Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.275 April 4, 1997 1) Yiddish Studies in Israel I (Leonard Prager) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 26 Mar 97 23:48:26 IST From: rhle302@uvm.haifa.ac.il Subject: Yiddish Studies in Israel I [Note: Having seen an offprint of this important article by fellow-Mendelist Leonard Prager, the shames suggested that he submit the following article to Mendele. Due to its length it will appear in four installments. It originally appeared in a special Yiddish issue (entitled _Il mondo yiddish: saggi_) of the venerable Italian-Jewish journal _La Rassegna Mensile di Israel_, Vol. 63, Nos. 1-2 (January-August 1996), 451-464. Readers of Italian may be interested in Vol. 62, an anthology of modern Yiddish literature. The article appears here with the permission of the journal. Let's hope that other Yiddish scholars will choose Mendele as an additional forum for their work. nm] * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Yiddish Studies in Israel Face the Twenty-First Century by Leonard Prager The Language Quarrel is Dead At this season, in late spring, Israelis are flocking to the huge annual Book Week sales which take place in every city and town, colorful and festive fairs often accompanied by literary events -- virtually all of them, like the thousands of new and remaindered books for sale, in Hebrew. This is but one of numberless tangible signs that a renativized Hebrew is the principal language of the renascent state of Israel. In 1927, a proposal was made to establish a chair in Yiddish studies at the recently (1925) established Hebrew University. A donor was ready with the requisite funds; the chancellor, Rabbi Judah Magnes, favored the plan, but Hebraist hostility defeated it.(1) Hebraists at that time feared the competitive threat of Yiddish, the vernacular of over ten million Jews, and that of most prospective settlers in the Land of Israel. The Shoa and the subsequent founding of the State of Israel witnessed the effective end of the so-called "riv haleshonot" ('language quarrel'), which in the 1920s and 1930s often exacerbated the life of the Yishuv. Yet the two languages had lived side by side harmoniously for centuries: "In historical perspective, 'rivalry' between Hebrew and Yiddish is a recent development, hardly a century old. The two languages became competitors under the pressure of profound social and political changes which assigned ideological and symbolic values to both languages which neither previously had."(2) In 1951 the generation-old plan of a Yiddish Chair was resuscitated, this time successfully. The chair was offered to the leading world figure in Yiddish linguistics, Max Weinreich, who had managed to escape from Vilna, home of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, and settle in New York. Weinreich, a Bundist, preferred to remain at the transplanted Yivo, then the leading Yiddish research center in the world. The position was offered to Dov Sadan (then Dov Stock), who accepted -- and the rest is history. Dov Sadan The virtuoso Sadan (1902-1989), a prolific and original writer in both Hebrew and Yiddish (in both of which languages he was an inimitable stylist), became an institution in himself while he lived. Israel's greatest Yiddish poet, Avrom Sutskever, could write of him: "Er iz geven an umfarglaykhlekher afile tsvishn umfarglayklekhe" ('Even among incomparable persons he was incomparable.') (3) Large numbers of students streamed to his courses -- both because of his notorious leniency in assigning grades and the fascination of his lectures. Most significantly, he trained a number of students who eventually became leading scholars and critics of Yiddish literature, namely his direct successor in Jerusalem, Chone Shmeruk, and Dan Miron. Sadan, who is said to have used over sixty pseudonyms -- more than any known Yiddish or Hebrew writer, and whose bibliography fills a substantial volume, deserves close study and evaluation, as does the archive he left to the Hebrew University. Moreover, he was an assiduous letter writer whose correspondence amounted to thousands of items which have yet to be collected and ordered. No writer on Yiddish can fail to be aware of Sadan's view of Jewish literature as a multilingual unity, of his lifelong insistence on the Hebrew-Yiddish symbiosis, an emphasis continued by many Israeli researchers, especially his most distinguished student, Chone Shmeruk. Chone Shmeruk Upon his recent retirement Shmeruk was presented with a festschrift, the editors saluting him as the historian of Yiddish literature," by no means an exaggerated title. (4) Due largely to Shmeruk, the tradition of historical and textual scholarship remains strong at the Hebrew University and at the University of Haifa as well. Though no one could hope to compete with Sadan, author of hundreds of books and essays, the present Hebrew University Yiddish Department scholars (mainly from Latin America) are highly productive. The department's special contribution has been to bring unknown and poorly understood texts to light. Shmeruk has single-handedly brought coherency to Old Yiddish studies, penned whole chapters in what is becoming a comprehensive history of Yiddish literature, edited texts at the highest standard, shown the intricate relations between Yiddish texts and classic Hebrew-Aramaic ones, brought order into study of the Yiddish Biblical play, illuminated Soviet-Yiddish writing, brought to his examination of every Yiddish text, whether Old Yiddish or twentieth-century, an eye for allusions, sources, influences, relationships to other texts and to the life of the author and his period. Officially retired, Shmeruk is currently completing a critical biography of Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, having studied Singer's writings in Yiddish for years -- assurance that we are not going to get some impressionistic Life based on journalism and English translations. Yechiel Szeintuch In scanning the research contributions by members of the Hebrew University's Yiddish Department one must not overlook the crucial project of Yechiel Szeintuch. This Argentinian-born scholar, a leading student of Hebrew and Yiddish writings produced during the Shoa period under Shoa conditions, has stubbornly pressed the distinction -- in terms of both historical validity and aesthetic power -- between stories and poems composed in the Nazi Hell and those revised and reshaped after the Shoa. Szeintuch's work on Yitskhok Katsenelson, Avrom Sutzkever, Khaym Grade and Shaye Shpigl (Isaiah Spiegel) are virtually unique in their attention to uncensored Shoa texts. No close student of what is loosely termed "Holocaust literature" can afford not to know Szeintuch's most recent book, Isaiah Spiegel -- Yiddish Narrative Prose From The Lodz Ghetto; 16 Stories Edited from Rescued Manuscripts with Introductions and a Series of Oral Interviews with Their Author (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1995). Teaching Yiddish in Hebrew Sadan attracted _sabras_ ('native-born Israeli Jews') to his Hebrew-language lectures on Yiddish, the texts studied of course being in Yiddish. This pattern of studying Yiddish in Hebrew became standard at the Hebrew University and later in other universities, with the partial exception of Bar-Ilan. It was necessitated by the simple fact that Israeli students did not know enough Yiddish to study Yiddish in Yiddish -- at least in the elementary stages. Some Yiddishists in and outside of Israel have been very critical of this practice. Because Yiddish courses in Israeli universities (as elsewhere) attract few students it is sometimes necessary to teach Yiddish texts in Hebrew translation, with special attention given to the few students who do read Yiddish. Such arrangements are especially common where the Yiddish "chativa" ('program') is administratively part of the Department of Hebrew Literature. At the University of Haifa, Yiddish courses are given within the larger frameworks of the Departments of Hebrew Language and Hebrew Literature respectively. Only the Hebrew University and Bar-Ilan Universities have autonomous departments of Yiddish, though at the latter this autonomy may be conditional upon outside funding. [end of Part 1] ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.275