YIDDISH LITERATURE

the body of written works produced in the Yiddish language of Ashkenazic Jewry (central and eastern European Jews and their descendants worldwide). Yiddish literature may be said to have been born twice. The earliest evidence of Yiddish literary activity dates from the 13th century and is found in southern Germany, where the language itself had originated as a specifically Jewish variant of Middle High German approximately a quarter of a millennium earlier. The Haskalah, the Jewish equivalent of the Enlightenment, effectively doomed the Yiddish language and its literary culture in Germany and in western Europe during the course of the 18th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, however, the Haskalah paradoxically promoted a renascence of Yiddish literature in those parts of eastern Europe to which the Yiddish language had been carried from the 13th century onward. The Haskalah therefore represents a watershed separating two essentially distinct cultural phenomena. Whereas in eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries Yiddish literature eventually became an autonomous modern mode of literary expression fully comparable with parallel European literatures, the Yiddish literature of medieval Germany and the adjacent territories to which it spread remained in the shadow of the infinitely more prestigious Hebrew literature and, in theory at least, was addressed only to women (who were not taught Hebrew but learned to read and write Yiddish in the community schools) and to untutored men. The low regard in which the Yiddish language and its culture were held conspired with the ravages of time and the turbulent vicissitudes of Jewish history in the German-speaking lands in such a way that all but a small proportion of medieval Yiddish texts have been lost, though important texts are still coming to light. From what survives, however, it is clear that the literature aimed predominantly at the edification of its readership and was either didactic in character or sought to entertain while serving as an antidote to the supposed moral dangers of Gentile literature. As a result of their traditional respect for learning, the efficacy of their community schools, and their predominantly urban way of life, literacy was much higher among the Jews of northern Europe during this time than among non-Jews living in the same area. Many works achieved such popularity that they were frequently reprinted over a period of centuries and enjoyed an astonishingly wide dissemination, with the result that their language developed into an increasingly ossified koine that was readily understood over a territory extending from Amsterdam to Odessa and from Venice to Hamburg. During the 18th century the picture changed rapidly in western Europe, where increasing cultural assimilation led to the abandonment of Yiddish in favour of the languages of the ambient societies. In eastern Europe, on the other hand, the Haskalah, as a result of the recognition that its mission to enlighten the Jewish masses could only be accomplished through the medium of Yiddish, unintentionally wrought a renewal of the language it disparaged. The resurgence of Yiddish literature in eastern Europe went hand in hand with the emergence of a new standard literary language based on the eastern dialects, which had been invigorated by contact with the languages of its Slavic environment. This article provides a historical survey of the development of Yiddish literature. For a discussion of literature in Hebrew, see the article Hebrew literature. the body of written works produced in the Yiddish language of Ashkenazic Jewry (central and eastern European Jews and their descendants worldwide). The beginnings of Yiddish literature are cloaked in mystery because of the huge number of documents that were lost or destroyed. The earliest-known explicitly dated items are proper names (1096); a rhymed blessing written into a prayer book (1272); and the extensive Cambridge Yiddish Codex (1382), discovered in Egypt and comprising the Jewish tales of Abraham, Joseph, and Moses as well as an early version of the German Ducus Horant. Other adaptations from the secular environment include the Yiddish King Arthur and the greatest work of old Yiddish literature, Bove-Buch, written in Italy in 1507 by Elijah Levita and published in 1541. It is a brilliant reworking of an Italian parallel to the Anglo-Norman Buve de Hantone (Sir Bevis of Hampton) and represents the first use of ottava rima (an eight-line stanza with a rhyme scheme of abababcc) in any Germanic language. A fusion of traditional themes with European forms is evident in the Yiddish epic versions of the biblical books of Samuel and Kings that circulated extensively in manuscript before being published in the 1540s. This same decade witnessed the publication of Yiddish translations of the Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament), dictionaries, historical works, and treatises on Jewish ethics, all of which were widely disseminated throughout Ashkenazic Europe. The oldest-known printed book in Yiddish is a Bible concordance (1534), preceded by the inclusion of a single Yiddish Passover poem in a 1526 volume published in Prague. From the late 16th to the end of the 18th century the chief Yiddish literary works drew on Jewish legend and folklore, ethics, and morality. Some, such as the Ma'aseh Buch (first printed Basel 1602), took the shape of collections of short tales that had evolved over many centuries. The best-loved and most reprinted work was the Tsenerene by Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Janw Lubelski, the lost first edition of which was published in Prague in 1608. This book, which influenced Yiddish stylistics for generations, weaves legend, ethical guidelines, and rabbinic commentary around the nucleus of a Yiddish paraphrase of the Pentateuch. The first complete Yiddish renditions of the Old Testament were commissioned almost simultaneously by two competing publishers in Amsterdam in the late 1670s. Other prominent genres of older Yiddish literature include historical songs and drama. Virtually all written Yiddish until the end of the 18th century was based on a quasi-standardized form of varieties of Western Yiddish, spoken in Central Europe. During the 18th century, western Ashkenazic civilization began to crumble. This was partly because of the influence of the Haskalah, the Berlin enlightenment movement of Moses Mendelssohn and his circle, which advocated the Germanization of the Jewish population in the German-speaking lands. It signaled the death of Yiddish literary creativity in the West, except for a few satiric enlightenment dramas. In eastern Europe, by contrast, the solid Yiddish-speaking population now numbered in the millions, and the rise of Hasidism, a religious movement stressing mysticism and the spiritual exaltation of each human being, gave rise to renewed creativity on an indigenous eastern European linguistic base. The wonder stories of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (then Russian), posthumously published in 1815, are the first major literary work created in a form of Eastern Yiddish (the dialects of Poland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, and the surrounding areas, which constitute spoken Yiddish to this day). The eastern European maskilim (adherents of the Europeanizing enlightenment movement) soon began using Yiddish as a vehicle for attacking and satirizing Hasidism. Both camps served consciously or unconsciously to develop a proto-eastern European Yiddish literature. The grandfather of modern Yiddish literature is Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, who came to be known by the name of his narrator, Mendele Moykher Sforim. Mendele abandoned his original goals of modernization and enlightenment to paint realistic portraits of eastern European Jewry, excelling in satire and allegory. Fusing elements from several Eastern Yiddish dialects into his literary language, Mendele in effect forged present-day literary Yiddish. The other two classicists, forming with Mendele the triumvirate of classical modern Yiddish literature, are Sholem Aleichem, the eminent humourist upon whose works the later popular musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964) was based, and Isaac Leib Peretz, a symbolist who romanticized traditional Hasidic mysticism while drawing Yiddish closer to the norms and trends of mainstream European literature. Shortly after World War I, Yiddish literature, both in its native eastern European heartland (split into Soviet and non-Soviet groupings) and in the United States, consciously broke away from the political and social tendentiousness that had characterized much of late 19th- and early 20th-century Yiddish writing on both sides of the Atlantic. The new organizations of young Yiddish writers in Poland, the Soviet Union, and the United States set out to explore the vast potential of Yiddish for the sake of art alone and in the interwar years brought Yiddish literature to the level of a great world literature. Among the American Yiddish poets, the mystical and dramatic works of H. Leivick and the poetic experimentation of I.J. Schwartz, Zisha Landau, and Menke Katz complemented the expressionism and symbolism emanating from eastern Europe. In the arena of prose, Lamed Shapiro's impressionistic fiction established him as the undisputed master craftsman of the short story, and such novelists as Israel Joshua Singer, author of The Brothers Ashkenazi (1936), and his younger brother, Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature and the most widely read of all Yiddish writers, strengthened the claim that New York City had become a major centre of Yiddish literature. A number of leading Yiddish writers flourished in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, including the poet and modernistic prose master Moyshe Kulbak, the novelist David Bergelson, and the symbolist Der Nister (Pinkhes Kahanovich). The phenomenal growth of Soviet Yiddish belles lettres was curtailed by the stifling of literary freedom on the part of the authorities and the murder of all the great Soviet Yiddish writers, particularly the shooting of the 24 leading literary figures on Aug. 12, 1952, in Moscow's Lubianka Prison. The great centres of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, and adjacent areas, where a vibrant press and all forms of Yiddish literature had developed at a breathtaking pace, fell victim to the Nazis, who slaughtered an estimated 6,000,000 Jewish victims, the majority of whom were Yiddish speakers. Since the Holocaust, Yiddish literature has continued to explore modernistic literary trends and thereby secure its links with mainstream European literature. It has also returned to its Jewish roots, synthesizing the romance of the destroyed shtetl (eastern European Jewish village) with the great city life of its present centres in North America and Israel and, to a lesser degree, in western Europe, South America, South Africa, and Australia. While the aging generation of eastern European-born Yiddish writers has failed to cultivate a younger generation of authors, the burgeoning youth-for-Yiddish movements in North America and western Europe may yet write a new chapter in the history of Yiddish literature. Additional reading General studies of the literature and of periods in its development are: Chone Shmeruk, Yiddish Literature, in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 16, cols. 798833 (1971); Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study on the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (1973); Charles A. Madison, Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and Major Writers (1968, reissued 1971); Sol Liptzin, The Flowering of Yiddish Literature (1963), The Maturing of Yiddish Literature (1970), and A History of Yiddish Literature (1972); Israel Zinberg, Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period, vol. 7 of his History of Jewish Literature, 12 vol., trans. and ed. by Bernard Martin (197278; originally published in Yiddish, 195571); N.B. Minkoff and Judah A. Joffe, Old Yiddish Literature, and Shmuel Niger, Yiddish Literature in the Past Two Hundred Years, both in Raphael Abramovitch, et al. (eds.), The Jewish People, Past and Present, vol. 3, pp. 145164 and 165219, respectively (1952); Leo Wiener, The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1899, reprinted 1972 with a new introduction by Elias Schulman); Yitzhak Kahn, Portraits of Yiddish Writers, trans. from the Yiddish by Joseph Leftwich (1979); A.A. Roback, The Story of Yiddish Literature (1940, reprinted 1974), and Contemporary Yiddish Literature: A Brief Outline (1957); and Israel C. Biletzky, Essays on Yiddish Poetry and Prose Writers of the Twentieth Century, trans. from the Hebrew by Yirmiyahu Haggi (1969). More specific topics are discussed in Chone Shmeruk, Yiddish Literature in the USSR, in Lionel Kochan (ed.), The Jews in Soviet Russia Since 1917, 3rd ed. (1978), pp. 242280; and Ruth R. Wisse, Di Yunge: Immigrants or Exiles?, in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 4361 (January 1981). Among anthologies are Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (comp.), Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries (1975); Joseph Leftwich (comp. and ed.), An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Literature (1974); Ruth Whitman (ed. and trans.), An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry (1966); and Ruth R. Wisse, A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas (1973, reissued 1986). For a history of Yiddish theatre, see Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars (1977).For further bibliography, see Dina Abramovitch, Yiddish Literature in English Translation: Books Published 19451967, 2nd ed. (1968), and Yiddish Literature in English Translation: List of Books in Print (1976); and Leonard Prager and A.A. Greenbaum, Yiddish Literature and Linguistic Periodicals and Miscellanies: A Selective Annotated Bibliography (1982). Hugh F. Denman