, and finds an anonymous leader, whom earth has covered with a mound of stones. There Time ‘‘stands a

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moment in silence, his head bowed over the dead dog, / Left suddenly alone with the blindness of exile and its laws’’: He bows his head and says: If you betrayed, traitor, you will be called on the Day of Judgment. But if your transgression was to knowingly walk In the way of surrender and obedience, And your rivals walked the very same path . . . then arise, dog, from the ground. . . . Arise and call to judgment the placards and the slogans, The embellished rhetoric of righteous wrath, the bronze statues!— And revolt that is not built on misunderstanding Will stand at your side, untainted by wrong. And as to ‘‘the moral for the generation’’: There is nothing more sublime than the moral of justice. It is a gesture that echoes the gesture made by the personified figure of the state in the poem ‘‘The Debts of the State,’’ where she imperceptibly withdraws from the multitudinous company of all her swarming creditors from all over the world, and goes to stand quietly in front of the stone mound under which lie those to whom she owes nothing at all, because all they gave her was their lives. Suggestively, a line is being formed, a line that connects the ultimate heroes of the national renaissance with its most reviled antiheroes. While his poems against American Jewry present him as a ‘‘tough,’’ intransigent, uncompromising, even bigoted apostle of hard-line Zionist orthodoxy, disdainfully looking down upon ‘‘soft’’ Diasporic Jewry, in his Judenrat poems Alterman goes out of his way to reach out to those who have come to represent Jewish diasporism in its most contemptible, spineless, and abominable ‘‘softness’’ or unmanliness. How are we to account for this duality? Might it not be possible to find some deep psychological and moral stratum that could convincingly be shown to be the origin of these seemingly incommensurate stances? I believe that such an origin is to be found and that it is identical with what the critic Gershon Shaked called the ‘‘Altermanian ethos of loyalty.’’43 This ethos, suggestively, hypnotically, reverberating through all of Alterman’s rich and variegated poetic corpus (the ‘‘pure’’ canonical poetry,44 the ‘‘mixed’’ poetry,45 the journalistic

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poetry,46 the light poetry and the plays), calls for a complete, unalloyed immersion of the individual in the collective body of its social (national) context. This immersion is conceived of as the highest moral attainment achievable by the individual. The transcendent aspect of this unconditional loyalty and commitment to the collective—rising above one’s egotistical interests and private concerns—is conceived of, indeed, as the incandescent emblem of morality itself. The ultimate sacrifice that one can make for one’s social group (be it the family, the ethnic group, the people, the nation, or the nation’s political incarnation—the state) is, of course, one’s life. Alterman’s poetry swells with the presence of the dead, with gestures to the dead, with the unearthly continued presence and voice of the dead—with an abundance of discourse about the dead, of the dead, and to the dead. The pinnacle of this mythic, rhetorical, and figurative presence is the figure of the living dead, Alterman’s poetry’s signature figure. In Alterman’s meta-realist poetic world, infused with balladic topoi and gothic atmosphere and appurtenances, the dead are still alive, in a way, because the values that guided and formed their lives are emblazoned in the hearts of the living and in the eternal collective memory or myth of the social group. They keep on living, as it were, through the continued existence of the social body. Being such a ruthless, overriding, and total thing, the ethos of loyalty implies a complete divestiture from material assets. To qualify for the ideal standard of loyalty, one must stand before the world economically naked. One must have no material possessions to stand as a barrier between oneself and the collective. Every possession, every asset, every economic capital is perceived, from this point of view, as a film that separates one from the rest of society, like a layer of fat that covers the heart and renders it obtuse. Alterman’s poetry is consistently suspicious of those who have, while strewn with manifestations of instinctive embrace for those who have not, or have relinquished everything—like the revered pioneers of the Second Aliyah, those who occupy the first rows in the Zionist Valhalla. Alterman is especially resentful of ideologies and political parties that defend, promote, and sanctify private property. He grudgingly accepts the existence of bourgeois egotistical trends in the society but sees them as a necessary evil that should be tolerated at best but never allowed to become the leading national ideology. As an instance of this position, see the biting cynicism with which he

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received the surprising success of the General Zionists Party—a liberal, capitalist-oriented party identified with the middle class and supporting market economy and private enterprise—in the municipal elections of 1950. ‘‘It’s an ancient power as old as the land and the sea,’’ he wrote on the luring power of the General Zionists. ‘‘And its mainstay—/ The desire of man’s heart. / A desire that seeks (even without a written license) / A bit of prodigal indulgence. / And they say that from ancient times / This power aims at directing / Man’s way./ But only in a nation wishing to seal its own fate, / Does this power rise to direct the ways of the state.’’47 This deep-seated severe code of unqualified, self-negating national identification, ultimate sacrifice, and economic divestiture is the one moral and emotional background behind the two seemingly antithetical positions visa`-vis Diasporic Jewry that we have reviewed in the course of this article. Alterman castigates American Jewry (Zionist and non-Zionist alike) because they do not commit themselves fully to the national cause (they do not make aliyah) and because they are affluent and the layer of fat around their hearts compromises their morality. And his heart goes out to the degraded Judenrat leaders because they have nothing and because they have taken upon themselves the terrible yoke of collective national responsibility, ‘‘the dire strait / called collective responsibility . . . and it is an outdrawn sword lying stealthily in wait . . . / collective responsibility: the cruelest of all weapons crafted by the enemy / as he turned into a bane blood ties of the tribe.’’48 Alterman distances himself from well-to-do Diasporic Jews who have a real choice but prefer not to separate from their comfortable existence, while feeling intimately close with weak and subjugated Diasporic Jews,49 driven to a desperate cul de sac where every route they take is overshadowed by a tragic cloud. Alterman was a Zionist poet in every fiber of his body, arguably the Zionist poet. He has harnessed his poetry completely to the political carriage of Zionism. Even as he sides with the Judenrat, he does not deviate from his fundamental Zionist principles. The moral to be drawn from that tragic era fully conforms to Zionist dogma: No, not in the least! For the terrible moral that’s being inscribed Is the fate of the gola. The fact that on a land rent asunder, Without a home front, without that hovel called homeland, Even the holiest of warriors have been forced to accept The law of step-by-step liquidation. . . .

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But, as his Judenrat poems attest, Alterman was also that poet whose ardent Zionism, whose paeans to the epic struggles, challenges, sacrifices, and victories taken on by the new Jew have not blinded him from seeing the tragedy, suffering, and heroism of the old one. Notes 1. Other segments of Alterman’s journalistic verse include Skitsot tel aviviot (Tel Avivian sketches) (Davar, 1934); and Rega’im (Moments) (Ha’aretz, 1934–43). The corpus comprises more than 900 poems and is by far the largest and most prominent corpus of topical poetry in modern Hebrew literature. 2. Natan Alterman, Hatur hashvi’i (The seventh column) (Tel Aviv, 1954), vol. 2. 3. In his lifetime, Alterman published four volumes of selections from The Seventh Column: the first, titled simply, The Seventh Column, in 1948 by Am Oved; the second, mentioned in n. 2 above, in 1954; the third and the fourth in 1962 by Hakibbutz Hame’uhad and Davar. The third volume is comprised of selected poems taken from the previous two volumes. 4. Alterman, Hatur hashvi’i, 6 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1973–2006). All the references to poems from The Seventh Column mentioned in this article will be to this edition. 5. This view of the modes or subgenres constituting Alterman’s journalistic poetry (the satiric mode, the ‘‘discursive-essayistic’’ mode, and the ‘‘high’’ mode, which includes the national prophetic poems, the odes, ballads, and elegies) is mine. It is based upon, but also constitutes a significant revision of, Dan Laor’s seminal work ‘‘Shirei Hatur hashvi’i l’Natan Alterman’’ (The poems of Natan Alterman’s The Seventh Column), thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1972. In it, Laor enumerated ‘‘five literary types’’ governing the ‘‘form’’ of the poems of The Seventh Column: the ballad, the dramatic monologue, the ode, oracular (or prophetic) poetry, and the discursive poem (130). 6. Eliezer Shweid, ‘‘Shtei gishot lera’ayon shlilat hagola ba’ideologiya hatsionit’’ (Two approaches to the idea of the negation of galut in Zionist ideology), Hatsiyonut 9 (1984): 21–44. 7. Gideon Shimony has also attempted a categorization of the different meanings that have been attached, in the course of time and place, to the concept of the negation of the galut. Shimony’s categorization sometimes overlaps Shweid’s, but, unlike Shweid’s, it lines up the different approaches along a spectrum, running from radical negation (Ratosh, Shvadron, Brenner) to ambivalent negation (Sirkin, Berdyczewski, S. H. Landau of the national-religious wing, Klatzkin, Kaufmann) to subjective negation but objective affirmation (Ahad Ha‘am, who is presented by Shimony as the very center of the spectrum) through basically an affirmation of the galut alongside the State of Israel (Zionist thinkers in Britain and America: Magnes, Friedlander, Brandeis, Kaplan). See Shimony, ‘‘Bhina mehadash shel ‘shlilat hagalut’ kera’ayon ukema’aseh’’ (A new assessment of the ‘‘negation of galut’’ as an idea and as a practice), in A.

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Shapira, Y. Reinhartz, and J. Harris (eds.), Idan hatsiyonut (The age of Zionism) (Jerusalem, 2000), 45–63. 8. As a representative, even if, admittedly ‘‘lone,’’ voice of ‘‘radical negation,’’ Shimony cites Avraham Shvadron, who raised the banner of absolute and uncompromising negation of ‘‘the monster called galut,’’ ascribed to the Jews of the gola contemptible parasitic attributes, ‘‘ugliness, baseness, humiliation, and slavery,’’ ‘‘life of shame and eternal ravage,’’ maintained that ‘‘Zionism must foster hatred toward the galut, a feeling of disgust toward this life,’’ that the continued existence of Jews in all their places of exile (with no distinction between Europe and ‘‘the lands of equality and freedom’’) is ‘‘a sinful condition from which the Jews must break away as soon as possible.’’ Shvadron has not even flinched from availing himself of the opinion that ‘‘for the Zionist, the phenomenon of Gentile anti-Semitism is not so bad, as it hastens redemption and liberty.’’ Other exponents of ‘‘radical negation’’ in Shimony are Ratosh and Brenner. Shimony qualifies though Ratosh’s inclusion on the ground that it is doubtful whether Canaanism is part of the Zionist framework or rather a heretical break from it (Shimony, ‘‘Bhina mehadash,’’ 46–47). 9. See Shimony, ‘‘Bhina mehadash,’’ 51–63. 10. Ahad Ha‘am, ‘‘Slavery in Freedom,’’ in Selected Essays, trans. L. Simon (Philadelphia, 1912). 11. Alterman, ‘‘Kabalat panim beboston ve’ehad hayehudim’’ (Reception in Boston and one of the Jews), in Hatur, 3:236–39. 12. See, for example, Sholem Aleichem’s The Bewitched Tailor (Moscow, 1958); and S. Y. Agnon’s ‘‘Hamalbush’’ (The garment), in S. Y. Agnon Ad Henna (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1969), 305–20. 13. Alterman, ‘‘Hanima hameyuhedet’’ (The special thread), in Hatur, 1:249–51. 14. Ahasuerus is the most common name given to the Wandering Jew. Other names include Buttadeus, Cartophilus, Isaac Laquedem, and Juan Espera en Dios. 15. See also Alterman, ‘‘Ze le’umat ze’’ (One versus the other), in Hatur, 5:103–5. 16. See also Alterman, ‘‘Lekol patisho shel hakongress’’ (To the sound of the Congress’s hammer), in Hatur, 5:263; and ‘‘Be’or hamagbit’’ (In the light of the Magbit [fund-raising]), in Hatur, 5:48. 17. Alterman, ‘‘Hovot hamedina’’ (The debts of the state), in Hatur, 1:260–62. 18. See, for example, the allusion to the Bund (General Jewish Labor Union of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which was socialist, Yiddishist, and internationalist in its orientation) and to other ideological rivals of Zionism in ‘‘Tnu’a velo miklat’’ (A movement, not a refuge): ‘‘But among all the factions of her time, / Like the Bund et al., which saw her as a crime, / It was she and she alone / who had cut the Gordian knot . . . / Therefore fame and glory shall forever be her lot.’’ Alterman, Hatur, 3:241. 19. This one-sided historical and ideological perspective, which is either blind to or disparaging of any other ideological plan or vision for the organization of modern Jewish life, is very different from the pluralistic view expounded by Harshav. See Ben-

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jamin Harshav, ‘‘Hamahapeha hayehudit hamodernit: Kavim lehavanata’’ (The Jewish modern revolution: Guidelines to its understanding), Alpayim 23 (2002): 9–75. 20. In this respect, as in many others, Alterman is very close to Ben-Gurion and, in fact, serves as his poetical spokesman or ventriloquist. On Ben-Gurion’s position regarding American Jewry and American Zionism, see Ariel Feldestein, Kesher gordi (Gordian knot) (Kiryat Sde Boker, 2003). 21. Alterman, ‘‘New Pumbedita,’’ in Hatur, 1:239–41. 22. Alterman, ‘‘Tsioney All Right, 1945’’ (All right Zionists, 1945), in Hatur, 3:83–84. 23. Alterman, ‘‘Svara mufrehet’’ (A baseless supposition), in Hatur, 1:242–44. The poem uses as its satiric fuel a saying by the head of the American Jewish Committee: ‘‘American Jewry strongly rejects the supposition that it is living in exile.’’ 24. Alterman, ‘‘Plitat hapeh hanora’ah’’ (The terrible slip of the tongue), in Hatur, 1:257–59. 25. Alterman, ‘‘Sakanat hatsioni hanitshi’’ (The danger of the eternal Zionist), in Hatur, 1:245–48. 26. Alterman, ‘‘Sihat shlomei emunim’’ (A conversation of the faithful), in Hatur, 2:258–60. 27. Alterman, ‘‘Netsigut o sohnut musmehet’’ (A representative or an authorized agency), in Hatur, 1:253–54. 28. Rudolf Kastner, also known as Israel Kastner, was the de facto head of the Va’adat Ezrah Vehatzalah (Aid and rescue committee) during the Nazi occupation of Hungary during World War II. As head of the committee, he was one of the conduits between the Nazis and the Jewish community in Hungary. In the Kastner trial (1954), the government of Israel sued Malchiel Gruenwald, a hotelier, amateur journalist, and stamp collector, for libel after he self-published a pamphlet charging Kastner, by then an Israeli government functionary, with collaboration. A major detail of Gruenwald’s allegations was that Kastner had agreed to the rescue in return for agreeing to keep silent on the fate of the mass of Hungarian Jews who were being transported to Auschwitz. This accusation was accepted by the court, leading Judge Binyamin Halevy to declare that Kastner had ‘‘sold his soul to the devil.’’ In 1958, most of the ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court of Israel, but not before Kastner had been assassinated. 29. The Judenrat (German for ‘‘Jewish council’’) was responsible for local government in the ghetto and stood between the Nazis and the ghetto population. 30. During its first phase, it was named Yom Hasho’a Umered Hageta’ot (Holocaust and the ghettos’ uprising day). 31. The Warsaw ghetto uprising started on 14 Nisan, which is Passover eve. Wishing to leave some space between Passover and the remembrance day but still stay close enough to the actual date of the uprising, lawmakers in the Knesset decided upon 27 Nisan. 32. The notebooks were posthumously found in Alterman’s files, edited by Dan

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Laor, and published by Hakibbutz Hame’uhad: Natan Alterman, Al shtei hadrahim (On the two paths) (Tel Aviv, 1989). 33. Alterman, ‘‘Yom hazikaron vehamordim’’ (Remembrance day and the rebels), in Hatur, 2:407–8. 34. ‘‘And in the remembrance day said the warriors and the rebels.’’ 35. ‘‘We are the bolt of lighting that has pierced its sky.’’ 36. ‘‘Its main and true symbol is not a barricade grand in flames / and not the figures of a youth and a girl who had burst forth to break through or die.’’ 37. ‘‘We that have seen Time in its horror and its dark grandeur, / We that have seen its heroism, which is as multifaceted as the history of the people.’’ 38. ‘‘And God’s stars are witnesses over the twain.’’ 39. On the debate see Avner Holtzman, ‘‘Natan Alterman u’pulmus shtei hadrahim’’ (Natan Alterman and the debate of the two paths), Bitsaron 8/29–30 (1986): 6–15. 40. Alterman, ‘‘Al shtei hadrahim’’ (On the two paths), in Hatur, 2:421–23. 41. See Roz’ka Korczak’s testimony on the Judenrat leaders Barash and Vigodsky and Haika Grossman’s account on her encounter with Barash as cited by Alterman (Hatur, 2:417–18 and 431). 42. Ibid., 2:434–40. 43. Gershon Shaked, Hasiporet ha’ivrit, 1880–1980, 5 vols. (Hebrew narrative fiction, 1880–1980) (Tel Aviv, 1978–98), 3:222. 44. Natan Alterman, Stars Outside (Tel Aviv, 1938), The Joy of the Poor (Tel Aviv, 1941), and The Plagues of Egypt (Tel Aviv, 1944). 45. City of the Dove (Tel Aviv, 1957) and Summer Revelry (Tel Aviv, 1965). 46. Rega’im and Hatur hashvi’i . 47. Alterman, ‘‘Hako’ah hasheni bamedina’’ (The second-largest political power in the state), in Hatur, 3:292–93. See also ‘‘Asur lehafhid’’ (One mustn’t frighten), in Hatur, 3:263–64; ‘‘Shivhei hasector haprati o kulanu halutzim’’ (The praises of the private sector, or all of us are pioneers), in Hatur, 1: 206–9; and ‘‘Sismot vanof’’ (Slogans and landscape), in Hatur, 3:297–98. 48. Alterman, ‘‘And to the Issue of ‘The Moral for the generation’ in Hatur, 2:436. 49. See Alterman, ‘‘Harav Uzi’’ (Rabbi Uzi), a poem on Russian Jewry, in Hatur, 2:386–90.

CHAPTER 12

Inserted Notes: David Boder’s DP Interview Project and the Languages of the Holocaust Alan Rosen

The choice of language among European Jews was never neutral. During the Holocaust, contention over languages intensified: idealistic calls for a return to Jewish languages competed with realistic defections to the vernacular. Speaking a flawless German, Polish, or Ukrainian, moreover, could help one escape the persecutor’s net. In the main arenas of terror, Jews forged their own tongues: coded communication in the ghetto, a fabricated jargon in the camps. In the war’s aftermath, language continued to be marked by these wartime struggles. Psychologist David Boder claimed that the victim’s postwar speech bore evidence of trauma, and this was one of the factors that led to his 1946 DP interview project. Language issues during the Holocaust serve as a prelude to discussing Boder’s handling of them in its aftermath. Although many Jews were competent in a number of languages, it was nevertheless significant when languages were used and for what purposes. True generally, choices if anything took on added weight in the ghettos. There, comments David Roskies, people wrote ‘‘to transcend the reality of the ghetto, to make sense of it through language, to communicate, to reach out.’’ And, Roskies continues, language choice (whether one wrote in, say, Yiddish, or Hebrew, or Polish) depended, ‘‘on the future envisaged.’’1 In the tumultuous career of the ghettos, moreover, the future envisaged often underwent change, compelling writers to switch from one language to another: when the Great Deportation of Warsaw Jewry to Treblinka began in summer 1942, diarist Abraham

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Lewin exchanged Yiddish for Hebrew; poet Yitzhak Katznelson did the same when penning his elegy to this devastation; and chronicler Rachel Auerbach traded Polish for Yiddish. Such changes attest to facility and diglossia, the ability to maneuver in more than one tongue and the changing need to do so in the tongue that mattered most. Page after page of historian Emmanuel Ringelblum’s notebook brings home how, in Warsaw, linguistic choices were never neutral. On May 7, 1940, for instance: ‘‘Cafe´ Gertner is now Aryan. [Yet] only Jews go there. The Jewish waitresses must try to pretend to be Polish. Didn’t answer me when I asked a question in Yiddish.’’2 Or a dramatic exhortation in October of the same year: ‘‘A Jew wearing a visor and with a red kerchief at his throat cries at a Jewish woman who is speaking Polish to him: ‘In the Jewish streetcar one must speak Yiddish!’ Someone else shouts: ‘And Hebrew, Hebrew too!’’3 And in a more subtle yet no less charged scene from the same period: ‘‘An elderly Jewish lady wearing the traditional headgear addresses Jewish children [presumably speaking Polish]: ‘You might speak Yiddish.’ ’’4 Even the children are caught up in the language wars. As adversity in the ghetto intensified, Ringelblum monitored its effects by noting its linguistic fallout. Ringelblum’s later, 1942 reflections show that Jews in the ghetto favoring Polish were a cause of particular concern. ‘‘The Jews love to speak Polish. There is very little Yiddish heard in the streets.’’5 Ringelblum offers two contrasting interpretations . The first figures Polish as the Jew’s language of resistance: ‘‘You have thrown us into a Jewish Ghetto, but we’ll show you that it really is a Polish street. To spite you [i.e., the Nazis], we’ll hold on to the very thing you are trying to separate us from—the Polish language and the culture it represents.’’6 But Ringelblum himself sees the phenomenon not as resistance but as assimilation, not as a declaration but as a sign of further capitulation: ‘‘What we see in the Ghetto today is only a continuation of the powerful linguistic assimilation that was marked even before the war and has become more noticeable in the Ghetto.’’7 Some hoped the ghetto’s silver lining would be the reversal of the trend, inspiring a return to Jewish languages. Most seemingly did not take the cue. In the ghettos of Eastern Europe, Jews continued to be enmeshed in family and community life that, while subject to unprecedented deprivation and danger, still bore resemblance to what preceded it. But the concentration camps proceeded according to different criteria, linguistic and otherwise.

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Primo Levi’s essay ‘‘Communicating’’ lays out the terrain. Levi chronicles how, in Auschwitz, knowledge of one or another language often made the difference between life and death. Most crucially, since commands were generally issued in German, and since survival depended on an inmate’s capacity to readily carry out commands, those who knew German fared best, and those who lacked knowledge of German fared worst: We immediately realized, from our very first contacts with the contemptuous men with the black patches [the SS], that knowing or not knowing German was a watershed. . . . whoever did not understand or speak German was a barbarian by definition; if he insisted on expressing himself in his own language—indeed, his nonlanguage—he must be beaten into silence and put back in his place, pulling, carrying, and pushing, because he was not a Mensch, not a human being.8 For the persecutors, German was ‘‘language,’’ other tongues simply ‘‘nonlanguage.’’ With brutal irony, the Nazis not only dictated what had to be done, they also dictated the medium. Importantly, Levi shows how this wartime classification carried over into the postwar period. Having ended a business meeting with certain well-mannered functionaries of the Bayer Company, Levi takes leave of them by invoking a phrase of Lager jargon, Jetzt hauen wir ab. It was, he reports, as if I had said, ‘‘Now let’s get the hell out of here.’’ They looked at me with astonishment: the term belonged to a linguistic register different from that in which our preceding conversation had been conducted and is certainly not taught in ‘‘foreign language’’ courses. I explained to them that I had not learned German in school but rather in a Lager called Auschwitz; this gave rise to a certain embarrassment, but since I was in the role of buyer they continued to treat me with courtesy.9 In Levi’s retelling, the idiom that the camps coerced comes back to haunt ‘‘well-mannered functionaries’’ once the camps no longer exist. And, significantly, Levi went further in having the wartime idiom continue to act as postwar provocation: ‘‘I later on realized also that my pronunciation [of

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German] is coarse; but I deliberately have not tried to make it more genteel; for the same reason, I have never had the tattoo removed from my left arm.’’10 What began with German as a means of subjugation—a stigmatizing linguistic tattoo—became for Levi a strategy of commemoration. His ‘‘coarse’’ mode of expression brought the life of the camps indecorously into everyday dealings. Once that happened, every word he spoke in German, even the most refined, bore the mark—to extend Levi’s analogy of the tattoo—of the camp. For Levi, vocabulary and pronunciation serve as organic artifacts, as linguistic tattoos, of what happened in the camps, carrying the memory of that experience provocatively from the time during the war to the time after. Language was indeed the evidence of trauma—one that he, Levi, on occasion, consciously chose to put on display.

Between Evidence and Audience: Boder’s Postwar DP Interviews For David Boder, the evidence of trauma entered into the picture by different means.11 In July 1946, psychologist Boder traveled to Europe to interview victims of the Holocaust who were in the DP camps and what he called ‘‘shelter houses’’ of Europe. Born in Libau, Russia (today Latvia) in 1886, Boder had arrived in the United States (via Mexico) in 1926, and a year later joined the faculty of the Chicago-based Lewis Institute.12 During his nine weeks in Europe in 1946, Boder carried out approximately 130 interviews in nine languages and recorded them on a state-of-the-art wire recorder. Eighty were eventually transcribed into English, most of which were included in a self-published manuscript of more than 3,100 pages. Boder undertook the trip because he felt that it was imperative to interview the victims/survivors while the memories were fresh and, in addition, to let them tell their stories in ‘‘their own language.’’ Boder coupled this accommodation to the victim’s language with his own two-pronged agenda: evidence and audience. His stress on language as evidence derives from an attempt to be faithful to the circumstances of the victims during the Holocaust: I kept in mind that most of the displaced persons had spent their time of imprisonment in camps among inmates of divergent tongues and dialects. For years they had been deprived of all reading

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matter (even prayer books), of religious services, of radios, and often of opportunities to talk with others in their own tongue. It is no wonder that their language habits show evidence of trauma.13 Yet the matter of audience was also crucial. Whatever Boder’s impressive repertoire of languages—the interviews were conducted most often in German, Yiddish, and Russian, but on occasion in six other tongues as well—he was, at the time of his visit to the DP camps, based in the United States. It was there he would find an audience; it was there he would bring the message that the audience needed to listen to. Indeed, he would preface every interview with the cue ‘‘We know very little in America about the things that happened to you in concentration camps. If you want to help us out by contributing information about the fate of displaced persons, tell your own story.’’14 And most of the American audience who knew very little undoubtedly regarded English as their primary tongue. On the rare occasions, then, when Boder came across a DP who could reasonably manage English over the course of an interview or even part thereof, he would not miss the chance—even though English was a tongue spoken with native facility by no DP whom he interviewed. Clearly, Boder had to juggle priorities. To go with English meant setting aside the scientific criteria—the search for linguistic evidence of trauma in native languages—that determined the interview protocol and had him emphasize the DPs’ ‘‘own language.’’ Yet set aside he did. The tension between evidence and audience, between native and acquired tongues, and, as we will see, between retribution and conciliation, appears perhaps most dramatically in the case of Bella Zgnilek, a twentytwo year-old Polish Jew who, having studied some English in school in Sosnowicz before the war, was working in August 1946 in the Joint Distribution Committee’s Paris office. The sense of pride at being able to hold her own in an English-language office job moved her, according to Boder’s notes, to choose to interview in English. Yet English, as we will see, doesn’t have the final word. Having come to the conclusion of the interview, Boder invites Zgnilek to add a closing remark: Is there anything you want to tell your own people in America from you? /Pause./ The microphone is yours. What do you think shall we tell them about all these . . . displaced people and deportees?15

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Seemingly in need of some prompting, Zgnilek’s response is polite but carries an undertone of chagrin: Well, I will just send them regards, and I am happy that not everybody of the Jews went through such a hell [hard life]16/?/ as we did. Speaking in English from the scorched earth of Europe, Zgnilek refers to the situation of American Jews, the largest Jewish community, who were spared going ‘‘through such a hard life.’’ Though she herself was not spared such a fate, she emphasizes the happiness that this knowledge brings to her. Her comments thus divide world Jewry into two groups: those who went through, and those who did not. Clearly, addressing this hell-spared community in their own tongue, Zgnilek pictures the cup half full. Yet she in fact feels these sentiments convey only half the picture. To complete it, however, she must turn to a different tongue, Polish, a language that, ironically enough, allows another side to be spoken: Boder: Bella wants to add a few remarks in Polish. Go ahead, Bella. Zgnilek: /in Polish:/ I would like to tell you, my friends, that all of us Jews ought to hate the Germans because of the wrongs which they did to us and our families, because they broke our hearts, broke our homes, and we ought never to forget that. By venting her bitterness in Polish, Zgnilek forges it into a Jewish tongue, a language of lament, accusation, and exhortation. No longer constrained by polite conventions, Zgnilek emphasizes not happiness but the ‘‘wrongs which they did,’’ not the distinction between those who ‘‘went through such a hard life’’ and those who did not, but the uniformity of response (‘‘all of us Jews’’) that links the different communities—American included. If the English message points to the possibility of a Jewish future with the American community leading the way, the Polish message sets forth the proper attitude toward the past; in Zgnilek’s formulation, hatred preserves the reality of what was ‘‘broken’’ and who is responsible for it. Zgnilek’s shift to Polish catches a postwar irony. During the war, we recall, the drift to Polish among Warsaw’s Jews was viewed either as a refusal to be cut off from the Polish nation at large or as a rejection of Jewish life and culture. Zgnilek’s final remarks point in a different direction, coinciding with a general preference of Polish Jewish survivors to testify

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not in Yiddish but in Polish.17 Polish Jewish writers such as Julian Stryjkowski also tried to transform the role that Polish once played: ‘‘Let the selfsame Polish language,’’ wrote Zygmunt Bauman of Stryjkowski’s postwar aesthetics, ‘‘which lured the dead with its splendor and yet proved a cage for many, become their permanent and secure shelter now that they are no more. Let them enter through this language the enchanted land they once lived in without being a part of.’’18 In Zgnilek’s case, too, Polish is used against itself. Yet her words, spoken outside of Poland, tell of disenchantment, of shelter not gained but lost. Zgnilek’s switch from English to Polish is also remarkable in the context of Boder’s interviews, for, along with English, Polish is Boder’s problem language. Though he himself did not speak it, he conducted sections of four interviews in which the interviewee spoke Polish while he questioned in Russian, an arrangement that by and large worked out well enough.19 Yet the dissonance between the two languages, however slight, was likely the reason why, in one case, he insisted that a child narrator interview not in Polish (which she preferred) but in Yiddish (in which she had significantly less facility).20 A final mark of the special problem Polish posed comes through in the fact that the Polish interviews, plus Zgnilek’s explosive final coda, were translated not by Boder but by his collaborator Bernard Wolf (about whom we will soon learn more). Boder was least at home in Polish, his own distance from it symbolic of its ambiguity for Jews telling their wartime stories. Zgnilek’s turn to Polish thus not only advocates what ‘‘all of us Jews ought to’’ do but also may have challenged Boder’s sense of what Polish could do, and for whom. Though Zgnilek’s English and Polish remarks seemingly mandate contrary responses, it may be that, from another angle, the second message complements the first. Precisely because American Jewry did not go through such a hard life, it risks attenuating a passionate response toward the enemy, cultivating forgetfulness as to what was suffered ‘‘to us and our families.’’ This gap between the two communities, exactly what Zgnilek voices appreciation of in her English remarks, points to the fragility of a collective memory (‘‘we ought never to forget that’’), and leads to her concluding emphasis on it. But the notion that Zgnilek’s switch from English to Polish should be viewed under the rubric of audience is mine, not Boder’s. As his pointed comments that follow Zgnilek’s and conclude the interview transcript emphasize, he sees it rather as an expression of feelings:

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Boder: [Zgnilek’s final remarks] were a kind of a postscript that I wanted to have recorded. It is exceedingly important to have the feelings of these young people. We notice here that [over the course of the interview] she spoke in German, in English, in Polish, and when it came to express her feelings she preferred to express in Polish. For Boder, Polish, one of Zgnilek’s native tongues, offers the preferred medium to express her feelings—feelings that, in this case, are decidedly vengeful. Again, rather than seeing the switch from one tongue to another as offering the possibility to invoke delicate subjects (namely, obligatory hatred of Germans) that couldn’t be brought up in English, Boder highlights her age—‘‘the feelings of these young people.’’ Why exactly Boder believed that ‘‘having’’ (rather than venting or airing) these feelings was ‘‘exceedingly important’’ is left unsaid. Perhaps Boder is commenting here particularly in his role as a psychologist, for whom feelings constitute a vital record of response; it may also have fit in with his larger design of rehabilitating the image of the displaced person; feelings here (even those advocating such a negative, if understandable, response) would document the vitality of such people, hence revising the general—to his mind, reprehensible—idea that DPs were abnormally lethargic. Zgnilek’s Polish ‘‘postscript’’ also prompts Boder’s closing reflection on the kind of terms most suitable for describing it: This polyglotism, or multilinguistics if we want to call it that way, represents a psychological and ethical /ethnic/ problem at the same time. Zgnilek’s abrupt shift in tone and content between English and Polish moves Boder to invoke categories—polyglotism or multilinguistics—that do not appear elsewhere in the transcripts. Indeed, the shift in the message from English to Polish is so dramatic that it brings out the very problem of languages—of choice of language as an active shaping force in the content of what is being expressed. As Boder then adds, the progression from gratitude in English to hatred in Polish represents a two-sided problem, psychological and ethnic. The psychological dimension Boder has addressed in his remarks on the expression of feelings; the ethnic dimension—a transcription correction of the interview word ‘‘ethical’’—alludes to issues of diglos-

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sia and audience, issues in other words of what can be said in a mother but not an adopted tongue (and vice versa), what can be said to one audience but not to another. Finally, although Boder backtracked and substituted his interview expression ‘‘ethnic’’ for ‘‘ethical,’’ it may be that the ethnic problem remains also an ethical one. Speaking in a language that is pointedly meant to be understood by one group while remaining opaque to another invokes problems of sincerity and truth, concerns as basic to ethics as to ethnicity. The message of remembering broken hearts and homes expressed in Polish reflects back upon the more benign English message in another way, highlighting the fact that the vast bulk of the interview has been conducted in English. If the mother-tongue Polish conveys a message so different from the English, might not the rest of the interview be viewed in a similar light, whereby the English has softened and civilized the youthful ‘‘feelings’’ that Boder in this case thought so important to express?

