The written word was at the core of traditional Jewish life. In the synagogue the most sacred objects were the handwritten scrolls of the law. The printed volumes of the Talmud, the Shas, occupied a place of honor in the talmud torah and, where he could afford his private copy, in the home of the orthodox Jew.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, publishers of Hebrew books, mainly on religious themes, developed a system of prepublication subscription, whereby they could cover their costs in advance. The lists of subscribers, printed in such books, give their names and towns of residence. They show that book collectors could be found even in the smallest shtetlakh, remote from cultural centers.
Almost everywhere, Jews were the most literate section of the population. The discrepancy between Jewish and non-Jewish literacy was particularly marked in east-central Europe, where between a quarter and a third of the general population was still illiterate in the 1930s. In the Soviet Union in 1939, 94 percent of Jews were literate, the highest figure for any Soviet nationality. The high rate was partly a function of urbanization, but even compared with other city dwellers, Jews were much more literate.
Polish census figures in 1921 that showed higher Jewish than non-Jewish illiteracy rates cannot be taken at face value, since the Polish census takers, like their Russian predecessors, did not include ability to read or write Yiddish or Hebrew as evidence of literacy.1 In fact, most Jewish males in eastern Europe were literate twice over, since they could read and write in both Hebrew/Yiddish and at least one other language; most Jewish women could also do so, though pockets of female illiteracy survived among the older generation.
Given their high rate of literacy and their disproportionate participation in commerce, it is hardly surprising that Jews played an important role in book as in newspaper publishing. Firms such as S. Fischer in Germany, Calmann-Lévy in France, and Emilio Treves in Italy were in the vanguard of literary publishing in the early twentieth century. These published in the national languages of their respective countries. In eastern Europe Jews were also heavily involved in the publishing as well as the printing industries. But there they produced books not only in languages such as Polish and Romanian but in Yiddish and Hebrew (and in much smaller quantities in Judeo-Espagnol).
The advent of the haskalah had broadened the scope of Hebrew literature and brought a wave of secular publishing of fiction and nonfiction on cultural, social, and political themes. Meanwhile, the Yiddish press in the late nineteenth century churned out cheap editions of popular literature.
In the shtetl, itinerant booksellers would offer for sale sforim (religious books in Hebrew or Aramaic), calendars, mayse-bikhlekh (collections of stories), the Tsene-rene, the classic Yiddish novels and stories of Mendele Moykher Sforim, Shalom Aleichem, and Y. L. Peretz, popular fiction by authors such as Ayzik Meyer Dik, and perennial favorites like the Centura Ventura, a Yiddish translation of the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor. As a result, all but the poorest Jewish homes contained at least a few books.
Reading began early. Jewish children read the same books as their neighbors, except perhaps for Christian biblical tales, but being close to 100 percent literate and members of a bookish civilization, they read more. Often they also read books specifically directed toward Jews, including books in Yiddish: simplified versions of the stories of Shalom Aleichem, Jewish folk tales, biographies of figures such as Nansen and Caruso, or translations of Grimm’s fairy tales, Oscar Wilde’s Dos Shternkind (“The Star-Child”), or Lucy Fitch Perkins’s Stone Age fantasy, The Cave Twins (the Yiddish version was published in Vilna in 1939).2
Such books percolated to every level of Jewish society. They often evoked deeply felt responses. It was a common practice for young booklovers to keep reading diaries in which they recorded impressions and reactions to what they had read. Poor people often spent significant sums on books. And where they could not afford to buy, they borrowed them.
By the early twentieth century even quite small Jewish communities in eastern Europe boasted libraries. Sometimes these were promoted by the kehillah and attached to the synagogue or study house, as in Buczacz in eastern Galicia. There the twelve-year-old Shmulik Czaczkes (later known as Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the name under which he wrote, in Yiddish and Hebrew, the works that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature) was commissioned by the gabai (warden) to arrange and catalogue the books, a task he is said to have performed with great professionalism.3 But he also committed the cardinal sin of the overenthusiastic librarian: he wrote comments in the margins of the books.4
Other libraries were associated with societies or movements, orthodox, Zionist, or leftist/Yiddishist. In Poland the Bund-affiliated Kultur-Lige alone claimed to operate no fewer than nine hundred libraries in the mid-1930s. The Hebraist Tarbut school network operated another 370. Big city communities established their own major libraries. In 1936, for instance, the Jewish Central Library in Warsaw, dating back to 1866 and holding thirty-five thousand books, opened a new building next to the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street.
Such institutions became poor men’s universities and inspired deep affection among their readers. Of the Strashun Library in Vilna, an important repository for Hebrew and Yiddish books and manuscripts, the poet Avrom Sutzkever wrote: “There were many libraries in Poland, but the Strashun Library, with its warmth and folksiness, and the friendly smile and charm of its librarian, Khaykl Lunski, … [was] unparalleled.”5 The library had an average of 230 visitors a day but only a hundred chairs. Often readers had to share a seat. Like many other Jewish libraries, the Strashun was open on the Sabbath, though no writing was permitted on that day.
Too much should not perhaps be made of the sheer number of libraries. Some lasted just a few years and had a pitifully small and tattered stock, composed mainly of popular fiction. Few could afford to buy new books and many were reduced to begging for them. In 1929, for example, the Y. L. Peretz Library in Czortków, Galicia, wrote to a Yiddish publisher in Chicago, pleading for donations of books on the ground that the dollar prices were “so exorbitant that we cannot even dream of buying them.”6 A number of gifts were, in fact, received from overseas.
