[In the following essay, Roskies explores the themes of anger and rebelliousness that he sees as defining the Yiddish literary canon.]

Back home in New York I am a member of a khevra kadisha, a Jewish burial society. It has taught me to distinguish between the living and the dead. No amount of verbiage or hype can bring a dead man back to life. When the oxygen stops flowing to the brain and the blood stops pumping from the heart, a person ceases to be among the living. Rumors of a renaissance do not a resurrection make.

As a member of a khevra kadisha, I have also learned to recite the entire book of Psalms. But when first it came my turn at shemirah, “to guard” the dead person on the eve of burial, I was not prepared to confront the full range of emotion expressed in this ancient anthology. Having studied the Siddur in the Jewish People's School of Montreal, I was of course familiar with the psalms of thanksgiving and praise that make up the Kabbalat Shabbat service and the Psukei Dezimra. Having then attended a Protestant high school, I learned to recite the Lord's Prayer, Psalm 23, by heart, in English. Nothing in my formal education or socialization as a Jew prepared me for the anguish and anger, and especially for the elemental cries for revenge that punctuate the Psalter with such regularity.

What happened to this Jewish rage and why is it so hard to retrieve? It was buried, I am now convinced, with the demise of a living Yiddish culture.

The most important lesson I have learned, however, as a member of a khevra kadisha is that attending the dead is a khesed shel emes, the highest mitzvah of all, because there is no expectation of reward. We do what is required for its own sake, and out of the public eye. In Jewish tradition it is considered a greater act of loving kindness than delivering a eulogy or reciting the Kaddish.

This, then, is the prescribed way of acknowledging the break, the irreparable loss. One must first voice the Yiddish anger that lies buried just beneath the surface. One must, above all, distinguish between past significance and present meaning, which is to say, attempt to understand modern Yiddish culture on its own terms, as a closed chapter of Jewish and human history with its own internal logic, and to pursue one's inquiry without regard to all the pressing needs of the present.

.....

Yiddish literary greatness was reserved for those who steeled their art and pitted their faith against the forces of darkness. The first to do so was Nahman of Bratslav (1772-1810), who wove fantastically elaborated tales so as to keep alive the lonely struggle for redemption. Then came Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (1836-1917), better known through his sidekick, Mendele the Book Peddler, who constructed an elaborate allegory called The Mare in order to expose the intellectual betrayals here on earth.² Not until the wrenching experiences of the twentieth century, however—secularization, migration, war, and mob violence—did anger become the warp and woof of Yiddish letters.

I.L. Peretz (ca. 1852-1915) broke new ground in Jewish culture because he revealed himself to his Yiddish readers as what he was: a hardnosed survivor of the khurban beit hamidrash, the ruined House of Study, who now made his home in the secular world. Peretz's first masterpiece depicted this urban intellectual traveling through the outback collecting statistics on the economic plight of the Jews. It was punctuated by an outburst of helpless rage, bordering on madness:³

Tomorrow morning I will record information.

I know in advance what I'll come up with. … I will find waifs next to the geese and ducks in the water at the edge of the swamp; infants in the cradle, crying their lungs out; the helpless sick inbed; boys, hardly more than children, boarding with strangers in order to study Talmud; young married women, modest or immodest in their coarse wigs. No sooner do I close my eyelids than I visualize a horde of faces utterly feeble, sallow, ashen, and twisted, hardly a one with a smile, hardly a one with a dimple; the men unvirile, lumpish; the young women with runny eyes, bearing things—a bushel basket of fruit, or a sack of onions, or a baby plus the sack of onions.

I know in advance that I will find an unlicensed gin mill, a couple of horse thieves, and more than a couple of smugglers.

What will be the upshot of the statistics? Will statistics tell us how much suffering is needed—empty bellies and unused teeth; hunger so intense that the sight of a dry crust of bread will make the eyes bulge in their sockets, as if drawn out by pliers; indeed, actual death by starvation—to produce an unlicensed gin mill, a burglar, a horse thief?

(“Bilder fun a provints-rayze,” 1891; trans. Milton Himmelfarb)

This was the 38-year-old author's long day's journey into night, which marked the end of his faith in science and social engineering and the beginning of his career as a Yiddish parodist and modernist.

