Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century 9780199812639, 2011006688

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DIASPORIC MODERNISMS HEBREW & YIDDISH

LITERATURE

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

ALLISON SCHACHTER

Paiiing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter

formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose

fiction. The Jewish writers discussed— including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef

Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah

Goldberg, Gabriel Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky—embraced diaspora as a formal literary strategy to reflect on the

historical conditions of Jewish language culture. Spanning from 1894 to 1974, the book traces the development of

this diasporic aesthetic in the shifting

centers of Hebrew and Yiddish literature,

including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Through an analysis

of Jewish writing, Schachter theorizes how modernist literary networks

operate outside national borders in minor and non-national languages. Offering the first comparative literary history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist prose, Diasporic Modernisms

argues that these two literary histories

can no longer be separated by

nationalist and monolingual histories. Instead, the book illustrates how these

literary languages continue to animate

each other, even after the creation of a Jewish state with Hebrew as its

national language.

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Diasporic Modernisms

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Diasporic Modernisms Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century Allison Schachter

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press, Inc,, publishes works that further Oxford University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education.

Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dares Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2012 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored In a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter 1 was published in a slightly different form as *7hc Shtetl and the City: The Origins of Nostalgia in Ba-yamim ha-hem andShloyme reb khayims," Jewish Social Studies 12.3 (2006): 73-94, and is reprinted by per­ mission of Indiana University Press. A portion of chapter 3 appeared as "Dovid Bergelson and the Landscape of Yiddish Modernlsm/ffast European Jewish Affairs, 38.1 (2008): 7-19, and is reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. Gabriel Prell’s poem, "Mi-yerushalayim, shir rishon,’ is reprinted by permission ofMosad Bialik. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schachter, Allison, 1974Diasporic modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the twentieth century/Allison Schachter. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-19-981263-9 (doth: acid-free paper) 1. Hebrew literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Yiddish literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Modernism (Literature) 4. MendeleMokherSefarim, 1835-1917—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Bergelson, David, 1884-1952—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Goldberg, Leah, 1911-1970—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PJ5O2O.S33 2011 892.4 '09006—dc22 2011006688

987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Leon Wiesel, who made the journey from Tarnobrzeg to

Vienna to Brooklyn.

CONTENTS

Note on the Transliteration Acknowledgments ix

viii

Introduction 3 1. The Storyteller in Translation 29 2. Diasporic Address and Transnational Hebrew 55 3. Yiddish Modernism in Weimar Berlin 84 4. Gender and the Language ofModernism 121 S. The Afterlife of Diasporic Modernism in Postwar New York Postscript 184 Index

189

152

NOTE ON THE TRANSLITERATION

For Yiddish, I have used the YIVO transliteration system. For Hebrew, I have used a simplified version of the ALA/LC system. In transliterating the names of Hebrew and Yiddish authors, I generally used the name as it appears in the U.S. Library of Congress, unless that spelling diverged from the one used by scholars of Hebrew and Yiddish literature for the most commonly cited authors (such as Abramovitsh, where the Library of Congress has Abramowich).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project began in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where many teachers, friends, and colleagues were an enormous source of support. Robert Alter has always been available to talk through a difficult passage or to discuss the frustrations and pleasures of writing. Chana Kronfeld is a generous teacher and friend, without whom this book would never have come to fruition. I am grateful for our continuing dialogue on Jewish modernisms. Steve Zipperstein mentored me since my undergraduate days at Stanford and has helped guide my career with his keen critical insight ever since. Michael Lucey shaped and continues to shape the theoretical concerns of my work. In addition to my advisers, I was lucky to have a community of graduate student colleagues with whom to collaborate and share work regularly. Robert Adler Peckerar, Jordan Finkin, and Naomi Brenner were and continue to be careful readers and interlocutors in all things Hebrew and Yiddish. They offered valuable feedback on the shape of my argu­ ments and the finer points of translation. The vibrant community of friends and colleagues at Vanderbilt Uni­ versity has helped me establish a new intellectual home. My chairs in the Program in Jewish Studies and the Department of English, David Wasserstein, Leah Marcus, Jay Clayton, and Mark Schoenfield, have been generous with their time and helped guide me in my work. I am grateful to the many colleagues at Vanderbilt who have read and commented on the manuscript; Leah Marcus, Mark Wollaeger, Teresa Goddu, Scott Juengel, Andras Kisery, Jonathan Farina, Sara Figal, Gabriel Cervantes, Julia Cohen, Ari Joskowicz, Rachel Teukolsky, and Ling Hong Lam. Bar­ bara Hahn read the manuscript early on and encouraged me to continue working on the project. Dahlia Porter has been a wonderful writing part­ ner and friend, carefully reading many of the pages in this book. I would also like to thank Ingo Kieslich for his research assistance and Sarah White for her careful proofreading. I am grateful to my colleagues in the field who have commented on parts of the manuscript and shared their knowledge and advice, including

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Acknowledgments

Benjamin Harshav, Todd Hasak Lowy, Shachar Pinsker, Tamar Hess, Mikhail Krutikov, Jeremy Dauber, Sidra Ezrahi, Kathryn Hellerstein, Natasha Gordinsky, Giddon Ticotsky, Jon Soske, Jennifer Greiman, and Barry Trachtenberg. Matan Hermoni kindly helped me to secure permis­ sions at the very last moment. The anonymous reviewers who read this manuscript offered invaluable suggestions for revisions. I am grateful for the feedback I received from presenting my work at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Georgetown University, Columbia University, Oxford University, the University of Warwick, and at sessions held at the annual meetings of the Association for Jewish Studies, the Modernist Studies Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the National Association of Professors of Hebrew. The Vanderbilt University College of Arts and Science and the Vander­ bilt Research Scholars Grant generously provided me with a year-long leave to complete this book. In addition, the College of Arts of Science and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research offered financial support to subvent the cost of publication. I also want to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a 2008 Summer Stipend that enabled me to pursue research for my chapter on Hebrew and Yiddish in postwar New York. I am indebted to the archivists and staff of the YI VO Archives and the Center for Jewish History, the libraries at the University of Cali­ fornia Berkeley, Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, and the Gnazim Institute in Tel Aviv. I would like to especially thank, Zachary Baker, Paul Hamburg, and Dvora Stavi for their research support. In addition, I am indebted to the tireless work ofJim Toplon and the interlibrary loan staff at the Vanderbilt library. The editorial staff at Oxford University Press have carefully shep­ herded this book through the publication process. lam especially grateful to Brendan O’Neil, Marc Schneider, and Joellyn Ausanka for enthusiasti­ cally taking on this project. This book would not have been possible without the stalwart support of my family, including my mother, Laura Schachter, and my father, Alan Schachter. Finally, to Ben, who has spent untold hours reading, editing, and com­ menting on this book, it is as much his as it is mine. I am grateful every day for our life together.

Diasporic Modernisms

Introduction

n 1926 Nachman Meisel and representatives of the Yiddish Writers’ Union petitioned to establish ajewish PEN Club in Warsaw that would represent both Hebrew and Yiddish writers around the world. For these writers, Hebrew and Yiddish literature were equivalent to Jewish litera­ ture. Founded in 1921, PEN International was an international organiza­ tion of writers advocating cultural understanding and world peace.1 The application for ajewish PEN Club confounded the international organi­ zation because Jewish writers sought to represent a literary culture that did not belong to any nation-state. PEN International responded to the request with a series of inquiries about the geography ofJewish literature. Referring to the well-known Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, they asked, “What country does he represent?” Finally they asked, “What is the cen­ ter ofjewish literature?”123The writers’ union responded to these concerns with a fifteen-page history of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. For­ mulated by Aaron Zeitlin and Yitzhak Shiffer, the paper described this literary development in extraterritorial, diasporic terms, demanding the creation of ajewish PEN Club that would represent Hebrew and Yiddish writers internationally? When PEN International formally recognized

I

1. The International PEN was initially founded in London with additional centers across Europe and New York. Since its founding in 1921, the organization has expanded to become a worldwide association with 145 centers in 105 countries. Its mission is to promote literature and advocate for freedom of expression. 2. Cited in Melech Ravitch, Dos mayse bukh fun mayn lebn, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz Publishing House, 1975) 273. 3. Nathan Cohen, Sefer, sofer vc-'iton: tnerkaz ha-tarbut ha-yehudit be-varshah, 1918-1942 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003) 71; Ravitch, Dos mayse bukh 273. The original petition was republished here, “Memoriyal vegn dem araynemen di yidishe shriftshteler in dem alveltlekhn pen farband,” Varshever shriftn (1926) 1-16 [each item in the journal is separately paginated, and the “Memoriyal" is the last item].

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Diasporic Modernisms

the Jewish authors’ right to create their own PEN Club in 1927, it refused the request to establish the Jewish PEN Club in Warsaw, where the Polish PEN Club was already located, and placed the Jewish PEN Club in Wilno (then in Poland, now the Lithuanian capital Vilnius) with secondary branches in New York and Warsaw.4 Although Warsaw was a dynamic center ofYiddish culture, the PEN International associated Poland’s cap­ ital city exclusively with Polish national literature.5 The PEN Club’s vexed response to the Jewish writers’ petition captures the paradox confronted by Hebrew and Yiddish writers in the twentieth century. In an age of hypernationalism, the act of writing in languages that had no fixed national territory constituted both a practical and an aesthetic crisis. Seeking international recognition, Jewish writers needed to articulate their project in national terms, but they had no nation-state to call their own—no territory, no political sovereignty, and no military. Instead, the Warsaw writers employed the language of diaspora to legiti­ mate their membership in the international literary organization. They identified themselves with other “stateless peoples” and explained that although they were spread out across national borders, they represented a single diasporic literary culture.6 PEN Club petitioners neither articu­ lated a desire for their own national territory nor did they identify them­ selves as national minorities (Jewish-Russian or Jewish-Polish). They were careful to distinguish themselves from writers of “the Jewish race (rase) who wrote in English, French, and German and were thus part of already crystallized national literatures.”7 Instead, these Jewish writers embraced a literary culture defined by language rather than national bor­ ders, discovering in diaspora a nonterritorial paradigm of identification and legitimization-a paradigm that resisted the homogenizing force of the nation-state. As Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin have argued, the power of diaspora is its challenge to nation-statism, that “global and universal logic” that “seeks to fix ethnically (genealogically and culturally) homog­ enous human groups within non-overlapping, neatly bounded, and per­ manent geographical boundaries.”8 Their decision to embrace a diasporic rather than minority identity is emblematic of a much broader transfor­ mation taking place in the twentieth century, whereby diaspora, as James

4. Cohen, Sefer, sofer ve-iton 71. 5. In 1928 Scottish writers, citing the precedent of the Jewish PEN Club, petitioned to have their own club separate from the British PEN. Their request was turned down. Cohen, Sefer, sofer ve-'iton 72. 6. "Memoriyaf 4. 7. "Memoriyal" 3. 8. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora (iMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

INTRODUCTION

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Clifford contends, has replaced other minority discourses by emphasizing attachments that transcend one’s citizenship or immigration status.9 The encounter between the Warsaw writers and the PEN International is but one example of how Jewish writers mobilized a diasporic identity, in this case to gain international recognition for their literary culture. The establishment of the Jewish PEN Club in Wilno represented a vic­ tory for Hebrew and Yiddish writers, mapping them onto the international literary field. However, the multilingual diasporic Jewish PEN Club was short-lived. Although the members of the Warsaw writers’ union (who wrote almost exclusively in Yiddish) envisioned themselves as part of a larger diasporic literary culture, Hebrew writers residing in Mandatory Palestine rejected this vision of a bilingual Jewish literature. According to Melech Ravitch, the secretary of the Yiddish Writers’ Union in 1926 and a prominent Yiddish poet and critic, these Hebrew writers angrily demanded: “Who gave you Yiddishists the authority to represent modern literature in Hebrew?”1011 In 1929, Hebrew writers established an independ­ ent Hebrew PEN chapter in Palestine. In response, the Jewish PEN Club in Wilno changed its name to the Yiddish PEN.11 In a matter of two years, the Warsaw Yiddish writers’ vision of a multilingual diasporic Jewish lit­ erature gave way to two separate, monolingual Jewish literary PEN Clubs. The divorce between the two clubs demonstrates how the pressures of territorial nationalism cast a long shadow over Jewish-language literary culture, fracturing the relationships between Hebrew and Yiddish writ­ ers. During this time, although writers and critics, most famously the critic Bal Makhshoves, believed in a bilingual Jewish literary culture, Hebrew and Yiddish literary cultures were increasingly polarized by nationalist politics.12 The Yiddish writers who petitioned for ajewish PEN Club could not have been surprised by the outraged response from their Hebrew contemporaries in Palestine. Efforts to foster a renaissance of Yiddish culture in the early twentieth century and the public declara­ tion of Yiddish as a Jewish national language at the 1908 Czernowitz Conference produced tensions between writers who affiliated with one or

9. James Clifford, “Diasporas," Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) 255-261. Diaspora has become a key term for both African and Asian studies. See Brent Hayes Edwards,"The Uses of Diaspora," Social Text 19.1 (2001) 45-73; Kim Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 10.2 (2001) 189-219; Rhacel S. Parrenas and Lok C. D. Siu, eds., Asian Diasporas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 10. Ravitch, Dos tnayse bukh 273. 11. Cohen, Sefcr, sofer ve-'iton 73. 12. Bal Makhshoves was the pseudonym of Isidor (Yisroel) Eliashev. He expressed his views on the topic in his 1918 essay, “Tsvey shprakhn—eyneyntsike literatur” (“Two Languages— Only One Literature”), Geklibene verk (New York: Tsiko bikher, 1953) 112-123.

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Diasporic Modernisms

the other language camp.13 Hebrew writers responded with their own Conference of Hebrew Language and Culture that took place in Vienna in 1913.14 These Hebrew writers identified with Zionism and believed that Hebrew represented the national interests of a new Jewish nation-state, while ardent Yiddishists argued that Yiddish was the authentic language of the Jewish folk and the Jewish working class.15 Zionists like Yosef Klausner held that the "diasporic” (i.e., Yiddish) elements ofjewish culture must be eliminated in order to “normalize” the Jewish nation: Jews required a sin­ gle unified territory and a single national language.16 Soviet Yiddishists, such as Moshe Litvakov, argued for the importance of building a national Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union.17 In contrast to Jewish writers who embraced territorial nationalism, the founders of the Jewish PEN embraced a nonterritorial, diasporic view ofjewish literature, and believed, at least for a time, that Jewish-language culture could flourish independently of any sovereign political territory. These writers privileged their minority Jewish languages over and above the languages of the metropolitan center. Through their diasporic identification with Hebrew and Yiddish, they staked out a minority liter­ ary culture that served as a barrier to other hegemonic European literary cultures, although they were indebted to and saw themselves as engag­ ing with these literary cultures. However, there are some important limitations to their literary historical model. They did not to acknowledge

13. Kenneth Moss examines how these linguistic tensions were reflected in the responses to the first “high-culture" Yiddish literary journal, Di literarishe monatsshrifien, in "Jewish Culture between Renaissance and Decadence: Di Literarishe Monatsshrifien and Its Critical Reception/’ Jewish Social Studies 8.1 (2001) 159-164. 14. For a discussion of the polemics that unfolded during the conference, see Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010) 120-122. Also see Kenneth Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cam­ bridge: Harvard University Press, 2009) 106,132-133. 15. Despite their differences, these political camps shared much in common. Barry Trachtenberg explains, "regardless of their political affiliation [Yiddishists and other Jewish na­ tionalists, including Zionists], nearly all believed that their present situation was untenable, that the historical experience of theJews was a unique one, that the nation was the highest ideal, that the agents of change would be an alliance of the Jewish intelligentsia and proletariat, and that this involved settling long-standing questions of language." See Trachtenberg, The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish 1903-1917 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008) 14-15. 16. Although Hebrew writers explicitly spoke out against Yiddish, many of them continued to implicitly engage with Yiddish culture. Naomi Brenner demonstrates, for example, that despite Avraham Shlonsky s vehement anti-Yiddish polemics in the late 1920s, his poetry drew "upon elements of the very Yiddish language and culture that he rejects." See Brenner, "A Mul­ tilingual Modernist: Avraham Shlonsky between Hebrew and Yiddish,” Comparative Literature 61.4(2009) 368. 17. David Shneer offers a detailed examination of the creation of Soviet Yiddish culture in Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture 1918-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

INTRODUCTION

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Jewish writers’ vibrant multilingualism; many Hebrew and Yiddish writ­ ers also wrote works in non-Jewish languages, such as German and Rus­ sian.18 Similarly, they did not include the other languages of the Jewish diaspora in their petition, including Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. Restrict­ ing the parameters of their diaspora to Ashkenazi Jewry, they viewed Hebrew and Yiddish as the languages that marked the boundaries of their diasporic culture. Nevertheless, their dream of a diasporic Jewish PEN club emblematizes the aspirations and challenges that Hebrew and Yiddish modernist writers faced in the twentieth century. I take this historical anecdote as a starting point for my book because it encapsulates both the historical challenges thatjewish writers confronted in the twentieth century and their diasporic and aesthetic responses to these challenges. By focusing my study on the dynamics of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, I examine how Jewish-language writers produced a culturally and linguistically specific modernist aesthetic that addressed the predicament of writing in literary languages that lacked fixed national borders and well-established cultural institutions. I argue that it is pre­ cisely this historical linguistic situation that gave rise to their modernist aesthetic. The book focuses on the formal or stylistic strategies that Jewish writers employed—particularly their use of metaliterary frame devices (to which I return shortly)—to capture the aesthetic and personal stakes of diasporic writing. My privileging of Hebrew and Yiddish as part of a shared history offers a critical purchase on the relationship between these two languages to challenge the nationalist narratives that have divided them in the twenti­ eth and twenty-first centuries. I use the adjective “shared” to describe Hebrew and Yiddish literary history in order to capture how Hebrew and Yiddish were enmeshed with each other, but not necessarily equivalent. There were Hebrew writers who spoke no Yiddish, and Yiddish writers who turned their back on Hebrew. Yet Hebrew and Yiddish addressed an overlapping community of readers who moved to new centers and periph­ eries, and affiliated with one or both languages across an ever-evolving map of twentieth-century Jewish culture. Diasporic Modernisms inve­ stigates Hebrew and Yiddish writing that thematizes the nonterritorial relationship between Jewish-language writers and their audiences. This relationship, I argue, amplified the writers’ engagement with modernist forms and trends. 18. For example, the Hebrew and Yiddish writer and critic M. Y. Berdichevsky also wrote significant works in German. S. Y. An-ski, the Jewish journalist, ethnographer, and playwright wrote a substantial body of work in both Russian and Yiddish, and played an important role in both languages. These are just two of many examples of multilingual Jewish writers who worked in both Jewish and non-Jewish languages and cultures.

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Diasporic Modernisms

From the early to mid-nineteenth century, Jewish writers began shaping both Hebrew and Yiddish to the contours of modern European genres, such as the modern novel. In order to write realist fiction, they had to radi­ cally transform these Jewish languages. Traditionally, Hebrew and Yiddish had served different functions in what Itamar Even-Zohar has termed the “Jewish linguistic polysystem”: Hebrew was the language of prayer and study, the symbolic reserve of men, while Yiddish was the vernacular. Until S. Y Abramovitsh innovated his unique Hebrew prose style, the nusach, which incorporated elements of Yiddish, as well as biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, there were no established stylistic norms for writing Hebrew prose fiction. Hebrew writers had to create these novelistic norms in a language that lacked a spoken idiom. In contrast, Yiddish writers struggled to write in a language that was thought to be unworthy of literature. Until the late nineteenth century, Yiddish was referred to by the derisive term, zhargon (jargon), and Yiddish texts were presumed to address women and unedu­ cated men. Not surprisingly, Jewish writers were reluctant to publicly author works in a language that lacked literary prestige.19 However, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, writers turned to Yiddish as a flexi­ ble instrument for describing everyday life. S. Y. Abramovitsh, for example, began his career as a maskil (adherent of the Jewish enlightenment) writing in Hebrew. Yet he was quickly frustrated by the constraints of the language, and in 1864, he published his first Yiddish novella. He would later develop his Hebrew nusach by translating his novels from Yiddish to Hebrew. Abra­ movitsh, like the Yiddish writers who followed, transformed his vernacular into a literary language that could represent and express the experiences of modernity. The rapid, and at times uneven, development of these languages made them rich fodder for modernist innovation. The reorganization of Jewish languages was part of a much larger upheaval of traditional Jewish practices and social norms. Ina society in which gender relations were regulated by Jewish textual practices, the new orientation of Jewish literary culture addressed and reflected new relationships to gender.20 Jewish writers took up the mantle of both

19. In his memoirs, Dubnow describes historical transformation of Yiddish from a devalued “jargon" to a legitimate language of intellectual discourse. See Simon Dubnow, Fun "zhargon" tsuyidish (Vilna: KJetskin, 1929) 47-48. 20. My approach to the gender politics of Jewish languages and literary cultures has been shaped by several important works of feminist scholarship. These include Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Euro­ pean Jewish Society (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2004); Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

INTRODUCTION

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languages with the hopes of addressing newly sex-integrated communi­ ties of readers. Hebrew writers strove to address Jewish women readers, who would be necessary for the creation of a modern reading community. Conversely, Yiddish writers endeavored to divorce Yiddish from its asso­ ciation with women in order to address a community of male readers. At the same time, these languages became tools for larger national and polit­ ical ideologies. For example, Zionists argued that Yiddish embodied the reviled, effeminate culture of diaspora, and they held that Hebrew was a necessary tool for transforming the weak diasporic Jew into the “new Hebrew man.” In response, Yiddishists sought to masculinize Yiddish culture, to fend off Zionist critiques and to embrace the masculine ethos of social revolution. As the Jewish secular polysystem developed, Hebrew and Yiddish moved beyond their traditional context. As a result, Jewish writers reoriented themselves to the new gendered-linguistic politics of diasporic Jewish culture, and language became shorthand for the gendered politics of Jewish diaspora. These newly evolving linguistic ideologies are refracted in Hebrew and Yiddish modernist works through the literary characters’ interrelated linguistic, sexual, and psychological struggles. The metaliterary and metalinguistic modernist works that I examine all concern the relationship between language, gender, and ethnoracial identity. These new literary genres and linguistic polysystems were also devel­ oping at a time of enormous upheaval and mass migrations. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, approximately two millionjews left the Pale of Settlement and the Polish territories of the Russian empire, fleeing poverty, pogroms, civil war, and revolution. Among them were many of the period’s prominent Hebrew and Yiddish authors. In the late nineteenth century, this was a literature largely rooted in the imagined space of the Jewish shtetl.21 Following the breakdown of both the multi­ lingual and multiethnic Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, Hebrew and Yiddish writers could no longer be certain of a shared territorial con­ text, a clearly defined and locatable audience, or even the future survival of their literary languages. By the first two decades of the twentieth cen­ tury, many Eastern European Jewish authors immigrated to the urban centers of Europe and the Americas, as well as the Jewish settlements of Ottoman and, later, British-controlled Palestine. Writers moved between languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and the various languages of their 21. For a discussion of the literary representation of the shtetl, see Dan Miron, “The Literary Image of the Shtetl,” Vie Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of the Modern Jewish Literary Imag­ ination (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000) 11-48. Also see Mikhail Krutikov s analysis of the shtetl in Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 190S-19I4 (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ versity Press, 2001).

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Diasporic Modernisms

new homes) and identities. For Raymond Williams, such historical and cultural conditions are precisely what gave rise to modernism and its heretical doubts about language’s presumed fidelity to the referential world.22 Williams contends that modernism develops when writers move to the metropolitan center and come to view language more as “a medium that could be shaped and reshaped—than as a social custom.”23 However, for Jewish writers working in languages that had no fixed territorial home, these particularly modernist concerns about language were amplified by the tenuous relationship between a nascent literary culture and its dis­ placed community of readers.

MODERNIST FRAMES

Diasporic Modernisms investigates how Hebrew and Yiddish writers cap­ ture the uneven relationships between their diasporic literary languages through strategies of translation, fragmentation, and narrative break­ down. As a response to the historical dynamics of Jewish culture’s dia­ sporic multilingualism and in concert with the development of European literary modernisms, the writers I examine developed self-conscious, modernist metaliterary framing devices that responded to the sociohistorical conditions of Jewish languages, to the dispersal ofJewish audiences, and to a range of modernist movements. These stylistic strategies, in­ cluding fictional prologues, multiple narrators, and embedded stories, enabled Jewish authors to wrestle with and represent competing linguis­ tic, territorial, and political affiliations. In these framed texts, the authors central to this project portray Jewish writers as travelers, refugees, and immigrants struggling to make their literary endeavors legible and perti­ nent to an implied audience that comprised Jewish immigrants transnationally dispersed. Bakhtin has argued that all linguistic utterances are shaped by centripetal and centrifugal forces, and he correlates the “cul­ tural, national and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world” with the centripetal forces of unitary languages.24 Diasporic modernism and its formalist strategies at once situated writers and addressed audi­ ences caught in the centripetal (territorial nationalist) and centrifugal (diasporic) forces of Eastern European Jewish literary culture, while 22. Raymond Williams, “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism,” Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art (New York: St. Martins Press, 1985) 13-24. 23. Williams, “The Metropolis and Modernism" 22. 24. “Discourse in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 272-273.

INTRODUCTION

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bringing the techniques of modernist storytelling into Hebrew and Yid­ dish literary culture. Through an examination of framing devices, I theo­ rize the relationship between particular Jewish modernist practices and the social conditions ofJewish readers and writers. The literary frame devices that I examine both represent and imag­ ine alternative forms of literary community to overcome the social con­ ditions ofjewish-language writing. These formal elements replicate the challenges faced by diasporic communities of writers and by reading audiences divided by political borders. Furthermore, they illuminate the fractured social contexts of Jewish literary culture. In his study of metaliterary nineteenth-century short fiction, Ross Chambers explores how literary texts attempt to replicate or replace the intimate encounter between the traditional storyteller and his audience by sup­ plying “through textual means, a contextual situation that gives force and point to its storytelling.”25 Building on Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the decline of storytelling and the rise of the novel, Chambers contends that literary texts overcome the distance between the author and reader through narrative “acts of seduction” that occur at moments of textual self-reflexivity. Chamber’s insightful examination of French and English fiction helps illuminate the very different narrative contexts of twentieth­ century Hebrew and Yiddish fiction. However in contrast to the works by Poe or Flaubert that he examines, for example, twentieth-century Hebrew and Yiddish writers addressed a community of Jewish readers, not through acts of narrative seduction, but rather through an appeal to shared linguistic and cultural identity, an appeal underscored by the sex­ ual anxieties and psychological breakdown of the implied authors and their protagonists. In the diasporic texts I examine, the writers attempt to bridge the divide between author and reader, while self-consciously acknowledging the impossibility of such acts of narrative recuperation under the conditions of diaspora. One of the central features of the modernist literary works that I exam­ ine is their self-conscious address to a diasporic literary audience. Hebrew and Yiddish writers portray their own experiences of alienation in rela­ tionship to their Jewish audiences. Jonathan Culler, in his astute recon­ sideration of Benedict Anderson, contends that the role played by novels in the development of nationalist sentiments is “the novelistic address which creates a community of those who pick up the book and accept the

25. Chambers focuses on canonical work by Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, Edward Allan Poe, Honord de Balzac, and Gdrard de Nerval. See Chambers, Story and Situa­ tion: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 4.

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readerly role that it offers.”26 Culler’s attention to the power of readerly address offers a profound insight into how the formal elements of a liter­ ary text negotiate the force of nationalism. However, as Culler notes, nov­ els often address multiple readers, readers with drastically different and opposing positions in relation to the nation. Ihe literary works that I examine attempt to self-consciously stage these various non-national rela­ tions by drawing attention to the audiences that their literary languages address and to the communicative limits of their particular languages. Framing devices are as old as storytelling itself and are prevalent in early novels, such as Don Quixote. In the nineteenth-century Jewish writ­ ers commonly employed frame stories to replicate the techniques of oral storytelling and to advance their novelistic prose. However, what distin­ guishes the modernist frames I examine from earlier examples is the way they question the author’s agency to communicate stories to a diasporic Jewish audience. Not all frames are modernist. As Mary Ann Caws has argued, however, a heightened attention to framing and a move “toward the notion of the frame itself as the principal object of interest, represents the distance from pre-modernism to modernism at its height.”27 Ihe mod­ ernist framing devices I examine draw attention to themselves in order to point to the representational limits of literary narrative. By dramatizing this crisis of representation, they capture the alienation ofJewish writers and readers, depicting the fractured social conditions of diasporic culture that Jewish authors sought to overcome. In contrast to Meisel and his fellow PEN club petitioners, I do not view Hebrew and Yiddish as comprising a single Jewish literary culture; rather, I contend that these literatures were part of a larger diasporic cultural system, characterized by competing and overlapping linguistic norms. Both lan­ guages share an overlapping community of writers and readers, and at least until the 1930s, they both lacked an official territorial home. Twentieth­ century Jewish-language literature emerged from a cultural community fraught with competing conceptions of language, gender, nation, and ter­ ritory. This community shared a common vernacular, Yiddish, and a com­ mon territory, the Jewish regions of the former Russian empire and parts of Poland. However, through the course of a century, dramatic political, territorial, and cultural transformations shattered cultural unity. Jewish writers headed to different urban centers, chose to write in different lan­ guages (Hebrew and Yiddish, Russian, German, and English), and became

26. Jonathan Culler, “Anderson and the Novel,” Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson, eds. Jonathan Culler and Pheng Cheah (New York: Routledge, 2003) 41. 27. Mary Ann Caws, Reading Frames in Modern Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 263.

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affiliated with a range of political viewpoints and modernist tendencies. The founders of the Jewish PEN Club, for example, identified themselves with the modern Jewish renaissance movement, which encompassed a wide range of conflicting ideologies, as evidenced by the strident objec­ tion of Hebrew writers in Palestine. Despite the differences among writ­ ers, literary centers, and languages, this diasporic literary community shared a common set of overlapping aesthetic practices and cultural iden­ tities. These Eastern European Jewish writers operated between Hebrew and Yiddish for a geographically dispersed audience that could read in one or both of these languages, in addition to a wide range of other possi­ ble languages. In their writing, they self-consciously grappled with this diasporic audience, formalistically thematizing their relations to their audiences. Hebrew and Yiddish writers promoted the idea ofjews as a dis­ tinct people with their own history, language, religion, and culture. How­ ever, these writers had contradictory ideas about what this “‘nation’ in the making” would look like.28 Despite the period’s ethos of cultural nationalism, Jewish life was being torn between competing modes of national affiliations, different languages, and different political ideologies. Jewish identity was being reoriented in relationship to a radically trans­ formed Jewish cultural polysystem, which introduced new possibilities of cultural identification, not all of which were national or nation-statist.29 These new modes of identification across languages, political affiliations, gender norms, and geography were absorbed into an emergent modernist and diasporic Jewish literary culture. Diasporic Modernisms traces the historical arc ofjewish-language mod­ ernisms from the last decades of the Russian empire in the 1890s to post­ World War II New York. Each chapter addresses the obstacles faced by 28. Kenneth Moss argues that Hebrew and Yiddish writers who sought to create a modern Jewish literature “were almost by definition cultural nationalists (whether leftist or liberal, au­ tonomists or Zionist) in that they saw their bid for Jewish culture as service to a secular Jewish 'nation* in the making.” However, I argue that it is important to distinguish between national identification and nationalism and to recognize the ways in which Jewish cultural-national identification was multifarious and conflicting. See Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution 4. 29. John Myhill argues that Jews largely defined themselves in relationship to ancestry and religion, even as they were influenced by the territorial and linguistic parameters of European nationalism. See Myhill, Language in Jewish Society: Towards a New Understanding (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2004) 16-17. Benjamin Harshav theorizes the systemic reorganization of Eastern European Jewish culture through the construct of the new "Secularjewish Polysystem.” According to Harshav, when the legal and religious institutions that defined Jewish life broke down in Eastern Europe, a new set of secular institutions arose to take their place. “In sum, the definition ofJewishness in the Religious Polysystem was legal and essentialist: a Jew was defined by being a Jew and was included in the whole network; whereas in the new, Secular Jewish Polysystem it is voluntary and aspectual." See Language in a Time of Revolution (Stanford: Stan­ ford University Press, 1993) 35.

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Jewish-language modernist writers in the new centers of Jewish cul­ ture and the formal strategies they devised to address these chal­ lenges. Although I have chosen to focus on a handful of literary centers, each center foregrounds a different aspect of the larger forces of diasporic culture. My approach to the multiple centers of Jewish modernism is in dialogue with Shachar Pinsker’s recent book on European Hebrew mod­ ernism, Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe. However, in constrast to Literary Passports, my project focuses on the relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish modernism, looking at the formal devices that Jewish writers employed to grapple with their diasporic cultures. This study does not aim to be an exhaustive account of Jewish literary centers. Instead, each chapter illuminates a particular for­ mal and historical aspect ofJewish diasporic literary culture. S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Kadia Molodowsky, and Gabriel Preil—the writers I examine in the following pages—all grew up in the Yiddish-speaking milieu of the Russian empire and immigrated to new centers of modern Jewish culture, including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Whatever their explicit ideological investments, these writers grappled with the practical and aes­ thetic struggles of writing in literary languages that lacked territorial, political, and cultural stability—struggles that gave rise to their diasporic modernist aesthetic.

DIASPORIC MODERNISM I pair these two concepts—diaspora and modernism—to formulate a new approach to the literary history of modernism and the study of diasporic cultural production. My diasporic approach to modernism underlines how communities of writers and readers relate to each other and to their shared languages, instead of focusing on an individual author’s experi­ ences of modernity, including exile, displacement, and homelessness.30 My approach to such literary historical formations is informed by scholar­ ship both on Jewish and non-Jewish diasporic formations. For example, in his work on Chicano culture, Jose David Saldivar poses a compelling ques­ tion: “Is it possible to imagine new cultural affiliations and negotiations in 30. Modernist studies has turned to diaspora in recent years as a key term. For example, Nico Israel examines the relationship between exile and diaspora in Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Brent Hayes Edwards argues for the theoretical significance of diaspora to Black transnational culture and the Harlem Re­ naissance in The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internation­ alism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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American studies more dialogically, in terms of multifaceted migrations across borders?”31 Saldivar radically rethinks American cultural studies by examining shifting borders and migration as an integral part of American culture. Moreover, scholars of Middle Eastern Jewish culture have sought to break the divide between Jewish and Arab cultures in the region by the­ orizing the space of the Levant as a site of entwined history of Jews and Arabs.32 These new geographic paradigms effectively produce counterhis­ tories to the prevailing nationalist myths of literary production. I view both of these approaches as informed by a diasporic methodology, which examines writers in relationship to their diasporic audiences. A diasporic approach to literary history captures the mobility of twentieth-century literary culture through specific and locally grounded networks of literary production and reception. Diaspora offers new ave­ nues for theorizing the vexed relationship between modernism and national literary history, illuminating how modernist literary networks operated outside national borders in minor and non-national languages, by which I mean languages that do not fit within the borders of a nation­ state. Furthermore, the term encompasses the diasporic cultural con­ ditions of reading audiences. A diasporic approach to modernism asks that we ground our discussion of an “international” or “global” mod­ ernism in multiple cultural contexts and illuminates how some of mod­ ernism’s most abstract concepts, such as exile and homelessness, read differently for literary communities that encounter these historical cir­ cumstances of exile and displacement en masse. At the same time, a modernist approach to diaspora studies challenges the reigning assump­ tions about how diaspora works, particularly how the term has been applied to Jews. Although the field of diaspora studies has flourished in the academy in recent years, the Jewish diaspora has been largely absent from these theo­ retical discussions, with the exception of scholars investigating the history of the African diaspora.33 Arguably scholars like William Safran, Khachig

Josd 31. David Saldivar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 1. 32. See Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Gil Hochberg, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 33. Brent Hayes Edwards traces the genealogy of the term “African Diaspora” to the work of George Shepperson and Joseph Harris, and examines their engagement with Jewish discourses of diaspora. Significantly, Edwards notes, "in appropriating a term so closely associated with Jewish thought, we are forced to think not in terms of some closed or autonomous system of African dispersal but explicitly in terms of a complex past of forced migrations and racialization.” Edwards, "The Uses of Diaspora,” 49-52, 64. Paul Gilroy turns to the shared resonances of the African and Jewish diasporas, noting that “diaspora can itself provide an underutilized

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Tololyan, and Stuart Hall have sought to expand the scope of diaspora beyond the Jewish frame to a more comparative perspective?4 However, for Hall, Jewish diaspora represents a reversion to nationalism that schol­ ars must work against. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin have warned against the dangers of uncoupling diaspora studies from the history of the Jewish diaspora, not because of the centrality of the Jewish diaspora, but because of the “need to refer to, and better understand, Jewish diaspora history with the contemporary diaspora rubric.”* 3536 34 37 Theories of diaspora should not ignore the complexity of modern Jewish diasporic culture and conflate the Zionist rhetoric of return with the diversity ofJewish cultural expression in the twentieth century?6 Zionists sought to nationalize the transnational bonds ofjewish culture, but they did not succeed in negating diasporic Jewish culture. Despite the Zionist insistence on a continuous narrative of Jewish diaspora, Jewish conceptions of exile and diaspora have never been historically fixed, evolving from rabbinic ambivalence toward the centrality of land to modern Zionist insistence on the necessity of a Jewish nation-state?7 Shulamit Volkov has shown how nationalism eroded the transnational bonds ofjewish diaspora, arguing that “by the beginning of the twentieth century, it was evident that Jewish life had not only lost its inner cohesion, but was also in danger of losing its diasporic

device with which to explore the fragmentary relationship between blacks and Jews and the difficult political questions which it plays host: the status of ethnic identity, the power of cultural nationalism, and manner in which carefully preserved social histories of ethnocidal suffering can function to supply ethical and political legitimacy.” Like Edwards, Gilroy finds the parallels between the Black and Jewish experience useful for understanding the political and cultural resonances of African diasporic culture. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) 207. The Boyarins also argue thatJewish diaspora must be viewed within the larger comparative framework of diaspora studies. Powers of Diaspora 1-33. 34. Khachig Tololyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Mo­ ment," Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 5.1 (1996) 3-36; William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return," Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1.1 (1991) 83-99; Stuart Hall "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990) 235. 35. The Boyarins offer numerous troubling examples of such attempts to “transcend” Jewish diaspora. They contend “that just because Jews have gotten so much attention as a diasporic people does not mean, of course, that they have enjoyed greater power or security in the every­ day." See Boyarin and Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora 10. 36. Jon Stratton makes this argument about the reification of Zionist definitions of exile and diaspora in his essay, “(Dis)placing the Jews, Historicizing the Idea of Diaspora,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 6.3 (1997) 301-329. 37. Arnold Eisen examines the history of these changing conceptions of exile. He shows, for example, how European Jewish thinkers, including Spinoza in the seventeenth century, Moses Mendelssohn in the eighteenth century, and Martin Buber in the early twentieth century, were redefininggalut (exile) in secular terms to be "compatible with Emancipation in lands where the Jews resided." See Eisen, Galut: A Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) 64.

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character.”38 At the same time, Volkov insists that not all bonds of Jewish identification can be reduced to the model of European territorial nation­ alism. The dynamism of Eastern European Jewish-language culture sus­ tained a Jewish literary culture that was defined not by territorial nationalism, but by linguistic and cultural identity. In order to rethinkjewish cultural production outside of the teleolog­ ical Zionist narrative of exile and return to the Jewish nation-state, I aim to denaturalize the internallyjewish theological and political discourses of diaspora that include the biblical account of the Israelites’ exile from the Land of Israel and the Zionist political solution to that theological dilemma. I am using the term “diaspora” to refer to the transnational production of Eastern European Hebrew and Yiddish culture. I want to read this diasporic culture outside of the binary of exile and home, by focusing on circuits of cultural production that are not rooted within any notion of a stable home. Of course, an internal Jewish discourse of dias­ pora and exile from Jerusalem operated within these communities. Many Jewish writers grew up in family homes that contained a mizrekh, a sign that oriented the family prayer eastward toward Jerusalem, recalling the centuries-long theological notion of exile from the Land of Israel.39 Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi points to “a specificallyjewish poetics of exile and return” that animated Jewish literary culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4041 However, the larger forces of destruction and displacement in the twentieth century cannot be reduced to a theological embrace of Jewish exile. These diasporic communities of readers and writers were separated by vast distances and opposing ideologies, as well as by class and gender, but at the same time they were united by their shared cultural allegiances. Stuart Hall cogently argues that diasporic experience is defined “not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of‘identity,’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.”*1 Hall insists on using the term diaspora “metaphorically” to disrupt the attachment between diasporic communities and their “original”

38. Shulamit Volkov, "Jewish History: The Nationalism of Transnationalism,” Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, eds. Gunilia Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006) 194. 39.1 thank Hana Wirth-Nesher for this observation. 40. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi offers an important examination of the narrative limits of territorialism and argues that the repudiation of exile “in favor of a reclamation of original space’ also activates, at the deepest level, a mechanism for renouncing the workings of the imagination, the invention of alternative worlds, to replace them with the recovery of what is perceived as the bedrock of the collective self.” See Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) 4. 41. Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 235.

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homes.4243 As Hall illuminates, the binary of home and diaspora leads to an oversimplified understanding of diaspora as a reversible condition, which does not give credence to the complexity of that cultural experi­ ence and its local conditions. For example, when the Hebrew writer Yosef Chaim Brenner emigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1909, his rela­ tionship to both this mythic Jewish home and to his Russian birthplace were fraught with ambivalence. Yet when Hall conflates Jewish diasporic thinking with “the old, the imperializing, the homogenizing form of ‘ethnicity’” that he associates with Zionism and Jewish diaspora, he denies the experience ofJewish diaspora its rich hybridity. Just as Jewish literary culture can offer insight into diaspora studies, so too can diaspora studies enrich modernism. Scholars of modernism have long argued that the formal innovations of modernism can be linked to larger historical dynamics, including immigration and exile. For Mal­ colm Bradbury and Jim McFarlane, modernism is “more than an aes­ thetic event” that “turns on the assumption that the registering of modern consciousness or experience was not a problem in representation, but a profound cultural and aesthetic crux... a problem in the making of struc­ tures, the employment of language, the uniting of form, finally in the social meaning of the artist himself.”13 Raymond Williams views the essential connection between modernism and the “specific conditions and relationships of the twentieth-century metropolis.” For Williams, as immigrants experienced the polyphonic metropolitan centers of Europe, they came to view language as arbitrary and conventional, and this new relationship to language led to the formal innovations of modern­ ism.44 However, these scholarly insights about the connections between historical change and modernist innovation have focused primarily on readings of Western European and Anglo-American modernist writers, and have ignored the relationship between writers and their culturally specific audiences.45

42. Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 223. 43. "Introduction,” Modernism: 1890-1930, eds. Malcolm Bradbury and Jim McFarlane (London: Penguin, 1976) 28-29. 44. Williams, “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism” 13. In addition, building on Williams s work, Perry Anderson understands modernism “as a cultural field of force triangulated by three decisive coordinates.” These coordinates include a “highly formalized academicism in the visual and other arts,” the emergence of “key technologies" of the industrial revolution, and the "imaginative proximity of social revolution.” See Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” NLR 1.144(1986) 104. 45. Recent collections, such as Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska's edited two-volume collection, Modernism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007), continue to challenge this paradigm.

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In the past decade, what Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz have termed “the New Modernist Studies” has expanded the field of modern­ ism beyond the metropolitan centers ofWestern Europe and individualis­ tic accounts of modernist exile to incorporate the insights of postcolonial theory and to look at “the interrelations of cultural, political, and eco­ nomic transactions.”46 This “transnational turn” in modernist studies has sought to unhinge modernism from the national by paying attention to cosmopolitan rather than nationalist attachments to literary commu­ nity.47 However, diaspora has not been the focus of these transnational approaches. Susan Stanford Friedman, in a recent article on transnational modernisms, introduces the concept of “paratactic comparativism” as a strategy for transnational reading that would look not at a writer in isola­ tion, but rather at a “conjuncture of writers” in order to make visible “the multiplicity of identities, traditions, and locales that once set in relation to each other can produce insights otherwise not visible.”48 Friedman’s emphasis on examining networks of writers across geographic locales resonates with my own view of diasporic literary history. Where we might diverge is the cultural logic that underlies such comparativisms. Fried­ man is drawn to the structure of colonial call and response, reading Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, a widely translated Sudanese novel that rewrites Conrad’s colo­ nial narrative.49 According to Friedman, Salih’s modernism is only visible

46. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies," PMLA 123.3 (2008) 739. 47. For interesting examples of work that separates canonical modernist works from nation­ alist contexts, see Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (New York; Columbia University Press, 2006); Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopoli­ tanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). ShuMei Shih stands the temporal and geographic hegemony of European modernism on its head, arguing "that Chinese Modernism both challenges the constructed history of modernism as primarily a Euro-American event, and destabilizes Western modernisms claims to ontological primacy and aesthetic uniqueness.” See The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolo­ nial China, 1917-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) 4. For approaches that seek to historicize and recontextualize the international reach of modernism, see Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 1992); Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, eds. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 2005). 48. Susan Stanford Friedman, "Cultural Parataxis and Transnational Landscapes of Reading: Toward a Locational Modernist Studies,” Modernism, vol. 1, eds. Astradur Eysteinsson and Viv­ ian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007) 37. 49. Friedman’s attempts to decenter Europe are undercut by her focus on Conrad as the key figure around which the turn to Salih occurs. Salih’s novel, as well as Conrad’s, might look quite different, for example, if we looked at them in the contexts of Middle Eastern or African Literature.

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through his direct response to Conrad. In her book, The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova describes the transnational circuits of world lit­ erary space differently, according to the temporal and geographic divides between the purported world literary center, Paris, and its many depend­ ent peripheries. Significantly, the world canon looks remarkably modern­ ist when seen through Casanova’s eyes, as she moves between Kafka, Beckett, Ibsen, and Joyce. Casanova’s transnational model of modernism relies less on the paratactic than on economic and sociological networks (indebted as she is to Bourdieu’s notion of the literary field), thus high­ lighting the shared relationship of peripheral writers to the centers of world literary value. However, like Friedman, Casanova’s objects of study are restricted to the translated canon. From this vantage point, those liter­ ary cultures whose networks are not wholly national, translated, or routed through Paris are largely invisible, including both Hebrew and Yiddish.50 Building on the work of Friedman, Casanova, and other scholars who argue for a transnational approach to modernist studies, Diasporic Mod­ ernisms examines the transnational circulation of modernist literature from a diasporic perspective. Rather than look at circuits of exchange between center and periphery, or within the circulation of imperial lan­ guages, I scrutinize the diasporic relationship between a mobile commu­ nity of writers and their equally mobile audiences, and the ways that this relationship is registered in the practices of this modernist prose fiction.

JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY

Contemporary scholars of Jewish literary history continue to struggle with the same concerns that Jewish writers grappled with in the late nine­ teenth and early twentieth centuries: how to situate Jewish-language lit­ erary culture in relationship to the purported “normative” model of national literatures. In her account of modern Jewish literature, Ruth Wisse argues that there exists a national canon of multilingual Jewish texts. According to Wisse, “the politically anomalous Jews generated a multilingual literature unlike that of any other modern nation.”51 In her view, Jews did not “make language synonymous with national identity,” and therefore all Jewish writing, by which she means works by Jews about Jews in any language, can be thought of as national.52 However, Wisse 50. For example, for Casanova, Yiddish only exists insofar as it relates to Kafka. See Casa­ nova, The World Republic of Literature, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) 269. 51. Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon (New York: Free Press, 2000) 7. 52. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon 7.

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offers no formal definition of this national canon, and the Jewish authors she examines did not necessarily consider themselves part of any national Jewish canon. Contrary to Wisse’s claims, Dan Miron, in his recent work on Jewish literature, Harpaya le-tsorekh negi'a, forthrightly rejects the idea of a unified modern Jewish literary tradition or culture.53 He contends “that any attempt to speak about a comprehensive, shared modern Jewish canon only proves the non-existence of such a canon.”54 Instead, he explains that “what was created and developed in the modern period is not Jewish literature, but a Jewish literary complex that is fluid with hazy borders.”55 Miron and Wisse both seek to embrace some notion ofjewish difference to help explain whyjewish literary culture cannot be easily ar­ ticulated by standard national paradigms of literary history. Whereas Wisse views the Jews as exceptional, Miron suggests that their difference made them paradigmatic of modern literary culture. But rather than view Jewish literary culture as national or as a loose complex of affiliated texts, I propose that we study these modern litera­ tures as part of a historically situated diasporic literary culture, care­ fully examining the diasporic networks of literary production in order to grasp the particularity ofjewish literary culture. My approach to Jewish language prose modernism owes a great deal to Chana Kronfeld’s groundbreaking study of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist poetry, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics, which introduced a paradigm for studying Hebrew and Yiddish modernist poetry comparatively and in relationship to the larger trends of Euro­ pean modernisms.56 Modern Hebrew and Yiddish literary histories have been defined by nationalist narratives that divided these literary cultures along a flawed geographic and geopolitical logic. The underlying assumption is that writers were drawn to different literary poles: Hebrew writers to Manda­ tory Palestine and Yiddish writers to Europe or the Americas. According to this narrative, modern Hebrew literary history culminated with the transfer of Hebrew culture to Palestine in the 1930s. Post-1948 literary

53. Miron reworked and expanded his argument in an English book entitled Front Conti­ nuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). This book offers a modified approach to the problem ofjewish literary thinking by focusing on continuity vs. contiguity. The title of the original Hebrew publication, Harpaya le-tsorekh negia, posits the idea of a slackening that necessitates contact. 54. Dan Miron, Harpaya le-tsorekh negia (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2005) 150. He offers a more direct critique of Wisse’s book in From Continuity to Contiguity 305, 360-361. 55. Harpaya 155. 56. Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins ofModernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 81-113.

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historians enlisted modern Hebrew literature, from the late nineteenth century (and in some cases from the Haskald), in a larger narrative of Israeli state building that erased the connections between Hebrew and Yiddish culture and Jewish life outside the land of Israel. The Zionist account of Hebrew modernism focuses largely on modernist Hebrew poetry that flourished in the Yishuv (the Hebrew term for the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine) in order to place modernism’s “begin­ nings chronologically in the 1920s and 1930s, and territorially with the shift of the literary center from eastern and central Europe to Pales­ tine.”57 At the same time, the development of Hebrew literature on European soil was rewritten as a story of decline. For example, Zohar Shavit argues that the Hebrew center in Berlin was assured of its death long before the arrival of such important literary figures as Chaim Nach­ man Bialik.58 In making this claim, she ignores the city’s significance as a new center of both Hebrew and Yiddish literature during the period and discounts how different Jewish writers related to the city.59 The encounter with both Weimar culture and Yiddish literature nourished Hebrew modernist writers in Berlin.60 Even as this national model of Hebrew literary history has been dis­ rupted, there remains strong resistance, particularly in the Hebrew schol­ arly community, to looking at Hebrew and Yiddish modernism outside of this national and territorial paradigm. Thus, Hebrew critics have argued that Hebrew and Yiddish modernism emerged as a result of the separation between these two languages. According to Itamar Even-Zohar, the scholar who originated polysystem theory, the development of a literary modernism in both languages led to “a total divorce between Hebrew and

57. Kronfeld, On the Margins ofModernism 59. 58. Zohar Shavit, “Aliyatam ve-nefilatam shel ha-merkazim ha-sifrutiyim be-eyropa u-va-amerika ve-hakamat ha-merkaz be-eretz yisra’el," lyunim bi-tkumat yisra’el 4 (1994) 422-477; Zohar Shavit, “On the Hebrew Cultural Center in Berlin in the Twenties: Hebrew Culture in Europe—the Last Attempt," Gutenberg Jahrbuch 68 (1993) 371-380. Tudor Parfitt and Glenda Abramson make a similar claim in their account of the rise and fall of Hebrew literature in Europe in their edited volume The Great Transition: The Recovery of the Lost Centers of Hebrew Literature (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowan & Allenheld, 1985). Shachar Pinsker also challenges this narrative in Literary Passports. 59. There has been a renewed interest in Berlin as a center of Hebrew and Yiddish mod­ ernism. See Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture, eds. Mikhail Krutikov and Gennady Estraikh (Oxford: Legenda, 2010). 60. Shachar Pinsker’s argues that Hebrew modernism was not a belated response to Euro­ pean modernism, but rather “contemporary with—even anticipatory of—literary trends that appeared in this period in the major European languages." Although Pinsker focuses on the European literary influences, Hebrew modernism was also heavily influenced by Yiddish mod­ ernist innovation. See Pinsker, Literary Passports 20-21.

INTRODUCTION

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Yiddish.”61 Dan Miron argues that modernism marks a defining moment of separation between both Hebrew and Yiddish literature, setting them free “each to follow its own trajectory.”62 For both critics, World War I marks the moment when two separate literary cultures emerge: one national (Hebrew) and the other diasporic (Yiddish). However, as I will show, Hebrew and Yiddish modernisms were deeply concerned with the persistent ties between their two diasporic literary cultures. Surely, the mass immigration ofJewish writers from the Pale of Settlement ruptured Jewish literary cul­ ture, but that rupture produced new diasporic literary relationships. Rather than viewing modernism as a decisive end to a multilingual Hebrew and Yiddish culture, Diasporic Modernisms examines how the multilingual ethos of that culture propelled its modernist develop­ ments. Jewish writers created this diasporic modernist aesthetic in the larger contexts of Eastern and Western European, as well as AngloAmerican, modernist movements. Jewish writers were keenly aware of the modernist literary trends in cities such as Odessa, Berlin, Tel Aviv, or New York. Like other immigrants in the major European and Ameri­ can urban centers, Jewish writers transformed their relationships both to their own languages and to the major languages of the metropolis, and their new relationships to language led to the formal innovations that we recognize today as modernism. We cannot demarcate between Hebrew and Yiddish according to the establishment of the borders of the State of Israel. In the first decades of the twentieth century, many Hebrew writers continued to write in Europe or traveled elsewhere (to New York or South Africa), while various Yiddish writers emigrated to the Yishuv.63 As I show in chapter 3, 1920s Berlin was the center of both Hebrew and Yiddish modernism. As late as the 1960s, as I discuss in chapter 5, Gabriel Preil, the American Hebrew and Yiddish poet, was enthusiastically received in Israel by, among others, Nathan Zach, who considered Preil to be one of the most important “Israeli” poets of his generation. However, Preil chose to live in New York and continued to write in Yiddish. These are not isolated examples of literary bilingual­ ism and extraterritorial Hebrew and Yiddish modernism; rather, they are signs of a larger Jewish cultural formation, concurrent with the development ofJewish literary modernism.

61. Itamar Even-Zohar, "Aspects of the Hebrew-Yiddish Polysystem: A Case of a Multilin­ gual Polysystem,” Poetics Today 11.1 (1990) 121. 62. Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity 171. 63. Yael Chaver examines the nearly erased history of Yiddish literary culture in pre-state Palestine in What Must Be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine (Syracuse: Syra­ cuse University Press, 2004).

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Despite persistent challenges to these national narratives, they remain dominant because underlying assumptions about periodization, genre, and geography have been difficult to dislodge. Although there has been serious scholarly study of the relationships between Hebrew and Yiddish modernist poetry, there has been little comparative work on modernist prose.6465 This is because prose fiction is more deeply rooted in the larger narratives ofJewish nation building and is assumed to be part of national cultural revival.66 Diasporic Modernisms rejects the restrictive national terminologies of Hebrew literature, such as “revival” and "statehood,” and literary periodization according to the various aliyot (literally “ascents” or waves of immigration to Palestine). As long as nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Hebrew literary history is periodized according to the narrative ofJewish nation-state building, the relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish will remain obscured. The literary works I examine are modernist responses to the changing relations of these literatures to each other, to their shared social contexts, and to their shared investment in modernism. In the twentieth century, Hebrew and Yiddish writers remained very much in dialogue with each other, influencing one another and crossing each other’s paths in the same literary centers, whether Odessa, New York, Berlin, or Tel Aviv. Affiliation with one language was not necessarily the rejection of the other. Even in environments in which language was strongly tied to nationalist identifications—that is, the Yishuv and certain Yiddish circles in Warsaw—there was not only a constant awareness of the other lan­ guages, but also dynamic contact and exchange. While the public rheto­ ric might espouse national monolingualism, the reality on the Jewish street was something quite different. These literary idioms continued to cross-pollinate each other through the pens of writers who emerged from this shared linguistic and cultural polysystem. Diasporic Modernisms focuses on self-reflexive literary works that foreground the storytelling context of Hebrew and Yiddish literature through their narrative form. Chapter 1 examines the late writings of S. Y. Abramovitsh, who is the locus classicus of Hebrew and Yiddish’s shared 64. For comparative approaches to poetry, see Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism; Yael Feldman, Modernism and Cultural Transfer: Gabriel Preil and the Tradition of Jewish Literary Bi­ lingualism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1986); Barbara Mann, “Icons and icono­ clasts: Visual poetics in Hebrew and Yiddish modernism,” Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1997. Jordan Finkin, “Constellating Hebrew and Yiddish Avant-Gardes,” Journal of Modem Jewish Studies 8.1 (2009) 1-23. 65. Hebrew scholars overlooked prose modernism, because they subsumed early twentieth­ century Hebrew under the rubric of Hebrew revival, and viewed it in terms of romanticism or realism. Shachar Pinsker, "'The Challenges of Writing a Literary History of Early Modernist Hebrew Fiction: Gershon Shaked and Beyond,” Hebrew Studies 49 (2008) 295.

INTRODUCTION

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prose history. In his early career, Abramovitsh was thought of as a liminal figure in Hebrew literature situated between the Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) and Ha-tekhiya (Revival) and in Yiddish literature between the Haskala and di klassiker (classic Yiddish writers).66 How­ ever, later in his career he served as an enabling figure who created the conditions of possibility for Hebrew and Yiddish modernism. Yet in nationalist and Zionist periodization, Abramovitsh is often lumped together with Ha-tekhiya (national revival) in total disregard of his for­ mal experimentation and critique of realism. The chapter focuses on his late, auto-translated protomodernist novels, Ba-yamim ha-hem (Of Bygone Days) and Shloyme reb khayims (Shloyme the Son of Khayini). In these novels, Abramovitsh introduces several autobiographical doppel­ gangers to undermine his narratorial authority and call into question the act of storytelling. In the preface, Abramovitsh imagines an encoun­ ter between his traditional Jewish storytelling persona, Mendele the book peddler, and a modern Jewish author, Shlomo. This encounter cap­ tures the alienated and unstable conditions ofJewish literary languages and the fractured relationships between Jewish storytellers and their audiences, as they are divided among competing cultural and linguistic affiliations. Abramovitsh’s novels portray the changing social condi­ tions ofJewish language storytelling in a moment of rapid cultural mod­ ernization, and they do so in protomodernist form, exploding the frame narratives of his earlier writing. Chapter 2 analyzes Yosef Chaim Brenner’s Hebrew novel, Shekhol vekhishalon (Breakdown and Bereavement). In the novel’s fictional preface, the frame narrator, an emigrant on a boat from Port Said to Alexandria, absconds with a fellow emigrant’s Yiddish diaries and transforms them into a third-person Hebrew novel. Brenner’s novel locates the act of story­ telling on a boat traveling away from Palestine, sending the Yiddish source material of his Hebrew novel back to a diasporic European audience. The novel’s formal strategies replicate the relations between Hebrew and Yid­ dish through a fractured narrative that calls into question the very possi­ bility of narrative fiction. Whereas the novel’s frame explores the fraught multilingual conditions of literary production, the embedded narratives dramatize these conditions through the characters’ psychological crises. In Brenner’s novel, the various characters’ struggles with mental illness and suicide figure the larger linguistic and cultural crises of diasporic

66. Di klassiker is the term used to refer to the classic Yiddish writers Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz.

