Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe 9780804777247

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Literary Passports

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture e d i t e d by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Literary Passports The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe

Shachar M. Pinsker

stanford u n i ve rs i t y p res s stan f o rd, ca l i f o rn ia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the Koret Foundation and of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archivalquality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pinsker, Shachar. Literary passports : the making of modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe / Shachar M. Pinsker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-7064-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Hebrew fiction—Europe—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Jewish fiction—Europe—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PJ5029.P56 2011 892.4'360994—dc22 2010011548 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard

For Amanda

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xi 1

Part I: The European Cities of Modernist Hebrew Fiction 1. Spatializing the Margins: Hebrew Modernism and the Urban Experience 

29

2. Odessa and Warsaw: A Tale of Two Centers? 

39

3. Homel and Lvov: The Significance of the Frontiers 

54

4. London: A Foggy Day in Whitechapel 

76

5. Vienna: “This Mocking and Innocent City” 

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6. Berlin: Between the Scheunenviertel and the Romanisches Café

105

Part II: Sexuality and Gender in Modernist Hebrew Fiction 7. The Sexual Turn in Modernist Fiction of Fin de Siècle Europe

147

8. “I Am So Weak and My Desire Is So Strong”: The Crisis of (Jewish) Masculinity

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Contents

9. In the House and in the Gardens: Erotic Triangulations and Homosocial Desire 

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10. Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

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11. Imagining the Beloved: The New (Jewish) Woman

237

Part III: Tradition, Modernity, and Religious Experience in Modernist Hebrew Fiction 12. Old Wine in New Flasks: The Reinvention of Jewish Traditions

275

13. In the Shadow of God: The Quest for New Religiosity in European and Hebrew Modernism

305

14. Mysterium Tremendum: The Varieties of Religious Experience in Hebrew Modernism

337

15. Out of the Depths: Visions and Guiding Spirits

360

Epilogue

391

Appendix: The Meaning of Hasidism and Its Echoes in Modern Hebrew Literature (1906) Yosef Chaim Brenner Notes Index

403 407 473

Illustrations

Figure 1. A postcard of Gershon Shofman.

2

Figure 2. Dzika Street, Warsaw, circa 1900. 

4

Figure 3. David Fogel’s Austrian passport, 1929.

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Figure 4. City of Odessa, Eruv boundaries.

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Figure 5. The sages of Odessa.

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Figure 6. Cover of the journal Ha-dor, Warsaw, 1901.

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Figure 7. The City of Homel , circa 1910.

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Figure 8. Lvov/Lemberg, early 20th century.

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Figure 9. Cover of Shalechet, Lvov, 1911.

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Figure 10. Soup kitchen for Jews in Whitechapel.

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Figure 11. A Jewish synagogue and cafés, Leopoldstadt, Vienna.

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Figure 12. Café Herrenhof, Vienna.

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Figure 13. In front of the Jewish lending library along the Grenadierstraße in Berlin, 1928.

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Figure 14. Cover of Rimon, Berlin, 1922.

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Figure 15. Cover of Albatros, Berlin, 1922.

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Figure 16. Young woman at the Romanisches Café in Berlin, circa 1924.

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Figure 17. Yosef Chaim Brenner and Gershon Shofman, Lvov, 1908.

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Figure 18. A postcard of Uri Nissan Gnessin.

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Figure 19. Shmuel Yosef Agnon, circa 1912. 

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Figure 20. A postcard of Hillel Zeitlin.

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Acknowledgments

Gershon Shofman, one of the main heroes of this book, once said that writing Hebrew in Europe at the outset of the twentieth century was like “an exchange of letters between a few kindred spirits scattered across the face of the earth.” Writing a book on modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century while working in places like Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and Tel Aviv, I felt very often like Shofman. Instead of letters, we now have e-mails, Skype, and international conferences, but what enables me to do the solitary act of writing is the support and encouragement of many kindred spirits who assisted me with this labor of love. They generously shared with me their knowledge, offered advice, believed in this project, and helped bring it to completion. I wish to express my gratitude to them. First, thanks to Uri (Robert) Alter, Chana Kronfeld, and Naomi Seid­man, my teachers and mentors at Berkeley, where I wrote the dissertation that eventually gave birth to this very different book. One could not hope for better teachers. Each one of them, committed and brilliant in his or her own way, has given me a lifetime’s worth of learning and intellectual integrity. Perhaps even more important, they have created an environment of rigorous scholarship combined with open, warm, and creative thinking, which continues to nurture me. I thank Chana for her rigorous reading of some rough drafts, and for inspiring conversations that led to the title and structure of this book. The special environment at Berkeley was equally created by a cohort of graduate students who are now respected colleagues, all supporters and attentive, critical readers of my work: Sheila Jelen, with whom I have edited a volume on Dvora Baron; Hamutal Tsamir; Yael Haver;

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Amir Banbaji; Todd Hasak-Lowe; Gil Hochberg; David Shneer; and Matthew Hoffman. I was inspired and learned much from their writing and scholarship. I am extremely fortunate to teach modern Hebrew literature at the University of Michigan, where I am part of the most wonderful community of scholars, whom I am proud to call my colleagues and dear friends. Anita Norich, Julian Levinson, and Mikhail Krutikov are my heroes. They not only read my manuscript and offered the most helpful suggestions but are a constant source of learning, encouragement, and warm friendship. Todd Endelman, Deborah Dash-Moore, and Gary Beckman offered support as chairs and directors beyond their call of duty. I thank Deborah also for her wise suggestions regarding the structure of this book. I received helpful advice from Carol ­Bardeinstein, Scott Spector, Sara Blair, Josh Miller, Yaron Eliav, and my new colleague, Maya Barzilai. I learned just as much from my many students in Michigan, in classes in which I was able to test many of the ideas articulated in this book. I am especially indebted to my graduate students: Oren Segal, Sara Feldman, Orian Zakai, Efrat Bloom, and Alexandra Hoffman. Numerous colleagues have shared with me their knowledge and advice, and were ready to answer any question, big or small. Alan Mintz has supported my project from the outset, offered criticism that forced me to explore new directions, and also offered extremely helpful comments on the manuscript. Dan Miron, the dean of modern Jewish literary studies from whom we all learned so much, was close at hand just at the right time. He shared with me his enormous knowledge, and I greatly benefited from his rigorous, yet extremely open mind. I was greatly assisted in writing this book by countless conversations with Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Avner Holtzman, Michael Gluzman, Glenda Abramson, Barbara Mann, Kenneth Moss, Michael Brenner, Marcus Moseley, Jeremy Dauber, Nurit Govrin, Avidov Lipsker, Pericles Lewis, Allison Schachter, Avram Novershtern, Haim Be’er, Scott Ury, and Benny Merr. Ofer Dynes was extremely generous with research assistance and with hours of discussing the ins and outs of modern Jewish literature. David Ehrlich was always ready to lend a hand and ear, and to be a good friend. I was fortunate to be a fellow in the inaugural year of the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies during

Acknowledgments

the fall of 2007. The first part of this book was shaped and influenced by our many fruitful discussions, and I thank all the fellows, especially Barbara Mann, Murray Baumgarten, Sara Blair, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, and Yael Shenker. This book would not have seen the light of day without the unfailing support of a number of people at Stanford University Press. I am especially grateful to Steven Zipperstein, the co-editor of the Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture, who is a formidable scholar and a real mentsh among men. Steve has been a strong supporter of my book, and has guided the project all the way toward publication with great wisdom and integrity. I would like to thank Norris Pope and ­Judith Hibbard at Stanford for the highly professional way in which they handled my book project at every stage. I would like to acknowledge Haim Watzman and David Lobenstine, professional writers, editors, and translators, whose hidden handprints can be detected in this book. They helped me, I hope, to create a readable, accessible piece of scholarship. I thank the staff of the Gnazim Institute in Tel Aviv, especially Dvora Stavi; the National Library in Jerusalem; and the library of the Oxford Centre for Jewish Studies for their help in locating materials and making them available to me. This book could not have been written and published without the financial support of a number of institutions, whose generosity I am happy to acknowledge. The completion of my dissertation was supported by a fellowship from the Foundation for Jewish Culture. A Kreit­man Post-Doctoral Fellowship took me to Ben-Gurion University, where I was able to embark on new research in a stimulating scholarly environment. I was able to take a research trip to Europe with financial support from the LSA College at the University of Michigan. I would like to thank the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies for supporting my research trip to Oxford. I am delighted to acknowledge the generosity of the Koret Foundation, which awarded a Jewish Studies Publication Program grant to the manuscript. I must acknowledge my parents and sisters in Israel who followed my academic adventures all over the world with love and encouragement from near and very far. My two precious boys, Yotam and Niv, were literally born and raised with this book around them. Their love and happiness gave me the most delightful sense that there is real life

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beyond the books. Finally, on the most personal and most important level, I wish to thank Amanda, my beloved wife and partner in life, for much more than I can hope to express with words. Her love makes every­thing I do possible. This book, then, belongs to her as much it does to me, and I dedicate it to her with love and appreciation. shachar m. pinsker

Literary Passports

Introduction

Hebrew Fiction as a “Literary Passport” In the summer of 1913, Gershon Shofman (1880–1972), a young but fairly well established Hebrew writer, embarked on a train journey from Lvov—the capital of Eastern Galicia, then part of Austro-­Hungary—to Vienna, the famed capital of the empire.1 When he arrived at the Nordbanhof railway station in the Leopoldstadt quarter—a common point of entry for many Eastern European immigrants (including many Jews)— he was stopped by Austrian officials and asked to present a passport or some other traveling document. Like many other Jewish émigrés and exiles from Eastern Europe at the time, Shofman had nothing to ­present.2 This could have made for a dangerous situation. Shofman was not merely an immigrant, but had been a fugitive from the Russian army since 1904, when he deserted his unit in the midst of the RussoJapanese War. Shofman had to think fast. He rummaged through his suitcase, searching for any papers or documents that might help him to establish his identity and affiliation. After a few tense moments, he found a small postcard that showed his photograph with accompanying Hebrew text. This postcard was part of a series of portraits of Hebrew and Yiddish writers published by Avraham Chaim Robinson, the owner of a Jewish bookstore, Ha-techiya, in Stanislawow, Galicia, which also operated a small publishing house under the same name.3 Designed in the Art Nouveau style that flourished in the fin de siècle, the postcard featured the author’s name and photographic portrait, encased in a drawn gilt frame, surrounded by a lyre and rose vines. Alongside these flourishes

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Introduction

Figure 1. A postcard of Gershon Shofman. (Source: Robinson Bookstore Collection, Tel Aviv)

were a few details about the writer and his published works, printed in a scroll design. Shofman showed the Viennese policeman this highly unlikely “literary passport,” explaining in German that it certified his identity as “a writer and critic who writes small, miniature sketches with great artistry.” To bolster this claim, he read the brief description: “His style is rich and multifaceted. He has a sharp eye and distinctive vision. His short stories (‘sketches’) were published in a collection by Yosef Chaim Brenner.”

Introduction

To Shofman’s astonishment and great relief, the policeman accepted the postcard and allowed him to enter the city. In this case, Shofman’s identity as a Hebrew writer had literally displaced the need for an actual passport provided by a government authority; instead, a “literary passport” enabled entrance into Vienna, one of the most important centers of European modernism. Shofman’s journey from Lvov to Vienna was neither the first nor last time that a Hebrew writer, traveling through the polyglot and multi­ national European continent, was forced to use—or to hide—his or her literary passport. Thirteen years earlier, in July 1900, the young Yosef Chaim Brenner (1881–1921), then a novice Hebrew writer, traveled from Homel, the provincial capital of the Mogilev region in southeastern Belarus, to Warsaw, the capital of Congress Poland.4 When Brenner arrived at the Warsaw train station, he immediately rushed to 21 Dzielna Street, a modest and cramped apartment complex in the city’s predominantly Jewish district, and the home of Brenner’s beloved friend and fellow writer Uri Nissan Gnessin (1879–1913). Gnessin had come from Homel to Warsaw earlier that year when he was invited by Nachum Sokolov, the editor of the Hebrew newspaper Ha-tzfira, to work at the paper’s editorial office. In Warsaw, Brenner lived incognito in Gnessin’s room because, like Shofman, he did not hold a passport or any other official papers. His identity as a Hebrew writer from Russia could hardly have served him other than to arouse suspicion. Indeed, the gatekeeper of the building complex was very suspicious of the young man with the “revolutionary” appearance.5 Though he was forced to conceal his identity, Brenner would later describe the time he spent in Warsaw as a foundational experience in his career as a Hebrew-European writer, an apprenticeship at the epicenter of an emerging literary tradition: There was a youthful inspiration, a longing for something, absorption of impressions with all the bliss and pleasure that comes along with this immersion. [We] met with Nomberg and with Reisin who had just published some literary collection in Yiddish; read some books and some critical essays. Uri Nissan [Gnessin] wrote a critical essay [...] and published it in Ha-tzfira under a “pseudonym.” Pseudonym—even the very word had a strong appeal because of its novelty. In short, we were

3

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Introduction

“entering” as if we were standing in the midst of Shacharit [“morning prayer”]. One evening [Gnessin] picked up from the street a new edition of Luach achi’asaf hot off the press [...] We sat at the dinner table and started to read [...] a poem by Ch. N. Bialik. And not too long after, when we finished our dinner, we already competed with one another to see who could best recite the poem by heart.6

The excitement in Brenner’s description and its sensual, almost erotic, tone point to the strong bonds between these youthful men, as well as to their palpable delight in being part of a new and dynamic literary community. Indeed, Warsaw in 1900 was an exciting place to be for young people who were just beginning their careers as Hebrew and Yiddish modernist writers. Apart from all the journals, newspapers, and publishing houses, writers like Gnessin, Brenner, Avrom Reisen, and Hersh Dovid Nomberg could meet in simple cafés where Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian newspapers were provided to the diverse clientele, described by the habitués as a mixture of Jewish workers, political activists, writers, and intellectuals.7 As the image of Warsaw

Figure 2. Dzika Street, Warsaw, circa 1900. (Source: Wikimedia Commons. Osmo Buller, gxen.dir., UEA Archives)

Introduction

in 1900 suggests, it was a space of crossroads, traffic, and changes, and indeed it played an important role in the emergence of modernist Hebrew literature and culture. Although Brenner had neither the passport nor the documents that would enable him to enter Warsaw officially, his Hebrew writing clearly provided him with a kind of calling-card into the city’s Jewish literary community. By likening himself and his fellow writers to people entering “in the midst of the morning prayer,” he also underscored the religious fervor that he and some of his fellow modernist Hebrew writers attached to literature. For Brenner, all this excitement and ferment proved short-lived. A month later, he was back in Homel (which was a much smaller, but no less active city), and less than a year later Gnessin followed him there. However, the time they spent together in Warsaw was a formative period that made a strong impact on their lives and on their careers as Hebrew-European modernist writers.8 Yet another emblematic European journey of a Hebrew writer took place at the beginning of 1931, when the modernist poet and prose writer David Fogel (1891–1944) traveled from Berlin to Warsaw and other cities in the newly formed independent state of Poland. Unlike Brenner in 1900 and Shofman in 1913, this time Fogel did hold an official passport, though it was not by any means an uncomplicated arrangement. Fogel, born in Satanov, Podolia, was also an East European Jewish writer who endured a life of peripatetic wandering during turbulent times in cities like Vilna, Lvov/Lemberg, Vienna, Tel Aviv, and Paris.9 In 1929, three years after Fogel moved from Vienna to Paris, he finally managed to obtain a passport: It was granted to him by the Austrian embassy in Paris because he was an Austrian expatriate who had officially resided in Vienna since 1913. Since Austrian law required every passport to state the occupation of its holder, Fogel’s passport carried the official inscription Profession: Writer (see Figure 3). With this passport, Fogel was granted official recognition as a Hebrew writer. The arrangement was, however, based in a place where he had spent only a fraction of his life, and declaring a nationality that could not have seemed to him natural or self-evident in any way. Indeed, obtaining an Austrian passport did not reinforce his bond to his sponsoring nation, but only intensified his desire (and as important, his ability) to travel

5

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Introduction

away from it. Fogel used the new passport to travel to Tel Aviv, where he stayed for a short while, and then to Berlin, where he immersed himself in the local Jewish literary community before returning to his initial points of departure—in Poland and Galicia. Although he had more than one good reason to visit various Polish and Galician cities, Fogel’s journey had a clear goal. Tarbut (“Culture”)—the organization for Hebrew education that operated schools and teachers’ seminars in Eastern Europe—invited Fogel to Poland to deliver lectures on Hebrew literature to an audience of women, most likely students and teachers of Hebrew.10 In spite of the organization’s effort, few people came to hear Fogel; those who did probably could not appreciate the historical importance of his lecture. However, for readers of Fogel and for historians of Hebrew modernism in general, the lecture, entitled Lashon ve signon be sifruteinu ha-tze‘ira (“Language

Figure 3. David Fogel’s Austrian passport, 1929. (Courtesy of the Genazim Institute, Tel Aviv)

Introduction

and Style in Our Young Literature”), is a priceless gem.11 Along with other important insights that the lecture offers, Fogel proposed a mapping of Hebrew modernism in the period 1900–1930. He singled out the work of four writers of Hebrew fiction: Shofman, Gnessin, Brenner, and Dvora Baron, and Fogel implicitly connected his own writings with these slightly older Hebrew modernists. In Fogel’s lecture, a spatial history of Jewish modernism as an effect of the restive, dialectical movement between urban centers began to suggest itself. ❊ These three anecdotes serve as a starting point in my exploration of the story of modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe. They introduce not only some of the main characters of my story but also its time frame, roughly between 1900 and 1930, and some of the cities, locales, and the material culture (journals, publishing houses, cafés) in which it took place. Perhaps more importantly, these snapshots of what I call “literary passports” underscore the restless mobility of writers like Shofman, Brenner, Gnessin, and Fogel; they belong to a loosely linked group of Hebrew writers who had no state or territory to call home, and no clear national affiliation in the modern, western sense of the word. They were astonishingly mobile, wandering from one place to another across Europe (and beyond). These men and women were linked, however, by their restlessness, and by what we’ll come to see as their literary passports: de facto certifications of affiliation in a community of Hebrew writers that enabled them to travel through multiple geographical spaces as “resident aliens,” and to participate in multiple cultural contexts, while maintaining a sense of belonging to something approximating a coherent group. Amidst the turbulence of the twentieth century’s opening decades, the places in which they touched down, congregated, wrote, and debated among themselves constantly changed, sometimes beyond recognition. Multinational empires became new nation-states; wars and revolutions changed the geopolitical borders that had been familiar and stable just a few years earlier; huge economic and historical shifts rewrote the cultures and daily lives of these familiar places again and again. At a time in which the only constant fact of life was change,

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Introduction

it was participation in a community of Hebrew writers that lent their lives a semblance of stability. As I will suggest, this community made them simultaneously “insiders” and “outsiders,” both in cities like Odessa, Warsaw, Homel, Lvov, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London, and in ­European modernist culture in general.

Hebrew Fiction, European Modernism The central claim of Literary Passports is that modernist Hebrew prose fiction, as it emerged from 1900 to 1930, was shaped by the encounter between young Jewish writers attempting to forge a sense-of-self in Hebrew and the shifting terrain of European modernity. It was a highly charged and electrifying encounter. Jews who had acquired their education and their Hebrew linguistic proficiency in the ­beit-midrash (the traditional “house of study”) came into contact with European literature and culture as it exploded in the artistic revolution that we now know as modernism. The lives of these men and women, as well as both Hebrew letters and European modernism writ large, would be irrevocably altered by the encounter. The pivotal role played by European culture in the formation of Hebrew modernist fiction of the early twentieth century has not, to date, been fully explored. The main reason for this absence is that we are used to thinking of modern Hebrew literature in the last century as linked exclusively with the Zionist narrative, with the creation of a Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv), which later became the State of Israel. Indeed, one of the main challenges of my study is to resist the teleological impulse of seeing the past from the vantage point of the present, and instead to capture the Hebrew, Jewish, and European cultural landscape in the uniqueness and complexity of this time and place. On the most basic level, my focus on Europe stems from the simple but crucial fact that all of the writers discussed in this book were born and raised in Eastern Europe. Although some of them migrated, at some point, to Palestine (for a few years or permanently) or even to North America, their cultural and literary horizon was and remained European.12 My chronological focus, too, is quite simply explained: the

Introduction

turn of the twentieth century witnessed huge shifts in the foundations of Jewish life and culture, as we shall see, which coincided with the enormous upheavals that modernism both responded to and created. Simply put, around 1900, Hebrew fiction began to change, and fast. Over the next three decades, the writers we discuss were active mostly in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe, in the period before Hebrew became fully coalesced into a vernacular, and before a literary and cultural “center” for Hebrew was solidified in Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s.13 The story on which I focus moves, to some extent, along the tense but productive axis between the “house of study” and the kaffeehaus; between the texts and religious traditions of the Jewish past (with which these writers wrestled, but never really abandoned) and the contemporary currents of European social and cultural life. My focus on Europe is bound to an exploration of early-twentiethcentury Hebrew fiction in the context of modernism, already a complex concept in itself. As numerous studies have stressed, “modernism” is an elusive term, at once a period, a style, and a trend, and also a wide variety of literary and artistic movements that developed in different locations in Europe, America, and around the world.14 Indeed, modernism is comprised of numerous and often contesting practices, which first flourished in a period that did not use the term as it has come to be understood retrospectively.15 Nevertheless, the term “modernism” is a powerful one, and is actually gaining more currency in the last decade or so in spite (or maybe because) of the challenges of postmodernism.16 It continues to be power­ful primarily because “modernism” is the only possible term for portraying the multitude of literary and artistic movements of the early twentieth century. It also captures how all the diverse movements under its umbrella attempted to reflect, but also to respond to, the historical and social upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the numerous and deep wounds of modernity. Richard Sheppard maintains that toward the end of the nineteenth century, European culture was experiencing the shattering of the most fundamental assumptions and conceptual models on which the liberal humanist epoch, from the Renaissance through the mid-nineteenth century, had been based. Thus, according to Sheppard, the literary and artistic works of

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Introduction

modernism “are not just reflexes, transcriptions or symptoms of a profound cultural upheaval, but simultaneously, responses through which the authors of those works try to pictorialize their understanding and so make sense of that upheaval.”17 From this important general observation, one can extract a set of concerns that in one way or another preoccupied many of the movements, trends, and writers associated with modernism. Some of the more salient are: the limits of rationality and the accompanying reconsiderations of “enlightenment” and “progress”; the crisis of literary language and the questioning of mimetic representation; the tension between tradition and the Nietzschean “now”; the changing conception of time and space in the encounter with the modern metropolis; and the changing modes of gender and sexuality amidst the crisis of masculinity, the rise of the “New Woman,” and the emergence of homo­sexuality in newly constructed understandings of social and cultural identity.18 It will become evident throughout this book that these were precisely the concerns and issues that preoccupied Hebrew writers in Europe as well as those who emigrated from Europe to other places (Palestine, America). Given their unique historical and social situation as Jews, however, these writers experienced the ruptures of modernity in particular ways, and they thus produced a version of modernism inflected by a set of distinctly Jewish concerns. Importantly, at the same time that European and western culture as a whole experienced this upheaval, Jewish society was undergoing a far-ranging revolution of its own, one that transformed its geography, modes of living, languages, professions, and consciousness. The confluence of the modernist revolution in art and literature and the massive transformations that Benjamin Harshav has called “the modern Jewish revolution” is what set Hebrew modernism in motion, and a full understanding of this new mode of Jewish self-expression requires attention to both of these developments.19 The international (or what Susan Stanford-Friedman and Andreas Huyssen have more recently called the “transnational”) quality of modernism has long been emphasized, and for good reason. In the context of modernist literature and culture numerous individual writers moved from one location to another, becoming émigrés, perpetual

Introduction

tourists, or—in one of modernism’s privileged terms—“exiles” (a term that was not surprisingly associated, usually metaphorically, with Jews and Jewish experience). Thus a number of modernist trends were initiated and developed more or less simultaneously in different locations across ­Europe and around the world. At the turn of the twentieth century, cosmopolitan and polyglot cities became the centers of modernism; the writers, artists, and intellectuals who lived—or just passed through—these cities were a mixture of locals, immigrants, and exiles from all over Europe and the rest of the world. As we have already seen, the restlessness of these writers was an essential ingredient of modernism’s ability to pollinate itself across a huge swath of countries and cultures. But modernism, as this study takes pains to remember, is also marked by the ways in which these trends were created and developed distinctively in different locations, and within different cultural and national contexts.20 If we view modernism, for example, through an Anglo-American lens (which is still the dominant historical and theoretical perspective, even in the “New Modernist Studies”), the chronology of modernism and its very nature appear in a particular way. The focus here is usually on the years between 1910 and 1930, the time of “high modernism,” with such canonical figures as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, ­Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner.21 But when modernism is viewed from Berlin or Vienna—the places to which many Hebrew writers gravitated—the chronological profile, the list of main poetic movements, and the set of representative figures and texts are entirely different. We would probably locate its origins in the 1890s, focus on movements like symbolism and expressionism, and explore figures such as Nietzsche (as the main philosophical influence), Rilke, Trakl, Hofmannsthal, Mann, Musil, Kafka, Döblin, and Brecht.22 Modernism in the Russian context—the one most familiar and relevant to many Hebrew writers—offered yet another trajectory, developing first in the symbolist and decadent trends during the period 1890–1917 (which is also recognized as the “Silver Age” of Russian literature). Among the writers associated with Russian early modernism are Dimitri Merezhkovsky, Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Fyodor Sologug, Valery Bruisov, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Leonid Andreyev.

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Introduction

­ yodor ­Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, and Vladimir Solovyov were F seen as the notable precursors who signaled the transition from the literary traditions of the nineteenth century to the early modernism of the turn of the twentieth century. The reaction to the decadent and symbolist trends in Russia (and elsewhere) brought forward the emerging and contradictory “post-symbolist” movements of futurism, acmeism, imaginism, and other smaller movements that flourished in the period around and immediately following the 1917 revolution.23 Modernist Hebrew fiction was developed in the context of these various European modernisms, and across Eastern, Central, and Western Europe. It added to this conglomeration still further distinctive features of its own, which stem from very specific linguistic, literary, historical, and cultural conditions of Jews in Europe, and more specifically of Hebrew literature and culture. The most significant factor that set Hebrew modernism apart from the major European literatures was the “newness” of Hebrew literature; at the beginning of a turbulent century, it simply did not have to confront a long and established tradition of realism or romanticism. This is especially true in the realm of Hebrew fiction, which is the main focus of this book. For the sake of comparison, we must remind ourselves that Hebrew poetry has had a distinguished tradition going back to the medieval period and earlier. Moreover, Hebrew poetry was written and developed throughout the haskalah period, the so-called Jewish Enlightenment (1780–1880). At the end of the nineteenth century, Chaim Nachman Bialik had already established himself (and was firmly understood) as a “national poet” and as a romantic Hebrew poet. Hebrew fiction, on the other hand, was a relatively recent phenomenon: the first Hebrew novel, Avraham Mapu’s Ahavat Zion (“The Love of Zion”), wasn’t published until 1853. For complex reasons that have to do with language, ideology, and historical context, this novel—like most fiction of the haskalah period—was based on the poetics of “romance, adventure and intrigue,” a formula typical of European literature in the early modern period (1500–1800), but very different from what Europeans or Americans were writing in the 1850s.24 The first Hebrew novels and stories considered to be “realist” were the Hebrew versions (or auto-­translations) of Sholem Yankev Abramovitz’s (Mendele Moycher

Introduction

Sforim) fictional Yiddish texts—the same novels and stories in which Abramovitz created the “nusach” (a synthetic style that combined biblical, rabbinic, and other historical layers of Hebrew), which enabled mimetic representation in Hebrew fiction.25 In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a new poetics of realism or naturalism was developed by writers of the so-called New Wave school like Ben ­Avigdor (Avraham Leib Shalkovitz) and Yishayahu Bershadsky. These were all relatively modest achievements when measured against the realist traditions that emerged in the major European literatures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hence, Hebrew fiction writers at the beginning of the twentieth century were compelled to develop a discourse of literary “realism” (mainly understood as a project of mimetic representation), at the same time that they absorbed a literary and cultural revolution that thoroughly shattered the assumptions underlying this mode of literature.26 The lack of a strong and lasting tradition of realist or mimetic Hebrew prose can also explain why Hebrew modernist fiction could develop early (in the opening decade of the twentieth century) and encounter relatively little resistance from the literary community and readers. The experimental forms of fiction by Gnessin, Shofman, Brenner, and others were not initially well received. Many Hebrew readers and critics complained about the fragmentation and “miniaturization” of their fiction, their “solipsism” and eroticism, and the strangeness of their language and structure. Yet, despite these many reservations, they became part of the emerging Hebrew canon. The criticism and resistance directed at modernist Hebrew writers is indicative of the issues they had to confront. A good example of these is the question of fragmentation and the “small forms” that replaced the large-scale social novel of the haskalah period. Ahad Ha‘am (Asher Ginsberg), the influential Zionist leader, thinker, editor, and critic, wrote the following critique about Hebrew fiction of the 1900s: “Seek and find out that even the best new Hebrew stories [...] are nothing more than fragments in which we can only see rudimentary hints of talent that has not yet developed clearly. These fragments would hardly make any impression in other, real literatures.”27 This criticism was common throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, and it came from the yearning

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14

Introduction

of figures like Ahad Ha‘am, Bialik, Yosef Klausner, Pinchas Lachover, and others to see large-scale social and realistic novels in Hebrew. Modernist Hebrew writers did not create such novels. Instead they turned to the “small forms,” or wrote the kind of fragmentary novellas and short novels (not to mention Brenner’s “anti-novels”) that were hardly recognizable in comparison to the traditional European realist novel of the nineteenth century. The turn to these forms was closely related to two important aspects of the literary passport: the restless mobility and the “inward turn,” which involved a drastic change in what was represented in fiction and its modes of representation and expression. The expectation of realism and mimetic representation (as well as for the romanticism of Hebrew poetry) was directly related to the role “assigned” to writers of Hebrew literature in nationalist thought. Building on the biblical trope of the prophet as the “Watchman for the House of Israel” (Ezek. 1:17), as well as the religiously inspired, Russian ideal of the writer as prophet, modern Hebrew critics and thinkers adopted the figure of the prophet-as-watchman to describe the writer’s role.28 This is an example (one of many) of a fusion of what seemed like “indigenous” Jewish tradition with the Russian tradition that connected writers like Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky with the prophet figure. As in the case of Russian modernism of the early twentieth century, there was a certain tension between this “designated role” of the Hebrew writer and modernist poetics, but they were far from being antithetic.29 In the case of writers like Gnessin, Shofman, Nomberg, Levi Aryeh Arieli, and Fogel (to name just a few), this tension was never really resolved, and it explains their unstable place in the emerging canon. In Brenner’s case, by contrast—and this is true regarding Micha Yosef Berdichevsky as well, and even Shmuel Yosef Agnon—his role as an editor, critic, and public intellectual made him seem as a kind of prophet; a prophet of skepticism and doom more than anything else, but a prophet nonetheless, and thus more readily accepted into the canon.30 The unique situation of Hebrew literature at the beginning of the twentieth century can also explain why the modernist manifesto was not the common feature it had been in some other European literatures, or would become in avant-garde movements of Hebrew and Yiddish

Introduction

poetry of the 1920s and 1930s.31 We do not see in Hebrew fiction of the era anything like Ezra Pound’s famous call to “Make it new!” or writing along the lines of the Futurist Manifesto of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1909) or Uri Zvi Greenberg or even Avraham Shlonsky’s call in 1923 for “wild poetry.” The absence of such brazen and beguiling declarations is simple: Hebrew writers did not feel the need to shatter a literary tradition that was quite shaky to begin with. Instead of writing programmatic manifestos, they reveal their modernist preoccupations in the texts they choose to translate from European languages and in the plethora of “small” (and often short-lived) magazines and journals in which they published their stories and created a new poetics. Modernist Hebrew writers also expressed their modernist concerns in their extensive correspondence, as well as in lectures (like Fogel’s lecture in 1931), and for some, in critical essays. Among these writers, Brenner was probably the one most inclined to express modernist concerns beyond his fiction. He did so in a manner at once reluctant and vigorous. In an essay written in 1908, for example, in a journal he was editing together with Shofman in Lvov, Brenner defends against the criticism of fragmentation by quoting Ahad Ha‘am’s complaint that Hebrew fiction presents “nothing but fragments” (Kra‘im—“torn pieces”) and that there is no large-scale novel to be found. But he also defends fellow writers like Shofman, Gnessin, and Nomberg (and implicitly himself as well) against these “accusations” by saying that “if reality itself is broken,” it is no wonder that the Hebrew literature that reflects it is also “miniature, torn, and broken into pieces.” He continues by asking rhetorically, “what can one do? [...] if there is nothing else, one has to contend with looking at one’s face with a miniature and broken mirror.”32 In another essay (1911), Brenner revisited this question after a further critique of Hebrew fiction was voiced by the critic and editor Lachover. In this essay, Brenner presents his own ideas while seemingly speculating on Lachover’s opinions: It is possible that he thinks that there is no place for novels, so long as there are no fixed forms of life, but rather floating pieces, which in no way can be made into continuous, comprehensive pieces; it is also possible that he denies the uniformity of processes of life, and thinks that in any large-scale portrait there is also an inevitable lie, and that the

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Introduction

inner truth of reality, the lively and essential truth, can be found only in the small sketches, which are presented fragment by fragment, shred by shred.33

It is crucial to note that in these essays Brenner makes a subtle but important conflation between the poetic and socio-historical arguments for the appearance of “fragmented” and “miniature” forms. He claims that the reason for fragmentation is both a broken historical reality (what he calls the “floating pieces” of Jewish life and modern life in general), and the fact that the literary text must reflect this reality— not with “continuous, comprehensive pieces” or with “large-scale portraits,” but rather with “fragments” and “small sketches.” In addition to this heightened social and historical awareness, Brenner also betrays a deep and fundamentally modernist sensibility, sure that the experience of fragmentation of (Jewish) modernity could be only expressed by a fragmented modernist text. If the processes of life themselves lack unity, then “the more essential truth” requires “the smaller pictures” that are presented “shred by shred.”34 Foreshadowing many scholars and historians of modernism, Brenner understands fragmentation as a quintessential modernist expression—an existential attitude that offers a way to cope artistically with the stresses of contemporary life, Jewish and otherwise.35 What Brenner explains is a cultural aspect of modernism, of the miniature and broken mirror, for writers not just in chosen exile but on the lam and on the run. In similar ways Brenner explained, and sometimes defended, the mixture of poetry and prose, the “impressionistic” and “symbolist” (or what he called re’aliyut simbolit—the mixture of realism and symbolism) that began to appear in his own fictional work and in the fiction of some of the writers close to him. Brenner’s expression of his “explicit poetics” (as outlined in his critical essays) tells us another important thing about the development of modernist Hebrew fiction. It highlights the complex and significant links between the instability and sense of rupture in literary forms and those of life itself, an essential feature of the crisis of modernity that was especially acute because of the radical shifts and breaks in Jewish life. East European Jewish writers like Brenner and his contemporaries did not have to “wait” for shocks like the Great War or the Bolshe-

Introduction

vik revolution.36 The experience of shock and unsettling upheaval was clearly felt at the turn of the twentieth century, and with very distinctive purchase by European Jews. This provides another explanation for the deep and rapid modernist change that erupted in Hebrew fiction in or around 1900.

Modernist Hebrew Fiction and the Challenges of Literary History Brenner’s essays and Fogel’s 1931 lecture are good examples of the ways in which the writers who created Hebrew modernism understood what they were doing. And yet, anyone who attempts to use their words as a blueprint with which to draw a map or a timeline of modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe will encounter considerable difficulties. In spite of the fact that the first three decades of the twentieth century are unequivocally within the period of European modernism in art and literature, there are surprisingly few scholarly attempts to discuss Hebrew fiction written during these years in the context of modernism. To be sure, there are many excellent discussions of modernist aspects in individual writers. Especially important for my book are Avner Holtzman’s studies of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky;37 Dan Miron’s and Hamutal Bar-Yosef ’s studies of Uri Nissan Gnessin;38 and Nurit ­Govrin’s studies of Gershon Shofman and Dvora Baron. 39 There is a growing body of scholarship on Yosef Chaim Brenner, to which Dov Sadan, Menachem Brinker, Yitzhak Bakon, Alan Mintz, Ariel Hirschfeld, Boaz Arpaly, and others have made major contributions.40 There is also a continuous and ever-growing body of scholarship dedicated to the fiction of S. Y. Agnon. I refer to and seek to build upon these works throughout this book. At the same time, these studies do not attempt to discuss modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe as a broad literary and historical phenomenon.41 An emblematic example of this absence can be found in the work of Gershon Shaked, who produced the most comprehensive and authoritative historiography of Hebrew fiction in the century between 1880 and 1980.42 In his monumental five-volume history—an impressive summation of Hebrew literary scholarship between the 1960s and

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Introduction

1980s—surprisingly little is devoted to modernism of the first half of the twentieth century. It becomes a significant presence only within a section entitled “The Moderna,” in which Shaked discusses at some length the issue of modernism in Hebrew fiction. The notion of the Moderna is explicitly borrowed from poetry, and with it he examines some trends of Hebrew fiction that emerged in the late 1920s and 1930s, mainly in Palestine, but also in Europe and America.43 Shaked thus divides what he calls modernist Hebrew fiction of this period into four groups of writers and trends: “the universalists,” “the expressionists,” “the impressionists,” and a fourth group that is comprised mostly of Hebrew writers in America. He identifies various modernist concerns in all of these groups: a preoccupation with sexuality and with the urban experience; a modernist approach to language, style, and tradition; and an affiliation with impressionistic and expressionistic trends.44 Shaked sketches an invaluable map of modernist Hebrew fiction, particularly in the period of 1925–1948. However, I find two major problems with this widespread approach. First, modernism becomes a marginal aspect of Hebrew fiction because it includes only writers like Eliezer Shteinman and Ya‘acov Horovitz, who were never central figures when they published their works, and are even less so today, when their stories and novels are virtually forgotten. Second, and more significant, if we follow this understanding of Hebrew modernist fiction, a crucial question arises: Did these concerns and preoccupations appear only in the late 1920s and 1930s? From the point of view of this study, it is clear that the answer is no. These preoccupations, and the poetics that come along with them, began to appear as early as 1900 in the fiction of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky. They intensified and became dominant in the writings of Gnessin, Brenner, Shofman, Nomberg, and Baron, and continued in interesting ways in the work of Ya‘acov Shteinberg, Arieli, and the young Agnon. Fogel, Eliezer Shtienman, Shimon Halkin, and other writers (who were active in the period Shaked discusses) are direct continuations of the modernist trends created in the period 1900–1930, mainly in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe. Shaked, then, relegates modernism to a minor role in Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century. His view has been influential for subse-

Introduction

quent students of Hebrew literature even though, as I argue throughout, it seems to me problematically ahistorical. There are several ways to explain the sources (as well as the undeniable power) of Shaked’s view. For Shaked, Hebrew literature in Europe is seen as a cul-de-sac, a dead end that cannot lead anywhere.45 But beyond this basic (and problematic) hindsight conclusion, there are three interrelated reasons for this understanding of Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century. First, this period has been known as sifrut ha-techiya—“the literature of revival” or “renaissance.” Without delving into the origins and the history of this term, it is safe to say that the term sifrut ha-techiya (as used in Hebrew historiography) is predicated on a three-tiered Zionist ideal: the revival of the Jewish/Hebrew nation, the revival of the Hebrew language, and the revival of Hebrew literature and culture. This notion of revival is a historiographic construct, one of many possible models, and it tells us a very specific (and very powerful) story with a clear sense of origin and of telos. From a literary point of view, most scholars of Hebrew literature understand the poetics of the so-called revival period as a phase of romantic and realist Hebrew literature, or more often, as a combination of both, thus effectively precluding the possibility of reading it in the context of European and Jewish modernism.46 This leads to the second issue, namely the fact that the prevalent historiography of modernist Hebrew fiction follows the common graphs and maps of modernist Hebrew poetry. These graphs and maps locate the origin of Hebrew modernism geographically in Palestine and chronologically in the post-symbolist poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. The result is that both the poetry and the fiction of the turn of the twentieth century are understood (by Shaked and others) as pre-­ modernist. A number of scholars (Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Chana Kronfeld, and Hannan Hever among them) have recently challenged the assumption that Hebrew poetry in the early twentieth century was essentially “late romantic,” and that modernism appeared only with Shonsky and Greenberg in the mid-1920s.47 At the same time, it is clear to me that— for reasons which I explore throughout the book—symbolist, impressionist, and expressionist elements surfaced in Hebrew fiction, and they became legitimate and even part of the canon before they fully emerged and achieved dominant status in poetry.

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Introduction

The third and directly related problem is the assumption of a time lag between the development of European and Hebrew literature. This is another commonly held view of Hebrew literature that has only recently been questioned.48 Essentially, the (mistaken) claim is that of belatedness, the idea that at the turn of the twentieth century, Hebrew literature had just begun to engage with the romantic and realist modes of literature that had reached their heyday in Europe and America during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. But anyone who reads a novella by Gnessin, a short novel by Shofman, or an “anti-novel” by Brenner written in, say, 1908, must surely notice the radical break with conventions of nineteenth-century fiction—Hebrew or ­European. How can this be explained? I have already suggested the feeble tradition of realist and romantic fiction in Hebrew as part of the answer. Another crucial ingredient is articulated in the following observation of Benjamin Harshav: Jewish literature attempted to catch up with the developments of European literary tradition since the Renaissance [...] and to spread out over the whole range of genres, both in original works and in translation. At the same time, it endeavored to break through to the contemporary trends of modernism which were turning that very tradition upside down.49

This extremely important point leads me to utterly abandon the entire model of “time lag” and “influence,” and instead to discuss modernist Hebrew literature and culture in terms of participation. Jewish writers working in Hebrew (and Yiddish as well, but that is part of a different, albeit closely related, story) had to overcome enormous difficulties of working with languages without long belletristic traditions, with small readerships and unstable literary and cultural infrastructures. However, paradoxically perhaps but unquestionably, these conditions actually made them more likely to embrace modernism and participate in it. As the contemporary trends of modernism dramatically altered European literary traditions, Hebrew writers could now find a place, a characteristically restless one, for themselves in Europe’s literary landscape. Hence, although these early Jewish modernists writing in Hebrew might have been reluctant to declare their modernism, they were not necessarily belated, but in fact, contemporary with—even anticipa-

Introduction

tory of—literary trends that appeared in this period in the major European languages. In this regard, a number of developments over the last decade in the rapidly evolving field of “New Modernist Studies” pose a real challenge and an exciting opportunity for a renewed understanding of Hebrew modernism (and modernist Hebrew fiction in particular). More than ever, it is now becoming evident that modernism is a complex literary and cultural phenomenon, and recent scholarship in the newly invigorated field has invited us to challenge many of the assumptions about when, where, and what modernism was or is. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz have emphasized the recent temporal, spatial, and vertical expansion of the field of Modernist Studies, as well as what they have termed “the transnational turn.” But while most of these new discussions focus on modernism in locations far removed from Europe (Asia, the Caribbean, and so on), and in periods far removed from socalled high modernism, my study examines the Hebrew creation of modernist fiction both at the center and the margins of Europe, and right in the heart of what is now considered to be the epoch of modernism (roughly 1850–1950).50 In so doing, I am hoping to show that the seemingly exceptional, “marginal,” and “liminal” modernist Hebrew fiction (and this is true regarding Yiddish as well, but in a different way) proves an excellent test case to examine in the context of these recent developments in New Modernist Studies.51 Any organizing historical concept tends to emphasize certain aspects of literary and cultural production and overshadow others, and I am very well aware that Hebrew fiction in this period can be—and indeed has been—described and analyzed in different ways. In examining earlytwentieth-century Hebrew fiction through the bifocal lens of Jewish and European modernism, certain dichotomies tend to blur, and new questions arise and come into focus. Among the questions that stand both in the background and the foreground of this study are: How would Hebrew modernism appear if viewed through the broader horizon of modernist European literary and cultural production? How would our conception of European or “transnational” modernism change if we were to include authors and writers like Brenner or Agnon—who have all-too-often been seen as specifically “Hebrew,” “Jewish,” or “Zionist”

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Introduction

writers—and analyze them as writers who express modernist concerns and modernist poetics? On the other hand, how would writers such as Gnessin, Shofman, and Fogel—sometimes construed as “European” writers whose only vestige of Jewishness is their choice of writing in Hebrew—be seen through an approach that seeks to identify the specific Jewish and Hebrew qualities of their modernist writing? In order to begin answering these questions, I explore Hebrew modernist fiction by taking different avenues of analysis. My attempt is not to write a comprehensive history of Hebrew fiction or to present a close reading of its “monuments,” but rather to introduce and to examine some of its main themes and preoccupations. Drawing on a wide range of literary and historical sources and texts, I wish to situate early-twentieth-century Hebrew fiction within the context of Jewish and European modernist literature and culture. The result is a book that I hope offers something to a range of readers. To scholars and students of modern Hebrew and Jewish literature, I offer a new model of the history and geography of Hebrew modernism, as well as new ways of reading important texts (some very familiar and others more obscure) and understanding certain thematic and stylistic features. To historians of European and Jewish cultures, I offer different ways to understand and evaluate what is surely an important cultural endeavor in this period. To scholars of modernism, I offer not only a chance to widen the modernist corpus by arguing for the inclusion of an alternative tradition but also a challenge to rethink central concepts about modernism and the relations among modernism, nationalism, urbanism, gender, and religiosity. These different directions of analysis also required me to develop a methodology that integrates the historical, the textual, and the theoretical. These three perspectives constantly overlap and crisscross each other and it is often impossible to demarcate them. Moreover, I use this methodological blend deliberately, because I truly believe that this kind of project requires dismantling the traditional compartmentalization of research methods: I seek to overcome the divide in literary studies between the textual and the extratextual, the divide between the empirical and the theoretical in historical studies, and the divide between normative Anglo-American models and unfamiliar and exotic texts and literary traditions.

Introduction

The different directions of analysis and the deliberately eclectic methodology also stimulate the structure of the book. The book is thus divided into three parts. The first part strives to achieve two interrelated goals. One is to spatialize modernist Hebrew fiction by describing and examining the geography of Hebrew modernism, especially the roles of the European cities and urban centers in which it was created and from which it emanated. The other task of the first part is to analyze the ways in which modernist Hebrew fiction expressed and represented this new urban experience, an unprecedented way of life both enabling and petrifying. My claim here is that the encounter with various European cities and with urban life instigated some of the stylistic and thematic changes we find in modernist Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century. The second part of the book deals with issues of sexuality and gender that became prevalent during the fin de siècle and in subsequent years. In this part, I explore the ways in which Hebrew writers dealt with the crisis of masculinity, the rise of the “New (Jewish) Woman,” the relations between writing and sexual desire, and the ubiquitous preoccupation with erotic triangles and homosocial bonds. I attempt to show here that central themes and preoccupations—for example, the so-called Talush (the “uprooted man”)—in modernist Hebrew fiction of the time can only be explained within the context of the intersection of European and Jewish modernity, and the changing literary modes of dealing with sexuality in modernist fiction of this period. Hebrew modernist writers were caught in a web of conflicting, at times irreconcilable, images and conceptions of gender and sexuality in contemporary European and Jewish culture: the crisis of masculine identity characteristic of fin de siècle Europe; the attendant rise of the “New Woman”; the Zionist attempts to transform Jewish sexuality and masculinity, and the antisemitic views of the “effeminate Jew”; the obsession with femininity and with the “dandy” in “decadent” literature; and the symbolist literary preoccupation with mystical conceptions of sexuality. These are just some of the diverse historical, philosophical, and literary currents that I explore in this part of the book, currents that played an important role in the intellectual world of the writers of modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe (and inevitably also in the nascent Hebrew literature created in Palestine and the United States by writers who emigrated from Europe).

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Introduction

The third part of the book examines an issue on which much ink has been spilt in Hebrew literary studies, namely the complex relations among tradition, modernity, and religion in Hebrew literature of the early twentieth century. My departure from previous studies lies in how I situate the preoccupations with religion within European modernist literature and culture. I trace the variety of attempts during these decades to reinvent Jewish traditions: collecting and recreating traditional texts, creating literature that will engage these texts, and so on. I pay particular attention to the role of Hebrew fiction in these endeavors and situate them within modernist and Jewish national contexts. I show that modernist Hebrew writers who abandoned traditional Jewish society and created “secular” literature were nonetheless intensely preoccupied with questions about religious experience. These questions permeated all European and Jewish modernist thought and literature in the period that came after the Nietzschean “Death of God” and the collapse of the rationalist Enlightenment. Thus, often despite all outward appearances, writers of Hebrew modernist fiction, together with their European counterparts, were engaged in a quest for a new sense of religiosity. The book’s triangular structure, which emerges from the main themes of the texts themselves, also enables me to integrate the historical, the textual, and the theoretical. This structure also provides me with an opportunity to develop a different approach to the field of literary history, an area of scholarship that is undergoing a radical process of rethinking in recent years.52 Hence, instead of following modernist Hebrew fiction chronologically (an approach that in my view is problematic, because Hebrew modernism did not develop in a linear way), or taking the more traditional approach of structuring a book around individual figures and writers, my method is both spatial-geographic and thematic. The three parts of this book thus become interrelated cycles that explore and examine important aspects of the same corpus, namely modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. They are related to each other on the macro level, and it is only by exploring the three of them side-by-side and juxtaposing them that I can fully make the case for retelling the story of large segments of Hebrew fiction in this period in the contexts of modernism and European

Introduction

culture. I am exploring cities and the urban experience, sexuality and gender, and the quest for a new religious experience in a “secular age,” not only because they constitute the central issues in the texts I examine, but also because I believe these issues can only be understood when discussed in the context of the intersections between modern Jewish culture and European modernism. The three parts are also connected to each other on a micro level by the very fact that in each part I discuss several of the same writers and texts as a way of illuminating these major themes through varying perspectives. My hope is that this mode of investigation and analysis does justice not only to the complex nature of the project but also to the incontrovertible spirit of exploration evident in the texts of modernist Hebrew fiction of the time. The restless mobility of Hebrew writers between European spaces and within European and Jewish cultures in a state of constant flux is linked to their intense desire to search and explore, both the worlds around them and the depths of their own identities. Whatever these writers sought (and sometimes found), they forged along the way new Hebrew fiction that was in conversation with European modernism, and yet with a distinct accent that is the subject of this book.

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O n e  Spatializing the Margins Hebrew Modernism and the Urban Experience

The first three decades of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of Hebrew modernism. Crucial to the development of this body of work were several urban and metropolitan centers in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe, which incubated this new brand of modernism in various guises: as literary “centers,” enclaves, and satellites; as sites for contact and interaction with other literatures that were part of international (or “transnational”) modernism; and as settings for the shifting modernist literary representations of urban life. However, for various theoretical, methodological, and ideological reasons, the role of these urban spaces has not been, to date, directly addressed as a general phenomenon. My aim in this first part of the book is to expand and spatialize the notion of Hebrew modernism as being a literature “on the margins”1 by examining its actual centers and enclaves, as well as the ways in which these spaces were experienced, imagined, and represented in modernist Hebrew fiction. Although modernism is mostly associated with, and examined through, the ideas of time and history, I also invoke the concept of space. In so doing, I follow the direction of cultural geographers such as David Harvey and Edward Soja in order to promote the spatialization of history and historiography, as well as the reexamination of the relations between “center” and “margins,” the “real” and “imaginary” spaces that were so crucial in the city of modernity and the modernist urban literature.2 Conceived in this way, the peculiarities and difficulties associated with the subject of the European cities and centers of Hebrew literature can be used as a springboard for exploring the complex relations among Jewish literature and culture, modernism, the city, and urban space.3 The city is the most frequently evoked context for understanding

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The European Cities of Modernist Hebrew Fiction

modernist literature, and there are a number of good reasons for the prominence of the city in critical and scholarly discussions of modernism. Important scholars of modernism such as Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane claim that “modernism was an art of cities,” and that it evidently found its “natural habitat in cities.” Most modernist writers tended to live and write in the great cities of Europe and America, using the city as a source of inspiration, a research tool, and a setting for their literature. City living fostered the formation of literary centers and coteries. The abundance of literary cafés, journals, and publishing houses encouraged the development of new styles of writing to meet new realities and needs.4 Cities were not only great centers for modernism and the myriad social realities against which it developed but also the very subject of shifting modes of literary representation. Needless to say, cities are not modern phenomena, and they have been described in literature since antiquity. The industrial modern city of the eighteenth century, for example, has been especially noted as an essential backdrop to the rise of the realist novel.5 Nevertheless, it is quite clear that a radical shift in the representation of cities in literature—coinciding with a shift in literary and aesthetic practices—took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century and intensified between 1890 and 1930, the period primarily identified with modernism. Burton Pike articulates this shift as a double movement: from ­stasis to flux, and from urban community as a representative of the city itself to the isolation of the individual within that urban space.6 From the mid-nineteenth century, “the crowd” in modernist literature became a metonym for the city, and a great deal of urban literature (as well as urban sociological study) is dedicated to the motif of the crowd in the modern city. One way of responding to the onslaught of the crowd, described by the sociologist Georg Simmel,7 is to become as indifferent to value as is the metropolis itself, and the challenge of the chaotic urban scene leads authors to develop innovative literary techniques. Another way of responding to the nervous stimuli of the city is embodied in ­Walter Benjamin’s famous description of the flâneur, who finds in the city streets a trigger for his own imagination and memory, and who makes urban life an object that is then internalized.8

Hebrew Modernism and the Urban Experience

Writers like Baudelaire, Flaubert, and their followers in the early twentieth century embody this move from an objective to a subjective view of the city, which is also the move from realism and naturalism to the variety of literary movements and practices we have come to know as modernism. In this process—at least in some versions of modernist literature—the city as a physical place gave way to the city as a state of mind.9 Urban space thus ceased to be merely an experiential domain and became a subject of modernist reflection. Bit by bit, urban space assumed the role of a psychological landscape, on which inner states are projected and where an actual event is always a psychological one as well. Thus, Peter Brooker articulates the task of the modernist artist who “writes the city” not only (or primarily) to find a way to somehow represent and convey the perplexing modern panorama of the city but rather “to render the shifting internal life of an individual consciousness, to present the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary.”10 According to Robert Alter, the way to understand how the urban experience impacts literary traditions is to examine the language of the modernist novel. In Alter’s account, the modernist breakthrough in narrative representation of the urban realm (which can be traced back to Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, published in 1869) was “to perceive the modern metropolis simultaneously as a locus of powerful, exciting, multifarious stimuli and as a spatial reality so vast and inchoately kinetic that it defied taxonomies and thematic definition.”11 As Alter points out, one decisive development in the novel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the practice of building narrative through the moment-by-moment experience—sensory, visceral, and mental—of the main character or characters. The fact that so much of the modernist representation of the city focuses on the interiority and inwardness of the protagonist, or “the perceiving subject” (which was a crucial part of the inward turn in modernist Hebrew fiction), is related to another central trope of modernism—“the stranger in the city.” Raymond Williams notes that “Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London, New York took on a new silhouette as the eponymous City of Strangers, the most appropriate locale for the art made by the restlessly mobile émigré or exile.”12 In his landmark essay, “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism,”

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Williams identifies the relationship between modernism and the metropolis not so much in the thematic realm but rather in the position of modernist artists and intellectuals within the changing cultural milieu of the metropolis: [T]he key cultural factor of the modernist shift is the character of the metropolis: in these general conditions, but then, even more decisively, in its direct effects on form. The most important general element of the innovations in form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis, and it cannot too often be emphasized how many of the major innovators were, in this precise sense, immigrants. At the level of theme, this underlies, in an obvious way, the elements of strangeness and distance, indeed of alienation, which so regularly form part of the repertory. But the decisive aesthetic effect is at a deeper level. Liberated or breaking from their national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practices.13

Thus, the restlessly mobile immigrant or exile is, in Williams’s view, both the paradigmatic writer and the protagonist of literary modernism. The conditions of the great polyglot metropolis enabled continuous motion across borders, the breaking of national or provincial cultures, and fertile interactions among different “native” languages. This is how “immigrants” and “exiles” became emblems of the modernist artistic universe. In the context of Jewish history and culture, it has long been recognized that Jewish modernity is essentially the product of a long and gradual process of Jewish encounters with modern urban and metropolitan culture (primarily in Europe and America but also in the Middle East).14 Important statistical data, including the well-known census in the Russian Empire from 1897, tells us that most Jews in the East European Pale of Settlement lived in urban environments. They resided in cities (from small towns to metropolitan centers) within largely rural agricultural areas. Murray Baumgarten writes that “city life offers a setting for the exploration of the historical ambiguities of Jewish experi-

Hebrew Modernism and the Urban Experience

ence. In the process of emancipation, the city is also the bridge from tradition to modernity.”15 If we formulate modern Jewry as “the people of the city,” one result is that inasmuch as the “restlessly mobile émigré or exile in the city” is turned into an emblem of modernism, we all too often perceive “the Jew” as a prototypically modernist figure.16 However, the history of modern Hebrew literature seems to embody an opposite version of modernism. We mostly associate Hebrew literature with what has been known as the “Zionist meta-plot,” which revolves around the tropes of territorialization, “negation of exile,” and the search for a national “home.”17 Seeing Hebrew literature through this trajectory is at least one of the reasons for the acute lack of research into the role of European cities in the development of Hebrew modernism.18 According to the standard historiography, Hebrew literature in the first half of the twentieth century moved rather smoothly from post-haskalah Odessa to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. ­Gershon Shaked, the Israeli scholar who has written the most comprehensive historiography of modern Hebrew fiction, echoes this common assumption: “to write in Hebrew implied support for the Zionist conviction that Jews could have no permanent home outside of Palestine.” Similarly, he maintains that “Hebrew emerged as the literary language of the Jews, and Eretz Israel as the center of the production and publication of Hebrew writing.”19 Shaked is surely aware of the Hebrew literary activity that blossomed in a variety of European centers and cities, but he views them solely in hindsight, from the vantage point of their “failure” and then destruction in World War II: “The Hebrew literary centers in the diaspora have been destroyed. It was a long and gloomy process: spiritual decline, physical destruction, followed by a vacuum which was never filled.”20 Zohar Shavit, who deals with these historical developments through structuralist methods and what is known as “polysystem theory,” is even more firm in her refusal to grant any significance to the Hebrew literary and cultural activity throughout Europe. She argues that the only “genuine” center of Hebrew literature in the twentieth century was Eretz Israel. On the other hand, she maintains, the centers or enclaves of Hebrew literature in Europe and America were in fact “dead” even before they were killed in the great violent sweep of the twentieth century.21

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Thus, whether seen from a structuralist or a historicist viewpoint, what we get is a linear and teleological account of the history and geography of Hebrew literature (from Galut to Eretz Israel). But what the accounts of Shaked, Shavit, and so many others conceal is a dizzying, and constantly shifting, array of urban centers, satellites, and enclaves of Hebrew literature in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe. Indeed, at the fin de siècle, there were two large urban centers of Hebrew literature in Eastern Europe. The most well known was in Odessa and the other was in Warsaw. Between 1900 and 1930, in addition to these two “centers,” there was a great deal of literary activity in other European cities that we need to consider as enclaves of Hebrew modernism: Homel, Lvov (Lemberg), Vilna, Kiev, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris, and other locations (including, of course, enclaves in Palestine and the United States that spun out of Europe). Despite the historical upheavals in these years, a challenging and fascinating Hebrew literature emerged, strengthened by a rich network linking all these disparate sites of creation. How could scholars have missed or ignored the potency of this urban realm for so long? I believe that part of the explanation stems from the peculiarity of modern Hebrew literature. It is a literature, after all, that developed “on the margins,” without a vernacular language and a territorial base. As a result, it is difficult to examine the role of these cities and centers with the terms we use to study the more established and “normal” national literatures. Hebrew literature (and this is equally true for Yiddish, but in a different way) sharply raises the question of how to define a “literary center.” Is it a general term for a literary school or group that develops in a specific location; is it the social arena for literary production, bringing together readers, writers, and publishers; or is it both? In short, how can we do justice to a literature without a center; produced by immigrants and exiles, who work alone or in small groups across many metropolitan centers; and whose readers are dispersed across an even broader swath of the globe? These questions are especially difficult in the context of Hebrew literature in the early decades of the twentieth century, because the writers and their audience were a small group and constituted a minority within a minority.22

Hebrew Modernism and the Urban Experience

Thus, many of the “typical” and “stable” elements of literary production in European cities are dynamic and unstable when applied to the history of Hebrew literature. For example, the important publishing house Shtybel and its journal Ha-tekufa (both crucial for the development of Hebrew modernism after World War I) were established in 1918 in Moscow and later moved to Warsaw, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Such frequent (and intercontinental) movement is hard to imagine for a comparable American or European publishing house. Likewise, it is impossible to understand the development of Hebrew modernism without looking at the provisional and often short-lived “little magazines” that were edited and published in many European cities: ­Ha-dor (“The Generation,” 1901–1902, 1904) and Reshafim (1908–1909) in Warsaw; Ha-me‘orer (“The Awakener,” 1905–1907) in London; Revivim (1908) and Shalechet (1911) in Lvov; Gvulot (“Borders,” 1918–1920) and Peret (1924) in Vienna; Rimon (“Pomegranate,” 1922–1924) in Berlin; and many others. These quick shifts, and equally sudden emergences and disappearances, are indeed abnormal and deeply destabilizing for cultural development. It is no surprise that historians of Hebrew literature have concluded that Hebrew literature of this period could not take root in Europe deeply enough to foster and sustain any “literary center.” However, if we shift our perspective slightly, the picture looks quite different. Scholars of international modernism remind us time and again how crucial these “little magazines” were for the development of modernism’s literary and artistic movements throughout Europe and America.23 These scholars correctly emphasize that the multiple and interfusing modernist movements—symbolism, impressionism, expressionism, futurism, acmeism, imagism, and so on—were “a product of an era of artistic migration and internationalism. They regularly came from those cities which were on, or were themselves, cultural frontiers [...] They came, too, from the clustering of migrant artists, in a time when willing and unwilling expatriations and exiles were common.”24 Thus, it is only by looking at the European cities of Hebrew modernism with a comparative approach, and in the context of international modernism, that one can account for the importance and the nature of the shifting centers, enclaves, and satellites of Hebrew literature.

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The European Cities of Modernist Hebrew Fiction

In this section of the book, I examine two European cities that were more or less the centers of Hebrew literature at the turn of the twentieth century—Odessa and Warsaw—and five other cities that should be considered as enclaves of Hebrew modernism: Homel, Lvov (Lemberg), London, Vienna, and Berlin. I chose these cities rather than others because they were crucial for the development of modernist Hebrew literary activity (especially fiction); because they were the loci of productive contacts among Hebrew, Yiddish, and other modernist literatures (in Russian, Polish, German, English, and other languages); and because the cities themselves served as a backdrop against which new modes of representation (primarily symbolist, impressionistic, and expressionistic) developed. My aim is to chart something that might be called a “geography of modernist Hebrew fiction” that has not yet been described. But what would this geography or spatial history look like? This is exactly the question asked in recent studies of modernism, such as in the works of Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker.25 They make clear that one way to render the spatial, geographical aspects of literary modernism would be a map, or an atlas with a series of maps. Such attempts can be found in Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel26 or in the section on modernism in Malcolm Bradbury’s The Atlas of Literature, which charts the world of modernist literature on a spatial axis.27 Bradbury and Mc­Farlane’s celebrated Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, and most other “guides” to modernism, chart similar maps (not necessarily cartographic ones) by examining the crucial role of the major cities that were the urban foci of modernist cultural and literary activity: Paris, London, Berlin, ­Vienna, Prague, St. Petersburg, New York, and Chicago.28 When we look at such atlases and guides—even the more recent ones that take into account Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—we notice immediately that the maps of Jewish (and more specifically Hebrew) modernism both overlap and radically differ from these Euro-American maps that take the major languages (English, French, and German, with a customary nod to Russian, Italian, and Scandinavian) as their reference point. But in fact, a third type of map—drawn from the perspective of “transnational modernism”—would provoke numerous (and essential) questions: how to distinguish between “the center” and “the

Hebrew Modernism and the Urban Experience

margins”; how to parse the influence of structures of power as they are reflected in differences of ethnicity, religion, class, and gender; and how to solve problems of visibility and access to means of cultural production. As David Harvey writes: The complex historical geography of modernism (a tale yet to be fully written and explained) makes it doubly difficult to interpret what exactly modernism was about. The tensions between internationalism and nationalism, between globalism and parochialist ethnocentrism, between universalism and class privileges, were never far from the surface.29

The spatial aspects of Jewish and Hebrew modernism inevitably force us to think in these terms. Hebrew and Yiddish writers at the beginning of the twentieth century lived and wrote “at the margins” in a very concrete, physical sense. Hebrew and Yiddish modernist literature was written, produced, and published in small frontier cities like Homel and Lvov (Lemberg) that are surely beyond the map of the major cities of European modernism. Significant Hebrew modernist literature was also produced at the margins and the edges of the metropolitan centers of European modernism, in the immigrant neighborhoods of cities like Vienna, Berlin, and London. Especially salient is the site of the “literary café,” which I see—borrowing from cultural geographer Edward Soja—as a “thirdspace,” beyond the dichotomy between “real” and “imaginary” space.30 Hebrew and Yiddish modernist writers gravitated to these literary cafés in European cities as spaces that became substitutes for a real “home,” community, or the traditional “house of study” which they left behind them. In these literary cafés they worked, wrote, met, and exchanged ideas with each other and with modernist writers and artists from all over Europe. These spaces were never pure in any way. The literary cafés could be imagined as a relatively safe haven of literature and were not exempted from mass consumerism and the commodification of culture. In a similar way, they were never purely “Jewish spaces,” and at the same time they transcended the “locality” of the specific cities in which they were located.31 Examining the spatial position of Hebrew writers within the European cities inevitably involves paying attention to issues of center and margins, and Hebrew modernist writers were both at the center and

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at the margins. Thus, the modernist Vienna of the late Habsburg Empire, of the Inner-Ring, Oper, Secession Building, and Café Central, is surely both different from, and similar to, the Vienna of the second district of Leopoldstadt, an area which gained the nickname Mazzesinsel (“Matzoh Island”) because of the large population of East European immigrants.32 The expressionist Berlin of the Weimar period, of the Kurfürstendamm, Tiergarten, and Romanisches Café, is both different from and similar to the Hebrew and Yiddish modernism of Scheunenviertel, the “Jewish quarter” of the same city.33 Modernist London of Bloomsbury and Russell Square is both similar and radically different from the Hebrew modernism of Whitechapel in the East End—a point of arrival for many immigrants, including a very large Jewish contingent. The East End of London was well known as a hotbed for Jewish and immigrant culture and equally notorious for its crowded slums, prostitution, and crime.34 My intention is neither to suggest that Hebrew writers were necessarily confined to these areas (some were, some were not), nor to glorify these sites and turn them into imaginary Edens of Hebrew literary activity. At the same time, one can hardly think of better places than Whitechapel, Scheunenviertel, and Leopoldstadt to capture the modernist urban experience of the “eponymous City of Strangers,” the experience that Raymond Williams and many others consider as defining the literary modernist metropolis. These were the places to which many Hebrew and Yiddish writers in this period ventured in order to explore the metropolis and to “write it” in a variety of new symbolist, decadent, impressionist, and expressionist modes. En route, sometimes reluctantly and other times self-consciously, these artists created a powerful modernist fiction.

Tw o Odessa and Warsaw A Tale of Two Centers?

At the end of the nineteenth century, modern Hebrew literature was a relatively young phenomenon (this is true especially for Hebrew fiction, since the first Hebrew novel was not published until 1853). Despite its short life, two very different literary centers were soon established, one in Odessa and the other in Warsaw. But how in particular did these cities function as literary centers? In what ways did the urban (Jewish) history and the urban space of these cities determine or influence the nature of the literary activity? What kind of interaction occurred in these cities between literature in Jewish and non-Jewish languages (Russian, Polish, and others)? How did authors engage these cities in their prose (if they did at all), and what kind of literary representations of these urban centers do we get as a result? Finally, and most significant for the context of this study, what was the role of these cities in the development of Hebrew modernism?

The “Odessa Style” and Modernist Hebrew Fiction In the early 1940s, the Hebrew and Yiddish writer Yitzhak Dov Berkovitz wrote in his memoirs that “Odessa, with its maskilim and Zionist activists [...] glimmers from the past like an unforgettable childhood summer.” But Berkovitz also noted that the Hebrew authors of Odessa constituted a closed and isolated group: “The writers of Odessa lived on an enchanted far-off island, strolling among the frivolous, fun-loving Odessa crowd; they viewed the Odessans [...] as if they were hospitable yet spiritually removed natives.”1 To be

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sure, these remarks are tinged by a sense of nostalgia (something that “glimmers from the past”), but they also capture what was true and unique to the spirit of Odessa, both as a city and as a Hebrew literary and cultural center. Steven Zipperstein and others have demonstrated the crucial importance of Odessa for the creation of modern Jewish culture, as well as commented on the peculiarity of the city, its newness, and its “wild” nature.2 Indeed, Odessa, established only in 1794, was in the nineteenth century a new frontier city. It was the capital of Russia’s “wild south” on the shores of the Black Sea, with handsome streets laid out by Italian architects, and a harbor from which shiploads of grain sailed to every Mediterranean port. The city was inhabited by a unique ethnic mélange of Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Greeks, Moldavians, Turks, Bulgarians, Armenians, French, Italians, and others. Odessa also had a large Jewish presence; on the eve of World War I, Jews numbered 165,000, a third of the city’s population. Even more important for our purposes was the fact that nineteenth-century Odessa was perceived as the Russian Empire’s city of new Jewish freedom. This freedom was represented in a highly ambivalent way in the popular imagination. To live in Odessa was to live, as the Yiddish popular dictum indicates, vi got in odes (“like God in Odessa”), but the city was simultaneously imagined as the place where “the fires of hell burn for forty miles around it.”3 This double image of the city is highly significant because there seem to have been two very different “Jewish ­Odessas”: God’s Odessa and hellish Odessa, the Odessa of Ahad Ha‘am and the Odessa of Isaac Babel, the Odessa of “the sages” and the Odessa of Benya Krik, the Jewish gangster. How did these images develop, and what was Odessa for the modernist young writers who burst onto the Hebrew literary scene in a number of cities and urban centers during the first decade of the twentieth century? The origins of the Jewish population in Odessa go back to its establishment, when merchants and workers left their families behind and came to the city to find their luck. They were supplemented later by maskilim from Galicia who brought with them secular education and a bourgeois sense of respectability. This new Jewish population of Odessa created educational and public institutions, as well as an intellectual

Odessa and Warsaw

Figure 4. City of Odessa, Eruv boundaries. (Source: The National Library of Israel, Shapell Family Digitization Project, Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Geography, Historic Cities Project)

elite that had no parallel in the Russian Empire of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1860s, teachers, public figures, and writers who had absorbed the spirit of the haskalah flocked to the city. In Odessa, the Jewish intellectual elite could follow a more open and secular lifestyle and, no less important, one that was actually accepted and appreciated by at least part of the public. The members of this elite circle in Odessa were all immigrants from different locations around the Pale of Settlement. Their diverse origins endowed them with a sort of pan-Jewish authority. Peretz Smolen­skin,

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­ lexander Zederbaum, Simeon Dubnov, Simeon Frug, and Sholem A Yankev Abramovitz (Mendele Moycher Sforim) were among the maskilim who called Odessa home, and it was here that they developed Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers (like Hamelitz and Kol-Mevaser), research institutions, and innovative and semi-secular educational institutions. Odessa was also the place in which they produced a significant body of literature.4 In the 1880s, when the Hibbat-Zion (“Lovers of Zion”) movement emerged, Odessa became its organizational and intellectual center. Leading Zionist and Hebrew writers gravitated to the city: Y. L. ­Pinsker, M. L. Leilinblum, and Ahad Ha‘am all settled in Odessa. Thus, by the last decade of the nineteenth century, the city’s Jewish culture and institutions were already widely known. Hebrew writers like Yehoshua Ch. Ravnitzky, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Simcha BenZion, and Elhanan Levinsky longed to live in Odessa because of the dual sense of lightness and heaviness: a promise of social and intellectual freedom, together with a sense of order and respectability. Indeed, the young Bialik, fleeing the Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania, went to Odessa in 1890 precisely because of these promises, and quickly became a member of a circle that was soon to be known as chachmey Odessa (the “sages of Odessa”). Odessa became famous in the history and geography of Hebrew and Yiddish literature by the virtue of these “sages” who allegedly created the Odessa nusach (the “Odessa style”). This is a vague term that connects quite diverse writings of different personalities who subscribed to varying ideologies. Yet, for many (including Bialik himself, who cultivated this idea with zeal), the nusach was a historically meaningful term. In order to construct the notion of an “Odessa style” it was necessary to connect Ahad Ha‘am’s doctrine of “spiritual Zionism” with the “mimetic” and highly allusive Hebrew style that Abramovitz developed in the 1880s and 1890s and the national poetry that Bialik wrote at the turn of the twentieth century. While these various aspects of the “Odessa style” were quite different, they were marked by certain common features. The style was soon associated with a sense of “classicism.” As Ya‘acov Fichman later put it, “everything was marked with a classic stamp, a classicism which meant: clar-

Odessa and Warsaw

ity, structure, order, and lack of haste.”5 More recently, Dan Miron described the common features of the “Odessa style” as “the importance attached to clarity, the focus on the collective, sympathetic criticism, continuity and historicity.”6 The sages of Odessa also controlled the successful publishing activity of Hebrew literature in the city. Ravnitzky edited and published the journals Kaveret (“Beehive,” 1890) and Pardes (“Orchard,” 1892–1896). In 1886 Ahad Ha‘am established the journal Ha-shiloah that became the most important and prestigious Hebrew journal of the time, later edited by the Odessans Bialik and Yosef Klausner. In the early 1900s Bialik founded, together with Ravnitzky, Ben Zion, and Levinsky, a Hebrew publishing house, Moriah, which issued Hebrew “classics,” books of Hebrew education, and some original Hebrew writings.

Figure 5. The sages of Odessa. (Source: Bialik House Archive, Tel Aviv)

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For some of the young aspiring writers of Hebrew, the sense of classicism created by the sages of Odessa was almost hypnotizing. Fichman described his arrival in Odessa as a young poet from the province in these terms: In April 1901, after a night of traveling in a crowded railroad carriage, I arrived in Odessa for the first time [...] Almost the entire night I had stood by the carriage’s open window [...] in an elated mood. I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t really want to. Tomorrow I would see Odessa and its great men! [...] I realized that I really was going to see them [...] If Bialik, Mendele and Ahad Ha‘am were not there, there would be no point to my going to Odessa.7

The sense of elation of the young Fichman was genuine and the reasons for his mood are clear. And yet, as early as 1901, the period which Fichman describes so vividly, Odessa had already lost much of its appeal for the young writers who would create Hebrew modernist literature a few years later. To be sure, Odessa did not really decline as a center of Jewish and Hebrew culture until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and the subsequent declaration of Hebrew as a “Zionist and reactionary language.” However, for many of the young Hebrew writers Odessa became less attractive in spite of, or maybe because of, its centrality and special cultural status. Some writers who created the modernist revolution in Hebrew fiction, writers like Yosef Chaim Brenner and Gershon Shofman, did not even visit the city—in spite of the fact that they left the shtetls of their childhood at a very early age. Others, like Uri Nissan Gnessin, Ya‘acov Shteinberg, and even Fichman himself felt that a short visit there was quite enough, and they moved on to Warsaw or other European cities. This is because during the first decade of the twentieth century, the Hebrew center in Odessa came to be seen as a place that belonged to the past. For these young Hebrew writers, Odessa had become the city that spoke the “vocabulary of yesterday.”8 This perception grew in part from Odessa’s association with Ahad Ha‘am and his worldview, as well as with the very notion of a normative nusach and its authority. In fact, it was the “respectability” and strong sense of classicism and authority that repelled many Hebrew writers, who found the cultural atmosphere of Odessa quite stifling. Ahad Ha‘am’s philosophy and ideology were rooted in nineteenth-

Odessa and Warsaw

century scientific positivism and the political liberalism of thinkers like Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill.9 In the world of the young Hebrew writers in Europe, this positivism was gradually replaced by the anti-rationalistic and anti-positivist thought of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Lev Shestov, as well as the writers and thinkers of contemporary Russian and German symbolism, decadence, and impressionism. Ahad Ha‘am’s view of a normative Hebrew literature, and the idea that it must deal with Jewish “themes” and collectivity, seemed too narrow for the young writers, who found Berdichevsky’s antinomian thought (as well as his experimental poetics) much more attractive.10 Equally important was their rejection of the notion that Hebrew prose must follow the path created by Abramovitz’s nusach. This idea of ­mimetic verisimilitude of “realistic” fiction written in an erudite and perfectly balanced Hebrew—which Bialik, for example, followed faithfully in his stories—was not seen by the creators of Hebrew modernism to be normative or even to be the last word in the development of Hebrew prose. Brenner, Gnessin, Shofman, Baron, Nomberg, Shteinberg, and their younger contemporaries were determined to carve new paths in Hebrew fiction at odds with the so-called Odessa style.11 In terms of literary engagement with Odessa and fictional representations of the cityscape, it is possible to point to a parallel development. In spite of Odessa’s attraction for the writers who were considered its “sages,” most of them did not attempt to give sustained literary expression to the city in their writings.12 To be sure, there are some fictional representations of Odessa by writers who lived there for short or long periods. The most important text is probably Shtey ha-ketzavot (“The Two Extremes,” 1888), the maskilic novel by Reuven Asher Braudes. This work, considered the first urban novel written in Hebrew, moves between a small fictional shtetl and the city of Odessa to tell the story of a young hasid who comes to Odessa and is transformed.13 However, it is difficult to find in Hebrew the kind of modernist literary engagement with Odessa found in the works of writers in the Russian language (many of them Jewish), such as Isaac Babel, Yuri Olesha, Valentin ­Kataev, Evgeni Petrov, Ilya Ilf, Eduard Bagritzki, and Vladimir Jabot­ insky in the post–World War I period. Isaac Babel, in particular, made Odessa the city that looms large in his modernist literary imagination.14

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The European Cities of Modernist Hebrew Fiction

The situation was much different with Hebrew literature. Bialik, the foremost Hebrew poet of the period, did not write much about the city in his poems and stories, even though he lived and worked there for almost three decades.15 His lyrical poetry and realist stories were fused with a sense of yearning for his childhood years, which he spent not only at the cheyder but also in the pools, rivers, and groves around the towns of Volhynia. Bialik idealized the enchanted hours he spent romping in the dazzling light of the fields and in the secret shade of the forests. When, later in his life, Bialik was asked why he did not write about the sea—the Black Sea of Odessa—he answered that only “the landscape of childhood” is inscribed in a poet’s mind. The sea did not make a strong impression on me, because when I was a child, I didn’t see the sea and my heart did not grow close to it. This is different from the river, which found a place in my heart in my childhood years. The forest and the prairies are close to my heart because I grew up there. There was a little sand dune by the river and it pleased me, and seemed to me like the mythical desert of the ancient Israelites. Today, I still like the sand more than the sea.16

Even Abramovitz, the celebrated “grandfather” of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, who lived and worked in Odessa from 1881 until his death in 1917, did not write much about the city which he loved and which cherished him so much. When he created a fictionalized Odessa—sometimes called Shichor, a reference to the Black (shachor in Hebrew) Sea—it was mainly to emphasize the foreignness of the city as a modern urban foil to the fictional shtetl that was the real focus of his writing. An interesting example of describing Odessa is found in Abramovitz’s updated version (1889) of the novel Fishke the Lame, as well as in the Hebrew version of the novel Sefer ha-kabtzanim (“The Book of Beggars,” 1901). After Fishke is forced to flee from the town of Glupsk/Kisalon, he arrives in Odessa and this is what he says: What can I say, [...] except I own that Odessa is a fine enough place in its way, I suppose. Though more’s the pity there are no people in it. Mind, I’m not saying that there are no folks actually living in it. Sure they are, quite a few in fact. Only they are not such as I would care to call people; anyway not such as know right from wrong. I mean, can you honestly call any of these gentry respectable people? Dast decent

Odessa and Warsaw

folks dress that way, dast they live that way? Go on Yontl, take a good look at them folks walking on that boulevard. Look at them swells parading about with females on their arm. Why it is plumb shameful! Jewish gents which actually shave; females who have left their hair to grow, not even bothering to cover it [...] Folks must be right to say that the hell-fires burn for forty leagues round Odessa.17

Fishke is bewildered by the foreignness of Odessa, and Abramovitz is using the total disorientation of the main character of his novel in order to estrange Odessa as a modern city and as a center of modern Jewish society (where he is located himself). This is true, too, of most other works by Abramovitz. With the exception of his late biographical writing Ba-yamim ha-hem and Shloyme reb Khayims, the fictional universe of Abramovitz’s Mendele could not withstand the pressures of the modern city.18 Somewhat similar is what Sholem Aleichem (who lived in Odessa between 1891 and 1893) does with Menakhem Mendl and his impressions of commercial Odessa, its stock market, and the famous cafés of Odessa (like Café Fankoni). Menakhem Mendl is berated by his wife, Sheyne-Sheyndl, for running away from Kasrilevke to Odessa: I know what you are up to. I know what your business is, and all about that Odessa of yours, where there is no God, where people desecrate the Sabbath or holidays and the cantor shaves his beard—may all my troubles descend on his head! From that hellish city and those sinners and crooks, you ought to stay away like the plague.19

Indeed, with a certain degree of simplification, it could be claimed that for Abramovitz, Sholem Aleichem, and the entire generation of pre-modernist Jewish writers, the main concern of their fiction is the precarious position of the Jew of the fictionalized shtetls of Glupsk/ Kisalon, Kabtsansk/Kabtziel, and Kasrilevke, rather than the city of Odessa. Although Odessa gave them the freedom to write and to create modern culture in both Hebrew and Yiddish, the city itself was beyond the horizon of their literary representation. Moreover, most modernist Hebrew writers, even those who visited Odessa or even lived there, did not attempt to represent the cityscape in their fictional writing. There were a few exceptions of modernist fictional texts that take place in Odessa, such as those written by Ya‘acov

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Rabinovitz and Eliezer Shteinman, who lived in Odessa for some time. In the interwar period, these writers published modernist novels such as Esther Hayut (1922) and Neve Kayitz (“A Summer Retreat” 1934).20 Shteinman’s Esther Hayut—perhaps the only modernist Odessan novel in Hebrew—tells the story of a young female protagonist who arrives in the big city from a small provincial town following her older sister. In Odessa, she meets the Russian man Adolf Grigorovitz who is “a native of Odessa, and the loyal son of the city he loved so much.” Here, the sexual and urban plots, told by a narrator who adopts Esther’s point of view, intersect in ways that are reminiscent of the fictional texts of Brenner, Shofman, Gnessin, and Fogel. But while Shteinman’s novel— written after he left the city for Warsaw—gives us some startling Hebrew portrayals of Odessa as an urban and mental space, it is difficult to place it in the history of Hebrew modernism. It was written in a time in which the Hebrew and Yiddish center in Odessa had all but vanished, and the modernist activity moved to places like Vienna, Berlin, or Palestine. In retrospect, these novels (and the writers who created them) must be seen as epigones of the modernist fiction written in other cities during the years 1900–1930.

Warsaw: The City of Youth The other large and important center of Hebrew literature in this period, one that offered a different alternative to Odessa, was Warsaw. In the nineteenth century, Warsaw became the capital of “Congress Poland,” the truncated autonomous state of Poland ruled by the Russian Tsar; the city in turn evolved into a major administrative and cultural center, the focus of Polish semi-independent political and economic life. Although the history of the Jewish community in the city goes back to the fifteenth century, the community itself became large and important only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Unlike Vilna and Odessa, it was not a large center of Hasidism or haskalah, nor was it home to great yeshivot. Yet, by the turn of the twentieth century, Warsaw had become the city with the largest and the fastest-growing Jewish population in Europe at the time: from 72,000 in 1864 to 210,500

Odessa and Warsaw

in 1897 (33.7 percent of the population), and then to 337,000 in 1914 (38.1 percent of the population). This astonishing growth resulted not only from a natural increase in the population and the move from the small towns and villages of Congress Poland to the capital, but also from the migration of many Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement.21 From the second half of the nineteenth century, Warsaw became a center of Jewish economic activity, and part of this activity was a dynamic literary community, which flourished in particular between 1880 and 1891 and again in the interwar period.22 The city was host to printers, publishing houses, and scores of journalists. In fact, by the end of the nineteenth century Warsaw distinguished itself as the world’s largest Jewish publishing center (to be surpassed later only by New York City). Three Hebrew daily newspapers—Ha-yom, Ha-tzfirah, and Ha-tzofeh— and no less than six Yiddish dailies were edited and published in Warsaw. These newspapers gave considerable space to literary endeavors, but the city was also home to a number of literary journals like He-asif, Luach Ahiasaf, Ha-dor, and Reshafim, as well as the first Hebrew children’s magazine, Olam katan. Furthermore, two publishing houses issued Hebrew books: Ahiasaf and Tushiya. The person behind many of these endeavors was Ben Avigdor (the pen name of Avraham Leib Shalkovitch), a Hebrew writer and editor who truly revolutionized Hebrew publishing with his concept of sifrey agora (“penny books”), a series of economically priced books, as well as Tushiya’s series Biblioteka ivrit (“The Hebrew Library”), which was aimed at a wide Jewish readership.23 Many young Hebrew modernist writers—among them Shofman, Brenner, Gnessin, Shteinberg, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, and Dvora Baron—gravitated to Warsaw in the first years of the twentieth century in order to work on one of the Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers and magazines (the young Gnessin, for example, worked at Ha-tzfira), and to publish their first books. At least for a while, it seemed that lively Warsaw could offer an attractive and younger alternative to Odessa. But Warsaw was not home only to new young talents. It boasted established and important writers as well. One of the most prominent was Yitzhak Lieb Peretz, who wrote in both Yiddish and Hebrew, and who was famous for encouraging and guiding young writers. David Frishman, not only an important Hebrew and Yiddish writer but also

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Figure 6. Cover of the journal Ha-dor, Warsaw, 1901.

the most respected Hebrew critic of the time, made his home in Warsaw. Nachum Sokolov and Ben Avigdor were prominent writers and editors. Nevertheless, Warsaw was unconstrained by “sages,” or its own nusach, or the normative authority and weight of Odessa’s literati. As such, young writers could experiment more freely in the Polish capital.

Odessa and Warsaw

Fichman, who reflected upon his move from Odessa to Warsaw in 1903, aptly expressed the difference between the two cities as centers of Hebrew literature: When I came to Odessa a few years before, I was anxious with anticipation. The great men of Odessa [...] projected prominence and a sense of awe [...] Only thinking about them made me apprehensive. In Warsaw, on the other hand, I didn’t know exactly where and to whom I was ­going. Peretz, Frishman, Sokolov they were simultaneously dear and remote [...] My heart was not focused on specific personalities, but on the city itself; the city of the young Hebrew literature, the place of Tushiya, Ahihasaf, Ha-tzofe and Ha-tzfira. The editorial office of Olam Katan attracted me like a green island. In the very first day, I met Shtienberg and Shneior, who like me came from the south, attracted to the boisterous literary center. In a few days, I was a regular in the tiny and grubby café of [Yehezkel] Kotik. There we sat on a cup of coffee with Sholem Asch and Avrom Reisen [...] the bohemian life attracted all of us to the Polish metropolis [...] the climate here was more “western,” more modern, and at the same time was more accommodating to Jewish, Hasidic symbolism.24

Fichman’s description captures many important elements of Warsaw as a literary center from the point of view of a young Hebrew writer. He emphasizes the attractiveness of its lack of authority, the semi-­bohemian life with its cafés and coteries, the fertile connections between Hebrew and Yiddish, and the opportunities for literary work that the city offered. Indeed, Warsaw was the “city of youth” for many modernist Hebrew writers and probably their first encounter with a large metropolitan center. However, many of them only “passed through” Warsaw. They lived and worked in the city for some time (a few months or years), but did not stay there.25 The result is a vast difference in how Yiddish and Hebrew literature developed in Warsaw. Yiddish took deep root in Warsaw and a rich literary and cultural activity developed in the city, including a number of significant modernist groups, until the destruction of Jewish Warsaw during World War II.26 The Hebrew activity in Warsaw, on the other hand, had begun to decline already around the revolutionary and crisisridden years of 1905–1907. The numerous attempts to reconstruct the

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Hebrew center in Warsaw during the 1910s and in the interwar period were only partially successful.27 Perhaps because the young modernist Hebrew writers did not live in Warsaw for long, it is hard to find significant literary representations of the city in their writings. In general, literary representations of Warsaw in Hebrew literature are few and far between. We can find a number of individual stories by Peretz, Frishman, and even Avramovitz (who called Warsaw “Be’er Sheva” in a Hebrew rearrangement of the consonants of its Polish name!) that take place in Warsaw. But as the Hebrew critic David Kna‘ani, who was born in Warsaw, writes, “Warsaw has not been very lucky. In Hebrew literature there are only two literary works that describe the city.”28 Hebrew modernist writers like Gershon Shofman wrote while in Warsaw a few short stories, but there is no real echo of the cityscape in them. Gnessin wrote his first poems and essays in Warsaw, but not any of his path-breaking modernist stories and novellas.29 Gnessin returned to Warsaw in 1912, but he was very ill, and he only managed to translate a few stories from German and Scandinavian languages before his untimely death.30 The only Hebrew and Yiddish fiction writer of this generation who lived in Warsaw until his death was Nomberg, who probably was the most “Warsawian” Hebrew writer. Nomberg described the urban space of Warsaw from the point of view of lonely male characters in stories like Yitzhak Toybkof (1903) and Fliegelman (1905), written almost simultaneously in Hebrew and Yiddish during the early years of the twentieth century, when Warsaw was still a center of Hebrew literature. However, after 1908, Nomberg found his place (perhaps not surprisingly in light of the decline of Warsaw as a center for Hebrew literature) as part of Warsaw’s parallel but distinct Yiddish literary circle.31 From the younger generation of Hebrew modernists, most notable is Eliezer Shteinman, who lived in Warsaw from 1912 to 1919, and became active—for a short time—in the attempts to regenerate the Hebrew literary center in Warsaw after World War I (he edited the journal Kolot in Warsaw in 1922–1924). Shteinman wrote an intriguing, rambling, and unfinished modernist novel entitled Skhor-skhor (“Around and Around,” 1918–1919). The novel describes the literary-bohemian atmosphere of Warsaw (thinly disguised in the novel as the city of W.)

Odessa and Warsaw

from the point of view of the protagonist, the writer Pesach Shalit, as he wanders around the city.32 Shteinman’s attempt to give literary expression to Warsaw in a modernist mode is quite exceptional, as was his short-lived journal. Like other Hebrew writers before him, he left Warsaw before there was a chance for his literary activities to germinate. It is impossible to give a conclusive answer to the question of why most Hebrew writers left Warsaw or why, for most writers, the city did not prompt them to give a literary expression to Warsaw’s urban landscapes. Some writers left in 1905 during the crisis of the Hebrew and Yiddish publishing industry.33 For others, the distance from Russia’s towns and cities and from the Russian language and its literature might have been difficult. Some early modernist writers might have felt like Gershon Shofman, who was deeply disappointed with the reception of his first stories by the more established voices (Peretz and Frishman, to name a few) in the Jewish literary community of Warsaw.34 The fact is that most Hebrew writers who created modernist fiction in the years to come left Warsaw and moved elsewhere, beyond the two centers of Odessa and Warsaw. They continued to live a life of wanderings that was often harsh, but nonetheless quite constructive for the creation of modernist Hebrew fiction. A few writers went to study in universities in Central and Western Europe; others were conscripted to the Russian army, and during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) fled the army and the Russian Empire altogether. The diversity of these wanderings was essential for the development of modernist writings. When we look at the corpus of Hebrew modernism in Europe and beyond the continent, perhaps it is no surprise that the centers of Odessa and Warsaw were not places where modernist Hebrew writers found inspiration or developed in their urban writing. Though both cities were profoundly important as centers of modern Jewish culture and of Jewish literature at the turn of the twentieth century, it was this role in the mainstream of Jewish life that rendered them not particularly suitable for modernist endeavors. The writers of modernist Hebrew fiction were nomads, after all. As we shall see, their literary achievements were created either in enclaves or “satellites” of Hebrew literary activity in small cities like Homel and Lvov, or in large Central and Western European metropolises like London, Vienna, and Berlin.

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Th re e Homel and Lvov The Significance of the Frontiers

54

It so happened that some of the first works of Hebrew modernist fiction created during the early years of the twentieth century were not generated in the large centers of Jewish culture like Odessa, Warsaw, or Vilna but in Homel (Gomel in Russian). This city was indeed an unlikely repository for modernist literature, but the Jewish history of the city, along with the life circumstances of a number of Hebrew writers and intellectuals who happened to live and create there, made this city an extremely important—though largely unrecognized—location on the map of Hebrew literature. Homel is a relatively small city that was then the capital of the ­Mogilev region, and later the capital of the Gomel region. The city is situated on the Sozh River, a tributary of the Dnieper, north of Kiev, in the southeast part of modern-day Belarus. Jewish settlement in Homel dates back to 1537, when the city was annexed to Lithuania, and it is even mentioned in R. N. Hanover’s book Yeven Metzula (“Mire of the Deep,” 1653). In the nineteenth century, the city and the entire area was the center of the Lubavitz Hasidic movement (the town Lubavitz itself is in the vicinity of Homel). In this period, the Jewish community in Homel grew significantly, and by 1897, the Jewish population had grown to 20,835, representing 56.4 percent of the total population.1 Between 1897 and 1910, the Jewish population more than doubled to 48,000.2 (In order to gain a perspective, it should be noted that in Ottoman Palestine around the same time the Jewish population was around 60,000.)3 The increase was created by both natural growth and the rapid process of immigration and deruralization of the surrounding towns. By the end of the nineteenth century there

Homel and Lvov

were thirty synagogues in the city, including a great synagogue built by Count Rumyantsev. Homel is known in the annals of modern Jewish history mainly because of the wave of violence that took place there in 1903, five months after another notorious pogrom in Kishinev.4 Of course, there was much more to Homel in this period than the pogrom and Jewish selfdefense. Indeed, in comparison with the great metropolitan areas, Homel was just a small urban center, but during the first decade of the twentieth century it bustled with Jewish economic and social activity. Very quickly it became also a kind of Jewish ideological and cultural marketplace. In 1921, the Zionist activist and writer Mordechai Ben Hillel Ha-Cohen described Homel in these terms: This city, which sits in the middle of the Polesia forests [on the East European Plain], joins the Ukraine and White Russia, and two railroad lines meet within it, the larger artery of which connects it to the Dnieper River—this Homel became a great hub for a variety of public movements [...] Our young people aspired to live in this city, which was full of applause, assemblies, and flocks of young men and women

Figure 7. The City of Homel, circa 1910. (Courtesy of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

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of all persuasions. And for Brenner [...] Homel became a great object of his desire, the urban “point” that seemed for a young man of sensitive soul as the center of the world.5

Indeed, in spite of its small size, Homel teemed with all the major political and ideological movements of the day. Hasidism, which was so dominant in the city during the nineteenth century, was still very strong, and the city prided itself on a large Hasidic yeshiva (founded by R. Issac Halevi Epstein, 1780–1857) that belonged to the Lubavitz movement. But by the turn of the twentieth century, Hasidism was supplemented by Bundism, Socialism, Zionism, territorialism, and other Jewish nationalisms of every shade and type. All these movements, and the bustling cultural activity they birthed, attracted young Jews from small towns across Ukraine and Belarus like Pochep and Kormi. Bundist and Socialist circles flourished in Homel; one analysis of the city’s labor movement argues that the many cultural circles in Homel produced a worker-intelligentsia “which stood on a higher level than the masses, which was well acquainted with the misery of the workers’ situation; thus appeared the first agitators who influenced the masses.” 6 Some early publications of the Bund such as Der Kampf (“The Struggle”) were edited and published in Homel from 1900. According to some testimonies, Yosef Chaim Brenner was heavily involved in the editing of this journal (for a short time he was the main editor), and even published there stories and articles in Yiddish.7 Homel was also a center of Zionism, a place of home and work for important leaders who would go on to influence future generations of Zionists. It was also a center of Hebraism, and with the exception of Odessa, perhaps the most radical Hebraist center in the Pale of Settlement. Methodologies of “Hebrew in Hebrew” were developed there by figures such as Yisrael Yehuda Adler, and the idea that Hebrew should be the spoken language not only in primary and upper schools but even in kindergartens emerged from Homel. Both Yitzhak Alterman (Natan Alterman’s father) and Yehiel Halpern (father of the poet Yonatan Ratosh and the linguist Uzi Ornan), who eventually created the Hebrewspeaking kindergarten, were educated as “radical Hebraists” in Homel.8 This mixture of Hasidism, Socialism, Zionism, and radical Hebraism was very attractive to the young writers who came to Homel from small

Homel and Lvov

provincial towns, and the city emerged as a breeding ground for some of the most important early Hebrew modernists.9 Personal circumstances—everything from the search for Hebrew teaching in schools, studying as “external” students, to service in the czar’s army—brought to Homel during these years an extraordinary group of Hebrew and Yiddish writers and thinkers. At different points between 1899 and 1905, the following remarkable group called Homel home: Hillel Zeitlin, Uri Nissan Gnessin, Brenner, Z. Aaharnson (Anochi), the brothers Eliezer and Moshe Hofshtein, Shimon Bichovsky, and Gershon Shofman. It was in Homel that these Hebrew writers and intellectuals read and fiercely debated the thought of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Russian existential-symbolist thinker Lev Shestov. Thus, Hillel Zeitlin writes in his memoirs that “our circle in Homel was Nietzschean, but we understood Nietzsche’s thought in a totally original and slightly strange way.”10 In Homel they also zealously read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and the latest Russian symbolist story or poem that came from Moscow or St. Petersburg. These writers followed with great interest the ideological debates of the Zionist and Socialist movements as well as developments in Hebrew and Yiddish literature and culture. At the same time, since they were slightly removed from both Odessa and Warsaw, the “Homel circle” could create a kind of critical distance and a sense of independence, mixed with an atmosphere of shared exploration that proved essential for literary breakthroughs. Gershon Shofman arrived in Homel on active service in the Russian army after spending some time in Warsaw. He described the sense of comradeship and mutual respect among these young writers: Nearly three years, among the best of my life, were spent “between its [Homel’s] walls,” that is, between its army camps, made more pleasant by friends-brothers in the city itself, during my free hours. It was a sublime moment when I was visited at my base by U. N. Gnessin and Z. Y. Anochi, whom I had not known before. Anochi wondered: “Are you the one who wrote the story “Yona”? We continued to meet thereafter in the home of the Hofensteins [...] the noble house on Mogilev Street, number 15, with two brothers and a younger sister who played a major role in my life, for which I must be grateful to them still [...] Hovering in the atmosphere was also the spirit of Y. Ch. Brenner, who

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had lived in Homel a short time before, and who had also been serving in the army then, in the city of Oryol [...] The image of Hillel Zeitlin, standing with me on the street a few days after the violence [the infamous Homel pogrom], is fresh in my memory. Zeitlin, thirty years old, pale and shocked and searching for answers.11

The strong sense of literary and intellectual community Shofman described is echoed by others, and emphasizes the difference some of these writers felt between Homel and the more recognized centers of Jewish life and culture. Beyond these differences in community, a powerful—but creatively productive—rift evolved between the Hebrew educational and Zionist establishment and the literary group of the Homel circle. The nature of this clash offers a revealing window onto the strange dynamics through which a modernistic Hebrew poetics emerged. On one hand, since the city attracted Hebrew teachers for its educational institutions, many aspiring Hebrew writers were drawn to it. One of the attractions was simply the opportunity to make ends meet by teaching Hebrew. Their work and Hebrew writing were valued by Hebraists and Zionists such as Yitzhak Alterman, who not only admired Hebrew writers and intellectuals but also established contacts with many of them.12 On the other hand, Homel’s literary group was considered not “­Zionistic” enough for many of these Hebrew teachers and political activists, as well as out of sync with the activists’ rather conservative literary taste. Needless to say, the young writers who lived in Homel saw it in exactly the reverse way. Brenner, in his second short novel ­Mi-saviv la-nekuda (“Around the Point,” 1904), described the educational establishment (embodied in the fictional teacher-writer-principal David Shendelansky) with scathing sarcasm. Brenner thought that the local Hebrew teachers and activists were provincial and lacked real education or intellectual curiosity. They are described in the novel as people who are “locked” in their zealous Zionist and Hebraist ideologies, which “protect them” from the inevitable doubts and suffering of an authentic spiritual life. Thus, Hebrew writers like Zeitlin, Brenner, Gnessin, and Shofman were surely drawn to the “Hebraist” center of Homel. It was important for their linguistic and literary development as Hebrew writers. At the same time, the sense of ideological remove

Homel and Lvov

from the overly Zionist and conservative Hebraists pushed these writers to deal with Hebrew and emerging ideologies with a complex, selfconscious irony.13 In contrast to Odessa and Warsaw, many of the Hebrew writers who lived in Homel represented the city in their fiction. Gnessin wrote about Homel in short stories like Jenya (1904), and in the novella ­Beterm (“Beforehand,” 1908), which takes place in the area between Kiev, Homel, and the town of Pochep. Shofman wrote about the city in a number of short stories, such as Siyut (“A Nightmare,” 1906) and Tiyul (“A Journey,” 1906). Brenner described Homel in his first collection of short stories Me-emek achor (“From the Murky Valley,” 1901), and in his first autobiographical novel Ba-horef (“In Winter,” 1901–1903). Most importantly, Homel is clearly the model for the “city of A.”14 in Brenner’s second short novel (or “anti-novel,” as Brenner called it) Mi-saviv lanekuda, which remains one of the pioneering and most interesting examples of modernist Hebrew novelistic prose.15 Mi-saviv ­l­a-nekuda is one of the first Hebrew novels in which “the inward turn” is connected with issues of sexuality and religiosity, and in a way that fuses symbolism, impressionism, and realism in a highly fragmented way, and I discuss it in parts II and III of this book in these contexts. Here, I would like to emphasize the fact that Mi-saviv la-nekuda is also one of the first modernist Hebrew fictional texts that deal with the urban space, and one which is greatly attuned to spatiality and the interaction between space and interiority. The plot of the novel starts as the main protagonist, the young Ya‘acov Abramson, leaves the fictional small town of Tzoar, where he has lived and worked for a number of years as a Hebrew teacher and aspiring writer. Abramson travels to the provincial capital, Homel, referred to only as “A.,” which he describes as “a large city in which the majority of the inhabitants are Jewish,”16 and a center of “Zionism and Hebrew enlightenment.”17 Abramson goes there because he feels that in this “large city,” bustling with Jewish political, ideological, and cultural activities, he will be able to realize some of his dreams and aspirations. Abramson hopes to be able to continue his literary and writing activity, to renew and deepen the spiritual contacts with his admired friend, Uriel Davidovsky, and to continue to instruct his young disciple,

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­ hlomo Frenkel. Most important, he hopes to establish a significant S intimate relationship with Hava Blumin (who is known by her Russian name, Yeva Issakovna), the young woman with whom Abramson is infatuated. Despite his initial success finding work as a librarian in a small Hebrew “Zionist” library, the novel ends with a failure of all these hopes. Shlomo Frenkel rejects Abramson’s mentorship and breaks free from him. Uriel Davidovsky commits suicide. The relationship with Hava Blumin is never established or developed. Abramson undergoes a bizarre attempt to commit suicide, but escapes death only to find himself at the end of the novel losing both his sanity and his touch with the turbulent social world around him. In the beginning of the novel, Abramson comes from a small provincial town to the big city, which is the archetypical narrative of both European fiction of the nineteenth century and the maskilic plot of the bildungsroman. But the transition of the protagonist in Brenner’s novel is quite different. Abramson knows the city of A. very well because he lived there before, and is familiar both with the space of the city and its inhabitants. In some sense, the city of A. is a natural place for Abramson because it is a center of what he describes at the beginning of the novel as “the new life,” a center of a young Jewish intelligentsia in a time of social, national, and ideological turmoil. Abramson knows exactly why he wants to go there and what he wants to do there. And his lips murmur confidently about his present freedom, and about once again being free to do as he wished in the big city, about his lifeto-be in this city, about how good he felt now and about the simple joy of being alive.18

Unlike Fishke’s total disorientation and bewilderment by the foreignness of fictional Odessa in Abramovitz’s novel, Ya‘acov Abramson is far from being lost in the city. And yet this does not mean that he is totally “at home” in it. In Mi-saviv la-nekuda, as in so many other modernist novels and stories, the city dweller at the center of the narrative’s consciousness is essentially an “outsider” struggling to find “home” or a “dwelling place”: At seven o’clock in the evening, the train stood in front of the new railway station of the city A. Abramson hurried to the wagon. From under

Homel and Lvov

the bench he grabbed his sack, in which he had a few shirts and books, and went out. Whither? ... he suddenly asked himself, when he paused in the middle of the road and stopped walking: to the house of Menashe Katzman? ... to see her? How nice ... suddenly ... Hava ... but if I will go to this house, it will be difficult for me to leave it, and I need a special dwelling place ... in order to work ... “Less of the world and more of happiness” Ha-ha! ... However, to go to Uriel Davidovsky is also not good ... it is difficult for him to have guests ... Uriel ... maybe just for one night ... tomorrow I will find “a mishkan,” a tabernacle, and I will dwell there. Never mind. To Davidovsky! ... his hurried steps were on target to the Caucasian street, the location of Uriel’s fathers’ house [...] The way there wasn’t short—a whole hour. His baggage wasn’t too heavy and neither his clothes, but his headache, though quite common, made him very tired. When he passed the butcher’s alleyway, by Katzman’s dwelling, where Hava Blumin lives, a glowing lightness came into his inner being and he almost couldn’t resist the trail and wanted to run there. The inner turmoil continued a moment. In the end Abramson took his feet and walked away.19

This passage, emblematic of the restless, twisted narrative style of Brenner’s modernist fiction (which many of Brenner’s contemporaries could not understand at first), contains within it the nucleus of many of the novel’s themes: the inner doubts, the agitation and distress, and the inability to choose between Abramson’s different passions and ambitions. The narrative traces Abramson’s actions and thoughts in a manner that draws close attention to the physical spaces of the city and the ways in which the individual experiences them. Thus, as soon as Abramson arrives in the railway station of the city A., for which he longed so much, he is consumed with the question of “whither to go.” The city affords many opportunities and intensifies the fundamental human condition of missed opportunities, choices, and inaccessibility. Thus, the choice between the two “homes”—Katzman’s apartment (a sort of commune full of young students and revolutionaries, including Hava Blumin) and Uriel Davidovsky’s house—also represents two poles of the modern urban experience: intense interaction and intense loneliness. This kind of representation of the cityscape in the inner consciousness of the protagonist calls attention to the crucial issue of fragmentation, imagination, and the interchange between real space and

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imaginary space. This is especially important when it comes to the experience of the individual in the physical and social reality of the modern city, because unlike the thoroughly familiar and traditional small town, the city (even a relatively small one like Homel) becomes legible only by fragmentary acts of imagination.20 Moreover, the unique language of Brenner’s narration highlights issues of spatiality in the Jewish textual world, from the Bible to Hasidic texts and traditions. Expressions throughout the text, like simcha (“happiness”), olam (“world,” in the meaning of mundane), bayit or ma’on (home), and mishkan (tabernacle, a temporary temple), work to signify symbolically the fact that Abramson is essentially looking not only for a home (bayit) but for a mishkan (tabernacle), a kind of self-made sacred space in the city, in which he can work and create. Here, the Jewish concept of home and space intersects with the modernist one. It is clear in Mi-saviv la-nekuda, as in other modernist fiction of the early twentieth century, that the notion of home itself is problematized because it is no longer demarcated as a secure, private space. As Hana Wirth-Nesher claims (using Bakhtin’s terms of the chronotope, or time-space), in the traditional novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “home” is often seen as a “private enclave, a refuge from the intensely public arena of urban life.” In modernist urban novels, “home” itself is no longer clearly demarcated, since there is a conflation of the public and the private self. “Home” in modernist novels is a “shifting place, a provisional setting, an intersection of public and private that is always in process.”21 This accounts for the fact that most of the action in the fictional worlds of the modernist urban novel “takes place in spaces that fuse public and private, that are uneasily indeterminate: coffee shops, theaters, museums, restaurants, hotels and shops.” Even when the setting is the interior of a “private” home, its dwellers are exposed to the gaze of the stranger.22 And indeed, Abramson spends most of his time in libraries, study halls, and other spaces that fuse public and private. Many scenes in the novel take place in liminal spaces, notably bridges, and are represented in the narrative through liminal states of consciousness, such as dreams and flights of fantasy. Even when Abramson is writing in the confines of the four walls of his room, he is exposed to the gaze of strangers and

Homel and Lvov

the “noise” of the city slips through the walls. In short, the narrative of Mi-saviv la-nekuda constantly moves between imaginary mental space, verbal space, and the built urban space. Brenner’s novel, I argue, is one of the first and most accomplished Hebrew modernist urban novels. In its themes, concerns, and linguistic and stylistic structure, the novel resembles and in fact foreshadows many modernist Hebrew fictional texts written in other and larger cities. And yet, this urban novel also embodies the unique sense of Homel as a significant and underappreciated space and enclave of modernist Hebrew literature. The fact that Homel was simultaneously a center of Hebrew and Jewish cultural and literary activity, and a frontier city far removed from the large centers of Jewish culture and European modernism, is represented well in the novel and enables us to understand the role of the city in the development of Hebrew modernism.

