Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.336 February 23, 1995 1) Avrom-Nokhem Shtentsl (part 1) (Leonard Prager) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 21 Feb 95 14:55:32 IST From: rhle302%uvm.haifa.ac.il@vm.tau.ac.il Subject: Avrom-Nokhem Shtentsl (part 1) [Mendele extends a yasher-koyekh to Leonard Prager for making this essay, originally a lecture, available to us. Due to its length, it is being sent in two parts. Endnotes will be found in 4.337. ] The Stencl Legacy -- Mainstream or Puddles?(1) by Leonard Prager Unlike real puddles that one may stumble into even in Oxford in the pleasant summer season, the puddles in the title of my talk are purely metaphorical and thus not dependent on atmospheric pressures, cloud formations, or any other climatic phenomena. They do, of course have much to do with climate, but again not with weather, but with climate in its transferred sense -- cultural climate. The term -mainstream- in my title is obviously equally metaphorical. _We_ are in the mainstream; _others_ are in the periphery -- the puddles. But to follow my thinking this afternoon you will have to know the specific source of my topographic terms. They are, in fact, a quotation from a seminal work of fiction by a brilliant Jewish-American writer named Cynthia Ozick, whom many of you here have probably read. "Envy; or, Yiddish in America; a Novella," first appeared in the prestigious and widely circulated Jewish-sponsored monthly _Commentary_ in November 1969 and has since then often been reprinted. Conventionally a "generation" is reckoned as twenty-five years, which is close enough to the twenty-three and three/fourth years which have passed since Ozick's story stunned and delighted its first readers. But it may be old-fashioned, or even inadequate, to speak in terms of generations. Writers and professional takers-of-the-public-pulse are now accustomed to think in terms of decades. They talk about "the sixties," or "the eighties," as though each were a unique historical epoch. Indeed, there are cultural _mavens_ (I trust the guardian spirit of this time-hallowed hall will sanction the use of this American neologism whose pedigree many here will recognize) who speak with authority of "the late seventies," "the mid-eighties" as eras which are no less discernible, say, than the Late Middle Ages. Though Ozick's text may be read in a number of ways, familiarity with the New York Yiddish literary scene of the sixties and earlier inevitably suggests the correspondences of a "roman a clef." Allowing for the license of satiric exagerration, one may clearly identify the envied writer in the story as Isaac Bashevis Singer, much criticized in Yiddish literary circles for purported exploitation of sexual themes bordering on pornography and distortion of East-European Jewish life, but munificently rewarded by the world at large in 1978 with the Nobel Prize for Literature.(4) The envious poet of the story may be seen as a composite figure representing all the supposedly unfulfilled Yiddish writers who were cut off from the larger American public and specifically the poets who, by the nature of their craft, were essentially untranslatable. In the story's embittered and frustrated Edelshtein some readers have identified the great "national" poet Yankev Glatshteyn, who was known to resent Singer's success.(5) The equally distinguished Yiddish poet Khayim Grade, who at a certain point in his career turned to fiction, was also known to be envious of Isaac Bashevis Singer, favored by a wide readership in translation while he remained within the supposed ghetto of Yiddish.(6) To turn now to Ozick's story, Edelshtein (read: Yankev Glatshteyn et al.) has met Hannah, the 23-year old niece of Vorovsky, one of the translators of Ostrover (read: Isaac Bashevis Singer). A figure of futility, the mentally unbalanced Vorovsky has spent his life producing a German-English bilingual dictionary of mathematics that nobody wants. His uncontrollable self-wracking laughter colors the entire story, adding to its macabre quality. Vorovsky's niece, Hannah, had learned Yiddish from her grandfather and even knows a poem of Edelshtein's by heart.