I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture

Ruth R. Wisse

• Éditeur: University of Washington Press
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780295805672
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Jewish Studies

I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), the father of modern Yiddish literature, was a master storyteller and social critic who advocated a radical shift from religious observance to secular Jewish culture. Wisse explores Peretz's writings in relation to his ideology, which sought to create a strong Jewish identity separate from the trappings of religion.

Reason and Faith

About the year 1888, Leon (as he was known in Polish) or Leybush (as he was known in Yiddish) Peretz, then a highly successful lawyer in his native city Zamość, was disbarred after being denounced to the tsarist authorities by an unknown informer. Despite his strenuous efforts to clear his name, he was unable to persuade the government to reinstate him. “I fell in battle,” he concluded after futile trips to Warsaw and St. Petersburg and equally fruitless appeals to gentile friends in the local court. “I was unable to prove that I was not a socialist, not an enemy of the government, and not hostile to the orthodox church, and that I don’t undertake the defense of revolutionary-minded Uniates.”¹ The Uniates, who acknowledged the authority of the Pope, were suspected of introducing foreign papal influences into the church, and were thus considered just as dangerous to the tsarist ideal of one national religion as the socialists were to the ideal of one autocratic ruler.

For ten years Peretz had practiced law successfully in the Zamość region, winning high respect for his professional competence. He was admired for his intelligence and learning, and not least for his generosity with money. He and his wife kept an open house for the modernizing young Jews of the town, whom he served as something of a mentor. One of Peretz’s friends, Yeshaye Margulis, wondered if his strong influence on local Jewish youth might have provoked some of their orthodox parents to try to drive him from the city for fear of his corrupting powers.² Whether or not theirs was the decisive charge, whoever wanted Peretz out of Zamość achieved that purpose. Because he was not given the chance to confront his accuser or accusers, Peretz was never certain who had lodged the complaint against him or why it should have been so decisively upheld. He knew only that at the age of thirty-seven he had suddenly lost his livelihood and had to look elsewhere for a new source of income.

From all we know of Peretz’s life in Zamość before this crisis, he seems to have been an energetic, optimistic native son. At a time when a man disclosed his identity in the cut of his beard, Peretz affected the look of a well-to-do Pole; in fact, the stone bust of Count Zamoyski that still stands in the courtyard of the former Zamoyski residence bears him an uncanny resemblance, with its deep-set eyes and thick, drooping mustache.³ There were many other signs of Peretz’s adaptation to Polish society. He conducted the courtship of his second wife, Helena Ringelheym, in Polish, which remained the language of their home. The son of his first marriage, Lucian, who was under his care, he had sent to the larger city of Plock to be educated in Polish. He subscribed to the Izraelita, the Polish-language Jewish newspaper, and he even discovered Yiddish literature in a Polish translation. The only works of modern Yiddish literature he seems to have known were Sholem Yankev Abramovitch’s Masoes binyomin hashlishi (The Travels of Benjamin III) and Di kliatshe (The Old Mare), which he had read in the Polish translations of Klemens Junosza.⁴ Peretz had come to maturity during the brightest years of Polish positivism, when faith in universal education, technological progress, and productive labor inspired high hopes of rational human improvement. He was encouraged by the liberal attitudes of the publicist Aleksander Świętochowski (1849–1938) and writers such as Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841–1910) to believe that the Jews would eventually be rewarded for their industry and their loyalty by the respect of their fellow Poles. His personal experience of injustice was not only a severe blow to his pride, and his pocketbook, but to his understanding of himself as a member of the surrounding society. By expelling him from the ranks of lawyers, the tsarist government bureaucracy drove him from the profession that he would probably have practiced to the end of his days.

The year 1888 happens to be famous in the annals of Yiddish literature for another reason. Although the fortunes of the Yiddish press were then at low ebb, the editorship of the single Yiddish weekly newspaper of the tsarist empire, the Yidishes folksblat of St. Petersburg, having passed into the hands of a certain Yisroel Levi (who compared Yiddish to castor oil, a necessary purgative), this was the year in which Sholem Rabinovitch launched a Yiddish annual, Di yidishe folksbibliotek, that established Yiddish belles-lettres as a major cultural force.⁵ Sholem Rabinovitch, better known as Sholem Aleichem, was then still in possession of the considerable fortune he and his wife had inherited upon the death of her father, and he determined to put this money at the service of the new literature by editing a yearbook of high quality. He sent out a call for Yiddish material to well-known Jewish writers in Russia and Poland, promising generous honoraria. Although Sholem Aleichem was still a relatively young man (Peretz’s junior by seven years), his address in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital that was outside the Jewish Pale of Settlement, and his respectful attitude toward Yiddish writers and their work promised an improvement over the ephemeral and apologetic character of earlier Yiddish publications. Through a third party, the call for Yiddish material reached Peretz, who at the time had only a modest reputation as a writer of Hebrew.⁶

