From a Distant Relation

Introduction

James Adam Redfield

Saturn and His Microcosms

The generation of East European Jews who came of age in the latter decades of the nineteenth century portrayed a culture in the throes of conflict and change. Leaders of the Jewish Enlightenment (haskalah) such as Lilienblum called for reform of rabbinic authority and social institutions, penning autobiography that exposed their feeble grip on youthful desires. Even at the Volozhin yeshivah, a bastion of traditionalist rationalism and Jewish law, a student may have encountered works on moral discipline (musar), haskalah, Bible criticism, and Russian belles lettres. A few such young men reached universities in the West, imbibing romanticism and contemporary philosophers like Nietzsche as they debated the direction of Jewish nationalism. Some grew fascinated by relations with non-Jews, writing on Christianity and translating European classics. Ethnographers from Moses Berlin (died 1888) to An-sky’s expedition (1912–14) represented Jews of the East to non-Jews and to themselves. Others focused on the modern meaning of the Jewish past: weaving harmonious tapestries of traditional lore (like Bialik and Ravnitzky) or fracturing tradition to expose the diversity and struggles within Judaism, like historians Graetz and Dubnow. From the Pale of Settlement, where the charismatic mystical piety of Hasidism still held sway, writers such as Rodkinson (Frumkin) spun more sophisticated tales of Hasidic saints and sages. Yet pogroms and economic persecution disrupted the old social order, challenging settled norms and opening new literary horizons as Jews fled to western Europe, the Americas, South Africa, and Palestine.

Amid these wrenching changes, writers like Baron, Brenner, and Gnessin were transforming Hebrew prose fiction from occasionally clunky origins (as in Mapu’s pastoral romances) into a potent vehicle for psychology and symbolism. Yiddish, with a wider public and far better resources for dialogue and social commentary, continued to evolve in competitive symbiosis, culminating in the language war of the early 1900s. Rhetorically, this could also be a gendered war between masculine Hebrew and feminine Yiddish, distorting the reality that—while women did author major works of Yiddish verse and other forms—Yiddish voices even crept into Hebrew works by men. Rather than a war, Hebrew and Yiddish formed what scholars today call a polysystem: a complex of literary and social relationships.

One writer produced substantial contributions to nearly every corner of this cultural cosmos, from yeshivah sketches in 1886 to an experimental novel dictated on his deathbed in 1921. He is part of the Hebrew canon and taught in Israeli schools, but his broader impact on modern Jewish culture is often ignored: to this day, the only monographs on his work are in Hebrew. He himself worked in three languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, and German), traversing the major Jewish questions and prose genres of his era. He wrote haskalah-tinted satires of traditional Jewish society as well as searing autobiography; collections of Oral Torah; critical, even subversive histories of the Hebrew Bible, of Moses, Jesus, and Paul; stories and dramatic sketches inspired by Russian, German, French, and Scandinavian writers; a wide range of influential essays and polemics, fusing Jewish with other European thought and earning the label the Jewish Nietzsche; a dissertation on aesthetics and an ethnography of Jewish life in the Pale, both in German; household anthologies of Jewish lore (aggadah) in both German and Hebrew; portraits of Hasidim and the world of the East European Jewish small town (shtetl), including narratives of changes wrought by pogroms and migration. Finally—and foremost in his literary legacy—he pushed Hebrew style to express mythic images, flashes of magic realism, and new depths of the self.

Given this extraordinary range and influence, which put him at the center of a group of self-consciously modern Jewish writers whom he dubbed the Young Ones, Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky (1865–1921) can justifiably be called a microcosm of his culture; a one-man polysystem, so to speak. As European Jews redefined what it meant to be modern—and its foil, tradition—Berdichevsky embodied both sides of their story. Resolutely individualist, he styled himself as one in a long line of Jewish heretics: a portrait of Spinoza hung by his writing desk. He held a dim view of goles (exile; diaspora) as oppressive passivity, calling upon Jews to revive their spirits and break free. Much as Zunz ushered in the Wissenschaft of Judaism by labeling Oral Torah as neo-Hebraic literature, or Steinschneider (whom Berdichevsky admired) ironically offered Judaism a decent burial, one of his famous slogans posed the same stark choice. His readers would live as the first Hebrews or die as the last Jews.

