[In the following essay, Fiedler discusses Peretz's work in relation to Jewish culture and the literature of the absurd.]

It is fifteen years now since I first read Peretz; and before that for perhaps another ten years I had been aware of him dimly as a name, an institution, a folk hero belonging to the darkness of Europe, the double-darkness of the ghetto from which my grandparents had fled to a sunlit America. It is an irony of communal memory that the bitterest critic of a way of life should be identified in recollection with the world he attacks, and yet it is a constant irony: an enlightened Aeschylus is confused with the bloody world of Agamemnon; a liberal Hawthorne blurs into the rigid Puritan commonwealth of Hester Prynne, an emancipated Peretz fades back into the ghetto from which in pain he escaped. This irony Maurice Samuel chooses to perpetuate in the title of his book, Prince of the Ghetto. Prince of the ghetto indeed—that believer in statistics, popular science, socialism, that "free" intellectual in a short coat who would not go home on Seder night: enemy of the ghetto, scourge of the ghetto, destroyer of the ghetto—Prince only in the sense that a revolutionist of '89 was Prince of the Bastille. And yet—

And yet there is possible another Peretz, a quite "real" Peretz, though one the living author would, I suspect, have had to deny: the folk Peretz—not, as Samuel misleadingly asserts, a writer of folk stories, but himself a myth of the folk, re-created by the Jewish people out of what was least conscious, most instinctive in his work. It is characteristic of greatness in writing, or of a certain kind of greatness at least, that it is amenable to precisely such mythic appropriation. There is a type of writer who permits himself to be transmuted, reinvented in response to the shifting needs of his audience; and eternally transformed, he yet integrally survives. It is Shakespeare, of course, who most spectacularly exemplifies this infinite lack of resistance to adaptation. Peretz, on his level, is almost equally responsive.

There are many possible Peretzes to be extracted from his whole work: the socialist, the enemy of orthodoxy, the exponent of Jewish self-hatred, the Yiddish Hans Christian Andersen, the rhapsodist of Romantic Love; and for some reader each of these must be especially valid, especially useful. It is always a question of use—and for Samuel's fictive Prince there is a clear and urgent use: to act as a mediator between the American non-Yiddish-speaking Jew (particularly the intellectual) and what is valuable in his Yiddish past—that is to say, the East European, the ghetto past as opposed to the Hebrew past. It is true, for better or worse, that for such a Jew the ethos of his recent ancestors is most easily available as "literature," at a level where not belief but the suspension of disbelief is exacted.

To such a Jew, for example, Hasidism, in its native context of intolerance, dirt and shabby magic, is somewhat repugnant; even in Buber's modernist presentation (out of the Baal Shem Tov by Kierkegaard), it remains stubbornly alien. But in the ironic-sentimental tales of Peretz, Yiddish mysticism and ethics come to seem, by virtue of the familiar tone, usable. The American Jewish intellectual fumbling uncertainly backward toward the sacramental values of ghetto life cannot quite reach that vanished world; he cannot achieve the innocence, and will not tolerate the narrowness necessary for the full return. He reaches back, back—and falling short, finds Peretz within touch and comprehension; for Peretz had in revolt moved as great a distance from the Orthodox community as the contemporary intellectual has in nostalgia moved back toward it. The American Jewish intellectual of this generation from his side, and Peretz from his, bound between them a rich area of what might be called alienated Jewishness, in which flourish Kafka's K. and Joyce's Bloom, the most compulsive modern images of Citizen and Artist.

In this light, it is not strange, though Peretz could not have foreseen it, that his chance of survival as a writer, his opportunity to enter the mainstream of Western literature depend on his survival in the English language and in America, where alone the Jews in Exile substantially survive, a community capable of producing intellectuals peculiarly prepared to achieve the liaison with Europe which is indispensable to American spiritual life.

Peretz was never sure of his language or his audience; he experimented with Polish and Hebrew, turned to Yiddish as a pis aller and not without regrets. On the one hand, he was tempted outward toward Europe as an audience, and on the other, he felt drawn inward as a teller of tales to his own people; but he could contemplate neither possibility without irony at his own expense. In a piece called "Stories," Peretz satirizes his European orientation in a portrait of the Jewish writer spinning yarns to a stupid, anti-Semitic shiksa in hope of charming her into forgetting his ugly Jewish mug and giving him a kiss (surely, at some level he was ironically recalling the Kiss, the Kiss of the Shechina, the ultimate hope of the mystic Jew); and in one sketch he reports no less bitterly the attitude of an ordinary Polish Jew to his work: "What is the good of it? I don't mean to you. God forbid! A Jew must earn a living if he has to suck it out of a wall. But what do they, your readers, get out of it?"

In the end, Peretz seems to have spoken to the Europeanized Jew (a prospect rather than a fact), the cosmopolitan, rationalist, socialist Jew made in his own image; in lectures and by tracts, he tried himself to create his own ideal audience, though his total success would have meant the death of his work. After all, Yiddish is the ghetto language, and with the complete Europeanization of the Jew that Peretz dreamed, it would have disappeared as a living tongue, along with the caftan and the sheitel. Part of the tragic impact of Peretz' work arises from its being in intent an act of suicide, art's immolation of itself for the secularization of Jewish morality, and the Jew's subsumption into a common humanity.