Peretz had actually begun his writing in Polish. At twenty-two he had produced a small sheaf of poetry in a variety of styles: light satiric verse in the manner of Heine, mildly erotic verse in the manner of Goethe, and fables of the kind he would later compose both in Hebrew and Yiddish. The longest of these maiden poems was on a Jewish theme. The narrator happens upon a tribe of Jews in their airless synagogue during the month of Elul. What is going on, he asks rhetorically. Is the rabbi giving the signal for the onset of battle? Are the agitated Jews embarked on a reconquest of Palestine? No, not at all, comes the answer. When the Jews rise up some day, as they assuredly will, they will not go to war against their enemy but will embrace the brother who had long ago cast his magic spell on them and transformed them into a worm. For the moment, alas, the Jewish worm is still a worm, and the rabbi is merely signaling the beginning of the penitential fast. Here, Peretz’s ambivalent attitudes toward both Jews and Christians are clearly in evidence as he tries to balance criticism of religious excess, protest against tsarist oppression, and aspirations of universal brotherhood in a single poem. He was later to dismiss his Polish poems as a false start, an “internationalist moment” that proved alien and had to be abandoned; the Polish manuscript was only saved from oblivion by his relatives, the Altbergs.⁷

His early Hebrew writing did not launch his literary career either. He made his Hebrew debut in 1877 in a small collection of poetry copublished with his father-in-law, Gavriel Yehuda Lichtenfeld, who was said to have supplemented Peretz’s limited command of Hebrew grammar.⁸ By the time the book appeared, Peretz was already divorced from Lichtenfeld’s daughter, was about to remarry, and had taken up the practice of law that completely absorbed him for the next ten years. Not until 1886 did he resurface as a writer, contributing poems and sketches to Haasif and Hatsefira, the leading periodicals in what was gradually developing into the national renaissance of Hebrew as a living language. By then he was also known locally as the author of occasional verse in Yiddish, and it may have been this aspect of his literary reputation that prompted a friend in Berdichev to inform him of Sholem Aleichem’s project.

We don’t know whether Peretz learned of the new publication before or after he was disbarred; the reference in one of his letters to Sholem Aleichem to the sudden decline in his earnings suggests that he was still trying to win reinstatement. The new literary journal, which Peretz said “surpassed in its significance everything that has been published in both our literatures,” was just the sort of project that by harnessing his energies could help offset his humiliation.⁹ He could not have considered Yiddish writing a practical alternative to the practice of law, since, as far as he knew, there wasn’t a single Yiddish book to be found in all Zamość.¹⁰ The only Yiddish writers then profiting from their labor were the incredibly prolific Isaac Meir Dik, “the first professional Yiddish writer,” and sensationalists like Shomer (pseudonym of N. Shaikevitch), whose potboilers Sholem Aleichem held responsible for lowering public standards.¹¹ But if not an alternative source of income, Yiddish writing provided Peretz with a new creative challenge. His Hebrew works had attracted some appreciative notice among small circles of enlightened Jews throughout the Pale of Settlement, but neither the coterie atmosphere of contemporary Hebrew letters nor the literary resources of the language gave Peretz the scope he apparently needed to develop his social and artistic ideas. With his contributions to Folksbibliotek, Peretz began his uninterrupted career as a Yiddish writer—as it turned out, the most influential Yiddish writer of all time.