Yet Berdichevsky’s concrete program for this revival was never very clear, certainly not avant-garde. Like Benjamin’s angel of history, he kept his face turned toward the past. He influenced Zionist thinkers and leaders but kept his distance from organized Zionism. He considered visiting Palestine but never did. Insofar as we can glean any program from his work, it is striking that all of his cultural models came from the Jewish past rather than contemporary Europe, let alone any socialist future. This way of articulating the nation’s modernity in terms of its past mirrors the inner course of his personality. As Holtzman shows in the definitive study of the first half of his life, Berdichevsky developed not in a straight line but in a spiral, obsessively trying out variations on a handful of themes as he returned over and over to his formative experiences. This mode of self-creation could look like a nostalgic, traumatized, even narcissistic clinging to private concerns. Holtzman notes that Berdichevsky’s critics, including Bialik, sometimes saw him that way. Reuven Braynin’s 1894 story The Exchanger (Bar-Halafta), for example, depicted Berdichevsky as an early specimen of a literary type: a rootless young man (talush) who vacillates between views (Holtzman 1993, 87–97). Braynin could not yet perceive the coherence of Berdichevsky’s poetics, a vision that was doubly microcosmic.

First, it was not because of Berdichevsky’s plan for action that he became a representative figure for his generation. It was because he succeeded in recounting his life on a national scale. His literary worlds spiraled back to his biography and expanded it, turning personal struggles into sustained thematic tensions.

Those literary worlds reflect each period and key event of his life: his early years in Medzhybizh, home of his mother’s ancestor the Bal-Shem Tov, recur in his literary breakthrough Sefer Hasidim; he identified his love for aggadah, in his folklore anthologies and Yiddish stories, with memories of old tales his mother had told him, and her death, when he was ten, left a permanent tear in his heart; his boyhood roaming the streets of his Podolian shtetl, Dubova—a child prodigy and eldest son of a pious, yet liberal, Hasidic rabbi—opened up a wealth of characters and scenarios for his work across languages and genres. Betrothal at fifteen and divorce at twenty under pressure from his wife’s father (blamed on his insatiable reading of the haskalah) deepened his affinity for Jewish heretics and spawned archetypes—the pure damsel, the brutish father-figure—who resurface in his stories. A year or two at the Volozhin yeshivah, where he was devoted to traditional learning but also to secular knowledge, fueled both his original studies of rabbinic texts and his turn to philosophy. Five years in the Western university towns of Berlin, Bern, and Breslau, where he wrote his dissertation on The Relation between Ethics and Aesthetics, took classes in fine arts, failed to break into German letters, and began tortured affairs with women (including a Christian) furnished a frame for his autobiographies. His very self-consciousness as an autobiographer, whose life would refract the life of his people, is epitomized by his use (from 1899) of the name Bin-Gorion: itself a pseudonym of the author of Sefer Yosippon, in turn based on Josephus: the first Jewish autobiographer, and another subversive historian of the Jews. The whole emotional texture of Berdichevsky’s work—his desire to rewrite Jewish history through unorthodox lives of its great personalities and his urge to resurrect chthonic forces like the Canaanite, curses of Mount Eval, and early Christian rebels—synthesized the romantics and Nietzsche with the Hasidic spirituality of his youth.

In sum, Berdichevsky’s major literary projects, well underway when he wrote the Yiddish work collected in this volume (1902–6), were firmly rooted in the inner tensions that defined his original vision of what it was to be a modern or a traditional Jew. Not that he ever styled himself as a generic Everyman. Poor in plot and characterization but rich in affects and images, his microcosm remained intensely personal; the world of a poetic I who contradicts himself so as to contain multitudes. By the same token, his literary World within a World (the title of his sole Yiddish autobiography) placed little hope in progress. Strong-willed as its figures are, the hand of fate lies heavy on them; the clash of will and fate only intensifies their tragedies. They pursue melancholy attachments like a lost beloved whose face shone like the sun, ending in sin, shame, death, or exile. The center of their universe is Saturn.

