Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 09.033 October 21, 1999 1) Yiddish and Hebrew (Abraham Brumberg) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 14:24:13 -0400 (EDT) From: abraham brumberg Subject: YIDDISH AND HEBREW--A RESPONSE TO MY CRITICS Last July, Konstanty Gebert, editor of the monthly MIDRASH, published in Warsaw, asked me to contribute an article on the strife between Hebrew and Yiddish for a special section of his journal devoted to "Jewish Historical Quarrels." I accepted his invitation, and wrote a piece that was promptly published in MIDRASH. I then sent it to "Mendele" and also to some of my friends. Unfortunately, the piece, which I had originally intended to deal largely with the "war" between Hebrew and Yiddish in Palestine/Israel, turned out to have a number of inaccuracies, some of them minor, a few more grievous, as several readers were quick to point out. I apologize for the errors, and I apologize, too, for the belated response, which was caused by an enormous backlog of work I had to finish before turning my attention to this matter. Now in reply to my critics. Mr. Bruce Mitchell of Oxford, England,calls attention to what is perhaps my most egregious error--namely, the dismissive remarks concerning Ladino language and culture. He offers compelling evidence of the continued flourishing of Ladino which, unfortunately, I had overlooked. The fact, as he writes, that doctorates have been awarded to scholars who made no less ghastly mistakes is of little comfort to me.... The information about the relative neglect of Ladino by Israeli authorities, as depicted by Mr. Mitchell, tends to bear out one of my major assertions regarding the position of Yiddish--and by extension other Jewish languages--in Israel. Until a fairly short while ago, Yiddish and Ladino were officially identified as "foreign" languages, and although that absurd epithet has now been dropped, both are still treated as "aliens" or, at best, as poor cousins. I am also glad to see that Mr. Mitchell corroborates what I said about the Sokhnut's squalid attempts to discourage the study of Yiddish in the countries that had constituted the USSR. . "During my recent visit to Vilna," he writes, "I was sickened by the way in which the Israeli government bribes Lithuanian Jews not to teach Yiddish in a school called Sholem Aleichem'. Teach Yiddish as a living language, and the school gets no funding." I part ways with Mr. Mitchell on the matter of Yiddish among the ultra-orthodox.. I discuss this subject in a reviews of the book The Politics of Yiddish, edited by Dov-Ber Kerler, which will soon appear in The Jewish Quarterly (London). I will also send a copy to Mendele. Suffice it to say at this point that I do not deny the importance of Yiddish among the haredim. The very fact that Yiddish is taught in ultra-orthodox schools in Israel and elsewhere constitutes a guarantee against the erosion of the Yiddish language. But the ultra-orthodox by and large deny that Yiddish has any form or specific grammar. They teach Yiddish exclusively as a spoken language, and will have nothing to do with anything that smacks of secular Yiddish, be it literature, scholarship, folklore, ethnography, and the like. Yet these achievements are what spawned the efflorescence of Yiddish and Yiddish culture. Think of Yiddish without Peretz, Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, without An-sky, without YIVO, without di vilner trupe, without the panoply of cultural and social institutions it created in Eastern Europe and you get a barren, fallow landscape. In this sense, Yiddish among the ultra-orthodox is no contribution to Yiddish culture as it had developed from the l9th century until the Holocaust. The comparison with German in the United States: Here, I fear, Mr. Mitchell is barking up the wrong tree. To the extent that German is used in certain areas of the country, it is, of course, very much of a living presence. The use of German among the Old Amish (I am not aware whether this holds true for all the Amish and for the Mennonites), however, is an oddity quite unrelated to modern German. I remember once in Pennsylvania some Old Amish showed me their only German book--the Bible. Moreover, as far as I know, Amish children do not use German, of whatever dialect, in spoken discourse. By comparison, the haredim are a vibrant source of a functioning idiomatic Yiddish. Another critic, Mr. Charles Fuchsman taxes me, first, with "overstating the Bund's role in the flowering of Yiddish," inasmuch as the best Yiddish writers had begun writing even before the Bund's birth in l897. Surely, he writes, there were some Bundist leaders who were "champions of Yiddish," but by and large the Bund "used Yiddish opportunistically." Not quite. Of course Yiddish literature predates the Bund, but if Mr.Fuchsman is not aware of the immense role of the Bund in developing Yiddish in interwar Poland, I can only suggest that he read some relevant histories of this period. Yes, the Bund first turned to Yiddish as a medium, and not as a value in itself. But this soon changed. For details, may I suggest my essay on the Bund in the