Polish Whiskers and the Jewish Tongue: On Y. L. Peretz Not Becoming a Polish Writer

Self-fashioning always involves some experience of threat, some effacement or undermining, some loss of self.

stephen greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning¹

Introduction

A curious experiment was conducted at the University of Massachusetts Extension School in the early 1930s. Abraham Aaron Roback, a professor of psychology, presented portraits of seemingly random people to his class and asked his students to determine their nationality. Roback, who was then writing a biography of Yitskhok Leybush Peretz (1852-1915), invented this imaginative experiment in order to examine whether, as many have suggested, Peretz passed as a Gentile, a non-Jew. With great satisfaction Roback reports that 'In … classes comprising a few hundred students, only two … identified Peretz's appearance as Jewish … all of the students … have taken him for a Russian, German, Englishman, Austrian, Frenchman, Irishman or Italian.'² Roback's findings were very much in line with the materials he was using for his biography. The rich memoir literature on Peretz is replete with comments on Peretz's Polish looks, Polish manners, and perfect mastery of the Polish language. The following piece, taken from Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk's memoirs, is a case in point. Trunk recounts an anecdote concerning the first meeting between Hershele, a folksy Yiddish poet, and Peretz. Hershele is so overwhelmed by Peretz's Polonized manners he is instinctively pushed to address the author in Polish:

Hershele, with his scrapbook of poems … once knocked on Peretz's door at his home at 1 Ceglana Street. Peretz, as always, welcomed his guests himself—and, as always, addressed unfamiliar faces in Polish: 'Co Pan potrzebuje?' ['How can I help you?']. Hershele was aghast upon seeing this porets [nobleman], with his big, yellow moustache, speaking such fine Polish. Nevertheless, he recognized that this was Y. L. Peretz. He couldn't answer in Polish, a language he had mastered quite poorly. He answered with the Polish of the Jewish masses, half Polish half Yiddish: 'Ja mam lidelekh' ['I have' (Polish) 'some little poems'

(Yiddish)].³

Hershele's ungrammatical, mixed language, half Yiddish and half Polish, suggests an imperfect, problematic, unfinished process of Polonization. Peretz, in contrast, appears to be the perfect product of acculturation: fully integrated in the Polish urban landscape, switching easily between different personas and different languages.

The fantasy of Peretz as a Yiddish writer who could pass as a Gentile, a Jew who has internalized the Polonization process to such an extent that his body has become Polonized, is arguably linked to the conceptualization of Peretz's writings, often presented as Jewish content in modern European attire. Some accounts pushed this analogy even farther, claiming that Peretz could not only 'pass' as a Pole, but could actually have become a Polish writer. For example, the Harvard Slavicist Leo Wiener suggested that Peretz's choice to write in Yiddish was a concession on the part of the author, who could easily have become a Polish writer if it were not for his commitment to the Jewish people: 'It is mere inertia and the desire to serve his people that keeps [Peretz] in the ranks of Judeo-German writers. He does not belong here … Peretz … offers gladly all he has, his genius, in the service of the lowly … For these reasons he writes in Judeo-German and not in any other language with which he is conversant.'⁴ This view of 'Peretz the goy', in terms of both linguistic practices and physical attributes, is by no means restricted to memoirs or to early scholarship. Chone Shmeruk qualifies Peretz as a person who 'perfectly mastered Polish and was very well read in Polish literature',⁵ and David Roskies describes him as 'looking for all the world like a Polish pan … a writer [whose] Polish does not reveal that he is a Jew'.⁶³⁴⁵⁶

A linguistic analysis of the texts Peretz wrote in Polish suggests a somewhat different picture, revealing the author's relatively limited proficiency in this language.⁷ The first comments on the quality of Peretz's Polish were made by contributors to the...