(7) Edelshtein's desperate fantasy of finding a translator and, like Ostrover, reaching a wide public directs him to Hannah. He wants her as his translator, but she is contemptuously uninterested. Here is a somewhat condensed version of their bitter dialogue: -"You'll save Yiddish," Edelshtein said, "you'll be like a Messiah to a whole generation, a whole literature, naturally you'll have to work at it, practice, it takes knowledge, it takes a gift, a genius, a born poet --" -... -"You old men." -"Ostrover's pages you kiss!" -"You jealous old men from the ghetto," she said. -... "translate me, lift me out of the ghetto...." -"Bloodsuckers," she said. "It isn't a translator you're after, it's someone's soul...." -"Breathe in me! Animate me! .... Translate me!" -Hannah said, "You think I have to read Ostrover in translation? You think translation has anything to do with what Ostrover is? .... even in Yiddish Ostrover's not in the ghetto. Even in Yiddish he's not like you people." -"He's not in the ghetto? Which ghetto, what ghetto? So where is he? In the sky? In the clouds? With the angels? Where?" -She meditated, she was all intelligence. "In the world," she answered him.... "Whereas you people listen only to yourselves." -"So? You're not interested? -"Only in the mainstream. Not in your little puddles."(8) Earlier in the story, the distressed Edelshtein recalls or imagines the following flippant yet caustic conversation with the successful Yiddish fiction writer: -Ostrover-: Now listen -- did you ever hear of Velvl Shikkerparev? Never. A Yiddish scribbler writing romances for the Yiddish stage in the East End, I'm speaking of London, England. He finds a translator and overnight he becomes Willie Shakespeare.... -Edelshtein-: Jokes aside, is this what you advise? -Ostrover-: I would advise my father no less. Give it up, Hersheleh, stop believing in Yiddish. -Edelshtein-: But I don't believe in it! -Ostrover-: You do. I see you do.... Tell me, Edelshtein, what language does Moses speak in the world-to-come? -Edelshtein-: From babyhood I know this. Hebrew on the Sabbath, on weekdays Yiddish. -Ostrover-: Lost soul, don't make Yiddish into the Sabbath-tongue! If you believe in holiness you are finished. Holiness is for make-believe.(9) Now if ever there lived a Yiddish poet less ready to follow the worldly-wise advice of the imagined Ostrover-Bashevis, it was Avrom-Nokhem Shtentsl (known in English as Abraham Nahum Stencl), the subject of my talk today, ten years after his death in 1983 at the age of 85, and almost two and a half decades after Ozick's story first appeared.(10) Unlike the distraught Edelshtein, Shtentsl, not even in a moment of weakness, could have said he didn't believe in Yiddish. Whatever Yiddish may have meant to him -- an immensely complex subject in itself, especially if we attempt to probe its unconscious elements -- there was hardly anything else in his life he believed in more and clung to more tenaciously. He seems to have ordered his entire life around the Yiddish language. Now most of us do not _choose_ our language any more than we do our parents, and if we become writers we normally write in the vernacular of the country we grow up in. But this simple natal determinism is far from universal and exceptions to it have radically altered the face of world culture. In the Middle Ages English writers chose between Latin -- the preeminent written medium, French -- the language of the privileged social class, and English -- widely spoken but generally thought too crude for literary use. Fortunately, Chaucer wrote in English -- is a Latin-spouting "Wife of Bath" even thinkable? Dante boldly chose Italian, the non-prestigious vernacular, rather than the universally respected Latin for his _Divine Comedy_. Milton, a world-class Latinist, chose to write his great epics in English. The novelist, Joseph Conrad, though born to Polish, adopted English when already an adult. The Irish Samuel Beckett wrote French so well that the French regard him as a French writer. Note that all the writers I have just cited chose linguistic media whose audiences were either existent or coming into being. Linguistic choice among Jewish writers of the past century and a half has been a very different matter. Shtentsl as Yiddish writer must be seen not only as a stubbornly courageous and visionary individual, but as one who grew up in the socio-historical context of Jewish multi-lingualism. In his first essay on Yiddish creativity in London, written in 1942, six years after arriving in London, Shtentsl writes: "In di ershte yorn fun undzer aynvanderung fun mizrekh-eyrope, bay undzere rishoynim, Vintshevski(11), Brener,(12) iz nokh keyn grenits-sheydung tsvishn yidish un hebreish nisht geven.... Demolt iz undzer shprakh geven mame-loshn, un ivris -- loshn koydesh!" ('In the early years of our migration from Eastern Europe, for our first generation of writers such as Wintchevski and Brenner there was no divide between Yiddish and Hebrew.... Our language then was Yiddish and Hebrew was loshn-koydesh, the Holy Tongue.')