In Their Surroundings: Localizing Modern Jewish Literatures in Eastern Europe

Efrat Gal-Ed, Natasha Gordinsky, Sabine Koller, Yfaat Weiss

Preface

When, in 1910, eminent critic Bal-Makhshoves (Man of Thoughts, pen name of Isidor Elyashev) coined the image of two plates (two languages) being part of one scale (one literature) in his article Tsvey shprakhen—eyn eyntsige literatur (Two Languages—One Literature), he aptly promoted the unity of a dynamic bilingual Jewish literature. Bal-Makhshoves is a sagacious and reliable voice when tracing the formation of modern Jewish literatures.⁴ This profound and far-reaching process began in the second half of the nineteenth century in Eastern Europe, primarily in provincial capitals and towns located in the historical region of the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. The historical, political, and sociocultural constellations of the time had a crucial impact on Jewish literary thinking. Jewish culture in Eastern Europe evolved in close connection with the Central and Eastern European imperial and minority languages specific to the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian cultures. The development led, on the one hand, to the participation of Jews in the intellectual and literary achievements in these languages. On the other hand, it generated a flow of aesthetic ideals and political ideologies from the surrounding majority cultures into the Jewish discourses in the Yiddish and Hebrew languages. The two forms, i. e. the literatures in Yiddish and Hebrew, in their polylingual environments were decisive for the evolution of Jewish secular culture from the turn of the nineteenth century onward. While literary works were preoccupied with the existential dilemmas of the Jewish people, they nevertheless relied on the philosophical apparatus of Russian and German literatures and thought (Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aleksandr Pushkin, Fëdor Dostoevskiy, Lev Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Aleksandr Blok, Anna Akhmatova, and many more). The keen interest of early Hebrew and Yiddish writers in Russian and German cultures made way for the Europeanization of modern Jewish literatures.⁵ An important dimension of this development was the continuing endeavor of translating German and Russian literary and philosophical writings into Hebrew and Yiddish, thereby preserving their humanistic legacy.

Within a vibrant polylingual and multicultural atmosphere, an eventful history marked by revolutions, the breakdown of empires, the rise (or reappearance) of young nations (partly with an inflated sense of nationalism), and mass migration to the New World, a modern Jewish literary thinking took shape. Numerous processes of cultural transfer played a major role in forging the concept of Europe for Eastern European Jewish intellectuals. In Hebrew literature, Uri Nissan Gnessin, Gershon Shofman, or Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner, among others, modelled their literary writings in imagined and real contact zones where European and Russian modernist trends were inspiring paragons. In Gomel, they avidly read and translated Chekhov, admired Charles Baudelaire, discussed the differences in the poetics of Maksim Gor’kiy and Andrey Belyy, and studied German. Whereas at the same time in other places, be it a Volhynian shtetl, Lithuanian Vilna, or the metropolis of Kyiv, their Yiddish-writing colleagues—Dovid Bergelson, Moyshe Kulbak, Perets Markish, and others—were eager to get hold of journals, almanacs, anthologies, or books of Russian Symbolist poetry, Russian and Ukrainian Futurist verse, or German Expressionism.

This concept of European culture was disseminated in the literary imagination of Jewish writers and expanded with the emergence of modernist movements in Europe. Based mainly in Eastern and Central European metropolises, Jewish literatures offered new aesthetic forms through which to understand, and come to terms with, modernity. Jewish intellectuals became the messengers of travelling concepts, be they radical political ideas or literary norms and conventions. Their acculturation to hegemonic cultures was accompanied by the adaptation of narrative models and critical paradigms that brought about fundamental changes in the conceptualization of history, Jewish collectiveness, Jewish spaces, and literature itself. However, the encounter of Jewish intellectuals with hegemonic cultures took place in specific regional contexts and through contacts with other, nonimperial cultures. As a result, Eastern European Jewish literatures faced different and even contradictory tendencies: universalism vs. particularism, Russification/Germanization vs. Jewish nationalism, and localism vs. cosmopolitanism.

