Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  They were utterly bewildered. . . . Everything around them was strange and grotesque: the barracks, the other soldiers, the language and the rudiments of military drill. Their uniforms draped them with all the gracefulness of [beggars’] sacks, their caps were tilted at a ludicrous angle. To the casual beholder the whole thing appeared farcical: the pair looked like scarecrows got up to parody soldiers and to burlesque military bravado. Az okh un vey tsu der biks, nebekh, vos iz arayngefaln tsu undzere parshoynen—pitiful was the fate of any rifle that fell into the hands of either of the two recruits. . . . Their drilling was one endless comedy, and needless to say they came in for their share of resounding blows.

  Benjamin and Senderl decide to escape. Late one night they sneak out of their barracks and head to the perimeter fence, where they are caught by a sentry and brought before a court-martial of resplendent Russian officers. The charge is desertion, the penalty is death. But Benjamin is undaunted. Instead of pleading for his life, he defends himself by challenging the military itself—from a decidedly Jewish point of view:

  “Your honor,” Benjamin vociferated. “Trapping people in broad daylight and selling them like chickens in the marketplace—that’s permissible? But when these same people try to escape, you call it a crime? If that’s the case, the world must be coming to an end and I fail to understand what you call ‘permissible’ and ‘not permissible.’ . . . Speak up Senderl—don’t stand there like a golem! Come out with God’s own truth . . . and say together with me: ‘We want to tell you that we don’t know a thing about waging war, that we never did know, and never want to know. We are, praised be the Lord, married men; our thoughts are devoted to other things; we haven’t the least interest in anything having to do with war. Now then, what do you want with us? You yourselves ought to be glad to get rid of us, I should think!’”

  We lose something in the translation. What Benjamin actually says about the “arts of war” is this: “Zey geyen undz afile gor in kop nisht—They don’t even go into our heads.” In other words, militarism lies outside their cognition: beyond their interest, their ability, or their comprehension. Their position, as Abbie Hoffman would have appreciated, is radical to the core, for it challenges not only the legitimacy but the very premise of military culture. And the incredible thing is that they get away with it. Roaring with laughter, the assembled officers set our Jewish heroes free on grounds of insanity.

  To quote the title of another of Mendele’s works, “Aderabe, ver iz meshuge?” (On the Contrary, Who Is Really Crazy?) If Mendele began writing in Yiddish to spread Western Enlightenment among the Jewish masses, it didn’t take him long to recognize that Yiddish-speaking Jews—despite, or rather because of, their marginality—had something to teach the Western world. In short, the Yiddish medium had become the message—a point underscored exactly one hundred years later, when Isaac Bashevis Singer stood in Stockholm as the first Yiddish writer to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature:

  The high honor bestowed upon me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language, a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics; a language that was despised by both gentiles and emancipated Jews.

  It’s true: Yiddish was despised, disparaged, and dismissed as insane because it was different; because the people who spoke it lived on the outside for a thousand years; because when Christian soldiers were marching as to war, they stayed home; because they didn’t want to talk about weapons and tactics; because they valued peace, decency, and social justice not as abstract values but as the strategy for their own survival. All this was part and parcel of the Yiddish language, and the longer Jews wrote in it, the more implicitly radical and challenging their literature became. No wonder it was despised by gentiles and emancipated Jews; and no wonder so many young people of my generation, having grown up in a world gone amok, were suddenly so ready to embrace it anew.

  BUT TIMES CHANGE. Today’s college students are too young to remember Vietnam or Abbie Hoffman or countercultural struggle. And yet for them, the pull of Yiddish seems to grow stronger with each passing year. So if not politics alone, then what other forces are at work? The answer, I believe, lies deeper still in the nature of the Yiddish language—and in the pages of Yiddish books.

