Czernowitz at 100: The First Yiddish Language Conference in Historical Perspective

Czernowitz at 100

Czernowitz at 100 The First Yiddish Language Conference in Historical Perspective

Edited by Kalman Weiser and Joshua A. Fogel

L EXINGTON B OOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Czernowitz at 100 : the first Yiddish language conference in historical perspective / edited by Kalman Weiser and Joshua A. Fogel. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-7391-4069-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4071-0 (electronic) 1. Yiddish philology—Congresses. 2. Jews—Ukraine—Chernivtsi—Intellectual life—20th century. 3. Yiddish language—Social aspects—Europe, Eastern. 4. Yiddish language—Europe, Eastern—History—20th century. I. Fogel, Joshua A., 1950- II. Weiser, Keith Ian, 1973- III. Title: Czernowitz at one hundred. PJ5113.C94 2010 439'.109—dc22 2009051178

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Contents

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Introduction Kalman Weiser

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The Czernowitz Conference: Contexts, Ironies, and the Verdict of Jewish History Ezra Mendelsohn

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I Politics, Language, and Ideology

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A Tale of Two Photographs: Nathan Birnbaum, the Election of 1907, and the 1908 Yiddish Language Conference Jess Olson

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Peretz’s Commitment to Yiddish in Czernowitz: A National Caprice? Marie Schumacher-Brunhes

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Mother-tongue, Mame-loshn, and Kulturshprakh: The Tension between Populism and Elitism in the Language Ideology of Noah Prylucki Kalman Weiser

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II Literature and the Arts

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Y. L. Peretz and the Politics of Yiddish Marc Caplan v

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vi

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Contents

Reclaiming Czernowitz in Aharon Appelfeld’s Flowers of Darkness Philip Hollander

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Dem Oyle Regls Tokhter: The Poetic Pilgrimage of Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman Leye Lipsky

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The Painter as Ethnographer: Maurycy Minkowski and the European Yiddish Intelligentsia before World War I Zachary M. Baker

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III The Legacy of Czernowitz

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The Success of the Czernowitz Yiddish Conference: Setting the Agenda for Yiddish Language Planning in the Twentieth Century Rakhmiel Peltz From Czernowitz to Paris: The International Yiddish Culture Congress of 1937 Matthew Hoffman Yiddishism in Canadian Garb Rebecca Margolis

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IV Appendices

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The Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives, Toronto David Birnbaum

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Mates Mieses’s Defense of the Yiddish Language Mordkhe Schaechter (Joshua A. Fogel, translator)

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Index

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About the Contributors

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1 Introduction Kalman Weiser

The present volume, Czernowitz at 100: The First Yiddish Language Conference in Historical Perspective, represents a selection of revised and expanded papers first presented at an international conference of the same name convened at York University in Toronto, Canada, in April 2008. The conference looked back over the long divide of a century—one marked with the mass migration of Ashkenazi (historically, Central and Eastern European) Jews across the globe, two world wars, the Holocaust, the birth of Israel, and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and other Soviet bloc countries—to assess the achievements and fate of participants in the First Yiddish Language Conference (held in Czernowitz—contemporary Chernivtsi, Ukraine—in 1908) and the successes and failures of Yiddish-based language nationalism itself as a phenomenon. Questions of language and identity remain as divisive in the contemporary “global village” as a century ago and, despite predictions to the contrary, nationalism has failed to disappear as a major factor in world politics since the end of World War II. Yiddishism represents a fascinating example of language-based nationalism in the early twentieth century due to the uncommon linguistic situation of the territorially dispersed Jews in Eastern Europe. Once a leading current in Jewish life, it has been eclipsed in both historiography and popular consciousness by the creation of a primarily Hebrew-speaking Jewish society in Israel, on the one hand, and by the social and political integration of Jews elsewhere, on the other. Participants in the 2008 conference were asked to consider how Yiddishism attempted to achieve its aims in a world that knew no concrete “Yiddishland.” How did the model of the state serve as an organizing principle for

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Introduction

such a quintessential Diaspora language and paradigmatic “stateless” culture as Yiddish? How did dynamic interaction with Zionism and other nationalist movements in the region shape the cultural ideology of Yiddishism and the political ideology of Diaspora nationalism (the movement for the recognition of Jews as a national minority within states)? What is the relationship of Jewish literature and art to the Yiddishist movement and to the multicultural city of Czernowitz itself? Finally, what legacy, if any, has Yiddishism left in the contemporary world? Jews traditionally formed a territorially dispersed, internally bilingual (Hebrew-Yiddish) minority that balanced expectations of messianic restoration to their ancient homeland in Palestine with a sense of indigenousness in their contemporary homelands. Prior to World War II, they were frequently perceived (and not merely by anti-Semites) as a distinct, non-European racial group dwelling on the periphery of non-Jewish life. Their modernization and path toward emancipation and integration into the dominant society evoked crises surrounding loss of identity and cultural integrity for both Jews and non-Jews. The rival ideologies of Hebraism and Yiddishism emerged as part of a complex of political and cultural responses to the decline of religioncentered identity and the challenge of Jewish integration in Eastern Europe. Ironically, both sought to achieve a monolingual revolution in Jewish society, mimicking patterns in general European society but in a specifically Jewish key. They faced vehement opposition from both outside and inside Jewish society, most importantly from antinationalist Orthodox leaders and from champions of the Jews’ assimilation into non-Jewish society. The brainchild of Jewish nationalist theoreticians, Nathan Birnbaum and Chaim Zhitlovsky, the Czernowitz Conference in August 1908 drew some seventy registered participants from Eastern Europe and beyond to what was then the multiethnic capital of the Habsburg province of Bukovina. A manifestation of language-based nationalism, the Czernowitz Conference arrived at a moment in history when many of the smaller and “non-historical,” that is, lacking a tradition of statehood, peoples of Europe similarly campaigned for recognition and rights for national languages as part of programs for political and cultural self-determination. A number of ethnic communities coexisted in Czernowitz prior to World War II. The city was home to Jews, Rumanians, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), and Germans, all with nationalist aspirations and engaged in complicated but more or less peaceful relations. In the pre–World War I period, Bukovina was adjacent to the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, which possessed the lion’s share of the Habsburg Empire’s Jewish citizens. It was also located at the crossroads of states with massive Yiddish-speaking populations. The political liberalism of the Habsburg monarchy compared with the oppres-

Introduction

3

siveness of the regimes of neighboring Rumania and tsarist Russia (which then included much of Poland) made Czernowitz an attractive location for the conference even if the city’s Jewish bourgeoisie identified most closely with imperial Austro-German culture and typically considered Yiddish more a language of the small town past—of grandparents and relatives still dwelling in neighboring shtetlekh and of recent working class migrants to the city—than of the cosmopolitan present embodied by “Little Vienna.”1 The conference’s leading participants included some of the most prominent Yiddish-speaking writers, intellectuals, and political activists of the day. Several were themselves “national penitents,” individuals motivated by social and political commitments to “return” to provincial Yiddish—often but not always their mother tongue—after having receiving their educations and established personal and professional lives in the dominant languages of European high culture in the region (German, Polish, or Russian). They championed Yiddishism, the movement to transform Yiddish from a folk language and culture into the focal point of modern Jewish identity and of a European Kultur. In “choosing” Yiddish, they swam against the dominant currents of middle-class Jewish life pressing for the jettisoning of Yiddish in the pursuit of social integration and economic mobility. Members of a selfconscious, secular elite, they also comprehended that their commitments and interests were not necessarily shared by the mass of still largely Orthodox, lower middle-class and working class Yiddish speakers in whose name they acted. Speaking the language of contemporary liberalism and nationalism, they envisioned institutions such as a daily press, a state-funded educational system, and a national language academy and theater in Yiddish within the multiethnic states of Eastern Europe. They sought to prepare a generation of Jews to embrace a new Jewish identity, one both built upon and transcending traditional culture, and to loosen the Yiddish language and culture itself from its religious and provincial moorings. In doing so, as a number of contributors to this volume observe, they wished to “humanize” the language, to expound universalist ideals and values in particularistic garb, thus harmonizing both modern European and Jewish identities. Their ambition extended, of course, beyond the spoken and written word to music and the plastic arts as well. The 1908 Czernowitz Conference aimed to raise the prestige of Yiddish, often derided as a mongrel jargon unsuitable for more sophisticated expression, and address its political and legal status in Eastern Europe polities. Its agenda outlined a number of issues relevant to the further development of Yiddish language, literature, and culture, which had begun in the second half of the nineteenth century a process of modernization akin to that of other European vernaculars. However, the bulk of the conference agenda was never addressed due to preoccupation with the central question of the status

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of Yiddish relative to Hebrew. Was Yiddish to rise to the level of Hebrew, a prestigious sacred language whose revival as a spoken and literary language had only recently begun, and be accorded a position as a national language of the Jewish people? Or had it already surpassed Hebrew, a clerical artifact in the appraisal of its most radical opponents, in relevance to contemporary life and thus deserved the title of the national language of the Jewish people? Blustery sessions ensued in which debate rose to feverish levels. Ultimately, a compromise resolution was declared recognizing Yiddish as a national language of the Jewish people while leaving individuals free to determine their own attitude toward Hebrew. In retrospect, the Czernowitz Conference has been alternately seen as the pinnacle of Yiddish language nationalism and as a false start to an ill-fated movement.2 While its anniversary was (and is still) employed as a moment of inspiration for further conferences, no permanent body directly emerged from the conference to continue its work. The dream of state-sponsored support for Yiddish culture was never fully realized. In the Soviet Union, official recognition was granted to Yiddish as the national language of the Jewish proletariat but ideologically controlled, Communist Yiddish culture received state support only until the late 1930s, when most remaining Jewish cultural institutions were closed by the state.3 Other states with large Yiddish-speaking populations in Eastern Europe (Lithuania is here an exception, though it dismantled provisions for Jewish national autonomy apart from schools and cooperative banks by 1926) failed to honor commitments enshrined in the international Minorities Treaty of 1919 to provide financial support for schools in Jewish languages.4 On the other hand, on the eve of World War II, Yiddish was truly a global language with likely eleven to thirteen million speakers.5 It supported a vibrant and dynamic culture, both traditional and modern, aimed at a mass audience in Europe, the Americas, South Africa, Palestine, and wherever else its Eastern European–born speakers carried it and established schools, newspapers, publishing houses, theaters, and other institutions. The standardization of Yiddish—a major goal of the 1908 conference—was, as Rakhmiel Peltz explains, to a remarkable extent accomplished within the space of a few generations thanks to the collective efforts of writers, journalists, educators, and scholars, above all those active in YIVO (Der yidisher visnshaftlekher institut, the Jewish Scientific Institute, founded in Vilna, Poland in 1925) and in Soviet academies. Regardless of evaluations of its concrete impact, the Czernowitz Conference represents a watershed moment: not only did it publicly proclaim a movement to transform the religiocentric Jewish people into a Yiddish-speaking nation; the promotion of “upstart” Yiddish put champions of Hebrew on the defensive, contributing to an infamous “language war” that divided Jewish society for decades to come.

Introduction

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Much has changed in Jewish life in the tumultuous century since the First Yiddish Language Conference. The murderous rampages of Hitler and Stalin, geographic dislocation on a massive scale, and decades of linguistic assimilation have taken their toll on Yiddish and its culture. Today, it has likely less than a million everyday speakers, most of whom are elderly and/or members of various haredi (ultra-Orthodox), primarily Hasidic, communities whose fiercely traditionalist, self-segregating way of life is typically opaque to outsiders.6 Indeed, it is not uncommon to hear the assertion outside these circles that Yiddish is “dead.” Yet, Yiddish is far from an endangered language— thanks largely to high birthrates in haredi communities, even if some haredi groups increasingly employ some other tongue (usually English or Hebrew) as their vernaculars—and continues to evolve, albeit in ways that may offend purists who champion a standard based on the language of the pre–World War II secular intellectuals rather than that of today’s Hasidim. What is in danger is the secular Yiddish culture promoted at the Czernowitz Conference and which blossomed so magnificently regardless of obstacles in the first half of the twentieth century. This is reflected in the language being learned outside ultra-Orthodox communities more often in university and adult education classes than in homes and in the dwindling number of publications, new literary and theater works, and cultural and professional organizations directed at non-haredi Yiddish speakers. Meanwhile, in those communities where Yiddish is preserved as a natural medium of intergenerational communication, there is generally little awareness or interest in the vestiges of secular Yiddish culture and the values espoused at the Czernowitz Conference. On the contrary, Yiddish has become emblematic of an anti-modernist religious stance that rejects external cultural influences and the left-oriented causes championed by many Yiddishists of the past as endangering Jewish piety and authenticity.7 Whatever one’s view of Yiddish, one cannot fail to recognize that it has left a deep and lasting impression on both Israeli and American (and hence global) popular culture and language. Yiddish peppers American English and Israeli Hebrew (indeed, some go so far as to argue that contemporary ivrit [Hebrew for “Hebrew”] is more Yiddish in Semiticized garb than the descendant of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew).8 In recent decades, scholars, musicians, and artists have begun to rediscover the rich intellectual and cultural legacy of Yiddish, contributing to a flurry of Yiddish-themed music and arts festivals, books, university courses, and conferences across the world. Almost invariably, these events celebrating Yiddish are conducted in English, Hebrew, or some other language widely spoken by contemporary Jews and others interested in Yiddish culture. As scholar Jeffrey Shandler observes, Yiddish thrives as a “post-vernacular” medium: a fragmented language and culture,

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its value is primarily symbolic, emotive, and performative rather than communicative (in the most basic sense of the word) for individuals immersed in general culture yet who identify with it as an ethnic heritage language and cultural code.9 It serves to reinforce the ethnic identities (and hence particularism) of Ashkenazic Jews who do not speak it vis-à-vis non-Ashkenazic Jews and other groups. At the same time, the translation of Yiddish scholarly, literary, and theatrical works into other languages and the reduction of Yiddish culture to a “sensibility”10 that can be expressed in a variety of tongues as well as nonlinguistic media, such as music and dance, has paradoxically made Yiddish more accessible (and hence universal) to an audience, both Jewish and non-Jewish, that is not defined by actual competence in it. The goals of the original Czernowitz Conference have thus been achieved in some measure but not without sacrificing Yiddish itself. Yiddish may today be given its due but primarily by those who do not speak it, at least not as their everyday language of home and community. The interest and commitment to the study of Yiddish and Eastern European culture evinced by a young generation of scholars whose work is presented here—mostly junior academics and all born after World War II—is itself a sign of the times, as Ezra Mendelsohn notes in his prefatory remarks evaluating the achievements of Yiddishism and rival ideological movements in the context of a tumultuous century. Yiddish is no longer a serious threat to the revival of Hebrew or to the establishment of American-Jewish, RussianJewish, Israeli, and other identities and thus can be viewed safely across the distance of time and space from pre-Holocaust Europe. Feelings of nostalgia, the void created by cataclysmic loss and cultural disruption, romanticism for an idealized and ill-fated civilization, and the “search for a usable past” to serve as a guide in contemporary life also help fuel this interest in a language that was, arguably, as much willingly abandoned or simply not passed on by its speakers to their children as it was murdered. Most of the essays included in Czernowitz at 100 examine the ideological development and political engagement of leading participants in the conference, in particular Nathan Birnbaum (Jess Olson), Y. L. Peretz (Marie Schumacher-Brunhes), Chaim Zhitlovsky (Matthew Hoffman), and Noah Prylucki (Kalman Weiser). All reflect the preoccupation, both implicit and explicit, of Yiddishist intellectuals with the creative tension between multiple poles: tradition and modernity, elites and folk, universalism and particularism, the artist or scholar and his or her subject or audience. Others explore the psychological and artistic dimensions of Peretz’s oeuvre (Marc Caplan) or Hebrew novelist Aharon Appelfeld’s (Phillip Hollander) and Yiddish poet Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman’s (Leye Lipsky) personal and literary relationships to their native city and its history. In the realm of the plastic arts, Zachary Baker

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explores attitudes of Yiddishist intellectuals toward the creation of a Jewish national school of art as expressed in their perspectives on painter Maurycy Minkowski and his work. The concrete manifestations of the “spirit” of Czernowitz are considered by three contributors. Peltz evaluates the achievements of collective Yiddish language planning between the two world wars while Hoffman studies a 1937 successor conference struggling to unite both Communist and non-Communist Yiddish activists against a common foe. Finally, Rebecca Margolis analyzes Yiddish cultural activity in Canada, where, she observes, the ideal of Jewish cultural autonomy reached its greatest degree of fulfillment in the English-speaking world. Hosted in Toronto, a city known, like the Czernowitz of 1908, for its ethnic diversity and cultural tolerance, the 2008 conference at York University was fondly dedicated to the memory of two luminaries in the field of Yiddish Studies, both of whom had personal connections to both the city of Czernowitz and to participants in the 2008 conference: the scholars Solomon Birnbaum and Mordkhe Schaechter. Solomon Birnbaum (1891–1989) was a son of Czernowitz Conference organizer Nathan Birnbaum, whose ideological migrations from pre-Herzlian Zionist leader to champion of Diaspora nationalism to spokesmen for Jewish Orthodoxy are treated in Olson’s work. As his grandson David Birnbaum explains in his description of the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives in Toronto, not only did his father, Solomon, a pioneering Yiddish linguist and founder of the field of Hebrew paleography, keep the 1908 conference’s minutes while an adolescent attending a local gymnasium. Having learned Yiddish as an adolescent, he also set upon a remarkably prolific career as a scholar of Jewish languages, was the first professor of Yiddish in a European university outside the Soviet Union, developed his own scientifically precise systems for Yiddish spelling and transliteration into Latin letters, and championed Yiddish as an essential part of Jewish identity in the Orthodox world.11 Birnbaum’s younger colleague Mordkhe Schaechter (1927–2007), a leading Yiddish language planner and author of language text books in post– World War II America, was the son of a Galician migrant to Czernowitz who attended the original conference.12 Schaechter was born in Czernowitz and, together with his sister, the Yiddish poet and songwriter Beyle SchaechterGottesman, grew up there in a Yiddishist-territorialist family in the interwar period. Shortly after earning a doctorate in 1951 with a dissertation about Yiddish linguistics at the University of Vienna, he immigrated to New York City. In his adopted city he taught in a number of academic institutions, including the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University, published extensively, was active in the YIVO Institute (whose standardized rules for Yiddish spelling he championed with great passion),13 served as chief

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interviewer for the Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, and directed the Yidish-lige (League for Yiddish) until his untimely death in 2007. With his erudition and indefatigable commitment to Yiddish as a living language and culture, he inspired generations of students (and progeny) to speak Yiddish and to pursue academic and cultural creativity in it. His essay about Mates Mieses’s address—likely the first scientifically grounded defense of Yiddish delivered in Yiddish—at the Czernowitz Conference (here rendered into English by Joshua Fogel) conveys something of the commitment of these men to both scholarship and the Yiddishist cause. This conference and volume would not have been possible without the participation and assistance of several individuals and institutions. The organizers would like to express their sincere appreciation to all presenters and respondents, as well as to the Birnbaum and Schaechter families, Alex Neumann, Evy Lackman, Jordana de Bloeme, and Sharon Levinas. The conference would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the following bodies at York University: the Centre for Jewish Studies, the Humanities Division, the History Department, the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Literature, the Faculty of Arts, the Office of the Dean, Office of the Vice President Academic, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation.

NOTES 1. On the attitudes of Czernowitz Jews toward the city’s languages and cultures, see, for example, Gaby Coldewey, Anja Fiedler, Stefan Gehre et al., eds., Zwischen Pruth und Jordan. Lebenserinnerungen Czernowitzer Juden (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003). 2. For reactions to and evaluations of Czernowitz, see Joshua A. Fishman, “Attracting a Following to High-Culture Functions for a Language of Everyday Life: The Role of the Tshernovits Language Conference in the ‘Rise of Yiddish,’” in his Never Say Die: A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), 382–88; Joshua Fishman, “The Hebraist Response to the Tshernovits Conference,” in Semitic Studies, in Honor of Wolf Leslau, ed. by Alan S. Kaye (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991), vol. I–II, 437–48; Robert King, “The Czernowitz Conference in Retrospect,” Politics of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Literature, and Society, ed. by Dov-Ber Kerler (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1998), 41–49. 3. On the history and activity of Soviet Jewish research institutes, see Alfred Abraham Greenbaum, Jewish Scholarship and Scholarly Institutions in Soviet Russia 1918–1953 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1978); Rakhmiel Peltz and Mark W. Kiel, “Di Yiddish-Imperye: The Dashed Hopes for a Yiddish Cultural Empire in the

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Soviet Union,” Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Soviet National Languages: Their Past, Present and Future, ed. Isabelle T. Kreindler (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1985), 277–309. 4. For a comparative overview of Jewish politics and culture in the region, see Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1983). 5. Neil Jacobs, Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3. 6. Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 1, 203. 7. On the use of Yiddish and other languages, see Miriam Isaacs, “Haredi, haymish and frim: Yiddish vitality and language choice in a transnational multilingual community,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 138 (1999), 9–30; Simeon D. Baumel, Sacred Speakers: Language and Culture among the Haredim in Israel (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). 8. Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Israelit safa yafa (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2008); Paul Wexler, The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1990). 9. Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture, 1–30. 10. See, for example, David Sax, “Rise of the New Yiddishists,” Vanity Fair, web exclusive, April 8, 2009. 11. See Kalman Weiser, “The ‘Orthodox’ Orthography of Solomon Birnbaum,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 20 (2004), 275–95. 12. League for Yiddish, Vegn mordkhe shekhter un zayn verk. Tsu zayn zekhtsikstn geboyrn-tog (New York: League for Yiddish, Inc., 1987), 7–8. 13. Mordkhe Schaechter, Der eynheytlekher oysleyg: takones fun yidishn oysleyg (New York: League for Yiddish/YIVO, 1999).

2 The Czernowitz Conference Contexts, Ironies, and the Verdict of Jewish History Ezra Mendelsohn

The goal of the Czernowitz Language Conference of 1908 was to play a decisive role in the creation of a more or less secular, Yiddish-speaking, progressive, modern East European Jewish nation. My introductory remarks to this volume will not deal with the conference itself or its subsequent impact—that will be the task of the other contributors. Rather, I will offer some brief reflections on the broader European context of Czernowitz, the paradoxes and ironies that attended it, and its place in the great scheme of modern Jewish history.

CONTEXTS I say nothing new when I point out that the discussions at Czernowitz were very much in tune with the general Zeitgeist in Europe of the years immediately preceding World War I. Everywhere, but particularly among the smaller, stateless nationalities of the continent, we witness determined efforts on the part of scholars (ethnographers, ethnomusicologists, linguists, lexicographers, and grammarians, among others) and artists (especially composers and painters) to engage with and hold up as a model the authentic culture of the “masses,” to make folk culture not only respectable but a solid basis for modern high culture, to celebrate the vitality of the language and culture of the lower classes (especially peasants), and to unite the nation-in-the-making around this folk culture. One aspect of the agenda of this national intelligentsia was to transform formerly scorned, mocked, and ridiculed “jargons” (as Yiddish was commonly called, even by Jews) into noble cultural artifacts, and

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Ezra Mendelsohn

by so doing to reverse or slow down processes of acculturation and assimilation that were corroding the unity and in some cases the very existence of the folk-nation. Let me present a few examples. In a far-away country in the North of Europe, a great debate broke out in 1909, around the time of the Czernowitz Conference, over the question of which language should become the land’s national tongue—the spoken language, or the literary one that was based on the language of another, neighboring country. Generally speaking the political and cultural left, including many prominent intellectuals and creative artists (one of whom was the country’s most famous composer) favored some version of the spoken language, while the conservatives insisted on maintaining the old, “artificial” language. Here was a true Sprachenkampf, a language war between those who wished for “an elevation and liberation of the folk life of the present” and those who wished to preserve the classical language. The country in question was Norway, and while Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), the country’s most celebrated writer, used the Danish-based traditional literary language, Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) favored what came to be known as Nynorsk, new Norwegian, a language based on the popular idiom. This Scandinavian language war continued to plague the country’s cultural politics throughout the twentieth century.1 Also around the time of the Czernowitz Conference, two young composers and musicologists, hailing from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, set out on an expedition to the countryside to discover their motherland’s authentic national musical style, which they hoped to make the basis for a new musical idiom which would be both “popular” and modern. One of these young men said (in 1907): “The days I spent in the village among the peasants were the happiest days of my life.” For him, we are informed, “[folk music] ranked even higher than the greatest pieces of art music.”2 The two composers were Hungary’s greatest musicians, Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and his friend Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967). A few years after their ethnomusical voyage to the Hungarian village, the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) composed the music for the ballet Petrushka (for the Ballets Russes), which made use of folk music, street calls, church music, and represented an effort—by no means the first, of course—to integrate Russian folk culture into the high Russian musical tradition. At the same time, two great Russian artists, Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) and Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964), were creating a new variety of high Russian art based on the lubok (wood cut) and the icon, the two most famous artifacts of Russian folk art. The modern Yiddish movement, whose advocates attended the Czernowitz Conference, had no difficulty in finding European models for their endeavor. We may mention the successful efforts to make Czech the high literary language of the Czech Lands (replacing German) and the much less successful

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efforts to replace English with Gaelic in Ireland (the Gaelic League, which aimed at doing this, was founded in 1893). To my mind the Ukrainian case is the most similar. Jews living in Ukrainian areas in Russia and the Habsburg Empire (Galicia) were mostly Yiddish speakers, and there was some awareness in Jewish circles of the efforts of local Ukrainian intellectuals to make Ukrainian into a literary language and a rallying point for the local national movement. Ukrainian, like Yiddish, was mocked as a worthless jargon (chłopska mowa, peasant speech, as it was called in Polish), or at best considered a “Little Russian” dialect of the great and noble Russian tongue. Like Yiddish, too, Ukrainian was persecuted by the Russian state—the notorious “Ems decree” of 1876 forbade the publication of most Ukrainian literary and journalistic efforts, inasmuch as the regime feared a Ukrainian national movement that might challenge Russian hegemony in what was considered an important and ancient core Russian region. Moreover, just as the existence of Yiddish was threatened by the inroads of Russification and Polonization, so was Ukrainian, since the aristocratic classes and the intelligentsia in Russian Ukraine spoke Russian, and in Galician Ukraine (the Western Ukraine) Polish was the language of high culture. The Yiddishists at Czernowitz, the advocates of Nynorsk in Norway and of Ukrainian in Kiev and Kharkiv, along with an army of great and not so great nationalist composers, artists, writers, historians, and grammarians representing the stateless nations of Europe, all shared a common Weltanschaaung. Grieg and Bartok would have sympathized with the message of Czernowitz—that folk culture can and should be preserved and uplifted, until it gains recognition as a state-supported unifying national culture. In the Jewish case, which was in many ways different from that of the other small nations, since there was no clearly defined national territory, that meant state recognition for the Jews as an extraterritorial nationality, whose cultural life (including, above all, education) would be carried out in the national language—Yiddish.

IRONIES AND PARADOXES In thinking about the Czernowitz Conference it is impossible not to be impressed by the paradoxes and ironies—apparent to us today—evoked by that historic assembly. For one thing, the Czernowitz Yiddishist project was promoted by a fairly small group of mostly secular, left-wing, Jewish intellectuals, on behalf of the Yiddish-speaking “masses” of Eastern Europe, who were mostly Orthodox Jews and antisocialist, many of whom did not care much about the status of Yiddish and were eager, if the circumstances

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allowed for it, to acculturate, because acculturation was seen as the path to success. One might accuse the delegates to the conference of a considerable degree of chutzpah for claiming to speak for the millions of Jews of the Russian Empire, Galicia, and Romania, but we should keep in mind that this phenomenon—the nationalist intelligentsia versus the apathetic masses—was common to most if not all national movements in Eastern Europe. I seem to recall a humorous anecdote having to do with a delegation of Ukrainian nationalists traveling by train to a conference; during this voyage one of the delegates was heard to say that if the train was blown up, that would signal the end of Ukrainian nationalism. On the other hand, it was true that in the Russian Pale of Settlement, and elsewhere, many thousands of young Jewish men and women were in the process of being politicized and “nationalized,” and that Jewish nationalism in its many varieties had actually approached the status of a mass movement during the first Russian revolution of 1905.3 If the delegates at Czernowitz believed that they were speaking in the name of the Jewish masses they were not entirely living in a dream world, but they were certainly guilty of vast exaggeration and wishful thinking. We should also keep in mind that while the Jewish intellectuals at Czernowitz were speaking in favor of the cause of Yiddish as the national language of East European Jewry, and in favor of Jewish national autonomy in the Pale of Settlement and elsewhere in “Yiddishland,” vast numbers of East European Jews were “voting with their feet” and traveling to the New World. Indeed, 1908 was one of the peak years of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. In the short run this meant the establishment in the United States, and in particular in New York, of a new, vibrant center of Yiddish culture, but in the long run Jewish emigration to America and other points west dealt a mortal blow to the Yiddish language and to Yiddish culture, since in the New World acculturationist pressures were much stronger, and much more irresistible, than they were in the Russian Empire and (later on) in independent Poland.4 Thinking about Czernowitz from our vantage point, another striking paradox is that back in 1908, as we have seen, the adherents of the Yiddish movement were mostly secular Jews, or at least Jews who had left behind the traditional life and culture of Orthodox East European Jewry, whereas today virtually the only Jews who still speak Yiddish and use it as their language of daily life are the ultra-Orthodox, whose base is Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, and Brooklyn. These present-day Yiddish speakers use Yiddish as a wall to separate and protect them from unwanted secular influences emanating from the secular world, whereas the men and women of Czernowitz regarded the new Yiddish culture as a bridge to the best in gentile culture as well as an expression of Jewish particularism. Today’s Yiddish speakers, in their Orthodox

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enclaves, have never heard of Peretz or Zhitlovsky, and if they were to read their works they would utterly condemn them. This is a development that no one could have predicted back in 1908. Yet another irony of the Czernowitz Conference is that while in 1908 the East European Jewish masses, or at least a large proportion of them, spoke Yiddish, while the revival of Hebrew as a modern, spoken language was the preserve of a tiny number of cultural Zionists and maskilim (followers of the Jewish enlightenment movement), who often suffered the ridicule of their contemporaries, today the situation is in a way reversed: amazingly enough, the Jewish masses, or at least a growing number of them, now speak Hebrew—in Israel, where an ever-growing percentage of world Jewry, soon to be a majority, now resides. Hebrew is now the vehicle not only of a high culture but of a middle and even low brow culture, of popular song and popular literature, while the secular (and I emphasize the word secular) Yiddish tradition promoted by the great writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is preserved today by a tiny number of contemporary Jewish intellectuals, most of whom teach at universities, some of whom took part in the conference on which this book is based. Paradoxically, the two major Jewish languages of modern times appear to have switched roles, a development that no one in 1908 could have imagined.

NOSTALGIA AND LOSS When thinking about the Czernowitz Conference one cannot avoid a consideration of loss and nostalgia, of the place of the gone-forever world of East European Jewry in our memory, and in our imagination. Unquestionably there exists in today’s Jewish world a certain degree of nostalgia for the lost world of Czernowitz, a world which seems, to some intellectuals, scholars, and artists, to be more attractive than the one in which we live, dominated as it is by the Jewish nation-state of Israel and its fierce form of nationalism, by the vapidity of American Jewish life, and by the recrudescence of Jewish Orthodox religiosity, as exemplified by the “born again” (tshuvah) phenomenon. The secularism, universalism, pluralism, socialism, and Diaspora nationalism based on Yiddish culture of the men and women of Czernowitz can appear to be an attractive alternative to Ariel Sharon, the Lubavitsher Rebbe, and American Reform Judaism. Nostalgia for this world can be seen in Israel in such recent publications as the four-volume encyclopedia of “secular Jewish culture,” edited by several of Israel’s most prominent left-leaning secular intellectuals and intended to inform young Israelis of a world of which they know practically nothing.5 It can be seen

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in the popularity of the Israeli historian Zvi Yavetz’s book on the history of Jewish Czernowitz,6 and in the appearance of a new Israeli journal on Yiddish culture, whose name is Davka. Another interesting example is the recent (2007) exhibition of works of the Israeli artist par excellence, Reuven Rubin (1893–1974), highlighting his early paintings done mostly in Eastern Europe (some done in Czernowitz)—an exhibition of Rubin before he became the iconic “Zionist artist,” who specialized in exotic and “Orientalist” landscapes and cityscapes of interwar Palestine/Eretz Israel.7 This interest in an alternative Jewish universe, secular, national, but modern and open to the world, is also in evidence in America. There is, for example, the Fiddler on the Roof phenomenon.8 Several important American Jewish novelists have written on the subject of Jewish Eastern Europe.9 The recent publication of the excellent YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, edited by Gershon David Hundert, also bears witness to this interest in the “old world,” as does the very convening of the conference on the Czernowitz Conference from which this volume developed.10 A sense of loss, nostalgia, yes, but one may wonder how deep this phenomenon goes, and how meaningful it is. Let me allow myself a personal vignette. My parents’ mother tongue was Yiddish, and my father even wrote a book in Yiddish (for the Jewish section of the International Workers’ Order, the IWO, which was affiliated with the American Communist Party). One of my earliest memories, and one that made a tremendous impression upon me, was of my father sitting at his writing desk, in New York, and trying to compose a letter to his brother, who lived in Paris. I remember my father holding his face in his hands and saying, to no one in particular, in Yiddish: “Ikh hob fargesn mameloshn”—“I have forgotten my mother tongue.” And yet, neither of my parents made any effort to teach their children Yiddish, to share with us their lost world of Yiddish culture (Hebrew was another story). My father’s comments were less a lament, I think, than an expression of amazement, astonishment at the fact that it is possible to forget one’s first language. My sister did not know a word of the language, and I had to study it in order to write my dissertation on the Bund. I can say that there was no nostalgia for Yiddishland in my home. My second piece of evidence concerning the issue of nostalgia, or the lack of it, for the lost world of Czernowitz comes from the wonderful memoir by Calvin Trillin called Messages from My Father. Trillin’s parents, too, were Yiddish speakers, but Trillin tells us that his father’s only prejudice was directed against immigrants to America who continued to speak their native language. He encountered German-speaking Jewish refugees in Kansas City in the 1930s and was furious, and when his son reminded him that he too had

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been a Yiddish-speaking refugee, he answered: “I don’t care what you say. They should speak English. This is America.”11 My third comes from the memoirs of the great Canadian writer Alice Munro: this is not about Yiddish, but rather about the decline and disappearance of another doomed language. In a story in the collection The View from Castle Rock, she describes how her grandfather and another old man sat in her home: “Sometimes they talked in the broad Scots of the district from which they came . . . the dialect of their childhood—discarded as they became men—which none of their descendants could understand.”12 There may be a sense of loss, here, perhaps sadness, too, but also inevitability: these old languages are doomed to wither and die, and this is no tragedy. I think this was the attitude of most Yiddish-speaking Jews toward mameloshn—they did not share the romantic nationalist-Yiddishist view of Peretz and the other speakers in 1908.13 Yiddish, after all, was but one of many languages that disappeared in new environments, or even in places where they had been spoken for centuries. Who among the immigrant ethnic groups to America and other places retained their language? And who wept over the loss?

CZERNOWITZ AND THE QUESTION OF WINNERS AND LOSERS It seems obvious to say that the men and women of Czernowitz are among the losers of Jewish history. Nostalgia aside, they, and their conference, have been largely forgotten. I asked a few of my historian colleagues at the Hebrew University if they knew what the Language Conference of 1908 was, and they did not. My children, all Israeli-born and educated, know something about Herzl and Weizmann, Bialik and Brenner, but nothing about Zhitlovsky or Birnbaum, or even Peretz. No state, as Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) remarked when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, stands behind Yiddish culture, and culture needs the support of the state to survive in the long run. We may say, from our vantage point, that the people of Czernowitz got some major things wrong. They were wrong in their assumption that Eastern Europe and America were places where, given the right conditions, the Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation could flourish, enjoying autonomy within the context of a world of nations.14 Interwar Poland, Soviet Russia, and eventually the Nazis and their local collaborators proved them to be disastrously mistaken. In the post–World War I period, Yiddish enjoyed a brief period of euphoria and well-being in the USSR, only to be eventually crushed by an intolerant, highly oppressive regime and by the unstoppable process of

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Russification. In interwar Poland the state refused to subsidize Yiddish cultural activities, and while Yiddish survived it was clearly losing ground, by the 1930s, to Polish. The American case has already been mentioned—here freedom and Americanization, symbolized by the public school system, doomed Yiddish to eventual near extinction. The Yiddishists’ belief that the Jews would obtain national rights in a multinational East European context was wrong, as was the faith of some of the delegates in the power of socialism to disarm anti-Semitism and guarantee Jewish survival and the attainment of minority national rights. These are serious marks against the men and women of Czernowitz. But their record is not entirely negative, and it is important to look at what they got right. They were right to believe in the tremendous creative power of Yiddish, which was, after all, the only immigrant culture to produce a brilliant, if short-lived, literature in the New World.15 They were also right to believe that Jewish nationalism had a future, and (in a more general sense) that small nations had the right to autonomy, or even independence. In this sense world history since 1908, and especially in the post-Soviet world, has shown them to be prophets. After all, the big political winners on today’s world stage are nationalists, whether they are Croatians, Slovenians, Georgians, or Kurds. Even if the idea of national autonomy did not work for the Jews, it is working, to one extent or another, for other small stateless nations today, as in the cases of Catalonia, the French in Canada, the Kurds in Iraq, and Scotland. In a way, the people of Czernowitz were prophets of the doctrine of multiculturalism, of the post-assimilationist era, in which today’s minorities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other modern nations reside. To my mind, the great question is whether or not they were right to think that Jewish nationalism and autonomous Jewish culture (whether in Yiddish or Hebrew) could coexist with the tradition of Jewish universalism, as expressed in the Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah) movement and in the moderate wing of Jewish socialism, both of the Bundist and Zionist socialist varieties. This question, of course, applies to all national movements—Albanian as well as Jewish. Speaking as an Israeli at the end of the year 2008, I can say that in this matter the jury is still out.

NOTES 1. For an introduction to this complicated issue, see Einar Haugen, Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), esp. 65ff. 2. Judit Frigyesi, Bela Bartok and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 150.

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3. See the soon to be published dissertation by Scott Ury, Red Banner, Blue Star: Radical Politics, Democratic Institutions and Collective Identity Among Jews in Warsaw, 1904–1907 (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2006). 4. See Gur Alroey, Hamahapekhah hashketah (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2008). 5. Yermiyahu Yovel, ed., Zman yehudi chadash: tarbut yehudit beidan chiloni (Jerusalem: Keter, Lamda, 2007). 6. Zvi Yavetz, Ts’ernovits sheli, makom shehayu bo anashim (Or Yehudah: Devir, 2007). 7. See the catalogue of the exhibition curated by Amitai Mendelsohn, Navi beiro: yetsirato hamukdemet shel Reuven Rubin (Jerusalem: 2007). 8. On which see Stephen Whitfield, “Fiddling with Sholem Aleichem: A History of Fiddler on the Roof,” in Key Texts in American Jewish Culture, ed. Jack Kugelmass (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Pres, 2003), 105–25. 9. Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (1966); Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm (1988). The first deals with the blood libel case of Mendel Beilis, the second with the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz. 10. Gershon David Hundert, ed., YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 11. Calvin Trillin, Messages from My Father (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996). 12. Alice Munroe, The View From Castle Rock: Stories (New York: Knopf, 2006). 13. But see, for a nuanced approach which does register sadness and loss, along with resignation, Harold Bloom, “The Glories of Yiddish,” New York Review of Books LV.17 (November 6, 2008), 24–26. 14. This point is made by Ruth Wisse in her biography of Peretz: I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991). 15. See, for example, Ruth Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

I POLITICS, LANGUAGE, AND IDEOLOGY

3 A Tale of Two Photographs Nathan Birnbaum, the Election of 1907, and the 1908 Yiddish Language Conference1 Jess Olson

The use of photography as a tool for recording the sheer energy of mass human activity was perhaps never so pronounced as in the early days of grainy black-and-white images. And for the Jews of turn-of-the-century Eastern and Central Europe, newly politicized, hungry for change, desperate for improvement in their lot, the photograph speaks with a unique urgency. Among the hundreds of visual images that exist of the political life of Jews in turn-of-thecentury Central Europe are two that show a fascinating development in one of its most interesting, if forgotten, figures: publicist, politician, and thinker, Dr. Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937). Taken a year apart, they depict two public events in the Jewish heartland of the far eastern provinces of the AustroHungarian Empire, Galicia and Bukovina. The first image (figure 2.1, p. 38), a panorama of a large crowd gathered in 1907 in a market square of the Galician city of Buczacz, shows Nathan Birnbaum at its center, and is a photo-op—an example of the very early days of political media coverage—of a whistle-stop made during Birnbaum’s quest to win a seat in the Austrian Reichsrat (parliament) as a Reichsabgeorbneter. The second (figure 2.2, p. 39), an intimate, posed photo, shows Birnbaum on the far right of the front row, seated among such Yiddish cultural luminaries as Y. L. Peretz (1852–1915), Sholem Asch (1880–1957), H. D. Nomberg (1876–1927), Abraham Reisen (Avrom Reyzen, 1876–1953), and Chaim Zhitlovsky (1865–1943). The occasion for this image was the 1908 Yiddish Language Conference at Czernowitz, Bukovina. Aesthetically and functionally, the photos are quite different. The first, a crowd greeting an eminent political personality, is an image of triumph, a photo that could just as easily be of contemporary William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) at his height as a now-obscure Jewish nationalist in the far eastern corner of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its outdoor setting 23

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reflects expansiveness and, more importantly, as shown by Birnbaum’s proud stance at the center, a modern, bold optimism and belief in the power of bare-knuckles popular will. The second, an interior photograph, is subdued, almost solemn. Its subjects reflect no less a seriousness of purpose than in the Buczacz photo, yet in an entirely different timbre. Rather than the masses, it shows an elite gathering, a sagacious and serious group that favors the arena of reasoned debate and contemplation to that of fickle populism. Its most important figures, those central to the conference as organizers or major personalities, do not demand the limelight: Birnbaum and Peretz, the president and keynote speaker of the conference, are off to the two sides; Chaim Zhitlovsky, the vice president, and, along with Birnbaum a principal organizer of the conference, stands far to the left, on the very edge of the photograph. The light from a single window shines and is itself almost a personality in the photo, upstaging and nearly washing Zhitlovsky out, while the contrasting darkness nearly obscures the darkly-clad Birnbaum on the other side. And what do they tell us about Birnbaum, the common denominator? They unwittingly record a major moment of transition for Birnbaum, a period of what might be called in kabbalistic parlance tsimtsum, of intentional selfwithdrawal. It illustrates an elemental shift in Nathan Birnbaum’s way of thinking about the problems that had preoccupied him from the beginning of his public career, particularly his strategy of public engagement. It was at precisely during the year between these two pictures that Birnbaum shifted his entire approach as a Jewish nationalist, from a model of political activism and mass politics to one of patient, subterranean cultural growth. The photographs show this change almost palpably: on the one side is Birnbaum, the populist politician and scrapper, the great leader of men he dreamed himself to be, never quite succeeding; on the other, Birnbaum the contemplative and reserved intellectual, deliberate in thought and uninterested in the spotlight, preferring that illumination fall on the truth alone. On the one hand, a brash iconoclast; on the other, a facilitator, an elder statesman among equally important men of letters. In one photo modern mass politics with all its tumult and dynamism; in the other, classic earnestness and gravity. To understand the change reflected in these two images, it is important to know their central figure, Nathan Birnbaum. At the time of these photographs, he was a man who would have required no introduction.2 He was a major participant in not one, but several of the definitive Jewish national projects of fin de siècle Central Europe. Simply reviewing some of the testimony to his place in the cultural and political debates of this period, offered by names far more famous now than his own, provides an illuminating metric of his stature. Franz Kafka (1883–1924), during his celebrated (and short-lived) infatuation with East European Jewish culture, provides wonderful anecdotal

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evidence of Birnbaum’s prominence. On at least two occasions, when present at one of the Jewish cultural evenings held in Prague’s medieval Jewish town hall, he was engaged enough with the speaker’s words to actually record his thoughts (usually, as one biographer reports, he ignored the speaker and spent his time observing the audience): once when Martin Buber (1878–1965) addressed the assembly, the other when Nathan Birnbaum did. Kafka found Buber uninspiring and pat, but he hung on Birnbaum’s every word. The vision Birnbaum spun of a vibrant Jewish nation to be found among the Yiddishspeaking masses of Eastern Europe, needing only to be brought to consciousness of its central role in the development of the Jewish people, struck a strong chord with Kafka. At least in part, Birnbaum’s words inspired Kafka’s own well-known ruminations on questions of his Jewish identity.3 And by no means was Kafka alone in his reaction; Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), arguably the central Jewish philosopher and theologian of the early twentieth century, author of The Star of Redemption, one of the great classics of modern Jewish philosophy, described Birnbaum as the “living exponent of Jewish intellectual history.”4 Kafka’s and Rosenzweig’s testimonials share a thread with many of Birnbaum’s associates, from his youth to his old age: Birnbaum was both a captivating and inspiring presence and a deep and original thinker. Josef Meisl (1882–1958), an early follower, wrote: “In the chain which went from [Moses] Hess through [Leo] Pinsker through Herzl, Nathan Birnbaum created one of the most important links.”5 “I remember distinctly what his form and his effect for us was” in the words of Berthold Feiwel (1875–1937, a lifelong associate, “his name remains nothing less for us than our symbol and our lodestar.”6 But no testimonial says as much about Birnbaum’s influence over Jewish history as the simple fact that it was a word he coined in 1890, Zionism, that came to be the definitive title of Jewish nationalism.7 If Birnbaum is best known for this lone contribution to the Jewish political lexicon, his involvement in Jewish intellectual history was immeasurably deeper. His nationalist career and prolific literary output began when he was only seventeen; and for the rest of his life, he went on to play a leading role in nearly every major Jewish political and cultural movement of turn-of-thecentury Europe. During his first months at the University of Vienna he and a handful of other students founded the first Jewish nationalist student society in Central Europe, Kadimah.8 In 1884, at the age of twenty, he penned a manifesto that rivaled Leo Pinsker’s (1821–1891) clarion-call Autoemancipation in its influence among the young Jewish nationalists in Central Europe, “Die Assimilationssucht: Ein Wort an die sogenannten Deutschen, Slaven, Magyaren usw. mosaischer Confession, von einem Studenten jüdischer Nationalität,” which ridiculed and castigated Jewish assimilation, demanding a national identity in its place.9 After he left Zionism, Birnbaum continued to

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be a powerful public voice in Jewish politics and culture. He embraced the Yiddish language and culture of East European Jewry and was welcomed as a native son. It was this preoccupation that led to his final intellectual conviction, Orthodox religious belief, which he embraced during the First World War. During the interwar period, as a fully Orthodox Jew he remained a serious contributor to Jewish intellectual discourse.10 But one feature remained constant for his entire life, despite all his personal transformations: to his contemporaries he was carefully watched, a voice whose ideas caused, time and again, waves of controversy and concerted debate. In 1907, the year of our first photograph, Birnbaum was at the zenith of his career as a Jewish nationalist. A decade-long struggle to find his footing in a shifting Zionist landscape completely changed by the arrival of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) in 1896 was coming to a close. Birnbaum, in choosing to stand for election to the Reichsrat, decided to take his greatest, and last, gamble in presenting himself as a political alternative to the hegemony of Herzl’s World Zionist Organization. This was not an easy choice for Birnbaum; rather it was part of a process that had been underway for a nearly a decade, years that had spanned his dramatic fall from leadership in Central European Zionism, and his attempt to redefine himself in the aftermath. It was a decision particularly weighed down by the baggage of his bitter conflict with Herzl. At the time of the publication “Der Judenstaat” and Herzl’s sudden, meteoric rise as the visible face of Zionism, Birnbaum was a nearly unchallenged leader in the small, parochial world of Central European Jewish nationalism. After the publication of Herzl’s pamphlet, and his rapid rise to international attention, Birnbaum was marginalized with equally bewildering speed. Immediately after Herzl’s appearance, an ultimatum emerged which confronted all his predecessors in the Jewish nationalist world: either join with his movement, or fall by the wayside. Herzl himself made this choice clear when he succeeded dramatically in recasting the entire movement in a spectacularly short period of time, dwarfing in a year what other staid and disorganized Zionist societies had done in ten. Birnbaum quickly discovered whatever leverage and status he had earned as a Zionist leader diminished, even among those he would have considered “his” followers. By the first meeting of the two men, not long after the release of Der Judenstaat, Birnbaum was prepared to accept Herzl as a participant in the movement; due to his deteriorating personal circumstances, he was soon looking to Herzl for material support and ultimately employment in the movement quickly coalescing around his rival.11 Never really changing his mind about Herzl’s shallow understanding of Zionism, nor ceasing to resent his ascendance, Birnbaum was forced to concede that he had forfeited any true position of leadership in the movement, and would have to seek the influence he felt he deserved in other ways.

