Introduction Throughout the ages, imaginative writing played a major role in shaping the Jewish self-consciousness of most Jews. The Jewish self-image was traditionally the projection of poets and philosophers, artists and dreamers. It was the construction of ba’aley aggada, masters of Jewish lore -- the weavers of parable, metaphor, paradigm and myth. In modern times, the role of the ba’aley aggada and the later paytanim or liturgical poets was assumed by the poets and fiction writers of our people, particularly those who did their work in Yiddish and Hebrew. One of the major functions of literature is to convey the historical meaning of a civilization by crystallizing its self-expression. For one hundred and thirty years, Yiddish literature in America escorted, comforted and inspired American Jewry on its adventure in freedom. It captured the changing image of the Jewish people all over the world, both because of the centrality of American Jewry in Jewish life of the past century and because the Yiddish writers of America remained overwhelmingly faithful to the mission of Yiddish literature as a whole: to responsibly mirror, interpret and advance the life of the Jewish people. Creative writing in Yiddish in America was always a social act fraught with both nationalistic and spiritual overtones, no matter how vocally such links were eschewed. Just as modern Hebrew, with its biblical and religious echoes, compels its writers to confront a legacy they may consciously seek to disavow, so Yiddish with its deep Jewish associations and nuances forbids spiritual and national amnesia or anonymity. It is not surprising that in his attempts to liberate American Jews from traditional Judaism, Yiddish-writing philosopher and political activist Chaim Zhitlovsky, at the turn of the century, advocated writing Yiddish in the Latin rather than the Hebrew alphabet. Yiddish has no more been able to liberate itself from the implications of its role as the language of traditional Torah instruction and the "God of Abraham" prayer regularly recited by Jewish women at the conclusion of the Sabbath, than modern Hebrew has been able to disassociate itself from its role as leshon hakodesh, the language of the sacred texts and prayers of Judaism. The conscious bastardization of the language by the American Yiddish press was no more successful than the similar attempts of Soviet bureaucrats to strip the language of Jewish associations and have it serve communist aims. The deeper levels of meaning in Yiddish words, phrases and idioms continued to haunt both American and Soviet Yiddish writers and draw them ever closer to the inner needs of the Jewish people. The Pioneers Elias Schulman, Kalman Marmor, and other historians of Yiddish literature in America, trace its origins to the writings of Jacob Zvi Sobel, who published a slim volume of Hebrew and Yiddish poems in 1877. Sobel was also the author of "The Three Principles of the Torah" in verse, subtitled "A World of Confusion." In the latter poem, he warned his people against the dangers of assimilation. The Torah's three principles were abstention from superstition, the practice of tolerance and humanism, and the elimination of poverty. If Jews would but unite, abandon fanaticism and drive poverty from their midst, no enemy could ever defeat them. Both Sobel and Elyokum Tsunzer, the badkhn or wedding rhymester, who came to America in 1889, were traditionalist Jews who had become maskilim or advocates of the modernization of Jewish life. Both preached agrarization, both were influenced by Hebrew-writing socialists such as Aaron Samuel Lieberman and Moshe Leib Lilienblum, and both bewailed the lot of the Jewish peddler in America. Tsunzer was the better poet, his poems representing the transition from primitive folk rhyme (set to his own tunes) to poetry. The work of these early writers was associated with the conservative wing of the American Yiddish press, which sought to preserve traditional Judaism in America and was obsessed with Jewish identity and ahavas Yisroel, themes to which Yiddish poets far removed from the world of tradition would return half a century later. N. B. Minkov estimated that in the 1880's and 1890's there were one hundred and fifty Yiddish poets in America. They wrote about nature and love, on the one hand, and about poverty and protest, on the other. It was the social motif and the revolutionary outlook, however, which dominated this poetry. Radical freethinkers, socialists, anarchists and others conveyed to the Jewish masses, in verse as well as in prose, their message of a working class solidarity that transcended all national and religious divisions. Jewish labor proclaimed the Yiddish poets its spokesmen and transformed them into culture heroes. The wealthy Jews and the observant traditionalists, who joined in cynically accusing the union organizers of being tools of Christian missionaries, could not but be envious that the better poets always seemed to be found in the radical camp. The socialist and labor poets were not, however, devoid of Jewish national feeling. Despite their conscious disavowal of Jewish nationalism and religion, there were conscious as well as subconscious allusions to the Jewish heritage and the Jewish plight in their poems that are striking. "What good is life beneath the whip of tyrants, without freedom or rights?" chanted David Edelshtat. "How long will we continue to be homeless slaves?" In his "Testament," the poet, who died of tuberculosis in 1892 at the age of twenty six, asked his comrades to bury him beneath the red flag of freedom, "sprinkled with the workingman's blood." As I lie ‘neath the red banner
Kindle the yortsayt candles in the Jewish streets,
Rosenfeld wrote of Jewish wandering, of life in the ghetto, of the solidarity of the Jewish people, and of the dream of Zion restored. His poems dealt with Jewish sorrows and Jewish hopes. He wrote of Moses and the prophets, and of Theodor Herzl, who had just come on the scene. Many of the Jews who came to America from Eastern Europe
did so with the hope of escaping the narrowness of shtetl civilization.
