by Ezra Glinter
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
SECTION ONE: Immigration and Its Discontents
Rokhl Brokhes
Golde’s Lament
Abraham Cahan
Shneur Zadobnik and Motke the Hatter
Morris Rosenfeld
Collecting Rent
B. Kovner
Brownsville Looks to the Heavens
Yente Describes a Strike
Yente and Mendel Look for Rooms
How Pinnie Celebrated Election Day
Yente and Mendel and Mendel Beilis
Pinnie Grows to Be a Businessman
Rooms with Steam Heat
Yente at the Metropolitan Opera
Roshelle Weprinsky
Annie
By a Far Shore
Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn
Compatriots
SECTION TWO: Modern Times
Hersh Dovid Nomberg
Friends
Avrom Reyzen
Who Will Prevail?
Yente Serdatsky
The Devoted Cousin
The Young Widow
She Waits
Lyala Kaufman
At Prayer
A Country Girl
To Go, or Not to Go?
The Grandmother
Poor Sammy!
Her Dowry
Miriam Raskin
She Wants to Be Different
In the Automat
SECTION THREE: World on Fire
Sholem Asch
The Jewish Soldier
David Bergelson
On the Eve of Battle
Israel Joshua Singer
Bakhmatsch Station
David Zaritski
The Edge of Death
Wolf Karmiol
After Liberation
SECTION FOUR: The Old Country
Yona Rozenfeld
A Holiday
Zalman Schneour
That Which Is Forbidden
Miriam Karpilove
In a Friendly Hamlet
Kadya Molodowsky
A House on the Hill
Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Hotel
Chaim Grade
Grandfathers and Grandchildren
SECTION FIVE: New Horizons
Blume Lempel
A Journey Back in Time
Yente Mash
Mona Bubbe
Mikhoel Felsenbaum
Hallo
Boris Sandler
Studies in Solfège
Translators
Acknowledgments
PREFACE
by Ezra Glinter
ON A SPRING day in 1902, Abraham Cahan was walking along East Broadway towards Division Street, where the Forward offices were then located, when he was stopped by William Lief and Albert Feller, the advertising managers of the newspaper. At that time, Cahan was not the editor. Although he had helped found the socialist Yiddish newspaper almost five years earlier, he had quit shortly afterwards and had gone to work for New York’s English-language press.
Now the Forward had fallen on hard times, and its business managers wanted Cahan back. They believed that his populist sensibilities would save the newspaper from a premature decline, and they would later be proven right. But at that moment, Cahan was unenthusiastic. He had worked for New York’s biggest news outlets and had a promising literary career, with short stories in magazines likes Cosmopolitan and the Atlantic Monthly. Going back to the Yiddish press was not an enticing prospect.
And yet, Cahan went back. Perhaps he agreed to return to the Forward because this time he was promised the editorial control he had demanded in the first place. And perhaps he made the choice because he was struggling creatively and thought that the rough-and-tumble of Yiddish journalism would reinspire his writing. But Cahan also took the reins of the Forward because he believed the newspaper itself to be a vital creative outlet. It was, as he conceived it, not just a place to report the news, but a kind of “living novel.” It told the story of its time and place from the front cover to the back page, through every news report, opinion column, cartoon, poem, recipe, essay, political polemic, and theater review. The Forward, in the end, would be his greatest work of literature.
Like other newspapers of its time, the Forward published literature in a more conventional sense as well. In its early days this consisted mostly of translations—Tolstoy was a favorite—but the Forward soon became associated with the most talented Yiddish writers of the day, from Sholem Asch and Avrom Reyzen in its early decades to Isaac Bashevis Singer and Chaim Grade in later ones. Under the leadership of Cahan and his successors, the newspaper became home to serialized novels and novellas, humor sketches and one-act plays, “high literature” and sensational potboilers. Often the paper would be running two or three novels at once, in addition to short fiction, belles-lettres, and poetry. For more than a century the Forward produced an immense trove of literature, most of which remained untapped—until now.
