Yale University Press
New Haven and London
For Lucy S. Dawidowicz
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Monish
Impressions of a Journey Through Tomaszow Region
Short Stories
Venus and Shulamith
What Is the Soul?
In the Mail Coach?
Bryna’s Mendl
A Musician’s Death
The Pious Cat
The Goldem
The Shabbes Goy
The Pooy Boy
Bontshe Shvayg
Kabbalists
A Contribution for a Wedding
The Dead Town
Uncle Shakhne and Aunt Yakhne
If Not Higher
A Conversation
Between Two Mountains
The Missing Melody
Stories
Revelation, or The Story of the Billy Goat
The Magician
Three Gifts
Downcast Eyes
A Chapter of the Psalms
A Pinch of Snuff
Yom Kippur in Hell
My Memoirs
1. Childhood and Childhood Teachers
2. More Hazy Years
3. Zamość—Shebreshin—Zamość
4. Haskalah. A Libel.
A Night in the Old Marketplace
Afterword by Hillel Halkin
Notes
Glossary
This book is dedicated, with affection and gratitude, to Lucy S. Dawidowicz, who established the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature and served as its president until her death in 1990.
I am deeply indebted to Neal Kozodoy for his help in initiating this project, to the members of the advisory board for their
Isaac Leib Peretz was arguably the most important figure in the development of modern Jewish culture—and until 1939 one would not have had to argue the claim at all. Peretz dominated Jewish literary life in Warsaw almost from the moment he settled there in 1890 until his death on the fifth day of Passover, April 3, 1915, his influence radiating outward from the Polish capital to the growing centers of Jewish settlement worldwide. The estimated hundred thousand people who accompanied his remains to the Warsaw cemetery included delegates and representatives of every sector of Jewish life, testimony to his inclusive appeal at a time of increasing political factionalism. When the Yiddish writers of America formed a new literary association the year after his death, they named it for Peretz. Between the world wars, in communities from Buenos Aires to Birobidzhan, dozens of schools, libraries, streets, and organizations were named for Peretz, who had championed Jewish cultural creativity as the guarantor of modern Jewish existence.
Peretz surfaced as a Hebrew poet in the 1870s, but it was as a Yiddish writer and literary figure that he won renown. Along with Sholem Jacob Abramovitch and Sholem Rabinovitch, better known by their pen names, Mendele Mocher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem, he entered the hallowed circle of classic Yiddish masters that closed when the three men died in rapid succession (Rabinovitch in 1916; Abramovitch in 1917). Mendele, “the grandfather of Yiddish literature,” and Sholem Aleichem, his self-designated “grandson,” adopted the literary personae of approachable storytellers, as if wanting to maintain in literature the cohesion and security that were everywhere eroding. By contrast, Peretz was eager to expose the anxiety of a changing social order. He considered the emergence of the individual from the collectivity a necessary and encouraging mark of human progress. Toward the end of his life he became the first Yiddish literary modernist, admitting nervous doubt into his art and giving fractured expression to the tension between warring parts of his personality.
Peretz assumed that sooner or later all Jews would have to take advantage of political emancipation and scientific progress, and replace God with human reason as the determinant of their fate. This process would require supple adaptiveness on the part of individual men and women and of the people as a whole. Self-taught in European languages and literatures, law, and social and natural science, he felt that his experience and knowledge could benefit his contemporaries, even though that knowledge was partial at best, and the experience inconclusive. His lifelong program of education, by which he meant the striving for an integrated humanistic culture, was predicated on the assumption that the secular future of mankind would surely bring vast improvements over the religious past, if only the Jews were prepared to meet it halfway.
At least part of this optimism had to do with being a Polish Jew. Peretz was eleven years old at the time of the Polish uprising of 1863, a passionate though doomed bid for national independence that was accompanied by high hopes for mutual assistance between Poles and Jews. The pragmatic spirit of Polish positivism in the aftermath of the uprising invited all citizens to contribute to the economic and social advancement of the country, without prejudice as to religion or race. Polish artists, writers, and publicists became interested in the Jew as a colorful and occasionally sympathetic subject.
The young man aspired to become part of this anticipated liberal society. His first preserved writings, from the age of twenty-two, were Polish poems. From young manhood on, he read Polish literature and the Polish-Jewish press, and he discovered Yiddish literature in Polish translation. When he later began to edit his own Yiddish magazines and miscellanies, he included in them Yiddish translations and reviews of Polish literature.
Peretz might have wanted to be a Polish-Jewish writer, along the lines of the German-Jewish writers in Vienna, or, closer to our own time, the American-Jewish writers of New York and Chicago. But this possibility of uninhibited Jewish writing in non-Jewish languages depends on the receptivity of the host society; and the relatively welcoming atmosphere that Peretz encountered as a young man underwent very radical changes in the decades that followed. In place of the progressive toleration that the Positivists had foretold, the Jews encountered opposition and suspicion from almost all segments of the Polish population—from the church, from the peasants, from the emerging urban middle class, from political leaders who discovered in anti-Semitism a potent weapon of nationalism, and even from intellectuals. Many Poles who pressed for Jewish assimilation grew terrified of its consequences once the Jews in increasing numbers actually began to penetrate Polish culture and society.