The Small Town from Hell

If Berdichevsky’s work was microcosmic in this first sense—spiraling outward from his own life to the modern Jewish condition—his fictions further depended on particular microcosms of their own. Aside from many autobiographical stories (set in garrets and streets of European cities, focused on the inner life of an ascetic student), he favored the same setting as his literary peers. A shtetl, or small town in the Pale with a large proportion of Jews, is the locus not only for his Yiddish stories selected here, but also for much of his Hebrew and German fiction. In part this is an accident of his creative process: had he not given up on his great German bildungsroman, recasting it in a few German stories and (from 1905) in his Hebrew novel Miriam (1921), the shtetl might have been only a chapter in his magnum opus. As it stands, however, nearly all of his other fictions unfold there, even in his later works. This consistent setting is even more striking in light of the different readers that Berdichevsky addressed in each language and his vocal—if, as Rokem says, mutable—views on the need to keep them apart. Why the shtetl? What problems did it help him to explore in his own way?

In a classic essay posing the same question on a much larger scale, Miron credits Berdichevsky with an antinomian version of the classic shtetl. Rather than a political idyll, a sovereign kingdom by and for Jews—fictional compensation, as Wisse notes, for its factual decline and erasure—Berdichevsky’s small town seemed bent on its own destruction. He rejected the common conceit that writers were simply documenting its timeless truth. On the contrary: There is nothing whatsoever to say about the history of this town, his first (1888) sketch of Dubova began, for it has no history, being founded only about seventy years ago (Berdichevsky 1996, 213). Still, some readers—even his third wife, German translator and amanuensis Rachel Ramberg—persisted in presenting his shtetl as a time capsule. Is not all there is to say and observe about Dubova, she asked in 1951, "written in the stories and sketches of M.Y.B., one of whose first collections was explicitly entitled From My Small Town?" (Ramberg 1998, 165).

Why, then, did the people of Dubova hate this book so much? Why did he revel in their dissatisfaction with his friends in Berlin and why, as she herself recalled, did a crowd of angry men surround the author in the street when he next returned to town for a visit? Here was a gallery of greedy dealers in hog-bristles and liquor; molesters, thugs, and shrewish wives; bitter feuds along every social fault line, full of poverty’s deprivations and depravities. Did the Dubovans read this hellish microcosm as all there is to say about their hometown? Or, more accurately, as an antinomian exploration of social limits that can only be breached at great cost? Perhaps some of these tales could be read as birth pangs of the first Hebrews who struggle against communal norms and thereby liberate repressed forces of will and desire. But on the surface, at least, the last Jews of the shtetl sacrifice them, and all other individuals, in order to save face: a pale imitation of their ebbing sovereignty.

Ambivalent Enchantment

From what we have seen so far of Berdichevsky’s microcosms—himself, a melancholy figure of Jewish modernity; and his shtetl, a tragic setting for warfare between dichotomous social forces—we can imagine why his work spoke to many East European Jews a century ago. It is less clear why it may speak to new readers today. To approach an answer, distinguishing the two worlds of his fiction also helps. The typical strong Berdichevskyan narrator is likely to provoke similar reactions as other romantic antiheroes like Werther or Raskolnikov. At times, one is entranced by his metaphysical questions and hypersensitivity to everything. His visions of the natural world can be thrilling; so, too, expressionist passages where external and internal views of reality trade places, objects seem to come alive, and mundane moments crackle with mysterious intensity. At other times, his voice quavers like the adolescent he essentially is. Regardless, as this romantic figure only appears once in the Yiddish autobiography, here is not the place to examine him in detail. For a sense of how he inspired a great writer of our own time, we might revisit a lecture by Amos Oz, who speaks of Berdichevsky’s definition of humanity—the sum of our sins and the fire pent up in our bones—as a miniature epic poem in crystal (Oz 1995, 47). But again, that sort of radical energy emanates from Berdichevsky’s poetic I, not from his shtetl.

