Yiddish in Jewish-American Literature:An Asset to Teaching at German Universities
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Pascal Fischer Yiddish in Jewish-American Literature:An Asset to Teaching at German Universities There are many good reasons to teachJewish-American literature at German uni- versities. An obvious motivation, which hardly applies to the German context alone, is that manynovels and short stories of Jewish writers undoubtedlycon- stitute an important part of the canon of Americanfiction in general. At the same time, this literature falls into the category of minoritywriting and thus negotiates identitiesdistinct from the American mainstream. Several theoretical concepts of postcolonial studies, ‘race,’‘alterity,’ and ‘hybridity’ among them, should be part of ateachingunit on Jewish writing,particularlyifitdeals with the immigrant experience.The contested idea of the AmericanMeltingPot,popularized by the Jewish-British author Israel Zangwill, maybediscussed in conjunction with Jewish-American landmark texts addressing the issue of assimilation. In this essay, Iwill focus primarily on arguments that are of particularrelevance to German higher education: the linguistic particularities of Jewish-Americanlit- erature by authorsofEastern European descent and the cultural proximityof parts of American Jewry to German students. Apart from my principal aim of fa- cilitating adeeper understanding of Jewish-Americanliterature for them, Ialso want to bring to mind that Jewish history does not consist of the Holocaust only. Frequently, Jewishhistory is exclusivelyequated with the Holocaust,which may preclude an appreciation of existing Jewish life-worlds.Iwant to counterbalance this tendency by offering students the opportunitytogothrough complex proc- esses of identification, empathyand understanding. Ihavebeen teachingJewish-Americanliterature and culturefor manyyears at several universities in Germanyand Iamnow part of the JewishStudies pro- gram at the University of Bamberg, which includes modules on literature, the arts and other aspects of culture. The number of studentsinthis program being modest,most of the participantsinthe lectures and seminars Iteach on this topic are regular studentsofEnglish and American Studies. The starting point for my reflections on teaching Jewish literature in this con- text maysound abit sobering:Most of the students have very little previous knowledge of Jewish history and cultureand – for that matter – languages. With- out these insights, clearly,itishard to understand manyofthe central concerns, conflicts and stylistic characteristics of Jewish-American fiction. Our students have certainlylearnt afew thingsabout the Jewish faith at school, and one can also relyonreasonable knowledge of the history of anti-Se- OpenAccess. ©2020 Pascal Fischer,published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110619003-014 128 Pascal Fischer mitic persecution in general and the Holocaust in particular. When it comesto Jewishculturebeyond that,specific religious tenets,customs,holidays,and as- pects of identity – in short – Jewish life, the situation appears to be somewhat disheartening.The German federal state governments put much effort into edu- cating students about the Holocaust,but they are less successful whenitcomes to educatingthem about the breadth of Jewishrealities – nonwithstanding the fact that manystudents show agreat interest in Jewishtopics.Toprovide an ex- ample:Aspart of my seminar on Jewish-Americanliterature and culture, Iask my students the following question: “What languagewas spokenbythe majority of Jews in Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century?” In aclass of more than 20 students, the reaction is generally – silence. Someone maysay: “ProbablyRussian or Polish.”“Hebrew” is another answer Ihavereceived. If I am very lucky,theremay be astudent who reluctantlysuggests “Yiddish?” When Ithen tell them that in the Russiancensus of 1897, almost 98 percent of all Jews living in the RussianEmpire claimed Yiddish as their mother tongue (Harshav1990,87; Fishman 1991:86), the reaction is surprise – if not incompre- hension. Our students do not know that the vast majorityofJews murdered dur- ing the Holocaust spokeYiddish, in fact at least five out of six million (Birnbaum 1988, 3). If Iask the students what kind of languageYiddish is, the reactions are hardlymore encouraging. Onlyfew students know that Yiddish is predominantly aGermanic languagewith Middle HighGerman providing the lion’sshare of its grammar and lexicon. The most important Anglophone Jewish-Americanwriters have been of Ash- kenazic Eastern European descent and those who wrote fiction in the first de- cades of the twentieth century regularly depicted processes of integration and assimilation. Since linguistic assimilation is at the center of that,Yiddish and amixture between Yiddish and English (sometimes referred to as Yinglish) playaneminent role in theirnovels and shortstories.Atutor thus has to provide some information on the culturaland linguistic background of the Jewish immi- grants who came to the shores of America around 1900.Atthe sametime, one has to introduce the studentstothe literarytechniques applied by authorsto conveysomething of the character and flavoroftheir mother tongues, commonly subsumedunder the term “literarydialect”.