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Both personal conflict and a stark ideological difference played out in public and private—even on the floor of the Basel conference itself. Although Birnbaum scored a small victory against Herzl and was voted the first paid general secretary of the movement’s action committee at the Basel conference in 1897, the move infuriated Herzl. “[Birnbaum] now had a few young people make the proposal that the secretary-general of the Actions Committee be elected directly and paid by the Congress,” Herzl wrote in his diary. “And this creature, who at the first National Assembly of the Jews has no other thought but to get himself voted a stipend, has the nerve to compare himself to me.”12 This Pyrrhic victory insured that Birnbaum would never have a place in the movement so long as Herzl was its leader. He refused to assign any important work to the committee, and especially to Birnbaum. “Birnbaum quietly incites against me . . . acts the part of Columbus and martyr of Zionism, while I am Amerigo Vespucci and the usurper. . . . The committee is an unserviceable instrument. Only indiscretions are committed. No one is able to help; for various reasons they are in no position to do so.”13 After little more than a year of his appointment, facing unabated hostility and marginalization from Herzl and no room to pursue his own ideas, Birnbaum left the movement altogether. Even as he was desperately trying to exert some influence over the Zionist movement—increasingly futile work—Birnbaum explored alternative approaches to nationalist organization than those pursued by Herzl. One of these was a return to direct political action at the ballot box, an effort Herzl was quick to stifle. A few months before the Basel conference, Birnbaum broached the idea of running for the Reichsrat as a Jewish nationalist candidate—and Herzl denied him the support of the WZO with gratuitous cruelty. Herzl claimed that he felt entanglement with local politics diminished his own aura among Galician Jews; however he was sure to make it known to Birnbaum both that he himself had been asked to run for office and refused, and that he intended to endorse other, more loyal candidates instead of Birnbaum. “He wanted my financial and moral support for his candidacy in the election district of Sereth-Suczawa-Radutz,” Herzl recorded in his diaries, “a candidacy that had been offered me as well, which I refused. . . . I denied him my support, because an unsuccessful attempt could compromise the mystical prestige of our movement in Galicia. He will never forgive me, no.”14 It is possible Birnbaum never did forgive him—but neither did he stand as a candidate that year. A corollary of the push for political office was a modified concept of a Jewish nationalist political party. This was, in fact, the root of the aborted 1897 campaign, and it did not rise out of a vacuum. It was part of an older effort to articulate a workable model of Jewish nationalist mass politics; although after

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1897, it became a search for an alternative not just to increasingly centralized political Zionism, but to a dogmatic and restrictive vision of Jewish nationalism itself. As early as 1894, Birnbaum began to think beyond a specifically Palestine-oriented idea of party organization, advocating instead a “Jewish People’s Party” (Jüdisches Volkspartei).15 This he envisioned as an umbrella organization, centered on a Zionist ideology, but that simultaneously embraced a broad spectrum of Jewish national ideologies with the common goal of putting forward Jewish nationalist candidates for government. The goal of the party would be, ultimately, to preserve and advance Zionism as the central political identity of Jewish nationalism, but in the short term would seek pragmatic allegiances to increase its numbers and influence—especially in elected government. “‘Zion’ must remain the ultimate, the highest purpose of the party. [However] what we can attain before ‘Zion’ for the good of our people we must fight for, and join with the oppressed against our common oppressor.”16 The Jewish people’s party would defend the interests of all Jews, thereby demonstrating the potential of Zionism and nationalism to be as practical as it was idealistic. Interestingly, what Birnbaum went on to define as Zionism itself reflected a significant dissention from the diplomacy and international activism of Herzl: Zionism [after all] represents both a Jewishly-oriented political organization . . . , a liberal economic Manchesterian perspective, [as well as], finally, the welcoming of religious opinion held as a private matter. [We must] lastly resist [opposition to religion] with an eye toward the final aim, that, in the end, Zionism itself will be the basis of communal religious belief.17

Zionism, in the end, by including all number of ideas, including perhaps the most resistant to usurpation by nationalism, religion, into the fold of nationalism would ultimately meld them all, creating an all-encompassing identity of integrated Jewish nationalism.18 After his departure from the Zionist party in 1899, Birnbaum kept his political efforts alive by successfully carving out an independent presence in nationalist debates. The most explicit example of this was his role in the so-called Ahad Ha’am affair of 1902. This vitriolic exchange that dominated the Zionist press in Russia and Central Europe for almost a year centered on Ahad Ha’am’s (1856–1927) bitter criticism of the vision of a future Jewish state presented in Herzl’s utopian novel, Altneuland. Printing his review in both Hebrew (in his own journal Ha-shiloah) and German (in the Berlin Jewish nationalist journal Ost und West, to which Birnbaum was a regular contributor), Ahad Ha’am spared none of his acid prose in portraying Herzl as a naïve and ignorant bungler, a danger to the future of Zionism.19 It was this review and the subsequent response, an equally bitter and ad hominem

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attack on Ahad Ha’am by Max Nordau (1849–1923) in Die Welt that concretized, more than any other single event, the so-called political and cultural approaches to Zionism in opposition to each other. Birnbaum, in a pose of maturity and equanimity, took up the cause of the beleaguered Odessa Zionist against Herzl and Nordau, insisting on the centrality of Ahad Ha’am’s ideas of Jewish culture, history, and language in the future of Jewish nationalism, while still critiquing some of his conceptions of exile and Zionism. Each of his major pieces on Ahad Ha’am were published and widely dispersed, keeping Birnbaum well within the public eye.20 Clearly, Birnbaum considered himself a voice that mattered in Jewish nationalist debate, if not still one of its central figures. His prolific contributions to Jewish nationalist political and cultural journalism and his popularity on the Central European lecture circuit suggest that his belief was not misplaced. The election of 1907 was thus the culmination of many strands in Birnbaum’s thought. It was his opportunity to put to the test, once and for all, the viability of broad-tent Jewish nationalism as an alternative to Herzlian Zionist hegemony. In running for office, Birnbaum did not identify himself primarily as a Zionist, although he shared enough common ground to caucus with four explicitly Zionist candidates.21 It was a chance to truly engage in mass political organization, including such in-the-trenches politicking and a coalition with another subaltern nationalist movement, the Ukrainian nationalists. For Birnbaum the election was, and he perceived it to be, the apotheosis of a type of political engagement he had advocated for over a decade, in clear continuity with his Zionist past. But in the end, the experiment failed. Alone among his Jewish nationalist colleagues, and despite widespread Jewish and Ukrainian support, Birnbaum lost to Polish nationalist Stefan Moysa (1853–1920), in an election that featured shocking displays of electoral corruption and intimidation by the Polish political machine, a major feature of the election of 1907. Yet, despite the fact that the fraud was so blatant and well documented, Birnbaum did not follow his loss with further political action.22 He filed an official protest which minutely detailed the corruption of the race; yet beyond this, wrote little about the election in the wider Jewish press—his reliable mouthpiece to the broader public. He did not attempt to run for office again—a surprise given that he had worked nearly a decade to lay the groundwork for this election, and, given the success of his colleagues and the obvious nature of the fraud committed against him, he may well have succeeded.

s The reason Birnbaum did not do this is to be found in a sudden turn to another, more subterranean intellectual pursuit: identifying, once and for all, the

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essence of authentic Jewish identity. After his defeat at the polls, Birnbaum disengaged from his long-held belief that mass political organization was the ideal medium for expressing his ideas. In its place, he began to seek a deep cultural form to give voice to his aspirations for European Jewry through a sustained reconsideration of the unique nature of Jewish peoplehood. This change was not one of content so much as it was a new focus; from then until the end of his life, cultural concerns assumed the central role in his activity. It is best understood as an inversion of his earlier approach, turning his outward energy inward. A preoccupation with authenticity and finding a transcendent basis upon which to build a stable conception of Jewish identity was hardly new to Birnbaum. In fact, it was one of the most consistent strains in his intellectual life. In a short memoir, written some years after Birnbaum had taken up an Orthodox lifestyle, Birnbaum reflected on his earlier feelings of alienation, tracing it all the way back to his adolescence. I was educated in German schools. After four levels of elementary school, I went on to Gymnasium. There is no doubt that German culture had a profound impact on me. But I was in no way disposed to consider myself a German, despite the fact that one would be unable to find a single Jewish youth in Vienna who didn’t consider himself a German.23

Expressing his disaffection in terms of his Viennese upbringing and education, these words articulate a theme that recurred throughout his life, but beginning when he was a young gymnasium student: why, on a fundamental level, he could not identify with his schoolmates and their aspirations to normal, bourgeois Viennese society. The ultimate end of this internal exploration for Birnbaum, almost a decade later, was East European, Hasidic-style religious Orthodoxy. However present these interests were before, in late 1907 and the first half of 1908, the months preceding the Czernowitz Conference, it took a different form: a frenetic preoccupation with the Yiddish language and literature as the essence of Jewish culture and national authenticity. The beginning of this reinvigorated (if enforced) period of introspection came soon after his electoral loss, when Birnbaum traveled for the first time across the Atlantic on a speaking tour in the northeastern United States. The purpose of his tour was to raise awareness of Jewish autonomist nationalism among the Jews of New York, although he quickly found that there was little interest among American Jews in his project. Along the way, Birnbaum crossed paths with another European Jewish nationalist then in the United States, Chaim Zhitlovsky. The two shared a great deal in common, from their opinions regarding Jewish nationalism, to their belief in the importance of the Yiddish language, as well as a penchant for exploring multiple approaches to

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Jewish national organization and identity.24 Most importantly, the two were critics of the dominance of Zionism over most Jewish nationalist discourse. By the end of Birnbaum’s journey, he and Zhitlovsky, along with a handful of others, had hatched the idea for a large-scale event that would, they hoped, challenge the centrality of Hebrew-centered Zionists Jewish nationalism, the a first-of-its-kind conference of the Yiddish Language. According to the Russian-Jewish émigré playwright David Pinski (1872–1959), the whole notion of the conference came about informally, almost spontaneously, in his own living room: “The idea for the Czernowitz conference and the first call for it came from my house. Once, on a Sunday in the spring of 1908, a meeting was held in my house with Dr. Birnbaum, Dr. Chaim Zhitlovsky, the publisher Evalenko, and me.”25 Birnbaum observed that the goals for his tour of the United States had failed, but the cause of the Yiddish Language Conference soon replaced them. “I felt that something must be done,” Birnbaum wrote on the twentieth anniversary of the conference, some greater achievement for Yiddish, a kind of manifesto of its existence as a language and its linguistic rights. And as I had found many others—well-known people—who agreed with my position on this, in the end we arrived at the decision to call for a Yiddish language conference, at which all of these issues which touched upon the interests of the Yiddish language and those who wrote in Yiddish would be discussed.26

Soon after this meeting, a circular was distributed in Yiddish newspapers throughout Europe and the United States announcing the convening of a “conference for the sake of the Yiddish language” in Czernowitz, Bukovina. The date was not specified, but the conference was to take place in the late summer or early autumn of 1908. The authors of the circular noted enthusiastically the great leaps in Yiddish literature and cultural consciousness in recent years, the mass dissemination of Yiddish newspapers and journals, the profusion of Yiddish popular and high culture, and the explosion of interest in the Yiddish theater. Yiddish, it seemed, was on the cusp of realizing its place as a mature national language. Yet, even as it continued to grow, the language faced one profound handicap: Only one thing is still lacking [in Yiddish] that other languages possess. [Other languages] are not allowed to run around completely free and wild in the world of languages and attract to themselves all kinds of illnesses and deformities and perhaps even death. They are cherished like a dear child. But as for the Yiddish language, no one looks at it this way. Thousands of Yiddish words are borrowed from German, Russian and English totally unnecessarily. The living law of the language which is born and develops with it in the mouths of the nation is not

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recorded, and thus nothing in it is considered subject to any [linguistic] law. And everyone writes it in their own way, with different conventions, whereas a Yiddish orthography, which should be standard for everyone and to which all should be required to adhere, has still not been established.27

Lack of a standard orthography, usage, and vocabulary stood in the way of the arrival of Yiddish as a recognized and respected world language, and contributed to the low status of the language in the minds of even its own speakers. In order to overcome this, to inject Yiddish with the nobility and pride that it deserved, “one must create a leash or fence, a way of cherishing our dear mother tongue, so that it does not run so free as it has in the past, so that it is no longer a wild thing, that it does not become torn and tattered.”28 All who were concerned with the future of Yiddish, all who “occupy themselves with it, be they writers or poets, be they its speakers, any who have a pure love for it” had a duty “[to] speak together and find the means to insure that it be used in an authoritative way, and all submit to it.”29 While ostensibly a conference dedicated strictly to issues of Yiddish language planning and support of literature with only marginal attention paid officially to questions of politics and nationalism, these were a constant undercurrent to its planning and execution. Birnbaum reflects as much in his 1928 recollection of the planning of the conference: “In the lectures which I gave in America, I had spoken out for a cultural exile-nationalism, and the main point I had underscored was the importance and necessity of the Yiddish language as a foundation of the Jewish people.”30 Indeed, the question of national culture started with the choice of its location. As Peretz noted in his opening address, Czernowitz embodied the national spirit of the conference. “And the best place for our assembly is Bukovina, and particularly its capital, Czernowitz. Here, where different nationalities live together in their different languages, it is easier for our word to go forth. We stroll in the evening streets, and from different windows the tones of different languages waft out, all different kinds of folk music; we wish to have our own window; our own individual motif in the folk symphony.”31 A number of practical considerations made Czernowitz attractive. As it was to host a conference whose principle delegates and constituents would be Yiddish-speaking Jews, for the sake of legitimacy the city needed to be an East European one. Czernowitz, although on the far end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a border city with the Russian Empire, making it more accessible to the large number of Russian delegates. The relatively liberal policies regarding speech and assembly in the Austro-Hungarian Empire certainly made it a better choice than the authoritarian Russian Empire. But Czernowitz was also an important political symbol to the conference planners. Peretz alluded to one of the central aims

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of the conference: to usher Yiddish into the family of national languages as its speakers entered the family of nations, several of whom shared a home in Czernowitz. Among its inhabitants were Ukrainians, Romanians, Poles, ethnic Germans, all of whom spoke their own national languages, and Jews, who themselves spoke German or Yiddish. Most importantly, however, as a capital in the multinational, liberal Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czernowitz was an ideal city from which to make a central, subtextual argument about the conference: that the Jewish people must be recognized as true nationality with the Yiddish language as its standard, rather than a Germanized religious minority. Czernowitz, a beautiful, multinational, multiethnic city, seemed to show the possibility, the harmony that would result when each national group—Poles, Germans, Romanians, Ruthenians, and Jews—were given their due respect. The conference convened on August 31, 1908, to extensive, albeit mixed coverage in the European and American Jewish press. The coverage reflects little ambiguity about the political implications of the conference, as the positive and negative reports broke down largely along political lines. Yiddishist Barzel (Shimon Ayzenshtat) was among the most enthusiastic journalists, called the opening of the conference the “long wished-for day, of which we had long thought and dreamt.”32 A reporter in Unzer leben declared: “Whoever considers the facts of the Yiddish conference in Czernowitz must come to the conclusion that it is a happy event in our lives. . . . Any activity is a sign of life and this conference is certainly a sign of a cultural revival.”33 While many accounts expressed tentative enthusiasm about the conference, derision and disdain came from expected (and some unexpected) sources. The perennially dyspeptic Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942) wrote that the conference “left me cold.”34 The Zionists were mixed in their opinions; voices sounded a tone of bemusement and detachment; however a studied, and perhaps nervous, public indifference dominated: “This assembly in Bukowina has no overall relevance to the Jewish community,” wrote H. Harris (Achaz) in the American Zionist periodical Ha’am. “It is nothing more and nothing less than a demonstration of what the times have necessitated for the sake of their [Yiddish writers’] private aggrandizement. However I see no sin in that (God forbid!); every person, a salesman or a writer, must be clear about bettering his position, and so I salute you, Yiddish writers.”35 The American Jewish press expressed a considerable amount of ire, even in the Yiddish press—both the European dominance of what was supposed to be a conference of concern to international Jewry, as well as a general resistance of American Yiddishists toward the idea of Jewish national autonomy earned their criticism.36 Indeed the distinction between politics and language that the conference was perhaps intended to achieve was quickly dissolved, as its ostensibly apolitical platform (at least according to the intent of its organizers) was

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cast into a maelstrom of cultural-political conflict from which it never really emerged. Even before the conference officially opened, Benno Straucher (1854–??), the Zionist Reichsabgeorbneter and chair of the Czernowitz Jewish community, made no secret of his disdain for Yiddish and Yiddishists. Although the community had just opened a beautiful, modern art nouveau Jewish National House on the plaza of the state theater, the capital campaign for which Straucher had been instrumental in leading, the facility was mysteriously declared unprepared for use by the conference (despite the fact that the conference had reserved the space well in advance).37 The conference thus moved at the last minute across town to the Ukrainian National House and opened with as much fanfare as possible. Birnbaum’s opening speech, given in Yiddish but infamously read from a text in Latin characters, was a markedly nonideological text that argued mostly, in true Viennese form, for the honor of Yiddish: Gradually a new intelligentsia . . . looked upon the Yiddish language with different eyes than their predecessors, even the nationalist intelligentsia . . . here is the soul of our people [they say], here is the heart of our people, here is the life of our people. Why do we cry that we lack a concern for our honor? From where should we take it for ourselves, if we live our entire lives ashamed? From where should we take it, if we believe the Hottentot’s genius more than our own, if we take every poor prattle for a language while our own language, in which we have for centuries . . . carried our spirit, our hearts, our humor, our joy and our sorrow— why should we consider it a mishmash, a zhargon? How should a people with such a constantly degraded and offensive view of itself have a concept of its own honor, of its national sovereignty? Let us take the shameful garments off of our mother language with which our sickly yidishkayt has draped it, so that our people may once again be beautiful and illuminated with honor!38

Aside from asserting the fundamental need to recognize the ethnic, even spiritual importance of Yiddish, Birnbaum largely avoids political idealism and dogmatism, and advocates flexibility. His was a posture of moderation that he would keep throughout the conference; participating minimally in the political contentions that would quickly descend, he preferred to seek a consensus built on the broad cause of creating a strong national cultural identity with Yiddish at its center. Y. L. Peretz’s more famous keynote address followed, and the conference proceeded with the first three panels, and then ground to a halt and made no further progress. The cause of its sudden disruption was the creation of a faction, a union of the Poalei Tsiyon under Lazar Khazanovitch (1882–1925) and the Bund under Ester Frumkin (1880–1943), that refused to allow any panels to continue until a specific procedural demand was met. They demanded that

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the conference immediately cease all discussion of the national status—or, in Frumkin’s terms, the question of the language’s “equal rights.” “This organization is establishing political goals for itself—struggle, propaganda for equal rights for language,” she argued. “Equal rights for language can be understood differently depending on its combination with this or that political program. Propaganda can be developed in a dozen different ways.”39 With one stroke, all efforts to table discussion of politics in favor of linguistic goals faltered, and on this issue, so too did the conference itself. No agreement was made between the various factions, no formal decision was made to continue the work after the conference, no formal minutes were submitted or accepted. An anemic, bland letter with a neutral statement of the conference’s conclusions was its sole product: We ask all Jews to help us in our work. In particular we ask all cultural societies and institutions that work in the Yiddish language and recognize Yiddish as a national language of the Jewish people, such as arts and culture societies, schools, . . . theater groups, libraries, writer’s groups, academic societies which regard Yiddish as their mother tongue, etc., to join with us and send us at least 5 crowns, 6 marks, 1 shilling, or 1 dollar, so that they receive the right to send representatives to the second conference. We also ask that you nominate several dedicated committee members for the different cities who shall 1) inform us of new developments in the situation of Yiddish in their locations; 2) refer all societies and unions of the aforementioned places; 3) found societies and unions; 4) bring in hundreds of members who shall send yearly 1 crown, 1 mark, 1.2 francs, 40 kopeks, 1 shilling, or 20 cents for the conference. Jews! Come together for this important work, which must be undertaken now, so that the Jewish people, who have accomplished so much in their ancient culture, may continue their development, and not be sunk in the sea of other nations.40

A lackluster conclusion to a contentious conference, this minimal statement was not supported by a significant number of the participants, and had little effect afterwards. Little financial support for future efforts seem to have been achieved despite a brief attempt by Peretz and a few other participants to tour Central and Eastern European cities to raise money. Birnbaum, attempting to support the efforts and supplement them with a Jewish bookstore in Czernowitz, failed and left Bukovina for Vienna a

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couple of years later, impoverished and turning to ever-new directions in his thought.

s The conference’s most obvious conclusion was that seemingly innocuous questions of Yiddish grammar and usage and the support of literature were anything but when mixed with nationalism and socialist politics. Yet Czernowitz raised many unanswered questions, one of the most confounding being the conduct of Nathan Birnbaum after his opening speech. Surprisingly, given his central role in the coalescence of the conference, and despite being its president, Birnbaum was uncharacteristically laconic as it quickly devolved to an impasse. Aside from the planning and logistical activities that brought the conference together, he did little more than give the opening address—most of the sessions were actually presided over by Chaim Zhitlovsky. Perhaps most puzzling, Birnbaum made almost no attempt to reign in the various factions that vied to control the conference, even as they threatened to tear it apart (indeed, only about three of the ten sessions proceeded as planned). Given Birnbaum’s history of outspoken participation in Jewish political and cultural debate, such diffidence calls out for an explanation. Why did the famously outspoken Birnbaum hold his tongue at so crucial a moment? The reason was precisely because the moment was so central to the redirection of his lifelong project. This becomes even clearer when one examines with some attention a key passage in Birnbaum’s opening address to the conference. In these remarks, he spoke abstractly about the mindset of unnamed Jewish nationalists and the crucial flaw in their attempts, thus far, to build a coherent Jewish national identity. It never even occurred to them that a national intellectual must not only be dedicated . . . to his people, but must first and foremost live among them; he must breathe in the same cultural atmosphere and his spiritual life must grow from the soul of the people [folks-neshome]. . . . And it does not occur to him that speaking another language than the people speaks and in which it thinks and feels . . . means abandoning his people, allowing one’s self to be turned into a wasteland, without friend or guide, going alone into the chaotic world, becoming a wanderer, lost from his home and from his people.41

These words reflect a pronounced transition in Birnbaum’s ideology. The unnamed “nationalist intellectual,” to whom this attack refers, is none other than the speaker himself. It was Birnbaum who, for the decades of his struggle to create a coherent Jewish nation, lacked the essential catalyst for such a project. It was he who, as a Germanophone nationalist—indeed, the

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product of the very apex of the German educational project, a doctor of law from the University of Vienna—had failed to perceive that he must himself tap the cultural atmosphere and—most importantly, it would turn out—the spiritual life of the folks-neshome. The “wasteland” Birnbaum described, the friendless, guideless midbar was a very personal one, it was his own galut as a Zionist, as a politician more focused on the pragmatic issues of electability and platforms than the cultural and spiritual foundation (in fact, as one who was at base more committed to the model of political Zionism Herzl advocated than he would probably have cared to admit). The font and expression of this awakening was the Yiddish language. But Birnbaum’s choice of Yiddish was not simply a matter of expediency. A rumor has long circulated about Birnbaum at Czernowitz, which began with the press coverage of the conference, that he did not speak Yiddish when he gave his convocatory remarks in that language. However, as letters that have come to light only in the last few months reveal, his commitment to Yiddish came from a much deeper, intimate connection—in fact, they came from within his closest family. Not, as one might first think, from some recollection of his childhood home—in der heym, as it were, although he certainly lived in a bilingual home.42 Rather, it may well have come from a highly unexpected source: his son Moni, none other than the scholar and linguist Solomon Birnbaum (1891–1989). Sixteen years old when his father traveled abroad to New York, seventeen at the time of the Czernowitz Conference, Solomon was so passionate about Yiddish that he insisted, as early as 1906, on corresponding with his father in the language almost exclusively. Birnbaum was reluctant at first, and indulged his son with a paragraph or two appended to the lengthier replies in German; after a while, though, he began to write whole letters to his son in Yiddish. Solomon’s appetite for the language was insatiable: “I read every day in Yiddish and Hebrew,” Solomon writes in one letter; 43 “You have no idea how difficult it is for me to improve my Yiddish,” he complains in another, “having only books to learn from.”44 In one fascinating letter, dated January 14, 1908, Solomon writes the following in his own German-inflected Yiddish, scolding his father for the very lectures he mentioned above in his memoir: “That you must speak German is certainly better for your [political] party, but for your principles?” 45 While one would not want to read too much into this simple sentence, it speaks eloquently to the very heart of Birnbaum’s internal intellectual struggle. In New York, as the same ambassador of the East European Volksgeist he had been for the better part of a decade in Central Europe, Birnbaum had spoken in German. After this tokheha from his son, this gentle rebuke, he would not make the same mistake again. Yet as a master of the written word and of self-presentation, Birnbaum recognized the potential for charges of hypocrisy for giving such a speech. And,

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to complicate matters, he read it from a text transliterated into roman characters. Birnbaum, standing at the podium as the embodiment of the Yiddish renaissance, was himself afraid to leave behind the security of a non-Jewish alphabet (a fact that was by no means lost on critics of the conference). It is true that Birnbaum was a public presence of some intellectual heft, sympathetic to the folk culture of East European Jewish culture. Having such a figure involved with the conference was a smart decision, lending it gravitas and legitimacy, just as Peretz’s presence loaned it his literary celebrity. But unlike Peretz, Birnbaum was a German-speaking, Western supporter and admirer of Yiddish with no literary accomplishment in the language (indeed, in August of 1908, he had little record of publication at all in the language, although this would change rapidly). Surely he could have had as powerful an impact from a more subdued role in the conference. Was it necessary for him to give the opening address? In fact, from Birnbaum’s perspective, it was absolutely necessary. Birnbaum’s Yiddish speech, in which he denounced in a language he felt he did not speak fluently his failure to recognize its very power, was an expiation. It was a kind of nationalist teshuva, repentance, for the mistakes he felt he

Figure 2.1. Panorama of a large ground in the market square of Buczacz with Nathan Birnbaum at its center, 1907.

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had made in his misapprehension of the core of Jewish peoplehood. It was a choice, furthermore, with stark political and cultural implications. Choosing Yiddish, not just as a language of expediency, but as a “high language” choice in and of itself was effectively and publicly to sever even the pretext of “getting along” with the wider Jewish nationalist network, to stand on principle, as Solomon demanded. It meant, in effect, to choose intellectual and philosophical commitment above politics. And it was to do so not in the name of success in the arena in which he had always sought it, that of party politics, but in the name of the very authenticity he believed would prove salvific for the crisis of European Jewish consciousness. The conclusion of this process, began in earnest in the months leading up to the Czernowitz Conference, was Birnbaum’s turn a few years later to religious Orthodoxy. In 1928, the twentieth anniversary of the Czernowitz Conference, Birnbaum would recall his participation in a letter sent to Yiddish linguist and historian Max Weinreich (1894–1969). Written long after he had left behind the Yiddish cultural movement, long after he had left all forms of secular Jewish identity and nationalism, Birnbaum still recalled

Figure 2.2. Group photo at the Czenowitz Conference. Nathan Birnbaum is at the far right of the front row.

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the conference in glowing and vibrant colors. But he ends his memoir on a somber note, writing: But today—only because of what I have been able [to apprehend] with my return to the Jewish Torah . . . [I observe] with deep emotion and concern: that radical parties have besmirched the Yiddish language and with it not only created a fear of it among the masses of religious Jews—the first and true creators of Yiddish—but also brought Yiddish itself into danger, that, torn from its source that it may, God forbid, lose its . . . true Jewishness . . . and become only a grey shadow of itself . . . just another quasi-European quasi-language.46

In view of Birnbaum’s final transformation, it might be tempting to dismiss these comments as presentist, a revision of his earlier thoughts about the possibilities of Yiddish through the lens of his new frumkayt or religiosity. But this misses the point. Rather, these words reveal a distinct continuity with the very sentiments that brought Birnbaum not just to embrace Yiddish, but Orthodoxy itself. At root, they share the same theme—the uncompromising demand for individual authenticity—a drive that was the most consistent, and significant, foundation of Birnbaum’s lifelong body of thought.

NOTES 1. Sections of this paper also appear, in revised form, in the proceedings of the 100th Anniversary International Yiddish Language Conference (August 18–22, 2008) edited by Wolf Moskowitz of the Hebrew University. 2. There is a limited amount of biographical material available on Nathan Birnbaum. Four monographs have detailed Birnbaum’s life. The latest is my own doctoral dissertation, Nation, Peoplehood and Religion in the Life and Thought of Nathan Birnbaum (Stanford University). The second is an unpublished dissertation from Dusseldorf written by Michael Kühntopf-Gentz; the third a monograph on Birnbaum’s Zionist thought published in Hebrew by Joachim Doron, Haguto ha-tsiyonit shel natan birnbaum (Jerusalem: Ha-sifriyah ha-tsiyonit al-yad ha-histadrut ha-tsiyonit haolamit, 1988); and finally, a study of Birnbaum’s use of language in the development of his ideology, Identity, Society, and Language: The Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum by linguist Joshua A. Fishman (Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1987). These, along with a few article-length pieces by Robert Wistrich, Barbara Galli, and Emmanuel Goldsmith, represent all of the academic work on Birnbaum. My own work is in no small part dependant upon a resource little utilized by other studies: the Birnbaum family archive in Toronto. (The one exception to all of these is an excellent short biographical piece written by Solomon Birnbaum, Nathan Birnbaum’s oldest son and in whose home his papers are preserved.) The archive, maintained after Solomon Birnbaum’s death by his son, David Birnbaum, is an exhaustive collection of Birnbaum’s publications, manuscripts, correspondence, and secondary pieces about Birnbaum collected both

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during his life and after. In total, it houses documents numbering in the tens of thousands, perhaps the most complete known collection of papers of a major European Jewish intellectual maintained in private hands. I owe particular thanks to the curators of this archive, David Birnbaum and his wife Jytte, as well as David’s brothers Eleazar and Jacob, who provided full access to the archives, as well as useful assistance and commentary on my work—I have been able to engage comprehensively with Birnbaum’s intellectual legacy. See the piece by David Birnbaum on these archives in the appendix to the present volume. 3. Rainier Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005), 66. 4. Franz Rosenzweig to Max Landau, 1924, As cited in Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 114. 5. Josef Meisl, “Selbst-Emanzipation,” in Von Sinn des Judentums, ein Sammelbuch zu Ehren Nathan Birnbaums, ed. Abraham Elijah Kaplan and Max Landau (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Hermon, 1924), 19–34. 6. Berthold Feiwel, “Ein Brief,” Von Sinn des Judentums, 14–15. 7. The first use of the adjective “zionistisch” occurs in the article “Um Ehre und Wohlfahrt unseres Volkes,” Selbst-Emancipation I.1 (April 1, 1890), and the noun “Zionismus” appears in “Die Siele der jüdisch-nationalen Bestrebung, II,” SelbstEmancipation III.4 (May 16, 1890). 8. For the history of Kadimah, see Robert Wistrich, “Kadimah and Jewish Student Nationalism,” in The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1989), 347–80. 9. Nathan Birnbaum, “Die Assimilationssucht: Ein Wort an die sogenannten Deutschen, Slaven, Magyaren usw. mosaischer Confession, von einem Studenten jüdischer Nationalität” (Vienna: Verlag der Buchhandlung D. Löwy, 1884). 10. For information on Birnbaum’s transition to Orthodoxy, see Jess Olson, “Nathan Birnbaum and Tuvia Horowitz: Friendship and the Origins of an Orthodox Ideologue,” Jewish History 17.1 (2003), 1–29. During the First World War, while acting as the curator for the Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv in Vienna, Birnbaum was introduced to several members of the Galician and Hungarian Orthodox establishment. Along with a member of the extended family of R. Israel Hagar, the Rebbe of the Vizhnits Hasidic sect, Tuvia Horowitz, Birnbaum articulated a plan for an Orthodox mass political movement, the “Olim.” After the war, partly due to their interest in his political thought but also because of his significant public persona, the Swiss-based leadership of the Agudat Yisrael party invited Birnbaum to join their executive committee. Leaving the Agudah a few years later, Birnbaum continued his relevance in a dynamic period within Central and East European Orthodoxy, organizing and editing two different periodicals, Der Aufsteig and Der Ruf, as well as acting as an inspirational figure for an entire generation of young Orthodox community leaders, including the founders of the Beyt Ya’akov women’s education program, and factions within the Agudat Yisrael itself, including the Zeire Agudah (Agudah Youth) and the Poalei Agudah (Workers of the Agudah). 11. A number of letters between Herzl and Birnbaum, as well as diary entries in Herzl’s famous Zionist diary, detail the tortured relationship between the two men.

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For a detailed study of the Herzl-Birnbaum relationship and its effect on early Zionism, see Jess Olson, “The Late Zionism of Nathan Birnbaum: The Herzl Controversy Reconsidered,” AJS Review 31.2 (2007), 241–76. 12. Theodor Herzl, Complete Diaries (August 27, 1897), trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Raphael Patai (New York: Herzl Press, 1960). 13. Ibid., April 11, 1898. 14. Ibid., March 10, 1897. 15. Nathan Birnbaum, “Ein jüdisches Volkspartei,” Neue Zeitung, 1894. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Fascinatingly, most, if not all of these ideas found their way into a widespread expression over the development of Jewish nationalism in Europe. The idea of Jewish participation on a wide scale in local nationalities politics began—with Birnbaum’s participation—within a decade of the publication of “Jüdisches Volkspartei” and continued on to its greatest expression in interwar Poland with Henryk Grynberg’s General Zionist coalition; the union of nationalism with religion, a position that would be embodied by the Mizrahi movement of R. Isaac Reynes, was exemplified by the theory of R. Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook (although in an inverted form) in Mandate Palestine. 19. See Ahad Ha’am, “Altneuland,” Ha-shiloah 10.6 (Kislev 5663/December 1902) and Ost und West 3:4 (April 1903). 20. For Birnbaum’s essays on the affair and Ahad Ha’am included, see “Open Letter to Ahad Ha’am,” Die Zeit (1902), “Achad ha’am: Ein Denker und Kämpfer der jüdischen Renaissance” (Berlin, 1903), “Die jüdische Bewegung,” Der Weg (August 20, 1903). 21. Ironically, one of the four candidates with whom Birnbaum caucused as a Jewish Nationalist was Benno Straucher, a Zionist who ran as the representative from Czernowitz. Straucher had been for some time a major figure in Czernowitz and Bukovinian politics; along with his election to the Reichsrat, Straucher was also the president of the Czernowitz Jewish community and the individual perhaps most responsible for the fundraising, planning, and completion of the beautiful art nouveau Jewish National House at 5 Teatral’na ploshcha (currently the Chernivtsi Palace of Culture), which, at one time, featured his bust prominently in the main entrance. It was primarily Straucher’s opposition to the conference that led to the sudden eviction of the conference from the Jewish National House on the eve of the conference, and its relocation to the Ukrainian National House on “vulytsia Ukraïns’ka.” 22. Birnbaum’s official protest was dozens of pages in length and sets out in minute detail some of the bold violations of electoral law by the Polish nationalists, including economic repression, blackmail against Jewish voters, and even physical violence and intimidation—including Polish “honor guards” who stood in front of polling places armed with clubs, threatening to beat Jews who voted for Birnbaum. 23. Nathan Birnbaum, “An iberblik iber mayn lebn,” Yoyvelbukh tsum zekhtsikstn geburstog fun d”r nosn birnboym (Warsaw: Farlag yeshurun, 1924), 10. 24. That the two happened to be of the same mind at this point in their careers is itself remarkable, for Birnbaum and Zhitlovsky shared the trait of frequent changes in their intellectual convictions. Chaim Zhitlovsky, the noted Russian-Jewish author best

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known as a close associate of Sholem Rappaport (S. An-sky), author of the classic Yiddish play The Dybbuk, who accompanied him on his groundbreaking ethnographic travels among the traditional Jewish communities of the Russian Empire, is one of the few modern Jewish intellectuals who could rival Birnbaum for the number and degree of shifts in his ideology throughout his career. For details of his intellectual development, see Jonathan Frankel, “Chaim Zhitlovsky,” in Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 25. David Pinski, letter to the Jewish School Society in Czernowitz on the twentieth anniversary of the First Conference of the Yiddish Language. Cited in Max Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe sprakh-konferents: barikhtn, dokumentn un opklangen fun der tshernovitser konferents, 1908 (Vilna: 1931). The volume Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents was published as part of the YIVO bibliotek by Max Weinreich. It was Weinreich’s attempt to collect in one encyclopedic volume all of the relevant sources and materials he could find relating to the Yiddish Language Conference. Celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 1928, Weinreich feared that the conference, due largely to its poor execution, was in danger of being completely forgotten, its accomplishments and debates lost. There was no published protocol of the conference, only a few documents were ever printed under its auspices, and the delegates had long since moved both geographically and intellectually from their interest in the conference or its issues. Weinreich thus attempted to gather a number of memoirs from attendees to the conference, however after issuing his request for submissions, he received only one response—from Nathan Birnbaum (the essay “Amol un atsind”). Nevertheless, through extensive archival research, Weinreich gathered a collection of new reports about the conference before, during, and after it, along with numerous letters and other accounts, and reconstructed a chronology of the conference as well as a collection of documents. It is the single most valuable source in understanding the Czernowitz Conference. 26. Nathan Birnbaum, “Amol un atsind,” in Max Weinreich, Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents, ix. 27. Announcement (Farbetung) of the Yiddish Language Conference, 1908, in Di erste yidishe shprakh-konferents, 2–4. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Birnbaum, “Amol un atsind,” ix. 31. Y. L. Peretz, “Opening Address to the First Conference of the Yiddish Language in Max Weinreich,” Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents, 4–5 32. Barzel (Shimon Ayzenshtat), Forverts (1908), in Weinreich, 40–41. 33. Unzer leben (August 27, 1908), in Weinreich, 22–23. 34. Hillel Zeitlin, “Folks-notisn,” Haynt (September 4, 1908), in Weinreich, 36–38. 35. H. Harris (Achaz), “Conference in Czernowitz,” August 28 (New York: Ha’am), as cited in Weinreich, 28–29. 36. For a detailed study of American Yiddishist politics, see Tony Michels, “The Politics of Yidishe Kultur,” in his Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

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37. Weinreich, 61–67. 38. Nathan Birnbaum, “Efenung-rede,” in Weinreich, 71–73. 39. Ibid, 131–33. 40. Announcement from the Bureau of the Conference of the Yiddish Language, Dr. birnboyms vokhenblat, No. 5. 41. Nathan Birnbaum, “Efenung-rede.” 42. The Birnbaum family archives hold a number of letters, some of them personal, some business, written in Yiddish by Nathan Birnbaum’s parents in the early 1880s. In at least one or two cases, business letters seem to have been dictated to Nathan Birnbaum in Yiddish. This, along with his swift return to Yiddish in the early 1900s, indicate an earlier and deep familiarity with the language, if not a confident fluency by his middle age. 43. Solomon Birnbaum to Nathan Birnbaum, January 4, 1908. 44. Solomon Birnbaum to Nathan Birnbaum, January 7, 1908. 45. Solomon Birnbaum to Nathan Birnabum, January 14, 1908: “Az du zolst shprekhen daytsh, iz avade far dayn partayn beser, ober far’n printsip?” , , 46. Nathan Birnbaum, “Amol un atsind,” in Weinreich, ix.

4 Peretz’s Commitment to Yiddish in Czernowitz A National Caprice? Marie Schumacher-Brunhes

The presence of leading Yiddish writers at the Czernowitz Conference in 1908 notwithstanding, the decision to write in Yiddish was still a burning issue at that time: Yiddish literature was still seeking a justification, both ideological and aesthetic. Y. L. Peretz (1852–1915), the foremost innovator of the three “classic authors” of modern Yiddish literature, and a leading figure in the historic conference, is also known as one of the outstanding representatives of Yiddishism. Yet, this characterization does not take into account the complex process leading to that position. Nor does it shed light upon the ambiguities concealed behind this ideological shortcut. At the beginning of his activity as a Yiddish writer, Peretz decisively defended what we can call, following Simon Dubnow’s (1860–1941) own lead, the pragmatic “theory of trilingualism,” before increasingly espousing national bilingualism. The fact that the Yiddishist camp fostered and nurtured the illusion that Peretz was exclusively devoted to the Yiddishist cause should not prevent us from considering Peretz’s production with a critical eye.1 Let us, first, briefly examine how Peretz’s commitment to Yiddish evolved throughout the years. What role did he grant to Yiddish, in particular in relationship to Hebrew? The answer to the question will allow us better to understand what was at stake at Czernowitz, where Peretz’s reflection on that subject reached its culmination.

STRATEGIC TRILINGUALISM: THE CALL TO JEWISH WRITERS Peretz’s commitment to Yiddish started early—considering the fact that he stepped onto the literary stage at the age of forty—and was connected to

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his first publication in Yiddish: his romantic ballad Monish, the first major modern narrative poem in Yiddish.2 His first theoretical reflections on language can be found in his correspondence—in Hebrew—with Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) about Monish.3 Peretz wrote that he had consciously striven for linguistic and stylistic innovation in Monish. His first goal was to widen the horizon of his readers, to open “new skies” for them. In carrying out the program, however, he was striving for a much more ambitious goal: only if Yiddish were consciously enriched would it achieve the status of a language. With the publication of Di yidishe bibliotek in 1891, his private musings on the subject found a platform, thus reaching beyond the limits of a mere dispute between two intellectuals. Di yidishe bibliotek—a zhurnal far literatur, gezelshaft un ekonomye, was an ambitious journal of literature, criticism, and popular science published by Peretz himself and aimed at educating Yiddish readers to become modern European Jews. In his emblematic essay Bildung,4 Peretz clearly spelled out the principles of his theory. First, he insisted on the necessity of an independent process of education adapted to the specificity of East European Jewry; second, he guaranteed the success of the enterprise by founding it on a reasonable appraisal of the linguistic landscape. Urging the estranged Jewish intellectuals to commit themselves to the advancement of their own people, Peretz suggested that they come back to the people, and, consequently, to the Yiddish language. Knowledge of Hebrew was indispensable, he wrote, insofar as Hebrew had united each Jew with his people through past generations and still did in present times. The language of the country was the tribute to pay to modernity. Yiddish as a “third language” was also essential, since it was a moral duty to speak and write in the language of the people. This manifesto and in particular the utilitarian perspective and the halfheartedness of his position toward Yiddish led to numerous controversies.5 And yet, the position of Yiddish, if not clearly asserted, was de facto legitimized thanks to the remarkable variety of articles featured in Di yidishe bibliotek and the innovative style of the literary texts.6 The ambition was immense and did not contradict love for Hebrew. On the one hand, it aimed at modernizing Yiddish, the language of the people, by introducing the vocabulary of technical modernity and, on the other hand, at “opening new skies” in order to promote Yiddish literature to the rank of a European literature.7 Peretz was actually much less concerned with the Yiddish language than with literature itself: “No language is holy per se. Language is a means whereby human beings communicate with each other and whereby the educated influence the uneducated.”

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TOWARD THE ASSERTION OF YIDDISH This strategy, however, had to be adapted to the new orientations in Jewish society. Since the basis of Jewish life had become secularized, language had become most significant, and the issue of language was obviously at the heart of nationalist concerns. In contrast to the Bundists who were discovering the magnetism of the Yiddish language and to the Zionists concentrating on Hebrew, Peretz chose to remain faithful to this pluralistic vision of the Jewish linguistic landscape. Standing by his principles, he kept on enriching the Hebrew publishing world and literature, orchestrating simultaneously the blossoming of Yiddish literature. He devoted to it the greatest part of his creative energy, first as a radical social writer, then as the founder of the neoHasidic tale. The relationship between the two Jewish languages quite clearly fascinated the writer. His brief correspondence with the Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934) illustrates this shift toward Yiddish and his rejection of any dogmatism. Professing his fascination with Hebrew, he could not but condemn the elitism of the Odessa Parnass—a group of accomplished Hebrew writers led by Bialik and Ahad Ha’am (1856–1927)— for “never having prayed in a great bet-hamidrash, surrounded by ordinary people.”8 Actually, a new element was now complicating the language problem: the fight between nationalists and assimilationists had been replaced by a fierce competition between Yiddishists and Hebraists, which the Czernowitz Conference further heightened. Up to that point, the followers of each camp had defined their nationalism through linguistic practice, a strategy that not only such writers as Dubnow and Peretz, but also writer and ethnographer Sh. An-ski (1863–1920) deplored. Such linguistic quarrels were quite sterile; everyone acknowledged that the different languages did not have the same national validity, but should be recognized as equal with regard to their use as tools for communication and cultural creation. Aware of the new configuration, Peretz definitively abandoned Dubnow’s theory of trilingualism, refusing to submit to the “fatality” that mandated that an important sector of the intelligentsia content itself with the coterritorial language as a cultural tool. Peretz was now clearly establishing his adherence to the literary national sphere through the credo of his double loyalty to both the Jews’ historic national language and to the everyday language of the people.

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CZERNOWITZ By the time of the Czernowitz Conference, Peretz openly defended Yiddish, favoring it over Hebrew, but without disowning the historical national language. Even if posterity remembers his emotive speech in which he paid tribute to the language of his folk, we should not forget that the conference, which was called for practical cultural purposes, actually dealt with the theoretical language question.9 As the sole member of the conference to be an accomplished writer in both languages, he had a specific role to play in this debate, despite his frustration with it. In his opening address to the conference,10 a kind of declaration of the cultural independence of Yiddish that had a “tremendous effect,”11 Peretz began by analyzing the factors that had created the Yiddishist movement through a chronological presentation of the “three moments of inner liberation” that led to its genesis. First, this process of liberation, which began on a social and philosophical level with hasidism, was echoed in literature through the hasidic tale, its “Book of Genesis”: in other words, the maskilic writer Isaac Meir Dik (1814–1893) was but a follower. As a second factor, he invoked women’s literature in Yiddish and the recognition of the language as the tongue of the ordinary masses and, especially, of the Jewish woman. The Ivritaytsh of her Tsenerene had become a “mother-tongue.” The third factor was to be found in the rise of the Jewish working class and of a proletarian culture in Yiddish: not until the worker seeking emancipation was forced to forge the linguistic tool of his fight could Yiddish claim to be a shprakh—a language. Finally, without the emerging recognition of nationality as a primary force in modern societies, this evolution would probably have remained unnoticed. The historical perspective was then followed by a plea for cultural autonomy as the condition for any creation: “Jews are one people whose language is Yiddish. In this language we wish to gather our treasure, create our culture, further stimulate our spirit and unite ourselves culturally in all lands and in all times.”12 The conference was an expression of Jewish national and cultural unity, in which “the Jewish theme in the symphony of peoples” could freely resound. To proclaim Yiddish the bond uniting all Jews would stimulate and enhance the creativity of the Jewish people, and thus contribute to the cultural blossoming of humanity as a whole. Consequently, Peretz proposed two main lines in the discussions: first, the translation of the Hebrew-Aramaic literary heritage into Yiddish to establish Yiddish as a shared language; and second, the means to make it accessible to the world at large, an essential criterion for its parity with other languages.

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At the planning session held immediately prior to the conference, Peretz had refused to have the burning issue of the relationship of Yiddish to Hebrew be included on the agenda, although he and his secretary and devoted friend, Jacob Dineson (1856–1919), had openly deplored the fact that it had been omitted in the official invitation.13 He probably wanted to avoid a clash between Bundists and Zionists, which would have discredited the assembly. Its official aim was indeed the recognition of Yiddish as a Jewish language by Jews and non-Jews. On the contrary, we can stress his interest in the practical aspects of the conference: “We have gathered together here for practical work on behalf of the Yiddish language and only positive work interests us,” he said during the planning session.14 We could just as well emphasize his arguing energetically on the question of organizing a Yiddish literary and cultural union at the third session of the conference. With the help of other officers of the conference, he had worked out every detail of the role and responsibilities of the future body and the details of its functioning. It focused on work in the field: assistance in the publication of model textbooks, arbitration of disputes between writers and publishers, establishment and support for model Yiddish schools, for libraries, for a model travelling theater, the creation of professional unions of writers and artists, the organization of lectures and public readings, the creation of propaganda to attain recognition and equal rights for the Yiddish language. But the goals were much more ambitious, too: assistance in the translation into Yiddish of all the cultural and artistic treasures of the Jewish past and especially of the Bible,15 creation of an authoritative body to decide questions of Yiddish spelling, grammar, and other language matters. During the discussion of Peretz’s resolution on the international organization, the relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish emerged as a vital political issue again. Zionists accused his proposal of hostility toward Hebrew, whereas the Bundist Esther Frumkin (1880–1943) feared it would, as an instrument of rightist Yiddishism, weaken the class consciousness of the Jewish proletariat. Pushed into a corner by the most extreme speakers, Peretz was forced to clarify his stand, although he was convinced that the question was a theoretical one and that searching for a collective statement about such a subject was completely futile. He expounded a theory on languages not altogether unlike Ahad Ha’am’s (1856–1927) position on the issue.16 Peretz believed that as the language of the Bible, Hebrew was and would continue to remain sacred. Every Jew had the moral task of acquainting himself with the Bible in its original tongue. Failing proof to the contrary, this was the national language, since it was the one which had been born with the Jewish nation and would

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not disappear unless the latter perished. This position did not contradict his enthusiasm for Mates Mieses’s (1885–1945) thesis, in particular for Mieses’s negative view of the role of Hebrew in modern Jewish life. He even proposed to publish Mieses’s address in a special brochure as the first scientific study of the Yiddish language.17 As long as the cultural treasures of the Jewish people remained in Hebrew, Yiddish was nothing but a folk language; the mother tongue admittedly had contained the spiritual treasures of the nation for many generations, but that was not sufficient to proclaim it a national language. Only by translating the cultural treasures from Hebrew into Yiddish would one help the folk language rise to the level of a national language. This did not mean that it was necessarily destined to replace Hebrew or the co-territorial language. Consequently, any resolution concerning Yiddish as a national language seemed to him to be premature. The only reasonable goal for the conference was to help the folk language elevate itself to the rank of a national language. It is not really surprising that Peretz first refused to adopt the formulation presenting Yiddish as “a national language.” He was even ready to withdraw from the presidium. Nevertheless, his will to secure a place inside the executive committee of the future international organization led him to change his mind and, not without a little “casuistic” pirouette about the definition of the term “national,” he consented to the radical shtimung or mood of the conference. Nonetheless, when asked to clarify his position on the Hebrew-Yiddish question by the Kraków newspaper Der sotsyal-demokrat just after the conference, not only did Peretz steadfastly refer to the dichotomy between the folk language and the national language (Mieses considered it degrading), but he also directly derived his answer from the structure of the Bildung essay published twenty years before.18 A few years later, in 1910, Peretz reflected on Czernowitz. In a Freudian slip, he called it “a congress of writers,” thus revealing his deepest wish. He admitted that he had put down his signature under the pressure of the majority, and that the resolution did not square with reality, but only expressed an aspiration dear to them all.19 Peretz’s charisma and powerful vision, however, helped him to emerge as the hero of the movement, so that he could become the leading figure of the Yiddish cultural movement throughout the world. This role became even more significant after his death. Continuing to base his membership in the literary national sphere on the credo of a double loyalty to Hebrew and Yiddish, he adopted a much more aggressive strategy for winning alienated Jews over to Yiddish and encouraging as many Jews as possible to speak Yiddish. This “linguistic proselytizing” cut across not only social classes, but also national borders. “The English Jew will have to learn Yiddish,” he said in one of his

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most famous speeches held in 1910 in Dobele, thermal baths not far from Riga. It was at that very moment that Peretz wished to accelerate the historical process: he gave literature a leading role in the enterprise, considering that it was not so much the language as, first and foremost, the contents which had to be Jewish. The poet’s task was to rebuild a temple. In his quest for the Jewish form, Peretz found inspiration in the Bible, in the spirit of hasidism, and in folklore.20 This strategy implied refusing to accept either models of the Jewish writer at the time: on the one hand, the Westernized writer, only able to produce a surrogate for Jewish literature because of his alienation from his own culture; on the other hand, the writer coming from the people, exempted from harmful influence but handicapped in his creative activity by his lack of general culture.21

CONCLUSION Peretz’s position concerning the language question had its roots in the writer’s double passion: his love for Hebrew language and culture determined the level of his obligations as well as his expectations toward Yiddish, the language of the people and a language admirable in itself. At the beginning of his career as a Yiddish writer, Peretz considered Yiddish a means of spreading education and worldliness among Jews. Shortly before his death, he saw the new primary task of Yiddish as the preservation and development of the historic-ethical values of Judaism, as the reassertion of the spiritual tradition of Jewry. This evolution was possible because he had never thought that language was an end in itself. By the time of Czernowitz, he could observe with satisfaction that Yiddish had abandoned its provincialism, and now wore the insignia of universality and modernity. It could reasonably make a claim to the status of a language, one seeking recognition inside and outside the Jewish world. Yiddish had nevertheless to become richer, in particular by reshaping the Jewish tradition, for the status of a national language gained in Czernowitz corresponded more to an ideal than to reality. Fearing the disappearance of Jewish national identity, but still feeling uncomfortable with radical Yiddishist militancy, Peretz focused on Yiddish literature and on its cultural enrichment: it had to become a literature of the entire Jewish people and the Yiddish writer its prophet. Notwithstanding his vindication of bilingualism in literary practice and artistic creativity, Peretz remained an unrepentant practitioner of trilingualism in the sphere of public and private life. Indeed, he was and remained Peretz the

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porets, “the Polish Pan, in literature as in life,” as Roskies has put it.22 He was a modern secular Jew, acquainted with several cultures, juggling with their symbol and contents, and using one rather than another of the four languages he spoke fluently—with a marked preference for the one his interlocutor did not expect. Let us quote from Avrom Reyzen (1876–1953) as a summary of the many observations concerning this disconcerting linguistic practice in the vast panorama of memoirs devoted to Peretz: “I don’t remember if he was talking in Yiddish or Polish; indeed, it mostly depended on his national mood of the day—vi zayn natsyonaler kapriz hot amol oysgetrogn.”23

NOTES 1. See, for example, what Turkov-Grudberg claimed as late as in 1965: Yitskhok Turkov-Grudberg, Y. L. Perets, der veker (Tel Aviv: Farlag Y. L. Peretz, 1965), 18. Already in the 1920s, Alter Kacyzne (1885–1941) commented on and deplored the futile struggle over Peretz’s name and heritage between myopic Yiddishist sycophants and the adversaries of Diaspora culture. See his article “Biz vanen darfn mir geyn mit Pperetsn un ven darfn mir avek fun im,” Literarishe bleter 49–50 (April 10, 1925), 5. In an article published in the Moment in 1920, H. D. Nomberg (1876–1927) remarked on the paradox underlying the flourishing of cultural institutions using Peretz as their authority: “Peretz, the man without a program; Peretz, for whom truth was nothing but a little step forward . . . ; Peretz who saw in questioning the height of beauty and nobleness and in the answer the dust and mud of grey existence, this Peretz is about to become a national program.” See Nomberg, “Der ruf fun friling,” Gezamelte verk (Warsaw: 1930), 8:82. 2. For a translation into English, see The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. Ruth R. Wisse (New York: Schocken, 1990), 1–16. 3. Briv un redes fun Y. L. Perets, ed. Nachman Meisel (New York: Farlag Ikuf, 1944), nos. 74–76. 4. Ale verk fun Y. L. Perets, ed. Shmuel Niger (New York: CYCO, 1947–1948), 8:3–17. For an English version, see Peretz, ed. and trans. Sol Liptzin (New York: YIVO, 1947), 332–38. 5. Involved in those feverish debates were not only Yiddishist activists but also well-known “Peretzianers” like H. D. Nomberg, G. Levin, and Y. Dinezon. See the pages which Shmuel Niger (1883–1955) dedicated to this subject in his monograph Y. L. Perets: zayn lebn, zayn firndike perzenlekhkeyt (Buenos Aires: Argentiner opteyl fun alveltlekhn yidishn kultur-kongres, 1952), 210–14. 6. Here we ought to recognize the perspicacity of the American literary critic Ber Gorin (1868–1925) who, as early as in 1894, recognized Peretz’s strategy. See Ber Gorin, “Di naye zhargonishe literatur in rusland,” Di tsukunft (December 1894), 12. 7. As told in the quoted letter to Sholem Aleichem. 8. See Briv un redes, 224.

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9. From the moment it was raised during the planning session held immediately prior to the conference, that issue nurtured feverish debates. 10. See Briv un redes, 371–74; or Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents—barikhtn, dokumentn un opklangn (Vilna, 1931), 74–78. 11. To use E. S. Goldsmith’s own expression. See Architects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (Cranbury, London: Associated University Presses, 1976), 192. 12. All following English translations are Goldsmith. See chap. 8: “The Czernowitz Conference,” Architects of Yiddishism, 183–211. 13. See Peretz’s answer to Nathan Birnbaum’s (1864–1937) proposal for organizing a conference, Briv un redes, 263–64. 14. See Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents, 65. 15. This demand was already to be found in his letter to Birnbaum. 16. His attitude toward Yiddish found expression in his polemic with M. Mieses in 1910. See in particular the essay entitled “The Language Controversy,” in Ahad Ha’am, Essays, Letters, Memoirs (Oxford: East and West Library, 1946), 228–29. 17. See the essay by Mordkhe Schaechter on Mieses in the appendix to the present volume. 18. See Di erste yidishe shprakh-konferents, 133–34. 19. See “Vegn der yidisher literatur,” Briv un redes, 380. 20. Ibid., 380–81. See also the central essay, “Vos felt undzer literatur,” in Ale Verk, 7: 278–79. 21. See the Vilna speeches in Briv un redes, 382, and Peretz’s interview with Sh. K. Shneyfal “Interviuen mit y.l. perets, vegn der yidisher literature,” Togblat, reprinted in ibid., 405. 22. David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 105. 23. Avrom Reyzen, Epizodn fun mayn lebn (literarishe erinerungen) (Vilna: Kletskin Farlag, 1929), 1:311.

5 Mother-tongue, Mame-loshn, and Kulturshprakh The Tension between Populism and Elitism in the Language Ideology of Noah Prylucki Kalman Weiser

With no single figure was the short-lived Diaspora Nationalist Folksparty and arguably the Yiddishist movement as a whole more closely associated in early interwar Poland than with Noah Prylucki (1882–1941). For almost thirty-five years, the firebrand lawyer and polymath scholar combined near constant immersion in the daily polemics of the Warsaw Jewish press and intensive political and social engagement with a singular dedication to recondite philological research in the service of nationalist goals. The emergence of a number of modern Yiddish cultural institutions in Eastern Europe, including the secular school movement and press, is in no small way the fruit of his labors. He also played a pivotal role in the establishment of Yiddish linguistics, literary and theater criticism, and ethnography as fields of independent academic inquiry, rather than mere subsets of German philology.1 Prylucki was not part of the founding generation of Yiddishists, such as the writer Y. L. Peretz (1852–1915) or the philosopher Chaim Zhitlovsky (1865– 1943), who first articulated and agitated on behalf of the ideology in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.2 From childhood, however, he was made intimately familiar with secular cultural and ideological developments among Jewish nationalists under the tutelage of his father Tsevi (1862–1942), an early supporter of Zionism and a pioneer in the development of a Jewish press in Russian, Hebrew, and, above all, Yiddish.3 Indeed, Prylucki stands out among Yiddish cultural activists for his precocious and varied engagement in the creation of a modern Yiddish culture. Having begun to collect folklore and to write for Yiddish periodicals by adolescence, he was already a principled champion of Yiddishism by the time of the landmark Czernowitz 55

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Conference in 1908. Exuding confidence and determination on behalf of his cause, he unfurled throughout his career as a journalist, scholar, and political activist an array of nation-building cultural activities characteristic of contemporary nationalist movements in Central and Eastern Europe.4 Although exceptional for the sheer diversity and longevity of his cultural and political activity, Prylucki illustrates a broader phenomenon common among the secularized nationalist leadership of early twentieth-century Eastern European Jewry. He provides an example of an acculturated intellectual who under the influence of the general European movements of Romanticism and populism “discovered” Yiddish as the “authentic” creative expression of an idealized Jewish folk dwelling on the territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Claiming to be a nonnative speaker of the language, he worked to refashion the folk’s own language (folkshprakh) into an instrument for the attainment of both political and cultural goals on its behalf. Paradoxically, he endeavored to create a kulturshprakh, a version of the language whose growth and cultivation was to be removed from the hands of the Jewish folk which had created it and ultimately entrusted to linguists necessarily at a social remove from it. TURNING TO YIDDISH Like many nineteenth-century Eastern European nationalists, most early champions of Yiddish (e.g., the chief convener of the Czernowitz Conference, Nathan Birnbaum—a native German speaker—and the founder of the socialist Zionist party, Poale Zion Ber Borokhov, and [1881–1917], whose mother tongue was Russian) were neither raised nor educated in environments where the language they promoted was widely spoken. Few early Yiddish language ideologists and language planners can be considered “full” native speakers, as they were predominantly products of the Russian or German cultural spheres. Noah Prylucki, like the Soviet linguist Nokhem Shtif (1879–1933), was exceptional among Yiddish linguists in that he grew up in proximity to the masses providing the corpus for his linguistic research. Yet, raised in a bourgeois home in the fin-de-siècle Russian Empire, he somewhat disingenuously claimed that “[m]y true mother tongue [mutershprakh] was Russian, the second, Hebrew, in which I tried for years to feel at home. My Yiddish, on the other hand, was poor and raw.”5 This statement is, however, not to be taken at face value, especially when one considers that one does not typically struggle to feel at home in his native tongue. Moreover, the movement for the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, which was promoted by the Zionist movement, was at best in its infancy during Prylucki’s earliest years.