No wonder, then, that when Peretz abandoned the critical observation of present reality for the reinvention of the past, he found Reb Nahman of Bratslav and was the first modern Jewish writer to hear the voice of a lonely visionary speaking through those seemingly naive tales. No wonder, that after numerous experiments with dramatic genres, Peretz wrote his own Walpurgisnacht, set in the old marketplace of an ancient Polish-Jewish town and starring the most blasphemous figure yet to appear on the Yiddish stage: the badkhn, or Jester, a combination folk bard and heretic. The Jester observes, then orchestrates, a vast assemblage of Jews living, dead, and in-between, using the cover of night to ridicule all the redemptive schemes—whether sacred or secular—that once had vivified the Jewish body politic. Betrayed by the past, the Jester betrays it in turn, championing the only potent force still left—Death itself.⁴

Because Peretz's Bay nakht afn altn mark (At Night in the Old Marketplace) was too technically bold and ideologically bleak ever to be staged as written, its broad historical sweep and depth of cultural layering failed to set a new standard in modern Yiddish letters. Instead, that honor was conferred upon someone more modestly attired: Sholem Aleichem's Tevye der milkhiker (Tevye the Dairyman). Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) proved that he could match Peretz, his great contemporary and rival, betrayal for betrayal. Sender Blank, the eponymous hero of Sholem Aleichem's first major novel, was betrayed by his spoiled and greedy son; Sheyne-Sheyndl, wife to Sholem Aleichem's first schlemiel hero, turned every letter to Menakhem-Mendl into a manic catalogue of his betrayals, real and imagined. But Tevye—Tevye was the sum of all personal betrayals, the patriarch-without-sons fated, therefore, to import his bridegrooms, who in turn brought nothing but anarchy, apostasy, suicide, and cynicism in their wake.

A close cousin to Mendele the Bookseller, Tevye collars his horse and his God whenever the emotional need arises, and only later does he confide in Pani Sholem Aleichem, his chief confidant. Behind all the verbal antics, however, the trilingual wordplay and folksy parables, the dialogues-within-monologues, the scriptural malapropisms, there stands a father in the eye of the storm, whose desire to emulate the personal God of Israel is matched only by his anger at the inscrutable God of History. Tevye is a latter-day Job, but he is also the Almighty, who must banish Eve (Chava) from the Garden; he is father to Hodel, his second daughter, who is ready to martyr herself for the cause of political salvation like her namesake Esther; and he is Abraham, cast into exile. If Peretz envisioned a grotesque reversal of Ezekiel's Valley of the Dry Bones, then Sholem Aleichem, through Tevye, replayed the whole history of biblical and exilic Israel on Mother Russia's unredeemed soil. And what Tevye could not experience, living as he did on the outskirts both of city and town, was left for other demented fathers to experience, as recounted live in the third-class train compartment to the anonymous traveling salesman, the stand-in editor of Sholem Aleichem's very bleakest work, The Railroad Stories.⁵

With the deaths of Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz, and the closing of their canon, the anatomy of betrayal, which is to say, the philology of anger, became more specialized and localized. A division of labor ensued. On the one hand, there were Yiddish writers (like I. M. Weissenberg and Oyzer Warshawski) who used the image of the shtetl (or Jewish market town) to document the extent of communal betrayal. On the other, there were H. D. Nomberg, David Bergelson, and Lamed Shapiro, for whom the betrayal of all personal aspirations was a given, and what was left was to chronicle the pain, the psychic aftermath. Both groups together up-ended the legacy of the Founding Fathers by replacing invective—mere verbal aggression—with the depiction of brute violence: class warfare, pogroms, and particularly suicide.