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Diasporic Modernisms

Jewish culture. In this novel, as in the fictional works of Goldberg and Bergelson that I discuss in subsequent chapters, narrative breakdown and psychological breakdown mirror each other. These correlations between emotional despair and narrative break­ down, a common tenet of modernist fiction, are central to Dovid Bergelson’s interwar short fiction. Bergelson served as an important model for both Hebrew and Yiddish modernists of the early twentieth century. From his earliest novels, Arum vokzal (At the Depot) and Nokh alemen (When All Is Said and Done), he experimented with the techniques of European modernist writing to narrate the disorientation and disloca­ tion of Eastern European Jewish life. In chapter 3,1 focus on his prose fiction from the 1920s. In these stories, Bergelson links his characters’ emotional torment, sexual anxiety, and suicidal tendencies to their lin­ guistic and cultural alienation as immigrants. For example, in his short story “Blindkeyt” (“Blindness”), the frame narrator discovers the Rus­ sian diaries of an immigrant woman in the apartment he has rented. These diaries describe the woman’s mental breakdown in terms of her unfulfilled sexual desires and her fractured identity, as both a young girl in the shtetl named Chana and as a russified Jewish immigrant in Berlin named Sonya. “Blindkeyt” portrays both Sonya’s and the frame narra­ tor’s alienation, depicting the personal consequences of operating between languages and cultures in the metropolitan center. Just as in Abramovitsh’s novels Ba-yamim ha-hem and Shloyme reb khayims, the authorial persona in Bergelson’s story is divided into multiple personas. However, in Bergelson’s story the divisions are multifarious across gen­ der and ethnic lines. Bergelson’s modernist style resonates with the mod­ ernist literary experimentation in Weimar Berlin. In his Berlin writing, Bergelson portrays new modes of sexuality and the new spectacles of urban mass culture, representing the dislocation of Yiddish modernism from its Eastern European, Kiev base. Chapter 4 examines Leah Goldberg’s 1946 modernist Hebrew novel Vehu ha-'or (And That Is the Light). Goldberg’s novel portrays the tensions between Jewish and European literary culture through her female protago­ nist, Nora. Although Goldberg wrote the novel after immigrating to Pales­ tine in 1935, she highlights the gender politics ofjewish culture in interwar Europe. She frames the novel with two train rides; Nora’s trip from Berlin to Kovno and her return to Berlin. In the train car, the European-educated Nora grapples with the place of women in both European and Jewish liter­ ary traditions, embodied in the figure of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish mer­ chant and a German-speaking Swedish doctor. The novel grapples with the triangulation of Hebrew, Yiddish, and European modernist cultures and foregrounds the ways that the modernist aesthetics of diaspora signal the

INTRODUCTION

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changing gender system of Jewish culture.67 In the novel; Hebrew is a deterritorialized language for modernist expression; one that must embrace European literary culture. I conclude the book looking at the post-1948 afterlife of diasporic Jew­ ish modernism in New York; focusing on the collaborative efforts of two important modernist poets and critics—Kadia Molodowsky and Gabriel Preil—in Molodowsky s postwar Yiddish literary journal; Svive (Sur­ roundings). I show how the modernist aesthetic that I traced in pre-World War II prose modernism had its afterlife in post-1948 New York literary circles, primarily among poets. In the early twentieth century. New York was a vibrant Jewish literary center, particularly for Yiddish modernism. However, the creation of the state of Israel and the devastation of Euro­ pean Jewish life in the war led to the reorganization of Jewish-language culture. The new Jewish state wielded the centripetal forces of territorial nationalism to centralize Hebrew culture in Israel, while rejecting Yid­ dish as a remnant of diasporic culture. In this period, poetry becomes the medium through which Hebrew and Yiddish poets reflect on the chang­ ing diasporic conditions of their literary culture. Both Kadia Molo­ dowsky and Gabriel Preil confronted this postwar transformation of Jewish-language culture, while taking part in New York Jewish literary life. Although by the 1960s Preil published his Hebrew poetry almost exclusively in Israel, he continued to write and participate in Yiddish and Hebrew culture in New York, where he affiliated not only with Hebrew modernism, but also Anglo-American and Yiddish modernism. Molodowsky, a Yiddish poet who lived and wrote in three of the most important centers of Yiddish culture (Kiev, Warsaw, and New York), was, at the end of her life, best known in Israel for popular Hebrew translations of her childrens poetry. The chapter looks at Preil’s diasporic Hebrew and Yiddish poetics in relationship to Molodowsky’s literary journal Svive. Molodowsky’s journal, like Preil’s poetry, embraced an ideology of diasporic multilingualism that sought to incorporate Israeli culture into a larger, multilingual Jewish literary system, one that would deterritori­ alize Hebrew from the national center and preserve the creative impulses of diasporic multilingualism. Each chapter considers the relationship ofJewish languages to Jewish and transnational modernist innovation from a different perspective.

67. Teresa de Lauretis defines a “gender system" as a “a symbolic system, or systems of mean­ ings, that correlates sex to cultural contents according to social values and hierarchies." See her discussion in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) 5.

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Whereas my discussion of Abramovitsh and Brenner, for example, focuses on these two writers’ changing relationship to Hebrew and Yiddish, my chapters on Bergelson and Goldberg consider the relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish and Western and Central European modernisms. Finally, the last chapter turns to post-World War II poetry, as the belated site of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist engagement. These chapters offer an alternative account ofJewish modernist culture—one that takes tran­ snational and diasporic conditions as its starting point to examine how two nascent literary cultures, developing outside of the boundaries of national territory, formulated a diasporic modernist aesthetic.

CHAPTER 1

The Storyteller in Translation

n his memoirs. Fun "zhargon” tsu yidish (From Jargon to Yiddish), Simon Dubnow, the renowned Jewish historian and theorist of Jew­ ish diaspora nationalism, recalls a series of exchanges with his close friend S. Y. Abramovitsh (1835-1917) regarding the future of Abramovitsh’s Hebrew writing. Abramovitsh and Dubnow were both important figures among a circle of Jewish writers and intellectuals who congre­ gated together in Odessa. By the 1890s, Abramovitsh had established himself as a leading literary figure. Considered to be the grandfather of Yiddish literature and the father of Hebrew literature, he is credited with developing a Hebrew prose style, the nusach, which allowed him to deftly and humorously depict daily life and speech in Hebrew long before the language became a vernacular.1 The two men met often at Abramovitsh’s home to discuss their work and share their intellectual concerns over tea. However, these conversations about the future of Abramovitsh’s Hebrew prose, which Dubnow dates to 1896, stand out in Dubnow’s memory because they encapsulate the dilemma of cultural modernization for Jewish writers and intellectuals in the Russian empire.12 Dubnow recalls warning Abramovitsh that the readership for his Hebrew prose was waning. He explains that Abramovitsh’s new

I

1. For a description of Abramovitsh’s nusach style see Robert Alter, The Invention ofHebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Hebrew Realism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988) 17-41. 2. When discussing modernization, I am referring to what David Feldman has described as “a set of economic, social and political changes in Europe, which are clearly, if unevenly, detectable from the eighteenth century. These include the advances of urban growth and

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Diasporic Modernisms

Hebrew prose style requires a reader familiar with all the traditional Hebrew sources from the Bible to medieval Hebrew poetry, and this, he tells Abramovitsh, can no longer be taken for granted: Many times I posed the question in conversation with my old friend and

said to him that very soon his Hebrew works would need to be printed with

commentaries that translate out-dated expressions, just as the works of Shakespeare and Rabelais are now published, or they will be published with the annotations that accompany the works of Yehuda Ha-Levi and Ibn Ezra. The next generation, which did not study in cheder and is not learned in the Talmud,

will not understand each and every linguistic feat that brings us inspiration.

Mendele [Abramovitsh] did not deny this; and with that, both of us became deeply saddened?

Dubnow acknowledges the speed of linguistic and cultural transforma­ tion that was taking place among Jews in the Russian empire and in Odessa, more specifically, and signals the significance of these abrupt transformations for Jewish literary culture. The rich textual allusions and linguistic innovations of Abramovitsh s Hebrew prose were to become increasingly illegible as readers both schooled in religious texts and open to secular culture dwindled. Once the previous generation left the strictures of traditional Jewish education, the next generation of ed­ ucated urban Jews would no longer have a strong connection to the tra­ ditional Jewish textual world that shaped Abramovitsh’s Hebrew prose style. These changes were sharply felt in Odessa, a city where the edu­ cated bourgeois Jews rapidly assimilated into Russian culture.34 Dubnow portrays both himself and Abramovitsh perched on a historical thresh­ old, caught between two worlds: one represented by the traditional

industrialization, of secularization and plurality within civil society, of more open forms of representative government, and of increasingly centralized and bureaucratic forms of adminis­ trative rule." Feldman, "Was Modernity Good for the Jews?" Modernity, Culture, and "the Jew," ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 171-187. For contemporary historical reconsiderations of Jewish cultural modernization, see Assimila­ tion and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth Century Europe, eds. Jonathan Frankel and Stephen Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, eds. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton Univer­ sity Press, 199S); Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Responses to Modernity (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 3. Dubnow, Fun “zhargon" tsuyidish (Vilna: Kletzkin, 1929) 113-114. 4. In the 1860s, when the Jewish press began to flourish in the city, Odessa’s Jewish intel­ lectual community "consciously modeled itself on the increasing russified gentile intelligentsia of the period." Steven Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986) 71.

THE STORYTELLER IN TRANSLATION

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sphere of Jewish texts and the other by an emerging and relatively unknown modern Jewish readership, one that might more happily turn to Russian or Yiddish, rather than Hebrew. The tenor of the conversation raises a central concern of this book: how the Jewish writers I examine accommodated their newly urbanized, secularized, and acculturated reading audiences. Dubnow published this melancholic account of Hebrew’s decline in a book that describes the vexed status of Yiddish as it struggled for cultural legitimacy.5 The disappearance of Abramovitsh’s Hebrew audience signi­ fied the rise of new Jewish readers who were embracing Yiddish for the first time as a language of cultural merit, and also turning to Russian and other non-Jewish languages. It also pointed to the vulnerability of diasporic Jewish languages that lacked a national-territorial home and were thus subject to the whim of ruling authorities. Between 1896 and 1905 the fortunes of Hebrew and Yiddish print culture underwent dramatic transformations that had an enormous impact on both Jewish authors and reading audiences. According to Dubnow, at the time of this conversation in 1896, Abramovitsh was frustrated with his progress writing the second half of Dos vintshfingerl (The Magic Ring) in Hebrew. Although he had written the first half in Yiddish, he decided to complete the novel in Hebrew because he was unable to find a Yiddish publishing venue.6 The scant publishing opportunities available to Yiddish writers, partly the result of strict censorship of Yiddish publications in tsarist Russia, motivated them to seek Hebrew publishing opportunities, which were on the rise at the end of the nineteenth century.7 Between the 1880s and 1890s readership of Hebrew literature and Hebrew periodicals was growing in the Russian empire. However, by the turn of the century the outlook for Hebrew publishing once again seemed grim.8 Following the

5. In the introduction, Dubnow describes how Yiddish evolved from a shameful language to a powerful “cultural-apparatus.” See Dubnow, Fun “zhargon” tsuyidish 8-9. 6. Dubnow explains that because of the demise of Sholem Aleichem s Folksbibliotek and the new restrictions on Yiddish publishing in Russia, Abramovitsh decided to write the second half of Dos vintshfingerl in Hebrew. Dubnow, Fun "zhargon" tsuyidish 111. 7. For a discussion of Russian censorship and Hebrew and Yiddish publishing history, see Dovid Fishman, ‘"The Politics of Yiddish in Tsarist Russia,” From Ancient Israel to Modern Judaism, ed.Jacob Neusner et al., vol. 4 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) 155-171. 8. In 1896 Ahad Ha-am, with the support of S. Y. Abramovitsh, founded the Warsaw Hebrew literary periodical Ha-shiloach, which became an important vehicle for establishing literary standards in Hebrew. Ha-shiloach soon hit on financial troubles. When subscription numbers dropped precipitously, the journal was temporarily forced to close doors. Steven J. Zipperstcin, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 117. Also see Shavit, “Aliyatam u-nefilatam shel ha-merkazim hasifrutiyim be-eropah uve-amerika ve-hakamat ha-merkaz be-erets-yisrael," lyunim bi-tkumat yisra'el4 (1994) 433.

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Diasporic Modernisms

1905 revolution and the lifting of restrictions for the Yiddish press, Yiddish publishing flourished more than Hebrew, because Yiddish attracted a much broader swath of readers.9 The rise of the Yiddish press in Warsaw undercut the Hebrew press. By 1906 Warsaw had five Yiddish dailies with a combined circulation of 96,000 and three weeklies with a combined circulation of 38,000.10 The Yidishe togblat {Jewish Daily) alone had an average press run of54,200, making it the most popular newspaper anywhere in the partitioned Polish lands. As evidenced both in his conversation with Dubnow and in his later works, Abramovitsh witnessed the decline of Odessan Hebrew culture and understood the fragility of a language that lacked a vernacular. This sense of fragility was heighted, in Odessa, where he was also surrounded by an acculturated Jewish com­ munity that had turned its back on Jewish languages. Abramovitsh’s work from the 1890s onward dramatizes the evolving relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish, as well as the uncertain future of both literary cultures. His protomodernist novels Ba-yamim ha-hem {Of Bygone Days) and Shloyme reb khayims {Shloyme the Son of Khayitn), written and serialized alternately in Hebrew and Yiddish, describe the vertiginous transformations taking place among his Jewish-language reading audiences. Abramovitsh portrays these changes by reflecting on his own relationship to Hebrew and Yiddish. The fictional prologues of both novels contrast the folksy Yiddish of Abramovitsh’s storyteller per­ sona, Mendele the book peddler, with the lofty language of modern Jew­ ish writers. Juxtaposing these two literary registers, Abramovitsh renders the plight of Hebrew and Yiddish writers working in unstable literary lan­ guages for a diasporic audience. He thematizes this fractured literary cul­ ture by layering the novels with authorial doppelgangers, who signal the disrupted social relations of Hebrew and Yiddish culture. In the chapter that follows, I examine the relationship between Abram­ ovitsh’s late works and the changing Jewish linguistic polysystem to show how the formal innovations of these novels respond to the diasporic con­ ditions of Hebrew and Yiddish. In Ba-yamim ha-hem and Shloyme reb khayims, Abramovitsh reflects on his evolving authorial identity, his changing audience, and the transfor­ mation of Hebrew and Yiddish literary culture. Abramovitsh wrote these

9. This reversal of linguistic fortunes explains why Abramovitsh’s collected works appeared first in Yiddish in 1910, after Y. H. Ravnitzky and Bialik failed to secure a Hebrew publisher in 1907. 10. Dubnow, Fun “zhargon” tsu yidish 28; Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: Vie Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) 48-49.

THE STORYTELLER IN TRANSLATION

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novels using a new practice of translation. Rather than writing the text first in Yiddish and then translating it into Hebrew (or vice versa), he moved back and forth between the two languages, writing some chapters first in Yiddish and others first in Hebrew.11 Unlike Abramovitsh’s earlier auto-translations, the Hebrew and Yiddish versions resemble each other closely. Abramovitsh referred to these novels as autobiographical; how­ ever, he disrupts autobiographical conventions by framing the stories with a fictional prologue that disarticulates his authorial identity. In the prologue he fractures the authorial persona that he had carefully culti­ vated in his earlier writing. The fictional prologue entitled “Petichta de-mendele mokher sefarim” (“Mendele the Book Peddler’s Prologue”) was first published in Hebrew in 1894.11 12 This frame orchestrates a complex encounter between Mendele and his long lost friend Shlomo, the modern Hebrew writer. In the petichta, Mendele arrives in Shichor (a fictionalized Odessa) to visit his friend Shlomo. They have not seen each other in the years since Shlomo departed from Kisalon. When Mendele appears on Shlomo’s doorstep, he finds his good friend sitting at a table surrounded by Hebrew writers dis­ cussing the future of Hebrew literature. After introductions are made, a young boy appears at the door looking for shelter and is turned away by an angered Shlomo. The following day, Mendele and the writers return to find Shlomo suffering from a bout of melancholy, upset with his own refusal to recognize and help the young boy, who reminds him of his childhood self. During the course of the conversation, Mendele and the writers impress upon Shlomo the importance of preserving the past and convince him to write his memoirs. The enclosed novels are comprised of Shlomo’s memoirs, written not in the first person, but from a distanced third-person voice. Although Abramovitsh frames these novels in the pro­ logue as memoirs, this third-person point of view disrupts the novel’s autobiographical premise. His novels’ self-conscious narrative style, his exploitation of the frame device, and his metafictional obsession with authorship are elements that anticipate later stylistic trends of modernist Hebrew and Yiddish prose. 11. These novels have a complex publication history. The first Hebrew chapter of Ba-yamim ha-hem originally appeared as “Petichta de-mendele mokher-sfarim,” Pardes 2 (Odessa, 1894) 173-188. The next five chapters were serialized in the Yiddish periodical Deryid in 1899. More Hebrew chapters appeared in 1903, serialized in the Hebrew periodical Ha-zetnan. Later chap­ ters appeared in 1912 in the Yiddish periodical Derfraynt. 12. Here, I will be primarily discussing the Hebrew version of the petichta. The principal deviation, which I discuss later, is that in the Yiddish version the writers sitting at Shlomos table are referred to as "yidishe shraybers,” an ambiguous designation that could mean either Yiddish or Jewish writers, while in the Hebrew version they are referred to as specifically Hebrew writers.

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Diasporic Modernisms

My readings of these novels are sharply at odds with their critical recep­ tion by contemporary and later critics across ideological spectrums. With the exception of Dubnow, critics do not typically read these novels or con­ sider them central to Abramovitsh’s literary corpus. In part, this is because scholars from all camps, whether Soviet or Zionist, have overlooked how Abramovitsh experiments with the frame story and exploits the conven­ tions of autobiography to call into question authorial agency. Instead, those who take up these novels either hail them with a nostalgic reverie for a lost Jewish world preserved in them or dismiss them for their sentimen­ tal romanticization ofjewish life in the shtetl. On the one hand, Dubnow, who considered these novels Abramovitsh’s great masterpieces, wrote that he heard in these works “di eybike melodye funem shtetl (the eternal melody of the shtetl).”13 Dubnow extols Abramovitsh’s attempt to repro­ duce and preserve in narrative form a disappearing social and cultural milieu. Of course, this milieu is an entirely romanticized Jewish land­ scape, bearing little resemblance to the reality ofjewish life in the shtetl. On the other hand, the Soviet critic Meir Viner, who celebrated the biting social criticism of Abramovitsh’s earlier novels, dismissed these later works as social apologies and disregarded their engagement with the his­ torical moment.14 Although the sentimental or nostalgic tone of these late novels has been read as Abramovitsh’s retreat from the ideals of the Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) and social criticism, I argue that these novels’ sentimental relationship to Jewish life in the shtetl signals Abram­ ovitsh’s embrace of a modern narrative style that placed Hebrew and Yid­ dish in a new relationship through his third-person narrative point of view. Distancing himself from his relentless attacks on the backwardness of traditional Jewish life, Abramovitsh impels himself toward the future of a modern Jewish audience seeking a modern Jewish literary language. At the same time, his writing also hints at the greater fear that perhaps this audience will turn away from Jewish languages altogether. Critics internalized Abramovitsh’s own sense of foreboding about the future ofjewish literature, a foreboding that after World War I seemed prophetic. In one of the most well-known lines of Hebrew literary criticism,

13. Dubnow, Fun “zhargon” tsuyidish 9. 14. Meir Viner, Tsu der gcshikhte fun der yidisher literatur in 19tn yor hundert, vol. 2 (New York: Yidisher Kultur Farband, 1945) 74-221. In contrast, I. Yakhinson, a contemporary of Viner, viewed the novels as accurate ethnographic depictions ofjewish life in the 1850s, see Mendeles epokhe (Kiev: Kultur lige, 1927). Furthermore, Yosef Chaim Brenner saw in them an ideal example of Abramovitsh’s realism, crucial to the project of "Jewish self-criticism.” Ironi­ cally, Brenner misquotes a satiric passage from Ba-yamim ha-hem in order to praise Abramovitsh's scientific criticism. See Brenner, “Ha'arachat atzmenu bi-shloshat ha-krakhim,” Ktavim, vol. 4 (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutzha-me’uchad, 1977) 1229-1230.

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David Frishman famously declared that were the entire Jewish world to be destroyed by a mabel (deluge), it would still be preserved in Abramovitshs novels Fishke der krumer (Fishke the Lame), Kitser masoes binyomen hashlishi ('The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third), and Shloyme reb khayims, along with two or three short stories.15 Shmuel Verses points out that the mabel is in fact a prominent motif in the critical reception of Abramovitsh, originat­ ing with Menachem Fey telsons remarks on Di klyatshe (The Mare).16 Verses goes on to cite Dubnow himself, who wrote of Abramovitsh, “He stood us on the threshold of a new historical epoch, which will arrive after the pre­ sent deluge.”17 For these critics, the flood is a metaphor for the upheaval of cultural modernization, the destruction wrought by the tides of moder­ nity. For Dubnow, who was writing in 1917, a year after Abramovitshs death, the apocalyptic imagery was also a response to World War I and the impending collapse of the Russian empire. Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” offers a paradigm for under­ standing the encounter between Dubnow and Abramovitsh, as well as the literary transformations in Abramovitshs work—both his nostalgic turn and his new relationship to Hebrew and Yiddish. In “The Storyteller,” Benjamin figures modernity as the sensation of estrangement or shock that occurs when social transformations accelerate so rapidly, in the course of a single lifetime, that one’s past is perceived as unintelligible in the pre­ sent. He invokes a haunting image that serves as a figure for modernity: For never had experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic ex­

perience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experi­ ence by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation

that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and

beneath those clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.18

Benjamin describes the degradation of experience in the post-World War I period and captures the looming horizon of modernity, which shadows the new landscapes of human experience. Here, Benjamin depicts the moment when the past appears innocent and strange, no

15. David Frishman, “Mendele, zayn lebn un zayn verk,” Kritik iber mendele moykher sforim (Warsaw: Farlag mendele, 1911) 13. 16. Shmuel Verses, “Mendele in shpigl fun der hebreisher literatur-kritik," Di goldene keyt 51 (1965) 189. 17. Dubnow, Fun "zhargon” tsuyidtsh 100. 18. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968) 84.

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longer a part of the new technologies of the present. The horse-drawn streetcar stands in for an idyllic pre-technological era, a lost world, a gen­ tler past. While Benjamin depicts the rapid advancement of transporta­ tion and military technology, his imagery strongly echoes Abramovitsh’s realization that his prose has, in his own lifetime, become archaic and even illegible to a younger generation of readers. Abramovitsh’s linguis­ tic realization is the literary counterpart to the historical experience of modernity that Benjamin portrays. The latter’s image of a generation’s failed comprehension of the postwar reality describes a shift in human perception—a shift that is at the heart not only of Dubnow’s recollec­ tions, but also of Abramovitsh’s late novels. Even though Benjamin and Dubnow are discussing different historical moments, for the former Germany in World War I and for the latter Russia in the 1890s, they are both describing an experience of historical estrangement from the past, a rupture that leads to the production of new literary forms and new lit­ erary landscapes. Abramovitsh’s novels transform the world of the shtetl into a quaint and innocent past in the face of a newly modern and urban Jewish life. However, Abramovitsh frames this lost past with the encoun­ ter between Mendele, his folksy narrator, and Shlomo, a new modern narrative voice. Like many writers of his generation, Benjamin limns the experience of modernity through the language of loss: the loss of tradition, community, and a sense of primal wholeness.19 Though this affective experience of his­ tory has its roots in German romanticism, it should not be mistaken for a purely romantic paradigm. Benjamin proposes a dialectical model for understanding the relationship between the historical forces of moderni­ zation and the feelings of loss and estrangement that accompany mod­ ernization. Although the death of storytelling (and perhaps of Mendele as well) “has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech,” it is also “making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanish­ ing.”20 Benjamin’s preoccupations with disappearing worlds, the divorce of art and ritual, and the loss of the storyteller’s immediate community are all concerns pertinent to the situation of an emerging modern, secular Jewish culture in Europe. There are other striking resonances between Benjamin’s discussion of aesthetic modernization and Abramovitsh’s novels, including their mutual interest in what Benjamin has termed the “aura.” These resonances point our attention to Abramovitsh and

19. For a further discussion of the relationship between modernity and loss, see Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988). 20. Benjamin, “The Storyteller” 87.

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Benjamin’s shared set of concerns about the effects of rapid cultural modernization on literary form.21 The seemingly sentimental turn in Abramovitsh’s writing reflects his engagement with the uncertain future of modern, diasporic Jewish culture. Even before the completion of Ba-yamim ha-hem and Shloyme reb khayims, Abramovitsh’s style had begun to evolve from the biting satire of Kitser masoes binyomen hashlishi and Fishke der krumer to more sympa­ thetic and romantic depictions ofjewish life, for example, in Dos vintshfingerl. In Ba-yamim ha-hem and Shloyme reb khayims, however, Abramovitsh self-consciously addressed the cultural modernization taking place in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and his fear that the newly emerging secular and urban Jewish culture threatened the textual world of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. Abramovitsh’s concerns about modernity are reg­ istered as an obsession with language. He was not falling into the trap of nostalgia, but rather seeking out new forms for modern literary expression in both languages. By framing the novel with the encounter between Shlomo and his old friend Mendele, Abramovitsh draws attention to the experience of historical estrangement that I discussed above. He captures the unsta­ ble conditions ofjewish literary languages and the alienation ofjewish storytellers and their audiences. Shlomo ultimately decides to write his memoirs because his past has become incomprehensible, and this mem­ oir becomes the justification for the formal transformations in Abramo­ vitsh’s writing. These changes include the transition from Mendele as the narrative voice to Shlomo as the narrative voice, as well as the move from first-person narration to the impersonal third-person, from storyteller to modern narrator. Abramovitsh adapts a new literary persona, Shlomo, the modern Jewish writer, who usurps the role played by Mendele, the folksy book peddler and narrator in many of Abramovitsh’s earlier nov­ els. This multilayered text comments both on the social conditions of Jewish intellectual thought in the face of cultural modernization and also on the metaliterary implications of modernization on Abramov­ itsh’s own literary work. Thus we can see the process through which the reorganization of the secular Jewish polysystem produced new modes of literary identification.22

21. For an exploration of Walter Benjamins relationship to Jewish cultural history, see Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Susan Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 22. Benjamin Harshav offers a thorough analysis of this transformation in Language in a Time of Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) 5-35.

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THE BATHHOUSE AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE SHTETL

The pathos of Abramovitsh’s frame story is rooted in the transformation of his narrative persona, Mendele, and Mendele’s strange encounter with Shlomo. A close examination of Mendele’s opening monologue quickly reveals the deep transformations that have taken place in Abramovitsh’s writing. Thematized in these opening pages are the apocalyptic fore­ boding and the deep fear of cultural annihilation that haunts the critical reception of Abramovitsh’s work. Mendele’s monologue is almost a fare­ well speech, a wave good-bye to shtetl life, and perhaps Mendele’s final act. The monologue welcomes the reader onto the seemingly familiar ter­ rain of Abramovitsh’s imaginary Pale of Settlement while unsettling the aesthetic terms of that fictional universe. Mendele delivers this monologue in his characteristically amiable and folksy style, replete with aphorisms about Jewish travel, complaints about his aches and pains, and allusions to biblical and rabbinic texts. If these opening lines at first appear to resemble Mendele’s trademark style, with his familiar tone of sarcastic derision, this is because Abramovitsh exploits the idiom that he developed for Mendele in his previous works. In fact, a good measure of Abramovitsh’s success lay in his relentless use of satire to produce simultaneously comic and derisive effects, mocking the narrow, provincial scale ofjewish small-town life against the epic quality of biblical narrative. However, as this monologue develops, both the scathing critique and the playful tone are strikingly subdued, establishing a very different relationship between Abramovitsh’s rhetorical style and his attitude toward Jewish life in the Pale. If Mendele’s allusive prose in earlier works—Fishke der krumer or Kitsermasoes binyomen hashlishi—was in the service of, in the words ofBrenner, “Jewish self-criticism,” here the biblical and rabbinic allu­ sions serve a different function.23 In addition to a clever comic effect, these allusions do not deflate the pathos of Mendele’s suffering; instead, they elevate that pathos through comparison to divine punishment. After complaining about his crushed limbs and aching back, the result of being crammed into a wagon with his fellowjewish travelers, Mendele recalls the passage in Lamentations 3:17, “Nashiti tova [I have forgotten comfort].” He explains: It should not happen to you, the aches and pains that racked my body when I

arrived at the distant city of Shichor after wanderings and adventures and many

hardships. At that moment every bone in my body felt the aptness of the

23. See Brenner s essay “Ha'arachat atzmenu" 1225-1296.

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interpretation our ancient sages applied to the words of Scripture: “I have for­

gotten comfort.” The comfort was none other than the bathhouse, by which they meant quite literally an actual bathhouse and all its accessories, with its broad benches, long beams on which to hang trousers and stockings and mis­ cellaneous items of men’s clothing, with an expert healer sitting in the corner, a lighted candle before him, shaving and bleeding our fellowjews in the approved

fashion. I could really have used that "comfort” just then, but alas—these com­

forts and the other advantages of which the small towns in our region boast are not to be found in Shichor. This alone makes living in the city difficult and there

is no doubt that the Jews of Kisalon and Kabtsiel can’t stand it here.24

In the passage from Lamentations that Mendele cites, the prophet Jer­ emiah describes the destruction of Jerusalem in terms of his own suf­ fering, that is, as a punishment meted out against him.25 Mendele refers to Rabbi Yeremiah’s rabbinic interpretation of the lost “com­ fort” as the amenities of the Roman bathhouse.26 Mendele coyly adopts this rabbinic argument in an entirely different context, describing the personal and mundane discomforts of the traveler inconvenienced, in this case, by the lack of a proper bathhouse. Unlike Mendele, the rab­ bis were not concerned with the troubles of traveling salesmen but rather with Sabbath observance. However, the comparison pokes fun at the rabbinic interpretation, which appears frivolous when removed from its pious context. Mendele also uses the rabbinic allusion to jab at the shtetl, comically conflating the rabbinic reference to the institu­ tion of the Roman bathhouse with the more primitive shtetl bath­ house, containing wooden benches, coat pegs, and healers who perform bleedings under unsanitary conditions. The poverty and backward­ ness of the shtetl bathhouse are magnified when juxtaposed with its grander Roman counterpart. Nowhere does Mendele acknowledge the modern amenities of the city. Yet there is sincerity to Mendele’s plaintive tone in pining for the bathhouse that undercuts the satire of the passage.

24. S. Y. Abramovitsh, Ba-yamim ha-hem, Koi kitve mendele mokher sfarim (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1947) 253. All translations of this novel have been modified from “Of Bygone Days," trans. Raymond Scheindlin, A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas, ed. Ruth Wisse (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986) 249-358. 25.1 have chosen to refer to the speaker in chapter 3 of Lamentations as Jeremiah, because I believe that Abramovitsh is creating a parallel between Mendele and the prophet. While con­ temporary biblical scholarship might take issue with this attribution, the young Abramovitsh would have most certainly studied the text as being that ofjeremiah. For a more comprehensive discussion of this debate, see Delbert R. Hillers, Lamentations, Anchor Bible (Garden City: Double Day, 1972) 10. 26. Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 25:2.

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What appears on the surface to be a rhetorical ploy poking fun at Talmudic reasoning is, in fact, a more complex and deeply thoughtful examination of the transformations of Jewish life in fin-de-si&cle Russia. Mendele’s sadness gestures beyond his arrival in Shichor and exceeds the context of the bathhouse. Abramovitsh parallels Mendele with Jeremiah in Lamentations: like the distraught prophet, Mendele suffers the collective sorrow of Jewish tragedy. In the Bible, Jeremiah mourns the destruction of the Temple and the devastation of Jerusalem, while Mendele, in Ba-yatnim ha-hem, mourns the breakdown of Jewish life in the Pale and the disappearance of its communal institutions in the urban center. This analogy expands the very scope of Mendele’s woes: his direct complaints about his own personal discomfort are broadened and magnified—through comparison to Jeremiah’s sufferings as God exacts his punishment on the Israelites—to include the deterioration of Jewish communal life in late-nineteenth-century Russia and, more spe­ cifically, in Odessa. Mendele mourns the loss of traditional Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, unable to recognize the newjewish cultural forms which attracted Hebrew and Yiddish writers, like Abramovitsh, to Odessa in the late nineteenth century. The parallel between Mendele and Jeremiah reveals Abramovitsh’s ambivalent attitude toward the secular urban centers of the Russian empire, centers that flourished at the expense of more traditional ways of life. We can see this ambivalence in his changing depictions of the Jewish bathhouse. Mendele describes this bathhouse through a catalog of archi­ tectural details. Absent are the bustling commotion, the tall tales and gos­ sip, the talk of politics or business deals. This is in stark contrast to the bathhouse as it appears in Abramovitsh’s earlier writings, for example, in Fishke der krumer: The only place for Jews to fish out what is going on, to complain about their own troubles and listen to those of others, is the bathhouse. There, one hears

many secrets repeated. Many business deals are closed there. The place has more activity than a marketplace.... Up above the notables, the fine Jews,

the men of good birth sit in a little group. Their conversation revolves around business and politics: the kosher meat tax, the troublemakers of this genera­

tion, the recruiting of soldiers, the choosing of town councilors, the

appointment of a rabbi, about one thing and another and also about the new police chief.27

27. S. Y. Abramovitsh, Fishke the Lame, trans. Gerald Stillman (New York: T. Yosseloff, 1960) SO.

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In this passage the bathhouse is a lively microcosm of shtetl life, bustling with customers. We see the bathhouse as the social nexus of the commu­ nity; without the bathhouse, Jews would find themselves socially and eco­ nomically isolated. These men are also Mendele’s customers, and the bathhouse provides a perfect opportunity for business connections, for buying and selling. However, the empty bathhouse in the late novels serves as a haunting reminder of Mendele and Abramovitsh’s anxieties about the disappearance of traditional Jewish cultural institutions and the alienation of city life. The breakdown of these communal institutions is not merely a senti­ mental matter for Mendele; it is also the tragedy of his growing eco­ nomic and linguistic irrelevance. The economic and the literary are inextricably linked in a novel where the narrator himself is in the busi­ ness of selling books. At the end of the passage cited above, Mendele notes the precarious position of the shtetl Jew, the Jew from Kisalon or Kabtsiel—fictional shtetls featured in Abramovitsh’s earlier novels. This self-referential allusion to Abramovitsh’s Active geography is espe­ cially poignant. Mendele suggests that the inhabitants of these towns are dispersing to the cities, where they no longer require his wares. These fictional towns are also a metonymy for Abramovitsh’s literary corpus as a whole. I read in them Abramovitsh’s fear that his entire fictional uni­ verse cannot withstand the pressures of the modern city. This mourning of the old, as part of the embrace of the new, is critical for understanding the dialectic of modernity and nostalgia in the novel. Abramovitsh’s novel mourns Mendele’s diminishing economic power and his weaken­ ing cultural status. Yet they are absolutely necessary to Shlomo’s emer­ gence as a new Jewish novelist.

THE ILLEGIBLE PAST

The encounter between Mendele, Shlomo, and the doppelganger of Shlomo’s youth highlights the pathos of Abramovitsh’s authorial trans­ formation. When Mendele arrives in Shichor, he hurries to visit his old friend, Shlomo. Mendele is an incongruous presence in Shichor’s urban setting and in Shlomo’s home. His dress and his behavior index him as an outsider, a Jew from the shtetl. He is a reminder of the Kisalonites whose lives Shlomo once documented. Yet now that Shlomo has become wholly immersed in the modern world of Shichor, the Kisa­ lonites have become incomprehensible to him. Shlomo cannot imme­ diately place this old Jewish man who has snuck into his house and tracks mud through the room, mistaking him for a Jewish beggar.

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Mendele explains in an aside to the reader that his sneaky entrance is an ironic gesture: The Jew enters as is his custom, secretly, bent over and submissive, unheard on his arrival, as though appearing out of nowhere; he stands before the owner of

the house like a bear lying in wait for his prey, and he suddenly grabs him so that he will have no time to hide. This custom of Israel is a reminder of the poverty and destitution of exile from time immemorial. This entrance, because it is an

ancestral legacy, endures with us to this day.28

Mendele’s ironic depiction of Jewish custom is at once humorous and biting. He reduces the whole ofJewish history to an overwhelming expe­ rience of poverty that robbed Jews of good manners and forced them to become beggars. Furthermore, by couching his entrance in terms of Jewish tradition, Mendele contrasts the condition of “the Jew,” whose customs he describes, with Shlomo’s “civilized” European-style salon of Hebrew writers. Shlomo’s failure to recognize Mendele demonstrates that Mendele’s gestures, and perhaps Mendele himself, are illegible outside of the cul­ tural context of poverty and privation that characterized life in the shtetl. Mendele serves an economic and a narrative function in these fictional­ ized shtetls, selling books to Jews in the Pale’s small towns and describing his encounters with the people he meets as he goes about his business. However, in Abramovitsh’s fictionalized Odessa, Shlomo usurps his eco­ nomic and narrative function. Shlomo, however, is not entirely cut off from the world of the shtetl. When Mendele apologizes for tracking mud into the house, Shlomo quips: “To the children of Israel, mud is a memo­ rial to the exodus from Egypt.” Shlomo’s embrace of mud as a feature of Jewish custom is an attempt to include himself in Mendele’s world. Then again, the mud seems out of place in the writer’s salon, as does the playful biblical allusion. Nevertheless, the writers are not speaking about Jews mired in mud, but about supposedly more lofty subjects: the future of Hebrew literature. Mendele is not the only figure from the past illegible to Shlomo. That same evening a young boy, soaking wet from the rain and wearing tradi­ tional Jewish garb, meekly asks to spend the night at Shlomo’s school. Shlomo angrily turns the boy away, shouting that his school is not a hotel. Shlomo is at first angry that the boy does not have the proper respect for his modern institution of learning. The next day, the Hebrew

28. Abramovitsh, Ba-yamim ha-hem 254.

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writers return and a despondent Mendele shows his visitors the white bone buttons from his own kapote (a traditional Jewish caftan) that he had worn as a young yeshiva boy, when he wandered through the Lithu­ anian countryside seeking shelter in the local study house, or beys medresh. Like an archaeologist examining an artifact, Shlomo attempts to piece together the culture that produced such an object. Fingering the ivory buttons, he realizes that he had misunderstood the boy’s request, which was unrecognizable to him outside of the cultural con­ text of traditional Jewish life. In effect, the young boy’s confusion mir­ rors Mendele’s uncomfortable arrival in the city: both Mendele and the boy lament the disappearance of the comforts traditionally afforded the Jewish traveler in the shtetl. Both Shlomo and the young boy suffer from a failure of cultural trans­ lation. The boy is unable to articulate his demand in a modern urban con­ text, and Shlomo does not succeed in recognizing the traditional Jewish custom behind the boy’s request. Shlomo describes how this encounter tormented him: An image of this poor boy, and an image of myself as a youth in the same clothes

as his, appeared and hovered before me the entire night, paining my spirit with harsh torments. Agitated and afraid, this miserable boy stood before me; his

voice was silent, his eyes alone told the troubles of his heart, and the entreaties of his soul were spoken on his beautiful face—they spoke and they begged: have mercy on this hungry, suffering spirit who hides, and let him spend the

night with you in some corner.29

Shlomo sees his own double in the face of this young boy, whose arrival signals the temporal distortions of rapid and uneven economic and social transformation. Whereas Shlomo has left behind the world of the shtetl for the modern city, a trace of that shtetl world remains within him, embodied in the figure of the boy. Although the novel appears to mourn the loss of the shtetl, in 1894 shtetl life had not yet disappeared. Both the traditional and the modern, the shtetl and the city, coincide and overlap in the novels, as Jews, like Mendele, move back and forth between these spaces. Shlomo’s failure to recognize the boy is also his lack of ability to recognize his own past and represents his self-alienation. Mendele and the yeshiva boy are mirrors that reflect images back to Shlomo that he can no longer recognize. Both the boy and the prose require annotations to be understood—in one case, buttons, and, in the other, footnotes.

29. Abramovitsh, Ba-yamini ha-hem 257.

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Mendele’s monologue describes the book peddler’s confrontation with the new urban space of the city, literally suffering the pangs of moderniza­ tion; Shlomo, however, is comfortable with his life, surrounded byjewish writers and intellectuals. He faces a different dilemma. He mourns his alienation from the world Mendele represents. It is Mendele’s arrival in Shichor that forces Shlomo to recognize that he has severed a crucial connection to his past, and it is the impetus for Shlomo’s—and thus Abramovitsh’s—new prose style. This encounter between Shlomo and Mendele resonates with Benjamin’s image of modernity’s uncomprehend­ ing generation, their eyes turned toward the new war machines under the skies. Abramovitsh refigures this dilemma through a problem of authorial persona as he struggles to create a new mode of storytelling, in order to communicate with a new, rapidly transforming audience. Shlomo’s fascination with the buried ruins of the shtetl and its archaeo­ logical remnants reflects Abramovitsh’s formal concerns with authorship and narrative style. These objects from the past, like the bone buttons, conjure up memories and images and provide Shlomo with an important, if tenuous, link to the past. Shlomo’s fascination with these objects recalls Benjamin’s discussion of the aura. Benjamin himself was deeply ambiva­ lent about the aura, which he defines in multifarious ways, including the ritual or cult value of the art object;30 the trace of the artist’s hand in the object he creates; as “the associations which, at home in the mtmoire involontaire, cluster around the object of a perception”;31 and as the “traces of the storyteller [that] cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.”32 The aura is the felt presence of the artist, the craftsman, the storyteller in the objects that he or she creates. In Abramo­ vitsh’s novels the aura is found in the authentic traces of the Jewish past, whether the bone buttons or Mendele’s folksy idiom and its connection to the Jewish masses. Shlomo dramatizes his aesthetic concerns about the proper form, sub­ ject, and style of modern literature as merchants hawking their wares. Merchandise figures prominently in Abramovitsh’s works as the stockin-trade of his book peddler narrator and small-town merchants. Men­ dele’s ability to travel, even his arrival in Shichor, is deeply connected with his line ofwork. However, his small trade in religious books, like the shtetl itself, is threatened by an encroaching capitalist economy, the

30. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illumina­ tions, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schoken, 1968) 224. 31. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schoken, 1968) 186. 32. Benjamin, “The Storyteller" 92.

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mass production of commodities, the concentration of populations in urban centers, and the erosion of the Jewish population’s adherence to religious law. Shlomo, the modern writer, is likewise not immune to the economics of publishing, driven by the demands of an audience. These economic demands partly drove the success of Yiddish print culture in Warsaw and the decline of Hebrew print culture in Odessa. Further­ more, Shlomo is keenly aware of how the market may affect the imme­ diacy or intimacy of storytelling, how it may denigrate or destroy the storyteller. Shlomo’s parable about the two merchants assimilates the novel’s concerns with the economics ofjewish culture and the transfor­ mation ofJewish reading audiences. The first merchant argues for the authentic object containing the trace of its history and its creator. He dismisses modern goods (modern litera­ ture) as cheap and fake, easily replicable. He pleads: Heaven save us from these new goods and these baubles of our time [among the people of Israel]. Everything you see here is nothing but fakes and trickery, frag­ ments of pottery coated in silver, a wineskin swollen and empty, kohl and lip­

stick, prettified on the outside and filthy and ugly on the inside. No item is

complete in its type and character, they are all blobs, like wooden blockheads, babies’ amusements, mouths gaping, drumming, tooting, ringing, and making

noise, not by themselves but rather by external stirring. Here they are. Behold you have antique trinkets, ancestral objects the lot of them, and their spirit

stands in them.33

The merchant dismisses the mass-produced objects as forgeries, trompe I'oeil, gilded to hide their rotting insides. These fakeries lack their own individual character; they are like marionettes, controlled by outside forces though they appear to have an internal will. In contrast to these modern objects, the antiques—like Shlomo’s bone buttons—recall their own history, containing within them a trace of the world that produced them. The antique seller touts the authenticity of his wares, their Jewish heritage, and their aura. These objects contain the trace of their histor­ ical “spirit.” The seller is hawking the past as the authentic mediator of experience. This merchant echoes the writers, who, seated around Shlomo’s table, demand from him a literary work that would preserve the trace of the shtetl and perform the function of the antiques and the bone buttons. These writers want protection from the onslaught of cul­ tural modernization and the economic forces driving mass production.

33. Abramovitsh, Ba-yamim ha-hem 258.

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Like Abramovitsh’s critics, they seek cultural preservation in traditional cultural forms. The hawker of the modern goods in the marketplace also vies for Shlo­ mo’s attention. He dismisses the antiques as relics of a dead world and polemicizes against what he sees as the fetishization of the past: The other one commands: “Come to me! Look at me. Don't bother with what

has passed and disappeared from the world, do not be a necromancer attempt­ ing to unite with the dead. And all who are in pain suffer from the fact that many

Jews have set aside the present and their hearts are drawn to the past; they go with their heads turned back, and they do not see the way, they trip and fall, and

the world grows dark for them.”3435

According to this merchant, the antiques being peddled are nothing but items taken from a dead world that is no longer relevant. He criticizes the “living dead,” Jews who are facing back to the past; nostalgia for the past is equated with death. The merchant quickly turns away from antique merchandise, proclaiming the importance of current struggles. One’s obligation is not to the past, not to memory’s dainty relics, but to those who suffer and struggle in the present. This merchant echoes the demands of the new urban Jews who are seeking an author to represent them and to portray contemporary Jewish life in the city. They want a literature that will embrace the forces of cultural modernization, much as they themselves have welcomed these changes. They are not interested in the storyteller’s aura or the preservation of the traces of history. The hawker of modern goods relies on industrialization and the mass production of goods for his profession. The literary analogue to this new merchandise is the creation and production of modern stories that will require an anonymous narrative voice, not a folksy narrator. The struggle between the two merchants, one selling antiques and the other modern mass-produced goods, remains unresolved. Shlomo des­ cribes them as being like Mohammed’s coffin, suspended between two magnets?5 Ultimately, the spirit of the past (“the aura”) that remains in the antique goods and the modern struggle for a political future, figured as modern goods, are placed in a new dialectical relationship; by exiling

34. Abramovitsh, Ba-yamim ha-hem 258. 35. The Soviet critic A. Gurshteyn takes issue with Abramovitsh’s image of the two magnets. According to Gurshteyn, all of Abramovitsh’s writings refer to an earlier historical period, and his work never approaches his contemporary moment. Gurshteyn’s reading says more about the struggle that Soviet critics faced when confronted with Abramovitsh’s later works, which could not be assimilated into their view of Abramovitsh as a social critic. A. Gurshteyn, “Vegn shloyme reb khayims," Shloyme reb khayims (Moscow: Farlag Ernes, 1935) 13.

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Mendele and embracing Shlomo, a new narrator is created, one who nar­ rates the past nostalgically, but in modern form. Shlomo’s parable about the two magnets also resonates with the historical tensions between Hebrew and Yiddish. The unresolved ques­ tion for Abramovitsh and for Jewish-language writers of the period was what the future held for their respective literary languages. In his 1896 conversation with Dubnow, Abramovitsh feared that his Hebrew idiom, mired in a Jewish traditional world, had become obsolete. During this period, he published his work in Yiddish, in part because a larger audi­ ence was clamoring for Yiddish books. However, a decade later, Hebrew writers would begin to dismiss Yiddish as a relic of diasporic life that would soon become obsolete. Abramovitsh does not take a side; instead, he wrote his final novel in both languages, hoping to create a novelistic style that would remain relevant, that would continue to attract diasporic Jewish audiences who had not turned their backs on Jewish languages. Moreover it is precisely this unknown future that haunted his writings and amplified his protomodernist form.

THE MODERN NARRATOR AND THE MODERNIST FRAME

In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin describes the death of storytelling and the rise of the novel as a sign of modernity. According to Benjamin, storytelling is an art form that harks back to a time when individuals were firmly rooted in the traditional life of their communities. However, with the advent of new technologies, the social conditions of narrative lend themselves to new cultural forms, such as the novel. In the novel, unlike in storytelling, narrative is no longer an intimate and immediate encoun­ ter between the teller and his community of listeners. Whereas the story­ teller communicates experience, the “novelist has isolated himself.”36 This isolation is matched by the isolation of the novel reader, who unlike other readers finds himself alone.37 On the one hand, the petichta reproduces the personal relationship between storyteller and listener: Mendele and Shlomo meet in person to swap personal stories. On the other hand, the enclosed third-person memoir displaces this personal encounter with the objective, imper­ sonal third-person narrator. The intricate layers of self-referentiality in

36. Benjamin, "The Storyteller” 87. 37. Benjamin, "The Storyteller” 100.

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the novels foreground the conflict between the vernacular culture of Yiddish and the text-based culture of Hebrew, the former embodied in the “folksy’’ book peddler and the latter in the “modern” Hebrew writer. The tension between Mendele’s vernacular Yiddish, peppered with folk sayings and religious allusions, and Shlomo’s polished third-person nar­ rative highlights an evolving modern Jewish readership whose relation­ ships to both the spoken idiom of Yiddish and the textual tradition of Hebrew were in flux. The storyteller here fades to the background, but he does not disappear. He remains fixed in the frame, a constant reminder of a different literary register whose presence is acknowledged and nec­ essary, yet displaced. On the other hand, Shlomo enters the scene as an already established Jewish author who wants to address a new audience, one that is more familiar with life in Odessa than life in the shtetl. Shlomo, unlike Mendele, does not address his story in the first person to a friend, an acquaintance, or someone he meets on the street. The implicit reader of Shlomo’s enclosed novel is an anonymous, modern observer of the Jew­ ish past. Whereas Mendele describes the shtetl in the language of its inhabitants, assuming a reader who is located in the shtetl or familiar with its vernacular, Shlomo describes Jewish life in the shtetl with an ethnographic distance, addressing a reader who is an outsider to that world. The transition from the pretense of storytelling to the generic norms of the realist novel is driven by the changing circumstances of a modern Jewish readership. Abramovitsh, who had once sought, through the guise of Mendele, to be a beloved friend to his readers, envisions a new relationship between Jewish author and Jewish audience. To establish this new rela­ tionship he must disarticulate his beloved literary identity. However, readers and critics have overlooked this authorial breakdown, instead characterizing the novel as autobiographical, by assuming a one-to-one correlation between Abramovitsh and Shlomo. The novel’s frame story orchestrates this confusion. Mendele’s introduction of his friend, the modern Hebrew writer who lives in Shichor, the chronicler of Kisalon, the head of a modern school, whose name even shares the same Hebrew root as Abramovitsh’s first name, Sholem, clearly references Abramov­ itsh, a Hebrew writer and head of a modern school in Odessa, who writes about a town called Kisalon. At the same time, however, Abram­ ovitsh also published his own work under the pseudonym Mendele, and therefore Mendele’s presence in the same room as Shlomo complicates the autobiographical pretense. The prologue encourages the reader to identify Abramovitsh with Shlomo and thereby upsets Abramovitsh’s assumption of Mendele as his authorial identity. Dan Miron astutely

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argues against the simple correlation between Mendele and Abramov­ itsh, insisting that Abramovitsh should be referred to as author and Mendele as his fictional creation.38 This argument is convincing, but it does not account for the complexities of Abramovitsh’s assumption of Mendele as his public literary persona and, I would argue, even pseudo­ nym.39 In effect, there are at least two Mendeles to contend with: author and narrator, one homodiegetic and the other heterodiegetic. The­ refore, Mendele as a character in the story also refers back to Abra­ movitsh’s pseudonymous identity. The intricate web of allusions to Abramovitsh’s other fictional works, which feature both Kisalon and Mendele, as well as to details from his life, creates a dizzying effect for critic and reader alike.40 This disarticulation of authorial identity and the questioning of authorial subjectivity that ensues underlies the frame story’s modernist form. The petichta presents a fragmented and distorted autobiographical subject who lurks between the fictional and the autobiographical, between mimesis and actuality. The layers of textuality in the novels pro­ duce an uneasy distance between Abramovitsh and his readership, one no longer mediated by the folksy Mendele. Abramovitsh draws attention to a newly developing relationship between the modern Jewish writer and his reader—the modern, urban Jew. Abramovitsh figures Shlomo as this new modern Jewish writer, a representative of an emerging cultur­ ally defined Jewish audience. However, his new audience’s identity is in the process of formation, and its collectivity is not assured. According to Mendele, his good friend Shlomo had been called to the city by its Jewish residents to portray their lives in print. He is to be their author, and they are his subject and audience. This is the model of the national writer who belongs to and represents the national community, and whose work stands in for the nation as a whole. As opposed to Ben­ edict Anderson’s assertion that the realist novel is the genre analogous to

38. For an in-depth discussion of die development of Mendele as Abramovitsh’s literary persona see Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modem Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973). 39. Tins argument was suggested to me in conversation with Benjamin Harshav. 40. Fictional autobiography was a prominent genre in the development of Hebrew litera­ ture. While this autobiographical tendency can be read as a step toward the development of psychological realism, Abramovitsh’s autobiographical text is less concerned with psycholog­ ical realism and more with the development of a third-person objective narrator. Of course, Ba-yanum ha-hem still shares much in common with these autobiographical novels; the de­ scriptions of young Shlomo’s mystical encounters with nature echo similar sentiments in Bialik’s short story "Safiach.” For a discussion of Hebrew autobiography, see Alan L. Mintz, “Banished from Their Father’s Table”: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

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the nation through its spatiotemporal structure of “meanwhile” and through the reading community it unites, Abramovitsh fantasizes a community united in its desire to find a representational genre and to become the subjects of the novel.41 However, this diasporic community is not territorially, but linguistically defined. In Abramovitsh’s novel, the audience imagines the author and not vice versa. Mendele foregrounds the emergence of the modern Jewish writer as a response to social demands; the modern Jewish writer heeds the call of the modern Jew, his subject matter: Shlomo saw that his source had begun to rot and stink, swarming with frogs and small inferior creatures, not worthwhile to attend to. He heard that there was a new sort of creature that had just appeared among us, Kisalonites in their spirit and wise, of various stripes and colors, muttering affectedly and boastfully, their

manner foreign and strange, and everyone wanted to know about them and understand their character. There had not appeared among them a pen worthy to draw them, they were still virgin territory, and they awaited the arrival of their writer. Because of this Shlomo abandoned the Kisalonites and departed

for Shichor.42

Mendele depicts the Jews of Kisalon in strikingly derisive terms, as rot­ ting creatures; they have become the refuse of history. As these shtetl Jews decay, a new species ofjews, a new fictional readership, is sprouting up in the cities—Jews who resemble the Kisalonites in their spirit, but whose speech and actions differ dramatically. Abramovitsh describes an acculturated community ofjews, who have adopted Russian manners, dress, and language. Yet they are still looking for their Jewish author. In this account, the appearance of these modern Jews precedes the author’s departure for the city.43 These new characters are in search of an author to portray them, to grant them a form of representational legitimacy. However, these new urbanites lack a clear and coherent identity; in Yid­ dish they are referred to as “chameleons.” In this passage, Mendele describes them as externally dissimilar, but internally similar, to the Kisalonites. It is not these Jews’ urban identity that unites them—they speak and dress differently—rather, it is the “spirit” of Kisalon, the trace of the shtetl Jew that brings them together. Shlomo must write his mem­ oirs in order to codify a unified nostalgic past around which he can create 41. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na­ tionalism (New York: Verso, 1991) 24-26. 42. Abramovitsh, Ba-yamim ha-hem 254. 43. In contrast, Abramovitsh belonged to a generation that departed for the city not only to passively document the lives of urban Jews, but also to actively produce modern Jewish culture.

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and sustain a diasporic audience of secular and modern urban Jews who read Jewish literature in Hebrew and Yiddish. As the conversation bet­ ween Dubnow and Abramovitsh highlights, questions might remain about what language would unite this new readership, and who might it now include. Mendele identifies these new Jews as rooted in a shared past, yet he also understands that their relationship to that past is unten­ able and temporary.

A MODERN HEBREW AND YIDDISH PROSE The new Jews that Shlomo documents in Shichor (or Odessa) are im­ mersed in urban life, surrounded not only by Yiddish, but also by Russian. Their daily lives are marked not by the shut and the bathhouse, but the stock market, the shipyard, the language of import and export. The novels’ fictional prologues introduce Shlomo’s literary mission to these newjews, contextualizing Shlomo’s memories of the past with the acculturated Jews who dress and speak like Russians, “Kisalonites in their spirit” who speak “affectedly and boastfully, their manner foreign and strange.’*44 The heteroglossia of the prologue, its mix of speech styles, points to the multilin­ gual diasporic audiences for modern Jewish writing. However, Abramovitsh’s new translation practices reflect emerging anxieties about the relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish. Unlike his earlier projects of auto-translation, Abramovitsh wrote and translated these novels moving back and forth between the two languages; some sec­ tions were written first in Hebrew and others in Yiddish. In contrast, in his earlier auto-translated works, the two versions were not always literal translations. Instead, they were meant to be read together, playing on each other with humorous linguistic puns.45 Abramovitsh developed his early novelistic prose in Yiddish, and then incorporating the vernacular quality of Yiddish into his Hebrew translations. This practice of translation recip­ rocally enriched both languages, bringing a layered textual tradition to Yiddish and a spoken idiom to Hebrew. In these works, Mendele served as the vehicle for vernacular Yiddish. His vibrant and friendly address to the reader, as well as to the characters he meets while peddling his wares, are rooted in the communicative functions ofYiddish and linked to

44. Abramovitsh, Ba-yamitn ha-hem 254. 45. Menakhem Perry argues that Abramovitsh assumed that the reader of his Hebrew trans­ lations had read the Yiddish version. Perry examines Abramovitsh’s complex practices of auto­ translation in "Thematic and Structural Shifts in Auto-translations by Bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish Writers: The Case of Mendele Mokher Sforim,” Poetics Today 2.4 (1981) 181-192.

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traditional Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement. However, in these later novels, translation is not about the enrichment of one or the other lan­ guage. Instead, Abramovitsh translates these novels in order to develop his third-person objective narrative voice in both languages. There are, however, important differences in both versions that result from the social functions of these languages. In the Hebrew version, all speech is registered in Hebrew, and Abramovitsh specifies that Shlomo’s salon is composed of Hebrew writers. However, Mendele is surely speak­ ing Yiddish, acting as an emissary of a Yiddish cultural context into this Hebrew space. There is also a linguistic indeterminacy that is glossed over in the Hebrew version: the writers’ speech is represented in Hebrew, although they are likely speaking Russian, a language Abramovitsh used for intellectual discussion and correspondence.46 In the Yiddish version, the tension between Hebrew and Yiddish is muted, as the writers are iden­ tified as “yidishe shraybers,” meaning either Yiddish or Jewish writers. Often, the context suggests that Abramovitsh is referring to them as Jew­ ish writers, when for instance he discusses “yidishe geshikhte shraybers” (Jewish history writers). Naomi Seidman has argued that, combined, the Hebrew and Yiddish versions of the novels represent Abramovitsh’s critique of the Jewish intel­ lectual valorization of Hebrew over Yiddish.471 agree with Seidman that these works are addressing the relationship between these two languages. I contend, however, that not only is this a critique of Hebrew’s privileged position, but it is also an attempt to reconcile the rifts between these two languages. Abramovitsh had to contend with a new Jewish audience for his prose—an urban secular audience, raised in the city, and, as Dubnow noted above, not schooled in all the historical layers of Hebrew. This new prose is designed to accommodate this new audience comprised of both Hebrew and Yiddish readers. In this sense, Abramovitsh’s choice can be seen as utilitarian; he aims to craft a new literary style in both languages, to develop a new set of tools for the modern Jewish writer. In the preface of these novels, Abramovitsh expresses a profound ambivalence toward the direction of modern Jewish literature as Jewish audiences migrated from the shtetl to metropolitan centers. Shlomo’s dilemma—whether to write about his own past and portray the world of the shtetl or to depict his present circumstances in the city—gives rise

46. According to Dubnow, Abramovitsh used Russian, not Yiddish, as a language of intel­ lectual discourse until 1907, after his famous tour through Warsaw, Lodz, and Bialystok, where he met a generation of readers who embraced Yiddish. 47. Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: Vie Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berke­ ley: University of California Press, 1997) 57-67.