Equal Heat: The Translator as Commentator Boder’s team included various students at various times.21 An essential member, Bernard Wolf, came aboard in Los Angeles, where Boder had relocated in 1952. Wolf was attractive to Boder because of his fluency in languages and because he himself had gone through labor and concentration camps.22 Born in Szydlowiec, Poland, Wolf, eleven years old when the war began in 1939, had been interned in several Polish forced-labor camps before being deported to Buchenwald, where he spent several years. At the close of the war he was sent to and eventually liberated from Terezin. Orphaned like so many, he was shipped to England with a group of Buchenwald children.23 His five years in England added English to his repertoire of languages and he was fluent when he traveled to Los Angeles to reside with relatives. As a freshman at UCLA studying English literature, he read of Boder’s project, contacted him, and was asked by Boder to work as a translator. Over the next years, Wolf translated from Yiddish, German, and Polish at least twenty-nine interviews.24 Wolf followed a simpler method than did Boder. Boder played back the interview on one wire recorder, while he translated into English on a second wire recorder; the English recording was then typed out.25 Wolf, perhaps less wed to the wonders of wire-recording technology, translated the interview phrase by phrase directly onto a pad of

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paper. Although Boder let Wolf proceed according to his own technique, Boder did instruct him that the translation should try to imitate the language of the original, a strategy meant to maintain the ‘‘verbatim without editorial adaptations of any kind’’ translation that Boder sought. In some cases, Wolf, knowing firsthand the spoken culture of the camps, was the perfect conduit for the translation, able to make sense of the idiomatic expressions in Lager jargon. Just for this reason, however, was Wolf not merely a skilled technician. His engagement with the recordings was what Susan Suleiman, with reference to a survivor reading another survivor’s Holocaust memoir, has called ‘‘autobiographical reading’’ (or, in Wolf’s case, ‘‘autobiographical listening’’).26 The stories he listened to he had lived through a few years before; indeed, in some cases, he had been together with the interviewee at the same camp at the same time. This kind of intimacy had two effects. First, onsite knowledge moved Wolf to gloss episodes or details in an account, inserting his own comments in brackets and tagging them with his initials. When, for example, Samuel Isakovitch describes the rationing of food in Buchenwald, he refers to a ‘‘Kino,’’ a theater, in a context where one would hardly expect theatrical entertainment: Isakovitch: And when one came out after bathing . . . he went outside improperly dressed in only . . . he only had something like a shirt . . . nothing . . . and when he stepped outside he immediately caught col . . . froze up, and remained lying outside near the blocks. Then every morning we threw the dead into the latrine . . . every morning we covered the dead with sand . . . /those/ that have lain on the ground. Then in the morning we went out for appell . . . and we were given once a day to eat . . . we were given at twelve o’clock in the Kino of the quarantine . . . Boder: What is a Kino? /The word appeared far out of context, hence the question./ Isakovitch: There was a Kino . . . Boder: Hm. Isakovitch: in the quarantine . . . Boder: Hm. Isakovitch: . . . there in Buchenwald . . . and . . . Boder: What did you call a Kino?

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Isakovitch: It was a Kino. There they dispensed the food . . . there was a Kino. Boder: Oh, a Kino, a theater. This is precisely where Wolf steps in to clarify: Footnote: The Kino was a large auditorium that had been used to show movies for the old-time political prisoners. It was located in the small lager called the ‘‘Quarantine.’’ At the time of Isakovitch’s arrival, the small lager was overcrowded and the movie house was used for dispensing the food rations to the newly arrived prisoners. B.W.27 Providing history and context for what otherwise would remain strangely out of place, Wolf’s annotation gives the curious reference a precise, if unsettling, logic. Hired on the basis of language skills, Wolf’s glosses were a bonus, offering a basic hermeneutic by which to follow the unfolding drama of the interview. The second effect of Wolf’s on site knowledge was in the way it complemented and, in a fashion, superseded Boder’s professorial authority. Boder was by all accounts authoritarian in dealing with students. He kept the interaction between professor and student clearly demarcated. As an undergraduate, Wolf understood that he had to defer to Boder’s authority. Yet his amphibious role, student yet survivor, translator yet witness to the events being recounted, earned him an authority that was difficult to challenge. Even here, however, Boder held his ground, refusing to yield when it came to translating a word or phrase over which he and his student differed. This intransigence makes all the more impressive the fact that Boder let pass the insertions that Wolf entered on his own initiative into the transcripts. In one place, moreover, Boder himself alludes to Wolf’s double role, and thereby confirms the special nature of Wolf’s experiential authority. In the interview in question, Adolf Heisler is recounting the ‘‘luck’’ that enabled him to reach Buchenwald when most did not: Heisler: And luckily we were taken and transported to Buchenwald from there. Boder: Transported back to Buchenwald.

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Heisler: Yes, and so . . . Boder: Nu? Heisler: But with me it was a special stroke of luck. I don’t know how I succeeded in that whole affair, because all were transported in the rr- . . . /correcting himself/ on foot. Boder: Yes. Heisler: And I had told myself—there were /other/ sick people—I am not going on foot any more. Let them kill me here. I have to go and suffer and then die? I decided to die here on the spot. Boder: Nu? Heisler: And then there came, in the last moment, trucks, and the sick were loaded on the trucks, and they were taken away. Boder: To Buchenwald? Heisler: Yes. Boder: Nu? Heisler: And that was our luck. /The following note was inserted in the first-draft translation by Mr. Bernard Wolf who himself was in Buchenwald at that time: He is probably referring here to the death march from Ohrdurf to Buchenwald. ‘‘Twelve thousand prisoners left Ohrdurf, less than half arrived in Buchenwald.’’/28 Boder’s introduction to the gloss—emphasizing that Wolf ‘‘himself was in Buchenwald’’—casts Wolf as one who has the right to insert such a ‘‘note.’’ In the next line, Boder plays the role that Wolf usually played, glossing the words spoken by the witness to elucidate half-told events. Yet in contrast to Wolf, Boder’s ‘‘probably’’ places him on the outside looking in, trying, speculatively, to reconstruct a historical episode (the ‘‘death march’’). In contrast, Wolf’s phrasing qualifies nothing: ‘‘Twelve thousand prisoners left Ohrdurf, less than half arrived in Buchenwald.’’ Wolf’s haunting phrase not only precisely counts numbers. Its symmetry also reenacts the movement of the ‘‘march’’ (a word used by Boder but not by Wolf). Just as with the march itself, the first half of the sentence shows the prisoners at full strength as the march begins, while the second half tells of the terrible losses sustained at its end. The symmetry also brings out the irony: the prisoners ‘‘left’’ and then ‘‘arrived.’’ The latter action seemingly fulfills the earlier one, yet arrival here bespeaks not resolution but dissipation, not a completed motion but a terminal one. Finally, at the end of each phrase stands

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a camp (Ohrdurf . . . Buchenwald), their parallel position limiting and encompassing the prisoners’ world; any movement outside leads not to freedom or well-being but to a similar constricting place with the only change being a different name. Moreover, if the camps are lethal, the movement between them is even more so—a fact that in the sentence is measured by the distance between ‘‘left’’ and ‘‘arrived.’’ Treating Wolf’s gloss like a line of poetry is no doubt unusual but justified because it tells an epic story in hauntingly shapely form. This shapeliness sets it off from Boder’s discursive, nearly scientific, prose. It also sets it off from the staccato interview exchange between Heisler and Boder, wherein each voice limits and pushes at the other. In contrast to these, Wolf’s comment is a unit unto itself. Its compressed picture of general conditions surely complements Heisler’s specific story. But it also stands alone, an observation crafted from within the memory of being there.29 Hired as a translator, Wolf, as survivor of ghettos and camps, thus served as an essential member of Boder’s team. Yet his work on the project had an eminently personal dimension as well; the translation of the interviews (and glosses thereon) became what he referred to as ‘‘my testament,’’ the work bringing to the English-speaking world a version of his own experience. The intimacy is understandable. If for the general reader the interview accounts are searing, they were for him often intolerable, bringing back memories so vividly that he would sit crying and would eventually have to leave off with the task of translation. Viewing the interviews from the inside and rendering them into a language that could be understood, Wolf could tell his story via the stories of others. His task of translation was thus both in language and in experience, a means of rendering into English and of joining his words to their narrative—which frequently also resembled his own. Like a writer of fiction (which the translation of the interviews certainly was not), Wolf could relay what he went through but not have to expose himself by doing it. The glosses—the relatively infrequent short comments that Wolf set down under his own name—were those points at which the veil dropped. His voice and authority were there brought into the open. Important in its own right, Wolf’s increasingly active role also suggests the change in Boder’s project. For several years, Wolf’s contributions were small and infrequent. But by 1956, he had become indispensable, translating twenty-four of the twenty-eight interview transcripts published that year.30 What had been a one-man operation became collaborative; what had been

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the work of an outsider striving for objectivity yielded to the idiom of the insider telling a version of his story. Together they endeavored to overcome, in Antoine Berman’s evocative formulation, the ‘‘obscure space’’ that intervenes between the conception of translation and its execution.31 With Polish, the strangely Jewish non-Jewish language that held a unique place in Boder’s repertoire, the balance shifted most dramatically: ‘‘The Polish translation,’’ wrote Boder in another inserted note, ‘‘is almost the exclusive responsibility of Mr. Bernard Wolf.’’32 With the ‘‘almost,’’ Boder saved his collaborative share in the final interview text; with the ‘‘exclusive,’’ he signaled that when it came to Polish he was out of his depths. Translation became the vehicle for Boder to return his project to those who had most to say. The search for evidence was one facet of Boder’s quest. In addition, he had to move between and among languages, both in the multilingual interviews he conducted and in the effort to translate them for a wider audience. A European Jew himself, he knew that what was spoken in one tongue often couldn’t be said in another, that a radical diglossia was often the order of the day. Yet translation was imperative; otherwise the DPs’ testimony, designated above all for an American audience, would languish. On top of that general imperative, the coded language of the ghettos and camps demanded its own translation, a skill requiring personal experience— something that Boder, well ensconced in America during World War II, did not himself have. He had to find a way to import the expertise, to enfold it within the project itself, to let it have its say, to give the translation, in the measured expression of poet Myra Sklarew, equal heat.33 Outsider to the tragic destruction of European Jewry, Boder labored to have the story told from the inside. Like Ringelblum, like Levi, Boder was a taxonomist, a classifier of the linguistic fallout of evil decrees. And like them, he aimed to show that language, too, had suffered in the European debacle. Each of them knew that the hard life stories needed to be told. Each of them also knew that the languages the Jews spoke, or were made to speak, or came to speak, were at the heart of the matter. Notes 1. David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 200. Roskies also addresses the centrality of Jewish multilingualism for the Holocaust in ‘‘Ringelblum’s Time Capsules,’’ in idem, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington, Ind., 1999).

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2. Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York, 1974), 38. 3. Ibid., 62. 4. Ibid., 64. 5. Ibid., 289. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Primo Levi, ‘‘Communicating,’’ in The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1989), 91–92. 9. Ibid., 99. It is possible that Levi, intent on letting the Bayer representatives know he was a camp survivor, overestimated the shock value of the phrase. Werner Sollors has commented that the phrase ‘‘Jetzt hauen wir ab’’ was (and is) regularly used in normal social discourse. Werner Sollors, e-mail to the author. 10. Levi, ‘‘Communicating,’’ 99. 11. Boder published three major contributions based on the interviews: a book containing eight interviews, I Did Not Interview the Dead (Urbana, Ill., 1949); a sixteenvolume self-published series containing seventy English-language interview transcriptions, Topical Autobiographies of Displaced People Recorded Verbatim in the Displaced Persons Camps, with a Psychological and Anthropological Analysis (Chicago, 1950–57); and a scholarly article, ‘‘The Impact of Catastrophe,’’ Journal of Psychology 38 (1954): 3–50. Boder’s papers and correspondence are mainly located at two archives: Special Collections, Charles H. Young Research Library, UCLA; and Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron (Ohio). Two Washington, D.C., archives are the repositories for the audiotapes of the interviews: the Music and Sound Division of the Library of Congress; and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For commentary on Boder’s life and work, see Alan Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (New York, 2010); Alan Rosen, ‘‘Evidence of Trauma: David Boder and Writing the History of Holocaust Testimony,’’ in Holocaust Historiography in Context, ed. David Bankier and Dan Michman (Jerusalem, 2008); Alan Rosen, ‘‘Early Postwar Voices: David Boder’s Life and Work,’’ Voices of the Holocaust, 2009, Paul Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, April, 26, 2010, http://voices.iit.edu/david_boder (this site also features transcription and English translation of most of Boder’s DP interviews); Alan Rosen, Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English (Lincoln, Nebr., 2005), 21–33; Donald Niewyk, ed., Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Carl Marziali, ‘‘Before It Had a Name: Part 1,’’ This American Life (radio program), October 26, 2001. For a summary of Boder’s years and work in Mexico, see S. Jurado, V. Cololta, and X. Gallegos, ‘‘David Pablo Boder: Su breve estancia en la psicologı´a mexicana’’ (David Pablo Boder: His brief stay in Mexican psychology), Revista Mexicana de Psicologı´a 6 (1989): 205–9 For an example of one of the few social science studies based on Boder’s interviews, see Peter Suedfeld et al., ‘‘Erikson’s ‘Components of a Healthy Personality’

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among Holocaust Survivors Immediately and Forty Years after the War,’’ International Journal of Aging and Human Development 60 (2005). 12. The Lewis Institute merged with the Armour Institute in 1940 to form the Illinois Institute of Technology. 13. Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, xiii–xiv. By including being deprived of ‘‘talk[ing] with others in their own tongue,’’ Boder seems to be referring to regular conversation in a native language. As far as I can make out, his interviewees most often experienced this deprivation not so much in concentration camps but rather when, in hiding, they were compelled to suppress Jewish language, inflection, and even gestures. That said, Boder’s observation may be unnuanced but not off base. For a striking example of such deprivation in a concentration camp—a Frenchman who in Dachau in 1945 nearly goes mad because he can find no one with whom to speak French—see Art Spiegelman, Maus II (New York, 1991), 93, and my commentary on this episode in Rosen, Sounds of Defiance, 164–65. 14. Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, xii–xiii. 15. Boder, Topical Autobiographies, ch. 53, 14:2591. 16. As the tape makes clear, Zgnilek says ‘‘hard time,’’ but the transcript mistakenly reads ‘‘hell.’’ Whatever the reasons for the error, the word ‘‘hell’’ dramatizes the distinction between the plight of European and American Jews, a distinction that Boder, transcribing ‘‘hell,’’ may have assumed. I am grateful to Joan Ringelheim for pointing out the discrepancy between voice and transcript. 17. Polish is the language of over 75 percent of the Jewish Historical Institute interviews conducted with survivors from 1945 to 1949. Riki Bodenheimer, archivist, Yad Vashem, e-mail, February 12, 2007. 18. Zygmunt Bauman, ‘‘Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer,’’ in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Durham, N.C., 1998), 347. 19. The four interviews were conducted with Boleslav Czolopicki, Helena Neufeld, Lena Kuchler, and a UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) student who gave only the name ‘‘Bogaslav.’’ I am indebted to Clare Rosenson for her assistance with Boder’s Polish-language interviews. 20. The interviewee was Rasel Meltzak, who, at thirteen years old, was Boder’s youngest narrator. 21. In Chicago, he drew particularly (but not exclusively) on graduate students whose research projects were based on Boder’s 1946 interviews or whose research Boder directed. Once Boder relocated to Los Angeles in 1952 and joined the psychology department at UCLA as a research associate, he apparently no longer directed graduate students. But he continued to make use of psychology-department students to help him with processing the interviews. 22. Phone interview with Bernard Wolf, July 2005. Cf. also ‘‘Interview with Bernard, Giselle, and Peter Wolf,’’ conducted by Bernice Scharlach, April 23, 1975. New York Public Library—American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection, where

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Wolf discusses his collaboration with Boder. The Shoah Foundation also interviewed Wolf on February 20, 1998, but since the interviewer was apparently not familiar with Wolf’s 1975 interview and did not probe Wolf’s postwar dealings with the Holocaust, the collaboration with Boder goes unmentioned. 23. On the fortunes of these children, see Judith Hemminger and Robert Krell, The Children of Buchenwald: Child Survivors and Their Postwar Lives (Hewlett, N.Y., 2000). 24. Sixteen interviews had been translated while Boder was still in Chicago, predating the collaboration with Wolf. Other interviews were in languages that did not require translation (i.e., English), in languages that Wolf did not know, or in languages in which Boder had greater competence. 25. Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, xiii. 26. Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘‘Monuments in a Foreign Tongue: On Reading Holocaust Memoirs by Emigrants,’’ in idem, Exile and Creativity, 403. 27. Samuel Isakovitch, in Boder, Topical Autobiographies, vol. 10, ch. 36. 28. Adolf Heisler, in Boder, Topical Autobiographies, vol. 12, ch. 46. 29. ‘‘From within’’ does not mean that by 1956, when Wolf commented on the march and arrival, he relies only on memory. The notoriety of the march was great in the postwar years, which may account for the precision of Wolf’s numbers. My assessment is indebted to an e-mail from Daniel Blatman, historian of the death marches, December 11, 2007. 30. Series 4 of Topical Autobiographies was compiled in 1956 and published in that year. 31. Berman’s comment glosses Walter Benjamin’s views of translation, as set forth in his essay ‘‘The Task of the Translator’’ and other writings. Quoted in Emily Apter, ‘‘Taskography: Translation as Genre of Literary Labor,’’ PMLA 122 (2007): 1411. 32. Lena Kuechler, in Boder, Topical Autobiographies, vol. 15, ch. 58. With Wolf’s translations from Yiddish and German, Boder would usually add a prefacing note stating that ‘‘Bernard Wolf was responsible for the first-draft of the translation’’—the ‘‘first-draft’’ indicating that Boder would go back over the translation and take ultimate responsibility for it. With the Polish, he had to forgo this option. 33. Personal communication from Myra Sklarew, July 2005.

CHAPTER 13

Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore Laurence Roth

For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? —Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Unpacking My Library’’

Two early memories of my father’s bookstore, J. Roth / Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica, are a prologue of sorts for this essay. Here is the first: it is 1967, and I am six years old. My father, Jack Roth, is having an IBM computerized billing machine installed in the store. This is the first store, the one on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, which started out as M. Harelick Books, a small Yiddish-oriented bookshop that Michael Harelick opened in 1944 and that my father bought and is making over into a more sophisticated operation. He has just expanded into what had been a beauty shop next door, which is where the machine is, in the new bookkeeping area. Reels of hole-punched tape magically run a clacking, loud typewriter. The salesman is explaining the system as I walk the pattern in the linoleum, black and white tiles arranged in concentric squares. I walk in rhythm to the keystrokes as they drum across the page—long burst, long burst, short, short, short. This is the sound of bookselling. The second memory: it is 1971, and I am ten or eleven years old. For some reason, I am alone in the back of the store. I am bored sitting there, and I wander out to the bookshelves to find something interesting to read. Somehow, I stumble upon a few copies of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, which, because of customer complaints, my father has moved from

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the new-book table, where they had been displayed face up, and has shelved them, yellow spines out, in the literature section. Did I really find them by accident? Did I know they were there? Had they been moved, in fact, because they were no longer new? What I remember is that I took a copy back to the lunch table and something changed, something that had to do with girls and cored apples and a character named The Monkey for sure, but also with reading. What was this doing in the store? What did it mean? Accounting and interpretation. These memories are emblematic of the two parts of this critical meditation on that bookstore, each an aspect of my understanding of, and introduction to, modern Jewish literature. On the one hand, the business of bookselling: it suffused the life of my family. At the end of the day, if my father was home for dinner, and he rarely was, the table conversation was about the ludicrous demands of New York Jewish publishers or, most likely, the outrageous behavior of customers— rabbis at the top of the list, followed by bar mitzvah–gift shoppers, Yekkes, those snooty German Jews, and sundry Yiddish-speaking oddballs. On the Sabbath and holidays, my father would sometimes take us to an Orthodox synagogue, sometimes a Conservative synagogue, and, on occasion, even to a Reform synagogue. It was good for business. At social events, my father would often take orders or promise to track down a hard-to-find book. It was good for business. On the other hand, literature framed our upper-middle-class perspective: books flooded into our home. Signed first editions of Isaac Bashevis Singer, oversize Jewish art and photography books, rare and new printings of prayer books and Hebrew Bibles, fiction by Sholem Aleichem, Cynthia Ozick, Isaac Babel, and Jerzy Kosinski, anthologies such as A Treasury of Jewish Poetry by Nathan and Maryanne Ausubel and The Golden Peacock by Joseph Leftwich, nonfiction by Hannah Arendt, Amos Oz, Ben Hecht, Trudy Weiss-Rosmarin, and Martin Buber. And not just Judaica; our library included Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Zola, Dreiser, Howells, biographies of Maurice Chevalier and the Kennedys, the entire Time-Life series on countries of the world, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland illustrated by Salvador Dali in a series of twelve heliogravures that my father framed and hung along the central hallway of our house. Little wonder, then, that I see my father’s business and his love of the book—his love of their look and feel—through the prism of Walter Benjamin’s essay about the passion and ‘‘tactical sphere’’ of book collecting. For

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Benjamin, taking ownership of a book is to bring it into the ‘‘magic circle’’ of one’s library, to bring it thus to consciousness as an extension without of the existential and intellectual order within one’s own mind.1 Yet a collector is also a wily tactician of the book business who must outwit the dealers and auctioneers who hold books captive. To the collector, ‘‘ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them’’ (67). So I have always appreciated the humor and the subtle theorizing of Benjamin’s essay; it so aptly describes my father and his store. Despite the fact that J. Roth / Bookseller was a commercial venture, a ‘‘regular bookstore,’’ as my father put it, the way its stock was bought, sorted, and displayed reflected the mind and habits of a book collector. The two times that I witnessed the store’s books packed up and moved, when it relocated first to the Pico-Robertson area of Los Angeles and then to Beverly Hills, will always color my reading of the quotation that is the epigraph for this essay. There on the floor and in boxes and on wooden pallets all around was Jewish literature in heaps: children’s books, reference books, sifrei kodesh, cookbooks, fiction, nonfiction, musar, history, women’s literature and nidah manuals, biography, humor, books in Yiddish and Hebrew, textbooks, used books, antiquarian and limited editions—the grand disorder of a Jewish bookstore where the religious and the secular, the patriarchal and the feminist, the popular and the arcane were all shelved under one roof. But to Jack Roth, whose habits as owner and salesclerk were many and ironclad, the store exemplified his belief that a clean, well-lighted place and the salutary order of literary categories could help remake the Jewish bookstore in America and lift it out of the chaos of Lower East Side depravity. He construed such categories, and that of Jewish literature itself, however, as widely as possible. This was so because in the end, and despite all the categories, they were his books, and the store his ‘‘magic circle.’’ Here, then, I unpack my father’s bookstore in order to theorize a different perspective on the relationship between memory and modern Jewish literature, one that takes into account the material and commercial aspects of that literature, both of which are amply on display in the public space of a bookstore. J. Roth / Bookseller was a ‘‘living library,’’ as Benjamin describes a book collection (66). It was both a personal and communal inheritance, and ‘‘inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection. For a collector’s attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus it is, in the highest sense,

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the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility’’ (66). Benjamin helps us to see that although what is in stock in a Jewish bookstore like my father’s certainly gives Jewish memory its texture, equally important is the physical ownership and transmissibility of that collection. The bookstore offered customers an opportunity to possess the personal recollections, creative works, and scholarly interpretations attesting to past and present varieties of Jewish identities and historical experiences. It offered them, in other words, an opportunity to define and be defined by their own Jewish collections. The bookstore’s appeal, and what made it viable for over twenty-five years, was that it retailed the building blocks for constructing Jewish memory, and for thereby materializing a Jewish literature of one’s own making, just as American Jews were looking to do both. J. Roth / Bookseller thus exemplifies the rise and fall of a particular kind of American Jewish bookstore. It thrived in the glow of the Jewish ethnic pride movements of the sixties and seventies, but was unable to market its unique definition and collection of Jewish literature after the resurgence of Orthodox Judaism and the assimilation of Jewish writing into the corporate book superstores, during the late eighties and early nineties. Hence the story of my father’s bookstore is a story about the limits of transmissibility, the insolvency of memory. He did not retire; the store failed. His Orthodox competitors undercut his prices for traditional sforim and stripped off his religious customers, while the book superstores undercut his prices for new Jewish publications and took away his secular customers. By telling this story, I hope, ultimately, to shift thinking away from questions regarding the ‘‘Jewishness’’ of writing by Jews and toward an understanding of modern Jewish literature as a historically contingent collection belonging, like all property, to those diverse individuals and communities wealthy and passionate enough to claim ownership. Such a purchased inheritance is, in fact, a disorder to which each generation gives the appearance of order by unpacking and arranging it on shelves of its own making.

