And, being but sinful flesh and blood, I’d also like to unburden my heart on the matter.
Now, for those who’d like to martyr themselves: go ahead, hear a lecture, read an article—or a dozen. In no time you’ll be drowning in a whole sea of titles, like “Spirit and Creativity,” “The Creative Spirit,” “Jewish Spirit,” “National Creativity” . . . and “Creativity and Spirit,” “Spirit and Creativity,” all over again. Later, splayed out in bed, trying to analyze the Ends of all this speechifying and scribbling, you’ll figure out a crucial division. When it comes to our literature, there are two types of camps: one type are our friends (let’s call them “utopians”) and the other—our enemies (“utilitarians”).
Now, in such a debate, it’s only worth it to take on the enemy; good friends are good to the point of discomfort here, they’ll praise you and heap on their hopes and leave you feeling altogether lukewarm. But the enemy’s got sharp teeth. He’s a biter, and you can bet he’ll go for the jugular—so best to take him head on.
So we’ll see now what the other side says. But I’d prefer not to call them “enemies,” the better term is: “our utilitarians.”
What do our utilitarians say about our literature? After all the speeches, they’ve come to a conclusion: the Jewish people are not a People, this literature is no Literature, and our writers are not Writers. Their advice: throw down your pens! Enough with writing in Yiddish. Learn English, Turkish . . . forget it: it’s over!
That reminds me of a joke, actually (perhaps a bit cynical): a hassid was once summoned to appear before a cruel nobleman. First he went to his rebbe to get a blessing, and then he went to the noble. But the noble had him beaten—a “penance,” presumably, for some infraction or another. The hassid came running back to his rebbe.
“My dear rebbe, that was a blessing?” he cried.
The rebbe stroked his splendid, voluminous beard. “My child, may it seem to you that the noble was no noble, the belt was no belt, and the penance—no penance . . .” he replied calmly.
“But, rebbenyu,” the hassid persisted, “it hurts!”
“Ah, so the question remains . . .” mused the rebbe.
Now, not too long ago, for probably the hundredth time, a very senior, very prominent lecturer—of the utilitarian camp—gave a series of talks on Our Literature. He broke the following “news”: we have no Ibsen, Heine or Goethe among our literati. Then he listed a lineup of gentile geniuses, each one with his own encyclopedia entry. “Why don’t we have those?” he exclaimed. “It is because the Jewish folk is an old folk. And an old folk is analogous to—though distinct from—an old man. And when an old man has a child, that child won’t be a prizefighter. He’ll be a cripple. So too, when an old folk produces a writer, he can’t be one of the giants—he is destined to be a dwarf.” (In the meantime, his eyes searched the room for his reflection in a mirror, thinking: “My son wouldn’t be much to look at either . . .”)
Well, there is the response that the Jewish people are just brimming with geniuses. Doesn’t every “chemical test” show that every world-famous person is either directly a Jew, or descended from one? So, the question remains . . .
Anyway, they’re half-right, those utilitarians: it really is dark in our Jewish literary world. We writers are tiny compared to the big names in world literature, just as our party presidents aren’t on the scale of global leaders, just as our singers at their ten-cent concerts are outclassed by the other nations’ Carusos. The riches of the long-ago Jewish Land did not surround us, and were too far-off besides. Gordon and Smolenskin’s words, that attempt to revive the Hebrew language during the Jewish Enlightenment, couldn’t stick: not only was it not the tongue we heard from our mothers, on the street, but, as we know, that literature was just agitational propaganda that declined after the language wars of the day. As for Yiddish: Peretz and the others aside, our literature’s only been noticed recently, with the rise of the radical press and the group known as Di Yunge. And ever since then, people can’t stop lecturing about it . . .
And so our literature is still young, still small and weak and poor. But it’s no cripple, as the utilitarians would hope, dragging itself to death on crooked hands and feet. Our literature is a literature of the proletariat.
What is a writer? If you ask me, he is a cantor, a prayer leader and messenger, sent by the congregation to sing and express the feelings of the public.
