The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century

by Leo Wiener

His next work,'The Dobbin,'[84] is the most perfect of his productions. It unites into one a psychological study of a demented man, with a delicate allegory, in which the history of his people in Russia is delineated, thus serving as a transition from the pure novel in his former production to the composite allegory in his poetical work 'Judel' which was published a few years later. It combines a biting satire with a tragic story; it is a prophecy and a history in one. If the 'Meat Tax' had made him the favorite of the masses who suffered from the oppression of the members of the kahal, 'The Dobbin' was calculated to endear him with all who professed the Jewish faith; for while the first pointed out an internal evil which could be remedied, the second painted in vivid colors their sufferings in the present and the misfortunes which awaited them in the future, which were entirely of an external nature over which they had no control. It showed them more graphically than anything that had been said heretofore how helpless they were to meet the charges which were continually cast against them by the Gentiles and the Government. Abramowitsch foresaw that the turning-point in the inner life of his race was near at hand, that the call to progress of the early writers had availed them little in righting them with the world without, that his own productions acquainting them with their weak points from within were now out of place, and that soon they would need only words of consolation such as are uttered when a great calamity overtakes a people.

In 1873 hardly any one dreamed of the possibility of the riots against the Jews that were to be inaugurated eight years later, for it was just then that the highest privileges had been granted to them, and the assimilation had been going on to such an extent that Judeo-German literature would have been a thing of the past, had not the writers of the previous decade continued now and then to issue a volume of their works. But Abramowitsch saw that the reforms of Alexander II. were not conceived in the same liberal spirit as had been proposed by Nicholas I., and that sooner or later they would be followed by retrenchments such as would throw the Jews back into conditions far worse than those they had been in half a century before; for they would find no avenues for their many new energies which they had developed in the meanwhile. It is this coming event that the author has depicted in his fantastic story, 'The Dobbin.' Jisrolik has made up his mind to acquire Gentile culture, and he is preparing himself for an examination in the Gymnasium. He falls in with a Dobbin that is pursued by everybody, and this so affects him, together with the worry over his examination, that he becomes demented, and he imagines that the Dobbin is talking to him. After that the animal is introduced as a transmigrated soul that tells its biography. The Dobbin is the personification of the Jewish race. The book was very popular, and although there was a demand for new editions, the Russian Government would not permit them, as even this veiled allegory appeared to it as too open an accusation of its acts. Only sixteen years later the censor relaxed and allowed a second edition to appear.

In 1879 there was published by Abramowitsch a volume entitled 'The Wanderings of Benjamin the Third,'[85] which is an excellent pendant to Cervantes's famous work and which has therefore been called by its Polish translator 'The Jewish Don Quixote.' The subject of his caricature was a real fellow, named Tscharny, who had been employed by some French society to undertake a scientific journey into the Caucasus, but who was entirely unfit for the work, as he had a very superficial knowledge of geography. For his more immediate purpose Abramowitsch copied a crazy fellow who was all the time citing passages from a fantastic Hebrew geography he had been poring over. Out of this Abramowitsch evolved the story of the Quixotic fellow who starts out to discover the mystic river Sambation and the tribe of the Red Jews, but who never gets any further than the town of Berdichev and its dirty river Gnilopyat.

Of the other works[86] of Abramowitsch the most important is his drama 'The Enlistment,' which deals with the same subject as Aksenfeld's 'The First Recruit,' but referring it to more modern times. After a long silence the author has again resumed his pen, and one may look forward for some new classics in Judeo-German. He has also written a number of popular scientific articles, which have been widely circulated by means of calendars which he has edited. His popularity as a writer is best illustrated by the fact that for a series of years his income from his books and calendars has amounted to three thousand roubles a year. Considering the poverty of the reading public, for whom cheap editions have to be issued, and the general custom of borrowing books rather than buying them, this will appear as a very great sum indeed. Many of the younger authors lovingly refer to him as the 'Grandfather,' although no one has attempted to imitate him either in manner or style. He forms by himself a school, and would have been the last to write in the dialect but for the occurrences of the eighties that have been the cause of a new set of writers who have no reason to follow the authors of the period of the Haskala, but who dip their pens in the blood that has been shed in the riots, or who from the same cause speak to their brethren, though not of them.

XI. PROSE WRITERS FROM 1863-1881: LINETZKI, DICK

IN 1867 the Kol-mewasser began publishing a serial story by Linetzki[87] under the name of 'The Polish Boy.' Its popularity at once became so great that to satisfy the impatient public the editor was induced to print the whole in book form as a supplement long before it had been finished in the periodical. The interest in the book lay not so much in the fact that it was written with boundless humor as in its being practically an autobiography in which the readers found so much to bring back recollections of their own sad youth. They found there a graphic description of the whole course of a Khassid's life as no one before Linetzki had painted it,—as only one could paint it who had himself been one of the sect, standing in an even nearer relation to their Rabbis than had been the case with Aksenfeld. While the latter had been a follower of one, Linetzki had narrowly escaped being a Rabbi himself, had suffered all kinds of persecution for attempting to abandon the narrow sphere of a Khassid's activity, and knew from bitter experience all the facts related in his work. The story of his own life, unadorned by any fiction, was dramatic enough to be worth telling, but he has enriched it with so many details of everyday incidents as to change the simple biography into a valuable cyclopedia of the life and thoughts of his contemporaries, in which one may get information on the folklore, games, education, superstitions, and habits of his people in the middle of our century.