Sufficiently confident as a Jew not to blame himself for the xenophobia of other peoples, Peretz tried to resist the enforced socioeconomic and political isolation without holding his fellow Jews responsible for their unpopularity. His belief in progress, which included the integration of Jews into European society, placed him among the reformers and alongside the radicals who encouraged acculturation. At the same time, he could neither shut his eyes to anti-Semitism, nor, finally, deny the bleak future it presaged for the Jews of Poland. For as long as he could, he tried in his writing to straddle the two worlds that were fast moving apart: then he recorded his failure.
Peretz was perfectly placed to become the figurehead of modern Polish Jewry. He was born in 1852 into a prominent, pious family of Zamość, a lovely small city in southeastern Poland that served as a hub of learning and trade for the district. The city’s founder, Jan Zamoyski, who had it modeled on Padua out of a wish to capture through architecture some of the intellectual spirit of the Italian Renaissance, founded a local university as an alternative to the Catholic seminaries. Strategically situated on the shifting border between Poland, Austria, and Russia (the governing power during Peretz’s lifetime), Zamość was also a walled fortress, a prized stronghold among warring nations.
The Jews of Zamość were affected by both its cultural openness and its military vulnerability. When the Ukrainian peasants under Bogdan Chmelnitski revolted against the Polish nobles and their Jewish protégés in 1648, Zamość stood directly in the line of attack, and hundreds of Jews who had sought shelter within its walls died of starvation during the protracted siege. Centuries later, during World War I, thousands of Jews fled the city that was several times overrun by the rival German and Russian occupiers. In the centuries between, the Jews of Zamość accumulated memories of local blood libels, of Jewish girls kidnapped and forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism, of public hangings and indignities. Stories in this volume such as “Downcast Eyes” and “Three Gifts” are based on legends of martyrdom that Peretz absorbed in his youth.
The intersection of cultures also fostered a strongly cosmopolitan atmosphere. Zamość began to gain prominence as a center of Jewish Enlightenment when the city came under Austrian rule, between 1772 and 1809. It remained within the rationalist, or misnagdic, camp of Jewish religious tradition, resisting the incursion of Hasidic pietism and Hasidic courts well into the nineteenth century. In Zamość there was no necessary contradiction between the study of science or interaction with Gentiles on the one hand, and strict Jewish observance on the other. While Peretz’s family took absolutely for granted the need to educate their gifted son in Talmud and commentaries, they were not opposed to the study of language or science, provided these did not conflict with his Jewish observance.
Peretz said that between them his parents provided the basis of his moral education. His mother in particular, who disallowed photographs of herself in deference to the commandment against graven images, was a model of piety. In his memoirs he recalls that once, when a guest demonstratively poured full beakers of water over his hands in the ritual washing before a meal, she said that he was “frum oyf AyzikVs kheshbn”—pious at Ayzikl’s expense. Ayzikl was the water carrier who for a fixed fee maintained the household’s supply of well water. The distinction his mother was making between excessive ritual piety and genuine religious sensitivity became a recurrent theme of Peretz’s work.
Whatever formal education Peretz received from local teachers and rabbis, and during a brief sojourn in the neighboring town of Shebreshin (Szczebrzeszyn), ended well before the bar mitzva age of thirteen. Thereafter, he read unsupervised in the study house, and discovered with great excitement Maimonides’ rational approach to Jewish law. The boy’s reputation for brilliance prompted a local bookdealer to give him the key to his private library. Unsystematically, and on his own, he began to read French novelists, British moral philosophers, German poets, and Polish reformers, along with the impressive Napoleonic Code of Law, which “rivaled Maimonides.” This was Peretz’s introduction to what he called “their beysmedresh” the study house of European civilization.
While many nineteenth-century biographies contain similar jolts of discovery, the typical young Jew’s encounter with the new literature was complicated by the asymmetry between his native culture and the one to which he was now being exposed. Delight in the fruits of Christian civilization had to call into question the validity of the Judaism that had persuaded him to bear its yoke and obey its commandments because of its special moral attainments. In fact, the emphasis among Jews on learning was part of that special attainment, and it was meant to prepare these youngsters for the lifelong study of Torah, the God-given Law. Once the premise of Jewish election was exposed by the more “advanced” cultures of Europe, many disillusioned youngsters turned their intelligence against the way of life to which it had been consecrated, and tried to liberate-themselves simultaneously from an onerous code of behavior and from a despised people. The political handicap of the Jews meant that intellectual realignment with Christian civilization—which was in any case turning secular—also became the key to much more tangible social and economic advancement.
Peretz understood this temptation. In his own native city, along with genuine Jewish reformers, there were converts and highly assimilated Jews, like the well-to-do father of Rosa Luxemburg. When Rosa, almost twenty years Peretz’s junior, helped to found the Social Democratic Party of Poland, she advertised her lack of interest in the Jews through a Marxist program strenuously opposed to Jewish peoplehood, and to any notion of a Jewish national culture. Peretz was later to write about “the paths that led away from Jewishness,” which attracted those who wanted to revolutionize society as well as those who aspired to rise in it.
