SOURCE: Landis, Joseph C. “Yiddish Dreams in America.” In Handbook of American-Jewish Literature: An Analytical Guide to Topics, Themes, and Sources, edited by Lewis Fried, pp. 143-65. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Landis chronicles the growth of Yiddish literature in America, focusing particularly on the image of the New World as represented in the writing and poetry.]

Collective dreams, unlike private ones, are a public affair and simpler to explore since their content tends to be more overt than latent. The wishes they reflect seem more obvious to the eye. It is not difficult to observe, however, that when wishes are held with such tenacity as to border on illusion, the corrections administered by reality are often bitter. Such certainly was the case with the European dream of America, which was from the outset imbued with illusion. Columbus's confusion of desire with reality became a pattern for many who followed him in thinking about America. But it took four centuries for that contrast between expectation and event to find its marvelously ironic embodiment in the Yiddish-speaking immigrant's wry exclamation, “Kolombuses medine!” (Columbus's country), a phrase that embraces simultaneously a whole range of feelings between admiration and despair. During the years that intervened between Columbus and the Jewish rediscovery of his medine, there were, of course, other visions of America and its people.¹ The New World had, on the one hand, been regarded as a wilderness where brutish savages roamed a Hobbesian wild—or at best, a land where pathetic creatures dwelt, untouched by the benefits of civilization or Christianity or both. At the other end of the spectrum was the romantic view of the “noble savage” (a phrase John Dryden originally intended for the primitive Europeans), or, in William Wordsworth's formulation, “that pure archetype of human greatness.” Needless to say, the awareness of America invaded the consciousness of the Yiddish world too late for it to enter into that classic-romantic dispute. Before the nineteenth century, there was hardly a Jew in Eastern Europe who knew “that there was any such place as America.”² By the time America became known to Eastern-European Jews through Khaykel Hurvits's immensely popular Yiddish adaptation (Berditchev, 1817) of J. H. Campe's Die Entdeckung von Amerika (The Discovery of America), the New World had outgrown earlier fictions and been clothed in newer visions. It had become the land of personal liberty and limitless freedom of opportunity. In the dreams of the oppressed of Europe, in the very folklore of Europe, it had become the golden land; to Eastern-European Jews, too, America had become di goldene medine: in Isaac Meyer Dick's (1814-1893) phrase, “a Utopia or better still a land of fable.”³

Yiddish dreams of the new utopia grew in Eastern Europe in proportion as waking life became a nightmare. The political dislocations following the three partitions of Poland in the 1790's; the succeeding social and personal penalties imposed on Russian Jews as the Czarist empire attempted to consolidate itself into a modern state; the economic consequences of Russia's emergence from a quasi-feudal economy—all acted like the movement of great geologic plates on the Eastern-European Jewish world: shtetl walls began to crumble and its inhabitants sought escape. By a happy coincidence, there was di goldene medine (golden land).

Sholom Aleichem (Shalom Rabinowitz, 1859-1916), with his genius for sensing and expressing what lay nearest the heart of the ordinary Jew, gave simple expression to this Jewish dream in 1892 in one of his few poems, “Shlof, mayn kind” (Sleep, My Child), which was soon set to music and quickly became so popular that it was mistakenly included as a folk song in the first major collection of Yiddish folk songs, which appeared in 1901.⁴

Sleep, my child, my consolation,
Sleep and hushabye
In America, your father
Oh, my dearest son,
You are still a little boy
Sleep and hushabye
America is, for everyone,
A land of luck, they say,
And for Jews—a Paradise,
Something beyond price.
There they eat, as daily fare,
Khale, oh my son.
There I'll cook you chicken soup,
Sleep and hushabye.

At last we meet the American dream we all know, the Jewish version of the official myth of America, available to one and all, a land of chaleh and chicken soup even on weekdays, a paradise for Jews, and entirely free of cost except fare. Well, not entirely free. A bill would be sent later.

The story of the flight to the goldene medine is by this time, over a century after its beginning, a familiar one. The first large wave of immigration began, following the oppressive anti-Jewish laws of May 1881 and, as would be expected, included mainly those who had nothing to lose—the poorest, the unskilled, the minimally educated—as well as those who had everything to lose—the young revolutionaries and idealists who had thrown themselves into Russian libertarian movements and were either wanted or about to be wanted by the Czarist police.

The first wave of immigrants that arrived in the New World met the full fury of American industrialization and its bitter extremes. It was the age of the robber barons, and of what Lincoln Steffens called the shame of the cities, the age of the rich and the age of exploitation of the poor. In response to these shocks, a Yiddish literature arose in the New World whose spokesmen were immigrant young men who shared the lives and sufferings of their fellow newcomers to a land with few Jews like themselves, where illusions were traded for bitter realities.

The roots of the new literature, despite its immigrant origin, were to a remarkable degree American. The sources, the character, often the very voice of the Eastern-European Yiddish literature, on the other hand, had been and continued to be derived from the parables, tales, and traditions of the Bible, the Talmud and commentaries, from the parables of Hasidic tsadikim (righteous men), most notably Reb Nachman of Bratslav and the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name, founder of Hasidism, 1700-1760) himself, from the unbroken flow of a religious tradition absorbed from infancy in home and kheyder (religious school), a flood from the past which even the powerful impact of Haskalah (Enlightenment) writers and intellectuals on modern Yiddish literature could not diminish. It is symbolic that Mendele Mokher Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, 1835-1917), dubbed the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature by the great Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem, should have spent nearly forty years of his life as director of a Talmud Torah in Odessa. Modern Yiddish literature, “officially” born in 1864 with the serial publication of Mendele's Dos kleyne mentshele (The Common Man), arose in the context of this millennial tradition, which had produced a stable way of life, one that provided a refuge and a solace, bounded from year's end to year's end, from birth to death by prescribed patterns of behavior and obligation, of joy and sorrow.⁵

Modern Yiddish literature was initially almost wholly a small-town literature. It grew out of the shtetl, and its major subject was the shtetl. It admired the shtetl; it satirized the shtetl; and it revolted against the shtetl, as it sought the broader horizons of the modern world. Fathered by the Haskalah that had spread eastward from central Europe, proclaiming the separation of faith and culture, the Eastern-European Jewish Enlightenment sought the total uplifting and modernization of Jewish life, economic, social, political, cultural.