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Rather, Yiddish was almost certainly the language of Prylucki’s home, even if he preferred other languages in his childhood. Raised in the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) center of Kremenets in the Ukraine, in his youth Prylucki shared a distaste common among maskilim, proponents of the Haskalah, for the language he later championed as the mother tongue (mame-loshn) and national language of Eastern European Jewry. In state schools in Ukraine, Congress Poland, and Russia he received a thorough grounding in Russian language and culture, with which he closely identified throughout his life. He also enjoyed a modernized Hebrew education thanks to his father Tsevi, an early proponent of the proto-Zionist Hibat-tsion (“Love of Zion”) movement active in the Hebrew and Russian-Jewish presses in the tsarist empire.6 While Prylucki recalled an early fascination with Yiddish folktales recounted to him by working class children in Kremenets, he recorded these, as a matter of course, in Russian, the language of the modernizing Jewish bourgeoisie in the Pale of Settlement.7 The memoirs of Nokhem Shtif, who was similarly raised in a bourgeois home in Ukraine, shed light on this experience: Though brought up in a Jewish home where Yiddish was always spoken, where I lived until I was nineteen, I believed, like all of my friends, that I did not know Yiddish, and even more certainly that I could not write it—so much so that when I had to write two pamphlets about the attempt on Krushevan’s life, I wrote in Russian and asked someone to translate into Yiddish.8

It is typical of a generation of politically active middle-class Jews that Prylucki’s initial use of Yiddish in the public sphere stemmed from reasons more practical than ideological: as a left-leaning Zionist orator traveling through the Pale of Settlement at the turn of the twentieth century, he sought to communicate his message to Jewish masses who knew well no other language. At the Seventh Zionist Congress in Basel in 1905, he was chosen to serve as secretary of the central committee of Dovrei ivrit (Hebrew speakers) societies that had multiplied throughout Europe to promote Hebrew as a spoken language. Having drawn closer to the Zionist left, he was also recognized for his facility with Yiddish and was recommended to serve as language editor for the Yiddish language paper of the newly formed socialistZionist party, Poale Zion, in 1906.9 Over time, however, he came to dismiss the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language in the Diaspora as a futile squandering of energies and to despair of Zionism as a form of utopian escapism and, in their place, he embraced Yiddishism and autonomism, the movement for Jewish national recognition and cultural autonomy in multinational states in the Diaspora. He quickly made the transition to writing regularly in Yiddish, a language with which he was intimately familiar despite claims to the

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contrary, and found quick success and a mass readership in the Yiddish press that burgeoned after the 1905 Revolution in Russia. After graduating from the University of St. Petersburg, Prylucki settled in 1907 in Warsaw to practice law and write for Der veg. The city’s first Yiddish daily, it espoused a general Jewish nationalist line sympathetic to Zionism and was founded and edited by his father Tsevi.10 In addition to regular articles about current events, politics, and theater reviews for Der veg and subsequent periodicals edited by his father, Prylucki published his own book of erotic poetry, Farn mizbeyakh (Before the alter, 1908), which he dedicated to his bride, the Polish (and later Yiddish) writer Paula R. (Rozental, 1876–1942). His own poetic attempts poorly received by critics, he dedicated his energies together with a part of his personal income to promoting modern literary production and the “salvaging” of elements of traditional Jewish life that were rapidly disappearing with the advance of industrialization and secular, cosmopolitan culture among the Jews. In his late twenties, he sponsored amateur folklore and literary circles in his Warsaw home and offered honoraria for contributions to his publications. Together with his father, he also helped in 1910 to found Der moment, one of Warsaw’s most popular Yiddish dailies until 1939. On its pages he wrote regularly about both Jewish politics and culture, frequently popularizing his own research for the benefit of the ordinary reader.

YIDDISHISM The cultural wings of the Jewish nationalist movement, like analogous movements among other peoples in Europe, placed great emphasis on language as the “soul” of a people. Language represented the most perfect expression of the “national genius” that, according to romantic thought, distinguishes one nation from another and guides the nation in the fulfillment of its unique historic mission for the benefit of all humanity. For the Jews, like other stateless and “non-historic” peoples (i.e., lacking a tradition of statehood) dwelling within multinational empires in Europe, the development of a national language along with art, music, literature, theater, and scholarship in it was to serve as a surrogate, temporary or permanent depending on one’s long-term political views, for a national territory. Yet, among themselves, Jewish nationalists in Eastern Europe could hardly agree as to which language—Hebrew or Yiddish—embodied this ideal and what should be its appropriate relationship to the other languages commonly in use in Jewish life, chiefly Russian and Polish. The synthesis of nationalist and populist ideas adopted from the Eastern European milieu, Yiddishism glorified the language of the Jewish masses

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and sought through it to fashion a modern, secular culture for the Jews on the basis of nearly a thousand years of European life—the time, roughly, during which Yiddish was the spoken language of the largest part of European Jewry. Not only would Yiddish serve, however, as the medium for the expression of a modern sensibility among Jews. The very language itself was to replace religion as the force binding the Jewish people as a collective. Like other forms of European populism, Yiddishism reproached intellectuals with betrayal and abandonment of the loyal folk (the Yiddish parallel to the German concept of Volk), the idealized guardians of the national soul and identity, through the adoption of foreign tongues and cultures. Taking inspiration from the Russian narodniki (“populists”), these wayward sons and daughters were exhorted to return to their people, to help awaken in them a secular national consciousness and to educate and modernize them in their own language. In return, the alienated intellectuals were to be inspired with and reinvigorated by the unreflective naturalness of the assumedly uncomplicated and unembarrassed identity of the folksmentsh (the simple person of the masses). Yiddish was to undergo a process akin to that by which other European vernaculars were transformed into standardized, national languages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (if not earlier), and reliance on both Latin and “foreign” languages was shed among educated classes. It was to be carefully cultivated, modernized, and its use expanded into domains of life such as mass politics, secular education, and modern scholarship from which it was previously absent or excluded. Eventually, it would become the primary vehicle of both high and low culture. Yiddish in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries possessed few conscious literary norms: decisions concerning spelling and punctuation were within the authority of the individual writer or editor; questions of standard grammar and gender to bridge dialectal variation had scarcely been formulated yet in a scholarly fashion.11 On the whole, an image prevailed of Yiddish as ugly and impoverished, incapable of expressing lofty and nuanced ideas and devoid of an internal logic and stabile lexicon. It was the language of the uneducated and impoverished while the “better classes” appropriated more “sophisticated” non-Jewish tongues. It was a language without a modern dictionary and a written grammar, then the hallmarks of national pride in language in Europe, and, it was commonly assumed, would never possess these due to some inherent defect. Even among those Jewish writers who recognized the irrational flaws in this critique and sought to cultivate Yiddish as a literary language, maskilic notions of the “purity” of German compared with the “mongrel” nature of Yiddish, in addition to the general prestige accorded German as a language of high culture in Eastern Europe, commonly resulted in the conscious patterning of Yiddish spelling,

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vocabulary, and syntax according to German literary norms—a phenomenon known derisively as daytshmerish.12

PRYLUCKI AND THE CZERNOWITZ CONFERENCE It was precisely to elevate the prestige of Yiddish within and without Jewish society and to draw up plans to resolve an array of cultural and linguistic problems that the First Yiddish Language Conference was convened in 1908 in Czernowitz, capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of the Bukovina.13 The conference, organized by the then Diaspora nationalist Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937), drew delegates from political parties, most notably the Bund and Poale Zion (both of whose ideologies assigned an important role to Yiddish), along with some of the foremost writers and theoreticians active in the “national renaissance” in Eastern Europe and even the United States. Among those present were the writers Y. L. Peretz, Sholem Asch (1880–1957), H. D. Nomberg (1876–1927), Avrom Reyzen (1876–1953), and Noah Prylucki, as well as Chaim Zhitlovsky and a promising young linguist from Galicia, Mates Mieses (1885–1945). The conference aimed at no less than a sociolinguistic revolution within Eastern European Jewish society, one which would democratize Jewish life by giving primacy to the vernacular of the masses in areas of both high and low culture. Carried to its logical end, this would mean the displacement of both the traditional Hebrew-educated religious elite and the newer Polish- and Russian-speaking secular elites. A significant shift in the language’s political and social status would require concomitant work to codify Yiddish and elaborate its vocabulary (corpus planning) both as a means to justify this change in status and in order to equip the language for new functions. Much time intended for the discussion of practical matters, such as the standardization of orthography and the creation of an authoritative dictionary, however, was lost to heated debates concerning the relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish. In fact, the issue of the status of Yiddish within Jewish society alone was debated to the exclusion of any discussion of its desired recognition by non-Jewish authorities. Out of personal respect for Hebrew and for fear of alienating much of the Jewish world, few participants were willing to accept the radical motion demanded by the Bundist Esther Frumkin (1880–1943) relegating Hebrew to the past as a clerical relic. Instead, a seven-person committee, in which Prylucki took part, agreed upon a compromise formula proposed by Nomberg to recognize Yiddish in the name of the conference as a national language of the Jewish people. Each individual was left free to determine his personal stance toward Hebrew.

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Despite common misperceptions, not all Yiddishists were hostile to Hebrew and Hebraism, although many in fact were. Hebraism—the movement to enthrone Modern Hebrew as the national language of the Jews and make it their vernacular wherever possible—was, of course, as much a product of the growing secularization of Eastern European Jewry by the late nineteenth century as Yiddishism. Zionists generally favored Hebrew as the national language of the Jews and wished this to become the spoken language in Palestine, although this did not deter them from making use of Yiddish in their work, especially after 1905, in the Diaspora. Indeed, Zionists such as Yosef Luria (1871–1937), Yitshak Grünbaum (1879–1970), and Nahum Syrkin (1868–1924) desired to allot a special place to Yiddish in Zionist thought and culture. Most Zionists, like the rest of the Jewish intelligentsia, tended, though, to use Russian (or Polish) at home; few were willing to make it the language of their daily lives or believed in its revival outside Palestine.14 Traditional Jews rejected outright both nationalist ideologies as dangerous fetishisms and continued to emphasize religious observance as the sine qua non of Jewish self-definition. The intended disruption of the complementary relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish (diglossia), sanctified by centuries of practice, represented in itself a heresy to them. Prylucki himself affirmed the importance of Hebrew to Jewish life as a historical and national language, making it an obligatory subject of study for Jews. Since Yiddish displayed the indelible mark of Hebrew upon both its lexicon and its syntax, he argued, an active command of it actually facilitates the learning of Hebrew.15 Moreover, the language enriches Yiddish and contributes to its distinctive character. In a speech prepared for but not delivered for lack of time at the Czernowitz Conference, Prylucki attributed what he saw as the poor quality of much contemporary Yiddish literature to the dire economic straits of writers. Poverty, he argued, caused them to be deprived of a solid grounding in the classic Jewish tongue. Without the support necessary to fund a higher religious education and obliged to work at a young age, they consequently knew less Hebrew than the educationally privileged yeshiva elite from which Yiddish writers such as Peretz, Mendele, and Sholem Aleichem were drawn in the previous generation.16 Prylucki thus affirmed an indispensable yet fundamentally auxiliary role for Hebrew in Jewish education. In his eyes, to claim that Hebrew was the language of contemporary Jewish life and to denigrate Yiddish, as did some extreme Hebraists, was not only to turn a blind eye to reality. It was also politically ill-advised inasmuch as such a fiction could win the Jews no recognition as a national community at a time when nationhood was closely associated with language use. Moreover, it deprived the folk of the very language in which it thinks, feels, and which it calls its mame-loshn.17

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While the contemporary Jewish press attributed little significance to the Czernowitz Conference, Prylucki was certain that its meaning would not be lost on future historians. They would recognize it as a conference not merely for the Yiddish language but for the entire “Jewish national-cultural present.” In the Diaspora, he noted, the Jewish people has lived more with its historic past and future dreams than with its present. The conference, however, was proof of an awakened Jewish self-awareness and commitment to self-help as a means to a better future; it served as evidence that the Jewish people was still alive, if a bit anemic. Czernowitz, he continued, united rival political groupings to lay the ideological foundations of an organized movement on behalf of Yiddish, the tongue that served as the Jews’ contemporary national language alongside their historical one. Both the Bund and the Zionists had been forced to confront the present and therefore created, respectively, programs embracing cultural autonomy in the Diaspora and a plan of Gegenwartsarbeit (“work for the present,” i.e., the development of Jewish culture and politics wherever Jews dwelled).18 These plans would necessarily make extensive use of Yiddish and struggle for its official recognition, for “the national recognition of the Jewish people depends on the recognition of the Yiddish language.”19

PRYLUCKI’S LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY By studying the Yiddish language and its culture both synchronically and diachronically, Prylucki sought to demonstrate the existence of a Jewish nation spread across a vast terrain but united by a common tongue. In keeping with the romantic currents then in vogue, he perceived Yiddish itself as the expression of a Jewish “folk soul” (folks-neshome) and located in its dialectal diversity evidence of the underlying unity of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Moreover, his research aimed to provide legitimization for the existence of a modern, secularized Yiddish culture indigenous to Europe by locating its foundations in a nearly thousand-year-old tradition of Ashkenazic society. To this end, he rummaged through premodern Yiddish literature in pursuit of nonreligious themes and also personally collected, analyzed, and published at his own expense anthologies of contemporary folksongs, proverbs, folktales, and the like. He also authored numerous articles and studies defending the legitimacy of Yiddish as an independent language of venerable age. He was active as a political commentator and popularizer of his own scholarly research, through which he aimed to legitimize the creation of a Yiddish secular culture rooted in folk traditions, as well as mentor to a number of budding writers and ethnographers. In the evaluation of Yiddish linguist

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Yudl Mark (1897–1975), he was “a one man center for folklore and dialectological research in Warsaw” prior to the creation of YIVO (Der yidisher visnshaftlekher institut, Jewish Scientific Institute) in 1925.20 In the absence of funded institutions to support independent research and the arts in Yiddish, he accomplished this at great personal expense and by relying on his virtually unfettered access to Der moment and on the assistance of a circle of colleagues and protégés. Folklore collectors such as the writer Peretz and the ethnographer Sh An-sky (1863–1920) sought poetic inspiration in religious life and reworked folkloric themes and customs in a highly stylized manner for use in their artistic works (such as Peretz’ Folkstimlekhe geshikhtn, Stories in a Folk Vein, and An-ski’s play The Dybbuk). Prylucki, on the other hand, mined folklore for linguistic data above all. Most other collectors scorned local dialects, arguing that their particularities obscured the beauty of folk poetry, and hastened to rewrite folklore in literary Yiddish before publication. For Prylucki, in contrast, it was essential not to tamper with the original language of his collections. He viewed Yiddish dialects not only as a reflection of the unique national psyche of the people but also an indirect record of the historical evolution of the language and a source for the enrichment for its developing literary idiom. He published his findings and their analysis in Yiddish rather than a language with an established academic tradition, not only to make them accessible to a broad audience and demonstrate the validity of Yiddish as language of culture.21 In doing so, he also sought to help cultivate a scholarly register in the language. A secularist and champion of Simon Dubnow’s (1860–1941) doctrine of autonomism, Prylucki regarded the Jewish religion as protective armor that had preserved Jewish nationhood in the Diaspora for generations but which would eventually be supplanted by language and secular culture as the organizing principle and unifying factor in Jewish life. While he was not hostile to religion as a matter of individual conscience, Prylucki contended that the Yiddish language and a modern European culture expressed through it were sufficient to insure the continued existence of the Jews as a people in Eastern Europe. Moreover, he maintained that in an age of decreasing religious observance the continued existence of the Jewish people was in fact dependent on the preservation of Yiddish and its expansion into domains, such as secular education and the state civil service, from which it was previously excluded. To this end, Prylucki and a number of his fellow writers for Der Moment launched the Folksparty during the German occupation of Poland in the summer of 1916.22 Without official recognition for Yiddish as the living, national language of the Jews, the Folkists argued, no recognition for the Jews as a national minority would be possible in the future Polish state likely to emerge

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from the war. Rights to cultural autonomy would be unobtainable and the Jews condemned to a struggle for political, economic, and cultural survival. Mother tongue (mutershprakh), as recorded in a national registry, would serve as the criterion of group adherence in a post-religious age.23

ELITISM VS. POPULISM For all Prylucki’s devotion to democracy and the “mother tongue of the masses,” his approach to language and linguistics reflects a tension between his populism and his irrepressible elitism. Prylucki delighted in the dialectal variation he noted among the folksmasn who came to him for legal consultation and was renowned for his folksy turns of phrase. He was, however, also accused by critics of objectifying Yiddish speakers for use in his research, exploiting the downtrodden for the purpose of collecting linguistic and folklore data. Indeed, it was often alleged that he callously made petitioners wait and paid less attention to what they said than how they said it.24 The elegantly attired Jewish “aristocrat” possessed a definite sense of his own importance and always maintained his social distance from his language informants even though he publicly praised their colorful turns of phrase and the “national genius” directing and informing their speech.25 Moreover, he detected a certain “corruption” of the language by baneful foreign influences among more status conscious (and hence linguistically “promiscuous”) elements. He also decried as pernicious a trend toward linguistic Polonization among segments of youth in the “lowest of classes.”26 To his dismay, the tendency toward Polonization only increased in the interwar period and came to affect all classes of Jewish society, especially through the vehicle of free, universal elementary education in state schools.27 With zeal he took Yiddish writer Sholem Asch to task for all too faithfully depicting the Germanized and Slavicized Yiddish of the Jewish upper middle class in Poland. He demanded that Asch follow the example of the greatest nineteenth-century Russian writers who refused to depict in dialogue the French-speaking Russian aristocracy and instead created for it a Russian spoken register congruent with its social class.28 For Prylucki, it was essential that writers demonstrate that the Jewish upper classes speak a cultivated Yiddish. The image of Yiddish as a language of the poor and uneducated, an image he had himself internalized in his youth, needed to be overturned. It was for him a mark of national dignity for wealthier Jews like himself to speak their mother tongue elegantly rather than rely on foreign languages as a social marker or lard their mother tongue with foreign locutions in order to approximate languages they were unable to speak comfortably. It was thus

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the task of the Yiddish writer to counteract assimilatory trends by teaching the Jewish upper classes its mother tongue. “From writers who have faith in the future of mame-loshn,” he concluded his reproach of Asch, “we have a right to demand a more serious attitude toward their task.”29 Prylucki was generally sanguine about the speech of the petit bourgeois and proletarian folksmasn, whom he considered the arbiter of linguistic correctness, especially as concerns the permissibility of Germanisms. He acknowledged that Yiddish was historically open to a variety of sources for its enrichment and development. The unprecedented tide of foreign influences since the latter half of the nineteenth century needed, however, to be controlled as Jews became familiar with non-Jewish languages and cultures in growing numbers. In order for Yiddish to survive in a time of changing social and intellectual boundaries between Jews and gentiles, the folk that had created it could no longer remain its exclusive guardians. Instead the cultivation and regulation of the language had to be entrusted to scholars who possessed the necessary sensitivity to the specificity of the languages vis-à-vis closely related German and co-territorial Slavic languages in order to safeguard its uniqueness. He thus proposed that scholars interfere in the national evolution of the language at the same time that he proclaimed the sovereignty of the people over its language. In the place of the rabbinic and wealthy lay elites who traditionally dominated Jewish society, nationalist language planners would police not only the boundaries of the language but of the Jewish people itself. This new variety of Yiddish to be cultivated by scholars, the kulturshprakh, would stand above all dialects and be used in public speaking and other occasions that required a more formal register of language. Consequently, it would serve as a marker of education and social refinement. It would be transmitted largely through the vehicle of the Yiddish secular elementary school, the cornerstone of the Folkist plan for national cultural autonomy. The Yiddish secular school would produce graduates capable of understanding and appreciating scholarly literature and belle lettres in Yiddish, thus yielding a class of both consumers and producers of modern Yiddish culture. Prylucki became famous for a “juicy” language permeated with proverbs and charming localisms even if was at times difficult to read. In his own speech and writing he cultivated forms specific to Yiddish, drawing the mockery of satirists who ridiculed his use of seemingly obscure, antiquated, or simply unheard of and outlandish forms.30 Some critics lampooned what was considered an overzealous drive to emphasize the specificity of Yiddish and to naturalize unnecessarily foreign elements already integrated into the language. They objected, for example, to his tendency to add the suffix –ish to adjectives that are internationalisms (e.g., populerish, genialish).31

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An opponent of the Vilna-centric school of language standardization, he argued against Northeastern Yiddish (Litvish dialect) serving as the basis for standard pronunciation since it was the Yiddish dialect closest in pronunciation to German, and it was spoken by the smallest number of speakers. The literary language, he explained, was based largely on the works of speakers of Southern Yiddish and, contrary to popular misconception, was not identical in pronunciation with that of the intellectual elite of Vilna.32 Instead, Prylucki came in the second half of the 1920s to support the development of a standardized pronunciation (orthoepy) for use in the schools and in public and official life alongside the use of dialects in private life—a phenomenon analogous to the relationship between the standard German spoken in schools and in formal settings and the German dialects spoken in most daily interactions. Again basing his reasoning on the model of German, whose standard pronunciation was developed on the basis of theater speech, he proposed that the Volhynian-based dialect commonly used in the Yiddish stage also serve with some changes and elaborations as the model for elegant pronunciation.33 It is also perhaps no coincidence that Volhynian Yiddish was the dialect he knew best from his Ukrainian childhood and a favorite subject of his study.34 Prylucki was not dismayed by the apparent chaos in Yiddish spelling reflected in the use of slightly differing systems in books and newspapers and in the creation of idiosyncratic systems by individual writers. Such chaos, he asserted, was common to every language of culture (kulturshprakh) and was spared only those languages, like Serbian, whose literary tradition was of recent vintage and whose orthography philologists had scientifically engineered. In support of his assertion, he pointed to English and French, venerable languages of culture with highly inconsistent orthographies, and to Russian and German, languages whose spelling reform was accomplished by committee and official decree. Out of the confusion of Yiddish spelling, he affirmed, would arise a new and superior order. This order could only be arrived at, however, through much diligent work on the part of scholars exploring the relationship between contemporary dialects and Old Yiddish and conversant in the history of the Yiddish orthography. An ideal spelling system would be capable of simultaneously reflecting the phonetic nuances of the major Yiddish dialects as well as those of the emerging kulturshprakh. Prylucki also championed the “naturalization”—the phonetic spelling—of Hebrew-Aramaic elements in the language as a means to “rationalize” spelling for greater facility in reading and to reflect the harmonious integration of all of the language’s components (Semitic, Germanic, Slavic, and other). Such a democratic system eschewed particularistic, nonphonetic spellings of Hebrew-Aramaic words, which, its proponents contended, had to be labori-

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ously mastered by students decreasingly familiar with Hebrew.35 While he saw naturalization as a progressive and historical trend in Yiddish, he remained fond of Hebraisms in his writings, including more recondite ones. For Prylucki, Hebraisms were an organic part of the language and indispensable without resort to the “ignorant daytshmerisms and provincial Slavicisms” commonly in use and which needed to be extirpated from the language.36 In Prylucki’s evaluation, the “defection” of Jews, especially the assimilationprone upper bourgeoisie, to allegedly more prestigious or useful languages in pursuit of social and economic advancement had to be halted at all costs. Not only did Jews’ traditional economic niches, such as in commerce and artisanry, need to be preserved in the face of increased competition with non-Jews. New economic and cultural opportunities in the form of jobs and cultural institutions needed to be created in Yiddish, protected by law, and funded with public monies in order for Yiddish to remain competitive with Polish and Russian. Yiddish was the Judeo-Aramaic of the modern era, a language whose origins were foreign but which had been so thoroughly transformed over the course of generations by the folk’s soul as to render it uniquely Jewish in character. Yet, while a history of periodic language shift among Jews served to justify the primacy of Yiddish, the adoption of another tongue by Jews, one which had not grown organically among the people, was tantamount to national suicide. It was also a form of dangerous self-deception since integration into gentile society was ultimately impossible due to the opposition of anti-Semites who continued to reject acculturated, even converted Jews.37 Moreover, Prylucki’s rather conventional, essentialist notion of race left no real opportunity for Jews to exit the biologically defined group whose characteristics allegedly marked their physical and intellectual composition.38 The ordinary Jew could not adopt a “foreign” language with complete success since the imprint of his native language was always present in his adopted one: “When I read belletristic or poetic works by famous modern German or Polish writers of Jewish descent, I often cannot free myself from the impression that even for the linguistic virtuosos among them the psychic apparatus and the language in which they express themselves is, nonetheless, not the same as that of a born German or Pole!”39 On the other hand, the Yiddish of his generation of (Russified) Jewish intellectuals, once they made the conscious decision to speak Yiddish, was unconsciously and inescapably influenced by the phonetic and syntactic norms and phraseology of the “foreign language” in which they were educated. Even the best Yiddish expert among them stumbled at times upon a syntactic or stylistic error since the foreign language remained “our internal and external language, the language of our thinking and our speaking. When we then

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switched to Yiddish, adjusting to the anatomy, physiology and psychology of mame-loshn was extraordinarily difficult for us.” In summary, in order for the individual to be whole and authentic, “[t]he basic construction of the thinking and speaking apparatus must be received through and in the mother tongue, which is the most important and most intimate [part] of the human soul.” Thus, in contrast with Prylucki’s cohort of intellectuals raised in “foreign” languages, the graduates of the Yiddish secular schools that he and Yiddishist colleagues struggled to create benefited from the opportunity to absorb fully the unique atmosphere of the Yiddish language. They could therefore learn their mother tongue with all its appropriate idioms and aphorisms.40 Ironically, Prylucki did not seem to notice or mind the inherent contradiction in these premises: while successful writers in Polish and German were betrayed by their Jewish psyches (a statement with which “zoological” antiSemites who supported measures to exclude Jews from the Polish economy and cultural life would readily agree), his Yiddish and that of other intellectuals in his generation revealed that their linguistic consciousness was more Russian than Jewish! Nor does it seem to have troubled him that he, whose Yiddish was by implication imperfect as a nonnative speaker of the “mother tongue,” had arrogated to himself authority in determining correct usage. Perhaps this dismissal of Polish and German writing by Jews as “inauthentic” reflects his own emotional distance from Polish and German cultures. He did not develop skills as an orator in Polish—a language, like Yiddish, discouraged by Russian officialdom—until adulthood, and his knowledge of German was mainly for reading purposes.41 Moreover, he grew up as part of a generation of Jews who continued to identify both ethnically and religiously as Jews despite Russification. In contrast, Jews raised in the Polish and German cultural spheres were more likely to conceptualize Judaism as primarily a religious category and otherwise to identify with these nations. To suggest that his Russian—a language whose native mastery was a source of pride for Jews in the late imperial period—was somehow less than perfect, would be to diminish his own youthful literary achievements in a language for which he had the greatest admiration. Rather than pursue a career in Russian, however, he had chosen Yiddish, a language whose secular culture was beginning to flourish in the early twentieth century and presented new opportunities, both commercial and creative, for someone with Prylucki’s talents. It was a culture in need of him as much as he needed it: Intellectuals who step over to richer and happier societies find there a readymade content for their life, disposition, and activity. One of many examples: the Jew Gershenzon, who became one of the finest scholars of Russian literary his-

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tory. The atmosphere of my father’s house implanted in me a natural tendency to live my life in the web (to use Mendele’s expression) called the Jewish people, of which I am merely an organic little thread. Jewish life had not yet, however, made ready the conditions for a Jewish intellectual to have a normal cultural life the way a Russian intellectual could in Russian life, etc. Seeking content for my life, an application for my work, air for my lungs, a goal for my existence, I had to come to work on the Yiddish language, Yiddish folklore, Yiddish literary history and research about Jewish folk life.42

CONCLUSION Like a number of other Yiddishists and Yiddish language planners, Noah Prylucki did not emerge directly from among the folksmasn, the “unreflective” carriers of the language. A combination of self-conscious alienation from the folk language and a secular cosmopolitan education was necessary to create the perspective of an outsider to the culture. This perspective permitted the appreciation of Yiddish both as an instrument for the promotion of Jewish nationalism and a cultural “renaissance,” as well as an object of scientific study.43 His interest in the Yiddish language expressed itself at first primarily as a form of social activism and later became the manifestation of an uncompromising national-cultural ideology. In his later years, after having largely left political activity behind him and devoted himself to dialectology and the study of Old Yiddish Literature, he openly conceded that his linguistics research was understood by few and served mainly to satisfy his own intellectual curiosity.44 In this respect he differed little from many of his academic colleagues at YIVO (such as Max Weinreich [1894–1969] or Zelig Kalmanovitch [1885–1944]), the Jewish Scientific Institute founded in 1925 and headquartered in Vilna which functioned as a “Yiddish university” and strove to standardize the language for use in schools and public life in interwar Poland and beyond. Their linguistic purism and idealization of Yiddish as an object of scientific study divorced from political activism caused the organization to be reproached by the Jewish left, particularly members of the Bund, with bourgeois remoteness from the needs and concerns of the actual speakers of the language in Poland.45 Yiddishism was expected to create a democratic revolution in Jewish society by linguistically empowering the masses without access to higher education in languages other than Yiddish. Mastery of Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages of the traditional elite, or Russian and Polish, the languages of the new secular elites, would cease to convey status and power. In practice, however, Prylucki and other Yiddishists set about to create a new secular nationalist elite

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commanding a standardized variety of the language.46 Traditional HebrewYiddish diglossia, as well as Russian-Yiddish or Polish-Yiddish diglossia or bilingualism, would thus be replaced with a new diglossia joining dialects and the kulturshprakh. The normative language was to be taught in schools and to become a mark of education and hence class. It was to have its roots in folk speech but its further development could no longer be entrusted to the folk, in whose hands the language’s development had slowly unfolded over the course of centuries but where it was beginning to exhibit signs of untoward external influences. Normative work therefore had to be accomplished by scholars capable of identifying the “natural” tendencies of the folk language and, equipped with this knowledge, properly guiding its continued growth into a kulturshprakh. Moreover, since language would define political membership in the Jewish people, language planners would police not only the boundaries of the language but of the national community itself. In the final year of his life, he fulfilled a life-long dream by being appointed by Soviet authorities to head YIVO and to serve as the inaugural professor of Yiddish language and literature at the University of Vilnius in Soviet-occupied Lithuania in 1940.47 Granted the title “professor” without having completed a doctorate in linguistics, Prylucki enjoyed the prestige and influence granted him by the Soviets. Moreover, throughout his career, he enjoyed the material comforts afforded by his income and was never shy in taking credit for his achievements. He was thus far from the ideal of a folks-inteligent, the intellectual who humbly lives and works among the masses, despite his intensive work on behalf of Yiddish schools and legal and relief work undertaken to help everyday Jews in times of crisis. Indeed, it may be concluded that while seeking to undo what he understood as his own early linguistic assimilation and to achieve the democratization of Jewish society, he also strove to preserve his own social class and standing. Nonetheless, it is evident that Prylucki was enamored of Yiddish. It was for him the mame-loshn of the Jewish people even if he never considered it his own mutershprakh. NOTES 1. On the development of Yiddish Studies and its relationship to German Studies, see Gabriele Strauch, “Methodologies and Ideologies: The Historical Relationship of German Studies to Yiddish,” Studies in Yiddish Linguistics (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1990), 83–100; Dovid Katz, “On Yiddish, in Yiddish and for Yiddish: 500 Years of Yiddish Scholarship,” in Identity and Ethos: a Festschrift for Sol Liptzin on the Occasion of His 85th Birthday, ed. Mark H Gelber (New York, Berne, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986).

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2. On Zhitlovski, see David H. Weinberg, Between Tradition and Modernity: Haim Zhitlowski, Simon Dubnow, Ahad Ha-Am, and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identity (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1996). On Peretz, see Ruth R. Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991); Delphine Bechtel, “Les chercheurs en linguistique et histoire littéraire yiddish: une génération d’intellectuels engagés dans la première moitié du XXe siècle,” Écriture de l’histoire et identité juive; l’Europe ashkénaze, XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003), 253–78. . 3. On Tsevi Prylucki’s career as a journalist, see Marian Fuks, Prasa zydowska w Warszawie 1823–1939 (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo, Naukowe, 1979); Ma. rian Fuks, “Poczet Publicystów i Dziennikarzy Żydowskich,” Biuletyn zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce 1–2/133–34 (1985), 69–72. 4. For a schema of language-oriented nation-building activities, see Miroslav Hroch, “The Social Interpretation of Linguistic Demands in European National Movements,” EUI Working Paper EUF No. 94/1 (1994), 13–19. 5. Noyekh Prilutski, “‘Der veg’” a bintl zikhroynes,” Der moment 176 (August 15, 1930). 6. On Tsevi Prylucki’s career, see Nathan Cohen, “Zikhronot tsevi prilutski: Teuda merateket le-heker itonut yidish be-varsha,” in Mi-vilna le-yerushalayim: Mehkarim be-toldoteihem ve-tarbutam shel yehudei mizrakh eiropa, mugashim le-profesor shmuel verses, ed. David Assaf et al. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2002); Marian Fuks, “Poczet Publicystów i Dziennikarzy Żydowskich,” 69. 7. “Draysik yor literarishe tetikayt fun noyekh prilutski,” Literarishe bleter 18.1 (May 1931), 330. 8. “Nokhum Shtif, “How I Became a Yiddish Linguist,” in The Golden Tradition, ed. Lucy S. Dawidowicz (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 259. 9. Avrom-Yitskhok Grafman, “Di geveylte yidishe ratmener,” Der moment 165, 167, 168 (July 18, 20, 21, 1916); B. Khilinovitsh, “Noyekh prilutski,” in Noyekh Prilutski, In poyln: kimat a publitsist togbukh, 1905–1911 (Warsaw: Yidish, 1921), VIII; Noyekh Prilutski, “Koshere asimilatorn,” reprinted in Noyekh Prilutski, Barg-aroyf (Warsaw: Nayer farlag, 1917), 170. “Koshere asimilatorn” first appeared in Unzer lebn 1–6 (January 14–20, 1910); Matityahu Mintz. Ber Borokhov, ha-ma’agal ha-rishon, 1900–1906 (Tel Aviv: University of Tel Aviv, 1976), 271; Matityahu Mintz and Cwia Balshan, Igrot Ber Borokhov, 1897–1917 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1989), 155. 10. On Der veg, see Kalman Weiser, “A Tale of Two Pryluckis: The. Origins of the Yiddish Press in Warsaw,” Gal-Ed (forthcoming); Fuchs, Prasa Zydowska w Warszawie. 11. For a comprehensive overview of the development of Yiddish spelling, see Mordkhe Schaechter, Der eynheytlekher yidisher oysleyg (New York: YIVO and the Yiddish Language Resource Center of the League for Yiddish, 1999). 12. On maskilic attitudes toward Yiddish, see Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken Books, 1973). 13. The protocols of the well-known conference were never published, but contemporary newspaper reports and conference speeches were collected and published

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by YIVO, Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents: barikhtn, dokumentn un opklangen fun der tsernovitser konferents 1908 (Vilna, 1931). Discussions and accounts of the conference are also to be found in Joshua A. Fishman, Ideology, Society & Language (Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, Inc., 1987) and Emanuel Goldsmith, Modern Yiddish: The Story of a Language Movement (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997). 14. Yehuda Slutsky, Ha-itonut ha-yehudit-rusit bereishit ha-mea ha-esrim (Tel Aviv: Ha-agudah le-heker toldot ha-yehudim, ha-makhon le-heker ha-tefutsot, 1978), 42. 15. Noyekh Prilutski, “Akhad hoom vegn ‘zhargon’” in Barg-aroyf, 171, 175–79, 186–87. The article originally appeared in Unzer lebn 67–73 (April 1–8, 1910). 16. YIVO, Di ershte shprakh-konferents, 83. 17. Noyekh Prilutski, “Akhad hoom vegn ‘zhargon,’” in Barg-aroyf, 194–95. Noyekh Prilutski, “Koshere asimilatorn” is reprinted in Barg-aroyf, 166–88. 18. Noyekh Priltuski, “Di tshernovitser konferents,” in Barf-aroyf, 147–51. 19. Noyekh Prilutski, untitled reprint of article from Lemberg Togblat 178, September 15, 1908, in YIVO, Di ershte shprakh-konferents, 217. 20. Yudl Mark, “Noyekh prilutski (1882–1944),” YIVO-bleter 26 (1945), 81. 21. Prylucki’s earliest folklore collections: Yidishe folkslider. gezamlt, derklert un aroysgegebn fun noyekh prilutski. Ershter band: religyezishe un yontevdike (Warsaw: Farlag “Bikher far ale,” 1911); Noyekh prilutskis zamlbikher far yidishn folklor, filologye un kultur-geshikhte (Warsaw: Nayer farlag, 1912); Yidishe folkslider: Tsveyter band: I. Lider un mayselekh fun toyt; II. Balades un legendes mit un on a muser-haskl (Warsaw: Nayer farlag, 1913). 22. On the career of the Folksparty, see my forthcoming book, Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press); Haya Meller, “Mifleget hafolkistim be-polin, 1915–1939” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Bar Ilan University, 2004). 23. Shoyl Stupnitski, Oyfn veg tsum folk (Warsaw: Nayer farlag, 1920), 140–42. 24. Prylucki’s disciple, the folklorist and writer A. Almi playfully celebrated this obsession with the particularities of speech in a commemorative poem about Prylucki. In it, he describes wretched petitioners appealing to the lawyer Prylucki for assistance in his home on affluent Świętokrzyśka street in Warsaw: “From Smocza, Stawka, Gizka, Śliszka, and from the shtetls near and far, people are drawn to Świętokrzyśka, eldery men, women, youth. With packages and ragged clothes, the common people come to Noah; Prylucki’s house is filled with suffering, groaning, folksongs, and tears. They are taking Jews’ livelihoods away, ‘O, save us, Councillor, Sir’; Noah has but one request, ‘Repeat that saying carefully.’” See A. Almi, Letste gezangen (Buenos Aires: Farband fun varshever un prager yidn in argentine, 1954), 60. Almi also tells of being sent by Prylucki to collect data among the Warsaw Jewish underworld. A naïve adolescent, he was held captive for hours by the angry management of a brothel because one of his informants communicated in song to him how she had been coerced into prostitution. See A. Almi, Momentn fun a lebn (Buenos-Aires: Tsentral farband fun poylishe yidn in argentine, 1948), 121–28. He was eventually released for fear that Prylucki and others knew his whereabouts and would bring the brothel to the

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attention of the police. Years later, the pimp requested that Prylucki defend him in a criminal case because Prylucki owed him a “favor” for releasing Almi. 25. The writer Elkhonen Zeitlin (1900–1942) recalled, “Always in a freshly pressed Russian attorney’s frock with stiff, white worsted wool, with an elegantly brushed little black beard that surrounded his tender face, Prylucki looked more like some sort of foreign diplomat than a Yiddish writer for a newspaper in the very Nalewki [a primary street in the heart of Jewish Warsaw]. Even Paula R., with broad, dressed lamb fur, with diamond rings on her hands, with the strangely decorated hairstyle, looked more like a grande dame, like an aristocratic Russian baroness.” Elkhonen Zeitlin, In a literarisher shtub (Buenos Aires: Tsentral farband fun poylishe yidn in argentine, 1946), 170. 26. Noyekh Prilutski, “Kleynikeytn,” Unzer lebn (Spring 1910), reprinted in Bargaroyf, 216. 27. On Polonization, see Gershon Bacon, “National Revival, Ongoing Acculturation—Jewish Education in Interwar Poland,” Simon Dubnow Institut Jahrbuch I (2002), 71–92; Ellen Kellman, “Dos yidishe bukh alarmirt,” Polin 16 (2003), 213–41. 28. On the development of a literary dialect of Russian combining various layers of the language together with European influences, see Lawrence L. Thomas, condensed adaptation into English of V. V. Vinogradov’s The History of the Russian Literary Language from the Seventeenth Century to the Nineteenth (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 29. Noyekh Prilutski, “Mekoyekh dem ‘printsip fun daytshmerish’,” Der moment 42 (March 3, 1911), reprinted in Barg-aroyf, 231–32. 30. See, for example, Der Tunkeler (Yoysef Tunkel), “Folklor un filologye, a lektsye fun noyekh prilutski,” in Der seyfer fun humoreskes un parodyes, ed. Yehiel Szajntuch (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1990), 207–9. 31. Mark, 94. 32. Noyekh Prilutski, “Undzer ortografishe komisye (fun a referat),” in Naye himlen: literarish zamelbukh, ed. L. Kestin (Warsaw: L. Kestin, 1921). 33. Noyekh Prilutski, “Di yidishe bineshprakh,” in Yidish teater 41 (1927), 130–44. For a discussion of debates surrounding standard pronunciation in Yiddish schools in Eastern Europe, see, Kalmen Vayzer, “Di debate arum aroysred in der yidish-veltlekher shul in mizrekh-eyrope,” in Yidishe shprakh (forthcoming). 34. On the issue of local patriotism among Yiddish language standardizers, see Hirsh-Dovid Kats, “Naye gilgulim fun alte makhloykesn, di litvishe norme un di sikhsukhim vos arum ir,” Yivo-bleter 2 (1994), 205–57. 35. On the subject of “naturalization,” see Rakhmiel Peltz, “The Dehebraization Controversy in Soviet Yiddish Language Planning: Standard or Symbol?” in Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), 125–50. 36. Noyekh Prilutski, “A shmues vegn gringe zakhn, vos vern kinstlekh farplontert,” Der moment 147 (June 26, 1931). 37. Noyekh Prilutski, “Tsu vos es firt der veg fun asimilatsye!” Der moment 139 (July 30, 1912).

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38. On racial science and Jewish nationalists, see John M. Efron. Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 39. Noyekh Prilutski, “Notitsn on politik,” Der moment 183 (August 7, 1931). 40. Noyekh Prilutski, “Triumf fun heyliker arbet,” Der moment 198 (August 24, 1934). 41. According to the information he provided Soviet Lithuanian authorities, Prylucki spoke and wrote Yiddish, Russian, and Polish well. He read French, English, and German weakly and spoke German weakly. (“Anketa,” 2, Lietuvos Valystubės Archyvas, F. R856, Ap.2, B. 1123, Noachas Priluckis, Vilnius University Papers). 42. M. K-ski [Magnus Krinski], “Di yoyvl-fayerung fun noyekh prilutski,” Der moment 106 (May 8, 1931). 43. Christopher Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-tongue Fascism, Race, and the Science of Language (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 190. 44. “To tell the truth, I have mainly worked for myself alone. The interest in philology in the broadest sense of the concept is an inborn quality. The social instinct that determines the relationship of the individual to the milieu directed this interest toward the Yiddish camp.” (“Draysik yor literarishe teytikayt fun noyekh prilutski,” 332). 45. Hutton, Linguistics in the Third Reich, 231–32. 46. Hroch, 19, 34. 47. On the Chair for Yiddish, see Izraelis Lempertas, ‘Uzmirsta jidis puoseletoja: Nojaus Priluckio katedra Vilniaus universitete,’ in Vilniaus Zydu intelektualinis gyvenimas, ed. Larisa Lempertiene (Vilnius: Mokslo aidai, 2004), 184–91; Kalman Weiser, “A Deal with the Devil? The Chair for Yiddish at the University of Vilnius,” Polin 24 (forthcoming).

II LITERATURE AND THE ARTS

6 Y. L. Peretz and the Politics of Yiddish1 Marc Caplan

In a conference dedicated to the establishment of Yiddish as a national, and therefore political, language—an effort that politicizes not only Yiddish, but also the conference itself—the political characteristics that Y. L. Peretz (1852–1915), the most prominent participant at the 1908 Czernowitz Conference, ascribed to Yiddish can serve as a starting point for understanding both the radical achievement of the Czernowitz event, as well as the moment of transition that this conference signifies for Ashkenazic modernity. Indeed, at the conference Peretz famously states, “The everyday Jew, the poor, simple Jew, is beginning to free himself. He is losing his trust in the great scholar, in the great magnate.”2 Both for the conceptualization of Yiddish culture, as well as an understanding of Peretz’s own image as a writer, this declaration signals a significant radicalization; famously, Peretz had defined himself twenty years earlier, at the outset of his career as a Yiddish writer, by telling Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovich, 1859–1916): “Your wish and goal . . . is to write for the sake of the audience that speaks jargon of jargon-land; I, for my part, write for my own pleasure, and if I take any reader into consideration, he is of the higher level of society, a person who has read and studied in a living tongue.”3 From his announcement as an elitist aesthete, itself an important and productive political declaration for the emerging culture of Yiddish modernity, to his affiliation with the most overt manifestation of Yiddish populism, Peretz not only activates an ongoing dialectic at the heart of Yiddish modernism, but also embodies both extremes within the parameters of his own writing. Nonetheless, an even more radical gesture lies at the heart of Peretz’s writing: one that makes the Yiddish of the marginalized folk masses a literary

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language of idiosyncratic obscurity and nihilistic rejection against the emancipatory politics of his own progressive populism. This pessimism calls attention to the problem of representing a dialectic that the progressive Yiddish writer is supposed to reconcile: between a text-tradition consisting primarily of sanctified writing in rabbinical Hebrew, and a modern print culture already emerging for Jews in Polish and other co-territorial languages. Already in an 1891 story, In post-vogn (In the Mail Coach), Peretz describes this crisis of mediation between tradition and modernity by writing, “Two distinct worlds, a man’s world and a woman’s world, . . . a world of the Talmudic ‘Four Categories of Damages’ and a world of storybooks bought by the pound.”4 The Yiddish author should reconcile these two polarities, and thus the story’s central image of the mail coach connects the protagonist to mobility, communication, and circulation; like the mail itself, the protagonist serves both a public, civic function and a private, intimate one. But where in most of Peretz’s subsequent, neo-Romantic narratives the function of the protagonist would unify these oppositions, here the protagonist emphasizes the divide and finds himself stranded in the interim. As the narrator of In post-vogn articulates this dilemma, “We need . . . at any rate to unite these two worlds. . . . That’s the obligation of every Jewish writer. Only Jewish writers owe too many obligations already” (Y 75; E 111). The most intensive presentation of the dilemma between a writer’s desire to modernize Yiddish culture and the resistance of that culture to his “fiction of salvation”5 occurs in Peretz’s 1891 travelogue, Bilder fun a provintsrayze (Impressions of a Journey Through the [Tomaszów] Region). The impetus for this work was an ethnographic expedition financed by Jan Bloch (1836–1902), an apostate economist and philanthropist. Bloch intended to use demographic data to disprove the anti-Semitic accusation that Jews in the shtetl exploited their non-Jewish neighbors. Significantly, tsarist censors shut the expedition down and the study was never published. Peretz signifies the expedition’s failure through his portrayal of the narrator, and this characterization is the first moment of departure in the Rayze-bilder from the theme and structure of previous Yiddish narratives. Whereas most earlier Yiddish narratives, particularly extended ones, chose as their protagonist a figure from the shtetl whose experiences serve to bring together the various elements that comprise traditional Ashkenazic life, Peretz’s protagonist here is an outsider and a stranger—a peripheral figure who neither reflects the values of the shtetl, even in the parodic manner of maskilic satire, nor shares with his interlocutors a common perspective. Anticipating the rhetoric with which Peretz begins his Czernowitz address, he demonstrates in the Rayze-bilder how ordinary Jews had lost their trust in the intellectual, a character intended to represent Peretz himself, and the magnate, Jan Bloch. Such liberation initi-

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ates the great anxiety of the work: the Rayze-bilder makes clear that a folk emancipating itself from the scholar and the magnate will have no use for a belletristic writer, either. To schematize this distinction further, previous Yiddish writers typically apply a strategy of incorporation in which the protagonist serves to embody traditional Jewish life; Peretz here employs a strategy of aggregation to articulate the failure of this culture to maintain a coherent set of values. One can thus summarize the role Peretz assigns his protagonist as a failed mediator, between tradition and assimilation, between the shtetl and the big city, between the assimilated Jan Bloch and the observant Jews who were to provide the subject matter for his research. Nachman Meisel (1887–1966), the leading Peretz scholar of the prewar era, states that the statistical expedition to Tomaszów was the first undertaking that Peretz engaged in after moving to Warsaw in 1890.6 He had only arrived in the big city from the large town Zamość a few months before setting out for Tomaszów, a region only about thirty kilometers from where he had grown up.7 Thus, the ability to reconnect with traditional Jews cannot have been as difficult as he portrays it in the Rayze-bilder, and Meisel notes that, in spite of some false starts, over time it was not difficult for Peretz to communicate with the shtetl residents. But all the more intense, therefore, was the feeling of dislocation that he experienced in moving to the city and leaving, ostensibly, this traditional world behind. Conveying this feeling becomes paramount in the Rayze-bilder, beyond any propagandistic or documentary impulse—hence his reduction of the narrative to a series of impressions, and his privileging of the metonymic over the symbolic, the contiguous over the representational. In linguistic terms so essential to the impetus and consequences of the Czernowitz Conference, the Rayze-bilder is among the most difficult works in modern Yiddish literature, and this difficulty is part of the effect of the sequence; by using a discourse so firmly rooted in the idiosyncrasies of local and traditional Polish Yiddish, Peretz renders his language unfamiliar to his newly urban, secular audience. This discourse can be seen as a dramatized rebuke, by the speakers of “Jargon from Jargon-land,” to Peretz’s original claims of creating a more elevated literary style for readers of the “higher level of society.” Paradoxically, the stylized representation of “everyday speech” proves to be more complex than the provisional conventions of an “elevated” literary tone. As such, one formulation for the contrast between urban modernity and the traditional shtetl—an opposition that breaks down over the course of the Rayze-bilder at the sentence-by-sentence level of style—is the difference between written culture, represented by the narrator coming to the shtetl to record (farshraybn) statistics, and the orality of the marketplace and synagogue. On the level of discourse, Peretz enunciates the

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spatial and temporal disruptions between shtetl and city by offering local and archaic usages as symptoms of the dislocated and the inassimilable. This accentuation of archaic regionalism thus serves as an act of resistance to the notion—embryonic in the 1890s, yet essential to the politics of the following decade—of Yiddish as a unifying linguistic culture for Ashkenazic Jews. Prior to Peretz, a “universal” Yiddish writing style, one addressed to the whole of Eastern European Jewry, independent of regional, dialectical variations, could only be conceived along the lines of two alternating models: either the daytshmerish, “Germanizing,” style of older, mostly Lithuanian writers such as Isaac Meyer Dik (1814–1893), or the magidish, “pseudohomiletical” style of Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, c. 1836–1917) and his followers, neither of which seemed to exert much influence on Peretz. As late as the Czernowitz address, Peretz still sees fit to disavow these models, stating: “Yiddish doesn’t begin with Isaac-Meyer Dik. The khsidic tale, that’s the Genesis. . . . The first Yiddish folk-poet is Reb Nakhman of Breslov” (Meisel, 371). As with In post-vogn, Peretz through this remark figures the conflict in Yiddish culture between the elite and the masses in explicitly textual terms. In the Rayze-bilder, by contrast, this conflict finds expression more radically in a distinction between orality and literacy. Though in 1908 Peretz would stand as the leading personality at the Czernowitz Conference, the regionalism and consciously archaic elements of his earlier belletristic writing provide a linguistic counterpart to the general tendency of the Rayze-bilder to focus on the marginal and isolated aspects of shtetl life, the parts most resistant to the nebulously national project of modernization. Peretz therefore achieves, to a much greater degree than his maskilic predecessors, an intensification of language, so that the language of “home” becomes unfamiliar to the modern reader, indicating that the concept of home has become reterritorialized, beyond the modern Jew’s grasp, and that language as such has become deterritorialized among the linguistic components of Yiddish, Loshn-koydesh, and Polish. Where previous maskilim presented themselves either as more rustic than they were in real life (Mendele, for example) or more modern than they actually were (such as Isaac Meyer Dik), Peretz fashions a mediating narrative voice that in fact is essentially as modern as he was in real life, and this lack of ideological or rhetorical distance between the author and his narrator is what renders this ineffectual and impotent mouthpiece all the more politically significant; because so little mediation transpires between Peretz and his narrating voice, the inability of that voice to serve as mediator between the tradition and modernity is rendered all the more acute. Peretz paradoxically internalizes modern consciousness at the moment that he renounces the maskilic ideology of modernization. Such internalization

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is characteristic of a later phase in modernity than preceding Yiddish literature and therefore explains why Peretz dispenses with previous narrative strategies which masked the estrangement of the traditional and the modern. Estrangement for Peretz no longer stands in the way of a modernizing program, but functions instead as the central concern of his incipient modernism. The first sentence of the Rayze-bilder—“It was at the end of the good, and the beginning of the bad times” (Y 119; E 20), referring to a period of significant decline in Polish-Jewish relations at the end of the nineteenth century—calls to the Anglophone reader’s mind the apposition in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities of the best of times and the worst of times. Such an association in fact helps to clarify the many respects in which Peretz’s peripheral modernism can be distinguished from the hegemonic modernity of nineteenth century realism. Thus for Dickens, the “best of times” and “worst of times” coexist in synchronicity; they are harmonized by the omniscient narrator’s synthetic and transcendent perspective. For Peretz, by contrast, the transience of temporality serves to intensify the narrator’s perception of the time, as well as the place, of Yiddish literature. These stories find the narrator pitched not only between two spaces (Warsaw and shtetl) but also between two temporalities. This conflict expresses itself stylistically in two conflicting discourses, as when Peretz writes, Der ruekh—der tsayt-gayst meyn ikh (“the spirit, I mean the Zeitgeist,” Y 119; E 20). Here the synonyms ruekh (spirit) and tsayt-gayst (Zeitgeist) deliberately reflect opposing worldviews: the traditional and centripetal against the modern and centrifugal. Meisel claims that Peretz opens the Rayze-bilder using such propitious rhetoric in order to distract the censors from the actual content of his sketches (Meisel, 114). But the ostensibly objective, scientific tone of the narrator’s monologue—which in the space of a single page refers to the political crisis of late-nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, immigration to America, Zionism, as well as contemporary psychological and astronomical investigations—in fact does not serve to anchor the narrator in a sociological or anthropological discourse so much as it underscores his estrangement from the life of the shtetl, and therefore his unsuitability to the project he has undertaken. His thoughts fly higher than the rooftops of Tishevits (Tyszowce); they are here, there, everywhere, except where they need to be in order to understand the people whom he will be investigating. This “modernistic” condensation of themes is itself a symptom of modernity—figures the totality of modern life as an absence that can only be represented through a fragmentary list of problems connected to one another by their distance from the shtetl and the tradition. The juxtaposition of an absent totality against the marginal community excluded from this totality is the point of origin for the Rayze-bilder’s structure of proliferating peripheries.

