The following was written as a letter to the New Yorker. Since they elected not to print it, I am posting it here, for anyone interested in what I have to say about Yiddish literature.
As a translator of Yiddish fiction, I read Adam Kirsch's profile of
I.J. Singer with delight. Yet I finished it concerned that, since so
much of it refracts the elder Singer's work through the prism of the
works of his younger, more widely lauded brother, it would leave
English-language readers with a limited sense of the wide range of
literary achievement in the Yiddish language.
Kirsch
contrasts the elder Singer's "panoramic social realism" to the "fable,"
"fantasy," and "romanticism" of the younger. A reader could be
forgiven, then, for thinking that I.J. Singer shared the disdain of some
critics for more allegorical forms of writing, and that had he survived
to witness his younger brother's bravura career, might have likewise
regarded it as a retrogression. Such an inference, however, would go
against the evidence of the elder Singer's own critical judgment, which
showed broad-minded appreciation for allegorical modes of expression.
An
example: Among the writers I.J. Singer met in Kyiv was one Pinkhas
Kahanovitsh, who had taken the pen name Der Nister, a Yiddish phrase
with the portentous meaning, "the hidden one." Of Der Nister, he went on
to write that "if the writers of the world could have read him, they
would have broken their pens." In 1921, the same year that I.J. Singer
returned to Warsaw, Der Nister emigrated to Berlin, where he published Gedakht
("Imagined"), a two-volume collection of short stories and novellas
heavy on allegory and symbolism, complete with recondite allusions at
turns to Talmudic and Kabbalistic scholarship and to the folk-religion
of Ashkenazi shtetls. (Full disclosure: I am currently translating a
collection of all the stories published by Der Nister in the 1920s under
the title Gedakht, in both its Berlin and Kyiv editions.)
Had
Franz Kafka, among other contemporaries, been able to read Der Nister,
perhaps he would not have broken his pens, but he would have recognized a
kindred spirit. Whereas Kafka's writing career and artistic development
were cut short in 1924 by tuberculosis, Der Nister survived until his
unjust incarceration in the Soviet gulag system in 1950, pushing his
fiction and nonfiction in new directions. His one venture into
novel-length fiction, The Family Mashber, published in the late
1930s, combines a study of social development that is clearly informed
by the writings of the elder Singer with a sensitivity to the
unfulfilled hopes expressed through religious belief, in this case, of
the Breslover Hasidim.
So little of the corpus
of Yiddish literature has been translated into English or other Western
European languages that it remains tempting to categorize it according
to binary oppositions derived from the history of European and American
canons--realism vs. romanticism, naturalism vs. symbolism. As lesser
known writers like Der Nister, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, Fradl Shtok, and
Kadya Molodovsky, to name just a few, are more widely translated, it
will be less tenable to view the Singer brothers as isolated dwellers on
the peaks of genius, separated by an abyss of generational and
stylistic differences. Instead, they were participants, among others, in
an ongoing conversation, in which the sacred and profane, the heavenly,
earthly, and the diabolical, the historical and the allegorical, jostle
one another rapidly in a variety of men's and women's voices.