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to the aesthetic and linguistic transformations in his work. Ultimately, Shlomo returns in his work to the shtetl, to his youthful days when he frolicked in the small village by the river. Though he retreats from describing an urban reality, his characterization of his childhood in the shtetl is modern in its nostalgia. Rather than importing his Yiddish ver­ nacular into Hebrew, as he did in his earlier works, Abramovitsh aims for a new literary style, less communicative and more descriptive. Shlo­ mo’s enclosed memoir is marked by a descriptive prose, more similar to Flaubert and Stendhal than to Mendele. The novel’s third-person imper­ sonal narrator offers us a bird’s-eye view of Shlomo’s childhood, in the style of Flaubert’s description of Yonville in Madame Bovary or Stend­ hal’s description of Verri&re in Le rouge et le noir: an impersonal descrip­ tion written for an audience unfamiliar with the locale, as if for a tourist, for the visiting reader, or, in this case, for the future generation. The memoir progresses through the Jewish holidays, through his educa­ tional development, and through the death of his father. There is an eth­ nographic quality to the writing as it does so, an attempt to describe and preserve customs. In Abramovitsh’s earlier works, the shtetl served as a site of social cri­ tique, a mechanism to advance the cause of social and economic mod­ ernization. In his late novels, Abramovitsh understood that a newly emerging generation of urban Jews would require a shared romantic past with which they could identify, while at the same time they were rejecting the traditional Jewish values of their parents. He hoped to create ajewishlanguage prose that would remain relevant and attract this future audi­ ence, which might easily be seduced by Russian. Abramovitsh envisioned an audience spread out in burgeoning urban centers like Warsaw, and he sought to reach this new audience, even as he faced the decline of his own literary center. His protomodernist prologue envisions the rapidly shift­ ing linguistic and social contexts of his newjewish audiences. Abramovitsh attempted to address this new generation of readers with mixed success. However, as I will discuss in the following chap­ ters, his aesthetic solution for the problem—the fracturing of his autho­ rial persona and his reflection on loss and nostalgia—haunted the next generation of Hebrew and Yiddish writers who had to contend with the destruction of the shtetl in the wake of World War I. These modernist writers needed to create a Hebrew and Yiddish literature that would be able to represent Jewish life in the newly developing literary centers like Berlin, New York, and pre-state Palestine. They had to contend with the multiple linguistic and social contexts of Yiddish-speaking Jewish audiences who left the Pale, emigrated to new cities, or identi­ fied with the new Soviet state. These audiences were united by tenuous

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linguistic affiliations to Jewish languages. Conversing in Odessa in 1896—before the 1905 revolution and World War I—Abramovitsh and Dubnow already sensed the linguistic and cultural uncertainty that would face the next generation. In the next chapter, I look at Yosef Chaim Brenner’s modernist Hebrew novel, Shekhol ve-khishalon {Breakdown and Bereavement), which Brenner wrote after immigrating to pre-state Palestine in 1909. Like Abramovitsh, Brenner frames his Hebrew novel with a fictional preface that describes the origins of the novel in personal biography. However, in Brenner’s pref­ ace, the author of the novel is not the autobiographical subject. Instead, the author discovers the diaries of a young immigrant on a boat departing Palestine and rewrites them in the third person, covertly translating them from Yiddish to Hebrew. Brenner’s embedded act of fictional translation and his use of the third person disrupt the novel’s autobiographical premise, calling into question the act of writing the self in Hebrew, and the project of territorializing Hebrew in Palestine.

CHAPTER. 2

Diasporic Address and Transnational Hebrew

Afterward, a young, sensitive couple came and sat down, speaking in Hebrew. He seemed about nineteen years old, and she seemed about sixteen years old—students at the National School. Surprisingly, the substance of their Hebrew conversation, as would have been common, was not about the necessity of speaking Hebrew, nor the emptiness and meaningless of life, but rather another subject—art itself. Their literature teacher said that poetry is the splendor and beauty in life, that poets and artists find beauty in all things. Jaffa is so beautiful at night, however when they were on "their trip to Jerusalem"—lovely I Especially the Old City at night....

Ihe young man said things for the sake of saying them as well as for himself; his lips labored with difficulty. He did not so much speak—he stammered, shouted, and stumbled over unnatural and foreign expressions, about particular artists, poets, and writers, about those lovely, beautiful land­ scapes ofJerusalem, the Old..., the Old... there was neither a ring to his words nor any spiritual basis to them.1

oward the end of Yosef Chaim Brenner’s Hebrew novel, Shekhol ve-khishalon (Breakdown and Bereavement), the narrator witnesses “a young, sensitive couple” from the National School in Jaffa engaging in Hebrew conversation. The young man attempts to woo the young woman with thoughtful reflections on beauty, art, and poetry. His crude Hebrew disrupts the intimate, romantic encounter. He labors to speak, his lips

T

1. Yosef Chaim Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon, Ktavim, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz hame’uchad; Sifriyat po'alim, 1978) 1666-1667.

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awkwardly contorting to pronounce the “unnatural and foreign expres­ sions.” Ultimately, he falls back on banalities: everything is “lovely.” This Hebrew conversation hardly seems worth mentioning. In fact, it is diffi­ cult to describe it as a conversation at all; only the young man speaks, barely communicating an idea, while the woman is silent. The most no­ table aspect about the exchange, according to the narrator, is that two young people are trying to have a conversation about art, and not about the importance of speaking Hebrew itself. The young man strives to move beyond the symbolic function of Hebrew speech to refer only to itself, but only succeeds in talking to himself. The young man’s contorted words hint at his concealed native tongue. The narrator suggests that another layer of meaning lurks beneath the couple’s strained conversation: “In his speech and in her silence, in his voice that kept breaking in the middle and in her hot constricted breath, there was something confusing and unintelligible that spreads before them over the sand.”2 The young man’s broken Hebrew and the young woman’s hot breath mask the meaning of their conversation. All that remains is something unintelligible, something unspoken that lies in their suppressed native languages. This brief moment shared by two peripheral characters encapsulates the novel’s central concern about language. Their conversation about art, inscribed in a larger discourse about language, mirrors the structure of the novel: a conversation about art that is really a conversation about Hebrew, beneath which lies a deeper meaning encoded in a partially concealed and displaced Yiddish. Brenner’s novel, written shortly after his arrival in Palestine in 1909, depicts a group ofYiddish-speaking Jews who immigrate from the Pale of Settlement to Ottoman Palestine and eventually reside in Jerusalem. The novel focuses on Yechezkel Chefetz, who has returned to Palestine for a second time to work on a collective agricultural settlement. After a few weeks of work, he suffers a groin injury and seeks medical care in Jerusa­ lem. He recovers from his injury in the home of his uncle, Reb Yosef. Dur­ ing his physical recuperation, Chefetz suffers a severe mental breakdown. Chefetz’s physical and mental ailments reverse the Zionist narrative of shelilat ha-gola (negation of exile), which figures exile as illness and Zion­ ism as its cure. In Brenner’s novel the Zionist prescription for exile fails, and the patient does not recover. Although Chefetz and his mental break­ down are the focus of the first half of the novel, his point of view recedes in the second half as we follow the lives of his uncles, Reb Yosef and Reb Chayim, his cousins, Esther and Miriam, and the other young men

2. Brenner, Shekhol vc-khishalon 1667.

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surrounding the family, as each struggles to make his or her way in the new Yis/iuv. At the end of the novel, a despairing and impoverished Chefetz and his two uncles, facing certain homelessness, leave Jerusalem to take refuge in Tiberias. The novel closes with Reb Chayim on the banks of the Sea of Galilee staring at the masts of the boat “which flashed: it won’t be hard, it won’t be hard, soon we will be on our way, quickly we will be on our way.”3 Although Chayim, along with the majority of the charac­ ters in the novel, fantasizes about escaping, the irony of the ending is apparent: the Sea of Galilee is landlocked.4 The novel’s fictional preface identifies the source material for the novel and offers a coda to Chefetz’s story. In the preface, the narrator explains that he met Chefetz on a boat traveling from Port Said to Alexandria (away from Palestine). He witnesses Chefetz suffering another break­ down and watches him being escorted off the boat in Alexandria. Chefetz leaves behind his belongings, including his Yiddish diaries (Chefetz is only literate in Yiddish). The narrator discovers them and decides to transform them into a third-person Hebrew novel. This adaptation is also an act of translation. Chefetz can barely speak Hebrew, let alone write it, and the narrator goes to great pains in the body of the novel to point out Chefetz’s linguistic failings. Although the narrator never directly acknowl­ edges his own acts of translation, the novel is filled with embedded stories of translation that mirror the frame structure of the novel and comment on the narrator’s adaptation and translation of the diaries. Just as the young lover’s stumbling Hebrew conceals his native language, so too the Hebrew of Brenner’s novel conceals its fictional Yiddish source. This chapter examines Brenner’s formal, aesthetic response to the transformation of the Jewish linguistic and cultural polysystem in pre­ state Palestine. I show how Shekhol ve-khishalon portrays the linguistic tensions that arose between Hebrew and Yiddish in the first decades of the twentieth century under the pressures of monolingual, territorial nationalism. Brenner dramatizes these tensions by framing his novel with an act of fictional translation that foregrounds the Yiddish source material of his Hebrew novel, which like the editor himself, is on a boat headed away from Palestine. I also analyze other moments of interior framing, including the conversation above, where the text comments on

3. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1688. 4. Uri Cohen posits a different reading of the novel’s conclusion. According to Cohen, the ending articulates an alternative Zionist ideology that follows the “the wise course of political patience and power building.” See "Soon We Shall Rise and Go: The Book of Esther and the Political Subtext of Breakdown and Bereavement" unpublished conference paper, Perspectives on Brenner Colloquium, Columbia University, March 7,2010.

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its own frame structure.5 These metafictional episodes juxtapose the Hebrew composition of the novel to the characters’ native languages, including Yiddish, Russian, and German, and also reveal the characters’ personal struggles with the linguistic imperatives of the Yishuv. Bren­ ner’s novel refuses to narrate the transfer of Hebrew to Palestine; instead, he depicts Hebrew as inextricably linked to Yiddish and the diasporic community of Eastern European Jews. Brenner’s novel calls attention to the diasporic conditions of Hebrew writing in pre-state Palestine, foregrounding the transnational circulation and diasporic address of Hebrew. In the novel, Brenner portrays the alienation and personal despair of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants to Palestine. The men and women in the novel attempt to participate in the emerging institutions of the new Yishuv, including the collective farms and modern Hebrew schools. How­ ever, all of the central characters fail to adapt to the linguistic demands of these new institutions. Their linguistic insufficiencies prevent them from successfully transforming themselves into national Jewish subjects. In the novel, Brenner denaturalizes the connection between language and national geography, showing the disjuncture between the language of everyday life in the Yishuv and the Hebraist dream of a nation-state. His characters’ linguistic alienation, their inability to adapt to Hebrew, and their reliance on Yiddish portrays the diasporic reality ofjewish linguistic and literary life in pre-state Palestine. Brenner frames his text as a narrative transaction that takes place between two men on a boat heading away from Palestine, emphasizing the transnational connections of Hebrew literary production in Europe, pre-state Palestine, and the Americas. The novel responds to the tension between the national and the transnational, between a Zionist project of negating diaspora and the reality of a diasporic Jewish population. The source material of the novel, the diarist, and the posited author are all headed in the direction of Europe, as if reaching for the dispersed read­ ing audience to whom the novel is addressed. Although Brenner was affiliated with the main organs of Zionism in Palestine, particularly Hapoel ha-tsair (The Young Worker), he remained ambivalent about the poli­ tics ofHebraism and territorial nationalism, as evidenced by his skeptical essays on the topic, his refusal to repudiate Yiddish, and his literary aes­ thetics. Brenner’s novel is framed by his ambivalent relationship to Zion­ ism and his investment in both Hebrew and Yiddish literary culture.

S. Mary Ann Caws discusses these acts of interior framing in Reading Frames in Modern Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 26.

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DIASPORIC MODERNISM

Brenner’s novel details how monolingual Zionism transformed the Ash­ kenazi Jewish linguistic polysystem and disrupted the practice ofJewish storytelling. He illuminates this process by foregrounding how Hebrew disrupts the intimate relationships in his novel, for example, in the case of the young couple in Jaffa, who try and fail to communicate their feelings for each other in Hebrew. The embedded stories about Hebrew in the novel index the larger metalinguistic questions about the conditions of Jewish storytelling in Hebrew and Yiddish. Brenner’s prose style is indebted to Abramovitsh’s grappling with Hebrew and Yiddish. But unlike Abramovitsh, who in his late works attempted to create approximate ver­ sions of the same work in Hebrew and Yiddish, Brenner brings the two languages together to produce a tense, awkward Hebrew that is inflected by translation. As Brenner illustrates, the Hebrew novel, like the young couple’s Hebrew conversation, chokes on its own words as its ability to refer to a meaning beyond itself dissipates. The result is both a psycholog­ ical novel about a young man’s personal breakdown and a modernist work that reflects on its own medium. Brenner’s novel represents the lin­ guistic and literary conditions of Hebrew and Yiddish. In the novel, he shows how the transfer and translation of Yiddish texts fragment a fragile literary culture, and he critiques the transformation of a diasporic Jewish linguistic and literary culture into a monolingual national culture. It is precisely this critique that animnated Brenner’s modernist aesthetic. Despite Brenner’s avowedly modernist concerns with language and his stylistic predilection for fragmentation, his work has not been typically read as modernist. Rather his literary corpus has been viewed as part of the “Hebrew Revival” and the larger narrative of the transfer of Hebrew to the new Jewish center in Palestine. Brenner’s reception typifies the liter­ ary history of early twentieth-century Hebrew prose writing, which critics have, by and large, subsumed under a broader narrative ofjewish national revival.6 Thus, Brenner is more likely to be referred to as a realist author. Gershon Shaked reads Shekhol ve-khishalon as a novel that functions on two levels: social realism and existential reflection.7 Menachem Brinker observes that Brenner’s realist style depends on a “retorika shel kenut” (rhetoric of sincerity). According to Brinker, Brenner exceeds the limits of

6. Shachar Pinsker, “The Challenges of Writing a Literary History of Early Modernist Hebrew Fiction: Gershon Shaked and Beyond,’’ Hebrew Studies 49 (2008) 32. 7. Gershon Shaked, "lyunim be-shekhol ve-khishalon,” Yosef chayim brener: mivchar ma'amarei bikoret ‘alyetsirato, cd. Yitzhak Bakon (Tel Aviv: Am oved, 1972) 204-205.

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literary generic conventions in his writing, subordinating aesthetic demands to the sincere engagement with the struggles of everyday life.8 Brinker and Shaked note the multiple layers of the text but do not equate these layers with modernist aesthetic self-reference. In contrast, Todd Hasak-Lowy identifies Brenner’s narrative style in Mi-kan u-mi-kan (From Here and There) as modernist, emphasizing the novel’s reliance on narra­ tive fragmentation and subjective experience. He characterizes Brenner’s style in the novel as “in a sense by default, a modernist approach to writing Hebrew.”9 However, to view Brenner’s modernism as a “default” strips Brenner of any aesthetic agency, suggesting that he stumbled upon mod­ ernism as part of a sped-up evolutionary process.1011 Brenner’s relationship to Jewish languages distinguishes his modern­ istwriting, even as it also explains his modernist techniques. Modernism, as Peter Brooker has argued, “is a retrospective construction which did not exist in the minds of its participants in the same terms as it did for its conservers.”11 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane famously des­ cribe modernism as an “aesthetic response, one which turns on the assumption that the registering of modern consciousness or experience was not a problem in representation but a profound cultural and aesthetic crux ... a problem in the making of structures, the employment of lan­ guage, the uniting of form, finally in the social meaning of the artist him­ self.”12 Brenner’s relationship to language and literary representation was mired in the political and social crises particular to the modernization and transformation of Eastern European Jewish culture and to the par­ ticularities of writing in languages that lacked national territories. His aesthetic response to these conditions was surely modernist. For Brenner and other Jewish writers, the encounter with modernity meant the radical transformation of their linguistic cultures, a reorientation of their rela­ tionships to traditional and secular cultural forms, and the emergence of new aesthetic forms.

8. Menachem Brinker, 'Ad ha-simta ha-tveryanit (Tel Aviv: Am oved, 1990) 20. 9. Todd Hasak Lowy, Here and Now: History, Nationalism, and Realism in Modern Hebrew Fiction (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008) 45. 10. In his recent book, Shachar Pinsker has argued that Brenner’s European novels are also modernist works, focusing his analysis on Mi-saviv la-nekuda (Around the Point, 1904) and Min ha-meitzar (Out of the Depths, 1908). Pinsker s focus is exclusively on Brenner’s European writ­ ings. See Pinsker, Literary Passports: The Making of Hebrew Modernist Fiction in Europe (Stan­ ford: Stanford University Press, 2010) 56-63; 80-86. 11. Peter Brooker, “xModernism Deferred: Langston Hughes, Harlem, and Jazz Montage,” Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry, eds. Alex David and Lee Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 231-247. 12. "Introduction," Modernism: 1890-1930, eds. Malcolm Bradbury and Jim McFarlane (London: Penguin, 1976) 28-29.

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Brenner wrote Shekhol ve-khishalon between 1913-1914 and 19171918; at a time when Jews were actively debating between Hebrew and Yiddish as Jewish national languages. This was five years after a strong backlash against the rise of Yiddishism, in the wake of the Czernowitz conference, by Hebrew writers who believed that Hebrew should be the Jewish national language. Despite the polarization of Hebrew and Yiddish camps, Brenner continued his close friendships with Yiddish writers. Hersh Dovid Nomberg and Abraham Reisin, both of whom attended the conference, corresponded with Brenner, and Brenner continued to pur­ sue close relationships with both men, as well as other Yiddish writers, including Lamed Shapiro. Brenner felt that both Hebrew and Yiddish writers “were citizens of the same literary republic.”13 Brenner refused to repudiate Yiddish and insisted on the important relationships between the two languages.14 Although he was committed to writing Hebrew lit­ erature, he rejected an ideology of Hebraism that transformed Hebrew into a term of national identity. Even after Brenner immigrated to Pales­ tine, he was skeptical of the project of writing Hebrew in Palestine and feared that the results might be a form of socialist realism. Brenner arrived in Palestine during the Second Aliyah (the immigra­ tion wave between 1904 and 1914) when there was almost no Hebrew literary infrastructure there. Zohar Shavit credits Brenner with territori­ alizing Hebrew literature in pre-state Palestine, arguing that his Hebrew writing in Palestine “was based on his deep understanding of the difficult situation of Hebrew literary centers in Europe, that at the peak of their flowering they had begun their decline.”15 However, Brenner left Lemberg for Palestine for personal reasons, partly in response to his falling out with Gershon Shofman. Although Shavit concludes that the rise of the Hebrew center in Palestine was inevitable, Gershon Shaked has argued that the future of the literary center in the Yishuv was not assured until the 1930s.16 According to Shaked, in the 1920s both the decline of Hebrew in Euro­ pean centers and the failure of an American Hebrew center to develop actually posed a threat to the Yishuv, because the existence of these cent­ ers was necessary to continue Hebrew life in Palestine. He points to

13. Anita Shapira, Brener: sipur chayim (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2008) 152. 14. Shapira, Brener: sipur chayim 152. Iris Parush, Kanon sijruti ve-ideologiya le'umit: bikoret ha-sijrut shel frishman, be-hashvaa le-vikoret ha-sijrut she! klozner u-vrener (Jerusalem: Mosad bialik, 1992) 285-286. 15. Zohar Shavit, Ha-chayim ha-sijrutiyim be-eretzyisra el, 1910-1933 (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uchad, 1982) 32. 16. Gershon Shaked, "‘Haleva’i nitna la-hem ha-yekholet le-hamshikh: le-sugiyat merkazei ha-mashne ba-sifrut ha-ivrit ben shtei milchamot ha-'olam,” Tarbiz 51.3 (1982) 479-490.

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debates playing out among Hebrew writers on both continents about the future of Hebrew in the Yishuv and elsewhere to illuminate the transna­ tional networks that constituted Hebrew literary culture of the period. The Second Aliyah was not a discrete event for Hebrew literature, but was part of a much larger wave of Jewish immigration that took place between 1904 and 1914 and represents a period of expanding geographic vistas for both literatures. During this period both Hebrew and Yiddish writers left the Pale, crossing each other’s paths in a variety of centers including London, Bialystok, Lemberg, Berlin, New York, and Ottoman Palestine. Ruth Wisse explains that Yiddish writers who came to Amer­ ica shared the same aspirations as the Hebrew writers who immigrated to Palestine.17 Moreover many Hebrew writers who came to Palestine during this time arrived for only temporary stays or left and returned, including S. Y. Agnon, Bialik, and Kalmon Marmor.18 This mobility of Jewish writers coincided with an intensification of modernist innova­ tion. In 1907 the New York Yiddish journal Di yugend (The Youth) launched a group of young modernist poets who became known as Di yunge (the Young Ones).19 In 1905 European Hebrew prose reached new heights with the publication of Uri Nissan Gnessin’s groundbreaking modernist Hebrew prose fiction.20 In 1909 the preeminent Yiddish mod­ ernist Dovid Bergelson published his first novella Arum vokzal (At the Depot). Thus Shekhol ve-khishalon should be read not only in relationship to the Second Aliyah, but also in relationship to this larger episode of Jewish modernism. Brenner’s mobility during this period alongside his commitment to both Hebrew and Yiddish cannot be reduced to the narrative of the Sec­ ond Aliyah. Brenner restlessly circulated among the important Hebrew and Yiddish literary centers, ranging from small cities in the Pale to the metropolitan centers of Europe.21 Whether in London, Bialystok, or Lemberg, Brenner’s paths crossed with many Hebrew and Yiddish writ­ ers. Whereas Brenner departed London (where he worked for the Yid­ dish socialist press) for Lemberg and then Palestine, his close friend, the

17. Ruth Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)27-28. 18. Shapira, Brener: sipurchayim 177. 19. Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan 28. 20. Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) 66. 21. Brenner began his writing career in Gomel. He also lived and wrote in London, Lem­ berg, and Jaffa. He published his first story "Pat lechem” in Ha-melitz in 1900 after it was rejected by Ahad Ha-am for Hi-shiloach. Shapira, Brener: sipur chayirn 32, 39.

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Yiddish writer Lamed Shapiro, departed London for New York. On the advice of Berdichevsky, Brenner also considered moving to Switzerland, as well as settling in New York.22 Brenner’s arrival in Palestine was part of the larger circulation of early twentieth-century Jewish language culture and the transnational blossoming ofjewish-language modernisms. In her essay, “Jewish History: The Nationalism of Transnationalism, ” Shulamit Volkov remarks that “Jewish history, so fitting for a truly trans­ national treatment, seems to slip back repeatedly into the various forms of national history.”23 Using Germany as her example, Volkov explains that Jewish transnationalism was subordinated to two competing structures of national identification: Jews came to identify either as national minori­ ties, that is, “Jewish-Germans,” or as Zionists, transforming the trans­ national bonds of a diasporic culture into Jewish national bonds through Zionism. Once Jews began to assimilate as a minority in a larger national culture, according to Volkov, they lost their attachment not just to the “Land of Israel,” but also to Jews beyond their national borders. At the same time, Jews who embraced Zionism as a model forJewish nationalism successfully transformed the transnational bonds of a diasporic culture into national bonds. In both cases, non-national Jewish bonds could no longer withstand these two competing forces of nationalism. However, Jewish writers and artists, particularlyjewish-language writ­ ers, did not and could not abandon their transnational affiliations. Although fervent Hebraists and Yiddishists argued for a monolingual, national Jewish culture, their audiences identified with languages that united them across national borders and could not be defined in solely national terms. Hebrew and Yiddish authors were writing and publishing for a diasporic community, geographically dispersed and rife with com­ peting identifications. Brenner’s own Zionist sympathies did not prevent him from understanding the diasporic complexity of Hebrew and Yiddish literary culture in the 1910s. His portrayal of the circulation of Hebrew culture and his address to a diasporic audience challenge a national nar­ rative of Hebrew literature. Even after his immigration to pre-state Pales­ tine, Brenner was not so much writing the Hebrew nation into existence as describing the practical problem of writing for an audience without national territory.

22. For a discussion of Brenners ambivalence about immigrating to Palestine, see Michael Gluzman, Ha-guf ha-tstyoni: le'umiyut, niigdar, ve-miniyut ba-sifrut ha-ivrit ha-chadasha (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uchad, 2007) 145-156. 23. Shulamit Volkov, “Jewish History: The Nationalism of Transnationalism," Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen ttnd Theorien, eds. Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006) 200.

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In Shekhol vc-khishalon, Brenner enacts the diasporic conditions of his literary production, illuminating how Hebrew culture is not congruent with nationalism and the nation-state. Jewish diaspora has a historically non-national resonance, and the significance ofjewish exile and diaspora has never been historically fixed.24 At the turn of the century, Zionist thinkers redefined Jewish exile as a secular and political problem, which could be solved by human rather than divine intervention. They believed that the modernization and secularization ofjewish life meant that Jew­ ish culture could not survive unless it was transformed from a religious identity to a national identity. However, to accept the assumption that the Israeli state ended the Jewish diaspora is to conflate “the Judaic claim as to God’s will with a particular modern discourse, that of the nation-state,” and thereby to enlist an uncritically theological premise into a secular nationalist framework.25 Yet this take on Jewish diaspora has been embraced not only by Zionist critics but also by scholars of diaspora.26 Brenner’s novel refuses to portray the “negation of exile,” and instead underlines the frictions between Jewish nationalist aspirations and diasporic Jewish culture. Brenner resists the naturalization of Hebrew in the Yishuv and addresses a non-nationally defined reading commu­ nity. Brenner’s work highlights the tension between the national and transnational bonds that diaspora scholars must explore in order to under­ stand how a diasporic culture engages with, but does not necessarily become subsumed under, nationalist identity formations. Brenner’s Zionism was fraught with ideological ambivalence and has been described as a “minimalist Zionism,” a Zionism af-‘al-pi-chen (in spite of it all).27 When Brenner arrived in Palestine in 1909, he did not intend to create a vibrant Hebrew literary center, but rather to transform himself through physical labor into a Jewish pioneer. Discovering that he was not cut out for the life of a worker, he returned to his literary labors. Brenner’s failure to embody the ethos of physical work magnified his increasing skepticism toward the Zionist mantra of “negating diaspora.” In a 1912 review of the volume Ha-‘ivri ha-chadash (The New Hebrew Man), Brenner attacks the collection for its naive pretense of rejecting 24. Arnold Eisen, Galut: A Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) 64. 25. Jon Stratton, “(Dis)placing the Jews: Historicizing the Idea of Diaspora,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 6.3 (1997) 304. Also see Erich Gruen, “Diaspora and Home­ land,” Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties ofjewish Identity, ed. Howard Wettstein (Berkeley: Univer­ sity of California Press, 2002) 18-46. 26. For example see Stuart Hall “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Identity, Community, Cul­ ture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990) 222-237. 27. Avner Holtzman, "Berdichevski, brener, ve-eretz-yisra‘el,” Erets-yisra el ba-hagut ha-yehudit ba-mea ha-esrim, ed. Aviezer Ravitski (Jerusalem: Yad ben tsvi, 2004) 373.

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diasporic Jewish culture. The “new Hebrew man” was a Zionist term used to refer to the national Jewish subject; whose masculine identity was pred­ icated on the rejection of diaspora as a feminine condition. In his review, Brenner points out the irony that the project is being carried out by Jews who are themselves in diaspora. He goes even further, declaring that all Hebrew literature is diasporic, referring to “the actual exile in which we all find ourselves.”28 Although he did not consistently describe the project of building a new Hebrew culture in Palestine in those terms, he remained skeptical of an ideology of Zionism that rejected all elements of European Jewish culture. In her 1940 essay “Zekher le-brener” (“In Memory of Brenner”), the renowned modernist Hebrew poet Leah Goldberg muses on Brenner’s difficult trajectory from the shtetl to the Yishuv. A regular Jew [Brenner], who left the shtetl and rolled and wandered in the cities of Europe and then arrived at his heart’s desire, yes at his heart’s desire;

although, on closer view, there is no place in the world that suits the man’s

desires. The path of a man and the path of his language are one and the same. Modern Hebrew, the language in which he wrote and in which he struggled

while he lived and grappled with his surroundings—it too made the journey with him across obstacles and hard clumps of earth to the pages of his books.29

According to Goldberg, Brenner’s journey is at once the Zionist travel narrative par excellence and a repudiation of that narrative. Cleverly referring to Brenner as an “adam-me-yisra’el,” an idiom that means a “regular Jew” but is literally a “man from Israel,” she describes how he leaves the shtetl and wanders Europe until the man from Israel arrives at his spiritual destination, the Land of Israel, only to discover that the place he longs for does not exist. Goldberg refuses to situate Brenner comfortably in Palestine, just as Brenner refused to settle himself there. Instead, she describes both Brenner and modern Hebrew as European arrivals on foreign soil, struggling to take root in a new land. Both the writer and his language were not at home, not quite attached to the new landscape of a foreign country. Nevertheless, Goldberg ignores the fact that Brenner did not travel the path from the shtetl to the Land of Israel with only Hebrew in his knapsack; he also carried with him his native tongue, Yiddish. Just as Brenner’s Hebrew cannot overcome the hard earth of the Yishuv, neither can his Yiddish. Brenner perceived both

28. Brenner, "Rishmei kore,” Ktavim, vol. 3,796; Gluztnan, Ha-guf ha-tsiyoni 150. 29. Goldberg, "Zekher le-brener," Ha-omets le-chulin (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat po'alim, 1975) 182.

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languages as connected to the larger diaspora of Jewish culture, and for him Palestine was one station on the map of modern Jewish culture.

LANGUAGE WOES

Like Brenner, the characters in Shekhol ve-khishalon are all immigrants who arrive in Palestine speaking Yiddish, but hoping to transform themselves into "new Hebrew men” (or women). However, they fail to achieve any measure of material success and/or personal happiness there, and many of them fantasize about leaving. Reb Yosef’s daughter Miriam dreams of traveling to America or Beirut; Mr. Bassin (a Jerusa­ lemite by birth) leaves for America; Chefetz’s romantic rival, Chamilin, circulates between Europe, Beirut, and Jerusalem; and Chefetz moves between Western Europe and Palestine. All of the characters in the novel are acquainted with each other from their time in Europe, seemingly trapped in a diasporic circuit of relationships. Reb Yosef taught Chamilin in Kiev; Chefetz made Chamilin’s acquaintance in Switzerland; and Menachem, who accompanies Chefetz to Jerusalem, met him first in Europe. Despite their familiarity with each other, the characters are not happy to meet again, and they disavow their shared pasts. Just as the preface figures storytelling as an exchange between alienated immigrants, one of whom steals the diary of the other, so too are the personal relationships within the novel characterized by suspi­ cion and distrust. Although the preface introduces the novel as a document of personal or psychological breakdown, the characters are beset by linguistic prob­ lems that drive their personal and psychological dramas.30 They suffer from linguistic insufficiencies that are linked both to their own personal failures and to the larger historical circumstances that underlie their psy­ chological breakdowns. The main characters are native Yiddish speakers from the Pale of Settlement who have traveled to Palestine by way of Europe. As they move beyond the Pale, they fail to adapt to a new and ever-changing Jewish linguistic system. Brenner does not suggest, how­ ever, that the rejection of Yiddish and the embrace of modern Hebrew would solve the problem. He portrays Yiddish as a diasporic vernacular

30. Brenner’s novel, particularly the detail of the mad diarist, recalls Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Gogol’s Diary of a Mad Man. Hebrew writers were influenced by Dostoyevsky’s characterization of alienation and madness in Notes. Furthermore, after his ar­ rival in the pre-state Palestine, Brenner began translating Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment into Hebrew.

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language threatened by Hebraism and by assimilation, a language that both signals a shameful masculinity and serves as a pragmatic vernacular. The novel opens with Chefetz returning to the Yishuv after a sojourn in Europe. He had fled the collective farm three years earlier following a mental breakdown. This initial departure signifies both his personal and ideological weaknesses; he left as a failed Hebrew pioneer. At the time, Chefetz had dreams of a bourgeois European life filled with days spent strolling European boulevards and attending concerts and the theater. However, Chefetz’s inability to speak a European language interferes with these fantasies. He seeks to transform himself into a cosmopolitan (or westernized) European Jew, but his project of self-transformation fails because he cannot situate himself linguistically: Whichever [city] he’d arrive at, he would live in the corner of some revolting

dirty bed in the home of one of those immigrant peddlers from the filthyjewish neighborhoods found in Western European cities, where even the zhargon

[Yiddish] of the fathers who were living there (the sons studied at school and

thus spoke the language of the land) was no longer yehudi [Jewish], was not

ivre-taytsh, but some other mixture, new, foreign, and alien... .31

Brenner’s narrator describes the linguistic landscape of Eastern European Jewish immigrants by using various Hebrew terms to refer to Yiddish. For example, he uses the term zhargon, which means “Yiddish,” but by Brenner’s time the word had taken on the derogatory connotations of the English “jargon.”32 The Hebrew adjective yehudi means “Jewish,” but it can also be used to refer to the Yiddish language. Brenner purposely plays with the ambiguity between “Yiddish” and “Jewish.” When the narrator describes the fathers’ zhargon as no longer “Jewish” (yehudi), this could mean either that the language is no longer ethnically Jewish or that it is no longer Yiddish. The meaning of “not Jewish” is further explicated as meaning “not ivre-taytsh” a Yiddish term for the Old Yiddish translations of Hebrew religious texts primarily intended for women, but also com­ monly used by men. The word invokes the traditional world of Jewish texts in Eastern Europe and represents the place of Yiddish in Ashkenazi Jewish liturgical culture. A language that is not ivre-taytsh is a language

31. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1455. 32. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Jews regularly referred to Yiddish as zhargon (jargon). This changed in the late nineteenth century when Yiddish newspapers began to refer to themselves as Yiddish instead of zhargon. By the Czernowitz conference in 1909, Yiddish’s pride of place in the Jewish linguistic pantheon had destigmatized the language.

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not translated from the Hebrew and not stemming from traditional Jew­ ish sources. This language—a de-judaized zhargon that has broken off from the structures of traditional Jewish life in the Pale—is alien to Chefetz. It is both Jewish and not Jewish, both Yiddish and not Yiddish. Although these older men are speaking neither the local national language nor Yiddish, their patois marks them as Jewish. The passage above describes this transforming Jewish linguistic com­ munity in familial terms. The fathers speak a new Jewish patois, and their sons speak the national language: German, French, or English. This lin­ guistic difference between fathers and sons highlights Chefetz’s exclusion and alienation from the Jewish family writ large. Brenner portrays him as a man with few ties. There is no information about his parents or brothers, or the town or village he left behind in Europe. Whereas the multigenerational immigrant families in London or Berlin acclimate to Western European languages, Chefetz remains among the impoverished popula­ tion of single Jewish men, who circulate among Jewish charitable board­ ing houses in the Western European capitals: “the rejected, the refugees, the bored, the uprooted, the abject, and the embittered ones, like him... ”33 These men have no families, no home, and no shared language. They are isolated from the communities of assimilating Jewish immigrants. Bren­ ner understands and figures their isolation linguistically, through their attachment to Yiddish, or rather to ivre-taytsh—to the linguistic world of Yiddish tightly connected to the traditional world of Eastern European Hebrew culture. This metalinguistic description of Jewish immi­ grants indexes the tension between Hebrew and Yiddish, it also links this diasporic community of alienated men with the community of male Jew­ ish writers of the period who were also torn between Hebrew and Yiddish. Chefetz’s linguistic anxieties also refract the sexual-linguistic tensions of the period. In Europe, Yiddish represents Chefetz’s abjection and lone­ liness, as well his sexual anxieties. Chefetz is especially intimidated by the Jewish women he meets. In his encounters with women, he experi­ ences the shame of Yiddish, referring over and over again to the language as “jargon.” And here—when he turned to some Russian exile, to say nothing of a native,

or to a local woman in this country, in the aba-inta (father-mother) language

out of necessity because he could only understand a few words of the language of the land, he had the feeling that he was speaking zhargon, zhargon, zhargon,

while his interlocutor, or all the more so, his female interlocutor, would

33. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1455.

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choose to chat with him in their preferred language—in Russian or the national language.34

Brenner employs the Hebrew term “aba-itna language,” literally father­ mother language, to refer to Yiddish. This Hebrew term is an approximate translation of the Yiddish, mame-loshn (literally mother tongue). How­ ever, Brenner transforms the maternal Yiddish into a parental Hebrew term for the language, and thus separates the language from its feminine associations.35 The narrator contrasts this familial term for Yiddish to the word zhargon. While Chefetz speaks his childhood Yiddish he feels that he is speaking zhargon. His linguistic shame isolates him from women. Chefetz’s anxieties about language reflect the conflicted transformation of the Ashkenazi sexual-linguistic system. Despite the creation of a newly masculinized Yiddish idiom, Yiddish still indexes a feminine audience. In the early twentieth century, Zionist Hebraists like Yosef Klausner exploited these associations and rejected Yiddish as a sign of a weak diasporic Jewish culture. Brenner, however, offers an interesting take on these gendered linguistic politics. He portrays Jewish women as linguistic experts who have successfully moved beyond Yiddish, whereas his immi­ grant male characters fail to learn another language. In Chefetz’s encoun­ ters with women, they are the ones who dictate the linguistic terms. These women’s linguistic prowess represents the fears that Jewish immigrant men felt about the loss of their patriarchal authority in the new centers of Jewish immigration.36 Although Yiddish is a mark of shame for Chefetz in Europe, Brenner portrays Yiddish as the shameless lingua franca among Jews in the Yishuv. Chefetz returns to Palestine, in part because he felt comfortable speaking “the language of Ashkenazi Jews” while there.37 In Palestine, the narrator refers to Yiddish as neither zhargon nor ivre-taytsh, but rather as the “lan­ guage of Ashkenazi Jewry,” the most neutral designation for the language in the novel. Chefetz feels comfortable speaking to women in Palestine because there is no pressure to assimilate to a non-Jewish language, and he is on equal footing with them. In the Yishuv, even the most superficial use of Hebrew signified a measure of cultural superiority. As the narrator

34. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1456. 35.1 thank Robert Adler Peckerar for this observation. 36. These linguistic anxieties are refracted in other literature of the period. See my discus­ sion of language, gender and indexicality in Dovid Bergelson’s and Dvora Barons work, Schachter, "Modernist Indexicality: The Language of Gender, Race, and Domesticity in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism,” MLQ. 11.4 (2011) forthcoming. 37. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1456.

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notes, if in the Yishuv Chefetz “sometimes spoke with a teacher, or a stu­ dent, or a young woman educated in Hebrew, they all felt a bit superior.”38 Whereas in Europe women surpass his language skills with their knowl­ edge of European languages, in pre-state Palestine these gendered con­ cerns disappear. There, unlike in Europe, the language question was a wholly pragmatic one. This linguistic pragmatism preserved the illusion of Hebraism. During the early twentieth century, “Hebrew” replaced “Jewish” as the adjective of national identity, signifying a “non-diasporicjewish identity.”39 Hebrew became a sign for the ideology of “the new Hebrew man” as opposed to a marker of language. Eastern European Jewish immigrants embraced Hebraism as an ideology of self-transformation and regeneration, believ­ ing that through Hebrew they could shed their diasporic character and embrace a new Hebrew masculinity. In effect, to be Hebrew trumped speaking Hebrew. As Hebrew was symbolically reterritorialized and nationalized, “Jewish” became a deterritorialized modifier.40 Brenner critiques this ideology of Hebraism through his characters’ personal despair and through the formal structures of the novel. Just as Yiddish speech fails Chefetz in Europe, Hebrew speech fails the charac­ ters in the Yishuv. Reb Yosef, Chefetz’s uncle, is a traditional Eastern Euro­ pean Jew, the most literate and polylingual character in the novel. He reads German, Hebrew, and Yiddish, and he is educated in both religious and secular topics. Reb Yosef is one of the few characters who actually speaks and thinks in Hebrew, albeit an antiquated Hebrew. However, he cannot adapt his linguistic knowledge to life in the Yishuv, as evidenced by his continued failure to secure a teaching position. At first, this is because the Hebrew schools in the Yishuv have embraced the Sephardic-inflected pronunciation, whereas Reb Yosef speaks Ashkenazi-accented Hebrew. Later in the novel, when Goldman, the wealthy owner of a guest house, proposes to create a modern Orthodox school in Ashkenazi Hebrew, Reb Yosef turns down a teaching position because he has come to embrace the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew, which he believes to be more proper. Reb Yosef’s refusal to adapt to the changing linguistic norms of the Yishuv means that he is unable to support himself and his family financially. By the end ofthe novel, Reb Yosef surrenders his linguistic mastery, no longer Germanizing the Yiddish letters he receives from his sons (he is ashamed

38. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1456. 39. Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine," Studies in Zionism 4 (1981) 167. 40. In effect, Jewish became a synonym for diasporic.

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of their Yiddish) or debating the merits of Sephardi Hebrew pronuncia­ tion. In his own internal monologue he quotes to himself the Book of Daniel, “Shut up the words until the end of time.’41 Women in the novel fare no better than men, in part because the women have been deprived of a traditional Jewish education and therefore have even less knowledge of Hebrew. Reb Yosef, himself a teacher, chose not to educate his own daughters in traditional Jewish texts. Therefore, Miriam lacks an education injewish and non-Jewish languages. Ironically, Miriam hopes to escape her family’s poverty by studying to become a teacher in the national schools, the very occupation her religious father repudiates. She studies Hebrew with Shneyerson, a young Jewish emigrant from the Pale, in the hopes of entering the Teacher’s Institute. However, Miriam gives up on this futile task and leaves her family for Jaffa. Once in Jaffa, with neither money nor work, she writes to Chefetz for help, in “poor Yid­ dish spiced with Hebrew words, picked at random, without proper spelling or punctuation.’*12 Her letter merges Hebrew and Yiddish indis­ criminately, a sign of the Hebrew illiteracy that prevents her from contin­ uing her studies. She does not complete the postcard, afraid to confide her loneliness and unable to express herself in Hebrew. Instead she pricks her­ self with a hairpin, and her self-inflicted wound turns fatal. Reb Yosef and Miriam are beset by failures of communication: Reb Yosef cannot adapt to the new Sephardic-inflected modern Hebrew, and Miriam cannot plea for help in Hebrew. They are alienated from each other and everyone around them. Brenner abstracts the failures of personal intimacy in the novel, con­ necting personal relationships to the larger historical and literary problem of immigration and language. In the second half of the novel, the narrator comically describes a budding romance between Shneyerson, a Yiddish­ speaking Jewish immigrant, and an unnamed Sephardi Jewish woman. The narrator’s description of their public exchange illuminates the central concerns of the novel: The Sephardi woman, like all of her girlfriends who have dealings with the Ash­ kenazi Jews in the Yishuv, the old ones and the new ones, knows of course Yid­

dish (zhargon) no less than Shneyerson. (All the fools abroad imagine that

Hebrew reigns ... this too is another story.) However, despite the fact that she knows, and that Shneyerson knows that she knows, and she knows that Shney­

erson knows that she knows, and Shneyerson knows that she knows because he

41. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1634. 42. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1651.

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knows that she knows, despite all of that, both he, Shneyerson and she, his

object of desire, the exotic type, the two of them pretend that—God forbid.... Who? Them? They know Yiddish? The two of them pretend that only Hebrew

brings the two of them closer: the two elements of the Yishuv.4344

Brenner plays up this farce with his drawn-out and repetitive descriptions of the young lover’s linguistic charade. The repetition of what each lover knows underscores the absurdity of the farce; anyone listening to their actual speech would immediately understand that neither of them speaks Hebrew. Brenner offers up a sample of the couple’s Hebrew dialogue: “Tokhal shokolada, tokhal (eat chocolate, eat).’H4 This grammatically incorrect passage mocks the couple’s stumbling Hebrew and their at­ tempts to hide their Yiddish speech. Brenner merges the syntax of Yiddish (the repetition of the verb) and the propositional attitude of Yiddish (en­ couraging someone to eat) with the Hebrew verb structure (the use of the future as an imperative) and the Hebrew roots system. In addition, Brenner includes an imported internationalism “shokolada.” The result is a Hebrew idiom that connects the social, political, and linguistic world of the Yishuv to the larger circulation of Ashkenazi Jewish culture in the twentieth century. The couple’s very public conversation alludes to the multiple language and cultural contexts of Ashkenazi Jewish culture, as well as to the interrelationship among different Jewish communities. Although Brenner depicts this Ashkenazi Yiddish-Hebrew patois as the common language between the couple, Yiddish is not the Sephardi woman’s native language (which could presumably be Ladino, or possibly Turkish or Arabic). The Sephardi woman’s Yiddish speech is implausible, insofar as Yiddish would not be her language of intimacy. However, her ability to move between Yiddish and Hebrew, outside her own native Jew­ ish language, points to her linguistic sophistication above and beyond that of the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi men. The passage also shows how Ashkenazi Jews valorized the Sephardi pronunciation of Hebrew, reject­ ing the diasporic sounds of their own Ashkenazi Hebrew. Even though, as this encounter illuminates, they were wholly reliant on the syntax and cul­ tural norms of Yiddish.45

43. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1636. 44. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1636. 45. As Even-Zohar demonstrates, “Clearly, the actualization of the so-called Sephardic pro­ nunciation by natives of Eastern Europe was quite different from that employed in Palestine by non-Europeans. What was actualized, in fact, was only the minimum necessary to establish it in opposition to Ashkenazic pronunciation." See Even-Zohar, “The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture" 178.

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The conversation also frames the larger stakes of the novel; mirroring the complex relationship between diasporic writers and their audiences. If, as the narrator asserts, everyone, including the couple, knows the linguis­ tic truth, to whom is this charade directed? The novel answers this ques­ tion in parentheses: “All the fools abroad imagine that Hebrew reigns ... this too is another story.” Although the narrator relegates this comment to a parenthetical aside, it is in parentheses that Brenner relates the important details of the novel. At these moments of the text, the narrator breaks through the frame story in order to offer his own subjective account of his writing practices and to draw attention to his editorial transformations. In this case, he shares his cynical view of the couple’s farce. Desperate economic necessity justifies their farce; the narrator spends ample time describing the charitable institutions funded byjewish communities abroad that sustain the impoverished Jewish immi­ grants. These institutions have their own ideological and linguistic expectations about those in the holy land who receive their charity. How­ ever, Brenner embeds this scene, like many others, to comment on his own fictional practices. Just as this Hebrew anecdote addresses “fools abroad,” so too does Brenner’s novel. This diasporic address recalls the fictional preface: the narrator and the diarist are both departing Pales­ tine and the diary is headed to ports unknown.

LANGUAGE, TRANSLATION, AND DECEPTION The conversation between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi couple above hints at the deceptive linguistic fiction in the novel. Just as the couple pre­ tends to speak Hebrew, the narrator also pretends that the diaries were written in Hebrew. However, Chefetz could only have written his most intimate thoughts in Yiddish, and therefore the narrator not only adapts the diary, but also translates it into Hebrew. Some of the characters do have Hebrew knowledge. For example, Chefetz’s uncle is fluent in Hebrew, and his thoughts are portrayed in classical forms of the language. Although Brenner wrote the novel in Hebrew, he inserts this fictional act of translation to denaturalize the relationship between Hebrew and the Yi's/iuv. Moreover, the narrator, despite his pretense in the fictional preface, continues to point to his own dishonesty. He insistently reminds the reader that the language of the novel, Hebrew, is not the language of the characters, peppering the Hebrew dialogue with English, Yiddish, Ger­ man, and other international words or inserting parenthetical assertions. For example, when Chefetz’s uncle is telling a story and refers to sz/rez tahara (books of purity), the narrator parenthetically inserts that “in the

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actual language of the speech: di reynikeytn.”*6 The narrator playfully mistranslates di reynikeytn as sifrei tahara, rather than the more accurate sifrei kodesh (holy books). Di reynikeytn literally means “ritually pure ones” and is a Yiddish term for the Torah, and sifrei tahara (purity books) is a caique of the Yiddish. The narrators parenthetical insertions and purposeful mistranslations operate on a number of levels. They extend the frame narrative into the body of the novel, pointing to the narrator’s editorial presence and his redaction of the protagonist’s diaries. By por­ traying the narrator’s act of translation in cynical and deceptive terms, Brenner exposes the hypocrisy of Hebraism, and by extension realist Hebrew fiction set in Palestine. Through the narrator’s manipulations, Brenner captures the fraught relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish. Brenner emphasizes the unequal power relations implicit in the act of translation through the guise of a secondary character, Kahanovitsh, a Russian Jew and sharp-tongued gossip who rooms with Shneyerson. Dur­ ing a visit to Reb Yosef, Kahanovitsh spreads rumors about Shneyerson’s new affair with the Sephardi Jewish woman. The narrator precedes Kahanovitsh’s gossipy anecdote about Shneyerson with a long parenthetical digression, which at first appears to be unrelated to the narrative. How­ ever, the digression stands out because it comments on the frame premise of the novel, focusing on translation as an act of betrayal. Kahanovitsh briefly served as a Yiddish censor in the Russian army—he would read the letters sent home by Yiddish-speaking soldiers and translate them into Russian for his superiors. Kahanovitsh’s commanding officer had a mis­ tress whose fidelity the officer suspected, and the officer decided to inter­ cept and read one of her letters to confirm his suspicions. The blameless woman finds out about this indignity and makes him get on his knees to admonish him: “Reading someone else’s mail! How could you I’M7 Although the story focuses on Kahanovitsh’s commanding officer who exploits his authority by reading his mistress’s mail, Kahanovitsh’s betrayal is more egregious. As a censor, he uses his knowledge of Yiddish to inform on his fellow Jewish soldiers, reading their private letters in Yiddish and making them public in Russian. Both Kahanovitsh and his officer are doubles for the narrator; all three betray someone else’s trust by reading their private correspondence and translating it for public consumption. The novel portrays storytelling as unauthorized translations that rely on the exploitation of personal relationships. These acts of translation in the narrative disrupt the “rhetoric of sincerity” that Brinker attributes to

46. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1553. 47. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1636.

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Brenners writings. According to Brinker, Brenner’s frame stories serve exactly this “rhetoric of sincerity” by undermining the literariness of the device and emphatically calling attention to the opposition of life and lit­ erature. For Brinker, Brenner signals to his readers that these are “fictional stories whose inspiration comes from ‘life itself’ and not from literature.’"18 Although Brenner’s novel captures the complicated “reality” of linguistic life, it does so through the insincerity of the narrator. The narrator’s cyni­ cal parenthetical interjections and his unscrupulous translation practices call into question his reliability as a narrator. Brenner does not turn his back on his commitment to portraying “the real,” but instead shows how the ideologies of monolingualism themselves distort the practices of mimesis. Moreover Shekhol ve-khishalon draws attention to literary con­ vention as the organizing principle of the novel. On the one hand, the dia­ ries function as a documentary source for the novel. On the other hand, the diaries are written by a man who has lost his grip on reality,- his mental breakdown prompts the narrative breakdown. Furthermore, the diary has been rewritten according to novelistic convention. These levels of literary artifice disrupt the novel’s realist pretension. The narrator also calls into question the realist pretenses of the novel that he has produced from the diaries. He explains: On the one hand, I did not make use of all the material, and there remained several matters that are quite essential. On the other hand, I did not adapt and

tie together sufficiently even the little that I did use, and a memoiristic scent still emanates from the chapters, and in several places the voice of someone speaking

for himself is still heard even through the third person.48 49

Unable to erase both the “memoiristic scent” and the first-person deixis, our narrator is reluctant to publish the work because it fails to live up to the realist pretenses of the third-person novel. Paradoxically, it is both too close and too far from the original diary. In Abramovitsh’s novels, Bayamim ha-hem and Shloyme reb khayims, Shlomo successfully writes his own memoirs in the third person. In Brenner’s novel, the project of the third person narration breaks apart. Here, the narrator cannot succeed in transforming someone else’s memoirs into the form of the novel because he can neither erase Chefetz’s voice nor his Yiddish. Thus, the remaining “memoiristic scent” in the novel is the lingering presence of Chefetz’s Yid­ dish voice. Brenner’s narrator, the novel’s posited translator, aims to erase

48. Brinker, 'Ad ha-simta ha-tveryanit 20. 49. Brenner, Shekhol ve-khishalon 1443.

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Chefetz from his own diaries, eradicating not only the first person but also the original Yiddish. This act of translation violates Chefetz’s voice and ultimately displaces Chefetz as the central character of the novel.

TRANSLATION AND THE LANGUAGE POLITICS OF THE NATION-STATE

The fictional preface exposes the conflicted relationship in the story between language choice, literary mimesis, and geography. Brenner illu­ minates both the aesthetic and personal consequences of Hebraism by showing how the imposition of monolingualism distorts both the inti­ mate lives of his characters and his own practices of realism. He portrays the relationship between Hebrew and the Yishuv critically, depicting a Hebrew world of alienation and despair. Brenner counteracts the nation­ alization and naturalization of Hebrew through his character’s linguistic deficiencies and the specter of Yiddish.50 Translation in the novel chal­ lenges the ideological naturalization and territorialization of Hebrew in Palestine, signaling a diasporic and modernist aesthetic. Brenner wrote his novel in the language of an emergent nationalism, but he refuted the territorial-linguistic claims of that nationalism. He did not allow his literary language to be conscripted into the service of nation­ alism. Instead, he acknowledged an audience of Jewish readers fluent in both Hebrew and Yiddish, who resided in New York, Berlin, Odessa, War­ saw, Jerusalem, and points in between. These diasporic communities of readers embraced multiple national, political, and linguistic identities. Their linguistic and territorial uncertainties are registered in Brenner’s writing through the formal, modernist strategies of framing, translation, and metaliterary awareness. Brenner’s concealed translation disrupts the premises of referential realism and critiques the anti-Yiddish ideologies of Zionism and Hebra­ ism. He portrays translation as a coercive act, one that calls into ques­ tion the literary project of “National Revival.”51 Although he wrote

50. Walter Mignolo argues that it is precisely the movement of populations in the twentieth century that has undermined the naturalization of language and territory. See “Linguistic Maps, Literary Geographies, and Cultural Landscapes: Languages, Languaging, and (Trans)nationalism," The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America, ed. Doris Sommer (Dur­ ham: Duke University Press, 1999) 60. 51. There has been little critical discussion of Brenner’s relationship to Hebrew and Yiddish. Iris Parush discusses his language politics in Kanon sifruti ve-ideologya le'umit 284-286. Yitzhak Bakon examines Brenner as a bilingual writer in Brener u-gnesin ke-sofrim du-leshoniyim (Beersheva: Ha-ketedra le-yidish, Universitat Ben Gurion, 1986).

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predominantly in Hebrew, he continued to read and review Yiddish litera­ ture; while also maintaining close friendships and correspondences with Yiddish writers and thinkers.52 In his essays Brenner often spoke out against the Zionist rejection of Yiddish. For example, he denounced Yosef Klausner’s polemic against Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire who listed Yiddish as their native language in the 1910 census.53 For Brenner, Klausner’s outrage too quickly disregarded the linguistic reality of the majority of Jews living in Galicia: "They understood that zhargon was a fact, an important and dear fact in our national life, and that we are obliged to fight for her, to protect her from the diasporic reality that threatens to swallow her.”54 In an earlier essay on the Jewish press, written while Bren­ ner was in London, he also criticized the New York-based Yiddish writer Reisin for his dismissal of Hebrew. Brenner warned that Yiddish also faced extinction in cities like Vienna and New York, where the language could become irrelevant within a generation. Brenner saw the fate of Yiddish and Hebrew as inextricably linked.55 In his well-known essay “Ha-zhaner ha-erets yisraeli ve-‘avizarehu” (“The Land of Israel Genre and Its Accoutrements”), Brenner opposed glorified representations of the Yishuv and railed against the fraudulent representations of Jewish life in Hebrew literature as “the lie that reigns here (in the Yishuv) in life-perspective and life-understanding ”56 He criti­ cized the majority of literature from the Yishuv for being written from a single point of view, which he called “Ha-tikva ha-le’umit” (national hope) in a sarcastic reference to Naftali Imber’s poem “Ha-Tikva.”57 In numer­ ous essays and letters, he expounded on the importance of maintaining a firm connection to the real.58 Brenner was concerned that writing in Hebrew in the Yishuv would produce the untenable illusion that his char­ acters were speaking Hebrew, serving the very ideologies he disparaged

52. Yael Chaver, What Must Be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine (Syra­ cuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004) 42-43. 53. Brenner "Noshanot,” Ktavim, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat po'alim; Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uchad, 1986) 699-705. 54. Brenner, "Noshanot” 702. 55. Brenner, “Rishmei sha'a" Ktavim, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat po'alim; Ha-kibbutz hame’uchad, 1986) 41. For a further discussion of Brenners relationship to Yiddish see Parush, Kanon sifruti 284. 56. Brenner, "Ha-zhaner ha-erets yisraeli ve-avizarehu,” Ktavim, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat po'alim; Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uchad, 1986) 572. 57. "Ha-tikva" was written by the Galician Jewish poet Naftali Herz Imber in the 1870s and published in 1886. It was later set to music by Samuel Cohen and was adopted as a Zionist anthem at the seventh Zionist conference in 1905. 58. Todd Hasak-Lowy offers an interesting discussion of the origins of Brenner’s commit­ ment to realism, citing from Brenner’s famous letter to Uri Nissan Gnessin and his essay on "The Field of Literature.” See Lowy, Here and Nowxii-xiv.