Henceforth, with the mass dispersion of Yiddish-speaking Jews over the seven seas, each new center had its own grounds for hope and despair. America was fertile ground for Yiddish parody, the amalgam of hatred and love that so perfectly expressed the pace and wrenching price of change. Out of the Yiddish humor magazines there emerged the greatest of all Yiddish parodists, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (1886-1932). He appeared in many guises—as street drummer, nobleman-turned dishwasher, Zarkhi the Philosopher-Clown, and most laughable of all, as Moyshe-Leyb, the sad-eyed Yiddish poet with a pipe in his mouth, composing verses amidst fire escapes and pushcarts.⁶

There are people who maybe go on bragging
That it's not nice to crowd around a wagon
With onions, cucumbers, and plums.
But if it's nice to schlep in streets after a death wagon,
Clad in back, and lament with eyes sagging,
It is a sin to go on bragging
That it's not nice to crowd around a wagon
With onions, cucumbers, and plums.

(“Keyn mol shoyn vel ikh nisht zogn”; trans. Benjamin & Barbara Harshav)

The material struggle is the irreducible core of human existence, rendered by a wish list of sweet and sour fruits and vegetables that so deliciously subvert the rhythm and the rhyme: “Mit tsibeles, un ugerkes, un floymen” (“With onions, cucumbers, and plums”).

Nothing like Halpern's anger had ever been heard in Yiddish before, as encyclopedic as the scope of his parody: an apocalyptic response to the First World War with its parody of Hebrew poet laureate Hayyim Nahman Bialik; anti-ballads that retold the story of Creation, the birth of Jesus, the saga of mass immigration, the squalid tale of “A Little Love in Big Manhattan.” Halpern even transmuted the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, that lightning rod of protest among radicals the world over, into an existential parable, poignant to this day. Moses and New World Mendele, Jeremiah and Every Jew—who knows what other parodic roles Moyshe-Leyb might have played had death not ended his act, at the age of 46?

In America, every Yiddish writer was free to reinvent him- and herself. Anna Margolin (1887-1952), the pen name of Rosa Lebensboym, imagined herself as a homosexual lover in Ancient Greece and as Caesar about to marry his own sister. To those who abhorred the pursuit of pure pleasure, Margolin-Caesar had this to say:⁷

In a wreath of roses, with wine, till late,
In haughty calm, I heard the news
About the weakling from Nazareth
And wild stories about the Jews.

(“Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling”; trans. Benjamin & Barbara Harshav)

At the opposite end of the poetic spectrum stood H. Leivick, arguing by personal example and historical exempla for sublimation as the supreme act of moral courage.

Henceforth, with the division of the globe between Right and Left, it was open season for ventilating one's rage. Where one's personal rage was forged in a furnace of revolutionary and liturgical poetics, the results could electrify. Peretz Markish (on the left) composed his travesty of the kaddish for the victims of the Ukrainian pogroms. Uri Zvi Greenberg (on the right) took leave of Christian Europe, rescuing only its Jewish-born Messiah. But when the Communist Party laid down the law (“socialist in content, national in form”), prophetic anger gave way to programmatic anger. New journals like Oktyaber, Di royte velt in the U.S.S.R., and Der hamer in the U.S. of A. spewed forth denunciations as fast as the Party faithful could churn them out. The exceptional writer, like Der Nister (1884-1950), who fell afoul of the Party almost upon his return to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, took the betrayal out on himself. His swan song as a symbolist writer was a confession of guilt, in which the hero-scholar and former circus performer awoke from a drunken stupor “Behind the Fence,” where, according to Jewish custom, suicides are buried.

With the rise of a Nationalist Socialist ideology that singled out the Jews for eventual destruction and signalled the abandonment of the Jews by Western civilization, every year would be a hundred in the chronology of rage.

1933. Sholem Asch writes Der tilim-yied (The Psalm-Jew; published in English as Salvation), the psychological portrait of a saint named Yehiel whose “strength lay in his faith, a deep, inward, blind faith in God's goodness,” who believed “that there was no evil either in God or in His creation,” but whose recourse to the entire book of Psalms, the book that first taught Jews—and Christians—how to talk to God, also makes Yehiel a conduit for divine wrath.

1934. I.J. Singer begins the serial publication of Di brider Ashkenazi (The Brothers Ashkenazi), which documents the rise and fall of Jewish Lodz, the Manchester of Poland. His verdict: Jewish life is built on sand.

