Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism 2020021767, 2020021768, 9780253051981, 9780253052001, 9780253051998

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YIDDISH WRITERS IN

WEIMAR BERLIN

German Jewish Cultures Editorial Board: Matthew Handelman, Michigan State University Iris Idelson-Shein, Ben-Gurion University Samuel Spinner, Johns Hopkins University Joshua Teplitsky, Stony Brook University Kerry Wallach, Gettysburg College Sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute London

YIDDISH WRITERS IN

WEIMAR BERLIN A FUGITIVE MODERNISM k MARC CAPLAN

India na Universit y Pr ess

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.org © 2021 by Marc Caplan All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2021 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Caplan, Marc, author. Title: Yiddish writers in Weimar Berlin : a fugitive modernism / Marc  Caplan. Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2021. | Series:   German Jewish cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020021767 (print) | LCCN 2020021768 (ebook) | ISBN   9780253051981 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253052001 (paperback) | ISBN   9780253051998 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Yiddish literature—Germany—Berlin—History and criticism.   | Yiddish literature—20th century—History and criticism. |   Jews—Germany—Berlin—Intellectual life—20th century. | Modernism   (Literature)—Germany—History—20th century. Classification: LCC PJ5143 .C37 2021 (print) | LCC PJ5143 (ebook) | DDC  839/.100943115—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021767 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021768

Dedicated to refugees everywhere—wherever they come from and wherever they find themselves

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Weimar and Now  1

Part I . Spectral Empires: Landscapes, Nation-States, and the Homelessness of Weimar Modernism

1.  A Past Become Space: Alfred Döblin and Dovid Bergelson in Poland, the Soviet Union—and Berlin  41 2.      At the Crossroads of the Twentieth Century: Neue Sachlichkeit and Dovid Bergelson’s Berlin Stories  91

Part II. Melancholic Conspiracies: Masks, Masques, and Baroque Aesthetics in Yiddish and German Modernism

3.           Watch the Throne: The Baroque, the Gothic, and Symbolism in Der Nister’s Early Stories  147 4.       Harold Lloyd and the Hermit: Popular Culture, Gothic Aesthetics, and the End of Der Nister’s Symbolist Career  192

Part III. Apocalyptic Origins: The Politics of Nostalgia in German and Yiddish Modernism

5.          A rrested Development: Fragmentation, Apocalypse, and the Pursuit of Origins in Joseph Roth’s Representation of Eastern Europe  267 6.        Moyshe Kulbak’s Berlin Writings: Here, There, Everywhere (Nowhere)  303 Conclusion: Origin Is the Goal  340

Selected Bibliography  355 Index  371

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The vener able Reb Shmuel Yosef of Buczacz says, in the name of Reb Hemdat of Szybusz, “He who quotes a statement in the name of its author brings about Redemption to the world, but those who write many books and do not attribute their material to its originators delay Redemption.” As an author of books, accordingly, it is my pleasure to hasten the Redemption somewhat by acknowledging the many institutions, teachers, and loved ones who were instrumental in the construction and completion of this book. First and foremost, I wish to thank my publisher, Dee Mortensen, and my production editor, Ashante Thomas, for their expertise in shepherding this book into print. Thank you, additionally, to David Hulsey and Pete Feely for their help with the book design and copyediting of this volume. Thank you to my friends Sam Spinner and Kerry Wallach for sponsoring this title in their book series and for being such marvelous colleagues over the long years of our mutual and respective friendship. Thank you furthermore to the two anonymous reviewers who offered equal measures of encouragement and constructive criticism of my work to clarify and improve it—I hope I will have occasion to thank you both in person at some point in the future. Thank you to Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson for graciously providing ix

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a cover illustration that so magnificently articulates an aspect of this project that my words could not and for allowing me to connect the profound literary experiments of her great-grandfather Dovid Bergelson to the aesthetics of contemporary visual culture through her own Berlin-based work. I hope we will be able to meet in person sometime soon! Most of this book has been researched and written under circumstances of great duress and uncertainty, amounting to a functional homelessness for its author over long stretches of the process. What began as an academic study of Walter Benjamin’s critical theory has felt frequently like a process of replicating Benjamin’s years of wandering in search of employment, affiliation, and sanctuary. Everyone who contributed to this experience deserves my gratitude, commencing with the Academic Council at Johns Hopkins University, whose shortsightedness and heartless ignorance have provided my work with its sense of political urgency and its harrowing connection to the contemporary plight of refugees and displaced people—there’s a really great Cee Lo Green song that I’m eager to play for, and at, all of them. As arrogant, stupid, and petty as the larger bureaucracy at Johns Hopkins proved to be in judging my fate as well as the fate of too many of my colleagues from the same era, I owe immeasurable thanks to my friends and onetime coworkers there in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures as well as the Leonard and Helen R. Stuhlman Program in Jewish Studies. In particular I wish to thank Neta Stahl and Benyomin Moss, each in their capacity as director of the Jewish Studies Program, for inviting me to return to campus, present my work in progress, and participate as much as possible in the intellectual labor of their outstanding program. The Center for Jewish History in New York City provided me with a first safe haven after leaving Baltimore, as well as the world’s most outstanding archive for studying German Jewish and Yiddish culture simultaneously. In addition to the great

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colleagues with whom I worked there, special thanks are due to Christopher Barthel and Judith Siegel, who did so much to make my year there as a scholar-in-residence possible. Thereafter I had the joy and privilege to participate in the Frankel Center Colloquium on “Secularization and Sacralization” at the University of Michigan; in addition to the coterie of outstanding scholars I worked with there, I wish to thank Scott Spector for his brilliant and collegial leadership as well as his ongoing friendship and support for my work. At Yale University the following year, I was pleased to continue writing, teaching, and lecturing thanks to a visiting professorship in Jewish Studies, made possible by my friends Maurice Samuels, Hannan Hever, and Steven Fraade, as well as the support of the MacMillan Center for International Studies under the direction of my undergraduate professor Ian Shapiro. Since then I have been able to teach some of the works considered in this book in a seminar, taught in Yiddish, at the Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish Summer Program at Tel Aviv University. In addition to my students, colleagues, and marvelous staff there, I owe special thanks to my friend and mentor Hana Wirth-Nesher for her ceaseless support, enthusiasm, and sage advice. The final revision of this manuscript was prepared under the auspices of the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaftliches (IFK) of the Kunstuniversität Linz in Vienna, Austria. My colleagues and the wonderful staff there, under the marvelous direction of Thomas Macho, Johanna Richter, and Julia Boog, deserve my most sincere thanks as well as a special place in my heart forever. Throughout my several years of wandering, my cousins John Caplan and Stacey Borow and my friends Dovid Fishman and Elissa Bemporrad, Sholem and Celeste Berger-Sollod, Janos and Judit Gellen, Josh Dorman and Ana Silva, Michael and Elise Wiener, and Robert and Sylvia Liska have provided me generous hospitality and shelter for extended periods, and I thank them all for the comfort and

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welcome they offered me for as long and as frequently as they did. I hope I will always be able to reciprocate their hospitality but that I will never have to under the circumstances that they opened their homes to me. As with every cultural production, this book is the consequence of conversations and correspondence with many colleagues, compatriots, and comrades. Among the most memorable and appreciated, I wish to thank my dear friends Ninoska Azuaje, Efrat Bloom, Rüdiger Campe, Tom Connolly, Deborah Dash Moore, Jess Dubow, Gennady Estraikh, Ilit Ferber, Clara Valentina Enciso Fuentes, Karen Grumberg, Paul Gybels, Jonathan Hess (o”h), Marketa Holtebrinck, Susan Jenkins, Sabine Koller, Misha Krutikov, Michael Löwy, Anastasiya Lyubas, Joshua Miller, Anita Norich, Paul North, Ashley Passmore, Caryl Phillips, Eddy Portnoy, Ato Quayson, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Liz Rosenkrantz, Pierre Saint-Amand, Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, Jonathan Skolnik, Melanie Strasser, Lisa Stuckey, Mira Sucharov, Eléonore Veillet, Kirk Wetters, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, Zelig Zumhagen, and many other people whose names I hope I will be able to include in my next book. Thanks as well to Sophie Duvernoy and Christiane Ketteler for their engagement with my work as well as their help finding much-needed bibliographical sources and resources. Marion Aptroot, Justin Cammy, Tal Hever-Chybowski, Jeremy Dauber, Bob Davidson, Guido Forci, Efrat Gal-Ed, Amelia Glaser, Adriana X. Jacobs, Vivian Liska, Brendan McGeever, Leslie Morris, Rachel Seelig, Miriam Udel, and Karen Underhill each provided me with kind hospitality and stimulating audiences for my work in progress at lectures and conferences that they organized at their respective institutions. Rabbis Fred Hyman at the Westville Synagogue in New Haven, Connecticut; Rod Glogower at the Ann Arbor Hillel; and Aharon Goldstein at the Ann Arbor Chabad provided me with spiritual homes when I was missing a physical home most.

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To my family: if there is one benefit that writing so esoteric a book as this one offers, it is the opportunity to thank the people in my life closest to me in a venue both public and intimate. Thank you to my parents, David and Norrine Caplan, for your support, your faith, and your love. To my sister-in-law Stacey Stepp Caplan, thank you for remaining the best member of the Caplan family, and to my brother Brent, z”l, thank you for living a life in which every deed was righteous and every memory is sweet. To my brother Donald Caplan and his family, thank you for joy when I have needed it most and consolation on countless other occasions. To my daughter, Zipporah Glikl Caplan, thank you for being my most honest critic, and to my son, Asher Rafael Caplan, thank you for being my biggest (reciprocal) fan. To Brukhe Lang, thank you beyond words, in any language, for your patience, your generosity, and your grace. To Chrissy Kleiner and Kim Gladman, two of my dearest friends, thank you for engaging with my thoughts in my formative years and continuing to do so throughout the writing of this book. To my three “wonder students,” Adi Elbaz, Marcus Heim, and Délia Rogobete, thank you for teaching me so much while we were in class together and remaining such good friends thereafter. Beth Lemoine, tu as et tu es mon coeur. Akhren akhren hoviv, Sara Nadal-Melsió, who has read and commented on every word of this book, often in multiple drafts—what follows is a pale reduction of a conversation she and I have been conducting over the past two decades. I hope we will continue conversing for many decades to come. Portions of this book have appeared in print previously, as follows: “A Gast af a Vayl Zeyt af a Mayl: Distance, Displacement, and Dislocation in Dovid Bergelson’s Mides ha-din and Alfred Döblin’s Reise in Polen.” In The Languages of Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Joshua Miller and Anita Norich, 252–74. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016.

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“Osterbrot or Matzo? Translation, Transubstantiation, and Temporality in Joseph Roth’s Hiob.” Recasting the “Other”: Readings in German-Jewish Interwar Culture and Its Aftermath: The Yearbook of the Association for European Jewish Literature Studies 2 (2015): 147–70. “Watch the Throne: The Baroque, the Gothic, and Symbolism in Reb Nakhman and Der Nister.” In Uncovering the Hidden: The Works and Life of Der Nister, edited by Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge, and Mikhail Krutikov, 90–110. Oxford: Legenda, 2014. “Byelorus in Berlin; Berlin in Byelorus: Moyshe Kulbak’s Raysn and Meshiekh ben-Efrayim, between Nostalgia and Apocalypse.” In Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture, edited by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov, 89–104. Oxford: Legenda, 2010. “The Corridors of Berlin: Proximity, Peripherality, and Surveillance in Bergelson’s Boarding House Stories.” In Transit und Transformation: Osteuropäisch-Jüdische Migranten in Berlin, 1918–1939, edited by Verena Dorhn and Gertrud Pickhan, 45–55. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010. “The Hermit at the Circus: Der Nister, Der blaue Engel, and GermanYiddish Cultural Parallels in the Weimar Period.” Between Two Worlds: Yiddish-German Encounters: Studia Rosenthaliana 41 (2009): 173–96. “Performance Anxieties: Carnival Spaces and Assemblages in Der Nister’s ‘Under a Fence.’” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 18, no. 1 (1998): 1–18.

In each instance the material was thoroughly revisited, reconceived, and revised accordingly. As with every book, what is meritorious in what follows is thanks to all the teachers, editors, and friends who participated in its production; all errors, excesses, and shortcomings are my own. I hope the preceding words will serve as thanks for the former and that Yom Kippur will perhaps atone for some of the latter.

YIDDISH WRITERS IN

WEIMAR BERLIN

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INTRODUCTION Weimar and Now

On or about January 1901, Yiddish literature changed. It was in that year that Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) published a story titled “Di Shtot fun di kleyne mentshelekh” (“The Town of the Little People”). Although pseudoanthropological caricatures of traditional Jewish life in the czarist Pale of Settlement had been a fixture of modern Yiddish satire since its origins more than a half-century earlier,1 Sholem Aleichem’s story initiates a new genre in which his prototypical shtetl, Kasrilevke, is not just the setting for his inexhaustible parody but also the collective protagonist for a segment of his writing, as distinctive as his other recurring characters, Menakhem-Mendl, Tevye, or Motl the Cantor Peyse’s son. The narrative begins, “The city of the little people to which I will introduce you, gentle reader, finds itself in the middle of the blessed ‘Pale’ in which Jews have been settled, one on top of another, like herring in a barrel, putting them on notice that they should be fruitful and multiply—and the name of this famous city is Kasrilevke.”2 What emerges from his portrait of an orems ober freylekhs (“poor but happy”) resident of this perennially impoverished shtetl is not the subversive ridicule of Jewish tradition, superstition, and privation that had motivated most previous Yiddish satire but instead a cumulatively forceful 1

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repudiation of modernity, technology, and progress as a way out of Jewish ignorance or powerlessness. Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke, unlike its predecessors in nineteenth-century Yiddish literature, is not the antithesis of modernity but its dialectical double. Although much can be— and has been—written about how the author accomplishes the rhetorical sleight of hand whereby Kasrilevke functions as a burlesque of modern life, culture, and ideology, including many of Sholem Aleichem’s own habits and convictions, 3 the image of greatest interest at the outset of the narrative is the comparison of shtetl Jews to “herring in a barrel.” It is a simile at once homey in its associations with one of the ubiquitous foods of Ashkenazic Jewish cuisine and uncanny in its equation of traditional Jews with the anonymous, dislocating, dehumanizing mass spaces to which Yiddish speakers were then being confined in the modern factories and tenements of Odessa, Warsaw, Łódź, and New York—or, for a few years after World War I, Berlin. An image of containment, it is also completely self-contained; in a barrel, the (pickled) herring can neither look out nor be seen within, except by someone with the ability to lift the lid, and this is the role that Sholem Aleichem performs as a “narrating presence,” mixing familiarity and distance even in his choice of pseudonym.4 Less than two decades later, Jews in the Pale of Settlement on the eve of its abolition, after the February Revolution, would become the object of scrutiny from German Jewish soldiers during the First World War, eager to find allies against the Russian enemy and curious about the traditional lifestyle of coreligionists so distant from their own modernity yet alluring in their observance of ritual and their use of a vernacular at once similar and foreign to their own. Of the many descriptions of this encounter, one of the most revealing is a collaboration between the novelist Arnold Zweig (1887–1968) and the artist Hermann Struck (1876–1944), Das Ostjüdische Antlitz (The Face of East European Jewry, 1920; revised 1922). In this intriguing combination of image

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and text, Zweig writes of the shtetl Jews, “[They are] piled upon each other in an environment whose tumultuous confinement may only be illustrated by comparison to aquariums in fancy restaurants, in which so many fish are squeezed between narrow glass walls that they are barely covered by water. . . . Moreover, the fish are stacked and pressed against the transparent, obstinate barrier either with their mouths clinging to the surface of the aquarium or pinned to the sandy bottom. The Jews are crowded together not all that differently in the shtetls or large cities of the East.”5 Although the descriptive language in this passage is serendipitously similar to Sholem Aleichem’s, the perspective and perceptions are notably different. Instead of depicting the shtetl as blindly cut off from outside scrutiny and its inhabitants as both dead and revenant—a crucial factor in their satirical function as doppelgängers to modernity—the transparent barrier separating shtetl Jews from their modern spectators changes the critique as much as the shift from Yiddish to German does. Where Sholem Aleichem had conceived of his imaginary shtetl as an inside joke of a refugee from traditional Jewish life to his international audience of still traditional and newly modern Jews united by Yiddish culture and its rhetorical habits,6 Zweig implies with increasing insistence in his essay that being a Jew outside of a Jewish community is like being a fish out of water.7 This is a book about the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture, concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, taken in comparison with corresponding figures working in German-language literature, critical theory, journalism, and film. It consists of three parts, and each part contains two chapters as well as an introduction and conclusion. Part 1 considers Dovid Bergelson (1884–1952)— who lived in Berlin from 1921 to 1933—in comparison with Alfred Döblin (1878–1957). This discussion considers Bergelson’s novel Mides ha-din (translated as Judgment, 1929), one of the first

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Yiddish-language treatments of the Sovietization of the shtetl, together with Döblin’s travel narrative Reise in Polen (Journey to Poland, 1925), as well as the affinities between Bergelson’s short stories set in Berlin and the aesthetic of Neue Sachlichkeit (“the new objectivity”) in German film and literature. Part 2 focuses on two narratives by the Yiddish modernist Der Nister (“The Hidden One,” Pinkhes Kahanovitsh, 1884–1950) that bookend his stay in Germany from 1921 to 1926: the literary tale “A Bove-mayse” (“A story of Bovve,” 1920), which is the last story published in a collection of his writing, Gedakht (roughly Imagined, 1922), that appeared in Berlin, and “Unter a ployt” (“Under a Fence,” 1929), which replaced “A Bove-mayse” when Gedakht was republished in the Soviet Union. To contextualize Der Nister’s narrative experimentation and to elaborate on the correspondences between Yiddish and German cultures, this discussion will take these narratives in comparison with the stories of the Hasidic storyteller Reb Nakhman of Breslov (1772–1810), Reb Nakhman’s German-language contemporary E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), and the German film Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), directed by the Austrian American filmmaker Josef “von” Sternberg (1894–1969). Part 3 examines themes of nostalgia, apocalypse, and the aestheticization of religious concepts in interwar Jewish culture. It begins with the parodically syncretic novel Hiob (Job, 1930), by Joseph Roth (1894–1939), who traveled from his native Galicia, at the border separating the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Pale of Settlement, to Vienna, then Berlin, then Paris, to work as one of the most successful German-language authors during the Weimar Republic. Though primarily a chronicler of urban life in the 1920s, his writing returns to his East European origins, mixing nostalgic and apocalyptic motifs in the 1930s. Hiob is the first novel to reflect this shift, and it is Roth’s most extensive and complex fictional treatment of Jewish themes. From Roth, the focus turns to the Yiddish author Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937), who

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lived in Berlin from 1920 to 1924 and produced two of his greatest early achievements there, the narrative poem Raysn (Byelorussia, 1922) and his first prose work, Meshiekh ben-Efraim (The Messiah of the House of Ephraim, 1924). These two works present alternately a deceptively idyllic and expressionistically apocalyptic perspective on Kulbak’s native Belarus, filtered through aesthetic lenses cultivated in Berlin. The three Yiddish authors who provide the primary focus of this comparison—Bergelson, Der Nister, and Kulbak—are among the most innovative and distinctive members of the Yiddish avant-garde during the era of High Modernism. Interpreting their writing through aesthetic categories developed in the experimental culture of the Weimar Republic is intended to advertise their centrality to modernist aesthetics, not in spite of their peripheral culture and language but because it is from the periphery, whether defined in geographic, cultural, or social terms, that modernism articulates its most productive critiques of modernity. Because they were temporary residents of Berlin, these figures were peripheral in all three senses of the term I am proposing, and yet their presence in the Weimar Republic is representative of a larger phenomenon of refugees from the east, both Jewish and non-Jewish, seeking reprieve from the political instability and physical dangers of life in regions such as Russia and the former Pale of Settlement after World War I and during the chaos ensuing from the breakup of the Czarist Empire in the years 1917–1922. As Oleg Budnitskii writes of the demographics for these refugees, “According to a 1925 census there were 253,069 former citizens of the Russian Empire (in the borders of 1914) living in Germany. Only 80,000 of them were ethnic Russians. Of the ‘Russian emigrants,’ 63,500 were Jews, and 59,000 ‘Russian Germans.’”8 Budnitskii goes on to state that more than a quarter of all Russian refugees coming to Germany were Jews, and depending on when and who was estimating, somewhere between 25,000 and 90,000 of the 100,000–300,000 Russian

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refugees in Berlin over the course of the Weimar Republic were Jewish. However counterintuitively, this study of Weimar aesthetics must therefore begin with a consideration of Berlin’s relationship to Eastern Europe. This is not only because of the status of Yiddish writers living in Berlin as recent and temporary refugees from the former czarist empire; the Soviet Union was also a subject of fascination, fear, and idealization for Germans as much as it was for once-and-future Soviet citizens, and ambivalent attraction and anxiety toward the Communist society unfolding there register across the political spectrum. As Zweig’s remarks from Das Ostjüdische Antlitz demonstrate, a vanguard of Jewish, mostly Zionist German intellectuals had begun to take interest in East European Jewish culture before the establishment of the Weimar Republic, but after the October Revolution both the development of Communism in Russia and the influx of Jewish refugees to Berlin offered new objects of contemplation and new venues for interaction. In a significant biographical essay, Joseph Sherman (1944–2009) describes Dovid Bergelson’s involvement in the establishment of one such gathering place for East and West, Berlin’s Sholem Aleichem Club: “Situated in a large apartment on the Savigny-Platz, it soon became popular in Jewish émigré circles for its excellent Ashkenazi cuisine, offering Yiddish speakers a heymish alternative to [the] city’s other cafés and lessening their sense of social and cultural isolation. It hosted evening lectures, discussions, and charity concerts at one of which . . . Bergelson and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) performed together as violin soloists.”9 For the Yiddish writers themselves, both the eventual and eventually fatal draw back to the Soviet Union and the demonstrably traumatic circumstances in which they fled their lands of origin provide an explanation for why Berlin figures only superficially and almost always in negative terms in their work. Indeed, the unfinished psychic and political work left at home prevented the “Weimar Yiddishists” from feeling settled in their

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place of refuge. The break these writers had made with their place of origin was too tentative to enable them to commit to life or work in Berlin; as Sherman documents in his essay on Bergelson (Sherman, 27), the many Hebrew-language authors active in Berlin during the same era were able to rationalize their sojourn there as a transit point and means of financing their imminent relocation to Palestine. The Yiddish writers in Berlin, however, knew that their writing was being produced for export, either back to Eastern Europe or for the American Yiddish press, yet their location in Berlin provoked the derision of compatriots still in Poland or the Soviet Union, as well as feelings of guilt, betrayal, and illegitimacy among themselves. Sherman thus quotes Der Nister in a letter from 1923, “In Berlin it’s a disaster. The Yiddish intelligentsia has been left without roots, and they rot away individually and collectively. . . . Some kind of action is demanded: summon us to America, or to anywhere else you wish” (Sherman, 31). For both temperamental and political reasons, America was not a feasible option for writers such as Kulbak, Bergelson, or Der Nister, and Poland by the end of the decade offered even less financial or political security than Berlin did. The pull of the Soviet Union would prove irresistible to each of these writers, yet what is of greatest interest about their Berlin period is neither the inevitability of their departure from Germany nor their rationale for returning to the East but the aesthetic and emotional complexity of what they managed to create in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany. This confusion and ambivalence are what make the “Weimar Yiddishists” true representatives of their time and place. The influx of East European refugees coincides with a massive population growth and geographical expansion of the Berlin city limits. Along with rapid industrialization and the creation of a new, consciously modernist architectural style, the radical social transformation from a militaristic, authoritarian empire to a democratic and occasionally anarchic republic signifies the

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ways in which Germany had become a “foreign country” for the native-born as much as for refugees. The traumas inflicted by economic chaos—at least before the period of stabilization ushered in by the currency reforms of 1923—as well as the unavoidable presence of crippled, disfigured, and psychologically battered former soldiers filling the streets amplified this estrangement with echoes of defeat, despair, and senseless destruction. Though linguistically foreign and socially other, refugees in Berlin and other cities participated in and contributed to a general sense of dislocation attested to throughout interwar German culture, among all ideologies. By concentrating on the aesthetic character of the Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, my comparison conceptualizes this social history in formal terms.10 This study therefore offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and of understanding the political resonances that result from these structures. The questions it considers are how Yiddish literature participates in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, regardless of how active Yiddish authors were on the Berlin literary scene, and what German-speaking Jews saw when they described Eastern European Jews. Preceding these questions, and therefore excluded from the scope of this book, is a history of reciprocal depictions of German Jews and Eastern European Jews, the daytsh or yekke (Yiddish colloquialisms for German Jews) and the Ostjude (literally “Eastern Jew” in German), respectively, in both Yiddish and German literature of the nineteenth century. The history of these modern depictions begins with Isaac Euchel (1756–1804) and Aaron Halle Wolfson (c. 1754–1835), who dramatized the two character types and languages side by side in the farces Reb Hanoch (1793) and Laykhtzin un fremelay (translated as Silliness and Sanctimony, c. 1794).11 During the next hundred years, a number of German Jewish writers, many of them actually originating in Eastern Europe, sought to portray Eastern European Jewish life for a liberal German readership, employing an ambivalent

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mix of nostalgia, apologetics, appeal to tolerance and modern rationality, and critique of traditional Jewish culture’s demonstrable economic impoverishment and putative intellectual poverty. Among the purveyors of this Ghettoliteratur, one of the last and most sophisticated was Karl-Emil Franzos (1848–1904), who grew up in the Eastern Austrian provinces of Galicia and Bukovina but as an adult wrote in Vienna and Berlin.12 In his earliest published story, Franzos warns the reader of the uncanny nature of his native domain, which is both home and foreign at the same time: “I have called the story strange, and it will sound strange to you, especially if you are at home in the West, where education and tolerance [Bildung und Duldung] reside.”13 The admonition at once flatters and cajoles the reader, equating the West with tolerance to foreclose the identification of German culture with an exclusively Aryan and Christian possession; to be Western, in this formulation, means to be defined against the primitive tribalism and violence of the East by exercising tolerance rather than claiming superior bloodlines. The semifictive reminiscence of the tale provides the means for its author to distance himself from his origins and enter into a dialogue with the West. As an adherent of civilization and an advocate for tolerance, Franzos is an exceptional product of the East—but this exceptionality is at the same time normative, since everyone in his shtetl is an exception to the norms of Western civilization. Thus, the narrator introduces the protagonist of the story by stating, “David was the strangest and most mysterious looking figure in the Gasse,14 which was anyhow only too full of such people; for when plants are kept in the dark they are apt to take eccentric forms” (JB, G 130; E 260). David, the protagonist of this story, is the most typical Jewish specimen in the ghetto by virtue of being the most unusual, so that in Franzos’s fiction, the abnormal is the exception that creates the rule, or rather locates the rule outside the scope of his fictional setting. Moreover, David serves as a mentor and hero for the autobiographical narrator.

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The Christusbild of the story’s title is a portrait of David that his non-Jewish first love paints of him after he renounces their romance out of loyalty to his people, substituting Passion for passion. David becomes a Christ figure—for both the Jews whom he serves as a medical doctor and the Christians who continue to love him—by remaining a loyal Jew. Franzos as the autobiographical narrator of the tale in turn identifies with David as a role model yet rejects the itinerary that David had chosen, circuitously, back from the West to his East European home. His identification with David is at the same time a rejection of him, reiterating perhaps unintentionally the Passion narrative that the tale both references and sublimates. What changes perhaps most categorically between Franzos’s era and the Weimar period is the increasing inability of Jewish writers to conceptualize East and West as civilizational opposites. Returning, accordingly, to the interwar era, at the heart of this study is the critical theory of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Benjamin’s ideas relating to the status of the fragment, language, history, and spectacle provide a model for characterizing the range of aesthetic problems that this study will consider. Moreover, as a participant in Weimar culture, particularly its radical and utopian Jewish avant-garde, Benjamin’s theoretical model provides the ideal source for allowing “Berlin modernism” to critique itself. His idiosyncratic and mostly hapless career was in large part motivated by the same anxious allure of the Soviet Union that determined the fate of the Yiddish authors in Berlin of whom he was otherwise unaware.15 And though the animating concerns of his work seem far removed from the traumatic uprooting of East European Jewry that provides their thematic subject, his preoccupation with mystical modes of contemplation resonates with the poetics of these Yiddish authors. The anticipatory character of his writing, its ability to introduce new perspectives by recalling obsolescent technologies and superseded aesthetics, together with the welcome current vogue for his writing, provide a means

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to connect Weimar culture to contemporary postmodernism, for all the profound differences between the two epochs. Just as Benjamin sees cultural productions not merely as historical relics but as an explanatory model for the relationship of the past to the present, the achievements of Weimar modernism—and Benjamin’s work paramount among them—serve not merely as precursors to the present but also as a resource for understanding the sleeping strength of contemporary aesthetics: its status for the future that every era designated by the prefix post- maintains. Although Benjamin’s work as a whole provides a foundation for the arguments I hope to develop in my comparison, there are three concepts—or, in Benjamin’s parlance, “constellations”16 — that recur with specific resonance throughout what follows: allegory, the Baroque, and melancholy. Of the three, allegory requires the most detailed explication, in part because the term has attracted such extensive critical debate and in part because the distinctive significance of this concept to the development of Yiddish literature has been so little remarked on in previous critical sources. Allegory is a trickier term to understand than other representational strategies because it hinges on a double substitution and consequently a double illusion. Allegory depends on an irreparably unstable relationship between signifier and signified, while at the same time it poses as offering an absolute connection between the terms of an equation that it exposes nonetheless as arbitrary. Indeed, Benjamin offers the most succinct and suggestive definition of allegory when he writes, in words that could serve as the epigraph to the present study, “That which the allegorical intention has fixed upon is sundered from the customary contexts of life: it is at once shattered and preserved. Allegory holds fast to the ruins. It offers the image of petrified unrest.”17 Allegory manifests itself as a performance of indeterminacy, masquerading as the imposition of a final and irrefutable truth. Characteristics of allegory nevertheless manifest themselves consistently.18 Specifically, allegory emerges at a conjunction of

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concept and image, thought and expression, the verbal and the visual. Allegory is not a genre or even an interpretive technique so much as a rhetorical effect—whether constructed verbally, pictorially, or most typically as a combination of the two—stranded between polarities of metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor thus functions as a mode of enchantment, endowing the objects of its equations with a capacity for transformation and suggesting an illusion of organic relationship to its poetic construction. Metonymy likewise establishes a relationship of apparent contingency predicated on the arbitrary and material circumstance of its conjunctions. Allegory, however, stands between the two as a mode of “consubstantiation,” reiterating the indivisibility of the physical and the abstract and thereby offering an eschatological relationship of objects and concepts nonetheless lacking in transcendence. For this reason, allegorical representations typically stress two signal features: an iconography characterized by the corpse, the skeleton, or the skull; and the muteness of either objects or subjects, the inability of a figure or image to speak for itself. The association of allegory with debilitation, disfigurement, and death makes it an apt strategy for depicting the body in extremis and therefore accounts for its uses in the portrayal of warfare, madness, and despair. One of the determinant factors for the significance of allegory to the aesthetics of the Weimar period is the legacy of World War I, which in both physical and social terms introduced an unprecedented level of violence against the body and the body politic. In Yiddish literature, one of the great narratives devoted to the destructive impact of the war on traditional Jewish life is Khurbn galitsye (The Destruction of Galicia, 1920), by Sh. An-sky (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport, 1862–1920), which beyond its ­documentary value offers an array of allegorical strategies for depicting the psychic consequences of the war’s violence on Jews caught and displaced in its path. In one particularly moving episode, An-sky records the testimony of a woman from the Galician

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town of Dembitz (Dębica) who has taken refuge in Tarnów. After dispassionately describing the disappearance of her children and grandchildren in the series of bombings and pogroms befalling her hometown, she suddenly breaks her monotone to bewail the desecration of Torah scrolls and the slaughter of horses during the same sequence of atrocities.19 Caught between the physical violence of the pogrom and the mechanized violence of the bombing, this refugee allegorically equates the fate of her children simultaneously, but only implicitly, with the slaughter of helpless animals and the destruction of sacred objects. Her ability to bemoan the fate of horses and Torah scrolls instead of her offspring affects the reader not because the loss of these animals or artifacts is commensurate with the murder of her family members but because it isn’t. The inadequacy of language that allegory enacts is, paradoxically, the only form of representation that offers a voice to what cannot be said. One similarly sees some—though not all—of the characteristics of allegory at work in Zweig’s commentary for Das Ostjüdische Antlitz, which generally offers an exemplary illustration of how allegory functions in the works under consideration in this comparison, as when he writes of young East European Jewish women: In the wide eyes of these girls you see the innocent tranquility, the trusting nature of organic creatures who gladly exchange a word with humans, because humans are created in God’s image, and friendliness is their commandment; who withdraw, disconcerted and wounded, when the Westerner, the shoddy psychologist, claims that there is an erotic feeling at play here and then maintains that he is witnessing a kind of cryptic flirtatiousness. Look at these innocent, full lips that are nothing more than childlike, whereas the European raised on the catchwords of operettas thinks he is discerning sensuality and who knows what else, anticipating the mass-produced kitsch fantasies to which the Jewish woman is subjected: that racial traits such as dark eyes and black hair . . . cannot prevent either soldier or student from

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wanting to make love to a dusky female Jew, Pole, or Spaniard. Not all girls have the sensitivity of their souls written across their mouths or on their parted lips; rarely does melancholy stand plainly between their curved eyebrows, and the pointed oval of their face, in its outline, does not often tremble from alienation so expressively as in these days. (Zweig, G 106–107; E 87)

Zweig here reads the faces of the young women he encounters— in part because they lack a shared language through which to communicate but equally because the purpose of his portraiture, like Struck’s illustrations, is to present an ideal composite rather than an individual. From the “organic creature” that he describes, the author constructs a timeless abstraction, deprived of context and self-definition, that denies her the living presence that he otherwise extols as the natural source of her praiseworthiness. The face serves as an emblem, and not only does Zweig project a sequence of meanings onto it but also these meanings serve as a series of negations—the Jewish woman is virtuous, tranquil, yet vulnerable for the same reason that she is exotic, because she is not modern, not Western, not German.20 Moreover, within the space of these negations Zweig confers and denies the femininity of the Jewish woman as type, because her eroticism, which is both present and absent, inferred but never implied, functions only as a misreading from the Western male, the author himself.21 Zweig’s imposition of a series of moral qualities onto the neutral features of the East European Jews he and Struck survey is hardly unusual among ethnographers, and the conclusions he draws from his own imputations are more benign than both a great deal of anthropological observation of racial others in his day and the competing stereotypes about Eastern European Jews among Western Jews and non-Jews. What is fundamental to anthropological or ethnographical research of the era, and intrinsically connected to the function of allegory, is the perception of the other not only as culturally, ethnically, or even biologically different but also as the inhabitant of a superseded

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temporality, a remnant of a bypassed historical dispensation.22 As Angus Fletcher (1930–2016) has written on the historical disconnection between a medieval worldview and the historical circumstances of the Elizabethan period, “One could hardly imagine an English author more addicted to medieval allegory than Edmund Spenser, and yet he conveys a strong sense of current political events and a general historicity colliding with archaic myth. . . . In that way, Spenser, for all his medieval yearnings and leanings, is a modern, forcing his vast allegory to think more and more about current historical pressures.”23 One might suggest, in more dialectical terms, that Spenser, like other allegorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, illustrates the collision of medieval conceptual categories with their newly modern usurpers and despoilers. Allegorical figuration captures the inadequacy of medieval rhetoric to represent the violent upheaval of the modern world, in conflict with the inability of modernity to generate conceptual models rapidly enough to convey the world onto which the poet has stumbled. This same collision of the obsolescent with the contemporary encapsulates, more than three hundred years later, the phenomenon of Yiddish modernists such as Kulbak, Der Nister, and Bergelson—or, in a separate medium, though the same cultural milieu, Marc Chagall (1887–1985)—carrying the vestiges of Jewish observance from the shtetl to an explosively revolutionary urban encounter with the modernist aesthetics of Russian Symbolism and German Expressionism. On the other side of this dialectic is the phenomenon of German Jewish intellectuals such as Arnold Zweig, Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, and especially Walter Benjamin, whose disillusionment with the ostensible rationality and seeming secularity of the modern world, revealed by the upheavals of World War I to be as much of a mystification as the pieties of bygone centuries, led them to an embrace of various forms of deritualized mysticism. In both the Yiddish and the German halves of this comparison, one observes

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a disenchantment, in Max Weber’s sense of the term, with disenchantment, expressed in allegorical terms by a recourse to visual imagery teamed with a lack of confidence in the knowledge produced by empirical means, a disillusion of faith in the world observable only through the physical senses. There is much more that could—and will—be said about the concept of allegory, but by way of introduction I turn now to the concept of the Baroque, both in Benjamin’s distinctive usage of the term and in my even more expansive adaptation of it here. For Benjamin, the Baroque is an aesthetic practice characterized by a series of unresolved contradictions: meticulous ornamentation and ruinous fragmentation, solemnity and failure, splendor and shadows, majesty and melancholy. The central concept that animates his thinking on Baroque aesthetics, famously, is the Trauerspiel (roughly, “play of mourning”), a seventeenth-century dramatic genre that Benjamin examines in the German (Silesian) context but with significant cross-references to figures such as William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681). The characteristics of the Trauerspiel relevant to Benjamin’s analysis include its pageantry and spectacle, its focus on intrigue and the theory of the state, and its preference, in contrast with classical or Renaissance tragedy, for historical or at least legendary settings, rather than mythical or supernatural ones. Of greatest significance, for Benjamin’s study as well as my own (to make a distinction!), are the repudiation of transcendence in favor of the immanence of corporeality and the turn common to most Trauerspiele of the tyrant into a martyr, or correspondingly, of a martyr into a tyrant. These features will be a recurring preoccupation of my comparison, which takes the Baroque less as a historical period than as a recurring aesthetic strategy manifesting itself in a series of movements, periods, and genres throughout the modern era: the Gothic, Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and both avant-garde and popular art at the beginning of the twenty-first

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century. By recognizing these aesthetic modes as descendants of the Baroque, I not only propose a “subterranean” genealogy for the aesthetic critique of modernity that develops in opposition to a dominant, though never static, aesthetic of mimetic realism but also contend that what mobilizes these antimimetic aesthetics of distortion, spectacle, fantasy, and allegory is the dissent from modern hegemonies motivated by a dislocation from dominant understandings of temporality, history, and time.24 The perception of belatedness with respect to a dominant mode of representation provokes an aesthetic practice that becomes anticipatory of a subsequent form of cultural production. This dynamic, I believe, is best illustrated by the development of Yiddish literature; during the heyday of Baroque aesthetics in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, although there was no shortage of writing in Yiddish, there were essentially no new Yiddish narratives produced in what would today be recognized as belletristic forms. When modern Yiddish literature begins with, among other literary productions, the publication of Reb Nakhman of Breslov’s stories, their aesthetic character is Baroque in several ways that I discuss in part 2 of this study. Reb Nakhman’s literary activity—only one aspect of his often manic and always remarkable career as a religious thinker and leader—coincides with the birth of European Romanticism and the heyday of the Gothic novel, cultural events of which he would have been largely, if not completely, unaware. Yet the juxtaposition of his Baroque tales with the Gothic novel demonstrates the many productive similarities between these aesthetic discourses. Similarly, the influence of Reb Nakhman on subsequent neo-Romantic Yiddish authors, since Yiddish had missed the Romantic period just as it had been absent previously from the Baroque, indicates the notable proximity of Gothic aesthetics to late nineteenth-century Symbolism. By the time one considers Yiddish Symbolists such as Der Nister and his contemporaries, their work coincides with the era of Surrealism and Expressionism.

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Yiddish literature in the period under consideration in this comparison, while participating surreptitiously in the culture of Weimar Germany, also provides an index to the whole history of antimimetic narrative forms in the modern era, not because it is identical to the many coterritorial literatures it abuts but because it is often so radically different. By the same token, the characteristics of belatedness and a failure to coincide with a temporal framework that insists on synchronicity pertain to the current era, for which the catch-all concept “postmodern” signifies only that previous social and aesthetic consensuses no longer apply to the present moment, even if a new vocabulary, or even name, for our contemporaneity has yet to emerge. The postmodern is Baroque insofar as the Baroque itself was protomodern, combining a premodern worldview with the material circumstances of an incompletely understood present. The unsettled feeling of not coinciding with the present moment prompts a longing for bygone periods, either as a means of connecting to a tradition of continuity and belonging or as a romance of previous eras in which a historical possibility of dynamic change and aesthetic experimentation provides a reproach to a current moment of mechanical, mass-produced, materialist culture.25 Benjamin associates melancholy with the seventeenth-century Baroque and its cultivation of allegory, but one recognizes that the concept applies with equal pertinence to the Weimar era and especially to the temperament of his own work. Writing of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), Benjamin observes, “Baudelaire was a bad philosopher, a good theoretician; but only as a brooder [Grübler] was he incomparable.” 26 This characterization applies as much to Benjamin himself—and perhaps to some of his most devoted readers, as well! The attention that Benjamin devotes to the concept of melancholy in his study of the Trauerspiel bypasses Sigmund Freud’s symptomatic, clinical differentiation of mourning, a seemingly organic process, from melancholy, a neurotic manifestation,27 to return to the origins of melancholy in ancient and medieval theories of the body.

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What defines melancholy against mourning for Benjamin, unlike Freud, is not a distinction in degree but a difference in kind. As Ilit Ferber explains, drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Benjamin, “The melancholic . . . mourns what he has not yet lost but also what was never his to lose.”28 In this respect, I would contend that the relationship to traditional Jewish culture of German Jewish intellectuals such as Benjamin, Döblin, and Arnold Zweig—even Gershom Scholem (1897–1982)—is one of melancholy, whereas for Yiddish authors like Bergelson, Der Nister, and Kulbak, it is one of mourning. To be sure, the loss of tradition is not something that twentieth-century Yiddish or Hebrew writers imagine; it was a trauma they experienced, observing the horrific devastation of the shtetl culture that Zweig apostrophizes, even if before World War I they had looked forward to the emancipation that a freedom from tradition had promised. If German Jewish radicals such as Zweig romanticize Yiddish culture to resist their familial legacy of bourgeois gentility and unreflective, though typically liberal, German nationalism, Yiddish writers witness the destruction of their parents’ world firsthand. The distinction between Yiddish mourning and German melancholia accounts for the unaffiliated, abstracted cosmopolitanism through which writers like Benjamin, Döblin, or Joseph Roth expressed their sense of Jewishness and for the explicitly Jewish character of Yiddish authors returning to the Soviet Union or the disparate Zionist affiliations of Scholem, Zweig,29 and the Yiddish and Hebrew poet Uri-Tsevi Grinberg (1896–1981). By way of provisional conclusion and belated beginning, these considerations determined the parameters of my research for this comparison. Among the many Yiddish writers, journalists, and community activists who passed through Berlin during the Weimar Republic, I concentrate on the ones who return from Germany to the Soviet Union; among the many more German Jewish figures who participated in public life in interwar Berlin, I focus primarily on Jews who identified publicly with Jewishness yet who expressed this Jewishness, particularly after the end of the

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Weimar Republic, through the radically cosmopolitan route of what can be considered a permanent exile. The mourning of the Yiddish authors I consider accounts for their decision to return to the Soviet Union and attempt to rebuild Yiddish culture along radically reconfigured lines, whereas the German Jews on whom I concentrate can neither remain in Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic, for obvious reasons, nor adopt anything other than a provisional understanding of home because, as melancholics, they had lost not only a physical location for home but also faith in the concept of home as such. The melancholia that motivates the ideological choices of these figures also characterizes the fates of many of them. Walter Benjamin committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis from France to Spain in 1940; Joseph Roth, who died from the effects of acute alcoholism before World War II even began, might as well be considered a suicide. Moyshe Kulbak, like most of the Yiddish cultural activists in Soviet Minsk, was a victim of the Great Purge in the late 1930s. Der Nister and Bergelson, who unlike Kulbak had become sincere and committed activists in the Soviet Union, achieved international prominence during World War II as members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, invested with the task of promoting the Soviet War effort among Jews abroad, in particular American Jews just before and during the early months of American participation in the war. Because of their association with American Jewish leaders, as well as the enthusiasm of so many Jews in the Soviet Union for the newly founded state of Israel, by 1948 the now-disbanded committee was accused of betraying the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Not in spite but because of their importance to the state and the party, they were tried, convicted, tortured, and killed by the government they had served. Although I could not know it when I began researching this comparison, the world today faces some of the same threats that destroyed the Weimar Republic. Eastern Europe and Russia in

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particular are being drawn into a widening gyre of authoritarianism, intolerance, and corruption. Europe generally seems in perennial danger of dissolving into ever more fractious, xenophobic nation-states, and paradoxically the more localized nationalist movements in places such as Spain and the United Kingdom possess a potential for more durable democratic models than the federated yet increasingly isolationist nation-states from which they would secede. The United States and Israel are less immune to these dangers than could have been imagined a few years ago. Throughout the world, governments that predicate their legitimacy on hostility toward science, demonizing minorities, and extolling the cheap nostalgia of an illusory past threaten to replace contemporary postmodernity with a newly mutant medievalism. In the face of these hazards—including the risks posed by acquiescence, passivity, and despair—the culture of Weimar Germany offers a cautionary lesson and several individual models for the pursuit of freedom, the dignity of the individual, and the value of community. Many of the figures in this comparison can be said to have given their life for these values, less as conscious martyrs than as sacrificial victims. One should not romanticize the condition of the cosmopolitans, however much each of them was prone to romanticize himself. Rather, the displacement each suffered, and the tragedy that befell so many of them, serves as a moral obligation to each citizen and every nation to provide a home to the homeless, a refuge to the refugee, not because nature recognizes some people as natives and others as transients but because the lesson of history, the lesson of immanence, the lesson of allegory calls continuously to mind the fact that on a planet eternally in motion, all homes are forever fleeting. The authors and artists in this study attest to the historical complexity, social significance, and formal brilliance of aesthetic modernism. By understanding the philosophical motivations for their aesthetic choices, the

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meanings of these works can be understood in ethical terms as well as formal ones. Every work in this study rewards an engagement with its difficulties, its ambiguities, its eloquence. It is hoped that their juxtaposition here will also reward the patience of its readers with new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the continuities—whether as menace or promise—between Weimar and now. Notes 1.  Though elements of pseudoethnographic satire characterize the narrative style of numerous early modern Yiddish authors, including Yisroel Aksenfeld (1787–1866), Isaac Meir Dick (c. 1814–1893), and preeminently Sholem-Yankev Abramovitsh (“Mendele Moykher-Sforim,” c. 1835–1917), as a distinct genre the most remarkable example is Moyshe-Arn Shatskes’s Der Yidisher far-peysekh (The Jewish Passover Eve, 1881). As I intend to demonstrate briefly, Sholem Aleichem’s intent is not only a notable departure from previous uses of this technique but also an innovation that signals a new function for Yiddish satire in the twentieth century. 2.  Sholem Aleichem, Ale verk, vol. 3, Kleyne mentshelekh (New York: Morgn Frayhayt oysgabe, 1937), 9. A translation of this story by Julius and Frances Butwin can be found in Selected Stories of Sholom Aleichem, ed. Alfred Kazin (New York: Modern Library, 1956), 28. 3.  In the interests of expediency, the morbidly curious are directed to my essay on these topics, “Neither Here nor There: The Critique of Ideological Progress in Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke Stories,” in Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries, ed. Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 127–46. 4.  For more on Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovitsh) as a pseudonym and a narrating presence within his own fiction, see Dan Miron, “Sholem Aleichem: Person, Persona, Presence” [1972], in The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 128–56. 5.  Das Ostjüdische Antlitz (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1922), 19; translated by Noah Isenberg as The Face of East European Jewry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 6–7.

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6.  My friend Eddy Portnoy has aptly described Yiddish as “a 1,000-yearold language based grammatically on Jewish variants of medieval German and written in Hebrew characters, [it] also includes copious amounts of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages. Yiddish can have bits of English, French, Spanish, or other languages thrown into the mix, depending on where the speaker lives. . . . Yiddish is terribly flexible and became the way it did in part because of the peripatetic nature of its speakers: Jews who were either on the move or on the run.” See his amazing Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 2. For the most insightful introduction in English to the development of the Yiddish language and the culture that grew out of it, see my teacher Benjamin Harshav’s The Meaning of Yiddish [1990] (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). For the giant on whose shoulders Harshav, and every modern Yiddish scholar, stands, see Max Weinreich’s posthumous History of the Yiddish Language [1973], trans. Shlomo Noble and Paul Glasser, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 7.  The equation of people with fish in an aquarium finds another serendipitous echo in an even more representative work of interwar modernism, Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant). Writing of the vanishing arcades of nineteenth-century Paris, Aragon states, “The great American passion for city planning, imported into Paris by a prefect of police during the Second Empire and now being applied to the task of redrawing the map of our capital in straight lines, will soon spell the doom of these human aquariums.” See Le Paysan de Paris [1926] (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 19. In English, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1994), 14. Aragon later literalizes the image of an aquarium by rendering the first “surreal” interpolation in his narrative as the vision of a woman floating in the flooded shop windows of a cane store in the Passage de l’Opéra. See Paysan de Paris, 28–30; Paris Peasant, 22–23. The image returns to Yiddish literature with even greater resonance (“revenance”?) in Avrom Sutzkever’s prose poem “Griner akvarium” (“Green Aquarium,” 1953). See Griner akvarium: Dertseylungen [Green aquarium and other stories] (Jerusalem: Tcherikover, 1975), 3–6. Translated by Barbara Harshav in A. Sutzkever: Poetry and Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 357–59. 8.  See Oleg Budnitskii, “Von Berlin aus gesehen—die Russische Revolution, die Juden und die Sowjetmacht” [As seen from Berlin: The Russian Revolution, the Jews, and Soviet power], in Transit und Transformation: Osteuropäisch-jüdische Migranten in Berlin, 1918–1939 [Transit and

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transformation: East European Jewish migrants in Berlin, 1918–1939], ed. Verena Dohrn and Gertud Pickhan (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010), 157. The translation is my own. 9.  Joseph Sherman, “David Bergelson: A Biography,” in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), 35. Subsequent references to this essay incorporated in text as “Sherman.” This essay offers one of the best short overviews of Yiddish culture and the ideological complications of everyday life for Eastern European Jews in Weimar-era Berlin, although my own analysis takes significant issue with Sherman’s contention that “there is little evidence that Weimar’s best artistic innovations made any significant impression on what they [the Yiddish-speaking intelligentsia in Berlin] produced themselves” (Sherman, 28). For a more recent, equally valuable description of the social life of East European Jewish refugees and transplants in Weimar Berlin, see Shachar Pinsker, “Berlin: From the Gelehertes Kafeehaus to the Romanisches Café,” in A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 142–85. 10.  In addition to Sherman’s essay and the Transit und Transformation collection cited previously, the most helpful historical sources in the preparation of my research—not otherwise cited in the body of my discussion— include Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Jack Jacobs, The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994–95); Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Modernity [1987], trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992–93); Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Karl Schlögel, Das russische Berlin: Ostbahnhof Europas [1998] (München: Pantheon, 2007); Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy [2007] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Delphine Bechtel, “Cultural Transfers between ‘Ostjuden’ and ‘Westjuden’: German-Jewish Intellectuals and Yiddish Culture, 1897–1930,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 42, no. 1 (1997): 67–83; Gennady Estraikh, “Vilna on the Spree: Yiddish in

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Weimar Berlin,” Ashkenas—Zeitschrift für Geshichte und Kultur der Juden 16, no. H.1 (2006): 103–27; Glenn S. Levine, “Yiddish Publishing and the Crisis of Eastern European Jewish Culture, 1919–1924,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 42, no. 1 (1997): 85–108; Stephen Vogt, “The First World War, German Nationalism, and the Transformation of German Zionism,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 57, no. 1 (2012): 267–91. The best general history of Weimar Germany I’ve encountered, as a student and as an instructor of the subject, is Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s [1972] (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). 11.  For a critical edition of Euchel’s play, see Reb Henoch, oder: Woß tut me damit, ed. Marion Aptroot and Roland Gruschka (Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 2004). For Laykhtzin un fremelay, see “Silliness and Sanctimony,” in Landmark Yiddish Plays: A Critical Anthology, ed. Joel Berkowtiz and Jeremy Dauber (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 81–111. In the original, see Fun Mendelson biz Mendele, ed. Zalmen Reyzen (Warsaw: Kultur lige, 1923), 37–68. 12.  The precedent of Ghettoliteratur will bear keeping in mind in the consideration of Joseph Roth in part 3 of this study, since it is against the conventions of this genre that he is writing when he portrays traditional Jewish culture from a modernist rather than modernizing perspective. 13.  Karl-Emil Franzos, “Das Christusbild” [1868], in Die Juden von Barnow (Berlin: Holzinger, 2013), 129. In English, “The Picture of Christ,” in The Jews of Barnow, trans. M. W. MacDowall (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), 259. The translation of this citation is my own. Subsequent references to this collection incorporated in text as JB. Martha Bickel notes of this story, “A youthful experience of the author’s lay behind this narrative.” See “Zum Werk von Karl Emil Franzos,” in Juden in der deutschen Literatur: Ein deutsch-israelisches Symposion, ed. Stéphane Moses and Albrecht Schöne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1986), 155. The translation is my own. 14. Although Gasse in German translates as “alley,” in this context it is a euphemism for Judengasse, literally the “Jewish Street” but more idiomatically the location where Jews had been confined in medieval Europe (i.e., the “ghetto”). This connotation persists in the Yiddish idiom af der yidisher gas, “on the Jewish street,” which means contextually, “within the Jewish community,” either of a specific location or in abstract, general terms. 15.  As Michael Löwy characterizes Benjamin’s intellectual location in Weimar culture, “he [Benjamin] concentrates in his life and thought all the contradictions, tensions, and oppositions that divided this neoromantic Jewish-German culture: between Jewish theology and Marxist

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materialism, assimilation and Zionism, communism and anarchism, conservative romanticism and nihilist revolution, mystical messianism and profane utopia.” See “Revolution against ‘Progress’: Walter Benjamin’s Romantic Anarchism” [1985], in On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin [1993] (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), 143. Although the cultivation of contradiction is not an exclusively Jewish German preoccupation in Weimar thought, Benjamin’s inflection of these contradictions is primarily, even predominately, Jewish, as Löwy’s series of scholarly articles on the subject documents. 16.  Martin Jay describes the conceptual significance of the constellation as “a juxtaposed rather than integrated cluster of elements that resist reduction to a common denominator, essential core, or generative first principle.” See Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 14–15. 17.  See Walter Benjamin, “Central Park” [c. 1939], in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 143–44. In the original, see Benjamin, “Zentralpark,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 1(2): 640. 18.  Henry Heinz Holz summarizes Benjamin’s concept of allegory through three terms: Trauer (“mourning”), the mourning over the loss of a “natural” or “unmediated” relation with nature; Entwertung (“devaluation”), the devaluation of appearances and the consequent rejection of everyday social relations; and Verstückelung (“dismemberment”), which refers not only to the violent shattering of experience into fragments but also to their creative reconstruction into subjective associations and meanings. See Hans Heinz Holz, “Prismatisches Denken,” in Über Walter Benajamin, ed. Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), quoted in Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning [1993] (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 116–17. 19.  Sh. An-sky, Der Yidisher khurbn fun poyln galitsye un bukovine fun togbukh in Gezamelte shriftn (Warsaw: Farlag “An-sky,” 1928), 4:190. For an abridged translation, see Joachim Neugroschel, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I (New York: Henry Holt, 2002). Neugroschel omits this episode from his version. 20.  As John Efron explains, the adoption of the Eastern European Jew as an ideal of virtue, contentment, and in particular good health signifies a shift in the representation of Jews and Yiddish culture among German Zionists at the turn of the twentieth century. Efron explains, “Beginning

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during the Berlin haskalah [the “Jewish Enlightenment”] of the eighteenth century and extending well beyond it, Jewish doctors saw German Jews as paragons of good mental health, while asserting that Eastern European Jews possessed myriad mental (and physical) disorders. But by the fin-desiècle of the nineteenth century and into the Weimar period, a significant paradigm shift took place in this construct. No longer was the German Jew regarded as mentally fit. Rather, it was now the Ostjude who best represented a model of Jewish sanity.” See “The Zionist World of Arnold Zweig,” in Nationalism, Zionism, and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond, ed. Michael Berkowitz (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 200. 21.  There is also the obvious issue of the unequal power relations between the portraitist and the person—really, people—being portrayed. One characteristic of allegorical representation that I wish to stress, however, is the way in which allegory undermines its own claims to authority, since what it presents as an absolute truth actually demonstrates the arbitrariness not only of its equations but of the power making these connections. It may be added that Zweig embarks on his encounter with East European Jews, however quixotically, in a spirit of fraternity and solidarity rather than domination. 22.  In sociological terms, Tobias Brinkmann describes the relationship between German Jews and Yiddish-speaking refugees in Berlin with a quote from the 1947 memoirs of the German Zionist author Sammy Gronemann (1875–1952): the distinction between Eastern Jews and Western Jews in Berlin was “not so much a geographical concept as a temporal one” (nicht so sehr geograpische wie zeitliche Begriffe). See Brinkmann, “Ort des Übergangs—Berlin als Schnittstelle der jüdischen Migration aus Osteuropa nach 1918” [Transitional space—Berlin as intersection for Jewish migration from Eastern Europe after 1918], in Dohrn and Pickhan, Transit und Transformation, 28. Berlin itself functions in this regard as an allegorical setting for its Eastern European refugees. 23.  See Angus Fletcher, “Allegory without Ideas,” in Thinking Allegory Otherwise, ed. Brenda Machosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 22. 24.  With a historical perspective that has influenced my own understanding of these concepts, Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre write, “One would have to introduce a new concept that might be called ‘critical irrealism’ to designate the opposition between a marvelous, imaginary, ideal utopian world and the gray, prosaic, inhuman reality of the modern world.” See Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity [1992], trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 12. As my work proposes, the

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“critical irrealism” that Löwy and Sayre introduce to the conceptual vocabulary of Romanticism can be both broadened and refined as the function of fantastic, nonmimetic representational strategies as a mode of dissent—not escape but engagement—against social, political, and aesthetic norms when either their adoption or their rejection is insufficient or impossible. 25.  The contrast I am suggesting between “continuity and tradition” and “dynamic change” is meant to draw on two terms for “experience”— Erfahrung and Erlebnis, “cumulative experience” and “spontaneous experience,” respectively—that are fundamental concepts in Benjamin’s critical theory. I elaborate on these concepts and their significance to Weimar aesthetics in parts 1 and 3 of this study. 26.  See Benjamin, “Zentralpark,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 669. In English, “Central Park,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland, in Selected Writings [2003] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 4:172. 27.  Freud’s differentiation will nonetheless resonate with many of the discussions that will follow in this study, particularly when he writes, “In its causes . . . melancholia can go far beyond mourning, which is as a rule unleashed only by real loss, the death of the object. Thus in melancholia a series of individual battles for the object begins, in which love and hatred struggle with one another, one to free the libido from the object, the other to maintain the existing libido position against the onslaught.” See “Mourning and Melancholia” [1917], in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 216. What Freud refers to as a “constitutional ambivalence” in his symptomology of melancholy characterizes the mixed, at times perhaps unconscious, motivations through which German Jews and Eastern European Jews view one another as well as their shared but antagonistic pasts as occupants of different territories and adherents to very different notions of Jewishness. 28.  Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s Early Reflections on Theater and Language (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 43. 29.  Zweig in particular is an interesting case because although he had become a committed Zionist by the time he wrote and published Das Ostüdische Antlitz, and although he spent the Nazi era in Palestine, he became disillusioned with Zionism specifically as a nation-building ideology and opted to return to East Germany in 1948, spending the rest of his life as a committed Communist. These ideological shifts, however, took place after the Weimar Republic and therefore beyond the scope of this comparison.

part i SPECTRAL EMPIRES: L ANDSCAPES, NATION-STATES, AND THE HOMELESSNESS OF WEIMAR MODERNISM

Italian Overture and Polonaise

The parameters of this comparison between Yiddish and Germanlanguage modernisms proceed along two complementary fault lines: a spatial one between nationalism and statelessness and a temporal one between the belated and the anticipatory. One observes from the origins of German nationalism a century before the establishment of the Weimar Republic, and a half century before the German nation-state had been consolidated into the Kaiserreich of Wilhelm I (1797–1888), that a German national consciousness clearly existed and defined itself against an as yet territorially undefined Italian nationhood and a recently vanquished Polish Commonwealth. The first notable critique of this aspirant nationalism, its opposition to adjacent modes of cultural nationalism, and the role of Jews among notions of nationhood and national belonging comes, unsurprisingly, from Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), who inserts Jews, as mediators, into the relationship of German national culture and its others that in large part constitutes post-Napoleonic European culture. In his travel

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narrative Die Bäder von Lucca (The Baths of Lucca, 1829), Heine describes two characters who serve as foils to the narrator, the Marquis Christophoro di Gumpelino and his valet, HirschHyazinth, both of them Jews newly converted to Christianity and traveling in Italy from Germany. Although Gumpelino is a mockery of the aristocratic pretensions of the recently baptized nouveau riche, based perhaps on the Hamburg banker Lazarus Gumpel,1 Heine’s more enduring portrait of Hirsch-Hyazinth2 embodies complementary oppositions of Jewish and Christian, German and Italian, and he stands as both the comic and the moral doppelgänger at the center of the narrative. 3 Via the character’s ambiguity, Heine identifies the ambiguity of nationhood that motivates the spatial associations of European thought throughout the nineteenth century. As Heine writes, “Here, at the memory of his little stepfatherland, his eyes gleamed with tears, and he said, sighing as he spoke: ‘What is Man? He goes walking with pleasure out of the Hamburg Gate, and on the Hamburg Hill . . . and then thinks how happy he’d be if he was only in a place a thousand miles off, in Italy, where the oranges and lemons are growing! What is Man? When he’s before the Altona Gate he wants to be in Italy, and when he’s in Italy, he wants to be back again before the Altona Gate.’”4 The consequence of wanderlust, and implicitly of religious conversion, is not only an inability to be at home where one finds oneself but also a recognition that no place figures as a genuine familial home but, at best, a “little stepfatherland” (Stiefvaterländschen). 5 A generation before Charles Baudelaire, Heine—who two years after writing Die Bäder von Lucca would settle in Paris and thereby help establish the city as an international center for the stateless— champions the alienated gaze over the concept of homeland.6 Just as Hirsch-Hyazinth is both Jewish and Christian—and his fanciful double name indicates that he is alternately an animal (a deer, Hirsch) and a flower (hyacinth)—national aspirations in Europe could be formulated only in transit or juxtaposition

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during the era when Heine was writing.7 Spatial coordinates of north and south signaled one series of rhetorical associations for the European imagination, while east and west maintained complementary oppositions of primitiveness and civilization, authenticity and artifice.8 Heine, the prototype of the nineteenthcentury German Jewish intellectual, had created the template through which German Jews would view the East even before depicting the encounter with his “post-Judaic” wanderers in the Italian countryside. In 1822 he recorded his episodic observations on the Polish landscape by writing, “Poland lies between Russia and—France. I won’t even count Germany before France. . . . On account of an oppressive barbarism from the hostile contact with Russia, and an oppressive hyper-cultivation from the friendly contact with France, [there is a] strange mixture of culture and barbarism in the character and domestic life of Poland.”9 In his symbolic geography, the emerging German nation is excised from the map, while a Polish nation that had actually been dismantled and annexed by the empires surrounding it stands simultaneously as Germany’s inversion and its twin; like Italy, Poland in the modern era has served as Germany’s doppelgänger. Almost a decade before his Italian writings, Heine offers an associative link between Poland and Italy by way of their linguistic distance from German: “And the otherwise so raw-sounding Polish sounds like Italian when I hear it sung” (Reisebilder, 501). This in turn leads him to connect Polish nationalism with a performed spectacle, not only because the theater was a primary institution for the maintenance of Polish linguistic and cultural autonomy10 but also because Heine suggests that nationhood itself is a theatrical mask that can be adopted, adapted, or discarded at will. He therefore notes, “Every Pole in Posen seeks patriotism in the theatre” (Reisebilder, 501). It is perhaps because of Heine’s counterintuitive identification of Germany with Poland—rather than their ostensible opposition—that he feels so little sympathy for Polish national aspirations, particularly in Prussian-controlled

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Posen: “Almost to a laughable extent the Poles now honor everything having to do with the Fatherland” (Reisebilder, 488), he writes. In this one dismissive comment, Heine champions the “stepfatherland” over the “fatherland” and thereby plants the seeds of a cosmopolitanism that during the nineteenth century would increasingly serve as a model for a “post-Judaic” Jewish identity. The confrontation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in turn becomes crucial during the Weimar era for charting the ideological stakes of German Jewish debates over Zionism, Communism, and their alternatives. These are the stakes to which the first chapter of this study devotes itself, through a consideration of two Weimar-era figures, the German writer Alfred Döblin and the Yiddish author Dovid Bergelson. As discussed, the purpose of Heine’s dismissive attitude toward Polish nationalism was to articulate an equally critical attitude toward a German nationalism as yet in a more embryonic condition than Polish nationalism; the Polish society that Heine depicts and satirizes is at least as much of a cover for his German contemporaries as his description of Italy would be a few years later. Döblin also depicts his skepticism toward the new Polish nation-state of the interwar era, from the perspective of a German citizen who imagines himself, more than a little disingenuously, to have outgrown nationalism. Here one observes the inevitable proximity of the belated to the anticipatory: the birth of German nationalism in the nineteenth century and the premature postmortem on nationalism in Europe generally a hundred years later provoke a comparable disaffection from two self-described Jewish cosmopolitans, Heine and Döblin, unable to identify with nationhood, whether German, Jewish, or otherwise. Döblin, born in Prussian Stettin (Szczecin), adopts Heine’s cosmopolitan stance in his examination of the new Polish Republic after World War I, Reise in Polen (Journey to Poland, 1925), in pointed comparison with both German and Jewish nationhood.

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For Döblin, the investment in a cosmopolitan politics eventually leads him to convert to Catholicism while living in the United States during World War II, but the roots of his attraction to Christianity are already visible in his Polish travels, which he had embarked on in search of a renewed identification with Jewish peoplehood, whether in religious or national terms. Although for Heine in the early nineteenth century Posen would be recognized as a foreign territory in linguistic as well as sovereign terms, for Alfred Döblin, whose native Stettin was even more deeply embedded in the Prussian empire, the identification with German-language culture precludes an affinity with the far stronger and more emergent Polish nationalism of the early twentieth century.11 As a German, accordingly, nationalism manifests itself for Döblin as an excess, an outdated social formation, a remnant from the nineteenth century that in the interwar era was to be abandoned for an international mobility and openness. Over the course of his travel narrative, however, it becomes clear that the foundational assumption of Döblin’s cosmopolitan antinationalism is a Germanness that can be taken for granted because it is in fact so well established and integral to his thinking. Cosmopolitans such as Heine in the nineteenth century and his many German Jewish heirs and heiresses in the twentieth century serve to caution that the psychological insight of recognizing nationhood as a performance, even a masquerade, is insufficient protection from the dangers that arise when borders are policed to exclude the cosmopolitans themselves. As will be recalled throughout the present study, cosmopolitanism in times of crisis becomes a synonym for homelessness. Döblin is a representative figure to illustrate this temporal shift from the cosmopolitan to the homeless: few German writers of the Weimar era went to greater lengths to encounter Yiddish culture, both in Berlin and Poland, yet comparably few came away from these encounters with less of an identification with Jewishness than Döblin. Unlike Joseph Roth—whose Juden auf Wanderschaft

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(Wandering Jews, 1927) was reportedly written partly as a protest to Döblin’s aloofly alienated perspective on Polish Jewry, and for whom Yiddish culture was a living memory from his upbringing in the border town of Brody, in Galicia—Döblin cultivates his inability to understand Yiddish and his indifference toward Jewish observance. Döblin’s travels in Poland thus demonstrate the elements of melancholy wandering that link travel writing with allegory: the melancholy wanderer goes everywhere but absorbs nothing, and though Döblin’s journey to the east is ostensibly motivated by a desire to experience a superseded temporality, his goal is no longer to reconnect with his origins but to measure his distance from them. For Bergelson, by contrast, the depiction of Eastern Europe is the consequence of the dislocation from his personal experience of Jewish tradition, and his ideological conclusions serve not to supersede identification with the Jewish people but to reintegrate Yiddish culture, which had been disrupted by war and devastation, with history. Bergelson—who, like Döblin, resided in Berlin during most of the Weimar era (1921–1933), longer than any other Yiddish writer of his stature—responds to a distinct but equivalent belief in the obsolescence of his Jewish past by identifying with the other predominate “post-Judaic” ideology of European modernity, socialism, particularly the Soviet Communism with which he aligned himself while living in Berlin. He signals this affiliation, ambiguously and allegorically, with the publication of his 1929 novel dealing with the Sovietization of a shtetl on the Ukrainian-Polish border, Mides ha-din (published in translation as Judgment). Stated in temporal terms, Döblin portrays his encounter with Jewish life in Poland as a trip to the past, whereas for Bergelson the predicament for Jews in the Soviet Union, on the opposite side of the same border, is how to connect them with the future. Bergelson’s ideological affiliation seems counterintuitive to the elegant, obscure, and difficult fiction that he had produced

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before World War I, which takes as its theme the disaffection and impotence of a shtetl haute bourgeoisie, particularly the children of relatively affluent yet still traditional Jewish businessmen who, like the author himself, had abandoned religious observance but remained trapped in traditional families, smalltown boredom, and the limited horizons imposed on Jews in the czarist Pale of Settlement. This prewar fiction signals a generational and stylistic shift for Yiddish literature as a whole, dividing the “classic” period of Yiddish fiction that had begun toward the end of the nineteenth century with writers such as Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Y. L. Peretz (1852–1915), and Sholem Aleichem from the High Modernist experimentation that began as Yiddish culture migrated out of the shtetl and into metropolises such as Warsaw, Odessa, New York, and—after the revolutions of 1917—Moscow. Although Bergelson extends a development in Yiddish modernism that begins with Peretz, away from the studied adaptation of oral narrative championed in the fiction of Mendele and Sholem Aleichem, the scholar Joseph Sherman notes that Bergelson in fact felt a closer affinity to Sholem Aleichem’s work than Peretz’s.12 However surprising this revelation may seem to anyone who has read both authors, they share a complementary relationship, perhaps like Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) and James Joyce (1882–1941); all the virtues of verbal energy, dynamism, and dexterity in the master are nullified in the writing of the disciple. Whereas Sholem Aleichem concentrates his comic genius and gift for mimicry on aging and impoverished Jews, granting center stage to figures marginalized by modernity, Bergelson focuses with a lachrymose intensity primarily on the young, the affluent, the urbanizing Jews who are ostensibly the beneficiaries of the modern world. Where a vortex of verbal energy characterizes Sholem Aleichem’s characters, each of whom is more vital than Bergelson’s younger protagonists, Bergelson’s world is marked by its silence—because his characters would no longer speak in

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Yiddish to anyone other than themselves. Sholem Aleichem and Bergelson devote themselves to a constant theme: the obsolescence of Yiddish culture, articulated at different frequencies in the Yiddish language. For Bergelson, unlike Sholem Aleichem, this obsolescence is connected explicitly with the influence of Max Nordau’s theory of degeneracy, which entered Yiddish modernism via the intellectual and stylistic influence of Russian Symbolism.13 In his prewar masterpiece Nokh alemen (1913), for example, Bergelson evokes Nordau’s thought when he writes of the novel’s protagonist, “Her father was also descended from an ancient family that had settled in Germany and had for a long time intermarried among its own members so that now, apparently, it was degenerating with age. This was possibly why she sometimes felt such purposelessness and was fit for nothing.”14 Bergelson’s fixation on the shtetl’s moribund status in his pre-Revolution fiction begets his equally morbid prognosis for Jewishness as such after World War I and the Revolution. In philosophical terms, this conviction suggests the challenge of narrating a “living death,” though in historical terms he is also contemplating the actual, unprecedented, nearly unfathomable magnitude of death and destruction brought about by World War I and the anti-Revolutionary pogroms. The focus of Bergelson’s contemplation, however, is less physical—as in the pogrom poetry of his contemporaries Peretz Markish (1895–1952) or Uri-Tsevi Grinberg—and more symbolic of the culture that had been destroyed in this period, and the uncertain status of the survivors as Jews or citizens of a new national dispensation. In Hegelian terms, Bergelson arrives at the metaphysical insight that physical and political impotence is the only available position for philosophical strength, and having accepted this premise, his gravitation toward a Marxist solution to the problem of political power was perhaps inevitable, since the historical legacy of Hegelianism, particularly for Eastern European Jews, was to be found in Marxism, even if affiliation with the

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Soviet Union was not the only manifestation of this phenomenon. All of these philosophical, temporal, and political viewpoints, however, correspond to the rhetorical characteristics and preconditions of allegorical representation, which characterizes works such as Nokh alemen and Mides ha-din equally. As will be seen, it is this allegorical condition that provides the conceptual terms for a comparison with Döblin, which in turn allows for an assessment of Bergelson’s Berlin fiction in the context of Weimar aesthetics. Notes 1.  See Heinrich Heine, Journey to Italy, trans. Charles G. Leland (New York: Marsilio, 1998), 144. Although the inference of Lazarus Gumpel as the target of Heine’s satire is understandable given the proximity of his name to Gumpelino and the familial association of Gumpel with Heine, Philip Veit (1920–1986) points out that Gumpel, unlike Gumpelino, never converted to Christianity; Veit suggests persuasively that Eduard Gans (1797–1839), a closer associate to Heine personally and a more ostentatious convert to Christianity, is a more likely target of ridicule in this narrative. See Philip F. Veit, “Heine’s Polemics in Die Bäder von Lucca,” Germanic Review 55, no. 3 (Summer 1980): 109–17. 2.  Also apparently inspired by a real figure, Isaac Rocamora; see Heine, Journey to Italy, 152. Veit likewise challenges this conventional interpretation, suggesting instead that Heine’s model for Hirsch-Hyazinth is David Friedländer (1750–1834), a prominent disciple of Moses Mendelssohn (1729– 1786). See Veit, “Heine’s Polemics,” 112–13. I fail to see the resemblance. More astute, however, is Veit’s observation that within the narrative HirschHyazinth serves as Sancho Panzo to Gumpelino’s Don Quixote (Veit, “Heine’s Polemics,” 112). Beyond Heine’s portrait, Hirsch-Hyazinth has achieved perhaps greater immortality through Sigmund Freud’s (inexhaustible) analysis of his portmanteau wordplay in his 1905 study Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990). 3.  As Na’ama Rokem observes, Hirsch-Hyazinth even shares the same initials as the author, Heinrich Heine. See her Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 33. 4.  Heinrich Heine, Reisebilder (Rye Brook, NY: Elibron Classics, 2006), 241. Subsequent references to this book incorporated in text as “Reisebilder.” See also Heine, Journey to Italy, 152–53.

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5.  Heine’s coinage Stiefvaterländschen resonates with a more contemporary reference to “the broken promised land” where “every dream slips through your hands” in the song “Across the Borderline” by Jim Dickerson, John Hiatt, and Ry Cooder. The version of the song recorded as the title track of Willie Nelson’s 1993 album could serve as either the soundtrack or the epigraph for this section of the present comparison; “across the borderline” is where Dovid Bergelson and Alfred Döblin, each located temporarily in Berlin, find themselves in a reciprocal if allegorical gaze, each dreaming of what the other fails to realize that he possesses. 6.  “Baudelaire’s genius, which is nourished on melancholy, is an allegorical genius. . . . For the first time, with Baudelaire, Paris becomes the subject of lyric poetry. Not as homeland; rather, the gaze of the allegorist, as it falls on the city, is the gaze of the alienated man.” See Walter Benjamin, “Exposé of 1935, Early Version,” in The Arcades Project [1999], trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 895. In the original, see Gesammelte Schriften, 5(2): 1231–32. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Arcades Project “G” (German) and “E” (English). 7.  Indeed, Veit contends that the Italian setting of Heine’s narrative serves as a cover for what is really a satire of contemporary life in the German world: “Ostensibly, the characters crossing the stage are mostly tourists like the narrator himself. . . . Actually, Heine deals with conditions and aspects of life in Germany and especially in the milieu in which he moved in Berlin. By transferring the action to far away Italy he can create a fictional façade which serves his camouflaging process” (Veit, “Heine’s Polemics,” 109). 8.  Susan Buck-Morss suggests an analogous spatial dialectic at work in Benjamin’s Arcades Project encompassing the axial coordinates of Paris (west), Berlin (north), Moscow (east), and Naples (south). See The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project [1989] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 25–37. 9.  Reisebilder, 485–86. Translations from “Über Polen” will be my own, with apologies. As my friend Jonathan Skolnik kindly informed me in an email dated July 3, 2017, Heine published “Über Polen” in the Berlin journal Der Gesellschafter, oder Blätter für Geist und Herz in January 1823. Though Heine’s impressions are fragmentary, the essay is apparently not a fragment. As Rokem explains of another travel narrative from the same era, Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey, 1824), “his [Heine’s] announcement that the text is bound to remain a fragment is to be read not as an espousal of a romantic aesthetic, but rather as amplifying the fact that the Travel

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Pictures are an experiment with a new type of genre and that in this genre, Heine’s understanding of the problematics of location was changing. . . . Heine makes clear that no one location along the journey can be described on its own terms, without reference to another location.” See Rokem, Prosaic Conditions, 43–44. 10.  For an appreciation of the role of theater in Polish nationalism during the early nineteenth century, see Harold B. Segel’s introduction to his edited volume The Major Comedies of Alexander Fredro (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 3–54. Fredro (1793–1876) was one of the most significant Polish-language authors of the early nineteenth century, but his relationship with Polish nationalism under Austrian rule is complex. Despite his military service to the Polish cause during the Napoleonic wars, as well as his support for the Polish insurrection against Russia in 1830, the denunciation of his writing as “overly French” (Francuszczyzna) that Seweryn Goszcyzński (1803–1876) delivered in 1835 resulted in his belletristic silence for the subsequent two decades. For more on the feud between Goszcyzński and Fredro, in addition to Segel’s introduction, see Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 108–9; Fredro is a leading personality in Wolff’s history of the region. Given their common models in French Enlightenment satire, it would be worthwhile to compare Fredro to Yiddish-language contemporaries such as Yisroel Aksenfeld (1787–1866) and Shloyme Ettinger (1803–1856). 11.  Werner Stauffacher writes of Döblin’s itinerary in Reise in Polen, “cities such as Posen, Bromberg (Bydgoszcz) were not included on his itinerary, because Döblin still regarded them as primarily ‘German.’” See “Polen 1924—eine Erfahrung zu Alfred Döblins Reise in Polen,” in Galizien Als Gemeinsame Literaturlandschaft, ed. Fridrun Rinner and Klaus Zerinschek (Innsbruck: Amœ, 1988), 132 (my translation). Döblin significantly excludes his native region from his purview, even though these cities were now part of Poland and even though the same reasons for excluding them—that they were not “legitimately” or “historically” Polish—could be applied to cities he did visit, such as Vilna (Vilnius) or Lemberg (Lviv), with equal accuracy or relativity. The disidentification of Posen with Poland anticipates his failure to identify with the Jews in Poland whom he meets, in spite of his evident desire, or at least his demonstrable effort, to do so. The concept of Polishness, as much as the concepts of “cosmopolitanism” and “statelessness,” is malleable in Döblin’s estimation, and this has implications for the narrative as a whole.