Among the nations of this world, this so-called “messenger” is sent by the well-connected, well-educated, and well-off: in other words, the crème de la crème. But the only cream we’ve got has gone sour: to their shame, our bourgeoisie, our doctors and intellectuals, feel no need to pour out their hearts (let alone in Yiddish). Our people—for centuries a merchant folk—are better attuned to the clang of a coin than the sound of a song. It is only now, with the emergence of the proletariat, that the “messengers” of Yiddish are being dispatched. And that call comes from within the proletariat, and goes to those who count themselves in its ranks: a tailor, a carpenter, a barber, a turner, a clerk—even a blacksmith.
So what are our ends, and what end do we imagine? “Dissolution! Decline!” cry our utilitarians. And it’s true, they’ll rally a thousand facts to prove their case. The strongest argument: our children neither learn nor know any Yiddish—and if not our kids, then for whom do we write? Yiddish dies with us! And our utilitarians rush to print English pages in Yiddish papers, Anglicizing the Yiddish until it looks like pure babble . . .
But that claim is wrong. They’re only looking at their children, at “ours.” And it’s true, among even the greatest of our writers, most of the kids grow like wild grass (may they be healthy!). Not only do they lack any roots in their parents’ language, but their parents’ ideals are entirely alien to them . . .
And yet—a look into the Jewish homes of America shows that ninety percent are God-fearing households. And in most of these, here’s what you’ll find: a bobe, a zeyde, a mame, talking in Yiddish, making sure that the grandchild, the child, speaks a bisl Yiddish so that they can daven. Sure, when they go to the library they borrow foreign books. But they know Yiddish, and all it takes is some fateful, positive feeling that comes from a taste for the mame-loshn, and you’ve raised an army of Yiddish readers.
And we haven’t even gotten to the readers. Out there is a whole Russia full of Jewish towns, Smargons and Shnipeshoks and Baysinols, and even more cities and villages, and the people there are simple, fruitful, and multiplying. Boys and girls are born, and no one there talks about compulsory education, about Goals and Ends. These kids are raised with Yiddishkeit, and when they’re of age they cross the ocean and come to America in droves, and here they become our readers—in fact, our employers—who demand that we create some form of nourishment, in Yiddish, for our soul . . .
*
Thus we, Yiddish writers, are the “delegates” of the Jewish working class, and by extension, we must have their perspectives, their qualities. There are no geniuses among us, and singling someone out won’t do; if one of us is taken by force and raised up onto Mount Olympus, he’ll look laughable, even grotesque. But we are original, unique in our own measure.
So we are a product of our class. And our class knows that there are marble palaces out there, with oriental rugs and gold vessels inside. But our class is still too weak to open those grand doors, so instead it dwells in dimly-lit backrooms, on wooden benches, with plain glassware bought from a pushcart. Our class knows the value and delight of hearing someone world-class like Caruso—but the cheapest seat costs a dollar and a half at the opera, so you rush to a ten-cent concert instead. And our class knows that silk clothes are finer, but no one has them, so they dress in rags so as not to go, God forbid, wearing only Adam’s fig leaf . . . And so too, they know that reading Byron, Heine, Goethe, and others can be the greatest delight—but they don’t know the languages (let alone have time to learn them), and there are some skilled folks out there who might deliver the work in Yiddish . . . and it’s then that the working-class man, the pauper, sends us out: “Hey, you son of a gun (or, sometimes, son of something worse), you’re no fool, tell us a story, sing a song, crack some kind of joke!” And we, ever wise, roll up our sleeves and do his bidding.
What is our future? We must respond that the future of our class is also our future. We walk hand in hand, and when the beautiful days come and the proletariat is powerful enough to open those heavy doors to the marble palace, the sun will shine on our heads, we’ll be decked out in silks and the finest perfumes, and we’ll move freely in the big, bright world, and our souls will soar high, high above that little dark planet, and we will sing the beautiful “Ho-hey” song of greatness and joy, a song for our uplifted masses . . .
