NOTES
THE FIRST DAY
Ansky (pseudonym for S. Z. Rapoport) (1863-1920)
The Tower of Rome
Drawing on the Solomonic tales that date back to the Talmud, Ansky completely
transformed the Jewish king into an anti-Semitic tyrant in order to weave
a parable about political and worldly power versus the messianic aspirations
of Judaism. The biblical diction, the use of magic, astrology, and symbolism
places the story in a context that gives the Jewish religious strivings
a mythic substance within an eschatological interpretation of Jewish history.
Mendele Moykher-Sforim (1836?-1917)
The Wandering of a Soul
Mendele's vicious satire (see The Mare, Vol. II, sixth day) reached a vitriolic
peak in this laughable and pathetic adventure of a Jew who visits Heaven,
only to be turned away because the Jewish quota is filled. This is the
ultimate pessimism, born of the frustrations and deceptions of Jewish life
in the nineteenth-century Pale of Settlement.
The Mayse-Book (1602)
The Rabbi Who Was Turned into a Werewolf
The Mayse-Book, a medieval collection of Yiddish stories, drew mainly on
Talmudic material, but it also included tales from other, sometimes contemporary,
sources. This tale about a rabbinical werewolf is fairly similar to Marie
de France's Le Bisclavret. The Mayse-Book version, however,
made Jewish by turning the courtly gentleman into a rabbi, is so much more
misogynous as to make us wonder whether it might not almost function as
a vicious attack on the position of women in a patriarchal culture. One
can scarcely blame the rabbi's wife, who was left out of the male-bonding
world of learning and friendship, for resenting her dreadful lot and taking
appropriate revenge-like Shylock. The misogyny intermingles with a malaise
about sex, thereby giving in to, an equation of sex and sin as embodied
by Eve or Lilith: salvation through study, virtue, and abstention as opposed
to the worldly and carnal possibilities of human existence.
Der Nister (pseudonym for Pinhas Kahanovitch)
(1884-1950)
At the Border
Der Nister gave himself a cabbalistic nom de plume, literally "The
Arcane." His prose (before a conversion to soviet Socialist Realism) takes
up cabbalistic energies, mythical material not always inherent to the Jewish
tradition, and elements from Jewish folklore. The. characters, however,
tend not to be specifically Jewish, but, like many figures in fairytales,
live in a timeless world beyond nationality and cultural specificity.
"At the Border," as well as his other stories in this anthology, are
taken from his two-volume collection, Gedakht (Spoken), published
in Berlin in 1922. Setting up a mythical quest for redemption through national
salvation, Der Nister curiously retains a reminiscence of a sense of Jewish
life and survival as a route toward spiritual fulfillment. The nearly petrified
waiting, the mystical yearning, the notion of an almost permanent quest
on a superhuman level - create a private mysticism, self-enclosed and rarely
admitting a lucid interpretation. Such absolute symbolism, easily traceable
to the tales of Rabbi Nakhman (see below), and to cabbalism, evokes rather
than explains, and is perceptibly analogous to the poetic experimentation
in European modernism. The language, an authentic, colloquial Yiddish,
alive with a hypnotic and mellow lyricism, flows along in strange, meandering
sentences, with rhymes, repetitions, and peculiar rhythms. We are left
on a hazy verge of something, a brink overlooking the ultimate reality,
that we can only sense with the prerational strata of the mind, but cannot
capture with logic or human discourse.
Y[itzok] L[eybesh] Peretz (1852-1915)
The Three Wedding Canopies
Taking the messianic yearnings of Eastern European Jewry and the dream
of a political autonomy for Jews, Peretz wove this short novel of a quest
for love as figuring the aspiration for harmonious earthly existence in
both personal and political life. The unanswered question at the end is
typical of a mootness in messianic hope: fulfillment just beyond our grasp.
The novel is stylized with traditional fairytale material in a highly Germanicized
Yiddish, betokening the powerful influence of the romantic Kunstmarchen.
The glittering polish of the diction, the romantic trappings, the gentle
irony coursing through the lyricism, create a nineteenth-century fairytale
camp, that, for Peretz then, seemed the only way of expressing his dual
attitude toward the two messianic strivings: the religious and the political
one-parallel lines that could only meet in an infinity beyond literature
and beyond history.