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when he argued that writers in the Yishuv all write from a Zionist perspec­ tive that occludes a difficult and unstable social reality: The Hebrew writer in Russia and elsewhere knows, and his readers know as

well, that he writes from the life of the diaspora in a language that is not spoken. This is an uncomfortable situation, but a clear one. However, with us, it is after all different. Here, there is a clichdd demand for sketches, where the imprints and language will both be "national revival.”59

According to Brenner, the European Hebrew writer does not pretend to be writing in the language that his characters are speaking, and his readers are aware of this; therefore, there is no risk of ideological mystification. In the Yishuv, however, the situation differs. It requires that writers pretend that they are describing a new national Hebrew life in Hebrew. Brenner ironically opines that everything in this new cliched literature must be about “National Revival.” However, Brenner avoids this problem by describing the fragmented linguistic and social reality of the Yishuv through the subjective point of view of characters who suffer from their own troubled relations to reality. Brenner’s reservations about writing Hebrew and his critique of the Hebrew revival help explain why he contemplated publishing Shekhol ve-khishalon in Yiddish instead of Hebrew. In a surprising letter to his good friend, the Yiddish writer and editor Nachman Meisel (dated December 1,1914), Brenner wrote in Hebrew: And here’s the thing: for more than a year I have held on to a long four-part

story (approximately 12 or 13 printing sheets) in Hebrew, and it seems to me

the best I have written until now. However, I haven’t wanted to publish it until this point for various personal reasons. Now it occurs to me: Perhaps the Kunst-

Farlag will purchase it from me? That is to say: I will write it in zhargon [Yid­ dish] (the title of the story is “Layden” [“Suffering”]) and the Kunst-Farlag will publish it as a special book.60

On February 15, 1915, he sent another letter to Meisel, this time in Yid­ dish. He writes to Meisel that he has worked for days trying to translate his story “Nerves” into Yiddish: Having spent a few days working on [a translation of] my story “Atsabim”

("Nerves”) I came to be convinced that writing in Yiddish is for me, technically,

59. Brenner, “Ha-zhaner ha-erets yisra'eli ve-avizarehu” 572. 60. Brenner, Koi kitveiy. ch. brener, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-me'uchad, 1967) 398.

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much more difficult than Hebrew, and that it is now beyond my powers. Re­

garding my larger story, the whole proposal must thus be dropped (as god is my witness, I should have done this).61

Brenner’s assertion that it is “beyond his powers” to write in Yiddish is especially poignant, given that this lament itself is written in Yiddish. Though Brenner discusses the technical difficulties of writing in Yiddish, the task before him is not writing new work, but translating from Hebrew to Yiddish. Michael Gluzman contends that Brenner sought to publish his work in Yiddish for the same reason that he also considered publishing it under a pseudonym: “to distance it [the novel] from the space of the Land of Israel.”62 According to Gluzman, Brenner wanted to protect himself from exposing the deeply personal autobiographical and psychological secrets embedded in the text, and for this reason he included the frame story and switched the point of view from first person to third person.63 The frame story, the narrator’s repeated parenthetical intrusions, and the concealed surreptitious translation, I argue, expose the linguistic tensions in the novel between Hebrew and Yiddish, estranging the language of the novel from the personal language of an individual protagonist.

TLISHUT (UPROOTEDNESS) AND DIASPORIC ADDRESS

Translation and textuality are among the central foci of Brenner’s frame story and the novel as a whole, at times overshadowing the drama of Chefetz’s personal crises. In a discussion of voice and the narrating instance, Gerard Genette compares the narrative conventions of “the novel as journal” to the epistolary novel. According to Genette, what is especially strange about the epistolary novel is that the letter “is at the same time both the medium of the narrative and an element in the plot.”64 As Genette explains, the medium becomes a central concern of the plot and vice versa. In Shekhol ve-khishalon, the story of the found journal is restricted to the fictional prologue. In the enclosed novel, we do not see Chefetz actually writing the journal. However, the frame nar­ rator’s voice and therefore the frame convention penetrates the body of the novel by means of the narrator’s parenthetical assertions and the

61. Brenner, Koi kitvey. ch. brener 401. 62. Gluzman, Ha-guf ha-tsiyoni 159. 63. Gluzman, Ha-guf ha-tsiyoni 23. 64. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) 217.

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various internally framed episodes that comment on the frame struc­ ture. The narrator’s interjections and his occasional reference to the “real language of the text” break down the boundaries between the fic­ tional prologue and the enclosed narrative. These narrative techniques draw attention to the medium of the novel, to both the Yiddish diary and the narrator’s act of translation. This formal attention to language and translation results in a modernist text that focuses on the linguistically exiled Yiddish diarist. This linguistic displacement amplifies Chefetz’s sense of dislocation and alienation. Chefetz, like many of the other younger men in the novel, is a prototypical talush (uprooted one), a common figure in the Hebrew and Yiddish literature of the period. Nurith Govrin has sketched their shared characteristics: He [the talush] is a hero who has broken from his parents’ house and his family, a break also in the wider sense of the term—with his past and with his tradition.

Full of expectations, the hero has reached the other side—what he called “life,” as against “book” [sic] which he left behind. He has discovered that he cannot strike roots in this new world, since the new doctrines he has learned in his new

place are no less disappointing than the books he left behind in his old world. He is thus suspended in midair, devoid and deprived of his past, with no present

and no future. This was a combination of spiritual disaffection, the lack of an

economic base, and social isolation, all of which were often expressed in a con­

centrated manner through the lack of ability to form a proper attachment to a woman. All this was a matter of personal experience, and it was all described

from the point of view of the individual, as the central and crucial problem of his life.65

Govrin describes talush literature as synthesizing a historical milieu that is experienced through the interior lives of estranged Jewish male charac­ ters.66 Her characterization of the talush accurately describes the strug­ gles of a generation of male Hebrew writers, torn between the traditional world of Jewish texts and the secular world of European literature, and struggling with their sexuality. Although Govrin views the talush as a cen­ tral innovation of the Hebrew literary renaissance in Europe, she criti­ cizes Brenner’s literary works written after his immigration to pre-state

65. Nurith Govrin, Alienation and Regeneration (Tel Aviv: MOD Books, 1989) 24. 66. For a discussion and gendered critique of the discourse of tlishut, see Sheila E. Jelen, Intimations of Difference: Dvora Baron in the Modem Hebrew Renaissance (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007) 13-24.

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Palestine for failing to move beyond the poetics of the European talush. According to Govrin, Brenner is unable to adapt to the new reality of life in the Yishuv, and therefore he only sees in Palestine a continuation of galut (exile).67 However, Govrin does not consider the linguistic dilemmas behind the alienation of these male characters. Far from being a failure to envision a non-exilic Hebrew, Brenner’s novel embraces a diasporic Hebrew aesthetic. Brenner’s novel transforms the talush into a vehicle of textuality. In Shekhol ve-khishalon, tlishut (uprootedness) is both a linguistic and tex­ tual problem. Chefetz and his acquaintances in the novel struggle with their linguistic failures. Chefetz uproots himself from the shtetl, but can­ not uproot himself from Yiddish. However, Chefetz’s diaries, and not Chefetz himself, are suspended on a boat between Port Said and Alexan­ dria. The talush is no longer a protagonist, and uprootedness no longer a personal condition—the first-person point of view has been eradicated from the novel. Instead, the talush is transcribed into a textualized, aes­ thetic problem of linguistic and spatial liminality. Brenner explores the literary and aesthetic effect of Hebraism in terms of uprootedness. He does so formalistically through the multiple layers of the novel, including the frames. The theme of uprootedness is also pertinent to Brenner’s publishing practices. Brenner’s major works written after his arrival in pre-state Pal­ estine were all published outside of Palestine: Atsabim (Nerves) in Lem­ berg, Mi-kan u-mi-kan in Warsaw, and Shekhol ve-khishalon in New York.68 Although Brenner participated in building a Hebrew printing infrastruc­ ture in pre-state Palestine, he published his novels abroad.69 Notably, these novels all portray the movement ofJewish immigrants and Jewish texts through Palestine, Europe, and New York. These works also high­ light the linguistic tensions between Yiddish and Hebrew. For example, Mi-kan u-mi-kan and Shekhol ve-khishalon share a similar frame premise. In both novels a frame narrator discovers a young man’s personal writings composed in Palestine. For each case, the young men leave Palestine with their private documents, which are then published abroad, and, as in the case of Shekhol ve-khishalon, heavily redacted by the frame narrator. In

67. Govrin, Alienation and Regeneration 112. 68. Brenner wrote Atsabim the year after his arrival in Palestine and published it in Shalechet in 1910. Mi-kan u-mi-kan was published by Sifrut in 1911. Shekhol ve-khisalon was published by Shtibel in 1920, although sections also appeared in print in a variety of journals in Palestine. 69. Shavit contends that necessity alone drove Brenner to publish outside of Palestine. However, Brenners letters to Meisel shows that he had other motivations. See Shavit, Ha-hayim ha-sijrutiyim 36.

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these novels, private, personal writing is transported away from Palestine and circulated to that very audience abroad, as if the displacement of per­ sonal writings and the multiplicity of languages preclude a private, per­ sonal, unfractured voice. Despite the ascendancy of nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jewish writers who chose to write in Jewish languages did not necessarily conceive of themselves or their audiences in national terms. Brenner’s desire to publish abroad underscores how Hebrew and Yiddish writers were struggling to articulate their relationship to lan­ guages and to reading audiences that could not be conceived in exclu­ sively national terms. While nationalism may have defined modern Jewish identity, a dispersed Jewish readership and new Hebrew literature could not be subordinated to nationalism. During this time, as displaced liter­ ary institutions circulated across the globe and a young national drive ebbed and waned, Jewish authors were separated from both audiences and literary institutions that were themselves in the process of upheaval. The separation of readers, writers, and publishers across Europe, the Americas, and pre-state Palestine represented an obstacle to the construc­ tion of a Hebrew reading audience. Shekhol ve-khishalon addresses a diasporic audience located in Europe, North America, and Palestine, depicting the diasporic conditions ofJew­ ish storytelling. Brenner’s novel describes diasporic literary production as a consequence of a fractured literary community comprised of readers and writers in distress. The novel mocks Zionism’s unification of one peo­ ple, one territory, and one nation. As the exchange between the Sephardi and Ashkenazi couple illuminates, for Brenner all speech in Palestine is also addressed elsewhere. Therefore, Brenner structures his novel accord­ ing to the logic of diasporic address, sending both the protagonist and the fictional author on a boat from Palestine to Port Said. Their shared jour­ ney, marred by psychological breakdown and literary exploitation, cap­ tures the formal constraints of diasporic writing. Dovid Bergelson, the preeminent modernist Yiddish writer, shared Brenner’s practical and aesthetic concerns about the instability ofJewishlanguage literary culture. Although the two men never lived in the same city together, both men were well aware of each other’s work and shared friends in common.70 Whereas Brenner struggled with the mimetic crisis of Hebrew in Palestine, Bergelson grappled with the uncertain future of

70. Brenner positively reviewed Bergelson s novel, Nokh alemen (When All Is Said and Done) in Ha-achdut (The Unity). See Brenner s review in Ktavim, vol. 4,1084. Bergelson also corresponded with Brenner in the same year, requesting a contribution from Brenner for Diyidishe velt.

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Yiddish in Berlin. In his short fiction from the interwar period, Bergelson reflected on the crisis of Yiddish culture and the uncertain position of the diasporic Yiddish writer. In the chapter that follows, I will examine how Bergelson’s concerns about writing in a language that lacked a territorial home amplified his modernist practices.

CHAPTER 3

Yiddish Modernism in Weimar Berlin

n Dovid Bergelson’s Yiddish short story, “Tsvishn emigrantn” (“Among Emigrants”); a young Jewish emigrant from Volhynia visits the home of an emigrant Jewish writer in Berlin. The writer describes the disjointed face of the impatient young stranger: one cheek is normal and the other alarmingly crooked, “like a cheek that is at war with the world.”1 The expressionist image of these two warring cheeks captures the young man’s psychological torment and rage as he wanders from his Ukrainian shtetl, to pre-state Palestine, and finally to Berlin.12 Arriving in Berlin, the young man happens upon a Ukrainian pogromist—the very pogromist who murdered his grandfather and destroyed his shtetl—living across the hall from him in a local boarding house. The young man then turns to the writer to help him revenge his grandfather and his shtetl, claiming that writers “are like the conscience of a nation. They are its nerves.”3 The young man’s statement disregards the question of what nation the Yid­ dish writer actually represents. Bergelson’s story depicts the pathology of the young delusional emigrant, chased through Berlin by phantom

I

1. Dovid Bergelson, “Tsvishn emigrantn,” Geklibe/ie verk, vol. 5 (Vilna: Kletzkin, 1930)

177. 2. Harriet Murav notes that Bergelson’s description of the young man’s face resembles Otto Dix's 1924 painting Skin Graft, explaining that “Dix’s portrait, like Bergelson’s verbal image, unites narrative and static description: a horrifying scene of violence unfolds on the young man’s face, transformed into a landscape of destruction." See "Bergelson, Benjamin, and Berlin: Justice Deferred,” Cultural Continuity in the Diaspora: Paris and Berlin 1917-1937, eds. Olga Tabachkova and Peter Wagstaff, forthcoming. 3. Bergelson, “Tsvishn emigrantn" 198.

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pogromists and doppelgangers, while capturing the dilemma of the stateless Yiddish writer and the conditions of Yiddish literary culture in the interwar period. Both the writer and the young man have been torn from their familiar cultural and linguistic contexts. The young man’s psychological torment mirrors the difficult social conditions of Yiddish writers who immigrated to Berlin after World War I. Bergelson’s mod­ ernist tale of personal and cultural breakdown resonates with Brenner’s bleak description of Jewish life in pre-state Palestine. Both works trans­ late the pathos of cultural and linguistic displacement into their protag­ onists’ suicidal desperation. However, whereas Brenner’s novel takes aim at the territorialization of Hebrew and the suppression of Yiddish, Ber­ gelson’s interwar stories, including, “Among Emigrants,” wrestle with the uncertain future of a literary culture that lacks a stable home. Bergelson channels this foreboding about the future of Yiddish into his diasporic, modernist prose fiction. In the early 1920s, emigrant artists and writers from all over Europe flocked to Berlin for its thriving intellectual and artistic communities. Berlin promised the possibilities of avant-garde artistic movements, the liberatory spirit of sexual revolution, and the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment.456 Between 1921 and 1924, both Hebrew and Yiddish writers arrived in the city with the hopes of shoring up a new Jewish liter­ ary and cultural center. They fled war-torn cities in Eastern Europe to escape hunger, poverty, and pogroms. In Berlin, they witnessed the mass spectacles of the cinema and the cabaret, eyed the crowds in the city’s thoroughfares, and wandered through the art galleries and museums. Weimar Berlin was more than a temporary way station for Jewish mod­ ernist writers; it served as an important site for the encounter between Jewish and non-Jewish modernist cultures? This encounter took place in the city’s many literary cafes, which attracted avant-garde modernist writers and served as a meeting place for the exchanges between Eastern and Western European Jewish and non-Jewish cultures? Jewish artists and writers were both witnesses to and participants in this flourishing

4. For a discussion of Weimar culture and the politics of gender, see Eric Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) 297-330. 5. Shachar Pinsker refers to Berlin as an "enclave” rather than a center, arguing against the reduction of Berlin to a temporary “station” of Jewish modernist culture. See Pinsker, “Deci­ phering the Hieroglyphics of the Metropolis: Literary Topographies of Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism,” Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture, eds. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2010) 28-29. 6. Pinsker delineates the important role of cafes as the meeting spaces for Jewish writers in Berlin. See, Pinsker, "Spaces of Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism: The Urban Cafes of Berlin,"

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modernist culture, including Hebrew and Yiddish writers like Uri Zvi Grinberg, Der Nister, Moyshe Kulbak, and Bergelson. Yiddish modern­ ist experimentation in Berlin should be read as part of the European modernist response to the violence of World War I, the rebellion against traditional artistic forms raging across Europe, and the challenge to bourgeois gender norms. However, the difficulty of writing avant-garde literature in a minor language for a diasporic reading audience amplified Jewish modernist experimentation.7 This chapter looks at Bergelson’s interwar fiction, focusing on the specific conditions of Yiddish culture in the Weimar period, to illuminate how Bergelson employed Yiddish as an instrument of modernist expression. The most prominent and widely read modernist writer on the Berlin Yiddish scene during the 1920s was Dovid Bergelson. He began his writ­ ing career as a young man in Kiev among the writers of the Kiev group, and after World War I he came under the influence of first Soviet and then Weimar culture. As an immigrant writer in Berlin in the 1920s, Bergelson faced the challenge of writing in a language that lacked a permanent home, a problem that intensified his modernist obsession with language. In this chapter, I examine Dovid Bergelson’s interwar Berlin writing, focusing on stories that thematize the unstable position of the Yiddish writer in the 1920s and the uncertain future of Yiddish itself. Modernist German-language Jewish writers of the period also viewed Yiddish as a language of literary curiosity, turning eastward in their writing toward the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the shtetl. These writers, including Alfred Doblin, Joseph Roth, and Franz Kafka, saw in the Eastern European Yiddish-speaking world and in Yiddish itself a lens through which to understand their own place—as outsiders of modernity. In contradistinc­ tion to these modernist writers, Bergelson sought to bring the language into the world of the metropolitan center and to sever it from its connec­ tions with the romanticized tradition that appealed to his Germanlanguage Jewish contemporaries. Unlike Brenner and Abramovitsh’s works, Bergelson’s fiction is less concerned with the friction between Hebrew and Yiddish than the tensions between Yiddish and the languages of the European metropolis, particularly Russian and German.8 In his

Transit und transformation Osteuropaisch-judische Migranten in Berlin 1918-1939, eds. Gertrud Pickhan and Verena Dohrn (Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010) 61-62. 7. By “minor" I am referring to languages that belong to minority or small reading communities. 8. Bergelson began his career writing in Hebrew and Russian before switching to Yiddish, and he was aware of developments in Hebrew literature, even though he chose to develop his career in Yiddish.

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interwar fiction, Bergelson rewrites the traditional Jewish tropes of exile and diaspora. He portrays Yiddish culture’s uncertain place within the changing Jewish linguistic and cultural polysystem and in the context of interwar European literary culture. Bergelson frames his stories with multiple and simultaneous tempo­ ralities to register Yiddish’s disjointed and diasporic attachments to the traditional world of the shtetl and to the modern world of the metropolis. He captures the trials of Yiddish culture through his characters’ psycho­ logical anguish and suicides. However, he encloses their personal suffer­ ing in frame stories that situate his characters’ psychological breakdowns within the historical contexts of World War I, the dissolution of Yiddish, the radical force of revolution, and the new sexual politics of the post­ World War I era. Bergelson’s stories waver between realism and allegory, capturing the disrupted and fractured spatio-temporalities of Yiddish cul­ ture and the Yiddish language. The origins of Yiddish modernism are like those of many other mod­ ernisms: it was forged through immigration and urbanization. Bergel­ son’s journey to Berlin mirrored the journeys of many well-known writers and artists like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Marina Tsvetaeva, all of whom immigrated to European metropolitan centers and participated in the period’s avant-garde movements, such as futur­ ism, expressionism, and dadaism. What distinguishes Bergelson from these canonical European writers is that he continued to write in his native language. Contemporary theories of modernism, including transnational modernist writing, tend to focus on modernist writers, whether as immigrants or cosmopolitan citizens, who wrote in major European languages as well as English. Raymond Williams contends that modernism developed as writers moved from the peripheries to the European metropolitan centers, where they encountered the polyphony of new vernaculars and broke from the traditional contexts of their national or provincial languages.9 According to Williams, the formal innovations of modernism can be understood by examining how immi­ grant artists and writers assimilated to the major languages of Western Europe. He explains that “to the immigrants especially, with their new second common language, language was more evident as a medium—a medium that could be shaped and reshaped—than as social custom.”10 When immigrant writers begin to write in their non-native, metropolitan

9. Raymond Williams, "The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism,” Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, eds. David Kelley and Edward Timms (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985) 21-22. 10. Williams, "The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism” 22.

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languages, according to Williams, they are better able to see language as “arbitrary and conventional.”11 These writers break from their pro­ vincial social contexts, and thus their provincial readership. Williams sees a necessary dichotomy between the provincial and metropolitan, arguing that is was the centripetal forces of modernism that drove writ­ ers from the periphery to the center, and from minor languages to major languages. Williams’s Western European view of modernism ignores the multi­ ple modernist cultures that appeared in peripheral centers or in smaller languages. Not all modernist writers abandoned their native languages; many continued to write in these languages whether or not they moved to the metropolitan center. Immigrant writers struggled with the demands of multiple languages and cultural contexts, while continuing to address a diasporic reading community, defined by its smaller or pro­ vincial languages. Yiddish modernists negotiated the tangible problems they faced as immigrants writing in a rapidly evolving language that lacked a fixed national home. These writers paid keen attention to the social and political contexts of their linguistic past and to the geography of Yiddish culture in both the cosmopolitan centers of Europe and in the provinces. They developed their modernist aesthetic not by break­ ing their ties with Eastern European Jewish culture, but through their evolving diasporic relationship to that culture. Bergelson’s concerns about the future of Yiddish are registered in his metalinguistic and metaliterary modernist stories. Bergelson exploited the tensions between the modernist ethos of his writing and the traditional resources of Yiddish. Writing in Yiddish, between these two poles, amplified his experimental practices. The spatio-temporal and allegorical distortions that permeate Bergelson’s writing in the interwar period are key aspects of his mod­ ernist, diasporic aesthetic. Avraham Novershtern shows how the 1920s marked a transformation in Bergelson’s poetics, as Bergelson strove to portray historical reality in expressionist form.11 12 These stylistic ele­ ments thematize the dialectical relationship between Yiddish and the metropolitan center, between the Jewish past and the modernist moment. Benedict Anderson notes the relationship between the spati­ otemporal imagining of the novel and of nationalism, looking particu­ larly at the European, nineteenth-century realist novel. He argues that “the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of a nation, 11. Williams, “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism” 22. 12. See Novershtern, “Aspektim mivniyim ba-proza" 137-143.

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which is also perceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.”13 According to Anderson, “empty homogenous time” is a synonym for the novelistic temporality of meanwhile: events that occur at the same time but in different locations are united in meaning by the governing structure of the novel. Anderson’s conceptualization of an imagined national community can be extended to that of an imagined diasporic community—a community, however, that must be imagined through very different formal literary structures. In the 1920s, Bergelson could not imagine his Yiddish-speaking characters moving through the empty, homogenous time of the nation. To write in Yiddish meant to occupy multiple spaces and multiple temporalities. Thus, Bergelson had to find the formal mechanisms to portray the dis­ parities between the time-space of Yiddish culture and the time-space of urban modernity.

BERLIN STORIES Bergelson was a founding member of the Kiev Group, a circle of mod­ ernist Yiddish writers and artists who came of age in pre-World War I Kiev and rose to prominence during the interwar period. He co-edited Eygns (Ours), one of the first Yiddish modernist journals, with Der Nister in 1918 while living in Kiev. In 1920, Bergelson left Kiev for Moscow, and then traveled to Berlin, where he remained from 1921 to 1933. Residing in Berlin, Bergelson published in the major literary centers of the period, including Warsaw, Moscow, and New York. By 1926 he aligned himself with the Yiddish literary community in the Soviet Union. In the essay “Dray tsentern” (“Three Centers”), he declared that the future of Yiddish depended on the Soviet Union. Despite this public proclamation, Bergel­ son remained in Berlin until the Nazi rise to power in 1933. American Yiddish critics from the 1920s to the present day have met this decision with skepticism and mistrust: they were suspicious of Soviet party poli­ tics and did not believe that Bergelson shared these politics.14 In 1952, after years of imprisonment and torture, Bergelson, along with other Jewish writers, artists, and scientists, was murdered by Stalin’s decree. In the years that followed, critics have unfairly attacked Yiddish writers who returned to the Soviet Union voluntarily, claiming that they

13. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) 26. 14. Although scholars, such as Joseph Sherman, continue to argue that Soviet Yiddish writers became party ideologues and were complicit in their later persecution, David Shneer’s

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were complicit in their own murders. However, Bergelson, like many Yid­ dish writers, could not have known the outcome of that decision. The choice to return, however, made excellent sense at the time. In the 1920s the Soviet Union housed a well-financed and state-supported Yiddish lit­ erary culture. Furthermore, by 1933, with the Nazi rise to power, Bergelson had no choice but to leave Berlin, and he chose the Soviet Union as his new home. In Berlin, Bergelson moved beyond his early impressionist and sym­ bolist descriptions of the decadent world of the shtetl. He turned to German-Jewish and German Expressionist writing and embraced the critique of modernity and the period’s spirit of Aufbruch (breaking free).15 During this period, Bergelson published a significant body of short fiction in the New York Yiddish periodicals Forverts (Forward) and Frayhay t (Free­ dom).16 Many of these stories, including “Khoyves” (“Obligations”) and “Hershl Toker,” describe the transformation ofjewish life in the throes of World War I, the Russian revolution, and the Ukrainian pogroms. These stories paint a dizzying landscape of interwar Jewish culture, veering between the literary world of the shtetl and the newly created centers of Jewish emigrant life. However, Bergelson’s Berlin writing polarized the international Yiddish literary community along political and geographic lines. American and Polish writers praised Bergelson. Nachman Meisel extolled the 1927 collection, Shturemteg {Days of Storm), for capturing both the “death rattle” of an old world and the “birth pangs” of the new. He proclaimed the collection to be the best work of Russian Jewry in “the past ten years.”17 Rokhl Korn hailed the collection for its new way of depicting Jewish life.18 Despite his skepticism of Bergelson’s politics,

and Jeffrey Veidlinger s recent work on Soviet Yiddish culture challenges these assumptions. See Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture: 1918-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 15. For a discussion of German-language Jewish expressionism, see Scott Spector, Prague Ter­ ritories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Sitcle (Berkeley: Univer­ sity of California Press, 2000). On Bergelson’s expressionism see Mikhail Krutikov, “Narrating the Revolution: From Tsugvintn to Mides-hadin,” Dovid Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism (Oxford: Legenda, 2007) 167-182; Avraham Novershtern, "Aspektim mivniyim baproza shel dovid bergelson me reshita ad midas hadin,” Ph.D., Hebrew University, 1981. 16. Bergelson republished a selection of stories from the Forverts and Frayhayt in Shturemteg (Days of Storm, 1927). Between 1928 and 1930 he published his eight-volume Geklibene verk (Collected Works), which included two volumes of short stories, Shturemteg and Veit ayn, velt oys (A World Comes, a World Goes). The second version of Shturemteg contained nine of the fourteen stories from the 1927 version, and two additional stories. 17. Nachman Meisel, “Dovid bergelson, shturemteg," Diyidishevelt 1 (1928) 147-149. 18. Rokhl Korn, “Mayn bakenen zikh mit bergelsonen," Literarishe bleter November 2,1934: 731-732.

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Shmuel Niger noted that the stories retained their artistic mastery and continued to show life “ how it is, and not how it should be.”19 However, the Soviet critic Moshe Litvakov attacked the collection for its bad politics, pointing, for example, to the unflattering portrayal of revolutionary heroes.20 Whether they praised or attacked the collection, critics mainly focused on Bergelson’s portrayal of a new Jewish social and political reality in Eastern Europe, ignoring the short stories that self-consciously reflected on the role of the Yiddish author and the future of Yiddish literature. These metaliterary stories portray not only a newly modern Jewish world, but also reflect upon the practices of describing that world in Yiddish. In the stories “Der bariton” (“The Baritone”), “Blindkeyt” (“Blind­ ness”), and “Tsvishn emigrantn” (“Among Emigrants”), Bergelson depicts Jewish writers and artists struggling to engage Jewish audiences divided by new borders and national identities. These struggles are thematized in the works’ modernist style. “Der bariton” describes the travails of a Yid­ dish folksinger alienated from his urban Jewish audiences. “Blindkeyt” portrays a dislocated emigrant community struggling in Jewish and nonJewish languages to constitute a community of readers and writers at the center of international modernism in Weimar Berlin. In “Tsvishn emi­ grantn,” Bergelson renders the pathos of the emigrant writer attempting to survive in a literary field that is threatened by newly assimilated Jewish audiences. In each story the landscape of the shtetl looms over the writer as an allegorical force that threatens to annihilate him. The fractured and disrupted spatiotemporal conditions of these frame stories thematize the precarious situation of Yiddish and its diasporic community of readers.

WORLD WAR I AND THE GEOGRAPHY OFJEWISH LITERATURE World War I marked a new era forJewish-language literary culture, threat­ ening the nonterritorial Jewish cultural nationalism that had developed in Eastern Europe. Prior to the war, in the wake of the failed 1905 revolu­ tion, Yiddish writers and critics took up the rallying cry of a secular Jew­ ish culture as a crucial building block ofjewish nationalism, developing a concrete infrastructure for Jewish culture including Yiddish schools,

19. Shmuel Niger, Lezer, dikhter, kritiker (New York: Yidisher kultur farlag, 1928) 156. 20. Joseph Sherman, “David Bergelson: A Biography,” David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism, eds. Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (Oxford: Legenda, 2007) 43.

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literary journals, and theater.21 In 1908 the Czernowitz conference declared Yiddish a national language of the Jews. In the same year the first journal devoted entirely to Yiddish literature, Literarishe monatsshrifien {Monthly Literary Writings), was founded.22 Jewish writers, including Bergelson, embraced these developments, viewing cultural and literary re­ vival as an imperative. While this new Jewish cultural production was framed as nonterritorial, it was deeply rooted in Eastern Europe. Jewish writers felt that they could sustain a Jewish literary infrastructure in the Pale of Settlement and the lands of the Polish partition, which constituted an ersatz Jewish space. The demise of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, however, deprived Yiddish writers of this common territory, at the very moment when other smaller national language communities were struggling for territorial independence. The creation of new national borders separated Jewish communities and Jewish cultural networks and divided the loyal­ ties ofJewish audiences.23 Although there has been, to date, no compre­ hensive historical survey of the effects of World War I on Jewish life in Eastern Europe, the war devastated the region; large numbers of Jewish communities were situated on the front lines of World War I, and major Jewish cities such as Lemberg, Kiev, and Wilno received the brunt of the conflict.24 Jewish residents fled the most affected areas, heading to safer homes in cities such as Berlin, London, and New York. Jonathan Frankel hones in on the paradoxes ofJewish life in the years 1914 through 1921, a period “of both untold loss and of unprecedented political achieve­ ment, of destruction and of opportunity.”25 On the one hand, Frankel notes that World War I exposed the “inherent vulnerability and weak­ ness of the Jews as a scattered minority,” while, on the other hand, “many

21. Michael Steinlauf, “Fear of Purim: Y. L. Peretzand the Canonization of Yiddish Theater,” Jewish Social Studies 13 (1995) 45. 22. A. Vayter, Shmuel Niger, and Shmarye Gorelik founded the journal in Vilna as a venue for Yiddish avant-garde literary production. The journal represented the first steps in construct­ ing a modem, secular Yiddish culture that could compete with other European national litera­ tures. See Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Culture Between Renaissance and Decadence: Di Literarishe Monatsshrifien and Its Critical Reception," Jewish Social Studies 8.1 (2001) 155. 23. Vilna and Kiev, for example, were two tightly knit literary centers that were separated from each other after the war. See Gennady Estraikh, “From Yehupets Jargonists to Kiev Mod­ ernists: The Rise of a Yiddish Literary Centre, 1880s-1914," East European Affairs 30.1 (2000) 17-38. 24. During the first year of the war, the Tsarist regime expelled hundreds of thousands of Jews along its western borders, and by 1915 there were approximately one million Jews who were made homeless by the war. See Jonathan Frankel, “The Paradoxical Politics of Marginality: Thoughts on the Jewish Situation during the Years 1914-21," The Jews and the European Crisis, 1914-1921, ed. Jonathan Frankel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 5-6. 25. Frankel, “The Paradoxical Politics of Marginality" 4.

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Jews—movements, groups, individuals—came to the conclusion that the moment of emancipation or auto-emancipation had arrived.”26 This fragile balance between two visions of Jewish destiny, as either national liberation or perpetual oppression and victimhood, could not be sus­ tained. Paradoxically, the waning of cultural nationalism did not mean the decline of cultural production; the interwar period proved extraordi­ narily fertile for Yiddish literature in Europe. In the post-World War I era, Jewish writers sought to establish them­ selves on the shifting ground of new nationalist and minority politics. Those who lived in political territories such as Poland and Lithuania struggled with their new status as minority citizens in monolingual nation-states. For example, Seth Wolitz argues that Yiddish modern­ ist writers in Poland felt that, unlike their Polish counterparts, an artist of “non-sovereign” nationality could never achieve “personal aesthetic freedom without compromising his national identity.”27 In contrast, in the Soviet Union, where authorities determined national status based on language, Yiddish literature was considered part of an official Soviet Jew­ ish culture.28 Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union saw themselves as the vanguard of a Yiddish culture, one that promised to transform both Jewish and Russian societies. Whether in Poland, Germany, the United States, or the Soviet Union, Yiddish writers faced challenges as they rene­ gotiated their relationships to both Jewish and non-Jewish languages, cul­ tural institutions, and political movements that includedjewish territorial nationalism (i.e., Zionism), nonterritorial nationalism (i.e., Bundism), and other forms of non-national cosmopolitanism. These competing ideologies of Jewish ethnic, cultural, and territorial identity influenced modern Jewish writers’ aesthetic practices, whether they viewed them­ selves as, in the words of the founders of the Jewish PEN Club, “stateless people” or as national minorities.

“THE BARITONE,” YIDDISH, AND THE GENDER OF EXILE “Der bariton” portrays the dislocation of Russian Jewry, the breakdown of the Russian empire, and the subsequent crisis of representation for Yiddish writers. The story describes the travails of a middle-aged Yiddish folksinger

26. Frankel, ‘"The Paradoxical Politics of Marginality” 4. 27. Seth Wolitz, “Between Folk and Freedom: The Failure of the Yiddish Modernist Move­ ment in Poland," Yiddish 8.1 (1991) 26. 28. Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture 5.

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who returns to the stage after the turbulent years of World War I. He per­ forms in “some of the small countries that had belonged to Russia before the war,” only to face disappointing ticket sales and mediocre reviews.29 The folksinger descends into anger and self-pity, and he laments his sacrifices, giving up his career as a baritone on the non-Jewish stage to perform Jewish folk music for a now-unappreciative audience. Infuriated that his modern Jewish audience has turned their backs on him, the folksinger cancels his remaining performances and decides instead to accept an invitation to per­ form in a tiny far-flung shtetl. At first glance his return to the shtetl is a romantic gesture, a return to the lost world of tradition. In German-Jewish writing of the same period, the journey to Jewish Eastern Europe was a popular romantic trope. However, Bergelsons folksinger does not venture to the shtetl in search of a lost Jewish past. Instead, he is a shtetl Jew, who travels to a world where he speaks the native language, where he was once a native. The folksinger returns to the folk culture that he has appropriated for his popular performances and that he also vehemently rejects. In the story, Bergelson addresses the strained relationship between Jew­ ish artists and a modern, diasporic Jewish audience. He depicts the folk­ singer as a frustrated modern Jewish artist who heeded the call of Jewish cultural revival only to find that his audience is no longer attentive. The baritone recalls the traveling folksinger in Sholem Aleichem’s early novel Stempenyu who revels in the attentions of his adoring audiences. In both stories the relationship between the folksinger and the audience is described in terms of heterosexual seduction.30 In contrast to Stempenyu, Bergelsons baritone performs folk music for a modern and assimilated audience that has lost interest in Yiddish culture and perhaps in Jewish life altogether. The protagonist of Bergelsons story resembles the Yiddish author: both rely on Yiddish as the medium of their art. “Der bariton” raises the dilemma of the disappearing audience for Yiddish-language culture. Although Yiddish culture thrived in the interwar period in cities like Kiev, Warsaw, and New York, Jewish writers and artists faced uncertainty about the future of their artistic and literary endeavors, confronting ambivalent audiences, shifting political borders, and clashing linguistic ideologies.

29. Bergelson, “Der bariton," Geklibene verk, vol. 6 (Vilna: Kletzkin Farlag, 1929) 127. 30. In Sholem Aleichem’s novel Stempenyu, adoring young Jewish women surround the folk­ singer, and he falls in love with one of these ideal Jewish women, Rokhele. However, Stempenyu is tricked into marrying a canny businesswoman, Freydl, who dominates him. As Anita Norich argues, with his marriage to Freydl “[h]is emasculation is complete and even his music loses its power to affect anyone." In both stories, then, the shtetl is a feminizing force for the artist, even as he longs to consummate his relationship to the shtetl in heterosexual terms. Norich, “Por­ traits of the Artist in Three Novels by Sholem Aleichem,” Prooftexts 4.3 (1984) 240.

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“Der bariton” also recalls Ba-yamim ha-hem and Shloyme reb khayims-, Bergelson begins his story where Abramovitsh’s left off.31 Although a period of thirty years separates these narratives, they are eerily reminis­ cent of each other. In Abramovitsh’s novels, the modern writer leaves the shtetl when he is summoned to the city by a Jewish audience who “awaited the arrival of their writer.”32 Once Shlomo arrives in the city, he finds him­ self unable to chronicle the lives of these urban Jews. In the novel’s frame story, he debates the future of Jewish literature and describes how he is torn between writing about his past in the shtetl or his contemporary environs of the city. After a visit from the specters of his shtetl past, he decides to write a memoir of his childhood, concluding that urban Jews need the shtetl as a coherent reference point for a modern Jewish identity. Whereas Shlomo mourned the gulf between his modern life and the vestiges of his childhood memories in the shtetl, Bergelson’s folksinger mourns the abyss between himself and the modern Jewish audience that has lost interest in his art. In Bergelson’s story, the urban audiences that Shlomo cultivated are no longer interested in embracing folk culture as the material for modern Jewish art, or as a part of the modernist enter­ prise, nor are they connected to the shtetl as a shared Jewish space. Their lack of interest in the folksinger’s art pushes him back to the very shtetl that Shlomo fled. Bergelson’s traveling folksinger also recalls Abramov­ itsh’s traveling book peddler: both sell their wares in the Jewish regions of the Russian empire. However, these areas have been decimated by World War I and reoriented according to new postwar national borders. As the new Jewish urban landscape fails to provide an audience, the looming presence of the shtetl, the mythic landscape of Jewish folk culture, encroaches on the urban scene. After his disappointing reception in the city, the baritone receives a barrage of telegrams from a tiny shtetl located in a far-flung border town. The telegrams sent from the shtetl are received as relics from another world. The baritone reacts to the telegrams as if to a proposed shidekh (arranged marriage); they “make him feel as if he were an eligible bache­ lor, and he was being proposed a very inferior match.”33 On the one hand, he sees these offers as proof of his failure. During his successful years he would never have deigned to perform in a shtetl. Now that his fame has diminished, he has been matched with an inferior bride. On the other hand, he feels drawn to the shtetl as a refuge from both an indifferent

31. Bergelson’s story can be read as a sequel to Abramovitsh’s novels. 32. S. Y. Abramovitsh, Ba-yamim ha-hem, Koi kitvc mendele mokher sfarim (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1947) 254. 33. Bergelson, “Der bariton” 129.

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modern audience and from his own sense of failure. As the story unfolds, the narrator slowly obscures the distinction between the concert invita­ tion and the marriage proposal; the two blend together, and the story takes a series of allegorical turns. Bergelson transforms the mimetic content of the story, a narrative about a frustrated folksinger, into an allegorical tale about Jewish wandering and exile with a modern twist. When the folksinger finally decides to forgo the city and accept the shtetl’s invitation, he is described as taking on “the bur­ den of exile.”34 This turn of phrase, set off by quotation marks, introduces another register of the story. In this passage, exile is both an idiomatic expression to describe being sent away from the urban/cultural center to the provinces and a theological reference to exile as a divine punishment meted out to the people of Israel. Bergelson’s story links the theme of mar­ riage to a traditional midrash of Jewish exile. According to the midrash, God punishes the people of Israel by turning his back on her, as a husband who abandons his wife.35 In Jewish law, an aguna (abandoned wife) is una­ ble to secure a divorce either because her husband refuses or because he has disappeared. She remains in this liminal state between marriage and divorce, a state that is described as akin to exile. Bergelson secularizes the traditional midrash: the Jewish bride (the Jewish past in the shtetl) lures the baritone to exile (the provinces), and God is noticeably absent from the story. Bergelson transforms a religious account of exile into a modernist alle­ gory of aesthetic practice. Bergelson’s shtetl is a metaliterary paysage moral­ ise that refers back to the shtetls of his literary predecessors. Dan Miron describes the allegorical significance of the classic shtetl in the literary works of the Yiddish klassiker (classical Yiddish writers):36 The classical literary image of the shtetl is structured around a metaphorical-

conceptual core that is none other than the following: the shtetl represents a tiny exiled Jerusalem, Yerushalayim shel mata, in the enriched sense of the term that indicates not only an earthly, mundane Jerusalem as opposed to the “celes­

tial” Jerusalem but also the low, downtrodden Jerusalem in exile as opposed to

the lofty, royal independent ancient capital graced by the presence of God in His Temple. The shtetl was Jerusalem in her fallen state, and yet it was still

Jerusalem—the Jewish polity par excellence.37

34. Bergelson, “Der bariton” 130. 35. For a cultural analysis of the aguna in Jewish literature, see Bluma Goldstein, Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 36. ‘'Klassiker" is the term for the three writers associated with the modem Yiddish literary renaissance: S. Y. Abramovitsh, I. L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem. 37. Dan Miron, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagina­ tion (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000) 33.

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The Jewish shtetl in Miron’s estimation signifies a secularized Jewish polity, one, however, that can be measured in relationship to the “celestial.” Miron shows how the allegorical core of these classical repre­ sentations oscillates between the secular Jewish state and the “celestial referent” of a heavenlyjerusalem. However, Bergelson’s allegorical figura­ tion of the shtetl differs significantly from that of the klassikers because he empties out the “celestial” significance. Rather than contrasting the shtetl to the elevated notion of a heavenlyjerusalem, he contrasts it to modern and urban Jewish life. Bergelson’s story shifts the allegorical reference point of the shtetl from the divine word of God to the secular register of modern Yiddish literature, producing a modernist allegory about the conditions of Yid­ dish culture. Contemporary critics have characterized modernist alle­ gory by its “lack of a stable referent for its ‘other speech.’”38 Walter Benjamin viewed the secularization of allegory as corresponding to the process of commodification, as Susan Buck-Morss explains about alle­ gory for Benjamin: “once the initial hollowing out of meaning has occurred and a new signification has been arbitrarily inserted, these meanings become interchangeable.”39 According to Benjamin’s account, temporality, rather than the divine, organizes these new relations. Paul DeMan argues that when allegory loses its divine referent it “necessarily contains a constitutive temporal element” such that the “allegorical sign” refers to “another sign that precedes.’40 DeMan illuminates how modern­ ist allegory, emptied of its relationship to the divine, can only reference the distance between competing significations. Bergelson’s modernist allegory registers not only the loss of divine meaning, but also marks the temporal and spatial gap between the Jewish past and the Berlin metrop­ olis. The story posits Yiddish as a language of modernist crisis, torn between the shtetl and the city, and unable to overcome the temporal gap between these symbolic locations. The train journey in the story enacts this temporal and spatial gap between the urban modernity of the city and the traditional world of the literary shtetl. When the folksinger embarks on his journey to the shtetl, the tiny train transports him through the pastures of an allegorized Yid­ dish landscape. The train propels the plot across time and space and builds the momentum to shift the story from diegetic narrative to allegory. The

38. Theresa Kelley, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 5. 39. Susan Buck-Morss, Vie Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991) 181-182. 40. Paul De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,’’ Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 207.

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small provincial railroad is similar to those in Sholem Aleichem’s Ayzenbangeshikhtes (Railroad Stories). The railroad, the station, and even the mud allude to the conventional literary universe of the shtetl. The railroad car itself is the quintessential Jewish space of Yiddish literature.41 In Abramovitsh’s story “Shem un yefes in a vagon” ("Shem and Japheth on the Train”), the train car is a microcosm of the universe of Eastern Euro­ pean Jewish culture, populated by exiles fleeing the persecution of Bis­ marck’s Germany.42 Bergelson’s folksinger makes a reverse journey back into the literary heart ofJewish Eastern Europe, a return to shtetl life in the forgotten corners of the former Pale of Settlement. The baritone’s jour­ ney back in time signals his entrance into an alternate universe. He boards the train in the city and disembarks in a different dimension of space­ time, in a different literary moment. The baritone’s arrival in the shtetl prompts an internal crisis between his identity as a baritone, a modern European performer, and as a folk­ singer tied to traditional Jewish folk life. The baritone’s oscillation between these two self-images parallels his ambivalent impressions of the shtetl. When the shtetl reflects his idealization of Jewish life and resem­ bles a youthful bride, he feels gratified by his connection to folk culture. However, when he is confronted with the poverty and the crudeness of shtetl life, he is disgusted by it and by the Jewish folk culture that he has made his career. This oscillation captures Bergelson’s own vexed relation­ ship to his literary predecessors and the historical tradition of depicting the shtetl. On the one hand, Bergelson’s fictional universe is dependent on the literary world of the shtetl. On the other hand, he also dreams of free­ ing Yiddish from its associations with Jewish life in the shtetl. The baritone’s encounter with the shtetl captures the alienation of modern Yiddish culture from its audiences in both the city and the shtetl. Once he arrives in the shtetl, the baritone fantasizes about his visit as though it were a wedding celebration, imagining himself as both honored guest and celebrated bridegroom. He experiences the preparations for his performance as preparations for a wedding: “How it bustles some! ... Just like a wedding, and all because of him; and this guest (the baritone), he too is from a shtetl.’43 Tellingly, the folksinger shares the same humble origins as the townsfolk. The baritone’s departure from European high culture in favor of Yiddish folk music recalls Shlomo’s modern nostalgia 41. For a discussion of railroad cars in Yiddish literature, see Leah Garrett, Journeys Beyond the Pale: Yiddish Travel Writing in the Modern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Todd Presner, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, and Trains (New York: Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 2007). 42. See Abramovitsh, “Shem un yefes in a vagon," Aleverkfunmendelemokhersforim, vol. 13 (Warsaw: Farlag mendele, 1928) 9-36. 43. Bergelson, “Derbariton” 132.

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for an imagined folk past. When the folksinger comes back to the shtetl to perform authentic folk music, his return is a nostalgia folded back on itself. The stylized folk music he performs—designed for an urban audience—is estranged from the shtetl. The baritone’s alienation is alle­ gorized as a secular exile from a dying Jewish past. Not only is the bari­ tone estranged, so too is Yiddish, a language that is uprooted from the traditional Jewish world and alienated from the modern metropolis. Like modernist allegory, Yiddish lacks a stable referent. The baritone’s wedding fantasy transforms into a macabre eroticism. An attractive widow hosts the baritone during his visit in the shtetl. The widow’s daughter was a folksinger who died tragically a year and a half earlier. The widow offers her daughter’s bedroom to the baritone. Next to the bed in the room is a portrait of the deceased daughter. Lying next to it [the portrait] on the bed, half-drunk, singing in his head, he

could not stop looking at the picture.—Some kind of girl, huh? . . . Ripe and beautiful, a rare beauty, a rare beauty. Thus he drunkenly felt passion for her, as

though for a living person—and it mattered little to him that she had died a year and half ago of scarlet fever.... He fell asleep with a sweet dream and a sweet

fantasy that he had married this beautiful well-off young woman, and was now returning home to her. Thus he was completely unconcerned that somewhere

at home he had a wife and kids... .**

The wedding metaphor plays out on two distinct fronts: one is allegorical, describing the baritone’s relationship to the shtetl in terms of social ritual—the baritone is the returning son/groom and the shtetl his new bride; the other is personal, describing the necrophilic fantasies of an aging married man. These necrophilic fantasies infect the trope of the shtetl as bride; like the young woman, the shtetl too is a corpse. This pas­ sage also alludes to the existence of another aguna, the baritone’s wife who remains in the city. The aguna permeates modernist Jewish fiction of the period and is a central concern in Bergelson’s interwar fiction. The agunas allegorical association with exile resonated with both the existential themes of mod­ ernist fiction and the territorial polemics of the period. Naomi Seidman argues that the changing significance of the aguna in the literature of the shtetl shows how its different uses comment on the changing relationship of both male and female writers to the world of the shtetl.44 45 S. Y. Agnon’s

44. Bergelson, "Der bariton” 134. 45. Naomi Seidman, “Gender and the Disintegration of the Shtetl in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature," The Shtetl: New Evaluation, ed. Steven Katz (New York: New York Univer­ sity Press, 2007) 203, 205.

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short story "Agunot” (“Abandoned Wives”) and Devorah Baron’s short story “Aguna” both exemplify the significance of this figure for modern Jew­ ish writing.46 In both stories, the allegorical figure of the abandoned wife represents the abiding and productive tensions between modern Jewishlanguage writing and the resonances of tradition. For Agnon she is a meta­ phor for the exile and alienation of the modern Hebrew writer. Barons story, published in the same year as Bergelsons, is a feminist response to Agnon’s instrumentalization of the aguna. Baron works against the tradi­ tional religious and nationalist interpretation of the aguna’s plight and brings to the fore the actual plight of abandoned wives.47 In Bergelsons story, in contrast to Agnon and Baron’s works, the aguna registers the gender politics of Jewish reading audiences, repre­ senting the relationship between Yiddish writers and their audiences in unstable heterosexual terms. The male writer returns to the feminized shtetl, which he then spurns. However, the male writer is also character­ ized in feminine terms; he has also become an aguna, abandoned by his modern, diasporic reading audience. In “Der bariton,” Bergelson employs the figure of the aguna to describe early-twentieth-century Yiddish cul­ ture as a gendered tale of abandonment. Here too, Bergelsons concerns about gender and modernist culture also echo the larger concerns of the Weimar years, which were marked by political, social, and economic “crises [that] were often perceived as contributing to the loss of (male) cultural authority.”48 In the story, Bergelson pairs the aguna, a female Jewish trope of exile, with the Wandering Jew, a male Jewish trope of exile, to portray Yiddish torn between the world of Eastern European tradition and the modern European metropolis. The story concludes when the baritone’s disgust overtakes his pleasure and, riding a small cart back to the train station, he abandons his bride at the wedding canopy. The town’s residents peer out from their doorways to watch as “he stumbles, all by himself, with his peklekh (bags).’*49 These peklekh are not modern “suitcases”; peklekh is the Yiddish term for the bags that the wandering Jew would carry slung over his shoulder. The figure of the Wandering Jew has its origins in anti-Jewish

46. Marc Bernstein compares these two stories in his essay, "Midrash and Marginality: The 'Agunot' of S. Y. Agnon and Devorah Baron," Hebrew Studies 42 (2001) 7-58. 47. Wendy Zierler also discusses Baron’s critique of allegory as a feminist strategy in And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women's Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004) 191-194. 48. Patrice Petro, “Perceptions of Difference: Woman as Spectacle," Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 43. 49. Bergelson, “Der bariton” 137.

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Christian writings. However, Jewish writers in the nineteenth century embraced the figure as their own.50 The Jewish acceptance of this Chris­ tian symbol “converges with the conscious Jewish acceptance of the val­ ues and the culture of the host countries, as can be seen in the case of Germany. The adaptation of the Wandering Jew image is therefore the concrete product of a change in point-of-view—that is, the non-Jewish view of the Jew was adopted by the Jews themselves.”51 Bergelson employs the image to mark a transformation for Jewish culture and of the folk­ singer in relationship to both Jewish and European forms. His Wandering Jew is not doomed to wander as punishment by God. Instead, his audi­ ence punishes him for adapting traditional Jewish culture into modern form. The baritone embraced Yiddish and Yiddish folk culture as his metier, only to be jilted at the altar by his modern audience. The aguna, the Wandering Jew, Yiddish, and the folksinger all share the same fate— doomed to eternal wandering. Bergelson’s story comments on what he perceived, at times, as the futility of the modernist Yiddish project, which sought to divorce Yiddish from the Jewish past and thus to empty the lan­ guage of its traditional remnants. The story imagines how the success of this project might mean the end of its audience. Of course, it is precisely this decoupling of Yiddish from its traditional world that proved to be so productive for Yiddish modernists.

“BLINDNESS” AND JEWISH LANGUAGES IN BERLIN

“Der bariton” emblematizes the vexed relationship of Yiddish writers to the Yiddish language as a medium of modern art. Although the story is set in Eastern Europe, it had deep resonances with Bergelson’s Berlin experiences. The story marks the unbridgeable distances between the metropolitan cities of Europe and the Jewish cities in the east, between the cosmopolitan languages of Europe and Yiddish. At the same time, the story captures the disjointed temporality of diasporic Yiddish culture in Berlin.

50. The Wandering Jew abounds in modernist Yiddish literature of the twentieth century, employed by writers “as a witness, chronicler, and survivor ofJewish history, often narrating or recounting acts of persecution or violence committed by Christians.” See Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stan­ ford University Press, 2007) 180. 51. Galit Hasan-Rokem, “The Wandering Jew: A Jewish Perspective," Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem: World Congress of Jewish Studies, 1986) 189. Also see Matthew Hoffman’s analysis of the assimilation of Jesus into Yiddish modernist culture: From Rebel to Rabbi 117-169.

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In the 1920s, many important Hebrew and Yiddish writers flocked to Berlin, including Bergelson, Bialik, Der Nister, Leyb Kvitko, and Shaul Tchernichowsky. Jewish writers sought an escape from the hunger and poverty rife in Russia and saw in Berlin the potential to establish a stable infrastructure for Jewish literature. However, few of them stayed as long as Bergelson. The city boasted an impressive printing industry, and the heavily inflated currency at the time meant that Yiddish writers, paid in foreign currencies, could afford to support themselves with their writing (until the end of 1923). Between 1921 and 1923, two hundred Yiddish books were published in Berlin.52 Berlin also had a long history of Hebrew cultural production; the Berlin circle of writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including M. Y. Berdichevsky, were committed to creating a Hebrew center in this high-status European city. Bialik arrived in Berlin in 1921 and founded the Dvir publishing house with his good friend Ravnitzky. Mark Wischnitzer founded the bilingual modernist journal Milgroym/Rimon (Pomegranate); Der Nister, Bergelson, and El Lissitsky were among the editors and contributors. Bergelson flourished in this Berlin literary scene, surrounding himself with Hebrew, Yiddish, and German writers including Kvitko, Der Nister, Doblin, Alexander Granach, Arnold Zweig, Herbert Jehring, and Alfred Kerr.53 This synthesis of Jewish and German culture met resistance. Some Eastern European Jewish writers viewed the burgeoning Yiddish scene in Berlin with great suspicion. Peretz Markish sharply criticized Yiddish writers for spending long hours at the Romanisches Cafe acting as “highpriests” and profiting from “the Russian-Jewish disaster.”54 Melech Ravitch viewed the Berlin writers as “traitors” to Eastern European Yiddish culture.55 Markish and Ravitch feared the consequences of uprooting Yid­ dish from Eastern Europe. Although Berlin persisted as a literary center, by the mid-twenties many important Hebrew and Yiddish writers departed because of the increased expense of living in Berlin and the emergence of alternative publishing centers, whether in New York, Pales­ tine, or the Soviet Union. German-language writers were largely indifferent to the presence of Emigre Yiddish writers in their midst, although there were some important

52. Gennady Estraikh, “ Vilna on the Spree: Yiddish in Weimar Berlin,” Aschkenas: Zeitschrifi fur Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 16.1 (2006) 111. 53. Sherman, "David Bergelson" 30; Estraikh, “Vilna on the Spree” 114. 54. Peretz Markish, “Biznes: moskve-berlin,” Khalyastre 1 (1922): 62. 55. Delphine Bechtel, "Milgroym, A Yiddish Magazine of Arts and Letters, Is Founded in Berlin by Mark Wischnitzer," Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Cul­ ture, 1096-1996, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) 424.

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points of connection. Else Lasker-Schuler befriended Yiddish writers in the Romanisches Cafe and developed a close relationship with the Yid­ dish poet Avrom-Nokhem Stench56 Bergelson maintained contacts with German writers and included some among his circle of friends. Both Bergelson and Stencl were translated into German. The arrival in Berlin of Jewish-language theater troupes, including the Vilna troupe and the Mos­ cow Jewish State Theater, as well as the Hebrew theater group Ha-bima, ignited curiosity among some German intellectuals.57 In fact, Doblin wrote enthusiastically about the 1923 Berlin performances of the Vilna troupe. Doblin was also a friend of Bergelson and glowingly reviewed the German translations of Bergelson’s works.58 Despite their seeming indifference to a thriving dmigfe community of Yiddish writers, German Jewish writers, particularly after World War I, were increasingly invested in traditional Jewish culture and Jewish lan­ guages. At the moment when Yiddish language modernists struggled to break free from the “backward” world of the shtetl, modernist, Germanlanguage Jewish writers turned to traditional Jewish culture to fuel their modernist projects and rebel against assimilated bourgeois Jewish cul­ ture. Doblin’s Reise in Polen (Travels in Poland, 1926) and Joseph Roth’s Juden auf Wanderschajt (The Wandering Jews, 1927) are both examples of this ethnographic tendency in modernist German literature. Kafka turned to Yiddish as an authentic mediator of folk culture. He was enamo­ red with a visiting troupe of Yiddish actors. In his 1912 lecture on Yiddish, he expressed his fascination with the language. Toward the end of his life, Kafka also studied Hebrew by reading Brenner’s novel Shekhol vekhishalon. Kafkas encounter with Yiddish and his romanticization of the language animated his modernist short fiction of the period.59 This spectral presence of Yiddish at the heart of German-language modernism haunts accounts of major-language Jewish modernist writers,

56. For a description of their relationship, see Heather Valencia, Else Lasker-Schuler und Abraham Nochern Stenzel: cine unbekannte Freundschajt: niit jiddischen und deutschen Texten aus dem Elisabeth-Wohler-Nachlass (Frankfurt; New York: Campus Verlag, 1995). 57. Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) 191-192. 58. In his review of a German translation of Bergelson’s novel Nokh alemen (When All Is Said and Done), Alfred Doblin described the novel’s modernist features, noting for example the “ret­ icent use of language.” Doblin goes on to describe the novel as “a transitional work, not in its origins Yiddish, even though it was written in Yiddish.” Doblin aims to divorce the novel from its association with Yiddish in order to express its European modernist ethos. Sherman cites the review in "David Bergelson: A Biography" 33. 59. For a discussion of Kafka’s relationship to Yiddish and the Yiddish theater, see Noah Isenberg, Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) 19-50. Also see Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work (Madison; University of Wisconsin Press, 1971).

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particularly Kafka. A tradition of writing about Kafka and the GermanJewish perspective on Yiddish culture has shaped a literary, historical, and theoretical framework that obscures the significance of Jewishlanguage modernist production in German-language centers. In Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and F61ix Guatarri contend that a minor literature is “that which a minority constructs in a major lit­ erature.”60 In a sharp critique of their theoretical project, Ghana Kronfeld elucidates how Deleuze and Guatarri blur the line between minor and modernist, reifying a restrictive canon of modernist literature in major languages. This linguistic restriction leads to a misreading of Kafka’s “cross-cultural” project and erases the presence of these “indigenous” modernisms in the metropolitan centers of German-language culture, ignoring his real engagement with Hebrew and Yiddish literary culture.61 moreover, despite Kafka’s fascination with Hebrew and Yiddish, he was ignorant about modernist writing in both literatures, making him a prob­ lematic spokesman for Jewish-language culture. However, Kafka continues to serve as an awkward representative of Yiddish culture. In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova treads into this familiar territory, examining the relationship of both major- and minor-language writers (primarily modernist) to the metropolitan cent­ ers of literary culture (in her case, Paris). Casanova critiques Deleuze and Guatarri for misinterpreting Kafka’s term “small literature” to mean “minor literature” and for abstracting and dehistoricizing Kafka’s political project.62 Instead, she chooses to read Kafka as a Jewish national writer, making the startling assertion that Kafka’s work “can be considered as entirely translated from a language that he could not write, Yiddish.”63 Kafka neither learned to speak or write in Yiddish. However, Casanova reads Kafka in essentialist, national terms—as a Jewish-language writer without a Jewish language. For Casanova, Yiddish is a language that expresses a Jewish essence, an essence she finds in Kafka’s writings. Kaf­ ka’s German, according to her logic, represents the modernist fulfillment of Yiddish. Casanova’s view of Kafka’s relationship to Yiddish allows her turn away from the Yiddish modernist writers who were Kafka’s contem­ poraries. Casanova, like Deleuze and Guatarri, views modernism as the purview of major-language modernist writers, and is thus only able to see

60. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 16. 61. Ghana Kronfeld, On the Margins ofModernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 11-12. 62. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004)203-204. 63. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters 269.

