From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener by Mikhail Krutikov (review)

Since the rise of Yiddish as a literary language, its writers have been plagued by the question of its future—spoken, written, and read. Sholem Aleichem, the most widely known of the three “classic” Yiddish writers (di klasikers), spoke Russian at home. Abraham Cahan, the larger-than-life editor and publisher of America’s premier Yiddish daily, Forverts, utilized his paper to facilitate the Eastern European Jewish immigrants’ process of acculturation, thus hastening that organ’s decline in influence. Long before the Holocaust sealed the fate of Yiddish culture in Europe, writers and artists who worked in that language understood that their task was as much one of cultural preservation as of cultural production. This consciousness of the vulnerability of Yiddish, Mikhail Krutikov suggests, goes a long way toward resolving the mystery that throbs at the heart of his recent subject, the life and intellectual journey of Meir Wiener.

In his twenties, the Yiddish writer and critic Meir Wiener underwent a “conversion to communism” (335) so powerful that this young man, who had been born in Kraków, educated in Vienna and Switzerland, and raised to speak three languages (none of them Russian), decided to emigrate to the Soviet Union. He did so in 1926, beginning a career as a literary scholar and critic that combined daring with caution, and youthful naiveté with a savvy prudence about how the Soviet system worked and how best to work the system. Apparently lured to the Soviet Union by the promise of publication for his first novel, Wiener would continue to write fiction. However, his novels never won for him the esteem or the authority secured by his criticism and work as a literary historian.

Krutikov’s painstakingly researched intellectual biography earns the reader’s curiosity and ultimate gratitude by placing his rather narrow subject within a much broader intellectual and social context. Thus, he begins by setting Wiener’s youth against a review of “the Jewish Question” from Herder to Buber, moving deftly between biography and intellectual history. The early chapters are enlivened by memoirs written by two of Wiener’s sisters at the behest of other scholars, as well as their correspondence with their older brother. Birth order was of great consequence; slightly younger sister Erna Adlersberg described her brother in loving but much more measured tones than their much younger sister Franzi Gross, who was awed by the family’s distinguished eldest brother. Since the book veers very little into the personal and Wiener’s eventual marriage is mentioned only once and within parentheses, his sisters’ recollections furnish as vivid a portrait as we are to glimpse of Wiener as person. Krutikov goes on to describe the beginnings of Wiener’s career in postwar Vienna, a period when he raised the ire of Gershom Scholem and so entered the first of several intellectual skirmishes that would punctuate his writing life.

Chapter 3 details the so-called Kiev group of writers, Wiener’s turn from German to Yiddish, and his nearly simultaneous turn to communism. While “Marxist ideas play a very small role in his pre-Soviet writing” (96), Wiener’s ideologically driven emigration was neither inexplicable nor unprecedented. Postwar Vienna’s atmosphere of political and cultural conservatism, attended by antisemitism, impelled a number of Austrian communists and socialists to seek better fortunes in the Soviet Union during the interwar period (96). The next chapter follows Wiener’s initial arrival in Kharkov and his move to an academic post in Kiev and richly summarizes his modernist novel Ele Faleks untergang (Ele Falek’s Downfall). The work was published at what, in retrospect, was to be the last hospitable moment for its expressionist aesthetic, for as Krutikov relates, “The eventful year 1929 marked the watershed between the period of relative stylistic and thematic freedom and the new era of the ideological...