Commentary
March 2005
Rebirth
Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish
by Dovid Katz
Basic Books. 464 pp. $26.95
Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures
of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books
by Aaron Lansky
Algonquin. 316 pp. $24.95
Reviewed by
David G. Roskies
While on an academic tour of Lithuania last summer, I came upon a folio-sized
book displayed in stores all over the country. It stood out as the only English-language
book in the window, and certainly as the only one whose cover also featured
Hebrew lettering. Upon inspection, the book, Lithuanian Jewish Culture,
turned out to have been heavily subsidized by the Republic of Lithuania, and
was clearly intended for the tourist trade and for coffee tables in the West.
The tipoff was not just the $100 price tag, the elaborate multicolored maps,
or the hundreds of facsimiles and photos; it was the upbeat message. However
remote present-day Lithuania may seem from anything Jewish, however tiny its
own surviving Jewish population, Lithuanian Jewish Culture offers up
a technicolor dreamscape of nostalgia, a "Jewish Lithuania" stretching
from the Baltic to Smolensk, its great "Litvak civilization" encompassing
hundreds of once-Jewish cities, towns, and hamlets.
Dovid Katz, the author of Lithuanian Jewish Culture, is himself an American-born
"Litvak," or Jew of Lithuanian descent, who in 1999 came full circle
by making his home in the country's capital city of Vilnius, where he promptly
established the first-ever Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University. Katz is
also a noted scholar who now, in Words on Fire, has two compelling stories to
tell about his academic specialty, the Yiddish language. One is the story of
Yiddish as the key to a transnational, cross-cultural, pan-European civilization
"of seemingly infinite differentiation." The other is the story of
Yiddish as the major repository of internal Jewish memory, continuity, tradition,
and "fun."
To anyone meeting him in person, Dovid Katz comes across as a mixture of Falstaff,
Karl Marx, and a charismatic hasidic rebbe. Meeting him in print gives
the same impression.
The Falstaffian side of his character is most evident in his aggressively antic
style. Eight of this book's eleven chapters treat an arcane corpus of medieval
and early-modern works that most readers will never have heard of: biblical
glosses, verse romances, rhymed chronicles, penitential and petitionary prayers,
moralistic tracts. Intent upon enlivening this miscellany of obscure texts,
Katz employs 60's slang and Madison Avenue hype, informing us at one point that
a 14th-century scholar "went nuclear" over the idea of producing a
self-help manual in Yiddish for married couples, at another point describing
a hypothetical reader as "rolling in laughter" at the "homespun
Yiddish" in a verse romance from the Italian Renaissance, at still another
hailing a yet-to-be-published anthology of early Yiddish texts "puls[ing]
with the rhythms of a confident, wholly natural 'Jewish-in-Jewish' civilization
that is spiritually at peace with itself and with components of the outside
world that do not threaten it." Whatever the charms of Old Yiddish literature,
the author's prose is in perpetual overdrive.
The Karl Marx aspect is less straightforward. Not that Katz exactly hides the
fact that he is a red-diaper baby: in a sketchy survey of Yiddish culture in
the 20th century, he singles out "left-wing poets" for special praise
and lauds the radical-Left variety of Yiddish popular culture over the supposedly
tired products of the mainstream. More subtle is his recurrent tactic of championing
a deep-seated "Yiddish rebellion" against hierarchical authority that
has, supposedly, been under way in Jewish life for centuries.
For Katz, it appears, every Yiddish book, regardless of its subject or theme,
is in and of itself a political statement, and it is so simply by virtue of
the fact of having been written in Yiddish, the lowly vernacular, rather than
in either of the two higher-status Jewish languages of Hebrew and Aramaic. Thus,
Jacob ben Joseph of Yanov, the editor-translator of the Tsene-Urene,
a famous Yiddish homiletic Bible from the 16th century, is hailed by Katz as
the "liberator" of Jewish women, his main intended audience. Other
examples of this "daring Yiddish counter-spirit" to the stratified
and male-dominated society of traditional East European Jewry are replete throughout
the book.
But this brings us to the hasidic rebbe in Katz. For him, Yiddish is the supreme
expression of the culture of Ashkenaz-i.e., Franco-German and East European-Jewry.
Some of the qualities of that culture, he stipulates, are its humor, its self-confidence,
and its companionability with some of the more benign aspects of the outside
world. But the uniqueness of Ashkenaz, the quality that makes it not just Jewish
but "Jewish-in-Jewish," lies elsewhere. It is an artifact of the "internal
Jewish trilingualism" we have already encountered. And in that triad, Yiddish
had a unique advantage. After all, the two scriptural and scribal languages
of Hebrew and Aramaic were not spoken, while Yiddish, though traditionally ranked
below them, was not only spoken but spoken universally.
Katz has more or less lifted this conceptual framework, without acknowledgment,
from the great historian of the Yiddish language, Max Weinreich. One minor difference
is that whereas Weinreich treated Hebrew and Aramaic as a single linguistic-cultural
entity, a language the Jews called "loshn-koydesh," the sacred
tongue, Katz has split them asunder, the better, no doubt, to highlight the
rebellious specialness of Yiddish. Another and more important difference is
that Weinreich spoke of Yiddish as "the language of the Way of the Talmud"-that
is, a language that came to enjoy "co-sanctification" with Hebrew-Aramaic
because of the manifold ways in which it helped its speakers mediate the laws
and customs of rabbinic Judaism. By contrast, Katz locates one of the essential
qualities of Ashkenaz not in adherence to talmudic law but in an affinity to
kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism. Accordingly, he devotes a great deal of space
in Words on Fire to reviewing the history of Jewish mysticism from the
11th-century Ashkenazi pietists to the rise and fall of Sabbetai Zvi, the 17th-century
false messiah, and beyond.