While Hebrew and Yiddish literatures evolved employing similar strategies, a dominant dynamic between them was the battle between Hebraists and Yiddishists, pursued with much political and ideological vehemence and resulting in considerable bitterness, particularly on the side of the Yiddishists. Nevertheless, looking across the Hebraist-Yiddishist divide from today’s point of view, it could be argued that the two young literatures shared the same vision of what literature ought to be and achieve, and how it should do that. As polyglot intellectuals, some Jewish authors decided to use a single language, while others wrote in both Hebrew and Yiddish. The emerging literatures in the two Jewish languages thus formed one multilingual system, which was constituted by dynamic interactions and linguistic crossovers that could include Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, German, and other languages.

The dynamic multicultural and polyphonic literary life outlined above was the object of investigation of the research project In Their Surroundings: Localizing Modern Jewish Literatures in Eastern Europe, funded by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (2017–2019). The project, based in Düsseldorf, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Regensburg, explored important developments in Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in the first decades of the twentieth century in the Eastern European context, utilizing the research possibilities that emerged following the political earthquake of 1989/90. Adding local and spatial perspectives to a comparative study of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in Eastern Europe, it aimed at capturing their regional and transnational impact. The project further examined the dynamic interactions between Jewish literatures and Eastern European literatures as a history of what Mary Louise Pratt calls contact zones.⁶ Written against the backdrop of the dramatic political events of the end of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century, Yiddish and Hebrew works posed radical questions about the future of Jewish culture on the European continent. The discriminatory conditions that encumbered their authors’ cultural ties to the European world required transversal thinking;⁷ a constant resituating of the minority culture and eventual clarification of the relations between the Jewish and European paradigms. What in the historical-ideological process tended toward exclusion and homogenization, acquired an impressively dynamic, pluralizing, and diversifying effect in literature. This arose from a belief not only in the interconnectedness of Jewish literary life but also in its close affinity to the surrounding world, as reflected, for example, in the Yiddish concept of doikayt (hereness). For these reasons, the concept of space adopted in this volume is not based on an essentialist and precarious conjunction of nation, language, and territory, but stresses notions of fluidity, permeability, movement, and geographical knowledge. Thus, the project traced literature and cultural knowledge on the move not in terms of homogenization but with respect to their dynamics, productive differences, and pluralism. It explored sites and relations of [literary and cultural] translation.⁸ Guided by the idea of a provincialized, i.e. decentralized, fluid and multifarious modernity, the space was approached from a translational perspective, in an attempt to discern the powerful interactions and the interconnectedness of Jewish literatures with a multicultural envisioned emphasis on space (Eastern Europe) and sites (Gomel, Kyiv, etc.). However, once pointed out on a map, these sites cannot be retained. Although being geographically the same, they are constantly on the move, shifting between the imaginary and the real, as well as between political entities and various languages. In the worst case, places may simply disappear while still represented on a map.

This catalogue is the outcome of a conference which took place from 23 to 25 October 2018 at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in the city of Leipzig. The aim of the conference, entitled Shared Space—Contact Zones: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in Eastern Europe, was to bring together different perspectives on Yiddish and Hebrew literatures beyond overly rigid concepts of one national literature, one national literary history, one literary canon. While enabling the encounter of different scholarly traditions, the multilingual conference created a productive Babel-like situation, in which scholars from Israel, Germany, and the United States discussed together Hebrew and Yiddish literary texts in their original and in translation. One of the challenging questions the conference addressed was how this extremely dynamic field of literary contacts, contexts, and intertextual dialogues can be accessed today. The hermeneutic approach at the core of both conference and catalogue might be described with Rita Felski’s recent concept of transtemporal communities. It foregrounds the collective dimension of critique as an act that draws strength from a communal ‘we’ extending across time as well as space.⁹

The methodological focal point of the conference was close reading, a reading in slow motion¹⁰ of Yiddish and Hebrew texts reflecting the following interrelated topics:¹¹ Eastern European urban sites as a poetic space in Jewish literary imagination; literary representations of migration; and relations between Eastern European literatures with Hebrew and Yiddish literature respectively. Within this realm of contact zones, the catalogue discusses the transformations of chronotopes and epistemes concerning genres, literary norms, motifs, and ideologies. Itamar Even-Zohar’s idea of literary polysystems, Dan Miron’s integral literary bi-/multilingualism,¹² Mieke Bal’s travelling concepts, Samuel N. Eisenstadt’s multiple modernities, and Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zones all provide the frame of reference for a multilingual encounter of modern Jewish literatures with manifold cross-references and entanglements.¹³ The literary scholar and translator Benjamin Harshav once suggested viewing the encounter between early twentieth-century Yiddish and Hebrew writers and the European literary tradition in the following way:

[T]he history of European literature was discovered by Jewish writers at the end of its development, when it was challenged from within. For the exultant discoverers, that history appeared not as a history but as a synchronic ‘imaginary museum’ where all displays were placed in adjacent rooms, from which they could pick models and influences with no historical order.¹⁴

The structure of this catalogue mirrors one of its essential goals, namely to familiarize the reader with the polyphony of significant Yiddish and Hebrew literary voices that arose in the first half of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Each voice, i.e. each author and one of their literary works, with its after-life in diverse cultural contexts, is discussed in an introduction and in a close reading written by two different scholars. Inter alia, the catalogue features texts by Israeli writers Sivan Beskin and Matan Hermoni, thus creating an intriguing dialogue between contemporary literati and modernist prose.

The variety of literary genres—the lyrical poem, short story, novella and novel, ego document—as well as literary translations were crucial for the development of Jewish Eastern European modernism, as they embodied what Mikhail Bakhtin called the creative memory of genre. His assertion that genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning¹⁵ is especially relevant for the different genres presented in this volume as they adopt and creatively transform European literary models. The decision to explore these texts through the lens of close reading allows for greater attention to these poetic transformations as well as to the texture of literary writings. Furthermore, the renewed practice of reading, as Mieke Bal suggests, may reflect and offer a potential bridge between the microscopic view¹⁶ and the larger cultural issues that are at stake—in this case, the continuous cultural negotiation between, and juxtaposition of, the minor and major literatures and the intimate connection of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures with their Eastern European surroundings. In these desperate times, may this catalogue make a modest contribution to the long journey through fascinating literary landscapes, some of which have already vanished and others that are on the verge of destruction.

At the end of this preface, we would like to thank all those who have paved the way for our project and, ultimately, for this publication. We extend our deepest gratitude to the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF) for their support and generous funding at different stages of this project. Our special thanks go to the contributing authors who willingly embraced our concept and made their research available to us. We gratefully acknowledge the help of our colleagues in archives and other institutions, above all the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, the National Library of Israel, and the Gnazim Archive—Hebrew Writers Association, who served our requests for text sources and images with the utmost commitment. We moreover wish to express our sincere gratitude to Yael Levi, who initiated the communication with authors and collected much of the text material, Tim Corbett, David B. Greenberg, and Lawrence A. Rosenwald for their English translations, Margarita Lerman for her assistance in reproducing and editing the Hebrew source citations and bibliographic references, and Jana Duman for the language editing of the volume. She did an excellent job. Last but not least, it was our great pleasure to work with our colleagues from the Editorial Department of the Dubnow Institute, namely Petra Klara Gamke-Breitschopf, Carolin Piorun, and, in the final weeks, Felix Müller. Their work has made an invaluable contribution to the final shape and form of this Digital Catalogue.

Düsseldorf/Haifa/Regensburg/Jerusalem/LeipzigFall 2022

1 Shmuel Niger, Di gegent-frage in der idisher literatur. An entfer Bal-Makhshovesn [The Territorial Question in Yiddish Literature. A Response to Bal-Makhshoves], in: Di Tsukunft [The Future] 27 (1922), no. 5, 308–314, here 308. Unpublished translation by Yaakov Herskovitz.

2 Leah Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-or [And This Is the Light], Merhavia 1946, 205. Unpublished translation by Yaakov Herskovitz.

3 See Bal-Makhshoves, Tsvey shprakhen—eyn eyntsige literatur [Two Languages—One Literature], in: idem, Geklibene shriften [Selected Writings], 2 vols., here vol. 2, Vilna 1910, 63–71, here 65. Unpublished translation by Yaakov Herskovitz.

4 Dan Miron offers a critical revision of this concept, replacing Bal-Makhshoves’ slogan by One text (written in two languages)—two totally separate literatures. See idem, From Continuity to Contiguity. Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking, Stanford, Calif., 2010, 224 f. and 282 (quote).