Linetzki was born in 1839 in Vinitsa, in the Government of Podolsk. At the age of six he was far enough advanced in Hebrew to begin the study of the Talmud. At ten he had passed through all the Jewish schools, and there was nothing left for his teachers to teach him. He was an Ilui, an accomplished scholar, but his father, who was a Khassidic Rabbi, was not satisfied with his mere scholastic acquirements; he wanted him to be initiated in all the mysteries of the Cabbala which would make of him a fanatical Khassid. He was put for that purpose in the hands of a few of his blind followers, who did not spare any means to kill the last ray of reason in him, even if they had to resort to violent punishments, with which they were very liberal. Instead of curbing his spirit, they only succeeded in nurturing an undying hatred toward themselves and everything connected with their doctrine. But finding it impossible to tear himself away from their tyranny, he finally feigned submission and openly professed adherence to his sect, while he secretly visited the few intelligent people that the town could muster up and borrowed from them works that told of the Haskala or that gave some useful instruction. These books he would take with him to uninhabited houses, or to the empty synagogues, and pore over them until their contents had been appropriated by the precocious boy. His father began to suspect that something was wrong with his son, so at the age of fourteen he married him to a girl who, he hoped, would take him back on the road of Khassidism. But finding that, contrary to his expectations, she agreed in everything with her child-husband, the father managed to divorce her from him. Linetzki's patience had come to an end; he threw off the thin mask he had been wearing, and began to make open attacks on the fanatics. He was again forced into marriage, but with the same result as before. The Khassidim now wanted to get rid of him at all cost, and in a dark night he was seized by them and thrown into the river. He was saved as if by a miracle. After that he was carefully guarded by the police, and his enemies did not dare to lay hands on him again. At the age of eighteen he escaped to Odessa, where he eked out his existence by teaching Hebrew to children, all the time perfecting himself in worldly sciences. He was again pursued by the Khassidim of the city, who got away with a box full of his manuscripts, and he decided to leave Russia, to take a course at the Rabbinical Seminary in Breslau. What was his surprise when, upon arriving at the Austrian frontier, he was put in chains by the Rabbi of the border town, who threatened to present a forged despatch from Odessa in which Linetzki was named as a dangerous criminal. He again pretended to repent, and was taken back to his father, from whom the forged despatch had emanated. The latter compelled his son to do penance at the house of the Rabbi of Sadugora. After that he was divorced from his second wife, as it was hoped that it would conciliate him to free him from the ties which had been hateful to him. Linetzki, however, took the first occasion to escape again. This time he went to Zhitomir, where at the age of twenty-three he entered the third class of the Rabbinical school, as his insufficient knowledge of Russian made it impossible for him to attend a higher class. His schoolmates were about twelve years old, and ridiculed the man who was sitting on the same bench with them. He left the institution and went to Kiev, where in 1863 his Judeo-German literary career began by his volume of poetry discussed in a previous chapter. His next work was 'The Polish Boy,' which has gained him a reputation as a classic writer.

Were it not for the many didactic passages which the author has interwoven in the second part of his story, it might easily be counted among the most perfect productions of Jewish literature. These unfortunately mar the unity of the whole. Except for these, the book is characterized by a truly Rabelaisian humor. Its greatest merit is that it follows so closely actual experiences as to become a photographic reproduction of scenes. There is hardly any plot in it, and it is doubtful if Linetzki would have succeeded so well had he attempted a piece of fiction, for in his many later works he is signally defective in this direction. The mere photographic quality of the story, the straightforward tone that pervades it, the grotesque, unbounded humor which one meets at every turn, have made it acceptable to the Khassidim themselves, who grin at their caricatures but must confess that it is absolutely true. The copy of the book in my possession was sold to me by a pious itinerant Rabbi, who had treasured it as a precious work.

Linetzki was misled by his early success to regard his unchecked humor as his special domain, and into cultivating it to the exclusion of the finer qualities of style and sound reason. The farther he proceeds,[88] the less readable his works become, the coarser his wit. Later, in the eighties, he abandons entirely original work to devote himself to the translation of German books. We have from his pen versions of Lessing's 'Nathan the Wise' and Graetz's 'History of the Jews.' The first is rather a free paraphrase than an artistic translation, while the second is not as carefully done as one might have expected. But once has he returned to the style of his 'The Polish Boy,' in his 'The Maggot in the Horseradish,'[89] but that is but a reflection of his great work. Linetzki's reputation is based only on his first novel, which will ever remain a classic.

A number of men with less talent than those heretofore mentioned have attempted imitations of this or that popular book. Among these writers the attacks against the Khassidim still continue at a time when they have lost their power to sting, when the best authors have abandoned that field for more useful works. However, some of the minor productions are quite creditable performances. Such, for example, is the well-told story in verse by M. Epstein, entitled 'Lemech, the Miracle-worker,' published in 1880. It tells of Lemech the tailor who leaves his wife, and turns miracle-worker, which he finds more profitable than his tailoring. He settles in a distant town and persuades one of the wealthy men to give him his daughter in marriage. The miracle-worker must not be refused, and the daughter's previous engagement with Rosenblatt, her lover, is broken off. Just as the rings are to be exchanged which would unite Lemech with Rosenblatt's former bride, Rosenblatt steps up with Lemech's wife, who has been travelling about to find her unfaithful husband, whom she knows only as a tailor. The story is developed naturally, and the reflections interwoven in it are well worth reading. An earlier one-act drama by the same author, 'The Drubbing of the Apostate at Foolstown,' relates also in verse of the punishment inflicted by the Rabbi on the Jew who had been found reading one of Mendelssohn's books. Another, 'The Conversation of the Khassidim,' by Maschil Brettmann, gives in the form of a dialogue the best exposition of the tenets of that sect, and shows how the various stories of miracle-workings originate. The introduction contains a short historical sketch of this strange aberration of miracle-working, written in an excellent prose.