A report issued by the Czortków library in 1937 provides evidence of the evolution of language use and literary tastes. By this time the library had collected 2,500 books. Unlike many secular-Jewish libraries, this one acquired only books in Yiddish, citing the existence of other libraries, private and public, that offered books in Polish. Interest in Yiddish culture in Galicia, however, was said to be weak. The report pointed out that unlike other libraries, where readers were mostly schoolchildren and women, here 78.5 percent of the users in 1936 were adult men. The explanation, it suggested, was that children in the town who attended Polish state schools were “far away from Yiddish.” As for women, many could not read the language.
The library had conducted a survey with other Jewish libraries in the town to determine the extent of demand for Yiddish and Polish books: it found that Polish readers were 2.4 times as numerous as Yiddish ones. Nearly a third of the books in the library were translated into Yiddish from other languages. The most popular book, as measured in number of loans of an individual title, in 1934, 1935, and 1936, was a collection of short stories by the little-known Chicago-based Yiddish writer Moisey Ghitzis (perhaps his Chicago publisher had, as requested, supplied it free of charge). The library also counted the number of loans per reader: the champion had read, or at any rate borrowed, 206 books in 1934.7
A revealing index of linguistic preference comes from a survey of the inventories of Jewish libraries in Warsaw in 1934. Just over half the total number of books stocked were in Polish. Yiddish came far behind with just over a quarter.8 Here was yet another telling indication of the decline of Yiddish, even in its largest center in Europe.
We should not imagine that the main goal of all these libraries was furthering a disinterested search for knowledge. Nearly all of them had an ideological flavor that governed the selection of materials they made available. So broad-minded a scholar as Emanuel Ringelblum, while conditionally approving the decision of his party, the Left Poalei Zion, in 1931, to end censorship in its libraries, set limits: Bundist and anti-Soviet propaganda should not be admitted.9
A more dramatic instance of attempted library censorship, one that exhibited the depth of mutual loathing between religious and secular Jews, took place in the shtetl of Radin, near Vilna. In 1926 students in the yeshiva of Hafets Hayim removed all the books from a secular Jewish library in the town. Like cats presenting mice tails to their mistress, they tore off all the bindings from the books and deposited them in the sage’s “throne room.” They then set fire to the pages in ovens in the yeshiva. A police investigation, while disclosing these facts, failed to unearth the culprits. Far from criticizing the perpetrators, Hafets Hayim issued a decree forbidding disclosure of their names by his followers to the detectives.10
Secularists in the town and far beyond denounced the “vandals” and vowed to reconstitute the library. Contributors gave money and books, including a Yiddish edition of Marx’s Capital. For their part, the supporters of Hafets Hayim angrily rejected the accusation of book burning as a politically motivated slander by persons bent on disparaging “our ancient Jewish culture, the mother of all world cultures.”11 Max Weinreich, of the YIVO Institute, who went to Radin to inquire into the affair, found that the incident was the culmination of a long struggle by yeshiva students in the shtetl against the library, against a modern Hebrew Tarbut school, against an amateur dramatic group, “in short, against anything that does not fit in with the spirit of the Aguda.”12
The commotion was whipped up beyond Radin by secularists who saw the incident as a godsend (as it were) for antireligious propaganda. Opinion in the town itself seems to have been more blasé. A report nine years later stated: “The local youth receives little benefit from this library. Because of the crisis and the dark prospects for the future, the young people are generally apathetic and show little interest in literature or study.”13
In the Soviet Union Hebrew books remained available in some public libraries in the early 1920s but thereafter they were withdrawn from all save specialist collections. In Kiev in the early 1930s Moshe Zalcman discovered a Jewish public library but there were few readers, mainly “aged persons or scholars engaged in historical or literary research.” “The catalogues were being continually revised: the number of legal books diminished. People were frightened to go and look for a book. Who could guarantee that the book would not be forbidden the next day? And then there would be a document attesting that such-and-such a person had read the now illegal book.”14 In Minsk, the Y. L. Peretz Library was ordered in 1924 to remove its collection of 2,900 Hebrew books, although it did not actually do so until three years later.15 By the late 1930s even private ownership of Hebrew books, particularly any by authors deemed anti-Soviet, became hazardous.
Jewish libraries could also be found in most of the larger Jewish centers in Europe. Paris had six, each associated with a different political group, in addition to the substantial library of the establishment Alliance Israélite Universelle. In Salonica many of the old Jewish libraries were incinerated in the great fire of 1917. But new ones were established, including the Biblioteka Sosyalista, which held Judeo-Espagnol editions of Marxist classics. Smaller Sephardic communities were less well endowed. A visitor to Monastir in 1927 noted, “Superstition and ignorance are rife. … Books are few and far between and no library is maintained by the Jews.”16
Who used the libraries, how much, and to what effect? We are told that, apart from a few girls, the readers in the Y. L. Peretz Library in Minsk in 1926 were exclusively male.17 Ten years later a survey of users found that 1,016 people visited the library in the course of a month. They read the Yiddish classics and the major Soviet Yiddish authors, as well as the works of Shakespeare and Nansen.18
In Poland libraries were much frequented by the young. Warsaw Jewish teenagers, it has been estimated, read, on average, a book a week.19 For these young people, according to one analyst, “reading opened up a path to communion with the self but also conduced to sundering of communion with family and community.”20 Books and their characters often became the best friends of their readers, revealing broader horizons, suggesting new values, introducing taboo subjects, and advertising forbidden but enticing worlds.