When I began work on this project, I started with a fairly basic research method—to learn from secondary sources which were considered the best as-yet-untranslated pieces the Forward had published and go through the microfilm archive to find them. This turned out to be a laborious process. Aside from a few famous authors, bibliographic resources for Yiddish writers are sparse. Often the best I could do was determine the year—or the decade—when a certain writer was appearing in the paper and hope to hit on the story I had in mind. Sometimes I would find the piece I was looking for quickly; at other times I would despair that it ever existed at all.
But the many hours I spent hunched over the microfilm reader had unexpected benefits. While I might have gone in looking for a particular item, I often came out bearing other treasures, some of which made their way into the final selection. Looking at the newspaper’s presentation allowed me to see what role each writer played in its overall structure and the value editors placed on particular pieces. Most important, while scrolling through months and years of the Forward I had the opportunity to see these stories in the larger context of the newspaper—in other words, to see them as readers first did.
A newspaper, after all, is a diverse entity. The stories now in this book were nestled amid world news, the Bintel Briv advice column, reports on labor and union politics, comics, recipes, movie reviews, and advertisements for everything from Ex-Lax to grand pianos. Sometimes the fiction was connected directly to the news, as with B. Kovner’s “How Pinnie Celebrated Election Day,” which appeared next to an editorial about the defeat of Tammany Hall. Often the connections were less direct, but no less meaningful. When Roshelle Weprinsky’s story “By a Far Shore” was published in March of 1942, the front page of the newspaper was full of news of the war and its atrocities. The same issue carried two pseudonymous pieces by Isaac Bashevis Singer on the subjects of pop psychology and war rationing, and a serialized novel by the Forward’s future Middle East correspondent, Shlomo Ben-Israel, titled His 41st Wife. High literature, that was not.
These cultural-historical associations—the totality of this “living novel”—bound together the contents of the newspaper and gave these works a layer of meaning that is difficult to extract from the whole. While the historical context of these pieces is often still evident—Sholem Asch’s novella The Jewish Soldier appeared in the very first months of the First World War, for example—inevitably much is lost. And this is only one of the present volume’s inevitable limitations.
One of the great joys of putting together this collection was the opportunity to unearth writing that may never have been read by anyone ever again, and to give it new life in a new language. Yet for all of the writers included in this b
ook, many more were excluded, including many who were essential contributors to the Forward for decades. And the Forward was not the only Yiddish newspaper to publish literature, or even the best. It was simply the biggest, the wealthiest, and now the longest-lasting. Thus, the writers in these pages turned out to be the winners of a kind of posthumous lottery. But their peers, whose work languishes in newspapers like the Tog (Day) or the Frayhayt (Freedom) are no less worthy.
In style and theme the stories collected here are extraordinarily diverse, representing the breadth of material that the Forward published. But this book excludes the serialized novels that constituted much of the Forward’s literary output, not to mention the immense amount of poetry, memoir, belles-letters, travelogue, literary criticism, and other genres that filled its pages. And of course it leaves out the sheer journalism that the newspaper produced over the decades: a 1934 front-page story by Israel Joshua Singer describing a rally of some 20,000 American Nazi supporters at Madison Square Garden; a 1967 profile of David Ben-Gurion by Elie Wiesel; pieces by Isaac Bashevis Singer on everything from the Lubavitcher Rebbe to experiments in hypnotism and extrasensory perception.
Yet the stories and novellas contained in this volume still have a collective meaning that goes beyond their individual merits. The fiction in this book offers a picture not only of the writers who contributed to the newspaper, but also of millions of readers for whom they were writing. Through these stories we are granted a glimpse into their imaginative worlds, from the immigrants newly arrived on American shores to contemporary readers of Yiddish who read and contribute to and translate from the Forward to this day, both in print and online. It is their world that Cahan tried to get down on newsprint, and to create from it his living novel. Through this collection, it lives on.
