Gender and Assimilation in I. J. Schwartz's "New Earth" (1921–1922)

Errata: The first line of Shelia Jelen’s article, “Gender and Assimilation in I. J. Schwartz’s ‘New Earth’ in (1921–1922),” in our July 2020 issue (iss. 13, no. 2), should have read: “According to critics and lay readers alike, I. J. Schwartz’s Kentucky is unlike any other Yiddish poem of his time.”

Introduction

According to critics and lay readers alike, I. J. Schwartz’s Kentucky is unlike any other Yiddish poem of his time. Serialized in the radical Yiddish journal Tsukunft from 1918 to 1922, and published in book form in 1925, Kentucky is read mainly for its documentary or ethnographic value within the history of Jewish Lexington despite the fact that it is clearly a work of fiction,¹ or as an exemplar of Yiddish modernism because of its affinity with Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass."² The poem has rarely been read closely for the story it tells about Jewish women in immigrant families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This essay will look at the representation of one of the poem's female protagonists, Sarah, the wife of Joshua, a peddler turned businessman from Eastern Europe, who makes a life for his family in the American South during the postbellum period.³ More specifically, this paper discusses how, through the development of Sarah, Schwartz's epic poem "Nayerd" (New Earth), at the heart of the poem-cycle "Kentucky," contains echoes and developments of popular American-Jewish discourses on gender and assimilation in the first decades of the twentieth century. According to Paula Hyman and Marion Kaplan, Jewish wives and mothers in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America, as well as in Western Europe, were appointed champions of traditional Judaism by the popular press in the face of widespread assimilation and secularization.⁴ In this essay I will consider how this presentation of wife and mother as "Priestess and Hausfrau," in Kaplan's terminology, is echoed, challenged, adopted, and ultimately reconfigured, in Schwartz's "New Earth."

Schwartz's presentation of assimilation is fundamentally ambivalent. It is inevitable and desirable on the one hand (as articulated through the character of Joshua), and lamentable and tragic on the other (as articulated through the character of Sarah). Avraham Novershtern has remarked on Schwartz's poem that, unlike other Yiddish literary works of the period, Schwartz does not lament assimilation. He seems, Novershtern argues, to wholly embrace it.⁵ In Schwartz's depiction of Sarah, however, we see a different understanding of assimilation than that presented in the main narrative of Joshua's business success and Sarah and Joshua's family's acclimation to life in the southern United States. While on one level the poem celebrates the transformation of an impoverished Jewish immigrant family into a prosperous, well-respected American one, on another level, through its depiction of Sarah in parallel to a discourse of Jewish literacy and its loss, Schwartz gives us a glimpse of a more qualified celebration of that transformation.

I. J. Schwartz and "New Earth"

Israel Jacob Schwartz, born in 1885 in Patrasiunai, a small village near Kovno, Lithuania, immigrated to New York City in 1906.⁶ Enrolling in high school at the age of twenty, Schwartz supported himself teaching Hebrew, first in Brownsville, then in the Bronx.⁷ Upon marrying, he was encouraged by his sister Lena to move to Lexington, Kentucky, where she had se led some years earlier with her husband, Samuel Krasne, a kosher butcher, rabbi, and cantor.⁸ When Schwartz moved from New York City to Lexington, Kentucky in 1918 to open a millinery shop with his wife Mary and daughter Sylvia, Schwartz arrived in a town of 46,000 people, only 200 of whom were Jewish.⁹ He left behind a bustling Yiddish literary and arts community to which he had already made a significant contribution as a member of the up-and-coming group of poets called "Di Yunge" (The Young Ones).¹⁰

Kentucky is made up of nine distinct poems: three short lyrics ("To Mary and Tselia," "Bluegrass," "Kentucky"), a two-hundred-page epic...