Alicia RAMOS-GONZÁLEZ Universidad de Granada
THE LITERARY VARSHE OF THE ZYNGER SIBLINGS FROM 1908 TO THE GREAT WAR1
(Part One)
RÉSUMÉ
Cet article porte sur le monde littéraire et culturel des Juifs polonais de Varsovie et sur le rôle joué par cette ville dans la littérature yiddish de l’Europe ashkénaze au début du XXe siècle. En 1900, apparaît la «Varshe» littéraire: c’est un centre artistique important qui, dans les décennies suivantes, donne naissance à de nombreux groupes littéraires, à d’importants mouvements d’avant-garde, à des prosateurs, des poètes et des dramaturges yiddish de premier plan, et à une série de familles littéraires extraordinaires. Parmi ces dernières, figurent les Zynger. Leur histoire familiale est parallèle à l’histoire de ce creuset culturel qu’est la capitale de la Pologne; c’est là que se déroulent la formation artistique de trois membres de la famille — les frères et sœurs Zynger: Ester, Yisroel et Yitskhok — et leur carrière littéraire. La première partie de la recherche porte sur la période comprise entre 1908, l’année de l’arrivée des Zynger à Varsovie, et 1914, l’année où éclate la Première Guerre mondiale; elle examine aussi les origines de la communauté juive de la ville, et elle étudie les principaux changements qui eurent lieu dans le paysage artistique et culturel de Varsovie. Enfin, elle considère la Varsovie yiddish comme une métropole littéraire juive où la figure du maître et patron Yitskhok Leybush Perets et sa maison servirent de guide pour une nouvelle culture yiddish dans les nombreux salons artistiques et littéraires de la ville.
ABSTRACT
This article explores the literary and cultural world of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the role of the city in the Yiddish literature of Ashkenazi Europe during the early twentieth century. In 1900 literary Varshe emerged as an important artistic
1. This work has been supported by the projects De Sefarad a Yiddishland: escritoras judías en Europa y sus Diásporas [From Sefarad to Yiddishland:Jewish Women Writers in Europe and its Diasporas] and CuRe. Cuerpos Re-escritos: dolor y violencia en escritoras y personajes femeninos de la literatura de mujeres [Re-written Bodies: Pain and Violence in Women Writers and Female Characters of Literature by Women], both of which received grants from the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Science of the Regional Government of Andalusia.
Revue des études juives, 171 (3-4), juillet-décembre 2012, pp. 351-379. doi: 10.2143/REJ.171.3.2184709
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centre that would give rise in later decades to numerous literary groups, important avant-garde movements, outstanding writers of Yiddish prose, poetry and drama, and a series of extraordinary literary families. Among the latter are the Zyngers, whose family history runs parallel to that of this important cultural hub. The Polish capital provided the setting for the artistic formation of three of its members — the Zynger siblings, Ester, Yisroel and Yitskhok — and for the consolidation of their literary careers. The first part of the article focuses on the period between 1908, when the Zyngers arrived in Warsaw, and 1914, the beginning of the Great War; it also examines the origins of the city’s Jewish community and studies the prin- cipal changes that took place in the Warsaw’s cultural and artistic landscape. Finally it considers Yiddish Warsaw as a Jewish literary metropolis in which both the figure of the master and patron Yitskhok Leybush Perets and his home served as guides for a new Yiddish culture in the city’s proliferating artistic and literary salons.
1. The Old Jewish Warsaw
Between the 15th and 18th centuries, life in Jewish Warsaw — which dated back to the 14th century — was complicated, and there had been episodes over these four hundred years in which Jews had been denied residence permits, expelled from the city or attacked by the Polish population.2 Even so, at the end of the 18th century there were almost 6000 Jews living in Warsaw3, many of them in the city’s jurydyki Warszawy.4 Although in the early decades of the 19th century the animosity and dis- trust felt by Poles towards the Jewish residents remained significant and Jews depended on daily passes to be able to live and do business in Warsaw, the first Jewish quarter was established in 1809, when the Jewish population represented 19% of the city’s inhabitants. However, not until the second half of the century would a significant improvement be perceived in the situation faced by the Jews in the Polish capital, and their improved position brought with it an increase in the activity
2. One of the best sources for studying this period is E. RINGELBLUM, Zydzi w Warszawie od czasów najdawniejszych do ostatniego wygnania w 1527 roku, doctoral thesis, Warsaw, 1932. 3. See C. SHMERUK, “Aspects of the History of Warsaw as a Yiddish Literary Centre”, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, 3, The Jews of Warsaw, 2004, p. 142. Shmeruk takes this figure from S. KIENIEWICZ, Warszawa w latach 1795-1914, Warsaw, 1976, p. 76. 4. “Jurisdictions”, private areas within the city that were exempt from the legal control of the municipal administration because they were owned by nobles or the Church. See S. KIENIEWICZ, “The Jews of Warsaw, Polish Society and the Partitioning Powers 1795-1861”, in A. POLONSKY (ed.), Studies from Polin. Fron Shtetl to Socialism, London-Washington, 1993, p. 84-85.