INTRODUCTION
by Dara Horn
WHAT DOES IT mean to be the “newspaper of record”? The question seems simple, but it goes to the heart of everything it means to be part of a culture, a civilization, and more fundamentally, to be a human being.
For the better part of a hundred years, the Forward was the newspaper of record for American Jews—and not merely for American Jews, but for Ashkenazi Jewish culture as a whole. While many other Yiddish-language publications thrived in the Americas, in pre-Holocaust Europe, and elsewhere in the world, none came close to the Forward’s reach. At its peak, the Forward’s daily circulation exceeded 250,000 copies, a number that all but a handful of English-language publications today would envy. With size came stature and influence. This marquee publication had the power to attract the most talented writers of the time both domestically and overseas, and even in some cases to sponsor them for American immigration.
The Forward’s journalistic mission went deeper than just reporting current events. The paper’s most influential editor, Abraham Cahan, used it to change the Yiddish language itself, teaching immigrant readers English while they were still reading in Yiddish. The appearance of such Anglicized expressions as makhn a lebn (to make a living), which did not exist in European Yiddish, were not merely descriptions of how readers spoke, but prescriptions for how they should speak. A Forward reader was expected to become an American as quickly as possible, with help from the Forward.
With its foreign correspondents, coverage of matters ignored by the English-language press, advice columns for new Americans, even the adjustments to the Yiddish language—all this would suffice to make the Forward the “paper of record” of the Ashkenazi world.
But what does it mean to record human experience? If this question matters to every person on the planet, imagine how much more it might mean for those people whose entire world has disappeared while they still live and breathe. This outlandish scenario, the equivalent of surviving a zombie apocalypse, was the normal daily life of the vast majority of Forward readers from 1897 to the present. In a sense, it has been the Jewish reality since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. But this cycle of destruction and displacement accelerated exponentially in the years since the Forward’s founding. Its earliest generation of readers abandoned a Europe their families had inhabited for over a thousand years. Its subsequent readers survived the physical destruction of that world. Even the Yiddish Forward’s readers and contributors today are often survivors of a new exile, Jews who fled former Communist countries and who, like earlier Forward readers, now find their lives divided between two worlds, one of them gone forever.
If our world were to suddenly vanish, would we be satisfied if the record of our civilization consisted only of its facts—of chronicles recounting who won what battle, or who won which election, or who said what about which scandal, or who was murdered and how? This is what news reporting consists of. Of course, reporting of this sort is essential to a functioning civil society. But as a record of human experience it is hollow, for it implies that the only thing worth remembering is who won and who lost. And this is what really made the Forward the newspaper of record for Ashkenazi Jews the world over: its record of private emotional experiences that would never make headlines. This record exists in the paper’s published literary fiction. And now, for the first time, English-language readers are invited to enter that world.
Consider the very first story in this collection, “Golde’s Lament” by Rokhl Brokhes. Anyone who has visited Ellis Island knows the basic facts of the mass migration of European Jewish immigrants to this country at the turn of the last century. But it is one thing to consider the statistics, read the documents, or visit the museums that have turned this migration into an official episode in American history. It is something else entirely to see this great departure through the eyes of Golde, whose chronically unemployed husband Leybe is leaving for America and saving desperately needed money by traveling with a female neighbor posing as his wife. Golde suffers silently until the night before Leybe leaves, when she bursts into uncontrollable wailing, her greatest pain a bottomless jealousy that she cannot admit to anyone. The story unpacks Golde’s and Leybe’s fears and regrets but also their generosities, the profound love revealed in their choices. In the subtle shades of their emotions, we twenty-first century readers recognize, with sudden humility, just how much our official records have infantilized these people, how much we have underestimated them, how little we know them. And this is only the beginning of this American Jewish story.