Lvov: The City of Uncertain Boundaries Another frontier city that is radically different from Homel, yet one that had a similar role in the history of Hebrew modernism, is Lvov. As reflected by its constantly changing names over the course of a few decades in the early twentieth century, Lvov—known also as Lemberg in German, L’viv in Ukrainian, and Lwów in Polish—has been (and perhaps is still today) what the writer Joseph Roth aptly called a “city of uncertain boundaries.”23 The history of this city, the capital and the largest urban center of Eastern Galicia, is marked by the successive conquests of the region by various imperial and national powers. Throughout most of its history, Lvov has been a frontier city par excellence. The mixture of nationalities, ethnicities, and languages became even stronger because of the special geographical and geopolitical position of the city. Situated close to the border between the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, and Congress Poland, the city did not escape the fate of wars, political upheavals, and ethnic cleansings. The urban landscape of Lvov is marked by the renaissance splendor of its old city, with its numerous Polish monastic churches, but it is equally

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dominated by the Jugendstil architecture of late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Until the two world wars the city was considered “CentralEuropean” according to the mental cartography of its citizens, and Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian by its ethnic makeup.24 Jewish history in Lvov goes back to the time of its establishment in the mid-thirteenth century. The city is situated on the medieval eastwest trade route, and Jews played an important role in commerce, finance, and crafts. In 1772, with the first partition of Poland, Lemberg (as it was called by the Austrians and the Galizianer Jews) came under Austrian rule and served as the administrative center of Galicia. Jewish life was regulated by the Judenordnung of Maria Theresa (1776), and then by the “Edict of Tolerance” of Joseph II (1789).25 The Hasidic movement reached Lemberg in the late eighteenth century, and since then, the city and its surrounding areas have had a strong Hasidic community. During the course of the nineteenth century, a secularized Jewish intelligentsia emerged in Lemberg, as it did in other parts of Galicia and Eastern Europe. Because of the ethnic and cultural diversity of the city, the Jews who departed from tradition were obliged to choose between contending cultural and political influences. The Galician maskilim of the early nineteenth century shared a reverence for German culture, and the German cultural orientation (rooted in the Enlightenment and the toleration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy) remained a potent force within the Jewish community until the end of the Habsburg Empire. But there were also, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, strong Polish currents in Lvov’s modern Jewish culture, and many modern Jews were influenced by Polish culture. The Jewish population of Lvov reached 44,258 (approximately 30 percent of the total) in 1900. Jewish students were allowed into Lvov University from 1806, and toward the end of the nineteenth century the number of Jewish students was especially large (561, about a fifth of the total).26 Thus, toward the turn of the century Lvov became one of the most active (albeit relatively small) centers of modern Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. Side by side with the cheyders and yeshivas there were new Jewish schools of different political and ideological movements. The Polish Socialist Party attracted many Jewish members, and the first Zionist groups were organized in the 1880s, producing numerous periodi-

Homel and Lvov

cals and founding various youth groups. In 1890, Ya‘akov Ber Gimpel founded the first Yiddish theater in Galicia. Apart from the numerous Jewish students at the University of Lvov, many Jews studied at other universities in Central Europe and came back to Lvov as scholars of classics and of Polish and German languages and literatures. Lvov also became the cradle of historical research on the Jews of Poland and Galicia, home to prominent scholars like Salomon Buber, Yechezkel Karo, and Majer Balaban (the first professional historian of Polish Jewry). Jewish printing and publishing activity was active for centuries and it expanded toward the end of the nineteenth century, with the Ha-levi, Hertz, and Balaban publishing houses. The city boasted an active Jewish press in German, Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew.27 The main figures in the Hebrew and Yiddish press were Gershon Bader and Moshe Kleinman, who both edited journals and, for a short period, even two Hebrew dailies: Ha-‘Et (“The Time”) and Ha-Yom (“The

Figure 8. Lvov/Lemberg, early 20th century. (Source: Bain News Service, publisher. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., 20540)

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Day”). ­Literary and publishing agents like Chaim Itzkovitz were active in bringing to Lvov the Hebrew press from Russia and Poland. Itzkovitz was also the publisher of experimental literary magazines like Revivim.28 In his memoirs, Moshe Kleinman wrote about his escape from the Russian army and his arrival in Lvov in 1904: I had no thought of settling permanently in Lvov, or anywhere in Galicia, even though many immigrants from Russia—refugees and deserters from the [Russian] army—were living in the city then [...] My desire was to go to a German or Swiss university, or to America, but Galicia was the closest “foreign country” and Lvov the first large city “over the border.” [...] Thirty-five years ago, in the eyes of a provincial youth from Russia, the capital of Galicia was already “Europe.” In contrast with Russia, Galicia, like all of Austria, was a country of free speech and a free press, and citizens were not such nonentities when facing a policeman. From a Jewish point of view, Galicia was then without a doubt a virtual paradise in comparison with Russia. Jews there walked erect and self-assured, under the protection of “the Emperor, long may he live.”29

Kleinman emphasizes the political and cultural difference between “the Austrian” Lvov and the towns of Russia. He also mentions his considerable surprise in finding a small but thriving Jewish literary and cultural enclave in Lvov, with journalistic and literary activities in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Indeed, between 1904 and 1914, Lvov became a small yet significant enclave of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. Apart from Moshe Kleinman and Gershon Bader, the “Hebrew colony” of writers during these years included Zvi Karl, Eliezer Meir Lifshitz, Reuven Fahan, Avraham Ben-Yitzhak (Dr. Sonne), Shofman, and Brenner, who lived and worked with Shofman in Lvov for a short period. The young writers Uri Zvi Greenberg, Asher Barash, and Zvi Diesendruck (all native-born in Eastern Galicia) began their literary careers in Lvov, as did another native of Galicia, the young Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes (Agnon), who published many of his early poems and stories in the city’s Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers and journals. Agnon also lived in Lvov for a short time in 1907, and there he met Shofman and Brenner and was exposed for the first time to the modernist Hebrew fiction of these writers.30

Homel and Lvov

A group of young Yiddish writers (many of them also wrote in Hebrew) were active in the city during these years. The group included Shmuel Ya‘acov Imber, Yitzhak Ferenhoff, David Kenigsberg, A. M. Fuks, Benzion Mozer, David Mastel and Zvi Bikles-Shpitzer, the young Uri Zvi Greenberg and Melech Ravitch, and even Moyshe Leyb-­ Halpern before he moved to New York City.31 Some of these Hebrew and Yiddish writers were native-born Galicians, and others immigrated to Lvov from the Russian Empire and Poland during the crisis years 1905–1907. Many young Jewish writers were students at the University of Lvov and were teaching Hebrew in the city. A Hebrew pedagogiyon (pedagogical school for teachers) was even established in Lvov in which Jewish students were trained in Hebrew teaching.32 As in the case of Homel, the relatively small size of this frontier city and its distance from more established Jewish centers like Odessa and Warsaw—and distance from their influential figures (and “sages”)— proved to have an enabling effect for the emergence of a Hebrew and Yiddish literary modernist enclave and for the germination of a modernist poetics. These factors freed the young writers to experiment, and to absorb influences from German, Austrian, Polish, and Russian literature and thought. Distance also pushed them to publish their literature in venues that were more open to modernist innovations than established (and ideologically oriented) journals like Ha-shiloah. During the crisis years of the revolution, publication of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, journals, and papers was relatively easy and free in Lvov, as elsewhere in the Austrian empire, and this enabled further activity that might not have been possible in other Jewish cities of Eastern Europe. Side by side with Kleinman and Bader, writers like Shofman (and for a short time Brenner) were leading figures and editors of Hebrew publications, and Shmuel Ya‘acov Imber was an influential figure in Yiddish literary publications, a significant synchrony, since they were themselves innovators with modernist tendencies.33 Moreover, the rift in Lvov between “the Galizianer” and “the Russians,” namely between the local Galician writers and the émigrés from the Russian Empire—a rift that Kleinman, Shofman, Brenner, and many others attest to—was sometimes harsh. It stemmed from the fact that in various Jewish centers of the Russian Empire and Poland, there

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were long-held stereotypes and prejudices about Galician Jews as “lazy” and “ignorant.” These prejudices led to a suspicion toward, and even a dismissal of, the “Galician (Jewish) literature” created at the turn of the twentieth century.34 As Kleinman writes: In my circle there were also young Russian writers that found their way to Lvov because of the crisis in the Czarist Empire [...] this circle cannot be considered native to Galicia, and one could feel a conscious split between the Russian and the Galician writers. The Russians look on the Galicians “from above” and the latter found the former a kind of unjustified “snobbism” that made them angry.35

When Brenner came to Lvov he was harsh in his judgment about the local literature. But as was often the case with Brenner, his criticism was taken seriously and influenced local authors, especially the young ones. The same was true in the case of Shofman. From a historical perspective it is quite clear that this rift became a creative tension that eventually was instrumental in the development of modernist Hebrew and Yiddish literature in Lvov, both for the “Russian” and the “Galician” writers, for years to come.36 Besides all these factors, the city of Lvov was known as an urban space with a strong Austrian influence, bursting with cafés, taverns, and restaurants. During the late nineteenth century, not only in Vienna but also in many other cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, cafés became associated with the particular creative groups that gathered at stammtische (regular tables) or met more formally in the back rooms of the café. In many memoirs and literary texts, Lvov emerges as a place in which Jewish writers and intellectuals thrived in cafés, and various literary coteries were created in these establishments. Zvi Scharfstein describes Lvov in these years as “the little Paris” of Galicia, with numerous cafés lining its streets. The young writers, students, and intellectuals sat at small sidewalk tables and watched the crowds pass by as they sipped coffee slowly.37 Melech Ravitch wrote about Café Abatzya, a well-known institution by the Russian theater of Lvov and not far from the Yiddish theater, as the place where the entire Yiddish and Hebrew literary and artistic community was to be found: “Like pigeons, who can only live in company, and who immediately begin pecking at one another as soon as they come across a grain of food—this is the conduct

Homel and Lvov

of the artistic visitors to Café Abatzya, the artists, the actors, and also we, the writers.”38 Moshe Kleinman writes that when he was looking for Gershon Bader, the editor of the local Yiddish paper Tagenblat, he was sent to Abatzya where the writers and journalists would gather at a specific time. In the café, he found “the entire editorial board together with a small group of young writers; one is writing sketches, the other poems, etc.”39 Apparently, the café culture was so robust that Jewish exiles and refugees from Russia also had their own cafés, restaurants, and meeting places. In a short essay published in Davar (1940), Gershon Shofman evoked the cafés and restaurants of Lvov with affection, but with the awareness of a certain critical distance and sense of alienation of the Russian émigrés from the local “Austrian” bohemian life. He writes about a café and restaurant on Bozhnitza Lane: Were it not for “Bacchus,” the owner of the restaurant in Bozhnitza Lane, who liked to joke and laugh, the Russian immigrants, who were traumatized by the riots of 1905, would not have been able to go on living at all [...] Famished, the young refugee eats for now, not knowing how things will work out in the end. To his delight, he suddenly feels someone tickling him with a piece of straw behind his ear, and he knows that it’s Bacchus who’s doing it.40

Thus, the city of Lvov with its newspapers, journals, cafés, and other cultural institutions became an enclave of Hebrew modernism. It occurred mainly because of the activity of Russian-Jewish émigré writers like Gershon Shofman and their tense but fertile collaboration with the local “Galician” Hebrew and Yiddish literary community. Like Kleinman and others, Gershon Shofman escaped the Russian army at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War. In March 1904 he crossed the border to Galicia and settled in Lvov, where he lived until 1913. In 1904, Shofman was still a young writer with some reputation and one published collection of stories, but the nine years he lived and worked in Lvov made him a significant and controversial writer, and one of the leading figures of the young modernist Hebrew fiction writers. The nine years Shofman spent in Lvov were some of the most fruitful years in his life. He wrote poems, translations, and works of criticism (some in his name and others under pseudonyms), and was involved in

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many editorial projects.41 The addition of Yosef Chaim Brenner, who arrived in Lvov in 1908, infused the Hebrew literary enclave in the city with a renewed energy, which can be seen best in its editorial activities. In 1908–1909, Shofman and Brenner edited together a literary annual called Revivim, in which they published work by themselves as well as Berdichevky, Shneior, Shimonovitz, Fichman, Radler (R. Binyomin), S. Y. Imber, and others. Later, in 1911, Shofman edited and published the journal Shalechet (“Falling Leaves”), where he published his own stories, as well as ones by Berdichevsky, Brenner (including the important modernist story “Atzabim”), Baron, Asher Beylin, and A. A. Kabak, and poems by Bialik, Fichman, Shneior, Y. Cahan, and others. Shofman was also involved in editing the monthly journal Snunit, published in Lvov between 1910 and 1913. The journal published the first Hebrew poem and story of the young Uri Zvi Greenberg, as well as materials by Ben Yitzhak (Sonne), David Shimonovitz, Y. Z. Rimon, and Zvi Diesendruck.42 Apart from these important publishing and editing activities, Shofman wrote and published about fifty short stories in Lvov, and many of them take place in the city and describe it. Some of the Lvov stories were published in various Hebrew journals (both local and abroad), a few in a collection Reshimot (“Sketches,” published in London in 1908), and others in a second collection of stories with the title Me-idach gisa (“On the Other Side”) issued in 1909 by the Sirota publishing house in Lvov. In these stories, Shofman clearly describes Lvov and Galician life not as a “native” but from the point of view of the Russian-Jewish refugees and immigrants. Yet it is precisely the point of view of the immigrant, with its insider/outsider outlook, that lends his Lvov stories a penetrating introspection. Stylistically and poetically, the urban space of Lvov is portrayed in Shofman’s stories with a mixture of naturalism, impressionism, and symbolism. The story Me-idach gisa (“On the Other Side,” 1909) is a good example of the way Shofman gives a fictional representation to the cityscape, and it contains some powerful, distinctively modernist accounts of the encounter of Russian-Jewish immigrants with Lvov.43 It focuses on a group of young Jewish socialist revolutionaries, most of them Russians and a few local Galicians. The group’s story is interspersed with another

Homel and Lvov

Figure 9. Cover of Shalechet, Lvov, 1911.

plot focusing on the harsh life of Brunia, a young Jewish immigrant girl who falls in love with the non-Jewish Romanenko, a revolutionary messenger from Russia. The poverty-stricken Brunia gives birth to a baby, tries to find work as a wet nurse, and finally dies in an accident when she is suffocated by the deadly fumes of heating coals. The title of the story and its concluding words are formed from the Talmudic-Aramaic expression, Me-idach gisa—“on the other side.”

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Shofman spatializes this metaphorical expression. The “two sides” and the border between them comprise the recurring leitmotif of the story.44 It moves swiftly, with sharply drawn events, characters, and descriptions portraying life and death, hope and despair, between the two sides of the border (Russia and Galicia) and the two sides of the urban space of Lvov. Here is how the narrator describes the arrival of the main protagonist in Lvov: As soon as he took his first steps on the other side of the border, his eyes, which were full of the horror of death, fell on fences, gardens, granaries, farmers wearing hats, and the far-off horizon promised a long life, a serene life without burden and without fear. It was hard then for the eye to take in the abundance of air and of the spring, which seemed to spray from the limpidness of the new sky, drenched with joy, youth, and freedom; but after a time, the mood changed somewhat. The streets of the city L. in Galicia are filthy and stinking, and wandering them aimlessly grows more and more tedious. Neither is there much happiness to be found in the meeting rooms of the different organizations. Here, the air is cold and barren, the newspapers scattered over the long tables are old and crumpled, having been read seven times, and Marx glowers forbiddingly on the wall.45

The initial response of the immigrant to Galicia and Lvov is overwhelming. The sense of freedom is so strong that it becomes difficult to breathe. The dominant landscape is that of the light and the green countryside. Soon enough, however, the refugees begin to get used to the light, and to see “the other side” of Galicia, which is the darker side of the city of Lvov. Wandering in the streets of the city does not allow the immigrants and refugees to forget their foreignness. Immediately they try to find familiar faces, languages, newspapers, and images. Eventually they do find some solace in “the place to which their feet lead them.” This is Vladivostok, the Russian café in Lvov (probably the fictionalized representation of Café Abatzya): As if they had a will of their own, their legs take them to Vladivostok, the restaurant with the Russian sign outside—the only stronghold of the émigrés. Here the air is entirely theirs. It consists of two rooms at the end of the courtyard, windowless, where the gas is lit even

Homel and Lvov

­ uring the day, so that it seems as if the night never ends here. The d ground is damp and full of refuse and cigar butts. The conversation, which is always both stupefying and soporific, like the rough faces with unshorn hair, can only be made out through a haze of blue smoke.46

Later on, the narrator describes Zvi, a poor young Jewish Galician with Zionist tendencies who becomes part of the group. Because of his political opinions, Zvi often argues with the communist-anarchists, “but their company near the tea-cups was comforting for him.” He says, “wherever there is a commune, you will find me.”47 The café is the place where there is a commune, where the female protagonist Brunia arrives, and where acrobats, revolutionary messengers from Russia, and various characters appear. In the stories Shofman wrote in Lvov these kinds of places and institutions become the “thirdspaces” that fuse the private and public sphere, the real and the imaginary space, the individual artist and the masses, the masculine spectator and the feminine object of desire. In another story from the same period, “Glida” (“Ice Cream,” 1909), we find the following description: Exhausted from the heat, we sat, I and my compatriot, my young and pleasant acquaintance Sokolin, in one of the cafés that the great cities of Galicia are full of. We sat at a smooth, cold, round marble-topped table near a window, through which we could see the young women of this land walking by. Tanned, dark, in shiny, shimmering white dresses, they looked so beautiful to us through the clear glass, and their eyes, gray in the heat of the day, looked like glowing, rosy embers with rivers of fire flashing under them.48

Here, as in many other places in Shofman’s stories, the café is the paradigmatic urban space, a place through which one can watch the urban spectacle of the crowd passing by, primarily the women that catch the narrator’s and the protagonist’s attention. Shofman’s narrator makes the liminal space of the café (both inside and outside, or “through the looking glass”) an occasion for impressionistic description of subjective reality. Thus he emphasizes the contrasts between the heat and the coolness of the marble table, and between the women’s white dresses and their gray, ember eyes.

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Although very different in style from Brenner’s stories (with his short miniature plots, the impressionistic descriptions of minute details), Shofman’s main way of presenting the cityscape is similar to his good friend and (for a short time) his fellow resident in Lvov. Both of them focus on liminal spaces: places like bridges, cafés, brothels, hospitals, and other spaces that are on the border between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, the home and the street. In later stories written in Lvov, Shofman describes primarily the “rough edges” of the city. The narrator of many Lvov stories (“Refugee,” “Henia,” “In the Hotel,” “Happiness,” “Sergey Mamutov,” and others) is engrossed with the underworld, with the dark alleyways and their shady characters—the whores, pimps, and madams of the brothel, the anarchists and revolutionaries who share the shady cafés with under­cover detectives and policemen, the madmen and the mentally ill in the mental institutions, the acrobats and the waitstaff in the local cafés and cabarets. All these fascinate the narrator and the protagonists in Shofman’s stories and gradually they begin to view the city through its underworld. One of the sharpest and most accomplished of Shofman’s stories that focuses on the margins and the underworld of Lvov is the aptly titled Be-katzvey ha-krach (“At the Edges of the Metropolis,” 1914). The story depicts a brothel in Lvov as an extreme metonymic representation of urban life. The narrative of Be-katzvey ha-krach does not focus on a single main protagonist but on a panorama of “low,” wretched characters: prostitutes, pimps, a madam (named “Black Sara”) and her mentally ill son, and the madam’s “guests,” clients and young (Jewish) students who come to the brothel to find some comfort. Shofman’s cast closely resembles the interests of Russian, Austrian, and German modernists, who repeatedly deal with marginal urban figures, from the aforementioned flâneur to the beggar, the ragpicker, and the prostitute. This story, like Me-idach gisa and other stories by Shofman from this period, is what Gershon Shaked has called the “episodal novella.”49 The narrative is composed of a sequence of scenes that occur “in between the edges.” At some point in the narrative, the madam and a prostitute named Stepka travel in a tram and are “crossing the entire metropolis from one edge to the other.” 50 And indeed, urban life in this story is

Homel and Lvov

presented from the point of view of its masculine protagonists, through the alleyway of the brothel on the one hand, and the hospital (the institute for the mentally ill) on the other hand. It is perhaps not surprising that the urban experience of Lvov—as a frontier city par excellence—is expressed and reflected by Shofman (and by other writers) through its margins and edges.51

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Fo u r London A Foggy Day in Whitechapel

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The metropolitan region of London is no doubt a very different space from small cities like Homel and Lvov, and even from larger East European cities like Odessa and Warsaw. At the end of the nineteenth century, London was the largest and fastest-growing city in the world, with a population of close to six and a half million people. Its enormity and boundlessness baffled social commentators and investigators and defied novelists attempting to grasp its mystery in a single panorama. London was also the center of English-language modernist activity, and between 1890 and 1920 it generated and sustained a vital sequence of experimental movements and phases. Malcolm Bradbury describes the literary climate of London as a “fruitful symbiosis of the cosmopolitan and the nativist that became a profoundly important aspect of the aesthetics of the entire period from the 1880s through to the First World War.”1 These very same years, between 1880 and World War I, mark the transformation of Jewish London, owing to a large wave of immigration from Eastern Europe to England, estimated between 120,000 and 150,000 people. The overwhelming majority of the immigrants settled in the East End of London.2 As a long-established point of arrival for newcomers and a traditional dwelling place for Jews and other immigrants, the East End was a natural place for East European Jews in search of new life, and indeed it became a densely populated area that the Jewish immigrants transformed. They built numerous Jewish schools and synagogues, set up tailoring and cabinet-making workshops, and established a small but thriving Yiddish and Hebrew press and a popular Yiddish theater.3

London

While critics still debate the place and significance of Jews in British literature,4 it is quite clear that London never really became an established center of “high” Hebrew or Yiddish culture in spite of the large presence of the immigrants and their cultural institutions. For example, Ahad Ha‘am moved from Odessa to London, where he lived from 1907 to 1921, acting as an agent for the Wissotzky Tea Company. He was mordant and sarcastic about English Jewry, and described his unhappy and unproductive life in the metropolis as a state of “complete loneliness.”5 Other Hebrew and Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem, Manny Leib, Y. D. Berkovitz, and many others “passed through” London on their way to America, but did not establish roots in the city. And yet, between 1904 and 1908, London unexpectedly became another small but important enclave of modernist Hebrew literature. This was mainly because of the intensive activity and the charismatic leadership of Yosef Chaim Brenner. Brenner arrived in London in April 1904, after he escaped from the Russian army. He settled down in Whitechapel, at the heart of Jewish East London, and stayed there for almost four years, a period full of contradictions and what appear to be divided loyalties between languages, ideologies, and political agendas.6 In fact, Brenner’s diverse activity in London is surely typical of his unique, restless literary and cultural persona, but it is also a perfect example of the strange exchanges and interactions that characterized the modernist activities of immigrants and exiles in many large European metropolitan centers. After the publication of his first novel and a number of stories in the Hebrew press, Brenner was already quite well known in the small circle of Hebrew and Yiddish writers and intellectuals. But in the first months of his life in London, Brenner remained more or less anonymous, working first in a Russian library for workers and later as a compositor and an occasional writer for the Social Democratic Yiddish newspaper Die Naye Zeit (“The New Time”). Brenner lived for a while together with Kalman Marmor (1879–1956) and both of them became involved with the socialist movement Poalei Zion. He also learned the craft of typesetting at the Naroditzky printing company. Later, he was the editor and publisher of an important Hebrew journal, while also working as the literary editor for the anarchist Yiddish journal Di fraye arbeter velt (“The World of Free Labor”).7

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It is not entirely clear to what degree Brenner tried to acquaint himself with English society, literature, and culture. On one hand, his Hebrew fiction and essays from this period assimilate and make a wonderful use of English words and expressions (and thus enrich and change the nature of literary Hebrew of the time). It is also clear that in his London years, Brenner became acquainted and interested in West European literature, as is manifested in his active reading and critical engagement with the writing of early modernist British writers like Oscar Wilde.8 He also enjoyed exploring European art in London museums and galleries. At the same time, it seems that his social and intellectual life was the life of East European Jewish immigrants and the émigré Russian intelligentsia. His gaze was focused on Jewish and Russian society as it experienced the urban life of London. One way or the other, Brenner’s years in London were far from being empty or unproductive. Apart from all his Yiddish journalist activities, for almost two years (1906–1907) Brenner edited a monthly Hebrew literary magazine, Ha-me‘orer (“The Awakener”). During these years, Brenner lived at 48 Mile-End Road in the heart of the East End and his apartment became the “editorial office” of this little but highly influential journal.9 Brenner’s flurry of activity came after the aborted 1905 revolution in Russia and the violence that swept the Pale of Settlement, which also brought dire consequences to Hebrew and Yiddish literary activity across the continent. Almost all the large Hebrew magazines and newspapers in Eastern Europe had to close down for some time, including Ha-shiloah in Odessa, Ha-tzfira in Warsaw, and Ha-zeman in Vilna. Many people felt that this was “the end of the road” for Hebrew literature, and for a short while the monthly Ha-me‘orer was almost the only Hebrew literary journal active in Europe. Because London was the place where it was edited and produced, a number of Hebrew writers and critics like Yehoshua Radler (known by his pen name, R. Binyomin), Asher Beilin, and even U. N. Gnessin came to London for some time to work with Brenner on Ha-me‘orer. During the aftermath of Russia’s revolution attempt, London really became an enclave of Hebrew modernism with intricate contacts with the Russian Empire, Galicia, and America.10

London

Ha-me‘orer did not try, and probably could not afford to be, an avantgarde, experimental modernist journal for various reasons. Since it took upon itself a “national” ideological responsibility for Hebrew publishing, it tried to give voice to every style of Hebrew writing of the day. Moreover, there were significant disagreements between Brenner and Gnessin about literary issues, although they shared similar modernist tendencies and influences. Still, the journal did publish many significant modernist works by Brenner himself; by Berdichevsky, Zeitlin, Shofman, Gnessin, Shteinberg, Dvora Baron, and others; and translations into Hebrew of works of Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Maurice Maeterlinck, Lev Shestov, and others. When U. N. Gnessin and Hillel Zeitlin developed their plans to publish books under the modernist Hebrew imprint Nisyonot (“Experiments”), it was in association with Ha-me‘orer and based in London. When it came to his own writings, Brenner engaged the city and its Jewish urban environment almost from his first day in London. Something of the way Brenner makes sense of the city can be seen in his first Hebrew essay Ha-tipa (“The Drop,” 1905). In this essay, Brenner described an ordinary day in East London, which happened to be the day on which he learned about Theodor Herzl’s early death: A crowd of Jews are running and carrying their merchandise on small carts: textiles, sacks, papers, fruits; their eyes are searching for some hidden policemen [...] “Grapes, Grapes, Grapes,” shout the fruit sellers. “It’s a penny, it’s a penny,” announce the youth to every passenger with the white handkerchiefs in their hands [...] “Three pennies a pound,” ­others declare advertising their apples. Hu-Ha, Hu-ha [...] ­ta-ra-ram, ­ta-ra-ram; the wild beast of the tram, who doesn’t know why it comes and to whom it answers, is howling and screaming on its way. The newspaper sellers announce the events of the war and its multitude of victims. And I, the baffled one, I am walking slowly in some “road”—whose name I happened to notice at that moment—and looking at my brethren who are slowly deteriorating while I am thinking my perplexed thoughts [...] from the earth I raise my eyes to the sky [...] but the sky here is not sky and the sun is not sun [...] the sun—is like some dull red boiled egg [...] indeed London does not belong to us, does not [...] strangers, strangers, strangers [...] I am dreaming the dreams of the son of the Ghetto—and suddenly [...] diagonal black letters cover the entire advertisement poster

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that was just now attached to the wall [...] the letters pass, and I still walk slowly [...] and another poster, and again the letters shout [...] the tram driver is ringing. What happened? A hand grabs me and pushes. What? Am I really standing in the middle of the road?11

The essay is written in the genre of the feuilleton, an important ­literaryjournalistic form in Russian, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish writing of the time that functioned as a modernist “snapshot” description of the urban space.12 The essay prefigures many elements that characterize Brenner’s literary engagement with London in his later and more “serious” novellas and stories. In this piece, Brenner presents a short and powerful portrait of the “crowd” vis-à-vis the individual subjectivity of the flâneur, the observer who wanders around the city. He emphasizes the shock of the noise and the swiftness of the trams and the changing scenes, as well as an articulation of the sense of alienation and foreignness (in this case, personal as well as national), and the projection of this estrangement onto the urban space. Brenner wrote a significant amount of Hebrew fiction with Jewish London as the setting and, in some sense, the topic. The presence of Jewish London can be seen in his experimental play Me-ever la-gvulin (“Across the Borders,” 1906–1907), which takes place in a London restaurant; Min ha-meitzar (“Out of the Depths,” 1908); Echad be-may (“First of May,” 1908); and El-Hamatara (“To the Target,” 1909). Min ha-meitzar is Brenner’s quintessential London novella.13 It follows the tribulations of a group of Russian-Jewish immigrants who work for a Yiddish newspaper, The Daily Crab. The workers of the paper are caught up in a conflict with the owner (the Anglo-Jewish Isaac Crab) who introduces a new typesetting machine to replace their manual labor. The conflict leads to a general strike that is ultimately unsuccessful. To this markedly “socialist” plot, Brenner juxtaposes a kind of melodramatic subplot about the young and newly arrived immigrant Hava Taler, who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby boy. The father, the Russian Fyodor Shtektorov, is revealed to be the only gentile worker in the print shop. These two plots are loosely connected by the mysterious character of Avraham Menuhin, whose integrity, sense of responsibility, and constant search for “vision” weakens the sense of crisis that almost overtakes the novella.

London

No less important than the dramatic events is the act of narration. The novella is told by a first-person narrator, a young Russian-Jewish immigrant who is strolling in the streets of the East End of London selling Jewish newspapers. From his usual spot at the corner of White­ chapel and Brick Lane, the narrator witnesses the events unfolding in front of him and tries to make some sense of them. Like virtually all of Brenner’s fiction, the plot of the novella draws on his immediate experience as a worker in a print shop and as a journalist. But Brenner is not a realist writer in the manner of the classic nineteenth-century novel, and these experiences are rendered in language and style with a strong modernist energy. Brenner employs a variety of narrative techniques: stream of consciousness, narrated monologue, shifting perspectives, and even a sudden and radical shift to dramatic discourse by several characters (as if one is reading a play and not a novella). Moreover, the fragmentation of Min ha-meitzar is highly pronounced. Various elements of the work further the overall sense of modernist fragmentation, including the title and subtitle (megilot chatuchot: “fragmented scrolls”), the wide-ranging length of these “scrolls” or “snapshots” (some are very long, others contain only a sentence or two, and some contain nothing but graphic signs), and the ways in which the “scrolls” of the novella are dissected and reorganized.14 The result is a kind of modernist “evangelic” or “visionary” piece, which carries strong symbolic and religious overtones that are ironic and very serious at the same time.15 This modernist energy is surely mirrored in the presentation of urban experience in London. Unlike the more familiar modernist fictional texts that depict London, in Brenner’s novella there is no mention of Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, Bloomsbury, or any other well-known landmarks. Almost the entire novella takes place within the confines of Jewish East London, but this does not make the presentation of the urban experience any less frantic or stimulating: Winter. Coal is dear. Bread, too. A great dispute has broken out in the butchers’ shop: rivalry between abattoirs; kosher meat, non-kosher meat. The Zionists levy a subscription for the party. The Suffragettes demand the right to vote. Twelve thousand unemployed wander about the streets. Three are arrested. Elections to some public institution are taking place. Carriages go prancing along the streets. The voters are

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conveyed in them. Meetings at every street corner. The missionaries, too, make propaganda. Four hundred and fifty six men killed in the iron mines. The world goes on as usual.16

Passages like this one constitute some of the first and most interesting instances in Hebrew fiction where an author makes an attempt to render in narrative fiction what Georg Simmel in his essay (written around the time the novella takes place), “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” called, “the rapid crowd of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.”17 Indeed, the novella presents a staggering panorama of shifting fragments. Mundane disputes between Jewish butchers are intermingled with news of disasters from far away, and with dramatic political events and social protests. All these impressions and fragments are presented together, on the same level, and equally demand the attention of the city dweller and the reader who are trying to make sense of them. Moreover, all the main protagonists are described through their position within the urban space and environment, and it is only in their spatial embodiment that they can be grasped. On the other hand, the enormous city itself, its commotion and rush of images and events, is made intelligible only by, and in relation to, the individual characters. Here is how the narrator describes the first time he met the commanding figure of Avraham Menuhin, “the patriarch,” in the novella’s opening: On a foggy day, a real “pea-souper,” the first day of Hanukkah, in darkness at noon, he first appeared to me ... From the six million multitude of this great city he emerged, a stranger recently arrived; he opened the door and in he came ... A few dozen other people sat around, Jews without doubt. They talked about seasonal unemployment, about exploitation, about immigration.18

Avraham Menuhin’s distinction is defined by the subjective gaze of the narrator (“appeared to me”) because he is set against the faceless and unfathomable multitude of the six million inhabitants of the metropolis. The city itself is described as great and awesome, but also as grey and foggy. It resembles the “pea soup” that the narrator and the other Jewish immigrants are eating in Maisey’s Soup Kitchen. This de-

London

scription surely brings to mind the famous foggy London of the Impressionists, as well as the way T. S. Eliot described London in “The Waste Land” a decade or so later (“Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, / so many, I had not thought death had undone so many”).19 But because the city is presented through the prism of the East European Jewish immigrants in Whitechapel (“Jews without doubt”), the foggy and “soupy” atmosphere acquires a meaning that is “universal” and existential, but the sense of alienation and estrangement is also distinctively the experience of a Jewish immigrant. Similarly, when the narrator presents Hava Taler in her pregnancy, he comments that “there is no fathoming the mind of a pregnant woman; her ways are devious and strange. For a whole week Hava has vanished—and nobody knows where she’s gone to. She is swallowed up in the great city, among the six million—and there’s no sign of her.”20

Figure 10. Soup kitchen for Jews in Whitechapel. (© Ursula Jacob, London, 2009)

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The narrator presents himself also in relation to the city of London and its inhabitants, as “an exile in a European capital”: I am twenty-five years old. I have taken myself into exile and come to a Jewish ghetto in a European capital ... yes, yes ... European. So what now? I am a stranger to the current speech, a stranger to the gentile population of the land, and far removed from my fellow Jews, whose newspapers I sell them. Stripped of any material framework, of any trace of congenial company, of any spiritual satisfaction.21

Here the narrator emphasizes his alienation from the language and the culture of the British in London, Jews and gentiles. And yet, it is precisely this alienation and critical distance which enable him to fully observe the city, to scrutinize the commodification of social and ideological life and to present a critique of moral fragmentation of values.22 Thus, we meet Hava Taler’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Haya-Rachel Taler, giving a lecture on the “Women’s Liberation Movement” at Toynbee Hall. Toynbee Hall was a center for social activity and change, a well-known institution that was founded in 1884 on Commercial Street in Whitechapel. Brenner surely makes use of this landmark of social activity, but in a typically ironic way. On one hand, Mrs. Taler’s intellectual and social activity is presented as a means of successful “integration” into British society. But the narrator points out through the character of Avraham Menuhin the hypocrisy that underlines her action, because at the same time that she gives a lecture on “liberation” to these female immigrants who have made it into the ranks of middle-class Anglo-Jewry, she abandons her own pregnant niece. The Jewish East End supplies Brenner with a wide panorama of urban spaces and social phenomena. Thus, it is quite significant that unlike the overwhelming majority of the novella, which takes place in the confines of the East End, the ending, in which the narrator points to the symbolic culmination of the “vision,” occurs elsewhere. The last scene (subtitled “The Final Scroll”) is located in Springfield Garden, a park in the borough of Hackney, northeast of central London, a place where, in this period, a significant amount of Jews “moved up” from the East End. With the change of the urban setting the atmosphere also changes, and the narrator makes a full use of the difference: The saplings in Springfield, the distant garden in the north of the city, are small, but the square is beautiful. It is close at eight o’clock in the

London

evening—and we are really sad about that. From too much walking we have got blisters on our toes—and it’s hard going back. At night our places in Maisey’s house are let to others, people who pay, but the nights are warm—and Menuhin and I stroll about Commercial Street, and see all our contemporaries there, who spend the nights walking. They are many.23

This description comes right before the novella’s final section: “The words of abraham came to me in Springfield, before the garden was closed behind us, saying: [...]” Like other modernist novellas and novels of Brenner, the ending is highly significant, and this is where the symbolic “evangelic” ending takes place.24 As elsewhere in his fiction, Brenner juxtaposes the harsh reality with the symbolic meaning, the mundane with the sacred. At the end of the novel, the narrator and Avraham Menuhin are in fact “homeless.” They are strolling in Commercial Street, at the heart of Whitechapel, but they go to “the Garden of Springfield,” which clearly suggests some ephemeral, Edenic space. The realistic and the fantastic are mixed here to such a degree that it is unclear whether Menuhin is actually dying of frostbite with the child in his hands or just imagines this event (and the way in which the London newspapers will report about it in a sensational way). Thus, even at this ending in the urban garden, there is no illusion of easy escape or salvation, but there is a source of inspiration and some small, intimate hope: Thus he spoke to me in the Springfield garden, before the sun went down. Avraham the typesetter—the proofreader—the porter—the father. And the sun went down: it went down in rich red grease and set. The little trees were silent. The keeper closed the park.25

Because of his critique of Jewish life in London, and many aspects of life in the Big City in general, a critique that he expressed in essays and stories, many readers and critics have concluded that Brenner disliked or even hated London. In my opinion, this view has missed an important point. Brenner’s critique of life and culture (Jewish and other­ wise) was persistent everywhere he lived—in Homel, Lvov, Palestine, and London, but the importance of London for the development of Brenner’s modernist poetics cannot and should not be denied. In London, Brenner extended his literary, journalistic, and cultural activities,

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and in turn the engagement with London in his literary output gave us some of the most memorable urban representations in Hebrew fiction of the time. A similar observation can be made regarding the role of London in Hebrew modernism. London did not become a center of Hebrew (or Yiddish) literature and culture in the early years of the twentieth century or in subsequent years. However, the role of London as an enclave of Hebrew modernism (at least for a few years) plays a crucial part in the strange and convoluted history and geography of Hebrew modernist fiction.

Fi v e  Vienna “This Mocking and Innocent City”

In spite of a certain conservatism in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at the turn of the twentieth century Vienna was a highly important intellectual center, not only for Austria but for the entire rising movement of international modernism.1 A wide range of modernist activity in literature, theater, visual arts, and architecture, as well as in philosophy and psychology, took place in Vienna during these years. Major artistic movements like the Vienna Secession, the Second Viennese School of music, the literary group known as “Jung Wien” (Young Vienna), and Viennese psychoanalysis all flourished in the city. The disproportionate number of Jews and their role in this bustling modernist activity has been widely noted. But when we think about Jewish Vienna and modernism, Hebrew literature hardly comes to mind. Hebrew was quite far from the towering Jewish figures like Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Schoenberg. In the realm of literature, the list of modernist Jewish writers (or writers of Jewish descent) who wrote in German is long and distinguished. Among the most well known are those who comprised the Jung Wien circle: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Richard Beer-Hofmann, and Peter Altenberg, as well as Jakob Wassermann, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig, and Elias Canetti. Indeed, fin de siècle Vienna remains fixed in our imagination as an outstanding example of urban modernism. It is still a common practice to regard Vienna as “the focal point of European Modernism.”2 This fascination, fostered by studies such as Carl Schorske’s Fin-deSiècle Vienna, produced the perception that Jewish modernist creativity in Vienna consisted of a brief period during which assimilated Jewish writers, artists, and thinkers functioned as the primary promoters of

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modernism. Their brand of creativity, so the story goes, flourished between 1890 and 1910 and then disappeared.3 However, from the point of view of the minor literature in Hebrew and Yiddish created in Vienna by immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe, significant modernist activity began only around 1914 and lasted until the end of the 1920s.4 Once again, we see how shifting the parameters of our focus leads us to see both the urban world and the world of modernism differently. To be sure, Vienna has had a long history of Hebrew creativity. It was a highly important center for haskalah and served as a locus for the writing and publishing of Hebrew beginning with the “Edict of Toleration” in 1782 and continuing throughout most of the nineteenth century. During this period, maskilic activities intensified across the Habsburg Empire, and in Vienna in particular. However, since many in the German-Jewish community of Vienna had already lost connections with Hebrew in the nineteenth century, the Hebrew center was composed of Jewish immigrants from Galicia and the Russian Empire. In the 1880s and 1890s, with the rise of Odessa and Warsaw, Vienna lost much of its importance and centrality as a center of Hebrew creativity and publishing. During the period of the Russo-Japanese war and the first revolution (1904–1906), there was a small but constant flow of Hebrew and Yiddish writers who came to Vienna as exiles, immigrants, and students.5 Nevertheless, it was not until World War I, and the immediate postwar years, that Hebrew and Yiddish literature blossomed in Vienna—not coincidentally the same years in which significant modernist activity took place. As Mikhail Krutikov has claimed in his recent study of Meir Weiner (who was part of the Viennese Yiddish and Hebrew circle in this period), the upheavals that shook Eastern and Central Europe between 1914 and 1921 (such as wars and revolutions) had a powerful effect on Jewish culture and literature. With the collapse of empires, where Hebrew and Yiddish culture had existed side by side with other minority cultures, and with the emergence of new political systems, the cultural space of Eastern Europe, with its regional and metropolitan urban centers and a large shtetl periphery, was now split into fragments. Some old Hebrew and Yiddish centers, such as Odessa, went into decline; others that once had been small regional enclaves gained momentum

Vienna

and vibrancy. A new constellation of centers and enclaves outside the traditional historical area of Jewish settlement emerged in Russia, Germany, and Austria, due to the mass migration of Jews out of areas devastated by the wars. Cities like Vienna became new enclaves of Jewish cultural activity, something like laboratories, in which Hebrew and Yiddish modernist literature and culture was germinated and fermented.6 Within a few years around World War I, an extraordinary group of Hebrew and Yiddish writers and thinkers congregated in Vienna, most of them immigrants and exiles from various places in Eastern Europe: Gershon Shofman, David Fogel, Avraham Ben-Yitzhak (Sonne), Zvi Diesendruck, and Ya‘acov Horovitz were active mainly in Hebrew. ­Melech Ravitch, Melech Chmelnitzki, Meir Henish, Meir Wiener, Moshe Ungerfeld, Moshe Zilburg, and Mordekhai Gottfried wrote mainly in Yiddish. Many, however, were multilingual and wrote in two or three languages: Hebrew, Yiddish, and German as well. The diaries and memoirs of this period reveal a close and fertile collaboration between the Hebrew and the Yiddish writers, creating a wide-ranging cross-pollination between the two literatures.7 The diaries of the Jewish Viennese writer and thinker Eugen Hoeflich (who called himself Moshe Ya‘akov Ben-Gavriel), for example, attest to the close connections between Hebrew and Yiddish writers and intellectuals such as Hugo Bergmann, Adolf Böhm, Max Brod, Arno Nadel, Eliyahu Rappeport, Oskar Rosenfeld, Siegfried Schmitz, and Friedrich Thieberger (many of whom were writing in the short-lived Vienna Jewish monthlies Esra and Das Zelt).8 In fact, Vienna in this period is an excellent example of connections and mutual influence between Hebrew and Yiddish literature and all aspects of Viennese modernism. Gershon Shofman knew Peter Alten­berg quite well and translated his Viennese short stories into Hebrew. In turn, Altenberg’s writings left a strong impact on Shofman’s ­modernist style.9 Through Altenberg, Shofman also knew and met the modernist architect Alfred Loos. The writer Elias Canetti, who admired Avraham Ben-Yitzhak (or as he was known to everybody, “Dr. Sonne”), recorded the connections between Ben-Yitzhak and figures like Robert Musil, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, Hermann Broch, and James Joyce.10 Other figures in the East European Jewish Vienna circle, like

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David Fogel and Meir Wiener, were acquainted with Viennese modernists of the postwar period, and these connections are clearly demonstrated in their poetry and prose fiction.11 All this literary and intellectual activity occurred during and around World War I, a time when the Hebrew centers in Eastern Europe and Palestine were almost defunct. During the war and soon after, when Vienna suddenly became the capital of the much smaller new republic of Austria, the Hebrew enclave in Vienna began publishing once again. This activity more or less coincided with the peak of Yiddish publishing activity in Vienna (1919–1922).12 Gershon Shofman and Zvi Diesendruck edited and published a short-lived but highly important journal aptly titled Gvulot (“Borders,” 1918–1920). In this journal they published their own work and also poems by David Fogel and Uri Zvi Greenberg and stories by Berdichevsky and S. Y. Agnon. In 1924, Shofman was the main figure behind another Viennese Hebrew journal, Peret, which also published innovative modernist works of Hebrew writers. The importance of these journals far exceeded their short lives, because they appeared in a time of changing poetic modes and were edited and published by writers who absorbed and participated in the Viennese modernist movements. Apart from the important Hebrew and Yiddish publications in ­Vienna, much of the Hebrew and Yiddish cultural and literary activity took place in an important Viennese institution, the kaffeehaus. The cultural historian William Johnston has characterized the typical Viennese café as a place that offered more than coffee and food. It was a place that “afforded much besides conversation. Most persons relied upon their café to furnish daily papers, which could be bought only at widely scattered kiosks. For some of the ‘regulars’ or stammgäste, the coffeehouse provided a place to receive mail and laundry or to change clothes.”13 These cafés functioned as natural annexes to cramped Viennese apartments, and were communal “salons” of a sort. Some café habitués did not have apartments at all, but rather lived in rented rooms, hotels, or pensions. In the days before telephones were commonplace, cafés also served as ad hoc offices. Waiters took phone messages and received mail for regulars, and readily extended credit to those they knew. Clients, greeted personally after just a few visits, were encouraged to linger.

Vienna

Most important, a single order of coffee entitled one to sit for hours, and some people spent large portions of the day at the café. It was a public space where men and women of all classes congregated, but which was particularly frequented by the bohemians, members of the literary and artistic circles that brought the coffeehouse its special fame. Indeed, literary cafés were indispensable for the creation of Viennese modernism, and we are well acquainted with the pivotal role of institutions like Café Griensteidl and Café Central in Viennese modernism.14 Steven Beller and Harold Segal have stressed the predominant presence of acculturated Jewish writers and intellectuals in Vienna kaffeehäuser. Beller claims that “the two institutions which provided the main milieu for liberal cultural life in Vienna at the turn of the century were the salon and the coffeehouse [...] and both of them had very high Jewish presence.” The coffeehouse was seen by the Viennese as “a Jewish space,” and there was a proverb in Vienna that “the Jew belongs in the coffeehouse.”15 Harold Segal maintains that what distinguished the fin de siècle Viennese literary café from similar institutions in Europe was “its heavily Jewish character.”16 The Viennese café proved to be also the place to bring the immigrant Hebrew and Yiddish writers together and open new paths for them. They spent much time in local cafés in Leopoldstadt, but they also ventured beyond. In the years before World War I, Arkaden Café, located opposite the Votivkirche near the University of Vienna, emerged as the chief gathering place.17 The memoirs of Meir Henish, Michael ­Weichart, Daniel Charney, and Melech Ravitch portray Arkaden Café as the meeting place of “students, writers, journalists, publishers, artists and bohemians from Austria and from all around the world,” but especially the place in which Jewish immigrants from East European Galicia felt at home.18 Meir Henish wrote that Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers were available and the Galician Zionists were stammgäste in the café.19 The Yiddish poet Melech Chmelnitzky wrote some poems about the Votiv­ kirche as he looked at it from the Arkaden Café.20 After World War I, places like the Café Herrenhof and Café Museum became the favorite meeting places for writers like Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, David Fogel, and Meir Weiner, and it is there that they experienced many important encounters with modernist writers from Vienna and all over Europe.21

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This rich literary and cultural activity occurred both in spite of and because of the marginality of Hebrew and Yiddish in Vienna, a marginality that was not only linguistic but also spatial. Hebrew and Yiddish writers lived and worked on the visible and invisible borderlines between Vienna’s cultural center of modernism and the geographi-

Figure 11. A Jewish synagogue and cafés, Leopoldstadt, Vienna. (Source: Wikimedia Commons. Photo of the Türkischer Tempel in Vienna, around 1900. Published in Pierre Genee, Ruth Burstyn, and Walter Lindner, Wiener ­Synagogen 1825–1938 [Wien: Löcker, 1987])

Vienna

cally bound and impoverished sections of the city. In particular, Jewish ­Vienna was contained primarily in the second district Leopoldstadt, the quarter built around the Nordbahnhof, the train station which brought immigrants from Galicia and Eastern Europe. Also known as ­Mazzesinsel (“Matzo Island”), this area had the highest proportion of Jews in Vienna and was particularly popular among newcomers from Eastern Europe. Along with many synagogues, Jewish shops, markets, cafés, and crowded apartment buildings, the area looked and felt like an East European Jewish enclave transposed onto the city of Vienna. Even in the 1920s, when Meir Wiener, David Fogel, Avraham BenYitzhak, and other Hebrew and Yiddish writers spent much time with Austrian writers and intellectuals in central locations like Café Central, Herrenhof, and Museum, Leopoldstadt was still the place most of them called home, however tentative and provisional their living arrangements might have been. This crowded marginal area of Vienna was the “base” from which the writers and their protagonists went to explore the cityscape, and the place to which they returned.22

Revealing the Rusting Metal Beneath the Bewitching Metropolis The short but intense flowering of Hebrew modernism in Vienna gave us numerous literary representations of the city of this period by writers who lived and worked there. Two very different, but especially rich and instructive, examples are the short stories of Gershon Shofman and the urban novel of David Fogel. The two writers arrived in Vienna in 1913 and lived there until the mid-1920s. Shofman wrote many sketches and stories, such as Sof sof (“At Last,” 1919), Bi-yemei hereg rav (“In the Days of Killing,” 1920), Kol ha-damim (“The Voice of the Bloods,” 1922), and Ba-matzor u va-matzok (“In Siege and Distress,” 1922), which take place in Vienna and describe the city in the stormy years before, during, and after World War I. As I have claimed before, earlier in his career Shofman dealt with urban experience and setting from the point of view of the émigré—a figure who is simultaneously an insider and an outsider in the city—in stories written in and about Homel and Lvov. There is a certain degree of continuity in Shofman’s urban writing, but his encounter with

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­ ienna—his first big metropolis—is surely felt in his prose. After movV ing to Vienna, his stories record the shock of the stranger in the big city who does not know his way around and who experiences the metropolis as a labyrinth. This is a well-known motif of turn-of-the-century urban literature, and is only compounded by the fact that the streets of Vienna are maze-like and disorienting, especially for the strangerimmigrant, and especially during the upheavals of the Great War.23 In the story Sof sof (“At Last,” 1919),24 the narrator follows the immigrant David Chertov, who is lost in the metropolis. He notes that “the locals, the city dwellers look like they wear empty glasses, without lenses.” Chertov, on the other hand, spends his time “meandering blindly over the strange, incredible streets, through groves you don’t know the way out of, to swing contentedly on bridges as a marquise’s carriage passes over them [...] It seems as if all you need do is stretch out your hand—but no! Because if for a guest the roads are not yet paved, for the stranger they are but an invisible stone wall.”25 Using the perspective of the immigrant and the stranger, Shofman’s narrator highlights the question of vision and the legibility of the urban space. A distinctive feature of Shofman’s Vienna stories is the detailed exposé of the slow process of “learning to see.” The immigrant slowly becomes familiar with the metropolis, and the shock and amazement of the new urban space give way to a deeper introspection. The narrator of Sof sof records this process, as perceived by the protagonist David Chertov: “This metropolis, which at first seemed so fabled and bewitching, its pathways become more and more familiar and the dross of the rusting metal is slowly revealed, coming out of the hiding place.”26 In another story, Kol ha-damim (“The Voice of the Bloods,” 1922), the nameless protagonist is traveling in a tram to the countryside in order to “leave the metropolis behind him” and gain a different point of view. This enables him to view the big city from afar, and triggers him to reflect on his life as an urban immigrant. He dimly remembers the house of his childhood, a house that might have been destroyed in the Great War, and builds the real and imaginary opposition between the “Jewish house” and the “stones of the great cities” in which he lives now. But all that was distant, indistinct, hazy. The distance of time and place had done their work, the stones of the big cities, the cities of

Vienna

foreign lands, on which he had trod for fifteen years had turned his heart both softer and harder. How good it was for a man to be alone! Alone, alone—in this mysterious, lonely city where anything could happen, which now twinkles in the distance, with its towers, churches, and parks. Among these, like a dribble of molten lead, the Danube shines. What is he doing in here? The dreamers meander on the sidewalks and take long looks at the display windows. They sit on the benches in the parks, and the legs of some of them do not even reach the ground [...] and he quickly rose, shook off the dust, ants, and worms, and returned to the city. 27

One of the most accomplished Viennese stories by Shofman, ­Ba-matzor u’va-matzok (“In Siege and Distress,” 1922),28 is set in Vienna during and after the war, and follows the fate of a group of East European Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals.29 Like many other urban stories by Shofman, this story builds on the familiar theme of the young Jewish male protagonist searching for cultural and intellectual self-­fulfillment in the big city, as well as his disillusionment in the face of a disappointing reality. These two elements—aspiration and failure, hope and despair—are present from the group’s very first encounter with the urban life of Vienna.30 In Ba-matzor u’va-matzok, the Viennese kaffeehaus, in which so much literary activity has occurred, and which serves so often as metonymy or metaphor for the city itself, is the space where these Jewish young men look for some sense of social belonging. It is of course also the place where they try to assimilate into the local and international bohemian and intellectual life. But the advent of World War I shakes the relatively calm capital of the empire, and suddenly reveals the same café as a space that can also be dangerous, especially for émigrés and exiles from Eastern Europe: Never had there been as much smoke in the café as in these new, onerous days. People sucked on their cigarettes with all their might as if they intended to hide in their own smoke. But the police agents with the bristle mustaches peered through the windows with their sharp, crushing eyes, cutting through the clouds. 31

Here, what I have called the “thirdspace” of the café reveals another, unfamiliar face. The same café, with its elusive promise of social engagement and sense of belonging, actually comes to prevent real human

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c­ onnection and communication. It is filled with thick cigarette smoke that masks people’s faces; at the same time that it brings them together, it also alienates them from each other. The café does not provide protection against the policemen searching for army defectors. Moreover, the young protagonists in the story quickly realize that the urban space of Vienna is comprised of many locations that interfuse the private and the public, and that the desired “outside” can actually become a series of closed and restricting spaces (the café, the army prison, the soup kitchen, the sanatorium). On the other hand, the protagonists learn that the “inside,” the closed space in which they try to create a protective, homey environment, is itself permeated by the “outside” world. Thus, two contradicting desires intersect in the city: the desire for the outside, for the Viennese, Central European society, and the desire for an intimate protective place. This yearning can be so strong in the story that the poet David Gol (who might be a fictional representation of David Fogel) is indifferent to the prospects of sitting in an army prison, and the painter Mando gives himself to the police and ends up in a sanatorium.32 In fact, the spatial organization of the entire story is rife with contradicting scenes and situations that characterize the urban space of the metropolis, now heightened by the extreme condition of the Great War and its aftermath. Once again we see the crowdedness of urban space set against the isolation of the individual. The poverty of the Jewish artists and writers who stayed in the city is set against an unreachable abundance of goods that suddenly filled the city after the war. The city’s endless opportunities are set against the helplessness of the immigrants. The bright intellect is set against the emotional distress that the city induces; the visible beauty against the lurking ugliness; the thirst for human contact against the meagerness of interpersonal relationship. All these contradictions seem to be embodied in the clash between the yearnings for a “home” and the opposite desire to undo its borders and to flee “outside.” The paradox of contradicting desires cannot be resolved. At the ­story’s conclusion, World War I ends and the borders are opened. “The English, the Italians and the Serbs,” Shofman’s narrator writes, are mixing with the Viennese. This opening of the political borders (and the end of what he describes as “the city in siege”) is enhanced by the fact

Vienna

that David Gol returns from the army prison to the city, the poet Meir Zilper reunites with his family, and the writer Shlomo Pick is able to travel from Palestine to Vienna in order to “absorb Europeanness.”33 At the same time, the end of the war brings no real change, and the sense of “siege and distress” is revealed as a kind of permanent existential condition. Mando, who appears at the end of the story as “the real artist,” remains in the sanatorium in Steinhof and retreats to a state of insanity. After the war, Mando (like the other characters in this story) is unable to go on as usual and at the same time unable to go back to the old world now destroyed. Instead, Mando attempts to capture people as portraits, holding onto an artistic image which he substitutes for reality. First, he tries to capture in a stable artistic portrait his own sister, Esther, who came to Vienna from Poland just before the war. But his desire to enclose her in a frame is unsuccessful because the woman eludes him, a parallel with her erotic inaccessibility that goes hand in hand with her sexual illicitness.34 On the other hand, Mando is able to capture the portrait of Shlomo Pick, whose presence in the city becomes superfluous the moment he is drawn on the canvas. The narrator comments that Pick, who came from Palestine, “doesn’t have a ground under his feet” in the city of Vienna but “his portrait will stay here; there is a place for the picture in Europe as well.”35 This metonymic ending brings into relief many social, historical, and artistic questions about the life of the Jewish émigré writer in European cities like Vienna, questions that were heightened by the violence of the war. The collapse of the Jewish “old world,” and the crisis of Jewish existence in unbearably shaky European cities, both parallel the collapse of the traditional experiences of time and space in the metropolis and changing paradigms of how to represent time and space in modernist literature. The insane artist literally disturbs the legibility of our world; the promise of a portrait—its artistic transparency—is denied in the story’s complex texture of ekphrasis, metonymy, metaphor, and abstraction.36 Like Mando the insane painter, the modernist urban (Jewish) writer can offer only a fleeting portrait, a fragmentary sketch of urban Jewish characters and of the city itself. Like Shofman, the young David Fogel arrived in Vienna at the beginning of 1913, and he lived in the city until 1925 or 1926.37 In Vienna,

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he wrote and published his poetry, including what has been recognized belatedly as one of the most important books of modernist Hebrew poetry, Lifnei ha-sha‘ar ha-afel (“Before the Dark Gate,” 1923). Vienna is also the setting of Chaye nisu’im (“Married Life,” 1929–1930), the novel that Fogel published a few years after he left Vienna.38 The plot of Chaye nisu’im takes place in Vienna of the early 1920s. It recounts the troubled, sadomasochistic relations between the young Jewish intellectual Rudolf Gurdweill and his wife, the Austrian “Baroness” Thea von Takow, from the day of their first meeting in a Viennese café until the day in which Gurdweill finally kills his wife. Throughout this period of “married life,” Thea abuses Gurdweill physically and emotionally. She sleeps with his friends, and after she gives birth to a baby boy, she tells him that the baby is not his. In spite of Gurdweill’s attempts to take care of the baby, he survives only a year and dies from neglect and a fatal illness. Throughout this period, Gurdweill seems completely unaware that he is the object of desire of one of his closest friends, a Jewish woman named Lotte Budenheim. After Gurdweill fails to respond to her love, Lotte commits suicide, which brings about Gurdweill’s emotional and psychological disintegration toward the end of the novel. Chaye nisu’im is the European modernist Hebrew urban novel par excellence. The novel is unprecedented in the history of Hebrew fiction in its attention to the urban space of the city. This attention leads to seemingly contradictory literary strategies of representation, a contradiction that can be seen in other urban modernist novels from the same period like Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, and James Joyce’s Ulysses.39 On the one hand, the novel gives its readers such a highly detailed account of streets, buildings, trams, stations, canals, gardens, public buildings, monuments, cafés, and bars that it is possible to reconstruct a map of Vienna in the 1920s based on the novel. One can easily take a tour of the city (even today) following the footsteps of Rudolf Gurdweill. On the other hand, the novel is thematically and stylistically far removed from the realist tradition of the nineteenth-century urban novel. Instead of mapping Vienna and describing the immobility of the known and visually perceived place, Fogel’s novel (like other modernist “city novels”) experiences the city

Vienna

through the subjectivity of the narrator and what we might call a “touring protagonist.”40 Rudolf Gurdweill, the main protagonist of the novel and its center of consciousness, spends most of his time in the streets, canals, trams, and parks of Vienna and in the coffeehouses and bars found along the boulevards and side streets. As such, Gurdweill is probably the best example in Hebrew fiction of the first half of the twentieth century of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur. For Benjamin, the street becomes a dwelling place for the flâneur; he is as much at home “among house façades as a citizen is within his four walls.”41 While Benjamin, following Baudelaire, locates the flâneur in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, his analysis is more indicative of the time in which he wrote his celebrated essays and of his unfinished “arcades project.”42 As Keith Tester argues, “the flâneur has been allowed, or made, to take a number of walks away from the streets and arcades of nineteenth century Paris.”43 In many modernist urban texts of the early twentieth century, the flâneur is no longer just the leisurely stroller gazing at fetishized objects of desire, but a filter for the mind of the new urban man that “becomes a maelstrom in which the centrifugal elements of experience are whirled together in dizzying combinations.”44 Gurdweill is no doubt a flâneur, a perpetual wanderer with no real home who builds himself a kind of imaginary home in the streets of Vienna; or as the narrator describes it, “Gurdweill now lived not at this or that address, but in the city of Vienna as a whole, in the literal sense of the words, he lived in Vienna.”45 Because of this fact, Chaye nisu’im develops a multilayered pedestrian vocabulary to deal with the activities of walking and the flânerie of the protagonist. As such, the city itself becomes a space to be “read,” a picture-puzzle that eludes any unequivocal deciphering. The urban experience is rendered in the novel primarily by means of a fragmentary chain of impressionistic and expressionistic sketches that portray the atmosphere and the mental world of the protagonist: Gurdweill took the tram with them to Franz-Josef Kai, where he got off after borrowing a small sum of money from Dr. Astel. The city was shrouded in a dull orange glow from the electric and gas lights. The streets were full of people, streaming out of the shops and businesses and hurrying home. Corrugated iron shutters came down with

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a deafening crash. At the tram stop the newspaper sellers announced the headlines at the tops of their voices, running after the receding trams and pushing their rolled-up papers through the windows. Here and there a barmaid could be seen crossing the street with a tray full of beer from a nearby bar. The rush and hurry infected Gurdweill too, along with all these people who had just finished working the whole day long. Although he did not have anywhere in particular to go, he pushed through the crowds and squeezed on to one of the packed trams. With one foot on the platform and one in the air, his body plastered against the broad, sweaty black standing in front of him like a wall, he reached the Schottentor, where he got off. For some time he walked back and forth in front of the Vienna Banking Company building without knowing what to do next. In the end he got on to a tram and rode back the way he had come and went home.46

This passage, like countless others in the novel, exemplifies the way the urban experience is refracted through the subjectivity of the flâneur protagonist and how, in turn, the cityscape itself becomes a mental space. The flânerie, the wandering of Gurdweill, is uncontrollable. He goes out and wanders around automatically and aimlessly, without any purpose or specific destination. His wandering is circular, as if he is walking in a huge labyrinth without a way out. Sometimes his wandering brings him relief, at other times it induces distress. The rush and the hurry of the crowds infect him in many different ways. However, he cannot but live in the city and even the thought of leaving it seems to him as if “someone told him to fly to the moon or to put an end  to his life.”47 The cityscape is reflected in the novel as a “landscape of the consciousness,” a staggering multiplicity of forms and actions that we experience as a seemingly endless parade of urban scenes. All these are fragmentary impressions that create an impressionist atmosphere, which in turn becomes an expressionist projection of the character’s consciousness that is exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. ­Fogel’s narrator has an uncanny ability to illustrate the urban mental landscape. Therefore, there is no coherent, single Vienna legible to the viewer that can be “seen” or “read” or “written.” The city changes in the novel together with every minute shade and nuance of Gurdweill’s mood and his frame of mind.

Vienna

Gurdweill is simultaneously drawn to the city and repelled by it. On one hand, he sees in the city “crowds of people streaming in and out [...] milling about like a swarm of ants,” 48 a picture which terrifies him. On the other hand, he expresses a “subtle but unconditional love for the city”: In some subtle way he loved this glittering city, this mocking and yet somehow innocent city. He loved her capriciously meandering streets, her haughtily humble luxury buildings, her gardens and pocket parks well-watered with sweet melancholy, the circle of interlocking hillocks enclosing her in which one could just barely sense the cold-wreathed banks of wind far away from here among the craggy ridges of the mighty Alps. He loved the light-hearted, fun-loving citizens of this city and the easy, superficial joyousness that permeated her.49

Like in Shofman’s urban stories, sometimes there is a need to get out of the city in order to grasp its disorienting enormity and multiplicity and lend to it some legibility. This can be seen in Fogel’s novel when Gurdweill goes with Dr. Astel and Lotte to the Kobentzal. They watch the city from above and then the narrator reports: Sadness gnawed at [Gurdweill’s] heart. He threw a leaf away and turned his head down towards the metropolis, where he couldn’t distinguish clear shapes but the sea of flickering light. The hidden city now seemed to him alien and hostile, and a fleeting anxiety welled up in him for his son and his wife.50

Significant portions of the narrative of Chaye nisu’im take place not just wandering in the streets and boulevards of the city but in the “thirdspace” of the Viennese café. Gurdweill and his friends spend much time in well-known cafés in the inner city, the heart of Old Vienna, like the famous Café Herrenhof. The Herrenhof was established in 1918 and replaced other well-known fin de siècle Viennese establishments like Café Griensteidl, which closed down in 1897, and Café Central, which lost much of its appeal to the literary and bohemian crowd after the war. Because of Herrenhof ’s belated arrival, it has been described both as a late, interwar imitation, and as a culmination of the café culture that flourished since the days of the Habsburg Empire as an important Viennese cultural institution.51

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Figure 12. Café Herrenhof, Vienna. (Courtesy of Stefan Popper, grandson of Bela Waldmann, co-founder with Marcus Klug of the Café Herrenhof. Photograph by Fritz Sauer)

In Chaye nisu’im, Café Herrenhof is clearly metonymic of the city of Vienna itself. It functions as a substitute for a “real” home. As a space that interfuses the public and the private, the inside and the outside, the culture of the bourgeoisie and the bohemian, the café brings the city inside, but also shields its habitués from the “crowds” and the rush. If “being alone in a crowd” is the quintessential experience of Gurdweill as a flâneur, the café supplies a perfect opportunity to do just that. Thus, the fictional Herrenhof of Chaye nisu’im is the second home for people like Gurdweill and his intellectual and pseudointellectual circle of friends, who visit it frequently but at random. But Fogel’s narrator is far from idealizing the café. If camaraderie is presented as a key element of the Viennese kaffeehäuser like the Herrenhof, it is balanced by the acrimony borne of the too close, at times suffocating, experience of the social space of the café.52 This ambiva-

Vienna

lent attitude toward the café captures much of the urban experience in the novel. With all the centrality of the Herrenhof, it must be noted that it is not the only café in the novel. Much narrative activity also takes place in small local cafés in Leopoldstadt and in Josefstadt, the eighth district, near the old university. Here is how the narrator describes one of these small cafés: It was nine at night. One by one the regulars of the little café near the university assembled: students and minor officials who sat in the same chairs night after night, and ordered their “Turkish” coffee as they were finishing off their evening meal at home. These customers were as much a part of the café and its particular atmosphere as the ragged, threadbare velvet sofas around the walls and the dark, dirty, marble tables. It was rare for a “stranger” to appear here.53

It is in this nameless café, with its “regulars” and sense of familiarity, that Gurdweill meets Thea von Takow for the first time.54 Of course, it is exactly the fact that she is a stranger that catches Gurdweill’s initial attention, and provokes his uncontrollable desire for the “other.” Gurdweill is unable to “take his eyes off her.” His gaze is fixed on her and only when “he meets her penetrating, steely blue glance” is he “forced to turn his eyes away.”55 This charged encounter of Gurdweill with Thea sets in motion the entire melodramatic plot of the novel. It also highlights the fact that Gurdweill is not just the quintessential Viennese flâneur of the early twentieth century who “lives in the city” (like Ulrich in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities). Fogel never lets readers forget who Gurdweill is, namely, a Jewish immigrant who came to Vienna from Eastern Europe, and he also shows where Gurdweill is located in the city. Like most of the city’s Hebrew and Yiddish writers, the fictional Gurdweill lives in the heart of the Leopoldstadt district, the Jewish area of Vienna. The small rented apartment that he shares with his friend Ulrich, which later becomes the dwelling place of the married couple, is located in Kleine Stadtgutgasse very close to the Nordbahnhof train station and the Prater, the public park of Vienna, and also the boulevard that connects the train station with the Danu Canal and the inner city. When Gurdweill marries Thea, the wedding and the conversion

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to Judaism that she undergoes in order to perform it take place in the Israelitische Bethaus (known also as the Leopoldstädter Temple), which at the time was the largest synagogue in Vienna. Much of the irony and the power of the novel stems from this position of Gurdweill as an immigrant East European Jew on the margins of this alluring, dizzying, and terrifying city. The novel starts and ends in Gurdweill’s small apartment in Leopoldstadt. Like many other characters in Hebrew fiction living in European cities and metropolitan centers, Gurdweill is simultaneously an insider and an outsider in the city, and this was true in many senses for Fogel, too, during his twelve years in Vienna. In short, Chaye nisu’im, published in 1929–1930, is the novel that goes further and deeper than any other piece of Hebrew literature in its exploration of the urban experience. I believe that to properly appreciate its role—and Vienna’s—we must consider the novel as both a continuation and a culmination of the tradition of European urban fiction in Hebrew that goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century, springing from the margins of European cities.56

S i x Berlin Between the Scheunenviertel and the Romanisches Café

Berlin is a compelling city to explore in the context of the development of modernist Hebrew literature. From the beginning of the twentieth century, Berlin has been an important enclave of Hebrew culture. In the Weimar period (1919–1933), especially during the period between 1920 and 1925, it was a major center of Hebrew literary activity, when a large and very distinguished group of East European Hebrew and Yiddish writers lived, wrote, and published in the city. And yet, most scholars consider the Hebrew literary activity in Berlin to be a short and minor episode. They see Berlin as a “temporary asylum” for Hebrew writers, a mere “station” on their way to the literary and cultural center that was being created in Mandatory Palestine.1 More recently, a number of scholars have studied the phenomenon of the Hebrew and Yiddish writers in Weimar Berlin, and its role in the development of a distinctive German-Jewish culture searching for “authenticity.”2 I want to change the direction of scholarship to examine the encounter with Berlin for the Hebrew writers who lived, worked, and wrote in the city, and more generally to uncover the city’s place in the development of Hebrew modernist literature.3 In his memoirs, the Hebrew writer and critic Yeshurun Keshet (the pen name of Ya‘acov Kopelovitz), who was a student in Berlin during the 1920s, evokes both the complexity and the allure of the city for Hebrew writers in these terms: Weimar Berlin was then, only three or four years after the end of World War I, a prosperous city to all appearances, a metropolis in which “the shell was very different from the core,” because the city was

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in fact stepping into the abyss [...] However, Berlin was also a center of scholarship and science, of vibrant culture and arts. The transportation and communication were extremely efficient, and it was possible to plan ahead and arrive promptly at your destination, whether it was a lecture at an institution of higher education, a concert hall, a play at the theater, an exhibition in the museum, or a motion picture at the cinema [...] you could catch a recital at the Gedächtniskirche and then walk to the nearby famous Romanisches Café to meet Ya‘acov Shteinberg who lived in Berlin and used to spend his evenings in the café [...] with “our people.” [...] In these days Berlin was a temporary center for many [Hebrew and Yiddish writers], no doubt because of its location: the cultural and economic metropolitan center closest to the “east,” and therefore the closest station to the exiles of the Soviet regime, and also because it was the place of the offices of the World Zionist Organization [...] For the East European Yiddish speakers, it was much easier to get adjusted to Berlin than to London or Paris, cities that seemed like a totally strange world [...] It is highly feasible that the prominence of so many German-Jews, in the field of commerce and intellect (especially in journalism) in this western capital was a crucial factor as well.4

Keshet’s description captures well not only the atmosphere  of  the time and place but also the manifold, even contradictory images of the metropolis in this time. More importantly, it clarifies the reasons why so many Hebrew and Yiddish writers chose to live and work in the city. Together with the observation (influenced, no doubt, by his retrospective look) that Berlin of the 1920s was a place “on the abyss,” he makes clear that for the East European writers who made Berlin their home for a short or a long time, the city, which had become a modern metropolis only recently, had much to offer in terms of transportation, communication, architecture, and access to a vibrant scene of modernist art and culture. Keshet’s observations about the tension between “surface” and “depth,” between visual appearance and what might be the “real” meaning of Berlin, and the need to decipher the metropolis as a kind of hieroglyph, were important features in Weimar Berlin culture and in literary engagements with the urban environment in Hebrew and Yiddish. Keshet’s account of meeting with Hebrew and Yiddish writers in places like the Romanisches Café or the new, massive movie theaters (re‘inoa in Hebrew, kinotopp in German slang) reveals just how embed-

Berlin

ded Hebrew and Yiddish writers were in the urban fabric of the city, including in what Janet Ward has called “the culture (or cult) of surface” in Weimar Berlin.5 This is in spite of, or maybe because of the fact that these Hebrew and Yiddish writers felt very different; as immigrants and exiles they maintained a critical distance from local German culture, in which they nevertheless participated quite intensively. In this context we must remember Peter Gay’s portrayal of Weimar culture (and Weimar Berlin in particular) as “the creation of outsiders, propelled by history into the inside for a short, dizzying, fragile moment.”6 When Gay writes that “Jews [...] making themselves at home in Berlin, transformed it and imprinted upon it something of their rootlessness, their restlessness, their alienation from soil and tradition, their pervasive disrespect for authority,”7 he surely did not have Hebrew and Yiddish writers in mind. However, his analysis applies, at least in some ways, also to the East European Jewish writers and intellectuals who were outsiders, but made Berlin their tentative, temporary “home.” As Keshet also makes clear in his portrayal of Berlin, in order to understand the nature of the Hebrew activity in the city as well as the literary representation of the cityscape in modernist Hebrew literature, we must consider the complex role of the city in a number of different contexts: Berlin as a historical center of Hebrew literature; Berlin as a crossroads between “East” and “West” and a magnet for immigrants in this period, including a huge émigré community of Russian (Jewish and non-Jewish) writers and artists; Berlin as a location for thriving Hebrew and Yiddish publishing endeavors; Berlin as a center for a distinctive German-Jewish culture, especially what historian Michael Brenner has called “the renaissance of Jewish culture in Weimar Germany”8; Berlin as a center of both German and international modernism; and finally, Berlin’s emergence as the third largest city in the world, a hectic metropolis with an accelerated rate of development side by side with political, social, and economic instability. These various contexts created powerful tensions and ruptures that made the place, almost literally, explosive. This volatility was clearly an important part of how German and transnational modernism developed in Berlin. As the historian Eric Weitz claimed recently, “Weimar culture and Weimar politics spawned so much creativity precisely

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­ ecause its artists, writers and political organizers sought to unravel the b meaning of modernity and to push it in new directions, some emancipatory and joyous, others frightfully authoritarian.”9 My claim is that these ingredients of Weimar Berlin were also essential to the development of Hebrew (and Yiddish) modernism during and after World War I, as well as in subsequent years. As is well known, Hebrew literature and culture had been associated with Berlin since the 1790s, when the city was the cradle of the haskalah movement of Moses Mendelssohn and his circle. Because of the activity of these early maskilim, some of the first works of modern Hebrew literature, and the Hebrew journals that published them, were created in Berlin and Königsberg from the late eighteenth century.10 However, throughout most of the nineteenth century, Berlin was not a locus of significant Hebrew literary activity, which shifted to Russia, Galicia, and Poland. Due to the rapid and high level of acculturation, Jewish creativity in Berlin and across Germany was conducted almost exclusively in German. It is only from the turn of the twentieth century that Berlin, the capital of the kaiserreich, became again a significant presence on the map of Hebrew literature and culture. Hebrew’s reemergence happened mainly because of the activity of a “Hebraist” movement in the city. This work, carried out by students and scholars of Hebrew in Berlin—including Ya‘acov Kahan, Shmuel Horodetzky, Shimon Bernfeld, Shimon Rawidowicz, Reuven Hermoni, and Itamar Ben-Avi—was accelerated when the writer and publisher Shay Ish Hurwitz founded the journal He-‘atid (“The Future”) in 1907. In 1909, the first International Conference of Hebrew Language and Culture convened in Berlin, as a kind of response to the famous Yiddish conference in Czernovitz, which took place the year before.11 The group of Hebrew writers in Berlin grew steadily in the second decade of the twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1914 the Hebrew poet David Shimonovitz (Shimoni) was a student of oriental philology and philosophy in Berlin and together with Ish Hurwitz edited the literary journal Netivot (1912), which published some of the most important modernist Hebrew texts written in this period (like Gnessin’s novella Etzel). Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, an original thinker, scholar, and pioneer of modernist Hebrew fiction, lived in Germany from 1890

Berlin

to 1921. Berdichevsky studied at the universities of Berlin, Breslau, and Bern in the last decade of the nineteenth century. As Avner Holtzman claims, it is during these years that Berdichevsky transformed himself from a rather typical maskil to “a revolutionary literary figure.”12 During the first decade of the twentieth century Berdichevsky lived in Breslau, and in 1911 he moved to Berlin and resided in the quarter of Fiedenau (which he insisted on calling Neve-Shalom in Hebrew) until his death in 1921. He was buried in the Weißensee cemetery of East Berlin. In the city, Berdichevsky worked on his large-scale anthologies of Jewish folklore, legends, and myths (published in both Hebrew and German). He also wrote his last literary works in Hebrew, including his only novel, Miram. In 1912, a year after Berdichevsky moved to Berlin, the twenty-four-year-old Shmuel Yosef Agnon embarked on a journey from Jaffa (where he lived for less than three years) to the city of Berlin.13 Agnon lived in Germany for the next twelve years, and although he ventured to cities like Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Bad Homburg, Berlin was his main intellectual base during this formative period in his personal, intellectual, and literary life.14 During the Weimar period, especially between 1920 and 1925, Berlin became de facto the largest enclave of Hebrew literature and culture in Europe (and perhaps in the world). As Yeshurun Keshet observed, this happened primarily because the German capital had become the city of choice for countless Hebrew and Yiddish writers (including many bilingual writers) who had left their homes in the stormy atmosphere of post-revolutionary Soviet Russia. They were joined by a number of writers who left Palestine around the same time in order to study or to “absorb some Europeanness.” Indeed, a large and very distinguished group of Hebrew writers arrived in Berlin after World War I and constituted a Hebrew “colony” in the city: Chaim Nachman ­Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, David Frishman, Yehoshua Ch. Ravnitzky, Zalman ­Shneior, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Ya‘acov Fichman, Ya‘acov Shteinberg, Chaim Hazaz, and numerous others joined Berdichevsky, Agnon, and the other writers who had been living and working in the city before the war. The number of Yiddish writers and artists who called Berlin home was equally large and distinguished. It included, among many others, the modernists Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, Leib Kvitko from

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the modernist Yiddish “Kiev Group,” Moyshe Kulbak from Minsk, and Uri Zvi Greenberg, who came to Berlin from Warsaw. In her discussion of Yiddish literary activity in Berlin, Delphine Bechtel describes the city accurately as a “center of Yiddish modernism in the 1920s.”15 Apart from the presence of so many Hebrew and Yiddish writers, the city was the locus of a bustling publishing enterprise in both languages. A number of Hebrew publishers and journals were based in Berlin before the war, but this was just a prelude to the interwar activity. Numerous Hebrew and Yiddish publishing houses were founded in Berlin in the early 1920s. Moriyah was transferred from Odessa to Berlin together with Bialik who also established the new Dvir publishing house. A. Y. Shtybel moved his important publishing house to the city in 1927. Other Hebrew publishing houses established in the city were Omanut (“Art”), Ayanot, Ha-sefer (“The Book”), Yavne, and Reuven Mass.16 These publishing houses issued classical Jewish and Hebrew texts alongside modern Hebrew literature. In Yiddish, the publishing atmosphere was even more frenzied, and during the first part of the 1920s it was second only to Warsaw. Apart from a number of important Yiddish publishing houses (including Klal Farlag, which also published Hebrew literature), at least nineteen (and by some accounts up to thirty) Yiddish-language journals and periodicals were published in Berlin at the time.17 There were some complex and revealing tensions between Berlin as the center of publishing during the early 1920s, and Berlin as an enclave of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism. Publishing found a base in Berlin mainly because publication of Hebrew (and to some extent Yiddish) in the newly established Soviet Union became difficult; the situation was also helped, strangely, because of the deeply unstable economics of Weimar Berlin. The tremendous inflation rate between 1919 and 1923 actually attracted East European Jewish publishers and editors to Berlin. Most of the publishers’ capital was foreign currency, and for them publishing in Germany was extremely cheap. In 1925, when the newly appointed president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, managed to tame the rate of inflation, Bialik and others who came to Berlin mainly in order to advance their publishing activities left the city and abandoned the dream of a flourishing Hebrew publication center in Germany.18 But the literary and cultural significance of the encounter of

Berlin

Hebrew and Yiddish writers with Berlin, and the city’s role in the development of modernism, cannot be reduced to economic forces or even to the highly important existence of the publishing market in the city. The immigration of these writers to Berlin was of course part of a larger phenomenon. From the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially during and after World War I, tens of thousands of East European Jews immigrated to Germany as exiles and refugees. The East European Jewish immigrants did not choose one city but spread their settlement among five or so German urban centers.19 Still, the most significant number of Jewish immigrants did settle in Berlin, and the immigrants from Eastern Europe can account for a large part of the growth of the Jewish population in Berlin from 65,611 in 1895 to 172,627 in 1925, when East European Jews became 25.4 percent of the overall Jewish population.20 Joseph Roth (himself a native of Galicia, who moved to Berlin from Vienna in 1920) wrote, “Berlin has no ghetto. It has a

Figure 13. In front of the Jewish lending library along the Grenadierstraße in Berlin, 1928. (Photo Credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York)

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Jewish Quarter.”21 Roth was referring to the area within Berlin’s Mitte known as the Scheunenviertel (which translates as the “barn quarter” or the “slum quarter”), located a few blocks northeast of ­Alexanderplatz. This area was the point of arrival for thousands of East European Jews (and non-Jews) from the beginning of the twentieth century. By the mid-1920s, around half of the area’s population consisted of East European Jewish immigrants. Many of the Hebrew and Yiddish writers lived and worked in and around Scheunenviertel, although if they could, they tended to move westward to elegant neighborhoods like the Kurfürstendamm and Charlottenburg that were more bourgeois and upper-middle-class in nature, and were also a magnet for the large Russian émigré community that included a significant number of important Russian writers, artists, and intellectuals.22 The writers who could not live in the western neighborhoods were often attracted to places like the Romanisches Café in West Berlin. As Yeshurun Keshet attested, in these places writers like Shteinberg, Greenberg, Agnon, and many others could meet Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Russian writers, intellectuals, artists, and bohemians and experience the intense pulse of the city. This geographical wavering between “east” and “west” within the city of Berlin is mirrored in the literary and cultural realm as well. The newcomers couldn’t help but encounter the German-Jews who were so prominent in all spheres of Weimar literature and culture. As the expressionist poet Gottfried Benn exclaimed: The overflowing plenty of stimuli, of artistic, scientific, commercial improvisations which placed the Berlin of 1918–1933 in the class of Paris, stemmed for the most part from the talents of this [Jewish] sector of the population, its international connections, its sensate restlessness, and above all its dead-sure instinct for quality.23

But the relations between German-Jewish culture and the Hebrew and Yiddish literature created by East European émigré writers and intellectuals were complex, fraught with some of the conflicting images, fantasies, and stereotypes that characterized contacts between the ­German-Jews (known as Yekkes) and the East European Jews (­Ostjuden) since the nineteenth century.24 For sure, there was a marked difference in how the average German-Jewish bourgeoisie perceived

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the East European immigrant “masses” in the Scheunenviertel and the perceptions of East European Jewish writers and intellectuals by their influential German-Jewish counterparts. But even with this difference the dynamics were intricate. On the one hand, East European Jews represented the past that German-Jews wanted to leave behind en route to acculturation into modern German society and culture. On the other hand, there was a mutual fascination between the “Western” German-Jews and the Ostjuden, especially in the years during and after World War I. This was surely true for highly involved German-Jewish figures like Martin Buber (himself an immigrant from Galicia), Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem, and Franz Rosenzweig, who saw the émigré Hebrew and Yiddish writers as representing an “authenticity” which they sought to infuse into their own attempts at Jewish cultural renaissance. What Gershom Scholem wrote in his memoirs about meeting Agnon for the first time is indicative of the way in which other German-Jewish intellectuals perceived the Hebrew and Yiddish writers whom they encountered during and after World War I: The appearance of Agnon in Germany in those years, was a major event for me and for some people of my age group [...] This, after all, was the time when a kind of veritable cult of the Eastern Jews (­Ostjuden) reigned in Germany, which represented a backlash against the arrogance and presumption which at the time were accepted attitudes in the circle of assimilated Jews from which we were descended. For us, by contrast, every Eastern Jew was a carrier of all the mysteries of Jewish existence.25

This encounter was also significant, albeit in very different ways, for the more “assimilated” German-Jewish writers such as Else LaskerSchüler, Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Arnold Zweig, and many others. In spite of the fact that these writers did not have command of Hebrew or Yiddish, they were highly attracted to the Ostjuden and what they represented. These German-Jewish intellectuals and writers fixed their gaze on East European or, more vaguely, on “oriental” Jewry, a term that enabled them to stress their own distance from tradition while still claiming a spiritual as well as genetic connection. They regarded the Eastern Jews as exotic and even intimidating, yet they also

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saw in the Ostjuden a vision of their own personal origins, a vestige of an authenticity they were trying to regain.26 Thus, in 1923, Alfred Döblin, the author of the quintessential expressionist urban novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), felt the need to expand his minimal knowledge of Jews and Judaism. Moved by his encounter with representatives of East European Jewry during his service in the war, as well as the antisemitic response to their existence in ­Berlin’s Mitte, he decided to embark on a journey to Poland. Döblin came back with a series of impressions and observations, which he presented in the book Reise in Polen (“Journey to Poland,” 1926).27 Around the same time, another journey was taken by Joseph Roth, a Galician Jewish writer and journalist who moved to Vienna and then Berlin. He published his impressions and reflections on the mass movement of the Ostjuden westward across the European continent in Juden auf Wanderschaft (“The Wandering Jews,” 1927). Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), one of the notable and most eccentric German poets of the time, who became identified with Berlin’s expressionism, was fascinated with what she called “the biblical Jews,” in contrast to what she conceived as the contemporary German-Jew. In spite of the fact that she hardly left Berlin since 1903, in her poetry she projected herself back into biblical times and associated herself with the figure of Joseph, to whom she dedicated two poems in her collection Hebrew Ballads (1913). She signed her letters as “Prince Jussuf of Thebes,” dressed in oriental clothes, and constructed her own biography as an “oriental” Jew. In her myth-making expressionist way, Lasker-Schüler claimed that she actually translated her poetry from biblical Hebrew into modern German. When the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg offered to translate some of Lasker-Schüler’s poems into Hebrew, she replied that she was already “writing in Hebrew.”28 But this was not only an exotic oriental desire of the extravagant German poet to present herself as “Hebrew.” The connections between Lasker-Schüler and other German expressionist writers with Hebrew and Yiddish writers like Uri Zvi Greenberg and Avrom N. Stencl were not only deep but also reciprocal.29 Greenberg met Lasker-Schüler during the time they both lived and worked in Berlin, a period in which he was developing his revolutionary expressionist poetics in Yiddish

Berlin

and Hebrew. Greenberg was poetically and emotionally attached to Lasker-Schüler and he remained her admirer after he left Berlin and immigrated to Palestine. In 1926, he wrote a beautiful essay in the Hebrew newspaper Davar entitled Dvora be-shivya (“Deborah in Captivity”), in which he claimed that Lasker-Schüler, like the biblical prophet-poetess Deborah (and also like a bee—the literal meaning of “Deborah” in Hebrew), was a “Jewish-Hebrew” poet that had been “captive” in German culture. Greenberg was fully aware of the fact that Lasker-Schüler was fully situated in what he called “Berlin’s Mitte,”30 and at the same time that “the non-Hebrew reader will find original Hebrew in her poem; living Hebrew of the twentieth century.”31 Greenberg was associated not only with Lasker-Schüler but also with other expressionist writers like Franz Werfel and Johannes R. Becher (1891–1958).32 A vital dimension of Berlin’s importance was the complex hierarchy of old and new, insider and outsider writers. The intense encounter between German-Jewish figures like Gershom Scholem, Alfred Döblin, Franz Werfel, and Else Lasker-Schüler on the one hand, and Hebrew and Yiddish writers like Agnon, Greenberg, Stencl, Shteinberg, and Bergelson on the other hand, was essential to the city’s vibrancy. And the depth of these encounters proves that at least part of the modernists’ great attraction to Berlin was due to the fact that many of Germany’s more important exponents of literary and artistic modernism, especially of expressionism, lived there, and because Berlin was not just a Jewish but a European center for modernist literature, theater, and the arts. Already during the early years of the twentieth century Berlin was an important and rich center of modernism in art, literature, theater, cinema, philosophy, and architecture. In the Weimar period, and during the 1920s in particular, Berlin was the city that fostered artistic and cultural developments like expressionist fiction, poetry, painting, and sculpture; the movements of Neue Sachlichkeit and Bauhaus in architecture; and avant-garde theater. 33 As Peter Gay writes in his study of Weimar culture, “when we think of Weimar, we think of modernity in art, literature and thought.”34 And Berlin was surely at the hectic center of Weimar culture, marked by explosive intellectual productivity, political instability, economic insecurity, and a troubling realization in the minds of many that the secure old order was passing but that no

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discernible new order was taking its place. Walter Laqueur sums up this period as “an age of experimentation, not of fundamental discoveries; a restless, extrovert age [...] [a period of] an abundance of talent as well as of sources of conflict, combined with the political freedom which made experimentation possible.”35 All these conflicts and uncertainties are reflected in the lives of the myriad intellectuals and artists who gravitated to Berlin, and in the characteristics of the artistic movements that burgeoned there and made significant cultural contributions in the fields of literature, art, architecture, music, dance, drama, and the new medium of the motion picture. As in the case of Vienna, the German-Jews who lived in Berlin, and were fascinated with the East European Jewish culture of this period, were very prominent in creating Berlin’s modernism during the early twentieth century and through the Weimar period.36 The huge colony of émigré writers and artists in Berlin has been, in one way or the other, part of Berlin’s modernist Weimar culture. This fact is clearly discernible in the visual arts, where linguistic differences are less of a barrier. During these years, many important Jewish émigré artists from Eastern Europe lived and worked in Berlin, including Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, El Lissitzky, Issachar Ber Ryback, Ya‘acov Adler, Henryk Berlewi, and Mark Schwartz. Some of the most important artists and writers in Berlin’s expressionist movement—like Ludwig Maydner, Oskar Kokoschka, and Gottfried Benn—not only recognized the quality and freshness of these East European Jewish artists but also saw collaboration with them as one of the most important elements for the renewal of Berlin modernism beyond the expressionism of the period of 1907–1917.37 No less important, albeit much less known, were the contacts between writers that took place in Berlin during these years. In this context, there was definitely a huge difference between the encounter with Berlin of Hebrew and Yiddish writers from the generation of Bialik and Berdichevsky, and the younger writers who came to Berlin as they were developing their literary and intellectual tastes and outlook. Shimon Rawidowicz, for example, commented on Bialik’s lack of interest in the literary, intellectual, and artistic ferment of Weimar Berlin when he noted in his diary that Bialik “lives in Germany, and he has no

Berlin

idea what is going on in the flourishing intellectual atmosphere of Weimar.”38 Indeed, Bialik was mainly concerned with his publishing business and with the possibility of creating new projects for publication, while the younger Hebrew and Yiddish writers were busy creating new forms of literature in new journals and magazines. It is important to note that while there was nothing particularly new in Bialik’s publishing projects in Moriyah, which he transferred to Berlin from Odessa, other Hebrew and Yiddish “small journals” were a significant part of the modernism that developed in Weimar Berlin. One of the best and most visible examples of this collaborative publishing activity is the short-lived but important journal Rimon/Milgroym (“The Pomegranate”) that appeared in six issues between 1922 and 1924 in Berlin. The journal was founded and published by the couple Mark Wischnitzer (a Jewish historian) and Rachel Bernstein Wischnitzer (a scholar of art history). Rimon/Milgroym is extraordinary in the history of Hebrew and Yiddish publication for several reasons. It has been recognized as the most beautiful and lavishly presented Hebrew and Yiddish journal ever published. It included artwork by modernist East European Jewish artists who lived in Berlin at the time (Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, and El Lissitzky) as well as essays about impressionist and expressionist art and Jewish and Muslim art.39 Delphine Bechtel describes the artistic orientation of the journal as “a mixture of Berlin expressionism and German/Russian neo-primitivism,”40 a description that also characterizes much of the journal’s literature. The journal was also one of the very few examples of bilingual journals in this period. The Hebrew Rimon contained different original materials from the Yiddish Milgroym, but the two were almost identical in form, and featured the same artwork and translations from German and world literature as well as many articles and essays. In fact, the journal was noted for its excellent Hebrew and Yiddish translations of German (Jewish and non-Jewish) modernist writers like Max Brod, Arthur Schnitzler, Arno Holtz, and Stefan Zweig. The first volume of the Yiddish version was edited by the Yiddish modernists Der Nister and Bergelson and included stories by the two editors as well as by other émigré Yiddish writers in Berlin such as Dovid Hofshtyen, Leib Kvitko, and Moyshe Kulbak. The Hebrew version was apparently edited by Moshe Kleinman

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(who moved to Berlin from Lvov) and Moshe Wischnitzer and included literary texts by a host of émigré Hebrew writers in Berlin: Berdichevsky (who had just been buried in Berlin), Bialik, Tchernichovsky, Shteinberg, Agnon, Uri Zvi Greenberg (who published in this journal his first large Hebrew poema), Avigdor Foyershtein (Hameiri), and others. Another example of a short-lived but highly important journal that owes much to the collaboration between Berlin modernism and East European Jewish modernism is Albatros, edited by the bilingual writer

Figure 14. Cover of Rimon, Berlin, 1922.

Berlin

Figure 15. Cover of Albatros, Berlin, 1922.

Uri Zvi Greenberg. Greenberg had established the Yiddish journal in Warsaw, but he had problems with Polish censorship after the publication of his prose poem Royte epel fun veybeymer (“Red Apples from Pain Trees”) in the second issue of Albatros. Greenberg moved to Berlin and issued the next two volumes in 1922 and 1923—this time with the subtitle, “Journal for New Poetic and Artistic Expression,” which clearly indicates its expressionist orientation. Albatros was one of the most

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important expressionist journals in Jewish literature, and as ­Avidov Lipsker has observed, the journal was “a milestone in the integration of poetic, publicist, graphic and typographic values.”41 The graphic configuration of Albatros was done by Greenberg (under a pseu­ donym) together with avant-garde Jewish artists like Henryk Berlewi and Mark Schwartz. Although Greenberg had already collaborated with them on the journal in Warsaw, when he moved to Berlin he adopted new directions, especially stylistic and literary innovations influenced by German expressionist journals (Die Aktion and Der Sturm) and the publishing fervor surrounding them. Of course, the influence of Berlin expressionism encompassed graphic and typographic as well as poetic elements, creating something unique and unprecedented in the history of modernist Jewish literature. Another urban cultural institution that became an emblem of Berlin modernism and fostered fertile contact among modernists working in German, Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish was—once again—the café, and more specifically what I have called the “thirdspace” of the “literary café.” As in Vienna, several cafés in Berlin emerged as important places for the creation and development of modernism in Berlin since the fin de siècle years. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Café Monopol near Friedrichstrasse in Berlin’s Mitte (not far from the Scheunenviertel) was a favorite meeting place for writers and young theater artists, which included Max Reinhardt and his friend (and later dramatic advisor) Arthur Kahane. It was during numerous meetings and rehearsals within the space of the café that Reinhardt developed his ideas and an agenda for a new theater.42 Several other Berlin cafés were especially important for the formation and development of expressionist art and literature. Public recitals and cabarets of der nue club (the New Club) were given in these cafés, and editorial activities of expressionist journals took place there. The most important of these was Café des Westens on the Kurfürstendamm, which by 1910 was quickly becoming not only the chief gathering place for all the expressionist circles centered in Berlin but also a magnetic pole drawing modernist writers and artists from all over Europe. The café was famous for the extravagant dress and eccentric behavior of its “regulars,” as well as for its artistic and literary activity. Poets, painters, critics, philosophers,

Berlin

actors, and directors packed the café in the evening. Periodicals such as Der Sturm and Die Aktion were founded and planned in the café, and it was an indispensable ingredient of the daily literary life for the Berlin modernists before the end of World War I.43 In 1915, however, the Café des Westens “closed for remodeling” and banished the writers and bohemians so that it could reopen as a more “respected” establishment. After World War I and throughout the Weimar period, the huge and rather shabby Romanisches Café became the new headquarters of the expressionists, as well as the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit movement, and in fact of all writers, artists, and many other intellectuals and bohemians—German and non-­German alike. The Romanisches Café performed many of the functions of the Café des Westens in the 1910s, and it also inherited the dubious name “Café Megalomania.” Among the many well-known figures who frequented the café were Else Lasker-Schüler, Franz ­Werfel, Kurt Tucholsky, Stefan Zweig, Alfred Döblin, Ludwig ­Meydner, Gottfried Benn, Erich Kästner, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht. These figures and many others described it as a second home for writers during the day; a place where heated debates on a variety of subjects were conducted far into the night; and a place where collective activities, such as the founding and editing of periodicals, were carried on. The Romanisches Café was indicative of Weimar culture in many ways, including that it was far from being the exclusive location of a small group of German expressionists, but rather was a place in which “insiders” and “outsiders,” locals and strangers, bohemians and the bourgeoisie, politics and art, and avant-garde and mass culture (both “high” and “low”) all coexisted in an elusive mixture.44 Walter Laqueur described well the atmosphere of this meeting place of the Weimar intelligentsia, and highlighted its strange mixture of people and cultures: Avant-garde and mass culture met in the coffee houses such as the ­Romanisches Café, at the corner of Tauentzien and Budapester Strasse, a stone’s throw from the Gedaechtniskirche; there you could see writers and critics, painters and actresses and quite a few original characters who never published a book, drew a line or composed a sonata, but nevertheless had some influence on contemporary literature, music

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and painting. The painters had their own little table [...] School reformers were sitting there next to all kinds of fanatics, revolutionaries next to pickpockets, people on drugs next to apostles of health-food and vegetarianism. Such a mixture caused a great deal of confusion, but it also acted as a strong stimulant.45

These well-known Berlin cafés and cultural institutions have been amply described, and their role in the various stages of Berlin modernism has been clearly demonstrated (and even mythologized). However, these accounts are hardly aware of the fact that Hebrew and Yiddish writers, intellectuals, and artists were a fixed presence in the very same

Figure 16. Young woman at the Romanisches Café in Berlin, circa 1924. (Photo credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York)

Berlin

cafés. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Hebraists of ­Berlin had a stammtisch (regular table) at Café Monopol. Aharon Hermoni and Itamar Ben-Avi (who came to Berlin as a student) write in their memoirs that by 1908 even the waiter, Eduard, knew some Hebrew in order to accommodate the “Hebrew” table, which included Shay Ish Hurwitz, Reuven Breinin, Horodetzky, Itamar Ben-Avi, ­Aharon ­Hermoni, and many other Zionist activists and Hebrew writers.46 Y. D. Berkovitz wrote that plans for Hebrew publishing ventures were laid out on the black marble tops of this plush café with its oriental-like appearance in the heart of Berlin. Journals like Ha-olam and He-‘atid were in fact edited in the café.47 The Hebraists in Café Monopol were far from isolated. Side by side with the Hebrew table there were many “German tables,” like the one of Reinhardt and his theater; though not often recognized, interaction between these groups was inevitable and abundant. Near the “Hebrew table” there was also a “Yiddish table” that enjoyed visits by luminaries such as Sholem Asch, whose play El nekamot (“God of Revenge”) was performed by Reinhardt’s theater, and Sholem Aleichem, who came to Berlin with the dream that some of his plays would be translated into German and produced by Reinhardt’s theater as well.48 There is less evidence of the presence of Hebrew and Yiddish writers in the famous Café des Westens during the 1910s, but we know that ­Berdichevsky, Shay Ish Hurwitz, and other Hebrew, Yiddish, and German writers used to meet every Thursday evening first at Monopol and then at Café des Westens.49 However, the rather modest activity before the war was just a prelude to the massive presence of Hebrew and Yiddish East European writers and artists in the Romanisches Café after World War I and throughout the Weimar period. Their presence was intense and notable and was attested by almost everybody who was part of the Hebrew and Yiddish colony in Weimar Berlin. The café is mentioned in the writing of Uri Zvi Greenberg, Ya‘acov Shteinberg, Yeshurun Keshet, Avrom N. Stencl, Dovid Bergelson, Lea Goldberg, Nahum Goldman, Henrik Berlewi, and numerous others.50 In fact, some accounts create the impression that the Romanisches Café was a kind of pan-Jewish urban space. Thus, Nahum Goldman writes that “each [Jewish] group had its own table; there were the ‘Yiddishists,’

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‘Zionists,’ ‘Bundists’ and so on, all arguing among themselves from table to table.” 51 The Yiddish author Avrom N. Stencl describes the scene of the Romanisches Café from the angle of East European Jewish intellectuals: From those fleeing the pogroms in the Ukrainian shtetls, from the famine in the Russian cities, and from the Revolution, a kind of Jewish colony formed itself in the west of Berlin, and the Romanisches Cafe was its parliament. It was buzzing with famous Jewish intellectuals and activists, well-known Jewish lawyers from Moscow and Petersburg, Yiddish writers from Kiev and Odessa, with flying party leaders from the extreme left to the extreme right wing—it buzzed like a beehive.52

In his characteristically fragmentary expressionist style, with its expansive grammar and outrageous images, Uri Zvi Greenberg writes in his essay on Else Lasker-Schüler that they “drank together dark coffee in the Romanisches Café, and until midnight this bitter drink was dripping in our hearts, and sipping through even deeper to the ‘inner existence,’ around the heart and beyond it like dark blood.”53 Yeshurun Keshet described his encounters with the Hebrew and Yiddish writer Ya‘acov Shteinberg, who spent most of his days in the Romanisches Café.54 In Keshet’s memoirs, the café emerges both as a kind of “Jewish urban space” and a place whose “regulars” are the “cultural elite full of decadence, smoke and the syncopated rhythm of the metropolis.” It is not surprising that Shteinberg, who was always attracted to this mixture of urban decadence and syncopated rhythm, and to modernist literary activity (in which he participated with a critical distance), devoted to the Romanisches Café an entire cycle of sonnets— Sonnets from the Coffeehouse (1922). The way Hebrew and Yiddish writers described the Romanisches Café—which was also known in Yiddish as Café Rakhmonishes (“The Café of Pity”)—is a testimony to the tensions between the “bohemian” existence of the Hebrew and Yiddish writers and a sense of certain marginality (both physical and spiritual) in the café and in Weimar Berlin in general. On the one hand, Stencl, Greenberg, and Shteinberg met Lasker-Schüler and other important figures of Berlin modernism in the Romanisches Café, and these experiences left strong marks on their literary and intellectual development. On the other hand, their experi-

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ences of the café, which clearly became a metonym for the urban space of Berlin in this period, emphasize both their participation in modernist Berlin culture and their marginality, the energy of the metropolis as well as its decadence, corruption, and sense of deep despair. Hebrew and Yiddish journals like Rimon/Milgroym and Albatros, and the intense presence of East European Jewish writers in places like the Romanisches Café, clearly indicated the importance of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist literary activity in Berlin. This creative burst attracted much interest outside Germany, and was praised by some and elicited strong criticism by others. Melech Ravitch, who moved from Vienna to Warsaw in 1921, saw Yiddish writers working in Berlin as deserting the realities of East European Jewish culture: Somewhere in Berlin, in the smoky atmosphere of the Romanisches Café, some of the best creators of Yiddish culture are hanging around, pretending to create a Yiddish culture. But those who are sitting in the Romanisches Café and looking at us from afar, as we are pulling the carriage of our culture, are simply deserters.55

Similar responses by modernist Jewish writers in Warsaw (including Peretz Markish, who actually lived and worked in Berlin in 1923) only highlight the importance of their creative efforts and the shortlived journals, and the fact that Berlin had become during these years a highly significant enclave of Yiddish and Hebrew modernism. Whether honored or criticized, this enclave would have substantial impact on the larger world of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in years to come. There is little doubt of Berlin’s profound impact on a broad spectrum of Hebrew and Yiddish writers, including Uri Zvi Greenberg, Ya‘acov Shteinberg, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Dovid Bergelson, Moyshe Kulbak, and others, regardless of the length of their stay in the city. And yet, it is extremely hard to define and summarize the nature of this contradictory encounter. If we examine the literary representation of Berlin and its cityscape, we reach similar conclusions. In this area as well, there is a manifest difference between writers of the generation of Bialik, Frishman, and Berdichevsky (who lived in Berlin for eleven years, but left almost no echo of the city in his literary oeuvre), and the younger writers who arrived in Berlin as they developed their literary style and voice. Not surprisingly, literary representations of the city are

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far from uniform, and also far from painting an ideal picture of the urban experience. This is true in the poetry and prose of Berlin created by the German expressionists and other modernists, and it certainly is no less true in what was written by Yiddish and Hebrew writers.

Deciphering the Hieroglyphs of the Metropolis An interesting feature of Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish literature is that the dominant genre in poetry was the poema (long narrative poem). While the genre of the poema, with its ancient epic roots, has been mainly associated with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ romantic poetry of Pushkin, Byron, and Heine, the poema was equally important in the development of modernism, as can be attested in the symbolist, futurist, and expressionist poemas of the early twentieth century in Russian, German, and other European languages.56 The modernist poema can be described as a “plotless novel” that revels in lyric digressions and rejects the importance of chronological order. There are frequent changes of focus, rapid sequences of changing scenes, and an emphasis on fundamental problems of human existence. The modernist poema’s compositional form is that of an amalgamation of parts; it does not seek a unity of stylized reality. This makes possible the integration of lyric, dramatic, descriptive, contemplative, rhetorical, and linguistic elements without detracting from the poema’s loose narrative axis.57 A number of narrative poems written in and about Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish between 1911 and 1933 are remarkable in the ways in which they were used by the writers to explore new poetic territories, as well as in the ways in which they were used to record a spatial topography of Berlin that is both physical and mental. A few years before the advent of World War I, David Shimonovitz (Shimoni) had written a number of poems that take place in Berlin. Shimonovitz was a student of oriental philology and philosophy in Berlin between 1910 and 1914. Together with Shay Ish Hurwitz he edited the Hebrew literary collection Netivot (1912), which published some important modernist Hebrew texts written in this period. In Hebrew literary historiogra-

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phy, Shimonovitz is usually seen as a (late) romantic poet, part of the so-called Bialik generation. But the narrative poems he has written in Berlin show that Shimonovitz was an experimental poet who took the traditions of Russian and German romantic poetry in modernist directions. Two of Shimonovitz’s poemas merit attention as precursors to what was written in Hebrew and Yiddish during the Weimar period. Although they appear to be very traditional in form and structure, these narrative poems actually waver between late romantic, symbolist, and early expressionist poetics. The first poem is entitled Chalom leyl choref (“A Winter’s Night Dream,” 1911) and the second Be-zohorey drachim (“In Splendor of the Roads,” 1913). In both of them, Shimonovitz maps the topography of Berlin from the point of view of a young Jewish student and poet. Like some symbolist and expressionist poemas in Russian and German literature, Shimonovitz maintains the formal elements of the Pushkinian genre (he also translated Pushkin’s poemas into Hebrew), but he employs it to present autobiographical materials in a highly ironic, selfconscious way. Shimonovitz’s poemas trace the journeys of the speaker-poet, a lost search for what is left of heroism and freedom in a modern, urban age. Unlike the epic and romantic journey of the pre-modernist poema in Russian, German, and Hebrew poetry, these modernist journeys end up mainly with paralysis and a sense of ennui, and are written with a selfconsciousness of their static nature. The speaker, who is the anti-hero of the narrative poem, is in the midst of a dreamy hallucination and at the same time he is engaged in intense, solipsistic self-analysis. Shimono­ vitz’s poemas of Berlin mix and contrast a pathetic naiveté with sharp wit, a colorful theatrical imagination with mundane sobriety, and the world of nature and myths with modern urban experience.58 Chalom leyl choref engages rather playfully the tradition of the romantic Russian poems of Pushkin, but also Goethe’s “Winter Journey” and Heinrich Heine’s imaginary journey in Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (“Germany: A Winter’s Tale,” 1844). The speaker is a poor poet without work who lives in dark rented rooms in pensions (boarding houses) in Charlottenburg that belong to harsh and cold women.59 The opening of the poem presents the speaker as a penniless student who

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is about to be evicted from his room in the middle of winter because he cannot afford to pay the rent. While he is daydreaming in the small cold room, the “Winter King” is revealed to him and takes him to an ice cave in the North Sea, where he joins “Nimrod,” the ancient legendary hunter. As part of his long imaginary travels to the “secret world,” he is able to witness the city of Berlin from a new vantage point. He is fascinated by the energy of the metropolis, with the rush of the crowds and the hum of the machines, so different from the serenity of primordial nature. But Berlin also emerges as a dark industrial city, where “pure snow” immediately becomes “black and dirty.” In the vast urban space, “dreams and flowers” alike can quickly die out. The city is described as “a cage of stone” populated with taverns and whores, full of illicit sexuality and devoid of human warmth. When a female prostitute approaches the speaker he is revolted, and it is only the Winter King who can save him and take him away. Following this experience, he decides to leave this “humanity in ruins” and to become a hunter in the ice-ocean, only to be awakened from his dream back into the reality of Berlin in 1911. The second poema, Be-zohorey drachim, uses the same narrative structure of a mock-heroic journey. The speaker leaves his rented room in the pension, which is being cleaned before the arrival of the spring, and wanders in and around the city of Berlin, observing the rush and rattle of the city. He observes the display of commodities in shop windows with their promise of material abundance, the spectacles of street performers, and the fleeting young women who arouse his desire before they disappear. He leaves Berlin and wanders around the forests that surround the city. Here he laments the death of the God Pan (à la Nietzsche in “The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music,” 1871), and at the same time realizes that in modern Berlin, the ancient Pan is nothing but a local drunkard arrested by the police. In the final part of the poema, he falls asleep in one of Berlin’s squares with a fountain and a monumental statue of Kaiser Friedrich the Great. In his dream, the speaker has a tense conversation with the Kaiser about his long-lost shtetl and his existence as a stranger and émigré in the city. In spite of the romantic overtones and references, this is a distinctively urban poem with symbolist and early expressionist elements. It probes issues

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of gender and sexuality, surface and depth, home and homelessness, power and powerlessness, the monumental and the everyday, and it ends with an ironic, meager sense of hope that comes from the speaker’s realization that he can continue wandering in the “splendor of the roads” of urban modernity.60 Shimonovitz’s poemas of Berlin set a tone that later East European Hebrew and Yiddish writers would follow, at the same time as they explored new poetic and spatial territories. A decade after Shimonovitz’s poemas, Uri Zvi Greenberg wrote between 1923 and 1925 some of the most astonishing and innovative modernist poemas in Yiddish and Hebrew literature. In the ten monumental poemas that comprise his first Hebrew book Eima gdola ­ve-yare’ach (“Great Trembling and a Moon,” 1924), Greenberg moved into completely new territory in the history of Hebrew narrative poetry. It was the first time that expressionistic poetry became a dominant mode in Hebrew poemas, and Greenberg transformed the very shape and poetic function of the genre. A number of these pioneering poemas were written in Berlin, and they take place in Berlin and deal with Greenberg’s experience in the metropolis. The city had a strong impact on his poetics, politics, and editorial activity. In Berlin, Greenberg absorbed and participated in not only the debates and formation of late (post– World War I) expressionism but also the wave of Die Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) that was widely discussed in these years.61 From the ten great poemas in Eima gdola ve-yare’ach, three were previously published in Berlin. Parts of the monumental poema Hakarat ha-yeshut (“The Knowledge of Being”) were written in Berlin, but it was completed and published in Palestine. Eima gdola ve-yare’ach was written entirely in Tel Aviv but deals extensively with the Berlin experience.62 The entire book is written with an awareness of the fact that modern existence in the twentieth century (or as Greenberg calls it, “the beginning of the sixth millennium”) is in essence the urban experience. The book begins with the words: “It has been decreed: Death to the village. Cry to the flute of the shepherd that was thrown to the grass and which will not be heard anymore [...] the shepherd went wide-eyed to the metropolis.”63 The metropolis takes the place of the village, the factory with the smoke takes the place of the windmill, and the new urban era is the time of steam, wheels, industry, electricity, telegraph, and

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radio. The city of Berlin appears as an emblem of the modern western metropolis as well as a concrete urban place through the entire book, mainly in Hakarat ha-yeshut and Eima gdola ve-yare’ach. Hakarat ha-yeshut is an extremely long poema whose lines are especially long (sixteen to eighteen words each). The structure of the sentences is ungrammatical and the style is wild. All these elements create a text that is very difficult to define—a kind of poetic prose or prosaic poem. In fact, it is possible to see Hakarat ha-yeshut as an updated twentieth-century Hebrew version of French symbolist prose poems like Baudelaire’s Le spleen de Paris and Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer (to which Greenberg refers explicitly when he calls his experience in Berlin “the season in hell”). However, Greenberg takes the themes of the symbolist French poets of the second half of the nineteenth century and writes them in a mode that is surely unique, but also characteristic of various European tendencies after World War I (German, Russian, Polish, and others) to develop a “post-symbolist” expressionist poetics. The chaotic wildness of the text, the esoteric and at times uncommunicative nature of the images, and what appears to be a lack of coherency between the stylistic and linguistic components, paradoxically work together to create a new organizing principle. The “wild poetics” actually reflects the main theme of the poema: the social and moral anarchy of Berlin in the early 1920s. Through the chaos that the poema creates, it is possible to trace a kind of loose narrative that outlines the poet-speaker’s individual story, his separation from his parents’ house, and his move to Warsaw and Berlin. We hear the story of the “poet with the red hair” who was born in a poorhouse and “was cursed to be the big wanderer” and a leader of a rowdy “gang.” He becomes the wild lover of licentious, lustful women in spite of the fact that he tries to be “a monk in his closed room.” The poet-speaker appears in Berlin as a flâneur who wanders the metropolis’s dark streets, amid criminals and prostitutes who offer their services in the public eye. In spite of his thirst for pureness, he frequently goes to brothels around the city and thus sinks into the depths of despair, filth, and fear of death. Toward the end of the poema, the speaker has reached the “bottom of existence,” a place from which one cannot decline anymore. At this point (in a separate concluding chapter) he turns to the God in which he does not and

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cannot believe anymore. He stands “like a purifying prostitute who left the brothel” and asks to renew the dialogue with God.64 This idiosyncratic “story” is actually framed in the poema (and the entire book) as a mental and existential reflection of humanity in modern times. The poema describes a number of contradicting psychological and mental changes that are typical of the modern existence in “the sixth millennium,” developments that are accelerated in the urban condition of the metropolis. One of them is the Nietzschean “death of God” and the loss of religious faith: “Faith has lapsed. The beast of the field raised its voice, for it acknowledged God. But we said there is no God and there is no heaven, abode of God. Blue emptiness and what is between, which are clouds.”65 The loss of faith has left the speaker, and with him all modern men, with the full existential awareness of the finality and inevitability of death and oblivion. This deep knowledge makes his life full of fears that “poison his being.” The “death of God” is parallel to the loss of all traditional social structures (namely family and community), and in fact the disintegration of all civilization, western and Jewish alike. With the collapse of religious faith and western culture, the urban man turns to orgiastic sexual activity. All man has now is physical existence, and from this pure physicality, he attempts—mainly by fulfilling his sexual urges—to reach some kind of ecstasy or “drunkenness” that might be able to tame, but will never neutralize, the angst and fear of death. At the same time, the radical “newness” of the modern urban experience is also linked to the taming of nature with the power of technology and science. This power changes not only nature but also human consciousness. The swiftness, power, and control enabled by modern technology become part of consciousness and “being,” and open new “perspectives.” These two contradicting aspects of modern urban existence—the loss of faith and disintegration of traditional civilization, and the rise of the new power of technology and science—are incommensurable. They create apocalyptic tensions between deep despair and optimistic vision that are at the heart of Greenberg’s poemas of 1924. In spite of Greenberg’s declarations of a “farewell to Europe,” the speaker never cuts himself off from the European cultural context (both Jewish and non-Jewish). It is clear that the poema that was published

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in Tel Aviv is told from the perspective of the here and now, which is “in Berlin Mitte.” Here we can see how Greenberg not only fuses the personal with the universal but also turns the existence of the East European Jewish outsider/insider in Berlin into an emblem of his expressionistic and apocalyptic vision of modern existence: “I am from the race of the Hebrews. No prayer shawl is wrapped on me. Lacquered shoes. Perfumed hair. The pipe in my mouth. In Berlin Mitte. Bridges. A journey under the base.”66 The urban space of Berlin is described as a chaotic place, violent, dangerous, full of prostitution, illicit sexuality, and emptiness (like the church in the middle of Berlin after Jesus’s death), and yet it is highly seductive to the “Jew without a prayer shawl.” In another poema in the book, entitled Yerushalayim shel mata (“The Earthly Jerusalem”), which deals mainly with landscape of Palestine, the speaker declares that “we must have left the solid metropolis.” However, at the same time he fully admits: We had to leave the solid cities. We really loved the smoky hours in the c­ afes. Opera. Frock coat. Perfumed heads and dance halls. Opium. Ballet [...] Boulevards and brothels. Hot electron [...] and the noise, the noise of the cities! The news now. Girls calling you to their beds. Antique shops. Museums, and royal libraries.67

Berlin remained such a powerful locus in Greenberg’s poetic world for many years because he created it as a liminal, heterotypic space. Greenberg calls Berlin “the gate” and “the city of a hundred bridges”68 because it stood on the threshold of his own exit from Europe and his entrance to Palestine, between the Galician world of his early years and the Zionist space which he attempts to enter. The city is a “bridge” because it is the emblem of European urbanity, and for him the definition of life in the twentieth century.69 As Dan Miron writes, Greenberg was one of the most “European” writers and cultural figures of his era; the characterization was true even when later, in Palestine, he became the poet most associated with revisionist right-wing Zionism. His encounter with Berlin became such a powerful experience and such an important presence in his literary works, precisely because of the contradictory nature of this encounter.70 It is difficult to think of a writer as different from the “wild” Uri Zvi Greenberg as Ya‘acov Shteinberg. However, like Greenberg and

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many other Hebrew and Yiddish East European writers, the thirtyfour-year-old Shteinberg moved to Berlin (in his case, from Palestine) in 1921 and lived there until 1923. In Berlin, Shteinberg published his poetry and fiction in Yiddish and Hebrew, and he met and married his wife Lisa Arlosorov. He lived in the suburbs of Berlin (in Kaiser­ allee, in the southwest of the city). As mentioned earlier, he was one of the “regulars,” the stammgäste, in the Romanisches Café. Although his poetics was not the expressionist poetics of Greenberg and Moyshe Kulbak,71 it is clear that the experience of Berlin in these years left its mark on him intellectually and poetically. Shteinberg has always been a writer with an affinity for the urban experience, and one can find interesting representations of city life in his poems in Warsaw, as well as later in his career when he lived and worked in Tel Aviv. Still, the cycles of narrative poems that Shteinberg wrote in Berlin and about Berlin are distinguished, and considered by some to be among the high points in his literary career. These cycles include Charuzim ba-nechar (“Rhymes from Exile”), Aravim (“Evenings,” 1922), and a cycle of sonnets entitled Sonetot m-beit ha-kafe (“Sonnets of the Café,” 1922). A number of scholars have described these cycles as “novelistic poetry,” characterized by a broad point of view based on a series of observations that are combined like a “plot” in a narrative. The narrative that the cycle of poems creates is united by recurring images, metaphors, “characters,” and “events,” as well as by a philosophical worldview.72 The cycle ­Charuzim ba-nechar (“Rhymes from Exile”) tells the story of the love affair between the adult speaker-poet who is in “exile” in a large city and a young girl. The cycle contains some wonderful observations of urban life: The city—like a magic net, fine clothes for the streets Here a new lot will be cast on the boundary every two lanes On every street corner your eyes seem to see In a single forge of illusion the bad with the good.73

The most important and accomplished literary text that Shteinberg wrote in Berlin is the cycle Sonetot m-beit ha-kafe (“Sonnets of the Café,” 1922), a cycle that was clearly inspired by his “residence” in the Romanisches Café, the endless hours he spent there and his observations.

