Times
Literary Supplement (TLS)
27 May 2005
From the Ghetto
by Joseph Sherman
Dovid Katz, Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (New York: Basic Books, 2004). ISBN 0-465-03728-3. xvi + 430, illus. US $26.95
Aaron Lansky, Outwitting History: How a Young Man Rescued a Million Books and Saved a Vanishing Civilization (London: Souvenir Press, 2005). ISBN 0-285-63724-X viii + 318 pp. £20.00
When Isaac Bashevis Singer became the first (and only) Yiddish writer to be
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, the journalist covering the
Stockholm ceremonies for The Observer noted that the new laureate was "the
first man with not only the knowledge but the temerity to speak Yiddish",
adding for good measure that "Singer's accent is itself a Jewish joke"
(Sunday 17 December 1978, p.11, cols. 7-8). Such offensively snide remarks could
be made only about Yiddish. Throughout its thousand-year long history, Yiddish
has been despised by a spectrum of people in other respects totally sundered
from each other. Socio-political, religious and cultural prejudices, Jewish
and Gentile alike, fixed Yiddish in the general perception as a "jargon"
spoken only by the uneducated, and written solely for the undiscriminating.
Scant credit is given to the power Yiddish exercised as the expression of a
stateless culture, in and of itself a "portable homeland". Nor is
its old and extensive literature valued as a major contribution to western civilization.
The cumulative twentieth-century effect of this neglect has been virtually to
efface Yiddish culture from educated consciousness. In British bookshops, obscure
works by minor Latin writers fill the shelves in paperback translation while
one seeks in vain for the classics of Yiddish literature. Only of recent decades,
notably in the United States, has the richness of Yiddish been demonstrated
conclusively and without apology. In different ways, and with contrasting qualifications,
Dovid Katz and Aaron Lansky have now published books that will go far in revaluing
Yiddish more widely. In Words on Fire Dovid Katz, drawing on years of research,
has followed a friend's advice to write "a radically alternative view of
Yiddish to be presented in a book in English for a wider readership" (p.
xii) whose patience he declines to try by adding a scholarly apparatus to its
length. Instead, as he frankly admits, he aims to stimulate debate by offering
a broad, though tellingly detailed, cultural history of Yiddish. Whatever hairs
his specialist colleagues may split with him, the extensive scope and sharp
insight of his survey admirably fulfil his aim.
Katz grounds his appraisal in his long-held linguistic theory of "continual
transmission", which maintains that present-day Yiddish - from its inception,
always written in the characters of the Hebrew alphabet to assert its indivisibility
from the religious and cultural tradition out of which it grew - is part of
an ancient trilingual "Jewish language chain" comprising, in the first
instance, Hebrew (loshn-koydesh, "the language of holiness")
and Aramaic (targum-loshn, "the language of explanation").
The meeting of Hebrew and Aramaic during the Babylonian Exile, according to
Katz, constitutes the "little bang"; the contact of this fusion with
medieval urban German dialects resulted in the "big bang" that created
Yiddish (loshn Ashkenaz, "the language of Ashkenaz"), which,
though later separated into western and eastern branches, each with its own
regional variations, stubbornly grew into a language in its own right.
The venerable biblical name Ashkenaz (Genesis 10:2) was bestowed on the
German-speaking lands of central Europe by the Jews who settled there in the
Middle Ages, and there, after the fifteenth-century expulsion from Spain and
Jewish migration eastwards, a unique Yiddish culture steadily developed. Like
every vernacular, Yiddish was feared by the rabbinical authorities whose power
lay in their command of Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages of the Torah and the
Talmud. Since language is power, their fear was justified. Much frivolous and
potentially corrupting entertainment could be found in the stories that proliferated
in the surrounding Christian world, and once these explicitly Christian sources
had been Judaized, courtly romances gave equal pleasure to Yiddish-speaking
listeners and readers, opening up for them the enriching world of the imagination;
such Yiddish texts date back to the twelfth century.