To access the emotional and thematic layers of this shtetl world, his Yiddish stories are crucial, together with his German and Hebrew fiction. The way in which the shtetl microcosm operates, across Berdichevsky’s entire mini-polysystem, goes beyond staging a local conflict between identities or a set of problems that can be limited to his own historical context. He did not only satirize small-town life in the Pale: exponents of haskalah such as Dik had already seen to that. Rather, I would describe the distinctive quality of this little world as ambivalent enchantment. The rules by which it runs, and the exceptions to those rules at the crux of many episodes, throw the reader into what may look like the beginning of a predictable modernity. The rules stand for tradition, the gravity of community; the exceptions are characters or external entities who threaten to rupture the community in the name of reason, eros, progress, individualism, or related transgressions. The very possibility of such a confrontation points to a world in an advanced state of secularization. Secularized, but not disenchanted: the bond between those two terms, which shapes so many accounts of what it is to be modern, does not hold here. The exceptions do not defeat the rule. They do not prove that will is superior to faith or that progress is superior to tradition. Nobody proves anything. Both sides lose. Instead, the best tales stray into deep theological and mythological waters: the origins of power, the message of suffering, the calculus of divine and human will. At this primordial level, symbols overshadow characters. Black and white shabes loaves become the Good and Evil Inclinations; a chicken, possessed by a lost soul, springs back to life in the pot. Like modernist visual artists from similar milieus (consider Chagall; or Ryback, on the cover of this book), Berdichevsky recovers the enchantment of the shtetl by relocating it in a corner of memory beyond the march of time, trapping its vitality in amber. There he remains transfixed and ambivalent. He knows that he can never go home again, but nowhere else is real.

Tales of Two Cities, Spaces of Ambivalence

The ambivalent enchantment of this shtetl world is reflected in its spatial structure. According to one common tale of two cities schema, the shtetl is divided: either within itself (split along class or generational lines, for example), or by opposition to another town or city (the shtetl vs. its non-Jewish counterpart).

The role of this schema in two Hebrew stories has been noted by Miron and others. In Two Camps (1899), set in Breslau, the hero wants to leave for Berlin, but he is too attached to a young woman. Nor can he return to his shtetl (the specter of a visit from his father, the rabbi, terrifies him). When the romance ends, he buys a one-way ticket out of town: He could not remain in the place where he had sustained a double loss, her and himself, another moment. Miron reads this two camps structure as the projection of a torn soul at war with itself and the inner chaos of its impotent hero, a modern Jewish Oedipus. Similarly, in Across the River (also 1899), set in a shtetl like Dubova, Miron reads the division of upper and lower towns (populated by gentiles and Jews, divided by a bridge) as a border between tradition and modernity. Indeed, in the final scene, space turns into time. The hero looks back at his shtetl as if gazing into the past. I saw once more the lower town at my feet, its inhabitants removed from me by the span of a few generations. To go across the river is to leave the past behind.

In these examples, however, the significance of the Two Cities schema is limited to the romantic protagonist. The shtetl is a space, viewed from a distance, which plainly mirrors his inner development. Its meaning for him is highly abstract, a schema in its purest form: the title practically declares how the shtetl will figure in his story. The tropes dividing the Two Cities are so easily recognized as to be cliché, almost formulaic (modernity is the Promised Land across the Jordan, and the shtetl is full of people who walk in darkness—an attitude and a phrase that the Babylonian Talmud, itself a diaspora text, attributes to snobbish Jews from the Land of Israel). Even in this reduced form, to be sure, the shtetl retains a measure of enchantment. The candles flickering in the windows of the lower town in Across the River, for instance, evoke the hero’s beloved. His tears mingle with hers in the darkness and their love shines through the benighted lower town where he has abandoned her. But this is the enchantment of nostalgia, of nursing an old wound. The beloved, buried in the shtetl, is already receding into the past.