As books became cheaper, more readily available, and public rather than private property, attitudes toward them changed. The traditional attitude of the Jew to the Hebrew written word was one of reverence: religious books were never destroyed, nor written in; when dropped, they were picked up and kissed; when no longer of use, they were decently retired and buried like human beings. But the modern Jew seemed to treat books differently. The head of the Grosser Library in Warsaw complained in 1933 of “the terribly lawless attitude of Yiddish readers towards books. The physical condition of a book in a Yiddish library cannot be compared with that of a book anywhere else. The book gets torn, smeared with grease, and defaced with graffiti by people who either curse the author or argue against a political opponent.”21
Yet this brutal intimacy with the book, deplorable in the eyes of the preservationist librarian, was perhaps a barometer of the passion invested in literature by Jews of all classes, outlooks, regions, and ages.
As the Yiddish critic Shmuel Niger pointed out in 1939, war and revolution in the period 1914–21 had destroyed “the unity and homogeneity which had been characteristic of Yiddish literature” before the First World War.22 What came to be regarded, in retrospect, as the “golden age” of Yiddish literature had come to an end with the deaths of Peretz, Shalom Aleichem, and Mendele during the war. Henceforth there were three main centers of Yiddish publishing: Poland, the United States, and the USSR, with the last becoming isolated from the others.
For a brief period in the 1920s it seemed as if the Soviet Union offered the brightest prospects for the survival and regeneration of Yiddish literature. The difficulties of making ends meet in the narrow and harshly competitive Yiddish literary market in capitalist countries led several major writers to return from exile to the Soviet Union. They were lured there by the promise of a secure income, low-cost housing in privileged accommodation, and guarantees of publication and wide dissemination of their works. As for censorship, did that not exist also in Poland, the only other European country with a comparable Yiddish-reading population? And was not the USSR more free of anti-Semitism than Poland? Among those who cast their lots with the Soviets on the basis of such reasoning were four major figures, all of whom paid for their decision with their lives.
The poet Dovid Hofshteyn had left Russia in 1924 after being subjected to official criticism for advocating the teaching of Hebrew. He lived abroad for two years, first in Berlin, then in Palestine. In 1926 he moved back to the USSR. He generally hewed to the official line and his work was widely admired. But his eminence did not protect him or his work from interference. In 1929 he found himself attacked as a nationalist. In the following year, when he received the gift of a Hebrew-Yiddish Corona-brand typewriter from America, it was taken away by secret police for a week’s inspection. Early poems of his reappeared with Hebraicisms deleted. A dedication to Bialik was removed. “Later,” his widow wrote, “all dedications were removed. There was no knowing what might happen on the morrow to a man to whom one had presented a poem the previous evening. …”23
Dovid Bergelson, born in Okhrimovo, a shtetl in Ukraine, had lost his parents at a young age and was brought up in Kiev by older siblings. He began publishing Yiddish stories before the First World War. In 1921 he moved to Berlin, where he became a central figure in the small circle of Yiddish writers. Although he sympathized with Communism, he remained in Germany for the time being. The rise of the Nazis, however, made his position there uncomfortable and potentially dangerous. As a temporary measure, he moved to Denmark in 1933. He toyed with the idea of emigrating to America but opportunities did not beckon. He might have gone to Palestine: he knew Hebrew well and in his youth had considered becoming a Hebrew rather than a Yiddish writer. But the outlook for Yiddish in Palestine was even less promising than in America.
In 1934 he returned with his family to Moscow. The decision was partly ideological and partly practical. Bergelson had been Berlin correspondent for the Moscow Yiddish daily Emes and his wife had worked for the Soviet trade mission in Berlin. She strenuously opposed their return to Russia. When they arrived at the station in Moscow, she said, “Where have we come? We shall all die here.”24
The poet, novelist, and playwright Peretz Markish, born in a shtetl in Volhynia, had worked in Kiev in the early years after the revolution but settled in Warsaw, where he became one of the founders of the Literarishe bleter. He moved to Moscow in 1926. A popular writer in translation as well as in Yiddish, he became a faithful adherent and articulate spokesman of the Soviet system, earning the Order of Lenin in 1939.
The last of the four was perhaps the greatest writer: Pinhas Kahanovich, who wrote poems and prose fiction in Hebrew and Yiddish under the pen name Der Nister (The Hidden One). The explanation of this name has been much debated. It may have arisen from his evasion of military service in Tsarist Russia or it may have had a quasi-kabbalistic significance in the mind of a writer whose early works, sometimes labeled symbolist, were full of mystical allusions. Der Nister had left Russia in 1921 and, like the others, lived for several years in Berlin. In 1926 he returned to the USSR, settling in Kharkov.