By contrast, the roots, the circumstances, and the shapers of the Yiddish literature that arose in America about a score of years after the “birth” in Eastern Europe were wildly different. The immigrants of the eighties and nineties were mainly not intellectuals speaking to or revolting from the shtetl world. They were, by and large, not steeped in traditional learning, and, having emigrated, in great proportion, as youngsters in their teens, they had not sunk tap roots into the archetypal way of life. Their American milieu was not a shtetl but the metropolis. They were oppressed, not by the intellectual stultification of quasi-medieval small-town life, but by the economic exploitation of a modern, burgeoning free-enterprise industrial, urban world. They were neither petty traders nor shtetl craftsmen; they were largely factory workers, proletarians.

It was in this urban setting, whose horizon was bounded by tenements, that Yiddish literature in America arose. Morris Winchevsky (Vinchevski [1856-1932]), sometimes called the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature in America, Joseph Bovshover (1873-1915), David Edelstadt (Edelshtadt [1866-1892]), Morris Rosenfeld (1862-1923), and dozens of less talented poets, mostly shop workers themselves, created a working-class literature that voiced the pathos and the indignation of their fellow “slaves of the machine.”⁶

Many of these proletarian writers had little contact with the substantial Yiddish literature that was developing in Russia, especially during the eighties and nineties. While the young writers in Russia were paying homage to Grandfather Mendele Mokher Sforim, and appearing in the periodicals published by Sholom Aleichem, Y. L. Peretz (1852-1915), and others, and gravitating to Warsaw to consult with Peretz, who had increasingly become the ideological center of the new renaissance in Yiddish, Joseph Bovshover in America was writing poetry under the influence of Shelley, Emerson, Whitman, and Markham, about whom he also wrote essays. And Morris Winchevsky, who had sojourned in London before coming to New York, brought with him his admiration for Thomas Hood and William Morris. As Leon Kobrin (1872-1946), himself a contemporary writer noted: “Our Yiddish-American literature has its own history. It is not a continuation of the older Yiddish literature in Russia. (In fact, we who created American Yiddish literature had no knowledge at all of Yiddish literature in Russia at that time.)”⁷

Out of the American asphalt rose the cries of the poets. Filling their imagery with the clichés of radical verse in English, Winchevsky, Bovshover, and Edelstadt, revolutionary in their outlook, summoned the masses to arise, to revolt, to raise the red flag of freedom, to throw off their chains, to usher in the new dawn.

A prophet of revolution, Bovshover proclaimed that he would come

like fiery lava,
like a storm from the north,
because freedom cannot forever be fettered by chains.(8)

In another personification, he thundered that he would loom like a lighthouse “till his sleeping brothers rise.”⁹

And Edelstadt rallied the masses:

“Awake!”

How long will you suffer as slaves? How long will you toil to enrich those who rob you of bread? How long will you bear the yoke of oppression?

Let the bells of freedom ring out and summon the oppressed to struggle.

And all will bloom

And love and feel

In that free and golden May.

Brothers, enough

Before tyrants to kneel,

Swear that you must be free!¹⁰

If the poetry of these two decades was public, declamatory, hortatory—sometimes bombastic and sentimental—it was so because the poets were mainly workers whose private woes coincided with the suffering of the multitudes and whose poetry was the public voice rather than the private lyric. So overwhelming was the initial shock that private feelings were molten into those of the mass, and the qualities of the response were derived from its very immediacy. The prose writers, many of them self-educated, produced fiction that was crude and primitive, but popular. Their work was direct and immediate, as hortatory as a demonstration placard. Like their audience, many of the writers were ordinary workers, uneducated even in Jewish matters. When they strove for elegance, they turned, not in the manner of their European confreres to Bible and Talmud for references, metaphors, and telling phrases, but to Germanized forms which have come to be known as “daychmerish.” But for the most part their writing was simple and direct, their construction unsophisticated, their themes obvious, and their strength in the realistic depiction of the everyday world and in their romantic exhortations to change it.

More shocking, however, than the economic exploitation and the physical degradation was the even greater affront to the self, the sense of dehumanization that assaulted the immigrant in every aspect of his being. He was no stranger to poverty and suffering; he was familiar with all degrees of hostility to Jews; but he was thoroughly unprepared for a total indifference to his very humanity. That spiritual assault struck at his sense of personal worth and dignity; it thrust upon him values that made a mockery of those in which he had been reared, and it created a generation chasm between “greenhorn” parents and native children. Fresh from a shtetl culture that was stable, integral, supportive, whole, and committed to mutual responsibility, the immigrant found himself plunged into an urban, highly mobile, competitive, indifferent, fragmented world in which he was merely as easily dispensable hand.

He had come here with unspoken suppositions of astonishing credulity. Implicit in the shtetl dream of the goldene medine that the immigrant brought with him was the assumption, unformulated, unverbalized, yet very real, nonetheless, that American freedom would somehow be joined to a Jewish community life; that he would be coming to a world which, however different, would still be familiarly Jewish. The assumption, though incredibly naive, was just as incredibly real. The discovery that it was an illusion produced a shock of maximum intensity. Even when conditions improved as the decades rolled along, new waves of immigrants, fresh from the Jewish world of Eastern Europe, still felt the same affront inflicted by the indignities of a world whose life-style and values were so hostile to the world they had left. If the red banners and exhortations to revolt appear less frequently in the literature of the new century, the anger at Columbus's medine continues, nevertheless, in middle-brow as well as in popular culture, in such widely repeated lyrics as Shloyme Shmulevitch's (1868-1943) outraged “Ellis Island” which denounced that brutal tyrant of rejection, the “Isle of Tears,”¹¹ and Yankev Leyzerovitch's (1893-1967) lacrimonious “Dem pedlers brivele” (The Pedlar's Letter, an example of a whole epistolary genre that arose)¹² and his sardonic “Di grine kuzine” (The Green Cousin, perhaps the most famous of Yiddish popular songs) with its bitter last line, “The hell with Columbus's country.”¹³

Alongside the revolutionary and denunciatory currents, but reflecting the same reality, flowed a third stream—longing for home. Mikhl Kaplan's (1882-1944) monologue “Tsurik aheym” (Going Home), in which Moyshe Yosel explains his decision to return to his native Vlednik, is a highly popular example of the type. As though picking up the green cousin's outcry, Moyshe Yosel erupts:

May he burn in hell, that Columbus!
It's a land for a fiend to find!
A hell, on my word of honor,
A flaming, blazing fire!
I'm going home to Vlednik.
I'll saunter into the square
Earn a couple of pennies
and not have to work hard at all.
And live in contentment and honor
And be respected by folks.

