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THE HISTORY OF YIDDISH LITERATURE

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE HISTORY OF YIDDISH LITERATURE

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

BY

LEO WIENER

INSTRUCTOR IN THE SLAVIC LANGUAGES AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1899

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Norwood Press J. B. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

To My Mother

PREFACE

A suggestion to write the present book reached me in the spring of 1898. At that time my library contained several hundreds of volumes of the best Judeo-German (Yiddish) literature, which had been brought together by dint of continued attention and, frequently, by mere chance, for the transitoriness of its works, the absence of any and all bibliographies, the almost absolute absence of a guide into its literature, and the whimsicalness of its book trade made a systematic selection of such a library a difficult problem to solve. Not satisfied with the meagre details which could be gleaned from internal testimonies in the works of the Judeo-German writers, I resolved to visit the Slavic countries for the sake of gathering data, both literary and biographical, from which anything like a trustworthy history of its literature could be constructed. A recital of my journey will serve as a means of orientation to the future investigator in this or related fields, and will at the same time indicate my obligations to the men and the books that made my sketch possible.

From Liverpool, my place of landing, I proceeded at once to Oxford, where I familiarized myself with the superb Oppenheim collection of Judeo-German books of the older period, stored in the Bodleian Library; it does not contain, however, anything bearing on the nineteenth century. In London the British Museum furnished me with a few modern works which are now difficult to procure, especially the periodical _Kolmewasser_ and _Warschauer Jüdische Zeitung_. Unfortunately my time was limited, and I was unable to make thorough bibliographical notes from these rare publications; besides, I then hoped to be able to discover sets of them in Russia. In this I was disappointed--hence the meagreness of my references to them. The Rosenthaliana in Amsterdam and the Imperial Library in Berlin added nothing material to my information. Warsaw was my first objective point as regards facts and books. The latter I obtained in large numbers by rummaging the bookstores of Scheinfinkel and Morgenstern. In a dark and damp cellar, in which Morgenstern kept part of his store, many rare books were picked up. In Warsaw I received many valuable data from Perez, Dienesohn, Spektor, Freid, Levinsohn, both as to the activity which they themselves have developed and as to what they knew of some of their _confrères_. In Bialystok I called on the venerable poet, Gottlober; he is very advanced in years, being above ninety, is blind, and no longer in possession of his mental faculties, but his daughter gave me some interesting information about her father. Wilna presented nothing noteworthy, except that in a store a few early prints were found.

In St. Petersburg I had hoped to spend usefully a week investigating the rich collections of Judeo-German in the Asiatic Museum and the Imperial Library. The museum was, however, closed for the summer, and the restrictions placed on the investigator in the library made it impossible to inspect even one-tenth of the three or four thousand books contained there. When about to abandon that part of my work the assistant librarian, Professor Harkavy, under whose charge the collection is, most generously presented me with one thousand volumes out of his own private library. In Kiev I had a long conference with S. Rabinowitsch and with A. Schulmann; the latter informed me that he is now at work on a history of Judeo-German literature previous to the nineteenth century; the specimen of his work which he published a few years ago in the _Jüdische Volksbibliothēk_ gives hope that it will entirely supersede the feeble productions of M. Grünbaum. In Odessa I learned many important facts from conversations with S. J. Abramowitsch, J. J. Linetzki, J. J. Lerner, P. Samostschin, and depleted the bookstores, especially that of Rivkin, of their rarer books. Jassy in Roumania and Lemberg in Galicia offered little of interest, but in Cracow Faust's bookstore furnished some needed data by its excellent choice of modern works.

Thus I succeeded in seeing nearly all the living writers of any note, and in purchasing or inspecting books in all the larger stores and libraries that contained such material. In spite of all that, the present work is of necessity fragmentary; it is to be hoped that by coöperation of several men it will be possible to save whatever matter there may still be in existence from oblivion ere it be too late. The greatest difficulty I encountered in the pursuit of my work was the identification of pseudonyms and the settlement of bibliographical data. As many of the first as could be ascertained, in one way or other, are given in an appendix; but the bibliography has remained quite imperfect in spite of my efforts to get at facts. A complete bibliography can probably never be written, on account of the peculiar conditions prevailing in the Imperial Library, from which by theft and otherwise many books have disappeared; but even under these conditions it would not be a hard matter to furnish four or five thousand names of works for this century. This task must be left to some one resident in St. Petersburg who can get access to the libraries.

