Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries

Chapter 10. Ethnopoetics in the Works of Malkah Shapiro and Ita Kalish: Gender, Popular Ethnography, and the Literary Face of Jewish Eastern Europe

CHAPTER 10 Ethnopoetics in the Works of Malkah Shapiro and Ita Kalish: Gender, Popular Ethnography, and the Literary Face of Jewish Eastern Europe Sheila E. Jelen In ‘‘Thank God for His Daily Blessings,’’ Amos Oz describes a walk through Geulah, the neighborhood in Jerusalem where he grew up among Labor Zionists but that has since evolved into an ultraorthodox enclave: ‘‘The Orthodox Eastern European Jewish world continues as though nothing had happened, but the fathers of modern Hebrew literature, Mendele and Berdyczewski , Bialik, and Brenner and the others, would have banished this reality from the world around them and from within their souls. In an eruption of rebellion and loathing, they portrayed this world as a swamp, a heap of dead words and extinguished souls. They reviled it and at the same time immortalized it in their books.’’1 Oz concludes by apostrophizing his reader: ‘‘However, you cannot afford to loathe this reality because between then and now it was choked and burned, exterminated by Hitler.’’2 In this statement, Oz eloquently articulates the notion that those seeking to understand a destroyed world will begin by looking to the literature of that world, written by its native sons and daughters, whether in a satiric or sincere light. My goal here is to identify, define, and analyze what I would call an ‘‘ethnopoetic’’ style in writers who wrote, after the Holocaust, about the world of Eastern European Jewry before the war. Ethnopoetics, in the sense that I employ it, is a hybrid of ethnography and poetics, of anthropological and literary aspirations. Writers of ethnopoetic texts respond to cultural 214 Chapter 10 obligations imposed by historical cataclysm to expand their literary texts beyond the literary. They employ a rhetoric that may even undermine the literary identity of their work. Ethnopoetics is born in literary texts as a response to critical and cultural forces that place those works, because of their subject matter, within an ethnographic, as opposed to a literary, trajectory .3 To probe the subtle balance between literary and ethnographic impulses in post-Holocaust depictions of pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jewish life, I will focus on two memoiristic works by two Eastern European –born Israeli authors and daughters of prestigious Hasidic rebbes: Malkah Shapiro (1894–1970) and Ita Kalish (1903–94). The term ‘‘ethnopoetics’’ has been used in a number of ways in literary theory over the past century.4 My sense of ethnopoetics is conceived partly in keeping with the notion of ethnopoetry, as introduced in 1908 by author and ethnographer S. An-sky (Semyon Akimovitch or Solomon Rappaport ).5 According to An-sky, ethnopoetry represents a synthesis of different levels of literary discourse: the popular and the elite, the historical and the contemporary, the secular and the sacred, taking on the valence of a new ‘‘Torah’’ for Eastern European Jewish culture at the turn of the twentieth century.6 In order to arrest the inevitable losses entailed in the breakdown of traditional Jewish life during that period, An-sky called for the collection of folklore and its transformation into ethnopoetry by up-and-coming young Jewish artists who could redeploy it for posterity and through it could create inspiration, Jewish cultural fervor, and historical consciousness in generations to come. Thus, ethnopoetry in An-sky’s view was fundamentally an act of cultural salvage. As David Roskies points out, however, before Ansky initiated his 1912–14 Jewish ethnographic expedition in Eastern Europe, his primary source for folk artifacts was limited primarily to ‘‘Yiddish and Hasidic storybooks.’’7 This dependence on literature for ethnographic materials by the father of modern Jewish ethnography himself anticipates the dependence for ethnographic materials on literary texts, within modern Jewish culture.8 Just as An-sky calls on ethnographically trained literary authors to combine their skills and to inscribe traditional ethnographically valuable Jewish literary forms into modern literature, thus preserving them for posterity, in the cases to be analyzed here, the work of literary memoirists is also viewed as a hybrid between the literary and the ethnographic. In An-sky’s conception of ethnopoetry, writers used literary expression in service to ethno- Ethnopoetics 215 graphic salvage; in the cases discussed below, writers’ literary expressions were deployed as works of auto-ethnographic witness.9 There is one major difference, however, between An-sky’s notion of ethnopoetry and my sense of ethnopoetics, as derived from post-Holocaust memoiristic works about pre-Holocaust Eastern European life...