Vilna My Vilna

by Abraham Karpinowitz

  For more on the history of chronicling Vilna, see Anne Lipphardt, “‘Vilne, Vilne unzer heymshtot . . . ’: Imagining Jewish Vilna in New York,” in Jüdische Kultur(en) im Neuen Europa: Wilna 1918–1939, ed. Marina Dmitrieva and Heidemarie Petersen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004), 85–97. The list above does not include Israel Cohen’s Vilna (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1943), which appeared in New York while the city was under occupation, and those works by witnesses to and refugees from the Holocaust that explore the fate of the city in its final years. See, for instance, the diaries of Herman Kruk and Yitskhok Rudashevski, and memoirs by Mark Dworzecki, Shmerke Kaczerginski, and Abraham Sutzkever.

  Weinreich, “Der yidisher visnshaftlekher institut,” 323.

  Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 144. Dawidowicz spent the academic year 1938–1939 under Weinreich’s tutelage as part of YIVO’s aspirantur (graduate fellows) program.

  Vilna in Yiddish Literature6

  For more on the representation of Vilna in modern Yiddish literature, see Avrom Novershtern, “Yung-Vilne: The Political Dimension of Literature,” in The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, ed. Yisrael Gutman, Jehuda Reinharz and Chone Shmeruk (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989), 383–98; Novershtern, “Shir halel, shir kina: Dimuya shel Vilnah be-shirat yidish bein shtei milhamot ha’olam,” in MeVilnah LeYerushalayim: Mehkarim betoldoteihem u’betarbutam shel yehudei mizrah eirope, ed. David Asaf, Israel Bartal, Avner Holtsman (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2002), 485–511; Justin Cammy, “Tsevorfene bleter: The Emergence of Yung-Vilne,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 14, ed. Antony Polonsky (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001), 170–91 and Cammy, “The Politics of Home, the Culture of Place: ‘Yung Vilne’: A Journal of Literature and Art (1934–1936),” Judische Kultur(en) im Neuen Europa: Wilna 1918–1939, 117–33. Yiddish readers in search of an anthology of writing about Vilna should consult Vilne in der yidisher literatur (Vilna in Yiddish Literature), vol. 84 of the series Masterworks of Yiddish Literature, ed. Shmuel Rozhanski (Buenos Aires: YIVO in Argentina, 1980).

  Surprisingly, it was not until after the destruction of Vilna Jewry that the city became a significant theme or locale in Yiddish prose writing. Though Isaac Meir Dik, one of the nineteenth century’s most popular Yiddish writers made his home in Vilna and drew on its environment for his maskilic narratives, the city had no novelist who did for it what Sholem Asch or I. J. Singer accomplished for Warsaw or Lodz in the first decades of the twentieth century. Instead, Vilna’s literary image was constructed in poetry, which can be divided into three general stages: (1) the poetic romanticizing of Vilna as utopian space, a process that began during World War I and continued through the interwar period; (2) the period of counter-myth dominated by the Yung-Vilne generation of writers in the 1930s; and (3) the lamentation and epic poetry emerging from the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath. Each of these contributed to Abraham Karpinowitz’s creative inheritance and situated him within an established tradition that, only after the war, would expand significantly into prose where he would join such fiction writers as Chaim Grade, Joseph Buloff, and Ber Halpern7 in contributing to the fourth stage of Yiddish writing about Vilna: the construction of thick landscapes of memory that offered detailed prose narratives of prewar Jewish life.

  See, for instance, Chaim Grade, Der mames shabosim (translated as My Mother’s Sabbath Days), Der shulhoyf (translated as The Well), Di agune (translated as The Agunah), Froyen fun geto (Women of the Ghetto), Beys harov (The Rabbi’s House), Di kloyz un di gas (translated as Rabbis and Wives), Der shtumer minyen (The Silent Prayer Quorum), Fun unter der erd (Beneath the Earth); Joseph Buloff, Fun altn markplats (translated as From the Old Marketplace); Ber Halpern, Mayn yikhes (My Lineage).