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12.  See “David Bergelson: A Biography,” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 9. 13.  The associations of Russian Symbolism with Nordau’s scientific theory of degeneracy are considered in part 2 of this study. 14.  Dovid Bergelson, Nokh alemen, in Ale verk, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: ICUF, 1961), 149–50. In English, The End of Everything, trans. Joseph Sherman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 51.

one

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A PAST BECOME SPACE Alfred Döblin and Dovid Bergelson in Poland, the Soviet Union—and Berlin1

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story

In his famous essay on the storyteller, Walter Benjamin recalls a German saying, “When someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about,” further elaborating that “people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home . . . who knows the local tales and traditions.”2 The explicit contrast that Benjamin draws to oral traditions in his essay is the novel, the one literary form to come of age after the printing press (“Erzähler,” G 442; E 146). In more material terms, suggested elsewhere in his writing, the object of his contrast is the mass media, which for economic and technological reasons is responsible for the mass production of information. Local storytellers and itinerant storytellers in this schema are representations of Benjamin’s preoccupation with Erfahrung (“practical experience”) and Erlebnis (“immediate experience”). Thus, in the Arcades Project he notes, “Just as the industrial labor process separates off from handicraft, so the form of communication corresponding to this labor process—information—separates off from the form of communication corresponding to the artisanal process of labor, 41

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which is storytelling” (Arcades Project, G 966; E 804). The focus of critique in this respect is less the novelist than the newspaper feuilletonist: “It was a matter of injecting experience—as it were, intravenously—with the poison of sensation [Sensation]; that is to say, highlighting within ordinary experience [Erfahrung] the character of immediate experience [Erlebnischarakter]. To this end, the experience of the big-city dweller presented itself. The feuilletonist turns this to account. He renders the city strange to its inhabitants. He is thus one of the first technicians called up by the heightened need for immediate experiences [Erlebnissen]” (Arcades Project, G 966; E 803–4). The problem with the feuilleton, as Benjamin learns from Karl Kraus (1874–1936), 3 is its premise that every observation is potentially an Erlebnis. If every experience is extraordinary, then the extraordinary becomes everyday. Like the abuse of psychedelic drugs in a later era, the overabundance of sensation leads to the deadening of perception. This contrast of modern writing with traditional modes of storytelling—as dissemination not just of narratives but more fundamentally of experiences—suggests a further complementarity between the “Erzähler” essay and the contemporaneous drafts of Benjamin’s equally renowned “Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility” essay. As he writes there, it is the task of a communistic aesthetic to represent not only revolutionary artistic values but also revolutionary experience. The counterpart to the “Erzähler’s” distinction between master craftsman and journeyman in the “Work of Art” essay is between the surgeon and the magician;4 the magician achieves healing through Erlebnis, whereas the surgeon achieves it through Erfahrung. For Benjamin, the manufacture of Erlebnis in the spectacle of mass culture culminates in fascism: “‘Fiat ars—pereat mundus’ [Let art flourish—and the world perish], says fascism, expecting from war . . . the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology. . . . Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by

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fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art” (“Kunstwerk,” G 383–84; E 122; emphasis in original). The goal of revolutionary cinema is to resist the manufacture of Erlebnis, common to both newsprint culture and the spectacles of fascism, by manufacturing an Erfahrung of experience and its representation in a technological and demystified process. 5 Döblin and Bergelson, similarly, are preoccupied with the worldviews suggested by Benjamin’s figures of master craftsman and journeyman, storytelling and mass culture, the transmission of the past and the transformations of the future. The two works under consideration in this comparison, Reise in Polen and Mides ha-din, reiterate the dilemmas set out in the introduction to this chapter, between an affirmation of alienated rootlessness and a reclamation of homeland but alternatively as well between a search for the past and a reimagining of the future. Of equal significance, they are each narratives about borders—between Poland and the Soviet Union, between Poland and Germany, between Jews and non-Jews—that had already been reconfigured radically by war and revolution, and negotiating these borderlines is a preoccupation of both narratives. Moreover, the incomplete erasure of imperial borders manifests itself as a ghostly presence within the new dispensation that each author notes. As Larry Wolff explains of Reise in Polen, “In 1924, when Döblin was traveling, Galicia remained still a meaningful place name . . . [an] only recently effaced geopolitical entity” (Idea of Galicia, 385). The newness of the borders separating and linking the territories that Bergelson and Döblin describe accounts for the ambiguous temporality of these works, and this ambiguity reconstitutes the allegorical figuration that transforms these political designations into textual spaces. The historical backdrop connecting Benjamin’s terminology with the belletristic writing of Bergelson and Döblin, and indeed all the twentieth-century figures in this study, is the First

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World War, which manifests its effect on each of these writers as the presence of death in their understanding of experience.6 A consequent factor linking Benjamin’s contemplation of storytelling with Bergelson and Döblin is his understanding of how storytelling relates to death.7 The role of death in determining the relationship among narratives, modernity, and experience distinguishes the stories that Döblin and Bergelson choose to tell, in philosophical as well as formal or linguistic senses. For Döblin, the Jewish cultures on display in Poland are obsolescent, already dead, and therefore are incapable of imparting to him either Erlebnis, because they are no longer am Leben (alive)— this kind of experience, as will be seen, occurs during Döblin’s Polish travels only in Catholic contexts—or Erfahrung, since he lacks either the time or the cultural skills to receive this type of “deep” or accumulative experience. For Bergelson, by contrast, the culture of the shtetl, in both its economic unproductivity and its ideological incoherence, is not already dead but under a death sentence. The stern justice of the novel’s title, and therefore the Communism that he holds out as the new dispensation to replace the shtetl, provides a paradoxical lifeline to the shtetl dwellers, provided that they surrender every aspect of their prior life to receive this new category of experience, and with it, a new life. One can accordingly recognize the distinction between Reise in Polen and Mides ha-din—beyond the obvious differences in authorship, language, and literary form—as a productive illustration of the relationship between the “allegorical image” and the “dialectical image,” a relationship that is less antagonistic than complementary. Reise in Polen constructs an allegorical image of the new Polish nation-state, in which the progress of independence is displaced by the regression, the “return of the repressed,” of nationalism. Mides ha-din in turn constructs a dialectical image of the emerging Soviet empire. Both allegorical images and dialectical images present “dialectics at a standstill,” a representation of reality that allows its historical contradictions

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to be visualized. What separates the two types of image is their relationship to temporality. As Rolf Tiedemann (1932–2018) suggests, the dialectical image differs from the allegorical image in that it offers the potential, though not the realization, of a “messianic” redemption when the historical materialist recognizes the phantasmagoric nature of the image and thus invests the image with revolutionary potential.8 The two types of image are intrinsically related, because they both construct a text out of the social and physical landscape, thereby allowing the society to be deciphered in historical terms, yet they are also simultaneously disrupted by a divergent conception of time. For Döblin, Poland is irrevocably a land of mutually exclusive pasts for Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and Germans. For Bergelson, the Soviet Union is an indivisible future to which the Jews on the border must be integrated; both Jews and the border in Bergelson’s novel signify the limits of the new regime. In both the allegorical image and the dialectical image, what is missing is the present tense, an effaced temporality tied mournfully in each example to the author’s absent presence from the social landscapes he constructs. In aesthetic terms, Döblin’s frustrated search for Erfahrung is characteristic of travel writing as a literary form and its contrast with the novel. In Reise in Polen, Döblin describes the Galician industrial town Drohobycz by writing, “But below the market, beyond the garbage and the grisly tower, there are narrow streets. A dreadful area. Anyone who hasn’t seen these alleys and ‘houses’ doesn’t know what poverty is. These aren’t houses, these are remnants of houses. . . . Windows covered with boards, windows without glass. . . . Each dump is overcrowded. A big, freshly whitewashed house shines, horrible, in the midst of this woe. . . . It’s the synagogue. It too was ruinous, but then it was renovated. And I can’t help thinking that it shouldn’t have been renovated.”9 The Drohobycz that Döblin describes through this series of first impressions is home to another great Jewish modernist, Bruno Schulz (1892–1942). And yet the Drohobycz that Schulz evokes as

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a site of continuous Erlebnis could not be further removed from the disenchanted, impoverished, and explicitly Jewish descriptions that Döblin offers.10 Both Döblin and Schulz are “Polish Jews with German names” (RiP G 230; E 175), and as such one can consider Schulz’s writing an inverted image of Döblin’s. Schulz is nonetheless situated in Drohobycz as Döblin never could be. Significantly, though, it is Döblin who figures Drohobycz as Jewish, and this Jewishness is central to his depiction of the landscape as mired in poverty, decay, and despair. Schulz’s descriptions therefore can be read via Döblin as a mirror of the “naturalistic” Drohobycz, in which the Jewishness of the “street of crocodiles” is understood as what remains unspoken. Döblin’s travelogue depicts freshly drawn and constantly trespassed borders between the new republic and the spectral empires it had replaced, as well as the equally illusory yet no less constraining boundaries between German civilization and the Jews of the East. Bergelson’s novel, by contrast, takes place on a single, permeable border separating Soviet Ukraine from the Polish Republic. Where Döblin stresses the political significance of crossing the border between Germany and Poland, only to emphasize in so doing the temporal boundary between present and past that characterizes his travels, Bergelson asserts the significance of the border itself in separating the new Soviet sovereignty from both its own imperial past and the capitalist decadence of speculation and counterrevolution that lie just to the west. Already in his prewar writing, Bergelson invested the obsolescence that he perceived in shtetl culture with the possibility of anticipating a new dispensation, which in turn provides the rationale for his commitment to a culture and language that seemed to offer so few prospects in the prewar era in which he began his career. In this respect he writes of the protagonist in Nokh alemen, “Mirel was something of an intellectual, after all. . . . Perhaps that acquaintance of hers was right in saying she was a ‘transitional

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point’” (Nokh alemen, Y 322; E 211). What Bergelson had made as the focus of his character studies in prerevolution fiction, of people estranged simultaneously from past and future, becomes extrapolated in Mides ha-din to the social predicament of the border shtetl as such. For Bergelson the negotiability of Jewishness focuses on the dead letter of prewar Jewish culture and the new Soviet culture promising liberation to Jews and non-Jews under a radical doctrine, just as the Christianity to which Döblin gravitates had promised previously.11 As Joseph Sherman explains, Bergelson had an additional motivation for the temporal and cultural distinctions between living and dead culture: “The bare fact of writing in Yiddish marked [Yiddish writers] as untrustworthy in the eyes of the apparat. Jews were notoriously attached to their lost past, and in the new social order, any attitude of mind that extended backwards to an ancient national particularism rooted in religious belief could neither wholeheartedly embrace cultural universalism, nor easily adapt to the totalitarian dictates of another people. To allay suspicion, Soviet Yiddish writers had therefore to ensure that they were not only dedicated to the Party line, but that they also showed more zeal than others in promoting it.”12 In the conceptual terms that guide this comparison, Soviet political realities obligate Yiddish writers to transform their relationship to the ruptured Jewish past from a perspective of mourning to one of melancholy; this is the philosophical predicament to which the “strict justice” of Bergelson’s title refers. Mides ha-din narrates the elliptical and episodic tale of a fictional Ukrainian border shtetl, Golikhovke, and its residents’ efforts simultaneously to make peace with and resist the authority of the local police headquarters, Kamino-Balke, recently appropriated from an abandoned monastery, and its new security administrator, the pseudonymous and mysterious Filipov, who functions by default as the novel’s protagonist. In the introduction to their fine translation of Mides ha-din, Harriet Murav and

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Sasha Senderovich note that despite his non-Jewish origins Filipov resembles Bergelson’s earlier protagonists in his muteness, his passivity, and his restlessness, all of which are symptoms of melancholy. As they write, despite the author’s efforts to make his novel pass muster as a bona fide work of inspiring, revolutionary Soviet fiction, contemporary Soviet Yiddish reviewers “strongly suspected that Judgment was a story set amid theatrical props that looked like the revolution rather than a narrative of revolutionary struggle.”13 Given Bergelson’s prolific output and the density of his prose, it’s perhaps surprising to consider that in a career already spanning more than twenty years, Mides ha-din was only his third completed novel; though written in Berlin, it was first serialized in the New York Communist daily Di MorgnFrayhayt in 1926–1927 and was published in book form in 1929 simultaneously in Polish Vilna and Soviet Kiev. This publishing history suggests that the novel trespasses political and geographical borders of its own. Döblin’s travel memoir, similarly, presents the aptly rambling associations of an assimilated German Jew—though a German in fact born in Poland and a Jew who had already baptized each of his four sons as Protestants by the time Reise in Polen was published in book form14 —making his way through the new Polish republic of the mid-1920s.15 In his definitive essay on Döblin’s encounter with Yiddish culture, Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer notes that Jewish characters and motifs appear only episodically in the first two decades of Döblin’s literary career preceding the appearance of this travelogue; asking himself at one point to which nation he belongs, Döblin decides zu den Kindern und Irren, “to children and lunatics.”16 In 1921, however, he began reviewing Yiddish theater17 as well as contemporary Yiddish literature in German translation, including the work of Dovid Bergelson, who became friends with Döblin at the famed Romanisches Café in Berlin.18 As Bayerdörfer states, “Given the literary shadows that East European Jewry had cast, along with the additional motivation

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of pogrom-like riots that took place in [Berlin’s] Scheunenviertel [in early November 1923], it is no surprise that Döblin decided in 1924 to make his journey eastward.”19 Another apparent motivation for Döblin’s trip to Eastern Europe was a desire to reconnect with an empirical, historical subject after having just published the futuristic fantasy novel Berge Meere und Giganten (Mountains, Seas, and Giants), but the world he encountered in Poland, particularly in its Jewish aspects, would prove for the author to be just as fantastic, overwhelming, and grotesque as the alternate reality he had envisioned in his previous novel. Nation Time

Indeed, a recurring theme in Döblin’s depiction of Polish Jews is their incompatibility with modern concepts of time. If Berge Meere und Giganten depicts an imaginary future,20 Reise in Polen becomes an attenuated portrait of Döblin’s immediate yet irretrievable past. Bergelson similarly represents the conflict in temporality that Döblin depicts between Germany and Poland through a linguistic tension in his novel between Russian and Yiddish. The use of Soviet terminology and whole lines of dialogue in untranslated Russian in Mides ha-din21—a tendency that occurs more frequently with non-Jewish characters than Jewish ones— not only reflects the new vocabulary introduced into Yiddish via Sovietization but also defamiliarizes the language, and the culture it signifies, for a non-Soviet readership, in ways reminiscent of Döblin’s frustration at being unable to decipher Yiddish on the basis of his German. The novel is addressed in part to non-Soviet readers by virtue of its publication in Vilna and New York, but it also excludes these readers through its linguistic strategies; it is in the West but not of it, about the Soviet Union but dissociated from it. Bergelson, whether deliberately or inadvertently, turns Soviet Yiddish into a “foreign” dialect for his “Western” audience, even as he introduces these readers to its new terminology.

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The novel’s action, such as it is, consists of the arrest and execution of smugglers and counterrevolutionaries—Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)—as Filipov institutes the “stern justice” of the new regime and, incongruously, the novel’s theodicean title. At the end of the novel, wearying of chronic illness and the burdens of his ideological commitments, Filipov meets his death in an apparent suicide mission against a band of thieves, and a young Jew, Pinke Vayl, newly converted to the Communist cause, pledges to honor his memory and fight for the new regime. In a sense, however, there is no real protagonist in the novel: like a travelogue, the narrative spaces of Golikhovke, Kamino-Balke, and the Polish border are as much the work’s preoccupation as any individual character is. Although structurally Filipov must be identified as the novel’s central figure, the drama of his interactions with the Jews of Golikhovke is constricted both by the language barriers between them and by the throat inflammation that Bergelson visits on him, which deprives him of the ability to speak comfortably and transforms him from a man of words, as the protagonist of previous Yiddish fiction would have been, into a man of action. With the collapse of “organic” shtetl society, what replaces Jewish tradition is neither a non-Jewish hero nor the new civilization of communism but the temporal contradiction of the Soviet shtetl. Here a spatial distinction exists between the old shtetl and the new local power, but implicitly there is an additional mediating circumstance of the author’s location in Berlin while writing this novel. As with Döblin’s preoccupation with the cultural and linguistic borders separating German and Polish Jews, the conflict between Jewishness and modernity in Bergelson’s novel is tied to the development of the new Soviet culture, now displaced by the fact that Bergelson, from the position of Berlin, chooses a nonJewish protagonist for a novel describing the profound transformation of his native region. Like Döblin, Bergelson is compelled to portray what was once his homeland in a radically dislocated

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way.22 Perhaps because of his relative unfamiliarity both with everyday realities in the new Soviet shtetl and with the shifting dictates for representing this world in a way that would be deemed “kosher” by the Soviet authorities, Bergelson bases his novel on a previously published, Russian-language source. As Gennady Estraikh writes, “There is little doubt that [Mides ha-din] was written under the influence of Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Life and Downfall of Nikolai Kurbov, published in Berlin in 1923. Both Ehrenburg’s and Bergelson’s novels underlined the idea that social progress was impossible without violent revolution, predetermined by Marxian historical forces. Like Ehrenburg’s Kurbov, Bergelson’s protagonist, Filipov, is a Chekist, a Soviet security officer, representing the merciless power that eliminates enemies of the revolution.”23 Just as Bergelson brings his fiction closer to contemporaneous Russian models, his protagonist combines the role of an ostensible Christ figure with the specifically Jewish—in Christian terms, “Old Testament”—notion of God as judge. The tragic element in the confrontation that Bergelson creates at the intersection of the shtetl with the new regime is to be found in the inability of most shtetl dwellers to decipher the new code that Filipov presents to them. His muteness and mysterious origins allow the other characters to project meaning on to his presence and his actions. As Sofia Pokrovskaya—an SR leader and therefore one of Filipov’s primary antagonists—says of him early in the novel, “Are they really saying he’s a magnate? An owner of coal mines? They also used to say: a former typesetter or a machinist at a printing press. ‘A dangerous communist,’ even. And now they’re saying: a simple coal miner. All that was said before was pure rumor—probably an intentional rumor, too, just to confuse everyone” (MhD, Y 50; E 39). In the collective imagination to which Sofia Pokrovskaya gives voice, Filipov embodies the contradictions of Bolshevik class-consciousness. Via Filipov’s fate, the revolution becomes simultaneously eschatological but nontranscendent. While proclaiming the revolution’s ultimate

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rightness, Bergelson deprives it of its redemptive aspect, or at least defers its redemption to an offstage future, and the confusion between the novel’s apparent ideological motivation, to “certify” its author in the eyes of the Soviet authorities, and its philosophical fatalism determines its allegorical character.24 In a short article written in 1927, Walter Benjamin characterizes the new literature coming out of the Soviet Union as “Baroque,” by which he apparently means the way in which aesthetic polemics in the Russian press mask ideological disputes within Soviet Communism; the critics in this analogy stand as courtiers vying for influence in the new regime.25 Writing in Berlin at the same time as Benjamin, though they were surely unaware of one another, Bergelson’s portrayal of the new Soviet society is Baroque in a more technical sense, in the way that the novel’s protagonist functions allegorically within the narrative. Filipov functions as a sovereign in the dual sense, characteristic of the Baroque Trauerspiel, as a tyrant and a martyr. This ambivalence accordingly invests his mute presence with the status of an emblem for the characters surrounding him. What stands at the heart of the new Soviet society, from Bergelson’s Berlin perspective, is—to quote a familiar phrase—“a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma.” If the landscape, whether social or natural, in both Mides ha-din and Reise in Polen becomes a text, Filipov in Bergelson’s novel becomes a hieroglyph. As Benjamin writes of the emblematic relationship that hieroglyphs maintain with allegory, “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance.”26 This erasure of individuality is the necessary precondition for the creation of a proper Soviet citizen, and Filipov necessarily serves as the vanguard for the shtetl, as well as the consequent dispenser of a destructive but just verdict on the surviving remnants of the unredeemed, prerevolutionary world.

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Just as Filipov serves as an embodiment of the tyrant/martyr in the Soviet system, Döblin’s travelogue, which lacks a central protagonist apart from its autobiographical narrator, chooses as its emerging focus the ultimate martyr/king, Jesus Christ, whose significance to the narrative stands to distinguish Jews from Christians and Poles from Germans. Döblin identifies so strongly with Christ in this narrative, eighteen years before his actual conversion to Catholicism, because only through Christ can he transcend the divisions in his own character and his relationship to nationhood that separate his Germanness from his Polishness and his Jewishness from his longing for spiritual and aesthetic communion with Christianity. As Werner Stauffacher writes of Döblin in Krakow, “What he sees in the figure of Christ at St Mary’s Basilica [Marienkirche] is not a founder of religion, nor a savior, but a sacrifice” (Stauffacher, “Polen 1924,” 136). Not Christ the Redeemer but Christ the martyr serves as an untranscendent rejoinder to the modernity that Döblin simultaneously flees from and encounters everywhere in his wanderings through Poland. In this respect, as Stauffacher notes, Döblin generally avoids the term crucifixion when referring to Jesus, preferring to refer to him as “the hanged man” (Stauffacher, “Polen 1924,” 136). Christ for Döblin, like the revolution for Bergelson, is at this point a provisional messiah, what in Jewish eschatology is known as the Meshiekh ben-Efraim (Messiah, the son of Joseph) preceding the final, redemptive Meshiekh ben-Dovid (Messiah, the son of David).27 By emancipating Christ from Christianity and reappropriating him as an allegory of Jewish suffering, Döblin creates not a liberation theology so much as a momentary liberation from theology. In keeping with the immanence of his eschatological themes, Döblin, like Bergelson in the relationship of his novel with other works of Soviet literature, cultivates intertextual echoes from his most significant German Jewish predecessor, Heinrich Heine. Heine’s “Über Polen” begins with a description of the Polish

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peasantry but soon turns to Poland’s Jews, of whom Heine writes, “Despite the barbaric fur cap with which he covers his head, and the still more barbaric ideas with which he fills the same, I esteem the Polish Jew much higher than many German Jews, with the Bolivar hat on their head and [the German Romantic novelist] Jean Paul in their head” (Reisebilder, 484–85).28 Heine’s narrator, like Döblin’s one hundred years later, stands outside both groups of Jews—though Heine, like Döblin, had not yet converted to Christianity when he published his notes—and it is through this distancing gesture that Heine establishes the Ostjuden’s symbolic value for subsequent German Jewish culture as barbaric but complete, preferable in their organic wholeness to the Western Jews’ pursuit of modern fashion and non-Jewish values.29 The dilemma between modernity and “authenticity,” both of which represent unattainable ideals for German Jewish intellectuals, motivates Heine’s Romantic, anti-Enlightenment critique of German Jewish culture. This dilemma in turn animates Döblin’s journey, as well as his consequent inability to recognize that an analogous conflict between tradition and modernity, the collective fate and individual destiny, was seething in the Yiddish culture he confronted on his journey. 30 Indeed, after his journey to Poland, Döblin began studying Yiddish and involved himself with the Territorialist movement, which aspired to a Jewish state outside of the land of Israel.31 In a letter to Martin Buber’s journal Der Jude in 1926, he reiterates that “the Jews are certainly a Folk; I saw this and experienced it for myself in Poland.”32 As much as Reise in Polen announces a “break” with its author’s past, a failed connection with his religious heritage, it also suggests an alternate future toward Jewish identification, one quite different from the trajectory he eventually settled on toward cosmopolitanism and eventually conversion.33 Between these alternatives, Döblin’s sense of self is split between east and west, Jewish and Catholic, a member of a community—whether Jewish or not, German or not—and an isolated, irreconcilable individual,

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a “wandering Jew,” in the Christian sense of the term. Döblin’s ultimate inability to identify with Jewishness, so painfully examined in his travelogue, is in fact the only means by which his Jewishness can find expression. The confusion this conflict creates for Döblin becomes palpable when he describes walking in Krakow: Along Grodska Street to the ring: Cloth Gazebo, St. Mary’s Church, the executed man [Jesus]. Everything’s symbolic; the executed man and Sefer Yesirah34 on one and the same level. But I reel at the sight of St. Mary’s, the women with bowed heads emerging with rosaries. Icons, incense—I don’t care for any of this. I’ve trained my heart toward powerful reality, toward the executed man. . . . The righteous man, the tsadik, the pillar that holds up the world [the lamed-vovnik]: that’s the executed man. . . . In stronger colors, more intense hues, like those of a stain-glassed window. (RiP, G 261; E 200)

Though Döblin states that everything is symbolic, his writing indicates that everything is metonymic, and he fills the rhetorical space between metaphor and metonymy with allegory. The continuous juxtaposition of Judaism with Christianity in the Erlebnis of the modern city, and in contrast to the traditional Jewish enclaves he also considers, results in the superimposition of one religion onto the other, and the contradictions through which two religions interpret common texts and shared spaces lead to the indeterminacy that characterizes allegory. The newness of civil society in Poland, the fact that unlike in Germany there is apparently no effort in Poland to create a secular culture, means that Döblin’s encounter with the two religions can find expression only as a mystical experience, but ultimately this mysticism remains as embedded in history as the mystical aspirations of Benjamin or Bergelson. Stated more directly, Döblin, like the Yiddish poets MoysheLeyb Halpern (1886–1932), Uri-Tsevi Grinberg, Moyshe Kulbak, and even Bob Dylan (not a Yiddish poet), is never more Jewish

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than when he’s talking about Jesus, yet this counterintuitive identification for Döblin stems from the assimilation of Christ, rather than the practice of Christian ritual, and leads eventually to an assimilation into civil society. In the Eastern European context, by contrast, the assimilation of Jesus was intended to articulate a rejection of both Christianity and orthodox or religious Jewishness, because the reality of East European culture made assimilation for Jews impossible, an impossibility signified linguistically by poets like Grinberg or Kulbak writing about Jesus in Yiddish. At the same time, however, that Döblin rejects the trappings of ritual, the “icons and incense,” as barriers to religious experience—an idea probably inherited from Martin Buber35— he nonetheless returns to the category of the aesthetic, “stainedglass windows,” to articulate, at this point, his attraction to both Jewishness and Christianity. If this paradoxical identification becomes the only available means by which Döblin can articulate a sense of self, what lessons do Bergelson’s Yiddish novel suggest by way of counterexample? Mides ha-din is a novel that, like Döblin’s travelogue, is preoccupied with borders, but the concept of border for both writers suggests an equally unstable series of associations with evaporating borders separating Jews from non-Jews, tradition from whatever new regimen will follow it, the individual from both the old shtetl-collective and the new Soviet or, in Döblin’s case, Polish one. From one perspective Bergelson demonstrates the irony inherent in replacing one distinction, and with it one concept of “stern justice,” with another, but with equal ambiguity and ambivalence he calls attention to the potential for danger, violence, and capriciousness that surrounds any partition. In historical terms, it is essential to reiterate that Döblin and Bergelson are writing at opposite sides of a border that ten years before had not existed; where before the distinctions between a “Polish” Jew and a “Russian” Jew were, especially in the German imagination, arbitrary and subjective, now these differences had

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become political, ideological, and territorial, with life-and-death consequences. Döblin reacts to this development by turning his attention to the problem of territory and statehood as such. In Lublin, he quotes his Jewish tour guide as saying, “Intelligence is ethnological; nations have different kinds of intelligence. The way of life dictates a few things that are part of intelligence. The Jews are generally said to be intelligent. . . . But they intensely reject all outside things, and this is due to their seclusion” (RiP, G 175–76; E 133). These lines, delivered in the narrative without quotation marks but clearly reflecting the perspective of the tour guide rather than the narrator, should be considered as further evidence of the inverted strategy for reading Döblin’s travelogue. Indeed, for a book the dedication of which reads, “‘For every border wields a tyrant’s power’: Of Every State Is This Said, and of the State Per Se,” what could be more antithetical than the notion of discrete “national” intelligences? To underscore the disparity of this passage from the author’s intent, not only is the narrator characterized by his inability to identify with the two nations he continuously contrasts in his book but also his ironic, perhaps malicious designation of the young tour guide as “Parsifal” (RiP, G 176; E 134) suggests the superimposition of one national culture onto another—or, conversely, the arbitrariness of all national demarcations. Döblin examines the new Polish nation-state as an effort at critique of nationalism and, in a different sense, nationhood. Under these terms, the contradiction between nationalism and nationhood, his efforts at identification with Jews or Jewishness are doomed to failure because of the confusion between the terms guiding his travels and informing his understanding of the intersecting loyalties among personhood, ethnicity, and the state. Döblin makes his anarchistic cosmopolitanism more explicit when he writes, “If a machine is useless, we smash it and make a new one. Today’s states are the graves of nations. . . . Now they [the

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Poles] have a state, and it poisons their nationhood. The border strikes back at them. They have reached out beyond themselves” (RiP, G 200; E 152). This problematic opposition of state to nation (Staat and Volk) suggests that the state automatically metastasizes into empire as a function of its borders, which signify not the limits of the nation so much as the overreaching of the state; every state automatically encompasses more than one nation. The border paradoxically signifies all that is unsettled within the state and outside the nation. Yet at the same time as he identifies the capriciousness of a Polish nation-state that encompasses, for example, Ukrainians and Jews without attempting to integrate their ethnic difference into its national culture, he critiques both in his subtle mockery of “Parsifal’s” naive endorsement of “ethnological difference” and his despair over the persistence of “primitive” Jewish otherness and the concept of collective identification as such. Poland is to be condemned for not including its ethnic minorities in its self-definition, yet these minorities might also be condemned for clinging to their notions of cultural difference. The Tyranny of Nationalism

In the then Polish, now Ukrainian city of Lemberg/Lwów/ Lviv/Lemberik, Döblin further elaborates on his despair over the recrudescence of nationalism: “Upon viewing the schools and hearing everything, I feel dejected. The boys and girls learn Ukrainian history. I have seen them learning Jewish history in the Jewish schools, Polish history in the Polish schools, German history in the German schools. There’s something gruesome about today’s nationalism. I lose all desire to advocate the freedom of nations. I lose all desire to comfort and threaten with ‘borders,’ which have a ‘tyrant’s power,’ where I see the tyranny of nationalism” (RiP, G 198; E 150). The author poses a dilemma of which even he is arguably unaware: as an alternative to the “micro-nationalisms” of the postimperial state—the nations

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emerging from the ashes of the Austrian, German, and Russian empires for which Döblin, like Joseph Roth, expresses an implicit nostalgia—what could serve as a unifying national narrative for the disparate and unassimilated groups comprising the new Polish republic of the mid-1920s? In what sense does Döblin offer a critique of the “new” nationalisms, and to what extent does he reveal himself to have returned to older imperial narratives, such as German identity, which arguably perpetrate as much projection, hostility, competition, and repression as the local nationalisms he attacks here? Is old nationalism really preferable to new nationalism? Big nationalism better than small? Empire better than the nation-state? One’s own nationalism better, or at least less apparent, than another’s? If Döblin’s book is dedicated to rejecting “all states, and the State, per se,” what distribution of power can be offered as an alternative? What replaces the concept of home in the absence of a homeland? Döblin seems to expose the limits of his cosmopolitanism while touring a textile plant in Łódź: “When I chat with a worker (I’m delighted that I can finally converse without an interpreter), the master, the owner, grows very quiet when the worker starts talking very vociferously about the bad times, about salaries. I go downstairs, there’s a cool good-bye. I would have liked to reenter his place: it had a German homeyness about it” (RiP, G 322–23; E 248). Döblin’s ambivalence manifests itself here with his focus simultaneously on the heimlisch German character of the factory and the unheimlisch, uncanny persistence of class conflict, transcendent of the national question that elsewhere dominates the manifest political content of the narrative. Döblin is delighted to speak without an interpreter because the workers in this factory speak German, not because he has managed any ability in Polish. At the end of his journey, the author finds in Łódź a mirror of the German, modern, industrial culture he identifies as home, which determines his conception of the modern and the national in spite of his declared opposition to the nation-state as a political category.

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By contrast, Mides ha-din is a borderless novel debuting in three countries simultaneously, and as such situating itself between regimes, ideologies, and aesthetics. It is a stateless narrative of the kind envisioned by Döblin but dedicated to the defense of borders and the construction of a state, the Soviet Union. The reciprocal longing for state and statelessness reflects the inverted status of Döblin as nationally affiliated and Bergelson in exile: each desires what the other is. In linguistic terms, paradoxically, Bergelson’s use of Russian doesn’t locate his narrative; it dislocates it. It thus culminates a history of the Slavic component within Yiddish and its literary significations. One prominent example of this usage is Mendele’s novel Masoes Benyomin hashlishi (The Travels of Benjamin III, 1878), in which the inability of Ukrainian peasants and Jews to understand one another reduces their respective languages to a series of gestures, grunts, and mispronounced syllables—a parody of language acquisition between these groups, but probably not much of an exaggeration among most Ukrainian and Jewish men in the nineteenth century. In this context, the mutual incomprehensibility of two coterritorial languages underscores the political, cultural, and temporal incompatibility of the people who speak them. In Mendele’s novel, about a satirically utopian quest to reunite the Ten Lost Tribes with the Jewish nation in order to return the newly whole Jewish people to Zion, these exchanges underscore the homelessness of Eastern European Jews. Significantly, in the 1896 Hebrew version of Mendele’s novel, all Slavicisms are translated parenthetically into Hebrew, even though the original Hebrew readership for Mendele’s work shared the same linguistic resources and limitations as the Yiddish one. Though in the Yiddish version to be “in” on Mendele’s joke about his characters’ linguistic limitations requires the reader to possess fluency in Yiddish and at least a rudimentary knowledge of Ukrainian, Hebrew readers are to be relieved of the obligation to understand either the Jewish or the non-Jewish vernaculars

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of Eastern Europe. Hebrew in the nineteenth century thus cultivates a sense of monolingual decorum that Yiddish lacks, and the porousness of Yiddish vis-à-vis its coterritorial languages only intensifies for the writers in Bergelson’s generation. Bergelson maintains the “open” status of Yiddish even after the moment when Yiddish speakers in America, Poland, and the Soviet Union, all of whom had access to Mides ha-din, became divided in national affiliations as well as coterritorial linguistic affinities. Writing, while living in Berlin, a Russian-inflected Yiddish in the 1920s for readers in Vilna or New York is nearly as utopian as Döblin’s dedication of his book to the destruction of the nationstate, and it derives, on a more specifically Jewish level, from the same impulses. Considering the formal affiliations of Mides ha-din with Reise in Polen, one can observe that the novel and the travelogue meet one another coming and going—as do the daytsh and the Ostjude—between Berlin of the 1920s and the prewar Pale of Settlement, and as such transience, mobility, and crossed borders determine the rhetoric of both works. With respect to the history of these forms, the travelogue generally develops parallel to the modern novel but functions as the novel’s other: in the modern era, authors have frequently reserved the travelogue as the form through which they have depicted exotic, often “primitive” cultures about which they have been unable to write from a perspective of psychological interiority. Where the novel focuses conventionally on the life of the individual, rendering place a secondary consideration, the travelogue makes individuals secondary and place its primary focus. The novel depends for its impact on defamiliarizing the everyday; travel writing by contrast dramatizes the necessarily frustrated effort of domesticating the unfamiliar, in order to demonstrate the inassimilable strangeness of the other. Mides ha-din in this regard relates to the travelogue as a modernist critique of novelistic conventions not only by virtue of

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Bergelson’s characteristically glacial narrative style but also because of the novel’s differentiation between the shtetl collective and the “new Soviet” individual that Filipov incompletely and inscrutably embodies. Bergelson’s novel can be considered an inverted travelogue, in which Filipov is viewed kaleidoscopically through the suspicious and uncomprehending perspectives of the townspeople he has been brought in to administer. Just as the travelogue constitutes the foreign narrator’s projection onto the exotic landscape he or she is describing, so do the shtetl dwellers project their fears onto the exotic, diseased body of the novel’s inassimilable main character. Indeed, Bergelson describes the Golikhovke physician Dr. Babitski’s understanding of his new patient by writing, “And it seemed to the doctor that Filipov was sick with a strange illness that nobody had ever heard of. This was an illness that can infect only a man like Filipov. When he ordered someone’s death, when he gave the command, ‘Shoot!’— there was no wisdom that could dissuade him, because it wasn’t Filipov who was giving the orders. It was History” (MhD, Y 75; E 59). Filipov in this description is a subject emptied of internal life, not an agent but a function of history, bringing the former Pale of Settlement into a new dispensation through revolutionary violence and justice. In this passage, Bergelson seems, arguably, to formulate a response to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926) from the opposite perspective—but thereby generating all the more intensive ambivalence, because unlike Red Cavalry he depicts the calamity of history from the perspective not of its instigators but of its victims. Babel’s ambivalence, pivoting between the desire for identification with the revolutionary Cossacks with whom the narrator travels and with the Jewish victims of revolutionary violence, is not generally replicated in Yiddish pogrom literature.36 In Yiddish there is never a question of where an author’s identification lies; Babel (1894–1940) admits to a desire and an identification with the Cossacks, both as builders of a new world and as a positive

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model of masculinity that would never and could never be articulated in Yiddish. In aesthetic terms, Babel brings a reportorial, journalistic precision to descriptions of violence that in Yiddish pogrom literature would be deliberately distorted with expressionistic effects of amplification, grotesquerie, and melodrama.37 Where Babel constructs an autobiographical narrator, Kirill Lyutov, whose internal struggle between loyalty to the past and allegiance to the future—an ambivalence never fully resolved over the course of Red Cavalry—embodies the instability of the historical moment in which the revolution erupted, Filipov in Bergelson’s novel stands as a projection and externalization of anxiety for the shtetl as a whole. Unlike Babel’s protagonist, there is no internal conflict in Filipov’s character, only the external, and mostly offstage, struggle against the forces of counterrevolution. An additional temporal paradox complicates the opposition of Filipov to the shtetl, insofar as the “new Soviet” person was conceived explicitly in collective, anti-individualistic terms. Just as the absence of individuality due to communal obligations regarding dress, customs, and religious strictures was an endless lament among maskilim—the adherents of haskole, 38 the “Jewish Enlightenment”—in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union replaces shtetl collectivity with a new set of collectivizing obligations. What vanishes in the transition from shtetl to Soviet is the opportunity to develop an individuated subjectivity that had served as the philosophical and psychological basis for modernity in a social, economic, and political context. Dr. Babitski, the bourgeois character who on the surface most closely resembles one of Bergelson’s prewar protagonists yet who also serves in Mides ha-din as a mirror of Filipov, 39 expresses the problem of individualism by stating, “What is this thing, the revolution? In one word, it’s Kamino-Balke” (MhD, Y 26; E 20). The revolution is simultaneously a location and a palimpsest, a spatial trope to be inscribed from the perspective of the character viewing it. Kamino-Balke is the site of the revolutionary collective, yet Golikhovke also

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forms a collective, if fragmented, character. Golikhovke serves not only as a dramatic chorus to the action of the novel but also as a representation of the simultaneously collective nature of Soviet and kleyn shtetldik life. These superimpositions function not only ethnically or spatially but also temporally as the novel dramatizes the end of a superseded, moribund era with which Bergelson’s writing had previously been associated. The problem of collectivity, particularly with respect to Jewishness, likewise haunts Döblin. In Warsaw, for example, the author describes seeing Jews at the cemetery on the eve of Yom Kippur: “Cold shivers run up and down my spine when I see and hear these things. I ride back on the trolley, climb the hotel stairs, sit in my room; it takes me awhile to collect my thoughts. This is something horrible. . . . Does this have anything to do with Judaism? These are living vestiges of ancient notions! These are vestiges of the fear of the dead, the fear of wandering souls. . . . It is the remnant of a different religion, animism, a cult of the dead” (RiP, G 92–93; E 66). Despite Döblin’s archaizing description, the Warsaw Jewish cemetery is actually a modern graveyard, established about a century before Döblin’s visit. Yet it functions as a synecdoche for the author’s journey to Poland as a whole.40 The Jews at the cemetery, occupying a space between life and death, journey back to the “living vestiges of ancient notions,” just as Döblin travels to a Jewish culture he sees as vanished from Europe and incompatible, for better or worse, with modernity. The need to reassure himself with references to the trolley car and the hotel room emphasizes the disorienting effects of his encounter with the primordial. But is the Warsaw Jewish cemetery any less a part of the modern city than the transit system or the grand hotel?41 Döblin in Reise in Polen renders Jewish culture in Warsaw as a dead letter, in spite of the evidence of life around him, as well as further instances of a vibrant, fractious Jewish modernity available had he sought it out. For Bergelson, by contrast, the

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territory under dispute at the border separating the Soviet Union from its former territorial possession in the new Polish republic is more literally a dead space because the effect of pogrom and dislocation—such as he had personally experienced—leaves these spaces significantly depopulated of their Jews and also left the institutions that defined shtetl life literally in ruins. In this respect Mikhail Krutikov notes that in one of Bergelson’s first major works responding to the border wars, the long story Tsugvintn (1922), there are no living Jewish characters.42 This spectral rendering of a recently murdered Jewish past sets the stage for a depiction of the ruinous postrevolutionary Jewish society in the shtetl that, like the Jews in Döblin’s description of the Warsaw cemetery, is less fully alive than a half-life depiction of fragments, ruins, and ghosts. Mides ha-din accordingly is as much a portrait conceived in Baroque shadows as it is a nascent experiment in Socialist Realism. Seen in the context of Berlin modernism, in which this writing was conceived, the trajectory from Tsugvintn to Mides ha-din can be understood aesthetically as the proximate progression from Expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit as it can be the ideological movement from cautious skepticism toward the revolution to a histrionic yet still distant identification with Soviet Communism. Ellen Kellman similarly notes that while writing for the antiBolshevik socialist New York daily Forverts, before his “conversion” to Communism, Bergelson had mocked the Soviet Yevsektsia for deciding that “there were no longer any Jews in the world.”43 Before pouncing on the irony of Bergelson affiliating himself with and adopting the ideological stance of his former rivals, one should consider the anxiety that prompts both his earlier derision and his subsequent allegiance: that Jewish life, violently severed from its cultural, religious, and economic foundations as Bergelson had understood them, really had become a dead letter. In this regard, both his ideological affiliation with the Soviet Union after 1926 and his literary conceptualization of

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Communism and its implications for the shtetl equally attest to his efforts to find a home for himself and the Yiddish language amid a new global dispensation. What motivates his ideological decision to embrace the Soviet regime is neither material comfort nor political expediency44 —at least not merely such considerations—but the philosophical melancholy of a wanderer grappling with his own displacement in the tectonic shift affecting his homeland. As a consequence of his dislocation in Berlin, Bergelson can no longer participate in the life of his community, and therefore he can only apostrophize either the persistence of Jewish culture there or the new culture that replaces it. The shallowness of his commitment to either option is directly tied to the distance he perceives, and articulates, between himself and the object of his longing. Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard

Döblin, back at the Warsaw Jewish cemetery, expresses such displacement more straightforwardly, as Heine had a century earlier, by referring to Jews exclusively in the third person: “The whole Jewish nation is praying, they all lie down before their god” (RiP, G 96–97; E 70). Such a strategy not only characterizes the Jewish “nation,” bizarrely, as a monolith—in Warsaw? In 1924?!—but also serves to exclude the author from its ranks. Reise in Polen is thus a post-Judaic work, in the sense that the narrator continually dramatizes his separateness from the Jewish people, which he sees as a people only in the ostensibly premodern context of Poland. This follows the logic of German Jewish liberalism, even taking this logic to the extreme of cosmopolitanism and internationalism, which can’t be identified as anything except Jewish. Bergelson, by contrast, consciously if ambivalently identifies with Soviet Marxism, but in order to show how the Pale of Settlement as a collectivity can also become post-Judaic. Unlike the cryptic and syncretic Catholicism of the Döblin narrative, Bergelson’s

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substitution of Marxism for traditional Judaism does not signify an abandonment of Jewish peoplehood, and this distinction accounts not only for some of the formal and ideological differences between Yiddish modernism and German modernism but also for the separate historical conditions determining Jewish identity in Eastern Europe as opposed to Germany.45 Much of Döblin’s anxiety in his narrative can be traced to his acknowledgment of these differences. As he describes his effort to meet the Gerer Rebbe, the leading Hasidic figure in Poland at the time, When further parleying proves useless, we decide to line up at a door, where a dozen young men are waiting. More and more keep streaming into the room. We are the focus of universal attention. People keep coming over to me. . . . [S]oon we are completely wedged in. . . . Silently, they push, they squeeze. Silently, they all press against the narrow door. . . . This is much worse . . . than any urban crowd that I have ever experienced. . . . Slowly . . . I see the crack in the door coming nearer. . . . And no one complains, no one curses. They moan. (RiP, G 103–4; E 75–76)

This passage is reminiscent of Franz Kafka (1883–1924), and it is noteworthy that Döblin employs an Expressionist strategy of spatial distortion and estrangement to signify the moment when the narrator must surrender his autonomy from the crowd he is observing, when the anthropologist merges with the object of scrutiny. The use of modernist narrative techniques thus articulates an instance in which travel writing collapses in on itself, in a situation where Döblin renders himself equal to the Hasidim he would presume to objectify. This is the source of his claustrophobia, as well as his emphasis on his and their voicelessness; he cannot speak for or about the masses as long as he is one of them.46 Furthermore, not just his voice but also his language fails both as a means of communication—he can’t understand the Rebbe’s Polish Yiddish (RiP, G 105; E 77)—and as a means of description. The meeting with the Rebbe therefore becomes an inversion of a

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religious experience. It is a carnival scene of parody and theater without walls, in which everyone becomes a spectacle and private spaces open up to public intervention. True, however, to Döblin’s insistence on the moribund condition of traditional Judaism, the scene is not only carnival but also charnel, juxtaposing the corporeality of male Jewish bodies in the overintimate proximity of a traditional Jewish space against wordless moaning. This anxiety is diametrically different from the raptures of Döblin’s still discreet attraction to the Catholic culture of Poland, as when he writes, “In all churches, the columns are truly God; Mary. In Wilno, in front of the beautiful miracle-working Madonna, I felt it with the throngs. Nothing is more natural than the feelings of these naïve people; I share their piety. . . . A street, Grodska Street, leads me downward. . . . Jews in dirty caftans wander back and forth, shrieking women. . . . The ground is muddy. Ragged women lug babies. Another airplane roars overhead” (RiP, G 166–68; E 126–27). At issue in this recurring opposition is a dialectical conception of the “masses” as community or as mob. For Döblin, this distinction hinges on a question of mediation. The narrator is able to share in the piety of the “naïve” Catholics of Lublin and Wilno because church architecture directs them, and him, outside the intimate contact between primitive and sophisticate, traditional and modern, east and west, toward a space both metaphysical and aesthetic and thus, seemingly, neutral, ahistorical, and “universal.” No such mediation exists in any of Döblin’s encounters with Jews, and therefore the author focuses his description not only on their physical misery but also, implicitly, on the spiritual and aesthetic poverty of traditional Judaism. This is a perennial critique of the nineteenth-century haskole, but Döblin participates in a postmaskilic era, in which the modernizing tools of mediation— Bildung, rationality, writing in modern Hebrew, and so on—can no longer be expected to slow the accelerating distance between Germany and Poland, figured in this passage as the sound of an airplane filling the heavens once pronounced by the psalmist to

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be the domain of God (Ps. 115:16). This juxtaposition introduces an even more grotesque description of a child’s funeral, further metonymical proof of the moribund condition of Polish Jewry, but rendered all the more obscene by the detail of a non-Jewish peasant woman urinating in the street behind the child’s coffin like “a robust horse” (RiP, G 169; E 128). The Jewish child dies, whereas the peasant woman outside the sacred space of a Catholic church becomes an animal, vital but fundamentally less than human, and the narrator remains estranged from both. Given the collective nature of both traditional Jewish life and the emerging Soviet culture, the “masses” are also a preoccupation in Bergelson’s novel. The choice of metaphor to convey his ambivalence toward community is therefore as significant as the decision to place Filipov at the center of Mides ha-din. As Filipov describes Golikhovke, “The revolution . . . is a sack. We keep on patching it up, but you here at the border are like mice, nibbling away. You are eating a hole at the edge of the sack and everything’s going to spill out” (MhD, Y 70; E 55). Here the revolution, rather than the Jews, is figured as inert, while the counterrevolutionary smugglers are at once destructive, parasitic, and revolting but also dynamic, resourceful, and tough. In spite of a socialist ideology that attracts the author, he can only draw characters from the shtetl who betray an ambivalence that is comparable to the portrayal of Hasidim in nineteenth-century satire as both unindividuated parasites and, paradoxically, more interesting than their “enlightened” counterparts. This stands distinct from the polemical fiction of earlier writers such as the nineteenth-century maskil Joseph Perl (1773–1839), in which the creative tenacity of the Hasidim in outfoxing the engines of progress that his own ideology embraces is an instance of how satire as an inherently political genre can overwhelm the ideological agendas that motivate it. For Bergelson, the self-canceling nature of the author’s characterizations is the motivation rather than the unintended consequence of his artistic decisions.

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An additional distinction between Bergelson and previous Yiddish writers, however, is the proximity and interaction between Jews and non-Jews in his fictional shtetl. He thus writes of a group of prisoners at Kamino-Balke, “The Pokras brothers were there, the dentist Galaganer, a very pockmarked Christian with a blond moustache (the same one who bent over while he walked, as if against the wind, although there was no wind) and also another man, packed tightly into his overcoat, also a Christian with a half-Jewish name” (MhD, Y 180; E 140). Ironically, Bergelson’s shtetl panorama is more ethnically diverse than any of his contemporaneous descriptions of Jewish life in Berlin; non-Jews and putative half Jews stand side by side with Jews, stylistically integrated through the classic Yiddish narrative device of constructing lists of shtetl types identified by a caricatured physical trait.47 The shtetl for Bergelson, no less than for Döblin, is no longer the locus of a pristinely authentic Jewish culture—a fictive locus, to be sure, but one nonetheless central to the discourse of nineteenth-century Yiddish narrative—but instead the site of contiguity and contingency between Jews and Christians, tradition and modernity, the old order of ostensibly stable cultural identifications and the possibility of new, intermingled associations. In both Döblin’s and Bergelson’s narratives, the politics of juxtaposition takes precedence over the ideology of hierarchy. Closely related to the satirical origins of Bergelson’s discourse, and further commenting on his new inclusion of non-Jews into the carnival domain of the fictive shtetl, Mides ha-din further distinguishes itself from contemporaneous narratives as one of the most filth-obsessed narratives in twentieth-century Yiddish literature. In this regard one of the smugglers wears a belted, koytik-gel jacket (MhD, Y 195; E 153), which the English translators render, euphemistically, as “dirty yellow.” A peasant’s encampment, similarly, is said to smell like the warm excrement under a pregnant cow (MhD, Y 196; E 153). The graphic naturalism of

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these descriptions recalls analogous images in Döblin’s descriptions of Polish peasants, and the candor of such references connects the authors’ characters with the natural world, though at the same time they distance these figures from the reader, since, as Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) suggests in Civilization and Its Discontents, a desire to separate ourselves from excrement is the primal motivation for civilization itself.48 The anxiety of Bergelson’s own trespass over the defunct border that had previously separated Jews from non-Jews in Yiddish fiction prods him as well to revert to quite chauvinist stereotypes when describing a group of non-Jewish smugglers: “Anton’s wife—an angry, snubnosed peasant woman—had spent the entire morning kicking her eldest shiksa of a daughter” (MhD, Y 197; E 155). Such language, however, differs little from Döblin’s description of both Poles and Polish Jews. Both use the rhetoric for describing difference that was habitual in the milieu for which they were writing, and by recourse to these usages they reveal themselves to be less emancipated from their preconceptions than they would claim. One of the densest examples of Bergelson’s stylistic “promiscuity” between Jewish and non-Jewish rhetoric occurs when he describes the religious reawakening of the non-Jewish wife of an anti-Bolshevik officer, just before her death sentence is pronounced in Kamino-Balke: “A feeling of separateness, some kind of profession of faith, such as pious monks recite with closed eyes immediately upon waking up from sleep, filled her heart with expectant devotion poured out of the entirety of her exhausted body and drew her to ‘Him’ as to something holy” (MhD, Y 253; E 201; translation modified). The use in Yiddish of words such as moyde ani (profession of faith), deveykes (devotion), and kadoysh (holy) is seemingly as out of place in the thoughts of a non-Jewish woman as Russian dialogue is in a Yiddish novel; the intrusion of these unfamiliar and unusual terms is supposed to be recognized as disruptive and incongruous.49 Indeed, this juxtaposition mocks the salvation to which the character aspires—which Bergelson

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could see only as a cliché derived from countless examples of nineteenth-century Russian literature—by articulating it in the wrong language, like setting the accompaniment to a religious hymn in the wrong key. The Jewish terms in this passage are as dislocated as the discourse Döblin uses to describe the collision among Judaism, Catholicism, tradition, and modernity in Poland. The reliance of both Döblin and Bergelson on these stylistic “collisions” suggests the methodology of juxtaposition through which this comparison has been structured. But more significantly, these perhaps accidental affinities bespeak a common struggle in their respective narratives to represent the ideological conflicts affecting Eastern European Jews in spatial terms. The two writers respectively confront the still living legacies of Jesus and Marx—quintessential “post-Judaic” belief systems50 to which they will each respectively submit—as well as the persistent, indeed urgent, problem of Jewish traditions’ relationship with the nation-state. Döblin at his most interesting emerges as neither a Jewish writer nor a Catholic one, but a modernist: “I praised Cracow, the Church of St. Mary, the Hanged Man, the Righteous Man. They are alive. The ancient is always the newest. But these machines here are also genuine, powerful. . . . They’ve won my heart. . . . I—and if the contradiction gapes all the way to nonsense and all the way to hell—I praise them both” (RiP, G 326; E 251). Here again, an inassimilable metonymy of religion and industry signifies the allegorical essence of his modernism, as well as the most heroic of his efforts to represent the contradictions of his own predicament. Bergelson, similarly, uses metonymy to represent not the proximity of cultures or historical epochs but their unbridgeable estrangement. For example, he describes Pinke Vayl’s possessions by writing, “There was one big photograph among the many tinted postcards, a family portrait of Pinke’s father, mother, and him, when he was little, twelve years old. . . . The photograph looked as if it came from olden times, which made it seem that

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everyone in it was long dead” (MhD, Y 101–2; E 79–80). The formal portrait, taken only seven years before the incident described in the novel, in which Pinke is guarding a death-row political prisoner, depicts a family for whom the son harbors no sentimental feelings and is wedged between postcards of his native Kiev.51 The juxtaposition of these relations therefore suggests that the world that produced Pinke is under as much of a death sentence, and as becomes clear is much less lamented, than the prisoner whose fate provides a counterpoint to Pinke’s presence at this point in the novel. 52 This allegorical image of a photo of a doomed, dysfunctional family stacked together with impersonal postcards of Kiev, Bergelson’s home before taking refuge in Berlin, also attests to the problem of representing Eastern Europe from Germany: what remains can be rendered only from the perspective of the postcard—flatly and impersonally—whereas what is subjective and personal is removed from the contemporary reality of either Berlin or Kiev and thus can be portrayed only spectrally. In this absence, the substitution of an absent space for an inarticulable time, lies both Bergelson’s and Döblin’s shared aesthetic. Pinke Vayl’s significance to the novel, aside from the intriguing similarity of his name to “Penek”—the protagonist of Bergelson’s next novel, the explicitly autobiographical saga Bam Dnyeper (“On the Dnieper,” first volume 1932; second volume 1940)53— grows in tandem with his loyalty to the Red Army and to Filipov. At his introduction in the novel, he is actually a prisoner, though it is unclear either what he has been charged with or why Filipov chooses to grant him amnesty and subsequently recruit him into the commissariat.54 The apparent familial relationship that develops between the two characters, however, corresponds to a key trope within the emerging conventions of the Socialist Realist novel. As Katerina Clark explains, though the term Socialist Realism was coined and elevated to official Soviet policy in 1932, this executive decision only consolidated an aesthetic policy that had been developing over the previous decade, with several technical

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features already apparent in the 1920s. One pervasive aspect of the aesthetic is what might be termed a “prosthetic” approach to parenthood, fully a function of larger motifs dedicated to the creation of a new “Soviet” peoplehood. The plot of the Socialist Realist novel, according to Clark, hinges in large part on a symbolic father figure’s mentorship and self-sacrifice in transforming his symbolic son into the new Soviet man. Clark thus elaborates, with respect to a representative Soviet novel, Aleksandr Fadeev’s The Young Guard (1946), “the father figure in the novel must bear the ‘burden of paternity’ and hence appear predominantly in the guise of the stern statesman and unflinching emblem of consciousness. . . . For the exemplary sons in The Young Guard, the order of the masks . . . is reversed. The sons, zesty, spirited creatures that they are, are forever laughing and smiling. However, they periodically grow serious and don the mask of severity.”55 Bergelson intuits this typology in the relationship between Filipov and Pinke Vayl, who is presented as a hapless, voluble young man proud of his status as a Red Army soldier, even if one under arrest in Kamino-Balke, because it takes him away from his former life in a conventionally bourgeois Jewish family. Pinke is the first Bergelson character to emerge successfully from the morass in which the author envelops his own class origins. As in other novels that serve as precursors to the Socialist Realist mode, a major theme of Mides ha-din is how Pinke takes over Filipov’s role by the end of the narrative. One feature of this plot motif left unexamined in other studies of Socialist Realism yet illuminated by the juxtaposition of Bergelson with Döblin’s early Christological ruminations, is the way in which the Socialist Realist novel inverts and evades an unreflective recapitulation of Christian symbolism. Instead of a son sacrificing himself for the sake of the father, Socialist Realist novels present the martyrdom of the father for the sake of the sons. In this regard, Filipov’s death becomes transfigured on the last page of the novel as a sacrifice, a ritual dedicated symbolically to a

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concept of transcendence that revokes the finality and physicality of death. At the moment in which Pinke wishes to eulogize the murdered commissar, however, he inherits the deceased man’s hoarseness, along with his revolutionary obligations: “He wanted to explain what Filipov had given his blood and life for. It didn’t bother him that his voice was so hoarse. Chills running down their spines, his comrades saw the blood flowing to his face from straining to speak with all his might; they saw his lips moving without hearing a single word . . . but, in any case, there were no words to describe what Filipov had given his life for, and maybe it was actually for the best that Pinke’s voice was so hoarse while he spoke” (MhD, Y 265; E 211). With the loss of Pinke’s voice, Bergelson returns the significance of the sacrifice from a symbolic transcendence to an allegorical immanence. He moreover underscores the primacy of the deed over the word—a curious, perhaps impossible, though by no means uncommon ideological position for a writer to take. But in keeping with the symbolic terms implicit in the title of the novel itself, one can recognize that Filipov’s death fulfills for him the role of Meshiekh ben-Efrayim, who according to the kabala precedes the ultimate, Davidian messiah; this provisional messiah perishes in an apocalyptic battle in order to bestow eternal life on the Davidian messiah. He is the messiah of stern justice (mides ha-din) preceding the permanent messiah of pure mercy (mides ha-rakhamim). 56 As Krutikov has explained this symbolism in his essays about Bergelson’s novel, 57 the new world of Soviet justice is to be governed entirely by din (judgment) rather than rakhamim (mercy). Although the novel suggests this institutionally and spatially through the transformation of Kamino-Balke from a monastery to the headquarters of the police, Bergelson might have considered that this transformation really signals the transition from one authoritarian institution, fully allied with the most repressive aspects of the czarist regime, to another. Like Döblin’s rhapsodies on Christianity and the Pauline pseudouniversalism of

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a world without nations or borders—or Jews—Bergelson’s critique of religion is curiously silent regarding the power dynamics between religions in Russian society and between religion and state atheism in the Soviet Union. In the search for a new world created in what for each author is an old home, both writers move neither backward nor forward but remain suspended in a motionless temporality and a territoriality that if not imaginary is nonetheless, and in ways that subvert their apparent ideological intentions, thoroughly fictive. Notes 1.  The phrase a past become space from which this chapter takes its title derives from a remark of Walter Benjamin’s in The Arcades Project: “One of the oldest arcades in the city has disappeared—the Passage de l’Opéra, swallowed up by the opening of the Boulevard Haussmann. Just as that remarkable covered walkway had done for an earlier generation, so today a few arcades still preserve, in dazzling light and shadowy corners, a past become space [raumgewordene Vergangnenheit].” See Arcades Project (G 1041; E 871). 2.  Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler,” in Gesammelte Schriften 2(2): 440. In English, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, 144. Subsequent references incorporated in text as “Erzähler,” G and E. For another discussion of Benjamin’s essay in connection with his contemporary Döblin, see Jonathan Skolnik, “Yiddish, the Storyteller, and German-Jewish Modernism,” in Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), 215–23. For a discussion of the essay in relationship to Benjamin’s philosophy of history, as well as the appropriation of Benjamin’s thought in the work of Giorgio Agamben, see Vivian Liska, “Ideas of Prose: Benjamin and Agamben,” in German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 101–11. 3.  Kraus articulates his critique of the feuilleton as literary form most comprehensively in his book-length essay “Heine and the Consequences” (1910). It is the quintessential Kraus operation: an evisceration of the feuilleton form, composed as an extended feuilleton. It’s also an attack

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against the most celebrated German Jewish author of the nineteenth century undertaken by the most celebrated German Jewish author of the fin de siècle. The self-reflexivity of the performance is both ironic and exemplary, as if Kraus were defusing antisemitic attacks on Heine by crafting a takedown more persuasively devastating than the racist arguments could hope to be. The essay is available in a bilingual edition with commentary by Jonathan Franzen, Paul Reitter, and Daniel Kehlmann as The Kraus Project (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). For Benjamin’s take on Kraus—an essay that Kraus himself is said to have considered impenetrable—see “Karl Kraus,” in Gesammelte Schriften 2(1): 334–67; translated by Edmund Jephcott in Selected Writings 2(2): 433–58. 4.  See Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 7:373. In English, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (2002), 115. Subsequent references incorporated in text as “Kunstwerk,” G and E. 5.  As Benjamin states, “The presentation of reality in film is incomparably the more significant for people of today, since it provides the equipment-free aspect of reality they are entitled to demand from a work of art, and does so precisely on the basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment” (“Kunstwerk,” G 374; E 116; emphasis in original). 6.  As Benjamin writes in a 1933 feuilleton that anticipates both his essay on the “Storyteller” and his “Work of Art” essay, No, this much is clear: experience has fallen in value, amid a generation which from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in the history of the world. . . . No, there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly: strategic experience has been contravened by positional warfare; economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger; moral experiences, by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.

See “Erfahrung und Armut,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 2(1): 214; translated into English by Rodney Livingstone as “Experience and Poverty,” Selected Writings, 2(2): 731–32. 7.  The conviction that death defines and determines what might be considered the “experience of experience” is a semantic similarity between Benjamin and his more politically astute contemporary Martin

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Heidegger (1889–1976). What distinguishes the two thinkers, irreconcilably, is Heidegger’s ahistorical insistence that death and experience validate one another; who can register surprise, though, that Heidegger writes ahistorically, given the history that he was party to? In this vein he writes, “Mortals dwell in that they initiate their own essential being— their being capable of death as death—into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death.” See his “Building Dwelling Thinking” [1951], in Basic Writings [1977], ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 352. Benjamin, by contrast, recognizes that death in the modern era has become just as institutionalized—and thus commodified—as any other aspect of life, and his essay on the “Storyteller” articulates this preeminently: “Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual, and a most exemplary one. . . . Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death—dry dwellers of eternity; and when their end approaches, they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs” (“Erzähler,” G 449; E 151). 8.  See “Dialectics at a Standstill,” trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevere, Arcades Project, 1014–15n23. Although this essay is a translation of the foreword to the Gesammelte Schriften edition of the Passagen-Werk, the footnotes do not correspond between the two editions, and I was unable to locate the original source for this remark. 9.  Alfred Döblin, Reise in Polen (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1993), 231. Translated as Journey to Poland by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 176. Subsequent references incorporated into text as RiP G and E, respectively. 10.  Schulz’s fiction, of course, maintains its own extraordinary balance of allegory, phantasmagoria, and haunted relationship with the past, conceived explicitly against the same backdrop of war and revolution as Bergelson and Döblin’s writing. See in this respect, most spectacularly and spectrally, “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” in The Fictions of Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, trans. Celina Wieniewska (London: Picador, 1988), 237–64. For the original edition, see Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą (Warsaw: Towarzystwo Wydawnicze “Rój,” 1937), 168–208. With thanks to my dear friends Karen Underhill and Sasha Lindskog for their help with the Polish citation. 11.  Well before relocating to Berlin, Bergelson had recognized the similarities between the October Revolution and early Christianity; in the essay “Dikhtung un gezelshaftlekhkayt,” he uses this analogy to explain

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why Yiddish writers were so ill-equipped to describe the disruptive circumstances in which they found themselves: The earliest Christian bards . . . were very bad poets. The first Christian sculptors rapidly became unskilled in accurately reproducing the forms of the human body. . . . Eventually they were unable to make more than a cross—two bare lines—but for the believing Christian these were wholly adequate and meaningful: in these lines he saw the symbol of his faith, and in their starkness, the sign that he was rejecting the old world and its old established forms; on the contrary, the more bare the lines were, the more possibilities existed to insert new content in them.

See “Dikhtung un gezelshaftlekhkayt,” in Bikher-velt, Kiev (August 1919). Translated by Joseph Sherman as “Belles-Lettres and the Social Order,” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 341. 12.  Joseph Sherman, “‘Who Is Pulling the Cart?’ Bergelson and the Party Line, 1919–1927,” Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe 1, no. 52 (2004): 13. This specific citation actually discusses the ideological predicament of Bergelson’s archrival, Moyshe Litvakov (1875–1939). But as Sherman makes clear, this ideological bind affects all Soviet Yiddish writers, regardless of their response to it. 13.  See Bergelson, Judgment, trans. Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), xxii. Their primary source for this criticism is A. Mapovets [Yashe Bronshteyn], “Unter dem ployt fun yerushe,” Prolit 6 (June 1929): 64–75. That the title of the review’s reference to Der Nister’s final avant-garde narrative, discussed in part 2 of this comparison, is intended to be unflattering is clear from the reviewer’s critique of the way in which Bergelson had farbergelsonevet the revolution. Unlike the term Nisterizm, however, Bronshteyn’s transformation of Bergelson’s name into a verb of opprobrium was an apparently isolated usage. 14.  For more on Döblin’s personal background, see David Midgley, “The Romance of the East: Encounters of German-Jewish Writers with YiddishSpeaking Communities, 1916–27,” in The Yiddish Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction, ed. Joseph Sherman and Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Legenda, 2005), 93. 15.  Before appearing in book form, Döblin’s travel notes first appeared serialized in the Vossische Zeitung. Excerpts from the book also appeared in Die Neue Rundschau. For an account of this text history, see Regina Hartmann, “Faszination Ostjudentum: Alfred Döblin auf dem Weg zu den Wurzeln des Herkommens,” Transversal 1 (2007): 51–54.

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16.  See Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, “‘Ghettokunst’ Meinetwegen, aber hundertprozentig echt: Alfred Döblins Bagegnung mit dem Ostjudentum,” in In Zeichen Hiobs: Jüdische Schriftsteller und deutsche Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Gunter E. Grimm and Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer (Königstein: Athenäum, 1985), 161. Translations from this article will be my own. 17.  Marline Otte suggests that it was Döblin’s contempt for Jargon theater, the Jewish-themed domestic comedies that dominated the popular stage in Berlin before World War I, that might have contributed to his interest in Yiddish culture. See Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 139–40. Once again one can recognize the distaste for mass culture, the manufacture of Erlebnis, that motivates Döblin’s pursuit of an “authentic” Erfahrung in Yiddish culture; in equal measure, one can contend that he sought out Yiddish culture less for its intrinsic interest than for its distance from the bourgeois Jewish culture most closely available to him in Berlin. This study will return briefly to the theme of Jargon theater in part 2. 18.  As Gennady Estraikh notes, “Döblin wrote warmly about Bergelson’s stories, translated in German by Alexander Eliasberg. Fascination with the Ashkenazic tradition brought Bergelson . . . together with Döblin.” See “Introduction: Yiddish on the Spree,” in Estraikh and Krutikov, Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, 13. 19.  Bayerdörfer, “‘Ghettokunst’ Meinetwegen,” 164. For an analysis of the Scheunenviertel Riots, see David Clay Large, “‘Out with the Ostjuden’: The Scheunenviertel Riots in Berlin, November 1923,” in Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History, ed. Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 123–40. Large begins his discussion by considering Döblin’s journalism on the riots in situ. Döblin wrote, “Among the Jews there was great anxiety about what might happen next. . . . However, I don’t see a true pogrom mentality in Berlin” (Large, “Out with the Ostjuden,” 123). Large essentially confirms and amplifies Döblin’s assessment of the riots, while noting the dire circumstances afflicting the populace in general. The riots, for example, coincided with the height of postwar hyperinflation, when the price of a loaf of bread was officially 140 billion marks (Large, “Out with the Ostjuden,” 128). Although there had been considerable isolation and demonization of the Eastern European Jews living in the Scheunenviertel ever since the neighborhood had become their ghetto during World War I, Large sees no evidence of directly coordinated agitation or direction of the violence, arguing instead that despite the efforts of radical right agitators to focus violence on Jewish

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targets, by the time the Scheunenviertel had been pacified, roughly two days after the unrest had begun, the targets outside of the neighborhood focused primarily on the material needs of the rioters—for food, clothing, or tobacco—rather than the ethnic background of their victims. In total, although Jewish individuals were disproportionately victims of physical violence, the rioters had looted 61 Jewish-owned shops and 146 shops belonging to non-Jews. Large additionally notes that a significant mitigating factor in the dispersal of the violence was the reduction of the price of bread to a mere 80 billion marks (Large, “Out with the Ostjuden,” 134). 20.  For an excellent summary and analysis of Berge Meere und Giganten, see Roland Dollinger, “From Berge Meere und Giganten to a Philosophy of Nature,” in A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin, ed. Roland Dollinger, Wulf Koepke, and Heidi Thomann Tewarson (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), 93–109. One might only add to his commentary that the essential premise of the preceding novel, which begins with a war between the European West and the Asiatic East, foreshadows in symbolic terms Döblin’s confrontation with the “eastern” culture of the Ostjuden in his travelogue. As Dollinger writes of the novel, “The leap into the future therefore dialectically ends in a pre-historic era with the creation of life that had long since perished” (Dollinger, “From Berge Meere und Giganten,” 96). A similar anxiety over the return to a way of life that Döblin had considered defunct characterizes his apprehension of Jewish culture in Reise in Polen. 21.  Even the essential detail that Filipov has been murdered is discussed in Russian for two pages before it is revealed in passing in Yiddish! In Yiddish, see Mides ha-din, vol. 7 of Geklibene verk (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1929), 258–59, 260. In English, Judgment, 206. Subsequent references to the novel incorporated in text as MhD, Y and E, respectively. The English translation gives little guidance as to when characters in the novel are speaking in Russian and when in Yiddish, though this is a fundamental feature of the novel in the original. 22.  As Bergelson notes at the beginning of “Dikhtung un gezelshaftlekhkayt,” We live in a time of great turmoil. Every day brings with it new disappointments and new hopes. Old forms lose their worth; new forms are not created. The analytic observer’s gaze floats over the formlessness and void of the time and perceives only disconnected features, bare outlines that are directly connected to the most important development of the present: to the process of rebuilding the life of society. . . . In this, belles-lettres are fundamentally at one with society, but belles-lettres depend too much on

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23.  Gennady Estraikh, “Arcadian Dreams of David Bergelson and His Berlin Circle,” in Studia Rosenthaliana, vol. 41, Between Two Worlds: Yiddish-German Encounters, ed. Jerold C. Frakes and Jeremy Dauber (Amsterdam: Peeters, 2009), 159–60. 24.  As Gennady Estraikh observes, when Mides ha-din premiered on stage in the Soviet Union, in Bergelson’s own (since lost) adaptation, in 1933, his archrival Litvakov praised its straightforward disavowal of ideological or moral ambiguity; the novel, one can deduce, falls far short in this purity test. See Estraikh, “Bergelson in and on America,” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 216. 25.  See “Die Politische Gruppierung der Russischen Schriftsteller,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 2(2): 744–45. In English, “The Political Groupings of Russian Writers,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings, 2(1): 7. 26.  Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1(1): 350. In English, The Origin of German Tragic Drama [1998], trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2009), 175. 27.  The concept of Meshiekh ben-Efraim will return to this discussion in part 3 with a consideration of the Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak, who used this concept as the title of his first narrative, written in Berlin and published in 1924. 28.  Jonathan Skolnik highlights the same passage in his discussion of Döblin’s debts to Heine, although his conclusions about its significance differ from mine. See Estraikh and Krutikov, Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, 218. Philip Veit also quotes this passage in his article on Die Bäder von Lucca (Veit, “Heine’s Polemics,” 113). 29.  In a series of notes Döblin wrote in March 1924, concurrent to his excursion to Poland, he writes of Western Jews, with whom he explicitly identifies, that although they are also producers of a legitimate Jewish culture, nonetheless this culture can be characterized as “mimicry, assimilation” resulting in an estrangement from Rabbinic culture, the synagogue, and the culture of the Ostjuden. His notes conclude with a critique of Zionism as an inadequate solution to the “Jewish Problem” and a call for the “careful slow development of the national core without shattering the Diaspora roots.” See “Zionismus und Westliche Kultur [Vortragskonzept]” [Zionism and Western culture: Presentation notes], in Schriften zu

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jüdischen Fragen [Writings on Jewish questions], ed. Hans Otto Horch and Till Schicketanz (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1997), 267–70. As his descriptions in Reise in Polen indicate, both the careful, slow development—synonyms, in fact, for Erfahrung—and the rapprochement with Eastern European Jews are easier said than done. 30.  As early as 1873, the Yiddish novelist Mendele Moykher-Sforim was describing the apparent contradiction of living as a Jewish intellectual in the Yiddish culture of czarist Russia, in terms strikingly resonant with contemporaneous struggles in German Jewish culture: “I’m despised in the eyes of my own people, the Jews, and in the eyes of the others, the gentiles. When one hates me for not being the right kind of Jew, the other hates me for being a Jew like every other Jew.” See Mendele Moykher-Sforim, “Di Klyatshe” [The mare], in Geklibene verk [Selected works], vol 2 (New York: YKUF, 1946), 16. Translated as “The Mare,” in The Great Works of Jewish Fantasy and Occult [1976], ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1986), 547–48. For German Jewish intellectuals, similarly, the curse of the intellectual is the inaccessibility of an “authentic” Jewish identity or an “authentic” German one. Döblin reiterates this condition most succinctly when he describes his encounter with a group of Jews at the Vilna Gaon’s “temple” (RiP, G 134; E 99): “Upon hearing and seeing how precisely they [the Jews in the traditional study hall] knew all these facts [about the Gaon], I am amazed. The only thing I learned about was the Battle of Marathon. So there are any number of other important issues. (Why was Marathon of all things sliced from the cake for me? I haven’t eaten it for a long time.)” Here Döblin makes explicit the irresolvable choice between Hebrew and Greek, Jewish learning or European culture, that defined the struggle for Bildung for nineteenth-century Jews. In his writing, however, this division is seen from the other side of the Enlightenment as what was lost with assimilation and how little seems to have been gained by assimilating. Döblin in this passage is envious of Jewish learning but nonetheless remains content to represent this achievement as a foreign culture, one that automatically excludes him as a mere observer. 31.  In an excellent discussion of Döblin’s fraught relationship to Jewishness, Klaus Müller-Salget ruefully notes that Döblin began studying Yiddish as a result of his involvement with the Territorialist movement “but did not make much more progress with this language than he did with learning French.” See his “Döblin and Judaism,” in Dollinger et al., Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin, 238. 32.  See “Ein Brief [An die Zeitschrift ‘Der Jude’],” in Schriften zu jüdischen Fragen, 271–72; my translation.

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33.  The rise of Nazism understandably resulted in a renewed sense of identification with Jewishness, and most of the writings collected in Schriften zu jüdischen Fragen were written after 1933. Among these is an article first printed in the Jewish Daily Bulletin (New York, June 26, 1935) under the title “I Am Not a Hitler Jew!” There, Döblin writes in an artless English, and a dubious recollection for dates, I was welcomed (in Poland in 1921 [sic]) by a gathering of Jewish writers, and I must say that for the first time in my life I felt that I was among my own. I heard them speak and sing and saw them dance, and I felt “This is mine! These are the people to whom I belong, though both their language and their customs were strange to me.” It was the language of my mother in which she spoke and wrote, and I knew nothing, neither the words nor the script. Yet I felt that it was close to me. I have often been welcomed as a member of the German Academy by my German colleagues, but I never felt such a sense of belonging. I was always an outsider, a Jew. (Schriften zu jüdischen Fragen, 310–11)

34. The Sefer Yetzirah to which Döblin alludes is the earliest known work of the kabala, though scholars continue to debate its historical origins. 35.  With respect to Döblin’s relationship with Buber, Müller-Salget cites a letter that Döblin wrote to Buber in May 1950, well after the former’s conversion to Christianity; see Müller-Salget, “Döblin and Judaism,” 242. 36.  One notable exception to this observation is the extraordinary pogrom fiction of the American Yiddish author Lamed Shapiro (1878– 1948), much of which is narrated from the perspective of the pogromist. See Di Yidishe Melukhe un andere zakhe [sic] (New York: Idish Lebn, 1929). In translation, see The Cross and Other Jewish Stories, ed. Leah Garrett (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 37.  As Boris Kotlerman notes, Bergelson translated “Crossing the River Zbrucz,” the first story in Red Cavalry, for the Yiddish-language Birobidzhaner shtern in October 1935. See Kotlerman, “Why I Am in Favour of Birobidzhan: Bergelson’s Fateful Decision (1932),” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 228. Harriet Murav elaborates that Bergelson and Babel knew one another quite well and that Babel translated one of Bergelson’s stories, “Dzhiro-dzhiro,” into Russian. See “The Judgments of David Bergelson,” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 2 (2018): 183. 38.  Haskole, or in modern Hebrew Haskalah, refers to a broad movement of Jewish modernization, in philosophical and aesthetic terms rooted in the European Enlightenment but in political terms more

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idiosyncratically attuned to nineteenth-century cultural nationalism, that began in Königsberg and Berlin toward the end of the eighteenth century and spread gradually eastward through the Austrian empire and into the Pale of Settlement. Though only the preoccupation of a small, educated elite—the signature Hebrew-language journal of the movement, Hame’asef, numbered subscribers in the low hundreds—haskole is the first consciously modernizing ideological movement among Eastern European Jews, and every later trend in modern Jewish culture, including academic studies such as this one, owes something to its legacy. For the best singlevolume discussion of haskole and its significance, see Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin’s collection New Perspectives on Haskalah (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001). Olga Litvak’s more recent Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012) is a provocative and compelling revisionist study. But its efforts to distinguish haskole in absolute terms from Enlightenment fail to account for the close proximity of haskole at its origin to the centers of a specifically German Enlightenment (Aufklärung) and therefore miss the dialectical nature of the movement. For the best discussion of haskole’s impact on the development of modern Yiddish literature, see Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century [1973] (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996). 39.  Although Dr. Babitski seems to be a bourgeois Jew displaced by the revolution, it is never explicitly stated that he is Jewish, and it is unlikely that a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement before the war would have had a Jewish (modern, medical) doctor; it is possible that he has converted to Christianity, but this is also never stated. Given what little Bergelson indicates about the character, one can conclude that, like Filipov, he is another—if less enthusiastic—tool of the revolution: “People like Filipov were forced to do its [the Revolution’s] bidding, and so was he, the doctor” (MhD Y 90; E 70). 40.  Döblin reiterates the status of Jews between life and death by dividing his chapter on Wilno in two parts, beginning with a description of Wilno/Vilna/Vilnius’s confused national identity among Russia, Poland, and (most indistinctly) Lithuania and culminating with the description of a military cemetery divided between simple German crosses and ornate Russian ones (RiP, G 132; E 98). There was, of course, no Polish army during Word War I, so the contemporary national identity receives no representation in the commemoration of the war that revived its nationhood. A simple space break then separates Döblin’s description of the cemetery from his discussion of Jewish Vilna, and the juxtaposition is telling, deliberate, and unambiguous.