Der Nister’s great, probably unfinished, family saga, Di Mishpokhe Mashber (The Mashber Family), of which the first volume appeared in Moscow in 1939, has been described as “one of the peaks of all Yiddish fiction” and “the most non-Soviet, and internally the freest work in Yiddish prose in the Soviet Union.”25 Set in the 1870s, the novel describes the mutual relations and spiritual struggles of three brothers, one of whom, portrayed with sympathetic insight, is a follower of the Bratslaver Hasidim. Quite why Der Nister was attracted to them (as he clearly was) is unknown. Perhaps it was their mysticism. Or he may have thought that the Bratslavers would be more acceptable to the Soviet censor since they, uniquely free of allegiance to a dynasty or court, had held closer than any other Hasidic sect to the democratic wellsprings of the early phase of the movement. (Ilya Ehrenburg, bellwether of the limits of the acceptable in Soviet literary circles, had admired the Bratslavers when he visited Poland in 1927.)26 That a novel with such a theme could be written and published in Stalin’s Russia at the height of the purges is extraordinary. Der Nister enjoyed the patronage and protection of the editor of Emes, Moyshe Litvakov. But after Litvakov was shot in 1937, that connection turned into a dangerous liability. That Der Nister was able to survive and continue to write (for the time being) was almost miraculous.
In recent years there has been a tendency to rediscover and celebrate the Soviet Yiddish writers of the 1930s. Intrinsically there is much to be said for that: these four are among the giants of the silver age of Yiddish literature. And there were others. But the Soviet Yiddish writers’ ranks, readership, and impact should not be exaggerated. As Mordechai Altshuler points out, of the 6,376 Jewish prose writers, poets, journalists, and editors recorded in the 1939 Soviet census, “only a tiny fraction worked in Yiddish.”27 The great majority wrote in Russian for the Soviet population as a whole rather than for their fellow Jews.
The peak year of Yiddish publishing in the USSR was 1932, when 668 books and pamphlets appeared. In 1935 the number declined to 437. Of these, however, 213 were translations from Russian. Many of the books were Soviet political literature or schoolbooks. Imaginative literature published in the original was a relatively small component of Soviet Yiddish publishing. Leaving aside fiction, hardly any was on Jewish subjects. For example, of thirty-six works on history that appeared in 1932, just three were on Jewish topics.
In 1934 twenty-four Yiddish writers participated in the first Soviet writers’ congress, which was preceded by the first all-union congress of Yiddish writers. Itsik Fefer, a former editor of Di royte velt in Kharkov and of its successor journal in Kiev, delivered a characteristically party-line oration. An exponent of supposedly proletarian values and proste reyd (simple speech), he seized the occasion to denigrate Sholem Asch and other non-Soviet Jewish writers, including Bialik, who had recently died. It was left to Maksim Gorky, the untouchable éminence grise of Soviet literature, to pay tribute to the memory of Bialik, “a poet who was almost a genius.”28 Joseph Opatoshu, visiting from the United States, attended the preliminary meeting but otherwise Yiddish writers from abroad were notable for their absence, a sign of the growing isolation of Soviet Yiddish—and of Soviet Jews. In the 1920s Soviet Yiddish writers had often engaged in vigorous correspondence with confrères in other countries. By the mid-1930s they hardly dared to send or receive a postcard.
This was a sealed and self-contained cultural world, since living non-Soviet Yiddish authors, other than Communist Party members or fellow travelers, could now almost never be published in the USSR. Nor could their works normally be imported. Even publication in the Soviet Union did not necessarily indicate easy availability. A writer in the Yiddish literary journal Sovetish in 1939 complained that the main Yiddish publishing house in Ukraine was so bad at advertising and distribution that “one rarely sees even a simple announcement in our Yiddish papers and journals, not to speak of catalogues, bulletins, fliers, or posters.”29 By this time book publishing, like newspaper publishing, in Yiddish was fading. The total number of Yiddish books issued in the USSR in 1939 was 339.
The isolation of the Soviet Yiddishists was demonstrated in 1937 when an international Yiddish cultural congress convened in Paris. It attracted 102 delegates from twenty-three countries. Four thousand people attended the inaugural session at the Salle Wagram. Although it was organized mainly by left-wingers (but not the Bund, which, in a characteristic display of ideological purism, boycotted the event), at a time when the left was supposedly still committed to the concept of the Popular Front, one country was notable by its absence: the USSR. When Wolf Wieviorka complained that a “mysterious veil” had descended over the assembly on the subject, the chairman twice tried to shut him up.30
The congress announced the establishment of an international organization, IKUF (Alveltlikher Yidisher Kultur Farband). Regarded by some as a Communist front organization, its leaders included non-Communists such as Zalmen Reyzen, editor of the Vilner tog. In its proclamation of the unity of the Jewish people, its affirmation that no law could deny Jewish national existence, and its declaration that “the present Jewish culture is the continuity of all the human and progressive traditions of the Jewish people, whose language is Yiddish,” IKUF sounded almost Zionist (save for the final word).31 The New York Forverts (or Jewish Daily Forward) dismissed IKUF as a “Communist maneuver to take over Jewish souls.”32 But Communism without Soviet support was not a viable proposition in the 1930s. IKUF did not last long.
Meanwhile, the other main European hub of Yiddish literary activity was also in decline. Until the 1920s Poland had been the center of Yiddish and Hebrew book production. But the publishing industry in Poland was severely affected by the Depression, and the number of Yiddish books produced fell to 222 in 1932. A limited recovery in the following years was reflected in an increase to 443 in 1939. As in the Soviet Union, many of these were translations into Yiddish: one of the last to appear was Der gelibter fun lady chatterly.