  The first attempts at the poetic mythologizing of Vilna begin in World War I and extend through the early 1930s. This period witnessed the publication of several dozen poems that were interested in the ways in which Vilna’s urban landscape could be read and interpreted as a cultural text, and thereby contribute to the imperative of landkentenish (knowledge and possession of place). Yiddish writing was harnessed to perform the Jews’ at-homeness in Poland by demonstrating the degree to which they were an integral part of its built and human landscapes. These early images of Vilna in Jewish poetry tended towards naïve odes to the city, often composed by expatriates or admirers. They often served as textual guides to the city for nonnatives, providing a visual panorama of its major sites. A. Y. Goldschmidt’s “To Vilna” (1921) is an early example of the sentimental strain that dominated Yiddish writing about the city in this period, one that emphasized harmony between the city’s natural beauty and the Jews’ organic presence there. Later, emigrant nostalgia prompted the composition of what would become the city’s unofficial anthem, A. L. Wolfson’s saccharine folk song “Vilna” (1934, music by A. Olshanetski), originally solicited for the celebratory anthology Vilne zamlbukh by the Vilna branch of the Workman’s Circle in New York City and premiered at the concert marking the volume’s publication. The song constructs Vilna as simultaneously an object of longing and a model for a holistic Jewish universe in which past and present are integrated. It speaks to the city as a spiritual and national inheritance, passed down from one generation to the next. Its effacement of the city’s multinational nature is a response to the context of its composition during a period in which Jewish rights were increasingly under attack by the authorities and local thugs. The song aggressively claimed Vilna as Jewish space (yidishlekh fartrakht, “Jewishly conceived”), with a refrain that roused its New World audiences for “Vilna, Vilna, our mecca.” When the song migrated back to Poland and was embraced by the city’s residents, the lyrics were changed from “our mecca”—a site of spiritual pilgrimage and longing—to “our hometown,” allowing it to serve as an anthem for more immediate political exigencies, including its collective articulation of local pride and resilience when it was later sung at community events in the ghetto.

  If Wolfson’s song proved effective in extending Vilna’s populist, transnational reputation, it was Moyshe Kulbak’s earlier neoromantic “Vilna” (1926) that opened it up as a legitimate theme for Yiddish high art by taking more seriously its complexities and contradictions. Even when Kulbak sought out cosmopolitan excitement elsewhere, he would confess “Ikh bin nokh alts a Vilner” (When all is said and done, I will always be of Vilna). Though the dominant color of Kulbak’s ode is gray and a funereal atmosphere punctuates its lyrics, they evoke an undeniable mystique. The city is repeatedly compared to a text, ranging from a psalm to a prayer, an amulet to a hymn, parchment to book, suggesting that its very existence is the source of its own poetry that invites praise, meditation, lamentation, and interpretation. By the end, the speaker’s public confession “I am your gray! I am your dark flame! I am the city!” transforms the city into a symbol for Polish Jewry’s dreams and anxieties, its commitments and its ambivalences. The fate of Vilna and the fate of the Jews have become synonymous.

  When the local writers of the literary and artistic group Yung-Vilne appeared on the cultural scene in the late 1920s, they capitalized on the city’s reputation in new ways. Its members were united by a common generational experience (all of them, like Karpinowitz, were born in the years immediately before World War I) and shared a commitment to Yiddish as the medium through which they would serve both the needs of their community and the cause of Yiddish literature. The group’s populist streak promoted a counter-myth of Vilna that was truer to lived experience and more amenable to destabilizing and subverting its inherited images. In poetry, these included biting parodies of local heroes and landmarks by Leyzer Volf (see, for instance, the manner by which his poem “The Vilna Synagogue Courtyard” deflates the city’s sense of sacred space), expressionist evocations of political radicalism by Chaim Grade, meditations on the generational mood by Abraham Sutzkever (“hear
the fever of a mute generation”), and attempts to provide an enlarged vision of the region’s multicultural diversity through Shimshon Kahan’s engagement with its Gypsy and Belorussian presence. Elsewhere, Kahan’s “Vilna” (1938) challenged Kulbak’s carefully constructed urban mystique with a poem that suggested that the layers of inherited tradition and divisiveness of contemporary politics contributed to a toxic atmosphere in which it was barely possible to breathe.

