The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century

by Leo Wiener

The advocates of the Haskala regarded it as one of their sacred duties to spread culture wherever and whenever they could do so. This they did through the medium of the Hebrew and the Judeo-German. The first was a literary language, the other was not regarded as worthy of being such. If, therefore, there was some cause to feel an author's pride in attaching one's name to productions in the first tongue, there was no inducement to subscribe it to works in the second. It was, to a certain extent, a sacrifice that the authors made in condescending to compose in Judeo-German, and the only reward they could expect was the good their books would do in disseminating the truth among their people. The songs of M. Gordon and Gottlober, and the works of Ettinger and Aksenfeld, were passed anonymously throughout the whole land. The books were not even printed, but were manifolded in manuscript form by those who had the Haskala at heart. A few years before the issue of the Kol-mewasser, the efforts of these men began to bear ample fruit. It was no longer dangerous to be called a 'German,' and many Jewish children were being sent to the gymnasia, to which the Government had in the meanwhile admitted them. The Rabbinical schools at Wilna and Zhitomir, too, were graduating sets of men who had been receiving religious instruction according to the improved methods of the Haskala. It was then that some of the works written decades before, for the first time saw daylight, but more as a matter of curiosity of what had been done long ago, than with any purpose. It would even then have been somewhat risky to sign one's name to them for fear of ridicule, and no native firm would readily undertake their publication. Thus the first two works of Aksenfeld were issued from a press at Leipsic in 1862, while Ettinger's 'Serkele' had appeared the year before at Johannisburg. Only the following year Linetzki's 'Poems' were published at Kiev, and, by degrees, the authors took courage to abandon their anonyms and pseudonyms for their own names. The time was ripe for a periodical to collect the scattered forces, for there was still work to be done among those who had not mastered the sacred language, and they were in the majority. At that juncture, Zederbaum began to issue his supplement to the Hameliz.

This new weekly was not only the crowning of the work of the past generation of writers, it became also the seminary of a new set of authors. It fostered the talents of those who, for want of a medium of publication, might have devoted their strength entirely to Hebrew, or would have attempted to assimilate to themselves the language of the country. In the second year of the existence of the periodical, there appeared in it 'The Little Man,' the first work of Abramowitsch, who was soon to lead Judeo-German literature to heights never attempted before by it, and with whom a new and more fruitful era begins.

Solomon Jacob Abramowitsch[81] was born in 1835, in the town of Kopyl, in the Government of Minsk. He received his Jewish instruction in a Cheeder, and later in a Jeschiwe, a kind of Jewish academy. He consequently, up to his seventeenth year, had had no other instruction except in religious lore. His knowledge of Hebrew was so thorough that, at the age of seventeen, he was able to compose verses in that language. He lost his father early, and his mother married a second time. When he was eighteen years old, there arrived in his native town a certain Awremel the Lame, who had been leading a vagabond's life over the southern part of Russia. He told so many wonderful stories about Volhynia, where, according to his words, there flowed milk and honey, that many of the inhabitants of Kopyl were thinking of emigrating to the south. Awremel also persuaded Abramowitsch's aunt to go with him in search of her absent husband. That she did, taking her nephew along with her. It soon turned out, however, that Awremel was exploiting them as objects of charity, by collecting alms over the breadth and length of the country. For several months he kept zigzagging in his wagon from town to town, wherever he expected to find charitable Jews, until at last they arrived a certain distance beyond Kremenets. Here they passed a carriage from which proceeded a voice calling Abramowitsch by his given name. They stopped, and Abramowitsch was astonished to discover his friend of his childhood, who had, in the meantime, become a chorister in Kremenets. The latter invited his youthful friend to go back to town with him, promising to take care of him. This the young wanderer was only too glad to do, for he wished to be rid of Awremel, who had been tantalizing him with his almsbegging. The Precentor, who was in the carriage with the chorister, paid off the driver, and Abramowitsch started with them back to town, where a new period began in his life.