Accounting My father was born in New York City, in the borough of Queens, in 1932, the youngest of six children. His father and mother, my grandparents, had immigrated to the United States in the 1920s from what was left of the

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Austro-Hungarian Empire, from an area that is now divided between eastern Slovakia, southwestern Poland, and northern Hungary. My grandfather was a shohet, a ritual slaughterer, but he was also an amateur poet who translated the book of Esther into rhymed Yiddish couplets. Though there were a great many religious books in my grandparents’ home, there were no secular Jewish writers. They were strictly Orthodox, admirers of Satmar Hasidism though not adherents themselves. My father attended Yeshiva Torah V’Daas in Brooklyn, but rather than go on to rabbinical school, as his three older brothers had done, he chose to enroll in the City College of New York, take a few classes in Russian literature, and work part-time for Jonathan David, a Jewish publishing company and wholesaler. No one factor was paramount in this decision. He was the youngest boy, so there was less pressure on him to prove his religious devotion. And this was New York in the late forties and early fifties; the city’s urban cosmopolitanism was a powerful lure. Between Frank Sinatra and the New York Jewish intellectuals—Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, and Irving Howe—lay a world that my father found irresistible. On the other hand, his reason for working at a publishing house, rather than another type of business, remains vivid for him even to this day. Shopping among the Jewish bookstores on the Lower East Side with his father, he was appalled at what a mess they were. ‘‘One day,’’ he announced, ‘‘I’m going to have a Jewish bookshop no one will be ashamed to walk into.’’ Jonathan David was his first step in that direction. Of course, as a part-time student, he had left himself open to the draft. Like the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man, my father seemed to need the help of larger historical circumstances to push him across the threshold into his future. So in 1953, he found himself headed to Korea. The war ended as his troop ship crossed the Pacific, and he spent his tour as a mail clerk. Upon his return to civilian life, he bought a new Chevy Bel Air and landed a job as general manager of Behrman House, one of the major independent Jewish publishers. On the surface, of course, both the car and the job appear unremarkable of any substantive change in my father’s life, until we look closer at some of the transformations in the American Jewish book trade up to that time. Before World War I, the Jewish book trade serviced a limited market. Jewish commercial publishers primarily issued Bibles, prayer books, liturgical reference works, and school texts and, acting as agents for European Jewish publishers, imported, reprinted, and/or translated various titles of Hebrew,

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Yiddish, German, and English Judaica, a business model developed by the first Jewish publishers in America: the American Jewish Publication Society (Philadelphia, 1845 [destroyed by fire in 1851]), the Jewish Publication Society (New York, 1871–73; Philadelphia, 1888), Bloch Publishing Company (Cincinnati, 1854 [relocated to New York in 1901]), and the Hebrew Publishing Company (New York, 1901).2 Following World War I, toward the end of the great wave of Eastern European Jewish immigration between 1880 and 1924, the Jewish publishing scene changed. Jewish acculturation into the urban manufacturing class— speeded up by the postwar economic expansion—opened new doors for business opportunities in publishing, one of the few major industries open to Jews. And a new crop of Jewish writers and intellectuals came into their own: Mary Antin, Waldo Frank, Horace Kallen, Anzia Yezierska, Walter Lippmann, Charles Reznikoff, Ludwig Lewisohn, Edna Ferber, and S. J. Perelman, to name just a few. These writers, as Jonathan Sarna points out in his history of the Jewish Publication Society, reflected a wide range of political views and aesthetic tastes.3 As a result, competition for publishing Jewish writing increased among new mainstream publishing companies founded by Jews, such as Alfred A. Knopf and Boni and Liveright, and among established houses like Macmillan and Harper.4 New Jewish commercial publishers like Behrman House and Ktav found their corner of the market catering to the growing, but still more insular, demand for Jewish textbooks, scholarship, and reprints of older, European Jewish materials; organizational publishers such as the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and United Synagogue of America developed new curricular materials for Jewish religious schools affiliated with those movements.5 In addition, after World War I, both general and Jewish book trades witnessed an increasing division between publishing and bookselling, an important development that helped shape the modern bookstore and increase its numbers.6 Nowadays, there is much nostalgia for the small, literary bookstores of old where there was no coffee, no tchotchkes, just books. But that Edenic past is exaggerated. Such stores were always an urban and college-town phenomenon, one that reflected changes in the book trade during the early part of the twentieth century.7 The vast majority of bookselling establishments in America from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, according to bookselling historian John Tebbel, sold stationery, cards, candy, snuff, calendars, pamphlets, erotica (under the

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counter), and, yes, coffee, in addition to books.8 In the late nineteenth century, the most popular and aggressive book retailers were department stores, such as Wanamaker’s and Macy’s, followed closely by the publishers themselves, many of which—Brentano, Scribner, Doubleday, and E. P. Dutton, for instance—boasted lavish and celebrated bookstores.9 The postwar culture of consumption led to an explosion of consumer goods and entertainment products as well as the development of modern advertising. Publishers, Jewish or otherwise, realized that they could make more money if they did not compete with retailers by selling their own goods directly to the public at highly discounted prices. And the beleaguered bookshop, once professionalized and revitalized, looked to be an important partner rather than a competitor in servicing a variety of customers, from small town to big city, from adults to children, and from the literary to the religious.10 This led to changes even on the Lower East Side, where the Hebrew Publishing Company had its own publisher’s bookstore (Bloch Publishing Company’s bookstore was on West 31st Street) doing business alongside an already large number of smaller Jewish bookstores modeled after the moykher sforim stores, stalls, and peddler’s carts ubiquitous in Eastern Europe.11 As a 1906 magazine article described it, these stores, ‘‘musty with the smell of books and soup,’’ featured in their show windows ritual items like prayer shawls, phylacteries, mezuzahs, kiddush cups, and Torah mantles, but in back stocked prayer books, Bibles, and works of halakhah and responsa.12 They might also, depending on the owner’s tastes, carry Yiddish stories by Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sholem Abramovitsh) or Jacob Dineson, plays by Jacob Gordin, or even Yiddish translations of Shakespeare and Tolstoy.13 Still, the expansion of Jewish publishing in the 1920s offered new opportunities for retailing, especially in servicing niche markets. Many of the bookstores that my father visited in his youth were, as he recollects, established during that decade: S. Goldman-Otzar Hasefarim (which specialized in Hasidic books), M. Wolozin, Zion Talis, Schenker Books (which sold sheet music), Wolf Sales, M. Vaxer (which specialized in Yiddish books), B. Morgenstern Books, and Zeigelheim’s.14 J. Levine Company, which began at the turn of the century as distributors of European ritual items, expanded into book sales in the 1920s when the selection of traditional books, Hebrew textbooks, and English language titles increased, though, as the store’s website notes, ‘‘[t]he entire stock required only a few shelves.’’15

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That changed dramatically after World War II, when a wave of new Jewish writing in English arrived for Jewish and general bookstores to sell. As Jonathan Sarna notes, American Jews were in search of religious and cultural affirmation after the war, partly in response to the dire news from Europe and partly in response to, and in support of, their own rapid climb up the social ladder.16 American Jews’ participation in the postwar economic boom, their exodus to the suburbs, and the relaxing of restrictions on Jewish entrance into the professions stoked a burgeoning appetite for writing that defended, explained, celebrated, or chronicled the passage of Jews into the American mainstream. Recognizing the educational and cultural opportunities afforded by this increased demand for and production of Jewish books, the Jewish Book Council of America even put out a manual, The Jewish Bookshop: Its Organization and Operation. By doing so, the council hoped to stimulate the establishment of more Jewish bookstores that would help distribute Jewish books outside the large metropolitan areas.17 These books included, according to Sarna, noncontroversial introductions to Jewish theology and observance, fiction about Jews struggling with their heritage, such as Jo Sinclair’s Wasteland or Milton Steinberg’s As a Driven Leaf, children’s books that focused on ethics, morality, and American settings, and books that tracked the lesser-known arcs of Jewish success in America, such as Harold Ribalow’s Jews in Sports.18 Add to this picture the more well-known story about the achievements of major literary voices such as Muriel Rukeyser, Arthur Miller, Grace Paley, and, of course, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud; color that picture with the knowledge that all this writing is being produced and distributed by Jewish and non-Jewish publishing companies that were still privately held and committed to publishing a wide variety of titles in order to make the most of the existing market; take all this together, and it becomes clear that Jack Roth’s new Chevy expressed, on a social level, his affiliation with a rising, mobile American Jewish middle class, while his choice of a career in the Jewish book trade reflected a decisive turn toward the worldliness and cultural uplift to which both he and that business aspired at midcentury. Working for Behrman House over the next ten years, then, my father married, started a family, and learned the trade more through careful watching than through any mentoring. As the product of a thorough Jewish education, conversant in the ideas, personalities, and historical trends of the Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking worlds, he seemed a ready-made

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employee to his boss, Jacob Behrman. Left to his own devices, my father used the position to further another kind of education. He noted the expansion of Judaica lists at the general publishing houses and the growing trade in Jewish textbooks. And he discovered—via phone and business trips to conferences for organizations like the National Association of Temple Educators—a growing network of Jewish synagogues, schools, and bookstores across the country. In 1960, the NATE convened in Los Angeles, and my father called one of his accounts and invited him out for coffee. He and Michael Harelick hit it off immediately. Harelick was then in his late eighties, a Russian-born Yiddishist so devoted to the literature of mameloshn, the mother tongue, that he once told a pesky customer looking for the latest Leon Uris novel to go find such trash somewhere else. He was therefore especially impressed that my father could speak Yiddish. Memory at this point yearns toward a simpler story: that my father’s dream of having his own Jewish bookstore, professional and up-to-date, in sync with the dominant trends of the industry at mid-century and servicing laypeople, rabbis, educators, and libraries, came to fruition at this meeting between a bookman of the Yiddish literary scene and a bookman of a newly blossoming American Jewish literary scene; or that my father, in a moment of historical prescience, saw in Los Angeles an obvious location for a store that would help educate and sustain a Sunbelt Jewish community already witnessing tremendous postwar growth. Yet the truth is that six years went by, until one especially torrid day in May 1966, when my father, trapped in the steamy confines of a New York City subway car, swore to himself that this was the last year that he would suffer through such an unbearable commute. Without telling Behrman, he flew to Los Angeles and made a deal with Harelick, who was happy to sell the store to his young friend. By August, we had moved to the West Coast. In went the billing computer, a larger and more diverse stock arrayed in clearly marked sections, a greater attention to customer service, and up went sales. At first, my father followed the general pattern of the Jewish publishing world that he had just left. He expanded his textbook line, essentially becoming the West Coast textbook distributor for a number of Jewish publishing companies. He also developed a brisk seasonal mail-order business wholesaling dreidels, Simhat Torah flags, and groggers, which he maintained for many years. But as he began responding to specific customer requests—especially from bibliophiles who discovered a Jewish bookstore totally unlike the Lower East Side imitations on L.A.’s Fairfax Boulevard—

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and as he began purchasing stock for his retail business from non-Jewish publishers and regional distribution companies, he sensed the commercial possibilities of a Jewish bookstore that seemed more like a library. He started building a deep backlist in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew books, taking one or two copies of a title that he thought this or that particular customer might buy, or, increasingly, that seemed interesting or important to him. He stocked books from a variety of genres and covering a range of subject matter. He began his habit of buying a personal copy of a particularly beautiful or collectible book that he was purchasing for the store. And, familiar with the leading Jewish studies scholars of the day, he also began ordering titles from university presses. In short, my father incited his own taste for collecting Judaica. Solomon Freehof, in On the Collecting of Jewish Books, notes that a true collector, one who aspires to creativity in collecting and to contribute to the making of a culture, begins with a desire for ‘‘exclusive possession. . . . There is something that no one else has and you have it.’’19 That something for my father was having the largest selection of Jewish books. By yoking that desire to a mid-century model of the American bookstore, he fortuitously discovered a powerful formula for retail success. It was particularly well suited for the times: the civil rights movement and Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967 provoked a surge of American Jewish ethnic pride, which in turn led to a flowering of renewed Jewish learning at Hebrew Union College on the Eastside and at UCLA on the Westside, in synagogues and day schools, and among those caught up in the Havurah movement and in the rage for Hasidic literature. J. Roth / Bookseller offered a useful resource for Los Angeles Jews in search of Jewish sources both popular and hard to find. By the end of the 1970s, my father needed to relocate the store to a larger space. So, in June 1979, he moved to 9427 West Pico Boulevard. This is the location that, to me, was the most complete incarnation of my father’s vision of a Jewish bookstore, an exemplary space that I offer as a frame for my speculation about collection and modern Jewish literature.

Interpretation Among other things, I have so far provided a fairly long and diverse list of authors and titles that, by 1979, were all stocked at J. Roth / Bookseller. As one local Jewish newspaper reflected years later, ‘‘[I]t stood alone as the place to find seemingly every book of interest to Jews. . . . Everyone, from

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Orthodox rabbis to Hollywood stars to visiting dignitaries, knew that whatever the Jewish book, J. Roth had it.’’20 Though I did not appreciate it at the time, this difference from his competitors not only explained our family’s economic good fortune, but also an assumption I often encountered from teachers and friends—that somehow I possessed special insight into Jewish literature. Looking back, my confusion about this is indicative not only of my adolescent self-absorption and utter lack of interest in my father’s work, but also of a larger and now quite familiar confusion: What is Jewish literature? Hana Wirth-Nesher’s critical anthology of the same name features an introductory essay that only underscores the problem. ‘‘Defining the Indefinable’’21 raises the corollary and equally important problem of how even to frame a critical approach toward a definition. Her review of the various attempts to do so reveals both the quixotic determination of literary critics and a curious omission. Wirth-Nesher considers explanations that highlight biography, thematics, linguistics, religiosity, assimilationism, and tradition. But missing from all these perspectives on the literature of the people of the book is the book itself. What do the libraries and collections of those who purchase and read Jewish writing look like? How do people use their collections? In what ways might books as objects, as well as the spaces in which those objects are kept, affect definitions of a modern Jewish literature? These are not new questions; they have merely been out of fashion for a while. Cecil Roth, Bernard Heller, A. Alan Steinbach, Philip Goodman, and Salamon Faber, for example, took them up in essays, the first of which appeared in 1944, for the Jewish Book Annual. Citing Ecclesiastes, Hai Gaon, and Judah Ibn Tibbon, these mid-twentieth-century critics traced a Jewish predilection for books and book collecting from antiquity to their own time. Roth, writing during World War II, argues that the persecution of Jews during the Middle Ages, along with the destruction of their books and illuminated manuscripts, was also a ‘‘persecution of literature,’’ and he notes that the mitzvah of redeeming Jewish captives became associated at that time with the redemption of books as well.22 Steinbach and Goodman laud ‘‘the traditional Jewish attitude which considered the lending of books a meritorious act, a religious obligation,’’ and Goodman, Heller, and Faber, faintly echoing Benjamin’s essay, all construe the ownership and collecting of books as a way of ordering and immortalizing human experience and knowledge.23

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My asking these questions anew, however, reflects not only indebtedness to these scholars and to Benjamin, but also to the recent boom in theory and criticism exploring commodities and the mundane bric-a-brac of modern life. ‘‘Rather than considering things as idols,’’ write the editors of ‘‘The Status of the Object,’’ a special issue of the journal Theory, Culture & Society, we ought to acknowledge that commodities, as totems of abstract ideas or as the charmed objects of our reverence, are ‘‘precisely what holds the social order in place and allows it to move at the same time.’’24 In other words, as James Clifford explains it, in the modern, consumer-oriented West, collecting things is an extension of ‘‘the idea that identity is a kind of wealth (of objects, knowledge, memories, experience)’’ and that analyzing the way that Westerners collect objects may help remind us ‘‘of the artifices we employ to gather a world around us.’’25 In that light, J. Roth / Bookseller was one such artifice, a space that enabled a certain kind of cultural and self-possession. Photographs of my father’s bookstore in Judaica Book News and The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles reveal the care he took to arrange and display his books, the meticulous presentation of his collection. Yet just as important to the store’s outward face was its inward floor plan, which reflected a narrative about the collection, about Jewish literature. Entering the store, you faced the checkout counter directly ahead. Behind it was my father’s desk, and behind him was his rare and fine bookcase; thus if you had a question or request, or were in search of something hard to find, the answer could be found here in the heart of the store. If you wished to browse, the floor plan led you in one of two ways. If you turned left at the entrance, you were at the children’s section, to the left of which were the Hebrew grammar and dictionaries, miscellaneous Hebraica, and finally, sifrei kodesh, holy books. At that point, you would be at the back wall, at the passage back to the shipping area, where the textbooks were stocked. Heading rightward along the back wall, and underneath the stairs to a small loft above the store, where my father kept a very few collectible paintings and silver items (a minor superstructure to the store’s substructure of books), was the religious literature in Hebrew and English—the Mishnah and Talmud, works of legal exposition and commentary, ethical and inspirational works, kabbalah, and a section devoted strictly to the burgeoning ArtScroll publications, today the premier ultra-Orthodox publisher of English-language and bilingual religious texts. Passing the billing and office area, you came to the English-language Bible section, which anchored the

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left side of the far wall of the store. Next to it was History/Holocaust/ Zionism, next to which was Philosophy/Jewish Thought, next to which was Fiction/Poetry, next to which was Yiddish/Cookbooks. In front of this wall were three tables, miscellaneous biblical scholarship in English and two giftbook tables, which, if you continued rightward, would lead you past the cookbook table and the new-book table in front of the store windows, and then to the three wire display racks of new and popular paperback books that brought you full circle (or, rather, full square) back to the store entrance. Following the books in this direction, customers were clearly led from the past to the present, from a Jew’s foundational reading toward works that, in some ways, depended on previous knowledge to contextualize their Jewishness. Traversing the store from the opposite direction simply turned such a pedagogical narrative into an archaeology of Jewish writing. Each wall could also be read in itself as a minor commentary on Jewish literature; most evocative was the far wall, which was telling in its reflection of my father’s and, by extension, of publishers’ thinking about the historical succession of Jewish writing: Bible, History/Holocaust/Zionism, Philosophy/ Jewish Thought, Fiction/Poetry, and Yiddish/Cookbooks—a spatial narrative whose punch line is ‘‘So now let’s eat.’’ One of my own photographs of the store also reveals a prominent and very telling detail of the store’s presentation. Rightward from the entrance, at the far end of the new-book table, was a large support column on which hung a sepia-tone photograph of a bearded old Jew in an old-fashioned, wide-brim biberhit, a beaver hat. He is leaning on a shtender, a lectern, in front of a Torah ark and looking straight into the camera. That was my great-great-grandfather, Dovid Roth. His is an image of Jewish memory and authenticity that privately advertised my father’s ownership of the collection and publicly advertised its cultural purpose. It also, if I may push my speculation a bit further, turned the customer into the object of a Jewish gaze. Given the composition of the photograph and its placement just above eye level, my great-great-grandfather functioned as a kind of store greeter, welcoming and surveying all who came in. His regard and appearance assured customers, especially new ones in search of a title like Hayim Halevi Donin’s To Be a Jew or Morris N. Kertzer’s What Is a Jew?, that they were in the right place. What I am suggesting here is that the consciousness that Benjamin attributes to a collection, a consciousness that is both an extension and reflection of the owner’s mind and tastes, finds symbolic

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expression in this photograph of a forefather. It illustrates the nature of my father’s living library: seeing and being seen within a space organized under this sign of memory and by the memory-driven spatial narratives of the store’s floor plan created a metaphoric Jewish community, one entirely dependent upon a dynamic interplay between subject-ness and objectness.26 To put it more plainly, Jewish memory and Jewish identity accrued social meanings through the customer’s interactions with the store’s collection—both the books and the customers were subjects and objects, actors and acted upon insofar as each took possession of the other. To shop at the store was, therefore, an engagement in self-definition and self-explanation. It acted out in small, and for purposes that did not require that one identify as Jewish so much as with Jews, the larger dynamic of my father’s quest to gather a meaningful world around himself through a collection of books. This is one reason that the store was perceived as a welcoming space by Jews of every denomination and ideological bent—from Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovitz, the Orthodox chief rabbi of England, to Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell, the Reform rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles; from Irving Howe to Dennis Prager; and from Barbra Streisand to Wolf Blitzer. They all shopped there. Non-Jews, too, saw it as a welcoming space, especially the evangelical Christians who visited the store in the 1980s in search of the Jewish roots of Jesus. Thus Jewish literature, as J. Roth / Bookseller defined it, is constituted not only by authors and texts but also through commerce and within social space. Seen from that materialist point of view, Jewish literature presents itself as larger than its parts; it becomes an activity. More specifically, my father’s store and its gathering of books as objects reveal modern Jewish literature to be a business, a network of human behaviors, transactions, and deeds in and of their time, and reveal bookstores as places where ideas and capital collide as literal bodies. This knowledge does not so much change our notions of Jewish literature as reassert what is tangible yet transient about it (definitions, like possessions, are fugitive goods), without reducing such transience to the vagaries of biological or cultural identity. The varied collection within my father’s bookstore therefore only underlined that a ‘‘modern’’ Jewish literature is not self-evidently a canon of works produced at a particular moment in history or even strictly by Jews. What is modern about that literature is implicit in its complex of responses to, improvisations on, and commercial interrelationships with

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classical Jewish texts; Jewish mystical writing and the Gentile interpretations inspired by it during the Renaissance; works that illuminate the ragged edges of Jewish affiliation like Uriel Acosta’s Exemplar Humanæ Vitæ or Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus; and works by non-Jews that claim to describe Jews, such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew—or even The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, both of which my father kept in a drawer of his desk available for sale, should someone ask for them. J. Roth / Bookseller manifested Annette Kolodny’s well-worn but still useful observation about literary canons, that ‘‘the choices we make in the present inevitably alter our sense of the past that led to them.’’27 It exemplified how we review and revalue the past through the creatively distorting lens of our contemporary writing, publishing, bookselling, and reading practices. In addition, ‘‘literature,’’ as it was constellated in my father’s bookstore, quite obviously meant more than just works of fiction and poetry. What counted as literature to his customers, however, is now beyond accurate recuperation—my father threw away all his billing and sales records when he closed his store. Nevertheless, he was still able to conjure, out of old notes and what remains in his personal collection, a long list of his best sellers over the years. That list is evocative of the wide range of genres described by ‘‘literature’’ and of the ways in which ‘‘literature’’ served his customers as a heuristic or pedagogic tool. Here is a very abridged version: The Encyclopaedia Judaica, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Abraham Cahan’s A Bintel Brief, the JPS Tanakh, Nehama Leibowitz’s Studies in the Weekly Sidra, Lawrence Kushner’s Book of Letters, Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, Arthur Hertzberg’s The Zionist Idea, Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton’s Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality, The Complete ArtScroll Siddur, Isidore Twersky’s Maimonides Reader, Art Spiegelman’s Maus I, Milton Steinberg’s Basic Judaism, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, the Lubavitch Women’s Spice and Spirit Cookbook, Leo Rosten’s Joys of Yiddish, Herbert Weiner’s 91/2 Mystics, The New Bantam Megiddo Hebrew-English / English-Hebrew Dictionary, J. Hertz’s Sayings of the Fathers, all the novels and short-story collections by Bellow, Malamud, and Roth, The Diary of Anne Frank, the Zion Talis Luach Minhagei Beit Ha-Knesset, Hayim Ben-Sasson’s A History of the Jewish People, and every I. B. Singer children’s picture book. As a commercial library of Jewish memory, then—memory of patriarchs and matriarchs, of law and custom, languages and commentary, the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the diverse histories

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of a transnational Diaspora—my father’s bookstore offered customers a social and cultural opportunity to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct a modern Jewish literature of their own. But it had its limits; the physical space of the store was finite, a reminder that the very materiality of the book, in Seth Lerer’s words, makes ‘‘the canonizing of the literary work into an act of space management.’’28 It was not, and my father never intended it to be, a version of Borges’s Library of Babel, that labyrinthine metonymy for the mind in which the entirety of human literary production would be cataloged and preserved for all time. And it was subject to the commercial and cultural marketplace, liable to competition and to public statements of discontent with the collection, such as when certain customers felt compelled to turn Lev Raphael’s Dancing on Tisha B’Av face down on the newbook table because its frank portrayal of gay Jewish life offended them. In these ways, the store revealed its vulnerability and historical contingency, foreshadowing its demise.

The Limits of Transmissibility Benjamin understood ownership well. My father did indeed possess the attitude of an heir—a sense that he had been entrusted with a responsibility to care for and preserve for the future his beloved Jewish book collection. Yet there was blindness along with Benjamin’s insight. The transmissibility of a collection may be its most distinguished trait, but it is not a given. There may be no one willing to purchase the collection, or the inheritors may decline their inheritance. The market may dry up or move on; after all, and especially in the West, the past is an endlessly regenerating commodity. And if objects share in our subjectivity, then they, too, are mortal. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake revealed the necessity for seismic retrofitting of all buildings in Los Angeles, and the landlord of 9427 Pico began work on the property. The store took on the look of a construction site. At the same time, the book business changed yet again. In the 1980s, S. I. Newhouse and Rupert Murdoch were transforming publishing in America, merging older houses and ruthlessly demanding that every title pull its weight in profits.29 More important, by the mid-1980s, the mall bookstore chains—Walden Books, B. Dalton, and Crown Books—had reached the limit of their expansion. They were sold off to outfits like Kmart and Barnes and Noble, which recognized, according to Jason Epstein, that the ‘‘surviving independents had shown that extensive backlist

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inventories attract customers to large freestanding bookstores, which often cost less per square foot to occupy than comparable space in high-rent malls.’’30 My father understood that these new book superstores could and would undercut his prices, and he even understood how attractive a target his backlist presented to them. But his strategy for facing these challenges was to move his store in November 1990 to larger quarters in Beverly Hills, adjacent to Beth Jacob Congregation and Hillel Hebrew Academy, and thereby mimic a superstore model. The new store was modern, box-like, and cold. Though it was only six blocks from the old location, to the Los Angeles Jewish community it seemed as if the bookstore had become too upscale and had lost its taam, its Jewish taste. For the first time, and in response to the superstores’ increasing pressure, my father began to stock ritual items, greeting cards, and gifts. He did so, however, with the same collector’s sensibility with which he had built up his book collection, and, ironically, this proved to be his undoing. His obsession with collecting blinded him to the dangers of the social changes taking place around him: the resurgence of Orthodox Judaism, the rise of the ba’al t’shuva phenomenon, and political developments in Israel that turned the question ‘‘Who is a Jew?’’ into an international Jewish brawl. In addition, as Haym Soloveitchik observed, the shift of religious and cultural authority to texts and ‘‘their enshrinement as the sole source of authenticity,’’31 though potentially a boon for my father’s business, instead provided a warrant for the newly religious to create litmus tests in order to discriminate between authentic and inauthentic texts. The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, with its report of American Jews’ high rates of intermarriage, only fanned the flames. My father responded to these changes by wearing a kippah during business hours (for the first time in his career, and not without complaint) and by simply collecting more Orthodox and traditional Jewish materials. The primary way in which he did that was by inviting an Orthodox silver wholesaler and an Orthodox sofer, a scribe, to set up their shops within his store. He put the sofer behind the glass wall of a corner room that had originally separated his small collection of Jewish paintings from the book collection, thinking to show him off as an attraction. Unwittingly, though, my father turned his store from a living library into a museum. His sofer exhibit, and the scribe’s performance of culture, suggested that authentic Jewish tradition belonged, literally, to religious insiders, relegating nonobservant out-

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siders to the role of audience and cultural tourists.32 This undermined the very concept of the bookstore. What had once been hospitable and inviting space now appeared staged and contested. It discomforted, even alienated, the few remaining Reform and secular customers who had not already been lured away by the cheaper prices and caffeine-fueled socializing at the superstores. In the meantime, the sofer, who stayed in the store after my father closed up for the night, was busy with his own plans. In less than a year, he opened his own shop back on Pico Boulevard, the 613 Mitzvah Store, which carried only ‘‘kosher’’ sforim and ritual goods. That signaled the end for my father’s bookstore. If the Jewish memory that materialized in his store can be said to have described a collective memory, it was only because my father, as a collector, gathered as much as would fit into that space. Once that memory collection—and, by extension, the definition of modern Jewish literature that it described—was broken up and demarcated by Jewish book publishers, retailers, and consumers into rigidly policed categories of classical and modern, traditional and secular, authentic and inauthentic, its purchase became subject to availability. By the spring of 1994, the shelves and tables of J. Roth / Bookseller were thinned out and filled with gaps, and both Jewish and non-Jewish publishers began refusing my father’s orders. In June, he sold what stock remained to another Jewish bookstore that took over his lease, and though he could have declared bankruptcy, he instead worked out repayment schedules with his many creditors. He paid the last of them off in 2004. Today, Jewish bookstores, like American bookstores in general, have reverted to the commercially and economically more feasible model of their late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forebears, albeit one now buttressed by new technologies. No Jewish bookstore that I know of carries only books, just as no general bookstore can survive without offering, if not the nonliterary inventory, at least the level of service of the old department stores. That is the secret to the survival of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon; City Lights in San Francisco; Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, California; the Tattered Cover in Denver; Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi; Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida; Kramerbooks in Washington, D.C.; and Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers in New York—the last of the large independents, a fact that they all advertise on their Internet websites. Bookstores come and go, however; insolvency is an ever-present hazard of doing business. Bemoaning the end of a particular model of the American bookstore, taking offense that no one in the new book superstores ‘‘seems

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to love books, or even to like them, except as money makers,’’33 simply underscores the one enduring aspect of the bookstore: it is a culturally invaluable space on which to project notions about writing and reading that express, and allay, anxiety about changes in literature and literacy. Change, though, is inevitable. In Brooklyn, Eichler’s Judaica Superstore, the largest Orthodox-oriented bookstore in America, retails a very well stocked but narrowly conceived selection of Jewish books in Hebrew, English, and, increasingly, Yiddish. The four largest nondenominational Jewish bookstores—Westside Judaica and J. Levine Books & Judaica in Manhattan, Pinskers Judaica Center in Pittsburgh (home to 1–800-Judaism and Judaism.com), and Rosenblum’s World of Judaica in Chicago (home to alljudaica.com)—offer more widely conceived selections, though their backlists are thin and their stock is still aimed primarily at tradition-minded customers. All organize the disorder of Jewish literature according to the habits of a new generation of American Jews. They forward a definition of that literature reflective of the more stringent tastes of those buyers and sellers who currently wield the greatest desire for, and ascribe the highest value to, the religion section of the collection. But the insolvency of memory that my father’s bookstore exemplifies is perhaps most evident in the person telling this story. Yes, I took a boxful of titles and an entire set of Talmud, the Zhitomir Shas, before the store closed. Nevertheless, as the obvious inheritors of my father’s collection, I and my two brothers failed to take possession of it. Though at the end I came to work for him in order to help salvage the business, I had long made it clear to my father that my career interests lay elsewhere. Working in the academy on a professor’s salary, I now lack the economic resources to buy an even remotely similar collection of my own. I have access to institutional libraries that offer a kind of recompense, but not the Benjaminian satisfactions of ownership. Which brings me to a final objection among some friends, that I at least remember that collection, and, as a teacher, I can forward its memory and its definition of modern Jewish literature for future generations. Maybe. Memory is a notoriously unstable and shape-shifting human production, and there is no telling how effectively or widely or enduringly my particular one will travel. Still, when it comes to endings, the very pitfalls of memory are what enable a choice of usable pasts. Here is one such choice. I actually do not recall what the final day of work at my father’s bookstore was like. I have no idea what we did or what my father said. As a scholar, of course, I could

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probably reconstruct that day in specific detail. As a writer, I prefer not to. Instead of trying to manage the trick of wrapping up the store’s history with an exacting account of that day, or overboiling it for sentimentality’s sake, I like to imagine that it was little different from all the other unremarkable days that we worked together. At six, we locked the door, neatened the books, and counted the money. We then drove in separate cars—this is Los Angeles, after all—to the Hamburger Hamlet on the Sunset Strip. We had a whiskey or two, discussed the poor state of the business, gossiped about customers and family, and ate our nonkosher burgers. Afterward, waiting in front of the restaurant for the valet to bring our cars, my father insisted on paying for my parking, and without too much argument, I let him. We said our goodnights, and we each drove off, tired, minds blank, looking forward to a good book and then bed. Notes My thanks to Arthur Kiron for helping me to see that I was finally ready to write about my father’s bookstore. This essay was originally presented as the John C. Horn Distinguished Service Lecture at Susquehanna University in March 2006. For their invaluable suggestions and insights as I drafted the lecture and essay, I am grateful to Susan Bowers, Ilan Stavans, David Myers, Laura Levitt, Zachary Braiterman, Lawrence Silberstein, Mary Bannon, and Michael Kramer. 1. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York, 1969), 60 (hereafter cited in the text). Clifford cites Benjamin as an example of a ‘‘good collector (as opposed to the obsessive, the miser),’’ for whom ‘‘[c]ollecting appears as an art of living intimately allied with memory, with obsession, with the salvaging of order from disorder.’’ James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 219. Gumbrecht and Marrinan contextualize Benjamin’s views on collecting as an extension of his views about historical materialism and the cult value of the artwork; see Hans Ulrecht Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan (eds.), Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age (Stanford, Calif., 2003), 196–97. 2. On American Jewish publishing and bookselling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Maurice Jacobs, ‘‘Generations of Jewish Literary Labor: Sixty Years of the Jewish Publication Society of America,’’ in Philip Goodman (ed.), Essays on Jewish Booklore: Articles Selected from the Jewish Book Annual, 1942–1971 (New York, 1972), 224; Charles A. Madison, Jewish Publishing in America: The Impact of Jewish Writing on American Culture (New York, 1976), chs. 1, 2, and 4; and Jonathan D. Sarna, JPS, The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888–1988: A Centennial History of the Jewish Publication Society (Philadelphia, 1989), chs. 1–2. 3. Sarna, JPS, 143. 4. Ibid., 144; and Madison, Jewish Publishing in America, 253–75.