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In the scenes following the prologue, the narrator describes the shtetl as a collective, an economic entity, organized spatially and socially around the marketplace. But even as the protagonist sees the shtetl in mass terms, it expresses itself, still collectively, against his efforts at representation: “The women [in the market] already know that I’ve come to record [statistics]; one tells the secret to another so silently that I can hear her in the marketplace all the way from my room. . . . ‘Better they should send a few hundred rubles,’ says another, ‘the writing I can do without’” (Y 120–21; E 21). Because they are presented without differentiation, this chorus of market women articulates a collective anatomy of criticism, directed by a single, undifferentiated body at the narrator, who is objectified in turn as a foreign element: just as he depicts them as a marginalized totality, they reject him as an inadequate and therefore incomplete totality, embodying everything they resist and resent— modern Jews, outsiders, the city, bureaucracy, the government, the military— and conspicuous among their complaints is the fact of his writing in the first place. In the terminology of Michel de Certeau (1925–1986), the critique of the narrator and the modern world he represents is accomplished not only verbally, through the fragmented complaints the narrator overhears in the marketplace as well as by their marketplace Yiddish, but also via the market women’s practice of everyday life, which acquires the value of political resistance when juxtaposed against the narrator’s modern perspective.8 One can compare the opening panorama of Peretz’s narrator entering the Tishevits market with the prologue to Mendele’s 1888 edition of Dos vintshfingerl (The Magic Ring).9 Mendele’s novel begins, like the Rayze-bilder, with a modern Jew entering the shtetl and arousing the hostile suspicions of the Jews in the marketplace—even inspiring the same unwarranted accusations of collusion with the government that Peretz’s protagonist incites. The modern Jew confides in Mendele, who narrates the story, that he was born in this shtetl, and he proceeds to leave Mendele with a copy of his autobiography, which forms the action of the narrative as a whole. The outsider thus reveals himself to be the shtetl’s native son; his life story embodies the shtetl, and by extension, nineteenth century Ashkenazic culture generally. If one can thus assert that “popular fiction is formula fiction,”10 then Peretz, by resisting the impulse to centralize the life of the shtetl in the story of a single protagonist, breaks the formula of previous Yiddish fiction. Of course, this “formula,” which can be summarized as the “pseudo-autobiography,” is in fact a complicated mixture of genres: part Bildungsroman, part picaresque, part didactic sermon, all of which are connected via a loose, associative, essentially oral narrative style.

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The Rayze-bilder introduces the travel narrative as a new model for Yiddish fiction. Travel literature, like the “pseudo-auto,” is a staple of Enlightenment belles lettres, and it is a comparably diffuse genre. Nonetheless, the structure of the travelogue is the inverse of the autobiography: the travel narrative looks outward where the pseudo-autobiography looks inward; the travel narrative is by definition peripatetic, where the pseudo-autobiography is rooted to the individual in the context of his or her place in the world. One might even suggest that these two genres recapitulate for written narrative what Walter Benjamin’s two types of storyteller—the journeyman and the master craftsman—represent for oral narratives.11 As such, the travelogue proposes not only a new mode for depicting the shtetl, but also a new relationship between the protagonist and (inevitably) his surroundings. Indeed, the travelogue as a model for the Rayze-bilder signifies an abdication of authority and authenticity in the narrator’s claims about the shtetl. From the time of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, the most sophisticated examples of travel literature have confronted the inability to understand the “alien” culture. These works demonstrate that although the travelogue claims to render a “foreign” culture comprehensible, it is the author, rather than the culture he or she describes, who is really foreign and inassimilable. Travel literature therefore begins with a deficit of knowledge, an inscription of ignorance12—a formal paradox made all the more profound when the traveling narrator is visiting not a foreign space, but his native one. Similarly, in the twelfth episode of the series, the narrator revisits the picaresque itinerary of maskilic satire by stating of this sketch’s main character: “It took me an hour to figure out that Leyvi-Yitskhok Bernpeltz is something of a rabbinic judge who sits in arbitration, a bit of an agent, a part-time businessman, a little bit of a matchmaker, and sometimes it happens that he does a little courier work on the side” (Y 160; E 52). The shifting roles of a character who might have held center stage in a satirical novel from the previous generation, such as Dos kleyne mentshele by Mendele or Dos poylishe yingl by Isaac Joel Linetski (1839–1915), are turned here into a marginal afterthought—a “twice-told tale,” as the eighth episode (Y 138–46; E 35–42) in the Rayze-bilder is titled—that can be summarized in a paragraph. The picaresque autobiographical hero of earlier Yiddish narratives can no longer represent the shtetl because, thanks to the impoverishment of the shtetl, everyone must become a picaro in order to survive. Of course, the picaresque, both in its original Renaissance manifestations and its reconfigurations in nineteenth century Yiddish fiction, is fundamentally a sociological genre, formulated in order to represent early modernity’s politics of dislocation and social disruption. Nonetheless, Peretz here deflates the picaresque in order to

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amplify the dislocation of late-nineteenth-century Eastern Europe by describing characters and social types even more marginalized than the picaros of Mendele or Linetski. As such, the object of satire is here turned not against the shtetl, the extreme poverty of which is reflected both in Leyvi-Yitskhok’s itinerant work habits, as well as in the punchline of the episode, “Even for his married daughter he has to earn money, because her father-in-law is really poor” (Y 160; E 52), but against the narrator’s efforts to measure the shtetl’s poverty in statistical, scientific terms. To further schematize the paradox on which the Rayze-bilder as a whole is built: the narrator comes to the shtetl as an agent of modernity, hoping to defend the shtetl, explain it to the outside world, and thereby encourage its modernization. But rather than changing the shtetl, the shtetl changes him—infecting him with the same anxieties over change and doubt toward the desirability of the modern condition that the shtetl Jews already live with. Rather than bringing the shtetl forward “into the twentieth century,” the journey brings the narrator backward, away from the linear conception of time on which modernity is premised, into a social space in which time only registers in the accretion of decline and decay. In this respect, Peretz follows in the wake of Mendele’s Di Klyatshe insofar as the narrative voice shifts perspective between third-person description and first-person introspection—never quite providing either psychological insight or objective reportage, as one might expect of first or third person narrators in realist fiction. At the same time as there are psychological differences between these narrative strategies, there are also temporal ones; the thirdperson, omniscient narrator is essentially a backward-looking narrator, while the first-person narrator, even when speaking in the past tense, is oriented toward events as they unfold, looking forward. Peretz’s narrative voice, significantly, is neither, but rather is suspended between the two, underscoring again the use of temporality as a political mode of representing dislocation. Such a strategy of dissolving the first- and third-person perspectives is indicative in both Peretz’s writing as well as Mendele’s of the modernizing maskil’s selfreflexive interrogation and dismantling of his own motivating ideology. In order to break out of the suspended, frozen temporality of this stance, Peretz shatters the narrative perspective and the narrative as such into fragments of genre, convention, and anecdote, to globalize the disintegration of the shtetl, rather than embody it in a single protagonist. This shattered perspective provides a means of understanding the multiplicity of fragmentation in this work, and therefore the structural logic of proliferation that characterizes its use of the peripheral. The shattering of narrative perspective, combined with the instability of the narrator as a character and observer, leads him to identify with a series of “mirror” figures

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over the course of the sequence; this in turn underscores his status as a failed mediator between the shtetl and the outside world, for instead of communicating between the traditional shtetl and urban modernity, he can only see his own reflection among characters that are, like him, trapped between spaces, statuses, and temporalities. The first mirror character in the Rayze-bilder is the Tishevits “maskil” described most fully in the “twice-told tales” episode, who is the only person in town to defend the narrator and take him into his confidence. The narrator, however, renders the maskil at least as old-fashioned as the other characters, and much more grotesque. This characterization demonstrates not only the bankruptcy of haskole (enlightenment) ideology at this late date—though not yet so late that a more modern Jewish ideology would have superseded it or penetrated the shtetl—but also undermines the narrator’s own claims to modernity and objectivity. For if the maskil is a mirror to the narrator, what, then, distinguishes the narrator from the shtetl Jews whom he would presume to describe or analyze? This becomes the impetus both for the narrator’s accelerating anxiety over the course of the narrative, and therefore the disintegration of the narrative structure as a whole: because he recoils from the maskil’s presumption to speak for him, he can no longer successfully speak for the shtetl, or even describe it in a systematic way. The second mirror-figure in the narrative is a young orphan whom the narrator takes out for a walk on Saturday night in the ninth episode. As Peretz describes the scene, “The sky hangs over Tishevits like a dark-blue uniform with dull-silver buttons. To my companion it would of course have resembled a curtain before the ark with sewn-in silver spangles. Perhaps he dreams of a blue silk tefilin bag with such spangles; in five or six years, he might receive such a gift from his bride” (Y 147; E 43). Here the narrator describes the evening sky from two contrasting perspectives: the modern, “national” viewpoint, represented by the reference to a military uniform, and the image of the tefilin bag suggestive of the shtetl and traditional Judaism. But of course, although attributed to the little boy, this latter simile is actually the narrator’s projection. Both comparisons spring from his imagination, indicating what little emotional distance separates him from the world of the shtetl. The narrator can imagine the little boy’s perception of the heavens—which after all rise above the modern and traditional alike: the object of comparison here transcends the temporal and spatial distinctions among these characters— because this is how he saw them before he had left for Warsaw. The reconciliation of these two perspectives within a single voice thus creates a moment of nostalgia and utopia, each of which are political modes of rethinking space in temporal terms of past or future, but because the object of perception is the nighttime sky, both nostalgia and utopia must be understood ironically as instances of mock transcendence.

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With these mirror-characters in mind, it now becomes possible to summarize the underlying narrative logic of the Rayze-bilder as a sequence built in symmetrical thirds: (1) episodes 1–8; (2) 9–15; (3) 16–24. In broadest terms, the triadic structure dramatizes a momentum beginning in the first third with the opposition of narrator and townspeople, shifting to an effort at identification in the second, and culminating with the dissipation of the narrator’s statistical project and the shtetl as a social construct in the third. As a close reading of these episodes indicates, new sections are initiated by the appearance of new mirror figures who confront the narrator not only with his own doubleness, but also with the intractable dilemmas of shtetl life. Thus, a decisive rupture occurs between the eighth episode—which describes the narrator’s disgusted encounter with the Tishevits maskil and his first impulse to resist identification with the politics of modernity—and the ninth, which narrates his Saturday night walk with the little boy and his fantasized reconciliation of the modern with the traditional. The sixteenth episode, likewise, consists of complementary apocalyptic and utopian motifs, to be examined in the next section of this discussion. The accelerating appearance of mirror figures conveys the intensification of the narrator’s anxiety, his need to create escape routes out of the moral dilemmas and social claustrophobia of the shtetl, just as the fragmentation of the narrative as a whole—though achieved by means of an artistically controlled and internally coherent structure—reflects the fragmentation of traditional Jewish life under the weight of modernity. In the final third of the series, Peretz presents in succession a proliferating series of mirror-figures: a fire victim, an emigrant, a lunatic, and an informer. These portraits offer a progression of intensifying desperation afflicting the shtetl—and it is both the structure of the short-story sequence as a literary form and the generic eclecticism of the Rayze-bilder that enables Peretz to intensify his narrative discourse from the characteristics of maskilic satire to a new, fin-de-siècle sense of dread. This expansion of expressive possibilities is one of the significant achievements of the Rayze-bilder. Of the four characters dominating the later episodes, the one who most significantly mirrors the narrator is the madman, der meshugener. In telling his tale to the narrator, he even uses the verb farshraybn, “write it down,” which over the course of the narrative has served as a mantra to the narrator. By appropriating this word, the madman not only signals the parallels between his condition and the narrator’s, but he also in effect consigns the narrator’s statistical project to the realm of insanity, a significant metonymy for the modern world as a whole. The last of these mirror-figures, the informer, is moreover the subject of another twice-told tale, in which his activities are summarized as, “Threats: he goes there, he runs here, he travels there, he writes here” (Y 188; E 71). Like the narrator, the informer is seemingly everywhere in the shtetl at once,

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not a person, but a projection of the shtetl’s fears of the outside world. And as such, he brings the narrative—at least in its 1891 version, a dozen years before Peretz appended the last two stories to the sequence—full circle as a final, mirroring connection of the shtetl with the outside world from which the narrator had arrived in the Tomaszów province. In this regard, one can consider the sixteenth episode, “Insured” (Y 170– 73; E 58–61), the weigh-station between the second and third “intensity,” as a microcosm of the generic juxtapositions that have characterized Peretz’s style throughout the Rayze-bilder. This story opens with reference to the legendary origins of the name “Poland” as a Hebrew folk-etymology: Po-lin, “stay here.” Language functions in this instance as a map, but one created through time, as a consequence of Diaspora and dislocation. The legendary opening of “Insured,” which in effect claims Poland as a Jewish territory, nonetheless leads to the despairing naturalism of the following paragraphs, in which the narrator comes to reject definitively his statistical methodology. Peretz invokes the legend of Po-lin in order to articulate a critique, simultaneously, of the illusory autonomy of the traditional shtetl as well as his own engagement with modernity as equally inadequate strategies for coping with the trauma of exile. The mirror therefore functions in this episode not as a relationship between the protagonist and other characters, but rather between his worldview and that of the shtetl. The gesture by which the Jews had originally laid claim to Poland is no less ambiguous and subversive than Peretz’s modernist debunking of this legend; the traditional Jews reject the narrator because as an agent of modernity he undermines the sense of autonomy that is crucial to their own acts of resistance. Peretz, like his satirical predecessors in nineteenth-century Yiddish literature, thus inherits the creativity of the folk imagination that refigures Po-lin as a Jewish space, but he also exposes the limits of traditional Jewish coping mechanisms in the Diaspora. If one understands neurosis as the by-product or half-life of a defense mechanism that no longer serves its purpose or fulfills its function, one can at last understand the narrative purpose of the protagonist’s neurotic disposition, to demonstrate the inherently neurotic situation of Jews at the twilight of the Tsarist empire. The narrator’s neurosis, which can only have a metonymic relationship with the behavior of the other characters in the Rayze-bilder, thus serves a stylistic function to the extent that style itself becomes neurotic, because proliferation as such is a modality of the neurotic. The legendary depiction of the Jews’ origins in Poland is aptly followed in this sketch by a quasi-mad scene or dream sequence—underscoring in turn the proximity of fantastic or mythical thinking and the “waking nightmare” of the current Jewish political condition—which concludes with the revelation

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that instead of looking at two ascending and conflicting angels (the yeytserhore or “evil impulse” and the yeytser tov or “good impulse”), the narrator in fact awakens to a suspicious fire burning across the street from his residence. This fire, like every other motif in Peretz’s anatomy of the shtetl, is at one and the same time an archetype and a satire, epic and mock-epic: the burning shtetl, as Dan Miron has convincingly argued in his work on the shtetl image,13 functions as a reference to the burning of Jerusalem which initiated the Diaspora, but in this millennial shtetl, Peretz’s narrator can draw comfort that, unlike the Temple in Jerusalem, the building in question was at least connected enough to the modern world to be fully insured. At the midpoint of this episode, Peretz offers a description of the shtetl as a whole: To the right of the wood . . . lies the shtetl. It’s divided into two parts. One part is a long thread of pure physicality. . . . The residents on this street are certain that they will live here and die here; that even if all the winds of the earth should descend, they will never move from this spot. . . . Then comes the other part. A different world entirely—pure spirituality. . . . Do the residents there hope to find a short cut . . . leading to the Temple Mount, or are they speculating on a fire insurance policy? (Y 170–71; E 59)

As with the description of the narrator and the orphan looking up at the sky, here the narrator describes the shtetl through two contradictory frames of reference, but as before, it is the same shtetl, seen through a single person’s divided consciousness. The Gentile, “physical” street—and this, significantly, is almost the only reference to non-Jews in the entire work, and an oblique, metonymical reference at that: the street is Gentile because a dog is barking on it!—and the Jewish, “spiritual” street are superimposed on one another, and cancel each other out. But they reveal as well that the narrator has shifted his characteristic ambivalence from a temporal stance or a cosmic one to the shtetl landscape itself. It is here, finally, that the narrator comes to understand the futility of change, futile because ultimately this shtetl can never be the genuine home for Jews, because the genuine home was destroyed as a result of a cosmological catastrophe that drove the Jews into exile nearly two thousand years previously. He thus decides to abandon epistemological confidence in his methodology as a means of knowing the shtetl. Only a page later, the next shtetl is reduced to a type, a carbon copy of the previous one, and the narrator there complains that “these foolish statistics are just a game with numbers” (Y 171; E 60) to which the shtetl will posit a different set of statistics: “24 days without fire in fireplace—ten days one after the other that we’ve lived off of potato skins—three died without a doctor or prescription, the fourth I had to revive

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myself” (Y 172; E 60). Here the shtetl again speaks as a fragmentary collective, against the individual with his modern science and faith in progress; the shtetl resists his efforts at classification and containment, even when these efforts are in service of what one would recognize as a progressive, humanitarian purpose. Moreover, it is precisely as a continuum that the shtetl as spatialtype exerts its unruly and destabilizing effects on the narrator: not a shtetl but the shtetlekh refuse his ministrations and classifications. As social spaces, they replicate themselves beyond the narrator’s ability to count. Contrary to the bucolic legend of Poland as a Jewish space of origins, the shtetl imprints Poland—itself a colonized region within the Tsarist empire—as a site of infinitely expanding Jewish poverty, not the Jewish home-away-from-Zion but the culmination of exile’s degradation. In formal terms, this degradation can only find expression as a collection of fragments, a disharmonized proliferation of narrative genres. The legendary discourse at the beginning and the collective complaints that conclude this episode therefore create an additional superimposition: the shtetl, as it has served throughout the nineteenth century, is both the embodiment of what Miron refers to as Yerushalayim shel mata (the earthly Jerusalem)14 and its negation at one and the same time. The desire for redemption and the reality of Jewish powerlessness stand opposed to one another in an irresolvable valence. What is new in this version of the shtetl “myth” is both the specificity of the failed modern agenda and its psychological consequences for the narrator and his readers, which is not, as it was in Mendele’s Di klyatshe, madness as a comic device for revealing uncomfortable truths, but rather a newfound sense of fatalism that expresses itself not as satire, but as symbolism. And this is indeed the direction in which the last third of the sequence, the final two episodes of which were added in 1904, heads. The turn to symbolism, fully consonant with Peretz’s contemporaneous development of a neo-Romantic style—for a literature otherwise lacking a Romantic tradition—in the self-invented genres collected as Folkstimlekhe geshikhtn (stories in the style of folklore) and Khsidish (Hasidic-styled stories), adds not only an additional instance of aesthetic rupture, but also a detour into a realm of mysticism that offers the promise, always frustrated by Peretz’s sense of irony, of reconciling the contradictions underscored in the earlier sections of the narrative. In the first supplementary chapter, the narrator leaves the shtetl for a village, and speaks with a non-Jewish coachman: as these stories began with Peretz traveling to the shtetlekh at the behest of a converted philanthropist, so they conclude with the narrator in dialogue once again with a non-Jew, and the non-Jewish world at large. When later in this episode the narrator turns to speak with the traditional Jew sharing the coach with him, Reb Moshke,

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he hears a “shaggy dog tale” involving the destruction of a shtetl following the arrival of modern Jews and modern Jewish ideologies, particularly Zionism. Reb Moshke describes the conflict between tradition and modernity as a struggle between an avenging “angel of fire” (Sar ha-eysh), determined to punish the wicked town, and an unimpeachably pious resident of the shtetl, Leybl the Capmaker. As Leybl had narrated his defense of the community, “The angel of fire would drop a spark onto a straw roof, and I—a tear on a holy book, and the tear on the holy book would extinguish the spark on the roof” (Y 201; E 82). This contrast between the spiritual and material worlds is resolved in Leybl’s struggles with the angel of fire on the plane of traditional, though fantastic, Jewish mysticism. The vehicle for this mystical struggle is the shtetl’s economic desperation, signified by the straw roof, but instead of focusing on these material conditions, which by 1904 would be a given for Yiddish fiction, another “twice-told tale,” Peretz sublimates the physical within a parodically metaphysical drama that, in its degradation of magical motifs, is an occasion for modernist disenchantment. The statistical, ethnographic discourse of the earlier sections therefore contrasts conspicuously with the mythic, symbolic struggle between the elements of fire and water, angel and man, at the end of the sequence, when a final conflagration defeats Leybl and destroys this shtetl—a shtetl that exists, significantly, only as a memory for the traditional Jew and a legend for the narrator. The fire is ignited from the pipe of a modern Jew (a daytsh) who had come to the shtetl to speculate in real estate, to inquire and write down (farshraybn) the price of land. Thus in symbolic terms it becomes clear that modernity—signified by a traveler from the West, capitalism and property ownership, as well as writing itself—is the destructive agent that undoes the shtetl, even as the traditional discourse of the shtetl figures this destruction in purely cosmological terms. Because cosmology conceives of time in cyclical terms, it negates the possibility of linear progress and undermines the logic of modernity itself; Peretz uses cosmology here as a means of foreclosing the possibility of redemption through modernization. At the end of the narrative, therefore, the narrator can neither record nor reform the shtetl, because the destructive force of modernity has already unmade the shtetl. The narrator’s visit, like the character types he has described in previous episodes, is already in advance reduced to a twice-told tale: once again, the narrator has become the interlocutor, with the shtetl collective imposing its self-description on him. The twenty-fourth story similarly recapitulates the theme of the shtetl reduced to a collective of fragments as the news of a Reb Berl’s illness and death circulates around the uncomprehending and impotent narrator from the women at the market to the men in the tavern, resolving at last in a conven-

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tionally “Talmudic” conundrum debated between two learned young men—a Torah scholar and the narrator’s landlord—over the dispensation of a pension to Reb Berl’s widowed sister: if he’s willed her sixty rubles a year at a rate of five per month, what is to be done in a leap year? (Y 209).15 The narrator asks, “who is Reb Berl,” just as in the opening of the sequence the market women had asked who he is. At the end of the series, the narrator remains as much of an outsider and stranger as he was at the beginning. It should come as little surprise that Peretz would reject each of these strategies—both the satirical and the symbolist, the maskilic and the neoRomantic, as well as the ambivalence on which all such aesthetic gestures are predicated—when he comes to the Czernowitz Conference as the leading spokesperson for an autonomous and political modern Yiddish culture. Yet as this discussion has attempted to show, the position from which he argues at Czernowitz on behalf of the proletarian, secular modernity of Yiddish is no less a fiction, premised on ideology as well as art, than his previous belletristic writing. To achieve this fiction in 1908, a point by which his narrative writing had largely ceased in favor of polemic and drama, Peretz characterizes the linguistic resistance that had set the traditional Jews of the Province against his modern protagonist from Warsaw as a political position to which modern writers such as himself might easily contribute: “The worker does not content himself with tkhines or prayers from the women’s gallery, or with fairy-tales told behind the study-house stove; he wants and needs to live his life in Yiddish” (Meisel, 372). In the Czernowitz address, the Jewish proletariat modernizes the Yiddish language—unlike the Yiddish of the Rayze-bilder, which rhetorically consists precisely of the language of tkhines, prayers, and fairytales. It is significant that at Czernowitz Peretz envisions a modern Yiddish culture that apparently had to abandon the folk-Yiddish of traditional culture, even though Peretz in his own belletristic work almost never depicts the modern working class that he conjures for the intelligentsia convened in Czernowitz. The question of class thus receives a newly urbanized and politicized attention in the Czernowitz address. The class dimension, however, is already present in the Rayze-bilder, in a reconfigured dialectical form: tradition vs. modernity, rather than proletariat vs. bourgeoisie. In a sense, this “retrogression” from what might be clumsily schematized as the political back to the sociological can perhaps be likened to “standing Marx on his head,” as Marx had claimed to stand Hegel on his head. But the rhetoric of the Czernowitz address signifies an effort at consolidation and homogenization, a gesture that aligns Jewish culture with a superficially “universal” Marxist model to which subsequent historical events would demonstrate it was ill-fitted. Peretz at Czernowitz elides the tensions of what remained, nearly twenty years after the

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original publication of the Rayze-bilder, a peripheral culture engaged not in a process of assimilation, but one of circulation, into and out of metropolitan modernity. Similarly, the narrator’s ethnographical and statistical perspective in the Rayze-bilder is, as it was in the historical circumstances that fostered the narrative, a political gesture, though given the fact of Tsarist censorship the narrator’s politics can only be expressed in negative and dislocated terms. Yet the Rayze-bilder demonstrates precisely what Peretz refers to at Czernowitz as “the modern world” (372) of “folk against state and nation against Fatherland”; the “minor” in the Rayze-bilder takes precedence over the “major” and the peripheral is privileged over the metropolis. Nonetheless, the fault lines in the Rayze-bilder explicitly exclude both the modern intellectual and his faith in a narrative of progress from the vanguard of an “organic” Yiddish culture. Because of its confrontation of the Jewish intellectual’s inevitable estrangement from the culture he would presume to champion, the Rayzebilder, more than any subsequent polemic, is perhaps the most significant and sophisticated ideological statement of Peretz’s career.

NOTES 1. Sections of this article are substantively revised from my essay, “The Fragmentation of Narrative Perspective in Y. L. Peretz’s Bilder fun a Provints-Rayze” in Jewish Social Studies (new series) 14.1. This previous work 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 sincere gratitude for their generous financial and intellectual support of my work. Particular and profound thanks are due to Professor Sara Nadal-Melsió of the University of Pennsylvania for her insightful and inspiring reading of this article in draft form. 2. Nachman Meisel, ed., Briv un redes fun Y. L. Peretz (New York: YKUF, 1944), p. 371 (subsequent references incorporated in text as “Meisel”). 3. For a fairly accessible Yiddish translation of the full, Hebrew original, see Meisel, 138–39. In its original context, it becomes clear that, although Peretz is writing to Sholem Rabinovitsh (that is, Sholem Aleichem), he thinks he is writing to Sholem Abramovitsh (that is, Mendele Moykher-Sforim)! This indicates that at the outset of his career as a Yiddish writer Peretz was unfamiliar not only with the leading writers but even the basic facts about contemporary Yiddish literature. He would soon prove to be a quick study. 4. Y. L. Peretz, Ale Verk (New York: CYCO Publishing, 1947), vol. 2, p. 75 (subsequent references to Peretz in Yiddish incorporated in text from this edition as “Y”); in English, see I. L. Peretz, The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. Ruth R. Wisse (New York:

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Schocken Books, 1990), p. 110 (subsequent references to Peretz in English incorporated in text from this edition as “E,” although translations will be my own). 5. Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 1996), p. 135. 6. See Nachman Meisel, Y. L. Peretz: zayn lebn un shafn (New York: YKUF, 1945), p. 110–11. 7. See Ruth R. Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 19. 8. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 1988). 9. For an extended discussion of Dos vintshfingerl, see Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973, 1996). One should note that this version of Mendele’s work appeared in the same volume as Peretz’s Yiddish debut, so it is a work that Peretz was at least familiar with, even if it was not a conscious model for revision. 10. A characterization my friend Professor Laurence Roth made during the discussion period of a seminar given at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, October 13, 2004. 11. See Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 83–109. 12. As Samuel Johnson put it in his classic work of travel literature, “[S]uch is the laxity of Highland conversation that the inquirer is kept in continual suspense, and by a kind of intellectual retrogradation, knows less as he hears more.” See A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, in Samuel Johnson: The Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 620. 13. See Dan Miron, “The Literary Image of the Shtetl” (1995), in his The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 1–48. 14. Miron, “The Literary Image of the Shtetl,” 34. 15. This twenty-fourth episode is left untranslated in the English edition of the Rayze-bilder.

7 Reclaiming Czernowitz in Aharon Appelfeld’s Flowers of Darkness Philip Hollander

Aharon Appelfeld’s 1962 short story collection Ashan (Smoke) helped take Hebrew literature in new directions by challenging the leading literature of its time that concentrated on contemporary events, such as the War of Independence and agricultural settlement, while providing an intricate picture of the Israeli landscape through detailed descriptions of soil types and rock formations, flora and fauna.1 Not only did many of Appelfeld’s stories turn their attention to the urban landscape of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but they portrayed isolated and alienated individuals whose lives proved largely incomprehensible to those myopically focused on the here and now.2 Other stories moved past mere gleanable details to take readers to Europe to voice the experience of Holocaust survivors in the immediate postwar period. By employing a contemporary literary idiom to satisfy the thirst for Holocaust knowledge sparked by the Eichmann Trial, Smoke brought Appelfeld literary acclaim, and he gradually emerged as the most prominent Israeli writer treating Holocaust themes.3 Yet, even more importantly, Appelfeld’s writing helped to bring Europe and Israel’s Jewish past back to the center of Hebrew literary discourse. In a seeming paradox, even as the geographic and temporal boundaries of Appelfeld’s fictional realm expanded, Czernowitz, the city where he grew up, found only limited representation in his fiction.4 Yet this seeming paradox resolves itself once one looks more closely at his biography.5 Appelfeld was born in 1932 to parents from Yiddish-speaking Hassidic backgrounds, who had acculturated to the dominant cultural norms of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of their youths by secularizing and assuming German as their primary language of culture and communication. Appelfeld’s father’s adaptive

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efforts helped him to succeed as a mill machinery merchant, and he set up a comfortable bourgeois home in Czernowitz, where he and his wife raised their only child. Appelfeld’s childhood took a sharp turn for the worse following the German and Romanian conquest of Northern Bukovina in October 1941. After barely missing execution alongside his mother and grandmother, he and his father were placed in the Czernowitz ghetto. Later Appelfeld would be separated from his father following their deportation to Transnistria. Living by his wits, he survived the war. He occasionally hid in the forests, and at other times he worked in the employ of marginal figures, such as whores and horse thieves, who asked few questions about his origins. After hooking on to the advancing Russian army in a service capacity following liberation, Appelfeld made his way to the Italian coast together with other young Jewish refugees and eventually made his way to Palestine. More than just a marker indicative of an actual physical place for Appelfeld, Czernowitz represented a cluster of complex and contradictory emotions tied to his expulsion from a seemingly Edenic childhood world and his incarceration in a brutal world where he could never let down his guard if he hoped to survive. Anger about his Jewishness that had caused his expulsion from his comfortable home, anger at his parents for failing to prepare him for what he would encounter, and anger at their failure to educate him about the Jewishness for which he suffered, combined with feelings of gaping loss and a sense of confusion about his place in the world to make Czernowitz a difficult subject for Appelfeld to address. With the traumatic events that had brought on these emotions taking place when he was between the ages of nine and twelve, these emotions were raw and not fully understood by Appelfeld, whose wartime memories were limited. When he first started writing about them in confessional poetry, he found it difficult to give them effective aesthetic form due to his inability to fully understand them.6 Only by first distancing himself from these emotions through their seeming objectification in the third-person narratives of Ashan did he begin to work through them. Gradually Appelfeld gained greater control and understanding of the traumainduced emotions he connected to Czernowitz, and as he achieved this control and understanding he moved closer to effective and balanced representation of Czernowitz and his parents’ place within it. Although the city still remains unnamed, over the course of the last decade life in Czernowitz during the war years has begun to play an increasingly prominent place in Appelfeld’s writing.7 His 2006 novel Pirhei ha-afelah (Flowers of Darkness) constitutes an important example of this emerging trend. Through comparison of Flowers of Darkness with Tor ha-pla’ot (The Age of Wonders), another important example of what Appelfeld scholar Yigal Schwartz has referred to as “imaginary

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autobiography,” it will be shown how Appelfeld has finally worked through his anger to embrace his acculturated parents and their lifestyle cognizant that their love and example continue to nourish him in a way that the physical environment of Czernowitz that he had idealized in childhood never could.8 Before providing summaries of the two novellas in preparation for their comparison, it would be useful to explain what is being referred to here as “imagined autobiography.” Neither Flowers of Darkness nor The Age of Wonders can be directly understood as autobiographical works. Rather Flowers of Darkness portrays fictional episodes during a two-year period in the life of its youthful protagonist Hugo Mansfeld, while The Age of Wonders portrays fictional episodes during a year-and-a-half period in the life of its protagonist Bruno A. just prior to his and his mother’s deportation, as well as during a short trip Bruno makes to his hometown decades later when he returns to Austria to deal with the literary legacy of his father, a prominent interwar German-Jewish writer. Both of these works relate to the Bildungsroman tradition and employ different techniques to aid in presentation of their connected episodes as their protagonists’ memories tied together by their role in their protagonists’ efforts to make sense of their lives. While Schwartz connects “imagined autobiography” to the first-person narration typical of autobiographical fiction, both the second part of The Age of Wonders, which Schwartz specifically includes within the genre, and the whole of Flowers of Darkness employ third-person narration. Nonetheless both of these works can be considered imaginary autobiographies, because, as the Holocaust survival stories of prepubescent children who arrived at sexual maturity around the time of the Second World War, they both share much in common with Appelfeld’s own biography. Awareness of this overlap helps readers to recognize that while these novellas possess a rich artistic texture and maintain an inner logic of their own, their narratives also function as “episodes in the life of a fictional persona named ‘Aharon Appelfeld’ and in the lives of the characters that surrounded that persona.”9 In other words, Appelfeld, whose memories of the war years remain limited, employs imagined autobiographies not only for aesthetic purposes but as an imaginative laboratory where he can test out thoughts and ideas about his childhood self and its relationship to central figures in his life, such as his parents. As his life experience and his knowledge of European Jewry have expanded, the parameters of Appelfeld’s imaginative experiments have changed, and, as a result, through experimentation in the laboratory of imaginative biography, where he began to work seriously in the early seventies, Appelfeld has proceeded to work through his alienation from his parents to arrive at increased identification with them and a growing sense that the Holocaust need not constitute an unbridgeable gap in Jewish experience.

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In its very construction The Age of Wonders works to communicate the disruptive effects of the Holocaust through focalization upon a young and perceptive child whose life is radically changed by the war.10 In the first part of the novella, a more mature version of this perceptive child employs the first person to partially fulfill his childhood promise through sensual portrayal of his experience over a year-and-a-half period earlier in his life. Two fateful train journeys skillfully bookend this period, and the narrator uses them to connect the dulling of his childhood perception and his failure to achieve his full promise to wrong-minded efforts at creating a German-Jewish identity. During the first journey, the narrator is made explicitly aware of his Jewish identity for the first time, when Jewish passengers are required to detrain and register with the authorities. Although his mother subsequently attempts to organize a Bar Mitzvah for him, the local rabbi hesitates to cooperate in the mother’s plan for her uncircumcised child. Consequently the narrator’s deportation from his Austrian hometown and the events of the Holocaust symbolized by the blank page separating the novella’s first and second parts serve as an alternative initiation into Jewishness for him. Following the Holocaust, he immigrates to Israel seemingly in accordance with the lessons of the Holocaust and leaves his German cultural heritage behind him. When we reencounter the narrator decades later as an adult named Bruno returning to Knospen in the novella’s second part, he no longer has the sensual and immediate relationship to his environment that he had as a child. The shift to third person that the narrative undergoes helps to portray this loss with Bruno not only alienated from his environment but from himself. Self-alienation has led to a nervous breakdown, and the unraveling of his marriage reflects his increasing alienation from his environment. When his father’s writing gains renewed popularity, Bruno is forced to travel to Austria to deal with this legacy. Yet, rather than dealing with it upon arrival, he travels “home” to Knospen instead in the hopes of overcoming his feelings of alienation through renewed contact with the childhood landscape that he so fondly remembers. When these hopes are dashed by revelation of a discordant social landscape, Bruno’s presence in Knospen pushes him to reevaluate his childhood past. In so doing, he has the opportunity to extract a usable past capable of aiding him in improvement of his present life. Unfortunately Bruno’s inability to overcome his antipathy to GermanJewish identity, embodied in the present by Mischling characters he meets, leads him away from reexamination of his past and his own sense of himself as a German-Jewish hybrid.11 Instead he functions in accordance with the Nazi-inspired conclusion of his childhood that German and Jewish people and things need to occupy separate spaces and categories. As a result, he utterly rejects all things German when confronted by cases that challenge this sharp

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bifurcation. After striking an elderly Jewish man named Brum, who survived the war through utter suppression of his Jewishness, Bruno leaves town. Bruno’s violent behavior gives him pleasure, because Brum’s behavior parallels Bruno’s father’s strategic embrace of German culture and his abandonment of his Jewish wife and child on the eve of the war, but this gesture constitutes an unsuccessful attempt to completely spurn his parents’ GermanJewish legacy. Without their spiritual guidance, it seems unlikely that Bruno will be able to move toward mental health and a rapprochement with his wife upon his return to Israel. Despite his seeming rejection of all things German when he strikes Brum, the breakdown of his relationship with his wife parallels the breakdown of his parents’ marriage prior to the war with his father’s selfish embrace of German culture and his mother’s self-effacing embrace of Jewish concepts of charity as opportunities for German-Jewish expression are pulled out from under them. By allowing the war years to serve as a psychological chasm separating his past and his present and the German and the Jewish sides of his character, Bruno loses touch with the blend of German and Jewish culture that contributed to the happy years of marriage that his parents enjoyed, of which he is a product, and which could effectively guide him in reconciling with his wife. While the construction of The Age of Wonders provided Aharon Applefeld with an opportunity to express authentic feelings of anger, loss, self-pity, and confusion, which originated with the loss of his stable childhood home in Czernowitz, both the Austrian setting and the portrayal of Bruno’s parents and the family maid in the novella simultaneously distort Appelfeld’s personal experience and enhance the work’s artistic merit by enhancing the sharp contrasts perceived by Bruno. The Austrian setting allows for a starker contrast between Jewish and German culture, as well as Jews and Germans, not as readily apparent in Czernowitz and Northern Bukovina. In Czernowitz Jews and Germans maintained collegial connections for much longer than in Austria, and, due to Jewish affinity to German culture and the large numbers of Jews who used German as their primary form of expression, both Jews and Germans were more likely to perceive themselves in opposition to the city’s Romanian and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) populations than to each other.12 Similarly Appelfeld’s portrayal of Bruno’s father and mother at the extremes of Germanness and Jewishness, as well as hate and love, misrepresents his parents. As Appelfeld poignantly recounts in his memoir Story of a Life, his father held on tightly to his weak, barefoot son during a forced march through Transnistria and prevented him from drowning in the deep muds. At a time when many individuals left friends and loved ones to die, Appelfeld’s father risked his own life to care for his son.13 Finally the family maid Louise is portrayed as an attractive, passionate, loyal, and loving figure in the novella’s

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first part, while in the second part she returns as an ugly, cold, treacherous, and hateful figure. People do change, but usually not so radically. Those who served his family likely maintained a much more ambivalent attitude to their Jewish employers.14 Appelfeld avoided presenting the mixture of love and hate that characterized these servants, as well as many other non-Jews, to help communicate Bruno’s feeling of radical change following the war. When looking to portray the possibility of Jewish continuity, despite the ravages of the Holocaust, which reflected the process of psychological maturation that he underwent over the course of decades, Appelfeld needed to work toward the portrayal of the frequently ambiguous nature of the relations between non-Jews and Jews. Czernowitz and its environs proved a much more authentic and effective location than Austria for the portrayal of such relations. Their representation through portrayal of Hugo and his mother’s relationship with her childhood friend Mariana in Flowers of Darkness helped Appelfeld successfully master his ambiguous feelings toward his parents to advance the admirable aspects of their characters as exemplars for contemporary Jews. Flowers of Darkness opens in fall 1942, just prior to its protagonist Hugo Mansfeld’s eleventh birthday. Having failed to find a reliable rural peasant willing to conceal him, his mother Yulia cares for him alone in the Czernowitz ghetto following her husband’s disappearance. Finally, with an escalation in deportations and growing fear that Hugo will not be safe in his hiding place, Yulia smuggles him out of the ghetto and takes him to her childhood friend Mariana, a Ruthenian. Concerned for her son’s safety, Yulia puts aside her fear of Mariana’s alcoholism and her questionable morality. Although Yulia does not explain where she is taking him, Hugo will spend the next year and a half concealed in a small closet-like room adjacent to Mariana’s room in the brothel where she works. Gradually Hugo loses touch with the outside world and his memory of his parents weakens. His tie to Mariana increases until it eclipses his relationship with his past. Although Mariana saves Hugo’s life, the motivations for her actions are complex. In her loneliness, Mariana takes Hugo into her bed on non-working nights and eventually starts having sex with him. When the war ends, Hugo heads to the mountains with Mariana. Her attempt to escape arrest fails, however, and, when she is led off to prison in Czernowitz for her collaborative servicing of German soldiers, Hugo accompanies her. When she is executed, though, Hugo is left to sort out his life in his physically unscarred hometown. Jewish refugees return from the east, but his parents are not among them. Like Bruno in The Age of Wonders, Hugo, while not the most talented of his peer group, is a bright and inquisitive child whose mental development is stunted by the war, but, unlike Bruno, Hugo succeeds in overcoming the traumatic events of the war to arrive at a more healthy mental state and a

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higher degree of functionality. The construction of the narrative itself reflects this. Bruno proves unable to interrogate his childhood memories to arrive at a more viable understanding of his past. Instead he maintains a highly idealized portrait of his prewar life that stands in marked contrast with the narrative of his mature postwar life. Meanwhile Hugo’s courageous willingness to puzzle over details of his wartime experience helps him to arrive at a Holocaust narrative that simultaneously communicates his past experience and the enhanced self-understanding he gains through his introspective efforts. These introspective efforts reflecting Hugo’s renewed postwar inquisitiveness and analytical skills are subtly grafted on to his Holocaust narrative through the use of a “future perfect” narrative modality. Since Modern Hebrew is usually considered to lack a future-perfect tense, it is necessary to more clearly explain what I am referring to as the “future perfect” narrative modality.15 As Hebrew literary scholar Dan Miron has noted, its use in Israeli fiction became widespread following its introduction by Israeli novelist Yaakov Shabtai (1934–1981) in his seminal novel Zikhron devarim (Past continuous), and has subsequently been taken up by many leading Hebrew writers, including S. Yizhar (1916–2006), A. B. Yehoshua (b. 1936), and Amos Oz (b. 1939).16 In a retrospective narrative employing this mode, elements from a distant future mix together with the narrative present, and impact the way that readers understand events in the narrative present and the significance that they assign them. One easy way to introduce this mode is through “seemingly random references to what the future will bring,” and such references are scattered throughout Flowers of Darkness.17 Analysis of a few instances of this device reveals a great deal about Hugo and the efforts that he undertakes to arrive at self-understanding. The following reference to what the future will bring long after the conclusion of the narrative provides an important glimpse into the subsequent growth that allows Hugo to move past the traumatic events of the war to effectively and sensitively conduct his life: Later Hugo would reflect a great about this pained journey. He would try to recall everything that had been said and everything that had been kept inside. Mariana knew what awaited her. She tried to free herself, but everybody was against her and her courage did not come to her aid.18

Rather than deciding like many survivors to repress his traumatic separation from Mariana, his lover and exploiter, Hugo will confront this memory and work to master it in his later life. Rather than self-pityingly reliving this moment of loss, Hugo reexamines it over time until he finds a way to extract something viable. While in the narrative present Hugo had no idea that Mariana’s arrest for collaboration would inevitably lead to her death, he much later

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comes to realize that this had been clear from the outset and that Mariana had had the ability to recognize it. While she was brave, she had no viable allies and no opportunity for escape. Rather than crumbling under her impending fate, she kept her composure and did her best not to make her fate any more difficult on Hugo than it needed to be. While Hugo proved incapable of such nuanced analysis as a thirteen-year-old child, his ability to process his primary experiences allowed him to move outside of himself, control his past, and extract Mariana’s caring attitude and courage in the face of her inevitable fate as exemplary characteristics worthy of emulation. Another important example of the seemingly random reference to the future comes at the novella’s conclusion. No longer with Mariana, Hugo waits for his parents to return to Czernowitz like many survivors who congregate in a central square to await their loved ones’ return. There he meets a woman who works to persuade him to abandon his wait and head out of town with a group of survivors. She argues that through give-and-take with members of the group Hugo can become part of a community: She spoke with increasing rapidity. Hugo didn’t understand all that she pulled out from her heart, but her words streamed into him with the warm coffee. Later he would say to himself, it was like a field hospital, people, blankets and burning pain. The little woman went from place to place, dressed wounds, drove away bad spirits, and served coffee and sandwiches. A man showed her the stump of his hand and asked, “Better?” “Much better,” she said and kissed him on the forehead.19

Synesthesia communicates the passivity of Hugo’s listening with the woman’s words entering him like a beverage made of heart extract. The lifeaffirming nature of her argument attracts Hugo and it is clear that he will accede to her appeal. As he starts to comprehend that his parents are dead and that his life in Czernowitz will never return to being anything close to what it once was, the burden of his loss begins to overwhelm him. Cognizant of his state, the woman reaches out to him with the opportunity for a foster family and a new home. As Hugo will come to see, he avoided mental anguish he did not yet have the wherewithal to address that could have brought him to depression and suicide. Hugo is grateful to the woman for looking out for him, but in retrospect her methods disturb him. As the simile that compares the refugee-inhabited square with a field hospital implies, Hugo, like the amputee whose head the woman kisses, undergoes a brutal “amputation” from Czernowitz and his parents. Rather than being a viable medical procedure like the amputation of the man’s hand, the woman’s actions more closely mimic those of a witch doctor as she tries to exorcise evil spirits by asserting a tribal identity in response to the devastation of the Holocaust. True mental

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healing proves more complicated than a return to tribal identity or the distribution of blankets, sandwiches, and hot coffee. While the woman attempted to cauterize Hugo’s wound by severing him from his past, this past continues to assert itself through memory and only by reexamining this severed past in a more nuanced process of healing does Hugo mature and succeed in moving forward with his life. Although Flowers of Darkness, unlike many examples of imaginary autobiography, employs third-person narration, it hints that Hugo, the only character privy to his experience, his inner world, and his process of maturation, constructs the narrative. Hugo’s authorship of this third-person text makes more sense once one sees this narrative style as a coping mechanism which he picks up from the women of the brothel that helps him move past the shame of his wartime weakness and the enormity of his loss. As the text explains, “The use of the third person was spread widely among them, and in this way they distanced themselves slightly from their lives.”20 Through this act of distancing, Hugo accomplishes a difficult task, and in so doing he also honors Mariana, who requests that he remember her not as a miserable figure but as “a fighting woman.”21 Despite Mariana’s central narrative role, however, Hugo’s renewed accounting with his parents and their legacy is reflected in more than purposeful references to what the future will bring, such as those analyzed above. It undergirds the narrative’s construction. Hugo’s treatment at the hands of Mariana and other brothel workers aware of his presence shapes the way he views himself as a Jew. Only when he neutralizes their influence will he find the ability to write his story and give his parents a prominent place within it. Hugo internalizes the brothel workers’ negative perception of the Jews as distasteful and inhuman, just as Bruno internalizes Nazi racial ideology. Consequently he finds the Jewish refugees who return to Czernowitz following liberation repellent, even after he leaves town with a group of them. When he first encounters the refugees, he is disgusted by what he sees. He notices that “their posture revealed that they had been in hiding places and that their measured cautiousness had taken root in their movements, and before they raised their legs and took a step they looked around them with a diagonal glance, like hunted animals.”22 To look at them is to see something about himself that Hugo feels uncomfortable acknowledging. When Hugo enters into hiding, he undergoes a similar process of dehumanization. Mariana treats him like a pet, which can be ignored or cared for at its owner’s whim. To clarify this status, Mariana refers to him as a puppy. Soon Hugo accepts this and when forced to return to his hiding place after being released for a short time for feeding, Hugo begins to cry “until his cry became an intermittent whine of a dog cast from a warm home to the pound.”23 When

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he later returns to confinement after a short period of affection, he moves in a recently acquired stooped manner that recalls how “animals stoop down when they are commanded to leave the house.”24 Eventually Hugo begins to hope that his dog-like status is something infectious that can be cured like rabies. Viewing Mariana’s room as similar to a hospital room, he hopes to be cured there of his Jewishness, which he views as the source of his dog-like status. Hugo works to achieve health. When one of the whores compliments his intelligence, which she sees as a “Jewish” characteristic, he takes it as a criticism and immediately renounces it. [The Jews] aren’t smart, they’re too sensitive. My mother, if it’s alright to bring her as an example, my mother is a pharmacist with two degrees, but she’s given her whole life to the poor and the suffering. God knows where she is and who she cares for now. She’s always running, so she returns home tired and immediately falls down pale on the arm chair.25

Before he went into hiding, Hugo competed with his friend Annah for recognition as his class’s top student. Now he distances himself from such behavior as merely misperceived sensitivity. In his critique of his mother’s “stupid” altruism that has prevented her from properly caring for him or for herself, one gets a sense of the type of powerful and self-centered non-Jewish male that Hugo has come to idealize. While able to recognize a parallel between Mariana and himself and Potiphar’s wife and Joseph, Hugo purposely avoids Joseph-like self-restraint, delicacy, and calculation. When Mariana begins to initiate him into sexuality, Hugo exhibits a readiness to take on any seemingly non-Jewish characteristic she chooses and allows continued sexual pleasure to blind him to the problematic nature of their relations. When they abandon the brothel and head for the mountains, Hugo complies with Mariana’s call for his further assumption of what she views as non-Jewish masculine characteristics. Hugo gradually takes greater charge of their affairs and views himself as cured of his Jewishness, but Mariana’s arrest shatters these dreams. Not only does Hugo fail to save her from the three policemen that come to arrest her, but he fails to even display Jewish sensitivity by taking her hand to comfort her as she heads toward her death. The failure of Hugo’s efforts to embody an assertive non-Jewish man become manifest to him as he passes a landmark from his walks with his father on Czernowitz’s outskirts and the memory of his father and Czernowitz’s ultra-Orthodox Jews, many of whose deportations he witnessed, comes to mind. After waiting unsuccessfully for Mariana’s release from prison, Hugo starts visiting various locations throughout the city to reacclimatize himself and regain what has been denied him over the last few years, just as Bruno

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attempts to do when he returns to Knospen. Not only does Hugo take in scents that he has known since childhood, he senses that “his real life beats in this city.”26 “He remembers every corner, every bend, not to mention the wide streets along which the street cars run. . . . The fear that the city was destroyed by bombing or looted by the armies was nothing but a false fear.”27 Yet Hugo’s return to Czernowitz and his childhood world soon proves deeply unsatisfying. As he arrives at Karil’s Kiosk, where everything is going on as before the war, his mind is flooded with memories and he fears to advance. Nevertheless he pushes on and passes his Uncle Sigmund’s favorite bar and a café where his Aunt Frieda used to drink coffee. Their absences make a deeper impression on him than the continuity before his eyes. When he arrives at school to find the elderly school janitor Ivan, Hugo greets him only to be rebuffed and denigrated as a Jew when he asks when school will start up again. Finding his parents’ pharmacy converted into a grocery, Hugo recalls customers commenting on his similarity to each of his parents. He comprehends that “what was will never return again.”28 Yet it will be his arrival home that will have the greatest impact: The house remained intact. On the wide attractive balcony, the exciting opening to the city, blue wash was hanging. The windows on its sides were naked and one could see the people inside. The large candelabra in the salon still hung from the ceiling. For a whole hour he stood in place and stared, and a feeling that had nested within him since he entered the city center became apparent in its full intensity: the soul had departed from this precious place.29

Still incapable of fending for himself, Hugo fails to find the nurturing environment of prewar Czernowitz that he had hoped would erase the trauma of Mariana’s death. The absence of curtains on the home’s side windows exposes the whole interior of the house, but Hugo fails to spot anything worthy of his attention. No longer sheltered from contemporary reality by Mariana and the other prostitutes, the apparent lack of any viable legacy overwhelms him. Despite his discomfort with the refugees, Hugo returns to them when his walk fails to provide him with something to grasp on to—something made only more raw when one of his parents’ customers, who recognizes him, indirectly informs him of their deaths when she speaks of them in the past tense. Recognizing him as the son of Yulia and Hans, the refugees are kind to him and try to keep him properly clothed and fed. For example, the aforementioned woman cognizant of the deep wounds of the refugees plunges herself into serving them, largely out of a desire to avoid coping with her own loss, and convinces Hugo to join the herd of dehumanized Jews heading out of the city. Hugo’s decision to join them has little to do with a sense of identification

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and does not reflect an act of maturation. Rather he takes up the opportunity to reassume the animal-like self-perception he maintained while in hiding to avoid succumbing to his psychic wounds. While necessary at the time, Hugo’s decision to protect himself in the herd continues his dehumanization. It will only be when he begins to work to break free of the herd through interrogation of his past and recognition of what he has lost that Hugo will begin to comprehend what he still retains. The narrative itself constitutes this later accounting and allows him to extract from the void what remains valuable to him from his life in Czernowitz. Hugo’s narrative centers on a muted but heroic portrayal of his mother who he will only learn to appreciate long after her death. In the difficult conditions of the ghetto presented at the beginning of the narrative, Yulia works to make Hugo’s birthday something worth celebrating and in so doing exhibits her true character. Rather than leaving the children to sink into despair through discussion of Aktions and work details, she and the other parents organize gifts and entertainment. Hugo receives books by Karl May and Jules Verne from Yulia, an ornamental fountain pen from his friend Otto, and packages of halva and chocolate from his friend Annah. The children eat the sweets and listen to one of the partygoers’ parents playing accordion music. Yulia’s heroism finds its clearest expression when she smuggles Hugo out of the ghetto. As they set out, she keeps Hugo calm by acting as if they are only headed off on vacation. Then, when the odor and smell of the sewers through which they escape cause Hugo to faint, she saves his life. Staying calm, she drags him through the sewers, and finally raises his unconscious body to the surface when they near their destination. Hugo later regains consciousness and only years later will he imagine with wonder how his delicate mother accomplished this Herculean task. Unaware of what he has, Hugo fails to comprehend the great difficulty his mother has in parting with him and the great loss he will soon incur with his delivery into Mariana’s care. When Yulia is swallowed in the darkness and Mariana closes the door, the reader is told: “It was cut, but Hugo didn’t feel it.”30 Hugo does not tell the story of his relationship with Mariana to merely comply with her request; he does so to help fill out his narrative of personal accounting through indirect communication of the pain of a loss he did not recognize when it occurred. Without communication of the pain that Hugo feels with the loss of a woman he has come to both love and desire, despite all of her negative attributes, the reader would be unable to grasp the inexpressible and exponentially greater pain and confusion caused by his loss of his parents and their love, especially that of his mother. Despite his mother’s love and care for him, as well as the way that she saves him in the sewer, she is by no means perfect. Viewed from a contem-

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porary perspective, she delivers him into the hands of a woman who sexually abuses him. Yet Yulia and Hans do their best for their son. Their petit bourgeois, Jewish liberal outlook fails to forecast what will befall Romanian Jewry, and the limited Jewish education that they provide Hugo does not help him to deal with the existential issues raised by the Holocaust. Yet their secular Jewishness manifested in their readiness to give free medicine to poor and marginal figures is nothing for which Hugo should be made to feel shame. On the contrary, they show an admirable and positive ability to appreciate the good in the world when it presents itself and to work toward it in their own lives. Hugo recalls an example of this when the tea and covered wafers that he eats with Mariana in the mountains bring his hikes with his parents to mind. First, Hugo remembers how in the early spring Yulia “loved the white snow flowers that would sprout up from the black saturated soil that was suddenly revealed.”31 Then, an even more powerful memory strikes him: “He now clearly saw his mother bending down on her knees, looking with wonder at the white flowers, and Dad, when seeing her wonder, also bending over, and for a moment they gazed in wonder without saying a word.”32 Yulia’s careful vision that allows her to take note of these flowers and take pleasure in them shows her essential optimism that allows her to embrace life and get the most out of it. While a more sober individual, Hans’ respect and love for his wife makes him forgo his reticence to appreciate what is right before his eyes. Such love, optimism, and appreciation of life constitute a positive legacy that Hugo can extract from Czernowitz and his parents’ lives there. It will take Hugo a long time to do this. Yet he will eventually come to view the past not as his and others’ traumatic Holocaust experience but as a time when his parents revealed themselves as positive role models. While no direct correlation can be made between the lives of Hugo Mansfeld and the writer Aharon Appelfeld, the imaginary autobiography Flowers of Darkness, as well as other recent works by Appelfeld written about Czernowitz during the war years, exhibit a newfound appreciation of the acculturated German-speaking petit bourgeois, Jewish liberals of Czernowitz among whom Appelfeld’s parents numbered. Such appreciation and representation of these Jews stands in marked contrast to earlier representations of Jewish proponents of German culture in Appelfeld’s writing, such as in The Age of Wonders. As a result, Flowers of Darkness constitutes a major act of reclamation and an important new trend in Appelfeld’s writing. Yulia and Hans Mansfeld’s seemingly banal altruism, love, and embrace of life humanizes the acculturated German-speaking Jews of Czernowitz and makes the sad fate of the majority of them fresh once again, even for those previously desensitized to the Holocaust. As a result, Flowers of Darkness and other late works constitute an important new layer in Appelfeld’s corpus.

