The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century

by Leo Wiener

Zunser has had many imitators, and their name is legion; few of them have been so versatile or have become so popular as he. They delight in their vocation of badchen, and take pains to mention their profession on the title-pages of the pamphlets which they publish, and frequently they try to make their publications more attractive by giving them the title of 'The Lame Marschalik,' 'The Marschalik with One Eye,' and so forth. Many of the improvisations of the badchen never see daylight, but pass in manuscript form to their brothers in the profession. Although, in the eighties, there has arisen a new class of singers who sing in the manner of the poets of the literary languages, yet the badchens still recite in the old style, frequently, however, reflecting the new conditions of life in their poems. A strange departure has taken place in the badchen's profession in America, where, under more favorable conditions of existence and increased well being, there has come to be a greater demand for amusement; the wedding day is no longer the one day of joy, but the 'jester' is now invited to entertain companies at any and all pleasurable meetings. He is now no longer required to create new poems, but to sing well the current couplets of the day.

VI. OTHER ASPECTS OF POETRY BEFORE THE EIGHTIES

THE popular poem, i.e. the tunable song, had only two purposes, to amuse and to prepare a way for the Reform. But these did not exhaust all the possibilities of poetic compositions and, in fact, were not the only ones to task the powers of the Judeo-German versifiers. An opportunity for more extended themes was given the badchens in their songs of contemplation, in which the moralizing tendency needed only to be developed at the expense of the allegory, in order to change the song into a rhymed sermon. Nor was the public unprepared for serious matters, for the greater part of all Judeo-German literature had been merely treatises of an ethical character in which the element of sadness caused by centuries of suffering predominated. The perfection of art is to the mind of a Jew its ability to move to tears. It is expected of the violinist that he shall play the saddest tunes in the minor key, such as will make his hearers weep like 'beavers'; the precentor's reputation depends on his powers to crush his audience, to call forth contrition of spirit, to make the hearts bleed; and the author who can make his reader dissolve in tears, no matter how absurd the story, is sure to become popular with a Jewish public. We have seen how the badchen at the marriage ceremony bade the bride to weep, and it has also been mentioned that he delivered the more serious discourses upon that occasion. It was then that he would spin out hundreds of stanzas upon such subjects as 'The Unhappy Man,' 'Pity,' 'Dialogue of the New-born Soul with the Angel of Life,' 'Sorrow,' and the like.

In the meanwhile, the old rhymed moral treatises continued in force and gave rise to compositions of a more regular structure. Two authors must here be specially mentioned, S. Sobel and Elieser Zwi Zweifel. The first published, in 1874, a book under the title of 'Destiny, or Discussions for Pleasant Pastime,' in which he makes use of the popular method of disputes between various objects in order to inculcate a series of moral truths. He excels in the use of a vigorous, idiomatic language, while Zweifel has shown what strength there lies in the employment of the simplest words for a similar kind of literature. Zweifel's[59] older productions, only two in number, are, one, a translation from the Hebrew, the other probably an imitation of a foreign model. The first contains a series of aphorisms, while the other teaches the wisdom of life in the testament of a dying father. These verses, like his prose works, belong among the most cherished writings of the Russian Jews and have been reprinted in a large number of editions. After his death another one of his poems was published which differs from its predecessors in that it is somewhat more elaborate and is entirely original.

Considering the love of verse on the one hand and the great demand on the other for a Judeo-German prayer-book for women, which has never ceased to be a necessity, the book-firm Eisenstadt and Schapiro had the happy idea to ask the then famous author Abramowitsch[60] to make a trial translation of a part of the Psalms in verse. This appeared to them so successful that they had him proceed with the Sabbath-prayers and the hymns, which were then printed in 1875 at Zhitomir. By the machinations of the great firm of Romm, in Wilna, who were afraid that such an excellent translation might seriously interfere with their sale of their old, stereotyped form of the prayer-book, Abramowitsch was made to desist from finishing the meritorious task that he had begun, and even the two books printed were for a long time kept out of circulation. The Sabbath-prayers he gave not merely in a versified form, but the most prosaic passages, by slight additions and remodellings, he so changed that they resemble the songs in a Gentile hymn-book. Still greater has been the work that he had to perform in making poetry out of the laconic hymns, for that could be accomplished only by amplifying them to ten and twenty times their original size. For this purpose he has availed himself of the current commentaries to the hymns, and this he has done in such a way that the hymns, in their original form, occur as conclusions to the poems. Except for a certain monotony of the masculine rhymes which are employed in them, they are masterpieces of religious poetry, and it is only a pity that the author has not published yet a translation of the Psalms, which certainly lend themselves more easily to poetic diction.

While these sacred poems were being printed in Zhitomir, there appeared in Warsaw another poetical production by the same author, in its way the most remarkable work in the whole range of Judeo-German literature. It bears the title of 'Judel, a Poem in Rhymes,' and in about four thousand verses tells the unfortunate course of the life of Judel,—the Jew. When examining it closely, one discovers that, like Goldfaden's 'The Aristocratic Marriage,' it is an allegorical story of the historical vicissitudes in the development of Judaism and of the sufferings of the Jew through the centuries. Not only is the story told unobtrusively, so that one does not at all suspect the allegory, but the wonderment increases when upon a second and third perusal one becomes aware of the wealth of Biblical allusions upon which alone the whole plot is based. The future commentator of this classic will, when it shall be fully appreciated, find his task made much easier by the many references to Biblical passages which Abramowitsch has himself made in footnotes. The value of this gem is still more enhanced by the refined language used in it,—a characteristic of all of Abramowitsch's works.