But Peretz remained among his own people. At about eighteen, resisting the impulse to run off to Warsaw to study, he allowed himself to be married to the girl his father had picked out for him. Later, after the marriage had failed and he became accredited as a lawyer, he once again returned to his native city, where he remarried and built up a successful law practice. He wrote and published Hebrew poetry in the Hebrew periodicals and literary miscellanies that were appearing in Galicia and Russia. He also lectured on Jewish history and Hebrew language to intensify young people’s understanding of themselves as Jews. The more he distanced himself from Jewish religious observance, the more he encouraged the development of a national consciousness through a strengthened Jewish culture.
Then suddenly Peretz experienced a terrible reversal. In 1887–88, responding to anonymous and unspecified accusations against him, the tsarist government deprived him of the right to practice law. Denied explanation or right of appeal, he lost his income, his profession, and also his home, because he could find no other suitable employment in the city. Through the intervention of friends he found temporary work on a statistical expedition investigating the condition of Jews in the small towns of Poland. Then, beginning January 1, 1891, he was hired by the Jewish community council of Warsaw, a job he held until the end of his life. Unlike his earlier, fairly lucrative practice of law, this work as a Jewish functionary provided only modest financial sustenance, and a far from sufficient outlet for his energy or ambition. It did allow him to take up, in tandem with the nine-to-three workday of a Jewish public servant, the more spacious career of a Yiddish man of letters; the daily contacts it required with people from every walk of life provided inexhaustible new materials for his pen. Peretz further divided his literary life between private and public spheres, between the solitary hours spent writing and the time he devoted to generating a cultural renaissance.
Peretz’s dislocation in many ways typified the move of tens of thousands of his contemporaries from small town (in his case small city) to big city, yet from the very first works that he published in Warsaw—in Yiddish, the language of the growing mass of Jewish readers—he tried to guard against the facile relegation of that small-town life to the irrelevant past. In Impressions of a Journey Through the Tomaszow Region in 1890, a pioneering work of Jewish reportage based on his own statistical research, a narrator very much like himself sets out to establish a reliable data base about Jews in the Polish towns that can be used to correct the false accusations of anti-Semites. Right from the start the merits of his mission are called into question by a succession of subjects who distrust his project and suspect his motives. The narrator finally succumbs to doubt himself. How will his statistics communicate the stubborn individualism of the rabbi’s widow who would rather manufacture “soap” from potato peelings than become the ward of her children or the community, or the moral sweetness of the orphan who wants the Messiah to come so that the moon should regain its lost parity with the sun? The narrator, who enters these towns armed with pen, notebook, and questionnaire, learns that he cannot hope to fathom the human condition using only the instruments of social science. What is more, he begins to suspect that the modern Jew may be more knowledgeable but not necessarily any wiser than his traditional forefathers. Peretz, who had been disbarred without right of appeal, is forced to wonder whether the faith of believers in God is less reasonable than the faith of enlightened Jews in government, or his own faith in progress.
This readiness to examine the rational premises of his optimism set Peretz apart from both the older generation of Jewish enlighteners and the new generation of radicals. He certainly shared the Enlightenment’s preference for science over metaphysics, and his stories take deadly aim at the excesses of Hasidic rabbis and the credulity of their flocks. But even as he exposes all the petty frauds and abuses of Jewish life with a lawyer’s thoroughness, he has two bits of mitigating evidence that complicate any indictment. As long as the Jews are deprived of political rights, and subjected to economic and social discrimination, they cannot be held fully responsible for the ugliness and failure of their lives. And while the “opiate of religion” may prevent people from first analyzing, then improving, their society, it has also, in the case of the Jews, created in the face of unparalleled adversity a civilization of remarkable moral refinement. In his most sober moments Peretz concluded that the absence of any material foundation condemned the Jews of Poland to death. Pushing the metaphoric concept of “a living death” as far as it could go, he demonstrates that the moral life, dependent on meaningful moral action, is impossible for a people that lives on air and subsists on dreams. In other moods he challenges the force of his own evidence. The short story “Kabbalists” opens with a materialist’s self-assured declaration that the spiritual condition of a people is determined by the degree of its prosperity: “When times are bad, even Torah—that best of merchandise—finds no takers.” The main character is the last remaining student of a once-flourishing yeshiva who adds a penitential fast day to the several days he has gone without food and tries to reach the highest level of union with God before starving to death. In a sense, the narrator demonstrates his thesis: the boy dies because he didn’t have, and wasn’t given, enough to eat. Nevertheless, the boy’s soul is so pure that it contradicts the rational prejudice of the man telling the story.