His thorough acquaintance with the Talmud and the Hebrew language soon gained him many friends, and he was able to make a living by teaching the children of the wealthier inhabitants. One of his friends advised him to make the acquaintance of the poet Gottlober, who, at that time, was teaching in one of the local Jewish schools. The old man who was giving him that counsel added: "Go to see him some evening when no one will notice you, and make his acquaintance. He is an apostate who shaves his beard, and he does not enjoy the confidence of our community. Nor do we permit young men to cultivate an acquaintance with him; but you are a learned man, and you will know how to meet the statements of that heretic. He is a fine Hebrew scholar, and it might do you good to meet him. Remember the words of Rabbi Meier: 'Eat the wholesome fruit, and cast away the rind.' I'll tell the beadle to show you the way to the apostate."

On the evening of the following day, Abramowitsch betook himself, with a copy of a Hebrew drama he had composed, to the house of Gottlober. The latter smiled at the childish attempt of the young Talmudist, but he did not fail to recognize the talent that needed only the fostering care of a teacher to reach its full development, and he himself offered his services to him, and invited him to be a frequent caller at his house. Here, under the guidance of Gottlober's elder daughter, he received his first instruction in European languages, and in the rudiments of arithmetic. He swallowed with avidity everything he could get, and soon he was able to write a Hebrew essay on education which was printed in the Hamagid, and which attracted much attention at the time. His fate soon led him to Berdichev, "the Jewish Moscow," where he married for a second time, and settled down for many years. In 1859 his first serious work, still in Hebrew, was published. In 1863 began his Judeo-German career, in which he still continues, and which has made him famous among all who read in that language.

The tradition of the Haskala came down to Abramowitsch in an uninterrupted succession, from Mendel Lefin through Ettinger and Gottlober. He, too, started out with the set purpose of spreading enlightenment among his people, and in his first two works we find a sharp demarkation between the two kinds of character, the ideal and the real. But he was too much of an artist by nature to persevere in his didactic attitude, and before long he abandoned entirely that field, to devote his undivided energy to the production of purely artistic works. Even his earlier books, in which he combats some public nuisance, differ materially from those of his predecessors in that they reflect not only conditions of society as they actually existed at his time, but in that his characters are true studies from nature. No one of his contemporaries reading, for example, his 'The Little Man,' could be in doubt of who was meant by this or that name. The portrait was so closely, and yet so artistically, copied from some well-known denizen of Berdichev that there could be no doubt as to the identity. There are even more essential points in his stories and dramas in which he widely departs from his predecessors. While these saw in a religious reform and in German culture a solution out of the degraded state into which their co-religionists had fallen, he preached that a reform from within must precede all regeneration from without. While they directed their attacks against the Khassidim as the enemies of light, and their Rabbis as their spiritual guides, he cautiously avoided all discussions of religion and culture, and sought in local communal reforms a basis for future improvements. To him the physical well-being of the masses was a more important question than their spiritual enlightenment, and according to his ideas a moral progress was only possible after the economical condition had been considerably bettered. His precursors had looked upon the Haskala as the most precious treasure, to be preferred to all else in life. Abramowitsch loves his people more than wisdom and culture, and the more oppressed and suffering those he loves, the more earnest and the more fervent are his words in their behalf. He is the advocate of the poor against the rich, the downtrodden against the oppressor, the meek and long-suffering against the haughty usurper of the people's rights. He is, consequently, worshipped by the masses, and has been hated and persecuted by those whose meanness, rascality, and hypocrisy he has painted in such glaring colors. He had even once to flee for his life, so enraged had the representatives of the kahal become at their lifelike pictures in one of his dramas. His love for the people is an all-pervading passion, for man is his Godhead. There is a divine element in the lowest of human beings, and he thinks it worth while to discover it and to bring it to light, that it may outshine all the vices that have beclouded it. He turns beggar with the beggar he describes, becomes insane with him who ponders over the ills of this earth, and suffers the criminal's punishment. He at all times identifies himself with those of whom he speaks.