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41.  A similar projection of archaic and reactionary motifs determines Bergelson’s description of Poland, implicitly in Mides ha-din and explicitly in his first pro-Soviet polemic, the essay “Dray tsentern.” There, Bergelson lampoons Polish Yiddish culture by writing, “Because of its conservative backwardness, it will take no risks for the new Yiddish culture and will under no circumstances defend it. And even if the Polish centre did suddenly wish to defend it, it is comprised for the most part of unproductive elements that, in every instance of serious conflict, will not represent any kind of political force whatever. The Yiddish words with which this Jewish majority communicates are consequently just as unproductive as they are themselves, and which serve, like worn-out straw, exclusively for the bourgeois yellow-press newspapers they read.” See “Three Centres (Characteristics),” trans. Joseph Sherman, in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 349. The original, with appropriate but unexamined irony, was published in Polish Vilna in the journal In Shpan [In harness], April 1926. 42.  See Krutikov, “Narrating the Revolution: From ‘Tsugvintn’ (1922) to ‘Mides-hadin’ (1929),” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 171. In this article, Krutikov dwells on the drama that propels Tsugvintn, the antihero Andryuk’s remorse over his murder of a Jew. The haunting of this Cossack character anticipates a similar transformation in Joseph Roth’s novel Tarabas, which narrates the pristinely Baroque metamorphosis of its eponymous protagonist from tyrant to martyr. Bergelson’s story deals in remnants and afterlives rather than directly depicting the violence of war—first, because unlike, for example, Lamed Shapiro’s naturalism, Bergelson’s aesthetic remained ill-equipped to depict violence except offstage; second, because the non-Jewish protagonists in Tsugvintn are fundamentally comparable to the Jewish characters of Bergelson’s prewar fiction in that they are belated, obsolescent figures trapped in their own inability to act. 43.  Kellman, “Uneasy Patronage: Bergelson’s Years at Forverts (1922– 1926),” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 198. Her source is Forverts, March 4, 1923. 44.  With respect to these concerns, Gennady Estraikh notes that when Ab. Cahan (1860–1951), the dictatorial editor of the Forverts, learned of Bergelson’s decision to “defect” from his paper to the New York Communist daily Frayhayt, where Mides ha-din appeared in installments, he attributed the decision to “his desire . . . to make money in the climate of Russia’s New Economic Policy (NEP), in which rumour had it that Bergelson was seeking to establish a publishing house or to continue his family business of timber trading.” See “Bergelson in and on America,”

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in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 209. In fact, if any single factor determined Bergelson’s gravitation toward Communism, it was the author’s frustration at what can only be referred to, with apologies for the technical jargon, as Cahan’s “dickishness” toward Bergelson and his writing for the Forverts. 45.  The problem posed by what I am referring to as “post-Judaic” cultural productions such as Döblin’s and Bergelson’s—and no less by what might be termed the “neo-Judaic” work of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, or Gershom Scholem, to which might be added an additional category of “crypto-Judaic” works such as Walter Benjamin’s and Ernst Bloch’s—is not a question of how Jewishness may be defined in the work or life of these figures. The motivation of fashioning or identifying with a post-Judaic ideology is ultimately to render the question of Jewishness opaque and inscrutable. It is this generation of interwar figures who, for the first time in the modern era, seriously grappled, not all of them successfully, with an individual or autonomous rather than collective relationship with Jewishness. The post-Judaic work of authors like Döblin or Bergelson signifies a crucial insight into the decoupling of identification from identity, and therefore their respective positions on the spectrum separating identification from identity provide an illustrative precedent to the way these oppositions might also be understood today, beyond the question of the rightness or wrongness of the decisions these individuals made when faced with the uniformly difficult options available to European Jews during their historical moment. 46.  Joseph Roth, who reviews Reise in Polen, critically, in 1926, describes his own encounter with a Hasidic rebbe in Juden auf Wanderschaft: “It was a day in late autumn that I set out to call on the rabbi. . . . Outside the rabbi’s house stood a red-haired Jew, the master of ceremonies.” The description of the red-haired Jew transforms the encounter from a meeting of a modern Jew with his diametric opposite into an encounter between two mirrored selves. Where Döblin dramatizes his estrangement from the Hasidim, Roth, whose native Galicia was a central location for several Hasidic courts, depicts his (momentary) identification with them. See Juden auf Wanderschaft, in Ich zeichne das Gesicht der Zeit: Essays, Reportagen, Feuilletons (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010) (Zurich: Diogenes, 2013), 164–67. In English, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 36–39. For a discussion of Roth’s review of Döblin and its evident relationship to his own portrayal of Eastern European Jews in Juden auf Wanderschaft, see Andreas Kilcher, “The Cold Order and the Eros of Storytelling: Joseph Roth’s ‘Exotic Jews,’” in

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Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography, ed. Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 87. 47.  As Ruth Wisse writes, “Although Bergelson’s stories following Der Toyber [1910] and Droyb [1919] become less and less satirical, the author never stops using certain satirical techniques such as, for example, the repetition of ‘distinguishing traits’ of a character when the character is mentioned.” See “Vegn Dovd Bergelsons dertseylung Yoysef Shur,” Di Goldene keyt 77 (1972): 137. The translation, with apologies, is my own. 48.  As Freud states, “The incitement to cleanliness originates in an urge to get rid of the excreta, which have become disagreeable to the sense perceptions. We know that in the nursery things are different. The excreta arouse no disgust in children. . . . Here upbringing insists with special energy on hastening the course of development which lies ahead, and which should make the excreta worthless, disgusting, abhorrent and abominable. . . . Anal erotism, therefore, succumbs in the first instance to the ‘organic repression’ which paved the way to civilization.” Although Freud further notes that man “scarcely finds the smell of his own excreta repulsive” (emphasis in original), the function of civilization as a repressive force invests its full power in shaming people who do not distance themselves from these odors and causing them to internalize this sense of disgust. See his Civilization and Its Discontents [1961], ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989): 54–55n1. 49.  Murav observes that the linguistic collision between Bergelson’s Jewish language and his non-Jewish characters is also a feature in the stories he collected before the publication of Mides ha-din: “Bergelson [in the stories collected as Shturemteg, 1927] uses Russian speech transliterated into the Hebrew characters of Yiddish. Frosya’s use [in “Civil War”] of Yiddish and the narrator’s choice of markedly Jewish terms to describe her anti-Jewish attitudes emphasizes the intimate enmity between Jews and non-Jews.” See Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 56–57. 50.  It is just these two “post-Jewish” worldviews that the American Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein (1896–1971) will attack in tandem in his 1938 repudiation of modernist cosmopolitanism, “A Gute nakht, velt” [Good night, world]: “Nem tsu di yeyzusmarkses, verg zikh mit zeyr mut” (“Take your Jesus-Marxes, choke on their courage”). See Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology [1986] (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 306–7; my translation differs slightly from theirs. It may be noted that, like Pablo Picasso’s return

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to figurative painting after analytical cubism, or Arnold Schoenberg’s (occasional) return to tonal composition after devising the twelve-tone technique, Glatstein’s return to explicit identification with Jewishness does not repudiate his modernism but only reconfigures it. For more on the significance of this poem to Glatstein’s career and to Yiddish poetry generally, see Anita Norich, “‘Good Night, World’: Yankev Glatshteyn’s Ambivalent Farewell,” in Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 42–73. 51.  Alice Nakhimovsky articulates the uncanny sense of anticipation of Bergelson’s eventual fate under Stalin in the descriptions he provides of the prisoners at Kamino-Balke in the novel: “As for the values associated with the worldview of literary texts, the one JAFC [Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee] defendant who sought moral counsel in his work was Berglson, whose 1929 novel Mides hadin (Judgment) takes place, in part, in a prison where smugglers and other low-lifes await execution by the Cheka.” See “Assessing Life in the Face of Death: Moral Drama at the 1952 Trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 2 (2018): 202. 52. In Nokh alemen, previously, Bergelson depicts the same estrangement of his protagonist from her parents: “Her home in the shtetl . . . that home meant nothing to her now, and was merely a source of frustration. She had no attachment to her mother and her father . . . it would be easier if she and her father lived apart from each other. They certainly couldn’t help each other, in any case” (Nokh alemen, Y 320; E 209). Although Bergelson’s ideological orientation changes radically between 1913 and 1929, his conception of the generational problems affecting Jews fundamentally didn’t. The decadence of his previous work sets the stage for the allegorical strategies of his Berlin writing, and these aesthetic continuities are ultimately as significant as the historical disruptions affecting the institutional or ideological location of his work. 53.  Both are diminutives of the name Phinehas, itself connected to themes of priesthood and divine wrath through its Biblical prototype (Num. 25:7–13). 54.  Murav notes the idealization of Bergelson’s descriptions in these scenes, writing, “In the fictitious prison there are no beatings or conveyor belt interrogations. The food seems decent: women prisoners bake bread, which smells good to one of the characters.” In short, “It goes without saying that Bergelson’s imagined prison of 1929 is nothing like the real prison in which he found himself in 1949.” See “Judgments of David Bergelson,” 178.

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55.  Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero,” in Socialist Realism without Shores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 39. 56.  Estraikh makes this point more economically in his essay on Bergelson; see his “Arcadian Dreams,” in Frakes and Dauber, Studia Rosenthaliana, 41:160. 57.  See Mikhail Krutikov, “Rediscovering the Shtetl as a New Reality: David Bergelson and Itsik Kipnis,” in The Shtetl: New Evaluations, ed. Steven T. Katz (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 211–32; and “Narrating the Revolution,” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 167–82. In addition to these authoritative and insightful essays, I am indebted to Professor Krutikov’s instructive conversations with me about this novel, as well as his generous responses to several panicked emails requesting help with Bergelson’s extensive Russian vocabulary!

TWO

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AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE T WENTIETH CENTURY Neue Sachlichkeit and Dovid Bergelson’s Berlin Stories

Berlin Requiems

The pioneering hip-hop duo Eric B. & Rakim set the terms of this chapter best when they declared, “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.”1 Where the previous chapter began with Heinrich Heine’s discussion of Poland, fixing a traveler’s limited gaze on the East as other, a gesture recapitulated in different respects by Alfred Döblin’s and Dovid Bergelson’s work in the 1920s, the focus now turns to the view that emerges at the same time of Berlin itself as a foreign, displaced space. If, as Walter Benjamin declares, Paris is the “Capital of the Nineteenth Century”2—a designation that merges temporality with space—Berlin during the Weimar era functions less as a capital city than as a crossroads, a place not where refugees, outcasts, and bohemians could feel at home but where everyone, even citizens of the nation, felt displaced, uprooted, and foreign. The alienated gaze that characterizes Baudelaire’s perception of the city, which distinguishes the poet from the masses he describes, now belongs to everyone in the metropolis, and the distinction between the individual and the crowd, the spectator and the spectacle, has vanished. 3 Just as Benjamin traces the evolution of the city in the nineteenth 91

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century from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849),4 the new status of urban space in the Weimar Republic can be summarized in a feuilleton that Joseph Roth wrote in 1923, “Der auferstandene Mensch: Ein halbes Jahrhundert im Zuchthaus” (“The Resurrected: A Half-Century in Prison”): Georg B. remembers Berlin the way it was fifty years ago. If, in the course of his long life behind bars, he thought of the city at all, then he saw before him a city with horse-drawn traffic in its streets . . . and the clatter of a cart would have struck him as a metropolitan noise indeed. . . . Then, all at once, B. climbed out of the S-bahn and stood in the middle of the twentieth century. Was it the twentieth? Not the fortieth? It had to be at least the fortieth. With the speed of arrows shot from a bow, like human projectiles, young fellows with newspapers darted here and there on flying bicycles made of shiny steel. . . . And sounds—threatening, deep and shrill, plaintive and warning, squeaking, angry, hoarse, hate-filled sounds—emanated from the throats of these vehicles. What were they shouting? What were these voices? What were they telling the pedestrians? Everyone seemed to understand, everyone except B. 5

In 1953, the past would be figured as a foreign country;6 in Berlin thirty years earlier, the present would acquire this status, mixing time with space to render both unfathomable. As Benjamin reflects in “Der Erzähler,” the function of information as a technological, economic, and epistemological feature of the modern city constitutes an assault against earlier modes of experience (Erfahrung) and its relationship with subjectivity and agency. Roth’s description renders the newspaper sellers as agents of technology, commerce, and information to the same effect. His feuilleton thus reads as a précis to the most ambitious novel about Berlin in the Weimar era, Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), and this anticipatory connection between the two works underscores Benjamin’s association of the feuilleton and the novel with the urban and modern depletion of experience as a basis for social community and verbal communication. At the

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same time, such works offer invaluable demonstrations of why and how the technological, economic, and political disruptions of the postwar city interrupt the subject’s experience of self. This phenomenon figures in the following discussion of Bergelson’s few but noteworthy stories set in Berlin, compared with other motifs in Weimar aesthetics, in particular the characteristic phenomenon of Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) in German architecture, visual culture, and literature. Although Bergelson’s stories are not “pure” or conscious examples of Neue Sachlichkeit, any more than Mides ha-din is an example of the Socialist Realist aesthetic that it anticipates by a few years, these stories nonetheless offer other, unexpected insights into the psychological experience of the metropolis, and the way in which Neue Sachlichkeit’s disruption of perception between public and private, surface and depth, constitutes yet another shock to the interaction of being and time, territory and temporality. Döblin’s novel expands the template of Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetics to epic proportions, both in the sense of creating a grand nineteenth-century bildungsroman of urban disenchantment using modernist techniques and in the more specific sense of using Bertolt Brecht’s “epic” aesthetics of interruption, demystification, and alienation to disrupt the reader’s identification with his dysfunctional, dystopian protagonist. As many commentators remark, the divisions and conflicts within the novel are already apparent in its title, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geshichte vom Franz Biberkopf (Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf), which sets up an opposition between the setting of the novel (Berlin Alexanderplatz) and its human protagonist (Biberkopf). As in Reise in Polen or Mides ha-din, the location of the novel is at least as important as, if not more so than, the humans who populate it. Like Georg B. in Roth’s feuilleton, the novel begins by portraying Franz Biberkopf, an ex-convict just released from prison and thrust into an urban metropolis with no means of navigating it or even deciphering it.

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The first person who meets Biberkopf is “a Jew with a full red beard”7 who amiably but inscrutably takes the stranger with him to the Berlin apartment of a displaced Hasidic rebbe; the only explanation the unnamed Jew offers, in broken German, for his hospitality is “Am just a guest like yourself. Well, that’s the way it is, one guest brings another, if only the room is warm” (BA, G 19; E 7). Despite the ambivalent affection Döblin shows in his description of the clever, talkative, impertinent Eastern Jew, the encounter between him and Biberkopf suggests that if the German criminal is to be likened to the Jew in his estrangement from Berlin, then perhaps the Jew is to be likened to Biberkopf in his criminality. This insinuation resonates with a shaggy-dog story that the Jew tells Biberkopf, without prompting, of an Albanian named Stefan Zannovich, who travels Europe posing as an Albanian nobleman, borrowing money against his borrowed name and leaving every place he visits in financial ruin as a result of his swindling. Although Zannovich is a hero in the eyes of the Jew narrating his story, the Jew’s brother-in-law, identified only by his brown beard, informs Biberkopf of Zannovich’s fate, to commit suicide and have his grave violated so that the corpse is finally dumped in a garbage heap among dead dogs, cats, and horses (BA, G 29; E 15). The shock of seeing Berlin anew for Franz Biberkopf reconfigures Döblin’s shock at and in Poland a few years before, just as Reise in Polen extends the thematic preoccupations of Berge Meere und Giganten while negating its supernatural aesthetics. The connecting and dissociative link is the Ostjude whom Franz Biberkopf encounters in Berlin, whose presence paradoxically undercuts all the distinctions between Poland and Germany around which Döblin had structured his travelogue. Despite the numerous correspondences that the exchange between Biberkopf and the red-bearded Jew hold with the larger themes of a German and Eastern European Jewish encounter, as well as with Döblin’s fictive and reportorial depictions of the clash

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between East and West—a clash that in fact allegorizes his own self-dramatization—the story as such serves only as a preamble to the larger picaresque panorama that the author conjures for Biberkopf’s odyssey in the jungle of cities. The Jewish characters don’t reappear in the novel’s urban sprawl, and readers gain neither a sense of backstory about these Jews nor a sense of what their life in Berlin might be like. The best fictional accounts of East European Jews living in Berlin at the time, though focusing on secularizing refugees from the Pale of Settlement rather than the Hasidim that Döblin describes to accentuate the Ostjuden’s foreignness from European modernity, are the stories that Bergelson wrote about Berlin during his twelve eventful years living there. Given the time that Bergelson spent in Berlin and the extent to which he took part in the life of the Jewish community there, as his son’s memoirs on the period indicate,8 the scant fiction he produced about Berlin—eight short stories, collected in a translated edition of little more than one hundred pages9—provides limited description and even less insight into his experience there: no account of convivial or disputatious evenings spent at the Romanisches Café or the Sholem Aleichem Club; no reflection on his engagement with artistic or political controversies in Yiddish-, Russian-, or German-speaking circles; and no acknowledgment of his encounters with figures as diversely illustrious as Marc Chagall, Alfred Döblin, or Albert Einstein. Regarding the non-Jewish world beyond this milieu, Bergelson offers only a single dismissive acknowledgment, the grotesque short story “Tsvey rotskhim” (“Two Murderers,” 1926), the penultimate story he published in the New York socialist newspaper Forverts. The narrative describes a German war widow, Hilde Guenther, and her hunting dog, Tell. “A dog,” Frau Guenther explains to her Ukrainian tenant Zarembo, who filters her monologue through his own recollections of raping, plundering, and murdering Jews during the war, “is like a human being. . . . But a jealous dog?

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Like a reasoning person, let’s say, like a man and even more than a man.”10 The juxtaposition of her insinuated tale of bestiality and infanticide with Zarembo’s barbarity toward Jews in the old country telegraphs all the reader needs to know, or all that Bergelson is willing to tell, about non-Jews in Berlin. What remains to be considered is how Bergelson’s Berlin fiction creates a spatial poetics to depict the social dislocation and cultural peripherality of Jewish refugees who were exiled from both the centers of the Yiddish-speaking world and the Germanspeaking environment in which they had only provisionally settled. One such story is “Far 12-toyzend dolar fast er 40 teg” (“For 12,000 Bucks He Fasts 40 Days”).11 This narrative, as its title indicates, depicts a Jewish refugee undergoing a forty-day fast while sitting in a cage in the middle of a restaurant to collect a prize of $12,000. Delphine Bechtel, contrasting the story with the motif of fasting in traditional Jewish piety, as well as Franz Kafka’s treatment of the theme in his story “Ein Hungerkünstler” (“A Hunger Artist,” 1922), writes of it, “Bergelson revives anew the theme [of fasting] in order to give it an entirely new inflection. For the determinant motif of fasting, this time, is money. Is this Bergelson’s ironic self-critique of the situation of Russian-Jewish artists in Berlin, who were accused from Moscow or Warsaw of having departed to the land of dollars, but who in reality were struggling to survive?”12 To articulate this critique, Bergelson produces a narrative about life lived under surveillance; the spectacle of a man fasting at a restaurant creates an inverted carnival to express the isolation and poverty of Jewish life in Berlin. Bergelson’s contemporary Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) suggests a similar kind of spectacle when, in the Russian-language novel Zoo, or Letters Not about Love (1923), he likens his life in Berlin to an exhibit of apes at the zoo: “The ape . . . is about my height, but broader through the shoulders, stooped and long-armed. Sitting there in its cage it doesn’t look like an animal. . . . [T]he ape climbs around in his cage, looking apprehensively at

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the spectators. . . . People seem like evil spirits to him. All day long, this wretched foreigner languishes in his indoor zoo.”13 As Brita Korkowsky writes, “The foreignness of the apes in the exhibit is something they share with the human world, as well as their homelessness. The life of the ape order anticipates the life of the Russian emigrants.”14 For both Shklovsky and Bergelson, what had been everyday life for these East European subjects has been transformed simultaneously into staged spectacle and an ostensibly voluntary form of incarceration in which these figures are separated from their ordinary needs for food and companionship, as well as the Berlin natives, by a cage, an image that both Shklovsky in his novel and Bergelson in his story use to characterize the technological, carceral, and inorganic character of the metropolis. This inorganicity, in fact, was a celebrated feature of Berlin as a “new” metropolis, and as such these two works participate in the aesthetic of Neue Sachlichkeit by ridiculing it, along with their place, or lack of place, in the cityscape. The refugee in these two works is rendered a spectacle and thus becomes just another commodity for the Berlin ocular consumer. A Feast for the Eyes

“Far 12-toyzend dolar fast er 40 teg” contrasts the grotesque display of its protagonist’s fasting with the correspondingly carnivalesque feasting of the restaurant diners, thereby illustrating the complementary relationship between allegory’s fetishization of the skeleton and carnival’s revelry in overindulgent bodies. Both the charnel and the carnal conflate the gestural, the figural, and the physical aspects of the body as biological and social organism. Bergelson writes accordingly, “A few of the spectators deliberately go up to the sealed glass [of the protagonist’s cage], with a fat piece of sausage in one hand and a chunk of tasty, bitten-off bread in the other: they chew with a lot more relish than they feel and they motion to the boy fasting inside the glass

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that eating is a very good thing.”15 The reciprocity of carnival and allegory at this moment reveals the indivisibility of spectator and spectacle—or sadist and masochist—insofar as the customers perform their consumption of food for the protagonist, who performs his hunger for them. For Bergelson, the specular quality of life in Berlin is a consequence of the collapse of distance, in temporal and political terms, between the abandoned East European home and the uncongenially adopted city of refuge. His protagonist is at once diametrically opposed to the German residents who mock and gawk at him, yet only a thin, transparent, fragile divide separates him from them.16 The indivisibility of Berlin from Eastern Europe is essential to Bergelson’s representation of Berlin and its refugee colony. The fascination with spectacle, performance, and display is moreover a primary aesthetic similarity between Bergelson’s Berlin fiction and the art of his German-language contemporaries. For this reason, it is worth considering the specularity of everyday life in the Berlin culture of the Weimar era to integrate Bergelson’s fleeting depiction of the city into a larger domain of interwar aesthetics. Perhaps the representative example of this performative approach to everyday life in Berlin is the film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: The Symphony of the Great City, 1927), directed by Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941). In common with the early critical consensus on Berlin Alexanderplatz, which viewed the city itself as the novel’s protagonist,17 Ruttmann’s film takes the metropolis as a whole as its sole subject, subsuming the life of the people—and even the animals—that constitute the city within a panoramic viewpoint in which the individual figures only as an instance of the typical, and choice or expression is inevitably subsumed to a pattern or, in temporal terms, a gyre. Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt could conceivably offer a prototype for the kind of cinema Benjamin envisions a decade later in his “Kunstwerk” essay: a technologized portrait of everyday life in the German capital, in which technology itself provides both

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the subject and the means of representation, particularly since the aesthetic models for the film are Soviet urban montage films such as Mikhail Kaufman’s Moscow (1927).18 Despite the revolutionary roots of Ruttmann’s aesthetic, his work nonetheless owes as much to new techniques in advertising, through which he earned a substantial portion of his income as a filmmaker, throughout his career;19 however attentive—and creative—he was as a student of Soviet film techniques, he had no apparent qualms about continuing to work under the Nazis, even serving as a technical assistant on Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935). An ostensible absence of ideological inflection was a target of criticism when Ruttmann’s film first appeared. Although this critique could be extended to the Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetic as a whole, particularly when contrasted with contemporaneous avant-garde movements such as Epic Theatre or Surrealism,20 this absence of affect was in fact its ideological motivation, just as, for example, Pop Art in the 1960s was conceived as a conscious effort at distantiation from the hothouse emotions and performed machismo of the previous decade’s Abstract Expressionism. As Helmut Lethen writes, “The motto of the new objectivity—‘Not expression—but signals; not substance— but motion!’ finds both a milieu and the necessary latitude for movement.”21 Traffic, the film makes explicit, is the regulating fact of life in the metropolis. The mechanism of travel serves to characterize, in Lethen’s words, the “culture of distance” that distinguishes the Weimar era’s privileging of gesellschaft (society) from the Wilhelmine preference for gemeinschaft (community). And yet, the circularity of momentum on which traffic depends, the demand that every trip come with a return itinerary, creates a proliferating repetition, transforming movement into mechanized motion and insuring that no matter how long the journey, the destination will become increasingly indistinguishable from the point of departure. Mass transit, as an emblem of

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urban progress, actually undermines the notion of progress by conflating motion with remaining in place. This paradox characterizes Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, which is structured as a travelogue in which the observer and the native informant are interchangeable. One can suggest—following Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)22—that the film’s radical, beguilingly ironic juxtapositions function as monads: arguing men, barking dogs, gossiping women, and chattering geese serve to identify a pattern of repetition connecting humans with animals (and also with mannequins), men with women, Germans with foreigners, so that each repetition provides a typology for the universal. Michael Cowan notes in this respect, “Throughout Berlin, the editing draws numerous graphic and thematic parallels between the actions of different groups of people as they work, eat, sleep, or relax, as well as those of people and machines or people and animals throughout the city. The result is a suggestion of a higher lawfulness; guided by the rhythms of the city, people, animals, and machines seem to all perform similar actions as if following a predetermined order or obeying an objective law . . .” (Cowan, 76; emphasis in original). At the same time, the camera eye, which establishes the patterns linking each of the objects and images in the film, demonstrates Deleuze’s formula equating “monadology” with “nomadology.” Motion bespeaks the dislocation that the film documents, yet this movement also enables the cinematic eye to make the connections that serve as the film’s only subject matter and aesthetic strategy. At the same time as the film functions as an ironized travelogue, it begins in the manner of the bildungsroman with a journey from the country into the metropolis, only this trajectory is sublimated into the camera eye that subsumes both within an inorganic, technological gaze. The complementary distinction of the novel as the preferred literary form for representing a society to itself and the travelogue as the preferred genre for representing an other for readers “back home” collapses in the perspective of the camera, an eye that is neither native nor foreign, nor even

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human. With the arguable exception of a fictive suicide episode, subjectivity in Ruttmann’s film is accorded not to people, individuals, but to the city itself. The city is a machine, an organism, a musical composition, and the people in it are merely cogs in the machine, or cells in the body, or notes in the score. This, perhaps, is the objection that Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) and other left-wing critics have made against the film and the adaptability they recognize in its aesthetic procedures to the rationale of fascism, which not only instrumentalizes citizens to the whims of the state but also, as Benjamin argues, constitutes the aestheticization of political and social action. Without discounting any of these critiques—or the ideologically passive pleasures of Ruttmann’s spellbinding montage—one can identify the displacement of subjectivity from human beings onto social mechanisms as a predominate feature of Neue Sachlichkeit, and this can be compared to the critique, expressed as lament, in Bergelson’s stories about the Berlin boardinghouses. Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt is a film constructed entirely out of metonymies, and as such Cowan distinguishes it from the filmic montages of Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), insofar as Eisenstein introduces images from outside the film’s frame of reference—for example, the slaughtered bulls that appear at the end of his 1925 film Strike—to represent the class oppression that constitutes this film’s subject (Cowan, 77). In Ruttmann’s film there is nothing outside the camera’s frame of reference, and therefore nothing “symbolizes” anything else but instead participates in the construction of a mobile image of the city in motion. The Querschnitt, or cross section, which as Cowan documents is its representative aesthetic strategy, is the means by which Ruttmann betrays the film’s allegorical motivations by illustrating the futility of its own project in successive and resonating reiteration. The juxtaposition, or Querschnitt, of allegory with metonymy occurs most explicitly in the film when it departs from its own documentary intentions, when it is compelled, however ironically, to impose a “meaning” on the images it catalogues.

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One therefore recognizes in the recurring patterns that structure the film—of labor, eating, fighting, shopping, and repose— the dialectical relationship between motion and repetition, and one can thus impute an ideological critique lurking beneath the film’s celebration of spectacle, movement, and surfaces. The frenetic pace of the montage, its effort to squeeze an entire day’s action23 into a single hour and imply within this hour that every day is like the model that the film projects, suggests that the eternal present that the movie presents is at the moment of its presentation already the past. The film is not only a distillation of the Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetic, it’s also an exposition of the dialectical image. Like the Parisian arcades through which Benjamin develops the notion of the dialectical image, the image that the film creates of Berlin is at once avant-garde and already outdated.24 Functioning as the allegorical emblem at the heart of the film’s dialectical image, like Filipov in Mides ha-din, the fictive suicide of a “deranged” woman that occurs three-quarters through the film is its most melodramatic episode, the artificial moment that exposes the artifice of its documentary footage.25 As Cowan explains, In Ruttmann, the sequence of the woman on the bridge is arguably the only individualizing sequence in the film; unlike most of the other footage shot on location and often with hidden cameras, this sequence was staged with an actor and uses quasinarrative techniques . . . in order to convey her anxiety and the panicked responses of onlookers. However this “individualizing” point of view lasts only a few seconds and is quickly reabsorbed after the woman’s suicide when the film cuts to an image of a fashion parade in which the movements of the city appear to continue as if nothing had happened (Cowan, 79).

As will be seen in Bergelson’s stories, the suicide is a “positive” political gesture, the only act of resistance to the regimentation of city life, and a lament for the futility of self-assertion in the anonymous urban space, a fleeting distraction that constitutes

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just another sensation in a society devoid of experience, community, or, paradoxically, individuality. The suicide in turn can be juxtaposed productively with what is arguably the other “staged” moment in the film, the encounter between a male and a female window shopper. After they spot one another through a street corner shop window, the man seems to follow the woman and is seen, apparently, walking together with her in the next frame.26 Although many viewers have taken the woman in this exchange for a prostitute,27 her juxtaposition with the female suicide in the film underscores a more elemental yet also more allegorical association between fashion and death. As Benjamin notes of the Parisian arcades, “The motif of death in Baudelaire’s poetry penetrates the image of Paris. . . . The undersea world of the arcades.28 Their importance for prostitution. Emphasis on the commodity character of the woman in the market of love” (Arcades Project, G 1232; E 896). Benjamin clarifies elsewhere that it’s not the sexuality of the prostitute that establishes her associations with death but her connection to the commodity process, which implicates consumer and merchant equally: “Fashion always stands in opposition to the organic. Not the body but the corpse is the most perfect object for its art. . . . The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the commodity is its vital nerve” (Arcades Project, G 1228–29; E 894). Ruttmann choreographs these two spectacles to call attention to the inorganic character of the montage as a whole, and thus he connects the images he collects with the commodification process in which his work from the beginning of his career to its end had participated. The dialectical image derives from capitalism’s impulse to consume and repurpose the commodities that constitute its means and its motion. Yet the allegorical quality imparted on these commodities becomes decipherable only when the economic engine of production and consumption has been disrupted, as was the case in Germany during and immediately after World War I, and

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again during the global Great Depression. These are the historical bookends through which Neue Sachlichkeit was developed, recognized, and experienced. As Janet Ward writes, “Urban modernity, emerging as it did for Germans with the civil revolution at the end of World War I, is experienced . . . as a psychosocial breakdown rather than as a breakthrough.”29 For Eastern European Jewish culture, modernity had always been experienced as breakdown, not breakthrough.30 The belatedness of Yiddish modernity therefore anticipates the breakdown of modernity in postwar Europe, most traumatically in Weimar Germany. The progress that modernizing, secularizing intellectuals had prophesied from various vantage points over the course of the nineteenth century had finally arrived with the technological, social, political transformations of the 1920s, and it proved itself to be more disillusioning and disruptive than anyone had previously expected (except, perhaps, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?). This disenchantment with disenchantment, the exposure of secularizing logic to be as self-satisfied and therefore mystifying as the sacralizing systems modernity was to have superseded, is the vantage point of modernist critique, and in this respect Yiddish literature offers a useful precedent for juxtaposing against and interpreting a range of critical German avant-garde cultural productions, the Neue Sachlichkeit included. Flies on the Wall

One should consider Dovid Bergelson’s writing in and on Berlin with an eye toward these correspondences. In this respect, his most famous essay, “Dray tsentern” (1926), a polemic advertising the need for Yiddish authors to tie their writing to the cause of the Soviet Union, presents a fundamental mystery to its readers. Its premise is to examine the options available for Yiddish writers in the 1920s as determined by the three primary locations for Yiddish culture at the time: Poland, the United States, and

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the Soviet Union. In Poland, Bergelson states, Yiddish literature possesses a readership but no material support or cultural infrastructure to sustain itself. In America, writers have material resources and cultural institutions but a dwindling audience. 31 Only in the Soviet Union, he concludes, is it possible to find a substantial audience, institutional support, and a purpose in creating a future for Yiddish, tied to revolutionary ideals.32 Leaving aside what became of these hopes for the Soviet Union and Bergelson’s own tragic fate—murdered by Stalin in 1952—the essay’s analysis of the possibilities for Yiddish in 1926 is perfectly reasonable, yet as Seth Wolitz has written, underneath the rational decision to affiliate with the largest and most committed Yiddish-speaking culture of the day lurks the desperation that Bergelson should here reject his previous aesthetic in favor of a newly strident solidarity with the Soviet Jewish working class. 33 The most curious feature of Bergelson’s essay, however, is its location as a publication—originally appearing in a fellowtraveling journal printed in Vilna—by the most famous Yiddish writer to live in Berlin during the Weimar era. As Sasha Senderovich has suggested, when read against the backdrop of Bergelson’s contemporaneous fiction, the essay is “a work striving to be at one and the same time a non-fictional narrative [sic] that defines itself on the basis of stating a newly accepted ideology, and a work that solves the larger concerns of the exilic Berlin text in a kind of concealed fictional form that only pretends to be nonfiction” (Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 164). Taking a cue from Senderovich’s interpretation, one notes immediately the paradox at the heart of both Bergelson’s essay and his Berlin sojourn generally. If “Dray tsentern” is part of what Senderovich terms Bergelson’s “Berlin text,” the template of his writings produced while living in Berlin, it functions in completely negative terms: Berlin is nowhere mentioned in it. The following discussion will focus primarily on two stories set in Berlin, “Tsvishn emigrantn”34 (“Among Refugees”) and “In Pension fun di dray

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shvester”35 (“The Boarding House of the Three Sisters”), both of which take as setting the pension or boardinghouse to illustrate the fundamental transience and spectacle of “Yiddish” Berlin. For Bergelson, the boardinghouse functions as the representative location for the Berlin experience not only because of the empirical, ethnographic reason that many Jews and other refugees resided in these dwellings but also because as a social space the boardinghouse stands halfway between older, communal hostels and the modern, autonomous, anonymous apartment building. Moreover, as a literary genre, the pension narrative was a favored premise for other expatriate writers of his generation— most notably Sh. Y. Agnon (1888–1970) in Hebrew (Ad Hena, 1951), 36 Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) in English (Mr. Norris Changes Trains, 1935; Goodbye to Berlin, 1939), and Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) in Russian (Mashen’ka, 1926)—which drew on an earlier, largely bypassed literary convention. 37 The belatedness of the pension genre for expatriate writers signifies their peripheral status to European culture at that time, but this peripherality in turn suggests their relevance to the larger dynamics of German culture in a moment of flux and upheaval. 38 Harriet Murav specifically compares Bergelson’s “Tsvishn emigrantn” with “Gai-Makan” (1925), a story by the Russian-language Jewish author Semen Grigorivich (né Avraam Gershovich) Gekht (1903–1963), a close friend of Isaac Babel;39 it is possible that “GaiMakan” provides a model for the story just as Ilya Ehrenburg’s writing had served as a prototype for Mides ha-din.40 In both cases, one recognizes that adaptation not only typifies a melancholic aesthetic in which all stories have already been told but also reflects the political uncertainty of addressing Eastern European audiences from Berlin: how could a writer in Germany anticipate what readers in Poland, the United States, or the Soviet Union would accept as an authentic representation, unless he adapted previous narratives? This strategy recapitulates the pathos of the story itself, which dramatizes how its characters are

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isolated from one another and are cut off from a larger sense of communal obligation and collective purpose. In “Tsvishn emigrantn,” the peripherality of and in Berlin precedes the unnamed protagonist’s arrival in the metropolis. Appearing at the home of the narrator, a correspondingly unnamed but apparently successful Yiddish writer, the protagonist calls to mind “gray dust on the roads of small towns, and he gave the impression of someone who had breathlessly traveled a long distance” (TsE, Y 221; E 21–22). The protagonist embodies not only the shtetl—“dust of small towns”—but also the dislocation between shtetl and city. He is breathless because he is neither in Berlin nor in the Pale of Settlement but constantly in transit, in conspicuous contrast with the narrator’s settled life in a home with his family. Physically, the protagonist’s face is described as a map, made up of two warring sides traversed by a moustache like a bridge. His face, “at war with itself and with the world” (TsE, Y 221; E 22), is a contested landscape, so that the protagonist is both a refugee from a civil war and an embodiment of the war itself. Although the story’s protagonist is meant to be perceived as a pathetic and hapless character, one can also understand him as a stand-in for the author in ways complementary to the narrator’s resemblance to Bergelson in external respects, as Joseph Sherman suggests: “However much he [Bergelson] might empathise with the Jewish working-class and share the ideals of the Revolution, he was fundamentally a displaced person. He had made his literary reputation from nuanced depictions of the Jewish moneyed classes to which his own family belonged, whose aspiration he knew at first hand, from whom his most discerning readers had always been drawn, and who were now the very classes declared redundant.”41 The protagonist of “Tsvishn emigrantn” might have been ridiculous—“superfluous” in the parlance of Russian literary realism—in a more genteelly ironic way before the revolution. But now he, like the narrator, and in his own view the author himself, had become irreparably desperate, a man both out of

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time and out of place in interwar Berlin. Before the upheavals of war and pogrom that brought him to Berlin by way of Palestine, the protagonist was an orphan, living with his grandfather in the shtetl. Just as the protagonist’s face resembles a map, his grandfather’s face is “like a clock” (TsE, Y 226; E 27), and this correspondence underscores how the grandfather’s relationship with the protagonist figures the temporal suspension of the narrative, just as the protagonist’s face signifies the spatial dislocation of the refugee. For both characters, the pogroms of civil war have interrupted the natural order of successive generations so that time itself, represented by the clocks in the grandfather’s house, becomes “a grave, a memorial candle” (TsE, Y 226; E 27).42 In light of these disruptions, both the grandfather and the protagonist occupy an obsolescent space removed from everyday life, which for the protagonist occurs across the street in the affluent home of the Pinsky family (TsE, Y 226; E 27). This dwelling stands as a mirror, an inversion of the protagonist’s home, representing abundance, sexuality, and femininity as opposed to death, sterility, and the neutered masculinity of an impotent grandfather and a sexually immature grandson. For the protagonist, the Pinskys perform everyday life—riding bicycles, playing piano, and hosting parties. The protagonist projects every feature of an ordinary existence onto the Pinskys, while his own life, both in its erotic and its violent dimensions, remains purely imaginary. These tendencies were already trademarks of Bergelson’s earlier, “provincial-bourgeois” fictions, but here crucially they are played against historical events of immediate political urgency. The protagonist’s fate in “Tsvishn emigrantn,” as with all of Bergelson’s characters, is self-reflexive; his thematic significance, distinctively, is not. The political implications of the protagonist’s predicament enter the story with his arrival in Berlin, when he ostensibly recognizes a man responsible for the pogroms that drove him from his hometown and who supposedly had violated the Pinsky

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daughter for whom the protagonist had pined. Bergelson writes, “Listen, for nearly three weeks now I’ve been living ‘with him’, here . . . in a squalid rooming house. I, in room number three. He, in room five—our doors facing one another” (TsE, Y 224; E 24–25). As with the Pinsky household, the protagonist in Berlin has established a spatial relationship in which the substance of his existence becomes projected onto the dwelling opposite him, and the substitution of his murderous designs on the “pogromist” for the erotic aspirations toward the Pinsky daughter serve to underscore the illusory, fantastic nature of all his desires. Understood spatially, the protagonist and the “pogromist” are mirrors of one another, inversions, but also projections of one another: “I can still feel his glare right here and here. (The young man quickly smacked both his cheeks.) . . . I wonder what the pogromist saw in me. A sordid young Jew” (TsE, Y 224; E 24–25). As is apparent, this is how the protagonist sees himself, so his neighbor, who may or may not be the pogromist he’s accused of being, becomes not just the object of the protagonist’s fantasies but also the instrument of his own self-abnegation. Just as the Ostjude serves as a ready-made dialectical image in German Jewish culture that combined fantasies of an authentic spirituality and folk religion with fear of disease, violence, and superstition—thus encoding and projecting the contradictions in German Jewish conceptions of the self—the non-Jewish refugees living sometimes cheek by jowl with the Eastern Jews arrived with a cultural semiotic already predetermined for them. As Joseph Roth writes, “Long before we thought of visiting the new Russia, the old one came to us. The émigrés brought with them the wild aroma of their homeland, of dispossession, of blood and poverty, of their singular romantic destiny. It suited our clichéd European notions of Russians that they had experienced such things, that they found themselves expelled from their warm hearths, were aimless wanderers through the world, were derailed.”43 Indeed, that the neighbor in “Tsvishn emigrantn” might not be an actual

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pogromist can perhaps be deduced from the hyperbolic way the protagonist describes him.44 Bergelson thus writes, “I’ve known him since my childhood: from every Jewish trouble. . . . You think he’s like Puriskevitsh . . . [who founded the Black Hundred]? You think he’s like Krushevan [who was the chief instigator of the Kishinev Pogrom]? He’s a lot worse” (TsE, Y 224; E 25). At once this remark reflects the historical truth that the pogroms of the Ukrainian civil war far exceeded previous antisemitic violence in czarist Russia, but it also makes of the “pogromist” a cosmic force responsible for the protagonist’s condition, divesting the protagonist of personal agency in precise proportion to the degree that the protagonist projects his self-destructive violence onto him.45 Ultimately, the nature of these fantasies blurs the distinction between erotic desire and a desire for destruction, so that the protagonist actually pines for the physical presence of the man he would ostensibly wish to destroy: “It was good to know that he was there, in the room across from me, behind door number five. And I always felt desolate whenever he went off somewhere and his room remained empty. The hours would stretch and stretch, and the minutes too” (TsE, Y 232; E 33). Here, at last, the generic dictates of the pension narrative—which deals characteristically with the interrupted, fleeting, frustrated attraction of two boarders at the rooming house—take over so that the two desires for eros and thanatos are superimposed on one another via the collapse of distance separating Volhinya from Berlin. The intersection of eroticized longing and political hatred creates a Liebestod for the protagonist. Similarly, the blurring of erotic and destructive fantasies disrupts the distinction between subject and object, or between the human and the inanimate. As the protagonist relates, “Our two doors glared at each other harshly. I tell you, the only doors that can glare at each other like that are the doors in a rooming house where that thing has to happen. Door number three glared at door number five and appeared to be saying: ‘My man, who lives

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behind me, is going to kill your man, who lives behind you’” (TsE, Y 231; E 32). Bergelson here draws on a technique already familiar from his earlier shtetl stories, of personifying inanimate objects, which in these earlier narratives illustrate the fundamental proximity or similarity between the living and the inert to suggest that insofar as immobile objects can behave like people, people conversely can be seen as immobile objects. Here, however, this technique is coupled with a dramatic and political dynamism that Bergelson had previously minimized, so that the effect is both a psychological indication of the protagonist’s mental instability and a narrative enactment of the “surreal” instability and unpredictability of life in a foreign metropolis. One distinction between the function of this ambiguity in Bergelson’s “urban fiction” of the 1920s and that in his “shtetl fiction” of the previous two decades is a broader reconceptualization of the relationship between human subjects and material objects developing among all the artistic circles surrounding Bergelson in Berlin. As Susan Buck-Morss states of the Russian constructivist Alexander Rodechenko (1891–1956), though with reference simultaneously to German Bauhaus, Italian Futurism, and the innovations of West European architecture, revolutionary art in this era was predicated on a rejection of the capitalist exploitation of laborers as objects for the acquisition and accumulation of property owners. “In contrast, his [Rodochenko’s] theory of the objects as comrades meant treating things as humans, subjective agents that collaborated with the consumer in his or her daily existence. This entailed the introduction of ‘art’ into daily life . . . but with a difference: in form and design, the socialist object communicated the new, industrial ‘nature’—and humanized it.”46 Bergelson ironizes this concept to demonstrate the dystopian implications of socialist aesthetics at their most utopian; material objects in Bergelson’s world are far easier to humanize than human subjects, and this irony is as paralytically true in Berlin as it was in the shtetl because ultimately for his characters there is

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no difference in either locale. Both are subsumed in a dialectical moment that allows the human subjects trapped in it neither the mobility nor the agency to change their circumstance. The Desire That Dare Not Speak Its Name

The protagonist’s longing in “Tsvishn emigrantn” simultaneously for his neighbor’s presence and for his destruction raises the inevitable implication of a poorly repressed homosexual desire on the part of the protagonist. This dimension, novel nearly to the point of uniqueness in previous Yiddish literature,47 can be connected to the protagonist’s paranoid suspicion of his neighbor’s supposedly murderous past via then-current theories regarding the relationship of paranoid psychosis with repressed homosexuality. As Sigmund Freud writes on the subject, “Paranoia is a disorder in which a sexual aetiology is by no means obvious; on the contrary, the strikingly prominent features in the causation of paranoia, especially among males, are social humiliations and slights. But if we go into the matter only a little more deeply, we should be able to see that the really operative factor in these social injuries lies in the part played in them by the homosexual components of affective life.”48 This perspective—which, however dated in the present moment, was nonetheless part of a vanguard of ideas circulating, preeminently in Berlin, during the 1920s—suggests that the protagonist’s previous desire for the Pinsky daughter consists of a wish not for possession or relationship but for identification. Of issue in the fictional case history Bergelson creates is the instability not just of his “subject’s” desire but also of the character’s identity as such. Frustrated desire, similarly, is the dominant theme in “Pension fun di dray shvester,” a story that in half-lurid, half-satirical narration describes the projected longings that a group of East European Jewish boarders cultivate toward their three apparently married, ostensibly related East European Jewish landladies.

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The description of the pension in the first paragraph suggests its bordello-like ambience: a young woman at the door, luxurious carpets in the salon, and seemingly countless photographs of women covering the walls and returning the masculine gaze with “bleary-passionate eyes” (IP, Y 101; E 45). Yet in fact the boardinghouse is the opposite of a brothel because its economic model depends on frustration and temptation rather than quick and efficient consummation of desire in order to stay in business. Indeed, “In Pension fun di dray shvester” depends for its dramatic tension on the inaccessibility of the three sisters as much as on their attractiveness. As with “Tsvishn emigrantn,” the suspension of erotic desire here signifies not only the nonproductive, isolating, narcissistic predicament of the Berlin exile—a continuous theme whenever and however Berlin is depicted in the Yiddish writing of the era— but also the psychologically debilitating and erotically perverse character of the society that congregates there. These themes, which find expression for the Berlin Yiddishists not just “subliminally,” in the Freudian sense, but “subcutaneously,” burrowing actively just under the surface, correspond to the most prominent feature of Berlin representations in refugee or expatriate literature. Indeed, they fairly characterize as well the postwar nostalgia for Weimar Berlin (in the 1972 film Cabaret, most exemplarily) and the contemporaneous, German-language literature of the Neue Sachlichkeit; the fracturing of erotic desire therefore provides not only a motif for the absence of community in Berlin but also a subterranean link between the peripheral literature of Berlin Yiddishists and the main currents of the 1920s German avant-garde. The three sisters exploit their tenants’ frustrated desires by staging the simulacrum of a seduction with a boarder referred to only by the suggestively non-Jewish name “the Greek.” As the boarder known as “Herr Moses” relates, “And it was only afterward that I realized the Greek wasn’t at home during those hours”

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(IP, Y 110; E 54), when the three sisters spent time in his room, titillating the other boarders with their supposed escapades with him. The Greek boarder never actually interacts with the sisters; he is a phantom of the projected erotic contact none of the boarders will experience firsthand, just as the protagonist in “Tsvishn emigrantn” will never assassinate the alleged pogromist. While embedding the story of the Greek in the larger description of the boardinghouse, Bergelson offers an additional image of failed reciprocity, tellingly constructed from the archetypal emblem of exile from paradise: “Herr Moses peels an apple with such holiday enthusiasm as if he wanted to give the whole apple to his beloved. But because the apple is already peeled, he slices off pieces and inserts them into his own mouth with the same holiday enthusiasm” (IP, Y 109; E 53). This image conveys not only the closed circuit of Herr Moses’s self-reflexive desire but also the spatial condition of the boarders, and the three sisters as well. They have not moved to Berlin; they have relocated their old home, so that just as Herr Moses’s apple never reaches any mouth other than his own, the boarders never interact with anyone except other East European Jewish boarders. This figure of hermetic isolation is a historical anomaly, as Bergelson’s own experiences in a cosmopolitan émigré culture suggest, but as such it functions all the more significantly in the poetics of Berlin Yiddish literature. The tale of the Greek therefore serves to represent the unproductive isolation of life during the Berlin exile, a place where in Bergelson’s writing there is no sex, no commerce, and no human interaction, only a pantomime of all three. This frustrated existence is determined and intensified by the boardinghouse ambience of voyeurism and spectacle.49 In these two stories, life is neither public nor private but experienced under the gaze of other boarders; the pension stands halfway between premodern collectivity and modern anomie, just as Berlin for Bergelson is never more than a transitional space between origin and return, from the Pale of Settlement “back” to a radically reconfigured Soviet

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Union. “In Pension fun di dray shvester” conveys this atmosphere of incomplete, inadequate privacy in its opening description. Bergelson writes, “All around, from the walls of the open, warmly furnished room, pictures and photographs of women peer down. . . . The shadowy corridor recalls one such picture, a too naked image: you feel you are both in the city and very remote from its millions of inhabitants” (IP, Y 101; E 45). If, as Anke Gleber notes, the street is the domain in which women must surrender their subjectivity to the gaze of men,50 Bergelson renders the boardinghouse as a social space in which men recognize, uncomfortably, that both the gaze and the objectification can be reciprocal. Even when seen from the outside, the pension is both a liminal space and a site of instruction where the incompletely modern tenants come to internalize the lessons of urban alienation. Bergelson thus writes, “Now it becomes clear why of all streets in Berlin the boarding house sought out this very street, in an area that is neither too noisy nor too quiet. The boarding house itself is that kind of place—it teaches everyone who comes in: ‘Don’t be too noisy and don’t be too quiet’” (IP, Y 102; E 46). The model for urban life that the pension provides suggests that it is an apt, if ultimately exploitative, destination for its boarders, who will inevitably gravitate toward unsettled conditions between noise and silence, public and private, modern and primitive, and who in this disrupted, suspended condition will ultimately never integrate into either the city or a genuinely private, autonomous life. The Death of the Author

What remains of this discussion is a sense of where Bergelson himself stands in relation to Berlin and what role his writing plays for Yiddish literature, having already designated Berlin, inversely, as the periphery of the three centers for Yiddish culture. In “Tsvishn emigrantn,” the protagonist appeals to the narrator because the narrator is a writer: “People read a writer’s works because

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they want to learn how his nation lived in his time” (TsE, Y 242; E 42). 51 The protagonist invokes the “national” mission of the writer—quite a nineteenth-century and Russian obligation for a Yiddish modernist in 1920s Berlin—to underscore the absence of nationhood for Jewish refugees, unlike the status of Jews in America, Poland, Russia, or the strategically omitted possibility of Mandate Palestine. In Bergelson’s reckoning, like Döblin’s, Roth’s, or Shklovsky’s, the East European refugees of Berlin live both as refugees and as spectacles. This interpretation of Berlin as a city without community captures for Bergelson an aesthetic as well as an ideological crisis that would eventually, though with greater delay and more misgivings than most of the other “Berlin” Yiddishists, send him back to the Soviet Union, where he would come to make an uneasy peace with the conventions of Socialist Realism. 52 His Berlin stories are significant in the larger context of his writing because they constitute experiments in creating a narrative practice that is not only emancipated from his previous, “Chekhovian” aesthetic of impressionism and stasis53 but also developing parallel to the dominant aesthetic trends such as Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, and avant-garde Marxism. If Bergelson in Mides ha-din had constructed a dialectical image of the Soviet Union to represent the violence that had ushered the birth of the new regime in positive terms, to construct a utopian future out of the very dystopian present, in Berlin he returns to the cultivation of allegorical images, though as with Mides ha-din these strategies bear their own ambivalence and ironies. Both strategies, in fact, reflect the displacement of a Yiddish writer in Berlin—but not “of ” Berlin—and in their reciprocal disconnection, they betray the political uncertainties that undercut the author’s ideological declarations. In “Tsvishn emigrantn,” the failure of the writer to represent the refugees provides a further instance of how the narrator serves as an inversion for the protagonist. Having set up the spatial dimensions of his predicament at the boardinghouse, the protagonist describes his

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journey from Volhinya to Palestine to Berlin, where he intends to write. In this respect he takes over the narrator’s role within the story by performing the role of a storyteller: “I thought up a story, not about me, but about someone else; the story begins by describing a certain Jewish pauper in our town. . . . The pauper is greatly despised by the Christian children there. . . . The moment they spot him, they pelt him with rocks and sic their dogs on him. . . . When the pauper arrives in the Christian neighborhood, he halts in the middle of the street and starts to cough, so that the children will see him and sic their dogs on him” (TsE, Y 227–28; E 28–29). This act of narration is a gesture of both creation and erasure; the story apparently only exists in this spoken monologue. The protagonist states that the character he describes is “not me,” but the parabolic interpretation he adds to it undermines this declaration by stating, “The Christian neighborhood, that was my town in disguise. . . . My cough—that’s my military service, my going to war, my leaving for Palestine as a common laborer. . . . The act of spite that I’ve wanted to commit ever since my childhood—that’s my way of begging for alms” (TsE, Y 228; E 29). The story, like its creator, negates its own existence even in the telling of it, and it serves as such only as a code for reading his solipsism. The two characters in “Tsvishn emigrantn,” analogously, are each incomplete in a complementary, interchangeable sense: both of them are cut off from a larger society, able to observe everyday life and its significance, but they are unable to affect the lives of others. Indeed, the only character observed even creating a narrative is not the narrator but the protagonist, yet his effort is thwarted by the allegorical limits of his imagination, so that he is incapable of distinguishing between the figures he imagines and the concepts they are intended to signify. The proliferating triangular oppositions on which “Tsvishn emigrantn” is structured—among Berlin, Volhynia, and Palestine; the narrator, the protagonist, and the “pogromist”; the protagonist, the Pinsky daughter, and the “pogromist”; truth,

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falsehood, and paranoia; and so on—serve to destabilize the narrative by keeping structural contrasts always in a state of flux. At the end of these contrasts, the narrator and the protagonist remain poised between the choices represented by the pen and the gun, word and deed, art and life, figured as death. But these oppositions dissolve, rather than resolve, when the protagonist sends the narrator a letter announcing his intention to kill himself rather than his neighbor. The act of suicide differentiates the protagonist from the narrator in the story, but it also suggests their ultimately interchangeable impotence: the protagonist turns to the narrator because as a writer he carries an ostensible responsibility to his “people.” The narrator’s subsequent inability or refusal to supply the gun, his passivity in the face of a demand for action, signifies both the abdication of his “national” role and the ineffectuality of “mere words” to affect history or help the dispossessed. Drastic actions, decisions that only decades later would prove calamitous, were called for in the historical moment that Bergelson confronted, and this, finally, provided the motivation for him to abandon what he had characterized as the passivity and futility of life in exile and to return, eventually, to the Soviet Union. Conclusion

As has been stressed throughout this consideration of the city in Weimar-era aesthetics, the dislocation and homelessness that Bergelson’s characters experience is a constant preoccupation in the German-language cultural production of the era, whether in journalism, critical theory, avant-garde literature, popular culture, or the sui generis theater of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Perhaps the work that best illustrates these thematic and formal affinities with Bergelson’s fiction is Irmgard Keun’s second novel, Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artificial Silk Girl, 1932). Although Keun was not Jewish, her writing and fate resemble the career of

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many Jewish cultural figures of the era: Das kunstseidene Mädchen was celebrated at its debut for its ironic and critical celebration of urban culture, yet for these reasons it was banned when the Nazis came to power. Keun herself participated thereafter in the largely Jewish milieu of expatriate German intelligentsia traveling in Western Europe, even conducting a fall-by-the-sword love affair with Joseph Roth during this period. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, she apparently faked her own suicide and returned to Germany, where she lived under an assumed name, then after the war in obscurity and poverty—aggravated by alcoholism and mental illness—until her rediscovery at the end of her life by a new wave of German feminists who recognized her as one of their own. One link between Keun and the literature of the Neue Sachlichkeit can be observed in the stylistic and thematic relationship between Berlin Alexanderplatz and Das kunstseidene Mädchen; Alfred Döblin was also an important mentor to Keun at the start of her career. As Maria Tatar writes, “Döblin met Keun at a reading in Cologne and encouraged her to write. . . . Following Döblin’s example, along with that of Brecht, who had portrayed armies of beggars, prostitutes, and gangsters in his popular Threepenny Opera (1928), Keun turned her attention to giving a voice to those who had never had any real literary representation.”54 Keun’s protagonist, Doris, is a marginal figure in two respects: she is a “girl,” and she is a legal fugitive because of her theft of a fur coat in her hometown, Cologne, which propels her to take refuge in Berlin. In keeping with Neue Sachlichkeit, her exterior self is inauthentic, borrowed, counterfeit, and this status indicates that her adventures in the metropolis are determined by a series of roles—as actress, as secretary, as prostitute, as homemaker—that she must play but with which she is unable to identify. 55 Her picaresque journey through the city enables her to become, within the narrative framework of her diary, 56 the movie star of her fantasies. She dramatizes her life as a series of performances in which she

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is simultaneously the actress seen in close-up, the “cameraman” filming the action, and the director choreographing her itineraries. 57 Just as Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt had imagined the city film as a bildungsroman, Das kunstseidene Mädchen imagines the novel as a film. In the novel, Doris serves as the chronicler of surfaces and appearances, but because her status as a fugitive, like the refugee characters in Bergelson’s fiction, denies her a permanent address or a stable social position, she must carry this “superficial” perspective into the interior spaces where she dwells. For Doris, writing is primarily a cinematic experience (Erlebnis) rather than a belletristic one (now relegated to an obsolescent mode of Erfahrung): “I’m looking at myself in pictures.”58 The lesson of her fugitive perspective is to demonstrate that within the surface of the new urban culture lie more surfaces, more appearance, more spectacle; the residents behind the glass facades of the Neue Sachlichkeit likewise possess hearts of glass. If Kracauer had written Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses, 1930) in protest against the cultivated superficiality of Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 59 Keun offers a synthesis between the two dialectically opposed documentary perspectives, not by exposing the inner life of the outward surface but by bringing the external facade indoors, by making the estrangement of everyday life the habitus in which life is lived. Intrinsic to this process is her allegorization of Doris’s body. Keun signifies the allegorical dimension of her predicament by effacing her subjectivity through technological and mass-culture analogies: “My heart is a gramophone playing inside of me” (ASG, G 58; E 48). Later she reiterates these analogies to dramatize her predicament within another mass culture genre: “I feel strong like a revolver. I’m a detective novel” (ASG, G 60; E 50). These technological juxtapositions, or substitutions, point to the dramatic motivation for the novel as a whole. Doris’s decision to steal the fur coat, her one “authentic” possession, and a down-market one

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at that (“genuine squirrel,” ASG, G 61; E 51), is a response to a lost sense of home and familial relations. The coat “spoke comfort to me, a guardian angel, protection from heaven. . . . I quietly took off my rain coat and put on the fur coat, and started to feel guilty toward my abandoned rain thing, like a mother who doesn’t want her child because it’s ugly” (ASG, G 61; E 51). Unlike Bergelson, Keun imparts human subjectivity on material objects not to suggest the immateriality of human relations but to suggest the way in which commodities fill a void created in the absence of human contact. The emotional investment in manufactured commodities—the simulacrum on which all of consumer capitalism is premised—connects, in the manner of Ruttmann’s Querschnitt, to the other simulated relationships in the novel. At the very center of the narrative, Doris embarks on a relationship with a blind neighbor, for whom she describes the sights of Berlin denied him in his condition. In the process, she performs the role of urban flaneur, a role otherwise unavailable to women of the era because as objectified and commodified objects of the male gaze, every woman on the street was transformed into a potential streetwalker. By performing the role of the blind man’s eyes, Doris transforms the verbal performance of her narration— in both its spoken dramatic context and its literal status as words on the page—into visual culture. The consequence of this doubled performance is a moment in which Doris is able to describe herself in the context of her social role on the street; she is able then to be both the spectacle and its viewer. As Keun writes, “I see myself—mirrored in windows and when I do, I like the way I look and then I look at men that look back at me—and black coats and dark blue and a lot of disdain in their faces—that’s so important” (ASG, G 103; E 88). The verbal energy of her descriptions further illustrates that the interior spaces that she shares with her blind (and married) companion are a further projection of the streets and their spectacle, just as the boardinghouse was for Bergelson’s refugees.

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Doris is able to perform the otherwise exclusively masculine role of a flaneur by serving as a surrogate or prosthetic, “artificial,” set of eyes for her blind yet male companion.60 At the same time, her relationship to her companion is in like measure artificial, since Doris’s function for him consists solely in transforming the visual into the verbal, an illusion that can be equated with her rhetorical “masculinity” as a flaneur or the artificial relationship she maintains with the accouterments she acquires through theft or the purchasing power of the men in her life. The disenchanted magic that she performs for her blind interlocutor is an ingenious placeholder for Keun’s relationship with her readers, and like Doris—but unlike, for example, the unnamed protagonist in Bergelson’s “Tsvishn emigrantn”—what both author and narrator achieve in Das kunstseidene Mädchen is the manufacture of Erlebnis, the prosthetic relationship to storytelling that signifies the urban modernity that unites the cultural sociology, in successive centuries, of the novel, flânerie, and cinema. Soon, inexorably, her imagined itinerary takes Doris all the way to the Romanisches Café,61 one of the celebrated gathering points for the Berlin intelligentsia, including the expatriate Jewish clientele who referred to the gathering place as the Rakhmones (“Have Mercy!”) Café: “Across the street from it [the Memorial Church] is the Romanisches Café with long-haired men! And one night, I passed an evening there with the intellectual elite. . . . And we all form a circle. But really the Romanisches Café is unacceptable. And they all say: ‘My God, that dive with those degenerate literary types. We should stop going there.’ And then they all go there after all. It was very educational for me, and like learning a foreign language” (ASG, G 103; E 89). Although Doris, like Keun’s subsequent protagonists, is too naive to recognize it, the author herself was doubtless aware that in any given moment at the Romanisches Café, one could indeed “learn” foreign languages, including Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish. One can even imagine Doris passing by the café while Döblin and

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Bergelson sat talking together at the same table.62 However whimsical such an image might be, Yiddish culture was part of the Berlin cityscape during the Weimar era, yet unintelligible to it; foreignness in spaces such as the Romanisches Café was another aspect of the urban spectacle, but it advertised the city as a social system in which no one could truly feel at home. As Keun suggests in Doris’s itinerary, the uncanny homelessness of Berlin connects dislocated and vulnerable German women such as Doris with transient figures such as Bergelson, even though Bergelson lived in Berlin far longer than Keun. Like Doris at the novel’s end, Bergelson, Döblin, and Keun were exiled from Berlin within a year of the book’s publication. Notes 1.  Eric B. & Rakim, “I Know You Got Soul,” track 4 on Paid in Full (New York: 4th and B’way Records, 1987). 2.   See Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Writer of Modern Life, 30–45. In the original, see Gesammelte Schriften, 5:45–59. 3.   As Janet Wolff notes explicitly of the women who populate Baudelaire’s urban poetry, “Modernity breeds, or makes visible, a number of categories of female city-dwellers. Among those most prominent in these texts [Baudelaire’s poetry] are the prostitute, the widow, the old lady, the lesbian, the murder victim, and the passing unknown woman. . . . But none of these women meet the poet as his equal. They are subjects of his gaze, objects of his ‘botanizing.’” See “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin [1989], ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1991), 148–49. Wolff’s gendered understanding of the poet’s position against the masses he perceives and represents illuminates the political implications of his modernist aesthetics and the political work that remains in recovering not just a “room of one’s own” but a means for women and all gendered subjects to negotiate the spatial, economic, and social traffic of modernity and its successors. 4.   See, for example, Benjamin, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 1(2): 628–29; “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” [1940], in Writer of Modern Life, 189–90.

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5.   See Joseph Roth in Berlin: Ein Lesebuch für Spaziergänger, ed. Michael Bienert (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1996), 126–27; emphasis in original. In English, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 86–87. 6.   So begins L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, first published in 1953. 7.   Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geshcichte vom Franz Biberkopf (Zürich: Walter-Verlag, 1996), 17. In English, Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf [1961], trans. Eugene Jolas (London: Continuum, 2004), 5. Subsequent references incorporated in text as BA, G and E, respectively. 8.   See Lev Bergelson, “Memories of My Father: The Early Years (1918– 1934),” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 79–88. 9.   Dovid Bergelson, The Shadows of Berlin, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2005). 10.   See “Tsvey Rotskhim,” in Velt-Oys, Velt-Ayn (Dertseylungen), vol. 6 of Geklibene verk (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1930), 206–7. In English, “Two Murderers,” in Shadows of Berlin, 2. 11.   This story first appeared in Forverts on March 30, 1926 (see Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 312); as far as I know, it has never been collected in Yiddish. The English translation appears in Shadows of Berlin, 57–64. 12.   Delphine Bechtel, La Renaissance culturelle juive en Europe centrale et orientale, 1897–1930 (Paris: Belin, 2002), 235. The translation from French, such as it is, is my own. Elsewhere Bechtel adds of the great Yiddish poet, and eventually one of Bergelson’s most significant Soviet “frenemies” and fellow martyrs, “Peretz Markish . . . accused the Berlin writers of ‘marketing a new Jewish people, a new Yiddish culture . . . a new territory for the Jewish spirit’ and of trying to turn Berlin into a new Jerusalem where they wanted to celebrate a sacrilegious new cult of Yiddish.” See Delphine Bechtel, “1922: Milgroym, a Yiddish Magazine of Arts and Letters, Is Founded in Berlin by Mark Wischnitzer,” in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 423–24. 13.   Viktor Shklovsky, Zoo, or Letters Not About Love: A Novel [1971], trans. Richard Sheldon (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archives, 2001), 26. To underscore the already evident parallel between the status of the ape and the narrator’s own predicament, the previous chapter in the novel details a parodic “order of monkeys” convened by a group of Russian Symbolists living in Berlin.

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14.   Brita Korkowsky, “The Narrator That Walks by Himself—Schklowski’s Erzähler, Kiplings Kater, und das Freiheitsparadoxen in Berlin” [Shklovsky’s storyteller, Kipling’s cat, and the paradoxes of freedom in Berlin], in Dohrn and Pickhan, Transit und Transformation, 309. The translation, with regrets, is my own; I will add that in my opinion Shklovsky’s Zoo is the most poignant work of literature written in Weimar-era Berlin, in any language. 15.   Bergelson, Shadows of Berlin, 62. 16.   The image of Bergelson’s “hunger artist” sitting in a glass cage in the middle of a crowded Berlin restaurant literalizes the metaphor that Arnold Zweig had conjured, likening the Jews of the shtetl to fish in an aquarium; see the introduction of this book for more on Zweig’s portrait of the Eastern European Jews. I do not know if Bergelson is consciously drawing on Zweig’s depiction for this image, but I would be unsurprised if he were familiar with Zweig and Struck’s book. 17.   See on this subject Sabine Hake, “Urban Paranoia in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” German Quarterly 67, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 348. One must note, however, that this appraisal underplays the role of Franz Biberkopf in the novel’s narrative and misses the point of the novel’s digressive narrative landscape, which serves only to emphasize the inconsequentiality of Biberkopf ’s character and his significance, even in his own story! In diametric contrast to Döblin, Ruttmann’s film celebrates Berlin as a metropolis, even if the director is compelled, in typical Neue Sachlichkeit fashion, to ironize his own effervescence. 18.   As the best English-language source on Ruttmann puts it, “The film [Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt] has generally been read as a prime example of late 1920s Neue Sachlichkeit. . . . In film-historical scholarship, Berlin is remembered above all as a prime example of a documentary form particular to this period: part of a series of ‘city symphonies’ including Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (‘Nothing but Hours’ 1926), Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek’s Kino-Apparatom (‘Man with a Movie Camera,’ 1929), and the collective film Menschen am Sonntag (‘People on Sunday,’ 1929).” See Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 58. Subsequent references to this book incorporated in text as “Cowan.” 19.   Cowan stresses the parallels between Ruttmann’s work in advertising and Alexander Rodchenko’s poster advertisements in and for the Soviet Union, emphasizing the intersection of an international avant-garde with apparatuses of state and ideology and thereby establishing a parallel between Neue Sachlichkeit and Soviet aesthetics before (and after) Socialist Realism. See Cowan, 191n3.

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20.   Nonetheless, as Max Pensky notes of Theodor Adorno’s response to Benjamin’s critique of Surrealism, “The surrealist movement ought to be seen as nothing other than a sort of ideological twin to Neue Sachlichkeit. Both of them direct themselves ‘critically’ against the superfluous object. Both, for Adorno, provide not so much critical alternatives to the melancholy subjectivity of late capitalism as examples of its most insidious forms of cultural domination.” See Melancholy Dialectics, 208. One might suggest that since, for Adorno, “cultural domination” comes in only two flavors—insidious or genocidal—it is possible to rehabilitate his dismissive equation of these “twin” aesthetics by trying to understand how they each respond to the moment of crisis out of which they emerge, both in rebellion against recent aesthetic and political history and as efforts at remaking the relationship between the artist (or, in the case of Neue Sachlichkeit, the architect) and his or her relationship to the technological and social landscape the artist inhabits. 21.   Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany [1994], trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 28. 22.   To which this discussion will return at greater length in part 2. 23.   Siegfried Kracauer identifies it as a late-spring day. See From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film [1947] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 183. 24.   As T. J. Clark writes, “The arcades were utter failures and abiding triumphs. They were old-fashioned almost as soon as they declared themselves the latest thing. As early as the 1830s, commentators could be found declaring them hopelessly passé. Their use of iron and glass was premature, naïve, a mixture of the pompous and fantastic. . . . And for all these reasons they were wonderful. They were a dream and a travesty of dreaming—in the golden age of capital, all worthwhile utopias were both at the same time.” See “Should Benjamin Have Read Marx?,” boundary 2 30, no. 1 (2003): 36. 25.   The edition of the film I have consulted for these remarks was released by Image Entertainment in 2012, on a single DVD with Ruttmann’s earlier, animated montage Opus 1 (1922). The film is also available online, though without the soundtrack included on the DVD, at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NQ gIvG-kBM. The “suicide” sequence occurs at about the forty-six-minute mark; it lasts approximately thirty seconds. 26.   This incident occurs at about the 27:20 mark and lasts for approximately fifteen seconds. Because there are two women followed by the

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camera in this sequence—one wearing a white hat with a black band, the other wearing a black hat—it’s possible that either or neither of the two women actually arranges a liaison with the male window shopper. But the instant in which the man and woman looking through the window appear to connect with one another is so ubiquitous in the reception of the film that the imputed encounter suggests a narrative even if it is one that is merely created in the viewer’s imagination. 27.   For a feminist discussion of this scene that persuasively challenges the assumption that the woman is a prostitute, see Anke Gleber, “Female Flanerie and the Symphony of the City,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 76–85. As Gleber states, “When a woman signals the flaneur’s aimless and purposeless drifting along the streets, she risks being perceived as a ‘streetwalker,’ as the object of a male gaze usually characterized by the flaneur’s disinterested attitude” (Gleber, “Female Flanerie,” 76). Thus, whether the woman in this incident actually is a prostitute is both unknowable and immaterial—she is just as likely an actress performing a role, like the “suicide” who follows her as another disruptive female presence in the modern city—but her presence and her gestures follow a semiotic code likely to be read as an example of prostitution, hardly a negligible feature of urban life at the time, regardless of her dramatic motivations or actual intentions. 28.   The “undersea” world of the Parisian arcades is most likely an image Benjamin takes from Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, which refers to the arcades as “human aquariums.” In a sense, Benjamin was unable to complete his Arcades Project because Aragon already had. For more on Aragon and the image of the aquarium, see the introduction to this study. 29.   See Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 121–22. 30.   The Hebrew-language modernist Yosef Haim Brenner (1881–1920) titled his final masterpiece—dedicated to the inability to establish a new life in the Palestinian Yishuv—Sh’chol ve-kishalon [1920], literally “Bereavement and breakdown.” Brenner’s novel has been translated as Breakdown and Bereavement [1971] by Hillel Halkin (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2004). 31.   One reason for Bergelson’s rejection of America as a potential center for Yiddish literature is his disdain for the aesthetic values of American Yiddish; in a 1929 article for the New York journal Der Ufkum, Bergelson characterized the leaders of American Yiddish—in what Gennady Estraikh identifies as a lightly veiled portrait of Bergelson’s erstwhile patron Ab. Cahan—as “pseudo-socialists [sotsyalistlekh], many of whom

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spoke a variety of Lithuanian Yiddish . . . and who became leaders of the American Jewish masses, preaching ‘physiological socialism, cosmopolitanism, and linguistic anarchism.’” See Gennady Estraikh, “David Bergelson in and on America (1929–1949),” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 211; his source is Ufkum 5 (1929): 2–6. 32.   See Dovid Bergelson, “Dray tsentern,” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 347–55. 33.   See Seth L. Wolitz, “The Power of Style. A Tribute to David Bergelson,” Jewish Affairs 52, no. 3 (1997): 131, quoted in Sasha Senderovich, “In Search of Readership: Bergelson Among the Refugees (1928),” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 163. 34.   “Tsvishn emigrantn” first appeared in book form in the volume Shturemteg: Dertseylungen (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1927); references in this essay will be taken from Ale verk, vol. 3 (Buenos Aires: YKUF, 1961–64), and incorporated in text as TsE, Y. English references taken from Shadows of Berlin and incorporated into text as E. 35.   According to Roberta Saltzman’s outstanding bibliography of Bergelson’s writings in Yiddish and in English translation, published in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 313, “In Pension fun di dray shvester” first appeared in the New York communist newspaper Frayhayt on April 10, 1927, 10. References in this chapter are taken from Geklibene verk, vol. 6, and incorporated in text as IP, Y. English references taken from Shadows of Berlin and incorporated into text as E. 36.   Discussed in the conclusion to part 2 of this study. 37.   The first notable example of the genre is Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1835), a foundational work of nineteenth-century literary realism. 38.   Shachar Pinsker astutely connects the pension to other transient social spaces such as hotel lobbies and cafes in Weimar culture; as he writes, “the pension is presented not only as a metonymic and metaphoric vehicle to express the existence of the individual immigrant in the metropolis, but as a hieroglyph, or a mirror-house in which visual surface . . . raises doubts about the possibility of apprehension and interpretation of people and things.” See his “Deciphering the Hieroglyphics of the Metropolis: Literary Topographies of Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism,” in Estraikh and Krutikov, Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, 45. Of course, what Pinsker refers to as the “Hieroglyphic” of urban space connects with what in this discussion has been termed allegory, and Pinsker applies this designation not only to the urban writing of Hebrew and Yiddish modernists working in Berlin but also to the writing of

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German-language modernists such as Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), Joseph Roth, Erich Kästner (1899–1974), and Vicki Baum (1888–1960). 39.   See Music from a Speeding Train, 48–54. 40.   Another model for “Tsvishn emigrantn,” in Yiddish, might be M. J. Berdyczewski’s Emigrantn, a brief sequence of monologues spoken by Eastern European Jewish refugees in Prussia to an authorial figure serving as implied narrator. Although apparently appearing in print for the first time in the fourth volume of a posthumous six-volume collection published in Berlin in 1924, the stories seem to take place in the immediate aftermath of the Kishinev pogroms, about two decades earlier. The stories these speakers narrate are linguistically rich and emotionally vivid, but as is typical of Berdyczewski’s Yiddish fiction, there is virtually no effort at dramatic development to elevate these narrations above the typological. As such, they suggest only a structure that Bergelson would expand on, drawing on his gifts for nuance and psychological resonance. See M. J. Bin-Gorion (Berdyczewski), Yidishe ksovim fun a vaytn korev (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1981), 131–42; for publishing history, 203–4. Avrom Novershtern quotes Bergelson’s friend Nakhmen Mayzl (1887–1966) as saying that Berdyczewski (1865–1921) exerted a decisive influence on Bergelson from the beginning of the latter’s career, as did other Hebrew-language authors such as Uri-Nissan Gnessin (1879–1913) and Yosef Haim Brenner. Mayzl adds that by the 1930s Bergelson was obliged to discount these influences because of the strictly enforced anti-Hebrew policy of the Soviet Union after 1921. See “Der Held un zayne handlungen in Dovid Bergelsons frie dertseylungen” [The hero and his actions in Dovid Bergelson’s early stories], Di Goldene keyt 94 (1977): 132. 41.   Sherman, “Who Is Pulling the Cart?,” 14. 42.   Gennady Estraikh, in an insightful historical and statistical study of the shtetl under early Soviet rule, introduces the subject by quoting the Soviet Yiddish writer Yekhezkel Dobrushin (1883–1953), who notes of the shtetl in a 1918 sketch, “In shtetl” (Eygns 1 (1918): 16), “es shloft oykh der luekh un der zeyger” (“even the calendar and the clock are asleep”). See Estraikh, “The Soviet Shtetl in the 1920s,” Polin, vol. 17, The Shtetl, Myth and Reality, ed. Anthony Polansky (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), 198. 43.   See Joseph Roth, “Die zaristischen Emigranten” [1926], in Reise nach Rußland: Feuilletons, Reportagen, Tagebuchnotizen, 1919–1930, ed. Klaus Westermann (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1995), 117. In English, “The Czarist Émigrés,” in The Hotel Years, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: New Directions, 2015), 101.

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44.   Heather Valencia also suggests that the neighbor might not be an actual pogromist but that the whole story is a figment of the protagonist’s imagination. See “Yiddish Writers in Berlin, 1920–1936,” in The GermanJewish Dilemma from the Enlightenment to the Shoah, ed. Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1999), 198. This article is, along with Delphine Bechtel’s work, one of the pioneering analyses of Yiddish literature written in Weimar Germany. 45.   The protagonist’s delusions in “Tsvishn emigrantn” can be linked to an atmosphere of mass hysteria surrounding the czarist cause in Berlin during the 1920s. One thinks of the reactionary violence that led to the assassination of Vladimir Nabokov’s father, the urban legends about the survival of the Princess Anastasia, and the tales of false glory surrounding expats and exiles from Russia. Of these, consider Roth’s January 8, 1922, feuilleton for the Berlin Börsen-Courier on “Fürst Awalow-Bermont,” a commoner posing as a Russian aristocrat, in Joseph Roth, Werke (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1989), 1:704. My thanks to Christiane Ketteler for helping me locate this source, along with so much other wise counsel and assistance she has provided in my research on Roth and German Jewish literature. In translation, see “Count Avalov-Bermont,” in Hotel Years, 48. 46.   Susan Buck-Morss, “The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe,” October 73 (Summer 1995): 17. 47.   One possible precursor to a putative homoerotic motif in “Tsvishn emigrantn” is Sholem Aleichem’s monologue “Dray almones” (“Three Widows,” 1907); see Ale verk (New York: Morgn frayhayt oysgabe, 1937), 25:165–212. For a discussion of the homoerotic dimension in this narrative, see Dan Miron, Hatsad Haafal b’tskhoko shel Sholem Aleichem (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004), 50. This affinity is yet another reason why Yiddish scholarship needs to consider the relationship between these two authors, particularly with respect to their construction of masculinity and gender relations, in greater depth. 48.   Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)” [1911], in Three Case Histories [1963] (New York: Touchstone Books, 1993), 136. Freud’s assumptions about the relationship between paranoia and homosexuality can be dismissed easily enough by considering that nonrepressed homosexuals might also be susceptible to paranoia. 49.   The specular and even paranoid nature of desire in Bergelson’s Berlin stories contrasts tellingly with the hotel that Louis Aragon describes in Paysan de Paris: “Such hotels for transients of various kinds

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are rather pleasant to live in: an atmosphere of freedom reigns in them, and one does not have the feeling, as in most ordinary lodgings, of being spied on all the time. When I was in Berlin I used to stay at a similar place, in the Joachimstalstrasse in Charlottenberg [one of the Berlin neighborhoods where East European refugees congregated during the Weimar Republic], where I paid for my room in advance each evening before going up, even though it already contained my baggage.” As Aragon goes on to describe, the difference between his transitory lodging and Bergelson’s pensions is the fact that in his dwellings desire can be consummated, inexpensively but nonetheless commercially; the difference is not just temporal or political but one of economic model, since Aragon’s hotel is part of an arcade where everything can be found, observed, and purchased. See Le Paysan de Paris, 21. In translation, see Paris Peasant, 16. 50.   Gleber writes of the disempowerment that women experience under the male gaze on the urban street, “the cause of this modern anxiety lies, more than in the experience of mere anonymity as such, in a realization that is known to every woman about the extent to which a person’s image and appearance is exposed to a ceaseless barrage of visual judgments within a narrow space” (Gleber, “Female Flanerie,” 81). 51.   As Misha Krutikov notes, Der Nister in an open letter to Bergelson after World War II employs this language identically, whether deliberately or unconsciously: “Echoing Isaiah (55:4) he called the writer’s words folkseydes (the people’s witness) and described literature as a ‘truthful mirror’ that preserves the ‘people’s body’ for the present and future.” See Krutikov, “The Writer as People’s Therapist: Der Nister’s Last Decade, 1939–1949,” East European Jewish Affairs 46, no. 1 (2016): 42. 52.   Estraikh reports that as late as 1930, four years after his public and explicit affiliation with the Soviet Union, Bergelson apparently approached Ab. Cahan through two prominent intermediaries about returning to the Forverts. Their efforts came to naught because Cahan was unwilling to extend a formal contract to Bergelson or appoint him as a staff writer. See “Bergelson in and on America,” in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 212–13. 53.   For a perceptive discussion of Bergelson’s productive use of the Chekhovian aesthetic, see Joseph Sherman’s essay “Bergelson and Chekhov: Convergences and Departures,” in Sherman and Robertson, Yiddish Presence in European Literature, 117–33. 54.   Maria Tatar, “Introduction” to The Artificial Silk Girl, by Irmgard Keun, trans. Kathie von Ankum (New York: Other Press, 2002), xviii. Subsequent references to this translation incorporated in text as ASG, E.

