New York's Yiddish Writers

by Isaac Goldberg

  NEW YORK'S YIDDISH WRITERS

  BY ISAAC GOLDBERG

  STRANGELY enough, it has long been a question to many, not alone whether the modern Jews have any literature, but whether Yiddish itself is a language. Many have been the prophecies which predicted the immediate extinction of the tongue, and yet, like the fabled Phoenix of old, it has risen new-born from its own ashes. Let prophets deal in futures -- and it must be admitted that from certain signs familiar to students of linguistic evolution Yiddish would seem to be eventually doomed -- the fact remains that to-day it is enjoying what amounts practically to a renaissance. And the question whether modern Jews have a literature is settled by a reading of the works themselves.

  To Americans it is of added interest to learn that the latest phase of this renaissance has taken place almost entirely in New York, which, since the beginning of the European war, has fairly wrested from Warsaw the position of literary capital of the Jews. And thus, in a metropolis which contains nations within a nation, is born a literature within a literature.

  The one thing that must strike even the superficial observer of Yiddish literature in New York is the fact that it rises almost wholly from the radical movements. Take up anything by Pinski, Asch, Raisin, Kobrin or Libin, for instance. You are immediately made aware of a revolutionary outlook upon life. There is an atmosphere of frustrated hope, crushing disillusionment, overwork that blunts the finer instincts, tenement life that saps the bodily strength. There is humour, too; a humour which is all too often the grin of the skull's teeth, yet which has its less ironic moments, and at its best can produce such a figure as the late Sholom Aleichem, long known and revered as the Yiddish Mark Twain.

  This revolutionary strain is, of course, in line with the foundations of Yiddish literature, which from its beginning has been forced to be in large measure a literature of propaganda and of enlightenment. The great Isaac Leib Perez, who was one of the most significant of nineteenth century writers in any tongue, outside of his generally worthless dramas fused this propaganda element with the highest type of pure artistry. His successors rise to uncommon worth in just the proportion in which their art triumphs over their propaganda.

  As to the drama, here we deal with an evolution more rapid and more complex. Yiddish drama, speaking from the standpoint of actual stage production, is but little over forty years old. It began in 1876, in Roumania, with Abraham Goldfaden, came to Russia two years later, was there stifled by official decree in 1883, and soon found its way to New York, where it has flourished ever since through various phases of achievement. Beginning in Roumania with the operettas of Goldfaden, in America the stage underwent a realistic reaction, at the head of which towered Jacob Gordin. Gordin, mainly concerned with the problem play, ransacked the world's library for subjects. He adapted Shakespeare, Ibsen, Goethe, Hebbel, Ostrovsky, and who not else, and the pendulum of realistic reaction swung often to the extreme of naturalism and grotesquerie. Gordin, like Goldfaden, left a tradition, but both were soon to be surpassed by a master who was to bring Yiddish drama into the light of universal literature. This David Pinski has but lately accomplished with his The Treasure recently characterised by Professor Baker of Harvard as one of the greatest dramatic products of the twentieth century.

  Yet the Yiddish stage, despite the fact that it has produced its greatest dramatists only yesterday, as it were (both Goldfaden and Gordin, like Sholom Aleichem, died in New York) is already, despite its financial successes, next door to extinction. That same spreading of secular education, that same melting-pot influence which has taken its best clientèle away to the Gentile theatres, will perhaps one day withdraw from Yiddish literature, too, that intelligent public which alone can call forth and reward an author's worthiest efforts.

  That such a literature, with all its internal and external drawbacks should in so short a time have produced a Perez, a Pinski, an Asch, is nothing less than remarkable. New York to-day holds a group of writers who, did they write in English, would easily stand beside the best we can show, and in several instances rise above.

  At their head stand David Pinski and Sholom Asch. The first represents what is most artistic in his people's literary development; the second, that which is most vigorously effective. The first is the soul of modern Israel; the second its body. They are complementary personalities; each at times reveals in his work those elements which are more characteristic of the other; to know the modern Jew one must read both.