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5. Madison, Jewish Publishing in America, 46–54. 6. On bookselling in America, including the reasons for the split between publishing and bookselling, see John Tebbel, ‘‘A Brief History of American Bookselling,’’ in Charles B. Anderson (ed.), Bookselling in America and the World (New York, 1975), 3–25. For further details on that split from the perspective of booksellers, see Chandler B. Grannis, ‘‘More than Merchants: Seventy-Five Years of the ABA,’’ in Anderson (ed.), Bookselling in America and the World, 65–108. 7. For an interesting discussion of the college-town bookstore, see Barbara A. Brannon, ‘‘The Bookshop as an ‘Arsenal of Democracy’: Marion Dodd and the Hampshire Bookshop during World War II,’’ The Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 92:1 (March 1998): 5–31. Nineteenth-century bookstores in Boston, particularly the Old Corner Book Store, seem like exceptions to my assertion about the twentieth-century development of this phenomenon. But, in fact, only a very few of these stores did not carry at least stationery and cards. Those that did carry only books, such as Charles E. Lauriat Co., are not so much exceptions as they are turn-of-the-century progenitors of the phenomena that I describe, Boston being the perfect amalgam of urban milieu and college town. See Frederick G. Melcher, ‘‘Bookselling in Boston,’’ in Anderson (ed.), Bookselling in America and the World, 156–62. 8. Tebbel, ‘‘A Brief History of American Bookselling,’’ 7–10. 9. Ibid., 13. Under pressure from the publishers and nonliterary merchants who carried books as loss leaders in order to attract customers, bookstores seemed a dying animal: ‘‘In Salem, Massachusetts, which had once boasted several retail stores, some of which became publishing houses, every bookseller had vanished by 1889, and the only outlet remaining for books was a chain drygoods store.’’ Ibid., 17. 10. The net-price wars of the late nineteenth century were brutal and destabilized the book trade for decades. Indeed, the American Booksellers Association was founded in 1901 in a spirit of progressive reform aiming to rationalize the net-pricing system and professionalize bookselling. A young Van Wyck Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winner and eminent American literary critic of the 1920s, taught the ABA’s first booksellers’ course in 1913. Grannis, ‘‘More than Merchants,’’ 67–74. 11. On the image and social function of the moykher sforim in relation to the fiction of S. Y. Abramovitsh, see the classic study by Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Syracuse, N.Y., 1996), 158–62, 187–91. 12. ‘‘Jewish Bookstores of the Old East Side,’’ The Book Peddler: Newsletter of the National Yiddish Book Exchange 17 (summer 1992): 20. 13. Ibid. 14. I am taking my father at his word here, despite the fact that his memory is as fallible as anyone else’s. I have verified that Zion Talis and S. Goldman were founded in the 1920s, and Schenker Books as well as Wolf Sales are likely products of that decade, too, but more archival research is called for here in order to locate and date the

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other stores, which seem to have vanished from the records of most of the databases I consulted. 15. ‘‘J. Levine Co. A Modern Tradition ‘Judaica Book News, 1981,’ ’’ J. Levine Books & Judaica website, August 10, 2005, http://www.levinejudaica.com/catalog/moderntraditions.php. 16. Sarna, JPS, 205–10. 17. The manual’s introduction makes clear the rationale for its publication: ‘‘The Jewish Book Council of America recognizes that if Jewish books are to be distributed in greater quantities, local communities must have adequate facilities for this distribution. Except for some large metropolitan areas, there are few communities that have acceptable Jewish book shops, if any. . . . These shops may provide profit-making activity; but, more importantly, will afford an exceptional opportunity to stimulate an abiding zeal for Jewish knowledge, the development of a Jewish cultural atmosphere in the home, and the enrichment of educational programs in all types of Jewish groups.’’ Isidore Cooperman, The Jewish Bookshop: Its Organization and Operation (New York, 1947, 1953). My thanks to Noni Rudavsky and the Klau Library at Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, for making this available to me. 18. Sarna, JPS, 208–15. 19. Solomon B. Freehof, On the Collecting of Jewish Books (New York, 1961), 8. 20. Robert Eshman, ‘‘A Book Man to the End,’’ Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles 11:39 (November 22–28, 1996): 21. 21. Hana Wirth-Nesher (ed.), ‘‘Defining the Indefinable,’’ in What Is Jewish Literature? (Philadelphia, 1994). 22. Cecil Roth, ‘‘The Jewish Love of Books,’’ in Goodman (ed.), Essays on Jewish Booklore, 180. Roth also cowrote with Abraham Meir Habermann the entry ‘‘Book Trade’’ for the Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Cecil Roth (Jerusalem, 1972), 4:1238–39. 23. The first quotation is from Philip Goodman, ‘‘Love of Books as Revealed in Jewish Bookplates,’’ in idem (ed.), Essays on Jewish Booklore, 199. Goodman observes that bookplates featuring the owner’s portrait reveal ownership as an ‘‘attestation of oneness’’ with the book, a kind of existential affirmation that he later sums up this way: ‘‘Furthermore, the bookplate testifies to the owner’s artistic and aesthetic sense and his literary proclivity for it is a fusion of two personalities—the owner who gives his own ideas reflecting his interests, and the artist who executes the ideas in his own style’’ (212). Heller ascribes to the book a metaphysical dimension: ‘‘The Universe was not only created by the Book, but also for the Book. Spirit, vision are concepts of supreme import. They constitute the heart of the Cosmos. If ideas and ideals, values and visions were to be extirpated then nature would be inconceivable or sink into a state of disorder which would make its existence impossible.’’ Bernard Heller, ‘‘The Book: God’s Blueprint,’’ in Goodman (ed.), Essays on Jewish Booklore, 187. Faber asserts that book collecting ‘‘reflects man’s desire to acquire and preserve knowledge’’ and ‘‘can become a source of spiritual delight to all involved: the collector who buys the books, the bibliographer who offers guidance, and even the dealer interested solely

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in a business transaction.’’ Salamon Faber, ‘‘Selected Private Jewish Library Collections,’’ in Goodman (ed.), Essays on Jewish Booklore, 336, 343. 24. Dick Pels, Kevin Hetherington, and Fre´de´ric Vandenberghe, ‘‘The Status of the Object: Performances, Mediations, and Techniques,’’ Theory, Culture & Society 19:5–6 (2002): 8. 25. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 218, 229. 26. This observation is predicated on two perspectives that helped shape my understanding of the interplay between people and books, identity and objects. The first perspective is from post-structural social theory, which, assuming ‘‘the performative and integrative capacity of ‘things’ to help make what we call society,’’ posits that in contemporary Western cultures, ‘‘we have also come to appreciate the fluidity and instability of the (multiple) ontological boundaries which separate thinglike from nonthinglike entities (persons, animals, relations, concepts), in a growing discomfort about the traditional hierarchies which separated subjects from objects, cultures from natures, and humans from nonhumans.’’ Pels et al., ‘‘The Status of the Object,’’ 2 and 3. The second perspective comes from Canetti’s novel Auto-da-Fe´, particularly Professor Peter Kien’s bibliomaniacal reflections on the sentience of books; see Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fe´ (New York, 1979), 67–68. 27. Annette Kolodny, ‘‘Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism,’’ in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York, 2001), 2154. 28. Seth Lerer, ‘‘Epilogue: Falling Asleep over the History of the Book,’’ PMLA 121:1 (January 2006): 232. 29. Andre Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (London, 2000), 73–102. 30. Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future (New York, 2002), 160. 31. Haym Soloveitchik, ‘‘Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,’’ in Roberta Rosenberg Farber and Chaim I. Waxman (eds.), Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader (Hanover, N.H., 1999), 339. 32. As both an exhibit and folkloric performance, the sofer incited what Kirshenblatt-Gimblett calls ‘‘the museum effect’’: ‘‘Not only do ordinary things become special when placed in museum settings, but also the museum experience itself becomes a model for experiencing life outside its walls.’’ Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘‘Objects of Ethnography,’’ in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C., 1991), 410. In terms of performing Jewish culture, the sofer illustrated that the question of ‘‘who is qualified to perform culture is thorny because it reveals the implicit privileging of descent over consent in matters of cultural participation’’ and that such performance makes operative ‘‘a distinction between those who are licensed to do and those who are mandated to watch.’’ Ibid., 431. 33. Jack Perry, ‘‘Bookstores, Communist and Capitalist,’’ The American Scholar (2001): 109.

CHAPTER 14

The Art of Assimilation: Ironies, Ambiguities, Aesthetics Michael P. Kramer

Ironies Circa 1990, the heyday of ethnic literary study. African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native Americans were all boldly claiming their place in the academy, demanding critical attention and respect for neglected literatures that they jealously claimed as their own. Canons were exploding everywhere, curricula were being challenged and rewritten, and faculties were being confounded and reconfigured.1 The intellectual movement of ethnic literary studies in the last decade of the twentieth century was markedly centrifugal, away from an encroaching cultural mainstream, away from the phenomenon that Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, in the first decade of the century, called ‘‘The Melting-Pot.’’ The objectives of the new movement (cultural, political, and personal) were particularist—the discovery, assertion, and celebration of difference. The movement was buoyed by quasi-essentialist assumptions and quasiromantic nationalism—pervasive, if often unarticulated and unacknowledged—that linked personal identity and spiritual health to the reclamation of cultural heritage and opposition to assimilation. Students and scholars looked to literature for glimpses of difference, of ethnic pride and purity, and they recoiled when the texts themselves suggested otherwise. Minority students looked for cultural heroes and for role models for themselves—not necessarily as they were but as they felt they should be. (Nonminority students looked on jealously and identified vicariously.) So while they read

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W. E. B. Du Bois’s cultural-nationalist The Souls of Black Folk voraciously, they didn’t know quite what to do with Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. They would take hold of it, with its undisguised accommodationist message, cleverly twisting it this way and that, searching for evidence of resistance, of mimicry, of ‘‘puttin’ on ol’ massa’’—or they would put it aside.2 But the literature of difference also could be seen to contain something surprising and troubling and, finally, fascinating. Those of us trained in broader Americanist perspectives, particularly those of Sacvan Bercovitch and Werner Sollors, tended to regard ethnic literatures with a skeptical, unreconstructed Americanist’s eye, to gaze ‘‘beyond ethnicity’’ toward the larger culture in which it did its cultural work, suspicious of proprietary particularism and alert to the ‘‘rites of assent’’ that both constrained and energized the writing.3 With Bercovitch, we looked with wonder at nineteenth-century German church historian Philip Schaff, who came to the United States in 1844 ‘‘to save emigrant Pennsylvania Germans from the dangers of Americanization [and] stayed to join the consensus,’’ marveled at ‘‘the Jewish anarchist Paul Goodman berating the country for abandoning its promise,’’ and then looked at ‘‘the descendant of American slaves, Martin Luther King, Jr., denouncing injustice as a violation of the American Way.’’4 While consensus historians may have been blind to the conflict and diversity of American culture as charged by oppositional critics, we believed that scholars who focused obsessively on diversity and dissensus were equally myopic, guilty of what Ulrich Beck has recently called ‘‘autistic ethnicism.’’5 Because they wanted to see something else, they repeatedly missed what we thought so obvious in the texts: the irresistible power of America to make Americans. This was the irony of ethnic literary studies: the literary works thought to be a hedge against assimilation were themselves, to borrow Leslie Fiedler’s term, ‘‘acts of assimilation,’’ inextricably bound up in the myth of America, always in earnest conversation with it.6 Even if they seemed markedly different, ethnic writings were no less expressions of American culture than the writings of Mark Twain or Kate Chopin or William Dean Howells. Indeed, their authors were not merely striving to be American but were already, ineluctably American—and not only avowed assimilationists, such as Booker T. Washington or Charles Eastman.7 Opposition, too, had American roots. When Zitkala Sˇa provocatively declared her belief in paganism, she used terms borrowed from the poetry of Wordsworth, no doubt learned

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in American missionary school.8 Du Bois, the great proponent of African culture, the great defender of the souls of black folk, saw his project fundamentally in terms of American exceptionalism.9 It was not that cultural otherness did not matter: plainly, Du Bois’s agenda was profoundly different from that of Washington. But otherness was only part of the story—and a part that could not stand in for the whole. In my case, I had begun studying ethnic literature because, like my students, I had expected something different. I wound up looking at difference differently. My students were generally in no mood for these niceties, for what I would later come to see as the aesthetics of assimilation. They wanted cultural diversity; I gave them assimilation. They resisted, for they saw assimilation as betrayal. But I began to see assimilation differently. If America were indeed a multicultural wonderland, wasn’t assimilation, wherever and however it appeared, all the more remarkable? If the cultural makeup of ethnic Americans were fundamentally different from that of regular Americans, didn’t that make assimilationist texts the sites of real imaginative work? Shouldn’t assimilation be taken seriously, as achievement, and not dismissed as surrender, as a presence rather than an absence? Assimilation did not negate ethnicity; it expressed ethnicity, albeit ironically. It was not a failure of the imagination but an imaginative success, a cause for astonishment and wonder. In their attitude toward difference, the Jews were no different.10 It is told of the great Wissenschaft scholar Moritz Steinschneider that the purpose of his scholarship was ‘‘to give Judaism a decent burial.’’11 If so, the resurgence of Jewish studies in our time was a miraculous rebirth. The study of Jewish literature was conducted primarily as an exercise in Jewish self-affirmation. Yiddish and Hebrew classes proliferated. Midrash studies boomed, and the relation of rabbinic thought to literary creativity was wholly reassessed and revaluated.12 Jews could hold their heads high. They needn’t look elsewhere, and they needn’t escape their Jewishness to experience the aesthetic. When it came to Jewish American literature, however, the evidence seemed to point elsewhere. Historian Lloyd Gartner said that you couldn’t talk about Jewish American history without talking about assimilation, and the same thing seemed true of the literature, even more so.13 Not only was much of the literature commonly studied in Jewish American literature courses composed of narratives of assimilation, stories whose plots were structured by the process of assimilation or stories of already-deracinated Jews—from Abraham Cahan’s Yekl to Mary Antin’s The Promised Land to

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Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers to Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money to Isaac Rosenberg’s Passage from Home to Alfred Kazin’s Walker in the City to Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day to Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus to Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem to Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn to Pearl Abraham’s The Romance Reader and on and on—but many of the texts frankly celebrated the transformation. So pervasive was the theme that it seemed to form the very core of the literature, a genre unto itself. Irving Howe’s well-known forecast in 1977 of the imminent demise of Jewish American literature was based on his perceiving this pattern in the writing, his sense that without the tensions of immigrant life, the tug-ofwar between tradition and assimilation, Jewish American literature would have no subject.14 Although his prognosis may have been off, his diagnosis is nevertheless significant. Narratives of return—from early works such as Ludwig Lewisohn’s Upstream (1922) to more recent works such as Mark Jay Mirsky’s My Search for the Messiah (1977) and Paul Cowan’s Orphan in History (1982)—are, by definition, inversions of the narrative of assimilation. Similarly, the ethnic awakening that gives the lie to Howe—the efflorescence of self-consciously Jewish writing by Cynthia Ozick, Mark Mirsky, Allen Hoffman, Steve Stern, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Michael Chabon, Joseph Skibell, Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander, Dara Horn, and many others— takes on literary-historical significance primarily in terms of a prior state of successful assimilation. As Mark Krupnick writes, ‘‘[I]t is inevitable that in America the recovery of Jewish roots will take on an American form.’’15 It enacts a return that reconfigures tradition in terms of the cultural changes that have already occurred, constituting, in Herbert Gans’s formulation, ‘‘only a more visible form of long-standing phenomena, or of a new stage of acculturation and assimilation.’’16 Like other ethnic literatures, Jewish American literary texts are not simply hybrid creations, part ethnic and part American, but ‘‘acts of assimilation.’’ To celebrate the Jewishness of Jewish American texts while devaluing or ignoring the assimilationary core and context of the writing is not only to miss a significant part of the literature but to distort and minimize its creative matrix. Assimilation is not simply the absence or betrayal of ethnicity but an imaginative act in its own right. To make sense of these texts as Jewish texts and to find the right key into their imaginative worlds—to hear what Lionel Trilling called ‘‘the hum and buzz of implication’’ in their narratives—one first has to make sense of assimilation.17

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Ambiguities Sociologists and social historians in America have been trying to define assimilation for over a century, and none has been unequivocally successful in ridding the term of its ambiguity, or of its fascination. They have bemoaned the multivalence of the term and the resulting imprecision in its usage. From the very inception of sociological research, studies of assimilation began with an almost pro forma complaint about the inexact usage of the term. Writing in the American Journal of Sociology in 1901, Sarah E. Simons complained that ‘‘when the theme [of assimilation] is touched upon no clearly defined, stable idea seems to exist, even in the mind of the author.’’18 To be sure, as Simons admitted, the discourse was then still in its swaddling clothes, but significant advances in the field and further attempts at definition over the next decade did little to change the situation. In 1914, for instance, influential sociologist Robert E. Park began an important, now-classic essay in the same journal, complaining similarly that ‘‘[i]t is not always clear . . . what assimilation means.’’19 Much nuanced and detailed academic work followed, including attempts at definition by Park himself, but a half-century later, when sociologist Milton Gordon turned to the issue, he rehearsed the same lament: ‘‘With regard to the term ‘assimilation,’ ’’ he wrote, ‘‘there is [still] a certain amount of confusion.’’20 Gordon surmised that the terminological quandary had much to do with the complexity of the phenomenon itself: assimilation had been called upon to represent a multifaceted, many-staged phenomenon that varied from place to place, group to group, generation to generation, and even from immigrant to immigrant. Not everyone could or would adjust to change in the same way and at the same pace, and no term could accommodate such multiplicity without ambiguity. So he called for, and provided, ‘‘a rigorous and systematic analysis of the concept of assimilation which would ‘break it down’ into all the possible relevant factors or variables which could conceivably be included under its rubric.’’21 He refined the concept, naming numerous stages of assimilation, from cultural assimilation (acculturation) to marital assimilation (amalgamation) and beyond. He organized theories of assimilation into three categories—Anglo-conformity, melting pot, and cultural pluralism—each representing a different vision of the goal of the process. His Assimilation in American Life was a benchmark in the sociological study of the phenomenon—in some ways, the most nuanced attempt ever made to theorize the varieties and degrees

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of assimilatory experience, ‘‘the touchstone for all future studies of assimilation.’’22 Despite Gordon’s efforts and influence, the ambiguity that adheres to assimilation persists. While many scholars have found Gordon’s distinctions useful, especially that between ‘‘assimilation’’ and ‘‘acculturation,’’ Harvard sociologist Marcelo Suarez-Orozco has recently observed that ‘‘assimilation’’ and ‘‘acculturation’’ were still ‘‘terms often used interchangeably,’’23 and Ewa Morawska has cautioned that ‘‘the [enormous] literature on the subject abounds with confusing and often contradictory usages.’’24 In 2004, calling for a ‘‘new definition or new understanding of assimilation’’ in her introduction to a new collection of essays on the subject, Tamar Jacoby had to admit that ‘‘even on the core issue—on just how assimilation does and should work—there are as many views as there [were] essays’’ in her volume.25 From a literary point of view, the significance of assimilation as a concept begins with its ineluctable ambiguity. The goal is not to determine how the term should be defined but how it has been used. ‘‘Assimilation’’ is a term that has been used in America for over two centuries, both professionally and popularly, to refer to a process by which social groups or individuals with divergent social characteristics become more alike, usually within a context of immigration or conquest. But it has not always been used in a uniform or consistent manner. The range of ways in which the term ‘‘assimilate’’ is used generates a range of ways in which the process or phenomenon of assimilation has been imagined. The ambiguity in the term opens numerous political, narrative, and poetic possibilities.26 The OED lists two primary definitions for the verb ‘‘to assimilate,’’ each of which subsumes several variations and sub-variations. The first may be called its ‘‘metaphoric’’ sense: ‘‘to make or be like,’’ and the second, its ‘‘metonymic’’ sense: ‘‘to absorb and incorporate,’’ not to resemble, but to make or become part of. Resemblance is not incorporation, as metaphor is not metonymy. Both definitions have been used in the technical and polemic literature, sometimes deliberately—that is, with the aim of underscoring the distinctions—sometimes blithely, oblivious of the distinctions. Much of the debate concerning assimilation rages in the no-man’s-land between these two definitions, and much of the art of assimilation emerges there as well. Let me complicate the issue a bit more. The metaphoric definition itself comprehends two very different processes and implies different narratives.

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In the transitive sense, the verb ‘‘to assimilate’’ suggests coercion of one sort or another, to cause something to resemble something else. To use an appropriate example, America (various governmental agencies, social services, popular culture, and so on) may be said to assimilate immigrants to its way of life, and, thus, immigrants are made to resemble other Americans. The subject of the verb ‘‘assimilate’’ is America; she is the protagonist of the implied narrative. The immigrant is the object of the verb, more or less passive. In the second, intransitive sense of the metaphoric definition, to be like or to come to resemble, the verb elides the cause and focuses on the state or transformation itself. In this sense, immigrants already resemble or come to resemble other Americans: immigrants assimilate to the American way of life. The subject of the verb is the immigrants. They are the actors; they are the focus of the drama. America is their stage, their museum, their model, their resource. One example of the relevance of this distinction for literary study is Abraham Cahan’s Yekl, where the irony that propels the narrative forward derives precisely from the tension between the two definitions. Yekl is deliberately and passionately trying to be an American, to assimilate to America by adopting an American name (Jake), American clothes, mannerisms, and language, but Cahan undercuts him every step of the way—as when one of Yekl’s coworkers in the sweatshop sarcastically remarks: ‘‘He thinks that shaving one’s mustache makes a Yankee!’’ Who is, and who is not, doing the assimilating? What are the forces at play in what Cahan calls ‘‘all the whimsical metamorphoses wrought upon the children of Israel of the great modern exodus by the vicissitudes of life in this their Promised Land of today’’?27 The humor and the pathos of the tale depend largely upon Cahan’s ability to put in play both the transitive and intransitive senses of the metaphoric definition of assimilation. Sometimes, and in some very key American documents (for example, the Federalist Papers, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Emerson’s essays), the verb ‘‘assimilate’’ is used in yet another metaphoric way, in the sense of becoming alike—not when one thing takes on the characteristics of another thing, but when two disparate entities become similar. In Federalist 10, the best-known of these classic political essays, James Madison writes: ‘‘Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government [i.e., pure democracy], have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the

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same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.’’28 Madison is referring to a popular vision of societal development in which contiguity and intercourse in a benign, distinction-free environment would inevitably lead to social assimilation. Madison, whose argument for ratification of the Constitution depended upon the diverse social and economic nature of the American republic, dismisses this vision as erroneous and as detrimental to the overall stability and freedom of the republic. Others disagreed. Either way, this usage becomes central to the discourse on individualism and equality that emerges in the mid-nineteenth century in America. It is allied to Tocqueville’s analysis of the tyranny of the majority, for instance, and to Emerson’s critique of conformity and his celebration of self-reliance. (‘‘Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.’’) And it informs Whitman’s complex poetic project in Leaves of Grass, in which the lines between self-reliance and conformity are blurred: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.29 By the first decades of the twentieth century, this particular use of the term ‘‘assimilation’’ became allied to a vision of cultural exchange and interchange that comes to characterize certain technical and polemical accounts of assimilation, a melting-pot vision in which each cultural group contributes its share to the American whole. Through cultural exchange, Americans from countless different backgrounds assimilate to one another and produce a new, composite American national character.30 In its metonymic senses—those senses having to do with absorption and incorporation, not to be made similar to but to made part of—the root discourse is, of course, biology. Literally, in its transitive form, the term ‘‘assimilation’’ is used to signify the process by which an organism converts food into, say, blood and tissue, and in its intransitive sense to indicate the way food is absorbed into the organism. Figuratively, however, and particularly under the influence of Herbert Spencer and other thinkers who made the ‘‘analogical leap’’ from biology to sociology and spoke about societies as organisms, the term is used to suggest the way that outsiders become part of groups.31 In the transitive sense, a society accepts and incor-

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porates an immigrant. In the intransitive, an immigrant becomes part of, or assimilates into, a society. In this figurative sense, the term often retains much of the emotional resonance of its original biological context, and the implications for attitudes toward immigration and for narratives of assimilation are indeed significant. Consider the following two passages. The first is from Immigration and Its Effects upon the United States (1906), by Prescott Hall, an American writer who was president of the nativist Immigration Restriction League: ‘‘When there is a lack of assimilation, social ptomaines are created, and do their deadly work as surely in the civic body as in the physical body. The explanation is obvious. We have taken in immigrants faster than we can assimilate them, and while we put forth strenuous efforts to digest those already here, still larger numbers are before us.’’32 The second passage is from They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914), by immigrant autobiographer and activist Mary Antin: The remedy for the moral indigestion which unchecked immigration is said to induce is in enlarging the organs of digestion. More evening classes, more civic centers, more missionaries in the field, and above all more neighborly interest on the part of the whole people. If immigration were a green apple that we might take or leave, we might choose between letting the apple alone or eating it and following it up with a dose of our favorite household remedy. But immigration consists of masses of our fellow men moving upon our country in pursuit of their share of human happiness. Where human rights are involved, we have no choice. We have to eat this green apple, the Law of the Fathers enjoins it on us, but we have only ourselves to blame if we suffer from colic afterwards, knowing the sure remedy.33 In each of these passages, however far apart the political positions they endorse, the figure of assimilation as digestion—what I’ve called the metonymic sense of the term—controls, as it were, the plot and plight of the immigrants. A separate category may be in order for one more, familiar use of the term: ‘‘assimilation’’ is also used to denote the process by which an individual learns or internalizes or assimilates new ideas. We might say, for instance, that the immigrant assimilates American values or American ges-

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tures. This usage can be understood in both the metaphoric and metonymic senses sketched above: an immigrant may be said to become an American by absorbing new ideas and values into himself; or, it may be said that an immigrant learns new ideas by associating them with ideas he already has. In the first sense, the new ideas transform the immigrant; in the second sense, the old ideas give context and meaning to the new ideas. Jonathan Sarna’s ‘‘cult of synthesis,’’ the phenomenon of Jews identifying American ideas as Jewish ideas, may be described as assimilation in this sense.34 What is significant about this meaning of the term is that, as opposed to the biological sense, the immigrant is the active agent, the protagonist of the immigration story. When we use the term ‘‘assimilation,’’ any number of the senses I have outlined may come into play. Consider an example from E. L. Doctorow’s recent autobiographical work, Reporting the Universe. At the end of a chapter in which he talks about his immigrant grandparents, Doctorow writes: ‘‘The term assimilation as used in the sociological sense refers to a gratifying integration into the great American diaspora, but it may mean as well the disappearance of one’s ethnic identity and tradition, a devolution of a rich and complex culture, as Jews marry gentiles, for example, and cease to observe the rituals and practices.’’ While we no longer think in classic Spencerian ways or resort to the graphic metaphors used by Hall and Antin, the way we commonly use the term ‘‘assimilation’’ nowadays nevertheless may retain much of the resonance of that usage, and ‘‘gratifying integration’’ plainly suggests the absorption of the immigrant into the social whole. Doctorow is careful to observe that the term brings with it negative senses as well. Indeed, the weighting of the sentence toward the negative connotations suggests that the persistence of this metonymic sense of assimilation may very well account for the distaste that so many have for the term, why some people cringe at its very mention, why assimilation has become for some the sociological phenomenon that dares not speak its name, why some scholars search for more palatable terms (I will expand upon this possibility in the following section), and why some even look it straight in the face and insist that what they are seeing is not assimilation but, say, Jewish renewal.35 It may be as well why Doctorow immediately follows the passage quoted above with this alternate, deliberately inverted use of the term: ‘‘But as I apply the term to literature the meaning is reversed. If I speak of literature as assimilation what is assimilated is the larger culture into the specificity

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of the book’s representations. It is America that is being assimilated when a true book, a true poem, enlarges the case of stubborn humanity. Something has happened, some small thing, a new synaptic recognition has fired, a fresh little nourishing artery has opened into the national mind—or even the global mind.’’36 This reversal, as he calls it, from one metonymic sense of assimilation to another, not only transforms America from assimilator to assimilated, from subject to object, but places the author, grandchild of immigrants, in the assimilationary driver’s seat, a not-insignificant turnabout. Moreover, it transforms assimilation itself from a sociopolitical into a psychological phenomenon, into an imaginative act that with Emersonian aplomb neutralizes, diminishes, and makes virtually irrelevant the immigrant’s very real cultural losses and gains. It makes the question of assimilation primarily and imperially a matter of consciousness, a matter of art. These are only the fundamental definitions, the broad categories. When we begin to probe further—What is resemblance? What are its social coordinates? What is incorporation? How is it measured?—then the full complexity of the subject, including its resistance to definition, comes into view. Add to assimilation the other terms that have been used to describe cultural adaptation—acculturation, amalgamation, accommodation, fusion, transplantation, imitation, passing, even mimicry—and we see the confusion and the richness that characterize the discourse.