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of Jewish Warsaw in subsequent decades. Its streets were filled with a mixture of devout Jews and erudite wise men, rich bankers, industrialists, merchants, alcohol smugglers, humble artisans, shopkeepers and itinerant salesmen. The Jewish community had multiplied by eight — representing at this point a third of the city’s population — and in the streets of Warsaw mikvoes proliferated. The year 1878 would see the founding on T¥omackie Street of the Great Synagogue, the largest and most important in Warsaw and next to it the Yudaistishe Bibliotek, one of the greatest temples of Jewish books in all of Ashkenazi Europe, would soon open — later it would have a collection of over 40,000 volumes. Before the end of the century, the construction of the orthodox synagogue on Twarda Street would begin, on land granted by Zalmen ben Menashe Nozyk and his wife Rivke bas Moshe, wealthy merchants from the city. Following the inauguration of the syna- gogue, its beautiful music would be heard throughout the streets of the Jewish quarter. While it is true that in the final decades of the century two thirds of the shtiblekh [prayer houses] in Warsaw were Hasidic, it is also a fact that the spread of enlightened and emancipationist ideas had turned Warsaw into an important centre of reformist thought by Polish Jews. As a consequence, a small part of the Jewish community was giving up its customs and tradi- tions to open up to gentile society and participate in the city’s cultural and political life. Some sectors of Jewish society were slowly becoming secu- larised, the sons of the most assimilated Jews no longer attended Jewish schools and instead went to government schools and, later, to universities, and their daughters now studied literature, music and languages. The num- ber of conversions increased greatly in Warsaw during these years, and the city had the highest number of apostate Jews in all of Ashkenazi Europe. The Jewish proletariat was deeply affected by the revolutionary ideas of the radical movements and the city began to receive a high number of young unemployed Jewish girls who emigrated from the shtetlekh to work as domestic employees in the homes of well-off Jews or in small workshops, where they learned sewing and socialism.5 At the end of 1881 a pogrom took place in the Polish capital, an echo of the ones triggered by Czar Alexander II’s assassination in Russia at the end of April of that year and which had reached more than thirty villages and cities like Odessa and Kiev. The attacks produced a large number of
5. These young people represent a considerable percentage of the internal Jewish migration that from 1880 to 1910 would take almost fifty thousand Jews from all over Congress Poland to Warsaw.
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displaced people and marked the beginning of a great migratory movement of Ashkenazi Jews, especially Russians and Hungarians, to North America, Palestine and South Africa. But in Warsaw Jewish life did not come to a halt as a result of aggression by the population that accused the Jews of the growing Russification of Poland, nor did such aggression put an end to the massive arrival of new members to the community, now increased by 150,000 Jews from Lithuania, Byelorussia and the Ukraine.