Ah, Vlednik—where, as Robert Burns had put it in his day, “a man's a man for a' that”!

If the Yiddish dream of the goldene medine was in so many ways similar to the dreams of other immigrant groups, it was, however, in essential ways utterly unique. One aspect of this difference is apparent in the decision to return “home”—which, incidentally, many an immigrant acted upon and many more cherished to their dying days. For an Italian or a German or a Russian to return home was to return to his own land and his own people and to a friendly world no matter how hard the conditions there. The Jewish immigrant, however, had left a country that was not his own, surrounded by a sea of dangerously hostile people not his own, and subject to squires and governments not his own. That he even entertained the thought of returning is an index of the intensity of the spiritual affront he endured.

Alongside the realistic fiction and didactic poetry, an entertainment literature, much of it imitative of popular literature in English, began to appear, at first hawked in the streets in penny installments, then as a regular newspaper feature. Wildly escapist, it was, in Jacob Gordin's phrase, “a Noah's Ark of nonsense and junk.”¹⁴ The list which Alexander Harkavy compiled of sixty-five Yiddish novels published in America before 1898, included such titles as Indian Prince, California Gold Miners, Heroes of the Night, The Black Hand, Between Love and Millions, A Daughter's Revenge, White Slavery, along with translations of Jules Verne.¹⁵ If the penny dreadfuls represent an escape from a difficult reality, they also suggest a measure of acceptance, of coming to terms with a new life and finding a place in it. And they also indicate that, however hard life was, the immigrant's economic level was higher than it had been “at home”: here he was able to buy the installments as they appeared. And if such purveyors of these dime novels as Getsel Zelikowitch (1863-1926), Moyshe Seifert (1859-1922), David Moyshe Hermalin (1865-1921), and Johann Paley (1871-1907)—the most widely read—sinned against literature, they also served it well, for they prepared an audience for works of quality.¹⁶ Once he became aware that the American reality was substantially different from the Yiddish dream of the goldene medine, the immigrant “greenie” Jew, now a little “oysgegrint” (ungreened), began to restructure and adapt some of that reality to his dream and his dream to the reality.

Unique among immigrants in his situation, the immigrant Jew was also unique—indeed, therefore unique—in his response to it, he began to shape a Jewish environment. Amazingly, within a mere decade—by the 1890's—the contours of an American-Jewish world began to emerge. The dream of the goldene medine, a shattered illusion to the newcomer, began to acquire a large measure of reality as his condition improved. As the century drew to a close and the immigrants found a place for themselves in the new land, Jewish life began to acquire stability and to re-create a surrogate shtetl world in the Jewish enclaves of the great cities. The immigrant who arrived at the turn of the century came to a Jewish world which had already developed a substantial measure of stability, a structure of institutions, a sense of community life, with its lands-manshaftn, its press, its theatre, its literature—in short, a culture and a linguistic base. As early as 1890, an editorial in the Yidisher Herold had proudly proclaimed: “Here in America, especially in New York, we now have the era of Yiddish.”¹⁷ To the immigrant fresh from the tyranny of Russia, New York seemed to be a city in which the thread of the Jewish past was not broken. The new arrival witnessed a vibrant Jewish way of life.

By the turn of the century many of the sweatshop poets of the eighties and nineties, those socially committed spokesmen for the people, had either ceased writing poetry or had died. Even Morris Rosenfeld had already done his best work and seemed to be trying to recapture his earlier passion.

With the new century, other voices—Yehoash (Solomon Bloomgarden [1872-1924]), A. Liessen (Liesin [1872-1938], born Valt), Avrom Reisen (Reyzin [1876-1953])—were beginning to be heard, and Jacob Gordin (1853-1909), having single-handedly created what was widely heralded as the golden age of a Yiddish theatre in America (which was only a scant two decades old), now reigned as the acknowledged reformer of the Yiddish stage. Indeed, the stage had become normalized. Pop-art “shund” (vulgar) for the groundlings shared the stage with serious drama.

When a new wave of Jewish immigrants began to inundate the American shore after the shattering Kishinev pogrom in 1903 and the failure of the Russian Duma in 1905, a busy, thriving Jewish world was already in existence on the old East Side of New York. The new wave of immigrants was also different in kind. It began to bring scores, hundreds, thousands of young men and women, products of a developing modern secular Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe, who were familiar with the substantial Yiddish literature that had developed there during the quarter-century that had elapsed since the first wave crashed onto the American shore and who had heard a different drummer—Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, the “father” of modern Yiddish literature. Many dreamed of careers as Yiddish writers. Some had even been to Tsegliana #1 in Warsaw, where Peretz (later dubbed somewhat grandiloquently the Prince of the Ghetto, by Maurice Samuel) lived and presided over a literary Yiddish salon on Saturday afternoons and where that doyen of modern Yiddish literature had read their work and encouraged them. Avrom Reisen recalled the exaltation of a literary afternoon at Peretz's:

When days are gray, my mind returns
To Peretz-house, to hours I loved,
When young folks used to gather there,
Their people's finest flower.
The door bell rang, the guests arrived,
And soon they sang their joyous songs,
Like Hassidim at their Rebbe's house,
“Beloved Rebbe, live and teach us.”
There it was—a new “Hassidish,”
Wordly free and worldly Yiddish.(18)

(Hassidish was the title of one of Peretz's best-known collections of stories, depicting Hasidic life and morality.)

The new mood of the time was reflected in a new dream of the goldene medine. I. J. Schwartz (1885-1971), who in later years tried to shape some of that American-Jewish experience into a Yiddish verse epic called Kentucky,¹⁹ recalled those ecstatic times half a century after the fact in a conversation with fellow poet and critic Abraham Tabachnik (1901-1970):

I came to America in 1906. It was the time of the great mass immigration. There was an endless stream of young people, among them scores of talented people. … We came here during a time of great hopes. Do you recall that time at the beginning of the century? I have several times tried to depict that great, grandiose time, when an entire people moved to a new land, a new environment, under a free sky. … We were dazzled, we were winged.