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Yiddish as an object of modernist fascination, rather than as a language of modernist creation. Bergelson embraced Yiddish as a language of European modernism, and a modernist language par excellence.64 At the same time, unlike Kafka and other German-Jewish writers, Bergelson also viewed the future of his literary language with doubt. The dwindling usage of Yiddish among Ashkenazi Jews, especially among urban migrants, was not lost on Yiddish writers. Brenner also noted the threat that emigration from Russia posed to the future of both Hebrew and Yiddish.65 Bergelson famously observed that he relied on style indirecte libre because his characters no longer spoke Yiddish, but rather Russian and, later, German: “It was difficult to give a direct equivalent (to their Russian speech) in Yiddish.”66 Although we must take this assertion with a grain of salt, it shows Bergelson’s awareness of the geographic limits of his language: Yiddish was a language that might not survive outside the traditional sphere ofJewish life in the shtetl, after the migration of its speakers and writers. Bergelson did not idealize the Jewish past, but he portrayed the allegorical distance between that past and the world of his modernist fiction. Rather than surrender his “provin­ cial language,” he exploited its alienation for his own modernist ends. Bergelson’s Berlin stories describe Yiddish emigrant writers amidst a multitude of languages. In “Blindkeyt” (“Blindness”), for example, read­ ing, writing, and speaking take place in Yiddish, Russian, and German.67 In the story, Bergelson foregrounds the rupture of Yiddish from the shtetl and its alienation in the metropolitan center through the sexual frustra­ tions and personal despair of his protagonist Sonya. The frame story con­ textualizes these personal traumas with the larger dislocation of Yiddish culture in interwar Europe, drawing attention to the personal conse­ quences of translation. “Blindkeyt” shares the same frame convention of a found diary as Brenner’s novel Shekhol ve-khishalon and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the

64. Harriet Murav integrates Bergelson into the canon of European modernism by situating his work in relationship to the major intellectual figures associated with modernism, including Freud, Bergson, and Benjamin. See Murav, "Bergelson, Benjamin, and Berlin: Justice Deferred." Avrom Novershtern analyzes Bergelson’s expressionist style in his dissertation, “Aspektim mivniyim ba-proza.” Jonathan Skolnik illuminates Dovid Bergelson’s and Alfred Doblin’s shared literary concerns in "Yiddish, the Storyteller, and Modernism," Yiddish in Weimar Berlin 215-223. 65. Brenner, "Noshanot,” Ktavim, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat po'alim; Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uchad, 1986) 702. 66. Cited in Y. Liberberg, "Materialen tsu D. Bergelson’s bio-bibliografye," Visnshaft un revolutsye 1 (1934) 69. 67. "Blindkeyt” first appeared in 1925 in the New York Yiddish journal Frayhayt and was included in his 1929 collection Veit ayn, velt oys (A World Come, A World Goes).

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Underground.63 Bcrgclson and Brenner traveled in overlapping literary circles. As early as 1913, Bergelson corresponded with Brenner, request­ ing a contribution for the Diyidishe velt (The Jewish World), and Brenner’s novel circulated in German-speaking circles in Europe in the period.68 69 Both Brenner’s and Bergelson’s works employ a Jewish emigrant narrator who discovers and translates the journal of another emigrant. In Bren­ ner’s story the translation is between Yiddish and Hebrew; in Bergelson’s it is between Yiddish and Russian. Each found diary describes the per­ sonal breakdown of an emigrant caught between languages and lost in a new home. Nevertheless, these shared acts of fictional translations mediate differing politics of language and territory. Whereas Brenner undercuts the emerging ideology of Hebraism in the Yishuv, Bergelson must confront the relevancy of Yiddish for a modernist Jewish literature and Jewish emigrant audience dispersed across European cities. In addi­ tion, Bergelson’s story grapples with the violent legacy of World War I in postwar Berlin. In “Blindkeyt,” Bergelson’s narrator, a Jewish emigrant, moves into a Berlin apartment where he discovers small clues to the identity of the pre­ vious tenants: the name Sonya carved (in Russian) onto a writing desk and a small notebook tucked away in a bureau. He speaks with the Swiss doorman, who is new on the job, and together they discover from the apartment ledger and the building’s old files the names and the fate of the former tenants. Dr. Greyer left the apartment ten weeks earlier with no forwarding address. His wife, Sonya, died and her body was donated to the anatomical museum. Intrigued by the unfolding mystery, the narrator reads the diary. He learns that Sonya and her husband are, like the narra­ tor, Russian Jewish emigrants. He also notes that a traumatic event had occurred in Sonya’s youth in her shtetl. The narrator’s discoveries frame the enclosed story—Sonya’s Russian diary, translated into Yiddish. In her enclosed diary, Sonya describes her psychological breakdown as she con­ fronts her lost youth and pursues a chaste affair with a young German veteran, blinded during the final battles of World War I. Her unraveling seeps out of the frame and contaminates the frame narrator. The narrator describes how the blind German veteran, Otto, paces back and forth, “looking” up toward the window at him, a haunting figure from Sonya’s world. This blind veteran recalls the distorted face of the “Jewish terror­ ist” in “Tsvishn emigrantn.” The shell-shocked and wounded World War I veteran animated postwar German literature and intellectual thought, from Doblin’s protagonist in Berlin Alexanderplatz to Freud’s writings on 68. Dostoyevsky was an important literary influence for both Brenner and Bergelson. 69. Ken Moss brought this letter to my attention.

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trauma. Bergelson was also deeply affected by the violence of World War I and the Russian revolution. 70 In this story, he pairs the iconic image of the wounded veteran with a figure of Jewish trauma, a woman who broke from her shtetl under unclear and violent circumstances. The frame story highlights the disparity between the language of the diary and the language of the narrative, referring at one point to their different alphabets, one Cyrillic and the other Hebrew.71 Sonya’s Rus­ sian name, which recalls the heroines of many Russian novels, and her neat Cyrillic handwriting obscure her first language, Yiddish. She is torn between the many worlds that these languages and their different alphabets represent; these worlds include the shtetl, the European metrop­ olis, and the world of Russian literature. The narrator mediates between these linguistic worlds. He reads and translates Sonya’s Russian into Yiddish. Just as in Brenner’s frame story, language is both a medium and a plot element. In her Berlin diary entries, Sonya describes how she lives in a double reality, both visually and linguistically; looking at her daily life in Berlin, she is drawn back into her past and is returned to memories of her Jewish childhood as a girl named Chana in the shtetl. When she looks out her Berlin window (the same window the narrator stares out of), she sees the streets of her childhood past. In the opening entry she describes a mem­ ory of looking out the window: I remember it clearly and forever. It was like this:

In the morning, I went to the open window and saw the bright blueness of

the pure, before Passover-eve washed-clean sky. It drew my gaze far, far over the enormous city and it suddenly, very suddenly, recalled the bright blueness of

my own eyes when I was about twenty years old.72

Sonya peers out on Berlin streets, but she directs her gaze far away to a reflection of her own eyes as a young woman. She translates the geo­ graphic distance between the city and the shtetl into temporal terms, as the distance between her past and present. She then codes the tem­ poral difference Jewishly, describing the sky metaphorically as the ritual cleaning that takes place prior to Passover. This image of her past haunts her Berlin life, producing an effect of temporal doubling and compression.

70. Murav addresses Freud s writings on World War I, trauma, and the uncanny and Bergelson's interwar fiction in “Bergelson, Benjamin, and Berlin." 71. Yiddish is written in Hebrew characters. 72. Dovid Bergelson “Blindkey t," Geklibene verk, vol. 6 (Vilna: KJetzkin farlag, 1929) 59.

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The spatiotemporal compression in the story is punctuated by transla­ tion. The visual memory of the blue sky transports her back both to her childhood in the shtetl and to her Yiddish name—Chana. She writes: The lively noise in the surrounding streets, near and far, in the course of a brief moment conjured up forme, as once upon a time, the pre-Passover noises in my

shtetl—people are baking matzos, and it smells for weeks of burning dough, of scoured dishes, and of the dust from beating the seat-cushions of chairs. The

cry of a passing servant to a runaway child reached me, like the disguised, obscure cry of my half-forgotten heywish name, from way back when:

Chana!... Chana... ,73

The scene crystallizes when, at the end of the passage, the sounds of the street conjure up her “half-forgotten” Yiddish name. These reveries about the shtetl during Passover time are a refrain throughout the story. Passover, her Jewish name Chana, and the images of the shtetl all function in the story as cultural codes, the component parts of which are all Jewish or Yiddish words. Passover is the Jewish holiday that celebrates the Ex­ odus from Egypt and the wandering in the desert, a holiday of emigra­ tion. Furthermore, her heymish (homey) name Chana represents her sense of being at home in Yiddish. There is a fictional act of double translation in this passage—Sonya translates her memories of typical Yiddish life into Russian, and the nar­ rator, performing the reverse operation, returns the memories to their original language. This double translation partially masks the strained distance between Sonya’s memory and the Yiddish of the narration. In Bergelson’s story, the narrator transforms Yiddish into a modern urban language by translating Ghana’s Russian-language account of her life in Berlin and her childhood memories back into Yiddish. Whereas Bren­ ner’s fictional translation slyly undermines the mimetic pretensions of Hebrew, Bergelson’s fictional translation attempts to do the opposite, to separate emigrant Yiddish in Berlin from the language of the shtetl. Sonya/Chana’s linguistic anxieties are mirrored by the narrator’s own linguistic position—he too is between Russian and Yiddish. In the story, Russian and Yiddish collide with German. Sonya’s daily life in Berlin takes place in German, and her erotic attachments are to German-speaking (non-Jewish) men. At one point she describes her fasci­ nation for a young German clerk at the local drugstore. She barely speaks to him, but fantasizes about their imaginary conversations. She tries to

73. Bergelson, "Blindkeyt" 59-60.

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locate this German man in the empty landscape of her half-forgotten past in the shtetl: “It would be good to live together with this German, some­ where in a half-peasant house, at the opening of the forest next to my shtetl.”74 Looking at him makes her feel “just like I was back home, in my shtetl.”75 Sonya’s erotic desire for this young German corroborates her longing for the shtetl. However, a young woman calling out the pharma­ cist’s German name, “Adolf,” ruptures her erotic fantasies. Whereas the folksinger in “Der Bariton” eroticizes the shtetl as a dead bride, Sonya eroticizes the shtetl by Germanizing it. However, she can only fantasize consummating her desire at the threshold of the shtetl in the liminal space of the forest and not in the Jewish space of the shtetl itself. Sonya’s desire to consummate her relationship at the borders of the shtetl shows her ambivalent relationship to Berlin and its ethos of sexual liberation, as well as to the shtetl. In the story, Bergelson captures Sonya’s growing feelings of sexual desire and deep frustration as she moves among the city streets, dances in the nightclubs and cabarets, and flirts with young German men. Sonya’s most significant relationship in the story is with Otto, the twenty-one-year-old blinded German World War I veteran. Otto’s war experience and Sonya’s traumatic memory of the shtetl represent both the shock of World War I and the trauma of anti-Jewish violence. These two shared events blind them literally and metaphorically. Otto is haunted by the visual memory of the bright explosion on the battlefield that preceded his blindness, while Sonya is tormented by her memories of her break from the shtetl. Bergelson’s Russian-speaking, Jewish heroine Sonya can­ not overcome the chasm between her Yiddish memories and her everyday life in Berlin. During Sonya’s encounter with Otto she lies about her age and her identity, telling Otto that she is a twenty-three-year-old Russian philology student who lives with her brother, a foreign professor in Berlin. Her attempts to conceal her Jewish past, to literally erase and forget her trauma, magnify her despondency. Her linguistic and cultural alienation, combined with her erotic frustrations, ultimately leads to her suicide at the end of the story. Bergelson frames Sonya’s desperate act of self-deception with the narra­ tor’s failed attempt to return the diaries to Sonya’s 6migr6 husband. He searches out Dr. Greyer, a Russian engineer-turned-merchant, among the Jewish £migr£ community in Berlin. When he finally locates Dr. Greyer and shows him Sonya’s diaries, Dr. Greyer disavows them. The husband’s refusal to recognize Sonya’s most private expressions, her personal thoughts,

74. Bergelson, “Blindkeyt” 62. 75. Bergelson, “Blindkeyt" 62.

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her deepest sexual desires, and even her handwriting, thwarts the narrator’s attempt to resolve the mystery of the diary. Bergelson refigures the recogni­ tion scenes of Greek tragedy into a modern context, depicting misrecogni­ tion as a psychological problem, magnified by the linguistic and geographic displacements of the emigrant.76 The narrator, the husband, and Sonya are all emigrants circulating within a community that cannot vouch for their identities. Just as Dr. Greyer cannot or will not recognize his wife’s diary, these Jewish immigrants, divorced from their familiar social contexts in Weimar Berlin, cannot recognize each other. Although the narrator reads the diary and attempts to return it to its rightful owner, the Russian text has become illegible, disrupted by the fractured social relations of an immi­ grant community in crisis, lost between the narrator’s Yiddish and the sur­ rounding German milieu. Dr. Greyer’s refusal (or inability) to recognize the diary captures the difficult conditions of diasporic Yiddish writing, con­ ditions that amplify the modernist theme of estrangement in the story.

YIDDISH GEOGRAPHIES

In both “Blindkeyt” and “Der bariton,” Bergelson foregrounds the frag­ ile relationship between the writer and his/her diasporic audience. In “Tsvishn emigrantn,” Bergelson figures the unstable position of the emigrant writer, torn between the bounds of the national and the inter­ national. In this story, the writer-narrator and his young visitor, the “Jewish terrorist,” struggle to situate themselves along the axes of na­ tional identity: language, territory, and ethnicity. The story confronts the territorial reality (or lack thereof) of Yiddish culture through the haunting vista of allegory. The story echoes the historical debates taking place among Jewish writers about whether to transform Yiddish into a cosmopolitan and international language, or whether to strive for national status. In 1924, in an article entitled “Unzer nokh-klasisher peryod” (“Our Post-Classical Period”), the Soviet Yiddish writer Nokhum Oyslender remarks that Yiddish literature has become so decentralized that it “has lost its name.”77 He opines that no single “name” or designation suffices to unite a diasporic Yiddish literature; Yiddish literature was hopelessly hyphenated: Russian-Yiddish or American-Yiddish. Oyslender captures the crisis of early-twentieth-century Yiddish writing in the interwar period:

76. For a discussion and literary history of misrecognition, see Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 77. Nokhum Oyslender, Vegayn vegoys: literarishe epizodn (Kiev: Kultur Lige, 1924) 173.

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the lack of a fixed geographic or national center. Between 1925 and 1926, Meisel, Ravitch, and Bergelson all published essays addressing this burning issue.78 Peretz Markish organized symposia in Warsaw and other Polish cities entitled; “Varshe; nyu york, moskve unyerusholayim” (“War­ saw, New York, Moscow, and Jerusalem”).79 During his 1925 tour of Europe, Meisel reported that H. Leyvik, the American Yiddish poet, was disturbed by the widening gulf between different centers of Yiddish and raised the matter at his first meeting with Moscow Yiddish literati.80 These writers and critics were debating the importance of their particular liter­ ary center, and justifying their personal decisions to immigrate to Amer­ ica, to remain in Poland, or to commit to the Soviet Union. However, beyond this boosterism, these exchanges describe the aesthetic chal­ lenges faced by writers who worked in a language that lacked a national territory. Without a permanent address or, in Oyslender’s view, a name to call its own, Yiddish literature might not be able to sustain itself. In his 1925 essay “Varshe, nyu york, moskve” (“Warsaw, New York, Moscow”), Meisel imagines a Yiddish literary geography that neatly cor­ responds to the mythology of Yiddish literary history. His pre-modernist literary map locates the three patriarchs of Yiddish—Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz—in the imaginary milieu of their fictional world, a Jewish topography only rarely impinged upon by national bor­ ders. He argues that their work, “was not, and could not be, a purely local literature, and it spread its influence and spirit far beyond the borders of their old-settled home, even though these writers resided and lived out their lives for the most part in the narrow ambience of the old world.”81 Meisel refuses to locate them in the cities in which they actually lived: Odessa, Kiev, and Warsaw. For Meisel, the non-national landscape of the literary shtetl becomes an idealized model for a non-national and nonter­ ritorial literature. Melech Ravitch takes a more radical approach to Yid­ dish literature in his 1926 series of articles entitled “Arum velkher aks dreyt zikh di yidishe literatur?” (“Around What Axis Does Yiddish Litera­ ture Turn?”). He writes, “it has become clear to me that a literature that has no center must seek its center precisely in its centerlessness.”82 He pro­ claims, “Before the eyes of the great poets of the world, before the eyes of

78. Nathan Cohen discusses these debates in Sefer, sofer ve-’iton: tnerkaz ha-tarbut ha-yehudit be-varshah, 1918-1942 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003) 115-125. 79. Melekh Ravitch, Dos mayse bukh fun tnayn lebn, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz Publishing House, 1975)417. 80. Nachman Meisel, “Varshe, nyu-york, moskve: arum dem kampf vegn der hegemonie iber der yidisher literatur," Literarishe bleter, November 27,1925: 262. 81. Meisel, "Varshe, nyu-york, moskve" 263. 82. Ravitch, “Di ideye vos felt,” Literarishe Bleter, December 10,1926: 823.

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the poets of the twentieth century, the poets of world war and world revo­ lution, the distant and blue expanse of the sea has suddenly revealed itself.”83 He then imagines the poets of the world collectively jumping into the sea. Although some are wary of leaving solid ground behind, the imagined Jewish poets exclaims, “then let us be even more wary of it; let us protect ourselves from land.”84 Rewriting the Jewish luftmentsh into the modernist yatn-mentsh (men of the sea), Ravitch rejects literary territorialism. Yiddish writers, lacking a homeland, can only survive in international waters. Both Meisel and Ravitch envision Yiddish literature flourishing in a borderless geography. In contrast, Bergelson was seduced by the promise of a new, national, Yiddish literary center. In his 1926 essay “Dray tsentern” (‘"Three Centers”), Bergelson attributes the failure of Yiddish cul­ ture in New York to the economic forces driving cultural assimilation and its failure in Poland to the predominance of religious conservatism, Zion­ ism, and poverty. As far as he could see, the Soviet Union remained the only hope for its future.85 His essay offers a materialist history of Yid­ dish literature, but the power of the essay rests in his description of an aesthetic project steeped in geographic anxieties and worries about the future of Yiddish. In the closing sections of his essay, Bergelson predicates the future of Yiddish literature on an agricultural vista far removed from his daily life in Berlin, in the fantastic realm of the Crimean steppes.86 Somewhere there on the steppes, occupied by Jewish farming villages, some­ where at the machine, in the factory, or in the workshop of the Jewish craftsman,

this new Jewish artist is already ripening. Following sunrise and sunset behind

the plough, filing his way between running rails of iron and steel, returning

home from his work—everywhere he finds himself, he pauses in thought for a moment, and fills his eye with the surrounding colorfulness of newly flourish­ ing Jewish life. Colorful fertilization, the song of labor and of self-sacrifice for world liberation—this will be the content of the new Yiddish book he will write; this will be the content of the new Jewish art in Soviet Russia.87

83. Ravitch, "Di ideye vos felt” 823. 84. Ravitch, "Di ideye vos felt” 823. 85. These arguments are in dialogue with those of Soviet critics, particularly Moshe Litvakov. See Mikhail Krutikov, “What is Yiddish Literary Tradition? The Soviet Marxist Moshe Litvakov versus the American Modernist Mikhl Likht,” Proojtexts 21.2 (2001) 210-213. 86. The Crimea offered a Soviet alternative to Palestine. For a discussion of Jewish settle­ ment in the Crimea, see Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers' Romance with Communism (Syra­ cuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005) 75 and 84-85. 87. Dovid Bergelson, "Dray tsentern,” In Shpan 1 (1926) 94.

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Bergelson’s quasi-proletarian revival of Yiddish literature in Soviet Russia unfolds in a newly imagined socialist landscape filled with factories and fields^ with steel railroad tracks traversing the land. These are the visual images that will fill the eyes of the Yiddish writer and stimulate a new Yid­ dish literature; one that will combat the "monochromaticjewish life” that permeates existing Yiddish works.88 Far from being a real literary center, the steppes offer Bergelson a new representational landscape for Yiddish literature outside of the shtetl and the liminal spaces ofjewish migration. The stark imagery of railroad tracks, factory workers, and steel resonate with the modernist imagery of the city, but they are now displaced onto a utopic Soviet landscape. In the essay, Bergelson imagines a new Yiddish literature neither subject to the confines of the shtetl nor stuck with its stock Jewish characters. He paints a picture not of an actual literary cen­ ter with its physical infrastructure, but of a utopian literary center: a new Yiddish writer, the Jewish proletariat, in a new terrain, the agricultural steppes. Bergelson’s imagined landscape merges the socialist ideal of work, the modernist values of the period, and the Jewish ethos of self­ transformation to produce an idealized modern workers’ literary space. Despite his exultant call for a new revolutionary Soviet Yiddish litera­ ture, his own work in the interwar period represents an attempt to shape a Yiddish modernism set outside both the shtetl and the steppes, in the urban centers of Western Europe and in the former Pale.89 Although Bergelson articulated a commitment to a project ofjewish national revival in the Soviet Union, his writing realizes this project in Berlin.

“AMONG EMIGRANTS”: A WRITER’S TALE IN BERLIN Bergelson’s story “Tsvishn emigrantn” ("Among Emigrants”), originally published in 1923 and reprinted in Shturemteg, exemplifies Bergelson’s pursuit to situate a new modernist literature in the absence of a national home or territorial center. The story juxtaposes postwar emigrant Berlin with devastated Jewish Volhynia. Bergelson frames the story with the visit of a Jewish emigrant to the home of a well-known Yiddish 6migr6 writer. The narrator (the 6migr6 writer) returns home one day to find waiting for him a young man who nervously claims to be "a yidishe ter­ rorist” (a Jewish terrorist). This self-proclaimed revolutionary proceeds to

88. Bergelson, "Dray tsentern” 92. 89. David Fogels 1929 novel, Chayei nisu'ini (Married Life), offers an interesting Hebrew literary parallel to Bergelson’s interwar Berlin fiction. In this novel, Fogel writes about Jewish emigrants in Vienna who speak German.

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recount the story of his life from his childhood in Volhynia, his travels to Palestine, his arrival in Berlin, and finally his discovery that an infamous pogromist from his birthplace is now living in the room opposite his own in the same boarding house. As the story progresses, the “terrorist” describes his psychological unraveling, finally begging the writer to help him take murderous revenge on his pogromist alter ego. At the end, how­ ever, unable to commit this murder, the young man delivers a suicide note to the writer instead. Suicide pervades Bergelson’s short fiction, and this violence, turned inward, is linked to the fragilities ofYiddish and the frus­ tration and alienation of the Yiddish writer. Bergelson frames the newly arrived man’s desperate tale of immigra­ tion, alienation, and mental breakdown through the eyes of the more established, older Yiddish emigrant writer in Berlin. The young man’s account of his travels from Eastern Europe to Palestine and, finally, Berlin is neatly contained within the author’s Berlin study, and creates an effect of confinement that distorts the geography of the tales. “Tsvishn emigrantn” has been read as a realist depiction of the emigrant experience in Berlin.90 Bergelson’s story, however, is not a mimetic tale transcribing the reality of emigrant lives. Rather, it is a mise-en-abime, a story framed within a story inside another story. Bergelson crafts a narrative that cap­ tures the disorientation of the emigrant writer and the geographical con­ flicts ofYiddish modernism between the wars. Bergelson’s frame narrator is not a folksyjewish book peddler wander­ ing through the familiar shtetlekh of the Pale, like Abramovitsh’s Mendele, nor is he a Jewish storyteller observing Jewish life in the Pale, like Sholem Aleichem. Instead, he is an emigrant, estranged from his sur­ roundings. The young man who visits him is an umbakanter, a stranger. Unlike the characters that Sholem Aleichem encounters on the road, he does not hail from any specific town, and he does not give his father’s name. The absence of the shtetl as a fixed literary landscape breaks down any context that might make this umbakanter more legible to both the writer and the reader. Like this unknown “terrorist,” the writer is also unknown, a foreigner writing in a language not native to his environment. Through these emigrants, Bergelson stages the conflict between two competing landscapes.

90. Delphine Bechtel, "Dovid Bergelson’s Berliner Erzahlungen,” Jiddische Philologie: Festschrift fur Erika Timm, eds. W. Roll and S. Neuberg (Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1999): 262-263; Heather Valencia,”Yiddish Writers in Berlin: 1920-1936," The German Jewish Dilemma: From the Enlightenment to the Shoah, eds. Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999) 197-199. For new perspectives see Schachter, “Bergelson and the Landscape ofYiddish Modernism,” East European Jewish Affairs 38.1 (2008) 7-19; Harriet Murav, “Bergelson, Benjamin, Berlin."

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The two landscapes—Berlin and Volhynia—foreground a central theme in the story: the struggle to escape the force of the Eastern Euro­ pean Jewish literary landscape. Even as Bergelson’s characters travel to Berlin to escape the shtetl, they constantly return to this literary land­ scape, refracted through the city streets of their new home. Berlin serves as the shtetl’s distorted mirror image. The same shtetl characters appear, scattered across the streets of Berlin, exercising an inescapable influence over the young Jew: they trail him through the city, they coax him to give up his murderous plot, and they torment him. One of them, Bereie Zhum, even tries to have him committed. Despite his effort to escape to a new, potentially Jewish center—Palestine—and his search for refuge in Ber­ lin, the young “terrorist” still lives deep within the distorted landscape of Volhynia. This pogrom-ravaged Volhynia exists refracted through Ber­ lin’s streets, haunting the city like a ghost. Although the narrative strug­ gles to maintain itself on Berlin streets, the story veers again and again into the world of the shtetl. Both the narrator and the “terrorist” translate the streets of Berlin and its cast of characters into the destroyed shtetls of Volhynia. The meeting of these two worlds, Berlin and Volhynia, and their themes of madness and war explode the Yiddish frame convention with a proliferation of doubles and embedded narratives, so that the tale comes to resemble a house of mirrors in which doppelgangers range across two very different but overlapping landscapes. The young stranger is not only a character in the frame narrator’s imagination but is also his alter ego. Like the narrator, the Jewish “terrorist” is an aspiring Emigre writer. If the would-be terrorist is a double for the writer in the frame narrative, he has doubles of his own in the enclosed story—for example, the pogromist who has followed him from Volhynia to Berlin now lives in the room opposite his in the pension. Bergelson figures the pogromist as the terror­ ist’s mirror image. At one point the young man describes the way their boots face each other outside their respective doors: “mine—worn-out Jewish boots with sagging elastic—they had already been to Palestine; and his—sturdy, Gentile, with bootlegs that extended right up, under his trousers.”91 The terrorist looks through a goyish mirror and sees himself reflected back in the form of a pogromist, an internalized image of his own self-hate. 91. Bergelson, "Tsvishn emigrantn" 163. My English translation is based on “Among Refu­ gees,” Vie Shadows of Berlin, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 2005) 21-43. Passages omitted by Neugroschel, like the one above, have been adapted from an unpublished manuscript by Robert Adler Peckerar. I have made slight modifications to Neugroschel’s translation. While Neugroschel translates the Yiddish word emigrantn as “refugees," I have chosen to retain the more literal meaning, referring to story as “Among Emigrants."

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Bergelson’s frame narrator-writer also blurs the spatiotemporal divi­ sion between Berlin and the landscape of the Jewish shtetl. In the tale’s opening scene, the frame narrator stares out onto the streets of Berlin through a curtained window. He looks out onto the past, over big-city streets into the shtetl. The result is a narrative distortion of time and space in which Berlin becomes the landscape of the Jewish past: Outside, beyond the long curtains, I could sense the vast, checkered streets be­

ginning to come alive, to teem and swarm, to radiate the huge dry heat they had been breathing the whole long day—a day like a year, a day like a long, long

road. On a day like this, looking back, you think to yourself that you’ve under­ gone an unusually long journey. A day like this drives all the lonely eccentrics into the street, and they wander about like silent, restless ghosts.92

The curtain functions on two levels. On one hand, it literally obscures the narrator’s view outside. On the other, it is an expressionist metaphor for sensory perception. Looking through the window, the frame narrator views the expanse of his own past. The distorted sense of time—a world moving in slow motion, a day stretched to a year—is amplified by the col­ lapse of time as space, as “a long way.” The day is transformed into a year and ultimately into a road, representing the distance that the writer and the terrorist traveled on their journeys from the shtetl to Berlin. As a result of this spatial and temporal distortion, the Jewish past looms over the expanse between the urban centers and the Jewish periphery, between the city and the shtetl.93 In contrast to the situation of German-Jewish writers, Bergelson was a visitor to Berlin from the Eastern European provinces, writing in the lan­ guage that signaled tradition, even when it strove to break through to the modern.94 In “Dray tsentern,” Bergelson argues that the failure of contem­ porary Yiddish literature is in part a failure of vision, a failure to look beyond the landscape of the shtetl. He condemns the colorless material of

92. Bergelson, “Tsvishn emigrantn" 177-178. 93. Bergelson’s spatialization of time, a practice Jordan Finkin insightfully describes as "temporaesthetisa,” is also characteristic of Peretz Markish’s expressionist poetics. According to Finkin, Markish’s tendency to spatialize time is rooted in his experience of "groundlessness and exile.” Bergelson adapts a strategy similar to Peretz’s to capture the conditions of writing Yid­ dish. Finkin "Markish, Trakl, and the Temporaesthetic,” Modernism/modernity 15.4 (2008) 783-784. 94. German Jewish modernism in the 1920s was marked by both "aesthetic innovation” and an "equally profound antimodern turn toward tradition"; however, whatever their attachment to tradition, in the German context, Jewish writers were "stigmatized by the mark of the 'mod­ ern.'” Of course, in contrast, Eastern European Jews were stigmatized by an attachment to tradi­ tion. See Isenberg, Between Redemption and Doom 2.

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Yiddish literature by exalting the new Yiddish writer who “fills his eyes with the surrounding colorfulness of newly flourishing Jewish life.” Yet when Bergelson’s frame narrator opens his eyes—in 1920s Berlin—the narrator can see only his past, his origins in the shtetl. Despite his own contempt for the shtetl, all of Bergelson’s Yiddish-speaking characters emerge from shtetlekh, and, like the narrator and the terrorist in “Tsvishn emigrantn,” they cannot eradicate their past even if its physical embodi­ ment no longer exists. Bergelson’s writing, like that of so many fellow modernists, grapples with the tension between tradition and modernity, a struggle that for Bergelson is intertwined with his chosen medium: Yid­ dish, a language excavated from the Jewish shtetl. Bergelson’s narrator similarly struggles to orient himself in relation­ ship to both the city and the shtetl, the past and the present. The narrator’s distorted spatiotemporal perspective colors his representation of the young Jewish emigrant. The description, noted earlier, of the day as a long journey echoes the narrator’s description of the young man. This young man evokes an alternate landscape for the narrator—not the wide boule­ vards of Berlin, but the unpaved roads of a small Eastern European shtetl: “His whole body reminded me of the grey dust on distant tiny shtetl roads, and he gave the impression of someone who had breathlessly traveled a long distance.”95 The narrator describes the young man as a specter of dust. This invisible dust that covers him is the indelible mark of the shtetl. The writer views the young man as an allegory of his own long journey from the Eastern European shtetl to the Western European metropolis; he is the Wandering Jew in the historical guise of the post-World War I emigre. Yet the allegory refers not to the Jewish people as a whole, but to the writer’s personal experience. This deflated national allegory, much like in “Der bariton,” is transformed into a personal meditation on the problem of Yiddish language and Yiddish authorship. While the writer in “Tsvishn emigrantn” transforms the figure of the would-be terrorist into a dusty figure of his own life, the young man resists being turned into a trope through his repeated refrain, “I will break in on the other side.” The young man’s violent urge to smash the world echoes with the violent revolutionary tendencies of German expressionism; he is an aspiring Yiddish writer and revolutionary. The young man offers the narrator a precis of the first chapter from an unfinished novel he began writing in Berlin. In this narrative, every Sunday a Jewish beggar goes to the town’s non-Jewish neighborhood, where some wealthy Jews also reside. There, non-Jewish boys throw stones and set their dogs on him.

95. Bergelson, “Tsvishn emigrantn" 176.

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Nevertheless, as soon as he arrives he deliberately coughs in order to attract the boys’ attention, because the clamor of the dogs’ barking announces his presence to the wealthy Jews who are willing to give alms to him. The beggar, who at the beginning of the anecdote appears as a pitiful persecuted figure defending himself against antisemitic attacks, in reality welcomes and encourages the persecution for his own gain. He profits from the antisemitism, and the wealthy Jews make themselves complicit with it by continuing to dole out alms to him. The young man’s story transforms an allegory of collective experience into an expressionist metaphor for his own subjective experience of his­ tory. His tentative “first chapter” resembles an Abramovitsh-style critique of the social conditions of European Jewry. The beggar allegorically repre­ sents the community of Israel which, in this story, invites its own persecu­ tion. The Jews’ actions spur the antisemitic violence and ultimately the destruction of the shtetl. After he recounts the story, the young stranger tells the narrator that the beggar in the story, the iconic embodiment of the Jewish condition in Eastern Europe, actually represents himself. This story within a story illuminates the complex force of allegory. The young “terrorist” at first employs the familiar allegorical figures of Jewish cul­ ture, in this case the Jewish beggar. He writes a moralistic story that appears to condemn the behavior of Jews who are responsible for their own suffering. Then he interprets the story in a reverse direction, like the baritone’s nostalgia folded in on itself. He reads the story of the beggar not as a tale of collective guilt, but as an autobiographical account of self­ condemnation. Whereas the frame narrator views the young man as an allegorical figure of his own journey from the shtetl, the young man views the collective sufferings of the Jewish people as an allegory for his own psychic struggles. Bergelson reverses and personalizes the process of allegoresis. He merges the iconic figures of Russian Jewish history—the pogromist, the terrorist or revolutionary, the wandering Jew, and the writer—to transform the Jewish past into a psychological landscape. The complex structure of allegorization and doubling come to a head when the young emigrant explains to the writer his real purpose: he demands a gun in order to assassinate the pogromist. He makes the request of the writer because writers “are like the conscience of a nation. They are its nerves. They present their nation to the world. From the work of writers, people will subsequently learn how their nation lived during their time.”96 The protagonist fixates on the writer because he stands in for the nation. However, emigrant Yiddish writers occupy a curious position

96. Bergelson, “Tsvishn emigrantn" 198.

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vis-i-vis the folk. What nation do they represent? Whose conscience do they serve? The Yiddish critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned to Mendele as the conscience of the Jewish folk, the recorder who would preserve all of Jewish culture after the deluge. But £migr£ writers cannot preserve the life of a folk when they are separated from that life. Bergelson’s story describes how the absence of a fixed nation-state and a clearly located audience posed a formal and aesthetic crisis for Yiddish writers. Without a clearly identified reading community a writer must constitute one through writing. This burden lends itself to the dangers of allegory and ultimately leads to suicide. At the end of the story the writ­ er’s inability to either function as the conscience of his people or to pro­ cure a gun leads the Jewish terrorist to commit suicide: “I have found a way out. Under the mirror that hangs in my room, number 3, in the boarding house, there is a hook. The rope on which the mirror hangs will suffice. I understand everything now. I am an emigrant... among emi­ grants ... I don’t want to be one any longer... ”97 The would-be terrorist proclaims that he has discovered a means of escape from his struggles, and more pointedly from the troubling force of allegory that draws him repeatedly back to the landscape of the shtetl, a force represented by the mirror on whose wall-hook he hangs himself. He moves beyond the reflective surface of the mirror and the doubling effect of emigrant narra­ tive. He cannot murder the pogromist, his alter ego from the landscape of the shtetl; therefore, he must destroy himself. Despite his plea for a gun, the story ends not with a dramatic action on his part, but with his last words in print. The young man’s suicidal despair echoes that of Sonya and the folk­ singer, as well as Brenner’s protagonist, Chefetz.98 These characters’ men­ tal breakdowns dramatize the crisis ofjewish literary culture, representing the personal struggles faced by writers forced to abandon their homes, their friends and families, and the comfort of their native languages. However, Bergelson, like Brenner, frames the personal despair of his characters as literary and linguistic crises. His stories veer between the allegorical and the mimetic, blurring the boundary between the psycho­ logical and the historical. In Bergelson’s fiction, events are embedded in

97. Bergelson, “Tsvishn emigrantn” 199. 98. Suicide is a recurrent theme in European and Anglo-American modernist fiction, for example Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway. The theme permeates Hebrew and Yiddish modernist writing in works by H. D. Nomberg, Brenner, Gnessin, Bergelson, and countless other writers. For discussions of suicide in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, see Janet Hadda, Passionate Women, Passive Men: Suicide in Yiddish Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); Pinsker, Literary Passports 360-367.

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historical circumstances, but these historical circumstances are internal­ ized. Suicide does not solve the aesthetic problems that Yiddish writers confronted in the interwar period; rather, suicide illuminates the per­ sonal and aesthetic stakes of writing in Yiddish. Hebrew writers who lived and wrote in Berlin wrestled with similar aesthetic challenges and linguistic difficulties. The Hebrew modernist poet and novelist Leah Goldberg arrived in Berlin in 1930, during Bergelson’s residence in the city. In her epistolary novel, Mikhtavim me-nesi‘a meduma (Letters from an Imaginary Journey), she describes the literary cafes inhabited by Bergelson and other Jewish writers of the period. Whether Goldberg or Bergelson crossed paths remains an open question. However, Goldberg’s encounter with the city profoundly shaped her liter­ ary career, and her Hebrew prose fiction from the 1930s and 1940s is deeply invested in the legacy ofWeimar culture. Goldberg, like Bergelson, wrestled with the tension between the Eastern European Jewish past and the modernist European present, depicting characters torn between these worlds and between the multiple languages they represent: Hebrew, Yid­ dish, and German. Like the many characters in Bergelson’s oeuvre, Gold­ berg’s protagonists spiral into despair, ruminate on suicide, and struggle with their identities as Jews and immigrants. In her novel Ve-hu ha-'or (And That Is the Light), Goldberg frames her protagonist’s personal and psychological crises with the gendered politics of Jewish languages. The next chapter examines how Goldberg’s novel transforms Hebrew into a medium that can capture the fractured subjectivity of Jewish cultural modernity from a woman’s point of view.

CHAPTER 4

Gender and the Language

of Modernism

n the opening scene of Leah Goldberg’s 1946 novel, Ve-hu ha-'or (And That Is the Light), Nora Kriger, a twenty-year-old university student, travels home on a train from Berlin to spend summer vacation with her family in Kovno, Lithuania. Nora sits across from an attractive Swedish doctor, who resembles a bourgeois character from an Ibsen family drama.1 Suddenly, a Jewish soykher (merchant) enters the train. The bearded Jewish man scans the train car for dangerous elements. He groans, spits on the floor, and rolls a cigarette with his yellow, tobacco-stained fingers. Thejewish merchant resembles a character straight out of the fictional universe of Abramovitsh or Sholem Aleichem. Nora is trapped between the gazes of both men. The Swedish doctor’s smile and his curious examination of her face embarrass her. The Jewish merchant’s prying questions—in Yiddish—about her family infuriate her. In the midst of her heated discus­ sions with both the bearded Jew in Yiddish and the Swedish doctor in Ger­ man (a conversation to which I will return later), Nora asks herself: “The Jew and the alien-gentile, may their names be obliterated. Why am I unable to be an T unto herself, an T without any sense of belonging with either of these two who are alien to me?”1 2 Nora expresses her indignation at both of these men who overshadow her own subjectivity, her “I” as a self-contained, non-relational entity. Her outrage represents a modernist crisis of margin­ alized subjectivity, punctuated by the frictions between language, gender, and both diasporic Jewish culture and non-Jewish European cultures.

I

1. Nora’s name alludes to the protagonist of Ibsens protomodemist play, A Dolls House. 2. Leah Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-or (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uchad, 2005) 12.

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Goldberg’s semi-autobiographical novel mirrors her own ambivalent relationship to European and Jewish literary cultures. Goldberg was born in Konigsberg in 1911 and grew up in the Russian-speaking milieu of Kovno, where she was raised reading Russian and German literature. In 1918, Goldberg’s parents enrolled her in the Hebrew gymnasium in Kovno, where she immersed herself in Hebrew culture. In 1931, she traveled to Germany to begin graduate work in Berlin and then later in Bonn, where she completed her doctorate in Semitic studies and wit­ nessed the waning of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi rise to power. In 1935, Goldberg immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. She was warmly welcomed and found a place for herself as a prominent member of the Moderna, a group of Hebrew modernist poets that included Avraham Shlonsky and Nathan Alterman. In addition to her work as a modernist poet and novelist, she was also a prolific translator, literary critic, play­ wright, and the founder of the Hebrew University’s department of com­ parative literature. Although she wholeheartedly embraced Hebrew as her literary language and emigrated to Palestine, in her poetry and prose she expressed an ambivalence toward Zionism and its ideology of negat­ ing exile, continuing to view herself in both Jewish and European terms. To that end, her diasporic modernist poetics blended Jewish and Euro­ pean exilic tropes from Genesis to Dante, expressing her complicated and multivalent relationship to exile and home, to European and Hebrew culture? In Ve-hu ha-'or she self-consciously grapples with the linguistic, geographic, and aesthetic uncertainties of diaspora through the perspec­ tive of her young protagonist. Like much of Goldberg’s prose fiction, Ve-hu ha-'or can be read through the lens of autobiography; however, the autobiographical details of the novel actually serve as jumping-off points for the novel’s reflections on subjectivity, gender, and language. Goldberg frames her novel with Nora’s two train rides: her arrival in Kovno and her departure to Berlin. These two train scenes enclose the protagonist’s marginalized and fractured subjectivity within the

3. Ofra Yeglin points to the importance of exile in Goldberg’s poetry and offers a compel­ ling analysis of Goldbergs poem cycle “Shirei tsiyon” ("Songs of Zion”), showing how the poem announces Goldbergs break with the Zionist collective. Yeglin also discusses Goldbergs affinity for Dante as a poet in exile. See Yeglin, Ulay tnabat acher: Klasiyut modernit u-modemizm klasi be-shirat le’agoldberg (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutzha-me’uchad, 2002) 13,39-40. Michael Gluzman also discusses Goldbergs poetics of exile, see Gluzman, The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) 56-64. Natasha Gordinsky offers a nuanced discussion of exile in Goldberg’s poetry, arguing that Goldberg does not romanticize exile, but rather suffers from the problem of at least two homes. See Gordinsky, '"Homeland I Will Name the Language of Poetry in a Foreign Country’: Modes of Challenging the Home/Exile Binary in Leah Goldberg’s Poetry,” Leipzigcr Beitrage zur jiidischen Geschichte und Kultur 3 (2005) 239-253.

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gendered linguistic tensions between Jewish and European literary cul­ tures. On the train, Nora confronts a Yiddish cultural tradition that viewed women as embodiments of tradition, a European literary culture that sexualized women and transformed them into objects of medical observation, and a Hebrew textual tradition that had been the reserve of men.4 Goldberg positions Nora between these diasporic literary and cul­ tural traditions, figured in the bodies of men, to portray the conflicted linguistic, literary, and cultural barriers facingjewish women in Hebrew literary culture. The Jewish merchant represents the pre-modernist Jew­ ish literature of Eastern Europe, a male-oriented Yiddish and Hebrew corpus. The Swedish doctor is a metonymy for European modernism: the social consciousness of Ibsen, whose work advocated social equality for women, as well as a nod to Strindberg’s more formal modernist works concerned with madness, a central theme of Goldberg’s novel.5 Nora’s rejection of these men represents Goldberg’s attempt to work through the conflicted intersections of modern European and diasporic Jewish literary traditions from a woman’s point of view. The novel rejects the literary idiom of the Jewish merchant because of its gender-segregated origins in the Jewish study house and also contests the secular paradigm of late-nineteenth-century European literature for its representation of women as passive objects of desire. All of this takes place in the liminal space of the train car, which serves as an apt metaphor for the double marginalization ofjewish women in modern European and Jewish liter­ ary culture, between Kovno and Berlin and between Jewish and nonJewish languages and literatures. Trains figure prominently in Goldberg’s writing. All three of her novels—Ve-hu ha-'or, Mikhtavim me-nesi'a meduma (Lettersfrom an Imag­ inary Journey, 1937), and Avedot (Losses, an unpublished novel written between 1935-1939)—open with train rides. The train is both a trope of Eastern European Jewish culture and European modernity. In Yiddish literature, the train represented the acceleration of modernity and the

4. In addition to these associations, Nili Sharf Gold illuminates the significant parallels between Freud’s case study of Dora and Nora. See Gold, "Rereading It is the Light, Leah Gold­ berg’s Only Novel,” Prooftexts 17.3 (1997) 248-255. 5. The Swedish doctor also recalls Joachim von Pasenow, the protagonist in the first section of Hermann Broch’s trilogy The Sleepwalkers. In her diaries, Goldberg remarks that she was reading The Sleepwalkers at the time she was writing her novel. Broch’s trilogy is about the his­ torical crisis of World War I and a metaliterary reflection on German literary history, each novel takes up a different literary style from romanticism to modernism. Goldberg adapts Broch’s metaliterary approach for her own gendered investigation ofjewish literary history. Yomanei lea goldberg, eds. Rachel and Ariyeh Aharoni (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat po'alim, 2005) 276-278. Menakhem Perry also notes Broch’s influence on Goldberg’s novel in his afterword, “He’arot al Ve-hu ha-or: hemshekh magev ha-sefer,” Ve-hu ha-or 221.

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experience of diaspora.6 At the same time, the train also disrupted traditionalJewish social conventions, introducing new cultural, linguistic, and gender norms. The train tracks connected the Jewish provinces to the metropolitan centers and linked Jews to the circuits of capitalism and international trade, as well as marking the economic decline of the shtetl and the mass emigration ofJews from the Pale of Settlement.7 The Jewish passengers on the third-class train cars of Yiddish and Hebrew fiction were predominantly men traveling for business and distraught families fleeing violence. Similarly in Russian literature, for example in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the train also served as a figure of modernization and cap­ italism. In Western European literature and culture, the railroad and the railway station signaled the triumph of technology, the rise of transna­ tional capitalism, and the possibilities of the future.8 German railroad lines, in particular, served as a crossroads between Eastern and Western Europe. In German culture “trains facilitated unprecedented mobility and mass migration, but, at the same time, they also enabled people to be denied citizenship and deported en masse.”9 In Ve-hu ha-'or, Goldberg depicts the train as an instrument of progress, commerce, and mobility, yet she hints at the darker side of train travel: the regulation of national and racial identities.10 Goldberg portrays the para­ dox of the train car, and by extension modernity itself for a woman. Although the train is a sign of Nora’s mobility, the male gazes that sur­ round her restrict her experience of that mobility. Goldberg depicts Nora’s mobility with ambivalence: despite her education, language abilities, and social status as a Jewish woman in 1930s Europe, her prospects are severely constricted.

6. Sholem Aleichem's Ayzenban geshikhtes (Railroad Stories') capture the alienation and dis­ orientation of a diasporic literary community. Dan Miron argues that the trains in the collection “always embody an extrinsic and foreign entity that pulls the protagonists out of the confines of their intimate world and hurls them into an alien one.” See Miron, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of the Modem Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001) 274. Todd Presner contends that these stories are "structured by the modernist logic” of the railway system. See Presner, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) 108-109. For an overview of train stories in Yiddish literature, see Leah Garrett, Journeys beyond the Pale: Yiddish Travel Writing in the Modern World (Madison: Univer­ sity of Wisconsin Press, 2003) 90-122. 7. For literary examples, see S. Y. Abramovitsh’s "Shem un yefes in a vogn,” Sholem Aleykhem's Ayzenban geshikhte (Railroad Stories), and Dovid Bergelson’s novella Arum vokzal (At the Depot). All three works appeared between 1902 and 1910. 8. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 9. Presner, Mobile Modernity 92. 10. Goldberg completed her novel in 1946. At this point the German train car had not yet become synonymous with the death camps and Nazi atrocities. However, Goldberg does associate Nora’s return train journey to Berlin with the Nazi rise to power.

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Written in Tel Aviv between 1941 and 1946 and set in 1930s Kovno, Ve-hu ha-'or describes Nora’s summer holiday with her family, capturing her relationship with her mentally ill father, her dying aunt, and the women who frequent her house. The modernist narrative is driven by Nora’s internal drama, rather than by external events. The third-person narrative point of view is punctuated by Nora’s dreams, her imagined con­ versations, and her interior monologues. The layers of subjective and objective narration blur in the novel, making it difficult to distinguish between events that appear to take place in Nora’s internal world and the external world.11 Despite the blurred layers of subjectivity, the historical reality of impending war impinges on Nora’s consciousness, amplifying the urgency of her personal despair by calling attention to impending his­ torical tragedy. Goldberg’s novel veered sharply away from Hebrew liter­ ary conventions of the 1940s, portraying the interior world of her secular, female protagonist in interwar Europe, as opposed to the collective expe­ rience ofJewish life in pre-state Palestine. Instead of focusing on the col­ lective project of nation-building, Goldberg’s modernist novel hones in on the personal experience of historical crisis. Unlike the literary works I have examined thus far, Goldberg’s novel portrays a modern Jewish woman who moves between the Eastern Euro­ pean provincial capital and the Western European metropolis. The motif of return to the shtetl proliferates in Hebrew and Yiddish fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, for example in Brenner’s Ba-choref (In the Winter, 1904), Bergelson’s In afargrebtershtot (In a Backwoods Town, 1919), and S. Y. Agnon’s Oreach nata la-lun (A Guest for the Night, 1939). However, Goldberg’s novel narrates the return of a young woman to an Eastern European capital, rather than a shtetl. In the provincial capital, as opposed to the shtetl, women could escape the gender segregation of tra­ ditional Jewish society. Nora, unlike the female figures of the shtetl, is already a modern, secular Jewish woman. She dreams of escaping the strictures of bourgeois Jewish life and the uncertain prospects of an edu­ cated women in a provincial capital. At the same time, she also struggles with the loneliness and alienation of her life in Weimar Berlin, heightened by the ominous rise of the Nazi party. Nora straddles the two worlds of Jewish and European modernity, worlds figured in the bodies of men. Historically, scholars of modernity have associated the modern city with masculinity. The prominent tropes of modernist writing, such as exile, displacement, and alienation, are11

11. Tamar Hess, "Onsham shel ba'aley-dimyon, al Ve-hu ha-’or: hitkablut, tsiyonut, u-migdar," Sifrut ve-chevra ba-tarbut ha-ivrit ha-chadasha ma'amarim mugashim le-gershon shaked, eds. Yigal Shvartz, Yehudit Bar-el, and Tamar Hess (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uchad, 2000) 278.

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often correlated with men. In her analysis of the relationship between women and modernity, Rita Felski critiques the quintessential theorist of modern life, George Simmel, for his view that femininity is incompatible with modernity. She explains that “in the context of a modern ontology that posits the human condition as one of alienation from an originary identity, women are deemed to be less burdened by this self-conscious sense of existential homelessness than men and hence to be closer to a timeless point of origin.”12 European intellectuals, artists, and philosophers romanticized women’s connection with tradition; women represented a refuge from urbanization and capitalist alienation. In contradistinction, in Jewish culture Jewish women’s ties to tradition signified a threat to Jewish men’s modernization, rather than a welcoming refuge. Naomi Seidman explains that “in the struggle between modernity and tradition, women were often aligned with tradition,” and as Jews fled the shtetl for the city, the shtetl became “gendered as feminine and emblematized by the figure of the woman.”13 Furthermore, when male writers portrayed urban Jewish women, they often depicted them as deviants or quasi-prostitutes.14 Diasporic Jewish culture in the twentieth century was defined in terms of a gendered binary that reduced the multiplicity of women’s experience to symbolic registers ofjewish men’s anxieties. Although women were largely absent from public discourses about modern life in the early twentieth century, they too negotiated the newly evolving social relations of urban modernity. Feminist scholars of mod­ ernism have cogently argued that women experienced the rapid changes of modernity differently from men.15 Cristanne Miller explains that “loca­ tion significantly inflected modernist women’s performances of subjectiv­ ity, gender, race, and religion,” showing how women’s experiences of different cities vary more sharply than men’s due to different laws govern­ ing property rights, access to education, and suffrage.16 Jewish women

12. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) 55. 13. Naomi Seidman, "Gender and the Disintegration of the Shtetl in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature,” Evaluations, ed. Steven Katz (New York: New York University Press, 2007) 197. 14. For example, see Dovid Bergelson “In pansiyon fun di dray shvester” (“In the Boarding House of the Three Sisters”) in Dovid Bergelson, Geklibene verk, vol. 6 (Vilna: Kletzkin, 1929) 99-112. The English translation appears in The Shadows of Berlin, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 2005) 45-55. See my discussion of the story in “The Language of Gender, Race, and Domesticity,” MLQ11.4 (2011) forthcoming. 15. See Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Cristanne Miller, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schuler (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Rita Felski, The Gender ofModernity. 16. Miller, Cultures of Modernism 1-4.

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writers in Europe straddled the gender lines of both European and Jewish culture. Dagmar Lorenz argues, for example, that German-language Jew­ ish women authors, facing both misogyny and anti-Semitism, ‘wrestled with social and political problems as they pertained to their specific posi­ tion of marginality.”17 Women’s marginality amplified their modernist expressions of alienation and displacement, which then gave rise to new literary strategies that reflect the changing social relations of gender in the twentieth century. In Goldberg’s novel, Nora’s struggle with her margin­ alization as both a Jew and a woman is refracted in the novel’s modernist portrayal of her fractured subjectivity. In the train car, as Nora moves between the language of the metropolitan center, German, and the East­ ern European Jewish vernacular, Yiddish, she is trapped by the social con­ ventions of race and gender that prevent her from “being an ‘I’ unto herself.” Language, as Nora evidences in the train car, is not a representa­ tional system that can stand outside of social relations. The novel’s mod­ ernist style and obsession with language resonate with the central concerns of modernist writing, while also transgressing the literary norms of Hebrew writing during the period.

SPEAKING JEWISH IN THE TRAIN CAR

Nora’s experience of the “Jew” and the “gentile” in the train car frames the novel and, like the other diasporic modernist works I have examined, roots the protagonist’s psychological breakdown in a larger literary and historical crisis. The opening scene focuses on the bodily presence of the Jewish merchant who pesters Nora with unwanted questions. Goldberg’s description of the Jewish male body resembles both Jewish and Chris­ tian depictions of Jewish male difference.18 These stereotyped descrip­ tions ofthemalejewish body are focalized through Nora’s simultaneously secular, Jewish, and European point of view, tinged with disgust and embarrassment: A Jew, around fifty-five years old, with a broad, grayish beard and a crushed,

thin-brimmed hat, of medium height, his belly protruding from the flaps of his 17. Dagmar Lorenz, "Jewish Women Authors and the Exile Experience,” German Life and Letters 51.2 (1998) 226. 18. European popular culture in the nineteenth century portrayedJewish men as effeminate, sex­ ually ambiguous, and perverse. Anne Pellegrini argues that “the Jewish male’s putative effeminacy came to signal ‘the’ Jewish people’s racial’ difference.’’ Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anx­ ieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York: Routledge, 1997) 7-37. Daniel Boyarin of­ fers his own cogent analysis of race, masculinity, and Jewish culture in Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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long frayed coat—the solid, dignified expression on his face testified to the fact

that he was one of those petty merchants who had a motley assortment of busi­

ness dealings in the small towns on the German border, and this time around he had a good season, but he wasn’t going to lay out his success in commerce for all

to see. He put his small and battered suitcase underneath the bench, groaned

politely, sat, at first on the edge of the bench, surveyed the rest of the passengers in the train car with the fluent survey of the experienced, and when he was sat­ isfied that no one was in any way dangerous, he arranged himself in his seat

comfortably and contentedly, smacked his fat lips that were flashing between

his mustache and his beard, and then aimed a juicy one onto the floor.19

Goldberg parodies the Jewish merchant’s behavior by describing his suspicious gaze, impolite manner, and pecuniary thoughts. He is an out­ sider who crudely makes himself‘at home” in these alien surroundings. The description takes a grotesque turn as the narrator hones in on the merchant’s fat lips and describes the “juicy” spit he aims at the floor. The exaggerated details that describe the merchant—his big belly, his flap­ ping lips, and his juicy spit—echo similar grotesque descriptions of traditional Eastern European Jews in earlier works by S. Y. Abramovitsh. Abramovitsh’s caricatures—particularly his attention to exaggerated facial features—critiqued the poverty and desperation that character­ ized Jewish life in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe with a measure of humor, if not pathos.20 In Goldberg’s novel, Nora’s revulsion motivates the caricature. For Nora, the Jewish male body signifies the patriarchal and provincial Jewish world that threatens to confine her, and thus she perceives the Jew’s body as a modernist vision of distorted and disaggre­ gated parts. The narrator describes the merchant from a distanced perspective, explaining that he “is one of those small merchants,” and thus he is not one ofus, certainly not a reader of modernist Hebrew prose.21 The traveling Jewish merchant in Hebrew and Yiddish fiction, including Abramovitsh’s Mendele the book peddler or the narrator persona in Sholem Aleichem’s Railroad Storie$f is an emblem of the conflict between traditional Jewish life and an emerging Jewish modernity. The merchant was on the front 19. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-or 9. 20. Gershon Shaked discusses Abramovitsh’s use of caricature in Ben sechok le-dema: iyunim be-yetsirato shel mendele mokher sfarim (Tel Aviv: Hotsa'at 'agudat ha-sofrim be-yisra’el, 1956) 22-36. 21. Tuvia Rivner argues that the Jewish merchant is a realistic character who represents the social strata of Nora’s world in Kovno. However, the Jewish merchant is not from the same world as Nora. Instead, he is strikingly similar to other literary characters in Hebrew and Yiddish literature. See Rivner, Le’a goldberg: monografiya (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat po'alim and Ha-kibbutz ha-me'uchad, 1980) 84-86.

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lines ofjewish life, a figure for the space of the shtetl and forJewish mobil­ ity. The train represented his mobility; he could freely hop on and off the third-class train car, where he was assured of meeting his fellowjews. In his 1926 essay “Dray tsentern” (“Three Centers”), Bergelson rejects these merchant characters and demands a modernist Yiddish literature that will move away from the monochromatic Jewish life, “which is every­ thing about selling.”22 In Goldberg’s novel, however, the merchant and Nora are in some sense mirror images. Both of them circulate between the provinces and the city, enjoying the mobility of the train car. But, whereas the merchant travels for commerce, Nora travels for education and enlightenment. Nora portrays the Yiddish-speaking Jewish merchant as a symptom of broken Jewish patriarchal authority, rather than as a symbol of mobility. The merchant questions Nora’s mobility and attempts to identify her place in her paternal line. When she tells him that she is returning home from Berlin he inquires, “Why should a young woman study in Berlin? Are there not gymnasia at home?”23 Then he asks about her father. He wants to know which branch of the Kriger family she comes from. Is her father “Kriger the dentist” or “Kriger the lawyer”?24 She exclaims that he does not know her family, but the merchant insists that he knows every Kriger. Frustrated, she announces that her family is not from Kovno, to which he knowingly answers, “Is that so? Where are they from, then? From Africa? All of the Krigers come from the same place. To me she tells stories (tnaasiyot/mayses). Kriger the brewery owner? Eh?”25 The Jewish merchant goads her with his attempts to identify her father. No matter how much Nora protests, the very fact that she understands Yiddish signals their shared origins. Just as the man comes close to naming her father, Nora ends all conversation, announcing that her father is deceased. The Jewish merchant tries to draw her into the world of Yiddish, into the universe of Sholem Aleichem and Mendele, but she trumps him. Her symbolic parricide is more than mere evasion; Nora’s father is still alive, though mentally ill. Throughout the rest of the novel, which takes place during Nora’s stay in Kovno, Nora worries that, like her father and her relatives on her father’s side, she too will fall mentally ill. By eliminating her father, she hopes to escape the mental illness that is the fate of the Jewish men in her life. However, like the characters in Brenner and

22. 23. 24. 25.

