Introduction Leah Garrett

ࡗࡗࡗ Introduction leah garrett A Jewish immigrant stands on the deck of a ship bound for the United States. Behind him lies a home visited by violence and destruction; ahead of him, a new world beckoning with the promise of limitless reinvention. Searching for a means to express the push-and-pull of past and future, he finds a reflection of his inner turmoil in the ocean below: Restlessly, the thick-dark waves capped with gray heads of foam hurl themselves one upon another. Harsh is the gloom of the mournful sea, and great its vexation. Little man, where are you crawling to? Little man, what are you striving to reach? You’ve set off over the mighty waters in the shell of a nut. O you pitiful wretch! Wherever they find themselves, whether in a seedy yeshiva or a noisy cafeteria, and whoever they are—bespectacled students or bearded sages, muscular butchers or disgruntled union men—the characters who people the fiction of Lamed Shapiro have set out over mighty, mournful waters in the shell of a nut. Shapiro’s writings graphically render the struggle of the modern Jew thrust into a desperate search for meaning at the very moment when the traditional community is de- caying from within and threatened by destruction from without. ix Like the young man fleeing his ravaged home, Lamed Shapiro was a Romantic manqué. How much happier he would have been as a Wordsworth, who found serenity in nature. As a Jew in the modern world, what he found instead was radical instability. For Shapiro, this conflict was inescapable, whether in the violence of pogroms or in the chaotic fate awaiting immigrants in the new world. Shapiro’s own life—marked by radical dislocations, always in danger of spiraling out of control—is one of the most disturbing in the annals of modern Jew- ish writing. Throughout his seventy turbulent years, Lamed Shapiro suffered from bouts of depression, some so severe that they led him to attempt suicide. When depressed, he would reject offers of help, isolate himself, and stop writing. Then, instead of returning to his desk, he would set himself obsessively on such seemingly impossible tasks as the reinvention of color photography. Friends would find him skinny and agi- tated from lack of sleep; in later life, his periods of morbid gloom were marked by bouts of heavy drinking. Small wonder that, when com- pared with most other Yiddish writers, his literary output was rather slim. Nonetheless, the critics were nearly universal in their praise. They admired Shapiro’s stories for their content and, above all, for their form and the “silence,” “discipline,” “stillness,” and “control” of their unique style.1 Here lay Shapiro’s primary contribution to Yiddish literature: a new way of showing the discord of Jewish life in the modern world through a controlled (or, as the poet Jacob Glatstein termed it, “claustrophobic”) poetic voice. A. Tabachnik articulated the critical consensus when he wrote: “There is no Yiddish writer, not even David Bergelson, who stands out with the degree of self-conscious mastery, of stylistic precision, of artistic control and discipline, as does Lamed Shapiro.”2 Levi Joshua Shapiro was born to Orthodox parents on March 10, 1878, in the Ukrainian shtetl of Rzhishchev, sixty-two kilometers southeast of Kiev.3 The 1939 census counted a Jewish population of 1,608 out of a general population of over 20,000 in Rzhishchev. The shtetl, surrounded by forests, adjoined the mighty Dneiper, a river that would later play a prominent role in Shapiro’s stories. x introduction Khaya Bluma, Levi’s mother, was the second wife of his father, Aryeh Leyb, who had two sons by a previous marriage. She regarded Levi as her favorite son, and the boy reciprocated her devotion. Their relation- ship remained intense and intimate as long as she lived—and also tempestuous, an Oedipal struggle that found powerful expression in his writings, where Jewish mothers are often depicted as sadistic hags who torment their children to distraction. The life of a Jewish male from a good home ought to have been de- voted to the study of the Talmud, followed by an arranged marriage and a career in the family business. But from the age of eight, Shapiro was irresistibly drawn to literature. Like other young rebels of his genera- tion, he was caught up in reading and then in composing heretical works, first in Hebrew, then in Russian, and finally in Yiddish. As an adolescent, Levi fell under the spell of the Russian nihilist writer Dmitrii Pisarev (1840–1868). Pisarev had issued a clarion call for realistic renderings of life based on honest self-analysis. His heroes were young men and women at war with the established order. It was Pisarev, paradoxically, who showed the young hopeful from the shtetl the literary potential of his own mother