2. The Origins of Literary Varshe
In 1814 the first Jewish printing press opened its doors in Warsaw6 and many similar workshops would appear shortly thereafter. After just a few decades there would be almost ten, most of them owned by Jewish printers. Thanks to their arrival, books in the leshon ha-qodesh and in the Jewish vernacular language began to be published and circulate in Warsaw: most of them were texts of the Holy Tradition and reprints of tkhines and Yiddish- language morality books for women from the 17th and 18th century. However, although in the Jewish quarter ancient traditions were observed and the city was becoming an important Hasidic centre, a small circle of maskilim7 developed in the early decades of the 19th century and brought to
6. Although the first Hebrew printing press had started to function in 1797, its owners were Polish. 7. Followers of the Haskole/Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment. The core of the Warsaw maskilim was composed of the pedagogue, writer, translator and censor Yakub Tugenhold (Breslau, 1791-Warsaw, 1871), the professor and polemicist Avraham Bukhner (1789-1869), Stanis¥aw Ezekiel Hoge (1794-1860), the translator Abraham Jakub Stern (1762-1842) and Antoni Eisenbaum (see note 8). Other noteworthy members of the movement headed by Mendelssohn in the Polish capital were Abraham Paprocki (Warsaw, 1813-1852) — the author of the first textbook in Poland on the history of the Jews — and the doctor Hirsh Goldshmit, member of an important Varsovian family and the paternal grandfather of Janusz Korczak [Yanush Kortshak] — pseudonym used starting in 1898 by the Polish doctor, writer, and educator Henrik Goldshmit (Warsaw, 1878-Treblinka, 1942), a man committed to helping disadvantaged groups, especially children, the main target of his socially-engaged activity, and who was also a writer. Korczak made his debut in the magazine Kolce [Thorns] in 1896 and also wrote hundreds of humorous sketches, stories and articles for children for the Polish press, along with novels and short stories for young people. For a detailed study on this group of maskilim and the activities and publications of many of its members, see the articles of M. WODZINSKI: “Language, Ideology and the Beginnings of the Integrationist Movement in the Kingdom of Poland in the 1860s’”, East European Jewish Affairs, 34/2, 2004, p. 21-40; “Good Maskilim and Bad Assimilationists, or toward a New Historiography of the Haskalah in Poland”, Jewish Social Studies, 10/3, 2004, p. 87-122; “Hasidism, Shtadlanut, and Jewish Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland: The Case of Isaac of Warka”, Jewish Quarterly Review, 95/2, 2005, p. 290-320.
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the capital the new ideas of the Haskole. And with them began the Jewish press in Warsaw; at the beginning of the 1820s the maskil Varsovian A. Eyzenboym8 published the weekly Dostrzegacz nadwislanski.9 Although the publication was short lived, the members of the city’s progressive circle were very prolific and their works would be published in the city in subse- quent decades.10 The Haskole introduced modern literature to Warsaw and its Jewish printing presses published the works of important maskilim from else- where, who contributed to nourishing the — still limited — audience of mod- ern literature. In Warsaw, for example, ‘Ayit Òavu‘a [The Painted Vulture or The Hypocrite], by the father of the modern Hebrew novel, Abraham Mapu11
8. Antoni (Arn) Eisenbaum (Eyzenboym) (Warsaw, 1791-1852), Polish pedagogue and writer. One of the most outstanding figures in the world of Jewish culture in the Warsaw of the first half of the 19th century, he was director of the first Rabbinical Seminary of the Polish capital, from its founding in 1826 until his death. The school, funded by the government, represented the reformist minority of the Varsovian Jewish population. Classes were taught in Polish and many of the professors of secular subjects were not Jewish. 9. Dostrzegacz nadwislanski — Der beobakhter an der Vayksel [Observer on the Vistula] came into existence on 3 December 1823. The first Jewish daily of Eastern Europe printed in Hebrew characters, it was written in Polish and Germanized Yiddish. Only 44 issues were published, with a print run no higher than 150 copies. See SHMERUK, art. cit., p. 146, and M. WODZINSKI, “Good Maskilim”, art. cit., p. 111. Another of the earliest periodical publica- tions in Warsaw was not much more successful than the illustrated publication. It was the assimilationist weekly in Polish Jutrzenka [Morning Star] (5 July 1861-23 October 1863). Founded by the Polish thinker and writer Daniel Neufeld (1814-1874), its principal objective was to defend Jews and fight antisemitism, and to promote the integration of Jews in Polish community life. The short life of these two publications, both with considerable financial support by Polish educational authorities, was due to the fact that the readership of Warsaw’s Jewish press was, up through the 1860s, in its vast majority conservative and Yiddish-speaking. However, Jutrzenka’s successor, Izraelita (1866-1912), founded by Samuel Hirsh Peltyn (Mariampol, 1831-Warsaw, 1896) and showing the same tendencies and contents — although it also published news about Jews all over the world, articles on Jewish history and literature and, most of all, features on the Jewish community of Warsaw — became the periodical favored by the assimilated segment of society that was growing quickly in the Polish capital during the final decades of the 19th century. For this reason Izraelita was able to survive almost half a century, becoming one of Warsaw’s longest-lived Jewish periodicals. 10. Although many of the Varsovian maskilim wrote in Polish or German, they produced numerous Hebrew texts as well. See M. WODZINSKI, “Good Maskilim”, art. cit., p. 101-104. 11. Although the first three parts of the novel by Abraham Mapu (Slobodka, 1808-Königs- berg, 1867) were published in Vilnius, between 1857 and 1864, the first complete edition appeared in Warsaw in 1869. The fourth edition of his first novel, Ahavat Òiyon [Love of Zion] (Vilnius, 1853) — with nine more editions appearing in the city before 1920 — and two of its Yiddish adaptations, in 1874 and 1923, would also be published in Warsaw. Also appear- ing in the city were some works by Yehudah Leyb Gordon (Vilna, 1831-Saint Petersburg, 1892), such as one of the editions of ‘Olam ke-minhago [The Same Old World] (1874), Sikhes khulin. Lider in der folksshprakhe [Mundane Conversation. Poems in the Language of the People] (1886), ’Igerot Yehuda Leib Gordon [Letters of Yehudah Leib Gordon] (1894) and, later on, the six volumes of poetry by Y. L. Gordon, published in two volumes by the publish- ing company Ha-Òefirah, under the title Kol Shire (1905).
