Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.303 January 31, 1995 1) Galitsianer II (Leonard Prager) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 29 Oct 92 12:47:36 IST From: Leonard Prager Subject: Galitsianer To give an adequate account of the Galician share in the achievment of which Mendelsohn speaks would fill many lengthy monographs. By sketching the lives and accomplishments of three modern, and in certain respects representative, Galician Jews -- Mordecai Gebirtig, Ignacy Schiper and Dov Sadan -- I may be able to evoke at least the outlines of a living collective portrait. (22) Mordecai Gebirtig Mordecai Gebirtig (1877-1942) was born in Krakow and lived in its Jewish working-class quarter all his life, one which was ended by a Nazi bullet in the Krakow ghetto on the infamous "Bloody Thursday" of June 4th, 1942. He is the preeminent "folk" artist in Yiddish literature and song, two realms which are united in his simple yet masterly lyrics, for most of which he himself composed the score. In characterizing him as a "folk" poet-musician, no condescension is intended, but rather acknowledgement of his universal appeal and of the origins and the course of growth of his art. He was self-taught in music, played the shepherd's pipe well, and tapped out tunes on the piano with one finger. He earned his livelihood as a furniture worker; music and theater were avocations. From 1906 he was a member of the Jewish Amateur Troupe in Krakow. He also wrote songs and theater reviews for _Der sotsial-demokrat_, the Yiddish organ of the Jewish Social-Democratic Party, to which he belonged. This party was in effect the Galician Bund, which after World War I fused with the Polish Bund to become the great Yiddishist party of the Polish Jewish proletariat, whose banner called for Jewish cultural autonomy in a democratic and socialist Poland. This movement was ultimately more effective in the realm of culture than in that of politics. The Jewish workers' movement from its beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century became the cradle of numerous amateur theater groups, choirs, lending libraries, discussion groups, and periodicals. It was in such an environment that Gebirtig developed, encouraged by such professional writers and Yiddishist culural activists as Avrom Reyzn, who for a time lived and published a journal in Krakow. His talent was his own, but he took the language, themes, types, tone and timbre of his art from his surroundings, in some measure continuing the musical tradition of the popular Galician cabaret entertainers known as the Broder Singers, who in turn were beholden to the yet older and still vital tradition of the batkhn's (wedding jester's) improvisatory art. Gebirtig served for five years in the Austro-Hungarian army and it was only in 1920, under the second Polish Republic, that he published his first collection of songs, significantly entitled Folkstimlekh ('of the folk'). His songs spread quickly even before they were published, and many people regarded them as folksongs whose author or authors were anonymous. Adopted by leading Yiddish players such as Molly Picon, Gebirtig's songs became staples of numerous regular as well as improvised theatrical productions wherever Yiddish theatre was performed. It is not an exaggeration to say that Gebirtig's songs were sung and lovingly sung the world over. Gebirtig's art appears to have won full recognition in the new Poland. This is gratifying, yet it is regrettable that too often his repertoire is rendered in a sentimental, even a saccharine manner. (22a) We need to remember that Gebirtig is most famous for his song "Undzer shtetl brent," which was written as early as 1938 following a pogrom in Pszytyk and which was later adopted by the Jewish youth of Krakow and others as a battlesong against the Nazis. In his song "S'tut vey" ('It Hurts'), Gebirtig is shattered by the absence of solidarity of all Polish citizens against the Nazi invaders. Dated Krakow February 1940, it is a song directed against those Poles who laughed when German soldiers humiliated and tortured old Jews in the streets of Krakow. "Un zey! / Vis zaynen itst vi mir / Geblibn on a land. / Vos filn itst vi mir / Dem vildn soynes hand, / Lakhn, freyen zikh un lakhn / In aza moment, Ven poyln's shtolts un koved / Vert azoy geshendt. / Ven poylns vaysn odler / Valgert zikh af der erd.... / Iz dos nisht a shand / An eybiker far zey? ('And it is they! / Who like us / Have lost a country,/ Who like us now feel / The savage enemy's strokes. / They laugh, they make merry and laugh / At this hour, / When Poland's pride and honor / Are being raped, / When Poland's White Eagle / Lies in the dirt.... / Is this not / To their eternal shame?') (23) Gebirtig has often been called "der zinger fun der umgekumener yidisher mase in poyln" ('the singer of the murdered Jewish masses of Poland'. Gebirtig's song "It Hurts" expresses what most Jews have always felt and what courageous Poles like Jan Blonski have clearly said on this painful subject: the Poles could not have saved the Jews from their fate and are not responsible for that fate, but they could certainly have shown more compassion to the Jews in their agony. (24) Ignacy Schiper Ignacy Schiper (or Schipper) was born Yitskhok Shiper in 1884, but changed his name when, as with so many young Jews of his day and place, Polish became his principal language and culture. A born historian, he published an essay on the pre-eighteenth century history of the Jews of Tarnow (Yiddish: Torne), his place