Titles produced did not, however, necessarily mean books sold, and the Yiddish publishing world in Poland remained in the doldrums: print runs were greatly diminished and several publishing houses collapsed. New York was eclipsing Warsaw as the Yiddish cultural capital, even as the main center of Hebrew creativity was moving to Palestine.
In 1933 the poet Elias Sheps, who wrote under the pen name A. Almi, gave an interview to the Literarishe bleter in which he bewailed the state of Yiddish culture on his return to Warsaw after an absence of twenty years: “I listen here to the same sighs of resignation as in America … here too Yiddish books lie mouldering on shelves, here too cynicism, lack of faith, and apathy have taken over.” He described the situation unapologetically as a khurbn (an extreme term used to denote a catastrophe or a holocaust): “Let’s call things by their real name,” he insisted.33 The interview evoked a furious, defensive riposte from Kadya Molodowsky: yet two years later she herself decided to leave Warsaw, hoping for better things in America.
She was not alone. Many prominent Yiddish writers had moved to North America by the late 1930s, notably the brothers Israel Joshua Singer and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Increasingly, contributors to the Literarishe bleter were writing not in Poland but from New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Montreal, or Toronto.
The ticking heart of Yiddish literature, nevertheless, remained in Europe. More specifically it resided at 13 Tłomackie Street in Warsaw. This was the bude (“den” or “doghouse”), home of the Yiddish writers’ club. Situated in the center of Jewish Warsaw, adjacent to a brothel, the club was a rendezvous for gossip, rumors, bitter quarrels, and incessant argument among its four hundred members. Its inner sanctum, dominated by a portrait of Y. L. Peretz, was later transmuted into literary legend by repeated evocation in the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Melech Ravitch, who had learned organizational skills by working for ten years in a bank in Vienna, served as club secretary from 1924 until his emigration from Poland in the mid-1930s. A considerable writer on his own account, he imposed some order on the quarrelsome and unbusinesslike literary rabble. On visits to the club Singer would be joined by other fledgling scribblers,
each with his own plans, complaints, vexations. One had been left out by a critic who had compiled a list of prose writers of the younger generation in a literary journal. A second had been promised to have his poem printed by an editor but months had gone by and the poem still lay in the editor’s drawer, or possibly he had lost it.34
Membership of the club was limited to accredited writers. The standard criteria for accreditation were numerical rather than aesthetic: ten published poems, two stories, fifty newspaper articles, or the translation of a book. Once elected, members settled into a life of ease. The balcony of the club became their “summer residence.” Food was cheap and the young Singer was able to obtain extended credit for his meals from an obliging waitress.
Yiddish writers in Poland and elsewhere attached considerable importance to the decision in 1927 by the International PEN Club for writers to constitute a “Yiddish Center”—the only nonterritorial group of its kind in the organization. The center was originally chartered in Vilna, apparently to avoid antagonizing the Polish Writers Association in Warsaw. But it soon established a presence in Warsaw at 13 Tłomackie. The recognition was a bittersweet victory, since it exacerbated the already difficult relations of Yiddish writers with the Polish PEN club, from which they were effectively excluded.
Most of the important Yiddish writers of the period spoke at the writers’ club at one time or another. One visitor who created a sensation was Itzik Manger, probably the most popular Yiddish poet of the 1930s. He was born in Czernowitz in 1901—or rather, as he put it, “I was born in a station, between one town and the next. From that, perhaps, derives the ‘wandering-demon’ in me.”35 Manger has been called “the last Yiddish troubadour.”36 In 1929 he visited Warsaw and was feted at the club as a new voice of Romanian yidishkayt. Interviewed by the Literarishe bleter, he deplored the lack of contact between Polish and Romanian Yiddish literary worlds. “The first salta mortalis [death leap] over that mythic-fantastic curse,” he said, “is my present visit to Poland.”37 He liked it so much that he spent most of the next nine years in Poland.
The atmosphere at the club was rarely placid. Isaac Bashevis Singer, for example, would engage in heated discussions with the journalist Isaac Deutscher, a Marxist who wrote for the bourgeois, moderately Zionist Nasz 
. Deutscher had been expelled from the Polish Communist Party in 1932 for advocating left-wing unity against the danger of fascism, thus becoming one of the earliest “premature anti-fascists.” He later moved to Trotskyism and defended his position in a rowdy meeting at the writers’ club.
The Stalinists tried to outshout him. They called him the renegade, fascist, sellout, capitalist bootlicker, imperialist murderer, provocateur. But Deutscher had a powerful voice. He pounded his fist on the podium and his audience of Trotskyites encouraged him with thunderous applause. He hurled sulphur and ashes at Stalinists and right-wing Socialists, at Fascists, and at such alleged democracies as America, England, and France.38
In 1939 Deutscher took refuge in one of the “alleged democracies,” living contentedly in England for the rest of his life.
In the late 1930s the club verged on collapse as conflicts erupted between leftists and bourgeois writers. Old-timers were annoyed when earnest young radicals told them to switch off the patephon (gramophone) because it was interfering with their political discussions. The restaurant closed as writers preferred to eat at the Piccadilly café. In the summer of 1938 the club moved into new quarters at 11 Graniczna Street. The opening of its new home was a star-studded festivity. The film star Molly Picon and the actress Ida Kaminska lent the occasion glamour. But within a few months the club was again in severe financial straits and on the edge of dissolution.