  Yung-Vilne’s fiction writers, Shmerke Kaczerginski and Moyshe Levin, established the group’s credentials with the Jewish street by taking up its prosaic concerns. They shared a commitment to socially engaged writing that was an important part of the group’s local popularity. Readers found their own lives and concerns expressed in the social realism and naturalist stories of these young writers.

  Kaczerginski excelled in his preferred genre of reportage. It allowed him to describe life in Vilna’s streets and back alleys and focus attention on the experience of workers and activists. His ear for idiomatic Yiddish interspersed with Polish curses expanded the register of literary language deemed appropriate by the city’s leading Yiddishists, a technique adopted later by Karpinowitz.

  Levin, the group’s main fiction writer, undermined romantic readings of Vilna by offering up angry vignettes of working-class life. The condition of his subjects is frequently one of anomie, alienation, humiliation, and fallen virtue. The Vilna that emerges in Levin’s stories is intimately tied to the material struggles of its inhabitants. It is a world where a Jewish droshky driver picks up a pair of police officers who need to be taken to the station, only to realize that their detainee is his estranged prostitute daughter. Levin was especially keen to explore the corrosive effects of class conflict on Vilna’s sense of community. The title story of his collection of stories Friling in kelershtub (Springtime in the Cellar, 1937) opens with the effects of seasonal floods on an impoverished neighborhood that sits along the banks of the Vilenke, a tributary to the city’s main Viliye River. The threat is particularly severe to the inhabitants of this area because so many of them live below the flood line in dank cellars or in structures already damaged by years of neglect. When the Jewish community’s volunteer flood committee urges Itsik, an unemployed laborer, to evacuate, he lets loose an invective that is a flood of a different sort: “Why don’t you ever come down to this neighborhood on ordinary days?! Or every day! Our life is in constant danger, not just from a surfeit of water but from a surfeit of hunger!” Levin here is not interested in the extraordinariness of Vilna but rather in the ordinary struggles of its most vulnerable. He exposed the growing fissure between residents who struggled at a time of acute economic and political vulnerability and intellectuals and expatriates who promoted the city’s reputation abroad.

  To the extent that Levin was unabashedly Vilnerish in his writings, he cleared critical ground in Yiddish prose upon which Karpinowitz could later build. One of his collections included a lexicon of terms that were part of the city’s specific Yiddish vocabulary in order to maintain regional distinctions. He insisted on situating his stories with precision, contrasting the illusion of grace suggested by the city’s steeples and the region’s natural beauty against the bleakness of material existence. Though Karpinowitz was never an official member of Yung-Vilne, the generational impact of a homegrown literary cohort that took the city seriously as a setting and theme for art impressed itself deeply upon him.

  The liquidation of Jewish Vilna between June 1941 and September 1943 initiated a new stage in the Yiddish literary engagement with the city. Yung-Vilne’s prewar strategy of counter-mythology was no longer appropriate to the imperatives of resistance, then mourning and memory. Once again, the fate of the city and its residents became the subject for legendizing. While the murderous grip on their hometown tightened, poets such as Sutzkever celebrated its folk heroes (“Teacher Mira”), its cultural resilience (“Grains of Wheat,” “Ghetto Theater”), and its partisan fighters (“Itsik Vittenberg,” “The Lead Plates of the Romm Press,” “Narotsh Forest”). When its few returning survivors recognized the extent of the community’s devastation, Yiddish poetry gave voice to the pain of leave-taking:

  You are my first love and my first love you will remain.

  I bear your name throughout the world

  as my ancestors bore the holy ark on their shoulders.

  And anywhere I wander

  All other cities will transform into your image.

  (A. Sutzkever, “Farewell,” 1943–1944)

  Threnodies for Vilna soon gave way to the epic, as in Sutzkever’s volume Geheymshtot (Secret City), in which a group of ten Jews form a symbolic minyan as they hide from the Nazis in the underground dystopia of the city’s sewers.