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Yeshurun Keshet, who was Shteinberg’s close friend in Berlin, tells us that Shteinberg was so fond of sitting in the smoky café that “he knew only one route—from his house to the café.” When Keshet suggested that Shteinberg should join him and spend some time outside the city or in one of its lovely parks, in order to be exposed to nature as befitting a writer of the “Hebrew Renaissance,” Shteinberg responded with a meaningful smile that Keshet understood as a declaration: “Maybe you are telling the truth—but is truth what I need? It’s already shown itself to be fiction.”74 Many Hebrew and Yiddish writers used to sit in the Romanisches Café and mention it in their writing, but Shteinberg’s cycle employs the urban space of the café in an unprecedented way. The cycle creates a tightly knit narrative that occurs solely in the café. The speaker-poet is a lonely character who interacts with others only by the act of gazing at the regular and casual “guests” as well as at the habitual and uncommon incidents that occur in the space of the café. His participation in the world is as an outsider, a witness and spectator whose only capacity is one of observation and introspection. In the beginning of the cycle the character of the speaker appears only by intimation and in the third person, as in “then a man sits and watches in front of the lampshade.”75 Toward the end of the cycle, he speaks to us directly, but only momentarily, before he disappears again, “hiding in a screen of smoke.”76 In the rest of the cycle the reader does not see him or hear about him at all. He exists only in the way he looks at the objects, events, and characters that fill the café over a period of a few days and nights. In this sense, the cycle is very different from all the other narrative poems about Berlin where the speaker is also the main protagonist. And yet, this cycle presents a full and meaningful narrative. Each one of the sonnets in the cycle tells us a short and concentrated “story” with a character (or several characters) and with a specific event or narrative situation. Moreover, the cycle as a whole is united not only by the shared space and the unique ambiance of the café. It is structured in such a way that several characters, events, situations, and motifs appear time and again and create a tightly knit narrative.77 Without going too far into this incredibly intricate text, it is clear that the Romanisches Café serves as a microcosm in Shteinberg’s cycle

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of sonnets. The large but enclosed space of the café, with its everchanging vistas and moods, contains everything because it can be full or empty, bright and dark, airy and smoky, friendly and hostile, familiar and anonymous. All these different aspects of the same space serve as an extended metonym for the urban experience of Berlin and the experience of western modernity in general. The café is described as a place of “happiness and chatter,” a place to which people can flock in order to avoid the “deep sadness” that lurks everywhere in the metropolis. But it is also a place that is likened to “a prison that closes on its inmates.” Like the city itself, the café is a place that can reveal the unexpected beauty as well as the ugliness of people and objects. This duality of the café is beautifully captured in the Hebrew expression beit-moed, which means the space in which people convene and congregate in order to meet each other, talk, make love, and so on. But beit-moed can also mean a cemetery, the space that contains the bodies of people who died. The café is thus both a space that is a refuge from death and oblivion as well as a space that embodies the void and abyss. In this sense, in spite of the radically different poetic style of Shteinberg, his representation of the urban experience is not so different from Shimoni, Greenberg, Kulbak, and other Hebrew and Yiddish writers who lived in Berlin and frequented the Romanisches Café. ❊ There is no doubt that the dominant genre in which Hebrew and Yiddish writers represented and gave shape to the urban experience in Berlin was the long narrative poem, but there is also a significant amount of narrative fiction written about the city as well. The two fiction writers whose encounter with Berlin was very significant, and who captured Berlin in their fiction—in ways both similar and different—were Dovid Bergelson and Shmuel Yosef Agnon. Both Agnon and Bergelson were actively interested in art, architecture, theater, cinema, photography, and fashion. Along with many intellectuals active in Germany during World War I and the Weimar period (such as Walter Benjamin, Seigfried Kracauer, Ernest Bloch, and Franz Hessel), Agnon and Bergel­son shared a fascination with ephemeral, unnoticed, and culturally marginalized phenomena of everyday life.78 Bergelson arrived in

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Berlin in 1921 and lived there until 1934, when he returned to the Soviet Union. Bergelson’s stories that depict the urban space of Berlin are Tzvishen emigraten (“Among Refugees”), In pension fun di dray shvester (“In the Boarding House of the Three Sisters”), Tsvey retsokhim (“Two Murderers”), Altvarg (“Old Age”), Blindkeyt (“Blindness”), Ayn nakht veyniker (“One Night Less”), and Far 12 toysend dolar fast er 40 teg (“For 12,000 Bucks He Fasts Forty Days”). These stories were published in 1926–1928 in Berlin, New York, and Moscow—some of them with the apt subtitle Berlin Bilder (Sketches of Berlin)—and in the volumes of “Collected Works” published by Kletskin Press in Vilna.79 Most of Bergelson’s Berlin stories take place in pensions, and are presented (not unlike the urban café) as a “thirdspace” that is constituted through the provisional intimacy of strangers, at once public and private, inside and outside, embedded within an urban, metropolitan culture, and yet called into existence by the dislocation of transient masses. In one of the stories entitled Altvarg (“Old Age”), the protagonist is an old and pious Jew, newly arrived from “a little Ukrainian ghost town” where he had been held in high regard, namely before the “Great Wind” (namely, World War I and its aftermath) swept the old life away. His children have installed him in their Berlin apartment. There he sits and studies. Bergelson likens his humming to a trapped bee banging against a double window. For the old man, the city of Berlin, which he experiences only as the sound of people in the street, is Nineveh, the city God wished to destroy and to which he sent off his unwilling prophet Jonah. Thinking of this, the old man remembers his own terrible sin: “At that very moment, the war had broken out.” The woman whom he had wronged “vanished, as if swallowed up by the sea,” and, in allowing himself to be brought to this Nineveh, he realizes that he has fled from God, just like Jonah.80 The most important and well-known story Bergelson wrote about Berlin is a distinctively modernist story called Tzvishen emigraten (“Among Refugees”) written in 1924. Tzvishen emigraten is a short story that features a young Jewish immigrant residing in Berlin who recognizes in one of his rooming-house neighbors a notorious pogromist. He determines to kill the murderer and turns to the immigrant community for help in procuring a gun. The Jewish community, however,

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remains unsympathetic to the young man’s plan, refusing him the assistance he seeks but offering him psychiatric help instead. Creating a highly ambivalent portrait of both the would-be assassin and the Jewish community, the story ends with the news of the young man’s suicide. Most of the story is given over to the would-be “terrorist” and his convoluted memories and disassociated consciousness: “It wasn’t I who had those thoughts, it was someone else.” Rejected by his fellow refugees, this tormented refugee among refugees decides to make his case to a writer. Writers, he explains, “present their nation to the world.”81 As mentioned earlier, Shmuel Yosef Agnon lived between 1912 and 1924 in several German cities, but Berlin was his intellectual base. For many years to come, Agnon gave a sustained literary representation of Berlin in his fiction, although he did so mainly after he settled in Jerusalem. As a number of scholars have noted, Berlin, and Germany in general, influenced Agnon’s career in different, seemingly contradictory ways.82 Agnon began his literary career in Galicia around 1906, writing impressionistic stories as well as his signature story Agunot, which was presented by the narrator as a “pseudo-medieval tale.” In 1912, the year he moved to Berlin, Agnon published the novella Ve-haya he‘akov le-mishor (“And the Crooked Shall Become Straight”), which signaled a deeper turn into the world of the pseudo-medieval and hasidic narrative. Agunot and Ve-haya he’akov le-mishor were translated to German and received enthusiastically by Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber, who did his best to encourage Agnon to remain in Germany, to continue writing, and to establish his reputation there. The major trend in Agnon’s writing during the time in which he lived in Berlin and other urban centers of Germany was its highly emphasized interest in the old East European world. What was seemingly on Agnon’s mind during this period was the pre-modern Jewish world of Poland and Galicia in its real or projected form.83 There were many reasons for this. As a young writer Agnon was still searching for his literary path, and unlike most Hebrew writers (but like Berdichevsky and Baron) he was predisposed to the challenge of finding a contemporary way of giving literary voice to the East European world of yester­year. At least part of this effort, which Agnon did exceptionally well, was the encouragement of German-Jewish intellectuals such as ­Martin Buber,

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Gershom Scholem, Aharon Eliasberg, Ernst Simon, Gustav Krojanker, Max Brod, Nahum Glatzer, and even Franz Rosenzweig. This formidable group did not expect the Ostjude author to write impressionistic and symbolist Hebrew stories and novellas that dealt with alienation and eroticism. What they wanted to see Agnon produce was something that confirmed their notion of “East European Jewish authenticity.”84 Agnon surely supplied them the goods by remaining the almost archetypal ­Ostjude, committed both aesthetically and intellectually to East European Jewish life and tradition as it had been shaped for centuries. The stories that he wrote and published during these years (sometimes in German translation even before the appearance of the Hebrew original!), include Ha-nidach (“The Banished One,” 1923), ­Agadat ­ha-sofer (“The Tale of the Scribe,” 1918), and Hakhnasat kala (“The Bridal Canopy,” which was the basis of the novel with the same title that Agnon published in 1931), and the cycle of Agaadot polin. In fact, there is something misleading about what Agnon wrote in Berlin and other German cities during and immediately after World War I. These stories and novellas are ostensibly steeped in the pre-modern East European Jewish world, but actually deal with the same modernist issues of sexuality, space, art, and the act of narrative. Young German-Jewish intellectuals like Gershom Scholem recognized this fact. Scholem even read aloud the German translation of Agadat ­ha-sofer to Walter Benjamin, and recorded Benjamin’s acknowledgment of the story’s importance.85 Some scholars have concluded that contemporary German literature and culture were completely outside Agnon’s scope during his stay in Germany; but a deeper exploration of his work shows such a judgment is far from justified. During the time he lived in Germany, Agnon became acquainted with much German and European literature. Unlike Greenberg and others, there is little indication that Agnon steeped himself in the post-symbolist expressionist literature that was being written in Berlin and Germany during this time. In his correspondence with Salman Schoken, Agnon reported to have read Goethe, Balzac, and Gottfried Keller, but also pioneers of modernism like Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Strindberg.86 We have to remember that Agnon was a writer who denied reading Freud and Kafka; who was always keen on claiming total originality and connections only to pre-modern, clas-

Berlin

sic Jewish texts; and who downplayed his connections to European modernist trends. But this should be taken with a grain of salt. Agnon was an avid reader of German literature, and he was highly attuned to current intellectual and literary trends, in which he participated in his own way. When in the later 1920s and early 1930s, Agnon wrote and published the nightmarish, surrealist stories that eventually became the collection Sefer Ha-ma‘asim (“The Book of Deeds,” 1932), many readers and critics were surprised and totally unprepared for the “newfound bracing modernism.” But in retrospect it was clear that Agnon was always connected to modernism and participated in its developments.87 Similarly, it is extremely difficult to characterize the ways in which Agnon represented Berlin in his writing. Among the manuscripts that were destroyed by the fire that consumed his house in 1924, Agnon reported a text he described as a “Berlin novel” entitled Katte ve-Grete (“Katte and Grete”).88 More significant is the fact that Agnon had begun to write about his experience in Berlin and Germany almost immediately after he moved to Jerusalem, but most of these works were completed and published later. Between the late 1920s and the late 1960s, Agnon published a large body of fiction of varied styles and modes that describes the milieu of Berlin and other German cities.89 Out of these texts, the most important is the novel Ad Hena (“To This Day”).90 Agnon worked during the 1940s (and probably even earlier) on a novel he called Bi-yemot ha-milchama (“In the Days of War”), but the final version was published with the new name only in 1952.91 While critics have tended either to ignore the novel or to dismiss it as an episodically meandering work,92 they missed the fact that Ad Hena is one of Agnon’s most formally experimental works. The novel is, on one level, a presentation of the horrors of war as reflected in the city of Berlin from a vantage point that only partially coincides with Agnon’s own experience at the time. Shmuel-Yosef, the first-person narrator of the novella, is shown wandering around the streets of Berlin (as well as Leipzig and other places in Germany), in a kind of a Kafkaesque perpetuum mobile. In the course of his journey, the narrator discovers that the country is in total chaos, its streets crowded with cripples and with ersatz substitutes, its houses filled with bereaved and broken families. However, it is important to note that although Ad Hena is a novel

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about World War I, it is infused with figures, events, and perspectives that are more characteristic of the Weimar period. This can be seen in the preoccupation, even obsession, with clothing and fashion, architecture, cinema, physiognomy, and other elements of visual surfaces that are described as opaque and highly elusive hieroglyphs that require (and defy) deciphering.93 Works like Ad Hena, published in 1952, are clearly beyond the scope of this book. But it is important to mention that Agnon was the notable Hebrew writer who attempted to represent Berlin as refracted through the experience of both German-Jews and East European immigrant Jews like himself. In this, he appears to be totally different from all other Hebrew and Yiddish East European writers who wrote in and about Berlin. However, as Dan Miron has persuasively shown, all of these texts—whether they deal with the experience of an East European Hebrew writer who wanders from one apartment to another in the middle of the war (Ad Hena) or with the marriage life of an assimilated “German-Jewish” man of the upper middle class (Panim acherot [“A Different Face”], 1932)—the point of view is always of an “outsider” and of an immigrant. Agnon’s work always deals with the issue of the encounter between the Jew from the East and the urban “West” and with the modernist experience of uprootedness. In this sense, Agnon’s representation of Berlin is similar in many ways to those of Shimoni, Shteinberg, Bergelson, Greenberg, and the other Hebrew and Yiddish writers who lived there for a short but intensive period.94

❊  Coda

There is no easy way to sum up the role of European cities in Hebrew modernist fiction. Admittedly, my sustained exploration of the topic is also necessarily partial, as I only touched on a number of examples of literary engagement with the city. Moreover, I did not even begin to explore European cities like Vilna, Breslau, Kiev, Moscow, Paris, and other cities that played some role in the making of modernist Hebrew literature in Europe. Furthermore, the cities which I have been discussing were very different from each other, to the extent that it is almost impossible to generalize about the role of the city and the urban experience—the singular, rather than the plural. Still, there are a few general conclusions I can draw from my discussion of the various European cities. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold [...]” wrote the Irish poet William Butler Yeats in his 1920 poem “The Second Coming,” which is one of the most iconic modernist texts.1 In these words, Yeats captured a certain mood of disintegration and radical change in Europe after World War I, but they also aptly describe many aspects of the cities and urban centers of Europe in modernist Hebrew fiction. First, I believe we can best appreciate the enclaves of Hebrew modernism in European cities when we see them for what they were— provisional, temporary, and constantly shifting. In spite of the wish of many writers and readers to find or create “a center” of Hebrew literature and culture, the reality was that until the 1930s (when a center of Hebrew literature emerged in Mandatory Palestine), there was no center for Hebrew literature and certainly no center of Hebrew modernism. Instead, what we have seen is an abundance of “margins”—

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Coda to Part I

enclaves and satellites of Hebrew modernist literature that moved and shifted together with the writers, and with the changing political, social, economic, and cultural conditions that were in a state of radical flux. But at the same time, we observed the crucial fact that Hebrew modernism thrived in the margins. The lack of center could often create a kind of critical distance and a sense of independence, mixed with an atmosphere of shared exploration that proved essential for literary breakthroughs. Second, it is important to remember that the cultural space of what used to be a relatively stable environment of Jewish life in Eastern Europe was now split into fragments. The new political and social reality forced Hebrew writers—and modern Jews in general—to search for new lives in new cities and urban centers. No matter how temporary and transient these urban centers or enclaves were, it is impossible to imagine the creation of modernist Hebrew fiction without them, and without the intense—at times overwhelming, but ultimately highly productive—encounter between Hebrew writers and the urban centers and metropolises. Thus, the new cities also became the actual provisional “home” of Hebrew writers in this period—London became associated with Brenner for some time, Vienna with Shofman and Fogel, and so forth. Jewish writers working in Hebrew were also embedded in this constantly shifting urban European setting, which was the landscape of European modernism as we came to know it. Third, the fluctuation and sense of rapid shifts is surely reflected in the way modernist Hebrew writers rendered the urban experience in their writing, especially in prose fiction and narrative poems. Characters and narrators in many of the Hebrew stories and novels of this period inhabit spaces that are clearly provisional. They include various intersections of public and private, and their dwelling places are constantly changing. They might strive to find “home,” but the search eludes them. Characters in modernist Hebrew fiction—figures like Abramson in “Around the Point,” the narrator in “Out of the Depths”—spend most of their time in the streets or in spaces like restaurants, soup kitchens, libraries, study halls, and bridges. Shofman’s and Fogel’s characters in Vienna are to be found in cafes, restaurants, public gardens, and brothels. Eventually all these cityscapes turn also into mental spaces.

Coda to Part I

Fourth, the search for ways to express the urban experience was one of the most important motivations for the creation of new literary forms. Thus, the literary representation of the city as a mental space (the “spatial turn”) is almost inevitably related to the “inward turn” in Hebrew fiction, the turn toward the consciousness (or unconsciousness) of individual characters that appeared in Hebrew fiction for the first time in Berdichevsky’s novellas published in 1900 (and taking place in Breslau, an urban center that was highly significant for the development of Berdichevsky’s fiction). Certain crucial aspects of reading and seeing the city reoccur in many texts: the feeling of terror emanating from space; the loss of boundaries between private and public space, living space and street space; the motif of “void” and “hollow space”; and the urban Bilder—the snapshots and sketches with their simultaneous lack and excess of legibility. Fifth, the urban experience in European modernist Hebrew fiction in the first three decades of the twentieth century was clearly one of provisional liminality. Since the writers and the characters they presented were almost always Jewish émigrés or exiles, their experience of being “strangers in the city” is also inextricably linked to a sense of uprootedness and alienation. Irving Howe once wrote about the myth of the modern city as “the enemy of man: a pesthole, prison, madhouse,” and at the same time one that is “the proper stage of being” in the modern world.2 And indeed, Hebrew writers were both attracted to and repelled by the atmosphere of the urban center and the metropolis. It simultaneously forced them and enabled them to “write the city” in Hebrew in a totally new way.

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S ev e n   The Sexual Turn in Modernist Fiction

of Fin de Siècle Europe

One should not look at anything. Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors is it well to look, for mirrors do but show us masks. —Oscar Wilde, Salome

In April 1907, from a tiny flat in the East End of London, Yosef Chaim Brenner published a translation of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome in his monthly journal Ha-me‘orer (“The Awakener”).1 Like other texts published in this short-lived yet highly influential journal, the circumstances of and the motivations for the translation are not entirely clear. The translation—entitled Shlomit—was done by Sh. Perlman and Avraham Robinson, two young Hebrew writers who studied during that time at the University of Berne in Switzerland, but it was published in ­Ha-me‘orer under the pseudonym A. Shefer. In all likelihood, the translation was done from the original French version of the play rather than from the English. Brenner, who commissioned the translation, was very proud of both the text and the fact of its inclusion in his nascent Hebrew journal. In a letter he wrote to Perlman on November 19, 1906, Brenner praised the translation lavishly: “Well, well—this is a translation! Our Hebrew literature is enriched with a nearly original work—regrettably, one that should have been written in [Hebrew], were it not that we lack a Wilde. Whatever the case, it’s now ours.”2 A year later, in a letter to Yitzhak ­Vilkansky (known as A. Tziony) from November 17, 1907, Brenner wrote: “Salome is translated in such a way that the translation is in no way inferior to the original. The work is by Sh. Perlman and A. Robinson of Bern.”3 Salome/Shlomit was neither the first nor the last text by Oscar Wilde to be published by Brenner in Ha-me‘orer. In the tenth volume of the journal’s first year (October 1906), two prose poems by Wilde were published: Ha-’oman (“The Artist”) and then Ha-nadiv (“The Doer of Goods”). Additionally, in the very same volume of the journal where

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Shlomit was published, Ha-me‘orer issued another Hebrew translation of a text by Wilde. It was entitled Me-hegyonotav shel Oscar Wilde (“From the Reflections of Oscar Wilde”), which is the well-known preface to Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (originally published in 1891). No one is identified in the Hebrew journal as the translator of the prose poems or the novel’s preface. However, given Brenner’s enthusiasm about the translation of Salome, and the fact that he was the editor and publisher of the journal, and also composed many of its texts—some under his signature, some under pseudonyms, and others without any signature—there is more than good reason to assume that the translations were done by none other than Brenner himself.4 But this uncertainty about the translator’s identity leads to still bigger questions. Why was Wilde’s work translated into Hebrew and published by Brenner at all—and in the journal, no less, that ventured to be the “Masada” of Hebrew literature and culture, and in the fragile, crisis-ridden years that followed the Russian revolution in 1905? And why was Brenner so proud of these translations to suggest hyperbolically that Salome should have been written in Hebrew, “were it not that we lack a Wilde”? These are not simple questions to answer, mainly because Brenner and Wilde seem to be a very odd couple. Oscar Wilde seems to represent exactly the opposite of what Brenner was fighting for, indeed everything that the name “Brenner” embodies in the history of modern Jewish literature and culture. Wilde was the most well known “decadent” writer of fin de siècle Europe and one of its most celebrated aesthetes—a strong supporter and practitioner of “art for art’s sake.” Wilde was also a notorious “dandy,” and (after his trial in 1895 and the two years he spent in prison) the most outed homosexual in European culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, in retrospect it is evident that Wilde has become the public face or the “incarnation” of the emerging category of “homosexuality” in this period.5 Brenner, by contrast, believed that good art and literature must be linked to a national purpose in order to attain meaning.6 Both in his personality and his politics, or so it seems, Brenner was on the opposite spectrum of “dandyism”; his vision of Hebrew culture seemed to have no place for “deviance” or alternate sexualities of any kind.

The Sexual Turn in Modernist Fiction

And yet, despite the ample differences between these two men, and what seems to be the enormous gulf between their worldviews and their cultures, it must be noted that Brenner was far from alone in his active interest in Wilde. Many strands of Jewish literature and culture in the early decades of the twentieth century were, improbably but unapologetically, preoccupied with Wilde. Two years after Brenner’s Hebrew translation of Salome, a Yiddish translation by Yoel Entin was published in London.7 In the same year, 1909, Wilde’s De Profundis (which is written as a letter that Wilde sent to his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas from the Reading Gaol prison) was translated into Yiddish. In fact, when one examines the translations of Wilde into Hebrew and Yiddish, and the prominence of those who translated and presented Wilde and his writing, we might conclude that Jewish culture in the first decades of the twentieth century was caught up in a kind of “Wildemania.” For example, David Frishman—the Hebrew and Yiddish writer regarded as the most consummate literary critic of the time—wrote as early as 1905 a comprehensive critical essay on Wilde.8 Fourteen years later, Frishman took upon himself the task of translating into Hebrew Wilde’s text De Profundis. Frishman published the piece with the apt title Mi-ma’amakim (“From the Depths”). This text, together with the Hebrew translation of the play The Importance of Being Earnest (made by Yisrael Chaim Tabiyov) was published in Warsaw in 1919, with an extensive introduction by Frishman about Wilde, his literary career, and his critical reception in Europe.9 Works like Salome, The Picture of Dorian Gray, De Profundis, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, as well as Wilde’s prose poems and other stories and plays, were in the first several decades of the twentieth century consistently introduced and translated into Hebrew and Yiddish by prominent figures like David Frishman, Kalman Marmor, Ba‘al Makhshoves (Israel Elyoshiv), Yoel Entin, Avrom Frumkin, and Yisrael Chaim Tabiyov. Wilde translations, often with substantial introductions and contextualization, were published in London, New York, Warsaw, and Berlin.10 Some of these publications highlighted Wilde’s anarchist spirit and idiosyncratic “socialism,” while stressing the aesthetic qualities of his literary works. And all of them commented on the unusual and tragic life circumstances of the writer,

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with references to Wilde’s sexual identity, his trial and imprisonment, and his early death. I believe that this Jewish “Wildemania,” and the more specific “­Salomemania” that developed, is a profound example of the fascinating relationship between fin de siècle Jews and the world of Europe. As I claimed in the first part of this book, we have to consider the locales of figures like Brenner, Marmor, Frishman, and other Jewish writers and intellectuals. They did their crucial work in London and other polyglot Western, Central, and East European cities, where English, French, German, and Russian were the dominant languages. It was here, in sites and amid languages to which these Hebrew and Yiddish intellectuals were both “insiders” and “outsiders,” that they were exposed to figures like Oscar Wilde and his writing. Translating Wilde was part of a broader movement that emphasized the significance of translating important works from contemporary European literature into Hebrew and Yiddish in order to enrich and advance it. Furthermore, there is no doubt that in the case of Salome/Shlomit the perceived “Jewishness” of the main female character, as well as the pseudo-biblical style of the play—to which Brenner clearly alluded in his letter to the translator— was part of Brenner’s motivation for translating and publishing the play. Indeed, the story of Salome is based on the New Testament and the writings of Josephus Flavius, and the language of Wilde’s play relies heavily on the Song of Songs. These cultural dynamics, which brought certain writers into the bloodstream of Hebrew and Yiddish culture, have been established by other scholars.11 However, I would like to suggest that beyond these important considerations, there is another crucial ingredient to understanding Jewish creativity in the literary and cultural environment of European early modernism, an often ignored aspect of Jewish culture that made the fascination with Wilde possible. In a curious turn of events, the decadent qualities of Wilde’s early modernist writing and the way he fashioned himself as an artist, as well as the ways in which Wilde and his texts deal with gender and sexuality, would become vital to the emergence of Hebrew modernism. Wilde himself claimed (in his typical hyperbolic fashion) that Salome was the most meaningful of his works, the one that allowed him to ex-

The Sexual Turn in Modernist Fiction

press himself most fully. As is well known, the “original” Salome is a very minor character in the New Testament. We learn of her in Matthew 14:3–11 and Mark 6:17–28; both passages recount the story of Herod, the Tetrarch of Judaea, who beheads John the Baptist at the instigation of Herodias, wife of Herod, who was angered by John’s charge that her marriage was incestuous. In both accounts, Herodias uses her unnamed daughter to demand the prophet’s execution. There is a reference in Mark to the fact that the stepdaughter of Herod danced before him and because the dance pleased him, he promised to grant her any wish she might ask for. Josephus Flavius records in his Jewish Antiquities that the unnamed stepdaughter of Herod (and daughter of Herodias) was ­Salome. The oblique biblical passages and Josephus’s account were later interpreted to mean that Herod was forced to grant Salome’s gory request to behead the prophet because he was so aroused by her sensual dance. The story of Salome had a long history in European art and culture until the end of the Renaissance, and then she returned to the cultural forefront during the nineteenth century. Between 1870 and 1920, well over a thousand versions of her tale (in poems, stories, plays, paintings, sculptures, opera, and dance) were made in Europe. Writers including Gustave Flaubert, Stephane Mallarme, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, all prominent figures in early modernist European literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, wrote about Salome as an embodiment of undying lust. Thus, by the end of the century, Salome, who had become familiar both as “the Jewish Princess” and “the Goddess of Decadence,” was one of the most important icons of femininity and sexuality in fin de siècle Europe.12 As Gail Finney claims, Salome was the fin de siècle femme fatale figure who served as a dramatic focus for the interplay of castration, fetishism, and decadence.13 The most influential version of the story of Salome, by far, was Oscar Wilde’s one-act tragedy. In a sense, Wilde’s version is belated and relies heavily on previous artistic representations of the story and its female main figure. Although he may first have thought of writing the play in England in 1890, most of it was written in Paris (and in French) during the fall of 1891.14 Themes of gaze, mirrors, artifice, and sexual desire dominate the play.15 In the very opening scene, Herodias’s page tries to persuade the young

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Syrian to look away from Salome: “Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems. She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.”16 This speech is characteristic of the entire play. Each paratactic sentence has a kind of declarative autonomy, as if it were uttered by a talking head without a body. This paratactic style is reminiscent of the Song of Songs, but the effect is typical of the “decadent style” of decomposition, as defined by Paul Bourget.17 For Bourget, decadent style is necessarily fragmented, and the semantic counterpart to the poetic decomposition of textual wholeness, in Wilde’s creation, is the act of looking. The vehicle of the look’s fear of “strangeness” is a metaphoric language that functions through verbal displacements and substitutions. “Looking” becomes a veil over the seen, a means of productive nonrecognition rather than of mimetic representation. The play presents two different levels of literary self-­consciousness: Salome expresses the literariness of her gaze, while Wilde expresses the literalness of her desire to possess its object. Wilde, it could be said, “looks at” Salome in the same way as Salome “looks at” Jokanaan for whom she lusts.18 Due to his self-conscious belatedness, Wilde’s play exaggerates the characteristic traits of the femme fatale of the late nineteenth century to the point of absurdity. Salome wants to kill men and dismember them (“Well, I tell thee, there are not dead men enough”). She even gets erotic pleasure from dead men (“I will bite thy mouth with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit,” she says to Jokanaan’s severed head). She loves revenge, takes pleasure in perverse cruelty, and her lust seems to know no bounds. But Salome’s desire to ravage and to castrate is in effect a ­parodic collage of decadent articulations of (female) desire. Wilde’s “Jewish princess” is as artificial and ornamental when she yearns for male flesh as when she talks about the biblical “lilies of the field.” These attitudes are juxtaposed “masks,” and as a feminine character in Wilde’s text, Salome embodies a unique paradox. She represents innocence in her virginal beauty, but also illicit lust by her own volition. While she clearly resembles other literary representations of the femme fatale, ­Salome also defies cultural, moral, and gender norms and boundaries. Salome in Wilde’s text is repeatedly called “the Daughter of Sodom,” and the play is suffused with a latent homoeroticism, which becomes even more explicit in the famous

The Sexual Turn in Modernist Fiction

illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley that accompanied the English edition of the play.19 Considering the multiple perspectives and masks of the play, Salome indeed resembles Wilde himself and his role in the formation of European modernist literature and culture. In aesthetic terms, Salome’s belatedness was understood by Wilde as a symptom of literature’s artificiality, of its “fetishistic” displacement of organic interiority. Wilde wrote that “art never expresses anything but itself,”20 and this displacement is perhaps the most fundamental subject of the play. In the other text of Wilde’s that Brenner published in Ha-me‘orer, the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, he declared that “all art is at once surface and symbol; those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.”21 Thus, we might conclude, together with Charles Bernheimer, that “Salome is the muse of negation, the siren of death. When she inhabits the psyche, she drives it to sadomasochistic splitting; when she inhabits language, she drives it to compulsive reflexivity.”22 No less important than the play—with its game of masks and mirrors and its self-conscious representation of sexual desire, gender, and aestheticism—is what might be called the “afterlife” of Salome in European fin de siècle culture. This afterlife was very strong in all the cities and locales where Hebrew and Yiddish writers lived and worked. Although the play was initially censored, banned, and ridiculed upon its first publication in French, it quickly caught on. Salome was translated into ­English, first by Wilde’s lover, Sir Alfred Douglas, and then (in 1893) by Wilde himself. These English translations were immediately followed by translations into German, Russian, and virtually every European language. After Wilde’s death, Salome and other works were readily available in many languages, and they found an appreciative, if not always approving, audience.23 Especially interesting are the ways in which Wilde was received in the Habsburg and Russian empires. Carl Schorske writes that in ­Vienna, Salome was “the fin de siècle’s favorite phallic woman.”24 Productions of Salome in Austria and Germany were common and mostly popular, starting with Max Reinhardt’s production in 1903. Salome was painted by Gustav Klimt and was the heroine of Richard Strauss’s famous opera. Sander Gilman emphasizes the fact that in German and Austrian

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culture, many authors constructed the image of Salome as the “essential woman” and simultaneously evoked her image in representing the “essential Jewess.”25 In Russia, Wilde’s works were read in English and French and also translated by such central symbolist figures as Konstantin Balmont, Valery Briusov, and Fyodor Sologub. Wilde’s works were discussed extensively by the writers Andrei Bely, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Alexander Blok (who also wrote a long poem on Salome in Russian). In fact, from the last years of the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde has been one of the main Western European aesthetic influences on Russian symbolism.26 Publicly, the Russian discourse about Wilde was saturated with cultural-religious terms of rebellion, suffering, and saintliness, often drawing analogies between Wilde and Nietzsche (as did the prominent Russian-Jewish critics Akim Volynskii and Lev Shestov). However, as Evgenii Bershtein has shown, there is no doubt that issues of sexuality, homoeroticism, and the new category of “homosexuality”—and the relation of these troubling categories to questions of aestheticism and literary symbolism—were just beneath the surface of these discussions.27 In short, Oscar Wilde and his writings (with Salome being the most popular and well known) were some of the most influential icons of fin de siècle European literature and culture. Without Wilde, it is impossible to understand the aesthetics of European early modernism, as well as the complex and rather strange ways in which sexuality (and Jewishness) were understood and represented in this literary and cultural environment. In spite of, or maybe because of its belatedness, Salome was understood both as a “New Woman” and—together with Oscar Wilde himself—an icon of fetishism, decadence, and aestheticism. This is because the fin de siècle was a time in which norms of gender and sexuality were put in question and redefined from a variety of standpoints.28 It was a time that Elaine Showalter aptly called “sexual anarchy.” During these years, Showalter reminds us, “the words ‘feminism’ and ‘homosexuality’ first came into use, as ‘New Women’ and male aesthetes redefined the meaning of femininity and masculinity.” At the same time, it was a period of cultural insecurity, when fears of regression and degeneration brought about longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender.29

The Sexual Turn in Modernist Fiction

Toward the end of his life, Wilde wrote: “I was a man who stood in symbolic relation to the art and culture of my age.”30 Wilde was surely correct in this observation, although he probably never imagined that the story of his life and his writings would soon become part of the development of Jewish modernism in Hebrew and Yiddish. What remains to be examined is how and why the writings of Wilde (and many other writings with a strong preoccupation with sexuality in all European languages) came to life in the Hebrew writing of Brenner and his contemporaries, the pioneers of modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe.

Sexual Anarchy and the “Sexual Turn” in Hebrew Fiction Recent historical scholarship makes it quite clear that questions of sexuality and gender roles played a crucial role in the encounter of Jewish society with modernity in Europe, as part of a changing socio-historical reality and as a complex set of cultural, ideological, and political modes of discourse.31 But gender and sexuality became equally important in Hebrew and Yiddish fiction during these first decades of the twentieth century. The emphasis on gender and sexuality was a relatively new phenomenon in these literatures. For a variety of reasons, sexuality was almost absent from Hebrew letters for more than a hundred years. Suddenly, around the turn of the twentieth century, there was an outpouring of literary texts preoccupied with themes of erotic desire, with the changing nature of masculinity and femininity, and with gender roles in Jewish society and culture. The Hebrew and Yiddish writers of the haskalah, and many of those who followed them in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, were quite aware of the lack of the erotic stratum in their writing. Since “erotic love” was one of the main preoccupations of European romantic and realist fiction during this century, especially in the dominant genre of the novel, Jewish writers were acutely aware of how they differed. This absence was explained by what seemed to many Jewish writers and critics to be “a lack of eros” in contemporary Jewish life in Eastern Europe. In general and necessarily schematic terms, it is possible to discern two opposing strategies with regards to sexuality

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by haskalah writers. One was to superimpose the conventions of the eighteenth-century European novel—namely a devotion to romance and intrigue—onto a highly imagined Jewish biblical past, creating unworldly “romantic” novels like Abvraham Mapu’s Love of Zion (1853). The other strategy was to satirically expose the “dehumanization of sex” in East European Jewish life, as was done in fictional texts written by Peretz Smolenskin, Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Mordechai A. Guenzburg, Shalom Yankev Abramovitz, and many others.32 But then, toward the very end of the nineteenth century, Hebrew writers not only discovered sexuality and gender but in fact made it a major subject of their fiction. The “inward turn”—as we have seen, a crucial element in the emergence of modernist Hebrew fiction, with its sustained focus on interiority and psychic (rather than social) life, as well as a self-consciousness about issues of literary artifice and language—­ happened to also be a major “sexual turn.” In numerous texts of Hebrew fiction from 1900 onward, narrators and protagonists began to assert their subjectivity through gender identity, by the virtue of their sexuality, and through what Freud has termed a “libidinal economy” of desire.33 There are many political, ideological, socio-historical, and literaryaesthetic reasons for this sexual turn at this specific moment in time, but they are not easy to pin down. Naomi Seidman has recently claimed that the Hebrew and Yiddish writers who emerged from the collapse of the dreams and ideologies of the haskalah turned to the very sources the maskilim had disparaged as irrelevant to their literature. The new writers discovered “passion, sensuality, romance, and myth in the rabbinic literature and in the Ashkenazic culture that took its authority from the rabbis.”34 Seidman’s is a crucial observation, and it constitutes an important aspect of gender and sexuality in the Hebrew fiction of the period. This rediscovery of passion can be clearly seen in the works of protomodernist authors like Y. L. Peretz and Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, who wrote at the turn of the twentieth century; in some works by Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Dvora Baron; and in Yiddish texts like the celebrated play Der Dybbuk by S. Ansky (1919). These and other writers indeed explored the ways in which erotic desire played an important role in rabbinic culture and throughout traditional East European Jewish culture. More precisely, they reshaped

The Sexual Turn in Modernist Fiction

elements of this culture in order to deal with the pressing preoccupations of their own time and place, namely the thrilling maelstrom that was early-twentieth-century European and Jewish culture. Yet, what Seid­man calls the “project of reinfusing tradition with its lost erotic wellsprings”35 does not provide us with adequate keys to comprehend large segments of Hebrew fiction written in the first three decades of the twentieth century by authors like Brenner, Gnessin, Shofman, ­Arieli, Shteinberg, and Fogel, who dealt with the myriad desires and discontents of a thoroughly modern (Jewish) sexuality. Another way to examine the “sexual turn” in Hebrew modernist fiction is illustrated by Michael Gluzman’s recent treatment of key moments in the history of Hebrew fiction, from the late nineteenth century to contemporary Israel, through its engagement with the sexual aspects of the Zionist “New Hebrew Man.”36 This approach, which continues the work of scholars like Daniel Boyarin and George Mosse, is highly productive.37 It supplies another way of understanding the preoccupation with sexuality, especially with constructions of masculinity in Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century. Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, the national Zionist project to create a Jewish homeland was perceived as a sexual revolution, a bold attempt to reverse the image of the “Old Jew” or the “Diasporic Jew” and to create in his place the “New Jew” or a “New Hebrew Man.”38 Like other national movements in nineteenth-century Europe, the Zionists were preoccupied with what has been described as the physical and emotional deterioration of their society, and the need to revitalize it by means of national awakening.39 One of the central convictions of Zionist ideology was that because of their lack of political sovereignty and self-­determination, Jews had led a disembodied existence for many generations, and that only a “healthy”—that is, a national and territorial—existence could restore a necessary measure of physicality to Jewish life. This political ideology not only used the body as a metaphor, it actually sought to transform the Jewish body itself. In nationalist thought, the individual body became a microcosm for the national body politic. Therefore, developing a new image of the Jewish body seemed a necessary step toward creating a Jewish nation that was new and revolutionary, and yet at the same time reclaimed its “primordial heroic past.” Since Zionism called for

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both the physical rooting of the “people of the air” (­Luftmentshen) in the soil of Palestine, and the reclamation of the Jewish body, it attempted a total sexual revolution.40 Zionist ideology in general, and the Zionist attempt to reclaim a Jewish masculinity in particular, is certainly a crucial context for understanding the gendered aspect of early modernist Hebrew fiction. But however important this context was, it cannot fully explain the gendered nature of the fiction written by Hebrew modernist writers like Gnessin, Shofman, Nomberg, Shteinberg, and Fogel who were indifferent, if not hostile, to Zionist ideology. Moreover, as Gluzman asserts in his study, even writers like Brenner and Agnon, who gradually committed to Zionist ideology, were highly ambivalent about the national aspirations of the Zionist movement and its attempts to transform the Jewish body and sexuality. Many modernist Hebrew stories, including those that became the heart of the Zionist canon (Brenner is probably the best example), drew close attention to the internal fissures and tensions in the gendered images and practices of the Zionist ideological and cultural project.41 Thus, I contend that in order to better understand the wide variety of ways in which Hebrew modernist writers inscribed gender and sexuality in their writing, we must be attuned to the fact that they were living and working in the intellectual and literary context of fin de siècle Europe. We have seen how the metropolises of London, Vienna, and Berlin (and other smaller cities) had an enormous role in shaping the creations of Hebrew modernism. Similarly, these writers were caught in a web of conflicting, at times irreconcilable, images and conceptions of gender and sexuality in contemporary European and Jewish culture: the crisis of masculine identity characteristic of fin de siècle Europe; the attendant rise of the “New Woman”; the Zionist attempts to transform Jewish sexuality and masculinity and the antisemitic views of the “effeminate Jew”; the obsession with femininity and with the “dandy” in “decadent” literature; and the symbolist literary preoccupation with mystical conceptions of sexuality. These are just some of the diverse historical, philosophical, and literary currents that I explore in this part of the book, currents that played an important role in the intellectual world of the writers of modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe, and inevi-

The Sexual Turn in Modernist Fiction

tably also in the nascent Hebrew literature created in Palestine and the United States by writers who emigrated from Europe and whose literary and cultural horizon remained European. Hebrew writers like Gnessin, Shofman, Brenner, Arieli, Shteinberg, Agnon, Greenberg, and Fogel developed a great interest in sexuality as part of an environment of changing historical and cultural discursive paradigms, as well as aesthetic and literary trends such as decadence, symbolism, and impressionism spreading through the Russian and Austrian empires, as well as in Germany, Scandinavia, France, and England. They were familiar (some more and some less) with the new discourse of psychosexuality developed by physicians and psychiatrists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing (the author of the well-known Psychopathia Sexualis, an attempt to classify sexual “deviance” systematically), Cesare Lombroso, Jean-Martin Charcot, Auguste Forel, and Havelock Ellis. Some knew the early writings of Sigmund Freud.42 They read, and sometimes admired, the writings of thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, Max Nordau, Otto Weininger, Vladimir Solovyov, and Vasily Rozanov, who attempted each in his own way to deal with changing modes of sexuality and gender during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beyond Wilde’s towering influence, they were sensitive to the literary works of poets, playwrights, and novelists like the French Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire; the Russian Lev Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; the Scandinavian Knut Hamsun, August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen; the German and Austrian Gerhart Hauptmann, Franz Wedekind, and Arthur Schnitzler; and the Polish Stanislaw Przybyszewski.43 Most Hebrew writers were also very familiar with contemporary Russian decadent and symbolist writers like Leonid Andreyev, Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Zinaida Gippius.44 Indeed, because most of the creators of Hebrew modernist fiction were born and raised in the Russian Pale of Settlement and their first non-Jewish language and cultural orientation was Russian, the ways in which gender and sexuality were reconceptualized in Russia during this period are very important. Laura Engelstein has demonstrated in her wide-ranging study that the years of turmoil leading to and following the failed 1905 revolution were a period of crisis that

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was manifested in what became known as “the sexual question.”45 The dominance of cultural discourse regarding gender and sexuality was no less discernible in fin de siècle Russia than in Western and Central Europe, although what Foucault called the “machinery for producing true discourses about sex” differed in Russia from other European equivalents. The most obvious difference was the context in which the discourse was produced, as the Czarist Empire both impeded public debate and severely restricted access to political power. Despite these restrictions, the new science of sexology (as practiced by Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and others) infiltrated the Russian medical establishment from the last decade of the nineteenth century until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.46 Russian symbolist writers, philosophers, and other intellectuals shared many of the gender assumptions and anxieties of their Western and Central European counterparts. This is clearly evident, for example, from the enormous interest in works of writers and thinkers like Oscar Wilde and Otto Weininger, both before and after they were translated into Russian.47 The great interest in sexuality and gender as a cultural construct can also been seen in popular culture, in journalism and in the era’s numerous controversies around literary texts that dealt with sexuality, including Lev Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1890); the “neo-realist,” decadent, and symbolist works of Andreyev’s The Abyss and In the Fog (1902); and Fyodor Sologub’s Petty Demon and Mikhail ­Artsybashev’s Sanin (both published in 1907).48 The sexual ideas of early Russian modernists, the symbolists of the so-called Silver Age, were refracted through distinctly Russian philosophical and religious notions that blended aesthetic critique of materialism with a utopian social criticism.49 As Olga Matich has shown recently, Russian modernists experienced a profound sense of anxiety resulting from the belief that they were living in an age of decline, decadence, and “degeneration.” What made them unique in relation to the general crisis of European modernity was their utopian prescription for overcoming the inevitability of decline and death—by employing metaphysical and physical means. They intertwined their mystical erotic discourse with European degeneration theory and its obsession with the destabilization of gender.50

The Sexual Turn in Modernist Fiction

The Russian complex attitude toward sexuality in the early twentieth century goes back to the radical Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889), who argues in his novel What Is To Be Done? (1863) for sexual love freed from the strictures of marriage and dependence. Tolstoy, ever troubled by his own sexual urges, explored in The Kreutzer Sonata the rejection of sexuality even in marriage. Valdimir Solovyov in The Meaning of Love (1892–1894) tried to restore meaning to sexuality by grounding it in a higher theological conception of the person as an androgynously interrelated male and female. Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919) preached a doctrine of divine sexuality to be realized in the bedrooms of bourgeois marriage. The symbolist writers Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) and his wife Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945) lived in a ménage à trois, which they believed to be a kind of “embryonic church.” Gippius was engaged in sexual relations with both men and women, and at the same time she was reputed to be a virgin. She wrote of her experiences in her Contes d’amour (1900), in which she intensely explored homoeroticism.51 The new cultural visibility of homoeroticism—whether constructed as androgyny, bisexuality, or homosexuality—evident across Europe by the late nineteenth century had a strong impact on Russian cultural life at the beginning of the twentieth century. The revival of the notion of the androgyne in the late-nineteenth-century Russian imagination was inspired both by the popularity of occult traditions and by the work of Vladimir Solovyov. Solovyov’s essay, The Meaning of Love, develops a mystical-philosophical doctrine of love seen as “total unity.” It glorifies the notion of lichnost (“the sense of a spiritually integrated, individual self ”), while renewing the tradition of the divine Sophia who, before the Fall of Adam and Eve, was simultaneously characterized as both the “Eternal Feminine” and androgynous man. Solovyov’s androgyne was both a dual-sexed Adam and the Eternal Feminine whose “uncertain gender” titillated the fin de siècle imagination. These early modernist Russians developed an erotic agenda premised on the postponement of coitus until the realized utopia seems not only untenable but also phantasmic. In Solovyov’s worldview, coitus is denounced, but without pathologizing sex. This is the paradoxical meaning of his erotic utopia.52 These psychological, philosophical, and literary preoccupations with different modes of sexuality swept across Russia and Europe at the

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same time that these cultures were confronted by “the Jewish question” and the persistence of Jewish difference in European culture and society. In fact, the question of the link between Jewishness and sexuality was on the mind of many European thinkers and writers, from KrafftEbing, Max Nordau, Otto Weininger, and Sigmund Freud to Vladimir ­Solovyov and Vasily Roaznov (to name just a few). One of the most common topoi of dealing with the “Jewish question” and with changing modes of sexual identity was the imbrication of Jewishness, effeminacy, and sexual decadence. The link can be seen in strange and fascinating ways in Max Nordau’s famous work Entartung (“Degeneration,” 1892). In his book Nordau not only explores the connections between Jewishness and sexuality but also, while attacking the “decadent” literature of the time, he was actually one of the first critics to assemble and identify nearly all the elements involved in European early modernism.53 Hebrew (and Yiddish) writers were part of this intellectual atmosphere, and an examination of the complex ways in which these contemporary European currents were understood and rethought by these Jewish writers can help us explain the many elements of gender and sexuality that seemed outrageous at the beginning of the twentieth century and still appear peculiar today. Understanding this context can account for the fact that the “turn to sexuality” in Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century has not always meant that sexual love, passion, and sensuality were celebrated as part of a modern Jewish sexual revolution. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The very notion of romantic love underwent a major reevaluation in fin de siècle European culture. After Schopen­hauer, Nietzsche, and Solovyov, early modernist European writers began to foreground sexual urges, the determinism of sexual attraction, and nothing less than the illusionary nature of romantic love. As will become clear in the following chapters, side by side with figures of exaggerated, at times grotesque Jewish virility, many Hebrew stories, novellas, and novels of this period focus on erotic discontent. Passivity, “effeminization,” fetishism, and erotic entanglements became the hallmark of numerous male characters in Hebrew fiction. The relations between sexual desire and writing were thoroughly investigated. Male characters in these works are also involved in homoerotic and homo­social desire, often (but not always) through complex erotic trian-

The Sexual Turn in Modernist Fiction

gulations. Almost as an inverted mirror of these male characters, we find female characters that are inaccessible and unattainable objects of masculine desire, or are passionate, voracious, and sexually obsessed women.54 As the many incarnations of Oscar Wilde’s Salome make clear, the obsession with gender and sexuality has much to do not only with the cultural and intellectual climate of fin de siècle Europe but also with the poetics of modernism in its various permutations. Nietzsche made the prescient observation that “decadence” is the revolt of the part against the whole, a revolt that disperses and displaces wholeness. His analysis was shared by many of Europe’s fin de siècle intellectuals and writers. Michel Foucault claims in his study of the history of sexuality that fetishism, which is “governed by the interplay of whole and part, principle and lack, absence and presence, excess and deficiency” was “the model perversion” of fin de siècle Europe because it “served as the guiding thread for analyzing all the other deviations.” 55 Foucault, who was not particularly interested in literary representations of sexuality, never explored the fact that fetishism has as much to do with issues of gender indeterminacy and perversion as with the poetics of early modernism.56 But this is exactly what literary scholars like Charles Bernheimer have been uncovering in Europe’s early modernist literature. Bernheimer describes the fiction of the European fin de siècle as “a stimulant that causes a restless movement between perspectives, the goal being the attainment of a position outside decadence.”57 Naomi Schor connects this movement to “a disintegration of a textual whole, the increasing autonomy of its parts and...a generalized synecdoche.”58 Rita Felski, in turn, stresses “the affiliations between the discourses of sexology and psychiatry and the texts of avant-garde art as they shape the formation of a distinctively modern vision of sexual desire.”59 In creating and mythologizing fetish substitutes for objects of desire, writers invoked the superiority of artifice to nature. Thus, among the emblematic figures of this literature are the effeminate “dandy” male, the homosexual, the androgyne, the femme fatale, and the masculinized woman. ­Felski identifies within early modernists an imaginary act of femininity loosening itself from the body of woman; instead, femininity was to become a governing metaphor in the fin de siècle crisis of literary representation, linked to an aesthetic definition of modernity that

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emphasized, with ­Nietzsche, the opacity of language and the omnipresence of desire.60 ­Felski links the fetishistic elements of these narratives of desire with abandonment of organic narrative and realist conventions, which leads to a self-reflexive preoccupation with the surface of language and the texture of the word, as well as with stylistic practices of parody, fragmentation, and aesthetic self-consciousness.61 These kinds of connections between modernist poetics of fragmentation, gender indeterminacy, and fetishistic (and voyeuristic) desire were common in Europe’s early modernist literature of the fin de siècle. These foundational elements of literary fetishism and fragmentation had a variety of guises—the specifically Russian poetics of fetishization and the androgyne were embedded in utopian and religious thinking—but a fundamental essence influenced Hebrew writers regardless of which corner of Europe was home.62 Considering the reach of this new sexuality, we should not be surprised that similar concerns can be found in the work of many Hebrew writers, even with those who did not see themselves as “aesthetes.” 63 As we shall see, the complex relations among sexuality, writing, and artistic “self-fashioning,” which are perhaps the defining features of Russian symbolism, are also a major preoccupation for Hebrew writers in this period. As different as they were in their ideological orientations and their poetic styles, Hebrew modernist writers of fiction created surprisingly similar narrative structures that probe the relations between sexual desire and artistic writing and fulfillment. If we explore some of these foundational texts of Hebrew modernism from our new, gendered perspective, we shall see how—despite the cultural chasm that lay between them—Brenner and Wilde are actually not such an odd couple after all. It is only with an awareness of modernism’s “sexual turn” that we can truly appreciate the complexities of our Hebrew and Yiddish writers.

E i g h t  “I Am So Weak and

My Desire Is So Strong”

The Crisis of (Jewish) Masculinity Mama’s bed is always so soft, and always ready to fall into sweet sleep, and I am so weak and my desire is so strong. —Uri Nissan Gnessin, “A Letter to Ya‘acov Fichman,” February 15, 1909

The overwhelming majority of modernist Hebrew writers were men, and the protagonists in their stories and novels are mostly men. As a result, it is hardly surprising that their preoccupation with masculine desire was part of an intense exploration of masculine identity, which was enmeshed in fin de siècle Europe with a concurrent “crisis of masculinity.” This crisis was a subjective experience, as well as a culturally conditioned construct that permeated the thought and literature of the period. From a historical point of view the “crisis of masculinity” was chiefly a European phenomenon that reached its zenith at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As George Mosse has made clear in his extensive studies, the ideal of masculinity throughout the nineteenth century was a “bourgeois” ideal that was itself a transformation and appropriation of the classical chivalrous ideal. Instead of the ideal of the warrior, the “bourgeois man” became an ideal characterized by productivity, self-discipline, moderation, and balance.1 Peter Gay characterizes “the authentically manly man” in this period as someone who is “at once self-assertive and self-controlled.”2 At the fin de siècle, this ideal of masculinity had fallen into crisis everywhere: in economic developments; political and social challenges to the exclusivity of male power (like the new women’s liberation movements); and attacks by critics on the decline of virility, with the rise and popularity of the new science of “sexology.” Moreover, the emergence and development of psychoanalysis as a distinctive theoretical perspective, therapeutic method, and scientific movement in the first decade of the twentieth century was inextricably tangled with these fears about masculine identity.

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This sense of calamity found complex expression all over fin de siècle Europe. Perhaps its most notorious articulation was written by Otto Weininger, the young Viennese thinker of Jewish origins. Weininger’s book Geschlecht und Charakter (“Sex and Character,” 1903) was an instant bestseller and became the focus of intense concern for a broad audience of writers and intellectuals in Austria, Germany, and all over Europe, including Strindberg, Karl Kraus, Kafka, Musil, Schoenberg, and Wittgenstein.3 It also exerted a strong impact on Hebrew and Yiddish writers like Arieli and Brenner.4 Sex and Character famously presents a “scientific” theory of biological bisexuality in which the relative ratios of “M” (masculinity) and “W” (femininity) in any individual could be quantified. The second and major part of the book is a speculative, philosophical construction of a dynamic dualism of “essences.” “Masculinity” is designated as the pole of conscious subjective agency, rational control, ethical individuality, freedom, and spiritual transcendence, while “femininity” is designated as the pole of unconscious objective passivity, sexual determinism, amorality, and material de-individualized immanence. The masculine identity of any particular individual—though supported by quantitative ratios of biological substance—thus emerges as primarily a human construct, as an ethical and cultural achievement. Femininity is also a construct, but only in a negative sense; in Weininger’s perspective, it was not a true identity, not a goal of human achievement or the desired product of self-determination but “something which can be transcended, which ought to be transcended.”5 Sex and Character combines this radical polarization of masculine and feminine with a parallel theory of “Aryan” and “Jewish” types. Jewish­ness in Weininger’s book is the collective form of femininity as it operates in the history of Western culture; as he bluntly puts it, “Jewishness was saturated with femininity.”6 Like femininity, Jewishness is not identical to a particular biological “race,” but it is presented as the epitome of a particular “psychological constitution, which is a possibility for all humankind but which has found its most grandiose actualization in historical Judaism.”7 To achieve the emancipated human identity of autonomous individuality was to repudiate the woman and the Jew in oneself. The true home for “Man” was, by definition, an Aryan fraternity in which femininity and Jewishness had been expunged.

The Crisis of (Jewish) Masculinity

According to Weininger, the goal of achieving this “pure masculinity” was only approached in the fields of art and philosophy, when it was produced by the “Genius”—the higher being who educates his fellows in the moral task of repudiating their sensual being (femininity and Jewishness). Art and philosophy had become decadent, however, in those fin de siècle movements that surrendered to the seductive pull of the sensual. Drawing heavily on cultural heroes such as Richard ­Wagner, Weininger called for a more purified and autonomous art, an art that mirrored, articulated, and thus helped to achieve the redemptive goal of spiritual transcendence, of purified masculinity. In recent years, scholars have shown that in spite of his eccentricity, Weininger was clearly a man of his age.8 In his writing about masculinity and Jewishness, Weininger articulates, in the most extreme fashion, the prevailing masculine fears about “feminization” of society in the wake of women’s liberation movements, the increasing number of women in the workforce, and what was perceived as “amoral aestheticism in literature and arts.” Weininger also articulates the prevailing anxiety and uneasiness about the changing nature of Jewishness in a modern world. Nancy Harrowitz cites Cesare Lombroso’s confusion of women and Jews as an influence on Weininger’s work. Ritchie Robertson has explained the concept of the feminized Jewish man with a detailed account of the different Jewish and non-Jewish writers and thinkers from the fin de siécle who contributed to the discourse of the Jew as feminized.9 However, as John Toews claims, for most writers and intellectuals (Jewish and non-Jewish alike), both in German-speaking countries and all over Europe, Weininger’s theories were not viewed as a “solution” to a crisis of masculinity. Instead, they were transformed into a case that required critical analysis before its materials could be reshaped into meaningful form (in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literature). Weininger’s case was not resolved through the discovery of “true masculinity.” Literary reflections on the conditions of experience were mobilized not as “instruments for resolution or transcendence but as a means to portray, as the distinguishing core of the modernist identity itself, a conception of the interminable, experimental, contingent, conflicted processes of constructing gendered and communal identities.”10

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This is surely true in the context of writing by East European Jewish men who wrote in specifically Jewish languages like Yiddish and Hebrew. The encounter of East European Jewish society with the paradigms of gender, sexuality, and European bourgeois society intensified a crisis that originated in the very physical transition into modern ­European society.11 Coming out of an East European context and writing in the Hebrew language, many Hebrew writers did not advance a masculine ideal for the emerging Jewish (or “Hebrew”) national identity—particularly not one grounded in the desire to extinguish Jewish difference. But as they attempted to create a modern Jewish European culture, it was impossible for them not to address the widespread European crisis of masculinity as well as the perception of Jewish men as emasculated. What kind of masculine figures, we must ask, did these writers then create? And how did they negotiate both the masculinity and the Jewishness of their protagonists? As we search for an answer, let’s look briefly at one of the very few attempts in the era’s Hebrew fiction to create a virile masculine Jew, which happened to be also the first attempt of the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik to write and publish a story.12 The result is Aryeh ba-’al guf (“Brawny Aryeh,” 1899),13 whose main protagonist is a highly ambivalent and grotesque character.14 Aryeh is a coarse father of three, a merchant of wood who lives in a remote small town. His physicality is described by the narrator in distinctly exaggerated terms: “The solid, powerful body, with iron sinews and bronze limbs, with a full, ruddy face—even though he has reached the age of fifty, he is as strong as a thirty-year-old.”15 Aryeh has a “strong, thick hand” and a “full belly.” He is a sight to behold, with his “strength and his breadth, his figure cut uniformly from a single stone, with no pits and no bumps, with no part out of proportion, no jutting bones—like an oak that, if every wind in the world came to blow on it, could not be budged from its spot.”16

But this kind of brawny man, full of a power and masculine virility that the narrator seems to admire, is almost a contradiction in terms. He is understood by the other Jewish characters (and by the narrator himself) as a man with a “non-Jewish” or “anti-Jewish” body. “Every-

The Crisis of (Jewish) Masculinity

body knows that Aryeh is Cham,17 that he does not have a single Jewish sinew in his body.”18 Bialik’s character of Aryeh is, in fact, exceptional in Hebrew fiction of the period. Similar figures can only be found in fictional texts by Hebrew writers living in Palestine trying to describe the Zionist “pioneer” man in similar terms of virility—although significantly, this pioneer is by definition part of a new ideal, an example of a “New Hebrew Man.”19 In contrast, most Hebrew modernist writers in Europe—from Brenner to Fogel—focused their writing on “emasculated” male protagonists with the “decadent” features, rather than on an “ideal” masculinity of urban bourgeoisie or rural types. The common masculine character in Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century has been, until recently, seen through a very specific lens. This context is known as the talush (uprooted), and a situation of tlishut (uprootedness). In his highly influential lectures from the 1950s, Shimon Halkin was the first scholar to assign the Hebrew name talush to what he understood to be the typical protagonist of Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century. Halkin characterizes the talush as a lonely young man whose quest for knowledge and for intellectual and emotional self-realization tears him away from the traditional “world of the fathers,” and yet he is unable to find a place in the modern European secular world.20 The origin of the word talush is the Talmud, where it is used to describe a fruit removed from the tree and yet not separated from its source. The first Hebrew story with the title “Talush” and with an explicit talush character was a story from 1904 by Yitzhak Dov Berkvitz, a writer who continued the “realist” or naturalist tradition of portraying “types” and “characters” that was dominant in the 1880s and 1890s. In Berkovitz’s story, the talush is a young physician, Doctor Winik, a former yeshiva student from an impoverished family who has left it all behind in order to seek an education and a professional career. He becomes integrated into an emerging middle class, but after he attains the social rank toward which he has long aspired, he finds that he no longer has a “home” to which he can return. He is called to his dying brother’s bedside and is shocked by the misery he sees around him. At the same time, he accompanies the daughter of a colleague to the theater and is

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disgusted by the dullness of her conversation and concerns. His own sense of self has been “uprooted.”21 In his essay, Me-hirhurei sofer (“Reflections of a Writer,” 1908),22 Brenner was the first critic to point out that the drama in Berkovitz’s story is a social one. “The soil of his family was taken beneath his feet,” Brenner writes, “but he is foreign to other worlds, thus he is caught in between two magnets, between two poles.”23 Ironically, the category of the talush has been extended from Berkovitz’s story, with its realistic conventions and socio-psychological dilemmas, to describe not just the gallery of masculine figures in Brenner’s own complex literary oeuvre, but the entire period of early-twentieth-century Hebrew fiction. Halkin developed an extended typology around the figure of the talush (pointing to three different kinds of tlushim: social, intellectual, and existential); and with it, he attempted to capture a large variety of characters, and the equally wide range of thematic concerns and poetic styles that have been employed in early-twentieth-century Hebrew fiction. Halkin suggests that what is shared by all these tlushim, and what explains the fact they are so common in Hebrew fiction of the time, is a historical and social reality. The protagonists, just like the writers who created them, have separated themselves from the world of their ancestors and the world of religious studies and belief, and are trying to find their way in modern society, but they fail to do so because they are forever caught in between “the two poles.”24 The categorization of the talush, and the way it was conceptualized by Halkin and by the numerous scholars who followed him, has been so dominant that any discussion of gender and sexuality, especially of male sexuality, is bound to be dominated by it. Thus, readers and critics perplexed with the sexual frustration—the “effeminate” qualities of so many male characters in early-twentieth-century Hebrew literature—are quick to latch on to the concept of the talush as an overarching explanatory framework.25 However, the term itself, and the entire literary and historical discourse that has been created around it, is in fact not very useful for dealing with the complex ways in which gender and sexuality have been expressed, even with the specific “masculine crisis” in Hebrew fiction of the time. The concept of the talush is at once too broad and too narrow. It is too broad because it tries to capture utterly

The Crisis of (Jewish) Masculinity

different phenomena that occurred over a long period of Jewish acculturation in Europe: the social disintegration of a supposedly “coherent” world of East European Jewry, the widespread migration away from traditional centers of Judaism, the alienation of individuals, and so on. On the other hand, it is too narrow because it implies a direct, overly determined mimetic relationship between “life” and “literature,” between a socio-historical reality that was complex and constantly changing and equally multifaceted aesthetic and literary practices. Moreover, Halkin’s description and explanation of the talush is based on a model that does not apply very well to the lived experience of the modernist writers of the first three decades of the twentieth century, or to their protagonists. As Alan Mintz and Dan Miron have shown, the theme of the ex–yeshiva student who breaks with his past and makes his way “out” to the world of secular studies, yet remains unchanged in his mentality, is a familiar figure from the haskalah literature of the second half of the nineteenth century. This character has been depicted well in texts like Moshe Leib Lielinblum’s autobiographical novel Chatot neurim (“Sins of Youth,” 1876).26 Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, who was born in 1865, and whose literary career began in 1888, already summed up this socio-psychological dynamic in 1900. Nowhere is it articulated better than in the words of Elimelech, the first-person narrator of Berdichevsky’s novella Urva parach (“A Raven Flies,” 1899–1900): “Although the books had changed, I the reader had not. My thoughts may have taken a different shape but the abstract habit of intellectualizing and dreaming had not altered at all.”27 In fact, as with many other aspects of Hebrew modernist fiction, Berdichevsky has been a crucial transitional figure in the portrayal of sexuality, especially the problem of masculine desire and the crisis of Jewish masculinity in Hebrew fiction. On one hand, Berdichevsky sums up the problematic aspects of the Jewish male protagonist of nineteenth-century haskalah fiction. On the other, he ventured toward a new modernist poetics and the crisis of masculinity in the novellas that were published between 1899 and 1900, Urva parach (“A Raven Flies”) and Machanaim (“Between Two Camps”). Although these two fictional texts relied on the autobiographical novels of the haskalah, they also broke a new path because they presented for the first time in Hebrew

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fiction a cohesive sequence that occurred thoroughly in the psychic life of the protagonist.28 The protagonist in Machanaim, a solitary young ex–yeshiva student named Michael, is divorced from his traditional Jewish past, community, and family, and he travels on his own to study at the University of Breslau. Michael lacks a social framework; he is estranged from both traditional Jewish culture and Christian society: “Hebrew books he no longer reads as he used to, and his tefillin and prayer book he purposefully forgot somewhere so as to cleanse himself of all assets of Judaism, in whose path he would no longer walk.”29 Although Michael “does not think about the Jews or Judaism,” he is constantly haunted by an internalized sense of the Jewish collective, against which he struggles. While he attempts to lead a “private” life far from the “law of his father,” he realizes that traces of this traditional Jewishness still reside within him and that despite his desire to repress his previous identity, the past returns uncannily. Hence, the carefully constructed private realm is infiltrated by the public, and Michael, who aspires to become a free, private, Europeanized individual, ultimately cannot unchain the bonds of Jewish identity. Michael can be seen as a talush of the kind that Halkin describes, and in Machanaim, the internal drama between private and public, between Judaism and “Europeanness,” is paralleled by a sexual drama. Hedwig, the adopted daughter of his neighbors, becomes the object of Michael’s masculine desire, of which he remains unaware. His suppressed sexual desire finally leads Michael to sleep with a poor laundress who happens to be Hedwig’s real mother. This act brings the protagonist to seek a symbolic, and Oedipal, punishment: he imagines going into exile and stabbing out his eyes. Thus, Michael’s inability to repress the traditional Jewish life from his new life is parallel to the failure of his sexuality.30 This dynamic of tlishut was crucial for transitional writers like Bialik, Feierberg, and Berdichevsky, who presented the character of the talush very well in their prose and poetry. However, this experience of tlishut was not the decisive element in the representation of masculine desire and masculine identity in the writings of modernist Hebrew writers like Gnessin, Brenner, Shofman, or Shteinberg (despite Berdichevsky’s strong influence on them), and tlishut was surely not central to younger

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writers like Arieli, Agnon, and Fogel.31 The sexual concerns of many of the protagonists (and perhaps their authors as well) were very different. As a result, we must resist the dominance of Halkin’s characterization, and instead push beyond the talush figure to find more satisfying answers to the question of masculine crisis.

Masculinity and Its Discontents in the Fiction of Brenner and Arieli In his quasi-autobiographical novel Ba-choref (“In Winter,” 1903), Brenner takes the character of the ex–yeshiva student who is lost in a new world, and gives this trope its most complete and exhaustive treatment.32 In the process he also gives the figure of the talush a final blow by exposing its utter conventionality as a literary topos. Yirmiah Feirman, one of the first male characters whose masculine sexual desire defines his subjectivity and psychic world, spends the novel trying to explain the reasons for his “gender troubles.” Throughout, he uses the familiar explanation about the culture of the yeshiva and the contradictions between “books” and “life.” In the scene where he first meets Rahil Moiseyevna (the Russian name for Rachel Obedman), the young woman with whom he is infatuated, he declares at once that there is no chance for anything to happen between them because “he is a yeshiva boy who has never seen a woman.” In another scene in which Yirmiah finally finds himself in the presence of his object of desire, he tells himself: “This is a yeshiva boy! I am a stranger to any girl.”33 In chapter five of the novel, which is presented as a long, involuntary “digression” of the first-person narrator from the main line of this story, Yirmiah spins a web of rationalizations around his masculine desire and his inability to act on this desire. One of his main explanations is that the culture of the beit midrash (“the house of study”) caused him to be abnormal and malformed, and because of it he is unable to create erotic contacts: “The thick Gemaras with its commentaries and the commentaries of the commentaries, and all the poskim and all the mitpalpelim; just changed themselves for other books.”34 In these sentences, Yirmiah

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constructs an opposition between the “books,” and the bookish atmosphere of Jewish traditional culture, and the “life” which is represented in love and erotic fulfillment. Yirmiah tries to give a kind of collective Jewish “sociological” explanation to his erotic masculine crisis. But the language the protagonist uses is infused with a sense of ironic belatedness: It is precisely the kind of phrasing that is all too familiar from the literature of the haskalah and from Berdichevsky’s novellas, to which Brenner makes direct and parodic references.35 The deceiving logic of the first-person narrator is actually revealed to the readers time and again. In the same chapter, for example, he tells us about his fellow yeshiva friends and their flirtations with young girls, flirtations that later develop into “healthy” sexual relationships. Thus, both Yirmiah and his readers actually know that these explanations are false, because other facts about his psychic life become manifest both in his actions and in his unsettled act of narration. The novel actually supplies us with multiple, often contradicting reasons for his actions and for his specific sexual obsession. As Dov Sadan has observed in a pioneering series of essays (written in the 1930s) applying psychoanalytic insights to Brenner’s fiction, we find that Yirmiah’s Oedipal relations with his parents are highly significant and they form a pattern which repeats in his adult life. Sadan suggests that the Oedipal struggle against the father and Yirmiah’s belief that he is similar to his father are actually the reasons that drive him toward the culture of “the house of study,” as if to hide within it from himself and from his psychological and sexual dilemmas.36 Whether we accept Sadan’s reading or not, it is clear that the sociological depiction of the talush is not an adequate explanation for the masculine crisis of protagonists like Yirmiah; the crisis is much more far-reaching. In fact, Ba-choref is a key text in the development of modernist Hebrew fiction and is equally crucial for understanding the psychosexual dynamics we find in Brenner’s later works and in other works by modernist Hebrew writers, including those texts that deal with completely different kinds of characters and themes. The third part of ­Ba-choref, in particular, contains what seems to be the nucleus for some of modernist Hebrew fiction’s main preoccupations with gender and sexuality: the crisis of (Jewish) masculinity, the “effeminate” mascu-

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line subject, erotic triangulation, the New Woman, the fetishization of erotic desire, and, finally, the relations among sexual desire, gender, and modernist narrative, Thus, it is worthwhile to dwell a little longer on Yirmiah and his erotic entanglements. The moment in which Yirmiah gazes at Rahil Moiseyevna’s body is a haunting and decisive moment in the novel. In spite of everything this protagonist-narrator says about himself, and about the “typicality” and the “insignificance” of his encounter with Rahil—which he introduces as agav orcha (“by the way”)37—one cannot mistake the specific kind of erotic desire in his description: In the home of Borsif I saw before me a strange young woman, dark, pretty, with vivacious, wide-open blue eyes, elongated silky cheekbones, an enchanting mouth and the movements of a doe, mixed with just a bit of uniquely special importance [...] She seemed not to look at me at all; I listened to her clear voice with great attention and, stealing a glance, I saw that twice during the time I sat there an agreeable twitch that highlighted her alabaster teeth and her upper lip and then rested them on her lower lip. The whole time I sat on my chair as if I were nailed to it. I was filled with a kind of feeling that if I moved a hand or foot, it would cause something awful to happen. And when I left my heart was full of deep loathing for Borsif, loathing for his full head of hair, for his laugh, for his sweater, for the buttons on his shirt, a loathing greater than any I had ever felt before. Obviously, this loathing was the result of jealousy, of my envy for his free and lofty bearing [...] 38

A few things become apparent in this extraordinary scene. ­ ecause ­Yirmiah sees Rahil for the first time with Borsif—Rahil’s friend B whom Yirmiah thinks, or imagines to be, her lover and his “rival”—and in his house, the whole scene has a clear voyeuristic quality (“I was looking in hiding”). In Yirmiah’s mind, he is not allowed to look, and yet he does. The description of Rahil is thus not so much a description of a beautiful woman, but rather a chain of synecdoches—a series of fragmented body parts that signify the specific structure of Yirmiah’s desire. Moreover, from the very beginning, the desire of Yirmiah for Rahil is a triangular desire because it is enmeshed with the rivalry and jealousy of Borsif, who becomes in the passage an object of a no less intense gaze by Yirmiah. In fact, the two metonymic and synecdochic gazes are

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parallel. Rahil is presented in the narrative through the eyes of the passionate man who is “dissecting” her body; his erotic gaze is focused on her eyes, cheeks, mouth, lips, and teeth. Likewise, Borsif is reduced to three power­fully condensed synecdoches: his manly forelock, his derisive laugh, and the gold button on his tunic. This is only the first in a chain of scenes and events with a similar structure, and it becomes clear that the “main thing” (ikar ha-davar) in the third, concluding part of the novel, is the very subject of Yirmiah’s sexual desire.39 It turns out that Yirmiah returns to his hometown from the big city because of Rahil, and his erotic obsession with her is what moves the plot and the act of narration both forward and in circular, repetitive motions. When Yirmiah meets Rahil again (this time, in his hometown in the presence of her brother), he is fully in the grip of obsession: “she was wearing a dark blue dress, and by the light of the lamp she was the quintessence of life, sparkle, and beauty.”40 Rahil, however, is quite bored, looking at a magazine, and Yirmiah immediately imagines that she is waiting for his “rival” Borsif. They chat for a while and the topic of the conversation is focused on their mutual acquaintances in the city and on Borsif. Then Yirmiah says that he has to excuse himself and go: When I apologized for rushing to return home by saying, “I cannot stay any longer,” I wasn’t lying. I would have in fact been happy to give up everything I own just to sit there, if only some thing [davar] had been in a different position. But this thing was as it was and it aroused in me a powerful desire to hide myself in the darkness outside.41

Alan Mintz has maintained persuasively (following Kurzweill) that the identity of this “thing” (davar), whose strange “position” forces Yirmiah to run away from Rahil’s house, is in fact his penis.42 In this passage, instead of the metonymies and synecdoches that are used to describe the objects of the triangular desire between Yirmiah, Rahil, and Borsif, Yirmiah instead is confronted with the embodiment of his own undeniable lust. He doesn’t know what to do with it, and instead he has a “powerful desire” to do what he always does (and what might be the only thing that gives him pleasure): “to hide myself in the darkness outside.”

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What follows is another extraordinary scene of voyeurism. Yirmiah runs home, yet he turns back and stands by the window where Rahil is visible and where he can gaze at her body through the window: “She was leaning against the table lazily, yet everything about her shone as if vibrating. Blood rushed through her face like strings of pearls.” 43 Here again, Yirmiah fetishizes Rahil through a series of synecdoches, transfiguring a young and rather bored woman into a voyeuristic object of desire. Now Yirmiah finally admits that he is at the mercy of his sexual obsession, that “his heart was beating like a hammer; all thought disappeared.” Yirmiah is transfixed to the object and only the steps that he hears in the street (which could have been anyone’s) reveal the other side of his sexual obsession. He immediately imagines that these steps are his, namely his sexual rival Borsif. This is an extraordinary narrative presentation of the structure of sexual desire. As we shall see, it is a voyeuristic excitement that is linked to the synecdochic and fetishizing quality of the narrative, as well as to the triangular nature of erotic rivalry and latent homosocial desire.44 The fact that much of the modernist quality of the narrative—its presentation of interiority, fragmentation, and circularity—is related to this structure of obsessive sexual desire is underscored by two nightmarish dreams that Yirmiah has toward the end of the novel. The first dream comes after another voyeuristic scene, an accidental and hasty meeting with Rahil in which he pretends not to see her, but actually gazes quite closely at different parts of her body: When she passed by, I yearned to gaze just for one moment at the braid of her hair, her curls, the shape of her body, her way of looking, the color of her coat, her hat. But I couldn’t. I was trembling in fear [...] and only when she disappeared from my eyes, I turned my head, transfixed for a long hour looking at the place where she was walking.45

At that point, Yirmiah’s imagination is working “overtime.” This asvanced stage of fetishism and voyeurism—in which the gazing subject is not even able to directly look anymore and instead imagines it—is linked directly to the first dream. Brenner here seems to be enacting a familiar scene from Berdichevsky’s stories: he is embarking on an

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imaginary journey to Germany. Ironically, this time, it is his father who sends ­Yirmiah to Germany “to find a bride.” Yirmiah answers that “in Germany one can find Friedrich Nietzsche and his thick moustache, and Borsif also has the same moustache.”46 Later, Yirmiah is on the train and the conductor asks for his ticket, which he doesn’t have. To Yirmiah’s surprise, the conductor turns out to be “half rabbi, and half Borsif.” Finally, the boy who guards the way approaches him and commands him that he needs to “take the journey on his own,” but he adds that “his nose prevents him” from moving on. When Yirmiah grabs this boy, he finds out to his great surprise that he becomes a girl, very possibly Rahil herself. Even without utilizing Freudian terms, as Dov Sadan has done convincingly, it is clear that the highly compressed images of these dreams resonate with all the elements of ­Yirmiah’s desire and his crisis of masculinity: the voyeuristic and fetishistic structure of his lust, the Oedipal relations with Yirmiah’s parents (and substitute father-figures like the rabbi), the self-consciousness about his own carnal desire (including “the nose” as a synecdoche for the sexual organ), the gender indeterminacy, and the dynamics of desire that bind together the male erotic rival with the subject.47 The links between Yirmiah’s second dream, his masculine sexual desire, and his crisis of masculinity is even more transparent. Yirmiah sees himself as a fly who is metzachek (a biblical verb which connotes “playing,” but mainly in the sexual sense) on Rahil’s cheek. She catches the fly and breaks off his wing. The pain, says the narrator, is similar to pain he felt in his childhood when he saw hell in his dreams. This dream under­ scores Yirmiah’s relationships with Rahil. From her perspective (and Yirmiah knows this), he is like an annoying fly that one wishes to get rid of. However, because of this he can play “on her cheek,” namely be a voyeur who gazes at the parts of the body and derives erotic pleasure from fetishizing. Likewise, the act of “clipping his wings” is a clear and almost standard metonym of castration anxiety that underlies the fear enacting the sexual fantasy. I have isolated the sexual elements from a novel that also deals with a narrative of apostasy, a narrative of “failure” that is also the awkward portrait of the protagonist as a young man, and perhaps also as a future writer. Yet, it is quite clear that the sexual desire as a manifestation of

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the crisis of Jewish masculinity, and masculinity in general, is central in Ba-choref, and Brenner’s treatment takes us far away from the sociological problem of the talush. A libidinal energy of masculine desire, and the crisis of masculinity that accompanies it, are fundamental to all of Brenner’s fictional texts, from his second novel Mi-saviv la-nekuda (“Around the Point,” 1904) through Bein mayim le-mayim (“Between Water and Water,” 1910) and to his last great novel Shchol ve-kishalon (“Breakdown and Bereavement,” 1919) written in Palestine. Sexual desire as a crucial element of crisis of (Jewish) masculinity is equally important in the writing of Brenner’s friends Uri Nissan Gnessin, Gershon Shofman, their contemporary Hersh Dovid Nomberg, and the slightly younger writers S. Y. Agnon, Ya‘acov Shteinberg, David Fogel, and Levi Aryeh Arieli. In the next chapters I will explore different aspects of gender and sexuality in the fiction of these writers. At this point, I want to provide another—and very different—glimpse into the link between sexual desire and the crisis of (Jewish) masculinity. This is the novella Le-or ha-venus (“In the Light of the Venus,” 1911), written and published by Levi Aryeh Arieli (1886–1943).48 Arieli was an East European Hebrew writer from the Ukraine who lived for more than a decade in Palestine and then immigrated to America. From today’s perspective, Arieli is seen as a minor, almost forgotten writer, but in the early decades of the twentieth century, he was considered a prodigy of Hebrew modernism together with another young Hebrew author, S. Y. Agnon. Arieli’s impressionist and symbolist stories and novellas, influenced by Russian symbolists such as Fedor Sologub, Zinaida Gippius, and Leonid Andreyev, as well as by German and Scandinavian early modernism, made a strong impact on Brenner and on other writers and critics at the time, and are an important part of Hebrew modernist fiction in the early twentieth century.49 At first glance, Ya‘acov (Yankl) Perlgold, the protagonist of Le-or ha-venus, seems to be radically different from Yirmiah Feirman. Unlike the bookish Yirmiah, Perlgold, a young Jewish man from Kherson, is a soldier in the Russian army and an amateur musician who is loved and appreciated by his fellow soldiers as well as by other men and women who come in contact with him. Yet his erotic desire is as complex and

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unresolved as Yirmiah’s, and is enmeshed with changing modes of masculine and Jewish identity. At the heart of the novella is the story of Perlgold’s life as a Jewish soldier, first in a small, remote base by the Siberian border, and then with the Russian colonel Burovsky, who lives in an attractive house in a provincial city with his young Polish wife Bronislava and their small daughter Lily. Like Brenner’s Be-choref as well as other Hebrew and European texts from this period, Arieli’s novella is rife with themes and images of the erotic gaze, with mirrors and with fetishistic and voyeuristic masculine desire. From the very beginning of the narrative, Perlgold is preoccupied with his own masculinity and the masculinity of the young soldiers around him, as reflected to him in the mirror: On the wall, above my bed, a rectangular mirror, not large, hung [...] Each morning after washing [...] the mirror was besieged by a huge camp of youngsters brushing up their moustaches and smoothing back their hair with spit.50

The homosocial bonds that are inherent in this all-male army environment are explicitly linked in Perlgold’s mind with a narcissistic, autoerotic gaze in the mirror: “I liked to gaze in the mirror not just after washing, but whenever, at every free moment. This gaze was a kind of source for getting to know my features and for being alone with myself.”51 As much as Perlgold is engrossed with gazing at himself and at the young male soldiers around him, he pays no less attention to the young women from the neighboring town and to the girls from the local gymnasium: The gymnasium girls and the pupils of the church school in their new pinafores and galoshes walked rapidly over the bright snow, with its tens of thousands of points and golden sparks and blinding fire. Of course, it’s hard for you to imagine what a hell my soul was in then. They did not even look at me, and if a girl glanced at me by coincidence, it was so meaningless, so dismissive, as if she had glanced at the most common gutter pipe or chimney [...] in short, friends, I was in a bad state.52

Here, as elsewhere in the novella, the erotic gaze of Perlgold at the young female students seems to require the fact that they are not looking back at him. Perlgold constantly mentions his intelligence and his resourcefulness as reasons why he should be “looked at” and loved, and

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yet he does not fail to notice the fact that these young women do not return his gaze. Their avoidance of looking is read anxiously (but not consciously) as linked both with his masculinity and his Jewishness. Not unlike Feirman and other protagonists of Brenner (and his contemporaries), the anxiety about his masculinity and his Jewishness, coupled with even stronger erotic desire, causes Perlgold to be in a continual state of moving and escaping, only to discover that his basic ennui goes with him wherever he goes. This protagonist’s modus vivendi is highlighted by the fact that the same pattern of the frustrated erotic gaze repeats itself even after a drastic transition from the harsh life of a soldier in a small, remote Siberian town to the comfort of the house of his colonel. Now it is the colonel’s young Polish wife with whom Perlgold is infatuated. When he meets Bronislava in her home for the first time, she is sitting together with her husband: Her face was pale, but so delicate, so enchanting, and the curve of her back staggeringly beautiful. Her long eyelashes, marble neck, and the angle of her eyes were an eternal Eden, and her delicate and lustful lips aroused, beckoned, offered no respite [...] Ah, comrades! She was perhaps twenty-six years old! No more. My stolen glances revealed how she gazed lovingly into his gleaming eyes, smoothed down his disheveled hair, and suggested softly that he have it cut today.53

The structure of the desire is described, like in Brenner’s novel, through fetishism, by gazing at parts of the body (rather than the entire person) and by dissecting the whole into parts; into synecdochic representations. And like in Brenner’s text, the masculine erotic desire is stimulated through a process of intense identification and rivalry with the other man. This time it is Burovsky, the husband of the desired woman, who is also Perlgold’s commander and direct superior. Perlgold is consumed equally by his erotic desire, by jealousy, and by his anger that the desired woman does not pay much attention to him. Perlgold, who tells his story in retrospect to the group of immigrants, comments on the repetition between his gaze upon the young gymnasium students and upon Bronislava: Think of it yourselves: how can the ostensible nonchalance of a gymnasium pupil, half schoolgirl and the other half someone that you can

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totally fluster with some ludicrous joke, compare with the contempt of a beautiful, brilliant graduate with the bearing of a dignitary and a lady, full of grandeur [...] But the titanic contempt, contempt and repugnance! They only served to magnify the flame in my heart sevenfold and to shrink the dwarf within me seventy-sevenfold.54

Now the anxious obsession about his masculinity and his desire for the Polish woman is specifically linked to Perlgold’s Jewishness. He is convinced (although there is very little ground for it within the narrative) that through him “the beautiful Polish lady enacted her hatred and revulsion towards Jews.”55 Shortly after he moves to the house of the colonel and begins to be erotically interested in the Polish lady, Perlgold goes to a room that is designated for “hair grooming and beautification.” In this room, full of images, mirrors, and reflections, he gazes at a painting with all the European kings, as well as at a large mirror on the wall in which he sees his own reflection: Alexander III gazed at me from above the wall full of portraits of all the kings of Europe [...] The large mirror reflected me at full height; for some reason, this time I was uncomfortable looking at myself and turned my head to the right—and saw myself in the other mirror. Now it was as if I had willingly accepted fate’s decree and I secretly took stock of myself, from my nose to the tips of my boots, and I thought: “What a stalwart devil! Most ridiculous!” My moustache was so black and so curled, my eyes and all the contours of my face also made me eminently desirable.56

In this moment of narcissism, artifice, and mirror-gazing, Perlgold resembles a kind of “dandy” figure, familiar from Baudelaire, Huysmans, Wilde, Andreyev, and Artsybashev as well as from some of ­Gnessin’s Hebrew novellas.57 This dandy-like activity highlights Perlgold’s “androgynous” qualities, but like in the works of the other writers mentioned above, Perlgold’s narcissism and mirror-gazing is linked to his masculine desire (as well as to his Jewishness). Perlgold convinces himself that the older colonel is impotent, and that only he, the young Jewish soldier, can sexually satisfy Bronislava, if only she will pay attention to him. In his fantasies, he imagines himself as a passionate lover who takes his woman to warm, exotic countries where she appears myste-

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riously “draped in white muslin dress, thin and sweet like a dream.”58 Perlgold fantasizes about how her slender body will appear through the dress and caress him. Later in the novella, the erotic passion becomes enmeshed with a parallel storyline about an assassination attempt that Perlgold is involved in. At this point, after an erotically charged scene in which Bronislava sits half naked and invites Perlgold to her bedroom, it seems as if finally the erotic fantasies of the male protagonist are about to become a reality. But then Perlgold’s obsessive desire becomes sadomasochistic and full of hatred: A sizzling stream of blood suddenly ran through my head, flooding and sweeping me along the carpet and bringing me in an instant to the low chair [...] In passionate hatred I put my teeth to her arm until I felt her blood break through and touch my lips through her sleeve.—Go away, madman, drunkard, sadist—she whispered searingly, grimacing from intense pain and pushing me away from her with violent revulsion.59

Perlgold tries to explain to Bronislava (as well as to himself and to his listeners) that this sadomasochistic behavior is due to the fact that he was drunk. He now wonders whether he really is a sadist or a pervert, a mere illustration to one of Cesare Lombroso’s books about psychosexual pathology: “Who am I? Not a cynic? Not a sadist? A Jew or some other creature? A revolutionary or a hooligan? No, simply both this and that, and not this and that, just a fin de siècle eunuch and hermaphrodite.”60 The novella’s structure of a narrative within a narrative highlights the fact that these sentences work on several levels. On the level of the firstperson narrator, they point to a realization that his crisis is related to the instability and indeterminacy of his masculine and Jewish identity. On a different level, as the author of the novella, Arieli seems to communicate to his readers the cultural specificity of Perlgold’s masculine crisis. By pointing to Perlgold’s “androgyny” and his unresolved Jewish identity, and by suggesting that he could be a “case” in Cesare Lombroso’s theories of psychosexual deviancy, he makes clear the connections between Jewishness, masculinity, and the new cultural visibility of androgyny, bisexuality, and homosexuality that proliferated all over

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Europe and had a strong impact on Russian and Jewish cultural life in the beginning of the twentieth century.61 Whether Arieli is presenting these links seriously or ironically is not entirely clear, as the novella ends with yet another escape and radical transition. What is evident is that one’s preoccupation with the intersection between masculinity, Jewish identity, and erotic desire can be as radically different as Feirman, the ex–yeshiva student, and the soldierdandy Perlgold (who might have been in his youth a yeshiva student as well). However, both of them, and many other male figures in Hebrew modernist fiction in this period, share more similarities than differences. The two radically different texts also share many important poetic and thematic elements: from the voyeuristic and fetishist structure of masculine desire (reflected in the textual fragmentation of so many Hebrew modernist narratives and their intense focus on conscious and unconscious psychic life), to the dynamics of rivalry and male bonding that underlies masculine desire, and finally to the preoccupation with the alluring yet intimidating “new woman,” whether she is a Polish lady like Bronislava or an assimilated Russian Jewish woman like Moiseyevna. Thus, in spite of the clear difference between the texts of Brenner and Arieli, both of them are good examples of the ways in which modernist Hebrew writers dealt with the complexity of Jewish masculinity and masculine desire. Looking at each one of these texts as yet another example of talush limits our understanding of the crisis of masculinity. While the break with Jewish traditions and the new national attempts to create a “New Hebrew Man” are surely important contexts, we must consider the way masculinity and masculine desire is constructed in Hebrew fiction of this period fit within the broader frameworks of modern Jewish culture and European modernism at the turn of the twentieth century.

N i n e   In the House and in the Gardens Erotic Triangulations and Homosocial Desire Suddenly, for the first time in his life, together with his first love, the love of his youth, with which he was filled toward his friend now, he also now understood him, comprehended his wild weeping, and wept. —Gershon Shofman, Ahava, 1911

One of the main themes apparent in the discussion of Brenner’s ­Ba-choref and Arieli’s Le-or ha-venus is that masculine erotic desire in modernist Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century is structured as an intense attachment and rivalry with another man—an erotic rival like Borsif or the colonel Burovsky. It also becomes clear (especially in Arieli’s novella) that the fin de siècle discourse around the new categories of homosexuality, homoeroticism, and “androgyny” is an important subtext against which modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe was written. However, in most texts of this period, masculine desire focuses very little on explicit homosexuality or homoeroticism.1 Rather, it is mediated primarily through what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has described as “homosocial desire.” Homosocial desire, as Sedgwick makes clear, is located in an erotic triangle involving two men and a woman, a structure in which desire and rivalry are closely related.2 The significance of the structure of triangular desire in narrative fiction was first described and analyzed by René Girard in his pioneering study Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Through readings of major European fictional texts, Girard traced a calculus of power built on the rivalry between the two active members of an erotic triangle. In any erotic triangle, Girard contends, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond between the lovers, and the bonds of rivalry and love are in many cases equivalent. Girard cites many examples in which the choice of the subject of desire is determined not by the “qualities” of the lover, but by the fact that the beloved has already been chosen by another person (a “mediator,” in Girard’s terminology) who then becomes a rival.3

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Sedgwick has observed that in Girard’s male-centered European novelistic tradition, these triangles are mostly two males who struggle for a female subject of desire. She has also highlighted the Freudian subtext of Girard’s triangular structure, the similarities with the Oedipal schema in which the standard gender of the subject is always male. Following these important observations, Sedgwick takes Girard’s insights a step further to show that an erotic triangle is often a powerful site of what she terms “homosocial desire,” a structure of relations that makes the play of desire and identification between men intelligible. Sedgwick defines “homosocial” as “social bonds between persons of the same sex,” and desire as “the affective or social force, the glue [...] that shapes an important relationship.”4 She goes on to explain that homo­social bonds can take many forms, and that there is a continuum rather than a clear dichotomy between homosocial and homosexual. Sedgwick’s crucial discursive shift from “homosexual” to “homosocial” and from “love” (as a particular emotion) to “desire” (which describes a structure analogous to “libido” in psychoanalysis) is crucial to understanding the gender and sexual dynamics of European and Hebrew modernist fiction of the early twentieth century.5 One of the most well known Russian fictional texts that explores triangular desire—one which is highly relevant because it was widely read and admired by Hebrew and Yiddish writers—is Lev Tolstoy’s novella, Kreitserova sonata (The Kreutzer Sonata, 1890).6 Of course, Tolstoy was the most respected and well-known Russian writer still alive in the fin de siècle. He belonged to a generation of “Russian classics” of the grand realistic tradition. However, this late novella, which was hugely popular in Russia (despite being censored by the authorities) and all over Europe, ushered in a new period of sexual discourse in Russian culture and has a central role in the creation of early Russian modernism. The Kreutzer Sonata is written in the form of a narrative within a narrative, told by the main protagonist to a listener who shares with him a journey on the train. Pozdnyshev tells of his youth and his first visits to brothels and about his subsequent remorse and self-disgust over sexuality. He decides to get married and after a brief engagement, the newlywed couple spends a disastrous honeymoon in Paris. Back in Russia the marriage develops into mutual hatred. Pozdnyshev believes (or fanta-

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sizes) that his wife is having an affair with a musician and he attempts to strangle her, until he finally kills her. He accuses both society and women for inflaming, with the aid of dressmakers and cosmeticians, men’s animal instincts. Pozdnyshev refers with irony to Jean-Martin Charcot, the French pioneer of the study of hysteria as a “degenerate” disorder. This and many other elements in the novella reveal Tolstoy’s familiarity with the fin de siècle literature of psychopathology. Thus, although the novella was intended by Tolstoy as a kind of a moral Christian sermon, it actually resembles a case history from Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis.7 In the context of the current discussion, what is especially interesting in this influential text is the structure of homosocial desire, which is revealed through the intense and phantasmatic jealousy that Pozdnyshev feels toward his erotic rival. Pozdnyshev attributes to Trukhachevsky—the musician who meets with his wife to play music— characteristics of the “feminized male.” The erotic rival is described through Pozdnyshev’s gaze as a man with “moist eyes, like almonds, smiling red lips, and a little moustache that was smeared with fixative; his hair was styled in the latest fashion [...] he had a particularly welldeveloped posterior, as women have, or as Hottentots.”8 It is clear that Pozdnyshev’s fear that his wife sleeps with this attractive man (attractive in his mind, that is), is also an expression of homosocial desire. The jealousy and rivalry make the entrance of the “third” legitimate, at least on the level of ­homosocial/sexual fantasy. As Olga Matich claims, similar patterns of erotic desire and erotic utopia appear everywhere in the writing (as well as the intimate life) of Russian symbolists from Zinaida Gippius and her husband Dmitriy Merezhkovsky to Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely.9 Given the fact that Hebrew modernist fiction of this period was written mainly by men who were preoccupied simultaneously with a crisis of European and Jewish masculinity as well as with the rise of Jewish nationalism, it is hardly surprising to find erotic triangles in their texts. In fact, when one examines stories and novellas of Brenner, Gnessin, Shofman, Agnon, and Arieli using the concept of homosocial desire that Sedgwick, Boone, and Matich have traced in English and Russian literature of this period, it becomes clear how widespread is this theme

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in European Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century. Indeed, I would like to suggest that triangular desire is a significant driving force of the structure of the narrative, as well as an important component in the poetics of fragmentation, fetishization, and voyeurism in Hebrew modernist fiction. I have already mentioned briefly the importance of triangular desire in the relations between Yirmiah Feirman, Rahil Moiseyevna, and Alexander Borsif in Brenner’s Ba-choref. Related patterns can be also found in Brenner’s second short novel, Mi-saviv la-nekuda (“Around the Point,” 1904), which will be discussed later. Other texts by Brenner, written both in Europe and in Palestine, also repeat this structure. Uri Nissan Gnessin, Brenner’s intimate friend from adolescence, frequently examined various permutations of erotic desire and sexuality. Erotic triangulation is a central aspect of his fictional work from the first to the last text he wrote.10 The first collection of stories that Gnessin published in 1904, Tzilelei ha-chayim (“The Shadows of Life”), is in fact unified by the theme of erotic triangulation.11 In the first story, Jenya, two men yearn for one woman and when the triangular structure collapses, the homosocial bond between the two men breaks down as well. In Ma’ase be-Otelo (“The Tale of Othello”), the protagonist male figure Zlatin falls in love with a married provincial woman, a kind of “Desdemona” whose husband “Othello” is the owner of a grocery store. The third story Shmuel ben Shmuel (“Shmuel, Son of Shmuel”) presents us with another triangle, this time with one man and two women. Shmuel has an older woman in town and a young mistress in the village. For both of them, he fulfills a sexual role: for his wife, he is the father of her twins, for the young mistress he is a lover. Out of these three stories, Jenya is the most relevant to the theme of homosocial desire. Jenya is Gnessin’s only attempt to write a text that also deals explicitly with contemporary social and political events in the Jewish sphere.12 The story follows a young male protagonist, David Fridin, who is entangled in a frustrated erotic affair with Jenya (Yevgenia Pavlovna), a mysterious young woman who arrives in his provincial town one day from Odessa—as we have seen, a center of Jewish political, cultural, and literary activity. Fridin’s desire for Jenya produces a frantic episode of Zionist activity in the small town and an equally stormy love affair.

Erotic Triangulations and Homosocial Desire

But Fridin’s affair with Jenya is overshadowed by the presence of his friend Lerner, a charismatic young leader, whose previous involvement with Jenya in Odessa is hinted at, but never fully grasped by the narrator until the very end of the story. The story concludes with the revelation of ­Jenya’s “illicit past,” causing not only the end of the love affair but also the painful separation of the two friends-cum-rivals and the collapse of the local branch of the Zionist movement that they have created. The story supplies its readers with a fascinating window into the political and social milieu of East European Jewish society in this period.13 It is possible to detect the influence of the Nietzschean (and ­Berdichevskian) Liebesspruch in the opposition between “eros” and “books,” and between the passionate Zionist activity of the “young” nationalists, and the political bureaucratic work of the “old” activists. However, Gnessin employs all these elements—that have become by 1904 quite conventional—with more than a pinch of irony. The story exhibits a gender economy that is quite familiar from Zion­ ist ideology, representing the idea of the national revival in terms of sexual awakening. But Jenya is not just an object of masculine desire and a highly ambivalent embodiment of the national trope; she is also a magnet that pulls together the relations between the two male protagonists. In this context the story is an interesting example of the “male friendship” and fraternity that George Mosse emphasized as central to nationalist culture, as well as an illustration of Sedgwick’s claim that structures of erotic triangulation are powerful sites of homosocial desire.14 Through the process of rivalry and identification, the two men desperately attempt to overcome and transform their “flawed masculinity.” Indeed throughout the story, the essential role of the woman, as embodied in the slippery character of Jenya, is to stimulate the virility and erotic desire of the two rival men. This is highlighted at the very beginning of the story with the opening sentence: “As soon as we entered the hall, my friend recoiled and retreated.”15 Since the story is told from the point of view of Fridin, the reason for the bodily gesture of his friend Lerner is unknown, both to him and to the readers, but it is clearly related to the appearance of Jenya, the mysterious “guest,” who was “draped in white clothing and was looking at the entrance.”16 This opening sets in motion the rivalry and desire through an impressionistic

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series of glances between Fridin, Lerner, and Jenya. Fridin notices in great detail (and using the same synecdochic and fetishistic mechanism of masculine desire) Jenya’s black curls, oval face, and the “freshness of her skin,” but more than anything else he notices her “large and moist eyes,” eyes which “seemed to promise something, that only the echo of its memory could bombard every chamber of the soul with her clamorous light and pulsing power, but along with this, as if with insistent caution, as if delivering some sort of message [...] she gazed the entire time directly at my friend’s face opposite her [...] and stretched across her lips was an evident, derisive laugh mixed with innocent curiosity.”17 The process of the stimulation of erotic desire in the subjectivity of the protagonist-narrator occurs while he looks at Jenya’s eyes and finds in them a “promise for something” that attracts him and alerts him simultaneously. This has to do with the fact that while Fridin is looking at her, Jenya is looking at his close friend Lerner with a meaningful gaze of curiosity mixed with scorn, a gaze that binds the three of them. As the story unfolds, Fridin becomes infatuated with Jenya, and she keeps giving him hints about the fact that she has known his friend Lerner (and other of their mutual friends) from the time she used to live in Odessa. Thus, the very development of desire is linked with the rivalry with his friend, and the rivalry creates even stronger homosocial bonds between both of them. The emergent story of the erotic relations between Fridin and Jenya is interspersed with the narrative of their “work” and their Zionist activity, and here it is clear that the feminine character and the desire for her is a locus for “intensification” of the masculinity of the two male protagonists. When the romance between Fridin and Jenya intensifies and becomes more and more physical, Fridin describes his feeling in these terms: “In my own soul, I felt a virility of ten Samsons, the might of the God of Gods himself and I was quite confident that it is enough to touch it with my small finger and it will be done. I shall speak and it shall be.”18 These sentences rely on a web of intertextual citations from traditional Jewish texts. The exaggerated virility of Samson (that eventually leads to his fall) and the evocation of the divine creation by the power of speech in Psalm 33:9 are juxtaposed with the concept of “work” and productivity. It seems that for Fridin and his erotic rival Lerner, work

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is an attempt to transfer their libidinal energy into a productive channel, an effort to become “real men.” Yet, when it comes to actual work they do very little, as the protagonist-narrator unwittingly comments: “Every labor was too small for me. I could not touch it because it was loathsome to me [...] Who could even notice such minor things? Work, work, give me tremendous work.”19 The obsession with and even fetishization of labor and work in the story can be seen as a metonym for the national project as a whole. The male characters compete with each other for the best performance of this “tremendous work.” But the libidinal energy of both their erotic desire and the national-Zionist “work” are portrayed as parallel to each other and equally phantasmic. This is because the two male characters are caught in an endless chain of imaginary substitutes, which inevitably brings to failure both the erotic love between Fridin and Jenya and the political activity: “Our motivation for work was in those days so immense, so vast, so amazingly vast and terrible that it almost swallowed both us and our lives [...] a feverish desire coursed through us, a blazing but blind desire to repair what we had disfigured—and we shot from one activity to another and one job to another without standing still for an instant.”20 Throughout the story, Fridin is seeking the company of his friend ­Lerner and yet, because of Jenya, his presence also becomes an irritation. The confrontation between the two rivals comes toward the end of the story. Lerner is having great difficulties telling Fridin that he used to be erotically and emotionally involved with Jenya. Instead, Lerner suggests, at least initially, that both of them will leave their small town (and the Zionist organ they have created) and move together elsewhere. But Fridin is too obsessed with Jenya to accept this offer of masculine companionship. Only then does Lerner confess his relations with Jenya. Since Fridin is consumed with passion and jealousy more or less from the first time he sees Jenya, this confession hardly comes as a surprise to Lerner. What unfolds then is an extraordinary scene of extreme envy mixed with even stronger passion. Lerner tries to warn his friend that Jenya is an adulterous, lustful femme fatale who cannot help but seduce every man she encounters. The passionate Fridin refuses to ­believe and he tells Lerner that all of his rage is simply because Lerner is still in

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love with Jenya. Then comes Jenya, and this is the first time since the opening scene that all three of them are together in one room. At this point the dramatic situation becomes slightly comic. The narrator is aware that he and his friend have become like chivalrous rivals fighting over a grand lady, who, in reality, is no more than a provincial girl. Despite the absurdity, Fridin’s passion is not diminished. In the midst of this scene, when Lerner tells both Fridin and Jenya that he is going to leave the town and move, he draws near his male friend: “So, farewell then, Fridin.” He finally rose from his chair and held out his hand. His voice shook. “Will you come by tomorrow?” “Perhaps [...] we’ll see each other again.” He apparently wanted to hint to me about his proposal. An oppressive feeling suddenly weighed on my heart. Was this the feeling of my future loneliness?21

This conversation (and the interpretation that Fridin gives it) underscores the strength of the homosocial bonds between the two men. The bonds exist and develop both in spite of and because of their mutual desire for Jenya, the third part of the erotic triangle and the feminine locus of the narrative’s libidinal energy. Similar erotic triangles and homosocial desire appear in one way or another in all four of Gnessin’s novellas, especially in the first two. In Ha-tzida (“Sideways,” 1905), Nahum Hagzar’s erotic desire is channeled through a complex process of rivalry and identification with his former friend Gavriel Carmel. Gnessin’s second novella Beynota’im (“In ­Between,” 1906) also presents us with an erotic triangle between two male protagonists, Naftali Berger and David Ratner, who are both involved with a young girl named Mina. An unusual erotic triangulation appears in one of the most sharply drawn articulations of masculine desire in Gnessin’s fiction, the story “In Gardens,” which was written and published in 1909 in Hebrew (­Ba-ganim) and in 1913 in Yiddish (Tsvishn Gertener).22 Ba-ganim recounts the story of Efraim, a young Jewish male protagonist, who goes on a journey in a rural landscape familiar to him from his youth, in order to seek some solace in nature. However, what he discovers “between the gardens” is something that shatters his view of sexuality, himself, and the world around him. Efraim meets a Jewish farmer named

Erotic Triangulations and Homosocial Desire

“Big Nose” (archi-hotem in Hebrew, archinoz in Yiddish) with whom he was familiar in his childhood and adolescence, but he discovers toward the end of the story that this Jewish “man of nature” is involved in incestuous sexual relations with Suli, his “imbecile daughter.” When Efraim witnesses the abject incestuous act, he finds himself sexually aroused, as if he is taking part in the act itself.23 This strange story of incestuous relations of crude “rural” people seems to be exceptional in Gnessin’s oeuvre—which usually deals with highly intelligent and overly sensitive protagonists. On the other hand, a close reading of the story reveals that it is actually a quintessential Gnessinian story in which the protagonist is engaged in an intense process of self-discovery. Like other of Gnessin’s texts, the story is rife with themes of visuality, gaze, and voyeurism; the shifting borderlines between nature and artifice, masculine and feminine; and the relations of these borderlines to sexual desire. With its variable perspectives and modes of narration, Ba-ganim also raises interesting questions about the relations among modernist poetics (especially the use of impressionist and figurative language), visuality, and the very act of narration.24 The enigmatic narrative begins with a complex description of nature that is supposed to be familiar and comforting, but becomes increasingly burdensome and even hostile for the weary traveler Efraim. The protagonist, who sways down the gentle river in his boat, suddenly awakes from a nap with a sense of strange apprehension. Unlike the rest of the story, the first paragraph is narrated not by Efraim himself but by a third-person narrator who portrays a tableau (tavla in Hebrew), a carefully crafted linguistic “picture.” It describes a luminous natural setting that suddenly becomes dark, thus prefiguring the change in the protagonist’s experience. When Efraim starts to tell his own story in the next paragraph, the reader discovers that this natural setting is actually a familiar place (“I had always loved the quiet, beautiful river of my birthplace, and had known it well”).25 Because of the intimate familiarity of Efraim with this environment, he is able to remember and discern every detail, in spite of the fact that many years have passed. In his state of agitation the familiar becomes not only strange but petrifying and oppressing. This is expressed mainly by the figurative, impressionistic language of the omniscient first-

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person narrator: “All around me I could hear the heavy breathing of the morning stillness in the field, the hush that with the burning heat of the day begins to oppress the flesh and overpower the senses.”26 Gradually, this oppressive sensation of something “strange” and yet vaguely familiar is associated with the discovery of the fact (and the memory that it later triggers) that the natural setting is not entirely natural; people actually live and work there. He suddenly remembers that a certain Jewish farmer (known by everybody as “Big Nose”) lives nearby, and works in the gardens of the nobleman (Poritz in the Yiddish version) of the village. Big Nose is a familiar character to Efraim from his adolescence, but he does not recognize him at first. When Efraim sees the man for the first time, he has a strange feeling that “this is a vaguely familiar character” who “came into view and intermittently emerged from and disappeared behind the foliage as he moved towards me.” The description of this person as he emerges is highly important: I could make him out as a hulking, sallow Jew, clad only in shiny kneebreeches, high boots and a spare grimy cap, beneath which shone a hard, narrow, bulging forehead. The man’s face was unusual: it was tanned by the sun, filthy with unwiped sweat, and slightly swollen from sleep; and each feature had its distinctive peculiarity. The lips were especially striking; forming a red, wet protuberance between his tawny mustache and beard.27

The erotic terms of this description are fairly clear: the obvious and exaggerated phallic masculinity of Big Nose and his “bulging” features are highlighted.28 But Efraim’s gaze is drawn to the fact that Big Nose’s face (especially his red and wet lips) resembles a huge female sexual organ. From Efraim’s perspective, Big Nose clearly has an “androgynous look,” to which he is strangely attracted but from which he is also repelled.29 As Adi Tzemach points out, this androgyny, or bisexuality, of Big Nose is a recurring theme throughout the story and is projected onto “nature” itself.30 In fact, Efraim himself draws the analogy between the half-naked Big Nose’s “gross and strange appearance” and the oppressive tremulous stillness of the field [...] breathing heavily and overpoweringly, and wafting to my nostrils the tainted effluvium that arose from the profusely flowering red poppies. Their stifling exhala-

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tion [...] was laden with the faint, disturbing provocation of fulfilled desire. My head whirled and I could see nothing before me except the moist, protruding blob of lips in the approaching face, lips that reddened brazenly in the brightening sun.31

This dense picture, laden with metaphoric, expressionist language, describes the strong and petrifying desire that both the strange man and the nature around him arouse in Efraim, as if against his own will. At this point, Efraim does not recognize the man, whom he actually knows well and even remembers. It is Big Nose who casts “a straight, piercing glance” in Efraim’s direction and this “stirs his [Efraim’s] blood.” Later, the play of gazes and the power relations change. Efraim stresses Big Nose’s crudeness and simplicity, but also the fact that he is a widower who lives without a woman. He remembers then that Big Nose has three sons who left for the city, and one daughter, the “imbecile” Suli (Sulye in Yiddish), who lives “in the gardens” with him. Efraim also remembers that Suli “resembled her father in her protruding facial features,” and her “close-cropped, scraggly black hair.” Most significantly, Efraim remembers that the house of Big Nose and his daughter used to be a locus of youthful eroticism for him and his friends (rendered in the text as getting “a drink of cold milk”).32 There, away from the more forbidding presence of the Jewish town, they engaged in a sexually suggestive conversation with the “man of nature” and some bawdy sexual gestures toward his “imbecile daughter” and her “exposed shoulders.” The response of the father to these provocations was always the same: he would take a whip and brandish it in front of her. All this important information is told as a way of memory of bygone days. Now, Efraim has a strong urge to go back to Big Nose’s house. What exactly he is looking for? The answer is almost explicit but not quite. Efraim is looking for relief, from the blazing heat and from his burning desire: “I took off my jacket again and in my nervousness at the suspense undid the buttons on my light shirt. Beneath it I could feel my flesh quivering.”33 Efraim suddenly hears (but can’t see) “an eerie, rasping voice,” a voice that resembles a man’s voice, but actually belongs to Suli: “the voice sounded repulsively petulant as it kissed each word it brought forth, Suski [...] Muski [...] Hi! Hi [...] where are you?”34

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Like her father, Suli has androgynous qualities. She is not only a “masculine woman” with a strong gender indeterminacy but an androgyne, and what Efraim hears is the voice of pure desire in its auto­ erotic form. This voice stands literally “in the middle,” between the two men, and it is quite clear that the structure of triangular desire is at work here. First Big Nose “shuddered and the blood rushed to his face.” Then Efraim is yearning for a glass of cold milk, for which he is ready to pay any price, as if he had lived all his life for the purpose of obtaining it. Big Nose is not so happy to supply Efraim the milk but finally he agrees (“temptation was obviously beginning to overcome him,” comments the narrator) and brings him into his cabin to supply him with the desired milk. Upon his entrance, Efraim immediately notices the absence of “the scraggly black head” (the metonymic representation of Suli), as well as the fact that the whip which used to be dangling at the doorstep was now hanging from a nail above the bed. Inside the cabin, what Efraim feels—together with a sense of revulsion toward the dirty house, the stillness, and the strange effluvium (familiar from the beginning of the story)—is an “utter heartconsuming loneliness.” At that point, Efraim feels that he has to get out of the cabin, and even the glass of cold milk that Big Nose finally brings him cannot help. The third and last part of the story brings it to some sense of closure. Instead of resting, Efraim, who is still extremely agitated and hot, goes up to a shady bush on the “top of the mountain,” a point from which the “entire plain” is visible to him like a “tableau.” Now Efraim is the ­voyeur; he is far enough from the plain and its people not to be seen, but in a position where he can clearly see everything. This situation enables the author to create a scene in which finally the three threads of the erotic triangle are present rather than absent. Efraim lies down in the midst of a nature that is in a state of “silent yearning [...] sprouting, budding, and flowering.” At first, he only hears some “peculiar groan.” Then he is able to gaze at “the seated figure of a rather tall, full-bodied woman” who wore nothing but a crude robe “that left most of body exposed.” The blazing sun, he continues, glided over her bare “ample shoulders.” Efraim derives erotic pleasure from the look first without knowing fully who he is seeing. Only when he notices the “black, scraggly head” does

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he recognize that this is none other than Suli, and he hears the same meaningless sounds of pure desire: “Suski [...] muski.” Just before Efraim makes out the figure of Big Nose, and recognizes him and his whip as the person who satisfies Suli’s passion, he comments: “I somehow felt that I was in very familiar surroundings where I had never been before, that I was looking at very commonplace things which, until that moment I had never seen.”35 He sees Big Nose’s thick-skinned neck begin to swell and notes his “harsh red fist and the knotted muscles in his dirt-streaked forehead”; his voyeuristic erotic excitement is at its peak, and his heart begins to pound violently. Like the sexual act that he is gazing at, what happens to him is not described directly but through metonym and synecdoche. His onanistic, autoerotic sexual relief is described through the act of clasping “a clump of grass in each hand” and pressing “the blades together” with all his strength. With the sexual relief everything comes to an abrupt ending and Efraim (and with him the readers) is able to hear and see the coarse figures of Big Nose and Suli shouting and cursing each other. This anticlimactic ending surely reminds Efraim that what he was gazing at was no more than a brutal, incestuous sexual act.36 But this brute realization does not reduce the voyeuristic and phantasmic heights of triangular desire that the entire story depicts. Efraim is clearly a voyeur who derives erotic pleasure from the very act of looking. Not unlike the characters in Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, and countless other Hebrew and European texts from the fin de siècle, the protagonist’s desire and libidinal energy is channeled through the urge to look. Freud stressed the fact that “visual impressions remain the most frequent pathway along which libidinal excitation is aroused.”37 Freud wrote about scopophilia, or the “desiring look,” a form of looking that gives sexual power and pleasure. Similarly, Lacan introduced the theoretical field of “the gaze,” which in itself has received a broad and complex treatment in psychoanalytic theory as well as in narrative theory. In Lacan’s scheme, the subject who looks is precisely the one who is being “seen.”38 The “gaze,” in this way, encompasses the voyeuristic wish not to be seen and the exhibitionistic wish not to be shown, and the relationship of these “perversions” points up rather directly the positionality of visual experience as

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a text.39 This link between voyeurism, textuality, and narrative, explored by Lacan, Kristeva, and others,40 is significant because Efraim is both the first-­person narrator of his own story and the voyeur who secretly gazes at the sexual act—which he describes only through metonyms and ­synecdoches. However, as readers we are actually invited to “see” his desire and his sexual anxieties, and become, at least partially, voyeurs who gaze at Efraim’s desire.41 Thus, in spite of dealing with taboos like incestuous relations, and with highly uncommon crude and rural characters like Big Nose, ­Ba-ganim is not only one of Gnessin best stories, it is also a text that deals with some of the most common modernist themes of male desire, sexuality, and identity. In this story, Efraim clearly goes on a journey of self-discovery. He turns “to the gardens,” namely to nature itself, in order to get some relief from his life in the city and to gain a different perspective on this life. By designing the story in such a way, Gnessin has managed to touch upon an important romantic (or neoromantic and naturalist) topos of the “return to nature,” and man’s perpetual attempt to be one with nature and with a “healthy” sexuality that is embedded in nature. This was still a very prevalent theme in Hebrew poetry and prose of the time (seen both in Zionist attempts to reconnect with the Land, and with the pantheistic tendencies of many writers) as well as in some early modernist European writers. In Ba-ganim, Efraim discovers—and because of the strange logic of the voyeuristic plot, Gnessin the author and we the readers are also implicated in this discovery—that nature can be as crude as the characters of Big Nose and his daughter. The complex dynamics of erotic triangulations and the homosocial/heterosexual desire, which are so typical in Gnessin’s more “refined” urban stories, are also present in the very “nature” to which the protagonist attempts to escape. Moreover, the journey of self-discovery takes Efraim to the muddled territory of memory, of childhood and adolescence (which in romantic thought and literature is connected, of course, with nature and its “purity”). But even in this realm, Efraim discovers that there is no purity, and memories of childhood are always and already “tainted” with conscious or unconscious sexuality. The theme of homosocial bonds which is so central in Ba-ganim is, thus, inextricably related to modernist nar-

Erotic Triangulations and Homosocial Desire

rative themes that connect voyeurism, visuality, and an intense scrutiny of the masculine Jewish self—themes that are at the heart of what Gnessin and many of his contemporary Hebrew-European writers explore.

