Enlightenment and Cultural Confusion: Mendele's The Mare and Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions

A persecuted minority that sees the dominant culture—the culture of the Oppressors—as a superior, desired ideal, a possible way out of social and cultural entrapment, is highly vulnerable to confusion in social relations and cultural values, acute self-criticism and disillusionment, leading to revolt. The individual within such a minority is more than usually susceptible to what Erikson calls "negative identity":

The individual belonging to an oppressed and exploited minority, which is aware of the dominant cultural ideals but prevented from emulating them, is apt to fuse the negative images held up to him by the dominant majority with the negative identity cultivated in his own group.¹

This essay explores two novels by minority victims of the "enlightenment" purveyed by dominant empires: The Mare (Yiddish versions: 1873, 1888, 1911; Hebrew version: 1911) by Mendele Mocher Sefarim ("Mendele the Bookpeddler," pen name of S.J. Abramowitz, 1835?-1917), and Nervous Conditions (1988) by Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959-) .² The characters in both novels are cursed with exceptional sensitivity to their social limitations. They begin with idealistic enthusiasm to improve their personal and social situations through education and the abdication of their 'native' identities. Education for both is the way out of the poverty trap. Their idealization of the dominant culture clashes with their growing awareness of the evil that poisons that culture (and ultimately proves politically fatal). Disillusionment sets in when they find themselves—their hopes and ambitions, the education they receive, the kind of person they are becoming—to be symptomatic of the social malaise from which they struggle to free themselves. Their bright-eyed innocent hope of making a mark in the world fades as they find the deck stacked against them. They cannot wrench themselves from their group of origin but must suffer the humiliation of catching up in a foreign culture that, while attractive in some ways, corrodes their self-esteem, and leads to what Fanon calls "colonization of the personality."³

1. Mendele and The Mare

To compare such different works and writers—one writing in Yiddish and Hebrew in Tsarist Russia, the other a Black woman writing in English of British-dominated Rhodesia in the 1960s—calls for justification. The differences make the similarities all the more surprising. Mendele is universally acknowledged as the "grandfather" both of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. The five novels which he wrote twice, first in Yiddish then in Hebrew, are the artistic foundations of these literatures.⁴ He is a pivotal figure in the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and a mordant social critic who revealed the corruption of diaspora Jewry, particularly in the shtetl (small town) and, implicitly, the need for Jewish nationalism. He is also the first Jewish novelist whose works are comparable with those of the great 19th century writers of fiction. He is particularly close to the Russian satirists Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Particularly as a Hebrew writer he breaks new ground in his use of classical sources, his manipulation of a parallel between present and past: in this respect, he anticipates modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Robert Alter has pointed out Mendele's pivotal role as a modern Hebrew novelist, in making "the heritage of the sages the medium of vividly satiric storytelling, pungent with the concrete details of quotidian reality."⁵ In sum, Mendele is indispensable in the canon of modern Jewish literature.⁶

Yet, Mendele is largely forgotten today. His works are set in a world that no longer exists: the Russian Pale of Settlement, the area on the western frontier of the Russian empire between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. Here the Russian Jews—the single largest Jewish community in the late 19th century, about five million, mostly uneducated, Yiddish-speaking, unassimilated into Russian society, living in medieval conditions, adhering for the most part to strictly...