  If Vilna’s mythopoetic reputation was first established and then repeatedly renegotiated in Yiddish poetry as the city’s survivors dispersed after its destruction, fiction’s strength at thick description seemed better suited to the imperative of its imaginative reconstruction. Yiddish writing after the Holocaust was self-conscious about its responsibility as the last repository for memories of specific places, personalities, and ways of life. This was certainly true of Chaim Grade, who turned much of his creative attention from poetry to prose after his arrival in New York City. Grade’s turn to fiction enabled him to capture the unique brand of Lithuanian rabbinic culture that had been part of his formative intellectual universe. His interest in the contest and moral weight of ideas recovered Vilna’s position as the meeting ground of misnagdic, Torah-centered tradition and varieties of Jewish secular humanism. His fiction delighted in exploring the coexistence of the sacred and the profane, in alternating its attention between the richness of the city’s moral and intellectual imagination and the dire material condition of most of its residents who, like his mother, struggled to eke out a living while exemplifying the modest piety of Lithuanian Jewish civilization. Grade’s achievements in expansive and erudite prose that conjured entire worlds were different in scope from Karpinowitz’s preference for shorter, self-contained tales focused on the persons and places associated with Vilna’s vernacular existence, including his ability to disrupt standard, literary Yiddish with street dialect and words native to Vilna’s Yiddish speakers.8 Karpinowitz’s tales take seriously the challenge of situating themselves in a specific geocultural landscape, one that recalls the street people and back alleys that were rarely the stuff upon which Vilna’s reputation was exported. In the same way that Bashevis Singer’s literary imagination was nurtured by the diverse human parade that came through his father’s courtroom and the artist’s atelier of his older brother, Karpinowitz benefited from growing up in a family where, literally, all the world was a stage. With two sisters who were Yiddish actresses and a father who managed a leading Yiddish theater, Karpinowitz spent his entire youth hanging around impresarios and theatergoers, many of whom could not afford even the modest price of a ticket but who were afforded a place on the balcony nonetheless. The Yiddish theater provided Karpinowitz with access to the broadest cross-section of Vilna Jewry, allowing him, as he admitted later, to “take in all this color . . . and feast on the thick stew of ordinary folk. . . . They were also a part of our people. . . . Why should they be forgotten?”9 Karpinowitz took this question as his aesthetic mantra. His stories often relied on private memories or collective folklore of a specific prostitute, underworld figure, wagon driver, street activist, or lunatic. In so doing, the writer sought to reveal that which was concealed underneath layers of Vilna’s stylized mythology. His was a heroism of the ordinary.

  One critic complained that “I have never read a book by a Lithuanian writer in which I did not understand so many words. . . . If the words are used for local color, the writer owes the reader a glossary with translations.” What Yiddish readers from elsewhere considered disorienting, Karpinowitz considered essential to maintaining Vilna’s distinctiveness and authenticity. See Shloyme Bikl, “Avrom Karpinovitshes Vilner dertseylungen,” Shrayber fun mayn dor
, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv: Farlag Y. L. Perets, 1970), 350.

  Monlogn fun yidishe shraybers: Avrom Karpinovitch (DVD), interview by Boris Sandler (Forverts, 2012). For additional biographical information on Karpinowitz, see “Avrom Karpinovitsh,” Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vol. 8 (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1981), 147–48; Helen Beer, “Avrom Karpinovich,” Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century, ed. Sorrel Kerbel (Taylor and Francis, 2003), 510–13. For additional critical readings of Karpinowitz, see A. Golomb, “A. Karpinovitshes Baym Vilner durkhoyf,” Di goldene keyt 60 (1967), 256–60; Yitshok Yanasovitsh, “Avrom Karpinovitsh,” Penimer un nemem, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Kiem, 1977), 274–79; Sandra Studer, Erinnerungen an das jüdische Vilne: Literarische Bilder von Chaim Grade und Abraham Karpinovitsh (Köln: Böhlau, 2014).

  As the title of this collection of stories suggests, for Karpinowitz Vilna was a visceral possession. Though his fiction resists the strain of postwar nostalgia that continued to press Vilna as cultural utopia, it may contribute to the creation of a no less idealized Vilna in which every simple worker or gangster shares a sense of community. In the end, readers of Karpinowitz will deepen their experience of this volume of short stories by keeping in mind that Vilna was never a fixed symbol. Yiddish writers consistently reimagined the city to respond to the needs of their cultural moment. We are left with the challenge of enjoying these narratives for their full-blooded characters and acute conjuring of a dynamic time and place that met a most violent end, while maintaining our critical recognition that the further one is from the source the more seductive is its aura.