The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature

Finding a Virtual Home for Yiddish Poetry in Southern Indiana

Finding a Virtual Home for Yiddish Poetry in Southern Indiana p Dov-Ber Kerler How uprooted is a person who insists on writing in a language that is itself homeless? Other writers represented in this book on con- temporary Jewish exile literature have moved between countries, cultures, and languages, ultimately reaching and settling on the shores of America. Some have adopted English as their new lin- guistic medium or even began their creative work entirely in Eng- lish ; others have continued to write in their first or native language. I, however, have chosen another course (or has it chosen me?) and write poetry in a language that is perceived to be inherently a language of exile. Yet, for a long time Yiddish was not a language in exile. Indeed, in prewar Eastern Europe, Yiddish had a home- land . It never had a state of its own, but it indeed had a homeland, a clearly discernible geographical space of its own, with its special ethnographic, cultural, and even sociopolitical properties. Oth- erwise , Yiddish literature and culture would not have come into their own, nor would they have almost simultaneously expanded to other lands and shores. Hence, while Hebrew was broadly ad- - Virtual Home for Yiddish Poetry in Southern Indiana | 217 opted or recalibrated as the national Jewish language, Yiddish, with the nearly global expansion of Ashkenazi Jews during the last few centuries, became for a considerable time the international Jewish language and maintained its role as a leading medium of Jewish national, literary, and cultural creativity. GiventhefactthatImyselfwasborninthepostwarSovietUnion, the issue of uprootedness becomes even trickier. Moscow, in the early 1960s, was of course a far cry from the prewar East European Yiddish homeland from which my own parents hailed. There is also a subtle distinction between uprootedness and deracination. Immigrants who came to America, whether they were fully bent on becoming Americans or grappled with maintaining some ver- sion of their pre-emigrant identity, could indeed be characterized as subjects of various degrees of uprootedness, a state that invokes geographical rupture and separation. By contrast, the phenomenon of Russia’s Jews turning, as it were, into Soviet citizens “of Jewish nationality” was heavy-handedly encouraged or in fact forced by the State. And many accepted this changeover willingly and had no reservations about becoming deracinated, uprooted from their own pre-Soviet, often traditionally Jewish upbringing and culture. As matters transpired, you did not have to travel very far, or even travel at all, to become deracinated in your own country. By the time I was born, the deracination process was more or less com- plete . The physical devastation of the Holocaust was successfully augmented on the mental or spiritual plane by postwar Soviet poli- cies , which brought about the transformation just described. So how did it happen that an ostensibly deracinated person born in Moscow in 1958 was to take up writing Yiddish poetry in the early 1990s in England? Before I attempt to answer this ques- tion , it’s important to clarify a number of things, many of which are known only in the very narrow circle of today’s devotees and readers of contemporary Yiddish literature. One of the advantages of being a postwar Yiddish author is 218 | Dov-Ber Kerler the privilege of being considered even today a “young Yiddish author”—young meaning someone who is not well over the age of sixty even in the first decade of the new century. The sad and inevitable logic here is that if, for some ostensibly inexplicable reason, a person born in this increasingly “post-Yiddish” era be- gan writing and publishing in Yiddish, he or she must be “young.” Secondly, while it would be a folly to maintain that Yiddish lit- erature is doing well, it nonetheless is quite remarkable that there are today about forty “younger” Yiddish authors, most of them po- ets (and some “poem writers”), a somewhat smaller but growing number of journalists and essayists, and finally a markedly small number of fiction writers and playwrights—all born after the war. Most began publishing in the 1980s and quite a few later still. (My estimate of about forty authors does not include those who penned and published less than a handful of “literary texts.”) This, of course, is a far cry from the situation that charac- terized the animated, though steadily waning, Yiddish literary life of the last prewar-reared generations in the 1960s, some...