of birth, before he was twenty (25); he was still doing original historical work on the eve of his heroic death in Majdanek in 1943. A sketch of the life and career of a man with as many interests as Schiper had will be fragmentary. He was an attorney, one of the chief leaders of the Zionist movement in Poland, for many years as a labor Zionist and later as a general Zionist, representing that party in the Polish Sejm. He pioneered in several historical fields -- the economic history of Polish Jewry (26) and the history of the Yiddish theater, to name but two. He was an avid local historian and a collector and student of Jewish folklore, an enthusiast and critic of Yiddish theater, a lover and a scholar of Yiddish and its literature, an historian of Polish chasidism, a lecturer, educator, essayist, journalist. Nor does this exhaust the list of his activities. Influenced at school by the social and national ideals of the Polish neoromantics, Schiper was early won to Jewish nationalism. This could then take two different forms, that of the autonomists who saw their future in a pluralistic Poland and that of the Zionists, who banked on an independent Jewish homeland in its own territory. Though a lifelong Zionist, Schiper was not of the ordinary cut: he defended Yiddishist positions against both the Hebraists and the Polonizers. In this reflection of intellectual independence, one glimpses Schiper's profound sense of identity with "amkho," the ordinary, everyday simple Jewish man and woman -- an attitude one would expect in a Gebirtig, but not in a Polonized attorney with a Dr. title before his name. Schiper worked actively for the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) and as a leading member of its Historical Commission (which issued the impressive series _Historishe shriftn fun yivo_) was often consulted. In a letter to his fellow Commission member, the historian, Elias Tchertikower, Schiper wrote: "I subscribe to writing history insofar as it relates to present-day problems. I feel that we should make a conscious effort to adhere to this principle, namely of supporting and organizing only those studies that have a direct or indirect bearing on vibrant Jewish life and can effect to some extent the deeper comprehension of present-day problems. With this viewpoint in mind, I must first form an image of the dynamic of the present; that is, in which the activity of a modern Jewish person reveals itself. I see this activity in the following areas: the question of migration, cultural universalism, that is, the aspiration to commingle specific cultural values with universal cultural aspirations. From this it follows that our historical research encompasses the following areas: history of Jewish migration, economic history (particularly the study of class differentiation of Jews, historical causes of Jewish mass poverty in Eastern Europe, the rise of class organizations, namely guilds, _kehillot_ as organs of economic struggle, modern proletarian organizations, artisan unions, merchants' associations, etc.), historical statistics, the history of Jewish autonomous aspirations, Jews as diplomats and members of legislatures, the role of Jews as intermediaries in transplanting the accomplishments of Oriental culture to Europe, European cultural achievements in Jewish culture, particularly in the culture of the Jewish common man, and the like." (27) In this credo-like statement we see the integral nature of Schiper's commitment to historical research; we also see his characteristic concern for the folk, the common people, a feeling devoid of paternalism or condescension. We know that Schiper's mother was a baker's daughter and his middle-class father upon marriage is said to have socialized in his wife's family's circles rather than his own parents'. The Yiddish that Schiper heard from childhood was the authentic vernacular which he was to champion all his life, even after he learned to move with ease socially and professionally in Polish and German. There are few better examples than Schiper of a young Jew who passed through the typical stages of acculturation and secularization without abandoning his earliest heritage, the Judaic lore of the kheyder, and the folk tongue. (28) Schiper was ideologically committed to the view, shared by Bundists and Folkists, that Yiddish was a value in itself in addition to being a barrier to assimilation and loss of group selfhood. His interest in and love of folklore flowed from his nationalism and from the belief that the community as a whole is creative and that its indigenous traditons are valuable. His pioneering history of the Yiddish theater met with a good deal of criticism, but -- as Bar-Ilan University's issuing a facsimile of the work this year shows -- it remains a book of great originality, one still worth consulting for the breadth and scope of its treatment. Schiper was especially fond of the theater because it was a popular art and a school for educating the people's taste. In his autobiographical _Fragmentn fun mayn lebn_ (Buenos-Aires, 1951), the actor and director, Zigmund Turkov, tells us that when Schiper lived in Warsaw he attended all opening nights of the Warsaw Yiddish theater, enjoyed drinking and chatting with the actors in their favorite cafe after the performance, was highly informed regarding the technical and artistic dimensions of theater and was much consulted by actors and, especially, directors. He was an acknowledged authority on the Purim shpil. Schiper the historian was sharply aware of the realia of daily