This history being intended for the general public, and not for the linguistic scholar, there was no choice left for the transliteration of Judeo-German words but to give it in the modified orthography of the German language; for uniformity's sake such words occurring in the body of the English text are left in their German form. All Hebrew and Slavic words are given phonetically as heard in the mouths of Lithuanian Jews; that dialect was chosen as being least distant from the literary German; for the same reason the texts in the Chrestomathy are normalized in the same variety of the vernacular. The consonants are read as in German, and _ž_ is like French _j_. The vowels are nearly all short, so that _ü_, _ie_, _i_ are equal to German _i_; similarly _ä_, _ö_, _eh_, _ee_ are like German short _e_. The German long _e_ is represented by _ē_, _oe_, _ae_, and in Slavic and Hebrew words also by _ee_. _Ei_ and _eu_ are pronounced like German _ei_ in _mein_, while _ēi_ is equal to German _ee_; _ā_ and _o_ are German short _o_; _au_ sounds more like German _ou_, and _äu_ and _ō_ resemble German _öi_; _aü_ is equal to German _ai_.

The collection of data on the writers in America has been even more difficult than in Russia, and has been crowned with less success. Most of the periodicals published here have been of an ephemeral nature, and the newspapers, of which there have been more than forty at one time or other, can no longer be procured; and yet they have contained the bulk of the literary productions written in this country. It is to be hoped that those who have been active in creating a Judeo-German literature will set about to write down their reminiscences from which at a later day a just picture may be given of the ferment which preceded the absorption of the Russian Jews by the American nation.

The purpose of this work will be attained if it throws some light on the mental attitude of a people whose literature is less known to the world than that of the Gypsy, the Malay, or the North American Indian.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., December, 1898.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE vii

I. INTRODUCTION 1

II. THE JUDEO-GERMAN LANGUAGE 12

III. FOLKLORE 25

IV. THE FOLKSONG 53

V. PRINTED POPULAR POETRY 72

VI. OTHER ASPECTS OF POETRY BEFORE THE EIGHTIES 95

VII. POETRY SINCE THE EIGHTIES IN RUSSIA 105

VIII. POETRY SINCE THE EIGHTIES IN AMERICA 118

IX. PROSE WRITERS FROM 1817-1863 131

X. PROSE WRITERS FROM 1863-1881: ABRAMOWITSCH 148

XI. PROSE WRITERS FROM 1863-1881: LINETZKI, DICK 161

XII. PROSE WRITERS SINCE 1881: SPEKTOR 177

XIII. PROSE WRITERS SINCE 1881: RABINOWITSCH, PEREZ 194

XIV. PROSE WRITERS SINCE 1881: IN AMERICA 216

XV. THE JEWISCH THEATRE 231

XVI. OTHER ASPECTS OF LITERATURE 244

CHRESTOMATHY

PAGE

I. SSEEFER KOHELES. ECCLESIASTES. M. M. Lefin 258

II. DIE MALPE. THE MONKEY. S. Ettinger 260

III. DAIGES NĀCH DEM TŌDT. WORRY AFTER DEATH. S. Ettinger 260

IV. DER ELENDER SUCHT DIE RUHE. THE FORLORN MAN LOOKING FOR REST. B. W. Ehrenkranz-Zbarżer 261

V. DIWREE CHOCHMO. WORDS OF WISDOM. E. Z. Zweifel 264

VI. DIE STIEFMUTTER. THE STEPMOTHER. M. Gordon 264

VII. DIE MUME SOSJE. AUNT SOSIE. A. Goldfaden 268

VIII. SEMER LE-SSIMCHAS TŌRE. SONG OF THE REJOICING OF THE LAW. J. L. Gordon 272

IX. DIE KLATSCHE. THE DOBBIN. S. J. Abramowitsch 276

X. TUNEJADEWKE. PARASITEVILLE. S. J. Abramowitsch 284

XI. A HARTER BISSEN. A TOUGH MORSEL. D. Frischmann 294

XII. STEMPENJU'S FIEDELE. STEMPENJU'S VIOLIN. S. Rabinowitsch 300

XIII. DER TALMUD. THE TALMUD. S. Frug 306

XIV. DĀS JÜDISCHE KIND. THE JEWISH CHILD. S. Frug 308

XV. DER ADELIGER KĀTER. THE NOBLE TOM-CAT. M. Winchevsky 312

XVI. JONKIPER. THE ATONEMENT DAY. J. Dienesohn 314

XVII. AUF'N BUSEN VUN JAM. ON THE BOSOM OF THE OCEAN. M. Rosenfeld 324

XVIII. BONZJE SCHWEIG. BONTSIE SILENT. J. L. Perez 332

* * * * *

I. APPENDIX. BIBLIOGRAPHY 355

II. APPENDIX. PSEUDONYMS 383

INDEX 385

THE HISTORY OF YIDDISH LITERATURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