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was published along with many of the Yiddish and Hebrew newspaper serials by Dik.12 While in Warsaw the number of female readers increases dramatically, within the group of Varsovian maskilim there do not seem to be any note- worthy women and the female readership of Hebrew is still very small. It is in this context that the Hebrew translation of Vale of Cedars, by Grace Aguilar13, the novel by the maskilah14 Toybe Segal, Di sheyne neytorin [The Beautiful Seamstress] (1883)15 and the novel by Sarah F. Meinkin Foner,
12. Ayzik-Meyer Dik (Vilna 1807?-1893). Learned Jew from Vilna who popularised sen- timental and realist short stories. Dik was one of the most famous writers in all of Ashkenazi Europe, his novels being published by instalments and read especially by the female audience. Some of them even reached the figure of one hundred thousand copies in the first print run and numerous reprints. 13. Grace Aguilar (Hackney, 1816-Frankfurt, 1847), an English theologist, novelist and poet of Sephardic descent. Although she died young, she left behind her a significant oeuvre that includes titles such as Records of Israel (1844), Home Influence; A Tale for Mothers and Daughters (1847), Woman’s Friendship (1850), Mother’s Recompense (1851), Days of Bruce (1852), Home Scenes and Heart Studies (1852). She was admired and praised by a large female audience for whom her books — especially Women of Israel (1846), Spirit of Judaism (1842) — became a guide for all women concerned about their status within Judaism. The Hebrew translation of The Vale of Cedars or, the Martyr (1850), appeared in Warsaw in 1875, under the title ‘Emeq ha-arazim. The translation was by the Hebrew writer Avrom-Sholem Fridberg (see note 32). For a more in-depth study on the author, her oeuvre and its scope, see M. GALCHINSKY, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer. Romance and Reform in Victorian England, Detroit, 1996 (especially the chapter devoted to the author, p. 135-189) and ID., Grace Aguilar. Selected Writings, Peterborough-Orchard Park, 2003. 14. The feminine version of the maskil, the maskilah or learned woman was not merely a woman attracted to the ideals and literature of the Jewish Enlightenment, a passive reader of texts written by learned men, she also contributed to this socio-cultural and literary movement with her own writing. It is true however that her prototype differed in some aspects from the learned Jewish man, since her concerns were different, as was her position, roles and experience in the Jewish community and religion. For an in-depth study on the maskilot and their contributions to the Haskalah movement, see C. B. BALIN, To Reveal Our Hearts. Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia, Cincinnati, 2000, p. 13-50; T. COHEN, “The Maskilot: Between Feminine and Feminist Writing?”, in C. FREEZE, P. HYMAN and A. POLON- SKY (eds), Studies in Polish Jewry. Jewish Women in Eastern Europe, Oxford-Portland, 2005, p. 57-86. 15. Born into an enlightened home in a shtetl of Grodno in 1860, she had become known a year earlier with the publication in the newspaper Ha-‘ivri [The Hebrew] of her “She’elat ha-nashim” [“The Question of Women”], in which she had advocated a change in the family and social status of women. See T. COHEN, “Portrait of the Maskilah as a Young Woman”, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues, 15, 2008, p. 9-29, p. 18-19 and 22, and S. FEINER, “Rereading She’elat Nashim by Toybe Segal of Vilna”, in D. ASSAF and A. RAPOPORT-ALBERT (eds.), Let the Old Make Way for the New. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Eastern European Jewry, Presented to Immanuel Etkes, 2, Jerusalem, 2009, p. 405-416. It is interesting to note that although Segal lived in Vilna, her first Yiddish novel was published in the Polish capital. Although it apparently appeared under the title ‘Olam ha-ma‘aseh [The World of Deed], it was reprinted in Vilna in 1894 and 1903 as Di sheyne neytorin.