life. In his _Kultur-geshikhte fun yidn beysn mitlalter_ (Warsaw, 1926), sketches of Jews on stained glass windows of a fourteenth-century church, descriptions of architectural details of medieval synagogues -- all are grist for his fertile historical imagination which builds larger constructs from isolated fragments. Schiper found strength in his work to the last, writing a history of Chasidism in Central Poland while in a death camp; he died in Maidanek. Fortunately, a young Polish student of Hebrew at the University of Warsaw, Zbigniew Targielski discovered, identified and typed two ms. notebooks of this book -- a third was apparently lost. The work, containing six chapters, was recently published. Professor Khone Shmeruk points out that in the polemical fourth chapter Schiper challenges the widely accepted view that chasidism represented a continuation of the commoners' struggle against their exploiters, the tsadik serving as the people's tribune, the defender of the downtrodden. Schiper, the pioneer of the economic and social history of the Jews, insists that chasidism in central Poland transcended class and enbraced rich and poor alike. Social activist though he was, he refused to believe in a utopian phenomenon in the total absense of historical evidence to support it. (29) In his second chapter, Schiper maintains that the principal leaders and propagators of chasidism in Poland in the second half of the 18th century were either from Galicia or under Galician influence, mainly that of R. Elimeylekh of Lezansk (or Lezajsk; Yiddish: Lizhensk). The latter's teachings regarding the tsadik swept Poland. Of particular interest is Schiper's view that the character of Polish chasidism was not determined by doctrinal divisions, but by such practices as healing the sick, absolving sins, praying with zeal, worshiping with joy, and scorning Talmud study (30). Most important were the rebes themselves, many of them highly charismatic, drawing thousands to their respective courts where a deep and often lifelong bond developed between rebe and follower. (31) Here again the social and economic historian was able to see that thaumaturgy is above class. In the third chapter Schiper showed that Yiddish popular literature helped spread chasidism; he also showed that Polish chasidism borrowed from mystical sources such notions as 'love of the Land of Israel', 'settling in the Land of Israel', and 'helping the Jewish settlement in the Holy Land'. Perhaps only an historian who was also a Yiddishist and a General Zionist could have seen so clearly that early Polish chasidism was nationalist, supra-class and Zion-oriented. Fate not only robbed Schiper of realizing a dream of settling in the Land of Israel, but from becoming the Jewish homeland's first professor of Yiddish, an honor which was to fall to Dov Sadan, the third and last of the Galician-Jewish figures I will talk about. .co off;.sk 1 .ce on;.sk 1 .bd Dov Sadan .ce off;.sk 1 .co on;.sk 1 Though he died only a few years ago, Dov Sadan is already a legend. Indeed for many he was a legend even while he lived. In eulogizing him, the great Israeli Vilna-born Yiddish poet Avrom Sutskever said what everyone thought: "Er iz geven an umfarglaykhlekher afile tsvishn umfarglaykhlekhe." ('He was incomparable even among incomparable persons.' (32) Dov Sadan was born Berl Shtok-Shperber in Brody in 1902. During World War I he moved with his family to Lwow, where he attended the Polish gymnasium. The teachers who influenced him toward history and literary research included the distinguished Jewish historian, Maier Balaban and the Poles, Tadeusz Fini and T.A. Modalski, both of whom later became professors. Though he was expelled from the gymnasium for giving Hebrew rather than Polish as his mother tongue, and for disobeying the rules regarding writing for the press, his life and work, like Schiper's, was indelibly shaped by his Polish gymnasium experience in Brody and Lwow. Yoysef Tenenboym's testimony supports the claim of Mendelsohn and others that Polish nationalism provided a model for Jewish nationalism, localizing this process in the Polish gymnasium: "...khotsh mir zenen geven yunge kinder, hobn mir zikh shoyn oysgelernt, az men tor zikh nisht lozn shpayen in der kashe oder lozn baleydikn undzer ume. Di profesorn un di kristlekhe studentn hobn zikh ongehoybn tsutsugevoynen tsum nayem ton fun di yidishe studentn. Ot azoy hot zikh pavolye oysgebildet a min 'modus vivendi'. Vos mer mir zenen ufgevaksen, alts mer zenen mir gevorn dreyster in undzer natsionaler haltung. Di poylishe poetn: Mitskevitsh, Krashinski, un epes veyniker, Slovatski, hobn geshept fun yidishn tanach zeyere inspiratsyes far zeyere poylishe meshikhes ideen. Un mir, di yungvarg hobn tsurikgeshept fun di verk fun ot di poylishe romantiker dem groysn entuziazm un di brenendike hofenung fun shives yisroel. Zeyere natsionale yontoyvim, zeyere heldn hobn mir fartaytsht af undzere eygene natsionale figurn un altsding, vos iz geven sheyn un ideal in der poylisher geshikhte, hot bakumen a yidishe tsure in undzer benkenish nokh der geule." ('Though we were only youngsters, we had already learned that we must not allow ourselves to be humiliated or our people to be insulted. The teachers and students began to accustom themselves to the new tone of the Jewish students. Thus there gradually grew up a 'modus vivendi'. As we grew older we became more confident in our nationalist bearing. The Polish poets Mickiewicz, Kraszinski, and to a lesser extent, Slowacki, drew their inspiration for their