[italics mine]²⁰

Not since Wordsworth remembered his youth in revolutionary France has a time been recalled with such exhilaration.

In this new and contoured world of the early twentieth century, there arose a clamor of new voices, a group of young writers who expressed the fresh mood of the American Jewish community. The spirit of the new century was heard in the literary revolt of the Yunge, the varied band of young rebels who had little in common except their rebellion against the public and social poetry and fiction of the nineteenth century. Prominent among them were Mani Leyb (Leib [1883-1953], born Brahinsky), Zishe Landau (1889-1937), Reuben Eisland (Ayzland [1884-1955]), Halper Leivick (Leyvik [1888-1962]), Joseph Opatoshu (1886-1954), David Ignatoff (1885-1954), and Berl Lapin (1889-1952). Though these young men brought with them, as some of their predecessors had done, the influence of European literature, and though, unlike their predecessors, they were well-read in Yiddish literature and schooled in Jewish learning, it was soon America that spoke through them in rich and supple Yiddish, which they liberated from “daychmerisms.” Beyond any doubt, for them America was home; none dreamed of returning to Europe. They had brushed the Eastern-European dust from themselves forever and looked—or wished to look—with unqualified love upon their new home.

Perhaps the most outspoken and extreme of these rebels was Zishe Landau, an arch-individualist who dismissed the nineteenth-century American Yiddish poets as a mere literary branch of the labor movement and who asserted the primary responsibility of the poet to express himself, rejecting the notion that the poet had any responsibility to be a spokesman for the mass. Is it only the times that are heard in Landau's declaration of individuality? Or are there not echoes of Emerson and Whitman and the great American dream of the unfettered self, of Emerson's dismissal of the “foolish hobgoblin of little minds,” in Landau's remark to a contemporary critic who chided him for his inconsistency and self-contradiction: “I am aware of the contradictions. Who cares about your logic? Contradiction is the logic of my soul, my need, my custom. … We who have any kind of individuality, we, the brave lads and bold adventurers, we assert our right to step on every logic and culture, and we treat all standpoints, ideas, opinions, and convictions—foreign or native—like children's toys.”²¹

If Landau's language was extreme, his spirit was, nevertheless, shared by his fellow rebels. Their revolt was not merely the product of a generation gap, a repudiation of predecessors by young Turks; nor was it merely a literary revolt, for theirs was a movement without any real manifesto. The revolt of the Yunge, in contrast to the revolution sought by their proletarian predecessors, was essentially an affirmation of America, of a new life, a new home, a new freedom, a determination to be American.²² Years later, Melech Epstein (1889-1979), journalist, biographer, labor activist, recalled it all much more simply: “To me as to an overwhelming majority of my fellow Jews, America was home.”²³

It is hardly surprising that these young people, having forever given up any hopes for Jewish life in Russia, should come to the new world dazzled by the American dream of the sweet land of liberty and opportunity. What is breath-taking is the new Yiddish dream they brought with them, the dream of creating in America a literature in Yiddish—even more—of living in a culturally creative Jewish community whose literature would be Yiddish! They were not thinking of a halfway house on the road to assimilation, nor were they expecting to be a cultural colony of the old country, nourished by its spiritual exports. They were thinking of an American segment of a unique world people, united by a Yiddish language and by a cultural tradition, a culture and a language that would be joined in a great interchange of Yiddish culture and creativity. This dream was in essence Peretz's view of the direction Jewish life should take in the modern secular world. It was the view that won a major victory at the historic language conference which took place in Czernowitz, Rumania, in 1908. In reality that conference, despite its lively debates, achieved nothing beyond a statement, but that statement was enough to fire imaginations for nearly half a century.

The dispute between Yiddish and Hebrew that occupied so much time at the conference and that rocked Jewish life on the threshold of the twentieth century was in one way or another a continuation of a nearly two-hundred-year-old quarrel between adherents of the two languages. That historic and in many ways destructive conflict was, however, not merely a linguistic quarrel; it was one of the battlefields of two contending views of the nature of Jewish identity, of Jewish continuity. It was at Czernowitz that a small assemblage of mainly young people of magnificent khutzpa, representing only themselves, leaving no organization to realize their adopted resolutions, decided that Yiddish was eminently deserving of being recognized and proclaimed as a—not the, as some participants had urged—language of the Jewish people. This proclamation by a group of young intellectuals, who were resolved formally to elevate Yiddish from jhargonhood to the status of a language, thereafter became a rallying cry of Yiddish culturists and an expression of their spirit.

If 1897 was a watershed year in modern Jewish history, because it witnessed the founding of two polar organizations—the Jewish socialist Bund in Poland and the Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland—whose conflicting ideologies dominated Jewish intellectual life over the four ensuing decades, 1908 is, in a subtler sense, also a year to remember for the two polarized forces that came to expression. It was not only the year of the Czernowitz conference; it was also the year when Israel Zangwill's play, The Melting-Pot, opened to very few cheers except those of President Theodore Roosevelt. But presidential approval gave a name to a concept of American unity. The process, the desideratum of our national life, enshrined on our very coinage, e pluribus unum, now had a popular designation for its cultural counterpart. We were reminded: America was not only the sweet land of liberty; it was also the land where our fathers died—even if they had to do so retroactively.

In the very teeth of this America, the young men and women of the second great wave of Jewish immigration proclaimed their Peretz-inspired dream of creating a modern Yiddish literature, a modern Yiddish culture. Literary and cultural critics and historians in English and in Yiddish record the path and quality of Yiddish literature and culture in America as though the entire enterprise were sane. With our matter-of-fact acceptance of its existence, we fail to perceive its madness, marvelous though that madness is. We never ask the question that should have been obvious—why did they persist in writing in Yiddish rather than in English as other immigrant groups soon did? We accept without the slightest expression of surprise the fact that thousands upon thousands of young intellectuals came to this country to live in a world where they chose to remain foreign: to read a foreign press, to teach in foreign schools, to create a foreign literature, and, above all, to commit their lives to the perpetuation here of this foreign culture, without the slightest suspicion that a dream of cultural autonomy born in the multi-national states of the two great European empires might not thrive in a new WASP-spawned world committed to a single nationality within the borders of the state. Of all the Yiddish dreams, this may well have been the noblest, the grandest, and surely the maddest.

