I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (review)

138 SHOFAR Fall 1992 Vol. 11, No. 1 I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, by Ruth R. Wisse. The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991. 128 pp. Not since Solliptzin's study of Peretz some thirty years ago has there been a serious effort in English to comprehend the Peretz phenomenon. The general paucity of Peretz studies reflects a waning interest in this iconic figure since World War II. "Is Peretz less compelling today because of an esthetic reassessment, or because of the substance of his thought?" (p. xvii). This is the challenge that Ruth Wisse poses in the introduction of her monograph and to which she attempts a response. Each of the three chapters is organized with a dyadic title (1. Reason and Faith, 2. Nation and Class, 3. Hope and Fear) in order to bring out the contradictory arid contrasting forces at work in Peretz's thinking and art. Chapter 1 defines Peretz's world view as that ofthe first-generation secular Jew who still possesses the tradition but who rejects its praxis because of his rational doubts while still seeking to preserve its moral richness within Western esthetic forms and logic. Chapter 2 defines the conflict within Peretz's socio-political vision, especially in the 1890s, between his ideological commitment to the resurrection of the peoplehood (the nation) as a collective enterprise and his admiration of socialist goals, on the one hand, and on the other his discomfort with socialist methodologies of class struggle which would be divisive of the Jewish nation. Attempting to draw the masses out of their passivity and create within them a "political will" allied to their "religious roots," Peretz could appreciate and yet not adhere to either Bundist socialism or Zionist utopianism, for his perspective, according to Wisse, lay closer to the Dubnovian ideal of cultural national autonomy in situ. Chapter 3, "Hope and Fear," a title borrowed from a 1906 address by Peretz, reflects his growing pessimism brought on by external and internal factors that chastened his idealistic vision of a humane new European order. The new generation 'went beyond Peretz's "inchoate social criticism and religious reformism" (p. 94) and shaped an activist socialist agenda that rejected his liberal secular humanism. And his hope of a Polish-Jewish entente in a reborn Polish Respublica foundered on the rising tide of antisemitism. Wisse's Peretz, rinsed of any sticky ideological labels placed upon him by earlier Yiddish critics, emerges as a liberal wary of socialist "political correctness," of assimilationist enticements, of desuet religious orthodoxies , and of foreign antisemitic nationalisms. Her Peretz appears as a mitteleuropa turn-of-the-century intellectual of a minority culture driven by a positivist belief in progress especially through education and the Book Reviews 139 construction of a new national culture leading to, if not accompanied by, a political and social enfranchisement with the European context. Unfortunately history, as Wisse observes, refused his prescription. Rather than interpret how and why he espoused or rejected his various social, cultural, and ideological positions, Wisse has preferred a descriptive presentation in the monograph. Peretz's stories and plays are skillfully integrated as illustrative material in each chapter to reinforce her understanding ofPeretz's perceptions and , perspectives. For the specialist, the texts follow the "established" canon and were shrewdly chosen, no doubt, for ready availability in English translation, including her new 1 L. Peretz Reader, of which this study may well serve as prolegomenon. After providing a resume of the plot, she quotes an appropriate passage and then interprets the text on its thematic level, usually eschewing the "received" perspective of the older Yiddish critics-but footnoting their contribution. Monish, The Reise, Bontshe Shvayg, The Cabalists, Neilah in Hell, The Golden Chain, etc. are sensitively evoked, but their function and meaning are linked too facilely to a psychoanalytical determinism in Peretz's biography (abandoning his flight from his childhood home, his disbarment, his imprisonment) that neither enriches the hermeneutics of the story nor elucidates his sociocultural activities. Was his discovery ofJewish folklore and the Hasidic tale really the effect of imprisonment and the basis of writing Hasidish? Throughout the...