THE SECOND DAY
Ansky (pseudonym for S. Z. Rapoport) (1863-1920)
The Penitent
Ansky, deeply interested in Slavic folklore, translated this Russian folktale
into Yiddish, totally preserving the Gentile world of the original, perhaps
because he couldn't bring himself to present a Jewish robber and patricide.
There is a curious kinship to the Lohengrin legend in the theme of penitence
emblemized in the motif of a flowering staff as a sign of salvation arid
divine forgiveness.
Y. L. Peretz (1852-1915)
The Three Gifts
The theme of salvation endures a sardonic treatment here. Peretz's castigation
of human mediocrity and pettiness is schematicized in the attempts of a
thoroughly middling person to attain redemption. The depiction of the human
condition as precisely balanced between good and evil is one of total mediocrity.
The gifts themselves, apparently requisites of loftier action, bring salvation,
but are waved off as petty trifles by the saints. The pessimism, measured
and sarcastic, is more metaphysical than social.
Der Nister (pseudonym for Pinhas Kahanovitch)
(1884-1950)
The Fool and The Forest Demon
Folk demonology was not always filled with sin and wickedness. There are
oases, as in this lyrical pastoral that turns an apparently slight incident
about release from servitude into bucolic tenderness and sensuality. Yet
the motif of emancipation is crucial throughout Jewish history.
I. J. Trunk (1887-1961)
The Jewish Pope
Many of I. J. Trunk's writings were actually adaptations of older Jewish
material such as the Bovve Book. His version of a medieval legend
about a Jewish pope was taken from The Mayse-Book (1602). Greatly
expanding the original tale into a parable of worldly ambition, he dwells
on the historical condition of Jews as bearers of a national faith and
ideology within a hostile, material world. Although there never was a pope
from a Jewish background, the legend has nevertheless inspired literary
and scholarly inquiry. Trunk's adaptation of the medieval tale is effective
for its clear, linear plot, straightforward style, and pop schematicism
of medieval color.
Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1940)
The Wind Who Lost His Temper
This fairytale for children is quite different from Kulbak's mystical novels
and later soviet satires. The interest in nature was belated in Jewish
life, and this anthropomorphic sympathy with natural forces ultimately
domesticated by a child differs from Kulbak's other treatments. His kind
optimism may have been dictated by his awareness of the juvenile audience.
Yudl Rosenberg
The Golem
Rosenberg brought out this pamphlet in 1909, passing it off as a translation
from Hebrew. He actually wrote it himself in Yiddish, following the tradition
of Hassidic hagiography, i.e., stories extolling the wondrous souls and
feats of the great rabbis. Drawing on the old legend of a manmade humanoid,
which tradition had somehow connected with the historical Rabbi Liva of
Prague, Rosenberg produced a journalistic chronicle of adventures; primitive,
schematic, and tendentious. His work was a striking example of Jewish pulp-writing
for the masses, and yet it inspired Leivick's renowned drama The Golem,
and was adapted into an episodic novel by Chaim Bloch (who never gave Rosenberg
credit for supplying him with the contents of his book). The Blood Libels
against Jews, accusing them of murdering Christians and using their blood
to bake unleavened bread for Passover, were growing in force during the
1890s. It was this disastrous trend that Rosenberg attacked in his vita
of Rabbi Liva. The one-dimensional pop quality of the writings, the intrusive
journalese, the linear optimism contrast with more complex literary treatments
of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Conventions of pop and pulp tend to be
ignored by historians and literati; and yet such grade-B Gothic is always
widely disseminated, and captures a much greater segment of the popular
imagination.
THE THIRD DAY
The Mayse-Book
The Conversation of Two Ghosts
Another (unfortunately) misogynous tale from the medieval collection. Pungent
and anecdotal, the story derives from folk superstitions and mocks vanity
and other supposedly feminine vices.
