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In the Privacy of One's Own Homelessness: the Search for Identity in Twentieth-Century Yiddish Travelogues Yuri Vedenyapin S

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In the Privacy of One's Own Homelessness: the Search for Identity in Twentieth-Century Yiddish Travelogues Yuri Vedenyapin S In the Privacy of One’s Own Homelessness: The Search for Identity in Twentieth-Century Yiddish Travelogues Yuri Vedenyapin Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Yuri Vedenyapin All rights reserved ABSTRACT In the Privacy of One’s Own Homelessness: The Search for Identity in Twentieth-Century Yiddish Travelogues Yuri Vedenyapin This dissertation argues that the richness and distinctiveness of modern Yiddish travel literature—with its emphasis on arriving rather than departing—reflects the complex nature of such notions as home, homelessness, and wandering within East European Jewish culture. It examines the ways in which the experience of travel affected the search for identity, home, and belonging by Yiddish writers from the first secularized and westernized generation of East European Jews. Yiddish travelogues written in the first four decades of the twentieth century show a curious trend with respect to the search for identity and the destinations that are their subject. These destinations fall into two categories: those with specific Jewish connotations and those without. For writers addressing the latter destination category, even though motivated by the search for a Jewish identity, locales beyond the Jewish map engender the greatest sense of empowerment. Even when their ostensible motivations and emphases are diametrically opposed, they arrive at the same conclusion, that Jews belong simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Peretz Hirschbein and Melech Ravitch are exemplary illustrations of this tendency: the former laments the countless roads on which Jews have traveled and many borders that separate them; he longs for universal brotherhood and closeness to nature, and as such rejects the diversity of the Jewish experience; the latter, on the contrary, celebrates diversity. How can we explain this trend? It is born of the contradictory set of ideological and artistic aims and interests of a generation that rejected the traditional beliefs and lifestyle of their parents, and that aimed to create a body of modern literature in Yiddish that would equal major European literatures, and that internalized a number of European cultural (primarily literary) tropes. Moreover, this literature was the product of a generation of writers who yearned for an organic connection to Jewish past, present, and future and at the same time saw problems with every existing ideology. The Introduction situates the study within the context of Jewish cultural and literary history and addresses questions of scope and methodology. Chapter 1 analyzes Yiddish travel writers’ fascination with exotic destinations lacking specifically Jewish connotations and its role in these writers’ struggles to define their cultural identity. Chapter 2 analyzes the work of Peretz Hirschbein and argues that his longing for universal brotherhood and closeness to nature reflected both a reluctance to celebrate the diversity of the Jewish experience and an impulse to embrace its global proportions. Chapter 3 focuses on the life and work of Melech Ravitch and contrasts his passion for diversity with the opposite approach of Peretz Hirschbein. Chapter 4 explores Yiddish writers’ travel to Mandate Palestine and to Soviet Russia and focuses on the parallels between travelogues about these two politically charged destinations. Chapter 5 examines the development of Yiddish travel literature after World War II, focusing both on works that describe travel back to Eastern Europe and are dominated by the themes of mourning and preservation, and on later works, filled with the urge to affirm a worldwide Jewish presence. The Conclusion recapitulates the dissertation’s main points and stresses the uniqueness of the Yiddish travelogue and its importance in Jewish studies and beyond. Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Introduction 1. The Prose and Poetry of Jewish Wandering 1 2. Existing Scholarship and Contribution 15 3. Questions of Scope and Methodology 36 4. On Chapter Division 45 Chapter 1. Encounters with the Other and the Self: Adventure and Exoticism 47 Chapter 2. “The Prince of Silence”: Peretz Hirschbein and His Search for Peace 109 Chapter 3. From Redem to Singapore: Melech Ravitch’s Search for “Cosmic Grandiosity” 165 Chapter 4. In Search of the Promised Land: Politics and Ideology 1. The “Grand Experiment” 234 2. Leyb Malakh and His Shadow 245 i Chapter 5. Presences and Absences: In the Aftermath of World War II 1. Home Lost and Remembered: Homecomings and Pilgrimages 262 2. In Search of Kinfolk: Solidarity and Nationhood 273 Conclusion The Endless