current issue of Jewish Social Studies? Incidentally, Khaim Zhitlovsky was never a Bundist, though with his passionate advocacy of socialism, secular Yiddish culture and national autonomy he stood close to the Band during the first few decades of this century. As for Soviet Yiddish literature--Mr. Fuchsman's second objection-- I happen am a great admirer of much of it; indeed, I feel that poets like Hofshteyn, Izi Kharik, Aaron Kushnirov and Peretz Markish in some respects towered over their contemporaries in Eastern Europe and the United States at the time of their debuts. And while Yiddish literature in pre-revolutionary Russia and then in Poland yielded a number of great figures, Der Nister was certainly among the most gifted contemporary Yiddish prose writers of this century. Furthermore, it is true that Yiddish culture lived on for quite a few years in the USSR. Bit it turned into a castrated culture, with a grotesque orthography, shorn of many "clerical" or "Zionist" (that is, Hebrew) words, whipped into the vise of Soviet patriotism and "socialist realism", its practitioners required to engage in abject "self-criticism" for their various sins and rewrite their works (Der Nister and Hofshteyn among them), all of which has b been fully dealt with in books such as Zvi Gitelman's volume on the "Yevsektsia", works by Irving Howe, Choneh Shmeruk and Benjamin Harshav and others. Mr. Fuchsman resents terms such as "unconditional fealty to the Third Rome," but unhappily even those Communists who wanted to preserve Yiddish culture acted as its greavediggers, most of them not out of fear or opportunism but out of fealty to the Communist doctrine. Vos shaykh khaver Mendy Fliegler, vil ikh im farzikhern az ir bin nit keyn soyne-idish, un ikh halt nit az "idish geyt unter." Ikh vil zikh do nokh a mol farrufn oyf mayn retsenzye in The Jewish Quarterly. Ober ikh hob moyre az guzmes veln do veynik helfn. Di tog shule in Vashington lernt idish oyfn shpitz meser, un idish reders vet zi oyf dem oyfn nit dertsiyen. Un zol mir khaver fliegler zayn moykhl, ober keyn idish reders in poyln vet er oyf a refue nit gefinen (ikh zog es oyfn smakh fun nit veynik derfarung). Tsum badoyern iz di situatsye nor a bisl beser in rusland un ukraine. Nito vos zikh araynleygn feygelekh in buzem. Let me respond, finally, to the thoughtful letter by Dovid Fishman, which he sent to me outside the framework of Mendele. To begin with, Dovid Fishman points out that Zionism had played an important role in supporting and advancing Yiddish culture, and he adduces numerous examples, from the Zionist Ahiasaf society which "published the first truly modern Yiddish weekly in Eastern Europe, Der Yid, l899-1903," and which "spearheaded the meteoric rise of modern Yiddish literature," to the first Yiddish daily in Russia, Der Fraynd, l903-l911 (St. Petersburg), which was also founded by Zionists, and other examples. He also adds an important caveat--that there was a significant distinction to be drawn "between Zionism (especially labor Zionism) in Eastern Europe and America...and Zionism (including labor Zionism) in the Yishuv." Fishman is quite right. I should have mentioned the striking Yiddish initiatives launched and supported by Zionists, especially of the socialist-Zionist variety. But the distinction he himself draws is crucial. With but a few exceptions, the Zionists who supported Yiddish in the "Diaspora" became its determined adversaries in the Yishuv. Ideology--a topic to which I shall return in a minute--and not some perverse transmogrification due to the presence of the Judea Hills or the salubrious winds from the Galilee or the Wailing Wall was the crux of the matter. Rachel Katznelson, as Benjamin Harshav illustrates in his Language in Time of Revolution (p. 189), who was extremely fond of Yiddish and of modern Yiddish writers, asserted that "there was in Yiddish thought a cowardice and lack of criticism concerning everything national...Yiddish was conservative and did not see beyond today. Do I need to mention the important newspaper Fraynd [the journal referred to by Fishman], the Bund, Zhitlovsky?", etc. All of this is humbug: Katzenelson was well aware that the Bund, for instance, did see rather a great deal (perhaps even too much, some might think) "beyond today." But the mystique of Hebrew as the sublime expression of national liberation dictated myopic assessments such as hers. "Many of the founding fathers of Yiddish culture," says Fishman, "were Zionists," and he mentions a few distinguished names. True--but none of those he mentioned had to experience the indignity of their works appearing for a long time only in Hebrew. "Nearly all branches of Poale Tziyon," he writes, "were Yiddishists". The word "Ysiddishist" is a misnomer, because Yiddishism as such denoted an ideology that advocated Yiddish as the only language of the Jews, and as one to be used in all cultural and official institutions, as a secular culture divorced from tradition as religious roots. Not many of the most fervent defenders of Yiddish necessarily subscribed to this exclusive (and thus, I am afraid, rather parochial) ideology. The Czernowitz Conference