Indeed, Yiddish is just about dead, though it died not in the triumph of universalism that Peretz foresaw, but in mass extermination and the Zionist exodus from Europe. Jewry survives not on the continent Peretz loved and preached as the Jews' future, but in America and Israel, drawn toward the poles of assimilation and Zionist nationalism, both of which Peretz despised as profanations of Universalism and the Allegorical Return.

What Peretz can mean to those intent on becoming Hebrews, in face of the anti-European, anti-Yiddish tenor of life in Israel, I cannot say; but for those of us in America, his meaning is evident, his uses clear. We have become aware that we must achieve, if we are unwilling to become shadows of shadows, a double assimilation, back to a stable past as well as forward toward a speculative future, and in that act Peretz is a potential ally. To make available to us what Peretz carried from the house he helped fire (we must not forget that the death of the Yiddish community, as distinct from the deaths of individual Jews, was not only a murder, but a suicide), he must first be translated, then interpreted—which is to say, somewhat misinterpreted. This pious and necessary misrepresentation, re-creation if you will, is the function of Mr. Samuel's book; and Mr. Samuel, who has done a similar job for Sholom Aleichem, is peculiarly suited for the job, as one who did not inherit but had to learn by an act of choice and will the language of Peretz.

On the whole, he has skillfully disentangled the living Peretz from the nineteenth-century corpse of the same name: the optimistic believer in material progress, science and rationalism, the popularizing lecturer, the despiser of ritual. He has perhaps made him, out of nostalgia and a desire to simplify, too single, too gentle and beneficent. For ajuster balance we might have been given more of the bitter, the dark Peretz: his commentary on the Jew's comical and soul-destroying pursuit of parnosseh (livelihood), his sketches of the degradation of woman in the Jewish community, his studies of the stultifying impact of hopeless poverty and the rule of the spiritually dead in Jewry. There is in Peretz a blackness that denies his avowed optimism, and an ambivalence toward his people that cannot be mitigated without sacrificing him as a writer.

My one major objection, however, is to Mr. Samuel's habit of referring to Peretz' artfully contrived fictions as "folk tales" or "Hasidic tales." Quite aside from the technical objection that the self-conscious writer for publication does not compose "folk" material, such loose terminology obscures the problem of Peretz' precise relationship to the folklore elements which he incorporated into his work. As a European writer, Peretz comes toward the end of a long tradition (which begins with Percy's Reliques and Ossian and includes the work of such men as Novalis and Hans Christian Andersen, Goethe and George MacDonald) of appropriating to high literature folk material, and of creating a pseudo-folk literature. It is a chapter in the long history of the writer's effort to domesticate to his task what was once called the merveilleux and is now fashionably called the Absurd.

The problem of the nineteenth-century Jewish writer in this regard was markedly different in two main respects from that of the Gentile manipulators of the fairy tale: first, the Jewish folk tale had not sunk in social prestige to something told by old women to children; the haggadic tradition had made it possible to keep the maase unseparated from the main body of Jewish belief and ritual; and the Hasidic movement had instituted the Tale as one of the centers of religious life. The Jewish folk story was in the lifetime of Peretz not an old wife's tale, a degraded myth, but Myth in full flower; and the writer's problem was to secularize rather than to redeem the Absurd. Second, for Jewish literature, whose development takes place in an incredibly short time, Enlightenment and Romanticism are telescoped, so that the ideological bias of Peretz is not the anti-rationalism of, say, Andersen, but a mixture of rationalism, sentimentalism and philosophical optimism that reminds the English reader, quite improbably, of Alexander Pope.

The myth becomes literature in Peretz, therefore, by a double process: by the sentimentalizing of the Absurd and the rationalizing of the Absurd. Let us take a single example, the story called "And Even Beyond," in which the "absurd" contention that the Rabbi of Nemirov spends the mornings of the Penitential Days in Heaven is challenged by a skeptical Litvak. In the end, the Litvak is content to grant the claim, after discovering that the Rabbi, disguised as a peasant, actually spends the holy mornings chopping wood for the old and the sick. For the Hasid's daring ambiguity of "Heaven," the Litvak and Peretz have substituted the rationalist (What else could Heaven mean to us moderns?), sentimental (to split kindling for a widow—what could be more Heavenly?) concept, "aiding the poor." What survives in the story, despite Peretz' conscious attempt to eliminate legend and magic, is the irreducible absurdity present as soon as the term "Heaven" is evoked, though the sentimentality endemic to Jewish emotional life nearly smothers it. Sometimes, as in "Silent Bontche," one of Peretz' best-known stories, a third and saving element enters: the joke, the Jewish Joke which secularizes the Absurd as the absurd; granted the pick of Heaven's abundance, the holy simpleton asks for "every morning a hot roll with butter, please!" But jokes are not frequent in Peretz, and he is ordinarily left to fend without the protection of wit against the shallow rationalization, the easy emotional response; so that most often, his reworkings of folk material are reductions, unintentional parodies of myth. More typical of Peretz' sensibility, though rare in its non-committal tone, is such a study of Hasidic madness and devotion as "The Kiss of Moses"—in which, for once, Peretz succeeds in maintaining toward the Absurd a quizzical detachment, suspended between irony and sympathy, that makes everything seem possible: even the Tightness of superstition and folly, even the Kiss of God.