A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas

A SHTETL

ASHTETL I. M. WEISSENBERG INTRODUCTION TO A SHTETL IN 1904 the young Sholom Asch made his literary reputation with The Shtetl, an idyll of the Jewish small town in Poland. Published when the shtetl was already going to seed, or its inhabitants to America, Asch's novella captures what wasf or is imagined as being, its golden age, a time when Jews were rooted in their own traditions and in harmony with both the Polish peasantry and the aristocracy. Asch describes a season in the life of the town's leading citizen and his household. Chapters are arranged by holiday, from Purim in spring to Simchat Torah in the fall; each occurrence in the life of family and town, set into the Jewish calendar, is hallowed by its sanctity and exalted by the imagery of ancient ritual. Critics hailed the work asu the first yea-saying in modern Yiddish literature." In sharp, angry reaction to the romanticism of Asch, Weissenberg published his literary rejoinder two years later, Haunting a title as close to the original as parody would allow. A Shtetl deliberately limits its focus to the socioeconomic struggle of the Polish Jewish town, in particular to the growing friction within the Jewish community between the emergent proletariat and the wealthier Jews, newly dubbed the bourgeoisie. Weissenberg follows Asch's calendar, but the festivals, shorn of sanctity, are now regarded as occasions for social protest In place of the communal harmony that Asch locates in the shtetl of memory, Weissenberg offers the mounting violence, even the brutality, of the contemporary town, 25 26 YIDDISH NOVELLAS rent by class dissension, united only by its common impotence in the face of Tsarist or peasant might. * "It was," as the story begins, "between minkha and maariv," that interval between late afternoon and evening prayers that is here suggestive of the transitional nature of East European Jewish life itself in the first decade of the century. Slowly and clumsily, over the spring and summer of 1905, the year in which the book's action occurs, the artisans and small factory workers of a town in the vicinity of Warsaw discover their collective power and forge a "union, "t Sorrowing ballads of unrequited love give way to rhythmic hymns of political allegiance, t The first tentative and ineffectual outbursts against traditional community leadership evolve into organized strikes that actually achieve at least some of their aims. But once its youthful workers are organized, the town becomes the object of the political designs of two large political parties, each seeking to expand its influence in the area: first the "Bund," the Jewish Social Democratic Union, whose socialism included provision for Jewish cultural autonomy; then the Polish Socialist Party, in which similar socioeconomic ideals were combined with an appeal to Polish national aspirations. The process of radicalization as it is chronicled in A Shtetl was repeated in hundreds of similar towns in that year when political and economic strikes together are said to have involved some three million men. § Within the story, however, the larger historical context is blurred, and lines of political demarcation appear as clouded as they are in the consciousness of the characters. For Itchele the bootmaker, there is no appreciable difference between the contending parties, nor can he easily distinguish between a Polish religious procession and a would-be workers' march. The shtetl is both place of action and confining point of view. *An outstanding interpretation of the novel is available in Yiddish: Uriel Weinreich, "I. M. Vaysenberg's nit-dershatst Shtetl" (I. M. Weissenberg's Unappreciated Shtetl) in Di goldene keyt, XLI, pp. 135-143. tWeissenberg's compression of a lengthy social process into a single fictional year may be compared with an excellent historical account of very similar events in Ezra Mendelsohn s Class Struggle in the Pale (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). tit may be interesting to note that the "hymn" sung by the shoeworkers in this novel is "Di shvue," (The Vow) the Bund's anthem, composed by S. Ansky whose novella, Behind a Mask, appears elsewhere in this volume.§Leon Trotsky gives the count as 2,863,000. See The Russian Revolution, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York, 1959), p. 32. A SHTETL 27 The novella's most interesting technical achievement is its creation of a collective hero. Some Yiddish writers, Sholom Aleichem among them, had used the Jewish town as a national and cultural unit, allowing the...