1935. Repudiating a humanistic world order in which individual action counts for something and where the betterment of life on earth is a laudable goal, younger brother Isaac Bashevis Singer publishes his first novel, Satan in Goray, in book form. Through a Polish shtetl torn apart by the messianic heresy of Sabbetai Zvi, Bashevis enlivens the terrors of history, which mirror the moral and political crisis of his day. The novel ends with a dybbuk blaspheming against the entire religious and social order.

1936. Folk bard Mordecai Gebirtig breaks with the melancholy tenor of his songs to write “Es brent!” a desperate call for Jewish self-defense after the pogrom in the Polish town of Przytyk.

1937. Novelist Mikhoel Burshtin writes Bay di taykhn fun Mazovye (By the Rivers of Mazovia), where he gathers his fellow Polish Jews to weep and calls upon them to rebuild the ravaged shtetl.

April, 1938. American poet Jacob Glatstein writes:⁸

Good night, wide world.
Big stinking world.
Not you, but I, slam shut the gate.
In my long gaberdine,
With my flaming yellow patch,
With my proud gait,
At my own command—
I go back into the ghetto.

(“A gute nakht, velt”; trans. Benjamin & Barbara Harshav)

Glatstein heralds the journey home of a whole generation of Yiddish cosmopolitans, and a journey into the abyss for those millions of his European brethren who are given no choice.

1939. “At the edge of the abyss,” writes Itzik Manger in the preface to his fanciful biography of Shmuel-Aba Abervo, subtitled Dos bukh fun gan-eydn (The Book of Paradise), “even laughter becomes desperate.” Only a few copies of the book make it out of Poland.

November 15, 1940. At the command of the Germans, the Jews of Warsaw are locked into a ghetto wherein Emanuel Ringelblum relocates his staff of chroniclers and statisticians. The Oyneg Shabbes archive will comprise over 7,000 documents by the time it is buried underground; an assemblage of laments, confessions, and indictments, some of high literary quality, most of them as yet unpublished.

1942. Lodz ghetto. After the latest deportation of 34,000 Jews and a few months before his wife, six-year-old daughter Blimele and newborn son are to be taken away, poet Simkhe-Bunem Shayevitsh writes “Friling taf-shin-beys” (“Spring, 1942”), where he invites Hayyim Nahman Bialik to revisit the City of Slaughter.

February 14, 1943. Vilna ghetto. Poet Abraham Sutzkever imagines the day of liberation as a Day of Wrath, and he asks:⁹

How and with what will you fill
Your cup on the day you're free?
Will you in your joy still
Hear the scream of the past
Where the skulls of chained days
Clot in bottomless pits?

And he answers:

In a rubble-encrusted old city
Your memory will be like a hole,
And your glance will burrow furtively
Like a mole, like a mole.

(“Vi azoy?”; trans. C.K. Williams)

October 3, 1943. Vittel, France. Poet Yitshak Katzenelson begins writing his jeremiad, “The Song of the Murdered Jewish People.” In it he chronicles the destruction of Jewish Warsaw, settles his score with the Jewish Police and the Jewish Labor Bund, conjures up a Jewry that is no more, and calls upon the heavens to destroy the Germans, a nation of murderers.

1943. New York, NY. Breaking ranks with those of his fellow American-Yiddish writers still wed to the present, I.B. Singer writes in a manifesto:¹⁰

We believe that the Jewish attachment to the past can accommodate an extremely progressive outlook, for the history of the Jewish people is the history of an ongoing revolution against the powers of darkness.

To make good on his credo, Singer adopts the voice, the diction, and the malediction of the Devil.

I rest my case.

.....

Anger, I have argued with increasing vehemence, is both the subject and substance of a culture reputed to be nothing if not heymish (homey) and humorous. I have spoken with so much authority because my case is built on the achievements of Yiddish literary scholarship since the Second World War. Yiddish academic scholars were able to see what they saw, first of all, because they disavowed the living community of Yiddish critics, pedagogues, and ideologues. As someone still educated within the Yiddish secular school system, and as someone who went on to found a Yiddish youth movement, I can personally testify that the price of admission to academe was that I repudiate the platforms of the right, left, and center that had heretofore determined the meaning of Yiddish and the members of its pantheon. My Folkshule teachers, for all their erudition, would not have recognized the Peretz I have just described. To raise Halpern above Avrom Lyessin or H. Leivick in the American-Yiddish pantheon would have seemed to them heretical. To mine the wellsprings of anger in Sholem Aleichem, of all people, would have struck them as absurd. And we all know what the Yiddish establishment thought about I.B. Singer, so ably rendered by Cynthia Ozick in her mini roman à clef, “Envy, or Yiddish in America.”¹¹