tongue. As Shapiro would re- call, Pisarev “turned my glance away from the morning star that sings its chorus—to the poor world, the world of my true surroundings.” In- deed, if the purpose of literature was the honest rendering of real hu- man experience, then there was no better tool than Yiddish. In 1896, at the age of eighteen, Levi Shapiro realized his “path lay with Yiddish literature”4 and made the young Jewish writer’s arche- typal move to the bustling metropolis of Warsaw, a provincial capital of the Russian Empire and the center of a burgeoning Jewish culture in several languages. No less archetypically, he promptly undertook a pil- grimage to the great Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz (1852–1915). Intent upon appearing the urbanite, the small town yokel got all dressed up, wearing an outfit that was a cross between a long jacket and a dress coat, and a hat with a shiny beak, like a real Russian student. In this get-up, I rang the doorbell of Number One, next to a plaque that read: “I. L. Peretz receives visitors at four in the afternoon.” The door opened to Peretz himself. Peretz’s large eyes became even bigger when he saw my get-up. Why introduction xi that look of astonishment? I asked myself. I realized that in my attire I looked like Genghis Khan.5 They spent the afternoon discussing the bright potential of Yiddish letters. Two years of hunger and chronic unemployment followed, after which Shapiro quit the metropolis and returned home to Rzhishchev. The next period in his life is poorly documented. A failed love relation- ship resulted in his first attempted suicide—by drinking iodine, the method then favored by young Russians of both sexes. While at home, he managed to avoid the draft and to publish his first piece: an entry in Russian for a joke contest. The one-ruble honorarium staved off his hunger for a few days. He had intended his stay to last only a few months. Instead, he remained at home for five long years. Finally, in 1903, at the age of twenty-five, Shapiro returned to War- saw, there to publish his first Yiddish stories, “Wings” (1903) and “Its- ikl Mamzer” and “Tiger” (1904), in journals edited by Avrom Reisen and Peretz. In Warsaw, Shapiro lived with the Yiddish-Hebrew writer Hirsh Dovid Nomberg (1876–1927), who tried to convince him to change his name. “What kind of name is Shapiro for a writer?” Nomberg protested. “A writer needs to have a name that will make on impression on the reader’s mind. Not Shapiro. There are hundreds of Shapiros.” “It will be one or the other,” the dime-a-dozen Shapiro replied, “ei- ther L. Shapiro will become a name to the reader, or it will be nothing to him.”6 While “Shapiro” may not have captured the imagination of the Jewish public, the sole initial “Lamed” (the letter “L” in the Jewish al- phabet) became something of a modernist affect, akin to that adopted by the American poet e. e. cummings. Shapiro’s second sojourn in Warsaw ended abruptly, in the epoch- making year of 1905. It was a time of revolutionary upheaval in Russia as the granting of civil liberties was followed by the shock of pogrom violence against Jews, more widespread and brutal than anything before. Late that year, Shapiro joined a wave of young emigrants fleeing Mother Russia to start a new life in America. Shapiro’s leave-taking was different from most in two crucial respects. While many could xii introduction boast a revolutionary past, Shapiro fled for reasons of economic failure. Moreover, he did not undertake the trip alone but with his mother in tow, though it is not clear whether this was out of a sense of duty or be- cause he feared venturing into the great world without Khaya Bluma at his side. Khaya Bluma was to live with her son for the next two decades until her death in 1925, when Shapiro was forty-seven. En route to America, Shapiro spent four months in London, a brief but extremely productive sojourn. There he befriended the Hebrew- Yiddish writer and revolutionary Yosef Hayyim Brenner (1881–1921), one of the founders of modern Hebrew prose and an uncompromising critic of Jewish life. Brenner’s fiction, like that of Berdyczewski, Gnes- sin, Schneour, Berkovitsh, and Nomberg, was peopled by variations on the type of the talush, the “dangling,” alienated young man adrift within Jewish and modern life. In London, Brenner and Shapiro de- bated the relative merits of Yiddish and Hebrew literature. By now, Shapiro was firmly convinced that Yiddish, as a supple, literary lan- guage, was the obvious choice for a writer committed to the represen- tation of contemporary Jewish life.7 In London, Shapiro enjoyed total freedom of expression for the first time, and it was there that he began to make his mark as a new voice in Yiddish literature.

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