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Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion

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Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion OUP UNCORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Wed Nov 13 2019, NEWGEN Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion 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 an- other 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 266 oso-9780197516485.indd 266 13-Nov-19 21:34:36 OUP UNCORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Wed Nov 13 2019, NEWGEN Cultural Studies, Literature, and Religion 267 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 bib- lical 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. oso-9780197516485.indd 267 13-Nov-19 21:34:36 OUP UNCORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Wed Nov 13 2019, NEWGEN 268 Book reviews 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—
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