Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry

5. Dead Children of the Hebrew Renaissance: The Conscription Story as Nationalist Myth

140 5 DEAD CHILDREN OF THE HEBREW RENAISSANCE: THE CONSCRIPTION STORY AS NATIONALIST MY TH an archaic avant-garde Written between the mid-1880s and the revolution of 1905, the conscription stories that appeared in the work of authors associated with the Hebrew Renaissance anticipated the moment of national rebirth. The contemporary mood of apocalyptic expectation projected back onto the Nicholaevan period raised the coming of the Jewish nation to the level of prophetic certainty. This, at a time when the historical future of Zionism was by no means assured; the movement achieved its greatest political and social victories only during the interwar period.∞ The paradigm shift inaugurated in the writing of the national revival was, in fact, greater than the sum of its Zionist parts.≤ Abramovich’s younger followers embraced his Jewish populism, rooted in a sustained and compelling critique of emancipation, as the rationale for the creation of modern Jewish culture. Long before the Zionist leadership of- ficially expressed its begrudging commitment to cultural ‘‘work in the diaspora ’’ (Ger. Gegenwartsarbeit, lit. ‘‘work in the present’’), Russian Jews had been reaping the literary fruits of their own imminent revival.≥ Translating 141 dead children of the hebrew renaissance the imaginary return to the pre-reform shtetl into the ideological register of collective mythology, the wayward sons of the Haskalah produced a parable of miraculous resistance to the secularization of Jewish experience and expression . The apocalyptic drama of national rebirth offered a ‘‘mythopoetic’’ resolution to the tensions that beset the maskilic attitude toward emancipation .∂ While urging the necessary death of the nation-in-exile, the literature of the Hebrew Renaissance effectively ensured the survival of galut as the repository of Jewish consciousness.∑ Continued imaginative investment in the Jewish topology of the Pale of Settlement, even as its social and cultural boundaries steadily eroded from within, partook of the same ambivalence about the ‘‘unserfment’’ of collective Jewish life that shaped Abramovich’s identity as a writer. Social, economic , and legal pressures unmoored increasing numbers of Jews from their places of origin; the secular effects of this process, nowhere more evident than in the fractured lives of Jewish enlighteners-turned-nationalists themselves, made the task of literary ingathering that much more urgent. To the chagrin of Russian reactionaries who everywhere sought evidence of pernicious Jewish solidarity, Russian-Jewish life at the turn of the century was subject both to the continuing effacement of formal divisions of estate and confession ostensibly dividing Jews from non-Jews, and to the sharpening of the same differences from everyone else that allegedly united Jews with one another.∏ The railroad and the spread of Jewish print culture (thanks both to increasing literacy and the loosening of censorship restrictions) in Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish helped to bridge the distance between the Pale and the rest of the empire.π A growing population of Jewish travelers—migrants, commercial agents, students, and revolutionary activists—undermined the sense of provincial isolation.∫ Steady urbanization and the uneven impact of capitalism on Jewish occupational structure radically stratified Jewish society .Ω While there were greater opportunities for personal enrichment through investment, there was no protection against the vagaries of the market. Along with the exponential growth of the Jewish mercantile and professional population came, for the first time, the development of a Jewish proletariat as well as the expansion of a visible underclass without steady means of support and only occasional employment. Internal social cohesion continued to decline, as an assertive orthodox leadership, buoyed by the support of a conservative regime, closed ranks against impiety.∞≠ The generally low ebb of religious observance and the erosion of confessional discipline provided additional impetus for the development of secular ideas about collective life; these took root not only among Jewish students and Russian radicals but also within the expanding network of middle-class philanthropic , civic, and cultural organizations.∞∞ A vibrant secular institutional life presented an alternative to the synagogue and to the more established forms of Jewish association, even as the world of the traditional learned elite came 142 conscription and the search for modern russian jewry to comprise its own special subculture self-consciously elevated above what its leadership disdained as religious philistinism and popular superstition.∞≤ The centripetal effects of socioeconomic and cultural change exacerbated long-standing anxieties in enlightened Jewish circles about the future of Jewish life in Russia. Widespread disagreement as to the nature of community came to the fore during the first decade...