Oct 14 2010
So I like studying Jewish Lit. There. I said it.
So I’m a Jewish woman from Queens, N.Y. and I enjoy studying all things Jewish. Don’t get me wrong, I love science and tech studies and the early American period, but I also find myself gravitating towards Jewish Studies. I swore I wouldn’t be that Jewish woman who studies Jewish literature. Well, look at me now. I’m really interested in 19th-century and early-20th century Yiddish culture–both secular and traditional. In Jameson’s first class, he mentioned in passing pragmatic communist texts written in Yiddish. Being the type of scholar that I am, I couldn’t help but fixate on this small sidepoint. Wait, Jews were writing communist treatises in Yiddish? Okay, this is sort of obvious but so obvious that I had never really thought about it until now.
Yiddish Communism, from what I’ve gathered, is oddly nationalistic despite its communist leanings. Being that I really know very little about all of this, I’m trying to read up as much as I can about this movement and the general Yiddish literary movement. “Yiddish in Amerike” explicates a strange Yiddish play written by Gordin that centers around Moses, Jesus, and Marx. Here are some of the important passages:
In “Moyshe Rabeynu, Yezus Kristus un Karl Marx tsu gast in Nyu York,” Jacob Gordin makes fun of Jesus, but he does so in Yiddish. He probably would never have done it in English, and certainly not in Russian while he was living there under the Tsar’s regime. This short satire, probably written between 1897-1902, is quite unlike the austere tragedy of Jacob Gordin’s full-length dramas.10 Although it is overtly socially conscious, it uses exaggerated typage and acerbic laughter rather than Gordin’s familiar Ibse- nesque realism to highlight society’s evils. The theme and the narrative structure place this satire in the tradition of purimshpil couplets, which often begin with a sacred Hebrew expression, only to profane it immediately afterwards. […] When Moses comes down from heaven and finds corruption on earth, he repeats his commandments in Biblical Hebrew, only to get threatened and spat on by New York Jews, then beaten up by a policeman. Jesus and(Wishnia 207, 208)“Moyshe Rabeynu” also begins in heaven, with Moses, Jesus, and Karl Marx challeng- ing each other as to which of their competing religions has the most adherents on earth […] “Moyshe Rabeynu” ends with a triumph that never occurred: the triumph of socialism in the US.” (Wishnia 208).
The son of a maskil (an educated follower of the haskala, or enlightenment movement), Gordin was most comfortable writingGORDIN in Russian and had to learn, or at least significantly improve, his Yiddish in order to reach the Jewish masses in the US and to achieve his goal of educating them (Shatzky 128; Epstein 138, 142; Sandrow 132). He wanted to bring “men of widely different social ranks to one intellectual level” (Shatzky 135). When he arrived in the US in 1891, many radical thinkers viewed Yiddish only as a means of reaching the workers, not as a literary end in itself. Many conservative thinkers still derided Yiddish as “the corrupt language of Babylon for maids and coachmen” (Noble 86), which is precisely why the radical thinkers wanted to use it” (Wishnia 208, 209). GORDIN in Russian and had to learn, or at least significantly improve, his Yiddish in order to reach the Jewish masses in the US and to achieve his goal of educating them (Shatzky 128; Epstein 138, 142; Sandrow 132). He wanted to bring “men of widely different social ranks to one intellectual level” (Shatzky 135). When he arrived in the US in 1891, many radical thinkers viewed Yiddish only as a means of reaching the workers, not as a literary end in itself. Many conservative thinkers still derided Yiddish as “the corrupt language of Babylon for maids and coachmen” (Noble 86), which is precisely why the radical thinkers wanted to use it” (Wishnia 208, 209).
Morris Winchevsky produced many parodies in Hebrew such as his socialist “Prayer of Faith,” published in England in 1903, which begins, I believe with perfect faith, that whoever profits by the labor of his fellow man without doing anything for him in return, is a willful plunderer…. I believe with perfect faith, that women will remain the slaves of men, or their playthings, as long as they will depend upon the will of others instead of enjoying the fruit of their own labor. I believe with perfect faith, that labor and handicraft will be de- spised by all as long as the working men will labor to satisfy the appetites of the idlers. (quoted in Davidson 81) (Wishnia) 209.
Plot of “Moyshe Rabeinu:”
The plot of “Moyshe Rabeynu” is relatively simple and straight- forward. There is equality in heaven. Moses is a respected figure who lives in harmony with the founders of two other world relig- ions, Buddha and Jesus (although Jesus is depicted as something of a naif); even Karl Marx is capable of civil exchange with his “adversaries (Wishnia 209).
OH. MY. GOD. This is Jewish humor at its best:
Both Gordin and [Lenny] Bruce have jokes about Christ and Moses taking contemporary modes of transport: in the Gordin piece, they take an elevator “from the seventh heaven straight to the roof of the Hebrew Institute” (Gordin, Ale shriftn 195); Lenny Bruce has them taking “Transcontinental [airlines], $88 to Chicago.” Both authors get in a dig at the immigration authorities: in “Moyshe Rabeynu,” Buddha protests that he should be allowed to visit New York as well, and Marx answers, “they won’t let you in,” thanks to the new Commissioner of Immigration (Gordin, Ale shriftn 194); Lenny Bruce has reporters from News-week asking if Christ and Moses have “State Department clear- ance (Wishnia 210-211). Note: the “Lenny” in italics I added.
The Yiddish of this satire reproduces the polyglot speech of the community that inspired it. Zalmen Zylbercweig lists “Yezus Kristus” along with a few other sketches in which Gordin “uses simple folk-jests and ‘builds’ stories around them”(Zylbercweig 398). This strongly suggests a cultural precedent: there must have been Jewish jokes about what would really happen if Moses (or Jesus) came down to visit “our” world, and how they would be treated. In this sense, this satire is a far cry from Gordin’s better- known “Realist and Modernist renderings” for the stage (Warke 247). In “Moyshe Rabeynu,” we have the textualization of a popular joke motif, one man’s version of an oral folk-tale aimed at urban Jews speaking Yiddish mixed with American English, written by a man whose first literary language was Russian, employing a great deal of Biblical Hebrew, dozens of daytshmer- isms (Germanisms) that Uriel Weinreich’s Modern Eng- lish/Yiddish, Yiddish/English Dictionary informs us are “inadmis- sible in the standard language” (Weinreich xl), in addition to a few words that are only to be found in Russian, Polish, and German dictionaries (Wishnia 212).
If some high and lofty Hebrew adds an air of the divine to the humble Yiddish text, the borrowings from English do precisely the opposite: many of them represent American life at its most crass and materialistic. Some of the Englishisms in “Moyshe Rabeynu” include: trost (trust, monopoly), grinhorn, biznes, “Get aut of hier, ” “Gad dem yu doirty sheenee,” tenement, boss, fektori, polisman, and feyker. Such multilingual borrowing is a common immigrant phenomenon, and it seems reasonable to transliterate some of these terms back into English, retaining their Yiddish spellings to mark them as “foreign,” particularly when they occur in dialogue or passages discussing life in the US (Wishnia 215, 216)
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