Ansky (pseudonym for S. Z. Rapoport) (1863-1920)
A Good Laugh
The Hassidic tradition of storytelling contributes both the theme and the
structure of this tale. Hassidic stories tended to be hagiographic encomiums
of guru-rebbes, and were told orally for the most part at a farbrengen,
a get-together of the rebbe and his followers. The more conservative rabbinate
thundered against such maysenen (storytelling) as sacrilegious,
and the Hassidic narrator in this tale utters a reminiscence of that fear,
when he points out that his stories might do his listeners more harm than
good in drawing their attention away from the greatness of God. Ansky was
interested in both the Hassidic substance of this narrative art and in
the spiritual and intellectual atmosphere within which it developed. Thus,
"A Good Laugh" is also about the intellectual and religious aesthetics
behind maysenen.
The Mayse-Book (1602)
The Possession
This tale from the medieval Mayse-Book is probably the first Yiddish
story about a possession, and begins a long tradition of dybbuk literature,
the most ?famous example being Ansky's play, The Dybbuk. Although
primitive in structure and rough in language, the story points out the
ambiguous power of the possessed sinner to recognize evil in others, so
that the dybbuk has the paradoxical function of rectifying evil before
his own exorcism.
Dovid Bergelson
At Night (See Foreword)
Der Nister
In the Wine-Cellar
The cabbalistic and Hassidic forces in this story are concentrated in the
enigmatic symbolism, the astrological lyricism, and the intricate convolutions
of tales within tales. The material and structural peculiarities can easily
be traced to Rabbi Nakhman's tales. The involved sentences, as usual in
Der Nister (see pp. 44, 123 ), draw the action into a meandering flow outside
the normal linear course of time.
Rabbi Nakhman of Bratslev
A Tale of a King and a Wise Man
Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1940)
The Messiah o f the House o f Ephraim
The messianic yearning of the Jewish masses is expressed in a complex of
legends concerning the Lamed-vovniks, the thirty-six hidden saints, who
come from humble origins and carry on a tradition of silent virtue. Kulbak,
writing in an earthy, colloquial Yiddish, blends together a number of folklore
motifs, such as the figure of Lilith or the character of Simkhe Plakhte.
At the same time, he draws on the apocalyptical intensity, the dramatic
heightenings, and cinematic juxtapositions of German Expressionism to produce
a mystical and lyrical novel. The plot disintegration of modern fiction
becomes a structural parallel to a desperate chaos that seeks redemption
in a vulnerable Savior, whose earthly fate is strongly Christological.
Yet Kulbak, rejecting Christian possibilities, looks toward an ultimate
Jewish salvation.
THE FOURTH DAY
Rabbi Nakhman of Bratslev (1772-1810)
A Tale of a Prince
The absolute symbolism forbids a rational unpeeling. When we remove the
skin of the story, we find lyrical jewels. This poetic inner substance
demands a nonrational, mystical response to an energy beyond verbalization.
Only the poetry of modernism could teach us to experience literature on
such levels. The ultimate shock, however, was the utterance of these mystical
forces in Yiddish, the language of everyday life, rather than in the sacred
tongue of Hebrew.
Ber Horovitz (1895?- )
The Dybbuk
Jewish folklore is rich in tales of wonder-rabbis and their exploits, which
often included exorcisms. The sin and the guilt are here tied to? illicit
sexual thought, whose effects are as disastrous as these of deeds. Rectification
of disorder leads to the confirmation of traditional values: family, religious
study, etc. Morality is tied to conservative banalities that are never
questioned even when flouted.
Y. L. Peretz
A Passion for Clothes
Unlike the sensuality that some Jewish writers saw as fulfillment in a
pantheistic nature (see Der Nister); greed, the love of material things
that are sharply divided from the spiritual, obsessed the Jewish imagination
as much as it did the unhappy protagonist of Peretz's tale. Cut off, like
all Jewish women, from the intellectual and spiritual world of men, she
fails in her duties as wife and mother and has to endure the requisite
punishment. Following Eve in succumbing to the Evil Spirit, she belatedly
realizes her transgressions to become a didactic example.