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55.   Janet Ward observes of the emblematic commodity from which the novel derives its title, “In magazines, artificial silk [rayon] was hyped as a surefire way to succeed on a date, and artificial silk stockings could now be worn by women of all classes—all the better to highlight the newly revealed and hence fetishized body part, the back of the knee.” Although the widespread availability of rayon, unlike “authentic silk,” democratized fashion in an unprecedented way, it came with a significant price for working-class women such as Doris: Ward notes, “one should bear in mind that a huge 25 percent of the average Weimar German income was spent on clothing.” See Weimar Surfaces, 86. 56.   Doris’s diary harks back to one of the primary narrative devices through which the novel as a literary form inherited the social significance of the picaresque. As Katharina von Ankum observes, the diary from its origins as a novelistic genre has been associated specifically with women. See her “Gendered Urban Spaces in Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädschen,” in von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis, 170. 57.   Katharina von Ankum comments on this narrative technique, “Doris’ practice of seeing herself in images illustrates the problematic aspect of a female identity largely constructed through a voyeuristic cinematic gaze. Her relationship toward her own body in particular betrays the degree to which her internalization of images has alienated her from herself. . . . Although Doris appears as narrator and author of her own story, she can ultimately represent herself only as the projection of the male gaze and define herself in reference to contemporary beauty ideals.” See her “Consumer Culture and the ‘New Woman’ in Anita Loos’ ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ and Irmgard Keun’s ‘Das kunstseidene Mädschen,’” Colloquia Germanica 27, no. 2 (1994): 167. 58.   Irmgard Keun, Das kunstseidene Mädchen [1932] (Berlin: List Taschenbuch, 2004), 8. Subsequent references incorporated in text as ASG, G. In English, see ASG, E 3. 59.   Inka Mülder-Bach suggests as much: “It is not known what gave Kracauer the immediate impulse for his journey of discovery [culminating in Die Angelstellten]. Perhaps he felt provoked by Walter Ruttmann’s celebrated film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), whose use of montage he subjected to scathing criticism.” See her “Introduction” to The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, by Siegfried Kracauer, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1998), 6–7. In From Caligari to Hitler, Kracauer quotes his 1928 review of Ruttmann’s film for the Frankfurter Zeitung: “Instead of penetrating his immense subject-matter with a true

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understanding of its social, economic, and political structure [Ruttmann] records thousands of details without connecting them, or at best connects them through fictitious transitions which are void of content.” See From Caligari to Hitler, 187. 60.   As Anke Gleber writes, “The overall absence of a female flaneur is the result of a social distribution of power that prescribes the exclusion of women from public presence” (Gleber, “Female Flanerie,” 72). Doris’s blind companion thus serves in her journey through the city as a pretext and a chaperone. 61.   For more on the Romanisches Café as a social institution and its role in the Jewish literary culture of Berlin, see my friend Shachar Pinsker’s A Rich Brew, in particular chap. 4, “Berlin: From the Gelehrtes Kaffeehaus to the Romanisches Café.” 62.   Valencia quotes a rhapsodic reminiscence of life at the Romanisches Café from the journalist and cultural activist Daniel Tsharni (1888–1959): “In the Romanisches Café of the Berlin that once was, I met again my good old friends and colleagues who occupied the East Wall of the so-called ‘Rakhmones Café’: Bergelson and [H. D.] Nomberg [1876–1927], Hirshkan [Zvi Hirsh Kahn, 1885–1938], and Onokhi [Z. Y. Anokhi, 1878–1947], Nister and [Leyb] Kvitko, [Zev-Wolf] Latski-Bartoldi [1881–1940], and [Jacob] Letchinski [1876–1966], and so on and so on: I was simply drunk with joy.” See “Yiddish Writers in Berlin,” 195. Valencia’s original source is Tsharni, A Yortsendlik aza, 1914–1924 (New York: CYCO, 1943), 329.

part ii MEL ANCHOLIC CONSPIRACIES: MASKS, MASQUES, AND BAROQUE AESTHETICS IN YIDDISH AND GERMAN MODERNISM

Baroque Prelude

However anomalous it may appear to juxtapose a discussion of Weimar-era modernism with a consideration of (relatively) contemporary hip-hop, the coupling itself suggests an equally unlikely affinity that both aesthetics share with the representational strategies of Baroque allegory. In the opening verse of “No Church in the Wild”—sung by the R & B singer Frank Ocean—the question of subjectivity as such is formulated in the context of spectacle, contrasting the autonomy of the individual, the human being, with the anonymity of the crowd, a mob: Human beings in a mob What’s a mob to a king? What’s a king to a God? What’s a God to a non-believer Who don’t believe in anything?1

Viewing the mob, an always politicized designation for a mass of people, is a king, yet the political history of the Baroque era introduces the challenge to absolute monarchy posed by the mob in

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defining incidents such as the English Civil War and the assassination of Henri IV (1553–1610), so that in this scenario the gaze as well as the menace is reciprocal between the ruler and the ruled. Subordinating both of them is God, and yet what the political strife of the Baroque era calls into question is an earlier era’s faith in the indivisibility between earthly and divine orders, the status of the king as God’s embodiment on Earth. As Walter Benjamin writes of the distinction between the representatively Baroque genre of Trauerspiel (“tragic drama” or play of mourning) and the archaic discourse of tragedy, in terms that provide the conceptual vocabulary for this discussion: Historical life . . . is its [the Trauerspiel’s] content, its true object. In this it is different from tragedy. For the object of the latter is not history, but myth, and the tragic stature of the dramatis personae does not derive from rank—the absolute monarchy— but from the pre-historic epoch of their existence. . . . [I]t is not the conflict with God and Fate, the representation of a primordial past, which is the key to a living sense of national community, but the confirmation of princely virtues, the depiction of princely vices, the insight into diplomacy and the manipulation of all the political schemes, which makes the monarch the main character in the Trauerspiel.2

The significance of this distinction for Benjamin is not just the Trauerspiel’s counterintuitive secularity—the corporeality of the monarch and the limitations of his claim to divine sanction, his protestations notwithstanding—but also its lapsarian nature, its descent from an epoch of myth and symbol into the modern era of history and allegory. At the center of the genre is the contradictory image of the Baroque monarch, simultaneously a tyrant and a martyr: “In the baroque the tyrant and the martyr are but the two faces of the monarch. They are the necessarily extreme incarnation of the princely essence” (OGTD, G 249; E 69). What better characterization of the gangsta, the representative hip-hop archetype, can there be than both tyrant and martyr at once? In

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the new dispensation dramatized by the Trauerspiel, one might echo the question posed in “No Church in the Wild” of whether the entity that may or may not endure is a member of the mob, the rebel, the blasphemer, the monarch, or even God. The churchless wild is not just the Baroque era of regicides and religious wars but modernity as such. One need not claim that Jay-Z and Kanye West are students of either the Baroque mourning play or Benjamin’s critique of it to recognize that the logic of the Baroque, its aesthetic strategy of spectacle, ornament, distortion, bodily extremity, artifice, and allegory, informs their artistic choices. Indeed, one need not identify the Baroque in their work at all to understand that it is great art, partaking like all art of multiple points of reference and cultural contexts. But discussing their music within this discourse provides their audience with an opportunity to acknowledge the lasting imprint of Baroque aesthetics on a deeper and vaster tradition of nonmimetic representational strategies, operating at cross-purposes from a dominant modern decorum of realism and verisimilitude, that contributes specifically to the peripheral, dissident, and dissonant critique of modernity known broadly as modernism. Such aesthetic affinities, in this instance, determine their album’s gold-filigreed cover art, its ostentatiously long samples of previously recorded music, and the conspicuous consumption at once displayed and critiqued in the videos promoting it. 3 Understood in this respect, Jay-Z and Kanye West are belated examples of a protomodern aesthetic logic that constitutes a vanguard of global postmodernism. Although the Baroque, like any artistic period, is an afterthe-fact taxonomy—one that conveys more about the uses of the past to specific cultural diagnosticians than the character of the past itself4 —what it signifies for critics such as Benjamin is a suggestive, volatile, yet preeminently stylized aesthetic fault line, between the Renaissance and the era of Enlightenment, which occupies a position that is in every manifestation

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protomodern. 5 As such, it can be suggested that the subsequent uses of Baroque strategies similarly call attention to moments of transition between orders and epochs, when older conventions of representation are in the process of breaking down. Instead of being declared merely obsolescent or defunct, these conventions continue to coexist and compete with newer styles and constitute modes of belatedness. There is therefore an aptness to understanding the affinities linking the protomodern Baroque to contemporary postmodern aesthetics, insofar as the postmodern can function only as a moment of transition between modernity and whatever after-the-fact taxonomy by which the present comes to be designated as past. Given its qualities of belatedness in the modern era, the Baroque aesthetic occupies a particularly illuminating position for cultures that lacked a Baroque period or for which the Baroque never provided an artistic practice contemporaneous to the Western modernity that called these aesthetics into being. In this regard, the absence of Baroque contemporaneity in Yiddish belles lettres not only calls attention to its conspicuous, if perhaps unexpected, presence in later historical manifestations but also underscores the paradoxical centrality of Yiddish peripherality to an understanding of modernist aesthetics as a whole. Because the Baroque in Yiddish literature functions as a sign of the culture’s belatedness to the discourses of modernity, these manifestations anticipate subsequent moments of crisis and transition within modern aesthetics. Placing a “Yiddish Baroque” proximate to the era of the Romantic Gothic, through the stories of Reb Nakhman of Breslov, calls attention to affinities between the Baroque and the Gothic, just as later, equally belated instances of Yiddish Symbolism such as Der Nister’s stand proximate to Western and Central European Expressionism and Surrealism, with which they share no direct cultural contact but often significant—one might say “uncanny”—aesthetic affinities. The purpose of this discussion is not only to identify

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the relevance of Baroque aesthetics to an understanding of the two most idiosyncratic modernist Yiddish storytellers but also to locate their distinctiveness in a continuous crisis of modern narrative representation.6 By way of introduction to the two subjects of this comparison, Reb Nakhman7 was the great-grandson of Israel Ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov (c. 1700–1760), a charismatic mystic and faith healer in whose spirit the modern Hasidic movement emerged from the Russian Pale of Settlement throughout the Yiddishspeaking world at the end of the eighteenth century.8 A child prodigy in Torah learning, Reb Nakhman seemed poised at an early age to become a leading figure in the rapidly expanding world of early nineteenth-century Hasidism.9 His mercurial spirit and controversial theological speculations, however, provoked gratuitous turf wars with older Hasidic leaders, and by the end of his life his following had dwindled to a handful of outcasts.10 His writings nonetheless continued to circulate, and among the most popular was a single volume of stories, first published posthumously in 1815 as the Seyfer sipurey mayses (roughly, “the holy book of stories”). Of his prodigious writings, this was the only work to have been published originally, and with the Master’s explicit instructions, in a bilingual Hebrew and Yiddish edition. Despite the perception that their format and linguistic packaging were aimed for a more popular audience than the esoteric thought that comprises most of his intellectual work, which was published exclusively in premodern Hebrew, they remain among the most original and perplexing artistic creations in all of Jewish literature. In the subsequent history of Yiddish literature, Reb Nakhman’s stories exerted a remarkable impact, standing as the primary source for the fantastic, abstract, melancholic counterbalance to the tendency toward social satire, carnivalistic parody, and the grotesque representation of everyday life in the Jewish shtetl. One observes echoes of Reb Nakhman’s literary style in the antiHasidic parodies of Joseph Perl, the pseudo-Hasidic parables of

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Y. L. Peretz, the philosophical poetry of Jacob Glatstein, the morbid mysticism of I. B. Singer (c. 1902–1991), and the fantastic prose poetry of Avrom Sutzkever (1913–2010). Nowhere in Yiddish literature is Reb Nakhman’s influence more deeply felt, however, than in the Symbolist tales of Der Nister.11 Like nearly every Yiddish writer of his generation, Der Nister was born in the czarist Pale of Settlement—in his instance, Berdichev—and received a private, traditional Jewish education before falling under the spell of German, modern Hebrew, and Russian literature during his adolescence. It is noteworthy, moreover, that Der Nister’s older brother Aaron joined the Breslover Hasidim, at a time when the sect was considered extreme even by other Hasidim, while his younger brother Max became a sculptor and art dealer in Paris. Der Nister’s vocation as a “secular” Yiddish writer falls between the two poles of traditionalism and assimilation that his brothers occupy. After beginning his career as a Hebrew poet, a gesture again typical of the Yiddish writers in his generation, Der Nister settled on Yiddish, as well as his provocative pseudonym, with his 1907 debut Gedankn un motivn: lider in proze (Ideas and Motifs: Prose Poems). For the next twenty years, Der Nister was the leading Yiddish author of Symbolist fiction, as well as a translator of world literature into Yiddish, whose publications include works by Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), Jack London (1876–1916), and Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875). Upon returning to the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s, he was obligated to conform to the emerging mandates of Socialist Realism.12 After struggling during the 1930s to reconceive his writing, he produced the major achievement in Yiddish Socialist Realism, the historical novel Di Mishpokhe Mashber (The Family Mashber), the first volume of which appeared in 1939 and the second of which was published in New York in 1948. During World War II, Der Nister was a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and in reward for his devotion to the Soviet Union, he was arrested by the Stalinist regime, tortured, and murdered in 1950.

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What Der Nister achieves by channeling Reb Nakhman’s influence is a turn for Yiddish storytelling away from one set of origins, in the “rationalist” and ostensibly antitraditionalist parodies of the haskole, back to its contemporaneous origin in the Hasidic tale. He employs a kabalistic discourse paired with the mystic’s belief in the tangibility and magical qualities of words, now emptied of its theological content. This contradiction of a “secular mysticism” compares with analogous themes in contemporaneous German Jewish culture, particularly with Benjamin. The unprogrammatic articulation of secular mysticism in Benjamin and Der Nister, in conspicuous contrast to the programmatic formulas of a figure such as Martin Buber (1878–1965),13 points to the simultaneous crisis affecting both religious tradition and secular modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century.14 When the rational codes governing civilization become dislodged from their authority, whether in the case of Der Nister by the failure of the 1905 Russian Revolution15 or in the case of Benjamin by the catastrophe of World War I,16 the first viable alternative is to embrace the nonrational and the extrarational.17 In the case of Weimar-era Germany, the fragmented mysticism of Der Nister or Benjamin serves as an eloquent rejoinder to the mystifications of totalitarianism that otherwise characterize the sad passing of the 1920s into the 1930s and that neither Benjamin nor Der Nister was able to resist completely. Notes 1.  See (hear!) Kanye West and Jay-Z, “No Church in the Wild,” track 1 on Watch the Throne (New York: Roc-a-Fella Records, 2011). For a transcription of the lyrics, with invaluable commentary, see http://rapgenius .com/Kanye-west-no-church-in-the-wild-lyrics#note-356508. 2.  Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte Schriften, 1(1): 242–43; subsequent references incorporated in text as OGTD G. In English, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 62; subsequent references incorporated as E.

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3.  Consider, for example, the song “Otis,” one of the highlights of the album: it begins with a nearly thirty-second sample of Otis Redding’s recording of the ballad “Try a Little Tenderness,” for which the licensing fees must have cost millions of dollars. In the video for the song, directed by Spike Jonze, Kanye and Jay-Z dismantle, customize, and then test drive a Maybach 57 (average retail price: in excess of $350,000), which after the release of the video they put up for auction to aid East African drought relief. For more information about this song, see https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Otis_(song). 4.  For more on the origins of “Baroque” as an aesthetic and historical category, see Jane O. Newman, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), especially chap. 1, “Inventing the Baroque: A Critical History of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth Century Debates,” 23–76. 5.  Even J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, one of the technical and aesthetic summits of Baroque music, is dedicated to a polemic on behalf of a new, modern tuning system (“equal temperament”) and a correspondingly expanded harmonic range, but at the same time it also constitutes an apotheosis of fugal counterpoint, which had already begun to seem atavistic to Bach’s contemporaries. Though constituting an encyclopedic artistic unity, it is nonetheless situated at a temporal crossroads, addressing the past in formal terms and the future in technological ones, simultaneously. 6.  Continuing to reflect and evoke the influence of Benjamin on this comparison, it may be noted from his essay on “The Storyteller” that storytelling—with its qualities of orality, tradition, and community—is the narrative quality that the modern era, characterized by the novel form, has rendered inaccessible. See “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings, 3:143–66. In the original, see Gesammelte Schriften, 2:438–65. Nonetheless, Reb Nakhman of Breslov was a storyteller in the most literal sense of the term, and however stylized Der Nister’s avant-garde tales are, they share more with nonmimetic storytelling genres than with any conception of the modern (realist) novel. The temporal impossibility of a “modernist storyteller” underscores the paradoxical character of Yiddish literature as a peripheral modernism, retaining the aesthetic character of protomodern storytelling while registering the disruptions of a sudden, anxious, tumultuous modernity. For an extended consideration of Yiddish literature’s relationship to the “storyteller” models that Benjamin proposes, see David Roskies, “Yiddish Storytelling and the Politics of Rescue,” in History and Literature: An Interdisciplinary Conversation, ed. Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen (Bethesda: University of Maryland Press, 2008), 15–31.

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7.  This discussion will follow Hasidic practice by referring to the founder of the Breslover Hasidim as “Reb” Nakhman of Breslov. In traditional Jewish usage, Reb refers to any married Jewish man; the term functions essentially the way Mr. does in modern English. However, because traditional Jewish discourse is nowadays confined almost exclusively to the precincts of the ultra-Orthodox, in modern usage the term Reb signifies, as here, a Hasidic leader. 8.  The best biographical study of the Baal Shem Tov (or, as he’s known by his initials in Yiddish and Hebrew, the BeSh”T) available in English is Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader [2012], trans. Saadya Sternberg (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012). One of the best English-language introductions to early Hasidic thought as mystical intuition and social practice, linking the Besht and his circle to Reb Nakhman and other third-generation Hasidic masters, is Joseph Weiss, Studies in East European Mysticism and Hasidism, ed. David Goldstein (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997). Equally significant is the collection Hasidism Reappraised, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998). 9.  The best biographical study of Reb Nakhman’s life and thought in English remains Arthur Green, Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav [1979] (Woodstock, VT: Hidden Lights Press, 1992). For the most persuasive consideration of Reb Nakhman’s theological philosophy, though often written at cross-purposes to Green’s interpretations, see Zvi Mark, Mysticism and Madness: The Religious Thought of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (New York: Continuum, 2009). 10.  It should be stressed that however low Reb Nakhman’s reputation fell during his life and in the decades following his death, today he has emerged as one of the most influential figures in contemporary Jewish thought, both in the Hasidic world and in neo-Hasidic, Jewish Renewal, and New Age adaptations of Jewish mysticism. An annual pilgrimage to Reb Nakhman’s grave in Uman, Ukraine, to commemorate his yahrzeit at Rosh Hashanah, maintained under tremendous adversity by Breslover Hasidim during the Cold War, now attracts tens of thousands of devotees from around the world and across the spectrum of Orthodox Jewish culture. 11.  The best single volume in English for information on Der Nister is the collection Uncovering the Hidden: The Works and Life of Der Nister, ed. Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge, and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2014). For a readily available and authoritative overview of Der Nister’s “first” career as a Symbolist author, see David G. Roskies, “The

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Storyteller as High Priest: Der Nister,” in A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 191–229. For the latter half of Der Nister’s career, Mikhail Krutikov’s forthcoming A Witness to the People: Der Nister and Soviet Yiddish Literature under Stalin, 1929–1949 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) promises to be definitive. 12.  Even in this period, however, Der Nister never fully abandoned the stylistic principles of his previous aesthetic, as can be observed even in an essay on the prosaic theme of Moscow’s literary drought immediately following the Soviet Revolution: “The city [was] half dead, a kind of Pompeii. . . . Few [Yiddish] literati were in Moscow [in 1920]. Prose was silent. Poetry was shouting. . . . Seven nonentities and untalented people were always at each real talent’s side, and seven rogues and drones made a living from them. The best writers overstrained their voices, but nobody could hear them outside Moscow.” In this brief passage, one sees a full arsenal of Symbolist techniques—equating a contemporary city with a legendary one, personifying literary forms, repeating the fairy-tale figure of seven, and, most characteristically of all, allowing the effect of the artistic construction to collapse on itself with the climactic declaration that none of these fantastic aspects were perceivable outside the fantasized object of representation, Moscow! See Der Nister, “Moskve: a shvere demonung,” Di Royte velt 7–8 (1932), translated by and quoted in Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 43. 13.  Martina Urban describes the influence of Fritz Mauthner (1849– 1923) on Buber’s understanding of mysticism, noting in particular the significance of Mauthner’s idea of a “godless mysticism,” consisting of what would recognizably resonate in Buber’s thought as the “I, the will, the thought, the soul.” See Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber’s Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 84. The imprint of this thinking on Buber’s work, culled in particular from Mauthner’s four-volume study Atheism and Its History in the West (1920–1923), demonstrates that the dividing line between figures such as Mauthner and Buber, against their contemporaries Der Nister or Benjamin, is not between the sacred and the secular but between the systematized and the eclectic. One step further on the spectrum of religiosity and secularism, of course, is Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), whose masterwork Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption, 1921) synthesizes mystical aspiration with philosophical analysis to affirm the complementarity of religious thought with philosophy and Jewishness with Christianity.

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14.  My friend Michael Löwy has discussed the problem of secularization in radical German Jewish thought of the early twentieth century as follows: Another explanatory model that seems unsatisfactory centers on the concept of secularization, which is frequently used to account for the link between religion and social or political ideologies. Its significance for the phenomenon under study here is limited, because the religious messianic dimension is never absent from the writings of the majority of these authors; it remains (explicitly) a central aspect of their world-view. In fact, in this German-Jewish thought there is as much “making sacred” of the profane as there is secularization of the religious: the relationship between religion and utopia is not here, as in the case of secularization, a one-way movement, an absorption of the sacred by the profane, but rather a mutual relationship that links the two spheres without suppressing either one.

See his Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe— a Study in Elective Affinity [1988], trans. Hope Heaney (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 22–23. 15.  The impact of the failed 1905 revolution on Der Nister’s turn, along with many of his contemporaries, to Symbolism, was first noted by Yitskhok Nusinov (1889–1950) in the introduction to the Soviet edition of Der Nister’s collected stories Gedakht. See Gedakht (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1929), xii. Nusinov’s introduction otherwise offers a remarkable example of the contortions and evasions that a doctrinaire Marxist must perform in order to rationalize Der Nister’s Symbolist aesthetic in light of then-emerging Soviet aesthetic strictures. 16.  On the influence of World War I in the formulation of Benjamin’s (as well as Ernst Bloch’s) secular-mystic “messianism,” see Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment [1997] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 27–65, esp. 47–53. 17.  Consider, by analogy, the historical circumstance that contributed to the canonization of kabalistic thought in early modern Jewish culture: “The decline of Spanish Jewry [after 1492] was accompanied by a decline in rationalistic philosophy with its tendency to universalism, whereas the esoteric doctrine of the kabala, which had become more and more intermingled with Jewish apocalyptic and expressed the yearning for national redemption, was regarded as the last hope for the spiritual salvation of a desolated people.” See Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, vol. 1 [1949], trans. David Goldstein (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 25.

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WATCH THE THRONE The Baroque, the Gothic, and Symbolism in Der Nister’s Early Stories

Beggars and Kings

A Jewish joke, taking place in the authentic storytelling context of Jews sitting together in the house of study (beys-medresh), received conspicuous circulation among German intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century: [Following an exchange of wishes and fantasies among other Jews, a beggar begins,] I would wish . . . that I were a great king. . . . In every city I would have a palace, and in the most beautiful a capital of onyx, sandalwood, and marble. There I would sit on the throne, would be feared by my enemies, loved by my people, like King Solomon. But in battle I don’t enjoy Solomon’s good fortune; the enemy breaks through, my armies are defeated, and every city and forest goes up in flames. The enemy is already before my capital; I hear the uproar on the streets, and sit all alone in the throne room, with crown, scepter, royal purple, and ermine, deserted by my standard bearer, and I hear how the people scream for my blood. Then I strip down to my shirt and throw off all my finery; I jump out the window into the courtyard. I make it through the town, through the commotion, into the open, and run, run for my life, through my plundered land. Ten days, to the border, where no one knows me, and I get across, to 147

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other people who know nothing of me, want nothing of me; I am saved, and since last night I’ve sat here. [When the rabbi asks him about the meaning of this fantasy, the beggar replies] Rabbi, [. . . in this fantasy] I would have something, actually: a shirt.

Although one encounters versions of this joke in the writing of Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin,1 this version finds expression in a collection of their contemporary Ernst Bloch (1885–1977).2 Bloch’s retelling mimics the structure of a Der Nister tale, and of all the German variants of the joke, only Bloch’s identifies its significance: “This remarkable Now as End, or this End of the Now in the words: since last night I’ve sat here, this breakthrough of Being Here from right out of the dream. Mediated verbally through the intricate detour that the beggar takes from the subjunctive form with which he begins, through the narrative present, suddenly to the actual present.”3 What Bloch describes philosophically, Der Nister dramatizes as a rupture in the fiction of the narrative present, the intrusion of the narrative present onto the presence of the reader.4 Der Nister’s Symbolist tales typically trace a sequence of digressions and frame narratives so that the beginning and the end of the tale are identical. This suspension of narrative time nevertheless occurs for the reader in real time. The rupture that Der Nister dramatizes is the separation between fictional worlds and the real world, and in his Symbolist stories Der Nister enfolds each into the other. The suspended time frame accounts in large part for the appeal of a quasi-medieval but ahistorical setting for these stories; the tale for Der Nister, like the drama for Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) or the poem for Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), must remain outside the identifiable history of modern literature so that the effect of timelessness stands out all the more visibly and viscerally. Yet the political function of this chronological suspension, as with Benjamin’s reading of the Trauerspiel, is to demonstrate how timelessness becomes timely, how the culture of Yiddish literature—with its origins in medieval

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romance and Hasidic storytelling, its historical apparatus of verbal mediation—enters into history. The awakening onto the historical present is denied the protagonists of Der Nister’s stories so that the reader may feel the shock of the now all the more forcefully. Tracing a historical arc from the beginning of Der Nister’s career as a Symbolist, through his time in Germany, to the end of this aesthetic trajectory in 1929 back in the Soviet Union, one recognizes that the “awakening” of Der Nister’s protagonists is an awakening not only into the sunrise of everyday life but also into the dawning of a new historical regime. The ensuing discussion will compare Reb Nakhman with Der Nister—focusing on the seventh of Reb Nakhman’s thirteen collected stories, together with Der Nister’s longest Symbolist narrative, “A Bove-mayse” (“A Story of Bovve”)—to consider the relationship between these distinctive writers and the Baroque in three respects: thematically, via their respective preoccupation with kingship and the breakdown of traditional yet worldly, presumably or apparently non-Jewish, authority; aesthetically, via their respective use of allegory as Benjamin describes it, distinct simultaneously from symbol and parable; and temporally, understanding in their affinity with one another and their respective similarity to the Baroque a means of conceptualizing the belatedness of Yiddish modernity as well as the anticipatory role that these writers maintain with other antimimetic aesthetic strategies. For both Reb Nakhman and Der Nister, the return of Baroque allegory as most prominently deployed in the German Trauerspiel suggests a displacement of mimetic values such as interiority and psychological motivation onto spectacle, dream, and hallucination, so that metaphor as such can be portrayed iconically, tactilely, thus performing the work of mimetic representation while critiquing the rational modernity that mimetic representational techniques had been developed to depict. This transformation of metaphor into gesture is, of course, what allegory is and what allegory does, and what these writers

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accomplish by returning to this strategy is at once a rejection of contemporaneous narrative conventions—of which Reb Nakh­ man, at least, was unaware—and the expression of mourning for a (mythically) lost symbolic order in which the discourse of myth had provided unity for a premodern culture. This combination of melancholy and critique signifies the modernism of these two authors, since their retrieval of protomodern aesthetics calls attention to a genealogy of discourses beginning with the Baroque and continuing with the Gothic, Symbolism, Expressionism, and Surrealism, each of which reiterates in its own cultural context a reconfiguration of allegory. It may be noted that in narrative terms the one genre that each of these aesthetics shares is the fairy tale, formulated as a genre in seventeenth-century France, revived by German Romantics in the era of the Gothic novel, 5 further championed by Symbolists throughout Europe, and reformulated again in the practices of Surrealism and, in more consciously dystopian terms, Expressionism. “Fairy tale” is the most accurate description of Reb Nakhman and Der Nister’s preferred narrative genre, so that by using it outside the conventional contexts of the European avant-garde, Reb Nakhman and Der Nister connect its fantastic discourse to a series of ruptures affecting aesthetic decorum, which suggests the productivity of finding links among representational strategies to reveal the historical logic motivating them from within. For Eastern European Jews, accordingly, aesthetic practices such as the Baroque, to name one example, can be reconstituted only as an after-the-fact simulacrum. On the question of a missing Baroque tradition in Yiddish culture, in particular, one might consider an early remark of Max Weinreich (1894–1969) on the absence of belletristic narratives in Yiddish for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Yiddish was nonetheless a dominant vernacular for Jews in Western Europe as well as in the East: “Ashkenazic Jewry [after the mid-seventeenth century] experienced a period of decline that must have had an impact on

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its literature. The light reading of this era was for the most part reprints: Bove-bukh, Zigmunt un Magdalene, etc. . . . The historical chronicle Sheyris yisroel (Amsterdam, 1743) makes an altogether respectable impression . . . but this can scarcely be considered belletristic.”6 The era in which European cultures experienced what is understood after the fact as a contemporaneous Baroque was a period in which no new Yiddish fiction was produced, an absence rectified on a significant level only with the 1815 publication of Reb Nakhman’s Seyfer sipurey mayses. Given that the primary literary form that Benjamin discusses in his study of the Baroque is, of course, drama, it is interesting to note that in the early modern period the only native Yiddish theatrical form, the Purim-shpil (“Purim play”), was also referred to as Trauerspiel.7 This designation offers insight into the anticipatory, if inverted, affinity that the Purim carnival possesses with the Trauerspiel and the consequent relationship that Reb Nakhman’s stories maintain with the Purim narrative, nowhere more explicitly than in their respective preoccupation with monarchy as both primary theme and setting.8 As Benjamin states, monarchy and the kingly court are the native habitat of the Trauerspiel: “The disillusioned insight of the courtier is just as profound a source of woe to him as it is a potential danger to others. . . . In this light the image of this figure assumes its most baleful aspect. To understand the life of the courtier means to recognize completely why the court . . . provides the setting of the Trauerspiel. Antonio de Guevara’s Cortegiano contains the following remark, ‘Cain was the first courtier, because through God’s curse [he had] no home of his own’” (OGTD, G 275; E 97). Just this odd juxtaposition of homelessness and melancholy with the carnival comedy of the Purim-shpil accounts at least in part for the disruptive and perplexing character of Reb Nakhman’s stories and their ambivalent portrayal of kingship. Like history itself, the Baroque first asserts itself as Trauer (sorrow) and repeats itself as farce.

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Indeed, despite the fact that monarchy was the only mode of governance for nearly all the lands in which Jews lived for most of their history, and despite the ambiguous notion within Rabbinic thought of a Davidic dynasty constituting a prerequisite to the final redemption, Jewish sources are generally resistant to the charms and pretentions of courtly life. The primary source for establishing a monarchy over Israel occurs in a passage from Deuteronomy. There Moses says to the Children of Israel, “When thou art come unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein; and shalt say: ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are round about me’; thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the Lord thy God shall choose” (Deut. 17:14–15). Moses, who despises kingship as only someone raised in a palace he grows to reject could, suggests that the Children of Israel’s desire for a king signifies covetousness, and he responds to this wish by suggesting that the ideal king should spend his days copying out the law and judging the people. That is, the king should behave exactly as Moses has for forty years in the desert. The legacy of Moses’s admonition falls well short of his expectations. And yet, in subsequent Rabbinical discourse, in particular the parabolic narrative genre of Midrash, the kingship motif is a primary device for expressing both religiously homiletic and politically subversive ideas.9 Although Reb Nakhman certainly drew from this precedent in creating his stories, it is notable that he is the first author in Jewish literature to invent stories about kings divorced from an explicit moralistic and exegetical context, and in this respect he can be identified as the first truly modern—even modernist—Jewish author. The quintessential king in Jewish discourse is King David, an almost Clintonian figure of inspired grace and carnal weakness, a poet uniquely positioned to praise God and a politician always prepared to play his own press agent. Beyond David and his son Solomon, there are only two truly memorable kings in the Hebrew Bible: Saul, whom David supplants, and Ahasuerus in

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the book of Esther. Saul, it can be summarized, is a study in tragic pathos, a figure of Baroque grandeur, animated as ably in George Frideric Handel’s oratorio as in the book of Samuel where he first appears. Ahasuerus becomes in Jewish folklore a burlesque contrast to Saul—a drunken, foolish, ultimately harmless figure who redeems the Jewish people and facilitates their return to the Land of Israel with the same equanimity and obliviousness as he had previously sold their fate to the wicked Haman. Not for nothing does the Bible connect these two untranscendent characters by making the rescue of the Jews under Ahasuerus dependent on two direct descendants of Saul, Mordecai and Esther. Through this plot twist, the Baroque Trauerspiel and the Purim carnival function in the biblical story and its reception as diametric inversions as well as rectifications of one another. Spider or Fly?

It is with these characteristics of ambivalence and anomaly in mind—the combination of Saul’s gloom with the Purim-shpil’s delirious levity—that one is able to consider Reb Nakhman’s seventh story, “Mayse zayen” (“Tale the Seventh”), in the parlance of the Seyfer sipurey mayses itself, miz’vuv v’akovish (“about a fly and a spider”).10 This tale, narrated on August 1, 1807 (SM, E 138), is the first story told after Reb Nakhman realized that he was dying of tuberculosis, and as such it marks the beginning of the “second half” of this collection of thirteen tales.11 It begins, like several of Der Nister’s Symbolist stories, by describing a journey: “I will tell you about the journey I took.” Its homiletic portent, however, dissipates in the next sentence, when Reb Nakhman states, “Perhaps you think that if I tell you everything, you’ll be able to understand” (SM, Y 109; E 138).12 Such optimism, Reb Nakhman suggests, is premature. Instead of offering his audience the travelogue of a physical journey, he speaks metaphysically, metaphorically, of a king who fought many wars. He conquered

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every enemy,13 and he celebrated his victories with an annual ball at his palace. The centerpiece of the festivities was a comic performance in which the customs of every nation were mocked—even the Turks, “and they probably mocked the Jews as well” (SM, Y109–10; E 140).14 By way of ethnographic verisimilitude, the king keeps a book in which all the customs of the world’s peoples are inscribed. One day the king is sitting with this book when he notices a spider creeping across its pages, in pursuit of a fly. Every time the spider comes within striking distance of the fly, a wind blows, causing a page of the book to fold over the spider, separating it from its quarry. Finally trapped without escape beneath this page, the spider disappears entirely; “and regarding the fly, I won’t tell you what happened to it” (SM, Y 112; E 143). Deeply disturbed by what he has witnessed, the king falls asleep over the book, and dreams that he holds a diamond in his hand. From this diamond, a myriad people emerge, and the king throws the diamond away. The king’s portrait hangs over his throne—“as is the accepted practice among kings” (SM, Y 112; E 144)—and on the portrait of the king hangs his crown. The people who emerge from the diamond behead the king’s portrait and throw his crown in the mud.15 They then attempt to assassinate him, but he protects himself, like the fly, with a page of his book. Still dreaming, the king wants to find out which nation’s customs is inscribed on the page that protects him, but he is afraid to look and cries out in his sleep. He dreams further that a high mountain comes to him and asks, “Why do you shout so? I’ve been asleep for so long that no one could wake me, but you of all people have awoken me” (SM, Y 114; E 145). The mountain tells the king that the same page that protects the mountain from people who would climb it with impunity also protects the king himself. Learning this, the king dreams that the people who had come out of the diamond to rebel against him now repair his portrait and restore the crown to its proper resting place.

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With this act of restoration—simultaneously aesthetic and political—the king wakes up. He immediately looks to see which page had protected the fly, and it proves to be the page that describes the customs of the Jews. Deciding to become Jewish,16 the king undertakes a journey, like the narrator of this story,17 in search of a wise man to interpret his dream.18 During his travels the king takes two assistants and disguises himself as an ordinary person—apparently as Reb Nakhman had in his search for medical treatment during the spring and summer of 1807 (SM, E 138; 149). Finding the wise man, the king reveals himself and tells his story. The wise man prepares a mixture of drugs19 for the king to smoke so that the truth will be revealed to him in a narcotic vision. Upon smoking this psychedelic mixture, the king witnesses the cosmic events that occurred at the time of his conception. When he was about to be born, his soul was paraded through the heavenly hosts, who were asked to identify the soul’s defects. When no one could speak ill of him, the Evil One20 shouted, “Lord of the Universe, listen to my plea! If this soul will descend to the physical world, what will I do with myself? Why was I ever created?” (SM, Y 119; E 150–51). It is decreed nonetheless that the soul will be born, and the devil will have to take care of himself. Upon reaching the last station before being born, the soul is intercepted by a messenger of the devil, an old and feeble man. At this point, the king realizes why he was born as a nonJewish king instead of a Jewish zaddik, why he fought so many wars and captured so many prisoners. “And more than this he didn’t tell. And there is furthermore much in all of this. And the part about the prisoners at the end is not transcribed exactly as he told it” (SM, Y 121; E 152).21 What sort of narrative does Reb Nakhman create in the “Story of a Spider and a Fly”? One can identify three principal components to this tale, each of which Reb Nakhman renders elliptically to an unusual degree—even by his standards! The first describes the king’s custom of throwing balls to celebrate his military

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victories, culminating in the chase of the spider and the fly. The second is the king’s dream, culminating in his dialogue with the mountain. The third describes the journey promised at the story’s preamble in search of an interpretation of the king’s dream. The interpretation, however, is not forthcoming, and indeed the story ends, as is progressively typical of Reb Nakhman’s stories, with an admonition against analysis as such. In the absence of interpretation, one is left with the structure of the story itself. In this respect, each of the three components in the story signifies a different storytelling genre: in the broken parable of the spider and the fly, Reb Nakhman offers a belated, perhaps parodic version of the Baroque. At the end, when the king’s “cosmic” heritage is revealed to be Jewish, the story resembles contemporaneous conventions of the Gothic, which hinge typically on the revelation of a secret paternity in a closed labyrinth, such as a castle, a monastery, a convent, or, more prosaically, an attic or a cellar. Reb Nakhman, by anticipating themes found in the Gothic novel in a story of about five pages, makes explicit what the genre’s preoccupation with closed spaces opening up to horrified revelations signifies: the process of internalization essential to the psychology of modernity—in an era only about a generation before the concept of psychology had been formulated—is sublimated into the spatiality of the Gothic novel, whereas for Reb Nakhman this process becomes explicit through the psychic journey that the king undertakes, a journey in turn reenacted by the storyteller for and with his audience. Moving from the belated Trauerspiel of the first section to the anticipatory Gothic of the third obligates the quest narrative of the second section, a motif Reb Nakhman reconfigures for Jewish narrative from the Yiddish adaptations of medieval romance, such as Dos Bove-bukh (1541), that had, along with Yiddish compilations of Midrash and other traditional stories such as Dos Mayse-bukh and the Tsene-u’rene (1622), constituted the most familiar source of entertainment and folklore among his original audience. In the quest, turned

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inward into a search for self-awareness and consciousness, Reb Nakhman negotiates a turn from the psychic and spatial world of the seventeenth century, directly into the themes and concerns of the nineteenth century. This is a consequence, simultaneously, of his radical experimentation with narrative form and the compressed, propulsive historical context in which he lived. Thus, in this elliptical Trauerspiel, the king is both hunter and hunted, a tyrant and a martyr; his courtiers are both servants and assassins. The only route of escape is through dreams, but in dreams, too, the story repeats itself, but with the difference that here the significations regroup into a cosmic drama that cannot be completed, not merely because the completion itself suggests heresy but also, as Arthur Green has observed, because the irresolution of the story stands as a charge to Nakhman’s own Hasidim, a challenge to recognize the falseness of all conclusions.22 The story is finally a rejection of all explanations that fail to expand the ever-widening gyre of ambivalence that Reb Nakhman sets into motion, like Der Nister, through the everdynamic act of narration itself. “Mayse zayen” is simultaneously a tale about two animals and a narrative about a king who moves perplexedly from tyrant to martyr to zaddik. The king is at once an animal—both spider and fly—and a victim of his own courtly machinations. In its fragmentary references and literary structure, moreover, “Mayse zayen” goes beyond a conflict of power and desire to approach the limits of the conflict between speech and silence, between what must be declared and what it is forbidden to reveal. The Lure of Heresy

The question therefore remains as to what Reb Nakhman would reveal in this story and why he is unable to do so completely. Equally central is the compulsion among his Hasidim toward self-censorship, their refusal to transcribe in full even the cryptic

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rendition of this story that the rebbe is willing to provide. This mystery can be clarified provisionally by considering the role of concealment generally in Reb Nakhman’s thought and self-image. As Joseph Weiss (1918–1969) writes, “The hidden Saddik remains in his paradoxical situation, a misunderstood and therefore even persecuted man, until the day breaks and his true character can be revealed within the framework of the all-inclusive messianic revelation. . . . During the period of concealment he kept hidden his most important characteristic: Nahman’s secret messianic nature.”23 Stated directly, the secret at the limits of silence and speech—the desire that dare not speak its name—is the evident heresy that Reb Nakhman himself is, or at least might be, the Messiah. The apocalyptic implications of this suggestion correspond with the disruptive, radical motivation of Reb Nakhman’s stories, as he explains: “In the tales which other people tell . . . there are many secrets and lofty matters, but the tales have been ruined in that they are lacking much. They are confused and not told in the proper sequence: what belongs at the beginning they tell at the end and vice versa.”24 Reb Nakhman’s solution to the problem posed by folklore is not to repair the stories of the nations but to fracture them further out of all structural or generic recognition. Because Reb Nakhman reorders and disorders the logic of the European fairy tale, his stories exert a similar effect of subversion and sublimation on what a Jewish story might be. Anticipating by more than a century Benjamin’s search for messianic redemption of and through storytelling, Reb Nakhman provides a model not just for Der Nister’s Symbolism but for the philosophical and eschatological aspirations of this comparison as a whole. In this regard, Reb Nakhman’s stories function simultaneously as extensions of his other published writing; whether his few fictional narratives or his extensive homiletic and exegetical discourses, all of Reb Nakhman’s writing constitutes an effort at self-dramatization—performance or spectacle—of his role as

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Tzadik ha”dor, the preeminent spiritual leader of his generation. What distinguishes his stories, however, are their aesthetic character, which both dramatizes the role of Tzadik ha”dor and relativizes it, by separating the tale from its teller, thus demonstrating the central modernist insight that “I” is an other. To elaborate on this distinction, if this story were merely a corollary to Reb Nakhman’s eschatological convictions, then it would function as a supplement to his homiletic project: the wandering, melancholic king is Reb Nakhman; the messianic destiny ostensibly reserved for this character signifies the actual spiritual status of his creator. The rebbe’s Hasidim, moreover, are simultaneously the king’s loyal courtiers and the guzmes mentshn that conspire against him, smiling in his face while stabbing him in the back. In this sense, the Hasidim are loyal courtiers insofar as they recognize Reb Nakhman’s kingship, his messianic status, but they are treacherous in their refusal to act on this recognition, because of either their self-censorship or their failure to live up to his ideals, an inevitable failure in an unredeemed world, a failure of which Reb Nakhman as the Messiah would be equally culpable. It is therefore entirely appropriate that Reb Nakhman begins and ends this tale with a warning against interpretation. Taking this story to the limits of its implications would not only be heresy, it would threaten to undo forever the relationship between the rebbe and his Hasidim, and in so doing it would undermine the only communal structure, the only tangible hope for redemption, that the Hasidic movement can hope to offer for Jews on earth. “Mayse zayen” is thus a “failed” story, the failure of which is redeemed when the reader understands that it is a story about failure—Reb Nakhman’s failure as a putative messiah—but this failure is, at the same time, the event that saves Reb Nakhman and his movement from heresy. But just for this reason, the associations that Reb Nakhman cultivates must be dislodged from conventional hermeneutics, since the purpose of the story must be dissimulated to the same

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extent and for the same reason that its characters are. In cultural terms, the components of the tale are neither original nor adapted but somehow, as he advertises in his project of subversive reconstruction, corrupted. They thus function not as moral lessons nor as folklore but as icons, stranded in their status between tableau vivant and nature mort—a fitting tension, given the means of their composition between oral storytelling and written narration, as well as their linguistic status as bilingual texts in sanctified Loshn-koydesh (pre-modern Hebrew) and vernacular Yiddish. Reb Nakhman simultaneously justifies and conceals the motivation for this disrupted messianic parable by offering, seemingly, a single autobiographical clue when he describes the final trial of the king’s soul in the heavenly tribunal before his birth. Speaking for the prosecution, the devil, is an old and feeble man (SM, Y 120; E 151). Both Hasidic and academic commentators25 concur that the man referred to here is Reb Aryeh Leyb of Shpole (1725– 1812), a venerable Hasidic leader known as der Shpoler zeyde (the grandfather of Shpole). The Shpoler zeyde was Reb Nakhman’s primary opponent during the last ten years of Reb Nakhman’s life, essentially for the entirety of his career as a rebbe.26 At this point, therefore, the story becomes not just a metaphysical representation of Reb Nakhman’s frustrated messianic ambitions but also a political satire about the fate of the Hasidic movement.27 If the King Who Fights Many Wars is indeed Reb Nakhman, then the empire over which he attempts to exert his authority is the Hasidic movement itself. It is thus of critical significance to consider the revelation in “Mayse zayen” that the royal protagonist was meant to be born a Jew, but through the machinations of the devil—represented, apparently, by the Shpoler zeyde—entered the world merely as a non-Jewish king. In simultaneously political and metaphysical terms, Reb Nakhman is stating explicitly that the real drama of human creation is to be fought out over the meaning and practice of Jewishness; a Jew, therefore, automatically commands a

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higher cosmological status than even the most powerful non-Jew in the world. This is perhaps a startling political assertion, given the actual position of Jews in Eastern European society during Reb Nakhman’s day. The aggrandizement of the Hasidic leader in the trappings of royalty is of a piece with similar gestures of kingship in hip-hop, as a bid for sovereignty among or within a subculture otherwise deprived of political agency. The story acknowledges how unlikely this assertion is through the catalytic motif of the ball at which the various cultures of the world, except, presumably, the king’s own, are mocked. Without this indulgence in “ethnic humor,” the king could never have learned of his supernatural connection with the Jewish people. In an era, or a regime, that mocks and diminishes all ethnicities without discrimination, Reb Nakhman makes a case not only for the specific, mystical properties of the Jewish people but perhaps also for the value of ethnic difference against the homogenizing imperatives of empire per se. Moreover, the Jews in this story are related metonymically to the fly: the fly seeks protection under the page that describes, signifies, and parodies their culture, and like the fly, they are small, hunted, and despised, yet they triumph over their persecutors in the as yet unrevealed end.28 The political metaphysics of this story, unfortunately, undermine whatever homiletic unity the exegete would presume to impose, for if the king was meant to be born the Messiah but instead was born a non-Jewish aristocrat, then he cannot symbolize Reb Nakhman, who may have been meant to be the Messiah but was certainly neither a non-Jew nor an aristocrat—except in the ineluctably Jewish world of Hasidism. Moreover, if Reb Nakhman depicts himself in this story as a non-Jewish king, why is the Shpoler zeyde, whose power over non-Jewish monarchs was marginal at best, invoked without comparable metaphorical camouflage? Instead of a parable about Reb Nakhman as king or the king as Messiah, “Mayse zayen” can more accurately be described as an allegory in which kings and zaddikim, to say

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nothing of courtiers and assassins or spiders and flies, appear as interchangeable rhetorical figures in a private struggle between Reb Nakhman’s messianic desires and the repressive threat of heresy. Indeed, one can say that in the deliberately bizarre contours of this story, Reb Nakhman has found an ideal structure for describing heresy as such; the story is structurally incoherent to the extent that heresy undermines the theological coherence of the world. And if the inconvenient factors considered in this discussion destroy the exegetical unity of this relentlessly diffuse narrative, they nonetheless acknowledge the contradictory impulses that more conventional readings shortchange.29 Allegory and the Incompossible

Although conventional exegesis, both in an academic context and in the Hasidic world, has typically read Reb Nakhman’s stories as allegories, they function as such only in the particular, peculiar sense that Benjamin suggests in his study of the Trauerspiel: “Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things” (OGTD, G 354; E 178). For Benjamin, allegory connects with the philosophy of history that preoccupied his thought from beginning to end, via the status of the object. Benjamin makes of allegories not mere ruins but relics, and this is the significance of allegory to his understanding of the Baroque. According to Benjamin, the Baroque allegory represents what modernity will abandon or supersede, and so allegory for the Baroque, in contrast to its medieval or scholastic manifestations, becomes a rationalizing strategy for containing the instability and ambiguity of metaphor. By yoking metaphorical language to conceptual language—“the lightning of calumny,” “the poison of Vainglory,” “the cedars of innocence,” and “the blood of friendship” are among the examples Benjamin offers (OGTD, G 374; E 198)—allegory negotiates the ambiguities between figurative and literal meanings in language, but at the same time it preserves

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these ambiguities, as if in amber. In the process of maintaining these qualities in suspension, it furthermore figures the temporal transition between historical epochs by making an obsolescent mode of signification both a means of representation and an object to be represented. Allegory conceives of language as an object, which allows concepts to be represented visually. But in this representation, allegory becomes simultaneously literal and figurative, text and image. As an object, allegory signifies the mythical potential of speech that modernity as a social, psychological, rhetorical construct must regulate, systematize, and suppress. If Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) in his study of Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) refers to the “incompossible” (l’incompossible) as two alternatives that are equally plausible but incompatible, 30 then myth is the one representational domain in which incompossibles can coexist. Myth in this sense refers to a mode of representation in which contradictory states of being, such as life and death, animal and human, sacred and blasphemous, can coexist simultaneously without the need to harmonize or rationalize these contradictions. Allegory by extension is mythical and it isn’t. It is a reification of what myth is in that it takes the place of what myth does, and in this instantaneous, self-canceling transformative process—the Midas alchemy of turning an animate concept into a gilded icon—the Baroque comes into being. Allegory is in fact exactly the opposite of what it claims to be; it is the production and proliferation of metaphor posing as a repudiation of the metaphorical and the collapsing of the figurative as literal. When the pageant of the Trauerspiel, precursor of the ballet, 31 performs the meaning of the play as physical gesture, it makes metaphor corporeal by reducing the body of the performer to the status of the figurative. Similarly, Reb Nakhman’s King Who Fights Many Wars acts in the tale not as character nor as symbol but as function, a narrative component within the allegory that instead of producing meaning consumes it. 32

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The reciprocal masquerade between meanings or levels of discourse is another feature of allegory’s characteristically Baroque character. Allegory as a representational strategy is always inadequate to the task of signification because it loses itself between concept and illustration, and as such it appeals to the melancholic who is by nature attracted to antiquated vessels and defunct vehicles. And what concept connects Benjamin’s project with Reb Nakhman’s better than melancholy? Of course, as with Jay-Z and Kanye West’s imputed affinity with the Baroque, identifying a conceptual relationship between Reb Nakhman and Benjamin is itself an act of allegorical assertion and can serve either thinker only in the context of an aesthetic genealogy. Designations such as allegory, the Baroque, or modernism cease to function merely as taxonomies when they help illuminate a social context in which these descriptions can be enlisted to identify a larger cultural phenomenon—in this instance, the subterranean interstices among various strains of the nonmimetic avant-garde. As has been suggested, Reb Nakhman in this context serves as an anticipatory modernist, so that by reading his tales, belatedly, against the Baroque, one can identify which strain of modernist aesthetics his stories most explicitly anticipate: the Symbolism of Der Nister. The affinities between the Baroque and Symbolism, indeed, have already been remarked on in connection with their respective attachments to the fragment and the ruin as constituents of a totality, a world conjured exclusively through writing. As Deleuze notes in his treatment of the Baroque, “It is well known that the total book is as much Leibniz’s dream as it is Mallarmé’s, even though they never stop working in fragments” (Le Pli, F 44; E 31). Not only does this remark suggest the affinity that Benjamin’s most intensive literary preoccupations maintain with one another—the Baroque, Symbolism, and Surrealism— but it also shares with Benjamin’s study a sense that allegory links the Baroque with Symbolism because they each depend

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on the inadequacy, fragmentation, and indeterminacy of language itself. Symbolism therefore functions as another mode of allegory, now lacking an external referent, creating poetry out of signifiers disconnected from external signifieds, since for the Symbolist artist nothing exists outside the mind, an application of Hegelian philosophy and the linguistic logic of modernity, driven to almost parodic extremes. 33 This perhaps explains the affinity of Symbolist poetics with structural analysis, since Symbolism properly understood constitutes itself as a series of signifiers signifying only themselves. Benjamin underscores the relationship between French Symbolism and German Idealism, as well as the explicit politics of Symbolism’s investment in philosophical categories, through a remark he records from a conversation with André Gide (1869– 1951): “At around the same time [as the heyday of Maurice Barrès’ xenophobic French nationalism] there was something similar in Mallarmé, only in his case he was content not to go beyond a world of spiritual interiority that converted every gaze at the outside world, every thought of traveling or learning foreign languages, into something exotic. Wasn’t it perhaps the philosophy of German idealism that induced its French disciples to adopt this attitude?”34 If German Idealism accounts for both the hermeticism and associative affinities of French Symbolism—and Gide’s contrast of Mallarmé with the protofascist Maurice Barrès (1862–1923) provides an insight to this—then it is an Idealism that must be traced back, as Deleuze notes, to Leibniz, the Baroque philosopher par excellence, and his concept of the monad. 35 Mallarmé internalizes the principle of German Idealism that the mind maintains an agonistic equilibrium with the world because the poet conceives of poetry, and the mind as such, as the production of monads in which the world is contained, but only as a localized, idiosyncratic, fragmented totality. 36 The poem is the world, but only as seen via the mind of the poet. Through this aesthetic transposition, German Idealism doubles back toward

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neo-Platonism and gnosticism, its respective philosophical and theological progenitors, and thereby produces for Benjamin the signature product of the encounter between aesthetic constructs and philosophical categories, a “dialectical image” of itself. Though the relationship between French Symbolism and German Idealism is entangled and complicated enough, the triangular relationship that Russian Symbolism establishes simultaneously with French and German aesthetic traditions amplifies these complexities. The quadrilateral relations of Yiddish Symbolism, in turn, underscore an absence of affiliation between Yiddish culture and, respectively, French, German, and Russian culture. As Avril Pyman explains, one of the primary influences on Russian Symbolism are theories of “degeneracy” advocated by the social theorist (and Zionist ideologue) Max Nordau (1849–1923): “The symptoms of ‘degeneracy’ Nordau defined as unhealthy nervosity [sic], moral idiocy, ‘cyclic’ states of depression and exaltation, mysticism, childishness, atavism, an intellect so enfeebled as no longer to be capable of thinking in terms of cause and effect, and extreme subjectivity, sometimes passing into diagnosable egomania, combined with a tendency to congregate in groups—all, he insisted, abnormalities of the criminal mind.”37 Nordau, a medical doctor, suggests a connection between Symbolism and Baroque aesthetics via the philosophical and scientific terms he uses to describe degeneracy. For Nordau, degeneracy manifests itself through stasis, death, ruination, and decay.38 With the exception of “a tendency to congregate in groups,” his symptomology is essentially identical to Sigmund Freud’s description of melancholy, and transposing their medicinal vocabulary to the realm of aesthetics, they also read like an index of themes in Baudelaire’s poetry or Der Nister’s fiction. The distinction between Russian Symbolism and French Symbolism, however, hinges on the respective relationships of these cultures to Enlightenment and rationality. In France, Enlightenment was a “native” possession, the foundation of the

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culture’s claim to civilization and modernity; in Russia, Enlightenment was always perceived, whether positively or negatively, as an external import, an intrusion onto the norm. To revolt against Enlightenment—as Symbolism does in aesthetic terms, in effect substituting aesthetics for rationality—in France is to disavow an inheritance. In Russia, by contrast, it is to lay claim to one. How much more disruptive, then, is Yiddish Symbolism, which is native to neither Western rationalism nor Russian primitivism? Inhabiting the Uncanny

In this regard, allegorical strategies connect Reb Nakhman and Der Nister as storytellers, and this accounts for their unique but related role within Yiddish literature, which creates a fictive world that is uncannily proximate to the “natural” habitat of a traditional Jewish culture abruptly opening up to modernity. They are the only Eastern European Yiddish authors of note to dispense entirely with the shtetl, its institutions, and even identifiably Jewish protagonists. Though Reb Nakhman is known as a profound and original religious thinker, both the homiletic purpose and any reference to Jewish sources in most of his stories remain elusive, intangible, as much as in the cosmopolitan, politically radical milieu of Der Nister’s writing. Yet for both storytellers, the implications of Jewishness in the newly modern world remain as animating as they are for writers like Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Y. L. Peretz, and, in an intimately adjacent Hebrew context, Sh. Y. Agnon. Similarly, although these are almost the only Yiddish narratives for which categories of the Baroque, the Gothic, and even the Surreal might be invoked without irony or quotation marks, their achievement radiates darkly, like an X-ray, illuminating both the aesthetic logic of Yiddish modernism and its subterranean, structural affinities to larger developments throughout modern literature.

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What these stories enact, of a small, closed narrative form opening itself up to the grand historical gestures of modernist critique, is what the classic shtetl satire dramatizes about the encounter—its dangers and its discontents—of the closed Jewish space with the wider modern world. For Reb Nakhman, as much as Der Nister, storytelling is a response to the crisis these historical circumstances engender, both personally and in the broader culture of the nineteenth century. 39 This crisis was as much a problem of narration, representation, and idiom as it was of culture or politics: as Yiddish came to be concentrated over the course of the eighteenth century more exclusively in the East, the old Yiddish genres of interpolation and mediation40 functioned less and less as vehicles of expression. The antiquated stylistic and linguistic norms of this repackaged and adapted literature underscore its historical distance from its readers before the advent of modern storytelling forms with the publication of Reb Nakhman’s tales. Though Reb Nakhman is the first storyteller to step into a new fictional universe, at a distance he nonetheless appears to follow the cues of the older, interpolated genres. But the manifestations he presents are unlike anything seen before in Jewish narratives and, though much imitated, not quite like anything seen since, although Der Nister and his contemporary Agnon come closest in distinctive respects. The first step in approaching Der Nister’s aesthetic achievements is to consider the implications of his pseudonym, “the hidden one.”41 The choice of pseudonym, when made, must be counted as the first and most important words in an author’s body of work, and Yiddish fiction during the nineteenth century was dominated by pseudonymous writers, in part because the Jewish vernacular was considered inferior to Hebrew, German, or Russian and therefore a demeaning linguistic vehicle for serious intellectuals. Over the course of classic Yiddish fiction’s development from the pseudonymous work of Mendele Moykher-Sforim

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(Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh) to that of Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovitsh), one observes a progression from a nearly three-dimensional persona narrating, conversing with, and interacting with other characters to a more subtle and complicated literary “presence,” as Dan Miron formulates it,42 felt only by implication but nonetheless shaping and determining the character and structure of each story or monologue. From Sholem Aleichem to Der Nister, an additional transformation and generational shift occurs from transparency to invisibility.43 Der Nister comments on this progression in the opening of his first significant work, Gedankn un motivn: “And as Der Nister hears people say ‘We dreamt a dream’ [in Yiddish, Es hot zikh undz ge’kholem’t a kholem; literally “a dream dreamt itself to us”], he smiles because he’s never heard once that dreams should say ‘we peopled a person’ [Es hot zikh undz gementsht a mentsh]” (cited in Boelich, 26). The reflexivity of the construction kholem’en zikh a kholem, though thoroughly idiomatic in Yiddish, offers for Der Nister a microcosm—in Leibnizian terms, a monad—of the aesthetic reflexivity that the author’s Symbolist narratives will inhabit. Dreams dream themselves, stories tell themselves, and the world of the narrative stands parallel to the world of people but never intersects because the path toward intersection with reality is foreclosed by the structure of the stories, which is designed to collapse on itself. Just as Bloch notes of his Hasidic joke, now is not a time or place where reality exists but is instead the time or place in which stories culminate and therefore cease to exist. What mediates between the now of reality and the now as end of the story is Der Nister’s narratorial persona, which functions as a medium between inside and outside, consciousness and the world, Jewish and non-Jewish Eastern Europe and Germany, mysticism and modernity. For this reason, the persona itself must function as a cipher, an allegorical figure that dissolves into and dispenses other allegories.

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Hiddenness, inscrutability, hermeticism, and the absolute estrangement of the narrated world from the experienced world are thus fundamental to Der Nister’s Symbolist aesthetic, which culminates in 1929 with “Unter a ployt.”44 In contrast to the injunction Isaac Babel’s grandmother issues that “you must know everything,”45 Der Nister in his choice of pseudonym suggests that the reader is incapable of knowing anything. Like the kabalistic allusions in the Torah commentary of the Judeo-Catalan mystic Nachmanides (1194–1270), Der Nister informs his readers only that a secret exists, never what the secret is. This insistence on the secrecy of knowledge is itself an anti-Enlightenment gesture that calls to mind both the hermeneutics of medieval Judaism and the oral origins of Yiddish storytelling; as Nouréini Tidjani-Serpos notes of the status of knowledge in oral cultures generally, “Science is never more appreciated than when it is secret and when it demands years of wandering and suffering before it can be properly acquired.”46 If Reb Nakhman cultivates the chaos of narrative apocalypse in order to change the times in which he was living, Der Nister came of age in an era when apocalypse was no longer fictive. Indeed, this juxtaposition illustrates the function of an anticipatory modernism. Because modernity is experienced in peripheral cultures as a catastrophe, the response to this phenomenon anticipates the historical crisis that engulfs modernity as a whole in the heyday of High Modernism, of which Der Nister remains as much on the periphery as Reb Nakhman had been a century before. A hundred years later, Der Nister’s narratives pick up where Reb Nakhman’s stories had left off, incorporating both Reb Nakhman’s refraction of Baroque aesthetics and later trends of the Gothic imagination, Symbolism, and other avant-garde narrative techniques.47 In this respect, Reb Nakhman provides a model for understanding Der Nister’s avant-garde stories; the designation “avant-garde” ultimately serves Der Nister better than “Symbolist” because Symbolism is only one element of his

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aesthetic, in addition to an increasingly dominant Expressionist motif, along with the broader influence of the literary fairy tale. As can be recognized in one of the preeminent achievements in Der Nister’s avant-garde period, “A Bove-mayse oder a mayse mit di melokhim” (“A Story of Bovve, or a Story of Kings,” 1920), the author takes his cues in both style and tone from Reb Nakhman’s story of the spider and the fly, along with the prototypical premodern Yiddish romance Dos Bovo-bukh,48 from which the colloquial expression bobe-mayse (“old wives’ tale”) originally derives. Where the Bovo-bukh, however, Judaizes several aspects of the medieval chivalric tale in order to neutralize the danger of importing a foreign narrative into a still traditional though dynamic culture, Der Nister here divests his writing of essentially all overt references to Jewishness except for the Yiddish language itself. The Jewish significance of Der Nister’s writing isn’t absent but concealed—just beneath the surface and requiring the revelation of a sensitive and culturally attuned audience. Like Reb Nakhman, Der Nister offers hermetically opaque parables to devotees and adepts willing to devote their lives to deciphering them. Unlike Reb Nakhman, Der Nister never actually recruited any Hasidim to the task. Nonetheless, the close, intense affinity between Der Nister’s writing with the precedents of the Bovo-bukh and Reb Nakhman’s stories indicates that like all great modernists—Reb Nakhman included—an agonistic sense of the past, tradition, and memory animates Der Nister’s imagination on what can be described as the subconscious level. Where history is one of the rationalizing discourses that signify and constitute modernity, the incorporation of the past as a spectral, unspeakable presence characterizes modernism in all its manifestations. As in Reb Nakhman’s story, Der Nister brings the reader into a world where characters and actions are at once overly familiar and torn from their expected functions, a world neither fantastic nor realistic but functioning

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parallel or perhaps inverted from the conventions of logic, history, and narrative form: Once there was a king. A king like any king, with a crown on his head and a throne to sit on, and all the qualities and everything that pertains to a king. One day the king fell ill. And this is what was wrong with him: He trembled for his crown and his throne, he no longer believed in his kingdom and his people, nor did he trust his lords and nearand-dear. Every night, he would dream of poisons and swords, plots and uprisings, revolts and upheavals. Always, every time he slept, he would see wild and terrifying visions, that made him go cold and go hot. He would wake up in the midst of them and never sleep a full night or full sleep.49

Two years after a world war had brought an end to at least three monarchies, Der Nister returns to the situation that had called the Baroque Trauerspiel into being. Yet he does so not as an expression of the Baroque poet’s horror at a world that had lost its old, divinely sanctioned order. 50 The regicide that he depicts, like Reb Nakhman, speaks to something more internal; it is the king’s own subconscious that betrays him, making of the imagined plot a prospect perhaps as much to be desired as feared. The Uses of Anachronism

If the solution that Der Nister offers to the broken world of the king’s consciousness is storytelling, it does not seek to repair the world, a task Reb Nakhman’s stories had resisted from a theological perspective at the dawning of Ashkenazic modernity, so much as to bypass it. At a moment when seemingly every other writer in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, cultivated the aesthetic of Expressionism, Der Nister reaches back to a cultivation of the archaic and the pristine, not as a program for remaking the future in the image of an idealized past—kings and knights in shining armor and enchanted forests, plainly, belonged to the Jewish

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experience no more in Der Nister’s day than they did in the era of the original Bove-bukh—but instead as a path of continuous escape. The fairy tale for Der Nister, like Reb Nakhman, serves as a weapon to subvert everyday reality, not to transform it. A wanderer comes to the palace of a morbid king to tell him the story of a wanderer named Bovve betrothed to another king’s daughter, and when the daughter grows ill and approaches death he goes wandering in search of a cure and encounters another wanderer who had formerly served a king whose son had been struck with a debilitating madness by a beggar emerging from the lake in the royal garden. In a dream, Bovve encounters one of his mentors, a stargazer, who instructs him on how to approach the prince in order to cure him: And the stargazer held in his hand the star-stone that he had given Bovve to take on his journey. And he held it up . . . and then a nursery appeared to Bovve’s eyes, a nursery in a royal palace, and it was still and hung with drapes, and a glow came in through the windows, a quiet evening-glow, as if for a quiet patient. It was evening now indeed, and a bed appeared by a wall, with bedding white and clean and tidy, and on the bed lay, covered with a blanket, a young boy, tender and frail, a prince, with open eyes staring into the room, bulging and big and senseless. . . . And as the king sat there in stillness, the stargazer took the stone in his hands and approached the foot of the bed and stood before the prince’s open eyes and put the star-stone before his motionless stare and held it for a spell. (Gedakht, Y 191–92; E 490)

In Der Nister’s Symbolist aesthetic, there is no fixed distinction between dreaming and waking reality, and like his contemporary Freud he suggests that storytelling serves as a bridge between these levels of consciousness, but one that doesn’t negotiate their differences so much as erase them. Unlike Reb Nakhman’s story of the spider and the fly, which resists literary structure by dissembling itself as a sequence of fragments, each story in the “Bove-mayse” resembles all the others so closely that they blur

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into one another, like a work of minimalist music structured not out of melody but out of resonances swallowed by an infinite echo. And like minimalist music, Der Nister’s writing can exert on his readers the sense that time is standing still. Unlike the immediacy of Reb Nakhman’s storytelling voice, still present in the written transcriptions of his narratives, Der Nister’s work derives energy from a labyrinth of deferral, delay, and digression. In structural terms, therefore, Reb Nakhman’s story and Der Nister’s writing are not only illustrations of fundamental distinctions between oral and written narration, they are also obverse examples of narrative technique. In the “Bove-mayse,” beggars and kings constantly reverse position with one another—just as Reb Nakhman’s king hovers between the spider and the fly—and these schematic reversals suggest an opposition of power and desire in a constant state of mutual deconstruction and decomposition. The kings in Der Nister’s story, as in Reb Nakhman’s, are conspicuously impotent; they have the authority to enforce capricious rules governing their own narrow domains, but it is the beggars who can see the future, relieve affliction, transport themselves through walls, and command the stars. When Bovve brings a king’s stillborn child to life (Gedakht, Y 242; E 517–18), he refuses all the rewards that the king offers him: “I don’t need any presents, and I don’t require anything. For what does a beggar want after all?” (Gedakht, Y 245; E 520). This reversal is evidence that what is depicted here is not monarchy as a political ideal. If Shakespeare’s Henry IV says, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” both Reb Nakhman and Der Nister make the crown so heavy that it renders its wearer immobile and a little ridiculous. The cosmic audacity of Reb Nakhman’s claims that Jews can be superior to non-Jewish kings recurs here in a sublimated fashion among knights, beggars, and wanderers, figures originally Judaized in the Bovo-bukh and the prototypes for Reb Nakhman’s stories. With respect to his storytelling motifs, Der Nister, like Reb Nakhman, inhabits a unique position in Jewish literature between

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the non-Jewish world of folklore from which he adapts his stories and a belief in the exceptionality of Jewish difference—perhaps identifiable only by the choice of language in his writing—that animates the moral and narrative logic of his writing. In the tension between metaphysical presence and physical absence, in writing in a Jewish language about characters otherwise unmarked by Jewish experience, one discovers the natural habitat for allegory. This tension can be observed in a passage that indicates the proximity of Der Nister’s neo-Baroque strategies to contemporaneous examples of modernist writing: And Bovve came to the capital, and he met no guards at the gates, and the gates were standing ajar, and no one guarded the entrance or his entrance. Bovve was astounded, he couldn’t understand the guards, and he wondered about their negligence and their unwatchfulness, for he wasn’t used to finding a royal city unguarded thus; but he did find it thus, and he saw no one to talk about it, so he didn’t ask, and he stepped across the threshold and through the gates, and thus, and undisturbed and not stopped by anyone, he came into the capital and into its streets. (Gedakht, Y 209; E 499; emphasis in original)51

One can scarcely be faulted for seeing in this description a serendipitous similarity with Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” however dissimilar these two authors otherwise are.52 Specifically, in Kafka’s story, famously, each person apparently has a gate leading to judgment and to justice, but this gate is blocked by one and possibly by fifty guards, each more fearsome than the previous. 53 For Der Nister, in contrast with “Before the Law,” the gate and the whole city have been abandoned, open, and exposed. If Kafka is said to have characterized himself as uniquely lonely, “as lonely as Franz Kafka,”54 one can argue that Der Nister at this moment achieves a new superlative, a hermit’s vision of hermetic isolation and interiority expanded over an entire landscape. The abandoned city in “A Bove-mayse” signifies the Baroque’s melancholic, fatalistic cultivation of ruin, a terminality expressed not just in

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the physical representation of death but also in the social obsolescence of a culture in which the living and the dead, the physical and the spiritual world, the real and the imagined interact in such promiscuous proximity that they become interchangeable. One might wonder if the distinction between Kafka’s gateways and Der Nister’s is the difference between a German-speaking Jew’s reaction to a tradition and a concept of justice too remote to be apprehended, and that of a child of Hasidic Jews who experienced both his own only partial secularization and the collapse of the whole social order built around that tradition. That is, does this contrast return this comparison of Yiddish and German Jewish modernisms to a question of melancholy and mourning? This question in turn prompts additional inquiry into the status of the symbol in Der Nister’s Symbolist stories. As Sabine Boelich (1950–2016) writes, citing Delphine Bechtel, “In Nister, all symbols lose their theological-kabalistic meaning and weave a new one. [Der] Nister creates a Kabbalah without God, an atheistic Kabbalah” (Boelich, 36). 55 In Bechtel’s interpretation, the symbol for Der Nister has lost its connection with transcendence and so functions as allegory, yet symbols in Der Nister’s fiction remain likewise dissociated from everyday reality; they maintain a chimerical function of pure textuality, suspended between reference systems the way heretical doctrines accumulate and dissipate in Gustave Flaubert’s—analogously Symbolist—La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1874). Boelich herself, by contrast, attempts to reconcile Der Nister’s poetics with a negationism implicit in kabalistic theology (Boelich, 36), recognizing a dialectical relationship between kabalistic motifs and existentialist ontology. One can suggest, however, that where Boelich sees an effort at harmonization between sacred motifs and secular aesthetics, Der Nister in fact underscores the dissonance between the two realms. In this sense, one can come to understand a dialectical resonance within the author’s pseudonym: Nister literally means “hidden one,” but in Hebrew it

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shares a root (‫ )ס–ת–ר‬with the Hebrew and Yiddish word stirah, “contradiction.” A contradiction can therefore be recognized as a relationship between objects, each of which obstructs the visibility or understanding (apprehension) of the other. It is this sense of the concept that motivates Der Nister’s aesthetic cultivation of obscurity and contradiction. Der Nister’s use of a depeopled landscape—which his stories share in Yiddish literature, uniquely, with Reb Nakhman— functions as a redeployment of Baroque and Gothic motifs within the poetics of modernism.56 As a critique of modernity, the structures of law, wisdom, and power that the Enlightenment had promised would confer universality, accessibility, and rationality on social institutions have become for Der Nister palimpsests, ruins, and snares. The unguarded city that Bovve enters provides him with another avenue for his journeying and another story through which the author can spin his tale. Der Nister’s “Bovemayse” nonetheless distinguishes itself from Kafka’s writing, as well as Reb Nakhman’s tale of the spider and the fly, by its ability to reach an eventual conclusion, and a happy one at that: the return of the beggar-knight Bovve to his kingdom and his princess, whom he weds in the last paragraph of the story. Unlike Reb Nakhman’s stories, Der Nister’s story represents salvation in this world, in real time. As Bloch perceived in his pseudo-Hasidic joke, the successful, harmonious conclusion of all narrative threads signifies a merger of archaic storytelling with the time frame of the present tense. In contrast to Reb Nakhman, Der Nister concludes his story not with an elusive and repressed gesture toward a deferred transcendence but in the departure from an archaic and Arcadian world into an immanence of history, newly born. As Benjamin states, in what is perhaps the most ambiguous fragment of his literary career, “The secular order should be erected on the idea of happiness.”57 It is the unsustainability of this idea of secular happiness that accounts partly for the fatalism of the Trauerspiel, and the collapse of happiness into history

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is similarly the trajectory that Der Nister traces in his subsequent “Weimar” allegories. Benjamin thus continues, “The quest of free humanity for happiness runs counter to the messianic direction [of history].”58 As Der Nister understands from the achievement of narrative equilibrium at the conclusion of the “Bove-mayse” (which, after all, is ultimately just a bobe-mayse!), history and happiness are diametrically incompatible concepts, and their divergence grows progressively wider and deeper in each of his later Symbolist stories. What stories such as the “Bove-mayse” had dramatized, or perhaps better said “orchestrated,” is not only the harmonization of their protagonists with time, as in Bloch’s figure of “the End as Now,” but also a harmonization with themselves. Every external figure in these sparsely populated, depeopled landscapes functions as an enabler in the quest toward reunification. In the later stories of the 1920s, figures external to the protagonist function diametrically as impediments to this quest, and as such they serve as extensions of a mass (or mob). The disharmony of the self and time that these stories illustrate is how history constitutes itself in the fallen world of the Trauerspiel and its descendants, so that if Benjamin’s study had traced the origins (Ursprung) of the genre, Der Nister’s tales in the same moment trace the genre’s decline and descent into the now. Deleuze, similarly, can help return this consideration of Der Nister’s (crypto-) Baroque aesthetics to the crisis in modernity that brought them into being: “If the Baroque has often been associated with capitalism, it is because the Baroque is linked to a crisis of property, a crisis that appears at once with the growth of new machines in the social field and the discovery of new living beings in the organism” (Le Pli, F 148; E 110). The crisis of the Baroque, as Deleuze schematizes it, is a crisis in having and being, brought about through redefinitions of political sovereignty, private property, and the drastically expanding limits of human knowledge. An analogous and recapitulated crisis occurs with the expansion and disruption of modernity among Jews such as

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Der Nister in the Pale of Settlement and then again throughout Europe during and after World War I. 59 These factors similarly account for why and how Benjamin argues on behalf of the contemporaneity of the Trauerspiel to Weimar aesthetics. What for Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz manifests as “monadology” signifies in Der Nister’s narratives what today would be called a “viral” structure of sequentiality and proliferation. The Gothic space of Der Nister’s later, dystopian fairy tales is constantly opening up not only to make room for the crowd but also to illustrate that the privileges of individuality claimed by aristocrats of the state— the kings of Der Nister’s “Bove-mayse”—or aristocrats of the spirit, his hermits and wanderers, have been leveled and reduced to typologies as much through a ubiquity of desire as through a new hegemony of power. The new regime for Der Nister and his contemporaries could be capitalism, tyranny, or communism because in its presentation as regime in “Unter a ployt” and other stories these modes of domination are interchangeable cogs in a series. The undoing and unmasking logic of this story, as will be seen in the next chapter, compels a choice among systems, and although historical evidence makes clear that Der Nister’s choice of the Soviet Union was not arbitrary, the sense of desperation at not having a better option among his alternatives must in part account for the fatalism of his choice. What in subsequent tales will upset the equilibrium of narrative form at work in the “Bove-mayse” is the presence of the crowd that must necessarily bear witness to the courtly pageant: Baroque spectacle comes to disrupt the harmony of Der Nister’s belated Symbolism, but in so doing it rescues these narratives—though unfortunately not their author— from the false comforts of a fictive salvation. These stories illustrate a visceral consequence of allegory as a rhetorical strategy; when the hermetic facade of the allegory cracks, as according to the logic of the Baroque it inevitably must, what rushes into the gap is the wider world of history and

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its discontents. Although the progression from Symbolist fantasy toward materialist burlesque—the genre with which the last of these stories, “Unter a ployt” (“Under a Fence,” 1929), is affiliated—suggests an internalization of modern disenchantment, the author’s dystopian aspiration toward an aestheticized communism indicates how urgently he sought to substitute a new faith for the pieties of religion and art he had abandoned. Like Dovid Bergelson in Mides ha-din (roughly, Judgment, 1929),60 what attracts Der Nister to the Soviet Union is not its utopian promise of a just and egalitarian society but the austerity of its judgment against his earlier lapse into decadence. Eventually the regime would provide him with stringency far beyond what anyone could expect. Notes 1.  Benjamin in fact relates the joke in his first essay on Kafka; see “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Selected Writings, 2(2): 812; in the original, Gesammelte Schriften, 2:433. 2.  Ernst Bloch, Spuren (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 97–99. Published in English as Traces, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 72–73; emphasis in original. The book was originally published in 1930. 3. Bloch, Spuren, 99; Traces, 73. 4.  The schematic contrast between beggars and kings, sleep and wakefulness, on which Bloch’s joke hinges finds resonance in one of the great examples of Baroque drama: “O sleep, O gentle sleep, / Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frightened thee, / That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down, / And steep my senses in forgetfulness? / Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs, / Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee / And hush’d with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber, / Than in the perfum’d chambers of the great, / Under the canopies of costly state, / And lull’d with sound of sweetest melody?” See William Shakespeare, Henry IV, pt. 1, act 3, sc. 1 (1708–1718). In this regard, it is noteworthy that although Shakespeare is one of the recurring models for Benjamin’s understanding of the Trauerspiel, in particular with respect to the aesthetic’s political

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dimensions, Benjamin focuses almost exclusively on Hamlet rather than the history plays that most explicitly portray the machinations of kingship and life at court. 5.  As Patrick Bridgwater notes, “Whether approached from a detailed structural point of view, or from a general literary historical one, the Gothic Romance is, by its very nature, a kind of Märchenroman (fairytale novel), which is in turn a kind of Kunstmärchen [literary fairy tale].” See Patrick Bridgwater, The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 542. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Bridgwater. 6.  Max Weinreich, Bilder fun der yiddisher literaturgeshikhte: fun di onheybn biz Mendele Moykher-Sforim [Studies in the history of Yiddish literature: From its beginnings to Mendele Moykher-Sforim] (Vilna: Farlag Tomor, 1928), 273–74. The translation is my own. By way of more contemporary scholarship, Jean Baumgarten’s essential study Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), offers little to contradict Weinreich’s assessment; his chapter on “Yiddish Narrative” (296–327) focuses primarily on the 1602 compilation Dos Mayse-bukh, itself a reworking of multiple, mostly venerable, sources. The subsequent chapter, “Terrestrial Suffering in a TopsyTurvy World,” confirms the historical rather than belletristic character of Baroque-era Yiddish writing: “Contrary to any static conception of ‘popular literature’, early Yiddish texts remain at all times firmly anchored in history and thus themselves function as direct responses to the tribulations experienced by the Jews” (Baumgarten, Old Yiddish Literature, 328). 7.  I owe this insight to Shlomo Berger (1953–2015). In his book Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2013), he notes, for example, the 1780 publication of a Purim-shpil with the title Er retung der Yudn durkh Ester und Mordkhe, Troyer shpil und fraydlekhes ende (69). 8.  Of the thirteen stories that comprise the Seyfer sipurey mayses, eleven of them make explicit use of monarchy as a central motif or preoccupation. 9.  For a magnificent explanation of the narrative characteristics of Midrash, with noteworthy commentary on the political significance and subversive implications of the kingship motif for rabbis living under the yoke of Roman imperialism, see David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). For an equally outstanding interpretation of Midrash as a genre rooted, like Reb Nakhman’s narratives, in the folkloric practices of

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storytelling, see Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature [1996], trans. Batya Stein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 10.  The edition I will be using of the Seyfer sipurey mayses was published in Jerusalem by Makhon “Toyres haNetsakh” Breslov in 1991—in citations here referred to as SM, Y. There are two primary translations of the complete stories in English. The translation, with invaluable commentary, published by the Breslover Hasidim themselves is Rabbi Nachman’s Stories, trans. Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan (New York: Breslov Research Institute, 1983); a more straightforward edition is Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales, trans. Arnold J. Band (New York: Paulist, 1978. Although I will translate citations myself from the Yiddish, page numbers will be provided from the Kaplan translation, elsewhere referred to as SM, E, unless otherwise stated. 11.  At the same time that Reb Nakhman created this story, he made the fateful decision to destroy one of his books before it could be published. According to both Joseph Weiss and Arthur Green, the decision to burn this work was connected with the diagnosis of his terminal condition: Reb Nakhman believed that his tuberculosis was a punishment for the ideas expressed in the burned book. Although the content of this book, of course, is lost to history, both Weiss and Green offer the persuasive hypothesis that this book argued for Reb Nakhman’s status as the Messiah. See Joseph Weiss, “Sense and Nonsense in Defining Judaism—the Strange Case of Nahman of Brazlav,” in East European Jewish Mysticism and Hasidism, 266–67; Green, Tormented Master, 233–44. The fragmentary nature of “Mayse zayen,” similarly, seems to be connected to the fate of the burned book and therefore to what Weiss refers to as “an acute crisis of identity in Nahman’s life” (J. Weiss, East European Jewish Mysticism and Hasidism, 267). For more (much more!) on Reb Nakhman’s suppressed and apocryphal manuscripts, see Zvi Mark, The Scroll of Secrets: The Hidden Messianic Vision of R. Nachman of Breslav, trans. Naftali Moses (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010). 12.  This story’s elliptical preamble actually recapitulates the opening of the first story in the collection: “On the way I told a story, and whoever heard it had instantaneous thoughts of repentance, and this is the story” (SM, Y 1; E 31). This reworking of the first—and equally fragmentary— story’s first sentence not only suggests that the seventh story should be read as initiating a new phase in the development of these narratives but also, since it occurs at the beginning of the book’s second half, calls attention to the ultimately symmetrical structure of the collection as a

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whole, not in spite of its frequent recourse to fragmentation but all the more so because of it. 13.  In Yiddish, er hot af zikh gehat kame milkhomes shvere un hot zey koyvesh geven. The verb koyvesh zayn (to conquer), an apparent neologism of Reb Nakhman’s own coinage, forms a word play with akovish, spider, in the story’s title. 14.  The custom of masquerading in the clothing of other nations figures prominently in Nikolai Gogol’s early story “St. John’s Eve”; describing Cossack wedding festivities, Gogol writes, “They used to dress in disguises— my God, they no longer looked like human beings! . . . How is it now? They just copy the Gypsies or the Muscovites. No, it used to be one would dress up as a Jew and another as a devil, and first they’d kiss each other and then grab each other’s topknots . . . God help us! You had to hold your sides from laughter. They’d get dressed up in Turkish or Tartar costumes: everything blazes like fire.” See The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1999), 13–14. In both of these literary tales, an ostensibly ethnographic observation about the authors’ shared Ukrainian social landscape conveys anxiety about the disparity between appearance and reality and foreshadows the destabilization of identity that characterizes the action of the story. 15.  The king’s dream in this story serendipitously echoes a passage from Leo Armenius, which Benjamin cites as representative of the Trauerspiel genre: He quails before his own sword. When he dines, the mingled wine that is served in crystal turns to gall and poison. As soon as the day is over the sabled throng, the army of dread creeps up and lies awake in his bed. In ivory, purple, and scarlet he can never be so peaceful as those who entrust their bodies to the hard earth. And if he should still be granted a short sleep, then Morpheus assails him and paints before him, at night-time, in gloomy pictures, what he thought by day, terrifying him with blood, with disenthronement, with conflagration, with woe and death and the loss of his crown. (OGTD, G 322; E 143–44).