The bibliographic scholar Brad Sabin Hill has investigated the last Jewish books published in Poland in 1939 just before the outbreak of war. The final work of rabbinic scholarship, he reports, was Barukh she-amar, a collection of Hebrew liturgical studies, including a commentary on the Talmudic tractate Avot, issued in Pinsk by Baruch Epstein, one of the leading Talmudic sages of the period. As for works of secular Yiddish literature, probably the last to appear was a collection of literary essays entitled Kritishe minyaturn, the first publication by a young German-born critic, Joseph Wulf. Printed in Warsaw in the summer of 1939, apparently intended for later distribution, it bears the date 1940. A copy sent to a Yiddish writer in America in advance of publication appears to be the only one to have survived.39
By far the most popular Yiddish writer of the period was Sholem Asch. In the Czortków library his works, taken as a whole, were the most requested every single year over the decade to 1937.40 He was one of the few Yiddish writers whose royalties enabled him to live comfortably by the pen. He was the only one who could, as a result, afford to buy a villa on the French Riviera (named Villa Shalom), where, clad in his flowered dressing gown, he would greet morning visitors in his garden overlooking the sea. He was indeed the only Yiddish writer in the 1930s who was regarded as a celebrity.
Asch’s life exemplified the transition from traditional Jewish society to modernity. He had started writing in Hebrew, had then (so at any rate went the legend) been persuaded by Y. L. Peretz to turn to Yiddish, and ended up being read mainly in translation into German and English. His earliest novella, published in 1904, was called A Shtetl. Later novels and plays explored more adventurous (some said salacious) themes. His play Got fun nekume (God of Vengeance), produced by Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1907, depicted lesbianism and prostitution and caused scandal in several countries. “Burn it, Asch, burn it!” had been the first reaction of Peretz when Asch read it to him.41
Asch’s writing had tremendous narrative thrust; vivid, if often crude, characterizations; an eye for social distinctions; and an ear for colloquial turns of speech. Perhaps because of his immense popularity, some critics looked down on Asch as a sensationalist, moralizer, and literary middleweight. It was said of him that he wrote Yiddish as if the language were his personal enemy.42 Isaac Bashevis Singer considered him “a rustic” whose stories “personified the pathos of the provincial who has been shown the big world for the first time.”43 According to Irving Howe, “Asch brought together two strands of the Yiddish tradition: the tendency to idyllicize the past, bathing it in a Sabbath light, and the tendency to enlarge upon the pathos of romanticism.” Howe dismisses him as an author of “middlebrow narratives with the kind of ‘power’ certain to endear him to popular audiences” and he adds that “under the shrewd hand of his translator, Maurice Samuel, he often read better in English than in Yiddish.”44
Asch also came under attack on other grounds. The orthodox were infuriated by his condemnation of the rite of circumcision (though he was not alone in this view—Simon Dubnow, for example, shared it and did not attend his own son’s bris). Moshe Zalcman, who once visited Asch in France with a party of young Communists, taxed him with his “glorification” of the Piłsudski regime and his failure to endorse the proletarian struggle in his fiction. Asch, who had a short temper, was offended and sent them packing: “I don’t know you and don’t want to know you. I don’t see you and don’t want to see you.”45 Zalcman was joined in his strictures by Isaac Deutscher, who complained in the Communist Miesieęcznik Literacki (Literary Monthly) that “the cult of the Jewish bourgeoisie [was] building up around Asch.” According to Deutscher, this was to be explained “not only by the fascist values in his fiction” but by Asch’s activities “in the arena of so-called Polish-Jewish relations.”46
In 1938 Asch moved to the United States and in the following year published The Nazarene, the first volume of a trilogy on the founders of Christianity. The novel was widely praised in the general press and became a huge bestseller in English. But its reception among Jews was deeply hostile. Haynt, which had previously serialized most of Asch’s novels, rejected this one. The New York Forverts stopped publishing it halfway through and the paper’s editor led a vitriolic campaign against Asch that permanently damaged his reputation. Asch was accused of Christianizing tendencies and of virtual betrayal at a time of extreme danger to the Jewish people. Asch, whose naïve intention was to further a vague, ecumenical coming together of faiths, felt badly bruised. He regarded the book as his “crowning work” and called himself “a sacrifice to my writing.”47 A few Yiddish critics, notably Shmuel Niger, shared this estimation, but their voices were drowned in the storm of abuse.
Something more was at work here than mere religious defensiveness. Neither Joseph Klausner’s Jesus of Nazareth, first published in Hebrew in 1922, nor the French-Jewish writer Edmond Fleg’s Jésus, raconté par le Juif Errant (1933) had aroused such a violent reaction. Nor did Chagall’s painting White Crucifixion, which was created almost simultaneously with Asch’s novel. Most of Asch’s detractors were nonreligious Jews. Their venom, it has been suggested, arose less from a feeling that he had betrayed Judaism than that he had betrayed yidishkayt by publishing the book first in English translation.48
Asch, however, insisted that he was not merely a Jewish but a universal artist. At least in terms of his large international audience in many languages, he could make this claim with greater justice than any other Yiddish writer of the period. But both the criticism and the defense raise the larger issue of what exactly constituted a Jewish writer and what, if any, special responsibilities might attach to such a label.
