Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion

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Ken Frieden, Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016. 389 pp.

Hayim Nachman Bialik, the great modernist Hebrew poet, is purported to have com- pared learning Hebrew through translation to kissing a woman through a veil. Travels in Translation, Ken Frieden’s marvelous, creative, and erudite book on the signal role played by heretofore neglected Hebrew and Yiddish “translations” of sea journeys— and their shipwrecks—in the origins of modern Hebrew literary history, proves the master wrong. These works, both formal translations from one written text into another and informal “translations” or adaptations of oral material into a new, written form, are a full-fledged literary, cultural, ideological, and religious love affair. En route through the artistry of Nathan Sternharz (Nahman of Bratslav’s secretary), Isaac Euchel, Moses Mendelsohn-Frankfurt, and Frieden’s hero, Mendel Lefin of Satanów, Frieden rewrites the beginnings of modern Hebrew prose. He shows how Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovich), long credited as the founding father of the revolution in modernizing Hebrew, had precursors in hasidic sea journeys and Haskalah translations, both of which had an intimate relationship with Yiddish, and the latter with a debt to German travelogues. Along the way, Frieden, in a deliberate post-Zionist move, redirects our attention to the vitality of postbiblical Hebrew in the diaspora. Although interested in reorienting Hebrew literary history, Frieden pays attention to the lived reality of his protagonists, showing their rootedness in Eastern Europe, specifically in Polish Podolia and Austrian Galicia, the heartland of Polish Hasidism and the most densely settled Jewish geographic space of the period. Frieden calls his method “textual referentialism” (pp. xix, 260–261); because classic literary studies often separated literary meaning from “mundane reality,” Frieden presses his demand for interpreting these texts in their historical context as a key to understanding their significance. Travels in Translation begins with biblical and postbiblical representations of sea travel, showing how premodern writers perceived seafarers’ experience of benevo- lent sunny days and fair winds, as well as their encounters with dangerous storms and natural disasters, as an expression of God’s will. Controlling the natural world, God parted the Red Sea and cast Jonah into the mouth of the big fish; the fate of His people at sea depended on their upholding His covenant. Frieden introduces readers to the travel narratives of Meshullam of Volterra, Ovadia of Bertinoro, Moshe Basola, and Eliahu of Pesaro, who thought in Italian but wrote in Hebrew; because they lacked a natural Hebrew vocabulary, they often reverted to biblical phrases from the book of Jonah and from Psalms when they described the tempests at sea. Innovation occurred

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when a writer unshackled himself from melitzah, a style that stitched together biblical phrases, and dared to describe nature with new phrases, new vocabulary, and the use of transliterated Italian. In Frieden’s words, “Hebrew writing that strung together biblical quotations was like a gradually changing ship in a bottle. By itself, the ancient Hebrew ship was inert; the language of the Bible was powerless to represent modern life in Europe” (p. 46). Only through these creative new kinds of “translation,” which encouraged the vernacularization of the holy tongue, could European Jewish writers vivify Hebrew. Turning next to hasidic writing in Hebrew that derived from Yiddish oral teachings, Frieden examines “Seder hanesi’ah shelo leeretz yisrael” (Order of His Journey to the Land of Israel) and “Nesi’ato leeretz yisrael” (His Journey to the Land of Israel), Nathan Sternharz’s two accounts of Nahman of Bratslav’s journey to the land of Israel from 1798 to 1799. Frieden compares them to Nathan’s retelling of his own pilgrimage 24 years after Nahman’s, and he concludes that Nathan’s “translations” of Nahman’s words and his own prose made a significant step toward naturalistic Hebrew writing. Although Nahman’s purpose in his pilgrimage tales was to use the life-threatening storms to convey mystical allegories to his readers—and Nathan, too, remained faithful to sacred time and concerns—the language moved away from the Bible, in great part because they were thinking in Yiddish even as their published works appeared in Hebrew. That hasidim wrote down their sermons, commentaries, and travelogues—spoken in Yiddish—into Hebrew makes their books a form of implicit translation, and an in- trinsic component in the development of modern Hebrew prose. They did not write in isolation. Despite fierce polemics against the hasidim by both mitnagdim and East European maskilim (among the latter were Lefin and his brilliant disciple, Joseph Perl) who pointed to their grammatically improper Yiddish and Hebrew as symbols of their resistance to modernity and of their cultural backwardness, hasidic prose writing deeply influenced maskilic writing in both languages. Translations became part of the literary Kulturkampf that rocked East European Jewish society at the end of the 18th century. As Frieden observes, “the maskilim, the mitnagdim, and the Hasidim all inhabited the same cultural space, notwithstanding their geographical spread and mu- tual animosities” (pp. 107–108). The influence of hasidic writing on maskilic writing derived from the two ideologies’ competition for the hearts and minds of the Jewish community. The average yeshiva boy, who was the target of both hasidic and maskilic works, was more likely familiar with the popular hasidic and moralistic chapbooks of the period than with the highbrow early maskilic works, which assumed literacy in the layers of the Hebrew language from the Bible through its postbiblical varieties. For instance, whereas East European maskilim, hasidim, and mitnagdim alike wrote about the “seaworthy” verses of Psalm 107:24–25 (“Those who go down in ships, making it their trade in vast seas/They have seen God’s works and His wonders in the depths”), they differed with regard to the question of salvation. From where would salvation come if a ship were threatened by terrifying swells and a deluge? For the hasidim, the savior was God, of course; for the maskilim, rationality, knowledge of nature, human preparedness—with some help from the Divine—would stabilize their vessel in the turbulent sea.