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NOTES 1. For discussions of Appelfeld’s literary development leading up to the publication of Ashan, see Avner Holtzman, “Darkho shel Aharon Apelfeld el ha-kovetz ‘ashan,’” in Bein kfor le-ashan mekhkarim be-yetzirato shel Aharon Apelfeld, ed. Yizhak Ben-Mordechai and Iris Parush (Be’er Sheva: Universitat Ben Guryon, 1987), 83–97; Michael Gluzman, “Zikaron ve-ivaron Apelfeld ve-ha-politikah shel ha-impresionizm,” Mikan 5 (2005), 89–99. 2. Fuller discussion of literary trends at the time of Appelfeld’s emergence can be found in Gershon Shaked, Ha-siporet ha-ivrit 1880–1980, vol. 4 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993), 14–188. For a detailed discussion of Appelfeld’s literary emergence in the early 1960s as part of a new wave in Israeli fiction, see Gershon Shaked, Gal hadash ba-siporet ha-ivrit (Merhavyah: Sifriyat po’alim, 1970), 11–86, 149–67. For an alternative discussion of this new wave’s emergence, see Nurit Gertz, Khirbet khiza’ah ve-ha-boker she-la-mokhorat (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1984). 3. For more on the Eichmann Trial and the impact it had upon Israeli society, see Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, trans. Ora Cummings with David Herman (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 237; for a primary source account documenting this shift in real time, see Haim Gouri, Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann, trans. Michael Swirsky (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004). 4. Appelfeld’s novella Katrina, which is narrated by its eponymous non-Jewish protagonist and is set partially in Czernowitz, constitutes one important exception. A full discussion of the geotemporal contours of Appelfeld’s corpus can be found in Yigal Schwartz, Aharon Appelfeld (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), 31–94. For a useful volume combining a history of Czernowitz’s Jewish community with a memoir of prewar and wartime Jewish life there, see Zvi Yavetz, Tshernovitz sheli: Makom she-hayyu bo anashim u-sefarim (Or yehudah: Dvir, 2007). For a relevant review of this work by Appelfeld see Aharon Appelfeld, “A City That Was and Is No Longer,” Haaretz, May 3, 2008, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ ShArt.jhtml?itemNO=961207 (accessed November 24, 2008). 5. For further biographical information see Gila Ramras-Rauch, Aharon Appelfeld: The Holocaust and Beyond (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 3–12. For life-writing supplying additional biographical information, see Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a Life, trans. Aloma Halter (New York: Shocken Books, 2004); Aharon Appelfeld, A Table for One (London: Toby Press, 2004); Aharon Appelfeld, Masot be-guf rishon (Jerusalem: Hasifriya Hatzionit, 1979). 6. Schwartz, Aharon Appelfeld, 8–11. 7. The novella The Ice Mine serves as a prominent example of a work treating wartime Czernowitz. For analysis of this work see Philip Hollander, “Building Bridges Destined to Fall: Biological and Literary Paternity in Appelfeld’s The Ice Mine,” in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse, ed. Justin Daniel Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint, and Rachel Rubenstein (Boston: Harvard Center for Jewish Studies, 2008), 357–69.

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8. Yigal Schwartz, Aharon Appelfeld, 14–25. 9. Yigal Schwartz, Aharon Appelfeld, 23. 10. For additional readings of The Age of Wonders, see Dan Miron, Pinkhas patuakh (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat poalim, 1979); Schwartz, Aharon Appelfeld. 11. Mischling is a pejorative German term used to indicate individuals of mixed German-Jewish ancestry. 12. See Zvi Yavetz, Tshernovitz sheli, 21–32. 13. See Aharon Applefeld, Story of a Life, 92–93. 14. For a discussion of non-Jewish women who served Jews and their ambivalent attitudes toward their employers, see Ilana Rosen, “Kri’ah sifrutit-tarbutit shel dmut ha-omenet be-yetzirato shel Aharon Apelfeld,” Mikan (January 2005), 57–65. 15. When he inquired about my use of the term future perfect in reference to fiction in a language that in a strict sense does not have such a tense following my oral delivery of an earlier version of this article, Ezra Mendelsohn made the need for this clarification evident to me. I am grateful for his question. 16. Dan Miron, Introduction to Preliminaries by S. Yizhar (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2007). 17. Dan Miron, Introduction, 23. 18. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah (Jerusalem: Keter, 2006), 234. 19. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 264. 20. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 179. 21. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 151. 22. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 244. 23. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 48. 24. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 49. 25. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 172–73. 26. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 252. 27. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 252, 253. 28. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 256. 29. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 257. 30. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 26. 31. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 202. 32. Aharon Appelfeld, Pirkhei ha-afelah, 203.

8 Dem Oyle Regls Tokhter The Poetic Pilgrimage of Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman Leye Lipsky

Poet, educator, writer of children’s literature, graphic artist, song stylist, Yiddish territorialist, and community activist, Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman has also secured a place for herself in the annals of Yiddish folk music. Her popular volume of songs, Zumerteg (Summer days),1 is a vade mecum for lovers of Yiddish who find in the language something to sing about. The songs contain within their melodic strophes brooding and wistful turns on love and youth lost and retrieved. “Harbstlied” (“Autumn song,” 22–23), a plaintive yet uplifting meditation on mutability and deferred dreams, has become her signature piece, an anthem for those who inhabit a spiritual Yiddishland. Her songs, however, are not my focus, nor will I address here her phantasmagoric dreamscapes, her take on her grandmother’s tkhines (prayers of supplication for women), her quotidian observations—including a meditation on her daughter’s slow but graceful gait—her jeremiads on the sad course of contemporary history. As the first language conference in Czernowitz was to become the defining moment in the modern history of the Yiddish language, so would it become a milestone for the Schaechter and Gottesman families and their successive generations of journalists, linguists, and poets. Her brother, Mordkhe Schaechter (1927–2007), was a key figure in Yiddish language planning, including efforts to modernize and normalize its orthography. Because Schaechter-Gottesman’s ideological lineage is implicated in every poetic act and because both her spiritual and genealogical lines of descent can be traced to the Czernowitz Conference, I will first address her familial background and the local inflections of her Bukoviner style. Subsequently, it is to the Modernist lexicon and the epistemological engagement in her canon, as elaborated through four collections of poetry,2 that I turn my attention. 111

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Schaechter-Gottesman’s oeuvre boasts many instances of “occasional verse,” a poetic acknowledgement of an event, momentous and public or intimate and personal: the killing fields of Cambodia (“Ven di tsayt is greyt” [“When the time is right”], Sharey 76) and the “Bienale 1985 in Vitni Muzey” [“Biennale 1985 in the Whitney Museum”], Perpl 67 both occasion dedicated poems. In “Farshpetikt” (“Tardy”) the speaker revels in the delinquent thrill of arriving late to a lecture: “Kh’vel zikh nokh onhern iber genug reyd./ melitses, shvokhim” (“I’ll have heard more than enough speeches,/ Florid language, compliments”) (Perpl 110). A threnody on September 11 is written in the folk tradition of disaster commemoration.3 Pertinent to our topic at hand, a full complement of poems pays homage, directly or obliquely, to the conference and to its legacy. The poem “Gininger—tsu nile” (“Gininger—at Ne’ile” [“at the closing of the gate,” from the Yom Kippur liturgy], Perpl 122–23) is a tender meditation on her brother’s deathbed vigil for his beloved linguistics professor, an attendee at the conference. The subtitle of the poem “Yene shtot” (“That city”) discloses a private occasion: “Leyenendik a sovetishe broshur vegn der bukovine” (“Reading a Soviet brochure about Bukovina”). Here the speaker laments the travel flyer’s erasure of the Jewish fact: no Sadegerer, no Boyaner, no Shotzer rebbe, no Itsik Manger (Sharey 77). Another such occasional poem is commemorative of the 90th anniversary of the conference: “Krik ken Tsernovits?: lezikorn der shprakh-konferents, 1908” (“Return to Czernowitz?: In memory of the language conference”).4 Here the speaker confirms the old saw that one cannot go home again even as she recalls the partisan polemic, the heated debate, the vibrant sights and haunting sounds of prewar Czernowitz. Her memories are padlocked, “dos shlisele ergets farleygt,/ Oysgrobn itst di yorn/ Un onton di yerushe-keyt?” (“Mislaid is the key,/ merely to excavate the years/ And wear the mantle of our legacy?”). The pervasive intellectual and civilizing force of Yiddish had long since retired from the scene: “Der park—baberglt, bavaldikt,/Di shtoltse ‘Habsburgs hey’/ Vi yidishe lider hobn geklungen/ Un debates in yeder aley” (“The park—hilly, forested/ The proud ‘Hapsburgs’ hey/ As Yiddish songs have sounded/ And debates along every way”). This same burden of loss and recovery insists itself pervasively into her canon. An imagined return to a childhood home in Czernowitz, and with it, the retrieval of history, are foiled by a loss of memory: “Ikh vil loyfn ahin—iz farmoyert der shtroz;/ Kh’vil klapn in fenster—felt dort dos gloz;/Kh’vil epes shrayen—gedenk ikh nit vos./ Fargesn. Fargesn. Fargesn” (“I want to run there—the road is bounded by a wall/ I want to bang on the window—no glass there at all/ I want to scream—what, I cannot recall/ Forgotten. Forgotten. Forgotten.”) (“Fargesn,” Steshkes 40).

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As presented in Peretz’s keynote speech at the conference—“mir viln undzer fenster hobn; undzer zelbshtendikn motiv in der felker-simphonye”5 (“we want our own window; our independent motif in the folk-symphony”)— his dream for Yiddish was to be fully realized and subsequently suspended by the murderous forces of history. In the Czernowitz of Schaechter-Gottesman’s youth, Yiddish had a window of its own from which issued its variously dulcet and cacophonous music; what is more, it was brought down into the noisy street, the tree-lined boulevard, and the marketplace. In her poem, “Er hot gehat di skhiye” (“He had the great honor”), Schaechter-Gottesman offers a playful reading of the agenda at the conference, that is, to turn Yiddish from “shifkhe” to “pritse,” from handmaiden to well-fed member of the landed gentry (Perpl 120–21). She also writes about the passion which brought her father, Khayim-Binyomin, territorialist and devotee of Khayim Zhitlovsky and his brand of Romantic and Socialist Yiddishism, to hear the fierce polemic and to witness the combative partisanship of the literati and ideologues of his generation: “heyse taynes—fayln gefloygn/ kider-viders” (“Heated arguments—hurled arrows/ delegates at loggerheads”). As she tells it, her father, “ersht aroys fun [der Stanisler] yeshive . . . azoy vi Khonen in Dibik” (“a newly-minted graduate of the [Stanislav] Yeshiva, like Khonen in [Sh. An-ski’s play] The Dybbuk”) trekked to Czernowitz as if on passionate and epiphanic pilgrimage to a holy site: “[Der] oyle-regl” iz “gekumen derzen dos/ emese likht” (“[The] pilgrim came to glimpse at the/ true beacon 121”). Itsik Paner corroborates Schaechter-Gottesman’s idiom of religious zealotry: “Far im iz di yidishe- toyre, vos er hot mekabl geven afn Czernowitzer bargSine, geven a lebens-neytikayt farn yidishn kiem” (“The Yiddish Torah which he had received at the Czernowitz Mount Sinai was for him a vital necessity for the survival of Yiddish”).6 How fitting is it, then, that a foundation for Yiddish language and culture—“Fundatsye far yiddisher shprakhkultur”—would be instituted in his name. Binyomin remained aloof from the internecine skirmishes which threatened to undermine the conference. Yet at his tender age, he might have already done battle with the “provintsiele maskilim, hiperhebraistn, asimilatorn, un glat grobe yungen” (“provincial maskilim, hyper-Hebraists, assimilationists, and simple ignoramuses”), as Mordkhe Schaechter named this motley crew of anti-Yiddishists.7 At its twenty-year anniversary, the success of the conference was a matter of endless conjecture. Was the conference but “the first mobilization”?8 Did it fast forward to the tenth item on the agenda—recognition accorded Yiddish, including the contentious matter of the definite article (a or the ethnonational language)—and remain stymied there? Did it but serve to show that the enemy at the gates was really the enemy within the ranks? No

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matter. For Schaechter-Gottesman, as she reveals in an essay on the sixtieth anniversary of the conference, her father’s long trek was a joyous one: it satisfied his simple desire to “zikh freyen mitn yontef fun yidish” (“to revel in the festival for Yiddish”). It is here we learn that if an errant anti-Yiddishist visited his home, the mild-mannered Binyomin would unceremoniously stand up and show him the door (Durkhgelebt 273, 275).9 One marvels at the confluence of the various streams of historical circumstance which determined Shaechter-Gottesman’s provenance and strong sense of place. Born in Vienna in 1920, she grew up in Czernowitz. She imbibed folksongs with her mother’s milk; her father educated her to the love of the language. Her father, Binyomin, was born in 1890 in Zhelin, moved to Deletin in Galitsia, and to Vienna, where he would marry Lifshe Gottesman in 1919. A graduate of the Stanisler Yeshiva, he was a descendent of generations of shokhtim and Horodenker khasidim.10 In her memoirs, Durkhgelebt a velt: zikhroynes (A Full Life: Memoirs),11 her mother, Lifshe SchaechterWidman, recorded in lively prose, details of the family’s life in her birthplace, di Zvinyetshke and in Vienna, Czernowitz, Bucharest, and finally New York. According to Dr. Schaechter, the memoirs are “a zeltn rayeler opshpigl funem mizrekh-galitsishn un tsofn bukoviner Yidish fun sof 19stn yorhundert” (“a rare and dependable reflection of east Galician and north Bukovina Yiddish of the end of the nineteenth century”) (“Editorial Note” to Durkhgelebt 5). Schaechter-Gottesman’s own literary Yiddish is punctuated by words from the Galician-Podolian-Romanian dialect, including elided letters and syllables, which merit a glossary in the collection, Sharey. Schaechter-Gottesman remembers typing this archive, of which she is now custodian, in this inversion of filial responsibility: “Ikh bin haynt di mame fun dayn frier” (“I am today the mother of your early days”) (“S’letste bletl,” [“The last page”], Sharey 42). In what her mother would call in her memoir “der ershter akt”(“the first act”) in the family’s wartime saga (Durkhgelebt 248), Binyumin was arrested by the Russian military on September 14, 1940, beaten, imprisoned after a trial on trumped-up charges, and finally driven into Siberian exile from which he never returned. In wartime the beloved Dniester River, the “Nester,”12 or, further truncated, the “Ester,” had become a “khvalikn keyver,” “an undulating grave” (“Mir zenen aroys” [“We left”], Perpl 85). The poem “Zey zenen gegangen” (“They walked”) (Perpl 84) chronicles, in documentary detail, the wartime trajectory of some 80,000 Jews in the Bukovina: deportation in October 1941 to Transnistria, to almost certain death. This would have been SchaechterGottesman’s fate but for serendipity and the acts of sacrifice of a Jewish family in Korelivke, in eastern Galicia. Her sense of history is both toponymic: “Krishtshatik, Kisilev, Borovets/ . . . Boyan” and onomastic: “Di Sheynholt-

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ses,/ di Kenigsbergs . . ./ di Krayners, di Kantors.” Demographic historical record stands alone, without commentary or figuration. These names and places—“ale shtet, shtetlakh un derfer fun der Bukovine/ un Basarabye” (all the cities, towns, and villages in the Bukovina and Bessarabia)—constitute the local inflections of her inherited nusekh. Schaechter-Gottesman volleys a challenge to her reader, a forthright question, with which she rather skeptically measures the accessibility of her poetry: “Farshteyt den mayn nusekh ver?” (“Who, then, understands my nusekh?”) (“Fun fremder nakht arayn” [“From out of the strange night”], Perpl 127). Nusekh—a communally received liturgical or stylistic tradition— brooks no rubato dissent or idiosyncratic improvisation. Hence a nusekh of one is not a nusekh at all. Yet she chooses here “nusekh” over “idyom,” “stil” or “shteyger” (synonymous variants), because it drags in tow the imaginative spirit, the intellectual currency and the cultural accretions of her collective circumstance. Bialik famously named Mendele the “creator of the nusekh.” Bialik writes that pride of place, including “tipn, folks-psikhologye, naturshilderung un landshaft” (“type, folk psychology, depiction of nature and landscape”) informs the artist. What he calls, “posheter, literarisher nusekh” (“simple, literary style”) anchors one in a specific landscape, even as it allows one creative latitude: “nusekh git dem kinstler nit nor dem festn bodn . . . er git im oykh luft un roym” (“nusekh gives the artist not only a firm terrain, it also affords him the expansiveness of air and space”).13 The Bukovina is the landscape from which Schaechter-Gottesman fashions her poetic persona and against which all poetic narratives are played. Her poems are palimpsests written over the still-discernable erasures of khasidic dynasties and Manger’s irreverent medresh. Her ort bavustzayn, her consciousness of place, was further informed by the idyllic Carpathian mesholim (fables) of her beloved compatriot Eliezer Shteynbarg.14 She has introduced into the repertoire of contemporary singers the traditional shepherd’s pastoral, “Basarabye,” which sings of the seductions of her native region to the haunting strains of the pan flute.15 While Schaechter-Gottesman observes nusekh-like stock description in others—“Yede mit zeyere epitetn” (“Each with his own epithets”) (“Bergelsonishe struktur” [“Bergelsonian structure”], Sharey 12)—there is nothing “skarbove,” that is, classically formulaic or trite, about Schaechter-Gottesman’s metaphors. Not for her the “fartige [sic], tsugegreyte bilder,” the ready-made figures so reviled by the Introspectivists.16 Her images are as bold as they are fresh, whether she animates the night—“In droysn voyet di nakht/ mit velvishe tseyn” (“Outside the night howls/ through its wolf-like teeth”) (“Af der rozeve gas” [“On the rose-colored street”], Sharey 34)—or objectifies, however empathically, the speaker: “Shtendik mit shnay mitsushneyen” (“Always

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to snow with the snow”) (“A muz aza” [“The way it must be”], Stezhkes 51). Hers is a singular voice within a chorus of folk expression; that voice is by turns whimsical, cerebral, enchanted, restless, skeptical, and darkly existential. Her nusekh, then, in Bialik’s determinedly literary application, tolerates some measure of lyric deviation. It is at once mode and variation within the literary mandate of the mode; a communal prototype, with universal access, and a private idiolect, whose nuanced symbology must be decoded: “Tsi vet ver/ deshifrirn mayn ksav?” (“Who will decipher my script?”). Here her handwriting metonymically stands for her intention (“Du poet” [“You, poet”] Perpl 63). The rich overlay of reference and allusion includes equally her grandfather’s prayers and the political instruction which obtained in Yiddishist circles. Her poetic mode is at once folkstimlekh (Peretz’s “in a folk manner”) and belletristic, drawing on, respectively, an aggregate of native custom and high Modernist precedent. Schaechter-Gottesman’s body of poetic work shows an abiding, if not programmatic, interest in how, as sentient being, one knows and records the world. Her trusty notebook contains within its covers a private and personallyassociative notation of the perceived world, simulacra captured, like pressed flowers, between its pages: “farklemen di teg tsvishn bleter”:/ . . . a rege geven, a makhshove/ a prat derzen, a vort/ . . . a mentsh, a gesheyenish, an ort” (“to catch the days between its leaves:/ a moment gone by, a thought/ a detail discerned, a word/ . . . a person, an event, a place”) (“Fir a togbikhl!” [“Carry a diary!”], Perpl 32–33). Her poetry registers her phenomenological encounter with the apprehended world. Her personal aesthetic also includes an autotelic concern with the poem’s own invention. These practices position her squarely in the varied tradition of Yiddish Modernism. While she shuns literary agendas and credos, she tacitly enforces, and newly invigorates, many of the articles of faith in the In Zikh (Introspectivist) manifesto. Schaechter-Gottesman is engaged with formal matters. “Eynvortik lid” (“One-word poem”) indicates her speaker’s desire for a “tsimtsum,” an austerity, a contraction, which distills poetic essence and lends a spare eloquence to her phrasing: “Gepatrt vifl reyd/ tsulib dem eynvortikn lid” (“How much talk have I expended/ in aid of a one-word poem?”) (Sharey 10). She endorses the Imagistic “hardness” of early Modernism and its attendant rejection of flabby, abstract diction. What is more, her speaker enters the scene with simplicity and artlessness on her lips: “Pashtes iz geven mayn ershte shprakh/ on kuntsn, umkinstlekh” (“Simplicity was my first tongue/ without artifice or contrivance”) (“Kh’bin aroys af a shpatsir” [“I went out for a walk”] (Sharey 13). Her canon includes poems reflexive of lexical choice: “Shvil” is an extended meditation on the denotative, yet nuanced, meaning of this German word shvul whose Yiddish approximations all but frustrate the speaker for their inadequacy

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to the task: “Heys—tsu veynik, dushne—tsu fil” (“Hot—too little, stuffy—too much”) (Sharey 118). The boundaries of Schaechter-Gottesman’s language indeed define the boundaries of her world; Yiddish is both the tenor and the vehicle of her poetic program. She also negotiates rhythmic matters. In the poem, “Shores fraye, ekste” (“Lines free, unbranded”), the contending strains of traditional prosody and free form are presented as a quarrel between parents and their “folgevdike bas-yekhide” (“docile only-daughter”). The acquiescent daughter follows traditional metrical practice, but longs to stray from its rigid strictures and yield to the heady abandon of open form, to “frank un fray poeteven” (“free and unencumbered poeticize”) (Sharey 19). What is but a flirtation in this poem, later becomes the entrenched practice of an adept vers libriste. Yet in the poem, “Grafisher plonter” (“Graphic confusion”), the “plonter fun linyes” (“tangle of lines”) is paradoxically told in the regular beats of the heroic couplet (Sharey 49). The above poems metapoetically name their own constituent features. In the poem, “Di toyb fun der ode” (“The dove of the ode”), Sutskever’s ode comes to life in the spirit of a bird who hovers over the poet/speaker. In the poem, “Du poet” (“You, poet”), the speaker removes the mask of artifice to ponder her own human face: “Du, poet . . . vi gut s’iz mir bakant dayn ponim,/ klor yeder traf” (“You, poet . . . how familiar to me is your face/ clear each syllable”) (Perpl 63). Schaechter-Gottesman’s poetry is rife with allusion to Modernism’s pantheon and to its lesser deities. She uses their themes and lexicon, both in tribute (“Ester” [“Shumiatcher Hirshbeyn”], Perpl 80) and in parody (“Kurts—Moyshe Leyb” [“In short—Moishe Leib”], Perpl 64). She echoes, interpretively, the refrain of Halpern’s “Memento Mori”: “Tsi vet es men dos gleybn?” (“Will anyone believe it?”)17 becomes “Ver volt dos gleybn af Moyshe Leybn?” (“Who would [dare] believe this of Moishe Leib?”). She out-Halperns Halpern in this biting parody. Schaechter-Gottesman reveals both her erudition and her affiliation: “I think of myself as post-Inzikhist, partly Impressionist and partly experimental. . . . I admire the cleverness and wit of Yankev Glatshteyn, and the bold expressionist lines of M. L. Halpern.”18 Hence she situates herself at a nexus, one that Chana Kronfeld tags, “liminal modernism”: on the threshold between Impressionism and Expressionism.19 Schaechter-Gottesman’s sensual notations are private, figuring a unique correspondence of word to world. Her poetry presents symbols—rich with the associations and suggestions so celebrated by the Inzikhistn (“Introspektivizm” 8–10). She draws attention to the poem’s weighty metaphoricity: “Ikh hob libersht/ di shmole krume geselekh/ fardreyt in bloe soydes/ . . . ongelodene mit remozim/ vi aropgekumene oreme-layt/ vos betn nisht ken

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nedoves” (“I prefer/ the narrow, crooked little streets/ twisted with blue secrets/ laden with hints/ like down-and-out, poor folk/ who do not ask for alms”) (“Ikh hob libersht,” Perpl 98). The suggestiveness is further elaborated as insubstantial, “on mamoshes on tokh” and finally culminates in a vague associative state: “Ikh hob libersht/dos ayngebakene benken nokh mayne vayte heymen . . ./ un s’iz nisht klor/ tsu vos un tsu vemen ikh benk” (“I prefer/ the well-rehearsed ache for my far-away home . . ./ [even though] it is unclear/ for what and for whom I long”). Here the meaning of the chain of suggestions— geselekh—soydes—oreme-layt—vayte heymen (Small streets—secrets— poor people—far-away home)—is not an obvious one. The poem’s title is typically for Schaechter-Gottesman the repository for her synaesthetic tropes: “Bloer vint,” “Royte oyfdernakhtn” (“Blue wind,” “Red evenings”) (Sharey 56 and 55) and “Di farb fun benkshaft” (“The color of longing”) (Perpl 26). This transference of the sense modalities pervades her work. The poem, “Mitn reyakh fun tsuzog” (“With the smell of promise”) proffers a haunting Proustian metaphor, evocative of mood and redolent of desire: “S’glust zikh papir,/ . . . ikh gar nokh papir,/ reyn, glatik vays,/ se zol fartoybn di khushim” (“I lust after paper/ . . . I yearn for paper,/ clean, smooth, white/ so that it deafen the senses”) (Perpl 61). The blank sheet of paper here is a tabula rasa that beckons, seductively, to be inscribed. To address the “khushim” (“senses”) mentioned above is quite possibly the central concern of Schaechter-Gottesman’s poetry. These senses are variously lulled—“Ale khushim ayngelyulyet” (“All the senses lulled to sleep”) (“A foygl ruft, a foygl vekt” [“A bird calls, a bird awakens”], Stezhkes 39) or turbulent: “vikhtike dates, khoyves un vey—/ zey yogn zikh um in a khushim gedrey (“important dates, debts and woe—/ chase each other in a sense imbroglio”) (“In hinerplet” [“In a daze”], Stezhkes 15) and finally discarded in favor of thought: “oysgeton di ongeshpante khushim./ kumen krik eyntsikvayz/ reyones, trakhtenishn” (“took off the tightly-fitting senses./ they return one by one/ reflections, thoughts”) (“Krik fun der nesiye” [“Home from the trip”], Perpl 88). The act of perception—what the Inzikhistn termed, in a typical daytshmerism, emfinden or discovery of phenomena (“Introspektivizm” 6)—is Schaechter-Gottesman’s poetic given. The world exists as it did for the Inzikhistn, “insofar as it is perceived introspectively” (17). This signpost of phenomenological epistemology is also an article in the In zikh credo: “Di velt iz do un mir zenen a teyl fun ir. Far undz ekzistirt ober di velt bloyz af azoy fil af vifl zi shpiglt zikh op in undz” (“The world is here and we are a part of it. For us, however, the world exists insofar as it is reflected in us”) (“Introspektivizm” 5–6).20 Her poem “Lebedike imazhn” (“Lively images”) refractively “mirrors” the manifesto both in sum and substance: “hashores/

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ibersortirn/ in mayne private/kolirn alding/vos se shpiglt zikh antkegn/ af viflerey ofanim” (“assumptions/ sort through/ in my private/ colors all things/ that are opposite are mirrored/ in myriad ways”) (Perpl 55). The opening lines of this poem reveal her broader epistemological journey which begins in visual wakefulness and ends in an act of cognition: “Ofn dos oyg/ tsum arum . . . tsunoyfboyen trakhtenishn/ shpiln af/ moyekh-klavishn/ meglikhkaytn” (“Open your eye/ to your surroundings . . . to build together thoughts/ to play on the mind’s keyboard/ of possibilities”). Her speaker in the poem, “Keyner” (“No one”) defers to her “ineveynikstn ikh” (Perpl 36), her inmost self, her personal vista, which is as deep as it is wide, her “inerlikhe panorame” (“internal panorama”) to borrow yet another term from the Introspectivist poetic world view (“Introspektivizm” 6). Schaechter-Gottesman tags her own poetry “introspective”21; yet she resists the Introspectivist’s solipsism as she does the self-apostrophes of Halpern’s capacious ego. The Introspectivist’s idiom reflects a chaotic and ever-shifting field of sensations: “kalaydoskopish . . . oder tsetumlt” (“kaleidoscopic . . . or bewildered) (6). This is particularly suited to the urban scene of which SchaechterGottesman is a keen observer. Her catalogue of the city’s vertical and horizontal planes constitutes a stock-taking of the phenomenal world: the el, tunnels, subway, skyscrapers, billboards. They dazzle her in a kaleidoscopic rush of images: “brikn, koymens, firmes/ adurkh, ariber/ af reder” (“bridges, chimneys, firms/ through, over/ on wheels”) (“Tchadnepl” [“Smog”] Perpl 109). What was in Stezhkes a guilty secret—“Shemst zikh oystsuzogn,/ az der koyln-porekh/ gazolin roykh/ der vilder getuml, hastik getrib/ iz dayn heym—un du host zi lib” (“You are ashamed to disclose/ that the coal dust/ the gasoline stench/ the wild din,/ the impetuous drive/ is your home—on her you thrive.”)—gives way to an unapologetic celebration of the metropolis. The title of this poem, “Mayn heym, nyu-york” (“My home, New York”) (72) is a mirrored reflection of Halpern’s “Zlochev, mayn heym”(“Zlochev, my home”).22 Her speaker out-Halperns Halpern in her self-destructive love for the brutalities of her adoptive city. The aforementioned poem, “Krik ken Czernowitz?” recalls Halpern’s “Benk aheym” (“Long for home”).23 While the latter was penned with a raw, but qualified, hatred of Halpern’s town of origin, Schaechter-Gottesman’s poem laments the changed face of her onceglorious city. Back in New York, the wail of the sirens is both lullabye and piercing affront to the night (“Sirenes in der nakht” [“Sirens in the night”], Perpl 104). Many poems are read most fruitfully in the light of SchaechterGottesman’s interest, education—she studied art in Vienna (1936–1938) and in Bucharest (1945–1946)—and achievement in the graphic arts. Indeed she

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inaugurates her career with this poet—painter identification: “tunkt [di trafn] in pastel kolirn” (“dip [the syllables] in pastel colors”) (“Poet,” Stezhkes 11). In the poem, “Di statue” (“The statue”) she turns her attention to the sculpted surfaces of “di shtaltne statue/ baleygt mit grine patine” (“the stately statue/ covered in green patina”) and to the portion of “brondzene eybikeyt” (“bronzed eternity”) that it confers on its subject (Perpl 103); coincidentally, the poem is a well-wrought artifact. Her palette is overarchingly a dark one, corresponding to her “makhshoves tunkele” (“dark thoughts”) (“Mitn fartunkltn barg siluet” [“With the mountain’s obscure silhouette”], Stezhkes 37). Yet she often surprises the reader with bold bands of vibrant color: the “laykhte pasteln tsezingen kolir” (“light pastel burst out in color”) of “Grafishe plonter” (“Graphic confusion”) (Sharey 49). The organizing principle is often a chromatic one: “kolirn kom-kom . . ./ tsereytste roytn kegenen zikh . . ./ aza bild halt ikh shtendik in moln” (“colors barely there . . ./ provocative reds contend with each other/ . . . such an image do I continually paint”) (“Aza bild” [“Such an image”] Sharey 21). Visually-conceived tropes often run to profusion and plenty: “der tog iz . . ./ Vi a milgroym . . ./ ongepikevet mit guter pratse” (“the day is/ . . . like a pomegranate . . ./ chock full of good labor”) (“Gib mir a roiz” [“Give me a rose”], Perpl 40). Perpl contains a cycle of ekphrastic poems which describe, or “give voice to,” a particular work of art or its textures, lines, spaces, properties of representation, perspective, and configuration. “Nokh der oysshtelung” (“After the exhibition”) is one such reflection on painterly values: “formes shvarts megushm/ linyes on shum tsamen/ varfen zikh un beygn . . . raysn zikh un heybn” (shapes crudely black,/ untamed lines/ hurl themselves and bend . . . strive and heave) (70). The aquarelle self portrait, whose subject leaps noisily out of its frame—“aroysgeshpart fun rem”—to confront the speaker (“Kh’gedenk dem portret,” [“I remember the portrait”] 60). In the poem, “Abstraktsye,” the speaker ekes out a description which is appropriately elusive and nonrepresentational: “. . . a baynander fun materye-shtromen/ in eygn oysgeboyte formen/. . . der mindster zeykher fun a shotn felt./a bild fun same soydes oysgevebt” (“. . . streams of matter flow together/ in their own constructed shapes/ gone the faintest trace of a shadow/ a picture woven of the most secret of secrets”) (66). Elsewhere scenes are arranged collaboratively by artist and subject: “Di toybn afn trotuar/ tseykhenen di shotns fun mayn/derzeung/. . . mikh nemen zey arayn in der kompositsye” (“Doves on the sidewalk/ design the shades of my/ sight/. . . implicate me in their composition”) (“Toybn afn trotuar” [“Doves on the sidewalk”] 112). In Sharey she also deploys a fund of graphic terms, as in the “still life” of table, vase, and chrysanthemum (“Shtillebn” [“Still life”] 112); the “black on white” of her

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father on the snowy plains of Siberia is an arresting image: “A vayse flakh— vays af vays,/. . . der tate,/ a gefalener, ayngegrobener/ in ayz./shvarts af vays (“A white plain—white on white,/. . . my father,/ fallen,/ deeply buried/ in ice/ white on black”) (“Shvarts af vays” [“Black on white”] 67). The stark visual antinomies demanded by the most dire of human circumstances is unlike the chiaroscuro nuance of light and shade one finds elsewhere in her poetry. Finally, neither the inward turn of the Introspectivists nor the tortured lyric assertions of the Expressionists afford her definitive answers to the questions posed throughout her canon, most notably, “Tsu vos?” (“To what end?”) (“Bloyz Linyes” [“Merely lines”], Perpl 68).24 The resolution, if not the answer, to this query might lie in a signature and recurrent word in SchaechterGottesman’s lexicon: “elehey.” One must, as in the French existentialist mode, imagine life comme si, “as if” it had meaning. She derives her own poetic meaning from “di farplontertkeyt fun der velt” (the entanglement of the world).25 “Plonter in nakht” (“Confusion/tangle in the night”) is a seething cauldron of contending directions, lines, and focal points: “A plonter fun linyes/. . . tsiklen vorones in shvartsn spiral;/ s’reytlen zikh flekn tsevorfnerley” (“A tangle of lines/. . . a swirl of crows in a black spiral/ these flecks grow red as they scatter”) (Perpl 29). In the poem, “Nokh alts in untererdkanaln” (“Still in subterranean channels”) Schaechter-Gottesman’s speaker wrests this truth from the dark underground: try as she might “funanderklaybn/ nor onkhapn dem ek fun fodem—shver,/ muz plonter vayter plonter blaybn” (“to make sense of [this muddle]/ at least to grab the end of the thread—difficult/ the tangle must remain a tangle”) (Sharey 70). Hence she embraces the world with all its evasions, confusions, and anguish, as in the poem, “Maskim” (“Agreed”): “Maskim mit der velt/ Maskim mit der zun/ Maskim mitn vint” (“I agree with the world/ I agree with the sun/ I agree with the wind”) (Steshkes 52). Rosa Goldshteyn, one of the early poets included in Ezra Korman’s anthology of women poets, writes: “[di] Yidishe muze, iz a klog-muter . . ./ A shtekn in hant, afn pleytse—a klimek” (“[the] Yiddish muse is a mother of lamentation . . ./A stick in hand, on her back, a bundle”) who is solicitous of the well-being of an entire people.26 Schaechter-Gottesman’s very personal muse, by contrast, is exacting, irascible, “blood-sapping,” relentless, yet well-intentioned and ultimately, forgiven: “Mayn muze is a beyze,/ Nor di kavones ire—gut,/ meyle, bin ikh moykhl ir, vos zi tsapt mayn blut” (“Mayn muze” [“My muse”], Stezhkes 21). Schaechter-Gottesman’s muse has also inspired her to hitherto unimagined metaphors and to the beauty found in unlikely places: a lone bird amid the ruins—(“A foygl ruft, a foygl vekt” [“A bird calls, a bird awakens”], Stezhkes 39)—whose flight cuts an arc across the broad canvas of her poetic oeuvre.

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NOTES 1. Zumerteg: tsvontsik zinglider (Summer days: fifty songs). (New York: Yidisher kultur kongres/Yidish lige, 1990) [2nd ed. 1994; cassette 1991; CD 1999], 22–23. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be cited directly in the text. 2. Der tsvit fun teg: lider un tseykhenungen (The bloom of days: poems and drawings) (New York: Tsiko bikher farlag, 2007); Perpl shlenglt zikh der veg: lider (The winding purple road: songs) (New York: Yidisher kultur kongres/Yidish lige, 2002); Lider (Poems) (Merrick, NY: Cross-Cultural Communications, 1995 [mostly previouslypublished poems with opposing-page translation in English]); Sharey (Dawn) (New York: Farlag matones, 1980); Stezhkes tvishn moyern (Foot-paths amid stone wall) (Tel Aviv: Farlag yisroel bukh, 1972). Subsequent references to these books will be cited directly in the text. 3. Af di gasn fun der shtot (On the streets of the city) CD. (New York: Yiddishland Records, 2003). 4. Mendele (accessed September 20, 1998): http//www.shakti.trincoll.edu~mendele/ vol08/vol08.060. 5. Nakhmen Mayzil, ed. Briv un redes fun Y.L. Peretz (Letters and addresses) (New York: IKUF, 1944 [Vilne: Kletzkin, 1929]), 373. 6. See Itsik Paner’s essay “Di shenste matseyve: (tsu der grindung fun der ‘fundatsye far yidisher shprakhkultur in nomen fun Binyomin Shekhter’)” (“The most beautiful tombstone [in honor of the establishment of the ‘Foundation for Yiddish Culture in the name of Binyomin Schaechter’]”), in Lifshe Schaechterwidman, Durkhgelebt a velt: zikhroynes (Survived a world, memoirs), ed. Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman and Mordkhe Schaechter (New York: Lifshe Vidman-bukhkomitet, 1973), 277. Subsequent references to this book will be cited directly in the text. 7. Mordkhe Schaechter, “Mates Mizeses farteydikung fun der yidisher shprakh: tsum akhtsikstn yoyvl fun der tshernevitser shprakh-konferents” (“Mates Mieses’s defense of Yiddish: in honor of the eightieth anniversary of the Czernowitz language conference”). Excerpts from a talk delivered at the Roosevelt Hotel, Manhattan, March 12, 1988 in Afn shvel 271 (July–September, 1988): 1. This entire speech is translated as an appendix to this volume. 8. Nakhmen Mayzl, “Di ershte mobilizatsye” (“The first mobilization”), Literarishe bleter 35 (1928): 681. See also Zhitlovsky’s oft-cited remark, at the twentieth year landmark, that while the conference failed to implement its practical aspirations, the “spirit of Czernowitz” has inspired the finest achievements of Jewish secular culture. “Czernowitz un der yidishizm” (“Czernowitz and Yiddishism”), Yidishe kultur 20 (May 1958 [Di tsukunft 1928]): 13. 9. “An oyle-regl tsu der Tshernovitser shprakh-conferents” (“A pilgrim to the Czernowitz language conference”), in Durkhgelebt [Afn shvel 185 (July–August, 1968): “Der zekhtsik-yoriker yoyvl fun der Czernowitzer shprakh-conferents” (The 60th anniversary of the Czernowitz language conference)], 273–76. We learn here that Schaechter-Gottesman’s father, intellectually consistent in his secular devotions, resisted appeals by the Znayimer rebbe to enroll in his rabbinical seminar.

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10. Di redaktsye (The editors), Vegn Mortkhe Shekhter un zayn verk (“About Mordkhe Schaechter and his work”) (New York: Yidish lige, 1987), 7. 11. See note 6 for full bibliographic details. Lifshe sang ballads and theater songs produced by activist Leybl Cahane as field recordings in 1954 and issued in 1986 as a cassette entitled Az di furst avek (When you go away). 12. See Falik Lerner’s essay on the maternal and mythopoeic powers of the Dniester River to the residents near its shores: “Nester,” in A basaraber shtetl (Buenos Aires, 1958). 13. The essay cited here is Bialik’s “Yoitser hanusekh” (“Creator of the nusekh”), penned on the occasion of the publication of Mendele Moykher-Sforim’s collected Hebrew prose (1910–1912). I cite here Yud Yud Shvarts’s translation, “Mendele’s nusekh,” in Shriftn: Kh. N. Bialik (New York: Yidish-natsionaler arbeter-farband, distrikt 9, 1946), 81. 14. See Eliezer Shteynbarg, Mesholim: The Jewish Book of Fables, ed. and trans. Curt Leviant (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003). 15. See liner notes for “Basarabye” in the CD, Brave Old World: Beyond the Pale (London: Rounder Select, 1994). 16. Y. Glatshteyn, A. Leyeles, and N. Minkov, “Introspektivizm,” in In zikh: a zamlung introspektive lider (Introspectivism: a collection of introspective poems) (New York: Mayzl, 1919–1920), 9. This prefatory essay would become the In zikh manifesto. All subsequent references will be cited directly in the text. 17. In nyu-york (New York: Farlag matones, 3rd ed., 1954 [1919]), 109. 18. “My Writing,” personal correspondence with the author, 2003. 19. Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentring Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 11. 20. Not the world, but one’s “sense of the world,” as Edmund Husserl put it in his entry, “Phenomenology” for the 1927 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Rpt. in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 2 (1971): 77–90. 21. “My Poetry and Songs” in Conference Proceedings of Di Froyen: Women and Yiddish: Tribute to the Past, Directions for the Future (New York: Jewish Women’s Resource Center, 1997), 80. 22. Moyshe Leyb Halpern, Di goldene pave (The golden peacock). (Cleveland, OH: Farlag grupe yidish, 1924), 16–18. 23. In nyu-york, 78. 24. A few critics have noted the frequent use of this query in her canon. Boris Sandler’s reading is a thoughtful one: “Tsu vos molt er? Tsu vos shraybt er poezye? Tsu vos shaft er muzik? Beyle kumt oys dem ‘tsu vos?’ shteln af . . . ale shites fun ire talantn” (“To what end does the artist paint? To what end does she write poetry? To what end does she create music? That Beyle has occasion to use ‘to what end?’ confirms . . . all the many methods of her talent”). See Boris Sandler, “A naye zamlung lider fun Beyle Shekhter-Gotesman (A new collection of poems by Beyle SchaechterGottesman), Di tsukunft 107: 3–2 (November 2002): 18. 25. Schaechter-Gottesman shares the positive spin on chaos with Glants-Leyeles, who, in an essay, “Poetishe ibershafung” (“Poetic super-creation”), decreed that “chaos and confusion” are the literary matrix from which man will create the world

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anew: “azoy iz di farplontertkeyt fun der velt mit ire ershaynungen gevoren alts greser, alts tunkeler, soydesfuler . . . zol der khaos gegebn vern” (“thus does the confusion of the world with all its phenomena become that much bigger, darker, more full of mystery . . . let chaos be ‘given’ [as a phenomenal datum]”) (In zikh 1:1 (January 1920): 36, 41. 26. Yidishe dikhterins antologye (Chicago: Farlag L. M. Shteyn, 1927), 45.

9 The Painter as Ethnographer Maurycy Minkowski and the European Yiddish Intelligentsia before World War I Zachary M. Baker

What connections, if any, might one be able to draw between the Czernowitz Conference and the visual arts? The main focus of the proceedings there, narrowly viewed, was language politics within the matrix of the competing nationalisms—including Jewish nationalisms—of Central and Eastern Europe. Political debates on language often elide the broader cultural concerns of linguistic communities. Not surprisingly, then, a perusal of the 300-page compilation, Di ershte yidish shprakh-konferents (The first Yiddish language conference), published by the YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute) in 1931, yields only a couple of fleeting references to art and artists. For example, in the plenary speech that I. L. Peretz (1859–1915) delivered on the afternoon of August 31, 1908, he proposed that the conference organizers establish a central office for their nascent movement. Among the numerous charges for this office would be the “publication and financial support (shtitse) for the publication of cultural and art works,” “establishing professional associations of writers and artists,” and serving as a liaison or arbitrator (farmitlen) “between writers and artists on the one hand, and publishers, booksellers, and the general public on the other.”1 Peretz’s proposal for a central office foundered during the deliberations that ensued, but his advocacy for artists and the dissemination of their creations likely had little to do with its failure. Rather, the notion of erecting a bureaucratic superstructure offered little appeal to delegates whose fractiousness and ideological cleavages made it impossible for them even to coalesce around a set of basic principles, never mind set up an organization that would act on behalf of these principles.2 Alongside Peretz, the lawyer, philologist, and journalist Noyekh Prilutski (1882–1941) was another of the roughly seventy delegates at Czernowitz. 125

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Notwithstanding the shortcomings of the conference on the pragmatic level, Prilutski came away convinced that the proceedings at Czernowitz transcended their ostensible focus as a “conference for the Yiddish language.” “Rather, the program of the conference permits one to say that its name was excessively narrow,” he wrote about a month after it was held. “In reality, the daily agenda of the Czernowitz gathering also included issues relating to Yiddish literature and the press, as well as the Yiddish theater. This leads to the observation that this was a conference for Yiddish culture in general.”3 In this appraisal of Czernowitz, however, Prilutski abstained from mentioning art or artists. Yet, in their writings and actions, both Peretz and Prilutski offered evidence that at least some in the Yiddishist milieu were already profoundly engaged with the art world. One of their particular favorites was a widely admired young Polish Jewish artist, Maurycy Minkowski (1881–1930). Between 1900 and 1910 a sizable cohort of young Jewish academy-trained painters, graphic artists, and sculptors, schooled in the conventions and techniques of Western art, was emerging in Eastern Europe.4 Many or most of these artists did not set out to identify as “Jewish” painters or sculptors. To the degree that they did so it was often in reaction to ostracism by non-Jewish artists in Russian Poland and Austrian Galicia—individuals who were themselves caught up in the nationalist fervor of the era. Like his older contemporary, Samuel Hirszenberg (1865–1908), however, Minkowski embraced his identity as a Jewish painter. He was one of several Jewish artists who were trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, the leading art school in Poland at the beginning of the twentieth century.5 He finished his studies there in 1904, receiving a gold medal in recognition of his talents and promise. Minkowski’s professors in Kraków included some of the leading lights of the Polish art world, including Julian Fałat (1853–1929), Józef Mehoffer (1869–1946), Jan Stanisławski (1860–1907), and Leon Wyczółkowski (1852–1936), skilled academic artists whose works even at their boldest remained within the conventions of Impressionism. Minkowski’s early career offers a tantalizing example of intersections between Yiddishspeaking intellectuals and a Jewish artist. The role that Jewish folk traditions and lore might play in the service of creating both a usable past for Yiddishism and a springboard for cultural creativity was another topic that was largely passed over at Czernowitz. Not very long after the conference, though, the ethnographic imperative would come to loom quite large indeed for the entire Yiddish cultural enterprise. To begin with, we may cite the contemporaneous but very different examples of Maksymilian Goldstein of Lemberg (1885–1942), a wealthy collector of Galician Jewish folk art and artifacts,6 and Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport, also know as Sh. An-ski (1863–1920), leader of the ethnographic expedition to the Ukrainian prov-

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inces of Volhynia and Podolia from 1912 to 1914.7 (The Austrian province of Bukowina, with Czernowitz as its capital, was situated right next door to the districts where these two cultural salvage operations were carried out.) And turning to Minkowski, one of the hallmarks of his genre paintings from early on was their reliance on Jewish folk elements, with models clad in altfrenkishe (old-fashioned) costumes that the painter assiduously collected in the course of his excursions through Polish market towns. This led the Yiddish literary critic A. Mukdoni (1878–1958) to describe Minkowski as “one of the first, if indeed not the very first Jewish artist to invent a Jewish style of painting based on Jewish folk creativity.” The painter’s studio, Mukdoni observed, “was a veritable museum of variegated articles of clothing [worn by] our grandmothers and great-grandmothers.”8 As this reflection suggests, above and beyond his devotion to ethnographic detail, Minkowski pioneered a new subspecialty in Jewish genre painting, the idealization of the Jewish woman. “Esterka” is one of the most frequently cited examples of his work in this vein (see figure 9.1). It was painted circa 1910 and its whereabouts are

Figure 9.1. Maurycy Minkowski, “Esterka” (or “Queen Esther”), reproduced from Tygodnik ilustrowany (Warsaw), 1911. . Courtesy of the Zydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute), Warsaw.

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now unknown.9 The painting depicts the legendary Jewish consort of the fourteenth-century Polish King Casimir the Great (1310–1370). When “Esterka” was displayed at an exhibition of Jewish painters in Warsaw in 1913, it made “an especially strong impression” upon the journalist who covered the opening for the Yiddish newspaper Der moment.10 Minkowski was not the first artist to draw upon the Esterka legend; a nineteenth-century Polish artist, Wojciech Gerson (1831–1901) preceded him, for example, and it seems probable that Minkowski was familiar with Gerson’s less flattering rendition of “Esterka” and with the nineteenth-century Polish potboiler romances that dealt with that medieval heroine.11 Minkowski’s “Esterka” is a beautiful young woman clad in a floral gown (which Prilutski characterized as “Oriental” in style12), with a patterned headdress or shawl covering her hair. She is standing on an elaborately tiled floor, evidently in a palace. Existing reproductions render the background somewhat murky, but a ram’s head is clearly mounted on a pedestal behind her and to the right. The carved wooden frame is a characteristic Minkowski creation as well, with representations of the naked Adam and Eve at the top, a gargoyle on the lower right, and what appears to be a man (possibly Abraham at the binding of Isaac) with a knife blade poised to slaughter a lamb. The model who posed for this picture was the Yiddish actress and writer Tea (Tocia) Arciszewska—also known as Miriam Izraels (ca. 1890–1962). Her husband was the artist Szymon Kratka, who is remembered for his tombstone sculpture commemorating the famous Yiddish actress Ester-Rokhl Kaminska (1870–1925) in Warsaw’s main Jewish cemetery. Both Arciszewska and Minkowski were befriended by I. L. Peretz, and this may help to explain how Minkowski first encountered his “Esterka.” Peretz’s affection for Minkowski’s work was later recounted by Mukdoni. “For years a painting by Minkowski hung opposite I. L. Peretz’s desk,” Mukdoni wrote. The painting depicted a ten-year-old girl, apparently in the marketplace, with a basket of apples at her feet. “Peretz spotted the picture at one of Minkowski’s exhibitions,” Mukdoni continued. “As was his wont, he immediately became very excited, ran up to Minkowski and told him that he was going to buy the picture. . . . And he rushed over . . . to his ‘finance minister,’ [Jacob] Dinesohn, and informed him that he need not bargain with Minkowski.”13 This incident probably occurred circa 1906, when the painter first attracted public notice for his paintings of pogrom victims, and a few years before he painted “Esterka.” Prilutski, for his part, must have met Minkowski at around that same time. In an article dating from March 1909, Prilutski cited the influence of the Bialystok pogrom of June 1, 1906, upon the painter’s choice of artistic themes. “Minkowski immediately traveled to that unfortunate city,” he wrote, “and

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what he saw there made such a profound impression on him that ever since then he has only painted ‘after the pogrom’ motifs.” Three months later, a pogrom erupted in the city of Siedlce, in Congress Poland, during which thirty Jews lost their lives. In the wake of that slaughter, Minkowski and Prilutski visited Siedlce together. “We had the occasion to spend a few minutes in the railroad station before a patrol was assigned to us, who would accompany us into the city,” Prilutski recollected. “The large waiting room for third-class passengers was overflowing with our unfortunate brethren, who were fleeing the conflagration. Minkowski quickly made a few sketches, and out of them emerged the large painting ‘After the Pogrom’—which was sold this winter in Paris.”14 (See figure 9.2.) Minkowski had been deaf since early childhood, and contemporaries debated the impact of his disability upon his art. Some took the view that the human subjects portrayed in his paintings were as silent as the artist himself. As Prilutski put it, “There is something missing in all of Minkowski’s paintings: The faces are wooden, the colors are dull and heavy. It appears as if all of the people whom he paints were deaf-mutes.”15,16 Peretz, for his part, commented that “it was simply a stroke of good fortune for us that Minkowski was deaf

Figure 9.2. Maurycy Minkowski, “After the Pogrom,” 1906. Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, California.