Aesthetics ‘‘Assimilation’’ is a term that can be used (and has been used) to signify a range of social and political phenomena, which is to say that it implies and encapsulates a variety of historical narratives, from the inevitable, benign, and reciprocal cultural borrowings of geographically contiguous communities to the coercive policies of czarist governments toward the Jews and democratic American governments toward Native Americans.37 It has been used as an expression of hope and of danger, of welcome and of disgust, of progress and of betrayal. It has been associated with dreams of universal brotherhood and nightmares of communal dissolution and national suicide. The repeated, laudable efforts by sociologists, in particular, to define the term and to distinguish among the phenomena have done little to alleviate the confusion or relieve the passion that accompanies the rhetoric of assimilation—and that often confounds rational discussion. No matter how

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it is used, ‘‘assimilation’’ is a word that carries with it the complex of emotions that have adhered to it. The multivalence of the term continues to spawn heated, protracted, and, finally, bootless debate. In America, the questions raised by the term are all but moot—at least with regard to the Jews. The barriers that defined the problem of assimilation in Europe were leveled at the outset, and as Jewish American journalist and playwright Isaac Harby wrote presciently in 1825, ‘‘Nothing causes men more to resemble each other . . . than equality of rights.’’38 Jews have had relatively unimpeded access to American society and have taken advantage of it, so that the differences between Jews and other Americans have become increasingly minimal. At the turn of the century, Abraham Cahan noted ‘‘the rapidity with which the Jewish immigrant falls in with the spirit of his new environment, his readiness to learn English and the manners of his new environment.’’39 By 1913, Anglo-Jewish scholar Joseph Jacobs could conclude that ‘‘there can be no doubt that, on the whole, Jews, especially in Western Europe and America, have become more like their neighbours in social practices and in the adoption of the surrounding culture in its widest sense.’’ The question, he remarked, was not whether they could ‘‘be assimilated’’ but whether they could ‘‘still remain Jews in the characteristics they had retained throughout the Christian ages.’’40 A half-century later, Philip Roth could answer the question wryly: ‘‘What [an American Jew] wants and how he goes after it does not on the whole differ radically from what his gentile neighbor wants and how he goes after it.’’41 No one asks seriously any more whether Jews can assimilate—a question that nagged at many during the period of the Eastern European migration—because, define it as you will, Jews already have. The only question that remains is, should the Jews assimilate? And that question has become so attenuated that it has been practically turned on its head: Is the phenomenon that we are witnessing American assimilation, or Jewish renewal? As if it could not be both. Yet ‘‘assimilation’’ continues to be a term of opprobrium.42 It cannot slough off the ‘‘depreciatory sense’’ that Ahad Ha‘am found to be the popular sense of the word, imitation (hikkuy), indicating ‘‘that which a man says, does, thinks, or feels, not out of his own inner life, as an inevitable consequence of his spiritual condition and his relation to the external world, but by virtue of his ingrained tendency to make himself like others, and to be this or that because others are this or that.’’43 To be sure, some in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America, such as

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philosopher Josephine Lazarus and anthropologists Maurice Fishberg and Franz Boas, touted assimilation as a practical solution to the Jewish problem.44 But most have shied away from such frank and wholehearted support, preferring to imagine that the assimilation of the Jews—their striving to be like their neighbors—is not assimilation at all, not a violation of a sacred psychic trust but its fulfillment, self-fulfillment. When I say ‘‘imagine,’’ I mean in the creative sense. I mean the art of assimilation, a large part of which aims to configure cultural transformation (whether perceived as devolution or gratifying integration, to borrow Doctorow’s terms) as something else. I am referring to Mordecai Noah’s harebrained scheme to settle Jews in a ‘‘city of refuge’’ on Grand Island, near Buffalo, and his suggestion that its government be like that of the premonarchic biblical Judges, so that it be true both to Jewish tradition and to American progress. And to Isaac Mayer Wise’s historical romance The First of the Maccabees (1860), in which the declarations of Mattathias the Hasmonean sound an awful lot like Thomas Jefferson. And to Nathan Mayer’s Civil War novel, Differences (1867), whose theme is union and the abolition of differences—between North and South, Jews and Gentiles. And to Emma Lazarus’s ‘‘New Colossus’’ (1883), which brashly Hebraizes the Roman goddess Libertas, renaming her ‘‘Mother of Exiles’’ and placing the words of Isaiah onto her silent lips.45 Perhaps the greatest examples of the art of assimilation are the two most unabashedly assimilationist texts in Jewish American literary history: Israel Zangwill’s melodrama The Melting-Pot (1908); and Mary Antin’s autobiography, The Promised Land (1912). Each of these texts narrates a young Jewish immigrant’s enthusiastic embrace of America, but neither dares to utter its name. I have written at length about The Promised Land elsewhere;46 here I will focus briefly on The Melting-Pot. In Zangwill’s play, David Quixano, a young Russian Jewish musical prodigy whose parents and siblings are massacred in front of his eyes in the Kishinev pogrom, comes to live with his uncle Mendel Quixano and his grandmother in Staten Island. David falls head-over-heels in love, first with America and then with Vera Revendal, herself a beautiful young Russian immigrant. Vera is not Jewish; she is a Russian aristocrat-turnedrevolutionary whose opposition to the czar forced her into exile. Now she works with immigrants in a local settlement house. Despite the vehement and vocal opposition of David’s Uncle Mendel and of Vera’s father, Baron Revendal, the two young lovers decide to marry. After all, as David rhapso-

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dizes throughout the play, America is God’s crucible, the great melting pot, where all blood hatreds and petty nationalisms are to be dissolved. But then David discovers that Vera’s father was not only present at, but personally responsible for, the Kishinev pogrom. So while religion does not keep the lovers apart—the play makes clear that David is no longer a practicing Jew and Vera’s church allegiances are thin—anti-Semitism and the massacre of his family are another thing altogether. Haunted by the bloody scene of the pogrom and by her father’s face, David declares, in a word, ois shidduch. By the final act, however, omnia amor vincet: David’s American symphony premieres, he overcomes his visceral antipathy—he ceases to look backward and resolves to look only forward—and the lovers are reconciled. They embrace, David rhapsodizes about the melting pot one last time, and the curtain closes to strains of ‘‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee.’’ Here we have prima facie a narrative of assimilation, par excellence: David and Vera slough off former allegiances and prejudices and passionately embrace new ones in the New World, and historian David Biale can speak straightforwardly of ‘‘Zangwill’s assimilationist vision’’ and ‘‘the play’s assimilationist message.’’47 But Zangwill did not see it that way. He would no doubt have expressed astonishment at the description, protesting that the play was not about assimilation at all. In fact, when the opening of the play was advertised in the New York Times in September 1908, another term was used: it was promoted not as an assimilation story but as ‘‘Israel Zangwill’s Play Treating of the Amalgamation of the Races in the Making of the American.’’ Indeed, in the published afterword to the play, Zangwill himself makes a point of explaining that the ‘‘process of American amalgamation, is not assimilation . . . as is popularly supposed’’ (203).48 For Zangwill, as for many others who were thinking seriously in the period of mass immigration about race and immigration, about racism and anti-Semitism—and there was then no discussion about immigration that did not take up the issue of race—assimilation and amalgamation were decidedly distinct, if not wholly divergent, phenomena. Consider the following definitions from a book called Races and Immigrants in America, by John R. Commons, professor of political economy at the University of Wisconsin. The book was published in 1907, just a year before the premiere of The Melting-Pot: ‘‘The term amalgamation may be used for that mixture of blood which unites races in a common stock, while assimilation is that union of their minds and wills which enables them to think and act

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together. Amalgamation is a process of centuries, but assimilation is a process of individual training. Amalgamation is a blending of races, assimilation is a blending of civilizations. Amalgamation is beyond the organized efforts of government, but assimilation can be promoted by social institutions and laws.’’ I bring Commons here for two reasons: first, as evidence of the conventional distinction between the two terms, between the biological and the cultural dimensions of the immigration problem; like Commons, Zangwill insists on the distinction; and second, to distinguish Zangwill’s approach from that of Commons. For the American Commons—and he is emphatic about this point—assimilation, not amalgamation, is the key to the success of American immigration policy. ‘‘[I]t is not physical amalgamation that unites mankind,’’ he writes. ‘‘[I]t is mental community. To be great[,] a nation need not be of one blood, it must be of one mind.’’ Note how Commons resists endowing assimilation with the full metonymic force he sees in amalgamation, as his purpose is to define and delimit the problem of race in America. ‘‘Racial inequality and inferiority are fundamental [to the immigration problem],’’ he argues, ‘‘only to the extent that they prevent mental and moral assimilation. If we think together, we can act together.’’49 But the Anglo-Jewish Zangwill denigrates assimilation. For him, assimilation is not ‘‘a blending of civilizations’’ but a ‘‘simple surrender to the dominant type,’’ which he sees as a kind of moral failing. It is the process of amalgamation, epitomized by the love of David and Vera, persecuted and persecutor, that leads to a blending of civilizations. It is ‘‘a truth of both ethics and observation,’’ Zangwill explains, that ‘‘in the crucible of love, or even co-citizenship’’—for amalgamation does not always entail ‘‘gamic interaction’’—‘‘the most violent antitheses of the past may be fused into a higher unity’’ (203). And so Zangwill tells us that The Melting-Pot is not about assimilation. David and Vera intermarry but do not assimilate. They amalgamate but do not surrender. In so doing, they look forward to the rising glory of America. The Melting-Pot was never universally admired, and among those who expressed opposition formally and vehemently were American Jews. While advertisements for the play carried encomia from philanthropist Jacob Schiff and former secretary of commerce Oscar Straus (both friends of Zangwill), many rabbis found the play offensive and said so from their pulpits, accusing Zangwill of preaching de-Judaization and race suicide—which he more or less was.50 For example, Rabbi Leon Harrison, a Reform rabbi from

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St. Louis, took the play to task in a sermon he preached at the Free Synagogue in New York soon after the play’s New York premiere. ‘‘[Zangwill] says our race should perish in order to be fused into the great American crucible, the Melting-Pot,’’ Rabbi Harrison charged. ‘‘Let all Jews marry Christians and make an homogenous America.’’ But, he warns, ‘‘[l]et us not be the victims of Zangwill’s laboratory-made metaphor.’’ Harrison did not reject the metaphor altogether: he says it would be a good idea to ‘‘cast . . . narrowness and bigotry and ancient prejudices into the crucible.’’ But only narrowness and bigotry and ancient prejudices. A ‘‘nation is not made by fusion but by co-operation,’’ he exhorted. ‘‘A nation’s unity does not depend on identity of blood, but on the social, commercial, philanthropic, and patriotic relations of the different races who live together in it side by side. The duties of co-citizenship dissolve all sectionalism without making intermarriage necessary. The real national crucible is the public school.’’51 While this argument largely follows that of John Commons, Harrison significantly maintains a reverence for what he calls ‘‘the sanctity of his people,’’ a sanctity that, Harrison charges, ‘‘Zangwill is selling for thirty pieces of silver.’’ In other words, the irony of the New Testament reference aside, his call for assimilation leaves considerably more wiggle room for ethnic distinctiveness than Commons would allow. In this sense, Harrison’s view appears consistent with the idea of a ‘‘republic of nationalities,’’ the expression used by Judah L. Magnes, then rabbi of Temple Emanu-el in New York, in his sermon against The Melting-Pot.52 For all that, in terms of the assimilation-amalgamation debate, Harrison comes down formally on the side of a strictly metaphoric assimilation, calling on the congregation ‘‘in the name of real American assimilation and in the name of your own holy traditions, sacred memories, transcendent ideals, to be yourselves and to fulfill your racial destiny from within’’ (my italics). How assimilation could be reconciled with racial destiny and resistance to amalgamation is a position that Zangwill would no doubt have thought at best, silly, and at worst, hypocritical.53 But let me summarize the three positions: Commons dismisses amalgamation as unnecessary and impractical and defines assimilation as the sine qua non of national unity. Harrison condemns amalgamation (the melting pot) as betrayal and calls for ‘‘real American assimilation’’ as a necessary adjunct to cultural survival. Zangwill denigrates assimilation as surrender and celebrates amalgamation and the melting pot as spiritual triumph. In some sense, this three-way debate turns on a quibble. After all, what

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we have here are three substantively different definitions of assimilation: for Commons, the creation of a common culture through laws and institutions; for Harrison, something like what Milton Gordon would eventually call ‘‘acculturation’’; and for Zangwill, absorption into the dominant culture. What the quibble obscures is what they all have in common: a belief— contra the position of nativists and immigration restrictionists such as Prescott Hall—that immigrants can and should change in America, a belief in assimilation. Zangwill’s position on intermarriage may seem the most extreme of the three assimilationist positions. He, of course, would claim that it is the most honest, the least blinded by prejudice and atavism. So construed, his insistence at the same time that he opposes assimilation may seem downright perverse. But in the end, it is something more. Zangwill plainly thought long and hard about the fate of the Jew in the modern world— about emancipation and persecution, about race and nationality, about religion and reform, about evolution and assimilation, about autonomy and amalgamation. This is to say that he also thought long and hard about the modern world itself—about England and Europe and America—about the promises it held but also about the hypocrisy that it practiced. His conclusions were rarely simple, often unpopular, and always passionate. The Melting-Pot emerges out of his engagement with these issues and ideas, and though it may not be a great play, certainly not by today’s standards, it is an undeniably well-crafted and nuanced play, a play of ideas, and its central, titular symbol is a well-wrought and complex trope. Throughout the play, David uses the melting pot in a variety of ways to explain to anyone who will listen how he feels about America. Consider the final scene of the play, in which most of the elements of the symbol are brought together. After the success of David’s symphony and the reconciliation of the two lovers on the roof of the settlement house, Vera calls David’s attention to the beauty of the sunset: David [Prophetically exalted by the spectacle.]: It is the fires of God round his Crucible. [He drops her hand and points downward.] There she lies, the great Melting-Pot—listen! Can’t you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth [He points east.]—the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human

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freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow— Vera [Softly, nestling to him.]: Jew and Gentile— David: Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem, where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward! [He raises his hands in benediction over the shining city.] Peace, peace, to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant continent—the God of our children give you Peace. [An instant’s solemn pause. The sunset is swiftly fading, and the vast panorama is suffused with a more restful twilight, to which the many gleaming lights of the town add the tender poetry of the night. Far back, like a lonely, guiding star, twinkles over the darkening water the torch of the Statue of Liberty. From below comes up the softened sound of voices and instruments joining in ‘‘My Country, ’tis of Thee.’’ The curtain falls slowly.] (198–200) David effuses about ‘‘how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame.’’ Several elements combine in this trope, each implying a different immigration plot. Melting transforms a solid into a liquid, making what is hard and obdurate soft and pliable. Fusing is something additional: combining two or more molten elements into an alloy, such as bronze, that displays the characteristics of both. Purging is something else again, a process by which impurities are removed from ore and a purer version of the metal remains. Alchemy is yet another process, through which base metals of various sorts are turned into gold. All these processes are emplotted in the drama: hearts are melted, prejudices are purged, an anti-Semitic Irish maid starts speaking Yiddish, David’s Orthodox grandmother comes to hear David perform on Shabbes, Vera quotes the Old Testament, David quotes the New. Melting, purging, fusing. What is missing here, of course, is the process of absorption, of ‘‘simple surrender to the dominant type’’—and this is precisely what Zangwill means when he says that the play is not about assimilation and that amal-

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gamation, intermarriage, is not assimilation. What is missing from The Melting-Pot is, in fact, the dominant type, the Anglo-Saxon. Almost everyone in the play is an immigrant. Indeed, the only real Anglo-Saxon in the play is Quincy Davenport, a biological son of the Puritans—wastefully opulent and comically decadent—in a word, David’s mirror opposite.54 Quincy is also after Vera, not for her virtues but for her pedigree, not because she is the ‘‘spirit of the settlement,’’ as David calls her, but because she is the daughter of a European noble. Hence this subplot pits David against Quincy: Anglo-Saxon nativism (ironically, philo-European) against American idealism (ironically, European immigrant) in the battle for the heart of America. The conflict between them surfaces dramatically when David accuses Quincy of ‘‘killing my America.’’ To this, Quincy quips: ‘‘Your America, forsooth, you Jew-immigrant!’’ David responds: ‘‘Yes— Jew-immigrant! But a Jew who knows that your Pilgrim Fathers came straight out of his Old Testament, and that our Jew-immigrants are a greater factor in the glory of this great commonwealth than some of you sons of the soil. It is you, freak fashionables, who are undoing the work of Washington and Lincoln, vulgarizing your high heritage, and turning the last and noblest hope of humanity into a caricature’’ (87). The interchange takes America away from the comically dissolute scion of the Puritans and gives it to their spiritual heir, the non-Jewish Jew whose Hebraism originally founded America.55 The intermarriage of David and Vera enacts a redistribution of cultural inheritance, as the God of our Children is substituted for the God of our Fathers, consecrated by the wordless strains of ‘‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee.’’ What we hear in all but words is this: ‘‘Land where our fathers died / Land of the Pilgrims’ pride, /From every mountainside / Let Freedom ring.’’ If, despite his protests, we insist on labeling Zangwill’s play as assimilationist art, we have to conclude that assimilation is no simple matter. The Melting-Pot dramatizes immigration as conquest and dislocation as arrival; it stages Americanization as the marginalizing of Anglo-Saxon America and envisions Jewish self-assertion as the foreplay of Christian-Jewish intermarriage. In short, it imagines assimilation as resistance to assimilation. Like the multifaceted symbol of the melting pot itself, these ironic inversions and paradoxes are the aesthetic analog of the multivalence of the term ‘‘assimilation.’’ Sociologists may continue to try to rid the term of its confusion; but as literary scholars, we should take its ambiguity for what it is: the matrix of its imaginative strength and resilience. We cannot be satisfied

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with understanding assimilation as a ‘‘gratifying integration’’ into American society or as the ‘‘devolution’’ of ethnic culture but must reconstrue it as the repository of all the hopes and fears, the achievements and disappointments of immigrant experience, the foundation of ethnic creativity. Notes 1. On the complicated place of Jewish studies in the multicultural curriculum, see Andrew Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled (Syracuse, N.Y., 2000), esp. 1–22. See also David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (eds.), Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley, Calif., 1998). For a critique of ethnic celebration in literary studies, see Michael P. Kramer, ‘‘Critical Narcissism and the Coming of Age of Jewish American Literary Studies,’’ JQR 94:4 (2004): 677–93. 2. On the politics and aesthetics of mimicry, see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), 85–93. 3. See, e.g., Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York, 1993); and Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York, 1986). See also Michael P. Kramer, ‘‘Up from Assent: Sacvan Bercovitch and the Theory of Assimilation,’’ RSA Journal 19 (2008): 101–6. 4. Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent, 55, 29. 5. Ulrich Beck, ‘‘The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach,’’ Common Knowledge 10:3 (2004): 438. 6. Leslie A. Fiedler, To the Gentiles (New York, 1972), 66. 7. See, esp., Charles Eastman, Indian Boyhood (1902), and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916). 8. See Zitkala Sˇa, American Indian Stories (1921), esp. 101ff. 9. See Michael P. Kramer, ‘‘W. E .B. Du Bois, American Nationalism, and the Jewish Question,’’ in Reynolds J. Scott-Childress (ed.), Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism (New York, 1999), 169–94. 10. See n. 1 above. 11. Quoted in Gershom Scholem, ‘‘The Science of Judaism—Then and Now,’’ in idem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York, 1971), 306. The statement is attributed to Steinschneider by his student Gotthold Weil. 12. See, e.g., Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington, Ind., 1990); Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany, N.Y., 1982); Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick (eds.), Midrash and Literature (New Haven, Conn., 1986); and David Stern, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, Ill., 1996). For a recent critique and revision of these approaches from inside rabbinic tradition, see William Kolbrener, ‘‘ ‘Chiseled from All

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Sides’: Hermeneutics and Dispute in the Rabbinic Tradition,’’ AJS Review 28:2 (2004): 273–97, and ‘‘The Hermeneutics of Mourning: Multiplicity and Authority in Jewish Law,’’ College Literature 30:4 (2003): 114–39. 13. Lloyd P. Gartner, ‘‘Assimilation and American Jews,’’ in Bela Vago (ed.), Jewish Assimilation in Modern Times (Boulder, Colo., 1981), 171. 14. Irving Howe, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Jewish American Stories (New York, 1977). 15. Mark Krupnick, ‘‘Assimilation in Recent American Jewish Autobiographies,’’ Contemporary Literature 34 (1993): 473. 16. Herbert J. Gans, ‘‘Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups in America,’’ in Werner Sollors (ed.), Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader (New York, 1996), 425. 17. Lionel Trilling, ‘‘Manners, Morals, and the Novel,’’ in idem, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Harmondsworth, 1970), 209. 18. Sarah E. Simons, ‘‘Social Assimilation,’’ American Journal of Sociology 6 (1901): 791. 19. Robert E. Park, ‘‘Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups, with Particular Reference to the Negro,’’ American Journal of Sociology 19 (1914): 606. 20. Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origin (New York, 1964), 61. Gordon’s book remains the most comprehensive account we have of the theory of assimilation. For accounts that include developments after Gordon, see Oliver Zunz, ‘‘American History and the Changing Meaning of Assimilation,’’ Journal of American Ethnic History (spring 1985): 53–72; Philip Gleason, ‘‘The Odd Couple: Pluralism and Assimilation,’’ in idem, Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1992), 47–90; Ewa Morawska, ‘‘In Defense of the Assimilation Model,’’ Journal of American Ethnic History (winter 1994): 76–87; Russell A. Kazal, ‘‘Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History,’’ American Historical Review 100 (1995): 437–71; and Gary Gerstle, ‘‘Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,’’ Journal of American History 84 (1997): 524–58. 21. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, 61. 22. Richard Alba and Victor Nee, ‘‘Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration,’’ International Migration Review 31 (1997): 837. 23. Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, ‘‘Everything You Wanted to Know about Assimilation but Were Afraid to Ask,’’ Daedalus 129 (2000): 8–9. For scholars who found Gordon’s distinctions useful, see, e.g., Allen Guttman, The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (New York, 1971), 8; Eli Lederhendler, ‘‘Modernity Without Emancipation or Assimilation? The Case of Russian Jewry,’’ in Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (eds.), Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 1992), 325; and Deborah E. Lipstadt, ‘‘Assimilation,’’ in Steven T. Katz (ed.), Frontiers of Jewish Thought (Washington, D.C., 1992), 197–211. 24. Morawska, ‘‘In Defense of the Assimilation Model,’’ 77.

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25. Tamar Jacoby, ‘‘Defining Assimilation for the 21st Century,’’ in idem (ed.), Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to Be American (New York, 2004), 5, 12. 26. For other accounts of the development of the word, see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge, 1991), 102–7; and Gleason, ‘‘The Odd Couple.’’ 27. Abraham Cahan, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (New York, 1896), 12, 29. See Kate Templeton, ‘‘The Making of an American: Patterns of Assimilation in Yekl and Bread Givers,’’ The Jewish Quarterly (autumn 2003): 37–42. 28. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York, 1982), 46. My italics. 29. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (London, 1838), 1:235; Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘‘Self-Reliance,’’ in idem, Essays: First Series (Boston, 1876), 46; and Walt Whitman, ‘‘Song of Myself,’’ ll. 1–3. 30. For an analysis and critique, see Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, 115–31. The classic text for this version of assimilation is J. Hector St. John de Cre`vecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782). For a critique of Cre`vecoeur, see Gerstle, ‘‘Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans.’’ 31. George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 1. 32. Prescott Hall, Immigration and Its Effects upon the United States (New York, 1906), 180. 33. Mary Antin, They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration (Boston, 1914), 122–23. 34. See Jonathan Sarna, ‘‘The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture,’’ Jewish Social Studies 5 (1998–99): 52–79. See also Byron L. Sherwin, ‘‘The Assimilation of Judaism: Heschel and the ‘Category Mistake,’ ’’ Judaism 55 (2006): 40–50. 35. I am alluding here, of course, to Steven M. Cohen’s pathbreaking sociological study American Assimilation or Jewish Renewal? (Bloomington, Ind., 1988). 36. E. L. Doctorow, Reporting the Universe (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 73–74. 37. See Gabriella Safran, Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Stanford, Calif., 2000); and Siobhan Senier, Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard (Norman, Okla., 2001). For studies of Jewish assimilation in other contexts, see, e.g., Michael R. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford, 1971); Bauman, Ambivalence and Modernity; and Frankel and Zipperstein (eds.), Assimilation and Community. 38. Henry L. Pinckney and Abraham Moise (eds.), A Selection from the Miscellaneous Writings of Isaac Harby, Esq. (Charleston, S.C., 1829), 79. 39. Abraham Cahan, ‘‘A Back Number,’’ in Moses Rischin (ed.), Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), 73.

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40. Joseph Jacobs, introduction to Arthur Ruppin, The Jews of To-Day (New York, 1913), xvii, xv. Ruppin himself, viewing the advances made by assimilation, believed it to be ‘‘the greatest danger that has assailed Judaism since the dispersion’’ (28–29). Jacobs was more cautious in his estimate. 41. Philip Roth, in ‘‘Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals: A Symposium,’’ Commentary (April 1961): 46. 42. See Jacoby, ‘‘Defining Assimilation for the 21st Century,’’ 4–5. 43. Ahad Ha‘am, ‘‘Imitation and Assimilation,’’ in Selected Essays of Ahad Ha‘am, trans. Leon Simon (Philadelphia, 1912, 1939), 107. 44. See Josephine Lazarus, The Spirit of Judaism (New York, 1895); and Maurice Fishberg, The Jews: A Study in Race and Environment (New York, 1911). On Boas, see Leonard B. Glick, ‘‘Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation,’’ American Anthropologist, n.s., 84:3 (1982): 545–65. 45. On the art of assimilation in early Jewish American literature, see Michael P. Kramer, ‘‘Beginnings and Ends: The Origins of Jewish American Literary History,’’ in idem and Hana Wirth-Nesher (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (New York, 2003), 12–30, and ‘‘Early Jewish Writers in America,’’ in Stephen H. Norwood and Eunice G. Pollack (eds.), Encyclopedia of American Jewish History (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2008), 2:537–45. 46. Michael P. Kramer, ‘‘Assimilation in The Promised Land: Mary Antin and the Jewish Origins of the American Self,’’ Prooftexts 18 (May 1998): 121–48. 47. David Biale, ‘‘The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity,’’ in Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel (eds.), Insider/Outsider, 21, 19. 48. References are to Israel Zangwill, The Melting-Pot: A Drama in Four Acts (New York, 1921). 49. John R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America (New York, 1907), 209, 20. Although he seems at times to be using the term ‘‘assimilation’’ here to mean cultural blending, it is clear throughout the volume that he means something more like Anglo-conformity. 50. For a contrary opinion, see Neil Larry Shumsky, ‘‘Zangwill’s The Melting Pot: Ethnic Tensions on Stage,’’ American Quarterly 27 (1975): 29–41. See also Biale, ‘‘The Melting Pot.’’ 51. The sermon was reported in ‘‘Rabbi Sees Peril in Intermarriage,’’ New York Times, May 14, 1909, 4. All quotations are from this article. 52. Judah L. Magnes, ‘‘The Melting-Pot,’’ in Arthur A. Goren (ed.), Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). The phrase was picked up by Horace Kallen in his essay ‘‘Democracy versus the Melting-Pot’’ (1915). Kallen’s essay may be found in Sollors (ed.), Theories of Ethnicity, 67–92. 53. This position is more or less the one described by Charles Liebman in The Ambivalent American Jew: Politics, Religion and Family in American Jewish Life (Philadelphia, 1973) and is close to the position Jacoby identifies.

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54. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 70. For Sollors’s reading of the play and its broader American context, see 67–101. 55. Here Zangwill partakes of Sarna’s cult of synthesis. See n. 34 above. See also Sam Girgus, The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984); and Michael P. Kramer, ‘‘New English Typology and the Jewish Question,’’ Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 3 (1992): 97–123.