16.  As my friend Miriam Udel has suggested to me, when the king wished to mock the Jews, they were a nation like any other; when he wishes to join them, he decides to convert, religiously, in a manner quite different from, say, “converting” to German, English, or Chinese. Reb Nakhman’s sense of the anxiety that Jewishness raises in its ambiguity as both a religion and a nation is yet another indication of how presciently modern his storytelling preoccupations are.

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17.  Benjamin similarly attributes “the melancholic’s inclination for long journeys” (OGTD, G 326; E 149) to a combination of astrological and premodern medical theories that form the intellectual basis for the Trauerspiel’s understanding of melancholy. These factors in turn call to mind the degree to which Reb Nakhman’s worldview, shaped in every respect by the late-medieval/Renaissance conceptual vocabulary of kabala, remains tied to the intellectual constellations of the Baroque, even though when he depicts these ideas in narrative form, he initiates a critique of modernity that anticipates both the style and substance of later modernist aesthetics. 18.  Max Pensky elaborates on Benjamin’s consideration of revived medieval medicinal discourse in the Baroque understanding and deployment of melancholia by writing, The theories of melancholic (saturnine) planetary influences, which the Renaissance inherited from Arabian and medieval Western astrology, underlie the persistent strand of speculation in which melancholy is associated with occult doctrines, as well as the conviction that melancholia expressed the entwinement of personal genius with cosmological structure. The lamentation and moralizing over decay, transience, and human vanitas characteristic of baroque melancholy expresses best the melancholic theme of intense mourning or hopelessness in the face of the universality of death and the reality of sin. As poetic device from eighteenth-century classicism through the nineteenth-century elegy to romanticism and symbolism, melancholy appears as a particularly consistent trope, indicating the intense “sweet sadness” and isolation of the poet who must struggle for the distillation of beauty from the material of worldly experience.

See his Melancholy Dialectics, 20. This quasi-medical genealogy for the resonances of philosophical melancholy in modern poetry runs parallel to the aesthetic genealogy under consideration in this comparison of Reb Nakhman with Der Nister. Just as the aesthetic line of descent stands in purposeful defiance against the rationalistic, naturalistic, mimetic aspirations of modern realism, the manifestations of melancholy that Pensky traces stand as a mode of resistance to the “well-balanced” and normative relations between the humors that determine both healthy physiologies and productive members of society. These sound minds and sound bodies stand in contrast to the brooding, mournful, obsessive preoccupations that in the modern imagination have constituted the poetic imagination, for Reb Nakhman no less than Baudelaire. 19.  In Yiddish, sammoney hakatores—literally, the “herbs of incense” (SM, Y 118).

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20.  In Yiddish, Samael, euphemistically referred to by the Loshnkoydesh abbreviation samekh-mem (‫)ס׳׳מ‬. 21.  As a friend of mine better versed in these subjects than myself has informed me, the recognition of knowledge that cannot be put into words is the conceptual link between religious heresy and the perceptions of a drug experience. In an aesthetic adjacent to Der Nister’s Symbolism, the cultivation of both heresy and hallucination would characterize the Surrealist movement as well as Walter Benjamin’s appreciation of it. See his “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” [1929], in Selected Writings, 2(1): 207–21; in the original, see Gesammelte Schriften, 2:295–310. 22.  Green quotes from two sources, Khayey MoHaRa”N 2(2):42 and Shivkhey HaRa”N 2(35): “The end of knowledge is (the realization) that we do not know.” See Green, Tormented Master, 294. For a very different, ultimately persuasive, interpretation of Reb Nakhman’s dictum, see Mark, Mysticism and Madness, 218–46. In Mark’s reading, this statement is not so much a license for intellectualized agnosticism as it is an imperative for a faith that surpasses the intellect and the capacity for rational understanding. To a certain extent, although his book examines only a single story from the Seyfer sipurey mayses, and that incompletely, Mark’s explanation of this concept complements the experience of king in this tale. 23.  J. Weiss, East European Jewish Mysticism and Hasidism, 258–59. 24.  As quoted in David Roskies, Bridge of Longing, 26. Roskies’s source is Arnold Band’s translation of the Seyfer sipurey mayses, 32–33. 25.  See, for instance, SM, E 147, 151; J. Weiss, East European Jewish Mysticism and Hasidism, 265–66. 26.  Biographical evidence suggests that the feud between Reb Nakhman and the Shpoler zeyde was almost completely Reb Nakhman’s doing. Not only did he choose to settle at the outset of his career in proximity to Reb Aryeh Leyb’s sphere of influence—literally infringing on his turf, in violation of the protocol that obtained among Hasidic leaders of the day—but he engaged in personal attacks on the zeyde’s integrity, apparently without justification. On this subject, see Green, Tormented Master, 100–2. Once the battle was joined, however, Reb Aryeh Leyb proved to be a fierce and relentless opponent, and it was largely because of his efforts that Reb Nakhman remained such a marginal figure, both during his day and subsequently, in the development of Hasidism as a whole. Despite the genuine and well-documented mutual antipathy between the two zaddikim, Joseph Weiss describes a dream recorded in Reb Nakhman’s writings about a year before his death in which the Shpoler

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zeyde figures in a positive light, apparently vindicated as a proper chastiser of Reb Nakhman’s transgressions rather than a slanderer or provocateur. See J. Weiss, East European Jewish Mysticism and Hasidism, 261–66. 27.  The distinction I am stressing between Reb Nakhman’s storytelling and his role as religious leader is intended to complement an article by my friend Hannan Hever, “The Politics of Form of the Hassidic Tale,” Dibur Literary Journal, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 57–73. Although, as Hever notes, there is a political function to Hasidic storytelling in general—in fact, to storytelling as such—Reb Nakhman’s stories are the only example of the early Hasidic tale genre in which the identification of the king with the zaddik and, by extension, with God is not seamless or schematic but in fact dialectical and Baroque. The king in Reb Nakhman’s tales is neither providential nor omnipotent but melancholic, haunted, and impotent. Though retaining, like other Hasidic tales, aspirations toward ideological transcendence, his stories remain rooted, mired, in the political immanence of intrigue, conflict, and thwarted desire. 28.  An equally valuable, though elusive, allegorical clue to the story can be identified in Reb Nakhman’s description of the “Book of Customs” that protects the fly as a seyfer rather than a bukh; as any student of Yiddish would recognize, the term seyfer when used in Yiddish is reserved exclusively for a sacred Jewish text, whereas a bukh would refer to a nonsacral or non-Jewish text. The king relies on a seyfer that leads him to a mountain. Within the Jewish tradition, the most significant figure who comes of age believing himself to be a non-Jewish aristocrat is the Biblical Moses, who received the Book of Books, the Torah, on a mountain, Sinai. This in turn suggests that the seyfer from which the king has studied the customs of all nations is the Torah itself, since altsding shteyt in toyre (everything is included in the Torah). However compelling this homiletic reading might seem, it constitutes a reordering of its scriptural precedent: instead of Moses bringing the Torah to the Jewish people, in Reb Nakhman’s version the Torah brings Moses to discover his own Jewishness! Moreover, identifying the king with both Moses and Reb Nakhman raises interesting prospects for what Weiss and other commentators have imputed as the crypto-messianic implications of Reb Nakhman’s thought, but in exegetical terms it suggests that instead of a single parabolic meaning, Reb Nakhman offers a proliferation of allegories. 29.  In this regard, perhaps a word on the methodology of this discussion is in order: after a presentation of this reading at an early stage in its development, my teacher Dan Miron stated that hearing my interpretation as it then stood, one might never have known that Reb Nakhman

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was a religious leader intensively engaged in a life of traditional Jewish learning and dedicated to guiding his followers in a path informed by kabalistic sources in order to maintain the religious and folkloric traditions they had inherited. As ever, his critique was well taken, and I hope that in this version Reb Nakhman’s religious motivations and commitments are clearer than they had been. Nonetheless, part of the experiment to which this interpretation is dedicated is to see what can be learned by reading Reb Nakhman’s stories not just as a compendium of his rabbinic and mystical learning—an objective pursued essentially by every previous commentator—but as narratives, subject to the same conventions of literary structure, language, and aesthetic logic as every other work of fiction. 30.  See Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988), 79–80. In English, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 59–60. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Le Pli F” and E, respectively. 31.  Thus, Mallarmé writes in a feuilleton, “The dancer is not a woman dancing, for these juxtaposed reasons: that she is not a woman, but a metaphor summing up one of the elementary aspects of our form: knife, goblet, flower, etc., and that she is not dancing, but suggesting, through the miracle of bends and leaps, a kind of corporal writing what it would take pages of prose, dialogue, and description to express, if it were transcribed: a poem independent of any scribal apparatus.” See Igitur. Divagations. Un coup de dés (Paris: Gallimand, 2003), 201. In English, Divigations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 130; emphasis in original. Benjamin—who cites this observation in his 1935 essay “Problems in the Sociology of Language” (Gesammelte Schriften, 3:478; Selected Writings, 3:84)—picks up on Mallarmé’s suggestive incorporation of allegorical significance onto the body of the dancer by suggesting that the pictorial element of Baroque poetry, the juxtaposition of image, text, and gesture that constitutes allegory, results in the dissipation of Baroque drama and its supersession by the ballet (OGTD, G 273; E 95). 32.  None of the figures in Reb Nakhman’s stories possesses a proper name, other than his or her function: Viceroy, Emperor’s Daughter, Master of Prayer, and so on. The King Who Fought Many Wars in this respect resembles characters from medieval romance, one of the likely literary sources—in its Yiddish iterations—that would have fed Reb Nakhman’s imagination. Consider, for example, the allegorical names in the fifteenthcentury Tirant lo Blanc, one of the works that Miguel Cervantes (1547– 1616) parodies (yet venerates) in Don Quixote: the protagonist is called “the white tyrant” as a function of his brute strength rather than as a

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proper name. Der Nister shares this archaic approach to naming with Reb Nakhman until the end of his Symbolist period, as this discussion will consider. 33.  In this regard, Valery Bryusov (1873–1924), a leading representative of the Russian Symbolists from whom Der Nister took some of his primary cues as an avant-garde writer, wrote in 1905, “It was enough to realize that all the world is in me, and our modern understanding of art was born. Like the realists, we recognized life as the only subject of art. But while the realists sought life outside themselves, we sought it only within ourselves.” Quoted in Delphine Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, 1907–1929: A Study of a Yiddish Symbolist (Berne: Peter Lang, 1990), 40; emphasis in original. 34.  Benjamin, “André Gide and Germany,” Selected Writings, 2(1): 82; Gesammelte Schriften, 4:501. 35.  For a concise discussion of the monad and its role in Leibnizian metaphysics, see Le Pli, F 33–37; E 25–29. 36.  See Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and the Monadology [1902], trans. George R. Montgomery (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 47–63; as well as Deleuze’s extensive commentary on Leibniz in Le Pli. 37.  Avril Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 5. 38. Pyman, History of Russian Symbolism, 5. 39.  As Roskies richly suggests in Bridge of Longing, 26. 40.  By “interpolation and mediation,” I mean that Yiddish fiction before the publication of Reb Nakhman’s stories was inevitably either a reworking from the sanctified tradition—such as the Bible or rabbinic literature—originally written in Hebrew (Loshn-koydesh, the “language of holiness”), or adaptations, often with significant alterations to reflect Jewish cultural norms, from coterritorial folklore and romance. 41.  The most thorough discussion of Der Nister’s pen name and its significance is to be found in Sabine Boelich, “Nay-Gayst”: Mystiche Traditionen in einer symbolistischen Erzählung des jiddisches Autor “Der Nister” (Pinkhes Kahanovitsh) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), 23–27. As she notes, “‘Der Nister’ is not so much the pseudonym of Pinkhes Kahanovitsh as it is a distinct concept” (26). Subsequent references incorporated in text as Boelich. All translations from this source are my own. 42.  See Miron, “Sholem Aleichem,” in Image of the Shtetl, 128–56. 43.  The author nevertheless allegorizes even his own inscrutability in two late Symbolist stories, “Fun mayne giter” (“From My Estates”) and “A Mayse mit a lets, mit a moyz, un mit dem Nister aleyn” (“A Story with an Imp, a Mouse, and Der Nister Himself ”), each of which figures

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the author as a protagonist in his own odyssey; this strategy derives from previous “persona” fiction in Yiddish literature, including pseudoautobiographical references in the narratives of Abramovitsh and early feuilletons by Sholem Aleichem. For a discussion of this strategy, see Miron, Traveler Disguised, 86–94. For Der Nister’s stories, see the collection Fun mayne giter (Kharkov: Melukhe Farlag fun Ukraïne, 1928), 7–40, 41–80. 44.  On the transliteration of this story’s title, it should be noted that “Unter a ployt” is ubiquitous in the Latin alphabet. In the table of contents of its first publication in book form, however, the title reads “Hinter a ployt”; at the beginning of the story in this collection it reads “Unter a ployt.” Although this discussion will adhere to convention by referring to the story as “Unter a ployt,” there are both dialectical and idiomatic merits to referring to it as “Hinter a ployt”: in Der Nister’s Ukrainian Yiddish, both hinter and unter would be pronounced, interchangeably, as inter. Moreover, the idiom to which the title refers means not “under a fence” (unter) but “behind a fence” (hinter) because the fence itself serves as a dividing line (mekhitsa) between sanctified and profaned spaces in a cemetery. More on this story, much more, in the following chapter. 45.  Isaac Babel, “Childhood, with Grandmother,” in Collected Stories, trans. David McDuff (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 26. 46.  Nouréini Tidjani-Serpos, “De l’école coranique à l’école étrangère ou le passage tragique de l’Ancien au Nouveau dans ‘L’Aventure ambiguë’ de Cheikh Hamidou Kane,” Préscence Africaine 101–2 (1977): 189. The translation is my own. 47.  As Sabine Boelich writes, “He [the Yiddish literary critic Sh. Tsharni, 1883–1955] refers to Der Nister as a neo-mystic, who wanted to be the Reb Nakhman Bratslaver of his generation” (Boelich, 24). 48.  For a critical edition of the Bovo-Bukh, see my friend Claudia Rosenzweig’s Bovo d’Antona by Elye Bokher: A Yiddish Romance, critical edition with commentary (Leiden: Brill Critical Editions, 2015). 49.  Der Nister, Gedakht, Tsveyter band (Berlin: Jüdischer Literarischer, 1923), 135. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Gedakht, Y. I owe thanks to my friend Dov-Ber Kerler for making this extraordinarily rare edition available to me. Though first published in book form in Gedakht, the story previously appeared in the Soviet-Yiddish journal Eygns 2 (1920): 1–33. In English, “A Tale of Kings,” in Neugroschel, Great Tales of Jewish Fantasy, 460. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Gedakht, E. 50.  It is worth noting in this context, moreover, that Der Nister’s contemporary—a fellow Berlin exile and eventual returnee to the Soviet Union—Viktor Shklovsky described the Russian avant-garde of the

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post–World War I era as “Baroque,” by which he characterized its aesthetic as consisting of grotesque, staccato transitions, spatial and temporal displacement, montage, hyperbole, antithesis, and paradox, together with “intensive detail.” See his 1931 polemic Poiski optimizma [A hunt for optimism], as cited by Richard Sheldon in “Making Armored Cars and Novels: A Literary Introduction,” in A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922, by Victor Shklovsky (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2004), ix. 51.  Before considering contemporaneous parallels, this passage calls to mind 2 Kings 7:3–20 (the haftoyre to the Torah portion Metzora, Leviticus 14:1–15:32), in which four lepers bring salvation to Samaria, and therefore to Israel, by discovering that the enemy Aramean camp lies unguarded and abandoned. 52.  As Hélène Cixous argues of Kafka’s “Vor dem Gesetz” (“Before the Law,” 1915), “It is not the body that prevents the man from the country from going through the door, but the word. The law is but a word, not a real being.” See “Writing and the Law: Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, and Lispector,” in Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva, trans. Verena Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 14; emphasis in original. The collapse of distinction between word and body marks the tale, or episode, as allegorical in Benjamin’s use of the term; this narrative is, along with “In der Strafkolonie” (“In the Penal Colony,” 1919), among the clearest examples of allegory in Kafka’s oeuvre. Elsewhere, as in “Blumfeld ein Älterer Junggeselle,” his focus is not on the ambiguity between myth and everyday life that the law (as allegory) signifies but more often on the disenchanted world of the Angestellten, the “salaried masses.” In this regard, even Gregor Samsa at the beginning of Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, 1915) is more concerned about being late for his business appointment than about being transformed into an insect! In Der Prozess (The Trial, 1925), similarly, Josef K. approaches the law from the perspective of an office worker, not a supplicant, and his resistance to the law throughout the novel—which Cixous doesn’t consider in her reading—marks him as the antithesis of the tale’s “man from the country,” not his double. 53.  Elsewhere in Kafka’s writing, as Lutz Koepnick has suggested, “The Great Wall of China” and “In the Penal Colony” exemplify the Baroque in contrasting ways through their use of spectacle and theater to constitute a political culture. See Lutz P. Koepnick, “The Spectacle, the ‘Trauerspiel,’ and the Politics of Resolution: Benjamin Reading the Baroque Reading Weimar,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 290.

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54.  This reported self-description comes from Gustav Janouch’s beguilingly subjective reminiscence, Conversations with Kafka [1968], trans. Goronwy Rees (New York: New Directions, 1971). Janouch’s phrase in turn provides the title for Marthe Robert’s (equally subjective) “psychoanalytical” biography, As Lonely as Franz Kafka, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Schocken, 1986). 55.  In its original context, see Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, 27. The notion of an “atheistic Kabbala” resonates with (a paraphrase of) Benjamin’s concept of Kafka’s stories as “Haggadah lacking Halachah.” See “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Selected Writings, 2(2): 803; Gesammelte Schriften, 2:420. 56.  Helmut Lethen identifies the retreat of modernist thinkers to modes of Baroque thought, or the repurposing of Baroque concepts to characterize the present, as the defining feature of German modernism in the interwar era: “Seventeenth-century ideas stressing the destructive potential of human drives, as well as remedies cooked up to tame them, surface among avant-garde writers of every description” during the Weimar era. See his Cool Conduct, 49. 57.  See Benjamin, “Theological-Political Fragment,” in Selected Writings, 3:305. In the original, Gesammelte Schriften, 2:203. Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno famously disagree on the dating of this writing. Scholem insists that Benjamin related its contents to him as early as 1921; Adorno states with equal confidence that Benjamin had described it to him as a recent formulation in 1938. Their disagreement underscores the dialectic between Adorno and Scholem’s respective proprietorship of Benjamin’s legacy, but it also highlights a dialectic in Benjamin’s concept of history itself. 58. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 3:305; Gesammelte Schriften, 2:203–4. 59.  The potential for reading Der Nister’s narratives against the backdrop of social turmoil immediately following the October Revolution was already apparent to the author’s closest contemporary in Yiddish literature, Dovid Bergelson, who discusses the significance of Der Nister’s wandering protagonists as an allegorical figure for the disruption recently visited on Yiddish culture, in his essay “Dikhtung un gezelshaftlekhkayt.” In English, see “Belles-Lettres and the Social Order,” trans. Joseph Sherman, in Sherman and Estraikh, David Bergelson, 340–41. 60.  For more on Bergelson’s novel, see part 1.

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HAROLD LLOYD AND THE HERMIT Popular Culture, Gothic Aesthetics, and the End of Der Nister’s Symbolist Career

The Gothic Legacy

Of all the writers in this study, except Reb Nakhman, Der Nister spent the shortest amount of time in Berlin; he split his time in Germany, from 1921 to 1926, between the capital and Hamburg, where he worked with the Yiddish “folk” poet Leyb Kvitko (c. 1890–1952) at a Soviet export agency.1 Yet there is no other Yiddish writer whose fiction more deeply reflects the legacy of German literature, from the Baroque period to the Wilhelmine era, or who merits closer comparison with the popular culture developing around him in the Weimar era. Though residing in Germany for only a brief period, his writing is as invested in German aesthetics as that of any other expatriate writer, in any language. This consideration of Der Nister’s German period is organized around two narratives that share a significant structural placement: the “Bove-mayse,” discussed in chapter 3, is the final story in the Berlin collection Gedakht; “Unter a ployt” (“Behind a Fence,” 1929), to be examined in this chapter, is the final story in the Soviet republication of Gedakht.2 In substituting 192

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the later story for the earlier one, Der Nister suggests a thematic inversion between the two narratives, as well as a progression, or degression, from the Symbolist aesthetics of the earlier story to the carnivalesque naturalism of his final work before adopting Soviet aesthetics. If Reb Nakhman’s tale of the spider and the fly is a Purim-shpil that disintegrates into a Trauerspiel, Der Nister’s “Bove-mayse” is a Trauerspiel redeemed as a fairy tale when the hero weds the princess. And yet as the remainder of his Symbolist stories progressively demonstrate, as much as Der Nister offers a rectification for Reb Nakhman’s broken stories and fragmented theology, he too feels increasingly compelled to shatter the graven image he has carved. To demonstrate the degree to which Der Nister’s later Symbolist stories participate in the aesthetics of German modernism, “Unter a ployt” will be considered here in comparison with two German artworks: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1815 novel Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs) and Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 sound film Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). These two enormously divergent works are necessary to contextualize the complexity of Der Nister’s later High Modernist style. Moreover, each of these German-language works shares with Der Nister a diversity of influences, to the extent that all three can be considered adaptations as well as examples of a belated aesthetic. Hoffmann’s novel dates approximately a generation later than the Gothic novel’s heyday in English literature, just as Der Nister’s writing is a comparably late instance of literary Symbolism. Sternberg’s film is, like Der Nister’s story, a free adaptation of Heinrich Mann’s satirical novel Professor Unrat (Professor Garbage, 1905). Such belated borrowing not only serves the aesthetic rationale of these individual narratives but also demonstrates the historical logic whereby obsolescent genres anticipate subsequent developments in the fantastic avant-garde.3 The belated aesthetic strategy serves as a bridge between genres, but in the process it also links

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historical epochs by articulating a spectral aesthetic value so that the work of art stands in a position of critique to the dominant modern aesthetic of mimetic realism. To schematize this distinction, realist narratives typically promise fidelity to everyday life while presenting an autonomously conceived story, whereas fantastic narratives depend on the recognizability of previously established conventions even when they depart from the possible or the plausible. The contradictory and associative action of “Unter a ployt,” like Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels, is almost impossible to summarize, but for the sake of clarity one can describe what appears to take place in the narrative as the confessions of a drunk and disgraced scholar who has been rejected by a circus acrobat, Lili. Upon leaving her dressing room, he is visited by one of his students, to whom he begins to confess the tale of his disgrace, which involves his abandonment of the academy and his esteemed teacher Medardus, and his subsequent alliance with a magical “Dust-Person,” who sells the scholar and his daughter to the circus where he had fallen in love with Lili. When the scholar’s daughter is injured, perhaps maliciously, while performing a circus trick with Lili, the scholar is put on trial by Medardus and his former students for his betrayal of their scholastic mission. At the moment when the scholar is sentenced to death by immolation, he wakes up behind a fence, covered in vomit, to find that he had fallen into a stupor after retreating to a bar from his humiliation in Lili’s dressing room. When a policeman rouses him, he returns home, where he is forced to confess his disgrace to his aggrieved and ashamed daughter, thus returning the story to its point of origin. One feature that distinguishes Der Nister’s Symbolist stories is their general absence of explicit Jewish referents, other than the language in which they are written. In lieu of an identifiably Jewish setting for “Unter a ployt,” Der Nister offers a structure in which power and desire are figured respectively as the law

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to which the scholar remains devoted and longing toward the world outside the confines of his hermitage and its strictures. This spatial structure of inside and outside, which in the logic of the hermitage functions as sacred and profane, recasts the dilemmas of Jewish modernity in allegorical form. “Unter a ployt” therefore unfolds as a struggle over the protagonist’s soul between two “father figures,” the Dust-Person and Medardus, the former suggesting a charnel physicality and the latter connected (ironically, as will soon be seen) to spiritual and intellectual aspiration. Under the terms of this conflict, the events of the story shift along the fault lines between the real and the imagined, the experienced and the performed, the internal and the external. These conflicts do not distinguish between temporalities or discourses— psychology as opposed to aesthetics, for example—but count instead as continuations of a crisis in representation across social and historical domains. If the conventions of literary realism are concerned primarily with dramatizing the relationship between social forces and the psychic development of the individual, fantastic literature such as “Unter a ployt” devotes itself to the abolition of distinction between the social and the psychological. The narrative can accordingly be understood as an intersection between a triangle of power involving the Dust-Person, Medardus, and the narrator, and a triangle of desire involving the narrator, his daughter, and Lili. Just as Der Nister emphasizes the interpenetration of power with desire via the repetition of dramatic relations within the story, the intertextual relationship of the story with its antecedents stresses that this dilemma is a constant theme in fantastic literature. In this respect, the primary antecedent to Der Nister’s story is Hoffmann’s novel, which depicts a protagonist named Medardus, a Capuchin monk torn, like Der Nister’s protagonist, between carnal desire and spiritual aspiration, public acclaim and private revulsion. The Yiddish literary scholar Chone Shmeruk (1921–1997) was the first to identify Hoffmann as the source for

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Der Nister’s use of the peculiar name “Medardus.”4 Patrick Bridgwater similarly notes that Hoffmann alludes to the Volksmärchen (literary fairy tales) of Benedicte Naubert (1752–1819): “Hoffmann’s tale . . . was prompted by Benedicte Naubert’s Die Fischer, where there is a monk named Medardus, a painter who paints the Virgin, with whom (and a young nun who resembles her) he falls in love, and a Devil who represents the monk’s id” (Bridgwater, 334). The character Medardus in “Unter a ployt” maintains no continuity with Hoffmann’s novel, and there are no other allusions to the work in Der Nister’s tale. Thematically, however, the two works share an idealization of monastery life predicated on its incompatibility with modernity, a gnostic opposition of spiritual aspiration and physical corruption, an absurd overdetermination of oedipal motifs, and a sense of disgust toward their respective protagonists’ failings. Moreover, the confusion of genre in both narratives signifies a confusion of worldview, and this in turn calls to mind both Baroque aesthetics and Benjamin’s reading of the Trauerspiel. Die Elixiere des Teufels must surely count as one of the most needlessly complicated narratives in world literature. In the end one can’t be certain of what actually occurs in the novel, what the protagonist has imagined, and what the reader has inferred. As Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) writes of the novel’s first English translation, in 1824, “At this point of German phantasmagoria, we begin to find ourselves no longer under any laws of creation, but amidst the anarchy of chaos: the dreams of dyspeptic lunacy can go no further” (quoted in Bridgwater, 327)! In its essentials, however, the novel describes the trail of deceptions and crimes that the charismatic and corrupt Medardus commits, or appears to commit, during a pilgrimage from the German lands to Rome, while also recounting the same monk’s obsessive passion toward a pious young woman named Aurelie, who may or may not be his half sister, while being stalked by a mad painter who may or may not be his father. Like Heinrich Heine in Die Bäder von Lucca, 5

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Hoffmann structures his narrative of madness and sanctity, eros and thanatos, around political and geographical contrasts of north and south. De Quincey aptly summarizes the exasperation of subsequent readers, and the narrative convolutions that Hoffmann contrives in the novel do little toward articulating a purpose to the story or endearing its arguably schizophrenic protagonist to the reader. The uncertainty surrounding its plot perhaps accounts for the novel’s ineffaceable inelegance: Hoffmann himself seems unable to decide if his protagonist’s behavior is attributable to demonic possession, the machinations of a sinister, if preposterous, conspiracy, or his own sociopathic narcissism. Each of these attributes derives from different generic affiliations, among Gothic romance, picaresque satire, or psychological realism, and the confusion among these discourses illustrates the degree to which Hoffmann in this novel is trapped between temporalities and narrative conventions. Many of the familiar themes from Hoffmann’s better fiction—such as the doppelgänger, the unstable border between the natural and the mechanical, the necessary correspondence between fantasy and madness, and conventional Romantic contrasts between satire and the macabre, or Italian ebullience and German morbidity—recur in this novel. What is schematized in, and among, stories such as if “Der Sandmann,” then “Der Goldene Topf” functions here as a superimposition of unresolvable contradictions. Of the geographical contrast between north and south structuring this novel, it’s noteworthy that the Gothic, like the Trauerspiel, is primarily a northern and Protestant fantasy of southern, Catholic Europe.6 The setting of Gothic novels in convents, monasteries, and decaying castles revels in imaginary spaces that in England and northern Germany would be exotic and isolated, whereas in France, Spain, or Italy they would be part of the social landscape. These settings revisit the spatial preoccupations of Baroque aesthetics. As Gilles Deleuze notes, “For ages, there have

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been places where what is seen is inside: a cell, a sacristy, a crypt, a church, a theater, a study, or a print room. The Baroque invests in all of these places in order to extract from them power and glory” (Le Pli, F 39; E 27–28). Such sites are analogously redramatized in the Gothic novel. Their interiority in the Gothic becomes the site not of power and glory but of furtive drive and desire. The Gothic inverts the Baroque, preserving its melancholy but disavowing its majesty. In these northern, Protestant aesthetics of the Catholic other, space functions as a figuration of desire—the secretive setting signifies the dark work of the unconscious, in an era preceding the formulation of interior psychology—but equally it reflects an anxiety over rapidly changing attitudes toward public and private life. The Screams of an Inanimate Room

Hoffmann seizes on the architectural significance that Deleuze identifies with Baroque philosophy when Medardus’s beloved Aurelie describes the home of her childhood: The wing of the castle where the small blue room was situated had remained uninhabited: it had been my mother’s room. . . . In the end, it became necessary to open up the room again in order to do some repairs on the building. I went into the small blue room while the laborers were busy tearing up the floor. While one of them was lifting up a board in the middle of the room, there was a noise and a movement behind one of the panels and once again the life-sized picture of the mysterious man appeared before my eyes. Someone also discovered a quill amongst the floorboards where a mechanical device behind the panel had set it in motion.7

Deleuze’s figure of the Baroque house, open at the ground floor but closed in on itself and windowless on the upper floor (Le Pli, F 7; E 5), is here reconceived as a scene of Gothic revelation. The discovery of the hidden chamber spatializes both a retreat to the

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past—the country estate from which Aurelie and her family had left for the city—and the discovery of her mother’s hidden lover, presumably Aurelie’s biological father, and perhaps Medardus’s as well. The spatiality of the psychological primal scene internalizes Baroque aesthetics, and it is the characteristic configuration of the Gothic novel. This gesture counts simultaneously toward the way in which the genre mobilizes archaic motifs to anticipate a conceptual field for psychology that had yet to be articulated, and at the same time the belatedness of these aesthetic materials signals that the disjunction between aesthetic means and conceptual ends is by definition allegorical. Die Elixiere des Teufels in fact has more in common with sui generis works such as William Beckford’s semisatirical, semifantastic Orientalist fable Vathek (1786) than more pristinely Gothic works such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) or Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Already in 1815 Hoffmann seems to have outgrown the limitations of the genre in favor of a psychological curiosity that characterizes his writing and the mimetic realism that comes to the fore only in his last narrative, “Des Vetters Eckfenster” (“My Cousin’s Corner Window,” 1822). What Hoffmann possesses is a provisional understanding of interior psychology—hence his exemplarity for Sigmund Freud—that his predecessors a generation earlier had not grasped and could represent only externally, as spectacle. As Patrick Bridgwater notes, Die Elixiere des Teufels shares a conceit with many other Gothic novels by purporting to be a “found manuscript” (Bridgwater, 332). Such “accreditation” was a hallmark of the eighteenth-century novel, used to justify both the unprecedented length and the claims to verisimilitude of the new fictional form by posing, typically, as a last will and testament, a diary or journal, or a collection of letters. What had been offered as evidence for the early novel’s verisimilitude had in the Gothic become its primary sign of artifice and stylization, and this signifies its cultivated aesthetic belatedness, as if the genre’s claims to

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fantasy required the same obsolete pretexts, and paratexts, that the realism of the novel as a new form had required a century earlier. Elsewhere Bridgwater states, “The Gothic romance challenged the novel of the time in that it derived from fairytale and can be described as a variety of Kunstmärchen” (Bridgwater, 316). Understood in the historical terms that the genre’s supernaturalism obscures, the Gothic resumes the political and historical melancholy of the Trauerspiel, and just as Benjamin attributes the force of the Trauerspiel’s engagement with worldly history to the despair and chaos that the Thirty Years’ War wrought,8 the morbid cruelty of the Gothic can be seen as a disenchantment with Enlightenment in the aftermath of the French Revolution.9 Matthew Lewis (1775–1818) thus describes the convent in terms that resonate with a Baroque courtier’s terror in the service of an absolute tyranny: “[Agnes] painted in their true colors the numerous inconveniencies attached to a Convent, the continued restraint. The low jealousies, the petty intrigues, the servile court and gross flattery expected by the Superior.”10 Hoffmann schematizes these parallels by dividing his narrative between the monastery and the princely court. The hybridity of his novel, in equal parts Gothic Romance and picaresque satire, suggests not only the proximity of melodrama with farce but also an interchangeability between the premodern social relations of church and state, to which everyday life in Europe remained enthralled, and the ultimately illusory distinctions to be made between private and public life, interior and exterior spaces, in the ordering of either Medardus’s or his creator’s imagination. The failure of the Enlightenment to emancipate the subject, the individual, from the tyranny of irrational powers, whether social or psychic, is the great theme of the novel, and it accordingly anticipates similar structures of confinement and dissolution in Der Nister’s writing, as well as the lament of a failed modernity in modernism more generally. If Die Elixiere des Teufels is an

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unsuccessful novel, it’s because its author is more sophisticated than the materials he has chosen to work with. Nonetheless, the tension between Hoffmann’s talent and the narrative’s limitations conveys a significance to the effort in that it illuminates the tensions of a larger temporal and structural disruption. By reading Hoffmann’s novel against the Baroque, the reader can understand the writing that most clearly acknowledges his influence, by way of Hans Christian Andersen, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Y. L. Peretz: Der Nister’s “Unter a ployt.” Just as Der Nister reanimates Reb Nakhman’s storytelling techniques for Yiddish modernism, in equal measure he adapts Hoffmann’s Gothic revisionism both to exemplify and repudiate the aesthetics of the Weimar era. Benjamin traces this conceptual history from the Middle Ages to the Expressionist era by writing, “The Trauerspiel is confirmed as a form of the tragedy of the saint by means of the martyr drama. And if one only learns to recognize its characteristics in many different styles of drama from Calderón to Strindberg it must become clear that this form, a form of the mystery play, still has a future” (OGTD, G 292; E 113). Benjamin identifies a religious character to the Trauerspiel, distinct from what Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) would refer to as the “cultic” origins of Attic tragedy.11 This inverted religiosity—a religiosity recognizable only in its immanent, postlapsarian condition— connects the spiritual dissidence of Reb Nakhman’s tales with Hoffmann’s Gothic labyrinth, though the temporal and temperamental affinities between these two authors become legible only through Der Nister’s juxtaposition of their aesthetics a century later. Benjamin’s definition of the Trauerspiel depends not only on its distinction from tragedy but more specifically on the way that religion mediates between myth and history in the genre’s conceptualization. Unlike the tragic hero, the prototype for the Trauerspiel is not a figure of legend but one of history: Socrates (OGTD, G 292–93; E 113–14).12 For Benjamin, Socrates’s

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death introduces the theme of martyrdom to literature, and just as the martyr functions as an inversion of the tyrant in the Trauerspiel, this figure is likewise the antithesis of the tragic hero. As Benjamin elaborates, the tragic hero is incapable of expressing his fate in words, since the genuinely tragic exists on a mythical level beyond human language. Martyrdom, by contrast, possesses no significance if the saint cannot explain his or her sacrifice to attain a moral, but also rhetorical, victory over his or her tormentors. Martyrdom is genuine only if it is exemplary, in a way that contradicts the inimitable fate of the tragic hero. This juxtaposition of moral eloquence with physical violence transforms the martyr’s body into a text. The suspension of the martyred body between the grotesque and the allegorical signifies the departure of the martyr from a realm of metaphysical symbolism into the world of historical materialism. In turn, the repudiation of sacrificial significance at the conclusion of either Die Elixiere des Teufels or “Unter a ployt” imparts the final dissolution of ritual into the refuse of history, the “Now as End.” Everybody’s Lucifer

Hoffmann structures Die Elixiere des Teufels as a series of primal scenes, in the Freudian sense, preoccupied as Gothic novels typically are with paranoid visions of paternity and a morbid interpenetration of sex with violence. Just as the protagonist in “Unter a ployt” is beholden to two mentors, one of them named Medardus, who stand at opposite poles of the temptation either to engage with the world outside the hermitage or to retreat within it, Hoffmann’s Medardus is presented with two father figures—the head of his monastery and the prince in whose court he takes refuge—as well as two doppelgängers and two erotic relationships. One of the two doppelgängers, the deranged Count Viktorin, is possibly Medardus’s half brother and possibly guilty of some of the crimes of which Medardus is accused; the other is the seemingly insane hairdresser who appears alternately as

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Peter Schönfeld and Pietro Bel Campo. Schönfeld/Bel Campo is both a doubled figure and a unique figure of legibility in the novel, whose transparency is bound to his embrace of ambiguity and whose rationality is inextricable from his pose of madness. He is the novel’s resounding figure of irony and as such is capable of transforming pathos into bathos, horror into farce, the primal incoherence of desire into articulate language. He is the figure of mediation not only between north (Germany) and south (Italy), head and heart, the classic and the Romantic, but also between fantasy and reality, and in this capacity he also mediates between Medardus’s delusions and the sanity of the world beyond Medardus’s solipsism and the story’s convolutions. Schönfeld/Bel Campo is for these reasons the primary character in the novel to comment on the process of subjectification, the structuring of an interior self in relation to an external world. He does so ironically by insisting on the primacy of surface relations over the supposedly more modern preoccupation with a psychology of interiority and depth. As Schönfeld/Bel Campo explains to Medardus, “You see sir, I have now identified the chief ingredients of your behavior, and if you are happy for me to do so, I also want to observe your movements, your form and your disposition. . . . [B]y the ethereal form of your locks and curls I perceive that in your blood, shape, and figure, your true alignment can only be the marvelous classical-romantic” (Hoffmann, G 106; E 83). Schönfeld/Bel Campo, the parodic artistfigure in the novel, offers an allegorical demonstration of the artwork’s “use value”: by focusing on surfaces and appearances— Medardus’s hair—he exposes an essential and embodied truth. As an artist-figure, moreover, Schönfeld/Bel Campo provides a key toward reading the aesthetic impulses of Hoffmann’s confused, satiric and fantastic, Gothic novel. Like its protagonist, the novel is aligned with the marvelous classical-romantic. In more general terms, Dorothea von Mücke comments on Hoffmann’s conception of the artist’s role and its relationship with the fantastic by citing Peter von Matt: “Most of Hoffmann’s

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fictions thematize two distinct aspects of producing a work of art. One aspect pertains to the visionary act of creative imagination. . . . Concurrently, though, Hoffmann emphasizes the concrete material artifact . . . embodied by the many craftsmen and mechanics who populate his fiction.”13 Hoffmann’s characteristic anxiety over the proximity of people to machines—itself an anxiety representative of the early Industrial Revolution—finds expression in this novel as a parody of the human subject as homo faber, the sum of his or her abilities and productivity. The contrast between philosophical speculation and irrational criminality indicates that storytelling mediates between the rational and irrational impulses of creativity. Medardus’s series of alibis for his mental illness and the crimes it induces functions therefore as a parody of artistic creation, of storytelling. In fact, everything in Die Elixiere des Teufels is predicated on the doubleness of subjects caught between discourses of the demonic and the insane, religion and medicine. Schönfeld/Bel Campo represents these contrasts and parodies them at the same time. One can in turn extrapolate in Der Nister’s “Unter a ployt” an analogously metafictive function for the protagonist’s dual patrimony, which embodies the contradictions of artistic production stranded between material production (the Dust-Person’s role) and spiritual aspiration (the Medardus of Der Nister’s story). Although Schönfeld/Bel Campo in Die Elixiere des Teufels embraces the role of picaro in the picaresque-Gothic hybrid that Hoffmann constructs, Hoffmann’s Medardus is also in constant motion among social and geographic settings, in contrast to the conventions of the Gothic novel. Nonetheless, socialization cannot alleviate the protagonist’s delusions because there is no relationship between him and the other characters in the novel; they function merely as projections of his mental anguish. In Leibnizian terms, Medardus is the “monad” around which the novel revolves. In this respect, psychosis can be likened to the figure of the Baroque house’s “upper chamber without windows”

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in Deleuze’s description of Leibniz. This upper chamber, which for Leibniz had been the realm of the spirit, functions for Hoffmann as a disenchanted domain of individual consciousness. As Freud reveals in his treatment of melancholy, what had been a metaphysical condition in premodern times is reduced to a medical one under the regime of modernity. Fittingly for Hoffmann, however, both the disenchantment and the abiding mystery of consciousness signify Medardus’s relationship not only with other people but also with himself: “I am the one who I seem to be, and seem not to be the one who I am: an inexplicable puzzle to my own mind, I am divided against myself” (Hoffmann, G 73; E 53–54). The absence of internal psychology is symptomatic of the novel’s allegorical character, and Medardus’s adoption and shedding of various names indicates that he functions as an allegorical emblem even for himself. The rhetorical figuration of allegory in the novel is inextricable from the workings and mysteries of mental illness. Medardus articulates his allegorical significance in the moments when he emerges from psychotic delusion: As my senses returned, I became conscious that my being was split into a hundred pieces. Every part of my body seemed to be a law unto itself; and it was futile for my head to try and control my limbs, for like unfaithful vassals they resisted all attempts to make them unite behind one master. My thoughts too began to separate and spin dizzyingly like shining points of light. Faster and faster they turned, forming themselves into the image of a fiery cross. The cross shrank into the distance just as fast as it had grown, so that it now seemed to be little more than a motionless fiery orb. (Hoffmann, G 254; E 214)

The return to consciousness manifests itself as an internalized Trauerspiel—the mind is sovereign to a body populated by treacherous courtiers and rebellious citizens. And yet, the “irrational logic” that Schönfeld/Bel Campo uses to explain the protagonist’s predicament only underscores, and therefore exacerbates,

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Medardus’s feeling of powerlessness. Hoffmann writes, “Folly [Die Narrheit] seems to be the true and ghostly ruler of the earth. Reason is only a slow-witted governor who is not concerned with anything apart from managing the borders of the realm, and out of boredom, he only permits his soldiers to exercise upon the parade ground so that when the enemy forces its way in from the outside they are hardly able to fire a decent shot in anger” (Hoffmann, G 259–60; E 219; translation modified). One can say that Schönfeld/Bel Campo’s logic feeds on its own reflexive insularity, for if folly rules the earth within the puppet regime of reason, then who are the others that impress themselves onto the border? The rhetoric in this passage, in fact, is pristinely monadological. The earth in this rhetorical figure is the self-contained world of the individual, controlled by his or her passions beneath the superficial order of reason, colliding blindly with the other monads of senseless passion surrounding him or her. In this way, Hoffmann signifies the psychology of psychosis in familiarly Baroque philosophical terms, yet emptying their appeals to reason, order, and harmony to reflect the chaos of the world— exterior or interior, political or emotional—as he found it at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which after the Thirty Years’ War were the first continental catastrophe (and reconfiguration) of the modern era. Throughout the novel, the author seems unwilling to differentiate the discourse of crime from that of sin. As such, the rhetoric he mobilizes in this novel is at once archaic, obsolete, and self-canceling. The consequences of Medardus’s delusional behavior manifest themselves most explicitly in the convoluted love triangle among himself and the idealized, virginal Aurelie (literally, “the golden child”) as well as the wicked and sensual Euphemie (“wellspoken”). The competition between these two love interests— which replays itself among the protagonist, the protagonist’s daughter, and the circus acrobat Lili in “Unter a ployt”—is at the

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same time a competition between sight and hearing, purity and corruption, surfaces and depths. Over the course of the novel, Medardus either murders or believes he has murdered Euphemie, and he apparently attempts to murder Aurelie as well; on their wedding day, Aurelie becomes his “bride of blood” (Hoffmann, G 252–252; E 211–212) when in a fit of madness he attempts to take her life. In mythical fashion, Hoffmann superimposes sexuality and death onto one another, so that Medardus’s psychotic personality performs simultaneously the work of myth and of the unconscious in coupling antithetical desires. In keeping with the historical significance of allegory, Medardus behaves mythically in an era that considers itself emancipated from myth. The inevitable cyclicality of his madness replaces a temporality of linear progress with a narrative of inescapable, unfathomable return. Into the Labyrinth

Inescapable and unfathomable return is also the literary struc­ ture of Der Nister’s Symbolist tales, and the fatalism that characterizes these works by the end of the 1920s indicates that the author was, like Hoffmann with the Gothic romance, struggling with an aesthetic and a literary structure that he had outgrown, without yet finding the means to replace them. Unlike Hoffmann, however, Der Nister uses the contradictions against which he struggled to produce one of his greatest works, and even if it is an accident of history that “Unter a ployt” stands at the conclusion of his career as a Symbolist, a better or bleaker conclusion could not be conceived. As in Die Elixiere des Teufels, Der Nister in “Unter a ployt” deploys the characteristic Baroque narrative structure that Deleuze describes as “the enmeshing [l’emboîtement] of narratives one within the other, and the variation of rapport between narrator and narration” (Le Pli, F 82; E 61; translation modified). This “enfolding”—to use another essential concept in Baroque

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aesthetics—of the narrative into and onto itself, the collapse of distinction between surface and depth or between experience and memory (and fantasy), is the denouement that all of Der Nister’s Symbolist stories achieve, yet in “Unter a ployt” the author reaches a point of no return in which the narrator, who has now merged with the protagonist, ends the tale with a renunciation of tale-telling as such. The choice of Hoffmann as a primary model—though not the only intertext—for “Unter a ployt” culminates the German fabulist’s influence on the Yiddish author from the beginning of his career. As Kerstin Hoge notes, “In his memoirs of Der Nister . . . Yankev Lvovski recalls his voracious reading in Russian and mentions [Hans Christian] Andersen along with E.T.A. Hoffmann as an author with whose works he was already thoroughly acquainted at the time [1902–1906].”14 Shmeruk identifies at once the impetus for incorporating Hoffmann’s influence into the tale while disguising the immediate cultural relevance of the allusion; among the contemporaneous Russian-language avant-garde, the “Serapion Brothers,” whose members included a conspicuous number of Jewish writers, had taken their name from Hoffmann’s fiction.15 As Shmeruk explains, “Since Serapion’s name was by 1929 out of favor, Der Nister replaced it with the name of a different hermit in the works of the same writer.”16 Like the Serapion Brothers, Der Nister’s writing both before and after his return to the Soviet Union had been the object of ferocious polemic among Soviet Yiddish critics eager to promote an antimodernist, “proletarian” model for Yiddish writing. Indeed, he is the only Yiddish author whose name became a term of general rebuke, Nisterizm, which was synonymous with decadence, obscurantism, and other “bourgeois” aesthetic excesses. By describing both the transgression and the penitence of his protagonist, Der Nister seems at once to dramatize and parody this critique.17 Indeed, Hoffmann’s Medardus, together with the femme fatale Lili, are the only proper names to appear not just in “Unter a

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ployt” but in almost the entirety of Der Nister’s Symbolist narratives; Bovve in “A Bove-mayse” is another singular exception. As Shmeruk explains, “Until ‘Under a Fence,’ Der Nister’s characters generally were without proper names. They are hermits, itinerants, saints, wanderers, old men, a green man, ‘a’ man, Adam, Der Nister himself, the master, King of Aces and Queen of Myth, a drunkard, clowns, ghosts, a witch, demons, and the like. In ‘Under a Fence’, however, there appear two figures who have proper names: the equestrienne, Lili, and Medardus, the teacher of the hermits.”18 The preference for abstract character types instead of proper names is another affinity that Der Nister shares with Reb Nakhman, and the decision to depart from this convention offers an indication of how Der Nister, if not yet prepared to develop a new aesthetic strategy, was at least beginning to dismantle his preferred stylistic habits. Lili and Medardus in fact have a dialectical relationship with one another. Although she would seem to embody the repudiation of Medardus’s supposedly spiritual and chaste values—and her embodiment, indeed, is significant of the way Der Nister sets about dismantling his Symbolist aesthetics by replacing Symbolism’s abstractness with the physicality of everyday life—she joins forces with Medardus in condemning the protagonist’s actions, even though she had provoked them at the outset. Like Hoffmann’s “original” Medardus—who, as has been documented, is not a completely original figure, either—Lili is a “borrowed” character and also a repurposed one who is not entirely what she seems. Shmeruk notes the influence of the Expressionist playwright Frank Wedekind’s “Lulu” plays on Der Nister’s Lili, particularly Wedekind’s figuration of human sexuality as a circus menagerie.19 More immediately, she seems derived from the female protagonist Rosa Frölich in Professor Unrat, as is the character Lola Lola in Der Blaue Engel. The doubling of Lola Lola’s name suggests both that she is a second-rate, simulacrum “Lulu” and that, like Vladimir Nabokov’s transformation

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of “Dolores” into “Lolita,” language itself has degenerated into sounds at once infantilizing, endearing, and obsessive. As will soon be considered in this discussion, Sternberg’s film and Der Nister’s tale share much with Gothic adaptations of the Baroque, but they both differ specifically in their imagining of la belle dame sans merci; in Gothic fiction, even the most “depraved” women, such as Euphemie in Hoffmann’s novel or the “Bleeding Nun” in Lewis’s The Monk, are inevitably as much victims of treacherous men as they are femmes fatales. Their demonic qualities nonetheless take on a passive character in comparison, or contact, with the frenzied evil of the Gothic antihero. The sexuality and selfassertion of either Lola Lola or Lili are wholly modern, and this signifies both the temporal conflict between (anti-) heroine and (anti-) hero and the emergence of a new femininity and sexuality. In the context of Jewish culture, which always functions as an éminence grise within the poetics of Der Nister’s Symbolist narratives, hiding behind the non-Jewish references yet motivating and determining them, Lili also suggests the archetypal succubus Lilith, who according to Jewish mythology was the biblical Adam’s first, scorned wife before the creation of Eve. Lili fulfills her demonic role through her aggression, directed not toward the protagonist’s wife,20 who plays a negligible role in the story, but toward his daughter: “And I saw that Lili was jealous and couldn’t bear to share billing with anyone else or to have another woman nearby. Though she knew that the woman was my daughter, it still bothered her, and she was always angry at her and worked against her whenever she could. . . . And I felt that she was capable of worse and that she was just waiting for the chance. Lili was the sort who would stop at nothing.”21 To the extent, however, that the reader understands the actions of the story to be dreamed rather than lived, he or she realizes that it is not the desired object, Lili, who stops at nothing, but the desiring narrator whose pursuit of Lili leads to his destruction.22 In the dream logic of the story, Lili at the tale’s denouement lights the bonfire on which

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the protagonist is to be burned—indicating that she is in league with Medardus in judging the protagonist and that no opposition can be maintained or even established between the world of the hermitage and the world of the circus. Both are united via the morbidly comic “show-trial” of the protagonist, which in turn reveals that trials, like circuses, are yet another instance of spectacle and ritual theater, and therefore the solemnity of the academy and the sensuality of the carnival ultimately collapse onto one another as spaces from which the protagonist has been exiled as punishment for his unconsummated desire. The cigarette that Lili lights on the bonfire that immolates the protagonist (UaP, Y 310; E 595) thus expresses a definitively ambivalent gesture of seduction and condemnation on which the story as a whole is premised. Moreover, as much as Der Nister’s Lili hearkens back to the Adamic Lilith, she shares more immediate similarities with the she-demon in Y. L. Peretz’s first Yiddish work, the narrative poem Monish (1888), which describes the corruption of a brilliant yeshiva student through the machinations of one devil disguised as a Jew in modern dress (a daytsh, literally a “German”) and another devil disguised as a non-Jewish woman. The “fallen yeshiva student” not only forms the subject matter for several Yiddish and Hebrew narratives throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century but also summarizes the biographies of countless writers from Sh. Y. Abramovitsh to Chaim Grade (1910–1982). Identifying this motif is essential to understand how Der Nister in “Unter a ployt” integrates the Gothic genre with a Jewish theme to offer not just a parodic response to critics of his literary style but also a critique of modernization and its hopes of deliverance through European culture. Indeed, although students at yeshivas constituted only a small proportion of Ashkenazic society,23 the recurrence of the fallen yeshiva student as a primary synecdoche for modernization underscores the paradox that even when breaking from convention the first modernizers of East European Jewry established a

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tradition to which subsequent generations conformed. Moreover, the persistence of this theme calls attention to the textual terms through which these Jews understood their modernity. After all, the itinerary of these intellectuals often involved a journey no greater than from Volozhin to Berdichev, or later Warsaw or Odessa, but the engagement with haskole served as a parallel to larger social forces in European modernity, as well as a placeholder when these technological, economic, or political innovations were absent in the Pale of Settlement. In biographical terms, Der Nister thus substitutes the motif of a student leaving his academy for the conventional European narrative of the journey from the provinces to the metropolis, in this instance recounted allegorically after a return to his own radically reconfigured point of origin. By indexing Hoffmann’s influence, Der Nister transplants the fallen yeshiva student motif into the Gothic—a genre otherwise essentially unknown to serious Yiddish fiction, unless in translation from world literature24 —first by “de-Judaizing” it (seemingly) and second by making his protagonist’s “academy” (nozir-hoyz) a ruin, like the fallen towers and impotent dynasties of the Gothic novel. For Der Nister, like Hoffmann, the Gothic offers a disruption in temporality, away from the bildungsroman implications of the fallen yeshiva student’s disenchantment and move toward a secular consciousness, back to a more fantastic storytelling tradition and toward a more allegorical mode of representation. And yet, as with Hoffmann, the juxtaposition of the Gothic with implications of the bildungsroman serves not to resist modernity but to expose the limits, and ultimately the collapse, of the allegorical imagination. The Yiddish reader will recognize “Unter a ployt” as a notvery-distant descendant of works such as Abramovitsh’s “Dos Tosfes-yomtov kelbele,” Y. L. Peretz’s “Mekubolim,” and Lamed Shapiro’s “Gegesene teg,” each of which is an example of the fallen yeshiva student genre. This motif connects the material

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poverty of the shtetl with the bankruptcy of both traditional Jewish education and a social system that left its most intelligent young men to waste away physically and emotionally. The story’s title refers obliquely to the spot reserved just over the boundary of the Jewish cemetery—behind the fence—for suicides, heretics, and similarly marginal members of the community. As such, it is preoccupied with the danger and despair of inhabiting a marginal space, one that might be considered at its most general the space between the Jewish tradition and the broader, modern world, but at its most specific might be understood as Berlin, the way station for Jewish refugees such as the author, “just over the border” from their devastated and dangerous postrevolutionary homes in Eastern Europe. Of the extreme poverty in the protagonist’s academy, Der Nister writes, You have permitted me to defend myself . . . but I don’t know how I can. Standing before you now, I feel like a turtle without a shell: completely naked. Medardus, my teacher, I left my shell, our tower, and I grew cold. And when we are cold we hug anything that can keep us warm, any garbage or filth, as long as it covers us. And we wear anything, even rags or flesh-colored tights, as long as it’s clothing. And when we are hungry and have no work, being a clown is work. . . . And when we have no home, the circus can be home. And the circus is as it is. Your life is cheap. (UaP, Y 283; E 580)

This “defense” indicates paradoxically that no meaningful difference exists between the world outside and the academy within: standing in the flesh-colored tights of a circus performer, the protagonist feels naked; but it was the nakedness, exposure, and degradation of the broken-down academy that had driven him to the circus to begin with. Like the protagonist in Dovid Bergelson’s story, set in Berlin, “Far 12-toyzend dolar fast er 40 teg,”25 the protagonist of “Unter a ployt” not only makes a spectacle of himself in a desperate attempt to escape poverty and degradation

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but also makes the performance of his poverty and degradation fundamental to this spectacle. By way of comparison, consider how Peretz portrays the setting of his fallen yeshiva student story, “Mekubolim” (“Kabalists”): “The impoverished town gradually sent less food to the students, provided them with fewer ‘eating days,’ and the poor boys went off, each his own way. . . . They frequently suffered hunger. Hunger leads to sleeplessness, and night-long insomnia arouses a desire to delve into the mysteries of Kabala.”26 The precedent of Peretz is particularly relevant to Der Nister because Peretz was the first Yiddish writer to engage with the aesthetic trends of Naturalism, Impressionism, and Symbolism and as such was the primary mentor of Yiddish modernists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, in addition to his universal respect as an author, Peretz’s embrace of Yiddishism as an ideology placed him as the primary representative of the Yiddish language’s aspirations to high culture.27 Nonetheless, his use of the fallen yeshiva student genre hearkens back to the roots of his fiction, never completely abandoned, in maskilic social critique. In Peretz’s satire of kabala, the poverty of the rabbinic tradition leads to the study of mysticism, whereas in Der Nister’s story the use of mysticism is sublimated to subvert and conflate the oppositions on which he structures his story. From an emblem in Peretz’s story of desperate irrationality and self-destructive aesthetic longing, kabala now becomes a narrative strategy unto itself. By contrast with “Mekubolim,” “Unter a ployt” reads as a revelation, not of truth through parody but of the corporeal reality of naked bodies and flesh-colored tights. Der Nister’s story is thus a retelling of the fallen yeshiva student story and a sequel to the genre, updating maskilic disillusionment with traditional study to reveal that the student unmoored by the traditional culture finds himself in the metropolis to be just as lost and alone as he had been before. At the same time, Der Nister’s nozir-hoyz or nozir-shul (both terms in the story mean

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“hermitage”) is not explicitly a yeshiva or a monastery, and these neologisms weld a Hebraic component (nozir, “hermit”) to a Germanic component (hoyz, “house,” or shul, “school”). The terms thereby demonstrate the liminality and heterogeneity of the author’s imagination; they are words, like the story as a whole, between linguistic, cultural, and religious orientations. Der Nister also refers to the skullcaps worn by the students at the “mock trial” as galekh-mitslekh (UaP, Y 303), “priest’s caps,” rather than yarmulkes. Similarly, Medardus is not a rabbi, or even identifiably Jewish. By the same token, he is also not identifiably a Capuchin monk as in Hoffmann’s novel. These neologisms and Germanizing deviations from the norms of Yiddish prose are striking in this context,28 and they suggest a conscious effort to distance this story from the traditional Yiddish discourse of the shtetl and to make the author’s mother tongue sound like a foreign language.29 In the absence of traditional Jewish referents, Der Nister uncovers the structure common to all of his predecessors in the fallen yeshiva student genre and connected to the beginnings of modern Yiddish storytelling with Reb Nakhman. It is a structure in which authority and desire receive spatial expression—here as elsewhere in the genre figured respectively as the yeshiva and erotic passion—but at the same time dissolve into one another to the double-voiced critique of both. With “Unter a ployt,” it is not just traditional knowledge that has lost its relevance but knowledge as such, the knowable as a category, which is parodically undermined. Yet by setting these polarities up as dramatic antitheses, Der Nister also demonstrates how they merge with one another as a critique of both the tradition and modernity. Filling the void left by the absence of knowledge is a series of intersecting power relations playing out over a network of desire entangling the protagonist with the other characters in the story—a dramatic dynamic in fact identical to Die Elixiere des Teufels. This series of relationships manifests itself in at least four ways over the course of the narrative: the displacement of dramatic roles and narrative

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functions onto a proliferating cast of characters; the consequent emptying out of narrative introspection in favor of the projection of the protagonist’s inner life onto the power dynamics of his interaction with the other characters; the repetition or recurrence of dramatic relations among characters; and the continuous fluctuation of narrative space between open and closed, public and private. One example serves as an illustration of these dynamics. After encountering the Dust-Person, who will lead him to the circus, the protagonist discovers an unnoticed room in his hermitage. The discovery of a hidden room, of course, is a fundamental theme in the Gothic novel, and Hoffmann, as has been discussed, makes use of the device in Die Elixiere des Teufels, as well. Der Nister incorporates the motif by writing, But when I looked closely at the bed, I was suddenly amazed to see that there were three people lying there: a father, a mother, and a child. . . . All three were made of straw. . . . The mother was dried out, thin, and flat as a board, without breasts for the child, but the father was fuller, and he was the one with breasts, and the child lay at one of his breasts and sucked. 30 The straw child had a little straw mouth, and the little mouth apparently pained and bit the father . . . for he twisted and grimaced while giving the breast. . . . And the longer I looked at him, the more his pain became my pain, and the more he twisted and turned, the more I twisted and turned as well. (UaP, Y 287–88; E 582–83)

This “straw” family is neither living nor dead; they may not even be made of straw. But if their purpose is to objectify the dysfunctional dynamics between the protagonist and his family, then either they fail or they succeed too well, insofar as the protagonist identifies with the straw father so much that he suffers in tandem with him, a parody of the imitatio Dei of Christian martyrdom. This bizarre image—which reiterates the Gothic’s primal scene of secret paternity, but from the perspective of the father rather than the child—initiates a juxtaposition of open and closed spaces that

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serves as a correlative to the exposure of the protagonist’s secret desires to the condemnation of the mob. The image of a suckling father finds precedence both in the androgynous iconography of several mystic traditions, whereby the religious leader is figured as both father and mother simultaneously, and in specifically Jewish legends of the golem, an inanimate object given life.31 The straw family is both mythically supernatural and a repudiation of myth in its corporeality. The unmaking of the protagonist’s gender corresponds to an indeterminacy, according to the norms of the day, in Lili’s gender. As Marline Otte explains, “The female circus athlete was routinely considered a member of the Third Sex, a judgment inspired less by her appearance—she did not hide her female attributes— than by her accomplishments in the ring. She clearly subverted traditional notions of female propriety and the female physique. She was athletic and commanding like a man, strong and beautiful like a wild animal, seductive yet chaste, part angel and part Amazon. Most importantly, she was a female in no need of a male to define her.”32 Otte notes the irony that the circus does not so much transgress then-current norms of bourgeois propriety as it exemplifies them by creating a role for the female performer that is simultaneously enticing and chastising. Lili accordingly transmogrifies gender roles, while sacrificing none of her sexuality, by sublimating eros into violence and cruelty; desire, under her control, is rendered into judgment. Truth to Power

The themes of knowledge subverted by desire and the sexual anxieties provoked when closed, intimate spaces are exposed to the spectatorship of the crowd are shared between “Unter a ployt” and Sternberg’s film Der Blaue Engel, as is a shared debt, more explicitly acknowledged in the film than the story, to Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat. 33 The subtitle of Mann’s novel is Das

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Ende eines Tyrannen, “the end of a tyrant,” and Sternberg amplifies Mann’s echo of the Trauerspiel’s preoccupation with tyranny by linking Rath’s downfall to the clash of temporalities that the film illustrates. The film’s protagonist is less a tyrant than a patsy, a relic of nineteenth-century rectitude martyred by twentiethcentury crassness, sensuality, and sensationalism. These are also the elements that Der Nister underscores in his adaptation of the novel. The coincidental attraction that the Austrian American Jewish filmmaker34 and the Yiddish author feel toward Mann’s novel suggests an analogously complicated identification among political, national, and linguistic outsiders active in interwar Germany. 35 As John Baxter writes of Der Blaue Engel, “Emmanuel Rath, professor of English at a provincial high school, pursues a group of his pupils to a sleazy night club called ‘The Blue Angel,’ is infatuated with the cabaret singer Lola, gives up his career to marry her, and becomes a stooge in the troupe. Years later, the combination of Lola taking a new lover and his appearance on stage in the town where he once taught drives Rath insane, and he runs to his old school room, dying with his arms locked around the desk that was a symbol of his standing.”36 Already in a cursory plot summary one perceives several similarities between the movie and Der Nister’s story. Of equal significance, however, are the strategic departures both works make from their original source, and their corresponding violations of realist decorum in both the narration of this story and its thematic resonance. In formal terms, Der Nister’s story compresses the action of Mann’s novel into an associative monologue, in which the narrative unfolds as a single, dreamlike (or dreamed) event. Sternberg’s film, by contrast, continuously interrupts its narration through montage, jump cuts, musical set pieces, and chronological gaps. Where the short story, which could be read “outside time” in successive sittings, simulates a single narrated event—thereby deceptively harking back to the origins of stories in the oral tradition—the

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film, which at least before the advent of the VCR generally had to be seen in one sitting, calls attention to the interruption of narrative time. An additional anomaly distinguishes Der Nister’s story from its German-language counterparts: “Unter a ployt” reverses the ordering of events observed in Professor Unrat and Der Blaue Engel; Der Nister’s story begins with Lili’s rejection of the protagonist, whereas in the film and more ambiguously in the novel the protagonist’s disgrace serves as denouement. Lili’s initial rejection, instead of culminating the protagonist’s descent from civility, plunges this character and the story he tells from the outset into a world of fantasy, introspection, and self-reproach. Working independently of one another, both Sternberg37 and Der Nister use the manipulation of narrative time to fashion substantial improvements over their source material, not only as innovative examples of avant-garde art but simply as narratives; they tell better stories than Mann (1871–1950).38 Why, then, are they both attracted to this source?39 Its appeal speaks to the crisis facing the intellectual when confronted by the rise of mass culture. The connection between knowledge and power, asserted as a general principle by Michel Foucault (1926–1984), was in actuality never more forcefully valorized than in the precincts of nineteenth-century German idealism; as Joseph Roth writes, immediately after Hitler’s ascendance to power, “Behind the sergeant stood the engineer who supplied him with weapons, the chemist who brewed poison gas to destroy the human brain, and at the same time formulated the drug to relieve his migraine; the German professor . . . who is paid to disseminate the idea of Prussian superiority, the non-commissioned officer of the university . . .”40 The aftermath of World War I and the Weimar era, however, saw the profound disconnection between the intellectual and various manifestations of political, economic, and cultural power. This accounts in part for the attraction that so many intellectuals cultivated for authoritarian ideologies of the right and left—each of which sought and received the subordination, often willing, of

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an entire intellectual class—with the catastrophic consequences these allegiances fostered among the right in Germany and the left in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s. Sternberg sacrifices the ideological critique of small-town life in Mann’s satire in favor of emotive, melodramatic themes of pathos and degradation—although the genius of the movie, as well as its politics, derives from the transformation of Professor Unrat from a figure of satirical contempt to one of sympathetic, at times endearing, pathos, which compels the viewer to identify with him not in spite of his ridiculousness but because of it. An ideological critique of the film can be voiced, and in fact was, by Theodor Adorno among others, insofar as Professor Unrat was a finished, published work before Sternberg’s (and Der Nister’s more attenuated) adaptation, and the changes Sternberg had made for cinematic expediency, including political changes specified by the right-wing businessmen who financed the production, were an explicit violation of the author’s intent, not a fulfillment of his vision in a new medium.41 One way in which Sternberg transforms Mann’s novel, nonetheless, is to deemphasize the social specificity of the narrative, like Der Nister, in favor of an imaginary, nearly surreal setting: adapting the tale not only to Expressionist aesthetics but also to the Baroque motifs of shadow, spectacle, and artifice from which Expressionism derives its aesthetic vocabulary. Both Der Blaue Engel and “Unter a ployt” focus on the powerlessness, the impotence, and the humiliation of the scholastic ideal. In this respect, Der Blaue Engel portrays its intellectual protagonist as a functionary, a bureaucrat, and a technician, reduced at the outset to a pitiable figure, who degenerates further to the ultimate point of losing both the power of speech and his sanity. As Judith Mayne notes, “The final performance number of the film, when [the magician] Kiepert puts Rath in the role of student and orders him to crow, is a parody of Rath’s teaching techniques. The scene suggests that mimicry has come full

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circle in the film, from Rath’s classroom to the stage of the Blue Angel.”42 As with “Unter a ployt,” knowledge itself, figured here as rational language, falls victim to the destructive effects of misplaced desire and the mockery of the crowd. Indeed, where the film begins with a parodic deformation of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy—a purposefully clichéd reference to high culture and civilization, comically debased by the inability of German students to pronounce the word the43—it ends with Rath’s speech as such reduced to the insane imitation of a crowing, egglaying rooster, evoking simultaneously the gender confusion of an emasculated, cuckolded husband, a gender confusion equally suggested through the figure of the nursing straw-father in Der Nister’s story, as well as the dehumanizing cruelty of the crowds gathered to watch his grotesque performance. Rath’s degeneration at the end of the film demonstrates his unmaking as a man and as a human being. Der Blaue Engel participates in and reflects what Helmut Lethen characterizes as a central feature of social life in the Weimar era, its “culture of shame,” which coincides with the rise of mass media. Just as the pageant in Baroque culture had signified the translation of the body into text via the gesture, mass media depends on the specular condition of the individual before the crowd. Quoting the film theorist Béla Balázs (1884–1949), Lethen writes, “Since this ‘visible individual’ can be photographed, the cinema can establish as its domain the once dark archive of the soul enacting itself through gesture. In the context of a shame culture, the arts can engage directly on the practical level in debates concerning the meaning of ‘perceived being.’”44 The spectacle of shame with which Der Blaue Engel concludes parallels an analogous narrative climax in Der Nister’s story. By conspicuous contrast, Mann’s novel adheres to what Lethen would classify as a “culture of guilt” distinguishing Wilhelmine interiority from Weimar-era externalization, and this contrast renders on a thematic level what visual culture had come to signify on the level

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of technique—the performative nature of everyday life—in the social history of early twentieth-century Germany. Rath’s transformation into the emasculated and dehumanized Unrat furthermore connects the film’s blurring of boundaries among man and woman, human and animal, with an anxiety emerging from the instability of German culture at a time of significant immigration, disputed borders, and the importation of popular culture from other countries, particularly the United States. As Janet Ward writes, “Reporters like Hans Kafka wondered at what cost the Lunapark fairground, a Coney Islandinspired ‘piece of America’ imported to Berlin, was entering the German psyche, and what would have to be given up in exchange.”45 Such Americanization is observable everywhere in the popular culture and visual landscape of the Weimar era, particularly in its cabaret songs, which are dominated by fox-trot and jazz rhythms; in the American motifs of Brecht productions such as Im Dickicht der Städte (In the Jungle of the Cities, 1923, 1927) and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagony (The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagony, 1930); and in the jazz instrumentation and sonic effects of composers such as Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), Ernst Krenek (1900–1991), and Kurt Weill (1900–1950). This phenomenon is both reflected and promoted by the music in Der Blaue Engel, composed and performed by Friedrich Hollaender (1896– 1976), one of the most popular cabaret musicians of the day. As much as these adaptations from American culture indicate the importation of new sounds, words, and cultural references, they also signal the temporal disruptions that characterize the film as a whole. Even the film’s title, which shifts the focus from the novel on Rath as a subject to the Blue Angel as the scene of dramatic conflict, dramatizes the transformation of language from the Wilhelmine era to the Weimar Republic: blue had been the privileged color of German Romanticism, associated with idealism, poetic inspiration, the otherworldly and unobtainable. By the twentieth century, however, blue had become associated

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with illicit sex and humor, jazz and African American culture, and the foreign, tawdry, and transient aspects of everyday life continuously in flux, and at a standstill, caught in traffic and dialogue with one another (Prawer, 13–14). Indeed, the film doesn’t just represent the destabilization of language in the Weimar era, it contributes to the process. As Patrice Petro discusses, Der Blaue Engel was conceived as a joint production between the Hollywood studio system and the German film industry; although the first significant German-language “talkie,” it was filmed simultaneously in an English-language version.46 Germany at the time was witnessing a disjuncture in the relationship of nation to language both from without—the importation of foreign-language media—and from within, via the integration of references from other languages into everyday speech. This erosion of linguistic boundaries was a preoccupation of contemporary journalists, yet the multilingual character of Weimar cultural life is merely symptomatic of a more pervasive deterritorialization of German culture, following the reshuffling of territory and populations in the aftermath of World War I. To the juxtaposition of languages, nationalities, and territories in Weimar Germany can be added a juxtaposition of temporalities. Thus, John Baxter notes, “There are no cars in The Blue Angel, no radios or cinemas, and the lamps that hang in almost every shot are gas-burning. Except for a short sequence showing Rath peeling leaves from a calendar that begins at 1923 and ends at 1929, the film is exclusively an image of the Europe in which Sternberg grew up.”47 But the specific chronology that the film claims to trace, from the era of (relative) stabilization of the Weimar economy to the advent of the Great Depression, not only historicizes the film but also connects Rath’s physical and mental decline to the profound economic collapse that Weimar Germany had just begun to experience at the time of the film’s production.48 Moreover, the collision of a seemingly nineteenth-century small-town ambience with the calendar, the jazz music, and the urban social

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disorder of the cabaret indicates the ways in which the film’s setting contributes to the dislocation of its narrative. Presenting a male protagonist and his female love interest as embodiments of two different eras in cohabitation and confrontation with one another represents the essential temporal condition of Weimar culture as between epochs—unstable, confused, tenuous, but also a moment of becoming that in retrospect acquires dreadful poignancy in the ineluctable awareness of what it actually became. At the same time that the borders of German culture were opening up on the east and west, and the temporality fluctuated between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, traditional hierarchies between high and low culture were breaking down, with Sternberg’s film again reflecting and contributing to larger trends.49 Although Der Blaue Engel is the most celebrated representation of cabaret culture in the Weimar era, the kinds of performances spotlighted in the movie are much coarser and more sensationalistic than what most Berliners of the day would have considered cabaret: “It has often been noticed how many key members of the Blue Angel team . . . had cabaret and revue experience; but that has led to a mistaken identification of the Blue Angel stage show as that of a ‘cabaret’ or ‘nightclub.’ It is nothing of the kind: it is a beer hall and rough eating-house, in which people order food and drink while the stage show is going on, and where customers yell out to Lola that they have their wage-packet with them . . . presumably for special favors which she is not likely to grant” (Prawer, 27). Der Blaue Engel, therefore, is cabaret and it isn’t. It is a representation of an art form “lower” than more upscale cabaret, but as a representation it is considerably more sophisticated than the performances actually given in cabaret. It is high and low all at once—much like the opera Carmen, with which it shares several morphological characteristics. Its depiction of low culture expands the expressive potential of high culture and creates an enduring work of modernist cinema but at the same time one of the most popular films of the era.

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Center and periphery thus change places in Berlin during the 1920s. By comparison, for a writer such as Der Nister, who was a peripheral figure even within the context of Yiddish literature, this peripherality becomes exemplary of and for the culture as a whole. Already in 1910 when Peretz had advised the author to leave Zhitomir, where he was then located, for Warsaw, Petersburg, or Berlin, Der Nister recalled, “It was better for me to live in a provincial hiding place, from where, as from a small room’s window facing a thoroughfare, I could from time to time show my head dreaming about the noise of a city.”50 This image, whether consciously or uncannily, replicates the premise of Hoffmann’s “Des Vetters Eckfenster” (“My Cousin’s Corner Window,” 1822), the final story of his career; whether in Zhitomir, Berlin, or Moscow, it was always on the periphery from which Der Nister’s writing is presented, hiding in plain sight. Der Nister is therefore out of place in the world of Berlin modernism, but this anomaly makes his work representative of the dislocation and displacement of the culture as a whole, and it is from this vantage point that he, like Hoffmann, will conclude his career as a fabulist. Cultures of Distraction

The overabundance of entertainment, at least in comparison with earlier eras, reflects and determines the apprehension that Der Nister shares with Sternberg’s film about the erasure of difference between public and private. This anxiety toward and attraction to mass culture is in fact pervasive to Weimar criticism and literature. What kind of an entertainment house the Blue Angel is, and where it fits on the social spectrum, is relevant to gauging how the film represents the changing nature of public amusement and therefore how its self-presentation connects to larger questions of temporality and social space. Berlin in this respect stands at a crossroads not just of languages and culture but also of technologies and their socialization in the delivery of popular culture. As

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Otte writes, “By the middle of the 1920s, four million Berliners found amusement and distraction in 49 theaters, 3 opera houses, 3 large variety theaters, and 75 cabarets. In addition, live entertainment increasingly competed with 363 movie theaters for which 37 film companies produced 250 movies annually. This abundance of entertainment venues was complemented by an equally impressive expansion of Berlin’s gastronomy: some 16,000 restaurants, including 550 cafes, and 220 bars and dancehalls made certain that in Berlin the live performances were not limited to the official stages.”51 For Yiddish culture from Berlin, accordingly, the relative newness of the distinction between public and private reiterates in specifically sociological terms the paradox already apparent from Reb Nakhman’s stories, that Yiddish modernism offers a critique of modernity almost before the institutional and social conventions of modernity had established—or even introduced—themselves. Berlin is a dynamic setting for East European Jews to encounter modernity. Yet, as Otte indicates, given its disorienting expansion in the first two decades of the twentieth century and its belatedness compared with other European metropolises— even Vienna—the preemptory critique of modernism toward modernity is as relevant a conceptual stance for German culture as it is for Yiddish. For Der Blaue Engel, the depiction of live entertainment via film signifies a self-conscious manipulation of temporality, showing movie stars depicting their predecessors in the theater of spectacle and attraction. Otte documents a major shift in postwar German popular culture from the Wilhelmine focus on ethnic difference to the deviance of the outsider’s inner psychology, a change that continues a process of interiorization that begins at the juncture between psychology and philosophy, which the Gothic novel had exposed as a rupture. In the era before World War I, the popular culture had ridiculed region and religion, including geographically marginal Germans as well as parvenu Jews, as a paradoxical but ultimately liberal expression

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of social inclusiveness:52 Jews and other outsiders are mocked as a means to normalizing them in the new national culture of the Wilhelmine era. 53 In the Weimar period, however, the preoccupations of urban culture focus on the morbidity of individual desires. This reflects the pervasiveness and the vulgarization of Freudian concepts, but in aesthetic terms, the fragmentation of postwar German culture, which was both inevitable given the historical circumstances and yet bemoaned across the political spectrum, meant that cultural production could no longer aspire to integrate ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences into a unified concept of German nationhood. It is not paradoxical but symptomatic that this loss of confidence in an integrative, liberal nationalism occurs at a moment when German cities in general and Berlin in particular experienced an enormous influx of both “internal” and external refugees. German nationalism lacked a concept of nationhood that would incorporate Yiddish-speaking and Russian-speaking newcomers, just as the presence of other German outsiders, including emancipated women, became increasingly characterized in terms of sexual deviance, criminality, and insanity. As the extreme subjectivity of Expressionism gave way aesthetically to Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) during the 1920s, the dialectical relationship between the two aesthetics manifests itself in the fragmentation, isolation, and disunity of the urban landscape. These characteristics apply equally well to Yiddish and Russian literature written in Weimar Berlin as to the German-language literature of figures such as Erich Kästner (1899–1974) and Irmgard Keun54 or the films of Fritz Lang (1890–1976). In terms of the film’s aesthetics, Der Blaue Engel demonstrates the relationship between Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit as the tension between prewar and postwar styles, between Rath’s nineteenth-century bearing and Lola Lola’s iconically twentiethcentury presence, between the old-fashioned provincialism of the port city and the urban cosmopolitanism of the visiting troupe.