of l908, , for instance, which Fishman refers to, did not declare Yiddish as the national language, but a language of the Jews--much to the dismay of its Yiddishist participants.. (For a sensible survey of Yiddishism, see "Yiddishism and Judaism," by Emanuel S. Goldsmith, in the aforementioned The Politics of Yiddish.) True, Labor Zionists played a central role in creating schools, newspapers, and various other institutions in Yiddish in Poland, the United States, in s Canada, Mexico, and Argentina. The differences between the Labor Zionists on the one hand and on the other m and the Band and similar groups on the other was that the first believed in "bi-lingualism," as it were, in the "Diaspora," and only Hebrew in the Yishuv. Only the Left Poale Zion was as loyal to Yiddish in Eastern Europe (especially Poland) as in the Yishuv, and published a Yiddish weekly in Palestine called Nayvelt. Fishman also takes me to task for misrepresenting "Bundist anti-Hebraism," as displayed in the "virulent" rhetoric of such Bundist anti-Hebraists as Esther Frumkin and Moishe Rafes. True, but this was in Tsarist Russia, under quite different circumstances. In Poland, the Bund waged a fierce struggle against what it considered the Zionist attempt to denigrate Yiddish, and to prevent its acquiring what it considered to be the legitimatge position of primus inter pares. But I am not aware of any contempt shown Hebrew as a language, comparable to the contempt heaped upon Yiddish by Hebraists in Palestine. I find Fishman's attempt to rationalize the the official attitudes towards Yiddish in the Yishuv --e.g., if there was no Yiddish daily paper it was not because of specific legal bans on it, but "because paper was rationed by the state...and the ministry would not allot paper fore a Yiddish daily" -- singularly unconvincing. It reminds me, mutatis mutandis--of the uncertain press policies pursued by the Soviet government in the first few years of Gorbachev's "glasnost." Fishman is too fine a scholar not to know that to practice of auditoriums "refusing to rent themselves out to Yiddish theaters" can be as harmful to the existence of the Yiddish performing arts as drama than a piece of paper bearing the full imprimatur of the Law and signed by the Yishuv authorities, or by the Knesset. He acknowledges the effect on Yiddish of the raucous zealotry of some Hebraists, but claims their attacks were "no worse than [attacks on] other foreign languages". Yiddish, Japanese, Hungarian and Icelandic all equally "foreign" languages?" For an enlightening report on what it meant to be a Yiddish speaker and/or writer in Palestine, see the essay fuftsik yor idishe sheferishkayt in isroel (Half a Century Jewish Creativity in Israel) by the writer, editor, journaloist and crfitic Mordekhai Tsanin, which appeared in the Yiddish journal idishe kultur (New York, May-June l998). Tsanin, still the editor of a the Yidish daily letste nayes in Tel Aviv (until the 1950s the authorities did not allow it to appear as a daily), who has spent the bulk of his 90-odd year old life in Israel, is as devoted to the country as he is to Yiddish and as unforgiving vis-a-vis its detractors. He cites the names of numerous Yiddish poets who in the 1920s persisted in writing Yiddish verse, and wonders "whence they drew the strength to sing the praises of the rejuvenated Eretz Israel in the atmosphere of hatred and militant hostility to the Yiddish tongue and the profound folk values embedded in that wonderful language." "In those years," writes Tsanin, " an unwritten law [Dovid Fishman please note] stipulated that a new immigrant to Palestine has the right to speak Yiddish one year after arriving in the country." Should he break this unwritten law, he could be shorn of a day's pay or subjected to other unpleasant measures. This was the time when newspaper kiosks would be set on fire for selling Yiddish publications, and when meetings at which Yiddish was spoken were frequently broken up and the participants roughed up. The fondness for Yiddish xdsespite all these depredations was not characteristic only of parts of the Left (e.g., the Left Poale Zion). Even Uri Zvi Greenberg, a fanatic member of of Zhabotinsky's rightist Revisionist Party, (and pro-grammatically a bitter opponent of Yiddish), who had in the early l920s contributed to the Yiddish expressionist journal "Albatross," published in Berlin, kept on writing Yiddish poetry after he came to Palestine in l924e--but not for publication. Tsanin urged him to "come out of the closet", which he finally did by publishing a few poems 1975-1979--this after nearly 30 years of silence!. The hostility to Yiddish continued uninterrupted after the birth of Israel, says Tsanin, through the forms of discrimination changed. Until 1952, only visiting Yiddish theatrical groups from abroad were allowed to perform on Israeli stages. Tsanin tells a fascinating story concerning Shloyme Zalmen Rubashov, who late changed his namer to Shazar and became third President of Israel. Shazar loved Yiddish and indeed wrote in that language, yet when he was appointed head of the Department of Culture of the Jewish Agency (Tsanin