  Pinski was born in Mohliv, Russia, forty-five years ago. Like so many youths of the day, he was destined to the career of a rabbi, and at the age of ten was a recognised Talmudist. Again like so many youths, he yearned for a broader life, and was early attracted to writing. It was not until he had reached his seventeenth year that he decided definitely to abandon Hebrew and Russian as literary media, and to write thenceforth in Yiddish. His early successes were achieved in the field of the short story; he has, in fact, been called by his nation's critics the discoverer of the Yiddish proletariat in fiction. Various vicissitudes brought him soon to Berlin, where he studied philosophy and literature, and made the acquaintance of Germany's foremost literary lights. It was here, under their influence, that he wrote his first significant drama, Isaac Sheftel, in 1899, -- a powerful study of the soul of a Jewish worker, whose deep vision is so far beyond his stunted mental powers that he is at last driven to suicide. Here at the very outset of his dramatic career Pinski reveals the artistry that has only lately won him universal recognition. There is not a word of propaganda in the play, great as the temptation must have been to include anti- capitalist tirades. Isaac Sheftel rises into a world-wide symbol. He is man's better self in combat with the crass materialism of life; he is our intuition of greater glories baffled by the limitations of our present intelligence.

  Pinski's reputation was now so widespread among the Jews that he was invited to become an editor upon a New York radical weekly. He accepted, not so much for the position, as for the fact that New York then possessed the only real Yiddish stage, and he felt that here was an opportunity to have Isaac Sheftel produced. But he reckoned without the managers; this gentry refused even to look at the manuscript, because, forsooth, it was written in three acts! And is it not the first commandment of the Yiddish theatre that all plays must be written in four? From that time on Pinski has gone his own way. All his plays, except Isaac Sheftel, have thus been written in New York. They are the logical offspring of his ideals, written with an artistry hitherto foreign to the Yiddish drama; at their best they leap across the borders of the pale and take their place beside what is most significant in universal drama.

  Thus, his Zwie Family, finished in 1904 upon the day for which his "Ph.D." examination was set at Columbia University, is far more than a mere pogrom-drama, for which superficial readers have mistaken it. The figure of Moses Zwie, the old grandfather, last of the pious Jews, who sees in his son and his three grandsons the disintegration of the Jewish race, is likewise something more than a mere patriarch that has outlived his days. Old Zwie becomes a human symbol, a sort of Yiddish Brand, and the play depicts the world-struggle between the Old and the New. The Zwie Family was accepted for production at the Moscow Art Theatre by Stanislavsky, but was forbidden by the censor. What are human symbols to censors, when the mention of pogroms can place Russian officialdom -- now happily overthrown -- in an unenviable light? Societies for the production of the Zwie Family sprang into existence all over Russia, and the play had to be smuggled into the country, as its production was a criminal offence. It is interesting to know that Pinski never took his Ph.D. examination.

  As playwright Pinski, even in his symbolic plays, belongs to the realistic school. He builds from character, and convent
ional situations, climaxes, and so forth, are meaningless to him unless they germinate from the inner soul of his men and women. Hence his The Treasure, written in 1906 and produced in a German version in 1910 by Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theatre, Berlin, is a masterly satire upon the power of wealth, real or imaginary, with a mystic epilogue that rises most naturally from the action that precedes. In general, his work may be divided into three manners: the plays inspired by proletarian and domestic problems, his sex dramas, and his biblical plays. Of the first, Isaac Sheftel is the chief representative; the one-act Forgotten Souls has been hailed by Professor Burton as a masterpiece; of the second, Gabriel and the Women (comparable in some respects to Shaw's Candida and Ibsen's Lady of the Sea) and Mary Magdalene, which is an entirely original and unconventional treatment of the theme, in which Mary symbolises woman's will to power. In respect of humour and passion, psychological insight and the suggestion of fascination, Pinski in this play surpasses both Paul Heyse and Maurice Maeterlinck's treatment of the same figure. The biblical plays are biblical in suggestion only; they deal with live men and women who are kin to us and our day. The Wives of King David is a beautiful series of one-act plays, five in all. The Dumb Messiah, one of a group of dramas founded upon the Messianic idea, is a masterpiece of colour, movement and poetic fire. Here, too, the figure of Menachem Penini, whose dream that he is the Messiah is finally wrecked, with the result that he jumps from a high cliff into the ocean, becomes a symbol of human disillusionment. It is almost incredible that a masterpiece of such deep appeal should have been written at high emotional pressure in four days.

