Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 09.039 November 1, 1999 1) Risen from the dead (Abraham Brumberg) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 15:33:17 -0400 (EDT) From: abraham brumberg Subject: Risen from the dead (The Politics of Yiddish - Book Review) [To be published in The Jewish Quarterly (London) - one of the leading Jewish literary and cultural journals, now amalgamated with the Jewish Book News & Reviews. Selected materials, subscription information and other details at http://www.jq.ort.org/ -i.v.] RISEN FROM THE DEAD? The Politics of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Literature and Society (Winter studies in Yiddish ; v. 4). Edited by Dov-Ber Kerler. Walnut Creek, CA : AltaMira Press, 1998; 212 pp. ISBN: 0761990240; 0761990259 (pbk.) "Is Yiddish Dead?" (or, alternatively, "dying") is a question that comes up repeatedly in commentaries and debates, recently in these pages in an essay by Janet Hadda and Iosif Vaisman's spirited reply (TJQ Summer 1998 and Winter 1998 respectively). The appearnce of The Politics of Yiddish, then, is timely. Ably edited by Dov-Ber Kerler, who teaches Yiddish and Yiddish literature at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Yiddish Studies and is a gifted Yiddish poet to boot (one of the few of his generation), this volume helps us differentiate between calls for action on the one hand, and for serious deliberations on the other. Suggest that Yiddish might be--or has been-- in a process of erosion and you get a veritable storm of passionate rejoinders. Historical parallels, legitimate or not, are cited, ringing Yiddish verses are dredged up, indignant denials fill the air, and those who voice such suggestions are denounced as ignoramuses or veritable traitors to the Jewish people.. Yet all this brouhaha is quite gratuitous, for it should be clear by now that Yiddish is indeed still alive and kicking, though in an altogether different reincarnation than in the past.. There is no dearth of evidence for it. Yiddish has become an object of pervasive interest and curiosity. Courses in Yiddish and Yiddish literature are taught in universities and even high schools, including, mirabile dictum, in Israel. Klezmer ensembles (virtually unknown 20 years ago) perform Jewish music at hundreds of camps, festivals, and concerts. Last summer Toronto was the scene of a week-long Yiddish festival, attended by several thousands spectators and nearly 200 performers. Scholars meet for conferences in Europe, Israel, and the United States. And other examples abound. Several reasons for this remarkable phenomenon come to mind: the reaction (however belated) to the Holocaust, the feverish search for "roots" and identity on the part of the post-Holocaust generations, perhaps a sense of nostalgia for a world that is no more but which one would like to be at one with.. Whatever the reason or reasons, the Yiddish revival is undeniable. Yet having said this, two caveats are in order: First, the reification of Yiddish must not be confused with the use of Yiddish for conversational purposes. I know very few young (and for that matter slightly older...) Yiddish scholars who actually speak Yiddish. Yiddish is admired, studied, written about, performed--but not spoken. Yiddish as an element of a live, vigorous daily culture no longer exists. This constitutes the fundamental difference between the prewar role of Yiddish and its present incarnation.. Take, for example, the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., founded about 15 years ago by an enterprising young Yiddish scholar Aaron Lansky. The Center has come to play a significant role in the Yiddish revival. It has one of the largest collections of Yiddish volumes in the United States (most of them donated by private individuals), and sponsors Yiddish lectures, recitations, and the like. Yet hardly any of the dedicated men and women who work there knows Yiddish fluently. The second caveat pertains to the Yiddish used by the haredi, the ultra-orthodox, mainly hasidic Jews in Israel (mainly Jerusalem) and in some other areas throughout the world. Joshua Fishman, one of the foremost American socio-linguists working in the field of Yiddish, maintains that the undoubted increase of Yiddish among them attests to the continued viability of the language.. Difference between the Yiddish used by the haredi and secular Jews, however fascinating linguistically and culturally, render both equal pillars of today's "Yiddishkayt." But this surely begs the issue. The real florescence of Yiddish, between about the middle of the 19th century until the Holocaust, was above all a secular phenomenon. Yiddish prose, poetry, scholarship, ethnography, let alone the development of a Yiddish press, theater, schools, political movements dedicated