The reason for this displacement of the Talmud, the supreme casebook of rabbinic
law and lore, becomes clear when Katz's historical survey finally reaches the
development of Hasidism in the 18th century. This movement, the culminating
phase of kabbalah, remains, in Katz's formulation, "the most potent force
in world Jewry," its adherents having proved "able to survive everything
the modern world, Jewish or non-Jewish, has hurled at" them. And the languages
in which they have characteristically accomplished that monumental task? Hebrew
and Aramaic, their languages of prayer and study, to be sure; but Yiddish, their
spoken language and the language in which they conduct their study, above all.
Indeed, in the book's final chapter we learn why the story of Yiddish is to
be considered, as Katz's title suggests, "unfinished": because its
pages are still being written by the only vital and truly resilient branch of
Jewry, the Yiddish-speaking, ultra-Orthodox Hasidim.
As a story-teller, Dovid Katz leaves much to be desired. Because he seems never
to have learned the difference between telling and showing, his hyped-up prose
engenders as much head-scratching tedium as do his polemics and his special
pleading. Because he has a better ear for his own voice than for literature,
his selections from seven centuries' worth of Yiddish writing seem both paltry
and pedestrian. His case for Hasidism having preserved the sanctity of Yiddish,
dubious as it is, would have been bolstered by just one passage from The Tales
of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, the only major kabbalistic work originally composed
in that language; alas, no passage is forthcoming.
By the concluding chapters, in any case, Words on Fire has lost all pretense
to being a story and has descended into dogmatic flailing-against the early
Zionists who fought for Hebrew over Yiddish as the Jewish national language,
against contemporary professors of Yiddish who lack either the proper linguistic
training or the proper ideological disposition, and so forth. The rich culture
wars between Hebrew and Yiddish in pre-state Palestine are laid out in ten bloody
and partisan pages, ending in a screed against modern-day Hebrew, a language
Katz satirically labels "Israeli." This self-professed historian of
Ashkenaz seems utterly deaf to the manifold ways in which modern Hebrew has
actually absorbed not only the music of Yiddish but thereby the spirit of Ashkenaz
itself-even as it has absorbed Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Romance, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Greek,
neo-Aramaic, Amharic, and other Jewish languages.
***
To move from Dovid Katz to Aaron Lansky is to move from ideology to idealism.
Outwitting History, a first-person account, tracks the journey of a third-generation
American Jew, with only a vestigial memory of his immigrant past, who in the
1980's discovered the single rescuable element of that past: disused Yiddish
books, stored away in cellars or thrown into dumpsters awaiting the wrecking
ball of urban renewal.
Between the covers of these books, the young Lansky realized, lay one of the
great revolutions of modern times-the cultural enlightenment and self-emancipation
of East European Jewry. Since many of the Jews who first owned and read them
had voted with their feet, setting out from their compact, Yiddish-speaking
communities to the far ends of the earth, the books themselves, both old and
new, had ended up in Australia, South Africa, Israel, and in every conceivable
place in North and South America. By the time Lansky, his small army of volunteers,
and his pickup truck arrived on the scene-just one step ahead of the dump, the
rats, and the mildew-the books were already indecipherable by the children,
and sometimes even by the surviving spouses, of the original owners. The cultural
revolution had succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams: Yiddish readers had
ended by emancipating themselves from themselves.
The physical rescue of the books turned out to be the easy part. Putting them
in order, making the collection accessible, taking possession of their intellectual
content, were by far the more daunting tasks. In an apple orchard in western
Massachusetts, Lansky proceeded to build the National Yiddish Book Center, a
state-of-the-art repository and cultural center to house, exhibit, and "unpack"
the contents of one million unread and unwanted volumes. That center and its
many programs and projects thrive today.
Since I collaborate with Aaron Lansky on one of his center's projects, I can
hardly claim to be a disinterested reviewer of his book. What I can objectively
say is that, in more ways than one, the story he tells in a deceptively light-hearted,
picaresque style makes an instructive contrast to Dovid Katz's Words on Fire.
Can the dead books of Yiddish rise again? Can history be "outwitted"?
Katz and Lansky lay out two mutually incompatible blueprints. For Katz, only
by resegregating themselves, and by reaffirming the sacred triad of Hebrew-Aramaic-Yiddish,
will Jews succeed in bringing about a rebirth of Ashkenazi culture. Only thus,
among the religiously faithful, will Yiddish itself return to its confident,
natural, "Jewish-in-Jewish" self.
For Lansky, Yiddish must on the contrary be revived within an open society,
in a marketplace of competing ideas and competing identities. He has had the
chutzpah to dream up a radically new home for Yiddish, a physical home with
spiritual overtones, and one that under a single roof manages to combine a number
of competing Jewish identities of its own. Far removed from the insular Yiddish
homesteads of old, Lansky's book center is dedicated to celebrating secular
Yiddish culture, but with a strictly kosher cafeteria. If you build it, he has
demonstrated with American bravado, they will come. I am with him on that one.
DAVID G. ROSKIES teaches literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary and
is the editor-in-chief of the New Yiddish Library, a series being brought out
by Yale.