The Thought of Death.—It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light here every moment! And yet it will soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life-loving people!
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, trans. Thomas Common
“Friends,” cried Zverkov, getting up from the sofa. “Let us all be off now, there!”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Constance Garnett
For the Jews of Eastern Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, the act of writing in one’s mother tongue was neither an unremarkable nor an obvious choice. Yiddish was widely spoken throughout the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, the vernacular of the overwhelming majority of Ashkenazi Jewry, yet it was discriminated against not just by the outside world, but also internally. Traditional Jewish literacy was centered around the learning of the liturgical tongues: Hebrew and, to a lesser extent, Aramaic. While European literature was still dominated by literary super-powers—French, English, German, and Russian—the nineteenth century brought a flourishing of minor literatures nourished by the awakening of national consciousness.
Nineteenth-century Jewish literature was dominated by the Haskole movement, or so-called Jewish Enlightenment. Maskilim (proponents of the Haskole) had the twofold mission of transforming Hebrew from the liturgical language of religious practice into a full-fledged modern literary language, and fostering the notion of a secular Jewish education in an effort to combat what they saw as widespread dogma and superstition. The Hebrew language once again became a vehicle for contemporary scientific, philosophical, and poetic ideas, but the potential audience for such a literature remained small owing to the fact that most Jews had limited literacy in Hebrew. Reluctantly at first, the Maskilim soon began producing material in the vernacular of the Jewish masses: Yiddish.
By the turn of the twentieth century, writers such as Isaac Meyer Dik (1807–1893) and Mendele Moykher Sforim (1836–1917) had succeeded in transforming Yiddish from a didactic vehicle, aimed predominantly at women and uneducated men, into a popular and sophisticated medium for literary expression. And so, dwarfed by neighboring giants German and Russian, the two fledgling literatures grew up side by side, occupying the same geographical space, jostling for the same readership, and often flowing from the very same pens. Both languages were in a state of flux: Hebrew was in the process of being rebuilt from the ground up, while for Yiddish the literary standard language was beginning to solidify, comprising elements of the various spoken dialects.
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Zalman (Zalkind) Shneour was born in 1887 in Shklow (modern-day Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire), the fourth of seven children, into a middle-class Hasidic Jewish family related to the Shneerson rabbinical dynasty. His father, a merchant dealing in antiques and precious stones, spent nine months a year traveling between Moscow and Warsaw, buying and selling merchandise.1
Shneour received a strict traditional religious education up to the age of eleven. His father was an avid reader of Kabbalah and would feed his children’s imagination by recounting Hasidic wonder-tales and Torah stories, emphasizing the mystical elements. When Shneour was later exposed to secular subjects such as Russian and Modern Hebrew, his interest in literature blossomed and he began devouring Hebrew poetry with an insatiable appetite. By the age of eight he had begun writing his own poems in Hebrew and Yiddish. His passion for literature soon brought the young Zalman into conflict with his father, who wanted him to go into commerce. Zalman persisted, and when he was twelve his father took him to Warsaw to meet with Nahum Sokolow (1859–1936), editor-in-chief of the Hebrew daily newspaper Ha-Tsefirah, to discuss the feasibility of Zalman becoming a writer. Nothing came of the meeting and the Shneours returned home, neither having managed to change the other’s mind.2
A year later, no longer able to stand the atmosphere of his childhood home, Zalman ran away to Odessa—a city home to a vibrant Hebrew literary scene—where he was welcomed by preeminent poet Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934), and made the acquaintance of the likes of Mendele, Yehoshua Ravnitski (1859–1944), and Simon Dubnow (1860–1941). Shneour enrolled in university, but without financial support from home he lived in extreme poverty and was eventually forced to suspend his studies and move to Warsaw where he secured a job in the newly formed Tushiya publishing house, the first privately owned modern Jewish secular press.3 In Warsaw he began to publish his first literary works, starting with Hebrew poetry in the children’s magazine Olam Katan, and Yiddish Poetry in the Yidishe folkstsaytung.4 In 1902, growing tired of menial work at Tushiya, he resigned and, after a brief stint as personal secretary to Yiddish writer (and de facto patriarch of Warsaw’s Yiddish literary circle) I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), secured a position on the staff of the prestigious Hebrew literary magazine Ha-Dor, where his new boss and mentor David Frishman (1859–1922) taught him everything he needed to know about the business side of literature. Shneour kept a foot in both camps, joining the Hebraist circle of Fishman, while continuing to frequent the Yiddish literary circle around Peretz.
