Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914 (review)

To write a literary history, even one that covers only nine years, is a project inherently full of sacrifices and tradeoffs. Consider the immense task that lay before Mikhail Krutikov as he set out to write this important new book.

Firstly, the years 1905 to 1914 were anni mirabili in the world of Yiddish publishing. The three “classic” Yiddish writers, Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, were continuing to publish important work, but a new generation of writers, including Sholem Asch, S. An-sky, Isaac Meir Weissenberg, David Bergelson, David Ignatov, and Joseph Opatoshu, were beginning to touch on new themes, new styles, to carve out a place of their own in the field. The Yiddish reader of the time had an embarrassment of riches; the contemporary critic is faced with a commensurately large challenge of selection and analysis.

But the sense of immensity comes not merely from the amount of work being published, but from the sense shared by readers then and now that the period was one of monumental historical change. For writers, constantly aware of the time of their times, the sweeping rise in immigration to the United States, the establishment of new political parties, movements, and even attempted revolutions, and the increasing rate of economic change among Jews of the period had to be filtered, sifted, and considered when thinking about how to write their respective works. Krutikov, a literary historian and critic influenced by a “special interest in the Marxist school” (p. 8), could do no less.

As Krutikov points out, the vast majority of critical works on Yiddish literature have been diachronic, not synchronic, and so a work like this is particularly welcome, as Krutikov strives not merely to implicitly identify the major works and authors of the period, but to explain how they demonstrated a sea change from the works of Yiddish writers of the previous period, ones who either had yet to encounter the “crisis of modernity” or who consciously avoided it altogether.

Were one simply to seek an overview to the major works and authors of the period, as well as the seminal critical responses to those works and authors, one would be hard pressed to do better than this work. Given that many of these works, popular or critically feted at the time, have now fallen into obscurity among all but scholars of Yiddish literature (for example, many of the works remain untranslated, and of those that were, few of the translations in question remain in print), Krutikov takes little for granted: in giving plot summaries that are detailed but not burdensome, as well as concise and well-crafted, he both explicates and advocates. Many who read this book will be convinced, for example, to pick up a copy of Ansky’s Pionern,or Asch’s Meri, and we may hope that translations will soon follow. Krutikov also bridges high and low culture, paying as much and as careful attention to the works of Mordekhai Spektor and Leon Kobrin as to David Bergelson or David Ignatov.

Krutikov also is well aware of the significant tradition of Yiddish literary criticism concerning the seminal works he discusses: more recent names like Wisse, Roskies, and Miron coexist cheek by jowl with Bal-Makhshoves, Dobrushin, Niger, Mayzel, and Rivkin, to name just a few. While a history of Yiddish literary criticism remains a significant desideratum in the field, Krutikov’s discussion of the various critical opin ions on authors and works may well be among the most useful overviews to scholars wishing to treat in detail the books he is forced to discuss in only a few pages.

It is this limitation that is one of the major, though inherent, disappointments of the work, if one may use the term without prejudice: Krutikov’s own readings of the works, building on other critical comment when sensible and wholly original when desirable, are compelling, persuasive, sensitive to theme, image, and language. The reader finds himself wishing...