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16 Beged bogdim [The Treachery of Traitors] (1891) would appear. These three authors belong to the small group of women writers who appear in the Enlightenment period, during which some maskilim advocate the inclusion of women in the new modern literature, as readers, to increase the number of readers of the reborn Hebrew literature, and, as authors, to endow this literature with what the male writers considered to be a “feminine” side, with “feeling and aesthetic refinement”.17 But the women writers of the 19th century, who include Aguilar, Segal, and Foner, would go much further. Although there are exceptional cases — such as that of Aguilar, the English theologian —, in general these women writers do not come from long lines of Rabbinical sages, nor are they authors with an extraordinary “masculine” intelligence or the unusual erudition of a Jewish man, unique in their genera- tion or in their place of origin; neither were they a new character created by the modern writers. They are normal women, writers with common, moder- ate or brilliant literary talent who take the floor to denounce their situation and demand what now occupies first place in the projects undertaken by women: the right to an education. Therefore, their contact with letters will truly change Jewish literature, as they are creating a new female model and will offer new roles. That is why the appearance in the Polish capital of the novels by these three Jewish women authors should not be interpreted solely as a sign of the modernization of the Varsovian audience. Also to be taken into account are the new female models that they and their heroines offer to the women readers of the progressive population of Warsaw, which was taking on con- siderable proportions judging by the attention it received from the city’s
16. Sarah Feyge (Meinkin) Foner (Zager, 1854-Pittsburgh, 1937). She was the first woman to write a novel in Hebrew, Ahavat yesharim o ha-mishpaÌot ha-murdafot [Love of the Right- eous or the Pursued Family] (Vilna, 1880). After its publication, she worked for some time as a traveling teacher and founded in ™ódz the Daughters of Zion Society, devoted to foment- ing girls’ education in Jewish history and the Hebrew language. She wrote stories questioning the margination of women from studying and created a biblical work in Yiddish entitled Der froyen bunt [The Women’s Revolt] (published by Foner herself, in London, probably at the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century). The Treachery of Traitors — a historical novel set in the times of the Second Temple — was published by the company Druk von A. Ginz. Foner, who often wrote with her maiden name or under a pseudonym and even published some of her stories anonymously, also translated various works into Yiddish which were published in ™ódz and Warsaw in the 1880s and 1890. See M. ROSENTHAL, A Woman’s voice. Sarah Foner, Hebrew Author of the Haskalah, Wilbraham, 2001, p. 1-72, 105-142 and W. ZIERLER, And Rachel Stole the Idols. The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women’s Writing, Detroit, 2004, p. 214-221. 17. I. PARUSH, “Readers in Cameo: Women Readers in Jewish Society of Nineteenth- Century Eastern Europe”, Prooftexts. Journal of Jewish Literary History, 14/1, 1994, p. 1-23, p. 17.
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publishers. This perspective is essential in understanding the motives lead- ing to the subsequent consolidation between 1910 and 1930 of a unique generation of Polish women who chose to write in Yiddish. In addition, periodicals in Hebrew would begin operations in the 1870s, with the appearance of Ha-Òefirah [The Dawn], the first Hebrew-language weekly in the city.18 Founded by Hayyim Selig Slonimski19, during its first year Ha-Òefirah was devoted to the publication of articles about science and technological advances, but starting in its second year, the publication’s sub- ject matter broadened and its pages included articles about education, current affairs and Jewish centres all over the world. This change increased its read- ership and in 1886 it became a daily publication. Ha-Òefirah also opened its pages to the writing of new authors writing in Hebrew such as Perets20, Sholem Aleykhem21 and Gnessin22; and also to the first women became prominent thanks to their texts written in this reborn language. These were mostly young authors, some of whom would later become the mothers of Hebrew literature.23