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and mute,” because this enabled him, “to a certain extent, to retain his Jewish authenticity.” He felt that the artist’s deafness posed a barrier to assimilation and prevented him from being led astray by the wider world’s enticements of fame and fortune.17 Mukdoni regarded this as an “overly symbolic” reading of the impact of deafness on Minkowski’s art. From all extant descriptions of his personality, he was both gregarious and highly animated.18 Far from being cut off from foreign languages and cultures, Minkowski was raised in a middle-class household, educated in the Polish language (at a school for the deaf), and he attended the leading Polish art academy, where he studied and mastered the iconography and techniques of European painting. And finally (as I have described elsewhere19), throughout his career he often succeeded in attracting the support of highly placed gentile patrons, including governors, generals, ambassadors, and cabinet ministers. The works of Minkowski occupied a central position in Prilutski’s ruminations on Jewish art and artists, in articles that he published between 1909 and 1913, and these writings provide a test bed for the elaboration of a specifically Yiddishist vision of national art and its constituent elements. On the one hand—notwithstanding his own ideological differences with the Zionist movement—Prilutski expressed a strong affinity with the ambitions and achievements of Boris Schatz (1867–1932) and his Bezalel School in Jerusalem. He was particularly impressed by the support the school received from “the most talented of the Western European Jewish artists. Rembrandt’s heir, the gray-bearded Jozef Israels [1824–1911], Max Liebermann [1847–1935], Hermann Struck [1876–1944], Samuel Hirszenberg, [and E. M.] Lilien [1874–1925]” all participated in a 1911 exhibition mounted by Bezalel in Warsaw, he noted. Prilutski considered the Bezalel School to be “an implantation from which a genuinely Jewish and national art must grow,” an art that would be “nationally Jewish [in its] form, nationally Jewish [in its] line, nationally Jewish [in its] coloration, [and] nationally Jewish [in its] tone. [The quality that] can turn an artwork into one that is nationally Jewish—independent of content—[is] the call [shtime] of Jewish blood.”20 In a purely literal sense the “Jewish blood” of the pogrom victims in his paintings might help to certify Minkowski’s art as “nationally Jewish.” However, Prilutski was primarily referring to racial or national physiognomy, costume, and customs.21 The faces painted by Minkowski were “not natural,” Prilutski acknowledged, “but one’s eye tarries upon [viewing] them. Something sui generis is vested in them, and that is where their value resides. This is also true with regard to Minkowski’s character [natur]: [his] Jewish blood. [That which is] characteristic of the Jewish people as a race stares out of all of Minkowski’s faces.”22 Thus, the “intimately Jewish subject matter” of

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Minkowski’s genre paintings, together with the antique and ethnographically “authentic” costumes of the subjects depicted in them, epitomized the “nationally Jewish” qualities that Prilutski sought in artistic production. Prilutski advocated a national art that would be both representational and realistic in technique, an art that derived its esthetic inspiration from the Old Masters and from the artifacts of antiquity. At the same time, his affection for the Bezalel School suggested that he approved of Schatz’s variations on the Arts and Crafts and Jugendstil traditions. Prilutski was far less taken with what he referred to as the “pure art” that he encountered in the salons of Paris and Moscow, an art that in his opinion needlessly sacrificed content for form. “In the famous art collection of the Muscovite millionaire Shchukin,” he wrote, “there are rooms filled with ungainly eyesores, Asiatic idols. And there are esthetes, renowned authorities, who are unable to tear themselves away from these collections, deriving tremendous esthetic pleasure from the outlandish manner in which they see the reflection of a different [a bazunder] world—a different psychology and a different culture.”23 Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin (1854–1936) was one of Europe’s leading collectors of modern art and a devoted patron of Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). If Prilutski did not hesitate to express his disdain for the ways in which “the leader of Russian Futurism, [Natalia] Goncharova [1881– 1962],24 made use of the wardrobe of the Russian peasant woman,”25 one can only imagine how he reacted to the Cubist paintings that he encountered on the walls of Shchukin’s gallery. In his 2003 article, “Vitebsk versus Bezalel,” Seth Wolitz posits “a Kulturkampf between the two Jewish ideologies that had come to the surface with the establishment of the Zionist movement and of the Bund in 1897. . . . [I]t is possible to align certain artists with the Zionist perspective and others with positions embraced by the Jewish socialists and folkists.” In one corner stood the disciples of Martin Buber (1878–1965), an exponent of “the importance of a Jewish art, the purpose of which was to fashion a ‘national Soul,’” writes Wolitz. “If Zion served as the teleological point of the Zionist movement,” Wolitz states, “the establishment of the Bezalel School in 1906 by Boris Schatz . . . in Jerusalem represents its allegory and early fulfillment in art.”26 Arrayed in the other corner were artists who followed in the footsteps of Yehuda (Yurii) Pen (1854–1937), founder of the School of Drawing and Painting, in Vitebsk. Some of Pen’s disciples, most prominently Marc Chagall (1887–1985), subsequently pursued distinguished artistic careers. Another of Pen’s students, Solomon Yudovin (1892–1954), is remembered for the engravings that were inspired by his participation in the ethnographic expeditions led by his uncle, Sh. An-ski, from 1912 to 1914. Yudovin’s travels throughout the shtetlekh of Podolia and Volhynia (which he photographed) served as

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the inspiration for the woodcuts—some of them influenced by cubism— that he published a decade or so later in Soviet Russia. For Wolitz “Vitebsk” is shorthand for “the cultural/artistic aesthetic of Jewish Eastern European cultural uniqueness as an ideological underpinning of its plastic expression.”27 In his words: “The Eastern European Jewish volksgeist dominates their canvas in all its tangible materiality and dreams”— “whether they were affected by realism, Mir isskustva, neo-primitivism, expressionism, or cubism.” Followers of this unofficial school banished “Zionist-stylized orientalisms” from their works, “and only the Slavic earth— Judaised—remains.”28 Even so, writes Wolitz, “Zionist art was an engaged art,” despite the fact that the “Bezalel” esthetic derived from older models, “whereas the art of Vitebsk was celebratory,” notwithstanding its stylistic affinities with modernism.29 In Wolitz’s view, consequently, national forms as represented by the “folkist” esthetic of Vitebsk ultimately “reached an impasse.”30 “The Jewish esthetic Kulturkampf was over, seemingly with either two losers or a stasis.”31 It took the ingenuity of Chagall, Wolitz asserts, to produce an essentially hybrid art that expresses “what can be called a Jewish point of view” and that “harbors a secret and meaningful gaze where Jewish art really exists: a distinct eygns (one’s own) hidden under a Western universal order.”32 Where the mainstream art critic might classify Chagall’s painting of a shabbily clad Jew suspended over a town in midair as capital-S Surrealistic, a reasonably sophisticated Yiddish speaker could comprehend it as a whimsical representation of a Jewish beggar, vos geyt iber di hayzer (who goes door to door seeking alms). “Vitebsk”-inspired artists such as Yosef Tchaikov (1888–1986) and Issachar Ber Ryback (1897–1937) readily adapted avant-garde esthetics to the Jewish themes that were the hallmarks of their oeuvre. To take a very different example—and speaking of Vitebsk—in 1919, the Constructivist artist El (Eliezer) Lissitzky (1891–1941) was lured to that city by Marc Chagall, where he briefly served as Professor of Graphic Art and Architecture in the local art school. However, while Lissitzky is sometimes remembered for the Jewish folk motifs that he contributed to Yiddish books, it is of course his Constructivist abstractions that are his main claim to fame. The trajectory of Maurycy Minkowski’s artistic career demonstrates that the borderline between “Bezalel” and “Vitebsk” cannot in all cases be strictly demarcated. Among his works one might readily encounter, for example, an ornate, Bezalel-inspired, gilded wooden frame surrounding an “ethnographically informed” domestic scene of a traditionally clad Eastern European Jewish family seated around the table for a festive meal. If in 1908 Minkowski was something of an avatar for Peretz and Prilutski, a decade later his art seemed hopelessly retrograde to the succeeding

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generation of writers and artists. As Henryk Berlewi (1894–1967) commented in a 1919 article, “Among Jewish artists in recent years none is so removed from the spirit of these times, representing such a strong contrast with prevailing artistic concepts, as is Maurycy Minkowski.” Yet, in defense of this artist’s reputation Berlewi added, “To measure Minkowski’s painting according to the yardstick of modern artistic concepts amounts to committing an injustice to art and especially to the artist.” Behind the superficial appeal of his pictures, Berlewi discerned in Minkowski’s oeuvre a “silent and peaceful world” filled with innocent and trusting faces. This artistic universe, presented with a naturalistic vocabulary, “bears only a superficial resemblance to our everyday reality,” Berlewi wrote. Minkowski was seemingly unaffected by the Kulturkampf that raged around him. The “poetic” qualities of his canvases are what made Minkowski particularly interesting—and problematic— to Berlewi, a leading exponent of the Polish avant-garde.33 As Peretz implied in his 1908 speech in Czernowitz, writers and artists shared obvious affinities and common interests. By 1920 Yiddish writers and Jewish visual artists were encountering one another regularly on the printed page, in publications of the Kultur-lige (Culture league)34 and Yung-yidish (Young Yiddish), to take two examples. Yet, these artists pursued visions that marked a stunning departure from the “nationally Jewish” esthetic that was so ardently espoused by Noyekh Prilutski in the immediate wake of the Conference for the Yiddish Language at Czernowitz. The case of Chagall suggests that the upheavals of war and revolution led “nationally Jewish” art—if we may still call it that—in very different directions from what Prilutski had envisaged.35 Thus, as applied to Minkowski, Prilutski’s Czernowitz-era musings offered an utterly unreliable predictor of the trajectory of the visual arts within the Yiddish cultural milieu. And ultimately, the activists of “Czernowitz” had very little to offer to the artists of “Vitebsk.”

NOTES 1. Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents: barikht, dokumentn un opklangen fun der tshernovitser konferents, 1908 (The first Yiddish language conference: report, documents, and reverberations from the Czernowitz Conference, 1908) (Vilna: Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut, filologishe sektsye, 1931), 86–87. 2. Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Modern Yiddish Culture: The Story of the Yiddish Language Movement (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 213. 3. Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents, 251; . emphasis in the original. 4. Jerzy Malinowski, Malarstwo i rze´zba Zydów polskich w XIX i XX wieku, vol. 1 . (Warsaw: Wydawn. Naukowe PWN, 2000); Artur Tanikowski, Malarze Zydowscy w Polsce (Warsaw: Edipresse Polska, 2006–2007; 2 vols.).

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5. Modern Polish Painting: The Catalogue of Collections, edited by Zofia Gołubiew (Kraków: National Museum in Kraków, 1998). 6. Maksymiljan Goldstein, Karol Dresdner, Jakób Schall, Stanisław Machnie. wicz, Kultura i sztuka ludu zydowskiego na ziemiach polskich. Zbiory Maksymiliana Goldsteina (Lwów: Nakl. M. Goldsteina, 1935; reprint: Warsaw: Wydawn. Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1991). 7. See, for example, Tracing An-sky: Jewish Collections from the State Ethnographic Museum in St Petersburg, [editors Mariella Beukers and Renée Waale] (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers ; Amsterdam : Joods Historisch Museum; St Petersburg: State Ethnographic Museum, 1992). 8. A. Mukdoni, “A idisher kinstler: tsum tragishn toyt fun’m moler M. Minkovski” (A Yiddish artist, on the tragic death of the painter M. Minkowski), Der morgen zhurnal (New York), November 30, 1930, 4, 7. 9. This painting was also referred to sometimes as “Queen Esther,” after the biblical heroine. 10. Syome [pseudonym], “Di oysshtelung fun di yudishe kinstler” (The exhibition of the Jewish artist), Moment, vol. 4, no. 270 (Dec. 8, 1913). 11. Chone Shmeruk, The Esterke Story in Yiddish and Polish Literature: A Case Study in the Mutual Relations of Two Cultural Traditions (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for the Furtherance of the Study of Jewish History, 1985). 12. Noah (Noyekh) Prilutski, “Di tsveyte yidishe kunstoysshtelung in Varshe” (The second Jewish art exhibition in Warsaw), in his Barg-aroyf (Uphill) (Varshe: Nayer ferlag, 1917), 129 [article is dated “Warsaw, December 1913”]. 13. Mukdoni, “A idisher kinstler.” 14. Prilutski, “M. Minkovski (a briv fun Peterburg) (M. Minkowski, a letter from Petersburg),” in his Barg-aroyf, 97 [article is dated “St. Petersburg, March 1909”]. Most likely, “After the Pogrom” was either the painting now owned by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art or the one held by the Judah L. Magnes Museum. 15. Even so, as his well-known painting “He Cast a Glance and Went Mad” reveals, a “Jewish gaze”—literally and figuratively—pervades his canvases (as Ismar Schorsch observes in “Art as Theology,” an unpublished essay about Minkowski’s painting “He Cast a Glance and Was Impaired [Hetsits ve-nifga]). 16. Ibid. 17. Mukdoni, “A idisher kinstler.” 18. On Minkowski’s voluble personality, see: Mukdoni, “A idisher kinstler”; Melech Ravitch, “Mauritsi Minkovski,” in his Mayn leksikon (My lexicon), vol. 2 (Montreal: Committee, 1947), 236–38; and Mark Turkov (Marc Turkow), “Di letste begegenish mit Mauritsi Minkovski (tsum tragishn toyt fun kinstler)” (The last meeting with Maurycy Minkowski, on the tragic death of an artist), Moment, vol. 21, no. 259 (November 28, 1930), 7. 19. Zachary M. Baker, “Art Patronage and Philistinism in Argentina: Maurycy Minkowski in Buenos Aires, 1930,” Shofar, vol. 19, no. 3 (Spring 2001), 107–19. 20. Prilutski, “Opklangen fun der Betsaleloysshtelung” (Reverberations from the Bezalel exhibition), in his Barg-aroyf, 104–5 [article is dated “Warsaw, January 1911”].

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21. That is, Blut und Geist, if not exactly Blut und Boden. 22. Prilutski, “Di tsveyte yidishe kunstoysshtelung in Varshe,” 126. 23. Ibid., 132. 24. During this period Goncharova was also associated with the Neo-Primitivists. 25. Ibid., 133. 26. Seth Wolitz, “Vitebsk versus Bezalel: A Jewish ‘Kulturkampf’ in the Plastic Arts,” in The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 153–58. 27. Wolitz, 255, note 32. 28. Wolitz, 159. 29. Wolitz, 164. For a discussion of Zionist visual culture before World War I, see Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 30. Wolitz, 165. 31. Wolitz, 168. 32. Wolitz, 172–73. 33. Henrik Berlevi [Henryk Berlewi], “Yidishe kinstler: Morits.Minkowski (Jewish artist: Maurycy Minkowski),” Ilustrirte velt 11 [Sept. 18, 1919], 12–13. 34. Background on the Kultur-lige (and the artists associated with that movement) may be found in Hillel (Grigoriĭ) Kazovskiĭ (Kazovsky), Khudozhniki Kul’tur-Ligi (Artists of the Kultur-Lige) (Moscow: Mosty kul’tury; Jerusalem: Gesharim, 2003); Kazovskiĭ, Kul’tur-Liga: khudozhni˘ı avangard 1910–1920-kh rokiv (Kultur-Lige: Artistic avant-garde of the 1910s and the 1920s) (Kiev: Dukh i litera, 2007); Kenneth Benjamin Moss, “A Time for Tearing Down and a Time for Building Up”: Recasting Jewish Culture in Eastern Europe, 1917–1921, doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 2003. 35. For a very helpful survey of artists and artistic trends during this period, see Ruth Apter-Gabriel, editor, Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928 (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987).

III THE LEGACY OF CZERNOWITZ

10 The Success of the Czernowitz Yiddish Conference Setting the Agenda for Yiddish Language Planning in the Twentieth Century* Rakhmiel Peltz

WHERE IS THE COLLECTIVE?: AN INTRODUCTION In the fall of 1962, I received a textbook for the freshman Yiddish language course at the Yidisher lerer-seminar (The Jewish Teachers Seminary) in NewYork. It was Der ortografisher vegvayzer (Guide to Standardized Orthography; 1961) by Mordkhe Schaechter and Max Weinreich. The main part of this course textbook was an alphabetically arranged dictionary of examples of words and phrases in their proper spelling that illustrated specific properties of the system of standardized orthography that had been ratified and accepted by YIVO (Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut/ Institute for Jewish Research) and CYShO (Tsentrale yidishe shul-organizatsye/Central Organization of Yiddish Schools) in Poland in 1936. The Vegvayzer was brand new, and it was supplied to us by our course instructor, Assistant Professor Mordkhe Schaechter. As a boy, I had studied Yiddish for nine years in the supplementary elementary school and high school of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute and the Farband Labor Zionist Alliance. I had heard nothing specific about standardized orthography. We never had a dictionary and did not think of checking spelling, as we used to do for English words in public school. We wrote the sound [ej] with two dots under the double yud letter combination. No one had made a big deal about spelling. What was happening here in Dr. Schaechter’s class? Who would or should care about such rules? Well, some thirty years later, I was teaching those same rules in the Advanced Yiddish language classes to undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University. Who constitutes the tsiber (collective) for shprakhkultur (language cultivation)? In 1934–1936 when these YIVO-CYShO rules were first codified, 139

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there were the researchers at YIVO and the Yiddish teachers and the Yiddish students in the schools of the Jewish Socialist Bund and the Left Poaley-tsion (Labor Zionist) parties.1 In the 1960s other than the few lerer-seminar students like myself, some eighty interested individuals, called by Schaechter “di smetene fun der demoltiker yidish-inteligents in Nyu-york” (“the cream of the Yiddish intelligentsia of New York of the day”),2 signed up for a course at YIVO to study the rules of standardized orthography. In those years, there were organizations whose secretaries still conducted business in Yiddish. I remember a roomful of Yiddish typewriters in the lerer-seminar, with some courses in Yiddish typing and shorthand. But the tsiber was changing and we must ask ourselves if indeed there was a significant collective effort involved at any stage of Yiddish language planning. The collective dimension of the work was present in Czernowitz in 1908. The report of Christopher Hutton’s master’s thesis at Columbia University in the 1980s focuses on “Normativism and the Notion of Authenticity.”3 Hutton reports on individualized notions of language norms, whether expounded by Chaim Zhitlowsky, or Max Weinreich, Noah Prilutski, or Solomon Birnbaum. But lacking in his discussion of these positions is the glamour and allure of the earlier 1908 Czernowitz Conference, namely that of a population, of a bunch of delegates. In the years to follow, Yiddish institutions flowered. The years from 1908 to 1941 represent a period in which Yiddish language planning was a growth industry. After World War II, what Mordkhe Schaechter might propose in Laytish mame-loshn (The Proper Mother Tongue; 1986), or Solomon Birnbaum in his 1979 grammar,4 was a kol koyre bemidber (“a lost call in the desert”). The collective that would be waiting to implement or even debate the recommendations of the language planners was no longer. True Yiddish language planning that had started in Czernowitz in 1908 had ceased to exist.

CZERNOWITZ YIDDISH CONFERENCE 1908 The major source on what took place at all stages of the 1908 conference remains the reconstruction of events based on newspaper reports contemporary to the conference that was assembled and published by YIVO.5 Subsequent analyses of the conference have largely been based on this publication.6 The main focus in these studies is the discussion of whether the conference should recognize and declare the status of Yiddish as “a natsyonale shprakh” (“a national language”),7 the topic that dominated the proceedings. The symbolic strength of this conflict and the public, outspoken advocacy of the prestige of Yiddish on the part of many of the delegates linger on to this very day.

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The symbolic influence of the discussion of other issues at the conference has oftentimes been ignored. Chief among these other matters were the calls for practical work on language planning. Nathan Birnbaum, the major architect of the conference and the leader of the short-lived organization after the conference that was constructed to implement its goals, emphasized in his recollections written for YIVO’s planned volume twenty years after the conference, that at the meeting he repeatedly underscored the necessity for “zakhlekhe oftuen” (“concrete achievements”) rather than declarations relating to “a national language.”8 In the invitation to the conference, sent out to individuals and editorial boards of newspapers, the organizing committee complained of the lack of order in Yiddish spelling: “Un shraybn shraybt yeder af an ander oyfn, mit an ander oysleygekhts, vorim a yidishe ortografye, vos zol giltn far alemen . . . iz nokh not bashafn” (“Everyone writes in their own style, with their own spelling, because a Yiddish orthography that would hold for everyone . . . has not yet been created”).9 The committee pleaded for the creation of regulations and rules for the language, as though they did not exist naturally: “Badarf men bashafn a min tsoym un geder, a min ophitung fun undzer tayern mame-loshn, es zol nit arumloyfn azoy vild vi biz itst, nit vern a hefkerzakh, nit vern tserisn un tseteylt” (“Therefore a kind of bridle and restraint, a watchdog for our mother tongue, to see that it should not run around so wild as heretofore, not become chaotic, torn apart and divided up”). Who should be concerned about averting this possible, dangerous fate for Yiddish? The organizers clearly see their audience as all of those who busy themselves with the language, including writers, poets, those with particular knowledge of the language, as well as those who just love Yiddish. They call for everyone to confer and to find the proper means to establish “an oytoritet, velkhe ale zoln muzn un veln zikh untergebn” (“an authority, which all will be obliged to and will willingly obey”).10 Theoreticians of the social planning process known as language planning have divided the endeavor into two subcategories: status planning, wherein a government usually decides which language is used for which purpose, and corpus planning, which regulates the content and structure of a specific language.11 In the invitation to the 1908 conference, there were ten items on the agenda, the first four of which related to Yiddish language planning, and more specifically corpus planning: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Yiddish orthography Yiddish grammar foreign and new words a Yiddish dictionary

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The other items related to Yiddish and Jewish youth, writers and literature, actors and the theater, the press, and only number ten, the famous: recognition for Yiddish, the ultimate status planning issue in this forum. Although most researchers of this historic conference have dwelled on this last point, I would like to highlight the primary goals of the conference as dealing with corpus planning. Reports on the proceedings described several sessions that addressed “the language itself (spelling, grammar, foreign and new words, dictionary, etc.)” on Sunday, the opening day, and additionally on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.12 At the conference, Y. L. Peretz outlined the objectives of the work on Yiddish corpus planning and the creation of an organization to implement the cultural work. The executive organ of the organization was to be an elected agency. One of the outcomes of this agency was “to create a body to serve as an authority in questions of Yiddish orthography, grammar, and other language questions.”13 Thus, a Yiddish Language Academy was foreseen that would deliberate and arbitrate and decree to those working with the Yiddish language in the arena of cultural organizations.

THE SHORT HISTORY OF COLLECTIVE YIDDISH LANGUAGE PLANNING (1908–1941) The role of the Czernowitz Yiddish Conference cannot be judged by the failed attempts by Nathan Birnbaum to establish a functioning organization and normative authoritative body in the years following the conference and before World War I. Most East European Jews were part of the repressive Russian Empire and although Yiddish cultural work was pursued with great energy by many former political activists after the failed revolution of 1905, the language planning process is generally lengthy, costly, and requiring a well organized system of interlocking institutions. Carefully deliberated recommendations of language use must be implemented judiciously in a variety of institutional settings, followed by evaluation of the efficacy of the changes that were put into practice. Such achievements were unimaginable following the 1908 conference. From a comparative point of view the First Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz in 1908 was more successful than many other first language conferences.14 For a language without a government and a territory, to be able to assemble for the first time so many cultural leaders who had to cross borders and seas is no small feat. After a century of Jewish Enlightenment that pitted Yiddish against Hebrew and a variety of European languages of high culture in language wars (riv halishonot, Hebrew), even to have Yiddish

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declared “a national language” is nothing to sneeze at. But from the point of view of cultural and social planning, to set an agenda in which Yiddish language planning took top billing established a vital precedent, even though the conference fulfilled few of the actual applied processes of such planning in its few days of proceedings or in its wake. However, the agenda of Czernowitz became the goal of collective Yiddish language planning between the wars. This is the success of that First Yiddish Language Conference. Charted first in 1908 and followed from 1917 until 1941, largely in Poland and the Soviet Union, the products of the corpus planners were tools for societal functions, often of a technical nature. The planners during these later years provided models of suitable usage, including associated dictionaries, grammars, and spellers, along with lists of specialized nomenclature, such as the Yiddish list for metallurgy terms.15 Regulators of language can treat lexicon, sentence structure, phonology, and writing systems, but the most commonly treated objectives of language planners are orthography and the lexicon (terminology). And so it was for Yiddish. The endpoint for Yiddish language planning aimed at a collective was cut short, on the one hand, by the Holocaust in the Yiddish heartland. In the lands of immigration, on the other hand, with the United States welcoming the most immigrants, as is the case for all immigrant groups, use of the ethnic tongue did not go further than the second generation (only Spanish has been transmitted to one more generation). Scholars of the language planning process point to modern language planning as part of an older and broader tradition, in which speech communities in history remain stable because of their capability to solve language problems. B. H. Jernudd views language planning within the context of continuing traditions of language treatment, in which communities with few material resources and political power may have deep understanding and control of their language.16 This outlook pertains to Yiddish and to its planners. For example, Zalmen Reizen, in the YIVO’s short-lived language planning journal, Yidish far ale, discussed that members of the speech community (shprakh-tsiber) express preferences through usage, often choosing between native forms.17 The integration within the community of the recommendations of the planners requires that the standardizers themselves demonstrate respect for the traditions of the speech community. Part of the difficulty in following this spirit lies in the operation of the corpus planners themselves, who are aware of the contrast with other languages. Schaechter, for example, pointed to the Yiddish language planners’ work of overcoming handicaps of Yiddish in comparison with a language of reference, such as German. Even when the autonomy of Yiddish was defended as a principle, the language of high culture, in this case German, often served as a “hidden standard.”18

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BUILDING ON THE PRECEDENT OF CZERNOWITZ A perusal of the reports of the Yiddish language conferences between the wars locates the participation of different sectors within the Yiddish speech community and a codification process that is largely based on continuity and commonality. As with most societies that engage in corpus planning, the Yiddish planners focused mostly on new terminology (number three on the Czernowitz Conference agenda) and orthography (number one on that same agenda). That flurry of groups that would emerge in Eastern Europe after World War I to pursue the language planning goals of Czernowitz are best illustrated by the variety of terminology planning committees. The earliest evidence includes the Terminology Committee of the Association of Yiddish Teachers formed in Vilna during the war in 1915. Among the others that followed were the Terminological Committee of the Cultural Conference in Warsaw, constituted in 1917 (including delegates from Warsaw, Vilna, Bialistok, Lodzh, and Shedlets), the Terminology Committee of ORT in Kiev in 1919, the Mefitseyhaskole (Disseminators of Enlightenment) Boys School Terminology Committee in Vilna in 1920, the Consulting Office for Terminology in Freidorf for the Soviets in Crimea and southern Ukraine, started in 1932, and the Terminology Initiatives of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidzhan, starting in 1934.19 Following the lead of the educators in the children’s schools, the philological sections of the newly constituted advanced research institutes in Minsk, Kiev, and Vilna aimed at providing Yiddish terms for all aspects of Jewish life, from technological work to a criminal justice system. An example of the language planning conferences that were grounded in the cooperation and participation of cultural leaders, along with linguists, in the selection, codification, and implementation stages involved the establishment of the YIVO spelling rules. A series of YIVO conferences in Vilna, commencing in 1929, and decisions of YIVO’s Central Board in 1930, made a commitment to procedures that would guarantee that the takones (rules) would carry maximal authority. From the beginning, YIVO promised that an orthographic conference would embrace “all interested circles.” However, such a conference that was convened by YIVO and included representatives of cultural organizations, teachers, printers, and typographers, as well as others, in 1931, ended in a stalemate. The members of YIVO’s Philological Section could not accept the majority decision of the delegates that favored the ratification of the Soviet Yiddish planning model to “naturalize” the spelling of words of the Hebrew component (this consisted in using the vowel letters and consonants of the Yiddish alphabet that are not present in traditional Hebrew spelling). Thus, it is clear that the standards accepted by linguist plan-

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ners are not always shared by the professionals in cultural organizations and vice versa. However, as early as December 1926, a teachers’ conference of the CYShO schools called for the establishment of spelling rules by CYShO in collaboration with the Philological Section of YIVO. The need for rules was sensed by the teachers and not imposed on them by the linguist planners. In 1934, the Central Board of YIVO recognized 150 rules established by YIVO’s Philological Section. In 1936, after an orthographic conference, YIVO’s Central Board accepted the corrections that had been initiated by CYShO. Thus, the interplay of linguist and educator planners resulted in the takones (rules) that were finally published and disseminated. It is those rules that I received in the New York lerer-seminar in 1962.20 In the Soviet Union, analogous Yiddish language planning conferences charted the future of Yiddish language usage that would be applied in cultural settings. In 1928, the Second All-Union Cultural Conference in Kharkov was attended by cultural leaders who dedicated themselves to the treatment of language questions. Foremost on the agenda was standardized orthography, the subject of a three-day meeting preceding the more general conference where the rules were discussed and later recommended for ratification by the larger conference. After this acceptance, these became the guidelines for Yiddish spelling in the Soviet Union. Both theoretical, linguistic work and practical applications were emphasized at the Kharkov Conference. The latter activity focused on the language of schools, press, and publishing. The accompanying verve and unrealistic timetable reflect the prevailing enthusiasm for language planning: within five years the planners intended to complete the necessary gate-keeping tools of corpus planning, including specialized terminologies, popular dictionaries for translating into Russian and other Slavic languages and vice versa (cf. Czernowitz Conference Agenda number four), and translations of laws and regulations into Yiddish. In addition, the Jewish cultural branch of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev was to serve as a consultant for publishing houses, workers’ cooperatives, and the Yiddish courts and soviets. Alongside this applied work, the linguists also devoted themselves to research into the history and structure of Yiddish, helping to guarantee that their prescriptive recommendations would rest on firm understanding of the standards that the Yiddish speech community had evolved over the centuries. Even during the subsequent years of much greater political restriction, Soviet Yiddish language work would maintain a diversity of opinions and recommendations.21 Thus, although the First All-Union Yiddish Language Conference convened in Kiev in 1931 was vitriolic in its rhetoric and co-organized by the political All-Union Communist Academy, a commitment to normative work was retained.22 In 1934, the community of planners for Yiddish was able to bounce

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back and pursue its efforts. The detailed volume that discussed this subsequent Kiev meeting paints a diversified picture of the public setting in which language planners pursued their efforts. Of the 116 voting delegates hailing from twenty-five cities, 33 percent were researchers, 34 percent journalists, 30 percent teachers, but only 2.7 percent party leaders. In fact amongst the participants, 56 percent were nonpartisan, 37 percent party members, and 7 percent Communist youth. Regarding the educational level of the delegates, 59 percent possessed higher education and 41 percent high school level education.23 Even during the tense political pressures of the Soviet Union in these years, a shprakh-tsiber is evident within the collective of Yiddish language planners as well as on the Jewish street where recommendations were applied. The manifestation at Czernowitz in 1908 and the articulation of its goals set a precedent that held sway through the 1930s.

RULES AND THE FORGETTING OF YIDDISH The twentieth century was ushered in for Yiddish language planning by the Czernowitz Conference in 1908, whose goal of assembling a collective to plan the language of culture for a speech community reached fruition in the years prior to World War II. That kulturshprakh was to lose its speech community when the Nazis and those that assisted them ensured through genocide that East European Jewry would never reconstruct itself. The Yiddish language planners of the postwar era, chief among them the recently deceased Mordkhe Schaechter (1927–2007), could no longer operate within a collective environment for language planning. That which Czernowitz achieved by assembling many of the leading lights of Yiddish culture, by planning for a regulated language in its cultural and social settings, and by strengthening the symbolic identity of Yiddish as part of a shared, national identity was no longer possible. However, the necessity of the call to arms of Czernowitz bespeaks a lingering distrust of Yiddish as a bona fide language and a doubt regarding the existence of its regular nature that accompanied the language and culture throughout modernity. Linguistics in the twentieth century promulgated a contrast between a theoretical, abstract system that explains the way language works and an observable display of behavior, termed “langue vs. parole” by Ferdinand de Saussure and “competence vs. performance” by Noam Chomsky. The strength of Chomsky’s formulation was reinforced by the demonstration that the abstract system corresponded to the way primary acquisition of language operated during child development. Theoretical linguistics contributed to an understanding and acceptance that rules are operating to explain language

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behavior. Later in the century, sociolinguistics indeed presented the reality of variable rules that could describe at least some of the variation that is exhibited in “parole” and “performance.” It is odd then that Yiddish even in that century would have to continually prove itself as a rule-governed language. In his original analysis of the forgetting of language in popular thought and philosophy, based on medieval studies, Heller-Roazen (2005) raises the fascinating notion that the fleeting nature of language, the concept that language is forever changing, is not only an idea that has united historical linguists and sociolinguists.24 He demonstrates that for quite some time major thinkers have presented the phenomenon of human language as incapable of being grasped, as always being forgotten. Dante did not associate the spoken language with any sort of rules, but rather viewed it as intrinsically variable and changing over time and space.25 He further points to Montaigne, who wrote about language that “runs away” from its speakers and “deforms itself.” Beginnings and ends of languages are just two points in a constantly changing process. Heller-Roazen asks further, “Have the speakers of the Strassbourg Oaths realized that they are speaking French or that they have already forgotten Latin?”26 Social and historical circumstances have conditioned the advancement of much forgetting. The history of Yiddish studies, for example, has documented the appearance of glossaries, dictionaries, and published grammars in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. These descriptive and prescriptive aids presented regular relationships within the Yiddish language corpus. Yet well into the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries, there have been those Jews and non-Jews who still question whether Yiddish has a grammar. It is in such an environment that the architects of Czernowitz charted their course. In order to guide Yiddish speakers and their critics, both Jewish and non-Jewish, as to the identity of and identification with Yiddish, these pioneers of language planning planted their seed. Detractors of the Czernowitz Conference have taken lightly the fact that the conference carried forward in history a symbolic sense of significance, self-recognition, and identification for the language and its speakers. Those who deride the symbolic advance of a cultural item, seemingly because of the absence of so-called practical achievement, fail to appreciate the path to achieving symbolic meaning. This essay has attempted to demonstrate that the actual planning and carrying out of the Czernowitz Conference established a powerful precedent for the Yiddish speech community that would serve it well. Only phenomena that carry with them symbolic significance have meaning for a culture. Scholars who keep returning to the Czernowitz Conference as a topic of study, such as Fishman, have reminded those interested in the cultural history of Yiddish of the centrality of the conference.27 Identification of Yiddishists with the

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conference and repeated revisitation of this historical moment by advocates of the language and culture is not only appropriate, but also imperative. The Holocaust has effected substantial forgetting. Not only have most of the Jews’ former neighbors in Eastern Europe forgotten the Jewish presence, so much so that gravestones and entire cemeteries have been desecrated and obliterated. But Jews themselves have averted their confrontation with the world that was destroyed. It is not surprising that peoples who are victims of genocide should avoid the trauma of facing and learning about the objects of loss. Academicians have demonstrated a poor record when faced with the challenge of providing restitution through guidance to the victims of genocide in how to teach and transmit the culture that was taken away from them. The world that existed in 1939 before World War II was the Jewish society for which the Yiddish language planners were planning a future. The mission of the Czernowitz planners and their successors was by far not inconsequential. As Uriel Weinreich pointed out with regard to language planning: “Let no one think that the coining of a new word or the proscription of an old one, a change in spelling or the conversion of a language to a different script, are trivial or painless matters.”28 Schaechter, the preeminent defendant and longstanding practitioner of Yiddish language planning, himself a son of the city of Czernowitz who internalized the conference into his life story, would gleefully uncover for critics who questioned the validity of a recommended word, supposedly a neologism, that the very word was used centuries before in Yiddish.29 Planners, although agents of change, can only be effective if they understand and appreciate traditional cultural elements. Living languages are successful modes of communication because they have developed means of self-standardization within the speech community. Languages are cultural systems that evolve variation alongside uniformity. It is not by chance that Jews developed a pan-Yiddish that was understood across borders and co-territorial cultures in Europe from Amsterdam to Odessa. The Yiddish language planners of Czernowitz and beyond appreciated the diverse treasures of traditional Yiddish at the same time that they argued for innovations and standardized orthography. They basically defended Yiddish from external influences that would upset many of the norms established through centuries of evolution. The Soviet planners were often viewed as the most radical and revolutionary.30 Most of their efforts, however, were targeted at the retention of a traditional style. One example will suffice. The new high schools with Yiddish as the language of instruction often turned to translating textbooks. The language planner E. Spivak criticizes the following translation in a Yiddish physics textbook:

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Mit der fargreserung fun der tsayt fun ufshtaygn farklenert zikh di gikhkayt funem arufgevorfenem shteyn inderheykh.

He rewrites it in a more folksy Yiddish: Vos mer tsayt es doyert der ufshtayg fun a shteyn, vos iz arufgevorfn inderheykh, alts klener vert zayn gikhkayt. (As the time increases for the rise of a stone thrown up in the air, its speed decreases.)31

NOTES *Lezeykher mayn lerer in Yidishn lerer-seminar un Zumer-program a”n Uriel Vaynraykh, bal-yoyets in Yugntruf, kolege, un fraynt, D”r Mordkhe Shekhter (Tshernovits 1927—Nyu-york 2007) 1. “Takones fun yidishn oysleyg,” Yivo-bleter 11 (1937), 97–128. 2. Mordkhe Shekhter, Der eynheytlekher yidisher oysleyg (New York: YIVO and Yiddish Language Resource Center of the League for Yiddish, 1999), 85. 3. Published as Christopher Hutton, “Normativism and the Notion of Authenticity in Yiddish Linguistics,” in The Field of Yiddish (5), ed. D. Goldberg (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 11–57. 4. Solomon Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1979). 5. Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents: Barikhtn, dokumentn un opklangen fun der tshernovitser konferents 1908 (Vilna: Bibliotek fun YIVO yidisher visnshaftlekher institut fililogishe sektsye, 1931); hereafter, Di ershte. 6. For example, Emanuel S. Goldsmith E.S. 1976. Architects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: A Study in Jewish Cultural History (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976); rev. edition: Modern Yiddish Culture: The Story of the Yiddish Language Movement (New York: Shapolsky and the Workmen’s Circle Education Department, 1987); expanded edition: New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. 7. See, for example, Di ershte, x. 8. Ibid. 9. Di ershte, 2. 10. Di ershte, 3. 11. Joshua A. Fishman, “Comparative Study of Language Planning: Introducing a Survey,” in Language Planning Processes, ed. J. Rubin, B. Jernudd, J. Das Gupta, J. Fishman, and C. Ferguson (The Hague: Mouton, 1977), 31–39; J. Pool, “Developing the Soviet Turkic Tongues: The Language of the Politics of Language,” Slavic Review 35 (1976): 425. 12. Di ershte, 62, 92, 64.

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13. Di ershte, 87. 14. See Joshua A. Fishman, ed. The Earliest Stages of Language Planning: The “First Congress” Phenomenon (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993). 15. “Terminologye far metalurgye,” Di yidishe shprakh 21–22 (1930): 91–96. 16. B. H. Jernudd, “Language Planning as a Type of Language Treatment,” in Can Language Be Planned? ed. J. Rubin and B. H. Jernudd (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1971), 11–23. 17. Zalmen Reizen, “Norme, yoytse min haklal, gramatishe dubletn,” Yidish far ale 6–7 (1938): 171–82. 18. Mordkhe Schaechter, “‘The Hidden Standard’: A Study of Competing Influences in Standardization,” in The Field of Yiddish [3], ed. M. Herzog, W. Ravid, and U. Weinreich (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), 284–304. 19. Rakhmiel Peltz, “Yiddish: A Language without an Army Regulates Itself,” in Germanic Standardizations: Past to Present, ed. A. Deumert and W. Vandenbussche (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2003), 435–36; L. Kahn, “Yidishe terminologishe komisyes—an iberblik,” Yidishe shprakh 31 (1972): 35–42; 32 (1973): 1–8; L. Kahn, “Der terminologisher oyftu fun Yivo,” Yivo-bleter 46 (1980): 229–41. 20. Shekhter, Der eynheytlekher yidisher oysleyg, 60–62; “Takones fun yidishn oysleyg,” 125. 21. “Tsveyter alfarbandisher kultur-tsuzamenfor in kharkov un di shprakh-arbet,” Di yidishe shprakh 10 (1928): 49–60. 22. “Rezolutsyes ongenumen af der ershter alfarbandisher yidisher shprakh konferents in Kiev,” Di yidishe shprakh 25 (1930): 15–24. 23. “Khronik fun der ukraynisher yidisher shprakh-baratung,” Afn shprakhfront 3–4 (1935): 275–79. 24. Referring to Uriel Weinreich, William Labov, and Marvin I. Herzog, “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change,” in Directions for Historical Linguistics, ed. W. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 95–195. 25. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalius: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 71. 26. Ibid., 74. 27. Rakhmiel Peltz, “The History of Yiddish Studies: Take Notice,” in Language Loyalty, Continuity and Change, ed. O. Garcia, R. Peltz, and H. Schiffman (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2006), 88–93. 28. Uriel Weinreich, “The Russification of Soviet Minority Languages,” Problems of Communism 2 (1953), 47. 29. M. Schaechter, Laytish mame-loshn (New York: League for Yiddish, 1986). 30. M. Schaechter, “Four Schools of Thought in Yiddish Language Planning,” Michigan Germanic Studies 3 (1977): 34–66. 31. E. Spivak, “Problemes fun sovetishn yidish,” Afn shprakhfront 3–4 (1935): 33–34.

11 From Czernowitz to Paris The International Yiddish Culture Congress of 1937 Matthew Hoffman

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spirit of Czernowitz is perhaps no better personified than in the life and writings of Chaim Zhitlovsky (1865–1943). One of the organizers of the Czernowitz language conference in 1908, the year he immigrated to America from Russia, Zhitlovsky devoted his public intellectual career to the elusive pursuit of a vital and thriving secular Yiddish culture. Like many of his Russian Jewish contemporaries from that generation, Zhitlovsky straddled the worlds of the traditional Judaism of his youth and the Russian radicalism of his student years. Influenced by both of these traditions, Zhitlovsky became something of an ideological maverick, whose blending of political and intellectual paradigms was driven by his relentless quest to integrate Jews into the wider world of progressive humanity through the creation of a high culture in Yiddish. This commitment to radical Jewish identity and politics and to Yiddish culture became the foundation of the Yiddishist movement for which Zhitlovsky became the standard bearer. For Zhitlovsky, the Czernowitz Conference of 1908 served as a means to help establish and legitimize his Yiddishist ideological program. Looking back on the Czernowitz Conference twenty years later, Zhitlovsky identified it as a “moral victory for Yiddishism,” seeing the “spirit of Czernowitz” as the foundation for the various forms of secular Jewish culture that had been produced in its wake: “And in everything we have achieved during these twenty years in the construction of our modern secular culture, . . . the spirit of Czernowitz lives, acts, and gives strength to continued life and work.”1 Indeed, in the years following the Czernowitz Conference, the Yiddish culture envisioned by Zhitlovsky flourished across the Jewish world, from Warsaw to New York, Buenos Aires to Berlin, and everywhere East European Jews

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lived. By the 1930s, this culture consisted of a rich and varied literary tradition, a prolific daily and periodical press, representing a wide array of political programs, popular and avant-garde theater and cinema, a diverse secondary educational system, and a number of academic institutions of research and higher education. However, also by the 1930s, Yiddish culture was beset by fierce internecine conflicts between various political and ideological factions. The rise of fascism in Europe and the trend of assimilation in America also threatened the continuity of secular Yiddish culture. Just as Zhitlovsky and his colleagues had organized the Czernowitz Conference in 1908 to put Yiddish culture at the center of Jewish life, a new cadre of Yiddishists came together in 1936 to organize an international conference with the aim of preserving its place there. In September 1936, the Yiddish Culture Front of Paris announced its plans for a World Congress on Yiddish Culture to be convened in Paris the following year. They sent invitations to prominent Yiddish cultural organizations and leading proponents of Yiddish culture worldwide to come together in Paris for the sake of preserving Yiddish culture. The main aim of the congress, which was originally planned to take place in 1938 to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Czernowitz Conference, was to unify Jewish cultural groups internationally as part of the campaign against fascism and to defend Jewish culture under siege in Europe. The invitation to the Paris conference called on all friends of Yiddish culture to transcend partisan and political differences and to take a stand in “defense of modern Yiddish culture.” Although an officially nonpartisan organization, which counted among its members leading Yiddish writers and scholars, such as E. Tsherikower (1881– 1943) and Zalman Shneour (1886–1959), the Culture Front was linked closely to the Yiddish Communists in Paris, and eventually in America, too. The Communist Yiddish playwright, Chaim Sloves (1905–1988), was the secretary of the Culture Front and led the organizational committee for the Yiddish Culture Congress.2 As we shall see below, the involvement of the Communists in the planning of the conference became a major point of contention and caused many leading Yiddish intellectuals and cultural groups to oppose the congress, mainly because of their distrust of the Yiddish Communists. Although the call to participate in the conference came out in September of 1936, the idea had been germinating since at least November of 1935 when a Yiddish Culture Conference with the aim of creating a Culture Front took place in Paris. There were 120 participants including “Yiddish writers, scholars, journalists, painters, doctors, and lawyers. This was the first time an event of this size and importance was organized in Paris, a place that was not considered a large Yiddish cultural center.”3 For nearly a year the Paris Culture Front tried to bring various Jewish factions together in support of the

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idea of an international conference on Yiddish culture, without much success.4 In many cases, it was political and ideological agendas that undermined cooperation with the Culture Front, as well as the question of which group had the standing to act on behalf of international Yiddish culture. The Bund, in particular, came out vociferously against the Culture Front, which it saw as attempting to usurp its place as the authoritative custodian of secular Yiddish culture. Given this substantial and, at times, staunch resistance to the plan for a Yiddish Culture Congress in Paris, the leaders of the Culture Front began to directly lobby major figures within the Yiddish cultural scene to endorse the congress and help to overcome its opposition. In the fall of 1936, Chaim Sloves, the chief organizer of the culture congress, contacted Chaim Zhitlovsky in New York to solicit his support for the conference. On account of Zhitlovsky’s role at Czernowitz in 1908 and his iconic status as the elder statesman of Yiddishism worldwide, Sloves turned to Zhitlovsky as a means of legitimizing the efforts of the Culture Front and to remove the perceived taint of ideological partisanship that had until then impeded wider support for the conference. In a letter to Zhitlovsky, dated November 20, 1936, Sloves acknowledged that his group was new and without standing in the Yiddish cultural sphere. However, due to the dire political circumstances facing European Jewry, the Paris Culture Front was acting on behalf of the entire Yiddish popular intelligentsia (yidishe folks-inteligents), without any consideration of competing political factions or orientations, in order to protect Yiddish culture from its many enemies, both internal and external.5 Sloves was keenly aware of the crisis of legitimacy that the Culture Front faced, especially because of its Communist association, and he tried to position it as a genuinely popular, nonpartisan representative of Yiddish culture. Sloves assured Zhitlovsky that the Culture Front’s aim was to “unify all of the creative forces of the Jewish masses (yidishe folksmasn) . . . to again forge the golden chain (goldene keyt) of Yiddish popular culture.” It was this call to revive the “golden chain” of Yiddish culture that Sloves and the other organizers of the congress repeatedly emphasized because of its broad appeal across partisan lines. This theme of unifying Yiddish culture and overcoming internecine conflicts recurs in almost all of the articles, essays, and speeches on the Paris congress, before, during, and after; indeed, unity is the underlying motif of the entire undertaking. This desire for unity needs to be understood within the larger context of the Popular Front movement among Jewish Communists in France and America.6 In the summer of 1935, the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International issued an official call for a “Popular Front” to combat fascism. This meant more cooperation between Communists and liberal parties or

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antifascist groups throughout the world, which had been previously banned by the Comintern during the Third Period (1928–1935). In the United States, one of the aims of the Popular Front was for Communists to form a coalition with other “progressives” in order to demarginalize the party and reposition it as an integral part of the American left and the labor movement. The Yiddishspeaking Communists enthusiastically embraced the Comintern’s goal of a popular or united front, and this became a recurring theme for them from 1935 on. They began to openly embrace Jewish culture and topics of general Jewish interest that had previously been considered taboo. Melech Epstein portrays the Yiddish-speaking Communists’ main concern during the Popular Front period as trying to end their isolation on the American Jewish left by stressing unity among the various left-wing factions, especially rallying around the causes of “saving the Jews in Europe, fighting anti-Semitism here and fortifying Jewish culture.”7 In this spirit of unity, Sloves asked Zhitlovsky to help build widespread support for the congress among the various Yiddish cultural organizations and leaders in America, noting that the Culture Front had contacted several and had so far only heard a positive response from a few of them. (Sloves observed that Zhitlovsky himself had not responded to the invitation to participate in the culture congress that the Culture Front had sent him months earlier.) At first, Zhitlovsky resisted the pleas of Sloves and the Culture Front to endorse the conference publicly, and Sloves sent Zhitlovsky another, similar letter in April of 1937, again asking for his help in building support for and diffusing the opposition to the congress. Soon after this second letter, Zhitlovsky began to actively support the Paris congress, becoming the chairman of the American committee for the World Congress by the summer of 1937 and writing a number of articles in the popular Yiddish daily, Der tog, that summer in support of it. In fact, outside of the Yiddish Communists, Zhitlovsky became the foremost champion of the Paris conference in America, identifying it as a natural continuation of the “spirit of Czernowitz.” As mentioned above, gaining support for the conference had not been easy, as many factions within the Yiddish cultural world, including the Bund, YIVO (the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilna), and the Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle), opposed it on various grounds.8 While none rejected the main goals of the conference (promoting secular Yiddish culture), several took issue with who was organizing it. In an ironic twist, it was the Communists, both in Europe and America, who became the primary advocates of the conference despite their previous ambivalence, and even hostility toward Yiddish culture. Since their acceptance of a Popular Front in 1935, the Communists, especially in the United States, had become enthusiastic in their support of secular Yiddish culture. By the beginning of 1937, the American

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Jewish Communists had begun to endorse the congress vigorously and made tireless efforts to promote it and attract widespread support. The organization of the Paris congress represented a major development on this new “cultural front” and marks the watershed of the Communists’ full-blown return to Jewish culture. It also should be seen as one of the first major successes of the Popular Front campaign launched by the Communists in 1935. The prominent Yiddish Communist writer, Kalman Marmor (1879–1956) became the secretary of the American committee for the Paris congress, appealing to many leading Yiddish intellectuals and institutions (both Communist and non-Communist) to take part in or support the congress. One of Marmor’s main activities was to solicit financial support for the congress, and he sent out donation cards to numerous organizations and individuals asking for financial contributions to the congress.9 Like Sloves before him, Marmor also turned to Zhitlovsky to help gather broad support for the congress from beyond Communist circles. In a letter to Zhitlovsky dated February 25, 1937, which was accompanied by a copy of the first newsletter from the organizers of the Yiddish Culture Congress, Marmor emphasized that the members of the Culture Front in Paris were prestigious leaders of Yiddish culture from all political leanings. He expressed his wish to Zhitlovsky that in America, too, the supporters of the Paris congress would be drawn from across the political and cultural spectrum. Interestingly, the list Marmor provided Zhitlovsky of individuals and organizations that he thought should take part in the congress were mostly affiliated with the Communists. This despite the fact that the major challenge Marmor and the Communists faced was overcoming the fierce opposition to the conference coming from the non-Communist Yiddish sector. Even as late as the end of July, just six weeks before the conference, Sloves wrote to Marmor requesting that he get one of the major non-Communist supporters of the congress in the United States, either Zhitlovsky, H. Leyvik (ca. 1888–1962), or Joseph Opatoshu (1886–1954), to write an article about the importance of the conference to help gather more bipartisan support.10 In addition to Marmor’s efforts on behalf of the Paris congress, Moyshe Olgin (1878–1939), Moyshe Katz (1885–1960), and other leading Communist figures in America repeatedly extolled the plan for the Paris congress in articles, editorials, essays, and public speeches throughout the months leading up to the congress. Appearing in the Yiddish Communist daily, Morgen frayhayt, on January 14, 1937, Moyshe Katz’s article, “It’s Time to Prepare for an International Yiddish Culture Congress,” spoke of receiving the announcement for the Paris congress from Sloves. He described the Paris Culture Front behind the conference as an ideological mix of socialists, Communists, left-Zionists, and general Yiddish culturists in an effort to demonstrate that it fit squarely in the spirit of the Popular Front. Katz asserted that while the left wing (di linke)

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generally supports the culture congress, much of the American Yiddish scene, led by the staunchly anti-Communist newspaper, Forverts, opposed it because of its association with the Popular Front and the Communists. Katz viewed this as another example of how their hatred of Communism kept them from taking part in the effort to preserve secular Yiddish culture. In his English-language column in the Frayhayt from February 25, 1937, the paper’s editor, Moyshe Olgin, came out in support of the Paris congress, calling it a plan “which ought to interest every friend of Jewish culture” and seeing it as something “which can unite all builders and friends of Jewish culture irrespective of ideologies and trends.” For Olgin, the two prime directives of the congress were the defense of modern Yiddish culture against its enemies (external and internal) and an assessment of the current state of secular Yiddish culture. In his capacity as editor and influential public intellectual, Olgin attempted to cast the Paris congress as a pressing concern for all Jews—not just Communists—who embraced Yiddish culture. In the March 1937 issue of the Communist Yiddish monthly, Der Hamer, Olgin cowrote an article in support of the Paris congress with Joseph Sultan (1892–1961), the leader of the Jewish section of the Communist Party USA. There, the authors defended the centrality of secular Yiddish culture for American Jewish life in general, especially emphasizing its importance for the Jewish masses. In the June 1937 issue of Der Hamer, Moyshe Katz penned a lengthy article in which he, too, stressed the popular nature of Yiddish culture. Katz attempted to distinguish the mass appeal of the Paris congress from the more elitist nature of the Czernowitz Conference.11 Czernowitz had been primarily aimed at Yiddishist scholars, while the Paris congress was concerned with secular Yiddish culture more widely defined. In the subsequent months leading up to the Paris congress, Olgin and his comrades continued to campaign for it, frequently and fervently. As the conference approached and the opposition to it stiffened, the Communists began to lash out at the conference’s critics, accusing them of not being true “friends of Jewish culture.” Olgin and his Communist colleagues accused the Yiddish “bourgeois press” of starting a “civil war” because of their vehement rejection of the Paris conference and their harsh condemnations of its Communist supporters. Indeed, the non-Communist Yiddish press bitterly condemned the congress, publishing articles and editorials in Forverts, Tog, and the Morgen zhurnal in August of 1937 attacking it as a Communist ruse and a “maneuver to take over Jewish souls.”12 The Forverts and Tog published a powerful declaration in opposition to the congress that was signed by twenty-six prominent Yiddish writers, including I. J. Singer (1893–1944), David Pinski (1872–1959), Aron Glantz-Leyles (1899–1966), Jacob Glatstein (1896–1971), S. Margoshes (1887–1968), Chaim Lieberman

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(1890–1963), and others.13 Jacob Glatstein himself wrote a column in Morgen zhurnal (August 27, 1937) condemning the Jewish Communists behind the congress, declaring “nowhere in Jewish history has such an organized group of scoundrels made so many attempts to throw themselves on Jewish life in order to corrode and blacken it.”14 The prominent editor of Tog, S. Margoshes, also wrote several articles in which he vehemently opposed the Paris congress and all those who supported it. He argued that “Jewish culture is rooted in Jewish tradition and no true friend of Jewish culture can possibly make common cause with Jewish Communists who are the inveterate foes of Jewish tradition.”15 As in the declaration that appeared in the Forverts and Tog, Margoshes cited the Communists’ many sins against the Jewish people as reasons to oppose their call for a Yiddish Culture Congress. These sins included their total abandonment of Jewish cultural values, their opposition to Zionism and support of Arab riots in Palestine, and their obeisance to the party line from Moscow. He asserted that the Communists were disingenuous and exploiting others’ interests in Jewish culture for their own propagandistic purposes, claiming that the Communists “have as much interest in Jewish culture as the Zulus have in the North Pole. What prompts them to pose as the promoters of Jewish culture and the best friends of the Jewish people is a desire to promote their political interests among the Jewish masses.”16 For Margoshes, no matter how much they changed their position on Jewish culture, the Communists were not to be trusted. According to this view, any good that might come from the Paris congress was overshadowed by the pernicious influence of the Communists and their involvement in the congress. Despite this vehement opposition to the “Communist-tainted” Paris congress, several prominent non-Communist Yiddish intellectuals and writers—led by Zhitlovsky—came to support and even attend the Paris congress. In addition to his organizational role as chairman of the American Committee for the Paris congress, Zhitlovsky wrote a number of articles in his regular column in Tog in the months before the conference proclaiming its vital significance. In fact, he became the most vocal, non-Communist proponent of the congress in the Yiddish press. Zhitlovsky envisioned the culture congress as part of the “progressive, national revival of our people” and a means to unify all segments of the Jewish people—from the far right to the far left—in one “gaystik natsionale idishe heym” (a spiritual, national Jewish home), which he referred to as Yidishland.17 Zhitlovsky had long been attracted to this concept of a cultural nationalism, linked by secular Yiddish culture, which did not depend on territory. If Czernowitz represented the foundational moment of this Yiddishist vision, then for Zhitlovsky the Paris congress was a crucial step to help preserve and revive Yidishland.