  According to Max Weinreich, Yiddish—like much of Jewish culture—was the product of two powerful dialectical forces. On the one hand, Jews’ core culture, rooted in Hebrew and Aramaic texts, was so strong that they could interact with their non-Jewish neighbors and, instead of being subsumed, could transmute foreign elements into their own frame of reference. Such familiar Jewish foods as challah, kugel, herring, and gefilte fish, for example, were first adapted from the kitchens of non-Jewish neighbors. The fur hats and black coats worn by Hasidim were an imitation of the finery of the Polish nobility in the eighteenth century.

  The same magic played out linguistically, as Jews borrowed words and grammar from a host of languages and made of them something distinctly Jewish. The name Yenta, for example, which now suggests a meddling busybody, comes from the French gentille, genteel. Yarmulke, the head covering of observant Jews, shares its Turkic origin with the helmets worn by Ukrainian Cossacks. In every case, Jews strengthened their culture not by hiding from the world but by making the world their own.

  An even more powerful dialectic existed within Jewish life, where a well-established system of ritual separation—between men and women, Shabbos and week, meat and milk, wool and flax, the holy and the everyday—found linguistic expression in the relationship between Hebrew, loshn koydesh, the holy tongue, the ancient language of scholarship and prayer, and Yiddish, mame loshn, mother’s tongue, the language of women, the marketplace, and everyday life. The creative interaction between the two can be plainly seen in traditional Jewish proverbs, many of which begin in Hebrew and end in Yiddish (represented here by small capital and lowercase letters, respectively):

  ATO BIKHARTONU MIKOL HO-OMIM—to vos hostu gevolt fun dayn folk Yisroel? THOU HAST CHOSEN US FROM AMONGST THE NATIONS—so why did you have to pick on us Jews?

  OMRU L’EYLOHIM—ober shray tsu der vant! SPEAK THOU UNTO THE LORD—but go scream at the wall.

  In short, Hebrew conveys abstract teachings, while Yiddish brings them down to earth. Like the dialectic between Jewish and non-Jewish spheres, which found expression in Benjamin III, the internal dialectic between high and low culture, Hebrew and Yiddish, is also radical and full of literary potential, as became clear in the writings of I. L. Peretz, another pioneer of modern Yiddish literature.

  Consider, for example, Peretz’s 1900 story about a rationalist Lithuanian Jew who visits the southern, Hasidic town of Nemirov, at the time of slikhes, the penitential prayers. When he asks where the rebbe is, the local Hasidim inform him that every year at this time the rebbe ascends to heaven to intercede on their behalf. Impossible, thinks the skeptical Litvak, and he vows to get to the bottom of things. That night he hides under the rebbe’s bed. Before dawn the rebbe rises, puts on the clothing of a Russian peasant, takes an axe, and goes into the forest. While the Litvak watches in amazement, the rebbe cuts a load of firewood and carries it on his back to the home of a desperately poor, half-frozen Jewish widow. He lights her stove for her, and only then, as the flames grow brighter, does he quietly recite the slikhes prayers. The Litvak, having seen all this, returns to town and becomes a Nemirover Hasid. Thereafter, every year at slikhes time, when the rebbe disappears, the Hasidim insist as always that he has ascended to heaven. All but the Litvak. He listens, nods, and adds quietly, “Oyb nisht nokh hekher (if not higher).” Even higher than heaven are good deeds here on earth.

  Here’s another of Peretz’s stories, although in this case the meaning may be less obvious: Bontsha, a treger, a public porter, makes his living carrying heavy loads in the marketplace. He suffers every manner of calamity—all without complaint. When he dies and goe
s to heaven the angels give him a hero’s welcome. Like every soul, he must still stand trial for his actions on earth, but in his case, we’re told, this will be a mere formality: “The prosecutor won’t dare open his mouth. Why, the whole thing won’t take five minutes. . . . Don’t you know whom you’re dealing with? You’re dealing with Bontsha, Bontsha the Silent!”

  As the trial begins, the defense attorney, an angel, reviews the sad story of Bontsha’s life, a series of disasters, deprivations, and miseries through which he never uttered a word of complaint. At the end, the court is still and when the judge finally speaks, his voice is soft and tender. “Bontsha mayn kind, my child, Bontsha . . . For you there is not only one little portion of Paradise, one little share. No, for you there is everything! Whatever you want! Everything is yours!”