Yiddish scholarship, produced mainly in Hebrew and in English, has been guided by an unwritten mandate to decenter, defamiliarize, and recontextualize its subject. In this respect, it is no different from sister disciplines in the humanities, or, for that matter, from Jewish Studies throughout the Western hemisphere. Because there is no state apparatus or national consensus to which Yiddish scholars are anywhere answerable, they are able to pursue an almost independent course. And the course they have taken is summed up by the (slightly emended) title of a famous essay by T.S. Eliot, “Anger and the Individual Talent.” Anger, in their scheme, is what separates the major from the minor writers, the singular talents from the epigones. Here is how it works:

The Polish-born scholar Khone Shmeruk has consistently championed those writers who defied the ideologies of the Yiddish street and whose greatest works were therefore declarations of independence. Thanks to Shmeruk, we now have a veritable Library of Yiddish Iconoclastic Writing: Peretz's At Night in the Old Marketplace, Uri Zvi Greenberg's complete Yiddish verse, Israel Rabon's novel Di gas (The Street), the Khumesh-lider (Bible Poems) of Itzik Manger, the monologues of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Were it not for Shmeruk, we would know next to nothing about that most hidden of Yiddish writers, the Hidden One himself, Der Nister.¹²

Coming from the Israeli academic scene, Dan Miron began his Yiddish career by demystifying the figure of Mendele the Book Peddler, the so-called Grandfather of Yiddish Literature, revealing the extent of Abramovitsh's alienation from the world of the Little Jew. Once Miron gets through with him, no one would want to claim Mendele as a zeydee (grandfather)! Whether studying the image of the shtetl in Yiddish fiction, the nineteenth-century Yiddish novel, the rise-and-fall pattern in Sholem Aleichem's major works, or Sutzkever's Lider fun togbukh (Poems from a Diary), Miron takes a hardnosed secular approach. Miron has also had the chutzpah to question the scholarly construct of Sifrut Yisrael, the image of an internally coherent Jewish literature in many languages. Where his teacher Dov Sadan saw continuities, the endless recycling of words, phrases, images, and motifs from one form of Jewish self-expression to another and from one language to another, Miron sees only multiple ruptures with the past.¹³

For Benjamin Harshav (formerly Hrushovski), the viable traditions in Yiddish poetry are those associated with modernism. Defining radical openness as the pintele yid, the essence of the Yiddish language itself, Harshav resurrects the speech rhythms and cosmopolitan world view of the Introspectivists, the American Yiddish modernists, and their cohort.

The theme of betrayal runs like a bold thread through the critical writings of Ruth Wisse. Wisse pulls at the thread from both ends, exposing the despair of Yiddish writers like Abramovitsh, Peretz, Halpern, Glatstein, and Sutzkever, at the betrayal of the Jews by their Christian lovers-in-arms, and the furious rage of these same writers at Jewish self-betrayal. Where, for example, readers celebrated only the playful wit of Peretz's inaugural poem, “Monish,” Wisse sums it up as “a painful parable about the makings of the modern Jew out of compounded acts of betrayal—his betrayal at the hands of Maria after he himself had betrayed the Jewish commandments in an attempt to win her heart.”¹⁴ No one, according to Wisse, waged that two-sided battle more courageously—and recklessly—than Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, and no one was himself betrayed more thoroughly than Peretz, by those who claimed to speak in his name.