Poets and novelists in Jewish languages such as Hebrew and Yiddish were in some sense the builders of Jewish culture. But could a writer who did not use a Jewish language also be regarded as one of the construction workers? Was such a writer of Jewish origin who wrote on non-Jewish subjects part of the work crew or regarded as working on a separate building site? Did one even have to be Jewish to be a Jewish writer?
These theoretical conundrums, at which scholars and critics have gnawed lengthily, if not always productively, become easier to resolve if viewed in biographical and historical context. The notion of a special Jewish sensibility is a fata morgana that has often led critics down paths to nowhere. Jewish writers of the period who did not write in Jewish languages were generally regarded as Jewish writers, though, like Asch, most did not subscribe to a narrow or exclusive understanding of that label and some preferred not to think of themselves as Jewish writers at all.
The greatest of them declared in his diary in January 1914: “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”49 Yet the life and work of Franz Kafka are incomprehensible without relation to his self-understanding of his Jewishness, his involvement in Jewish issues, and his insights into the Jewish condition. In 1923 (probably—we do not have an exact date) he wrote to his lover Milena Jesenská:
I’ve spent all afternoon in the streets, wallowing in the Jew-baiting. “Prašivé plemeno”—“filthy rabble” I heard someone call the Jews the other day. Isn’t it the natural thing to leave the place where one is hated so much? (For this, Zionism or national feeling is not needed.) The heroism which consists of staying on in spite of it all is that of cockroaches which also can’t be exterminated from the bathroom.50
Kafka was not alone in comparing the Jew to a giant insect. The image was a commonplace of anti-Semitic propaganda. The difference was that Kafka, unlike the anti-Semites and unlike other Jewish writers in German who sometimes wrote in such terms of the Ostjuden, was squarely on the side of the cockroaches. As Nahum Glatzer writes, “The West European Jew had shaken off the burden of tradition. But Kafka does not—at least with part of his being—consider himself as belonging to that traditionless, uprooted community.”51 He identified much more with the Ostjuden. At one point, coming upon a hundred east European Jewish war refugees in the Jewish Town Hall in Prague, he wrote: “If I’d been given the choice to be what I wanted, then I’d have chosen to be a small East European Jewish boy in the corner of the room.”52
Kafka’s shade hung over modernist Jewish writers in Europe in the 1930s, perhaps over none more than the mordant fantast Bruno Schulz, whose quasi-autobiographical writings in Polish are written largely from the point of view of “a small East European Jewish boy in the corner of the room.” A teacher, artist, and author of stories such as The Street of Crocodiles, in which he constructed a magical, imaginary version of his Galician hometown, Drohobycz, Schulz transmutes the mundane into the exotic and then back again. Although Schulz rarely refers directly to Jewish issues, his works are full of allusions to the problems of small-town Polish Jews and to the larger existential issues facing Jews in the 1930s. Of all Polish-Jewish writers of the period in any language, his work, like Kafka’s, conjures up an imaginary that is at the same time Jewish and universal.
Schulz was one of several important Jewish writers in Poland who preferred to write in Polish rather than Yiddish. Indeed, the main Warsaw cultural weekly, Wiadmości Literackie, had so many contributors of Jewish origin that it was sometimes described as a Jewish paper.
Three other Polish writers of the period found themselves compelled, whether they liked it or not, to address the question of their Jewishness. The poet and satirist Julian Tuwim also made frequent appearances in Wiadmości Literackie. He criticized the “black Hasidic rabble” yet attacked anti-Jewish stereotypes.53 “I do not deny that I am a Jew, but only [by] origin,” he declared in an article in Nowy Dziennik in 1935.54 “My greatest tragedy—that I am a Jew,” he wrote, though later in the same poem he declared his pride in being “a son of the oldest people—of the embryo of messianism.”55 Was this irony or ambivalence? As in many such cases, probably a mixture of the two.
A sharper double edge may be felt in the work of Bruno Jasieński, a futurist poet and novelist who converted to Christianity and then became a Marxist. In 1925 he emigrated to Paris, where he consorted with Ilya Ehrenburg and other left-wingers at the Café du Dôme. Although he wrote in Polish, he was sympathetic to Yiddish, declaring that he had been “estranged from [Yiddish] by my father.”56 Expelled from France in 1929, he was not permitted to return to Poland and took refuge in the USSR. In 1937, however, he was arrested there and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
Together with Tuwim, Jasieński, and others, Aleksander Wat became a leading member of the “Skamander” group of young futurist poets in Poland in the 1920s. Wat had grown up in a moderately observant family but received little Jewish education. Although he chose assimilation to Polish culture, his early poetry, blasphemous and grotesque, contains traces of kabbalistic mysticism and some of his early fiction was on Jewish themes. He later summarized his attitude toward his origins: “I have never felt myself either a Polish Jew or a Jewish Pole. … I always felt myself a Jew-Jew and a Pole-Pole (as they would say in French). It is difficult to explain, yet it is true. I have always been proud (if one is permitted at all to be proud of belonging to this or that group) that I am a Pole, that I am a Jew. And simultaneously driven to despair that I am a Pole, that I am a Jew. What a lot of bad luck!”57
A similar avowal might have been made by Ilya Ehrenburg, apart from Isaac Babel, the best-known Soviet-Jewish writer of the period. Ehrenburg enjoyed the unusual privilege of being able to travel with relative ease between Moscow and Paris, where he spent most of his time between 1921 and 1940. In the 1930s he served as a correspondent for Izvestia in Paris and during the civil war reported from Spain. When his friend the poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested in 1934, Ehrenburg, together with Boris Pasternak, helped prevent his execution. Stalin instead sent Mandelstam into internal exile with the instruction “isolate but preserve.”58 Ehrenburg’s intervention was certainly not an act of Jewish solidarity (all three writers were of Jewish origin). The extent to which Ehrenburg stuck his neck out has been disputed, though Joshua Rubenstein has argued ably the case for Ehrenburg’s defense. Insofar as he tried to use his influence to soften the edges of Stalinist terror, he did so as a writer, not a Jew. But there is no doubt that the depth of Ehrenburg’s loathing for fascism was connected to his strong Jewish identification.