I. INTRODUCTION

The literatures of the early Middle Ages were bilingual. The Catholic religion had brought with it the use of the Latin language for religious and ethical purposes, and in proportion as the influence of the clergy was exerted on worldly matters, even profane learning found its expression through the foreign tongue. Only by degrees did the native dialects manage to establish themselves independently, and it has been but a few centuries since they succeeded in emancipating themselves entirely and in ousting the Latin from the domain of secular knowledge. As long as the Jews have not been arrested in their natural development by external pressure, they have fallen into line with the conditions prevalent in their permanent homes and have added their mite towards the evolution of the vernaculars of their respective countries. It would be idle to adduce here proofs of this; suffice it only to mention Spain, whose literature would be incomplete without including in the list of its early writers the names of some illustrious Jews active there before the expulsion of the Jews in the fifteenth century. But the matter everywhere stood quite differently in regard to the Latin language. That being the language of the Catholic clergy, it could not be cultivated by the Jews without compromising their own faith; the example of the bilingualism was, however, too strong not to affect them, and hence they had recourse to the tongue of their own sacred scriptures for purposes corresponding to those of the Catholic Church. The stronger the influence of the latter was in the country, the more did the Jews cling to the Hebrew and the Jargon of the Talmud for literary purposes. It need not, then, surprise us to find the Jewish literature of the centuries preceding the invention of printing almost exclusively in the ancient tongue.

As long as the German Jews were living in Germany, and the Sephardic Jews in Spain, there was no urgent necessity to create a special vernacular literature for them: they spoke the language of their Christian fellow-citizens, shared with them the same conception of life, the same popular customs, except such as touched upon their religious convictions, and the works current among their Gentile neighbors were quite intelligible, and fully acceptable to them. The extent of common intellectual pleasures was much greater than one would be inclined to admit without examination. In Germany we have the testimony of the first Judeo-German or Yiddish works printed in the sixteenth century that even at that late time the Jews were deriving pleasure from the stories belonging to the cycle of King Arthur and similar romances. In 1602 a pious Jew, in order to offset these older stories, as he himself mentions in his introduction,[1] issued the 'Maasebuch,' which is a collection of Jewish folklore. It is equally impossible, however, to discover from early German songs preserved by the Jews that they in any way differed from those recited and sung by the Gentiles, and they have to be classed among the relics of German literature, which has actually been done by a scholar who subjected them to a close scrutiny.[2] On the other hand, the Jews who were active in German literature, like Süsskind, only accidentally betray their Jewish origin. Had they not chosen to make special mention of the fact in their own works, it would not be possible by any criterion to separate them from the host of authors of their own time.

Had there been no disturbing element introduced in the national life of the German Jews, there would not have developed with them a specifically Judeo-German literature, even though they may have used the Hebrew characters in the transliteration of German books. Unfortunately, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, a large number of Jews, mainly from the region of the Middle Rhine, had become permanently settled in Bohemia, Poland, and Russia. Here they formed compact colonies in towns and cities, having been admitted to these countries primarily to create the nucleus of a town population, as the agricultural Slavs had been averse to town life. They had brought with them their patrimony of the German language, their German intellectual atmosphere and mode of life; and their very compactness precluded their amalgamation with their Slavic neighbors. Their numerical strength and spiritual superiority obliterated even the last trace of those Jews who had been resident in those regions before them and had spoken the Slavic dialects as their mother-tongues. Separated from their mother-country, they craved the intellectual food to which they had been accustomed there; but their relations with it were entirely broken, and they no longer took part in the mental life of their German contemporaries. The Reformation with its literary awakening could not exert any influence on them; they only turned back for reminiscences of ages gone by, and hungered after stories with which their ancestors had whiled away their hours of leisure in the cities along the Rhine. And so it happened that when the legendary lore of the Nibelungen, of Siegfried, of Dietrich of Bern, of Wigalois, of King Arthur, had begun to fade away even from the folk books of Germany, it lived on in the Slavic countries and continued to evoke pleasure and admiration.