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In response to the declaration of opposition to the Yiddish congress that appeared in the anti-Communist Yiddish dailies, Zhitlovsky published a “counterdeclaration” in Tog on August 21, 1937. There he argued that the Paris Yiddish congress was a general cultural concern for all Jews and that partisan political conflicts should be put aside. He rejected the opposition’s claim that the Communists’ role in the congress was reason to boycott it, positing that as long as the Communists were working to preserve Yiddish culture, their efforts should be joined by all who supported those goals. Zhitlovsky had always maintained that Yiddish culture was the national patrimony of the Jewish people, regardless of religious or political orientation, and therefore all factions and groups should come together to work on its behalf. Since 1936 Zhitlovsky had been attracted to the idea of a “united front” (fareynikte front), which was being advocated strongly in Yiddish Communist circles. Despite what had been a fairly cold relationship with the Communists prior to then, Zhitlovsky began to reevaluate his assessment of the American Jewish Communists once he believed they were trying to reconcile with other groups on the Yiddish left and beginning to champion secular Yiddish culture. Similarly drawn by the goals of strengthening and preserving secular Yiddish culture, other important Yiddish writers and scholars such as Shmuel Niger (1883–1955), H. Leyvik, Joseph Opatoshu, B. Z. Goldberg (1895–1972), Peretz Hirschbein (1880–1948), A. Mukdoni (1877–1958), and a few others, allied themselves with the Yiddish Communists in support of the Paris congress, even though many of them had been severely critical of the Communists in the past. In a letter to Marmor dated June 16, 1937, the poet and journalist for the Tog, Yoel Slonim (1884–1944), declared his support of the Paris congress, calling it an “undertaking of the utmost importance.” He saw it as no sin to cooperate with the Communists who were organizing the conference and claimed that they deserved a “yasher koyekh” (congratulations) for doing so. This realignment was the source of much controversy and these new “fellow travelers” were often perceived by the congress’s opponents as providing a fig leaf of respectability for the mostly Communist-driven culture congress. Some of them, especially Leyvik, worked tirelessly to convince the opponents of the congress to suspend partisan differences and join ranks in order to support Yiddish culture. Leyvik and Opatoshu even wrote the conference organizer, Sloves, in August of 1937, asking to postpone the Paris conference until they could get all political factions within Yiddish culture to participate.18 Sloves refused and Leyvik had no success convincing the conference’s foes to back down. Despite all of the opposition, the American committee for the Paris conference held a convention, the “First National Conference for the International

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Jewish Culture Congress,” in New York’s Town Hall on August 28–29 of 1937 to elect the delegates to attend the Paris conference. Similar regional conferences were also held in Estonia, Lithuania, South Africa, Argentina, and France.19 According to Kalman Marmor, more than 2,000 people attended the opening ceremony, and more than 800 delegates representing 425 organizations were in attendance. In a letter to Zhitlovsky dated September 3, 1937, Marmor provided the delegate breakdown, state by state, mentioning that delegates from Canada and Cuba were there as well. Confirming the American conference’s popular appeal, the headline article in the Tog, from August 30, 1937, reported on the proceedings of the conference in New York, providing the number of attendees and adding that another 2,000 or so tried to attend but were turned back for lack of space. Melech Epstein later explained that the opening of the conference in Town Hall “was an enthusiastic affair” because “strengthening and expanding Jewish culture went straight to the heart of the left rank and file.”20 At the New York conference the delegates selected ten representatives to make up the American delegation to the conference in Paris, with only three avowed Communists among them: Marmor, Olgin, and Reuven Saltzman (1890–1959). The delegation also included prominent non-Communist writers, led by Opatoshu and Leyvik, which reflected the ongoing concern of the conference organizers to gain a sense of international legitimacy for the conference beyond Communist Party lines. Zhitlovsky could not travel to Paris because of ill health, but he continued to support the conference vehemently in the press up to and after its taking place. Although the delegation was of a bipartisan nature, Communist organizations such as the Frayhayt and the IWO (International Workers Order) paid the entire expense for the trip to Paris; there was no significant financial support from any prominent nonCommunist organization or institution.21 After more than a year of planning and months of controversy, the International Yiddish Culture Congress opened in Paris in the Vagram Hall of the Sorbonne on Friday, September 17 with a full house of approximately 4,000 people in attendance. The conference presidium greeted the crowd from their perch on the balcony, which was draped with banners. Among them were large pictures of the founders of Yiddish literature, Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz. Other banners included slogans such as “Yiddish: Our National Language” and “With United Energy in Support of Yiddish Culture.” Unlike at Czernowitz, the organizers of the Paris conference unanimously agreed that Yiddish was the national language of the Jewish people. For them, the pressing concern was unifying the various factions and groups that shared a commitment to Yiddish culture. The opening night of the conference featured opening speeches and greetings from representatives of the delegations of twenty-three

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countries, including Poland, France, United States, Palestine, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, Rumania, Estonia, and Italy. This strong international representation at the congress helped bolster the spirit of unity that the organizers had been touting since announcing the plan for the conference in 1936. Echoing this theme, Nakhmen Mayzel (1887–1966), of the Polish delegation, wrote in an article published on the opening day of the conference, “each country on its own is weak, united, we will be able to carry out our cultural work and achieve new heights.”22 Despite this sense of international unity for Yiddish culture, there were many significant groups not represented in Paris. As discussed above, the Bund, YIVO, the Forverts, and other major factions and organizations boycotted the conference and refused to participate. Both in Europe and in the United States, the opposition to the conference had been widespread and significant. Moreover, although the participation at the conference of major Soviet Yiddish writers, such as Dovid Bergelson (1884–1952), Itzik Feffer (1900–1952), and Izzy Kharik (1898–1952), had been planned for, at the last minute, the Soviet delegation was not allowed to attend. The Communist Party Central Committee in Moscow cancelled the trip, explaining that “the main organizer of that anti-Nazi gathering was Chaim Zhitlovsky, who suggested discussing the idea of the so-called ‘Yiddishland’—a symbolic spiritual homeland, which would unite all Yiddish-speaking Jews, independent of class and state borders.”23 In the end, the theme of international unity around Yiddish, as articulated by Zhitlovsky at least, sounded threateningly nationalistic to Moscow. The main conference organizer, Chaim Sloves, gave the opening address of the conference in which he declared that the current moment was one of the most tragic in world history. He framed the conference within this broader historical context of world fascism and the persecution of Jews throughout Europe and the world. Sloves passionately affirmed that the unity of all Yiddish cultural forces was crucial for the continued survival of the Jews and their culture in such perilous times. As did many participants at the conference, Sloves saw culture as one of the most important weapons in the struggle for a people’s national existence. For the Jewish people, Sloves proclaimed, Yiddish culture was a means of national self-preservation that needed to be bolstered at that moment, more than ever. Opatoshu, Olgin, Marmor, and Leyvik gave opening speeches for the American delegation. For Opatoshu, the congress was a momentous occasion for the unification and glorification of Yiddish culture, yet he also acknowledged the many opponents of the culture congress, who prevented the unification he and the other conference participants sought.24 In this respect, Opatoshu viewed the opening day of the congress as a “Day of Judgment”

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(yom ha-din) for Yiddish culture itself, implying that all who supported this culture must stand with it and not against it. He insisted that the conference was not a partisan conference, but a culmination of the Yiddish culture begun by di klasiker (Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz, whose images hung on huge banners above him), one representing the heart and soul of Yiddish culture. In Leyvik’s speech, he lamented the tragic state of disharmony that has prevailed in the Yiddish cultural world since the era of Czernowitz, during which, he believed, there was a general unity of purpose. Leyvik hoped that the Paris congress and the movement that came out of it could achieve Jewish cultural unity and overcome political differences and factionalism in search of what he termed “gantskeyt” (“wholeness”).25 Indeed, almost all of the speeches stressed the concept of a “united front,” a coming together, a unity that transcended all of the fractionalization and partisanship that had been synonymous with Yiddish cultural life. Although Zhitlovsky was not able to make the trip to Paris due to his poor health, his paper entitled “Yiddish Culture from Czernowitz to Today” was read at the conference by Zishe Vaynper (1892–1957) on Saturday, September 18.26 In the paper, Zhitlovsky set out to compare the two conferences—their respective circumstances and goals—as well as to evaluate the progress of Yiddish culture from 1908 until 1937. Zhitlovsky devoted a considerable portion of his speech to assessing the Czernowitz Conference and its accomplishments and failings. He argued that due to the circumstances surrounding the Czernowitz Conference and its time, the delegates were forced to take up the issue of the Yiddish language as such, rather than the subject of Yiddish culture. However, Zhitlovsky claimed that the true goal of Czernowitz was the creation of a worldwide “spiritual-national territory”—Yidishland—in which a Jewish national culture in Yiddish could take root. Despite the deleterious effects of assimilation, Zhitlovsky pointed out that, in the almost thirty years since Czernowitz, such a worldwide Yiddish culture emerged and still flourished. It was precisely this culture that Czernowitz spawned that allowed the current gathering in Paris to address the needs of Yiddish culture, rather than language, as in Czernowitz. True to his Yiddishist philosophy, Zhitlovsky preached that a rich and diverse Yiddish culture, which incorporated the whole gamut of human culture and Jewish culture, would raise the status of the entire Jewish nation, allowing it to take part in the universal brotherhood of humanity. For this to happen Yiddish culture must be inclusive and united, not a house divided. Zhitlovsky believed that the Paris congress, as the necessary continuation of Czernowitz, “must lay the foundation for the unification of all of our forces of cultural creativity, in order to achieve the highest ideal of a Popular culture (folkskultur-sfera).”27 Ever an optimist, Zhitlovsky believed that the Paris congress

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was continuing the work he had formally begun in 1908 and that the “spirit of Czernowitz” would ultimately persevere, despite the many perils the Jews faced in 1937. Over the next four days there were dozens of speeches and reports from the various delegations, mostly taking stock of the present state of modern Yiddish culture around the world, and identifying the major problems or trends within different genres of Yiddish culture that needed addressing. The delegates formed various commissions, which passed resolutions that included concrete proposals for the forward progress and growth of Yiddish literature, theater, schools, scholarship, Jewish art, and the like. The congress concluded by issuing a general manifesto, addressed “to the Jewish People!” calling on them to come together to help build up Yiddish culture. The manifesto also called for the founding of an international Yiddish cultural organization intended to carry on the work initiated at the Paris gathering. The new cultural organization created at the conference was the Alveltlekher yidisher kultur farband (International Yiddish/Jewish Culture Alliance), known by the acronym YKUF. The YKUF and its monthly journal Yidishe kultur, which began publication in 1938, became the enduring manifestation of the new cultural front that had been created by Yiddish Communists and their supporters in the run-up to the Paris congress. Prominent non-Communist intellectuals, poets, and writers contributed to Yidishe kultur and took part in YKUF cultural events, especially in the United States and Canada. Besides Zhitlovsky (who was named honorary chairman of YKUF), Leyvik, and Opatoshu (who were vice-chairmen of the YKUF), other regular contributors to Yidishe kultur included the writer Chaim Grade (1910–1982), the poets Kadya Molodovsky (1894–1975), Rachel Korn (1898–1982), and Esther Shumiatcher (1899–1985), the painter Marc Chagall (1887–1985), and other leading figures of modern Yiddish culture who were not Communists. There were also regular contributions from leading Communist figures, such as Olgin, Marmor, Moyshe Katz, and others. Moreover, the content of Yidishe kultur and the many other publications put out by YKUF was not explicitly political. Although the YKUF maintained a pro-Soviet and pro-Communist editorial line, its cultural offerings, including poetry, literature, and literary criticism were of a high quality and mostly nonpartisan. Indeed, for both the non-Communist and Communist members of YKUF, the goal of unifying the various Jewish political factions in a united cultural front was central. In the monthly bulletin of the American branch of YKUF from June 1938, the leading figures of YKUF discussed the aims of the organization and the Paris congress from the preceding year. Author after author—both Communist and non-Communist—envisioned the Paris congress

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and the YKUF as trying to build something that transcended ideological and political divides and would spread Yiddish culture to the “breytste yidishe folksmasn” (broadest Jewish masses).28 While the Yiddish Culture Congress in Paris has been largely forgotten today, even within academic circles, its successes and accomplishments were, in many ways, as great as those of the Czernowitz Conference. More than a final act of a dying culture and its standard bearers, the Paris congress, despite the controversy and boycotts surrounding it, was able to harness Yiddish cultural forces in ways that had consequential and long-term effects. The YKUF, which can be seen as the most significant byproduct of the Paris congress, remained an important institution for the preservation and ongoing production of secular Yiddish culture through the end of the twentieth century.

NOTES 1. Emanuel Goldsmith, Modern Yiddish Culture: The Story of the Yiddish Language Movement (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 217–18; cited from Chaim Zhitlovsky, “Tshernovits un der Yidishizm,” Yidishe Kultur (May 1958), p. 14. 2. The executive committee of the Yiddish Culture Front consisted of Nakhum Aronson (Chair), Dovid Einhorn, Prof. Kivelevitch, Chaim Sloves (Secretary), Ben Adir, and a few others. 3. Sima Beeri, “The ‘Forgotten’ Yiddish Congress, World Yiddish Culture Congress of 1937 in Paris,” unpublished paper presented at the Graduate Conference at New York University, 2006, p. 6. 4. Ibid. 5. This letter, along with subsequent letters from Sloves to Zhitlovsky, is located in Zhitlovsky’s archive, RG 208, Folder 1128, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. 6. See David H. Weinberg, A Community on Trial: The Jews of Paris in the 1930s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 121–22. 7. Melech Epstein, The Jew and Communism: The Story of Early Communist Victories and Ultimate Defeats in the Jewish Community, U.S.A., 1919–1941 (New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1959), p. 301. 8. Beeri outlines this opposition, focusing especially on the Bund, p. 8 ff. 9. YKUF Archive, RG 1226, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. 10. Ibid, Sloves’s letter to Marmor is dated July 28, 1937. 11. In the article, Katz erroneously states that the Czernowitz Conference took place in 1910. 12. Cited in Bat-Ami Zucker, “American Jewish Communists and Jewish Culture in the 1930s,” Modern Judaism 14. 2 (May 1994), p. 184, n. 35; see also, Melech Epstein, The Jew and Communism, p. 324–25. The articles appeared in the Forverts

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on August 13 and 20, 1937; in Tog on August 16, 18, and 22, and Morgen zhurnal on August 27. 13. See Epstein, p. 324–25. 14. Ibid., p. 325. 15. Der tog, August 16, 1937. 16. Der tog, August 22, 1937. 17. “Der idisher kultur-kongres,” Der tog, June 12, 1937. The subsequent articles appeared on July 31 and August 21. 18. Sloves’s letter to Opatoshu of August 18, 1937, explains why postponing the conference was not possible and why it must go on as planned; see Opatoshu archive, RG 436, folder 315, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. 19. Ershter alvetlekher yidisher kultur congres, pariz 17–21 september 1937, tsentral-farvaltung fun YKUF, Paris, New York, and Warsaw, 1937, p. 9. 20. Epstein, p. 325. 21. Ibid. 22. Beeri, p. 12; the article appeared in Literarishe Bleter 38 (September 17, 1937). 23. Beeri, p. 10. 24. YKUF Bulletin, June 1938, “Farmest un Arbet” (“Challenge and Work”), p. 2; found in YKUF Archive, RG 1226, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. 25. For Leyvik’s main speech at the conference, see Ershter alvetlekher yidisher kultur congres, pariz 17–21 september 1937, central-farvaltung fun YKUF, pariz-niuyork, varshe, 1937, p. 87–103; Leyvik also discusses the congress in YKUF Bulletin, June 1938, “Farmest un Arbet,” p. 3; found in YKUF Archive, RG 1226, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. 26. Zhitlovsky’s paper is included in the conference proceedings, Ershter alvetlekher yidisher kultur congres, pariz 17–21 september 1937, p. 70–85; and in Zhitlovsky’s posthumous collection, “Mayne ani mamins” (YKUF: New York, 1953), p. 396–410. 27. Zhitlovsky, p. 84–85. 28. “Farmest un Arbet,” 9. YKUF Bulletin, June, 1938, YKUF archive, RG 1226, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

12 Yiddishism in Canadian Garb Rebecca Margolis

Canadian Jews did not directly participate in the Czernowitz Conference. They sent no delegates and no salutary messages. Canada’s English-language press, including the Anglo-Jewish weekly The Jewish Times, made no mention of the event. The country’s only Yiddish newspaper, the Keneder adler (Canadian Jewish Eagle), founded in 1907 as a weekly, offers only an argument from silence as it did not begin a regular schedule of publication until a month after the conference. The sizeable body of memoirs and histories by local Yiddish cultural activists make no reference to the event. Given the nascent nature of Yiddish life in Canada and given Robert King’s assertion that the event had “no impact . . . not even as a symbol of anything” in the far more developed Yiddish community in the United States,1 this lack of attention is hardly surprising. However, despite the absence of discernible coverage, the event has had a lasting, albeit indirect, impact on Canadian Yiddish life. The Czernowitz Conference has played itself out in significant ways in Canada. The conference’s Yiddishist ideals—the legitimization and institutionalization of modern Yiddish language and culture—were implemented by immigrant communities across Canada, notably in the field of education. Both Joshua Fishman2 and Robert King assert that the event serves as a milestone marking the transition from low to high functions for Yiddish; this expansion of Yiddish into realms of modern Jewish culture—education, the press, scholarship, theater—forms the basis of Yiddish life as it has evolved in Canada. Moreover, two of the event’s leading figures have been key to the development of Canadian Yiddish culture: Chaim Zhitlowsky and I. L. Peretz. Most concretely, item five of the conference invitation—“Jewish Youth and 165

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the Yiddish Language”—came to assume particular prominence in Yiddish Canada in the wake of Zhitlowsky’s 1910 call for the establishment of a system of secular Yiddish schools under the aegis of the labor Zionist Poale Zion movement. Moreover, Zhitlowsky’s concept of a completely secular Yiddish culture combined with Peretz’s promotion of Yiddish as a locus for Jewish revitalization have reverberated in Yiddish Canada for almost a century; not coincidentally, Peretz quickly became the namesake of choice for institutions of a Yiddishist orientation. This study discusses the shifting manifestations of Yiddish life through the lens of secular Yiddish education. It posits that Canada’s models for Yiddish continuity were created ad hoc by klal-tuers (community activists)—notably pedagogues—in response to shifting, wider trends and the community’s changing needs. This flexible “Yiddishism” lies at the core of the Canadian infrastructure that has allowed Yiddish to be so resilient in the face of worldwide attrition. I shall propose a schema that divides the development of Canadian “Yiddishism” into three distinct periods. In the first period—which coincides with the mass migration of Eastern European Jews to Canada from 1905 until 1920—the promotion of modern Yiddish language and culture manifested itself on a utilitarian level, subordinate to ideological and political goals, in particular via the labor Zionist movement. Yiddish served as the lingua franca of the Canadian Jewish community. In the second, interwar period, the conscious promotion of modern Yiddish language and culture—the ideals of Yiddishism—became a fixture on the Canadian Jewish cultural scene. At the same time, the language was beginning to lose its hold as the vernacular of the wider community. The third, post-Holocaust period, has been characterized by a growing rift between those who promote modern Yiddish language and culture as heritage and engage with Yiddish on a symbolic level but do not relate to it as a vernacular, and its daily speakers in the Haredi (ultraOrthodox), mainly Hasidic communities. The Canadian movement for secular Yiddish education mirrors these three periods.

PERIOD 1: 1900–1920 Yiddish life in Canada a century ago was in its infancy, with the local Jewish community in the throes of upheaval. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the nation’s small population of Jews had overwhelmingly acculturated into the Anglo-Canadian milieu. In a country that divided along religious and linguistic lines into its two charter groups—Anglo-Celtic Protestant and French Catholic—Jews identified with the English elite and participated in its social,

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economic, and political life as Canadian “members of the Mosaic faith.” Mass immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe marked an abrupt change to the existing status quo. Between 1891 and 1911, the Canadian Jewish population exploded from some 6,500 to over 75,000, with annual immigration reaching 12,000 in the peak year of 1907. The population would double again by 1931.3 While small numbers settled in Canada’s western agricultural colonies, a majority of these Jewish immigrants made their homes in Montreal, followed by Toronto and Winnipeg. The newcomers were conspicuous in more than just their numbers and urban settlement patterns. First, the newcomers were almost entirely Yiddish speakers. Second, in the relatively homogeneous landscape of Canadian Jewry, their ranks spanned the traditionally observant and politically radical. Third, as in the United States, most initially joined the working class and were prominent in the development of the trade union movement. Zionism—a prominent ideology among the country’s Jews that encompassed both the Canadian “establishment” and immigrant components of the Jewish community—served as common ground. Thus, the ninth Convention of the Federation of Zionist Societies of Canada that coincided with the week of the Czernowitz Conference brought together delegates from across the country and was widely reported in the Anglo-Jewish and Yiddish press. Within this Zionist movement, the Canadian Poale Zion, headquartered in Montreal from its founding in 1905, acted as the driving force behind the initial development of modern Yiddish culture in the country. As the primary destination for the Jewish mass migration between 1900 and 1920, Montreal served as Canada’s Yiddish hub. By 1912, Jews numbered some 30,000 out of the city’s total population of 470,000, and for a time, Yiddish functioned as the city’s third language, both officially and unofficially.4 As Canada’s first significant non-Christian group, Montreal’s new immigrants found themselves sandwiched between the city’s “two solitudes”: its French-Catholic and English-Protestant populations. Marginalized by both groups, Jews of all stripes joined an emerging venture to build a religious, social, and cultural infrastructure, with Yiddish as the common language. Ideology was translated into active community building, and active community building into cultural preservation, whether the mechanisms be secular Yiddish culture, Orthodox Judaism, Zionism, or any combination thereof. The common denominator was Yiddish, as a means or an end, or both. David Roskies has characterized Montreal as the site of a “utopian venture,” where a group of “lay intellectuals” forged a maximalist, future-oriented culture of yidishkayt as the basis for Jewish continuity.5 The resulting degree of institutional completeness in this “Jerusalem of the North,” in particular in the area of education, prompted journalist Ben Zion Goldberg (Benjamin Waife,

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1895–1972) to remark in New York’s Tog-morgn zhurnal in 1955, “if there was ever the possibility of cultural Jewish/Yiddish autonomy in Anglo-North America, it was in Montreal.”6 Community education represented the most important Canadian manifestation of modern Yiddish culture. In a global Yiddish “youth culture revolving around autodidacticism,” a strong commitment to adult self-education expressed itself in the creation of local libraries.7 The Zionist movement, in particular the Poale Zion, stood at the forefront of pioneering library ventures at the turn of the last century. In 1912, a library “for the advancement of learning and of Yiddish literature in particular” opened in a rented store in the Jewish district; it served as the precursor to Montreal’s Yidishe-folksbiblyotek (Jewish Public Library), which was officially launched in 1914. Spearheaded by McGill University student and Poale Zion activist Yehuda Kaufman (1886[7]–1976)—later known as renowned Israeli Jewish scholar lexicographer Even Shmuel—the Jewish Public Library was established in the Jewish immigrant quarter as a nonpartisan community lending library and cultural center. Since its inception, it has served as the local hub of Yiddish literary activity: presentations by local and visiting writers, book launches, celebrations of milestones in the Yiddish world, and public lectures. In its early years, the library also offered an array of courses under the auspices of its Folksuniversitet (People’s University), a venture that was subsequently revived in 1941. The same core group of Poale Zion activists was behind the creation of Canada’s modern secular Yiddish school—or “shul”—system in the 1910s. Canada has been at the forefront of the shul movement since its inception. As Jeffrey Shandler points out, twentieth-century advocacy for Yiddish heralded the beginnings of its formal pedagogy: “For Yiddishists, the classroom became the venue par excellence for enacting a modernist transformation of traditional Ashkenazic culture.”8 Whereas the development of comprehensive systems of secular Yiddish education were delayed in Europe and the United States—the former by tsarist restrictions on Yiddish cultural activity and the latter by a cosmopolitan leftist ideology that promoted Anglicization among the early American mass immigration9—the nationalist orientation of the Canadian Jewish immigration translated into Yiddish-centered education. In principle, Canada’s Poale Zion promoted both Yiddish and Hebrew as expressions of Jewish identity in its schools; in practice, Yiddish formed the core of the curriculum with a variable role attributed to Hebrew. The first Canadian shuln were founded in the aftermath of the fifth North America Poale Zion conference, held in Montreal in 1910, where Chaim Zhitlowsky passed a resolution calling for a system of “natsyonale radikale shuln” (national radical schools) to transmit the movement’s core Zionist and

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Socialist values. After repeated attempts, schools with Yiddish language and culture as a core component of the curriculum were established in Montreal, Winnipeg, and Toronto by 1914; these were renamed Peretz Shuln after I. L. Peretz’s death in 1916. The shul movement embodied the ideological struggles between Yiddish and Hebrew that expressed themselves in practical ways. Soon after the founding of the National Radical Schools, groups of activists broke away to found Yidishe Folkshuln (Jewish People’s Schools) in Montreal and Toronto. The People’s Schools were distinguished by their increased emphasis on Hebrew in the curriculum and the teaching of ivrit-beivrit (Hebrew in Hebrew). What can be termed Canadian “Yiddishist” ideology evolved in relation to wider developments in the Jewish world. As the shared spoken language of the Jewish immigrant masses, Yiddish filled a utilitarian role in wider efforts at community building. As Emanuel Goldsmith points out, rather than develop a comprehensive ideological framework, Yiddishism initially relied on the de facto centrality of Yiddish as a shared vernacular.10 The connections between Yiddish cultural activity and the Poale Zion are a case in point. Activist and historian Sh. Belkin’s meticulous study, Di poale tsiyen bavegung in kanade, 1904–1920 (The Poale Zion movement in Canada, 1904–1920)11 discusses Yiddish only in relation to its educational program, notably the establishment of libraries and schools. It reflects a movement whose early commitment was not to Yiddish per se, but rather to conveying leftist Zionist ideology in the language of the Jewish masses, whether expressed through trade unionism, political agitation, or cultural activity. Never an actual point on the Poale Zion’s agenda, its Yiddish-oriented institutions have fallen prey to wider trends: with the leftist component virtually vanished from Canadian Jewish life, within the Zionist component, Yiddish has largely ceded to Hebrew.

PERIOD 2: 1920–1950 The interwar period marked the highpoint of modern Yiddish culture in Canada, with an efflorescence of literary and educational activity. The local Yiddish milieu, in particular in the hubs of Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg, developed a core intelligentsia committed to expanding the high functions of the language. This emerging trend is reflected in one of Canada’s pioneering Yiddish literary journals, Der kval (ed. A. Almi), which first appeared in Montreal in 1922. Its eclectic contents include modernist poetry by Yud Yud Segal (1896–1954), a Yiddish translation of the ZendAvesta by Yehude Elzet/ Zlotnik (1887–1962), studies of world literature, music, and theater, and an essay bemoaning the lack of serious scholarship in Yiddish by A. A. Roback

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(1890–1965). This publication reflects the optimistic expansion of a minor center in a multifaceted and dynamic Yiddish world. During this period, the shuln movement expanded into smaller Jewish centers such as Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver. Adopting the existing model, these new schools offered supplementary Yiddish-centered education in language, Jewish literature, folklore, and history, rooted in leftist/nationalist ideologies. Again, the role of Hebrew varied. By the end of the 1920s, shuln in Winnipeg and Montreal were offering day school education, with Montreal’s Communist-oriented Morris Winchevsky Shul following suit from the mid-1940s through the early 1950s. The Canadian development of Yiddish full-day education parallels developments in Latin America; in contrast, the secular Yiddish schools in the United States, despite their rapid expansion, remained a supplementary system to complement the public school system. The shuln promoted active engagement with Yiddish language and culture, as the example of Montreal’s secular Yiddish day schools reflects. All of these institutions—the Peretz School, Jewish People’s School, and the Morris Winchevsky School—featured classes in Yiddish literature and composition, and encouraged the students to actively engage with Yiddish literature by discussing, declaiming, and authoring belles-letters. At every opportunity, the shuln invited Yiddish guest writers and other prominent visitors to the city into the classroom or school assemblies. They sponsored shul clubs and journals to encourage student publication in Yiddish. Moreover, many of the schools’ activists and teachers were leaders in the Yiddish cultural milieu: published poets and authors who moonlighted as teachers included Shimshen Dunsky (1899–1981), Yud Yud Segal, Sholem Shtern (1907–1991), and Yaakov Zipper (1900–1982). Always understanding themselves as an integral part of the wider community, the shuln offered programming for adults that included lecture series and reading circles. Shuln events were well attended by the Yiddish public: for example, during the interwar period, shul graduations filled the Monument-National, home of local Yiddish theater. In a shul journal in 1929, Yud Yud Segal expressed the shuln’s holistic approach to Yiddish education, despite initial community opposition: “I see us all as one camp: poets, artists, writers, teachers, journalists, cultural activists, and cultural builders. I see us all as one edifice, one venture.”12 Segal’s comments serve as a reminder that although the Yiddish language was shared by the community, the Yiddishist vision of secular Yiddish education was not. Unlike the daily Keneder adler, which cultivated an inclusive and moderate character, or the nonpartisan Jewish Public Library, the shuln were founded as overtly secular institutions. The shuln have been central to a long-term commitment to Yiddish in the face of its growing attrition. The Canadian Jewish community’s shift away

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from Yiddish to English as shared vernacular was underway by the 1920s, when the tightening of immigration laws reduced the arrival of Yiddishspeaking Jews to a trickle until the late 1940s; meanwhile, the second generation—largely streamed into English schools—was steadily acculturating away from Yiddish. Thus, while 96 percent of Canadian Jews declared Yiddish as their mother tongue on the 1931 census, just over 3 percent declared themselves unable to speak English.13 In the face of the steady decline of Yiddish as lingua franca, shuln activists worked to promote Yiddish as a living, creative language. By the 1920s, shul pedagogues were implementing innovative mechanisms to maintain a Yiddish-centered environment as the language shifted from a means of conveying ideology to a carrier of Jewish identity for an increasingly Canadianized student body. Here we find the beginnings of a Canadian commitment to Yiddish as a value in itself, despite the impracticalities associated with its implementation. The memoirs of Montreal Jewish People’s School principal Shloime Wiseman (1899–1985) provide insight into these ongoing efforts: I recall going around in the hallways or in the yard at recess and telling the students, “redt Yiddish” (“speak Yiddish”). This went on for several years until we got sick of it, and concluded that it was pointless. This did not, however, cause a deterioration in the instruction of Yiddish in class; rather, the requirement that children speak Yiddish was limited to the classroom during interactions with the teacher, answering questions, or recounting the contents of a paragraph. Much emphasis was placed on writing. Composition class came to occupy an important position.14

The cultivation of Yiddish in the Montreal shuln came to embody a community’s hopes for a future-oriented culture, in particular through the cultivation of young writers. The Yiddish literary world rejoiced when Peretz School graduate Rivke Royzenblat (1906–2000) published a book of verse in 1929; its foreword by leading New York literary critic Sh. Niger refers to Lider (Poems) as the first collection by a Yiddish poetess who grew up and was raised in Canada. It is the first, tender fruit of the new Yiddish education in the world. . . . This is the first quiet gift to Yiddish literature from the Yiddish school in America, a gift that will be accepted with joy.15

Together with other Canadian-raised students that published in Yiddish, Royzenblat was seen as a harbinger of a viable Yiddish-centered cultural life. Typical of shul graduates, none of these students established long-term careers as Yiddish writers, although a number did remain engaged with Yiddish

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in the long term: for example, Royzenblat left her mark as renowned Yiddish folklorist and singer Ruth Rubin.

PERIOD 3: 1945–PRESENT Despite its strong institutional base, Yiddish had succumbed to English as the dominant lingua franca of the Canadian Jewish community by 1950. Today, some 27,000 of Canada’s estimated 315,000 Jews declare themselves to be Yiddish speakers.16 Most of these speakers are found in rapidly expanding Hasidic enclaves, where Yiddish occupies primarily “low functions” as a vernacular. Hasidim speak Yiddish day-to-day at home, in the community, and with their children as a link to the Old World and means of maintaining boundaries between their members and the mainstream, secular world. They officially neither produce nor consume modern Yiddish culture.17 This worldview is expressed by Alex Werzberger, president of Montreal’s Coalition of Outremont Hasidic Organizations (COHO): “Yiddish is not a language. Yiddish really is a jargon, a joual.18 It’s a bastardized version of German. Hebrew and Yiddish are not even third cousins.”19 In contrast, the mainstream community has moved to an increasingly “postvernacular” engagement with Yiddish, with the language assuming primarily symbolic functions. Local demographic shifts combined with the destruction of the European Yiddish civilization in the Holocaust and the increased emphasis on Hebrew after the creation of the State of Israel has transformed the functions of the language in Canadian Jewish life. While Yiddishist activists persevered in their promotion of Yiddish language and culture, Yiddish moved from a dominant force in the national Jewish community to the margins. The loss of the Yiddish heartland in the Holocaust prompted a profound reorientation toward Yiddish as artists and activists, such as Yud Yud Segal, “began to sanctify the language of those who had died.”20 As Anita Norich suggests, Yiddish has become anthropomorphized to “metonymically stand” for the speakers lost in the Holocaust.21 Thus, Canada’s memorialization of Yiddish has been expressed through numerous odes to Yiddish. The Yiddishoriented institutions that have remained reflect the shift of an increasingly non-Yiddish speaking community toward engagement with Yiddish as an end in itself. Yiddish Canada was bolstered by the arrival of large numbers of Yiddishspeaking Holocaust survivors, with Montreal forming their second North American destination after New York City. These tens of thousands of new immigrants included both Hasidic leaders such as the Tasher Rebbe and prominent cultural figures such as poet Rokhl Korn (1898–1982), novelist

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Chava Rosenfarb (b. 1923) and theater director Dora Wasserman (1919– 2003). In the cultural realm, core institutions, in particular the Jewish school system, have displayed ongoing vitality despite Yiddish’s ceasing to be the daily language of a vast majority of Canadian Jews. Goldie Morgentaler, Rosenfarb’s daughter and translator, writes: “Because Montreal managed to preserve its Yiddish heritage for so long, to institutionalize it, and to offer it some organizational and cultural backing, the language held onto its vibrancy in a way that it did not in other places.”23 The shuln in the post-Holocaust period placed increasing emphasis on continuity. In 1953, the publication of Gut morgn dir, velt (Good morning to you, world) by thirteen-year-old Morris Winchevsky School student Aaron Krishtalka caused a sensation in literary circles: Niger’s review of the book remarked that Krishtalka’s poems “awaken in us hope for a new generation of young Canadian Yiddish writers.” The Montreal shuln also produced one of the few secular writers born after the Holocaust to publish in book form: twenty-one-year-old Jewish People’s and Peretz Schools graduate Leybl Botwinik, published his Geheyme shlikhes (Secret Mission) in 1980. The group can be expanded to include academics and activists in the contemporary field of Yiddish Studies who express varying levels of ideological commitment to Yiddish, including David Roskies, Ruth Wisse, and Sheva Zucker. At the same time, a shrinking clientele for Yiddish education has resulted in widespread losses to the institutionalization of Yiddish in the educational system. Many of the shuln have closed their doors or merged with other Jewish schools: whereas Edmonton’s Peretz Shul closed in 1939 after just seven years, Winnipeg’s Peretz Folk Shul persevered until 1983, when it lost its Yiddish component in an amalgamation with the local Talmud Torah. Despite deep losses, Canada continues to house some of the world’s few non-Orthodox Jewish day schools where Yiddish study remains compulsory. Both the elementary and high school levels of Montreal’s Jewish People’s and Peretz School (JPPS) system, which merged in 1971, offer Yiddish instruction for several hours a week. With none of the students experiencing Yiddish as a daily language, the instruction is focused more on establishing a connection with Ashkenazi culture than linguistic fluency, in particular in comparison with Hebrew: JPPS recognizes the primacy of Hebrew as the language of the entire Jewish people. Nevertheless, in its educational philosophy and orientation, this school has, from its very beginning, integrated the study of Yiddish language and literature into the curriculum of the school. This program of studies is viewed as the vehicle to make the students more knowledgeable and appreciative of this unique and particular part of their Jewish heritage and culture.24

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Yiddish also forms an integral part of the curriculum of Toronto’s Bialik Hebrew Day School, founded by labor Zionists in 1961 as “a natural extension” of the city’s existing Jewish People’s School. In contrast with Hebrew, which is taught as a “modern spoken language” in an immersion program beginning in first grade, Yiddish instruction emphasizes the symbolic value of the language: Our Yiddish language program, unique among Jewish day schools, creates a wonderful bridge between our past and present, between grandparents and grandchildren. The Yiddish culture of the pre-Holocaust era is taught through song, drama and humor, and through the study of classic Yiddish authors and poets.25

This mode of teaching Yiddish mirrors Shandler’s theory of American Yiddish pedagogy in the post-Holocaust era: Yiddish has taken on symbolic value as “an object of heritage” where the very act of engaging with Yiddish holds meaning. Like the changing rhetoric around Yiddish as a whole, the uses of “heritage” in Yiddish life is anything but neutral: Barbara KirshenblattGimblett’s definition of “heritage” as “a mode of cultural production that gives the disappearing and gone a second life”26 captures the Canadian trend of drawing on Yiddish to engage with elements of a Jewish past. Like wider manifestations of secular Yiddish culture such as music festivals, the use of the language in the shuln is deliberate and fragmented. These activities reflect the “performative nature of Yiddish culture,” where the very act of using Yiddish carries meaning that outweighs the contents of what is actually said.27 Bialik Hebrew Day School is one of a handful of secular institutions promoting modern Yiddish culture that have been founded since the Holocaust. From their inception, these organizations catered to a constituency for whom Yiddish represents “heritage” rather than lingua franca. Vancouver’s Jewish community, bolstered by the immigration of former army servicemen and Holocaust survivors, founded the Vancouver Peretz Institute in 1945 “in response to the threat to Jewish culture and Yiddish language posed by the Holocaust and WWII.” The Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture, as it is now known, places “secular humanist Yidishkayt . . . at the core of Peretz Centre educational and cultural programs” that include a Sunday school for children, Yiddish classes for adults, and the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir. These activities are conducted in the English vernacular, with sporadic use of Yiddish. Targeting both Jews and non-Jews, they reflect the increasingly interethnic character of contemporary secular Yiddish culture. The Peretz Centre forms part of a sphere of secular Jewish culture that continues to actively promote Yiddish, with the language serving as a means to forge connections with aspects of Jewish heritage that are not inextricably linked with religious observance or statehood. A primary vehicle for this

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movement has been the Fareynikter Yidisher Folks Ordn/United Jewish People’s Order of Canada (UJPO). Founded in April 1945 as a merger of far left Jewish groups in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg, the UJPO is a cultural and educational organization whose mission statement spotlights Yiddish: [The UJPO] develops and perpetuates a progressive secular approach on social and cultural matters, our Jewish heritage, the Yiddish language and holiday and festival celebrations; we sponsor secular Jewish education, musical and cultural groups, concerts, lectures, public forums, and take part in social action and related community activities.

These activities reflect Shandler’s model of “postvernacular Yiddish,” with symbolic meanings assigned to the language in a post-Holocaust Yiddishland that is no longer Yiddish speaking. Yiddish is incorporated into these activities in fragmented ways through songs, isolated phrases or words, or literature in English translation. They reflect a commitment to the symbolic aspects of the language that far exceeds the participants’ linguistic competence.”28

CONCLUSION The Yiddishist vision put forth at the Czernowitz Conference continues to resonate in Canada in changing ways. Modern Yiddish culture remains firmly ensconced in Canadian Jewish life, albeit in the increasingly nebulous realm of “heritage.” Canadian Jews continue to teach, study, and engage with Yiddish. This secular Yiddish community engages in discourse about whether Yiddish is dead or dying in what Shandler calls “the trope of Yiddish as moribund.” Meanwhile, its vernacular speakers continue to expand in Canada’s Haredi communities, in particular among rapidly growing Hasidic enclaves. Yiddish Canada is evincing a polarization: those who value Yiddish as a heritage language—largely secular Jews who do not speak Yiddish as their daily tongue—and those who speak Yiddish daily but do not value Yiddish culture per se—the growing population of Hasidim. In a sense, Canada reflects a Yiddish world that is as divided as it was at the Czernowitz Conference a hundred years ago.

NOTES 1. Robert D. King, “The Czernowitz Conference in Retrospect,” in The Politics of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Literature, and Society, ed. Dov-Ber Kerler (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1998), p. 46.

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2. Joshua A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language: the Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum (Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma, 1987). 3. Louis Rosenberg, Canada’s Jews–A Social and Economic Study of the Jews in Canada (Montreal: Canadian Jewish Congress, 1939). Reissued as: Canada’s Jews: A Social and Economic Study of the Jews in Canada in the 1930s, ed. Morton Weinberg (Montreal & Kingston, London, Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), p. 10, 12. 4. See Eiran Harris, “Yiddish Was Official in Quebec,” Outlook Magazine (May/ June 2006), at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/outlook/library/articles/CdnJewishExperience/ 06m_Yiddish.htm (accessed June 25, 2008). 5. David G. Roskies, “Yiddish in Montreal: The Utopian Experiment,” in An Everyday Miracle: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, ed. Ira Robinson, Pierre Anctil, and Mervin Butovsky (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990), p. 22–38. 6. Ben Zion Goldberg, “In gang fun tog: ayndrukn—montreol,” Tog-morgn zhurnal, April 19, 1955. 7. Ellen Kellman, “Dos yidishe bukh alarmirt! Towards the history of Yiddish reading in interwar Poland,” Polin 16 (2003), p. 215. 8. Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 71. 9. Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 10. Emanuel S. Goldsmith, “Yiddishism and Judaism,” in The Politics of Yiddish, p. 15–16. 11. Sh. Belkin, Di poale tsiyen bavegung in kanade, 1904–1920 (Montreal: Aktsions komitet fun der tsionistisher arbeter bavegung in kanade, 1956). 12. J. I. Segal, “Akshones,” in Folksshuln bukh: tsum 15-yorikn yubileyum (Montreal: 1929), p. 46. 13. Rosenberg, Canada’s Jews, p. 255, 257. 14. Shloime Wiseman. “A memuar fun mayn lebn vi a yidisher dertsyer,” in Kanader yidisher zamlbukh/Canadian Jewish anthology/Anthologie juive du Canada, ed. Chaim Spilberg, and Yaacov Zipper (Montreal: Canadian Jewish Congress, 1982), p. 380–414. 15. Rivke Royzenblat, Lider (New York: Y. L. Magid, 1929). 16. 2006 Census, Stastistics Canada, http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census06/ release/language.cfm (accessed June 25, 2008). 17. See Miriam Isaacs, “Haredi, haymish and frim: Yiddish Vitality and Language Choice in a Transnational, Multilingual Community,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 138 (1999), p. 9–30; William Shaffir, “Safeguarding a Distinctive Identity: Hassidic Jews in Montreal,” in Renewing Our Days: Montreal Jews in the Twentieth Century, ed. Ira Robinson and Mervin Butovsky (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1995), p. 74–94. 18. A Québec dialect of French. 19. Mark Abley, Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004), p. 224.

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20. Cecile Esther Kuznitz, “Yiddish Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. M. Goodman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), pp. 541–71; Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 21. Chava Rosenfarb, “Canadian Yiddish Writers.” In Traduire le Montréal yiddish/ New readings of Yiddish Montreal (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2007), p. 15. 22. Anita Norich, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 5. 23. Goldie Morgentaler, “Yiddish Montreal Lost and Regained: The Recuperative Power of the Translated Word,” in Traduire le Montréal Yiddish, p. 104. 24. JPPS Elementary School, Languages. http://www.jppsbialik.ca/en/jpps/ academics/languages, retrieved June 22, 2008.Bialik 25. 25. 25. Hebrew Day School, Language. http://www.bialik.ca/schoolinfo.html?screen =academic§ion=languages, retrieved June 22, 2008. 26. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Sounds of Sensibility,” in American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002), p. 133. 27. Jeffrey Shandler, “Postvernacular Yiddish: Language as a Performance Art,” TDR/The Drama Review 48:1 (Spring 2004), p. 19–43. 28. Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, p. 139.

IV APPENDICES

13 The Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives, Toronto David Birnbaum

THE ARCHIVES The Archives were put together by my father, the Yiddish philologist and Hebrew paleographer Solomon Birnbaum (1891–1989). They include the archive of his father, my grandfather, the writer and thinker Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937), together with his own archive. There are also smaller sections on my uncles, the poet and artist Uriel Birnbaum (1894–1956) and the artist Menachem Birnbaum (1893–1944), as well as other family members. Since my father died in December 1989, I have been looking after the Archives, with help from my brothers, Professor Eleazar Birnbaum and Dr. Jacob Birnbaum. The Archives1 contain roughly: • 36,000 letters; • 150,000 papers (manuscripts, drafts, articles, notes, cuttings, and the like); and • thousands of books. These materials are mostly either by, or about, Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum, as well as Uriel and Menachem Birnbaum. Many of the letters are from famous people in the fields of scholarship, religion, politics, Zionism, Yiddish, linguistics, and literature. Some examples would include: Writers Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Y. L. Peretz, and S. Y. Agnon; Zionist leaders Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau; philologists Max and Uriel Weinreich; Orthodox leaders Sara Schenierer (founder of the Bais Yankev schools), Jacob Rosenheim (leader of Agudas 181

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Yisroel), and Rabbi Joseph Kahaneman (the Ponevezher Rav); historians S. Dubnow, Umberto Cassuto, and Bernard Lewis; statesmen Yitzchak Ben Zvi and Tomas Masaryk (first president of Czechoslovakia); philosophers Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig; and others such as William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury during the World War II years). The following short biographies of Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum will give the reader a better idea of the Archives, whose contents exactly reflect the various phases and interests of their protagonists.

NATHAN BIRNBAUM (1867–1937) The development of Nathan Birnbaum’s thinking falls into three main phases: • Zionist phase, ca. 1883–ca.1900. He was a Zionist well before the advent of Theodor Herzl, and he actually coined the words “Zionist” and “Zionism.” At the First Zionist Congress in 1897, he was appointed general secretary of the Zionist Organization later W.Z.C. • Jewish cultural autonomy phase, ca .1900–ca.1912, which included the promotion of the Yiddish Language. It was in this phase that he convened the Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference of 1908. • Religious phase, ca.1912, until his death in Holland in 1937, during which he still continued to promote Yiddish. He was the first Secretary General of the (Orthodox) Agudas Yisroel (1919–1921).

SOLOMON A. BIRNBAUM (1891–1989) Solomon Birnbaum received his Ph.D. from Würzburg University, Germany in 1921. He was professor of Yiddish at Hamburg University in Germany— the first professor of Yiddish in any university—from 1922 to 1933, when he fled to England from Hitler. His main fields of expertise were Yiddish, other Jewish languages, and Hebrew paleography, and he was professor of both Hebrew paleography and Yiddish at London University (1936–1957). A few explanatory notes are in order here: • Yiddish: he was an expert in its history, development, and linguistics. • Other Jewish languages, of which there are/were many—for instance, Judezmo/Jidyo (“Judeo-Spanish”), Bukharan (one form of “Judeo-Persian”), Yevanic (“Judeo-Greek” from the Byzantine Empire on), Arvic (my

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father’s name for “Judeo-Arabic”), Zarphatic (“Judeo-French”), Italkian (“Judeo-Italian”). (Note that I have placed the “Judeo-” in quotation marks. My father strongly opposed the practice of referring to these languages with the prefix “Judeo-.” They were languages in their own right, just as Yiddish is no longer referred to as “Judeo-German,” or French as “Gallo-Latin” or English as “Anglo-German.”)2 • Hebrew paleography is the study of the evolution of Hebrew scripts since antiquity. My father developed this discipline more or less from scratch. It came about in this way. As part of his Yiddish studies in the 1920s, he read many medieval Yiddish manuscripts. Noting how their scripts varied according to place and date, he began to wonder if he could construct a framework for such a study by comparing dated manuscripts. This led him to the study of Hebrew paleography. I have no personal memories of my grandfather, inasmuch as he died in Holland when I was only three years old and living in England—but I do, of course, have very full memories of my father, which offer a better idea of his life and times.

SOLOMON BIRNBAUM AT THE CZERNOWITZ CONFERENCE When Nathan Birnbaum opened the Czernowitz Conference, my father, who was still at that time a very young man, was also present. One would imagine, therefore, that our Archives would contain a full range of documents from the conference. Yet this is not the case. As we know, no official proceedings (Protokol) of the conference were published, because the papers were mislaid or lost. How could this have happened? When looking through our own boxed files for 1908, I was surprised to find that there was almost no material from the conference itself, although there was quite a lot of material from both before and after the conference. In general, the boxed files for other years are quite complete. My father told us that, after the conference, his father asked him to work on these papers, editing them and putting them in order. Although he was not yet seventeen years of age at the time, it was definitely NOT my father’s style to lose such important papers! Right from his boyhood, he was always a highly thorough and organized person. When the YIVO book on the conference3 was being assembled, Max Weinreich asked my father and grandfather for various pieces of information about the conference, as well as to contribute articles for the forthcoming book (which they did). I see from a letter in the Archives dated January 7, 1931,

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that my father wrote to Max Weinreich that Mr. Gottlieb, still living in Czernowitz, had the draft Protokol documents. In about 1910, after my father had finished his work arranging and editing the papers, he was asked to hand them over to Mr. Gottlieb, a participant in the conference. Clearly, Max Weinreich was not able to retrieve the Protokol, either because he could not get hold of Mr. Gottlieb, or Mr. Gottlieb had lost the documents. Indeed, it is possible that in 1910 there were no funds available to publish them. In any case, they were never seen again.

SOLOMON BIRNBAUM AT HAMBURG UNIVERSITY I came across this story in my father’s files, after his death. Typically, he never mentioned it to me or anyone else. He was the sort of man who did not spend time and effort looking back at unpleasant memories; he always looked ahead. In 1926, when he was a professor in Hamburg, he submitted a dissertation (“Habilitation”) for a further, more advanced, doctorate. He was “advised” to withdraw it. So in 1929 he wrote and submitted a new dissertation on a totally different subject; again it was rejected. My father really did not know the reasons for this; as you can imagine, his dissertations were immaculately researched. He just picked himself up, dusted himself off, and got on with his life. In 1983 Dr. Peter Freimark of the Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden (Institute for the History of German Jews) in Hamburg, who was researching what had happened in Hamburg University during the Hitler years,4 wrote to my father. He explained why my father’s dissertations had been rejected. One of the adjudicating professors was an Austrian Nazi by the name of Hans Reichelt, and another one was apparently consumed by professional jealousy. This was still well before Hitler had come to power. Freimark expressed the view that it would be understandable if my father were bitter about this, to which my father replied—and this was typical—that he did not feel bitter. He said that at the time, he neither knew what the reasons were for these rejections, nor which people had made the decisions, and now it was all so long ago. Freimark wrote in his book that Solomon Birnbaum was so generous-minded that he had not said one critical word about these events, but had only expressed his gratitude to his former colleagues who had supported the promotion of Yiddish studies at Hamburg University. After Germany took over Austria in 1938, the Nazi professor was appointed Rektor of Graz University—but did not enjoy the fruits of his labors for very long—he died a few months later in 1939.

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As a sequel to these events, I should mention that in 1986 the University of Trier in Germany (which has a distinguished Yiddish department) awarded my father an honorary Ph.D. At the impressive ceremony, complete with string quartet, which he attended at the age of 94, he delivered an acceptance speech, in which he described his plans, fifty-three years earlier—in 1933— for the foundation at Hamburg University of an institute for Yiddish language research and other Ashkenazic studies.5 In January 1933 he had sent a letter to a large number of non-Jewish scholars in precisely the same general field, mostly in Germany, inviting them to sign an appeal in support of such an institute. He received sixty signatures from the cream of German scholarship. Interestingly, most of them were sent in February— after Hitler had already become Reichskanzler—and some even after the Nazi success in the elections a few weeks later. After the Nazi victory, of course, my father’s plan was still-born, but it does show that many Germans were willing, even after Hitler’s advent, to take the risk of supporting such a venture. As a further sequel, some time in the 1960s the Hamburg Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden elected my father an honorary member of its governing body, and in 1993 named its Yiddish library The Salomo Birnbaum Library. Also in Hamburg, the Salomo-Birnbaum-Gesellschaft/Shloime Birnboim Gezelshaft (The Salomo Birnbaum Society) was set up in 1995, with the object of promoting Yiddish language studies.

NORMAN JOPSON In the spring of 1933 my parents left Hitler’s Germany and went to London with their three young children. I was not yet born, but was on the way. Life was extremely difficult. They had no real parnose (way to make a living), except for a little private teaching. They were living in cramped, rented accommodations in a house in North London. Entrance was via the kitchen door, from the backyard. One day a man walked into the backyard and knocked on the door. When the door was opened, he held out a copy of my father’s ground-breaking Yiddish grammar (in German) of 19186 and said: “Are you Dr. Birnbaum, the author of this book? I am Norman Jopson. I heard yesterday that you were in London, and I just had to come round to see you immediately.” My parents could not afford a phone. Norman Jopson (who was not Jewish) was a professor at London University, an absolutely brilliant linguist. It was said that he could master the essentials of a new language in a single weekend! He could see my parents’ poor circumstances. Some time later, out of the blue, an invitation arrived for

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my father to give a series of public lectures at London University. Jopson had managed to arrange this, and that was how my father got his foot in the door of the British academic world. My father was professor of Hebrew Paleography and Yiddish at London University from 1936 till his retirement in 1957, and continued to work diligently in his two main fields of scholarship till the very end of his life in 1989. When, in 1970, my parents together with my own family left London and came to Toronto, where my brother Eleazar was already living, my father brought the Archives with him. The importance of this collection is that it contains an uninterrupted record of 125 years of Jewish life, which has survived Hitler’s destruction, when so many other records had not, an oytser far kumendike doyres (a treasure for future generations).