Ehrenburg, who did not know Yiddish, wrote exclusively in Russian. Like Babel, he wrote for a general, not a Jewish audience. Only one of his novels, The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz (1928), has a specifically Jewish theme, narrating the story of a hapless small-town Jew in his encounters with Communism, Hasidism, and Zionism. Lazar Kaganovich considered the book an expression of “bourgeois Jewish nationalism” and it was banned in the USSR.59
Ehrenburg, unlike Babel, survived the terror and his reputation suffered as a result. He came to be regarded as an unprincipled compromiser. Abraham Brumberg wrote of him that “his cynicism was as acrid as his sentimentality was poignant.”60 But his Russian-Jewish duality was open and unapologetic. For all his political maneuvering, Ehrenburg seems to have had less of a complex about his Jewishness than most other Jewish writers of his time.
A rather different case was that of the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian. Educated as a lawyer in Paris, he returned to his native land, where he achieved success in the 1930s as a novelist and playwright. Like Romanian intellectuals in general, he admired French culture and regarded Paris as the intellectual capital of the world. But like most Romanian Jewish writers, he wrote in Romanian and sought integration and recognition within Romanian culture. He chose as his nom de plume the more Romanian-sounding name by which he is remembered. As was the fate of many Jewish intellectuals in the highly nationalistic states of east-central Europe between the wars, he bumped repeatedly against resentment and hostility on the part of those who regarded themselves as guardians of the national culture.
His reactions, recorded with candor in his diary, published only long after his death, were perplexed and often contradictory. Blessed with a great zest for life in all its infinite variety, Sebastian was a democrat who at times flirted with Communism. Yet he remained close to radical-right intellectuals such as the philosopher Nae Ionescu and the religious thinker Mircea Eliade, whose attitudes were strongly infected with anti-Semitism and who were close to the Romanian fascist movement. “Under all circumstances, and especially the present ones, the Jewish writer, quite aware of reality, clings to an imagined integration into national life, while knowing that actual integration has been denied him” was the comment, after a meeting with Sebastian, of his fellow Jewish writer and diarist Emil Dorian in February 1938.61
Bordering the literary kingdom but separate from it was the realm of scholarship. In the interwar period researchers on Jewish issues applied the methodologies of the social sciences to Jewish historical study. The effort to create a general understanding of past and present Jewish societies and cultures gave birth to two great scholarly enterprises, the Encyclopaedia Judaica, several volumes of which appeared in German before the project was aborted by the rise of Nazis, and the Yiddish Algemeyne entsiklopedye, which limped to a conclusion after the Second World War.
The head of the latter project was Simon Dubnow, the most influential Jewish historian of the time, a protean scholar whose World History of the Jewish People, published in many languages, shaped Jewish historical self-consciousness in his generation and beyond. He had no university education and his only formal academic appointment was at a short-lived “Jewish People’s University” in Petrograd in 1919–22. Dubnow called for a new focus in Jewish history. Whereas the scholars of the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums had researched Judaism and others had written about exemplary individuals and their relation to men of power, he and his followers would research the “folk.”62
Dubnow, who lived in Berlin and then in Riga during the inter-war period, served as an inspiration to the founders of YIVO. He also influenced the group of young students in Warsaw, headed by Emanuel Ringelblum, who formed a seminar that collected materials on Polish-Jewish history. This “Young Historians’ Circle” intended, wrote Ringelblum, “to impart a new spirit to the writing of Jewish history,” liberating it from “nationalist and religious attitudes” and applying the methods of historical materialism.63 The enterprise won the support of Polish-language scholars such as Majer Bałaban, head of the Institute of Jewish Studies in Warsaw, founded in 1927, and from 1936 occupant of the chair in Jewish history at Warsaw University, the only professorship in the subject at a Polish university.
In the Soviet Union the prerevolutionary Jewish intelligentsia was either bolshevized or went into exile. The “last Mohican” of non-Marxist Jewish scholarship in Russia was the literary historian Yisroel Tsinberg. A chemist by profession, he had been an ardent Yiddishist in his early years. Between 1929 and 1937 he succeeded in publishing in Vilna eight volumes of his Yiddish History of Jewish Literature, a remarkable feat for a Soviet citizen. His home in Moscow became a “cultural outpost” of secular Jewish scholars and intellectuals. But he was arrested in April 1938 and died in a transit camp in Vladivostok at the end of the year.64
Scholars and poets, avant-garde modernists and journalistic hacks, visionaries, pedants, and purveyors of fairy tales—these writers responded variously to the Jewish predicament, their predicament, but, considered collectively, their lives and works expose the dark heart of the Jewish experience in Europe of the 1930s.