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Siegfried Kracauer notes this tension disparagingly by writing, “Lola Lola sings her famous song on a miniature stage so overstuffed with props that she herself seems part of the décor,”55 a characterization that identifies the point of contact between Expressionist mood-painting and Neue Sachlichkeit objectification. As S. S. Prawer describes the film’s interior shots, “Sternberg abominated what he called ‘dead space’ between the camera eye and the actors, and he filled this in with a profusion of props. At the same time, however, he wanted to stimulate imagination by concealing parts of his set: through objects looming into the frame from above or below, or double framing it with stove-pipes or screens or pillars, or draping gauze over part of it” (Prawer, 33–34). These are strategies derived immediately from Expressionism, but more generally they lend a “Baroque” character to the film; Sternberg’s sets are both overfull and shadowed in gloom. Like Jacopo Tintoretto’s depiction of The Last Supper (c. 1593), the characters of Der Blaue Engel are enshrouded in darkness, regardless of the illumination emanating from them. Der Nister’s descriptions anticipate Sternberg’s visualization of Professor Unrat remarkably. Just as Sternberg makes effective and ironic use of the distorted perspective when Rath enters Lola Lola’s dressing room only to find a spiral staircase leading up to her private bedroom, visually telegraphing the reversal of “high” and “low” social positions as well as Rath’s vertigo at this discovery, Der Nister’s protagonist describes leaving the crowd at the circus for Lili’s dressing room by telling his daughter, “Your honorable and esteemed father [took] up a place at the circus, and not as a clown among clowns, and not as an audience member in the audience, but only on the narrow, twisting stairs that lead, dark and maze-like, to the wardrobe rooms” (UaP, Y 272; E 574). The protagonist from the outset of the story is trapped between public and private, spectators and performers, circus ring and dressing room. The immovable juxtaposition of these spaces and their social significance indicates that the private room is just as

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much a site of spectacle as the public space, while the public space is no more and no less a place of transformation. Wherever he finds himself, the narrator will always be, like Rath in Der Blaue Engel, in a condition of suspended desire. The mixture of high and low, the intermingling of intellectuals with either circus acrobats or cabaret singers, and the juxtaposition of high culture with sex, violence, and performance all point to the most obvious figurative similarity between Sternberg’s film and Der Nister’s story: the prominence accorded in both works to the carnivalesque. Where Mikhail Bakhtin claims that carnivalistic themes lose their authenticity and power over the course of the nineteenth century—“There is no all-encompassing whole of triumphant life,” he complains of Romanticism and Symbolism, “there remain only the denuded, sterile, and therefore, oppressive contrasts”56 of death with laughter and eros—one can see that “Unter a ployt” and Der Blaue Engel use carnival themes in unreconstructed form. Carnival is particularly significant to any interpretation of “Unter a ployt,” and in this regard it is necessary to call attention again to its often-ignored and undertheorized subtitle, “A revyu.” All the surreal and grotesque developments in the narrative occur under the mantle of this subtitle, which underscores the idea that this story, like life itself, is essentially a carnival performance, a theater without walls in which anyone can witness his or her private life held up to the ridicule of the mob. One might offer other synonymous subtitles for Der Nister’s tale: a burlesque, a spectacle, a pantomime, or even—moving from the carnal to the charnel—an auto-da-fé. But as Otte explains, the “revue” resonates in the history of early twentiethcentury German entertainment: “At the fin-de-siècle, no other entertainment genre so aptly captured the new spirit of mobility, curiosity, and frivolity as revue theater, which gave voice to the seemingly boundless optimism and pride of Berlin’s upper middle classes.”57 The revue, a genre of cosmopolitan and risqué entertainment involving spectacle, titillation, and short sequences

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in a variety of performance styles, signifies a specifically urban, modern attitude toward ethnic difference, gender relations, and sexuality. This sense of optimistic liberalism had dissipated from the revue by the time Sternberg and Der Nister turn their respective attention to it, which further underscores their mutual attraction to Heinrich Mann’s satire of this setting. For Der Nister, the subtitle “A revyu” for “Unter a ployt” signifies not only the dismantlement of his earlier allegorical mode of figuration but also the abandonment of the artistic unity that had determined the structure of his Symbolist tales. If Reb Nakhman initiates modern Yiddish storytelling by transforming the Trauerspiel into a Purim-shpil, Der Nister in this story returns the Purim-shpil to its origins in the Trauerspiel. For Sternberg, similarly, the historical dislocation of the revue setting reinforces both Rath’s obsolescence and the temporal collision between Wilhelmine and Weimar cultures that motivates the film. In both these examples, however, if the fragmented narratives offered are meant to resemble a revue, the revue itself is distinctly down-market. This is demonstrated in Sternberg’s film through the absence of distinction between audience and performer: the crowd calls out to the stage, and the behavior of the performers, drinking and lounging through production numbers, mimics not only the themes of the drama but also the casual stance of the audience before whom they perform, to emphasize the porousness both between spectacle and spectator and between art and life. The performance style in either work is as degraded from its heyday and ideal as the protagonists themselves. Even as Rath is drawn—more closely to Der Nister’s protagonist than Mann’s— to the life of the stage, his final status as a mute clown demonstrates not only the degree to which life is a performance in the world he inhabits but also how much carnival motifs of mockery, scandal, and abnegation call the performance into being. For Der Nister, by contrast, the squalor that comes to characterize Rath’s life only en route to becoming Unrat, unmade by his

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desires, has already affected the protagonist while he was still a scholar in the hermitage. As the protagonist tells Medardus, “[If] in your time our house flowered, in my time it withered. If in your time our tower shined—polished and golden—on its environs, in my time, the entire house laid waste, and nobody came but dogs to lean against the walls and urinate. . . . At one time I was there in the tower, alone and heavy-hearted, because not far outside the streets were noisy, and no one came to us but occasionally a teacher from the city, with students, to show them our poverty and decrepitude” (UaP, Y 283–84; E 580–81). The sharp contrasts implicit in the distinction between sacred and profane, tower and circus, have dissolved before the narrator has abandoned his monastic order; already the boundaries between public and private have been erased as the tower itself crumbles. In keeping with the contiguity of sacred and profane, the tower becomes a performance site, as the narrator and his hermitage serve as museum exhibits for schoolchildren traveling from the city. Out of this dissipation comes the Dust-Person, who functions in the story as the one figure that modern literature has added to the roster of carnival character types: the carny. The Dust-Person’s name suggests a kind of terminal materialism, a literal returning of the spirit to ashes. Though he is accordingly an allegorical figure, he serves to illustrate the ultimate proximity of allegory to carnival.58 They are neighbors on the opposite side of the same fence—and it is literally under (unter) that fence where Der Nister’s protagonist can be found. Indeed, if a theory of modernity can be invoked to explain the carny’s function in carnival performance and literature, one can suggest that this new role is a consequence of the general specialization and professionalization demanded by modern life. Unlike the carnival king, which is a ceremonial role assumed within the organic cycle of carnival activities, the role of carny is essentially a job, divorced from the natural processes of death and regeneration performed in traditional carnival but ultimately connected to the economic

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processes of production and consumption. The carny makes the commodification of carnival institutions, and therefore their integration into the modern economy, a possibility through his role as marketer, entrepreneur, and huckster; he capitalizes on the carnival as much as he carnivalizes capitalism. Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Where Der Blaue Engel achieves the paradoxical distinction of creating an enduring work of popular culture while at the same time articulating anxiety toward the mass culture essential to popular success, “Unter a ployt” offers an extended meditation on the hazards of popularity as such, demonstrating the failure inherent in any success. In common with other works by the “Weimar” Yiddishists, it suggests a lament for the time spent in Germany, implying that leaving the Soviet Union in pursuit of material sustenance constitutes a sin for which penance was required. 59 For Yiddish writers, the engagement with mass culture and the international avant-garde calls attention to the transience of the culture itself. The 1920s was, of course, the great era not only of ideological “isms” in Yiddish literature but also of Yiddish cosmopolitanism. As the 1920 manifesto of the New York–based inzikhist or “introspectivist” movement formulated its demands, “For us, everything is ‘personal.’ Wars and revolutions, Jewish pogroms and the workers’ movement, Protestantism and Buddha, the Yiddish school and the Cross, the mayoral elections and a ban on our language—all these may concern us or not, just as a blond woman and our own unrest may or may not concern us. If it does concern us, we write poetry; if it does not, we keep quiet.”60 Such aspirations speak equally to the Weimar Yiddishists, though seldom do the mayoral elections in Berlin figure in their writing. The Weimar Yiddishists, indeed, never created a manifesto that would represent their aesthetic so concisely or comprehensively

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as the inzikhistn did—their artistic inclinations were too diverse, their circumstance was too unsettled, and they never considered Berlin to be a genuine home for their work. As Joseph Roth famously commented in 1926, “No Eastern Jew goes to Berlin voluntarily. Who in all the world goes to Berlin voluntarily?”61 If anything, this makes the presence of Yiddishists in Berlin all the more aesthetically and historically compelling. Theirs is a modernism created on the fly, a fugitive aesthetic that returns the casually used term avant-garde to its political and territorial origins. Nonetheless, the fusion nature of the Yiddish language makes it an especially appropriate vehicle for the emergence of what Benjamin Harshav terms a “demonstratively eclectic” modernist aesthetic. As Harshav states, writing on Marc Chagall,62 “Like the ideal of ‘pure poetry,’ pure art to the avant-garde meant the acceptance of one language that dominated each work. . . . For them, at any given moment, the poetics of their art was like a spoken language: one speaks either French or English or Russian, but not all in the same sentence. In Yiddish, however, one can speak several languages in the same sentence.”63 The concept of demonstrative eclecticism further illuminates the attraction of Der Nister toward Mann’s novel, as well as the author’s fusion of allegory with carnival to adapt the narrative to his own aesthetic. The notion of demonstrative eclecticism links Yiddish cosmopolitanism to other forms of Jewish cosmopolitanism, such as the writing of Kafka or Bruno Schulz; their effacement of explicit Jewish references suggests a sense of the internal exile of Jewish culture even within Yiddish modernism. After all, it is unsurprising that neither Professor Unrat nor Der Blaue Engel makes any reference to Jewishness. Indeed, John Baxter observes only a single, telling insertion of “Jewish” content in the film: “For the misery of Rath’s school, Sternberg recalled his own childhood, basing the character of Rath on a hated [Hebrew School] teacher from Vienna. His early tuition in Hebrew, a language he was forced to learn by rote, with no knowledge of the meaning of the words

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he memorized, appears in Rath’s overbearing attempts to make the hapless Ertzum pronounce the word ‘the.’”64 As significant as Sternberg’s identification of Rath with a Hebrew teacher is the replacement of Torah, the sacred text of Jewishness, with Shakespeare, the sacred text of European high culture. Der Nister’s avoidance of Jewish references, however, is a consequence, simultaneously, of Yiddish High Modernism’s efforts to embrace a broader range of cultural references, Soviet Yiddish culture’s demands to abandon Jewish “parochialism,” and most significantly his own poetics of concealment and latency. All of these motivations offer evidence of the dislocation of European Jewry. Homelessness is the Janus face of Jewish cosmopolitanism during the 1920s, just as allegory is the Janus face of carnival. Analogously, one can understand Der Nister’s heterogeneous symbol systems—which in his Symbolist phase embrace Christianity, Buddhism, medieval fantasy, and European folk motifs, in addition to German Romanticism and Jewish mysticism—as masks for the ostensibly “Jewish” content of his imagination.65 Adorno thus writes of Gustav Mahler’s orientalism, “This orient is pseudomorphous also as a cover for Mahler’s Jewish element. One can no more put one’s finger on this element than in any other work of art: it shrinks from identification yet to the whole remains indispensable.”66 One can say this of Jewishness in Der Nister’s work too, the demonstrative eclecticism of which also serves as a displacement for the author’s Jewishness. What is unusual in Der Nister’s instance is what is most comprehensible in Mahler’s (or Adorno’s) case; Jewishness for German-speaking Jews must find a cover by the logic of assimilation and civic culture since the obligation for participating in a national culture historically has been not to appear “too Jewish.” Jewishness “hides in plain sight” for these figures in order for them to speak beyond the parameters of their “parochial” culture. Why, though, does Der Nister habitually find camouflages for his Jewishness when writing for a completely Jewish audience in a Jewish language?

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At least in historical terms, one can understand this as a consequence of the dislocation affecting Jewish culture in Eastern Europe after World War I and the Russian Revolution; what novelists such as Bergelson and the Hebrew writer Haim Hazaz (1898–1973), as well as poets such as Uri-Tsevi Grinberg and Peretz Markish, proclaim on the thematic level regarding the destruction of Jewish tradition, Der Nister internalizes into narrative form. Der Nister’s adaptation of Professor Unrat is of a piece with his translations from world literature, combining a Romantic belief in the ability of storytelling to remake the world with the modernist’s resignation to the fact that all stories have already been told. As an attenuated example of the fallen yeshiva student genre, “Unter a ployt” uses motifs from German literature to superimpose the destination of the lost yeshiva student—the modern, European world—onto the abandoned academy, revealing that the opposition of the tradition and modernity, like the opposition of public and private, dissolves in the face of unattainable and illusory desire. At the same time, the self-consciousness of adaptation in Der Nister’s Symbolist phase returns Yiddish narrative to its origins in the premodern era when all Yiddish narratives were adaptations of either coterritorial sources or extracts from the classical tradition in Hebrew and Aramaic,67 as well as their beginnings in the modern era, when Reb Nakhman, whose tales similarly disguise their Jewish content, proclaimed that the stories of the nations become holy when rearranged in their proper order. If the Trauerspiel can be seen as a reaction against the Renaissance comedy of abundance, as much as it is the recontextualizing of tragedy from the mythical past into the traumas of history, then when the motifs of Trauerspiel dismantle themselves, it is no surprise that carnivalesque comedy figures in this disassemblage as the return of a repressed. This return in fact had already been foretold in the Trauerspiel burlesque that figures in Enlightenment satire, and no less in the tales of Reb Nakhman. The title story

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from Der Nister’s previous collection, “Fun mayne giter” (“From My Estates,” 1928), similarly describes a protagonist who buys a book by Der Nister that narrates how the author’s hands were consumed by bears. The “Now as End” with which that story culminates indicates that the author has become a martyr to his own writing; his body dissolves into and constitutes the substance of his story. The image is at once allegorical and carnivalesque, and it demonstrates—in contrast to Bakhtin’s assertions about the incompatibility of the two modes of representation—that the two discourses signify a complementary relationship between the body as text and the text as body. Rather than the production of meaning, both allegory and carnival consume meaning, in spite of the diametric difference in their mood and style. Carnival is perhaps the signal difference between either “Unter a ployt” or Der Blaue Engel and the source that inspired them.68 The strategic use of carnival, mostly repressed in Mann’s novel, makes more explicit and therefore palpable the play of desire, eroticism, and cruelty that these works dramatize. Moreover, the gestures of disrobing, unmasking, and uncrowning that structure “Unter a ployt” and at last repudiate the artificiality of Der Nister’s Symbolist masks are indicative of the ways in which the author internalizes the carnival aesthetic for Yiddish literature and carnivalizes Yiddish aesthetics, particularly the specific narrative genres of Yiddish fiction such as the fallen yeshiva student motif, for modernist literature. When the protagonist in “Unter a ployt” meets with his student to discuss love, he does not explain what love is but instead dramatizes its meaning: love as loss, self-abnegation, injury, and humiliation—as good a definition as any—over the subsequent course of the story. In keeping with the modernist pursuit of unity between form and content, meaning in Der Nister’s Symbolist stories is identical with and inextricable from the act of storytelling. Both the fate of the protagonist in “Unter a ployt” and the act of narration indicate in formally parallel terms what the narrative’s continuous

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use of private spaces opening into public ones signifies, that life is a performance, even, or especially, when the life in question is not so much lived as it is dreamed. The dream is a performance the psyche mounts for itself, and the self-reflexivity of dreams is the model for each of Der Nister’s stories, as well as the refuge to which his Symbolist aesthetic retreats when forced to conform to the demands of the realist novel later in his career. At this point of collapse between the governing oppositions that structure Der Nister’s story—comparable to Rath’s return to the classroom at the end of Der Blaue Engel—the comparison tentatively undertaken here can at last and with steadfast tentativeness conclude. In these two works, each representative of the larger complexities inherent in Yiddish and German modernism, respectively, the recurring conflict between power and desire is animated through the carnivalizing mediation of an urban space figured as circus or cabaret. For both Der Nister and Sternberg, carnival performance represents the vitality as well as the brutality of a new mass culture on display everywhere in Weimar Berlin. In the years ensuing, the savagery and exploitation of modern life that the story and film each depict with a parodic intensity, approaching nihilism, would soon find expression in a ferocity and apocalyptic purpose that neither Der Nister nor Sternberg could have predicted but that each of their works anticipates. The ineluctable knowledge of subsequent history that the present-day observer of these two works brings to them lends an unexpected poignancy to these otherwise diabolical satires of Weimar culture and suggests their persistent relevance to the still contemporary problems of brutality, desire, and exploitation. Conclusion

Der Nister’s writing over the remaining two decades of his life, as indicated, takes a different course from what he had pursued over the previous two decades. To an extent, this was mandated

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by the demands of Soviet policy, but as has been suggested, part of his attraction to the Soviet Union was the obligation it imposed on him to break with his aesthetic “monadology” in order to develop a new relationship in his work with the outside world. Although this latter half of his career is mostly incompatible with the terms under which the first part was conceived—and in any event, recent scholarship has been devoting much more attention to these last two decades than before69—one sees how the earlier aesthetic perseveres, in keeping with similar practices of nineteenth-century realism, in circumscribed dream sequences, reveries, and fantasies. Rather than dwell on this phase of his career, which takes this discussion too far afield from its (loose) historical parameters and risks getting entangled in another labyrinth, it is perhaps better to conclude with a consideration of the contemporaneous writer most similar aesthetically to Der Nister: the Hebrew author Sh. Y. Agnon. Agnon, born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in Galicia,70 had emigrated to Palestine in 1908 but spent twelve years in Berlin and Bad Homburg, from 1912 to 1924, before returning to Jerusalem. During his time in Germany, he met with many leading Jewish figures there, both communal leaders such as Salman Schocken (1877–1959), who became Agnon’s lifelong patron, and intellectuals such as Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin.71 From a distance, Agnon seems quite removed from Der Nister’s sensibility, because of his choice of language and ideology— Hebrew and Zionism—and his engagement with Jewish observance, on a personal as well as an artistic level.72 Although it’s possible that Agnon met Der Nister while they were in Germany, and he would have known of his work, the most relevant connection they share occurs when Agnon published three stories during the early 1920s in the Hebrew-language journal Rimon.73 This unique journal of high culture, published for six issues in parallel Yiddish and Hebrew editions—with largely divergent contents in the two versions—also claimed Der Nister in its

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inaugural issue, for which he served as coeditor with Bergelson of the Yiddish edition Milgroym (both titles mean “pomegranate”).74 Despite the linguistic similarities between Yiddish and German, Der Nister seems to have made no impact on the German Jewish literary scene, whereas Agnon, writing in Hebrew but translated into German, was feted by German Jewish elites as the definitive exemplar of Eastern European “authenticity.” The brief conjunction between the two writers nonetheless indicates both the affinities and the distinctions between two of the most idiosyncratic literary stylists in twentieth-century Jewish culture. Each author, for whom the mythopoesis of traditional folklore and Hasidic mysticism provides a decisive if diffuse influence, inhabits a separate, unequal, yet complementary position in Weimar aesthetics. The artistic aspect in which Agnon relates to Der Nister most closely is their respective affinity for allegory, which they each cultivate under the influence of Reb Nakhman’s tales. Perhaps the clearest instance of this affinity occurs in Ad hena (To This Day), a novella that Agnon published in 1951 about his experience in Berlin during World War I. Although one cannot link the two figures—as one could, for example, Alfred Döblin and Dovid Bergelson, who were friendly with one another while they both lived in Berlin, or Agnon and Scholem—their “adjacency” offers an avenue toward contemplating the influence of Reb Nakhman’s storytelling techniques and their attendant Baroque aesthetics on two of the most sophisticated modernists working in Jewish languages. In that regard, Agnon’s Ad hena offers an insight into the way that this aesthetic could be integrated into a quasi-realist narrative technique that suggests an alternative to the Socialist Realist path that Der Nister chose (“chose”) to pursue upon returning to the Soviet Union. In this respect, Agnon’s writing serves as a doppelgänger for Der Nister’s Symbolism in a contiguous aesthetic and language also fed by the experience of exile in Berlin. Ad hena is essentially a picaresque narrative about its protagonist’s perennial dislocation and displacement during World

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War I, as he finds himself traveling between Berlin and Leipzig on petty errands and acts of charity, and as he wanders the streets of Berlin in search of an always temporary dwelling place. In thematic terms, therefore, it shares a great deal with the literature of Neue Sachlichkeit in the 1920s, which similarly depicts the rootlessness and isolation of unsettled German city-dwellers in the aftermath of the war.75 It would be easy enough to consider the narrative as a memoir of the author’s own experiences in Berlin or to add the complicating factor that this recounting of his Berlin experience during the First World War—which, comparatively speaking, was more benign for Jews than the subsequent three decades in Germany—was conceived and written after World War II and the Holocaust.76 However easy it is to impute a comment on the aftermath of the Second World War to a Hebrew novel set in Germany during the First World War, Maya Barzilai demonstrates that the contemporary event that Agnon evokes in his historical narrative is in fact the 1948 War of Independence, which in autobiographical terms caused the author comparable displacement from his home in Jerusalem as the events narrated in the novel thirty years earlier.77 Rather than elaborate on the historical context of the novella, it is worthwhile to consider two instances of allegorical figuration in it, both of which occur at a moment between wakefulness and sleep. Early in the story, the protagonist finds himself stranded for the night in Leipzig, where he must take refuge in an unfriendly hotel. Unable to sleep, he lulls himself by constructing a series of allegories out of the system of “roots” (three- or four-letter series out of which Hebrew vocabulary is constructed) of Hebrew letters: And as if the bed beneath me and the hunger inside me weren’t enough, I now began to worry about the future ahead of me. To take my mind off it, I tried thinking of different combinations that could be made from the letters of Hebrew roots. . . . I chose the letters bet-kuf-resh (‫)ב–ק–ר‬, which spelled boker (‫)בוקר‬, morning. Switch them around and they spelled rakav (‫)רקב‬, rot. Switch

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them again and they spelled krav (‫)קרב‬, battle. Switch them once more and they spelled kever (‫)קבר‬, grave. . . . Ayinnun-gimmel (‫ )ע–נ–ג‬gave oneg (‫)עונג‬, enjoyment, which could be turned into nega (‫)נגע‬, infection. Shin-peh-resh (‫ )ש–פ–ר‬produced shefer (‫)שפר‬, loveliness, which became refesh (‫)רפש‬, filth. . . . Little by little my eyes grew heavy until, thinking of halom (‫)חלום‬, dream, I fell asleep and dreamed of war, milhama (‫)מלחמה‬.78

Agnon’s Hebrew in this passage is ostentatiously “Baroque”; its wordplay functions as ornament and artifice rather than communication. The protagonist’s virtuosity with the language contrasts poignantly with the absence of anyone to speak it with, so that, like Symbolist poetics, the signs he manipulates can signify only themselves rather than an external object. As with the protagonist in “Unter a ployt,” Agnon’s hero experiences the disconnection between knowledge and power. His wordplay consumes meaning because he lacks any physical form of sustenance. As Barzilai has suggested in her reading of the novel, the protagonist’s extravagant fluency in an unspoken language contrasts with a recurring doppelgänger in the novel, a shell-shocked soldier rendered mute by wartime trauma, whom the protagonist refers to as a “golem” and who turns out to be the long-lost son of the protagonist’s landlady. Speech and speechlessness are interchangeable in this contrast, as one dislocated and powerless individual displaces the other. In another dream sequence, when the protagonist has been forced by the return of the “golem” to spend a final night at his boardinghouse sleeping in the bathtub, Agnon writes, I believe it was Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav who said that God in His goodness conducts the world’s affairs more splendidly from day to day. My own affairs were an exception. . . . Somehow I managed to fall asleep. The reason I know I did is that I had a dream. . . . I dreamed that a great war had broken out and that I was called up to fight and took a solemn oath that if God brought me home safe and sound I would sacrifice to Him whatever came forth from my house to greet me. I returned home . . . and behold, coming forth to greet me was myself. (Agnon, H 59; E 86)

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Just as Reb Nakhman seems to use the space of his fiction to give cryptic voice to ideas too dangerous to be explicated in his homiletical writing, the protagonist invokes the Rebbe’s homilies to underscore his own shattered faith. What emerges out of the disparity is not a dream in a psychological sense but an allegory constructed out of direct reference to the scriptural vow of Jephthah in the book of Judges (11:30–40). This disturbing and inscrutable episode relates how a socially ambiguous judge of the Israelites, referred to as “the son of a harlot” (Judg. 11:1), leads the Israelites to military victory against the Ammonites. In the heat of battle, he improvidently vows to God that he will offer the first object he sees as a sacrifice in exchange for victory. True to a mythical verdict that the “binding of Isaac” (Gen. 22:1–19) was to have superseded, the first “object” Jephthah encounters upon returning home is his own daughter, whom he now must sacrifice in fulfillment of his vow. The episode with Jephthah therefore contravenes the moral and historical significance of the Hebrew Bible, which dramatizes the struggle away from mythical thinking into the establishment of community, law, and civilization. Agnon reimagines the episode in Baroque terms, however, by internalizing the sacrifice. His protagonist must martyr himself because at this moment of psychic and social extremity he finds himself lacking a home to return to, a family to relate to, or even a language with which to express his despair; like Hoffmann’s Medardus, he becomes doubled, both a monad and a disintegrated subject. The pathos of his predicament therefore finds expression only in an allegory that mixes legend with melancholy, duplicating the work of Trauerspiel by making the protagonist’s despair function as an emblem of his political lament. Such is the Baroque use of allegory. In this regard, perhaps, one can in fact recognize a larger lament in the predicament of Ad hena’s protagonist, not for what he gives voice to but for what he can’t. Consider, therefore, the oddly serene final lines of the narrative: “And because so many things befell me and I lived to tell

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about them all, I have called this book ‘To This Day’ in the language of thanksgiving for the past and of prayer for the future. As it says in the Sabbath morning service: To this day have Thy mercies availed us and Thy kindness not failed us, O Lord our God. And mayst Thou never abandon us ever” (Agnon, H 131; E 175). Agnon concludes his novel in the same way as Bloch’s Hasidic beggar had finished his joke, with the “Now as End.” This discordantly abrupt conclusion collapses the author’s personal history in Germany, which extended six years after the end of World War I, with the subsequent twenty-six years before publishing his fictional memoir of life in Berlin. With greater irony, he collapses the prayer of thanksgiving to God for not abandoning the Jewish people with an elision of Jewish history’s greatest instance of abandonment, whether by God or by other people. Agnon’s irony is allegorical because, as with so many of his contemporaneous practitioners of allegorical rhetoric, the misplacement of his grandiloquent words not only articulates his personal displacement but also provides dislocated expression to the unspeakable. Notes 1.  For a consideration of Kvitko’s poetry in the context of Weimar aesthetics, see Sabine Koller, “‘The Air outside Is Bloody’: Leyb Kvitko and His Pogrom Cycle 1919,” in Estraikh and Krutikov, Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, 105–22. 2.  Before its appearance in the Soviet edition of Gedakht, the story was first published in Di Royte velt 7 (July 1929): 8–34. Daniela Mantovan states in fact that “Unter a ployt” should have been included with Der Nister’s more recent stories in the Soviet collection Fun mayne giter (From My Estates, 1928), but since official approval for the collection had already been given in November 1928, no further stories could be included. “Unter a ployt” therefore replaced the “Bove-mayse” in the new edition of Gedakht. Yet this substitution changes the aesthetics and the political significance of the earlier collection, altering its overall mood from ascending triumph and harmonization to radical collapse and despair. Given its conscious cultivation of German motifs from E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Mann, and the contemporaneous popular culture, it stands as both a summation and

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a repudiation of the author’s German sojourn. See “The ‘Political’ Writings of an ‘Unpolitical’ [sic] Yiddish Symbolist,” in Estraikh et al., Uncovering the Hidden, 88n38. 3.  This juxtaposition also calls to mind that the interwar avant-garde drew inspiration from contemporary popular culture as much as from obsolescent artifacts; as Benjamin would suggest, the unprecedented model that contemporaneous examples of “low” culture provided for the avant-garde calls attention to the ways in which artists had discovered that all modes of cultural production participate in the processes of commodification, the signal characteristic of “the work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility,” to quote a phrase (discussed in part 1 of this comparison). With respect to the uneasy proximity of the artwork’s “ritualistic” origins and its present predicament in the commodified world of mass culture, an epigraph of sorts for this comparison might be taken from a 1925 feuilleton by Joseph Roth: “And then the projectionist began to officiate at the film by Harold Lloyd. . . . And even as the man on the screen was performing some wonderful comic gag, I decided I would dedicate the rest of my life to God, and become a hermit.” See “The Conversion of a Sinner in Berlin’s UFA Palace,” in Joseph Roth, Werke (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1989–91), 2:513. In English, What I Saw, 169. 4.  See Khone [sic] Shmeruk, “Der Nister’s ‘Under a Fence’: Tribulations of a Soviet Yiddish Symbolist,” in The Field of Yiddish, Second Collection, ed. Uriel Weinreich (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), 281. 5.  Discussed in part 1 of this study. 6.  As Benjamin declares, “The great German dramatists of the baroque were Lutherans” (OGTD G 317; E 138). Although Benjamin counters this statement, throughout his study, by considering the Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca, as Jane Newman has demonstrated, his analogous inclusion of William Shakespeare’s tragic dramas, in particular the “Danish” Hamlet, is intended to stress a specifically Northern European character to Baroque aesthetics. Nonetheless, the great Trauerspiele, like the Gothic novel, privilege both spaces and time periods of an antithetical other: antiquity, Byzantium, Venice, etc. See on these points Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 115. 7.  E. T. A. Hoffmann, Die Elixiere des Teufels (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 2007), 239. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Hoffmann, G. In English, The Devil’s Elixirs, trans. Ian Sumter (Surrey: Grosvenor House, 2007), 201. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Hoffmann, E, though translations may be modified when necessary.

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8.  In this regard, Benjamin writes, “In the middle ages there was nothing, either in art, or science, or the state, which could stand alongside the legacy of antiquity. . . . [A]t the time of the Thirty Years War, the same knowledge stared European humanity in the face. Here it is worth noting that the most obvious catastrophes did not perhaps impress this experience on men any more bitterly than the changes in legal norms, with their claims to eternal validity, which were particularly evident at those historical turning-points. Allegory established itself most permanently where transitoriness and eternity confronted each other most closely” (OGTD, G 397; E 223–24). 9.  Helmut Lethen notes in the American preface to Cool Conduct (ix) that the era from 1914 to 1945 was also a Thirty Years’ War, and in this sense as well the Weimar period parallels the Baroque. So too can one identify a comparably discrete period affecting Europe as a whole between roughly 1789 and 1815; this period encompasses not only the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars but also the final dissolution (1795) of the Polish Commonwealth—begun in 1772—and the period of the fastest and most significant growth of the Hasidic movement throughout the Yiddishspeaking world. 10.  Matthew Lewis, The Monk [1980] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 396–97. 11.  Blair Hoxby, however, argues of Benjamin’s opposition of tragedy and Trauerspiel, “Benjamin’s idea of tragedy underrates the centrality of mourning as a motive and theme of Attic drama and fails to account for works like the Ajax, the Philoctetes, or the Trojan Women.” See his (obnoxiously titled) “The Function of Allegory in Baroque Drama: What Benjamin Got Wrong,” in Machosky, Thinking Allegory Otherwise, 90. It is perhaps reasonable to suggest that the dialectic between tragedy and Trauer, fundamental to Hoxby’s (and Benjamin’s) understanding of dramatic form and function, is internal to both Attic and Baroque drama and not merely a categorical antithesis in which one opposes the other immutably. What endures beyond the contrast of classical drama with Baroque drama—terms that Benjamin merely inherits rather than formulates—is what Benjamin says about allegorical figuration, which is of at least as much relevance to an understanding of Weimar modernism as it is to the Silesian Baroque. 12.  It should be noted, in an adjacent yet radically different context, that Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) is also a prototype for Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the novel, since the Socratic dialogue provides a philosophical

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structure through which competing voices and worldviews come to be integrated in the Menippean satire: “In shaping . . . the development of the novel . . . two genres from the realm of the serio-comical have definitive significance: the Socratic dialogue and the Menippean satire.” See Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 109; emphasis in original. Although this is not the only affinity that Benjamin and Bakhtin (1895–1975) share, one can recognize that they are each devoted not just to a historicization of early modern literatures (Trauerspiel and the novel, respectively) and early modern discourses (allegory and carnival, respectively) but also to the interaction of these worldviews in and with history. Like Hoffmann and Reb Nakhman, Benjamin and Bakhtin are philosophical metonymies, conceptual neighbors. 13.  Dorothea E. von Mücke, The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 40. Von Mücke’s source is Peter von Matt, Die Augen der Automaten (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971), 94–97. 14.  Estraikh et al., Uncovering the Hidden, 46–47. Hoge’s source is Lvovski, “Der Nister in zayne yugnt-yorn,” Sovetish heymland 3 (March 1963): 107. 15.  Viktor Shklovsky in fact disputes the significance of Hoffmann for the Serapion Brothers: “The name of the society is accidental. The Serapion Brothers aren’t crazy about Hoffmann. . . . They prefer Stevenson, Sterne, and Conan Doyle.” This assertion, however, seems more an effort to disclaim Hoffmann’s influence on his own writing than a statement about the group as a whole, with whom he denies membership and for whom he is a perhaps deliberately unreliable witness. See Sentimental Journey, 268–69, 286n71. Regardless of the Serapion Brothers’ engagement with Hoffmann, Der Nister’s affinities with Hoffmann’s work as well as with theirs are beyond doubt. 16.  Shmeruk, “Der Nister’s ‘Under a Fence,’” 281. 17.  As Mikhail Krutikov explains, the attack on Der Nister was motivated by a mixture of ideological, aesthetic, and geographical rivalries: “The publication of the dark and obscure novella ‘Under a Fence’ enraged the zealots of proletarian literature, most of whom were associated with the Soviet Yiddish cultural and academic institutions in Minsk. They attacked Der Nister for ‘reactionary and petit-bourgeois morals’, and ‘empty metaphysics, mysticism, idealism, and ubiquitous reaction’. Although Der Nister was the primary target and victim of the ideological critique, the whole campaign was part of a wider struggle between Yiddish

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cultural institutions in Kiev and Minsk.” See his “‘Turning My Soul Inside Out’: Text and Context of The Family Mashber,” in Estraikh et al., Uncovering the Hidden, 112; for further discussion of the “proletarian” critique of Der Nister’s Symbolist writing, see Mantovan in Estraikh et al., Uncovering the Hidden, 74–75; and Estraikh, In Harness, 130–31. 18.  Shmeruk, “Der Nister’s ‘Under a Fence,’” 277. 19.  Shmeruk, “Der Nister’s ‘Under a Fence,’” 283. As the Animal Tamer declaims in the prologue to Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and also Alban Berg’s opera (Lulu, 1935), the protagonist Lulu is a snake—if the allusion to original sin weren’t otherwise clear enough—“geschaffen, Unheil anzushtiften, / Zu locken, zu verführen, zu vergiften— / Und zu morden— ohne das es einer spürt” (“Created for every abuse, / To allure and to poison and seduce, / To murder without leaving a trace”). For Berg’s libretto in German, see http://www.kareol.es/obras/lulu/acto1.htm; for the translation, see Wedekind, The Lulu Plays and Other Sex Tragedies [1952], trans. Stephen Spender (New York: Riverrun, 2000), 11. One notes, with only slight facetiousness, that in Der Nister’s native Ukrainian Yiddish the name Lulu would be pronounced “Li-li”! 20.  In the conventional demonology involving Lilith, she is often portrayed as a predator against Jewish children or targeting both mother and child during childbirth. 21.  Der Nister, “Unter a ployt: a revyu,” in Gedakht (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1929), 304–5; subsequent references incorporated in text as UaP, Y. In English, “Behind a Fence,” trans. Seymour Levitan, in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 592; subsequent references incorporated in text as UaP, E. 22.  One might offer an additional complicating factor in this dynamic: Lili’s antipathy toward the protagonist’s daughter is motivated by sharing the marquee with her in the advertisement of their performance. The presumably oedipal rivalry here is sublimated into the marketing process. Since such marketing, however, conflates psychological and physiological desires with the commodification of modern life—the phantasm on which capitalism is premised—the protagonist’s dream maintains an allegorical relationship with the modern marketplace, just as the advertisement culture of modernity serves to allegorize the relationships among people through a relationship of consumers to commodities. 23.  For a discussion of how exceptional advanced yeshiva training was among Eastern European Jews—yet also how embedded it was in the fabric of shtetl society—see Shaul Stampfer, “Heder Study, Knowledge of Torah, and the Maintenance of Social Stratification” [1988], “Literacy

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among Jews in Eastern Europe in the Modern Period” [1988], and “Dormitory and Yeshiva in Eastern Europe” [1997], in Families, Rabbis, and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010): 145–66, 190–210, 211–28. 24.  The one exception to the absence of Gothic motifs in the Yiddish novel that readily comes to mind is the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose writing characteristically includes supernatural themes, morbid sexuality—the only kind of sexuality in his work—and characters often hovering between melancholy and mania. His first novel, Der Sotn in Goray (Satan in Goray, 1935), initiates his engagement with the Gothic aesthetic, but this appears, of course, after “Unter a ployt.” 25.  Discussed in part 1 of this study. 26.  Y. L. Peretz, “Mekubolim,” in Ale verk (New York: CYCO, 1947), 4:20; the story was first published in Hebrew in 1891 and in Yiddish in 1894. In English, see “Cabalists,” trans. Shlomo Katz, in Howe and Greenberg, Treasury of Yiddish Stories, 219. 27.  For a singular first-person account of how decisive Peretz’s influence on Der Nister was, see Der Nister’s essay “Peretz hot geredt un ikh hob gehert” [Peretz spoke and I heard], in Dertseylungen un eseyen [Stories and essays] (New York: IKUF, 1957), 279–89. As Mikhail Krutikov has written, the occasion for this essay, originally published in the Soviet Union in 1940, was “the ideological ‘rehabilitation’ of Y.L. Peretz, who had been practically banned in the Soviet Union since 1935”; this rehabilitation followed the partition of Polish territory after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which provided an impetus to recruit Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews to support the Soviet cause, as well as a more general relaxing of aesthetic control over Yiddish culture during the war. As subsequent events would confirm, this cultural thaw was relatively short-lived. See Krutikov, “Writer as People’s Therapist,” 27. 28.  Indeed, as early as 1908 Der Nister had seen fit to defend his mannerism of placing predicates at the end of the sentence; in a letter at that time to the Yiddish critic Shmuel Tsharni, he states, “The predicate [predikat] at the end of the sentence is not just an exclusively German feature . . . and in general I reckon that all those who are after more unusual phrasing make use of this word order.” Whether one chooses to apply the proscriptive, and pejorative, label of daytshmerizm (“Germanizing”) to this habit, Der Nister is correct that the tendency is distinctive in modern Yiddish literature, so much so that one can identify it primarily with his writing. For this statement, see Kerstin Hoge in Estraikh et al., Uncovering the

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Hidden, 49. As Hoge further notes, “Like Hans Christian Andersen, Der Nister rebelled against established linguistic conventions; but in contrast to Andersen, Der Nister’s linguistic rebellion was directed against written as well as spoken models of Yiddish discourse, resulting in the attempt to forge a style that was uniquely his own and uncompromisingly elitist” (Estraikh et al., Uncovering the Hidden, 49). 29.  Similarly characteristic of Der Nister’s style is his archaizing use of the conjunction and (un) to convey an incantatory rhythm to his prose. The Yiddish linguist Isaac Zaretski (1891–1956) notes that the conjunction and (un) appears in one of Der Nister’s stories, “Tsum Barg” (“To the Mountain”), 1,226 times—this, in a story of forty-three pages! See his “Nister’s ‘Un,’” in Shriftn, vol. 1, ed. Nokhem Shtif (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1928), 131. To count the ands for yourself, see Der Nister, Gedakht (1929), 37–80. 30.  One possible source—or, at least, resonance—for this image is the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 53B, which describes a rabbinical debate about a widower who lacked the money to pay for a wet nurse and who grew breasts to nurse his children. Although Rav Yosef considers this a great miracle, Abbaye demurs that the man was to be pitied because the order of creation had to be changed on his account. It may be inferred from Der Nister’s adaptation of the image that his sympathies align more closely with Abbaye. 31.  For a treatment of the golem in modern Jewish literature, see Maya Barzilai, Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters (New York: New York University Press, 2016). 32. Otte, Jewish Identities, 66. 33.  For the text history of Mann’s novel, including its relationship to (his younger brother) Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, as well as the divergences between the novel and Sternberg’s film, see Ulrich Weisstein, “Professor Unrat, Small Town Tyrant, and The Blue Angel: Translations, Versions and Adaptations of Heinrich Mann’s Novel in Two Media,” in Proceedings of the 6th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (Stuttgart: Kunst und Wissen, 1975), 251–57. 34.  As Richard McCormick writes, “Josef von Sternberg was not German. His original name was Jonas Sternberg and he was born in Vienna to Austrian Jewish parents in 1894. . . . He first came to New York at seven and lived there for three years. Then he and his family returned to Austria, but four years later, at fourteen, he came back to New York. From then on he lived in the United States.” See Richard W. McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity” (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 115.

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35.  Another possible source for Der Nister’s story is the 1925 German film Varieté (Variety), directed by E. A. Dupont and starring, like Der Blaue Engel, Emil Jannings. Like “Unter a ployt,” Varieté depicts, in Richard McCormick’s description, a “good, solid German male whose passion for his exotic mistress blinds him to her betrayal of him. . . . All three of them [the main characters in the film] are trapeze artists, objects of the spectacle of the circus, and it is only by accident that Jennings’s [sic] character learns to see ‘for himself.’ Then he can see what is actually going on behind the seductive spectacle of success.” See McCormick, Gender and Sexuality, 29; for an extended discussion of this film, see McCormick, Gender and Sexuality, 72–86. 36.  John Baxter, The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg (London: A. Zwemmer, 1971), 70. 37.  Although “titular correctness” might suggest that the director of Der Blaue Engel should be referred to as “von Sternberg,” it was studio directors who added the von to his name when the Jewish, working-class Viennese director arrived, already an American citizen, in Hollywood; Sternberg himself never took the phony honorific seriously, and as such the practice here will be to demystify his class origins and refer to him properly as “Sternberg.” 38.  It is significant in this regard that when Mann’s novel appeared in English, it was retitled, apparently over the author’s objections, as The Blue Angel. Although Sternberg’s film adaptation of this novel must be counted as the most enduring achievement of Mann’s creativity, it is additionally noteworthy that Sternberg rejected Mann’s original effort at creating a screenplay from his novel. 39.  For a spirited defense of Mann’s novel against Sternberg’s film, see Theodor Adorno, “A Title” and “Unrat and Angel,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 299–304. One can respond to Adorno’s preferences only by saying that this is not his greatest misjudgment in the realm of popular culture. One wonders, moreover, if his characterization of the novel’s glibly ironic climax—“As a degenerate, he [Unrat] attains greatness through his obsession with revenge on a world that for him is composed of disobedient pupils” (Adorno, Notes to Literature, 301)—speaks more to his anticipatory identification with Mann’s protagonist than the merits of the novel over the film. For the originals, see Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2003), 11:654–60. 40.  Joseph Roth, “The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind” [1933], in Joseph Roth in Berlin, 247; What I Saw, 209. Unlike critics who championed Mann’s novel

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over Sternberg’s film, such as Siegfried Kracauer, cited below, or Adorno, Roth sees the intellectual class not as the victims of the mob—which both Kracauer and Adorno “backshadow” as precursors of Nazi terror—but as servants and even instigators of their submission to authority, as well as the most vociferous persecutors of dissidents among their own class (including dissidents such as Kracauer and Adorno themselves). 41.  S. S. Prawer discusses the role of right-wing finance in the production of the film in The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel) (London: BFI, 2002), 10–13. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Prawer. 42.  Judith Mayne, “Marlene Dietrich, The Blue Angel, and Female Performance,” in Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation, and Rhetoric, ed. Dianne Hunter (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 36. 43.  As Barbara Kosta suggests, moreover, the use of Hamlet reiterates a “surrogate” oedipal relationship between Rath and his students that had been more explicitly developed in Mann’s novel: just as Hamlet murders the uncle who had served as a usurping substitute for his murdered father, so Rath’s students come to exert their own emasculating revenge on their professor by exposing his shameful desire to the school authorities and the town at large. See Kosta, Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 10. 44. Lethen, Cool Conduct, 16. 45. Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 161. 46.  See Patrice Petro, “National Cinemas/International Film Culture: The Blue Angel (1930) in Multiple Language Versions,” in Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. Noah Isenberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 255–70. The edition of Der Blaue Engel that I have consulted, a two-disc DVD available from KINO Video (2001), includes a ninety-four-minute English-language version, about twelve minutes shorter than the German-language disc but notably longer than previously available English-language versions. Petro explains that some of the cuts in the English version were made to delete scenes that might be objectionable to American viewers, including scenes of a multiracial (“integrated”) clientele at the Blue Angel. 47. Baxter, Cinema of Josef von Sternberg, 70. 48.  On this point, see Petro, “National Cinemas/International Film Culture,” 264. 49.  Der Blaue Engel in this respect dramatizes a conflict affecting German definitions of culture that implicate film itself as both technology (mass culture) and art (high culture). As Kosta explains, “In a further

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effort to lend pedigree to cinema, literary adaptations were used to draw the middle class to the box office. Reputable authors were enlisted to establish an Autorenfilm, lending seriousness to cinema as an art form, as opposed to mere popular entertainment and kitsch. Works of such wellknown German and Austrian authors as Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Arthur Schnitzler lent respectability to the cinematic fare” (Willing Seduction, 12). 50.  See Der Nister’s essay “Peretz hot geredt un ikh hob gehert,” in Dertseylungen un eseyen, 288. Gennady Estraikh discusses this comment in his introduction “Der Nister’s ‘Hamburg Score,’” in Estraikh et al., Uncovering the Hidden, 9–10. 51. Otte, Jewish Identities, 201. 52.  Otte argues for the ultimate liberalism of the image of Jews— created in collaboration between Jewish and non-Jewish performers, producers, and writers—in German-language popular theater before World War I, akin perhaps to the essentially positive, or at least self-deprecatingly endearing, stereotypes of Jews in late twentieth-century American comedy. As in the work of Philip Roth or Jerry Seinfeld, the comic image of Jews in early twentieth-century German popular culture actually reflects and participates in the integration of Jews into an urban, upper-middleclass milieu, while playing on their status as cultural and temperamental outsiders. See “Comic Relief: Jewish Identities in Jargon Theater, 1890 to the 1920s,” in Jewish Identities, 125–97. As Otte proceeds to document, however, the comic appeal of these benign stereotypes quickly vanishes from the German stage with the rise of an increasingly monolithic German nationalism, as well as antisemitism, during and after World War I. 53.  Gershom Scholem offers a slight yet significant reminiscence of the Jargon theater—Jargon, in this usage, refers specifically to a “Jewishly” inflected German and not to zhargon, an old and pejorative term for the Yiddish language—that diverges somewhat from Otte’s consideration of the genre’s integrative function: A strange phenomenon of Jewish Berlin was the little Herrnfeld Theater . . . where the Herrnfeld brothers, two excellent actors (who were baptized Jews), performed Jewish comedies for years before an almost entirely Jewish public—the only audience able to appreciate the idiom and intonation of these plays, which often remained in the repertoire for a very long time. I once went to see one of these stock comedies, Die Klabriaspartie [The Card Game], and my father waxed very indignant over it, for he claimed that such plays promoted anti-Semitism—as though anti-Semitism had been waiting for the Herrnfeld brothers.

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See From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth [1977], trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), 15–16. 54.  Keun’s 1932 novel Das kunstseidene Mädchen is discussed as a quintessential Neue Sachlichkeit novel at the conclusion to part 1 of this study. 55. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 217. Kracauer’s description of the film, though far more perceptive than Adorno’s, is no more favorable. 56.  M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays [1981], trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 199–200. 57. Otte, Jewish Identities, 202. 58.  Although there is no historical evidence, or contextual reason, to consider that Bakhtin or Benjamin would have known one another’s work, Michael Löwy remarks on one telling instance where Benjamin considers the concept of carnival in his own writing: “In a story from the 1920s entitled Gespräch über dem Corso, he [Benjamin] writes, ‘The Carnival is an exceptional state [Ausnahmezustand]. A descendant of the ancient Saturnalia, when everything was turned upside down and the lords waited on the slaves. But an exceptional state really only stands out against an ordinary one.’” See Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” [2001], trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2016), 60. For the original, see Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 4(2): 763–71 (esp. 765). 59.  Bergelson’s (few) stories set in Berlin while he lived there suggest as vividly that the pursuit of material success in Berlin is both disgraceful and self-deluding. Moyshe Kulbak similarly writes from the vantage of Soviet Minsk an ironic (and virtuosic) mea culpa for his time in Berlin in the mock epic poem “Disner Childe Harold” (“The Childe Harold of Disna,” 1933; Disna is a town in Belarus). Although this discussion considers Bergelson’s Berlin stories in part 1 and Kulbak’s Berlin-era writings in part 3, the definitive discussion of “Disner Childe Harold” can be found in my friend Rachel Seelig’s Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919–1933 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), chap. 3, “‘A Youthful Rogue Am I’: Moyshe Kulbak between Exile and Arrival,” 79–100. 60.  Quoted in Benjamin Harshav, “Chagall: Postmodernism and Fictional Worlds in Painting,” in Marc Chagall and the Jewish Theater (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992), 20. 61.  Joseph Roth, “Berlin,” in Juden auf Wanderschaft, in Romane und Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Dorfler, 2011), 1149. In English, Wandering Jews, 68. 62.  For more on Chagall’s association with Der Nister during the early years of the Soviet Union, see Sabine Koller, “A mayse mit a hon. Dos

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Tsiegele: Marc Chagall illustrating Der Nister,” in Estraikh et al., Uncovering the Hidden, 55–72. It may be noted, as well, that Der Nister’s brother Max (Motl) Kaganovitsh (1894–1979) displayed Chagall’s artwork extensively in his Paris gallery. For more information about Kaganovitsh’s collections—but almost nothing on his relationship with Der Nister—see http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/espace-professionnels/professionals /researchers/archive-centre.html#c59641. It was my pleasure to spend a day with this archive in Paris on August 10, 2012. 63.  Harshav, “Chagall,” 18; emphasis in original. 64. Baxter, Cinema of Josef von Sternberg, 70. 65.  Regarding the specifically Christological references in the author’s Symbolist writings, Dov Sadan (1902–1989) notes that Der Nister is the first significant writer to introduce the figure of Jesus to modern Yiddish literature, even before the more famously (notoriously) syncretic work of Sholem Asch (1880–1957). As Sadan elaborates, the impulse to incorporate Christian motifs into his work was yet another aspect of the influence that Russian Symbolism exerted on Der Nister, since the language of Russian Symbolism was saturated with Christian rhetoric. See Sadan, “Fodem un kanves: vegn Der Nister” [Thread and canvases, 1978], in Toyern un tirn [Gates and doors] (Tel Aviv: Yisroel Bukh, 1979), 51–52. For further consideration of the Jesus figure in modern Yiddish culture, which nevertheless overlooks Der Nister’s work, see Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 66.  Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik, in Gesammelte Schriften, 13:291. In English, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy [1971], trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 149. 67.  On this point see Max Erik, Vegn altyidshn roman un novele, fertsenter-zekhtsenter yorhundert (Warsaw: Der veg tsum visn, 1926), 22–23. 68.  As Barbara Kosta specifies of Der Blaue Engel, “The mute clown, played by Reinhold Bernt, often initiates the transition from sound to silence by opening and closing the dressing room door. One of the more elusive figures in The Blue Angel, he serves as a remnant of the silent era when cinema focused on the body, and when pantomime was identified as its closest relative—he invites a reading of the pure image and reminds the viewer of cinema’s roots in the carnivalesque” (Willing Seduction, 118–19). 69. In Uncovering the Hidden alone, there are three articles out of a total ten devoted to Di Mishpokhe Mashber. More recently, the collection Three

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Cities of Yiddish: St Petersburg—Warsaw—Moscow, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2017), devotes two articles to Hoyptshtet (1934), Der Nister’s “transitional” volume between Gedakht and Di Mishpokhe Mashber: Sabine Koller’s “Der Nister’s ‘Lenningrad’: A Phantom fartseykhenung” (73–89) and Misha Krutikov’s “From Facts to Symbols: Space and Architeture in Der Nister’s Hoyptshtet” (90–103). 70.  Sadan recognizes an inverse relationship between Agnon and Der Nister in their approach to language: just as Der Nister begins his career as a teenager writing in Hebrew and then switching over to Yiddish, Agnon starts in Yiddish and then adopts Hebrew as well as his pseudonymous alter-ego—as worthy of exegesis as Der Nister’s—by the age of twenty. See on this point Sadan, “Fodem un kanves,” 43–44. Like all dialectical relationships, the correspondences between the two figures are as pertinent as the divergences. 71.  Scholem offers two assessments of Agnon and his time in Germany, “S.Y. Agnon—the Last Hebrew Classic?” [1967] and “Agnon in Germany: Recollections” [1966], in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 93–116, 117–25. In his memoir on Walter Benjamin, he further recounts how he attended a Passover seder (“according to the strictly Orthodox ritual”) with his brother Werner, a militant leftist; Benjamin and his wife; and Agnon, with the family of Agnon’s wife. Of all the dinners in history, this is the one at which I would most want to have been present! See Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship [1975], trans. Harry Zohn (New York: NYRB, 1981), 140. 72.  In addition to his voluminous prose fiction in Hebrew, Agnon was a significant anthologizer, in German as well as Hebrew, of traditional tales and commentaries, and he was moreover the coauthor of a prayer recited in many modern synagogues, including Orthodox ones, on behalf of the state of Israel. The representative anthological volume of his available in English, translated from Hebrew, is Days of Awe: A Treasury of Jewish Wisdom for Reflection, Repentance, and Renewal on the High Holy Days [1948], trans. Maurice T. Galpert. (New York: Schocken Books, 1995). 73.  See Dan Leor, “Agnon in Germany,” AJS Review 18, no. 1 (1993): 83. 74.  For critical considerations of these twin Yiddish and Hebrew journals, see Delphine Bechtel, “1922,” in Gilman and Zipes, Yale Companion, 420–26; and Naomi Brenner, “Milgroym, Rimon and Interwar Jewish Bilingualism,” Journal of Jewish Identities 7, no. 1 (January 2014): 23–48. Der Nister and Bergelson resigned from their editorial positions with Milgroym

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after the first issue in order to make more explicit their growing affiliation with Soviet Communism, which precluded their association with a purely aesthetic, ideologically unaffiliated journal, particularly one that published a Hebrew edition, which by then would have been prohibited in the Soviet Union. 75.  Shachar Pinsker notes the affinities and intellectual debts that Ad hena shares with Neue Sachlichkeit, both in its depiction of interwar ennui and in its attitude toward urban space, in his “Deciphering the Hieroglyphics of the Metropolis: Literary Topographies of Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism,” in Estraikh and Krutikov, Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, 42–49. 76.  For a Hebrew-language consideration of Agnon’s novel, which overdetermines the degree to which it was conceived under the shadow of the Holocaust, see Hillel Weiss, “Ad hena kemavo lasho’ah,” Bikoret ufarshanut: ktav-‘et bein tehumi leheker sifrut vetarbut 35–36 (2001–02): 111–46. What Weiss seems to misconstrue about Agnon’s narrative is not the presence of the Holocaust but its absence. 77.  See Maya Barzilai, “S.Y. Agnon’s German Consecration and the ‘Miracle’ of Hebrew Letters,” Prooftexts 33, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 64. This article insightfully expresses the degree to which German and Hebrew interpenetrate one another, conceived through Agnon’s linguistic consciousness, which mastered each language but mediated them both through his native Yiddish. The effect of these linguistic interferences achieves for Agnon’s prose style an affinity with Der Nister’s, in that both authors cultivate a sense that they are writing in a borrowed language. Hebrew and Yiddish, respectively, is the national language for each writer, yet the nation to which each language gives voice remains for either writer, in their fictional narratives, a mirage. 78.  Sh. Y. Agnon, Ad hena (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998), 22. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Agnon, H. In English, To This Day, trans. Hillel Halkin (New Milford, CT: Toby, 2008), 39. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Agnon, E. The passage cited here is actually more extensive and elaborate in the original—which includes much convoluted wordplay too ambiguous and idiosyncratic to be translatable—than in Halkin’s quite resourceful translation.

part III APOCALYPTIC ORIGINS: THE POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA IN GERMAN AND YIDDISH MODERNISM

Metal Machine Music

If Neue Sachlichkeit, as considered in the first section of this study, is an aesthetic of smooth surfaces1 and cool conduct,2 the Baroque in its variety of manifestations can be characterized simultaneously as the aesthetics of elaborate ornamentation and mosaic fragmentation; the two stylistic characteristics maintain a dialectical relationship in German culture during the Weimar era, and no work of art captures this dialectic as well as Fritz Lang’s overwrought yet iconic film Metropolis (1927). Punctuated with interpolated dreams, delusions, and parables, the film tells a tale of social revolution, instigated by the ruler of the futuristic city (Joh Fredersen), through the machinations of the rival for his late wife’s affections (Rotwang), who constructs a cyborg-clone of the true love (Maria) of the city father’s only son (Freder). The master’s plot is foiled, paradoxically, by Freder and the true Maria’s intervention on behalf of the rebellious mob, restoring the order that the masses apparently crave over the chaos into which they have been manipulated by promising a “heart” to the tyranny

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under which they live. Thomas Elsaesser refers to Metropolis as a “ruin-in-progress.”3 Like so many works of German-language modernism—one thinks of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, as well as Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities and Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron—it is not just an unfinished work but in all likelihood unfinishable. The Baroque ornamentation in Metropolis extends to its depictions of the working urban masses, transformed under the camera eye into the “mass ornament” that Siegfried Kracauer identifies as the casualty in industrial production’s assault on nature and individuality.4 The complaints of H. G. Wells (1866–1946), among others, that Metropolis functions so poorly as a predictor of the future of course miss the point of the film, 5 which is not to offer a “realistic” or even plausible vision of the future but instead to present an allegorical image of the present.6 It reimagines the visual montage of Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt from the perspective of Joseph Roth’s Georg B.,7 showing the present moment accelerated from the twentieth century into the fortieth.8 The conflict between Freder and Fredersen—and if Fredersen is literally the “son of Freder,” then the child here, truly, would be father to the man—is between an “Americanist” father and an “Expressionist” son; progress, whatever it means in the film or for the filmmakers, is figured as a regression.9 Although it is set one hundred years in the future, in 2026, a disconcertingly close date to the composition of this book, Metropolis is nevertheless relentless in its production, or recycling, of allegorical images rather than dialectical ones, and the redemption it promises is not transformational but restorative. Like Alfred Döblin’s Berge Meere und Giganten, its vision of the distant future is identical to a journey into the primordial past. Though the storyline’s vision of apocalypse and redemption is a late vestige of Expressionist aesthetics, the visual design of the film—its infinite cityscapes of unornamented skyscrapers juxtaposed against the same close-ups of machinery in motion

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that punctuate the visual cadences of Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt—derives from Neue Sachlichkeit. As Andreas Huyssen writes, “The expressionist view emphasizes technology’s oppressive and destructive potential. . . . During the 1920s and especially during the stabilization phase of the Weimar Republic [from the German currency reform of 1924 until the global Great Depression of 1929] this expressionist view was slowly replaced by the technology cult of the Neue Sachlichkeit and its unbridled confidence in technical progress and social engineering.”10 The film represents the exchange between these two aesthetics, the dialectics at a standstill capturing both. The plot of the film is overdetermined in its allusions to the Faust motif, mythology, and religion: it mixes the coming into Enlightenment of the Buddha with the tale of Salome, juxtaposed against a Marian retelling of the Christian Passion. At one point, about forty-eight minutes into the film,11 Freder’s arms are crucified on the hands of the clock, or wheel, at which he toils, and he exclaims, “Father, Father, will 10 hours never end”—the Neue Sachlichkeit equivalent of Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani (Matt. 27:46). Cinematically, it contains elements that either derive from or anticipate the blockbuster epic,12 science fiction, the urban crime thriller, the family drama, and a love story. The many contradictions of genre and theme that constitute the plot of Metropolis ultimately subvert its ability to tell a coherent story, and these contradictions grow most prolix— “Baroque”—in what for most films would be the main plot but which in Metropolis is at best a subplot, at worse an afterthought: the romance between Freder and Maria. By projecting almost all of Maria’s sexuality onto her robot double, Lang subverts eros as an attribute of technology, betraying as director his own erotic fascination with fetishized machinery rather than the “organic” allure of the human body. Janet Lungstrum connects this fetishism with Ruttmann’s film: “In Ruttmann’s Berlin, everything moves constantly in a sexually interactive circuitry, with the

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camera crosscutting to and fro between close-ups of the pistons of the factory machinery, the legs of the commuters, the dancers’ Charlestoning legs, the soldiers’ marching legs, and the legs of the cattle.”13 One recognizes the parallel, or commentary, to these motifs in the soul-crushing synchronization of marching workers in the underground city of Metropolis, as well as the threat signified by the merger of uncontained feminine sexuality with mechanization in the figure of the Robot Maria. Indeed, at least as ardent as the romantic relationship between Freder and Maria, both in thematic and dramatic terms, is the homosocial relationship between Freder and Josephat, an executive dismissed by Fredersen and forced to undertake the same descent into the lower depths that Freder has undertaken voluntarily. Josephat and Freder’s relationship in turn corresponds to Fredersen’s competition with Rotwang; these two “couples” cross with one another over the split identity of Maria as human and robot, virgin and femme fatale. Fredersen and Freder represent in gnostic terms what in Dovid Bergelson’s novel had been suggested as the dialectical relationship of mides ha-din (“strict judgment”) and mides ha-rakhamim (“pure mercy”).14 Fredersen is the Father as unforgiving judge; Freder is the Son as incarnation of mercy, the “heart” beating for all humanity. These theological implications coincide with the science-fiction melodrama fueling the action of the film by compelling a displacement of the oedipal struggle between father and son onto an artificial father figure, Rotwang, just as the sexual danger posed by Maria is displaced onto her cyborg double, the simulacrum of her image captured against her will that confirms the suppression of her sexuality by projecting it onto an inhuman, automated double. Almost as much as Maria herself, Rotwang embodies the proliferating contradictions of the film. Though likened by critics to Rabbi Loew in Paul Wegener’s film Der Golem (1920)—Anton Kaes in particular has stressed the antisemitic insinuation of this

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semblance in his critiques of the film15—Rotwang seems to bear a closer resemblance to a matinee-idol version of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), crossed with an anticipation of Peter Sellers’ performance as Dr. Strangelove. His prosthetic hand signifies that he has become one with the machines he invents and despises. Living, apparently, in the one nonmodern dwelling in the city, he is both a harbinger of the future and a relic from the past, just as the film as a whole is. He is the romantic genius at war against Fredersen, the rational materialist, and their conflict, as much as the love affair between Freder and Maria or the romance of Freder and the working classes, is what propels the film, both in its visual logic and in its dramatic action. The final battle between Freder and Rotwang is accordingly oedipal: Freder confers a surrogate paternity on Rotwang’s status as his mother’s lover, as Hamlet does Claudius, by killing him. The contrast between Rotwang’s visionary derangement and Fredersen’s masterful coldness, a struggle that precedes the narrative framework of the film, suggests the historical conflict between Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit, and it is appropriate in terms of characterizing German culture in the Weimar era that there is no clear winner. Although Rotwang has died at the end of the film and his machine has been destroyed, these acts signify the subversion of Neue Sachlichkeit’s cool conduct through the fire and fury necessary to subdue them, indicating that the forces in contest with one another throughout the film are as much complementary as antagonistic. If the film’s ending failed to persuade so many people,16 it is not only a consequence of its ideological ambiguity— because the handshake that concludes the action underscores that a verbal promise is worth the paper it’s written on, because after all the melodrama surrounding her rescue, audiences remain unconvinced that Freder has chosen to save the right Maria—but also because of its generic incongruity. After the film has derived so much of its dramatic energy from the lexicon of the Trauerspiel,

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the efforts at a happy conclusion feel unconvincing, a Hollywood ending tacked on to an Expressionist horror show. The allegorical significance of the film can be likened structurally to Sh. Y. Agnon’s Ad hena,17 insofar as its most fantastic moments are figured as insertions of vision, hallucination, or nightmare to the ostensibly realistic primary narrative, as when Freder stares into the machine providing power for the city and sees a vision of the biblical god Moloch, fed by human sacrifice, or Maria’s interpolated vision of the Tower of Babel; even the Robot Maria’s “Whore of Babylon” dance can be seen as Freder’s fever dream, and as such a fantasy of the real Maria as much as the action of the fake one. If one can say that fairy tales and the Trauerspiel are related to one another in that the former concerns enchanted children and the latter portrays their disenchanted parents,18 both Freder and Maria revert to fantasy, in contrast to Fredersen’s cerebral empiricism and Rotwang’s demonic experimentation. Maria’s Tower of Babel sermon is meant to be a parable about the way in which the modern production process alienates workers from their labor by dissociating the vision of the owners from the hands that bring that vision into being. But it could serve equally well, like all allegorical narratives, to illuminate the pathos of the film itself, which tries to visualize a world it can only gesture toward without articulating it. The allegorical nature of the film is demonstrated most explicitly in its motto: the head and the hand require a mediator rather than a redeemer or savior. Christ as labor arbitrator—one poised to inherit his father’s business, no less—is the most untranscendent deliverance ever imagined, in film or otherwise. Like many other classics of Weimar cinema, including Der Blaue Engel,19 Metropolis depicts a conflict in temporality. This conflict finds representation most vividly in the contrast between the ten-hour clocks marking the workday in the lower depths and the conventional twelve-hour watch that Fredersen wears and consults. Moreover, as one of the last great silent films before the

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advent of the talkie—it was released just three months before The Jazz Singer20 —it was, like the Parisian arcades, at the same time avant-garde and obsolete.21 These temporal contradictions expand to include dislocations of ideology, narration, and artistic rationale. If Metropolis is an aesthetic failure, it offers not a failed aesthetic but an aesthetic of failure in which every gesture undercuts every other, and its promise of a classless union among heart, head, and hand only underscores the incompatibilities within the society of the present as much as the irreconcilability of organs, limbs, and will in the technologized bodies of the future. The primary affinity that Metropolis shares with the works under consideration in this section is less its technological anxieties than its eschatological apprehensions. As Kaes states, the biblical themes in Metropolis are taken primarily from the book of Genesis (the Tower of Babel) and the book of Revelations (the Whore of Babylon), and they connect the apocalyptic fears of the film to an aspiration for new beginnings.22 These motifs also speak to larger concerns in Weimar aesthetics—particularly in its Expressionistic preoccupation with the dawn, transformation, apocalypse, and redemption—tied to biblical models. What follows is a consideration of religious motifs alternately in German Jewish and Yiddish modernism, specifically the writings of Joseph Roth and Moyshe Kulbak.23 Although Roth was one of the leading journalists of the 1920s, as well as a successful producer of novels in the Neue Sachlichkeit style of disaffected urban stories, often focusing on the inability of demobilized soldiers to readjust to everyday life, by 1930 his writing had taken a turn toward alternately apocalyptic and nostalgic evocations of his native Galicia and his belief in the social harmony and purposefulness of life under the fallen Austrian monarchy. Kulbak, analogously, spent almost four years in Berlin (1920–1924), arriving already as one of the most accomplished “neo-Romantic” lyric poets in postwar Yiddish literature and leaving as one of its most experimental High Modernists, particularly in his newly developed narrative

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style, which like Roth’s later work combines nostalgic and apocalyptic motifs in a thematic focus inextricable from a complex of mystical, syncretic, and heretical religious ideas. Notes 1.  See Ward, Weimar Surfaces. 2.  See Lethen, Cool Conduct. 3.  See Thomas Elsaesser, Metropolis [2000] (London: BFI Film Classics, 2005), 37. 4.  On this point, see Anton Kaes’s article “Metropolis (1927): City, Cinema, Modernity,” in Isenberg, Weimar Cinema, 176. 5.  For a summary of such complaints, see Elsaesser, Metropolis, 16. More comprehensively, see Fritz Lang’s Metropolois: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, ed. Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), which provides a compendium of older and newer criticism on the film. 6.  Nonetheless, when one considers the increasing automation of the workplace, the displacement of the working classes in industrialized nations from manufacturing to service industries, the dilution or outright prohibition of labor organizing throughout the “new” economy, and the collusion between industry and government as a business model for the maintenance of capitalism globally, many aspects of Metropolis’s vision of the future resemble the economic present more uncomfortably than prognosticators could have predicted or than we today would wish to admit. 7.  Each considered in part 1 of this study. 8.  Derek Hillard in this respect compares Ruttmann’s compression of everyday life in Berlin to a single hour to Lang’s focus on temporality: “The film Metropolis—which despite its futuristic genre is comparable with Berlin [Symphonie der Großstadt] in its visual concerns with modern mass labor—dispenses entirely with . . . natural temporal rhythms. In Metropolis work never stops, and while some workers retire after a day’s labor, there is no general cyclical pause brought about by the end of natural light, which would offer time to return to a seemingly authentic and reconciled moment.” See his “Walter Ruttmann’s Janus-Faced View of Modernity: The Ambivalence of Description in Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt,” Monatshefte 96, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 80–81. 9.  See, in this respect, Isenberg, Weimar Cinema, 188.

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10.  See “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” New German Critique 24–25 (1981–82): 223. 11.  The version of the film I have consulted for these remarks is The Complete Metropolis, released on DVD by Kino Lorber Films in 2010, which includes twenty-five minutes of footage recovered from a damaged copy located in Buenos Aires in 2008; although this version is still as much as a half hour shorter than the premiere version, it is as complete as can currently be expected, and it fills in a few plot details unavailable in previous editions. 12.  As Anton Kaes notes, in the era of silent film, the cinematic epic was typically a Biblical epic. See Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009): 191. 13.  See her essay “Metropolis and the Technosexual Woman of German Modernity,” in von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis, 136. 14.  See part 1 of this discussion. 15.  See, for example, Isenberg, Weimar Cinema, 180; Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 172. 16.  For a summary of the ideological debates affecting the film’s reception, see Elsaesser, Metropolis, 42–56. In spite of the film’s reputation, particularly among left-wing critics, from Kracauer to Kaes, as a consciously fascistic parable, Elsaesser documents its vilification in the Nazi press, at least by the 1940s. 17.  Discussed at the conclusion of part 2 in this comparison. 18.  In this respect, one can observe how the refrain at the film’s end from the Thin Man and Grot—“Where are the children?”—anticipates Lang’s disenchanted fairy tale, M (1931). 19.  Considered in part 2 of this study. 20. Elsaesser, Metropolis, 38. 21.  Walter Benjamin himself argues of Surrealism, which derives from distinct political motivations and therefore is never invoked in discussions of Metropolis—in spite of overlapping themes between the film and many Surrealist artworks regarding the role of myth, technology, and gender— that the “will to apocatastasis [a theological concept in which salvation is figured as a return to origins] speaks here, the resolve to gather again, in revolutionary action and in revolutionary thinking, precisely the elements of the ‘too early’ and the ‘too late,’ of the first beginning and the final decay.” See Das Passagen-Werk in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 5(2): 852; in English, Arcades Project, 698. Michael Löwy cites this reference in Fire Alarm, 36.

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22. Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 188. 23.  To be clear, the purpose of the juxtaposition of Lang with Roth and Kulbak is not to allege a “Jewish” identification for Lang’s personal life or his art but instead to illustrate how significantly the religious themes of these “peripheral” authors—one writing about Eastern Europe, the other writing in an Eastern European language—intersect with those of a leading purveyor of the mainstream German culture in the interwar era. Although his mother had been born Jewish, Lang himself (1890–1976) was baptized in infancy and raised as a Roman Catholic, devoutly according to his recollections. Moreover, his collaborator on Metropolis and his other Weimar-era masterworks was Thea von Harbou (1888–1954), whose sympathies for the Nazi regime apparently preceded her decision to join the party after the start of World War II. Lang’s own relationship to Nazism was more complex: reportedly, Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) was so enamored of Metropolis that he was prepared to offer Lang “honorary” Aryan status, though Lang rejected the offer and left Nazi Germany within the year that the party came to power.

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ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT Fragmentation, Apocalypse, and the Pursuit of Origins in Joseph Roth’s Representation of Eastern Europe

Silent Prophecy

In his invaluable biography, David Bronsen (1926–1984) relates that Joseph Roth’s last words, murmured at the end of May 1939 in a Paris hospital where he lay dying of bronchial pneumonia and suffering from delirium tremens, were spoken to a French nurse who was unable to understand German.1 For a writer of such famously contradictory religious and political convictions—a Galician Jew with a passionate fondness for Catholic ritual;2 a radical, antinationalist pacifist with nostalgia for the Habsburg military; a great and well-regarded journalist with inexhaustible energy for writing fiction and spinning fictions about himself—it is emblematic that his final confession, and the deity to which it was addressed, should remain a mystery. That the essence of this riddle should be found not only in the confusion over his multiple ideological affiliations but also in his use of German at a moment of exile suggests that the one stable identification in his professional career, with the German language, in fact contributes to the blurring of his social commitments by confining their multilingual resonances to a single language and by locating their cosmopolitan mobility in a single nationality with which they never comfortably or exclusively coincided. 267

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The elusiveness of Roth’s final utterance provides a cautionary but suggestive lesson for the reading of his published writing, even when considering its most celebrated instances. In particular, the novel Hiob: Roman eines einfachen Mannes (Job: Novel of a Simple Man, 1930) ostensibly offers his most straightforward fictional dramatization of the traditional Eastern European Jewish world to which he was born. Yet not only does a critical examination of the work reveal the ambiguities of its descriptions, it also underscores the role of the German language in magnifying the work’s complex cultivation of paradox and ambiguity. Often paired with Radetzkymarsch (Radetzky March, 1932) to demarcate the break in Roth’s career between the generally topical, urban novels of the Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetic and the more consciously romantic, mythopoetic, seemingly nostalgic fiction of the 1930s, in several respects Hiob stands as a schematic complement to the novel Tarabas: Ein Gast auf dieser Erde (Tarabas: A Guest on This Earth, 1934). While the latter novel depicts a brutish Russian peasant’s journey from New York City back to the border town of Koropta in pursuit of moral redemption foretold by a gypsy fortune-teller, Hiob describes a pious Jewish householder, Mendel Singer, who travels from the czarist Pale of Settlement to New York. Over the course of Hiob, structured loosely but deliberately to resemble the biblical book of Job, 3 Mendel abandons his youngest, severely handicapped son, Menuchim, in the shtetl—in anachronistically contemporary terms, one would likely diagnose the child with profound autism—and loses his two older sons, Jonas and Schemarjah, the latter known in America as “Sam,” to the vicissitudes of World War I.4 Mendel’s wife, Deborah, dies of grief after Schemarjah/Sam’s death, and his daughter, Mirjam, succumbs to mental illness. At the end of the novel, however, Mendel’s sufferings are apparently redeemed when Menuchim, having adopted the name Alexej Kossak, arrives in New York and reveals himself to Mendel during a Passover seder, now miraculously cured and a successful composer. Although Mendel’s

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trajectory from the traditional world into urban modernity reflects Roth’s own journey, the author situates the novel in the czarist Pale of Settlement and New York City. These two settings are similar to his native Galicia and the metropolises of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, where he resided throughout his adult life, but in geographic, political, and “socio-semiotic” terms, 5 they are fundamentally distinct from his own itinerary. The complexity of his project in transposing a straightforward, semiautobiographical story into a fable of suffering and redemption can be located in the incongruous proximity, the allegorical substitution, of one locale, language, and landscape with the other. Linguistically, these disjunctions manifest themselves in an unannounced conflict between the narrator’s German and his characters’ Yiddish.6 Thus, in the guise of presenting a nostalgic reverie of his native culture for a Western reader, Roth reiterates a conventional cultural hierarchy in which written, literary German supplants spoken, colloquial Yiddish, while at the same time relegating the German-language reader to the status of an interloper on the native culture, for whom Yiddish can be evoked but never actually used.7 For example, in the scene depicting Mirjam’s mental breakdown, Roth describes the arrival of a doctor by writing, with deceptive simplicity, “The doctor came. He was a German. He could talk with Mendel.”8 The difference between Yiddish and German is effaced in the novel, so that the “original” language of the characters’ thoughts and speech is never quoted or represented directly but is written over by the text’s actual German. This novel, like any number of immigrant and postcolonial narratives, functions as a kind of palimpsest, a translation for which a native-language original version never existed. This strategy sets each language against the other with respect to discourse in the novel, subordinating both to a rhetorical subterfuge that excludes the reader from complete access to either.9 To account for the ways in which the German language assumes a simultaneously territorializing and dislocating role in the novel,

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one should consider a remark Roth makes a few years later, when he was already an exile from the German-speaking world. In his “Preface to the New Edition (1937)” of the travelogue Juden auf Wanderschaft—which along with Hiob constitutes the most intensive and sympathetic account of Jewish culture in his oeuvre— Roth writes, “Many years ago, when I wrote this book [1926] . . . there was no acute problem affecting the Jews of Western Europe. What mattered then was to persuade the Jews and non-Jews of Western Europe to grasp the tragedy of the Eastern Jews—and especially in the land of unlimited opportunity, by which of course I meant not America but Germany.”10 The juxtaposition of Germany with America suggests a clue toward interpreting Roth’s decision to set Hiob (partly) in New York. If Germany substitutes for America, in the context of the 1930s, as both a promised land and a paradise lost, then Mendel’s journey from the Pale of Settlement to the United States can be seen as a refiguration of Roth’s own migration from Brody on the Austrian border of the Russian Empire to Berlin. Mendel Singer’s reluctance to travel to America, otherwise anomalous with respect to the desperation of so many European Jews trying to emigrate after the United States closed its borders to them in the 1920s, resonates with Roth’s own ambivalence toward the German metropolis and the modernity it signified. Indeed, Roth’s retreat to an only semihistorical Eastern European past is predicated on his rejection of both Western modernity and the future that the Soviet Union signified for so many of his contemporaries. As Andreas Kilcher has written, Roth’s disenchantment with the Soviet Union derives from his sense of its growing resemblance to Western Europe. His break with Communist sympathies can be dated to a lecture in January 1927 where he states, “In Russia the scarlet, ecstatic, bloody terror of the active revolution has given way to the dull, silent, inky-black terror of bureaucracy.”11 What the hypermodernization of the Bolshevik revolution achieves for Russia is the disenchanted

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bureaucratization and technological transformation of everyday life. Roth’s rejection of communism is thus identical to Siegfried Kracauer’s critique of Neue Sachlichkeit and the whitecollar standardization of contemporaneous, capitalist Germany. Roth’s consequent retreat from Neue Sachlichkeit, in both the philosophical and aesthetic senses, leads the author back to the “other,” despised, discredited, superseded Eastern Europe—and to his efforts to create a “manufactured” storytelling technique.12 Hiob is therefore a modern novel written in the German language but against what Roth perceives as the bankruptcy of Jewish abandonment of tradition in pursuit of German modernity. If one recognizes Mendel’s emigration to America as parallel to Roth’s journey to Berlin, via Vienna, then Roth’s address of a common readership in both Hiob and Juden auf Wanderschaft becomes comprehensible: Germany must be the “land of unlimited opportunity” for Western Jews, because who else but German Jews would Roth be addressing with a critique of German modernity written in German? The role of German, historically the language of assimilationist enlightenment, is crucial to the polemic that Roth suggests in both books. The German language is the means by which the collision of one space and temporality with another occurs. The optimistic, arguably fantastic conclusion of Hiob signifies not the implication that Mendel has found a home in America, in spite of the providential nature of his experience there, but a nearly spectral reconciliation of his present with the past.13 Indeed, Mendel at the end of the novel remains as nostalgic for his abandoned home in the Pale of Settlement as Roth would grow for the vanished dual monarchy of his youth. Menuchim, in this respect, doesn’t so much appear at the end of the novel as he is conjured by Mendel’s desire. In the legendary terms of the novel’s allegory, his return to the novel recalls as much the Golem of Prague—created out of the hopes and fears of a newly modern, urban Jewish culture—as the prophet Elijah of the Passover seder.

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Osterbrot or Matzo?