The next generation of Yiddish scholars has followed suite. The price of betrayal is suicide for passive Jewish men and passionate Jewish women, whom Janet Hadda psychoanalyzes in her book on the subject. My own work and that of Abraham Novershtern on apocalyptic themes and responses to catastrophe look at the subject of betrayal from God's perspective. Ken Frieden traces the uses of irony and satire in his overview of Classic Yiddish Fiction. Irony and satire are of course literary vehicles for what other people call: anger.¹⁵

But there is more. Because the scholars are rapidly becoming the purveyors of Yiddish culture, as well as its main interpreters, now that the lay community of Yiddish publishers, critics, pedagogues, and ideologues has almost ceased to be active and a small group of academics has entered the breach in faraway Oxford, England, the new consensus on Yiddish literature is being shaped by the politics of scholarly editing and the politics of translation.

The rule of thumb among textual editors is to go with the latest available version of a text. This presupposes a culture in which authors are at leisure to revise their work, and where ever more complete editions of their oeuvre appear in their lifetime. Not so in Yiddish. There is no such thing as a truly complete Complete Works of any major Yiddish writer: not Abramovitsh, not Peretz, not Sholem Aleichem, not Bergelson, not Der Nister, not Markish, not Halpern, not Glatstein, and not (for all his promises) I.B. Singer. Despite important work done in the U.S.S.R. on two of the Founding Fathers, Abramovitsh and Sholem Aleichem, which was picked up again decades later in the State of Israel, no such project was ever brought anywhere near to completion. To overcome the ideological fault lines that run through the twentieth century, moreover, Yiddish textual editors have had to adopt the unorthodox principle: the earlier, the better. Thus, in order to restore what is Jewish to the major Soviet-Yiddish writers who were forced to expunge all expressions of petit bourgeois nationalism during the 1930s, before they themselves were expunged on August 12, 1952, editor Khone Shmeruk invariably chose those versions of their poetry and prose published before 1929. The textual apparatus at the end of his landmark anthology, A shpigl oyf a shteyn,¹⁶ bears eloquent testimony to the price exacted by Soviet re-education. Conversely, in order to restore what is radical and experimental to the American-Yiddish modernists after most of them recanted and became kosher members of the literary establishment, editor Benjamin Harshav consistently favored those editions of their verse published before 1940.

At the heart of Yiddish culture lies the most disastrous of all cultural ruptures, the destruction of European Jewry. Whether consciously or not, those who translate Yiddish literature in the wake of the Holocaust are guided by the aesthetic principle: the angrier, the better. How else to explain two brand new translations (one in English, one in Hebrew) of Sholem Aleichem's Ayznban-geshikhtes (Railroad Stories); an I.L. Peretz Reader that gives greater weight to the critical realist than to the writer of literary fairy tales and hasidic monologues; two English-language anthologies of shtetl novellas that do more to bury the shtetl than to praise it; the translation into English, Hebrew, and French of Israel Rabon's horrific novel, The Street, immediately upon its rescue from obscurity; and the various translations of Glatstein's selected poetry (particularly his Holocaust poetry) into English by Ruth Whitman, Etta Blum, Cynthia Ozick, Richard Fein, Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, and Barnett Zumoff. The newest ism to hit the field of Yiddish—feminism—has already produced anthologies of everything from Yiddish tkhines, women's petitionary prayers, to Yiddish lesbian verse. But at least in one case, that of poet-translator Irena Klepfisz, mame-loshn (the mother tongue) stands for all those mothers and daughters ground to dust, even in a utopian world devoid of patrimony.

To fully appreciate the power of this scholarly revision, we would do well to recall the portrait of Yiddish culture that it most immediately replaced: the one painted by the late Irving Howe. Expressing his own poignant sense of loss, and recognizing the ever-growing chasm between the world of Yiddish and the worlds of secular politics, Howe had this to say: “The virtue of powerlessness, the power of helplessness, the company of the dispossessed, the sanctity of the insulted and the injured—these, finally, are the great themes of Yiddish literature.”¹⁷ I dare say there are many in this audience who would still prefer Howe's elegiac and frankly engagé approach to the one I have been describing, and I will have more to say about this at the end of my presentation. But even on its own terms, Howe's descriptive model does nothing to address the dark side of its own theme: the rage that one feels on being powerless, dispossessed, insulted, and injured. There is no Yiddish equivalent, after all, to “turning the other cheek.”