does not provide the date), he sent a delegation to Buenos Aires, with orders to close down its Sholem Aleichem School which, though under Zionist auspices, used Yiddish as the language of instruction. "Ideology!", exclaims Tsanin. Precisely. Years later, when Avrom Sutskever had left Russia and was planning to settle in the United States, Rubashov, then editor of Davar, begged him to settle in Israel. Sutskever concurred, on the condition he could publish a literary journal in Yiddish. In order to avoid "a liberum veto" by the Ben Gurion government, Rubashov arranged that the journal, di goldene keyt, destined to become the most luminous literary journal in Yiddish, be published by the Histadrut. True, as Dovid Fishman notess the Histadrut is a quasi governmental agency," but it is nevertheless significant that the journal had to be provided with a fig leaf if it was to continue publication in Israel.. (See Tsanin's article for other curious examples of Marano-type tactics which Yiddish writers were forced to adopt for many years.) Finally, what about the state of Yiddish in Israel today? I confess that in my essay I exaggerated the malevolent attitude of the Israeli authorities and its detrimental effect on Yiddish. Dovid Fishman, however, sins rather on the other side.. Yes, the state subsidizes the few Yiddish radio, and the Yiddish theater "receives most of its funds from the Tel Aviv municipal government"--this among other other positive measures that have been implemented. Yet pace Fishman, the situation with respect to Yiddish in public schools is far from encouraging. According to Fishman, "Yiddish is taught as a third language in about 50 schools,": the costs covered by the state budget. Yet the fact is that although at first -- as a result of a grant in the amount of $300,000 oferred by a wealthy Canadian Jew to Bar Ilan University a few years ago--50 classes came into being, they have now been reduced to less than 40 classes where Yiddish is taught once or twice weekly--this out of a total of 45,000 classes in 3050 schools in the country. (See Mordkhe Dunits, government supervisor for the study of Yiddish in Israel, Forverts, NY October 1, 1999).; and also "Gender, Literacy, and Religiosity: Dimensions of Yiddish Educaiton in Israeli Government-Supported Schools," by Bryna Bogoch, International Journal of the Sociology of Languages, No. 138, l999), This negligible number may be further reduced, writes Bogoch and also I. Luden in lebns-fragn (Tel Aviv), mainly because of recent budget cuts and the lack of Yiddish teachers--a situation that could be ameliorated only by the appropriation of more funds. Three years ago the Knesset established a special agency to preserve the cultural treasures of Yiddish and Latinoand encourage various activities in those two areas. The Ladino section, as far as I know, has been operating successfully since its formation, but the Yiddish section has thus far received only part of the yearly $350.000 that had been allotted to it. According to the September-October l999 issue of lebns-fragn, a number of festivals, theatrical productions and concerts are being planned for the near future. About the only program thus far was an evening devoted to Yiddish songs, poetry readings, and theatrical excerpts, which took place around Rosh Hashana this yea, in Tel Aviv. Despite its modest conception, the evening, according to lebns-frfagn, "was transformed spontaneously into a festive manifestation of Yiddish artistic expression." How effective all these initiatives will prove in the course of time is a subject for vague speculation only.. The question to ask oneself is what those initiatives are meant to achieve. If it is to restore Yiddish to its prewar status as a robust, functioning culture and as a language for communication among many people, the answer is that this is almost certainly not destined to happen. If, on the other hand, the idea is to encourage various Yiddish and Yiddish oriented activities, from klezmer camps to scholarly conferences, from occasional theatrical performances to the encouragement of Yiddish language course--much on the line, that is, of what is happening in the United States, then there is some ground for optimism. The realization of even modest goals, however, depends vitally on the Israeli authorities. Thus far, as I have noted, their response (from being chintzy with money tolopenly discouraging Yiddish in Ukraine and Russia) is far from satisfactory. The burden of past policies, past enmities and past zealotry still lie heavily upon the Israeli Establishment and Israeli society. Call this offensive or outrageous; but above all it is a source of pity and a misfortune, for just as Yiddish had ceased to offer any challenge to the position of Hebrew, it is still being treated with circumspection, with disrespect, and callous lack of generosity. Abraham Brumberg ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 09.033 Address for the postings to Mendele: mendele@lists.yale.edu Address for the list commands: listproc@lists.yale.edu Mendele on the Web: http://mendele.commons.yale.edu http://metalab.unc.edu/yiddish/mendele.html