The Mayse-Book
King Solomon and Ashmedai
Solomon was always an ambiguous figure in the Jewish tradition. This medieval
tale, drawn from Talmudic material, naively and unwittingly presents a
schizophrenic Solomon who, in the process of building the Temple (that
spiritual center of all Jews) is confronted with his alter ego, Ashmedai,
ruler of the demons. More cunning than the devil, Solomon is in many ways
his moral inferior. After all, Ashmedai goes to heaven every day to study
the holy texts, while the King devotes himself to worldly politics. The
prophetic Ashmedai sounds almost like Solomon, paralleling his wisdom.
Unhappily, Ashmedai's downfall is his sexuality, or rather,
his transgression of Jewish sexual taboos, which Solomon, although
the most powerful man in the world, would never flout. He leaves such sins
to his darker alter ego, who has to take the consequences.
Rabbi Nakhman of Bratslev (1772-1810)
A Tale of a Rabbi and His Only Son
The Messiah will come when the world is totally good or totally evil. The
polarities in this tale are kept in a negative dialectic: evil interferes
with the fusion of good and good.
Y. L. Peretz
The Conjuror
Drawing on Jewish folklore, Peretz presents Eli-Ha-Novi - not Elijah,
the formidable prophet of the Bible, but a friendly and lovable figure
who wandered, anonymously poor, through Eastern Europe, helping Jews in
moments of trouble. Above all, he reminds us that the Bible was often on
a magnificent plane, its splendor far removed from the daily banalities
of life. Of course, there was a sad side to Eli-Ha-Novi. His existence
was limited to the Eastern Europe Diaspora. Ultimately, the land and the
language of the Bible would have to be restored, and the awe-inspiring
avatar, the Prophet Elijah, would have to loom over his folk alter ego.
A. B. Gotlober (1811-1899)
The Gilgul or The Transmigration
The Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, turned its satirical venom on what
is derided as superstition, mysticism, and degeneracy in Jewish life. Gotlober,
using the folklore theme of reincarnation, viciously traces a series of
lives through Jewish history, although obviously the conditions he describes
were contemporary. Addressing the masses in their own language, and using
popular motifs and material (a number of Hebrew books on the same theme
preceded his short novel), he produced one of the most acute attacks on
Hassidism and rabbinical corruption, as well as on the exploitive Jews
who added to the hardships of their vulnerable communities, Conversational
in tone and structure, the story sums up much of the social and economic
horrors of Jewish life, and paved the way for the ultimate vitriol of Mendele
Moykher-Sforim.
THE FIFTH DAY
The Mayse-Book
Haninah and the Frog
This more universal story from the medieval Mayse-Book combines
two fairytale complexes: the quest for the queen on the basis of a clue
of hair (Tristan and Isolde); and the ability to speak the languages
of animals and employ them in time of trouble. The result seems almost
like a weave of two stories, which possibly explains the author's callous
treatment of Haninah's first wife, who conveniently dies so that he may
wed the queen of the golden hair.
Rabbi Nakhman of Bratslev (1772-1810)
A Tale of a Menorah
.The concept of imperfection and fragmentation are central to the aesthetics
of Nakhman, the artist-rabbi, who deliberately truncated his tales, using
the fragment as an allegorical figuration of human life, which find perfection
only in the divine and the messianic. The young man who can show the faults
in the craft of others is the rabbinical poet pointing out the imperfection
of worldly existence.
Ber Horovitz
The Legend of the Madonna
Half-ecumenical, half-contemptuous of Christian hypocrisy, the author picks
up a Christological motif that had become more and more frequent in Jewish
writing: the attempt to re-Judaicize the New Testament figures. Humanizing
them, and slyly making Christianity almost tempting, despite the horrors
perpetrated in the name of the Church, Horovitz turns the Mariological
miracles of medieval Christian literature into pro-Jewish feats that point
out the superior force of true faith and piety.
