Part 8

Judeo-German poetry has developed in Russia in precisely the opposite direction from the one generally taken by that branch of literature among other nations. Whereas the usual course would have been to pass from the simple utterings of the folksong to more and more elaborate forms, the process among the Jews in Russia has been inverted. The first poetical expressions were those of Dr. Ettinger, who may be regarded as a dialectic continuator of Schiller and Lessing. After that followed the school of popular poets of the Gordons, Goldfaden, Linetzki, Ehrenkranz, Berel Broder. In the seventies a few traces of that school are still to be found, but the majority of songs produced then smack of the badchen's art, while Goldfaden himself has deteriorated into a writer of theatre couplets. The explanation of this is found in the fact that in the sixties the efforts of the folk-singers were crowned with success. The Rabbinical schools had graduated several classes of men trained in the Reform, the Gymnasia and Universities had been thrown wide open to the Jewish youths, and in the next decade a large number of them had availed themselves of the highest advantages offered in these institutions of learning. The cloud of a stubborn ignorance had been successfully dispelled, the light shone brightly over the whole land. The bard's task was done; he had no need to spur the people on to progress, for that duty was now devolved on the large host of younger men who had tasted the privileges of a Russian education. But these had been identifying themselves with Russian thought, with Russian ideals. For them German culture had little of significance, except as it appeared in universal literature, or had affected Russian ideas. Still less were they interested in Jewish letters, whether in Hebrew, or in Judeo-German. On the contrary, they were trying hard to forget their humble beginnings. Neither for these nor by these could the Judeo-German language be employed for any literary purposes. The masses had become accustomed to look with favor on the new education, and one by one the better elements were disappearing from the narrow world of the Ghetto. There was still left a large proportion of those who could not avail themselves of the benefits offered them. They knew no other language than the homely dialect of their surroundings, and they were still thirsting for entertainment such as the folk-singers have offered to them. The older men, the champions of the Haskala, were dead, or too old to write; the younger men had other interests at heart, and thus it was left to a mediocre class of writers to supply them with poetry. This part naturally fell to the badchens. Another quarter of a century, and Judeo-German literature would have run its course; even the badchen would have been silenced. But it suddenly rose from its ashes with renewed vigor after the riots against the Jews in 1881.

VII. POETRY SINCE THE EIGHTIES IN RUSSIA

The latest blood-bath was instituted against the Jews of Russia in 1881. In the same year there was started in St. Petersburg a weekly periodical, _Jüdisches Volksblatt_, by the editor of the _Kol-mewasser_ which had gone out of existence ten years before. The purpose of the new publication was to focus all the available forces that had been dispersed in the decade preceding through the agencies that made for assimilation, and to prepare the way for a renewed activity among the people. These no longer needed to be urged on to progress, but had to be comforted in the misfortunes that had befallen them, and in the dangers that awaited them. In the first number of the new periodical there appeared the poem of J. L. Gordon on 'The Law written on Parchment,' while the second brought one by the same author, outlining his plan to sing words of encouragement to his suffering, hard-working brothers and sisters. However, very soon after all singing ceased. The year 1882 had been one of too much suffering, when even consolation is out of place. Two years later S. Rabinowitsch, who was destined by his unresting energy and good example to cause a revival of Judeo-German literature, justly exclaimed in the same weekly[63] in a poem 'To Our Poet': "Arise, thou Poet! Where have you been all this time? Send us from afar your words of wisdom! For what other pleasure have your brothers if not your sweet and consoling songs?"

While no other singers were forthcoming, Rabinowitsch composed himself a series of songs, although he was preparing himself to be a novelist. His heart was with the poetry of the Russian Nekrasov, and his native Judeo-German gave him Michel Gordon for a model. He imitated both, taking the structure from the Russian, and the manner of the folksong from Gordon. When his talent was just reaching its fullest development, he abandoned this branch of literature to devote his undivided attention to prose. Only twice afterwards he returned to the use of rhythm, once in a poem, entitled 'Progress, Civilization,' an imitation of Nekrasov's 'Who lives in Russia Happily,' and at another time in a legend in blank verse. The first has never been finished, the other appeared in a collective volume of poetry published in 1887 by M. Spektor, his friend and rival in the resuscitation of Judeo-German letters.

That volume, named 'Der Familienfreund,' was intended as an attempt to bring together all those who wrote poetry; but we find in it only names that had been known to us from the previous period: M. Gordon, Zunser, Goldfaden, Linetzki.[64] To these must be added the name of Rabinowitsch just mentioned, and of Samostschin, who had furnished a few poems to the _Kol-mewasser_ nearly twenty years before. In the _Volksblatt_ there were published in the meanwhile a few songs by various authors, most prominently by Moses Chaschkes. He also printed in 1889 a volume of his poems at Cracow, under the name of 'Songs from the Heart,' in which are contained a number of reflections on the riots in Russia. There are some good thoughts in them, although the technique is not always faultless. He, too, belongs to the older type of folk-singers.