Throughout the 1890s Peretz was involved in socialist politics. His stories and publications were credited with bringing many young Jews into the ranks of the emerging socialist movement. The little fables he wrote about the pious Jewish cat who swallows the canaries, or about expensive “pike” that are prepared to urge masses of cheaper “carp” to sacrifice themselves, organized the resentment of the Jewish poor against their would-be exploiters. In particular, the character Bontshe Shvayg was held up to Jewish workers as a symbol of their passivity. Bontshe is a battered victim who never once complains or cries out, so in keeping with the scheme of Jewish folk religion, he is rewarded when he gets to heaven. Bontshe the Silent Sufferer is greeted by an angelic chorus of praise, and after his soul is tried in the ultimate court, the Supreme Judge invites him to claim anything he wants for his heavenly reward. The scheme does not work, however, because Bontshe has never learned his worth. When he stammers out a request for a buttered roll every morning, the evil prosecuting angel has the last laugh, and readers understand that they had better learn to demand their due in this life.
Peretz was particularly eloquent in his defense of the Jewish woman who was expected to carry the financial burden of the family she was raising so that she could then sit as her scholarly husband’s “footstool” in heaven. The shrewish housewife had figured prominently in earlier Yiddish writing; her ill-tempered tyranny over the household demonstrated how topsy-turvy the Jewish order had become. The reformers who wanted men to assume financial responsibility for their families set out to satirize shiftless Jewish husbands, but their comic barbs struck less at the passive males than at the overbearing wives. It was Peretz who turned this characterization inside out to show at what terrible cost to women the unwordliness and holiness of Jewish manhood was often attained. The title of his story “Bryna’s Mendl” leads us to anticipate yet another portrait of a henpecked husband and his Cossack of a wife. Then, having organized these expectations, the story reveals the limits of Bryna’s strength and the degree to which she has become the victim of Mendl’s hypocrisy.
Despite Peretz’s wholehearted sympathy for the oppressed, however, he was not satisfied by the ideological prescriptions for the reordering of society. No sooner did the Jewish political parties begin to crystallize and to turn their vague protests and aspirations into fixed party platforms than he rebelled against their materialist constraints, and in the dialectical pattern that characterized both his life and his work came to the rescue of the threatened spiritual values. Attracted as he was by some of the egalitarian and liberal aspirations of socialism, he feared that the systematic reapportionment of wealth would stifle individuality and encroach on the freedom of the creative spirit. The rule of the many could become even more oppressive than the rule of a few. He wrote to the movement after the abortive revolution of 1905 had shown the strength of the revolutionary cadres:
I worry that as victors you may become the bureaucracy, apportioning to each his morsel as to inmates in a poorhouse, allotting work like a sentence of hard labor. You will destroy that creator of new worlds—the human spirit. You will plug up the purest well of human happiness—initiative—the force that is able to pit a single human life against thousands. You will mechanize life …. you will be occupied with regulations …no stomach will be empty, yet the mind will be famished.
These fears were sharpened by his concern for the creative vitality of the Jews, because if human needs could be satisfied through the redistribution of wealth alone, why shouldn’t a Jew speed up the process by dissolving his particular identity? Peretz was far from persuaded by the necessity of class conflict, and unwilling to assist in the dissolution of the Jews toward any such higher end. In 1899 he was arrested and briefly imprisoned for antitsarist activity, but at the very moment when he was thus enshrined as a political martyr, he used some of the time in prison to write neoromantic tales extolling the glories of the Jewish spirit. And despite the swell of criticism that they aroused among some of the younger revolutionaries, these modern folktales and retold Hasidic stories became his most popular works.
Hasidic tales were nothing new. The inspirational religious leaders of what came to be known as the Hasidic movement had used the miracle tale and the exemplum to inspire faith and piety in their followers, who, in turn, traded stories about the virtues and miracles of their respective rebbes and zaddikim. Thus, as Hasidism swept Poland in the late eighteenth century, it generated a vast fund of legends and music. But a century later these same Hasidim and their charismatic leaders had come to represent for the modernizing Jews the embodiment of everything most corrupt and reactionary in Jewish life. Reformist writers, including Peretz himself, had mocked the corruption that was known to infect the courts of the rabbis and the attribution to these faith healers of supernatural powers. In fact, in his political essays and news columns Peretz never ceased to criticize the Hasidim for their fundamentalist beliefs and their resistance to change.
Now, however, along with this critical view, Peretz was among the first to recognize in the ideals of the early Hasidic masters, and in the web of legend that had been spun around them, models of spiritual independence that the Jews of his time were otherwise lacking. All around him in Warsaw and in Poland he observed the pace of linguistic adaptation to Russian and Polish at the expense of Yiddish and Hebrew, the flight of the young to America—or to Palestine or Argentina—and the recklessness with which a new generation was quitting what centuries of Jewish civilization had so painstakingly and at such sacrifice accumulated. Like an engineer who has tried to stoke a recalcitrant engine, only to see it hurtling down an incline out of control, Peretz tried to retard the process he had helped to set in motion, or, if not to retard it, then at least to warn against its runaway abandon.