Dovid Bergelson, "Dray tsentern,” In shpan 1 (1926) 92. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or 11. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or 12. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or 12.

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Bergclson’s works, Nora cannot escape her feelings of alienation and suicidal despair. In this scene, Goldberg satirizes Abramovitsh’s Hebrew nusach (prose style) and his narrative persona, Mendele the book peddler. For example, she captures the Yiddish syntax of the merchant’s speech, with its thirdperson commentary on someone present, as in, “to me she tells stories.” She uses the Hebrew word maasiyot (stories), which is also the standard Yiddish word, mayses (Yiddish pronunciation), for stories and tall tales, and the Hebrew niele (is that so), which is an Aramaic word for "light” that comes back to modern Hebrew via its use in Yiddish. The narrator also employs style indirecte libre to channel the salesman prayer-house infused Jewish idiom. For example, the narrator describes the salesman’s success in prakmatiya (commerce) using an Aramaic word from the merchant’s realm of the study house, which captures the linguistic register of the nusach that Abramovitsh created to represent daily life and conversation. The nusach emerged from the gender-segregated realm of the Jewish study house and was a literary language closed off, with rare exception, to women.26 In this passage Goldberg critiques the nusach, mocking the now old-fashioned, Yiddish-speaking Jewish merchant, whose battered suit­ case is described with the Hebrew word sh'chuka, which I translate as “battered” but can also mean a hackneyed or cliched phrase. In Gold­ berg’s opening, the small Jewish merchant stands out as an outdated cliche in a train car filled with modern Europeans. In contrast, Goldberg’s prose does not rely on the outdated male idiom of the Jewish study house. Instead, she creates a Hebrew that speaks to the experience of a young woman, who is a reader of secular Hebrew. Goldberg’s opening scene also recalls Abramovitsh’s short story “Shem and Japheth on the Train.” In the story, Mendele the book peddler boards the third-class train only to be shocked by the frenzy of the Jewish pas­ sengers, particularly the women. The train car is packed full with refugees expelled by decree from Bismarck’s Germany.27 Mendele, the traveling merchant, imagines himself to be more assimilated and refined than the Jewish masses pushing and shoving to find a place. At the same time, Mendele observes how the gentile passengers wait quietly in the station to

26. Goldberg s novel portrays the changing readership of Hebrew literature. Whereas Simon Dubnow observed that the transformation of Abramovitsh’s reading audience in the late nineteenth century was the result of the decline in the numbers ofJewish men educated in traditional Jewish texts, Goldberg s novel describes the emergence of a new community of ed­ ucated women who are literate in secular Hebrew. 27. The Jewish and non-Jewish passengers are fleeing the German empire after Bismarcks 1880 expulsion order for all resident aliens.

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board the train at the proper time and sit in their appointed seats. In Abramovitsh’s story, the train car magnifies the chaos ofJewish life. He satirizes the way Jews adapted to this new mode of modern travel. They push and squawk, while the gentiles are polite and respectful. Mendele, like Nora, shares the perspective of the gentile passengers, but unlike Nora, he sits with his fellow Jewish travelers in the third-class train car. There, as a Jewish man, he is welcomed without reservation. Ve-hu ha-'or transforms the merchant from the privileged witness ofjewish suffering into a target for Nora’s contempt and revilement. Whereas the Jewish merchant represents a world that Nora reviles, the Swedish doctor represents a bourgeois European milieu. The protagonist does not revile the doctor but feels ashamed when she is subject to his sexual gaze. The narrator’s description of the Jewish merchant is focalized through Nora’s perspective, yet the narrator describes Nora from the perspective of the doctor. The Swedish doctor, who sat across from her, leaned his elbow on the small

counter beneath the window, smiled at her, and looked alternately at her own face and at its reflection trembling in the dark window pane. He smiled at this

tilt of her neck and the tiny, embarrassed movements of her narrow shoulders, and at the great seriousness and radical decisiveness that were, for whatever

reason, in her brown eyes, and that are so touching on the faces of people who are somewhat feeble and very young.

And Nora suddenly felt the gaze of her temporary companion, who had

momentarily paused in his conversation, the feeling of an actual touch, and without realizing it a great embarrassment came over her, and she wanted to

shield her eyes from him, and in the process her gaze wandered and clung to the Jew with the beard who already sat, with back reclining and belly protruding, and was rolling and fondling a thin cigarette with his fingers, yellow from

smoking.28

The doctor perceives Nora to be young, feminine, and weak. He eyes her with desire and feels drawn to her youthful features as they are reflected in the window of the train car. The doctor’s gaze embarrasses her and leaves her feeling exposed, touched, as though violated. The Swedish doctor perceives Nora as both an object of desire and a muse for his romantic reflections about his childhood. He looks at Nora’s reflection in the window as it shudders upon the dark glass. The Swede’s alternating gaze, between Nora’s reflection and her actual face, suggests the doctor’s

28. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-’or 12.

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ambivalence: he cannot decide between the reflection and the corporality of Nora’s body. The doctor’s uncertain relationship to image and reality resonates with the novel’s larger concerns about reality.29 The images of dark glass, train car lights, and train station lamps recur throughout the novel, and here they connect the doctor to a mood of impressionism, a focus on the dreamy experience of light. However, in the novel, Goldberg eschews the doctor’s relationship to light and image, calling into question this impressionistic relationship to the world. Nora feels exposed before the eyes of both men and is overtaken by a powerful, searing shame. To thejew, she is her father’s daughter (a source of embarrassment); to the Swede, she is an object of desire. To make mat­ ters worse, in the train car thejew is privy to her sexualized body and the Swede to her Jewish body. In the last lines of the passage above, Nora turns her gaze back to the Jewish merchant and watches him roll and fondle a cigarette. I translate memaekh as “fondle,” since the word’s con­ notations can be sexual. This cigarette could be the narrow-shouldered Nora herself. This is how Nora sees herself, between the eyes of thejew and the alien gentile—objectified, fondled, and threatened. Patronized by the merchant who addresses her as a Jewish daughter and sexualized by the gaze of the Swede, she rejects affiliation with the two men: At that very moment a deep and burning shame seared her, a fierce shame

because of the three of them together. And it was as though she was standing for

show in her nakedness before them, the Jew and the alien-gentile. May their names be obliterated. Why am I unable to be an “I” unto herself, an "I” without

any sense of belonging with either of these two who are alien to me.30

The narrator describes Nora’s feelings of shame in the third person. Just as in Brenner’s novel, Goldberg uses style indirecte libre to capture the pro­ tagonist’s interior thoughts. In this passage, however, Nora’s firstperson thoughts break through the narratorial frame, as though mirroring her own attempt to be an “T unto herself.” Nora suffers the gazes of both men but refuses affiliation with either. Her first-person voice penetrates the third-person narrative point of view, attempting to break free from the confines of the narrator and, by extension, the train car. In the enclosed novel, Nora struggles between her longing for independence from her father and her feelings of attraction for her father’s close friend Albert

29. Tamar Hess argues that representation is a central theme of Goldberg s novel and shows how Nora’s own ambivalent relationship to reality serves as a critique of Zionist narrative prac­ tices. "Onsham shel ba alei-dimyon” 277,283. 30. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or 12.

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Arin.31 Nora’s predicament in the train car points to the larger predica­ ment of Goldberg’s Hebrew novel, situated between European and Jewish literary traditions, between Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. Nora rejects the merchant’s Yiddish idiom and the doctor’s impressionist aesthetic. She turns her back on Hebrew and Yiddish literary paradigms that repre­ sent women in the guises of shtetl daughters, wives, and prototypical Jew­ esses, as well as the European model that sees women as objects of beauty and desire. Goldberg’s novel captures Nora’s internal world, situated in the liminal space between first and third person, to transgress the gender boundaries of European and Jewish literary traditions.

GENDER AND JEWISH LITERARY HISTORY

Goldberg’s novel describes the entrance of a young woman onto the stage of modern Hebrew, drawing attention to the complex relationship of language to gender. Frustrated by the gendered reception of her work, Goldberg rarely spoke about her education or her writing in feminist terms, and she resisted identifying herself as a “woman” writer.32 She took umbrage at the use of the term “poetess” or meshoreret, praising Ya'acov Fikhman for referring to her as a meshorer chadash (new poet, [masc.]).33 Although her works address the challenges that women faced in Hebrew literature, she was reluctant to publicly discuss the topic. In a 1959 interview with Drora Idelman, Goldberg stated “that she never felt a special difficulty in pursuing her literary path because she was a woman.”34 Notably, at the end of the interview, Goldberg singled out two women writers, Devorah Baron and

31. Menakhem Perry and Adi Tsemach argue that the Swedish doctor is a double both for Arin (Nora’s love interest) and for Noras father, as well as for Goldbergs own love, the Hebrew poet Avraham Ben Yitzhak. But this simple autobiographical reading misses the complexity of Goldbergs metaliterary engagement with gender in the novel. Though Tsemach makes the case that there are allusions in Goldberg’s novel to Ben Yitzhak, he never considers that Goldberg might be aligning her literary project with Ben Yitzhak, especially in their shared affiliations with European modernism. Instead, he reads the novel as an ironic rewriting of their love affair, thus missing the complexity of Goldbergs work. See Adi Tsemach, “El ha-metsiut: 'al ha-proza shel le’a goldberg," Pegishot ‘im meshoreret: masot u-mechkarim ‘alyetsirata shel lea goldberg, eds. Ruth Kartun-Blum and Anat Weissman (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat po'alim, 2000) 68. Menakhem Perry agrees with Tsemachs identification of Arin with Sonne in his afterword to the novel, “He’arot al Ve-hu ha-'or” Ve-hu ha-'or 221. 32. Chaya Shacham, “Meshoreret bi-kahal meshorerim: 'al hitkablutan ha-bikortit shel lea goldberg u-dalia ravikovitsh 'al yedei bikoret zmanan," Sadan 2 (1996) 203-240. 33. Shacham, “Meshoreret bi-kahal meshorerim" 204. See Hamutal Tsamir’s discussion of Goldbergs use of the term meshoreret in Be-shem ha-nof: le'umiyut, tnigdar ve-subyektiviyut ba-shira ha-yisra'elit bi-shnot ha-chamishim ve-ha-shishim (Jerusalem: Keter, 2006) 132-133. 34. Drora Idelman, “Ha-’isha ba-sifrut: sicha 'im le’a goldberg," Ha-po'el ha-tsa'ir December 15, 1959: 11.

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Dahlia Ravikovitch, for high praise. Despite her refusal to explicitly situate herself as a woman poet, in the interview as well as in her poetry and prose she implicitly addressed the place of women in Hebrew literature.35 Goldberg’s novel marks an important transformation in Hebrew liter­ ary culture, a moment when women entered the Hebrew literary canon as Hebrew writers, a moment when the “sexual-linguistic system” or gen­ dered linguistic system was in flux.36 The division of labor in the nine­ teenth century between Hebrew and Yiddish intersected and reified the gender divide in Jewish culture. Yiddish was the language of everyday life, the language of the domestic sphere and women’s prayer. Hebrew was the language of textual study restricted primarily to men. I do not want to argue that Hebrew is a male language and Yiddish a female language. However, I do contend that these languages correlated to a hierarchy of cultural values split along gender lines, that they constituted a “gender system” of languages that indexed the social relations of gender.37 In the nineteenth century, this gendered linguistic system enforced social roles and gender binaries. Jewish writers viewed Yiddish as the feminized lan­ guage of women while embracing Hebrew as the language of men.38 Despite the fact that books like the Tsenerene (a loose Yiddish rendering of the Bible directed at women) and shundromanen (romance novels) were explicitly targeted at women, their audiences also included uneducated or curious men.39 Whereas Yiddish had a mixed audience, the audience for

35. Orly Lubin demonstrates, for example, that Goldberg’s short fiction poses the question of whether a woman can write in Hebrew. See Lubin, Isha koret isha (Haifa: Haifa University Press, 2003) 288-298. For a discussion of women’s place in the field of Hebrew poetry and Leah Goldberg’s poem "Dyokan ha-meshorer ke-ish zaken" (“The Portrait of the Poet as an Old Man”), see Allison Schachter, “A Lily among the Bullfrogs: Dahlia Ravikovitch and the Field of Hebrew Poetry," Prooftexts 28.3 (2008) 310-334. 36. Naomi Seidman introduces the term “sexual-linguistic system" to describe the social relations of Jewish language in A Marriage Made in Heaven? The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 37. Teresa de Lauretis defines a “sex gender system" as “a symbolic system, or systems of meanings, that correlates sex to cultural contents according to social values and hierarchies.” See Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) 5. 38. Naomi Seidman offers an important literary-historical analysis of the vexed relationship between male writers and Yiddish. She quotes Abramovitsh’s powerful statement: “Yiddish in my time was an empty vessel, devoid of everything but prattle, vanity, and deceit written by fools using meaningless language without any reputation, and the women and poor people would be reading these things without understanding what they were reading, and the rest of the people, although they knew no other language, would be embarrassed to read it and expose their ignorance in public. And if someone was tempted to look into a Yiddish text, he would laugh at it and rationalize his actions by saying, ‘I’m just skimming through a ‘woman’s book’ a silly feminine thing, for the fun of it.’” Cited in Seidman, A Marriage Made tn Heaven ? 11 -40. 39. Chava Weissler examines the role of popular Jewish literature in establishing gender norms in Jewish culture in "For Women and for Men Who Are Like Women: The Construction of Gender in Yiddish Devotional Literature," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5.2 (1989) 7-24.

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Hebrew literature was more strictly proscribed by gender. The barriers to Hebrew literacy for women were great. In the early twentieth century, as these two languages were competing for literary status, Hebrew and Yiddish writers had to negotiate the new relations of a changing gendered linguistic polysystem. Hebraists strove to educate women in Hebrew in order to claim a heteronormative, national status for Hebrew, while Yiddishists had to tear Yiddish from its association with women to attract male readers and gain legitimacy as a Jewish national language. Only in the twentieth century, with the development of secular schools for women like the Hebrew gymnasium that Goldberg attended in Kovno, did women gain Hebrew literacy in numbers.40 In her groundbreaking work on Jewish women’s reading practices, Iris Parush has shown that bourgeois Jewish women’s access to European languages and literary culture impelled the Jewish literary renaissance. Parush’s work offers insight into the important role women played in shaping Jewish modernity despite their absence from the official histori­ cal record. As Parush elucidates, Jewish women, whose reading habits went largely unsupervised by religious authorities, acquired literacy in foreign languages; the privileged ones, at least, became readers of Euro­ pean literature.41 Educated Jewish women played an important role in transmitting European linguistic and literary culture to Jewish men. However, these educated bourgeois women came to represent a “linguis­ tic foreignness” that complicated the gender stratification of traditional Jewish society. By the end of the nineteenth century, the foreignness of Jewish women’s reading and writing was perceived as a threat to Jewish masculinity and nationalism. According to male writers and educators, women readers were spurning Hebrew, a language they had little access to, as well as Yiddish, and “getting into bed” with foreign literatures. The Hebrew and Yiddish educational systems sought to regulate the threat that educated and assimilated women posed to Jewish children. Hebraists emphasized preschool education as a strategy for rescuing children from their Hebrew-illiterate mothers. For example, Yechiel Heilprin and Yaacov Fikhman founded a journal called Ha-gina (The Garden), the aim

40. Tova Cohen and Shmuel Feiner have uncovered an interesting selection of previously unknown Hebrew womens writing during the Haskala. See Koi alnia 'ivriya: kitvei nashim maskilot be-mea ha-tesha-'esre, eds. Tova Cohen and Shmuel Feiner (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz hame’uchad, 2006). 41. Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Jewish Society (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2004) 1-7. Shaul Stampfer also addresses how traditional attitudes towards womens education ultimately enabled women to read novels, both in Yiddish and in European languages. See Stampfer, “Gender Differentiation and Education ofJewish Woman in Nineteenth-century Eastern Europe" Polin 7 (1992) 69,81.

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of which was to develop curricular materials that would replace Jewish mothers’ Yiddish lullabies with Hebraicized lullabies written by male poets. Similarly Yiddish pedagogical journals warned against russified women teachers who were "entirely cut off from the masses.’*’2 In a 1933 series entitled “Briv tsu a frayndin” (“Letter to a Female Friend”), Nach­ man Meisel bemoaned the linguistic assimilation of Yiddish-speaking women into European languages and questioned whether his Yiddish essay would even reach the eyes ofJewish women.42 43 Goldberg was at the vanguard of a new generation of Hebrew-educated women who studied Hebrew in secular Jewish schools and in European universities.44 She was well-versed in European literary culture, reading German and Russian literature long before she learned Hebrew.45 Unlike the other writers I have examined so far, Goldberg’s native tongue was not Yiddish, but Russian. Although her father read and published articles in Yiddish, Goldberg did not read or speak the language.46 Her earliest liter­ ary influences were not Jewish, but Russian and German. In contrast to the male Hebrew writers she admired, for example Gnessin and Brenner, Goldberg studied Hebrew in secular educational institutions. Even after women like Goldberg, entered the Hebrew literary commu­ nity, for the most part as poets, the norms of the prose literary field favored male authors and subjects. It was not until the 1960s that larger numbers of women took up Hebrew prose and gained legitimacy in the genre.47 In

42. Kenneth Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009) 201-206. 43. Nachman Meisel, “Briv tsu a frayndin," Afunzer kultur-front (Warsaw: Literarishe Bleter, 1936) 275. Avram Novershtem writes about these essays in his article on Yiddish womens poetry, “Ha-kolot ve-ha-makhela: shirat nashim be-yidish ben shtei milchamot ha-olam," Bikoret u-farshanut 40 (2008) 76. 44. Leah Goldberg describes her positive experiences in the gymnasium in "Pirkei zikhronot mekuta’im,” Hekhal she-shaka . . . : ha-chinukh ha-ivri be-kovna—mosadot ve-'ishim, ed. Y. Yablokovsky (Tel Aviv: Irgun bogrei ha-gimnasyon ha-'ivri be-kovno, 1962) 126-134. 45. Goldberg talks about these literary influences in her childhood correspondence. See Nearot 'ivriyot: mikhtevei lea goldberg min ha-provintsya, 1923-193S, eds. Yfaat Weiss and Giddon Ticotsky (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat po'alim, 2009). See also Yfaat Weiss’s discussion of Goldberg’s childhood in “Devar be-chayai lo halakh le-'ibud: le'a goldberg, chaverta me-no‘ar, ve-zikhronot me-germanya,” Zemanim 100 (112-125). 46. Goldberg recounts that during her first years in the Hebrew gymnasium she felt isolated because the other Jewish students spoke Yiddish among each other. See Goldberg, "Pirkei zikhronot mekuta'im," 126-134. On Goldbergs relationship to Russian and Yiddish, see Rivner, Lea goldberg: monografiya 9,17-18. 47. Dan Miron argues that women poets flourished during the Third Aliyah, when the poetic model of Bialik and his followers was overturned. See Miron, Imahot meyasdot ahayot horgot: al reshit shirat ha-nashim ha-'ivrit (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uchad, 2004). Michael Gluzman criticizes Miron’s reading of these poets, in particular Rachel, as "emotional and confessional’’ and argues that Miron reads them “outside of the context of Hebrew modernism.” Gluzman, The Politics of Canonicity 137. Wendy Zierler also challenges Miron’s reading, taking him to task for

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her book No Room of Their Own, Yael Feldman insightfully analyzes the emergence of Israeli women novelists in the second half of the twentieth century. Surprisingly, Feldman dismisses Goldberg’s and Baron’s writing as too feminine, contending that they “wrote stories and novellas mainly in the lyrical impressionist style, thereby fulfilling the ‘feminine’ role devised for the second sex by the arbiters of the Hebrew renaissance/'18 Feldman is correct that both writers reacted to the exclusion of women from Hebrew prose. However, although Goldberg was drawn to Baron’s impressionism, there was nothing “feminine” in Baron’s style, which Goldberg likened to Flaubert. Goldberg’s novel might be better described as post-impressionist or anti-impressionist, with its attention to the elec­ tric lights and to modern technology more generally. Despite their stylis­ tic differences, both wrote about women’s lives in Europe. Notably, although Baron and Goldberg are often cited as the only Hebrew women prose writers in the early twentieth century, there were, in fact, a significant number of Hebrew women writers in the Yishuv. How­ ever, unlike Baron and Goldberg, these women—like Rivka Alper, Sara Gluzman, and Batya Kahana—have nearly disappeared from the literary record.*48 49 In the 1930s and 1940s, when the norms of Hebrew prose were to describe the new Hebrew man’s perspective ofjewish life in the Yishuv, Jewish women who chose to write about the Yishuv were ostracized from the literary field. Thus, it is perhaps less surprising that the two most wellknown and widely read Hebrew women prose writers, Baron and Gold­ berg, both of whom lived in the Yishuv, chose primarily to describe the intimate lives ofjewish women in Europe. The national literary culture of the Yishuv could only tolerate women’s experiences if they were located outside of its territory.

READING AND WRITING EUROPE

Both Baron and Goldberg had to step outside of the national narrative of state building to describe women’s experience ofjewish modernity. For ignoring the tools of feminist criticism. She then offers her own account of Hebrew womens writing. See Zierler, And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence ofModem Hebrew Women’s Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004) 8-9. 48. Yael Feldman, No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Womens Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) 4. 49. Yaffa Berlovitz shows how these women writers have been ignored not only by the Hebrew literary establishment, but also by feminist critics. See Berlovitz, "Be-hipus achar 'hadiyukan ha-'erets-yisra'elit’ be-sifrut ha-nashim bi-tekufat ha-yishuv,” Bikoret u-farshanut 34 (2000) 91-113. Berlovitz has collected samples of these many women writers in Sh’ani adama ve-adam: sipure nashim ad hum ha-medina (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uchad, 2003).

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Goldberg, Europe provided a metaphorical space to express women’s experiences that were occluded from collective life in the Yishuv. Gold­ berg’s modernist and European aesthetic troubled the Hebrew literary establishment in Palestine.50 Various critics dismissed Ve-hu ha-'or as women’s gossip, as a distorted depiction of Jewish life, and as individu­ alist, European, and simply autobiographical. Nora was derided for, among other things, not having any “Jewish character.” The Hebrew critics of the period criticized the novel for not being “representative,” in part because in the 1940s a female subject could not be heard as the “the voice of the Zionist collective.”51 Ultimately, the novel was read and reviewed, but it was poorly received because critics could not tolerate its European perspective. In his five-volume history of modern Hebrew literature, Ha-siporet haivrit (Hebrew Narrative Prose), Gershon Shaked categorizes Goldberg’s novel as European, as opposed to national or Jewish. In a chapter point­ edly entitled “Be-shulei ha-siporet” (“The Margins of Narrative Prose”), Shaked groups Goldberg’s prose with that of Elisheva Bikhovsky and David Fogel, despite the fact that Fogel and Bikhovsky were writing Hebrew prose much earlier than Goldberg. However, what they share, in Shaked’s eyes, is a connection to non-Jewish literary influences. Shaked explains that Bikhovsky, a Russian Christian, came to Hebrew literature first from Russian literature; that Leah Goldberg, after finishing her stud­ ies in the Hebrew gymnasium, went to study in Germany; and that Fogel traveled to Western Europe, to Vienna, and finally to Paris.52 Shaked ignores the fact that Goldberg wrote her novel while living in pre-state Palestine, not in Berlin. What troubles Shaked is not so much her educa­ tion, as her diasporic subject matter. Furthermore Goldberg, Fogel, and Bikhovsky were not the only Hebrew prose writers to have lived or stud­ ied in Western Europe. Berdichevsky and Brenner, for example, both spent significant amounts of time in Western Europe. As Shaked himself notes, Berdichevsky received his doctorate in 1896 from the University of Berne in Switzerland, and remained in Western Europe, writing in Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. Brenner lived in London, where he founded the Hebrew journal Ha-me'orer in 1906. However, Shaked does

50. A. B. Yoffe describes the novel’s ambivalent reception in the Yishuv in his broad overview of Goldberg's reception history. See his “Yetsirata shel lea goldberg be-re’i ha bikoret,” Lea goldberg: mivchar ma’amarei bikoret "alyitstrata, ed. A. B. Yoffe (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1980) 7-37. Hess offers a compelling analysis of how Goldberg’s novel conflicted with the dominant Zionist narrative style of her time in “Onsham shel ba'alei-dimyon" 274. 51. Hess, “Onsham shel ba'alei-dimyon" 275. 52. Shaked, Ha-siporet ha-ivrit 1880-1990, vol. 4 (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uchad) 84.

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not associate these writers with the margins of Europe; instead, to him they make up the heart of the national Hebrew canon. Goldberg appeared foreign to Shaked, because he felt that she not only wrote in a style that was more European than Jewish, but also depicted characters who do not speak Hebrew: It is no surprise that their [David Fogel, Elisheva Bikhovsky, and Leah Gold­ berg’s] language does not tend toward the nusach, that it does not have many neologisms, that their protagonists are neither Hebrew nor Yiddish speakers

(Hebrew is a subject of conversation and interest in Bikhovsky's works), and that their literary language is translated from Russian or German. The protago­ nists’ and the narrators’ existence outside of any Jewish linguistic context and

the translated linguistic actualization of reality characterize these marginal

authors, whose writing is, at times, closer to literature in translation than to original literature.53

Shaked imagines that all three writers dreamed up novels in Russian or German and in some sense “translated them” into Hebrew. Of course, the majority of early twentieth century Hebrew fiction described characters whose native languages were Yiddish or Russian. Brenner’s novels and short stories of the early twentieth century drew attention to this linguis­ tic deficit. However, in contrast to the many canonical writers of the Hebrew revival, the characters in Goldberg’s novels actually speak Hebrew, including Karon in Avedot and Nora in Ve-hu ha-'or. Hebrew is an abiding concern of both novels, however, not as a national idiom but rather as a tool for modernist expression. In her essays on the Hebrew modernist writers Baron and Uri Nissan Gnessin, Goldberg articulates her relationship to both Hebrew and Euro­ pean modernism. In a 1951 review of Baron’s short story collection Parshiyot (Stories), Goldberg traces Baron’s affinity with Flaubert and compares her shtetl to Flaubert’s French provinces in Madame Bovary. She praises Baron’s unsentimental, objective narration and embraces her not as a writer ofJewish life, but rather as the unsentimental narrator of women’s lives: “In the end, even the story ofMadame Bovary is nothing but the nar­ rative of a woman who lived a life too difficult to endure in one small town. In this sense, there is no difference if the town is French or Jewish.”54 Goldberg uses the Hebrew word ayara (small town), which is the standard Hebrew translation for “shtetl,” to describe the setting of both Flaubert’s

53. Shaked, Ha-siporet ha-ivrit 85. 54. Leah Goldberg, '"Al dvora baron: parshiyot,” Ha-’omets le-chulin (Tel Aviv: Sifiriyat po'alim, 1975) 95-103.

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novel and Baron’s story, in order to undermine the perception (and dis­ missal) of Baron as a writer who deals with the feminized world of the shtetl. By comparing Baron’s female protagonists in the shtetls of Eastern Europe to Flaubert’s heroine in the French provinces, Emma Bovary, Goldberg situates Baron’s work in a European literary context and draws attention to the importance of women’s experiences, however fraught, to the modern European literary canon. In addition to reading Baron in relation to Flaubert, Goldberg viewed Uri Nissan Gnessin to be a European, Hebrew modernist writer in the style of Joyce and Proust. She marvels that, despite his Russian reading habits, Gnessin’s writing was much closer to the English and French mod­ ernists.55 Goldberg contends that he adopted their modernist conventions for representing the subjective experience of characters, including stream of consciousness and internal monologues, long before they arrived in Russian literature. She dismisses readers and critics who declare that they feel connected to the Jewish world represented in Gnessin’s fiction, explaining that “[t]his is the product of a superficial reading. His world was much larger than his shtetl. It is the world of the new European novel that traces the fine variations of the human soul.”56 For Goldberg, Baron’s shtetl and Gnessin’s Jewish stories must also be read as part of the larger narrative of European modernity in which she locates her own writing. Despite her celebration of European modernisms, Goldberg’s novel also critiques the place of women in European literary culture. Through­ out Ve-hu ha-'or, Goldberg underscores the troubling European represen­ tations of women as passive objects of desire, restricted to the domestic sphere and suffering from physical and mental illness. In Goldberg’s novel, Nora, her aunt, and her mother are avid consumers of European secular literature and culture. When Nora’s love interest, Albert Arin, asks about the origin of her name, she explains that her aunt Liza was reading Ibsen at the time she was born.57 In an important scene in the novel, Nora, her mother, and Liza are sitting in their living room reading foreign novels. This section of the novel reads like an episode from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, recalling the Bennett women occupying themselves at home while waiting for the arrival of potential suitors. Like the Bennetts, the Kriger women are trapped at home waiting for news of a visiting suitor, Albert Arin, and discussing whether he will marry Liza or Nora. Goldberg shows the flip side of Jewish women’s attachment to European literature. For these women, reading represents an enforced

5S. Goldberg, "Mi-saviv le-etsel/' Ha-'omets le-chulin (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat po'alim, 1975) 78. 56. Goldberg, "Misaviv le-etsel” 78. 57. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or 48.

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passivity that takes place not in the university but in the domestic sphere, where they must sit at home and await the arrival of a suitor. This scene sharply contrasts with Nora’s life in Berlin as a university student study­ ing Semitic languages. In addition, Goldberg’s novel portrays female suicide as a symptom of European bourgeois culture. The second chapter of the novel, “Na'ara u-mavet” (“Maiden and Death”), playing off Schubert’s Lied “Death and the Maiden” and evokes the European aesthetic fascination with women and death, a fascination that haunts Ve-hu ha-'or. Nineteenth-century European visual art abounded with images of dying and drowning women.58 The dying woman’s body served as an inspiration for the crea­ tion of art, and in her death she became an object of art.59 In the early twentieth century, the popularity of the death mask of the “L’inconnue de la Seine” (“Anonymous Woman of the Seine”) perpetuated the popular aesthetic fascination with women’s death. In the 1920s and 1930s this death mask was widely reproduced and coveted by writers and intellectu­ als, including Maurice Blanchot and Louis Aragon.60 Although the ori­ gins of the mask have never been confirmed, according to popular lore the young woman jumped to her death into the Seine in the 1890s. Thus the mask celebrates the aesthetic beauty of female suicide. Notably, Nora hangs a copy of the famed death mask in her room. Nora’s attachment to the mask both symbolizes her own suicidal thoughts (she contemplated killing herself while living in Berlin) and also the sway of European cul­ ture over her psychology, as though her own suicidal tendencies are linked to the cultural ideal and aesthetics of the female corpse.61 Goldberg contrasts the European fascination with women’s suicide to the neurotic illnesses and suicidal tendencies of her male Jewish charac­ ters. Hysteria and suicide in both European literature and in bourgeois Jewish circles were connected with women. However, early studies on hysteria associated the nervous illness with Jewish men. Freud’s later the­ ory of the Oedipal complex was a response to these racialized depictions of Jewish men.62 Early-twentieth-century Hebrew literature also corre­ lated nervous illness or hysteria with Jewish men. In Hebrew novels, such

58. Some famous examples include John Everett Millais’s "Ophelia” and Paul Delaroche’s “La Jeune Martyre.” 59. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992) 71. 60. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body 205-208. 61. Nora’s fascination with suicide and the novel’s attention to trains recall Tolstoy’s suicidal heroine, Anna Karenina, who commits suicide by throwing herself in front of the train. 62. Thus Freud "transformed a medical discourse about masculinity and ‘race’ into a dis­ course about femininity and ‘sex.’” See Pellegrini, Performance Anxiety 28. Daniel Boyarin

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as Brenner’s Shekhol ve-khishalon, male psychological breakdown and sexual anxiety signify the crises ofjewish modernity and Jewish national­ ism.63 In Goldberg’s novel, Nora’s dying aunt informs her that suicide runs through her paternal line: “This is in your blood. In your family’s blood. All of the Krigers.”64 The list of attempted and successful suicides includes her father, her uncle, and a male cousin in Berlin. Nora fears that she has inherited the family proclivity toward mental illness and suicide. She describes a nightmarish memory to Arin of a “stifling” summer week­ end in Berlin. Alone in the city, after all her friends had gone to the coun­ try, a German man approached her in the street and shouted “selbstmord [suicide].”65 The macabre encounter frightens Nora, who is haunted by her father’s history of suicide. Yet in contrast to her male cousin, who is also living in Berlin and hospitalized with a severe “nervous illness,” Nora suc­ cessfully overcomes her suicidal feelings.66 Goldberg juxtaposes these aestheticized images of dying European women with grotesque images of her sickly Jewish aunt. In the novel, Nora not only rejects the European idealization of dying women and the neurotic breakdown ofjewish men, she also turns her back on the domes­ tic role of traditional Jewish women. Nora visits her dying maternal aunt and experiences the stench of what the narrator terms the “Jewish hall­ ways” in her aunt’s apartment building. Goldberg focalizes the descrip­ tion of the building through Nora’s consciousness. Nora smells the scent of “dying fish, rot, dust, rags not aired out for months ... of pale children of Israel who have not known soap or water; the stench of unwashed dishes, remnants of Shabbat foods, the suffocating atmosphere of sealed apartments, whose windows are closed summer and winter.”67 These smells capture her visceral sense of disgust, a disgust that recalls Abramovitsh’s satiric descriptions ofjewish poverty in his early fiction. However, in Goldberg’s novel, it is the confines ofjewish domesticity for Jewish women that repel her protagonist. The stifling world ofjewish domesticity engraved on her aunt’s dying body disgusts Nora. The stinking hallways of her aunt’s apartment build­ ing and the tiny kitchen where her aunt has cooked for her family encap­ sulates Nora’s view of her aunt’s domesticity:

examines the influence of male hysteria on Freud s theory of childhood sexual development in Unheroic Conduct 189-220. 63. David Biale examines these motifs in Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contempo­ rary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992) 172. 64. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or 12S. 65. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or 142. 66. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or 124. 67. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or 118-119.

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Her entire small world, a world of pots and pans in the kitchen, a world of

account books and percentages, a world of uncertainty and naked suspicion that lies in wait for anything that comes her way, the world of dog-like devotion to her husband’s memory, and a world of security and belief in her righteous­

ness, in her devotion, in the integrity of her way of life that crawls in these sealed hallways for more than fifty years.68

Nora characterizes her aunt as prisoner in a narrow and close-minded domestic world. Her aunt, like the Jewish merchant on the train, views the outside world with suspicion. Unlike the traveling salesman, however, her aunt never leaves the confines of her apartment building. Instead, she seals herself off from the outside world and from the bourgeois pleasures of Nora’s life. Nora draws a connection between her aunt’s narrow domes­ tic sphere and the decaying world of Jewish tradition. She remembers a dreadful Shabbat evening spent with her aunt and uncle as “a suffocating and depressing prison of family warmth.”69 The suffocating rooms in her aunt’s apartment are metaphors for Nora’s own feelings of suffocation in Kovno. Goldberg’s novel refuses the cliched Jewish nostalgia for the domestic warmth ofjewish tradition and cooking. Instead she depicts the world ofjewish tradition as backward and repressive. Goldberg’s novel eschews the standard gendered narratives that domi­ nated Hebrew modernism in the early twentieth century, narratives that center on the sexual and neurotic complexes ofjewish men. Instead she portrays Jewish women collectively confronting the economic and social consequences ofjewish male breakdown. Nora’s aunt Liza, for example, moves in with Nora’s family in the wake of Nora’s father’s mental break­ down. She works as a typist during the day and then teaches private les­ sons in Russian and German at night in order to help support the family. Despite her education and language skills, Liza scrapes together a living working two jobs. Nora’s friend Lucy remarks that her only hope after she receives her university degree is to become a teacher in the shtetl. She tells Nora of an infuriating episode that took place at a friend’s wedding: “And this Giltman of yours came up to me, drunk as Lot, pressing first my one hand and then the other, and pouring his heart out: ‘Do you know what our tragedy is? It’s that we are already certain that we will have no choice but to marry some rich fat woman, to sell ourselves!’ Their tragedy!”70 Lucy’s sarcasm in her account of this episode is telling. Giltman’s collec­ tive tragedy excludes women. He has no understanding of women’s social

68. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-or 121. 69. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-or 120. 70. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or 168.

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struggles regarding marriage and independence—women like Nora in Ibsen’s play, or Nora in this novel. Goldberg enacts a powerful gender reversal with Giltman’s anecdote. While the two women are discussing the future of Jewish life, the poverty of Eastern European Jews, and the challenges of being women, it is the young men whose concerns rest in the domestic sphere of marriage. These are educated young Jewish women who, struggling as both women and Jews, grapple with their marginaliza­ tion in both traditional Jewish and bourgeois European culture.

THE HEBREW LIGHT OF MODERNISM Goldberg portrays Nora as a young Jewish woman suffocating in the prov­ inces and fearful of the Nazi rise to power in Weimar Berlin. Nora’s only exit is her dream of becoming an archaeologist in Africa or the Middle East. Nora wants to pursue this dream through her studies in ancient Hebrew. Whereas Nora fantasizes about returning to an orientalized, ancient Hebrew past, Goldberg’s novel offers a modernist Hebrew solu­ tion to Nora’s crisis and to Goldberg’s own aesthetic dilemmas. The novel develops a diasporic and modernist Hebrew style that integrates both European and Jewish literary forms. The novel associates this new Hebrew prose with the repeating motif of light. Light is a central preoccupation of Goldberg’s novel. Its title, Ve-hu ha-'or (And That Is the Light), is a verse from a poem by the medieval Hebrew poet Moses Ibn Ezra. Goldberg includes the verse as an epigraph: “And that is the light that goes on glowing through my youth,/and grows yet brighter as I grow old.”71 These lines refer to divine light, but, as the epigraph of a secular Hebrew novel, they take on new meaning. In her novel, Goldberg secularizes the divine light of Ibn Ezra’s poem; it is, as we will see, the train headlights and the electric light beside Nora’s bed, among other things.72 Goldberg draws the connection between light and Hebrew prose in her review of Baron’s short story collection Parshiyot (Stories). Goldberg is not interested in impressionist techniques for capturing light; instead she employs light as a metaphor for literary realism. Thus she disputes the notion that Baron’s stories are impressionist and feminine. Instead, she

71. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or i. For the original Hebrew, Moses Ibn Ezra, Shirei ha-chol, vol. 1, ed. Heinrich Brody (Berlin: Schocken, 1934) 148. For the English translation see “The Lamp Within," trans. Raymond Sheindlin, Prooftexts 17.3 (1997) 260-263. 72. Critics have read Goldbergs use of the light in various ways. Adi Tsemach argues that Nora herself is the light, noting that Goldberg would have known that in Aramaic, nora means light. See Tsemach, "El ha-metsiut" 72. Rivner, on the other hand, sees the light as symbolizing memory. See Rivner, Lea goldberg: monografiya 191.

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extols the “noon light” that pervades Baron’s writing and notes that “with all the distance of memory and all the lyrical ability, there is no fog here, no blurring of colors, no ‘outpouring of the soul’ in the hours before even­ ing, but rather a clarity that, even with all its tenderness, is almost cruel.”73 This strong light is not the dreamy Stimmung of twilight, and not the “out­ pouring of the soul” associated with romanticism or nostalgia, nor the soft, muted colors of impressionism. Instead, the light in Baron’s fictional universe is incisively clear, even cruel, while still retaining tenderness and warmth toward its subject. The bright light here illuminates the world of the shtetl and reveals its contours, its dark corners, and its women. Whereas Goldberg hails the naturalistic, noon light in Baron’s short fiction, in her own novel she embraces the motif of electric lights. This technological development represents her aesthetic embrace of modern­ ism. In the novel’s last section, entitled “October,” Nora receives a letter from her friend Antonia, who is spending the university holidays with her family in the Tyrol. Upon reading the letter, Nora’s first reaction is to flee her mother’s home and return to Berlin. Nora goes to bed but wakes up in the middle of night, turns on the “electric light” by her bed, and opens a book entitled A Collection of Hebrew Poetry, specifically to the Ibn Ezra poem of the novel’s epigraph.74 The following lines capture Nora’s atten­ tion: “And that is the light that goes on glowing through my youth,/and grows yet brighter as I grow old./It must be of the substance of God’s light,/for otherwise it would be fading as my years and strength decline.” Nora reads these lines with uncertainty, asking who or what is the light: “And that [he] is the light. In thanks to him we live our lives. And that [he] is the light—that. Which one? And that [he] is the light.”75 Nora has come upon these lines half asleep after turning on the electric light by her bed­ side. Despite her knowledge of Hebrew, she reads these lines as secular, connecting the light by her bedside to the light in Ibn Ezra’s poem. For Nora, this light is as much technological as it is natural, more secular than divine.76 It is the light that she uses in order to read poetry, rather than the light of prayer or of poetry itself.

73. Goldberg, “Al dvora baron: parshiyot" 96. 74. This collection of poetry is Mivchar ha-shira ha-ivrit: lemi-yom chatorn kitvei ha-kodesh 'ad galut yisra’el me-'al admat sefarad bi-shenat 5252, eds. Chaim Brody and Meir Viner (Lipsia [Leipzig]: Hotsa’at inzl, 1922). 75. Scheindlin’s translation does not capture the ambiguity of the Hebrew me-oro for a secular reader. He translates me-oro as “God’s light," but it is literally “his light" or even “its light." 76. Nili Gold also relates her interpretation of the novel to Ibn Ezra’s poem. She argues that in the novel light is “the creative spark, writing, and in Hebrew!" I agree that the light is related to Hebrew, but it is specifically a secular and modernist Hebrew. See Gold, "Rereading This Is the Light" 256-257.

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The electric light takes on metaliterary significance in relationship to Ibn Ezra’s medieval poem. In the opening lines of the poem, the lyrical voice describes how he closes his eyes and ears, puts his senses to sleep, and rouses his sleeping mind. By closing off his senses, the poet can use the power of his intellect to perceive an internal light, which is specifically God’s light:

I roused my sleeping mind to lull my lusting soul, my restless eyes, and in my heart I studied what has passed away, so that my ears might hear what lies in store.77

Though Goldberg’s novel has been dubbed impressionist, Ibn Ezra’s poem is a proleptic, anti-impressionist manifesto: a call to turn off the senses of the body and embrace the sense of the mind. In her classic work on lit­ erary modernism, Maria Kronegger argues that impressionism is “born from the fundamental insight that our consciousness is sensitive and passive. Man’s consciousness faces the world as pure passivity, a mirror in which the world inscribes or inflects itself.”78 However, the poem describes an active internal engagement with the world, not the passive reception of sensory experience. Nora’s internal light is not God’s light; instead, it is her attempt to seek the truth about the world around her, obscured by neither the blurred light of impressionism nor that of nostalgia. Nora turns the electric light that illuminated Ibn Ezra’s poem to eluci­ date her own memories. Toward the end of the novel, Nora’s mind is drawn to a series of recollections about her year in Berlin, memories that are punctured by the harsh light of a provincial train station: Up until that moment she had been gliding over the surface of her memories, memories of her year of redemption, just as if she were traveling on a night train

over the surface of the lights and stars and pools shot through with moonbeams. Then, here all at once and with a jerk, the train stops in a station lit by a fierce

yellow light. And there is no more magic of night or magic of movement to cover up the reality. There are only the details of things, and everything is filthy. And here, in this way, the train of Noras memories now stops.79

Goldberg uses the metaphor of the train to describe Nora’s passage through her memories, her “train of thought,” so to speak. The train 77. Ibn Ezra, "The Lamp Within" 260. 78. Maria Kronegger, Literary Impressionism (New Haven: College & University Press, 1973)14. 79. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or 185-186.

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metaphor recalls the opening passage of the novel with its description of the black glass and the fluttering reflection of Nora’s face. At night, the light inside the train turns the glass black and makes it impossible to see outside, so that the windows of the train become mirrors reflecting the interior compartment. In this passage, the light is first described as nat­ ural, as moonlight and stars. Suddenly the fierce yellow light of the station cuts through the magical light of the moon and stars. The train station’s light reveals a different world, not dreamy impressionist images, but rather a stripped-down, detail-oriented hyperrealism that exposes the reality of “things as they are.” If impressionism is concerned with how things ap­ pear to the subject, this bright electric station light is about something radically different. The harsh glare of the station lights recall the electric light by Nora’s bedside. Both impinge on Nora’s subjectivity, prompting her to recall the dark reality of the Nazi’s imminent rise to power. Nora’s train of memories in the passage takes her back to a memory of Berlin in 1931 when she and her friends are talking about the upcoming elections— the 1932 elections that would bring the Nazis to power and lead to Hitler’s ascendancy to the German chancellorship. Nora recalls that some of her friends support the Nazis and are likely to vote for them—a chilling recollection. This is the historical imminence that threatens Nora’s own fascination with Berlin and her attempts to escape the suffocation of Kovno. Goldberg assimilates the electric light in the novel as metaphor for her prose style—modernist and historically conscious, embracing secular and technological ways of knowing. The fierce light of the station pierces through Nora’s subjective experiences, disrupting her personal crisis with the urgency of history. Goldberg’s light motif both signifies and calls into question the Euro­ pean humanist traditions that were central to the Jewish Enlightenment and to European literary culture. In a notable conversation with Arin, Nora describes her desire to continue her studies in Berlin. Arin pro­ claims, “‘Europe, Europe!’ you say and ‘this different life’ that you long for. But your Europe is nearing the edge of the abyss. How will you be able to draw so much life from this death?”80 In response, Nora compares herself to Solomon Maimon, a central figure of the Haskala. She explains to Arin that perhaps only in the small towns of Eastern Europe are there still young people committed to the ideals of enlightenment: “We believe, we believe that there is a very real value in the things we learn, in the possibil­ ity of learning, in knowledge. We are exiles in the place of knowledge, like in the period of the Haskala, like Solomon Maimon in his time.”81 In a 80. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-’or 80. 81. Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-'or 81.

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1945 article entitled “Eropa shelchem” (“Your Europe”), Goldberg describes her generation of Eastern European Jews’ continued devotion to European culture, even after the destruction of World War IL These youngjewish men and women saw themselves as “children of the dim cor­ ners of Eastern Europe, prisoners of the Jewish shtetl,” who had fled to the European centers. “We were naive and foolish, like Solomon Maimon in his day. Like people of the enlightenment we young people left ‘the mar­ gins’ to drink from the fountain of knowledge. An affinity for the enlight­ ened world was in our blood, a legacy from the blood of the maskilim [adherents of the Enlightenment].”82 Identifying Maimon, Goldberg par­ allels the world of Kovno with the eighteenth-century Lithuanian shtetl to view her own story as a continuation of Maimon’s. However, in the 1940s the ideals of the German Jewish enlightenment have become tainted by the violence and devastation of World War II.83 Yet Goldberg imagines herself as a female niaskil, drinking from the fountains of Euro­ pean culture. She explains that for her generation, Europe was synony­ mous with “Dante, Goethe, Michelangelo, Flaubert, Mozart, Stendhal, Verlaine, Rilke and Rodin, Cezanne, Stravinsky, and James Joyce .. .”84 In the wake of World II, Goldberg asks herself whether this intellectual and artistic tradition, which she describes as her “first love,” should be rejected and forgotten. At the end of the piece she concludes that “your Europe” is also “my Europe,” one whose evils could never be forgotten, but whose value cannot be dismissed. Although Goldberg imagines herself a maskil, the literary and artistic movements that she embraced are both classical and modernist. In the novel, the train car represents both the journey to Western Europe for Enlightenment and her own embrace of modernism. In her essay about the modernist Hebrew writer Gnessin, Goldberg invokes the train car as a way to imagine his entrance onto the stage of Hebrew modernist writing. However, his [Gnessins] "meanwhile” is not only a general, universal "mean­

while.” It is the “meanwhile” of a Jewish spirit that has not been set right. AJew gets on a train. A dark night, summer colonies, and “fat-bellied fields” of

82. Leah Goldberg, “Eropa shelchem,” Mishmar April 30, 1945: 6. Reprinted in Ne'arot ivriyot: mikhteve le’agoldbergmin ha-provintsyah, 1923-1933, ed. Yfaat Weiss and Giddon Ticotsky (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 2009) 291. 83. Like Maimon, Goldberg traveled from what is now Lithuania to Berlin to seek higher education. Maimon, however, abandoned his wife and family in order to gain entrance to the elite intellectual circles of eighteenth-century Germany, while Goldberg arrived in twentieth­ century Berlin and gained access to a German university that, until the twentieth century, excluded women. 84. Goldberg, “Eropa shelchem" 293.

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theirs—of the goyim. And he remembers his grandfather and his father and

wants badly to make amends and take solace—“Father, after all there is a God in heaven, and he is so good!” But, yet, father isn’t so sure that there is a God in

heaven, and if this father, who hunches over old books at night, still lives in a

world of a collapsing culture, for there is yet another father, who still doesn’t know this: once again its "Stojka" [Russian for wood struts] and once again “Krokva” [Russian for rafters]... the world is shrinking. And his grandfather—

the same happy grandfather, who knows for certain that “there is a God in heaven and he is very good," did not feel stifled, did not feel fenced inside the confines of the small shtetl. His world was big and wide, because his world was

in God. But his grandson, who lost his God and feels, in reality, the material

world, apparently a very wide one, yet one that lacks a central and important

idea—lives in the constricted world of the shtetl and it’s no good for him, he is stifled, for he has no way out into the world, no way out to his new god.8S

Goldberg plays with images and scenes from Gnessin’s fictional universe to characterize both the author and his literary corpus, blurring the bor­ ders between the two. She describes three generations of men: the grand­ father secure in his faith, the father who doubts God, and the son who has lost all belief in God’s existence. Gnessin’s painful break from the shtetl and the world of his grandfather is analogous to the story of countless other Hebrew writers who left the shtetl to seek secular learning.86 Signif­ icantly, Goldberg imagines Gnessin (and by association his fictional corpus) on a train at night—a train leading out of the shtetl—as he looks for his new God. This is how Gnessin and his protagonists live in the world of his fiction, in the “meanwhile” between the death of the old God and the appearance of the new one. The parallels between Nora (and by extension Goldberg herself) and Gnessin capture two contrasting relationships to Hebrew modernist cul­ ture. The young Gnessin learned Hebrew in the religious environs of the cheder (school for young children) and the yeshiva. Nora studies Hebrew in her secular high school and then later in Berlin. Her relationship to the language is mediated by Jewish nationalism and European orientalism.87 But somewhere between these two poles, Nora, unlike Gnessin, finds a way out through her Hebrew studies. Many modernist women poets, including Else Lasker-Schiller and Mina Loy, turned to the ancient 85. Goldberg, “Mi-saviv le-etsel” 79. 86. Alan Mintz describes these Jewish narratives of lost faith in “Banishedfrom Their Father's Table": Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 87. Yfaat Weiss offers an important discussion of the influence of European Orientalism on Goldberg in "A Small Town in Germany: Leah Goldberg and German Orientalism in 1932," Jewish Quarterly Review 99.2 (2009) 200-229.

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Hebrew world as part of their process, "not as a route to escapism or originary relationship to nature, but as an authorizing historical precedent,” one that allowed them to write themselves into the modern canon.88 How­ ever, in Goldberg’s novel, Hebrew not only authorizes a woman writer, but also offers a solution to the conundrum that is both the Jew and the gentile on the train. Hie language represents an alternative path, one that is both Jewish and modern, both outside of the shtetl and beyond the European humanist tradition, one that captures the crisis of modernity for Jewish women who find themselves doubly marginalized in both traditions. The last scene of Goldberg’s novel illuminates Nora’s relationship to both European and Jewish culture. Nora boards a train en route to Ber­ lin. The train car is empty except for Nora, an elderly woman who is asleep, and an older man reading a French newspaper. The man asks Nora about her family, and Nora tells him that her mother is a handicrafts teacher, but when he asks about her father, she refuses to answer. She disavows her father and the madness she associates with him. Instead, she looks out the window, and her eyes rest on a single light on the hori­ zon, emanating from an approaching provincial train station. Nora turns away from the French reader, from French, the language of international modernism, to the light outside, the dusky light of the forlorn station— perhaps a shtetl, perhaps a little village, perhaps even her own reflection. As in the passage about Nora’s memory, the train car itself represents an ambiguous subjectivity—it is potentially the train of Nora’s thoughts, but it is also a symbol of new industrial technology and of modern trans­ portation. At the end of the novel, the consciousness of a woman appears in Hebrew, figured against the Jew and the European and between Yiddish, German, and French. At the same time, the novel ends on an uncertain note. Goldberg offers a Jewish interpretation of Ibsen’s A Doll's House. The end of Ibsen’s play, like the end of Goldberg’s novel, is ambiguous. Ibsen’s Nora leaves her bourgeois prison and steps out onto the street. But Ibsen’s nineteenth­ century audience knew well that the only likely option available to Nora would be prostitution. Goldberg’s Nora boards a train in 1932 to Berlin— an economically depressed city where there would be few career options

88. Lasker-Schuler, like Goldberg, felt torn between Jewish and German culture. Her rela­ tionship to Jewish tradition was mediated by her orientalist fantasies of biblical landscapes, ev­ ident for example in her Hebraische Balladen (Hebrew Ballads). In the 1920s and 1930s Lasker-Schuler faced increasing anti-Semitism; her writing was derided for being too Jewish. Like Goldberg, Lasker-Schuler left Germany in the 1930s, fleeing the Nazi rise to power, and later emigrated to Palestine. Although Lasker-Schiller articulated a powerful connection to Hebrew, she chose a different path, writing in German between Jewish and German culture. Miller, Cultures of Modernism 133.

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for a woman, and in eerie proximity to Hitler’s rise to power. A dark cloud, therefore, hangs over Nora’s burgeoning subjectivity in the novel. But while the novel ends on an ambiguous note, Goldberg resolves a different set of literary problems, which allows her—by way of Ibsen, a linguistic foreigner—to write women into the narrative of Jewish modernism. At the same time, the Hebrew universe that Nora occupies remains within Europe, between Kovno and Berlin, and not in Palestine. Goldberg’s introspective, diasporic modernist aesthetic is her resolution of a highly complicated literary dilemma: how to write a modernist Hebrew prose that, while assimilating multiple literary histories, can contain a female subjectivity. Goldberg’s novel does not celebrate Nora as a radical subject, but rather Goldberg creates a Hebrew prose style that is radical in its point of view, that of a young Jewish woman, and in its assimilation of Jewish literature, European modernism, and women’s writing. Goldberg’s novel envisions Hebrew as a language ofjewish culture that is neither rooted in the shtetl nor territorialized in Palestine, one that addresses an audience of both men and women beyond the emergent state. She resists the project of nationalizing Hebrew literature and the demand to locate Hebrew cul­ ture in the new Jewish home. Goldberg’s trajectory from Kovno, to Berlin and Bonn, and finally to pre-state Palestine, emblematizes the movement ofjewish modernist lit­ erary culture to the newly forming Jewish nation-state. In 1935, the same year that Goldberg arrived in Mandatory Palestine, Kadia Molodowsky, the modernist Yiddish poet, critic, and editor, emigrated from Warsaw to New York. Molodowsky was welcomed by the New York literary estab­ lishment and became a central figure of Yiddish culture, founding the lit­ erary journal Svive (Surroundings) in the 1940s and then reviving the journal in the 1960s. Just as Molodowsky was establishing herself in the New York Yiddish literary scene, Gabriel Preil, a young Yiddish poet from New York, began turning out Hebrew poetry, publishing his first collec­ tion, Nof shemesh ve-khefor (Landscape of Sun and Frost) in New York in 1944. Preil’s Hebrew poetics would come to be associated with the Israeli Statehood Generation, including Nathan Zach and Yehuda Amichai. However, Molodowsky, Preil, and Goldberg were all working within a multilingual, diasporic, modernist tradition. This tradition looked very different in postwar New York, where both Molodowsky and Preil col­ laborated to sustain the diasporic aesthetic that underwrote much of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism in the first decades of the twentieth cen­ tury. Their poetry and critical writings of the period bear witness to their extraordinary commitment to this modernist culture.

CHAPTER 5

The Afterlife of

Diasporic Modernism in Postwar New York Kh'bin efsher di letstefun tnayn dor. S'iz nit mayn zorg.' (I am perhaps the last of my generation. That is not my worry.) —Kadia Molodowsky

n a 1964 article written for Kadia Molodowksy’s New York Yiddish journal, Svive (Surroundings); Melech Ravitch posed the question on the minds of many Yiddish writers and readers after the end of World War II; “Is Yiddish literature at an end?”12 Ravitch wrote the essay to commemorate the fiftieth-anniversary issue of the American Yiddish newspaper Der tog (The Day), which contained a list honoring one hun­ dred deceased contributors. Meditating on the list; Ravitch mournfully observes; “Few remain and even fewer will come next.”3 By the 1960s, this foreboding about the death of Yiddish permeated the poetics of modernist New York Yiddish poets. In his 1956 collection Erdene red (Down-to-Earth Talk), the Introspectivist poet Jacob (Yankev)

I

1. Kadia Molodowsky "Tsind on dayn likht," Likhtfun dornboym: lider un poetnes (Buenos Aries: Kiem, 1965) 144. 2. Melekh Ravitsh, “Tsi endikt zikh di yidishe literatur?” Svive 14 (1964) 23. 3. Ravitsh; “Tsi endikt zikh di yidishe literatur?” 23.