The Jews had at that time furnished three names to Russian poetry: those of Nadson, Vilenkin (Minski), and Frug. Of these the first had a Christian mother and died at the early age of twenty-four, in 1886. The second had begun his poetical career in the seventies, after having received a thorough Russian education. There was only Frug left, who had not entirely broken with his Jewish traditions, for he had gone directly from the Jewish farmer colony where he had been born to St. Petersburg to engage in literary work. His first Russian poem was published in 1879. In 1885 he began to compose also in Judeo-German, continuing to do so to the present time.[65] Like many other Jewish writers he had become convinced that his duties were above all with his race, as long as it was oppressed and persecuted, and his energy was thus unfortunately split in two by writing in two languages. For the same reason such poets as Perez, Winchevsky, Rosenfeld, have taken to Judeo-German, which is understood by few and which in a few decades is doomed to extinction, except in countries of persecution. They adorn their humble literature, but they would have been an honor to other literatures as well, and from these they have been alienated.

When Frug began to write in his native dialect, he had already acquired a reputation in a literary language. He had passed the severe school of the poet's technique, had been trained in the traditions of his vocation. One could not expect that in descending to speak to his coreligionists in their own tongue, he would return to the more primitive methods of the popular bard. He simply changed the language, but nothing of his art. By this transference he only gains in reputation, although he loses in popularity, for the accusation frequently brought against him, that he confines himself to too narrow a sphere, falls to the ground when he intends that that narrow sphere alone should be his audience. Half a century had gone by since Dr. Ettinger had introduced the form and subject-matter of German poetry, and since those days no such harmony had been heard to issue from the mouth of a Jewish poet. There were no literary traditions to fall back upon, except the folksong of the preceding generation; there scarcely existed a poetical diction for Judeo-German, and a variety of dialects were striving for supremacy. What he and the people owed to Michel Gordon, he expressed in two poems entitled 'To Michel Gordon' and 'On Michel Gordon's Grave'; both collectively he named 'One of the Best.' In an allegorical series, 'Songs of the Jewish Jargon,' he sings of the history of the language which is identical with that of his downtrodden race. The prologue is a model of beautiful style. The Slavic dactyllic diminutives, grafted on German stems, the gentle cadence of words, the simplicity of the diction, remind one rather of mellifluous Italian than of a disorderly mixture which, in the poem, he compares to the bits of bread in a beggar's wallet, or which, according to another part in the same allegory, excludes the deceased Jew from heaven, as the angel at the gate cannot understand him.

There are a few poems in his collection in which he bewails the lot of a Jewish poet who has only tears for his subject, but the most deal with incidents in the life of his oppressed coreligionists, now painting pictures of their misery, their poverty, their lack of orderliness, now giving them words of consolation. He never passes the narrow frame of his people's surroundings, no matter what he sings. Even when he chooses nature of which to sing, it appears to him transformed under a heavy cloud of his own sufferings superinduced by the persecution of his brethren. The best of his poems are those entitled 'Night Songs,' in which he depicts a few night scenes. Here is the way he describes the Melamed, the teacher of children in those miserable quarters called a school: "Behold the palace, oh, how beautiful, how magnificent: ivory and velvet, silk, leather, bronze, cedar wood ... here lives a Jewish teacher.... Of velvet is his skullcap--it glistens and shines from afar; the fescue is made of ivory; his girdle is of silk; the candelabrum is of bronze; the knout is of leather; the stool, the stool is cut out of cedar wood!" One can easily see that the rest of the picture is in keeping with the glory just described. There is gloom everywhere in his songs. And how could it be otherwise? It was proper for Ettinger to smile and to jest, for he was active at the dawn of better days; it was natural for the poets of the thirties and fifties to battle against superstitions and to sound the cry of progress; for the poets of the eighties there was nothing left but tears.

It has been Frug's ambition to be a continuator of the bards who sang for the masses, to be a folk-poet, and the people look upon him as such, although he hardly appeals to them in the manner of the older bards. He is entirely too literary to be understood without previous training, and his allegory is not so easily unravelled. His greatest faults are, perhaps, an absence of dramatic qualities and a certain coldness of colors. Nevertheless, he is one of the best poets in Judeo-German literature, who may also claim recognition by a wider class of readers.