Despite a superficial similarity to their Hasidic sources, Peretz’s stories present the familiar material from a modern perspective. “If Not Higher,” one of the earliest and perhaps the most famous of the neo-Hasidic stories, is told by a skeptical Jew from Lithuania who is so eager to disprove local legends about the rabbi of Nemirov that he hides under his bed to check things out for himself. The rabbi’s Hasidic followers believe that when he disappears every year between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, he ascends to heaven to plead on their behalf with God. The skeptical sleuth discovers that the rabbi is assuming the disguise of a woodcutter in order to perform anonymous acts of charity. He becomes the rabbi’s disciple, and thereafter, if anyone speaks of the holy man’s ascent to heaven, he softly adds, “if not higher.”
If faith in the Jewish God was no longer possible, Peretz expected Jews to continue to honor the exalted moral tradition that derived from faith. Somewhat like the Lithuanian in the story, he tracked the faithful, persuaded that their human values were on the one hand superior to the religious impulse that had shaped them, yet on the other hand superior to values that could be arrived at through reason alone. The pointed conclusion of the story attributes a “higher” value to earthly goodness than to its heavenly inspiration, but without repudiating the power of that inspiration. Peretz had come to the paradoxical conclusion that in order to improve the material lot of the Jews he would have to continue to nurture their spiritual-religious heritage.
The passion for folklore was already highly developed in Poland, where it also served as a kind of substitute for national autonomy. In addition to the nostalgia for folk culture that was characteristic of every industrializing society, subject minorities like the Poles or the Jews could use their folk sources to express the will to national resurgence. Inspired by the work of Polish ethnographers (some of whom appreciated the Jewish component of Polish lore), Peretz determined to gather every kind of Jewish folk expression and to instill in his followers an appreciation of their native culture. When aspiring writers came to see him with the first samples of their work, he would question them about their background, ask them to sing the songs and tell the stories of their homes, and encourage them to collect all they could. In this way he accumulated material for his own writing and directed them to where Jewish inspiration might be found.
Peretz put this material to varied use. Sometimes he retold a folktale so as to make it appear unembellished, as the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen did in their collections. In such instances, the practiced student of literature, or the scholar who knows the original source, must hunt for the transforming hand of the modern author. Elsewhere, as in the story “Three Gifts,” the author set the tales into a most ironic framework. The soul that circles the globe trying to find suitable “gifts” for heaven discovers a Jew who will die for the soil of Israel, a Jewess whose modesty is more important to her than her life, and a Jew who dies rather than dishonor his God. These are standard folk motifs, and they are selected to represent the national, moral, and religious foundations of Jewish life. But if the story values the bloody gifts these martyrs create, it is far less enthusiastic about the heaven that invites such offerings and finds “beauty” in their martyrs’ blood. Here the narrator drives a wedge between the heroism of the Jews and the metaphysical trust that occasions it.
Peretz also used Hasidic and folk settings to project the grandeur of Jewish civilization. He created mighty rabbinic personalities and an imagined golden age of the Jewish past when great yeshivas flourished simultaneously (as they never did in history) in Safed, Babylon, and Jerusalem. One thinks of Theodor Herzl, the architect of political Zionism, who insisted that all the delegates to the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 wear formal attire. Herzl may have wanted to establish the credibility of his movement in the eyes of the European community, but he had also to involve the Jews in a manifestation of national dignity. A people that is forever picking away at its faults, and being impressed by neighbors with proofs of its failings, has also to be reminded of its capacity for greatness and beauty. Peretz, intent no less than Herzl on affirming Jewish national pride, dusted off the purple of the Jewish experience in dramatizations of intellectual and moral combat, of titanic struggles with God.
Peretz assumed such a major role in the development of a national Jewish literature that the personal themes of his writing are often overlooked. Part of this is due to the lingering modesty of Yiddish culture even after it broke away from its religious moorings. The kind of inquiry that is taken for granted in modern biography, into the sexual activity of the artist or writer as an indispensable key to the understanding of his art and his character, is almost completely missing in Yiddish scholarship, and there have been no such investigations of Peretz’s known involvements with women. This perhaps commendable reticence need not extend to his writing, however, which accorded sex an unprecedented degree of importance as both an enhancement and a complication of human happiness.
Compared to religions that distrust the body and uphold ideals of celibacy, Judaism has a relatively liberal attitude to men and women who want to enjoy physical love as part of the fulfillment of marriage. Unfortunately, the theoretical possibility of love was often thwarted by the practical arrangement of marriages. We know that Peretz’s first marriage was miserable: his father’s attempt to match him up with a suitably intelligent family resulted in a real bond between Peretz and his father-in-law, but not between him and his wife. The strange and partially autobiographical little story “Uncle Shakhne and Aunt Yakhne” captures the emotional atmosphere of such a union. A writer describes the day of his marriage to a wife from whom he is long since estranged, but for whose unhappiness he continues to feel responsible. Contrasting sharply with his own misalliance, he remembers his aunt and uncle who were so alike as to be indistinguishable, less like a wedded couple than a set of twins. The uncle and aunt are sweet and kind, yet as regards romantic love or physical attraction there is not much to choose from between this fraternal couple that smothers the marital fire and the incompatible children who have been yoked together.