(see e.g. Cole 1986;Rothman 1993) When studying Jewish-American novels with my students, Iemphasize the points of similarity between their own cultureand Jewish culturewithout down- playing the differences. This can quite effectively be done by highlightingthe connections between Germanand Yiddish. German-speaking studentshavethe great advantage of understanding most of the Yiddish expressions thatappear in the Jewish-American novels Idiscuss in class. The problems that Jewishliter- Yiddish in Jewish-American Literature 129 ary characters face in learning English are similar to the problems of German learners. At the beginning of my teachingunit on immigrant writing,Ithus devote some time to Yiddish. Italk about the history and composition of the language, about regional variants and about the functional diglossia of the mameloshn (mother tongue) Yiddish and the loshkoydesh (holytongue) Hebrew in Eastern Europe (Fishman 1972, 137–140; see Glinert 1987for amodified view). When I playthem arecording of Yiddish, students are confronted with something that soundsfamiliar and alien at the same time. The lastrecording Ichose wasa short contribution from the Forverts Sound Archive about the Yiddish writer Sho- lem Aleichem (1859–1916). My studentsenjoy recognizing phrases and frown when they do not.Ialso show them some written Yiddish in the original – with Hebrew letters – and provided them with aschema to transliterate the char- acters.Since we have talked about Sholem Aleichem anyway,Iask them to read TheTown of the Small People / יד טש טא ופ דן קי יל ני מע נע שט לע ךע the title of his story Imay .(9 ,1918 ול ם לע כישם) in the Yiddish original with the help of the alphabet have to help them alittle bit,but in the end we come up with: Di Shtot fun die kleyne mentshelekh. Of course, Ihope for the epiphanic moment when they sud- denlyrecognize words behind something that looked so utterlystrangeand opa- que to them at the beginning.Asthe modern German words sound very similar to this,nostudent has problems understanding the Yiddish title. Having equipped them with some Hebrew characters,Ithen present to them Yiddish writing related to the immigrant experience. Yiddish was, after all, the languagespoken on the streets of Jewish immigrant neighborhoods in America, of which the Lower East Side of Manhattanwas by far the largest.Asanexample of the identification of manyJewish immigrantswith America,Ishow them the -Lebenzol Amerika. In my ex / על עב ן לא מא רע קיזא sheet music cover of the song planations of the role of journalism for the integration of Jewish immigrants, I -For / ֿפ ָא ור עו טר ס introduce them to the most important Yiddish newspaper,the verts. It certainlyhelps that my students understand Lebenzol Amerika and For- verts as ‘LongliveAmerica’ and ‘Forward,’ because these are the samewords in German. When readingexcerpts of Jewish novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with my students, Ialso emphasize the significance of lan- guageinthe immigrant experience.The linguistic dimension of that literature cannot onlyillustrate the hybrid and transcultural nature of immigrant identities (Fischer 2009), it can also open up interesting perspectivesfor Germanstudents. On the first pages of Elias Tobenkin’s1916 novel Witte Arrives,Masha and her children have just set foot on Americansoil in the harbor of NewYork in 1890 and are about to board atrain to the Midwest: 130 Pascal Fischer Then came the train with awelcomesurprise – aconductor whogreetedthem in German. There was adifferenceofcenturies between the German which the American conductor spokeand the ghetto Yiddish of Masha Witkowski and her children. Neverthelessshe and her children were cheeredtothe marrow.With aman who spokeGerman they felt kin- ship. Masha even took it as agood omen. She put her questions in the most cosmopolitan Yiddish she could summon to her command. (Tobenkin 1916,2–3) This is agood opportunity to reflect upon the role of languagefor our sense of belongingand how the kinship of languages maycontributetoafeeling of com- munality. In view of the Holocaust,reading about the feelingoffriendship aYid- dish speaker expresses towardsaGerman speaker mayalso arouse embarrass- ment and shame on the