CHAPTER 15

Hebraism and Yiddishism: Paradigms of Modern Jewish Literary History Anita Norich

In 1974, the Yiddish poet Malka Heifetz Tussman, born in Russia, living in California, published a small volume of poems in Israel. This peripatetic author’s text is paradigmatic of the cosmopolitan, multilingual nature of modern Jewish literature. The book, written by a woman who at various times was a Yiddish teacher, an anarchist, and a writer of Russian poetry and English essays, was titled Unter dayn tseykhn (Under your sign), and it is only one of the reasons she was awarded the Itsik Manger Prize for Yiddish Poetry in 1981. Like much of her poetry, the book enters into many conversations: with Yiddish culture, with the nascent Jewish feminist movement, with American literature, and even with—as its title suggests— contemporary literary theory. Semiotics informs these poems, as do questions of identity and, most emphatically, desire in all its meanings. The titles of Tussman’s six Yiddish collections also indicate these passions. One, from 1958, is titled Mild mayn vild (Mild my wild); another, from 1977, is Haynt iz eybik (Today is forever).1 In Unter dayn tseykhn, Tussman included the poem ‘‘Almoneshaft’’ (Widowhood). The poem begins: Tu epes Mitn mem in ‘‘almone’’ S’zol nit zayn Vi a

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Zshuk Vi a Muk S’krikht iber mayn hoyt Un grablt ‘‘Toyt’’ Un grablt ‘‘Toyt’’ Tu epes Mitn Mem In Almone Two translators of the poem agree about how best to render it into English. Marcia Falk writes: Do something to the W in ‘‘widow’’ so it won’t be like a spider. that crawls on my flesh scratching death, scratching death Do something to the W.2 In Kathryn Hellerstein’s translation, the lines read: Do something With the W in

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‘‘Widow’’ So it shall not be Like a beetle Like a Gnat It crawls over my skin And scratches ‘‘death’’ And scratches ‘‘Death’’ Do something With the W In Widow.3 The poem rejects the category of widowhood, rails against the compassion that the word elicits, and calls for passion instead. The poet seems to cry: ‘‘Do not assume that you have understood anything about me when you harness me with this word; do not think you know me by this sign of mourning and loss.’’ Tussman says nothing so prosaic, but the sentiment is clearly there. She demands that the world listen to the speaker and not to the sign. She insists that identity is more complex and more manifold than the label can ever encompass. When the poem made its way into English—in both cases above, with the cooperation of the poet herself—that mem in almone presented a particularly interesting problem that was easily resolved by both translators’ use of the w in ‘‘widow.’’ The mem is visually central and the w frames the English word, but both offer the same crawling sense, the same softness. The physical centrality of the d in ‘‘widow’’—with its evocation of death and dying—echoes that of mem in Yiddish—with its own evocation of maves/death. The poet announces that almone/widow may signify meaning, but it is a terrible mistake to understand it as nothing more than a sign of mourning and loss. Harnessed to this word by social conventions and solicitous observers, the speaker refuses to be confined to the sentiments that it conjures. In so doing, Tussman demands that the world listen more carefully to the speaker in all her multiplicity and not to the sign. She insists

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that identity is more complex and more manifold than the label can ever encompass. She counters the focus on widowhood and mortality with a strong claim to individuality, to the ongoing life of the body and mind unfettered by the eye of the beholder but attentive to the ‘‘I’’ of the poem. Tussman’s poem offers us a message worth heeding not only when addressing questions of identity, but literary and cultural dynamics more generally. It is a particularly important reminder about the importance of translation itself, about the ongoing life of the poem, in another language and cultural context. As translation theorists have often reminded us, translation should not be regarded merely as a pale imitation or distortion of the original but rather as a re-enlivening of it, encouraging us to see it anew again, or for the first time. Believing in an immutable sign—widow, or Yiddish itself—is tantamount to killing it. In her poem, Tussman goes on to insist that what is needed now is not the compassion—derbaremkayt— that one directs at a widow but rather the passion—glustung—that the living continue to seek. Passion is the life force; compassion extinguishes it. It is an admonition that we must heed. Particularly—but not only—for those of us who study Eastern European Jewish culture or Yiddish, the reminder that when our compassion for the fate of our subject is stronger than our passion for it, we are likely to distort it, to impose upon it, to become deaf to the voices that we would like and ought to hear. Passion distorts, too, of course, but it is at least more provocative, more energetic, more enlivening. Scholars of Jewish literature have devoted considerable attention to questions of identity, nomenclature, boundaries, and intersections, seeking a definitive identity for the texts they study, or simply seeking a working definition of their subject. In such discussions, we often find ourselves in the awkward position of accepting the American view of pornography made famous by Justice Potter Stewart when he said: ‘‘I shall not . . . attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it.’’4 Much legal wrangling later, that line still stands as the most memorable one of the many ensuing debates. Jewish literature (l’havdil [to make a separation between one subject and the other], one should add) has been identified in comparably problematic ways. Despite Hana Wirth-Nesher’s excellent analysis of the question, despite the vocabulary and conceptualization of ethnic literatures in America that Werner Sollors has been instrumental in giving us, and despite the controversy generated by Michael Kramer’s straightforward assertion that Jewish literature is literature written by Jews, the issue is no closer to

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resolution than it has ever been.5 Indeed, the question of what constitutes Jewish literature is as intractable as any other question about identity, as likely to run the risk of offering essentialist definitions as it is to produce imprecise assertions about hybridity or multicultural influences. This dissatisfaction with all the signs that we attach to Jewish literature has nothing to do with the quality of the criticism or theory but rather with the question itself. It cannot be resolved categorically, but only and always situationally, contextually, changing as the history of the Jews and their lived experiences within or among other groups changes. Concerns about how to identify, characterize, and analyze modern Jewish literature are often framed by a series of dialectics or at least juxtapositions that have a good deal in common. They posit a set of tensions between Jewish and non-Jewish languages, diglossia and heteroglossia, exile and homeland, the cosmopole and the shtetl, diaspora and zion, derivation and influence. Is English now a Jewish language? Are Jews most creative when they are at home or when they are outsiders critical of home?6 Did urbanization or modernization make Jewish identity too diffuse and indistinguishable from others? Is there a distinctly Jewish sense of humor, a Jewish aesthetic, a Jewish voice? What is a Jewish book?7 These are familiar and overlapping questions, primarily asking who is inside and who is outside of some border that is always necessarily shifting. They underscore a profound anxiety about gatekeeping and permeability. It is as if we were considering physically porous borders and worrying about the influences that might enter and the privileges that might be lost. These are not, finally, productive questions, certainly not in literary or cultural terms, partly because they ignore the difference of the literary and partly because they are masks for that underlying question of identity that, as Tussman reminds us, is never a fixed category. The contours of Jewish literature are, indeed, defined contextually, by who is asking, who is answering, and when. I. L. Peretz, arguably the most influential of the Yiddish classical writers and the most important Yiddish modernist, asked a version of this question in his first published work, the long autobiographical poem ‘‘Monish.’’ In 1888, he wrote: mayn lid volt andersh gor geklungen / ikh zol far goyim goyish zingen (‘‘my song would sound quite different / if I were to sing for non-Jews in a non-Jewish language’’). He did not—could not—specify just how it would sound, contenting himself with asserting that Yiddish had no language for passion or romance. Twenty years later, when ‘‘Monish’’ was reissued, those words

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had disappeared from the text. Yiddish had not radically altered its lexicon or syntax in order to incorporate new words for sexuality or any aspect of the modern age. Rather, what had changed by 1908 had much more to do with the mass emigration to America now under way, with the Dreyfus affair and the ensuing loss of Jewish faith in the Enlightenment, with the First Zionist Congress (1897) and the attempts to codify a national ideal for the Jews, with the Kishinev pogrom (1903) that once again made the blood libel an excuse for killing Jews, and with the failed Russian Revolution (1905). In the year of the Czernowitz conference that proclaimed Yiddish an ethnonational language of the Jews, the distinctiveness and certainly the limitations of Yiddish were no longer at the forefront of Peretz’s modernist inquiries. In a radically different context, the questions and foci of his imagination necessarily changed. The inquiry into the characteristics of Jewish literature changes in a similar fashion. The concern about just what Jewish literature is in the modern era is an academic version of the equally problematic ‘‘who is a Jew’’ question. The answer may appear easy halakhically, but is less so politically, sociologically, and culturally. Thus we run the risk of defining Jewish literature as literature written by Jews and testing our definition by arguing over individuals whose identity is in question. We ask if Norman Mailer (who was born a Jew) or Heinrich Heine (who famously, controversially, converted to Christianity) or Benjamin Disraeli (who proclaimed a kind of nascent Jews-for-Jesus thinking in order to combine his birth and his conversion into one presumably harmonious whole) should be considered part of a Jewish literary canon. But we might more fruitfully ask what the effects are of including or excluding them or why the question of including them is so fraught. We are not engaged in a hermeneutic inquiry, but a historical, sociological, or political one. If we include these men, have we stretched the category to include nearly everyone with any hint of Jewish blood or even Jewish sympathies? If we exclude them, are we to create a list of Jewishly identifiable markers or thematics that is at least as objectionable as racial markers? Is Marcel Proust in or out? What about Anton Shammas, whose Hebrew writing is nuanced, deeply rooted in contemporary Israeli realities? Or George Eliot, who was never a Jew but, in writing Daniel Deronda (1876), produced one of the most philo-Semitic novels in the English language? Groups are identified as much by who is out as by who is in; it is often easier to identify what one is not than what one is. This question of belonging and what

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Jacob Neusner might describe as ‘‘category formation’’ may be inescapable, but it is not immutable.8 And, by now, the questions no longer yield satisfying or, alas, even provocative responses. What is striking about the invocation of the familiar cases is just how liminal they are and also how they challenge the very notion of canon. These authors and their texts are either dismissed as not clearly Jewish enough, or admitted in precisely because they reflect the outsider status of the Jew, the Jew’s rootlessness or necessary adaptability, his or her—but usually his—status as marginal to the larger culture. Just as there is no agreed-upon canon of modern Jewish letters,9 there is also no agreement nowadays about what we mean by ‘‘normative Judaism.’’ But there is also no reasonable definition of ‘‘normative’’ that defines the Jewish people in terms of repeated attempts at annihilation or conversion or that defines Judaism as a series of responses to destruction from without or indifference from within, as these liminal cases seem to do. Nor can we agree about what belongs within or beyond the Jewish literary canon. Borders, we all know, matter desperately even, or perhaps especially, in the era that is supposedly post-nationalist but hyper-ethnic, where various sorts of deadly religious fundamentalisms abound and where countries on every continent debate the status of ‘‘guest workers’’ and the demographic makeup of their citizens. The focus on who is in and who is out has political and cultural as well as moral implications. The Jewish use of l’havdil—a term I used earlier to distinguish between Jewish literature and pornography—is usually invoked to distinguish between the sacred and the profane. It underscores the need for separation and, indeed, separating things into categories and assigning them a role and even a status is not at issue here. But border control is. While much attention has been devoted to the liminal cases, scholars and readers (understandably) never argue about whether Sholem Aleichem or S. Y. Agnon belongs to the Jewish literary canon. Here, too, it might be more productive to question the term ‘‘canon’’ rather than the term ‘‘Jewish.’’ Canonicity is not a useful category for post-rabbinic Jewish texts or, more pointedly, for modern literary texts. There is no modern Jewish literary canon because, until quite recently, there have been none of the Jewish institutions of power that allow us to make sense of canon formation. In the presence of a Jewish nation, Jewish schools, or a Jewish press, we may be able to talk about a canon. Although each of these institutions has existed at various points in Jewish history, they have not been continuous or even

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unifying for Jews throughout time and place. In their absence, the term lacks force. Canon implies a kind of unity, or at least community, that does not exist for Jewish culture, spread, as it is, all over the world and in scores of languages. Like the border-control concerns, this may well be one that we should not seek to resolve. We will not define ‘‘Jewish culture’’ because, as has often been noted of late, there is no such useful category, certainly no such universal category. We need, instead, as David Biale has most convincingly reminded us, to speak of Jewish culture[s], situated, again like Tussman, in different locations at different times, in contact with varying cultures, influencing and being influenced by them.10 The Jew has been ‘‘read’’ in various symbolic terms at least since the Enlightenment, probably since Exodus, possibly since the banishment from Eden propelled humanity out of myth and into history. The Jew as parvenu, the Jew as capital, and the Jew as sexuality or impotence have been supplemented by the modernist view of the Jew as Every-alienated-man and, more recently, by the postmodernist view of the Jew as the sign of indeterminacy. Jean-Paul Sartre, who, more than any other philosopher, was responsible for giving us the concept of the Other, saw the Jew as the product of antiSemitism, a projection of the anti-Semite’s own worst fears. In this, he was not entirely different from the German Wissenschaft philosophers who believed that with the end of anti-Semitism would come the end of Jewish distinctiveness. In America, Bernard Malamud and many others saw the Jew as the quintessential modern Everyman. George Steiner embraced exile and the productive tensions to which it leads. Cynthia Ozick embraced home and homecoming and the conditions that create a lasting culture. The contestations over the locations of the Jewish imagination and the Jew’s body (to appropriate Sander Gilman’s title) have been intense and constant. The philosopher Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard wrote of jews in the lowercase to highlight their symbolic significance to Western culture without confusing them with real, historical Jews.11 Emmanuel Levinas sought the Jewish ethical foundations embodied in the Talmud as a way of countering the malaise of modernity. These are a not-quite-random set of prominent figures, to which numerous others could be added as representatives of various influential and problematic readings of the Jew.12 Still, neither the views that suggest the universality of the Jewish condition nor those that privilege its particularity should satisfy us here. The Jew as symbol is particularly prominent and dangerous. The fact that many at the forefront of symbolic appropriations of the Jew have

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themselves been Jewish tells us very little about the accuracy or usefulness of such tropes. The symbolic uses of group identities have serious stakes, not least among them the recognition that they contribute to a culture of atrocities of which the Jew is one breathtaking victim. To object to such dangerous symbolic readings need not—indeed, cannot—lead us to seek some essentially Jewish quality or to adjudicate among the various constructions of Judaism and Jewishness as a religion, a history, a set of folkways, a people, a race, a nation. Constructions of the Jew as ‘‘a symbol of’’ or as ‘‘the thing itself’’ are equally limiting and equally politicized. I want to pose a different tension, one that is best represented by the two Jewish languages that are indisputably important to any discussion of Jewish culture: Hebrew and Yiddish. I choose them partly because no one will dispute that they have produced Jewish literatures; partly because they have produced more Jewish literature than any other Jewish language; and partly because, although they seem like more straightforward cases than English, French, German, Arabic, Italian, and even Ladino or other Judeohyphenated languages, they reveal profound oppositions that are worth exploring. The divisions between Hebrew and Yiddish have been mapped onto gendered, political, economic, and cultural divisions within Jewish communities. Thus, Hebrew is gendered as masculine and patriarchal, Yiddish as feminine and maternal. Hebrew (at least to Soviet and other Communists) was the bourgeois language and Yiddish the proletarian language of the (politically and economically redeemable) Jewish people. Hebrew was a sign of the past and then the future, while Yiddish lived in the here and now and then in the past. Modern (post-Haskalah) Jewish literary scholarship has often compared the development of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, commenting on the large number of writers who wrote in both languages, or began in one and switched to the other. The dominant view of Jewish literature has been that at least until the late nineteenth century, Hebrew and Yiddish comprised one literature, the cultural expression of one people that should not be divided along linguistic lines. The assertion has obvious sociological advantages for any idea of Jewish national unity. What we continue to describe euphemistically as the events of the twentieth century—the Russian Revolution, the Soviet purges, the Holocaust, the success of political Zionism, to name only the most obvious—are, in this view, said to have disrupted that essential unity, with inescapable consequences. The view of Jewish literary unity was codified in

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the oft-cited 1918 essay ‘‘Tsvey shprakhn—eyn un eyntsike literatur’’ (Two languages—only one literature) by the Yiddish and Hebrew writer Baal Makhshoves (the pen name of Isidor Eliashev).13 It was further explicated by Shmuel Niger in his 1941 book Di tsveyshprakhikayt fun undzer literatur (The bilingualism of our literature), in which Niger made bilingualism a defining characteristic of Jewish literatures of all times.14 But this insistence on essential unity amid obvious diversity has been more recently and vigorously challenged by Dan Miron. Contra these critics and what he has described as Dov Sadan’s view of ‘‘a dialectical continuity of a unified modern Jewish culture,’’ Miron has argued that Yiddish and Hebrew were not part of one literary system and that they were antagonistic, aimed at different audiences, subject to different aesthetic and historical influences, fiercely seeking independence from each other.15 Yet they were equally informed by the lived, varied experiences of Jews and encounters with Jewish texts. This revision of the dominant view of unity parallels other recent changes in the cultural and theoretical discussions concerning Jewish literature. There was a time—quite recently—when critics spent enormous energies showing that Yiddish and Hebrew were just like other Western literary traditions, following similar patterns of development. Only by claiming commensurability could we claim a place for ourselves in the cultural landscape. Along with the melting pot, this claim seems to have changed as the climate of multicultural discussions more generally have changed. We no longer need to claim likeness to claim interest, and we are all more likely to claim equality these days without the prior claim of similarity. Indeed, in our current cultural moment, we tend to assert implicitly or explicitly not the centrality of our authors and texts, but precisely their marginality, their status as unknown or underappreciated masterpieces, misunderstood because they do not quite fit into accepted paradigms. This status of difference and marginality has become an observation to lament, but it has also become primarily a distinguishing characteristic and a source of pride. I do not want to make a special claim for Hebrew or Yiddish, but rather to consider something we may call Hebraism and something we may call Yiddishism. And, like Tussman, I want us to look beyond our sympathetic understanding of a continuous, unbroken, sanctified Hebraic tradition or a minority, secular, radical Yiddishist one, to incorporate and give new meanings to the view of Hebraism and Yiddishism. We have here a Jewish version of Matthew Arnold’s division between Hebraism and Hellenism,

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although no longer in the service of a muser-shmues, a lesson in morality or ethics. Hebraism and Yiddishism suggest potentially different ways of regarding one’s place in the world and in world cultures. What I mean by Hebraism here is not a language but a worldview, one that insists on autonomy, that lauds independence, that sees itself as part of an ancient canonized tradition from which it derives its authority. It strives toward assertions of authenticity, particularity, and distinctiveness. Normalcy or security—being one among other nations, to put it in more familiar terms—is predicated on one’s status alongside other nations, rather than within them. Hebraism seeks to maintain the distinctiveness of Jewish cultural identity and to remind us of its boundaries. It posits Jewish culture as an organic, continuous whole. The view of Hebrew as chauvinist or insular is, under the rubric of Hebraism, understood instead as an affirmation that creative endeavors, even existence itself, is predicated on autonomy and independence. Yiddishism, in contrast, insists on intersections and interdependence, on the virtues of living within other cultures and developing one’s own productive, if sometimes tense, relationship with them, contributing to them, and being influenced by them. It asserts accretion and synthesis as the bases of cultural vibrancy. It prides itself on its abilities to adapt and change. Thus, the sense of some critics that Yiddish literature was derivative of European literatures, unable to develop an independent character of its own and therefore doomed to imitation is, under the rubric of Yiddishism, understood instead as a positive response embracing its own openness, adaptability, and multicultural perspective. If, by multiculturalism, we mean the relationships among a wide range of diverse, distinct cultural influences in which something new is created, then Yiddishism offers the paradigmatic example of that definition. Yiddish as a fusion language, Jews as always part of a multilinguistic universe, and the fact that virtually every Yiddish writer or reader was also conversant in some other language all underscore this multiplicity. There is no serious debate nowadays that suggests that Jewish culture has ever been so insular as to be free of non-Jewish sources and influences. But under the sign of Hebraism, the impact of the non-Jewish world is more masked; diverse sources are made to appear seamless and indistinguishable, part of one organic, continuing whole. Under the sign of Yiddishism, traces of these sources remain clearer; they create something new but leave clearly discernible elements. As in pentimento or palimpsest, these

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traces may be covered over; but now and then, the canvas reveals what came before. If Hebraism represents the clearest marker of boundaries, and Yiddishism the clearest marker of intersections, then the fact that both have and continue to inform Jewish literatures should tell us something about the workings of Jewish literature. Neither maintaining strict boundaries between Jews and others nor looking for points of intersection is a guarantee of anything—not of viability, not of security, and certainly not of authority or authenticity. The slipperiness between these two positions is a wonderfully productive one that warns against embracing one at the expense of the other. Thus, the debates at Czernowitz a century ago were not about the indefinite or definite article (i.e., is Yiddish a national language of the Jewish people or the national language?) but about the possibilities of inclusiveness and plurality and the refusal to reject either path of Jewish cultural development. Niger’s insistence on bilingualism can be seen not merely as an attempt by a committed Yiddishist to secure a respectable place for Yiddish at the Jewish literary table but also as an argument, actually in the Hebraist vein, in favor of a unified, continuous Jewish cultural tradition. In this, he is not so different from Sadan. Miron’s rejection of that view—written in Hebrew by a prominent critic of Hebrew and Israeli culture and of Yiddish literature—is not an attempt to destroy any notion of Jewish culture but rather to expand its parameters and to see diversity where others see unity. These are not mutually exclusive perspectives but mutually necessary ones. For many, all this will raise the still-vexed question of the particular status of Hebrew nowadays and the famous reversal between Hebrew and Yiddish that took place in the twentieth century. Isaac Bashevis Singer observed this switch in the dreadful year of 1943, commenting that what had once been the language of the Jewish street (Yiddish) was now relegated to the language of the past, while Hebrew, once the language of scholarship and learning, was rapidly taking its place on new Jewish streets.16 Hebrew and Yiddish, like Hebraism and Yiddishism, can occupy each other’s discursive positions for a while and can switch roles or share them. Equally striking is the extent to which their perceived centrality to Jewish culture can become no more than a trace, a gesture. The Jewish authenticity and authority that adheres to Hebrew—even in the absence of a knowledge of Hebrew and Hebrew texts—is rather like the contemporary gesturing at

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Yiddish: both are understood as sure markers of something Jewish, but they seem unlikely to be essential markers in our own day or the days to come. Forty years ago, in an address provocatively called ‘‘The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History’’ to the graduating class of Hebrew College, Gerson Cohen countered the idea that only a Jewish culture created in Hebrew could ‘‘contribute anything enduring to . . . Jewish culture.’’ A culture, he noted, should not be judged ‘‘by the extent to which it survives for future generations’’ but rather by its relevance and significance in its own time.17 This may seem to invoke Yiddish, but it refers more directly to those languages used by Jews throughout their history and now considered ‘‘lost.’’ Unless we are willing to dismiss Jewish creativity in other languages—past and present, Aramaic and English, Greek and German—we cannot consider them lost at all. It is also worth recalling Avrom Sutskever’s haunting questions, understood as a post-Holocaust inquiry into the traces of his lost world: Ver vet blaybn? Vos vet blaybn? (Who will remain? What will remain?), the poet asks. The Israeli Yiddish writer leads us to conclude that fantasy, words, religious practice, and belief are all possible answers; but clearly, the force of the question is in the fact that it is asked (and perhaps that it is asked in Yiddish). Other answers, perhaps more satisfying because more definitive, do us a disservice because they would distance us from the wider net appropriately cast by the range of languages and experiences of the Jewish imagination and the Jewish imaginary. It is certainly time to move away from the dialectics of the discussion (Is this a Jewish writer? Is this a Jewish text?) and to replace the tensions of the dialectics and the yes/no responses they seek with a different model. That model would examine diachronic shifts even as it compares Jewish communities synchronically. It would privilege conversation over debate, multiplicity over clarity. It would, in short, be appropriately located in current critical and theoretical discourse even as it is grounded in Hebrew and Yiddish sources and those of the territorial languages of Jewish history. In a collection of poems printed mid-career (Shotns fun gedenken [Shadows of remembering], 1965), Malka Heifetz Tussman wrote another poem warning about the limitations of one-dimensional understandings of our signs. ‘‘Vaser on loshn’’ (Water without speech) foreshadows the rebellious hermeneutics of ‘‘Almoneshaft.’’ Here, the sea tears a rib from its side and says to it: Gey, / Leyg zikh dortn, / Zay mir a simen az ikh bin / Groys (Go, / Lie down there, / Be a sign for me that I am / Great). Unmistakably refer-

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encing the biblical story of Adam and Eve, the poem shows once again the limitations of our signs. It concludes with yet another insistent question that is at once about women, about Yiddish, about poetry, and about the act of speaking and interpreting: Vos ken nokh troyeriker zayn / Vi vaser / On loshn? (What can be even sadder / Than water / Without speech?).18 Urging us all to speak, to use our language(s), to listen more closely, to refuse to be made into or to make signs that become silent, Tussman reminds us that the questions that we may think are fixed always need to be reconsidered. The homology between Tussman’s poems and Jewish literatures is clear. Hebraism and Yiddishism are not stagnant; neither one is a silent partner to the other or subordinate to the other. They are, as yet another biblical story tells us about man and woman, different yet equal. And both remain as dynamic ideas that continue to inform Jewish culture. What we may finally see as defining Jewish literature is the series of conversations around defining Jewish literature—the openness to the range of experiences, influences, contexts of Jewishness and Judaism in the modern era and in the past, and the unwillingness to dismiss any of them. The rest, as Rabbi Hillel said in a different context, is merely commentary. Now we can go and learn.19 Notes A version of this essay was published as Anita Norich, ‘‘Under Whose Sign?: Hebraism and Yiddishism as Paradigms of Jewish Literary History.’’ Reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association of America from PMLA, vol. 125, no. 3 (May 2010): 774–84. 1. Malka Heifetz Tussman, Mild mayn vild (Los Angeles, 1958), and Haynt iz eybik (Tel Aviv, 1977). Tussman’s other books include Lider (Poems) (Los Angeles, 1949), Shotns fun gedenken (Shadows of remembering) (Tel Aviv, 1965), and Bleter faln nit (Leaves do not fall) (Tel Aviv, 1972). 2. Marcia Falk (trans. and ed.), With Teeth in the Earth: Selected Poems of Malka Heifetz Tussman (Detroit, 1992), 129. The poem also appears in Falk’s translation in Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk (eds), The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New York, 1987), 502. 3. Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav (trans.), with Kathryn Hellerstein, Brian McHale, and Anita Norich, American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (Berkeley, Calif., 1986), 603. 4. Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 197 (1964). 5. Hana Wirth-Nesher (ed.), What Is Jewish Literature? (Philadelphia, 1994) (she addresses the issue in the 1st ed.); and Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York, 1986). See Michael P. Kramer, ‘‘Race, Literary

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History, and the ‘Jewish’ Question,’’ Prooftexts 21/3 (fall 2001): 287–321; and, in the same issue, ‘‘A Response from Bryan Cheyette’’ (322–24); ‘‘A Response from Morris Dickstein’’ (324–27); ‘‘A Response from Anne Golomb Hoffman’’ (328–30); ‘‘A Response from Hanna Naveh’’ (331–32); ‘‘A Response from Gershon Shaked’’ (332–34); and ‘‘Michael P. Kramer Replies’’ (335–49). 6. See Cynthia Ozick’s essay (‘‘Toward Yavneh?’’) in response to George Steiner, both initially delivered as lectures in Israel. She begins her essay: ‘‘Two years ago an illustrious man of letters came out of Diaspora to this place [Israel] and offered Exile as a metaphor for the Essential Jew, himself as a metaphor of Exile’’ (20). Cynthia Ozick, ‘‘America: Toward Yavneh,’’ in Wirth-Nesher (ed.), What Is Jewish Literature?, 20–35. First delivered at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth, Israel, summer 1970. George Steiner, ‘‘Our Homeland, the Text,’’ Salmagundi 66 (1985): 4–25. 7. See the answers to this question by Ruth Wisse and Cynthia Ozick. Wisse lambasted American writers (E. L. Doctorow and Grace Paley are her primary examples) ‘‘who treat Jewishness as whatever they wish it to be.’’ Ozick wrote that a Jewish book is necessarily ‘‘didactic’’ and that it can be identified not by its author but by its content. ‘‘What’s a Jewish Book? Cynthia Ozick: Promoting Virtue Through Learning’’ and ‘‘What’s a Jewish Book? Ruth Wisse: Honest Reflections of Moral Collapse,’’ Forward, October 26, 2001, both on B1. 8. For a fuller view of Neusner’s sense of the stakes in category formation, see, especially, Jacob Neusner, Ancient Judaism and Modern Category-Formation (Lanham, Md., 1986). 9. For a different view of the possibilities of a Jewish canon, see Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (New York, 2000). 10. David Biale (ed.), Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York, 2002). See also Anita Norich and Yaron Z. Eliav (eds.), Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Contexts and Intertexts (Providence, R.I., 2008). 11. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), and Heidegger and ‘‘the jews,’’ trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis, 1990). See also Brian Cheyette and Laura Marcus (eds.), Modernity, Culture, and ‘‘the Jew’’ (Cambridge, 1998), 188–96. 12. Hana Wirth-Nesher writes that in Irving Malin and Irwin Stark’s ‘‘landmark essay,’’ ‘‘the Jew is seen to be an existential hero and therefore a modern Everyman,’’ in idem (ed.), What Is Jewish Literature?, 216; Irving Malin and Irwin Stark (eds.), Breakthrough: A Treasury of Contemporary American Jewish Literature (New York, 1964), introduction. Reprinted in Abraham Chapman (ed.), Jewish-American Literature: An Anthology of Fiction, Poetry, Autobiography, and Criticism (New York, 1974), 665–90. See also Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York, 1948); Ozick, ‘‘America: Toward Yavneh’’; Steiner, ‘‘Our Homeland, the Text’’; Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition and Heidegger and ‘‘the jews’’; Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago, 1980); Sander Gilman,

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The Jew’s Body (New York, 1991); Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington, Ind., 1994); and idem, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore, 1990). 13. In Petrograder Tageblatt (Petrograd, 1918). Reprinted in Geklibene verk (New York, 1953). Hana Wirth-Nesher’s translation of Baal Makhshoves’s ‘‘One Literature in Two Languages’’ appears in Wirth-Nesher (ed.), What Is Jewish Literature?, 69–77. 14. Shmuel Niger, Di tsveyshprakhikayt fun undzer literatur (The bilingualism of our literature) (Detroit, 1941). 15. Dan Miron, ‘‘One Modern Klal Yisroel Literature?,’’ in idem, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse, N.Y., 2000), 358. The essay first appeared in Hebrew in his Im lo tihye yerushalayim (If there will be no Jerusalem) (Tel Aviv, 1978), 143–62. See also Miron, Harpiya l’tsorekh ngiya (From continuity to contiguity) (Tel Aviv, 2005), and ‘‘Contiguity versus Continuity in the Jewish Literary Complex,’’ in Norich and Eliav (eds.), Jewish Literatures and Cultures, 9–36. 16. Bashevis (I. B. Singer), ‘‘Problemen fun der yidisher proze in amerike’’ (Problems of Yiddish prose in America), Svive 2 (March–April 1943): 2–13. Avraham Novershtern documented these realities in an essay whose title summarized the status of Yiddish a generation later: ‘‘From the Folk to the Academics: Study and Research of Yiddish after the Holocaust,’’ Encyclopaedia Judaica Yearbook (Jerusalem, 1988–89), 14–24. See also Anita Norich, ‘‘Yiddish Literary Studies: The Future of the Past,’’ Modern Judaism 10 (fall 1990): 297–309. 17. Gerson Cohen, ‘‘The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History,’’ Boston, 1966, reprinted in Gerson Cohen, Jewish History and Jewish Destiny (New York, 1997), 149. 18. In Tussman, Shotns fun gedenken (my translation; a different translation— titled ‘‘Water Without Sound’’—appears in Falk’s With Teeth in the Earth). 19. Hillel, famously, was speaking to a man who had sought to learn all of Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel’s response was ‘‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah, and the rest is merely commentary. Now go and learn’’ (Bavli Shabbat 31a).

