A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas

BEHIND A MASK

BEHIND A MASK S, ANSKY INTRODUCTION TO BEHIND A MASK IN THE first chapter of his Memoirs, Ansky* recounts the adventures of his seventeenth year, the year 1881, when he left his birthplace, Vitebsk, to become a private tutor in a neighboring shtetl, "with the purpose of spreading the ideas of the Haskalah among local youths and of opening their eyes. "His undertaking was characteristic of the period: a young man, inspired by the ideals of the Jewish Enlightenment to which he has only recently been exposed, tries to share his new rational, skeptical approach to knowledge with the students he undertakes to tutor, and thereby to subvert the cultural conservatism of their home and community. Meanwhile the shtetl, accustomed to pitting itself against external enemies, but threatened beyond sanity by this enemy from within, does its best, which is its worst, to expel the heretic from its midst, t The Memoirs cover the same ground as Ansky's fictional treatment of the subject in Behind a Mask, which includes some of the same incidents and even some of the same phraseology, although its *Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport assumed the pseudonym of Ansky, son of Anna, when he became a Russian, later a Yiddish, writer. An English translation of this part of Ansky's Memoirs is to be found in The Golden Tradition, ed. Lucy Dawidowicz, pp. 306-311. tFor a very similar account, see Abraham Cahan's autobiography, The Education of Abraham Cahan (Jewish Publication Society, 1970), early chapters. 215 2 l 6 YIDDISH NOVELLAS tone is noticeably different. The Memoirs take the progressive idealism of the boy at face value. Like the youth he was, the mature Ansky expresses outrage at the vicious fanaticism of the orthodox townspeople who burned "guilty" books at a private auto-da-fe and who held the Maskilim responsible for the anti-Semitic pogroms instigated by the Tsar. The story, on the other hand, is more even-handed in its characterization of the struggle. Traditional Jews and rebellious enlighteners figure here as antagonists in a fierce cultural battle, in which the claims of one side are put forth no more persuasively than the convictions of the other, and the focus is on the hardening, darkening atmosphere rather than on the stated causes of the clash. In his Memoirs, Ansky is content to describe the encounter between the Haskalah and the solidified East European Jewish tradition as a conflict of world views; in Behind a Mask, he concentrates on the strategy, on the cat-and-mouse games in which deception becomes an end in itself, and on the mounting tensions that could, and in this story do, lead to madness. The subject of Behind a Mask is the stuff of Jewish life, but the literary spirit is that of Russian mysticism. As in The Dybbuk, Ansky s world-renowned drama, characters seem possessed by a driving force that propels them beyond self-interest or any "reasonable " calculation of means and ends. The atmosphere throughout is morbid and mysterious, the fascination with subterfuge and secrecy all the more striking because the ostensible subject is the spreading clarity of enlightenment and rationality. In the plot itself, the young Maskilim of V do seem to come out ahead of the thin-lipped preservationists of Bobiltseve, but thematically, the pretenses of the Haskalah are decisively exposed by the wholly irrational, subconscious , and self-destructive instincts of its leading proponent, Krantz. If the man of light succeeds in his venture, it is only because he is so thoroughly possessed by the powers of darkness. Ansky himself was a dedicated socialist, and for several years served as secretary to Pyotr Lavrov, the great Russian Populist theoretician who held that "socialism was a movement of ideas deriving much of its authority from ethical imperatives."* Like Lavrov, Ansky seems to have felt that the ideals of socialism could best be disseminated by rational persuasion. At the same time, Ansky's interest in "the people" was that of an inspired ethnogra- *Avraham Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution (Collier, 1962), p. 198. BEHIND A MASK pher and folklorist, trying to peel away all the later "rational"accretions in an effort to reconstruct the fundamental myths of Jewish society. In much of his writing he appears as a scholar and critic, but in his poems, dramas, and stories, he gives himself over to the "lower depths/' transferring to sophisticated literature those conflicts that seemed to...