to maintaining Yiddish culture all took place outside the religious community, and hardly impinged on the use of Yiddish by the latter. Imagine Yiddish without Sholom Aleichem, without Peretz, Avrom Sutskever, H. Leivik, the vilner trupe , without Maurice Schwartz, Avrom Goldfagen, without the YIVO; imagine Yiddish without the historical values embedded in modern Yiddish literature., from Peretz to Chaim Grade. The result is a barren and bleak landscape. This brings me to the book under review, and first to the essay "Yiddish in the Orthodox Communities of Jerusalem," by Miriam Isaacs. Professor of Yiddish Studies at Maryland University, .Ms. Isaacs is a thoroughly secular Jew, but with an abiding and open-minded interest in the Yiddish of the ultra-orthodox. An assiduous scholar, she compares the various dialects of Yiddish within that community, its role at home and in schools (in the latter as the language in which secular subjects such as chemistry and physics are taught), the diffderences in teaching Yiddish in haredi girls' and boys' schools, its relationship to loshn koydesh--the Ashkenazy Hebrew used in teaching religious subjects-- the extent to which Yiddish is used in intra-personal relationships outside of school and home, the use of standard Hebrew. . (Only a small group of ultra-orthodox Jews, who belong to the right-wing fanatic group "Naturei Karta" refuses to use Hebrew, the "language of Zionism"--which they reject--and which will be spoken only when the Messiah returns to earth.) Though Isaacs is obviously impressed with the use of Yiddish among the haredim, she does not ignore some of its more troublesome aspects. Thus, she writes, most teachers of Yiddish, however great their sentiment for the language, maintain that it has no formal structure or grammar, and refuse to teach anything that smacks of secular values, such as modern Yiddish literature. Yiddish literature may have absorbed centuries-old religious values and experiences--think of Sholem Ash or Bashevis Singer, or Shmuel An-sky, or for that matter the Yiddish poet Avrom Liesin --but the ultrra-orthodox do not reciprocate, ignoring and rejecting anything relating to secular Judaism. (This point, incidentally, is developed in the excellent essay "Yiddishism and Judaism," by the distinguished scholar Emanuel S. Goldstein, which opens The Politics of Yiddish). Another disturbing aspect is that because of the disdain still prevalent in Israel towards Yiddish in general and toward the Yiddish of the haredim in particular, many ultra-orthodox Jews conversing in Yiddish on the street will suddenly switch to Hebrew if a secular-looking Jew should approach them. (I am reminded of Jews speaking Yiddish in a Moscow park one afternoon in the 1960s. They launched into Russian when I came near by--clearly I was not one of them. In both cases, this behavior was--is-- a mark of rank insecurity.) The title of the Kerler volume, The Politics of Yiddish, is eminently apt. The history of modern Yiddish has been forged in many struggles--internal, vis-a-vis detractors and competitors, with ideological foes and against enemies bent on destroying not only Yiddish but the Jewish ethos in general. In his "The Politics of Research on Spoken Yiddish," the eminent Yiddfish linguist Rakhmiel Peltz deals with how political and ideological assumptions and values shaped linguistic research, particularly in the Soviet Union and in the United States. In both countries, he demonstrates compellingly, "linguistic research ...was a political entrerprise. The obsession with normativism and predetermined standards of what constituted the refined kulturshprakh led the linguists to intentionally overlook the ways of speaking of most Yiddish speakers." (Unhappily, the marvelous Yiddish-English and English-Yiddish dictionary by the late Uriel Weinreich displays just such a normative attitude, in which the question of "what should" often takes the place of "what is.") The vicissistudes of the relationship betweeen the Left and Yiddish in the United States is examined in three essays, of which Milton Doroshkin's "Yiddish Socialist Press in New York, 1880s-1920s" and Edna Nahson's "Art and Politics: the Case of the New York Artef Theatre (1925-1940)," are the most interesting. In the first, the author traces the history of the left-oriented press (which is to say almost the entire Yiddish press) from the early 20th century, reaching a print run of 537,982 in New York and 716,146 (!) nationally, before declining and having to compete, as of the early 1920s, with the Communist Morgn frayhat. The second essay deals with the little known Yiddish theater maintained in the mid-1920s until 1940 by the Jewish Communist movement, scoring notable artistic successes, but finally collapsing--not surprisingly--after the Hitler-Stalin