THE EXHIBITS AT THE CONFERENCE A series of exhibits selected by David Birnbaum from the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives was displayed at the Toronto conference in 2008 marking the centenary of the Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference, and referenced at various points in the papers and discussion. Some of the highlights include: • A copy of the title page of Theodor Herzl’s Judenstaat (1896) inscribed by him to Nathan Birnbaum. Also, an 1896 letter from Herzl to Nathan Birnbaum in German, asking him for help in finding a good translator for the book into “Jargon” (i.e., Yiddish). • The front page of the first edition of Selbst-Emancipation! (1885), a biweekly edited and largely written by Nathan Birnbaum. In it he coined the words “Zionism,” “Zionist,” and “political Zionism” (1890). • Photograph of Nathan Birnbaum, candidate in the Austrian parliamentary election of 1907, in the marketplace of Buczacz, East Galicia, surrounded by a dense crowd of Jewish and Ruthenian (i.e., Ukrainian) supporters. He won the ballot, but the election was corruptly “fixed” in favor of the Polish national candidate. • Materials from Nathan Birnbaum’s travels in the United States in early 1908, when he first discussed the idea of a Yiddish language conference. • Picture postcard from Czernowitz at the time of the conference, sent by Nathan Birnbaum to a friend in Vienna, signed by the chief participants

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at the conference (Nathan Birnbaum, Yitskhok-Leybish Peretz, Chaim Zhitlovsky, Sholem Asch, Avrom Reyzn, Hirsh-Dovid Nomberg). Part of a welcoming address to Nathan Birnbaum with the signatures of thirty-nine Jewish students in St. Petersburg in 1911. The very first signature is that of Max Weinreich, then about sixteen years of age. He probably wrote the document. A short selection of letters to Nathan Birnbaum from famous Yiddish writers (Chaim Zhitlovsky, Sholem Asch, Dovid Pinski, Sholem Aleichem, Yankev Gordin, Y-L Perets, A. M. Evalenko). Front covers of Gottes Volk (German 1919) and Gots folk (Yiddish 1921) by Nathan Birnbaum, designed by Menachem Birnbaum. It was Nathan Birnbaum’s most famous book of his later, religious period. Title page of “Nation, Peoplehood and Religion in the Life and Thought of Nathan Birnbaum”: Doctoral dissertation by Prof. J. Olson (2006). Letter (June 6, 1967) from Lucy Dawidowicz to Solomon Birnbaum about Nathan Birnbaum’s work. Two letters to Solomon Birnbaum from Mordkhe Schaechter (to whom, together with Solomon Birnbaum, the Toronto conference was dedicated). Title-page of Solomon Birnbaum’s ground-breaking Yiddish grammar, Praktische Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache (1918). (Revised, enlarged editions were published in 1966, 1979, and 1984). Title page of Solomon Birnbaum’s Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar (1979). Two exhibits expressing Solomon Birnbaum’s frustration at so-called improvements to his Yiddish spelling by editors and even typesetters! Title page of Solomon Birnbaum’s Yiddish Phrase Book (1945), written in Roman characters, for rescue workers to use in devastated postwar Europe. Page from a Beys Yankev Zhurnal (1931), asking Jews in Poland to continue to speak Yiddish. Assimilation was affecting even Orthodox Yiddish speakers. Cover of “Dos Girangl fun Britanye” (1942) (“The Battle of Britain,” the name given by Winston Churchill). This three-month-long air battle saved Britain from German invasion in 1940. This Yiddish translation by Solomon Birnbaum of an illustrated British government publication was dropped on occupied Europe to encourage the population. Some examples of Solomon Birnbaum’s studies in paleography, including the article in 1954 in which he was the first person to recognize a letter as written by Bar Kokhba.

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• The contents page of a selection of sixty-two of Solomon Birnbaum’s scholarly articles and papers, several never before published, presently being prepared for publication, expected in 2010.

NOTES 1. See John M. Spalek and Sandra H. Hawrylchak, Guide to the Archival Materials of German-speaking Emigration to the United States after 1933 (Bern and Munich: K. G. Saur Verlag, Vol. 3, Part I, 1997), 57–67, with a chapter written by me with a detailed general outline of the contents of the Archives at that time. 2. See chapter by Salomo (Solomon) Birnbaum, “Jewish Languages,” in Essays in Honour of the Very Rev. Dr. J. H. Hertz, ed. I. Epstein et al. (London: E. Goldston, 1944 [?1942]), 51–67. 3. YIVO: Di ershte yidishe shprakh-conferents (Vilna: Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut, filologishe sektsye, 1931). 4. Peter Freimark, “Juden an der Hamburger Universität” (Jews in Hanburg University), in Hochschulalltag im Dritten Reich: Die Hamburger Universität 1933–1945, ed. Eckart Krause et al. (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1991), 129–33, 144–45. Also correspondence in Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives. 5. See S. A. Birnbaum: “Institutum Ascenezicum,” in Year Book XVII of the Leo Baeck Institute (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), 243–49. 6. Salomo Birnbaum, Praktische Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache für den Selbstunterricht. Mit Lesestücken und einem Wörterbuch (Vienna: Hartleben, 1918). Subsequent enlarged editions in 1966, 1979, 1984.

14 Mates Mieses’s Defense of the Yiddish Language1 Mordkhe Schaechter z”l translated by Joshua A. Fogel

Mates (Matisyohu or Matthias) Mieses (Mizes) (1885–1945)—he spelled his family name with the venerable old spelling mem/yud/zayin/yud/shin—was a scholar and writer in German, Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish. He worked on languages, script, religion, anti-Semitism, and the like. He was the author of two classic studies on the history of Yiddish: Die Entstehungsursache der jüdischen Dialekte (The origins of the Yiddish dialect, 1916) and Die Jiddische Sprache, eine historische Grammatik des Idioms der integralen Juden Ostund Mitteleuropas (The Yiddish language, a historical grammar of the idioms basic to Jews of East and Central Europe, 1924). Born in the old Galician city of Przemyśl (Premisle in Yiddish), Mieses was a twenty-three-year-old young man at the time of the Czernowitz Conference in 1908, although he had already acquired a small reputation as a writer in Hebrew. While Mieses had no official position at the conference,2 he nonetheless played a central role. His speech about the Yiddish language made a colossal impression: an enthusiastic one on the Yiddishists, but evoked bitter opposition from the anti-Yiddishists (who screamed at him and even cried). Peretz suggested that Mieses’s speech be published as a separate pamphlet. Although it was not published as such, it did appear in full in the volume, Di ershte yidishe shprakh-konferents (The first Yiddish language conference; YIVO, 1932, p. 143–93).3 I would like here to describe in short some of the main arguments of his overall defense, prepared in lawyerly fashion, of the Yiddish language against the calumnies which were devised, first, by anti-Semites and converts over the course of hundreds of years and, later, by provincial maskilim, hyper-Hebraists, assimilationists, and simple ignoramuses in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. We need remember that Moses Mendelsohn (1728–1786), Joseph Friedlander, and other pioneers of 189

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the Haskalah (Jewish Renaissance) had vilified Yiddish: the “filthy jargon” is “guilty of the immorality of the ordinary Jew.” Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), who raised generations of Eastern European intellectuals with his history of the Jewish people, referred to Yiddish as “a half animal language.” Earlier insults (including “diasporic language,” “corrupted German dialect,” and the like) may now sound simply idiotic to us, but in 1908 one still had to respond to them, and Mieses did it masterfully—both in an entire series of articles in Hebrew but also mainly orally in his speech at the Czernowitz language conference. Mieses began his speech with the assertion that language is the strongest bond by which a national group coheres. He used the Irish as an example. He enumerated the philosophers and writers who emerged from the Irish people, but as they no longer then spoke their own language, the Irish no longer had any substantive culture of their own. Jews well understood the importance attached to having one’s own language. Mieses listed a number of Jewish languages, but at the same time disparaged most of them. He compared them to Yiddish, and they were much diminished by the comparison. Yiddish alone was a great and wonderful language. Mieses, needless to say, belittled Jews who approached Western culture through German. As for the Yiddish-speaking community, however, which he estimated at eight million at that time, Mieses said: “Their character . . . is as eternal as cast iron, as difficult to erase as if carved into a boulder.” And, he then proceeded to dissect and destroy every anti-Yiddish argument and every anti-Yiddish bias, some of which continue on in one form or another to this very day, while others now sound to us prehistoric. “Would one say that the language the Jews have created is not a language at all . . . but a mishmash of damaged German with some Hebrew-Aramaic and Slavic thrown in? I would ask the refined epicures: What is English, not a GermanicFrench pudding? What are the Romance languages—Italian, French, Spanish, etc.—not a corrupt folk Latin stuck together with fundamental elements imported from German, Celtic, Basque, and even other languages? We Jews can take comfort in the fact that not only we have a war to fight against superficial condemnation from the world.” He explained how Dante was compelled to apologize for writing his work, The Divine Comedy, “in the depraved jargon of the mob,” Italian, and not in Latin. And, in sixteenth-century France, literary debates were still going on to prove that French was not a “patois” but a language no less than Latin. “The fact that a Jew feels no rapport to this language,” maintained Mieses, “no love and no affection, is not because he considers himself unjustly served to speak a mixed language (mishshprakh) [what Max Weinreich would later call a fusion language (shmeltzshprakh)]. The real reason is

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shame, . . . a sense of servitude. The Jew allows himself to be influenced by the anti-Semites’ [slanders].” Just the opposite, said Mieses, for being a mixed language is a positive quality, a virtue: “It is [none other than] the languages of uncivilized peoples that are clean and tidy, without alien admixtures. The Indians, the Bantu, and the Australian aborigines have cared for their languages in the . . . quiet of the forests” (p. 150) against alien influences and “to keep their uniform structure as kosher as the six days of creation.” The more cultured a people, the greater the external influences. Mieses then brought forth numerous examples of language evolution from Japanese, German, and the Romance languages, and he demonstrated successfully that the evolution of Yiddish, too, was a natural, normal, progressive process and not something to be ashamed of. In proof after proof, he demonstrated that the simplification of grammatical systems was a characteristic of higher language development, something that Ber Borokhov (1881–1917) would five years later point out as well, in his “Di oyfgabn fun der yidisher filologye” (The tasks of Yiddish philology).4 The difference between Yiddish and German was another theme that Mieses discussed at length. He emphasized, for example, the difference between “wir sind” and the double pronoun “undz ze’mir,” “wir geben,” and “undz gi’mir” (in Galician Yiddish). Or, the semantic distinction between Yiddish and German in such [Yiddish] words as eydl (refined, polite), nogn (haunt), farzukhn (taste), shmekn (smell), beyz (vicious), klern (contemplate), zetsn (seat), hoyl (hollow), megn (may), meldn (declare), and mild (gentle), among others. Against the accusation that Yiddish took names of plants, crafts, and concrete objects from foreign languages, Mieses showed that the Germans had taken the very basis of their culture from without, “and thus the entirety of their spiritual and technical culture in their language [in German] is expressed solely in foreign words,” although the wider world does not know this. Mieses listed twenty of the simplest German words that had all been imported, such as Kaiser (emperor), Reich (realm, regime), Grenze (limit, border), Bezirk (area, region), and Küche (kitchen, cuisine), among others. In the twentieth century foreign words entered the language for entire categories: English words for sports; French words for style and for cuisine; Latin words for jurisprudence; numerous Greek words for medicine and science generally. As Mieses showed, the Hungarians had solely foreign words for crafts and horticulture, because they had no previous knowledge of gardeners and workshops. The French introduced largely Arabic terms for matters concerned with military and hunting. Yiddish has been accused of having no language to depict nature. Mieses replied: The classical literature of the Romans and Greeks cannot boast of a

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single word that might describe the nobility or refinement of nature. Homer portrayed in great detail the weaponry of his heroes, but for the eternal spring of the Hellenic heaven—not a peep. Caesar laid out in extraordinary detail the war in Gaul that he was waging in the Alps, “and it never occurred to him at all to describe the magnificence of the glaciers or the immense majesty of the mountains.” Yiddish has no words for love? Mieses ridiculed this idea. “Love,” he remarked, “is a feeling that has always existed, although conventional Jewish marriages were in no way dictated by love. The ancient Greeks understood as little about love marriages as the contemporary Japanese. There were times when even European literature was stultified by the church, so that here, too, love faded away” (p. 160). “We are now hearing complaints that” Yiddish is “an ugly, abominable language,” declared Mieses, and he struck back: “This is an anti-Semitic prejudice,” he offered, “that we have internalized.” And, again he brought out fascinating historical facts which trivialized the notion of beauty when it comes to languages, such as the German humanists, for example, who considered German a raw and barbarous tongue and were ashamed to write in it (p. 161, 162). Friedrich II, King of Prussia, would only read and write French. Mieses disputed the reproach that the etymologically mixed character of Yiddish was a defect with comparative arguments and figures: that 70 percent of the vocabulary of a Germanic language such as English actually comes from classical languages; that 45 percent of the Albanian vocabulary comes from foreign tongues; that Urdu and Turkish derive their sources of nourishment from Arabic and Persian; and Japanese similarly from Chinese, among others. It is not the raw material, contended Mieses, that is decisive but the creative power that transforms this material. For much of their mythology the ancient Greeks drew on Egypt, Assyria, and Phoenicia, and despite that no one charges Hellas for lacking originality. The most beautiful French and German legends—of the Holy Grail, Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal, Lohengrin, and the court of King Arthur—grew from a Celtic source, but no one claims that the medieval German or French literature was either fruitless or thievish (p. 164). “What does it matter to people,” asked Mieses, “where the Yiddish language came from? If people were to examine the pedigree of words, they would see that the names of even the most chauvinist of nations are borrowed.” The French after all bear the name of a German tribe, the Franks. The Prussians bear the name of a Latvian people. Even the word “Germania” is not a German word, but a Celtic one. The Russians bear the name that the Normans gave them. As Russian a city as Petersburg is called by a German

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name; cities as Germanic as Berlin, Vienna, and Breslau are all called by Slavic names; and Munich, Augsburg, Cologne (Köln), Münster, and Trier all bear Latin names (better said, they all have names that grew out of Latin). Mieses next examined the case of the classical languages. In the HebrewAramaic (Loshn-koydesh) of the Hebrew Bible, there are several hundred words that come from Assyrian—that is, non-Semitic origins. And, Assyrian draws from Sumerian. Latin, furthermore, is full of Greek and Etruscan words. “If anyone,” argued Mieses, “when taking a drink of water, should want to look at it through a microscope, he would probably die of thirst.” If one looks closely at an oil painting, one will see only spots and stains. If one were consistently to analyze the constituent parts, one would have to deny the existence of the German people, for the residents of northern Germany and the residents of southern Germany belong to different racial types—in the north to those with long skulls and in the south to those with broad skulls. In sum, “too much analysis leads to nothing” (p. 165). According to the arguments of people with exaggerated national pride, how could it be that such an ancient people as the Jews, “the people of the Bible, borrowed words from a people who munched on acorns in the woods, . . . while we at the same time were compiling the Talmud?” Mieses replied: The Lombards are Germanic and speak Italian; the Germans from eastern Germany are Slavs and Letts and speak German; the French are Celts with a Germanic admixture and speak a Romance language. The Bulgarians speak a Slavic language but are actually of Mongolian stock. Mieses then let loose with pathos to remark: “We speak a language that we have adapted to our essential being. As far as we are concerned, it is utterly meaningless whether the substance of the language is kosher according to Semitic pedigree. We should be strong and not allow ourselves to internalize theories tinged antiSemitic racialism.” Mieses was not afraid of using hyperbole to invite alarm from his own argument. What is the harm, he asked, that we “now speak a language of people whose ancestors caused our ancestors so many problems? Who brought the French their language? The soldiers of the Roman Empire who ruined the beautiful Gaul and eliminated the ancient Celtic culture. . . . Who introduced the English language into Ireland? Thievish lords with their blood-stained hands. Who brought Arabic to Egypt? The fearsome, barbarian Mameluks. Who brought to England the foundations of the French language? Norman tyrants” (p. 162–63). To the ignorant complaint that Yiddish reminds one of the exile, of enslavement, Mieses fired back with the following words: “The proud peoples of Europe who learned Romance [Latin] from the swords of the [Roman] legions allowed themselves to be enslaved internally, too. There were times

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when all of Europe was lying at the feet of the Romans [i.e., the Pope], who sat on the chair of the Jewish fisherman from the Galilee. . . . Like a slave did the great Henry IV, emperor of Germany and Italy, ruler of all Christians, stand barefoot before the church in Canossa. For hundreds of long years, Europe trembled like a broken reed, like a slender twig in a blizzard, before the eternal city [Rome] that gave him the language he spoke, before the city that enslaved the world twice—once with the sword and violence, and the second time with the cross and holy fires (autos-da-fé). We Jews who survived the dark, dreadful Middle Ages, despite the fact that we were tortured and tormented . . . , must not view those times as times of slavery. We must look up to those times as an era of iron strength . . . , of formidable might, . . . and as the period in which our own culture succeeded in developing further and produced a language of its own. We may look back at this with pride and head held high. This language should not remind us of any shame . . . from moral enslavement.” There were three competing formulations at the Czernowitz Conference: Yiddish as a vernacular (folkshprakh), as either a national language, or the national language. Mieses argued against the designation of “vernacular” and summed up: “If Jewishness (yidishkeyt) is to have a future, then the Yiddish language must be considered a national language and we must entrench ourselves in it with masterpieces. There is a peal of frightful despair in [the term] folks-loshn, something resembling the voice of one who is writing his last will and testament. One no longer believes in one’s own ability to go on living.” If Yiddish is a national language, what then should be the status of Loshnkoydesh? (Mieses did not, incidentally, use the newer term Hebreish (Hebrew), but the more traditional expression Loshn-koydesh, as was also the practice of Micah Joseph Berdichevsky, Nathan Birnbaum, Solomon Birnbaum, and others). Or as Mieses formulated it: “If Yiddish is our national language, then what is our position vis-à-vis Loshn-koydesh? Loshn-koydesh is a language that lives only in books, and so it should remain: a language of texts.” We need to remember that Mieses gave his speech in 1908. Consequently, it is easy to understand his prognosis that it was “simply a dream” that Loyshn-koydesh might become a spoken language in the disapora. “We simply do not know . . . what a concentration of Jews in the Land of Israel might be able to accomplish” (p. 175–76). “For the Jews of the dispersion, Loshnkoydesh is the language of the past. . . . Yiddish is the language of today. Life, the present,” explained Mieses, “must find expression in Yiddish. The past, visnshaft, and scholarship . . . can and should find their linguistic organ in Loshn-koydesh” (p. 175). This is less than what maximalist Yiddishists called for. Mieses spoke at the same time very positively about the past: “We must have a past which

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can with its luster give us comfort in national emergencies. . . . We must have a past through which we can remind ourselves of better, brighter times to convey us through the dark . . . weekdays of grief and anguish” (p. 176). He later repeated this: “Our language of life will be Yiddish, and our scholarship Hebrew” (p. 177). Mieses’s speech provoked quite a negative response among the Hebraists, as we shall soon see, but his attitude toward Hebrew was actually quite positive: “Loshn-koydesh can play a greater role for us than just as the language of the synagogue and of belief. Aside from rabbinic response, biblical commentaries, and the like, one may . . . give expression to the Jewish mind within it. Traditional poetry, publitsistik [i.e., writings on current affairs], and political newspapers would not do any harm. . . . Yiddish and Loshn-koydesh will be able to be good neighbors when it comes to serious literature” (p. 178). Mieses further went on to say: “We need not fear that Loshn-koydesh may come to the same end as . . . Latin,” and he brought arguments to bear on why he felt this way (p. 178). “Yiddish is the language of yidishkeyt,” declared Mieses. Whether one is a strong adherent of Yiddish or not, one has to acknowledge: “Wherever one ceases speaking in Yiddish, the angel of death of national desertion comes crashing in” (p. 181). If people were to begin speaking Russian in Russia, Polish in Poland, and so forth, “the Jewish ethnic group would melt away. We can see this in Western Europe, where the majority of Jews earlier spoke Ashkenaz [Western Yiddish], and now since they have become assimilated, they are strangers with each other” (p. 181). “Wherever Yiddish is silent, yidishkeyt too becomes silent, and there no one dreams of speaking Hebrew” (p. 182). “We are Jews, Yiddish-speaking Jews, good Jews, because our Yiddish is soaked through with our spirit, because our Yiddish continues the past” (p. 193). And, Mieses ended with pathos: “The nineteenth century created human rights, the twentieth has the equally high task of creating linguistic rights. Whoever believes in the progress of humanity should join our ranks, and with courage and hope work for our blessed, national goal, providing the developmental possibilities for our Yiddish language.” Mieses’s speech on the Yiddish language, as I have noted, made a huge impression. When Peretz, though, proposed that it be published as a separate pamphlet, only then did the real storm explode. Gershom Bader recounted in the newspaper Yidishes tageblat (Jewish daily news) out of Lemberik (Lemberg, Lvov, Lviv) that people almost literally came to blows. The Hebraists began booing loudly, and the zhargonistn (advocates for Yiddish), as Bader referred to them, were well prepared to physically fight on behalf of Mieses’s speech. “And among the screaming Hebraists,” described Bader, “there was one went to the corner to cry. . . . Not far from him stood two Hebrew-speaking young women, and upon seeing him, they too cried along with him.” Avrom

196

Mordkhe Schaechter z”l

Reisin, too, described in his memoirs the young man crying and how he went over to comfort him. A large part of Mieses’s speech has not lost its timeliness to this day. Eighty years later, despite the fact that people organize, people have conferences, people adopt resolutions, and people carry on divisive quarrels as they did decades ago, Yiddish still remains as always our stepchild. In both community life publicly and in our private lives, as Peretz Miransky wrote with such tragical beauty in his poem, “Al khet shekhotonu beyidish” (For the sin which we have committed with respect to Yiddish),5 Yiddish is after all our Cinderella, the eternally sinned against part of our Jewish world. Mates Mieses’s call for linguistic equality has, unfortunately, still not been heeded.

NOTES 1. From a lecture given by Dr. Schaechter at the literary celebration honoring the eightieth anniversary of the Czernowitz Conference, at the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City, March 12, 1988; together with Yugntruf Youth for Yiddish, the League for Yiddish, and the World Congress for Jewish Culture (Chair: Dr. Anita Abraham). Published as “Tsum akhtsikstn yoyvl fun der tshernevitser shprakh-konferents: Mates Mizeses farteydikung fun der yidisher shprakh,” Afn shvel 271 (July–September 1988), 1–5. Translator’s note: I would like to thank Sheva Zucker for going over my translation with a fine-toothed comb and saving me from making several embarrassing mistakes, and Gitl Schaechter for permission to include her father’s essay in translation in this volume. 2. The president of the conference was Dr. Nathan Birnbaum (Nosn Birnboym); vice presidents were Y. L. Peretz, Dr. Chaim (Khayem) Zhitlovsky, and Leybl Toybish; secretaries included Dr. Satek, Hersh-Dovid Nomberg, Esther Frumkin, and Lazar Kahan. 3. All citations are taken from this publication. 4. Der pinkes: yorbukh far der geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur un shprakh, far folklor, kritik un bibliografye (The register: annual on the history of Yiddish literature and language, folklore, criticism, and bibliography), ed. Shmuel Niger (Vilna: Kletskin farlag, 1913). 5. Translator’s note. The title of this poem plays on the litany of prayers said during the High Holidays when, traditionally, Jews pray that God forgive them their many and sundry sins. In this case, Miransky refers to the treatment suffered by Yiddish [at the hands of its own speakers].

Index

“Abstractsye” (Schaechter-Gottesman), 120 Academy of Fine Arts, 126 acculturation, 13–14, 25, 95–96, 166 Achaz, 33 “After the Pogrom,” 129 The Age of Wonders (Appelfeld), 96–97, 107; alienation in, 98; Holocaust in, 98, 99, 100; Jewish identity in, 98–99 Agudat Yisrael, 40n10 Albanian, 192 Aleichem, Sholem, 77 “Al khet shekhotonu beyidish” (Miransky), 196 All-Union Communist Academy, 145 Almi, A., 72n24 Altneuland (Herzl), 28 Alveltlekher yidisher kultur farband (International Yiddish/Jewish Culture Alliance) (YKUF), 162–63 American Committee for the World Congress, 154 An-ski, Sh., 41n24, 47, 63, 126–27, 131 anti-Semitism, 78 anti-yiddishists, 113 Appelfeld, Aharon: The Age of Wonders, 96–99, 100, 107; Ashan, 95; in

Czernowitz, 95–96; family of, 95–96, 99; Flowers of Darkness, 96–97, 100, 101, 102–4, 105–6; The Ice Mind, 108n7; imagined autobiography of, 96–97; Katrina, 108n4; Smoke, 95; Story of a Life, 99; Tor ha-pla’ot, 96–97 Arciszewska, Tea, 128 Asch, Sholem, 64, 65 Ashan (Appelfeld), 95 Assyrian, 193 Austria, 99 Autoemancipation (Pinsker), 25 Ayzenshtat, Shimon, 33 Bader, Gershom, 195 Bartók, Béla, 12 Barzel, Shimon, 33 “Basarabye,” 115 Belkin, Sh., 169 Benjamin, Walter, 83 “Benk aheym” (Schaechter-Gottesman), 119 Bergelson, Dovid, 160 Berlewi, Henryk, 134 Beys Yankev zhurnal, 187 Beyt Ya’akov women’s education program, 40n10 197

198

Index

Bezalel School, 131, 132 Bialik, Chaim Nachman, 47, 115 Bialik Hebrew Day School, 174 Bible, 48, 49–50, 193 Bilder fun a provintsrayze (Peretz), 78–80, 81–92 Bildung (Peretz), 46 Bildungsroman, 97 Binyomin, 113 Birnbaum, David, 184 Birnbaum, Eleazar, 181, 186 Birnbaum, Jacob, 181 Birnbaum, Menachem, 181, 187 Birnbaum, Nathan, 2; biography of, 182; career of, 25–27, 28, 29–30; culture of, 36–37; Czernowitz Conference and, 34, 35–36, 37–38, 141; Herzl and, 26, 27, 28–29, 40n11; Kafka and, 25; Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives, 181–87; as Orthodox, 26, 30, 38, 39, 40n10; photos of, 23–24; in politics, 27–28, 41n22; writing by, 187; Yiddish for, 37–39, 43n42; Zhitlovsky and, 30–31, 41n24; Zionism, 28, 182 Birnbaum, Solomon, 7, 140; biography of, 182–83; honorary degree of, 185; Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives, 181–87; writing by, 187, 188; Yiddish for, 37 Birnbaum, Uriel, 181 Bloch, Jan, 78, 79 “Book of Genesis,” 48 Borokhov, Ber, 191 Botwinik, Leybl, 173 Bryan, William Jennings, 23 Buber, Martin, 25, 132 Buczacz, 23 Bukovina, 2, 96 Bund, 153 Caesar, 192 Canada: 1900-1920, 166–69; 19201950, 169–71; 1945-present, 171–75; Czernowitz Conference

and, 165–66, 175; Hebrew in, 169, 174; immigration to, 167, 171; Jews in, 165–71; Montreal, 167, 168; Poale Zion in, 167, 168, 169; shul movement in, 168–69, 170; social life of, 166–67; Toronto, 7; Vancouver, 174; Yiddish in, 165–66, 168–71, 174–75; Yiddishism in, 166, 169; Zhitlovsky and, 165, 166, 168–69 Casimir the Great (king), 128 censorship, 78, 92 Central Organization of Yiddish Schools. See CYShO de Certeau, Michel, 82 Chagall, Marc, 132, 133, 135, 162 Chomsky, Noam, 146 city names, 192–93 Coalition of Outremont Hasidic Organizations (COHO), 172 COHO. See Coalition of Outremont Hasidic Organizations Comintern, 154 Communism, 154–56, 157; in Alveltlekher yidisher kultur farband, 162 Communist Party Central Committee, 160 competence vs. performance, 146 Consulting Office for Terminology, 144 Convention of the Federation of Zionist Societies of Canada, 167 cosmology, 90 CYShO (Central Organization of Yiddish Schools): orthography of, 139–41, 145; teachers conference, 145 Czech, 12–13 Czech Lands, 12–13 Czernowitz: Appelfeld in, 95–96; minorities in, 2; symbolism of, 32–33 Czernowitz Conference, 2; archives of, 42n25, 183; Birnbaum, N., and,

Index

34, 35–36, 37–38, 141; Canada and, 165–66, 175; as elitist, 156; goals of, 194; Hebrew in, 3–4; origins of, 31; Peretz address at, 32–33, 77, 91, 92, 125, 142; Prylucki, N., on, 62, 126; reporting of, 33, 138; SchaechterGottesman on, 113–14; success of, 142–43, 147–48, 151–52; Zhitlovsky on, 151, 161 Dante, 147, 190 Davka, 16 Dawidowicz, Lucy, 187 dehumanization, 103–4, 105–6 Der hamer, 156 Der Judenstaat (Herzl), 26, 186 Der kval, 169 Der moment, 58, 63, 129 Der ortografisher vegvayzer (Guide to Standardized Orthography) (Schaechter and Weinreich), 139 Der sotsyal-demokrat, 50 Der tog, 154 Der veg, 58 Diaspora, 88 Diaspora Nationalist Folksparty, 55 Dickens, Charles, 81 Die Entstehungsursache der jüdischen Dialekte (The origins of the Yiddish dialect) (Mieses), 189 Die Jiddische Sprache, eine historische Grammatik des Idioms der integralen Juden Ost und Mitteleuropas (The Yiddish language, a historical grammar of the integral Jews of East and Central Europe) (Mieses), 187 Di ershte yidish shprakh-konferents (YIVO), 125, 189 Die Welt, 29 Dik, Isaac Meir, 48, 80 Di klyatshe (Mendele), 84, 89 Dineson, Jacob, 49 “Di oyfgabn fun der yidisher filologye” (Borokhov), 191

199

Di poale tsiyen bavegung in kanade, 1904-1920 (The Poale Zion movement in Canada, 1904-1920), 169 “Di statue” (Schaechter-Gottesman), 120 “Di toyb fun der ode” (SchaechterGottesman), 117 The Divine Comedy (Dante), 190 Di yidishe bibliotek, 46 Dniester River, 114 Dobele, 50–51 Dos Girangl fun Britanye, 187 Dos kleyne mentshele (Mendele), 83 Dos poylishe yingl (Linetski), 83 Dos vintshfingerl (Mendele), 82 Dovrei ivrit societies, 57 Dubnow, Simon, 45, 63, 182 Dunsky, Shimshen, 170 “Du poet” (Schaechter-Gottesman), 117 Durkhgelebt a velt: zikhroynes (Schaechter-Gottesman), 114 The Dybbuk (Rappaport), 41n24 Eichmann Trial, 95 elehey, 121 Elzet, Yehude, 169 Ems decree, 13 Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. See YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe English: etymology of, 192; in Ireland, 12–13 Epstein, Melech, 154, 159 “Er hot gehat di skhiye” (SchaechterGottesman), 113 Ester, 114 “Esterka,” 127, 128 estrangement, 81 Fałat, Julian, 126 Fareynikter Yidisher Folks Ordn/United Jewish People’s Order of Canada (UJPO), 173 Farn mizbeyakh (Prylucki, N.), 58

200

Index

“Farshpetikt” (Schaechter-Gottesman), 112 farshraybn, 85 fascism, 153–54 Feffer, Itzik, 160 Feiwel, Berthold, 25 Fiddler on the Roof phenomenon, 16 First All-Union Yiddish Language Conference, 145–46 First National Conference for the International Jewish Culture Congress, 158–59 Fishman, Joshua A., 165 Flowers of Darkness (Appelfeld), 96–97, 100, 101; dehumanization in, 103–4, 105–6; Jewish identity in, 102–3, 104; Jewish refugees in, 103, 105–6; third-person narration in, 97 folk culture, 11–13, 79; Yiddish in, 49, 50, 56, 58, 62, 70, 77–78, 91 folklore, 63 Folkstimlekhe geshikhtn, 89 folks-inteligent, 70 folks-loshn, 194 Folksparty, 41n18, 63–64 Folksuniversitet (People’s University), 168 Forverts, 156 Frayhayt, 159 Freimark, Peter, 184 French, 190, 192 Friedlander, Joseph, 189–90 Friedrich II (king), 192 Frumkin, Ester, 34–35, 49, 60 Gaelic, 12–13 Galicia, 2 gantskeyt, 161 Geheyme shlikhes (Secret Mission), 173 General Zionist coalition, 41n18 genre painting, 129, 131 German: humanists on, 192; for Jews, 99; prestige of, 59–60, 143, 172; Yiddish influence from, 59–60, 66, 191

Germania, 192 German-Jewish identity, 98 Germany: Jews in, 98–99; racial heritage of, 193 Gerson, Wojciech, 129 “Gininger–tsu nile” (SchaechterGottesman), 112 Glants-Leyeles, Aaron, 123n25, 156 Glatstein, Jacob, 156, 157 Goldberg, B. Z., 158, 167–68 Goldshteyn, Rosa, 121 Goldsmith, Emanuel, 169 Goldstein, Maksymilian, 126 Goncharova, Natalia, 12 Gorin, Ber, 52n6 Gots folk (Birnbaum, N.), 187 Gottesman, Khayim-Binyomin, 113, 114, 122n9 Gottesman, Lifshe, 114 Gottes Volk (Birnbaum, N.), 187 Gottlieb, Mr., 184 Grade, Chaim, 162 Graetz, Heinrich, 190 “Grafisher plonter (SchaechterGottesman), 117 Greek, 191–92 Greek mythology, 192 Grieg, Edvard, 12 Gut morgn dir, velt (Good morning to you, world) (Krishtalka), 173 Ha’am, Ahad, 28–29, 47, 49 Habsburg, 2–3 Hagar, R. Israel, 40n10 Halpern, M. L., 117, 119 Hamburg University, 184, 185 “Harbstlied” (Schaechter-Gottesman), 111 Harris, H., 33 Hasidim, 5 Haskalah (Jewish Renaissance), 189–90 Hebraism, 2, 61 Hebrew: after Israel, 172; in Canada, 169, 174; in Czernowitz Conference, 3–4; Frumkin on, 60; future perfect

Index

tense in, 101; as Loshn-koydesh, 194; as national language, 61; naturalization of, 144; paleography, 183; Peretz on, 46, 47, 48, 49–50; Poland in, 87; poverty and, 61; revival of, 15; spoken, 56, 57; Yiddish and, 4, 49, 61, 66–67, 142– 43, 195–96 Hebrew Bible, 48, 49–50, 195 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 149 Henry IV (king), 194 Herzl, Theodor: Birnbaum, N., and, 26, 27, 28–29, 40n11; Der Judenstaat by, 26, 186 Hibat-tsion, 57 Hirschbein, Peretz, 158 Hirszenberg, Samuel, 126, 131 Holocaust, 95, 97; in The Age of Wonders, 98, 99, 100; emigration after, 172; memory of, 148 Homer, 192 Hundert, Gershon David, 16 Hungarian, 191 Hutton, Christopher, 140 Ibsen, Henrik, 12 The Ice Mind (Appelfeld), 108n7 imagined autobiography, 96–97 immigration, 14, 16–17, 143, 167, 171 In post-vogn (Peretz), 78, 80 Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden (Institute for the History of German Jews), 184, 185 International Workers Order. See IWO International Yiddish Culture Congress, 159–63 Introspectivism, 118, 119 Inzikhistn, 117, 118 Ireland, 12–13 Irish, 190 Israel, 95, 172 Israels, Jozef, 131 IWO (International Workers Order), 159 Izraels, Miriam, 129

201

Japanese, 192 Jernudd, B. H., 143 Jewish identity: in The Age of Wonders, 98–99; Birnbaum, N., idea of, 29, 36; in Flowers of Darkness, 102–3, 104; German-Jewish identity, 98; Russification and, 17, 68 Jewish National House, 34, 41n21 Jewish People’s and Peretz School (JPPS), 173 “Jewish People’s Party,” 28 Jewish Public Library. See Yidishefolksbiblyotek The Jewish Times, 165 Jews: acculturation of, 13–14, 25, 95–96, 166; anti-Semitism towards, 78; Ashkenazic, 6, 62, 77, 78, 80, 82, 168, 173, 195; in Austria, 99; in Canada, 165–67; censorship of, 78, 92; enslavement of, 193, 194; German for, 99; in Germany, 98–99; immigration of, 14, 16–17, 143, 167, 171; as intelligent, 104; as minority, 2, 17–18, 63–64, 160; modernization, 86; nationalism of, 14, 18, 41n18; neuroses of, 87; Orthodox, 14–15, 26, 30, 38, 39, 40n10; in Poland, 89, 130; in politics, 27–28, 29, 41n22; as refugees, 103, 105–6; sensitivity of, 104; as visual artists, 128–134 Johnson, Samuel, 93 Jopson, Norman, 185–86 A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (Johnson), 93 JPPS. See Jewish People’s and Peretz School “Jüdisches Volkspartei,” 41n18, 63–64 Kaczyne, Alter, 52n1 Kadimah, 25 Kafka, Franz, 24–25 Kaminska, Ester-Rokhl, 129–30 Katrina (Appelfeld), 108n4 Katz, Moyshe, 155–56 Kaufman, Even Shmuel, 168

202

Index

Kaufman, Yehuda, 168 Keneder adler (Canadian Jewish Eagle), 165, 170 “Keyner” (Schaechter-Gottesman), 119 Khazanovitch, Lazar, 34–35 Khsidish, 89 King, Robert, 165 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 174 Kodály, Zoltán, 12 Kokhba, Bar, 187 Kook, R. Abraham Isaac HaCohen, 41n18 Korman, Ezra, 121 Korn, Rachel, 162 Korn, Rokhl, 172 Kratka, Szymon, 129–30 “Krik ken Tsernovits?: lezikorn der shprakh-konferents, 1908” (Schaechter-Gottesman), 112 Krishtalka, Aaron, 173 Kulturkampf, 133, 134 Kultur-lige, 134 kulturshprakh, 56, 65, 70, 146 language: abstract systems of, 146–47; changes in, 147; equal rights for, 34–35; etymology of, 192; European, 192–94; folk, 12, 49, 50, 56, 58, 62, 70, 77–78, 91; as map, 87; Mieses on, 190–93; mother tongue, 64, 68; national, 4, 60, 61, 62, 80; norms of, 140; planning for, 141–42, 143, 144–46, 148. See also individual languages Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, 7–8 language vs. parole, 146 Larionov, Mikhail, 12 Latin, 193 Laytish mame-loshn (The Proper Mother Tongue) (Schaechter), 140 “Lebedike imazhn” (SchaechterGottesman), 118–19 Leyvik, H., 155, 158; in Alveltlekher yidisher kultur farband, 162; at

International Yiddish Culture Congress, 161 Lider (Poems) (Royzenblat), 171 Lieberman, Chaim, 156–57 Liebermann, Max, 131 Lilien, E. M., 131 Linetski, Isaac Joel, 83 Lissitzky, El, 133 Lithuania, 70 Little Vienna, 3 London University, 185–86 Loshn-koydesh, 194 Margoshes, S., 156, 157 Mark, Yudl, 62–63 Marmor, Kalman, 155, 159 “Maskim” (Schaechter-Gottesman), 121 Matisse, Henri, 132 “Mayn haym, nyu-york” (SchaechterGottesman), 119 Mayzel, Nakhmen, 160 Mefitsey-haskole (Disseminators of Enlightenment) Boys School Terminology Committee, 144 Mehoffer, Józef, 126 Meisel, Nachman, 79, 82 Meisl, Josef, 25 Mendele Moykher Sforim, 80, 82, 83, 84, 89, 115 Mendelsohn, Ezra, 6 Mendelsohn, Moses, 189 Messages from My Father (Trillin), 16–17 Middle Ages, 194 Mieses, Mates, 50, 187, 189; on language, 190–93; on Yiddish, 190– 91, 192, 193, 194–95 Minkowski, Maurycy, 126, 129; Berlewi on, 134; career of, 133; deafness of, 130, 131; faces by, 131; Peretz and, 130 Minorities Treaty, 4 Miransky, Peretz, 196 Miron, Dan, 88, 101 Mischling, 98, 109n11

Index

“Mitn reyakh fun tsuzog” (SchaechterGottesman), 118 Mizrahi movement, 41n18 Molodovsky, Kadya, 162 Monish (Peretz), 46 Montreal, Canada, 167, 168 Montreal Jewish People’s School, 171, 173 Morgen frayhayt, 155 Morgentaler, Goldie, 173 Morgen zhurnal, 156, 157 Morris Winchevsky Shul, 170, 173 mother tongue, 64, 68, 70 Moysa, Stephen, 29 Mukdoni, A., 129, 130, 131, 158 Munro, Alice, 17 Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives, 181–87 “Nation, Peoplehood and Religion in the Life and Thought of Nathan Birnbaum” (Olson), 187 National Assembly of the Jews, 27 nationalism, 1; cultural, 157; Jewish, 14, 18, 41n18; Ukraine, 14 national penitents, 3 National Radical Schools, 169 natsyonale radikale shuln, 168–69 Nazis, 184, 185 Nester, 114 neurosis, 87 New York, 159 Niger, Sh., 171 Niger, Shmuel, 158 “Nokh alts in untererd-kanaln” (Schaechter-Gottesman), 121 Nomberg, H. D., 52n1 Nordau, Max, 28–29 Norich, Anita, 172 “Normativism and the Notion of Authenticity” (Hutton), 140 North America Poale Zion, 168 Norway, 12 nusekh, 115 Nynorsk, 12

203

Odessa Parnass, 47 Olgin, Moyshe, 155, 156 Olim, 40n10 Olson, J., 187 Opatoshu, Joseph, 155, 158; in Alveltlekher yidisher kultur farband, 162; at International Yiddish Culture Congress, 160–61 orthography, 31–32, 59, 139–42, 143– 45, 148 Ost und West, 28 Pale of Settlement, 14, 57 Paner, Itsik, 113 Paris, France, 159 Paris congress. See International Yiddish Culture Congress Peltz, Rakhmiel, 4 Pen, Yehuda, 132 People’s Schools, 169 Peretz, I. L., 23, 24; as authority, 52n1; Canadian Yiddish culture and, 165; Czernowitz Conference address by, 32–33, 77, 91, 92, 125, 142; death of, 169; fundraising tour of, 35; on Hebrew, 46, 47, 48, 49–50; Minkowski and, 130; on trilingualism, 45, 47, 51–52; works by, 46, 78–80, 81–92; Yiddish for, 45–46, 47, 48, 49, 50–51, 77, 91 Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture, 174 Peretz Folk Shul, 173 Peretz Shuln, 169, 171 Perpl (Schaechter-Gottesman), 112, 120 Petrushka, 12 photography, 23–24 picaresque, 83–84 Picasso, Pablo, 132 Pinsker, Leo, 25 Pinski, David, 31, 156 Pirhei ha-afelah (Appelfeld), 96–97 Poale Zion, 57, 166; Canadian, 167, 168, 169

204

Index

Podolia, 128–29 “Poetishe ibershafung” (GlantsLeyeles), 123n25 pogrom, 130 Poland: art school in, 126; in Hebrew, 87; Jews in, 89; pogrom in, 130; Yiddish in, 17–18 Po-lin, 87 Polish, 13 politics, 27–28, 29, 41n22 Polonization, 64 Popular Front, 153–54, 155–56 poverty, 61 Prilutski, Noah. See Prylucki, Noah. Protokol, 184 Prylucki (Prilutski), Noah, 125, 134; Almi on, 72n24; appearance, 73n25; on Bezalel School, 131, 132; career of, 55–56, 70; on Czernowitz Conference, 62, 126; Hebrew for, 61; Minkowski and, 130; on poverty, 61; Yiddish for, 56–58, 61, 62–63, 64–66, 67–69, 70 Prylucki, Tsevi, 55, 57 R., Paula, 58, 73n85 Rappaport, Shloyme-Zanvl. See Anski, Sh. Rappaport, Sholem. See An-ski, Sh. Rayze-bilder (Peretz), 78–80, 81–92 Rebbe, Tasher, 172 refugees, 103, 105–6 Reichelt, Hans, 184 Reizen, Zalmen, 143 Reynes, R. Isaac, 41n18 Reyzen, Avrom, 52, 187, 196 Roback, A. A., 169–70 Romans, 191–92, 193–94 Rosenfarb, Chava, 172–73 Rosenzweig, Franz, 25 Roskies, David, 167, 173 Royzenblat, Rivke, 171–72 Rozental, Paula, 58, 73n25 Rubin, Reuven, 16

Rubin, Ruth, 172 Russia, 12, 13 Russification, 17, 68 Ryback, Isachar Ber, 133 Salomo-Birnbaum-Gesellschaft/ Shloime Birnboim Gezelshaft (The Salomo Birnbaum Society), 185 The Salomo Birnbaum Library, 185 Sandler, Boris, 125n24 satire, 84 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 146 Schaechter, Mordkhe, 7, 8, 111; orthography, 139–40, 148 Schaechter-Gottesman, Beyle, 6, 7; on Czernowitz Conference, 115–16; education of, 121; poems by, 111, 112, 113–16, 117; senses for, 118, 120; songs by, 111; Yiddish for, 117 Schaechter-Widman, Lifshe, 114 Schatz, Boris, 131, 132 School of Drawing and Painting, 132 Schwartz, Yigal, 96–97 Second All-Union Cultural Conference, 145 Segal, Yud Yud, 169, 170, 172 Selbst-Emancipation, 186 Sentimental Journey (Sterne), 83 Serbian, 66 servants, 99–100 Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, 153 Seventh Zionist Congress, 57 Shabtai, Yaakov, 101 shaggy dog tale, 89–90 Shandler, Jeffrey, 5–6, 168, 174, 175 Sharey (Schaechter-Gottesman), 114, 120–21 shattered perspective, 84–85 Shchukin, Sergei Ivanovich, 132 Shneour, Zalman, 152 “Shures fraye, ekste” (SchaechterGottesman), 117 Shtern, Sholem, 170

Index

shtetl, 84, 86–87; burning, 88, 90; influence of, 89; modernity and, 90 Shteynbarg, Eliezer, 115 Shtif, Nokhem, 56, 57 shul, 168–69, 170, 173 Shumiatcher, Esther, 162 Shvil, 116–17 Siedlce, 130 Singer, I. J., 156 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 17 Slonim, Yoel, 158 Sloves, Chaim, 152, 153, 154, 158, 160 Smoke (Appelfeld), 95 Soviet Union: Communists from, 160; language planning in, 145–46; Yiddish in, 4, 17–18, 145–46. See also Russia Spivak, E., 148–49 Stanisławski, Jan, 126 The Star of Redemption (Rosenzweig), 25 Sterne, Laurence, 83 Story of a Life (Appelfeld), 99 Straucher, Benno, 34, 41n21 Stravinsky, Igor, 12 Struck, Hermann, 131 Sultan, Joseph, 156 A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens), 81 Tchaikov, Yosef, 133 Temple in Jerusalem, 88 Terminology Committee of ORT, 144 Terminology Committee of the Association of Yiddish Teachers, 144 Terminology Initiatives of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidzhan, 144 “It’s time to Prepare for an International Yiddish Culture Congress” (Katz), 155 Tog, 156, 157, 158, 159 Tog-morgn zhurnal, 168 Tomaszów, 79 Tor ha-pla’ot (Appelfeld), 96–97

205

Toronto, Canada, 7 Transnistria, 96, 99, 114 travelogue, 83 trilingualism, 45, 47, 51–52 Trillin, Calvin, 16–17 Tsherikower, E., 152 tsimtsum, 24 Turkish, 192 UJPO. See Fareynikter Yidisher Folks Ordn/United Jewish People’s Order of Canada Ukraine, 13; expedition to, 128–29; nationalism, 14 Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, 145 Ukrainian National House, 34, 41n21 United Front, 158 United States: immigrants in, 143; Popular Front in, 154 University of Trier, 185 Unzer leben, 33 Urdu, 192 Vancouver, Canada, 174 Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir, 174 Vancouver Peretz Institute, 174 Vaynper, Zishe, 161 The View from Castel Rock (Munro), 17 Vilna, 66 visual arts: in Eastern Europe, 128–33; genre painting, 129, 131; Jews in, 128–34; Zionism and, 132, 133 Vitebsk, 133 “Vitebsk versus Bezalel” (Wolitz), 132 Volhynia, 128–29 Wasserman, Dora, 172–73 Weinreich, Max, 38, 42n25, 139–40, 183–84, 187 Weinreich, Uriel, 148 Werzberger, Alex, 172 Wiseman, Shloime, 171 Wisse, Ruth, 173 Wolitz, Seth, 132, 133

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Index

women: in genre painting, 129; Yiddish for, 48 woodcuts, 132 World Congress on Yiddish Culture, 151, 155, 156, 157 World Zionist Organization (WZO), 26, 27 Wyczółkowski, Leon, 128 WZO. See World Zionist Organization Yavetz, Zvi, 15–16 Yene shtot (Schaechter-Gottesman), 112 Yiddish: autonomy, 143; for Birnbaum, N., 37–39, 43n42; for Birnbaum, S., 37; in Canada, 163–66, 168–69; culture, 5, 64–65, 77–78, 161; etymology of, 192, 193; as folk language, 49, 50, 56, 58, 62, 70, 77–78, 91; in folklore, 63; foreign influences in, 59–60, 65, 66, 67–68; German influence on, 59–60, 66, 191; Hebrew and, 4, 49, 61, 66–67, 142–43, 195–96; for immigrants, 16–17; Mieses on, 190–91, 192, 193, 194–95; modern, 5, 51, 80–81; as national language, 4, 50, 58, 60, 62, 80; naturalization of, 66–67; nature in, 191–92; by Orthodox Jews, 14–15; orthography, 31–32, 59, 139–42, 143–45, 148; for Peretz, 45–46, 47, 48, 49, 50–51, 77, 91; planning for, 141–43, 144–46, 148; poetry, 112, 113; in Poland, 17–18; postvernacular, 175; poverty and, 61; for Prylucki, N., 56–58, 61, 62–63, 64–66, 67–69, 70; regional, 66; revival of, 5–6; for Schaechter-Gottesman, 117; in Soviet Union, 4, 17–18, 145–46; spelling, 66–67; standardization of, 4, 66, 69–70; as unsophisticated, 3, 193; as vernacular, 194; vilification of, 190; for women, 48 Yiddish: A Survey and Grammar (Birnbaum, S.), 187 Yiddish Culture Conference, 152

“Yiddish Culture from Czernowitz to Today” (Zhitlovsky), 161 Yiddish Culture Front, 151, 152–53 Yiddishism, 1–2, 58–59; anti-, 113; in Canada, 166, 169; elitism of, 3, 13–14, 69 Yiddishland, 16, 111, 160, 161 Yiddish Language Academy, 142 Yiddish Phrase Book (Birnbaum, S.), 187 Yidishe-folksbiblyotek (Jewish Public Library), 168, 170 Yidishe Folkshuln (Jewish People’s Schools), 169 Yidishe kultur, 162 Yidishes tageblat, 195 Yidish far ale (YIVO), 143 yidishkeyt, 194 YIVO (Jewish Scientific Institute), 4, 63, 69; conferences, 144; Di ershte yidish shprakh-konferents by, 127, 189; orthography of, 139–40, 145; Philological Section, 144; Prylucki, N., at, 70; Yidish far ale by, 143 YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 16 YKUF. See Alveltlekher yidisher kultur farband (International Yiddish/Jewish Culture Alliance) York University, 7 Yudovin, Solomon, 132 Yung-yidish, 134 Zeitlin, Elkhonen, 73n25 Zeitlin, Hillel, 33 ZenAvesta (Elzet), 169 “Zey zenen gegangen” (SchaechterGottesman), 114–15 Zhitlovsky, Chaim, 2; Birnbaum, N., and, 30–31, 41n24; Canadian Yiddish culture and, 165, 166, 168–69; career of, 151; Communism support by, 158, 159; on cultural nationalism, 157; on Czernowitz Conference, 151, 161; photos of, 23, 24; Yiddish Cultural Front and, 153, 154; “Yiddish

Index

Culture from Czernowitz to Today” by, 161 Zikhron devarim (Shabtai), 101 Zionism, 25, 26, 27; approaches to, 28–29; Birnbaum, N. on, 28, 182;

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visual arts and, 132, 133. See also Poale Zion Zipper, Yaakov, 170 Zlotnik. See Elzet, Yehude Zumerteg (Schaechter-Gottesman), 111

About the Contributors

Zachary M. Baker is Reinhard Family Curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. Previously he served as head librarian at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He visited Buenos Aires twice on fact-finding trips, in the wake of the July 1994 terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish community building, which among other things housed a museum devoted to the works of the Polish Jewish painter Maurycy Minkowski. David Birnbaum is a grandson of Nathan Birnbaum, and has been the director and chief archivist of the Nathan & Solomon Birnbaum Archives, Toronto, Canada for the last twety years. Born in London, England in 1933, and originally trained as an architect, he has lived in Toronto since 1970. Marc Caplan earned a PhD in comparative literature from New York University; since then he has held positions at Indiana University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. In 2006 he was appointed the first Tandetnik Professor of Yiddish Literature, Language, and Culture at the Johns Hopkins University. Joshua A. Fogel is Canada Research Chair in Chinese Studies at York University. His work concentrates on the cultural relationship between China and Japan over the past few centuries. A former student of the late Mordkhe Schaechter, his work in the field of Yiddish studies includes a translation of Shmuel Niger’s Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature.

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About the Contributors

Matthew Hoffman is currently assistant professor of Judaic Studies and History at Franklin & Marshall College, where he teaches courses on Jewish history and culture. His book, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, was published by Stanford University Press in 2007. Philip Hollander is assistant professor of Israeli Literature and Culture at University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled From Schlemiel to Sabra: Transforming Masculinity in Early Twentieth Century Palestinian Hebrew Culture. Leye Lipsky teaches Yiddish modernist poetry, among other literature courses, at York University in Toronto. Her doctoral dissertation was on the phenomenological engagements of Delmore Schwartz’s poetry. She has an interest in the crosscurrents of philosophy and literature, the visual arts, and poetry. Rebecca Margolis is an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s Vered Jewish Canadian Studies Program. Her research centers on Yiddish culture in Canada, and she has published studies on Yiddish education, literary life and the press in journals such as Shofar and the Journal of Canadian Studies. Her book, Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, 1905–1945 (McGill-Queen¹s University Press) is forthcoming. Ezra Mendelsohn is professor emeritus, Hebrew University. He has worked on modern Jewish politics, the history of the Jews of Poland and Eastern Europe in general, and Jewish cultural history. His most recent book deals with the Polish Jewish artist Maurycy Gottlieb (English, 2002; Hebrew, 2006); this book won the Bialik Prize in Israel in 2008. Jess Olson is assistant professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University in Manhattan. His work centers on the intellectual and cultural history of the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He is currently completing an intellectual biography of early Zionist, Yiddishist and later ultra-Orthodox leader Nathan Birnbaum. Rakhmiel Peltz is professor of sociolinguistics and founding director of Judaic studies at Drexel University. Holding doctorates in molecular biology and Yiddish Studies, he has contributed to both fields. His current specialty is the social history of Yiddish language and culture. A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (German studies), Marie Schumacher-Brunhes received her PhD in Jewish Studies from

About the Contributos

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Charles de Gaulle University (Lille, France, 2005). She left teaching in 2008 and works currently for the European Commission. Keith (Kalman) Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland (University of Toronto Press, 2010).