  Pinski, at his best, writes a Yiddish prose that is his own discovery: a limpid, crystalline, melodious line that rivals the flow of a Maeterlinck, a Yeats or a Dunsany. His latest piece, Little Heroes, a one-act playlet of the present war in which the oldest character is but fourteen and the youngest ten, is one of the most touching artistic products of the conflict. Its tender humanity would have warmed the heart of Dickens; those same angels who, in their lighter moments, have been said to sing Gilbert and Sullivan in the heavens, would read Little Heroes to the cherubim. Pinski is still a young man, and his best work may lie yet in the future.

  Sholom Asch is some seven or eight years younger than Pinski. Unlike the latter, he has been a resident of New York only since the war, and was one of the arrivals that helped swing the Yiddish literary centre of gravity from Warsaw to New York. Again unlike Pinski, who is a Socialist and Jewish nationalist, Asch is an individualist. Russian by birth, he is by predilection cosmopolitan. At the age of twenty-four he started his literary career with flying colours, with his drama Returned and his The Town, a series of pictures of Jewish life which may, in some respects, be likened to Phillpotts's charming Widecombe Fair.

  Asch has been hailed as the successor of Perez, but despite a positive flair for the melodramatic, the theatrical, the effective, he has not cultivated, as yet, the vision and the art of the genius who fostered him. Asch, perhaps the most popular of living Yiddish writers, has done much to earn that popularity. He is at times inclined, however, to be guided by, rather than to guide, his readers. A writer of undoubted power, humour, pathos, he is so prolific, and his work is in such demand, that he shirks the sterner dictates of adequate planning and technical mastery. Yet more than one of his earlier short stories, which have earned him the sobriquet "the Yiddish Maupassant," is a masterpiece in its kind. At his best he is unsurpassed as a story-teller; one feels, and feels strongly, positively, that he is much better than he sometimes cares to write himself down. His intense God of Vengeance, produced in German by Max Reinhardt in 1910, at the Deutsches Theatre, is a drama that presents the terrible retribution visited upon parents who keep a brothel into which their own daughter is at last ensnared, despite the pious gifts with which they had hoped to buy their child's purity as a compensation for their evil life. The crushing power of the final scene, where the father thrusts his daughter into the cellar with the rest of his prostitutes, is as undeniable as it is revolting. Jepthah's Daughter, a symbolic play upon the theme of sex, is remarkable for its Dyonisiac frankness -- a theme, moreover, which is treated by Yiddish writers with far greater freedom than would be permitted to their American confrères. The play has beauty, poetry and elemental power. It is surpassed, however, by the one-act The Sinner, where the symbolism, though a little less clear at first, is united to a plot where there is less insistence upon mere sex and more upon the age-old struggle between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The latter theme is one which has fascinated -- and naturally, more than one of the Yiddish writers. Asch has treated it again in With the Current and Our Faith. He is not afraid to adopt an unorthodox standpoint. His latest play (excepting the recent dramatisation of his novel Mottke the Scamp) is A String of Pearls, in which the purity of the Yiddish race is framed against a background, neutral in tone, of the present war.

  It is natural that Asch should have been accused of eroticism, yet it should be constantly borne in mind that the Yiddish public will listen to and read, without hiding it, much of what the American public would affect not to care for, only to read it surreptitiously. The racial sense of humour is so strong, so elemental, often so Rabelaisian, let us say, that what to outsiders would appear a question of morality is really nothing but a problem in humour. At other times the presentation of certain scenes is an artistic obligation which the author cannot shirk. Thus, in Asch's Mottke the Scamp, which ran serially in the columns of the New York Forward, the world's largest Yiddish daily, and was afterward published in book form, achieving an enormous sale, there are certain passages to which Comstockian readers would certainly object strongly in an English version. And yet, the story of Mottke's progress, or retrogression, from his birth in the cellar so common to Jewish fiction, to his final imprisonment for self- confessed murder, demands those scenes and is spoiled without them. American squeamishness and hyper-puritanism have much to profit from Yiddish fiction and Asch's healthy elementalism in particular.

