The Fables of Eliezer Shteynbarg and the Modernist Relocation of Ethics

The Yiddish fables of Eliezer Shteynbarg offer an ideal study in the modernist subversion possible in a traditional folk form. His finely wrought verse fables exemplify the moral didacticism typical of their genre even as they expand its artistic claims. Shteynbarg is deservedly praised as Jewish literature's most skillful heir to Aesop, Jean de la Fontaine and Ivan Krylov, but unlike those masters, he was also a thoroughgoing modernist who relocated morality from the realm of behavior into the realm of speech. Shteynbarg shifts the fable's focus from a simple account of what happens to a complex and clever examination of how we talk about what happens. The very rigidity of the fable form emphasizes the ethically complex transactions that take place through conversation.