Given both its dramatic significance to the narrative and its idiosyncratic linguistic usage, Roth’s descriptions of Passover at the novel’s conclusion offer an interpretive key to the narrative as a whole. Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) translates a crucial passage by writing, “People were preparing for Easter, and in all the houses Mendel helped. He ran the plane over the wooden tabletops to rid them of the profane remains of food accumulated during the year. He placed in the white partitions of the showwindows the cylindrical packages in which the layers of Passover bread were wrapped in bright red paper” (Hiob, E 183–84). But just as Thompson follows Roth’s strange reference to the season as “Easter” (Ostern) rather than Passover (Passah), the narrator similarly refers to “Passover bread” in fact as “Easter bread” (Osterbrot; Hiob, G 181), overlooking a readily available, nonsectarian term for the concept, ungesäuertes Brot (“unleavened bread”).14 Despite the novel’s insistence on Mendel’s unmediated connection to Jewish tradition—although he abandons strict adherence to ritual following his personal tragedies, in outer appearance he remains an orthodox Jew from the shtetl—in semantic terms it is unclear whether the holiday at which the novel’s denouement occurs is Easter or Passover. As Gershon Shaked notes, Osterbrot is Roth’s neologism (Shaked, 283), and given the uses to which the Passover story has been put in Christian symbolism, this substitution implies that matzo functions here as a communion wafer, the means by which Mendel’s “dead” son is conjured back to life.15 In socio-semiotic terms, therefore, Osterbrot doesn’t translate— in etymological terms, “carry over”—the term matzo; it writes over the Jewish concept with a German coinage, so that the original term is effaced in the new linguistic context. In Shaked’s interpretation, it is necessary to recognize the Jewish reference system working through Roth’s German—for example, when the

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narrator stresses repeatedly that Mendel is “a teacher” (Lehrer) to evoke the Yiddish concept of a melamed, which in Yiddish is both an elementary instructor of Jewish texts and colloquially a luckless, foolish, implicitly impotent pauper. In semantic terms, Lehrer is the only available translation into standard German of the term melamed, but in a semiotic sense, the two words convey opposite connotations of knowledge and prestige. Thus, Roth isn’t translating Yiddish for his German readers but transubstantiating it to create a discourse in which neither the absent Yiddish nor the present German can be understood if divorced from one another.16 In this way, the contradictory implications of the novel’s metaphorical language can resonate without resolution, so that more than one interpretation can be deduced from any rhetorical gesture, and no hermeneutic conclusion can take precedence over another. To borrow a (theoretically contested) term from musicology, Hiob is a polytonal narrative,17 in which the mythopoetic discourse of the novel clashes continuously with an ethnographic impulse toward verisimilitude. For want of a formula, one might suggest that Roth the novelist is constantly at odds in Hiob with Roth the journalist, though even a casual encounter with his feuilletons indicates that the same tensions persist in that body of work as well. As Shaked notes, the cosmology of timing the narrative’s climax at Passover lends the novel an unmistakably messianic gloss: “Menuchim’s appearance in the family room during the celebration of Easter [Osterfestes] is a clear allusion to the coming of the Messiah. He does this in fact at the very instant after the Jewish custom of awaiting the Prophet Elijah, the precursor and herald of the Messiah” (Shaked, 289).18 This messianic insinuation takes a particularly, though not exclusively, Christological turn when Menuchim/Alexej convinces Mendel to violate a religious commandment in public for the first time, by riding in an automobile on a holy day. Roth’s usage here again is noteworthy: “Der Sohn bereitete ihm das Bad, kleidete ihn an, setzte ihn in den Wagen”

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(Hiob, G 214; E 217). Not specifically Mendel’s son but the son bids the father to abandon Jewish law for a new, apparently more benign dispensation. Mendel, for his part, readily acquiesces to the son’s prompting by declaring of the Lord, “He is so great that our badness seems very small” (Hiob, G 209; E 211). Though still acknowledging that riding in a car on the first day of Passover constitutes a sin, it is now a negligible one, so that if Mendel’s worldview remains unmistakably Jewish, it is nonetheless compatible with whatever authority—whether Christian, modern, or artistic—Menuchim/Alexej has summoned when prompting the transgression. As becomes apparent in a broader consideration of the novel’s treatment of Jewishness, this adaptability signifies both the ethical preoccupations and the potential subversiveness at the narrative’s core. Indeed, the apparently Christological motif in the novel begins in the first chapter, when Deborah beseeches a rabbi in the shtetl Kluczýsk for a blessing to heal Menuchim. In his pronouncement, the rabbi performs the role not only of a Hasidic rebbe but also of a Christian prophet: “There will not be many like him in Israel. Pain will make him wise, ugliness good, bitterness mild, and sickness strong. His eyes will see far and deep. His ears will be clear and full of echoes. His mouth will be silent, but when he opens his lips they will announce good tidings [Gutes künden]. Have no fear, and go home!” (Hiob, G 19; E 15).19 By way of both the proclamation of Menuchim’s moral strength in physical weakness and Mendel’s subsequent, if reluctant, decision to abandon him in the shtetl, Roth creates a series of associations, from a Christian implication that Jews received the revelation of Jesus’s divinity but rejected it, to an inversion of Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as the valorization of Jewish weakness over pagan strength,20 to a rebuke of the migration from the shtetl to the city and from the East to the West. Each of these associations remains implicit within the narrative as a whole, but the allegorical significance of one remains juxtaposed against the others, so that

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an interpretation of the novel must proceed analogically rather than exegetically. For if Menuchim functions in the narrative as a Christ figure, he does so only in grotesquely nontranscendent terms. 21 In this respect, Roth writes, “Menuchim did not die; he lived, a mighty cripple. From now on, Deborah’s womb was dry and barren. Menuchim was the last deformed fruit of her body” (Hiob, G 24; E 20). Deborah, similarly, had functioned before the onset of Menuchim’s infirmity as a parodic earth mother. Thus, when nursing her youngest son in Mendel’s schoolroom, the narrator notes, “White, swollen, and colossal, her breast flowed from her open blouse and drew the glances of the boys irresistibly. All present seemed to suckle at Deborah” (Hiob, G 11; E 7). Roth reiterates this association when, following Jewish tradition, Deborah goes to the cemetery to appeal for heavenly intercession on behalf of Menuchim: “She sought after the dead who might intercede for her, called upon her parents, upon Menuchim’s grandfather, after whom the child had been named, then upon the ancestors of the Jews, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, upon the bones of Moses, and finally upon the Matriarchs [die Erzmütter]”22 (Hiob, G 17; E 13). Although the cosmology of these associations suggests the chthonic potential for rebirth within death—a process interrupted by Menuchim’s illness, which deprives Deborah of her primal fecundity—such resurrection is fulfilled only in New York, not the shtetl. Miracles can be foretold in the traditional domain of Eastern Europe but actually occur in the modern metropolis, which functions for Roth, as for Fritz Lang, as a site of “Hollywood endings.”23 Roth therefore reverses the illusory effort to reenchant the past by casting the shtetl as the place of disenchanted Erfahrung and the modern city as the domain of fabulous Erlebnis. He thus assembles a broad cluster of associations around the spatial polarities of New York and the shtetl in Hiob: New York is fantastical but modern, a city of human vitality and technological progress—the

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urban setting par excellence for conventional realism—yet a locale that for him could only be purely imaginary.24 Mendel’s hometown, Zuchnow, by contrast, is a domain of death and suffering, where Jobian rhetoric resonates with a culture in which the Hebrew Bible remains the primary measure for understanding, interpreting, and assimilating experience. These contrasts, however, are by no means static. Rather, Roth establishes them in order to suggest a spectrum against which his characters’ trajectory acquires meaning. In this respect, it is their ability to traverse the geographical and metaphysical distance between the shtetl and Manhattan that is significant. As Roth writes, “One travelled to Dubno with Sameshkin’s wagon; one traveled to Moscow by railway; but in order to get to America one traveled not only with a ship but with documents. And in order to get these one had to go to Dubno” (Hiob, G 77; E 77). The journey from shtetl to empire to world encompasses three temporalities via three conveyances, yet it constitutes itself as a continuum rather than a disconnection. More than a faith in a specific metaphysical system or religious credo, therefore, the novel commits itself to a neo-Romantic faith in the connectivity among places, cultures, and people, in which the marginal figure of the East European shtetl Jew circulates, and is circulated, at the heart of modern civilization. In these terms, Roth’s perspective is set in motion by the daughter Mirjam’s promiscuous desire for non-Jewish soldiers, which compels Mendel and Deborah to join Schemarjah/Sam in America, even if it means abandoning Menuchim. Like Deborah, Mirjam’s attractiveness derives its force from the Slavic landscape, hence the ubiquity of her liaisons in fields or forests.25 Mirjam, in this aspect of the narrative, complements Deborah’s function as “matriarch” by serving as a parody of the Virgin Mary; according to medieval Jewish legends still circulating in the East European yeshivas of Roth’s day—and echoed, coincidentally, by Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)—Jesus was conceived illegitimately by Mary and a Roman soldier.26 This

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inversion of Mary through Mirjam both subverts the ostensibly Catholic symbolism of Roth’s narrative and suggests that this promiscuity characterizes youth, mobility, and modernity. Menuchim in his turn enacts these values as an untranscendent savior when he reappears as Alexej at the novel’s end. Though the novel deliberately trespasses over the boundaries of religious decorum, drawing in equal measure from Christian and Jewish motifs while also inverting their traditional values, it is only through the “playful” rhetorical strategies of irony, parody, and burlesque that the earnestness of Roth’s humanistic, inclusive, and compassionate moral vision can effectively complement the novel’s allegorizing rhetoric without undermining the descriptive power or aesthetic pleasures of his writing. It is significant in this respect that Roth’s most overtly religious novel is also his most erotic. The superimposition of spiritual love with sensuous love cancels the antitheses out to propose a dialectical relationship between the sacral and the carnal. Ultimately, Hiob is no more a religious or an erotic tale than it is a Jewish or Christian one; it is all of these, but none of them completely. The boundlessness of Mirjam’s sexual desire consequently seems motivated more by a will to escape parental constraints—an inversion of the son’s redemption of the father but also a schematic contrast to Deborah’s sexless marriage with Mendel27— than by attraction to the Cossacks who receive her affections: “Mirjam hummed the text of the song, of which she only knew the first two verses: I have fallen in love with you, because of your beauty. A whole company sang that song to her! A hundred men sang to her! In an hour she would meet one of them, or maybe two. Sometimes, even, three came” (Hiob, G 98; E 98). As with Deborah’s primordial fecundity and Menuchim/Alexej’s putative messianism, Mirjam’s promiscuity is abstracted as part of a more pervasive parodic strategy. The soldiers appeal to her less than the song they sing, and the sex she engages in with them seems correspondingly anonymous, compulsive, and joyless.

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It is nonetheless significant that, at least in Mendel’s opinion, Mirjam’s subsequent insanity is not apparently a consequence of her overindulgence in the shtetl but occurs in the context of her sudden, ostensible abstinence in America. As he states, “She could not live without men. She has gone mad” (Hiob, G 156; E 158). What had been an organic feature of her life in Eastern Europe, a habit that connected her intrinsically to the landscape there, becomes pathological in New York, an inversion of the fantastic fate of Menuchim/Alexej’s half-Jewish, half-Russian destiny as his family’s sacrificial lamb and eventual deliverer. The status of language connects with the discourse characterizing Mirjam,28 in that the doctor—whose German is supposedly interchangeable with Mendel’s Yiddish, a linguistic promiscuity devoid of the erotic danger conveyed by Mirjam’s intimacy with the other yet ultimately an additional parallel to the cultural and sexual intermingling on which the novel is predicated— diagnoses her condition by drawing on an explicitly German, if Latin-derived, vocabulary of morbid sexuality: “Your daughter is very ill. There are lots of such cases now; the war . . . and the misery in the world—it’s a bad time. Medicine doesn’t yet know how to heal this illness. . . . We physicians call it ‘degenerative psychosis’. . . . But it can also appear as an illness which we physicians call dementia praecox—but even the name is uncertain” (Hiob, G 159; E 161). That the name for Mirjam’s condition should be uncertain comes as little surprise, since almost every name in the novel is uncertain: Schemarjah is Sam, Menuchim is Alexej, and Mendel is Job! The pervasive ambiguity of language signifies the precariousness of the family’s experience, as much as Roth’s own circumstance. In the Jungle of Cities

Mirjam’s downfall occurs, then, not as a result of her uncontrollable erotic nature but because of modernity’s demand that she

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repress what had been unconscious, almost animal-like, in the “primal” shtetl. For Roth, the ultimate continuity between Deborah’s mythologized fertility and Mirjam’s compulsive sexuality illustrates, like the ambivalently fraternal embraces of Mendel and the peasant Sameshkin (Hiob, G 93; E 92–93), the embeddedness of Jews in Eastern Europe.29 Both peasants and Jews serve a broader contrast in the novel against the hypercivilized alienation and sequestration of Western modernity, which Roth, in equal measure, cultivated, embodied, and despised. And yet, thanks to the circulation of the Singer family, the presence of East European Jews—particularly the Russian Jewish fusion that Menuchim/Alexej signifies at the novel’s end—might serve to redeem not just the old order of Jewish tradition but also the new regime of urban modernity. The rhetorical means for this renewal, connected to the discourse of circulation that binds the shtetl to the metropolis, is a superimposition of Kluczýsk onto the Lower East Side: “But this America was no new world. There were more Jews here than in Kluczýsk, it was really a larger Kluczýsk. . . . The windows opened into a dark court in which cats, rats, and children romped and scuffled” (Hiob, G 126; E 126). In this strategy, Roth serendipitously follows the lead of American Yiddish writers when describing Jews in New York. Unlike these Yiddish authors, however, both the czarist shtetl and Manhattan for him are not represented spaces but imagined ones. The pertinence of this distinction becomes clear, perhaps, when one considers the rhetoric of Roth’s depictions. When describing the Singer family’s arrival in New York harbor, for example, Roth writes, “‘Now,’ said a Jew who had made the trip twice to Mendel Singer, ‘we shall see the Statue of Liberty. . . . In her right hand she holds a torch. And the best of all is that this torch burns in the night, and yet is never burnt up. Because it’s only electric light. That’s the kind of trick they can do in America!’” (Hiob, G 114; E 114). Roth improves on Franz Kafka’s famous image of the Statue of Liberty bearing a sword by refiguring it as a Burning

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Bush; just as Kafka reimagines an icon as a myth, Roth makes of the same image a biblical allusion and, simultaneously, a disenchanted allegory. Moreover, the tale of the statue’s glory is already legendary because it is conveyed to Mendel by a fellow traveler who has made the ocean crossing two times. The Statue of Liberty, and by extension perhaps all of America, functions for Roth literally as a “twice-told tale.”30 With similar simultaneity, the “men in uniform” patrolling Ellis Island “looked somewhat like gendarmes and somewhat like angels. Those must be the American Cossacks, thought Mendel” (Hiob, G 114; E 115). The juxtapositions of angel and Cossack, American and Russian, in fact prefigure the contradictory reconfiguration of Menuchim/Alexej as Jewish and Russian, artist figure and Christ figure, just as they suggest that the metropolis at which they stand guard functions not as a historical space but as a hybrid combination of proliferating temporalities—the shtetl past and the American future—that draw their allegorical significance from their status as extra-European, noncontemporaneous territories. To the same purpose, Schemarjah/Sam himself appears in Roth’s description as Jewish and American to an equal degree: “They saw Schemarjah and Sam at the same time; as though Sam were superimposed on Schemarjah, a transparent Sam” (Hiob, G 115; E 115). Given his status as a sacrificial victim, itself an essential component of symbolic thought and eschatological representation, Schemarjah/Sam’s overenthusiastic identification with American nationalism, which leads to his death in World War I, identifies him in Jewish mystical terms as the “scapegoat” Messiah, or Meshiekh ben-Efraim, to Menuchim/ Alexej’s “Davidian” Messiah, even if this relationship is ultimately canceled out, with the ambiguity of an emblematic discourse in which anything can signify anything else, by Menuchim/Alexej’s equally provisional status as victim and redeemer. As a patriarchal figure, not only with respect to his paternal role in the Singer family but also as an embodiment of the

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Hebrew Bible’s religiosity, Mendel pronounces judgment on his son’s seduction by a rival father figure: “America is a real fatherland, indeed, but a death-dealing fatherland. What was life, with us, is death here. The son, who at home was called Schemarjah, here was called Sam. You are buried in America. Deborah, and I, too, will be buried in America” (Hiob, G 154; E 156–57). 31 Roth’s anti-Americanism here seems predicated not just on Mendel’s sense of estrangement and homesickness for Russia but also on Schemarjah/Sam’s dangerous sense of identification with the new fatherland; Schemarjah/Sam’s love for America kills him, even though technically he has died in Europe, fighting a European war. Roth resists American nationalism not because it is American but because it is nationalistic, and the identification of Jews with a specific territory—distinct, however obscurely, from their identification with the Slavic landscape in the sense that nature is distinct from nationhood—whether in Germany, America, or especially Palestine, poses the greatest threat to what Roth identifies as Jewish values and the Jewish contribution to humanity. 32 Indeed, as an ostensible embodiment of religious orthodoxy— an orthodoxy he willingly abandons so that his son can redeem him—Mendel rejects the identification with America, and accordingly Roth depicts him as responding to the superimposition of Kluczýsk with New York, and the intermingling it underscores, with a complementary, reactive image of urban inferno: “All the smells united in a hot vapor, together with the noise which filled his ears and threatened to split his skull. Soon he no longer knew whether he was hearing, seeing, smelling. He went on smiling and nodding. America pressed down on him; America broke him; America shattered him. After a few minutes he became unconscious” (Hiob, G 118; E 118–19). In keeping with the eschatological subtext of Roth’s modernism, however, this apocalyptic depiction presages Mendel’s symbolic death and resurrection as a cultural hybrid, thus suggesting an

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additional parody within Roth’s allegorical frame of reference.33 If Menuchim/Alexej is Jesus, then Mendel is not only the “Old Testament” paternal God but also Lazarus. In terms of narrative structure, Mendel’s apocalyptic arrival in America ends the first half of the novel, with the second half devoted to his despairing acclimation to and eventual, sudden redemption in America. Fittingly, this division corresponds to the cosmological rhythms of the novel, not the chronological pacing of the events it narrates. Rather, the passage of historical time is signified only in the second half, when a gap of several years appears to occur between chapters 10 and 11, which advances the story to the eve of World War I, the only historical event that explicitly informs Roth’s evocation of the lost shtetl culture. 34 The intervening years are evoked impressionistically via the disconnection of Mendel’s thoughts from the topics of conversation among his children: “He dreamt of events at home, and things which he had only heard about in America: theatres, acrobats and dancers in red and gold, the President of the United States, the White House, the millionaire Vanderbilt, and ever and ever again—Menuchim” (Hiob, G 138; E 139). Again, Roth superimposes Mendel’s imagined Yiddish with English, the language of American modernity and “the most beautiful language in world” for his children (Hiob, G 138; E 139). In this contrast Roth illustrates the rupture not only between the father and his children but also of the protagonist from the space and time in which he finds himself. Though an immigrant, Mendel is depicted as an exile, and the redemption that Roth provides for him serves not to assimilate him to his new environment or its temporality but to valorize his homelessness and timelessness. The historical events in Hiob do not therefore embed Mendel’s experience in a progressive or linear history; they emphasize the absence of an organic connection between Mendel and the city. His heart, however, remains inexplicably in the shtetl. Roth states

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in this regard, “And, nevertheless, mixed with his admiration for the future was a nostalgia for Russia, and it calmed and comforted him to think that, before the living had their triumph, he would be dead” (Hiob, G 139; E 140). By 1930, Roth understood already that the twentieth century would destroy the utopian hopes that Mendel’s children, among others, had invested in this “triumph of the living.” The juxtaposition of an unwarranted optimism about the future with Mendel’s unmerited nostalgia toward the Russian Jewish past—comparable, as will soon be shown, to Moyshe Kulbak’s cultivation of nostalgia in his distanced reveries on Belarus—suggests a critique of both positions. Both Mendel and his children are unable to live in the present. They inhabit a contiguous space but not a compatible temporality, and Roth’s modernist critique fills the void of an absent contemporaneity in the novel. By the novel’s end, nonetheless, Mendel reaches a sort of temporal impasse. He is physically in New York, but mentally and spiritually he migrates back to the shtetl, an inversion of the traumatic superimpositions of one space on the other that he had endured when he arrived in America. As Roth writes, “Before him lay the vast ocean. Once again he must cross it. The whole great sea waited for Mendel. All of Zuchnow and its surroundings waited for him: the barracks, the fir forest, the frogs in the swamp, and the crickets in the fields. If Menuchim were dead, he lay in the little cemetery and waited. And Mendel would lay himself down there, too. . . . The church bells would sound for him, and remind him of the listening light in Menuchim’s foolish eyes” (Hiob, G 187; E 189–90). Once again Roth illustrates the temporal contradictions of his narrative through biblical allusion and myth. Mendel’s ocean crossing evokes the parting of the Red Sea, a reference that becomes plausible in the context of American immigrant literature, particularly among Jews, which habitually figured the United States as “the Promised Land” and the arrival

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at Ellis Island similarly as the Israelite crossing of the Red Sea.35 At this point in the novel, the Promised Land for Mendel is not America but Death—as both John Donne (1572–1631) and Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) might suggest, the church bells sounding in his memory toll for him. And yet, this chapter reveals that Menuchim/Alexej has neither died nor waited for Mendel but has changed himself from Jew to Cossack, 36 paving the way via this transubstantiation for Mendel’s resurrection. Despite the proliferation of metaphysical references throughout the novel, its implications are both earthy and worldly. The new life that Menuchim/Alexej grants his father brings not the death for which Mendel had longed but a way of living in the world, uniting his presence in America with the life he had left behind, and connecting Mendel’s Jewishness with all that had been defined against it before. For all the contradictions that Roth cultivated in his own life, it is this sense of resolution—a harmonization that occurs only fictively—that eluded him. This too can be recognized as an object of critique in the novel. Despite the patronizing tone of sympathy that the narrator lavishes on Mendel, the novel’s protagonist is more diasporic, mobile, and adaptive than Roth himself, who was unable to leave Europe even at a point when it might have prolonged his life. In fact, this irony occurs not at Roth’s expense but at the heart of the novel’s purpose, which is to illustrate that the East European Jew can serve as a vanguard, simultaneously, for Christianity and modernity, each of which had presumed to have superseded the ostensibly primitive and parochial world of the Jews. This bespeaks the transitional position of the novel in Roth’s career, from the radical, cosmopolitan journalism of the 1920s to his later novels’ paradoxically nostalgic apologetics for the Habsburg monarchy. In this characteristic paradox, Mendel Singer becomes the pioneer who abandons the shtetl for American urban modernity, while “the Red Roth” remains the traditionalist by virtue of his attachment to his old home among the ruins of a vanished order.

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Vanquished Vienna

Roth’s “self-sacrificing” loyalty to an idea of Europe that the rise of nationalism and totalitarianism had rendered obsolete is tied to his quixotic yet increasingly vehement allegiance to the defunct Habsburg monarchy. This political identification is the most profound distinction between Roth and his Jobian protagonist, because it is such loyalty to earthly power that Mendel Singer disavows. Indeed, this perhaps explains why Roth chooses to situate his fictional shtetl in the Pale of Settlement rather than in Galicia, because a Jew from the shtetl would never be tempted to identify with the czar in the way that Roth increasingly would identify with Emperor Franz Joseph (1830–1916). Nonetheless, as Bernd Hüppauf states, Roth’s “traditionalism” should not be viewed as a simplistic affiliation with reactionary politics but must instead be considered through the same lens of paradox as his fiction: “It is crucial to understand Roth’s change at the end of his leftist commitments not as leading to a new conservatism; his new position results rather in the attempt, beyond the truth claims of historical theories and political systems, to find a way back to the concrete and the particular. The root of his skepticism lies in early-bourgeois French humanism, at the center of which stand freedom and the self-determination of the individual.”37 To Hüppauf’s reading of the novel, one might add that Hiob offers a mock-epic account of Mendel Singer’s departure from the “mythical” world of the shtetl into the modern, enlightened world of New York. In this sense, the novel is a mock epic not only because of Roth’s critical perspective on modernity but also because the character of Mendel Singer, like other modernist mock-epic protagonists, is avowedly unheroic. Myth thus constitutes itself in the novel not through a validation of the old shtetl but through the pseudo-Christian redemption of the father through the son. Just as it would be ill-advised to read the Christological references in the novel without considering the ironic uses to which

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Roth consistently puts them, one can contend that Roth extols concepts such as empire, nature, and belief not because they are attainable components of an ideology that can effectively resist the modern onslaught of technology and urban anomie but because they are idealizations that acquire resonance through their inadequacy to the struggle in which they are employed. Roth ironizes the mythical images in his novel to fashion an allegorical vision of the past that undermines the rational and mechanical claims of modernity from the perspective of the cultures that had been marginalized in the long and increasingly brutal march of material progress. As a burlesque of modernity, Roth’s embrace of nature and soil—his allegiance to a land he had forsaken, which was no longer accessible to his return—can be compared to the cultural conservatism of Jewish circus owners in German-speaking lands during the early twentieth century. As Marline Otte explains: “By reverting to the ‘outdated’ concept of Landespatripotismus [which Otte defines as loyalty to region and sovereign rather than to the modern nation-state], GermanJewish circus directors tried to avoid shipwreck on the shoals of national sentiment. They imagined themselves to be a part of a community that defined itself through personal allegiance to the emperor rather than one based on race, religion, language, or territory. In short, the managers of traveling circuses resorted to a demonstrative conservatism (Weltkonservatismus) in an era of national awakening.”38 Whereas Jewish traveling circus directors clung to a superseded mode of conservatism because the craft they practiced belonged to a bygone era, Roth cultivates this brand of “melancholic” conservatism as a protest against the modernity then manifesting itself in the pseudoscientific jargon of race as much as in the technological devices rendering the traveling circus and similar modes of rural, regional, “artisanal” performance obsolete. What connects Roth circumstantially with Jewish circus troupes is a life spent wandering across territories, cultures, and

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languages. For such itinerant figures, loyalty and Heimat— the specifically German concept of home as a social mode of belonging—can be identified more readily in the embodiment of a figurehead than in the institutional or abstracted principles of a nation-state, particularly one defined to the exclusion of artists, migrants, and Jews, among other minorities. By latching on to an empire already vanished by the beginning of his career as a journalist and a wanderer, Roth not only signifies the melancholy of his profession, he valorizes it. Roth’s nostalgia for the “old” Austria should be seen in an oppositional manner, since paradox is ultimately the only lens through which such an ideological commitment might be said to make sense. Both Eastern Europe as a territory and the Austrian monarchy as an institution gain allegorical value for Roth as relics, vestiges of an untenable and spectral world: the romanticization of either can be mobilized only via their superseded status. 39 The identification with Austria nonetheless poses an additional dilemma that manifests itself in an intensifying contradiction for Roth: the incompatibility of “Austrianness” with Jewishness. Roth shares this perception of contradiction with most of the leading Austrian Jewish intellectuals in his generation40 —one thinks most pathologically of Otto Weininger (1880–1903) but also of Karl Kraus or Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) and even of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) in either phase of his career as (Austrian) journalist or (Zionist) ideologue. Just as every one of these figures, with the exception of Herzl, converted to Christianity, Roth similarly understands the incompatibility of his identity as a Jew with his identification as an Austrian, whether he converted to Christianity or not.41 What Roth felt in fact was not Austrian patriotism but Habsburg nostalgia; a Jew could be a proper subject of the kaiser, perhaps even the ideal subject, since he or she supposedly felt no local or national loyalty except to the beneficence of the emperor, but could never be an ideal citizen of Austria, since Austria as a nation was (and remains) explicitly

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and inflexibly Catholic. With the ideal of empire lost after World War I and the ideal of Europe lost in the consolidation of national and racial exclusivity with the rise of fascism, Roth’s reclaiming of identification with the empire devolves into an ambiguous embrace of Austria, and with it Austrian Catholicism. It may be noted, however, that the impossibility of the author’s declared loyalties to the Habsburg Empire and European civilization, as well as to Catholicism and Jewishness, is an ideal ideological position for Roth, whose work is best summarized as a “coexistent contradiction,” as the title of a major retrospective on his career puts it. His Jewishness and his Austrian nostalgia become productive resources for his writing only when they cease to be viable. He allegorizes both because he sees them as defunct relics of a more humane world than the one to which he was consigned. In spite of the distance Roth establishes in Hiob between Russia and Galicia, or New York and the metropolises where he lived, he nevertheless identifies with Mendel Singer, even as Mendel represents for him a diametric inversion of every linguistic, political, territorial, and religious affiliation Roth himself had ever made. This identification only intensifies as Roth begins to resemble his prematurely aged and permanently homeless character at the end of their respective journeys; as David Bronsen writes, “There would be for him [Roth] no home, just as had been the case for Mendel Singer, the hero of his Job-novel.”42 Like his character, Roth at the end of his career stood at the shore of an unbridgeable ocean, and the fact that this ocean was as much temporal as territorial made it all the more impassable. Yet this impasse was the location from which all his writing emerged. If philosophy for Novalis (1772–1801) was homesickness, “the urge to be at home everywhere,”43 the same might be said of literature for Roth.44 If homelessness is the Janus-faced double to cosmopolitanism, homelessness is nevertheless the only home to which Roth adhered, throughout his career.

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This homelessness characterizes the author’s relationship to religion as much as to nationhood. “Inside” the novel, the force of the narrative tends not toward Christian supersession of Jewishness but toward the sublimation of religion in culture. Art is Menuchim’s new religion, not Christianity, and the art of fiction in turn provides the means for Roth to refigure his perceptions as allegory. In the broader context of Roth’s writing, Jews have no need to “universalize” their civilization via Christianity, because for Roth Jews are already the most universal people prior to their contact with Christianity. Rather than using the biblical text of Job to prefigure Jesus’s redemptive vision, as Christian exegetes had read the Hebrew Bible since the founding of the church, Roth suggests via his juxtapositions that Christianity can be used to uncover the Jewishness of biblical parable, and in this way Judaism can be considered the universal “church,” not because of its religious strictures but because of its adherents’ status as wanderers and seekers.45 In such a religion, Mendel Singer would indeed count, like Job, as a man “perfect and upright” (ish tam v’yosher), and Roth himself might serve as his high priest.46 In Hiob, the true Christianity is thus to be found in and among Jews, a temporal impossibility as much as a theological one, but fully in keeping with a cosmopolitan anarchist’s longing for home in the romance of a vanished empire. Roth’s allegorical treatment of space in Hiob, through which he juxtaposes the czarist Pale of Settlement with New York City in order to reconfigure his personal migration from Galicia to the metropolitan capitals of Europe, finds a resonant correspondence in the writing that Moyshe Kulbak produced while living in Berlin during the early 1920s. Although Kulbak, like most of the “Berlin” Yiddishists, focuses almost exclusively on Eastern Europe, and published his writing during the era mostly in New York or Poland, his relocation to Germany appears to motivate his engagement with Expressionist techniques of distorted

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description, graphic violence, and sexual decadence (in Max Nordau’s sense of the term). It moreover highlights the same contradictions between the primordial and the apocalyptic that figure in Roth’s writing and Fritz Lang’s filmmaking. In many respects, Kulbak’s writing maintains a continuity with the thematic concerns of Eastern European Yiddish modernism, but his equation of nostalgia with apocalypse, like Roth’s, contributes to the translation, or transubstantiation, of the Eastern European landscape, already a major theme in his lyric poetry, into an allegorical template. Both the distance that Berlin places between Kulbak and his native territories—further away than Warsaw or Kiev yet not so far as New York City or Buenos Aires—and the aesthetic currents Kulbak drew from while there account for his distinctiveness within the Yiddish avant-garde, as well as his unexpected exemplarity for Weimar-era modernism. It is to these concerns that the comparison now turns. Notes 1.  David Bronsen, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie [1974] (Munich: DTV, 1981), 599. 2.  Bronsen (Joseph Roth, 600–1) relates the mutually self-canceling testimony of a half-dozen intimates regarding Roth’s religious affiliations, from Jews who had themselves converted to Catholicism such as Jean Jabès and Pauline Kulka—who claimed that Roth’s enthusiasm toward Catholicism coincided with their own—to Soma Morgenstern, who indicated that Roth swore to having never been baptized. It would probably be most prudent to conclude that Roth’s friends saw in his religious identifications a mirror of their own, and Roth was content to encourage these perceptions. Wilhelm von Sternburg’s more recent Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2010), 484, essentially corroborates Bronsen’s account. 3.  In his article “Wie jüdisch ist ein jüdisch-deutscher Roman? Über Joseph Roths ‘Hiob, Roman eines einfachen Mannes,’” Gershon Shaked (1929–2006) offers a comprehensive summary of the parallels between this work and its biblical prototype. See Moses and Schöne, Juden in der deutschen Literatur, 287–88. Subsequent references to this article

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incorporated in text as Shaked. The translations, for better or worse, are my own. A more recent, and thorough, discussion of the correspondence between Roth’s novel and the book of Job can be found in Gabrielle Oberhänsli-Widmer, Hiob in jüdischer Antike und Moderne: Die Wirkungsgeschichte Hiobs in der jüdischen Literatur (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2003), 205–26. In addition to its perceptive discussion of the novel, this essay features a comprehensive bibliography of German criticism on Roth. 4.  As much as Roth deliberately cultivated resonances between his novel and the biblical book of Job, one finds an almost involuntary resonance between this depiction of Jewish tradition and a far less sympathetic contemporaneous portrayal in T. S. Eliot’s 1928 poem “A Song for Simeon”: “Before the stations of the mountain of desolation, / Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow, / Now at this birth season of decease, / Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word, / Grant Israel’s consolation / To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.” See T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 [1950] (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 70. In calling attention to this similarity, I wish to underscore the ways in which Roth appears to embrace the supersessionism of Christian rhetoric, as exemplified in Eliot’s poem, in order to overturn its doctrine, as I attempt to show. 5.  The concept of the Soziosemiotik is fundamental to Shaked’s interpretation of the novel (see Shaked, 283), and I am adopting and adapting it here to my own purposes. 6.  It’s unclear in fact how much Yiddish Roth himself knew. By the 1890s the majority of the large Jewish community in Brody would have spoken German primarily, particularly middle-class and relatively modern Jews such as Roth’s family. Nonetheless, Brody was just over the border from the czarist Pale of Settlement—where at the time well over 90 percent of the Jewish population spoke Yiddish as a primary language—and trade among Jews across the border was a pervasive fact of economic and cultural life. At the least, one can assume Roth’s passive knowledge of Yiddish, but in this regard his friend Joseph Gottfarstein offers a telling comment: “Er sprach nicht sehr gut, aber er bat mich Jiddisch mit ihm zu reden.” Quoted in Heinz Lunzer, Joseph Roth: Im Exil in Paris 1933 bis 1939 (Vienna: Zirkular, 2008), 176–77. For an effective explanation of the limits to Roth’s understanding of Yiddish, see my friend Ilse Josepha Lazaroms’s excellent monograph, The Grace of Misery: Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile, 1919–1939 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 15–16, where she demonstrates the author’s confusion of the Yiddish words Batlan (“unemployed scholar”) and Badkhn (“ceremonial moralizer and jester”).

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7.  Joseph Gottfarstein’s reservations notwithstanding, Andreas Kilcher notes that Roth read Aleksandr Chemeriskii’s Di Alfarbandishe kumunistishe partei (bolshevikes) un di yidishe masn (The United Communist Party [Bolsheviks] and the Jewish Masses, 1926) in Yiddish while preparing for his trip to the Soviet Union—a trip that, as Kilcher contends, accounts for the beginnings of Roth’s turn from a leftist, cosmopolitan Neue Sachlichkeit perspective to a romantic engagement with the East and its unassimilated cultures, including Yiddish-speaking Jews. See Kilcher, “Cold Order,” in Kilcher and Safran, Writing Jewish Culture, 71. 8.  Joseph Roth, Hiob: Roman eines einfachen Mannes (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1982), 156. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Hiob, G. Translated by Dorothy Thompson as Job: The Story of a Simple Man [1931] (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1982), 158. Subsequent references incorporated in text as E, though my translations may of necessity depart from the published version. 9.  This strategy, in fact, contrasts pointedly with the status of English in the novel. For example, Roth writes ironically of Mendel’s efforts to acclimate himself to New York, “Ja, er war beinahe heimisch in Amerika! Er wußte bereits, daß old chap auf amerikanisch Vater hieß und old fool Mutter, oder umgekehrt” (Hiob, G 123; E 123). It is noteworthy that the English phrases old chap and old fool are neither set off in the text from the German, nor correctly translated! Presumably Roth understood their correct usage and expected that German readers would as well—granting them more credit in their knowledge of English than he would their knowledge of Yiddish and playing his readers’ sophistication against Mendel’s ostensible naivete. Significantly, Thompson’s translation effaces these ironies by substituting “old man” for “old chap” and “old lady” for “old fool.” By extension, Matthias Richter offers an astute discussion of the status of Russian words in the novel as well as a useful schematic interpretation of English, Russian, and Yiddish in the novel as a whole; see “Überspielte Distanz. Joseph Roth: Hiob (1930),” in Die Sprache jüdischer Figuren in der deutschen Literatur (1750–1933) (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1995), 317–19. 10.  J. Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft, 75. Subsequent references incorporated in text as JaW, G. In English, Wandering Jews, 121. Subsequent references incorporated in text, without modification, as E. 11.  See Kilcher, “Cold Order,” 75. Kilcher also notes that a month before this lecture, in December 1926, Roth met Walter Benjamin for the first—possibly the only—time, while the two were staying in the same Moscow hotel (Kilcher, “Cold Order,” 74). The proximity of these two German intellectuals passing one another while traveling in the East

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suggests an exemplary rhetorical figure for the focus and methodology of this comparison as a whole. It may be noted, nonetheless, that in 1926 Roth was at the height of his popularity as a correspondent, while Benjamin had yet to publish his obscure treatment of the Trauerspiel that counts as the single full-length book he managed to produce in his lifetime. Their reputations have evened up considerably over the intervening nine decades! 12.  This aesthetic is best exemplified—indeed, “thematized”—in the story “Der Leviathan” (begun in 1934 but completed apparently in 1938): the story describes the melancholy fate of Nissen Piczenik, a shtetl coral dealer whose livelihood is transformed when a Hungarian competitor, Janö Lakatos, introduces artificial coral to the sthetl market, and Piczenik is “seduced” into following suit. Although the story promises to offer a parable, along the lines of Walter Benjamin’s “Erzähler” essay (discussed at length in part 1 of this study), about the moral distinction between artisanal craftsmanship and industrial manufacture, corresponding to the difference between the virtues of Erfahrung (cumulative experience) and the tyranny of Erlebenis (spontaneous experience), Roth’s narrative actually delivers exactly the opposite of what it advertises. It presents an urban reimagining of the shtetl, its values, and its stories that is persuasive enough to pass for the genuine article, a phenomenon that David Roskies describes in the context of Yiddish modernism as “creative betrayal.” Roth’s storytelling persona, like many of his Yiddish-language contemporaries, is Lakatos disguised as Piczenik. As Roth narrates, “When Nissen Piczenik got home . . . he started looking at his beloved corals with confused eyes, eyes confused by the Devil, his living corals that didn’t look nearly as flawless as the fake celluloid corals that his rival Jenö Lakatos had shown him. And so the Devil inspired the honest coral merchant Nissen Piczenik with the idea of mixing fake corals with real.” See “Der Leviathan,” in Die Erzählungen [1992] (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2011), 380. In English, “The Leviathan,” in The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 270–71. On “creative betrayal,” see Roskies, Bridge of Longing. 13.  The irreconcilability between present and past that Roth poignantly evokes calls to mind another contemporaneous description of suspendend temporality: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” See Antonio Gramsci, “‘Wave of Materialism’ and ‘Crisis of Authority’” [1930], in Selections from the Prison Notebooks [1971], trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1995), 276.

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14.  As Richter notes, by contrast, when Roth as a journalist wishes to describe Jewish customs and ritual objects—in Juden auf Wanderschaft, for example—he does so explicitly and correctly. See Richter, Die Sprache jüdischer Figuren, 316. Andreas Kilcher similarly notes an article Roth published as “Das Völker-Labyrinth im Kaukasus” (“The Labyrinth of Peoples in the Caucuses”) in which he describes the “Jewish matzo” in Baku. See Kilcher, “Cold Order,” 79–80. 15.  Ross Benjamin’s more recent, and excellent, translation of Hiob offers a single footnote at this point in the narrative, suggesting, “Perhaps to avoid terms that would be unfamiliar to non-Jewish readers of his time, Roth refers to the Jewish Passover feast, Pesach, by the name of the Christian holiday Easter . . . celebrated at the same time of year and calls matzoh . . . ‘Easter bread.’” See Job: The Story of a Simple Man (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2010), 171. As one says in American-inflected Yiddish, this explanation seems a bisl farfètched! 16.  It is worth recalling in this context a contrast that Ritchie Robertson makes between Hiob and the Ghettoliteratur of nineteenth-century German Jewish belles lettres: “Jewish terms and customs [in Ghettoliteratur] are presented as curious survivals from the past and reassuringly explained by a German translation in brackets, thus ‘Barmizwe (Einsegnung)’ or ‘Marshallik’ (Spaßmacher).’” See “Roth’s Hiob and the Traditions of Ghetto Fiction,” in Co-existent Contradictions: Joseph Roth in Retrospect, ed. Helen Chambers (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1991), 188. This, it may be noted, is the strategy that Roth does not pursue in presenting Eastern European Jewish culture in Hiob, instead preferring to allow the dissonance between the German signifier and the Yiddish signified to resonate within the narrative. Unlike Ghettoliteratur, for Roth it is not the assimilability of the Ostjuden and their language but their foreignness from Western norms that is essential to their appeal. 17.  It is perhaps worth digressing briefly to describe in detail the source for my usage of “polytonality,” which in any event I hope to elaborate on in the context of Yiddish modernism contemporaneous to Roth’s writing. At an orchestral concert a few years ago, I was reacquainted with Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score Petrushka (1911). I was struck in this performance not only by the famous “Petrushka chord” at the beginning of the second part (C against F#) but primarily by the way in which different folk melodies in the last part collide with one another as part of the fairground tableau. Stravinsky (1882–1971), like his contemporary Béla Bartók (1881–1945), shares with Roth and the Yiddish modernists the legacy of an East European folk heritage in which disparate linguistic, sonic, and thematic

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elements coexist without harmonization or homogenization. The ability of these artists to tap into this heritage bespeaks the anticipatory modernism of these nonmodern folk cultures. 18.  Of course, at the same time that Menuchim’s “resurrection” at the end of the novel calls to mind his (never very sublimated) status as a putative Christ figure, his strategy of disguising himself and adopting a non-Jewish name to reenter the family dynamic as a stranger resembles the narrative of Joseph, who was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt but then reveals himself to them, and later to his father, as Pharaoh’s viceroy when he delivers them from famine in Canaan at the end of the book of Genesis (see Shaked, 289). Through these references, Menuchim emphasizes the Judaic origins of the Easter narrative and equates the Resurrection of Christ, allegorically and syncretically, with the “Josephian messiah” (Meshiekh ben-Efraim) of kabalistic eschatology. 19.  The proclamation of “good tidings” [Gutes künden] in particular resonates with the language of the New Testament. For example, in Luther’s translation of Luke 1:19: “Der Engel antwortete und sprach zu ihm: Ich bin Gabriel, der vor Gott steht, und bin gesandt, mit dir zu reden, daß ich dir solches verkündigte”; in the King James Version, “And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings.” One hears a similar echo in the promise “Der Schmerz wird ihn weise machen. . . .die Krankheit stark” to 2 Corinthians 12:9: “Denn meine Kraft ist in den Schwachen mächtig. Darum will ich mich am allerliebsten rühmen meiner Schwachheit, auf daß die Kraft Christi bei mir wohne”; “For my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” As Michael Löwy notes, citing Giorgio Agamben, the expression “my strength is made perfect in weakness” might also be a source for Benjamin’s concept of a “weak messianic power.” See Fire Alarm, 33. 20.  One finds a similarly paradoxical formulation of a Jewish ethical mission to the world in a 1929 feuilleton, “Betrachtung an der Klagemauer” (translated simply as “Wailing Wall”): “It takes, I thought, a truly divine love to choose this people. There were so many others that were nice, malleable, and well trained: happy, balanced Greeks, adventurous Phoenicians, artful Egyptians, Assyrians with strange imaginations, northern tribes with beautiful, blond-haired, as it were, ethical primitiveness and refreshing forest smells. But none of the above! The weakest and far from loveliest of peoples was given the most dreadful curse and most dreadful blessing, the hardest law and the most difficult mission: to sow love on

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earth, and to reap hatred.” See Roth, Joseph Roth in Berlin, 85–86. In English, What I Saw, 47. 21.  This inverted reformulation of the Passion narrative—not the Spirit made flesh but rags and sawdust made spirit—is another similarity between Petrushka and the novel. The potential for parody is an implication that Matthias Richter seems to overlook in his apparently indignant reading of Menuchim’s “resurrection”: “The whole scene is surreptitiously suffused with Christianity; scandalously so, one can say, but for a nonJewish, Christian reader, accordingly all the closer” (Richter, Die Sprache jüdischer Figuren, 316; my translation). 22.  Thompson’s translation in fact misreads the plural Erzmütter, matriarchs, as a singular Erzmutter, “earth mother,” or “Mother Eve” (as she puts it). Although she is to be faulted for the error in transcription, her understanding of the passage’s implications remains defensible. Ross Benjamin (Job, 18) nonetheless offers a more accurate translation. In keeping with the transubstantive tendencies in Roth’s rhetoric, however, though Deborah invokes and embodies a seemingly pagan spirit of eternal motherhood, at the same time she also inhabits the specifically Jewish archetype of the Matriarch Rachel: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children; she refuseth to be comforted for her children, because they were not” (Jer. 31:14). As a figure of a primordial female Ostjude, it can be recokoned that Deborah is simultaneously a pious Jewish woman and a still pagan Slav; this sublimated syncretism is characteristic of the way Roth conceives the Eastern European landscape and its inhabitants in a dialectical relationship with a modern, deracinated German cosmopolitanism to which he has only semivoluntarily confined himself. 23.  In just this respect, Bronsen quotes Dora Landau’s criticism of the novel: “I found the first part excellent, but not the second. New York seems artificial there, as if filmed in a studio. I said this to him and he answered without contradicting, ‘It may be.’ But he explained to me explicitly that he wouldn’t have been able to write the second part without drinking almost incessantly” (Bronsen, Joseph Roth, 389). 24.  As my friend Eléonore Veillet has suggested to me, although New York is the fictive setting of urban modernity in the novel, it also functions as a substitute setting for Roth’s polemic against the urban modernity of Berlin; in this respect it is both fantastic and realistic in equal measure. One observes a similar substitution in Lang’s Metropolis, which as Kracauer notes takes place in “a sort of super New York” (From Caligari to Hitler, 149) that at the same time offers a funhouse distortion of contemporary Berlin;

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Anton Kaes likewise credits Lang’s first visit to New York, in the fall of 1924, for the visual style of Metropolis, even though Thea von Harbou had already written the script several months earlier (Shell Shock Cinema, 182). Although one might wonder whether Roth could have set a similarly fanciful narrative in Berlin, it is worth considering how seldom he set fiction of any kind in Berlin, particularly in the latter decade of his career. 25.  Of the names Deborah and Mirjam, which are neither more nor less representatively “Jewish” than, for example, Sarah, Rachel, Ruth, or Esther, one notes that Arnold Zweig’s panegyric to the East European Jewish woman asserts of these two Biblical characters, “The figures of Mirjam, Moses’ sister, and Deborah clearly demonstrate that for the Jew there was somehow a period in which it was made possible for women to play a central role in the active, official community.” To the extent that Roth participates in a similar project of rehabilitating Eastern European Jewry, though without Zweig’s pious idealizations, he chooses these two names in order to defy the significance that Zweig had ascribed to them through his dramatization of their respective fates in the novel. See Zweig, Das Ostjüdische Antlitz, 88. In English, Face of East European Jewry, 70. 26.  For all the information one could wish on these medieval parodies, see Toledot Yeshu (“The Life Story of Jesus”) Revisited, ed. Peter Schäfer, Michael Meerson, and Yaakov Deutsch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). 27.  See Oberhänsli-Widmer, Hiob in jüdischer Antike und Moderne, 220. 28.  Indeed, the connection between language and madness becomes explicit when Mirjam tells Mendel, at the onset of her delirium, “‘I’ve slept with Mister Glück, ha, with Mister Glück! Glück is my Glück. Mac is my Mac. Mendel Singer pleases me as well and if you like’—there the nurse held her hand over Miriam’s mouth to silence her” (Hiob, G 156; E 158; translation modified). The wordplay between the name Glück and the concept Glück (“happiness” in both Yiddish and German) reduces the signifier and the signified to an empty repetition of sound. This pun offers the only evidence that Mirjam articulates her breakdown in Yiddish rather than English. It is all the more meaningful that at the moment when Mirjam appears to be on the verge of stating an incestuous desire toward her father, in their familial language, the nurse covers her mouth and Mirjam falls silent. In equal measure, the connection between Yiddish as the intimate language of the Jewish family, the association of Yiddish with a “mad” or disordered German, and its repression as a language of obscenity are indicative of the status of Yiddish for the novel as a whole. 29.  For Roth, the feminine archetypes of primeval mother and nymphomaniac—which, as Helen Chambers demonstrates, are essentially

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the only varieties of female characters to be found in Roth’s fiction— signify the ultimate compatibility of Jews with their (lost) East European home. See, in this context, Helen Chambers, “Predators or Victims?— Women in Joseph Roth’s Works,” in Co-existent Contradictions, 107–27. 30.  Even before arriving in the New World, Mendel and Deborah’s first encounter with America, courtesy of the American Mac’s delivery of a letter to them from Schemarjah/Sam, becomes an exercise in miscomprehension and untranslatability, as well as an allegorical substitution achieved through biblical allusion: “The audience strained themselves to listen to Mac’s account, hoping that they would catch a single, tiny intelligible syllable out of the storm of words and their hearts leaped at the word Ararat which sounded strangely familiar to them although he had changed it dismayingly and rolled it out with a dangerous and terrible rumble” (Hiob, G 65; E 64). If Eastern Europe for Mac has acquired significance because of its proximity to the landing point of Noah’s ark, America for the Singers, as for Fritz Lang (implicitly) in Metropolis, is imagined in this disjointed exchange as the Tower of Babel. 31.  As Sidney Rosenfeld, the pioneering figure of Roth criticism in English, suggests, Schemarjah/Sam’s sacrificial destiny echoes a comment of the American parvenu (and parodic messiah) Henry Bloomfield in Roth’s early novel Hotel Savoy: “I am an Eastern Jew and, to us, home is above all where our dead lie. Had my father died in America, I could be perfectly at home in America. My son will be a full-blooded American, because I shall be buried there.” See Hotel Savoy in Romane und Erzählungen (Frankfurt Am Main: Dörfler, 2011), 135. Translated by John Hoare as Hotel Savoy [1986] (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2003), 107. Schemarjah/Sam’s death in a European war offers at once a refutation and affirmation of Bloomfield’s definition of an American Jewish Heimat; America according to the metaphorical logic of the novel isn’t Mendel’s burial place, it’s Schemarjah/Sam’s. America’s attractiveness to the Ostjude, its promise of providing at last an enduring home, signifies its danger as a place for which these Jews are willing to die. In this sense, America is a space of both fantastic vitality and ultimate doom. See Rosenfeld, “The Chain of Generations: A Jewish Theme in Joseph Roth’s Novels,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 18, no. 1 (1973): 228. 32.  Roth’s anti-Zionism, in particular, was a consistent and pronounced strain within his otherwise contradictory ideological affiliations—even at a point toward the end of his life when those other commitments had failed to offer a solution or salvation for the Jews of Europe. To cite just one example of this ideology in which he equates, with a degree of historical

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justification, his own anti-Zionism with traditional religiosity, in Juden auf Wanderschaft he writes, “An orthodox hasid from the East will prefer a Christian to a Zionist. For the latter would change Judaism root and branch. His Jewish nation would be along the lines of a European state. The outcome might be a sovereign nation, but it wouldn’t have any Jews in it” (JaW, G 25; E 31). In this passage, he suggests by a rhetorical bait and switch that his own attraction to Christianity remains compatible with Hasidic piety, or at least more so than Zionist nationalism! 33.  This apocalyptic account of Mendel’s arrival in New York City moreover complements and contrasts with Menuchim/Alexej’s narration of the event that enables his discovery of speech: “Then one day I saw a great red and blue fire. I lay down on the floor. I crept to the door. Suddenly someone seemed to lift me up and push me. I was outside. People were standing on the other side of the street. ‘Fire!’ I cried” (Hiob, G 212; E 215). The catastrophe that awakens his consciousness provides rectification for the catastrophe that had transplanted Mendel from the “timeless” shtetl to the historical city. In a sense, the same catastrophe and the same trauma affects them both, but in keeping with the Hasidic rabbi’s messianic prophecy regarding Menuchim, it is out of the apocalypse that he, and in turn Mendel, will be reborn. 34.  As Delphine Bechtel writes, “With his great novel Job . . . Roth takes another step. He leaves definitively the observation of reality in order to embark on an atemporal tale anchored in the world of traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe.” See Bechtel, La Renaissance, 193; the translation from the French, such as it is, is my own. One can add to Bechtel’s briskly accurate characterization only that “atemporality” fairly renders the first half of the novel. Once the Singers arrive in New York, however, they enter into a verifiable and urgently historical temporality. This arrival into history, in turn, becomes the source of nostalgia—hence the “resurrection” of Menuchim/Alexej, which places Mendel simultaneously in a past reborn and in a new, millennial future. 35.  To offer two prominent, completely opposite takes on this rhetoric, consider Mary Antin’s classic 1912 autobiography The Promised Land as a valorization of this discourse. By way of satirical response, see Sholem Aleichem’s Motl Peyse dem khazns (Motl, the Cantor Peyse’s Son), particularly part 2 (1916), chapter 2, “Kries yam-suf ” (“The Parting of the Red Sea”). The linguistic contrast between a celebratory account of the Americanization process in English and a skeptical, parodic depiction in Yiddish is neither deterministic nor accidental.

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36.  In this sense, Menuchim’s lost older brother, Jonas, foreshadows the younger son’s eventual triumph when he transforms himself from a Jew to a Cossack. Roth signals Mendel’s ambivalence toward this achievement when he writes, “For a long time now Mendel had heard nothing from his Cossack [Jonas], as he called him in secret—not without contempt, nor yet without pride” (Hiob, G 103; E 103). Jonas is subsequently lost to the narrative, because he has made his identification with the Russian state, just as Schemarjah/Sam’s fate is sealed when he identifies with America; both become in Mendel’s eyes, and Roth’s narration, anticipatory, failed figures for Menuchim’s apotheosis. What is perhaps at issue in the distinction among these brothers is the semantic difference between transformation, which suggests a fixed teleological destination, and transubstantiation, which enables Menuchim/Alexej both to become something new and to remain as he had been. 37.  See Bernd Hüppauf, “Joseph Roth: Hiob: Der Mythos des Skeptikers,” in Grimm and Bayerdörfer, In Zeichen Hiobs, 315. Translations from the German are my own. By a “new conservatism,” Hüppauf refers to a trend during the years 1928–1930 when, according to Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), German literature “rediscovered” values of nation, nature, and belief after the postwar crisis. 38. Otte, Jewish Identities, 78. 39.  Lazaroms cites a list of characterizations to describe Roth’s cultivated marginality; among the most suggestive, quoted by the journalist Martin Kraft but not coined by him, is “Austroslavism,” as good an example of self-canceling motivation as any to represent Roth’s contradictory politics and their motivation. See Grace of Misery, 10. For Kraft’s article, see “Joseph Roth: The Legend of the Holy Drinker,” Krakow Post, May 27, 2009. 40.  A contemporaneous work, Hugo Bettauer’s Die Stadt Ohne Juden (The City Without Jews, 1922), more directly, and satirically, addresses the contradictions between Jewishness and Austrian national identity, as when he describes the unintended consequences of the (then) fictive expulsion of Jews from Vienna: “Ten Christian-Social deputies had to be expelled as being of Jewish origin; almost a third of the Christian newspapermen were affected either directly or through members of their families. It had developed that our best Christian citizens are steeped in Israel—our oldest families are being torn apart.” See Die Stadt Ohne Juden (Vienna: R. Löwit, 1926), 43. In English, The City Without Jews, trans. Salomea Neumark Brainin (New York: Bloch, 1991), 44.

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41.  As Robert Wistrich (1945–2015) schematizes the incompatibility of Jewishness, or any form of otherness, with an Austrian identity, “[Adolf] Fischof [1816–1893] put his finger on the central contradiction of the 1867 Constitution—that Austria-Hungary was a multinational State (Nationalitätenstaat) masquerading under liberal German hegemony as a nationalstate on the West European model.” See The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph [1989] (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006), 151. Roth’s nationalism in the 1930s manifests itself as an effort to accommodate a contradiction that Fischof had already recognized in 1869. If such a contradiction had mandated that Austrian Jews during the late nineteenth century choose between a Jewish identity and an Austrian one, how much more hopeless would this choice be seventy years later, when either of these affiliations would gain access, at best, to a phantom political culture? 42. Bronsen, Joseph Roth, 589. 43.  Novalis’s statement is found in Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature [1920], trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 29. Lukács (1885–1971), like Roth, was a German-speaking Jew from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though significantly one who identified with the Hungarian cause that was anathema to Roth and whose subsequent ideological career was an antithetical complement to Roth’s own. It is nonetheless significant that Lukács apparently thought highly of Roth’s Radetzkymarsch. For Roth’s own take on the homelessness essential to Novalis’s and Lukács’s imagination, consider a comment in the 1920 feuilleton “Bei den Heimatlosen”: “All state officials should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love” (Joseph Roth in Berlin, 105; What I Saw, 65). 44.  One might recognize a rejoinder to this aspiration to be at home “everywhere” in the world in a remark of Roth’s contemporary and fellow (sister) refugee, Hannah Arendt (1906–1975): the “spurious world citizenship of [the interwar] generation, this fictitious nationality which they claimed as soon as their Jewish origin was mentioned, in part already resembled those passports which later granted their owner the right to sojourn in every country except the one that issued it.” As quoted in my friend Rachel Seelig’s Strangers in Berlin, 164. For the original, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 53. 45.  As Roth states in Betrachtung an der Klagemauer, “It’s not that they fall away from the faith of their fathers—their faith falls away from them.

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Or it becomes sublimated in their descendents. It determines the way they think, act, and behave. . . . A Jew fulfills his ‘religious duties,’ even if he doesn’t fulfill them. Merely by being, he is religious. He is a Jew. Any other people would be required to affirm their ‘faith’ or their ‘nationality.’ The Jew’s affirmation is involuntary, automatic. He is marked, to the tenth generation” (Joseph Roth in Berlin, 86–87; What I Saw, 48; emphasis in original). 46.  Earlier in his career, Roth seemed to have found a model for this ideal in Walter Rathenau (1867–1922), at least after Rathenau’s martyrdom. As Roth writes in Besuch im Rathenau-Museum (1924), “His life is characterized by its attempt to bring together antiquity, Judaism, and early Christianity. . . . By day he [Rathenau] read and studied the New Testament. It lay beside his bed to fill him with its love. He was a Christian; you won’t find a better one” (Joseph Roth in Berlin, 222–23; What I Saw, 186). As with Roth himself, Rathenau’s attachment to Christianity only underscores his Jewishness.

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MOYSHE KULBAK’S BERLIN WRITINGS Here, There, Everywhere (Nowhere)

Space Is the Place

Moyshe Kulbak’s Berlin period offers another example of how the city functioned as a crossroads of the twentieth century. For Kulbak’s writing, the city stands at a chronological crossroads between aesthetic periods and a geographical crossroads between the “organic” setting of the Eastern European shtetl and the emerging concentration of modern Yiddish culture in metropolises such as Moscow, Warsaw, New York, and Buenos Aires. This coupling of dislocated, transformative juxtapositions suggests an analogous preoccupation with what has been identified, in Jewish Studies among other disciplines, as a tension between place and space: “Jewish place is defined by location, Jewish space by performance. Both can be congruent or overlap, and the difference between them is not so much defined by where one can find them, but lies in their function, or . . . in the different roles they play.”1 Following this distinction, the radically divergent aesthetics of Kulbak’s most significant publications while in Berlin, the episodic poem Raysn (New York, 1922) and the experimental narrative Meshiekh ben-Efraim (Berlin, 1924), suggest an effort to decouple place from space. The dialectic that emerges from considering these dissimilar works consists in the poem’s depiction 303

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of place without space and the narrative’s description of space without place. Both, in turn, are consequences of the author’s own dislocation, summoning a Belorussian mythos—indeed, more than one—from the Berlin metropolis. Nostalgia and apocalypse are the two determinant concepts that expose the complicated relationship between place and space, in Kulbak’s writing as much as Joseph Roth’s. Svetlana Boym (1959–2015) thus observes of nostalgia’s typical territoriality, “Curiously, intellectuals and poets from different national traditions . . . claim that they had a special word for homesickness that was radically untranslatable.”2 Boym then discusses German, French, Spanish, Czech, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, and Romanian terms—concluding, persuasively, that these various terms convey a “desire for untranslatibility” (Boym, 13) that is as generic and prototypical as the concept of home itself. In this context, it is worth pointing out that the Yiddish words for homesickness and nostalgia, by contrast, are benkenish, longing without reference to place, and nostalgye, easily recognized as an internationalism. The inference is clear: Yiddish has no “special” word for homesickness because it has no fixed concept of home. As a recent novel formulates the paradox of displacement so crucial to this comparison’s understanding of Baroque aesthetics, “The Baroque is here. The Classical does not exist.”3 However unremarkable the Yiddish lexicon of nostalgia is, the phenomenon of nostalgia is nonetheless a central component of Yiddish modernist aesthetics, one that distinguishes the development of twentieth-century Yiddish literature from the preceding “classic” period, in which the lost home of the shtetl was seldom mourned because it was only exceptionally and incompletely depicted as abandoned. In temporal terms, nostalgia complements apocalyptic imagery that would otherwise be figured, progressively, as utopia. As Avrom Novershtern demonstrates in his treatment of apocalyptic themes in modern Jewish literature, the foundation of the

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apocalyptic motif at the beginning of the twentieth century tends to exclude the terminology of redemption, along with utopia or even connotations of harmony.4 For Yiddish apocalypticism, the future can be conceived only in negative, destructive terms. Like Walter Benjamin’s now overfamiliar angel of history, its only view of paradise is a backward glance from the maelstrom. Nostalgia therefore becomes indicative of a larger phenomenon of conflicted temporalities—a problem dramatized through a number of strategies in Meshiekh ben-Efraim and deferred in Raysn through its use of a suspended concept of time, a permanent present tense signifying an organic, cyclical notion of time uninterrupted by history, change, or modernity but closed off definitively by death. In this regard, Kulbak’s major Berlin writings offer contrasting and interconnected strategies for conceptualizing specifically Yiddish notions of nostalgia and apocalypse. Although Raysn and Meshiekh ben-Efraim depict Kulbak’s origins in rural Belarus, they represent this theme from nearly opposite aesthetic and psychological points of view. Raysn, an old Yiddish name for the land of Belarus, is a sequence of twelve short narrative poems using conventional meters and rhyme schemes to depict the speaker’s extended family of two grandparents and sixteen uncles against the backdrop of the rural landscape. Meshiekh ben-Efraim (referring to the apocalyptic precursor of the redemptive Messiah of the house of David5) is a formally anomalous and structurally fragmented jumble of prose and poetry set in an unidentified past—one in which signs of modern technology are nowhere visible and where the Polish aristocracy still wields local power and prestige—that combines both Jewish and Christian imagery as well as low comedy with mystic abstraction to confront the crisis of values, beliefs, and social identities of the prerevolutionary Pale of Settlement. Together, these two works, each of which is constructed along principles of dislocation and contiguity, in turn establish a dialectical relationship with one another out of their respective formal and thematic ruptures and connections.

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To the extent that Raysn presents a nostalgic view of the old home Kulbak had left for Berlin, it does so in counterintuitive terms to the Yiddish literature that precedes it: instead of the shtetl synagogue, marketplace, and bathhouse that constitute the privileged spaces for nineteenth-century Yiddish literature, Raysn presents as prototypical a landscape that consists of woods, rivers, and the farm on which the speaker’s family lives. Although its second poem introduces the tribal family in propitiously symbolic terms—the rapidity with which they take to the day’s work is likened to a mizmer (psalm), and the speaker repeats their total number of eighteen men, equated numerologically with life6 — the poem’s only subsequent references to the Jewish religion, aside from the names of the speaker’s uncles, are to a non-Jewish love interest as a goye (Raysn, 55), the honorific olev ha-sholem (“rest in peace,” Raysn, 43, 49) after the mention of the speaker’s late grandparents, the description of his grandmother’s corpse as a bar-minen (Raysn, 49), and the final confession or vide that the grandfather makes before his aptly patriarchal deathbed soliloquy (Raysn, 60). That is to say that Jewishness is referred to in either the negative sense of its relation to non-Jews or the opposition of life with death. The grandfather’s benediction is accordingly significant in that it evokes the blessings of Jacob and Moses at the end of Genesis and Deuteronomy, respectively, but in the context of Belorussia, not the Land of Israel. By blessing his sons with prosperity in and through the land, the grandfather elevates Belarus to the status of home, thus giving the speaker an address for his longing. Indeed, the poem distinguishes itself from the conventions of Yiddish literature by focusing, like Roth’s later fiction, on the archetypal Slavic landscape, rendering it in deliriously overripe imagery of superabundant life: “Juices run from the ground, so that a drunkenness runs through every limb” (Raysn, 43). This intoxicated romance with the land stands in contrast not to a critique of Jewish tradition, as one might expect from nineteenth-century

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Yiddish satire, but instead to a studied, self-conscious omission of references to the Jewish ritualization of everyday life through prayer, Torah study, the religious calendar, and so on. This deliberate exclusion of ritual, tradition, and cosmological memory in Raysn stands in contrast both to the intensive engagement with ritual and cosmology in Meshiekh ben-Efraim and to the circumstances of Kulbak’s own upbringing, which did occur in the vicinity of “Jewish” Belarus—Smorgon, Kovno, and Minsk—but which included education in a modern heder and yeshivas in addition to a Russian-language Jewish elementary school.7 Though drawing on some of the details of his background, the autobiographical element of the poem is more a deadpan satire than a confessional revelation. One can suggest that Raysn, with its unusual foregrounding of a specific geographic location, counts as an instance of Benjaminian—and perhaps Bergelsonian—mourning, defined by its preoccupation with “place” and the possibility of recovering what has been lost. Meshiekh ben-Efraim serves by contrast as an example of perhaps “Döblinian” melancholy, characterized by a focus on the more abstract connotations of “space,” acquiescing in this abstraction to what is unrecoverable and relegating it to the apocalyptic. In this regard, Meshiekh ben-Efraim opens with a reconfigured description of the same rural, peasant Jews that figure in Raysn, only now described in the mystical terminology of the lamed-vovniks, the thirty-six hidden, righteous Jews on whom the existence of the world depends:8 “All those who have set their souls on the word yud-key-vov-key, the Lamed-vovniks, go about at the edge of the world, alone and isolated.”9 At the same time as the author inserts these figures in an explicitly Jewish context mostly absent from Raysn, he excludes himself from their company by referring to their religious devotion using the sacred Tetragrammaton forbidden by Jewish tradition in all but the most sanctified contexts.10 The use of this term is radically subversive of both the conventions of secularizing Yiddish literature and

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the subject matter of religious speculation; it serves to alert the reader here not necessarily of God’s uniqueness and indivisibility but of the audacious originality of Kulbak’s literary experiment. In narrative terms, Meshiekh ben-Efraim resembles Raysn insofar as it consists less of a linear plot than of a series of associations built around the juxtaposition of contrasting character types. At the center of the narrative stands Reb Benye, an old and isolated Jewish peasant, tormented by sexual desires, whom the other characters in the story invest with desperate messianic expectations. Among the cast Kulbak assembles are a trio of lamed-vovniks; their Christian counterpart Kiril the bathhouse attendant; Benye’s miserly brother, Levi; Levi’s messiah-seeking daughter, Leahle; a discredited Hasidic rabbi, Simkhe Plakhte, who takes up with Leahle;11 the Polish nobleman Pan Vrublevksy, who pursues Leahle; the unnamed daughter of another aristocrat, Pan Lubomirsky, who joins Kiril on his religious quest; and Gimpele, an enigmatic, perhaps mad philosopher. Each of these characters—who dramatically parallel one another in carefully arranged contrasts and who all resemble, inversely and parodically, aspects of Benye’s own character—converge at the failed apotheosis of Benye, when he rejects his redemptive calling and in turn is murdered, apparently, by his mob of would-be disciples. The diffuseness of Meshiekh ben-Efraim’s plot and structure— combining tragic and comic motifs as freely as it does poetry and prose—reads as a compendium of familiar Yiddish storytelling genres: the mystical allegories of Reb Nakhman,12 the madcap picaresques of Mendele, the pseudo-Hasidic legends of Y. L. Peretz, and the melancholy impressionism of Dovid Bergelson’s early narratives,13 to name just a few. The ritual crowning and decrowning of Reb Benye around which the work is built parallels contemporaneous effects in Der Nister’s Symbolist writing,14 which in turn calls to mind the affinity of both writers with the Trauerspiel genre. Indeed, the stylistic or generic malleability of Kulbak’s first narrative underscores the fact that the Trauerspiel

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itself, even before it had “regressed” into satirical inversions as it was reworked into Enlightenment farce and the Gothic novel, was always a hybrid literary discourse.15 Meshiekh ben-Efraim, like much of Kulbak’s writing, is thus distinguished by its contrasting perspectives of collective and individual destinies. This contrast distinguishes his writing from many of its avant-garde German counterparts, which tend, with perhaps the notable exception of the Lehrstücke in contemporaneous Epic Theater, to focus on the individual, the “lonely man in the crowd,”16 at the heart of urban modernism since the era of Charles Baudelaire. The group for Kulbak—the lamed-vovniks in Meshiekh ben-Efraim, the family in Raysn, and eventually the tribe in his Soviet-era masterpiece Zelmenyaner—is characteristically as indivisible as the individual protagonist, while individuals highlighted from within this framework are as self-contradicting as larger conglomerations.17 In this tension, Kulbak’s writing, even before he relocated to the Soviet Union, is preoccupied with the correspondence of collective fate connecting shtetl premodernity with the collective transformations of the “New Soviet Man” also contemplated in Bergelson’s Berlin-era fiction. The unharmonized instability between the premodern collective and the post-Freudian individual demonstrates that temporality as such is seldom stable in Kulbak’s writing but always conflicted so that neither generic categories nor narrative modes remain constant or self-contained. For works such as Raysn and Meshiekh ben-Efraim specifically, Kulbak’s unstable temporality represents a larger rupture between Berlin and Belarus, as well as the old Pale of Settlement and either the newly established Polish Republic or the even newer Soviet Union. The Pleasures of Parataxis

In keeping with the stark, typological structuring of the characters and fragmented dramatic pacing of Meshiekh ben-Efraim,

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Kulbak establishes a telegraphic rhythm of brief, declarative sentences for the work: Once there was a miller in the land of White Russia. His wife died and his son was taken off into the army. The mill was overgrown with mosses and weeds. . . . The miller didn’t know what to do. He went into his stable and saw that of all his livestock only his cow was left. He felt so lonely and miserable that he sat down on the threshold of his house and wept bitter tears. His name was Benye. (MbE, Y 17; E 268–69)

This technique departs both from the chatty, theatrical discourse of classic Yiddish fiction, modeled on oral performance, and from the more contemporary, introspective, free indirect discourse of fellow Berlin residents Bergelson and Der Nister, however distinct their respective styles are from one another. The use of these bardic sentence-paragraphs—a style that Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron attributes to the influence of, among others, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883–1891)18—combines the compression of verse with the rhythm of journalism, in a manner that seems to anticipate Joseph Roth. Kulbak’s writing is distinctive in its pacing and syntax, as are the uses to which he puts these simple statements, which likewise contribute to the analogical associations out of which the fantastic elements of his story emerge. As Novershtern states, “Parataxis, the coordinated clause, is the distinguishing characteristic of Kulbak’s style, which is explicitly concerned with coupling very heterogeneous materials.”19 Parataxis therefore provides the grammatical structure through which metonymy functions, and it establishes a framework through which the metaphorical in Meshiekh ben-Efraim can be read allegorically. The primary instance of this effect occurs when Benye lies on the ground and vegetation begins to grow out of his body: “He lay there with the hill and it was as though he had been poured into it;

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and if a blade of grass were to spring up anywhere, it would grow out through him, out of his back” (MbE, Y 27; E 274). Here the figurative intimacy of Raysn’s characters with the land becomes explicit, absurd, and grotesque. As Ksiazenicer-Matheron writes of this passage, “First reduced to the level of animal, he precedes little by little to a vegetal state, then mineral, before congealing into the dust of the earth, an inert form having renounced the prestige of the human to return to the simplicity of the machine . . . and an elemental passivity” (MbE, F 22–23). In the folkloristic terms from which Kulbak derives this imagery, Benye’s status in this passage, between machine and primordial, pre-Adamic dirt, functions as a sort of golem, the legendary homunculus made kabalistically out of clay.20 He has willed himself, reluctantly, to become clay and then to become life—an internalization and reversal, in fact, of the actual golem legend, which originates as a culturally specific legend about the Maharal of Prague (c. 1520–1609), thus connected not only with the origins of urban modernity but also with the contemporaneous embrace of the primordial by the Yiddish-language Kiev Group, as well as the “post-Nietzschean” Russian avant-garde.21 Nonetheless, from the parodic connection of the Jewish peasant with the land, Kulbak embarks, by way of Levi’s experience of the same mystical “connection” with gold instead of clay, on a discussion of the ten Sephirot (MbE, Y 36; E 279), the most abstract and esoteric motif in classical kabala.22 The sudden juxtaposition of the physical with the abstract, literal meanings with figurative ones, is characteristic of Meshiekh ben-Efraim’s poetics, and it encourages a radical reconsideration of the conventional structuralist understanding of poetry’s alignment with metaphor and the alignment of prose with metonymy.23 Just as it is nearly impossible to differentiate where poetry ends and prose begins in this narrative, so too is there a constant challenge to distinguish metaphorical meanings from metonymical ones, in keeping with a more general shift from metaphorical connotations to abrupt

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metonymies in the poetics of modernism, but equally characteristic of the way in which allegory mediates between the two representational strategies by disenchanting the metaphorical and abstracting the metonymical. Through these techniques, the ambiguous relation of the narrative between Berlin and Byelorus, between nostalgia and apocalypse—two strategies for politicizing past and future, respectively, from the standpoint of a present time and place in flux—serves to mobilize these uncertainties. Nostalgia, as Boym underscores, is one consequence of dislocation. Kulbak’s narrative utilizes nostalgia, distinct here from “sentimentality,” by incorporating dislocation as its animating structural principle. To underscore the significance of dislocation as a structuring device, Kulbak traverses the poetic and prose sections of Meshiekh ben-Efraim with Gimpele’s interjections of a negationist, contrarian philosophy, which present themselves not so much as ideological positions but as a strategy of reading premised on contingency and paradox. As Kulbak writes, “‘You have asked me to explain the system of irrational thinking . . . ’ And he burst out laughing, and laughed so hard that Benye began to smirk” (MbE, Y 52; E 289). Laughter is Gimpele’s philosophical system, and it unmakes that system at the same time; the narrative’s philosophy cancels itself out in deformative, derisive, disruptive laughter, a gesture in keeping with Expressionism’s elevation of psychological extremes and representations of chaos, while undermining the apocalyptic doom it seeks to cultivate. “While we reject reason,” Gimpele continues, “we also do away with the categories of rational thinking: space and time” (MbE, Y 52; E 289). This rejection of space and time in fact parallels and figures the dislocation that nostalgia produces. The longing for an abandoned place cannot bring the nostalgic subject back in time; it can only dislocate him or her from the present moment he or she inhabits. With respect to Gimpele’s antiphilosophy as interpretive strategy, the entire narrative can be summarized as a generative

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exercise in misreading: the lamed-vovniks misread Benye’s capacity for redemptive action, men and women misinterpret one another’s intentions with respect to amorous and spiritual love, and Jews and Christians confuse one another with the mutually exclusive means by which they read common signs in religious texts, icons, and the landscape itself. As the climax to this series of misreadings, Benye’s rejection of the redemptive role attributed to him, like Gimpele’s antiphilosophy, becomes a subversive strategy of overturning interpretive conventions by repudiating the role of “Messiah, son of Ephraim,” a role in which the redeemer must sacrifice himself for the sake of a subsequent and definitive redemption.24 In fact, Benye’s repudiation derives explicitly from his acceptance of Gimpele’s worldview. As he says, “I’m going to the earth . . . Gimpel is right. . . . There is no God” (MbE, Y 117; E 320). Significantly, Benye says “to the earth” (tsu der erd), not “in the earth” (in d’r erd), or “go to hell,” as colloquial Yiddish would express it. The fractured idiom reflects the function of fantastic discourse in the narrative; in a world without God, spiritual metaphors can be rendered only physically, parodically, literally. Yet this reversal and disavowal of mystical imagery reanimates the symbols of religion as allegories—granting them, like Gimpele’s philosophy, a dramatic purpose in the absence of a theological one. Benye thus creates a discourse of death and self-abnegation— “Die, my dear ones, die!” he tells his would-be disciples (MbE, Y 145; E 344)25—that comes to determine the fate of the other characters as well as their decision finally to annihilate him. He also demonstrates that this burden of death cannot be displaced on another person: just as he refuses to die for the sake of other people, a refusal that paradoxically ensures his ritualized destruction, so too does he suggest that redemption cannot be displaced onto an external redeemer. In terms characteristic of the mythic dimension of the work, Benye’s annihilation becomes a selfvalorization and vindication, a single contradictory action that like the “crowning” and “decrowning” of the carnival king must

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be understood as indivisible in its unification of opposites—in his case, as in the Baroque Trauerspiel, of a religious leader as tyrant and martyr. Furthermore, moving from the mythical to the historical, Benye’s simultaneous rejection and apotheosis of the folk serves to represent the lingering commitments and ruptures between Kulbak in Berlin and the native land he had abandoned temporarily but could not sever from his imagination. Meshiekh ben-Efraim is therefore “mythical” in the structural sense that its images combine antinomies in a way that resists logical, linear analysis, yet it is also allegorical in the sense that these antinomies resist gestures toward transcendent or symbolic meaning. Raysn, likewise, is “mythical” in a more colloquial sense of projecting an idealization of Kulbak’s native land that could only have been produced, nostalgically, from afar. Nostalgia provides a motivating structure for Raysn, but if the object of nostalgia, distinct from apocalypse, is return and restoration, then what could function as the desired object in this poem? To answer this question, provisionally, one should consider the origins of the modern Yiddish ballad: the first significant narrative poem in modern Yiddish is Peretz’s Monish, first published in 1888. It tells the ironic, tragicomic story of its eponymous hero, who falls from the summit of rabbinic learning via the seduction of two demons—one disguised as a German Jew and the other as his “Aryan”-looking daughter. These demons personify the cultural and linguistic foreignness of modernity to the traditional world of the shtetl, for which the ballad form is as foreign as the German language or non-Jewish sexuality. For Kulbak, by contrast, poetic form becomes a means of locating the family depicted in the poem in and of the Eastern European “firmament,” even though the author himself is living in Berlin at the time.26 By using a neo-Romantic poetic form in the 1920s, Kulbak, like previous Yiddish neo-Romantics such as Peretz, Avrom Reisen (1876–1953), and Leyb Naydus (1890–1918), expresses a

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desire not for a reconstituted territorial past but for the “pure form” of standard meters and regular rhymes through which he constructs this sequence. For what, other than formal purity, itself atavistic in the context of Kulbak’s engagement at the time with urban Expressionism, could be restored following Raysn’s blueprint? Even the name Raysn—a homonym, of course, for the verb raysn, “to rip or tear asunder”—is so archaic that it seldom, if ever, appears in the classic Yiddish literature of the nineteenth century; few Yiddish speakers in Kulbak’s day, and far fewer today, even recognize the place to which it refers. One can conjecture that instead of a return to the rural landscape, what Kulbak is in fact striving for is the ability to apostrophize its loss in poetic form, which is an anachronistic yet characteristically modernist desire in the context of contemporaneous avant-garde experimentation but nonetheless a productive enough use for the nostalgic impulse. More broadly considered, nostalgia can express itself only in formal terms, since its content is always announcing itself as absent, imaginary, allegorical. Kulbak thus performs a feat comparable to what the Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka achieved when he began the lectures collected as Myth, Literature, and the African World by stating, “I shall begin by commemorating the gods for their self-sacrifice on the altar of literature.”27 Just as Soyinka could consecrate this “self-sacrifice” only in the context of Cambridge University, where he delivered his lectures, so could Kulbak commemorate Belarus only from Berlin. In both cases the living reality of the spaces and places represented by these authors would have proved too resistant to their mythologizing poetics when confronted too closely. Poetic form, by contrast, is a far more amenable object of displaced desire for Kulbak than contemporary Belarus. Indeed, what had been radical for Peretz in 1888 now seems nostalgic for Kulbak, only thirty years later, thus revealing that another

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characteristic of nostalgia is to render quaint, to neutralize, what had been most formidable for a previous generation. Connected to the romantic preoccupation with pristine form—a preoccupation that distinguishes the major currents of poetry from nearly every other literary mode in the early nineteenth century—is the status of language in Raysn. In this regard, one should consider the line, “A silent life presses on through grasses and roots and branches” (Raysn, 43). Silence is key to the poem’s rhapsodic character; silence figures the absence of Jewish content, which could be constituted only through speech acts such as prayers, exegesis, and descriptions. The poem’s silence, therefore, is one of contemplation and reverie, out of which grows his evocation of an idyllic vision of absent nature and an imaginary home. Moreover, when the beauty of the landscape motivates the grandfather in this passage to speak finally, he utters a Slavic curse rather than a Hebrew prayer (Raysn, 43), an inversion that further underscores the absence, perhaps the repression, of religious reference. The Ghost(s) of Peretz

If Raysn’s romance with pure form originates, however circuitously, with Peretz’s introduction of the ballad form to modern Yiddish poetry, Peretz also looms large behind the inspiration for Meshiekh ben-Efraim, both in its formal eclecticism and in its ideological despair. As the critic Y. Y. Trunk (1887–1961) wrote, “Kulbak is ideologically a follower of Peretz. But he takes his preferred Jewish characters from the same reality that provides the source for Yiddish Naturalism” (quoted in Novershtern, 126:189). At the heart of Meshiekh ben-Efraim’s aesthetic repudiation of this Naturalist tradition and its claims for an “organic” connection between Jews and the territory of Eastern Europe, a claim ostensibly valorized by Raysn, is a critique of ideologies advocating, alternately, Jewish integration into modern nation-states such as the brand-new Polish Republic and the more radical aspirations

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of Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe advocated, in varying degrees, by movements such as the Territorialists, Seymists, and the Yiddish-socialist Bund. Though first incorporated as a formal ideological organization, the “Jewish society for knowledge of the land,” in 1926,28 each of these movements on behalf of Doikayt, “presence in the land,” embraces a concept that came to be known as Landkentenish, the notion of “knowing the land” as an essential prerequisite—one shared by cultural-nationalists of the Diaspora, liberal integrationists, and Zionists in Palestine—to claiming the land as territory. As the historian Samuel Kassow explains in his study of the Landkentenish movement in Poland: “The second source of the Landkentenish idea was the Jewish cultural revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, symbolized by the Yiddish writer Yitzhak Leybush Peretz, the writer and folklorist S. Ansky, and the historian Simon Dubnow. This cultural revolution . . . nurtured the ideal of Landkentenish by highlighting the central role of the people, rather than traditional religious texts, in the survival of the Jewish nation” (Lipphardt, 243). Among these figures, the most influential spiritual godfather of Landkentenish is Peretz. And yet, already a decade before Meshiekh ben-Efraim, Peretz himself, in a move characteristic of his ambivalent position between modernist poetics and secularizing cultural ideology, had offered a parody of what can subsequently be identified as Landkentenish in his most experimental work, the Expressionist verse drama “Ba Nakht afn altn mark” (“At Night in the Old Marketplace”). There the notion of becoming one with the land, whether in a Polish-territorialist sense, figured by Peretz as Yiddishism, or in a Zionist version of this ideal, figured as “the land of milk and honey,” is presented as a drunken old man rolling obscenely in the dirt: How sweet, how fine The damp earth smells, Like milk and honey!