In the more external form of composition there is again a vast progress from the writings of Lefin to the style and diction of Abramowitsch. Lefin was the first to show what vigor there was in the use of the everyday vernacular. Ettinger, Aksenfeld, and Gottlober have well adapted that simple, unadorned speech to the requirements of literary productions; but it was only Abramowitsch who demonstrated what wealth of word-building, what possibilities of expression, lay dormant in the undeveloped dialects of Judeo-German. He was peculiarly fitted to enrich the language by new formations, for having passed the first eighteen years of his life in Lithuania and passing the greater part of his later years in the Southwest, he was enabled to draw equally from the source of his native Lithuanian dialect and the spoken variety of his new home. He has welded the two so well that his works can be read with equal ease in the North and in the South, whereas the language of Aksenfeld offers a number of difficulties to the Lithuanians and even the Polish Jews whose dialect the Southern variety resembles. In diction he differs from his masters in that he substitutes a regular prose structure for the semi-dramatic utterances of the older narration, without affecting the natural speeches of the characters wherever these are introduced. In these cases he becomes so idiomatic as to baffle the best translator, who must be frequently satisfied with mere circumlocutions. He also abandons the anonym of the former generation for a pseudonym, Mendele the Bookpedler, which is, however, but a thin disguise for his real name, for his writings are of such an individuality that there can be no doubt about their authorship. Beginning with Abramowitsch style is regarded as an important requisite of a Judeo-German work.

Now we shall turn to the discussion of his several books. The subject of his first, 'The Little Man,' is an autobiography of a man, who, by low flattery, vile servility, and all dishonest ways, rises to high places of emolument which he uses entirely in order to enrich himself at the expense of the people. Such men had been the bane of Jewish communities in the middle of our century. In Berdichev it was, at the time of the publication of the book, Jacob Josef Alperin, who by similar means had come to be the right hand of the Governor General, Bibikov; but far more vile than he was Hersch Meier Held, who stood in the same relation to Alperin that the latter occupied to the Governor General. That flunky of a flunky is personified as the hero of the story, Isaac Abraham Takif. In this work we still have the ideal persons of the older writers. We are introduced there to a poor, honest, and cultured family, in whom one cannot fail to recognize his master and friend, Gottlober, and his daughter.

If this work made him a host of friends among those who were the victims of Alperin and Held, the next drama he wrote endangered his stay in Berdichev, for the persons attacked in it, the representatives of the kahal, would not shrink from any crime to rid themselves of a man who, like Abramowitsch, had come to be a power and a stumbling-block to their incredible rascalities. The greatest curse of the Jewish community in Russia had ever been the meat and candle tax, which all had to pay, nominally to support communal institutions, but the greater part of which went into the pockets of the representatives of the kahal to whom the tax was farmed out. No meat and no candle could be purchased without that arbitrary imposition by the members of the kahal, who in their fiendish craving for money increased the original cost of meat several fold, and who spared no means, however criminal, to silence any opposition to their doings. It is these men that Abramowitsch had the courage to hold up to the scorn of the people in his 'The Meat-Tax, or the Gang of City Benefactors.'[82] He had to flee for his life, but the drama did its work. It even attracted the attention of the Government, which tried to remedy the evil. It became the possession of the people, and many of its salient sentences have become everyday proverbs. The revolt against that Gang of City Benefactors of Berdichev was so great that Moses Josef Chodrower, whom all recognized as the prototype of the arch-rascal Spodek in the play, and who had been a prominent and wealthy merchant, was soon driven into bankruptcy by the infuriated population that refused to support him. That was the first time that a literary production written in Judeo-German had become a factor in social affairs. A Russian troupe that was then playing at Berdichev wanted to give a Russian version of the drama, but was restrained from doing so by the machinations of the kahal. The book had done its work thoroughly.

In the same year there appeared his story from the life of the Jewish mendicants, 'Fischke the Lame.'[83] This psychological study of the impulses of the lowest dregs of society is probably unique in all literature. It is a love story from the world of the lame and the halt that constitute the profession of mendicants in the Jewish part of every Russian town in the West. But it is not merely the love of Fischke the Lame for a beggar girl and the jealousy of his blind wife, who tyrannizes over him in spite of her affliction, that we are made acquainted with in that remarkable book. We are introduced there to a class of people with entirely different motives, different aims in life, from those we are accustomed to see about us. They hide from daylight and have a morality of their own; but yet they are possessed of the passions that we find in beings endowed with all the senses and enjoying the advantages of well-organized society. One must have lived among them, been one of them, so to reproduce their language, their thoughts, as Abramowitsch has done in this novel; and one must have broad sympathies with all humankind to be able to find the divine spark ablaze even in the lowest men.