Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries

Chapter 3. The Merchant at the Threshold: Rashel Khin, Osip Mandelstam, and the Poetics of Apostasy

CHAPTER 3 The Merchant at the Threshold: Rashel Khin, Osip Mandelstam, and the Poetics of Apostasy Amelia Glaser And Jesus . . . made a scourge of small cords [and] drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables; and said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise. —John 2:13–17, King James version The entrance to the Trinity Church in the Kiev Cave Monastery is bordered by a peculiar eighteenth-century fresco, illustrating the above passage from the Gospel According to John. In case there is any doubt as to the saved and condemned in the scene, Jesus has a full face, reminiscent of the holy figures of Orthodox icons, whereas most of the moneychangers show only one eye, an iconographic symbol of evil.1 The latter are depicted in swarthy baroque colors; their fleshy arms shield their heads and their spilling wares as they make haste to leave. What is striking about this particular fresco is that beyond the theological relationship between Jesus and the moneychangers , it displays a tension between the Christian majority and Jewish minority in the Russian Empire. At least two of the merchants wear yarmulkes ; others have beards and hats characteristic of the Jews of the czarist empire in the eighteenth century. With his raised arms and two scourges (more evocative of a pogrom than an act of Christ), this Jesus appears to Merchant at the Threshold 67 be driving the group of Jewish merchants downward, out the actual church door. I have chosen this fresco to begin my discussion of two early twentiethcentury Russian Jewish writers, Rashel Khin (1861–1928) and Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), not as a means of historicizing the place of Jews in the Russian Empire. Rather, the New Testament dichotomy between the vendor and the church sheds light on the choice of a number of assimilating Jewish writers to depict the church and the marketplace as symbols of the desirable Russian high culture and the undesirable Jewish place of origin. As Efraim Sicher has observed in his study of Jews in Russian literature after the Revolution , ‘‘[I]nherent in the systematic ordering of artistic space is the tension between the rejected svoi (one’s own) of the home and the rejecting chuzhoi (other, alien) of the outside. Each area is designated as bounded or nonbounded by evaluative markers, while the border (doors, windows, courtyards , walls) between them is a crossing point of plot action.’’2 Rashel Khin and Osip Mandelstam schematize the entrance of the Jewish writer into the bounded space of culture’s cathedral, and the subsequent rejection of the unbounded landscapes of lower-class, Pale of Settlement Jewish culture.3 Rashel Khin and Osip Mandelstam were deeply engaged in the literary inner circle of their respective ages, Khin in Moscow and Mandelstam in Petersburg. Both, significantly, had fathers who had made their way to these Russian cities as merchants. Both Mandelstam and Khin underwent quick conversions to Christianity, primarily for pragmatic reasons, but nonetheless , in their writing exhibit a deep fascination with Christian aesthetics. Both address the influence of certain specters of Jewish culture on the assimilated Jew’s identity.4 Whereas Khin presents a character who is sacrificed at the irreconcilable intersection of her Jewish heritage and her Christian milieu, Mandelstam presents this intersection as part of the unchangeable flow of Western history. The daughter of a successful Jewish merchant, Rashel Khin grew up in Moscow.5 In 1884, the Russian Jewish journal Voskhod began to serialize The Misfit (Ne ko dvoru), a novella by the then little-known Khin (a second edition was completed in 1895). The Misfit portrays a young woman, torn between her Christian upper-class schoolmates and her secular Jewish family , struggling to make sense of a Jewish identity that she knows little about. Khin, in her neo-Romantic novel, offers us a fictional heroine with the kind of marginal existence that would soon come to fascinate Russian high modernists, Jewish and Christian alike. 68 Chapter 3 Born in Warsaw to an assimilated mother and an assimilating father, Osip Mandelstam was raised in Petersburg. Mandelstam was, along with Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, a founding member of Acmeism, a Russian high-modernist poetic movement with a belief that poetry can bridge classical art forms, Hellenism, and...