Yiddish Modernism: Studies in Twentieth-Century Eastern European Jewish Culture

East European Jewish Affairs ISSN: 1350-1674 (Print) 1743-971X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/feej20 Yiddish Modernism: Studies in Twentieth-Century Eastern European Jewish Culture Joel Berkowitz To cite this article: Joel Berkowitz (2018) Yiddish Modernism: Studies in Twentieth-Century Eastern European Jewish Culture, East European Jewish Affairs, 48:3, 442-444, DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2018.1566588 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2018.1566588 Published online: 23 May 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 21 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=feej20 442 BOOK REVIEWS Yet such questions do come from a very stimulating and serious study. With its wide range of primary sources, Jewish Volunteers provides a welcome reevaluation and nuancing of the history and memory of Jewish involvement in the International Brigades. It will be a point of reference beyond specialists of Jews in the Spanish Civil War or of Jewish communists, to scholars working on the Yiddish press or those interested in expanding the scope of Holocaust memory. Constance Pâris de Bollardière American University of Paris, Paris, France [email protected] © 2019 Constance Pâris de Bollardière https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2018.1566587 Yiddish Modernism: Studies in Twentieth-Century Eastern European Jewish Culture, by Seth L. Wolitz, edited by Brian Horowitz and Haim A. Gottschalk, Bloomington, Slavica, 2014, 442 pp., $44.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-89357-386-7 Over the course of a long and multi-faceted career, Seth Wolitz has produced pioneering scholarship in a number of arenas. Though his contributions to francophone literature are not our focus here, it exhibits characteristics also true of his work as a scholar of Jewish literature: for example, his willingness to explore various periods, geographical arenas, and genres, as well as the place of literary translation within his scholarly project. Wolitz’s earliest books include a coedited critical edition from 1962 of the songs of a medieval French troubadour, the 1968 anthology Black Poetry of the French Antilles, and the monograph The Proustian Community (1971). Those studies can be seen as bookends, in terms of Wolitz’s career so far, with his recent volume of translations, Jean-Claude Grumberg: Three Plays (2014). In the more than four decades in between, Wolitz has carried out an ongoing examination of modern Yiddish literature and culture, with forays into other areas like Jewish cuisine and visual arts. Yiddish Modernism, a collection of twenty-five essays previously published in academic journals, powerfully demonstrates how fiction writers, poets, playwrights, and visual artists built a flourishing modernist Yiddish culture. As co-editor Brian Horowitz remarks in his preface, Wolitz was among the very first scholars to identify the remarkable transformation of Yiddish culture from the pre-World War I nationalist vision with its mystical lure exemplified by Y. L. Peretz into a legitimate modernism standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the most advanced elements of European cultural creativity. (x) The original publication dates of the articles gathered here range from 1977 to 2012. Eight of them focus primarily or exclusively on drama, another eight on fiction, five on poetry, two on multiple literary genres, three on visual arts, one on film, and one on what might be categorized as “society” or “philosophy.” Careful readers may have noticed that this taxonomy – not the only possible way to arrange the book’s contents – adds up to more than twenty-five, since some articles explore multiple genres at once. Indeed, the artful, in-depth analysis of multiple genres and multiple texts – and frequently sources and influences from multiple linguistic and cultural backgrounds – is central to Wolitz’s scholarship. In essay after essay, he masterfully walks the reader through the multiple EAST EUROPEAN JEWISH AFFAIRS 443 incarnations of a single motif, theme, or story, whether the urtext be literary, musical, or visual. This starts with the opening article in the collection, “The Americanization of Tevye, or Boarding the Jewish Mayflower” (1988), which takes us from the original incarnation of Sholem Aleichem’s beloved narrator, to the same author’s efforts to rewrite the stories for the stage, to a variety of other adaptations, including both the Broadway and Hollywood versions that launched a global Fiddler industry that continues to thrive. Later scholars who have mined this field fruitfully in their own right, like Stephen Whitfield, Alisa Solomon, and Jeremy Dauber, have in some respects walked through a door that Wolitz first opened. The Tevye essay is in many ways a sensible way to open the volume, and a worthwhile introduction to Wolitz’s scholarship for the uninitiated. There he takes a character whose place in Jewish culture has become ubiquitous and follows him from Eastern Europe to America through his reinvention in multiple arts forms and eras. It also offers an agenda that Wolitz will return to, mostly implicitly, time and again. Near the end of the article, Wolitz writes, Sholem Aleichem may have sent Tevye in his play to the Land of Israel, but history and the Eastern European Jewish masses drew Sholem Aleichem and Tevye to America. Well beyond the control of Sholem