Itinerary: Findings and Critical Implications 290 Bibliography 292 ii Acknowledgements I am grateful to many individuals and organizations for their support throughout my work on this project. Above all, I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Professor Jeremy Dauber, for his guidance, encouragement, and patience. iii Introduction 1. The Prose and Poetry of Jewish Wandering The Yiddish-speaking Jew, the twentieth century, and the search for home—these three notions are at the heart of this dissertation. Each may spark an infinite number of associations, opinions, and questions. Why, for instance, did a Jewish journalist in the 1920s choose to write “ ,” using the Yiddish transliteration of the English expression rather than the regular Yiddish equivalent?1 Was it not partly because the idea of “the twentieth century” was already then—before Stalinism, Nazism, World War II, and the Cold War—inseparable from such categories as foreignness, displacement, and transformation? The grouping together of this “century of horrors” with the world of Yiddish and the opposition between home and homelessness is anything but arbitrary; one can think of these three notions’ various connotations as filling three overlapping circles. Indeed, their overlap is so significant that in order to understand any one of the elements, one must first consider them all. The political and geographical instability that for centuries characterized the Jewish people’s existence has had a major impact on the Jewish psyche. It contributed to a complex engagement with geographic movement and to the development of a set of concepts and aspirations that compelled many individuals to leave their homes even when external circumstances did not render it necessary. This dissertation examines these phenomena within Yiddish culture by looking at modern Yiddish travel literature and argues that this genre is uniquely suited for studying the evolution of modern Jewish identity. Because of their inherent focus on space and movement, strangeness and belonging, change and continuity, these mostly 1 Yankev Mestl, “A rayze-fond far yidishe vort-kinstler,” Kultur (Chicago) (November 6, 1925): 1 . 1 unstudied texts serve as a test case for theories that concern some of the most central and challenging issues of modern Yiddish—and Jewish—culture. Twentieth-century Yiddish travelogues and related sources reveal a peculiar relationship between time and space, in which geographic destinations correlate with temporal memories, identities and expectations. They also draw attention to the strikingly ambiguous boundaries between departure and arrival, past and present, individual and collective. Finally, they demonstrate a rootedness in traditional Ashkenazi lifestyle, religious rituals and sensibilities, and the Yiddish language itself. According to the Hebrew expression, which is popular in Yiddish culture as well, “Meshane mokem – meshane mazl (“A change of place brings a change of luck”).2 A somewhat lesser-known version, unique to Yiddish, appends a clarification: “A mol tsum gutn, a mol tsum shlimazl” (“Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse”). As is often the case with folk wisdom, the repertoire of Yiddish idioms pertaining to travel, wandering, and leaving home is far from consistent in its views on these matters. On the one hand, it celebrates the search for new possibilities and frowns upon lack of initiative: “Af an oysgetrotenem veg vakst nit keyn groz” (“A well-trodden path has no grass”). On the other hand, it expresses skepticism about exchanging a familiar environment, however unsatisfying, for the unknowns of the road: “Beser a noenter groshn, eyder a vayt kerbl,” (“Better a groschen nearby than a ruble far away”), “Zitstu gut, to ruk zikh nit” (“If all is well, don’t move”), or “Tsen mol trakhtn eyn mol forn” (“Think ten times, travel once”), “Az men zitst in der heym, tserayst men nit keyn shtivl” (“He who stays at home doesn’t tear his boots”), or the slightly irreverent proverb “Ashrey yoyshvey beysekho iz der bester handl” (“‘Blessed are they that dwell in thy house’ is the best trade”)—an ironic twist on a verse from the Book of Psalms that is reminiscent of Tevye’s playful 2 All translations from Yiddish, Russian, and Polish throughout this dissertation are my own. 2 reinterpretation of Scripture in Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye der milkhiker.3 The number and diversity of these folk expressions, coupled with the multitude of words denoting travelers, wanderers, and tramps—vanderer, vandler, vogler, vandrovnik, vanderfoygl, navenadnik, arumshleper, goles-oprikhter, and goles-praver, to mention only a fraction—testify to the immense importance of this subject in Yiddish language and culture and in European Jewish history. As is implicit in the last two terms for “wanderer,” Yiddish culture is inseparable from the notion of goles
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