More powerful ambivalence requires deeper immersion in the world of the shtetl itself, not as a projection of the hero. In his eyes, tradition and the past are already at a distance by definition. In the shtetl, they are present reality. Transgressing this reality from within, rather than merely glancing over one’s shoulder, is a better measure of this literary world’s enduring capacity for enchantment. It exerts a stronger pull upon its characters as they realize that they might be able to stray across the river; and, at the same time, that its orbit will not be so easily broken.

This Two Cities schema is only prominent in one Yiddish story, but the story is a good point of departure for exploring how it fosters the shtetl’s ambivalent enchantment in Hebrew stories as well. The narrator of The Broken String begins by stressing the stark differences between the New City and the old part of town in Uman (the provincial capital near the author’s hometown). The New City, on top of the hill, is full of wealth and life. Modern Jews mingle with Christians in a bustling metropolis. At the bottom of the hill, the town is poor and decrepit. Its only noteworthy residents are the haskalah-aligned old cantor (whose acquaintance with the narrator explains how he came by this story) and the main character, Rivele the fiddler. Rivele represents the vitality of the Old City and its tradition but, just as the Two Cities schema dictates, he is overtaken by a stronger and more fashionable New City fiddler, Shimele. In the end, he only has one audience: the older generation, for no good reason but that they could never adapt to any other style.

The climax, Rivele’s sublime self-immolation at his final performance, does not disrupt this downward arc. The implication is not that he triumphs over his rival and resurrects some lost glory. Like many of Berdichevsky’s stories, the tale is a classic tragedy. Every ingredient of the hero’s downfall is determined at the outset, but only in hindsight do they crystallize and speak to the group. The mute chorus, watching as Rivele literally plays his heart out, mirrors the readers of the story, gazing at the drama on the page. More vital in death than in life, the tragedy of the shtetl is its most enchanting aspect. Rapt, vaguely guilty, we cannot look away.

In five Hebrew stories which appeared within a year of this Yiddish tale, the Two Cities schema functions to comparable effect. A Generation Passeth Away depicts the decline of the shtetl, centered on the kloyz and other traditional institutions of the Old City. A New City of uneducated nouveaux riches springs up around it. The spatial order mirrors the social order. The center of town is the old world of the elite; upwardly mobile lower classes settle in the outskirts. This spatial and social logic is repeated in temporal terms as a conflict between the old and new generations. The narrator sediments this homology (space : time : society) in a thick texture of ironic classical allusions. A Generation Passeth Away implies the verse’s continuation (another generation cometh). The first line, I saw an inverted world in Ladyzhynka, is the nightmare of a learned elite: I saw a topsy-turvy world—the higher ones were on the bottom and the lower ones were on top (see Glossary, topsy-turvy world). The irony is that, even as such allusions echo the prestigious texts of the elite (in this case, the Talmud), their old world has been hollowed out by secularization. Polite conventions still mark their status, but bitter resentment is simmering just below the surface.

This resentment comes to a head in a wedding: the crux of many of Berdichevsky’s shtetl fictions, whether tragedy or comedy. This wedding is between representatives of the Two Cities: Menashe-Shloyme, a once-wealthy man from the learned elite, is driven by debt to marry his daughter to Itsik-Hirsh’s ignoramus son. Itsik-Hirsh, the son of a blacksmith, lives at the edge of town where the forge once stood—a marginal space that, for Berdichevsky, connotes eros and brutality (see The Smith in this volume). This grossly unequal match makes public the fact of the Old City’s decline. Ashamed, Menashe dies, like Rivele, on the wedding day—by his own hand.

