PART THREE
TRADITION AND MODERNISM
In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth
century, Yiddish writers continued what was basically a genre tradition,
recording and illuminating everyday Jewish life in the shtetl, but, of
course, selecting and omitting. For even though they often claimed to be
"historians," dealing with types rather than individuals, more concerned
with the collective than with individuals, they nevertheless, and obviously,
created literature rather than historiography. The shtetl tended to be
stereotyped in this fiction, largely in the negative, but at times lovingly.
The attempts at a quasi-historical recording of
life are exemplified in Sholom Aleichem's novel Stempeniu. While
attacking the Yiddish pulp writers and depicting a highly moral romance
in an everyday Jewish milieu, he aimed for realism by imaginatively using
the jargon of Jewish musicians in his dialogues. This jargon was so specialized
that he had to provide translation footnotes for his audience. An English
equivalent, used to render the jargon here, is the lingo of contemporary
American rock musicians, who, in our culture, have the same erotic outsider
appeal of these itinerant Jewish musicians. (The latter, however, were
an accepted component in shtetl life rather than superstars of a youth
culture.)
Stempeniu has an ethical resolution, promoting
the traditional structure of courtship and marriage. Although critical,
Sholom Aleichem is nowhere as negative as the Haskalah about the way Jewish
husbands treated their wives. From a modern viewpoint, Rachel's final acceptance
of marriage and materialism, though hardly as drastic as that of Stempeniu's
wife, may be a rather dismal end. But for some contemporary thinking, it
was good for herself and the collective.
The decay of the courtship ritual (which Sholom
Aleichem later described in the Tevye stories) was at the core of evolution
in Jewish life. And Dovid Bergelson depicted it with fin-de-siecle
pessimism in Joseph Shorr. Reduced to the virtues of property and
propriety, which none of his young urban contemporaries take seriously,
the title character, a non-hero, embodies (upper-class) small-town traditionalism,
which the modern age was undermining. This impressionistic novella also
exposes the gap between shtetl and city Jews and between conventional,
materialistic parents and the iconoclastic, metropolitan younger generation
with its uprooted cosmopolitanism.
A more nostalgic picture of shtetl life at the
turn of the century can be found in the hundreds of pastel sketches by
Avrom Reyzen. Generally showing types rather than individuals, and using
a delicate, lyrical language, he produced a low-key and loving comedie
humaine of Jewish life (both in Eastern Europe and the New World).
"The Dog" is a rather bizarre exception for him, since he seldom dwelt
openly on horror.
A writer who focused almost exclusively on violence
was Lamed Shapiro. His stories explore the psychology of both Gentile murderers
and Jewish victims, especially in regard to the issue of Jewish response
and self?defense, a question that he examined but could never fully resolve.
Amid the realism, soi-disant, of Yiddish fiction,
there has always been a tradition of fantasy, even in modern times, when
writers have competed with constant new editions of older fairy tales,
legends, and romances, from the medieval Mayse Book to Yiddish versions
of The Arabian Nights. Weissenberg's satirical "A Tale of a Goat"
attacks superstition and provincialism with Haskalah acid and yet poetic
charm, leaving the characters in an endless waiting for a "stranger," presumably
the Messiah.
This Messianic yearning, of course, infused Jewish
life - and now in various new forms, both religious and political, e.g.
socialism, Zionism, and the like. But while the shtetl may have been assailed
as static, backward, and rooted in superstition, as Weissenberg shows it
to be, it nevertheless remained a tenacious social organization, despite
the breakup of traditions, despite industrialization, despite large migration
to big cities and foreign countries. It was not modernism that destroyed
the shtetl.
 
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