The year 1888 is momentous in the history of Judeo-German literature: it gave birth to two annuals, _Die jüdische Volksbibliothēk_ and _Der Hausfreund_, around which were gathered all the best forces that could be found among the Jewish writers. The first, under the leadership of S. Rabinowitsch, started out with the purpose of clearing away all rubbish from the field of Jewish letters and to prepare it for a new, a better harvest; the second set out to serve the people with the best existing literary productions. The latter was doomed to a certain mediocrity on account of the bounds which it had placed around itself; the first, in exercising a severe criticism on the productions presented for publication, and in purifying the public taste, attracted from the start the best talent obtainable and encouraged young promising men to try themselves in Jargon letters. In the _Volksbibliothēk_ appeared the firstling from the pen of Leon Perez, the poet and novelist, who must be counted among the greatest writers not only of Judeo-German literature, but of literature in general at the end of the nineteenth century. If he had written nothing else but 'The Sewing of the Wedding Gown,' his name would live as long as there could be found people to interpret the language in which he sings. But he has produced several large volumes of admirable works in prose and in verse.

Leon Perez, or Izchok Leibusch Perez, as he proudly prefers to be called, was born in 1855 in Zamoszcz, the city which has been the birthplace of so many famous men in Hebrew and Judeo-German letters, the home of Zederbaum and Ettinger. He obtained his education in a curious way. In his town there had lived a surgeon's assistant who, on becoming rich, had collected a library on all kinds of subjects, numbering nearly three thousand volumes. There came reverses to him, and his books were stored away pell mell in the loft. Perez somehow got hold of the key to that room, and without choice took to reading, until the whole library was swallowed up by his omnivorous appetite. He read everything he could get hold of, and he learned German through a work on physics which he had discovered in the loft. Then he passed on from science to science, all by himself. Then he studied Heine by heart, then Shelley, and then he became a mystic. This history of his education is also the history of his genius. There is reflected in it the subtleness of the Talmud, the wisdom of the ancients, the sparkle of Heine, the transcendency of Shelley, the mysticism of Hauptmann. He has treated masterfully the Talmudical legend, has composed in the style of the Romancero, and has carried allegory to the highest degree of perfection.

Perez is even less of a popular poet than Frug. He has entirely parted company with the people. Although he started with the avowed purpose of aiding his race to a better recognition of itself, yet his talents are of too high an order, where language, feelings, and thoughts soar far above the understanding of the masses. He can hardly be properly appreciated even by those who enjoy the advantages of a fair school education, not to speak of those who are merely lettered. It is only an unfortunate accident, the persecutions of the Jews, that has thrown him into so unpromising a field as that of Judeo-German letters, where to be great is to be unknown to the world at large and to be subjected to the jealous attacks of less gifted writers. He could easily gain a reputation in any other language, should he choose to try for it, but, like many of his predecessors, he is pursued by the merciless allurements of the Jewish Muse. Her enchantment is the more powerful on her devotees since she appears to them only in the garb of their own weaving. They spend so much work in creating the outer form and fashioning a poetic diction that they get fascinated by their creative labor, and stick to their undertaking, even though they have but few hearers for their utterances.

'Monisch' is the name of the ballad with which Perez made his debut ten years ago.[66] It is the old story of Satan's recovery of power over the saint by tempting him with an earthly love. But the setting of the story is all new and original. The fourth chapter, beginning with

Andersch wollt' mein Lied geklungen 'ch soll far Goim goisch singen, Nischt far Jüden, nischt Žargon

(My song would sound quite differently, were I to sing to Gentiles in their language, not to Jews in Jargon)

is the best of all. He describes there the difficulty of singing of love in a dialect that has no words for 'love' and 'sweetheart'; nevertheless he acquits himself well of his task to tell of Monisch's infatuation, for which, of course, a saint and a Jew can only become Satan's prey. Perez has written a number of stories in verse. Some of them are mosaics of gems, in which the unity of the whole is frequently marred by a mystic cloud which it is hard to penetrate. Such, for example, is his 'He and She,'[67] a story of the Spanish inquisition, and 'Reb Jossel,'[68] the temptation of a teacher of children by his hostess, the wife of a shoemaker. The latter poem is very hard to grasp at one reading, but the details, such as the description of the teacher, his pale and ailing pupil with his endless school superstitions, the jolly shoemaker, are drawn very well. Much more comprehensible are his 'The Driver'[69] and 'Jossel Bers and Jossel Schmaies.'[70] The first is a sad picture of a Jewish town in Poland, in which the inhabitants have lost, one after the other, their means of subsistence after the railroad had connected them with Warsaw. The drivers, the merchants, the artisans who throve at their honest professions before, have become impoverished and are driven to despised occupations, only to keep body and soul together. It is a very sad picture indeed. In the other, the author tells of two boys who had been fellow-students out of the same prayer-book, but who soon separated at the parting of the roads. The one, a faithful believer in all the teacher told him, becomes a Rabbi; the other asks for facts and reasons to fortify the statements of his mentor, and subjects himself to many privations in order to acquire worldly wisdom in the gymnasium and the university. The final picture is placed in Roumania (or Russia, had the censor permitted it), where the student is driven through the streets by a mob, while the Rabbi, unconscious of the outer world, is somewhere thinking hard over the solution of a question of ritual.