(13) This is of course true, but it skirts the issue of the writer's and the intellectual's choice of a _literary_ medium. For many individuals, the decision was difficult and momentous. The classic triumvirate -- Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleykhem and Yitskhok-Leybush Perets -- all of them multi-lingual, may be said to have launched modern Yiddish literature by making Yiddish their primary literary language.(14) Shtentsl, who names Brenner, one of the giants of modern Hebrew literature, in tandem with the Yiddish writer Vintshevski as one of "di rishoynim" ('the pioneers'), was deeply aware that Brenner had preceded him in Whitechapel.(15) Their common bonds with the publisher and printer, Israel Narodiczky, who was to print virtually all of Shtentsl's British publications, including _Loshn un lebn_, further strengthened this awareness. Brenner lived in London from 1904 to 1908, and in 1909, a mere twenty-seven years -- a generation -- before Shtentsl arrived in London, he published a journal entry which echoes a linguistic anxiety by no means rare before, during and after the period in which it was written: Dokh, dokh darf men shraybn, shafn, lebn un shafn.... Ober vuhin geyt men? Vuhin? Vos far a lebn? Alts iz farfroyrn, farglivert, glaykhgiltikeyt fun gayst-kaptsonim vos hobn gor nit lib un hasn gor nit. Efsher gor ufhern shraybn hebreish un shraybn zhargon? Ver farshteyt den hebreish? Tsulib vos un tsulib vemen zol men shraybn hebreish? Iz den meglekh tsu shraybn in a toyter shprakh? Zhargon leynt khotsh dos folk un der hebreisher lezer ken oykh zhargon lezn. Lib iz di mame-shprakh ober m'kon zikh nit opgebn tsu ir mitn gantsn hartsn, es felt ir di originalitet [originelkeyt], dos harts benkt dokh nokh der "eyntsiker," di "fargese[ne]" mit ir groysn over... Der kheshbm iz oykh nit gants rikhtik... Emes, zhargon lezt men mer, ober keyn lezer zenen dokh nito... Inteligente lezer -- keyn zeykher. Dos folk -- es noytikt zikh gant veynik in poezye... Der nayer dor -- er vert dertsoygn af der rusisher, poylisher, englisher literatur.... Un m'shraybt, m'shraybt visndik az s'hot keyn vert nit... M'shraybt zayendik ibertsaygt az s'iz nito far vemen tsu shraybn." ('But one has to write, to create, to live and create.... But where am I going? Where? What kind of life? Everything is frozen, congealed, the indifference of spiritual paupers who hate nothing and love nothing. Perhaps I ought to stop writing in Hebrew and write in Yiddish? After all, who understands Hebrew? Why and for whom should one write in Hebrew? Is it possible to write in a dead language? The folk at least reads Yiddish and the Hebrew reader can also read Yiddish. I love my mother-tongue but one can't devote oneself to it with all one's heart, it lacks originality; one's heart years for the "one and only one," the "forgotten one" with its great past... But the account is not so simple... True, Yiddish is read more, but there are no readers... There is not a sign of an intelligent reader. The folk doesn't have much need for poetry... The younger generation is being educated on Russian, Polish, English literature.... But I write, I write, knowing that it has no value... I write even though I know there is no one to write for.')(16) The occasion for Shtentsl's break, later healed, with Sholem Ash, was Ash's despairing utterance that Yiddish was finished.(17) Ash while still a young man in Poland had flirted with the idea of writing in Polish. Perets and others felt he was currying favor among gentiles. (18) Y.-Y. Zinger (Israel Joshua Singer), the brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer -- to name another instance from among successful Yiddish writers -- endured "a five-year long, self-imposed silence, whose source may have been despair over the fractious Yiddish literary world and the lot of the Yiddish writer."(19) Much of Ash's material success came through translations for a non-Jewish and not merely a non-Yiddish-reading audience; many of his translated works did not even mention their source language, Yiddish.