Vilna My Vilna

by Abraham Karpinowitz

  The underworld characters in Karpinowitz’s stories uphold a strong moral code. When the painstakingly assembled contents of Ortshik the Barber’s shop are stolen in the story “Lost and Found,” members of the Jewish underworld are outraged. They immediately set out to find the culprit and retrieve the loot. A meeting called to redress the wrong is attended by “everyone with the slightest involvement in illegal activity” (p. 77), as well as by Rabbi Kivele, the criminals’ rabbi. Referring to the Shulchan aruch, The Code of Jewish Law, Rabbi Kivele informs the assembled group that unless the stolen goods are returned, the offending individual will be excommunicated. The thief will not only be banished from the community, he will also cease to enjoy the protection of “the all-powerful” in his thieving operations. The assembled crowd does not take this threat lightly. Even God, it appears, looks out for the members of the Vilna underworld.

  Karpinowitz’s characters, like their real-world counterparts, struggle with the harsh economic and political realities of the time. During the 1930s, large numbers of Vilna Jews were forced to resort to begging. The struggle for survival in difficult times is a theme that runs through many of Karpinowitz’s stories. In the story “Shibele’s Lottery Ticket,” Karpinowitz sympathetically humanizes two Vilna beggars, Shibele the Conductor and his partner, Zerdel, who plays a violin without a back. In the story, “Vladek,” Berke and Vladek try to earn an honest living by “working on the freight cars . . . going into Kinkulkin’s mill, but it didn’t pan out. One day there was work and ten days, nothing” (p. 83). To survive, the two get involved in petty illegal activity, like “wrench[ing] copper doorknobs off the more expensive doors and [selling] them for scrap” (p. 83). Karpinowitz’s portraits of his struggling characters suggest that people turn to begging or crime when they have no other options; and, moreover, these “trades” can be honorable occupations if practiced honorably.

  Another harsh reality faced by both historical Vilna Jews and Karpinowitz’s characters is anti-Semitism. The story “Vladek,” about the relationship between a petty Jewish criminal named Berke and his Polish friend Vladek, reveals the anti-Semitic atmosphere in Vilna during the 1930s. Berke explains, “Jewish students were being beaten up at Vilna University. And the anti-Semites hired guards to stand outside Jewish shops and stop Christian customers from entering. The threat of violence hung over the city” (p. 85). This story reveals the troubled and often contradictory relations between Jews and gentiles during the years leading up to the Holocaust, with real friendships and mutual respect existing between members of the two groups against a background of antagonism, hatred, and violence. As the story progresses, Berke is forced into the Vilna ghetto, established by the Nazis in 1941. In desperation, he turns to Vladek, his Polish friend from childhood, for help. The behavior of the fictional Vladek shows the reader the complex challenges faced by Poles in Vilna during the period of the Nazi occupation.

  Various left-wing ideologies, promising a better life for the disenfranchised, exercised considerable influence on Jews in interwar Vilna. Socialism, Bundism (Jewish socialist trade unionism), communism, and Bolshevism all had their fervent followers, as reflected in Karpinowitz’s stories. In the story “The Amazing Theory of Prentsik the Shoemaker,” we see the influence of Soviet propaganda on the main character, Prentsik. Rather than looking to the God of the Torah and Talmud for salvation, Prentsik turns to the theories of the Soviet agronomist, Ivan Mitchurin, whose experiments in the genetic engineering of plants won him the Order of Lenin. Prentsik, a poor, uneducated man, “clear[s] out the nettles from the little courtyard behind his room on Kleyn Stephan Street, next to Tserile’s inn, and set[s] up a zoo” (p. 23), determined to “transform nature” (p. 25) and “beautify the world” (p. 24) in a doomed attempt to apply Mitchurin’s theories of the social engineering of plants to the animal kingdom.

  In this story, like many others, the placement of important historic figures is complex, innovative, and effective. Yoysef Giligitsh appears as a secondary character. Giligitsh was, in fact, a beloved teacher to countless students at the Re’al Gymnasium (a Yiddish-language secondary school that Abraham Karpinowitz himself attended) and the author of scholarly works about zoology and botany. In Karpinowitz’s story, Giligitsh acts as a foil to Prentsik, showing both him and the reader the fallacy of the theories of the Soviet scientist Ivan Mitchurin. Giligitsh patiently explains to Prentsik that not only is “botany . . . not zoology” (p. 24), but “Mitchurin is bluffing. . . . His experiments are going nowhere” (p. 25).