18. Actually it had first appeared in 1862, but its publication paused for some years and it was not until September of 1873 that it began to be published regularly in Warsaw. 19. Hayyim Selig Slonimski (Bia¥ystok, 1810-Warsaw, 1904), mathematician, inventor and Hebrew-language writer of scientific literature. See M. ZALKIN, “Scientific Literature and Cultural Transformation in Nineteenth-Century East European Jewish Society”, Aleph: His- torical Studies in Science and Judaism 5, 2005, p. 262-264, and O. SOFFER, “Antisemitism, Statistics, and the Scientization of Hebrew Political Discourse: The Case Study of Ha-tsefirah”, Jewish Social Studies, 10/2, 2004, p. 75-77 (notes 4, 5, and 9). 20. Yitskhok Leybush Perets (Zamosc, 1852-Warsaw, 1915), who would be considered the father of modern Yiddish literature and the founder of national-romantic Yiddishism, made his debut in literature in Polish. Later, his first poems in Hebrew were published at the begin- ning of the 1870s, when he was just over twenty years old, and he would write in this language for the rest of his life. Perets’ first visit to Warsaw would also be around this time, in 1873, when, imbued with the ideals of the Haskalah, he married Nehama Rahel Ringelheym, the daughter of one of the city’s maskilim. In 1876 and 1877 Perets would live in Warsaw for a few months, but the break-up of his marriage prompts him to return temporarily to Zamosc. 21. Pen name of Sholem Rabinovitsh (Pereyaslav, 1859-New York, 1916). The author of some biblical romances in Hebrew, he began his literary career collaborating with important periodicals, such as Ha-meliÒ [The Advocate] (Odessa, 1860-1871; Saint Petersburg, 1871- 1904) and also Ha-Òefirah itself. 22. Uri Nissan Gnessin (Starodub, 1879-Warsaw, 1913) is considered one of the founding fathers of modern Hebrew literature. He arrived in Warsaw at the age of just eighteen and became one of the directors of Ha-Òefirah, to which he also contributed his own short stories, poems and essays. However, four years later he left the Polish capital and did not return for some years. 23. Ha-Òefirah would publish, in 1903, Mi-zikhronot yeme yalduti, o mar’eh ha-‘ir Dvinsk [Memories from my Childhood, or Images of the City of Dvinsk] — Hebrew reminiscences about the native city of its author, the maskilah Sarah Foner. That same year and also in 1904 the publication would offer several stories by a teenaged girl from White Russia, the rebbeÒin Dvora Baron (Uzda, 1887-Tel-Aviv, 1956).
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The first attempts to establish Yiddish press in the capital of Congress Poland also began in the 1860s with Varshoyer yidishe tsaytung [Warsaw Jewish Newspaper], a weekly of little literary importance that in its short life (1867-1868) was consumed mostly by the city’s craftsmen and merchants.24 Two more decades would have to pass before we find long-term periodicals in the vernacular language. The first of them would be yearbooks, which began to appear when H. Epelberg25 and M. Spektor26 moved to Warsaw. The former, at the age of just twenty-seven, would start what is known as the Epelberg Calendar, the Varshever yidisher kalendar [Warsaw’s Jewish Calendar] (1889-1901) while Spektor would publish Der Hoyzfraynd [The Home Companion] (1888-1896), a yearbook which some time later would be joined by the Varshever yidisher familyen kalendar [Warsaw’s Jewish Family Calendar] (1893-1897), also published by the Russian writer.27
24. The publication, which appeared for the first time on 8 February 1867 and for the last time on 23 January of the following year, was published by Hillel Glatshtern (1827-1874). Varshoyer yidishe tsaytung had a print run of just 500 copies and hardly any readership out- side of the capital city. It published mainly modern texts by local authors, informative features and articles about current affairs, science, etc. In its fifty numbers, the weekly offered few literary pieces of high quality, and instead filled its pages with the writings of minor authors such as the Hebrew and Yiddish author from Odessa, Peltiel Zamoshtshin (1851-1909) and Neftali Herts Naymanovitsh (1843-1898), a writer from the province of Lublin who made his literary debut in this publication. Its best texts were two poems by Shloyme Ettinger (1803- 1856) — Warsaw’s first modern Yiddish-language writer (see A. P. QUINT, “The Currency of Yiddish: Ettinger’s Serkele and the Reinvention of Shylock”, Prooftexts. Journal of Jewish Literary History, 24/1, 2004, p. 99-115) — and some stories by Dik, among them his famous “Reb Traytl der kleynshtetldiker noged” [Reb Traytl, the Small-Town Rich Man], which appeared in no. 34 of 1867. See SHMERUK, art. cit., p. 147, and D. ROSKIES, “Yiddish Popular Literature and the Female Reader”, Journal of Popular Culture, 10/4, 1977, p. 853-856. 25. Heshl Epelberg (Bia¥a Podlaska, 1861-New York, 1927), from ™omza, came to the Polish capital at the age of nineteen. There he would not only collaborate in the development of some of the city’s periodicals but would also start to publish his first efforts as a playwright and, at the turn of the century, to put some of his plays on stage. 26. Mordkhe Spektor (Uman, 1858-New York, 1925). Realist writer of the same genera- tion as Ukranian poet Shimen Sh. Frug (Bobrovy Kut, 1860-Odessa, 1916) and the Lithuanian novelist Yankev Dinezon (Zagare, 1856?