(20) Ash was the first Yiddish writer to have met with the kind of success Ozick paints in Ostrover. Shtentsl's real-life clash with Sholem Ash contrasts sharply with the craven Edelshtein- Ostrover relationship. Uncultivated or nonexistent audience; uncultivated or petty fellow-writers -- these are among the principal external complaints of numerous practictioners of Yiddish letters. The supposed intrinsic shortcomings of Yiddish, as alluded to in Brener's words, have also often been lamented. In 1888 Y.-L. Perets wrote in _Monish_: "Andersh volt mayn lid geklingen / Kh'zol far goyim goyish zingen....") ('My song would sound different [i.e. better] if I were singing for gentiles in a gentile [i.e. European] tongue').(21) But far more characteristic of Yiddish literature is its huge corpus in every genre celebrating the Yiddish language.(22) In 1919 the New York Introspectivists Yankev Glatshteyn, A. Glants-Leyeles and N. Minkov wrote in their "Manifesto": Mir gloybn in idish. Mir hobn lib idish. Mir haltn zikh nit op tsu makhn di derklerung, az der, vos hot a farneynende batsiung tsu der idisher shprakh, oder afile bloyz a gringshetsende, kon durkh dem aleyn nit zayn keyn idisher dikhter. Ver es lakht fun idish, ver es klogt zikh, az idish iz orem un a shlekhte shprakh, ver es iz bloyz glaykhgiltik tsu idish, gehert nit tsu der hoykher kategorye fun idishe dikhter. Tsu zayn a idisher dikhter iz a hoykhe kategorye, iz a madreyge, un es kon nit gemolt zayn, az der vos sh;aft in idish, zol shpayen in dem brunem fun zayn shafung....(23) ('We believe in Yiddish. We love Yiddish. We do not hesitate to say that he who has a negative relation to the Yiddish language, or who merely looks down on it, can not be a Yiddish poet. He who mocks Yiddish, who complains that Yiddish is a poor and shabby language, he who is merely indifferent to Yiddish, does not belong to the high category of Yiddish poets. To be a Yiddish poet is a high status, an achievement, and it is umimaginable that a person creating in Yiddish should spit in the well of his creation....' {Anita Norich's translation}) Perhaps there is a shade of bravado in these words, but they undoutedly reflect a deepseated conviction of many contemporary Yiddish poets on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1923, a year after Shtentsl published his first volume of poems in Leipzig, A. Glants-Leyeles wrote: There is no need to deny. We have adopted free verse under the influence of American-English poetry. But this was no more than borrowing a shell, a mold.... I read English poetry in free verse, I compare this free verse with ours. And I maintain, with no hesitation whatever, that our free verse is better, more masterful, more rhythmically lucid and more profound, natural, and imperative in its sound and in its flow. It may seem immodest, but I sincerely believe that the free verse of the Introspectivists is now perhaps the best in all languages.(24) Yet the author of these confident words also suffered from a sense of isolation. In 1937 he wrote: Azoyfil yorn shoyn in amerike, aza fayne literatur do geshafn, un fremd tsu di shkeynim, elehey mir voltn gelebt in siam, oder geshribn in epes an eskimosishn dialekt.(25) ('So many years in America, such a fine literature created here, and we remain strangers to our neighbors as if we had lived in Siam or had written in some Eskimo dialect.') There is no indication that Shtentsl suffered from a similar ambivalence, yet he often found himself quite alone -- never more so than in his last days in Berlin in late 1936. Sh. Niger, writing in the _Nayer Folksblat_ of February 1937, notes that of all the members of the once considerable community of Yiddish writers in Berlin, all had left except Shtentsl, "geblibn hitn di khurbes, hitn azoy vi der malekh in _Megilas hoesh_ di letste brenendike koyl afn tseshtertn mazbeyekh." ('left guarding the ruins, like the angel in _The Scroll of Fire_, guarding the last burning coal on the demolished altar." (26) Published in February, these lines may have been written under the impression that Shtentsl was still in Berlin at that time. We know that he barely escaped Germany with his life -- according to one account leaving in a coffin disguised as a corpse -- and arrived, very much alive, in London in November 1936.