The Yunge, like the overwhelming majority of those who were a part of the great Yiddish modernist movement, were hardly aware of the magnitude—or magnificent folly—of their enterprise. Of course it was possible in America! Even a half century later, Joseph Opatoshu, himself one of that varied crowd of young writers, in trying to explain the appearance of Young America, still regarded it as a purely literary revolt, a rejection of tradition that found a later parallel in American literature. “The answer was of course that these youthful writers considered this revolt the only way to liberate Yiddish literature from traditional sentimentality.”²⁴ It still did not occur to him to wonder aloud about the very viability of the Peretz dream and of a Yiddish literature in America! He still saw only the literary revolt, American Yiddish writers—the Yunge and the later Inzikhistn (Introspectivists) alike—“united in their protest against the mediocrity and irresponsibility existing among their fellow Jews.”²⁵ A decade after Opatoshu's appraisal, Abraham Tabachnik observed: “The Yunge were not so much exponents of a new ideology as of a new psychology. Something took place in Jewish life at that time, something matured socially and culturally, which made the rise of poets like the Yunge inevitable. They felt differently, saw differently, heard differently.”²⁶ Surely, underlying what they felt and saw and heard was the unuttered, unformulated—because so obvious to them—conviction that in the freedom of America the Peretz notion of Yiddish cultural autonomy was beyond question: the modern era in Jewish peoplehood was here. In spirit, they were not foreigners. They were natives, and they asserted their kinship. To H. Royzenblatt (1878-1956) in “Amerike,” America was “our soil,” where the spirit of “Jefferson, Lincoln, John Brown and Paine had wandered.” Whitman and Poe and Emerson had written “On our land and under our sky.”

And you and I? Children of another world—
On the stretches of this lovely land
We built our new abode
We wandered long and came here late, so late,
But—free and broad the shore still stretches,
And tomorrow, tomorrow new cities will be built.
Translucent skies will hang forever over us
And endless, endless is the line of crystal days.(27)

The same spirit of love, of rejoicing in a land where the Yiddish dream is possible, is to be found in Aaron Glantz-Leyeles's (Glantz; Glanz [1889-1966]) paean “To Thee, America”: “I love the dream of the truth that's called America.”

I'm one with the audacious sky-line of Manhattan,
The mighty rivers, canyons, prairies, woods primordial,
I'm one with the roaming autos that seem the earth to flatten,
I'm one with all the things that ring and bravely call: America!
I hail the youthful fervor, the breath of dauntless spaces,
The free and hopeful voices, dialects and speeches manifold,
The blend harmonious of peoples, tribes and races—
From sunny south to northern snows, what strength
          what pride, behold—America!(28)

The eyes of the new generation of dreamers and writers looked beyond the ghettos of the great cities to the broad horizons of the new land. David Ignatoff began to write fiction about the West. So did Isaac Raboy (1882-1944): “… who is not the galut Jew of the great cities. In him runs the blood of the old-time healthy Jews who lived close to nature … who perceived that there is too much of the gray and the workaday in the life of the great cities and went off to the open freedom of broad fields to sing of the beauty of the prairies.”²⁹

A thrill of exhilaration and pride ran through a group of them as they settled into what was then a new section of New York in the process of being built up:

… the most beautiful section of the Bronx—the achievement of energetic and enterprising Jews. In this neighborhood, while it was still quite rural, young Jewish writers conceived their songs, their stories, their novels. And if they felt gratified to cleave to the soil, with its flowers and living creatures, they were even more pleased to associate with the dynamic men who were building homes, streets, cities. This joy in nature and this dynamism enlivened their writings.³⁰

How little the Old World understood of these new developments, of the new home in the New World, can be seen from the tone of the greeting sent by Mendele Mokher Sforim to the New York Yidishes Tageblat for its March 20, 1910, anniversary issue. It reads in part:

How are you Sisters, how are you Brothers, in the new land whither you have wandered far from home? As a leaf is in autumn, in the storm, in the cold, so have you been cast away far from your old home, having left there forever all that is so dear to your hearts. … Woe unto the fallen leaf that is driven and buffeted by the wind. …

Yes, my Dear Ones, you have been storm-tossed and I have remained here. But what sort of remaining has this been? … Broken-hearted, I have yearned, and I have worried endlessly about my poor forsaken sisters and brothers. …

The first generation of American Yiddish writers had been untouched by the influence of Mendele in Odessa or of Sholom Aleichem in Kiev or of Peretz in Warsaw, which were becoming major centers of literary activity. The second generation refused to follow their patterns. “There is a rhythm in the United States that is alien to Europe,”³¹ remarked Opatoshu, and American Yiddish writers were responding to that rhythm in their poetry, in their experimentation, in their new forms and their new subject matter. Whitman's catalogues are puny in comparison to the geographical atlas of America that could be compiled from the works of American Yiddish writers. They turned to America with love and with hope; and they created verse and prose as patriotic as any that has ever been written in this country. The Peretz dream was real.

Meanwhile, literary revolt followed upon literary revolt. The concentration on self of the Yunge was, a decade or so later, denounced by the expressionist Inzikhistn. Urban and intellectual, they emphasized the importance of ideas and rejected the concentration on self and mood. And they proclaimed their derivation from the American Imagists. But for all their literary declarations, “The fathers of the Inzikhistn—Leyeles, Glatstein, Minkoff—would have felt just as much at home among the members of Young America (i.e., the Yunge), and vice versa.”³² They shared a common dream of a culturally creative Yiddish world on American soil, a dream that seemed no dream at all. And for two decades and more, much more, it glowed and summoned almost without rebuke from reality.