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Notwithstanding their embrace of modernizing ideologies, the Berlin maskilim arrested to a large extent the potential literary revolution by their obsession with the written biblical text, which they viewed as the zenith of Jewish classical culture. Distancing themselves from postbiblical Hebrew and rejecting Yiddish—the despised “jargon” of their fellow Ashkenazim—most of the Berlin writers limited their range of expression. Isaac Euchel and Moses Mendelsohn-Frankfurt made steps to innovate Hebrew prose through travelogues, but Euchel’s ardor for Spanish Jewish culture and German classicism stymied his efforts. Euchel’s “Letters of Meshullam ben Uriah the Eshtonite,” a Sephardic travelogue that he published in Hame’asef, was mostly a patchwork of passages from Genesis, Jonah, Psalms, and Proverbs, leaving little room for any naturalistic descriptions of what it meant to be at sea. Mendelsohn-Frankfurt was more successful because his works were translations of contemporary German travelogues. Turning to Joachim Heinrich Campe’s adaptation of “The Discovery of America” to broaden the geographic horizons of his fellow Jews, Mendelsohn- Frankfurt moved the Hebrew language forward, creating a glossary of difficult nau- tical terms and shaping new idioms (p. 162), although he did not completely dispense with biblical phrases. The huge literary leap in modernizing Hebrew came, however, with the maskil Mendel Lefin, who for too long was considered a secondary figure of the Haskalah. In Frieden’s analysis, Lefin emerges as the most important Hebrew stylist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries (full disclaimer: Lefin was the subject of my first book).1 Moving away from melitzah, Lefin shaped a Hebrew prose that was flex- ible, direct, and clear, evidencing a “sharp edged naturalism” (p. 206). Apart from translating German sea journeys into Hebrew, Lefin also translated biblical texts into Yiddish, Swiss medical texts into Hebrew, and retranslated Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed into a mishnaic style; additionally, he wrote original anti-hasidic sat- ires, a French essay for the last Polish parliament, and adapted a technique of moral self-reform from Benjamin Franklin’s French memoirs into Hebrew. His literary innovations were ideologically driven; Lefin wanted to make universalist non-Jewish writings and rationally oriented Jewish texts accessible to East European Jewish youths tempted by hasidism, which he considered obscurantist, anti-modern, and a subversion of traditional rabbinic culture. In his introduction to Mase’ot hayam (Sea Voyages, 1818), Lefin juxtaposed the sailors’ reliance on preparedness and skill— alongside faith in a reasonable God—with the hasidic (probably Nahman’s) reliance on a nes mevurar (clear miracle). Faith in the power of prayer to alter nature had no place in the worldview of enlightened Jews. Travels in Translation contains long excerpts of many original texts in Hebrew and German, alongside Frieden’s translations into English, as well as the reprinting of Lefin’s important introduction to his translation of Mase’ot hayam, preserved by Perl in his archive, which Frieden first published in 2009. The book is also enhanced by maps of the sea journeys, frontispieces of little-known, late 18th-century Hebrew, Dutch, and German texts, and by charming anchor icons to separate sections within chapters. Paying homage to Dan Miron’s A Traveler Disguised in its title, and drawing on the scholarship of Dov Sadan, Shmuel Werses, Moshe Pelli, Naomi Seidman, and Seth Wolitz, Travels in Translation places translation at the center of modern Jewish

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culture. In so doing, it brilliantly shows the limitations of the criticism of “cultural appropriation”; without the ardor of East European maskilim for non-Jewish travel writings as a vehicle to transform their culture, without their courage to buck the ar- rogance of Berlin’s fidelity tomelitzah , and without their intimate relationship to Yiddish—even when they disparaged it—Hebrew writing would have been stuck in the archaisms of the biblical text for most of the 19th century and beyond. In Frieden’s words, “The elite German Jewish writers—Berlin maskilim—missed the boat, so to speak” (p. 262). We all would have been—and will be—poorer in a world without translation. Long live the East European Jewish armchair explorers of the late 18th century!

Nancy Sinkoff Rutgers University

Note

1. Nancy Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (Providence: 2004).

Sarah Hammerschlag, Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 272 pp.

Over the past three decades, growing scholarly attention has been paid to the place of Judaism in Jacques Derrida’s thought. Such attention is certainly justified, given that, from the second half of the 1980s, religion in general—and Judaism, in particular— became one of Derrida’s central concerns. Derrida’s writings on Judaism and on religious themes are often interpreted as part of the turn in his thought from texts dealing with questions of language, literature, and the history of philosophy to those focusing in the main on ethics, politics, and religion. Moreover, this turn is often interpreted as a move on the part of Derrida toward Emmanuel Levinas, following his early critique of the latter in an essay titled “Violence and Metaphysics.” In Broken Tablets, Sarah Hammerschlag challenges these two positions. She rejects the idea that there is a turn in Derrida’s position, and she believes that, even in his later writings, Derrida maintained his distance from Levinas’ thought. In her words, the relationship between the two can be described as “a friendship which is demonstrated by betrayal” (p. 3). At the center of her interpretation is the connection between religion and literature in Derrida’s thought, with special emphasis on his examination of the question: “In what way does literature descend from Abraham?”1 In exam- ining the links drawn by Derrida between religion and literature, Hammerschlag ties Derrida’s so-called “later” thought with earlier preoccupations—namely, the distinction between fictional and non-fictional language and the related distinction between philosophy and literature. This interpretation of Derrida’s thought also helps to clarify