  Abke the Nail Biter, the antihero of the story “The Red Flag,” is an unlikely hero in the fight for communism in Poland. A petty criminal, Abke is arrested on his way to a game of poker and falsely accused of “helping the Bolsheviks seize Poland” (p. 34). In this story, Karpinowitz paints an affectionately mocking picture of the world of Jewish communists as seen through Abke’s eyes. Abke’s tribulations during his arrest and subsequent imprisonment also reveal the repressive anti-Communist stance of the Polish government in Vilna. In this story, Karpinowitz introduces the lawyer, Joseph Tshernikhov, a significant historical figure in interwar Vilna, as a secondary character. As well as defending Jewish communists, Joseph Tshernikhov was a leader of the Freeland League, the Jewish territorialist organization that sought a Jewish homeland outside of Palestine. Tshernikhov’s presence in the story provides Karpinowitz with the opportunity to explain Jewish territorialism and its fraught relationship with Zionism.

  Karpinowitz’s story “Jewish Money” reveals the influence of the Zionist dream on early twentieth-century Vilna Jews. But rather than placing a Zionist ideologue or movement leader in the role of main character, the action of the story is propelled by a nameless “every Jew” with neither friends nor institutional allegiances. Alone in his attic apartment, the man hatches a plan to manufacture Jewish money. “That way I’ll get Vilna Jews used to their own money as a first step towards having their own state” (p. 103). The consequences of his efforts are both poignant and humorous.

  Karpinowitz’s commitment to honor the world of his characters permeates every aspect of his writing, starting with the very building blocks of his stories: the Yiddish language spoken by the real-life counterparts of his characters.7 The writer frequently employs words, expressions, and grammatical structures specific to the Litvak or northern European dialect of Yiddish spoken by Vilna Jews. He also foregrounds Vilna street slang.8

  I hope those who can read Yiddish will afford themselves the pleasure of reading Karpinowitz in the original. A number of his books have been digitized by the Yiddish Book Center and can be downloaded from their website, http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/books/search.

  Karpinowitz’s stories include extensive vocabulary and grammatical syntax that are not to be found in Yiddish dictionaries or texts on Yiddish grammar. Fortunately there are many native Yiddish speakers who generously aided me in establishing the meanings of these words, expressions, and sentences. I cannot thank them enough. Their names are listed in the acknowledgments.

  Karpinowitz makes a special point of preserving the language of particular Vilna trades by putting pertinent words and expressions into the mouths of his characters, sometimes even providing the reader with lists of sayings, aphorisms, and curses. In the story “Chana-Merka the Fishwife,” for example, Chana-Merka provides the researchers at YIVO with a number of Yiddish expressions used in the market and the fishing trade. Karpinowitz reproduces her lists in his story, so that the fictional character becomes a real-life transmitter of lost linguistic knowledge and the reader a real-life recipient. “Lost and Found” incorporates extensive vocabulary used in the barbering trade, and “The Amazing Theory of Prentsik the Shoemaker” employs the vocabulary of the shoemaking trade.

  Like many people in Vilna, many of Karpinowitz’s characters were known by their colorful nicknames. In the story “Lost and Found,” for example, Karpinowitz lists the underworld members in attendance at the meeting called to deal with the theft of Orts
hik’s barbering supplies: “Zelik the Benefactor sat at the head of the table with Prentsik and Zorukh the Double Boiler at his side to assist him. Further down the table, according to their rank, sat Avromke the Anarchist, Wise Melekh, Dodke the Ace, Elinke, Motke the Little Kaiser, both Squirrel brothers, and so on, all the way down to the little minnows at the end of the table” (p. 77).

  Karpinowitz also took advantage of the versatility and porousness of the Yiddish language to animate his stories. For example, the story “Vladek,” with its central Polish character, contains a large number of Polish words that were familiar to Vilna Jews. Thus, Karpinowitz uses his stories not only to memorialize but also to preserve and transmit certain aspects of the Yiddish language to post-Holocaust generations of readers.