(27) But Niger's allusion to Bialik's famous poem and his picturing of Shtentl as a guardian and defendant of the young Yiddish literary tradition are both apposite. Bialik, though he chose Hebrew as his principal literary language, was the "national" poet of most Jewish writers, a poet who reacted to historical events and, in a measure remarkable for a poet, influenced them as well. Shtentsl always viewed his poetic enterprise as a kind of shlikhes ('mission'): there were certain redemptive tasks to be performed by the poet for the salvation of the Jewish People, "salvation" of course transmuted into humanistic, secular terms. Literature, though made by individuals, was fed by and in the best instances was food for the collective. In Berlin, Shtentsl was a Yiddish-poet-in-Germany, very much aware of his milieu, conversant with the work of German-language Jewish poets, but also in contact with Yiddish writers and editors in Poland and America. Though he lived in Germany, he was a Yiddish poet in Yiddishland, a non-territorial empire of uncharted extent and few resources. Transferred by fate to the shtetl of Whitechapel, England, he immediately knew where he was on the literary map of Yiddishland. In vaytshepl hot Vintshevski geshribn dos rov fun zayne sotsiale lider -- do iz er gevorn der "Meshugene Filosof"! Do, af dem bodn, af undzer farblotiktn vaytshepl-pitsele, unter di kalte zhaver neplen, vi unter grates, hot Roznfeld, der yinger leyb fun undzer nayer dikhtung geshpant iber dray yor un naye lider gebrilt in zayne groyse vonses arayn. Yo, vi eyner fun undzere fartsaytike "meshugo ish haruach" hot er do gemuzt arumshpanen az dos dorndike do hot mitufgeflamt inem "sne" fun yidishn shafn. Un zayt demelt tliet es do unter dem dornikn kshak. Es blit uf un s'farvyanet, ober der ungetsungener funk vert nisht mer farloshn. Der oysgetriknter dorn dershpirndik dem funk, vert er dokh ongetsundn mit lebidikn fayer. ('It was in Whitechapel that Wintshevski wrote most of his social poems; here he became "The Mad Philospher"! Here, on this ground, in the muddy sparse acres of Whitechapel, under cold, damp foggy skies like grates, Rosenfeld, the young lion of our new Yiddish poetry, strode for more than three years, roaring his verses into his thick mustache. Yes, like one of our ancient "Madmen of the Spirit," he had to stride here so that our thorny plants would flame into a "Burning Bush" of Jewish creativity. And since that time it smolders under the thorny bush. It flourishes and it fades, but the kindled spark is never extinguished. When the dried out thorn feels the spark, it nevertheless ignites with living fire.')(28) It is no accident that Shtentsl, who incidentally -- as the above passage suggests -- joins Perets, Sutskever, Grade, Glatshteyn and a few others in being a master of Yiddish prose as well as of Yiddish verse, employs sacred fire imagery in his scanning of the first half-century of Yiddish writing in London. In Shtentsl's writing, again and again, one sees that marvelous integration of the language of "derekh hashas" with the idiom of the twentieth century that Max Weinreich observed and marveled at.(29) In 1938, Yankev Glatshteyn, whom we have hypothesized to be a segment of Ozick's composite Edelshtein, gave a positive reading to the ghetto metaphor we encounter in the story: I do not know if there is a better parallel to ghetto life than writing Yiddish.... I just cannot be afraid of the word "Ghetto," because both economically and culturally, for me, ghetto means the greatest part of my life. The coercion to see my own brother, hear his language, see myself in my own national mirror, is, for me, no coercion.(30) Shtentsl felt likewise about "ghetto."(31) Heir of Vintshevski and Roznfeld, he never felt isolated in the world of Yiddish letters; he never sought his literary salvation in translation, and his devotion to Yiddish never wavered. This devotion to Yiddish is undoubtedly the single greatest component of the Shtentsl legacy. Ostrover-Bashevis warned Edelshtein not to turn Yiddish into the Sabbath-tongue. Though generally glossed as 'Holy Tongue', _loshn_koydesh_ 'Hebrew-Aramaic' literally means "language of holiness;" the post-Shoa sacralization of Yiddish is expressed in the calqued glottonym _yidish-koydesh_, literally "Yiddish of holiness." Even before the Shoa, Yiddish for Shtentsl was not merely "mame-loshn" but "yidish-koydesh." This new name for Yiddish sanctifies a millenium of Jewish life lived in Yiddish, but by elevating the status of Yiddish to a celestial sphere it also somehow removes it from the concerns of ordinary life. For Shtentsl, however, Yiddish was always like the God of certain Chasidic saints, both imminent and transcendent, familiar and awesome. Unlike Moses in Heaven, Shtentsl on earth spoke Yiddish on the Sabbath as well as weekdays. The dividing line between Sabbath and weekday is work. What did Edelshtein do for a living? He lectured on his one subject, the murder of Yiddish and the corruptness of Western Civilization. "Synagogues, community centers, labor unions underpaid him to suck on the bones of the dead."