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the distance between Levinas and Derrida, since Levinas maintains a clear distinction between literature and philosophical thinking, even though he often uses examples from literature to exemplify his philosophical position. Broken Tablets has five chapters. The first discusses encounters between Levinas and Derrida, with special attention paid to their participation in a meeting of the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française in 1965 and to Levinas’ re- mark concerning the distinction between a “Protestant-Jew” and a “Catholic-Jew,” which was later recalled by Derrida in a eulogy he wrote for Levinas. The eulogy not only demonstrates the close ties between Derrida and Levinas, but also emphasizes the Jewish dimension of their friendship. In the following chapter, Hammerschlag explores Levinas’ thought—in particular, his approach concerning the relationship between religion and literature. In her view, Levinas sought to maintain a separation between the two, believing that the choice between religion and literature was essen- tially a choice between justice and freedom. Further, Levinas’ conception of religion was based specifically on Judaism. From here, Hammerschlag turns to “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida’s essay on Levinas’ Totality and Infinity (1961). Hammerschlag argues that literature plays a central role in this essay, and that it should be read together with another of Derrida’s essays, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book.”2 In that essay, Derrida makes use of the image of the broken tablets (as presented by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra)—according to Hammerschlag, the broken tablets are a metaphor for the situation of Judaism after the Shoah, in that they indicate a continued link with Jewish law, even if this link is not one of simple obedience. The fourth chapter discusses the relationship between literature, ethics, and politics in Derrida’s thought. Hammerschlag argues that, for Derrida, literature is a necessary component in political freedom, as it reveals the problematic relationship between the universality of the law and the singularity of each individual’s responsibility to the law. According to Derrida, the universal law of ethics cannot be grounded in the singular subject. For Levinas, in contrast, the universal law of justice is grounded in the responsibility of the subject toward the other, and this responsibility is grounded in Judaism. This explains the difference in the two philosophers’ attitude toward Israel. The privileged place of Judaism in Levinas’ thought prevents him from criti- cizing Israel as a Jewish state, whereas for Derrida, since the singular can be related to Judaism—but need not be—there is no hindrance to making such a critique. In her concluding chapter, Hammerschlag uses her discussion concerning the links between politics and religion to criticize some current approaches regarding the political-theological nexus, mainly those of Judith Butler and Alain Badiou. Butler is especially relevant since she uses Levinas’ ethics in order to criticize his attitude toward Israel. Against Butler’s claim, Hammerschlag argues that Levinas’ ethics cannot be separated from his attitude toward Judaism in general and Israel in particular. Broken Tablets offers an original and important contribution to the literature on Levinas and Derrida. Its main achievement is to show how Derrida’s thoughts on literature are a guiding thread in understanding his views on ethics, politics, and religion, and as such are the basis for understanding how his thought relates to that of Levinas. In addition, the book offers an illuminating comparison of views of literature as expressed by other philosophers, in particular Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot,

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and Georges Baitaille. Its more problematic aspect is Hammerschlag’s attempt to read all of Derrida’s thought via his relationship with Levinas, and this relationship via the prism of Judaism. For instance, while the comparison between “Violence and Metaphysics” and Derrida’s articles on Jabès is very interesting, it overlooks the fact that the main reference points in “Violence and Metaphysics” are Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. From reading Broken Tablets, it would appear that philosophy, and phenomenology, in particular, was not really important for Levinas and Derrida. A similar problem concerns the place of Levinas in Derrida’s thought in the 1960s. In this early phase, Derrida read Levinas from a larger context (language, phenomenology, literature, Judaism), whereas by the 1990s, Levinas’ thought is often a main reference point from which other thinkers are read. This difference, however, is blurred by Hammerschlag. Nevertheless, she has made a significant contribution to understanding the Levinas-Derrida nexus and important aspects of Derrida’s thought in general; anyone interested in these subjects will find Broken Tablets a work of great value.

Michael Roubach The Hebrew University

Notes

1. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (2nd ed.) & Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago: 2008), 156. 2. Both essays appear in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: 1978).

Vivian Liska, German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017. 203 pp.

Through the good offices of the European Enlightenment and its ideals of tolerance and personal freedom, the walls of the ghetto, which had restricted the Jews not only to residential enclosures but also to cultural and spiritual seclusion, were torn down. As the denizens of the ghetto rushed to embrace the opportunities afforded them by their liberation from the degradation of enforced isolation, they adopted European secular culture. Despite the extraordinary exuberance they often displayed for their new culture, they did not enter modern European society, as had their Christian spon- sors, “in a long process of ‘endogenous’ gestation and growth, but they rather plunged into it as the ghetto walls were being breached, with a bang, though not without pro- longed whimpers.”1 The “oy veys” intermingled with the Hallelujahs. The Jewish narrative of secularization is thus a profoundly ambivalent one; its legacy is, indeed, “tenuous,” as Vivian Liska notes in her elegantly crafted and challenging analysis of postmodernist appropriations of 20th-century German Jewish thought.