“—Don’t hold your breath!” I hear the cynics laugh.
“The time will come!” we call out, proud and sure. And if it’s not meant to be in our time, we’ll respond as Ibsen’s protagonist once did: “My poems were not written in vain, though I was not recognized; my daughter will be a singer, and she’ll have inherited that from me . . .”
I’d like to turn now to the spiritual suffering of the gentle Yiddish writer and poet of our time. Who am I writing this for? I can’t say. But I’m pretty sure some faces will turn red soon enough . . .
On the one hand, as I’ve said, there are our utilitarians, fraying our nerves with all the claims elaborated above. Maybe they can’t even tell how toxic these formulas are to our souls . . .
On the other hand, the folk, our “friends,” have their own forms of torture. From time immemorial, the author has been placed on a pedestal, and from there he—The Writer, The Creator, The Genius—has gazed down on the people, and the people have gazed up at him. Not so with us: now that the writers are there in the shops, right at eye-level, we’re seen as no better—or, in truth, even worse. Here’s what happens: there’s two Moyshes—Carpenter Moyshe and Moyshe the Carpenter-Poet. Down in the shops, that Moyshe the Carpenter-Poet is no longer a Writer, but a measly little scribbler. “Look—we’re just the same,” says Carpenter Moyshe. But because Carpenter Moyshe actually thinks he’s the bigger man, he resents the poet, and injects his venom straight into the gentle writer’s heart.
But even more than that, we suffer from the “aristocrats” in our midst. God in heaven, these people! Most of them are “credentialed,” “educated.” But don’t for a second assume they’re the scholars, innovators, or statesmen who might represent the intelligentsia like they do in the other nations. Thank God, we have almost none of those in our camp! Ours are simple working people who study anatomy or law, the same way our shoemakers make shoes. (And oftentimes, they’re pretty bad shoemakers . . . ) But as I said, with a people like ours, made up of shopkeepers and proletarians, our “professionals” couldn’t possibly be any other way.
Well, we can’t blame them. But at the end of the day, in the muck, every worm thinks it’s a butterfly. These “professionals” mix with us writers in our cafés, in public spaces, God only knows why! Maybe they’re drawn to the fragrant notes of all those flowery lyrics . . . Anyway, the smaller the person, the more concentrated his toxicity—so these little people don’t hold their poison. They sit across from us with the dear old face of a sculpture by Professor Rubek and demand: “So, Avreml the Scribbler, tell us something about anatomy!” And they stare like a cat waiting to catch a mouse. And Avreml, so sensitive, so naive, blushes deeply and twists and turns in bed all night.
And thus Avreml the Lawyer rips into Avreml the Scribbler about the law, and the poor soul—who happens to have learned all the classics by heart twenty-five years ago—tears the lawyer apart for not knowing a thing about world literature, and the others gang up on the Scribbler from all sides. And afterwards they turn him into a public disgrace: at every turn, to strangers and friends, they make it known that Avreml is a total ignoramus. “There you go, friends! Take a look at these ‘writers’—now you’ll know what your ‘professionals’ are worth.”
And when the writer’s been poisoned by all sides and can’t hold it anymore, he’ll take that toxicity out on everyone else, belittling and denying their talent. There he goes, old Yidl the Poet-Writer, nails all bloodied from scratching at the souls of his peers. And there are those among us who hear something and, instead of stepping back and taking a more philosophical approach, descend into cynicism and gossip, and so on. My friends, it doesn’t have to be that way.
I’d like to say: be strong, my dear colleagues. Don’t let that poison inside, so that you won’t have to pour it for your friends later. Be proud and full of respect for others who deserve it—and, of course, also have respect for yourselves. We are great in our small numbers. Let us hold our heads up high! And with free, open eyes, let us look to our beautiful future, and walk onwards, proud and sure. We have been chosen by nature to be its avant-garde, and to hold in our hands the two tablets of Creativity and Culture.