Ten years later Goldfaden returned to the allegory of his 'Aristocratic Marriage,' completing it, after the example of Abramowitsch, in a poem of about six hundred lines, entitled 'Schabssiel, a Poem in Ten Chapters (Thoughts after the Riots in Russia).' The master's influence on this poem is not to be mistaken, for it serves as a pendant to the previous work; it is as it were a continuation of it. Abramowitsch's poem ends with the futile attempt of Mephistopheles to tempt Judel to a course of vice, when he discovers Judel's wife, i.e. the Law, faithfully by his side. In Schabssiel, the sufferings of the Jew are ascribed to his having departed from the Law, to his having desecrated the Sabbath. Though somewhat fantastic in its plot, and far from reaching his predecessor's philosophic grasp of the Jew's history, his work is full of fine passages and may be counted among the best of his productions. At about the same time, another young writer, M. Lew, made use of the form of 'Judel' in a poem whose title 'Hudel' seems to indicate its obligation to the prototype. There is in this even less of a philosophical background than in the verses just mentioned, and by its subject-matter it clearly belongs to the following period, for it describes not a purely Jewish theme, but one of a more general character, namely the fall of an orphan who is left to shift for herself in the world. It is, however, given in this place as being, at least in outward form, a direct descendant of Abramowitsch's 'Judel.' While not of the highest poetic value, it is written in a good style and gives promise of better things should the author choose to proceed in his poetic career. Mention must here also be made of a versified story, 'Lemech, the Miracle Worker,' by M. Epstein, to which we shall return later.

Like the allegory, the fable has been a favorite subject of imitation among the writers from the beginning of this century. We possess such, partly translations or adaptations, partly original, from Suchostawer, Dr. Ettinger, Gottlober, Reichersohn, Katzenellenbogen. Of Suchostawer's, only one, a translation of one of Krylov's fables, 'The Cat and the Mice,'[61] has come down to us. It was written in 1829, and, like the fables by Ettinger, circulated in the thirties and forties, is far superior to any translation from Krylov that has appeared before 1880. The most original production is that by Gottlober called 'The Parliament,' a poem of more than one thousand lines, in which he gives an explanation why the lion had been chosen king of all the animals. While some of the matter contained in it is unquestionably borrowed from other sources, yet the whole is moulded in so novel a form, with such a pronounced Jewish setting and biting wit, that it occupies a place by itself in the history of fables. After the candidacy of all the beasts, from the donkey to the wolf, had been rejected as incompatible with the highest security of the rest, the lion appears on the scene, and by his majestic presence at once silences the contending parties; and he is at once and unanimously chosen to his high post. "He rules in fairness, does no wrong, not a sigh is heaved by any of the animals against him; the forest is ruled as of yore: the weak lie still, the strong go free, the great are great, the humble are humble: well to him who has sharp teeth! It has been so of old, and you cannot change the course of things. But no one need complain of the lion as long as he feels no hunger in his stomach, for then he is all peace and rest,—God grant there be many such!"

The whole of Krylov was translated into Judeo-German, though with but moderate success, in 1879 by Zwi Hirsch Reichersohn, and more weakly still in 1890 by Israel Singer. Two of the fables have been admirably rendered by Katzenellenbogen, who has also produced a number of excellent poems in the popular style which surpass those of Goldfaden in regularity of structure. He has also translated a few poems from the Russian and Hebrew, all with the same degree of care displayed in the renderings from Krylov. His songs have not been disseminated among the people, the most of them not having been published until quite lately.

The most unique person in Judeo-German literature of the first half of this century is Dr. Ettinger.[62] All that is known about him is given in the scanty literary recollections by Gottlober. He there says that Dr. Ettinger had studied medicine at Lemberg, where he became acquainted with the Judeo-German writings of Mendel Lefin, who is regarded as the first man of modern times to use the dialect of everyday life for literary purposes. He then settled in Zamoszcz, which had been a seat of Hebrew learning of the Haskala. Being prohibited to practise medicine with his foreign diploma, he became a colonist in the newly formed Jewish colonies of the South, but not being successful there, he finally settled in Odessa. This is all that is given of his biography. It is further known that he wrote his comedy 'Serkele' in the twenties and that he composed a large number of poems, a few of which were published in the Kol-mewasser in the sixties, a few in the Volksblatt in the eighties. In 1889 his family issued a volume of his poetical works which forms the basis of our discussion. In this book are contained sixty fables, a number of poems of various character, and epigrams. About one-half of the collection consists of translations from the German; among these are fables and epigrams by Lessing, ballads and poems by Schiller, Blumauer, and others. The other half is made up of original compositions. All are of equal excellence both as to the language used in them and the more mechanical structure of the verses.