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The ambiguous fortunes of Jewish emancipation may be analyzed from the per- spective of three parallel tracts: the integration of the Jews in modern German society was not only political but also manifest in their attunement to its cognitive culture and governing axio-normative social codes. Though they may overlap, each of these dimensions of the process of integration is distinct. The story, of course, actually began before the Jews’ formal emancipation, which, alas, turned out to be a far more protracted affair than simply dismantling the ghetto. The emancipation proceeded in- crementally, with many false starts, and was frequently contested. Accordingly, the political and social integration of the Jews lagged considerably behind their cognitive integration. Under the tutelage of Aufklärer such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Jews adopted the cognitive culture of the Enlightenment while they were still confined to the ghetto. Led by the likes of Lessing’s protégé and later most intimate friend, Moses Mendelssohn, Jews hastened to participate in the then unfolding culture of the Enlightenment and the Republic of Reason, in which citizenship would be de- termined by intellect alone. There was a hitch, of course; admission to this Republic was to be acquired at a far-reaching price. For the cognitive universe sponsored by the Enlightenment posited the elimination of divine revelation as a source of knowledge. The epistemic dignity of Scripture and of the traditions grounded in the revealed Word of God were transferred to reason and secular experience alone. Cognitive integration thus required the jettisoning of Torah and rabbinic wisdom as the ultimate arbiter of truth and of what constitutes a spiritually meaningful life. Political and social integration did not always follow suit, at least not in an utterly unambiguous fashion. Even before they crossed the threshold of the ghetto’s gate, the Jews were apprised that political and social acceptance would be conditioned on their Verbesserung, or self-reformation. Not only were they expected to shorn the beards and sidelocks enjoined by biblical injunctions, but they were also to adjust their values and social codes to conform with modern European aesthetic and normative sensibilities. Even their best friends, those passionate advocates of extending to them human rights, assaulted them with negative images of their “Asiatic religion.” Kant, who proudly cultivated Jewish disciples, scathingly criticized Judaism as Afterdienst, a pseudo-religion, putatively embedded in a spiritually jejune array of heteronomous or legally prescribed rituals. He, accordingly, called for the “euthuna- sia” of Judaism, advising the Jews “to throw off the garb of [their] ancient cult, which now serves no purpose and even suppresses any true religious attitude.” By discarding their Afterdienst, or at least radically reforming it, they would “quickly call attention” to themselves as “an educated and civilized people who are ready for all the rights of citizenship.”2 Hence, whereas Jewish tradition deemed the observance of the Torah as enhancing one’s humanity, Kant and his intellectual progeny deemed Judasim as debasing one’s ethical and cultural dignity. The conditional acceptance of the Jews as fellow human beings worthy of equal civil and political rights set in motion a dialectic that rendered the experience of modernity unique in the annals of Jewish history. From its biblical origins on, Jewry lived comfortably and creatively with other cultures. As the Hebrew Scripture testifies, the Torah was spawned of diverse cultural influences. Later, the adaptation to Hellenistic culture did not vitiate the spiritual integrity of Judaism. Nor did the rabbis hesitate to incorporate Greek legal terms and concepts into talmudic law. The cultural hybridity

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of Judaism was most palpably attested to by Yiddish and Ladino and a dozen or so other hybrid Jewish languages of the diaspora. In the Middle Ages, the discourse with Arabic philosophy engendered an unprecedented flourishing of Jewish religious and mystical thought. For traditional Judaism, acculturation did not lead to assimilation and the loss of self-esteem and fidelity to the Torah. On the contrary, acculturation often served to deepen and inflect Judaism with new vitality. In post-Enlightenment Europe, however, acculturation perforce—so it often seemed—demanded assimilation, and a consequent deracination and the loss of what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called amour de soi, which is not dependent on how others might view one. With the quest for acceptance by “enlightened” custodians of the new order, amour de soi was replaced by amour-propre, a self-esteem that is contingent on the approval of others. Acculturation qua assimilation, then, was an expectation—eine Erwartungshorizont—shared by Jews and non-Jews alike. It was, however, frustrated by the so-called Jewish Question. Votaries of the Enlightenment and the lib- eral polity, not to say antisemites of various stripes, tirelessly debated whether Jews were ultimately capable of discarding their allegedly deleterious Jewish traits. The more concerted the efforts at assimilation, the more the Jewish Question was par- adoxically deemed ever more intractable, increasingly encouraging thoughts of a Final Solution. German Jewish thought thus took place in the ominous shadow of the Jewish Question. Such was the Sitz im Leben—the existential ground—of German Jewish thought, particularly in the wake of the Great War, which gave rise to conduct and attitudes that decisively put the lie to the vision of the Enlightenment and its faith in Reason to secure human dignity and felicity. For Jews, the hopes invested in assimilation were ever more regarded as a delusory chimera. Disillusioned, they found themselves in an existential bind. For though they now questioned the axio-normative premises of assimilation, they nonetheless remained acculturated German Jews, bound to the cognitive and cultural universe that removed them from Judaism, its spiritual and meta- physical resources. Vivian Liska is alert to the methodological issues attendant to the study of German Jewish authors who found themselves adrift in unchartered waters of post- assimilation. She suggests, in effect, that it is the hermeneutic task of the student of German Jewish thought to be attuned to the depth and tenacity of the existential aporia of post-assimilated Jews, even if expressed but pianissimo. Their reaffirmation of Jewish tradition and identity after having experienced the purgatory of secularization (godless modernity) and assimilation was often voiced as a mere “rumour,” “a sort of theology passed by whispers dealing with matters discredited and obso- lete” (Walter Benjamin, cited by Liska, p. 2). In her critical review of contemporary, postmodern appropriations of 20th-century German Jewish thought, Liska trench- antly notes that they tend to de-contextualize the existential ground of the writings of the likes of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Kafka—and thus mini- mize or distort their Jewish dimension. The bête noir of Liska’s critique is Giorgio Agamben, whom she regards as the most egregious representative of such conceptual eviscerations of the distinctive Jewish concerns of post-assimilated German Jewish authors. With singular exegetical deftness, Liska thus exposes Agamben’s selec- tive and tendentious reading of Benjamin’s meditations on history and messianism