(32) But more important, where did he publish? A fellow Yiddish poet Baumzweig, printed some of them in his little magazine, _Biterer yam_ 'Bitter Sea', subsidized by a trust established by a laxative manufacture. Baumzweig's "salary check came from the laxative manufacturer's grandson -- a Republican politician, an Episcopalian." (33) The laxative was named LUKEWARM. Those who mockingly called Shtentsl's _Loshn un lebn_ _Lokshn un leber_ 'Noodles and Liver' little understood how central it was to his life. It is true that _Loshn un lebn_ was printed gratis for a number of years by Yisroel Naroditski and, after his death, by his sons Bar-Kochba and Carmel Narod, but all other expenses, not to speak of the labour, were borne by Shtentsl and the Friends of Yiddish group. The journal he kept going for over four decades was largely his personal outlet, but he did all he could to encourage others to write in it, publishing material which he knew to be substandard, simply to encourage new writers. Some people may have seen Shtentsl's struggle to keep his little magazine as pathetic, especially when seeing him hawking it at every large Jewish gathering in the East End. Shtentsl was not too proud to be a colporteur. He saw _Loshn un lebn_ as an historic achievment, comparable to Brener's London Hebrew journal, _Hameorer_, whose importance in the development of Hebrew literature is out of all proportion to its size. "Gevidmet tsum 40stn yor _Loshn un lebn_" ('Dedicated to the 40th Year of _Loshn un lebn_') both whimsically and earnestly expresses a number of the then 81 year-old poet's staunch ideas: Oyb kh'shtey do itst bay der tir, Loshn un lebn kh'farkoyf, Vet mit undz yidn yidish, Blaybn bizkl tsum eyn-sof. Mamesh a toyter kh'shtey shoyn, Un der miskher geyt a gang -- Vi lang ikh vel nokh shteyn do? Eybik s'yidishe gezang: Far gan-eydn toyer nokh Mit loshn lebn {sic} kh'vel shtayn, {shteyn} Un mayn ershte koynete, Di mame rokhl vet zayn. Oykh di shkhine hakedoyshe, Oykh zi "heftl" koyfn vet, "Iz dokh shoyn yidish kosher"? Azoy in gan-eydn m'redt... Mit ire gute oygn, Zi kukt mikh mamedik on "Shoymer in der yad shtekn, Un vest zitsn oybn on"! "Libe maminke rokhl, On der babeshes _Lev tov_, Un zeydns _Kav hayoshor_, Gantser gan-eydn tfilas-shov."(34) The poet declares that his standing at the door selling _Loshn un lebn_ augurs the eternity of Yiddish. Weary, he asks how long he can continue selling _Loshn and lebn_. He is determined to hawk it even in Paradise and knows his first customer will be the matriarch Rachel. The Divine Presence will also buy a copy. The talk is that Yiddish is now acceptable in Paradise, but Rachel maternally advises him to hold on to his stick if he wants a top place there. He tells her that he is not interested in a Paradise which has no room for Yiddish and for the beloved works his grandparents read and which represents a Jewish ethical tradition which eschews violence. Aside from this truly extraordinary love of Yiddish, what does the Shtentsl legacy contain? Could it not be argued by some latter-day version of Ozick's intelligent young Hannah, someone who perhaps learned Yiddish at the Oxford Yiddish Summer Programme rather than from her grandfather, that the so-called "Shtentsl legacy" is no more than antiquarian curiosities and quaint documents of a now archaic and irrelevent era, minor works by a Yiddish writer widely ranked as second-rung? In short, is the Shtentsl legacy, to repeat the words of Ozick's Hannah, "mainstream" or "puddles"? Leonard Prager [continued in 4.337] ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.336 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line 2. Sign your article (full name please) A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. 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