Aleichem, the immigrants and their descendants created their American Tevye, who reflects the various stages of Jewish-American acculturation. (24) This is an observation, not a lament. Wolitz is no purist fixated on a cult of originality. Rather, he lovingly analyzes the twists and turns that beloved works of art and literature end up making as they wind their way through Jewish culture, and shows how they fulfill writers’, adaptors’, and sometimes other people’s aesthetic and political agendas as they adapt to new environments. In a constellation of the articles here, Wolitz shows us how works created by such writers as Sholem Aleichem, S. An-ski, and Avrom Goldfaden become classics within, and sometimes beyond, Yiddish culture. Wolitz also gives the reader a set of master classes in the analysis of theme and variation. The musical reference is no accident, for though only one article here examines a song (“Shabes, yontef un rosh-khoydesh,” from Goldfaden’s opera Shulamis) in depth, Wolitz frequently approaches texts with a musician’s precision. Nowhere is this more clearly on display than in his meticulous analysis of Karl Gutzkow’s 1847 German drama Uriel Acosta, the most successful foreign import into the Yiddish repertoire.1 The fact that the play was adapted by four Yiddish writers provides perfect fodder for Wolitz, who engages in a pentagonal comparison, teasing out how each version reflects the context in which it was created, from mid nineteenth-century Germany to late nineteenth-century Russia to interwar Poland and the USSR to 1960s Romania. In an appendix consisting of a six-page table, Wolitz literally lays key lines from all five versions side by side, giving the reader a clear view of how Gutzkow and his adaptors bend language to their particular circumstances – or in some cases, fail to do so as successfully at they might. Yiddish modernism is not only about Yiddish, and neither is Yiddish Modernism. Wolitz is consistently mindful of the variety of linguistic contexts, dialects, registers, and other details that gave rise to, and influenced, the evolution of modern Yiddish culture. The critic often travels with the writers he spends time with, which often means starting in Poland or the Russian empire and moving westward, with figures like Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. And Wolitz’s ear is finely attuned to the polyglot sounds that swirl around the creation of works of Jewish art. In the collection’s longest essay, and certainly among its crowning achievements, Wolitz delves into S. An-ski’s seminal drama The Dybbuk in ways that he is uniquely equipped to, as he gives the play a kaleidoscopic reading: here looking at the great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski’s influence, there examining the role that An-ski’s work as a folklorist has on the text, and elsewhere exploring how the 444 BOOK REVIEWS playwright dramatized Hasidic parables and texts, among many other influences. In one particularly Wolitzian flourish, the essay gives us six different versions of the opening line, taken from a Hasidic nign collected by the Polish Yiddish writer Alter Kacyzne: the original Ashkenazic Hebrew, An-ski’s Yiddish adaptation, other variants in Ashkenazic and Sephardic Hebrew, and an English translation. Wolitz then proceeds to explain in depth how the text “invit[es] the audience into the play and the Weltanschauung of these shtetl Jews,” and then pans out from this textual detail to the broader treatment of Hasidic life and thought that An-ski so skillfully marries to ideas of the well-made play that he absorbed from his contact with Russian and other Western cultures. The editors have done the field of Yiddish Studies, and related subject areas like modern Jewish literature and Jewish art, a service by bringing all these essays together in one volume, handsomely illustrated with a plate section that accompanies two important essays on Jewish visual art (which again take us on journeys, from the genesis of the modern Jewish plastic arts in the Russian empire to newly formed centers of such activity in places like Paris and Jerusalem). The volume would have been further enhanced by a proper introduction, rather than just a brief preface, and some system of arranging the chapters, which currently seem to follow no organizing principle at all. Indeed, a couple of the pieces, fascinating in their own right, that have nothing directly to do with Yiddish, feel out of place here. Those quibbles aside, Yiddish Modernism is an essential volume in Yiddish Studies by a leading scholar whose work has tended to appear more in scattered journals than in single monographs. Several of these essays are already recognized as classics of Yiddish scholarship. Assembling them all within a single volume should help give them the wider readership they deserve, while making it easier for readers to follow key themes that run through Wolitz’s criticism and make new discoveries about the success of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Yiddish artists at building an international, modernist Yiddish project. Note 1. Full disclosure: This essay and one other, on Goldfaden’s Shulamis and Bar Kokhba and Shmuel Halkin’s adaptations of them, appeared in essay collections that I edited or co-edited. Joel Berkowitz Professor, Department of Foreign Languages & Literature, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA [email protected] © 2019 Joel Berkowitz https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2018.1566588