The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century

by Leo Wiener

The sketch named 'The Fur-Cap' is one of the very few that he has written as an attack on the Khassidic Rabbi. There is here, however, a vast difference in the manner of Perez and of Linetzki. While the latter goes at it in a direct way, with club in hand, and bluntly lets it fall on the head of the fanatic, Perez has above all in mind the literary form in which he clothes his attack, and we get from him an artistic story which must please even if the thrusts be not relished. The Rabbi never appears in public without his enormous fur-cap, which is really the insignia of his office. In this story we find the furrier engaged in a monologue, in which he tells of his delight in making the Rabbi's cap. He feels that it is he who gives all importance to that dignitary, for it is the cap that makes the Rabbi. He relates of the transformation of a common mortal into an awe-inspiring interpreter of God's will on earth. No important occurrence in life, no birth, marriage, or death, can take place without the approval of him who wears that fur-cap. It is the cap, not the man, and his wisdom, that sanctions and legalizes his various acts. Were it not for the cap, it would not be possible to tell right from wrong. This fine bit of sarcasm is not a mere attack at the sect of the Khassidim; it is also meant as an accusation of our whole social system, with its conventional lies. Perez does not show by his writings to what particular party he belongs, but he is certainly not with the conservatives. He is with those who advocate progress in its most advanced form. He is opposed to everything that means the enslavement of any class of people. In Russia, where one may not express freely views which are not in accord with the sentiments of the governing class, authors have to resort frequently to the form of allegory, fable, or distant allusion, instead of the more direct way of writers in constitutional countries. For these reasons pure literature is generally something more to the Russians than mere artistic productions. The novel takes frequently the place of a political pamphlet, of an essay on social questions. The stories of the Judeo-German authors share naturally the same fate with those of the Russians, and, consequently, cannot be free of 'tendencies' whenever the writers have in mind the treatment of subjects which would be dealt with severely by the censor. Much of the alleged obscurity of Perez's writings is just due to the desire of avoiding the censor's blue pencil, and the more dangerous a more direct approach becomes, the more delicate must be the allegory. The best of that class of literature is contained in this volume in a series entitled 'Little Stories for Big Men.'

The first of these is called 'The Stagnant Pool.' We are introduced here to the world of worms who live in the pool, who regard the green scum as their heaven, and pieces of eggshells that have fallen into it as the stars and the moon upon it. A number of cows stepping into the pool tear their heaven and kill all who are not hidden away in the slime. Only one worm survives to tell the story of the catastrophe, and he suggests to his fellows that that was not the heaven that was destroyed, that there is another heaven which exists eternally. For this the narrator was thought to be insane and was sent to an insane asylum. The second sketch, 'The Sermon of the Lamps,' in which the hanging lamp instructs a small table lamp to send its flame heavenwards and not to flicker in anarchistic fashion, is a fine allegory in which the social order of things is criticised. There are altogether ten such excellent allegories, or fables, in the collection, all of the same value. The last of Perez's articles in the book is a popular discussion of what constitutes property; it is written in the same style as his scientific works spoken of before.

From 1894 to 1896 Perez has been issuing small pamphlets of about thirty octavo pages at irregular intervals. They are called 'Holiday Leaves,' and bear each a special name appropriate for each particular occasion. A certain part of these pamphlets has stories and discussions to suit the occasions for which they are written, but on the whole their contents do not differ from those of his periodicals. Here again Perez has furnished most of the matter. The other writers are David Pinski, J. Goido, Solomon Grossglück, M. J. Freid, who also contributed to his earlier magazines. It is evident that they follow their master in the general manner of composition, though at a respectable distance. Of these, Freid[107] has written some good sketches of animal life. His 'Mursa' is the story of a bitch who has given birth to some puppies:—her love for her offspring, her madness when she finds her young ones drowned and gone, and her death by strangulation. 'Red Caroline, a Novel of Animal Life,' is a similar story from the life of a cow. They are well told and display talent in the author. Of the others, Pinski[108] deserves to be mentioned specially, both on account of the quantity and the quality of his work. Most of his sketches do not rise above the mediocre, but there are several that are as good as those of Spektor. The best of his are those that are entitled 'The Oppressed,' the first of which appeared in 'Literature and Life.' In this he tells of the tyranny exercised by a shopkeeper on his clerk, and of the timidity of his wretched subordinate, who merely ekes out an existence by working for him from daybreak until late at night from one end of the year to the other. The brutal master, the cowardly, downtrodden clerk, his courageous daughter who urges her father to leave the store in spite of the shopkeeper's protest, the scene at home, where his wife has just given birth to a child, where there is no money for a fire or for medicine,—all this is drawn dramatically and naturally. Goido[109] began to issue a aeries of stories in Wilna, in the manner of Perez's 'Holiday Leaves,' and they attracted Perez's attention, who encouraged him in his literary career. Regarding his career in America, we shall find him more especially mentioned in the next chapter.

After the financial failure of the different magazines started since 1887, only Spektor's Hausfreund has been able to survive with some degree of regularity. The last of this series appeared in 1896, after which Judeo-German letters seem to have been checked entirely. There still appear publications by societies, but they are all of a Zionistic nature. It is hard to foretell what the future of this literature will be. But having worked out such a variety of styles in the last fifteen years, it can hardly fail of presenting the same interesting features with which we have just become acquainted, unless, indeed, the intelligent classes abandon this field for other European languages and turn it over to the class of writers who have in view the filling of their pockets and not the good of the people. Then it will revert to the chaos into which it was led by Schaikewitsch and the like. In any case it will reflect the conditions from without; it will flourish in proportion as the Jews are oppressed by the government and public opinion; it will disappear when full rights shall have been accorded them. The latter are not to be hoped for in any appreciably near time, hence Judeo-German letters will continue to be an anomaly in Russia, in Galicia, and in Roumania for some time to come.