5 For the role of the German language in the making of modern Jewish culture, see Marc Volovici, German as a Jewish Problem. The Language Politics of Jewish Nationalism, Stanford, Calif., 2020.

6 See Mary Louise Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone, in: Profession (1991), 33–40.

7 See Wolfgang Welsch, Vernunft. Die zeitgenössische Vernunftkritik und das Konzept der transversalen Vernunft, Frankfurt a. M. 1995, 762.

8 James Clifford, Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass., 1997, 23.

9 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, Chicago, Mich./London 2015, 49.

10 Reuben A. Brower, Reading in Slow Motion, in: idem/Richard Poirier (eds.), In Defense of Reading. A Reader’s Approach to Literary Criticism, New York 1962, 4–21.

11 On the reappraisal of the concept of close reading and its relevance for the study of modernism, see David James (ed.), Modernism and Close Reading, Oxford 2020.

12 See Itamar Even-Zohar, Polysystem Theory, in: Poetics Today 1 (1979), no. 1–2, 287–310; Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity, chap. 9, esp. 287–295.

13 Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide, Toronto 2002; Samuel N. Eisenstadt, Multiple Modernities, in: Dædalus 129 (2000), no. 1, 1–29; Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone.

14 Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, Stanford, Calif., 1993, 28.

15 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and transl. by Caryl Emerson, with an introduction by Wayne C. Booth, Minneapolis, Minn., 1984, 105.

16 Mieke Bal, Close-Ups and Mirrors. The Return of Close Reading, with a Difference, in: idem (ed.), The Practice of Cultural Analysis. Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation, Stanford, Calif., 1999, 137–142, here 138.

In Their Surroundings | doi.org/10.13109/9783666306112.21

Map of Europe in the Rand, McNally & Company’s Indexed Atlas of the World, Chicago, Ill., 1898.

David Frishman

Naomi Brenner

Hebrew Critic Par Excellence:

David Frishman

David Frishman was the preeminent critic of Hebrew literature in Eastern Europe during the last years of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. He advocated passionately for the creation of a distinctly European Hebrew literature and rarely hesitated to castigate writers who failed, in his view, to develop lyricism and other aesthetic features he argued were essential. As a translator, he created Hebrew versions of many European fictional and philosophical works held in high regard, including texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, George Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. As an editor, he wielded power at many publishing venues for Hebrew writers young and old, such as Ha-Dor (The Generation), Ha-Boker (The Morning), Ha-Tekufah (The Era), and the Stybel publishing house. His literary work in Hebrew and Yiddish, however, was often overshadowed by his other literary pursuits. Still, Frishman’s extensive efforts as a cultural agent left a lasting mark on the development of modern Hebrew literary culture.

Born in Zgierz, near Łódź, in 1859,¹ Frishman spent time in many of the centers of Jewish culture of the time: Warsaw, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Odessa (fig. 1). He started publishing poems, translations, and articles in Hebrew at a young age in a variety of Eastern European Hebrew periodicals. By the late 1880s, he was writing for the Yiddish press as well; his first Yiddish poem, Oyfn bergl (On the Hill), appeared in 1888. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Eastern European Yiddish newspapers such as Yudishes Folks-Blat (Jewish People’s Newspaper), Der Yud (The Jew), Der Fraynd (The Friend), and Haynt (Today) were publishing his lyric poetry, stories, and feuilletons on a regular basis.² ­Frishman also took the first of many positions as editor at the daily newspaper Ha-Yom (Today, 1886–1888) in St. Petersburg, which allowed him to start shaping the kind of Hebrew periodical he believed his time needed. The growing press was essential to the development of Hebrew literature, as most writers began their literary careers publishing in various newspapers and periodicals. Frishman’s editorial positions at Hebrew outlets and publishing houses granted him immense influence over the selection of writers and texts for publication.

Fig. 1: David Frishman, undated.