Often this meant severing all links with Jewishness. Together with Rosenfeld
and the poet and Bible translator Yehoash, Abraham Walt-Lyessin (1872-1938)
kindled Jewish pride and helped forge the national identity and self-awareness
of the American Jewish community. Arriving in America in 1897, he became
the outstanding Jewish national poet in the Yiddish tongue. In his poem
"Yiddish" (1922), Lyessin reached heights of prophetic exaltation. At a
time when the language seemed doomed to extinction in America, he had a
vision of its luminous significance in the heritage of generations.
I come to you, my child, from the silent exile,
Rebel Spirit Homesickness and longing for the old country were also
expressed in the work of Moyshe Leyb Halpern (1886-1932), the greatest
rebel of American Yiddish literature.
Joy blessed by God reigned at home and in the street.
Halpern was one of the Yunge, the young rebels who after 1905 brought a new sophistication and refinement to Yiddish writing in America. "The Yunge," writes A. Tabachnik, "were not so much exponents of a new ideology as a new psychology. Something took place in Jewish life at that time, something matured socially and culturally which made the rise of poets like the Yunge inevitable. They felt differently, saw differently, heard differently." In the poetry of the sensitive and lyrical Mani Leib (1883-1953),
a new type of person emerges in Jewish life. The individualism of Mani
Leib and of the Yunge generally was based on a very intensive, more
acute way of feeling; on a highly refined sensibility and openness to experience.
In poor houses there is so much beauty;
Jewish survival and the preservation of Jewish religio-cultural
distinctiveness were major concerns of I. J. Schwartz (1885-1971), another
member of the Yunge. Schwartz translated numerous masterpieces of
medieval and modern Hebrew literature into Yiddish and wrote narrative
verse about America and the American Jewish experience. His skillful poems
about the American landscape, about Jews and Blacks in Kentucky, and about
his Lithuanian childhood assured his place among the outstanding Yiddish
writers of America.
Poet of Accountability Another early member of the American Yunge, who
was to become a central figure in the history of Yiddish literature and
in the culture of the Jewish people, was H. Leivick (1888-1962). Leivick,
who inherited the mantle Y L. Peretz had worn in Europe, became the poet
of ethical sensitivity and moral responsibility in Yiddish literature.
His poems and plays revolve around the themes of guilt and forgiveness,
accountability and humanity, messianism and mission as individual, collective
and universal experiences. "What is sorrow?" he asked, and answered: "Sorrow
is responsibility for everything, for everyone, for all times." The very
first poem that he wrote in America (in 1914) already contained motifs
to which he continued to return throughout his life. In January 1940, when
reports of Jews compelled to wear yellow armbands in Europe reached America,
images from that first poem came back to haunt the poet.
The first snow fell today
The rebellion of the Yunge sparked another rebellion
-- that of the Inzikhist or Introspectivist-Imagist writers of the
1920'as and 30's. Where the Yunge had taken Russian, French and
German poets as their models, the Inzikhists took American poets,
and especially Walt Whitman, as theirs. To the Inzikhists it also
seemed that the Yunge, despite their outstanding achievements in
developing Yiddish poetry, had limited themselves to traditional form and
content. The time was ripe, they felt, for more experimentation and more
outspoken individuality than the Yunge, in their quest for delicacy
and refinement, had permitted themselves.