Entangled Love and Masculine Homosociality Gershon Shofman, a contemporary and for some time a close friend of both Gnessin and Brenner, is another Hebrew modernist for whom erotic triangles are important. Already in his first collection (1902) there is the story Be-vaiyat zar (“In a Strange House”), about a handsome and strong young man, Reuven Pvesner, who brings his “emasculated” friend Shaul to his house in order to introduce him to his sister as a kind of sexual initiation. The emotional and physical relations between Shaul and Reuven are clearly described in homoerotic terms, yet the erotic gaze is focused on the young and beautiful sister of Reuven. Then there is also the story Glida (“Ice Cream,” 1909), in which two men are sitting in a Galician café and one of them tells the other a story about his falling in love with a young woman, Penka, who becomes the object of desire for two erotic rivals. However, the most extensive and compelling example of erotic triangulation and homosocial desire in Shofman’s writings is the story Ahava (“Love,” 1911), published in the journal Shalechet that Shofman was editing in Lvov.42 Ahava is considered to be one of Shofman’s best stories, and it has been praised by Brenner, Zalman Shneior, David Frish­man, and other Hebrew writers and critics.43 The story recounts the relations between two young men—Yosef Schmidt and Moshe Obskurov—who have been close friends since childhood.44 These two young men read and write passionate love poems and stories. Together they philosophize about love and dream about the same girl, Feigl Lifshitz—“a young blond woman with a thin neck and smiley eyes.”45 With their libidinal energy focused on this young woman, there is no mistake about the homosocial relations between them, which are clearly described in erotic terms: Dour Obskurov, with intelligent creases on his strong and energetic forehead, spoke of his fondness for the gentle, vulnerable Schmidt,

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who needed protection; and he, the latter, was also drawn to his friend, to his bleakness, to the dark element within him. While the spring and the hot, bright days of summer showed up the defects in Obskurov’s features, making him out to be almost ugly, he was handsome, quite handsome, in the dark nights of autumn. Then his decent, encouraging eyes glowed with a special attractive power, eliciting a desire to embrace him, to take shelter behind him, to cling to his garments. 46

The homosocial desire is figured by the narrator as a father–son relationship (in spite of the fact that they are both eighteen years old), but also as an erotic relationship between the “soft” Schmidt who is attracted to the “hard” Obskurov.47 Later, life circumstances force the two friends to separate, but their relations continue to unfold with the letters “full of caressing affection” that Obskurov sends to Schmidt. During the time they do not see each other, the two men are described as “wasting their heat” with “the love of corrupt, counterfeit groping, love arising out of boredom, out of inaction, out of fear of emptiness.”48 After a few years in which the two men only correspond with each other, there is a dramatic change in their relationship. Schmidt finds out that Obskurov fell in love with a woman named Yulia and the two are about to get married and then come to live in the city where Schmidt lives. When Schmidt meets Yulia for the first time, his impression is that she looks like Feigl, the girl with the blond hair and smiley eyes who was the object of desire for both of them when they were young. This already marks the repetition of desire in the relations between the two men. Seeing Yulia and remembering Feigl fuels the homosocial desire and the rivalry between the two men; this dynamic is revealed ironically when Yulia remarks: “You both kiss each other, and I will eat the grapes!”49 As the story progresses, the triangular desire and the erotic rivalry between the men becomes more and more obsessive. Schmidt accompanies his friend and Yulia everywhere, at first feeling “thankful that his friend of youth found this beauty, from which he [Schmidt] can now enjoy.” Schmidt helps the couple to find an apartment, and he immediately becomes a fixed presence there, especially on the Turkish sofa that Yulia buys.50 In one scene, Schmidt (and with him the narrator, who confines himself mostly to Schmidt’s point of view) lies on the couch

Erotic Triangulations and Homosocial Desire

and plays the voyeur, as if dissecting Yulia’s whole body with his eyes into fetishistic parts: His eyes burned and, as if of their own volition, tracked and stalked every move of Yulia’s who, as was her habit, lazily meandered from room to room in her braided sandals [...]. Afterwards, he looked at her with new curiosity, trying to imprint in his memory—no matter what!—the small blemish on the side of her nose, the depression of her jaw, her chin.51

At first, Yulia tries to be oblivious to Schmidt, but soon enough, she begins to succumb to his erotic gaze: With a stolen, cursory glance she sometimes touched Schmidt’s hair, and he, after comments and various movements while walking outside, began to feel like a marksman who had put his sights precisely under the bull’s-eye [...]. She looked at him then from behind her husband’s shoulder [...] as if he were not there at all, and a sharp, twisted unease prevailed [...] and the two friends for some reason began to abstain from remaining alone with one another. They looked at each other askance, fearing a collision.52

In this passage, Shofman brings the dynamics of gazing and masking—that accompany the triangulation of rivalry and desire, and that characterizes so much of modernist Hebrew fiction of the time—to one of its most sharply drawn manifestations.53 The narrator comments that from this moment on, the two men “were looking at each other like two people drowning in the sea and fighting over a stub of wood.”54 Obskurov starts to cry hysterically, and Schmidt is trying to comfort him, but together with his sympathy and love for his friend, he also feels that sadistic pleasure of victory over the woman. And indeed, at the next opportunity that Obskurov is absent from home, Schmidt approaches Yulia on the Turkish sofa, and the two engage in sexual activity. This act brings on another separation between the two friendscum-rivals; soon after, Obskurov and Yulia move to another city. At this point, Schmidt receives postcards not from his friend but from Yulia, and he turns these postcards into fetish objects. After five months, Schmidt is feeling extremely agitated and aroused (especially after seeing young gymnasium girls skating on the ice). He can-

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not ­control his desire, and he takes the first night train that goes to ­Obskurov and Yulia’s town. When he arrives he realizes that something has changed and Yulia is a “stranger” to him because she is now submitting her desire to her husband. He gazes at her body again, but notices the new sexual intimacy between the two: “Her figure now testified with awful certainty to the secret nighttime happiness with which she satiates Obskurov, and which Schmidt, even in his imagination, in surrender to that abysmal beauty, barely dared to take in hand.” Now, it becomes Obskurov’s turn to sadistically express the rivalry and desire between the two men, and he does so in an act of exhibitionist sex with Yulia in front of Schmidt, who doesn’t have much choice but to leave their town the same day. The story ends with a telegram from Obskurov to Schmidt announcing that Yulia has died while giving birth, and he asks him to come. Schmidt is now relieved from the rivalry for Yulia, and his gaze is focused solely on his friend Obskurov: With special pleasure his desultory gaze fell on the man, broad of shoulder and strong of brow, who now veered among the pallbearers and could not find his place [...] A thick silence spread through all his limbs, a tranquility that tickled the cords of his laughter, and Schmidt smiled, smiled, the way a tired man smiles as he luxuriates in a freshly-made bed as sleep begins to envelop him [...] Yulia is dead! [...] ­Obskurov broke out in hysterical weeping and fell on the melting snow. Come, don’t cry, come, don’t cry! Schmidt knelt over him, and suddenly, for the first time in his life, together with his first love, the love of his youth, with which he was filled toward his friend now, he also now understood him, comprehended his wild weeping, and wept.55

The woman—whether it is the imagined beloved Feigl or the wife Yulia—“belongs” ultimately to both men and erotic rivals. The strong “love” which is the title of the story—the first love and youthful love— is ultimately the one between the two male friends. The homosocial relationship between Yosef Schmidt and Moshe Obskurov—like the one between many other male characters in the fiction of Shofman, Gnessin, Brenner, Arieli, and Agnon—is the prevalent way to explore the slippery border between desire and identification, and to make the rivalry, friendship, and love between men intelligible.

Erotic Triangulations and Homosocial Desire

Figure 17. Yosef Chaim Brenner and Gershon Shofman, Lvov, 1908. (Source: The Pinhas Lavon Institute for Labor Movement Research, Tel-Aviv, Israel)

While it is both tempting and intriguing to connect the common theme of homosocial desire in these fictional texts with the actual intimate lives of the Hebrew modernist writers who created them, this is probably an issue that will remain unknown, and hidden “in the closet.”56 Rather than to try “outing” these writers, and speculate on their private lives and desires, the proliferation and structure of this theme in their work points to a paradox; as Sedgwick puts it, “intense male homosocial desire” is at once “the most compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds.”57

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According to Sedgwick and other scholars, exactly because of the “masculine crisis” of the fin de siècle, the homosocial continuum was severely disrupted, forcing men to identify themselves within a binary opposition of homosocial versus homosexual. This homosocial/­ homosexual binary made bonds between men suspect. At a time when social masculine bonds—bonds that were at the heart of traditional East European Jewish culture until the end of the nineteenth century—suddenly became inextricably linked to questions of sexuality and gender, the exploration of these bonds and their various erotic triangulations was also a way to negotiate unresolved issues of masculine identity and Jewish identity. Thus, the fetishization of erotic desire, and the fears of degeneration, castration, and homosexuality, are closely linked to the epoch’s crisis of masculinity and the intense engagement with the Jewish question.58 These issues were far from resolved in modernist literature written anywhere in Europe; they were surely not resolved in Hebrew modernist fiction either, despite certain Zionist attempts to create the New Hebrew Man out of the turmoil of the early twentieth century. But rather than seeking a definitive answer to their quest, we can instead recognize the prevalence of homosocial desire and erotic triangulation in modernist Hebrew fiction. Our explorations illuminate the attempts of these writers to confront the interrelated crises of Jewishness, subjectivity and masculinity, just as they explored in very revealing ways the complications of masculine desire itself.

Te n Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire He shut himself up in his room and sank entirely into his work. Between chapters, true, sometimes thoughts appeared of their own volition—an intrusion of intense desire that encircled his heart. —Yosef Chaim Brenner, Mi-saviv la-nekuda, 1904

Modernist Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century, as we have seen, is full of young Jewish male protagonists who are also writers. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is the autobiographical element that was essential to Hebrew literature of the haskalah, and the narrative of apostasy that continued to be an important factor in the writing of Fierberg, Berdichevsky, and the young Brenner. Many of the Hebrew (and Yiddish) authors of the early twentieth century continued to write about themselves and about their own experiences, even as the genre of autobiography (or fictional autobiography) became gradually less dominant.1 This autobiographical tendency does not mean that we can simply equate the writer-protagonist in the stories of Gnessin, Brenner, Shofman, and Agnon with the actual authors who wrote them. Critics such as Menakhem Brinker, Dan Miron, and Gershon Shaked offer a useful corrective to this tendency, revealing the complexity of the relations between the lives of authors and the radically different fictional characters and plots that they fashion using some of their experiences.2 Thus, the common appearance of the writer-protagonist in Hebrew fiction of this period should be understood as part of the modernist process of self-fashioning—the crucial journey of a young man becoming an artist and a writer. This theme was prevalent in romantic writings, and was developed in totally new ways in the works of the French and Russian symbolists, as well as in Rilke, Bely, Joyce, Gide, Proust, and Kafka. As John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury write, “the theme of the portrayed artist is a recurrent one in the modernist novel, and one of the means by which the aesthetic self-consciousness of the species develops through the great classics of modernism.”3

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Another reason for the prominence of writer-protagonists, one which intersected with the modernist preoccupation with literary selfconsciousness and the crisis of representation, is a utopian vision of the very act of writing and creating literature. The exaltation of literature by so many Jewish writers and intellectuals at the fin de siècle was surely an important part of emergent Jewish national ideologies. These ideas resonated in particular for the Hebrew and Yiddish writers (and readers) who had broken with tradition, and who looked to aesthetic culture as a new source of Jewish identity. These writers and readers were influenced no less, we should note, by the conceptions of literature prevalent in Russian and Polish culture, as well as in other minority cultures in Europe where literature was accorded a quasi-religious status.4 The prominence of the theme of writing and the presence of so many male writer-protagonists made the complex tensions between writing and erotic desire (especially masculine desire) a major preoccupation in Hebrew fiction of this period. In novels such as Brenner’s Mi-saviv ­la-nekuda and stories like Agnon’s well-known Agunot, these tensions are explicitly linked with an anxiety about the viability of creating Hebrew writings and Jewish art as part of a new national Jewish culture. In other modernist texts, like Gnessin’s Ha-tzida and Etzel and Agnon’s Tishrei/Givat ha-chol, these questions are implicit but still present. Throughout, it is quite clear that the question of literary creation in Hebrew literature—the very act of writing, and its success or failure—is loaded both with modernist conceptions of writing as a sublimation of desire and national conceptions of literary and aesthetic culture. Not surprisingly, dominant in these works are the complex and fertile tensions between notions of “decadence” and a utopian “renaissance” that characterizes so much of the literature of this period.5 Another fascinating element, common to many texts that explore the relations between erotic desire and writing, is the protagonist’s experience of childhood and adolescence before he became a writer. As we shall see, in contrast to the fictional autobiographical genre and its confessional impetus (Brenner’s Ba-choref is a good example), where the story of childhood and the family drama are essential elements, in the stories I examine here, the writer-protagonists appear as solitary men, with their families largely absent and the stories of their childhood un-

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

told. And yet, childhood and the absent parent figures often appear as “black holes.” They may be hardly mentioned at all, and yet they assert their presence in the narrative through dreams, involuntary utterances, or as something that the omniscient narrator inserts into the narrative— as if against the protagonist’s will. Thus, the connections between writing, masculine desire, sublimation, and the Oedipal drama that Freud and others explored in the early twentieth century are especially relevant to understanding the dynamics of the following stories.

Sexual Desire and Literary (In)activity in Gnessin’s Ha-tzida One of the earliest and most interesting fictional texts that explore the links between sexual desire and writing is Gnessin’s first novella Ha-tzida (“Sideways,” 1905).6 From the time of the novella’s original publication by David Frishman, it has created great controversy. While many critics and readers have been at a loss to comprehend what Gnessin is trying to do in this text, others consider Ha-tzida to be Gnessin’s first major breakthrough, an assessment that has been strengthened over the years.7 The novella recounts the story of Nahum Hagzar, who moves from the city of Vilna (where he lived for a period of about three years) to a small provincial town. Because of the novella’s unique narrative voice and structure, it seems at first glance that “nothing happens,” despite the relatively long duration of the narrative time (which includes some significant flashbacks). The omniscient narrator seems to be engaging in stylized, impressionistic descriptions of natural and domestic environments, as well as offering some insights into the troubled psychic experience of the main protagonist. Stylistically, the striking innovation of this novella indeed lies in its impressionist and symbolist modes of narration, and its unprecedented employment of what Dorrit Cohn calls “psycho-narration” (the reporting of the character’s thoughts and feelings in the language of the narrator), and “narrated monologue” (the representation of the inner speech of the character).8 But this does not mean that the novella has no plot; it is just radically different from the realistic narrative of most European

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Figure 18. A postcard of Uri Nissan Gnessin. (Courtesy of the Gnazim Institute, Tel Aviv)

and Hebrew fiction. As Dan Miron and Ada Tzemach make clear, there are actually two interrelated storylines in the novella. One has to do with Hagzar’s attempts and struggles to write and become a writer, and the other is focused on Hagzar’s troubled masculinity and his erotic desire.9 Neither of these plots is presented in a linear fashion, but we can reconstruct them both through a close reading.10 At various junctures within the narrative, we learn that Hagzar is engaged in literary activity. Close to the beginning of the story, just after he moves to the small town, we are told that “he hurried home to await the new job and the challenging life that would begin the next

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

day, here in this provincial town to which he had chosen to move from Vilna.” Soon after, the narrator elaborates, and tells us that Hagzar “has come to the provinces hoping to find the leisure to carry out his many literary projects.” We discover that while in Vilna, Hagzar produced some literary works and that a certain Hebrew journal published “a long article of his on Hebrew belletristic literature of the nineteenth century replete with copious citations.”11 In fact, Hagzar is in the midst of writing a second article on contemporary Hebrew literature, which he expects to publish. In addition, he is planning to establish a “literary society” in the small town where he lives, and he has aspirations to move to a large city abroad—an aspiration shared by many hopeful writers of his generation.12 Parallel to the storyline of Hagzar’s writing, we are introduced to the erotic plot. Here we learn of Hagzar’s erotic entanglements with several female characters, mainly the three sisters, Rosa, Mania, and Ida. ­Hagzar is attracted to the “pleasant house at the edge of the quiet street,”13 where the three sisters live, which is marked metonymically as a “feminine space,” full of caressing and softness that both arouses the erotic desire of the male protagonist and soothes him. In fact, the “pleasant house” is described in the novella as if it was some kind of harem. It is constantly warm inside, and has “soft carpeting and soft beds and the sofas that are draped with red velvet.” The house is full of drawing rooms with “half-ajar doors” that open to the bedroom, where the sisters would be lying down. When Hagzar comes to the house, the three sisters, who are constantly aroused and arousing, envelop the young man with the “warmth of their fresh body.”14 The first sentence of the novella underscores the strong and uncontrollable attraction of Hagzar to the “pleasant house.” He first came to the house “for some insignificant reason that he sometimes remembered and then immediately forgot.” But this “insignificant reason” (siba tefela), we soon learn, is actually very significant—it is his erotic desire, which is not yet channeled to one specific subject but to the “feminine house” and the three sisters who live in it. Although at some points it seems that he is attracted mainly to Rosa, the older sister who is more or less his age, his desire still wavers between the three girls and he is equally attracted to Mania and Ida.

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Thus, it is no wonder that Hagzar keeps coming back to the house; he does so before, during, and after the moments in which he attempts to write. But in a crucial twist, Hagzar is comfortable in this caressing, all-embracing erotic environment as long as he can be passive and does not need to act upon his desire.15 Within the framework of the narrative, the passivity of Hagzar together with his “vegetarianism,” his timidity, and his lack of confidence positions him as a “feminized” or emasculated male figure. Moreover, the focus here is not on masculine erotic fulfillment but on the dynamics of desire itself; a desire that in Hagzar’s case is fetishistic and voyeuristic, imbued with narcissism and autoeroticism. Not surprisingly, Hagzar’s desire is also homosocial, aroused by the jealousy of and identification with a male erotic rival. The “gender troubles” of Hagzar begin to arise when he is faced with “active” feminine desire or with the masculine desire of his rival. This happens more than once in the novella, and the initiative is almost never that of Hagzar. For example, on one of his visits to the house he meets with Rosa and thinks fondly of her. But then Rosa clearly begins to show interest in him: Afterwards, Rosa always talked a lot about whatever was on her mind— herself, Mania, Ida, her father—and she spoke with feverish intensity, peppering her words with a soft, enigmatic laugh, mixed with a bit of mystery, gazing on her interlocutor with confident affection. Hagzar would get up then and tuck his hands behind the tails of his frock coat, pacing step after step over the soft carpets, taking pleasure in every squeak of his shoes sinking into the fabric, and diverting his mind.16

Hagzar is faced here with the feminine desire of Rosa, which is manifested not only in her passionate “feverish speech” and her “confident affection” but mainly in her “enigmatic laugh,” which is almost always a signifier of feminine desire in Gnessin’s fiction.17 In response, Hagzar turns to himself and to his own body. He derives pleasure—described in the passage in unmistakably autoerotic terms—from withdrawing into his own body and to tactile rubbing against the soft carpets and pillows. This narcissistic, autoerotic pleasure causes him to turn his mind away from Rosa, and from the active libidinal energy of the woman. This is in fact a pattern that repeats itself throughout the novella. Hagzar always derives pleasure from sinking into “soft sofas” and “red

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

velvet” (which he can find both in the “pleasant house” and in his own “modest room”), and in general into any soft pliable surface. In autumn, he seems to enjoy sinking into the softness of the “falling leaves”; later in the narrative he is “sinking his feet pleasurably in the oily lakes that emit a glorious vitality, ingesting the suppleness of the earth, warming and longing, and becoming one with the mist rising from the rich, decomposing, pungent manure.”18 How should we understand this autoerotic pleasure of Hagzar? In Freudian theories of sexuality, autoeroticism is known as a “stage.” In “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905), Freud presents a narrative of libidinal development in which autoeroticism is an initial infantile stage. Freud characterizes infantile sexuality as autoerotic, narcissistic, and “objectless,” since it pertains only to the realm of the subject.19 However, this understanding of autoerotic narcissism as a “stage” (both in adult and infantile sexualities) becomes much more complicated in Freud’s later writing, where the idea of “neurosis” and “normalcy” or sublimation of desire does not negate the autoerotic. This notion of the autoerotic realm as a productive part of sexuality that is especially linked to fantasy and the creative process is explored in other constructions of sexuality beyond the Freudian scheme.20 Thus, it is conceivable that Hagzar’s autoerotic pleasure, which is bound up with his narcissism and fantasy, is in fact an important part of the peculiar process of his erotic development as well as his path for becoming a writer. Against the autoerotic, narcissistic, and voyeuristic desire of Hagzar, Ha-tzida presents a sequence of scenes in which the male protagonist “fails” in his erotic conduct while he is faced with a feminine subject. The climax of this sequence comes as Hagzar and Rosa are taking a walk in the park. He is gazing at her body and notices her bright face, “pretty and flushed, and the sound of her laughter rang playfully through the park, and the white straps of her crossed dress behind her shoulders.”21 The eroticism is evident and Hagzar even tries, in a rare forceful moment, to act upon this desire. But then he is faced with Rosa’s “strange laugh”—the metonymic laugh of her feminine desire—and he becomes terrified and immediately freezes. She reads this freezing as a “failure” and not only withdraws from him but also teases him with a strange

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venom, “reminding him with fleeting hints of things that are best left hidden; things that he prefers not to think about.”22 One of those things Hagzar would prefer to “leave hidden” is surely the rivalry between him and the other, “strong” men who appear in the novella. We encounter the strong and coarse burlak (a Russian word used to describe a bandit) who constantly ridicules Hagzar, especially his nervousness and his vegetarianism, and even challenges him to a fight (which Hagzar of course refuses). There are a few other minor male figures in the novella and each of them stands as a kind of virile alternative to the emasculated Hagzar. The main male figure is Hagzar’s friend, Gavriel Carmel, whom Hagzar knows from the time they lived together in the city of Vilna. The relationship between Hagzar and Carmel appears in a few important places of the narrative. At the beginning, shortly after Hagzar arrives in the town, he finds out that he and Rosa have “a mutual [...] well not exactly a friend, but an acquaintance: Gavriel Carmel.” Hagzar finds out from Rosa that Carmel used to visit the “pleasant house” very often (just like Hagzar is about to do), and he even was a private tutor of the youngest sister, Ida. At one of the first meetings between Hagzar and Rosa, they spend time together looking at a photo album: By the misty glow of the shade-spreading lamp the two of them studied the brave, youthfully chaste face [of Carmel’s] that looked up at them from a page of the handsome album. Hagzar’s own face, which had worn a slight smile before Rosa opened the album, was now full of excitement concentrating on the two large, innocently self-assured eyes [...] how distant this face seemed to him—yet how it drained the blood from his own. The trace of laughing mockery upon it [...] haunted him, like the forgotten end of a dream. 23

This is a good illustration of the drama of simultaneous rivalry and bonding between the two male figures. It seems that the picture of his friend-rival haunts Hagzar until the story’s end, when Carmel actually appears in the pleasant house. Ha-tzida’s primary themes—of Hagzar’s erotic desire, of his inability to “act” upon this desire, and of his masculine rivalry—parallels the plot of Hagzar’s ability or inability to write. This becomes evident through a number of sharply drawn narrative images in which Hagzar sits at

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

his desk. At some point, when Hagzar is content with the autoerotic and voyeuristic pleasure he derives from visiting the erotically charged “pleasant house,” he begins to write, and the pleasure is apparent: The round, curlicued, carefully formed letters raced handsomely across the page. His face grew intense and excited. His breath came and went irregularly, and his movements were nervous and quick. With dizzying speed he filled lines and whole pages [...] Only when he had marked the final period with a large, black ink stain and had drawn a black line beneath the last sentence did he throw down his pen on the table with a sigh of relief.24

Indeed, the tactile pleasure Hagzar derives from a successful writing session is described in very similar terms to the erotic pleasure he derives from visiting the sisters and their soft beds and pillows. However, when he is presented with an active feminine desire (or with a male erotic rival) and he is unable to respond to it, his writing similarly takes a turn for the worse. Thus, immediately after Rosa and Hagzar’s erotic discontent in the park, he takes out his notebooks and stares at them. He tries to write but “when the spindly, crooked, rat-tailed letters ran from his pen at last, their sickliness so filled him with loathing that he broke off in the middle.”25 There are many other images and metonyms in this novella in which erotic desire, with its pleasures and discontents, parallels the complex dynamics of writing. Indeed, writing and erotic desire are inextricably linked throughout the novella, but the exact link between them is never fully clarified. It is significant that alongside all we learn about Hagzar and his inner world, there are a number of important things that are left unsaid and unexplored. Most significant is the lacuna about Hagzar’s life before he came to the small town. Apart from the fact that he used to work in Vilna, we find out only a few details about Hagzar’s traditional Jewish family in a conversation he has with R. Simcha, the father of the three sisters. Thus, we learn that Hagzar was born and raised in the house of his father, Leyvik, on “the street of the goats” in Mogilev, and that he has an “important uncle” whose name is Rabbi Shmuelke. There is not a word in the novella about Hagzar’s mother, or about the relations between Hagzar and his father. It is possible that the omission of these details is due to the fact that Hagzar himself is totally cut

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off from his family, or perhaps this is because Hagzar does not allow himself to think about the family he has left behind. One way or another, the novella creates expectations that Hagzar’s total separation from his family (and the possibility that his mother died when he was young, just like the mother of the three sisters), will become significant in understanding his sexual and creative dilemmas. But at the same time, the opacity with which these details are presented blocks the reader (and perhaps the protagonist as well) from making any clear psychological connections. Ha-tzida can be read as a story about a crisis in writing and a crisis of masculine erotic desire. Dan Miron’s interpretation of the story suggests that Hagzar’s attraction to the “pleasant house” and the three young women is like a trap into which he falls, and from which he is unable to escape. Miron further claims that Ha-tzida is a chronicle of Hagzar’s slow process of “moral degeneration,” both as a person and as an aspiring writer.26 There is no doubt that these elements exist within the novella. However, when we read the novella as part of a larger preoccupation with interconnections between desire and writing—in Hebrew and in European literatures of the early twentieth century—it becomes evident that this is not just a story of morality, but a story about the complex incubation of both erotic desire and the writing process. This incubation is presented dramatically at the narrative’s end, with two events that happen more or less simultaneously and trigger Hagzar’s memory and a moment of crisis. Not surprisingly, one is related to the erotic storyline and the other to the plot of writing, which, as we have seen, are inextricably linked. On the erotic side, his male friend and erotic rival Gavriel Carmel becomes a much more intensive presence in the “pleasant house.” Carmel is now firmly situated among the three sisters, his phallic presence so palpable that he even carries “a thick cigar” in his mouth. The other event occurs when Hagzar suddenly notices a large advertisement in the newspaper. The ad is published by “some doctor in Vilna” who is probably (it is never explicit in the text) looking for a young and intelligent Jewish man to help him or to teach his children. Initially, Hagzar does not pay much attention to this ad. But then he realizes the three sisters are attracted to Carmel.

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

When even Rosa, who had become his primary object of desire, “went off just like that [...] when she saw Carmel,” then Hagzar suddenly felt a horrible throb in his heart and a spurt of blistering blood flushed his face and blinded him. What was he doing here? A moment passed and Carmel’s confident laughter cut through his heart [...] Afterwards the Vilna doctor’s advertisement again flashed through his brain and disappeared. And suddenly the splendid life of Vilna appeared before him, and he remembered its many seminaries, and the Strashon Library, and his work in the reading room, and the book Knesset Yisra’el with its beautiful picture of Peretz Smolenskin, and the nights of colossal labor in his quiet room there, and his friends who dreamed the same dreams he did, and the pressure on his heart increased to the point of suffocation, and his eyes rose for a moment, and his ears began to ring.27

It is crucial to note that what Hagzar “remembers” here is as phantas­mic as his desire and the erotic rivalry. He conjures idyllic images of Vilna, which was a center of the nineteenth-century haskalah, and mixes it with the image of Perez Smolenskin (1840–1885). ­Smolenskin—who actually lived most of his short adult life in Odessa—was the writer who, in spite of his early death, created many volumes of belletristic and publicistic literature, and thus his figure could become a metonymic icon of personal and national writing and “productivity.”28 But this mental picture of Vilna and of Smolenskin is not the end of the novella. In fact, the closing sentences of Ha-tzida pose rather forcefully the question of what happens (or what is going to happen) after Hagzar’s phantasmatic “memory” and crisis. His feet stumbled toward the door. And when he went outside, a clear wind blew through him, his eyes lit up a bit, his temples throbbed, and his heart pounded, and he walked past the end of the street, leaving the city, and walked unhurriedly, his eyes staring with equanimity at the long, long railroad track that stretched flatly out before him, desolate and faint in the heat of the day.29

We can read this closing scene either as the final moment of failure and a concurrent realization of this failure, or alternatively as a crucial junction in the making of a young artist. Although Hagzar might continue

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his journey, this is a writer who does not have any more illusions that “moving to a new place” is going to change him.30 His future life seems to him as desolate as the heat of the day and the endless railroad tracks that might lead him away from this town. And yet, Hagzar is a young man whose life experience makes him a writer. The acts of creation and writing do not necessarily involve a clear-cut sublimation or resolution of the desire. Writing (or the potential of writing and creativity) can also be born out of the depths of the unconscious and unruly desire. As we shall see, this vision of sexual desire as a kind of “incubator” for writing and creative expression reveals a great deal about modernist concepts of writing and sexual desire and the anxieties and hopes of modernist Hebrew literature in general.

Moving Around the Point Like Hagzar, Ya‘acov Abramson, the main protagonist of Brenner’s short novel Mi-saviv la-nekuda (“Around the Point,” 1904), is a young writer who travels to a different place in order to write. In his case, the journey is not from the city to the small town but the opposite, from the small town where he has been teaching for a while into the large city—the city of A., which as we have seen is the fictional representation of Homel, a small but important enclave of modern Jewish culture and Hebrew modernism between 1900–1905.31 Like Hagzar, Abramson does not write poetry or fiction but mainly essays and works of criticism, and like him he works as a tutor and a librarian and aspires to establish a “literary group” where he would lead Hebrew writers. Throughout the novel, the narrator describes Abramson as “a man of the new wave” in Hebrew literature, a “pioneering” avant-garde Hebrew writer who serves as “a priest in the holy temple of literature.”32 Abramson publishes in a new Hebrew journal an essay he has written on “the influence of Hasidism on Hebrew literature,” which is described by one of the characters as “an article that is nothing but poetry.” He is at work on a large essay dealing with “Hebrew literature at the beginning of the twentieth century,” which he eventually writes but never publishes. Indeed, Abramson comes to the

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

city of A. explicitly in order to write and “to work” in this hotbed of new Jewish culture. But things do not go as smoothly as Abramson expects. In fact, together with some progress with his writing, during the time Abramson spends in A. he goes through a process of physical and mental breakdown. A significant aspect of Abramson’s life in Homel and his ability (or inability) to write and do work of any kind is his erotic entanglements. The links between Abramson’s writing and his erotic desire are dense and complex but they are almost never explored in a straightforward way, either by the protagonist or by the omniscient narrator. A good example of the ways in which the narrator simultaneously reveals and conceals the links between writing and sexual desire comes in the fourth chapter of the novel. Shortly after Abramson settles in A., he meets his friend Uriel David­ ovsky and tells him about his “literary work.” He gives him details about the first essay he has published and about his plans to continue writing and publishing. Since Abramson admires Uriel, his male friend whose Nietzschean-like presence is quite intimidating, he talks about his writing anxiously, anticipating Uriel’s questions and responses. At one point, the narrator comments that “Abramson added a small ‘ha’ and, despite himself, his face went slightly red, the same shade of red that colors the face of a young man when he speaks of his first love.”33 This seemingly minor comment, which is “casually” communicated to the readers by the narrator, touches upon something central in the narrative. As Dov Sadan has taught us in his pioneering essay on the “unconscious” in Brenner’s writing (1933), the fact that Abramson’s little nervous laugh and his blush of embarrassment is done unconsciously (bli mesim) is surely significant because it tells us something that is beyond Abramson’s self-perception and excessive rationalization.34 No less important is the explicit link the narrator makes between writing and first love. Writing and erotic love—the creative process and the libidinal energy of sexual desire—are linked and parallel each other in the novel primarily because in both there is a strong element of exposure and self-revelation, which the protagonist Abramson yearns for and yet is highly anxious about. As the conversation between the two male friends continues, it becomes clear that the link between erotic desire

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and writing in Abramson’s life actually revolves around a specific object of desire—the young Hava ­Blumin, who is known to everybody by her Russian name Yeva Isaakovna. After Abramson attempts to give some information about the content of his new essay, Davidovsky stops him mid-sentence and says: “Yeva Isaakovna always asks me ... strange. She doesn’t see me often, but every time we meet, she asks me about you and about your literary work.” “Yeva Isaakov ...”—The last syllable, “na,” got stuck in Abramson’s throat. Uriel went on smoking his cigarette; his narrow lips did not open and did not stop grimacing in his effort to hold back his ­laughter:—Blumin had such big grievances against him. Really. Big, impervious grievances each time they met: Why does Abramson write in Hebrew? Abramson rose up and stood by the stove. “She’s a fine girl. Isn’t she, Uriel? All that’s fine in the fair sex: feminine gentleness, refined friendship, delicate sensibilities.”35

This dialogue, with all its tensions, stuttering, and points of embarrassment and silence between the two young men, goes even further to uncover how closely related are the links between Abramson’s writing and his erotic desire for Hava Blumin/Yeva Isaakovna. While Uriel speaks to his friend about Blumin’s difficulty in understanding why he writes in Hebrew (and not Russian, since Yeva is highly acculturated into Russian culture and is involved in revolutionary socialist activity), Abramson cannot help but think about the young woman who infatuates him and who seems to him to be the “essence of everything that is good and beautiful in the other sex.” Indeed, from the very beginning of the novel, when Abramson still makes his way to A. on the train, he is thinking with excitement about the fact that the city is not only a great center of Jewish culture, but also the place where he is going to see Hava. Her presence there is the major reason for his desire to go there. Abramson’s contemplations about his relationship with Hava before he arrives in A. are important for understanding what happens later in the novel: His reflections about her were sensitive and shy. She was distant yet close, she could complete his life, perfect and uplift it, were it not for one point that stood between them; that, at first, he was simply dumbfounded

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

by her mortal beauty, but afterwards, little by little, during that same short period, when they became very close through that immense shared work, and her curls would sometimes inadvertently brush his cheeks, he began to recoil, lest any movement he might make would reveal that new aspect that had intermingled with his feelings and his attitude towards her ... Abramson was ashamed of that aspect; sometimes he would pray silently that he reveal himself to her, and at the same time he was terrified, terrified ... he always tried to temper that side of him, to attenuate it, but did he have to do that if he could not purge it from his heart? And when he reached the conclusion that she knew, only one question arose within him: Was there any chance that the point will be removed, the oppositions will be united and the temple will become one?36

In this passage of narrated monologue (typical of the way in which the narrator focuses on Abramson’s inner world), we see the pattern of relations between Abramson and Hava, the complexity of his attitude toward her and toward love and sexual desire in general. As far as his emotions toward Hava are platonic and “spiritual,” all seems to be well. But then there is also what Abramson calls “the point” (ha-nekuda), which is in the title of the novel and later becomes the central metaphor of the narrative. This “point” which “stands between” him and Hava is (at least in this passage) the fact that Abramson is sexually attracted to her. When there is even a slight and unintentional physical contact between them—when “her curls would sometimes inadvertently brush his cheeks”—he does not know what to do. He is anxious that this “new side” of him, namely his sexual attraction, will be revealed to her. Paradoxically, Abramson feels that his sexual desire, which he simultaneously wants to communicate to Hava and hide from her, and which he constantly tries to diminish but “cannot remove from his heart,” is what stands between him and Hava. He hopes that one day “the point will be removed, the oppositions will be united and the temple will become one.” Abramson’s perception of sexual desire and erotic love causes him to think and act in a severe split, marked by a duality between a “sublime” and spiritual concept of erotic love on the one hand, and a physical, “low” perception of sexual desire. Both of these sides are connected with Hava Blumin. On the one hand, “Hava Blumin captured his soul, which yearned utterly for her beauty and purity,” and on the other hand,

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there was his “feverish body, the body of a bachelor more than twenty years old who had never had a woman.” On the one hand, there was “his absolute celibacy [...] which undermined him and led his brain to bitter and shameful thoughts of fornication [...]” And on the other hand, “his heart remained innocent and whole and seeking pure love. Love was, in his eyes, a very important part of life, a part without which life could not be conceived. It was all complicated and simple at the same time.”37 This separation between what Abramson calls “pure love” and the “prostitution of the mind” points both to his strong and irrepressible desire and to his “shame” and inability to act upon this desire. 38 When Abramson tries to explain to himself the reasons for his inability to act upon his sexual desire, he sometimes resorts to the same explanations and rationalizations common in Berdichevsky’s stories and in ­Ba-choref: Like Michael and Yirmiah, Abramson is also a former yeshiva student who reads too many books and cannot act; he writes Hebrew and has national “Zionist” tendencies which the Russian and socialist Yeva Isaakovna cannot understand. Although these are real dilemmas in Abramson’s life, when it comes to explaining Abramson’s desire, these sociological and ideological explanations are exposed as mere rationalizations. But Abramson’s psychic world is communicated to the readers of the novel not just in his speech and thoughts but also in junctures that are beyond his rational faculties. These junctures are particularly revealing narrative moments, which take the form of conversations, dreams, and hallucinations (like when he thinks about his father and his dead mother), or even confrontations—like when he is confronted with Gregory Petrov, the Russian student whom the protagonist perceives as his erotic rival. When Petrov is around Abramson, he thinks to himself that he is “a tired old man” with a “broken spirit.” Furthermore, he understands his own physicality as “damaged” and “incurable”: “My mouth gave off a bad odor [...] I had never kissed a woman in my life [...] and I had never gone dancing in my life.”39 As we know, these are familiar aspects of masculine desire and its discontents in Hebrew fiction of this period. What sets Abramson apart from other male protagonists is the fact that throughout the novel, the protagonist poses a utopian-religious conception of erotic love that

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is highly reminiscent of Vladimir Solovyov’s poetic and philosophical writings, especially in his important essay The Meaning of Love (1892– 1894). In this work, as we have seen, Solovyov proposed a program of fusing religion and love, where procreation was rejected and “androgyny” reclaimed. Solovyov’s endeavor was to recover the union of the spirit and the flesh in love and to claim that “the meaning of love” lies in a synthesis of opposites, the feminine and the masculine, the spiritual and the material. This theory of love, premised on unconsummated erotic desire and an anti-procreative basis, broached the idea that the androgynous God-man who conflates the spirit and the flesh, male and female, could be recreated only by mankind as a whole, and not by individuals.40 Following both Christian and kabbalistic traditions (some of which he studied in the original Hebrew), Solovyov maintained that physical love can affect a positive influence on the divine system of spheres; that human copulation reflects and operates as a divine ­syzygy (unity or copulation of mythological opposites).41 Solovyov’s ideas about love and sexual desire exerted a strong influence not only on all the leading Russian symbolists (especially Alexander Blok) but also on Jewish writers and intellectuals in Russia, writers such as Ahad Ha‘am, Dubnov, Zeitlin, Bialik, and probably also Brenner, who was familiar with his writing.42 What is extremely important is that in Brenner’s novel, just like in the writing of Solovyov and other thinkers and writers in this period, the utopian and religious conception of erotic love and desire (as well as the idealization of the feminine object of desire) is coupled with a fetishization of erotic desire, and with a fear of degeneration, castration, and homosexuality that is closely linked to the epoch’s crisis of masculinity.43 Indeed, the “decadent” fetishistic and voyeuristic aspects of Abramson’s erotic desire come together with his religious and utopian theories about erotic love, the exaltation of the feminine object of desire, and his own anxiety about his masculinity. This can be seen most clearly in scenes in which Abramson is not discussing with Hava his writing or ideological issues, but simply looking at her: Hava [Yeva] Isaakovna returned from a day of work and lay down to rest in her clothes on the bed in her room. She felt slightly ill. Abramson sat next to her [...] He was in an unusual mood—Blumin’s faintness

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proved to him how much he cherished this person, and that proof was infinitely pleasant for him. He gave her a brief glance of friendship and freedom, and he found the profile that made him most fond of her sight­—the animated lips, the quiver of her tanned, clear cheeks, the paleness of her pretty forehead, and the sparkle of her blue eyes­—this profile was most evident at this moment and made him feel closer to her. All his effort and anger seemed to be suddenly whisked away. It was beyond his control and his thoughts revolved around one strange axis: “Her forehead is pale, but not white, but not white [...] and her hair—her hair.” 44

Abramson’s desire is aroused when Hava is lying down in her room and he is free to gaze at her body. Looking at her seems first to “prove” his exaltation and his platonic love (or “friendship”). But soon after his gaze is focused on dismembered parts of her body: the line of her lips, her white cheeks, her blue eyes and pale and pretty forehead, and her hair. He finds himself surprised with the “strangeness” and power of his own fetishistic desire, but takes pleasure in the fact that this gaze makes him forget everything else. Abramson’s fetishistic and voyeuristic desire focuses at times on parts of Hava’s body and at other times at objects of her dress. In a highly important scene in the novel, just before Abramson goes to the bridge and attempts to commit suicide, he sits in the Hebrew library where he works. His gaze is wandering to and fro until he dreamily focuses on a spot on a cloud that quickly metamorphoses into metonymic objects—Hava Blumin’s hairclip and dress: “He stared at a single spot at the edge of the translucent cloud at the sky’s apex, and within him the spots metamorphosed into the long points of the colorful hairclips in the hair of the girl who said to him that ‘It’s hard, hard’ for her—metamorphosed into the small round buttons on her dress which danced playfully inside him.”45 Abramson’s complex relationship with his own sexual desire (expressed densely through the metaphor of “the point”) is almost always parallel to his other passion—the desire to write and to become “a true writer.” How this masculine desire is related to Abramson’s ability or inability to create is a question that the narrative forcefully raises, but never fully resolves. The few moments of physical contact between Abramson and Hava, significantly, are mixed with disagreements be-

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tween them about Abramson’s writing and work. During one such juncture, Hava touches Abramson with her “small palm” and tries to tell him that in a time when “Russia is awakening to new life” he should write in Russian and “connect with the people” instead of writing Hebrew which no one can understand. Abramson is so focused on the argument that “he did not feel even the touch of the little hand.” Soon after, Abramson is reflecting upon his literary work and, in a familiar chain of thought, he concludes that what disturbs him is “the point”— the same point connected with his desire for Hava and which had been painful since the day Hava came into his life. On another occasion, Abramson and Hava are together in the same room, and he sits by her bed. This situation is imbued with eroticism, but Abramson is anxiously trying to communicate his “progressive” ideas about “degeneration” and “free love”: And Abramson sat next to Hava Blumin’s bed [...] “If the dissolute lives of the Europeans have defiled the sanctity of marriage, and if hypo­crisy and lust have proliferated, then what grievance can we lodge against unified and harmonious love that stands above all?” And these simple reflections, emerging from the depths of his heart, expressed to she who sat beside him, in such a voice and with such words, what only a special hour like this one was right for. Without any premeditation, his voice was like a revealing whisper, as if he intended to bring her into the most confidential recesses of his heart. A clear, small laugh momentarily flushed her pale face, and when he finished speaking, she raised herself up a bit from her bed and said, with her fine, playful laugh, that all that, Yakov Issakovitz, is fine and good, the opinions of a real progressive, but why can’t he learn to adjust his tie better?46

Hava Blumin’s reaction to Abramson’s excited speech about free and exalted love is that he needs to learn how to knot his tie properly. As she tries to fix the tie, she touches his chest with her “warm and smooth hands.” This scene in which sexual contact between Hava and Abramson is “close yet far” constantly comes up in Abramson’s mind, especially when he compares himself to his erotic rival, Petrov. Then he thinks of himself as “someone whose tie is always upside down [...] this Abramson is thinking about kisses, and about love to Yeva Isaakovna [...] how ­revolting it would be in her eyes, if she knew it!”47

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Thus, in order to understand the protagonist’s psychic landscape, and the complex links between his ability to write and his erotic desire, we must take into account Abramson’s highly conflicted relations to—and repression of—desire. His very specific attraction to Hava is forever linked to his anxiety and his jealous identification with his masculine (and non-Jewish) erotic rival. In addition, like in other stories by Brenner and so many other Hebrew modernists, there is a great significance to Abramson’s childhood, to his family, and to his Oedipal relations with his father and his unrequited love for his dead mother. All this family drama remains mostly unexplored. It is only in passing that we learn about Abramson’s father, Yitzhak the ritual slaughterer, who is still alive in his small hometown. Apart from one letter which Abramson remembers at some point, the father comes up only in Abramson’s reveries and dreams when he appears, appropriately enough, with “a beard that resembles Tolstoy’s beard.” Abramson’s beloved mother is even more absent, but this absence is felt at several junctures in the novel. For example, at the beginning when his student Frenkel tells Abramson that “if his mother would have been alive ... then ... then ... who knows”;48 in Abramson’s observations about the attachment of Uriel Davidovsky’s mother to her children; in the subtle and enigmatic comment of the narrator that Abramson’s attraction to Hava is somehow connected to the fact that “she also does not have a mother.” It seems that Abramson is unable to talk or even think directly about the struggle with his father and his love for the absent mother. These issues in Abramson’s life appear only in unconscious moments, in dreams, or in times of delusional “insanity.”49 All these elements of the narrative—Abramson’s erotic desire, his relations with Hava, his writing and creative work, his unresolved relations with his parents—come together into some kind of closure. By the end of the novel, Abramson has attempted suicide, has burned every­­thing he has written in Hebrew, and has tried to write in Russian in order to get closer to Hava. Eventually, Abramson breaks down and becomes “mad” or insane. However, as in most of Brenner’s texts, this is an open, enigmatic, and symbolic ending. As a result, it is hard to tell whether the crises of writing and eroticism are resolved or whether his mental breakdown is a signifier of a total failure.

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

On the realistic level of the plot, this insanity of Abramson is genuine and it is caused by the “collapse of his nerves.” At the same time, this is a literary, symbolic “madness” that highlights the figurative strata of the novel.50 In short, this ending allows Brenner and his narrator to present a different Abramson. Now the “mad” Abramson is writing not articles and essays (in Hebrew or in Russian), but fragments of a diary in Hebrew that record the thoughts and “visions” of his delusional mind— fragments which “he writes for himself.” These bits can be understood only by himself and by the readers who have been following the mechanism of his conscious and unconscious psyche. Even as Abramson goes mad, he does not abandon his erotic desire or his passion for writing in Hebrew. Thus, without declaring it, the novel seems to enunciate Abramson’s writing as something that is born out of these visions. This is writing that is by definition fragmentary and esoteric, the writing of a “madman.” Its communicative possibility is questionable, but its power and authenticity are not in doubt. As depicted at the conclusion of ­Mi-saviv la-nekuda, writing does not necessarily involve sorting out desire or its sublimation. Rather, Brenner seems to suggest that writing is developed, incubated, and finally created from within the neurosis of the writer-protagonist, from the very depths of his masculine erotic desire. The ambiguous conclusion of Brenner’s novel raises a similar issue to the one posed in Gnessin’s Ha-tzida and touches upon the problem of the relations between writing and sublimation of erotic desire. Freud made the sublimation of libidinal desire part of his theory of sexuality and the psychic life. In Freudian theory, sublimation is a process of channeling or directing sexual instinct toward an aim besides sexual gratification and into the achievement of “socially acceptable” goals, whether in art, poetry, science, or other fields of endeavor. Freud first sketched out this concept in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), where he speaks of sublimation as involving the satisfaction of a sexual drive without repression. Sublimation is thus a diversion of sexual instinctual forces “to find an outlet and use in other fields.” Freud further suggests that “here we have one of the origins of artistic creativity,” but then he adds that “a highly gifted individual, and in particular one with an artistic disposition, may reveal a mixture, in any proportion, of efficiency, perversion and neurosis.”51

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In his 1910 essay on Leonardo da Vinci, Freud works out the concept of sublimation more fully, but what is curious is that he chose as a “test case” an artist who is marked by his unsteadiness, his tendency to leave works half-finished, and his inability to execute many of the projects he imagined.52 Leo Bersani and other critics of Freudian theory note that in his essay on da Vinci, Freud calls the work of the artist an example of genuine sublimation, and yet he tends to treat his painting as a repetition of “complexes,” which in Freud’s terms of “normative development” can only be considered as “neurotic.” Thus, even in Freud’s reading, sublimation seems to be not a mechanism by which desire is denied, but a self-reflexive activity by which desire multiplies and diversifies its representations.53 Charles Bernheimer makes a similar observation when he discusses the relations between Freud’s concept of sublimation and European “decadent” literature of early modernism: To displace desire from the world into art sounds like Freud’s definition of sublimation. Through sublimation, libido transferred from sexual objects is made available for original artistic creativity. In decadence, however, this creative energy finds itself framed in a mirror of reflection and repetition [...] The decadent solution is to embrace paralysis as creative potential, to make of the petrifying head the vehicle of one’s originality.

The Depths of Masculine Desire and the Birth of the Hebrew Writer It appears that in modernist Hebrew fiction written by male writers in the early twentieth century, the sublimation of erotic desire is precisely this “decadent energy” which finds itself framed in a mirror of reflection and repetition. The crisis of masculine erotic desire is thus connected not just to a “failure” of its protagonists but, perhaps more significantly, to a recognition of—and even an embrace of—the creative potential of paralysis. This process can be detected not only in Gnessin and Brenner, but perhaps even more arrestingly in the early stories of Sh. Y. Agnon.

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

Agnon wrote a number of stories in which erotic desire is linked to artistic creativity.54 His signature story Agunot (1908) is probably the most well known, but similar issues appear in different ways in other early work, such as Be’era shel Miriam (“Miriam’s Well,” 1909), which became, together with the Yiddish story Toytn Tanz (“The Dance of Death,” 1911–1912), the foundation for Agadat ha-sofer (“The Tale of the Scribe,” 1918). Perhaps the most explicit exploration of erotic desire and writing can be seen in Agnon’s story Tishrei (1911), which he later revised into the story Givat ha-chol (“The Hill of Sand,” 1919).55

Figure 19. Shmuel Yosef Agnon, circa 1912. (Source: The Pinhas Lavon Institute for Labor Movement Research, Tel-Aviv, Israel)

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The relations between the early and late versions of this story have been discussed and explained by a number of Agnon scholars. Tishrei is more symbolist, impressionist, and “loose” in its style and structure when compared with the more ironic and tightly constructed version which Agnon reworked eight years later while he lived in Germany.56 In Tishrei, Agnon mixes prose and poetry; the story is prefaced by a long symbolist poem and parts of other poems are interspersed through the narrative. In the middle of the story, a symbolist legend is told by Na‘aman, the protagonist (named Hemdat in the later version). The earlier version also reveals more fully how immersed the young Agnon was in European early modernism—German, Russian, and Scandinavian—as well as in the writing of Berdichevsky, Peretz, Brenner, ­Gnessin, and Shofman. From this perspective, although the story takes place in Jaffa and was published in Palestine a year before Agnon moved to Germany, it is (especially the early version) a thoroughly European Hebrew story.57 The story recounts a full year in the life of the young male protagonist, Na‘aman, starting in the month of Tishrei (the first month in the Jewish calendar). Na‘aman is a lonely immigrant, a Hebrew poet and writer newly arrived from Europe to Jaffa. His travel to the far-off location causes Na‘aman to be (even more than Hagzar and Abramson) completely cut off from his family. The reader knows nothing about his father and mother or about the hometown where he grew up. When he comes to tell about “his ancestors,” he narrates a symbolist story about the legendary Hemdat and his love. The only thing we know about Na‘aman’s real ancestors is that a hereditary disease runs in the family and he might be the “last one of his kin.”58 The only family memory he has is about a beautiful female relative who was artistically talented and wanted to be a singer, but her strength dwindled and “the light in her brain dimmed.” She became insane and “did not leave her house for two years.”59 The link between this sick artist relative and the would-be writer is suggested by Na‘aman himself, with all the possible implications of the relations among madness, creativity, sexuality, and gender indeterminacy. Indeed, like in Gnessin’s Ha-tzida and Brenner’s Mi-saviv la-nekuda, the narrative of Tishrei contains two parallel storylines.60 One focuses

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

on the protagonist’s literary work, or more precisely, on his struggles with writing and his attempts to write, and the other on Na‘aman’s troubled relationship with a young woman named Yael Hayut and his erotic entanglements with her. Close to the beginning of the story we hear that Na‘aman writes or used to write poetry. He compares himself and is compared by others to a Hebrew poet with the fictional name Pizmoni, and even to the great Bialik. However, throughout most of the story, Na‘aman is not writing; instead, he spends his time teaching Yael or “lying in his bed” waiting for her. Apparently, he is caught up in a state of melancholy and suffers from a kind of prolonged writer’s block. At this point, he only dreams about being productive and about writing again: “Na‘aman set his sights on the winter. Cold winds blowing. He’d be lying in his bed [...] and would get up after a pleasant sleep. Days would go by in which he would continue with his story [...] Na‘aman would pour out the dew of his soul on the page.” 61 Eventually, Na‘aman emerges from his crisis and goes back to writing. First he is engaged in a translation into Hebrew of the novel Niels Lyhne (1888) by the Danish writer Jens-Peter Jacobsen. Only toward the very end of the narrative is Na‘aman able to fully work on his extended “long story,” and the readers even get (in Tishrei) a glimpse of what the writer-protagonist actually writes. The other storyline focuses on the troubled relationship of Na‘aman with Yael Hayut, who is, like himself, an immigrant from Eastern Europe without parents or family. The erotic attraction of Na‘aman to Yael, and the partial repression or sublimation of this attraction, are the main themes of the story, and most of the narrative is devoted to them. By the end of the year depicted in the story—more or less parallel with the Jewish year—the two interrelated plots come to an enigmatic, open-ended closure. The two storylines, the erotic drama and the drama of writing, are clearly interrelated. However, like in Gnessin’s and Brenner’s texts, the correspondence between writing and erotic desire is far from clear.62 As a story about erotic desire and writing, about the dynamics of repression and sublimation, Tishrei is a good example of what Nitza BenDov has called Agnon’s “poetics of indirection.”63 From the beginning, Na‘aman is sexually attracted to Yael but doesn’t admit it to others, to

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her, or even to himself, until he has driven her to the hands of his erotic rival Cohen (Shamai in the later version of the story). Na‘aman meets Yael for the first time when he agrees to become her tutor and teach her Hebrew “without knowing why.” It is only when Yael asks Na‘aman to read to her from Y. L. Peretz’s stories that the narrator comments, “his heart slowly went frantic at the dismayed blush that played on her full, round, tempting cheeks.” Na‘aman doesn’t fail to notice Yael’s “fresh skin, slender back and excellent posture,” but the narrator comments that this observation only arouses in him respect, compassion, and tenderness toward her and has nothing to do with lust. On the other hand, when his friends ask him about Yael and his feelings toward her, he tells them that she is not beautiful at all, and in fact that she is like “a piece of steak.”64 Unwittingly, this duality of what he tells himself and what he tells the others reveals Na‘aman’s deeply repressed desire for Yael. Later he notices her intensely green eyes and intensely green shirt and her green hat— she is a living emerald. And in the depths of his heart he was full of joy that she was so tempestuous and full of life and youth [...] and he silently squeezed her hand.—I know why you have squeezed my hand.— Why?—You believe that I did not read Forel’s book, about the sexual release in such a squeeze.65

Citing the fin de siècle sexologist Auguste Forel, Yael is suggesting (for the first time) that there is something sexual in the physical contact between them.66 But Na‘aman is again satisfied by Yael’s response because he misinterprets her suggestion that the squeeze of a hand is a transference of sexual satisfaction, as if it were a sign of her innocence and purity. Indeed, time and again in the story, the male protagonist rationalizes his desire and explains it as a sense of compassion toward her. He imagines himself as her teacher, brother, and even father. He gives her food and money and teaches her Torah and Hebrew. Even when Yael attempts to initiate an erotic exchange with him, he withdraws and is not able to respond: “Had he tried to kiss her, who could say what she would do? He liked to look at her, to look at her. Without prostituting his senses.”67

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

The protagonist thinks that the fact that he could kiss her and chooses not to means that he is in “full control” of his desire, but it is precisely the fact that he “loves to look at her” which reveals his (partly repressed) desire and the central role of the erotic gaze in the story. Despite that this is a story about “erotic failure,” and that not much happens between Na‘aman and Yael, just as in the other stories I have examined, it is rife with voyeuristic and fetishistic masculine desire. For example, when Yael comes to his house on a rainy day and takes off her wet shoes, Na‘aman observes, “how gentle is her foot.” He also notices her socks and secretly admires them.68 Sometimes the desire transfers even to a fetishistic object like a piece of soap that Yael used. Na‘aman becomes so attached to it that he wants to preserve it for his pleasure. Rationally, he is aware that this is a silly thing to do, but he cannot help it. Na‘aman’s complex erotic entanglement with Yael is further confused by the fact that his own sexual identity is indeterminate. He is presented  by the narrator, and is seen by Yael and later by his male erotic rival Cohen, as “feminine” and as someone who has an inverted or “deficient” masculinity. This inverted masculinity is always measured against the sexual “norms” and stereotypes that the narrator poses, or against other male and female characters. One of the main features that mark his “femininity” is his beautiful long brown hair, which is compared with the hair that Yael once had and lost because of a disease. Na‘aman is also significantly shorter then Yael. The fact that his hands are “weak, gentle and beautiful” and are “like girls’ hands” is highlighted a number of times. They are contrasted with the “hard hands” of his erotic rival Cohen. Na‘aman’s “femininity” is also associated with his tidiness; Na‘aman is a good homemaker (baleboste, in the YiddishHebrew expression). He is also a vegetarian, and this fact is associated with femininity because of “his lack of appetite” for meat. More than anything else, the emasculation of the male character is related to Na‘aman’s erotic passivity and lack of action, to his apparent masochism and his melancholy.69 In opposition to the “femininity” of Na‘aman, Yael has clearly “masculine” attributes. Yael’s hair might have been cut short because of her illness, but it is hard to ignore the fact that when she meets Na‘aman she resembles a young man (especially when her short hair is compared

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to his beautiful long hair). Yael is also taller than her teacher Na‘aman, which makes the physical arrangements for their study together highly awkward. More significantly, Yael’s “masculinity” is related to her being sexually active (her last name, Hayut, means “life” or “force of life”). In the beginning of the story, Na‘aman hears rumors about her frivolous nature and about her alleged promiscuity (a‘gvanut in Hebrew). These rumors surely arouse his curiosity, but also make him suspicious to the point that he has to convince himself that she is actually a virtuous girl (bat-tovim in Hebrew) in a state of distress. Thus, it is very significant that Yael is the one who initiates all the attempts to create erotic intimacy with Na‘aman until she gives up. Na‘aman discovers that Yael has in fact a strong sexual appetite, parallel with her appetite for food and especially for meat. When this appetite is not “satisfied,” her desire can become dangerous and sadistic: And again she touched him, even holding his head. And had she wanted, she could easily have sunk her teeth into his fine hair and sheared it off in an instant. Why should he have anything so fine? Na‘aman giggled. That would be a laugh! In fact, he wanted it. He was just about to say so when Yael Hayut bit off a shock of hair. He had never laughed so hard. She was a demon, not a woman. One with a Greek figure and the face of a courtesan. Who would have believed it?70

This scene reveals the way Na‘aman sees Yael both as a masculine “woman” and as a kind of sadistic “phallic woman” (like Wilde’s Salome), whose sexual energy and appetite are simultaneously alluring and threatening. Yael’s aggressive or “sadistic” behavior (which, in fact, perfectly matches Na‘aman’s masochistic inclinations) is revealed again in another scene in a restaurant, when Yael takes the crusty shell of an almond and puts it around his finger. This unexplained act prompts Na‘aman to painfully push his finger against the table, causing it to bleed. This is one of the junctures in the story where Yael and her extrovert sexuality are associated (consciously or not) in Na‘aman’s mind both with a fantasy of masochistic pleasure and a fantasy of castration. The entire story is rife with images of haircutting, biting, and amputation of hands and other body parts that are clearly related to castration anxiety and fantasy.71 The gender confusion and indeterminacy of the two main protagonists are also highlighted by minor characters like the grotesque an-

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

drogynous character of Aylonit (or Ilonit).72 She meets Na‘aman in the street and brings him to her house, which is manifest by its disorder. Nothing there seems to be “in its place,” and there is nowhere to sit apart from the bed. Then Na‘aman sees, to his great astonishment, that Aylonit has in her room “his own pants.” She invites him to dance with her and takes him in her arms. Afterward she dresses up with his pants, expressing her envy of him “being a man.”73 The androgynous Aylonit and her gender “disorder” clearly scares and disgusts Na‘aman. In her indeterminacy, she appears like an exaggerated, grotesque embodiment of certain elements of Yael’s sexuality as well as his own. Na‘aman indeed seems to be lost within the dichotomies of masculinity and femininity, and this indeterminacy is linked to his erotic passivity and melancholy, which are, in turn, related to his difficulties with writing. At the same time, it seems that Na‘aman is not totally uncomfortable within the slippery space of gender indeterminacy. Like other Hebrew stories from the period, erotic passivity and fetishistic desire are the defining characteristics of male figures. This “passivity” almost never means that sexuality is not part of their world. Quite the opposite, it leads them to substitute the heterosexual norm of coitus or “consummation” of desire with elaborate fetishistic and voyeuristic sexual fantasies, as well as with homosocial desire involving an erotic triangle. Agnon’s story explicitly connects the erotic triangular desire, in which the male erotic rival becomes a subject of intense jealousy and identification, with the act of artistic representation. It does so using the metaphors of mirrors, masks, and substitutions, the same metaphors that proliferate in other early modernist writing of fin de siècle European and Hebrew literature. In the first chapter of Tishrei, we encounter a reproduction of Rembrandt’s painting The Jewish Bride (1667), hanging on the wall of Na‘aman’s room. Since he does not have a mirror in his room, Na‘aman uses the picture as a mirror. “In the past, when Zinakov’s fiancé, and others like her trailed after him, it seemed to him, so long as he gazed at the picture and his reflection looked out at him from between the couple, as if he were a ‘third person’ trying to turn the old man against her. How far he was now from such games.”74

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This practice creates a strange identification between himself and the scene in Rembrandt’s painting.75 There is an explicit link between Na‘aman’s fantasy of seeing himself in the role of the “third” in an erotic triangle, and the Oedipal desire to get rid of the “old man.” In Rembrandt’s enigmatic painting, the non-Jewish man is indeed significantly older than the Jewish bride, and he lays his hand on her breast in a position that is simultaneously authoritative and awkwardly hesitant. When Na‘aman looks at the painting, he does not “see” himself or identify with the man depicted within it. Rather, he uses the painting as a “mirror” for his narcissistic gaze, which poses him as the “third,” the rival in an erotic triangle. Although Na‘aman tells himself that he is now far removed from such thoughts, he repeats the triangular fantasy time and again in the story. Later, when Yael comes back from the hospital and is driven to the hands of Cohen, the erotic rival builds in the protagonist’s anxieties. Na‘aman begins to fantasize about what is going on between them (“Cohen for sure hugs and kisses her”). He imagines Yael married and giving birth to children, and then before his eyes come “the strong muscles” of Cohen and “his young face.” When Na‘aman contemplates the reasons for Yael being with Cohen, his fantasies are structured around the same metaphoric relations between sexual desire and food that are prevalent throughout the story: Yael “was hungry for bread, and Cohen supplies her both with bread and with chocolate.”76 Toward the end of the story, it seems that these sexual fantasies spring from the release of libidinal desire: Na‘aman “was consumed once again by carnal erotic desire,” the narrator tells us after his elaborate fantasies about Yael and Cohen. Na‘aman suddenly yearns to gaze at “the girls who go out to the streets with their light shirts.” He even yearns to meet with the androgynous Aylonit who scared him so much before. Just around the time that this erotic desire seems to be rekindled, Na‘aman begins to write with renewed force and vigor, an act that is represented (like in Gnessin’s Ha-tzida) with “white sheets of paper that are being filled with the black ink.”77 As Michal Arbel points out, the act of writing that comes toward the end of the narrative does not necessarily involve Na‘aman’s fulfillment or “consummation” of desire. Nor does it demand the “sorting out” of

Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

Na‘aman’s indeterminate gender identity, or even achieving fruitful sublimation of erotic desire. Though Na‘aman admits that he is “in love” with Yael (namely that he is and was attracted to her from the time they met), and that he has been repressing his desire for her, the protagonist does not give up his “feminine side,” his homosocial desire, or even the complex masochistic fantasy that Yael will “penetrate” him (connected as it is with the fear of—or fantasy of—castration).78 Indeed, the murkiness of Na‘aman’s unconscious thoughts continues even when he renews his writing. As “perverse” and “unproductive” as it might seem, unconscious sexual desire in Agnon’s story simultaneously blocks the possibility of writing and at the same time it fuels writing and artistic exposure and self-fulfillment. This modernist, “decadent” conception of the relationship between erotic love, sexual desire, and writing comes up in the symbolist self-definition of the male protagonist: “I am a sleeping prince whose lover awakens him into a new slumber; a beggar of love whose bag is tattered from use, and who now places his love in his tattered bag!”79 Na‘aman identifies with a feminine model of the princess, “the sleeping beauty” whose sexuality is dormant until the lover comes through and awakens it. But here it is Na‘aman as the “prince,” whose own sexual desire arouses him and “wakes him up” and at same time puts him back to sleep. The second half of his self-definition is not that of a prince but of a beggar, the subject who consumes the erotic love and libidinal energy of others. He cannot hold this desire (or love) in a bag because it is used too much. Still, he continues to put his love in the torn bag. After all, this indeterminate model of gender identification, with its repetitious pattern of sexual desire, repression, sublimation, and renewed libidinal energy is precisely what makes Na‘aman the writer. Thus, we can see in modernist Hebrew fiction written by male writers in this period that writing (or the potential of writing and creativity) can be born out of the depths of the unconscious and unruly desire. The act of writing does not necessarily involve “sorting out” desire or its sublimation. Rather, writers like Gnessin, Brenner, and Agnon seem to suggest that writing is developed, incubated, and finally created from within the neurosis of the writer-protagonist, from the very depths of

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his masculine erotic desire. Writing and erotic love—the creative process and the libidinal energy of sexual desire—are linked and entangled with each other primarily because in both there is a strong element of exposure and self-revelation, which the protagonists (and probably the writers as well) yearn for and yet are highly anxious about.

E l ev e n  Imagining the Beloved The New (Jewish) Woman And he thought bitterly that not only was the female soul a total mystery to him, but that so it would be forever, and there was no remedy for it. —Uri Nissan Gnessin, Ha-tzida, 1905 So we take all that dumb, devastating despair and cast it, together with the burning head and together with the faintest shadow of a final thought of [...] the dark, quivering bosom of the woman. —Gnessin, Etzel, 1912

The French historian Michelle Perrot wrote that “on the eve of the twentieth century, the image of the New Woman was widespread in Europe, from Vienna to London, from Munich and Heidelberg to Brussels and Paris.”1 As we consider the crucial role of sexuality and gender in Hebrew modernist fiction, we would be remiss if we did not include this figure and its representation in our exploration. Who was this “New Woman”? What was the image of her spreading all across Europe? And was there a New Woman in Jewish society? Did her image travel to Hebrew (and Yiddish) modernist fiction written in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century? The term “New Woman” emerged both in English and in other European languages in the last decades of the nineteenth century, first in England and then all over Europe.2 The new term, and the image that went along with it, had to do both with the suffragettes and other movements of women’s liberation, as well as with the sense of turbulence and anxiety about changing modes of gender roles and sexuality. Ann Ardis points to the prominence of contradictory labels and images of the New Woman—including Novissima, the Odd Woman, the Wild Woman, and the Superfluous Woman—in novels and essays in England of the fin de siècle.3 Similar images were prominent during the same ­period in France, where there was a rather vague yet ­noticeable perception that “women were in the process of no longer being the same.” 4

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Feminist scholars like Rita Felski and Elaine Showalter claim that the apparently opposed yet closely related figures of the “hysteric woman” and the “New Woman” appeared as images that permeated the culture and literature of the fin de siècle. Nervous disorders such as anorexia, hysteria, and neurasthenia were associated with changes in women’s aspirations. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer noted in their Studies on Hysteria (1895) that hysterical girls were likely to be “lively, gifted, and full of intellectual interests,” women of “powerful intellect” and “sharp and critical common sense.”5 The “hysteric” woman was itself a socially determined phenomenon, an index of the fin de siècle preoccupation with sexuality as “the truth of the self ” that found expression in the emergent doctrines of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and thus the distinction between the New Woman and the hysteric woman was highly blurred in much of the writing of the period. In short, the New Woman pervaded the literature and culture of fin de siècle Europe as a powerful symbol of both the dangers and the promises of the new age.6 Side by side with the growing strength of women’s emancipation movements all across Europe—including in Tsarist Russia, where the emergence of both educated and working-class women into the public domain took place around the revolutionary period of 19057—there was a discernible intensification of misogynistic currents in art and literature of the period. This newfound misogyny appeared as a counter-thrust to representations of the liberated and supposedly emancipated New Woman. The association of the New Woman with hermaphroditism and androgyny was given added fuel by the “degeneration” theory. Max ­Nordau dedicated his Degeneration to Cesare Lombroso, who argued in La Donna Delinquente that women who attempted to transgress the strict distinction between masculine and feminine were engaged in evolutionary reversion, a “sinking back into the hermaphroditism of the indeterminate primal state.”8 The discourse of “degeneration” was accompanied by the belief that civilization was a manifestation of the masculine, whereas “decadence” was synonymous with effeminacy; the New Woman was thus also seen as the embodiment of a malformed civilization, regressing from the rational and natural to the supernatural and perverse.9 This linking of effeminacy with decadence became notorious in thinkers like Otto Weininger. But even in the progressive thinking of

The New (Jewish) Woman

the new field of modern sociology, it is possible to trace a deep hesitation about the relationship between femininity and modernization. One of the most influential thinkers in Germany, and one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, was Georg Simmel, who dealt extensively with the issue of women and modernity as part of his theory of modernization. In a series of essays published between 1890 and 1911, Simmel wrote about topics such as “female culture and psychology,” the relationship between the sexes, and the German women’s movement. For Simmel, it is characteristically male “qualities” or “capacities,” like objectification and individuation, which generate the social and cultural forms of modernity: There is no sense in which culture exists in a domain that lies beyond men and women. It is rather the case that with the exception of a few areas, our objective culture is thoroughly male. It is men who have created art and industry, science and commerce, the state and religion. The belief that there is a purely “human culture” for which the difference between man and woman is irrelevant has its origins in the same premise from which it follows that such a culture does not exist—the naive identification of the “human” with “man.”10

Simmel diagnoses—and at the same time reproduces—the cultural equation between masculinity and modernity. As he exposes the limitations of an abstract logic of identity, Simmel’s ascription of an “ontological otherness” to women guarantees both their authenticity and their exclusion from a modernity that remains identified with masculine individuation and agency. As Klaus Lichtblau claims, in Simmel’s theory woman is “laying like an immovable prehistoric boulder in the landscape of modernity.”11 While it is clear that Simmel is seeking to escape from a dualistic, relativist metaphysics of gender, he replaces it with a definition of woman outside of the binary structures of male thought, thereby finding a way for woman to exist as “authentic femininity,” as if she is located outside the social and symbolic hierarchies through which these very same categories of sameness and difference are constituted.12 Thus, Simmel’s theory of the gender of modernity seems diametrically opposed to Weininger. Against Weininger’s view of the unscrupulous and destructive nature of female sexuality, Simmel conceived of women

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as embodying a “natural,” almost childlike piety, an unproblematic unity of morality and desire. Instead of Weininger’s demonization of femininity, Simmel creates an equally fantasized and idealized view of a nonfissured, noncontradictory feminine identity that is free of alienation and contradiction. What he calls modernity’s “tragedy of culture” is clearly a crisis of male culture, insofar as culture is composed of structures and artifacts that are objectifications of masculine ideas and values.13 These historical changes and the cultural image of the New Woman were not restricted to the European mainstream; it should come as no surprise that these shifts were manifested in Jewish society and culture in many different ways. Historians have recently explored the specific ways in which Jewish women experienced the new conditions that accompanied the complex social and political changes associated with emancipation and revolution. The responses of Jewish women to modernization were shaped both by the criticism they faced in their communities and by the available non-Jewish models around them. Paula Hyman has demonstrated that in nineteenth-century Germany and other central European countries women generally adopted the gender roles that characterized bourgeois society. By creating a Jewish version of the bourgeois Protestant wife and mother, acculturated Jewish women in Europe served as a conservative force. By the beginning of the twentieth century, with the changing expectations of gender roles and with the rise of the New Woman in non-Jewish society, middle-class German women used their prescribed “moral sensibilities” to engage in public welfare activity that brought new ideas of women’s equality into public discourse.14 In the Russian Pale of Settlement, bourgeois gender norms were not shared by many Jews. In traditional Jewish society, women had long participated in the struggle to earn a livelihood, especially in the cultural elite circles of learned men who devoted themselves to Talmud study. For them, a capable wife who could support the family was highly valued. Although few Jews actually belonged to these circles, the model of the providing wife as a “woman of valor” was posed as an important communal ideal. Though the notion of a subjugated woman was strongly condemned in the ideology of the haskalah, the maskilim were very reluctant to accept educated women into their ranks.15 At the same

The New (Jewish) Woman

time, as Iris Parush has shown, because of the patterns of education of traditional Jewish society during the second half of the nineteenth century, there were circles of women who learned European languages and freely read European novels as part of their private education. Because Jewish women were marginalized and neglected by rabbinical authorities who regarded men as the bearers of religious learning, they were free to read secular literature in German, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. Thus, both in spite of and because of their marginality, the exposure of these women to European literature (and its influence upon secularization and modernization) sometimes preceded that of men.16 By the beginning of the twentieth century, with the rise of a variety of political ideologies and movements in Eastern Europe and with the new range of possible Jewish cultural identities, these educated women at the margins of Jewish society became more visible. Women participated in all these movements, but they seemed particularly drawn to the Bund and other socialist revolutionary movements. The debate over the appropriate place of women in modern Jewish culture, and the anxiety over the appearance of the “New Jewish Woman,” revealed the enormous tensions around questions of gender and sexuality that accompanied the modernization of East European Jewry.17 Was the figure of the “New (Jewish) Woman” represented in Hebrew literature, and if so, how? In 1905, the critic Menachem Mendl Paytelson published in the Hebrew journal Ha-zeman an essay entitled: Ha-isha ha-mishtacherert be-sifrutenu (“The Emancipating Woman in Our Literature”), which asked precisely these questions.18 Most of the essay deals with the literature of nineteenth-century haskalah and the so-called New Wave naturalistic fiction of the 1890s by writers like Ben Avigdor and Bershadsky. However, the concerns of this essay are manifestly contemporary. The fact that the essay appeared in the same volume of the journal in which Gnessin’s novella Ha-tzida was published might have been coincidental, but there is no doubt that both Gnessin’s fictional text and the critical essay deal with the same issue—the “New Jewish Woman”—and the way she was understood and represented by Hebrew male writers. The essay starts with a bold assertion: “One of the most important phenomena of our time is the ambition for liberation of women

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in ­general and of the Hebrew woman in particular.” Then Paytelson asks an important question: “How has our new literature addressed the woman’s ambition for liberation, and in what way has this aspiration been recorded in it?” Paytelson’s answer is clear and very relevant, not only to Hebrew literature of the nineteenth century but also to the new fictional texts written in the early twentieth century: “Disproportionately, the issue has been addressed by men, whose own interests dictate that the woman will not cease to be submissive.”19 According to Paytelson, the reason for this is not necessarily that Jewish men held a regressive ideology, but rather that Hebrew writers were caught in an ambivalent position that he calls “the contradiction between the rational and actual.” In other words, they were caught between an ideological commitment to support the “emancipated” new woman, and the anxieties and fantasies about her. Paytelson searches in vain in Hebrew literature for a successful representation of New Jewish Women, “who want to stand in their own right or wish to make their mark in the public domain.”20 These women, argues Paytelson, can be found in East European Jewish life, but are absent from Hebrew literature. Less than a year after Paytelson’s essay, a critic named Bar-Tuvia (the pseudonym of Shraga Feybush Frenkel) wrote another short essay on women, or rather on the question of “the relations between the sexes.” The essay, which was published in Brenner’s journal Ha-me‘orer, begins with the claim that “since the time of secularization sexual desire became strong,” and the relationship between the sexes is changing.21 Bar-Tuvia discusses the representation of women in “progressive” Russian literature, and also raises questions about the kinds of masculine characters that populate Russian literature. He observes that these men are far removed from “the heroes” that used to populate the Russian literature of bygone days. He concludes the essay with a provocative statement: “In short, the man and the woman are disappearing. They are being replaced by a massed multitude of hermaphrodites.”22 Although Bar-Tuvia’s essay deals with Russian literature and Paytelson’s with nineteenth-century Hebrew literature (with references to Ibsen and other European writers), their discussions about a “new” or “emancipated” woman and changing gender definitions and roles clearly speak to their contemporaries. Both point to a contempo-

The New (Jewish) Woman

rary confusion and to the anxiety of men about the appearance of the “woman who is in the process of changing” in both the Jewish and non-Jewish domains. Like most works of European modernist fiction, feminine subjectivity in Hebrew modernist fiction was created by male writers and written almost exclusively from a masculine point of view.23 There were very few women who wrote Hebrew literature in early-­twentiethcentury ­Europe, and even fewer whose writing was accepted as part of the emerging canon.24 However, precisely because the overwhelming majority of modernist Hebrew fiction was written by men, and because this fiction deals with masculine desire and with the crisis of masculinity, it is highly instructive to examine the ways in which women, especially the figures of emancipated New Women, were depicted in this fiction. Like other aspects of gender and sexuality in modernist Hebrew fiction, Brenner’s first novel Ba-choref is an important juncture in the ways in which the Jewish New Woman is presented through the lens of the male protagonists and narrators. In the fifth chapter of the novel, as we explored earlier in the context of the crisis of masculinity, the male protagonist Yirmiah Feirman is contemplating his relationship with women, and admits to himself that, “There wasn’t any individual woman that I would meet. Each woman I’ve been fated to encounter had no special form. Rather, the entire sex has been like the same article covered with a white pinafore.”25 This highly abstract perception of “the other sex” prevents the male character from being able to recognize any specific woman as an individual, only as a generalized representation of “womanhood.” The fact that this abstract notion is depicted by the synecdoche of “being covered with a white pinafore” is surely significant not only in the psychological world of Yirmiah (and his relationship with his mother), but in the general identification of “womanhood” with motherhood and maternity. Yirmiah contemplates the fact that his concept of woman is highly conflicted, and he moves between admiration and total ignorance of “the totally different world” of women. He finds this conflict to be at the heart of the depiction of women in the traditional Jewish texts with which he grew up, as well as in the new secular literature

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that he has been reading. In these new books he finds, yet again, a strong contradiction between a superficial “bowing down in front of the beauty of the woman” and a portrait of a woman as someone who is “small, deceitful, cruel, loves only her body, extremely calculating, craven, faithful to tradition, and keeps her distance from criticism and thought.”26 Therefore, when Yirmiah is in a situation where he has to express his opinion on the contemporary issue of “the emancipation of women” he does not know what to say, and he finds himself entangled in intellectual and pseudo-intellectual arguments. The intellectual power of women, one must admit, is weaker than that of men at this time, and the truth is that they have no desire for knowledge; but on the other hand, they have other good traits that men do not have [...] but of course you can not make generalizations [...] There are decent women [...] the initial signs of the “woman of the future” have just now begun to be seen in this country [...] relations between the sexes can and should be different. It’s also foolish to find it necessary to prove that a woman is not simply a female, just as a man is not just a male.27

Here we see the same confusion between different perceptions and slogans about the changing nature of gender roles, and especially of the New Women (or the “woman of the future”—eshet ha-atid) in contemporary culture that we have seen in the essays of Paytelson and BarTuvia, as well as in the writing of European thinkers like Simmel or Weininger. For Yirmiah, the bottom line is that all these slogans and arguments are mere rationalizations, woman “simply doesn’t figure in the book of my life. I feel her absence, I am alone, like a juniper tree in the desert.”28 Yirmiah admits that this void causes him to develop complex lovehate relations with the actual women he does meet. He feels special estrangement, even hostility, toward the New Woman (ha-alama ha-chadasha): “Even less agreeable were my feelings about the ‘new woman,’ who is ‘half male,’ and it may well be that I disliked the young women of this latter sex even more—perhaps because these are the ones I have had the best acquaintance with, and perhaps because they lack that personal grace that attracts me, at least in the case of ordinary women.”29

The New (Jewish) Woman

This comment reveals again how conflicted and complex was the image of the New Woman (both Jewish and non-Jewish) in this period. The New Woman can be seen as a political figure who threatens to turn the world upside down and also as an androgynous “half-male” whose sexuality is highly indeterminate. One way or another, she causes much anxiety and confusion for masculine subjectivity. What is interesting is that Yirmiah encounters different incarnations of the New Woman. Some of them are unattractive to him (as he said); others are in fact very attractive but equally intimidating. Thus, Rahil Moiseyevna, with whom Yirmiah is infatuated, is clearly one of these New Jewish Women. The fact that she is known by her Russian name, and the few other things we know about her (such as her reading habits), indicate that she is a modern young woman who is acculturated into Russian culture. This is true also of Yeva Isaakovna/Hava Blumin, the female character who is the object of Abramson’s desire in Brenner’s Mi-saviv la-nekuda. Yeva is not only acculturated into Russian language and culture, but is also active in revolutionary socialism. In fact, this acculturation to Russian (or Polish, German, or even British) culture is one important signifier of the Jewish New Woman in most texts of modernist Hebrew fiction of the period.

The “Erratic Femininity” of the New Jewish Woman in Gnessin’s Fiction Another early modernist Hebrew text, written more or less at the same time as Brenner’s Mi-saviv la-nekuda, is Gnessin’s story Jenya (1904), which I discussed earlier. Jenya is another example of a New Jewish Woman, here depicted through the eyes of Fridin, the male protagonist and narrator. Jenya (whose full name is Yevgenia Pavlovna) is a mysterious young woman who arrives in the story’s small town from Odessa. She is an elusive object of desire, and the locus of a system of representation that equates femininity with the Jewish (or Hebrew) nation and sexual desire with national awakening. Jenya is figuratively described by the narrator as entirely “new”—“new skies, still unknown opened before my eyes”—and yet also as old and familiar as a dark

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r­ epressed past—“Dark, unclear memories arouse in my heart.”30 Jenya’s past is rendered in the narrative as a suspicious and repressed unconsciousness, which nevertheless fuels desires, both erotic and national. Like Rahil and Yeva/Hava in Brenner’s texts, Jenya is thoroughly acculturated into Russian society, language, and culture. However, for the (unreliable) protagonist-narrator she embodies the spirit of national awakening, in spite of the fact that she neither speaks Hebrew, nor was she ever involved in Zionist activity before she appears before Fridin’s eyes: The woman, with whom I spoke, leans recently towards Zionism, perhaps even a lot. While she was still in Odessa, some friends made her more or less close to this movement. She hasn’t really taken any practical part in Zionist activity, but sometimes she was present in Zionist gatherings. In such occasions, she was very enthusiastic about the tremendous aspiration for a national awakening which she felt in the hearts of the Hebrew youth [...] It’s really a shame that she doesn’t know Hebrew [...] In times like this, Hebrew literature must be very enticing.31

Thus, Jenya becomes an embodiment of the national spirit for others, despite the fact that she comes from an assimilated, Russified Jewish family and lacks any real connections to Jewish history or heritage. I have discussed elsewhere in more detail the ways in which the story Jenya depicts the failure of both the erotic and the national affair, and how this collapse is perceived to be the result of the betrayal of the erratic feminine behavior of Jenya.32 This dynamic is best seen in the last scene, where Jenya is fully exposed as an adulterous, lustful femme fatale who cannot help but seduce every man whom she encounters. This betrayal exposes the double-edged sword of the feminine trope in the masculine-national imagination. The same female object of desire, so essential as a narcissistic mirror of the projections of the national (male) subject, can also turn against him because the trope of the nation-as-woman contains the possibility of betrayal by the sinful, lustful woman as its other repressed side. While female fecundity is valued in “the mothers of the nation,” unruly female sexuality threatens to discredit the nation. The double representation of the feminine in Gnessin’s story, as both a maternal or wifely enabler and an adulter-

The New (Jewish) Woman

ous seducer, exposes and amplifies not just the necessary inadequacy of the two rival male characters, but also the inevitable ruptures in the masculine national imagination. In Be-terem (“Beforehand,” 1909) and Etzel (“Beside,” 1912), ­Gnessin’s two late novellas, we encounter two male protagonists, Uriel Efros and Efraim Margolis, who ostensibly represent the exact opposite of the erotic inferiority of characters like Fridin (in Jenya) or Hagzar (from the novella Ha-tzida). Instead of the emasculated characters, marked by their erotic frustration, Uriel and Efraim are the objects of desire and the erotic gaze of others, mainly of the women that fall in love with them. Instead of characters tormented by their inabilities, Uriel and Efraim become hommes fatales—men who are full of sex appeal that women are ready to give their life for. Uriel and Efraim are fully aware of the fact that they are sexually attractive, but they are unable to respond to these erotic yearnings. Thus, it is interesting to examine what kind of “New Women” are found in these novellas. Uriel Efros, the main protagonist of Be-terem, is caught up in erotic relationships with women who overwhelm him with their feminine passion. At the beginning of the narrative, we find Uriel in the big city of Kiev. He lives in the house of a Russian landlady, Irena Vasliyevna, and has a complex sexual and emotional relationship with her. Irena is a wealthy non-Jewish Ukranian woman (described by the narrator as a “Matronita” and “Aramaic”). Her husband is “a short and stocky engineer, whose pink bald scalp is always damp,” and who travels for months on business trips. In the absence of her husband, Uriel fulfills Irena’s desires and needs as if he were a male prostitute (what Guy De Maupassant called l’homme fille). When we meet Uriel for the first time, the Ukrainian woman feeds him both with rich food and with “kisses” until he is quite literally fed up with her and with his entire life in Kiev. Gnessin even creates a complex system of intertextual analogies between Be-terem and the Odyssey, resulting in a mythical plot in which Uriel (as Odysseus) is captured on the island (Kiev) by Calypso (Irena).33 But Uriel is so self-absorbed in his state of ennui that he hardly notices Irena’s attention. Furthermore, her intense passion scares him because it demands his full involvement, so he simply ignores it. This pattern is repeated with every woman with whom Uriel has any relations.34

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Although there are a number of minor female protagonists who hover around Uriel, the most significant character in Be-terem is Mili. Initially, the connection between Mili and Uriel is made through writing. Uriel hears from Mili first when he still lives in Irena’s house in Kiev. At that point, he receives from her a postcard written “in a poetic style”: “My dear friend, come to me in the early morning. Come and listen. From the day it happened, I am sad since the early morning.”35 This short and enigmatic letter is in fact a call for help, and Uriel is aware that it arouses “a flurry in his soul,” which has something to do with “her long, black braids of hair, coming down to below her waist.” However, he ends up sending a polite response letter that does not say anything significant. After sending another letter, Mili finally arrives at Uriel’s house (when he visits his hometown). The inevitable meeting between Uriel and Mili is described at length and is the most extensive example of Uriel’s inability to move beyond his narcissistic self and respond to the subjectivity of the women around him.36 This scene is one of the finest examples of Gnessin’s artful Hebrew narrative, with half dialogues and internal monologues that are full of subtle irony and pain. It starts with a series of synecdoches and metonyms: Uriel’s gaze is focused on Mili’s white gloves and her shawl, then on her bare hand, a braid of black hair, and her white teeth. He observed how she bit her lips with her small, white teeth and then removed her palms to reveal a smiling, glad face. At first he was hesitating and a voice within him called out: You are an idiot, Uriel [...] But then his mind became a little more relaxed, and he now directed his attention to the girl who was smiling at him. He bent down and softly kissed her shiny and perfumed curls. She trembled; a light cry escaped her and in one springy moment she was on the edge of the bed. From this vantage point, she threw herself on his neck, entwining his body, her lips feverishly devouring his face.37

Uriel does not know what to do with this “feverish” feminine desire, and he just stands there unresponsive and mumbling to her to leave him alone. Mili, on the other hand, is totally entrenched. Her blouse remains open and her body is “warm and trembling with pleasure to his touch.” In her passion she only manages to say one thing: “Mama!

The New (Jewish) Woman

Mama!” This only makes him anxious, as he thinks about Mili, about his own mother, and about “pure dreams and yearnings of childhood.” Although Uriel does not fail to notice Mili’s “bare throat and the shadows between her full white breasts,” he tells Mili that he is a stranger, “a man who is full of ice.”38 Gnessin’s narrator describes here in very different ways the masculine desire of Uriel and the feminine desire of Mili. While Uriel’s sexual desire is complex and mixed with his inability to express it, the desire of Mili is “blazing” and “pure” and it seems to be boundless. But since this feminine passion is always presented from the point of view of the anxious Uriel, it seems as something that threatens to swallow and “devour” him. The fact that we know next to nothing about Mili, besides her desire for Uriel, renders this presentation of a New Woman similar to the image of the femme fatale, the “primal” and hysteric woman familiar from fin de siècle European literature.39 ❊ The novella Etzel (written 1911–1912 and published posthumously in 1913)40 is the most extensive attempt of Gnessin to deal with the New (Jewish) Woman. Apart from an array of minor female characters, the novella features three women protagonists: Dina Barabash, Zina Adler, and “little Ruchama.” Here, for the first time in Gnessin’s writing, we have detailed and wide-ranging portraits of female characters. Moreover, in spite of the fact that the main narrative perspective is that of the male protagonist, there is a conscious attempt to give voice to the female characters. Efraim is actually absent from many sections of the narrative and the stage is given to one or more female characters. For example, in the second chapter, there is a long and detailed account of Zina Adler’s visit to the house of Ruchama (and her sister Vera), with Efraim appearing as “a guest” only toward the end of the scene. The three female protagonists are modern and independent women. Dina Barabash is the oldest of the three. She met Efraim when both of them were young students in St. Petersburg, before she became a physician in a provincial town. Zina Adler is younger than Dina. She met Efraim in Kiev a few years before the fictional present of the novella, and she aspires to be an actor or musician (although it is not clear how

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successful she is). Ruchama, the youngest of the three, is a ­kursiste— the female counterpart of the familiar male “extern” student, who takes classes in the gymnasium hoping to get educated. These women are as removed as possible from most women characters in nineteenth-­ century Hebrew and Yiddish literature. They are not occupied with issues of marriage and family nor are they engaged with ideological struggles against their restrictive fathers or their Jewish communities. From a socioeconomic point of view, these women are part of a new Jewish bourgeoisie. They live in comfortable houses in the provinces and do not suffer from economic hardships.41 However, when we look closer, we see that these New Women are not radically different from Gnessin’s other female characters or from most texts of modernist Hebrew fiction, because they are presented chiefly as figures bound to the men they desire. The erotic sphere is central in the inner world of these women, and they are presented as a kind of feminine circle swarming around the main male protagonist. Thus, in spite of the vast differences between the three women—in terms of age, profession, location, life circumstances, and some psychological traits—there are also many similarities in the way they are presented, both in their physical appearance and their interior, psychic life. They are similar to each other in certain patterns of speech, in the way they dress and even in many facial and bodily features. The heads of the three women are always described as “fragrant and impassioned” with “black curly hair.” Their faces are “oval”; their eyes are moist and the pupils are “large and dilated”; their hands are small, warm, and soft; their hips are “slender and whispering.” They like to wear thin shawls on their bare shoulders and soft gloves which they always take off in Efraim’s presence. At one point in the novella, Efraim is sitting in a café in Kiev, looking like a “rooster,” who gazes “at the audience of women sitting around him,” and we get the following reflection of femininity through his eyes: These women ... ha, ha, these women ... these beautiful animals, necessary domestic animals, raised at home, humanity’s dish, fattened by generation after generation and of tender flesh, supple, like the cats of Siberia, when they laze in the afternoon sun and dreamily pleasure themselves by licking their own flesh, and as destructive and ­tortuous

The New (Jewish) Woman

of body as those cats, and when their primal wild blood begins to seethe, that blood that entire generations of civilized man have not defeated, and it seeks flesh and hungers ... really, it would be best if someone took a little notice of this matter.42

Efraim’s notion of the animalistic “feminine nature”—like a cat that seems to be domesticated but actually retains its savage nature—is taken directly from late-nineteenth-century representations of femininity from Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Tolstoy, Wilde, and Przybyszewski.43 At the same time, it is important to note that this reflection is part of a long stream-of-consciousness monologue triggered by (and directed at) Zina Adler and her unsettling presence in the Kiev café. Efraim reaches this state of reflection when he contemplates a very concrete memory of a specific woman who embodies the “animal aspect” of woman’s sexual desire. This “animal” was a woman “of a very early age” whose “figure was marvelously shaped,” with whom Efraim had an affair when he himself was young. This woman was married to a “pale and somewhat weary doctor” who used to call her “my innocent lamb.” Efraim does not describe directly his sexual relationship with this young woman “in a distant quiet room” (most likely Efraim’s own room). Instead, he resorts to sharply drawn metonyms: the woman had a “toothache” and instead of going to the dentist she used to go to a cabinet, take a wad of cotton, and stick it in her mouth. She would then “with her white teeth slice a generous portion from it, as the man slices with his teeth a portion of raw meat.”44 The meaning of this metonymic representation of sexual appetite is obvious (Efraim as a “piece of meat,” devoured by the lusting woman), but its function in Efraim’s consciousness is less clear. The significant element here is not necessarily the rather conventional, misogynist presentation of voracious feminine desire, but the fact that this reminiscence is saturated with Efraim’s own sexual desire. Efraim not only remembers it as something that marks his former self as a virile and sexually active man, but also as a “lesson” which he learned from the woman and applied to himself. In fact, he himself “acts like a woman,” who uses her lovers and abandons them, unable to respond to their needs.45 These appropriations of gender roles and stereotypes, which seem to be fluidly transferable between men and women, occur throughout the

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novella. Sexual desire is presented as a raw and primal feminine trait, but more than anyone else it is Efraim, the male protagonist, who appropriates its “feminine” erratic logic. This appropriation repeats itself on a different, meta-textual level. In Etzel, for the first (and last) time in Gnessin’s fiction, women become the center of narrative consciousness in significant sections of the text. Rather than being presented from the male protagonist’s perspective, we see the world from their own point of view, using their own thoughts and even (to some degree) their own language. However, like the “dandy” protagonist, this diversity of perspectives is ultimately no more and no less than a literary appropriation of female subjectivity by Gnessin, the male writer. This paradox, central to our understanding of gender and sexuality in Gnessin’s work and in Hebrew modernism in general, is dramatically enacted in the well-known and sexually subversive poem that Gnessin inserted into the prose narrative of the novella. Within the novella, the poem appears as a text written by Dina Barabash, who sends it in a letter to Efraim. The poem is discovered by “little Ruchama,” who reads it twice—once by herself, and once in the presence of Efraim and Dina. The poem can thus be read as another, and perhaps the strongest, manifestation of voracious and violent feminine sexual desire. The woman in the poem is the sexually active subject. The man “returns from his wandering,” comes to visit the woman (à la the Song of Songs) “in her mother’s house,” and lies “for a night” under “one roof ” with his lover, where he fulfills his passion and reaches an orgasmic “rest.” But this is only a prelude for the woman’s “real” act of sexual desire when she kisses her man with lust and thirst for his blood. “The blood will be mine, to quiet my thirst, / And it will be my medicine, / to quiet the desire of a lonesome sick soul.”46 It is highly significant that within the novella, the poem which breaches the prosaic narrative is not written or even imagined by the male protagonist but is articulated by a woman’s subjectivity, as a “direct” aesthetic creation of a woman who expresses her desire in a poetic form. But of course, this poem, like the interior monologues and stream-of-consciousness segments from a female’s point of view, are all written by Gnessin, the male writer who imagines woman’s all-­ consuming desire.

The New (Jewish) Woman

As if to multiply this game of masks and acts of gender appropriation, the poem itself, which was considered, for some time, to be ­Gnessin’s own, is actually a complex act of plagiat, a text written by a female poet and appropriated by a male prose writer. The poem was actually written by poet Celia (Levin) Dropkin in Russian (and later was adapted to Yiddish with the title “The Kiss”).47 Celia met Gnessin in Kiev in 1907 and was his lover for a short time, before immigrating to America and becoming a major modernist Yiddish poet throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Gnessin took the Russian poem written by the young woman, and without Dropkin’s knowledge or permission he adapted it (with many significant changes) into the Hebrew poem that eventually became part of the text of Etzel as the creation of Dina Barabash, the female character.48 The whole affair of plagiarism and appropriation tells us much about the struggle of women writers in these years, and how difficult, and almost impossible, it was for a talented and sensitive Jewish woman like Celia Dropkin to become a writer—in Russian, Yiddish, or Hebrew. But it also sheds light on the appropriation of what is imagined to be woman’s subjectivity and feminine desire by Gnessin and by other Jewish modernist male writers.

“The Modern Lady” in the Fiction of Nomberg and Shteinberg It is important to note that the picture of femininity and the New Woman we get in Hebrew literature appears to be rather different than in the Yiddish fiction of the period. Thus, Mikhail Krutikov argues that the New Jewish Woman plays a crucial role in Yiddish fiction of the early twentieth century. He identifies a clear shift from the representation of women in the “classic” novels of the nineteenth century to the ways women are presented by Yosef Opatoshu, Sholem Asch, and Dovid Bergelson, the three major Yiddish writers of the early twentieth century. While in the writing of the three ­klassiker (“classic writers”)— Abramovitz, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz—women are assigned secondary and marginal roles, in major works of early-twentieth-century Yiddish fiction, sensitive and dynamic female characters are the main

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­ rotagonists. Women become the focus of the struggle between difp ferent forces tearing apart the fabric of traditional Jewish life. Thus, claims Krutikov, while looking for new options on the verge of their maturity, these young female protagonists seem to embody in their intricate dilemmas both the radical changes in Jewish life and the crisis of modernity.49 On the surface, the depiction of the New Jewish Woman in Yiddish fiction appears to be very different from Hebrew fiction of the period. Indeed, it is difficult to find Hebrew texts like Asch’s Meri (1911), or novels that focus on female characters like Mirl Hurvitz in Bergelson’s Noch ­Alemen (“When All Is Said and Done,” 1912) or Sorke in ­Opatoshu’s novel Aleyn (“Alone,” 1919). As we have seen, there are a few stories with a protagonist who is a New Woman.50 These exceptional attempts to present women seem to prove the rule of the relative absence of female characters in Hebrew fiction of the time. It is thus tempting to conclude that while Yiddish writers made the New Jewish Women such a central factor in their emerging modernist fiction, Hebrew writers focused exclusively, and rather obsessively, on male characters and their inner world. The fascination with the inner life of men and with masculine desire is indeed central, but a closer analysis shows that the picture is much more complicated. First, we have to take into account that the figures of New Jewish Women in Yiddish fiction are also written entirely by male authors. Here also, what is represented is the figure of the Jewish woman in the fantasy of male authors: the changing images of women from various masculine perspectives. Second, if we look at the writing of Dovid Bergelson, the most innovative modernist Yiddish fiction writer, and examine the female characters and the literary techniques he uses to represent them, we find he is not radically different from Hebrew modernists like Gnessin. A comparison of Noch Alemen with Gnessin’s Be-terem and Etzel reveals numerous lines of similarity not only in their modernist poetics but also in the way they deal with gender and especially with women characters.51 Third, we have to take into account that writers like Hersh Dovid Nomberg and Ya‘acov Shteinberg, who gave us some of the most elaborate and memorable descriptions of women protagonists in their stories, wrote and participated both in Hebrew and Yiddish fiction.

The New (Jewish) Woman

Like most stories written during the short but productive period in Hersh Dovid Nomberg’s writing career, Ha-charishi (“Be Silent”) and Mitoch shi‘amum ve-ga‘aguim (“Out of Boredom and Longing”) were written and published almost simultaneously in Hebrew and in Yiddish.52 Both stories introduce urban female figures in the city of Warsaw who are also the main protagonists and the center of narrative consciousness. Mitoch shi‘amum ve-ga‘aguim centers around a “New Woman”—or as the story calls her, a “modern lady”—the twenty-twoyear-old Lyova Issakovna Fidler, a Russian-Jewish woman who emigrated from a small town in south Russia to Warsaw. She is studying and working hard in order to become a nurse and midwife. Lyova Fidler is also a socialist activist who works together with her young female friends—both Jewish and non-Jewish—in revolutionary political movements. Apart from her study, work, and political activism, Lyova is presented as a “pleasing woman” who is “loved by everybody.” Thus, comments the narrator, it was impossible to know that she is also stricken by melancholy (the quintessential feminine illness according to the psychosexual discourse of the time), which is explained as a result of her sexual and emotional dissatisfaction. Her present life in the Big City is contrasted with the bygone days when she was a beautiful young girl in the small town. There she used to be frivolous; she loved to dress up, and was the object of erotic desire of many young men. In Warsaw, however, Lyova Fidler spends her life studying hard, working in the hospital, and reading illegal revolutionary literature. Devoid of men, Fidler’s erotic energy seems to be directed at her roommate—the Christian Russian Kratova: Fidler sat by the window, trying to read the book open before her, and Kratova stood behind her, brushing her hair, opening her hairpins and rearranging them, and in this state allowed herself to laugh out loud, which she would have been too shy to do in broad daylight [...] The two friends looked at each other and giggled.53

The relations between the two girls seem to mirror the prevalent masculine homosocial desire found in so many stories from this period (including Nomberg’s own stories, like Be-ma’on echad). But in spite of the explicit homoerotic terms used to describe the physical contact

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­ etween the two women, they are constantly dreaming about the men b that they hope to find one day. And indeed, already in the second chapter of the story, Fidler comes home and tells her Russian girlfriend that she is infatuated with a young man whom she has just met at the theater. She discovers that Dr. Weinstein is a well-to-do “bourgeois” man twelve years her senior, who lives in Warsaw with no apparent purpose or aspiration. Later, Fidler gets an invitation from Weinstein to watch a production of a Wagner opera at the Warsaw Theater. From this point on, the “love affair” between Fidler and Weinstein becomes highly volatile. While she is clearly attracted to him and enjoys his attention, she is also disturbed by something that she cannot quite figure out. She suspects that this experienced man “knew” many women before her and hides some dark secrets. On the other hand, Weinstein writes to his friend in Berlin that he met the revolutionary young Fidler and began to date her just “out of boredom.” He is also full of doubts about their relationship. The plot thickens when Weinstein’s sister-in-law discovers his relations with Fidler. Without giving much thought to his new idea, Dr. Weinstein asks his sister-in-law if she would take Fidler as a private tutor for her son Boris, and she agrees. At this point, Fidler finds herself between the old world of her girlfriends, studies, and work and the new world of Dr. Weinstein, his sister-in-law, and the theaters and cafés of Warsaw. Soon, Fidler’s obsession is directed at Weinstein’s sister-in-law, Sonya: “She felt as if her heart were filled with passion for this beautiful dark girl with the straight, chiseled nose, with those lashes on her violet eyes and her cool glance, and she was overcome with that blind hatred that women so quickly feel towards those who stand in their way—a mute, caged hatred, but burning in hidden places.”54 The story of conflicted, unfulfilled desire comes to closure with a kind of deus ex machina when a police officer finds revolutionary materials in the house of Fidler and her roommate. When the officer asks the girls who owns these socialist proclamations, Fidler intends to answer that they belong to her, but she is silent. Her Russian girlfriend Kartova gives the policeman the answer they are looking for, and is taken for investigation. Terrified by her friend’s look, Fidler attempts to confess, but it is already too late. Shaken by the experience, she is determined to

The New (Jewish) Woman

leave Warsaw. She goes to the house of Dr. Weinstein to say farewell, which prompts him to confess his love to her for the first time and ask her to marry him. Her response is that it is too late, and the story ends with a short coda, describing Dr. Weinstein living in Switzerland years later. One day, the doctor hears that Lyova Fidler was found guilty for participating in the assassination of “Colonel A.”55 A number of critics have noted what seems to be a sharp contrast between Nomberg’s passive and ineffectual male figures (like Fligelman and Yitzhak Toybkof) and his portrayal of spirited, aggressive, and erotically passionate female characters.56 Indeed, the story Mitoch shi‘amum ve-ga‘aguim presents us with the psychic world of Lyova Fidler—an independent, politically active, and passionate New Jewish Woman situated within the urban environment of Jewish Warsaw. However, Fidler’s eroticism, independence, and political activism are also presented as a potential threat that arouses deep anxieties in modern Jewish male figures like Dr. Weinstein. In this sense, she is no different from the female characters in Brenner, Gnessin, Agnon, Arieli, and Shofman. Moreover, Fidler’s eroticism and independence is presented in the story as an impasse, an impossible predicament of a woman caught between indeterminate, conflicting gender roles and images.57 ❊ Another fascinating attempt to portray the New Jewish Woman, her sexuality, and her predicament is Ya‘acov Shteinberg’s story Bashtanes (“Watermelon Fields”), which was first published within one year (1913–194) in Yiddish and Hebrew (with the title Bashtanim).58 On first impression, the story and its extensive depiction of female characters and feminine desire seems to be very different from most Hebrew stories written in this period, not only in its focus on women characters but also in its exceptional setting. Instead of the urban setting of small or large cities, the story takes place in the countryside—the remote area of Kherson, where Jews and non-Jews alike work in agriculture, growing watermelons in fields they lease from the landlords.59 Although the time in which the story takes place is never specified, the references to the men serving in the Russian army might help us to establish the story’s time frame during the

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latter part of the nineteenth or early twentieth century. It appears as if the urbane Shteinberg (who lived in Odessa, Warsaw, and Berlin before he settled down in Tel Aviv in the mid-1920s) deliberately displaced his characters to a remote agricultural area, a place where ostensibly “healthy” Jewish men and women live and love. It is tempting to see the protagonists of the story, Chana-Chaya and her daughter Feige, as female counterparts to the title character in Chaim Nachman Bialik’s Aryeh Ba‘al Guf (“Brawny Aryeh,” 1898), or even as Jewish-Ukrainian counterparts to stories of Zionist writers depicting the New Hebrew Man (and Woman) in Palestine. However, a closer examination reveals that Shteinberg was preoccupied in this story with the same concerns that most Hebrew (and Yiddish) writers of fiction in Europe were dealing with during the first decades of the twentieth century. In part because the story takes place in a kind of a “third zone”—away from the city as well as the traditional shtetl—it presents the dilemmas  of Jewish women in this period of transition very well. ChanaChaya and her daughter Feige are both new women who are better suited to assimilating into the unfamiliar agricultural environment, as well as women who continue the patterns of female occupations in traditional Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, where men were expected to study (or to be artisans), and the women to go “out” in order to provide them with livelihood. In Bashtanim the women protagonists’ place is outside the house “in the fields,” while their men inhabit the domestic sphere. However, in their search to adapt to changing conditions, men and women are implicated in each others’ needs and desires, successes and failures. Thus, the attempt of women to go “outside” and to constitute new feminine subjectivity and desire is depicted in the story as a “crisis” for men and women alike. The Jewish woman’s complex situation is articulated in the story mainly through a configuration of desire and space using the field as a physical and metaphorical organizing principle.60 The field is a “natural” space away from town, but also a “man-made” environment, limited and protected by a fence. The duality of “in” and “out” in the story is mainly the domain of the Jewish women, who are also caught between the changing borderlines between Jews and gentiles. Thus, ChanaChaya and her extroverted feminine sexuality is presented by the narra-

The New (Jewish) Woman

tor and seen by her husband (and the Jewish society around them) as a woman of “gentile features.” She is tall, fair-haired, tanned, well-built, dominant, and sensual to the point of being crude: Chana-Chaya is a woman who isn’t afraid to work and who isn’t afraid of gentile men [...] She is tall and suntanned [...] a girl of well-endowed breasts, whose face turns entirely red at any suggestive talk, and who surveys, each night before she falls asleep, her well-formed body. In the afternoons, when Chana-Chaya reclined at full length, her eyes closed, in front of her house to sun herself, anyone passing would say: only a Moldovian woman would be so brazen! The sock that Chana-Chaya had been knitting before she lay down would slip out of her hands, her two full breasts would of their own accord undo the buttons of her shirt, and their whiteness would push out into the light of the day.61

Chana-Chaya’s sexuality is explicitly related to her alleged “foreignness.” Her ample breasts and tall, built body, her receptiveness to sexual hints, her sensuality, autoeroticism, and hot temper put her in a borderline zone between Jews and gentiles. Her sexuality is also presented by the narrator through her animalistic gestures of groaning and ­lying on the ground to warm in the sun. As opposed to Chana-Chaya’s comfort with working in the fields and with her sexuality, her husband Sholem is identified exclusively with the Jewish domestic space. He works as a menaker, the assistant to a butcher who plucks the feathers of chickens. Sholem is described as a “faint man,” an “avrech with fallen shoulders”62 who came from the Hasidic town of Berdichev. He is thus totally out of place in the new agricultural environment of Kherson. Because of the incongruity between the emasculated, “faint” man and his sensual woman, the relationship between husband and wife becomes asexual and Chana-Chaya resorts to autoeroticism. Her work in the fields seems to be a natural extension of her sensuality, and she derives a physical, almost erotic pleasure from being outside in the blazing sun among the juicy watermelons. But Chana-Chaya’s complex position stems from her identity as a woman and a Jew. Unlike the Ukranian and Moldovian uninhibited femininity, Chana-Chaya’s domain—the space of the field—becomes a site of constant clashes and confrontations. In the Jewish context, her sexuality and independence render the field as the only appropriate place for her, because of her

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nature and her husband’s inability to handle her sexual desire. In the non-Jewish context, the same “outside” and the sexuality associated with it exposes her to other men’s desire and forces her to protect herself by remaining behind a fence.63 Likewise, her resort to autoeroticism (as opposed to the gentile woman’s heterosexual desire) is both a choice and a necessity. Chana-Chaya is not the only woman to complicate life in the fields, and the second half of the story focuses on her daughter, Feige. Like other stories and novels in Yiddish and Hebrew written in this period, Bashtanim dramatizes the crisis of modernity and sexuality in an intergenerational context.64 Chana-Chaya’s attempt to maintain a delicate balance between opposing demands and desires can be seen as a prelude to the deeper crisis that her daughter Feige faces as a New Jewish Woman. Feige wishes to reside both in the field and at home, but this desire poses even more difficult challenges. Feige is faced with the appearance of Mendil, a Jewish man whose masculinity and masculine desire turns him into a “threat” (in the eyes of Feige’s parents), but also as an object of Feige’s intense erotic desire. The “solution” of her mother—making the field an alternative home where she works, eats, and sleeps, and a place in which she finds autoerotic pleasure, cannot satisfy the daughter who refuses to renounce erotic desire. Interestingly enough, Feige’s desire is mediated through female homos­ocial bonding with her gentile friend Marianna.65 Marianna is married to a young man named Stefan who is not afraid to engage in sexual activity with his wife in the presence of Feige. This act of exhibitionism fuels Feige’s erotic desire, but it also exposes her to a model of sexuality that does not contradict domesticity and family life. The model of Marianna that Feige wishes to emulate is thus of a woman comfortable with her body, attracted to men and assuming the role of both a wife and a lover. Predictably, young Mendil quickly finds his way to Feige’s “field,” and they engage in intense but very short-lived sexual contact. Crossing the border from her mother’s field to Mendil’s field marks a short period of sensual bliss that is experienced by Feige as pleasure but also as a transgression of borders. Thus, Feige’s situation is fragile from the very beginning. She wants to have erotic relations with Mendil, but

The New (Jewish) Woman

since she wants to do so as a Jewish woman her desire seems to be condemned to failure. First, Mendil is about to be drafted into service in the Russian army, and as a modern Jewish man, he does not try to avoid it by becoming ill and unfit for service. Second, Mendil is not considered by Feige’s parents as a suitable match for her. Reluctant to act against accepted Jewish customs and her parents’ wish, Feige ends up repeating her mother’s choices. She marries Efraim, a “young, tall and pale avrech from Berdichev.” The temporary “solution” of Feige is to establish a nonsexual relationship with Efraim. She finds a way to assume the expected domestic femininity (with which she is quite comfortable) without renouncing her freedom, by constituting a mother– child relationship with her ill husband.66 But eventually her sexual desire overcomes her quest for domesticity. She misses the open fields of Kherson and the sensuality she associates with them, and persuades her husband to go there in order to get better and stronger. But since Feige has never been attracted to her husband, she is ambivalent toward the possibility of his overcoming the sickness. This is seen most clearly in her dreams. Feige dreams about Efraim’s renewed health and virility, but suddenly even the possibility of being exposed to his masculine desire appears to her to be threatening and violent: “She feels a prickling in all her limbs [...] Efraim laughs at her strangely and presses her chest with fingers like iron, until she wakes up with a cry of pain.”67 At this point, it seems that Feige’s femininity can exist only in relation to other women like Marianna, with whom she can feel an intimacy associated with mother–daughter relations: “Feige’s head lay on Marianna’s lap, and Marianna stroked the hair of her Jewish friend, wiping away her tears and comforting her [...] And Feige slowly gave in to Marianna’s caresses and the restfulness of the night.” Now, even Mendil (who comes to the watermelon fields when on leave from his service in the Russian army) ceases to be either a threat or an object of erotic desire. Instead, he enters the field looking for milk—expressing both his masculine desire and his need for motherly care. Within the homosocial and familial intimacy established between the two women, Mendil becomes Marianna’s imagined child and Feige’s imagined brother.68 And yet, this is not the closure of the story. Rather, it ends with a surprising

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return of a familiar scenario: the triangle of two men and a woman. The fragile triangular relations are premised on celibate sexuality that cannot be consummated: And Mendil sat next to her, asking after her husband and entering into an easy conversation with her [...] Mendil kept his promise, coming every day and faithfully keeping watch by Efraim’s bed. And at night, when the sick man had fallen asleep, Feige whispered into Mendil’s ear: “Now you may leave.” He sat with her for a long time on the porch [...] and when Mendil’s hand sometimes brushed Feige’s hand, no shiver ran through her, and her eyes looked calmly, as they always did, deep into the stillness of the night.69

This is an extraordinary ending that is open to many interpretations. How should we read Feige’s peaceful gazing into the night with the two men around her? Is it a story of success or failure? Does it mark the independence of the New Jewish Woman or her submission to forces beyond her control? Feige’s situation seems a repetition of her mother’s predicament. In order to keep their feminine freedom, both of these women had to renounce their (hetero)sexual desire and to resort to asexual relationships with men, substituted with autoeroticism or with homosocial bonds with other women. This is a compelling and unresolved situation that is figured by the “middle zones” that these women inhabit—the field and the threshold remain places of endless possibilities and endless contradictions. On the level of meta-narrative, we also need to take into account the position of Ya‘acov Shteinberg as a male writer who acts like a ventriloquist to depict the subjectivity of the New Jewish Woman. From this perspective, the act of exposing Chana-Chaya’s body (no other story in Hebrew fiction of this period presents such an explicit female sexuality with so many exposed body parts as Bashtanim) as well as each ­woman’s imagined feminine desire can be seen both as an act of literary voyeurism and a projection of masculine subjectivity upon feminine desire. Perhaps only this can explain the surprising—and yet very familiar—return of the masculine triangle of desire at the very end of a story that ostensibly focuses on women’s subjectivity and women’s desire. Even when modernist male Jewish writers like Shteinberg try and push the boundaries (as Shteinberg clearly does in Bashtanim), they often cannot

The New (Jewish) Woman

resist returning to more familiar territories in which feminine desire is presented as unsettling and threatening, as a projection of both masculine fantasies and masculine fears.