The shorter poems are either translations from the Russian poet Nadson, or imitations of Heine. They are well done, though some suffer somewhat by their veiled allegory, at least at a superficial reading. The best of these are those that deal with social questions, or describe the laborer's sufferings. Preëminent among them is 'The Sewing of the Wedding Gown.'[71] If Thomas Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' is to be compared to a fine instrument, then this poem is a whole orchestra, from the sounds of which the walls of Jericho would fall. Instead of a criticism, a short review of the story will be given here. The scene is at a dressmaker's; the cast: the modiste, two dressmakers, and sewing-girls. The modiste tells of the care with which the wedding gown has to be sewed. The choir of sewing-girls sing the song of the prison. The first dressmaker speaks of the beauty of the gown, and compares the bride to an angel from heaven, whereupon the choir sings of the misery at home, of asking the 'angel' to advance a rouble on the work, of the 'angel's' cruel refusal, of the pawning of her silks for a loaf of bread, and of the girl's arrest by the 'angel.' "And the angel has taken care of me during the great frosts, and for three months has provided me with board and lodging." The second dressmaker compares the rustle of the silk to the noise made by her tired bones, speaks of the diamond buttons that will be sewed on the gown "as large as tears of the poor," and bids the wheel of the machine to drown the noise of her breaking bones. The choir sings the song of the grave, where no sewing is done, where all go down in a shroud forever. The second dressmaker continues the song, whereupon a girl, named 'Fond-of-Life,' protests, telling of her good health, of her desire to pass her youth in pleasure. The choir chides her with the Ragpicker's song, in which 'Fond-of-Life's' future is portrayed, and the conclusion to the song is given by the first dressmaker. The first dressmaker contrasts the luxury of the bride's bed with her straw bed on the floor, the bride's splendor of light in her parlor with the two candles at her head when she is dead. The modiste, oppressed by the sad songs that portray their own unhappiness, bids them sing of other people's happiness. To this the choir responds by singing the happiness of the bride, but the modiste sees in this only the girls' jealousy, whereupon the choir tells of the obedient daughter who is advised by her mother to scorn sweetness, getting the promise of a gilded nut if she behaves properly. When the nut is brought and cracked it is found to be wormy and bitter. Of course, that is a picture of a match made by the parents for their daughter. The modiste answers that happiness does not always dwell in high places; and the first dressmaker tells the story of labor, which is quite unique: There lived two brothers happily together. A stranger, who is no other than the Biblical serpent, visits them; he is clad in diamonds and costly stones, and dazzles the older brother with his splendor. He, too, would like to be rich. He follows the stranger out into the woods, and seats himself at his side to inquire of the manner of acquiring such wealth. "What a fool you are to allow your opportunities to slip by," says the serpent. "You do not know that the sweat of your brother is nothing but diamonds, the tears are brilliants, his blood pearls." The elder brother returns home, beats his younger brother to elicit blood and sweat and tears. His wealth grows, but not his happiness, for he suffers as much from fear of his hoarded riches as his brother sighs under tears. They finally fall to blows,--but here the poet purposely breaks his story, for he will not undertake to tell the end of their hostility. The choir sings the ten o'clock song, when all must go to rest: "You are rested, and at times you dream of--a loaf of bread! The clock strikes ten, the work is done,--good night, madame!" The modiste answers: "Be back early in the morning!"

This is the bare skeleton of the poem, of whose painful beauties nothing but a perusal in the original can give an adequate idea. There is the making of a great poet in one who can sing like that; but Perez has chosen, like Rabinowitsch, to devote his best energies to prose, and to this part of his activity we shall return later. Of the minor poems of this period there might be mentioned those by David Frischmann, Rosa Goldstein, M. W. Satulowski, M. M. Penkowski, W. Kaiser, Paltiel Samostschin. Frischmann has produced but a few poems, but they are all of excellent quality. His best is a ballad, 'Ophir,'[72] but he has also written some clever satires in verse. Samostschin,[73] who had begun composing in the sixties, has translated several poems, especially from the Hebrew of J. L. Gordon, and has written some clever feuilletons in rhymes. Minchas Perel has published a small collection of poems on the Fall of Jerusalem, of which the first, 'The Night of the Destruction of Jerusalem,' is a very spirited and dramatic story of the event. Another good book of poems is 'The Harp,' by G. O. Hornstein. Although some of them are in the style of the coupletists, others betray original talent that might be well developed. The best of these is the ballad, 'The Cat and the Mouse,' an allegory of Jewish persecutions, in which the Jew is represented as a mouse living on the fat of the oil candelabrum in the Temple at Jerusalem, and the Romans and other nations are represented as cats who drive the mouse out of her abiding place.