In Quest of Modernity The chief theoretician of the Inzikhists, and a
major voice in American Yiddish literature, was Aaron Glanz (1889-1966)
whose pen name was A Leyeless. Even before the organization of the Inzikhist
group, Leyeless had published a volume of experimental poems with the telling
title Labyrinth. In the 1930's he created the persona of Fabius
Lind, the poet's alter ego, whose very name symbolized the mature,
intellectual, sensitive and activist, modern Yiddish writer, alive to both
the modern world and his traditional culture. What is especially exciting
about Leyeless' poetry is the fact that it was always on the move -- probing,
feeling, experimenting. It is the poetry of the modern Jew in quest of
the totality of modernity while loyal to his people, his culture, his faith
and himself. Leyeless' poems record the entire adventure of Yiddish literature
in twentieth century America and they reflect and ponder the odyssey of
the Yiddish language the world over in modern times.
Our poem of a sevenfold heaven,
Eretz Yisrael, you are the Bible-come-true of a little schoolboy
Speaking in God's name, Segal appropriated for himself
the role of the prophet, visionary and seer in Jewish tradition. "The artist
must prophesy, not in the sense that he foretells things to come but in
the sense that he tells his audience, at the risk of their displeasure,
the secrets of their own hearts... Art is the community's medicine for
the worst disease of the mind: the corruption of consciousness." (R. G.
Collingwood)
Who is as strong and powerful * * *
Zeitlin and Grade The work of Aaron Zeitlin was completely suffused with the religious quest and with the doubts and conflicts of the religious soul. Philosophically and theologically more avant-garde than any other major Yiddish poet in the years following the Holocaust, Zeitlin's forays into the world of tradition, into the liturgical mode, and into the mythologies and vocabularies of Kabbalah and Hasidism were journeys into the past of a highly self-conscious and sophisticated artist who recast the precious ore of a hoary antiquity into the startling and grotesque designs and structures of the contemporary imagination. Zeitlin was a mystical poet in the tradition of William
Blake, Meister Eckhart, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Nachman of Bratzlav and Abraham
Isaac Kuk. Like them he was forever in search of the other side of things,
the eternal in the temporal, the cosmic in the earthly. He sought contact
between the material and the spiritual, the revealed and the hidden, the
human and the divine. Zeitlin's metaphysical probings often collided with
his grotesque humor to produce statements typical of modern Jewish religious
sensibility.
I defy death with all my might.
Though a stranger in the world. my life has purpose.
Stress on Individuality It is also in American Yiddish literature that the awareness of individuality first surfaces in collective Jewish consciousness in America. The Yiddish writers celebrated individuality and concretized it as a major component of modern Jewish identity. Although Judaism and individuality are far from incompatible, independent thought and feeling were discouraged in traditional Jewish society. Individuality is as rare in Yiddish poetry as in Yiddish fiction until the emergence of Edelshtat, Rosenfeld, the later Yehoash and the Yunge in America. In American Yiddish literature, the modern Jewish individual qua individual and qua Jew comes into his own. "The function of literature, through all its mutations," writes Lionel Trilling, "has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive." In giving voice to the emergence of the sensibilities and conflicts of individuality in modern Jewish life, American Yiddish literature has both reflected and participated in the creation of that individuality. The changing image of the Jewish people in American Yiddish literature is the image of the Yiddish writers themselves. Creative writing may actually be said to have but one hero -- the author himself. American Yiddish literature provides the most complete, most condensed and most authentic record of the changing image of American Jewry and of the Jewish people as a whole in the twentieth century. It is a complex and often bewildering image. The horrors of persecution and physical annihilation, on the one hand, and the processes of identity-erosion and language-assimilation, on the other, wreaked havoc upon the thousand-year-old Ashkenazic Jewish civilization. Yet what was essentially a scattered, backward, medieval people at the dawn of the century, attained national self-consciousness, forging a this-worldly political and cultural identity that is one of the wonders of Jewish history. Together with the emergence of the modern Jewish religious movements, the rise of Jewish Socialism, Zionism the Hebraic renaissance and the birth of Israel, the flowering of modern Yiddish literature and culture all over the world in the first half of the twentieth century is a miracle of Jewish creative survival. The significance of Yiddish culture in the totality of the Jewish experience and in the vastness of the 4,000 year old Jewish heritage is still only vaguely realized. But the magnitude and significance of the Yiddish cultural achievement have made it an absolutely vital and essential dimension of modern Jewish continuity. It is the Jew's map and compass amid the Scylla of all antiquated, anachronistic forms of Jewish identity, and the Charybdis of individual and collective self-denial that inevitably leads to anomie and spiritual self-destruction. Emanuel S. Goldsmith Translations from the Yiddish in this essay are by the author. |