TSUM FOLK VEL IKH FUN KEYVER ZINGEN I WILL SING TO THE PEOPLE FROM THE GRAVE: THE EMOTIONS OF PROTEST IN THE SONGS OF DOVID EDELSHTAT By JOHN SAMUEL LORBER Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in Religion May 2015 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Shaul Jacob Kelner, Ph.D. Nina Warnke, Ph.D. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would not have been possible without the financial support of a Vanderbilt Program in Jewish Studies tuition award, a grant to attend the YIVO/NYU Summer Program in Yiddish Studies, and work-study in the Vanderbilt Divinity Library. I am particularly grateful to Professors Dan Cornfield and David J. Wasserstein for their early support of my candidacy for the program and Professor Leah Marcus for her patient guidance through the challenges of coursework. The complex task of weaving several disciplines into a cogent project could not have been accomplished without the selfless hours Professor Nina Warnke spent steering me through nuanced translations of arcane Yiddish texts. Special thanks to Professor Gary Gerstle for introducing me to Irving Howe and modeling the highest standards of academic composition. Most of all I would like to thank Professor Shaul Kelner whose generous professional and personal disposition as advisor and mentor made the journey a joy. ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Mayn tsavoe .................................................................................................................1 2. Sofia Perovskaia ........................................................................................................20 3. Der 11-ter November .................................................................................................26 4. In kampf .....................................................................................................................27 5. Vakht oyf! ...................................................................................................................31 6. Yidishes folks-blat ......................................................................................................37 7. Fraye arbayter shtime ................................................................................................39 8. Dovid Edelshtat portrait .............................................................................................59 9. Dovid Edelshtat grave ................................................................................................60 10. Dovid Edelshtat in America .......................................................................................61 11. Vakht oyf! sheet music ...............................................................................................62 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ ii LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... iii SINGING FROM THE GRAVE .........................................................................................1 SONGS OF PERSUASION .................................................................................................7 Emotions of Protest .........................................................................................................9 SOVIET YIDDISH CULTURE PROJECT.......................................................................11 Edelshtat Wars ..............................................................................................................13 Revival ..........................................................................................................................17 DOVID EDELSHTAT (1866-1892)..................................................................................18 In America – Exile ........................................................................................................22 RUSSIAN HEART, YIDDISH VOICE ............................................................................24 Immigrant Audience, Yiddish .......................................................................................33 Immigrant Community..................................................................................................34 Yiddish and the Yiddish Press in the Diaspora .............................................................35 Diasporic Literature ......................................................................................................39 Jewish Religious Memory.............................................................................................41 Edelshtat the Martyr: fun keyver zingen........................................................................43 EUROPE AND THE BUND – RETURN .........................................................................45 Half-Intellectuals...........................................................................................................48 Power of Singing...........................................................................................................49 INSPIRING THEIR HEARTS ..........................................................................................54 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..............................................................................................................63 All primary source translations of Edelshtat, Janovsky, Marmor, Litwak, Pomerants, and Remenik are by the author unless otherwise indicated. Transliterations and Yiddish are YIVO standard orthography unless otherwise indicated. iv SINGING FROM THE GRAVE Mayn tsavoe1 O gute fraynd ven ikh vel shtarbn Trogt tsu mayn keyver undzer fon Di fraye fon mit royte farbn Bashpritst mit blut fun arbetsman 1 Dovid Edelshtat, Folks-gedikhte, Steven Spielberg digital Yiddish library 04549 (Nyu- Yorḳ: Hebrew publishing company, 1906), 40; Eleanor Mlotek, Mir Trogn A Gezang! : Favorite Yiddish Songs of Our Generation, 4th ed. (New York: Workmen’s Circle Education Dept., 1987), 92. Translation, Lorber 1 Un ven ikh her di shverdn klingen In letstn kamf fun blut un shmarts Tsum folk vel ikh fun keyver zingen Un vel bagaystern zayn harts My Testament Oh good friend when I am dead Carry our flag to my grave The free flag of red color Stained with the blood of the workingman And when I hear the swords clanging In the last battle of blood and pain I will sing to the people from the grave And will inspire their hearts Dovid Edelshtat “Mayn tsavoe” (My Testament) in Di varhayt 22 March 1889 “The October revolution sharply raised the grand question of the epoch for the artistic intelligentsia: with whom are the artists – with the people or against them? The best minds in literature welcomed revolution and immediately began building the new Soviet literature and culture.”2 Hersh Remenik (1905-1981), “Tsu der frage fun di onheybn fun der yidisher sovetisher literatur” (On the question of the beginning of Yiddish Soviet literature) 1966 2 Hersh Remenik, “Tsu der fage fun di onheybn fun der yidisher sovetisher literatur,” Sovetish heymland, no. 11 (1966): 132–140. Remenik was a Soviet literary historian and significant contributor to the post-Stalinist Yiddish journal, Sovetish heymland. 2 “Songs cross borders without passports and visas”3 A. Litwak (1874-1932), “dos yidishe arbiter-lid” (The Jewish Labor Song) 1926 The fate of the Sweatshop Poets [Morris Rosenfeld (1862-1923), Morris Winchevsky (1856-1932), Dovid Edelshtat (1866-1892), and Joseph Bovshover (1873- 1915)], a group of late nineteenth century Russian immigrant Yiddish writers, was not obscurity and irrelevance as the twentieth century progressed, but persistence, significance, and passion well beyond their demarcated time and place. The assimilation of the their fellow East European Jews in America did not diminish this, nor did the upheaval of the old order and revolution of the new in the Russian Empire. In fact, decades after their work was produced it was still relevant and worthy of fervent and even polemical discussion. Surprisingly, much of the discourse about these Yiddish labor songs written in the United States was taking place in the emerging Soviet Union, the land of the writers’ origin. Of particular interest was the fierce debate over Dovid Edelshtat’s place in the pantheon of Soviet literary pioneers; the case of the so-called “Edelshtat Wars.” It was described in detail by bibliographer Aleksander Pomerants (1901-1965) in his 3 A. Litwak, “Dos yidishe arbeter-lid,” in Vos geven: etyudn un zikhroynes: Litwak, A. 1874-1932 (Vilne: Ṿilner farlag fun B. Ḳletsḳin, 1925), 242, accessed November 23, 2010, http://www.archive.org/details/nybc208225. Litwak was the pseudonym of Khayim Yankl Helfand, socialist, Yiddish writer, translator, and editor. He was a so- called “half-intellecutal” responsible for translating political, scientific, and other documents into Yiddish for the Bund. He immigrated to America during World War I, and Vilna in the 1920s where he continued to advocate for the Yiddish socialist cause. 3 remembrance on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Edelshtat’s death.4 Pomerants was born in Grodno, Belorussia and immigrated to New York in 1921, but from 1933-1935 was member of the faculty of the Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture at the Ukrainian Academy of Science and so was quite familiar with the literary-political context in which the argument was framed. The attention