Peretz knew that the sexual and creative urges were closely linked. Just as communal discipline should not be allowed to throttle the individual’s intellectual or artistic striving, so too domestic harmony cannot be allowed to quench erotic desire. More than once Peretz dramatized the struggle of the artist between marital fidelity and lust. All his sympathy in the story “A Musician’s Death” is with the dying Mikhl, the frisky father of a band of musicians, who during his final hours has to face his wife’s jealous rage. Although Mikhl tries to assure his wife that his affection for her was never compromised by his attraction to other women, neither the presence of his sons in the room nor his own impending death can persuade him to express regret for having committed adultery. Sexual freedom is no more blameworthy than the passion for life.
Elsewhere, however, this theme was also complicated for Peretz by the cautionary impulse of the filial Jew. Along with the strength of sexual desire, Peretz knew its destructive potential. As it happens, the very first work that he published in Yiddish, the poem “Monish,” which he later characterized as a portrait of himself, presents the conflict between son and lover in semiplayful fashion. A pious Jewish boy is distracted from his studies by the song of a German maiden, really Lilith in disguise, and in his fierce attraction to her he betrays everything in his Jewish universe, from his sidelocks and phylacteries, through his parents and teachers, to Almighty God. The battle between passion and responsibility is often thematically linked in Peretz’s writing, as it is here, to the conflict between Gentile and Jew, not only because of the proscriptions against lust in Jewish teachings (which would make a lecherous Jew feel un-Jewish), but because the sexual drive, directed often enough toward Gentile women, felt to him like an act of national betrayal. Modern man and the creative writer especially might feel they had to liberate their instincts from religiously imposed laws. But to accept the primacy of the sexual drive and to follow its instincts was to destroy any possibility of a living community.
In sum, Peretz provided Jews with the vocabulary of their experience. Focusing on problems rather than solutions, he dramatized the wrenching choices that faced young men and women who had been brought up in one way of life and now had to invent another. Was the moral discipline of the halakhic way of life possible in a secular society? How far was a Jew’ to go in his desire and need to feel at home among the Gentiles without sacrificing his own distinctiveness? Was the struggle for social justice compatible with the desire to preserve a unique people? How could the condition of the Jewish woman be improved without danger to the already-crumbling Jewish social structure? Was the messianic idealism of the Jew the source of his noblest striving or the fatal impediment to his progress? How could the instincts be freed from their civilizing constraints without the destruction of the civilization that was created to contain them? Throughout the centuries of dispersion, the best Jewish minds had been consecrated to precise and subtle argument over legal and moral questions. Trained in Jewish law and practiced in Russian law, Peretz adopted the courtroom as the natural venue of literature, and threw the caseload of modern doubt open to the jury of readers. People said that he was “more than a writer,” by which they meant that he had achieved the status of a moral authority.
It should be noted that to some critics being “more than a writer” meant being less than a good writer. The fine Hebrew stylist David Frishman, for example, published quite a nasty parody of Peretz in 1894, and became his bitterest critic thereafter. He said that Peretz corrupted literature with polemics, that he was a careless writer, that he fawned over the reader yet failed to consummate the courtship. Sholem Aleichem had harsh things to say about Peretz’s readiness to set himself up as a literary “rebbe,” assuming false authority and inspiring cheap adulation. The objection to Peretz’s cerebral fiction carries over to the present: though Saul Bellow included three works by Peretz in his volume Great Jewish Short Stories, he confessed to finding him excessively “talmudic.” Even in Peretz’s day, readers objected to the obscurity of his allusions—another aspect of his talmudism—and while the modern reader may be inclined to appreciate certain kinds of difficulty in fiction, he too may resent being made aware of his ignorance.
A balanced assessment of Peretz’s work is made more difficult by his endless experimentation and changeability. Peretz slipped at both ends of the spectrum. Sometimes, while trying to express the restlessness and malaise of the cosmopolitan whose every new desire turns to ashes in his grasp, Peretz evokes the vagueness of his hero through an unsatisfyingly imprecise prose. And when, contrarily, he is overly determined to put the best face on an unhappy situation, he forces the triumph of his characters because he cannot convince us artistically that they do prevail. He could be alternately too misty and too dogmatic.
Curiously, Peretz produced some of his finest work when he thought he was being least profound. The stories that he designated “humoresques” stand up exceptionally well. The modern reader is likely to appreciate both their unresolved narrative tension and their moral ambiguity. The last humoresque that he wrote, “Yom Kippur in Hell,” consigns the artist, in this case, a cantor, to a posture of eternal defiance within a universal scheme that demonstrates the futility of such defiance. Similarly, Peretz’s satires and works of sanctification are often most successful when the unconscious hand of the author interfered with his apparent purpose. The figure of Bontshe Shvayg, mentioned earlier, was drawn by Peretz with so much residual sympathy that he defied the expectations of the story just as he had defied the expectations of heaven: the suffering saint could not be contained by the moral that was to have made a bad example of him. Peretz’s contemporary audience was understandably desperate for comfort and inspiration, and many readers valued him to the extent that he was able to supply what religion no longer could. For us, the greatest works are those that betray the darker side of Peretz’s doubts and fears. They are better literary works not because of their gloom, but because they allow glimpses of a deeper if more disturbing truth.