In the years after World War I, however, doubts began to surface. A large uneasiness about the prospects for Yiddish and Yiddish culture, about the continuation of the Yiddish renaissance in America, began to darken the mood of Yiddish culturists here. If the first two decades of the century seemed to thrill with the spirit of optimism, the twenties began to give freer expression to underlying, persistent doubts.³³ As the twenties drew to a close, Shmuel Niger (Shmuel Charney, Samuel Niger [1883-1955]), addressing a group of student activists, was urging that their “work among students is the crown and justification of our cultural activity in this country. Your duty is the hardest and the finest activity of all duties; your duty is to build a bridge to the future, and I hope that you will be brave, believing, and energetic builders.”³⁴ Other writers and critics addressing the same group reiterated the hope that its members would be able to attract the estranged young Jewish men and women back to Yiddish and Yiddish culture.³⁵ But in all their words of encouragement there is heard more anxiety than hope.

If the broad river of American Yiddish literature during the first three decades—indeed, during the first three quarters—of the twentieth century reflects the naturalization of Jewish life in America, it also reveals an ambivalence towards the American home, sharp doubts about the prospects for the dream of a Yiddish cultural world. The affirmation of America, the sense of belonging here runs deep and strong after the Yunge asserted themselves. The American landscape is painted with love and wonder. The great cities, the overpowering natural wonders, the exhilarating sense of freedom strike sparks in the Yiddish imagination. But along with the acceptance there is a sense of disquiet, of not being wholly at ease in Zion, a disaffection that goes beyond that alienation which is indigenous to literary creativity. It goes beyond the protests against the oppression of blacks; beyond the outcries on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti; beyond the proletarian sympathies in such plays as Leivick's Shmates (Rags), Shop, or Keytn (Chains); beyond the sharp criticism of American values in Lamed Shapiro's (1878-1948) short stories and the gentle satire in Ossip Dymov's (1878-1959) Bronx Express. It is evident in these works, as it is also evident in the deep concern about intermarriage and assimilation in such novels as David Pinski's (1872-1959) Arnold Levenberg and The Generations of Noah Edon and in Sholem Asch's East River. This sense of uneasiness in popular culture re-creates the old East Side as a shtetl surrogate and finds expression in theatre songs such as one Ludwig Satz made popular, singing “Oh, my! Life is sweet / I'm back again on Attorney Street,” as though it were a reprise of “I'm going home to Vlednik.”

There is palpably a heightened awareness of the price America continually demanded: surrender of ethnic and moral identity—the bill tendered by the land of the free for the freedom it allows. The sanguine expectation of the development of a Jewish folk life in America, of the growth of a Jewish cultural world here did not long survive the act of immigration. Worries grew increasingly grave about the fate of Jews as a cultural entity, about the sense of Jewish commitment—an uneasiness about Jewish destiny that is the underlying concern of the overwhelming majority of Yiddish writers and that constitutes the mainstream of Yiddish writing. This is the broad river upon which literary manifestos and revolts are but paper boats; and it is this concern that finds repeated and troubled expression. It is central to the historical novels of Joseph Opatoshu and to the triple-decker novels of I. J. Singer (1893-1944) and Sholem Asch (1880-1957). Unlike their nineteenth-century European counterparts, these novelists do not hold up for critical examination the way we live now nor do they strive to depict a Jewish society. They are troubled by such questions as how did Jews get here and what lies in store; they are concerned with movement, not stability; history, not social mobility. Once the timeless traditional world of the shtetl is shattered, time and place, modernity and geography are thrust upon the Jewish experience and the Jewish consciousness. And from American soil, past and present began to look different; the future—disturbing.

And therefore the note of shtetl-longing first struck earlier in the century is heard again with renewed strength, and during the 1920's a rose-colored haze again begins to envelop the shtetl world that was left behind. Its traditions, its holiday warmth, its people (recalled as moral and pious despite their poverty), its wholeness, its meaningful existence—all these contrast with the well-known ills of an urban, indifferent, competitive, alienating world. It is this American platform that provides Peretz Hirschbein (1880-1948) with the perspective for his idyllic portraits of Jewish farmers in Green Fields (1916) and accounts for the very great popularity of the play; in this perspective is seen the Old World in so much of the poetry of Joseph Rolnik (1879-1955), Reuben Eisland, and Mani Leib, of the later fiction of Israel Metzker (1901-1984), and of untold volumes of memoirs. It is this perspective that is evident in scores of popular musicals that played in the Yiddish theatres along New York's Second Avenue, the Yiddish Broadway. “Mayn shtetele belz” became the most popular of the shtetl songs of nostalgia; it was, however, only one of dozens that were sung about the long-lost hometowns and peaceful fields and mighty woods of Rumania, Galicia, Poland, or Russia. But the longing for an integral Jewish world, whether Vlednik or Belz, was unsubdued in belles lettres as well as in popular literature, a longing that was, in its own terms, an expression of the growing fear of the failure of the Peretz dream, the great dream of a flourishing Yiddish cultural community.

Those on the political left who shared the Peretz dream and looked for Yiddish redemption as part of a proletarian restructuring of the world perhaps remained sanguine longer than most and blamed the middle-class orientation and the acceptance of bourgeois values by Yiddish writers for the limitations of Yiddish literature and culture. In 1945, Yitskhok Alkhonen Rontch (Rontsh [1899-1985]), a left-of-center literary critic, surveying the development of the Yiddish novel in America, commented that the great Yiddish novel of the American Jewish experience had not yet been written. His remarks grew out of a time when critics still awaited “the great American novel” and out of a conviction then current in Rontch's circles that great American Yiddish fiction should grow out of those democratic traditions and common-man sympathies that Granville Hicks had earlier traced in the American novel (The Great Tradition, 1935). With keen disappointment Rontch observed that “The Yiddish novel in America has yet to be born.”³⁶ The Yiddish novel of American Jewish life had up to that time depicted the negligible number of Jews who had made it and had ignored the huge majority who were workers. The cause of this neglect he ascribed largely to Abraham Cahan (1860-1951), whose The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), despite its rich portraits of ordinary Jews, concentrates on Levinsky the capitalist. This “Ab. Cahanism” Rontch found embodied in the novels of Sholem Asch (Chaim Lederer's Return, 1927), David Pinski (Arnold Levenberg, 1928; The Generations of Noah Edon, 1931), as well as in those of a number of lesser lights whose heroes were all successful entrepreneurs. The heroes of the younger novelists, he noted with puzzlement, are all defeated. They are always running away. They return to Jewish nationalism and tradition. And the novelists themselves are pessimists.