CONTRIBUTORS

Olga Borovaya received a Ph.D. from the Russian State University for the Humanities. Since 1998, she has been conducting research and teaching at Stanford and other American universities, focusing on Ladino print culture in the late Ottoman period. She has written articles on this subject and a book on the belles lettres and theater of Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire (Moscow, 2005). She is finishing a book, Ladino Print Culture in Modern Times: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire (1845–1908), to be published by Indiana University Press. She is also completing a translation and study of a sixteenth-century Ladino narrative by Rabbi Moses Almosnino. Marc Caplan received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University in 2003. He then held appointments at Indiana University and Harvard, as well as a Betsy and Morris Shuch Term Fellowship in 2004–5 at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2006, he has served as the first Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Professor of Yiddish Literature, Language, and Culture at Johns Hopkins University. Amelia Glaser is assistant professor of Russian and comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her work centers on JewishSlavic literary relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently completing a book-length study of images of rural marketplaces in Russian, Yiddish, and Ukrainian literature. A collection of her translations, titled Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2005. Kathryn Hellerstein is associate professor of Yiddish at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include a translation and study of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s poems, In New York: A Selection (Jewish Publication Society, 1982), Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky (Wayne State University Press, 1999), and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology

344

Contributors

(coeditor; W. W. Norton, 2001). Her articles include ‘‘Beyond the Purimshpil: Reivnenting the Scroll of Esther in Modern Yiddish Poems,’’ in Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe, edited by Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Her poems and translations have been widely published, and she is poetry editor of Kerem and Nashim. Her forthcoming book is A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish. Sheila E. Jelen is associate professor of English and Jewish studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in modern Jewish literatures. She is the author of Intimations of Difference: Dvora Baron in the Modern Hebrew Renaissance (Syracuse University Press, 2007) and coeditor, with Shachar Pinsker, of Hebrew, Gender and Modernity: Critical Responses to Dvora Baron’s Fiction (University of Maryland Press, 2007). With Eliyana Adler, she coedited Jewish Literature and History: An Interdisciplinary Conversation (University of Maryland Press, 2008). Jelen is an associate editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History. Michael P. Kramer is director of the Lechter Institute for Literary Research and the Anne Shachter-Smith Memorial Project in Literature at Bar-Ilan University. In addition to numerous essays on Jewish and American literature and culture, he is the author of Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton University Press, 1992); editor of New Essays on Seize the Day (Cambridge University Press, 1998); and coeditor, with Hana Wirth-Nesher, of The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He is also the founding editor of MAGGID: A Journal of Jewish Literature. Currently he is working on a translation of S. Y. Agnon’s And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight. L. Scott Lerner is professor of French and Italian at Franklin & Marshall College. In 2008–9, he was a fellow of the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Michigan. He is presently completing a book, After Exile: Narrative and Jewish Experience from the French Revolution to Proust, and is at work on another book, Over the Ruins of the Ancient Ghettos: Narrative and Jewish Identity in United Italy. Most recently, his work has appeared in Diacritics and Modern Fiction Studies. Alan Mintz is the Chana Kekst Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is the author of Popular Culture and the Shaping

Contributors

345

of Holocaust Memory in America (University of Washington Press, 2001) and Translating Israel: The Reception of Hebrew Literature in America (Syracuse University Press, 2001), among many other works. With David Roskies, he cofounded and for many years edited Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History. He is currently completing a critical introduction to American Hebrew poetry, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.. Gideon Nevo is a senior lecturer in the Department of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is the author of Seven Days in the Negev: On ‘‘Days of Ziklag’’ by S. Yizhar (Hakibutz Hame’uhad, 2005) and So Far, a novel (Hakibutz Hame’uhad, New Library, 1996). His Seat of the Scornful: The Rhetoric of Hebrew Satire will be published by Heksherim Institute and Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir in 2010. Anita Norich is professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan. Her most recent book is Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture in America During the Holocaust (Stanford University Press, 2007). She is also the author of The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (Indiana University Press, 1991) and coeditor of Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext (Brown University Press, 2008) and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Harvard University Press, 1992). She teaches, lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning Yiddish language and literature, modern Jewish culture, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature. Alan Rosen was a 2006–9 research fellow at the Fondation pour la Me´moire de la Shoah. He is the author most recently of The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of English (University of Nebraska Press, 2005); editor of Approaches to Teaching Wiesel’s Night (Modern Language Association, 2007); and collaborator on a French edition of I Did Not Interview the Dead, by David Boder (Tallandier, 2006). He lectures on Holocaust Literature at the International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem. His current book project is A New Index for Time: Calendars and the Holocaust. Nicham Ross is a lecturer in the Department of Jewish Thought at BenGurion University of the Negev and director of the Gandel Institute for

346

Contributors

Adult Jewish Learning at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed a Ph.D. in Jewish thought at Ben-Gurion University and specializes in issues of identity and tradition in twentieth-century Jewish literature. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to carry out his postdoctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Dov Rappel prize for research in Jewish thought, and the Goren-Goldstein Scholarship, he is also a research fellow at the Lamda Pozen Foundation for Secular Jewish Culture. Laurence Roth is professor of English and Jewish studies and director of the Jewish studies program at Susquehanna University. He is the author of Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories (Rutgers University Press, 2004) and numerous essays on American Jewish popular literature. He is also editor of Modern Language Studies, the scholarly journal of the Northeast Modern Language Association. He is currently coediting, with Nadia Valman, The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Jewish Cultures. Anita Shapira is the Ruben Merenfeld Professor Emerita in the Study of Zionism at Tel Aviv University. She specializes in modern and contemporary Jewish history, especially its social and cultural aspects and questions of identity. Her Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (Stanford University Press, 2000) won the National Jewish Book Award. She has published numerous other books and articles, among them three biographies: Berl: The Biography of a Socialist Zionist, Berl Katznelson 1887– 1944 (Cambridge University Press, 1984), Yigal Allon, Native Son: A Biography (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), and J. H. Brenner: A Life (Am Oved, 2008). She was awarded the Israel Prize in History in 2008. Liliane Weissberg is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences and professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Geistersprache: Philosophischer und literarischer Diskurs im spa¨ten achtzehnten Jahrhundert (1990) and Edgar Allan Poe (1991); and editor of Weiblichkeit und Maskerade (1994), Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (with Dan BenAmos, 1999), and Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (with J. Gerald Kennedy, 2001). She has issued a critical edition of Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1997) and has published many essays in the field of German Jewish studies. She has just completed a book on late eighteenth-century German Jewish autobiographies.

INDEX

Abramovitsh, Sholem Yankel. See Mendele Moykher-Sforim (S. Y. Abramovitsh) acculturation, 31–32, 83–84, 304, 312, 314, 318– 20, 326n55. See also amalgamation; The Misfit (Ne ko dvoru [Khin]) Acmeism, 68, 76, 88n33 Adam (biblical figure), 71–72, 340 Agnon, Shmuel Yosef, 105, 109, 113–14, 160 Aguilar, Grace, 5 Ahad Ha‘am, 7, 9, 151, 162, 241, 314 Ahavat Tsiyon (Mapu), 6 Akimovitch, Semyon. See An-sky, S. Aksenfeld, Yisroel, 134, 142n7 aliyah to Land of Israel, 148, 157–58, 160, 172, 249–50 Alliance Israe´lite Universelle (AIU), 10, 83, 84, 94–95, 100 Alter, Robert, 221 Alterman, Natan: American Jewry in poetry of, 242–43, 246–48, 250–52, 258; on American presidential elections, 243–44; antiDiasporic critique of, 17, 243–46; ethos of loyalty, 256–58; figure of the living dead in poetry of, 257; Holocaust in poetry of, 252–53; Judenrat in poems of, 17, 252–55, 256, 258; personified figure of Time, 256–57; on Zionism, 17, 243–46, 248–50, 258. Works of: ‘‘Al shtei hadrahim,’’ 255; ‘‘The Debts of the State,’’ 256; ‘‘Hanima hameyuhedet,’’ 243–44; ‘‘Hovot hamedina,’’ 247; ‘‘Kabalat panim beboston ve’ehad hayehudim,’’ 242–43, 246–47; ‘‘Magash hakesef,’’ 254; ‘‘Netsigut o sohnut musmehet,’’ 252; ‘‘New Pumbedita,’’ 250–51; ‘‘Plitat hapeh hanora’ah,’’ 252; ‘‘Sakanat hatsioni hanitshi,’’ 252; ‘‘The Seventh Column’’ (Alterman), 17, 237, 238;

‘‘Sihat shlomei emonim,’’ 252; ‘‘Svara mufrehet,’’ 252; ‘‘Tsioney All Right,’’ 251–52; ‘‘Ule‘inyan ‘halekah lador,’ ’’ 255–56; ‘‘Yom hazikaron vehamordim,’’ 254 amalgamation, 315–18, 325n49 American Hebrew poets and writers: America portrayals in works of, 181; Bialik’s influence on, 169–70; detractors in Palestine, 177; eroticism in works of, 174– 76, 179, 181–86, 188n18; European literature, 172; narratives of return, 306; public school education of, 169, 171; tensions with American Jewish community, 181; traditional world of faith left behind by, 187n8. See also American Yiddish poetry; Halkin, Simon; Silberschlag, Eisig American Jewry: Alterman’s poems about, 242–43, 246–48; assimilation as fulfillment/self-fulfillment, 315; exilic existence of, 242; Holocaust survivors on, 268, 269, 278n16; as idealists, 321; identification of American ideas as Jewish ideas, 312; interest in Jewish books, 287, 301n17; Jewish identity of, 242, 314, 315; old Jew of the shtetl compared with, 245; in poetry of Natan Alterman, 242, 250–52, 258; social mobility of, 287; State of Israel, 246–47, 250–51. See also The Melting-Pot (Zangwill) American Yiddish poetry: eroticism in, 200– 202, 204–6; objectification of women in, 200, 201–2; Salome’s dance as motif in, 196–98, 210n20, 210n25; sexuality in works of, 190–91, 198–204. See also Dropkin, Celia; Tussman, Malka Heifetz Anagnostou, Yiorgos, 234n9 Anokhi, Zalman Yizhak, 155

348

Index

An-sky, S., 214–15, 236n35 Antin, Mary, 230, 311, 312, 315 anti-Semitism: Dreyfus affair, 135–38, 144n27, 145n29; Hep! Hep! riots, 44, 47, 60; introduction of term, 33, 34; the Jewish problem, 315; Jewish stereotypes, 91, 93, 242–43, 334; The Melting-Pot (Zangwill), 316; in modern times, 240–41; pogroms, 81n29, 315–16; Wandering Jew, 27, 28, 244–45, 260n14; words used by Christians to express, 91 apostasy narratives, 227, 228, 230, 231–32 Arendt, Hannah, 32 Arnold, Matthew, 336–37 Asch, Sholem, 159, 167n54 assimilation: Ahad Ha‘am on, 241, 314; biology in, 310–11; definition of, 307–13; Dreyfus affair as reflection on, 135–36; ethnic literary works, 304–5; identificational assimilation, 79n4; intermarriage, 16, 35, 315–18, 319–20; internalization of antiSemitic images, 69–70; language and, 26, 83, 84, 264, 314; racial destiny, 318; and rejection of traditional Jewish identity, 69–70; religious conversion as, 35, 67, 73, 74–75; as solution to the Jewish problem, 315; views on, 305–9, 316–18. See also The Melting-Pot (Zangwill); The Misfit (Ne ko dvoru [Khin]) Auerbach, Rachel, 264 Baal Makhshoves (Eliashev, Israel Isidor), 22n13, 153, 336 Baal Shem Tov (Besht), 105, 106, 114, 178 Bacon, Yitzhak, 165–66n30 Band, Arnold, 172, 187n4 Baron, Dvora, 218, 219, 235n17 Bat-Zion (Shapiro’s protagonist), 223, 225–27 Bauman, Zygmunt, 269 Bavli, Hillel, 181, 187n1 Baxter, John, 141–42n2 Beck, Ulrich, 304 Behrman House, 284, 285, 287–88 Beilin, Asher, 166n39, 167n54 Ben-Gurion, David, 157–58, 163, 249, 250, 261n20 Benjamin, Walter, 144n24, 280, 281–82, 290, 291, 295 Ben-Or, Aharon (Orinovski), 125n24 ben Yehezkel, Mordechai, 110

Ben Yehuda, Eliezer, 166n40 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 304 Berdyczewski, Micha Josef, 110–11, 213, 217, 239, 259n7 Bergelson, Dovid, 227 Berkowitz, Yitzhak Dov, 155 Berlin Jews, 26, 27–31, 29, 34–37. See also Jewish women in Berlin; salons Berman, Antoine, 276 ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ (Peretz): criticism of, 105, 108–9; dancing on Simhat Torah, 107, 122n5; Hasidism portrayed in, 105, 106, 108–9, 112–14, 116–17, 124n14; lack of deference to teacher in, 106, 109, 110, 124n14; Mitnagedism in, 114–15; modernity, 112–13, 121; rabbinic scholastics in, 106, 109, 124n14. See also Reb Noah’ke of Biale (‘‘Between Two Mountains’’) Bhabha, Homi, 78 Biale, David, 13, 16, 21n5, 48, 316 Bialer Rebbe. See Reb Noah’ke of Biale (‘‘Between Two Mountains’’) Bialik, Hayyim Nahman, 12, 150, 153, 156, 160, 169, 213, 241 Bigart, Jacques, 95 Bikhowsky, Simeon, 154 Bishevilim bodedim (Silberschlag): arrangement of poems in, 178; classical Hebrew poetic influences in, 176–77, 188n13; eroticism in, 174–76; Hebraic erudition in, 175–76; lyric precision in, 177; ode to Ibn Gabirol, 176–77; poetic authority in, 177; shift from sensual intoxication to awareness of temporality, 176 Boas, Franz, 315 Boder interview transcripts (David Boder): bibliography of Boder’s publications, 277n11; Boder’s personality, 273–74; Boder’s response to interviewee’s transcript, 269–70; choices of language as expression of feelings, 269–70; diglossia and audience, 269–70; English-speaking audience for, 267–68, 269–70, 279n24; ‘‘ethnic’’ substituted for ‘‘ethical,’’ 271; interviewees’ choices of language, 267–69 278n13, 278n19; languages of interviews, 266; Polish-language interviews, 14, 267–70, 276, 278n19; on translation strategies, 271–72 book collecting: Benjamin on, 280, 281–82, 290, 291, 295; bookplates, 301n23; con-

Index sciousness of, 292–93, 302n26; transmissibility of a collection, 295 bookstores, Jewish: authors carried by, 281, 285, 286; as book collection, 282–83; as community, 292–93; customer demands, 281; discovering books in, 280–81; growth in traditional Jewish book sector, 296, 298; history of, 284–85; Jewish Book Council of America, 287, 301n17; on Lower East Side, New York, 2–3, 286, 298, 300n14; as moykher sforim, 286; post-World War I era, 286, 291; in post-World War II era, 287; publishing companies, 286; publishing versus bookselling, 285, 300n6; and rise in Jewish learning, 289; sale of non-book items in, 285–86, 288, 300n7; superstores, 296. See also J. Roth / Bookseller Borochov, Ber, 22n13, 164n10 Borovaya, Olga, 10 Bossuet, Jacques Be´nigne, 52–55, 64n32 Brainin, Reuven, 156 Brenner, Joseph Hayyim: on anxieties of mastering spoken Hebrew, 157; autobiographical voice in works of, 220; Bund publications of, 152–53, 165n20, 165n21; ethnographic reception of, 217; Hebrew dialogue in works of, 152; on Hebrew language instruction, 156, 160–61; Homel period of, 152, 156; on importance of Hebrew language, 148–49, 152–54, 159–60; on Israeli Yiddish culture, 161; on a Jewish national language, 159–60; on the language wars, 158, 161–62; London period of, 153– 54, 156, 165n20, 166n39; murder of, 162; negation of galut by, 239, 240, 260n8; Palestine period of, 157, 160; rhetoric of sincerity, 222, 223; Russian-to-Yiddish translation of, 153–54; on speaking Hebrew in the Diaspora, 156, 157, 160; spoken Hebrew of, 153, 155, 156, 157; tensions with Hebrew and Yiddish, 148, 152–54, 159–60, 165n20, 165n21; Yiddish as spoken language of, 152, 156, 157; Yiddish translations of, 154; Yiddish works of, 152–53, 165n20; on Zionism, 148–49, 161–62. Works of: Bahoref, 152, 232; Hame‘orer (journal), 148, 154–58; Me‘ever ligvulim, 152; Misaviv lanekuda, 148, 153, 156 Brinker, Menachem, 222 Brisker Rav. See Gaon of Brisk (‘‘Between Two Mountains’’)

349

Brisk method of Torah study, 107, 122n6 Buber, Martin, 110, 111, 124n19, 136n30 Buchenwald, 271–74, 279n29 Bund, 149, 151–53, 163, 164n10, 165n20, 165n21 Bynum, Carolyn, 71 Cahan, Abraham, 2–3, 236n35, 309, 314 Caplan, Marc, 18, 22n13 cathedrals, 71, 72–73, 75–76 Cavanagh, Clare, 80n11, 82n33 Chani, Avraham, 122–23n6 Chateaubriand, Franc¸ois Rene´ de, 54 Christianity: as aesthetic form, 71, 72; cathedrals, 71, 72–73, 75–76; Chateaubriand on, 54; churches, 67, 71, 72, 79; concept of Jewish witness, 61–62; conversion to, 35, 67, 73, 74–75; Jesus, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 64n32; as paganized Judaism, 46; twelve epochs, 52, 64n32 churches, 67, 71, 72, 79 Clifford, James, 291 coachman (‘‘Between Two Mountains’’), 107, 125n24 Cohen, Gerson, 339 Commons, John R., 316, 317, 318, 325n49 concentration camps, 263–64, 265, 271–74, 277n9 counterhistory, 48, 56, 63n17 critique of conformity (Emerson), 310 Cuddihy, John Murray, 145n29 cult of synthesis (Sarna), 312, 318, 320, 326n55 cultural borrowing (hikui shel hitharut), 7 Czernowitz conference, 159, 162, 167n54, 332, 338 Darmesteter, James, 45–46 Davar (newspaper), 17, 237 David Quixano (character in The Melting Pot [Zangwill]), 315–17, 319–21 ‘‘Debate of the Two Paths’’ (pulmus shtei hadrakhim), 254 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 54 Degel mahane Ephraim (Zaddik of Sadilikow), 117 Der Yidisher Kemfer (periodical), 154 Der Yud, 122n5, 151, 165n20 Diaspora: aesthetic considerations, 239–40; Natan Alterman on, 17, 243–46; Hebrew language in, 149, 156, 157, 160; Jewish polit-

350

Index

Diaspora (continued ) ical parties on, 151; negation of galut, 238– 41, 259n7, 260n8; as negative form of existence, 239–40; relocation to the Land of Israel, 151; spiritual considerations, 240. See also American Jewry; The Melting-Pot (Zangwill); Zionism Dick, Isaac Meir, 5 Die Naye Tsayt, 153 Die Yudishe Freiheit, 154 Discourse on Universal History (Bossuet), 52, 53 dispatches from Le´vy’s travels: from Adrianople, 85, 87, 89–92, 97–98; attitudes toward Jewish religious practice, 86–87, 93–96; description of synagogue attendance in Adrianople, 86–87; differences between French and Ladino accounts, 90–91, 99– 100; ethnographic viewpoint in, 86–87, 93–97; in French, 86–91, 90, 92; on Jewish identity in Vienna, 88; to Le Journal de Salique, 86–91; in Ladino, 86–90, 93; Le´vy’s Jewish identity reflected in, 92–93; negative images of Jews in, 86–87, 93, 97–98; Ninth of Av observances, 85, 87, 91–93, 97–98; Yom Kippur observance in Vienna, 86–87, 90 displaced persons, interview project (David Boder, 1946). See Boder interview transcripts (David Boder) Disraeli, Benjamin, 332 Doctorow, E. L., 312, 315 DP interview project (David Boder, 1946). See Boder interview transcripts (David Boder) Dreyfus affair, 135–38, 144n27, 145n29 ‘‘Dreyfus in Kasrilevke,’’ 13, 135–38, 144n27, 145n29, 145n31 Dropkin, Celia: background of, 192–93, 209n11; desire articulated by, 199–200; objectification of the male body, 198, 211n37; publication of poetry, 193; Salome’s dance, 196–98, 210n20, 210n25; selfdestructive desire in poetry of, 194–95; sexuality in poetry of, 191–95, 199–201, 205–7; traditional modesty (tsnies) challenged by, 191–95, 207–8. Works of: ‘‘A libe briv,’’ 204–6; ‘‘Mayne mame,’’ 191–92; ‘‘Di tsirkus dame’’ (Circus Lady), 193–94, 195, 199–200, 201

Dubnow, Simeon, 110 Du Bois, W. E. B., 304, 305 Eastman, Charles, 304 Efros, Israel, 172, 177, 187n1 Einhorn, David, 93 Eliashev, Israel Isidor (Baal Makhshoves), 22n13, 153, 336 Eliot, George, 332 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 310 English language, 219, 267, 314, 329 epistolary history, 15, 59–60, 61 La Epoka, 11, 84–89, 92–93, 98–100 Epstein, Avraham, 174, 176 Epstein, Jason, 295–96 Eretz Israel. See Land of Israel; State of Israel Erik, Max, 131, 141n1, 144n21, 145n31 eroticism, 174–76, 179, 181–82, 184–86, 188n18, 198–204 ethnography: ethnopoetics, 17–18, 213–14, 216, 222–23, 233n3, 233n4; Kacyzne as Ansky’s ethnographer, 236n35; photographs and, 229–32, 236n35; poet as ethnographer, 215, 217; in translation process, 219, 232; in travelogues, 86–87, 93–97; in work of women Yiddish writers, 215, 217, 218, 224, 227, 228 Etmoli (My Yesterday [Kalish]): departure from Hasidic world, 227–30; first-person change to third-person in narration, 230; poet as ethnographer in, 215, 217 Eve (biblical figure), 340 Faber, Salamon, 290 Falk, Marcia, 328 Feinstein, Moshe, 187n1 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 35, 36, 37 Fiedler, Leslie, 304 Fishberg, Maurice, 315 Foa, Euge´nie, 5 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 216 Fogel, David, 227 Forverts, 193, 209n13, 230, 236n35 France, 50–51, 60, 100 Franco, Moı¨se, 96–97 Francophone periodicals. See Le Journal de Salonique Freehof, Solomon, 289 Freidin, Gregory, 77, 81n18, 81n31 French Jews: citizenship of, 48; Dreyfus

Index affair, 135–38, 144n27, 145n29; regeneration paradigm, 50–51, 64n29; on synagogue reform, 89; Westernizing influence of, 83 French language, 10, 83, 86–91, 92 Freud, Sigmund, 78 Friedlander, Yehuda, 104 Frischmann, David, 216–17, 219, 222, 223 Frohberg, Regina (ne´e Rebecca Salomon), 37–38, 39 froyen-lider, 189–90, 195 Funkenstein, Amos, 48 galut. See Diaspora Gaon of Brisk (‘‘Between Two Mountains’’), 106–10, 116, 123n11, 124n14 Gaon of Vilna, 114, 122n6 Gartner, Lloyd, 305 gender: of artist, 202, 211n37; gendering of language, 155–56, 335; gendering of tea, 33, 39; impact of Jewish emancipation, 30; masculinization of churches, 71; medicine as social control, 38–39; religious studies, 223; spaces, 30–33, 223; talush as male, 232; tavern as social space, 139–40; women as salon hostesses, 32–33 General Zionists Party, 258 German language, 26, 35, 265 ghetto: degradation in, 240–41; foreignness (neihar) of cultural life in, 240–41; history of, 2–3, 5; Judenrat in, 17, 252–55, 256, 258, 261n29; lacking in Berlin, 27; languages used in, 240, 263, 264; in Rome, 2; the wallless ghetto, 2–3, 6, 7, 9, 20–21; Warsaw ghetto uprising, 254–55, 261n31 Gilman, Sander, 334 Ginat, Tzvi, 123n7 Ginzburg, Shimon, 187n1 Glants, Aron, 189, 208 Glaser, Amelia, 19 Glatshteyn, Yankev, 140 Gnessin, Uri Nissan, 152, 154, 157, 192, 204–6 Goethe, Johann, 35 Goodman, Paul, 304 Goodman, Philip, 290, 301n23 Gordon, Aharon David, 241 Gordon, Milton, 307–8, 319 Gordon, Samuel Leib, 160 Gra (Gaon of Vilna), 114, 122n6 Graetz, Heinrich, 2, 51–52 Graetz, Michael, 63n17

351

Gre´goire, Henri, Abbe´, 50 Grodzinski, Solomon, 159 Guillon, He´le`ne, 98 Gumilev, Nikolai, 76 Hado’ar (newspaper), 171, 177 Halevy, Shmuel Saadi (Sam Le´vy). See Le´vy, Sam Halkin, Simon, 7, 9, 172, 177, 181, 187n1 Hall, Prescott, 311, 312, 319 Halperin, Moyshe-Leyb, 196, 201–2, 204 Hama’asef (journal), 225 Hame‘orer (journal of J. H. Brenner), 148, 154–58 Hapgood, Hutchins, 3 Hapo‘el Hatsa‘ir, 152 Harby, Issac, 314 Harelick, Michael, 288 Harrison, Leon, Rabbi, 317–18, 319 Harshav, Benjamin, 221, 260n19 Hasidim and Hasidism: adherence to halakhah, 119; compassion, 116; continuity of tradition by, 119–20; dancing and singing during prayer, 106–7, 117; impoverished state of, 116–17; joyfulness of, 117–18; kabbalah, 110; Kozience Rebbe, 219, 220; literary interest in, 109–10; marriage, 228–29; monetary donations to the Rebbe, 123n10; in nationalist context, 111–12; nature, 117, 118; nostalgia for, 111–12; Otwock dynasty, 219, 227, 228, 231; in poetry of Eisig Silberschlag, 178, 179; relations with ordinary people, 106, 114–16, 125n24; socialist slant in stories of, 115; soul of Torah, 116, 122n5; spirituality of, 107, 117, 122n5, 125n29; subversive element in, 105; women writers from Hasidic families, 17. See also ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ (Peretz); Kalish, Ita; Mitnaged/Mitnagdim/Mitnagedism; Shapiro, Malkah Haskalah, 29, 110 Hatsefirah (newpaper), 138, 145n32, 158 ‘‘Di hayrat’’ (Halperin), 201–2 Hebraism, 13, 336–38, 340 Hebrew Bible, 29, 46, 47, 49, 51, 320, 321 Hebrew language: after Russian Revolution (1905), 148; aliyah associated with, 157–58, 160; Berlin women’s knowledge of, 34; as bourgeois language, 335; compared to sanctity of Torah, 149; as composing one

352

Index

Hebrew language (continued ) literature with Yiddish, 335–36; Czernowitz conference, 159, 162, 167n54, 338; education in America, 171; gendering of, 13, 155–56; generational fluency differences, 152; Hapo‘el Hatsa‘ir, 152; in Holocaust-era Warsaw, 264; Hug ‘Ivriya, 156, 157, 166n39; instruction in, 77, 156; masculinization of, 13, 335; periodicals in, 17, 148, 154–58, 171, 177, 225, 237; reinvention as vernacular language, 223; rise in post-World War I Europe, 152; role reversal with Yiddish, 338; secularization of, 83–84, 147–50; as sole language of writers (Hebraists), 151; spoken Hebrew, 153, 156–58, 160, 166n40; status of, in Ottoman Empire, 83–84; traditional sources for literature, 150; Zionists on, 149, 151, 164n10. See also Brenner, Joseph Hayyim Heine, Heinrich, 5, 332 Heisler, Adolf, 273–74 Heller, Bernard, 290, 301n23 Hellerstein, Kathryn, 13, 328–29 Hep! Hep! riots, 44, 47, 60 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 27, 29 Hertz, Deborah, 35 Herz, Henriette, 5, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32 Herzl, Theodor, 135, 144–45n28, 145n29 Heschel, Susannah, 47, 48 Hirschbein, Peretz, 155 historiography, 59–60, 61 History of the Institutions of Moses and the Hebrew People (Salvador), 45, 58 Holocaust: in Alterman’s poetry, 252; concentration camps, 263–65, 271–74, 277n9; death of Alter Kacyzne, 231–32; ethnopoetic idiom in the post-Holocaust era, 216; Rudolf Kastner, 252, 261n28; language choices during, 263–64; as taboo subject in Israeli literature, 217; Warsaw Jewry, 254– 55, 261n31, 263–64; Yom Hazikaron Lashoa Velagvura, 253 Holocaust survivors: change from English to Polish in interviews, 268; deprivation of talking in their own language, 278n13; evidence of trauma in language habits, 267, 268, 278n13; interviews in English, 267–68; interviews in Polish, 268; language usage by, 14; Polish-language interviews, 14, 267– 70, 276, 278n19. See also Boder interview transcripts (David Boder)

Horodecky, Shmuel Aba, 110, 111, 114, 118, 247 Hug ‘Ivriya, 156, 157, 166n39 Ibn Gabirol, Shlomo, 176–77, 188n13 Iceland, Reuven, 200–201 immigrants: absorption into society, 310–11; as American idealists, 319–20, 321; and assimilation, 309; confrontation with Anglo-Saxon nativist, 321; culture of inheritance, 320; patriotism of, 320. See also The Melting-Pot (Zangwill) Immigration and Its Effects upon the United States (Hall), 311 intermarriage, 16, 35, 74–75, 312, 315–20 inverted ideological critique, 131, 143n15 Isakovitch, Samuel, 272–73 Ish-Horovitz, S. Y., 112, 123n11, 239 Islam, 95–96, 97 Itkes, Immanuel, 114 Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 154 Jacobs, Joseph, 314 Jacoby, Tamar, 308 jargon, 150, 154, 155 Jelen, Sheila, 17 Jerusalem: as trope for Jewish culture, 15, 29, 46, 59–61 Jesus, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 64n32 Jewish Book Council of America, 287, 301n17 Jewish literature, identification of, 9, 330–34, 341n7 Jewish Publication Society, 285 Jewish Society for the Propagation of Enlightenment in Russia, 158 Jewish women in Berlin: attendance at Fichte lectures, 35–37; conversion to Christianity, 35; education of, 26, 34; Regina Frohberg (ne´e Rebecca Salomon), 37–39; Hebrew language knowledge of, 34; Henriette Herz, 5, 25–27, 31, 32; as letter writers, 37; Rahel Levin, 26, 28–30, 32, 35–36; linguistic abilities of, 27; marginalization of, 28–29, 34–35; translations by, 26; Dorothea Veit Schlegel (ne´e Brendel Mendelssohn), 5, 26. See also women’s salons Joint Distribution Committee, 267 Jonathan David publishers, 284 Le Journal de Salonique, 84–86, 91–94, 96, 98, 102n6 J. Roth / Bookseller: ba‘al tshuva phenome-