We know, or think we know, what it meant for these Jewish immigrants to turn themselves into Americans: to change languages, shed habits, and renegotiate religious, family, and work commitments. But we would never imagine it the way Forward editor Abraham Cahan presents it in the excerpt from his novella The Additional Soul. The story traces the paths of two Jewish immigrants: Shneur Zadobnik, a wealthy hedonist who rebuilds his wealth in America by operating a chain of bars and brothels, and Motke the Hatmaker, a poor fool whose failure to make it in New York drives him to small-town Pennsylvania. From that description you might think you already know this story, because the official record of American immigration is all about material triumph, success and failure announced at the bank. But that’s not what interests Cahan. Instead he describes these men’s “additional souls”—deeper spiritual dimensions of their characters that can expand or contract, and for which the radically different circumstances in America and Europe make all the difference. In Europe, the pageantry of wealth included public charity as well as entertaining religious scholars and secular intellectuals. These rituals provided Zadobnik with spiritual enrichment: “The true humbleness, which would come upon him in a split second, the delicate feelings that fine company would inspire in him, the sweet elusive dreams of an honest, fine life—that was the sanctification of his good fortune.” But in America, Zadobnik’s wealth does not entitle him to spiritual perks, and his soul withers. Motke, meanwhile, had been a laughingstock in Russia, a pimp’s lackey who playacted at madness as a way of coping with debasement. But in Pennsylvania, the narrator hardly recognizes him. Motke, though still poor, has remade himself in his
new community as a respected man.
The story is a psychological dive into what it means to be a person when all of one’s circumstances have been altered. If someone can change so much, is there such a thing as integrity of character or soul? In a story written in English, this might seem like a ponderous question. But Cahan’s Yiddish makes this question much larger than merely a commentary on immigrants in America. It is the existential question about what makes us who we are—a question that Judaism has been asking for millennia. The novella’s title, The Additional Soul, is an expression used to describe the spiritual amplification Jews are said to receive on the Sabbath. Cahan could have settled for social commentary. Instead he joins a three-thousand-year-old conversation about free will and destiny.
This depth of insight even appears in the Forward’s lighter fictional fare. Many Americans know the term “Yente” and think it is a Yiddish word meaning “busybody.” But Yente is simply a woman’s name—a name made famous by Yente Telebende, a fictional character in a hugely popular Forward humor series by the author B. Kovner that was later featured on the Yiddish stage and the Forward’s radio hour. Yente, her husband, and their children, are trying to survive in Brownsville, an immigrant neighborhood where many of the Forward’s readers lived. Making it in a new country was a challenge, but it also brought out people’s true colors, including Yente’s, whose philosophy of life seems to be an insistence on getting her way. Poverty and social mores never keep Yente from what she wants, whether she’s faking an ethnic identity in order to confound a bigoted landlord, buying a new mattress she can’t afford (and which her son soon burns for fun), or providing her own full-volume commentary on the Metropolitan Opera. Yente’s children, too, have internalized her refusal to be refused by this new country. Her son Pinnie comes home with bags of coal the family desperately needs but can’t afford. Convinced he’s stealing, Yente forces her husband to follow the boy. He soon discovers his son’s method: Pinnie taunts and provokes local merchants until they throw coal at him to make him go away. Pinnie thus heats the family’s home all winter, as his mother praises him: “It’s obvious: he’s growing into a businessman.” These stories are silly, slapstick, the opposite of profound. Yet reading them over a century later is an unexpectedly moving experience, because they feel so familiar. There is a seed within them of what has become an informal American Jewish identity: people uninterested in bowing to conventions, because conventions never served them well; people who see opportunities others overlook, because through inherited anxiety they are always looking; people who, after centuries of degradation, no longer take “no” for an answer. A paper of record might well provide the details of an immigrant group’s political and economic challenges, as the Forward always did. But in the Forward’s fiction we find something greater and truer: a psychological record of the invention of American Jews.
