The Shtetl: A CREATIVE ANTHOLOGY OF JEWISH LIFE IN EASTERN EUROPE
Translated and edited by Joachim Neugroschel
 
PART TWO
THE JEWISH ENLIGHTENMENT

The nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment, Haskalah in Hebrew, was partly aimed at what the Enlighteners saw as dead tradition, superstition, backwardness. They held up the shtetl as the locale and symbol of these horrors, and assaulted
it ruthlessly for what they regarded as its stranglehold on Jewish progress. In earlier writings, the shtetl was simply a backdrop, a matter of course - because that was where Jews lived. But now
the shtetl became the object, the subject matter, the endless target of Haskalah criticism, especially satire. The vehemence of the attacks, the vitriol of the satire, though perhaps justified in part, distorted the shtetl out of all proportion. And often, the Enlighteners completely disregarded the Gentile pressures on Jews. The two novels and the short story in this section are prime examples of the Jewish Haskalah.

Aksenfeld's The Headband is vicious and unflinching. Despite little peeps of hope here and there, it crushes shtetl life under caricaturing pessimism. Even the few sympathetic characters among the shtetl Jews are rendered defective by the parody and by the exposure of a basic materialistic nominalism in Jewish life, where wealth is prized more highly than spiritual values.

Peretz's "A Woman's Fury" exemplifies one of the Haskalah's pet peeves: the Jewish treatment of women. Drumming along in a claustrophobic present tense, squeezing the character into an overcrowded space, that slowly shrinks down to the suicidal hook at the precise center of the room, the story attacks the inability of the religion to deal with the human needs of women. Historical studies reveal that the situation of women was even worse than depicted in these Enlightened diatribes.

The issue of how accurately fiction mirrors reality is put to an extreme test in the novels of Mendele Moykher-Sforim, particularly in the one presented here: The Travels of Benjamin the Third. Dwelling on the yearning of Jews to escape the shtetl and also to achieve the utopian and messianic goal of the Holy Land, the author offers us a picaresque account of an attempt at realization. Mendele gives his satirical knife a further twist with the sexual ambiguity of the characters, letting Sender, a henpecked husband nicknamed the Housewife, act out a role traditionally assigned to women. In a mixture of scorn and sympathy, the author dwells on the metaphorical power of rivers as stations in the pilgrimage. And this metaphor betrays the almost antirealistic caricature of the fiction. Many of the shtetls were actually located on broad, lovely rivers, and l yet most Yiddish writers, like Mendele, focusing on the static aspects of Jewish life and the ugly features of the shtetl, tended to depict tiny, filthy rivulets, perennial eyesores that ultimately acquired an aura of loving nostalgia as in Reyzen's "The Greek". The further Benjamin and Sender get from their shtetl, the broader and more attractive the rivers appear, with the ultimate fantasy river beckoning at their utopian destination: the Sambatyon, the Sabbath river, hence the river of ultimate salvation.

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