  For the first time Bontsha lifts his eyes.

  “Really?” he asks, doubtful and a little embarrassed.

  “Really!” the judge answers. “Really! I tell you, everything is yours! . . . Choose! Take! Whatever you want! You will only take what is yours!”

  “Really?” Bontsha asks again, and now his voice is stronger, more assured.

  And the judge and all the heavenly host answer, “Really! Really! Really!”

  “Well then”—and Bontsha smiles for the first time—“well then, what I would like, Your Excellency, is to have every morning for breakfast a frishe bulke mit puter, a hot roll with fresh butter.”

  A silence falls upon the great hall, and it is more terrible than Bontsha’s has ever been, and slowly the judge and the angels bend their heads in shame at this unending meekness they have created on earth.

  Then the silence is shattered. The prosecutor bursts out laughing.

  What does the story mean? Ruth Wisse tells me that most of her students at Harvard think Bontsha is a hero, a paragon of humility. Professor Tzvi Howard Adelman points out that his students in Israel “want to see in the story a paean to piety rather than a critique of Jewish passivity.”

  A little more than a century ago, when Peretz wrote the story, few Jewish readers would have missed the point. It may be true, as Shylock said, that “sufferance is the badge of all my tribe,” but Jews rarely made a virtue of it. For Peretz, who had spent time in prison for socialist agitation, what mattered was protest in the here and now, and “Bontsha the Silent” was therefore a blistering critique of those who would remain silent, who would abstain from political engagement and wait for pie in the sky instead. It’s not only in the last line, where the prosecutor gets the last laugh, that Peretz makes his meaning clear; condemnation of Bontsha is implicit throughout the story. After all, any eight-day-old baby who fails to cry during his own circumcision is demonstrating not moral conviction but neurological deficit. A person who fails to tell the police the identity of a hit-and-run driver is not being noble, he’s abrogating a basic civic responsibility and thereby putting future pedestrians at risk. If Bontsha burns with moral fire, then why does the narrator tell us that his eyes were “oysgeloshn (extinguished)”? If his silence can be regarded as a moral stance in the face of evil, then why does the narrator tell us that “er hot geshvign far shrek (he was silent out of fear)”? Now that Bontsha is in heaven, now that his race is run, why does he need a third-person narrator? Why can’t he tell his own story and extol the virtues of meekness for himself? And finally, why, when he’s offered his just reward, does he opt for a bulke and butter, instead of, say, something a bit more ambitious, like world peace, Messianic redemption, or a Mercedes-Benz?

  “Bontsha” was not intended as a terribly subtle or ambiguous story. The fact that so many students today conclude otherwise is, I think, a measure of assimilation: the degree to which we’ve been influenced, whether consciously or not, by the Christian ethos that surrounds us.

  It wasn’t always that way. In her trenchant introduction to The I. L. Peretz Reader, Ruth Wisse writes, “Isaac Leib Peretz was arguably the most important figure in the development of modern Jewish culture— and until 1939 one would not have had to argue the claim at all.” Out-side the door of Peretz’s Warsaw apartment was a brass plaque in Hebrew that gave the hours when he would receive aspiring writers from the provinces. Around him grew a literary circle whose luminaries included I. J. Singer (the elder brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer), Alter Kacyzne, Hirsh Dovid Nomberg, Sholem Asch, I. M. Weissenberg, and many others. In cities around the globe there were (and in some places still are) Peretz schools, Peretz libraries, Peretz Streets, even a Peretz Publishing House. Years ago, when the Book Center first began, I met an elderly man in New York who proudly informed me, “Ikh bin a khosid fun Peretsn (I am a disciple of Peretz).”