It did not then strike Rontch that perhaps Levinsky is the great American Yiddish novel, despite the irony of its having been written by a Yiddish writer in English; that perhaps the failure of a success whose price is loss of cultural identity is the essential theme of the American-Jewish experience; that perhaps the failure of spirit and the surrender of values are parallel expressions of the failure of the great Yiddish dream of a thriving world of Yiddish culture; and that perhaps this realization underlies the pessimism he deplored among the younger novelists.

If a romantic faith in the viability of the Yiddish dream in America with or without social revolution remained an occasional mood or a current of varying strength, the rising tide of Nazism during the thirties and the later revelations about the Holocaust gave a powerful impetus to the current of pessimism. The anxieties of the twenties were succeeded by the shattering impact of the Hitler decade. If Rontch in 1945 was still looking for a renewed flowering of the great Yiddish dream, Yankev Glatshteyn (Jacob Glatstein [1896-1971]) along with most of his literary colleagues was pouring his wrath and contempt upon the false promises of the West that had fostered a dazzling dream of modern culture, which he and his comrades had lovingly adopted and shaped to their own needs and that was now betraying that dream with a horror whose dimensions were more terrible than anyone yet suspected. As early as 1938 he had hurled back into the teeth of the world its phony modernity, its blithely hawked illusion of civilization and culture. “Good night, wide world,” he crooned, as though opening a lullaby, and then thundered, “Big, stinking world,” as he proclaimed his repudiation of the unclean culture of the West and his return to the dusty humanity of the traditional Jewish world.³⁷

And when the full panorama of hell was at last revealed, the very security of the American refuge became a source of unendurable guilt and anguished impotence. If, along with H. Leivick, they could lament, “Ikh bin in treblinka nit geven” (I was not in Treblinka), American Yiddish writers could nonetheless never escape it. The horror of those years brought to bitter fulfillment the powers of Leivick, Glatshteyn, and others who in their youth had been proud rebels and dreamers; and it also ended the blind love affair with America and American optimism.

Since the Holocaust, America has appeared far less frequently as either subject or hope in American Yiddish writing. The predominant subject is the destroyed world of the shtetl, that Jewish world which had given birth to those giddying hopes of a greater Yiddish world. Since the Holocaust, the great Yiddish dream, the Peretz dream, has been much subdued. Post-World War II poetry and prose are more concerned with the recent past than with the present. Fiction is more likely to deal with the Old World than with the New. The destruction of that world created a mood of mourning and farewell, the desire to erect a monument to its memory.

This elegiac literature mourns not only the annihilation of the old home; it mourns even more the waning of the great Yiddish dream and the enormousness of that blow. It is especially strong in poetry, whether in such works as Glatshteyn's Shtralndike yidn (Radiant Jews) or, more recently, in Eliezer Greenberg's (1896-1977) Gedenkshaft (Memorabilia), in which he recalls with astonishment and pain: “How great were the riches we once possessed / How great were the riches we have lost!” and reminds us of Avrom Reisen's lines: “There was so little then—/ Why is there so much left?”

This elegiac note is struck again and again, whether in the verse of Chaim Grade (1910-1982) or Meyer Shticker (1905-1983) or of a dozen other poets of stature.

During the sweatshop years, writing about the shtetl was a longing for a still living world. During the teens, twenties, and after, the longing became a nostalgia which no one seriously considered bringing to fulfillment. After Auschwitz, nothing remained but to elegize a world whose loss forever altered the course of Jewish history and Yiddish culture and to recall a vanished Motherland (in more ways than one), a lost Atlantis which, with all its flaws and failings, was an admirable world whose traditions endowed life with human decency and dignity and warmth. This mood is detectable not only in Yiddish writing, though it is strongest there. Its echoes are detectable in the American-Jewish community at large and occasionally in American-Jewish fiction in English. That world is still continually evoked by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-), who is caught in a web of ambivalence, caught between his longing for the lost God-fearing world and its God whom he could not love yet could not reject, and his modernity as a Yiddish writer who could not wholly share the secular Peretz dream of a modern Yiddish culture and yet could not wholly reject it for that longed for pious world, which had no place for Yiddish writers.

The achievement of Yiddish literature in America has been towering, especially in poetry and fiction, and its dreams have shared the glories of Quixote. While dreaming its Jewish version of the American dream of freedom, it has been inescapably American. Every Yiddish writer who came here absorbed something of the spirit of America and underwent the experience of America: the hope of America, the pain of America, and ultimately, the ambivalence of America.

Eras rarely end abruptly. They blend into new eras and fructify them. While the era of the Eastern-European-born Yiddish writer is drawing to a close, a new involvement with Yiddish is evident in the American-Jewish community and among Jewish students on the American campus.

Among Yiddish writers themselves the moods range from I. B. Singer's oft-asserted optimism to deepest, bitter pessimism. The center holds in shades of gray. In “With You,” A. Luria turns his back on Royzenblatt's delight with “our land,” and as though in counterpoint to Mendele's pitying letter of 1910, addresses his fellow poets, living and dead:

All of us,
Those
Whom time
Banished here to an alien shore,
To an alien table,
To an alien door—
To you my greeting,
To you my tear.
We are one,
Of the same clay,
Flesh of flesh and bone of bone.
Like you I bear
The alien taint:
An alien sky weighs on my head,
An alien tree rocks me to sleep.
An alien star, through the wind,
Into my window blinks blind.
And one-alone, I am sustained—
We're equal partners in our pain. …(38)

On the other hand, Kadye Molodowsky (1894-1975) refuses to yield though disaster impends:

Perhaps I am my generation's last.
That's no concern of mine.
I do not prepare the seeds of time.
My day, my only day was given me on loan.
When it will be recalled cannot be known.
Light your light and be its keeper.
And if your light is burning, you must bear.
The fire's brightness and the fire's wounds.
And it may be there is no final generation.
It's no concern of yours.
Light your light and be its keeper.(39)

And again:

And what will be—
If the flyers return
And say that no sky exists?
Then where should I look,
If not higher, above?
How shall I stand the grayness of rain?
The dusts of stoney streets?
Where will I find a haven from wrongs?
And who will help me to write these songs?
If nothing at all is up there?
But I won't believe what the flyers say,
I won't believe what they say …
For I have seen an angel,
Not once, but many a time.
And he has rescued me
From threatening woes.
And I won't trust the flyers,
I won't trust them.
And what will be
If the flyers return
And deny that there is a heaven?
The home of God's righteous?
And how will I manage
To cross paper bridges
If not with God's righteous?
But I will not heed the flyers,
I will not heed them.
For I have seen God's righteous,
Not once but many a time.
So I won't even look at the flyers,
Neither notice nor look at the flyers,
Only those can reach up to heaven
Who weave the heavenly blue,
And have climbed up miracles like steps
And know eternity's ways.(40)

In a similar vein of stoic acceptance is Eliezer Greenberg's

“IN DAYS OF DEEPEST GRIEF”

In days of deepest hopelessness and grief
When no darkness could be darker,
Suddenly a voice from deep within begins to sing aloud
With mercy most consoling, in purest grace and light.
The voice begins caressing me and scolding, angry, sharp
What did you think it meant to be a poet
Among a folk oppressed?
Picking words of honey, dipped in foaming wine,
Amid melodious voices and the twanging of a harp?
That's not what fate decreed.
The fate of song is fate of folk.
God let you be a poet, writing Yiddish verses.
What reason then for wonder or for curses?
Your poem must be faithful to that need
And share the fate of language and of folk.(41)

In the same spirit, Moyshe Shifris, grim but doggedly persistent, speaks for all the Yiddish writers who are determined still to beat their luminous wings—even in the void, hopefully not in vain—as he defends the contemporary Yiddish writer's last redoubt, his indifference to destiny and thereby his triumph over it:

… And even if
The last Yiddish reader
Should disappear
And no one ever ask
For a Yiddish book—
I will not cease
My Yiddish song to sing.(42)

Notes

1. This chapter is not intended as a survey of Yiddish literature in America. It is an account of the fate of some Yiddish hopes—economic and cultural—as reflected in American Yiddish literature. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author. Biographical dates are given if information is available.

2. Shmuel Niger, “America in the Works of Isaac Meyer Dick,” p. 63.

3. Ibid., p. 64.

4. See Shoel Ginzburg and Perets Marek, Yidishe folkslider in rusland, Petersburg, 1901.

5. See Kol ha' mevaser (Voice of the Messenger). 2. No 45 (November 12, 1864); No. 6 (February 4, 1865).

6. See M. Bassin's collection Yidishe poezie oyf amerikaner motivn and the much larger anthology Amerike in yidishn vort by Nachman Mayzel (Meisel).

7. Leon Kobrin, Fun daychmerish tzu yiddish in amerike, p. 28. In English, see Yiddish. 2. (Winter-Spring 1976), p. 47.

8. J. Bovshover, Gazamlte shriftn (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1923), p. 34.

9. Ibid., p. 104.

10. Translated by the author from David Edelstadt; can also be found in Songs of the American Jewish Experience, compiled and arranged by Neil Levin, p. 95.

11. Ibid., pp. 58-59.

12. Ibid., pp. 80-81, 92-93. Leyzerovitch's pen name was Yankele Brisker.

13. Mikhl Kaplan, Geto klangen, p. 19.

14. Elias Schulman, Geshikhte fun der yiddisher literatur in amerike, 1870-1900, p. 89. Schulman's book is a guide to the literature of this period, as is N. B. Minkoff's Pionern fun der yidisher poezye in amerike (New York, 1956).

15. Ibid., pp. 89-90.

16. Ibid., pp. 62-90.

17. Shlomo Noble, “The Image of the American Jew in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in America, 1870-1900,” p. 96. See also Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto, rev. ed. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1909).

18. “Varshe.” For full text and English rendering, see the Forward. (July 11, 1986), p. 19.

19. For a translation by Gertrude Dubrovsky of chapter 1 of Kentucky, see Yiddish. 2. (Winter, Spring 1976), pp. 93-107, and for an interview with Schwartz regarding the translation, see Gertrude Dubrovsky, “Between a Yiddish Poet and His Translator,” Ibid., p. 67-92.

20. I. J. Schwartz, “About Myself and My Generation” (an interview with A. Tabachnik, in Yiddish), p. 35.

21. Noyekh Shteynberg, Yung amerike, pp. 44-45.

22. See especially Joseph Opatoshu, himself one of the young rebels, relating the revolt of the Yunge to a parallel development in American literature in “Fifty Years of Yiddish Literature in the United States,” pp. 72-73.

23. Melech Epstein, “Pages from My Stormy Life—an Auto-biographical Sketch,” American Jewish Archives, p. 137.

24. Opatoshu, op. cit., p. 78.

25. Ibid., p. 79.

26. Abraham Tabachnik, Dikhter un dikhtung, p. 162.

27. Mayzel, op. cit., p. 236.

28. In a musical setting by Lazar Weiner, “To thee, America” became “a Cantata for Solo, Mixed Chorus and Piano (or orchestra).” The English version is by Glantz-Leyeles himself.

29. Shteynberg, op. cit., p. 83.

30. Opatoshu, op. cit., p. 79.

31. Ibid., p. 80.

32. Ibid., p. 79; See also Jacob Glatstein, “Thinking Back,” pp. 33-36.

33. Shmuel Niger, one of the most prolific and generally regarded as the greatest of Yiddish literary critics, dealt with this problem in a number of his essays.

34. Elias Schulman, “A kultur tkufe” (A Cultural Period), p. 102.

35. Ibid.

36. I. A. Rontch, Amerike in der yidisher literatur, p. 7.

37. For a full translation by Etta Blum, see her Jacob Glatstein: Poems (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz Publishing House, 1970), pp. 39-40.

38. A. Luria, “Mit aykh” (With You), Yidishe kultur, pp. 44-45.

39. Kadye Molodowsky, “Tsind on dayn likht” (Light Your Light), Likht fun dornboym (Light of the Burning Bush), pp. 143-144.

40. “Un vos vet zayn” (And What If), ibid., pp. 97-98.

41. Eliezer Greenberg, “In teg fun tifn tsar” (In Days of Deepest Grief), p. 64.

42. Moyshe Shifris, “Un ven afile” (And even if), p. 8.

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