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so as to “transform crucial elements” of Benjamin’s “approach to history, Judaism and ultimately politics” (p. 105). Read through the prism of Agamben’s neo-Pauline Christianity, Benjamin advocates the abrogation of the law, and the end of history and the chimerical messianic quest for terrestrial justice (p. 118). Agamben reads Hannah Arendt is a similar vein, calling “for the transformation of history into myth, the very antithesis of those elements of Jewish tradition that inspired Arendt” (p. 38). Agamben is not the only one Liska indicts for misappropriating German Jewish thought. She also singles out the literary theorist Maurice Blanchot for rendering into French and interpreting Benjamin’s texts on translation in such a manner as “to distant himself” and his readers from their theological and a fortiori Jewish dimension (p. 97). In commenting on Agamben’s contorted reading of Kafka as adumbrating a Pauline struggle to overcome the “oppressive effects” of the Law of Moses, Liska gives voice to her own credo:

It takes an am haaretz such as [Kafka’s] man of the country [...] to approach the law, to bring the human, creaturely element of the Aggadah to Halakhah in order to point to its limits and subvert it: not by suspending or abrogating it but by marking the necessary complementary of law and narrative, which is itself the notion of justice upheld by Judaism. [...] The law has to be limited by the man from the country, by Aggadah and narrative, because they provide the necessary human dimension that enbables the law to reckon with lived life (p. 65).

A life lived on this, the-temporal side of the eschaton, in an as-of- yet unredeemed world. As Liska observes in her homage to the late Geoffrey Hartman, aggadic commen- tary is primed by “struggle” (p. 160), an irresolvable and hence unending struggle grounded in quotidian human realities. Accordingly, Liska endorses what she under- stands to be Kafka’s ultimate message to resist the temptation of closure. “The Jewish ‘critical modernity’ imagined by Kafka [...] does not consist of overcoming trans- gressing, or trespassing.” For we are to find the “vitality and living substance” of which Kafka speaks “in building [a]‌ forever unfinished dwelling, of which the judicial domain conceived as an endless striving for a just order may be a part” (84 f.).

Paul Mendes-Flohr The Hebrew University

Notes

1. R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Changing Religions in a Changing World (London: 1976), 42. 2. Immanuel Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties,” in idem,Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: 1996), 274f.

Edna Nahshon (ed.), New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 327 pp.

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In 1913, a Russian and Yiddish playwright, Osip Dymow, immigrated to America. That year, his play Eternal Wanderer (Der Eibiger vanderer) was performed by Boris Tomashefsky’s Yiddish theater. In 1917, another play by Dymow, Nju was staged by the Bendbox Theater on Broadway. And then, as he later recounted, “in 1919, I wrote a comedy, From Bleecker Street to Prospect Avenue. Leon Crystal [a promi- nent American Yiddish journalist] said, ‘An awkward title. You’d better call it Bronx Express.’ It was the best gift I ever received.”1 The retitled play went on stage three years later, at the Astor Theater—and became the hit of the Broadway season. Thus it was that, Dymow, an émigré author who humbly debuted on the Yiddish stage of New York City’s Lower East Side, rose to fame at a major American theater uptown. The history of New York’s Yiddish theater from the 1880s to the 1950s is a sim- ilarly fast-paced story of humble beginnings, stunning success, and long-lasting legacy. In the words of Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry, who edited an earlier collection of essays, “its history is astonishingly compressed,” with theater artists forced “to reckon with changes that might in other cultures take generations to unfold.”2 To be sure, modern Yiddish theater is a transnational phenomenon. It did not begin on the Bowery, nor was Broadway its final destination. However, while in its heyday, New York’s Yiddish theater set the standard for the global Yiddish stage, and today its story is a major chapter in the history of Yiddish theater, reflecting “the totality of modern Jewish experience in a popular art form.”3 The texts and illustrations comprising “From the Bowery to Broadway” cap- ture that totality. This book, both an exhibition catalog (of an exhibition held at the Museum of the City of New York from March to August 2016) and an edited volume of collected essays, is structured as a dramatic play in eleven acts. Each “act” is a the- matic essay in which the authors, including such experts in the history of Yiddish theater as Barbara Henry, Edna Nahshon, and Nahma Sandrow, tackle multiple aspects pertaining to the subject. Nahshon’s opening essay (Overture) sets the stage. Nahshon argues that, from the outset, Yiddish theater was a decidedly Jewish space, a “meeting place and forum of the Jewish community” (p. 10). Theater played a major role in the Jewish immigrant culture of New York’s Lower East Side. The first Yiddish theatrical performance in New York took place in 1882, and by 1925, fourteen Yiddish theaters catered to the New York area’s 300,000 Jewish families. Most of these theaters did not survive the Great Depression or the increasing Americanization of their audience. By 1945, there were only four Yiddish theaters in New York, and all of these were gone by the late 1950s. However, at its prime, New York’s Yiddish theater helped immigrant Jews conduct a conversation with America. In many instances, this was accomplished by means of Yiddish-language adaptations of American classics such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was played by Yiddish actors “in Maccabean spirit” (p. 29). In other cases, theatrical music—the “DNA of the Yiddish stage” (p. 24)—resonated both with mainstream Broadway musicals and, more generally, with popular American culture. Indeed, Yiddish theater was, in many ways, “integral to the genealogy of American theater” (p. 44). As Nahshon notes: “Without the Yiddish Theater, the American stage would simply not be the same” (p. 48). Hasia Diner (Act 1) portrays the New York-centric dynamic of Jewish migration and settlement in America, explaining why half of America’s Jews lived in New York

