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Language in Time of Revolution

University of California Press

As we look around us in contemporary America, we see large numbers of "Jews" or persons of Jewish origin (many of whom shed their recognizably Jewish names) in such areas as law, medicine, psychoanalysis, mathematics, theoretical physics, economics, linguistics, the academy in general, as well as in the communications and entertainment industries, in trade and political thought, and very few among farmers, industrial workers, or soldiers. A similar picture is revealed if we observe the small Jewish populations of England and France today, even the Soviet Union (despite long-standing attempts to bar Jews from higher education and positions of power); and certainly if we look at the cultures of Germany and Soviet Russia in the 1920s. With some exaggeration, we may say that, if observed as one social group, such "Jews" derive from a religion but strive to the condition of a "class," occupying large parts of certain social domains and professions with no proportionality to their percentage in the population as a whole. As is well known, this situation resulted in important contributions made by individuals of Jewish origin to modern culture and science. After Hitler's racism, especially vis-à-vis the Jews, this is a sensitive issue, though it serves as a favorite topic in Jewish insider whispering. But the striking statistical imbalance, often accumulating in a very short period, and despite most individuals' fully assimilated behavior and sincere professionalism, make those "Non-Jewish Jews" (as Isaac Deutscher dubbed them)—justly or unjustly—"Jewish" again in the eyes of the beholder. Though antecedents of this phenomenon can be found in earlier centuries, the massive influx of Jews into general culture is a product of a very short period, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

Simultaneously, especially after 1882, a new secular culture emerged in the internal Jewish domain, giving rise to a rich and variegated literature written in Yiddish and Hebrew (which, for many reasons, is open in its full flavor only to those who master the intricate layering and universe of allusions of those languages). Hand in hand with this new literature, a rainbow of ideological and

social movements showed a vigorous life among the Jews and gave ideological and cultural momentum to a whole generation and their children, until it disappeared; one branch of this trend survived and culminated in the stunning creation of a new, Hebrew society, the Yishuv —the organized Jewish community in pre-independent Palestine (1882–1948)—which eventually led to the establishment and flourishing of the State of Israel.

Both those directions—which we may call the extrinsic and intrinsic respectively—exhibit a total transformation of the modes of existence of Jews and their descendants in the post-Christian modern world. It was a period of the rejuvenation of the Jews, which took many forms and directions and endowed people weary of suffering with a nervous creative energy. Whatever the results, the process itself is as rich in meanings as a work of fiction. Indeed, it was thematized in the multilingual Jewish fiction that was, at the same time, part of the process itself.

Today, it is hard to believe that just recently, about a century ago, Jewish literature had captured the essence of Jewish existence in the fictional image of the primitive shtetl, the East European Jewish small town. Sholem Aleichem (Rabinovitsh, 1859–1916) had immortalized it in the image of Kasrilevke:

The town of the little people into which I shall now take you, dear reader, is exactly in the middle of the blessed Pale1 into which Jews have been packed as closely as herring in a barrel and told to increase and multiply. [ . . . ] Stuck away in a corner of the world, isolated from the surrounding country, the town stands, orphaned, dreaming, bewitched, immersed in itself and remote from the noise and the bustle, the confusion and tumult and greed, which men have created about them and have dignified with high-sounding names like Culture, Progress, Civilization. ("The Town of the Little People," Sholom Aleichem 1956:28)

The irony, of course, is double-directed, but the shtetl is unmistakably reconstructed from a distance, much as James Joyce reconstructed Dublin. Both the writer and his readers are already modern city-dwellers who believe in "Culture, Progress, Civilization" and look back at the small town as at a museum exhibit. When we read the memoirs of Solomon Maimon (1753–1800) or the writings of Mendele Moykher Sforim (Abramovitsh, 1835–1917), we are amazed at how wretched, dirty, degenerate, illiterate, or ugly our ancestors appeared—only three or four generations ago. Here, for example, is a typical description by the master of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Mendele Moykher Sforim, following The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third from his small shtetl of Teterevke to the regional "metropolis" of Glupsk (i.e., "Fooltown"):

"Pale of Settlement"—former Polish territories, comprising central Poland, Ukraine, Byelorussia, Lithuania, occupied by Russia at the end of the eighteenth century and turned into a large geographical ghetto beyond which only a few Jews were permitted to live. The Pale included thousands of small towns, many of them predominantly Jewish.

First of all, when you arrive in Glupsk, by the road from Teterevka, you must leap over—I apologize for mentioning it—a mud hole; a little farther on you must leap over another, and still farther on a third, the largest of the lot, into which all the sewage of the town flows. If the gutters are filled with yellow sand used for scrubbing floors, with chicken and fish guts, with fish scales and chicken heads, you know it is Friday and time to go to the steam bath; if, on the other hand, they show egg shells, onion skins, radish parings, herring skeletons and sucked-out marrow bones—why, good Sabbath to you, you Jewish children! (Mendele 1968:89)

This metonymic description of the mire of Jewish uncivilized existence was supposed to be symbolic for the whole Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia. And Mendele's readers in the early twentieth century, themselves born in Jewish small towns, thought that was an appropriate portrait. Without foreseeing the Holocaust, the Hebrew literary critic David Frishman (1859–1922) wrote that, if the Jewish world were destroyed, it would remain alive in the writings of Mendele Moykher Sforim. Similar images, influenced by Mendele's perception of the shtetl, were repeatedly used by those who revolted against traditional Jewish existence, such as the British chemist, Zionist leader, and later President of Israel, Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952), who described his hometown Pinsk (capital of Polesye, Byelorussia) as a sleepy swamp. The transformation since then has been enormous.

What was clear to the children of the shtetl was that, to regain the dignity of human existence, they would have to embrace the culture and ideas of the "civilized"—that is, Western European—world. And this could be done in one of two ways: either join it or imitate it. In other words: either go to the center of culture (in both the physical and spiritual sense), master its...