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Glatshteyn ponders, “Soon we’ll have lost all the words./The stammer­ mouths are growing silent.” Reflecting on these lines, Benjamin Harshav asks, “Can we imagine the tragedy of writers—H. Leyvik, Jacob Glashteyn, A. Leyeles, others—who felt such a mission of beginning in their own lifetime and stood before the abyss of the end... .’M In her last collection of poetry, Likht fun dornboym (Lights of the Thornbush), Molodowsky mournfully proclaims “Ikh bin a viderkol/fun a farshvundenem orkester” (I am an echo/of a vanished orchestra).45 Just as American Yiddish writers faced the uncertain fates of their lit­ erary languages, so too did diasporic Hebrew writers. In a 1977 interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediotacharonot (The Latest News), the Hebrew modernist poet Gabriel Preil was asked, “What is it like today to be a Hebrew poet in America. Does it mean loneliness?”6 Preil answered: "Yes, it means loneliness. Were it not for the fact that I feel myself to be like an Israeli, it would be very hard. I would have no one to exchange a word with.”7 Preil was one of the few American Hebrew writers who remained in the United States rather than immigrating to Israel. However, he was also a Yiddish poet, a detail he declines to mention to his Israeli interviewer. The mournful tone of these reflections on the end of Yiddish and Hebrew in New York has clouded critical understandings of postwar Hebrew and Yiddish culture, casting a long shadow over a period of dynamic transformation.8 Undeniably, Yiddish culture, along with Hebrew culture, was experiencing a dramatic decline in New York. How­ ever, there is more to the story of New Yorkjewish-language culture than the account of its death rattle. Despite this discourse about the decline and death of American Jewish language culture, writers like Molodowsky and Preil continued to pursue their literary careers in New York. In fact, 4. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, "Introduction," American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, eds. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 53. Benjamin Harshav is a translator, scholar, and poet, as well as a founding member of two modernist literary movements in Israel, the Yiddish Yung Yisroel and the Hebrew Likrat. 5. “Ikh bin a viderkol,” Likhtfun dornboym 158. The poem is dated 1960. 6. Zissi Stavi, “Gavriel Preil ve-ha-meshulash lita, nu-york, ve-yerushalayim" (Interview with Preil), Yediot acharonot October 21, 1977. 7. Stavi, "Gavriel Preil.” 8. In 1999 I co-wrote an essay with Robert Adler Peckerar on Gabriel Preil and Jacob Glatshteyn's relationship to Hebrew and Yiddish culture in New York. The essay focused on Achisefer, a volume of Hebrew translations of Yiddish poetry and literary history published by the Louis LaMed Foundation for the Advancement of Hebrew and Yiddish literature (or, as it was known in Yiddish and Hebrew, for "Our Literature in Both Languages"). In the essay we argued that the controversy surrounding the publication of this collection in the 1940s offered an important counter-narrative to the standard accounts of both Hebrew and Yiddish literature in America.

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Ravitch concluded his 1964 article on a surprisingly hopeful note: "Yiddish literature is not at an end—it is only concluding its earthly, tem­ poral period, and it is moving to its heavenly period.’’9 In 1972, one year after Der tog closed its doors, Molodowsky reprinted the essay with a brief foreword by Ravitch that reaffirmed his view about Yiddish’s "heavenly phase.” Meanwhile, a closer look at Preil’s response to his Israeli inter­ viewer illuminates the complex dynamics of this literary culture. When Preil says that he has no one to “exchange a word with” and then describes himself as one of the last “[Hebrew] Mohicans,” he is only telling part of the story.1011 During the 1960s and 1970s, Preil was not only a lonely Hebrew poet in America, he was also an American Yiddish poet and essayist. Why does Preil obfuscate his relationship to American Yiddish culture in the interview? If Yiddish was really dying or dead, then why hide his participation? Preil’s vexed relationship to both Hebrew and Yiddish culture in New York and Israel and his reluctance to acknowledge his continuing work as a Yiddish poet are not signs of the death ofYiddish, but of the intensifying force of Jewish territorial nationalism and its accompanying politics of monolingualism. In the 1960s and 1970s, writers like Molodowsky, Preil, and Ravitch sought to preserve a bilingual Hebrew and Yiddish literary culture that was increasingly threatened by the centripetal force of nation­ alism in the post-World War II era. Despite Preil’s public disavowals of his continuing bilingual literary project, his Hebrew and Yiddish poetry in the 1960s and 1970s engages with a complex bilingual modernist and diasporic aesthetic, one that was nourished in Molodowsky’s postwar journal Svive. Molodowsky’s and Preil’s New York literary careers illumi­ nate how the post-World War II creation of the state of Israel transformed the geographic, political, and linguistic landscape of the modernist Jewish literary culture that I have discussed so far. This chapter moves to postwar New York literary culture, at a moment when poetry served as the site of self-reflexive Hebrew and Yiddish mod­ ernist writing. Focusing on Molodowsky and Preil’s late careers as they orbit the New York literary journal Svive, I trace the afterlife of the diasporic modernist tradition that I examined in the preceding chapters. Preil and Molodowsky, have been at the margins of critical writings on Jewish modernism, despite their centrality to Jewish modernist culture.11

9. Ravitsh, Tsi "endikt zikh di yidishe literatur" 23. 10. The other “Mohican" was the Hebrew poet Eisig Silberschlag. 11. Yael Feldman, Dan Miron, Kathryn Hellerstein, and Avraham Novershtern have offered important studies on Preil’s and Molodowsky’s modernist writing. However, by and large, both poets have been absent from the broader critical discussions ofJewish modernism.

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The 1950s and 1960s saw the explosion of American Jewish fiction in English, and Yiddish prose writers gained acceptance into the American literary canon in English translation.12 However; unlike their prose con­ temporaries; Jewish-language poets, like Molodowsky and Preil, were left to grapple with the futures of their literary languages with scant attention from the American literary scene.13 A close reading of both their poetic and editorial projects demonstrates their continued investment in the diasporic, modernist aesthetic developed by Brenner, Bergelson, and Goldberg. However, in the postwar period, these aesthetic concerns moved from prose fiction to the realm of poetry and print culture. Molodowsky and Preil collaborated in the New York Yiddish Journal Svive, one of the most important Yiddish literary journals in the second half of the twentieth century. Molodowsky founded Svive in 1943 with hopes of renewing American Yiddish literary culture.14 In 1944, in the wake of the devastating news about European Jewry’s fate, she abandoned the endeavor. Two decades later, Molodowksy revived Svive to preserve, rather than to renew, Yiddish literary culture in America. However, the postwar Svive did not take a nostalgic and mournful tone toward Yiddish. Instead, the journal articulated a new ethos of multilingual diasporism, publishing an international array of Yiddish poets and Yiddish transla­ tions of Hebrew essays, stories, and poems. Preil’s essays, translations of his Hebrew poems, and his original Yiddish poetry appeared in Svive throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Both Preil and Molodowsky had close ties not only to New York Yiddish literary culture, but also to Israeli Hebrew culture. Molodowsky lived in Israel from 1948 to 1950, and dur­ ing this time she edited the Yiddish literary journal Heym {Home). Trans­ lations of her children’s poems became instant Hebrew classics. Although Preil never lived in Israel, he sustained close ties with the Israeli Hebrew literary scene and published his Hebrew collections there. However, he chose to conceal his relationship to Yiddish from his Hebrew reading audience, not publicly acknowledging his work in Yiddish until the late

12. Isaac Bashevis Singer is an excellent example of a Yiddish writer who was able to sustain his literary career, primarily, by courting an English-language audience. Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. 13. Molodowsky tried to publish translations of her essays in English, but they were rejected from Jewish literary publications, such as Midstream. See YIVO Archives, Molodowsky Collec­ tion 2/35. 14. Anita Norich offers an insightful analysis of the vibrant American Yiddish cultural scene in New York during World War II. She is one of the few scholars to write about Molodowsky s journal, examining the cultural politics of the Holocaust as represented in Svive. See Norich, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) 29-35.

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1970s.15 Despite the risks of working in both languages, a risk especially poignant for Preil as a diasporic Hebrew poet, both Preil and Molodowsky viewed the continued relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish as neces­ sary for their literary projects. This chapter argues that a bilingual diasporic Jewish literary culture persisted in the post-World War II New York literary center, albeit in veiled form. In the same way that Hebrew and Yiddish prose writers worked out the diasporic relations among lan­ guage, territory, and cultural identity through modernist framing devices, Preil and Molodowsky negotiated the historical conditions of New York Jewish culture through their practices of translation and their investment in narrating the shared literary history of these poetic traditions. In this chapter, I examine how Preil’s auto-translated poems “A dorf tsvishn shtern” (“A Village among the Stars”) and “Mi-yerushalayim, shir rishon” (“First Poem from Jerusalem”) frame each other and articulate Preil’s modernist poetics of diasporism. “A dorf tsvishn shtern,” published in Svive in 1968, is one of the few postwar poems that Preil published (and possibly wrote) first in Yiddish. The Hebrew version, “Mi-yerushalayim, shir rishon,” appeared four years later in Mi-tokh zeman ve-nof (Of Time and Place). Read in relationship to each other and to Molodowsky s post­ war diasporic modernist project, these poems illuminate a Jewish mod­ ernist poetics shaped by the postwar reorganization of Jewish literary culture, that is, the centripetal forces ofjewish nationalism in Israel and the lingering centrifugal pull of diasporic Jewish literary production in New York. Following World War II, monolingual nationalism appeared to be a stronger force than diasporic multilingualism. But in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, American Jewish writers and thinkers began to take stock of the state of Yiddish culture, as well as its future both in Israel and in the broader Jewish world. These writers organized the Alveltlekher yidisher kultur kongres (The World Congress for Jewish Culture) to debate the future of Hebrew and Yiddish culture in the pages of American Hebrew and Yiddish journals. Yiddish writers, including Molodowsky, hoped that the creation of Israel as an independent Jewish state would help nourish a severely weakened postwar Yiddish culture. However, the new Israeli state embraced a policy of monolingualism that severely restricted Yid­ dish culture within its borders, creating laws against printing a daily Yid­ dish newspaper and placing severe restrictions on Yiddish theater. In 1951, members of the World Congress for Jewish Culture petitioned the

15. Yael Feldman, Modernism and Cultural Transfer: Gabriel Preil and the Tradition of Jewish Literary Bilingualism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1986) 55.

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Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurion, to lift these restrictions and support Yiddish culture both in its borders and in the diaspora. Ben Gurion responded to the petitioners by retorting that Yiddish had no rel­ evance for the future of Israel.16 Ben Gurion’s official rebuke to Yiddishism dashed the hopes of intellectuals that the language might survive with the institutional support of the new Jewish state. According to Rachel Rojanski, Yiddishists had premised the future of Yiddish on prewar “autonomist concepts,” and following Ben Gurion’s 1951 declaration the discussions on the status of Yiddish “were primarily left to those with a sense of nostalgia.”17 Rojanski concludes that after 1951 there could be no practical belief in the future of an autonomous, diasporic Yiddish literary culture in Israel or elsewhere without any state support. Yet in 1951, just as Ben Gurion pronounced that Yiddish represented the past, a group of Yiddish poets, among them Yosl Birshteyn, Binyamin Hrushovski (later Harshav), and Rivka Basman, established Yung Yisroel (Young Israel), a modernist Yiddish literary group and journal in Israel that lasted through 1957.18 Meanwhile, in New York both Hebrew and Yiddish writers per­ sisted with the project of diasporic Jewish-language culture, even as they struggled to sustain a literary culture without a national literary center.

GABRIEL PREIL’S AESTHETICS OF DIASPORA Gabriel Preil emigrated from Eastern Europe to America in 1922 at the age of eleven and arrived on the New York Yiddish scene in the 1930s when “Yiddish was a poetic milieu in which ‘Modernism’ had been a catchword for two decades.”19 His first published poems appeared in the Nyu-yorker vokhnblat (New York Weekly) in 1935. During the 1930s he af­ filiated himself with Glatshteyn and the Introspectivist Yiddish poets, publishing in their journal In zikh (In Onself).20 As Preil schooled himself in Yiddish modernism, he attempted to adapt this modernist style to his

16. Rachel Rojanski, “The Final Chapter for the Struggle for Cultural Autonomy,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 6.2 (2007) 185, 198-199. 17. Rojanski, "The Final Chapter for the Struggle for Cultural Autonomy" 200-201. 18. For a discussion of Yung Yisroels history and significance, see Shachar Pinsker, “Choosing Yiddish in Israel: Yung Yisroel between Home and Exile, Center and Margins," Choosing Yiddish: Studies on Yiddish Literature, Culture, and History, eds. Shiri Goren, Hannah Pressman and Lara Rabinovitch (Detroit: Wayne State University, forthcoming). Also David Roskies, “Di shrayber grupe ‘Yung Yisroel,”’ Yugntruf 28-29 (1973) 7-12. 19. Feldman, Modernism and Cultural Transfer 106. For a history of Yiddish modernist poetics, see Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry 33-34. 20. Feldman, Modernism and Cultural Transfer 106.

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Hebrew poetry, publishing Hebrew translations of his work in the New York Hebrew paper Ha-doar (The Post) and in Yitzhak Lamdan’s Tel Aviv journal Gilyonot (Pages).21 In a 1982 interview with Jeremy Garber, Preil describes his relationship to both Yiddish and Anglo-American mod­ ernism: “I was the Hebrew parallel of the English-language imagistic poets and in this sense I was a pioneer.”22 He explains: “Neither [Hebrew nor Yiddish] literature was very daring until In zikh came along. I was influenced by their manifesto, which was similar in a way to the credo of the imagists Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound.”23 As Preil matured stateside as a poet, his career flourished in Israel, where he was embraced as a mod­ ernist innovator. Of his nine published collections, only one, Lider (Poems), was written in Yiddish, and seven of his eight Hebrew volumes were published in Israel. However, Preil did not turn his back on Yiddish poetry or American Hebrew culture. His Hebrew and Yiddish articles and poems continued to appear in American periodicals, including Ha-doar, Svive, Bitsaron (Fortress), and Di tsukunft (The Future). By the 1960s Preil occupied a complicated position in the world ofjewish letters, posing difficulties for critics of both Hebrew and American poetry. He was a bilingual Hebrew and Yiddish modernist poet writing in America at a time when Jewish bilingual writing was on the wane and American Jewish writing in English was on the rise. He was a diasporic Hebrew poet at the moment when the Hebrew literary center had moved to the newjewish state. Yet, his success in Hebrew meant that he was often mistakenly identified as an Israeli poet. For example, in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics the noted American Hebraist Ezra Spicehandler describes Preil’s poetry under the heading “Israeli Poets.” Though he does specify that Preil is writing in New York, he fails to distin­ guish between “Hebrew” and “Israeli,” as though they were an uncompli­ cated set of synonyms.24 Furthermore, Preil obfuscated his Yiddish writing for his Israeli audiences. In his 1977 interview with Yediot acharonot, Preil acknowledges his early Yiddish poems but makes no mention of his continuing participation in Yiddish culture in America. Despite his claim that he felt “like an Israeli,” Preil never immigrated to Israel.25 Preil’s diasporic modernist aesthetic has been difficult to read because of his complicated relationship to both New York and Israel, and critics

21. Stavi, "Gavriel Preil." 22. Jeremy Garber, "A Conversation with Gabriel Preil," Present Tense 9.2 (Winter 1982) 19. 23. Garber, “A Conversation with Gabriel Preil" 19. 24. Ezra Spicehandler, "Hebrew Poetry,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Po­ etics, eds. Alex Preminger and T. V. E Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 501-509. 25. Stavi, "Gavriel Preil."

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have struggled to characterize his modernist project. In her important work on Preil’s early Hebrew and Yiddish poems, Yael Feldman con­ tends that Preil “constituted, indeed, an American link between those early attempts at Hebrew Modernism (mostly of European provenance), and its flowering in Israel three decades later.”26 Miron argues, in contra­ distinction to Feldman, that “in Hebrew literary history, Preil is not the herald of Israeli modernism, but the mediator between romanticism and modernism.”27 According to Miron, the historical context of Preil’s work is neither American Hebrew nor Israeli modernism, but rather the history of Hebrew poetry from the romantics to the Moderna. American Hebrew critics of the 1930s and 1940s embraced Preil as the representative of a new, younger generation of American Hebrew poets. Uninterested in his modernist Yiddish poetry, they viewed him as an important figure in American Hebrew literary culture. Moreover, Israeli modernist poets claimed him as one of their own, ignoring his connection to Yiddish culture and to New York. They were drawn to Preil’s conversational tone, his minimalist aesthetic, and his free verse. In his 1966 essay “Le-akliman ha-signoni shel shenot ha-chamishim ve-ha-shishim be-sifrutenu-ha-chadasha” (“The Stylistic Climate of the 1950s and 1960s in Our Poetry”), the Israeli poet Nathan Zach identifies Preil as one of the important Israeli poets of his generation.28 Preil’s contemporaries recog­ nized his genius, but ignored his multilingual poetic contexts. The Israeli and American critical establishment viewed Preil as a bridge between the romantic and the modern, between America and Israel. However, this reading of Preil ignores his connection to diasporic modernistjewish cul­ ture both in New York and in Israel. Preil was not so much bridging the divide as continuing a modernist tradition of diasporic writing. Preil embraced the United States as an important diasporic center of Hebrew literature that could ensure the future of an international and cosmopolitan Hebrew poetry. In his 1954 article, “Nusach amerike bashira ha-'ivrit” (“The American Style in Hebrew Poetry”), he argued that American Hebrew writers significantly contributed to Hebrew literature worldwide by bringing the influences of Anglo-American literature, from Shakespeare to Carl Sandburg, into modern Hebrew literature. Accord­ ing to Preil, “only on American soil did Hebrew literature receive direct and profound nourishment from the works of English literature.”29 Preil 26. Feldman, Modernism and Cultural Transfer 2-3. 27. Miron, Chadashot me-ezor ha-kotev: iyunim ba-shira ha- ivrit ha-hadasha (Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan, 1993) 123. 28. Gabriel Preil, "Le-akliman ha-signoni shel shenot ha-chamishim ve-ha-shishim besifrutenu-ha-chadasha,” Ha-aretz July 29,1966. 29. Preil, “Nusach amerika ba-shira ha- ivrit,” Metsudah 7 (1954) 503.

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embraced an ethos of Americanness that he connected to the American landscape: Americanness is the attainment of the smells and colors that are particular to this climate and that no other climate has produced, it is striking roots in the

tradition of the land, of the styles of its day, in writing and in speech, and recog­

nizing their finest strands. It is the unequivocal feeling of the difference in char­ acter and the ways of life of its people. Here there is no exterior adaptation to

the appearance of things—it pervades their inwardness and their unique atmo­

sphere.3031

In the passage, Preil describes an indigenous American culture that draws sustenance from its native roots in the land. Yet, he also imagines that Americanness is attainable for anyone who tries to transplant himself in American soil by writing about native themes. Preil gives the examples of American Hebrew poets who achieved, in his eyes, a native Americanness by writing about American Indians and African American culture, for example Abraham Ephrat’s poem “Vigvamim shotkim” (“Silent Wig­ wams”), inspired by Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.” He also makes note of Hillel Bavli’s poems about small-town America?1 Preil also believed that Hebrew poets in America would absorb Anglo-American poetry in the American landscape, noting that “the majority of American Hebrew writers were influenced, if not always knowingly, by the Victorianism of Tennyson or by the defiant meter of Haussmann.”32 In his 1959 pamphlet Israeli Poetry in Peace and War, written in English, Preil asserts the impor­ tance of Anglo-American poetry for the best Hebrew poets in Israel, in­ cluding Uri Zvi Grinberg and Leah Goldberg. According to Preil, Grinberg drew from the work of Walt Whitman, and Goldberg from the imagists and Emily Dickinson.33 Although it was the next generation of Hebrew poets, the Statehood Generation, who would proudly announce these Anglo-American influences, Preil highlighted the significance of Anglo-American literary culture for an earlier generation of modernist Israeli Hebrew poets and a cosmopolitan culture that relied on its dia­ sporic Hebrew outpost in New York. Despite his openness to Anglo-American literary influences, Preil expressed skepticism about English-language American Jewish writing. 30. Preil, “Nusach amerika ba-shira ha-ivrit” 497. 31. For a discussion of American Hebrew writers’ fondness for Native American and African American culture, see Stephen Katz, Red, Black, and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). 32. Preil, “Nusach amerikeba-shira ha-ivrit" 503. 33. Gabriel Preil, Israeli Poetry in Peace and War (New York: Herzl Institute, 1959) 5,13.

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Preil’s essays on Hebrew and America appeared at a time when American Jewish literature was flourishing. Jewish writers and intellectuals of the New York school gained attention by writing for important postwar Jewish and non-Jewish journals, such as Commentary and Partisan Review. These writers, including Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, became important American and Jewish literary fixtures. Preil looked at this development with some suspicion. Responding to essays on this new Jewish American literature by Molodowsky and Ada Lapin in Svive, Preil writes that, “Jews who write in another language—who cannot and do not want to learn Hebrew and Yiddish” will be fated “to remain, for the most part, foreign to our people.”34 Although he believed that “it is natural and inevitable that the Hebrew and Yiddish writer should knowingly or unconsciously receive all the local color, absorb all the climates of the countries in which they live and work,” he felt that this influence should be absorbed into Hebrew or Yiddish.35 Despite his worries about the rise of American Jewish writing in English, he still believed that Jewishlanguage writing could be sustained in diaspora: “The T of the Jewish artist in a foreign land is not torn out—in any case—not for the writer whose writing tool is Hebrew or Yiddish.”36 As long as the Jewish author writes in a Jewish language, he or she will benefit from the rich cultural and linguistic surroundings. Preil’s and Molodowsky’s worries about American Jewish literature reflected a growing postwar concern that diasporic Jewish language culture was threatened by the success of Amer­ ican Jewry. On the face of it, these concerns about the dangers of linguis­ tic assimilation were very similar to those expressed by Abramovitsh, Brenner, and Bergelson. However, in postwar America the dynamics of Jewish language culture had taken a different turn, given the revival of Hebrew as an official language in Israel and the growing monolingualism of American Jewish culture. Despite his faith in diasporic Jewish writing, Preil also sensed that the reorganization ofjewish culture in the postwar period threatened Hebrew literature in America. Concluding his essay on the fertile tradition of Hebrew culture in America, he warns of its possible demise: There will not be a future for our literature, because there will be no future life

for Jewish culture outside of Israel if we do not begin to make foundational changes in the structure ofjewish cultural education outside of Israel, in Amer­

ica. Hebrew education is a required element for the continuation of a secular

34. Preil, "Vos kenen mir farlangen fun di english-shraybndike yidn,” Svive 15 (1965) 45. 35. Preil, "Yidish un univerzal in poezye,” Svive 12 (1964) 40. 36. Preil, "Yidish un univerzal in poezye” 41.

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literature. Without it all our plans for the future progression of our interests will

be the deception of our conscience, like a tragic children’s game.37

In this passage, Preil bitterly warns against the imminent death of Hebrew culture in America. One year later, Preil argued that the future of Hebrew literature in America depends on two tenuous factors: “the tide of new talent and the influence of the state of Israel.”38 Without both of these factors, he predicted that Hebrew culture in America would dis­ appear and “without them I doubt whether the historians will, in a few generations, have anything to record.”3940 41 Preil recognized that the bal­ ance between the Zionist centripetal forces and the diasporic centrif­ ugal forces was now shifting. In his eyes, the success of the American center depended on Israel, and not vice versa. However, he worried that the new national Hebrew center posed a threat to the continued existence of diasporic Hebrew. Preil’s feelings about the death of diasporic Hebrew literature shed light on his reservations about the direction of Anglo-American mod­ ernism in the postwar period. In his 1955 Yiddish essay, “Di hebreyishe literatur in amerike” (“Hebrew Literature in America”), Preil takes a conservative tone toward the future of Hebrew poetry and what he per­ ceives as the possible dangers of modernism. He observes that the Hebrew poets of the 1930s moved away from modernist influences, favoring Whitman over T. S. Eliot, whose goal was “to negate and to destroy.’**0 He explains that “the Hebrew writer here, in general, has just decided that modernism is a transient phenomenon, which one can very easily do without.’**1 Preil then goes on to side with those who caution restraint as a shield against “today’s atomic chaos” of modernity, an atomic chaos signaled by the devastation of World War II. Here, Preil does not disavow modernism, but rather what he views as Eliot’s nihilist (and antisemitic) tendencies. Preil’s essay on Hebrew modernism and Eliot appeared in the Yiddish journal Di tsukunfi in 1955, the year after he published his second collec­ tion of Hebrew poems, Nermul kokhavitn {Candle Opposite Stars), in Jeru­ salem. However, Preil makes no mention in the essay of his own Hebrew poetry and his growing affiliation with Israeli poets and literary journals. He neither addresses the connection between the future of Hebrew and the future of Yiddish in America, nor does he discuss his own place in 37. Preil, “Nusach amerike ba-shira ha-ivrit” 504. 38. Preil, “Di hebreyishe literatur in amerike," Di tsukunfi (October 1955) 371. 39. Preil, “Di hebreyishe literatur in amerike” 371. 40. Preil, “Di hebreyishe literatur in amerike" 371. 41. Preil, "Di hebreyishe literatur in amerike" 371.

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American Hebrew and Yiddish circles. Preil veiled his Yiddish writing from his Hebrew audience because of the politically charged linguistic politics in Israel, while hiding his Israeli poetic affiliation from his Yiddish audience for fear of disappointing them. These deceptions testify to his pressing need to work in both languages no matter what the personal costs. Despite his reluctance to admit his bilingual poetic output to his American and Israeli audiences, he continued to write and translate in both languages. Continuing a tradition that began with S. Y. Abramovitsh, Preil auto-translated his Hebrew poetry into Yiddish, and many of these poems appeared in the pages of Molodowsky’s Svive. Preil’s auto-translations articulate a complicated aesthetic of diaspora, one that mediates between Hebrew and Yiddish, between Jewish and Israeli cultures. Preil’s poems “Tsayar ‘ivri” (“A Hebrew Painter”) and “Yidisher moler” (“Jewish/Yiddish Painter”) highlight how his translations medi­ tate on his diasporic poetics.42 Preil regularly described the work of the poet as that of a painter, and the poem as a painting. In “Tsayar ‘ivri,” the poet describes himself in Hebrew as a “Tsayar ‘ivri she-'adayin lo ra’a bemo ‘einav /et ha-shamayim haivriim” (A Hebrew painter, who has still not seen the Hebrew sky with his own eyes). In Yiddish he is “A moler-yid vos hot nokh mit di oygn/nit geshept mit tif yidishe himlen” (A painterJew who has not, with his own eyes,/drawn from the deep Jewish skies). In the Yiddish version of the poem, he modifies “painter” with “yid” (Jew). The skies are Jewish, not Hebrew, and the language of poetry in the Hebrew poem becomes the language of identity in the Yiddish poem. The Hebrew poem gives voice to Preil’s sense of “cultural-linguistic seclusion” as a Hebrew poet in America at a time when many of his Hebrew con­ temporaries immigrated to Israel.43 In contrast, Preil’s Yiddish poem expresses his growing alienation from a diminishingJewish/Yiddish cul­ ture in America. Together, these two poems articulate the complicated position of a Jewish poet in New York who watches his two poetic worlds, one Hebrew and one Jewish or Yiddish, move away from each other. Preil offers two visions of himself as a poet-painter, one Hebrew and the other Jewish/Yiddish, which, allow Preil to figure himself as a diasporic Jewish poet, torn between linguistic and cultural contexts. Preil’s two poems, “A dorf tsvishn shtern” and “Mi-yerushalayim, shir rishon,” illuminate Preil’s diasporic poetics from the vantage point ofjerusalem. Unlike “Tsayar ivri” and “Yidisher moler,” Preil published “A dorf tsvishn

42. The Yiddish version appeared in Svive 4 (1961) 35; the Hebrew version was published in Preil’s collection Mapat erev (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1960) 111. 43. Feldman, Modernism and Cultural Transfer 47.

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shtern” four years before the Hebrew version, “Mi-yerushalayim, shir rishon.” Preil wrote the poems following his first visit to Israel in 1968, two years after he published his collection ofYiddish poetry, Lider [Poems]. These two poems appear to deviate from Preil’s practice of writing his poems first in Hebrew and then translating them into Yiddish. In these poems, Preil figures the rela­ tionship of diasporic Jewish languages to the new Israeli state. Preil intended to include “A dorf tsvishn shtern” in a second collection ofYiddish poetry that was never realized.44 Preil’s Yiddish poem “A dorf tsvishn shtern” captures the spatiotempo­ ral disorientation of immigration and diaspora. The title of the poem cryptically points to an imaginary place with no coordinates. The Yid­ dish dorf in the titles recalls the small villages of Eastern Europe where Preil spent his early childhood and about which he wrote many poems. However, the poem’s unnamed village is displaced among the stars, no longer part of an earthly reality. The first stanza begins by guiding the reader’s attention to a specific place, “these historical skies.” However, this is a place whose specificity rapidly dissolves in the poem. The temporal frame of the poem is similarly distorted. The lyric voice is simultaneously “older than Abraham” and “the very young father.” The reference to both Abraham and his “never-sinking stars” alludes to God’s covenant with Abraham and his promise to multiply the children of Israel (Genesis 22:15-17). However, the poem invokes the divine promise of Jewish nationhood only to situate the poetic voice outside of biblical prophecy and the national history that it evokes. If the lyrical voice is "older than Abraham,” then he is not one of the stars representing a new Jewish nation. The poem disrupts the division between biblical and national time, sharply contrasting the biblical patriarch with the young father. Preil’s timeless historical skies refer to an unlocatable lost home that hovers above multiple temporalities. In the first stanza, Preil refer­ ences three different registers of time. The first is a mythic past that pre­ cedes the story of Abraham and transcends the human life span. The second is Jewish historical time, from Abraham to the present, both bibli­ cal and national. The third register is personal, measured by the relation­ ship between a father and his children. These three registers coexist within the lyrical voice. He is young and old; he is mythic and historical; and he is biblical and still alive. In the closing lines of the first stanza the poet tenta­ tively suggests that he is in fact the embodiment of time: “Perhaps I myself

44. The ordered pages of the manuscript are in the Preil archives at the Gnazim in Tel Aviv. Included were Preil’s Yiddish translation of his 1977 Hebrew poem about the modernist Hebrew poet Yehuda Leyb Teller, 82/45066, and several other poems which he listed as having published in Di Goldene keyt and Svive, such as "Eybike itst” (“Eternal Present"), 82/45079.

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A Village among the Stars Beneath these historical skies I am much older than Abraham and his never-sinking stars, I am the very young father of the children who shimmer blond through rosily luminous trees. Perhaps I myself am history, I myself am the present.

Just once before noon on quiet Al Harizi street as in a window frame, flashed such a thinly-blue hour, of which a prophet tired from the fire perhaps also had a premonition: he too dreamed about such a cool village among the stars. 45.

Preil, "A dorf tsvishn shtern,” Svive 26 (October 1968) 6.

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am history, I myself am the present.’46 The different temporal registers also reflect the condition of writing in a Jewish literary tradition that simulta­ neously resounds with the mythical, the historical, and the personal. In the poem, historical time and the present are both uncertainties. The ethereal presence of the children in the first stanza enacts the poem’s relationship to temporality and geography. The children signal their pres­ ence to their father as they “minyen blond dorkh royzik-loykhtndike beymer” (shimmer blond through rosily luminous trees). Preil blends the tenor and vehicle in the metaphor by using the adjective “ blond” to describe the light rather than the children’s hair. Does the play of light resemble children playing among the trees, or do the children among the trees resemble the play of light? The uncertain referent of the metaphor recalls the uncertain deixis of “these historical skies.” The ambiguity of the refer­ ent is underscored by the repeated use of the word efsher (perhaps). Unlike the first stanza, the second stanza refers to a specific place and time: “before noon/on quiet Al Harizi street.” The poem moves from the images of trees and the forest, a romantic poetic trope (as in Baudelaire’s “forest of symbols”), to the city streets ofJerusalem. However, the view of the city is distilled into a peculiar light: “such a thinly-blue hour flashed.” The poet transforms the “blue hour” into an aesthetic object, looking at it “as if in a frame.” The phrase “blue hour” is a translation of the French I'heure bleue, meaning twilight. Preil uses this French poetic term to describe the experience of Jewish prophecy, blurring the line between prophecy and poetry, between the religious and the profane. At the end of the stanza, the language of uncertainty returns with the modal “perhaps,” when the lyrical voice imagines that such a light flashed at a prophet who “perhaps also had a premonition.” The “perhaps” weakens the parallel between the poet and the prophet, both of whom “perhaps” long for “such a cool/village among the stars.” Moreover, Preil also invokes the latetwelfth- and early-thirteenth-century medieval Hebrew poet and transla­ tor Judah al-Harizi, who was well-known for his translations of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic into Hebrew and for his adaptation of the Arabic Maqamat form, a genre of rhymed prose, into Hebrew.47 Through reference to

46. Preil s poem recalls Peretz Markish’s poem “Veys ikh nit tsi ikh bin in dr’heym" (I Don’t Know If I’m at Home), in which the poet imagines himself an exuberant wanderer "without a beginning, without an end.” 47.1 thank Chana Kronfeld and Jordan Finkin for their observations about the importance of Al Harizi as a translator. Among the works that al-Harizi translated are Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed (Moreh nebukhim), Moses Ibn Ezra’sMaqalat al-hadiqafi mana al-magaz wa alhaqiqa (Treatise of the Garden on Figurative and Literal Expression), and al-Harin's Maqamat. For a discussion of these translations, see Rina Drory, "Literary Contacts and Where to Find Them: On Arabic Literary Models in Medieval Jewish Literature," Poetics Today 14.2 (1993) 284-286.

THE AFTERLIFE OF DIASPORIC MODERNISM

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First Song from Jerusalem

Beneath these historical skies I am older than Abraham and his stars, I am the very young father of the children playing among the rosy trees. Afternoon on Al-Harizi Street peering out of the arched frame a precious, purple hour of contentment that certainly one time whispered to a prophet who, exhausted by the fire, dreamed of a cool village among the stars.

Preil’s Hebrew version of the poem, “Mi-yerushalayim, shir rishon,” reframes the language politics of the Yiddish to portray the Hebrew poet as a diasporic figure, longing for a home elsewhere. The Hebrew poet stands on Israeli ground and looks up at the stars to discover his home displaced onto the heavens. The title of the Hebrew poem locates the act ofwriting the poem in Jerusalem, making this a poem not just about Jerusalem, but also

49. 50.

Preil, Mi-tokh zeman ve-nof: shirint mekubatsim (Jerusalem: Mosad bialik, 1972) 5. Preil, Mi-tokh zeman ve-nof 9. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

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from Jerusalem. At the same time, Preil qualifies his poem: it is a “first poem” from the city. Unlike the Yiddish first stanza, the lyrical voice in the Hebrew is not displaced under the vast unknowable skies. Instead, the Hebrew title establishes that the “historical skies” are those above Jerusalem, and thus the children playing among the trees are also located in the city. The first stanza of the Hebrew version is less impressionistic than the Yiddish poem. The children no longer shimmer with light, and they are not an uncertain ethereal presence. Instead, they are simply described as “play­ ing among the rosy trees.” The ambiguity of the dusk's shimmering light is transformed into a sharper depiction of a single image. In addition, Preil changes the modality of the poem. He removes the repetition of efshar (per­ haps), as well as the last lines of the first stanza in Yiddish, “Perhaps I myself am history/I myself am the present.” He also reverses the temporal disori­ entation of the lyrical “I.”51 The lyrical voice in the first stanza of the Hebrew poem is more self-assured, more certain of the world that the poet witnesses. However, in the second stanza the assertive voice of the lyrical speaker is displaced. The subject shifts from the lyrical “I” to a personified light: “At noon on Al-Harizi Street/peering out of the arched frame /a purple hour of contentment that must/have one time whispered to a prophet who, exhausted/by the fire, dreamed of a cool village/among the stars.” In these lines the voice of the lyrical “I” dissolves and the subjective voice of the poet dissipates into the delicate light of dusk. The gentle assonance of the repeating “ah” sounds in the first line, “U-v-achar ha-tsohorayim bi-rechov al-charizi,” is broken up by the assonance of the repeating “eh” vowel sounds in the second line, “nishkefet mi-tokh misgeret kemura.” The last word of the line, kemura (arched), flows into the rest of the poem as it builds a slow, almost breathless momentum until the last lines. The emphatic description of the arched window accentu­ ates the sensation of its curves, and the vowel sounds of “eh” are like rays of light that play and dazzle on the window panes.52 The dusky, ethereal hour of contentment disappears and leaves behind a lingering melan­ choly. Preil translates the Yiddish collocation (din bloyik sho) of the French I'heure bleu into the Hebrew shaat ratzon. Shaat ratzon is the traditional Jewish term for the hour when God is most receptive to prayer, usually dusk. The Yiddish poem internalizes an internationally recognizable French collocation for a Jewish moment, while the Hebrew

51. For a discussion of the use of“efsher” in modernist Yiddish poetry, see Jordan Finkin, A Rhetorical Conversation: Jewish Discourse m Modern Yiddish Literature (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010) 51-65. 52. Benjamin Harshav theorizes the relationship between sound and meaning in his article “The Meaning of Sound Patterns in Poetry,” Poetics Today 2.1a (1980) 39-56.

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poem transforms a traditional Jewish phrase into a modernist image of dusk; the liminal moment par excellence. In addition, the reference to Al-Harizi also draws attention to the relationship between the Yiddish and Hebrew poem, highlighting the poem as a work of intra-Jewish translation and drawing attention to the difference between the Yiddish and Hebrew poems: the former rhymes, and the latter does not. Whereas Preil’s Yiddish poem strikes a mournful note about the destruction of Eastern Europe, his Hebrew poem channels a sharper tone that contests Zionism’s historical narrative, which imagines an unbroken line between the biblical past and the modern Israeli state. Although both poems refer to God’s promise to multiply the people of Israel, the allusion to the divine promise of nationhood is stronger in Preil’s Hebrew poem. The references to Abraham, children, stars, and trees coalesce as disag­ gregated references to the story of Abraham’s averted sacrifice of Isaac. Preil playfully alludes to the wood used in the sacrifice, describing the children playing “among the rosy trees.” In Hebrew the words for wood and tree (eits) are the same. Preil then parallels the “children playing among the trees” with the “village among the stars.” If the children in the first stanza represent the averted sacrifice and the promise to Abraham, the “cool village among the stars” in the second stanza is meant to repre­ sent the fulfillment of that promise. Yet these villages are not located on the holy ground of Jerusalem. Instead, they are displaced onto the heav­ ens. Perhaps they are the Eastern European derfer (villages) or the cool New England villages of Preil’s poetry. Either way, when the prophet in the second stanza dreams of the stars—the biblical symbol of Jewish nationhood—he dreams of a cool village, a haven from the brutal Middle Eastern heat. Ironically, the prophet, already standing in the “promised land” at an indeterminate time, does not dream of the fulfillment of prophesy, but of a cool refuge elsewhere. In both poems, the stars signify the displacement of the Jewish people, even when they are in the land of Israel. But the effect is starker in the Hebrew version, because Preil deter­ ritorializes not only the poet but also the Hebrew poem. Preil contrasts the secular and religious, Jerusalem and the dorf, the prophet and the poet, and thus questions the relationships between them. The poem links Abraham’s stars, the prophet’s fire, and the poet’s description of the purple light of dusk. These lights tenuously connect the fates of three people, all of whom have been displaced from their homes: Abraham traveled from his birthplace in Ur to Canaan, the prophet left behind his cool village, and the poet departed from his childhood village in Lithuania. Preil’s two poems are in dialogue with the modernist Israeli poetry of the Statehood Generation. In the 1960s both Yehuda Amichai and Nathan Zach wrote poems that contested the biblical account ofjewish

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nationhood, through reference to God’s promise to Abraham. Amichai’s poem “Be-khol chumrat ha-rachamim” (“To the Full Extent of Mercy”) from his 1962 collection Shirim (Poems) and Nathan Zach’s poem, “Kemo chol” (“As Sand”) from his 1965 collection Shirim shonim (Miscellaneous Poems) both call into question the national legacy of such a promise. Chana Kronfeld has compared these two poems in her discussion of Israeli modernism and biblical allusion. She shows how Amichai deflates the biblical verse by renouncing the biblical “promise of plentitude” to reveal a world where individuals “are victimized by their own depend­ ence on impossible dreams and empty promises.”53 This is evident in the first stanza of “Be-khol chumrat ha-rachamim”:

Count them. You can count them. They aren’t like sand on the seashore. They aren’t like the numerous stars. They’re like lonely people. On the corner and in the street.54 On the contrary, Zach’s “Kemo chol” points to the figurative language of the biblical verse in order to write a “modernist message about the meaninglessness of language and the futility of the divine and creative word.”55 Zach pays particular attention to the figurative language of the promise:

When God in the Bible wants to promise He points to the stars. Abraham strolls from his tent at night and sees lovers. As sand on the sea shore, the Lord says. And man believes, even though he understands that to say as sand is merely a way of speaking.56 For Zach, the very language of the promise negates its fulfillment and therefore calls into question the connection between the biblical text and modern Israel, while also, like Amichai, insisting on that connec­ tion. “Mi-yerushalayim, shir rishon,” however, does not call attention to 53. Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 133. 54. Cited in Kronfeld, On the Margins ofModernism 130. 55. Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism 139. 56. Cited in Kronfeld, On the Margins ofModernism 136.

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modern, alienated life in Israel, like Amichai’s poem does. Nor is Preil’s poem invested in the figurative language of biblical Hebrew. Instead, the poem calls into question a narrative of history that locates the mod­ ern Jewish nation squarely on the site of the biblical past, and the Hebrew poet as the modern incarnation of the Hebrew prophet. Preil does something different with these biblical allusions—not only con­ testing nationhood, but also doing so in relationship to both Hebrew and Yiddish. Preil’s two poems, “Mi-yerushalayim, shir rishon” and “A dorf tsvishn shtern,” illuminate the fragmented linguistic and poetic contexts that Preil negotiated in his poetry. In these poems we find the shared influ­ ences of Israeli and American Yiddish modernisms. In a 1983 interview with the English-language Israeli newspaper Vie Jerusalem Post, Preil describes his position as an American Hebrew poet by alluding to a stanza from his poem “Pirkei zeman” (“Chapters of Time”): “I am an anomalous creature, a split soul. I am perhaps the most American of the past and present Hebrew poets. I am the only Hebrew poet, for example, who wrote a series of poems on the State of Maine.”57 Preil’s image of a “split soul” resonates with his poetry, composed in a language foreign to his home and inspired by competing cultural influences. For Preil, the Hebrew language was not bound to a national space delimited by the borders of Israel; rather, Hebrew was a part of his experience as an American poet living in New York, and connected to his Yiddish modernist roots.

MOLODOWSKY’S DIASPORIC AESTHETICS

“A dorf tsvishn shtern” appeared in the October 1968 issue of Svive. In that issue, Molodowsky juxtaposed early-twentieth-century Hebrew modernism with contemporary Yiddish culture. This editorial strategy signaled her commitment to the cosmopolitan and multilingual aesthetic that had pervaded early-twentieth-century Hebrew literary culture. The issue included her translation of U. N. Gnessin’s 1909 modernist Hebrew story “Be-terem” (“Before”) and a poem by Abraham Broides paying tribute to Gnessin. In addition, there was Melech Ravitch’s essay, “Velt-literatur un velt-krisis” (“World Literature and World Crisis”), a story by the Australian Yiddish writer Hertz Bergner, and poems by the Canadian Yiddish writer Rokhl Korn and the Israeli-Yiddish writer Ephraim Auerbach. In the pages of Svive during the 1960s and 1970s, Molodowsky reenacted the multilingualism and translation practices 57. William Grimes, “Obituary of Gabriel Preil," New York Tinies, June 10,1993.

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that had enriched both Hebrew and Yiddish modernism in the early twentieth century. Although the journal did not revive Yiddish mod­ ernism, it became a site for the afterlife of this tradition, a coda to a rich diasporic modernist literary culture. Molodowsky was born in 1894 in the Pale of Settlement and was edu­ cated in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian, a rare pedagogical combination for women of her generation. As a young teacher in training she studied with Yechiel Heilprin and became part of the burgeoning Hebrew school movement, later working in Hebrew kindergartens in Warsaw and Odessa.58 Despite this commitment to Hebrew, Molodowsky began her literary career in Yiddish. Her poetry was discovered by members of the Kiev Grupe (Kiev Group), a circle of modernist writers that included Bergelson, Der Nister, and Yekhezkel Dobrushin.59 Bergelson published her first poems in the 1920 collection Eygns and mentored her during the early years of her career.60 Molodowsky left Kiev for Warsaw, where she honed her voice as an active member of the Warsaw literary scene and was one of the only women to play a prominent role in Yiddish culture there.61 Molodowsky continued to write poetry but also developed her skills as an essayist and critic; her early criticism addressed the denigra­ tion offroyen dikhtung (women’s poetry) by critics like Meisel.62 By the time Molodowsky arrived in New York in 1935, she was a well-estab­ lished modernist Yiddish poet with four published collections of poetry.63 Two years after her arrival, she published In land fun mayn gebeyn (In the Country of My Bones). The poems in this collection capture the 58. Kathryn Hellerstein summarizes Molodowsky s biographical information, which she mines from Molodowksy s memoirs published serially in Svive from 1965 until her death. See “Introduction,” Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadia Molodowsky, ed. Kathryn Hellerstein (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999) 17-60. 59. See Kathryn Hellersteins discussion of Molodowksy s relationship to modernism in Paper Bridges 30-31, and Avraham Novershterns discussion in “Ha-kolot ve-ha-makhela: shirat nashim be-yidish ben shtei milchamot ha-olam,” Bikoret u-farshanut 40 (2008) 128-145. 60. Novershtern compares Molodowsky s collection, Kheshvendike nekht, to Bergelson’s novel Nokh alemen, noting a similar blurring of external and internal reality, as well as a similar aesthetics of ennui. Novershtern s essay on modernist Yiddish women’s poetry offers insightful readings of Molodowsky s work. However, the central premise of his argument—that feminist scholars marginalize women writers by treating them as women—ignores his own debt to feminist critics who paved the way for thinking about the relationship of gender to literary history. See "Ha-kolot ve-ha-makhela" 132. 61. Nathan Cohen discusses the chauvinism women writers faced in Warsaw Yiddish circles and describes Molodowsky s exceptional success in the city as a teacher, poet, and critic. See his: "Mekoma u-fe'ula shel kadya molodovski ba-sviva ha-sifrutit ha-yehudit be-varshe," Bikoret u-farshanut 40 (2008) 164-167. 62. Cohen, “Mekomah u-feulah" 166. See Molodowsky s well-known essay on women writers, “Bagegenishn," Literarishe bleter, January 31,1930: 95-96. 63. These included Kheshvendike nekht (Nights of Heshvan), Mayselekh (Tales), Dzhike gas (Dzhike Street), and Freydke (Freydke).

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disorienting experiences of immigration and the dizzying sensations of the New York metropolis through the rupture of figurative language.64 In 1949 she left New York and immigrated to Israel, where she edited Heym {Home), a Yiddish journal for women in Israel. In 1952 she returned to the United States. Little is known about why Molodowsky and her hus­ band left Israel.65 When she returned to the United States in 1952, she continued her career as an editor, poet, and critic until her death in 1975. She sustained her feminist project at the Forverts {Forward), where, under the pseudonym Rivke Zilberg, she wrote articles about important women, including Gluckel of Hameln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dina Prive (Bialik’s mother), and Janet Herzl (Theodor Herzl’s wife).66 One of Molodowksy’s greatest contributions to New York Yiddish culture was her tireless editorial work at Svive, which provided an important venue for Yiddish literary culture in the 1960s and 1970s. In order to understand the significance of Molodowsky’s postwar liter­ ary activities, it is necessary to examine her prewar view of Yiddish culture in New York. Although World War II and the creation of the state of Israel hastened the decline of Yiddish, Yiddish culture was waning in New York in the years before the war. When Molodowsky arrived in the United States in 1935, she observed a faltering literary community. In her mem­ oirs she recalls that after attending a series of literary events in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, she longed for Warsaw, “where Yiddish was the language of a vibrant life and not the business of admirers, Yiddish amateurs.”67 In response to the weakened state ofYiddish literary culture in New York, Molodowsky collaborated with Auerbach, Glatshteyn, and Dr. A. Mukdoni (the pen-name ofAlexander Kappel) to estab­ lish Svive.68 Lasting until 1944, the journal published articles, poetry, and 64. Kathryn Hellerstein offers an important analysis of "how the very elements of language—words and letters—become fragmented signs of the poets exile.” See Hellerstein, "In Exile in the Mother Tongue: Yiddish and the Women Poet," Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Essays in Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies, ed. Mae Henderson (New York: Routledge, 1995) 68. 65. Mordechai Tsanin, in a phone interview with Kathryn Hellerstein, suggests that they left because Molodowsky s husband, a communist, could not abide living in Israel. Tsanin also claims that Molodowsky was an ardent Zionist who, according to Hellersteins paraphrase, “chose to 'ingratiate' herself with the Zionists by speaking in Yiddish against the Yiddish language.” However, in her correspondence with the Drost family, Molodowsky expressed both her optimism toward the new state and her discouragement at the reception ofYiddish in Israel. See "Introduction," Paper Bridges 45-46. 66. Molodowsky wrote a number of these articles about the wives and mothers of famous Jewish men and the lives of famous Jewish and non-Jewish women. 67. Molodowsky, “Mayn eltern zeydns yerushe,” Svive 37 (1972) 60. 68. According to Molodowsky, Bashevis Singer came up with the name, which captured the goal of the journal to create a literary svive, or community. See Molodowsky, “Mayn eltern zeydns yerushe," Svive 38 (1973) 59.

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fiction by well-known Yiddish writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Lamed Shapiro, Aaron Zeitlin, Ravitsh, and Glatshteyn. In the inaugural issue, Molodowsky outlined the pressing need for a literary journal in New York, claiming that writers require their “eygenem hefker” (own free space) in order to fulfill their necessary role of social criticism. She observed the crumbling state ofYiddish literature in America and compared it to a stream of water that hits a rocky patch of earth: “The stream is no longer a stream. It does not have its own way and its own will. Chance scatters it, and chance brings it together. Jewish life is now a cry of pain. It lies underneath a thou­ sand woes. The field ofYiddish, here in America, is a small one, with the frightening likelihood to become even smaller.”69 America, she announces, must respond to these challenges and provide a new public space for Yid­ dish, And yet, she opines that “in a country like America, in a city like New York, there is not a single properly literary journal. There is not a single organization dedicated to Yiddish literature, to literature itself.”70 Despite Molodowksy’s claims, Svive was not the only forum for Yiddish literature in 1940s America—Yosef Opatashu’s Zamlbikher (Miscellanies') and the jour­ nal Epokhe (Era, founded in 1943) were both dedicated to Yiddish litera­ ture—while periodicals such as Di tsukunft and Forverts included significant amounts of literature and criticism.71 However, Molodowsky felt that only a journal devoted solely to literature, along the lines of the literary institu­ tions in Warsaw, could overcome the situation of a literary community dominated by “Yiddish amateurs.” The first run of the journal had a different ethos than the revived journal in the 1960s and 1970s. During the early 1940s, Molodowsky was more concerned with capturing the dynamic transformations of Jewish life than with preserving Yiddish. The journal’s early issues captured conflicting views over the future of Yiddish culture.72 In 1943, the journal published an important exchange among writers including Singer, Molodowsky, and Simcha Lev regarding the future of Yiddish in America. The exchange epitomized the pressures that New York Yiddish writers faced as their urban audience assimilated and

69. Molodowsky, "Af eygenem hefker,” Svive 1 (1943) 5. 70. Molodowsky’, "Af eygenem hefker” 5-6. 71. For an overview ofYiddish literary periodicals, see Leonard Prager and Alfred Greenbaum, Yiddish Literary and Linguistic Periodicals: A Selective Annotated Bibliography (Darby, PA: Norwood Editions, 1982). 72. In the first issue Molodowsky announced a symposium in which different Yiddish writers would address the goal and purpose ofYiddish literature. For its various participants the symposium was an opportunity to reflect on the significance of World War II for Yiddish literature, and the responses embraced the notion that "Yiddish culture could not be ignored when European Jewry, in which it was literally and figuratively grounded, was nearing its end.” Norich, Discovering Exile 30-31.

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disappeared into English-language American culture. It also raised the question of what the Yiddish language signified in the American con­ text: the Eastern European Jewish past or the modern experiences of American Jewry. The polemic began with Singer’s controversial article on the future of Yiddish in America, “Problemen fun der yidisher proze in amerike” (“Problems ofYiddish Prose in America”), in which he posits that Yiddish is a language of the Jewish past in Eastern Europe and cannot be used to describe modern Jewish life. He explains that Yiddish writers in America are limited in their subject matter and style by the decline of a rich and living vernacular. His arguments about Yiddish recall Brenner’s concerns about Hebrew in early-twentieth-century Palestine. Both writers felt that there was a gap between the literary language they were employing and the language of the surrounding everyday life. According to Singer, Yiddish, like Hebrew in the nineteenth century, was untershtelik, an old-fashioned relic of the past that could no longer adapt to the modern American city.73 Singer concludes the essay provocatively, “Our mother­ tongue is growing old. Our mother is now a grandmother, and great­ grandmother. ... She is in America now, but her spiritual life is with the old home, with her memories.”74 Molodowsky responded with outrage to Singer’s assertion that Yid­ dish is “an old lady” and rejected his claim that Yiddish is a language appropriate only for the past. Although she conceded that American Jew­ ish life was in trouble, she refused to accept that the crisis was linguistic in nature. She explained that is was much harder for a Hebrew writer like Abramovitsh to describe Jewish life in the Pale than for a Yiddish writer to describe Jewish life in New York. She also disputes Singer’s assertions about Hebrew, noting a long tradition of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian prose writers who composed in languages that their characters did not speak, a sentiment echoed by her husband Simcha Lev.75 Instead, Molo­ dowsky viewed as the more serious problem facing Yiddish writers in America: “The creation of a new style, for which there are no models in our classical literature.”76 Molodowsky believed that the American Yiddish writer needed to develop new methods for representing the new American Jewish life: “It is a new way of life, and literature must bite into it. It [literature] must find a form for it, and not only a language.”77 73. Singer, "Problemen fun der yidisher proze in amerike," Svive 2 (1943) 3. 74. Singer, “Problemen fun der yidisher proze in amerike” 13. 75. Simcha Lev, “Hayntsaytikayt un fargangenheyt in der yidisher literatur,” Svive 3 (1943) 9-10. Lev gives the example of Bergelson's use of style indirecte libre in his novel Nokh alemen. 76. Molodowsky, "Tsu di problemen fun der yidisher proze in amerike," Svive 3 (1943) 56. 77. Molodowsky, "Tsu di problemen fun der yidisher proze in amerike" 60.

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The innovative modernist poems in her first American collection, In land fun mayn gebeyn, indicate her own commitment to formal and stylistic innovation in America. However, Molodowsky set aside these views about the future of Yiddish in the wake of World War II. Writing in her memoirs about her decision to shut down the first version of the journal, Molodowsky explained that after learning her family and friends’ fate in Europe she could no longer continue her literary work.78 As the magnitude of the destruction ofjewish life in World War II became apparent, Molodowsky could no longer believe that Yiddish culture would thrive in America. In a 1948 essay for Der yidisher kemfer (The Yiddish Fighter), she described Yiddish literature as “living through a deep paralyzing winter,” and she likened the literary scene in New York to the characters of Bergelson’s novel Opgang (Descent), a novel about a suicide set in Ukraine during the Bolshevik revolution.79 She bemoaned the absence of any newness in the literary culture: “In the past there was new life, there was a literary life full of readers, the period of Reisen, [Isaac Meir] Vaysenberg, Asch, [Peretz] Hirshbein, and Lamed Shapiro.”80 However, she argues that postwar Yiddish literature in America had become a “bourgeois factory of dreams.”81 While Molodowsky waxed hopeful about the vibrant future ofYiddish in America in 1943, by the late 1940s her optimism had waned. In her view, a dynamic Yiddish literary culture required a vibrant reader­ ship, and the readership for Yiddish in America was disappearing. How­ ever, despite the slow vanishing of an American Yiddish audience, Molodowsky and her literary peers continued to write and publish. They still believed in Jewish-language literary culture, and they felt that their work remained essential. Yet Molodowsky’s poetry moved away from her prewar stylistic inno­ vation. In her prewar poetry, Molodowsky incorporated traditional sources in order to challenge them, critiquing bourgeois Jewish life and offering a feminist world view that she ardently defended. Her Yiddish poems in the 1930s had a decidedly brash style, referencing the Spanish Civil War and the Popular Front alongside New York City skyscrapers and Eastern European landscapes. Her first collection of poetry after the war,Derdovid tneylekh aleyn izgeblibn (Only King David Remained), which appeared in 1946, in no way resembled her modernist American poems of the 1930s. These are some of the first poetic responses to World War II 78. Molodowsky, "Mayn eltern-zeydns yerushe” Svive 38 (1973) 60. 79. Molodowsky, “A folksliteratur, oder a fabrik fun khaloymes," Der yidisher kemfer (Rosh Hashona 1948)30. 80. Molodowsky, "A folksliteratur oder a fabrik fun khaloymes" 34. 81. Molodowsky, “A folksliteratur oder a fabrik fun khaloymes” 34.

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and the Holocaust. Molodowsky’s mournful tone persisted in her later works. Her final collection of poems, Likhtfun dornboym: lider un poemes (Light of the Thorn Bush}, published in Buenos Aires in 1965, signaled the total transformation of her poetic style. Critics acknowledged the wide gap between the early and late poems, suggesting that Molodowsky ’s best years were behind her.82 In this last collection, Molodowsky confronts her waning energies as a poet, her fascination with Jerusalem, and her own sense of poetic irrelevance. Yiddish poetry becomes a strangely her­ metic world, no longer addressing a living audience. For example, in “Ikh bin a viderkol” (I Am an Echo), the poet describes herself as an echo of a vanished symphony and proclaims “Ikh bin do, ikh bin do, du darfst nit keyn vor/s’vet mayn shtim dikh dergreykhn” (Here I am, here I am,/You don’t need what is real./My voice will reach you.)8384 The poem describes Yiddish poetry as an echo of a vanished source, a language without any living referent. In 1960, Molodowsky revived Svive so that it could serve as a platform for Jewish literary culture in New York. But this time, the renewed journal represented Molodowsky’s transformed perspective on the future of Yid­ dish and the relationship between Yiddish and Hebrew both in America and in Israel. In the new Svive, she published translations of Hebrew fic­ tion, poetry, and essays. She also reviewed Hebrew fiction in the pages of the Yiddish Forverts (Forward}.8'' The journal brought together an inter­ national array of contemporary Yiddish poets, framed by translations of important twentieth-century Hebrew writers, including Gnessin, Bren­ ner, and Baron. Molodowsky’s investment in Hebrew culture, in the translation of Hebrew texts into Yiddish and the broader project of Svive, echoed Preil’s poetics. Like Preil, Molodowsky embraced a modernist ethos of Jewish diasporic multilingualism that she felt would insure the future of Jewish-language literary culture. Molodowsky strategically translated diasporic Hebrew literary texts into Yiddish to sustain Yiddish

82. Yisroel Emyot, “Meditatsies vegn Kadia molodovskis likht fun dornboym,” Der yidisher zhuntal, July 9,1965. Rokhl Korn, on the contrary, takes the collection more seriously, explaining that between Molodowsky’s first collection Kheshvandikc nekht and Likhtfun dorn­ boym there is an enormous distance of time and space in what Korn terms this “mixed-up, shocking century," but argues that the "spiritual climate" of Molodowsky s poetry has become the “root of her poetic ripeness.” See Korn, “Kadia Moldovskis derekh tsum ‘Likht fun dorn­ boym,’" Di tsukunft (March 1965) 131. 83. “I Am an Echo," Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadia Molodowsky, trans. Kathryn Hellerstein (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999) 481. 84. See her reviews of works by David Shimoni and Yehudit Hendel: Molodowsky, “Unzer alter heym geshildert fun dikhtcr, David Shimoni," Forverts 1957; Molodowsky, “Di gas iz der nider,” Forverts March 18, 1956. These are just a sampling of her reviews.