These chapbooks, embodying the folklore of past generations, were almost the first printed Judeo-German books, as they certainly were the most popular. That the early Judeo-German literature was intended mainly for readers in the east of Europe is amply evidenced by specific mention in the works themselves, as for example in the 'Maasebuch,' where the compiler, or author, urges the German women to buy quickly his book, lest it be all too fast sold in Bohemia, Poland, and Russia.[3] In fact, the patron of the 'Maasebuch,' or the author of the same, for it is not quite clear whether they are not one and the same person, was himself a native of Meseritz in Lithuania. Only after these story books had created a taste for reading, and in order to counteract the effects of the non-Jewish lore, the Rabbis began to substitute the more Jewish legends of the 'Maasebuch' and the 'Zeena Ureena,' and the ethical treatises which were intended to instruct the people in the tenets of their fathers. In this manner the Judeo-German literature was made possible. Its preservation for four centuries was mainly due to the isolation of the German Jews in Russia and Poland, where the German medievalism became ossified and was preserved intact to within half a century ago, when under favorable conditions the Russianization of the Jews began. Had these conditions prevailed but a short time longer, Judeo-German literature would have been a thing of the past and of interest only to the linguist and the historian. But very soon various causes combined to resuscitate the dialect literature. In the short time that the Jews had enjoyed the privileges of a Russian culture, then German medievalism was completely dispelled, and the modern period which, in its incipient stage, reaches back into the first quarter of this century, presents a distinct phase which in no way resembles the literature of the three hundred years that preceded it. It is not a continuation of its older form, but has developed on an entirely new basis.

The medieval period of Judeo-German literature was by no means confined to the Slavic countries. It reacted on the Jews who had remained in Germany, who, in their narrow Ghetto life, were excluded from an active participation in the German literature of their country. This reaction was not due alone to the fact that the specifically Jewish literature appealed in an equal degree to those who had been left behind in their old homes, but in a larger measure to the superior intellectual activity of the emigrants and their descendants who kept alive the spark of Jewish learning when it had become weakened at home and found no food for its replenishment within its own communities. They had to turn to the Slavic lands for their teachers and Rabbis, who brought with them not only their Hebrew learning, but also their Judeo-German language and literature. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century there was no division of the Jews of the west and the east of Europe; they took equal part in the common Judeo-German literature, however scanty its scope. What was produced in Russia was read with the same pleasure in Germany, and _vice versa_, even though the spoken form of the vernacular in Slavic countries was more and more departing from that of Germany.

Even Mendelssohn's teacher was a Galician Jew. But with Mendelssohn a new era had dawned in the history of the German Jews. By his example the dialect was at once abandoned for the literary language, and the Jews were once more brought back into the fold of the German nation. The separation of the two branches of the German Jews was complete, and the inhabitants of the Slavic countries were left to shift for themselves. For nearly one hundred years they had to miss the beneficent effects of an intellectual intercourse with the West, and in the beginning of our century the contrast between the two could not have been greater: the German Jews were rapidly becoming identified with the spiritual pursuits of their Gentile fellow-citizens, the Slavic Jews persevered in the medievalism into which they had been thrown centuries before. Only by slow degrees did the Mendelssohnian Reform find its way into Poland and Russia; and even when its influence was at its highest, it was not possible for it to affect those lands in the same way that it affected the districts that were more or less under German influence. The German language could not become the medium of instruction for the masses, whose homely dialects had so far departed from their mother-tongue as to make the latter unintelligible to them. In Russia it was a long time before the native literature could make itself felt, or before Russian education came to take the place of the German culture; so in the meanwhile the Judeo-German language was left to its own evolution, and a new literature had its rise.

In arriving at its present stage, Judeo-German literature of the nineteenth century has passed through several phases. At first, up to the sixties, it was used as a weapon by the few enlightened men who were anxious to extend the benefits of the Mendelssohnian Reform to the masses at large. It is an outgrowth of the Hebrew literature of the same period, which had its rise from the same causes, but which could appeal only to a small number of men who were well versed in Hebrew lore. Since these apostles of the new learning had themselves received their impetus through the Hebrew, it was natural for them to be active both in the Hebrew and the Judeo-German field. We consequently find here the names of Gottlober and J. L. Gordon, who belong equally to both literatures. Those who devoted themselves exclusively to creating a Judeo-German literature, like the other Mendelssohnian disciples, took the German literature as the guide for their efforts, and even dreamed of approaching the literary language of Germany in the final amalgamation with the Mendelssohnian Reform. In the meanwhile, in the sixties and still more in the seventies, the Jews were becoming Russianized in the schools which had been thrown open to their youths. In the sixties, the Judeo-German literature, having received its impetus in the preceding generation, reached its highest development as a literature of Reform, but it appealed only to those who had not had the benefits of the Russian schools. In the seventies it became reminiscent, and was in danger of rapid extinction. In the eighties, the persecutions and riots against the Jews led many of those who had availed themselves of the Russian culture to devote themselves to the service of their less fortunate brethren; and many new forces, that otherwise would have found their way into Russian letters, were exerted entirely in the evolution of Judeo-German. In this new stage, the Mendelssohnian Reform, with its concomitant German language, was lost sight of. The element of instruction was still an important one in this late period, but this instruction was along universal lines, and no longer purely Jewish; above all else, this literature became an art.