  Abraham Karpinowitz credits his success as a writer to the fact that he was raised in a theater home and had access to people from all classes of society. His father, Moyshe Karpinowitz, was an important theater impresario. As well as organizing performing tours for various Yiddish actors and writers including Sholem Aleichem, Moyshe Karpinowitz ran two Yiddish theaters in Vilna, first the Palace Theater and then the Folk Theater. Abraham Karpinowitz recalls, “The theater was an open door. Who didn’t come to the theater?”9 He said that when he walked down Sophianikes Street, “the Jewish prostitutes would yell through the windows, ‘Ah, the writer is here.’” Karpinowitz elaborates, “I feasted on a bowl of thick folk soup . . . I absorbed all the color and variety, all the sadness and joy of the stage.”10 Karpinowitz’s theater background uniquely positioned him to write knowledgably and sympathetically about members of all social classes.

  Karpinovitch, interview with Boris Sandler, 1995.

  Ibid.

  This book includes two memoirs (“Memories of a Decimated Theater Home” and “The Tree beside the Theater”) and a story (“The Great Love of Mr. Gershteyn”) about the Yiddish theater in Vilna. Through the skillful interweaving of memory and imagination, Karpinowitz provides an intimate picture of the Yiddish theater world with its many personalities, challenges, and triumphs.

  Abraham Karpinowitz survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. In 1944, he briefly returned to his native Vilna, now emptied of Jewish life. He left for Palestine in 1947. After two years in a British internment camp in Cyprus, he arrived in the newly formed state of Israel, where, following in his father’s footsteps, he became a cultural impresario. He managed the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra for over thirty years, from 1952 until his retirement. According to Karpinowitz, this work provided him with “the opportunity to travel and meet interesting people,” as well as “to do the ongoing research necessary to continue writing.”11 Karpinowitz died in March 2004, just two months short of his ninety-first birthday.

  Ibid.

  Yiddish writers like Abraham Karpinowitz, whose literary oeuvres postdate the Holocaust, faced many obstacles. As the Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb said, most of the Yiddish-reading public had “gone up in the smoke of the crematoria.”12 Furthermore, Karpinowitz’s adopted country of Israel embraced Hebrew as the sole national language, providing no official support for, and even numerous sanctions against, the Yiddish language.13 As Allison Schachter writes, “The new Israeli state . . . creat[ed] laws against printing a daily Yiddish newspaper and plac[ed] severe restrictions on Yiddish theater.”14 David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was not alone in his view that although “Yiddish was one of the important spiritual assets of the Jewish people, nevertheless, with respect to the State of Israel, . . . [It] belongs to the Jewish past, not the present and certainly not the future.”15

  As explained on page 2 of this introduction, the subjects of Karpinowitz’s stories, the Jews of Vilna, were, with some exceptions, not murdered in the infamous Nazi death camps with their crematoria, but mostly shot and then buried by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators in open pits at Ponar, an area close to Vilna. A number of Vilna Jews were sent to Nazi camps in Latvia and Estonia. These camps did not have crematoria.

  Despite numerous reports to the contrary, the Yiddish language is neither dead nor dying. A large percentage of Hasidic Jews speak Yiddish as a daily language. Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to accurately assess the exact numbers of Hasidic Jews, in his book The Rebirth of Hasidism: From 1945 to the Present, published in 2005, Jacques Gutwirth estimated that there were between 350,000 and 400,000 Hasidim in the world at the time of publication. With the highest Jewish birth rate, this population is steadily increasing. However, the various contemporary Hasidic groups eschew “secular” Yiddish writers like Karpinowitz. The Yiddish “revival,” on the other hand, celebrates the Yiddish literary tradition. Although the Yiddish revival supports the learning of the Yiddish language, its focus is on making Yiddish literature and culture available in translation.

  Allison Schachter, Diasporic Modernism: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 156.

  Rachel Rojanski, “The Final Chapter in the Struggle for Cultural Autonomy,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 6, no. 2 (2007): 198.