Although this literature has assumed such great proportions and has produced a score or more of good writers, it has still remained an unknown quantity to a large number of the better classes who have not yet broken entirely with their mother-tongue. They continue looking with disdain at the popular language and thus make it hard for those who devote themselves to the service of the people to produce the desired effect; for, failing to get the support of those whose opinion might weigh with the masses, the latter are somewhat indifferent themselves. Another unfortunate factor in the development of this literature is the petty jealousies of many of the writers, which have again and again kept them from uniting for concerted action. If in spite of all this it has been able to hold its own and to evolve to such perfection, it is due to the untiring, self-sacrificing, noble efforts of Zederbaum, Spektor, Rabinowitsch, and Perez. All honor to these men!

XIV. PROSE WRITERS SINCE 1881: IN AMERICA

MANY years before the great immigration of the Jews had begun, there was a sufficiently large community of Russian Jews resident in New York to support a newspaper. In the seventies there existed there a weekly, The Jewish Gazette, and there was at least one book store, that of the firm of Kantrowitz, that furnished the colony with Judeo-German reading matter. The centre of that Jewish quarter was then as now on Canal Street, where there was also the Jewish printing office of M. Topolowsky, from which, in 1877, was issued a small volume of Judeo-German poetry by Jacob Zwi Sobel, probably the first of the kind in America. His few songs are all in the style of Goldfaden. One, entitled 'The Polish Scholar in America,' is especially interesting, not from a literary standpoint, but from the light it throws on the condition of the Jews before the eighties. Whether they wished so or not, they were rapidly being amalgamated, on the one side by the German Jews, on the other by the American people at large. Many tried to hide their nationality, and even their religion, since the Russian Jews did not stand in good repute then. The vernacular was only used as the last resort by those who had not succeeded in acquiring a ready use of the English language, and its approach to the literary German was even greater than that attempted by Dick at about the same time in Russia. However, English words had begun to creep in freely and to modify the Germanized dialect. It is evident that the seeds of the American Judeo-German, as it may now be found in the majority of works printed in New York, had been sown even then. The proneness to use a large number of German words is derived from the time when the smaller community had been laboring to pass into American Judaism by means of the German Jewish congregations.

Suddenly, in 1881, began the great forced emigration of the Jews from Russia, and in the same year the main stream of the unfortunate wanderers commenced to flood the city of New York, and from there to spread over the breadth and the length of the United States. At present there are, probably, not less than three hundred thousand Russian Jews to be found in New York alone. The aspect of the Jewish colony was at once changed. It was thrown back into conditions resembling those in congested Russian cities. There came misery, poverty, and squalor. The struggle for existence was even harder than it had been at home. They had exchanged the tyranny of the autocracy for the liberty of the republic, but they did not at the same time better their material well-being. It was then that the sweat-shop with all its horrors had its beginning, or at least found its most objectionable development. And they were not all laborers who were forced to tread the sewing-machine, or roll cigars and fill cigarettes. Many of them had seen better days at home, some had even been students at gymnasia and at universities. Without any previous training in their particular occupations, forced to do ten and twelve hours' work of the hardest labor, they had no time to think of any but the most sordid, more immediate physical needs. Some indeed succeeded in establishing themselves permanently, but the majority groaned under a heavy yoke. Only by degrees did more and more of them issue from the sweat-shops, to take up other occupations; but few of them ever forgot the horrors of their first years in America. The whole course of the Judeo-German literature is a reflex, on the one side, of their sufferings, on the other, of the greater liberty, the slowly increasing well-being.

With the large immigration came also some of the literary men: Zunser, Schaikewitsch, Seiffert, Goldfaden. They at once set about to produce books with the same vim that they had developed at home. But the field was not so profitable, and they had to turn to other work. Schaikewitsch and Zunser have become printers instead of writers of books, and Goldfaden gave up his attempt in despair and returned finally to Europe. However, in the short time that they have been active in America, they have succeeded in doing immeasurable harm not only to Judeo-German literature, but to the people for whom they wrote as well. They have corrupted the language in accord with the forms which they found in vogue among the Jews who had been here before them, and they started out to minister to the sensational tastes of the masses who received their nourishment from the lower English press of New York. The amount of many-volumed so-called novels that they have produced is simply appalling. These are mainly adaptations of the most sensational novels in whatsoever language they could lay their hands on. Goldfaden also started The New York Illustrated Gazette, the first of the kind in Judeo-German, but it lived only a short time. In spite of the mass of printed matter in the vernacular, literature did not pay in America, and Goldfaden left the country in disgust.

But the eighties were not by any means devoid of interest and far-reaching importance to Jewish letters. During that time Judeo-German journalism received its fullest development. In Russia a daily press could not exist at all, and the few weeklies that had been issued from time to time had to move in such closely circumscribed limits that journalism ever remained there in its infancy. But on the other side of the Atlantic, the first thing the Jews learned to value and to make free use of was the newspaper. A large number of these were started in the first ten years of the great immigration, but most of them have been of short duration. In the struggle for existence the oldest newspaper, that had had its beginning in 1874, came out victorious. It bought out and consolidated twenty Jewish dailies and weeklies and now appears in the form of The Jewish Gazette, as the representative of the more conservative faction of the Russian Jews of America. But the most active in that field of literature were those who at the end of the eighties clustered around the newspapers that were published in the interest of the Jewish laborers. Of these Die Arbeiterzeitung was the most prominent.