-Warsaw, 1919) (see note 32), he is perhaps one of the most forgotten writers of this period of Yiddish literature, which is known mostly for its Klasiker, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Aleykhem and Perets. He settled in Warsaw in 1887, when his most important novel, Der yidisher muzhik [The Jewish Peasant] (Saint Petersburg, 1884) had already been published and he was one of the most widely-read writers in Yiddish literature. 27. Just a few months after his arrival in the Polish capital city, Spektor started publishing Der hoyzfraynd, although he had already given life in Warsaw to the magazine Der familyen fraynd [The Family Friend] (1887-1888). Spektor, who in the 1890s would become one of the most important Yiddish literary figures of the new literary centre taking shape in the city and one of its most prestigious publishers, would also work, among others, on new publications there. See the sections “No. 1 Tseglana and Other Literary Circles in the City” (below) and “The Great Literary Families” (in the second part of this article, forthcoming).
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These publications arose out of Spektor’s determination to offer ordinary people the best literary texts of the times and although it is true that in form, and on occasions in style and content, they were very modest, equally true is that from the very beginning they included works by important writers. These publications, which find part of their readership in Warsaw’s con- servative, middle-class circles28, became the first showcase of the literary Varshe of the last decade of the 19th century: local authors were very scarce and among them few had the literary quality to see their work printed in publications like these.29 The Home Companion was thus filled with contri- butions by authors from elsewhere who already enjoyed a certain prestige, such as the poet and playwright Avrom Goldfadn30 or Sholem Aleykhem — whose first version of Tevye der milkhiger appeared in Spektor’s peri- odical in 189531 —, by new writers who had moved to the city, such as Fridberg and Dinezon32, or by young talents who spent time in Warsaw
28. SHMERUK, art. cit., p. 149. 29. In the 19th century, very few writers in the city or its province stand out in Yiddish literature. The first had been the maskil Shloyme Ettinger (see note 24), who was followed by the learned Antoni Eisenbaum (see note 8). In the second half of the century, although the city was beginning to produce more writers, a good number of them would leave Warsaw while young, as part of the migratory wave that started in 1880. These include the politician and writer Benyamin Feygenboym (1860-1923/2?), the Kolton brothers, Yudl (1866-1913) and Mendl [Milton] (1868-1946), and the journalist Yankev Milkh (1866-1945). In this same generation, among those who stay, none is to become a prominent figure in Yiddish letters, but all of them participate actively in the new local press, as staff writers or regular contributors. They are Yankev Graf (1840-1895), Arn E. Kartuzinski (1853-1922), the son of Slonimski himself, Yoysef (1860-1933), and the playwright Duberish Tursh (1863-1935?). To these we must add the few local writers whose texts appear in the yearbooks published by Spektor, who include Mikhl Veber (1859-1907) — born in one of the province’s shtetlekh, starting in the mid 1880s he would work as a staff writer for Ha-Òefirah and would contribute regularly to Spektor’s various publications — Hayim Zilbershteyn (1845-1907), and the veteran journalist Arn Tenenboym (1815-1901). 30. Avrom Goldfadn (Starokostiantyniv, 1840-New York, 1908), a prolific poet and play- wright from the Ukraine who has been compared on occasion with Shakespeare as the founder of Yiddish theatre (see note 44). 31. A friend of Spektor, Sholem Aleykhem began writing in Yiddish in the early 1880s, and he also collaborated in the first periodicals published in this language in Warsaw. Two of his most charismatic characters then appeared, the first in the two series of letters of Menakhen Mendel (1892 and 1895). The second in the monologues of his famed Tevye der milkhiger [Tevye the Milkman], the protagonist of which embodied with great tenderness the feelings of the average Jewish man faced with the swift and profound changes experienced by his com- munity at the close of the century. 32. Fridberg (Grodno, 1838-Warsaw, 1902), Spektor’s father-in-law, moved to Warsaw in 1886, and not only did he collaborate with the local Hebrew press, he also contributed to the new Yiddish periodicals. Yankev Dinezon who left his native Lithuania and arrived in Warsaw in 1885, collaborated with various of Spektor’s publications. Of special interest are the memoirs of the maskil Abraham Mapu, published in the first number of Hoyzfraynd.