Even before his rise to authority in literary circles, Frishman made a name for himself in Hebrew letters with his scathing criticism of Jewish cultu­ral institu­tions, including the venerable Russian Jewish weekly Ha-Meliẓ (The Advocate). In 1883, for example, the young Frishman published a small pamphlet entitled Tohu va-vohu (Chaos), which attacked several of the most prominent Hebrew writers and critics of the time. Ha-Meliẓ(1860–1904) published the works of most Hebrew writers active in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century and was an important platform for many prominent maskilim, proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). By the 1880s, Ha-Meliẓ supported ḥibbat ẓiyon (Fondness for Zion), a pre-Zionist nationalist movement advocating for Jews to settle in Palestine. Frishman begins his essay by dramatically narrating his shock when he received a telegram informing him of Ha-Meliẓ’s plan to start publishing twice a week. In elegant, biting prose, Frishman launches into an extended critique of the newspaper and some of its best-known contributors, arguing that the paper featured self-serving and derivative journalism. Attacking prominent writers such as Saul Israel Hurwitz and Yehalel (Yehuda Leib Levin), as well as Aleksander Zederbaum, the long-time editor of Ha-Meliẓ, Frishman ridicules what he saw as their facile imitation of European literary ideas, sardonically noting Hurwitz’s confusion of Auguste Comte with Immanuel Kant. Referring to Ha-Meliẓ’s contributors as frogs who infested various periodicals, he writes, their idioms are dreadful, the words that issue from their lips are wanting, and their entire power emanates from the noise and storm of their words that a simple man like me cannot, for the world, understand.³ Not surprisingly, Frishman made a lot of enemies within the Hebrew literary establishment, especially since this was only one of the first of what would be many controversies provoked by his critical essays.

Frishman’s Tohu va-vohu is often regarded as a rejection of the maskilic ideas espoused by many of these writers, as part of a broader transition from the Haskalah to a new phase called the teḥiya, the national revival, in the wake of Russian pogroms in the early 1880s. While Frishman’s Hebrew aestheticism differs from maskilic approaches to Hebrew literature, his critique of Ha-Meliẓ is driven by his rejection of Zionism, a stance that came to define Frishman’s writing. Iris Parush delineates two related themes that begin to emerge in texts like Tohu va-vohu: Frishman’s belief that the creation of a national homeland was both impossible and inadvisable.⁴ Frishman was deeply invested in questions of national revival, but he rejected both political and spiritual Zionism as solutions to the challenges facing Jews in the modern world. In 1899, only two years after the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Frishman writes in a letter to Mordecai (Marcus) Ehrenpreis: I have never felt myself as lonely and solitary as now […]. The few friends that I had are leaving me one by one, day by day, going to one place—Zionism, and I am left alone and lonely.⁵ Despite the power Frishman maintained as an editor, he was convinced that his politics, namely his resistance to Zionism, curtailed his influence and his status in Hebrew literature.

While Frishman’s harsh rejection of Zionism changed later on in his career—scholars still debate whether his poetry and essays of the time cautiously embrace Zionist ideas or if he essentially modulates his opposition⁶—he remained committed to his own national cultural vision in his numerous essays and feuilletons. From the 1880s on, Frishman argued that literature was an essential foundation for national revival. As he wrote in 1913, All of my hopes have always been in literature—and only literature. It has been a life-saver for me, the only one that we have left … National revival begins with literary revival.⁷ Belletristic literature, he argued, was the only way to rehabilitate the Jewish soul.

Frishman’s goal, however, was not the creation of a particularistic, nationalistic Hebrew literature, but rather a modern, universal literature in Hebrew. His understanding of universal was strongly oriented toward Europe, since he regarded classical and modern European thought and literature as both inspiration and raw material for his cultural project. While he criticized contemporary writers for their shallow imitations of European literary trends, Frishman envisioned the creation of a modern Hebrew literature that was thoroughly European in its sensibilities. His focus on individual sensibilities cultivated in and through literature represents a significant contrast to the collectivist mentality that came to define twentieth-century Hebrew Zionist culture.

Frishman’s strong inclination toward European literature is evident in his essays and many translations. Starting in the 1890s, after Frishman spent four years at the University of Breslau, he translated a remarkable number of literary texts into Hebrew, including German, Russian, French, and English poetry, prose and plays by Goethe, Aleksandr Pushkin, Heinrich Heine, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Hans Christian Andersen, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, George Eliot, and more. While these works demonstrate Frishman’s supple Hebrew