A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas

Preface

PREFACE FOR THREE YEARS, 1968-71, as part of the Jewish Studies Program of McGill University, I taught a course, in English translation , on the Yiddish narrative. By some great good fortune, the course attracted a disproportionately high number of excellent students whose curiosity exhausted the available materials and left us wishing for more. The present volume was prepared with their standards and questions in mind. The five short novels that comprise this book, here translated for the first time into English, were all written between the turn of the century and World War I, giving some indication of the thematic and stylistic scope of Yiddish literature in that brief period. They also share a common setting, the Eastern European Jewish town, or shtetl, then in a crisis of dissolution. It was thought that by bringing together these five similarly located and almost contemporaneous works in a single volume we might offer the reader a sharpened sense of the interpretive variety of the literature and provide substance for comparative analysis and appreciation. Each of these works deals in a different way with a single topic: the Jewish confrontation with modernity. The turning point in the confrontation was the abortive Russian revolution of 1905, when Jewish hopes for political liberalization reached a stormy climax, and then shattered in anger and despair. I. M. Weissenberg's novella , which opens this book, was an immediate response to that historical moment; its harsh emphasis on class warfare, vivid descriptions of brutality, and unmistakable pessimism, introduced a new tone and new literary idea of "reality" into Yiddish literature. Bergelson's short novel is no less concerned with the economic underpinnings of society and no less despairing in its vision, but the rhythmic, impressionistic prose and the slow probing of individual IX PREFACE sensibility make this a realistic work of quite another kind. The short novels of Opatoshu and Ansky. present the shtetl at somewhat greater remove. Both are actually romances, the emotional tendency heightened in the one case for the telling of a love-tale, in the other for a bitter drama of hate. With the single exception of Mendele's memoir, Of Bygone Days, the selections have been placed in their original order of publication, though it should be noted that a period of no more than two or three years separates any one from the next. Mendele's work, written before 1905, is here placed at the end as a kind of elegy, a harmonious portrait of a world the author knows to have passed. Despite the variety of literary modes, each of these works makes an earnest claim to be telling the truth. And to be sure, they do, in fact, enrich our understanding of East European Jewish life with their vivid descriptions of places, people, and events. Yet this is primarily a literary anthology; fact has been filtered through fiction, and the bias of the mediating imagination must be clearly understood . It seems necessary to make this standard admonition only because, in an understandable hunger for sheer information about the shtetl and the East European "roots" of modern Jewry, the reader may be led too hastily to accept interpretation as fact, to read a story as sociology or anthropology rather than as the work of fiction it is. Even though they are "about" the shtetl, these stories are really primarily about themselves, their truth the self-referring truth of literature. The intrinsic merit of these works has earned them a favored place in the Yiddish canon and recommends them to a wider readership. With the decline of spoken Yiddish in the United States, there is an understandable desire to have the major works made available in English, a desire this book hopes to satisfy at least in part. Introductory comments are sparingly included. For a broader introduction to the field of Yiddish, the reader is referred to the bibliography; for more intensive enjoyment—to the original texts. I would like to thank my brother, David G. Roskies, and my colleague, Raymond P. Scheindlin, for undertaking the translations of Opatoshu and Mendele, and Abraham Igelfeld for the first draft of Ansky's Behind a Mask. The results bear witness to their sensitivity and skill. PREFACE XI Louis Tencer seemed to welcome my weekly list of questions, and I certainly welcomed the precision of his information. I have also received, through the years, unstinting help from Shimshon Dunsky, Hertz Kalles, Rochel...