The Trials of a Yiddish Writer in America: Jonah Rosenfeld's Autobiographical Novel

JAN SCHWARZ The Trials of a Yiddish Writer in America: Jonah Rosenfeld's Autobiographical Novel Jonah Rosenfeld was not appreciated by Yiddish criticism. I believe that Rosenfeld will first be discovered by a younger generation that has no knowledge of the earlier accounts and falsehoods. Then it will be revealed that this allegedly primitive person was a sophisticated writer, and one of our best.1 IN HIS ARTICLE "America in the Memoir Literature" (1945), the Yiddish critic Y. A. Rontsh mentioned that the 1930s and early 1940s were particularly rich in autobiographies by Yiddish writers in America: Recently there is a plethora of memoirs in Yiddish America. This is a sign that our literature is getting older; a result of the anniversaries. Yankev Milkh's Memoirs in the Morgn-frayhayt; Peretz Hirshbeyn's in Tog; Osip Dimov's in the Forverts; Mordkhe Dantsi's in Tog; and more and more are prepared. A. Raboy has published his memoirs in the Morgn-frayhayt. Yankev Glatstein's Yash is an original memoir of artistic scope.2 At the end of their artistic careers, these Yiddish writers who immigrated to the United States between 1899 and 1914 wrote autobiographical works that expressed the artistic centrality of their earliest, formative years in the PROOFTEXTS 18 (1998): 187-206 C 1998 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 188JAN SCHWARZ shtetls of Eastern Europe. Ruth R. Wisse's observation that Di yunge (the youngsters) "in their estrangement from America, . . . sought an alternate fictional homeland, and re-created themselves in the atmosphere they had left behind"3 also applies to the Yiddish autobiographer in America. The American Yiddish writer's loyalty to the Old World as his or her primary artistic source of inspiration was expressed sarcastically by the American Yiddish poet Moyshe Leyb Halpem in the poem Di letste (The last) (1924): May her right leg wither If she plucks a harp By strange waters Or forget the dear dung heap That had once been her homeland.4 Jonah Rosenfeld's autobiographical novel Eyner aleyn (1940) and Yankev Glatstein's Ven Yash iz geforn (1938) and Ven yash iz gekumen (1940) were arguably the most artistically innovative autobiographies of Yiddish writers in America during this period. These works each presented a complex, evolving self in the process of becoming; they accentuated modernist fragmentation by fusing genres such as the travelogue, the novel, and the shundroman (trashy novel) with autobiographical modes. Glatstein and Rosenfeld modernized the Yiddish autobiography's image of the Old World by avoiding nostalgic and sentimental approaches to Eastern European Jewry. The Yash books and Eyner aleyn were exceptional among autobiographies by Yiddish writers in America because of the personal urgency with which they re-created the Old World, transforming it into an artistic arena for autobiographical self-confrontation. The urgency with which Rosenfeld wrote Eyner aleyn originated in his conflict with Abraham Cahan, the editor-in-chief of the Forverts, who refused to print Rosenfeld's stories during the last ten years of his life (1934-44). Rosenfeld's portrait in Eyner aleyn of his troubled relationship with his balebos (boss) more than forty years earlier in Odessa was fueled by his conflict with Cahan. This drama is revealed in a series of unpublished letters between Rosenfeld and Cahan that are discussed below. As I will demonstrate, the book's narrative voice and themes must, to a large extent, be viewed as Rosenfeld 's artistic response to his exclusion from the Forverts while he was at the height of his creative powers in the second half of the 1930s. As noticed by the Yiddish critic Nakhmen Mayzel,5 Eyner aleyn belongs to the Yiddish autobiographical tradition in its portrait of the artist as child and young man. The three classical Yiddish writers S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Y. L. Peretz, had created the two dominant paradigms for the Yiddish autobiography. One was an ethnographic chronicle from bayamin hohem, bygone days, the Hebrew title of Jonah Rosenfeld's Autobiographical Novel189 Abramovitsh's autobiographical novel Shloyme reb khayims (1894-1914). The other was a set of metapoetic keys to the writer's oeuvre in Peretz's Mayne zikhroynes (1913). Abramovitsh's Shloyme reb khayims...