Katz's entertaining summary of famous sixteenth-century Yiddish romance-pastiches show in a short space how, from its earliest beginnings, Yiddish both drew from, and fed back into, the European literary tradition. In appealing chiefly to "women and the ignorant", as the rabbinical phrase has it, these Yiddish texts built a clearly identifiable popular culture that all could share. Wealthy women sponsored book publication; some wrote prayers, and others pioneered Yiddish poetry. At their core, the earliest Yiddish texts strove to strengthen faith with books of ethics, a "women's bible", and Kabbalistic works which, Katz claims, "played an essential role … in a newly uninhibited transmission of classical Jewish knowledge …]a motivating factor in the enfranchisement of women and unlearned men" (p. 121). This process of enfranchisement was accelerated by the eighteenth-century rise of Hasidism. This movement, conceived as a devotional counter to the hysteria engendered by Shabbetai Zvi's false messianic claims, came to birth in the wake of libertarian ideas brought to Europe by Napoleon's conquests. A profoundly democratising force, early Hasidism stressed the capacity of all individuals, whatever their learning, to achieve full communion with God.
Inevitably, therefore, it favoured the Yiddish vernacular in which, further to inspire devotion, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav produced his Tales, a work that Katz justly hails as "the first actual literary masterpiece of East European Yiddish" (p.161). The influence of these Tales reached out beyond the Yiddish canon to shape the modern symbolist movement, further proof that Yiddish could speak to western culture. And western culture replied. By the early nineteenth century, the process of cultural transmission through Yiddish translations of European classics refined the language as a literary medium. At the very moment that Yiddish was entering the mainstream of European letters, however, it opened the fault line along which the Jewish world permanently split. The language formerly despised by the rabbis now evoked the opprobrium of the "enlightened", led by Moses Mendelssohn, who demanded the eradication of "this jargon that has contributed so much to the immorality of common Jews" (p.179). The old rabbinical charge of "immorality" against a language that had hitherto supported piety was now levelled by an assimilationist calling for the silencing of Europe's quintessentially Jewish voice. Some eighty years later, Herzl did the same, dismissing Yiddish as among those "ugly and stunted jargons, those ghetto languages that […] were the sly languages of prisoners" (p.235).
Language had now become the criterion by which Jews defined themselves. Mendelssohn's heirs became the founders of Zionism and the revivers of Hebrew, while Yiddish culture separated into ideologically contending camps. While the rabbis, formerly so resistant to its empowering nature, now embraced it as a bulwark against assimilation, secularists employed it to preach worldliness to the masses. Katz is at his most stimulating in his challenging account of this period. He defines the growth of modern Yiddish culture as a great "secular outburst" (p.229) whose agents remained inextricably bound to the Jewish tradition, regardless of how far they personally strayed from it. Thus they enriched two cultures, adding to the Jewish heritage while enlarging the ethos of the West. By lucidly unpicking the multifarious strands of a complex period, Katz delineates the compass of the Yiddish cultural heritage, showing that the superficially named "language war" between Yiddish and Hebrew was fought over the socio-political identity of the Jewish people as a whole. On one side rose a nationalist ideal, willing the destruction of the Diaspora through the creation of a sovereign Jewish body politic defined by a revived Hebrew and a "new Jew". On the other side stood the Diaspora and an international culture, whether secular or religious, supported wholly by Yiddish.
Though Katz treats these near-irreconcilable positions even-handedly, he stresses the extent to which Yiddish was undone by the Zionists. His account will be eye-opening to those who have grown up since 1948 in the belief - fostered by Zionist ideology - that the achievements of Ashkenazi Yiddish culture were of no account, and that, as Isaac Bashevis Singer tartly summed it up, Jewish history "jumped from the Bible to Ben-Gurion with nothing in between". Despite the fact that, as Katz notes, "the State of Israel was built almost entirely by Yiddish-speaking East European Jews" (p.236), they despised the stereotype of the "old" Jew as passive, obscurantist, and incapable of any work but petty trade, personified in the Yiddish "jargon" which they swept aside in favour of an artificially revived Hebrew pronounced under Arabic influence, misnamed "Sephardi", and shaped in their own hard-boiled image. Those who laid down the State of Israel's language policy refused to grant even minority status to the Yiddish language, blocked the establishment of an American-endowed chair in Yiddish at the Hebrew University (in 1927), and made it illegal to publish Yiddish periodicals or newspapers.
Emphasising, despite all this, the importance of Israel's existence to modern
Jewish identity, Katz nevertheless strains credibility by inviting the belief
that that the efforts of the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, and the arrival
in Israel of a handful of Yiddish writers from the Soviet Union, made the country
a "major centre" of world Yiddish literature between the 1970s and
1990s. While Yiddish writers are certainly free of physical persecution, where
are they to publish their work? There are virtually no readers of Yiddish in
Israel today, and its two surviving Yiddish publishing houses run on non-existent
budgets with no state support. When Sutzkever retired from the editorship of
his distinguished literary journal in 1993, it ceased publication. There is
manifestly no future for Yiddish, at least in its secular form, in Israel.