  But Karpinowitz found a community of Yiddish writers. This community was centered in Israel, but had connections with Yiddish writers throughout the world and access to Yiddish readers internationally. Abraham Sutzkever, the acclaimed Yiddish poet and editor and a childhood friend of Karpinowitz’s from Vilna, also settled in Israel and had an enormous influence on Karpinowitz’s life and work. In a 1995 interview published in Di pen (The Yiddish Pen), Karpinowitz explained, “Abraham Sutzkever offered me a way forward in literature and even in life. . . . When I arrived in Israel . . . Sutzkever organized us into a group known as Yung-Yisroel. He encouraged us to do nothing less than to write in Yiddish.”16 Karpinowitz was an active member of Yung-Yisroel, which formed in 1951 and remained active until 1959.17 As well as Abraham Sutzkever and Abraham Karpinowitz, Yung-Yisroel members included poets Moshe Yungman, Rivka Basman, and Rukhl Fishman, and fiction writers Zvi Eizenman and Yossl Birshtein.18 Karpinowitz’s first book, Der veg keyn Sdom was published as part of a series of seven books written by various members of Yung-Yisroel and issued under the name of the group.19 Karpinowitz was a regular contributor both to the Israeli Yiddish newspaper, Letste nayes, which published from 1949 to 2006 and to the Yiddish literary journal, Di goldene keyt, edited by Abraham Sutzkever, and published from 1949 to 1995.20 Di goldene keyt showcased the work of Yiddish writers throughout the world and accessed an international reading public. Karpinowitz also coedited the second volume of Der almanakh fun di yidishe shrayber in Yisroel (The Almanac of Yiddish Writers in Israel).21 He regularly lectured on Yiddish literature in Vilna, Lithuania; Poland; Russia; Canada; and Israel. He gave his last talk, entitled “My Vilna,” to the Israeli group Yung Yiddish just four days before his death (Cahan 2011).

  Avrom Karpinovitsh, “Intervyu: Avrom Karpinovich.” Fun Gennady Estaikh, Di pen/The Yiddish Pen 7 (February 1995): 35, 36. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies.

  David Hirsh Roskies, “Di Shrayber-Grupe ‘Yung Yisroel,’” Yugentruf (September 1973): 7–12.

  Shachar Pinsker. “Choosing Yiddish in Israel: Yung Yisroel between Home and Exile, the Center and the Margin,” 277–94. In Choosing Yiddish, New Frontiers of Language and Culture, ed. L. Rabinovitch, S. Goren, and Hannah S. Pressman. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013.

  Roskies, “Di shrayber-grupe ‘Yung Yisroel.’”

  Rachel Rojanski, “The Beginnings of the Yiddish Press in Israel: Ilustrirter vokhnblat,” Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture 5, no. 1 (2008): 141.

  M. Gros-Tsimerman, A. Karpinovitsh, and A. Shpiglblat, eds. Almanakh fun di yidishe shrayber in Yisroel, 2nd oysgabe (Tel Aviv: Fareyn fun yidishe shrayber un zhurnalistn in Yisroel, 1967).

  Abraham Karpinowitz wrote seven works of fiction, two biographies, and a play,22 including five collections of short stories about Jewish life in Vilna before the Holocaust, the major theme of his literary output.23
He was awarded numerous prizes, including the prestigious Manger Prize (1981). His work has been translated into German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.

  Karpinowitz’s publications are Der veg keyn Sdom (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1959) with Alexander Bogen; Baym Vilner durkhhoyf (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1967); A tog fun milkhome (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1973); Oyf Vilner gasn (Tel Aviv: Di goldene keyt, 1981); Tsu fus keyn Erets-Yisroel (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1985). Oyf Vilner vegn (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1987); Di geshikhte fun Vilner Ger-tsedek Graf Valentin Pototsky (Tel Aviv: Vilner Pinkhes, 1990); Vilne mayn Vilne (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1993); and Geven, geven, amol Vilne (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1997). According to Goldberg, Karpinowitz also wrote the play “Itsik Vitenberg,” which was produced in Argentina in 1958. Karpinowitz wrote a biography of the violinist Bronislaw Huberman in Hebrew, which was also published in Spanish.

  Karpinowitz’s collections of stories about Jewish life in Vilna are Baym Vilner durkhhoyf, Oyf Vilner gasn, Oyf Vilner vegn, Vilne mayn Vilne, and Geven, geven, amol Vilne. Di geshikhte fun Vilner Ger-tsedek Graf Valentin Pototsky is about an individual from Vilna.

  “Vilna, Vilna, Our Native City,” the epilogue story in this collection, is an eloquent ode to the “decimated beauty of Vilna” (p. 149). The unnamed narrator tells the reader: “I must confess in the name of the survivors, in the name of the small group of Vilna Jews who managed to travel to the other side and escape their native city when it was converted by the murderers into one bloody Daytshe Street; in the name of all those who escaped from the hellfire through ghettoes, through forests, through camps, combat zones, and battlefronts; in the name of them all, I must confess that we were in love with Vilna. To this very day that love pierces our hearts like a broken arrow that cannot be removed without taking part of us with it” (p. 149).