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by the early 20th century. As a result, in mainstream American culture, the words “New York” and “Jewish” became almost synonymous. Diner demonstrates that the epicenter of New York Jewish life and the locus of the vibrant Yiddish theatrical culture—the Lower East Side—retained its Jewish aura well into the postwar era. Music was both a significant part of immigrant culture and a key ingredient of modern Yiddish theater, as demonstrated in Nahma Sandrow’s contribution (Act 2). In Eastern Europe, early Yiddish theatrical music built upon cantorial pieces and hasidic melodies, as well as on opera and Slavic and Yiddish folksongs. In New York, it was increasingly influenced both by contemporary European opera and operetta and by American popular music. The music score for the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer synthetized Jewish liturgical and folk melodies with ragtime and jazz. According to Sandrow, music itself played an important role in the movie, showing that the recon- ciliation of Jewish and American cultures was possible. While the Jewish masses were quite happy with the entertainment provided by musical theater, members of the Jewish intellectual elite of the Lower East Side were concerned with artistic quality, striving to reform the theater of shund (trash) to se- rious art. One of the pivotal figures in this regard, Jacob Gordin, is brought to the fore by Barbara Henry (Act 3). As she shows, Gordin’s prolific playwriting contributed to the maturation of Yiddish theater to an influential art form. Henry argues that the ultimate sources of Gordin’s success were his knowledge and ability at adapting and modernizing European classics, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy, in a manner that re- flected the anxieties and preoccupations of Yiddish-speaking audiences. In Act 4, Nahshon, Stefanie Halpern, and Joshua S. Walden recount stories of three of the Yiddish theater’s superstars: Jacob Adler, Boris Tomashefsky, and Molly Picon. In addition to their enjoying great success on the stage, these figures left a lasting imprint on mainstream American theater and culture. Adler, one of the great inter- preters of Shakespeare—he was noted by critics for his “entirely Jewish take on the character of Shylock” (p. 106)—started a theatrical dynasty. His children—Celia, Luther, and Stella—made significant contributions to Yiddish and American theater (pp. 110–116). “Matinee idol” Boris Tomashefsky was also a talented entrepreneur who not only expanded Yiddish theater by mounting Yiddish-language productions both uptown and in cities outside New York but also founded a Yiddish theatrical syn- dicate and a Yiddish film studio. Whereas Adler and Tomashefsky were immigrants, the American-born Picon had to visit Eastern Europe to imbibe the authentic spirit of Yiddish culture and to learn the Yiddish spoken and understood by her New York admirers. A special chapter (Act 5, again by Nahshon) is devoted to Maurice Schwartz, ar- guably the brightest star of New York’s Yiddish theater. He established and ran the Yiddish Art Theater, the longest-lasting Yiddish theatrical enterprise, which ran from 1918 until the mid-1950s. Schwartz envisioned Yiddish theater as a collabora- tion of cutting-edge performance and visual arts. He visually revamped the Yiddish stage with pioneering sets designed by the Russian émigré avant-garde artist, Boris Aronson, whose contribution is discussed in Act 7 by Arnold Aronson. Another in- stitutional effort aimed at the creation of Yiddish art theater—the Artef (1925–1940), rooted both in radical leftist politics and in an aesthetic of high culture—is described by Nahshon in Act 6.

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Acts 8 (by Eddy Portnoy), 9 (Nahshon and Judith Thissen), and 10 (Nahshon) explore little-known facets of New York’s Yiddish theater culture. According to Portnoy, the Yiddish puppet theater Modicut (1925–1933) “represents a moment when Yiddish culture was at its peak and serves as an example of what was possible within the framework of a greater Yiddish culture” (p. 236). Yiddish vaudeville, a flourishing genre of Yiddish theater, had mostly disappeared by the 1940s. However, vaudeville’s “revue format was transported to early radio, film, and tele- vision, leaving its mark on American show business” (p. 244). Also important was the hybrid “Yinglish” entertainment culture of the Catskills Mountains resorts that catered to predominantly Jewish clientele. The careers of such icons of American theater and film as Mel Brooks, Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, and Moss Hart were all launched in the Catskills. The volume’s grand finale, Alisa Solomon’s Act 11, discusses the continuity and ultimate triumph of New York’s Yiddish theater in an English-language embodi- ment, the stunningly successful 1964 Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. In Solomon’s words, “work on Fiddler was a labor of loving rediscovery of their roots” (p. 300)—referring not only to director Jerome Robbins (a student of Maurice Schwartz), set designer Boris Aronson (a veteran of the Yiddish art theater), and Luther Adler (the son of Jacob Adler, who was Zero Mostel’s replacement as Tevye in the play), but also to many of those in the audience. While the volume’s eleven acts comprise an engaging storyline, the illustrations (more than 200 in number) both complement the story and tell their own. The visual materials are integrated in such a way that a reader can learn from world-class experts in the field (from the text on the even-numbered pages) while enjoying high-quality reproductions from actual exhibits on display at the Museum of the City of New York (on the odd-numbered pages). Among these, colored lantern slides from the early 1900s that depict Yiddish actors (pp. 140–149) stand out as a collective portrait of New York’s Yiddish theater at its prime. Pieces of oral history—reminiscences of Yiddish actors and their families, such as Eve Kahn’s poignant story about her Uncle Misha, a forgotten star of the Yiddish theater—complement the articles and visuals. Biographies of key figures in the New York Yiddish theater complete the volume, along with a selected bibliography and index, making From the Bowery to Broadway a useful tool for research and teaching. Theater is an essential part of material culture, and thus its history is preserved and documented by artifacts: playbills, posters, set designs, costumes, newspaper clip- pings, and photographs. It is therefore no surprise that exhibition catalogs stand out among the major works on the history of Yiddish theater.4 It is no coincidence that the most important of these exhibitions have taken place in New York City. Two of them, at the Guggenheim Museum in 1993 and at the Jewish Museum in 2009, emphasized the artistic significance and global impact of Yiddish theater. From the Bowery to Broadway, the product of the most recent exhibition on the subject, provides a vivid, multifaceted portrayal of Yiddish theater at home, in New York.