Peretz’s writing was part of a broader hope that culture in the Jewish languages, Yiddish and Hebrew, would serve modern Jews as a creative substitute for both religion and politics. We have already mentioned Peretz’s attempt to forge a chain of continuity by reinvigorating folktales and religious motifs. He expended much energy on translating the five Megillot of the Bible into Yiddish, and gave enthusiastic encouragement to the younger poet Yehoash (Solomon Bloomgarten), who undertook to translate the entire Hebrew Bible for modern Jews who might never learn the sacred tongue. He championed the study of Jewish history, using the analogy of a family that through genealogy and geographic contacts seeks to maintain its wholeness in time and space. As the most prominent participant in the Czernowitz Conference of 1907, which declared Yiddish to be a national language of the Jews, Peretz issued an inspirational call for the intensification of Yiddish cultural activities. He became personally involved in projects to establish Jewish choirs and a musical society, dramatic groups and a flourishing theater, informal education through an open university, and Jewish orphanages and schools.
Politically, Peretz hoped that the folk was about to replace the nation, and that in a disarmed continent of peoples, each peaceably separated from the other by a different language and culture, the Jews would live alongside the Poles, Germans, Russians, and so forth, developing their own native culture. According to this view of culture as the determinant of the national character and the guarantor of national survival, the Jews could fare very well in Europe, theirs being a particularly rich heritage and an essentially unthreatening, antiexpansionist notion of specialness or “chosenness.” In the same manner that Yiddish plays could be performed in Warsaw alongside the Polish plays in a neighboring theater, Jews and their neighbors might live side by side, sharing an appreciation for one another’s developing modern culture.
Unfortunately, as Peretz approached the end of his life, there was not a shred of evidence to support this idea of Europe’s evolution. Instead, anti-Semitism became an effective tool of nationalist politics, while the revolutionary movements insisted that Jews be the avant-garde of the new International. From a socialist-internationalist perspective, those nations that already occupied a place on the map would have to make a gradual transition from national to class consciousness. But because the Jews had no land, they were to dissolve themselves at once. Any attempt on the part of the Jews to regroup as a nation would be a setback to the cause of world revolution.
As for the Jews, who were the simultaneous target of both these powerful, competing political forces, they tried frantically to find a solution to their dilemma. Many emigrated, and many assimilated. Jewish political parties proliferated, and the tensions between them increased in direct proportion to the pressure against the Jews from the outside. Peretz, who stood at the center of Jewish life in Warsaw, had to confront not only the mounting hostility to the Jews on the part of his native Poland, but spreading demoralization in the Jewish community itself.
He responded in different ways to these defeats. In 1913 he began to write memoirs that seem to find—or at least to seek—solace in the remembered past. His descriptions of childhood in Zamość, free of nostalgia or bitterness, show how firmly he derives from that native locale. As an autobiographer, Peretz set himself the ambiguous task of revealing himself as a writer. He did not intend to provide confessional self-exposure in the manner of Rousseau, because part of the autobiographical essence he set out to reveal was the shaping influence upon him of the moral atmosphere of his childhood, emphatically including its values of modesty. At the same time, his emergence as a modern writer had been at the expense of that formative tradition. As the young boy begins to experience his uniqueness, to luxuriate in his sensations of pleasure and pain, to cultivate a critical temper, to recognize the conflict between filial devotion and the instincts of revolt, he knows that he will be forced to choose between his creative impulses and the responsible life of a Jew. The autobiography Peretz wrote is a fascinating attempt to prove (the reader will have to judge how successfully) that he had managed to keep intact the Jewish boy within the modern writer.
There is hardly an image or incident in the memoirs without its vital counterpart in Peretz’s works, though the relation between the two treatments is always complex, and often ironic. The author has a habit of pointing, here and there, to motifs or characters that appear in his dramas and stories, showing the connections between memory and art on the one hand, memory and personality on the other. But the connections are often deeper where the author does not make them explicit. So, for example, the reader may want to compare Peretz’s self-absorbed description of his marriage with its bittersweet transformation in the story “Uncle Shakhne and Aunt Yakhne,” or the story of his forfeited first love with the ironic resolution of a youngster’s philosophic doubt in “What Is the Soul?” One of the most haunting images of the memoirs is the well in the center of the marketplace that almost lures the boy to his death with its “liquid smile.” This well stands at the center of the expressionistic drama A Night in the Old Marketplace, which he worked on during the last years of his life, only there it has already lured a band of musicians into its depths and threatens to cast its eerie spell on all the rest of the Jews in its orbit. In the memoirs Peretz tries to reimpose authorial control over the unconscious and accidental forces that shaped his development. He gives free rein to his creative will in telling how his creative powers assumed their characteristic form. This was the sunniest of his late projects, a vital counterpoint to the book of Ecclesiastes, which he was simultaneously translating into Yiddish.
