Yiddish Literature beyond the Singer Brothers

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.