MIRROR MAZE
Shtetl is Yiddish for "small town." The word has
passed sentimentally into English, describing the small towns where Jews
lived in Eastern Europe for centuries. In fact, nostalgia has made the
shtetl the symbol of Ashkenazi civilization. Historians and sociologists
have somewhat gone along with this synthetic memory, leaving us with a
simplified, often stereotyped image of a relatively serene, self-contained
world, troubled only by a foreign politics generally summed up in pogroms
and survival.
Obviously, the reality and the complexity of
the shtetl, or rather the shtetls, were far more confusing and interesting.
First of all, we have to think in plurals, we have to talk about shtetls,
many, many shtetls.
Of course, certain essential Jewish features
were recurrent throughout Eastern Europe. Most important, there was the
nuclear religion and its overlay of habits, customs, and traditions, completely
ruling the lives of Jews as individuals and as a collective - or collectives.
There was the community structure, socializing, protecting, domineering,
with its own survival as one of its chief functions. There were the two
symbiotic languages: Yiddish, mainly, but not only, for secular life, Hebrew,
mainly for religion and for certain other forms of communication, as in
business. And there was the omnipresent Christian world, with its laws,
pressures, hostility, friendliness, its commercial and economic relations,
and its myriad other energies that were part of an intricate cultural enmeshing
with Jews.
But despite the features common to all Eastern
European Jews, no two shtetls were truly alike. The personal and public
dynamics, the interrelations with non Jews, the climate, the economics,
the politics, even the dialect of Yiddish and the pronunciation of Hebrew
varied sufficiently to form sharp differences, often contradictions - a
crazy quilt through time and space. For we are speaking of an enormous
geographical area, and we are speaking of centuries of Jewish history.
The most exciting mirror of Jewish life (or lives)
in the shtetls was the absorbing literature created mainly in Yiddish and
Hebrew, and then to some extent in Gentile languages like Polish and Russian.
But if we speak of mirrors, then we have to imagine the mirrors in the
fun house of an amusement park. Each mirror distorts in a different way,
focusing on a different image. And if we chance to see a more "objective"
mirror, say "realistic" fiction or documented historiography, we find that
it warps reality in its own peculiar way - any mirror will at least exchange
left and right, disorienting us in the universe of our experience. In this
collection of Yiddish tales about the shtetls, I have tried to show the
variety and diversity of Jewish life in Eastern Europe from the religious
roots of the late middle ages to World War II and the destruction of the
shtetl world. Like imaginative literature anywhere, these tales had an
infinity of goals. The authors meant to instruct, entertain, attack, flatter,
inquire, analyze, moralize, laud, preach, reform, restore, amuse, divert,
ridicule, destroy, depict.... The list is endless. Common to all of them
is a reflection of certain aspects of shtetl life, and at the very least
the author's personal shtetl experiences - refracted through later experiences
and emotions. But books change with every reader. And a mirror, of course,
usually reflects the observer. Need it be said that this literary array
of the Jewish past tells us almost as much about our own present, about
most people in most places.
The collection is divided into chronological
sections, paralleling Jewish history in Eastern Europe, showing how the
literary shtetl developed from a backdrop to the object and substance of
both satirical and sentimental treatments, of negative, affectionate, and
even indifferent approaches. Not even historiography can honestly testify
to so-called "accuracy" of description. True accuracy can at best be found
in the tone, style, language, attitude, and psychological space of each
writer. For we learned long ago that the reality of literature lies in
its own creativity, just as its truth lies in spiritual revelation, and
in what Aristotle called its "universality."
The shtetls achieved "universal" realities in
one of the most stimulating phases of Jewish literature - a diminishing
microcosm of which is presented here. This literature, in turn, was a major
creative legacy of shtetl life, a profound and inexhaustible gift to the
future. The nineteenth century brought the disruption of shied life. The
twentieth century brought its destruction and the end of a civilization.
The people of the shied took up permanent abode in the literature created
about them. They were like Rilke's flamingos: They entered one by one into
imagination.
 
|