Dvora Baron and the Challenge of the (Jewish) Writing Woman In light of the enduring practice of “imagining the beloved”—of the fantasies and fears about the figure of the New Jewish Woman, which is clearly a projection of masculine imagination upon women’s subjectivity—it would be fitting to end this chapter (and the entire discussion of gender and sexuality in modernist Hebrew fiction) with a short incursion into the writing of the only woman who was part of the male-dominant Hebrew modernist fiction: Dvora Baron. I have written elsewhere about Baron’s complex (and mostly misunderstood) place within modernist Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century. In the context of the present discussion, it is important to note that in spite of the fact that Baron was situated in the new urban setting of Europe (she lived in Mariampol, Kovno, and Vilna before she emigrated to Palestine), the majority of her stories have not focused on the urban New Jewish Woman (or the New Jewish Man). Instead she returned once and again to the traditional shtetl of the Pale of Settlement in the time of its disintegration. This choice meant that writing from a female point of view within the fictional world of the shtetl enabled Baron to participate in Hebrew modernism (as well as the nascent nationalism), and at the same time to pose a subtle but powerful cultural critique of contemporary ideologies, literary practices, and conventions. Not surprisingly, this choice made Baron’s place within Hebrew modernism deeply unstable, and while she was embraced by her contemporaries (writers, editors, and critics) as the token “woman-writer,” her stories were very often not properly understood.70 However, along with the prevalence of the “old women” of the traditional shtetl, there are a number of exceptions to Baron’s avoidance of portraying figures of New Jewish Women (and Men).71 Perhaps the most interesting and the most relevant to the present discussion is a three-story cycle that Baron wrote between 1910 and 1919. The cycle

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is focused on the figure of Sender Ziv and other young and urban male and female urban figures around him. Sender Ziv has moved to the large (unnamed) city in order to pursue his education. He lives in rented rooms of widowed landladies. He cannot pass his exams or make good progress with his studies, and he is desperately trying to master Russian. The first two stories in the trilogy focus almost entirely on Sender Ziv, and do not present us with sharply drawn female characters. The young women who appear in these stories are either remote, inaccessible objects of Sender’s desire or grotesque representations of the life that might await him if he cannot pass his exams. The most fully developed female protagonist is found in the final story of the trilogy, Kitzo shel Sender Ziv (“The End of Sender Ziv,” 1919).72 The story was highly praised by Brenner, who called it an accomplished “small epic.”73 The female protagonist of the story is named Rachel Finberg, and she is no doubt reminiscent of the character of Rachel in Berdichevsky’s Urva parach, and of Rahil in Brenner’s Ba-choref, two important texts that were clearly on Baron’s mind when she wrote this story.74 In Kitzo shel Sender Ziv we meet Sender, described as a “short and thin,” balding thirty-year-old man, and Rachel Finberg, who is more or less his age. Both of them are young and unmarried “extern students” who live in the big city away from their home, family, and community. Sender Ziv desires Chana Malkin, a local governess and teacher and the daughter of his former widowed landlady, while Rachel (the “­tormented” figure) is secretly in love with Sender Ziv to which he is totally oblivious. At the same time, there is also a parallel male erotic “rival,” a tall and handsome young soldier (with his iconic moustache and phallic “thick cigar”), with whom Sender imagines Chana to be in love. This twist in the plot of the narrative definitely retains the structure of intense homosocial desire and rivalry, and at the same time subverts it by inserting a parallel feminine erotic triangle. What is fascinating in Baron’s story is that this double “erotic triangle” is presented from both Sender’s and Rachel’s point of view. Here is how the omniscient narrator describes the triangles from Rachel’s perspective: The alley where Miss Finberg lived was pervaded by a pleasant coolness and silence at night [...] Nevertheless, the memory of the sight of

The New (Jewish) Woman

the widow’s daughter never for a moment faded, and the image of her clear face always rose before her alongside his, with Sender, her friend. Sitting at night before her open window, alone, infinitely and boundlessly alone, silent and excellent tears often welled up in her eyes, tears of both melancholy and joy, at the sight of that delightful couple, bound in her imagination by thick cords of love, bound forever, for eternity, at the time that the soldier, the admirer of the widow’s daughter, stood behind them, despondent and angry, desperately sucking on his thick cigar.75

In this passage, Rachel contemplates the erotic rivalry and homosocial bonds between the vegetarian and “emasculated” Sender and the soldier, but behind this, there is the second triangle, the intense imaginary relations of identification and rivalry between her and Chana. The only direct meeting between these two erotic rivals occurs when Chana and Rachel go on vacation to a nearby resort town—Rachel with her tutorial students, Chana with the children for whom she is governess. Rachel invites Sender Ziv to join her there, tempting him to come by guaranteeing a meeting with his beloved Chana. He accepts Rachel’s offer, but his visit is short-lived and tragic—after spotting the soldier, he dies by falling off a cliff (it is never clear if it is a result of an accident or suicide). Like in other texts of modernist Hebrew fiction, the most fully articulated desire in this story is Sender’s unfulfilled passion toward Chana. Rachel’s desire toward Sender is not only unnamed, but seems to be totally subsumed and implicated in her maternal care for him. However, it is this desire that fuels the narrative. Moreover, the dominant point of view in this story (which is rendered in third-person narration) seems to be Rachel’s. When Rachel enters the story as a protagonist, she also serves as an additional omniscient observer-narrator of Sender: Rachel Finberg, the “elderly” private tutor Rachel Finberg, who had taken the exams along with Sender Ziv and had also failed by one mathematics problem, entered his room at one such twilight hour and the sight that appeared before her eyes shook her so deeply that she remained transfixed at the door and couldn’t move from the spot.76

Rachel here becomes the voyeur who gazes at Sender. She has violated his privacy and has gazed at what she is not supposed to. But Rachel

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also deliberately moves into a new room which Sender could use to gaze at her “erotic rival” Chana: The new room was much smaller than the one she used to have in the other neighborhood [...] however, the windows were large and in good shape. Through one of these windows the little garden [...] could be seen in exquisite detail, the garden with its narrow footpaths of freshly raked sand that wound their way among the flowerbeds and the governess [Chana], the governess of Starkman’s children, who was now strolling along those sandy paths.77

Indeed, Sender uses these large windows in order to spy on Chana, and his erotic desire is inflamed when he sees her strolling with her relative, the soldier, with whom he imagines she has sexual relations. How are we to read Rachel’s own voyeurism of Sender Ziv and her “misplaced” sexual desire? Rachel is clearly placed as a mediator of desire between Sender Ziv and Chana. But at the same time Rachel supplies Sender Ziv with “a room with a view”—a voyeuristic vantage point to gaze at Chana. She can now also function as a mediator between Sender Ziv and the reader. This is where the other prevalent theme of modernist Hebrew fiction—the theme of writing and erotic desire—dramatically enters the story. Now Rachel becomes the writer that Ziv can never become because “he did not have the gift of expressing himself in words.” In fact, the narrator contrasts Sender’s inability to write with the fact that “the external student Rachel Finberg [...] wrote and sent him short, beautiful letters from the summer resort every day.”78 Like Dina Barabash in Gnessin’s Etzel, Mili in Be-terem, Hava in ­Mi-saviv la-nekuda, and numerous other female characters (including Sender’s own sister in the beginning of Baron’s story), Rachel articulates her desire through letter writing. However, in Baron’s story, via her letters to Ziv, Rachel also transforms herself from a passionate lover into a writer. Whereas Ziv never moves beyond his desire for Chana, Rachel becomes the author, the writer that Ziv will never be. Thus, as Sheila Jelen has noted, at several points in the narrative, Rachel’s subjective recording of certain experiences in the form of a correspondence with Ziv becomes the text of the narrative itself.79 Most of the time, Rachel does not use her writing to express her own desire for Sender Ziv, but “displaces” it onto Sender’s yearning for Chana. The origin of

The New (Jewish) Woman

a female’s writing subjectivity and her sexual desire is rendered problematic in this paradox. Even when Chana invites Sender to join her “in the woods,” the invitation seems to be all about Sender’s ability to see Chana, hiding behind it the unspeakable feminine desire. Thus, in the fiction of Gnessin, Brenner, Nomberg, and Shteinberg, feminine desire is presented as animalistic, unruly and disturbing, a mystery that needs to be deciphered. In Baron’s story, female desire and subjectivity is unspeakable, and yet it is also the impetus, the incubator of the very act of narration. This complexity is given another articulation at the very end of the story. After Sender’s death, Rachel is presented even more dramatically as the only one who can “write” Ziv’s life in an act of commemoration. When she happens to meet Chana Malkin in the streets of the big city, Rachel imagines that her “erotic rival” tries to tell her something in a sharply drawn glance. Rachel imagines for a fleeting moment that this glance surely has to do with Sender Ziv, and that her (former) erotic rival is trying to tell her that something needs to be done with Sender’s grave. The reader finds out that Rachel was the one who saved money for the inscription that should be written on his gravestone, and Rachel imagines that Chana’s look “gives her an approval to do so.”80 Rachel wants to approach Chana and talk to her about Ziv and the new bond that may be formed now by the commemoration of his death. But then Rachel notices that Chana’s gaze was not focused on her as a person and a subject, but rather on her black hat. Rachel has been wearing this hat of mourning since Sender’s death, and the hat is very similar to Chana’s own hat—the hat that Chana wore after her own mother’s death, which used to be the object of Sender’s erotic gaze. Rachel realizes her mistake and quickly moves to the other side of the street. Thus the story ends with inscribing Rachel as the only possible “writer” of Ziv’s story and his memory, as well as with a repetition of the familiar fetishistic gaze that focuses on masks, mirrors, and substitutions—in other words, on metonymic objects of desire. As someone who never expects to have her displaced and unspeakable feminine desire fulfilled, Rachel seems to be enacting, or rather mimicking, Hebrew fiction’s more dominant trope of masculine desire, erotic gaze,

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and ­subjectivity. It seems that Baron is crafting in this story a feminine equivalent of the masculine desire prevalent in Hebrew modernist fiction, and at the same time subtly destabilizing it by revealing its gaps and points of blindness. As a woman protagonist written by Dvora Baron—a female writer highly aware of the masculine crisis of her male contemporaries—Rachel Finberg is also a female subject who provides a complex and critical perspective on the conventions that govern modernist Hebrew writing on gender, sexuality, and desire. To the extent that Rachel Finberg can be read as a New Jewish Woman, she is both a typical and an exceptional character (in the context of Baron’s writing and in modernist Hebrew fiction in general). In most of Baron’s stories, she weaves in the notion of feminine desire and subjectivity in the guise of a variety of female protagonists and narrators both from the “old” and the “new” Jewish worlds. The rabbi’s daughters, the young girls of the shtetl, the East European women who are displaced as immigrants and refugees in Egypt or in Palestine are also complex and inverted mirrors and masks of the far more prevalent young male protagonists and their imaginary objects of desire. But because Finberg is a “writer”—like Baron herself—her unspeakable desire and subjectivity is also the source of a writing subjectivity. As we have noticed, the connection between desire and writing is one of the most prevalent themes of modernist Hebrew fiction, and it does not necessarily involve the act of sublimation of desire or “sorting out” indeterminate sexual identity. Baron does a similar thing in her fiction, but the fact that the desire is of a female subject and a woman writer makes it even more complex.

❊  Coda

Dvora Baron’s participation in, and subtle subversion of, the representation of the New (Jewish) Woman is, in my reading, part and parcel of the multifaceted phenomena that I have termed “the sexual turn” in modernist Hebrew fiction. This “sexual turn,” of course, was far from unique to Hebrew literature or Jewish culture. As we have seen, it was a major aspect of the many manifestations of fin de siècle European modernism; and Hebrew writers were participating in and responding to the plethora of different, at times conflicting, phenomena that Elaine Showalter and others have described as “sexual anarchy”: the crisis of masculine identity; the attendant rise of the “New Woman” and the passions and fears associated with this figure; the obsession with androgyny; the experimentations with homoeroticism; and the effort to both expand and clarify boundaries of homosocial/­homosexual bonds. These were some of the diverse historical, philosophical, and literary currents that swept across Europe and beyond in this period. These issues were especially acute for Hebrew writers because of the added complexity of the links between this “sexual anarchy” and “the Jewish question.” The prevalent perception of the Jew as “effeminated”; the changing views of masculinity and femininity in the context of Jewish modernity and the disintegration of traditional Jewish society; the rise of Zionist and national attempts to transform Jewish sexuality and masculinity: all these were never far from the surface of Hebrew fiction (even in cases when they were not at all obvious). Modernist Hebrew writers were not trying to “solve” or bring into relief all these thorny

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and unsettling issues. Rather, they engaged them and explored them with an intense and startling determination and passion. The fictional outcomes of their engagement form one of the most striking manifestations of early-twentieth-century modernism.

Tw e l v e  Old Wine in New Flasks The Reinvention of Jewish Traditions I tell once again the old stories, and if they sound new, it is because the new already lay dormant in them when they were told for the first time. —Martin Buber, The Legend of the Baal-Shem, 1907 One often hears: this is good but it belongs to yesterday. But I say: yesterday has not yet been born. It has not really existed. —Osip Mandelstam, “On the Nature of the Word,” 1922

Precisely because of a sense of loss and a very recent and still on­going break with tradition, the modern Jewish culture that emerged in ­Europe at the turn of the twentieth century was in dire need of what David Roskies and others have called “a usable past.”1 As the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, and after a long period dominated by the ideology of the haskalah (which was ultimately a movement of an elitist minority, even though it exerted a strong influence on all writers and creators of modern Jewish culture), there was a new sense of urgency in fundamental inquiries: How do we deal with the legacy of the traditional Jewish past? What do we do with its myriad of mostly religious texts and traditions? How do we make them available and useful for new cultural purposes? There is no doubt about the centrality of the Hebrew Bible to virtually every movement and ideological strain of modern Jewish culture. The Bible endowed all brands of Jewish nationalism, and especially Zion­ism, with a mythological-historical foundation that consolidated its distinctiveness and amplified its call to return to the ancestral land.2 The Bible was also central, albeit in different ways, for the Jewish socialist movements.3 These new Jewish movements at the turn of the twentieth century continued, to some extent, the legacy of the haskalah and its emphasis on the loftiness and high cultural status of the Bible. In the realm of Hebrew literature, both for linguistic and ideological reasons, the poetry and prose written in Hebrew throughout most of the

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nineteenth century was based on the language and tropes of the Bible. The use of biblical materials also helped legitimize the then-radical use of romantic and national concepts in literary texts.4 When it comes to the multitude of texts and traditions created by the so-called rabbinic Judaism in the Jewish Diaspora—from the Tanna’im and the Amora’im in Babylonia and Palestine of late antiquity to the latter-day rabbis of eighteenth-century Europe—the modern attitude was considerably different. In contrast with the centrality and inevitability of the Bible, the texts and traditions of rabbinic Judaism were seen by many of the creators of modern Jewish literature and culture in Europe as antiquated and even obsolete. This attitude was especially pronounced toward the main corpus of traditional Judaism, which was still intimately familiar for many of the creators of modern secular Jewish culture from their childhood and youth, though it seemed to be rapidly losing its relevance. Notwithstanding this prevailing attitude, at the turn of the twentieth century certain rabbinic, mystical, and hasidic texts and traditions were still valued and deemed necessary for a modern revision and reinvention. Questions about how to understand and evaluate the texts of the Aggadah (the nonlegal part of the Talmud and Midrash), as well as the mystical and hasidic texts and traditions, suddenly became a vital concern in the attempts to create modern Jewish culture. These were the very same texts and traditions that had been marginal in the mainstream of traditional Jewish learning for the past several centuries, and were particularly despised by the rationalist and positivist-oriented haskalah. This effort to “rescue” and reinvent selected texts and traditions from oblivion and neglect was part of a distinctively modern preoccupation that emanated from a variety of different, often conflicting cultural agendas. Their concerns were typical of European and Jewish fin de siècle culture: national romanticism; the attempt of the new Jewish intelligentsia to harness the folk and “folklore” to their ideologies;5 the new interest in the world of myth and the occult; Nietzschean ideologies of “transvaluation of values”; and last but not least, symbolist, decadent, and other modernist aesthetic sensibilities.6 These new preoccupations were far from being unique to modern Jewish culture. All around Europe, national groups (especially small ones) touted their “folklore” as

The Reinvention of Jewish Traditions

part of an ideological and political agenda of national renewal.7 There was an attempt to go to the “folk,” for example, by the revolutionary narodnik intelligentsia in Russia and Poland. From a different perspective, early modernist writers and thinkers had been mining Christian (and in some cases Jewish) mythology and mystical traditions in search of distinctively modernist poetic and philosophical sources of mysticism, the occult, and “primitivism.”8 Perhaps what distinguished the modern Jewish search for “a usable past” ready for reinvention, and what endowed it with a unique sense of urgency, was the ever-present tension between a desire to break away from traditional religious Jewish identity altogether and the impulse to create a new Jewish culture that would serve as a kind of “substitute” for it. These simultaneous and conflicting hopes can be found in many of the emblematic figures of this period, including Y. L. Peretz, Chaim Nachman Bialik, and Micha Yosef Berdichevsky.9 The same people who initiated bold efforts to reorient Hebrew and Yiddish literature toward contemporary European models were also those who attempted to find ways to reinvent and recreate Jewish traditions. It is important to note that these East European Jewish writers and intellectuals were transitional figures. They were still connected to the haskalah, but they broke new ground in the post-haskalah period, namely in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century. They were transitional also in the sense that they were “suspended between two magnets”—between traditional Jewish upbringing and the new secular world.10 These were the figures who propelled Jewish literature in Hebrew and Yiddish to a new stage of artistic maturity, at the same time that their literary works were caught between different poetic, aesthetic, and philosophical trends: realism, romanticism (or “neoromanticism”), symbolism, decadence, and other strands of early modernism that exploded at the fin de siècle.11 As we shall see, Bialik, Berdichevsky, and Peretz were heavily involved in reinventing traditions in a variety of ways: as creative writers composing stories, poems, and essays that attempted to retell traditional texts in radically new ways; as “collectors” and “redactors” who selected, assembled, edited, and published texts in thoroughly modern anthologies; and as cultural critics and public intellectuals. Two areas of selective

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engagement with traditional texts and traditions emerged in this period as central: Aggadah and Hasidism. In a very broad way, Aggadah may be defined as the nonlegal material of rabbinic literature, consisting of homiletical and exegetical materials, ethical teachings, legends, sayings, prayers, and so on. More narrowly, Aggadah refers specifically to rabbinic legends and stories. Aggadah never appears as a separate and distinct book or collection of texts. Instead, aggadic texts are scattered throughout the largely ­halakhic (legal) discussions in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, as well as in many collections of Midrash spanning a number of centuries and locations. In traditional yeshiva study, the focus was on ­Halakha, and there was no need for a systematic or separate study of the aggadic materials. German-Jewish scholars of the nineteenth-­century Wissenschaft des Judentums, like Leopold Zunz and Zacharias ­Frankel, were interested in Aggadah as part of their historical-­philological scholarly inquiries into ancient Judaism, but they were hardly interested in these texts as a possible source of new Jewish literature and culture.12 The writers of the haskalah were not particularly interested in the Aggadah either, mainly because of their emphasis on pure biblical style. Besides, for the maskilim, Aggadah was too strongly associated with the late rabbinic culture against which they were fighting. Bialik was engaged with rabbinic Aggadah in many ways throughout his creative life. There is some evidence that Aggadah had enchanted the young Bialik since his days as a student in Zhitomir, and he began writing about Aggadah and using aggadic texts in some of the first poems he wrote and published in the early 1890s.13 But it was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that this affection turned into a major preoccupation, even obsession. Bialik then began to devote a remarkable amount of attention and labor to the task of editing several ambitious anthologies of ancient Jewish texts. The most impressive and well known of these projects was the monumental anthology Sefer Haaggadah, which he undertook together with Yeoshua Ch. Ravnitzky during the years 1906–1910.14 To a certain extent, Bialik’s interest in anthologies of Aggadah was in line with the ideology of cultural Zionism associated with Ahad Ha‘am.

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Indeed, in many respects, Bialik was Ahad Ha‘am’s loyal disciple, especially in questions of the direction and the shape of modern Jewish culture.15 From this concern grew the idea of the kinus (ingathering) that occupied Bialik from the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of his life.16 Kinus was the name that Bialik gave to the enterprise of “ingathering” important works of the Jewish past that appeared destined to be forgotten in the modern world. They were to be preserved and to reenter the bloodstream of modern Jewish culture by collecting them into well-structured and properly conceived anthologies.17 As Adam Rubin has recently shown, Bialik endeavored to imbue his project with “the sanctity of Torah” by heavily borrowing from the vocabulary of Jewish religious tradition in order to describe it.18 He seemed confident that he could create a “new Talmud” to replace the old one. In 1913, Bialik went so far as to claim: If we want to restore to our literature some of its vitality and revive its influence on the people [...] it is our responsibility to once again create a new national kinus [...] of the best Hebrew literature from all historical periods [...] [W]e are concerned and anxious about what little wealth we have in our possession lest it be lost because of paucity and dispersion [...] “[A] time to gather”—this is the dictate of the hour.19

Bialik insisted that in order to salvage these texts for the next generations, a radical process of selection and reinvention must occur: “In order to build a new synagogue the old one must be destroyed.”20 In a sense, the revolution that Bialik and others imagined had to be double: a transformation of religious texts into secular literature, and then a transformation of secular literature back into “the sacred realm” of the national. The result of this twofold process would be the product of what Bialik called the “nation’s collective genius,” or ruach hau’ma (the spirit of the nation). All these concerns are clearly evident in Sefer Ha-aggadah, and in a condensed form in the essay Le-kinusa shel ha-aggadah (“The Ingathering of Aggadah,” 1908), which eventually became the introduction to the first volume of the published anthology.21 In this highly suggestive essay, Bialik uses a number of images to articulate the motivation and methodology of the anthology. The main one is an architectural

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metaphor describing different kinds of buildings; what was crucial for ­Bialik was to create a new structural and compositional arrangement for these texts.22 He maintained that Jewish writers and readers no longer had easy access to the texts of the Aggadah because they were “ruins” that were “buried in the graveyards” of rabbinic legalism and the convoluted rabbinic commentaries and homilies.23 Bialik thus describes his task as a compiler, and his job to create a transformation of the “messy,” indiscernible aggadic material “buried” in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds and in various midrashic works. Instead, ­Aggadah should be a magnificent palatial edifice, “the permanent dwelling place for the living spirit and soul of the nation.” If ­Aggadah turns into a museum, he warns, instead of being a vital source of sustenance, it will remain an “abandoned ruin.”24 This perspective clearly constitutes not only Bialik’s conception of his role as compiler but also his understanding of the very nature of rabbinic Aggadah, the fragments of rabbinic texts as “the principal literary form of the Jewish people.”25 Bialik defended the idea that in order to recognize the aesthetic and literary qualities of Aggadah, it had to be “redeemed” from the religious and studious atmosphere of the traditional house of study, the cheyder and yeshiva.26 Scholars of Midrash and Aggadah like Yosef Heineman, Ephraim E. Urbach, and David Stern have shown that the act of selection and rearrangement of aggadic material came at a considerable price.27 Bialik was troubled by many elements of the Aggadah as it had been preserved for centuries in the Talmuds and the various collections of Midrash. What disturbed him was what he perceived as the fragmentation of Aggadah, and the fact that it was impossible to find large-scale epic narratives in rabbinic literature. Bialik seemed to believe (without much historical evidence) that in the distant past Aggadah was more epic in nature, and that the process of fragmentation occurred due to the nature of its dissemination and the corruption of its materials. He strove to correct this “historical accident” not by philological study, but through a kind of “creative restoration.”28 Another feature of the Aggadah that disturbed Bialik was that most of the aggadic texts were written in ­Aramaic. He and Ravnitzky translated all Aramaic texts into a homogeneous, synthetic Hebrew.29

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Even more significantly, Bialik and Ravnitzky edited and compiled the narratives so as to divorce them from their original homiletical and exegetical setting. Instead they created a new arrangement of the material, which is historical, thematic, and literary. They crafted a new version by subjectively selecting aggadot—the individual pieces that make up Aggadah as a whole—giving precedence to the Babylonian Talmud because it was more commonly used by the “folk.” They then wove these individual pieces together into a coherent narrative. In form, the narratives of Sefer Ha-aggadah looked nothing like a passage of Midrash, and they had little in common with the biblical text. This new arrangement produced unity and narrative closure, but it was entirely the creation of the compilers, aimed at molding Aggadah into something like their idea of literature.30 Anyone who reads Aggadah in its original context in the Talmud and Midrash knows that, to a large extent, the essence of this kind of literature is its relation to the biblical text on which it comments and was built. Most of the Aggadah’s narratives and dicta were not related for their own sake but rather as interpretations of the Bible. Bialik, however, thought that “Aggadah has a bad tendency [...] to employ the Biblical text as a prooftext.” He maintained that “the verse is a distraction; it stands between us and the Aggadah.”31 Moreover, many aggadot in the Talmud and Midrash were part of homilies (whether real sermons or literary representations of homilies). Other parts of Aggadah appear in the context of debates and discussions that are of a legal nature. All these elements, though they are the essence of rabbinic literature, invoked for Bialik the stifling environment of the yeshiva or beit midrash (“house of study”). Despite all these dramatic changes he was making, Bialik felt that he and Ravnitzky were not only faithful to Aggadah, but were actually “restoring to it something of its original glory.” This is mainly because Bialik thought that Sefer Ha-aggadah would become a “new Talmud” for the new generation of Hebrew readers and writers, and would be a major building block of the language itself as well as the regeneration of a new national Hebrew culture.32 ❊

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More or less contemporary with Bialik’s project, Berdichevsky became engaged in a parallel task of collecting and presenting aggadic materials. Although they were active in the same years (1890–1920), Bialik and Berdichevsky were different from each other personally, poetically, and ideologically. If Bialik was hailed as the “national poet,” and was (at least ideologically) a loyal disciple of Ahad Ha‘am, Berdichevsky was the enfant terrible of Hebrew literature and culture at the turn of the century. As mentioned before, Berdichevsky was a pioneer of modernist Hebrew fiction, and the influence of the stories and novellas he published in 1900 was immense. Berdichevsky had also become prominent among Jewish writers and intellectuals, especially after his famous attacks on Ahad Ha‘am’s programmatic policies of cultivating a distinctive modern Jewish culture.33 Creating modern Hebrew and Jewish culture required, according to Berdichevsky, a radical rethinking of the relationship between Jewishness and European models of literature: When we limit our circle in the name of Judaism [...] we split life into two branches, ours and what is around us; [in so doing] we expand the internal split in the heart of our youth, who even without this, experience a constant war in their hearts between the beauty of Japheth and the tents of Shem [...] You come to repair the ruptures but the waters of Ha-shiloah will tear the heart of every man in Israel into two separate parts: a Jewish part and a humanist part.34

In fact, what characterized Berdichevsky’s entire literary and intellectual career was exactly this kera she-balev (“tear in the heart”) against which he was warning Ahad Ha‘am. Avner Holtzman describes the trajectory of Berdichevsky’s life and work between 1887 and 1902 as a complex and circuitous path from a maskil torani (“a maskil critic of Torah”) to a “revolutionary literary figure.”35 The mature Berdichevsky, who cast a spell on young modernist writers like Brenner, Gnessin, Shofman, and Agnon, recognized that he would not be able to heal this rupture or synthesize the conflicting realms in his personality, but this “tear in the heart” was precisely the source of his creativity.36 This is clearly visible when we examine Berdichevsky’s major efforts to write autobiographical stories and novels, which seemed to pull him even more strongly toward the texts and the legacy of Agga-

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dah and Hasidism, and in the process toward creative, radical reinventions of these traditions. Berdichevsky was engaged in collecting and rewriting anthologies and compilations of Agaddah and Jewish folklore for the last twentyfive years of his life. He collected and published (in Hebrew as well as in German translation) several anthologies, including his first major collection of aggadot under the title Me-otzar Ha-aggadah (“From the Treasure of Aggadah,” 1913).37 This collection was later expanded to include more than 800 texts, and was published under the title ­Tzfunot ve-aggadot in two volumes in Leipzig in 1924.38 This book is not strictly a collection or anthology like Sefer Ha-aggadah, but more of an adaptation—a creative reworking that Berdichevsky wrote as his own creation, using numerous sources: legends and tales from Genesis to the end of the talmudic period, as well as from the post-talmudic, medieval, and early modern periods. Berdichevsky also collected for almost twenty years a huge amount of texts and sources of Aggadah for a major anthology similar in scope and structure to Bialik’s Sefer ­Ha-aggadah, but very different in terms of sources and style. Berdichevsky was not able to publish this ambitious anthology during his lifetime, although he planned to do it with the title Sefer Ha-ma’asiyot (“The Book of Tales”). The outcome of this huge effort was Mi-mekor Yisrael (“From the Source of Israel”), which was posthumously published by ­Berdichevsky’s son. There are many important differences between Bialik’s and Berdichevsky’s projects and their approaches. Berdichevsky took much more freedom than Bialik in his endeavor to collect and present aggadot to the modern reader, both in his attempt to “rework” aggadot as a creative writer, and in his effort to collect them and record them “in the original.” The main point of difference in his approach was that Berdichevsky was interested in recovering Aggadah as folklore, and focused strictly on what he considered folkloric narrative material. 39 Unlike Bialik, Berdichevsky understood folklore in a similar way to most scholars and collectors of folklore, especially in Central Europe and Germany, where he lived since 1890. The result was that Berdichevsky included in his anthologies and in his creative rewriting of Aggadah a large amount of material from texts other than the classic

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rabbinic corpus. Many sources Berdichevsky employed were “apocryphal” texts from outside the canon and the mainstream of the rabbinic culture of the late antiquity, medieval, and early modern periods. He considered works such as the narratives of the Samaritans and the Karaites—though deemed heretical by the rabbis—to be legitimate aggadic material. Berdichevsky viewed Jewish society and thought not as a cohesive, integrated social and philosophical system but rather as an arena of conflicting forces and tendencies. He rejected what he considered to be the religious synthesis constructed and sanctioned by the rabbis, and instead wanted to present the messy multiplicity of Judaism as fully and profoundly as possible. As Dan Ben Amos has asserted, Berdichevsky’s approach was that any book which purports “to present segments of ancient literature in its own style must rely to a certain extent on the differences of the periods and generations, and could not fulfill its goal completely if it brings everything into a single category.”40 On the other hand, Berdichevsky did not include in his anthologies numerous talmudic and midrashic materials that were considered part of Aggadah, but did not fall into his definition of folktale.41 Bialik used the term “folklore” in a very different way, because for him it was the literary essence of what “the spirit of the nation” created. These differences were not only a matter of method and historical approach but also part of an ideology. Zipora Kagan’s analysis shows that Berdichevsky approached his collections and anthologies both as a philosopher of history and as a creative writer. He would either rewrite them in his own style, or collect different versions of stories and traditions and assemble them in a way he deemed fit in order to create a literary genre with both historical and philosophical dimensions.42 This diffusing rather than unifying approach also marked Berdichevsky’s conception of the anthologies. In his introduction to Me-otzar Ha-aggadah, he writes that his intention was to create not a whole book, made according to one mold or one overarching design [...] but a certain collection of Aggadot that were chosen and written in different times and different contexts [...] The redactor did not have a specific goal to create a unified book of Aggadah [...] The Hebrews did not have one single literature, with one spirit that was

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given by one shepherd, but a variety of fragments of literature, that were born and developed in different periods, in different places and under different spiritual conditions.43

Here and in other introductions and texts written around this period, Berdichevsky makes a point of distinction between his work and Bialik and Ravnitzky’s Sefer Ha-aggadah. Indeed, whereas Bialik was striving for unity and harmony in his editing, Berdichevsky was seeking diversity and heterogeneity. Consequently, the ways in which Berdichevsky retells the Aggadah, as well as his ways of collecting and creating anthologies, are different from Bialik. In Me-otzar Ha-aggadah he constructs a continuous narrative, as opposed to using short and fragmented stories and midrashim strung together with aphorisms and parables. In Mi-mekor Yisrael, Berdichevsky often presented different versions of the same narrative side by side, to exhibit the multiplicity of these texts. In hindsight, despite these very significant differences, Berdichevsky’s literary and intellectual project was, just like Bialik’s, driven by his very modern aspirations and modernist cultural surroundings. Like Bialik, Berdichevsky wished to explore what he perceived as the psychological and social forces that generated the “national spirit of the folk,” but for him that meant the spirit which was not subjugated to the pressures of “normative Judaism.” Hence, in spite of the clear ideological and methodological differences, there is something similar in Bialik’s and Berdichevsky’s rebellious quest for a modern conception of Jewishness, which they hoped the new collections would enable or even generate. Needless to say, Bialik and Berdichevsky (as well as others involved in anthologies) were well versed in the textual world of rabbinic and other traditional Jewish texts. Like the Jewish Russian modernist writer Osip Mandelstam and numerous other European modernists who were engaged in this period in the “modernist creation of tradition,” they were very aware of the radical nature of their “reinvention of tradition.”44 Nevertheless, they believed they were not inventing but preserving, not breaking but building, even restoring (to use Mandelstam’s words quoted in the epigraph) a “yesterday” that “has not yet been born.”45

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Standing Before the Bookcase Bialik and Berdichevsky’s reinvention of those traditions at the heart of the Jewish religious past was meant, in more than one sense, to serve as a substitute for religious traditions, or what Gadamer has called a “secular savior” for the new era. But this cultural and literary feat did not spare either Bialik or Berdichevsky from the anguish and self-doubts about  the meaning and impact of this act of reinvention. When articulating the necessity of ingathering the Aggadah and recreating it in modern anthologies like Sefer Ha-aggadah and Me-otzar Ha-aggadah, their tone was confident, even triumphant. The immediate success and popularity of Sefer Ha-aggadah seemed to support this sense of accomplishment. Sefer Ha-aggadah indeed quickly became one of the most popular Hebrew books ever published. Tens of thousands of copies were sold to the Hebrew-reading public, and it was used as a textbook in Jewish schools of every ideological persuasion.46 But in reading ­Bialik’s poetry and Berdichevsky’s fiction one discovers deep doubts and painful, even tragic awareness of the impossibility of achieving what they advocated. In their literary works, we can see the complex dialectics between modernity and tradition, between the religious texts of the past and what Gadamer called the “standpoint of art,” and, perhaps most important, between loss of faith and the search for the “sacred.” In Bialik’s case, the awareness of the dialectical nature of this project can be best seen in several poems that Bialik wrote during the course of his life, which touch on the Aggadah, the Talmud, and the world of traditional yeshiva study.47 The most interesting and revealing of these poems is Lifnei aron ha-sefarim (“Before the Bookcase”), which was written and published by Bialik in 1910, close to the completion of Sefer Ha-aggadah, and just before the publication of its last volume in 1911. In this poem, Bialik is far from celebrating the great achievement of the publication of his anthology. On the contrary, his often celebratory mood is replaced by a ruthless sense of disappointment and failure. ­Bialik felt not only that the attempt to find personal happiness and consolation in the traditional Jewish books was mistaken and bound to fail but also that it was wrong to project his own fantasies on these

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books and the religious Jewish tradition they represented. Bialik is here coming to terms with the fact that these “aging, elderly” books always promised and could promise only one thing—the values and traditions of religious Judaism: I look, I see—and I do not recognize you, old folk, from within your letters won’t gaze any longer to the depths of my soul-opened eyes that stir in a forgotten grave in the distance ... has my eye dimmed or my ear grown faint? Or are you decay, you eternal dead with no survivor in the land of life.48

What, then, did Bialik come away with after working so intensely in “the graveyards of the nation, and the ruins of the spirit”? According to the poem, he found nothing but the “dagger” and “dust” that those who engage in “burial” and in “archeological digs” find. By his own poetic account, Bialik attempted to revive Aggadah as part of modern, secular literature and culture, but he failed and instead accomplished something akin to the scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentum, who embarked on a mission of giving Judaism “a proper burial”: and nothing remains with me and nothing is saved apart from this spade that cleaves to my hand and this ancient dust grooved in my fingers— if not poorer and emptier than I was to the glory of the night I’ll not spread my hands [...] 49

As Dan Miron has claimed in his study of this poem, this sense of failure was to a certain degree due to Bialik’s sense that the more attention he gave to Sefer Ha-aggadah and the entire project of kinus, the less he wrote poetry. But this does not account for the larger issue with which Bialik struggled all of his life. The sense of failure is to a large degree a result of a conflicted ambivalence and a painful, tragic realization that it was impossible to transform religious Jewish texts and traditions. In order to produce the desired new “secular” Hebrew culture, there was a need to go deeper and deeper into the religious system and its language, and the transformation was never as successful or complete.50

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Bialik realized this futility, and he gave his sense of simultaneous hope and disappointment, successes and failure, an astonishingly honest expression in his poetry.51 Avner Holtzman and other scholars of Berdichevsky have shown that in his entire writing career—through his essays and his stories— one can detect similar dialectical tension.52 Marcus Moseley describes Berdichevsky’s entire literary and intellectual career not only as a synchronic “tear” or “chasm” but rather as a kind of pendulum motion between two poles. In his search for literary expression and at different key points in his literary career, the further Berdichevsky is driven away from Jewish tradition, the more he seems to be drawn back to a reexamination of traditional Jewish texts. Moseley further suggests that Berdichevsky’s intense anthological activity may have been a displacement of the strong autobiographical impulse of his early years, as well as a strategy to reconcile the individual with the collective. In other words, he projects his own “tear in the heart” onto the history and mythology of Judaism, which becomes understood by Berdichevsky as a constant play between normative and repressed forces.53 Similar pendulum shifts underlie emblematic stories of Berdichevsky’s like Para aduma (“The Red Heifer,” 1906) in which three thematic and structural layers intermingle: the autobiographic, the realistic, and the mythical infrastructure, which is revealed through antinomian elements in the plot and through numerous intertextual references to ancient texts and traditions that Berdichevsky was collecting in his anthological projects.54

Literary Reinventions of Hasidism The other significant domain of Jewish texts and traditions that occupied Berdichevsky—as well as Peretz, Hillel Zeitlin, Martin Buber,55 and other modern Jewish writers and intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century—was Hasidism. Compared with classic or medieval Aggadah, hasidic texts and traditions were much closer in time and place. In fact, hasidic texts were created and published throughout the nineteenth century, but for the maskilim these texts were hardly seen as a viable source of modern, secular Jewish culture. On the contrary,

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the enormous popularity of many hasidic rabbis in East European Jewish society made Hasidism one of the main targets against which the maskilim fought. In the first half of the nineteenth century, maskilic writers like Yosef Perl, Yitzhak Erter, and Isaac Baer Levinsohn exploited hasidic texts mostly as a source of parody and satirical works.56 Toward the end of the century, however, a gradual change occurred. First came books like Eliezer Zweifel’s Shalom al Israel (“Peace upon Israel,” 1868–1873), which defended Hasidism as a legitimate trend within Jewish culture that could be compatible with the aims of the haskalah.57 In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a number of highly important Jewish writers and intellectuals began to value Hasidism and engage with it seriously in their work. The historian Simon Dubnov wrote his first study of Hasidism, which was published in the Russian-Jewish newspaper Voskhod between 1888 and 1891. Dubnov argued that the triumph of mysticism in Jewish life, which developed into Hasidism, had to be understood in historical terms as a reaction to the destruction of Jewish life in the time of the infamous Khmelnitzky pogroms (1648– 1649). Thus, he was seeking to integrate mysticism and Hasidism into the course of a national Jewish history in Eastern Europe.58 Dubnov, and other Russian-Jewish historians who integrated Hasidism into Jewish history, were clearly influenced by the populist Russian narodnitzstvo movement and its notions of “turning to the folk.” From this perspective, Hasidism was not seen as a religious mystical system of ideas and traditions, but rather as a populist movement that democratized Jewish institutions and gave voice to the masses.59 At the turn of the twentieth century, the nature and scope of writerly interest in Hasidism became very different. Important Hebrew and Yiddish writers were preoccupied with Hasidism for very different reasons than late maskilim or historians like Simon Dubnov. These early modernists (or proto-modernists) dealt with Hasidism in many different ways: composing “neo-hasidic” stories, collecting hasidic tales and traditions, and writing essays about Hasidism and its place in Judaism.60 It is not hard to fathom why the central concepts of Hasidism would be attractive to these creators of modern Jewish culture and literature, especially when they were looking for symbolist and neoromantic elements within Jewish texts, and for alternative paths to rabbinic or

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“normative” Judaism. Certain elements like the idea of dvekut (cleaving to God) or that of the tzadik (spiritual leader), the immanent divine presence in every aspect of existence, and the emphasis on enthusiastic worship versus the more studious and bookish Torah study lent themselves to the creation of a thoroughly modern and radical reinvention of tradition. It was possible to portray Hasidism as a humanistic, philosophical movement that rejoiced in worship of god, and at the same time as a force within Judaism that connected with the mystical and the antinomian. Another important reason for the attraction of Hasidism was the centrality of narrative and storytelling in the movement’s textual manifestations—especially tales of the Ba‘al Shem Tov (Rabbi ­Yisroel Ben Eliezer, the founder of the hasidic movement) as recorded in Shivche ha-besht (“In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem Tov,” 1815), and the tales of R. Nachman of Bratzlav collected and published by his student, Nathan Steinhartz (R. Nathan of Nemirov). These hasidic stories inspired a number of modern Jewish writers to employ the power of storytelling and harness the mystical elements of religious and existential quests for their modern purposes. We must acknowledge, however, that as much as they revived interest in Hasidism and hasidic texts, the neo- or pseudo-hasidic tales that writers like Berdichevsky and Peretz recreated demonstrate how selective, revisionist, and radical they were. Compared with his engagement with Aggadah, Berdichevsky’s attempts to collect and rewrite hasidic texts were much more important in his emergence as an early modernist, and exhibit even stronger struggles with what he called the “tear in the heart.” Berdichevsky was a scion of an important hasidic family and was born in the town of Medzhybizh in Podolia, the place of residence of the Ba‘al Shem Tov and the birthplace of R. Nachman of Bratzlav. Berdichevsky’s knowledge of hasidic traditions and texts was intimate, but since his youth, he moved very far from this realm. First the young Micha Yosef moved to study at the exceptionally “modern” Lithuanian yeshiva in ­Volozhin, which was followed by a brief visit to Odessa. He went on to formal academic studies at universities in Germany and Switzerland (1891– 1896), where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, writing his dissertation on ethics and aesthetics. The appreciation of neoromanticism and symbolism, coupled with a Nietzschean revolt of shinuy arachim (“trans-

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valuation of values”), found its way into Berdichevsky’s writings about Hasidism in various guises. Berdichevsky’s engagement with Hasidism encompassed various realms: an “academic” study of a scholar of Judaism, a longing to recreate the legendary world of the hasidic masters and to give a narrative voice to the hasidic experience of the last generations, and an attempt to write autobiographical fiction permeated with a hasidic spirit. The most important and well-known work in which Berdichevsky engaged with Hasidism was the book Sefer Hasidim (“The Book of Hasidim”). Berdichevsky had already composed some of the texts that became Sefer Hasidim in 1894, when he was a student in Berlin. The book was then completed and published six years later. It is quite clear that writing the stories and essays of Sefer Hasidim marked an important turning point in Berdichevsky’s writing career. Berdichevsky himself perceived the main innovation of Sefer Hasidim in its poetics rather than its scholarly aspects. He asserted in a letter that in writing Sefer Hasidim he reached a “transition between his essayist and poetic writing.”61 He made a number of attempts to write fiction before 1894 but they rarely reached beyond the models of haskalah which he imitated.62 Only in Sefer Hasidim is Berdichevsky able to reach an adequate balance between the narrative, lyrical, and essayist elements of his writing. This transition was a result of changes in the intellectual and literary atmosphere in which Berdichevsky was immersed during the last years of the nineteenth century, and offers an interesting insight into the complex dynamics of the emergence of Hebrew modernism.63 When Berdichevsky was still living and working in the Russian Empire (as well as during his early years in Breslau), he read and was very interested in classicist German and Russian literature and the great French and Russian realist novels, as well as the philosophy of Kant. When he moved to Berlin, he was exposed for the first time to the writing of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the literature of Ibsen, Przybyszewski, and other symbolist and early modernist writers. This change from Kant to Nietzsche and from realist to symbolist literature facilitated the transition from objectivism to subjectivity, and from maskilic rationalism to an expressive style that gives precedence to experiential and fantastic elements.64 More or less around the time that he was conceptualizing

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a large autobiographical novel in German, Berdichevsky was working on the essay Nishmat Hasidim (“The Soul of Hasidim”) that eventually became the introduction to Sefer Hasidim.65 In this essay, which can be seen as a lyrical ode to Hasidism, Berdichevsky seamlessly combines his own autobiography with an attempt to explicate the nature and the allure of Hasidism as a religious movement and “an alternative force” in historical Judaism. The text is typical of the genre of the reshima (“notes”), which was instrumental at the turn of the century in blurring the lines between a narrative and lyrical (or even scholarly) essay, and between realism and symbolism.66 Nishmat Hasidim, with its hasidic subtitle—Histaklut (“Introspection”)—starts and ends in a highly personal tone about the childhood of the speaker: Like a pleasant ray of light that appears from those fine days when I was still a boy, at one with myself and with my God, and I walked the paths of life with his pious ones—and life was full of a sublime majesty from the world of truth; like a rainbow adorning a cloudy day, so the radiance permeated and broke through and lit up the darkness of the abyss separating me, with my many transgressions, from my Father in heaven [...] And here the holy ones of this life, the pious, punctilious ones, they and their radiance and their light now come and place themselves before my mind’s eye, hosts and hosts of them, and all are enveloped in a divine aura; the luminosity of heaven. And they showed me the shadows of heaven in the spring of my youth.67

The speaker singles out one childhood memory in which the people in the town and nature itself (the sky, moon, and stars) enchanted him, but his father told him to stay and listen to the words of the hasidic rabbis. As a child, he could sense but not understand the power of these hasidic masters. The autobiographical speaker sketches out the process in which in his youth he rejected his hasidic upbringing because it seemed to him “opposed to life.” Like many in his generation, he embraced the haskalah and “cut the shoots.” Eventually, as an adult looking backward, he realizes that Hasidism offered something else: “I look longingly to the beautiful period of the days of Hasidism, for in that exalted period I find life lived from the depths of the heart, a poetic and lofty life—a life of Life.68

The Reinvention of Jewish Traditions

In this essay, Berdichevsky became the first figure in Hebrew literature who attempted to define the experiential side of Hasidism. He found in it three interrelated characteristics: Hasidism has three dimensions: fervor, devotion, and holiness; the three come together as one in the Hasid. Through fervor his soul is strengthened and becomes turbulent, its swells grow larger and more powerful. Through this he traverses his boundaries and becomes more than what he is [...] Devotion is the removal of the boundary that separates his world from the world outside him [...] the senses and the emotions are suppressed to some extent and he, the Hasid, has a taste of eternal time [...] There is no thought and no knowledge, no intention and no desire, all is one [...] But via the third, holiness, he comprehends his inner truth, his purity, he is sanctified [...] and all that is profane within him is purified and distilled—and he becomes a pure thing, a thing itself.69

Berdichevsky clearly ignores here theology and focuses on the experiential. In his conception of Hasidism, even yichud (“mystical union”) is the act of removing borders between man and the world. It has little to do with the knowledge of truth—religious or otherwise. Holiness enables a person to reach the mysteries of his own “authentic” and “pure” inner being, rather than the metaphysical world. 70 Religious ecstasy is seen not as a static state but as a “potent storm.” According to Berdichevsky in this essay, Hasidism is not necessarily a creation of the “folk,” but rather it is a collection of religious “masterpieces” that express spiritual and aesthetic experiences only very few masters can create. The hasidic master is described as “a foreign element” within traditional Jewish society, as a “man with new language and new spirit.” If such a master was presented to “men from the old breed of Judaism sitting with their old prayer shawls and crying,” he would appear like a man “standing upright, with the spirit of life in him, a spirit which penetrates the world open before him in all its breadth and depth [...] he would be like a king among troops, like a man with the wreath of God on his head among those who sit in darkness.”71 Berdichevsky presents here the possibility of a highly selective reconciliation with Hasidism. He identifies himself with the founder of

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the hasidic movement, the Ba‘al Shem Tov, and his quest for mystical ascent: I, too, after all my spiritual torments and searching, [...] see the light between the cracks [...] in the rays of light beckoning me from the distance, from the days when the soul of the Hasidim was upon the earth [...] banishing the shades that separated me from myself, from my ­Father in heaven.72

The autobiographical elements in Nishmat Hasidim are clear. Yitzhak Bakon highlights the affinities between the descriptions of mystical visions and revelations in the essay and in Berdichevsky’s novellas and stories like Machanaym, Urva parach, and Ben ha-patish ve-hasadan.73 Thus, Nishmat Hasidim is both an attempt of Berdichevsky to come to terms with Hasidism as a movement and mystical force in Judaism and an important juncture in the development of his poetics. Sefer Hasidim is divided into three parts—Aggadot (Tales), Partzufim (Portraits), and Chezyonot (Visions)—each of which expands on certain elements expressed in the introductory essay, and each of which anticipates different aspects of the poetics that Berdichevsky would develop later in his career.74 The first part is composed of eight stories linked together to tell the dramatic narrative of the life of the Besht. Berdichevsky used here the original materials from Shivche ha-besht (“In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem-Tov,” published in 1815), but he carefully chose eight stories out of several hundred and created a modern “biography” or hagiography of the Besht, from the tribulations of the Besht’s father and the birth of the tzadik until his death and ascent to heaven. Scholars like Shmuel Werses, Avner Holtzman, and David Jacobson have shown in their analyses of these compact stories that Berdichevsky does not try to achieve any realistic verisimilitude or “fill in the gaps” in the story of the life of the founder of Hasidism. In his rewriting of hasidic tales, Berdichevsky instead attempts to portray the parallels between the story of the Besht and his own life story. He stresses important events and motifs that his autobiography shared with the life story of the Besht (particularly the separation of his father from a loved wife, the death of his mother in his childhood, and his departure from his father’s house). He also highlights and expands upon the mythical, ecstatic, and fantastical elements in these tales.75

The Reinvention of Jewish Traditions

In the first story, Shne olamot (“Two Worlds”),76 Berdichevsky presents the well-known story about Eliezer, the father of the Besht, who lived “far away from the men of the city in a small inn,” and later was taken as a captive and sold into slavery, where he came to serve one of the king’s ministers. During his captivity, Eliezer manages to maintain his hidden identity as a Jew and eventually he is appointed to be advisor to the king of the land. Apparently because of his loyalty to the God of Israel (even when the king gives him a beautiful gentile woman, he doesn’t touch her, nor does he eat forbidden food), he is rewarded by being allowed to return home; though his wife is now in old age, she soon gives birth to the boy who would become the Ba‘al Shem Tov. Although Berdichevsky uses the structure and the basic plot line of the familiar hasidic story from Shivche ha-besht, he inserts many new elements and presents the story in a new way. For example, the narrator stresses that Eliezer’s house is near the river where the “ships were loaded with the sheep and the wolves of mankind” of which Eliezer and his wife seem to be totally unaware. They also hold in the inn a servant who is “part slave and part free.”77 As David Jacobson maintains, these shadowy elements hint that despite or because of their great piety, Eliezer and his wife are isolated and unable to grasp the realities of human existence around them.78 Likewise, together with Eliezer’s piety and the fact that he preserves his “Hebrew” identity even under the most difficult conditions, there are hints of discord within this dual identity. Eliezer, for example, wears a sackcloth “under his purple garment,” implying that he hides his true identity. Berdichevsky seems to suggest that only Eliezer’s son, Israel, can transcend these dichotomies because he can hear in everything around him how “life is speaking [...] in the heavens above and the earth below, in the quiet of the hills, and the waves of the sea, and in the recesses of his heart—he could hear the sound of all living things.” In another story in this cycle, Ner la-ma’or (“A Candle for Light”), Berdichevsky relies on a well-known tale in Shivche ha-besht, in order to present the background of the appearance of the tzadik and the source of his mystical knowledge.79 Here a man known as “Reb Adam” finds scrolls of a manuscript in a cave and is decreed by God to give them to a certain boy, Israel, son of Eliezer. Israel is a simple steward in the house

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of study, but R. Adam’s son moves to Akop and gets to know Israel. By trial and error, he discovers that the boy is indeed the hidden tzadik. Compared with the original version in Shivche ha-besht, Berdichevsky retells the story with very few realistic details. On the other hand, the scene of finding the scrolls in the cave is developed in Berdichevsky’s story into a long and ecstatic description: Late afternoon. The holy one and the world alone [...] All is silent, the rocks, too, lie hushed, melancholy swathes them [...] And suddenly black clouds come, one column after another, thunder and lightning, the earth nearly splits from their sound. All are frightened, all shake in terror. Boulders are torn to pieces and letters fly through the air—­ indeed there is God in this place. The holy one falls on his face; his heart thrills to see the Torah’s secrets revealed, in his lap.80

This kind of “ecstatic storm” that brings about divine revelation is typical of the way Berdichevsky reconceives the tales. He also changes the nature of the search of the young Besht. In his version, the Besht attempts to perform a miracle of “getting the candle to shine an eternal light.” But then Satan intervenes and the candle burns the house and the entire city as well as the son of Reb Adam. These dark tones are considerably different from the story of the Besht as a miracle-worker in Shivche ha-besht. The Besht as refracted through the stories of Sefer ­Hasidim resembles the biography of young Berdichevsky himself in many ways. The ways in which Berdichevsky reinvents and recreates the Besht and Hasidism in general also point to his evident struggles with questions of religiosity and its place in modernity, with aesthetic considerations of the literary vis-à-vis religious, mystical traditions. These issues were not only personal, they were some of the most crucial cultural and literary concerns of Jewish and non-Jewish European modernists during the time in which Berdichevsky was engaged in creating his neo-hasidic stories. It must be noted that Sefer Hasidim was not the last time Berdichevsky dealt with hasidic tales and thought. Shmuel Werses, who traces Berdichevsky’s views of Hasidism, has demonstrated the changes which Berdichevsky underwent in his attitude, from rejection in his youth, through appreciative admiration and adulation in his “German” period, to criticism and intense self-doubts about the value and viability of engaging with Hasidism in the last two decades of his life.81 Berdi-

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chevsky returned to hasidic materials in an unpublished anthology that he planned to call Yalkut ha-hasidut, on which he was working for five years between 1905 and 1910. The anthology did not materialize, and there is good evidence that the reason for this is not only Berdichevsky’s difficulty in finding a publisher, but also his changing attitude toward the very nature of the hasidic tale and the movement of Hasidism.82 Berdichevsky then returned again to hasidic materials in his anthology Me-otzar Ha-aggadah. In the introduction, Berdichevsky writes: “I set out some time ago to adapt the hasidic legends, a task that occupied me for a long time, if for some other purpose; and then I did not seek the nation’s children but rather the children of my own spirit, and in the place of life open before me I sought shelter in the shadows of illusion.” 83 Before the end of his life in 1920, he wrote: “Truth be told, I did not seek in Hasidism the mysteries of religion, but it was rather something like a poetic vision that struck me and prompted me to seek a religious garb for my spiritual ruminations.”84 Here, Berdichevsky, in his role as an anthologist and historian of the Jewish past, seems to distance himself from his earlier poetic inter­ fusing of his personal search for spirituality with his interpretation of Hasidism and his idiosyncratic symbolist retelling of hasidic tales. And yet, the distinctions between Berdichevsky’s roles as historian, the anthologist, and the creative writer were never straightforward and clearcut. If in 1900 he attempted to find in “the soul of the Hasidim” the balm that may heal “the tear in the heart,” he later recognized that this split—which cannot be healed—was also the source of his struggles with hasidic material and the source of his creativity in general. In these struggles, as in other things, he was typical of his generation of early modernists and their convoluted and powerful search for a radical “reinvention of tradition” in Jewish and European literature and culture.85 ❊ Unlike Berdichevsky, Peretz, the other Hebrew and Yiddish writer who was involved in creating neo-hasidic stories, did not come from a hasidic background, nor did he have the same kind of prodigious yeshiva background. In fact, Peretz probably never really even intended to “rescue” the stories or the teachings of the hasidic masters for his own

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modern era. Like the young Berdichevsky, he also was, in his early writings and thought, rather typical of the positivist haskalah ideology, and shared its tendency to see the Bible both as the arbiter of classical style and as the record of the history of the Jews. We must remember that Peretz was a thoroughly modern urban Jew who has resided in Warsaw since 1889. Some claim that Peretz met a hasidic rabbi only once in his life, in the offices of Warsaw’s Jewish community council. Other scholars attribute Peretz’s attraction to Hasidism in his reading of Dubnov’s description in Voskhod of the Besht as a radical reformer, or to his journey to shtetls in Poland in 1890, where he saw that many hasidic communities in these small towns were actually very much alive and well. One way or another, what is quite clear is that the lack of personal and familial attachment gave Peretz a certain freedom in his engagement with Hasidism, quite different from the personal sense of loss and attempt of retrieval that one can detect in writers such as Berdichevsky.86 At the famous Chernowitz conference of 1908, Peretz connected hasidic tales emphatically and exclusively with the history of Yiddish literature and culture. He claimed that the hasidic tale is the “genesis” of Yiddish literature: “The tales in ‘In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem Tov’ are folk-poetry. The first poet is Reb Nachman of Bratzlav and his seven beggars.”87 This act of championing the history of Yiddish (and linking the hasidic tale with it) hides the fact that Peretz was a highly influential figure at the turn of the twentieth century for all Jewish writers, both Hebrew and Yiddish.88 In fact, Peretz developed many of his neohasidic stories (published in Yiddish under the title Chasidish [Hasidut in Hebrew]) during the 1890s, first in Hebrew and then in Yiddish.89 The traces of the romantic and narodnik outlooks are evident in some of Peretz’s attempts to describe hasidic figures in order to illustrate what might be called a socialist ideology. However, Peretz developed his neohasidic stories mainly for literary and stylistic reasons, and not necessarily because of his enthusiasm for the social, religious, and mystical world of the movement.90 Peretz published these neo-hasidic stories in Hebrew and Yiddish in a period in which symbolism and decadence became dominant in Russia, Poland, and all over Europe. In fact, he was the first Hebrew and Yiddish writer who wrote something like a “manifesto” of deca-

The Reinvention of Jewish Traditions

dence and symbolism, in Ha-chetz (1894), the Hebrew “little journal” in which he wrote a number of proto-symbolist stories and poems, as well as manifestos attacking realist and romantic texts and calling for a move into symbolist writing.91 Not unlike Berdichevsky, Peretz’s turn to the hasidic world for literary and aesthetic reasons was part of his search for a new style of writing that was symbolist but also “Jewish” in nature. This search brought Peretz to forge new paths in the absorption of the hasidic tale into his stories. The power of Peretz’s best neohasidic stories derives from their subtle juxtaposition of hasidic themes, first-person narration, and ironies that suggest the underlying conflicts and dialectics of Peretz’s own time.92 One of Peretz’s early neo-hasidic stories, Mishnat Hasidim (“The Teaching of Hasidim”), was written in Hebrew and published in 1894 in Ha-chetz.93 The opening paragraph of the story is told by a simple and naïve narrator, described as “the orphan from Nemirov,” who expresses his love and admiration toward “our master and teacher, the Rebbe of Nemirov”: It is known to all that our master and teacher from Nemirov served God out of joy. Happy was the eye that had the fortune to see the enthusiasm and the joy that sprang from him like water from a fountain, and flowed to us, showered us with abundance, attached itself to us, so that we forgot all of our worldly sorrows, all of the misfortunes and evildoers.94

Later on, the narrator comments that the Rebbe was “full of joy, song and dance every day of the year until his death.” These are familiar elements of hasidic hagiography. The narrator stresses the presence of song and dance and the fact that the tzadik is the one who “knows the melody, and thus he finds constant joy.” But what appears to be a traditional tale about the Rebbe becomes complicated by the ironies, tensions, and uncertainties that are revealed unwittingly by the first-person narrator. Most of the story is devoted to a description of the wedding of the Rebbe’s daughter. This is another familiar motif in hasidic stories and a highly significant event because in the absence of the Rebbe’s son, his son-in-law will continue his legacy. The narrator follows the conventions of the genre by recalling the song and dance of joy with which the

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Rebbe exalts his disciples and the simple folk participating in the joyous occasion. But then a sense of discord and distress is inserted by the narrator as he glimpses the future: It is known to the whole world that following the death of the Rebbe of Nemirov, and after what happened to his son-in-law, I traveled to holy men throughout the land and did not find one whom my soul could cleave onto. I saw the great and awesome; I saw workers, healers and miracle-doers, but joy I did not see.95

This enigmatic foreshadowing of a “joyless future” is subtly linked to what happened to the son-in-law. The readers do not know what exactly happened to him but can guess that it has something to do with the way the groom acts at the wedding itself. While the Rebbe and all his disciples extolled in their song and dance, the groom “stood aloof and did not join in the song.” For the narrator, this silence is a threat, but the Rebbe assures him that during the meal, the groom “will speak Torah according to the Rebbe’s dance.” Something like that indeed happens, and in the eyes of the audience, the groom’s words of Torah seem to correspond to the Rebbe’s dance and song. But the Rebbe himself is far from being content: “Do you see that thief?” he said to me proudly. He is repeating my dance and saying it in his own name. “But anyway,” said the Rebbe with slight resentment, “just as he didn’t enter into my song, I won’t enter into his Torah!” I suddenly felt that a sharp blade entered my belly. “Rebbe,” I asked in a whisper, “where does he come from?” “He is the student of the Vilna Gaon,” he answered. I felt as if struck by thunder. Then the tzadik said to me: “Go and order liquor for the peasants and food for the horses [...]” And until this day I don’t know the secret of these words.96

The story ends with this highly enigmatic and discordant note. Here even the naïve narrator senses the doubts and the deep conflicts that underlie the Rebbe’s actions and thoughts. The shocking revelation that the son-in-law of the Rebbe is a student of the Vilna Gaon, the great scholar who was the leading figure in the anti-hasidic movement, means that the line of hasidic rebbes will be broken. It is not clear whether this was done deliberately or because of a lack of a suit-

The Reinvention of Jewish Traditions

able groom for the Rebbe’s daughter (which is another familiar motif in hasidic stories). One way or another, it is connected to the rivalry between Hasidim and mitnagdim (the opponents of Hasidism), and to the dichotomy presented earlier in the story between the “outer shell” of scholarship of Torah and the “inner” worship of God through song and joy. After the realization that the Rebbe himself chose a mitnaged groom for his daughter comes the final command to order liquor for the peasants and food for the horses. The narrator assumes that, as in any good hasidic tale and teaching, there is a secret allegorical meaning “hiding” in these words. However, the meaning is sealed and unknown to him. The modern readers of Peretz’s story are left, too, with the burden of interpretation. Perhaps the ending implies that hasidic life rejects learned, abstract discourse and instead focuses on the needs of people and animals, or perhaps it simply means that even the Rebbe does not know what to do in this case. As Ken Frieden has suggested, the mystery of these final words is closely related to the mystery of what happened to the son-in-law after the Rebbe’s death. These two mysteries are embodied in the title of the story, “The Teaching of Hasidim.” While the story presents its readers with what seems like a concrete example of such “hasidic teaching,” it also points to the power and unresolved tensions that, according to ­Peretz, were manifest within the hasidic tradition from the start.97 In this sense, the story is another example of the paradoxical reinvention of a “yesterday that has not yet been born.” In 1903, Peretz published in the journal Ha-shiloah another neo-­ hasidic story, Ha-ofot ve ha-gvilim (“The Birds and the Scrolls”), with the subtitle “Tales of R. Nachmanke” (the traditional Yiddish endearment of Nachman).98 The story begins with a short preface that discusses the very nature of hasidic storytelling in the modern world: Everyone knows that the tzadik Rabbi Nachmanke loved to tell tales, and these tales were holy stones set in the gold of the land of Ofir—in other words, secrets of the Torah in the guise of tales and legends, such as “The Tale of the Seven Beggars” and the like. And when I want to bring these before the public again through the printing press, I feel my heart tremble and shake. I know that it is almost impossible to tell these tales in these times—people are different and the language is dif-

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ferent. I doubt whether I am worthy of telling them and whether this generation is worthy of hearing them [...] the world seeks vain games and entertainment [...] and is not at all concerned with its soul, and does not take in what is deep inside; it sees only the outer shell, and it lacks the discernment to extract the kernel from within [...] But be that as it may, I must save these precious pearls from the sand.99

The narrator seems to be uncertain how to tell the stories of R. Nachman or how the stories will be received by his audience. His task is to “rescue the precious pearls from the sand,” namely to retell them in a way that will resonate with the modern Jewish reader. ­Peretz’s retelling of the story of R. Nachman in Ha-ofot ve ha-gvilim is laden with some of the same symbolism that characterized the original R. Nachman’s dream-like story, told by his disciple R. Nathan of Nemirov in the collection Chaye Moharan (“The Life of Our Teacher R. Nahaman”).100 Both in the hasidic story and in Peretz’s retelling, we find the ­tzadik who is wandering in the desert; the flock of birds who cannot fly because their wings were turned into fins; the old house of the people who caged the birds and caused their deformity; the musty room (in which R. Nachman hides) that is full of ancient scrolls sealed with red wax. But in the new narrative that Peretz put forth, the tzadik is not engaged in an act of personal tikkun. Rather, he acts like a spy in a time of war between the people in “the old house” and the birds that have no wings. “The king of the birds” explains to Reb Nachmanke that the birds lost their wings and their ability to fly because they were placed in cages within the old house; now they seek revenge and want to destroy the house. Nachmanke runs to the house to warn its inhabitants of the imminent attack. Although the people who still live there—a house with windows but no light—fully understand the danger, they cannot agree on the necessary action. Some suggest waging war against the birds, while others propose a peaceful solution or even the possibility of abandoning the house and “becoming like the birds.” The final and most radical proposition is “to burn the scrolls with the red seal,” which will work as a magical formula to become like birds and grow wings. Some people act on this proposition and begin to burn the scrolls. But then an old man jumps up and calls them traitors and extinguishes the fire in

The Reinvention of Jewish Traditions

the only lamp in the house. Reb Nachmanke runs away from the dark house, and thus the tale comes to a halt. When the listeners (including the narrator) ask Nachmanke for a conclusion, he tells them that there is no end: the birds with wings are still slowly making their way to the old house but have not reached it. With this gloomy and enigmatic ending, which leaves both the protagonists and the readers literally in a state of eternal suspense, we notice that what was a story of spiritual wandering and tikkun in R. Nachman’s tale becomes for Peretz another open-ended story of a thoroughly modern search for religiosity and the dialects of tradition and modernity.101 Ruth Wisse maintains that in Peretz’s neo-hasidic stories it is impossible to ignore his application of motifs of faith to very different, even conflicting ends. As she claims, “Peretz did something remarkable in the stories of [...] ‘hasidic’ motifs: he alerted his contemporaries [...] to the mythic and spiritual resources in their indigenous culture as well to the potential sterility of modernity should it lose those resources.”102 This paradox is at the heart of the whole phenomenon of the neo-­ hasidic stories written at the turn of the century. Moreover, it points to the fact that in spite of the many important differences between Peretz’s and Berdichevsky’s attitudes toward Hasidism, and the different ways in which they crafted their neo-hasidic stories, there are also many similarities. Both of them were ultimately looking to hasidic texts and traditions as sources for cultural and aesthetic inspiration. Both of them were influenced by the turn to the mystical and the occult in European culture (in Russia, Poland, and the German-speaking lands). Both of them were struggling with the religious meaning of hasidic texts and with the almost infinite possibilities of interpretation and reinterpretation that they offer the modern writer and reader. Bialik, Berdichevsky, and Peretz were transitional figures caught up between different worlds, beliefs, and poetic and ideological systems. It is impossible to place them neatly within the category of modernism. However, it is clear that some of their works, written around the turn of the twentieth century, launched the modernist era in Hebrew and Yiddish literature.103 Even more significant in the context of the current discussion, their complex attitudes toward, and their experiments with, Aggadah and Hasidism—through their anthologies and literary

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texts—show several variations on the pattern of rebellion, loss, and retrieval that is essential to the modernist process of a radical reinvention of tradition and its ways of dealing with the religious past. This pattern, which David Roskies has identified as the process of “creative betrayal,” is not just a personal process. It is also a central facet in the literature and culture of European modernism (Jewish and non-Jewish alike). The effort to retrieve texts and traditions from the past and “reinvent” them was, among other things, a modernist preoccupation. In the following chapters, it will become clear that the next generation of Hebrew modernists were dealing with very similar issues and shared some of the same sources for cultural and aesthetic inspiration, but their quest took them in quite different directions.

Th i rt e e n  In the Shadow of God The Quest for New Religiosity in European and Hebrew Modernism After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887 If someone would say about me that I am a “mystic,” [...] I would not think of this as an offense. —Yosef Chaim Brenner, “A Letter to Shimon Bichvsky,” April 11, 1907

As we have seen in the previous chapter, at the turn of the twentieth century, tremendous cultural energy was given to creating neo-aggadic and neo-hasidic stories, as well as to various modern collections and anthologies of traditional texts. This kind of activity, which was typical of transitional figures like Y. L. Peretz, Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, and Chaim Nachman Bialik, was not the path undertaken by most writers of modernist Hebrew fiction of the next generation. The trajectory of these “transitional” writers, which was pronounced also in many East European Jewish writers and thinkers who were active in Germany (like Martin Buber), found its best practitioner in the figure of Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the “revolutionary traditionalist” of modernist Hebrew fiction.1 Agnon was indeed, at least in this context, an heir of Berdichevsky, Bialik, and Peretz. Not only had he written new (or pseudo-) aggadic, midrashic, and hasidic stories, he also became involved in a number of anthological projects. For example, in the early 1920s—while living in Germany—Agnon collaborated with Martin Buber on a large anthology of hasidic stories entitled Corpus Hasidicum (in German) and Sefer Hasidut (in Hebrew). This large, four-volume project was in the final stages of preparation, but was abandoned when a fire destroyed Agnon’s house in Bad Homburg and burned the entire manuscript.2

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Years later, Agnon would compile a large and successful anthology about the Jewish High Holidays, Yamin Nora’im (“Day of Awe”), published in 1938.3 Less well known than Agnon but also an important modernist is Eliezer Shteinman, who wrote modernist stories and novels in the 1920s and 1930s and was later occupied with a number of collections and anthologies of hasidic and mystical texts.4 In Yiddish literature as well, certain elements of neo-midrashic and neo-hasidic storytelling became essential for symbolist writers like S. Ansky, Der Nister (Pinchas Kahanovitz), and H. Leyvik.5 In a very different manner, we can detect a continuation of aggadic and midrashic modes of narrative fiction in the stories of Dvora Baron.6 However, by and large the new generation of writers of modernist Hebrew fiction—who burst almost at once onto the literary scene in the first decade of the twentieth century—did not continue to engage with traditional Jewish texts or with issues of religious faith in the same ways as did Bialik, Berdichevsky, and Peretz. Most writers of modernist Hebrew fiction, including Uri Nissan Gnessin, Yosef Chaim Brenner, and Gershon Shofman, along with their younger contemporaries Levi Aryeh Arieli, Ya‘acov Shteinberg, and David Fogel, did not assemble midrashic, aggadic, or hasidic anthologies, nor did they write any neo-aggadic or neo-hasidic stories. In fact, their stories and novels have been quite often described as totally devoid of any recognizably religious (sometimes even Jewish) elements. As we have seen in previous parts of the book, like most European modernist literature, modernist Hebrew fiction is mainly characterized by the “inward turn,” with a focus in stories and novellas on the inner life of individual protagonists. Modernist Hebrew writers invested great efforts to create new ways to express the psychic, inner worlds of these protagonists, as well as describing the urban experience and the contemporary preoccupation with gender and sexuality. These efforts surely produced a revolution in Hebrew fiction, one which originated newfangled ways of constructing plot, themes, characters, and language. However, it would be a mistake to simply equate Hebrew modernist fiction with “secularization” and with what the critic Baruch Kurzweil has sharply called “de-Judaization.”7

The Quest for New Religiosity

Most readers and critics have emphasized time and again the secularism, and what seems to be a lack of engagement with religious Jewish texts and traditions, in the fictional texts of modernist writers such as Gnessin, Shofman, Arieli, and Fogel. Gnessin’s plots, characters, language, and style, so we are told, are devoid of any religious elements (Jewish or otherwise). When Gershon Shaked wrote in his history of Hebrew fiction that “the fictional world that Gnessin created is not related to Jews in particular and the associative infrastructure of his work is not Jewish,”8 he summed up the critical consensus of several generations, from Bialik all the way to contemporary Hebrew criticism.9 Likewise, it was easy for readers and critics to conclude that Shofman’s stories are devoid of any religious preoccupations or engagement with Jewish texts and traditions. The Jewishness of his characters cannot be easily detected because the characters and narrative situations in his stories are devoid of any familiar sociological or semiotic Jewish codes. The language of Shofman’s stories seems like it refrains from alluding to any Jewish sources.10 The stories and novels of David Fogel were understood, for better or worse, as Austrian-Viennese literature that was written in Hebrew as if by chance, and perhaps should have been written in German.11 Even Brenner—the reluctant modernist writer and critic who never stopped writing about the Jewish milieu and was constantly occupied with Jewish national and ideological concerns—was usually understood as a secular writer and thinker who was hostile to any form of religious experience. In spite of this, in order to understand the modernist fiction of early-twentieth-century Hebrew writers, one has to recognize the ways in which these writers, and the fictional texts they wrote, were engaged not only with the crisis of religious faith but also with a quest for religiosity and religious or mystical experience. In this sense, they both continued the preoccupations of their transitional predecessors and were radically different from them. While they did not follow the poetic and ideological solutions of the writers of the previous generation, they did share with them, and with many contemporary European modernists all over Europe, concerns about religious traditions and the role of the sacred and mystical realms in literature. They were especially preoccupied with questions about the possibility for

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r­ eligious ­experience in a post-Enlightenment world permeated with Nietzschean doubts and quests. In order to understand the engagement of these writers with religious texts experience, one has to look beyond the well-known and well-documented collapse of traditional Jewish social institutions during the second half of the nineteenth century: the collapse of Jewish traditional society, the painful separation from the world of the beit midrash, and the tension between “fathers” and “sons” that was so pronounced in the transitional generation of Bialik, Frishman, Feierberg, Peretz, and Berdichevsky.12 All of these problems were of course very significant, but they have long distracted us from a more profound comprehension of the age and its literature. We must acknowledge that European modernist literature of the early years of the twentieth century wrestled earnestly, and consistently, with the continuous crisis of the loss of faith. Although European modernist literature is usually seen as thoroughly secular, for many writers and thinkers of the various modernist movements, part of the process of coping with the loss of (traditional) religious faith was an equally modernist quest for religiosity—an attempt to find new ways to express the experience of the sacred in literature and art. In recent decades, the debates about what modernism was and how it developed in different places and various ways have finally caused some scholars to attend to the religious and mystical aspects of modernist literature and culture. In his illuminating discussion of European modernism, Richard Sheppard has highlighted the interest in mysticism and religiosity as one of the most profound responses of modernist literature and art to the “crisis of modernity.”13 He claims that a significant number of modernist writers, artists, and thinkers turned to mysticism and the “sacred” as a way of confronting the upheavals of the era. This mystical approach took many different forms. On one extreme we find Vasily Kandinsky’s programmatic statement of abstract art Über das Geistige in der Kunst (“Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” 1911),14 in which the artist adopts a mystical or theosophical view of the world’s inner reality. There is also the esoteric hermetism of Yeats’s poetry and the more or less westernized versions of Eastern mysticism, like Herman Hesse’s novels or T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”15

The Quest for New Religiosity

But as we look more carefully, we see that mystical and religious elements are important not only for those modernists (like Yeats, Kandinsky, Hesse, Stefan George, and Andrei Bely) who considered themselves to be religious thinkers as well as writers and artists.”16 The mystical, religious quest also took more secular forms, such as Lord Chandos’s openness to inexplicable epiphany and anagogic moments in Hofmannsthal’s The Letter of Lord Chandos (1902), which is considered by many to be one of the foundational texts of modernism in the German-speaking environment.17 Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry and his path-breaking modernist novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) express what has been termed “individualist mysticism” and an “aesthetic of transcendence and epiphany.”18 Although Rilke detested religious concepts such as sin and atonement, he sought salvation from the alienation of life in the modern city through a mystical “emptying of the self.” Roy Pascal has noted that “Rilke’s longing is typical in that it is associated neither with any particular transgression nor with belief in God: it is the only positive element left over from Christian belief.”19 Gershom Scholem’s well-known remarks on Franz Kafka’s fiction (“In order to understand the Kabbalah nowadays, one has to read Franz Kafka’s writings, particularly The Trial”)20 reveal that even in an author whose work seems so bereft and Godless, and whose relationship with institutional Judaism was so confrontational, there is a strong mystical and even kabbalist dimension. Such remarks by Gershom Scholem indicate that in an age of radical secularization and an irreversible decline of religious belief, Kafka’s oeuvre offers the image of a world devoid of meaning, but it is a world, nevertheless, in which the trace of a fugitive transcendence, like an indentation marking absence, still remains. Thus, Kafka can be read as a kind of sacred yet heretical “scripture” of modernism.21 Robert Alter has also examined in detail the mystical aspects of Kafka (and the modernist aspects in the work of Scholem on Jewish mysticism). He notes that for Scholem, Kafka was the last great Jewish mystic, a “heretical kabbalist” in whose writing “the light of revelation burned [...] unmercifully.”22 Alter further emphasizes the role of irrationalism and the resurgence of mythological symbolism and mysticism in other works of European modernism of the early twentieth century.

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He claims that some major modernist works like Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg and James Joyce’s Ulysses bring all of these themes together powerfully.23 In fact, we can see that this understanding of the peculiar religious aspects of modernism actually goes back to the modernists themselves. T. S. Eliot, after all, interpreted Ulysses—arguably the single most influential work of modernist fiction—as struggling against the effects of secularization by establishing a “mythical method” as a way of “controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history.”24 As Pascal, Sheppard, Alter, and others have claimed, there is much evidence that modernist writers were searching for a religious stratum beyond modern society’s appearance of entropic chaos or irresolvable conflict. The religious stratum (or substratum) in modernist literature and art may have been psychological or metaphysical, but it permitted what existentialist philosophers have called a sense of “being out of nothingness.” Even the aestheticism associated with modernist trends, such as decadence and symbolism, was linked to a peculiar modernist sense of religiosity and the sacred. In Hofmannsthal’s essay Der Dichter und diese Zeit (“The Poet and This Age,” 1906), he writes that “modernity is an age in which the representative things lack spirituality, an age that has no mysteries or sacraments with which people can lift themselves above everyday life. It is now the artists’ task to recapture the lost sense of mystery.”25 More recently, Pericles Lewis has maintained that some of the most canonical writers of fiction during the period known as “high European modernism” were not exactly the devout secularists that critics of modernism have portrayed. In fact, they were far from celebrating the putative secularization of modernity. In Lewis’s reading, the fiction of writers as diverse as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka exhibits an impulse to find religious meanings in the every­ day “secular” world. Modernist writers were seeking, through their experiments in fiction, to offer new accounts of “the sacred” in an age of continued crisis. While modernist novelists used techniques that had been associated with the realist novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly the accurate description of social phenomena, under the influence of symbolism they tended to describe more esoteric

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and inexplicable experiences and to challenge the realist novel’s emphasis on the orderly, comprehensible workings of the visible world.26 Many modernists were seeking to locate ultimate meaning in the flux of individual everyday experience, in what Virginia Woolf called “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.”27 According to Lewis, modernist fiction writers conducted their search less to find a “substitute” for religion than to develop a satisfying explanation of such spiritual phenomena. The attempt to turn the novel’s sociological possibilities toward a consideration of this type of religious experience helped the modernists to transform the very nature of the novel.28 Similar observations can be found in a recent study of Gregory Erick­son and an essay about the sacred in modernist literature and art by Wendy Faris and Steven Walker.29 Faris and Walker correctly observe that the modernist subversion of nineteenth-century positivism and realism did not result in a purely aesthetic art that substituted for religion. Rather, modernist literature engaged with the need for contact with “the sacred” through the creation of a new set of subliminally perceived iconic representations, which they trace in the work of writers like Rilke and Woolf. These recent explorations of the religious impulse make clear that the quest for a new kind of religiosity in a secular, post-Nietzschean world was not limited to writers and artists, but was shared by many contemporary thinkers, philosophers, and psychologists. The modernist moment seems to have been the first in which a newly private and personal character of “religious experience” was widely recognized  and reckoned with. This is evident not only in seminal works of literature like William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and ­Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (“The Idea of the Holy,” 1917), but can also be seen in the works of sociologists of religion, such as Georg Simmel, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber, and of thinkers of modern religiosity from Lev Shestov and Martin Buber to Carl Jung and Paul Tillich.30 ❊ William James (1842–1910), the American philosopher, psychologist, and social theorist, was one of the most influential figures of fin de siècle culture in America and all over Europe. James’s work on religious

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experience, especially The Varieties of Religious Experience, is indicative of a post-Nietzschean approach to religion. Dogmatic theology and religious institutions were seen by William James as mere outgrowths of the religion that he identified with “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”31 James considered the experience of the divine, especially in his inquiry into what he called “personal” as opposed to “institutional” religion, as a natural feature of human psychological life. Even mystical experiences—“trance-like states of insight into truth”—were for him “special cases of kinds of human experience.”32 Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) was one of the most important and original thinkers who continued James’s explorations on the nature of the religious experience in the early twentieth century. Otto, who saw himself as a modern theological thinker, was not content with the empiricism and psychologism evident in William James, but rather insisted on the experiential dimensions of religion. Otto sought to reestablish the integrity of the “Other” of religious experience. In his highly influential book Das Heilige, Otto insisted that at the heart of any religious experience (Christian or otherwise) is what he famously called sensus ­numinous. Otto explained the numinous as a “non-rational, nonsensory experience of feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self.”33 Furthermore, according to Otto the sensus numinous is the experience of “the wholly other” in a sense of awe, trembling, fascination, amazement, and wonderment, for which he used the Latin term mysterium tremendum (“awful mystery”).34 Mysterium tremendum, according to Otto, is the “only one appropriate expression” of the experience of the holy. “Tremendum” refers to the uncanny sense accompanying an uncommon and unfamiliar experience. Otto takes this feeling to be the origin of religion: “This fact of our nature—primary, unique, underivable from anything else—is the basic factor and the basic impulse underlying the entire process of religious evolution.” The other fundamental characteristic of the experience of the sacred is “mysterium,” which refers to the holy being so far beyond our comprehension that it fills “the mind with blank wonder and astonishment.”35

The Quest for New Religiosity

In his description of the experience of the holy, Otto stresses the categorical difference between the human and the Divine. The notion of “the wholly other” implies an interest in the difference, gap, and separation between God and the self: The truly “mysterious” object is beyond apprehension and comprehension not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something inherently “wholly other,” whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own.36

Otto’s emphasis on the non-rational or numinous aspects of religious experience and his approach to the holy as a sense of mysterium tremendum are crucial and highly indicative of early-twentieth-century thought. Indeed, Otto’s writing has had an enormous impact on the modern philosophy of myth and religion, on psychology, and on literature and art, as is evident in his influence on figures like Paul Tillich, Carl Jung, and Mircea Eliade.37 One of the radical innovations of James, Otto, and other thinkers of this period was to detach the concept of religious experience from any one specific tradition and to make it a capacious category that embraced all the diverse phenomena grouped under the rubric of “religious.” James defined “religious experience” as a phenomenon that informed “religion-in-general” apart from any tradition in particular. Thus, while James and Otto were mostly familiar with and preoccupied with the Christian tradition, their new understanding of the category of “religious experience” was, as we shall see, equally attractive to Jewish writers and thinkers of the time. Similar moves toward new understanding of religious experience can be seen in another turn of the twentieth-century European thinkers, including those who had a great impact on modernist Hebrew writers. Thus, although he came from a particularly Russian Slavophile tradition, there was a strong “ecumenical” thrust in the thought of Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), the greatest Russian thinker of the late nineteenth century, who had an enormous influence on the development of Russian symbolism and modernism in general. Solovyov not only became one of the most vigorous supporters of Jews on a political level but also incorporated elements of Judaism and Jewish thought into his

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vision of “Godmanhood”—what was for him the ultimate interaction of humanity and divinity on earth. Although Solovyov’s main interest was in Eastern Orthodoxy, he was also a serious student of Talmud and Jewish mystical traditions.38 Solovyov actually saw Judaism in potentia as a living, creative force indispensable to the reconciliation of the peoples of Eastern Europe as well as to the revitalization of Christianity itself.39 Even more significant and close to Hebrew modernist writers was Lev Shestov (1866–1938), a Jewish-Russian thinker and writer (his original name was Yehuda Leib Shvartzman) who admired both William James and Vladimir Solovyov.40 Shestov was a leading figure in Russian symbolism and what became known as the “religious renaissance.”41 ­Although he became well known as a religious existential philosopher in the west (Shestov fled Bolshevism in 1920 and settled in Paris),42 his main mode of writing was literary criticism infused with religious and philosophical insights.43 In his early works Shestov sketched out a paradigm in which logic was questioned from the standpoint of religious existentialism. He criticized the reliance on logic characteristic of positivism, examples of which he found in Western and Russian literature. Likewise, he opposed the leading populist critics of the day, who subordinated aesthetic concerns to social goals. From the beginning of his career, Shestov was attracted to what he called Nietzsche’s “critique of intellect.” His conclusion was that, as Bernard Martin put it, “the gods of the nineteenth century—science, technology, the idea of historical progress, autonomous ethics—are [...] nothing but vain and destructive idols.”44 In his short book The Good in the Teaching of Count Tolstoy and Nietzsche (1900), he attacked philosophical idealism and rationalism. Equally critical of Tolstoy and his moralism, Shestov claimed that tragedy, evil, and suffering are inevitable. In later essays, he claimed that good and evil are always present in humanity and that the role of philosophy is not to reach a compromise but to stimulate a struggle for the impossible. Using Nietzsche as a kind of guiding spirit and intellectual companion, Shestov articulated his “philosophy of tragedy,” holding that universal truth is a deceptive posture. While appearing to satisfy and give meaning to the individual, it cannot account for or justify personal pain, injustice, or death.45

The Quest for New Religiosity

Personal tragedy became for Shestov the source for acute self-­ knowledge. What he termed his “search for God,” which was intensely personal and existential, lasted his lifetime. His philosophy was markedly nondogmatic, and focused on the existential suffering of individuals rather than on social issues. In aphoristic writings like the books Apotheosis of Groundlessness (1905) and Beginnings and Endings (1906)—a work which Gnessin translated into Hebrew—Shestov dealt with the problems of “despair” and “amor fati ” in the works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche.46 It is essential to note what appears to be a paradoxical harnessing of Friedrich Nietzsche’s radical thought for the purpose of modernist religious searching. Indeed, for many early-twentieth-century modern thinkers, psychologists, and writers, the “prophecy” of Nietzsche’s madman, written in the 1880s, was quite accurate as a depiction of things to come in the early twentieth century: God might have “died” for the modern man (or more precisely for the intellectual elites of Europe and the West) in the nineteenth century together with institutional religion, but the “caves in which his shadow dwells” 47 were visited time and again by modernist writers and thinkers in subsequent years. Nietzsche and his radical thought are in fact an important part of an interest in the anti-rational and the mystical especially characteristic of Eastern and Central European literature and thought at the turn of the twentieth century. The influence of the philosophy of Nietzsche, mainly as it was refracted through the lens of religious thinkers like Solovyov, Shestov, and Dimitry Merezhkovsky, was very strong in Russia’s religious thought and symbolism.48 The entire spectrum of Russian symbolism and the culture of the socalled Silver Age of Russian modernism demonstrated a profound interest in religious mysticism. Almost all Russian symbolists—from Dimitry Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, Konstantin Balmont, ­Fyodor Sologub, and Valery Bryusov to Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, and Viacheslav­ ­Ivanov (who defined Russian symbolism as “religious art”)—approached the religious and mystical in literature and art, and were part of the ­so-called revolution of the spirit in pre-revolutionary Russia.49 They were strongly engaged with sacred language and the place of ­religious-mystical experience after the crisis of institutionalized religion.50

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Similar developments were taking place during the same years in Central Europe. German and Austrian symbolists and early expressionists were attracted to mysticism, especially to the religious traditions of the “East” that were presumably “untouched” by the rationalism and materialism of the bourgeois West. The fascination with religious mysticism in the German environment was also influenced by the legacy of Nietzsche (and Schopenhauer).51 This quest for alternative sources of religiosity and mysticism generated an enormous and wide-ranging literary and artistic activity—from Mahler and Klimt to Stefan George, Hermann Hesse, Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, Rilke, and Kafka. 52 Numerous journals, reviews, and publishing houses were founded in order to cater to this new interest, and more established publishing houses joined them in additional publication activities. As scholars like Paul Mendes-Flohr and Zachary Braiterman have shown, the unprecedented success of Martin Buber’s writing on Jewish religiosity, Hasidism, and Jewish mysticism in German modernist culture should be understood in the context of this new post-­Nietzschean, anti-rationalist mysticism, as well as through the expressionist pre­ occupation with “oriental” religious traditions (from Buddhism to Russian Orthodoxy) and the occult.53 Hence, it was possible for Buber to depict Hasidism, Kabbalah, and various other Jewish religious cultural phenomena as expressions of a “universal mystical experience” that provided a liberating alternative to European bourgeois materialistic rationality. Buber wrote in 1914 that “religiosity is man’s sense of wonder and adoration [...] a longing to establish a living communion with the unconditioned, his will to realize the unconditioned through his action, transposing it into the world of man.”54 This distinction between religion and religiosity can be seen as an expansion of Georg Simmel’s concept of “religiosity” as an experience unconditioned by formal structures of religion, as well as Nietzsche’s sense of the “death of religion,” which had lost its natural meaning and become a fossilized system of traditional rites and dogmas.55 This intense interest in new forms of religiosity in a post-Nietzschean era did not escape the attention of modernist Hebrew and Yiddish writers. Together with other early modernists all over Europe, many of the Hebrew writers of this period were experiencing the shattering of ra-

The Quest for New Religiosity

tionalism, positivism, and the belief in materialist, social progress of modernity. This experience brought about a renewed interest in the religious amid the collapse of traditional social institutions. This intellectual and cultural atmosphere was shared by most, if not all, writers of modernist Hebrew fiction. It is especially pronounced in the group of young writers that was forming in Homel around 1900–1905 and later dispersed to different locations. It included, as we have seen in Part I of this volume, Hillel Zeitlin, Brenner, Gnessin, Shofman, Z. Y. Anochi (Aharnson), and Shimon Bichovsky, but was equally important to additional writers of modernist Hebrew fiction who worked in other European cities and beyond them.

Thirst: The Search for the Religious in Zeitlin, Brenner, Shofman, and Gnessin The position of Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942) is crucial. Although the close relations between Zeitlin, the deeply religious thinker and writer, and the modernist Hebrew fiction writers is well known, his role in the development of Hebrew modernism has not been explored until recently, and is not properly understood. In spite of Zeitlin’s undeniable idiosyncrasy, his thought and writings in the first decade of the twentieth century are an important part of the tendency of Hebrew modernism to search for new meanings in religious, mystical, and hasidic traditions and to connect them with contemporary European literature and thought.56 Unlike Peretz, Bialik, and Berdichevsky, who were admired by young modernist Hebrew writers from a (geographical and generational) distance, Zeitlin was much closer to them both in age and in geographical proximity. As we have seen in Chapter 3, Homel in the period of 1900–1905 was the time and place of intellectual and literary ferment. For these young modernists, living near the slightly older Zeitlin was very significant. In particular, Gnessin and Brenner were not only close friends of Zeitlin but also saw him as their mentor and guide into European and Jewish literature and thought. Zeitlin wrote in his memoirs that when Brenner lived in Homel, “there was hardly a day that passed without

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Figure 20. A postcard of Hillel Zeitlin. (Source: Robinson Bookstore Collection, Tel Aviv)

us seeing each other.”57 In an essay from 1920, Brenner wrote about his first encounter with Zeitlin in 1899: Not only was he my acquaintance, he was my teacher and mentor, a model writer, a man of spirit and a pillar of fire. I was a youth then, a youth without knowledge of world literature or our literature (besides the Bible and Talmud) [...] He was the first writer that I had met face to face. I admired him so that I rolled in the dust of his feet. I strived

The Quest for New Religiosity

to converse with him, to hear words of Torah and learning from his mouth.58

The nature of Brenner’s youthful admiration of Zeitlin surely changed over the years, but it never diminished. In 1908, Brenner wrote that Zeitlin’s work Shekhina was “a most important contribution” and that “the hearty and soulful Zeitlin who amazes us with his erudition in all the chambers of the human and Hebrew spirit [...] is a tragic soul from the supernal world that is cast against its will from the world of tragedy.”59 Similar assessments of Zeitlin and his writing were expressed by Gnessin and Shofman, and also by contemporary Hebrew writers who were not so close to Zeitlin.60 The poet Ya‘acov Fichman wrote that Zeitlin’s early writings were “probably the first writings according to which we have learned the most important problems of contemporary philosophy.”61 Why was Zeitlin so revered and so influential, and what was the nature of his impact on writers like Gnessin, Brenner, Shofman, and many others? Zeitlin was a creative, multifaceted intellectual who made many contributions in Hebrew and Yiddish in various different realms: philosophical, literary, political, and journalistic. In fact, it is virtually impossible to sum up his career and legacy because he was working with great intensity in all these diverse fields in seemingly incongruous ways. Zeitlin’s first significant publication in Hebrew was a highly original and extremely erudite study entitled Ha-tov ve ha-ra (“Good and Evil”).62 In this study, clearly influenced by Schopenhauer and ­Nietzsche, Zeitlin sought to explain pessimism as a worldview shared by early Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism. Zeitlin moves here seamlessly among ­nineteenth-century Western philosophical works and rabbinic, kabbalistic, and hasidic texts, as well as Christian and Buddhist sources. For example, he finds similarities between certain rabbinic and Buddhist teachings and emphasizes what seems to him the kabbalistic view of the inherent mixture of “good” and “evil” in reality. He suggests an analogy between Schopenhauer and R. Nachman of Bratzlav, and claims that R. Nachman reached a similar position to that of the German philosopher not through a highly refined philosophical method but through his innocence and striving to overcome his despair.63 Finally, Zeitlin dedicates a significant portion of this study to an exploration of

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Nietzsche’s thought and to his concept of the Übermensch, for which he finds an “­indigenous” Hebrew expression, adam elyon. He also begins to explore in this book what became for him a long-lasting preoccupation, namely the comparison between Nietzsche and hasidic thought and storytelling.64 In the same period, Zeitlin published an early monograph on Baruch Spinoza (1900) and the first monograph in Hebrew that was dedicated entirely to Friedrich Nietzsche (1905).65 These studies had a great influence on an entire generation of Jewish writers and intellectuals, who were exposed to these thinkers primarily through Zeitlin’s mediations. Parallel to these philosophically inclined essays, Zeitlin also published a number of literary texts that were path-breaking in the way they crossed generic and stylistic boundaries. His extremely inventive works, like Kavanot ve’yihudim (“Intentions and Unions,” 1903), “Le-cheshbono shel olam (“Pondering the World,” 1904), Shekhina (1908), and Tzima’on (“Thirst,” 1910),66 are composed of prose-poems, meditations, aphorisms, and prayers, as well as pieces of narrative prose permeated with ecstasy and despair. In all these texts, Zeitlin was clearly influenced by contemporary German and Russian writers and thinkers, but he was striving to find a synthesis between these poetic and philosophical trends and what he believed to be their “indigenous” Jewish manifestations. In a short auto­biographical essay from 1928, Zeitlin wrote that during these years he was dissatisfied with the positivist philosophy of Kant, Spencer, and Darwin as well as with Russian positivist critics such as Pisarev, Tcher­ nischovsky, and Michaelovsky. Instead, he says, he became acquainted with the depth of Schopenhauer, Hartman and Friedrich Nietzsche, and surprisingly, these thinkers, who are considered to be complete atheists, brought me closer to my inner religious self [...] In the depth of their writing, I learned to distinguish between the outer shell and the mysterious inner truth. In the radical disbelief of Nietzsche I came to recognize the man searching for God across the land to the point of madness.67

In the same autobiographical essay Zeitlin singled out one Russian writer as the most influential on his own thinking and writing: Lev Shestov, whom Zeitlin not only read but also met in 1904. Zeitlin re-

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garded Shestov as “the true heir of Nietzsche,” from whom he came to know “the quest for God,” which is “beyond external, radical heresy,” and from whom he learned that “in particular, out of a very great psychological tragedy one comes to true knowledge of God.” 68 Zeitlin wrote the first (incomplete) essay in Hebrew on Lev Shestov in 1907.69 It was published in Brenner’s journal Ha-me‘orer and aimed to introduce the work of Shestov to Hebrew readers, but it also showed the unexpected affinities between the thinking and aphoristic writing of Shestov, Nietzsche, and hasidic texts and traditions. The essay ends with an echo of Nietzsche’s cry: “God is dead. You killed him!” cried Nietzsche. But for someone who lacks everything, who lost everything, someone who stands in wonder and awe in front of reality, it is impossible not to dream about the strange and supernal. This person cries: “My God, my god, why have you forsaken me?”70

Tzima’on—a text subtitled “a vision of the heart”—is a lyrical portrayal of Zeitlin’s spiritual odyssey, what he described as his journey from the “truths of philosophy” to the uncertainty of the quest for the divine. In this hard to define text, composed of poetic stanzas, dialogues, and impressionistic prose, Zeitlin’s lyrical speaker wanders amid philosophical systems, all claiming that “God is dead,” and searches for “His grave.” He is driven by this “thirst” to the source of his wonder—religious experience of “amazement” and “awe.” Zeitlin recoils from accepting the tangible representations of God expressed in organized, institutional religion. He identifies with the individual who seeks not “the God that is found and nailed down, but the God who has not been found; not the God of the world, but the hidden God.”71 As Moshe Waldoks claims, this striving for individual religious experience led Zeitlin to his first significant and comprehensive compositions on R. Nachman and on Hasidism (published in 1910), as well as his exploration in the phenomenology of the varieties of religious experiences.72 Published in 1913, Zeitlin’s essay Be-chevion ha-neshama (“In the Hiding Place of the Soul”) is a kind of Jewish adaptation of and elaboration upon William James’s pioneering work.73 Zeitlin takes James as a starting point for his own explorations. He suggests that Man’s yearning for the ineffable, for what he calls “the hidden ­fountain”—which is

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the source of his own existence—is the fundamental basis of religious experience. This kind of intense inquiry is a product of what he called ­ha-pli’ah she ba-lev (“the wonder of the heart”). He claims that this kind of wonder is far beyond intellectual curiosity but is rather a creation of the spirit. “Wonder” and histomemut (“amazement”) do not engender clarity but do prompt an engagement with religious experience as well as artistic creativity: “there is no investigation, but only a retreat backwards, a desire to penetrate from all sides, awe and love, joy and trembling.”74 Be-chevion ha-neshama comes to define religious experience in terms that are very close to Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige, published four years later. Of course, Zeitlin does not use terms like “the numinous” or mysterium tremendum, but his Hebrew phenomenological terms are strikingly similar. Zeitlin never completed the projected second part of the essay, and it is hard to tell where it would have taken him. His plan was to devote the second part to examine the process of divine revelation—from heavenly voices to prophecy. What is clear is that after World War I, Zeitlin turned from his role as a thinker and writer who explored religious experience to an involvement in what can be termed “practical esoteric mysticism,” and also adopted a position of “prophet” and “rebuker.”75 Indeed, Zeitlin of the interwar period became identified as a “rabbi” and a “mystic,” who did not hesitate to take an active role in organized traditional Jewish religious life. In this sense, the end of his career (cut short by the Nazi extermination of Warsaw’s Jews) took him very far from his early years. However, it is important to resist the temptation of “backshadowing,” the retroactive foreshadowing of the past in light of what happened later.76 In the years before World War I, Zeitlin was a highly influential thinker and writer, whose thought and writing had a huge impact on other Hebrew writers who knew him well and constantly read his work with great interest. In spite of the fact that Zeitlin never wrote modernist fiction or poetry in the usual sense, his work intersected with European and Jewish modernism in many ways. As we shall see in the next chapter, Zeitlin’s texts from this period can explain much about the nature of the quest for religious experience in Hebrew modernism in the various enclaves in Europe and beyond (in Palestine and America).

The Quest for New Religiosity

Although different from Zeitlin in significant ways, modernist Hebrew writers like Gnessin, Brenner, and Shofman (and many of their contemporaries, including Arieli, Shteinberg, Baron, Agnon, and Fogel) were preoccupied with the same issues. They constantly asked themselves if it was possible to create literature and artistic expression that is dissociated from religious experience. The literary and intellectual explorations of religiosity and new religious experience—namely, the very same ideas that preoccupied Zeitlin in his early years—were no less important to these emerging modernists than the specifically Jewish entanglements of the haskalah, the Zionist thought of Ahad Ha‘am or the literature written by Freiberg, Bialik, and other members of the preceding generation. The religious stratum in Gnessin, Brenner, and Shofman is often expressed in highly fragmented, figurative, and symbolic structures rather than on the surface level of plot and characters. The operation of symbolic and fragmentary language as a means of tapping into the abyss, and into the mysteries of religious experience, occurs across a spectrum of Hebrew modernist texts in peculiar and unfamiliar ways that are closer to Russian and German modernist writers and thinkers. Furthermore, as we shall see, the modes of inter­textuality and engagement with religious Jewish texts are totally different from those of writers like Bialik, Berdichevsky, and Peretz. This is part of the reason why the religious layer is not easily identified. Not only were critics and readers not looking for religious elements in a fiction that was considered so thoroughly secular, but the radical fragmentation and the formal and linguistic experimentation of this fiction did not lend itself easily to analysis of intertextuality with religious texts and sources. The issue of language and intertextuality is a crucial point, and I have examined it in more detail elsewhere.77 In Hebrew literary historiography and criticism, there seems to be a correlation between what is known as the “anti-nusach” style of early-twentieth-century Hebrew fiction—the rejection of the allusive style of Abramovitz’s nusach—and a growing distance from Jewish religious texts, and indeed from any religious concerns.78 For many years, both the critics who accepted and those who rejected the writing of Gnessin, Brenner, Shofman,

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Shteinberg, and Fogel associated their stylistic revolution with the presumed absence of religious elements in their writings.79 In this context, the incident about Gershon Shofman, recorded by Dov Sadan on the occasion of Shofman’s seventieth birthday, is highly instructive and tells us much about the development of modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century. Shofman used to tell that on one occasion, while he was living in ­Vienna, he was intensively reading the scriptures in one of the city’s public gardens. When a Jewish man acquainted with him and his writings asked Shofman why he was reading the Bible with such intensity, his answer was: “I am checking that no melitza from the Bible found its way to one of my stories.”80 We can find similar anecdotes, as well as explicit comments on this very issue, in the writing of Shofman, Shteinberg, and Fogel.81 There is no doubt that writers like Shofman wanted to avoid—­ indeed were terrified of—what is known as shilton ha-melitza, or “the reign of the allusive Hebrew style,” which was so strong in the prose of the haskalah and in the Hebrew nusach style developed by Abramovitz in the 1880s and highly influential in subsequent years.82 Furthermore, writers of the fin de siècle had to confront the towering figures of Bialik, Berdichevsky, and Peretz, among others, who found different ways to both continue the nusach style and to establish alternatives to it. Writers like Shofman, Gnessin, Brenner, and Arieli were well aware of the fact that Hebrew carried with it semantic baggage, accumulated across many generations, and that many words and expressions became fixed in their meaning and overused. This was, in fact, inevitable given the fact that Hebrew was not used as a vernacular in this period. The modernist writers rejected the pastiche of biblical phrases associated with the flowery employment of biblical texts during the haskalah, and even rejected the more successful synthetic nusach style of Abramovitz. But these modernist writers nevertheless used biblical, rabbinic, mystical, and hasidic language, texts, and concepts in their writing. Thus, it is not so surprising that the very same Shofman who supposedly read the Bible in order to avoid any melitza in his fictional writing simultaneously used the Bible, and all of Judaism’s other foundational texts, to great effect in his fiction, albeit in different ways than the writers who preceded him.83

The Quest for New Religiosity

Moreover, Shofman was clearly occupied throughout his career with questions about religious experience and its place in modernist literature. For example, he wrote an essay entitled Al ha-ecstasa ha-religiousit ba-siporim (“On Religious Ecstasy in Prose Fiction”), in which he discusses the question of religious experience and the ways in which modern literary texts can approach “the sacred.” In a way that is typical of both modernist Hebrew and Russian writers, Shofman projects these questions on those writers who were considered quintessentially “religious”—Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Lev Tolstoy. The essay begins with a quote from Tolstoy’s diary in which the seventy-year-old Russian author writes: I rode out on the way from Tula and I thought to myself: I am really part of him, and in a certain way I left behind certain other parts [of me]—everything, a father, and I felt love, real love, for him. Now, especially now, that I cannot awaken, but only remember, that feeling. And that made me so happy that I told myself: I had believed that I would never again know something new, and yet I have this wonderful feeling, full of happiness, a new feeling, yes: feeling.