Katz's conviction that such a future does indeed exist, however, is the most
challenging postulate in his book, and marks its most original claim to attention.
He believes this future lies with the "Ultraorthodox", an appellation
he views as pejorative and treats with suspicion. The growing enclaves of those
who follow the strict rabbinical teaching that "all innovation is prohibited
by the Torah" are the only Jews for whom Yiddish is integral to the practice
of their faith. Since they continue to speak, write and use Yiddish in their
daily lives, Katz believes they will beget "the future millions of Yiddish
speakers and the Yiddish literature of a hundred and two hundred years hence"
(p.396). He adduces demographic statistics to show that since theirs will be
the greatest Jewish population growth - a figure of half a million of Hasidic
Yiddish speakers for 2005 is regarded as conservative - "Yiddish will be
the future language of the bulk of Diaspora Jewry because speaking it is part
of the Jewish civilization of the Hasidic movement […] not because of Mendele,
Sholem Aleichem, Peretz or any other Yiddishist icon" (p.379).
Katz soberly notes that Yiddishism, the secular belief in Yiddish as a "portable homeland", could survive only as a real civilization in its native Eastern Europe; when this was destroyed by Hitler's Holocaust, it was doomed in the rest of the Diaspora because the call of assimilation was too strong. Now, only in the guarded enclaves of severe Orthodox observance can the language and the culture it supports develop. Katz counters academic criticisms of contemporary Hasidic-Haredi Yiddish - that it flouts normative rules of grammar and orthography - with the claim that, as with the transformations of a century earlier, such departures merely mark it as "a language in a state of beautiful linguistic flux that signifies stylistic youth and energy and the first sproutings of the future new Yiddish literature" (p.390). He suggests that its contemporary manifestations in the explosion of publishing activity, the expansion of Western-influenced genres, and the tension between dialect and standard language usage are signs of burgeoning vitality.
If Dovid Katz is right and, to the bemused wonderment of secularists, the "Ultraorthodox" will indeed produce major works in Yiddish, they will be have to be influenced solely by the religious tradition, since the secular masterpieces of Yiddish remain taboo for them. Instead of the simplistic didacticism we currently confront therefore, if profoundly spiritual poetic inspiration like that of the prophet Isaiah or Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav suffuses the work that is to come, the world will be well content.
A wholly different perspective on the contemporary resilience of Yiddish is given by Aaron Lansky, whose love for the language and its culture led him single-handedly to save the books that assimilated American Jews discarded. The astounding success of Lansky's effort, charted in his newly-published memoir, Outwitting History, has, in one decade, provided a glittering new world address for Yiddish. From a one-man book-salvaging operation run from a bachelor pad, Lansky's project is now housed in a multi-million dollar, custom-designed complex on the campus of Hampshire College, in the heartland of WASP America's academia. From here, Lansky now directs a project disseminating Yiddish culture world-wide through the most modern technology available. From saving millions of Yiddish volumes printed on acid paper and crumbling to dust, Lansky's National Yiddish Book Center has now digitized the entire corpus of modern Yiddish literature and has preserved it both for present needs (printing Yiddish books on demand) and for eternity ("in a former Strategic Air Command bunker buried deep inside a mountain").
Lansky recounts the history of his ten-year long pursuit of an impossible dream in a warm, witty narrative as instructive as it is entertaining. More than simply the record of a personal quest, however fulfilling, Lansky's book addresses the future of Yiddish with passionate conviction. He has personally travelled all over the world, not only saving books in such unpromising locations as Cuba and the former Soviet Union, but also enriching libraries in many countries that wish to pursue the academic study of Yiddish. Notably, these include the newly independent states of the old world of Ashkenaz, where the Yiddish born there is slowly being revivified, at least in universities.
Vitally, Lansky recognises that, for the secular world at any rate, Yiddish literature today will have to appeal in translation: "the imperative for translation […] is no longer a matter of grandchildren knowing their grandparents, but rather of grandchildren knowing themselves" (p.297). Such translations, of which more are urgently needed, will bring home the extent to which Yiddish is integral to the legacy of Western civilization. Yiddish, after all, as Bashevis Singer noted in his Nobel Lecture, is far from having said its last word. We may hope that the timely appearance of these two energizing books will give it fresh breath.
Joseph Sherman directs Yiddish Studies at Oxford University.