Vassili Schedrin Queen’s University

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Notes

1. Osip Dymow, Diary, 15. Unpublished manuscript, found at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 469. 2. Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry (eds.), Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business (Detroit: 2012), 3-4. 3. Ibid., 2. 4. See Marc Chagall and the Jewish Theater (New York: 1992) and Susan Goodman (ed.), Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949 (New Haven: 2008).

Karen E.H. Skinazi, Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 290 pp.

This lively and readable book opens the window to a rich and vibrant world of Orthodox, or religiously observant, Jewish women who keep kosher and Shabbat while holding jobs, solving crimes, confronting prejudice, and making music. Drawing on memoirs, novels, film, and a graphic novel, Karen Skinazi argues that Jewish women find opportunities for personal empowerment through religious observance, and that their actions within the tradition (and against it) offer opportunities for corrective approaches to the tradition and to its perception by outsiders. The book is structured around selected verses of “Eshet ḥayil”—“Woman of Valor” (Prov. 31:10-31)—an acrostic poem that is sung on Friday nights as part of the Shabbat observance (the term also refers to any woman who is an active public figure). For Skinazi, the initiative, authority, energy, and intelligence ascribed to the woman of valor in the poem offers a counternarrative to mainstream fictional and media depic- tions of religious observance. The book thus offers itself as a feminist affirmation of religious practice in the post-secular age as described by German philosopher and so- ciologist Jürgen Habermas and Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. The first chapter, “A G-d- Fearing-Woman, She Should Be Praised,” focuses on narratives by and about women who have rejected Orthodoxy. Among the texts analyzed by Skinazi are memoirs by Deborah Feldman, Leah Vincent, Reva Mann, Leah Lax, and Chaya Deitsch, and fiction by Judy Brown, Anouk Markovits, and Naomi Alderman, all of which position their authors as “still dedicated to the betterment of their (former) communities” (p. 66): “Rather than resigning themselves to con- demning Orthodox Judaism as an instrument of women’s oppression, the authors reconceive it as a space of female empowerment and activism” (p. 31). The second chapter, “A Woman of Valor Who Can Find,” focuses on Orthodox Jewish women characters in crime fiction by Faye Kellerman (the Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus se- ries), with Rochelle Krich’s Blues in the Night and Libi Astaire’s The Disappearing Dowry also mentioned. In portraying the Orthodox woman “who speaks, who does, who teaches—even as she wipes a dish” (p. 96), these novels fulfil their primary func- tion: to “teach the lessons of Orthodox Judaism” to the reader (p. 97). This dedication and service to the tradition is evident as well in the following chapter, “She Opens her