Meanwhile, Shneour’s literary horizons began to expand. In addition to making a name for himself as a promising Hebrew poet (Bialik would later hail him as one of the great new poets: “Here is Shneour—a young ‘Samson’ who overnight grew all seven of his tresses”),5 Shneour also began writing short stories and comical sketches in both languages, as well as Yiddish poems, which would later become immortalized as popular folk songs.6
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The year 1904 saw the opening of Ha-Zeman, a new Hebrew language daily newspaper in Vilna (modern-day Vilnius, Lithuania). Many Litvaks7 who had found employment in the Warsaw publishing world, Shneour among them, saw this as an opportunity to earn a living closer to home.
Shneour lived in Vilne from 1904 to 1906 during a period of unprecedented political turmoil in the Russian Empire; beginning with the Russo-Japanese war and culminating in the failed revolution of 1905 and its aftermath, it was a time of widespread instability, riots, labor-stoppages, anti-Jewish pogroms, and political assassinations.
There Shneour fell in with a circle of like-minded young Jewish writers and intellectuals, which included Peretz Hirshbeyn (1880–1948), Yitskhak Dov Berkowitz (1885–1967), Ernestina Rabinowitz (1884–1938), and Y. Bershadsky (1871–1908). Eighteen years old, Shneour was the baby of the group. His hair, which he had previously worn long in the style of an Orthodox priest, was now cut short, and he began to dress in the dandyish fashion of his peers. His new roommate Berkowitz, who had befriended Shneour in Warsaw, described the enthusiasm with which Shneour came to Vilna:
Shneour was a young, slender, and energetic transplant to our new Vilna colony. His Litvak heart could no longer resist the call: no sooner had I described in my letters to him the charms of the city than he abandoned Warsaw, paid a visit to his native Shklow for passover, and came to settle in the reborn “Jerusalem of the North.”8
One thing that set this group apart from similar groups in Warsaw or Odessa—where the first walls would soon be erected between the hitherto porous worlds of Yiddish and Hebrew letters—was their commitment to the idea of Jewish bilingualism and passion for self-translation (though this passion was not purely ideological or aesthetic: dire economic conditions meant that they needed wares to sell, and Yiddish was a significantly more lucrative commodity than Hebrew). Bershadsky, the elder of the group, who in 1905 would be forced to retire from editing Ha-Zeman owing to tuberculosis, proposed a unique plan: to become a single association, with the aim of translating their own works.9 It was in this context that Shneour took one of his Hebrew short stories written three years earlier, “Min ha-Mavet,” and translated, adapted, and expanded it into the full length Yiddish novella, A toyt: Shriftn fun a zelbsmerder a tiref.10
The plan was prescient, as the post-1905 easing of strict Tsarist press controls led to a proliferation of new Yiddish language newspapers and with them opportunities to publish. Soon Shneour’s first books began to come out—notably, a Hebrew poetry collection and a book of Hebrew children’s stories—culminating in 1909 with the release of four books: his collected Yiddish short stories, a collection of Yiddish poems, and the Yiddish version and a new Hebrew translation of A Death.
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A Death had as its backdrop a large, unnamed Eastern European city. This dark, expressionist cityscape, lacking discernible landmarks or identifying features, full of bustling streets and constant noise, is contrasted with the protagonist’s hometown, a distant provincial market town. The novella takes the form of a diary as a narrative device, granting the reader access to the protagonist’s inner world—a world filled with demons, both figurative and hallucinated; where ideas feed and grow inside you like parasites; where shadows dance on the walls to the tune of the characters’ moods. It is a world home to perhaps the most singular supporting character in all of Yiddish literature: a hungry, spiteful, sensually charged revolver.
The diary follows the Jewish calendar, beginning during the month of Elel (Heb. Elul), the traditional month of introspection and soul-searching, spanning the High Holidays and the Autumnal festival of Sukkes.
The narrator, Shloyme (or Salomon, as he is known to his semi-assimilated Russian-Speaking acquaintances), is a variant of a stock character popular in Jewish literature of the day—shaped by the likes of Hersh Dovid Nomberg (1876–1927), Berkovitsh, and Chaim Brenner (1881–1921)—known in Hebrew as a talush (lit.: “uprooted one”), and in Yiddish as a Fliglman (after the protagonist of Nomberg’s eponymous short story). A typical Fliglman is a young man who has left the provinces, leaving behind his family, religious faith, and traditional lifestyle to broaden his intellectual horizons (usually involving an excessive consumption of Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche) and explore a new, modern life in the big city—only to find spiritual disaffection, economic instability, social isolation, and a chronic inability to relate to women.11 But Shloyme is a self-aware Fliglman, and, recognizing in himself the traits of this stereotype, is filled with violent self-loathing:
I know the type. They emerge from the yeshivas and from dark corners of their small-town parents’ houses, seeking a “goal.” They set off for the big cities, starve and languish in cellars, begging and earning a pittance from private lessons. They in turn take lessons from other students for next to nothing. Their brief youths stifled among dusty books, of no use to anyone. And by the time they’ve attained their goals they are already sick, depressed, and broken for good. Consumptive, short-sighted, emaciated, with protruding Adam’s apples. I can’t stand those sickly, talentless scholars with their pure diplomas, with their sunken chests, without flesh, without life. I can’t stand those victims of education.