Index non’s impact on, 296–97; book inventory of, 281, 291–92, 294, 296–97; change in character of, 296–97; closing of, 297–99; customers of, 281, 292–93; engagement with memory and identity, 292–93; engagement with the modern, 294, 295; Jewish literature and, 293; limits of transmissibility, 283; as living library, 282–83; move to Beverly Hills, 296; non-book items in, 296; as nondenominational space, 293; photograph of Dovid Roth (grandfather of Jack Roth), 292–93; sofer in residence at, 296–97, 302n32; store layout, 291–92, 295 Judenrat, 17, 252–56, 258, 261n29 kabbalah, 91, 110 Kacyzne, Alter, 229–32, 236n35 Kalish, Ita: background of, 227–28; departure from Hasidic world, 227–30; on ethnopoetic idiom of, 219; marriage of, 228–29; memoir of, 227; on the Orthodox Eastern European Jewish world, 233n3; photographs of, 229, 230, 231, 236n35; translations into English, 219; work on Hasidic courts, 219. Work of: A rebishe heim in amolikn poyln, 227. See also My Yesterday (Etmoli [Kalish]) Der Kamf (Bundist paper), 152 Karpeles, Gustav, 8–9, 23n20 Kasrilevke stories: anti-Semitism in, 136–38; critique of realism in, 133–34; Dreyfus affair, 135–38, 144n27, 145n29; isolation in Russian empire, 133–34, 144n24; Kasrilevke as parody of outside world, 132; modernity, 130–33, 139; newpapers in Kasrilevke, 132, 138; as ‘‘no place,’’ 128, 134–35, 142n3, 144n24; Paris compared with, 135, 136, 144n24; parodies of social trends in, 130; postmaster as model of surveillance, 137, 138, 145n31; rival summer colonies in, 138– 39, 146n34; sense of dislocation in, 128, 133– 35, 141n2, 144n24; shprakh-folklor, 139; ‘‘Di Shtot fun di kleyne mentshelekh,’’ 129, 133, 144n24; size of Kasrilevke, 129; statelessness in, 137; Ukrainians compared with Jews of, 137–38; Zionism in, 133–34, 138–39, 146n34 Kastner, Rudolf (Israel Kastner), 252, 261n28 Katz, Jacob, 31–32

353

Katznelson, Berl, 150–51, 155, 158, 162, 165n18, 166n32, 166n40 Katznelson, Rachel, 162 Katznelson, Yitzhak, 264 Kaufmann, Yehezkel, 239, 240 Kautsky, Karl, 80n11 kenut (authenticity/sincerity), 222 ‘‘Ketanot’’ (Baron), 218 Khin, Rashel: anti-Semitism, 70, 75; on assimilation, 79n4; on Christian aesthetic sensibility, 68; conversion to Catholicism, 67, 73, 74; on tensions between the worlds of shtetl-Jewishness and Russianness, 68. See also The Misfit (Ne ko dvoru [Khin]) Kiev frescoes, 66–67, 75–76, 78 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 304 Kipnis, Menachem, 236n35 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 302n32 Kishinev pogrom, 315–16, 332 Klatzkin, Ya‘akov, 239 Klausner, Joseph, 7–9, 150, 160, 172 Klier, John, 233n3 Kling, Berta, 13, 202–4 Kohn, J., 96, 98 Kolodny, Annette, 294 Korczak, Roz’ka, 163 Kotik, Abraham-Zvi, 153 Kozience Rebbe, 219, 220 Kramer, Michael P., 16, 330 Ktav (publisher), 285 Kulbak, Moyshe, 140 Ladino literature, 98–99 Ladino press: Adrianople dispatches from Le´vy in, 89–90; El Avenir, 85; as educational tool, 100; La Epoka, 11, 84–89, 92–93, 98–100; El Luzero, 93, 94; Le Progre`s de Salonique, 84, 85; travelogues in, 99. See also Le´vy, Sam Lamartine, Alphonse de, 60 Landau, Zishe, 196, 200–201 Land of Israel: aliyah to, 148, 157–58, 160, 172, 249–50; Hebrew language in, 149; nativeborn children as Hebrew speakers, 160; rise of Hebrew language in, 152; Silberschlag’s relationship to, 172, 180; spoken Hebrew among early settlers, 157–58; Yishuv, 237, 238. See also Brenner, Joseph Hayyim; Zionism

354

Index

language usage: assimilation, 26, 83, 84, 264, 314; bilingualism, 11, 150, 151, 159, 338; ethnic dimensions of, 270–71; for expressions of feelings, 268–70; for instruction, 83, 84, 91; interviewees’ choices of language in DP interviews, 267–70, 278n13, 278n19; multilinguistics, 16, 270, 271, 276; psychological dimensions of, 270; for survival, 264–65 Lazarus, Emma, 315 Lazarus, Josephine, 315 Lerer, Seth, 295 Lerner, Scott, 15, 144n27 letters of protection (Schutzbriefe), 27, 29–30 Levi, Primo, 265–66, 276, 277n9 Levin, Rahel (later, Rahel Varnhagen), 28–32, 35–37 Levinas, Emmanuel, 334 Le´vy, Sam: attitudes toward Jewish religious practice, 86–87, 93–96; editorial work of, 84; as francophile, 88, 95–98, 100; identification with Europeans, 88–89, 95–98; as Jewish educator, 91; Jewish identity of, 88, 92–93; on Jewish religious instruction in Alliance schools, 94–95; on Muslim worship, 95–96; Paris visit, 99; on Le Progre`s de Salonique, 84, 85; proponent of Jewish acculturation, 81; ‘‘Vers la Danube’’ series (‘‘Toward the Danube), 86, 92, 94. See also dispatches from Le´vy’s travels Lewin, Abraham, 263–64 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 306 Lezhnez, Isai, 68 Liebman, Charles, 325n53 Lisitzky, Ephraim E., 187n1, 188n15 Loti, Pierre, 95–98 Loyhoyopoli (Aksenfeld’s fictitious town), 134, 142n7 luftmensh, 14–15 Luria, Joseph, 151 El Luzero, 93, 94 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 21n5, 334 Madison, James, 309–10 Magnes, Judah L., Rabbi, 318 Mailer, Norman, 332 Maimon, Solomon, 29 Malamud, Bernard, 334 Mandelstam, Osip: Acmeism, 68, 76, 88n33; alienation from Judaism, 76–77; appreciation of symphonic music, 78; architecture

in works of, 76, 77, 78; on assimilation, 79n4; on Christian aesthetic sensibility, 68, 72–73, 76; churches in works of, 71; colors, symbolism of, 77, 81n31; conversion to Christianity, 67, 73; Judaic chaos (khaos iiudeiskii), 70, 72, 73, 76, 78; language knowledge of, 70; October Manifesto, 81n29; in St. Petersburg, 70, 76–78. Works of: Kamen (Stone), 76–77; ‘‘Morning of Acmeism,’’ 76; The Noise of Time (Shum vremeni), 68, 70, 78; ‘‘Notre Dame,’’ 71–72, 73, 81n33 Mannheimer, Isaac, 88, 102n8 Mapu, Abraham, 6 Marcus, Levin, 30 Margolin, Anna, 201 marketplaces, 61, 67–71, 73, 75, 77 market woman (torgovk), 69–71, 73, 75 Marmor, Kalman, 154, 156, 165n20 Marr, Wilhelm, 33 marriage, 35, 74–75, 228–29 Mayer, Nathan, 315 Meister, Wilhelm, 32 The Melting-Pot (Zangwill): amalgamation in, 315–18; anti-Semitism in, 316; confrontations with nativism in, 320–21; intermarriage in, 35, 315–20; narratives of assimilation in, 315–17, 319–20; responses to, 318–19 Mendele Moykher-Sforim (S. Y. Abramovitsh): autobiographical voice in works of, 220; changes of narrator’s identity by, 221; depictions of Jewish life, 131, 132, 216–17; Frischmann’s criticism of, 219; generic exigency, 223; Hebrew and Yiddish knowledge of, 150; Hebrew nusah style of, 12, 152; inverted ideological critique, 143n15; on the Orthodox Eastern European Jewish world, 213, 233n3; rhetoric of sincerity, 223; ‘‘skaz’’ effect used by, 222. Work of: Dos kleyne mentshele (Mendele MoykherSforim), 6 Mendelssohn, Moses, 46 Meyer, Michael, 31–32 Mintz, Alan, 16, 232 Miron, Dan, 1, 21n4, 129–30, 221, 336, 338 The Misfit (Ne ko dvoru [Khin]): anorexia as aeceticism, 71; assimilationist father in, 70–71; fluency in non-Jewish subjects, 70–71; marginalization of main character,

Index 73–76; market woman (torgovka) stereotype in, 69–71, 73, 75; religious conversion, 73, 74, 75 Mitnaged/Mitnagdim/Mitnagedism: on adherence to halakhah, 116, 118–19; bans against Hasidim, 117, 125n29; as deaf man in Degel mahane Ephraim, 117; derogatory remarks against Hasidim, 117, 125n218; engagement with Torah study, 118; Gaon of Brisk as characteristic of, 106–7; rabbinic Judaism, 113; stereotypes in neoHasidic literature, 113, 116. See also ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ (Peretz) modernity: connection with Jewish tradition, 120–22; Hasidism as alternate way to connect with tradition, 120–21; modern Jew as runaway from tradition, 120; Paris in mythologies of, 144n24; Sholem Aleichem on, 133–34, 137–39; shtetl and, 137, 138, 145n31 Molodowsky, Kadya, 190–92, 195, 208 Morawska, Ewa, 308 Mosaic law, 53–56, 65n46 Moses (biblical figure), 52–56, 64n32, 64n37 Muslims, 95–97 My Yesterday (Etmoli [Kalish]): departure from Hasidic world, 227–30; first-person change to third-person in narration, 230; marriage in, 228–29; poet as ethnographer in, 215, 217 Nahman of Bratslav, Reb, 117 Nathans, Benjamin, 79n4, 81n28 National Association of Temple Educators (NATE), 288 National Jewish Population Survey (1990), 296 nativism, 311, 321 Dos Naye kasrilevke, 139 neo-Hasidic literature: contrasts between the Vilna Gaon and the Baal Shem Tov, 114; dissonance that tradition poses for the modern Jew, 120–21; Hasidism linked with the masses, 114; nostalgia of, 111–12; soul v. body of Torah, 118; stereotype of the Hasid, 112; stereotypes of Mitnagdim in, 116. See also Berdyczewski, Micha Josef; ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’ (Peretz); Buber, Martin; Horodecky, Shmuel Aba Neue Freie Presse, 136, 145n29

355

Neusner, Jacob, 333, 341n8 Nevo, Gideon, 16–17 new Jews (juif novateurs), 56 New Testament, 49, 64, 67, 198, 318 Niger, Shmuel, 10, 22n13, 104, 109, 126n31, 189–90, 208, 338 Ninth of Av observances, 85, 87, 91–94, 97–98 ‘‘Nokhn pogrom’’ (Shofman), 154 Nomberg, Hirsch David, 159 Norwich, William, 24, 25 Old Testament, 29, 46, 49, 51, 320, 321 Ottoman Empire, 10–11, 83, 95–96, 102n6. See also Le´vy, Sam Otwock Hasidic dynasty, 219, 227, 228, 231 Oz, Amos, 213, 217 Pale of Settlement, 81n29, 128, 129, 134, 146n34, 221, 239, 241 Paris, 15, 60–61, 135–37, 144n24, 144n27, 145n29 Paris, Rome, Jerusalem (Salvador), 15, 46, 59–61 Park, Robert E., 307 Peretz, I. L.: anti-Hasidic satires of, 110; attraction to the Hasidic movement, 104–5; as belletrist, 109; bilingualism of, 11, 150; on Enlightenment literature, 111; on extreme religious devotion, 110; on identification of Jewish literature, 331; socialist slant in Hasidic stories of, 115; treatment of shtetl by, 132. Works of: ‘‘The Kabbalists,’’ 110; ‘‘The Kaddish,’’ 110; ‘‘Monish,’’ 331–32; ‘‘The Partnership,’’ 110, 124n16; ‘‘Di Toyte shtot’’ (Peretz), 128, 134. See also ‘‘Between Two Mountains’’; Reb Noah’ke of Biale (‘‘Between Two Mountains’’) photography, 229, 230, 231, 236n35 Pinless, S. Y., 219, 223 ‘‘The Pleasures of the Soul’’ (Landau), 200–201 Po‘alei Zion, 149, 154, 157, 164n10, 165n20 ‘‘Poema kontsa’’ (Poem of the End [Tsvetaeva]), 78–79 poetry of Eisig Silberschlag: arrangement of poems in, 178; classical Hebrew poetic influences in, 176–77, 188n13; desire in, 176, 179, 182–84; eroticism in, 174–76, 179, 181– 82, 184–86, 188n18; Hasidism, 178, 179; Hebraic erudition in, 175–76, 185; lyricism

356

Index

poetry of Eisig Silberschlag (continued ) in, 173–77, 181–82, 186; mothers in, 176, 178–79; ode to Ibn Gabirol, 176–77, 188n13; poetic authority in, 177; presentation of self in, 178, 186; satire on American life, 180–81, 188n16; shift from sensual intoxication to awareness of temporality, 176. Works of: ‘Aleh, ‘olam, beshir, 177–79, 188n15; ‘‘In Pagan Footsteps,’’ 184–86, 188n18; ‘‘Kavim ledemuti,’’ 178–79; ‘‘Mipolin ‘ad amerikah,’’ 180–81; ‘‘Sevel yerushah,’’ 178–80; Tehiyah utehiyah bashirah, 172; ‘‘Yesh yif ‘ah ‘atsumah behokhmah,’’ 181–83. See also Bishevilim bodedim (Silberschlag) Polen, Nehemia, 220, 227 Polish language: interviewee’s switch from Yiddish to, 268–70; as Jewish language, 268; as language of Polish Jewish survivors, 268; speaking Polish as capitulation, 264; in Warsaw ghetto, 264, 268–69 polu-intelligentsia, 150 prayer for the government, 81n28 Le Progre`s de Salonique, 84, 85 The Promised Land (Antin), 315 Proust, Marcel, 136, 144–45n28, 332 public schools, 318 Pulido, Angel, 94, 98–99 Quincy Davenport (character in The Melting Pot [Zangwill]), 321 rabbinic Judaism, 46, 116, 120–22 Rabinovich, Sara, 69 Rabinovitch, Sholem. See Sholem Aleichem Rabinowitz, Yaacov, 149 Rappaport, Solomon. See An-sky, S. Ravitsh, Melekh, 189, 208 Rawnitzki, Y. H., 151 Rebbe of Biale. See Reb Noah’ke of Biale (‘‘Between Two Mountains’’) Reb Noah’ke of Biale (‘‘Between Two Mountains’’): accuracy of portrayal, 108; criticism of, 106–8, 123n8, 123n10; life embraced by, 118; mitnagedism and, 106–7, 113, 116, 120; as paternal figure, 114–16; relations with ordinary people, 106, 114–15, 119, 125n24; as representative of Hasidism’s uniqueness, 113; on Torah study, 106–7 Reform Judaism, 88–89, 93

Regelson, Abraham, 172, 187n1 regeneration paradigm, 50–51, 64n29 Reisen, Abraham, 158–59, 165n20 Renan, Ernest, 48–49, 54 rhetoric of sincerity, 221–22, 223 Ringelblum, Emmanuel, 264 Rome, 2, 57, 58, 61 Rosen, Alan, 14 Roskies, David, 79n2, 104, 143n12, 214, 263 Rosman, Moshe, 13 Ross, Nicham, 11–12 Roth, Cecil, 290 Roth, Dovid, 292–93 Roth, Jack: at Behrman House, 284, 285, 287–88; biography of, 283–84; as book collector, 282–83, 288–89; move to Los Angeles, 288; publishing house experience, 284, 287–88. See also J. Roth / Bookseller Roth, Laurence, 19 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 56 Ruderman, David, 2 Russia: inferiority of Jewish culture, 77–78; Pale of Settlement, 81n29, 128, 129, 134, 146n34, 221, 239, 241; Russianness and Jewish culture, 68, 77–78, 149; Russian Revolution, 77, 81n28, 148, 220; St. Petersburg, 70, 76–78. See also Khin, Rashel; Mandelstam, Osip Sadan, Dov, 152, 336, 338 salons of Berlin: documentation of, 37–39; as gendered spaces, 30–33, 35; Gentiles as guests in, 32, 35; identified as Jewish salons, 25, 33–34; Jewish issues not discussed in, 34–35; medicalization of, 38–39; origin of term salon, 33; social hierarchy in, 31, 32; tea served in women’s salons, 33, 39 Salvador, Joseph: centrality of Jews to history, 54; on Christian concept of Jewish witness, 61–62; commitment to scientific methodology, 45; epistolary history of, 15, 59–61; Hep! Hep! riots, 44, 47, 60; as historian, 49–50, 55–59; influence of French culture on, 60; Jerusalem in works of, 44– 46, 54–57, 63n17; on Jewish history, 48; on literature, 55, 58, 59; on Moses, 56; on rabbinic Judaism, 45, 46; regeneration paradigm, 50–51, 64n29; scientific methodology of, 45, 48–49; subject posi-

Index tion as a writer, 60; universal history, 51– 53, 64n32, 64n37; works of, 45 Sarna, Jonathan, 285, 287, 312, 318, 320, 326n55 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 334 Schadow, Johann Gottfried, 30 Schaff, Philip, 304 Schiff, Jacob, 317 Schlegel, Friedrich, 35 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 27, 39 Schutzbriefe (letters of protection), 27, 29–30 Schweid, Eliezer, 238–41, 259n7 Second Aliyah, 138, 157–58 Sennett, Richard, 2, 73 Sephardim, 83, 84, 97–99, 156. See also Alliance Israe´lite Universelle (AIU); Le´vy, Sam Shaked, Gershon, 256 Shammas, Anton, 332 Shapira, Anita, 11 Shapira, Lamed, 148, 158, 159 Shapiro, Malkah: as admorit hasoferet, 227; articulations of protagonist’s location, 223; authenticity of narrative demonstrated by, 222–25; as bridge between Hasidic court and the world of modern Hebrew literature, 225; as daughter of Kozienice Rebbe, 220; Eastern European-born writers of Hebrew compared with, 221; on ethnographic value of her work, 215, 217, 224; historical context of, 219, 223, 224; impact of Holocaust on work of, 222; as meshoreret hahasidut, 227; negotiations of the position of the narrator within the narrative, 222; as observer of the Rebbe’s tisch, 223, 235n23; on the Orthodox Eastern European Jewish world, 233n3; translations into English, 219. Works of: Midin lerahamim: Sipurim mehatserot ha’admorim, 220, 233; The Rebbe’s Daughter, 220, 225. See also Bat-Zion (Shapiro’s protagonist) Shneour, Zalman, 155 Shofman, Gershon, 154 Sholem Aleichem: ambivalence toward Yiddish writing, 131; autobiographical voice in works of, 220; bilingualism of, 150; changes of narrator’s identity by, 221; depictions of Jewish life, 131; deterritorialization of shtetl, 18; fluency in Hebrew and Yiddish, 150; generic exigency, 223; inverted ideological critique, 143n15; on modernity, 133; novels of, 132, 143n18; oral character of

357

Yiddish, 139–40, 146n38; on the Orthodox Eastern European Jewish world, 233n3; realist conventions for the Yiddish novel, 131; rhetoric of sincerity, 223; satire of, 136, 138, 144n24, 145n33; shprakh-folklor, 139–40; ‘‘skaz’’ effect used by, 222; translations of, 142n6. Works of: Farbenkt aheym, 133; ‘‘Di Shtot fun di kleyne mentshelekh,’’ 129, 133, 144n24; Stempenyu, 132, 143n18; ‘‘Tevye der milkhiker,’’ 221. See also Kasrilevke stories shprakh-folklor, 139–40 Dos shternikhl (Aksenfeld), 142n7 shtetls: dehumanizing oppression in, 129; deterritorialization of, 18; encounter between the world of shtetl-Jewishness and that of Russianness, 68; Jewish behavior in, 137; and modernity, 137, 138, 145n31; old Jew of the shtetl compared with American Jew, 245; Paris as transposed shtetl, 135; shtot compared with, 129, 142n7; synagogue in, 137; translations from literature to ethnography in works on, 219; treatment of shtetl by Mendele MoykherSforim, 132. See also Kasrilevke stories Shtok, Fradl, 13, 196–99, 203 shtot, 129, 142n7 Shvadron, Avraham, 260n8 Sicher, Ephraim, 67, 79n3, 80n11, 81n33 Silberschlag, Eisig, 16, 187n1; absence from contemporary accounts, 171; arrival in America, 171; classical literary influences on, 170–73; cosmopolitanism of, 171; cultural influences on, 170–72, 178; education of, 171–72; Greek classical influences on poetry of, 170; Hashomer Hatza‘ir Zionist Youth Movement, 171; Hebraic erudition in poetry of, 175–76; Hebrew College (Boston), 172; on Hebrew in the Land of Israel, 172; his life in America, 171–73, 180; intellectual world of, 170–73; poetic persona of, 178; relations with contemporary American Hebrew writers, 171; relations with Eretz Israel, 172, 180, 187; representations of women and sexuality, 181–83, 188n17; Satri, Galicia, as birthplace of, 170–71; Tchernichovsky’s influence on, 170; translations of Greek comedies into Hebrew, 170; at University of Texas at Austin, 173. Works of: ‘Aleh, ‘olam, beshir, 177–79, 188n15;

358

Index

Silberschlag, Eisig (continued ) Aristophanes translations, 170, 173–74; From Renaissance to Renaissance, 173; ‘‘In Pagan Footsteps,’’ 184–86, 188n18; ‘‘Kavim ledemuti,’’ 178–79; ‘‘Mipolin ‘ad amerikah,’’ 180–81; ‘‘Sevel yerushah,’’ 178, 179–80; ‘‘Shirei na‘arah,’’ 175–76; Tehiyah utehiyah bashirah, 172; ‘‘Yesh yif ‘ah ‘atsumah behokhmah,’’ 181–83. See also Bishevilim bodedim (Silberschlag) Simhat Torah, 106–7, 117, 122n5 Simons, Sarah E., 307 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 338 Singer, Israel Joshua, 236n35 Sirkin, Nachman, 238 ‘‘skaz’’ effect, 221–22 Sklarew, Myra, 276 social class: market woman (torgovka), 69–71, 73, 75; of polu-intelligentsia, 150 socialism, 115, 151, 161, 165n18 Sokolow, Nahum, 158 Sollors, Werner, 277n9, 304, 330 Soloveitchik, Hayim, 296 Soloveitchik, Hayyim, Rabbi, of Brisk, 107 Soloveitchik, Joseph Baer, Rabbi, of Brisk, 107 songs in Yiddish, 139–40 Sorkin, David, 32 Spencer, Herbert, 310, 312 S.S. (Zionist Socialist Workers Party), 151, 165n18 Stae¨l, Germaine de, 26 State of Israel: aliyah to, 148, 157–58, 160, 172, 249–50; American Jewry, 250–51; being a Zionist requires being in the Zionist place, 249–50; Holocaust and women’s writing as taboo subjects, 217–18; period after establishment of, 249; reaction to the Holocaust, 253; Yom Hazikaron Lashoa Velagvura, 253 Stavans, Ilan, 10 Steinbach, A. Alan, 290 Steinberg, Yehuda, 109 Steiner, George, 334, 341n6 Steinschneider, Moritz, 305 stereotypes, Jewish: of Diasporic Jews, 242–43; homelessness, 27–29; Judaic chaos (khaos iiudeiskii), 70, 76, 78; market woman (torgovka), 69–71, 73, 75; of merchants, 66–67, 71, 75–76; Mitnagdim in

neo-Hasidic literature, 113, 116; tailor, 242–43; zhidovka, 74 Stewart, Potter, 330 St. Petersburg, 70, 76–78 Straus, Oscar, 317 Stryjkowski, Julian, 269 Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo, 308 Suleiman, Susan, 272 Sutskever, Avrom, 339 synagogues, 76–77, 86–89, 137 Tabenkin, Yitzhak, 155–56, 166n31 talush, 15–16, 232 Tanner, Tony, 74 Tchernichovsky, Shaul, 16, 169, 170 Tebbel, John, 285 They Who Knock at Our Gates (Antin), 311 Tisha b’Av. See Ninth of Av observances Tocqueville, Alexis de, 310 Torah study: Brisk method of, 107, 122n6; centrality of, 116; in court of Biale Hasidim, 106–8; exclusivity of, 106, 114–15; of Mitnagdim, 105–7; ordinary people and, 106, 114–15, 119, 125n24 torgovka (market woman), 69–71, 73, 75 translation: of ‘‘Almoneshaft’’ (Widowhood [Tussman]), 329–30; as cultural or historical mediation, 219; ethnographic, 219; impact of personal experience on, 272–76; literary criticism as, 219; of Yiddish poetry, 327–30 Trumpeldor Battalion, 160–61 tsnies (modesty), 190–95, 198–99 Tsukunft, 193, 209n13 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 78–79 Tussman, Malka Heifetz: letter placement in poetry of, 329; on limitations of onedimensional understandings of our signs, 339–40; widow’s need for passion (gustung), 330. Works of: ‘‘Almoneshaft’’ (Widowhood), 327–29, 339; Haynt iz eybik (Today is forever), 327; Mild mayn vild (Mild my wild), 327; Shotns fun gedenken (Shadows of remembering), 339; Unter dayn tseykhn (Under your sign), 327; ‘‘Vaser on loshn’’ (Water without speech), 339 universal history, 15–16, 51–53, 64n32, 64n37 Uspensky, Boris, 90

Index Va‘adat Ezrah Vehatzalah, 261n28 Varnhagen, Karl August, 37–39 Veit Schlegel, Dorothia (ne´e Brendel Mendelssohn), 5, 26 Vera Revendal (character in The Melting Pot [Zangwill]), 315–17, 319, 321 Verein fu¨r Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, 5 ‘‘Vers la Danube’’ series (‘‘Toward the Danube), 86, 92, 94 Ver vet blaybn? Vos vet blaybn (Sutskever), 339 Vienna, 86–88, 90–92, 136, 145n29, 171–72 Viner, Meyer, 139 Voltaire, Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet de, 52–54 von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 34, 35 Wandering Jew, 27, 28, 75, 244–45, 260n14 Warsaw, 254–55, 261n31, 263–64 Washington, Booker T., 304 Waxman, Meyer, 9 Weber, Max, 72 Weil, Simone, 71 Weissberg, Liliane, 5, 18 Whitman, Walt, 310 Wilde, Oscar, 198, 210n25 Wilhelmy, Petra, 34 Wilkansky, Yitzhak, 155 Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 1, 290, 330–31, 341n12 Wise, Isaac Mayer, 5, 315 Wisse, Ruth, 105 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 47–48, 50, 59, 334 Wolf, Bernard (David Boder’s assistant): autobiographical listening by, 272–74; as collaborator with David Boder, 275–76, 279n24, 279n29; experiences shared with interviewees, 272–74, 276, 279n29; glosses added to transcripts, 272–75; Holocaust experience of, 271–74, 276; as multilingual, 271, 276; personal stake in project, 275; translations of, 271–72, 275–76; translation technique of, 271–72 women: absent from Rebbe’s tisch, 223, 235n23; education of, 26, 34, 225–26, 228; the female body, 201–2, 204–6; female Jewish merchant (mark-yidene), 69; freedom of movement in Adrianople, 97; Hebrew fluency among female settlers, 158; hysteria as ailment of, 38–39; market woman (torgovka), 69–71, 73, 75; in traditional Jewish

359

law, 190; tsnies (modesty), 190–95, 198–99; widowhood, 328–29. See also Jewish women in Berlin women poets in Yiddish: eroticism in works of, 198–204; male poets on, 189–90, 196; Salome’s dance, 196–98, 210n20, 210n25; sexuality in works of, 190–91, 198–204; traditional modesty (tsnies) challenged by, 191–95, 198–99; women’s voice in, 198, 199, 202–3. See also Dropkin, Celia; Kalish, Ita; Shapiro, Malkah; Tussman, Malka Heifetz women’s salons: as gendered spaces, 30–33, 35; guests in, 29–33, 35; Jewish identity of, 25, 33–35; medicalization of, 38–39; origin of term salon, 33; social hierarchy in, 31, 32; tea served in, 33, 39 World War I, 228, 284–85 World Zionist Federation, 248, 250 yeshiva/yeshivot. See Torah study Yezierska, Anzia, 196 Yiddishism, 13, 336–38, 340 Yiddish language: as composing one literature with Hebrew, 152, 335–36; co-territorial loan words in, 140; Czernowitz conference, 33, 159, 162, 167n54, 332; gendering of, 13, 155; Hebrew writers’ switch to Yiddish, 155; in Holocaust-era Warsaw, 264; impact of immigration to America on, 332; as language of the enlightened, 5, 150; mediation with co-territorial languages, 140; in Palestine, 161; periodicals in, 122n5, 151–54, 165n20, 193, 209n13, 230, 236n35; political parties supporting, 151, 152; as proletarian language, 335; in propaganda, 152, 154; reinvention as folksy language, 223; role reversal with Hebrew, 338; songs in, 139–40; as spoken language, 139– 40, 146n38, 151, 152, 156, 157; survival of/ continuity of, 339; Yiddish bookstores, 286; Zionists on, 149–51, 164n10. See also American Yiddish poetry; women poets in Yiddish Yishayahu, Yehiel, 227 Yunge, 192, 196, 200 Zaddik of Biale. See Reb Noah’ke of Biale (‘‘Between Two Mountains’’) Zaddik of Sadilikow, 117 Zangwill, Israel, 303; on amalgamation, 315–18; on intermarriage, 16, 315–17, 319– 20. See also The Melting-Pot (Zangwill)

360

Index

Zeitlin, Hillel, 154 Zgnilek, Bella, 267–70, 278n16 Zionism: Alterman on, 17, 243–46, 249–50, 258; El Avenir, 85; being a Zionist requires being in the Zionist place, 249–50; Brenner on, 148–49, 161–62; Dreyfus affair, 135–38, 144n27, 145n29; First Zionist Congress, 332; Hebrew language, 149; Theodor Herzl and, 135, 144–45n28, 145n29; historical validity of, 248, 260n19; Jewish homeland, 249–50; in Kasrilevke stories, 138–39, 146n34; kib-

butznik, 249; liberal European nationalism repudiated by, 133–34; mitnahel (settler), 249; negation of galut, 238–41, 259n7, 260n8; Po‘alei Zion, 149, 164n10; redemptive quality of, 246, 248; religious quality of, 246; as repudiation of European nationalism, 133n23, 134; as requiring repositioning, 248–49; Yishuv, 237, 238 Zumerdike romanen, 132, 138 Zunz, Leopold, 5–7, 9, 47–48