Pact. During the 1930s, various Communist Yiddish enterprises (journals, theatre, etc.) were supported not only by party members, but also by a number of distinguished Yiddish writers and poets--to all effects and purposes at that time "fellow travellers"-- such as H. Leivick, Peretz Hirshbeyn and Khaim Zhitlovsky. Stalin's toast to "the health of Herr Hitler whom I know the German nation loves" was too much not only for them, of course. but for a great number of genuine believers who upped anf left the party in droves. The fate of Soviet Yiddish literature, scholarship, and of several prominentt Yiddish writers and the actor and theatre director Shloyme Mikhoels, victim of a grisly assassination masterminded by Stalin) constitutes perhaps the most tragic chapter in the history of Yiddish letters, the non plus ultra of maniacal political persecution in literature and the arts, is the subject of several essays. Of them, the essay on Dovid Hofshteyn, one of the Russia's most inspired Yiddish poets and a man who religiously put his trust in both the Jewish and the general humanitarian promises of the Russian Revolution, is outstanding. It was written by Josif Kerler, father of the editor of this volume, and a distinguished Yiddish poet, now living in Israel. Hofshteyn's poetry, which he began writing around the time of World War I, was imbued with intoxicating images, unexpected rhymes and an innovative language not known in any other center of Yiddish poetrry, including in the United States, where the modernist group "Di yunge" was thriving at that time. Like other Soviet Yiddish writers and poets, including the prose-writer, Dovid Bergelson, Hofshteyn (spelled Hofstein in the book) had been forced during the late 1920s and 1930s to censor his own poetry, excise specific words and phrases (such as Hebraisms that smacked of "clericalism" and Zionism), to engage in debilitating mea culpas. In addition both he and Bergelson, could never live down the fact that as young men they both had lived in Palestine, and wrote at that time in Hebrew. Their apologies and "self-criticisms" proved of no avail.. In August 1952, Hofshteyn, Bergelson and l3 other defendants, including two other Yiddish writers, were tried for "treason" and promptly dispatched with KGB bullets in the backs of their necks. I cannot resist citing one poem by Hofshteyn, a veritable gem, written around 1918-1919. mir shtamen fun felzn, fun felzn tsemolte oyf milshteyn fun tsaytn.. mir shtamen fun felzn vos hobn dem goyrl farbundn mit yamen, mit vintn, mit vaytn... Mir shtamen fun felzn vos hobn tsebrokhn dem yokh fun'm glivernem shteyn-- mir geyen un velder nor viste undz konen farhaltn... Mir zaynen di ershte in faldn fun vintn, mit vikhers gebundn, mit khvalies geshvestert, gebrudert mit shturem-- keyn mizrakh, keyn mayrev, keyn tsofn, keyn dorem! (We spring from rocks/from rocks ground by millstones of time/ We spring from rocks/ we have tied our fate/ to oceans/to winds/ to yonder../ We spring from rocks/that shattered the yoke /of boulders--/we march on/and only the thickest of forests/can thwart us.../We are the first who reached/ the folds of the winds,/ we are lashed to gales/sistered with waves/ brothered with tempests/ surging onward east and west, northward and southward! (I have modified the translation in the book). On a personal note: Of the many splendid essays, which I am unable discuss within the confines of this review, one won me over particularly. I had known something about Yiddish in England from the turn of the century into the 1930s, but nothing prepared me for the wealth of details, lovingly rendered by Raphaela Lewis, in her "Petticoat Lane and the North-West Passage (London, 1880-1940)". Who would have known that Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor Aveling-Marx learned Yiddish "in order to help in the effort to unionize immigrant tailors"? That from 1900 to 1937 "the old Pavilion Theatree in Whitechapel Road was given over entirely to the Jewish community," which used it for plays and prayers? That in 1912 "Feinman's Yiddish People's Theatre" opened in Commercial Road with seating for 1500, and staged 'Rigoletto' in Yiddish?" "Rigoletto," mind you, not "La Juive"! And so, in the end, I put down my copy of The Politics of Yiddish, moved, saddened but also delighted and enriched. Abraham Brumberg Abraham Brumberg is an expert on Russian and East European affairs. He writes for The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He has also been active in Yiddish letters: his work has appeared in Yiddish journals and newspapers, and he produced a record album, "Of Lovers, Dreamers, and Thieves--Yiddish Folk Songs from Eastern Europe." ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 09.039 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