Shofman further comments on Tolstoy’s sudden and fleeting religious “epiphany”: Only this feeling can be acceptable as a basis for a religious view for modern man. The love for God [...] but when do we receive this? You have to first be Tolstoy, that is: have a natural, inborn religious essence, to work on yourself and to struggle with yourself every long day of your life [...] , to live and create great works toward the great moment [...] and even he, after he had already been privileged to reach that moment, did not have the power to make it stay, and when he wanted to awaken it again—he could not! It is a momentary inspiration, illumination, enlightenment, and it can appear in a poetic work only following certain experiences, after certain shocks. Its force is in its discreetness, its calm, its rarity. And like this one must be very economical [...] 84

I suspect that Shofman’s remarks are revealing more about his own writing, and the writing of Hebrew and European modernists close to him, than about Tolstoy’s religiosity. It explains the momentary, fleeting nature of the religious experience, or what Rudolf Otto has called the

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­ uminous in some of Shofman’s short stories. In this respect, Shofman’s n case is not singular but typical of other modernist Hebrew writers of the early twentieth century. Side by side with a desire to break with the ubiquitous presence of the religious Jewish textual tradition, and the long shadow it cast on Hebrew fiction in this period, there was a quest to find ways to express and explore momentary, fleeting religious experience. On the heels of Shofman’s quest we turn now to Gnessin, whose fictional work was understood, until very recently, as completely devoid of any religious element (Jewish or non-Jewish). Gnessin did not supply us with a significant body of critical writing and he very rarely conceptualized his thought outside the fiction he wrote. However, his choice of texts for translation into Hebrew is highly significant. If we look at the handful of texts that he translated during his short life, we discover that apart from Chekhov, Baudelaire, and Guy de Maupassant, he chose to translate the religious Russian thinker Lev Shestov. ­Gnessin translated Shestov’s essay “Beginnings and Endings” under the title ­Techilat devarim acharonim in Brenner’s journal Ha-me‘orer.85 Like other things that Shestov wrote in this period, this extraordinary aphoristic text is a combination of philosophical inquiry and a personal search for religious meaning. The decision to translate this text into Hebrew and to publish it in Ha-me‘orer (even before the text was published in a book form in Russian!) points not only to the personal contacts between Shestov, Zeitlin, Gnessin, and Brenner but also to the impact of Shestov’s writing on all of them. Gnessin also left us a number of unpublished fragments that provide a clear sense that he was highly preoccupied with questions of religious experience in what Gnessin’s contemporary, Max Weber, has called “a disenchanted world.” These fragments point to the possibility that he was at work on a philosophical-religious essay, similar in form and content to the essays written by Lev Shestov and Viacheslav Ivanov. It is possible that Gnessin intended to include these bits in one of his stories or novellas. In any case, in one of these surviving fragments, Gnessin writes: The philosophy of the randomness is a restraint to mystery. Coincidences fill the space of the world; and the world does not lack the temperament that arranges them in the lives of men [...] Is there then

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a man free of this? [...] When a person hears the music of, let’s say, the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, will he not kneel before the spirit of God that hovers within it?86

This is an illuminating aphorism written in the spirit of Nietzsche, Shestov, and Zeitlin, and it points to a basic paradox. On the one hand, it says that rational philosophy teaches us that there is no such thing as “mystery” in the world and in our life. Of course, people observe a flood of seemingly strange and unexplained incidents in the world around them, but their rational faculty dictates that they will explain them and put them in some kind of logical “order.” On the other hand, writes Gnessin, rational philosophy is totally helpless in front of the subjective experience of human beings. There are moments in which a person hears a sublime musical piece (the example is Beethoven’s ninth symphony, but Gnessin is careful to stress that it is just one example), and he or she must recognize and “bow down” in front of a “divine spirit” that hovers over it. Gnessin seems to say here that whether or not we believe in God or in divinity as an objective “reality,” we must acknowledge the personal, subjective experience of a divine, supernal entity.87 Beyond these fragments and translations, another clue to the religious preoccupations of Gnessin is what Hillel Zeitlin, Gnessin’s mentor and good friend, has written about him and about his attitude toward Hebrew language and its “sacred nature” and potential: The Hebrew language was sacred to him and beloved of him, and he fostered it with great care, and worked assiduously to convey with it all the finest and delicate shades, and with the greatest accuracy; not because he thought it a living language, but quite the contrary, because it belonged, in his opinion, to the very distant past; because it was like that beautiful princess who lies entrapped in her castle of ice, way, way up on the mountain peak [...] 88

This is an important observation that teaches us much about Gnessin and the way he approached Hebrew and his modernist fiction. Zeitlin seems to say that Gnessin, who became the writer of the most refined and intricate Hebrew narrative at the beginning of the twentieth century, made such effort to express every shade and hue not because he believed in the possibility of turning it into a “living

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l­anguage,” not because of the ideology of “revival” of Hebrew, but because Hebrew contains something sacred. Although Zeitlin does not spell it out, the implications of this view are that writing Hebrew has a potential for a modernist writer to bring into life religious, sacred elements even if (or maybe especially if) he writes about the most intricate articulations of individuals (who seem to have very little to do with traditional Jewish life) and their sexual dilemmas and urban predicament. Indeed, it is only recently that Dan Miron and others have begun to explore the close links between the symbolist, modernist style and the religious-mystical (“anagogic,” in Miron’s terms) stratum in the fiction of Gnessin.89 The case of Brenner and his relation to religiosity and religious experience is probably the most complex, because he was the one who reflected most about these issues throughout his career as a writer, critic, and essayist. As is well known, Brenner has written numerous essays in which he sharply condemned the religious-traditional Jewish way of life and the “bookish” and “damaging” tendencies of studybased Judaism, which he knew very well in his childhood and youth. This aspect in Brenner’s writing can be seen, for example, in what became known as the “Brenner Incident,” the stormy debate between Brenner and figures like Ahad Ha‘am that followed the publication of Brenner’s notorious essay Al chezion ha-shmad (“On the Specter of Shmad,” 1911). In this essay, Brenner discusses the question of conversion to Christianity; and many readers understood him as suggesting that religious belief had nothing to with Jewish identity and Jewish culture.90 Another example would be an essay from 1908, in which Brenner responded harshly  to ­Ha-shachar, a Hebrew journal published in Galicia whose goal was to disseminate new ideas among the young students of the yeshiva: As one who spent his entire youth in the tents of Jacob [the study halls] learning the disputations of [the Talmudic sages] Abbaye and Rabba, I have no love lost for yeshivot and yeshiva students. Because who knows as well as I do how much vacuity and muddle prevails in this public institution, the yeshiva—and how terribly this institution manifests itself in our lives. Who knows as well as do I and others like me the extent to which these yeshivot have consumed every good quality we have,

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the extent to which they have not, and never had, even a single positive aspect, to what extent there is no possibility that a yeshiva will have a positive influence on even one of its pupils in any way whatsoever.91

This kind of radical, negative view of traditional Jewish religious education, which Brenner knew first-hand, as well as the rigorous and often disapproving “self-evaluation” of contemporary Jewish life, brought even an antinomian figure like Berdichevsky to write in 1908 (after meeting Brenner face-to-face for the first time) that Brenner was “not Jewish anymore in his soul. He hates Judaism; he sees its destruction and perhaps wishes for it.” 92 Berdichevsky was clearly wrong in his assessment.93 He did not recognize that beneath the disdain for traditional Jewish institutions, and alongside his strenuous critique of Jewish life of past and present, not only was Brenner passionate about the question of Judaism and modern Jewish culture but also he was someone with a very strong sense of religiosity and deep religious quest.94 Brenner expressed his religiosity, and even his mystical tendencies, in stories, short novels, and also in his extensive essays and critical writing. In 1908, the same year in which Brenner met Berdichevsky and wrote his devastating attack on Yeshiva education, he also wrote: The matter of life is strange, the matter of life is a secret; it is veiled to us. We are baffled with every step we take; with every step our eyes gape and tremble: What is this? Where are we? Where is the creator and where is creation? It is also so incomprehensible, so hidden from us. The different worlds, the different combinations, the different processes, the different relationships, the different forces, the different organisms—all this bears within it a riddle, an inner, essential, invisible aspect [...] Every corner, every manifestation, every simple and ostensibly non-spiritual thing contains an inherent enigma and spirit. Everything bears lines of illumination that eyes of flesh cannot imagine [...] For those whose senses are refined, all is mystery, all is wonder and astonishment.95

When Brenner uses terms like “the secret of life,” “the riddle of life,” the “mysterious,” “wonder,” and so on, terms that are familiar to us from Zeitlin, James, Otto, Shestov, and many modernist writers and thinkers, he denounces rationalist and positivist thought and turns toward a

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sense of religiosity and mysticism that is beyond institutionalized religion. Indeed, throughout the first decade of the twentieth century (and probably until the end of his life), Brenner expressed his affinity with religious mysticism. In a letter to Hillel Zeitlin he writes, “I am not afraid of sacredness,” and talks of how “my head is heart and it tends towards mysticism.” Even in 1914, Brenner writes: “The author of these lines,” for example, does not conceive that the human soul could have any other, non-mystical relationship with this wonder in which we are enveloped, to the incomprehensible that enfolds every movement and breath. Anyone who has been granted un-coarse qualities of spirit cannot but see in all embodiments of life a secret, and cannot relate to these except as a mystery.96

What is the meaning of this tendency of Brenner toward religiosity and mysticism, and how can we reconcile it with Brenner’s stated “atheism” and his disdain for traditional religious life and institutions? There are different ways to approach this question. One could stress Brenner’s declarations, such as the manifesto-like essays which lay down the foundation for the new journal Ha-me‘orer: We want the Hebrew person [...] to find in his language, the language of the bards of Israel and the masters of the aggadah, the language of the sacred poets and the mystics and the pietists of yore, the language of “The Thought and the Harp” [a story by Y. L. Peretz] and “Beyond the River,” [a story by Berdichevsky] the language of “The Vale of Tears” [a story by Mendele Mocher Sefarim] and of “The Destruction of Nemirov” [a poem by Bialik]—all that is close to his heart, all that is close to his philosophy of life, all the burdens of his soul, all the sparks of his spirit, all the reverberations of his ideas, all the flashes of his imagination, all the words of his God rising from the earth.97

Or the one Brenner published in the eleventh volume of Ha-me‘orer (November 1906): The Me‘orer’s prayer: May all those enter my academy who have a share and portion in the seers and prophets of Judah and in the those who pray for the afflicted when he faints, in the stalwart heroes of the rebellion and the diligent masters of the Mishna, in the Levite singers and Ibn Gevirol, and those who follow Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki [Rashi]

The Quest for New Religiosity

and Rashal [Rabbi Shlomo Luria, also known as Maharshal], those sheltered under the tallit of the Ari [the kabbalist Rabbi Yitzhak Luria], and those who flock to the tomb of Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav; may all those come here who have the word of the God of Israel and the God of Man in their hearts and their mouths and may they become a glorious, sublime, holy unity!98

In these “manifestos,” Brenner devotes considerable attention to texts of Aggadah, Kabbalah, and Hasidism, and sees them as part of a long line that begins with the poetry of King David (in the Psalms) and ends with Bialik, Mendele, Peretz, and Berdichevsky. The significant implication here is that his own work and his journal Ha-me‘orer is a continuation of this legacy. However, it is important to note, as Iris Parush has done, that Brenner’s main concern in these essays is not the formation of a stable Jewish canon or the project of kinus that occupied figures like Ahad Ha‘am, Bialik, and Berdichevsky. Brenner is not interested in creating or sustaining a sense of continuity between traditional religious texts and contemporary Hebrew literature. He does not advocate collecting these religious texts and traditions for “conservation” or rewriting them in order to foster a modern Jewish national identity and culture.99 His view of modern Hebrew literature is pluralistic and avoids any preconditions or preconception of what is essentially “Hebrew” or “Jewish.” And yet, Brenner himself clearly exhibits a strong affinity with certain religious figures and texts, like the Hasidism of the Ba‘al Shem Tov: The souls of the Ba‘al Shem Tov and his peers, as they are revealed to us in many passages, are closer to us than the souls of, for example, Lilienblum. The Ba‘al Shem Tov was, of course, a wonder-worker, a man who knew nothing about the laws of nature and natural philosophy as it is taught in schools, a man full of superstitions, a man in awe of God who greatly desired to do His will, who never read [Georg] Simmel on Nietzsche, and despite all this we see clearly that in the life of his spirit, in his penetration of the mysteries of life, the world, existence, beauty, light, in his joy and his melancholy, in his wanderings over the Carpathian Mountains and in his lonely thoughts on the Carpathian Mountains, he was closer to the soul of the modern than the author [Lilienblum] of Derekh Teshuva [The Path of Repentance].100

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The Besht is understood by Brenner as very close to, indeed a model for, the “modern Jew.” This is despite the fact that he was full of narrow-minded beliefs and prejudices, and despite the fact that he did not (and could not) read the modern thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Simmel. Still, Brenner seems to suggest that there are some parallels between the Besht on one hand, and Nietzsche and Simmel on the other hand. The choice of names here is hardly incidental. In Brenner’s view, the Besht was closer to the sensibilities and concerns of a modern Jew at the first decade of the twentieth century than a rationalist and nationalist maskil like Moshe Leib Lilienblum, whom Brenner clearly appreciated.101 It is especially telling that Brenner finds an affinity between modernist concerns and hasidic mysticism and its ability to penetrate the “mysteries of life.” Brenner is quite clearly far from claiming that Jewish mysticism or Hasidism has a “special key” to solve the secrets or the mysteries of existence, as he is far from a belief in God as a transcendental entity. Brenner maintains that the Besht (and others like him) sensed the impenetrable mystery of existence and this is what made him close to modern man and modern thought. Brenner rejects the rationalism of the European Enlightenment and the practical positivism of the nineteenth century (with its Jewish representatives like Lilienblum) that emphasize the “clear light of reason.” Instead, he suggests that modern consciousness is shaped by the recognition of the “fog” of existence. He follows Nietzsche in thinking that “the pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence.”102 Brenner writes that he feels very close to “those shattered, complex, tragic souls that penetrate into the secret, that rise into the mist, the mystery.”103 These “shattered souls” cannot reveal any truth beyond what is explored by rationalist, philosophical, and scientific investigation, but they do expose its limitations. I, the writer of these lines [...] I am not a man of science; I have not frequented the halls of learning and I am neither a rationalist nor a positivist, and I do not value above all else “pure intellect,” nor the norms of society and its gratification, not even the truth of our experience; on the contrary, quite the opposite, I know very well, like the simplest of the simple who has a soul within him, the limit and

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negligibility of the human mind, all the errors and illusions of our senses, and along with this all the difficulty of life and the conjunctions of life, all the bitter gloom of life without God, and along with this all the fear and trembling and deadlock of the mystery of our life and death [...] But, perhaps precisely because my pain is simple and elementary, it pierces and punctures me to the very depths—I do not understand how people who call themselves enlightened are not ashamed to cast into that awful open maw pointless little words, words that will not soften a thing, not warm a thing, and not reveal a thing, about some fiction—a fiction in every sense of the word—that they are searching for and miss and which they find, about some fiction called God.104

This is Brenner’s unique and paradoxical sense of religiosity. He writes about the religiosity and the religious experience of “free atheists,” people who are religious “not in the common sense,” and “are far from theology.”105 In his view, institutional religion, the search for theological dogma or a practical set of “divine laws,” stands in stark opposition to what Brenner considers “real religiosity.” For Brenner, the experience of wondering and awe leads to mysticism and a religiosity that does not attempt to give a theological answer, and at the same time does not negate the metaphysical yearning and quest. The experience of awe, or what Rudolf Otto calls the numinous, is the recognition of the limitations of immanent human existence, and is the essence of what Brenner calls “mysticism.” This mysticism is not an attitude toward a transcendent object, but an approach toward an existence that is beyond reasoning and understanding.106 Perhaps the best description of the idiosyncratic religiosity of Brenner was captured by the Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld, who wrote that [Brenner’s] weaknesses unite into a kind of thundering force that raises him up into a different sphere that I would call the sphere of religious anguish. When we say religious sphere, we mean a primal, fundamentalist sphere of “who am I and what am I?” [...] Beyond the wonder of the individual, the religious inclination focuses on the search for the meaning of life, not as a matter of utility, convenience, or spiritual enrichment, but rather as anguish, for so long as there is no flicker of hope in reality, all joy, beauty, and pleasure seem inconsequential.107

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One of the most extensive and riveting (albeit little known and discussed) engagements of Brenner with religiosity and with Jewish mysticism and Hasidism is expressed in an essay he wrote in Yiddish around 1906, while living and working in London. Entitled Di bedeytung fun Hasidism in yudentum un zayn obklung in der moderner ­hebreisher literatur (“The Meaning of Hasidism and Its Echoes in Modern Hebrew Literature”), this essay was intended to be the first of a series in a Yiddish appendix of the British newspaper The Jewish Chronicle. The plan to publish the series did not materialize, and only the first essay survived, in manuscript form. It was published by Yitzhak Bakon only in the 1970s.108 As Bakon stresses, in spite of the fact that the essay was intended for a popular audience, it reveals much about Brenner’s attitude toward Hasidism, about his understanding of the place of ­Hasidism and Jewish mysticism in Hebrew writing of the early twentieth century, and by implication in Brenner’s own writing. The essay takes the tone of a polemic, addressing the reader whom Brenner calls “the average member of the West European Jewish intelligentsia,” who might see Hasidism as nothing more than a “movement among Polish Jews in the eighteenth century that was full of superstitions, weird ideas, belief in tzadiks, and nothing else besides.” He anticipates the rationalist dismissal of Hasidism as a “religious mystical” movement. To counter this bias, Brenner seeks to place Hasidism in the context of a certain path of Jewish history, culture, and thought. He describes a trajectory of what he calls “the law of the hidden,” the “occult” impulse of Jewish mysticism that unfolds from the Zohar through Lurianic Kabbalah, and from there to the Hasidism of the Ba‘al Shem Tov and his disciples. This historical exposition of Hasidism and mysticism is not very different from ideas expressed by Berdichevsky and Zeitlin. Yet, it is clear that the main emphasis of the essay (and the projected two parts of the series) is the meaning of Hasidism for “us, the children of the present and of the future”: Yes, Hasidism really was a religious mystical movement. Its founders, teachers and followers really were mystics; that is, people who searched for a way to their God, who contemplated their relationship to being, the artificiality of their lives, and the place they occupied in the different worlds.109

The Quest for New Religiosity

Instead of stressing the importance of Hasidism as a popular movement or as a group that established a novel approach toward religious practices, Brenner emphasizes Hasidism as a path-searching force in Judaism. Using hasidic terminology he makes a distinction between the “inside”—the new spiritual position—and the klipa, the outer shell that is, in his opinion, hasidic beliefs and practices: instead of exoteric dogma (torat hanigla), which demanded faith and commanded what one should do and shouldn’t do, esoteric doctrine came to the fore, brushing away action and the world of doing, and leading the way directly to the thousand palaces (heykhalot dekhsifin) and revealing the sfirot, which were formed after the Limitless Light restrained itself to make room for them. Kabbalah crowned the human as king over the world, as the purpose of the world of creation [...] The Kabbalist is a free person who strolls in the most beautiful worlds and penetrates the deepest abysses. He looks upon practical commandments as external matter that holds very little significance. The most important is the essence, the soul of the Torah. He becomes a partner in the creation of the world.110

Brenner describes Hasidism and Jewish mysticism as a human disposition. The focus in his description is the fact that this movement created a profound change in the individual human being. Rather than being confined by the world of normative laws, tzadik is the man who experiences his freedom and is a partner in divine creation. In hasidic circles, metaphysical yearning receives an affirmation within the fabric of religious life. This is the reason why, according to Brenner, Hasidism should be a living force in early-twentieth-century Jewish life and in Hebrew literature: for us, the children of the present and of the future; for us, for whom Jewry is a living thing from which we derive spiritual benefits; for us, who search for substance for our own lives, only the lofty aspirations and soarings of Jewish thought in various periods are important; for us, significance lies only in the light that Hasidism brought to the Jewish soul; its battles against the ossification of the rabbinical tradition, its divine inspiration, its religious ecstasy, its ideals, its romanticism, its poetry. And so we can actually see that as soon as New Hebrew literature came out of its maskilic diapers, as soon as it started searching for,

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and finding, national Jewish substance, Hasidism also started having very particular echoes within it.111

Although Brenner mentions Berdichevsky, Peretz, and Zeitlin (as well as Yehuda Shteinbeg and Sholem Asch) as examples of the successful contemporary evocation of Hasidism in Hebrew literature, the thrust of this unfinished series of essays is not on acts of retelling hasidic stories or creating neo-hasidic texts. Instead, it suggests the compelling potential of fashioning a thoroughly modernist literature that deals with the life of individual Jewish characters, with the urban experience, and with the changing terrain of sexuality and gender, but in a way that is permeated with the religiosity that Brenner finds in mystical and hasidic texts and traditions. As we shall see in the next chapter, this is exactly what Brenner himself and some of his contemporaries did in one way or another.

Fo u rt e e n  Mysterium Tremendum The Varieties of Religious Experience in Hebrew Modernism It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only [...] in personal human situations, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma [spirit], which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together. —Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 1918

One way to compare Jewish traditions, texts, and questions of religiosity and religious experience in Hebrew writings of the late nineteenth century with modernist writings at the beginning of the twentieth century is to examine the theme of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Yom Kippur—the holiest day of the Jewish year—was a dominant presence in Hebrew fiction of the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It appeared in stories such as David Frishman’s Be-yom ha-kipurim (“On the Day of Atonement,” 1880–1881), Ben Avigdor’s Elyakim ­ha-meshuga (“Mad Elyakim,” 1889), Mordecai Ze‘ev Feierberg’s novella Le’an (“Whither?,” 1899), and Micha Yosef Berdichevsky’s story Me-ever ­la-nahar (“Beyond the River,” 1899).1 In spite of some differences in the ways the theme functions in all these texts, it is safe to say that Yom Kippur was employed in all of them as a background for recording the collapse of traditional Jewish institutions and for describing the tensions between fathers and sons, between tradition and the allure of modernity. These elements are the building blocks of the narrative of apostasy and loss of faith that is so common in the literature of this period. Perhaps the most representative employment of Yom Kippur is in the well-known scene in Feierberg’s novella Le’an. Here, the young protagonist Nachman’s break from the authority of family and religious tradition is signaled by the momentous act of blowing out a candle at the synagogue in the midst of Yom Kippur. At that point, in an act that embodies the desecration of the holy place and holy time, Nachman is seen by his father and by the others as “mad.” He himself realizes that this momentous occasion is the beginning of

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his “different life.”2 In Berdichevsky’s story published in the very same year, the protagonist Gavriel also realizes his alienation from Jewish traditional society in the midst of Yom Kippur: And, paradoxically, on Yom Kippur, when the entire people, small and large, gather in the beit midrash, cloaked in their tallitot and their shrouds, stand and pray by the light of wax candles—precisely at that hour I see, like the darkness of God breaking through the pale faces of these fearful people as if their end and the end of the entire world had come. Then [...] as if a strange desire burned within me, that only with great effort I suppress, a desire to raise my tallit over my head and to call out in a great Jewish voice: “Awaken, my people.”3

The devastating result of this realization is that Gavriel is forced to divorce his beloved young wife and to move away from the traditional Jewish community that disavows him. This event brings about the typical conflict within the protagonist, who is caught up between “the two magnets.”4 The two fictional texts of Feierberg and Berdichevsky, published at the tail end of the nineteenth century, are already self-conscious reminders of a familiar theme: Yom Kippur is the dramatized symbol of tradition, enacting the tension between the “old” and the “new” generations, the “fathers” and the “sons,” and the gap between the individual protagonist and the institutions of the Jewish community. However, when we turn our attention to the writings of Shofman, Gnessin, Brenner, and the young Agnon during the early years of the twentieth century, the theme of Yom Kippur takes a very different turn.5 Here the historical and socio-religious drama as well as the internal “narrative of apostasy” gives way to something quite different. A good example of the new ways Yom Kippur can reappear in modernist Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century is in the short stories of Gershon Shofman, a writer who rarely touches on religious themes in an explicit way. One of Shofman’s early stories is entitled Ha-ardal (“The Sandal,” 1902). In the story, we find the deeply introspective protagonist Daniel on the fuzzy borders between sleep and wakefulness, consciousness and unconsciousness. The story presents its readers with a series of dreams

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and reveries; the most extensive and interesting one transports the protagonist to the Eve of Yom Kippur: That whole night was filled with tossing and turning. He dreamed of Yom Kippur Eve when the dawn breaks. A thick fog outside. The corners of the house were filled with potatoes and other damp, muddy roots. The tender roosters lay trussed in the darkness under the tables, from time to time voicing their peculiar, broken calls. When he grasped his rooster, it made a strange groaning noise. Without even wondering about it, he saw that it was not a rooster in his hand but rather a flailing fish opening and closing its mouth. A familiar and very unpleasant feeling welled up within him at the sight of this overly expressive mouth [...] While he wanted to shake the sandal fiercely and brutally, he felt a great weakness in his arm and it simply slid out of his hand and fell at his feet [...] 6

Although the story deals, at a superficial level, with the conflict between the younger and older generations—similar to most nineteenthcentury writing—here the center of attention shifts significantly. Most importantly, the story (and its engagement with Yom Kippur) occurs almost entirely within the psychic world of the protagonist, in his dreams, reveries, and associations. Moreover, instead of the iconic authoritative father (or father-in-law), we have the mother; instead of Yom Kippur, there is the Eve of Yom Kippur, the day on which atonement is enacted not through prayer and fasting but by eating and performing the ritual of kapparot or kappores (“atonements”). In the ritual of kapparot a person’s sins are transferred or “passed on” to a rooster, a chicken, or even a fish that is offered as a substitute for oneself. These Jewish symbols of Yom Kippur, which are more connected to mystical and folkloric traditions than to institutional religious practices,7 are clearly an important part of Daniel’s dream. What is interesting is the fact that in the dream the rooster is transforming into a fish, and later to the sandal, which is metonymic to Daniel himself. In Freudian terms, we might say that what is important here is not only the raw materials or “latent content” of the dream but also the “dream work” itself, namely the practice of displacing and condensing the images which create a dream.8

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Within this dream-world, Daniel is not totally surprised when the crowing rooster is suddenly turned into a silent fish that can only open and close his mouth, but it leaves him with a “familiar and unpleasant sensation.” What is important in the context of the current discussion is the fact that the dream work is parallel to the act of substitution and displacement that is at the heart of the ritual of kapparot. Here, Daniel’s lack of satisfaction and his inability to take control of his life and “be a man” (or “become a rooster”) is expressed not only in psychosexual terms but also in terms that are taken from the religious sphere, in which atonement is a desire to become a “new being.” This kind of imagery probably relies on Jewish and Christian symbolism of conversion and atonement, and indeed, Shofman and other Hebrew writers in this period do not hesitate to mix Jewish and Christian texts, icons, and images. What is significant in this small example is that the traditional fictional symbolism of Yom Kippur—an element of the narrative of loss of faith and the disintegration of tradition—is totally bypassed, and yet some of the religious symbols and language of Yom Kippur are nevertheless employed by Shofman in order to explore the psychological, sexual, and existential predicament of his protagonist. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Shofman was highly suspicious of extended and continuous use of religious language and evocation of religious experience. He called instead, in his essay on Tolstoy, for only momentary and brief evocations of religious symbols and experience. Thus, we can see how one fairly isolated instance of religious language and symbols is effectively employed by the narrator in a way that is exceptional and yet linked to other themes of the story. The protagonist Daniel might be entirely outside the realm of Jewish tradition but the religious realm can be activated (or reactivated) as part of his experiential, psychic world. Another, even more unusual example of Shofman’s employment of religious language that also has to do with Yom Kippur can be found in Yona (1902). Yona Hanin is a twenty-two-year-old man who works as a teacher of young children. He lives alone with his mother (his father is not mentioned at all) on the outskirts of a small Jewish town. Sick and on the verge of dying of tuberculosis, Yona spends most of his time seeking the companionship of other men (like many of the male characters discussed in Part II). His life is gradually extinguished by the

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disease, and he is exhausted by his desperate search for intimacy and his homoerotic desire. In this unexpected context, we find a surprising appearance of Yom Kippur: And on Yom Kippur his sweet intoxication would reach its highest heights. In the synagogue—the rustling of the tallitot and the white robes, the languid pacing in the dusty hay, the flickering of the wax candles in the light of the day, the singing of the cantor, the chiming of the clock [...] and outside, an early autumn wind. An endearing torpor played over the face of his beloved Shachna as he paced indolently in his sandals, and the scent of his shirt was so potent today that he could feel his soul taking leave of him.9

This scene actually brings to mind (albeit in a very remote way) some of the familiar stories in which Yom Kippur is a main theme, but the context and the meaning could not be more different. As in Ha-ardal, here Yom Kippur is not associated with any break with the tradition or with a figure of authority (like the angry rabbi-father in Feierberg’s novella). Instead, the experience of Yom Kippur is evoked in a highly impressionistic manner through the intoxication of Yona with the ritualized prayer in the synagogue, the white garments, the candles, the cantor, and even by the proximity of the bodies of the praying men (especially that of his beloved friend Shachna). The synagogue and the awe-inspiring experience of Yom Kippur become a site of Yona’s distressed religious yearning, as well as his sexual fantasy, and it is impossible to separate them.10 The story reflects a clear blurring of the lines between the “sacred” and the “profane.” The enchanted space of the sacred synagogue and the association of Yom Kippur with the cyclical death and renewal of nature (which Yona observes outside) are linked in this scene, at least momentarily, to the protagonist’s sexual and spiritual desires. If the synagogue, the prayers, and perhaps the very experience of Yom Kippur have become what Nietzsche called (in his evocation of churches) “the tombs and sepulchers of God,”11 then Shofman and his characters are strangely attracted to these tombs. Yom Kippur appears again later in the story when Yona becomes too sick to even go to the synagogue, and therefore he misses the entire religious and sensual experience. Instead, he is lying in his bed and the only vestige of the awe-inspiring rituals of Yom Kippur is the candle that he

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puts in front of him in a clay pot. However, as he looks at the flickering candle, he is overcome by a kind of mystical vision or reverie12: On Yom Kippur night, Yona sprawled on his bed facing the large candle that was stuck in a large clay-pot full of sand, where he mused and fantasized until morning about the “three proud date trees” that stood by a rivulet in the Arabian desert and which complained to God that no creature enjoyed them, and then a diseased and tormented monk who lay in the desolate desert arrived and laughed and blinked in the fierce sun and thanked God for the few embers of life that still glimmered within him.13

This is a strange passage that might seem incomprehensible at first glance. During the night of Yom Kippur, Yona has a reverie about three palm trees in an Arabian desert and about a priest who is about to die in the desert heat. Like in the story Ha-ardal, there are clearly links between the condensed images of the dream and Yona’s physical and psychological state. However, the entire dream scene comes to life if we recognize that it is written as symbolist prose with a unique employment of intertextual allusions. As often occurs in Hebrew literature from this period, the intertexts are from both traditional Jewish texts and Russian literature. In the sixth chapter of Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, there is a scene in which the protagonist Raskolnikov has strange reveries or “waking fantasies”: He kept having waking fantasies, and they were all such strange ones; most frequently of all he fancied he was somewhere in Africa, in some kind of Egyptian oasis. A caravan was resting, the camels were l­ying down peacefully; all around there were palm trees, an entire circle of them; everyone was eating their evening meal. He, however, kept drinking water, straight from the spring that flowed murmuring right by his side. It was so cool, and the water is so wonderfully, wonderfully cold and blue, hurrying over various-colored stones, and sand that was so pure, with spangles of gold [...] 14

This vision of Raskolnikov itself resonates with an earlier Russian text, namely Alexander Pushkin’s final poem of the cycle “Imitations of the Koran” (1824). In the poem, a young traveler bitterly rails against

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God’s injustice as he has lost his way in the desert. Burned by the heat and covered with dust, he hopelessly wanders for three days and three nights. Suddenly, he spies an oasis with palm trees. The poem describes the wanderer’s long sleep, during which he grows old. The palm trees and the cold stream dry up; the bones of a dead camel begin to crumble. Then a voice finally awakens the traveler, who is now an old man, and alerts him to the passage of time. The man becomes despondent, but then a miracle takes place: the palm trees revive, the spring fills up with cold flowing water, and the bones come to life. At this point, the wanderer renews his faith in God; his strength and youth return; and he begins his journey anew filled with hope.15 Both Pushkin’s poem and the “vision” of Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s novel represent a kind of conversion experience in which the traveler finds renewed faith in the Divine and gains some sense of salvation.16 Shofman’s story is clearly in dialogue with these nineteenth-century Russian texts. It seems that Shofman was looking for some articulations of religious experience far removed from the East European Jewish town in which his protagonist Yona is located. The intertextuality in this story sends us to the Islamic Koran via well-known nineteenth-century Russian literature, providing a Christian/Slavic engagement with questions of faith and religiosity.17 Of course, Shofman’s passage is different from these texts because the priest that Yona dreams about—like the protagonist Yona himself—is about to die, and all he can do is thank God for the last vestiges of life he still has within him. It is unclear whether he finds any salvation or sense of atonement. But by examining all these intertexts, it suddenly becomes clear that Shofman’s invocation of Yona, the biblical prophet from the book of Jonah, is very central to the scene and to the story as a whole. The prophet Yona is not only the source of the name of the protagonist, but the protagonist of the biblical story, which is traditionally read in the Yom Kippur service. The oft-told story in the book of Jonah unfolds with a drama in which God provides Yona with a tree to shade him from the heat of the sun. Yona is pleased, but within a day God provides a worm that kills the tree. Jonah is wracked with agonizing grief and implores God to grant him death. The story of Yona ends enigmatically because we do not know what ultimately happens between him and God. Does

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Yona overcome his despair? Does his despair move him toward a new engagement with God? I would like to suggest that Shofman’s modernist story invokes all these questions about atonement, despair, faith, and religiosity in a way that actually makes the experience of Yom Kippur very remote from the familiar Jewish socio-religious experience of the day. And yet, the story offers the reader an intense engagement with these core religious questions and with some of the religious texts, traditions, and rituals associated with this day as “a sacred time.” ❊ A few years after the appearance of Shofman’s early stories, Gnessin wrote and published the story Se’uda mafseket (“The Meal before the Fast,” 1905–1906).18 At first glance this story also appears to continue the same dilemmas that are found in stories set in Yom Kippur (and/ or deal with the theme of Yom Kippur) in the late nineteenth century. Like the more naturalist fiction of his forebears, the story focuses on a specific time and place—just a few hours in the afternoon on the eve of Yom Kippur, inside the house of Reb Noach and his daughter Gittel. Noach is a simple Jew who works in commerce and maintains the traditional East European Jewish lifestyle. His sixteen-year-old daughter Gittel is a typical New Jewish Woman, of the kind we saw in Part II, an “external student” who is preparing herself for the Russian gymnasium. She reads Russian books of all kinds and does some writing as well. The beginning of the story presents the readers (through the father’s eyes) with her messy room that is full of books and scribbled-on pieces of paper. Later on, we discover that the young girl has decided to become a vegetarian, under the influence of one of the Russian books which she has read (very likely Tolstoy, who became vegetarian and preached for vegetarianism). This causes a potential conflict between Gittel and her father who prepares for Yom Kippur by eating the traditional meal before the fast. This is the most important meal of the year, as Jews preparing for the fast are commanded to eat, and to eat well. Traditionally, the meal before Yom Kippur is also a special time in which families who have been separated are supposed to reunite. In

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Gnessin’s narrative, with its indeterminate ending, it is unclear whether the vegetarian Gittel will agree to join her father and eat meat. The story can be thus seen as yet another text expressing the conflict in Jewish society of the time between the old and the young, the “fathers” and the “sons” (or daughters), the traditional socio-religious way of life and the yearning for enlightenment and freedom—all conflicts that are dramatized in the symbolic day of Yom Kippur and the rituals that surround it. But in reality, Gnessin’s story is very different from the late-nineteenth-century stories of Yom Kippur, not only in its transition from “son” to “daughter,” and from the day of Yom Kippur to the Eve of Yom Kippur,19 but also in its tone, style, and thematic core. As Dan Miron has suggested, the main preoccupation of the story is not the tension between the two characters but actually the death of Gittel’s mother and the devastating impact it has on Noach and on his daughter. In spite of what seems like a deep chasm between the father and the daughter, they are actually very close to each other and both of them are deeply affected by the mother’s death, a traumatic event which happened only ten months before the present moment. Written in an impressionistic and symbolist style, the story follows the process of death becoming an immanent presence in the life of people who witness it and cannot easily uproot themselves from the impression it leaves on them. The strong impact of the mother’s death is never communicated directly but through Gittel’s reflections and through some of the protagonists’ actions.20 For example, we see Noach going to the table on which the candles of Yom Kippur are set: Afterwards he approached the table, which was covered with a white tablecloth in honor of the Day of Judgment, and at the edge of which were arranged the silver candlesticks with their white and still-unlit candles, and directed his gaze onto the window. At that moment he reached out and gripped the edge of the tablecloth and quickly removed it from the table. The silver candlesticks spun, clattered, and fell loudly to the floor. Rabbi Noach woke up.21

The scene is described by the narrator as if Noach is in the midst of sleep or a reverie from which he awakes only after the loud tumble of the silver candelabrums. We do not know why he drops the candles, but it becomes clear from the reactions of both Gittel and Rachel (the

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maid of the house) that Noach’s strange act is related to the absence of the mother. This causes Gittel to remember that exactly a year ago, on the Eve of Yom Kippur of the previous year, their mother was there lighting the candles. Gittel then remembers the terrible and slow process of her mother’s death and how it affected her father, who shortly after refrained from going on a business trip and then stopped conducting his business altogether. At this point, Gittel (who until now seemed very removed from her father and self-absorbed in her writing and reading) suddenly “feels a strong and blind desire to see her father, to hug and kiss him and to speak with him.”22 She comes to a realization or recognition that her beloved father is a broken man whose life is extinguishing in front of her eyes, someone who might also be on the verge of dying. It is very significant that the moment in which the memory of her mother and the realization of the devastating effect of her mother’s death on her father become clear to Gittel is the Eve of Yom Kippur, which is designated in the story as both the “Day of Judgment” and the “Day of Memory.” Like in Shofman’s story, it is not the day of Yom Kippur, but the Eve of Yom Kippur that becomes the momentous occasion. This might have to do with the fact that in various Talmudic and rabbinic texts, the Eve of Yom Kippur is described as a day of memory and judgment that is no less (and perhaps even more) significant than Yom Kippur itself.23 The Eve of Yom Kippur and the “meal before the fast” function in the story as a juncture of memory and as an awe-inspiring moment that brings the father and daughter together, in spite of the fact that they are on two different sides of the generational and sociohistoric divide in Jewish society. The notion of reunion can be seen very clearly at the end of the story. The father comes back from the synagogue and tries very gently, even sheepishly, to ask Gittel to join him in the “meal before the fast.” He does not say anything apart from “together with me [...] together with me.” But his moment of stuttering, and his clear hesitation, acts as a personal, existential, and spiritual shock for Gittel: “Like a sunstroke, her brain was sliced through by a single, abysmal black thought. The window facing her looked for a moment like a black square on the white wall, and she fell back onto the couch with a strangled, poisonous groan.”24

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After this moment of shock the father and the daughter are united only in one heartbreaking cry that joins them together in spite of the fact that they might not be able to eat the meal together. Gittel’s distress is not only described with the beautiful symbol of the window becoming “a black square on the white wall.” The same window is also described from Gittel’s point of view as a site through which she can gaze upward toward the skies and the mystery of existence: Gittel suddenly felt an enormous weakness in her ankles, and her brain seemed to be cracking slowly. With a knotted heart she approached the window, opened it, and sat on the windowsill. Above the line of low houses on the other side of the quiet street she could see the pure, free dome of the sky, stretching diving and plunging, plunging and drowning behind the dew-drenched treetops, which grasped the blue on and on in an oblique, uplifting distance that speaks to the heart, that whispers to the soul, that leads the eye to the church steeple as well, glittering in the tired rays of the setting sun, and also the trees of the cemetery, frozen not far from it, and also the twisting, narrow train tracks winding behind them, endlessly and pointlessly [...] on and on beyond them, from another world, from a new world that indicates that unknowable distance [...] and there, in the heights, almost beyond what the eye can see, one of the free birds bathes in the blue, free waves, clearing a path, its wings bearing it wherever its spirit takes it, born up and praying, born up and expiring, until it becomes one with the blue that takes form, that the human eye cannot yet perceive.25

It is not difficult to understand why, at this moment of distress, ­Gittel diverts her gaze from the dark and gloomy house toward the open window and the blue skies way up above her. However, there is something quite surprising in the quest of Gittel, the seemingly modern and rational young woman, to look beyond visible reality into the “uplifting distance,” or her quest to find solace in the figure of the “praying bird,” who becomes one with the blue skies. The bird and the skies are presented as a process in which the Divine becomes corporeal, and it beautifully captures what we might term Gittel’s numinous experience of awe. This is a good example of Gnessin’s employment of symbolist fiction as a way to express numinous or religious experience.

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As Pericles Lewis observed, European modernist writers of fiction used techniques that had been associated in the realist novel with the accurate description of social phenomena, but they tended to adapt these techniques under the influence of symbolism in order to describe more esoteric experiences and to challenge realist fiction’s emphasis on the orderly workings of the visible world.26 The same can be seen in modernist Hebrew writers’ employment of Yom Kippur. Not unlike Shofman’s stories, here the experience of Yom Kippur (or the Eve of Yom Kippur) as “sacred time” goes beyond the mimetic representation of traditional Jewish society and rituals, and even beyond a psychological representation of the dilemmas into a new sphere of symbolic prose. When Gittel looks up towards the sky, the church, and the “praying bird” with which she identifies as part of her search for meaning and consolation, we move into a realm of religiosity that can be only imagined in a modernist “secular” text, and is articulated in a symbolist language. The usage of symbolist language to both amplify and alter traditional Jewish language and concepts is, in fact, an important aspect of the varieties of religious experience expressed in modernist Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century. Gnessin’s mature novellas are some of the most prominent and rich modernist texts to examine this new form of religious expression. A final example of the way modernist Hebrew writers of the early twentieth century deal with the experience of Yom Kippur comes from the third chapter of Gnessin’s novella Beterm (“Beforehand,” 1908). Here, the protagonist Uriel Efros takes the train to his hometown. When he senses the “smell of his hometown,” he recognizes a man with the Russian name Yevsi Gregorovitch, known to Uriel by his Hebrew nickname, Mr. Shalshelet.27 The narrator tells the reader that Uriel would probably not have even remembered this Mr. Shalshelet if not for a childhood incident forever etched in Uriel’s memory. This is a memory of Yom Kippur, in which Uriel was invited to Shalshelet’s house. Here, we encounter once again Yom Kippur, this time in a radical and yet quite familiar position as a symbol of the disintegration of traditional Jewish life: the “secret meal” that certain “­rebels” and “heretics” used to make in the midst of Yom Kippur. This kind of meal was apparently taking place in Shalshelet’s house every year on this

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day. The young Uriel was confronted by friends who invited him to join the “secret meal,” and greeted him with a smile that seemed to say: “hey, you and I share the same secret, that there is no God in heaven.”28 While it is unclear from Uriel’s account whether he actually took part in the “secret meal” (his recollections seem to register his simultaneous attraction and reluctance about it), what he remembers very clearly is actually the night after Yom Kippur, in which Mr. Shalshelet came to visit him in his family’s house. Uriel remembers that he observed his grandfather intently on this occasion: Uriel’s grandfather, who studied under the rabbis of Lubovitch, a tall, slightly stooped old man who was then the rabbi of the town of Z., had just come to the synagogue, and was, prior to havdalah, walking around the large hall, which was lit only by two rows of Yom Kippur candles, which cast a bit of red light and many shadows. He wandered in his long robe, his soft sandals slightly and weakly clacking on the floor, and he clapped his hands together, and his broad but somewhat weak voice was, after the fast, supplicating his father in heaven and filling the space of that dark hall with the bim-bam of devotion and of a longing soul. Uriel sat in a dark corner of the hall watching his grandfather, his dreaming heart a bit warm and very, very melancholy.29

Notice here that some of the familiar tokens of holiness of the Yom Kippur day—the special candles, the long white prayer robe, and the soft sandals—reappear in the figure of Uriel’s grandfather on the night after Yom Kippur. Upon watching his grandfather, the young Uriel cannot help but to be touched. At this point, the older and cynical Mr. Shalshelet enters the room and exclaims: “What do you think, Uriel? Real peace of soul can be found only among such as these! [...] But that’s completely absurd, even if one were to discuss it. They are people surrounded by certainty and their inner world is certain.”30 In Beterm, the “rebellion” against the traditional, religious Jewish way of life by people like Mr. Shalshelet and Uriel’s friends is taken for granted; it is a sign of the disintegration of the traditional Jewish life, and is assumed to be a “realistic” representation of the socio-historical fabric. But the narrator is interested in this socio-historical aspect only as a background to the inner drama that takes place in Uriel’s mind. The young Uriel seems to understand (and it is in fact Mr. Shalshelet who

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articulates it to him, albeit with quasi-philosophical skepticism) that “real peace of soul” can be found only in the ardent grandfather, who has not lost touch with the mystery of religious experience. This vision of his devout grandfather flickers in Uriel’s daydreaming, just like the glistening candles, without further comment or analysis. Indeed, the mature Uriel is constantly moving between the rational skepticism of people like Shalshelet and the religious awe and sense of the numinous that is (consciously or unconsciously) a part of his inner world. I believe that Uriel and the other characters mentioned here give us a crucial insight into the nature of Hebrew modernist fiction. Though it is easy to see how the writing of the early twentieth century, and its themes and concerns, break sharply with the previous generation of Jewish writers, if we look more closely we see a series of both fascinating continuities and differences in their engagement with the religious experience—Jewish or non-Jewish.

A Lonely Young Man with the Voice of God Crying in his Heart The crucial role of Yom Kippur in Gnessin’s novella Beterem is, in fact, not an isolated incident. As much as this novella focuses—as we saw earlier—on urban experience, on masculine sexual desire and dysfunction, on psychological disintegration and despair, it is also deeply concerned with questions of religiosity and religious experience. One interesting and seemingly strange example can be found in the last chapter of the novella. Here we find the protagonist Uriel Efros in a state of total exhaustion and despair. This situation is no doubt a result of his realization that all his attempts to escape from the misery of his life cannot succeed. Uriel runs away from the Kiev apartment of Irena Vasliyevna, with whom he has a complex sexual and emotional relationship. He returns to his parents’ house in the small hometown, and then escapes again to the riverbank where he encounters his non-Jewish friend Antip and his sister Natasha. Uriel seems to be on the verge of a breakdown after his encounter with Mili, the young woman who demands his love, to which he is unable to respond in spite of his strong sexual desire. In a climactic moment, Uriel declares to Mili that she cannot expect any-

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thing from him because he is a man who is “all ice and deception inside [...] a stranger to men and far removed from God.”31 This indeed seems to be the basic predicament of Uriel—a person who is far removed from people and from any sense of God or the divine. Just after this climactic moment in the narrative, Uriel lies in his bed late in the morning and reads Homer’s Odyssey. The entire chapter is presented to the reader as if he “eavesdrops” on Uriel’s narrated monologue, in which he dictates to an imaginary “modern Homer” the story of “a Jewish young man with a flair for poetic philosophy,” who is none other than Uriel Efros himself.32 Here, in spite of many layers of cynicism and self-irony in which the protagonist wraps himself, it suddenly becomes evident that when Uriel was younger, he used to be not only an active and outgoing man but also someone who “went out and listened to the prophets, the seers of [...] divine light and the mercy of God.”33 A few more paragraphs into Uriel’s monologue we learn that later in his life he became disappointed with these “prophets” and “seers” not because “the voice of God has disappeared from him” but rather because he became tired of fighting the battle (or as the Hebrew expression goes, “the war of Mitzva”) against “the crowd of blind, rushing people.” The people he seems to fight against are those who think that they “fulfill their obligations to the great Divine by setting Him up in a birdcage, in a picture-frame or in a bookcase.” The description suggests that Uriel is weary of people who “domesticate” God within systems of institutionalized religion, instead of experiencing what Rudolf Otto called the numinous, or the mysterium tremendum, which as we saw in the previous chapter is a sense of religious awe, understood by Otto (as well as by Gnessin’s friend Hillel Zeitlin) to be the basic tenet of any religious experience.34 Uriel feels that there is a sharp discord between himself, “a pale and lonely young man with the voice of God crying in his heart,” and the crowd of “healthy and full-blooded cattle enjoying their sins and overcoming life [...] ignorant of the word of God and not wishing to know it.”35 This self-representation of Uriel in whose heart the “voice of God is crying” and who is fighting against the people who “set up God in birdcages and bookcases” seems to come out of nowhere. We wonder whether this is the same protagonist who just declared that he is a

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“stranger to men and far removed from God.” However, before we have much time to pause and think about the source of this self-­representation and its meaning, or how this might alter the way we understand the protagonist of the novella, there is another, even more surprising self-image of Uriel. He suddenly asks himself about the possibility that maybe he is not so far removed from the “crowd” or “multitude” of people, and might be able to actually communicate with them at some level: Or perhaps those multitudes whose camps covered the face of the burning desert are for him, those for whom His world dropped like a hammer, like fire, in their hearts, and His mighty hand grasped them by the hairs of their heads and yanked them into this sandy wilderness, and here they flock after him, their bowed heads bare, and their quiet, life-giving song is borne aloft, making the rocks and sands bring forth green, glistening grass, towering flowers and shrubs, and trees that are, in his vision, thick with foliage and heavy with fruit.36

This is an astounding and bizarre passage that might seem totally incomprehensible at first glance. However, if we examine its language and images more carefully, we discover that it presents us with a fantastic, mystical, and highly personal version of familiar scriptural scenes, such as the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai and the divine creation of the world. It makes allusions to these scriptural texts, as well as to others, like Jeremiah 23:29—“Is not my word like a fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces”—and their rabbinic and kabbalistic interpretations.37 Surprisingly, Uriel projects himself in this passage as a “prophet” and “seer of God,” a semi-divine creature with the ability to grasp and lead the multitude of people who are actually following him. He appears as a Moses-like (or perhaps a Jesus-like) character who is able to lead people through “the desert” and give them some kind of “covenant.” The multitude whom he leads is a group of people who are then transformed into “seers,” people who are caught in a mystical state of ­mantic vision. They begin to sing silent songs that are carried forth by the wind. They create the kind of “sacred music” that can alter reality: the music makes the sand-desert bloom and causes it to appear like the Garden of Eden, with fruit-bearing trees and flowers that seem as if they themselves begin to dance and pray.

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This wild, mystical “vision” borders on the psychedelic. Its language reaches such high notes that it is hardly surprising when Uriel quickly moves away from this hallucinatory vision and counters it with his customary sober and self-deprecating tone: “Ach-well! Better get up, eh? That’s what he ought to do—what has got into him anyway, dwelling on all that nonsense about the soul and suffering? Phew, get rid of it! That’s what it was—asceticism [...] spiritual anguish.”38 The mystical vision is associated in Uriel’s more sober mind with “asceticism” and with “spiritual anguish,” and his highly skeptical awareness is quick to dismiss it. But there is no point in denying that this spiritual anguish, and the numinous, mystical vision that engendered it, is an essential (if repressed) part of Uriel’s mental world. This kind of highly subjective religious experience and sense of the numinous is in fact not only part of Uriel’s world but also of Gnessin’s world. If we are attentive enough to the text, we can find a number of such examples in Gnessin’s stories and novellas. To be sure, this idiosyncratic engagement with the religious is an aspect of Gnessin that readers and critics have rarely paid any attention to, mainly because we have not expected to find it in the writings of such a secular modernist writer as Gnessin. However, as Dan Miron has observed, these invocations of religious experience, or what Miron calls “the anagogic,” in Gnessin’s fiction are in fact some of the most distinctive and radical instances of symbolist prose in Hebrew literature of the early twentieth century.39 Perhaps the closest Hebrew texts one can find to the passage quoted above, with its fantastical recreation of the giving of the Torah and the divine creation, are the mystical and philosophical “prose-poems” written by Hillel Zeitlin that we discussed earlier, particularly texts like Shekhina (1908) and Tzima’on (“Thirst,” 1910). Gnessin’s passage is also similar in content, tone, and structure to many Russian symbolist poetic and philosophical texts written in this period, especially to works of experimental symbolist prose fiction like Andrei Bely’s four Symphonies (1902–1908) and his novel The Silver Dove (1909).40 It is clear that Uriel’s religious experience might be concealed and suppressed at the back of his consciousness, but there are some occasions on which it comes to the fore. The numinous can be stimulated in different ways—by sensory sights, sounds, and smells and by memory

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and introspection. In some cases, the religious experience or the sense of the numinous is attached to specific religious texts and formulations (Jewish and non-Jewish) that are activated and brought to new life within the act of narrative.41 In other cases it is attached to specific people and moments in time. Sometimes it affects the current life of the protagonist, and in other cases it can appear and disappear without any evident consequences. Most of all, as in the other texts examined thus far, it seems to strike the protagonist especially in moments of great despair and calamity. One such example is found in the very first chapter of Beterm. Here Uriel lives in Kiev in the apartment of Irena Vasliyevna as a “trapped” man. He is full of “nerves” and doesn’t know how to break away from this situation. He receives a letter from his father urging him to come back to his hometown from the big city, but he does not know what to do. His experience is one of pronounced angst and ennui: The experience that began to trouble his weary soul while he was ­lying in bed depressed him completely. Like a storm that sweeps up the haystack in the field and scatters the straw to the winds, it came and snatched up his anxious soul and sucked his strength and cast him down, forlorn and weary—so completely worn out and sorrowful.42

It is essential to note that from the outset this crisis—or what the text describes as a “storm”—is expressed in both psychological and ­ religious-existential terms. It is summed up in the narrated monologue through the following formulation: Sometimes you suddenly remember the welcoming face of a warm heart, a happy morning of splendor, one blue night of rest, as if to say so—but this is nothing in relation to what there is. Nothing! And what there is— there is no place without it, my friend. There is no place without it.43

In order to describe the psychological void, the lack of coherence and Baudelairean ennui that governs the world of the protagonist (in spite of those rare moments of splendor and rest), the narrator employs a kabbalistic-hasidic formulation: the Aramaic expression leyt atar panui miney, “there is no place without it.” The formulation, referring to the immanence of God (and especially the Shekhina, the feminine aspect of the Godhead) in the world, appears in numerous places in kabbalistic

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literature. In Tikkunei Zohar, for example, we read: “There is no place without Him, neither in the upper or the lower worlds.”44 This kabbalistic concept was expanded upon by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi in the book of Tanya, the most important text of Lubovitch Hasidism. In the Tanya, the kabbalistic expression is interpreted as meaning that God is omnipresent, and everything in the world exists only because it is imbued with divine vitality even at the lowest sphere.45 The way the kabbalistic-hasidic expression is used in Gnessin’s novella is fascinating and quite indicative of the possibilities for inter­ textual (re)activation of religious meaning in modernist texts. This employment makes clear that although Uriel’s ennui and sense of crisis is chiefly sexual and psychological, it has a theological-existential aspect as well, and this aspect is revealed through intertextual language laden with mystical meaning. While the formulation is rewritten in a radically new context that alters and subverts its meaning, its “original” religious meaning with the sense of divine immanence is not entirely lost. Rather, what has been a metaphysical expression of the immanent presence of God in the world becomes now a sense of overwhelming mystery and quest for meaning in what appears to be a bereft and godless world. This quest is exemplified in a number of ways in the same opening chapter of the novella. It seems that the only way for Uriel to deal with the crisis and despair that engulf his being is to think and speak “like a child.”46 He strives to adopt a certain emotional and psychological freedom from his own cynical self that will allow him to reconnect with certain parts of his personality, as well as to go back to his parents’ house—in spite of his awareness that the same sense of ennui and void will find him there as well. Uriel contemplates the virtues of childhood at the same time that he is skeptical about the possibility of attaining a state of innocence. He is fully aware that he invokes “certain childhood memories” that have nothing to do “with a grown-up person.”47 But then, suddenly, he is reminded of a certain religious or numinous experience that happened to him earlier in the day: And what about that old cripple, whom he saw in the morning sitting by the fence of their House of Prayer, the one whose long white hair and beard and proudly wrinkled forehead reminded him of one of the apostles of bygone days, the one who approached him with his crutch

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and spoke to him softly and sorrowfully: “What’s the difference, my son? Is not the truth always one?”48

This scene, based on Christian iconography and imagery, makes a very strong impression on Uriel. The old crippled man, who is probably a beggar, sits at the side of the church and speaks to Uriel. He appears to the protagonist as an apostle, one of the twelve that Jesus sent out into the world to preach his gospel. The beggar seems like an apostle not only because he sits by the church and looks like a figure out of Christian iconography, but also because of the pure wholeness of his solemn upward glance. He holds an empty bowl, but he doesn’t ask for money or for anything else. It is significant that this “apostle” appears in Uriel’s stream of consciousness exactly at the point when the protagonist argues with himself about the virtue of “childhood.” At first, the apostle speaks softly and appears to tell Uriel that “there is no difference” between the child and the adult, that the simple truth of the emotional need for love and protection is universal and always valid. Uriel (or the more “rational” and “mature” part of him) is not persuaded, so the “apostle” seems to approach him in a different way: Afterwards, he [the apostle] would be silent for a while and conclude with a harsh sounding phrase and a throbbing forehead, which raised Uriel’s suspicion already in the morning, when he saw him sitting solemnly, holding his empty bowl and looking up serenely to heaven: “and if you say—if it is more blameworthy, so what, let it be.” 49

In Uriel’s mind, the apostle—who appears not only as a father-­ figure with white hair and beard, but also has a harsher “prophet-like” side (represented by his harsh-sounding voice and his throbbing forehead)—tries to convince him that even if abandoning the rational adult perspective in favor of the child’s view is irresponsible or blameworthy, it is still a valid and compelling way of thinking. As culpable and irrational as it might be, it is possible that adopting a child’s perspective will bring Uriel a possibility of deliverance from his current state. As Miron has suggested, it is entirely possible that the figure of the “apostle” is in fact a projection of none other than Uriel’s father. But here the fact that Uriel finds the voice of guidance not in his Jewish hasidic father but in a wretched, yet noble Christian figure is highly significant.50

The Varieties of Religious Experience

The numinous, awe-inspiring experience of this encounter brings Uriel in touch with a different religiosity—a Christian religiosity that perhaps creates a more effective subjective experience, precisely because it is far from his Jewish childhood, from which he feels so removed at present. This other Christian religiosity and the old man who represents it provide Uriel both with a sense of the numinous and a kind of counseling and spiritual guidance. He appears to Uriel as what Carl Jung has famously termed the figure of the “Wise Old Man” (or “Senex”).51 This figure (whether in its “Jewish” or “Christian” manifestations) is an essential aspect of the religious experience in Brenner’s fiction, but it is no less important in Gnessin’s and Shofman’s stories and novellas. As we have already seen in Shofman’s stories, in the works of Hebrew modernist writers of the early twentieth century, religiosity and religious experience can be expressed and articulated not only through Jewish but also through Christian figures, texts, motifs, and icons. This attraction to Christian symbols and motifs by Hebrew writers might seem strange and surprising. But we must remember that the whole category of religious experience, as articulated in this period by figures such as William James, Vladimir Solovyov, Lev Shestov, Rudolf Otto, Hillel Zeitlin, and Martin Buber tended to detach the concept from any one religious tradition and make it a capacious category. Furthermore, the changes that occurred in Jewish literature and culture in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century stimulated a widespread fascination with the figure of Jesus and with Christian motifs among numerous Jewish intellectuals, writers, and artists.52 These multiple factors meant that Hebrew (and Yiddish) modernist writers of the early twentieth century did not hesitate to invoke religiosity through Christian symbols, language, and iconography. If we return to Uriel’s narrative, we can see one example among many of the specific forces that these Jewish and Christian figures can have on modernist protagonists. Here, the religious experience of the meeting with the apostle actually affects Uriel’s decision to leave Kiev and to travel to his parents’ house. This impetus drives the narrative toward one of the central and most important scenes in the novella, in which Uriel encounters his aging parents and their world. Indeed, as Baruch Kurzweil and other critics have recognized, characters like Uriel

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cannot experience any sense of “return” to the traditional Jewish world of the “fathers.”53 This becomes clear when, soon after Uriel remembers his hasidic grandfather on the train, he arrives in his parents’ house. He gazes at his father’s bookcase, which is full of kabbalistic and hasidic books. He remembers that he was highly attracted to these books as a child in spite of the fact he could not fully understand them. Now, he looks at the same books and his reaction is very different: And these dog-eared old books, thick with dust and warped from ­lying there so long, are the very same books that he had once so long contemplated? Perhaps—had these dead, strange letters once spoken to a young heart that was so fearful for its life? Today, too, there were young hearts fearful for life and its call, and today, too, they print books in strange letters like these. Sometimes he even opens one of those books, and his ears ring. What is the name of that book, for example, the one horribly consumed by the dust of generations past? Okay, the writing on top says: Words of Peace, Selections and Sayings. Dearer than Gold. And More Abundant Than Gold, The Voice of God on the Water, by a Tail of Lions, the Holy Shalom, etc. etc. Okay, that one, its title is Parerga und Paralipomena, by Arthur Schopenhauer. Everything’s okay.54

This scene brings together many crucial concerns in Gnessin’s fiction—the crisis of language, the disintegration of a stable and coherent subjectivity, the crisis of tradition, and the quest for religious experience that remains in the shadow of this crisis. Of course, this scene can neither be read simply as a rebellion against the “world of the fathers” and the religious Jewish tradition, nor as an attempt to “return” to this lost world. In fact, Gnessin deconstructs here the Hebrew literary tradition in whose center stands the familiar topos of “the tear in the heart,” the conflict between the “two magnets” or “two realms” of traditional religion and “European enlightenment” that was such a dominant theme in the writing of the older generation of Feierberg, Bialik, and even the young Berdichevsky.55 Gnessin’s narrator represents Uriel’s current estrangement not only from the hyperbolic language of traditional East European late rabbinic texts but also from the philosophical work of Arthur Schopenhauer (Parerga und Paralipomena), which (as we know from Gnessin’s letters) was one of Gnessin’s favorite books,

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and somewhat surprisingly appears in Uriel’s father’s bookcase. The narrator uses a rabbinic-legal term: nicha,56 designating that “Everything’s okay,” namely that for Uriel in his current cynical and desperate situation there is no essential difference between Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy and the late rabbinic hasidic texts.57 Uriel contemplates the fact that “he used to read so many of these books and suddenly stopped.” He acknowledges that the words in these books (the Jewish religious ones and the German philosophical ones alike) are “shabby words [...] corpses of meaning [...] putrid vestiges.”58 This is a realization of the distance of the mature and estranged protagonist from what used to be so important for him, as well as his total separation from his father and from the institutions of traditional Jewish life and learning. And yet, it is evident that Uriel’s quest for religiosity, his encounter with the numinous and the sacred, have not disappeared at all. Perhaps, Uriel wonders in this scene, as his heart “trembles for life,” his quest for the sacred has actually become stronger and more restless. Paradoxically, in spite of the repudiation of the “books” and “dead letters,” it is precisely the language taken from these books, with which he is still familiar, that enables Uriel, and together with him Gnessin the writer, to express a modern religious experience as a crucial, though often ignored, backbone of modernist Hebrew fiction.

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Fi f t e e n  Out of the Depths Visions and Guiding Spirits Man still clings to the same hidden riddle, and even in the midst of calamity, his soul still finds a sweet mystery. —Yosef Chaim Brenner, Mi-saviv la-nekuda, 1904

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The variety of religious experiences and their modernist articulations in Uri Nissan Gnessin’s novella Beterem (1909) can be fruitfully compared with Yosef Chaim Brenner’s short novel Mi-saviv la-nekuda (“Around the Point,” 1904). A comparison is compelling precisely because there are many important similarities and differences between the two texts and the ways they approach and represent the religious experience. As in Gnessin’s novella, the main quandary of Ya‘acov Abramson, the protagonist of Brenner’s novel, is not the conflict between “fathers” and “sons,” between traditional Jewish life and European secular education.1 Like Uriel (and most of the protagonists in Gnessin’s fiction), Abramson in Mi-saviv la-nekuda is situated beyond this familiar drama. Although the protagonist is a graduate of the cheyder and yeshiva, at the point where we find him at the beginning of the novel, this past is not really a concern for him anymore, and he is preoccupied with psychosexual and existential quandaries and with his predicament in the city of Homel. Unlike Gnessin’s withdrawn protagonists, however, Brenner’s Abramson is fully engrossed in the dilemmas of ideological, political, and social affiliation within the contemporary Jewish world. These concerns, quandaries, and preoccupations are expressed in a language and style that is rife with religious meanings. One of the most interesting features in this modernist work is the way in which the symbolist-figurative configuration of narrative cuts through the social and psychological plot. This type of narration creates a fragmented, even schizophrenic style, as well as a unique linguistic structure. Side by side with the seemingly “messy” sentences and “erratic” grammatical structures, which early readers criticized, there is a well-orchestrated

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symbolic-figurative stratum that is created mainly by activating the potential of religious Jewish and Christian texts and motifs.2 An especially instructive example of this configuration can be found in a decisive moment that appears right in the middle of the narrative. Here, Abramson leaves the small Hebrew library where he works and steps into the dark, sultry night. He wanders aimlessly until he finally finds himself on top of a bridge. Lost in his thoughts, he seems to reach a decision to commit suicide by jumping from the bridge into the dark river beneath him. However, at the last minute, after hearing and seeing an old and drunk woman (apparently a prostitute), he changes his mind. He gives the woman a coin and walks back to the city A. and into the house of his friend Uriel Davidovsky.3 This is a highly enigmatic scene for several reasons. First, it is very difficult to understand what happened to Abramson that brought him to contemplate such a desperate move. Second, it is not clear what caused Abramson to change his mind and turn back to the city and to his friend’s house. Is it the brief encounter with the prostitute and the seemingly impulsive act of kindness toward her that made him change his mind? Was it something else that the text alludes to but never clarifies? Third, while it is evident that this attempted suicide on the bridge is a crucial turning point in the plot of the novel, the link between this event and what comes after it is much less obvious. If Abramson indeed overcame his desperate thoughts and came back to life from the bridge with renewed energy (as the scene might suggest), what causes his mental breakdown at the end of the novel? Finally, the narrated monologue, which is the chief technique used in the text to convey Abramson’s thoughts and inner world, does not help to answer these questions in any straightforward way. Abramson’s thoughts are not only highly fragmented and associative, but are also rendered in a distinctively cryptic way. The entire scene is riddled with symbolic language about gods, angels, and devils and enigmatic references to a range of Jewish and non-Jewish, ancient and modern texts. The narrative trope of suicide (or the suicide attempt) is a familiar, almost archetypal scene in western literature. There are dozens of stories and novellas that depict suicide and suicide attempts in the early-­ twentieth-century Yiddish and Hebrew fiction of Gershon Shofman,

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Gnessin, Yitzhak Dov Berkowitz, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, Zalman ­Shneor, and Dovid Bergelson, as well as in the work of Brenner himself.4 Moreover, as a number of critics have argued, this scene of attempted “suicide on a bridge” might contain a sustained allusion to a novel that immensely influenced the entire range of European and Hebrew modernists (and one which Brenner later translated into Hebrew)—Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.5 In the second part of Dostoyevsky’s novel, ­Raskolnikov goes to a bridge and sees a woman attempt to drown herself. Lost in his thoughts and only partially aware of his actions, ­Raskolnikov realizes that he was about to attempt to do the same thing. But then he encounters Sonya, the young woman who has been driven to prostitution, and gives her his money. Yael Feldman, who compared Dostoyevsky’s and Brenner’s novels, comes to the conclusion that in spite of many parallels between the two texts, these scenes are totally different. While in Dostoyevsky’s novel, the attempted suicide on the bridge and the act of altruism toward Sonya bring Raskolnikov closer to a moral and metaphysical salvation, the religious path, claims Feldman, is not open to Abramson or any of Brenner’s protagonists because of the author’s highly pessimistic and secular worldview.6 Feldman is surely correct in claiming that there are obvious differences between Dostoyevsky and Brenner and their way of approaching metaphysics and religion, but there is no doubt that Brenner was pre­ occupied with the way Dostoyevsky deals with questions of suicide and religiosity. Moreover, the allusion to Crime and Punishment is only one of several intertextual matrixes that are present in this text. As Yitzhak Bakon points out, in Hebrew fiction of the late nineteenth century, the crossing of a bridge was a recurring motif with a clear meaning and function. In stories like Ezra Goldin’s Bien kerach le-kerach (“Between Ice and Ice,” 1896) and Micha Yosef Berdichevsky’s Me‘ever la-nahar (“Across the River,” 1899), going over a body of water is metonymically understood as the process of “crossing over” to the world of European enlightenment and secularization. In Berdichevsky’s story in particular, the entire spatial arrangement of the lower city and upper city linked by a bridge is charged with this metonymic meaning.7 All these Hebrew and European intertexts are present in Brenner’s bridge scene but their meaning is far from determined. Abramson is

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clearly not “crossing the bridge” toward enlightenment and freedom, nor is he on his way to the Christian salvation that Raskolnikov achieves in Crime and Punishment. And yet, these and other intertexts play a significant role in this scene, which is not free from religious overtones. The interplay between Brenner’s novel and these Hebrew and European intertexts becomes more palpable when we examine closely the symbolic and figurative language of the text. Here is how the narrator presents what goes on in Abramson’s mind immediately after he reaches the bridge: “Uriel to his right, Mephistopheles to his left, Lucifer in front, the ­Divine Presence behind ... and above his head ...” He stationed himself on the bridge and gazed at the water. Darkness. Above his head, endless expanse, and in his heart—the worm Jacob. The worm Jacob and endless expanse? Is there no end? But the end had come ... Black was the sky above him and black the water below. His entire body surged and was carried toward the railing—and a suppressed, soft wistfulness suddenly coiled through him. He froze and the ripples on the river quivered. And just as the ripples quivered, so did the thoughts of the one standing above them: He would perish with her. She was dying— why should he live? She was dying ... and he, like Jeremiah of Anatot, like Yehuda Ha-Levi, he was but one of her sons ... Silence and black darkness were all around. A sound of soft little steps. Like the steps of a lost woman, heard from a distance, from a distance. The ripples undulated, ran, frothed, whitened—the face of the one standing above. His heart did not beat, his knees grew weak ... his hands rubbed his head, his shoulders, his chest—and compassion of a type he had never before felt awakened in his thinking head, in his turbulent chest, and in his strong hands, that they not perish with him. He felt pity for every movement in the air, for all that was silent, for the bridge, for all those homes on both its sides, for those walkers heard from afar, all that would be lost and would not be when he no longer was!8

This is a remarkable example of Brenner’s modernist style of agitated, twisted, and associative narration. In the context of the present discussion, what stands out to the reader familiar with Jewish and Christian texts is that Abramson’s claustrophobic sense of being trapped and surrounded by demons is described with well-known, but radically altered, formulations from Jewish tradition. By alluding to a myriad of texts,

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the scene creates a kind of “sacred space,” with both a mythical and mystical architecture. The most immediate and recognizable text is the one that is traditionally recited in the prayer before going to sleep (known traditionally as “the recitation of shema on the bed”). The prayer invokes a sense of comfort and security by calling upon the Shekhina and the angels of God (Uriel, Michael, and Gavriel) to watch over the sleeping person before “he gives his soul to God to keep.” The origin of this divine “architectural” formulation can be found in Pirkei Rabbi Eliezer 4 and Numbers Rabbah 2:10, as well as the kabbalistic description of God’s camp that is surrounded by angels in the Zohar.9 In this account, the person who is guarded by the angels is parallel to God.10 In Brenner’s narrative, the linguistic formulation that creates the structure of the “sacred space” is both preserved and radically altered. “Uriel” is the only name of a guarding angel that is mentioned, but of course, what stands in the background is Uriel Davidovsky, Abramson’s friend who is portrayed earlier in the novel as “the other force within him.”11 Uriel is the person who actually commits suicide toward the end of the novel, and Uriel’s strong moral and philosophical pessimism is one of the forces that brings Abramson to contemplate the act. Here Uriel appears together with Mephistopheles and Lucifer, “the fallen ­angels” who are associated with Satan in Christian mythology as well as in classics of Western literature by Milton, Byron, and Goethe, among others.12 As such, Abramson does not seem to be protected but actually besieged by angels and demons. In light of this, it is not surprising that the main question Abramson contemplates is “who is above him”? In the traditional Jewish formulation, it is the Shekhina, the feminine personification of the Godhead, who is hovering above and guarding over the person. But in Brenner’s altered formulation, the Shekhina is “behind him,” which could be easily understood as the divine presence that Abramson has “thrown” or abandoned behind him. However, the question mark that comes after the words “and above him,” as well as the ellipsis that comes after the second appearance of this expression, indicate the divine as a highly meaningful absence that cries for some fulfillment. In the absence of the Shekhina, there is an endless darkness, which is mirrored by the endless depth and darkness in the river beneath him—an equally mythic, chaotic

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space reminiscent of the unformed and void earth (tohu va-vohu), darkness (choshech), and deep waters (tehom) described in Genesis 1:1–2, before the divine creation of the world. This is the point where Abramson seems closest to jumping off the bridge. Indeed, the symbolic structure of Abramson’s situation is marked by the presence-absence of the Divine and his desperate yearning to overcome this absence. The entire figurative-symbolic structure of this narrative situation is charged with a great religious energy, because it takes the character (and the reader)—through the use of symbolic language—far beyond the mundane world that the novel otherwise depicts. The invocation of the satanic angels, the mixture of Christian and Jewish mythology, the presence-absence of the Shekhina, as well as the despair and nihilism of Abramson, only highlight the sacred numinosity of this moment. When he stands on the bridge, suddenly and unexpectedly, Abramson is in the heart of the mythic sacred space. Already in the next sentence, Abramson is metaphorically merging with his namesake, the patriarch Jacob; with the nation; and with the Shekhina herself (which is the aspect of God that is close to, or even identified with, the Jewish people). We learn that the “worm of Jacob” is “in his heart,” namely at the center of the entire metaphorical-symbolic picture that the scene portrays. The formulation “the worm of Jacob” is an expression from Isaiah 41:14: “Fear not, thou worm of Jacob, and ye men of Israel; I help thee, said the Lord, and thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.” In rabbinic tradition, the expression “worm of Jacob” is interpreted as a metaphor for the Jewish people. As the lowly worm can “destroy even the most powerful cedar tree with the power of the mouth, the Jewish nation can do the same by prayer to God.”13 This thought alerts Abramson’s consciousness to the realization that if the absent-present Shekhina is “dying,” he is destined to die together with her because he is “just one of her sons” like Jeremiah or the medieval poet and philosopher Yehuda Halevy. This is the point at which Abramson hears the steps of a woman walking—“a sound of small and soft steps like the sound of the footsteps of a lost woman was heard from far away.” If we read the passage carefully, we realize that at this point, the only “lost woman” is the absent Shekhina, the divine feminine presence that had been personalized in

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Abramson’s imagination (“he will die together with her”). This is a decisive moment because hearing the steps of the woman whom he associates with the Shekhina moves Abramson from “the domain of death” to the “sphere of life”: He broke away, as if freeing himself from iron chains—and ran. His feet stumbled on a pothole, on stones, but he did not feel a thing, no, no, no. He would not be and all this would remain; all this would remain and he would be an insensible clod of earth forever and ever, to eternally close off the future, the generations, passing generations ... he would not be—the riddle would remain ... no, no, no ... the distant steps came closer. A older woman passed by, one who sells her decrepit body for crumbs of bread and drops of whiskey. She was drunk, teetered, and had nothing to say, as if she were ashamed and frightened to call out to the standing man. Abramson caught up with her and drew out of the pocket of his overcoat the shiny yellowish coin he had received just a few hours earlier from the bald man and held it out to her,—Sister ... then he turned his face again to the river waters and laughed out loud. There had been a man—and he was no longer. And the world lacked for nothing. The author of the article “The Influence of Hasidism” was not, and the world lacked for nothing [...] And his father? ... Reb Yitzhak would continue to sit in his tallit and ­tefillin and occupy himself with his daily Torah studies, reading twice the text ­ ramaic and once the Aramaic translation, twice the text and once the A translation: “And the Lord said to her: Two nations are in your womb and two peoples from your belly will separate; one nation will be stronger than the other nation and the elder will serve the younger; ­Va-amar adonai la trei amimin bimi’a’ikhi vi-taritain malikivan ­yitparishan u-malikhu mi-malikhu yitiqaf vi-raba yishita’eivid lizi’era— Reddish-green lines and sparks of white fire danced before his eyes. “The elder will serve the younger,” “vi-raba yishita’eivid lizi’era”: Esau will stoke our ovens on Sabbaths, will also split wood—Haman adds his calumny. The Jews were too lazy to do it themselves, the anti-Semites claim. The square letters with their vowel points and cantillation symbols clashed between the reddish-green lines. Abramson closed his eyes. The letters were engraved on the edge of the sky’s dome in black fire.14

Toward the end of the scene there is a clear transformation and even a deflation of the religious and symbolic meaning. The feminine

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Shekh­ina is reincarnated in the figure of the woman who sells her body, and thus instead of the “dead mother” there is a “living sister,”15 to whom Abramson can show kindness and compassion. This “living sister” is not exactly the woman who represents life and salvation. In contrast with Raskolnikov’s encounter with the youthful Sonya—who is a kind of incarnation of the Christian figure of Mary Magdalene as well as the Russian Orthodox figure of Sofia—Abramson meets a woman whose body is aging and dying. And yet, this symbolic “substitute” is someone who saves Abramson from death and sends him to life, albeit a life of despair and madness into which he is driven. Abramson knows this. Even at this moment of deep despair, which is nonetheless mixed with religious elation, he does not have any illusion that his life will be different. Rather, he accepts his life and his being in the world as a “riddle,” a mystery that is still there and will never be removed. And yet, this realization itself is crucial.16 Indeed, in light of Abramson’s existential decision to choose life, with all its riddles and mysteries, we must read the entire scene as a symbolic death, replacing the real act of suicide with a death-like experience after which the protagonist comes back to life. A certain Abramson died on the bridge: “there was a man—and he is no longer here.” Although he knows well that his actions and writings do not make much difference to “the world,” Abramson cannot actually bear the fact that he, the man who wrote the essay about “Hasidism and its influence on Hebrew literature,” will not exist anymore. This essay about the hasidic essence of religious yearning and freedom (which, as we know, was written not only by the fictional Abramson, but also by Brenner himself) is intimately linked to Abramson’s existential decision not to kill himself but to continue with his life and to accept its mysteries. It is as if the character of Abramson were a strange modernist reincarnation of R. Nachman or the Besht, or at least the way Brenner understood them. What is the outcome of this symbolic suicide? What kind of “new Abramson” is born out this experience? On the realist level of the narrative, Abramson’s return to the city of A., his turn to Hava Blumin, and his attempts to reinvent himself as a Russian-socialist intellectual are doomed to fail (as they do eventually). On another level, however, the symbolic and religious configuration that has been created in this

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scene does not diminish at all, but in fact only intensifies. The act of the symbolic suicide further places Abramson in the middle of mythic and sacred space that is surprising, and in fact goes against the narrative plot that charts Abramson’s failure of personal, social, and sexual fulfillment. We are reminded that Abramson is not only the writer of the essay on Hasidism, but also the one who stands metonymically for Jacob the patriarch and for the mythical role of Jewish people as it is explicated in biblical, rabbinic, and kabbalistic texts. At this point, the narrator actually presents the text of Genesis 25:23, which Abramson imagines his father reading after his death. The biblical Hebrew verse is presented, complete with the marks for vocalization and cantillation, and the repetition of the Aramaic translation: ve-rabba yishta’abed le-tze’ira (“and the elder shall serve the younger”). Abramson becomes the representative of “the house of Jacob” or “the worm of Jacob,” which is at the center of a mythical rather than historical conception of Jews and Judaism, and the fact that the protagonist Ya‘acov is the son of Yitzhak, the son of Abraham (Abramson), is highly significant in this context. Here is an important difference between the ways in which Brenner and Gnessin employ and activate religious texts and motifs in order to express religious experience. While in Gnessin, the religious aspect is always personal (psychological and existential), Brenner does not hesitate to connect the personal with the collective and the historic. Abramson’s religiosity and his sense of religious awe is connected to his mythical place (if paradoxical) as an embodiment of Jewish collective existence. Another difference is that while Gnessin employs elements of religious or numinous experience locally, sometimes even momentarily (a quality even more true in Shofman), Brenner tends to use these religious elements and turn them into a kind of structural, figurative-symbolic net that can govern the entire narrative. Indeed, as critics like Ariel Hirschfeld and Yitzhak Bakon suggest, the scene of the symbolic suicide on the bridge is at the heart of the novel because it ties the “realistic” plot that charts the thorny path of Abramson with the figurative-symbolic and religious structure that Brenner develops in the novel alongside the realist plot.17 It is part of a sequence of textual moments that seem quite strange, even enigmatic

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on the realistic level, but in fact are well integrated into the symbolic structure of the novel. There are, indeed, many connections between the scene of “the suicide on the bridge” and what we might term the “hasidic” opening and the “prophetic-mystical” ending of the novel. The opening of Mi-saviv la-nekuda presents Abramson in a state of transition. “In the middle of the semester” he leaves the small town of Tzoar, in which he had “a good position,” and takes leave of his student Shlomo Frenkel. The entire scene of separation between Abramson and his student, which sets the plot of the novel in motion, is infused with an ironic tone. Shlomo Frenkel is sad, or so it seems to Abramson, because he cannot join his teacher in his journey to the large city of A.18 Abramson tries to appease his student’s sadness and disappointment. He tells Shlomo Frenkel that he will soon be able to join him in the city of A., which is the place where “the children of the future,” as Abramson puts it, clearly belong. Some of the irony in this scene is created in retrospect, because the readers discover later that Frenkel indeed arrives later in A., but his presence there turns out of be part of Abramson’s gradual collapse. Another important element of how the scene is presented (one which is ironic and very serious at the same time) is the religious, ­mystical-hasidic way in which the narrative describes this separation and the embarking on the journey. For example, when Shlomo Frenkel asks Abramson to make sure he sends him letters, Abramson responds: Of course, of course!—Abramson cried with a quiver of joy—Do you need to say this? I will certainly not write to you with the name of your father. But I will write to you at the very first opportunity. As soon as I get there I will begin to seek a position for you—and I will notify you. And then ... “The trembling and the power are His who lives forever!” Is it but a small thing to you to fulfill, simultaneously, the precept of redeeming captives and of sending the mother bird away from her nest when you take her eggs? You must send away the father—and take the sons, ha-ha-ha! Come to me and we will live together. Where will we live and off what? [...] Just like with the Ba‘al Shem Tov that Rosh Ha-Shana, when his soul ascended. Do you remember “the great joy”? So look, then, Shloymele, remember, do not forget, and you will be a man and fight!19

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Abramson is a young person who has ostensibly broken with all religious traditions and institutions, whose goal is to mobilize for socialism and the rejection of traditional Jewish life—especially with young disciples like Shlomo Frenkel. In the spirit of a true heretic who knows how to use the language of tradition satirically, it seems that Abramson mocks the traditional language of commandments such as “the redemption of captives,” suggesting that Shlomo is the “captive” because he is in the domain of traditional life in the Jewish town, and “sending away the mother bird,” suggesting that it is a good deed to let Shlomo’s mother (and father) go when taking the child. At the same time, with all the irony and satire, it is rather clear that both the situation of this leave-taking and the language used to describe it greatly resemble a scene of a farewell between a hasidic rabbi and his disciple. In fact, Abramson is comparing himself here to none other than the Ba‘al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. He quotes, verbatim, words and expressions from one of the most famous hasidic texts: the letter that the Besht wrote to his brother-in-law, R. Gershon of Kotov. In this letter, known also as “the holy epistle,” the Besht gives a detailed report of an “ascent of the soul” he had experienced on Rosh Hashanah of the year 5507 (1746). Apparently, the Besht used a certain technique— “adjuration”—which enabled his soul to separate from his body during the course of a prayer. While his body remained on earth, his soul “ascended to Heaven” and he “beheld amazing things in a vision.” The Besht goes on to say that one of the things he saw in this vision was that among the people he observed in Heaven “there was extreme happiness.”20 Abramson also quotes, here and in other places in the novel, lines from a hymn that is known as Ha-aderet ve ha-emuna (“Excellence and Faithfulness”), after its first line. The hymn, which is read traditionally during the High Holidays (and in hasidic circles also on Saturday), is originally found in the early mystical text Pirkei Heikhalot. It is one of the oldest mystical poems in the Jewish liturgy, dated perhaps as early as the second century c.e. It is written as an acrostic twenty-two lines long, with one line for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Each line of the poem describes an aspect of God (holiness, power, majesty, and so on). Gershom Scholem described this text, following Rudolf Otto’s definition, as a “numinous hymn.” This hymn was considered to be “the

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song of the angels” by medieval commentators and has been a central feature of hasidic traditions of song and prayer from medieval times until today.21 Of course, the invocation of these mystical, kabbalistic, and hasidic texts is made with a certain ironic, even subversive twist, but at the same time, it is also very serious and maintains some of the numinous power of the sacred texts. The thrust of Abramson’s argument is that Shlomo Frenkel and himself—those who left the traditional Jewish institutions—are engaged in a quest to be the new bearers of mystical power and light. As Abramson says, before he jumps on the train, “the main point is that there is a different life, a life of renewal; that your place, my son, is within this other world, the world of light and creativity.”22 Readers of the novel do not have to wait very long to discover that the “world of light and creativity” is also a world of despair and anguish. The pairing of light and darkness is one of the main themes of the novel; the way religious experience is expressed is through a religious quest, a quest for renewal and light that comes out of despair and anguish. Indeed, almost as soon as Abramson goes on the train and starts to reflect on his life and on what he sees around him, the narrator tells us that Abramson stood in his corner, and everything around him was alien. His constant headache, which was growing more intense as the sea of his emotions assailed him, had concealed and defended the sanctity in his heart from impurity. He pressed his palm to his burning forehead and his eyes blinked and blinked, as if he wanted to concentrate the entire world in his thoughts. A level expanse of snow sparkled over the entire universe: whiteness, pure whiteness, clear and magnificent, throughout the space beyond the walls of the railroad carriage. Next to him sat that Jew dressed in rags [...] yet his full beard reminded Abramson of his father, Reb Yitzhak, the ritual slaughterer, and of his devoted singing in the Sabbath morning service: The luster and the splendor ... ay-ay-ay-ay ... are His who lives forever ... The rite and the purity [...] bim-bam bam, are His who lives forever!23

Abramson’s “constant headache” is a kind of psychosomatic state of being that overcomes the protagonist every time he seems to be overwhelmed by emotions, sensations, and anguish. And yet, this headache

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is simultaneously described as something that protects the numinous sense of “holiness,” the mysterium tremendum which is located “within his heart” and is connected with what the narrator constantly calls the “riddle” or the “mystery” of his life and the lives of the people around him. Abramson is able to connect with the numinous when he focuses on his own thinking, when he observes nature, and even when he observes the reality of the poor Jews around him. It is important that when Abramson sees the Jew “with the tattered clothing,” he reminds him of his father and the song he used to sing on Saturday morning. This is the ancient poem Ha-aderet ve ha-emuna, the same “numinous hymn” that Abramson used in his speech to Shlomo. The scene on the train comes to an end when the poor man thinks that the young Abramson is a good candidate to join the minyan—the quorum of ten people required by traditional Jewish law to make a public prayer. Abramson refuses to join the minyan, but the narrator comments that “the young man remained standing wrapped up in his reverie by the window. All the stirrings of his heart, all his internal organs were singing and praying by themselves, in solitude.”24 Though he does not join the communal public prayer, Abramson instead engages in a mystical-hasidic form of private prayer that involves silent meditative singing. It becomes evident that although Abramson is not in any way part of the traditional Jewish world, his quest for a new kind of religiosity and religious experience has not been extinguished. The more he is engulfed in a deep despair, the stronger his religious quest becomes. We have seen this seeming paradox in his attempted suicide on the bridge, and it reappears with a great force and crescendo at the very end of the novel. Here, the narrator describes the situation in which Abramson “loses his mind” and becomes insane. He gradually loses touch with reality, and nobody around him can understand what he does, says, or writes. This insanity of Abramson has some “realistic” motivation: while he tries to adapt himself to the socialist and “Russified” circle of friends around him, and to switch to write in Russian, Abramson hears about a violent act that took place in an unspecified Jewish town. Later, he also learns about the suicide of his close friend Uriel Davidovsky in the city of B. But this insanity, which can be seen

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as the last step in a narrative of Abramson’s sharp descent into the abyss of hopelessness, is also a moment of mystical-religious elation. We must keep in mind that the post-Nietzschean European (especially Russian) and Hebrew literature of the turn of the twentieth century is packed with characters who lose their minds. However, this condition is not necessarily seen as a stumbling block but rather as a kind of modern Dionysian moment, a mantic or mystic channel that leads to a different kind of knowledge and perhaps even to truth.25 What is crucial at the end of Mi-saviv la-nekuda is the fact that this mantic state is related to the religious experience and being communicated by religious language, motifs, and texts. Thus, it is not surprising that toward the end of the narrative the inner world of Abramson is represented with a long, nightmarish dream or reverie (chizayon), one that reconnects him with numinous, awe-inspiring moments in his life in a highly condensed manner. The reverie is about Saturday morning in his hometown, where he stands in front of a church. There he has a vision of his father, Reb Yitzhak, who suddenly appears before his eyes like Lev Tolstoy. He asks his father/Tolstoy for guidance and instructions, but then this father figure disappears.26 Nor is it coincidental that in the very last paragraphs of the novel, what appears to everybody around Abramson as an act of total madness—Abramson’s frantic writing on the ground in a state of total darkness—is portrayed by the narrator as Chazon Ya‘acov, and Megilat Ya‘acov, the “vision” and “Scroll” of Ya‘acov: “In the year ... etc. ... three steps forwards and three backwards. Outside you will bereave stone and inside—a knife. And I will tear my flag into twelve pieces, so it will not fall into the hand of the enemy. And Ya‘acov remained alone. The dying is over. Alone in the entire space of the world. And like this it will be forever [...] He will always be the last. Everything will expire and he will be the last. And when he suddenly rises to come to the garden in the mountain, the garden that stands like a point on the mountain; to pass the point to come to his beloved children who are faithful to his covenant and to sow the seed that bears fruit; then the flaming-sword will whirl and will not let him enter the gate. And Mazurk and Amalek will run after him until the end, but they will not destroy him. Where will he escape to? He will

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escape and circle the garden. And will circle, circle, circle—the entire day. His lions will be full of fear and he will circle around and around and around. This is the Scroll of Ya‘acov.” [...] Abramson sat down in peace. The neighbor Chaim-Leib the yeast-maker hadn’t come yet. In the house there was a fearful cry and with it a stillness. Cry and stillness. And the stillness said nothing.27

This “Scroll of Ya‘acov” is a boisterous, unruly text that perfectly expresses the madness of Abramson, but at the same time presents the reader with its own peculiar logic. This logic is revealed through the symbolic structure of the novel, and through the many allusions to a myriad of biblical, rabbinic, mystical, and hasidic intertexts. I will not attempt to explain or unpack it. A small example of the way the text works will suffice. When Abramson writes, “And Ya‘acov remained alone,” he is referring, of course, to himself, but he also clearly alludes to the well-known biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel: “And Jacob remained alone and a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn” (Genesis 32:25). This biblical story is in turn connected with the midrashic and kabbalistic interpretations and elaborations on this story in a way that connects Jacob’s wrestling with the Jewish people and with what the Midrash calls “the dawn of redemption.”28 As in the scene of “the attempted suicide on the bridge,” the existential, religious quest of Abramson the individual is something that unites the personal with the collective. The madness of Ya‘acov has its own symbolic and religious logic. Brenner’s novels and stories never present us with the kind of closure that can be found in the plot of realist novels. In fact the ending is almost always an “open” ending, but one that brings into resolution many of the themes. Brenner thus creates his own peculiar “sense of ending.”29 In Mi-saviv la-nekuda, the novel comes to its resolution with Abramson’s mad writing in the dark, which is also an act of writing a “prophetic” or “visionary scroll” that is integral to the entire novel, and can be seen as its culmination. In fact, Brenner has a tendency to finish his novels and stories with a figurative-symbolic ending that has strong religious overtones. We find it not only in Mi-saviv la-nekuda but also in Brenner’s first novel, ­Ba-choref. Other examples of such religious-symbolic endings can be found in the play Me-ever la-gvulin (“Beyond the Borders,” 1907), the

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novella Min Ha-meitzar (“Out of the Depths,” 1808–1809), and the novel Mikan u-mikan (“From Here and from There,” 1912). In the stories of Shofman, Gnessin, and other Hebrew modernist writers from this period, religious experience is (almost by definition) a powerful but fleeting and momentary sensation. This is true in terms of both the inner life of the fictional protagonists and the linguistic and symbolic fabric of the fictional text. Thus, a writer like Gnessin would very rarely employ the religious stratum as a way to end the narrative of his stories or novellas. This kind of ending is one of the elements that distinguishes Brenner’s way of articulating the religious experience in his fiction. Brenner tends to use these religious elements and turn them into a kind of structural, figurative-symbolic net that can govern the entire narrative, and perhaps even lead to a new philosophy (perhaps even ideology) that is permeated with a sense of religiosity.

Wise (Old) Men as Spiritual Guides in the Fiction of Gnessin and Brenner In my earlier discussion of Gnessin’s novella Beterem, I have noted the important role of the “guiding spirit” or “wise old man” that appears in various guises: the old “apostle” that is revealed to Uriel near a church, the memory of his old grandfather and his devout singing and mystical spirituality. The appearance of this kind of figure, who provides a sense of religious and spiritual guidance for the young protagonist in search of “vision” or “revelation,” is in fact a common theme in modernist Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century. Perhaps because the conflict between “fathers” and “sons” was such a decisive element in the literature of the haskalah and the post-maskilic writing of the late nineteenth century, it is not entirely surprising that the new quest for religiosity and religious experience contains also a new search for religious and spiritual guidance and a new “father figure.” It is also not surprising that this father figure is almost always not the biological father but someone else. He can be old or young, Jewish or Christian, close to the protagonist or totally unknown to him; he can come from the local vicinity of the main character or can appear out of nowhere. Finally and most importantly,

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this alternative father figure can be a kind of guiding spirit that supplies the protagonist with some answers and a sense of consolation, or he can be one that opens new worlds and new realms for him. An interesting example of this theme and character can be found in Gnessin’s story Be-vet saba (“In Grandfather’s House”), which was written around 1904. Gnessin was apparently very proud of this story and sent it for publication in the prestigious (and ideologically oriented) journal Ha-shiloah. The story was rejected by the editors, Yosef Klausner and Chaim Nachman Bialik, as unsuitable for the journal, and it was only published posthumously in 1921.30 Be-vet saba is somewhat exceptional in Gnessin’s oeuvre because it does not deal with young Jewish-Russian intellectual characters typical of Gnessin’s four novellas and most of his other stories, but with an adolescent who is surrounded by contemporary followers of Hasidism. At the center of this story is Shmuel, an adolescent sent by his father to live and study with his pious hasidic grandfather, Zalman, who is the rabbi of a small town. The fictional universe of the story is mainly confined to the closed space of the house with its two rooms. The grandfather’s room is a realm of traditional piety and authority where a lesson of Talmud is constantly being conducted. The other room, where his uncle Hazkil lives, offers Shmuel a view of the disintegration of traditional Jewish values and institutions. In the other room Shmuel is exposed to his older brother Pinye and the latter’s friend Leyvik, who comes back from extensive traveling. He also meets the young Bluma, who seeks Pinye’s love in vain. The boy moves between these different realms (embodied in the spatial arrangement of the house), trying to grasp the shadowy world which has become very ambiguous for him. On the surface, then, the story resembles similar narrative situations in haskalah and post-haskalah Hebrew literature of the 1890s and 1900s. As Shmuel moves between “the dimmed lights” and the “dark shadows,” and as he looks at the ceiling which is covered with the “dust of the generations,”31 we are reminded of Feierberg’s adolescent protagonists (in stories like “In the Evening” and “Whither?”), Berdichevsky’s early stories (Gershaim, “Beyond the River”), and Bialik’s early poems (“Upon My Return”). These stories and poems famously address the narrative of apostasy and dramatize the tension between “fathers” and

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“sons,” “religion” and “life,” the painful crisis of the loss of faith and the inability to cling to secular western culture.32 Gnessin indeed used in Be-vet saba these materials, which had become thoroughly familiar by 1904. However, the structural and thematic center of the narrative is to be found elsewhere. The main event in Be-vet saba is, in fact, the appearance of R. Asher, a quasi-mysterious wanderer (apparently, the original title of the story was “The Wanderer”), who meanders around for years.33 R. Asher has not been seen for many years, and his arrival creates an upheaval in the town, in the house of the grandfather, and, most importantly, within the psyche of the young protagonist Shmuel. Shmuel is greatly impressed with this mysterious character who suddenly appears in the town, but he also hears some of his friends dismiss him as a pathetic, useless remnant of hasidic practices and ways of life. The word used by Shmuel’s friends to dismiss R. Asher is neched (“grandson”). Apparently, the term “grandson” (eynikl in Yiddish) became derogatory among the opponents of Hasidism (both mitnagdim and maskilim) because of the phenomenon of grandsons of famous hasidic rabbis who did not become great scholars and spiritual leaders. Some of these “grandsons” became known as imposters or idlers who wandered around East European towns, looking for donations and hospitality in hasidic communities.34 However, the fact that some of the greatest hasidic masters were eyniklech, grandsons of other rabbis, is also part of the dynamics of the phenomenon of “grandsons” in Hasidism. This creates, at least potentially, a question mark around the figure of R. Asher: Is he a real Hasid or an imposter and idler? Moreover, within the story, Shmuel himself is referred to as “the grandson,” and perhaps because of this fact, he finds himself even more drawn to the mysterious wanderer. Shmuel observes him and his actions with wonder and awe, but he also feels some kind of identification with him, and senses that he might be able to provide him with spiritual guidance in his current state of confusion. When R. Asher enters the house of his grandfather Zalman, he is revealed to Shmuel as a high forehead, deeply creased at the base of the nose, interwoven with deep blue veins, which shined in the light of the lamp. The broad,

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purplish face was magnificent, encompassed by a flowing beard whose whitening hairs rippled with glistening waves. The white eyebrows stood out frighteningly, and the shoulders—broad. Shmuel remained on the doorstep. His legs seemed to have frozen and a sort of luminous tremor ran through his limbs. 35

At this point in the narrative, Shmuel can only sense the awe, the mysterium tremendum, that R. Asher impresses on him, but he cannot comprehend it. It is only later that he slowly begins to understand who R. Asher is, and why he makes such an impression on him. This slow process of making sense of something so strange and mysterious is implicated in the highly fragmentary narrative. Thus, the story of R. Asher and his relations with Zalman and with the other protagonists slowly emerges not only for the young Shmuel but also for the readers. We come to understand, together with the protagonist, that R. Asher used to be Zalman’s close friend. Together they were students of a great hasidic master. Both of them were destined to become local rabbis, and this indeed was the fate of Shmuel’s grandfather, who became the rabbi of the town. However, R. Asher made a crucial decision to give up a secure rabbinic post in the city of Vitebsk. Instead, for the last twenty years he wandered around Jewish communities in the towns of Eastern Europe. What is highly significant in the story is the contrast created between R. Asher and Shmuel’s grandfather, Zalman. While Zalman represents a solid world of stability and firmness, R. Asher is just the opposite. Although he is part of the traditional hasidic world (which is ridiculed by some of the young protagonists), R. Asher, more than anyone else in the story, personifies dynamism, instability, and a constant, restless quest. In fact, the character of R. Asher is a kind of mixture between a hasidic master (like the Ba‘al Shem Tov or Reb Nachman of ­Bratzlav) and a Nietzschean Zarathustra figure. Hence, R. Asher resembles many “wanderer” characters in contemporary European literature, as well as those in some of Peretz’s neo-hasidic stories and symbolist plays, Agnon’s wandering characters, and even the well-known figure of the wanderer in S. Ansky’s play Der Dybbuk. Because R. Asher is a man of solitude and loneliness, a wanderer and perpetual seeker, he is highly critical of both the grandfather Zalman

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and his friend Leyvik, the social and political activist. Or, as he puts it bluntly: “There are people and there are people [...] and there are also watermelons [...] watermelons in little tallitot, watermelons in red coats—it’s all the same!”36 Shmuel discovers through the unexpected perspective of R. Asher that the difference between the rabbi and the secular and “modern” political activist is external and shallow, just like the difference between the prayer shawl that the rabbi wears and the red coat that Leyvik wears. Deep inside they are very similar, and although they aspire to be leaders of “the masses” (either as a rabbi or a political figure) they cannot rise up and become inspirational characters. R. Asher surely does not supply Shmuel, or anyone else in the story, with a clear theological doctrine or ideology. However, the few things Shmuel does hear from R. Asher are important and revealing. For example, R. Asher says: Man is as weak as a fly and the great God is, as it were, in his heart. As long as he climbs—he climbs [...] perhaps he also ascends [...] but if he stands still for a moment, his God immediately pulls him down [...] the sky reflected in the swamp is so frozen and serious, dreamy and serious and peaceful—and he begins to look for spider webs [...] 37

This kind of aphoristic, philosophical-poetic discourse (in a style that is probably influenced by Nietzsche, Shestov, and Zeitlin) can be described as religious existentialism mixed with nihilism. Paradoxically, the ghostly shadow of belief is discernible in the description of the greatness of God as a weight that pulls the believer down to the depths. When Man looks up to Heaven in search of God, he resembles a fly caught in a spider web who searches for ways to get out. The young Shmuel is highly receptive to R. Asher. Although he cannot fully grasp these philosophical-religious aphorisms, they makes a great impression on Shmuel and stir his heart and mind: The words fell in the silence and roiled it. On every closed mouth and every feverish and attentive ear. Shmuel’s burning ears were attentive and every one of his soul’s trembling cords tensed. His brain, full of a churning vapor, burned and tossed. Rabbi Asher’s words were a sealed book for him, but each and every word penetrated deeply into his soul and made it boil. He sensed and felt, without knowing what this feeling really was, because the words were awesome, tempestuous and

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potent, and they fell on and settled into his soul until their time would come. The speaker’s agitation filled his heart and was moved to the bottom of his soul.38

With this kind of spiritual shock, the story moves toward its openended closure. It is impossible to know what influence this shock makes on Shmuel as he grows up. Unlike his later novellas, with their internal monologues and constant flashbacks, Gnessin confined this story to a short period in Shmuel’s adolescence and did not portray Shmuel as a mature man. But what is described in the story is enough to know that it will make not only an impression but some difference in his life. It is even possible to connect other figures in Gnessin’s fiction (for example, Uriel in Beterm) with the young Shmuel. In any case, it seems that what was important for Gnessin in this story was to highlight the religious potential in this kind of nihilistic, hasidic way of thinking represented by alternative father figures of “wise old men” like R. Asher.39 These characters, and the impact they can make on people who are receptive to them, has been described by Carl Jung in his famous lecture about the phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales (1945). Jung spoke about the figure of the “wise old man” as an archetypal image of meaning and wisdom: The figure of the wise old man can appear so plastically, not only in dreams but also in visionary meditations (or what we call “active imagination”) [...] it takes over the role of a guru. The wise old man appears in dreams in the guise of a magician, doctor, priest, teacher, professor, grandfather, or any person possessing authority.40

In modernist Hebrew fiction of the early decades of the twentieth century, these figures indeed appear not only in dreams but also in many “visionary meditations,” the active imagination that turns certain people into wise old (or not so old) men. This type of character as a source of religious experience and a source of some guidance clearly appears in Brenner’s fiction. The first critic to point it out was probably Dov Sadan in one of his pioneering essays about Brenner’s protagonists (written in the 1930s). Sadan wrote that the central character in Brenner’s stories is the figure of a young person who is surrounded by “the horror of reality and its distress”; someone who is “crying for redemption and

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wholeness.” Sadan also noted that in much of Brenner’s fiction there is another kind of figure, who is resolute and undeterred by a courageous, cruel introspection, undiscouraged by the intense agony of self-exposure, but rather descends into the inferno, reaching the final levels of descent, deriving from that place the beginning of his ascent and the strength of his rising toward wholeness and reconciliation [...] These figures stand before us as though shrouded in mysterious light, [...] hinting at the hidden tzadik whose light is shining, illuminating the crowd of little, afflicted men.41

This kind of figure appears most clearly in two texts that Brenner wrote about the urban experience in London—the play Me-ever ­la-gvulin (“Beyond the Borders,” 1907), and the novella Min Ha-meitzar (“Out of the Depths,” 1908–1909). Me-ever la-gvulin, a play in four acts with the subtitle “fragments of a play,” was published in the journal Ha-me‘orer.42 At the center of this play is Yochanan Maharshak, a thirty-year-old Hebrew writer who arrives in London after spending time in prison for escaping from the Russian army. Like many other protagonists in Brenner’s fiction, Yochanan has many questions and doubts about his identity as a writer and as a young Jewish man—ideological questions, issues of language, writing, and so on. The play begins with the arrival of Yochanan at a restaurant in the Jewish East End quarter of London, owned and operated by his brother, Chaim Yehuda, and his beautiful nineteen-year-old daughter Fiege (Fanny), and by his sister Rivka, who is married to the Zionist-Socialist activist Naftaly. Rivka and Naftaly have a small son Yosef ’l, but their marriage is on the brink of collapse, as Naftaly is about to leave London for New York City. The play follows the process of disintegration of the Maharshak family after Naftaly leaves Rivka and her small son on their own, and after Chaim Yehuda is forced to sell the restaurant and travel back to Russia. Eliyahu Chazkuny is an enigmatic character who becomes central in the play as it progresses. Eliyahu arrives in London together with Yochanan, and when everybody is leaving London, the two of them remain with the little boy Yosef ’l and with his mother Rivka in the deserted restaurant. For Yochanan, Eliyahu is a mysterious and mystical man, a kind of “savior” and “miracle-doer.”43 From the very beginning of the play, Yochanan talks about Eliyahu, without whom he could not

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have gotten to London or even found the address of his brother and sister. For Yochanan, the fact that Eliyahu discovered him is “a miracle.” 44 The other characters imagine Eliyahu as a “Tolstoyan character,” full of “Christian morality.” One of them comments that Yochanan talks about Eliyahu Chazkuny the whole day long, as if he was “madly in love with him.”45 Eliyahu Chazkuny himself appears in the restaurant at the end of the first act, as the desperate Rivka asks herself: “Oh God, what will happen?” Then Eliyahu enters, as if he is the answer to Rivka’s anguished prayers: The day is coming to an end. The restaurant is empty. The door opens and a young man of about 26 strides through it. He is short, ungainly, stocky, and his cheeks and lips are thick, ardent, and full of cracks. He wears a tattered greatcoat, which serves him both in sun and rain. ­Under the greatcoat he wears nothing but a shirt.46

The dialogue between Rivka and Eliyahu further confirms his identity as a kind of iconic religious man, a tzadik nistar (“the hidden righteous man”). It is interesting that Eliyahu is described as someone with “passionate lips,” and as someone who possesses a “powerful and awesome desire” when he encounters the young Fanny and he has to resist his passion.47 This sexual desire is implicitly connected with images of fertility and the power of procreation—to Eliyahu as “the father”—as well as with his fatherly love for children and his special relations with them. He immediately finds common language with the three-year-old Yosef ’l and a mutual love develops between the two. At the same time, Eliyahu is the first to discover (it is not clear how exactly) that Fanny has become pregnant. He seems to offer to become the father of the baby: Fanny?: What do you want from me? Eliyahu: Not want—not at all, not a thing. I know everything, Feige; me. There will be a child; he has a father; he will have. To get rid of it—you don’t have to. God forbid. Not good. A father will be found, Feige. I accept. I will earn my bread. Not want, not at all, for me. Today, tomorrow; he will leave you alone. No black moods, no obscene figure; a nice figure. For acquaintances; for friends; must face.48

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The figure of Eliyahu Chazkuny stutters, and also seems to know something about the future, like the stuttering prophets of the Bible. In fact, the character of Eliyahu is a kind of modern reincarnation of the mythical figure of Elijah: the Elijah who raises the widow’s son at Zarephath (I Kings 17:17–24), and the Elijah who in rabbinic, mystical, kabbalistic, and hasidic tradition becomes a savior and a “revealer of secrets” (one of many examples is the kabbalistic concept of Giluy Eliyahu, “the revelation of Elijah” to scholars as a teacher, counselor, and friend, in order to further their spiritual development).49 He also clearly has some features reminiscent of Jesus, as the savior of children, as well as the power of procreation found in the mystic and kabbalistic figures of tzadikim. This does not mean that Eliyahu is a perfect man. He is rather a hidden tzadik who is revealed only to those who are perceptive. Yochanan describes him as a Janus-faced figure and emphasizes the contrast between the banality and dullness of his “outside appearance” and the intensity of his “inner being,” which is revealed only when Eliyahu comes unexpectedly to people who are in a state of anguish and despair, and provides them with support and guidance.50 Toward the end of the play, Eliyahu’s role as a spiritual guide merges with his moral act of taking responsibility for the baby that Rivka gives birth to after her husband leaves her for New York City. The birth of the new baby poses a moral dilemma that is understood by Yochanan as a religious, existential, and moral trial. The last act of the play is also the place where—in typical Brennerian fashion—the realistic framework collapses, and the action and language become highly symbolist and “prophetic” in nature. It takes place in a dark, womb-like basement where there is only a little light that illuminates the room. Yochanan and Eliyahu are lying down, covering themselves with the blanket and trying to keep warm. Yochanan: Silence ... everyone has gone away. She has gone away, too. Had she at least understood, had she at least not pretended to understand. There is no understanding in the world. Eliyahu (in the dark): My Yochanan, there is one for whom to be a father in this world. Yochanan: Eliyahu! Beyond the borders there are no saints. Eliyahu (softly): I am not a saint.

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Yochanan: I know. You don’t ask for recompense. You find no joy in that. It is no secret to you that you are nothing. Your vision is not as blunted as not foreseeing the loss. You are only what you are. I know that.51

The conversation between them is about the meaning of “fatherhood” and being a tzadik. Eliyahu insists that he is not a tzadik, just a simple man, but for Yochanan the fact that he is willing to take responsibility for the child without expecting any reward or even satisfaction (an act that he himself cannot imagine doing) is the mark of his morality and his righteousness. This brings about some sense of clearness of vision for Yochanan as well. This shift is represented by the “fog” (ed in Hebrew), which is part of the familiar London reality, but is used here symbolically to signify a sense of haze and murkiness that is social, mental, and existential: Yochanan: [...] The fog clears. Eliyahu: Yes? Yochanan: It clears. Eliyahu: And what does it say? Yochanan: It says that all that will be is what was and is, and that all this that we, the wretched and the mad, call existence, and all this that we, the blind and the ignorant, call life—52

For Yochanan, the possibility of “revelation” (which is related explicitly with the kabbalistic concept of “the revelation of Elijah”) is experienced as the “clearing of the fog.” The clearing (which is always only partial) is for him connected with the act of writing, which he understands as parallel with fatherhood. Both parenthood and writing require some belief that although life is “strange and convoluted,” and although it is full of pain and anguish, its affirmation can take people out of the depths and bring them up. Yochanan’s notion of the clearing of the fog is described as a deeply religious experience, one that is possible not only because of the despair but also because of the mediation (real or imaginary) of Eliyahu Chazkuny as a “wise (old) man.” Similar themes of “revelation” are also evident in Brenner’s novella Min Ha-meitzar (“Out of the Depths”). In this novella, subtitled “fragmented scrolls,” a father figure of spiritual and moral guidance is even more central. As mentioned before in Part I of this book, Min

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­ a-meitzar is concerned with the tribulations of a group of RussianH Jewish immigrants in the East End of London who work for The Daily Crab, a Yiddish newspaper. The workers of the paper are caught up in a conflict with the owner which leads to a workers strike. There is also a dramatic subplot about Hava Taler, who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son outside of marriage. One of the main themes of the novella is a quest of the unnamed narrator—the young newspaper-seller—for “revelation” and “vision” amid social and existential wretchedness. The possibility of revelation comes to the narrator at the very beginning of the novella, with the sudden appearance of Avraham Menuhin, a thirty-six-year-old Jewish immigrant who arrives in Maisey’s kitchen at the heart of Whitechapel: December, Hanukkah. It was in Maisey’s kitchen that he came “shining at me.” “Shining at me”—what are you thinking? ... Poetry at your age? ... That’s not very nice! And especially since I still know nothing about him, nothing at all ... an odd fellow, solitary, out of the common run, not the kind you come across every day ... Yet can one rely on one impression? After all, I have only seen him twice, only twice altogether ... On a foggy day, a real “pea-souper,” the first day of Hanukkah, in darkness at noon he first appeared to me ... Appeared to me. From the six million multitude of this great city he emerged, a stranger recently arrived: he opened the door and in he came. A tall figure, strong, broad shoulders slightly hunched, firm, healthy, swarthy.53

For the newspaper-seller, the lowly, desperate, and routine life of the Jewish emigrants in East London is suddenly shaken up with the appearance of Avraham Menuhin, who is “revealed” like an ancient patriarch or prophet. The narrator, who does not know Avraham, hesitates about whether to verify what his eyes behold, since the act of “shining” is so strange and numinous. In his uncertainty (“can one rely on one impression?”), he resembles someone who undergoes a religious experience, but whose sober rationalism and cynicism forces him to question and doubt it. However, the more the narrator observes Avraham Menuhin, the more he becomes convinced that what he sees is “true” and “valid”: As the sudden smiling glow of the gaslight in the floating mists fell on his full, generous features, its rays about his face and on the black, ­reddish hair of his tousled beard with its curling tip—there flashed

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across my mind a memory of daybreak in my native land, my native sun, in the book of my first childhood—the Bible [chumash].54

Here the narrator explicitly connects the figure of Avraham Menuhin with the biblical patriarch—the Father Abraham. Menuhin is thus a modern reincarnation of the patriarch, illuminated by the gaslight of the London restaurant. The narrator is especially impressed with the appearance of Avraham because he searches for some “vision.” The search for vision is especially acute since the world of the RussianJewish immigrants in London’s East End is, as the narrator puts it, a “strange and Godless world.”55 As the novella progresses the reader finds out that Avraham Menuhin is no more and no less than a Russian-Jewish immigrant who works as a typesetter at The Daily Crab. And yet, his experience and travails (he spent some time in Siberia after being active as a revolutionary socialist in Russia) have turned him into a moral and spiritual leader and guide. Details about Avraham Menuhin’s past and personality are revealed to the narrator when an old overcoat (which both of them use in the winter as a blanket) is being torn. Inside, the narrator finds some of Menuhin’s correspondence, and as he says, “fragments of old letters tumbled out like messages from heaven.”56 When the typesetters’ attempt at a workers strike fails, and when Hava Taler becomes pregnant, Menuhin’s role as a guiding spirit and “savior” becomes crucial and takes a central place in the narrative. He is the one who stands up and confronts the father of Hava’s child, who happens to be the Russian (non-Jewish) immigrant Fyodor Shtaktorov. In his confrontation with Shtaktorov he even gets injured and sent to the hospital. Menuhin also tries to find a match for Hava Taler who will be a father to her yet-to-be-born baby. When all these plans fail, and Hava herself disappears after giving birth (possibly sent to Argentina as part of the human trafficking business), Avraham takes responsibility for the baby boy. At this point the narrator observes Avraham Menuhin as he comes out of the London hospital: Avraham Menuhin is still alive! He came out of the hospital sick, with a wound on his head—but he is alive. He leans on a stick, but there is hope that he may soon recover, and won’t need it. The man is strong.

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His complexion has darkened. The color of his face is dark. His features now resemble the face of Jesus in the painting of Murillo. When he saw me, he said: “Ya, Ya [God, God]—out of the depths.”57

At this point, Avraham Menuhin appears to the narrator not only as Abraham, the patriarch and father of the Hebrews, but also as Jesus who tries to take his followers “out of the depths.” Indeed, Menuhin, who is still sick, appears like Jesus in a painting. Brenner refers here to the seventeenth-century work of the Spanish painter ­Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682), Christ Healing the Paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda (1667–1670).58 This is another example of how Hebrew modernists used not only Jewish but also Christian imagery (especially the figure of Jesus) in order to depict a different kind of “wise man” or father figure. Menuhin serves precisely as a kind of guiding spirit who supplies the protagonist with some answers and a sense of consolation, or as one who could open new worlds and new realms for him. After seeing Menuhin leave the hospital, the narrator is left to reflect on everything that has occurred and he comes to the conclusion that “the sum total of Avraham Menuhin’s life is not great.” He was not really successful in bringing “salvation” or “redemption,” but he is still alive and the “round infant with his lively eyes” is still safe in Menuhin’s arms. The last chapter (or “The Final Scroll”) of the novella is titled, “The Word of Avraham.” Like other of Brenner’s fictional texts it ends with a “vision”—in this case, a kind of fragmented and broken ­Evangelion or Gospel. Avraham Menuhin is talking about life and death, about his childhood in a small Jewish town and about the fact that he might die soon but the child will remain: The child who will be left an orphan after me, the child who will not come under the rod of teachers and educators, the child whom I carried in my arms—he will grow ... Thus he spoke to me in the Springfield Garden, before the sun went down, Avraham the typesetter—the porter—the Father. And the sun went down: it went down in rich red grease and set. The little trees were silent. The keeper closed the garden.59

At the end of the novella, the narrative comes to a resolution with a new version of the story of the exclusion from the Garden of Eden. We

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are also left with the “Word of Avraham,” and with the infant who will most likely be entrusted to the narrator. This is a very dark and pessimistic ending, but also one with a great religious and existential power. The narrator is inspired by Menuhin and feels charged by his word and by his new mission as a father. Brenner’s father figures—wise old men and guiding spirits alike—are not rabbis in Houses of Study or apostles who sit around the church. They are also not (or not always) old men with white beards. They can be simple and lonely men that in many respects resemble Brenner’s main protagonists and their lives. What distinguishes these figures is the suffering that they have endured, and their moral and inspirational power. Something about their actions and their words makes certain people listen and observe. However, it is quite clear that they are the modernist incarnations of traditional Jewish rabbis and teachers that writers like Brenner left behind.

❊  Coda

As we have seen, many of the Hebrew writers at the turn of the twentieth century and in the following decades were preoccupied—like their European contemporaries writing in Russian, German, French, or ­English—with modernity’s crisis of faith and with the Nietzschean “death of God.” For the Jewish writers who chose Hebrew as their language of expression, the crisis was in many ways entangled with an Oedipal struggle against a tradition personified by “the father.” For transitional Hebrew writers like Berdichevsky and Bialik, a tragic realization of “the tear in the heart” was a result of this struggle, and they gave it powerful expressions. Younger modernist writers like Yosef Chaim Brenner, Uri Nissan Gnessin, and Gershon Shofman were less interested in this social and spiritual conflict, probably because they experienced it in a very different way; they also, not surprisingly, expressed it in their fiction in very different ways. And yet, it is quite clear that the continuing crisis of religious faith, accompanied by the search for a new kind of religiosity and new ways of expressing it in fictional work, did not cease as modernism emerged; in some ways it even intensified. In this context, the search for spiritual guides and wise men was highly important across the first three decades of the twentieth century. Some aspect of the personalities of fictional protagonists and their authors (often related to “childhood” and to the chance of attaining “innocence”) remained perceptive to the possibility of spiritual guidance from “wise men”—old or young. They were more open generally to religious experience and to an encounter with the sacred and the numinous. This encounter came into being and was expressed almost always in moments of great despair, without an

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expectation of salvation or deliverance. Moreover, this encounter was mostly created and expressed in pianissimo, in fleeting moments within typically fragmentary narratives. In the world of modernist Hebrew fiction, like in most of European modernism of this period, there was no other way “out of the depths.”