  Perhaps better even than Mottke the Vagabond, which is the title of the novel in its English translation, are Asch's two older novels Meri and The Road to Self, which present, in a wealth of colour, passion and frequent pages of consummate artistry, the epic of the revolutionary and Zionistic movement among the young Jews of Russia in the crucial days of 1905.

  The works of Abraham Raisin, who was recently accorded a Jubilee at Carnegie Hall, in honour of his twenty-five years' service to Yiddish literature, run to twelve solid volumes of poems, tales and an occasional play. His style is so simple, so unaffected, that at first one is misled into believing there is little behind it. He has been compared, by his admirers, to Tchekov, for just this simplicity, this readiness to forsake the easier field of sharply marked climaxes for the story that often has no real ending -- an unframed picture, as it were. None knows better than Raisin the soul of the wanderer; he is himself a Jewish Bohemian. The Jewish reader, moreover, is not so insistent as the American upon a rising climax in his tales, and many of Raisin's stories are in reality fine genre pictures: snap-shots from life, flashlights of character, related with a minimum of words and a maximum of effect. He appeals to people in their quieter, more contemplative moods, even as his work has itself blossomed from reflection rather than action. His poetry has at times so well spoken for his people that some of his verse is a national possession.

  Although Perez Hirschbein left New York a few months ago for a circuitous journey to Russia, a few words should be said here for the conscientious artistry of this writer. He is about the same age as Asch. Although some of his work is spoiled by an overinsistence upon symbolism, which he imbibed from the French, and much of his drama is too poetic to endure before the footlights, he is a highly successful seeker after beauty and truth. The five volumes of his plays published in 1916, containing twenty-six of his dramatic works, and representing, incidentally, some of the best bookmaking that has yet appeared with a Yiddish imprint, hold between their covers much th
at should be known in English.

  None of the preceding writers has devoted much attention to Yiddish life in America; Pinski says that the psychological types which he prefers do not abound among the Jews on this side of the water; Asch does not yet know America well enough. It has been left to Leon Kobrin and Zalmon Libin to write the drama and comedy of the East Side. Libin, who early made a name for himself as a writer of powerful sketches, and has been called "the O. Henry of the East Side," knows the trials of the immigrant as few of his people do; he has lived through all he writes; he is, in fact, largely autobiographical. To read the tales of Kobrin and Libin, indeed, is to peruse the best Baedecker to the East Side that one could desire. Of the two Kobrin is the psychologist and Libin the anatomist, as it were. One sees the effect upon the immigrant's mind of his new environment -- follows it in its various stages, chronicles it with minute detail; the other catches its more external, yet none the less essential aspects, and endears himself to his race by his faithful transcript of their daily trials. Of late, however, Libin has abandoned his natural field for the more lucrative writing of theatrical thrillers. Although he has been mentioned as the compromiser, on the stage, between the purely literary drama and popular trash, there is altogether too little literature in the compromise. Libin makes his living from his plays; he will live through his tales.

  As dramatist Kobrin began by collaborating with Jacob Gordin. He has been identified with the fight of the better playwrights against managerial tyranny, and dramas like Israel's Hope and Children of Nature (which was lately produced with much success, in a Russian version, at the Moscow Art Theatre) rise far above the average pieces that draw East Side audiences.

  Of those who are concerned exclusively with poetry, and whose work, from the very nature of the medium they employ, suffers most by translation, there lacks space to treat adequately. I should like to call attention to the neglect, in our tongue, of such a spirit as Yehoash (Sol Bloomgarden). Yiddish already has its school of "young" poets, too. The poetic consciousness of the race cannot help being strongly stimulated by the recent appearance, in two large, splendid volumes, of Bassin's anthology, entitled Five Hundred Years of Yiddish Poetry. For Yiddish poetry dates back to 1410.