In The Broken String, the reader’s enchantment with the old shtetl was tied to the transcendent power of Rivele’s music. In this story, it is relatively muted: when Menashe opens the Talmud, we are invited to share his sense of continuity with the rabbis in its pages. But that bond, too, is torn by another ironic allusion to Talmudic rhetoric (Come and see: even the Torah is no defense against the day of its passing). On the other hand, readers’ ambivalence is heightened by direct address from the narrator, who places us on the side of the New City or young ones (recalling Berdichevsky’s own literary circle). The reader is not, however, thereby identified positively with any particular modern values. We are simply returned to the position of the spectator, outside of the world where the drama unfolds. The weight of the narration, and all of the passion, remain on the side of the Old City and Menashe, crushed between the vulgarity of modernity and the vicious parochialism of tradition. Therefore, although in this case, the reader is explicitly distinct from the characters in the shtetl who witness its tragic downfall, this is a distinction without an emotional difference. We moderns are no less ambivalently spellbound by the awful burden of the past.

Four more Hebrew variants of the Two Cities schema appear in a subgenre that one narrator calls the history of a house (see also Houses). In this form, a house—the ultimate metaphorical reference, in de Certeau’s formulation—is anatomized and takes on a life of its own. The house both condenses the biography of the shtetl as a whole and positions the narrator and reader outside of that world, looking in. The narrator is not shy to exploit metaphorical oppositions such as interior/exterior or building/destruction to craft a sharply delineated, yet internally intricate, tale of the decline of the shtetl which remains enchanting from both outsider viewpoints.

This history of a house subgenre intersects with the Two Cities schema to create a more nuanced spatial structure. It is not a clean dichotomy between Old and New, traditional and modern, with an individual tragic figure caught in the middle (as in the previous examples). Rather, the house, like the court of a Hasidic tsadik, is a center from which life, power, and memory radiate outward. The house represents the Old City before it was old, enclosing within its walls the residue of enchantment no longer visible from outside. Its owners are entangled in the New City and inevitably fall victim to the forces of modernity. Yet these stories are not their stories: the house looms larger than its inhabitants. Its location and views, artifacts and rooms, are at once perfectly concrete and symbolize dimensions of the shtetl that acquire an almost mystical intensity. If there were anything sacred left in the world, it would be here.

Forefathers reads like a draft of this form. It is not quite a story (nothing really happens), but a sketch of a shtetl drawing the Two Cities and the history of a house into a common structure. The narrator begins by portraying the shtetl as undistinguished in every respect, except for the four houses of its wealthier families: two in the center of town and two at the outskirts (replicating the Two Cities schema). The contents of each house are then exhibited and contrasted, but the narrator concludes with praise for all four pillars of the town, which sustained ordinary folks by reassuring them that God did bless at least some Jews. The central opposition is not between rich and poor but, more generally, between death and life. For most people, there is little difference: death is simply a sort of picking up in one place and putting down in another, as another story (Partners) puts it. These four houses, by contrast, are the shield and the stuff of life for the entire shtetl. It is as if the classical ideal of the shtetl as an independent kingdom, by and for Jews, cannot be abandoned but must be displaced. The life of the people is constrained and gathered inward, not annihilated.

How very precarious that solution is becomes clear in the more developed stories of this type. A Dying Breed again presents four distinctive houses as a substitute for the Two Cities schema. Customarily in a town, the narrator opens, power is arranged from the center to the outskirts. In this town, that was not the case. Four houses stand like pillars on four corners, each with its own story. This is the history of the house of Yosl-Neta, a once-wealthy man who fell through public disgrace into his dotage, spinning yarns of former glory that only he believes (see The Liar in this volume). The sole relic of his past is a room in his house where the great Hasidic tsadikim used to stay. Yosl-Neta keeps this sanctum under lock and key: the townsfolk wonder if treasures are buried there, though the only treasure that it truly holds is his memory of a once-vital community. In the longer of the two distinct versions of this tale, this room’s sanctity is enhanced by its status as a liminal zone, on the border between Jewish center and gentile periphery, where purity and eros converge. From the window, one could watch women coming up from the ritual bath, boys frolicking in the river, flocks returning from the fields. All that is over now. The house was razed and replaced by a pharmacy. The story retains some of the shtetl’s enchantment within this memory chamber, but it is ambivalent at best. The past is past. Ours is not to question why. "Is the narrator in God’s