“Anger and the Individual Talent” represents a real breakthrough in our critical as well as cultural self-understanding. It suggests, first of all, a way of separating the major writers from the minor writers. As much as we admire the quiet lyricism of I. J. Segal, or the wry understatement of Yoysef Rolnik, or the Proustian expeditions of Yosl Birstein through the streets and back alleys of Jerusalem, Segal, Rolnik, and Birstein must remain minor writers precisely because the element of Jewish anger is missing from their work. Secondly, it forces us to take a second look at the presence or absence of anger within a given writer's work. For example, so long as we fail to tap into the hidden rage that underlies the classical meters and extravagant rhymes of Abraham Sutzkever, we cannot begin to define how his neoclassicism diverges from everything that came before it. Conversely, the moments of serenity and romantic love that appear in Halpern's verse are that much more precious against the backdrop of his perennial anger. Only recently, moreover, have we been made aware of the self-censorship of Jewish rage in the writings of Holocaust survivors, especially, as Naomi Seidman has demonstrated, when Yiddish is abandoned for other languages.¹⁸

Anger, then, defines the Yiddish literary canon.

But the dialectical movement of rebellion and return is what defines modern Yiddish culture as a whole. For out of the anger came a negotiated return to the discarded past, a passionate desire to rebuild the culture out of its shards.

Peretz conjured up an apotheosis of mesires-nefesh, “Devotion Without End,” a love that conquers all.

Sholem Aleichem turned the tally sheet of personal failures into a luminous tale about the infinite resilience of one Sholem Aleichem, the artist, in Funem yarid (From the Fair), which he touted as his Song of Songs.

Out of Glatstein's modernism came Yidishtaytshn, Yiddish-in-all-its-meanings, the discovery that language is fate, is the poet's sole window to the world; came “The Bratslaver to His Scribe,” the quest for wholeness through the persona of a zaddik turned pantheist-poet.

After giving the Devil free rein to blaspheme and to seduce the innocent and the not-so-innocent, I.B. Singer wrote his tales of breathtaking humanity: “Gimpel the Fool,” “The Spinoza of Market Street,” “The Little Shoemakers.”

Out of the Holocaust came Sutzkever's Geheymshtot (Secret City), the great epic of survival in classical metre, came Gaystike erd, the Odyssey of a saving remnant of Jews returning to their “Spiritual Soil.”

Following the expulsion of Jews from Poland in 1968 and the exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Yiddish writers who for decades had been writing for their desk drawers came to Israel and there gave voice to thanksgiving.

Yiddish is not merely a literature of exile. It is most decidedly and unambiguously a literature of homecoming as well.

The scholars, too, if you prick them, they bleed. Here is not the place to reveal that Shmeruk, Miron, Harshav, Wisse, Roskies, and others are rebels and dreamers manqués, that they too bring to the study of their subject a personal drama of rebellion, loss, and negotiated return. But here is the place to honor, in conclusion, the greatest Yiddish scholar of all times, the late Max Weinreich. Published posthumously in 1973, his History of the Yiddish Language constructs a mighty edifice of Jewish interlinguistics, a new field of research, in order to place the Yiddish language at its very pinnacle.¹⁹ Writing in a superidomatic scholarly style, designed to speak volumes about the suppleness of modern Yiddish, Weinreich also provides his readers with a myth of origins. In a place called Loter, somewhere in the early Middle Ages, was born “the language of Derekh haSHaS,” the perfect fusion of a Talmudically-rooted and integrated Yiddishkeit with all that was best in the surrounding cultures. Yet this work of consummate scholarship and abiding love was the product of a man himself consumed with rage. Max Weinreich, we were told by his surviving son at a recent memorial conference, was consumed with rage at the Germans for incinerating millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews, the soil upon which the sapling of Yiddish scholarship had barely begun to grow; rage at Hitler's professors for poisoning the wells of Wissenschaft, the ideal of enlightened learning that was to have nourished a world entire.