Had it been possible to ensure the continuity of the Jewish people through literature in a Jewish language, or to fashion out of literature a weapon of cultural resistance sufficiently forceful to stave off those who hated the Jews, the collected works of Peretz might have secured the Jews till the end of time. When Peretz died, his most devoted biographer and interpreter, Shmuel Niger, could not bring himself to use the past tense because “Peretz was the future” and how could the future be relegated to the past? Indeed, when the American writer John Hersey set out to dramatize events in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II in his novel The Wall, he described the cultural resistance of the Jews through an evening devoted to Peretz. Such commemorative gatherings had taken place not only in the Warsaw Ghetto but wherever Jews mounted a cultural resistance by trying to maintain confidence in the higher spirit of humankind.
Peretz’s idea of culture as a guarantor of Jewish national survival did not prove viable. But as the Bible remains the most important book to readers who may no longer credit its divine source, so within the modern context the works of Peretz outlast the idea that inspired their creation. Arguments over what is best in the Peretz canon will be resolved by each new generation in turn. This volume of the Library of Yiddish Classics presents some of the finest and most interesting of Peretz’s work in the hope that a companion volume of drama, essays, and publicistic writing will follow.
RUTH R. WISSE
Montreal, 1990
With the poem “Monish” Peretz made his debut as a Yiddish writer in 1888. This story of a pious Jewish boy, autobiographically inspired, as Peretz tells us in his memoirs, comments on the crisis of the Jewish artist who succumbs to the powerful attraction of Christian culture. The original version contained a discursive passage about the constraints of the Yiddish language, which has no words for sex appeal / and for such things as lovers feel.” Perhaps Peretz no longer felt these constraints as sharply in later years, because he omitted this passage in the final version of 1908, on which this translation is based.
MONISH
Life is like a river;
we are fish.
The water’s wholesome and fresh
and we would swim forever,
but for a black figure
on the riverbank.
There Satan stands,
in his hands
a fishing rod,
and catches fish.
With a worm that eats the dust,
a little lust,
a moment’s pleasure,
the line is baited.
Hardly a flick
and the pike flies in the pan
to be fried or roasted
on the flames of hell.
May his name be obliterated!
we know whose work it is—
Satan’s—
and why it works so well.
The cause
is the little worm;
it draws and draws—
And so the story I’m about to tell.
Listen!
There was a prodigy,
precisely when or where is hard to say,
but in Poland,
in olden days,
and he was raised
in a pious house.
Pious father,
pious mother;
the family,
one after another,
scholars all,
known and praised
everywhere,
and those who know best
say they’ll all be surpassed
by our hero—Monish.
He’s only
seven, eight.
Yet always at his studies
day and night.
He laps up Torah like a sponge.
His mind is lightning;
it can plunge
from the highest
to the most profound,
and can sound the Taz
and the ocean of Shas’,
however stony the Rambam,
he finds a cleft in the rock.
And he’s beautiful.
Black as night, his locks;
his lips are roses;
black arching eyebrows
and sky-blue eyes,
fire-bright.
A joy to see.
Ah, the blushes and sighs
when the maidens see Monish
go by.
The young rebetsin at kheyder
watches Monish, nothing else,
and she melts;
and the pots in the oven
spill and burn
as she sits,
her hands in her lap,
seeming to hear
how the children learn.
And the neighbor, pretty Odl,
lets her needle fall
as she listens to Monish:
her hand on her heart,
her ear to the wall,
tears rolling down her cheek.
But Monish is as good as gold;
he knows nothing of this!
What does Monish seek?
His love—Gemara,
reason and hypothesis:
shor shenoygakh es hapora1
“If an ox should gore a cow …”
He’s as good as gold—
And in those days
Monish was renowned.
Scholars from abroad,
rabbis near and far,
came to hear him out,
“A new star!”
say the silver beards dancing for joy—
“Happy the mother who bore him,
happy the father and the place!”
(I say only what I heard, word for word.
But is that what they would say
on Ararat?)
Those were the days
of the worthy men of old:
brass-rimmed spectacles,
tfiln housed in silver,
talis crowned in gold,
and their minds were as towers.
Other times,
other powers.
The house of study full,
and the people overflowed
to the entry and the step;
the lamp burned steady
past the middle of the night,
and judgment and Torah
abundant as the light.
Now mountain peaks are plentiful,
but the Bible’s Ararat
is not the average snowy
peak;
Ararat’s unique,
for there when the flood waters crested
Noah’s ark rested,
and the One Above Us drew the line;
and, as we’ve heard,
granted life forever to the earth.
“Dear people,” He said, “steal, betray, and slaughter.
You will not be drowned in water,
for I avert my eyes,”
and in the sky he hung a bow
for a sign.
That was once, a pack of years ago,
but the ark is still buried deep in snow,
and there live Sammael and Lilith—man and wife—
grateful for the chill,
and to pass the time away,
far away from Gehenna,
and isn’t it a pretty tête-à-tête?