Epilogue

In 1923, while living and working in Berlin, Uri Zvi Greenberg wrote the following words in the avant-garde modernist Yiddish journal ­Albatros: “I longed to live in Europe, where I was born—but that has not been possible. Perhaps the Orient would take me back.”1 In the last days of that same year, Greenberg traveled to the “Orient,”2 namely to Mandatory Palestine, where he would become one of the most important (and certainly the most radical) of Hebrew modernist poets of the pre-state period. Uri Zvi Greenberg’s own powerful recognition that he “longed to live in Europe,” a yearning “that has not been possible” to realize, continued to haunt him for the rest of his life. Even as the thrust of his work was insistently Zionist, his cultural orientation was always European, no matter where he was living. The strong influence of European modernism (mainly German, Polish, and Yiddish expressionism) could be felt throughout his entire writing career. Similarly, his pre­ occupations with urbanism, sexuality, and religiosity never diminished. These elements were evident when Greenberg endowed his expressionist Hebrew poetry about the pioneers with messianic and apocalyptic fervor, when he wrote urban poems about Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, and when, years later, he was one of the first Hebrew writers to lament the European Jews who perished in the Holocaust.3 Around the same time, other modernist Hebrew writers, with ideological and poetic tendencies very different from Greenberg’s, expressed (overtly or covertly) a similarly intense recognition of their indissoluble connection to Europe after they were forced or compelled to bid farewell to the continent. For example, in July 1924, a few months after

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Greenberg left Berlin for Palestine, Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s house in Bad Homburg was burned by fire while he was recovering from a minor operation in a hospital. The fire destroyed his rich library and all his manuscripts, and the devastated Agnon soon came to understand this traumatic event as an apocalyptic “sign” that he must leave both Germany—where he had lived, worked, and in many ways thrived since 1912—and the European continent altogether. Agnon wrote in a letter to his patron Zalman Schocken that because of the fire, “all day long I see burning scriptures and flying letters, and at night, too, my heart gets no rest [...] grief is eating me with its whole mouth.” 4 On October 31, 1924, Agnon arrived in Palestine. Unlike his first short-lived stay in Palestine between 1909 and 1911, this time Agnon settled down and became one of the most important modernist fiction writers of Mandatory Palestine. In spite of the vast differences between Agnon and Greenberg, their almost simultaneous departures from Europe shared much in common: the journey away from Europe and toward their new home in “the Orient” was rife with complexity and ambiguity.5 They, and many others like them, maintained a tense but powerful link with Jewish and nonJewish European culture. The standard notion is that Hebrew writers as halutzim (pioneers) came to Palestine in order to break all ties with Europe and with the Jewish Diaspora (embodied by the oft-cited “negation of exile”) and to begin a new life in Palestine. But this explanation does not portray adequately either the reality of modernist Hebrew literary life in the first half of the twentieth century or the literature itself. From an empirical historical point of view, the mid-1920s—in the aftermath of World War I, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and other upheavals that jolted Europe and the rest of the world—were the moment in which Europe and all of its various enclaves ceased to be the chief arena for Hebrew literature in general, and for modernist Hebrew literature in particular. Hebrew writers from different generations and of various poetic styles, such as Chaim Nachman Bialik, Yitzhak Lamdan, Avigdor Ha-meiri (Foyershtein), Eliezer Shteinman, Avraham Shlonsky, Ya‘acov Horovitz, Haim Hazaz, and Lea Goldberg, arrived in Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s from Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, Odessa, Moscow, Paris, and other urban capitals. There

Epilogue

were many other Hebrew writers (Shaul Tschernichovsky and Natan ­Alterman among them) who traveled back and forth between Europe and Palestine throughout the 1920s and eventually settled in Palestine. Modernist writers like Gershon Shofman, Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, and David Fogel did not immigrate to Palestine, and instead remained in Europe until it was impossible to ignore the imminent threat of the Nazi regime (or in Fogel’s case, until he was shipped to a concentration camp). One way or another, it is quite clear that by the mid-1930s, Hebrew writers in Europe became a minority group within the Hebrew literary community. By then, a full-fledged Hebrew “literary center” had emerged in Palestine, including a fairly large readership, publishing houses, journals with relatively stable and continuous publication (such as Moznayim [1933–1947], Ktuvim [1926–1931], Turim [1933–1938], and Gilyonot [1933–1954]), daily Hebrew newspapers with literary supplements, and several literary groups that competed against each other.6 None of this would have appeared inevitable at the beginning of the century when Palestine was, to use Gershon Shaked’s words, a small and rather “insignificant spot on the map of Jewish and Hebraic culture.”7 Until the mid-1920s, Palestine was another enclave of Hebrew literature, part of a map and network with many enclaves and satellites but without any center. As Zohar Shavit showed in her detailed study, the Palestinian Hebrew enclave (like all the other enclaves) was dependent on Europe and America for everything: writers, literary materials, readership, venues for publications, and financial support.8 Moreover, the most dominant figure in Hebrew literature in Palestine, until his untimely death in 1921, was none other than Yosef Chaim Brenner, who was—as I hope to have shown, and as Anita Shapira’s excellent recent biography indicates—a thoroughly European Jewish writer. Brenner was highly doubtful about the possibility of settling down in Palestine (both personally and collectively), despite living there for the last twelve years of his life, and he was quite suspicious of any highflown nationalist rhetoric about creating “a New Hebrew Man” in Palestine.9 In terms of the fiction Brenner wrote while in Palestine, the setting and location of his stories and novels surely changed (not surprising, since he gave immediate literary expression to every location in

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which he lived and experienced), but the very same issues that occupied him in Europe—sexuality, religiosity, the representation of inner experience, the relations between the individual and the collective—continued to engage him. Poetically and stylistically, Brenner’s novels like Mikan u mikan (“From Here and from There,” 1911) and Skhol ve kishlon (“Breakdown and Bereavement,” written in 1914, published in 1919), maintained the same elusive mixture of what Brenner called “symbolic realism,” regardless of where they were written; the only change over time was his ever more radical fragmentation and subversion of each and every possible convention of the traditional nineteenth-century novel.10 Other modernist Hebrew fiction writers like Arieli, Agnon, and Dvora Baron immigrated to Palestine around the same time as Brenner (although most left a few years later, either by choice or because of the upheavals of World War I). They were different from Brenner poetically but were connected to European culture and to various trends of European modernism. They were also equally suspicious of ostentatious Zionist ideology and rhetoric and the attempts to harness literature to politics. To be sure, there was plenty of more conservative, even anti-modernist, fiction produced in Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century onward, written by such figures as Moshe Smilansky, Meir Vilkansky, Sh. Ben-Zion, and Yosef Luidor, whom Brenner called with disdain “genre writers”—artists who preferred Zionist dogma to literary complexity. There was also the fiction written by younger (and much more sophisticated) realist writers such as Aharon Reuveni and Dov Kimchi.11 The majority of Hebrew writing in Palestine of this period was far removed from modernism. As Itamar Even Zohar asserted in his seminal study of the rise of “native” Hebrew culture in Palestine, the kind of Hebrew fiction which attempted to deal with the “local scene,” and whose heroes were created to embody Zionism’s “New Hebrew Man,” was fundamentally not modernist. Rather, “it was a literature based upon models too old-fashioned for the tastes of the new writers.”12 Modernist Hebrew fiction, on the other hand, was by and large written and produced, in the early decades of the twentieth century, in Europe, by Jewish writers who were part of European modernism and preoccupied with the complex intersections between Jewish and European culture.

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European Modernism and Hebrew Literary Culture in Palestine While the aim of this book has been to explore Hebrew modernist fiction in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century, its findings also shed a new and perhaps different light on the nature of the change that occurred in Hebrew modernism in the subsequent period between the mid-1920s and the mid-1940s—a period bookended by the end of World War II and the establishment of the State—both in Europe and in the new center of Mandatory Palestine. Several important and interrelated changes in Hebrew modernism occurred in the new period, which coincided with the geographical shift. These changes, I contend, though they appear to be local and even singular—the creation of a distinctive, “native” Hebrew literature in Palestine—are better understood when considered with regard to both European modernism and larger changes in Jewish literature and culture in this period. One important development has to do with the fact that, in contradistinction to the first decades of the century (when writers created modernist works or defended them, but tended not to declare them as such), since the mid-1920s and early 1930s Hebrew modernism had declared itself with loud and radical manifestoes outlining a variety of avant-garde and revolutionary poetic creeds.13 Though most often these manifestos served more as a new “genre” to be utilized, rather than expressions of dogma that was rigidly adhered to, they were nevertheless important in ushering in a new poetics, in fighting against older or contemporary trends (and figures), and sometimes in connecting poetics with politics. When viewed in isolation, through the lens of the Yishuv and its developing culture, many of these manifestos seem to be local, preoccupied with Zionist ideology (socialist, revisionist, and so on) and with a struggle against “the old” in Hebrew literature (the so-called Bialik school, the “Techiya generation,” and so on). However, when examined through a comparative lens, it is clear that they were part of a transnational modernism. Avant-garde modernist manifestos frequently proclaimed their new “-isms” to be distinctively national (Italian and Russian futurism, German and Polish expressionism, Russian imaginism, French symbolism and surrealism, English vorticism), but they were nevertheless documents of fundamentally

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transnational movements. One modernist group in a specific location or national tradition almost invariably took cues from another, and the similarities in both form and content are often greater than the particular differences.14 Moreover, within the realm of Jewish literature, there is no doubt that Hebrew modernists were inspired by Yiddish modernist groups, whom they knew well and with whom they were most closely affiliated. Thus, what seem to be the distinctive local, “Palestinian” revolutionary poetic manifestos of Shlonsky, Shteinman, Greenberg, Lamdan, and others are actually shared by Yiddish, Russian, Polish, German, and French modernisms. Another, even more crucial change has to do with the relations between Hebrew poetry and fiction. As I have shown throughout the book, in the period between 1900 and 1930, the symbolist, impressionist, and expressionist elements of modernism not only were created in the various European enclaves (and to some degree in the Palestinian one as well) but gradually became accepted and even dominant in fiction before they fully emerged in poetry. As I claimed in the Introduction, for various and complex reasons, Hebrew poetry, until the mid-1920s, was still dominated by a mixture of late romanticism and provisional, liminal modernism. Recent research has challenged the prevailing view that Bialik and Tschernichovsky were romantic poets and has shown the symbolist and decadent elements in the poetry they wrote after 1900.15 Moreover, as Chana Kronfeld has demonstrated, poets like Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, David Fogel, Ya‘acov Shteinberg, and Rachel Bluvstein created new “minor key” poetry that was located between symbolism, impressionism, and expressionism.16 The marginality and liminality of this poetry was, at least partly, due to the fact that Hebrew poetry was still considered more “important” and was expected to express the nation and the collective, even when it was lyrical and personal. The period between the 1920s and the 1940s (considered, of course, to be the heart of “high modernism” in most Anglo-American accounts) was the mirror image. The different modernist poetic trends of Avraham Shlonsky, Natan Alterman, Lea Goldberg, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Avigdor Ha-meiri, Yitzhak Lamdan, and others gradually became dominant (and existed side by side with the more minor key poetry of David Fogel, Rachel Bluvstein, Esther Rabb, and Yelizabeta Ivanova Zirkova, known

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better as Elisheva). By 1938—the date of the publication of ­Alterman’s book Kochvim ba-chutz (“Stars Outside”)—modernism was indisputably the prevailing and most influential trend in Hebrew poetry. The opposite, however, was true in modernist Hebrew fiction. In the period of 1900–1930, modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe and elsewhere reached high artistic excellence and even managed to influence the larger arena of Jewish culture. In the two decades after 1930, the novels and stories of modernist writers like Eliezer Shteinman, Ya‘acov Horovitz, Menashe Levin, and Natan Bistrizky were a far cry from the brilliant fiction of Gnessin, Brenner, Shofman, and the other writers I have explored throughout this book.17 The “new” modernists of the 1930s and 1940s were preoccupied with the same issues of interiority, sexuality, urban experience, and religiosity. They wrote with a modernist approach to narrative, and were explicitly affiliated with symbolist, impressionistic, and expressionistic trends. And yet, not only did these writers fail to attract a wide audience (readers in the Yishuv were much more interested in poetry and in realist and documentary fiction about contemporary life), but their writing could not compare to the high achievements of Brenner, Gnessin, Shofman, the early Agnon, Arieli, and the other modernist writers who were active in the period of 1900–1930, mainly in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe. Especially interesting is the case of Shteinman, who was the chief spokesman for modernism in Palestine in the late 1920s and 1930s. Shteinman began his career in Odessa and Warsaw, publishing novels such as Skhor Skhor (“Around and Around,” 1919) and Esther Hayyut (1922). After he immigrated to Palestine, he published Zugut (“Couples,” 1930) and Duda’im (“Mandrake,” 1931). All these novels deal with the urban experience in Warsaw, Odessa, and Tel Aviv and are preoccupied with sexuality and with religiosity. On the face of it, Shteinman (together with Ya‘acov Horovitz) seemed to be on the revolutionary flank of modernism, a counterpart to the poets Shlonsky and Greenberg. However, his writings were flawed and unsuccessful, and he gradually stopped writing fiction and focused instead on essays and projects of collecting hasidic stories.18 In fact, the one exception to the decline of modernist Hebrew fiction in the 1930s and 1940s in Palestine was Agnon. Agnon, who, unlike other writers of his generation, had a long and productive career, wrote

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the most impressive and canonic achievements of Hebrew modernist fiction in this period. After he settled in Palestine in 1924, over the next decades he wrote surrealist, Kafkaesque stories such as Sefer ha-ma’asim (“The Book of Deeds”) and modernist novels such as Orech Nata Lalun (“A Guest for the Night”) and Tmol Shishom (“Only Yesterday”), along with the modernist novella Ad Hena (“To This Day”) in which he revisited his experiences in Berlin during World War I.19 Despite the move eastward, modernist Hebrew fiction in this period continued to be written and produced in Europe and in America as well. David Fogel wrote in Vienna and Paris (until his death in World War  II), Shimon Halkin in New York City, Chaim Hazaz in Paris, ­Elisheva Bichov­sky in Moscow, and Lea Goldberg in Kovna, Berlin, and Bonn (before their immigrations to Palestine in the 1930s).20 The fiction of these writers—primarily known as poets—continued the modernism of the early twentieth century (Gnessin and Shofman were their main influences) and even opened totally new avenues of modernist Hebrew fiction. However, because these urban, European texts were written outside of the new “center” in Palestine and did not attempt to relate to the Yishuv in any way, they were marginal from the start, poorly received by Hebrew readers, and often totally misunderstood by critics.21 In short, unlike in the first three decades of the twentieth century, during the 1930s and ’40s, modernist poetry—especially in the Yishuv— clearly eclipsed prose fiction. This seemingly sudden reversal can be partially explained by the ongoing status of poetry, which was still deemed more “important” and representative in the prevailing culture. In the new period, with the rise of Palestine as a literary center, Hebrew poets were, for the first time in the twentieth century, able to utilize their work and make it more clearly relevant to their tumultuous world. These poets threw off the shackles of the romantic standards and linked their poetics to the more revolutionary politics of modernism, which was by then almost exclusively linked with the equally revolutionary ethos of pioneers. Thus, poets like Shlonsky, Greenberg, and Lamdan created an image of “poet-pioneers.” Their modernist poetic revolution seemed to be intimately connected to the pioneering, even messianic ethos of the Zionist revolution in Palestine, and this, together with the brilliance of their writing, is what made the poetry so influential and dominant.22

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These elements are quite familiar to scholars of Hebrew literature and Zionist history and culture. But when we view these well-­documented years through a European lens, the picture becomes even more complicated. In fact, the writers of both modernist Hebrew fiction and poetry (and the literature itself) in Palestine were caught in the same potent relationship with Europe that we saw with Uri Zvi Greenberg and so many other writers from the first three decades of the century. Thus, Shlonsky and the so-called Moderna group are sometimes understood to be products of, and shapers of, the revolutionary Labor Zionism (associated mainly with what is known in Zionist historiography as the “Third Aliyah” of 1919–1923). Greenberg and his poetry, on the other hand, became associated, from the 1930s onward, with the Revisionist movement of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky (another fascinating revolutionary figure who grew out of Russian and Italian radicalism, symbolism, decadence, and futurism).23 Indeed, when one reads Shlonsky’s early poems about the Jezreel Valley and Mount Gilboa, which comprise the famous “Gilboa” cycle in Bagalgal (“In the Wheel,” 1927), one gets the impression that Shlonsky was a halutz (“pioneer”) working in agriculture and road construction for his entire life. The truth, of course, is that Shlonsky lived and worked there for only a few years. He spent another year (1924) in Paris—where he studied in the Sorbonne, as well as in what he called “the universities of the Parisian cafés”—and when he came to Palestine again he moved, more or less permanently, not to the hallowed farm but to the small city of Tel Aviv.24 Moreover, these early poems of Shlonsky betray the heavy influence of Russian, Polish, and Yiddish futurism (which offered a model for combining revolutionary ideology with an attack on the literary institutions of the past), as well as expressionism and imaginism.25 Like Greenberg, Shlonsky attempted to fuse these European modernist trends with the ecstasy of the Yishuv’s pioneering ethos. But as Jordan Finkin has recently shown, Shlonsky’s “pioneer” poems from the 1920s are better understood when read side by side with the ­Yiddish modernist poet Peretz Markish, a member of the avant-garde Yiddish groups in Kiev and Warsaw. In spite of the differences in language and orientation, Markish and Shlonsky shared many ideological affinities, and there are various points of contact (and divergence) in their poetic styles, which both of them

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shared with Russian, Polish, and German modernism.26 If this is true of Shlonsky’s early poetry, how much more so in the case of Greenberg, who had been, just before his immigration to Palestine, one of the most important modernist Yiddish writers, part of Warsaw’s poetic revolution of Khalyastre and the expressionist circles in Berlin. Furthermore, during the mid-1930s, just as Shlonsky became the leader of the modernist group Yachdav (the so-called Moderna group), and the editor of its literary journal Turim (1933–1938), his poetics became “neo-symbolist,” strongly connected to early-twentieth-century Russian symbolism and late-nineteenth-century French symbolist poetry. With the rise of Natan Alterman in the 1930s and 1940s as the most dominant poet in Palestine, this European-tinged neo-symbolism reached unprecedented status and popularity. Alterman’s powerful resonance and unprecedented popularity were due, in no small part, to his uncanny ability to reconcile the inherent tension between Palestine and Europe and between public politics and hermetic symbolism. On the one hand, he was deeply involved in the ideology and politics of Labor Zionism, writing “low-brow” topical verse that celebrated the pioneering ethos of settlement and defensive military power.27 On the other hand, his “high-brow” poetry offered a potent neo-symbolism affiliated, even more than his “mentor” Shlonsky, with French and Russian symbolism. Thus, Alterman’s abstract, metaphorical, and hermetic urban poems presented the figure of the helech (“wanderer”), which is nothing short of a brilliant Hebrew reincarnation of the Baudelarian flâneur, as filtered through the “wanderer” figures and poetic bravado of Russian poets like Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Boris Pasternak.28 Though we may be reluctant to acknowledge it, the truth is that each and every modernist Hebrew poet and fiction writer active in Palestine during the Mandatory period (Lea Goldberg is perhaps the best example) was intimately connected with modernist European literature and culture, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. As Greenberg and Agnon remind us, these writers were in Palestine because they had to leave their European homes (both the old East European ones and their more tentative, provisional homes in Europe’s urban centers). They left Europe with much pain and a sense of loss, and then sought to somehow retrieve

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and relive their heady European days (and even their past wanderings) within their new environment. Similar dialectics are also evident in what I call, as discussed in Part I, the geography or the “spatial history” of Hebrew modernism. In the Yishuv period, Europe was imaginatively mapped onto Palestine. This is true not only regarding fiction writers like Agnon, Shteinman, Horo­ vitz, and Hazaz, but also the poets Shlonsky, Greenberg, Lamdan, and Alterman. They certainly wrote about, and perhaps even identified with, the pioneers of the Third Aliyah, the soldiers and agriculture workers of the kibbutzim. However, by and large, all these modernist poets lived and worked in urban settings, especially in Tel Aviv, “the first Hebrew city,” which by the early 1930s became an urban center with very visible European characteristics. Thus, for example, instead of the cafés of Odessa, Warsaw, Lvov/ Lemberg, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, there were the new cafés of Tel Aviv, created by European immigrants and clearly modeled on their European predecessors. The writers of modernist groups like Ktuvim and Turim, as well as their “rivals” (both old and new), each had their separate stammtisch in cafés like Sheleg ha-levanon (established in 1929), Ratzki (1932), Kasit (1935), and Ararat (1937). When Shlonsky and his group left the journal Ktuvim following a rift between him and Eliezer Shteinman, they moved their place of meeting from Ratzki to Kasit and Ararat. Since Shlonsky was known as a great creator of poetic neologism, he is even believed to have given some of these cafés their names.29 Indeed, as Barbara Mann wrote in her recent study of the city, “Tel Aviv has become, in some ways, the European city it aspired to be.”30 In certain essential ways, the Hebrew modernists of the Mandatory period of the Yishuv, in Tel Aviv and elsewhere, also became the European writers they always longed to be. Only if we acknowledge the complex, tumultuous jumble of European culture and Jewish tradition can we more fully appreciate the efforts of these artists to create and (re-create) a sense of self. Paradoxically perhaps, even as Jewish life in Europe dimmed and new Jewish life in Palestine emerged, writing Hebrew fiction and poetry in Tel Aviv provided, once again, a certain kind of “literary passport” to European modernism.

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Appendix  The Meaning of Hasidism and Its Echoes in Modern Hebrew Literature (1906)1 Yosef Chaim Brenner

Jewry (yudentum), as any living and growing organism, is always expanding and ramifying. Various currents flow through it; they grow and diminish, at times dry up altogether only to be revived anew and continue to flow in a liberal and rustling stream. Various thought-processes take place within it; at times they invade from the outside but, most of the time, they actually stem from its inside; sometimes they arrive quietly, like silent waters that run deep, and at other times they emerge with thunder and lightning; sometimes they are pushed away, expelled, erased from it; usually, however, they are digested in the tumultuous course of Jewish history, renewing it with fresh life and merging with it into one harmonic whole. Wanting to provide the readers of The Jewish Chronicle, in a series of articles, with some notion of these different processes and currents, we focus, first and foremost, on Hasidism; we do this for several reasons, the main one being that this movement—uniquely Jewish, yet with generally human motifs—was little explored by us up to now. Surely, the average member of the West European Jewish intelligentsia, who derives his knowledge in Jewish matters—if he has any interest in them at all— from non-Jewish encyclopedias, has a notion of Hasidism as a religious, mystical movement among Polish Jews in the eighteenth century that was full of superstitions, weird ideas, belief in tzadiks, and nothing else besides. The one who has delved somewhat deeper into this question adds to this notion also that this superstitious movement spread in Podolye and Ukraine in particular, because the Jewish masses there are little-educated and so better-suited for embracing this mystical Hasidism. ❊ “A religious mystical movement”—this is more than enough for the average perfunctory member of the intelligentsia. “Mystical”—is there a need to talk any longer? Religious mysticism and he—the European-educated, who thinks rationally, and thinks he knows everything—what can the two have in common? Yes, Hasidism really was a religious, mystical movement. Its founders, teachers, and followers really were mystics; that is, they were people who searched for a way to their God, who contemplated their relationship to being, the artificiality of their lives, and the place they occupied in the different worlds. It is also obvious that,

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Appendix: Yosef Chaim Brenner having formed and developed in such an environment as Polish Jewry of the eighteenth century, Hasidism was bound to be pasted over with many dry shells, many unacceptable foolishnesses, and even with worse things like “pidyonot” (money given to hasidic rabbis for their advice), and so forth. But is this important for us today, when we wish to discuss the meaning of Hasidism for Jewry as a whole? Certainly, this is significant for ethnologists, for writers who write about the life of those Jews, and for historians. But for us, the children of the present and of the future; for us, for whom Jewry is a living thing from which we derive spiritual benefits; for us, who search for substance for our own lives, only the aspirations and soarings of Jewish thought in various periods are important; for us, significance lies only in the light that Hasidism brought to the Jewish soul; its battles against the ossification of the rabbinical tradition, its divine inspiration, its religious ecstasy, its ideals, its romanticism, its poetry. And so we can actually see that as soon as New Hebrew literature came out of its maskilic diapers, as soon as it started searching for, and finding, national Jewish substance, Hasidism also started having very particular echoes within it. The perfunctory maskilim, such as Yosef Perl, the author of Megale tmirin (“Revealer of Secrets”), Yitzhak Erter, the author of Gilgul nefesh (“The Reincarnation of the Soul”), and even Rabbi Yitzhak Ber Levinzon, have all disputed and mocked the superstitions of the Hasidim. Of course they were justified, in and of themselves. The contemporary poetic explorations of Hasidism in Jewish literature—such as that of Dr. M. Y. Berdichevsky, Y. L. Peretz, and Hillel Zeitlin on the highest level, and Yehuda Shteinberg and Sholem Ash on a lower level—are not deluded either, after all. It is only that they are not interested in the shell (the klipa, to use a hasidic term) but, rather, in the root of the soul, in the historic conception. For them, what holds most importance is that which we can learn and that which we can create anew when we immerse ourselves in the teachings and experiences of hasidic tales and beauty. What is Hasidism, then, in our own conception? What has it contributed to Jewry? As is generally known, ancient biblical Jewry—that appeared and developed in the insipid monotonous desert environment of Canaan—was simple, concrete, and purely monotheistic. Very seldom would you find within it traces of former mythology with its mysteries and magic, and no more frequently do you have there any metaphysical elements. However, as soon as this Jewry started coming into contact, and conflict, with the teachings of Greek thinkers, it began producing its own philosophers who, on the one hand, reconciled the Jewish and Greek paradigms, and, on the other hand, tested its own “pure” concepts which were completely other and unfamiliar to it. Further, when the Jewish nation, its living carriers, began wandering from land to land, it had to increasingly fit in with the dominant theories of its surroundings, pushing them away so as to cleanse itself of them or, very often, also absorbing some of them. The concept of the occult, the Sitre-torah (Secrets of the Torah), which was, as already mentioned, completely foreign to Jewry in its inception—the occult that had no room in the religion of a healthy, simple, land-working

Appendix: Yosef Chaim Brenner people—started forcefully penetrating the holy books of an old, broken, pensive diaspora-people. This friction went on for hundreds of years in Jewish history, until, after a long while, the fantastical Kabbalah finally got the upper hand, more or less, as it became sanctioned in Sefer ha-zohar, which hovers, as it itself expresses it, in “the place from which all the worlds are drawn.” And instead of the dry Talmud with its laws and explications, which gave food only for the brain and not for the heart and satisfied the dialectical need, but not the metaphysical and poetical ones, and instead of exoteric dogma (torat hanigla), which demanded faith and commanded what one should and shouldn’t do, esoteric doctrine came to the fore, brushing away action and the world of doing, and leading the way directly to the thousand palaces (heykhalot dekhsifin) and revealing the sfirot, which were formed after the Limitless Light restrained itself to make room for them. Kabbalah crowned the human as king over the world, as the purpose of the world of creation. The rabbis’ severe and capricious Lord of the Universe became, here, a merciful father-king who sits on His holy throne, and all the kings of the world and all the nations of the world are nothing to Him, and He concerns Himself only with delivering ruakh yisrael, the Jewish soul, the divine presence in exile (shekhinata she begaluta), and He cries, and a noise passes through the higher worlds, and the Messiah awakens to relieve and deliver the world. The Kabbalist is a free person who strolls in the most beautiful worlds and penetrates the deepest abysses. He looks upon practical commandments as external matter that holds very little significance. The most important is the essence, the soul of the Torah. He becomes a partner in the creation of the world. Sefer ha-zohar—which was, as is known, revealed in Spain—acquired a very important place in Jewish literature, and so the Kabbalic current had a greatly refreshing influence on Jewry as a whole. But with the Spanish Exile, when the people’s lives became even darker, when Jewish existence became even more unbearable, then, unfortunately, even this source has become contaminated. There was no growth in the positive elements of the Kabbalic stream, such as liberation from dogma, transcendence (hit’alut), piety (hitdabkut), profundity (hit’amkut), lyricism, seclusion (hitbodedut), reflection (hitbonenut), ardor, unification with nature and its mysteries, aspiration toward redemption and renewal; abstract Kabbalah was pushed aside, and practical Kabbalah took over in its stead, with its conjurations, incantations, numerological combinations (tzerufey shemot), belief in evil spirits (­gilgulim), fasting, penance, rolling in snow for self-mortification, to the point that the wholeness and loftiness of life was further hindered, and the Jew’s personality fell even lower. The Kabbalah had a complete teaching about the birth of souls—which Hasidism later took advantage of in its teachings about tzadikism—and which can be comprehended by us, should we express it using the terminology we draw on when we speak of different kinds of psychic organization, according to which the born person is not a blank slate on which one can impress anything through

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Appendix: Yosef Chaim Brenner upbringing, environment, and so on; rather, each person is a small world in and of itself, which is the only way that it can be, and so it can often, very often, occur, that two brothers that had exactly the same upbringing, who grew up in exactly the same environment, should, when they grow up, be the complete opposite of each other, to the point of misrecognition. Rabbi Yitzkhak Luria, the Holy Ari, said that he only needs to look at a person, and he already knows from where his soul stems. All souls, so taught the Kabbalists, that exist here, in the lower world and that originate in the cache (otzar) that is there, in the higher worlds, were integrated within the first human, Adam. Each of our souls continues to hold onto one of Adam’s body parts, and so there are souls of the brain, eyes, ears, hands, or legs kind. With his sin, Adam mixed together the good and the bad, Satan and holiness. And since in each soul there is yet a spark of Adam, and it is a mixture of impurity and purity, its purpose is to clean and purify itself until the holy sparks burst through the shells (klipot), and impurity is separated from purity, and then the Messiah will arrive, along with the world to come. As we see from the above, Kabbalah was concerned only with the chosen souls of the brain kind, and even to them it didn’t offer any practical life value in any contemporary sense, having limited itself to dark asceticism, ineffectual reckonings of the End, and so forth. It was inevitable that the Kabbalic current, struggling against dry Torah-study, introducing new desires into the Jewish soul, and enriching Jewish imagination, should, on the one hand, spread the movement among social circles that are capable of embracing it, among simple and honest Jewish people; and, on the other hand, that it should give their lives substance, inspiration in daily life, a drawing near to their source, and human improvement and refinement. It was in that time that Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, appeared. What kind of a person was this Rabbi Israel? Where did he grow up? All this will be discussed in the next chapter.2

Notes

Notes to the Introduction 1.  The story as told by Shofman himself appears in Norman Tarnor, The Many Worlds of Gershon Shofman (West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1989), 42–44. 2.  For a discussion of the difficulties for many Jews to obtain “internal” and “external” passports in the Russian empire, see Eugene M. Avrutin, A Legible People: Identification Politics, the Imperial Russian State, and the Jews (forthcoming). 3.  For more on Robinson and its publishing activities, see Uri Sela, Sfarim, sofrim ve-sipurim: me’a shenot Robinson (Tel Aviv: Y. Robinson, 1989). 4.  Brenner took the trip mainly because his first book—a collection of short stories with the title Me-emek ‘achor (“From the Desolate Valley”)—was about to be published in Warsaw by the publishing house Tushiya. He might have also come to meet with Y. L. Peretz (the revered Yiddish and Hebrew writer who was known to guide young writers), as well as with people from the socialist Bund movement, with which Brenner was associated in this period. See Hillel Zeitlin, “Chalomot ha-no’ar,” Ha-tekufa 14–15 (1922): 635–637; Yitzhak Bakon, Brenner ­ha-tza’ir (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1975), 78–84. 5.  Yosef Chaim Brenner, “Uri Nissan” (1913), reprinted in Yosef Chaim Brenner, Ktavim, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1978–1985), 3:155–162. 6.  Ibid., 155. 7.  See Avrom Reisen, Epizodn fun mayn lebn (Vilna: Klatzkin, 1929), 214–216; Ya‘acov Milkh, Oytobiagrafishe skitzen (New York: Ikuf, 1946), 1967. 8.  For a further discussion of Brenner’s and Gnessin’s time in Warsaw, see Avner Holtzman’s essay in Tmuna le-neged einay (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2001), 77–91. 9.  Dan Pagis, “Kavim le-biographia,” in David Fogel, Kol ha-shirim, ed. Dan Pagis (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1972), 13–33. 10.  Ibid., 24–25. 11.  The lecture was forgotten for many years, but the notes were discovered in 1964 and parts of it were published for the first time in the journal Bitzaron 51 (1965): 9. It was published in its entirety in the journal Siman Kria 3–4 (1974):

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Notes to Pages 8–11 387–391. An English translation of Fogel’s lecture by Eric Zakin and Yael Meroz can be found in Prooftexts 13, no. 1 (1993): 15–20. 12.  As Robert Alter has observed, most writers of Hebrew fiction in Europe did not have a part (official or otherwise) in the nascent Zionist movement. “They were not necessarily antipathic to the stirrings of Zionism in their time, but they were mainly drawn to a different cultural horizon. What they had in mind, was the creation of authentically Hebrew fiction on the soil of Europe.” Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 71. 13.  See Zohar Shavit, Ha-chaim ha-sifrutiyim be-eretz Israel (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1982). 14.  Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism 1890–1930 (London: Penguin Books, 1991). 15.  Raymond Williams indicates that the homogenization of these diverse practices into modernism as a “movement” occurred in the 1950s. See Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989), 31–37. For a good analysis of the concept of modernism and a detailed account of how it was developed, see Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 16.  One indication of the growing interest in modernism is the establishment of journals like Modernism/Modernity (1994) and the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) (in 1999). The MSA defines its mission as an effort to provide “a venue, interdisciplinary and international, in which scholars of modernism could contribute to ongoing reshaping of the field.” For a good summary of these developments, see Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737–748. 17.  Richard Sheppard, “The Problematics of European Modernism,” in Steve Giles, ed., Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1993), 5. 18.  For the most recent and comprehensive discussion of these aspects of modernism as European and global phenomena, see Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, eds., Modernism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007). 19.  Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; reprinted Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 20.  For a good discussion of this aspect of modernism see Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Andreas Huyssen, “Modernism at Large,” and Susan Stanford Friedman, “Cultural Parataxis and Transnational Landscapes of Reading: Toward a Locational Modernist Studies,” in Eysteinsson and Liska, Modernism, 53–86. See also the September 2006 special issue of Modernism/Modernity, entitled “Modernism and Transnationalisms.” 21.  For a good corrective for this trend in Anglo-American modernism, see

Notes to Pages 11–15 Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 22.  Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick, eds., Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 23.  For an excellent recent presentation and discussion of the complex trajectory of Russian modernism, see Edward Mozejko, “Russian Modernism,” in Eysteinsson and Liska, Modernism, 891–909. 24.  Dan Miron, Ben Chazon le-emet (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1979). 25.  For a discussion of the nusach style, its creation, and its significance, see Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose, 15–42. 26.  On the confluence of realism and modernism in Hebrew fiction, see Todd Hasak Lowy, Here and Now: History, Nationalism, and Realism in Modern Hebrew Fiction (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 34–67. It should be emphasized that in recent years, the traditional understanding of modernism as simply a revolt against realism and as a “successor” of realism has been challenged. Scholars have now reached a more complex and nuanced understanding of modernism as not what replaced realism (and romanticism), but as a diverse artistic movement that grew on their margins, arguing with them and questioning their assumptions. See Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 179–242; Edward ­Mozejko, “Tracing the Modernist Paradigm: Terminologies of Modernism,” in Eysteinsson and Liska, Modernism, 11–33. 27.  Ahad Ha‘am, Luach Aahiasaf (1903); reprinted in Kitvei Ahad Ha‘am (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1947), 227–230. 28.  Dan Miron, H. N. Bialik and the Prophetic Mode in Modern Hebrew Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000). 29.  For a discussion of this issue in the context of Russian modernism, see Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, eds., Creating life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Pamela Davidson, “The Validation of the Writer’s Prophetic Status in the Russian Literary Tradition,” Russian Review 62, no. 4 (2003): 508–536. I want to stress that the relations between modernism and nationalism are complex and not at all antithetical even in the more familiar modernist fiction (English, French, and German). For a good discussion of this, see Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 30.  For more on this subject from the point of view of modern Jewish culture in general, and its links to Russian culture, see Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Culture between Renaissance and Decadence: Di Literarishe Monatsshriften and Its Critical Reception,” Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 1 (2001): 153–198. 31.  See Bradbury and McFarlane, “Movements, Magazines and Manifestos: The Succession from Naturalism,” in Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism, 192–205; Benedikt Hjartarson, Myths of Rupture: The Manifesto and the Concept of Avant-Garde, in Eysteinsson and Liska, Modernism, 173–194; Binyamin Harshav, ed., Manifestim shel Modernism (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2001).

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Notes to Pages 15–19 32.  Brenner, “Me-hirhurei sofer,” Revivim 2 (1908). Reprinted in Brenner, ­Ktavim, 3: 270–271. 33.  Brenner, “Mi-tzror ktavim Yeshanim,” in Ha-po’el ha-tzair (n.p., 1911). Reprinted in Brenner, Ktavim, 3:411. 34.  Iris Parush, Kanon Sifruti ve idio’logya leumit (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1992), 301–308. 35.  For a recent good summary discussion of the issue of fragmentation and modernism see Sascha Brau, “A Map of Possible Paths: Modernism after Marxism,” in Eysteinsson and Liska, Modernism, 107–124. 36.  My intention is certainly not to imply that World War I or the 1917 Revolution did not make a strong impact on Hebrew writers in Europe and elsewhere. The point is that, perhaps unlike writers in English or French literature, Hebrew writers had experienced a powerful sense of upheaval much before the war. For a good discussion and analysis of Hebrew writing in the context of the war, see the recent study of Glenda Abramson, Hebrew Writing of the First World War (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008). 37.  Avner Holtzman, El Ha-ker’a she ba-lev: Berdichevsky shenot ha-tzmicha (­Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1995). 38.  Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Metaforot ve-smalim bi-yetzirato shel Gnessin (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987); Dan Miron, Chachim be-apo shel ha-netzach (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1997). 39.  Nurit Govrin, Me-ofek el ofek: G. Shofman chayav ve-yetzirato (Tel Aviv: Yachdav, 1982); Nurit Govrin, Ha-machatzit ha-rishona: Dvora Baron chayeh ­ve-yetzirata (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1988). 40.  For a comprehensive review of Brenner’s scholarship, see Avner Holtzman, “Poetics, Ideology, Biography, Myth: The Scholarship on Y. H. Brenner, 1971– 1996,” Prooftexts 18, no. 1 (1998): 82–94. 41.  Three earlier excellent studies that cover different aspects of early-twentieth-century Hebrew literature in Europe, and enabled my study, are Dan Miron, Bodedim be-mo‘adam (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987); Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose; and Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Maga‘im shel dekadens (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1997). 42.  Gershon Shaked, Ha-siporet ha-ivrit 1880–1980, vols. 1–5 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Keter, 1977–1998). For an abridged version of these volumes see Gershon Shaked, Modern Hebrew Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 43.  The title Moderna is taken from the name of a group of poets established in Mandatory Palestine during the early 1930s by Avraham Shlonsky and his circle. 44.  Shaked, Ha-siporet ha-ivrit, vol. 3, 17–178. In the abridged English version, the discussion of these writers and trends is in the ninth chapter of Modern Hebrew Fiction, 113–138. 45.  Gershon Shaked, Le-lo Motza (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1973). Shaked was born in Vienna in 1929 and became an important part of the Israeli literary establishment in the 1950s and 1960s.

Notes to Pages 19–29 46.  The concept of Techiya literature goes back to the first attempts by critics of Hebrew literature like Yosef Klausner to deal with the Hebrew literature of their time. See Yosef Klausner, Ha-zeramim ha-hadashim shel ha-sifrut ha-ivrit ha-tzeirah (New York: Ivriyah, 1907). On Klausner’s ideological and literary system in comparison, see Iris Parush, Kanon Sifruti, 205–257. I am well aware that the concept of Renaissance does not have to be exclusively linked to this literary-ideological construct. In Russian literature of the time, symbolism was linked to a sense of renaissance (hence the designation “Silver Age”). Moreover, Jewish thinkers like Martin Buber (in his famous essay “Jüdische Renaissance” in the journal Ost und West, 1901) articulated a very different concept of “renaissance” in Jewish culture. See Asher Bieman, “The Problem of Tradition and Reform in Jewish Renaissance and Renaissancism,” Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 1 (2001): 58–87. See also the special issue of Jewish Studies Quarterly 10, no. 4 (2004) dedicated to the concept of “Jewish renaissance.” 47.  Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary ­Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Maga‘im shel dekadens (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1997); Hannan Hever, Kore Shira: ma’marim u masot al shira modernit (Tel Aviv: Keshev, 2007). 48.  See, for example, Bar-Yosef, Maga‘im shel dekadens, 13–41; Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism, 21–78. 49.  Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 27. 50.  This is the consensus emerging in work of historians like Peter Gay, in Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (New York: Norton, 2007), as well as the wide variety of literary scholars assembled in Eys­ teinsson and Liska, Modernism. 51.  A step toward an integration between modernist studies and Jewish literature in various languages has been taken in a recent volume of Modernism/­ Modernity 13, no. 4 (2006), dedicated to Jewish modernism and edited by Amir ­Eshel and Todd Presner, with essays by Scott Spector, Barbara Mann, Uri S. ­Cohen, and Gabriella Safran. 52.  Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés, eds., Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). In the field of Hebrew literature, see my own reflections: Shachar Pinsker, “The Challenges of Writing a Literary History of Modernist Hebrew Fiction: Gershon Shaked and Beyond,” Hebrew Studies 49 (2008): 291–298.

Notes to Chapter 1 1.  Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 2.  David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change; Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

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Notes to Pages 29–33 3.  See Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 1–13. 4.  Malcolm Bradbury, “The Cities of Modernism,” in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane , eds., Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (London and New York: Penguin, 1991), 96. 5.  “The world of the novel is essentially the world of the modern city.” Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 185. 6.  Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1981), 26. 7.  Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1950), 409–424. 8.  Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 155–200. 9.  Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 71–76; Bart Keunen, “Living with Fragments: World Making in Modernist City Literature,” in Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, eds., Modernism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 271–290. 10.  Peter Brooker, Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film, and Urban Formations ( New York: Macmillan, 2002), 25. 11.  Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 20. 12.  Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?” in The Politics of Modernism, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989), 34. 13.  Williams, “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism,” in The Politics of Modernism, 45. 14.  See the collection of studies and essays in Ezra Mendelsohn, ed., People of the City: Jews and the Urban Challenge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 15.  Murray Baumgarten, City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 1. See also a special volume edited by Barbara Mann, “Literary Mappings of the Jewish City,” Prooftexts 26, nos. 1–2 (2006). 16.  Some very different examples of this widespread tendency can be seen in: George Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” Salmagundi 66 (1985): 4–25; Jean François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 17.  For a discussion of these poles and the ways in which Jewish writers are caught between them, see Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 18.  One important exception is the collection edited by Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt, The Great Transition (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985). My work attempts to build upon the foundations that have been laid out

Notes to Pages 33–38 in this ­pioneering, but ultimately uneven, collection of essays. Another interesting attempt to write a “geography” of Hebrew literature is Nurit Govrin, Ktivat ­ha-aretz: Arim ve-aratzot al mapat ha-sifrut ha-ivrit (Jerusalem: Carmel, 1998). 19.  Gershon Shaked, Modern Hebrew Fiction, trans. Yael Lotan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 3. 20.  Gershon Shaked, “The Great Transition,” in Abramson and Parfitt, The Great Transition, 124. 21.  Zohar Shavit, “The Rise and Fall of Literary Centers in Europe and America and the Establishment of the Center in Eretz Israel,” Iyunim bi-tkumat Israel 4 (1994): 422–439. 22.  We do not have exact numbers on the readership of Hebrew literature in the early twentieth century, but it is clear that it was rather small. See Dan Miron, Bodedim be mo‘adam (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 1987), 23–43; Kenneth Moss, “Printing and Publishing after 1800,” in Gershon Hundert, ed., The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1459–1468. 23.  See, for example the recent work of Mark Morrison, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), and Adam McKible, The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York (New York: Routledge, 2002). 24.  “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” in Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism, 13. 25.  Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Routledge, 2005); Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds., Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 26.  Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998). 27.  Malcolm Bradbury, The Atlas of Literature (London: De Agostini Editions, 1996). 28.  Bradbury and McFarlane, “Geography of Modernism,” in Modernism, 95– 190. 29.  Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 24–25. 30.  The concept of “thirdspace” was inspired on one hand by Henri Lefebvre’s work on “the production of space,” and by Homi Bhabha. See Soja, “Thirdspace: Toward a New Consciousness of Space and Spatiality,” in Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner, eds., Communicating in the Third Space (London: Routledge, 2009), 49–61. 31.  On the European “literary café” as “thirdspace” see my essay: Shachar Pinsker, “The Urban European Café and the Geography of Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism,” in Mark Wollaeger, ed., Oxford Handbook of Global Modernism (­Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 32.  Ruth Beckermann and Teifer Hermann, Die Mazzesinsel Juden in der ­Wiener Leopoldstadt 1918–1938 (Wien: Locker, 1984). 33.  Eike Geisel, Im Scheunenviertl: Bilder, Texte und Dokumente (Berlin: Severin und Siedler, 1981).

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Notes to Pages 38–47 34.  Chaim Bermant, Point of Arrival: A Study of London’s East End (London: Eyre Methuen, 1975).

Notes to Chapter 2 1.  Y. D. Berkovitz, Ha-Rishonim kivney adam (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1943), 1002–1003. 2.  Steven Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985). 3.  Dan Miron, Bodedim be-mo‘adam (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 1987), 341–343. 4.  Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa, 96–114; Ezra Spicehandler, “Odessa as a Literary Center of Hebrew Literature,” in Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt, eds., The Great Transition (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), 75–90. 5.  Ya‘acov Fichman, Amat Ha-Binyan (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1951), 1002– 1003. 6.  Dan Miron, “The Odessa Sages,” in Rachel Arbel, ed., Homage to Odessa (Tel Aviv: Beth Hatefutzot, Nahum Goldman Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, 2002), 62–81. 7.  Ya‘acov Fichman, Sofrim be-chayehem (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1942), 7–8. 8.  Miron, Bodedim, 353–355. 9.  Steven Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha‘am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993), 10–20. 10.  Miron, Bodedim, 355–365. 11.  For an account of these poetic changes see Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988); Shachar Pinsker, “Intertextuality, Rabbinic Literature, and Modernist Hebrew Fiction,” in Anita Norich and Yaron Eliav, eds., Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Contexts and Intertexts (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2008), 201–228 . 12.  Lea Bairach, From Space to Symbol: The Memories of “Hebrew Odessa,” 1881– 1914 [Heb.], Master’s Thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1991. 13.  For an analysis of this novel and fascinating insights on the relations between the city and its literary image, see Steven Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 73–77. 14.  Efraim Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995); Rebecca Stanton, “Identity Crisis: The Literary Cult and Culture of Odessa in the Early Twentieth Century,” Symposium 57 (2003): 117–126. 15.  Beirach, From Space to Symbol, 66-67. 16.  Ch. N. Bialik, Ba-ma‘ale (January 1933); reprinted in Avraham Broides, Pgishot ve dvarim in sofrey ha-dor (Ramat Gan: Masadah, 1976), 50–51. 17.  “Fishke the Lame,” translated by Ted Gorelick, in Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler, Fishke the Lame and Benjamin the Third (New York: Schocken Books, 1996), 261–262.

Notes to Pages 47–53 18.  For more on this topic see Allison Schachter, “The Shtetl and the City: The Origins of Nostalgia in Ba-yamim ha-hem and Shloyme reb khayims,” Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 3 (2006): 73–94. 19.  Sholem Aleichem, The Letters of Menakhem Mendl and Sheyne Sheynd land Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son, trans. Hillel Halkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 20.  Eliezer Shteinman, Esther Hayut (Warsaw: Shtybel, 1922); Ya‘acov Rabinovitz, Neve Kayitz (Tel Aviv: Mitzpe, 1934). 21.  Anthony Polansky, “Warsaw,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1995–1996. 22.  Nathan Cohen, Sefer, sofer ve-iton: Merkaz ha-tarbut ha-yehudit be-varshah, 1918–1942 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2003). 23.  Shmuel Werses, “Ha-sifrut ha-ivrit be-polin: tkufot ve-tziyunei derech,” in Israel Bartal and Israel Gutman, eds., The Broken Chain: Polish Jewry through the Ages, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2001), 161–190. 24.  Ya‘acov Fichman, Ruchot menagnot: sofrei polin (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1952), 9–10. 25.  Miron, Bodedim, 377. 26.  Chone Shmeruk, “Aspects of the History of Warsaw as a Yiddish Literary Center,” Polin 3 (1988): 142–155; Cohen, Sefer, sofer ve-iton, 39–141. 27.  Miron, Bodedim, 377–379; Werses, “Ha-sifrut ha-ivrit be-polin,” 182–190; Hannan Hever, “From Exile-without-Homeland to Homeland-without-Exile: A Guiding Principle of Hebrew Fiction in Interwar Poland,” in Israel Gutman and Ezra Mendelshon, eds., The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), 334–367. 28.  Kna‘any refers to the late works of A. A. Kabak, In the Shadow of Hanging Tree, and Binyamin Tanenboym, Yesterdays on the Threshold. Although Kna‘any exaggerates that these are the only works that depict Warsaw in Hebrew literature, he is correct in his general observation. See David Kna‘any, “Warsha ba-sifrut ­ha-ivrit,” Orlogin 8 (May 1953): 3–15. 29.  The last two novellas of Gnessin (Beterem and Etzel) contain some distinctively modernist urban representations, but the model for them was the city of Kiev and not Warsaw. 30.  Gnessin’s brother, Menachem Gnessin, was a pioneer of the Hebrew theater who spent more time in Warsaw, absorbing the Yiddish and Polish theater in the city. His memoirs include vivid descriptions of Homel, Warsaw, and Palestine. See Menachem Gnessin, Darki im ha-teatron haivri (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad, 1946). 31.  See Gershon Shofman’s essay on Nomberg in Gershon Shofman, Kol Kotvei Shofman (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1960), vol. 4, 268–269; and Mati Meged, “Mavo,” in Hersh David Nomberg, ed., Sipurim (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1969), 7–41. 32.  Eliezer Shteinman, “Skhor-skhor,” in Ha-Tekufa, vols. 1–5 (1918–1919). 33.  The crisis in the publishing industry in Eastern Europe was part of the

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Notes to Pages 53–57 upheavals that followed the aborted 1905 revolution. The perception of crisis in Hebrew publishing was even more pronounced because of the decline in Hebrew readership. See Miron, Bodedim, 44–5, 379–381. 34.  Shofman, “Warsaw 1901,” in Kol Kotvei, vol. 4, 98–99.

Notes to Chapter 3 1.  Similar percentages of Jewish population were also seen in other cities of the area: Minsk, Pinsk, Mogilev, Boburisk, and Vitebsk. Vitebsk is a good example of a city that is similar to Homel and which became a small but important enclave for Yiddish literature and Jewish art. 2.  Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Czarist Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 4; Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2001). 3.  Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 4.  Two lightly armed self-defense groups (one organized by the Bund and another by the left-wing Zionist “Poalei Zion”) attempted to resist the assaults after their appeal to the authorities was not taken seriously. According to some accounts, police and troops punished the defenders, but their efforts succeeded in limiting the scope of the violence. See Simon Dubnov, “The Pogrom at Homel and the Jewish Self-Defense,” in History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1918), 160–161; John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 195–247. 5.  Mordechai Ben-Hillel Hacohen, “Yosef Chaim Brenner: Zichronot,” Ha-­ shiloah 39 (1921): 357. 6.  Avram der Tate, “Zikhroynes,” quoted in Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale, 55. 7.  Yitzhak Bakon, Brenner Ha-tzair, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1975), 68, 79. Bakon identified Brenner as the writer of the Yiddish story “No, and a Thousand Times No.” See Brenner, Haketavim hayidiim: Di yidishe shriftn, ed. Y. Bakon (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 1985), 57; first published in Der Kampf, no. 3 (March 1901); Anita Shapira, Brenner: sipur chayim (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2009),30. 8.  Menakhem Dorman, Pirkei biographia ve-i’yun bi-yetzirat Alterman (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1986), 13–28. 9.  See the important memoir of Hillel Zeitlin, written after Brenner’s death in 1921. Hillel Zeitlin, “Arachim ve-zichronot,” Ha-tekufa 14–15 (1922): 617–645. Hillel Zeitlin, “Yosef Chaim Brenner un zeine nohente,” Tzukunft (June–September 1938); “Y. C. Brenner un zeine briv,” Tzukunft (September 1940). An abbreviated

Notes to Pages 57–66 version was published in Mordecahi Kushnir, ed., Y. Ch. Brenner: Mivchar divrei zichronot (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1971), 23–54. 10.  Zeitlin, “Arachim ve-zichronot,” 31. 11.  Gershon Shofman, “Homel,” Moznayim 18, no. 4 (1944): 245; reprinted in Kol Kitvei Gershon Shofman, vol. 4 (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 1960), 197–198. 12.  Dan Miron, Min ha-parpaer el ha-tola’at (Tel Aviv: Open University Press, 2001), 31–33. 13.  I would like to thank Dan Miron for pointing out to me these important dynamics. 14.  The Hebrew writers follow the tradition of Russian literature of Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and many others in writing the first letter of the city name—real or fictional. 15.  Yosef Chaim Brenner, “Mi-saviv La-nekuda,” Ha-shiloah 14 (1904). Reprinted in Brenner, Ketavim, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1977), 399– 563. 16.  Brenner, Ketavim, 1:404. 17.  Ibid., 1:423. 18.  Ibid., 1:407 19.  Ibid., 1:408–409. 20.  Bart Keunen, “Living with Fragments: World Making in Modernist City Literature,” in Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, eds., Modernism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 277–286. 21.  Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 19. 22.  Wirth-Nesher, City Codes, 20. 23.  Joseph Roth, “Lemberg, die Stadt,” in Werke 2: Das journalistische werk 1924–1928 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990), 337. 24.  Delphine Bechtel, “Lemberg/Lwów/Lvov/Lviv: Identities of a City of ­Uncertain Boundaries,” Diogenes 53, no. 2 (2006): 62–71. 25.  Rachel Manekin, “L’viv,” in Gershon David Hundert, ed., The YIVO ­Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1106–1110. 26.  Ezra Mendelsohn, “Jewish Assimilation in Lvov: The Case of Wilhelm Feldman,” Slavic Review 28, no. 4 (1969): 577–590; Israel Bartal, “Among Three Nations: The Jews in Eastern Galicia,” in Sarah Harel Hoshen, ed., Treasures of Galicia (Tel Aviv: Beit Ha-tfutzot, 1996), 25–29. 27.  Bartal, “Among Three Nations,” 28. 28.  N. M. Gelber, “Toldot yehudey Lvov,” Enztiklopedia shel galuyot, vol. 4 (­Jerusalem: Chevrat Enztiklopedia shel galuyot, 1956), 303–343, 539–568; Yehoshua Tehon, “Dmuyot mi-lvov,” in Israel Cohen and Dov Sadan, eds., Pirkei Galicia (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 1957), 343–344; Naftali Zigel, “Zichronot Galicia,” in Dov Sadan and Natan Michael Gelber, eds., Toldot ha-tnu’a ha-tzionit be-galitzia, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Rueben Mass, 1958), 635–736.

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Notes to Pages 66–75 29.  Moshe Kleinman, “Galitzia lifney shloshim ve-chamesh shanim,” Moznayim 11 (1940): 223–241. 30.  Yitzhak Bakon, Agnon Hatzair (Tel Aviv: Hidekel, 1989), 18–29; Dan Laor, Chaye Agnon (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998), 35–58. 31.  Kleinman, “Galitzia,” 236. 32.  Naftali Zigel, “Zichronot Galicia,” in Sadan and Gelber, Toldot ha-tnu’a ha-tzionit be-galitzia, 2:635–736. 33.  Miron, Akdamut le-Atzag (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2002), 13–14. 34.  On the Hebrew writers in Galicia see Hannan Hever, “The Struggle over the Canon of Early-Twentieth-Century Hebrew Literature: The Case of Galicia,” in Steven Kepnes, ed., Interpreting Judaism in a Postmodern Age: New Perspectives on Jewish Studies (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 243–280. Hever claims that Galician Hebrew writers were excluded from the canon because they chose to write “minor” literature and did not fit with the “hegemonic” or “major” tendencies of the Hebrew literary establishment. 35.  Kleinman, “Galitzia,” 237. 36.  Kleinman notes what he calls “the positive influence of the Russians” on the local Hebrew writers from Galicia (235), but of course the influence was mutual, as was the exposure to modernist writing in German, Polish, and Russian. See also the discussion about the development of the young Agnon as a youthful writer in Bakon, Agnon Hatzair, 78–127. 37.  Quoted in Norman Tarnor, The Many Worlds of Gershon Shofman (New York: Behrman House, 1989), 23. 38.  Melech Ravitch, Dos mayse-bukh fun mayn lebn, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Central Committee, 1962–1964), 116. 39.  Kleinman, “Galitzia,” 227. 40.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 3:321. 41.  Nurit Govrin, Me-ofek el ofek: G. Shofman, hayav ve-yetzirato (Tel Aviv: ­Yahdav, 1983), 82–103. 42.  Govrin, Me-ofek el ofek, 91–97. 43.  Gershon Shofman, Me-idach gisa (Lvov: Sirota, 1909), 3–14. Reprinted in Kol Kitvei, 1:162–173. 44.  It should be noted that many of the titles of Shofman’s short stories (like the stories and novellas of Gnessin and Brenner) use spatial terms, often ones that indicate liminality, marginality, and fragmentation. 45.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 1:162. 46.  Ibid., 1:160–161. 47.  Ibid. 48.  Ibid., 1:195. 49.  Shaked, Lelo Motza, 138–143. 50.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 1:313. 51.  Obviously, Shofman’s way of dealing with the urban space through these figures points to the gender dimension of his work. In all of Shofman’s stories it

Notes to Pages 76–80 is the male flâneur character, walking around and trying to make sense of the city and himself within the city through his spectacular desire for female characters like the prostitute. On this subject see Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17–42; Scott McCracken, Masculinities, Modernist Fiction and the Urban Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

Notes to Chapter 4 1.  Malcolm Bradbury, “London 1890–1920,” in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism 1890–1930 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 175. 2.  Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 127–130. 3.  Lloyd Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870–1914 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1960), 241–269. 4.  Bryan Cheyette, “British-Jewish Writing and the Turn towards Diaspora,” in Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, eds., The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 700–715. 5.  Steven Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha‘am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993), 277–310. 6.  For an illuminating examination of Brenner’s ideological positions and commitments, see Jonathan Frankel, “Yosef Haim Brenner, The ‘Half-Intelligentsia,’ and Russian-Jewish Politics, 1898–1908,” in Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran, eds., Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 145–176; Anita Shapira, Brenner: sipur chayim (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2009), 75–87. 7.  For more details of Brenner’s life in London, see Yitzhak Bakon, Brenner ha-tzair, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1975), 121–238; Shapira, Brenner, 60–135. For a study of the radical Jewish labor movement and its activities see William J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals 1875–1914 (London: Duckworth, 1975). 8.  See my discussion of the engagement of Brenner with Wilde in Part II of this book. 9.  For a vivid personal description of this period see Asher Beilin, “Brenner be-london,” Ha-tekufa 14–15 (1922): 646–671. 10.  In fact, the journal was edited by Brenner with help from Radler and Beilin in London and from U. N. Gnessin and Shimon Bichivsky in Homel and Pochep. See Hagit Matras, Ha-meorer: Ketav-et va-arikhato (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1983). 11.  Yosef Chaim Brenner, Ktavim, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1978–1985), 3:13. 12.  See Andreas Huyssen, “Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of ­Urban Spaces,” PMLA 122, no. 1 (January 2007): 27–43; Hamutal Bar Yosef,

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Notes to Pages 80–88 ­ a-reshimah ke-zaner shel maavar me-realizm le-simbolizm ba-sifrut ha-Ivrit (Tel H Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1989). 13.  Y. Ch. Brenner, “Min ha-meitzar,” in Ha-`olam (1908–1909). Reprinted in Brenner, Ktavim, 2:1019–1094. For an English translation of the novella, see ­Yosef Chaim Brenner, Out of the Depths, trans. David Patterson (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992) (hereafter cited as “English version”). 14.  There are many similarities between the fragmentary structure and style of “Out of the Depths” and Leonid Andreyev’s story “The Red Laugh” (1904). Each of the story’s chapters is called otryvok—fragment. Another important text, which was written around the same time and resembles its fragmentary structure and themes, is Rilke’s well-known novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). 15.  See an extended discussion of the religious aspect of the novella in Part III of this book. 16.  Brenner, Ktavim, 2:1033; English version, 32. 17.  Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 409–424. Brenner was familiar with Simmel’s influential work and wrote about him in an essay from 1908. See Brenner, Ktavim, 3:221. 18.  Brenner, Ktavim, 2:1019; English version, 17. 19.  T. S. Eliot, Wasteland and Other Poems (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 57. 20.  Brenner, Ktavim, 2:1080; English version, 85. 21.  Brenner, Ktavim, 2:1021; English version, 19. 22.  Bart Keunen observes that sociologists and critics such as Simmel and Benjamin, and numerous modernist writers point to a culture of fragmentation of the social and private life that brings about a commodification and breakdown of values. Modernist city fiction, according to Keunen, attempts to both express this fragmentation and its consequences and also employs a number of “world making strategies.” See Bart Keunen, “Living with Fragments: World Making in Modernist City Literature,” in Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, eds., Modernism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 271–277. 23.  Brenner, Ktavim, 2:1092; English version, 98. 24.  For an illuminating discussion of Brenner’s “sense of ending,” see Menachem Brinker, Ad ha-simta ha-tveryanit (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990), 229–262. 25.  Brenner, Ktavim, 2:1093–1094; English version, 99.

Notes to Chapter 5 1.  Franz Kuna, “Vienna and Prague 1890–1928,” in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism 1890–1930 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 120–129. 2.  Jurgen Nautz and Richard Vahrenkamp, eds., Die Wiener Jahrhundertwende Einflusse, Umwelt, Wirkungen (Wien: Bohlau, 1993). 3.  Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1979). For an important critique of Schorske and a contextualization of the period

Notes to Pages 88–91 within the Jewish history of the city, see Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867– 1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 4.  For a parallel phenomenon of Jewish women writing in German, see Lisa Silverman, “Zwischenzeit and Zwischenort: Veza Canetti, Else Feldmann, and Jewish Writing in Interwar Vienna,” Prooftexts 26, nos. 1–2 (2006): 29–52. 5.  Eisig Silberschlag, “Hebrew Literature in Vienna 1782–1939,” in Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt, The Great Transition (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allan­held, 1985), 75–90. 6.  Mikhail Krutikov, From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, forthcoming). 7.  One of the most vivid descriptions of the Jewish literary milieu during these years comes from the memoirs of the Yiddish poet Melech Ravitch. See Melech Ravitch, Dos mayse-bukh fun mayn lebn, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: The Central Committee, 1962–1964), 180–517. I have recently discovered a forgotten Yiddish collection of poetry and prose edited by Ravitch in which Fogel and other Hebrew writers participated. See Melech Ravitch, ed., Toyt tziklus (Vin: Der Kval, 1919). 8.  Eugen Hoeflich (Moshe Ya‘akov Ben-Gavriel), Tagebücher, 1915 bis 1927, ed. Armin Wallas (Wien: Böhlau, 1999). 9.  Peter Altenberg, Ktavim nivcharim, trans. Gershon Shofman (New York: Shtybel, 1921). 10.  Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 132–162; Hannan Hever, “Acharit Davar,” in Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, ­Kol-hashirim (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1992), 107; Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 14. 11.  On Meir Wiener’s contacts with Fogel, see Krutikov, From Kabbalah to Class Struggle. 12.  The major intellectual outlet of modern Yiddish culture in Vienna was the journal Kritik, ten issues of which were published in 1920–1921. See Ravitch, Dos mayse-bukh, 486–499. 13.  William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 120. 14.  On the literary café and its role in Viennese modernism, see Harold Segal, The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits 1890–1938 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993). 15.  Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 40–41. 16.  Segal, The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 12. 17.  The Arkaden is not as well known today as the Greinsteidel or Central, but it was patronized by Wittgenstein and members of the philosophical Vienna Circle, as well as many students and musicians. See Allan Janik and Hans Veig, Wittgenstein in Vienna: A Biographical Excursion through the City and Its History (Vienna: Springer, 1998), 188–189.

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Notes to Pages 91–97 18.  Daniel Charney, Di velt iz kaylekhdik (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1963), 160–165; Michael Weichart, Zikhroynes (Tel Aviv: Farlag Menorah, 1960), 229–248; Ravitch, Dos mayse-bukh, vol. 2, 180–188. See also Dan Pagis, “Kavim le-biographia,” in ­David Fogel, Kol Ha-shirim (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1966), 22. 19.  Meir Henish, Mi-bayit u mi-chuts: pirke zikhronot (Tel Aviv: Ahdut, 1961), 145–147. The German term stammgast was modeled in Yiddish as shtamgast. 20.  Melech Chmelnitzky, Ruh un imru (New York: Ignatoff Foundation, 1948), 31. 21.  Canetti’s meeting with Ben Yitzhak took place in the Café Museum. Meir Wiener recorded many encounters with Fogel and other writers and intellectuals in the Café Herrenhof. 22.  In this sense also there is a striking similarity to Jewish women writers in German living in Vienna. See Lisa Silverman, “Zwischenzeit and Zwischenort,” 29–52. 23.  The element of shock for the stranger in the big city is one of the most recurring themes in the modernist fiction of the early twentieth century. See Irving Howe, “The City in Literature,” Commentary 51, no. 5 (May 1971): 61–68; Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 71–76. Glenda Abramson notes in her study of Hebrew writing of World War I the ways in which the Great War made an impact on Shofman’s stories in and of Vienna. See Glenda Abramson, Hebrew Writing of the First World War (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 213–229. 24.  Sof sof was originally published in Ha-tekufa 4 (1919): 55–64. Reprinted in Gershon Shofman, Kol Kitvei Gershon Shofman, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 1960), 44–55. 25.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 2:48. 26.  Ibid., 2:66. 27.  Ibid., 2:121. 28.  Shofman, “Ba-matzor u’va-matzok,” Ha-tekufa 16 (1922): 101–109. Reprinted in Kol Kitvei, 2:125–137. 29.  According to Nurit Govrin, the story is a kind of roman à clef and all the characters are based directly on the Hebrew colony—the group of Hebrew writers and artists in Vienna. Govrin, Me-ofek el ofek: G. Shofman, hayav ve-yetzirato, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Yahdav, 1983), 345–349. 30.  My reading of the story was shaped by the work of my student Efrat Bloom. I thank her for the extremely fruitful scholarly dialogue and for allowing me to draw on her unpublished paper. See Efrat Bloom, “Behind the Fence: The Gendered Spaces of Hebrew Modernism,” unpublished paper, University of Michigan, 2007. 31.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 1:101. 32.  Ibid., 1:125–126. 33.  Ibid., 1:134. This expression which Shofman employs in the story is highly indicative of the back and forth movement of so many Jewish writers, journal-

Notes to Pages 97–99 ists, intellectuals, and politicians who traveled between Palestine and the cities of ­Europe throughout the period 1900–1930. 34.  As Efrat Bloom claims, the yearning for “home” assumes the form of a phantasmatic attempt to confine Esther, the only woman in the story, within the house, as well as within the picture frame. The group’s collective admiration for Esther and her stay in Vienna during the war signifies the longing for a home and family life. As a woman and a representative of the “old world,” now separated by the war, she becomes an object of erotic desire which reflects the need to domesticate space and to recreate a home for the male protagonists “through the woman.” Bloom, “Behind the Fence.” See also the discussion of Scott McCracken, Masculinities, Modernist Fiction and the Urban Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 14–45. 35.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 2:137. 36.  In this sense, what Shofman attempts in his “sketches,” miniatures, and short stories is the same project of modernist urban writing seen in Austrian and German writers such as Altenberg, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, and Musil. See Andreas Huyssen, “Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces,” PMLA 122, no. 1 (January 2007): 30–32. 37.  Shofman left Vienna with his Austrian wife and lived in a village near Gratz. Fogel left Vienna in 1925 and moved to Paris. On Fogel in Vienna, see ­Pagis, “Kavim le-biographia,” 22. 38.  David Fogel, Chaye nis’u’im (Tel Aviv: Mitzpe, 1929–1930). A new version of the novel was published by Menakhem Perri (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1986). The English translation is based on the new version. David Fogel, Married Life, trans. Dalya Bilu (New York: Grove Press, 1989). 39.  See Bart Keunen, “Living with Fragments: World Making in Modernist City Literature,” in Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, eds., Modernism (­A msterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 271–277. 40.  Andrew Thacker makes this distinction between realist “mapping” and modernist “touring” and “spatial stories” using the theoretical model of Michel de-Certeau. See Michel de-Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 29–36. 41.  Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 19. 42.  Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Roy Tiedemann (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 43.  Keith Tester, ed., The Flâneur (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 1. 44.  Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 20. 45.  Fogel, Chaye Nisu’im, 429. Toward the end of the novel Gurdweill is losing

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Notes to Pages 100–105 his sanity and the descriptions of his actions, thoughts, and the ways in which he perceives the urban space tend to be more surrealistic and more expressionistic. He is no longer working, and after the death of his baby boy he spends almost of all his days and nights strolling around the city of Vienna in concentric circles. See also Eric Zakim, “Between Fragment and Authority in David Fogel’s (Re)presentation of Subjectivity,” Prooftexts 13, no. 1 (1993): 103–125. 46.  Fogel, Chaye Nisu’im, 19. 47.  Ibid., 226. 48.  Ibid., 96. 49.  Ibid., 136. 50.  Ibid., 207, emphasis mine. 51.  Segal, The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 25. 52.  In an essay entitled “Theorie des Café Central,” the writer Alfred Polgar noted, “Its inhabitants are for the most part those whose hatred of humankind is as strong as their need to socialize with people who want to be alone.” Alfred Polgar, “Theorie des Café Central,” in K. J. Heering, Das Wiener Kaffeehaus (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1993), 149–154. 53.  Fogel, Chaye Nisu’im, 19. 54.  It is quite likely that this café is modeled after the Café Arkaden, which was, as we have seen, a center of Jewish literary and cultural activity. 55.  Fogel, Chaye Nisu’im, 22. 56.  Coincidently or not, the same year, 1929–1930, saw the publication of a number of other urban novels in Hebrew: Simta‘ot (“Alleyways”) by the poet and prose writer Elisheva Bichovsky, which narrates the story of Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals in Moscow after the revolution; Yechiel Hagari by Shimon Halkin, which deals with New York City; Ha-shiga’on ha-gadol (“The Great Madness”) by Avigdor Foyershtein (Ha-Meiri); and Cholot Kchulim (“Blue Sands”) by Menashe Levin, which is probably the first novel that describes the new city of Tel Aviv as a “miniature metropolis.”

Notes to Chapter 6 1.  Gershon Shaked, “Halevay nitna lahem hayecholet lehamshich,” Tarbitz 51, no. 3 (1982): 479–490; 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. 2.  Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 185–212. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Jews within German Culture,” in Michael Meyer and Michael Brenner, eds., GermanJewish History in Modern Times, vol. 4, Renewal and Destruction: 1918–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 170–194. 3.  For an extended treatment of the topic and a comparison between Yiddish and Hebrew literature in Berlin see Shachar Pinsker, “Deciphering the Hiero-

Notes to Pages 106–112 glyphics of the Metropolis: Literary Topographies of Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism,” in Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov, eds., Yiddish in Weimar Berlin (Oxford: Legenda, 2010). 4.  Yeshurun Keshet, Kedma va Yama (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 1980), 144–145. 5.  Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 2. 6.  Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), xiii. 7.  Peter Gay, “The Berlin-Jewish Spirit,” in his Freud, Jews and Other Germans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 171. 8.  Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture. 9.  Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2007), 4. 10.  Moshe Pelli, The Age of Haskalah: Studies in Hebrew Literature of the Enlightenment in Germany (Leiden: Brill, 1979). 11.  Elias Hurwitz, “Shay Ish Hurwitz and the Berlin He-‘atid: When Berlin Was a Centre of Hebrew Literature,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 12 (1967): 85–102; Stanley Nash, In Search of Hebraism: Shai Hurwitz and His Polemics in the Hebrew Press (Leiden: Brill, 1980). 12.  Avner Holtzman, El ha-kera sheba-lev: Mikhah Yosef Berdichevksky—shenot ­ha-tzmihah (1887–1902) (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1995). 13.  Agnon wrote that after he worked as a Hebrew teacher of Dr. Arthur ­Rupin, he longed to travel to Berlin. Brenner encouraged him to go to Berlin in order to read and explore German literature. See Agnon, Matzmi el-atzmi (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1976), 136–137. 14.  Dan Laor, “Agnon in Germany, 1912–1924: A Chapter of a Biography,” AJS Review 18, no. 1 (1993): 75–93. 15.  Delphine Bechtel, “Babylon or Jerusalem: Berlin as Center of Jewish Modernism in the 1920s,” in Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger, eds., Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 116–123; Gennady Estraikh, “Vilna on the Spree: Yiddish in Weimar Berlin,” Aschkenas 11, no. 1 (2006): 103–127. 16.  See Shimon Rawidowicz, Sichotai‘im Byalik (Jerusalem: Devir, 1983), 42–45. 17.  Arthur-Tilo Alt, “A Survey of Literary Contributions to the Post–World War I Yiddish Journals of Berlin,” Yiddish 7, no. 1 (1987): 42–52. 18.  Rawidowicz, Sichotai‘im, 76; Shavit, On the Hebrew Cultural Center, 378. 19.  Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial ­Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 20.  Scholem Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 1880–1940 (Tobingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1959), 164–165. 21.  Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: Norton, 2001), 68. 22.  It is estimated that in the period between 1920 and 1923, half a million

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Notes to Pages 112–116 Russians lived in Germany, and most of them chose to settle in Berlin, particularly in Charlottenburg (which they renamed Charlottengrad). They were mostly aristocrats and intellectuals—writers, poets, literary critics—eager to speak out and write, in search of publishers. As the Jewish Russian writer Ilia Erenburg observed, they all carried a “mandatory crack in the soul” that kept them distant from their German surroundings, and nourished their desire of recomposing the coordinates of the lost Russian culture on German soil. See Karl Schlögel, Berlin, Ostbahnhof Europas: Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert (Berlin: Siedler, 1998). 23.  Gottfried Benn, “Doppelleben,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8 (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1968), 1939. 24.  Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). 25.  Gershom Scholem, “Agnon in Germany: Recollections,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York: Schocken, 1976), 119. 26.  Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture, 129–152. See also Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Fin-de-siècle Orientalism, the Ostjuden, and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self-Affirmation,” in his Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 79–109. 27.  Alfred Döblin, Reise in Polen (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1926). On Döblin see Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture, 143. 28.  Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture, 137. 29.  On Stencl and his relations with Lasker-Schüler, see Heather Valencia, Else Lasker-Schüler und Abraham Nochem Stenzel eine unbekannte Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1995). 30.  When Greenberg writes of Berlin’s Mitte, he refers both to the “middle of Berlin” as a kind of extended metaphor for modern urban civilization and to the specific area in Berlin where Greenberg and many other East European Jews lived. 31.  Uri Zvi Greenberg, “Dvora be-shivya,” in Davar (02/26/1926); reprinted in Kol-Kitvey U. Z. Greenberg, ed. Dan Miron, vol. 15 (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2001), 124–128. 32.  Dan Miron, Akdamut le-atzag (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2002), 36. 33.  James McFarlane, “Berlin and the Rise of Modernism, 1886–96,” and Richard Sheppard, “German Expressionism,” in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism 1890–1930 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 96–105, 274–291; Roy F. Allen, Literary Life in German Expressionism and the Berlin Circles (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983). 34.  Gay, Weimar Culture, viii. 35.  Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History (New York: Putnam, 1980), 10. 36.  On the period of the fin de siècle, see the essays in Emily Bilski, ed., Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918 (Berkeley: University of California, 1999). On the Weimar period, see Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture, 129–184.

Notes to Pages 116–126 37.  Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 166–168. 38.  Shimon Rawidowicz, Sichotai im Bialik (Jerusalem: Dvir, 1983), 46. 39.  Avner Holtzman, Tchiyat ha-’uma: Melechet mahshevet (Tel Aviv: ZmoraBitan, 1999), 87–90. 40.  Bechtel, “Babylon or Jerusalem,” 117. 41.  Avidov Lipsker, “The Albatrosses of Young Yiddish Poetry: An Idea and Its Visual Realization in Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Albatross,” Prooftexts 15, no. 1 (1995): 89–109. 42.  Erica Fischer Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London: Routledge, 2005), 46. 43.  Allen, Literary Life in German Expressionism, 67–73; Sigrid Bauschinger, “The Berlin Moderns: Else Lasker-Schüler and Café Culture,” in Berlin Metropolis, 58–101. 44.  Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920–1933, trans. Michael Hofmanns (London: Granta, 2004), 136–138; Allen, Literary Life in German Expressionism, 160–163. 45.  Laqueur, Weimar, 277. 46.  Itamar Ben-Avi, ’Im shachar atzma’utenu (Tel Aviv: Magen, 1961), 146–156; Aharon Hermoni, Be-ikvot ha-bilu’im (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass, 1951), 145–158. See also the description of the café and the “Hebraic” activity in the biography written by Hemda Ben Yehuda, Eliezer’s second wife. Hemda Ben Yehuda, Nose ha-degel: chaye Itamar Ben Avi (Jerusalem: Talpiyot, 1951), 58–80. 47.  Yitzhak Dov Berkovitz, Ha-rishonim ki vnei adam (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1975), 533; Hermoni, Be-ikvot ha-bilu’im, 151. 48.  Nash, In Search of Hebraism, 172. 49.  Immanuel Ben-Gurion, Reshut ha-yachid (Tel-Aviv: Reshafim, 1980), 64–72. See also Berdichevsky’s German diary of these years, published in Ginzey Micha Yosef 7l (1997): 90–113. 50.  See the description of the Romanisches Café in Henrik Berlewi, “El ­Lissitzki in Warsaw,” in El Lissitzky (Hannover: Kestner Gesellschaft, 1966). 51.  Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox (New York: Fred Jordan, 1978), 21. 52.  Avrom Nokhum Stencl, Loshn un lebn 10–11 (1968): 25. 53.  Greenberg, “Dvorah be-shivya,” 127. 54.  Yeshurun Keshet, Maskiyot (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1953), 137. 55.  Quoted in Bechtel, “Babylon or Jerusalem,” 116. 56.  In Hebrew literature the poema has been an important genre for writers of the haskalah, for Bialik and his generation, as well as for the development of modernist Hebrew and Yiddish poetry since the 1910s and 1920s. See Yehudit Barel, Ha-­poema ha-ivrit me-reshita ve-ad reshit ha-meah ha-esrim (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1995). 57.  Binyamin Hrushovski, “Bi-ntiv ha-poema ha-ivrit ha-modernit,” Masa (Oc-

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Notes to Pages 127–134 tober 2, 1952); Binyamin Hrushovski, Ritmus ha-rachvut (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1978). 58.  Dan Miron, Bodedim be-mo‘adam (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987), 510. 59.  David Shimoni, Sefer ha-poemot, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1952), 3–32. 60.  Ibid., 86. 61.  Tamar Woolf-Monson, Lenogah nekudat ha-pele: ha-poetica ve ha-­publitzistika shel Greenberg bi-shnot ha-esrim (Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan, 2005), 13–33; Avidov Lipsker, Shir adom, shir Kachol (Ramat Gans: Bar Ilan University Press, forthcoming, 2010). I would like to thank Avidov Lipsker for sharing with me his work on Greenberg and Berlin. 62.  Ba-elef ha-shishi was published in Berlin in the journal Ha-olam under the title Mispar hato’im ha-gdolim (“A Number of Great Wanderers,” 1923). Later in 1923 Ha-olam published Ha-dam ve-habasar (“The Blood and Flesh”). In the same year, the poema Ba-m’avarv (“In the West”) was published in the journal Rimon. See Woolf-Monson, Lenogah nekudat hapele, 59–62, 107. 63.  Greenberg, Kol ktavav, 1:9. 64.  Ibid., 1:29–41. For a sensitive reading of this difficult poema from which I draw my discussion see Miron, Akdamut le-atzatg, 60–62; and Woolf-Monson, Lenogah nekudat hapele, 107–121. 65.  Greenberg, Kol ktavav, 1:34. 66.  Ibid., 1:37. 67.  Ibid., 1:66. 68.  Ibid., 1:39. 69.  Avidov Lipsker has observed that it is possible to read Greenberg’s depiction of Berlin as “the city of a hundred gates” in two meanings. In the Hebrew expression me’at ha-gashrim, the word mea can mean both “a hundred bridges” and “a century of bridges.” Thus, Berlin is also what defines the modernist twentieth century as a century of “bridges,” namely of threshold liminality. See Lipsker, Shir adom, shir kachol. 70.  Miron, Akdamut le-atzag, 36. 71.  Moyshe Kulbak, the expressionist Yiddish poet and novelist, published in 1933 an extended cycle of over sixty poems that dealt with his Berlin experience entitled Disner tshayld harold (“Child Harold of Dinsa”). See Pinsker, “Deciphering the Hieroglyphics.” 72.  Dan Miron, “Al ha-novela ha-shirit shel Ya‘acov Shteinberg,” Haaretz (4/08/63 and 4/12/63); Yehudit Bar-El, “Machzor ha-sonnetot me-beyt ha-kafe ­le-Ya‘acov Shteinberg,” Mechkarey Yerushalaym be-sifrut Ivrit 1 (1981): 73–88. 73.  Ibid., 59. 74.  Yeshurun Keshet, Maskiyot (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1953), 138–139. 75.  Ya‘acov Shteinberg, Kol Kotvei Ya‘acov Shteinberg (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1959), 67. 76.  Ibid., 68. 77.  Miron, “Al ha-novela ha-sihirit,” Haaretz (4/12/63); Bar-El, “Machzor ­ha-sonnetot,” 77–80.

Notes to Pages 135–140 78.  See Miriam Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing, Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique 56 (1992): 43–75. 79.  Dovid Bergelson, Shturemteg (Vilna: Kletzkin, 1928); Dovid Bergelson, Velt ayn, velt oys (Vilna: Kletzkin, 1929). For a recent English translation by Joachim Neuregschel, see Dovid Bergelson, The Shadows of Berlin (San Francisco: City Lights, 2005). All references to Bergelson’s stories are from these editions. 80.  Bergelson, “Altvarg,” in Shuremteg, 159–173; and in English, Shadows of ­Berlin, 9–20. 81.  Ibid., 42. For an analysis of the story in the context of Berlin as a center of Yiddish literature, see Allison Schachter, “Bergelson and the Landscape of Yiddish Modernism,” East European Jewish Affairs 38, no. 1 (2008): 7–19. 82.  Laor, “Agnon in Germany, 1912–1924,” 75–93; Dan Miron, “German Jews in Agnon’s Work,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23 (1978): 265–280. 83.  Laor, “Agnon in Germany, 1912–1924,” 83–84. 84.  Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture, 205–209. 85.  Gershom Scholem, “S. Y. Agnon: The Last Hebrew Classic?” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York: Schocken Books, 1976). 86.  Emunah Yaron, ed., Sh. Y. Agnon—Z. Shocken: Chilufei igrot (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1991), 78–79. 87.  Dov Sadan, Al Sh. Y. Agnon (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1959). 88.  Laor, “Agnon in Germany, 1912–1924,” 82. 89.  These include the important stories: Ba-derech (which eventually became part of “The Book of Deeds”), Panim acherot, Ferenhheim, Merutzat ha-sus, and Bein shtei arim; the novels Ad Hena and Shira; and a number of stories and texts written in the 1940s that were collected only posthumously. See Dan Miron, “German Jews in Agnon’s Work,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23 (1978): 265–280. 90.  S. Y. Agnon, “Ad Hena,” in Kol Sipurav shel S. Y. Agnon, vol. 7 (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Schocken, 1960 [1952]), 5–170. The novel was recently translated into English by Hillel Halkin: S. Y. Agnon, To This Day (Jerusalem: Toby Press, 2008). 91.  Laor, Chaye Agnon, 417. 92.  Arnold Band, for example, calls the structure of the novel “unintegrated and haphazard without any clear justification.” Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 347, 352–353. 93.  For an analysis of Ad Hena in the context of Berlin of World War I, see the recent study of Glenda Abramson, Hebrew Writing of the First World War (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 147–180. Maya Barzilai has demonstrated convincingly in her recent study that Ad Hena is strongly preoccupied not only with the German language and Berlin’s urban environment but also with the popular and visual culture (especially cinematic and popular representations of the Golem myth) in which Agnon was immersed during his Berlin period. Maya Barzilai, “Anatomies of Creation: Reviving the Golem in Times of War and Death, 1915– 1962,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009. For a com-

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Notes to Pages 140-149 parison of Ad Hena and Bergelson’s Berlin stories see Pinsker, “Deciphering the Hieroglyphics.” 94.  Miron, “German-Jews in Agnon’s Work,” 269–280.

Notes to Coda to Chapter 6 1.  William Butler Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Churchtown, Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1920), 19. 2.  Irving Howe, “The City in Literature,” Commentary 51, no. 5 (May 1971): 61–68.

Notes to Chapter 7 1.  Opening epigraph is from Oscar Wilde, Salome: A Tragedy in One Act (New York: Dover, 2002), 40. Oscar Wilde, “Shlomit,” Ha-me‘orer, vols. 4–5 (April– May 1907). 2.  Yosef Chaim Brenner, Kol Kitvei Y. Ch. Brenner, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1967), 282. 3.  Ibid., 3:305. 4.  This is also the assumption of Hamutal Bar-Yosef-see, Maga‘im shel dekadens (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 1997), 314. Brenner’s enthusiasm about Wilde did not prevent him from writing in 1913 a critique of the “epigonism” and “decadent” nature of Zalman Shneior’s poetry, comparing it to Lord Henry’s words in Dorian Gray, which Brenner designates as “a famous and ridiculous novel”; Yosef Chaim Brenner, Ktavim, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1978–1985), 4:1041. This remark reveals both Brenner’s intimate familiarity with Wilde and his reluctance to be publicly associated with him and his writing. 5.  Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 1987). For a discussion of Wilde’s life and works in the context of a new discourse of homosexuality, see Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of Discourses on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992); Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 6.  See Brenner’s well-known early letter to Gnessin (1899), in which he writes disapprovingly about Gnessin’s attraction to the “theory of art for art’s sake” (Brenner, Kol Kitvei, 3:222). 7.  Oscar Wilde, Salome: A tragedye in eyn akt, trans. Yoel Entin (London: Progress, 1909). 8.  David Frishman, “Al Oscar Wilde ve-goralo,” Ha-zeman 1, no. 9 (1905): 409–418. 9.  Oscar Wilde, Mi-ma’amakim, trans. David Frishman and Mordechai Tabiyov (Warsaw: Shtybel, 1920). 10.  1907 saw another translation of Wilde into Yiddish, The Rose and the

Notes to Pages 150–153 Nightingale and Other Stories. See Oskar Vayld, Di royz un di nachtigel un andere ­ertzelungen, trans. A. Frumkin (London: Germinal farlag, 1907). Two years later, both Salome and De Profundis were translated into Yiddish. See Oskar Vayld, Salome: A tragedye in eyn akt, trans. Yoel Entin (London: Progress, 1909); Oskar Vayld, De Profundis, trans. K. Marmor (London: Progress, 1909). For a list of Yiddish translations of Wilde into Yiddish in Britain, see Levnard Prager, Yiddish Culture in Britain (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990), 696–697. In Hebrew, see also Oscar Wilde, Tmunato shel Dorian Gray, trans. Y. Ch. Tabiyov (Moscow: Shtybel, 1918). 11.  See, for example, Gideon Toury, “Translation and Reflection on Translation,” in Robert Singerman, Jewish Translation History: A Bibliography of Bibliographies and Studies (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002). See also the recent discussion in Kenneth Moss about translation, “Not the Dybbuk but Don Quixote: Translation, Deparochialization, and Nationalism in Jewish Culture, 1917–1919,” in Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran, eds., Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 196–240. Moss briefly discusses the 1918 translation of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray by Tabiyov and its reception (202–203). 12.  Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), 149–168. 13.  Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 55–78. 14.  Wilde involved most of his French literary friends and acquaintances in his creative process, obsessively testing out ideas on writers such as Theophile Gautier, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Anatole France. He cultivated a broad knowledge of the Salome iconography. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 316–341. 15.  My understanding of the complexity of Oscar Wilde’s play is based mainly on Charles Bernheimer, “Fetishism and Decadence: Salome’s Severed Heads,” in Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds., Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 62–83, and his chapter on Salome in the posthumously published book Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 122–138. 16.  Wilde, Salome, 3. 17.  “Decadent style is one in which the unity of the book breaks down.” Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, vol. 1 (Paris: Plon, 1920), 20. 18.  Bernheimer, “Salome’s Severed Heads,” 73. 19.  Gail Finney suggests that Salome is, “on a disguised, symbolic level,” not a woman but a man. It is in a male role, Finney argues, that Salome fetishizes ­Jokanaan’s body parts, her ornamental dismemberment of his physical integrity being an “attempt to gain control over the forbidden object of homosexual desire.” Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama, 62–63. 20.  Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” (1889), in Karl Beckson, ed., Aesthetes and Decadents of the l890s (Chicago: Academy, 1981), 191.

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Notes to Pages 153–157 21.  Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings (New York: Bantam, 1982), 3. Ha-me‘orer (1906), 5. 22.  Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects, 138. 23.  Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 149–151. 24.  Carl E. Schorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna, 224. 25.  Gilman claims that the German and Austrian reading of Wilde’s Salome contains a stereotypical image of Salome as a Jewish woman because the reading of this image was so closely linked to the general qualities ascribed to the “feminine” at the fin de siècle that later writers could not see the Jewish aspects of the figure. He notes, the simultaneous yet exclusionary existence of two related images of difference, “the femme fatale and the belle juive—which usually function in two different cultural contexts, the former misogynist, the latter anti-Semitic.” Sander Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘Modern Jewess,’” German Quarterly 66, no. 2 (1993): 198. 26.  Betsy F. Moeller-Sally, “Oscar Wilde and the Culture of Russian Modernism,” Slavonic and East European Journal 34, no. 4 (1990): 459–472. 27.  Evgenii Bershtein, “The Russian Myth of Oscar Wilde,” in Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler, eds., Self and Story in Russian History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 168–188. 28.  Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (London: Heinemann, 2007), 59–70. 29.  Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 3–4. 30.  Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis,” The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 94. 31.  The most influential examination of sexuality as discourse is Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Vintage Books, 1988–1990). For a good summary of the ways in which the attention to gender and sexuality changed the ways Jewish modernity is understood, see Paula E. Hyman, “Gender and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identities,” Jewish Social Studies 8, nos. 2–3 (2002): 153–161; this is also the goal of the collection of essays edited by Jonathan Frankel, Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Hierarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 32.  Dan Miron, Ben Hazon le-emet (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1979), 231–279, 379–411; David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 149–168. 33.  Sigmund Freud, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1920–1922). 34.  Naomi Seidman, “The Modernist Erotics of Jewish Tradition: A View from the Gallery,” in Frankel, Jews and Gender, 157. 35.  Seidman, “The Modernist Erotics,” 161. 36.  Michael Gluzman, Ha-guf ha-tziyioni (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007).

Notes to Pages 157–162 37.  George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985); George Mosse, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993); Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 38.  Anita Shapira, Yehudim hadashim, yehudim yeshanim (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1997). 39.  Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 1–22. 40.  Biale, Eros and the Jews, 177. 41.  Gluzman, Ha-guf ha-ziyoni, 28, 136–181; Shachar Pinsker, “Imagining the Beloved: Gender and Nation Building in Early Twentieth-Century Hebrew Literature,” Gender & History 20, no. 1 (2008): 105–127. 42.  I should clarify that although I am sometimes using Freudian language in my discussion, the main issue is not the influence of Freud on Hebrew writers of the period. Though it is clear that some Hebrew writers became familiar with Freud and his writings, pre-Freudian conceptions of psycho-sexuality that circulated in early-twentieth-century Europe were much more important for Hebrew writers and intellectuals. For a very relevant discussion of Freud in Russian culture, see Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: A History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, trans. Noah and Maria Rubens (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). 43.  Many of these authors were translated into Hebrew and Yiddish in this period, sometimes by the same Jewish writers who created modernist Hebrew fiction. 44.  Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Maga‘im shel dekadens, 33–41. 45.  Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin de Siecle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 1–10. 46.  Ibid., 132–164. 47.  Erich Naiman, “Historectomies,” in Jane Tussey Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles, eds., Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 262. 48.  Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 368. 49.  Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, eds., Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 5; Avril Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 226–242. 50.  Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 3–7. 51.  Quoted in Matich, Erotic Utopia, 209. 52.  Matich, Erotic Utopia, 73. 53.  See Hans-Peter Soder, “Disease and Health as Contexts of Modernity: Max Nordau as a Critic of Fin-de-Siècle Modernism,” German Studies Review 14, no. 3 (1991): 473–487. The question of the relationship between Jews and sexuality was explored in different ways in the writing of Otto Weininger in Austria and of

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Notes to Pages 163–167 Vladimir Solovyov and Vasily Roaznov in Russia. See Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 299–334; Matich, Erotic Utopia, 236–273. 54.  One extreme expression of this tendency was the portrayal of sadomasochistic relationships between a femme fatale—either an aristocratic gentile, or an assimilated Jewish woman—who dominated an emasculated, passive Jewish man. Examples can be found in the works of Berdichevsky, Gnessin, Agnon, Arieli, and Fogel. 55.  Foucault’s analysis is based on the fact that European psychopathologists devoted much of their attention to fetishism. See Sigmund Freud, “On Fetishism,” Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 152–159. 56.  Leo Bersani, “Sexuality and Aesthetics,” October 28 (1984): 27–42. 57.  Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects, 27; Bernheimer, “Fetishism and Decadence,” 62–83. 58.  Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1987), 43. 59.  Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 174. 60.  Ibid., 91. 61.  Ibid., 100–101. 62.  Matich, Erotic Utopia, 16–20. 63.  This is especially pronounced in the thematic connections between mikdash and kdusha (holinesses), wholeness and sexual union in writers like Brenner and Agnon. These writers explore these religious-utopian themes at the same time as they examine “deviant” and fetishistic sexual desire. (See my discussion in Part III.)

Notes to Chapter 8 1.  George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17–39. 2.  Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 103. 3.  Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Wien: W. Braumüller, 1903). For a discussion of Weininger’s ideas see Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and the Crisis of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York: Continuum, 1993). 4.  Brenner refers to Weininger in his critical writings on a regular basis from 1910 onward. See Yosef Chaim Brenner Ktavim, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1978–1985), 3:393, 416, 486; vol. 4, 1088, 1627. 5.  Weininger, Sex and Character, 344. 6.  Ibid., 306. 7.  Ibid., 303. 8.  John E. Toews, “Refashioning the Masculine Subject in Early Modernism:

Notes to Pages 167–170 Narratives of Self-Dissolution and Self-Construction in Psychoanalysis and Literature 1900–1914,” Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 1 (1997): 31–67. 9.  Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams, eds., Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Ritchie Robertson, “Historicizing Weininger: The Nineteenth-Century German Image of the Feminized Jew,” in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, eds., Modernity, Culture and “the Jew” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 23–39. 10.  Toews, “Refashioning the Masculine,” 34. 11.  Hillel Kieval, “Imagining ‘Masculinity’ in the Jewish Fin De Siècle,” in Jews and Gender, 142–155. 12.  As Bialik himself attested, in writing this story, he was strongly influenced by Abramovitz and with what he perceived to be the creation of realist tradition in Hebrew fiction. 13.  The story was serialized in Ha-shiolah (1899); reprinted in Chaim Nachman Bialik, Kol Kitvei Ch. N. Bialik (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1938), 97–111. 14.  On the ambivalence of Bialik toward the character of Aryeh, see ­Shmuel Verses, Sipur ve-shorsho: Iyunim be-hitpatchut ha-prosa ha-ivrit (Ramat-Gan: ­Masada, 1971), 133–143. 15.  Bialik, Kol Kitvei, 97. 16.  Ibid., 98. 17.  The reference seems to be both to Cham—the “non-Jewish” son of Noah— and to the uncharacteristic “heat” of Aryeh’s body. 18.  Bialik, Kol Kitvei, 101. 19.  Michael Gluzman, Ha-guf ha-tzioni: leumiyut, migdar u minuyut (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007), 91–93, 182–185; Shachar Pinsker, “Imagining the Beloved: Nation and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century Hebrew Literature,” Gender and History 20, no. 1 (April 2008): 105–110. A special case is the “earthy Jew” in several of Berdichevsky’s stories. See for example the story Para aduma (“The Red Heifer,” 1908) in Berdichevsky, Kitvei M. Y. Berdichevsky: Sipurim (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1960), 181–184. 20.  Shimon Halkin, Mavo la-Sifrut ha-Ivrit (Jerusalem: Mifal ha-Shikhpul, 1958), 339–371. For a useful synopsis of Halkin’s categories and a typology of the different tlushim, see Nurit Govrin, Telishut ve-Hithadshut: Ha-Siporet ha’Ivrit ­ba-Golah u-ve-Eretz Yisra’el be-Reishit ha-Mei’ah ha-20 (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1985), 20–30. See also Avner Holtzman, Ha-Sipur Ha-Ivrit be-Reshit ­Ha-me’ah Ha-esrim (Tel Aviv: Ha-Universitah ha-petuhah, 1993), 79–91. 21.  Y. D. Berkowitz, “Talush,” in his Sipurim (Cracow: Yosef Fisher, 1909), 1–18. 22.  Y. H. Brenner, “Me-hirhurey sofer,” in Revivim (Lvov, 1908), republished in Ktavim, 3:272–276. 23.  Brenner, “Me-hirhurey sofer,” 281. 24.  Halkin, Mavo la-Sifrut, 379–407. 25.  Gershon Shaked, Ha-siporet ha-ivrit 1880–1980, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz

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Notes to Pages 171–178 Hameuchad and Keter, 1977), 362–364; Yitzhak Bakon, Ha-tz’air ha-boded ba-siftut ha-ivrit (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1978); Govrin, Telishut ve-Hithadshut. 26.  Dan Miron, Bodedim be-moadam (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987), 225–260; Alan Mintz, Banished from Their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 94. 27.  Berdichevsky, Kitvei M. Y. Berdichevsky, 36. 28.  Dan Miron, Bo’a Layla: Iyunim be-ytzirot Ch. N. Bialik ve M. Y. Berdichevsky (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1987), 193–203. 29.  Berdichevsky, Kitvei M. Y. Berdichevsky, 23. 30.  Miron, Bo’a Layla, 193–222; Mintz, Banished from Their Father’s Table, 92. 31.  Dov Sadan pointed out this problem already in 1961. In an article on Brenner’s criticism he wrote: “Talush and tlishut [...] not only that the concept requires some questioning but from the very beginning it might be no more than a plot.” Dov Sadan, “Al Brenner u-mevakrav,” Molad 156 (1961): 291. 32.  Ba-choref was originally published in Ha-shiloah, vols. 11–12 (1903). It was republished in Brenner, Ktavim, 1:95–259. Subsequent references are to this edition. 33.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:210 34.  Ibid., 122. 35.  For example, when the narrator describes his first meeting with Rahil as nothing, as Urva parach—“A raven flies.” See Miron, Bodedim, 245; Mintz, Banished from Their Father’s Table, 177–178. 36.  Dov Sadan, Midrash psychoanality: Prakim ba-psichologya shel Y. H. Brenner (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 1996), 81–85; Miron, Bodedim, 245–247. 37.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:208. 38.  Ibid., 209. 39.  Baruch Kurzweil, Ben Chazon le-ven ha-absrudi (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1973), 274. 40.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:235. 41.  Ibid., 236. 42.  Mintz, Banished from Their Father’s Table, 188. 43.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:237. 44.  On the term “homosocial desire” and its centrality in modernist Hebrew fiction, see the following discussion in Chapter 9. 45.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:249 46.  These connections to Germany, Nietzsche, and Borsif (and perhaps also to Berdichevsky, who lived in Germany and sported a Nietzschean moustache as well), through the synecdoche of the “masculine moustache,” reveals how closely linked the masculine crisis that Yirmiah experiences is to changing notions of gender and sexuality in Europe, in which Nietzsche is a chief influence. See Bernheimer’s discussion of Nietzsche’s “decadent philosophy” in Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 7–28. 47.  See Sadan, Midrash psychoanality, 80–90; Miron, Bodedim, 239–240; Mintz,

Notes to Pages 179–185 Banished from Their Father’s Table, 194–195. Dana Olmert has recently suggested an intriguing reading of the dream scene. She claims that Yirmiah’s attraction to Rahil is in fact a mere “cover” for his repressed homoerotic desire which is directed at Borsif, as well as other male characters (Haymovitz, Davidovsky). She interprets the dream scene, as well as the scene in which Yirmiah spits at Borsif, as ways to express unconscious, deeply repressed homosexual desire. Dana Olmert, “Miniut u merchav be ba-choref le Y. Ch. Brenner,” in Hannan Hever, ed., Rega shel Huledet: mechkarin be-sifrut ivrit ve yidish lichvod Dan Miron (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2007), 387–401. 48.  The novella was serialized in the journal Ha-poel ha-tza’ir between March and July of 1911. It was reprinted in L. A. Arieli, Sippurim, mahazot, hagadot, maamarim, igrot, ed. Michael Arfa, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1999), 3–70. 49.  On Arieli’s life and work, see Gershon Shaked, “Ha-te‘om sheyarad,” Siman Kri’a 5 (1976): 492–532; Gila Ramras Rauch, L. A. Arieli: Chayav ve-yetzirato (Tel Aviv: Papyrus, 1992). 50.  Arieli, Sippurim, mahazot, hagadot, 9. 51.  Ibid. 52.  Ibid., 5–6. 53.  Ibid., 17–18. 54.  Ibid., 19–20. 55.  Ibid., 19. 56.  Ibid., 20–21. 57.  On the dandy or “feminized male” and its role in modernism see Rita ­Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 91–114. There are many similarities between the ways in which Arieli depicts Perlgold in the novella and how Gnessin represents Uriel and Efraim, the protagonists of his two last novellas, Be-terem and Etzel. See a discussion of these novellas in Chapters 10, 11, and 15. 58.  Arieli, Sippurim, mahazot, hagadot, 21. 59.  Ibid., 62. 60.  Ibid., 54. 61.  The fact that Arieli explicitly cites the work of the Jewish-Italian Cesare Lombroso on psychosexual pathology and on Jewishness and antisemitism is the best evidence of how self-conscious Arieli was on these issues. On the importance of Lombroso, see Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 56–57, 221. On Lombroso in the context of Russian culture, see Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin de Siecle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 128–165.

Notes to Chapter 9 1.  No Hebrew story from this period describes explicit homosexuality. There are a number of stories and novellas—like Gershon Shofman’s Yona (1903) and L. A. Arieli’s Yeshimon (“Wasteland,” 1920)—that involve homoerotic relations in

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Notes to Pages 185–188 more or less explicit terms. But these texts are exceptional compared with the far more prevalent theme of homosocial desire and erotic triangulations. For a discussion of the question of homoeroticism with a different approach than mine, see Yaron Peleg, “Heroic Conduct: Homoeroticism and the Creation of Modern Jewish Masculinities,” Jewish Social Studies 13, no. 1 (2006): 31–58. See also Philip Hollander, “The Role of Homosociality in Palestinian Hebrew Literature: A Case Study of Levi Aryeh Arieli’s Yeshimon,” Prooftexts 29, no. 2 (2009): 273–304. 2.  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 3.  René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 2–26. 4.  Sedgwick, Between Men, 1–5. 5.  While Girard’s analysis is clearly ahistorical, and Sedgwick focuses mainly on British fiction from the nineteenth century, their theoretical frameworks (especially Sedgwick’s) have proven particularly useful in explorations of sexuality and the shaping of modernist fiction. This is evident in works such as Allen Boone’s study of English and American modernism, and more recently in Olga Matich’s discussion of gender and sexuality in Russian early modernism in the fin de siècle. See Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2005), 23, 108. 6.  Brenner, Gnessin, Shofman, and Shteinberg mention Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata frequently in their critical writings and their letters, as well as more implicitly in their fictional writing. See for example Brenner’s essay on Tolstoy from 1911 and Gnessin’s references to Tolstoy’s novella in Be-terem (1909–1910). It is not inconceivable that the novella made some impact even on David Fogel when he wrote his novel Chaye nisu’im (“Married Life”). 7.  Matich, Erotic Utopia, 27–56. 8.  Lev Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, trans. David McDuff (London: Penguin Classics, 1985) , 80. 9.  Matich, Erotic Utopia. 10.  During Gnessin’s lifetime a number of critics and readers noted, often disapprovingly, the “deviant” or “perverse” sexuality in Gnessin’s writings (see Lily Ratok, ed., U. N. Gnessin: Mivchar ma’amarey bikoret al yetzirato [Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1977], 7–22). After his death there was a tendency to ignore these sexual aspects and assimilate them into a rather sentimental view of Gnessin as “the poet of sunset.” The first critic who attempted a systematic analysis of sexuality in Gnessin’s texts (using Freudian terminology) was Zvi Rudi. See the highly suggestive essay, Zvi Rudi, “Ha-erotica bi yetzirato shel U. N. Gnessin,” Ein ha-kore 2–3 (1923): 81–88. Later, scholars such as Baruch Kurzeweil, Adi Zemach, and Dan Miron have called attention to gender and sexuality in their discussions of several of Gnessin’s texts. 11.  Uri Nissan Gnessin, Tzilelei ha-chayim (Warsaw: Tushiya, 1904).

Notes to Pages 188–193 12.  Uri Nissan Gnessin, “Jenya,” reprinted in Uri Nissan Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, ed. Dan Miron and Israel Zmora, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1982), 1:7–46. 13.  The story depicts the various movements—political Zionism, cultural Zionism, and Socialism—and the debates and differences among them, as well as the gaps between the new middle class of Jewish merchants and Hebrew teachers and activists. For a discussion of this story see Dan Miron, Chachim be-apo shel ha-netzach (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1997), 41–52; “Shachar Pinsker, “Imagining the Beloved: Gender and Nation Building in Early Twentieth-Century Hebrew Literature,” Gender & History 20, no. 1 (2008): 115–118. 14.  George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), 66–89. 15.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:7. 16.  Ibid. 17.  Ibid., 1:9. 18.  Ibid., 1:26. 19.  Ibid., 1:27 20.  Ibid., 1:30. 21.  Ibid., 1:37. 22.  The Hebrew story was published in the fourth volume of the journal ­Sifrut, edited by David Frishman and Pinchas Lachover in Warsaw. The Yiddish version was published shortly after Gnessin’s death in the journal Di Yudishe Velt (vol. 1, no. 4), edited by Dovid Bergelson and Shmuel Niger in Vilna. It is unclear whether the Hebrew or the Yiddish version of the story was written first. While Yitzhak Bakon claims that the Yiddish text was written first, Dan Miron suggests the Yiddish text is Gnessin’s later translation from the original Hebrew text. See Yitzhak Bakon, Gnessin ve-Brenner ke-sofrim du leshoniyim (Beer-Sheva: Ben-­Gurion University Press, 1986), 47–48; and Miron, Chachim, 304. 23.  Hamutal Bar-Yosef points out that Ba-ganim might have been influenced by Leonid Andreyev’s story Bezdna (“The Abyss,” 1902), which is one of the texts that enjoyed a succès de scandale. Bezdna presents a pair of teenagers walking together in the evening into the forest, talking about romantic love. As the sun is setting, they meet a couple of whores and then a group of hooligans who attack the teenage girl, rape her in front of the boy, and leave. The shocked boy approaches the unconscious girl and—for the first time—makes love to her unconscious body. Gnessin’s adaptation of “The Abyss” functions through a similar juxtaposition of rural scenery and human sexuality, and yet it has a particularly shocking effect because the protagonist observes not a Ukrainian peasant but a Jew having violent incestuous sex with his daughter. See Hamutal Bar-Yosef, “The Reception of Leonid Andreyev in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 58, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 139–151. 24.  My discussion of the story follows, in several points, previous readings by Miron, Bakon, and Ada Tzemach. I am especially indebted to Ada Tzemach’s

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Notes to Pages 193–199 reading. See Ada Tzemach, “Acharey ‘be-terem’: Kri’a be-’baganim’ le-U.N. Gnessin,” Mikan 6 (2005): 34–65. 25.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:346. See also the English translation of the story by David Segal in Uri Nissan Gnessin, Besides and Other Stories (New Milford: Toby Press, 2005), 68. 26.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:346; Gnessin, Besides and Other Stories, 68 (hereafter cited as “English version”). 27.  Ibid., 350; English version, 69. 28.  The exaggerated masculinity of Big Nose is emphasized in Miron, Chachim, 323–330. 29.  Compare this with the desperation of the lover-cum-rival in Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata. 30.  See Adi Tzemach, “Efraim chozer la-ganim,” in Dan Miron and Dan Laor, eds., Uri Nissan Gnessin: Mechkarim v-te-udot (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1986), 105–126. 31.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav 1:350–352. English version, 69–70. 32.  Ibid., 1:352. English version, 72. 33.  Ibid., 1:360. English version, 72. 34.  Ibid.; English version, 73. 35.  Ibid., 1:376; English version, 76. 36.  As Dan Miron claims, this sharply drawn ending can be read as a strong critical response to the budding cult of the robust healthy new Jew who is (unlike the stereotypical exilic Jew) connected to nature and to his virility, and against new philosophies of “vitalism.” See Miron, Chachim, 333–334. 37.  Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 127. 38.  Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 163. 39.  Robert Con Davis, “Lacan, Poe, and Narrative Repression,” MLN 98, no. 5 (1983): 983–1005. 40.  Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 46. 41.  As is clear in discussions of voyeurism from Freud onward, the voyeur’s gaze is not only an assertion of power and privilege, but an acknowledgment of anxiety as well. 42.  The story was originally published in Shalechet (1911), 149–160; reprinted in Gershon Shofman, Kol Kitvei Gershon Shofman (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 1960), 1:216–231. 43.  Brenner: “‘Love’ is a short and sharp sketch, penetrating and wonderful in each word, its illustrations are like arrows that one shoots.” Yosef Chaim Brenner, Ktavim, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1978–1985), 3:520. Frishman, known as a harsh critic, is quoted as telling Shofman (when he met

Notes to Pages 199–204 him in Vienna in 1913) that Ahava was one of the best literary pieces he had ever read. Shofman himself was very proud of this story, and in a letter to Brenner he wrote: “I am busy now with writing something that is going to be not bad and not small with the title ‘Love.’” Quoted in Bakon, Bein ha-shurot (Tel Aviv: Papyrus, 1981), 144–145. 44.  Nurit Govrin claims that Shofman intended to call the story Ha-re’im, a title which means “friends” but also “lovers.” 45.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 1:216. 46.  Ibid., 1:217. 47.  Both Yitzhak Bakon and Nurit Govrin see the story “Love” as a fictional representation of the relations between Brenner and Shofman themselves. The two writers, who knew each other just through letters until this point, lived together in Lvov during the year 1908. According to Govrin, both of them fell in love in Lvov with the same girl, Esterke Lempert. While the approach of Govrin and ­Bakon tends to reduce the story to personal anecdote, the possibility that the literary text is related to Brenner’s and Shofman’s lives is surely intriguing. See Yitzhak Bakon, Bein ha-shurot, 141–165; Govrin, Me-ofek el ofek, 540–544. 48.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 1:219. 49.  Ibid., 1:221. 50.  Apart from being a metonymic object of desire, the sofa might be also a reference to Tolstoy’s famous lounge, which became an ambivalent symbol of potency and progeny, but also of sexual desire. See the discussion in Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia. 51.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 1:223. 52.  Ibid., 224. 53.  Brenner, who also expressed the same dynamics but in many more words, was the first to notice this intensity when he commented that “Love” is full of “sketches that are like sharp arrows.” Brenner, Ktavim, 3:520. 54.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 1: 25. 55.  Ibid., 1:230–231. 56.  The possibility of homoeroticism as an important element in the relations between Brenner and Gnessin (and to some extent Shofman) was suggested recently by critics such as Ariel Hirschfeld, Haim Be’er, and Dana Olmert. See Ariel Hirschfeld, “Dyokan atzmi,” Helikon 5 (1992): 30–54; Chaim Be’er, Gam ahavatam gam Sina’tam, 106–107; Dana Olmert, “Miniut u merchav be ba-choref le Y. Ch. Brenner,” in Hannan Hever, ed., Rega shel Huledet: mechkarin be-sifrut ivrit ve yidish lichvod Dan Miron (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2007), 44–55. 57.  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology in the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 187. 58.  See the discussion of Daniel Boyarin in Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 33–80; Naomi Seidman, “The Ghost of Queer Loves Past: Ansky’s Dybbuk and the Sexual Transformation of Ashkenaz,” in Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 228–245.

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Notes to Pages 205–208

Notes to Chapter 10 1.  Alan Mintz, Banished from Their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 203–206; Marcus Moseley, Being For Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 13–35. 2.  See Gershon Shaked, Le-lo Motza (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1973), 66–79; Dan Miron, Chachim be-apo shel ha-netzach (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1997), 127–139; Menachem Brinker, Ad ha-simta ha-tveryanit (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990), 29–64. 3.  John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury, “The Introverted Novel,” in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism 1890–1930 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 404. 4.  See Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, eds., Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1–23; Dimitri Segal, “Russian and Hebrew Literature in Cross Mirrors,” in Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Yaakov Ro’i (Tel Aviv: Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1995), 237-247; Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Culture between Renaissance and Decadence,” Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 1 (2001): 153–198. 5.  Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Maga‘im shel dekadens (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1997); Kenneth Moss, “Jewish Culture between Renaissance and Decadence: Di Literarishe Monatsshriften and Its Critical Reception,” Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 1 (2001): 153–198. 6.  Uri Nissan Gnessin, Ha-tzida, Ha-zeman (Vilna, 1905). Reprinted in U. N. Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, ed. Dan Miron and Israel Zmora, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1982), 135–174. For an English translation by Hillel Halkin see Gnessin, Besides and Other Stories (New Milford: Toby Press, 2005), 1–30. Since I am trying to stay as close as possible to Gnessin’s Hebrew style, I have amended Halkin’s translation. 7.  See the critical essays collected in Lily Ratock, U. N. Gnessin: Mivchar ma’amarey bikoret al yetzirato (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1977). 8.  Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 99–142; Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 58–66. 9.  Within the fictional world of the novella, Hagzar does not produce poetry or fiction, but works of Hebrew literary criticism. The fact that Hagzar is not writing belles-lettres is significant, although we have to remember that in the Jewish literary system of the time period, being a sofer (a writer and part of a literary community) was something that was shared by writers of fiction, poetry, and criticism alike. 10.  Dan Miron, “Mihamuah ve-hitvadut be Ha-tzida” (1963), reprinted in

Notes to Pages 209–219 Miron, Chachim, 140–161; Ada Tzemach, Ba-‘emtza: kri’a bi-shnei sipurim she U. N. Gnessin (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2000), 13–38. 11.  Yosef Chaim Brenner, Ktavim, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1978–1985), 1:136. 12.  See Part I for my discussion of cities as literary centers and enclaves of Hebrew modernism. 13.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:135. 14.  Ibid., 1:141. 15.  Tzemach, Ba-‘emtza, 20–25. 16.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:138, my emphasis. 17.  Miron, Chachim, 153. 18.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:152. 19.  Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7 (London: Hogarth, 1901–1905), 123–246. 20.  Discussions of autoeroticism and its relation to narcissism, phantasm, and the acts of writing and self-fashioning are abundant both before and after Freud. See for example Havelock Ellis (who is credited with the invention of the term “autoerotism”), Solovyov’s discussion of self-love in The Meaning of Love, or Melanie Klein’s theory of narcissism. See the discussion of Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 51–80. 21.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:150. 22.  Ibid. 23.  Ibid., 137. 24.  Ibid., 144. 25.  Ibid., 151. 26.  Miron, Chachim, 145–160. 27.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 162. 28.  Smolenskin, like many Hebrew and Yiddish writers from the nineteenth century until today, wrote in the genre known in Russian (and consequently in Hebrew and Yiddish) as “publisistica” or “publicistic” writing. On Smolenskin and the way his iconic image is used see Miron, Chachim, 149. 29.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 162. 30.  In this, and in other things, Hagzar is quite similar to Yirmiah in Brenner’s Ba-choref, and there are many similarities in the endings of the two narratives. 31.  See my discussion of this novel in the context of the urban experience of Homel in Part I. 32.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:449. 33.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:417. 34.  Dov Sadan, Midrash psychoanality: Prakim ba-psichologya shel Y. H. Brenner (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 1996), 26. 35.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:419–420. 36.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:408, my emphasis.