  Nowadays it’s hard to imagine any writer eliciting such devotion. If anything, young people who encounter Peretz for the first time seem to find him unsettling to the point of misinterpretation. But that, I think, is only a first reaction, because he’s so different from the complacent Jewishness they’ve come to expect. If you read enough of Peretz and the countless Yiddish writers who followed, a deeper vision begins to emerge: of a Jewishness infinitely more interesting, more challenging, and more relevant, rooted in tradition, shaped by marginality, fueled by a relentless dialectic, and unafraid of the inextricability of art and action. If anything, Yiddish books are more of a counterculture today—more of a challenge to mainstream values—than they were when they were written. That, I think, even more than their scholarly significance, is what accounts for their growing popularity. And that’s why I remain confident, even as once-powerful Yiddish organizations fade and the last native Yiddish-speaking Jews pass on, that, sooner or later, the old books we’ve saved will find the new readers they deserve.

  18. “Hitler’s Fault”

  Ten years after we recovered books from the old Atran House, we were invited to the new Atran House. An improbably narrow building on East Twenty-first Street, it had almost no windows, as though the old organizations—most were still there—had turned their backs on the outside world for good.

  We had come to meet with officials of the Congress for Jewish Culture, which was one of the world’s younger Yiddish organizations, having been founded in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Subsidized by German reparations money, the CJC had published many extremely important Yiddish titles, including the eight-volume Lexicon of the New Yiddish Literature, Simon Dubnow’s ten-volume World-History of the Jewish People, and Yehoash’s masterful, two-volume Yiddish translation of the Tanakh, the complete Hebrew bible. Unfortunately the organization’s refugee leaders had proved themselves more adept at editing and printing than at marketing and distribution. Their titles were beautifully printed and bound, yet a huge number of brand-new copies remained unsold.

  Which is why we were there. Despite the truckload of books we had carted away from their old location almost a decade before, the Atran House was still teeming with books, most of which belonged to the Culture Congress, which had overflowed its allotted space, taken over the offices of its neighbors, and spread throughout the building. There were books everywhere—on shelves and desktops, inside file cabinets, in corridors, closets, and bathrooms. Stacked boxes were used as partitions, and tottering piles leaned against every wall.

  The CJC leadership had recently changed, and two of the new heads of the organization—Yonia Fain, a respected Yiddish writer and artist, and Manny Goldsmith, a personable American-born rabbi and scholar whom I had known for years—were eager to do something about these stockpiles. So they sat down with me and my colleague Jeffrey Aronofsky (who was even younger than I) and made us an offer: For the nominal cost of $2 a volume, they would give us every book in the place.

  Under ordinary circumstances I would have rejected their proposal out of hand. We never paid for books. Even if we were willing to pay, where would we get the $80,000 needed to pay for the CJC’s estimated forty thousand volumes?

  But these were not ordinary circumstances. Not only had the books taken over every office in the buildi
ng, they—together with most of the irreplaceable archive of the Jewish Labor Bund—had spilled over into the basement as well. Manny and Yonia gave us a tour. From floor to ceiling, the cellar was a solid mass of boxes extending to within four inches of what can only be described as a Byzantine web of pipes: cast-iron sewer lines, hot and cold water pipes, sprinkler mains, and steam pipes covered with ripped asbestos that was raining down on the boxes below. My stomach lurched. Twelve years before, when the Yiddish Book Center began, we had temporarily stored several hundred recently collected books in a similar space, a subbasement storeroom beneath the press room of the Forward on East Thirty-third Street. We had assumed the books were safe until we received a call one day telling us that a pipe had broken, the water had been running undetected for more than a week, and (although the pipe was now fixed) all of our books were soaked. By the time we got there the next day, it was too late by far. Immersed for so long and then left packed together in a warm, windowless room, the swollen books had sprouted a furry rainbow of mold. In three of the most dispiriting hours of my life, we donned masks, packed the soggy books into heavy trash bags, and hauled them up through the press room and out to the trash.

  That was a few hundred books. By my estimate, fully half of the congress’s forty thousand books were stored in its basement. When I expressed my concern I noticed Yonia and Manny exchanging glances with the congress’s young, American-born executive director, who had joined us for the tour.