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It has no hands, but it fondles me like a mother . . . It has no tongue, but it talks to me like a brother . . . 29

Peretz’s graphic, nihilistic rejection in “Ba Nakht afn altn mark” of the various movements of Jewish nationalism for which he had served, willingly, as an inspiration in his public role as polemicist and spokesperson counts in Expressionist terms as an example of a characteristic function of Yiddish comedy, an inverted ideological critique. The most sophisticated examples of Yiddish satirical parody, particularly in the writing of Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz himself, undermine not just the features of traditional shtetl life that earlier, maskilic comedy had eviscerated but also many of the beliefs of the author’s own progressive, culturally nationalist faith in rationality, collective destiny, and political liberalism. An additional motif from Peretz’s drama recurs in Kulbak’s work in the scene describing Pan Vrublevsky’s ball, where the entertainment is provided by Jewish klezmorim, including Wolf, one of the lamed-vovniks who initiate Benye’s messianic tribulations. In the backstory of Peretz’s play, the protagonist had served as a badkhn (ceremonial jester) performing with three klezmorim at a non-Jewish ball, after which the three drunken musicians had drowned in a well seen on stage. 30 Where Peretz uses the story of the drowned klezmorim, seemingly, as a warning against overintimate proximity of Jews with non-Jews, for Kulbak, such intimacy is essential to the syncretic apocalypticism that motivates his writing. The implications of this juxtaposition can be observed in Kulbak’s description of the lamed-vovnik: “Wolf . . . who was standing in front with closed eyes, began playing a fiddle. His soft, tired hand guided the bow, stroking, weeping secretly. The prayer of a poor man who was hidden / And he poured out his heart to God” (MbE, Y 101; E 317). This passage, which mixes poetry with prose to depict the mixing of Jews with Christians, conveys the irreconcilability of physical pleasure and

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spiritual aspiration, as well as a metaphysical reconfiguration of class struggle in Eastern Europe. A banquet for the aristocrats is an occasion for weeping among the poor klezmorim, yet this weeping becomes another source of entertainment, for the party revelers but for the reader as well. Incompatibility is the structural principle by which ethnicity, religion, gender, discourse, and genre are deployed in Kulbak’s work. The pervasive resistance to harmonization in Meshiekh benEfraim in turn underscores the artificial, disembodied discourse of the poems constituting Raysn. They, too, count as instances of extreme stylization, deriving, like the Landkentenish ideology itself, as much from the precedent of German and Slavic or Baltic Romanticism as the contemporaneous imperatives of Yiddish territorialist secularization. Moreover, Raysn’s atavistic loyalty to poetic form, though in fact consistent with much of Kulbak’s lyric verse, stands as explicitly in contrast to the formal experimentation and generic mutability of Meshiekh ben-Efraim as nostalgia relates to and inverts apocalypse. The two works form an ideal interconnectedness not for their similarities but for their conscious and schematic differences. Indeed, the formal ambivalence of Meshiekh ben-Efraim generates not only its thematic preoccupation with apocalypse—the fragments out of which it is constructed resemble the remnants of a narrative after a cataclysm—but also its resistance to linear development and mimetic description. In lieu of psychological or dramatic development, Kulbak presents the contiguity of genres and their affective moods, tempos, and associations, structuring the progression of episodes analogically rather than logically. It is perhaps to be expected that one of the most productive sources of ambivalence in Kulbak’s writing is the conflicted relationships between men and women, and the formal treatment of gender as such. In Raysn, the primary female figure is the grandmother, described in the third section as “A master of

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mothering—a new child every spring / And easily, without any birth-pains, like a hen lays an egg / She hatched the twins— a twin following a twin” (Raysn, 40). This description renders the grandmother as a figure of supernatural fertility, much like Deborah in Roth’s Hiob, even inverting and dispensing with the curse of Eve by giving birth without physical pain, yet also as a figure beyond humanity, comparable to chickens laying eggs. The imagery is at once animal and metaphysical, hence mythic, for an East European archetype as ostensibly pagan as it is Jewish: femininity in Raysn is figured beyond the frame of conventional Jewishness, in conspicuous contrast to the masculine character of the tribe as such. Nonetheless, her death (Raysn, 49) is narrated immediately after the first reference to Uncle Avrom’s non-Jewish love interest Nastasia, who appears in the previous section as a kind of water nymph, with green brows and green eyes, embraced by the waves of the river (Raysn, 45). The limits of the grandmother’s status as earth mother coincide with the boundaries separating Jew from non-Jew, just as Deborah’s primal motherhood in Hiob is undone by Mirjam’s promiscuity with czarist soldiers. Moreover, at her funeral her sons, the sixteen uncles, appear to give vent to their own culpability in her death: “Then they cried out, pathetically, my uncles / Like murderers before the gallows” (Raysn, 49). In this figuration, the sons whom she bore so effortlessly have killed her, with the inference that their attraction, or at least Avrom’s, to a non-Jewish woman is the culprit. Sexuality therefore serves simultaneously as the limit that separates the Jewish world from the non-Jewish one in this poem and as the means by which that limit is trespassed. Consequently, the mythical “Raysn” extends only so far as the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, analogous to the boundary between tradition and modernity, are observed. Once this border vanishes, with the appearance of Nastasia, “Raysn” becomes “Belarus,” and as such is no more idyllic than Berlin.

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A similar fault line between eros and thanatos, youth and old age, motherhood and virginity, as well as Jews and non-Jews, circumscribes the figure of Leahle in Meshiekh ben-Efraim. As the target of Pan Vrublevksy’s erotic pursuit (MbE, Y 122–23; E 329– 30), which occurs in the course of enacting her own eroticized and syncretic aspirations for redemption, she becomes the parody of a Madonna figure who in succumbing to an erotic encounter supposedly brings about the coming of the Messiah. The danger and temptation she embodies therefore becomes the pivot that serves to dramatize the otherwise diffuse motifs and themes Kulbak introduces. 31 Furthermore, in keeping with the principle of contrast that structures the narrative, Pan Vrublevsky’s assault on Leahle—interrupted by Simkhe Plakhte, who apparently becomes involved with her thereafter—finds an echo in Benye’s grotesquely parodic temptation by the archetypal succubus Lilith;32 the fault line between Benye and Lilith occurs between the human and spirit world just as Leahle’s liminal status separates and conjoins the Jewish and the non-Jewish. These correspondences create a series of complementary narrative functions. The anxiety over Jewish and non-Jewish exogamy stands in the domain of realistic narrative analogous to the metaphysical anxiety on which all of Benye’s acts are predicated, between the animate and inanimate world, and between the human and the demonic world. Benye’s respective proximity to both the inanimate and the spiritual domain in turn anchors his fate, parodically, in the realm of myth invoked in Kulbak’s use of fantasy, so that Leahle’s motif connects the realistic and tragic elements of the work to the fantastic and parodic element of Benye’s fate. Contrasting with her status as a parodic virgin mother, Leahle remains a no less legendary, or parodic, lost daughter—a figure in classical Jewish mysticism for the Shekhinah, or Divine Immanence vanished with the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, and known to modern Jewish literature through the stories of Reb Nakhman—and in this capacity she prompts her father, Levi, to

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become like a lamed-vovnik in his pursuit of her. By smashing the objects in his home and breaking his windowpanes (MbE, Y 124; E 330), Levi divests himself of his possessions, coming to the belated recognition that love and not gold is all that can sustain him, a lesson that corresponds to Benye’s rejection of the messianic calling. As brothers, like the Biblical twins Jacob and Esau, Levi and Benye serve as inversions that reinforce one another through their own reversal, and the love that Levi seeks by the end of the story acquires a far more redemptive connotation than the sacrifice of a putative messiah figure. Benye’s death scene at the end of the narrative, in which “His soul left him, and all at once he became as big and as strong as the earth” (MbE, Y 145–46; E 344), therefore collapses the narrative motifs that had determined his fate from the beginning, by culminating his fantasy of return to “the dust of the earth.” Similarly, the concluding prayer, which elevates “the clay, which is better off than anything else” over “my useless hand / . . . my useless heart” (MbE, Y 147; E 345), unifies the motifs and fragments on which the narrative has been structured by equating the stasis of death with the stability of prayer as a speech act. The irony of pure form here contributes to the ambivalence and the negation of transcendence that propel the work to its end. By way of a provisional conclusion to this reading, one should return to another remark of Boym’s: “The nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and universal” (Boym, 12). In Meshiekh ben-Efraim and Raysn, Kulbak has chosen an aesthetic to convey the productivity of nostalgia as a mediating phenomenon. The form of Meshiekh benEfraim, or rather its formlessness, is a means of affiliating Kulbak simultaneously with the Jewish culture of a just-vanished Pale of Settlement and with Expressionism, then in its last moment as the dominant modernist discourse in Central and Eastern Europe. Where Meshiekh ben-Efraim evokes and dramatizes this double identification as “space,” Raysn, through its embrace of

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a pseudo-oral, conspicuously Romantic poetic form, fulfills the same function as “place,” signified in Raysn ultimately in negative terms of absence, silence, and death. One can thus suggest that Kulbak’s Berlin perspective is as crucial to the ambivalence of his ideological critique as it is to the articulation of his ironic nostalgia for the Belorussian landscape. This ambivalence, predicated on the recognition that nothing is more German than a Jew’s nostalgia for Eastern Europe, suggests a pattern in which the Berlin sojourn for Kulbak becomes a critical means of renegotiating his relationship to a Heimat that had and would change again to a nearly unrecognizable degree during his absence. This process of mediation and dislocation, one should hasten to add, is distinct from what occurs in the Yiddish writing contemporaneously appearing in New York because of the comparative proximity of Berlin to Eastern Europe and German to Yiddish. The common denominator for nearly all the “Berlin Yiddishists,” therefore, is the way in which the Berlin experience—the experience of a metropolis, the mediation of German, and the encounter with various modernist aesthetics such as Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, and the Marxist aesthetics that would eventually emerge as Socialist Realism— distorts and reconfigures the perception of what previously had been the “natural habitat” for Yiddish culture, the East European shtetl. The sickness of nostalgia—its algia—is the displacement of space onto place, the superimposition of a spatial significance onto an absent place. This confusion results in an additional dislocation: the suggestion, essential to both nostalgia and apocalypse, that time, from the perspective of Berlin, has been suspended in Eastern Europe. Raysn demonstrates the symptoms of nostalgia in its commitment to form, while Meshiekh ben-Efraim resists nostalgia by violating the strictures and conventions of form. Both works are, like so many Yiddish works about Eastern Europe written in Weimar Germany, at both places and at

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neither at the same time. One can see through the juxtaposition of Kulbak’s Berlin writing with Roth’s thematic “return” to his Eastern European origins how a discontent with the present moment motivates the blurring of history with mythology that characterizes allegorical representation. Each writer focuses his attention on a social system rendered irretrievable by the upheavals affecting Europe during and just after World War I, thereby focusing the trauma of history on the merger of nostalgia with apocalypse that renders a desire for redemption indistinguishable from a search for origins. What remains of this discussion is to consider how these motivations can affect not just a depiction of the recent Eastern European past, as in the writing of Roth or Kulbak, but also the conceptualization of the Jewish religion from its earliest, primordial beginning. Conclusion

For this purpose, the comparison will conclude, provisionally, with a consideration of another Austrian who, like Joseph Roth, returned from an aggressively assimilationist modernism to a radical reconceptualization of the Jewish past, stretching beyond the Eastern European nineteenth century to the origins of Jewishness as a religion and a people. The Viennese-born Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), like many of the leading Jewish intellectuals in the German-speaking world at the time, converted to Christianity in 1898—but to Lutheranism, not Catholicism, as would be expected in so thoroughly Catholic a city as the Austrian capital. As with most Jewish converts in Vienna, his life seems to have changed little either emotionally or socially because of this decision; many of his associates remained Jewish, both of his wives were also born Jewish, and there is no evidence that he was a regular churchgoer or devout believer. If he drifted from the faith of his ancestors, he seems to have drifted only slightly, and by the 1920s the rise of European antisemitism began

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to motivate him to affirm his discarded faith more passionately than he had ever proclaimed his adopted one. This spiritual and political return is significant not only for its overt declaration of faith but also for its rejection of what by the late 1920s had become for Schoenberg a variety of false gods. The agon of his rejection accounts for why Schoenberg can be considered the definitive Jewish artist of the twentieth century, not in spite but because of the fact that his relationship to Jewishness was so idiosyncratic and fraught. Unlike Schoenberg, every other self-referentially Jewish artist—Marc Chagall, Sh. Y. Agnon, Larry David, and even Franz Kafka, particularly in Walter Benjamin’s reading of the latter—presents an effort at aestheticizing Jewish culture, experience, or existence. Only Schoenberg signifies, via his twelve-tone technique and its relationship to halachic systemization and biblical Bilderverbot (prohibition of images), a conscious effort at Judaizing aesthetics. The twelvetone technique through which Schoenberg organized most of his mature music dates from the early 1920s, the same moment when his return to Jewishness had begun. There are three primary features that characterize Schoenberg’s influential new system: compositions are organized out of “tone rows” consisting of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale (that is, all the white and black notes on a piano within a given octave) with no tone dominating the work, and an obligation to sound all twelve notes before any single note may be repeated; quadratic chordal combinations are privileged over triadic harmonies, which guarantees that music will sound dissonant when heard from the perspective of earlier European classical music and which resists the harmonic association of twelve-tone music with tonal music; and compositions develop not via chordal relationships or modulations but rather through inversions and reversals of the tone row. Schoenberg’s work reverses the conventional understanding of secularizing modernization in Jewish culture, yet this reversal functions in a conspicuously postlapsarian sense. Schoenberg’s

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ritual observance was in no sense doctrinaire, but the aesthetic systemization of his twelve-tone technique functions as a substitute for religious codification and prophetic aspiration, in the Hegelian sense in which the negated term of a dialectic is at the same time incorporated and elevated—an Aufhebung, or “sublation,” in philosophical parlance—within the displacing object of the dialectic. Schoenberg’s dialectical music achieves this by functioning as a remainder, an echo of Baroque compositional techniques, divested of their associations with Western tonality, and by serving as the remnant of a longing for form and meaning that both recalls and revokes the substitution that nineteenthcentury Bildung was supposed to have offered Jews in the aftermath of religious affiliation and insularity. For Schoenberg, what replaces religion is a soundscape, a reimagining of musical space as a territory, and this affiliates his music, however counterintuitively, with the allegorical function that can be ascribed to contemporaneous German Jewish travel writing such as Alfred Döblin’s or Joseph Roth’s. The theological implications of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique are most consciously performed in an opera-oratorio, Moses und Aron, that he composed in Berlin and subsequently in Barcelona before abandoning it in 1933. This work strives to depict the disparity between an absolute Divinity in its unrepresentability and the temptations of excess, depravity, and violence that false gods and graven images inevitably sanction. Philippe LacoueLabarthe (1940–2007) has referred to Moses und Aron as “nothing other than the negative (in the photographic sense) of Parsifal.”33 If one understands Parsifal as Richard Wagner’s attempt to create a Christian pageant devoid of any Jewish connotations, then Moses und Aron is an effort to articulate a Jewishness devoid of Christian associations. 34 As Lacoue-Labarthe suggests, it is not a repudiation of Wagnerian aesthetics but a dialectical inversion, an effort at Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) conceived from Judaic rather than Nordic sources.

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Schoenberg fashioned his own libretto for the opera, adapting the biblical narrative of Moses and Aaron—even altering the spelling of Aaron to Aron, to limit the letters in the opera’s title to twelve, in keeping with the twelve-tone compositional technique he had devised, and to avoid violating his own phobia toward the number thirteen. Where the Pentateuch mostly depicts Moses and Aaron as an indivisible team, Schoenberg perceives a philosophical and theological conflict between the two figures by virtue of Moses’s tongue-tied obeisance to a “single, eternal, omnipresent, invisible, and unimaginable God” and Aron’s overeager fluency and consequent capacity for representation. Though the ostensible protagonist is Moses, for much of the opera he is offstage, communicating with an equally inaccessible though musically present God, while Aron contends with the Children of Israel’s debates over whether such a God could defeat the gods they had known in Egypt and whether such a God would be worthy of their exclusive devotion. As in the biblical account, these disputes spill over into mutiny, until Aron is able to mollify the rebels with a graven image, the Golden Calf. The dramatic climax of the opera presents a spectacle of extraordinary debauchery as the Children of Israel follow Moses’s logic in equating the worship of a graven image with an indulgence of every selfish and sensuous desire—including rape and human sacrifice, both shown on stage with varying degrees of explicitness, depending on the production. It is at this moment that Moses reenters the narrative to chastise Aron for his betrayal of the prohibition against graven images and the covenant with God. Aron responds, however, by stating that words are as much a representation of an inconceivable deity as idols, and the tablets bearing the Law are as much a graven image as the Golden Calf. Here the music of the opera concludes. Nonetheless, Schoenberg wrote an additional scene for the libretto, in which Moses must pass judgment against Aron for his transgression. Rather than sentencing him to death—the only punishment sanctioned for

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violators of the Decalogue—Moses bids Aron to return to the desert, where the original revelation of God’s Oneness occurred. If Aron could survive there, with the knowledge of his errors, he could go free. Unable to undertake the burden, Aron falls dead on the spot. The conflict that propels the opera yet prevents its conclusion concerns the irreconcilability of revelation with representation. Schoenberg’s substitution of the twelve-tone technique in place of conventional tonality, in this regard, is directed against the music of the past, likened in the dramatic logic of the opera to the representation of God through the false idols of Egypt.35 Understood theologically, the attraction to graven images is what marks the work as Jewish, particularly for Jews of the biblical period. Understood historically, Schoenberg’s opera is as much a return to Wagnerian aesthetics as it is a repudiation of these values as Schoenberg perceived them.36 The pathos of the opera is demonstrated in its central theological insight; just as Moses’s tablets of the Law are as much a representation as Aron’s Golden Calf, the opera’s musical language assures that the two protagonists conceived dramatically as opposites must be equated musically, in that they must share the same notes. As Joseph Auner writes, “Even Moses holds out a moment of hope in his first encounter with Aron—significantly, the only time he actually sings in the opera: ‘Purify your thinking, / Free it from worthless things, / Let it be righteous.’ His vocal melody is a complete statement of the inversion of the row, underscoring the sense that, for a moment at least, he has become like Aron.”37 Aron describes this relationship between the two brothers when he refers to the dual function of Moses’s miraculous staff by singing, “In Moses’s hand, an unbending rod: the Law—in mine, the most supple of snakes.” Ruth HaCohen suggests, however, that this complementarity also conceals an implicitly Christian threat in Aron’s substitution of wonders for signs, in that his miracles don’t just seduce believers, they convert them.38

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It is noteworthy in this regard that not Moses but Aron appears to offer an exposition of Schoenberg’s aesthetic philosophy and its relationship to divine revelation: “Do not expect the form before the ideal, but both will appear at the same time,” he declares at the beginning of act 2. Aron’s fate serves in this respect as a parody of Schoenberg’s striving for aesthetic perfectibility, and therefore a rebuke to it. It is nonetheless in the imperfection of a sacred fragment that the composer’s greatest achievement manifests itself; Aron serves as a repudiation of Schoenberg because his character only receives expression dialectically, in relationship with an equally incomplete Moses. As HaCohen contends, in terms adapted to this comparison, where Bergelson’s Mides ha-din presents a father who sacrifices himself for his son and Metropolis presents a son prepared to sacrifice himself to his father, Moses und Aron presents a brother sacrificing himself for the sake of his brother. 39 But in this formal substitution, is Schoenberg suggesting, even unconsciously, that the voice of the divine is better represented by Aron than Moses—that Aron, paradoxically, is closer to the divine word than Moses? It is significant that the role of God in the opera, despite the composer’s vehement emphasis on Its unrepresentable Oneness, is voiced by a collective choir: God is one, yet in the opera God speaks, literally, in several voices. Indeed, if representation as such is prohibited, in either the words of the Law or the image of the Golden Calf, why does Schoenberg permit his audience to hear the voice of God? Why is sonic representation more acceptable, less threatening, than visual representation?40 Schoenberg seems both to ask this question and to answer it; how else can an ineffable Voice be portrayed, except in a way that violates all expectations of how voices should sound and what they should sing? The depiction of the Voice in the Burning Bush at once fulfills a metaphysical promise within twelve-tone technique, liberating tonality from the complacencies of convention, and reveals that the motivations for the technique have

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been messianic from the outset. Messianism for Schoenberg, the convert returned, is as much a repudiation of Christian iconicism as it is a reclamation of Jewish iconoclasm. Christians, like Aron himself, may have an image of God, but Jews have God’s voice. Indeed, music has conventionally been understood as the one medium that escapes the Jewish prohibition against graven images. As Theodor Adorno writes, “The Jewish prohibition on making images which forms the centre of the text also defines the approach of the music. . . . Music is the imageless art and was excluded from that prohibition.”41 But in an opera, as Adorno acknowledges, music is the only means of representation that matters. Although Moses and Aron inhabit contrasting styles—Moses’s musically notated declamation (Sprechstimme), in opposition to Aron’s melismatic singing—the pathos of the work emanates from the characters’ obligation to share two indifferentiable languages, the words and music of the opera. Style not only limits the contrast between the two characters to the most superficial level, it betrays the fact that the contrast itself is a masquerade, insofar as style bespeaks representation, the condition that Moses seeks to evade, disavow, and prohibit. As tempting as it is to identify Schoenberg with Moses, this temptation in fact underscores the status of the opera as a representation, as surely as the tablets of the covenant or the Golden Calf itself. Though Schoenberg’s role as the “lawgiver” of twelvetone technique corresponds to Moses, he performs the task of representation consigned to Aron; had he found the means of combining the two roles, the opera might have been completed. As it remains, however, the spectacle that constitutes the Trauerspiel’s theatricality can be understood as the masquerading of Aron’s representations as Moses’s prohibition against graven images, the superimposition of Aron’s id onto Moses’s superego. What deepens and complicates Schoenberg’s version of the Moses narrative is its aesthetic status as spectacle, which obligates a necessary element of simulation and dissimulation.

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His divided identification between Moses and Aron, superimposing one on the other, interferes with his ideological loyalty to Moses as protagonist by subsuming this loyalty within the larger performance. Schoenberg in his identification with Moses becomes his betrayer, as much as Aron himself—because like Aron, Schoenberg must reduce Moses and his laws from revelation to representation. As a drama, Moses und Aron aspires to tragedy but remains Trauerspiel, just as in terms of musical genre, the work remains a hybrid of opera and oratorio that can be recognized as an effort at differentiating its protagonists when in fact they must remain conjoined. However much the scenes involving Moses are meant to function as oratorio, whenever Aron takes the stage, the spectacle of opera inevitably follows.42 If tragedy dramatizes the incompatibility of divine judgment with human justice, the Trauerspiel as a historical spectacle focuses on the incompatibility of justice with mercy—hence its focus on the tyrant, the courtier, and the martyr. Neither tyrants nor martyrs can accept the quality of mercy, a quality that courtiers reserve for themselves. By imagining a conclusion to his Trauerspiel in which Moses and Aron trade dramatic functions, whereby Moses deviates from his commitment to absolute justice and Aron submits to the same judgment of the absolute, Schoenberg moves beyond the logic of either tragedy or Trauerspiel, from a position of either myth or history into a domain of ethics. The enduring pathos of this progression is his inability to imagine a music for this domain, his lasting hesitancy to give voice to his protagonists’ reciprocity. There is an additional theological nuance to the relationship between Moses and Aaron that Schoenberg reveals in his effort to reimagine these figures as Moses and Aron: in the Midrash, Moses is understood to embody the principle of truth (emes), tempered by Aaron’s embodiment of the ideal of kindness (khesed);43 if, by analogy, some listeners find Schoenberg’s music “uningratiating,” such a characterization would probably have mattered little

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to the composer, since his music didn’t pursue the “kindness” of aesthetic beauty so much as the rigor of an aesthetic “truth” that in the world as he found it was for Schoenberg unlovely indeed. In the conflict between truth and kindness that Moses and Aaron play out over the course of the Torah, and in particular in the incident of the Golden Calf, Moses and Aaron reveal a cosmic incompatibility that can be reconciled only in God’s Being. Despite the unorthodoxy of Schoenberg’s adaptation, he displays the conflict within these abstractions that develops beneath the surface of the story of the two brothers. Schoenberg’s inability to reconcile these ideals does metaphysical justice to a moral problem that no aesthetic solutions, no matter how rigorous, could resolve. In the final scene, the action shifts from the conflict between revelation and representation, or tragedy and Trauerspiel—myth and history—to justice and mercy. This transition leads from the pagan paradoxes that brought classical tragedy into being to a Jewish domain of ethics between people and reciprocal obligations between God and humanity unknown to Greek mythology. Moses und Aron ends with an inability to give voice to mercy—the trait missing from both classical tragedy and Baroque Trauerspiel. In reconciling justice with mercy, Moses und Aron would fulfill the moral imperatives of the Jewish religion that Schoenberg had sought to reformulate. But as the work’s fragmentary nature indicates, such a reconciliation would have been incompatible with the dramatic imperatives of opera as a mode of the tragic. Schoenberg fails in his pursuit of a sacred opera because of the incompatibility of the musical form with the morality of the religion he had embraced anew. But the modernism of his quest resides in the resulting status of his work as a sacred fragment. Mercy is the quality that cannot be revealed in the music of the opera, no matter how it is represented in the libretto. Writing in 1933, how distant must the particularly Jewish understanding of mercy as a moral obligation have seemed to a refugee from Germany? This

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is the historical circumstance that did not call Schoenberg’s Trauerspiel into being but ensured its subsequent silence. Notes 1.  Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke, eds., Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 4. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Lipphardt. In addition to my thanks to Anna Lipphardt for making a copy of this collection available to me, I wish to acknowledge Mozelle Foreman for calling it to my attention in her paper on Meshiekh ben-Efraim for a spring 2009 graduate seminar I conducted at Johns Hopkins University. 2.  Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 12. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Boym. 3.  See Laurent Binet, The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel [2015], trans. Sam Taylor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017), 300. 4.  See Avrom Novershtern, “Tsvishn morgnzun un akhris-hayomim: tsu der apokalyptisher tematik in der yidisher literatur” [Between morning sun and the end of days: On the apocalyptic theme in Yiddish literature], Di Goldene keyt 135 (1993): 116; the translation is my own. More expansively, see his Kesem ha-dimdumim [The lure of twilight] (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003). 5.  For more on the relationship between these two messianic figures, see, of course, Gershom Scholem’s essay “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 1–36. 6. See Ale verk fun Moyshe Kulbak [Collected works of Moyshe Kulbak] (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1929), 2:38. Subsequent references to this edition incorporated in text as Raysn; translations are my own. 7.  See “Moyshe Kulbak,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1:952. 8.  For historical sources on the legend of the lamed-vovniks, see Scholem, “The Tradition of the Thirty-Six Hidden Just Men,” in Messianic Idea in Judaism, 251–56. 9.  Moshe Kulbak, Meshiekh ben-Efraim & Montog (Buenos Aires: Farlag Dovid Lerman, 1950), 13 (subsequent references incorporated in text as MbE, Y); translated in Neugroschel, Great Works of Jewish Fantasy, 268

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(subsequent references incorporated in text as MbE, E, though my translations occasionally depart from the published edition). 10.  Blasphemy was definitely in the air surrounding Jewish literature at this moment, and Kulbak’s use of the Tetragrammaton compares with his contemporary Uri-Tsevi Grinberg, whose Expressionist poetry at the time was filled with Christian references calculated to offend Jewish readers and Christian censors in equal measure. Indeed, the threat of legal prosecution for blasphemy against his journal Albatros, published for three issues in Warsaw and containing much of his greatest Yiddish-language writing— including the extraordinary “Uri-Tsevi farn tseylem, INRI” (“Uri-Tsevi before the Cross, INRI”), arranged typographically in the shape of a crucifix—prompted Grinberg to flee Poland under a false passport and take up residence in Berlin. Although Grinberg lived in Berlin for less than a year, in 1923, it was there that he abandoned Yiddish for Hebrew and nihilistic Expressionism for Revisionist Zionism. For this period in Grinberg’s complex career, see Neta Stahl, “Uri-Zvi before the Cross: The Figure of Jesus in the Poetry of Uri-Zvi Greenberg,” Religion and Literature 40, no. 3 (Autumn 2008): 49–80; and Seelig, “Orient, So It Is! Uri-Zvi Greenberg’s Farewell to Europe,” in Strangers in Berlin, 101–30. However provocative Grinberg’s appropriation of Christianity was, Kulbak’s use of the Tetragrammaton could be seen as comparably scandalous within the Jewish context. 11.  Seth Wolitz discusses the folkloric figure “Simkhe Platkhe” in a remarkable essay, “Simkhe Platkhe: From ‘Folklore’ to Literary Artifact” [2003], in Yiddish Modernism: Studies in Twentieth-Century Eastern European Jewish Culture (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2014), 93–110. 12.  Discussed in part 2 of this study. 13.  Discussed in part 1 of this study. 14.  Discussed in part 2 of this study. 15.  As Ilit Ferber notes of Walter Benjamin’s work on the subject, “In fact, it is precisely the term genre that preoccupies Benjamin so extensively in the book’s prologue, where he proposes that the Trauerspiel’s underestimation rests on its being virtually unable to fit into any genre.” See Philosophy and Melancholy, 11. 16.  Indeed, as Katharina von Ankum stresses, “In the male-determined discourse of modernity, the metropolis is engendered as woman. . . . The distanced, voyeuristic gaze of the flaneur strolling across the modern metropolis, a gaze that consciously denied social reality, was thus clearly determined and limited by his gender.” See “Gendered Urban Spaces in Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen,” in von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis, 163, 165.

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17.  It is because of the collective function of the family in Raysn and the lamed-vovniks in Meshiekh ben-Efraim—as well as the origin of both works in Berlin—that this comparison concentrates on Meshiekh ben-Efraim and Raysn rather than what would be a more logical thematic pairing of the narrative with Kulbak’s poem “Lamed-vov.” According to Novershtern, in his major study of Meshiekh ben-Efraim (published in Di Goldene keyt 126–27), the poem was first published in Di Tsukunft, New York, 1920 (see Di Goldene keyt 126:203n19). It was thus written before Kulbak’s Berlin period, and its relative formal equilibrium reflects this. In schematic terms, “Lamed-vov” signifies both a precursor and a partial rationalization of Meshiekh ben-Efraim’s radical experimentation; it is a metrically flawless yet generically adventurous mix of standard lyric sequences, poetic lines extended almost to the status of rhymed prose—itself a fixture of premodern Yiddish writing—and the internalized drama of the protagonist Shmuel-Itse’s Jobian dialogue with Samael. Raysn by contrast, not in spite but because of its ostensibly “pure” commitment to poetic form, is a stranger achievement: why does Kulbak use a fixed form to represent such oddly “unrepresentative” figures as this tribe of Jewish peasants? In a sense, one can suggest that Raysn anticipates the mock-epic, mock– Socialist Realist novel Zelmenyaner as “Lamed-vov” prefigures and reconfigures Meshiekh ben-Efraim. Yet Meshiekh ben-Efraim, at the center of Kulbak’s creativity, divides its thematic preoccupations between collective and individual destinies, a topic of ultimate significance for a writer cut off from immediate contact with the main social currents of his native land yet bound to its culture linguistically and temperamentally. 18.  Le Messie fils d’Éphraïm, ed. and trans. Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1995), 14. Subsequent references incorporated in text as MbE, F; translations from the French are my own. 19.  Avrom Novershtern, “Moyshe Kulbak’s ‘Meshiekh ben-Efraim,’” Di Goldene keyt 126 (1989): 199. Translation from the Yiddish is my own; subsequent references incorporated in text as Novershtern, 126. 20.  Indeed, according to legend, the golem was created by manipulating the Tetragrammaton, which Kulbak had invoked at the beginning of Meshiekh ben-Efraim. 21.  As Dovid Lazer remarks, “He [Kulbak] was full of admiration for [Alexander] Blok, for [Sergei] Yesenin, for [Osip] Mandelstam, for [Anna] Akhmatova.” See “Mit Moyshe Kulbak in Vilna,” Di Goldene keyt 77 (1972): 37. 22.  Misha Krutikov has pointed out to me that however obscure the language of the Sephirot in fact is, it would already be familiar to a Yiddish

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readership thanks to the popularization of kabalistic concepts in Hasidic culture. Nonetheless, not even Reb Nakhman’s stories present this terminology so explicitly and centrally in a work of Yiddish fiction as Kulbak does here. 23.  On the relationship of metonymy to metaphor, see Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987), 114: “The principle of similarity (metaphor) underlies poetry. . . . Prose, on the contrary, is forwarded essentially by contiguity (metonymy).” 24.  Yankev Frank, the desk-drawer drama that Kulbak wrote while in Berlin on the eighteenth-century false messiah Jacob Frank (1726–1791), includes in the protagonist’s first exchange a denial that he is the messiah. See Yankev Frank (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1929), 17. 25.  In his Trauerspiel on Jacob Frank, Kulbak similarly has the protagonist say, “I have a wonderful, Jewish dream. . . . I, the Señor Santa, stand on the side of the road. . . . Groups go by . . . Butchers with beards, smiths with glowing eyes, blackened chimneysweeps, staid villagers. . . . I stand with hands crossed over my heart. I look upon all the groups and I shout to them ‘Go, Die, my Dear Ones’!!!” See Yankev Frank, 84; my translation. 26.  As Misha Krutikov explained in a Yiddish-reading group in which I had the good fortune to participate at the University of Michigan, the poem incorporates place names of villages once significant to the history of Belorussia, particularly in the eleventh section, where Kulbak writes, “Un fun Kreve biz Mazhir / un fun Zshetl biz Damir / Yogn rayter in karetn” (“And from Kreva to Mazyr / and from Dziatlava to Damir (Mir?) / the knights give chase in chariots” Raysn, 58). Through this interpolated and translated folk song, Kulbak suggests that his poem is a national epic for Belorussia, conceived through the eyes of Jewish peasants. This superimposition of multiple peripheries asserts the place of Jews within a Belorussian historical consciousness, yet in so doing it also negates the concept of a monolingual epic, or ethnic, voice for the region. The poem is therefore both an epic and a mock epic—nationalist and cosmopolitan—simultaneously. 27.  Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World [1976] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1. 28.  This organization was known both by its Yiddish name, Der Yidisher gezelshaft far Landkentenish, and perhaps more popularly in Polish, Zydowskie towarzystwo krajoznawcze or ZTK (see Lipphardt, 260–61n2). The two equivalent names indicate its intention to appeal to both Yiddish-autonomous aspirations and Polish-integrationist strategies. The

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apparently greater popularity of the Polish-language wing reflects a more general linguistic and cultural dynamic among Polish Jews at the time. 29. See Peretses yiyesh-vizye: interpretatsye fun Y. L. Peretses “Ba nakht afn altn mark” un kritishe oysgabe fun der drame [Peretz’s vision of despair: Interpretation of Y. L. Peretz’s “At Night in the Old Marketplace” with critical edition of the drama], ed. Chone Shmeruk (New York: YIVO, 1971), 245. In English, “A Night in the Old Marketplace,” trans. Hillel Halkin, in The I. L Peretz Reader, ed. Ruth R. Wisse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 379. Although Halkin astutely follows Peretz’s rhyme structure in his translation, it should be noted that in the original, the last couplet of this verse reads “On hent, vi a mame glet zi / On loshn, mame-loshn redt zi” (literally, “Without hands, like a mother she caresses / Without a tongue, she speaks mame-loshn”). Mame-loshn, the mother tongue, is the colloquial term for the Yiddish language, and Peretz employs it here to stress a structural contrast and ideological parallel between the Zionist longing for the land of milk and honey and the Yiddishist ideology of Doikayt. 30.  It may be noted in this context that the badkhn performs an ambivalent function in traditional Jewish festivities, particularly weddings: he is both a lachrymose moralizer and a social satirist. The institutionalization of this type of folk performance dates, significantly, from the midseventeenth century, and Peretz’s choice of this figure for his play serves to retrieve Yiddish theater, along with the badkhn figure, from the carnival atmosphere of the Purim-shpil back to its Baroque, melancholy origins. For more on the history of the badkhn in Ashkenazic culture, see E. [Yehezkl] Lifschutz, “Merrymakers and Jesters among Jews (Materials for a Lexicon),” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 7 (1952): 43–83. For the anticarnival motivations of Peretz’s drama, see Michael Steinlauf, “Fear of Purim: Y. L. Peretz and the Canonization of Yiddish Theater,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 1, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 44–65. 31.  The principle of embodiment finds an echo in Yankev Frank in the protagonist’s belief, adapted from the preaching of the historical Jacob Frank, regarding the Matronisa (“Holy Mistress”), the Frankian syncretization of the kabalistic shekhinah, or Divine Immanence, with the Virgin Mary, imputed within the cult to be Frank’s daughter Eva (c. 1754– c. 1817). As Kulbak writes of the figure, “Does it not state in the Torah [sic] how beautiful Shulamis was when naked . . . ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes’ [Song of Songs 4:5], people, that means real breasts! Not a parable, breasts round like an apple . . . That is who is meant to redeem you, all of you . . .!” (Yankev Frank, 17; my translation). For a discussion

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of the theological sources and implications of this syncretism, see Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 167–79. 32.  For more on this episode, see Novershtern, 126:192. 33.  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner), trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 121. 34.  One can also recognize more than a dialectical echo between Moses und Aron and Richard Strauss’s Salome, a work that Schoenberg initially admired but came to reject for several personal and aesthetic reasons; in particular, Schoenberg’s orgiastic imagining of the Golden Calf scene takes its dramatic and structural cues in part from “The Dance of the Seven Veils” in Strauss’s opera. For more on Schoenberg’s fraught relationship with Strauss (1864–1949), see Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 51–52, 58–59. 35.  As Charles Rosen (1927–2012) has written, “If no one was so thorough as Schoenberg in his renunciation of tonality, it is paradoxically because no one was so deeply attached as he to certain aspects of it. . . . For him, either tonality meant a method of tonal integration, total control over every element of the work—or it meant nothing.” See his study, Arnold Schoenberg [1975] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 33–34. 36.  Theodor Adorno writes, accordingly, “Moses und Aron is traditional in the sense that it follows the methods of Wagnerian dramaturgy without a hiatus. It relates to the biblical narrative in just the same way as the music of the Ring or Parsifal relate to their underlying texts. The central problem is to find musical and dramatic methods whereby to represent the idea of the sacred—that is to say, not a mythical but an anti-mythical event.” See Theodor Adorno, “Sacred Fragment: Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron,” in Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1998), 239–40. 37.  Joseph Auner, “Schoenberg as Moses and Aron,” Opera Quarterly 23, no. 4 (Autumn 2007): 382. 38.  See Ruth HaCohen, “Psychoanalysis and the Music of Charisma in the Moseses of Freud and Schönberg,” in New Perspectives on Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism”, ed. Ruth Ginsburg and Ilana Pardes (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006), 193. 39.  See HaCohen, “Psychoanalysis and the Music of Charisma,” 189. The equation of HaCohen’s insight into the “fratricidal” nature of Aron’s sacrifice with the motif of sacrifice in Bergelson and Lang is, of course, my own.

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40.  It is perhaps worth noting, however speculatively, that though Schoenberg was an enthusiastic painter at the beginning of the twentieth century, associated with the Blaue Reiter movement of painters (1911–1914) centered in Munich around figures such as Wassily Kandinsky (1866– 1944) and Franz Marc (1880–1916), he seems to have abandoned painting by the time he developed the twelve-tone technique. He tells Robert Craft (1923–2015) in a conversation recorded in July 1949 that he had not painted for “at least two or three decades.” See (hear!) Robert Craft, “A Conversation with Arnold Schoenberg,” track 26 on Concerto for String Quartet / Lied der Waldtaube / The Book of the Hanging Gardens (Franklin, TN: Naxos CD, 2005). Although there might well be aesthetic motivations for abandoning his interest in painting—having developed a “mature” technique as a composer, he no longer felt the need to experiment in another medium—it is equally possible that his disinterest in painting, connected implicitly with his estrangement from Kandinsky over inferences of the latter’s antisemitism, derives from his return to Judaism and his literal interpretation of its prohibition against graven images. 41.  Adorno, “Sacred Fragment,” 230. 42.  As HaCohen observes, the oratorio lends itself better than other musical forms to Schoenberg’s ambitions of creating a philosophical, theological, and nationalistic commentary on Jewishness. Yet by constructing a hybrid opera-oratorio, he brings Moses und Aron closer to its negative role model, Wagner’s Parsifal! See “Sounds of Revelation: Aesthetic-Political Theology in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron,” Modernist Cultures 1, no. 2 (2010): 114. 43.  The association of Moses with truth (emes) and Aaron with kindness (khesed) is stressed in contemporary Jewish thought primarily by the Chabad (Lubavitch) Hasidim. The rabbinic source for this connection, however, can be traced back to Midrash Rabbah Shemoth 5:10: “‘And he went, and met him’ (Exodus 4: 27); when it says Mercy (khesed) and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other (Ps. 85:11)—Mercy refers to Aaron while Truth refers to Moses.” See Midrash Rabbah, vol. 3, Exodus, trans. S. M. Lehrman (New York: Soncino, 1983), 89. I owe this particular insight to a lovely Saturday afternoon conversation and meal with my dear friends Rabbi Zev and Rebbetsin Chana Gopin on February 28, 2015—with thanks, as ever, for their impeccable hospitality. In their home, the values of truth and kindness are never in conflict!

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CONCLUSION Origin Is the Goal

The apocalypse to which Benjamin devoted so much of his thought to theorizing is perhaps most succinctly formulated in the work of a contemporary whose writing seems to have gone unnoticed in Benjamin’s circles, another transient able to unlock a gate that he neither sought nor approached: “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?”1 As difficult as it is to recall today, there was a time not long ago when Walter Benjamin’s writing was still inaccessible and exotic, not for its esoteric content but simply for its unavailability, even for scholars. I can still pinpoint the moment when I first encountered his thought, in an unexpected but accordingly suggestive source. It was October 1989, and I had recently relocated to New York City, opting to commence employment after graduating from college rather than gallivant around Europe with a group of my friends, because I knew from my junior term abroad that Europe was dead and one could no longer expect anything of historical significance to occur there. (My gift for global prognostics has not improved much since.) But with the drapery on the Iron Curtain beginning to flutter, I spent part of my first paycheck at the Tower Records on East Fourth Street and Broadway—now a bygone 340

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landmark more lamented than the Berlin Wall—to purchase the just released Laurie Anderson CD Strange Angels. On that album she sings “The Dream Before (for Walter Benjamin),” where she sings of the Brothers Grimm’s most famous dysfunctional couple, “Hansel and Gretel are alive and well, and they’re living in Berlin / She is a cocktail waitress; he had a part in a Fassbinder film.”2 Anderson is accompanied in the second half of the song by Bobby McFerrin, a great vocalist whose overplayed and misconstrued hit from the previous year, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” signaled both the high point and the end of his career, thus exemplifying how every triumph contains within itself a potential catastrophe. Together they sing an elegant paraphrase of the “Ninth Thesis” of Benjamin’s On the Concept of History. 3 Anderson’s coupling of Benjamin’s “angel of history” with references to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, (West) Berlin’s postwar squalor— the only feature of the song that now wears its age—and Rainier Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) connects Benjamin with a German cultural legacy sometimes forgotten when one considers the cosmopolitanism of his interests and the tragedy of his fate.4 As such, the Angel of History she sings of contemplates both the persistence of legend and the shadows cast by Benjamin’s memory on a still divided Germany. Whether they are siblings or lovers or both, Hansel and Gretel are now grown up and completely disenchanted; their life apparently consists of only drink and regret. Their apprehension of history is simultaneously metaphysical and impotent: an angel watches over the past, yet it is powerless to fix the things that have been broken. From this perspective, one sees at long last, in Benjamin’s most famous rhetorical figure, that the allegorical image and the dialectical image are in fact the same image. The angel faces backward, allegorically, whereas we humans must experience history looking forward, lacking either the tools for repair or the ability to see what comes next. Yet our one gift, the

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one implement in our kit missing in the angel’s, is the hope for redemption, the “weak messianic power” that Benjamin speaks of earlier in On the Concept of History as the “secret index” conjoining past with present and future (On the Concept of History, G 693–94; E 389–90; emphasis in original). Elsewhere in her work, in a piece called “Word of Mouth,” Anderson describes a 1980 visit to the Micronesian island of Ponape (now Pohnpei). When introduced to the local leader, she states, “As a present I brought one of those Fred Flintstone cameras, the kind where the film canister is also the body of the camera, and I presented it to the chief. He seemed delighted and began to click off pictures. He wasn’t advancing the film between shots, but since we were told we shouldn’t speak unless spoken to, I wasn’t able to inform him that he wasn’t going to get twelve pictures, but only one very, very complicated one.”5 Stressing the temporal disconnection between her role as a representative of the West and a remote “island paradise” still ruled by a hereditary potentate—yet also, though unmentioned in her performance, an “associated state” of the United States—Anderson introduces a disposable commodity of Western technology, which simulta­ neously enchants and confounds the ruler on whom she bestows the gift.6 His response, however, at once subverts and repurposes the object by creating a different type of image than its manufacturers had intended. The transaction territorializes the way in which the past projects a determinant series of images onto the present, by showing how the “past” civilization alters an image of the future as much as the present imposes its own values, judgments, and images onto the past. The result is what allegory does:7 not a single image but several complicated, resonant images imposed and projected onto any given space, object, or event. Like the Weimar Republic, it seems that we are once again living in an age of rapid technological obsolescence and political fragility, as well as an era of proliferating allegorical representations. With this in mind, it is noteworthy that the most significant

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achievement in American theater over the last three decades, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1993), bears multiple similarities to the Baroque Trauerspiel.8 Although most great playwrights derive their literary strength from a close proximity to lyric poetry—not for nothing is Aristotle’s foundational work of dramatic criticism known as the Poetics—Kushner’s gift is “prosaic” to a similar extent as the Silesian writers to whom Benjamin dedicates his study of Baroque drama; unlike them, however, his exemplarity is in no sense “typical.” 9 Kushner’s sprawling panoply of late ­twentieth-century American life encompasses Jewish mysticism and Mormon theology, race relations and the AIDS crisis, looming environmental catastrophe and the death throes of the Soviet Union, and the internal politics of the (male) gay community before the formation of Act Up. At its center is the historical figure Roy Cohn (1927–1986), who functions as a consummate courtier, feeding the center of power in Reaganite Washington from a miasma of Manhattan corruption, and as a closeted, hateful tyrant turned martyr to the AIDS virus. In his own description, he is moreover a sovereign unto himself. Speaking of his actual role in the judicial murder of Ethel Rosenberg (1915–1953), who, despite Kushner’s depiction of her ghost, illustrates in historical terms as much as Cohn himself that not every martyr is a hero, Cohn says, “I pleaded till I wept to put her in the chair. Me. I did that. I would have fucking pulled the switch if they’d have let me. . . . Was it legal? Fuck legal. Am I a nice man? Fuck nice. . . . You want to be Nice, or you want to be Effective? Make the law, or subject to it. Choose.”10 His presence in the play becomes allegorical for the other characters because he is simultaneously an embodiment of American corruption, greed, hypocrisy, and cruelty—a “polestar of human evil,”11 as one character identifies him—and an illustration of how this embodiment is inextricable from history and correspondingly lacking in transcendence: “You come with me to room 1013 over

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at the hospital [where, in the drama, Cohn lays dying], I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy, and mean” (Perestroika, 96). Like Benjamin’s primary, counterintuitive example of the Trauerspiel genre, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Kushner’s Trauerspiel is as much ghost-haunted as it is eschatological, and the ghosts give greater eloquence to its metaphysics than the angels: reacting to a vision of two men slow-dancing in an imaginary reconciliation, one of the ghosts says, “The twentieth century. Oh dear, the world has gotten so terribly, terribly old” (Millennium Approaches, 114). Though it is a play preeminently about angels, Kushner demystifies their presence by theatricalizing them and ceding their power to impose meaning onto the human protagonists of the drama. When the “Continental Principality”—with whom one protagonist must wrestle—first descends onto the stage, Kushner burlesques the event by juxtaposing it against the untranscendent realities of New York rent laws: Angel: Get a shovel or an axe or some . . . tool for dislodging tile and grout and unearth the Sacred Implements. Prior: No fucking way! The ceiling’s bad enough, I’ll lose the lease, I’ll lose my security deposit, I’ll wake up the downstairs neighbors, their hysterical dog, I. . . . Do it yourself. (Perestroika, 45)

Divine justice is an important theme in the play, but as the Bible indicates, prophetic callings can be evaded, whereas the rules governing tenancy in New York are a Mides ha-din (doctrine of strict judgment) unto themselves! As Prior later explains, angels signify monads that are both spectacular and, in keeping with traditional Jewish exegesis, limited in function and vision: “Each angel is an infinite aggregate myriad entity, they’re basically incredibly powerful bureaucrats, they have no imagination, they can do anything but they can’t invent, create, they’re sort of fabulous and dull all at once” (Perestroika, 49; emphasis in original). It is therefore incumbent on humans, in the words of

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another character, to complete the work of creation by joining the angels, not in heaven but in the atmosphere hovering just above the earth: “Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired” (Perestroika, 144). Death therefore signifies not a release from earthly obligations but their fulfillment, and for that reason the ideal dramatized in the play is not stasis but motion, not myth but timeliness, not transcendence but, in the words of its closing benediction, “More Life” (Perestroika, 148; emphasis in original). It is for this reason that the human characters, rather than the spiritual entities, must furnish the meaning to the physical suffering that biology and ideology conspire to inflict on them. In this respect, the play fulfills its great Aristotelian promise by transforming Roy Cohn, not unlike King Lear, from a figure of terror to a figure of pity, without mitigating either his dramatic malevolence or his historical destructiveness. As the nurse Belize explains to Louis—the character who would seem most closely to resemble the playwright intellectually (Jewish, gay, articulate, politically militant) yet who resembles Cohn emotionally more than any other on stage—when he bids Louis to say kaddish in memory of Cohn before stealing his illicit supply of the AIDS medication AZT, “He was a terrible person. He died a hard death. So maybe . . . A queen can forgive her vanquished foe. It isn’t easy; it doesn’t count if it’s easy, it’s the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet” (Perestroika, 124). Kushner thus elegantly connects the gay camp that has supplied much of the play’s theatricality with the rhetoric of royalty intrinsic to Baroque dramaturgy, and in the process he surpasses

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both tragedy’s preoccupation with myth and the Trauerspiel’s preoccupation with history to provide for the drama an entrance into the domain of ethics. In the new millennium—the twenty-first century and not, as the epilogue to Angels in America explains, “the capital M Millennium” (Perestroika, 147)—the allegorical representations of the postmodernist avant-garde have become the common currency of popular culture, and like a latter-day Neue Sachlichkeit one recognizes the ability of even the most corporate mass entertainment to participate not only in the creative energy of the avantgarde but also in its discourse of self-critique. Nowhere is this more apparent than in one of the most successful and best films of the previous decade, the Disney-Pixar collaboration WALLE (2008), directed by Andrew Stanton. Much like Benjamin’s initiatory conception of The Arcades Project as a “dialectical fairy scene,”12 WALL-E is a children’s film that confronts the grownup problems of technology, global capitalism, and environmental apocalypse. Set in the year 2805, the film depicts as the sole survivor of a global environmental apocalypse a trash-gathering robot, WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load-Lifter, Earth Class), whose desolate days are spent compacting and stacking an infinitude of garbage left in the wake of humanity’s departure from the ruined planet. What Benjamin describes as “wreckage upon wreckage” (On the Concept of History, G 697; E 392) separating the Angel of History from Paradise has now become the sole inheritance of the earth itself. WALL-E is therefore not just a child; it—“he” in the logic and nomenclature of the film—is an orphan, with only a cockroach for companionship. As a child, however, WALL-E is capable of reenchanting even the trash-strewn landscape that constitutes his world, both because the past that he investigates is intrinsically mythical, in that it has lost a connection to human history, and because in common with all children, WALL-E is capable of reinvesting the objects he discovers while making his rounds

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with symbolic meaning, thus redeeming their utopian potential.13 This process illustrates what Benjamin identifies as the mission of the historical materialist, to see the work of the past as incomplete and to participate in its continuation.14 In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, WALL-E finishes his workday by sorting through the items he has collected from the rubble. Finding a diamond ring in a velvet case, he discards the ring and keeps the case; he makes a hat out of a hubcap and sunglasses out of a brassiere.15 (Can you say brassiere in an academic study?) Most remarkably, seeking to store a plastic spork, he compares it with his assemblage of forks, then his assemblage of spoons, and decides it merits a new pile.16 At the end of the day, he has found an object that signifies his own status as an exception, a remainder, a surplus, and a hybrid creature.17 The following day, or what appears to be the following day, since, like Berlin in Walter Ruttmann’s Sinphonie der Großstadt,18 every day presumably is identical to every other day on a planet that has rendered time obsolete with its own devastation, he discovers an even greater exception: a sprouting plant, the first evidence of sustainable life in centuries. This discovery alerts another robot, EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), to descend from heaven. EVE is at once an angel, a cyborg— though, unlike the robot Maria in Metropolis, without demonic attributes—and, like Deborah in Joseph Roth’s Hiob, an earth mother.19 In her primary capacity, however, she is la belle dame sans merci, a ruthless functionary, not unlike the similarly feminized Continental Principality of Angels in America, and it becomes WALL-E’s task to teach her the qualities of love and nurturing for both the vegetation and the terrestrial cyborg in her care. The intrigue of the film occurs when the two robots return to the Axiom, a space station on which the earth’s survivors had been sent seven centuries earlier by the BnL (Buy n Large) corporation, successor to Fredersen’s apparently global monopoly in Metropolis and fulfillment of the prophecy of critical theorists

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such as Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) that corporate capitalism would prove as destructive and totalitarian as Nazism or Stalinism. Though continuously referencing the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the dystopia portrayed in WALL-E is less a conflict between man and machine, the paradoxical curse that humans have the ability to create a machine smarter than ourselves, than a world in which all material needs are met without effort. Just as death is the ultimate threat to life, the return to life poses the ultimate threat to the living death depicted on the Axiom, and this is the threat to which the robot overlords of the space station respond: they are custodians of immaculate order struggling to restrain the organic contamination of the living and the earthly. The implication that robots make more functional human beings than Homo sapiens is not completely ironic, given the complete dependence of the film on machines to generate all of its visual effects. Having ruined the earth by saturating it with disposable commodities, BnL has transformed the human refugees into obese and helpless permanent babies—from which, nonetheless, other babies mysteriously emerge—waited over by robots that function both as servants and jailers. When the (human) captain of the space station, however, joins with EVE and WALL-E and their band of on-board robotic misfits to save the plant and revoke BnL’s plan for the permanent pacification of the human survivors, they are able at the film’s end to return to Earth and set about the utopian task of not ending history but starting it anew. The story WALL-E tells is thus a combination of allegorical motifs, and in keeping with the nature of allegorical storytelling, it is noteworthy that viewers, while almost unanimously praising the film, have been able to derive so many divergent lessons from it. Equally striking is the imprimatur of Disney and Pixar, two of the most profitable marketers of licensed products in the contemporary culture industry, producing a film so critical of their

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own business model.20 As one conservative blogger noted when the film was released, “I’m . . . not sure I’ve ever seen a major corporation spend so much money to issue an insult to its customers. Those potato-y people of the future seemed uncomfortably close to paying guests of Walt Disney World, passively absorbing entertainment in a sterile, climate-controlled, completely artificial wonderland that profits from everything they eat, see, or do.”21 To be sure, the film’s attitude toward its own inevitable commodification is ambivalent; it uses obsolete advertisements from BnL to do the work of plot exposition, signifying that narration and marketing are inextricable. Although my interpretation invests the film with perhaps ironic, or at least counterintuitive, Marxian notions of resistance to consumerism and apocalyptic predictions regarding the tyranny of the marketplace, WALL-E is at least equally congenial to religious interpretations, even culturally conservative ones, that stress the multiple biblical references in the film and the director’s identification as a believing Christian22 to deduce a parable on humanity’s stewardship of the earth and the need to restore community, the home, and family against the faceless anomie and egoism of corporate hedonism.23 Perhaps the film’s ultimate optimism bespeaks a utopian hope for the allegories it inspires: that in recognizing the validity of all of them—since, as this book has argued throughout, allegory by its very nature supports the multiplicity and indeterminacy of meaning intrinsic, or rather extrinsic, to a given statement, gesture, or image—one might recognize a basis for reconciliation among ostensibly incompatible worldviews, at least in the face of common threats that menace the present moment as much as they did the interwar era. However utopian either the film or its interpretations might be, its aspirations remain worldly and historical. That the focus of the movie, despite its beguiling portrayal of space travel, remains terrestrial—populated only by prosthetic angels and the debris

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of history—confirms that the earth has become an exotic and enchanted space, but for this reason it is revealed as the paradise to be reclaimed. This reclamation is predicated, however, on the efforts of humans to overcome their dependence on corporate commodification and the machines that perpetuate the tyranny of the marketplace, instead of a spiritual redeemer. The redemption promised in WALL-E is not the stasis of being emancipated from time but a return to the obligations to labor, produce, and cooperate that time and history bespeak. Hollywood’s most enduring dream has always been “there’s no place like home,” a myth and regression belied by the technology and commodification that make the culture industry profitable. It was a myth, moreover, constantly referenced in the culture of Weimar Germany, and nearly every figure examined in this comparison critiqued, embraced, rejected, and represented various versions of its allure in their own circumstances and ideological perspectives: as the return to Eastern Europe, as the creation of a new homeland, as an investment in the traditions and beliefs bypassed in a previous generation’s pursuit of the new. To this myth the only complementary rejoinder can be “there is no time like the present,” and WALL-E suggests an allegory for imagining and representing this reality, not of a dream factory but of a necessary awakening. The return to Earth in WALL-E is a return to communal and civilizational responsibilities, to reciprocity and mutual aid—the end of history recognized as the beginning of now. What other response can there be to “all this destruction . . . all the terrible days of this terrible century” (Perestroika, 133)? Only one compelling answer comes to mind, and that possibility finds expression, appropriately, in the words of a fictional Dr. Spielvogel, a burlesque bird and healer, another profane angel, who at the end of a great novel’s wreckage of narrative and history asks in a refugee’s parodic fusion of English, German, and Yiddish, a voice crying out from a Weimar-era wilderness, “Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”24

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Notes 1.  James Joyce, Ulysses [1922], ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 24. As the superlative notes to this edition explain, Joyce’s source for this image is more likely William Blake (1757–1827) than Benjamin’s inspiration, Paul Klee (1879–1940). 2.  Strange Angels, prod. Laurie Anderson and Roma Barran (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros Records, 1989). For a commentary on the contemporary culture industry’s adoption, adaptation, and appropriation of Walter Benjamin, see Benjamin Wurgaft, “The Uses of Walter: Walter Benjamin and the Counterfactual Imagination,” History and Theory 49 (October 2010): 361–83. 3.  For the “Ninth Thesis” [1940], see Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1(2): 697–98. Translated by Harry Zohn in Selected Writings, 4:292. 4.  For the clearest statement of Benjamin’s own “Germanness,” produced in defiance of Nazi efforts to monopolize the concept, see “Deutsche Menschen: Eine Folge von Briefen” [1936], published under the pseudonym Detlef Holz, in Gesammelte Schriften 4(1): 149–233. In English, “German Men and Women: A Sequence of Letters,” in Selected Writings, 3:167–235. 5.  See track 4 of The Ugly One with the Jewels and Other Stories, prod. Laurie Anderson and Roma Barran (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros Records, 1995). 6.  Like Der Nister’s king in “A Bove-mayse,” discussed in part 2 of this comparison, Anderson’s sovereign is the least free person in the realm because he is trapped in the frame of the pictures he takes; like Aron in Moses und Aron, discussed in part 3, he is possessed and betrayed by his own graven images. 7.  The piece even stresses allegory’s characteristic focus on death and dead bodies: the occasion for her encounter with the island leader is a state funeral for four murder victims who had been killed when a group of escaped prisoners had taken hostages at the island’s one radio station, during a week that had brought the introduction of television along with Anderson’s delegation there. The piece concludes with a description of Anderson and the performance artist Marina Abramović burying the dogs that had been slaughtered for the ceremonial banquet to which they had been invited. 8.  Full disclosure: Tony Kushner was my drama instructor for two years at a summer program in Louisiana when I was in junior high school.

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For an excellent source on the enduring impact that Angels in America has made on American theater, see Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, “Angels in America: The Complete Oral History,” Slate.com, December 17, 2017, http:// www.slate.com/articles/arts/cover_story/2016/06/oral_history _of_tony_kushner_s_play_angels_in_america.html. 9.  As Benjamin writes, “There can be no question of the free or playful unfolding of poetic genius in these dramas. Rather did the dramatists of this age feel constrained by force to apply themselves to the task of actually creating the form of a secular drama. And however many times, between Gryphius and Hallmann, they applied themselves to this task—all too frequently in schematic repetition—the German drama of the Counter-Reformation never achieved that suppleness of form which bends to every virtuoso touch, such as Calderón gave the Spanish drama.” See OGTD, G 229; E 49. 10.  Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches [1992] (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993), 108. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Millennium Approaches. 11.  Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika [1992] (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994), 95. Subsequent references incorporated in text as Perestroika. 12.  The original subtitle for the project was a “dialectical fairy scene” (dialekische Feen), though he discontinued using this designation by 1934. As Susan Buck-Morss explains, the term fairy scene (Feen) as opposed to fairy tale (Märchen) is significant because “Benjamin was not intending to narrate a fairy tale in a story-telling fashion . . . but to portray it, transforming dream images into dialectical images through a montage of historical representations.” See Dialectics of Seeing, 460n91; emphasis in original. In like manner, WALL-E is not a fairy tale because it is not a tale; its narrative proceeds imagistically—all the more so since so much of the movie develops visually, without dialogue—and its critique necessarily develops scenically rather than verbally. Like “Sleeping Beauty,” which is the specific model for Benjamin’s research, the film depicts a waking-up from the collective dream of the commodity phantasmagoria (Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 271). 13.  See Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 274. 14.  See, in this respect, Benjamin’s essay “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian” [1937], trans. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, in Selected Writings, 3:267; for the original, see Gesammelte Schriften, 2(2): 477. However productive the juxtaposition of this article with WALL-E might be, the film is considerably more entertaining!

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15.  Figuring in the aural debris of the robot’s scrounging is Bobby McFerrin’s song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” sung ostensibly by an animatronic fish. 16.  For the purpose of this study, WALL-E’s daily routine calls to mind a remark Benjamin makes about the role of ragpickers in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry: The poets find the refuse of society on their streets and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse. . . . This new type is permeated by the features of the ragpicker who made frequent appearances in Baudelaire’s work. . . . “Here [writes Baudelaire] we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance. . . . He sorts things out and selects judiciously; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.” This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse, and both go about their solitary business while other citizens are sleeping; they even move the same way.

The ragpicker, like the poet—like WALL-E, who combines both functions while parodying them—collects, reclassifies, and repurposes the refuse of society. By preserving what was meant to be discarded and disappear, the ragpicker acts not only as a critic of the commodification process but also as an agent of memory in a culture that defines progress as forgetfulness and the quest for the new. See “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” [1938], trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, 4:48; in the original, Gesammelte Schriften 1(2): 582–83. 17.  As has been suggested to me, the spork in WALL-E alludes to the Disney animated film The Little Mermaid (1989), in which the protagonist repurposes a fork as a comb; Disney movies always incorporate this selfreferentiality as part of their commodification of nostalgia, and this is a further continuity of contemporary culture with Neue Sachlichkeit. 18.  Discussed in part 1 of this study. 19.  Both the Fritz Lang film Metropolis and Joseph Roth’s novel Hiob are discussed in part 3 of this comparison. 20.  The allegorical signification of WALL-E bears comparison with a more recent Disney-Pixar blockbuster, Coco (2017)—the year’s best film, in my experience, though I don’t get out much—which describes the efforts of a Mexican boy to cross the border into the Land of the Dead to

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reunite his living and dead relatives and defeat a dead but still powerful megalomaniacal narcissist who has exploited, robbed, and murdered his great-great-grandfather. Although the film was conceived and produced before the political events of 2016, it is hard to avoid inferring the serendipitously parabolic implications of a Mexican family crossing over a border to confront a fraudulent hero who preaches a gospel of selfishness, greed, and winning at all costs, and these political resonances deepen the film’s abundant visual, emotional, and moral richness. In 2018, Black Panther offers a similarly pristine presentation of Trauerspiel motifs to dramatize a meta-allegorical conflict between myth and history: in a characteristically African American version of Afrocentric aesthetics, it depicts Africa as an ahistorical realm of mythology and magic, exempt from the traumas of modernity. The African American antagonist in the film is a prodigal son turned tyrant turned martyr whose sacrifice actualizes the ability of the African utopia that serves as the film’s collective protagonist to enter into history without jeopardizing its mythical power or mystique. 21.  See Kyle Smith, “Disney’s ‘Wall-E’: A $170 Million Art Film,” KyleSmithOnline.com, posted June 26, 2008, http://kylesmithonline​ .com/?p=1319, accessed July 5, 2019. Smith identifies himself on his website as a “Critic-at-Large” for the National Review. 22.  Stanton discusses his faith in an interview for the Evangelical magazine Christianity Today conducted by Mark Moring, published June 24, 2008. 23.  My friend Rod Dreher reviewed the film in this vein for the Dallas Morning News when it first appeared, writing, “If anything, its politics are traditionalist conservative. . . . To be fair, that label is too reductive. ‘Wall-E’ goes much deeper than contemporary politics. It’s a brilliant Aristotelian, even agrarian, critique of modernity, and the fate of man under consumerist technopoly. It’s also a lot of fun.” The review first appeared in print on July 16, 2008; my thanks to Rod for providing me with the text of the review now that it is apparently no longer available online. 24.  Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint [1969] (New York: Random House, 1994), 274.

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INDEX

Abramovitsh, Sh. Y. (Mendele Moykher-Sforim), 22n1, 35, 60, 83n30, 167, 168, 189n43, 211, 308, 318 Adorno, Theodor, 126n20, 191n57, 220, 234, 250n39, 330, 338n36 Agnon, Sh. Y., ix, 106, 167, 168, 238–43, 255nn70–72, 256n77, 262, 325 Allegorical image, 44–45, 73, 116, 258, 341 Allegory, 11–16, 18, 21, 26n18, 27n21, 34, 37, 38n6, 43, 52, 53, 55, 72, 73, 75, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 117, 120, 128n38, 135, 137, 149, 150, 161–64, 167, 169, 175, 176, 178, 179, 186n28, 187n31, 190n52, 191n59, 195, 199, 202, 203, 205, 207, 212, 230, 231, 233, 234, 236, 239, 240–42, 243, 245n8, 247n22, 262, 269, 271, 274, 277, 280, 282, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 310, 312, 313, 314, 315, 324, 326, 342–50, 351n7, 353n20 An-sky, Sh. 12–13, 317 Andersen, Hans Christian, 140, 201, 208, 249n28 Anderson, Laurie, 341–42, 351n8 Angels in America (drama). See Kushner, Tony Apocalypse, 4, 170, 258, 263, 290, 299n33, 304–5, 312, 314, 319, 323, 340, 349

Austria, 4, 9, 39n10, 59, 85, 218, 249n34, 252n49, 263, 270, 285–88, 300n40, 301n41, 324 Babel, Isaac, 62–63, 84n37, 106, 170 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 229, 236, 245n12, 253n58 Baroque (aesthetics) 11, 16–18, 52, 65, 86n42, 135–39, 142n5, 149, 150, 151, 156, 162–65, 166, 167, 170, 172, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180n4, 181n6, 184n17–18, 187n31, 190n53, 191n56, 192, 196, 197–98, 200, 201, 204, 206, 207, 210, 220, 221, 228, 239, 241, 242, 244n6, 245n9, 257, 259, 304, 326, 332, 337n30, 343, 345 Barzilai, Maya, 240, 241, 256n77 Baudelaire, Charles, 18, 30, 38n6, 91, 103, 123n3, 166, 184n18, 309, 353n16 Bechtel, Delphine, 96, 124n12, 176, 299n34 Benjamin, Walter, 10–11, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 25n15, 38n8, 41–43, 44, 52, 55, 76nn 1–2, 77nn4–7, 87n45, 91, 92, 98, 101, 102, 103, 136–39, 141, 142n6, 144n13, 148, 149, 151, 158, 162–66, 177–78, 180n1, 181n4, 187n31, 191n57, 196, 200, 201, 238, 244n3, 244n6, 245n8, 246n12, 253n58, 255n71, 258, 265n21, 292n11, 293n12, 305, 325, 340–50, 352n9, 352n12, 353n16

371

372

I n de x

Berdyczewski, M.J., 129n40 Bergelson, Dovid, 3–4, 5, 7, 15, 19, 20, 32, 34–37, 38n5, 43, 44, 45, 46–48, 49–52, 53, 56, 60–64, 65–67, 69–76, 78n11, 81n22, 82n24, 85n39, 86nn41–42, 85n47, 89nn51–52, 91, 93, 95–98, 101, 102, 104–118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127n31, 130n45, 130n51, 180, 191n59, 213, 235, 239, 253n59, 260, 308, 309, 310, 329 Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (film). See Ruttmann, Walter Bloch, Ernst, 67n45, 148, 168, 177, 178, 243 Boym, Svetlana, 304, 312, 322 Brecht, Bertolt, 92, 118, 119, 222 Bridgwater, Patrick, 196, 199, 200 Buber, Martin, 54, 56, 84n35, 87n45, 141, 144n13, 238 Buck-Morss, Susan, 111, 352n12 Cahan, Ab, 86n44, 127n31, 130n52 Carnival, 68, 70, 96, 97, 98, 139, 151, 211, 229, 230–32, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 254n68, 313–14, 337n30 Chagall, Marc, 15, 95, 233, 253n62, 325 Circus, 213, 217, 228, 231, 237, 286 Clark, Katerina, 73–74 Cowan, Michael, 100, 101, 102, 125n18 Deleuze, Gilles, 100, 163, 164, 178–79, 197–98, 205, 207 Der Blaue Engel. See Sternberg, Josef “von” Der Nister (Pinkhes Kahanovitsh), 4, 5, 7, 15, 19, 20, 79n13, 130n51, 138, 140–41, 142n6, 144nn12–13, 145n15, 148–49, 150, 153, 157, 164, 166–80, 187n32, 192–96, 200, 201, 204, 205, 207–17, 218, 219, 220, 221, 225, 228, 230–31, 232, 234–37, 238, 239, 243n2, 246n17, 248n28, 249n30, 250n35, 254n65, 255n70, 256n77, 310, 351n6

Di Morgn-Frayhayt, 48, 86n44, 128n35 Dialectical image, 44–45, 102, 103, 109, 116, 166, 341, 352n12 Döblin, Alfred, 3–4, 15, 19, 32–34, 38n5, 39n11, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48–49, 50, 53–58, 58–59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67–69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76n2, 80nn17–19, 81n20, 82n29, 83n31, 84n33, 85n40, 87n45, 91, 92–95, 116, 119, 122, 123, 125n17, 239, 258, 326 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 50, 106 Erfahrung/Erlbenis, 28n25, 41–42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 55, 77n6, 80n17, 83n29, 92, 120, 122, 275, 293n12 Eric B & Rakim, 91 Estraikh, Gennady, 51, 80n18, 127n31, 129n42, 130n52 Expressionism, 15, 16, 17, 65, 67, 116, 138, 150, 171, 172, 201, 220, 227–28, 258, 261, 263, 289–90, 312, 315, 318, 322, 323, 334n10 Fairy tale, 150, 158, 173, 179, 193, 200, 262, 265n18, 352n12 Ferber, Ilit, 19, 334n15 Forverts, 65, 86n44, 95, 124n11, 130n52 Franzos, Karl-Emil, 9–10, 25nn13–14 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 28n27, 37n2, 71, 88n48, 112, 113, 130n48, 166, 173, 199, 202, 205, 227 Gender and sexuality, 13–14, 102–3, 113–15, 118–23, 123n3, 126n26, 127n27, 131n50, 132nn55–59, 133n60, 187n31, 210–11, 227, 230, 248n24, 250n35, 259–60, 277–79, 297n25, 297nn28–29, 314, 319–20, 334n16, 347–48 Gothic, 16, 17, 138, 150, 156, 167, 170, 177, 179, 181n5, 193, 195–207, 210, 211, 212, 216, 226, 248n24 Grinberg, Uri-Tsevi, 19, 36, 55, 56, 235, 334n10

I n de x HaCohen, Ruth, 328, 329, 334n42 Hasidism 67, 69, 139, 141, 143n7, 143n10, 149, 157, 159, 160–62, 171, 176, 185n26, 239, 245n9, 274, 339n43 Haskole, 27n27, 63, 68, 84n38, 141, 212, 214 Hebrew, 7, 19, 60–61, 68, 84n38, 106, 122, 127n30, 129n40, 139, 140, 152, 160, 167, 168, 176–77, 188n40, 211, 233–34, 235, 238–41, 248n26, 255n70, 256nn76–77, 276, 281, 289, 316, 334 Heidegger, Martin, 77n7 Heine, Heinrich, 29–32, 33, 37nn1–3, 38n5, 38n7, 38n9, 53–54, 66, 76n3, 91, 196 Hip-hop (rap music), 135–38, 161 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 4, 92, 193, 194, 195– 207, 208, 209, 212, 215, 216, 225, 242, 243n2, 246n15 Homosexuality, 112, 130n47, 343, 345 Israel, 20, 21, 240 Italy, 30, 31, 196–97, 203 Jargon Theater, 80n17, 226–27, 252n52–53 Jay-Z, 137, 142n3, 164 Jesus (Christ), 53, 55, 56, 72, 78n11, 254n65, 259, 262, 273–74, 275, 276–77, 280, 282, 285–86, 289, 295nn18–19, 296n21 Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, 20, 89n51, 140 Jewish messianism, 53, 75, 158–62, 182n11, 186n28, 273, 280, 295n18, 299n33, 305, 308, 313, 318, 322, 330, 337n31, 342 Joyce, James, 35, 340 Kabala, 55, 75, 84n34, 141, 145n17, 176, 214, 295n18, 311, 321, 336n22, 337n31 Kafka, Franz, 67, 96, 148, 175–76, 177, 190nn52–53, 233, 279, 325

373

Keun, Irmgard, 118–123, 132nn55–57, 133n60 King Saul, 152–53 Kracauer, Siegfried, 101, 120, 126n23, 132n59, 228, 258 Kraus, Karl, 42, 76n3 Krutikov, Mikhail, 65, 75, 86n42, 90n57, 130n51, 246n17, 248n27, 335n22, 336n26 Ksiazenicer-Matheron, Carole, 310, 311 Kulbak, Moyshe, 4–5, 7, 15, 19, 20, 55, 56, 253n59, 263, 283, 289, 303–24, 335n17, 336n24–26, 337n31 Kushner, Tony, 343–46, 347, 350, 351n8 Lang, Fritz, 227, 257–63, 264n8, 265n18, 266n23, 275, 290, 296n24, 298n30, 329, 347 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 100, 163, 165, 179, 204, 205 Lethen, Helmut, 99, 221, 245n9 Lewis, Matthew, 199, 200, 210 Litvakov, Moyshe, 79n12, 82n24 Löwy, Michael, 25n15, 27n24, 145n14, 253n58, 295n19 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 148, 201 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 148, 164, 165, 187n31 Mann, Heinrich, 193, 209, 217–18, 219, 220, 230, 233, 235, 236, 243n2, 250n38 Markish, Peretz, 36, 124n12, 235 Martyrdom, 21, 135, 201–2, 216, 236, 242, 314, 331, 343, 354n20 Melancholy, 11, 18–19, 20, 28n27, 34, 38n6, 47, 48, 66, 106, 126n20, 150, 151, 164, 166, 175, 176, 184nn17–18, 198, 200, 205, 242, 286, 287, 337n30 Metaphor, 12, 55, 69, 149, 153, 162, 163, 310, 311–12, 336n23, 353n16 Metonymy, 12, 55, 72, 101, 161, 246n12, 310, 311–12, 336n23 Metropolis (film). See Lang, Fritz

374

I n de x

Milgroym/Rimon (journal) 238–39, 255n74 Monad, 165, 168, 179, 204, 206, 238, 242, 344 Moses und Aron (opera). See Schoenberg, Arnold Moses, 152, 186n28, 306, 327–33 Murav, Harriet, 47–48, 88n49, 89n54, 106 Myth, 163, 201, 207, 210, 217, 235, 242, 247n20, 265n21, 279, 280, 283, 285, 313–14, 320, 321, 332, 345, 346, 350, 354n20 Narrative space, 50, 63, 68, 72, 96, 114, 179, 195, 199, 216–17, 228–29, 237, 244n6, 303–24 Neue Sachlichkeit, 4, 65, 93, 97, 99, 101, 102, 104, 113, 116, 119, 125nn17–19, 126n20, 227–28, 240, 257, 259, 261, 263, 268, 271, 323, 346, 353n17 Nordau, Max, 36, 166 Nostalgia, 4, 9, 21, 59, 113, 267, 283, 287–88, 290, 299n34, 304–5, 312, 314–16, 319, 322, 323 Novershtern, Avrom, 129n40, 304, 310, 316 Otte, Marline, 80n17, 217, 226, 229, 286 Pension (boarding house), 106–115, 116, 121, 128n38, 130n49 Peretz, Y.L., 35, 140, 167, 201, 211, 214, 225, 248n27, 308, 314–15, 316–319, 337n29 Perl, Joseph, 69, 139 Pinsker, Shachar, 24n9, 128n38, 133n61, 254n75 Poe, Edgar Allan, 92 Poland, 7, 31–32, 33, 34, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58–59, 61, 64, 66, 67, 72, 86n41, 91, 94, 104, 106, 116, 248n27, 309, 316

Polytonality, 273, 294n17 Post-Judaic, 66, 72, 87n45, 88n50 Postmodernism, 11, 18, 21, 137, 138, 346 Purim-shpil. See Purim Purim, 151, 153, 193, 337n30 Reb Nakhman of Breslov, 4, 17, 138, 139–40, 141, 142n6, 143n7, 143n10, 149–51, 152, 153, 153–64, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177, 182nn11–12, 183n16, 185n26, 186nn27–28, 187n29, 187n32, 193, 201, 202, 209, 215, 226, 230, 235, 239, 241–42, 308, 321, 336n22 Roth, Joseph, 4, 15, 20, 25n12, 33, 59, 86n42, 87n46, 92, 93, 109, 116, 119, 130n45, 219, 233, 244n3, 250n40, 258, 263, 267–89, 290n2, 291n6, 292n7, 292n9, 293n12, 294n16, 295n20, 297nn28–29, 298nn30–32, 299nn33–34, 300n36, 301n45, 302,n46, 306, 310, 324, 326, 347 Roth, Philip, 252n52, 351 Ruttmann, Walter, 98–104, 120, 121, 125nn17–18, 126n26, 127n27, 132n59, 258, 259–60, 264n8, 347 Schoenberg, Arnold, 89n50, 258, 324–33, 338nn34–35, 339n40, 351n6 Scholem, Gershom, 19, 87n45, 191n57, 238, 239, 252n53, 255n71 Schulz, Bruno, 45–46, 78n10, 233 Senderovich, Sasha, 48, 105 Shakespeare, William, 16, 174, 180n4, 233–34, 244n6, 344, 345 Sherman, Joseph, 6, 7, 24n9, 35, 47, 79n12, 107 Shklovsky, Viktor, 96–97, 116, 124n13, 189n50, 246n15 Shmeruk, Chone (Khone) 195, 208, 209 Sholem Aleichem, 1–2, 3, 22nn1–4, 35, 36, 130n47, 167, 169, 189n43, 299n35, 318 Socialist Realism, 65, 73–76, 93, 116, 125n19, 140, 239, 323

375

I n de x Soviet Union, 4, 6, 7, 19, 20, 34, 37, 43, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 86n41, 99, 104–5, 106, 114–15, 116, 118, 149, 179, 208, 220, 232, 234, 238, 239, 246n17, 248n27, 253n62, 256n74, 270–71, 309 Sternberg, Josef “von,” 4, 193, 210, 217–24, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233–34, 236, 237, 249n34, 250nn37–38, 251n46, 251n49, 254n68, 262 Struck, Hermann, 2, 14 Surrealism, 16, 17, 23n7, 99, 126n20, 130n49, 138, 150, 164, 167, 185n21, 265n21 Symbolism, 15, 16, 17, 36, 124n13, 138, 140, 148, 149, 150, 153, 158, 164–67, 168, 170, 173, 176, 178, 179, 180, 188n33, 193, 207, 209, 210, 214, 230, 234, 235, 236, 237, 239, 241, 254n65, 308 Temporality, 15, 17, 34, 43, 45, 49, 76, 91, 93, 207, 212, 224, 225, 226, 262, 264n8, 271, 282–83, 293n13, 299n34, 309, 323 Trauerspiel, 16, 18, 52, 136–37, 148, 149, 151, 153, 156, 157, 162, 163, 172, 177, 178,

179, 180n4, 183n15, 184n17, 193, 196, 197, 200, 201, 202, 205, 218, 235, 242, 244n6, 245n11, 261, 262, 308–9, 314, 330, 331, 332, 333, 336n25, 343, 344, 346, 352n9, 354n20 USA, 7, 20, 21, 61, 104–5, 106, 116, 127n31, 222–23, 249n34, 270, 271, 275–76, 278, 279–80, 281, 282, 283–84, 289, 296nn23–24, 298n31, 299nn33–35, 342 WALL-E (film), 346–50, 352n12, 353n17, 354n23 Ward, Janet, 104, 132n55, 222 Weiss, Joseph, 158, 182n11, 185n26, 186n28 West, Kanye, 137, 142n3, 164 Yeshivas, 211–14, 215, 235, 236, 247n23, 276 Zionism, 27n27, 28n29, 32, 82n29, 238, 298n32, 334n10 Zweig, Arnold 2–3, 6, 13–14, 15, 19, 26n20, 27n21, 28n39, 125n16, 297n25

marc caplan is Visiting Professor in the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. He is author of How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms (2011).