This subgenre of Jewish literature, exploring the lives of characters on the margins of Jewish society—characters bearing striking biographical similarities to many Jewish writers themselves—borrowed stylistically and thematically from Russian literature, particularly Dostoevsky. A Death calls explicit attention to this influence with allusions to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, specifically in its repetition of the euphemistic phrasing characters use when speaking of visiting a brothel: tuda/ahin (italicized in both) meaning there (in the sense of “to there/thither”). Shneour drew further attention to this intertextuality when he reprinted the book in 1923 by changing the title from a toyt (“A Death”) to ahin (“There”).
Shneour was far from the first Yiddish writer to critique the restrictive nature of traditional Jewish society, but he was unsurpassed in his ability to articulate the seething resentment of those who did not fit in. While his later works would explore this same alienation with more breadth and nuance, A Death captures this rage and suffocating desperation with energy and originality.
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Shneour went on to travel extensively throughout Western Europe, notably Switzerland, France (where he studied medicine), and Germany. He spent the First World War in a German prison on account of his Russian citizenship.
By the mid-1920s, the two strands of Jewish literature had gone their separate paths. Palestine had become the definitive epicenter of Hebrew publishing, while Yiddish publishing was concentrated mostly in the newly independent Poland and the United States. Shneour, now based permanently in Paris, attempted to work in both markets but was significantly more successful in Yiddish and soon he began writing prose exclusively in that language. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s he enjoyed critical, popular, and financial success with his Shklover yidn (Jews of Shklow) cycle, a series of short stories, set in his hometown. The stories—over a hundred in all—were published weekly in both the Moment (Warsaw) and Forverts (New York), and were followed by various book-length collections. Ranging from the nostalgic to the satirical, they were praised for their humor and sharply tuned psychological insight. Other major works included Noyekh Pandre (Noah Pandre), a picaresque epic in five volumes, and Keyser un rebe (The emperor and the rabbi), a sprawling multivolume historical novel centered around the figures of Napoleon and the Lubavitcher Rabbi, Shneour Zalman Schneersohn (Shneour’s aforementioned famous ancestor). Other standalone novels included A tog oylem haze (A day of worldly pleasures), Di meshumedeste (The convert woman), and Der mamzer (The bastard). Shneour’s Hebrew translations (some of which were probably the work of a ghost translator) never found the success in Palestine/Israel as they had in Europe and North America, and so by the 1950s his fame as a Hebrew writer was almost entirely based on the strength of his poetry, while in Yiddish his prose had all but overshadowed his poems.
Readers of English looking for a taste of Shneour’s later works can find a good selection in Moshe Spiegel’s anthology, Restless Spirit: Selected Writings of Zalman Shneour (Thomas Yoseloff, 1963).
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I would like to thank Batia Baum, Judy Feldmann, Daniel Hahn, Bill Johnston, Eitan Kensky, Fleur Kuhn-Kennedy, Marc Lowenthal, Yitskhok Niborski, Larry Rosenwald, Katherine Silver, the 2016 Translation Fellows at the Yiddish Book Center, and the 2018 prose-workshop participants at the BCLT summer school for advice, feedback, and encouragement at various stages of the translation process.
Daniel Kennedy
Rennes, August 2018
1. Zalman Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur prese un filologye, vol. 4 (Vilna: Farlag B. Kletskin, 1929), 807–820.
2. Dan Miron. “Shneour, Zalman,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2010, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Shneour_Zalman.
3. Shachar Pinsker, “Warsaw in Hebrew Literature 1880–1920: New Perspectives,” Studia Judaica 35, no. 1 (2015): 111.
4. Reyzen, Leksikon.
5. Naomi Brenner, Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact (Syracuse University Press, 2016), 129.
6. Most famously, Margaritleklekh.
7. Litvak literally means “Lithuanian Jew” but refers to a group whose regional identity was considerably older and more stable than the borders of Eastern Europe, living in the area roughly equivalent to modern-day Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and parts of northeast Poland. The Litvaks differed from the Poylish (Polish) Jews and Galitsyaner (Galician/Ukrainian) Jews in dialect, cuisine, and temperament.
8. Y. D. Berkowitz, Undzere rishoynim (Tel-Aviv, 1966), 138.
9. Brenner, Lingering Bilingualism, 125.
10. Nethanel Lilach, “David Vogel’s Lost Hebrew Novel, Viennese Romance,” Prooftexts 33, no. 3 (2013): 331.
11. Alison Schachter, Diasporic Modernisms (Oxford University Press, 2012), 80.