The terrible divide that separates the Jewish past from the hyphenated Jewish present makes it all the more inevitable that Yiddish culture will be viewed through the prism of our contemporary, postwar sensibilities. This tension between “past significance” and “present meaning” exists in every living culture. You can be sure that when the revisionism stops, not only is the patient dead; she has been erased from living memory as well. I do not, therefore, deny the right of those who use Yiddish to bash Zionism, to promote radical feminism and alternative lifestyles, or to denounce the legacy of the Jewish Left. Bash gezunterheyt. Nor do I claim immunity from the same ideological pressures that affect everyone else. My own presentation opened with a thinly-veiled polemic against the chorus of cheerleaders who would have us believe that some miraculous Yiddish renaissance is now underway. Where I draw the line, however, is over the historically verifiable legacy of Yiddish literary culture. Because so many fine scholars have established a fruitful and ongoing dialogue with that culture, in the disinterested, khesed-shel-emes way that scholars have of talking, they have succeeded in capturing its internal rhythm, logic, direction. That is no small miracle, if you ask me. No smaller miracle than that so many Yiddish rebels came back from the cold and turned their psalm of rage into a psalm of thanksgiving. Or, as Glatstein prophesied and said: “The joy of homecoming weeps within me; S'veynt in mir di freyd fun kumen.”²⁰

Notes

1. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Il mondo yiddish: saggi, ed. Elèna Mortara Di Veroli and Laura Quercioli Mincer, a special double issue of La Rassegna Mensile di Israel LXII, no. 1-2 (1996): 467-82.

2. Sholem-Yankev Abramovitsh, Di kllyatshe oder tsar baley khayim, in Ale verk fun Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Warsaw: Farlag Mendele, 1928), vol. 5; trans. as “The Mare” in Yenne Velt: The Great Works of Jewish Fantasy and Occult, ed. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Wallaby, 1978), 545-663.

3. “Impressions of a Journey Through the Tomaszow Region,” in The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. Ruth R. Wisse (New York: Schocken Books, 1990), 19-84.

4. I. L. Peretz, “A Night in the Old Marketplace,” trans. Hillel Halkin, special issue of Prooftexts 12 (1992): 1-70.

5. Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories, trans. with an intro. by Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken Books, 1987).

6. Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, “I Shall Never Go On Bragging,” in American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 416-419.

7. Anna Margolin, “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling,” in Lider, ed. Abraham Novershtern (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991), 3. The translation is as yet unpublished.

8. Jacob Glatstein, “Good Night, World,” American Yiddish Poetry, 304-7.

9. Abraham Sutzkever, “How?” in The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe, ed. David G. Roskies (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 495-96.

10. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Problems of Yiddish Prose in America (1943),” trans. Robert H. Wolf, Prooftexts 9 (1989): 12.

11. In Cynthia Ozick, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), 41-100.

12. On Manger, Singer, and Der Nister, see David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), chaps. 6-8, and the relevant notes.

13. See Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken Books, 1973); idem, Der imazh fun shtetl: dray literarishe shtudyes (The Image of the Shtetl: Three Literary Studies), (Tel Aviv: Y. L. Perets, 1981); idem, Im lo tihye yerushalayim (If There Is No Jerusalem … : Essays on Hebrew Writing in a Cultural-Political Context), (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987), 93-171. The University of Syracuse Press is soon to publish a collection of Miron's essays on Yiddish and Hebrew fiction.

14. Ruth R. Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1991), 16.

15. Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).

16. A shpigl oyf a shteyn: antologye (A Mirror on a Stone: Anthology. Poetry and Prose of Twelve Murdered Yiddish Writers in the Soviet Union), ed. Benjamin Hrushovski, Abraham Sutzkever and Khone Shmeruk (Tel Aviv: Di goldene keyt and Y. L. Perets, 1964).

17. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Viking, 1989), p. 38. Emphasis in the original. See Edward Alexander, “Irving Howe and Secular Jewishness: An Elegy,” Judaism 45:177 (Winter 1996): 101-18.

18. Naomi Seidman, “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage,” Jewish Social Studies, n. s. 3 (1996): 1-19.

19. Max Weinreich, Geshikhte fun der yidisher shprakh: bagrifn, faktn, metodn (History of the Yiddish Language: Concepts, Facts, Methods), 4 vols. (New York: YIVO, 1973). The first two volumes were translated by Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman and were published by the University of Chicago Press in 1980.

20. Glatstein, “Good Night, World,” last line; my translation.