Yiddish Literature in America - 1870-2000
American Yiddish Literature and Jewish Continuity
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
Sing me my freedom-song,
My battle-song resounding like chains
Of enslaved Christians and Jews.
("Mayn Tsavoe")


The greatest of the Yiddish labor poets was Morris Rosenfeld (1862-1923). A poet of the working class, Rosenfeld was also an intensely Jewish poet. The national motif and religious sentiments expressed themselves in some of his best loved poems. Both his social and national poems were alike reactions to Jewish homelessness and suffering. In his poem on the fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York in 1911, in which 146 workers, most of them young Jewish girls, lost their lives, he wrote:
 

Kindle the yortsayt candles in the Jewish streets,
This catastrophe is the catastrophe of the Jewish masses,
Of our benighted and pauperized masses.
The funeral is ours, and ours the graves.
("Di Royte Behole")


Language Consciousness

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,
From crowded, sealed-off ghettos.
I possess only the beauty of pious prayers,
I have naught but the loveliness of martyrdom.
And if I have no lightning flashes that blind one
Or flaming sun-like words that perform miracles,
I do have the sparkle of starry legends,
The precious moonlight of the spirit.
From Worms, from Mainz, from Speyeir,
From Prague and Lublin to Odessa,
One fire continued to burn,
One miracle continued to glow.
Wherever mortal enemies lay waiting
And death was ready nearby --
There, alone and in sorrow,
I accompanied your parents.
For hundreds of years together
We faced every danger
I absorbed all the anger
And I took in all the pain.
I forged through the generations
The wonder of will power and woe:
To live for sacred teachings
And die for them with strength.
If pure holiness
Be reflected in suffering,
Then, my child, I am yours,
I am your most sacred one.
("Yidish")


Although he was already well known in Europe, it was after his arrival in the United States in 1908 that Abraham Reisen (1876-1953) came to be acknowledged as one of the leading Yiddish poets and short story writers. Reisen, whose writing went through several fascinating metamorphoses, made Jewish poverty a symbol of the universal condition, and made Yiddish poetry the recorder of the full gamut of Jewish and human experience.

 
In our noisy land,
On roads without end,
We go about silently,
Pensive and longing.
Some suppress their woe --
But it is sensed anyway.
In his heart each
Has brought his home along.
In the chase and the noise,
In the tumult and confusion,
Each sees above himself
His own bit of sky.
("In Undzer Land")

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.
Children played with their fathers' long beards.
Over ancient tomes, singing and always in deep thought,
Sat gentle young people day and night.
Young girls sewed phylactery-bags of gold and silk
And all the girls looked as pure as stars.
("In der Fremd")


Halpern's stature has continued to grow since his untimely death at the age of forty-six. His influence on Yiddish poets everywhere has been enormous because he brought a new, liberated diction and style to Yiddish poetry. This, together with his strong individuality and his powerful, earthy Jewishness, made him one of the leading Yiddish poets of all time. Halpern could also be devastatingly critical of the old country and the old way of life -- and this too is highly characteristic of American Yiddish literature and of the American Jewish community as a whole.

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;
Faith ennobles hungry lips.
In its abject smallness the hand that is beaten
Keeps all doors open for a poor neighbor
Beside the cold fire of the dying coals,
Around the tables, heads leaning on elbows,
Ears perked and old greybeards speaking
Words of wisdom, sorrow and imagined miracles.
And above all heads -- the silent one, the liberator
He emerges from the talk and sits in their midst.
The thin coals flicker with new fire
And redden all the heads and beards carved out of the fire.
("In Hayzer Oreme")


Mani Leib's enduring historical accomplishment for Yiddish literature was "the purification of the dialect of his tribe." He established boundaries for Yiddish poetry which helped lift it to new levels of aesthetic accomplishment and refinement. In Tabachnik's formulation, "he purified Yiddish poetry of prosaisms, jargon, and poor taste."

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
And children are sleighing in the park.
The air is filled with joyful shouting.
Like the children, I too love white snow
Most of all I love winter days.
(Somewhere far, somewhere far
A prisoner lies alone.)
True God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
Punish me not for this old love of mine.
Punish me for not shaping
A Moses from the meager New York snow
For not making a Mount Sinai from the snow
As once I did in distant years of childhood.
(Someone wanders in the snow
Strewn all about.)
Punish me for not actually wearing
The six-towered Star of David and
The round emblem of the yellow badge,
To strengthen Israel in the hangman's land,
To praise and glorify
The arm that wears the honor of this ancient seal
In every country of the world.
("Lider Vegn der Geler Late")


After the Holocaust and years of struggle with self-incrimination and guilt for not having been in Treblinka with his martyred brethren, the original vision helped Leivick search for meaning in his people's sufferings.