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Notes to Pages 220–228 37.  Ibid., 462. 38.  Sadan, Midrash psychoanality, 123. 39.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1: 518. 40.  Olga Matich, “The Symbolist Meaning of Love: Theory and Practice,” in Paperno and Grossman, Creating Life, 24–50. 41.  Edith W. Clowes, “The Limits of Discourse: Solov’ev’s Language of Syzygy and the Project of Thinking Total-Unity,” Slavic Review 55, no. 3 (1996): 552–566. 42.  See Brenner, Ktavim, 3:648. On the reception of Solovyov in Jewish literature and thought and his own interest in Judaism and Kabbalah, see Hamutal BarYosef, “The Jewish Reception of Vladimir Solovyov,” in William Peter van den Bercken, Manon de Courten, and Evert van der Zweerde, eds., Vladimir Solov’ev: Reconciler and Polemicist (Leuven: Peetres, 2000), 363–392. 43.  Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 81–88. 44.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:462, my emphasis. 45.  Ibid., 501. 46.  Ibid., 463. 47.  Ibid., 498. 48.  Ibid., 403. 49.  Sadan, Midrash psychoanality, 60–66. 50.  For a wide-ranging exploration of the figurative symbolist strata in the novel see Ariel Hirschfeld, “Acharit davar,” in Yosef Chaim Brenner, Bachoref ve Mi-saviv la-nekuda (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1988), 316–343. 51.  Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in Standard Edition, 7:371. 52.  Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” in Standard Edition, 11:131. 53.  Bersani, The Freudian Body, 49. 54.  For an exploration of this theme within Agnon’s career see Nitza Ben-Dov, Agnon’s Art of Indirection (Leiden: Brill, 1993). 55.  Tishrei was first published in the journal Ha-poel ha-tza’ir 5, nos. 1–5 (1911). Agnon did not include this story in his Collected Works. A new and different version of the story with the title Givat ha-chol was published as a separate book in Berlin. Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Givat ha-chol (Berlin: Judischer Verlag, 1919); it was then included (with minor changes) in Kol Sipurav shel S. Y. Agnon, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1972), 251–289. 56.  For a detailed analysis of the different versions, see Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare: A Study in the Fiction of Sh. Y. Agnon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 67–70, 113–115; Yehudit Ha-levi Zweick, Agnon be-ma’agalotav (Tel Aviv: Papyrus and Tel Aviv University, 1989), 45–69. 57.  Several early modernist writers like Jens-Peter Jacobsen, Mikhail Artsybashev (the author of the erotic novel Sanin), and Henrik Ibsen are mentioned in Tishrei. Other writers and texts are not explicitly mentioned by name, but it is clear

Notes to Pages 228–232 that Agnon knew their writing and was influenced by them. On the connections between early Agnon and these writers see Dov Sadan, Al Shay Agnon (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1978), 15, 50. 58.  On the preoccupation with hereditary disease in literature and culture of the fin de siècle and its relations with changing modes of sexuality, see Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Matich, Erotic Utopia, 109–119. 59.  All quotations are from the original version of Tishrei that was reprinted in Gazit 33, nos. 9–12 (1977): 87–99. 60.  The story was discussed and interpreted by many of Agnon’s critics and scholars. The most relevant for my purposes are Gershon Shaked, “Ben ha-melech ha-nirdam,” in Omanut ha-sipur shel Agnon (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1976), 151– 167; and the more recent study by Michal Arbel, Katuv al ‘oro shel ha-kelev: al tefisat ha-yetzirah etzel Shai Agnon (Jerusalem: Keter, 2006), 172–198. 61.  Agnon, Tishrei, 93. 62.  See Arbel, Katuv al ‘oro, 175. 63.  Ben-Dov, Agnon’s Art of Indirection. 64.  Agnon, Tishrei, 88. 65.  Ibid., 89. 66.  Auguste Forel (1848–1939) was an eminent Swiss psychiatrist and sexologist. His book Die sexuelle Frage (The Sexual Question, 1905) was his best-known contemporary work and was published in many languages. It appeared when Freud’s writings were just beginning to be widely circulated. Historically, Forel’s work was one of the first to provide a comprehensive treatment of human sexual life from biological and sociological perspectives. It not only reached enormous sales in many languages but also became the target of many attacks, especially from religious circles. In 1908, Forel also appeared as a contributor to the first Journal of Sexology (Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft), which was edited by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin. See Angus McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 93–114. 67.  Agnon, Tishrei, 89. 68.  See the extended attention given by Freud to fetishes that are focused on the foot or shoe: “For that reason it became attached to a fetish in the form of a foot or shoe, the female genitals (in accordance with the expectations of childhood) being imagined as male ones.” Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in Standard Edition, vol. 7. 69.  On melancholy as a “feminine” and “Jewish” mental disease, see Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 150–191. 70.  Agnon, Tishrei, 89. 71.  Castration anxiety and masochistic fantasies are a major part of Freud’s sexual psychoanalysis theory. However, as Charles Bernheimer notes, much of the imagery about castration is pre-Freudian. “The priority attributed to castration within psychoanalysis has much the same function as the priority attributed to art within decadent aesthetics.” Charles Bernheimer, “Fetishism and Decadence,” 62.

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Notes to Pages 233–240 72.  The term aylonit (or ilonit) is a designation for an androgynous, “masculine woman” in numerous places in the Mishnah and Talmuds. See Sarra Lev, “How the ‘Aylonit’ Got Her Sex,” AJS Review 31 (2007): 297–316. 73.  Agnon, Tishrei, 90. 74.  Ibid., 88. 75.  For a discussion of the ways in which Agnon uses Rembrandt’s painting, see Avner Holtzman, Melechet machshevet: Tchiyat ha-u’ma (Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan and Haifa University Press, 1999), 168. 76.  Agnon, Tishrei, 97. 77.  Ibid. 78.  Arbel, Katuv al oro, 195–198. 79.  Agnon, Tishrei, 91.

Notes to Chapter 11 1.  Michelle Perrot, “The New Eve and the Old Adam: Changes in French Women’s Condition at the Turn of the Century,” in Margaret Higgonet et al., eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 51. 2.  The term “New Woman” was introduced only in 1894, but as Ellen Jordan claims, “the birth of the New Woman predated her christening by a good many years.” Ellen Jordan, “The Christening of the New Woman: May 1894,” Victorian Newsletter 63 (1983): 19–21. 3.  Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 1–29. 4.  Quoted in Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-desiècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 20–21. 5.  Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), 40–41. 6.  Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 3. 7.  Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin de Siecle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 335. 8.  See Bram Djikstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 212–213. 9.  J. Edward Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman, Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 10.  Georg Simmel, On Women, Sexuality and Love (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 11.  Klaus Lichtblau, “Eros and Culture: Gender Theory in Simmel, Tonnies and Weber,” Telos 82 (Winter 1989–1990): 98–106. 12.  Felski, Gender of Modernity, 45. 13.  Ibid., 47.

Notes to Pages 240–248 14.  Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 19–33. 15.  Paula E. Hyman, “Two Models of Modernization: Jewish Women in the German and the Russian Empires,” in Jonathan Frankel, ed., Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Hierarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 44–50. 16.  Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004), 57–71. 17.  Hyman, Two Models, 47–48. 18.  Menachem Mendl Paytelson, “Ha-isha ha-mishtacherert be-sifrutenu” (“The Emancipating Woman in Our Literature”), Ha-zeman 3, nos. 7–9 (1905): 181–188. 19.  Ibid., 181. 20.  Ibid., 186. See also the recent discussion on the “New Woman” and Paytelson’s essay in Yael Shenker, “Ha-tlushot min ha-sifrut: al mikumin shel nashim be-sifrut ha-tlushim,” in Hannan Hever, ed., Rega shel Huledet (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2007), 403. 21.  Bar-Tuvia (the pseudonym of Shraga Feybush Frenkel), “Ha-minim,” Hame‘orer 1, no. 12 (December 1906): 20–21. 22.  Ibid., 21. 23.  On women as modernism’s “other,” see Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Woman as Modernism’s Other,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–62. 24.  On this issue see Wendy Zierler, And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women’s Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Pinsker, “Imagining the Beloved.” 25.  Yosef Chaim Brenner, Ktavim, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1978–1985), 1:121. 26.  Ibid., 122 27.  Ibid. 28.  Ibid., 123. 29.  Ibid., 122. 30.  U. N. Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, ed. Dan Miron and Israel Zmora, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1982), 9. 31.  Ibid., 1, 10. 32.  Pinsker, Imagining the Beloved, 115–120. 33.  On the parallels between Be-terem and Homer’s Odyssey, and on Uriel Efros as a modern Odysseus, see Dan Miron, Chachim be-apo shel ha-netzach (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1997), 444–446. 34.  Gnessin, Kol-Ktavav, 1:300. 35.  Ibid., 219. 36.  Miron, Chachim, 204–206; Ada Tzemach, Ba-‘emtza: kri’a bi-shnei sipurim she U. N. Gnessin (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2000), 103–111, 130–133. 37.  Gnessin, Kol-Ktavav, 1:279–280.

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Notes to Pages 249–256 38.  Ibid., 281. 39.  The link of woman to primal nature has one of its many expressions in the phrase, “Woman is natural, that is, abominable,” as Baudelaire famously noted in his Mon cœur mis à nu (1864). 40.  Uri Nissan Gnessin, Etzel, in Netivot (Berlin, 1913). The novella was reprinted in U. N. Gnessin, Kol Kitvei, 1:379–485. All references are to the text of this edition. 41.  For a discussion of the three women characters in the novella, see Ruth Shenfeld, “Ha-nashim ha-lalu: Dmuyot ha-nashim be-etzel,” in Dan Miron and Dan Laor, eds., Uri Nissan Gnessin: Mechkarim v-te-udot (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1986), 153–172; Miron, Chachim, 241–253. 42.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:414. 43.  For a comprehensive overview of these conceptions, see Bram Djikstra, Idols of Perversity; Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 44.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:414. 45.  Miron, Chachim, 278. 46.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:430. 47.  See a translation of the original Russian poem by H. Binyomin, “Tzili shel Gnessin,” Siman Kri’a 12–13 (1981): 240–243. See also Dropkin’s memoirs of Gnessin in Laor and Miron, U. N. Gnessin, 398–424. 48.  For a full discussion of this complex act of appropriation, see Miron, Chachim, 587–600. See also Janet Hadda, “The Eyes Have It: Celia Dropkin’s Love Poetry,” in Naomi Sokoloff, Anne Lapidus Lerner, and Anita Norich, eds., Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 93–112. 49.  Mikhail Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 164–200. 50.  There are also a handful of novels, like A. A. Kabak’s Levada (“Alone,” 1905), and Miriam, the novel that M. Y. Berdichevsky planned to write in 1905 but published in a radically different form only in 1921. 51.  On the connections between Bergelson and Gnessin, see Avraham Noversh­ tern, “Ha-zar ha-karov: Gnessin ve yetzirato be-aspaklarya shel ‘Noch Alemen’ le Dovid Bregleson,” in Laor and Miron, eds., U. N. Gnessin (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1986), 371–397. 52.  Because the Hebrew and Yiddish versions appeared almost simultaneously, it is virtually impossible (and quite irrelevant) to determine in which language they were first written. The stories were serialized in the Hebrew journal Hed ­ha-zman during 1907. In Yiddish, the titles of the stories are different: one is called Di kursiste (“The Student”) and the other Shveyg shvester (“Be Silent, Sister”). All quotes are from the Hebrew edition of Nomberg’s stories, H. D. Nomberg, ­Ktavim (Warsaw: Tushiya, 1911). 53.  Nomberg, Ktavim, 17. 54.  Ibid., 37.

Notes to Pages 257–262 55.  Ibid., 44. 56.  See Janet Hadda, Passionate Women, Passive Men (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 23–27, 135–149; Yitzhak Bakon, Ha-tzair ha-boded ba-siftut ha-ivrit (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1978), 233–255. 57.  This impossible predicament can be seen even more sharply in the short story Ha-charishi (“Be Silent”). The main protagonist of this story is Felye Feinstein, another New Jewish Woman who lives in the city of Warsaw and ends up committing suicide. 58.  “Bashtanim” was published in Der Fraynd between September and October of 1913. It was republished in a separate book (Berlin: Klal Farlag, 1922). The Hebrew version of the story was in the journal Ha-poel ha-tzair 7, nos. 33–36 (1914); it was republished in Berlin in a collection of Shteinberg’s Hebrew stories (1923). There are significant differences between the Yiddish and the Hebrew versions of the story. For a discussion of some of these differences, see Aharon Komem, “Yezirato ha-sipurit be-yiddish shel Ya‘acov Shteinberg,” in Ya‘acov Shteinberg, Gezamelte Dertzeylungen (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 1986), 37–45. 59.  Jewish agricultural colonies in the Russian Empire were first established in the Kherson district in 1806. A proclamation from December 1804 allowed Jews for the first time in the Russian Empire to purchase land for farming settlements, and agricultural settlements in this remote area in Ukraine were continually in existence until their destruction during the Civil War of 1917–1921. The inhabitants of the agricultural colonies in Kherson were chiefly of Russian descent, including Cossacks, but there was a considerable mixture of Moldavians, Wallachians, Tartars, Armenians, and Jews. See Israel Bartal, “Farming the Land on Three Continents: Bilu, Am Oylom, and Yefe-Nahar,” Jewish History 21, nos. 3–4 (2007): 249–261. 60.  See Efrat Bloom, “Behind the Fence: The Gendered Spaces of Hebrew Modernism,” unpublished paper, University of Michigan, 2007, 19–27. 61.  Ya‘acov Shteinberg, Kol Kitvei Ya‘acov Shteinberg (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1959), 111–112. 62.  The Hebrew word avrech, which is found only once in the Bible to describe Joseph, means literally “tender father.” In Ashkenazi traditional culture it became a title for a young unmarried man who studies full time in the yeshiva. 63.  The danger of gentile men is figured by their eagerness for the juicy watermelons; see page Shteinbeg, Kol Kitvei, 111. 64.  See Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction, 190–200. 65.  The two friends share not only feminine desire but also language; they converse half in Yiddish and half in a local language. Shteinbeg, Kol Kitvei, 113. 66.  It is not entirely clear if Efraim is sick or makes himself sick in order to escape serving in the Russian army. In any case, in his illness Feige feeds Efraim, fixes his bed, carries him and in general acts like his mother. Shteinberg, Kol Kitvei, (120). 67.  Ibid., 121. 68.  Bloom, “Behind the Fence,” 26. 69.  Shteinberg, Kol Kitvei, 122.

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Notes to Pages 263–271 70.  Shachar Pinsker, “Unraveling the Yarn: Intertextuality, Gender and Cultural Critique in the Stories of Dvora Baron,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender 11 (2006): 249–279; Sheila Jelen and Shachar Pinsker, eds., Hebrew, Gender, and Modernity: Critical Responses to Dvora Baron (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2007). See also Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 67–101; and Sheila Jelen, Intimations of Difference: Dvora Baron in the Hebrew Renaissance (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007). 71.  See for example the stories Tiyul Ivri (“A Hebrew Trip,” 1904), and Gilgulim (“Transformation,” 1937), with which I have dealt in my studies of Baron (see n. 71). 72.  The story was originally published in the journal Ma’abarot in 1919. It was reprinted in Baron’s first published collection of stories, Sipurim (1927); however, she decided not to include it in her “canonical” collection Parshiyot. The story was republished in a book with all of Baron’s early writing, Dvora Baron, Parshiyot Mukdamot, ed. Nurit Govrin (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1988), 592–604. All subsequent references are to this edition. 73.  Brenner, Ktavim, 4:1657. See also Yosef Luidor, “Kitzo shel Sender Ziv” (1919), in Parshiyot Mukdamot, 332–335. 74.  For a reading of the story and the entire trilogy see Nurit Govrin, “The Genesis of Dvora Baron,” in Jelen and Pinsker, Hebrew, Gender, and Modernity, 55– 57. A more developed analysis can be found in Jelen, Intimations of Difference, 15–24. My analysis relies on these readings but develops them in slightly different ways. 75.  Baron, Parshiyot Mukdamot, 594, my emphasis. 76.  Ibid., 593. 77.  Ibid., 595. 78.  Ibid., 599. The fact that Rachel becomes the writer of the story is subtly amplified by a meta-literary comment that Baron inserts into the narrative. It is articulated by Sender’s friend, the only “professional” writer in the story, who comments that “if we came to write and describe this thirty-year-old man” who is “infatuated with the shadow of a young and bright woman,” then “they would say that we misrepresent life, that the story is far from being realistic, and will not withstand the demands of criticism.” If nothing else, this sly comment reveals Baron’s awareness of the ways in which the modernist stories of her contemporaries (and her own stories) were in conflict with most of the Hebrew criticism of the day, as well as the conventions of modernist Hebrew fiction. 79.  Jelen, Intimations of Difference, 20–21. 80.  Baron, Parshiyot Mukdamot, 604.

Notes to Part III 1.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004), 76. 2.  “Most of what now passes with us for religion [...] will be replaced by po-

Notes to Pages 271–276 etry.” Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in William E. Buckler, ed., Prose of the Victorian Period (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 502. 3.  See also Theodore Ziolkowski, Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 4.  Peter Krasztev, “Central and Eastern European Symbolist Literature and Its Projects,” in Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, eds., Modernism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 879–889. 5. Recent years have seen a widespread questioning and challenging of the “secularization thesis.” See Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Hent de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Recent studies that reexamine the secularity of modernist European literature include Gregory Erickson, The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For a critique of the secularization thesis in the context of Jewish culture and Zionist discourse, see Raz-Krakotzkin, “A National Colonial Theology: Religion, Orientalism, and the Construction of the Secular in Zionist Discourse,” Tel Aviv Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte (2002): 312–326. 6.  The discussion has been dominated by Baruch Kurzweil’s terms of “continuity or revolution.” Baruch Kurzweil, Sifrutenu ha-chadashah-hemshech o mahpechah (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1959).

Notes to Chapter 12 1.  David Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 2.  Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 13–36; Anita Shapira, “The Bible and Israeli Identity,” AJS Review 28, no. 1 (2004): 11–41. 3.  “Characteristic of both the narodnik schools of thought was their frequent appeal to the Bible, particularly to the Mosaic Code and the Prophets.” Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 555. 4.  Ruth Kartn Blum, Profane Scriptures: Reflections on the Dialogue with the Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1999); Gershon Shaked, “Modern Midrash: The Biblical Canon and Modern Literature,” AJS Review 28, no. 1 (2004): 43–62. 5.  On the turn to folklore see Dan Miron, Bo’a Layla (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1987), 11–21; Adam Rubin, “Hebrew Folklore and the Problem of Exile,” Modern Judaism 25, no. 1 (2005): 78. 6.  See Martina Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal (Chicago: University of Chicago

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Notes to Pages 277–279 Press, 2006); Zachary Braiterman, The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 7.  See the essays in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 8.  See Anne E. Fernald, “Modernism and Tradition,” in Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, eds., Modernism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 157–172. On Russian symbolism and relations with religious themes, mysticism, and the occult, see Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, A Revolution of the Spirit: Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890–1918 (Newtonville, MA: ORP Publications, 1982). On German literature and culture in this period see Roy Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism: German Literature and Society 1880–1918 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 161–197; Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Fin de Siecle Orientalism, the Ostjuden and the Aesthetic of Jewish Self-Affirmation,” in Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 77–132. 9.  A similar impulse is found in figures of the same generation like Martin Buber, who was active mainly in the German-speaking environment, and S. Ansky, who was active in the Russian-speaking sphere. 10.  Dan Miron, Bodedim be mo‘adam (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 1987), 115–150. 11.  Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Maga‘im shel dekadens (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1997), 13–41. 12.  See Yona Fraenkel, Darkei h-aggadah ve ha-midrash (Givataim: Masada, 1991). 13.  Pinchas Lachover, Chaye Bilaik (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1944), 27–34. 14.  Sefer Ha-aggadah was originally published in three parts between 1908 and 1911. Chaim N. Bialik and Yehosua Ch. Ravnitzky, eds., Sefer Ha-aggadah, 3 vols. (Odessa: Moriah, 1908–1911). 15.  See Steven Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha‘am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 49–50. 16.  Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Cultural Zionism’s Image of the Educated Jew: Reflections on Creating a Secular Jewish Culture,” Modern Judaism 18, no. 3 (1998): 227–239; Eliezer Schweid, Hayahadut ve-hatrabut hachilonit (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1981), 55–66. 17.  Mark Kiel, “Sefer Ha-aggadah: Creating a Classic Anthology for the People and by the People,” Prooftexts 17, no. 2 (1997): 177–197. 18.  Adam Rubin, “‘Like a Necklace of Black Pearls Whose String Has Snapped’: Bialik’s ‘Aron ha-sfarim’ and the Sacralization of Zionism,” Prooftexts 28, no. 2 (2008): 157–196. 19.  Ch. N. Bialik, “Ha-sefer Haivri,” in Kol Kitvei Ch. N. Bialik (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1953), 192–201. Twenty years later, Bialik proclaimed: “From the tempests of our life the voice of history cries out: ‘now is the time for kinus! Woe to those who do not hearken to this voice.’” Devarim She-be’al peh, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1935), 230. 20.  Bialik, “Ha-sefer Haivri,” 29. This might be a direct reference to ­Nietzsche’s dictum: “In order to build a temple one must destroy another one.” See Azan

Notes to Pages 279–284 ­ adin, “A Web of Chaos: Bialik and Nietzsche on Language, Truth, and the Death Y of God,” Prooftexts 21, no. 2 (2001): 179–203. 21.  The essay was first published in Ha-shiloah, vol. 10 (1908), and republished in Chaim Nachman Bialik, Kol Kitvei Ch. N. Bialik (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1938), 204–206. 22.  David Stern, “Introduction,” in The Book of Legends (New York: Schocken, 1992), xvii. 23.  Ch. N. Bialik, “Lekinusa shel ha’agadda,” in Kol Kitvei Ch. N. Bialik, 206. 24.  Bialik, Lekinusa shel ha’agadda, 205–206. 25.  Ibid., 204. 26.  Ch. N. Bialik, “Al ha-aggadah,” in Dvarim she-be-al pe, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1935), 43. 27.  Yosef Heineman, “Al darko shel Bialik be’agdat hazal,” Molad 17 (1959): 266–274; E. E. Urbach, “Bialik ve-agadat hazal,” Molad 31 (1974): 82–83; David Stern, “Introduction,” xxi–xxii. 28.  Kiel, “Sefer Ha-aggadah,” 186–188. 29.  The Hebrew translation was in fact not very different from the synthetic nusach of Hebrew fiction that Abramovitz created and which Bialik was emulating in his own prose writing. 30.  Alan Mintz, “Sefer Ha-aggadah: Triumph or Tragedy?” in William Cutter and David C. Jacobson, eds., History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2002), 17–26. 31.  Bialik, Al-Hagaddah, 69. 32.  See Kiel, “Sefer Ha-aggadah”; Mintz, “Sefer Ha-aggadah”; Shachar Pinsker, “Restoration or Break? The Construction of Secular and Religious in Modern Hebrew Literature,” in Zvi Gitelman, ed., Religion or Ethnicity? Jewish Identities in Evolution (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 221–238. 33.  On the debate see Hannan Hever, Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon: Nation Building and Minority Discourse (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 13–18; Michael Gluzman, The Politics of Canonicity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 15–35. 34.  M. Y. Berdichevsky, “Al parahat Drachim,” Ha-shiloah 1 (1896): 154. 35.  Avner Holtzman, El ha-kera she-balev: Micha Yosef Berdichevsky s hnot hatzmicha 1885–1902 (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1996), 59–82. 36.  Holtzman, El ha-kera she-balev, 274–296. 37.  M. Y. Berdichevsky (Imanuel Ben Gurion), Me-otzar Ha-aggadah, 2 vols. (Berlin: Achisefer Verlag, 1913). 38.  M. Y. Berdichevsky, Tzfunit ve-aggadot (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1924). A German translation that was made by Berdichevsky’s wife Rachel Ramberg was published under the title Der Born Judas (“The Well of Judah”) (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1916–1921). 39.  Imanuel Ben Gurion, Kore ha-dorot (Holon: Reshafim, 1981), 28–35. 40.  Dan Ben Amos, “Introduction,” in Mimkor Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), xxix–xxxv.

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Notes to Pages 284–289 41.  Kagan, Homo Anthologicus, 49. 42.  Ibid., 42. 43.  Berdichevsky, Me-otzar Ha-aggadah, xii. 44.  See Clare Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Anne E. Fernald, “Modernism and Tradition.” 45.  Osip Mandelstam, “On the Nature of the Word,” in The Collected Critical Prose and Letters (London: Collins Harvill, 1991), 113. 46.  Kiel, “Sefer Ha-aggadah,” 177–178. Berdichevsky’s collections were less popular in the general public but they made a strong impact on Jewish writers and intellectuals in Germany and elsewhere, and became the foundation for the modern study of folklore. See Kagan, Homo Anthologicus. 47.  The most important are the early poem “To the Aggadah” (1882), “On the Threshold of the House of Study” (1884), and “Before the Bookcase” (1910). For an analysis of these poems see Dan Miron, Bo’a Layla (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1987), 125–190; see also Shachar Pinsker, Restoration or Break? 48.  The poem was first published in the journal Ha-shiloah, vol. 23, no. 2 (1910): 143–146, reprinted in Chaim Nachman Bialik, Shirim, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Dvir and the Katz Institute, 1983), 282–284. English translation by Atar Hadari can be found in Songs from Bialik (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 27–28. 49.  Bialik, Shirim, 283–284. 50.  Miron, Bo’a Layla, 183–185. 51.  For a similar perspective see Alan Mintz, “Sefer Ha-aggadah: Triumph or Tragedy?” 17–26; Rubin, “Like a Necklace.” 52.  Holtzman, El ha-kera, 274–295. 53.  Marcus Moseley, Being For Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 217–219. 54.  See Avner Holtzman, “The Red Heifer,” in Alan Mintz, ed., Reading Hebrew Literature: Critical Discussions of Six Modern Texts (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003), 52–63. 55.  Martin Buber, The Legend of the Baal-Shem, trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). 56.  Jeremy Dauber, Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 67–102. 57.  Eisig Silberschlag, “Interpretations and Reinterpretations of Hasidism in Hebrew Literature,” in Joseph Strelka, ed., Anagogic Qualities of Literature (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), 231–244; David C. Jacobson, “The Recovery of Myth: A Study of Rewritten Hasidic Stories in Hebrew and Yiddish, 1890–1910,” Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 1977, 12–17. 58.  Robert M. Seltzer, “The Secular Appropriation of Hasidism by an East European Jewish Intellectual: Dubnow, Renan, and the Besht,” Polin 1 (1986): 151–162.

Notes to Pages 289–295 59.  Hamutal Bar Yosef, Mistika ba shira ha-ivrit ba-me’a ha-esrim (Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 2008), 48–50. 60.  Silberschlag, Interpretations; Bar Yosef, Mistika, 39–83; Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal, 1–4; Zachary Braiterman, Shape of Revelation. 61.  Holtzman, El ha-kera, 191. 62.  On Berdichevsky’s early stories see Dan Miron, “Reshito shel Berdichevsky ha-mesaper,” in Kivun Orot (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1979), 17–35. 63.  Holtzman, El ha-kera, 191–194. 64.  Another source for Berdichevsky’s changing style and his poetic engagement with hasidic themes and characters was the publication of Hachetz (“The Arrow”) by Peretz in 1894, which includes his first hasidic story. Berdichevksy read and admired Peretz’s neo-hasidic stories, at the same time that he began to experiment with his own adaptations of hasidic stories; see Holtzman, El ha-kera, 195. 65.  Apparently, Berdichevsky first sent the article for publication to Ha-shiloah, but after it was rejected by Ahad Ha‘am, it first appeared in the Berlin periodical Mimzrah umi-ma’arav in 1899 and then in Sefer Hasidim (Warsaw: Tushiya, 1900). 66.  See Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Ha-reshima. 67.  Sefer Hasidism (Warsaw: Tushiya, 1900), 5; reprinted in Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, Ktavim, ed. Avraham Holtzman and Yitzhak Kafkafi, vol. 4 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999). 13. Ellipses are in the original. 68.  Ibid., 11; Ktavim, 4:17. 69.  Sefer Hasidim, 14–15, Ktavim, 4:20. 70.  Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal, 47–52. 71.  Kitvei Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, vol. 4 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999), 20. 72.  Berdichevsky, Sefer Hasidim, 19–20; Ktavim, 24. 73.  Yitzhak Bakon, Ha-tzair ha-boded ba-siftut ha-ivrit (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1978), 29–40. 74.  Holtzman, El ha-kera, 195–196. 75.  Shmuel Werses, “Ha-hasidut be-olamo shel Berdichevsky,” in Sipur ve-shorsho (Ramat Gan: Masada Press, 1971), 114; Holtzman, El ha-kera, 197–199; David Jacobson, Modern Midrash: The Retelling of Traditional Jewish Narratives by Twentieth Century Hebrew Writers (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), 20–29. 76.  The story was published for the first time in Ha-magid (January 1899), reprinted in Berdichevsky, Ktavim, 4:25–28. An English translation was published in Howard Schwartz, Gates to the New City (New York: Avon, 1983), 570–574. 77.  Berdichevsky, Ktavim, 4:25. 78.  Jacobson, Modern Midrash, 26–28. 79.  In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem Tov, 15–18, 31–32. On the name “Adam” and the sources of the story see Gershom Scholem, “Ha-navi ha-shabtayi R. heshel zore: R.  Adam Ba‘al shem,” in Yehuda Libes, ed., Mechkerei shabtaut (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991), 579–599; and Khone Shmeruk, “The Stories about R. Adam Baal

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Notes to Pages 296–301 Shem and Their Formulations in the Versions of the Book Shivchei ha-besht,” Zion 28 (1963): 86–105. 80.  Berdichevsky, Ktavim, 4:29. 81.  Shmuel Werses,Sipur ve-shorsho, 104–118; Werses, “Ha-hasidut be-olamo shel Berdichevsky le’or chibuto she-nignaz,” in Avner Holtzman, ed., Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, Mechkarim ve-te’udot (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2002), 215–258. 82.  Werses, Sipur ve-shorsho, 251–258. 83.  Me-otzar Ha-aggadah, xvi. 84.  M. Y. Berdichevsky, Kol Mamarey M. Y. Berdichevsky (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1952), 375. 85.  Moseley, Being For Myself Alone, 241–244. 86.  Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, 114–115. 87.  Quoted in Marvin Zuckerman and Marion Herbst, eds., Selected works of Y. L. Peretz (Malibu: Joseph Simon Press, 1996), 485. 88.  See Shofman about Peretz in Warsaw in Gershon Shofman, Kol Kitvei Shofman (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1960), 4:159–161. Brenner wrote about Peretz: “In the treasure of our literature there are already great and excellent writers. There is Y. L. Peretz, who is simultaneously a sharp realist and an outstanding romantic. He is a realist, precisely because he is not picking on the small details, but elevates entire aspects of life in small and wonderful pictures. He is the kind of romantic that doesn’t pull us back to the past, but constructs something totally new—creations of the present and the future like ‘the Conversations of R Nachmanke.’ We have Itahak Leibush Peretz who is the poet of ‘the Harp,’ ‘the Tunes of Time,’ and ‘Hurban Beyt Tzadik.’” Brenner, Ktavim, 3:110. 89.  Shmuel Niger, Y. L. Peretz: Zanyn Leben, zayn firendike (Buenos Aires: Alvetlikher yiddisher kultur kongres, 1952), 265–297; Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem and Peretz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 281–284. 90.  Niger, Y. L. Peretz, 285. 91.  “The sun of Realism has set over world literature, the sun of Materialism [Naturalism] already shines in its wake and the Decadents have unfurled their banners! [...] while for us, far from the battlefield, ‘Realism’ is still a new and stirring motto!” Y. L. Peretz, “Hazekenim ve h-atze’irim Basifrut ha-ivrit,” in HaChetz: Yalkut siruti (Warsaw: Svartzberg, 1894), 14. 92.  Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction, 308; see also Shmuel Werses, “Al Omanut ha-sipur shel Y. L. Peretz,” in Sipur ve-shorsho, 130–131. 93.  Peretz, Ha-Chetz, 35–41; the Yiddish version was published in the journal Der Yod 19 (1902). 94.  Peretz, Mishnat Hasidim, 35. 95.  Ibid., 38. 96.  Ibid., 40–41. 97.  Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction, 300–301. 98.  Y. L. Peretz, “Ha-ofot ve-hagvilim,” Ha-siloah 13 (1903): 289–297. Re-

Notes to Pages 302–307 printed in Kitvei Y. L. Peretz, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1966), 83–97. The Yiddish version, “Reb Nachmanke’s mayses,” appears in Ale verk fun Y. L. Peretz, vol. 4 (New York: CYCO, 1947–1948), 187–201. 99.  Kol Kitvei Y. L. Peretz, 2: 83. 100.  English translation of this story by Arthur Green can be found in David Stern and Mark J. Mirsky, eds., Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 335–336. 101.  See the different possible allegorical interpretations of the story by Jacobson, Modern Midrash, 32–40; and Roskies, Bridge of Longing, 122–124. 102.  Ruth R. Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 56–59. 103.  Berdichevsky was no doubt the most important figure in the move toward Hebrew modernist fiction at the fin de siècle. The crucial place of Peretz in the development of Yiddish modernism is also well recognized. Roskies even calls Peretz “the master architect of Jewish modernism.” Roskies, Bridge of Longing, 116. On Bialik as proto-modernist, see Barbara Mann, “Visions of Jewish Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 4 (2006): 673–699.

Notes to Chapter 13 1.  The phrase is Gershon Shaked’s. See Gershon Shaked, Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist (New York: New York University Press, 1989). 2.  Agnon’s posthumous volume Sipurei ha-Besht (“The Tales of the Besht”), which was published in 1987, is a late and partial product of the ambitious multivolume anthology. See Dan Laor, “Agnon and Buber: The Story of a Friendship, or the Rise and Fall of the Corpus Hasidicum,” in Paul Mendes-Flohr, ed., Martin ­Buber: A Contemporary Perspective (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 48-86. 3.  S. Y. Agnon, Yamim Norai’m (Jersualem: Schocken, 1938); translated to English as Days of Awe (New York: Schocken, 1948). 4.  Eliezer Shteinman, Sefer ha-besht (Tel Aviv: Knesset, 1958); Eliezer Shteinman, Be’er Ha-hasidut (Tel Aviv: Knesset, 1959). 5.  See David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 191–229. 6.  See Shachar Pinsker, “Unraveling the Yarn: Intertextuality, Gender and Cultural Critique in the Stories of Dvora Baron,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender 11 (2006): 249–279; Marc Bernstein, “Like a Wife Forsaken: On the Story Aguna,” in Sheila Jelen and Shachar Pinsker, eds., Hebrew, Gender, and Modernity: Critical Responses to Dvora Baron (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2007), 117–144; Sheila Jelen, Intimations of Difference: Dvora Baron in the Modern Hebrew Renaissance (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 99–126. 7.  Baruch Kurzweil, Ben chazon le ben ha-absurdi (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1973), v–xii. 8.  Gershon Shaked, Ha-siporet ha-ivrit 1880–1980, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Keter, 1977), 424.

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Notes to Pages 307–310 9.  Similarly, Avner Holtzman notes that, “more than other writers of his generation, Gnessin removes himself from the horizon of Jewish themes. Rather, his stories reflect the Russian intellectual and mental atmosphere.” Holtzman, ­Ha-sipur ha-ivri be-reshit ha-me’a ha-esrim (Tel Aviv: Open University Press, 1993), 94. 10.  See the critical essays collected in Nurit Govrin, ed., Gershon Shofman: ­Mivchar ma’amarei bikoret al yetzirato (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1978). 11.  Gershon Shaked, “A Viennese Author Who Wrote in Hebrew,” Modern Hebrew Literature 11 (1986): 20–27; Menakhem Perri, “Afterward,” in David Fogel, Chaye nis’u’im (Tel Aviv: Mitzpe, 1929–1930), 335–344. 12.  In spite of the problems in his general and all too sweeping approach, Baruch Kurzweil was probably the first to identify these questions in Hebrew modernism, which he called the absurd: “The transition to the absurd was marked very well by great Hebrew writers who were born in the diaspora such as Brenner, Gnessin, Fogel and Shteinberg [...] these writers, whose texts expose the absurd, are far removed from the tendency toward de-Judaization. These writers knew very well the explicit and implicit relations connecting them with the Jewish past. It is precisely this deep knowledge that endows their texts with a dimension of painful and powerful authenticity.” Kurzweil, Ben chazon, vii–viii. 13.  Richard Sheppard, “The Problematics of European Modernism,” in Steve Giles, ed., Theorizing Modernism (London: Routledge, 1993), 1–51. 14.  Vasily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover, 1977). 15.  Sheppard, “The Problematics of European Modernism,” 34–35. 16.  Theodore Ziolkowski, Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 53–82. 17.  Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “The Letter of Lord Chandos,” in Selected Prose, trans. Mary Hottinger and Tania and James Stern (New York: Pantheon, 1952), 129–141. 18.  Andreas Huyssen, “Paris/Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” in Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick, eds., Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 113–141. 19.  Roy Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism, 195. 20.  Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1981), 125. 21.  Stéphane Moses and Ora Wiskind-Elper, “Gershom Scholem’s Reading of Kafka: Literary Criticism and Kabbalah,” New German Critique 77 (1999): 149–167. 22.  Robert Alter, “Kafka as Kabbalist,” Salmagundi 98–99 (1993): 86-99. 23.  Robert Alter, “Scholem and Modernism,” Poetics Today 15, no. 3 (1994): 429–442; Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 24.  T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 177–178. 25.  Quoted in Sheppard, Problematics, 35.

Notes to Pages 311–314 26.  Pericles Lewis, “Religion,” in Kevin J. H. Dettmar and David Bradshaw, eds., A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 19–28; Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 27.  Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1966). 28.  Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, 4–5. 29.  Gregory Erickson, The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Wendy Faris and Steven Walker, “Latent Icons: Compensatory Symbols of the Sacred in Modernist Literature and Painting,” in Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, eds., Modernism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 637–650. 30.  For a discussion of “religious experience” in the thought of this period (whose origin is Friedrich Schleiermacher on one hand, and Friedrich Nietzsche on the other hand), see Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 78–130. 31.  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1902), 31–32. 32.  James, Varieties, 37. 33.  Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 11. 34.  Ibid., 12–40. 35.  Ibid., 26. 36.  Ibid., 28. 37.  See Todd A. Gooch, The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of ­R udolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000); Jay, Songs of Experience, 110–121. 38.  See Vladimir Wozniuk, ed., Freedom, Faith, and Dogma: Essays by V. S. ­Soloviev on Christianity and Judaism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 39.  On Solovyov and his influence on Jewish writers and thinkers in Russia, see Hamutal Bar-Yosef, “The Jewish Reception of Vladimir Solovyov,” in Wil van den Bercken and Jonathan Sutton, eds., Vladimir Solov’ev: Reconciler and Polemicist, (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2000), 363–392; Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 20–23l. 40.  See Shestov’s essays on Solovyov: Lev Shestov, “Speculation and Revelation: The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov,” in Lev Shestov, Speculation and Revelation, tran. Bernard Martin, (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982). On his attitude toward James see Brian Horowitz, “A Knight of Free Creativity: Lev Shestov on William James,” in Joan Delaney Grossman and Ruth Rischin, eds., William James in Russian Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2003), 159–168.

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Notes to Pages 314–317 41.  On the place of Shestov within Russian symbolist literature see Avril Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 139–150. 42.  Following his emigration, Shestov became well known to figures like Martin Buber, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger in Germany; Jules de Gaultier, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Albert Camus in France; and D. H. Lawrence in England. 43.  Edith W. Clowes, Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 130–154. 44.  Bernard Martin, “The Life and Thought of Lev Shestov,” in Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), 1. 45.  Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969). 46.  Brian Horowitz, “The Tension of Athens and Jerusalem in the Philosophy of Lev Shestov,” Slavic and East European Journal 43, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 156–173. 47.  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974), 182. 48.  On the Russian reception and appropriation of Nietzsche in this period see Bernice Glatzer–Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche in Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Bernice Glatzer-Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 27–112. 49.  Bernice Glatzer-Rosenthal and Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, eds., A Revolution of the Spirit: Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890–1924 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 1–40. 50.  Pyman, History of Russian Symbolism, 183–242. 51.  Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 201–231. 52.  Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism, 162–185. 53.  Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Fin de Siecle Orientalism, the Ostjuden, and the Aesthetic of Jewish Self-Affirmation,” in Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 77–132; Martina Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber’s Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 35–36. 54.  Martin Buber, “Jewish Religiosity,” in On Judaism, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1973), 79–94. 55.  On the influence of Simmel and Nietzsche on Buber in the early years of the twentieth century, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal, 94–115. 56.  On Zeitlin’s early years, see Moshe Waldoks, “Hillel Zeitlin: The Early Years (1894–1919),” Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University, 1984. See also Avraham Holtz, “Hillel Zeitlin: Critic, Mystic, Social Architect,” Conservative Judaism 20, no. 3 (1966): 50–65; Yonatan Meir, “Mavo,” in Hillel Zeitin, Rabi Nachman mi

Notes to Pages 318–322 bratzla: Tza’ar ha-olam ve kisufei mashi’ach (Jerusalem: Orna Hess, 2006), 9–40; Pinsker and Krurikov, “Zeitlin Family,” 2116–2118. 57.  Hillel Zeitlin, “Yosef Chaim Brenner: Arachim ve-zichronot,” Ha-tkufa 14–15 (1922): 626. 58.  The essay was written by Brenner when he heard mistakenly that Hillel Zeitlin had died. It was published many years later by Dov Sadan. Y. Ch. Brenner, “Al Hillel Zeitlin,” Mibifnim 42 (1966): 334–336. 59.  Yosef Chaim Brenner Ktavim, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1978–1985), 3:211. 60.  On the influence of Zeitlin see Yonatan Meir, “Tshukatan shek ha-neshamot el ha-shekhina,” Mechkarey Yerushalaim be machshevet Israel 19 (2005): 771– 818; Hamutal Bar Yosef, “Ma kibel Brenner mi Zeitlin,” Iyunim bi-tkumat Israel (forthcoming). 61.  Ya‘acov Fichman, “Hakdama,” in Hillel Zeitlin, Ktavim Nivcharim, vol. 2 (Warsaw: Tushiya, 1911), vi. 62.  The essays were published in the journal Ha-shiloah between 1899–1900 and reprinted as the first volume of Hillel Zeitlin, Ktavim Nivcharim. 63.  Zeitlin, Ktavim Nivcharim, 1:90. 64.  For more on Zeitlin’s evolving understanding of Nietzsche’s thought see Jacob Golomb, “Hillel Zeitlin: From Nietzschean Übermensch to Jewish Almighty God,” in Nietzsche and Zion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 189–214. 65.  Hillel Zeitlin, Baruch Spinoza (Warsaw: Tushiya, 1900); Hillel Zeitlin, “Friedrich Nietzsche,” Ha-zeman (January–October 1905). 66.  These essays were collected as volume 1 of Ktavim Nivcharim. 67.  Hillel Zeitlin, “Kitzur Toldotay,” in Sifran Shel Yehidim (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1979), 2–3. 68.  Ibid., 3. 69.  Hillel Zietlin, “Lev Shestov,” Ha-me‘orer 10 (1907): 175–180. Zeitlin dedicated another essay to Shestov in the 1920s. See Hillel Zeitlin, “Chipusei ha-­ elohim shel Lev Shestov,” Ha-tekufa 10–11 (1923–1924): 424–444. 70.  Zeitlin, Lev Shestov, 180. 71.  Hillel Zeitlin, “Tzima’on,” Sifrut 4 (1910): 141, reprinted in Ktavim Nivcharim, 2:165–184. 72.  Hillel Zeitlin, Ha-hasidut le-shitoteya u-zrameya (Warsaw: Sifrut, 1910); Hillel Zeitlin, Rabbi Nachman mi Bratzlav (Warsaw: Sifrut, 1910). 73.  Hillel Zeitlin, “Be-chevyon ha-neshama,” in Netivot (1913): 205–335. Reprinted in Hillel Zeitlin, Al Gvul Snhei Olamot (Tel Aviv: Yavneh, 1965), 9–44. See Waldoks, “Hillel Zeitlin,” 205–219. 74.  Zeitlin, Al Gvul Snhei Olamot, 18. 75.  Waldoks, “Hillel Zeitlin,” 241. 76.  On the concept of “backshadowing” see Michael Andre Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 16.

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Notes to Pages 323–329 77.  On this issue in more detail see Shachar Pinsker, “Intertextuality, Rabbinic Literature, and the Making of Hebrew Modernism,” in Anita Norich and Yaron Eliav, eds., Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Texts and Intertexts (Providence: Brown Judaica Studies, 2008), 201–228. 78.  On the anti-nusach see Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Invention of Realism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 45–67; Pinsker, Intertextuality, 209–219. 79.  Shaked, Ha-siporet ha-ivrit, 1:378–382, 418–423. See the discussion of antinusach in Pinsker, Intertextuality, 201–208. 80.  Dov Sadan, “Le-chatan ha-gvurut,” in Bein din le-cheshbon (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1963), 130. 81.  Pinsker, Old Wine in New Flasks, 127–130, 294–304. 82.  Alter, Invention of Hebrew Prose, 29–41. 83.  See Ya‘acov Fichman, “Gershon Shofman,” in Bney dor (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1952), 123–126. See also the discussion of Shofman’s unique employment of biblical texts in Govrin, Me-ofek el ofel, 2:409–428. 84.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 4: 117. See also his essay on William James and Sigmund Freud in Kol Kitvei, vol. 4. 85.  Lev Shestov, “Techilat devarim ahcaronim,” Ha-me‘orer 2, nos. 8–9 (­August–September 1907). Reprinted in Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 2:228–274. The essay was published originally in Russian. 86.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 2:534. 87.  Dan Miron, Chachim be-apo shel ha-netzach (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1997), 567–568. 88.  Hillel Zeitlin, “U. N. Gnessin,” Zukunft 1938. Reprinted in Mordecahi Kushnir, ed., Y. Ch. Brenner: Mivchar divrei zichronot (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1971), 43–44. 89.  Miron, “Ba-derech el ha-chorsha ha-kdosha ve be-hazara,” in Chachim ­be-apo shel ha-netzach, 505–585. 90.  Brenner, Ktavim, 3:476–487. For the reactions to this essay see Nurit Govrin, Me’ora Brenner (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1985). 91.  Y. Ch. Brenner, Ktavim, 3:289. 92.  M. Y. Berdichevsky, in Mordechay Kushnir, ed., Yosef Chaim Brenner, ­mivchar divrei zichronot (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1971), 113. 93.  For a comprehensive discussion of Brenner’s perceptions of Judaism and Jewish culture and the differences between him and figures like Ahad Ha‘am and Berdichevsky, see Menachem Brinker, Ad ha-simta ha-tveryanit (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990), 157–190; Shmuel Schneider, Olam ha-masoret ha-yehudit ­be-­kitvei Y. Ch. Brenner (Tel Aviv: Reshafim, 1994); Avi Sagi, Li-hiyot Yehudi: Y. Ch. Brenner ke-existensianlist Yehudi (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007), 151–213. 94.  Baruch Kurtzweil was apparently one of the first critics to recognize this after generations in which Brenner became an emblem of “secular” labor Zionism. But because he was so invested in showing the tragic element of secularization of

Notes to Pages 329–338 Hebrew literature he could only find in Brenner what he called “negative religious faith”: “Brenner’s language brings all the associations from the religious sphere, with a religious pathos, which is a result of the terrible disappointment of religious faith. Brenner’s protagonists give themselves to the charms of the mysticism of nothingness [...] they never forgive God for not existing for them.” Kurzweil, Ben Chazon, 276–277. 95.  Brenner, Ktavim, 3:247. 96.  Ibid., 4:1164. 97.  This “manifesto” was first published in a London Yiddish journal, Ha-­ Yehudi, and then again in Ha-me‘orer 6 (June 1906). Reprinted in Ktavim, 3:95. 98.  Brenner, Ktavim, 3:145. 99.  Iris Parush, Kanon Sifruti ve ideologia leumit (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1992), 140–141. 100.  Brenner, Hed ha-zman (June 1908). Reprinted in Brenner, Ktavim, 3:221. 101.  See his essay on Lilienblum’s writings in Ktavim, 3:466–472. 102.  Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979). 103.  Brenner, Ktavim, 3:179. 104.  Ibid., 370. 105.  Ibid., 178. 106.  See Sagi, Li-hiyot Yehudi, 73–94. 107.  Aharon Applefeld, Masot be-guf rishon (Jerusalem: Zionist Library, 1979), 69–70. 108.  The essay was first published by Yitzhak Bakon in Hebrew translation in the journal Shdemot in 1971 and then in a Yiddish-Hebrew bilingual edition in Y. Ch. Brenner, Ha-ktavim ha-yidi’im/Di yiddishe shriftn, ed. Yitzhak Bakon (BeerSheva: Ben-Gurion University, 1985), 207–216. See an English translation of the entire essay in the Appendix. 109.  Y. Ch. Brenner, Ha-ktavim ha-yidi’im, 209. 110.  Ibid., 212–213. 111.  Ibid., 210.

Notes to Chapter 14 1.  David Frishman, “Be-yom ha-kippurim,” Ha-boker Or 5, no. 5 (1880–1881): 339–359; Ben Avigdor, “Elyakim ha-meshuga,” Hamelitz, 237 (1889): 2–4, 239; M. Z. Feierberg, “Le’an,” Ha-shiloah 5 (1899): 141–148, 217–232, 311–320; M. Y. Berdichevsky, “Me-ever la-nahar,” in Mi-bayit u mi-chutz (Warsaw: Tushiya, 1899), 44–72. 2.  M. Z. Feierberg, “Le’an,” Ha-shiloah 5 (1899): 141–148, 217–232, 311–320; collected in Kitvei M. Z. Feierberg (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1941), 65–127. English translation by Hillel Halkin in Whither and Other Stories (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973), 121–215.

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Notes to Pages 338–343 3.  Berdichevsky, Kitvei M. Y. Berdichevsky: Sipurim (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1960), 11. 4.  On this story see Shmuel Werses, “Ha-sipur me’ever la-nahar shel M. Y. Berdichevsky: iyun be-mekorotav ve-nuschaotav,” in Ezra Fleischer, ed., Mechkarei Sifrut mugashim le-shimon halkin (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 1973), 35–60; Yitzhak Bakon, Ha-tz’air ha-boded ba-siftut ha-ivrit (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1978), 13–28. 5.  Insightful comments on Yom Kippur in Hebrew literature of the period can be found in Baruch Kurzweil, Masot al sipurei Shay Agnon (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1970), 269–281. 6.  Gershon Shofman, Kol-Kitvei Shofman, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1960), 1:11. 7.  On the ritual of kapparot and its folkloric and mystical origins, see J. Z. Lauterbach, “The Ritual for the Kapparot Ceremony,” in Bernard J. Bamberger, ed., Studies in Jewish Law, Custom and Folklore (New York: Ktav, 1970), 133–142. 8.  Sigmund Freud, “On Dreams,” in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 5, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953– 1974), 633–686. See also the interesting comments of Shofman on Freud’s theory of dreams. Shofman, “Al ha-tasbich,” in Kol Kitvei, 4:43. 9.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 1:59. 10.  In this mixing of the sexual and religious domain, Shofman, like other Hebrew writers of the time, is close to Russian symbolists who were following Vladimir Solovyov. See Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). 11.  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974), 182. 12.  As Alan Mintz has observed, the “reverie” is a common literary technique in the Hebrew fiction of this period. A reverie is not properly speaking a dream, because it takes place in a waking state; nor is it a soliloquy or a monologue, because it is neither spoken aloud nor spoken before anyone; nor is it entirely a vision, because it contains many elements of meditation and reflective reasoning. See Alan Mintz, Banished from Their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 68–79. 13.  Shofman, Kol Kitvei, 1:64–65. 14.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. David McDuff (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 83. 15.  Alexander Pushkin, “Podrazhaniia Koranu,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, vol. 2 (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1941), 352–356. 16.  See Halimur Khan, “Dreaming of Islam: Dostoevskij’s Vision of a New Russia in Crime and Punishment,” Russian Literature 48, no. 3 (2000): 231–261. 17.  The dialogue is not only with Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, but possibly with Lermontov too and his poem “Three Palm Trees.” I would like to thank Omri Ronen and Hamutal Bar Yosef for their help with identifying and locating these Russian texts.

Notes to Pages 344–353 18.  The story was first published in Nahum Sokolov, ed., Sefer hashana 5 (1905– 1906). Reprinted in Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:122–129. 19.  The focus on the Eve of Yom Kippur is apparent not only in Gnessin and Shofman but also in Y. D. Berkovitz (see his story Be-erev Yom ha-kipurim) and in a number of stories and novels by S. Y. Agnon. 20.  Dan Miron, Chachim be-apo shel ha-netzach (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1997), 100–124. See also Hamutal Bar-Yosef, “Huledet ha-sovlanut mi-toch haparadox,” in Kriot u-shrikot (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2005), 225–227. 21.  Gnessin, Kol Kitvei, 1:123. 22.  Ibid., Kol Ktavav, 1:126. 23.  The Eve of Yom Kippur is an important time in rabbinic literature. Just before the most sacred day of the year, the sages of the Talmud appear to be carrying out the most mundane activities. In that moment, the lives of many rabbis and sages are about to change forever. The Eve of Yom Kippur appears to be a time of memory and judgment for those people. See, for example, the stories in the Babylonian Talmud Kiddushin 81a–81b and Ketubot 62b, and the discussion of these stories in Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 147–167. 24.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:129. 25.  Ibid., 128. 26.  Pericles Lewis, “Churchgoing in the Modern Novel,” Modernism/Modernity 11 (2004): 671. 27.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:245. Apparently the name “Shalshelet” is a metonymic name because it is a reference to a trope of reading the Torah with an especially high pitch. 28.  Ibid., 246. 29.  Ibid., 247. 30.  Ibid. 31.  Ibid., 280 (my emphasis). 32.  Ibid., 285. 33.  Ibid., 286. 34.  Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 5–30. 35.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:287–288 (my emphasis). 36.  Ibid., 288. 37.  In rabbinic and early theurgic texts (for example in the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 34a) the verse from Jeremiah is interpreted as related to the divine act of revelation and the giving of the Torah to humans. The image of the hammer striking the rock has become a powerful image of the midrashic process itself. See Azzan Yadin, “The Hammer on the Rock: Polysemy and the School of Rabbi Ishmael,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 10, no. 1 (2003): 1–17. 38.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:288.

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Notes to Pages 335–359 39.  Miron, Chachim, 512–513. 40.  On Bely’s symbolist fiction and its elements of religious and mystical experience, see John E. Malmstad, ed., Andrey Bely: The Spirit of Symbolism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); John Elsworth, “Introduction,” in Andrey Bely, The Silver Dove (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 7–25. 41.  Of course, not every allusion to or quotation of texts from the Jewish religious tradition—biblical, rabbinic, mystical, or hasidic—carries with it religious meaning. In the fiction written in the period before Hebrew became a vernacular, there are many cases where texts are employed for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they have a “neutral” semantic meaning, in other cases they are ironic, and sometimes they are evoked in ways that reactivate their religious meaning (often in surprising ways). For more on this issue see Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 17–41; Miron, Chachim, 550–552; Pinsker, Old Wine in New Flasks, 70–87. 42.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:213. 43.  Ibid., 215, my emphasis. 44.  Tikkunei Zohar 122b. 45.  Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Sefer Ha-tanya: Sha’ar Ha-yichud Ve ha-emunah, chap. 7. (n.d.). For a discussion of the text and its central role in hasidic thought, see Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 13–18. 46.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:213. 47.  Ibid. 48.  Ibid., 214. 49.  Ibid. 50.  Miron, Chachim, 534. 51.  In Jungian terms, the wise old man appears in dreams in the guise of a magician, doctor, priest, teacher, professor, grandfather, or any person possessing authority. See Carl G. Jung, “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales,” in Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9, part 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 207–254; see also James Hillman, “On Senex Consciousness,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1970): 146–165. 52.  See Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Neta Stahl, Tzelem yehudi: Yitzugav she yeshu ba-sifrut ha-ivrit ba-me’a ha-esrim (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2008). 53.  Baruch Kurzweil, Bein Hazon Levein Ha’absurdi [Between Vision and the Absurd] (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1966), 350–355; see also Adi Tzemach, Kri’a tama (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1990), 93–108; Miron, Chachim, 222–223. 54.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:261. 55.  See Kurzweil, Bein Hazon, 350–354; Miron, Chachim, 559–562. 56.  Literally means “accepted” and designating an agreement with a legal ­argument.

Notes to Pages 359–364 57.  Miron, Chachim, 474–475. 58.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:261.

Notes to Chapter 15 1.  Brenner himself dealt with the “narrative of apostasy” in a succinct manner that sums up this narrative tradition from the haskalah until Berdichevsky, and takes it to a new place in the novel Ba-choref. See Alan Mintz, Banished from Their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 23–153; and my own discussion in Part II. 2.  See Ariel Hirschfeld, “Acharit davar,” in Yosef Chaim Brenner, Ba–choref/­ Mi-saviv la-nekuda (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1988), 301–343; Yitzhak Bakon, Brenner ­ha-tza’ir (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1975), vol. 2, 381–399. 3.  Yosef Chaim Brenner, Ktavim, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1978–1985), 1:499–505. 4.  See for example Brenner’s “Ba-choref,” Gnessin’s “Beynota’im,” Shofman’s “Taluy,” Nomberg’s “Hacharishi,” and Shneor’s “Le-sham.” For a discussion of this theme see Gershon Shaked, Le-lo Motza (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1973), 58. In Yiddish literature, see Janet Hadda, Passionate Women, Passive Men: Suicide in Yiddish Literature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). 5.  Yitzhak Bakon, “Ha-ma’amad al ha-gesher bemi-saviv la-nekuda,” Hasifrut 4, no. 3 (1973): 274–283; Yael Sagiv-Feldman, “Bein ha-miti le-bein hatragi,” in Menakhem Dorman and Uzi Shavit, eds., Machbarot Brenner (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1984), 217–238. 6.  Sagiv-Feldman, “Bein ha-miti,” 230. 7.  Bakon, “Ha-ma’amad.” See also Yigal Y. Schwartz, “Mahashevet ha-makom ba-siporet ha-ivrit ha-betar-klasit: Me’ever ha-nahar me’et M. Y. Berdichevsky,” in Yehudit Barel et al., eds., Sifrut ve-hevrah ba-tarbut ha-ivrit ba-meah ha-esrim (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2000), 455–469. 8.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:504. 9.  At the head of the angelogical system described in rabbinic literature are four “archangels,” corresponding to the four divisions of the army of Israel as described in Numbers 2: “As the Holy One blessed be He created four winds (directions) and four banners (for Israel’s army), so also did He make four angels to surround His Throne—Michael, Gabriel, Uriel and Raphael. Michael is on its right, corresponding to the tribe of Reuben; Uriel on its left, corresponding to the tribe of Dan, which was located in the north; Gabriel in front, corresponding to the tribe of Judah as well as Moses and Aaron who were in the east; and Raphael in the rear, corresponding to the tribe of Efraim which was in the west.” Numbers Rabbah 2:10; see also Pirkey de-rabbi Eliezer 4 and Zohar: Bereshit 21. 10.  For a scholarly account on angels and their names in Jewish texts see Saul Olyan, A Thousand Thousands Served Him: Exegesis and the Naming of Angels in Ancient Judaism (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1993).

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Notes to Pages 364–377 11.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:500. 12.  See Jeffrey Burton Russell, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); Jeffrey Burton Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 13.  Mekhilta de-rabbi Ishmael, be-shalach, parasha 2:4. 14.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:505. 15.  Apart from the allusion to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, there might be here an additional allusion to the description in the seventh chapter of the Book of Proverbs, where the woman is described with an attire of a harlot. 16.  See also Boaz Arpaly, “Nigudim lo simetim,” Sadan, vol. 4, (2000), 211–265. 17.  Hirschfeld, Acharit davar, 330–343; Bakon, Brenner ha-tzair, 2:434–439. 18.  The city of A. is, of course, Homel, the minor but significant center of Hebrew literature and Jewish culture. See the discussion in Chapter 3. 19.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:399. 20.  See the text of the letter in its different versions in Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005), 272–281. See also the discussion of the concept of the “ascent of the soul” in Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 94. 21.  Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, Schocken Books, 1954), 58. 22.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:400. 23.  Ibid., 405. 24.  Ibid., 406. 25.  For a suggestive reading of the Dionysian element in fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Lillian Feder, Madness in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). For a different perspective see Louis A. Sas, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 26.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:530–534. 27.  Ibid., 540–541. 28.  “During the night of Exile, the nations of the world and the kingdom of Edom (Esau) wrestle with Jacob, until the dawn of redemption.” Midrash Lekach Tov on Genesis 32:25. 29.  On the issue of “the sense of ending” in Brenner’s stories and novels, see Menakhem Brinker, Ad ha-simta ha-tveryanit (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990), 229– 262; Hirschfeld, Aharit davar, 330–343. 30.  Uri Nissan Gnessin, “Be-vet saba,” Ha-tkufa vol. 9 (1921). Reprinted in Uri Nissan Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, ed. Dan Miron and Israel Zmora, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Sifriat Poalim, 1982), 1:75–121. 31.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:83. 32.  In fact, the story could have reminded Bialik of his own childhood and the poems he wrote about it, and the world of the “house of study.” It is possible, in my

Notes to Pages 377–387 opinion, that Bialik rejected the story because he felt that Gnessin had touched on an area that he and other writers had dealt with extensively, but in a new and unconventional way, a way that was not received well (and probably not understood) by Bialik. 33.  See Dan Miron, Chachim be-apo shel ha-netzach (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1997), 67–99. 34.  On the phenomenon of the eynikl in the history of the hasidic movement see David Assaf, Derech ha-malchut (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1986), 100–120. 35.  Gnessin, Kol Ktavav, 1:94. 36.  Ibid., 113. 37.  Ibid., 115. 38.  Ibid. 39.  See the comments of Dan Miron, Chachim, 91–99. 40.  Carl G. Jung, “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales,” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R.F.C. Hull, 2d ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 217–230. 41.  Dov Sadan, Midrash Psychoanality, 159–160. See also Arik Glasner, “­Ha-dmut she-keneged be kitvei Brenner,” Master’s thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2004. 42.  Y. Ch. Brenner, “Me-ever la-gvulin,” Ha-me‘orer (1906). Reprinted in Brenner, Ktavim, 1:725–826. 43.  Sadan, Midrash Psychoanality, 88–89. Yitzhak Bakon claims that Yochanan and Eliyahu are two parts of one character—Brenner himself. Yitzhak Bakon, Brenner be-London: tkufat ha-me‘orer (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 1990), 197–232; Yisrael Hameiri, “Shnei Panim Ro’im ha-mebitim bo: hofa’ato shel ha-acher ha-miti ba-machaze me-ever la-gvulin me’et Y. Ch. Brenner,” Mikan (2008): 5–21. 44.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:736. 45.  Ibid., 744. 46.  Ibid., 747. 47.  Ibid., 770. 48.  Ibid., 784. 49.  On the development of the figure of Elijah from a ferocious prophet to a counselor and “revealer,” see Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, trans. Allan Arkush (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 35–39. 50.  Brenner, Ktavim, 1:704. 51.  Ibid., 823–824. 52.  Ibid., 825. 53.  Brenner, Ktavim, 2:1019. For English translation, see Yosef Chaim Brenner, Out of the Depths, trans. David Patterson (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 17 (hereafter referred to as “English translation”). 54.  Ibid., 2:1020; English translation, 18. 55.  Ibid., 1027. 56.  Ibid., 1064. 57.  Brenner, Ktavim, 2:1090; English translation, 96.

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Notes to Pages 387–394 58.  The painting was (and still is) displayed in the National Gallery in London, and Brenner probably saw it there. 59.  Brenner, Ktavim, 2:1093–1094; English translation, 99.

Notes to the Epilogue 1.  “Kh’hob gevolt voynen in Eyrope—vu ikh bin geboyrn gevorn. Es hot zikh nisht gelozt. Efsher nemt mikh oyf dos Orient tsurik.” Uri Zvi Greenberg, “Baym Shlus,” Albatros 3–4 (July 1923): 25–27; reprinted in U. Z. Greenberg, Gezamelte verk, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 1979), 478. 2.  Of course, Greenberg’s suggestion that he might be able to be “received” by the Orient is just as interesting as his longing to live in Europe. It is related to one of the most complex issues of the literature and culture created in Palestine by these Jewish European immigrants. For a recent discussion of these questions, see Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective,” in Derek Penslar and Ivan Davidson, eds., Orientalism and the Jews (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005), 162–181. 3.  Dan Miron, Akdamut le azag (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2002). 4.  Emunah Yaron, ed., Sh. Y. Agnon—Z. Schocken: Chilufey igrot (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1991), 116. 5.  For a sweeping, interesting overview of the attitudes of modern Jewish and Israeli culture toward modern Europe, see Ya‘acov Shavit and Yehuda Rehinharz, Eiropa ha-mehulelet ve ha-mekulelet (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2006). 6.  Itamar Even Zohar, “Ha-sifrut ha-ivrit ha-israelit: model histori sifruti,” Ha-sifrut 4, no. 3 (1973): 427–440; Zohar Shavit, Ha-chayim ha-sifrutiym be-eretz Israel (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1982). 7.  Gershon Shaked, Modern Hebrew Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 63. 8.  Shavit, Ha-chayim ha-sifrutiym, 35. 9.  Anita Shapira, Brenner: Sipur chaim (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2008), 176–177. See also the perspective of Jonathan Frankel, “Yosef Haim Brenner, the ‘Half-­ Intelligentsia,’ and Russian-Jewish Politics (1899–1908),” in Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran, eds., Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 145–175. 10.  See Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Magaim shel deakadens, 344–371. On Mikan u mikan see Boaz Arpaly, Ha-ikar ha-shlili (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1992). On Skhol ve kishalon see Michael Gluzamn, Ha-guf ha-ziony (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2007), 136–181. 11.  On the literature created in Palestine until the 1930s, see Nurit Govrin, Dvash mi-sela: Mechkarim be-sifrut Eretz Israel (Tel Aviv: Misrad Ha-bitachon, 1989); Yaffa Berlowitz, Lehamtzi eretz lehamtiz am (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1996);

Notes to Pages 394–398 Eric Zakim, To Build and Be Built: Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 12.  Itamar Even Zohar, “The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882–1948,” Poetics Today 11, no. 1 (1990): 189. 13.  For an excellent and comprehensive presentation of these manifestos, see Binyamin Harshav, Manifestim shel modernism (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2001). See also the documents presented in Shavit, Ha-chayim ha-sifrutiyim, 405–433. 14.  Janet Lyon, Manifestos: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, eds., Words in Revolution: Russian Futurist Manifestoes, 1912–1928 (Washington, DC: New Academia, 2005); Benedikt Hjartason, “Myths of Rupture: The Manifesto and the Concept of the AvantGarde,” in Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, eds., Modernism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 173–195; Harsha Ram, “Futurist Geographies: Center, Periphery and the Struggle for Aesthetic Autonomy, Paris, Italy, Russia, 1909–1914,” in Mark Wollaeger, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, forthcoming. 15.  Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Maga‘im shel dekadens (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1997), 45–233. 16.  Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 17.  The Hebrew fiction writer Chaim Hazaz is an exceptional figure, and somewhat like Agnon, it is difficult to place him in any map or graph. He began his writing career in Paris during the 1920s writing about the disintegration of the shtetl and the impact of the Russian revolution. When he arrived in Mandatory Palestine in 1931, he continued to write expressionistic stories and novels but turned his attention to the Zionist project, Yemenite Jews, and the dialectics of Jewish history. 18.  There is no good study of Shteinman’s life or his fiction, but see the introduction in Eliezer Shteinman, Ish ha-ktzavot: Mivchar, ed. Avino’am Barshay (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1995), 9–33. 19.  It is extremely difficult to follow the dates in which Agnon wrote and published these texts. For example, some of the stories in Sefer ha-ma’asim were first published as early as 1932, but as a book were only published together in 1941. The same is true with Tmol Shilshom and Ad Hena, which Agnon wrote and rewrote throughout the 1930s and 1940s. 20.  See David Fogel, Le-noach ha-yam (Tel Aviv: Mitzpe, 1934); Elisheva, Simta’ot (Tel Aviv: Tomer, 1930); Lea Goldberg, Michtavim mi-nesi’a meduma (Tel Aviv: Davar, 1937); Lea Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-’or (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalum, 1946); Shimon Halkin, Yehiel Ha-hagari (Tel Aviv: Shtybl, 1936); Shimon Halkin, Ad Mashber (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1945). 21.  The complex dynamics between canonicity, marginality, and Hebrew modernism are explored by Michael Gluzman in The Politics of Canonicity, and Hannan Hever in Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon. 22.  For a good analysis of the modernist aspects of “the Hebrew poet as a producer,” see Eric Zakim, To Build and Be Built, 91–119. For a discussion of the messianic

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Notes to Pages 399–406 and apocalyptic elements of this poetry see Hannan Hever, “Poetry and Messianism in Palestine between the Two World Wars,” in Jonathan Frankel, ed., Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era: Metaphor and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). And for the parallel phenomena in Yiddish literature, which of course was not connected to the Zionist project, see Avram Novershtern, Kesem ha-dimdumin: Apokalipsa ve meshichiyut be-sifrut Yiddish (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2003). 23.  For discussions of Jabotinsky in the context of Russian and European modernism, see Alice Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity: Jabotinsky, Babel, Grossman, Galich, Roziner, Markish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 116–238. 24.  Shlonsky’s biography, especially his life during the 1920s, is still shrouded in the mythical aura which he himself created. See Hagit Halperin, “Aliya ve kotz ba: aliyato she avarham shlonsky artza, bein biyographia le-mitos,” Madaey hayahadut 44 (2007): 249–263. 25.  Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism, 103–109. 26.  Jordan Finkin, “Constellating Hebrew and Yiddish Avant-Gardes: The Example of Markish and Shlonsky,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 1–22. 27.  For a discussion of these poems and their role in this ethos, see Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 212–214; 277–352. 28.  Dan Miron, Parpar min ha-tolaa’t (Tel Aviv: Open University, 2001), 242– 262. 29.  See the memoir of Israel Zmora, “Batey ha-kafe ha-sifrutiyim shel shnot ha-30 ve ha-40,” Yediot Aharonot, 12/23/1977; Batya Carmiel, Batey ha-kafe shel TelAviv (1920–1980) (Tel Aviv: Eretz-Israel Museum, 2007); Maoz Azaryahu, Tel-Aviv: Mythography of a City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 106–123. 30.  Barbara Mann, A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 249.

Notes to the Appendix 1.  Translated by Alexandra Hoffman and Shachar Pinsker. Originally published in Yiddish in Yosef Chaim Brenner, Ha-ktavim ha-Yiddim (Yiddish Writings), Universitat Ben-Gurion, 1985. Translation published with the permission of Ben Gurion University Press. 2.  The next chapter was never published. The article was supposed to be the first in a series, but the plan never materialized.

Index

Note: Locators in italic indicate a page with an illustration. Abramovitz, Sholem Yankev (Mendele Moycher Sforim), 46 Abramson, Ya‘acov (fictional character), 59–62, 216–25, 360–74 Ad Hena (To This Day), 139–40, 428–29n93 Adler, Zina (fictional character), 249–51 Agadat ha-sofer (“The Tale of the Scribe”), 138 aggadah and aggadic texts Berdichevsky and, 282–86, 454n46 Bialik and, 278–81, 284–86 Agnon (Czaczkes), Shmuel Yosef, 226–36, 227, 305, 425n13, 471n19 Ad Hena (To This Day), 139–40, 428– 29n93 Agadat ha-sofer, 138 Agunot, 137 Berlin, 109, 135, 137–40 German-Jewish intellectuals and, 113 influences, 444–45n57 Lvov (Lemberg), 66 Palestine, 392, 394, 397–98 Sefer Ha-ma‘asim, 139 Sefer Hasidut (Corpus Hasidicum), 305, 457n92 Tishrei, 227–35, 444n55 Ve-haya he‘akov le-mishor, 137 agricultural colonies, 449n59 Agunot, 137

Ahad Ha‘am, 13, 43–45, 77, 282 Ahava (“Love”), 199–202, 440–41n43, 441n47 Ahiasaf (publishing house), 49 Albatros (periodical), 118–20, 119 Al chezion ha-shmad (“On the Specter of Shmad”), 328 Al ha-ecstasa ha-religiousit ba-siporim (“On Religious Ecstasy in Prose Fiction”), 325 alienation (theme), 107. See also flâneur (wanderer-observer); marginalization in the city, 32, 80, 143, 309 immigrants, feelings of, 69, 83–84 from tradition, 338. See also faith, loss of Andreyev, Leonid, 11, 159–60, 420n14, 439n23 Altenberg, Peter, 89–90 Alter, Robert, 31, 309–10 Alterman, Natan, 396–97, 400 Alterman, Yitzhak, 56, 58 Altvarg (“Old Age”), 136 androgyny. See also masculine identity/ masculinity; sexuality and gender in literature, 161, 163–64, 182–83, 196, 221 New Woman and, 238, 245 angels, 364–65, 467n9 anti-Semitism attempts to defend against, 416n4 Russian, 55, 58 Appelfeld, Aharon, 333 Arbel, Michal, 234–35 Ardis, Ann, 237

473

474

Index Arieli, Levi Aryeh, 179–84, 394 Arkaden Café, 91, 421n17 Aryanness, 166 Aryeh ba‘al guf (“Brawny Aryeh”), 168–69 Atlas of Literature, The, 36 Atlas of the European Novel, 36 autoeroticism, 210–11, 443n20 Aylonit/Ilonit (fictional character), 233–34, 446n72 Ba‘al Shem-Tov, 290, 294–96, 331–32, 370– 71. See also Hasidism Babel, Isaac, 45 Ba-choref (In Winter), 173–79, 243–45 Bader, Gershon, 65 Ba-ganim (“In Gardens”), 192–99, 439nn22–23 Bakon, Yitzhak, 294, 334, 362, 368 Ba-matzor u-va-matzok (“In Siege and Distress”), 95–97, 422n29 Barabash, Dina (fictional character), 249, 252–53 Baron, Dvora, 263–69, 306, 394 Bar-Tuvia (Shraga Feybush Frenkel), 242–43 Bashtanes/Bashtanim (“Watermelon Fields”), 257–63, 449n58 Bar-Yosef, Hamutal, 17, 19 Baumgarten, Murray, 32–33 Be-chevion ha-neshama (“In the Hiding Place of the Soul”), 321–22 “Beginnings and Endings” (Techilat devarim acharonim), 326 “Be-katzvey ha-krach” (“At the Edges of the Metropolis”), 74 Belarus. See Homel Bely, Andrei, 98, 309–10, 353, 466n40 Beller, Steven, 91 Ben Avigdor (Avraham Leib Shalkovitz), 49–50 Ben Amos, Dan, 284 Ben-Gavriel, Moshe Ya‘akov. See Hoeflich, Eugen Benjamin, Walter, 99 Benn, Gottfried, 112 Ben-Yitzhak (Sonne), Avraham, 66, 70, 89, 91

Berdichevsky, Micha Yosef, 45, 108–9, 303–4, 457n103 Hasidism and, 290–97, 455n64 influence of, 171–72, 174 Machanaim, 171–72 Me-ever la-nahar, 338 Me-otzar Ha-aggadah, 283–85, 297 Mi-mekor Yisrael, 283, 285 Ner la-ma’or, 295–96 Nishmat Hasidim, 292–94, 455n65 Para aduma, 288 reinvention of Jewish culture and, 277, 282–86, 288 Sefer Hasidim, 291–96 Shne olamot, 295 Tzfunot ve-aggadot, 283 Urva parach, 171 view of Brenner, 329 Bergelson, Dovid, 135–37, 253–54 Berkovitz, Yitzhak Dov, 39, 169–70 Berlin, 36, 105–43. See also café culture (artistic and literary); Yiddish literature and writers bridge motif and, 132, 428n69 cultural role of, 105–7, 109, 115–16 Jewish lending library, 111 Jewish publishers and publishing, 110–11 portrayal in literature, 125–40 Bernheimer, Charles, 163, 226 Be-terem (Beforehand), 247–49, 348–60 Be-vaiyat zar (“In a Strange House”), 199 Be-vet saba (“In Grandfather’s House”), 376–88, 468–69n32 Beynota'im (In Between), 192 Be-zohorey drachim (“In Splendor of the Roads”), 127–29 Bialik, Chaim Nachman, 42–46, 168–69, 303–4, 457n103 Aryeh ba‘al guf , 168–69 Berlin and, 110, 116–17 Hebrew poetry, 286–87 Le-kinusa shel ha-aggadah, 279–80 reinvention of Jewish culture and, 277– 81, 286–88 Sefer Ha-aggadah, 278–81, 286 Bible, the, 275–76, 324, 451n3

Index Biblioteka ivrit (The Hebrew Library), 49 “Big Nose” (fictional character), 193–99 Bi-yemot ha-milchama. See Ad Hena (To This Day) Blumin, Hava (fictional character), 218–24, 245 bonding. See homosocial bonds Burovsky, Colonel and Bronislava (fictional characters), 180–81 Borsif, Alexander (fictional character), 175–78 Bradbury, Malcolm, 30, 36, 76, 205 Braudes, Reuven Asher, 45 Brenner, Yosef Chaim, 3–5, 14–16, 147, 203, 305, 407n4 Al chezion ha-shmad , 328 Ba-choref, 173–79, 243–45 Europe and Palestine, 393–94 Hasidism and, 331–36 Ha-tipa, 79–80 Homel and, 56, 416–17n9 influence of, 68, 70, 170 Jewish culture and Judaism, view of, 328–29, 462n93 London and, 77–86 Me-ever la-gevulin, 381–84 Min ha-meitzar, 80–85, 384–88 Mi-saviv la-nekuda, 58–63, 216–25, 360–75 religiosity and mysticism, 328–36, 360–75, 462–63n94 “The Meaning of Hasidism and Its Echoes in Modern Hebrew Literature,” 334, 403–6, 463n108 Wilde, Oscar and, 148–49, 430n4 Zeitlin, Hillel and, 317–19 Breuer, Joseph, 238 bridge motif, 132, 362, 428n69 Brooker, Peter, 31, 36 Buber, Martin, 137–38, 275, 316 Bund (the) and Bundism, 56

Tel Aviv, 401 Vienna, 90–93, 92, 95–96, 101–3 Café des Westens, 120–21, 123 Café Herrenhof, 101–2 “Café Megalomania.” See Romanisches Café Café Monopol, 120, 123 Café Rakhmonishes. See Romanisches Café Carmel, Gavriel (fictional character), 212, 214–15 castration anxiety, 232, 445n71 chachmey Odessa (sages of Odessa), 42–45, 43 Chalom leyl choref (“A Winter’s Night Dream”), 127–28 Chana-Chaya (fictional character), 258–62 Charlottenburg, 425–26n22 Charuzim ba-nechar (“Rhymes from Exile”), 133 Chasidish (Hasidut), 298 Chaye nisu'im (Married Life), 98–104 Chazkuny, Eliyahu (fictional character), 381–84 Chertov, David (fictional character), 94 Christian imagery, 356–57, 386. See also Jesus figures cities, 29–36. See also space, urban; under individual names frontier, 63 immigrants and, 32, 94–95 Jewish population, 54–55, 416n1 movement between, 11, 96, 422–23n33 portrayal in literature, 70–75, 79–85, 94–100, 423n40 coffeehouses. See café culture (artistic and literary) Cohen (fictional character), 230–31, 234 Crime and Punishment, 342–43, 362 crisis of faith. See faith, loss of crowd motif, 30

Café Abatzya, 68–69, 72 café culture (artistic and literary), 37, 73, 91, 96 Berlin, 120–25, 122 Leopoldstadt, 91–93, 103 Lvov (Lemberg), 68–69

Daily Crab, The (fictitious periodical), 80, 385–86 dandy motif, the, 148, 182–84, 437n57 Daniel (fictional character), 338–40 Davidovsky, Uriel (fictional character), 217–18, 364, 372

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476

Index death (theme), 130–31, 135, 345–46, 366–68 of God and religion, 131, 316 of nature, 341 Der Dichter und diese Zeit (“The Poet and This Age”), 310 Diesendruck, Zvi, 90 Divine, the. See also religious experience, quest for; Shekhina experience of, 312–13, 327, 343, 347–53, 372 immanence of, 354–55 partnership with, 335, 352 presence/absence of, 364–65 Döblin, Alfred, 114 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 342–43, 362 Dropkin, Celia (Levin), 253 Dr. Sonne. See Ben-Yitzhak, Avraham Dr. Weinstein (fictional character), 256–57 Dr. Winik (fictional character), 169–70 Dubnov, Simon, 289 Dvir publishing house, 110 Dvora be-shivya (“Deborah in Captivity”), 115, 124 East European Jews and Jewish life, 156–57. See also under individual cities in England, 76–78, 82–84 German Jews and, 112–16 portrayal in literature, 137–38 Efraim (fictional character), 192–99 Efros, Uriel (fictional character), 247–49, 348–60 Eima gdola ve-yare'ach (“Great Trembling and a Moon”), 129 Elijah (prophet), 383, 469n49 Eliot, T. S., 310 erotic desire femininity and feminization and, 250–53, 258–63 fetishism and fetishization and, 182, 201, 204, 221–22, 231, 233, 445n68 masculine identity/masculinity and, 173–84, 221–23, 226, 229–31 role of, 156–57 spiritual desire and, 341, 464n10

writing and, 205–7, 217–25, 227–30, 234–36, 266–68 erotic passivity, 210, 233 erotic triangulations, 185–89, 196–204, 210, 233–34, 264–66 Esther Hayut, 48 Etzel (Beside), 249–54 exile motif. See motifs, literary expressionism and expressionists, 116, 129 faith, loss of, 131, 308. See also religious experience, quest for Faris, Wendy, 311 father figures and fatherhood, 356, 373, 375–76, 380–84, 386–89. See also generational conflict and reunion; Oedipal schema; spiritual leaders Feierberg, Mordecai Ze’ev, 337–38 Feige (fictional character), 258, 260–61 Feirman, Yirmiah (fictional character), 173–79, 243–45 Feldman, Yael, 362 Felski, Rita, 163–64, 238 femininity and feminization, 166–67, 231, 239 erotic desire and, 250–53, 258–63 Zionism and Zionist ideology and, 246–47 fetishism and fetishization, 230–31, 233, 445n68. See also voyeurism of erotic desire, 184, 201, 204, 221–22 fiction and, 162–64, 177–81, 434n63. See also fragmentation of national-Zionist work, 190–91 feuilleton (literary-journalistic form), 80 Fichman, Ya‘acov, 42–44, 51 fiction, Hebrew. See Hebrew fiction fiction, modernist, 98–104. See also Hebrew fiction; Yiddish fiction fiction, Yiddish. See Yiddish fiction Fidler, Lyova Issakovna (fictional character), 255–57 Finberg, Rachel (fictional character), 264 flânerie (wandering), 99–100 flâneur (wanderer-observer), 30, 80, 99– 103, 130, 400

Index Fletcher, John, 205 Fogel, David, 5–7, 6, 407–8n11 Chaye nisu'im, 98–104 poetry, 97–98 folk (the) and folklore, 109, 276–77, 283–84, 289, 454n46. See also narodnitzstvo movement Forel, Auguste, 230, 445n66 Foucault, Michel, 163 fragmentation, 15–16, 81–82, 164, 420n14, 420n22. See also fetishism and fetishization; voyeurism Frenkel, Shlomo (fictional character), 60, 369–70 Frenkel, Shraga Feybush. See Bar-Tuvia Freud, Sigmund castration anxiety, 232, 445n71 fetishism and fetishization, 445n68 Oedipal schema, 186. See also Oedipal schema Studies on Hysteria, 238 sublimation, 225–26 Fridin, David (fictional character), 188–92, 245–46 Friedman, Susan Stanford. See StanfordFriedman, Susan Frishman, David, 49–50, 149 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 271–72, 286 Galicia and Galizianers, 63–64, 67–68, 418n34 Gavriel (fictional character), 338 Gay, Peter, 107 gender and sexuality. See sexuality and gender generational conflict and reunion, 337–39, 344–47. See also father figures and fatherhood; Oedipal schema German Jews and East European Jews, 112–16 Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). See Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter) Gvulot (“Borders”) (periodical), 90 Gimpel, Ya‘akov Ber, 65

Ginsberg, Asher. See Ahad Ha‘am Gippius, Zinaida, 161, 187, 315 Girard, René, 185–86 Gittel (fictional character), 344–47 Givat ha-chol (“The Hill of Sand”). See Tishrei [story] “Glida” (“Ice Cream”), 73, 199 Gluzman, Michael, 157–58 Gnessin, Menachem, 415n30 Gnessin, Uri Nissan, 3–4, 58–59, 208, 375–88 Ba-ganim (“In Gardens”), 192–99, 439n22–23 Be-terem, 247–49, 348–60 Be-vet saba, 376–88, 468–69n32 Beynota'im, 192 Etzel, 249–54 Ha-tzida, 192, 207–16 Jenya, 245–46 religious experience, quest for, 326–28, 353–59 Se‘uda mafseket, 344–47 themes and motifs, 188–99, 207–8, 344– 50, 438n10 Tzilelei ha-chayim, 188 Warsaw, 52 Goldberg, Lea, 400 Gomel. See Homel Good in the Teaching of Count Tolstoy and Nietzsche, The, 314 “grandsons” in Hasidism, 377 Greenberg, Uri Zvi, 70, 119–20, 124, 391, 399–400 Dvora be-shivya, 115, 124 Eima gdola ve-yare'ach, 129 Europe and Palestine, 132, 470n2 Hakarat ha-yeshut, 129–32 influence of Berlin, 132 Lasker-Schüler, Else and, 114–15, 124 poemas, 129–32 Yerushalaym shel mata, 132 Gregorovitch, Yevsi. See Mr. Shalshelet (fictional character) Gurdweill, Rudolf (fictional character), 98–104, 423–24n45

477

478

Index Ha-‘ardal (“The Sandal”), 338–40 Ha-charishi (“Be Silent”), 255, 448n52, 449n57 Ha-chetz (periodical), 299 Ha-dor (periodical), 49–50 Hagzar, Nahum (fictional character), 207–16, 442n9 Ha-isha ha-mishtacherert be-sifrutenu (“The Emancipating Woman in Our Literature”), 241–42 Hakarat ha-yeshut (“The Knowledge of Being”), 129–32 Halkin, Shimon, 170–71 Halpern, Yehiel, 56 Ha-me‘orer (periodical), 78–79, 147–48, 330–31, 419n10 Hanin, Yona (fictional character), 340–43 Ha-ofot ve ha-gvilim (“The Birds and the Scrolls”), 301–2 Harshav (Hrushovski), Benjamin, 10, 20 Harvey, David, 29, 37 Ha-shiloah (periodical), 43, 67, 78 hasidic literature. See Hasidism; postbiblical literature Hasidism, 288–90, 331–36. See also Ba‘al Shem-Tov; Mishnat Hasidim (“The Teaching of Hasidim”); Sefer Hasidim (The Book of Hasidim); Sefer Hasidut (Corpus Hasidicum) Homel and, 54, 56 kabbalistic concepts and, 354–55 Lvov (Lemberg) and, 64 stories and storytelling, 290, 301 Yiddish literature and, 298 haskalah (the) and maskilim, 64, 88, 275, 289 Ha-tipa (“The Drop”), 79–80 Ha-tov ve ha-ra (Good and Evil), 319–20 Ha-tzfira (periodical), 78 Ha-tzida (Sideways), 192, 207–16 Hayut, Yael (fictional character), 229–35 Hazaz, Chaim, 471n17 Ha-zeman (periodical), 78 He-‘atid (periodical), 108 Hebraism and Hebrew education/ educators, 56–58, 108

Hebrew fiction, 155–59, 306, 424n56. See also Hebrew literature and writers; under individual titles and writers autobiographical aspects, 205 “new modernists,” 397–98, 471n17 Hebrew language, 323–24, 327–28, 330 Hebrew literature and writers, 12–15, 89, 269–70, 306, 408n12 autobiographical aspects, 205–7 centers of, 34, 63, 141. See also under individual cities development of, 20–22 Europe and, 7–9, 17–19, 37–39, 150, 391, 394, 400–401 history and geography of, 24, 34–35 Palestine and, 391–94, 400 readership and, 413n22 religious faith and traditions and, 307–8, 316–17, 323–24, 348–50, 458n9 Hebrew poetry, 12, 14–19, 396–98. See also poemas [long narrative poems]; poems, narrative; sonnets Hebrew publishers and publishing. See Jewish publishers and publishing Heilige, Das, 312, 322 Hemdat. See Na‘aman (fictional character) hermaphroditism. See sexuality and gender Hibbat-Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement, 42 Hoeflich, Eugen, 89 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 309–10 Holtzman, Avner, 109, 282 home space and (concept of), 62–63 yearning for/substitution for, 102, 423n34 Homel, 36–37, 54–63, 55 Hasidism and, 54, 56 Hebraism and Hebrew education/ educators, 56–58 Hebrew literature and writers and, 63 Jewish culture and political life, 55–58 pogrom, 55, 58 representations in fiction, 59–63, 217–18 Zionism and, 56, 58–59

Index homoeroticism, 161, 436–37n47, 438n1 homosexuality. See homoeroticism homosocial bonds, 4, 180, 184–204, 212. See also homoeroticism homosocial desire, 185–87, 190–204, 210, 233, 260–62 homosocial/homosexual binary, 204 Hurwitz, Shay Ish, 108 Huyssen, Andreas, 10 Hyman, Paula, 240 identity, 1–3 Jewish, 172, 179–84, 204 masculine. See masculine identity/ masculinity sexual. See sexuality and gender Ilonit. See Aylonit/Ilonit (fictional character) imagery. See also motifs, literary Christian, 356–57, 386–87 Jewish, 340 mirror, 15–16 Imber, Shmuel Ya‘acov, 67 “Imitations of the Koran,” 342–43 immigrants and immigration, 32 alienation and marginalization of, 69, 83–84, 104 in Germany, 111–12, 425–26n22 Russian-Jewish, 70–72 insane artist and insanity (themes), 97, 224–25, 228, 372–73 inside/outside, concept of. See space, private/public; space, urban: psychological aspects intellectual centers, 88–89. See also literary centers Berlin, 105–6, 109, 112, 115–16 Vienna, 87 intellectuals, German-Jewish, 113–14 International Conference of Hebrew Language and Culture, 108 intertexuality, 247 Hebrew and European texts, 362–64 Hebrew literature and Jewish texts, 190, 323–24, 343–44, 355, 465n23, 465n37, 466n41 Hebrew literature and Russian texts, 342–43, 464n17

Isaakovna, Yeva. See Blumin, Hava (fictional character) Itzkovitz, Chaim, 66 James, William, 311–13 Jenya, 188–92, 245–46, 438n13 Jesus figures, 357, 383, 387. See also Christian imagery Jewish culture, 272–73, 328–29, 462n93. See also café culture (artistic and literary); under various literature entries Homel, 55–58 Lvov (Lemberg), 63–67 reinvention of, 276–88, 290 Jewish education/educational institutions, 328–29. See also Hebraism and Hebrew education/educators Jewish lending library (Berlin), 111 Jewish literature and writers, 89, 421n7. See also Hebrew literature and writers; Russian-Jewish writers; Yiddish literature and writers café culture (artistic and literary), 90–91 rift between Galizianer and Russian writers, 67–68, 418n34 Jewish publishers and publishing, 35, 53, 415–16n33 Berlin, 110–11 London, 77–79 Lvov (Lemberg), 65–67, 70 Odessa, 43 Vienna, 88 Warsaw, 49–53 Johnston, William, 90 Jonah (prophet/book of), 343–44 journals. See periodicals, Hebrew and Yiddish Jung, Carl, 380 Kaffeehäuser (coffeehouses). See café culture (artistic and literary) Kafka, Franz, 309 Kagan, Zipora, 284 kapparot ritual, 338–40 Keshet, Yeshurun, 105–6, 124 kinus (ingathering), 279

479

480

Index Kitzo shel Sender Ziv (“The End of Sender Ziv”), 264, 450n78 Klausner, Yosef, 43, 411n46 Kleinman, Moshe, 65–66, 68–69 Kna‘ani, David, 52 Kol ha-damim (“The Voice of the Bloods”), 94–95 Kopelovitz, Ya‘acov. See Keshet, Yeshurun Krasztev, Peter, 271 Kratova (fictional character), 255–56 Kreitserova sonata (The Kreutzer Sonata), 186–87, 438n6 Kronfeld, Chana, 396 Krutikov, Mikhail, 88, 253–54 Kulbak, Moyshe, 428n71 Kurzweil, Baruch, 306, 458n9, 462–63n94 Lachover, Pinchas, 15–16 Laqueur, Walter, 116, 121–22 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 114, 124 Le’an (Whither?), 337–38 Le-kinusa shel ha-aggadah (“The Ingathering of Aggadah”), 279–80 Lemberg. See Lvov (Lemberg) Leopoldstadt (Vienna), 91–93, 103–4 Le-or ha-venus (In the Light of the Venus), 179–84 Lerner (fictional character), 189–92 Lewis, Pericles, 310–11 leyt atar panui miney (“there is no place without it”). See Divine, the Lifnei aron ha-sefarim (“Before the Bookcase”), 286–87 Lifnei ha-sha‘ar ha-afel (“Before the Dark Gate”), 98 Lifshitz, Feigl (fictional character), 199 Lilienblum, Moshe Leib, 332 literary centers, 34, 39–53, 141. See also intellectual centers Homel, 54–63 London, 77, 81–86 Lvov (Lemberg), 63–75 Odessa, 39–48, 53 Warsaw, 48–53 literary forms, miniature, 15–16 literary history, 24, 34–35

literary motifs. See motifs, literary literature, Hebrew. See Hebrew literature and writers literature, Yiddish. See Yiddish literature and writers Lombroso, Cesare, 167, 238, 437n61 London, 36, 38, 76–86 East End, 76, 81–84 Jewish publishing and, 77–79 portrayal in literature, 79–84, 384 Lubavitz movement (Hasidic), 54, 56 L'viv. See Lvov (Lemberg) Lvov (Lemberg), 36–37, 63–75, 65. See also café culture (artistic and literary) educational institutions, 64–65, 67 Hasidism and, 64 Jewish culture and political life, 63–67 Jewish publishing and, 65–67, 70 portrayal in literature, 70–75 Zionism and, 64–65 Lwów. See Lvov (Lemberg) Machanaim (Between Two Camps), 171–72 Maharshak, Yochanan (fictional character), 381–84 male bonding. See homosocial bonds Mandelstam, Osip, 275, 285 Mando (fictional character), 96–97 Mao, Douglas, 21 marginalization, 29 immigrants and, 69, 83–84, 104 Jewish writers and, 37, 92–93 Margolis, Efraim (fictional character), 249–52 Marianna (fictional character), 260–61 Markish, Peretz, 399–400 Marmor, Kalman, 77 masculine desire. See erotic desire masculine identity/masculinity, 165–74, 204, 436n46 erotic desire and, 173–84, 221–23, 226, 229–31 Jewish, 184 maskilim. See haskalah (the) and maskilim Matich, Olga, 160, 187

Index Mazzesinsel (Matzo Island). See Leopoldstadt McFarlane, James, 30, 36 “Meaning of Hasidism and Its Echoes in Modern Hebrew Literature, The” (Di bedeytung fun Hasidism in yudentum un zayn obklung in der moderner hebreisher literatur), 334, 403–6, 463n108 Meaning of Love, The, 161, 221 Me-ever la-gvulin (Beyond the Borders), 381–84 Me-ever la-nahar (“Beyond the River”), 338 Me-idach gisa (“On the Other Side”), 70–72 Mendele Moycher Sforim. See Abramovitz, Sholem Yankev (Mendele Moycher Sforim) Mendil (fictional character), 260–61 Menuhin, Avraham (fictional character), 82–85, 385–88 Me-otzar Ha-aggadah (From the Treasure of Aggadah), 283–85, 297 metropolis, the. See cities; space, urban Mili (fictional character), 248–49, 350 Mi-mekor Yisrael (From the Source of Israel), 283, 285 mimetic verisimilitude. See realism, literary Min ha-meitzar (Out of the Depths), 80–85, 384–88 Mintz, Alan, 171, 176 Miron, Dan, 43, 132, 140, 171, 214, 287, 328, 345, 353 Mi-saviv la-nekuda (Around the Point), 58–63, 216–25 narrative structure, 360–65, 367–68, 374–75 religious texts/motifs and, 361–74 Mishnat Hasidim (“The Teaching of Hasidim”), 299–301 misogyny, 238 Mitoch shi‘amum ve-ga‘aguim (“Out of Boredom and Longing”), 255–57, 448n52 Moderna group. See Yachdav (Moderna group) modernism, 9–12, 15–17, 37, 87–88 autobiographical aspects, 205 influence of, 89

literary centers and, 67 nationalism and, 409n29 religious faith and, 271–74, 308–12 transnational quality of, 11, 21–22, 36–38, 395–96 modernism, European, 8, 21–22, 25, 154 Hebrew modernism and, 24–25, 33–36, 98, 142, 150–51 influence of, 391 religious faith and, 308–12 symbolism and, 348 modernism, Hebrew, 18–25, 291, 395 Berlin, 108 Europe and, 33–36, 98, 141–42, 150–51 Lvov (Lemberg), 69 modernism, Russian, 11–12, 186–87 modernism, Yiddish, 109–10 Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 36 modernity (theories), 239–40 Moiseyevna, Rahil (fictional character), 173–78, 245 Mordechai Ben Hillel Ha-Cohen, 55–56 Moretti, Franco, 36 Moriah (publishing house), 43 Moseley, Marcus, 288 Mosse, Geroge, 165 motifs, literary. See also themes and motifs bridges, 132, 362, 428n69 the crowd, 30 the dandy, 148, 182–84, 437n57re exile, 11, 16, 31–32re paralysis, 226–29 patriarchs. See patriarch motif reveries, 342, 350, 373, 464n12 stranger in the city, 31–32, 94–95, 143, 422n23 “tear in the heart.” See “tear in the heart” motif Mr. Shalshelet (fictional character), 348–50 mysterium tremendum (awful mystery), 312, 350–55, 372, 378 mysticism and mystical literature, 314–16. See also Brenner, Yosef Chaim; Hebrew literature and writers; post-biblical literature

481

482

Index Na‘aman (fictional character), 228 Nachman (fictional character), 337–38 Nachman of Bratzlav, 301–3, 319 narodnitzstvo movement, 277, 289, 451n3. See also folk (the) and folklore Nathan of Nemirov. See Steinhartz, Nathan (R. Nathan of Nemirov) nationalism, 56–57, 157, 189, 409n29. See also Zionism and Zionist ideology national romanticism, 276–77 Ner la-ma’or (“A Candle for Light”), 295–96 Nesher, Hana Wirth. See Wirth-Nesher, Hana Netivot (periodical), 108, 126–27 New Hebrew Man, 157, 393–94. See also masculine identity/masculinity New Jewish Woman. See women, Jewish: emancipation and newspapers. See periodicals, Hebrew and Yiddish New Woman, the, 237–38, 240, 244–45, 446n2. See also women, Jewish Nietzsche, Friedrich, 163, 305, 314–16, 320–21. See also death (theme): of God and religion Nishmat Hasidim (“The Soul of Hasidim”), 292–94, 455n65. See also Hasidism Nisyonot (Hebrew imprint), 79 Noach (fictional character), 344–47 Nomberg, Hersh Dovid, 253–57 Ha-charishi, 255, 448n52, 449n57 Mitoch shi‘amum ve-ga‘aguim, 255–57, 448n52 Warsaw, 52 novellas, episodic, 74 novels, Hebrew. See Hebrew fiction novels, urban. See Hebrew literature and writers novels, Yiddish. See Yiddish fiction numinous, the, 312–13, 322, 325–26, 333, 347, 351–54. See also divine: experience of; mysterium tremendum (awful mystery) nusach style, 324. See also Odessa nusach (Odessa style)

Obedman, Rachel. See Moiseyevna, Rahil (fictional character) Obskurov, Moshe (fictional character), 199–202 Odessa, 36, 39–48, 41 Hebrew literature and, 46–48 Jewish population and literary figures, 40–42 Jewish publishers and publishing, 43 sages. See chachmey Odessa (sages of Odessa) Odessa nusach (Odessa style), 42–45 Oedipal schema, 174, 186, 389 Opatoshu, Yosef, 253–54 Ostjuden. See East European Jews and Jewish life Otto, Rudolf, 312–13, 322, 333, 351 Palestine, 391–94, 400. See also under names of individual writers Para aduma (“The Red Heifer”), 288 paralysis motif, 226–29 parenthood. See father figures and fatherhood Parush, Iris, 241 Pascal, Roy, 309 patriarch motif Abraham, 82, 385–87 Jacob, 365, 368 Pavlovna, Yevgenia [Jenya] (fictional character), 188–92 Paytelson, Menachem Mendl, 241–42 penny books, 49 pensions. See rooming houses (pensions) Peret (periodical), 90 Peretz, Y. L., 49, 303–4, 457n103 Chasidish , 298 Ha-'ofot ve ha-gvilim, 301–2 Hasidism and, 297–303 influence of, 298, 455n64, 456n88 Mishnat Hasidim, 299–301 reinvention of Jewish culture and, 277 periodicals, Hebrew and Yiddish, 90. See also under individual names Perrot, Michelle, 237 Pick, Shlomo (fictional character), 97

Index Pike, Burton, 30 plagiarism and appropriation, 253 poemas [long narrative poems], 126–32, 427n56 Greenberg, 129–32 Shimonovitz, 126–29 Shteinberg, 133–35 poems narrative, 126–29 sonnets, 124, 133–35 poet-pioneers, 398–99 poetry, Hebrew. See Hebrew poetry pogroms. See anti-Semitism Polish culture, 64 positivism, 45. See also rationalism post-biblical literature, 276, 278–80. See also intertexuality; religious texts Pozdnyshev (fictional character), 186–87 pre-modernism, 19 psycho-sexuality, pre-Freudian conceptions, 433n42 publishing, Hebrew. See Jewish publishers and publishing Pushkin, Alexander, 342–43 rabbinic literature. See post-biblical literature Rabinovitsh, Sh. Y. See Sholem Aleichem (Sh. Y. Rabinovitsh) Rabinovitz, Ya‘acov, 48 R. Asher (fictional character), 377–80 Raskolnikov (fictional character), 342–43 rationalism, 316–17, 327, 332–33. See also positivism Ravitch, Melech, 68, 125, 421n7 Ravnitzky, Yehoshua Ch., 42–43, 278, 281, 285 Rawidowicz, Shimon, 116–17 realism, literary, 13–16, 19, 45–46, 409n26. See also symbolist language and symbolists realism, symbolic, 394 religion, institutionalized, 333, 351 religious experience, quest for, 324–28, 338–40, 343, 353–59, 368–75. See also Varieties of Religious Experience, The religious faith, loss of. See faith, loss of

religious faith and traditions. See also religious experience, quest for Hebrew literature and writers and, 307– 8, 316–17, 323–24, 348–50, 458n9 modernism and, 271–74, 308–12 Russian symbolists and, 314–15 religious guidance. See spiritual guidance religious texts, 368–71. See also post-biblical literature revelation (theme), 381–86 reveries motif, 342, 350, 373, 464n12 revival or renaissance literature. See sifrut ha-techiya (literature of revival or renaissance) Revivim (periodical), 70 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 309 Rimon/Milgroym (periodical), 117–18 rivalry. See erotic triangulations Robertson, Ritchie, 167 Romanisches Café, 121–25, 122 rooming houses (pensions), 136–37 Roth, Joseph, 114 Ruchama (fictional character), 250, 252 rupture and upheaval, 9–10. See also fragmentation; “tear in the heart” motif; World War I Berlin, 107–8 Eastern and Central Europe, 88–89 modernism and, 15–17 Russian-Jewish writers influence of, 68–71, 418n36 Shestov, Lev, 314–15, 320–21, 326 Russian symbolists, 160, 164, 187 influence of, 179, 221, 353, 400 influence of Wilde, 154 religious faith and traditions and, 313–15 sacred, the. See religious faith and traditions sacred space and sacred aspects, 364–65, 368 Sadan, Dov, 174, 217, 380–81 sages of Odessa. See chachmey Odessa (sages of Odessa) Salome (fictional character), 151, 153–54, 431n19, 432n25 Salome (play), 147–54 Scheunenviertel (Berlin), 112

483

484

Index Schmidt, Yosef (fictional character), 199–202 Scholem, Gerhard (Gershom), 113, 137–38, 309 Schor, Naomi, 163 Schüler, Else Lasker. See Lasker-Schüler, Else science and technology, 131 scopophilia. See voyeurism secularization, 272–73, 307–8 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 185–86, 203–4 Sefer Ha-aggadah, 278–81, 286 Sefer Ha-ma‘asim (“The Book of Deeds”), 139 Sefer Hasidim (The Book of Hasidim), 291–96 Sefer Hasidut (Corpus Hasidicum), 305, 457n2 Segal, Harold, 91 Seidman, Naomi, 156–57 senex. See wise “old” man protagonist Se‘uda mafseket, (“The Meal before the Fast”), 344–47 Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter), 166–67 sexual desire. See erotic desire sexuality and gender, 23, 75, 166, 418–19n51, 432n31. See also femininity and feminization; masculine identity/ masculinity fiction and, 155–59, 185–86, 251–53, 266– 68, 438n5 haskalah writers, 155–56 Jewishness and, 162, 434n54 role confusion, 244–45, 446n2 Russian attitude toward, 160–61 Shaked, Gershon, 17–19, 33, 74 Shalechet (periodical), 70–71 Shalkovitch, Avraham Leib. See Ben Avigdor Shalshelet. See Mr. Shalshelet (fictional character) Shavit, Zohar, 33 Shekhina, 354, 364–67. See also Divine, the Sheppard, Richard, 9–10, 308 Shestov, Lev, 314–15 “Beginnings and Endings,” 326

Good in the Teaching of Count Tolstoy and Nietzsche, The, 314 influence of, 326 influence on Hillel Zeitlin, 320–21 Shimonovitz (Shimoni), David, 108, 126–29 Shlomit. See Salome (fictional character) Shlonsky, Avraham, 396–401 Shmuel (fictional character), 375–88 Shne olamot (“Two Worlds”), 295 Shofman, Gershon, 1–3, 2, 57–59, 69–70, 89–90, 203 Ahava, 199–202, 440–41n43, 441n47 Al ha-ecstasa ha-religiousit ba-siporim, 325 Ba-matzor u'va-matzok, 95–97, 422n29 “Be-katzvey ha-krach,” 74 Be-vaiyat zar, 199 “Glida,” 73, 199 Ha-ardal, 338–40 Kol ha-damim, 94–95 Me-idach gisa, 70–72 religious experience, quest for, 324–26, 338–40, 343 short stories (Homel and Lvov), 59, 70–75, 199 short stories (Vienna), 93–97, 423n36 Sof sof, 94 Warsaw, 52–53 Sholem (fictional character), 259 Sholem Aleichem (Sh. Y. Rabinovitsh), 47 Showalter, Elaine, 154, 238, 269 Shteinberg, Ya‘acov, 124 Bashtanes/Bashtanim, 257–63, 449n58 Charuzim ba-nechar, 133 influence of Berlin, 132–35 poemas and sonnets, 124, 133–35 Sonetot m-beit ha-kafe, 133–34 women protagonists and, 253–54 Shteinman, Eliezer, 48, 52–53, 306, 397 Shtey ha-ketzavot (The Two Extremes), 45 Shtybel, A.Y. (publisher), 110 Shvartzman, Yehuda Leib. See Shestov, Lev sifrey agora (penny books), 49 sifrut ha-techiya (literature of revival or renaissance), 19, 411n46 Simmel, Georg, 30, 82, 239–40, 316

Index Sipurei ha-Besht (The Tales of the Besht). See Sefer Hasidut (Corpus Hasidicum) Skhor-skhor (Around and Around), 52–53 Snunit (periodical), 70 Sof sof (“At Last”), 94 Soja, Edward,29, 37 Solovyov, Vladimir, 161–62, 221, 313–14 Sonetot mi-beit ha-kafe (“Sonnets of the Café”), 133–34 Sonne, Dr. See Ben-Yitzhak (Sonne), Avraham sonnets, 124, 133–35 Sonya (fictional characters), 256, 362, 367 space, concept of, 29, 62–63 space, private/public, 132 café culture (artistic and literary) and, 96, 102 fusion of, 62–63, 73–74 space, sacred. See sacred space and sacred aspects space, urban, 27, 29–30, 106–7. See also cities portrayal in literature, 59–63, 98–101, 133–36, 143 psychological aspects, 31, 96, 132 spiritual desire, 341, 464n10 spiritual guidance, 375–88 spiritual leaders, 360–90. See also Ba‘al Shem-Tov; father figures and fatherhood; Nachman of Bratzlav; tzadik (spiritual leader) Stanford-Friedman, Susan, 10 Steinhartz, Nathan (R. Nathan of Nemirov), 290 Stencl, Avrom N., 124 stranger in the city motif, 31–32, 94–95, 143, 422n23 Studies on Hysteria, 238 sublimation, 225–26 suicide trope (symbolic), 361–64, 367–69, 372 Suli (fictional character), 193, 195–98 symbolist language and symbolists, 154, 314–16, 348. See also Russian symbolists Tagenblat (periodical), 69 Taler, Hava (fictional character), 80, 83, 386

Taler, Haya-Rachel (fictional character), 84 “Talush” (story), 169–70 talush (uprooted), the, 169–74 “tear in the heart” motif, 282, 288, 297, 358 Tel Aviv, 401 texts, traditional. See post-biblical literature Thacker, Andrew, 36 theater, Yiddish, 65 The Letter of Lord Chandos, 309 themes and motifs. See also motifs, literary alienation. See alienation (theme) death. See death (theme) insane artist and insanity, 97, 224–25, 228, 372–73 revelation, 381–86 “tear in the heart.” See “tear in the heart” motif vision, search for, 352–53, 385–87. See also revelation (theme) writing (act of). See writing, act of Yom Kippur, 337–50 thirdspace. See café culture (artistic and literary); rooming houses (pensions) Tishrei [story], 227–35, 444n55 tlishut (uprootedness), 169–73 Toews, John, 167 Tolstoy, Lev, 186–87, 325, 438n6 translations, 149–50, 153 transnational modernism. See modernism: transnational quality of triangles, erotic. See erotic triangulations Trukhachevsky (fictional character), 187 Tushiya (publishing house), 49 tzadik (spiritual leader), 299–302, 334–35, 383–84 tzadik nistar (hidden righteous person), 295–96, 381–83 Tzfunot ve-aggadot, 283 Tzilelei ha-chayim (The Shadows of Life), 188 Tzima'on (Thirst), 320–21 Tzvishen emigraten (“Among Refugees”), 136–37 Tzvishen gertener. See Ba-ganim (“In Gardens”) University of Lvov, 64–65

485

486

Index upheaval. See rupture and upheaval urban experience. See cities; space, urban Urva parach (A Raven Flies), 171 Varieties of Religious Experience, The, 311–12 Vasliyevna, Irena (fictional character), 247, 350, 354 Ve-haya he‘akov le-mishor (“And the Crooked Shall Become Straight”), 137 Vienna, 36, 38, 87–104. See also café culture (artistic and literary) Jewish immigrants and, 88–89, 91, 93 Jewish publishers and publishing, 88–90 modernism and, 87–88, 90 portrayal in literature, 93–96, 98–101 Vilna, 207, 209, 212–15 violence, against Jews. See anti-Semitism virility. See masculine identity/masculinity vision, search for (theme), 352–53, 385–87. See also mysticism and mystical literature; religious experience, quest for; revelation (theme) visuality. See voyeurism von Takow, Thea (fictional character), 98–99, 103–4 voyeurism, 175–78, 184, 196–98, 201, 230– 33. See also erotic desire; fetishism and fetishization; fragmentation Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), 271 Walker, Steven, 311 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 21 wanderers, 53, 378, 400. See also flânerie (wandering); flâneur (wandererobserver) Warsaw, 4–5, 36, 39, 48–53 Jewish community, 48–49 Jewish publishing and, 49–53 portrayal in literature, 255–57 Weber, Max, 337 Weimar culture, 115–25 Weininger, Otto, 166–67, 239–40 Weinstein, Dr. See Dr. Weinstein (fictional character) Weitz, Eric, 107–8

Werses, Shmuel, 296 Whitechapel (London), 83 Wilde, Oscar, 147–55 Brenner and, 148–49, 430n4 influence on Russian symbolism, 154 translations of his works, 149–50, 153 Williams, Raymond, 31–32, 38 Winik, Dr. See Dr. Winik (fictional character) Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 62 wise “old” man protagonist, 357, 375–90, 466n51 Wisse, Ruth, 303 women, Jewish emancipation and, 240–42. See also New Woman, the portrayal in literature, 241–45, 249–66 professional struggles, 253 World War I. See also rupture and upheaval Hebrew writers and, 16–17, 90, 410n36 impact on Shofman’s stories, 97, 422n23 writers modernist. See under individual names; under various literature entries as protagonists, 205–7, 228–29 role of, 14–15 writing, act of, 205–7, 217–25, 227–30, 234–36, 266–68 Ya‘acov (Yankl) Perlgold (fictional character), 179–84 Yachdav (Moderna group), 399–400 Yekkes. See German Jews and East European Jews Yerushalaym shel mata (“The Earthly Jerusalem”), 132 yeshivot, 328–29 Yiddish fiction, 155, 253–54. See also under individual titles and writers Yiddish literature and writers, 135–37 Berlin, 109–10 Hasidism and, 298 influence of, 89 Lvov (Lemberg), 67 Warsaw, 51

Index Yom Kippur (theme), 337–50 Yona, 340–42 Yulia (fictional character), 200–202 Zalman (fictional character), 375–88 Zeitlin, Hillel, 57–58, 318, 322, 327, 416– 17n9 Be-chevion ha-neshama, 321–22 Brenner, Yosef Chaim and, 317–19 Ha-tov ve ha-ra, 79–80

influence of, 317–22 Tzima'on, 320–21 Zionism and Zionist ideology, 157–58 the Bible and, 275–76 femininity and feminization, 246–47 Homel and, 56, 58–59 literature and, 19, 33, 394–95, 398–400 Zipperstein, Steven, 40 Ziv, Sender (fictional character), 264 Zohar, Itamar Even, 394

487