Der Nister
A Tale of Kings
As in his other fiction, Der Nister draws on Rabbi Nakhman's tales within
tales to produce a convoluted fairytale novella about a secular quest and
salvation. The schematic and universal structure of the threefold problems
to be solved by the hero before he attains the hand of the princess is
thus refracted by a plot line that twists into and out of itself like a
multidimensional Mobius strip. Stories told to the hero break up the irreversibility
of time; prophecies described. in detail and then realized in the same
detail set up mirror images that once again slow down and splinter the
movement of time. Bovve, a hero with no past but with a definite and timeless
future of endless happiness, has to withstand the trials of earthliness
in order to achieve that timeless redemption. Set in a world beyond the
experience or possible reach of its readers, the long, meandering, lyrical
story sets up an allegorical utopia beyond history. Bovve is the typical
fairy-story self-made man, whose self-help nevertheless requires magical
assistance from other sources, but whose courage and perseverance gain
him the salvation that is neither religious nor worldly, but exists only
within the private domain of fantasy.
THE SIXTH DAY
Mendele Moykher-Sforim (pseudonym for Sholem Yankev
Abramovitch) (c. 1836-1917)
The Mare
He took the pen name of Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Mendele the Book Dealer,
and employed this narrative persona in most of his fiction, which he wrote
in both Yiddish and Hebrew. His subject was the life of Jews in Eastern
Europe, and especially their double vulnerability - in the face of a hostile
outer world and at the hands of their own exploiters within. His satire,
armed with probably the most vicious irony since Fielding's Jonathan
Wild, flayed the entire Jewish world of Eastern Europe, all classes
of society, all the pleasures and frustrations, all types and characters.
Using the language of everyday life, Yiddish, he applied it with all
the nuances at his disposal, all the colors and rhythms, the influences
of Hebrew and Gentile culture. His style is a complex of subtleties, allusions,
and playful twisting of language from mimetic realism to energies that
make language an absolute power beyond its average use.
"The Mare" is an ambiguous title. The Yiddish word can mean a female
horse (or donkey) or be a pejorative term for a "nag" or "dobbin," a broken-down
horse, an old gray mare.
This intricate and didactic satire sets up a twofold allegory, in which
the Jewish nation is split into Israel, Izzy, a young Jew striving to make
something of himself in the misery of the Pale of Settlement, and the Mare,
the representation of the Jewish people throughout history. Twice humiliated
by being turned into an animal, and a female at that (the profoundly patriarchal
structure dictated such a dehumanizing attitude toward women), the Mare
engages in endless dialectics with Izzy, fashioning an inner Jewish struggle
that plays on all the confusions and contradictions? of Jewish history.
Mendele, by resorting to the use of traditional folklore and Talmudic motifs,
may have been giving in to a popular audience. But at the same time, he
revealed the paradox. of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which
attacked what it called superstition and mysticism, and yet made use of
this material in these very attacks. Mendele's works form a satirical summa
of a devastating era in Jewish history. They look toward salvation as a
historical development of human effort rather than as a messianic advent.
AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY
Rabbi Nakhman of Bratslev (1772-1810)
The Tale o f the Seven Beggars
Hassidic stories usually extolled the wondrous doings of a rebbe. But here
the rabbi became an artist and told an entirely different kind of story.
Supposedly, Rabbi Nakhman of Bratslev, a great-grandson of the Baal Shem-Tov,
told his tales to his disciples and dictated them to his scribe Nathan,
who published them after the author's death. The book was bilingual, with
the Yiddish versions filling out the bottom half of the page, and a Hebrew
translation the top half. The symbolism of languages was obvious: Yiddish,
the language of everyday life, of the earth and the Exile; Hebrew, the
loshen-(ha)koydesh, the tongue of holiness and heaven. Nakhman had
told his followers to pray in Yiddish, and he used it in his sermons. The
long, rambling sentences of his stories twist and turn like existential
dragons trying to shake off the categories of time and space. Repetitions,
contradictions, puzzling symbols, tales within tales make for a mystical
world that invites and yet defies rational analysis. The fragmentary character
of the stories, often attacked by critics for "getting nowhere" (just as
modernism is attacked for being fragmentary and anticlassical), actually
emblemizes the unfulfillment and truncation of earthly life. The only way
of completing these stories is in the messianic redemption; there is no
earthly way of solving the puzzles or rounding out the fragments. That
is why we not only never quite understand who the beggars are, but we never
find out about the seventh beggar. Our ultimate Sabbath is still far away.
 
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