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,
Our poem -- nourished with the dew and poverty of every land,
Can it not once again irrigate every soil?
Behold, we have gone for beyond A, B, and C.
Our poem -- a blade of grass, a little flower yesterday,
Is now a rare and lovely growth.
("Tsu Aykh Dikhter Yidish")


Jacob Glatstein (1896-1971), an early colleague of Leyeless, was the twentieth century poet of Judaism par excellence. There was no aspect of modern Jewish experience that did not find expression in his deeply thought poems. Glatstein brought to Yiddish poetry complete self-identification with Judaism and the Jewish people, humanitarianism, wisdom, humor and genius. His work is a culmination of all that is admirable in modern Yiddish verse. His poems about Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, his odes to Yiddish, and his poems of the Holocaust, of Israel reborn, and of American Jewry, are among the major documents of the Jewish People's tribulation and transcendence in the modern world.
 

Eretz Yisrael, you are the Bible-come-true of a little schoolboy
Above whose head all has been fulfilled.
Sing, Jewish daughters, in the vineyards: all has been fulfilled!
From early childhood he was shown signs and wonders.
His teacher Daniel never stopped
Reciting triumphant verses
But he never understood a word.
Now he sees the light of day.
It really did not take very long
For the hour and its aftermath to arrive.
("Bist Geshen, Bist Qevorn")


J. I. Segal (1896-1959) and Aaron Zeitlin (1898-1973) were, like Glatstein, writers whose scope of activity was defined by their Jewishness. Segal was obsessed with Jewish uniqueness, with the shtetl, and with Hasidism. He was the poet of longing for the past and hope for the future.

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
As you, my beautiful little trampled people?
 Who is like you, who may be compared to you, Israel?
* * *
You are as eternal
As the eternal heavens.
You are as enduring as time itself
Sacred is the soil
Of your generations and your cemeteries.
Yisroel sheli - you are my people Israel
I believe, I  believe, I believe in you, my people.
("A Bletl fun Gots Sider")


Despite the so-called "secularism" of modern Yiddish literature, religion and religious motifs occupy a prominent place in it. There is scarcely an important Yiddish poet who has failed to take up this theme in his work. Where Y L. Peretz, in Europe, had spoken of Yiddish literature as a substitute for a national territory, the American Yiddish essayist and literary critic B. Rivkin spoke of it as an erzatz-religion in the modern world.

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.
Death is nothing but a name.
Are the six million really dead?
They are an ever-present flame.
My generation, you say, is in retreat.
I say: not so! In Netsakh Yisrael
The past and present meet.
Even in despair there is a Levite's song.
Just listen for the tune.
We shall all be there soon.
The road from Prophet to Sabra isn't long.
* * *
"Jew" and "stop" can't unite, never will.
 The meaning of Jew is anti-end.
("Dialog Tsvishn Mir un Mayn Atsves")


Another major, unique voice in American Yiddish literature was Chaim Grade (1010-1982), who arrived in the United States after the European Holocaust. An accomplished novelist, whose works vividly depict the world of the common folk of his native Lithuaniia and of the students of the Lithuanian yeshivot, the poetry Grade wrote while in the United States dealt primarily with the Holocaust and the rebirth of Israel. In classical lines, reminiscent of the Hebrew poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik, Grade captured the profound reactions of a modern Jew to these two crucial events of modern Jewish history. He saw the mission and purpose of his life and work in the recording for posterity of the travail and glory of his people.
 

Though a stranger in the world. my life has purpose.
I live so that I may revive the dead.
("Geheyme Gest")


Despite the fact that Yiddish literature in America was written in an unattended language, it created great values. "The Yiddish writers here," writes Glatstein, "raised Yiddish to the highest heights, as if to protect themselves from shallowness and escape the continuous funeral-like echo of dying... Out of apathy to language, Yiddish literature in America created language-consciousness, and for a declining generation it created a beautiful linguistic instrument." The Yiddish writers of America helped preserve and stimulate loyalty to the Jewish people and to Jewish religious and cultural values and ideals.

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.
 
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