Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers

Introduction

Introduction In the absence of a living, struggling, singing, protesting Yiddishspeaking folk; in the absence of Yiddish schools, newspapers and political movements; in the absence of broad-based institutional support for the study of Yiddish—we, the scholars, can, if we so desire, recreate the landscapes of Yiddish by pursuing and mastering a rigorous mental curriculum.1 David G. Roskies, “Yiddish Studies and the Jewish Search for a Usable Past” Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever.2 Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile” This study examines the way in which Yiddish writers reconfigured the dominant autobiographical models in European and American literature by fusing them with Jewish content, sensibilities and literary modes. Among the many critical gaps in the field of Yiddish literature is the lack of a systematic study of the Yiddish literary autobiography. Ruth R. Wisse pointed out that “the field is still missing a good basic introduction to Yiddish literature and reliable critical biographies of almost all the major and minor writers. . . . Missing are studies in periodization , studies of literary groups, basic surveys of American Jewish literature, Russian Jewish literature, the Polish novel between the 3 wars, the history of literary genres, and so forth. We don’t have proper collected editions or bibliographies of most of the major writers, or the standard introductions that are basic for the orientation of every new student and class.”3 The objective of this study is to fill one such critical lacuna by examining the Yiddish autobiography as an independent literary genre with its own artistic paradigms and history. Scholars of Yiddish literature noted long ago that the Yiddish literary autobiography exists as a separate genre consisting of works with a certain inter-textual continuity. However, they did not investigate this genre comprehensively and systematically. This study intends to do so by analyzing eight Yiddish literary autobiographies written by seven important Yiddish writers and published between 1894 and 1956. In addition to presenting close readings of these autobiographies and outlining the history of this literary genre, this study also seeks to highlight some general characteristics of twentieth-century Yiddish literature. Writers as diverse as Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, the “grandfather ” of Yiddish literature, and Yankev Glatshteyn, co-founder in 1919 of the inzikhistn, a group of modernist poets in New York, initially viewed the autobiography as a problematic and inferior literary genre. Each turned to life-writing only in response to an urgent personal crisis. Such reticence to view the Yiddish autobiography as a legitimate literary genre is also reflected in the scant criticism on it. In fact, three of the works by Jonah Rosenfeld and Yankev Glatshteyn (whom I discuss in chapters 3 and 4), arguably the most original examples of Yiddish literary autobiographies in the twentieth century, were never examined beyond book reviews and a few critical articles. Even the autobiographical works of the classical trio—Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz (the subject of chapters 1 and 2)—and the two great masters of Yiddish prose after the Holocaust, Chaim Grade and Isaac Bashevis Singer (see chapter 5), have been analyzed only rarely as part of a literary genre. This study is the first systematic attempt to examine a body of Yiddish works that belong on the borderline between fiction and autobiography. These works’ hybrid character enabled me to investigate questions of self, life history and literary art in Yiddish culture. In using Yiddish primary and secondary sources, I sought to reclaim a body of work doubly marginalized by being written in Yiddish and in a genre considered marginal in Yiddish literature.4 Critics have typically viewed Yiddish life-writing as artistically inferior to what they viewed as the canonical prose genres in Yiddish 4 Introduction literature: the novel and the short story.5 The notable exceptions, Glatshteyn’s two Yash books, have been the object of recent interest after decades of critical neglect. The primary reason for this is the sophisticated...