That Peretz should have taken up Yiddish literature at just the time he suffered a fatal economic and social reversal may be considered symptomatic of contemporary cultural developments. It would be a vulgar simplification to suggest that modern Yiddish literature resulted from hostility to the Jews, but some connection between the two is undeniable. The earlier generation of East European Maskilim had favored the linguistic integration of the Jews into Russian, just as their Central European brothers were learning to function in German. Following the accession of Alexander II in 1855, when the shackles on publishing were slightly loosened, some Jewish writers took advantage of the relaxed censorship to write and publish in Hebrew and Yiddish. But the primary impulse of this literature was exhortation to reform. The enlighteners hoped that political emancipation would mean equal citizenship for the Jews, who would have to demonstrate their readiness for citizenship by adoption, among other things, of the local language. It stands to reason that modern young Jews like Peretz and Sholem Rabinovitch should have aspired to political and social equality; that they chose to educate their children in Polish and Russian, and to speak and write to them in those languages, reveals that their deepest personal hopes for the Jewish future included linguistic adaptation.¹² The particular conditions of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, where a rapidly swelling population was hemmed in by just as rapidly multiplying restrictions, forced the postponement of these hopes. With mixed emotions some Jewish intellectuals were persuaded of the need to develop an independent culture in reinforcement of their separate national identity. In the face of pogroms and xenophobic nationalist tendencies in populist, government, and elite circles alike, they increasingly turned to each other.

Had the process of liberalization that began in Russia in the 1850s maintained its hospitable promise, Jewish creativity would most likely have flowed into the host languages, as it did wherever toleration flourished elsewhere. That potential was never fully realized. In the same way that Peretz rechanneled his energies into writing when his advancement as a lawyer was blocked, on a much larger scale the extraordinary flowering of late nineteenth-century Yiddish and Hebrew literature was a creative response of the Jews to the obstruction of their political progress. Intensified Jewish culture was one spontaneous reaction to social repression. By contrast, those Jews who chose to write in Russian and Polish were forced to confront—in themselves—the growing hostility of those cultures to their Jewish legitimacy.

At the time Sholem Aleichem initiated the Folksbibliotek, the status of Yiddish was still much lower among the Polish Jews than it was in the Russian Pale, among other reasons because the political optimism of Polish Jews had been correspondingly higher. Polish liberalism was significantly more hospitable to the Jews than was its Russian counterpart, as long as the Poles expected Jewish help in their struggle for national independence. This proffered friendliness, or expectation of friendliness, held out for a longer time the promise of an integrated community of Jewish Poles.¹³ Polish positivism was also immensely encouraging to the Jews. Its emphasis on rational forces of progress, on the need for industrial and technological improvements, on socioeconomic rather than religiometaphysical ideas of nationhood, allowed Jews to consider themselves potential partners in the advancement of the public weal. Yet even before Peretz was disbarred, the public mood had begun to change. The pogrom in Warsaw following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 shattered the image of Polish-Jewish cooperation that flourished around the time of the 1863 uprising and for a time thereafter. The Catholic Church and the conservative nationalists opposed the accommodationist politics of positivism—the Church because it weakened the religious basis of Polish peoplehood, the nationalists because they still hoped to free Poland from the yoke of foreign rule. From the socialist camp too, there rose an attack on the bourgeois spirit of positivism, which was said to profit individuals at the expense of the working class.¹⁴ The decline in mutual toleration affected the Jews who were at that time being squeezed out of their former occupations by the expansion of industry, a changing peasant economy, the rising Polish middle class, and, not least, discriminatory tsarist edicts. Peretz described this period as the end of the good years and the beginning of the bad. His own setback was typical of the worsening fate of Polish Jewry.

Peretz did more than turn to literature as a result of his dilemma: he turned his dilemma into literature. No longer an inexperienced young man, he took up Yiddish writing with the kind of authority authors normally acquire only after many years of trial and error. Along with his first manuscripts, he sent Sholem Aleichem his credo as a writer: “Your wish and goal (as far as I understand it) is to write for the sake of the audience that speaks jargon of jargon-land; I, for my part, write for my own pleasure, and if I take any reader into consideration, he is of the higher level of society, a person who has read and studied in a living tongue.”¹⁵ The letter is written (as is most of the correspondence between them) in Hebrew, which is clearly not the living tongue Peretz had in mind. A paraphrase of Peretz’s compressed message would read something like this: though I now find myself writing, as you do, in Yiddish, let me make it clear that I don’t consider myself the sort of Yiddish writer you presumably are, adapting your intelligence and your literary style to the market women and the synagogue goers you write about. No, I write for someone as educated and complicated as myself, a reader and student of Polish or Russian, who may also know German and French, and who might now be writing in one of those languages if anti-Jewish hostility had not retarded local Jewish emancipation. “I, who write for my own pleasure and only according to my mood,” he wrote, “take my material simultaneously from different worlds.”¹⁶

None of this can be taken as a serious comme...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Reason and Faith
• 2. Nation and Class
• 3. Hope and Fear
• Notes
• Index