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modernism through its relationship to Hebrew culture. For example, in 1963 Molodowsky published two excerpts from essays by Brenner on the relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish. In these translated essays, Brenner describes the historical significance of Yiddish for Jews, and he mocks Hebrew nationalists who denied Yiddish culture. Brenner declares that perhapsjews suffer from the tragedy of having not two languages but of “being torn between two languages,” and he asserts, “we cannot and must not renounce either one of them.”85 Brenner’s musings on Hebrew and Yiddish from 1912 took on new meaning in New York in 1963. Although Brenner was responding to the language polemics between Hebrew and Yiddish in the wake of the Czernowitz conference, Molo­ dowsky translated them as a response to the new language politics of Israel and world Jewry. In her many essays over the course of fifteen years as editor of Svive, Molodowsky underlined the importance of the shared literary heritage of Hebrew and Yiddish. In these various essays she was not espousing a new linguistic worldview. Instead, she was responding to the centripetal force of Jewish nationalism, hoping to preserve diasporic Yiddish through its relationship to Hebrew. Grappling with the political realities of the new state, she does not argue that Yiddish should be the national language, but rather that Yiddish and Hebrew are inextricably tied. Molodowsky continued to reiterate the sentiment she expressed in the foreword to Svive's first issue (November I960): “In our time Yiddish lit­ erature and also perhaps the Yiddish writer, is a protector of knowledge, that wrestles with the chaos, and stands up to protect our language and our innermost essence.”86 If Svive, in its first incarnation, sought to create a public space for a Yiddish literary renaissance in New York, in this new post-World War II Svive, Molodowsky described the role of the journal as protecting both the Yiddish language and its “innermost essence,” its yerushe. Molodowsky turned her attention away from a future-oriented emphasis on Yiddish literary innovation toward a past-oriented focus on preservation—that is, the preservation of a modernist, diasporic, and multilingual Jewish aesthetic. In her critical essays on Yiddish poetry, Molodowsky focused on the intimate connection between Yiddish and Hebrew modernism and ancient Hebrew sources. In “Der gang fun der yidisher poezye” (The Direction of Yiddish Poetry), she opines that “we live in a time when eve­ rything is rapidly changing.”87 However, she insists that, despite these

85. Brenner, “Vegn yidish un hebreyish,” Svive 9 (1963) 59. 86. Molodowsky, “Farvirte bagrifn," Svive 1 (1960) 4. 87. Molodowsky, “Der gang fun der yidisher poezye" Svive 12 (1964) 7.

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changes, “drops from the ancient well trickle through and introduce its [the tradition’s] murmur into the new melody” of modern Jewish poetry.88 In this essay, she traces these drops from the well of tradition in poems by Moyshe Kulbak, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, and the Hebrew poet Avraham Shlonsky. Molodowsky makes similar assertions about the ties between Yiddish modernism and Hebrew tradition in her 1967 essay “Di yidishe literatur in a tsayt fun farshtarkter asimilatsye” (Yiddish Literature in a Time of Heightened Assimilation). In that essay she argues that “artistic creations—that which we call literature—are the canals, the hidden pas­ sages that bring forth the innumerable generations’ transformations and weave the essence, the particularity of the folk, that is what we call yerushe (heritage).”89 For Molodowsky, language served as the vehicle of cultural transmission, encapsulating the cultural identity of its speakers and there­ fore the basis of a diasporic literary culture. She claims, for example, that the “Yiddish language identifies itself with the holy tongue (loshn kodesh). Not only with the holy tongue, but also the holy spirit, holy thought, holy ritual, the old spirituality is woven into it, and Jewish thought and the Jewish world view have been transplanted into Yiddish secularism.”90 Molodowsky plays with the term loshn kodesh (holy language) as a syno­ nym for Hebrew, to emphasize how tightly bound secular Yiddish culture is to Hebrew and Jewish tradition. Despite her embrace of early-twentieth-centuryjewish modernist cul­ ture, Molodowsky, taking a surprisingly conservative line, turned her back on the internationalism that Jewish modernists wholeheartedly embraced in the early twentieth century. Although her linguistic position was still radical from the point of view of Zionist literary critics of the period, she criticized Jewish writing in non-Jewish languages, and even foreign or non-Jewish influences on Hebrew and Yiddish literature. View­ ing Jewish languages as shields against assimilation, she praises those writers who do not “run away to foreign languages.”91 In her 1969 essay “Der nekhtn un der haynt in der literatur” (Yesterday and Today in Litera­ ture), published in the journal Kultur un lebn (Culture and Life), she went so far as to argue against the use of international words in Yiddish. In her 1966 essay, “Opgeshlogn fun beyde bregn” (“Beaten on Both Ends”), she also described what she saw as the tragic linguistic fate of writers like Heine and Kafka, who in her opinion could not be fully understood by

88. Molodowsky, "Der gang fan der yidisher poezye" 9. 89. Molodowsky, “Di yidishe literatur in a tsayt fan farshtarkter asimilatsye” Svive 23 (1967) 40. 90. Molodowsky, "Di yidishe literatur in a tsayt fan farshtarkter asimilatsye" 45. 91. Molodowsky, "Di yidishe literatur in a tsayt fan farshtarkter asimilatsye" 45.

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Germans or Jews. She viewed Kafka’s "Letter to his Father” as a poignant expression of the stakes of Jewish linguistic alienation. According to Molodowsky, those who write in foreign languages are “like water flowers whose roots are carried by the current.”92 In contrast to Preil, Molodowsky believed that Jewish assimilation posed an enormous threat to the future of Yiddish; and therefore to the future ofJewish culture. Even more significantly, in the wake of the Holocaust Molodowsky could no longer believe in a politics of internationalism or what we might think of today as an ethos of world literature. Molodowsky and Preil both struggled to sustain their diasporic liter­ ary project on American ground. Preil would neither relinquish Hebrew or Yiddish, nor eschew international influences on his poetry. For Molo­ dowsky, the future of Yiddish culture lay in its continued attachment to Hebrew. She mobilized the bilingual modernist aesthetic of the early twentieth century to support these claims. At the same time, at the end of her career her largest audience was in Israel, in part because of the popu­ larity of her children’s poems translated into Hebrew. Ironically in Israel she became a Hebrew poet. In her 1963 poem, "Tsind on dayn likht” (Turn On Your Light), Molo­ dowsky proclaims, “I am perhaps the last of my generation/this is not my worry.”93 Writing about “A dor fun toye/a dor vos hot gezen dem himl fain” (A generation of chaos/a generation that saw the heavens fall), Molodowsky ponders her obligations as a poet of her generation, a pro­ tector of her people, whose days are numbered. However, in the poem she brushes aside the fear that she is the last of her generation, and she answers the call to “turn on the light,” that is, to keep writing her poems. In the 1960s and 1970s, Molodowsky and Preil faced the collective crisis of Yid­ dish literature in America: dwindling audiences, disappearing institu­ tions, and the absence of a new generation of writers. However, neither of these writers believed that the end of Yiddish was near. Instead, survival meant a new faith in the shared relationship between Hebrew and Yid­ dish, and in the importance of diasporic Jewish culture. Molodowsky imagined the future of Yiddish preserved in the continuation of a bilin­ gual diasporic aesthetic. Preil understood that the future of Hebrew poetry lay in Israel, and he began to publish his collections of poems there. At the same time, Preil could not disentangle himself from Yiddish culture in New York. In his Hebrew and Yiddish writings from the 1930s until his death, we can find the circulation of influences moving back and forth between Hebrew and Yiddish. Preil brought his diasporism and his 92. “Opgeshlogn fun beyde bregn,” Svive 10 (1966) 3. 93. Molodowsky, Likhtfun dornboym 143.

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American influences to Israeli Hebrew literature, and he brought the young generation of Israeli modernist poets back with him into his New York home. When Ravitch imagines that Yiddish literature is not dying but it is entering a “heavenly stage,” when Molodowsky refers to herself as “an echo of a vanished symphony,” or when Preil’s book is celebrated in Israel, we can see the balance between the new national center and the diasporic periphery shifting. Preil denied his Yiddish poems in Israel, and Molodowsky could never publicly denounce the anti-Yiddish atti­ tudes that reigned in Israel. Preil remained a faithful contributor to Molodowsky’s magazine in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, he chose not to immigrate to Israel. I doubt that at the end of their lives either Molo­ dowsky or Preil were emphatic Zionists, but they knew where their future works would be read. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was not that the relation­ ship between Hebrew and Yiddish had disappeared; if anything, it became more important in Jewish cultural outposts such as New York.

Postscript

his book has attempted to show how modern Jewish writers con­ fronted the institutional and aesthetic challenges of writing in lan­ guages that were not territorialized within national borders; how they negotiated the uncertain historical futures of their literary cultures; and how they addressed an audience of readers separated by vast distances, but united by language. In response to these diasporic writing conditions, Jewish writers developed formal structures to address their dispersed audiences, always with some skepticism about their abilities to succeed in the endeavor. They employed the techniques, styles, and structures of modernist prose fiction to grapple with the transformations of their lan­ guages, literary cultures, and reading audiences. They embraced mod­ ernism not only as a rebellion against traditional Jewish narrative forms, but also as a means to transform their nascent literary languages into the vehicles of modern literary expression. Through the particularity of their Jewish languages, they reimagined themselves in new social and linguis­ tic contexts, adopted new ideas about sexuality and the body, negotiated the evolving parameters of national and cultural identities, and resisted the centripetal forces of monolingual, territorial nationalism. My account of Hebrew and Yiddish writing challenges the prevailing narratives of Jewish modernism, which locates its origins in the Jewish experience of being consummate outsiders and rootless cosmopolitans. Hebrew and Yiddish writers were not the rootless moderns whose rela­ tionship to modernity was predicated on their abandonment of Jewish tribalism. Instead, they embraced the particularity of their literary cul­ ture, even as they participated in the revolutionary practices of interna­ tional modernism. In doing so they produced a literary culture that addressed a community ofJewish-language readers. Their audience was

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not delimited by national citizenship, but defined by marginalized lan­ guages and by a shared experience of diaspora. Even as they held fast to Hebrew and/or Yiddish they also remained open to other linguistic and cultural influences. In their 1919 In zikh manifesto, the Yiddish mod­ ernist poets Glatshteyn, A. Leyeles, and N. Minkov proclaimed, “We are ‘Jewish’ poets simply because we write in Yiddish. No matter what a Yiddish poet writes in Yiddish is ipso facto Jewish.”1 Yiddish was the vehicle through which these poets experienced and expressed their encounters with the modern world. Many Jewish writers turned their backs on Judaism as a religious practice, on their parents’ values and way of life, and on the traditional world of Eastern European Jewry. Yet they continued to hold fast to Jewish forms, and, above all, to Hebrew and Yiddish. In the decades between the establishment of the Jewish PEN Club in Wilno and the reappearance of Molodowsky ’s Svive in the 1960s, the exu­ berant vision of an international Jewish literary culture in Hebrew and Yiddish was on the decline. Yet Molodowsky’s continued postwar embrace of diasporic Jewish-language literature carried on the spirit of cultural revolution that animated Jewish modernist writers and led to the creation of the Jewish PEN: an insistence on the use of minority Jewish languages that were increasingly threatened by encroaching hegemonic languages. When Molodowsky in her 1966 essay, “Opgeshlogn fun beydc bregn” (“Beaten on Both Ends”), describes the tragic situation of writers like Heine and Kafka, one a perpetual outsider and the other a Jewish writer deprived ofJewish languages, she was also entering into a cultural debate about the role ofJewish writing in both America and Europe. Although it is difficult to accept her conservative claim that Jewish writing can only be meaningful in Hebrew or Yiddish, her fear that major-language Jewish writing threatened Hebrew and Yiddish was not without cause. For exam­ ple, in his essay of the same year, “The Jew as Modern Writer,” the Ameri­ can Jewish literary critic Alfred Kazin celebrates the triumph of Jewish writers in America, explaining that Jewish American writing became so central to American letters because the Jewish writer of the 1940s “found shelter under the wide wings of the ‘modern movement,”’ at the same moment that they began to feel "that the country was ‘theirs.’”2 Although Kazin specifically credits the chaos of the Russian Jewish experience with forming this intellectual writer, for whom “the ‘dark’ ages and the ‘mod­ ern’ age, the ghetto and the revolutionary movement, persecution and free

Thc manifesto is included in American Yiddish Poetry, eds. Benjamin and Barbara l. Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 780. 2. Alfred Kazin,‘"Ihe Jews as Modem Writer," Commentary 41.4 (1966) 40.

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human development were conjoined in the Jewish mind/’ he never explic­ itly refers to the Yiddish culture that nourished this chaotic Russian Jewish experience? In his history ofAmericanjewish writing from Emma Lazarus to Vaudeville and Bellow, he declines to mention, for example, the explo­ sion of avant-garde Yiddish poetry in New York in the 1910s and 1920s. Kazin instrumentalizes Yiddish without ever speaking its name and excludes Yiddish writing from the Jewish American literary experience. Scholars, like Kazin, have privileged linguistic and cultural assimila­ tion as a marker ofjewish modernity, contending that Jews must abandon their attachment to Jewish traditions in order to become moderns. For example, in his essay “The Non-Jewish Jew,” Isaac Deutscher celebrates a tradition ofjewish heresy wherebyjewish intellectuals who “went beyond the boundaries of Jewry” came to “represent the sum and substance of much that is greatest in modern thought.’*1 Deutscher celebrates the affin­ ity ofjewish intellectuals for universalist thinking and argues that it is only by giving up Jewish particularity that Jews become central to mod­ ern thought. Yuri Slezkine captures this sentiment in his history ofjews in the twentieth century, arguing “that modernism was a rebellion against the two bodies of modernity, and no one expressed or experienced it more fully than the chosen Jewish son who rejected the capitalism and tribal­ ism of his father and found himself alone.”4 53 Slezkine rehashes an older debate about how Jews were able to achieve great visibility in modernity through their rejection of their own traditions, a rejection that made them especially mobile and adaptable. Certainly, many modernist Jewish writ­ ers articulated conflicted relationships to Jewish identity and Jewish cul­ ture, and their ambivalence was a source of creativity. However, my study of Hebrew and Yiddish offers an alternative narrative, illuminating mod­ ernist writing that addressed local audiences in Jewish languages. Although Kafka, for example, has been celebrated as another rootless Jew­ ish modernist, it is interesting to consider how, unlike Deutscher’s nonJewish Jew, Kafka sought to recuperate the world ofJudaism spurned by those who cast their lot with the dream of universalism. In her 1944 essay, “The Jew as Pariah,” Hannah Arendt also singles out Heine and Kafka for inclusion among a select group of European Jewish intellectuals and political thinkers whom she deems “pariahs,” Jews who refused to abandon their Jewishness on their path to partici­ pating in European culture and “were great enough to transcend the

3. Kazin "The Jew as Modern Writer" 38. 4. Isaac Deutscher, "The Non-Jewish Jew,” The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, ed. Tamara Deutscher (New York: Oxford, 1968), 26. 5. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) 75.

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bounds of nationality and to weave the strands of their Jewish genius into the general texture of European life.”6 Arendt’s celebrated pariahs are primarily Western European Jewish writers and thinkers who assim­ ilated to the major European languages, even as they sustained their con­ nection to their Jewishness. Despite their different views on Jewish literature, Arendt and Molodowsky were both drawn to Kafka and Heine as liminal figures that entered the modern European canon in German, while also remaining attached to Jewish languages and Jewish culture. Arendt embraced their linguistic liminality as a marker of their outsider status. However, for Molodowsky, an Eastern European Jewish writer and intellectual, Jewish languages marked the border of Jewish literary identity, and Kafka and Heine had come too close to the edge of linguis­ tic assimilation for her taste. Both Kafka and Heine represent the process by which Jews assimilated to European languages, and in their writings they depict the consequences of that assimilation. In contrast to Heine and Kafka, all of the Hebrew and Yiddish writers I examine in the book, chose to participate in both the modern Jewish revolution and the modernist revolution by transforming their Jewish languages into the vehicles of modern literary expression. Unlike Molodowksy, they did not necessarily see these languages as the authen­ tic vessels of tradition, but rather they sought to reappropriate these lan­ guages and wrest from their attachment to tradition. Yet they continued to hold fast to Jewish forms, and, above all, to Hebrew and Yiddish, cul­ tivating an audience that was not only cosmopolitan, but also local and linguistically specific. This Jewish-language modernist culture I have examined prefigures the evolving circuits of identity in the twenty-first century and asks us to reevaluate the politics of minority languages in our historical moment. In his work on the imagination in the post-national and postelectronic age, Arjun Appaduari argues that “territory as the ground of loyalty and national affect (what we should mean when we speak of a national ‘soil’) is increasingly divorced from territory as the site of sov­ ereignty and state control of civil society.”7 Appadurai describes our current moment as a post-national age that has resulted in the imagina­ tion of new forms of community and belonging. He specifically argues that the combination of mass migration and mass media work together to “impel (and sometimes compel) the work of the imagination” in new

6. Hannah Arendt, "The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition," Vie Jewish Writings, eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schoken, 2007) 275. 7. Arjun Appadurai, "Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geogra­ phy," Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996) 47.

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Diasporic Modernisms

“diasporic public spheres.”8 These transnational imaginings have a prec­ edent in early twentieth-century Jewish diasporic literary culture. Jew­ ish writers produced modernist literary works that challenged the territorial logic of the nation-state. As we look at our current age in which the borders of the nation-state are constantly blurred and culture is now circulating transnationally at heightened speeds, we must pay careful attention to how communities continue to deploy culturally spe­ cific languages to constitute communities in and against the hegemonic forces of both territorial nationalism and economic globalization. I want to suggest a more capacious view of the role that “minor” languages play in the production of culture, and of the necessity to read and follow the multiple, overlapping languages that communities employ beyond the territorial borders of the nation-state. During these times of accelerated globalization and tightened national borders, we must not forget that identity formations and cultural productions still operate transnation­ ally through recourse to their particularity, and that these circuits of cultural production are only visible through the many languages in which they occur.

8. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapo­ lis: University of Minnesota, 1996) 4.

Index

Abramovitsh, S. Y: audience envisioned by, 52-53; autobiographical style of, 47-49; authorial doppelgangers used by, 25, 32,34,41-43; auto-translations of, 25, 51-54,163; Ba-yamim ha-hem, IS, 26, 32-54,75,94-95; Bergelson influenced by, 94-95,118; Brenner influenced by, 59; di klassiker, IS, 96n36, 111; Dubnows exchanges with over Yiddish, 29-32,47, 54, 130n26, 161; early writings of, 142; Fishke derkrtimer, 35,37,38,40-41; Hebrew prose style of, 8, 29-30,47,130, 177; Jewish linguistic change, 32-33, 51-52; Kitsermasoes binyomen hashlishi, 35, 37,38; late writings of, 24-25; merchant figures in works of, 44-47, 121,128; migration path of, 14; multilingual novels of, 32-33; Russian used by, 52n46; satire used by, 38; self-referentiality in works by, 47-49; “Shem un Yefes in a vagon,” 98,130-31; Shloyme reb khayims, IS, 26, 32-54,75,94-95; shtetl in early works of, 53; Dos vintshfingerl, 31-32, 37; Yiddish, 31-32,47,47-48, 50,51-53. See also separate headingfor Ba-yamim ha-hem Abramson, Glenda, 22n58 Achisefer, 153n8 “adam-me-yisra’el,” 65 African diaspora, 15-16 Agnon, S. Y.: “Agunot," 99-100; Oreach nata la-lun, 125; Palestine sojourn, 62 aguna (abandoned wife), 96,99-101 Ahad ha-’am (Asher Ginzburg), 31n8,62n21 Aleichem, Sholem: Ayzenbatigeshikhtes, 97, 124n6, 128; Mosel's essay on, 111; as

member of di klassiker, 25n66,96n36; merchant figure in works of, 121; Stempenyu, 94; storyteller figure in works of, 114 al-Harizi, Judah, 167,171 allegory: in Bcrgelson’s writings, 87,88-89, 91,95-101,105,110-13,117, 118-19; in Goldberg s writings, 121,130-31, 144-48; secularization of, 97; trains in Yiddish literature, 123-24 Alper, Rivka, 137 Alter, Robert, 29nl, 37n21 Alterman, Nathan, 122 Alveltlekheryidisher kultur kongres, 156-57 Amichai, Yehuda, 151; “Be-khol chumrat ha-rachamim,” 171-72 Anderson, Benedict, 11-12,49-50, 88-89 Anderson, Perry, 18n44 An-ski, S. Y, 7nl8 Appaduari, Arjun, 187-88 Aragon, Louis, 141 Arendt, Hannah: "The Jew as Pariah,” 186-87 Asch, Sholem, 3,178 Ashkenazi Jewry: diaspora and, 7; language and status in Palestine, 67-69,70,71-73 assimilation: of educated women, 135-36; in New York, 181—82, 186; linguistic, 87, 161,177,181-82,186-87; in Palestine/ Israel, 63,67,68, 69; of urban audiences, 30,91,94,103,112,130,177 audience(s): address, 7-12,48, 134-35, 184-85; changing relationship to Jewish languages, 31,32,37,45-51, 53,91, 94-101; diasporic, 10-11,47, 50-51,

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audience(s) (continued) 53-54,63,64,73,82,88-89, 100, 13; 110gender of, 8-9,134-35,151; implied, 10, 11-12, 119; national, 11-12, 119. See also diasporic address Auerbach, Ephraim, 173,175 aujbruch, 90 Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice, 140 Austro-Hungarian empire, breakdown of, 9,92 authorial doppelgangers, 25,32,41-43,74, 85,115,118-19 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10 Bakon, Yitzhak, 76n51 Bal-Makhshoves, 5 Baron, Devorah, 133-34; "Aguna,” 100; Parshiyot, 139-40, 144-45; Yiddish translations of stories by, 179 Basman, Rivka, 157 bathhouses, 38-41 Baudelaire, Charles, 167 Bavli, Hillel, 160 Ba-yatnim ha-hem (Abramovitsh): bathhouse, 38-41; Bergelson influenced by, 94-95; critical reception, 34-35; publication history, 33nl 1; third-person narrative style, 25,26, 34, 37,44,47-51, 53,75; translation method in, 32-33, 51-54 Beckett, Samuel, 20,87 Bellow, Saul, 161,186 Ben Gurion, David, 157 Benjamin, Walter: aura concept, 36,44; on secularization of allegory, 97; “The Storyteller," 11,35-37,44,47 Ben Yitzhak, Avraham, 133n31 Berdichevsky, M. Y., 7nl8,63,102 Bergelson, Dovid: Arum vokzal, 26,62; authorial doppelgangers used by, 118-19; “Der bariton,” 91,93-101,109, 117; "Blindkey t,” 26,91,105-10; concerns about Yiddish languages survival, 82-83, 161; death of, 89; "Dray tsentern," 89,90nl6,112-13,116-17,129; expressionism, 84,85-86, 87,90nl5, 116,117-18; /n a fargrebter shtot, 125; Geklibene verk, 90nl6; “Hershl Toker,” 90; "Khoyves,” 90; Kiev Group and, 86, 89,174; migration path of, 14,86-87, 89-90,138; modernist aesthetic of, 155; narrative breakdowns in works by, 26, 85, 115; Nokh alemen, 26, 82n70,103n58;

Index Opgnng, 178; Shtureniteg, 90-91; “Tsvishn emigrantn," 84-85,91, 106, 110, 113-20; Veit ayn, velt oys, 90n 16, 105n67 Bergner, Hertz, 173 Berlin: cafes in, 85, 102-3, 120; emigrant artists and writers in, 14, 23, 24, 85-86, 102,113-20; Hebrew language in, 22, 85, 102; Jewish languages in, 22,85,101-10; modernism in, 26, 53, 83, 84-120,122; print culture in, 102; sexuality in, 109; Weimar period, 84-120, 144-51 Berlovitz, Yaffa, 137n49 Bialik, Chaim Nachman, 32n9, 136n47; in Berlin, 22, 102; Palestine sojourn, 62; “Safiach,” 49n40 biblical allusion, 38-39,42, 166-68, 171-73 Bikhovsky, Elisheva, 138, 139 Birshteyn, Yosl, 157 Bitsaron, 158 Blanchot, Maurice, 141 Bourdieu, Pierre, 20 Boyarin, Daniel: Powers of Diaspora, 4-5, 16, 16n33; Unheroic Conduct, 127nl8 Boyarin, Jonathan: Powers of Diaspora, 4-5, 16, 16n33 Bradbury, Malcolm, 18, 60 Brenner, Naomi, 6nl6 Brenner, Yosef Chaim: Abramovitsh’s novels viewed by, 34nl4; “Atsabim” (“Nerves”), 78-79,81; authorial doppelgangers used by, 74; Ba-choref, 125; Bergelson influenced by, 82-83, 105-6; critical reception of, 59-60; essays on HebrewYiddish relations, 180; “Ha-zhaner ha-erets yisra'eli ve-‘avizarehu,” 77-78; on Jewish self-criticism, 38; migration path of, 14,18, 62-65, 81, 138; Mi-kan u-mikan, 60, 81-82; Min ha-meitzar, 60nl0; modernist aesthetic of, 155; modernist technique, 59-60; "Pat Lechem," 62n21; publishing practices, 81-82; relationship to Hebrew and Yiddish, 60, 139,161, 177; Shekhol ve-khishalon, 25-26,54, 55-83,85,103,105-6,132,142,179; on writing in Yiddish, 78-79, 105; Yiddish translations of essays by, 179. See also separate headingfor Shekhol ve-khishalon Brinker, Menachem, 59-60 Broch, Hermann: The Sleepwalkers, 123n5 Broides, Abraham, 173 Brooker, Peter, 60

Index ( 191 ) Buber, Martin, 16n37 Buck-Morss, Susan, 97 Bundism, 93

Casanova, Pascale: The World Republic of Letters, 20, 104-5 Caws, MaryAnn, 12 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 12 Chambers, Ross, 11 Chaver, Yael, 23n63 Chicano culture, 14-15 Chinese modernism, 19n47 Clifford, James, 4-5 Cohen, Nathan, 3n3, 11 ln78, 174n61 Cohen, Samuel, 77n57 Cohen, Tova, 135n40 Cohen, Uri, 57n4 Commentary, 161 Conference of Hebrew Language and Culture (Vienna), 6 Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness, 19-20 Crimean steppes, 112-13 Culler, Jonathan, 11-12 Czernowitz Conference, 5-6, 61, 67n32, 91,180 dadaism, 87 Delaroche, Paul: "La Jeune Martyre,” 141n58 de Lauretis, Teresa, 134n37 Deleuze, Gilles: Towards a Minor Literature (with Guatarri), 104 DeMan, Paul, 97 Derfraynt, 33nll Der Nister, 86, 89,102,174 Der tog, 152, 154 Deryid, 33nll Deutscher, Isaac: “The Non-Jewish Jew,” 186, 187 diaspora: African, 15-16; Ashkenazi Jewry and, 7; Bergelson's aesthetics of, 85, 87-89; Brenners aesthetics of76,81-82; as centrifugal force, 10-11, 27,88,154, 156, 162-63,180, 183; challenges of, 11, 168; cultural legitimation and, 4,110-13, 118-20,151; cultural system of, 12-13, 17; Goldbergs aesthetics of 122-23, 144, 151; hybridity concept, 17-18; identity issues of, 4-5, 6-7,93; mass migrations and, 9-10,12-13, 23,53-54, 62, 66, 85, 92, 124; nation-statism, 4; Preil’s aesthetics of, 157-73; talush figure, 79-83; trains as symbolic of, 123-24,

130-31; Zionism and, 17, 63,76-79, 122 diasporic address: in Brenner’s works, 58, 63-64, 73,78—83; identity and, 11-12, 119; modernism as strategy, 10-11, 14-20, 88-89,184—85; multilingualism and, 155-56; transnationalism and, 7, 10-11,58,184 Dickinson, Emily, 160 Di literarishe monatsshriften, 6nl3,92 Di tsukunft, 158,162-63,168n48,176 Dix, Otto: Skin Graft, 84n2 Diyidishe velt, 106 Diyunge, 62 Doblin, Alfred: Bergelson and, 102; Berlin Alexanderplatz, 106; Reise in Polen, 103; review of Bergelson’s Nokh alemen, 103n58; Yiddish viewed by, 86 Dobrushin, Yekhezkel, 174 doppelgangers, 25, 32,41-43,74,85, 115, 118-19 Dostoyevsky, Feodor: Notes from the Underground, 66n30, 105-6 Dosyidishe togblat, 32 Dubnow, Simon: Abramovitsh’s work viewed by, 35; exchanges with Abramovitsh over Yiddish, 29-32,47,54; Fun "zhargon” tsu yidish, 29-32,130n26; transformation of Yiddish viewed by, 8nl9,52

Edwards, Brent Hayes, 14n30,15n33 Eisen, Arnold, 16n37 Eliot, T. S., 162-63 embedded stories: Bergelson’s use of, 114; Brenner’s use of, 25-26,57-58,75-76, 79-80, 81-82; as modernist technique, 10 Ephrat, Abraham: “Vigvamim shotkim,” 160 Epokhe, 176 Estraikh, Gennady, 92n23,102n52, 112n86 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 8,22,72n45 exile: Bergelson’s portrayal of, 87,93-101; conceptions of, 15,16nn36-37; gender of, 93-101; Israeli state and, 166-73; modernism and, 14; Wandering Jew trope, 100-101, 117-18; Zionist narrative challenged by Brenner, 56-57, 65-66,81; Zionist narrative of, 64, 65, 122 expressionism, 84, 85-86, 87,90, 116, 117-18 Eygns, 89,174 Eysteinsson, Astradur, 18n45 Ezrahi, Sidra De Koven, 17

(192) Fciner, Shmuel, 135n40 Feldman, David, 30n2 Feldman, Yael: No Room of Their Own, 137, 154nll, 159 Felski, Rita, 126 Fey telson, Menachem: Di klyatshe, 35 fictional prologues: in Abramovitsh’s works, 25,32-54; in Brenner’s works, 54,57-58, 66,73,76, 80; as modernist technique, 10 Fikhman, Ya'acov, 133,135-36 Finkin, Jordan, 116n93 Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary, 11,53, 139-40 Fogel, David: Chayet nisu'im, 113n89; Hebrew prose of, 138,139 Forverts (newspaper), 90,175, 176,179 fragmentation: in Bergelson’s works, 91,95; in Brenners works, 59,60,75-76,78; as modernist technique, 10; in Preil’s works, 173 framing: Abramovitsh’s use of, 33, 37, 47-51; Bergelson’s use of, 26,87,91, 105,107, 113-16; Brenner’s use of, 25-26,54,57-58,75,79-80,81-82, 107; early uses of, 12; Goldberg’s use of, 122-23; legibility and, 10, 30, 36, 41-47,110,114; metafictional, 57-58; mid-nineteenth-century Jewish writers’ use of, 12; misrecognition and, 10,30,36, 41-47,110, 114; as modernist technique, 10-14; self-conscious, 12; types of, 10; use of, 7. See also embedded stories; fictional prologues; multiple narrators Frankel, Jonathan: “The Paradoxical Politics of Marginality,” 92 Frayhayt, 90 Freud, Sigmund, 106-7, 141n62 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 19-20 Frishman, David, 35 futurism, 87

Garber, Jeremy, 158 gender: in Bergelson’s works, 26,93-101; in Brenner’s works, 67,70,71-73; in Goldbergs works, 26-27,121-51; Jewish languages and, 8-9,12,13, 93-101,134-35; Jewish literary history and, 133-37; modem city and, 125-26; modernism and, 8-9,26-27,121-51; in Molodowsky’s works, 174-75; place of women in European literary culture, 140-44; system, 27n67; Weimar-era sexual politics, 87,125-26; women

Index

readers, 9,134-37; Zionist views of, 65, 68-69 Genette, Gerard, 79 German-language Jewish writers, 86-87, 102-3,127 Gilroy, Paul, 15-16n33 Gilyonot, 158 Glatshteyn, Jacob (Yankev): Erdene red, 152-53; Preil and, 157; Svtvc and, 175, 176; hi zikh manifesto, 185 Gluzman, Michael, 79, 122n3, 136n47 Gluzman, Sara, 137 Gnessin, Un Nissan, 62; "Be-terem,” 173; Brenner s letter to, 77n58; Goldberg s essays on, 139, 140, 148-49; suicide as theme in works by, 119n98; Yiddish translations of, 179 Gogol, Nikolai: Diary of a Mad Matt, 66n30 Gold, Nili Sharf, 123n4, 145n76 Goldberg, Leah: Avedot, 123, 139; depiction of non-Hebrew-speaking Jews, 139; education in Hebrew, 136-37; essays on Baron and Gnessin, 139-40, 148-49; Europe as metaphorical space for, 137-44; gendered reception, 133-34; migration path of, 14, 120,122, 151; Mikhtavim me-nesta meduma, 120, 123; modernist aesthetic of, 155; narrative breakdowns in works by, 25-26; poetry of, 160; Russian spoken by, 136; "Shirei tsiyon,” 122n3; Ve-hu ha-'or, 26-27,120, 121-51; "Zekher le-brener,” 65. See also separate headingfor Ve-hu ha-'or Goldstein, Bluma, 96n35 G ordinsky, Natasha, 122n3 Gorelik, Shmarye, 92n22 Govrin, Nurith, 80-81 Granach, Alexander, 102 Grinberg, Uri Zvi, 86, 160 Guatarri, Fdlix: Towards a Minor Literature (with Deleuze), 104 Gurshteyn, A., 46n35

Ha-bima theater group, 103 Ha-doar, 158 Ha-gtna, 135-36 haivri ha-chadash, concept of. See new Hebrew man Hall, Stuart, 16,17-18 Halpern, Moyshe-Leyb, 181 Ha-me'orer, 138 Ha-poel ha-tsair, 58

Index ( 193)

Harlem Renaissance, 14n30 Harris, Joseph, 15n33 Harshav, Benjamin (Binyamin Hrushovski), 13n29,153, 157 Hasak-Lowy, Todd, 60,77n58 Ha-shiloach, 31n8 Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment), 22, 25, 34,85, 135n40, 147-48 Ha-tekhiya (National Revival), 25, 59, 76-77,78 Ha-zeman, 33nl 1 Hebraism, 58,61,70-72,76-79, 106, 135-36, 154 Hebrew language: concerns about survival in diaspora, 153,161-62, 185; decline of print culture, 31-32,45; as a diasporic language, 58-59,63-65,72-73,81, 82; in European lands, 22, 23,61-62, 78,85-86, 102, 121-51; gender and, 9,68-69,130,134-37, 150,174; loshn kodesh, 181; modernization of, 8, 29-31, 51-54, 139; in New York, 23,61-62, 153; in Palestine, 69-70, 78, 169-73; traditional uses of, 8 Hebrew literature and culture: Abramovitshs position in, 25, 30-31, 36; in Berlin, 85; fictional autobiography genre, 49n40; gender in, 123,134-35; Hebrew school movement, 174; historical estrangement, 36, 37; in Palestine, 21-22; periodization of, 24, 62-63; secularism and, 185; talush figure in, 79-83; theater troupes, 103; in United States, 161-62 Hebrew PEN chapter, Palestine, 5 Hebrew-Yiddish relations, 4-10; diasporic multilingualism ethos, 179-83; as shared history, 7-8, 20-24; preservation of, 181-82; tensions between, 46-47, 57, 61,81-82,91-93,153-55; territorial separation and, 22-23, 85 Heilprin, Yechiel, 135-36,174 Heine, Heinrich, 181-82,185,186-87 Hellerstein, Kathryn, 154nll, 174n58, 175n64 Hess, Tamar, 132n29 Heytn, 155,175 Hirshbein, Peretz, 178 homelessness, experience of, 14,15

Ibsen, Henrik, 20,123; A Dolls House, 121nl, 140,144,150-51 Idelman, Drora, 133 identity issues: definition ofJewishness in

polysystem, 13n29; diaspora and, 4-5, 12-13,17-18,93,187-88; Hebraist ideology, 58, 61,64,70-72,76-79,13536, 154; Jewish exceptionalism notion, 21; Jewishness apart from language, 20-21; in Mandatory Palestine, 5,13; transnationalism and, 63; of women, 121-51. See also assimilation; diaspora imagined space, shtetl as, 9, 34,36, 43-44, 48,53-54,94-101, 107-9, 116 Imber, Naftali Herz: “Ha-Tikva,” 77 implied reader, 10,11-12, 119 impressionism, 132, 137,145-47 introspectivist Yiddish poets, 157-58 Inzikh, 157-58, 185 Ionesco, Eugdne, 87 Israel: influence on Jewish-languagc culture, 27; monolingual policy in, 155, 156-57; nation-building in, 22; Statehood Generation of poets, 151,160,162, 171-73 Israel, Nico, 14n30 ivre-taytsh, 67-68, 69 Jehring, Herbert, 102 Jerusalem, 14 Jerusalem Post, 173 Jewish Enlightenment. Sec Haskala Jewish PEN Club controversy, 3-4,5,13, 93,185 Jewish renaissance movement, 13 Joyce, James, 1 ln25, 20,140 Judeo-Arabic language, 7 Kafka, Franz, 20; Arendts views on, 186-87; Molodowsky’s views on, 181-82,185; Yiddish viewed by, 86,103-5 Kahana, Batya, 137 Kappel, Alexander, 175 Kazin, Alfred: “The Jew as Modern Writer,” 185-86 Kerr, Alfred, 102 Kiev, 92,94 Kiev Group, 86, 89, 174 Klausner, Yosef, 6, 69,77 Korn, Rokhl, 90,173,179n82 Kronegger, Maria, 146 Kronfeld, Ghana: On the Margins of Modernism, 21,104,136n47,172 Krutikov, Mikhail, 9n21,90nl5, 112n85 Kulbak, Moyshe, 86,181 Kultur un lebn, 181 Kvitko, Leyb, 102

( 194 )

Ladino language, 7,72 Lamdan, Yitzhak, 158 Lapin, Ada, 161 Lasker-Schuler, Else, 103,149-50, 150n88 Lauretis, Teresa de, 27n67, 134n37 Lemberg, 92 Lev, Simcha: “Hayntsaytikayt un fargangenheyt in der yidisher literatur," 176-77 Levant region, 15 Leyeles, A., 185 Leyvik, H., Ill Liska, Vivian, 18n45 Lissitsky, El, 102 literary centers, 22, 24, 27,52-53,61-62, 81,85n5,87-88,89,92,102,104, 12 111Lithuania, Yiddish culture in, 93 Litvakov, Moshe, 6,91,112n85 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth: "Hiawatha," 160 Lorenz, Dagmar, 127 Lowell, Amy, 158 Loy, Mina, 149-50 Lubin, Orly, 134n35 mabel (flood) topos, 35 Maimon, Solomon, 147-48 mame-loshn, 69 Mann, Barbara, 24n64 Mao, Douglas, 19 maqamat (Arabic form), 167 iMarkish, Peretz, 102,111,116n93; “Veys ikh nit tsi ikh bin in dr’heym,” 166n46 xMarmor, Kalmon, 62 masktl (adherent of the Jewish Enlightenment), 148 McFarlane, James, 18,60 Meisel, Nachman: Brenner and, 78; “Briv tsu a frayndin," 136; criticism of womens poetry, 174; on Shturemteg, 90; "Varshe, Nyu York, Moskve," 111; Warsaw Jewish PEN Club and, 3-4,12 Mendelssohn, Moses, 16n37 merchant figures, 44-47,121,127-31,143 metalinguistic devices, 9, 58-59, 68, 88 metaliterary devices: as "acts of seduction," 11; allegory and, 96-97; Abramovitshs use of, 48-49; Bergelsons use of, 88, 96; Brenner s use of, 76; Broch’s use of, 125n5; diasporic address and, 7, 10-14, 73,16-11,79-80,88; framing as, 7,10; Goldberg s use of, 121, 123,133n31,

Index 146; social context of, 9, 11, 37,47,82, 133n31 Mignolo, Walter, 76n50 Mi/groym/Rimon, 102 Millais, John Everett: “Ophelia,” 141n58 Miller, Cristanne, 126 Minkov, N., 185 minority literature: Deleuze and Guatarri definition of, 104; modernism and, 15, 86, 87-88, 104, 185; position in diaspora of, 4-5,6-7,187-88 Mintz, Alan, 149n86 Miron, Dan: on Abramovitshs literary persona, 48-49; From Continuity to Contiguity, 21n53, 22-23; Harpaya le-tsorekh negi'a, 21; The Image of the Shtetl and other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination, 96-97, 124n6; on Preil's poetry, 154n 11,159; on women poets in Palestine, 136-37n47 mizrekh, 17 Moderna group, 122 mobility: between city and the shtetl, 41, 43,44-45,95,124-25; gender, 125-27, 129; ofJewish writers, 9-10, 14-15, 58, 62,174. See also diaspora; train journeys; transnationalism modernism: Benjamin on, 35-36; Chinese, 19n47; diasporic approach to, 14-20, 59-66,76,154-55,173-83; formal innovations, 7,10-14,18, 23, 32-33,87, 178; gender and, 8-9, 26-27, 121-51; German expressionist, 84, 85-86, 87, 90,116,117-18; Hebrew, 14, 22-23, 24n65, 25, 27,139-40,143, 144-51, 159, 162, 173, 174, 180; impressionism, 132,137,145-47; Kazin on, 185-86; Kiev Group, 86,89,174; periphery vs. center in, 20,87-88, 162-63; polysystem theory and, 22-23; post-1948 diasporic, 27,151, 152-83; prevailing narratives of, 184-85; rise of, 7,10; Russian, 7,9-10, 12,105-10,124, 138-40, 186; selfreferentiality, 47-48; Soviet Union and, 13; 112spatiotemporality, 26, 84-120, 166-68,169-73; transnationalism and, 19-20; urbanism, the city, and, 9-10, 14, 18-19,41-47,50-54,85-87,125-26; Yiddish, 14,22-23, 25-27, 85-120, 151,157-58,174,181. See also framing; specific authors “Mohammed’s coffin” story, 46-47 Molodowsky, Kadia: concerns about

Index ( 195)

American Jewish literature, 161, 181-82, 185-86; diasporic aesthetics of, 173-83; Dcrdovid meylekh aleyn izgeblibn, 178-79; essays on Hebrew-Yiddish relations, 180, 181-82; essays on Yiddish poetry, 180-82; "Ikh bin a viderkol,” 179,183; importance of, 154-55; In landfun mayn gcbeyn, 174-75,178; Israeli reception of, 27, 175; Kheshvandike nekht, 179n82; Likhtfun dornboym, 153,179,179n82; migration path of, 14,155,174-75; "Der nekhtn un der haynt in der literatur,” 181; "Opgeshlogn fun beyde bregn," 181-82, 185; modernist aesthetic of, 174-75, 178-79,181; poetry of, 27,153,174-75, 178-79; prewar view of Yiddish culture in New York, 175-78; pseudonym "Rivke Zilberg,” 175; Svive and, 27, 152,154,163,173-83; "Tsind on dayn likht,” 182; "Tsu di problemen fun der yiddisher proze in amerike,” 176-77; “Di yidishe literatur in a tsayt fun farshtarkter asimilatsye," 181; Der yidisher kctnfer, 178 Moscow Jewish State Theater troupe, 103 Moses Ibn Ezra, 144,145,146 Moss, Kenneth, 6nl3,13n28 Mukdoni, Dr. A. See Kappel, Alexander multilingualism: diaspora and, 5,9-10, 23,27,51,151,155-56,167,173-74, 179-83; identity and, 5,159, 179-83; ofjewish literary history, 20-24; nonJewish languages and, 7, 12-13,68,86, 102-6,122,127,133, 136,138-39, 161,181-82, 185-86; Palestine Hebrew writers’ rejection of, 5,13 multiple narrators: in Abramovitshs works, 25, 26, 32-54; homodiegebc vs. heterodiegebc, 49; as modernist technique, 10. See also authorial doppelgangers Murav, Harriet, 84n2, 105n64 Myhill, John, 13n29 narrators, multiple: in Abramovitshs works, 25, 26, 32-54; homodiegebc vs. heterodiegetic, 49; as modernist technique, 10. Sec also authorial doppelgangers nabonalism: as centripetal force, 10-11, 27, 154,162-63,180,183; cultural, 4, 13,16n33,91-93; Hebrew-Yiddish tensions and, 57-58,76-79,93,154;

Jewish literary culture influenced by, 5-6, 21-22; narrative limits of, 17n40; novels’ role in development of, 11-12; spatiotemporal imagining and, 88-89, 97-98, 166-73; translation and language polibcs, 76-79; in twenty-first century, 187-88. See also Zionism Nazi rise to power: Bergelson and, 89-90; Goldberg and, 122,124nl0, 125,144, 147, 150n88 Nerval, Gdrard de, 1 ln25 new Hebrew man, 9,64-65,70, 137 New York: Bergelson’s essay on Yiddish culture in, 112-13; diaspora in, 92; emigrant writers in, 14, 23,24,94; Jewish PEN Club branch in, 4; modernism in, 53,62; post-1948 diasporic modernism in, 27,151, 152-83; pre-World War II, 175-78,186 Niger, Shmuel, 89n 14,91,92n22 Nomberg, Hersh Dovid, 61,119n98 Norich, Anita, 94n30, 155nl4 nostalgia, 37,40,46, 53,98-99,118,143, 145-46,157 Novershtern, Avraham, 84n2,88, 105n64, 154nll, 174n60 nusach, 8,29,130,139 Nyu-yorker vokhnblat, 157 Odessa: depicted in Abramovitshs late works, 33,40-54; emigrant writers in, 14, 23,24; Jewish cultural transformabons in, 30-31,32 Opatashu, Yosef: Zamlbikher, 176 Oyslender, Nokhum: “Unzer nokh-klasisher peryod," 110-11

Pale of Settlement: as imagined space, 38-41, 51-52; mass migration from, 9, 23,53-54,62,66,85,92,124,174 Palesbne: Goldberg in, 122,138,151; Hebrew as preferred language in, 5, 13,21-22; immigration to, 9-10, 122; nabon-making idenbty issues, 13; women poets in, 136-37n47,150n88. See also Yishuv parataebe comparabvism, concept of, 19-20 Parfitt, Tudor, 22n58 Partisan Review, 161 Panish, Iris, 76n51,135 Peckerar, Robert Adler, 115n91,153n8 Pellegrini, Anne, 127nl8

(196) PEN International: founding of, 3n 1; Warsaw Jewish PEN Club controversy 3-4,5; Scottish PEN Club denied, 4n5 Perctz, I. L., 25n66,96n36, 111 Perry, Mcnakhem, 51n45, 133n31 Pinsker, Shachar, 14, 22n60,24n65,60nl0, 85n5 Poe, Edgar Allan, 11 poetry: avant-garde Yiddish, 1920s, 186; in early-twentieth-century New York, 62; imagist, 158,160,162-63; post-1948 diasporic, 27,151,154-83; Statehood Generation, 22,151,160, 162, 171-73; women modernist, 149-50, 174-75 Poland, Yiddish culture in, 93,112 polysystem (theory): in Abramovitsh’s late works, 32,48; in Bergelson’s works, 87; decline in pre-state Palestine, 57, 59-73, 66-73; definition ofJewishness in, 13n29; explanation of, 8; gender relations and, 8-9,13,134-36; identity issues and, 13; mass migration and, 9-10,12-13; modernism and, 22-23,153-57,173-83; persistence of, 24; reorganization of, 37 Pound, Ezra, 158 Preil, Gabriel: aesthetics of diaspora, 157— 73, 179,182; auto-translations of, 156, 163-73; "A dorf tsvishn shtern,” 156,163, 164,165,166—68, 170-71; on Hebrew usage in New York, 153,154,182-83; "Di hebreyishe literatur in amerike,’’ 162— 63; importance of, 154-55; Israeli Poetry in Peace and War, 160; Israeli reception of, 23,155-56,158-59,162-63,182-83; language choices of, 153,154,157-73, 182,183; Lider, 158, 164; migration path of, 14,157; Mi-tokh zeman ve-nof: shirim mekubatsim, 156; "Mi-yerushalayim, shir rishon," 156,164, 168-73,169; Nermul kokhavim, 162; Nofshemesh ve-khefor, 151; “Nusach amerika ba-shira ha-'ivrit,” 159-60,161-62; poetry of, 27; “Tsayar 'ivri," 163; "Yidisher moler,” 163 Presner, Todd, 124n6 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 158 Proust, Marcel, 140

Raab, Esther, 137n47 Ravikovitch, Dahlia, 134 Ravitch, Melech: "Arum velkher aks dreyt zikh di yidishe literatur?" 111-12; German-Jewish writers viewed by, 102;

Index "Tsi endikt zikh di yidishe literatur?” 152, 153-54, 183; "Velt-literatur un velt-krisis,” 173; works published in Svive, 176; as Yiddish Writers’ Union secretary, 5 Ravnitzky, Y. H., 32n9, 102 Reisen, Abraham, 61, 77,178 realism, 24n, 25, 34nl4,49n40,65,49, 59, 61,74-76,77n58,87, 144 Rivner, Tuvia, 128n21 Rojanski, Rachel, 157 Roth, Joseph: Judea auf Wanderschaft, 103; Yiddish viewed by, 86 Russian empire: 1905 revolution, 32, 91; breakdown of, 9, 12, 14, 92; transformations ofJewish life in late nineteenth-century, 38-54; Yiddish print culture in, 31-32; Hebrew print culture in, 31-32 Safran, William, 15-16 Saldivar, Josd David, 14-15 Salih, Tayeb: Season of Migration to the North, 19-20 Schwartz, Delmore, 161 Seidman, Naomi, 52,99,126,134n36,134n38 Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew, 70, 71-73,82 Shaked, Gershon, 24n65, 60, 61-62, 128n20; Ha-siporet ha-ivrit, 138-39 Shapiro, Lamed, 61,63,176,178 Shavit, Zohar, 22,61-63 Shekhol ve-khishalon (Brenner), 25-26, 54,55-83,85,179; communication difficulties in, 55-56, 66-73; criticism of Zionism in, 82,85; diasporic address in, 79-83; diasporic modernism in, 59-66; fictional preface, 57-58; fictional translation in, 57,73-76; Kafka and, 103; language of, 78-79; male anxiety in, 142; publication of, 81; Yiddish translation of, 78-79 Shepperson, George, 15n33 Sherman, Joseph, 89nl4 Shiffer, Yitzhak, 3 Shih, Shu-Mei, 19n47 Shlonsky, Avraham, 6nl6,122,181 Shneer, David, 6nl7,89nl4 Shofman, Gershon, 61 shtetl as imagined space: in Abramovitsh’s works, 34, 36, 38-41,43-45,48, 50,52-54; allegorical significance of, 96-101; bathhouse in, 38-41; in

Index

Bergelson’s works, 87,91,94-101, 107-9, 116-19; Bergelson’s rejection of, 113-15; in Brenners works, 81; in German literature, 86, 103; Goldbergs rejection of, 125-26,129,133, 139-40, 143, 145, 148-51; Meisel’s conception of, 111; in nineteenth-century literature, 9,94, 111, 114 Shturemteg, 113 shundromanen (popular novels), 134 Silberschlag, Eisig, 154n9 Simmel, George, 126 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 155nl2, 175n68; “Problemen fun der yidisher proze in amerike,’’ 176-77 Slezkine, Yuri, 186 socialist realism, 61,77-78, 113 South Africa, 23 Soviet Union: Bergelson in, 89-90; Yiddish culture in, 6,93, 112-13 Spinoza, Baruch, 16n37 Stampfer, Shaul, 135n41 Stencl, Avrom-Nokhem, 103 Stendhal: Le rouge ct le noir, 53 storytelling: in Abramovitch’s novels, 29-54; authenticity and, 45-47; Benjamin on, 35-37,47; in Brenners novels, 74-75; decline of, 11; framing devices in, 12; modernist, 11, 25; Zionisms disruption of, 59 Stratton, Jon, 16n36 Strindberg, August, 123 style indirecte libre, 105,130,132,177n75 suicide, theme of: “Anonymous Woman of the Seine" death mask, 141; in Bergelson’s works, 109,114, 119-20; in Brenners works, 25; in Goldberg’s works, 120,130, 141-42; in modernist fiction, 119n98 Svive: first run, 173-77; founding of, 151; inaugural issue, 176; multilingual ideology of, 27,154,155-56; post-war shutdown, 178; Preil’s works published in, 158,161,163,168; Ravitch’s articles in, 152; revival of, 179-83,185 talush figure, 79-83 Tchemichowsky, Shaul, 102 Tel Aviv, 14, 23, 24 tlishut (uprootedness), 81—83 Tololyan, Khachig, 15-16 Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina, 124, 141 n61 Trachtenberg, Barry, 6nl5 train journeys: in Abramovitsh’s works,

( 197)

130-31; in Bergelson s works, 97-98, 100; in Goldbergs works, 26,122-24, 127-33, 146-47, 148-49 translation: in Abramovitsh’s works, 25, 33,51-54, 163; in Brenners works, 54, 55-83; in Bergelson’s works, 105,108; cultural, 43; fictional, 57,59,73-76, 107-8; nation-state politics and, 76-79, 156, 179; in Preil’s works, 156, 162-73; as modernist strategy, 10, 105 transnationalism: of Brenner, 62-63; in Brenners works, 55-83; diaspora and, 4-5, 7, 10; Harlem Renaissance and, 14n30; Jewish-Arab history in Levant, 15; Jewish identity and, 63; Jewish PEN Club and, 3-4; modernism and, 19-20,27-28,63, 87,188; nationalist eroding of, 16-17, 57-58,63-64,70-72; in twenty-first century, 187-88. See also diaspora Tsanin, Mordechai, 175n65 Tsemach, Adi, 133n31,144n72 Tsenerene, 134 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 87 Vaysenberg, Isaac Meir, 178 Vayter, A., 92n22 Vc-hu ha-'or (Goldberg): critical reception of, 138-39; “light” motif, 144-48; portrayal of modern woman in, 125-27, 133,141-44; train scenes, 121,122-23, 124,128-33,148-51 Veidlinger, Jeffrey, 89nl4 Verses, Shmuel, 35 Viner, Meir, 34 Vblhynia, 113-15 Volkov, Shulamit: “Jewish History: The Nationalism of Transnationalism," 16-17, 63 Waikowitz, Rebecca, 19 Wandering Jew trope, 100-101,117—18 Warsaw: interwar Yiddish culture in, 94; Jewish PEN Club application for, 3-4, 5; rise of Yiddish print culture in, 32,45, 174 Weiss, Yfaat: "A Small town in Germany," 149n87 Weissler, Chava, 134n39 Whitman, Walt, 160, 162 Williams, Raymond, 10, 18, 87-88 Wilno (Vilnius): Jewish PEN Club in, 4,5; World War I devastation of, 92; Yiddish PEN Club in, 5

(198) Wischnitzer, Mark, 102 Wisse, Ruth, 20-21,62 Wolitz, Seth, 93 Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. D alloway, 119n98 World War I: Hebrew-Yiddish relations and, 23,91-93; legacy of, 106-10

Yakhinson, I., 34nl4 Ycdiot acharonot (newspaper), 153,158 Yeglin, Ofra, 122n3 Yiddish language: Bergelson’s concerns over, 86,88, 89,99,105,110-13; Brenner’s portrayal of, 66-67; concerns about, 1940s, 176-79; concerns about, 1960s, 152-53,185; gender and, 9,68-69,93-101,130; in Israel, 156-57; modernization of, 8,51-54, 91; Molodowsky and preservation of, 181-82; as national language, 5-6, 61, 91-92,110,135,154nl0,180; tensions with Russian and German, 86-87,88, 101-10; uses of, 8,12; in Yishuv, 23, 76-79; as zhargon, 8,29-32,67-69,77 Yiddish literature and culture: Abramovitshs position in, 25; alienation of, 98-99; backlash against, 61; in Berlin, 83, 85-120; Czernowitz Conference and, 5-6,61,67n32,91,180; diaspora and, 6-7,21-22; gender in, 123,134-35; geographies of, 110-13; Kafka and, 103-5; klassiker writers, 96-97, 111; in Poland, 93,112; modernism, 85-120; post-1948 poetry, 27, 178-83; rise of print culture, 31-32,45,102; secularism and, 185; talush figure in, 79-83; theater troupes, 103; trains in, 123-24, 130-31;

Index in United States, 62,153-83 Yiddish PEN Club (Wilno), 5 Yiddish Writers’ Union, 3-4, 5 Yidishe togblat, 32 Yishuv: Brenner in, 18, 54, 59-63, 64-65, 77-78, 81; depicted in Brenner’s works, 55-59, 66-83, 85; Hebrew in, 69-70,77-78, 177; Hebrew poetry in, 22; Hebrew women writers, 136-37; language difficulties in, 55-56, 76-79; modernism in, 53; nation-building narratives and, 23-24, 56, 77-78; Second Aliyah, 61-63; Third Aliyah, 136-37; Yiddish in, 23, 65-66, 69-70,76-79. Sec also Mandatory Palestine Yoffe, A. B., 138n50 Yoffe, M., 168n48 Yung Yisroel group, 157

Zach, Nathan, 23,151; “Kemo chol," 171-73; "The Stylistic Climate of the 1950s and 1960s in Our Poetry,” 159 Zeitlin, Aaron, 3, 176 zhargon, 8, 29-32,67-69,77 Zionism: Abramovitshs works viewed in context of, 25; Brenner and, 64-66, 82; gender views of, 65, 68-69; Goldberg's ambivalence toward, 122; Hebraism and, 58,70-72,76-79,106, 135-36, 154; Hebrew language and, 6,22, 59-66; identity issues and, 16, 63-64; Molodowsky and, 175n65; narrative of exile and return, 17, 56, 64,122, 171-73; Yiddish language viewed by, 9,93,154 Zweig, Arnold, 102

“A very powerful response to

scholarship that remains bound to

nationalist frameworks, Diasporic Modernisms provides a convincing new model for understanding the

relationship between the literatures

of modern Hebrew and Yiddish.”

—Barry Trachtenberg, author of The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allison Schachter is Assistant Profes­

sor of Jewish Studies and English at Vanderbilt University.

JACKET DESIGN:

Rachel Perkins COVER IMAGE:

“Sihfs Karta" (Boat Ticket), an illustration from Six Stones with Easy Endings by Ilya Ehren El Lissitzky, 1922. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

“Allison Schachter’s important and eloquent book shows us why transnational modernism can’t be all in one language. Diasporic Modernisms argues convincingly that literary histories organized around English, German, Hebrew, or any other single tongue tend to reaffirm the exclusive project of the nation-state. By following

the intersecting paths of Yiddish and Hebrew literary modernisms, Schachter

introduces us to innovative writing best understood in a multilingual context of multiple centers and multiple audiences. Anyone interested in ways of thinking about modernism beyond the nation and beyond Western Europe will want to read

this book.”

—Rebecca Walkowitz, author of Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation

“Diasporic Modernisms is smart, beautifully written, and meticulously researched. Working to decouple the link between nation, language, and territory, the book

suggests the model of diaspora to illuminate the multilingual conditions in which modernist Hebrew and Yiddish writing thrived. While neither ‘about’ history nor geography per se, Schachter’s study raises compelling questions about both as

categories of literary analysis, bringing Jewish literary studies into conversation with theories of modernism and diaspora studies.” —Barbara Mann, author of A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation ofJewish Urban Space “Impressive in scope and attention to shifting contexts, Diasporic Modernisms boldly

rethinks the role of Hebrew and Yiddish in the shaping of diasporic modernisms. Schachter offers a powerful account of the way these languages, with their linked and mutual histories, enabled variously situated Jewish writers to create the conditions for experimental modernism, thematize the nonterritorial relation between Jewishlanguage writers and readers, and negotiate crises of nationalism and representation. ” —Sara Blair, coeditor of Jewish in America "Allison Schachter’s lucid, richly informed account of the productive ambivalences between Hebrew and Yiddish modernism has implications beyond the history of Jewish literatures. As the assumed confluence between national borders and national

literatures loosens, there is a lesson for our times in this perceptive study of diasporic creativity.”

—Robert Alter, author of Hebrew and Modernity

ISBN 978-0-19-981263-9

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