Polish messianic ideas from the Jewish Bible. And we youngsters in turn drew from the Polish romantics the great zeal and burning hope of the Return to Zion. We translated their national holidays and heroes into our own national figures and everything that was beautiful and idealistic in Polish history assumed a Jewish form in our yearning for Redemption.') (33) To understand the phenomenon of Dov Sadan one must also take into account the vital role of the Zionist youth movements as auxiliary educational institutions. These youth movements became powerful vehicles for secularization, Polonization, modernization, politicization, and productivization -- a major source for the dynamism noted by several historians of interwar Poland. Yoysef Tenenboym writes: "Di gimnazye iz geven undzer shule, ober undzer emeser besmedresh, undzer kloyz un undzer dertsiung iz geven undzer eygene yugnt-organizatsye...." ('The gymnasium was our school, but our true study-house and schooling were our youth-organization') (34) Youth-movement members studied Hebrew, Palestinography, Jewish history and art, heard lectures and held discussions. They awaited weekends as religious Jews did the Sabbath. In many places these activities were forbidden to high school students, which added spice to them. Educated in Polish, German, Hebrew and Yiddish, Sadan wrote Polish poetry in his youth, periodically read and wrote Polish throughout his life, and until his very last days enjoyed speaking Polish to friends. He often met with Anna Dresner, the translator of Sholem Aleichem in Polish, for chats in Polish -- a kind of recreation for both of them. Anna Dresner told me several years before her death, when Sadan was already over eighty, that his Polish was perfect. This life-long retention of his native Polish after leaving Poland at age 23 is surely significant in one who was a stylistic virtuoso in several languages. He has been called "one of the great masters of modern Hebrew prose" and is noted, too, for his original Yiddish style. He himself regarded his letter-writing -- he estimated that he wrote a quarter of a million letters in his lifetime -- as the crown of his literary production. This in itself underlines the unity of his writing and his life. Yet aside from his letters, the list of his publications is quite astounding: three thousand items, including over fifty books. Without aspiring to such a position and with virtually no formal schooling beyond the Polish gymnasium which he never completed, Sadan became the first incumbent of the chair in Yiddish at the Hebrew University, the first such chair in the State of Israel. At his inauguration he told his audience: "Permit me to begin with a word of thanks for the opportunity now being given me in the second half of my life to devote myself to learning.... Not that I have the slightest regret regarding the half that is over. I don't intend to burden you with my biography, but permit me to say that my earliest life goal was not realized. By background and education I was destined to become an enlightened rabbi and a modern Judaic scholar. I do not regret that my path went in another direction. Just as I am not sorry that my struggle for Zionism and Hebrew got me expelled from my Polish gymnasium, so am I not sorry for having been caught up in the chaluts movement, for having been one of the doers and builders, for having come to this land at a young age borne on the waves of this movement, which I served first in the kibuts and later for many years on the staff of the workers' federation daily, work which I never regarded as a vocation but as an avocation. But even afterwards, when my literary and scholarly work began to take wing, I felt that early desire for learning and wondered if the time would ever come when I would be able to devote myself exclusively to scholarship and writing." (35) The thrust of Sadan's creativity in the second half of his life will take scholars years to digest. His works in the field of Jewish folklore alone -- in which he often compared Polish analogues and sources -- cover a huge area of subjects, including jokes, idioms, proverbs, and beliefs. His studies on Agnon and Bialik are among the most profound in Hebrew criticism. He is a consummate translator and was the first to translate Kafka into Hebrew. In his varied career Sadan also served as a member of the Israeli Keneset, representing the Labour Party, but he resigned before his full term expired. He did not feel he could be as effective in politics as he could be as teacher and writer. He did not err in this judgement and one can readily assess how influential Sadan was in these central roles. More than any other person, Sadan championed the view that modern Jewish literature was "one multi-faceted unified body in a variety of languages," a view which had a particularly beneficial effect on the status of Yiddish. In addition to the prestige he gave to Yiddish by returning to write in that language after a hiatus of thirty years, Sadan educated a generation of first-rate Yiddish research scholars which has helped place Yiddish scholarship on the highest level. (36) Gebirtig, Schiper and Sadan were all men of talent and dedication who gave of themselves freely in the creative resistance which defined Galician-Jewish life between the two world wars. To fathom the richness of their lives and work -- so marvelously unified -- is to begin to glimpse the remarkable community that Galician Jewry was. Leonard Prager Haifa ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.303