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Mouth with Wisdom,” which highlights Malka Zipora’s collection of short stories, Lekhaim!, the publication of which Skinazi credits with propelling hasidic women to political prominence in Quebec (though she provides no evidence to support this claim). Chapter 4, “She Senses That Her Enterprise Is Good,” addresses representations of Orthodox businesswomen through a reading of Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls (in which one of the characters opens a small shop before being forced to close it by the community’s rabbi). Chapter 5, “She Will Be Praised at the Gates by Her Very Own Deeds,” discusses American filmmakers Tobi Einhorn and Robin Garbose, whose feature films are screened for women only, and the indie rock band Bulletproof Stockings, who performed at women-only venues between 2011–2016. This varied context is presented as an extensive rebuttal to what Skinazi describes as mainstream representations of Orthodox Jewish women and girls who, she insists, are consistently featured as “sitting silently in their dun-colored, floor-length, appro- priately fastened clothing at the back of the bus or locked in their homes, despairing their helpless fate” (p. 20; see also p. 191). This is a powerful image, one that hardly fits the diverse communities and practices featured in this book. Judaism encompasses a continuum of attitudes, practices, and beliefs, and “Orthodox,” Skinazi acknow- ledges, is “a catchall word that seems to mean both too much and too little” (p. xii). What binds these women is how they are represented: “passive, limited, interpellated subjects in an oppressive patriarchal society” (p. 191). Though this image, and its impact, is never documented by Skinazi, each chapter of Women of Valor is dedicated to demolishing it. The memoirs and novels discussed in Chapter 1 subvert the assump- tion that women who “have suffered under the weight of their wigs and their wombs [and] watched the suffering of others” must perforce offer a “wholesale denunciation” of the tradition they have rejected (p. 30). Chapter 2 contradicts “the cultural logic that deems Orthodox Judaism a mysterious and therefore potentially dangerous practice” by featuring Orthodox women characters who “[take] charge” (76). The Orthodox woman who “opens her mouth with wisdom” (Chapter 3) assuages fears that “women in minority groups such as the Hasidim were being oppressed and silenced” (p. 117). Orthodox businesswomen in fiction and film (Chapter 4) correct the stereotype that “many people believe that Jewish [ . . . ] women, once they are mothers, don’t work” (p. 151). As one who does not share the assumptions or stereotypes Skinazi attributes to her audience, I wondered about the implied readership of this book. Skinazi includes American, British, Canadian, and Israeli material and emphasizes that the link between women and Orthodoxy cannot be confined by national borders, but Woman of Valor is resolutely American in its emphasis on “mainstream American popular culture and media” (p. 191). And yet, most of Skinazi’s American readers do not need the repeated clarification that “Shabbat” refers to the Jewish Sabbath (p. 5, 32); they might rather benefit from translation of the more esoteric terms (among them, “bursa” [p. 87], “gingi” [p. 89], and “niggun” [p. 144]) that Skinazi leaves unglossed. Despite its flaws, this is a timely book. Recent decades have evidenced a more widespread practice of religious modesty laws by both Muslim and Jewish women for whom the headscarf represents personal empowerment, political affiliation, and critique of gender norms. While readers seeking a feminist affirmation of religious

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practice are likely to be disappointed by Women of Valor (the book can be read as a la- ment to the extent to which women’s self-representations have not managed to correct or evade patriarchy), Skinazi’s discussion helps set the stage the stage for 21st- century approaches to the religiously observant woman.

Naomi Mandel The Hebrew University

Jeffrey Summit, Singing God’s Word: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 293 pp.

At the end of the 12th century, a Jewish scholar from the (then) Provençal town of Lunel left his home to embark on a long journey to the towns and yeshivot of south- western Germany, northern and southern France, the Provence, England, and Spain. The scholar, R. Abraham ben Nathan (Hayarḥi), compiled his learnings with the great teachers of his time, alongside observations of the local communities he visited, into a book that became a rich source for contemporary liturgical and sociological research in the field of Jewish medieval Europe: hisSefer hamanhig, “The Guide.” Ethnomusicologist Jeffrey Summit, it seems, went on a similar—albeit anthro- pological rather than halakhic—journey. Singing God’s Word: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism traces the Jewish American conversation on tradition, experience, and performance of Torah chanting (leyening). Over the course of about a decade, Summit visited select communities in New York, Los Angeles, greater Miami, Cincinnati, and Chicago, conducting 137 interviews, collecting 237 online surveys, and analyzing an additional 250 interviews carried out by his students. He was especially interested in Jews like himself: well-educated American Ashkenazim for whom Jewish identity and its specific musical tradition are sources of pride and meaning. These are Jews who have had a bar/bat mitzvah celebration at some point of their lives, and who, as adults, dedicate time and energy to learning and reclaiming “an authentic performance of Jewish identity” (p. 123). Singing God’s Word is a dense and profound work that deals with an important aspect of Jewish American discourse and custom. Structured as a mix of traditional learning from canonic rabbinical sources and quotes from the interviews Summit and his students conducted, it begins with an overview on the tradition of Torah reading, including an outline of the ritual pattern of a Torah service and a thick-reading thereof. This is followed by a section describing and analyzing the experience of chanting Torah “in different keys,” in the words of Erving Goffman (whom Summit quotes on p. 10)—namely, from individual, communal, feminist, and inclusive perspec- tives. The third section discusses the performance itself, while the final section provides a brief overview on the available online resources for learning the skill of Torah chanting, pointing to the growing democratization (and musical homogeneity) result- ing from this availability.

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This book, it seems, will be most insightful for those who are not described in it. As a profound description of the nature of the white American Jewish conversation, it is likely to be most useful to readers who come from different backgrounds: non- Americans, non-Ashkenazi Jews, and, simply, readers of the future. Those who are similar to Summit in terms of Jewish education and training are apt to be familiar with the book’s contents, whereas readers who are less Jewishly educated may be frustrated by the fact that details related to traditional learning—from the theological symbolism of the Torah service to the practical details of the leyening skill itself—are spread throughout the book and therefore difficult to combine into a cohesive analysis. In short: Singing God’s Word is not about Torah reading. Rather, it is a fasci- nating inquiry into the spirituality and practice of a large group of American Jews “in search for the sacred” (p. 242). Though never stated explicitly, this quest appears to be the guiding theme of the book. Summit attempts to get to the core of Jewish-American identity: Why do we at- tend services? Why do we wish to leyen? How do we experience and think about our- selves, about Judaism, about our lives as Jews? In a previous book, The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land (2000), Summit offered an analysis of one way in which American Jews seek to preserve their heritage, community and identity. Here, in describing Torah leyening as a second way, he simultaneously describes American Jews as spiritual seekers who invest great efforts, financial resources, and time, in order to get “a sense of kedushah—the sacred nature of the experience” (p. 132).

Sonja K. Pilz Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion

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