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during these years, such as Yehoyesh33; it also published some scientific articles about Polish folklore — precursors of the intense research under- taken by the group of folklorists who met in Warsaw at the end of the century34 — as well as texts by some young writers, among them Miryam Rabinovitsh35 and Izabella, Spektor’s wife and one of the first female Yiddish writers in the city.36 It is thus in the final two decades of the 19th century when the Jewish press of Warsaw begins to expand, bringing to life new publications of outstanding quality. They increase their readership and are in charge of the publication of texts by some of the most important authors of the time, while at the same time assuring their future by supporting young literary talents.
33. Pseudonym of Shloyme Blumgarten (Varzhbolove, 1872/70?-New York, 1927) (see note 64). With a traditional religious education, during adolescence he immersed himself in maskilica literature. When he came to Warsaw in 1889, he had already written some Hebrew poems but at that point he started to write verses in Yiddish. In 1890 he emigrated to the United States, and from his new home he would send his manuscripts to Spektor’s Der hoyzfraynd (1894). 34. For example, in 1889 the article by Yoysef Yehude Lerner, “Di yiddishe muze: yiddishe folkslider” appeared in number 2 of Der hoyzfraynd (p. 182-198). Lerner (1847- 1907), a Yiddish-Hebrew writer, lived just temporarily in the Polish capital at that point — since some of his original plays were being performed there at the time. However, in the last decade of the century various of those people who would later form the city’s folkorists group did settle in Warsaw. More about them can be found in the section “The Great Literary Families” (in the second part of this article, forthcoming). In Spektor’s Hoyzfraynd (vol. II) would also appear a work about Jewish customs, beliefs and superstitions by the Odessa-born writer Avrom-Yitskhok Bukhbinder (186?-1897), “Yiddishe simonim (zabobones)” [Jewish Superstitions]. See I. N. GOTTESMAN, Defining the Yiddish Nation. The Jewish Folklorists of Poland, Detroit, 2003, p. XIX and 91. 35. Originally from Berdichev (1860-1927) and Yoysef Yehude Lerner’s wife. This young female author who wrote under the name Mariye Lerner, had started to write theatre pieces at the beginning of the 1880s. Although many of them had been censored in Russia, Di agune [The deserted woman] appeared in the second volume of Spektor’s Der Hoyzfraynd and later, in 1908, they also appeared in the Polish capital in the form of leaflets. For more information about Rabinovitsh’s writings, see N. ORCHAN, “Yiddish: Women’s Participation in Eastern European Yiddish Press (1862-1903)”, Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclo- pedia, Jewish Women’s Archive, October 30, 2011
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As mentioned above, the 1881 pogrom and its consequences over the fol- lowing years, did not put a damper on this literary flowering of Warsaw and the newspaper presses and printing shops37 are joined by the appear- ance, between 1892 and 1899, of three publishing houses, two of which — ’AÌi’asaf and Tushiah — specialise in the publication of Hebrew press and literature — mostly Hispanic-Hebrew poetry, philosophical works and children’s literature —, making Warsaw the biggest Hebrew publishing centre in all of Poland and Russia.38 The third, Progres, would be the first in Warsaw to devote itself exclusively to the publication of books of Yiddish literature.39 At the dawn of the new century the fever for George Bernard Shaw spread all over Poland and the stages of Warsaw presented his hits such as Candida (1894) and The Devil’s Disciple (1897) — the latter would be followed by ten more productions of other works by the Irish playwright up through the beginning of the 1910s40— but it is Jewish theatre that, starting in 1890, made the greatest strides in the capital city, where sensation was caused not only by some of the works of the playwrights who around this time settled in Warsaw, such as Esterke, by Epelberg41, but new Varsovian companies also appear. Standing out among them is Avrom Kaminski’s42
37. For more information on the Jewish printing shops in Warsaw and some of the city’s most important printing families during the 19th century, see SHMERUK, art. cit., p. 145-146. 38. Both houses were founded by the writer and publisher of Russian descent Abraham Ben Avigdor [Abraham Leib Shalkovitsh (Zheludok, 1867-Carlsbad, 1921)]. ’AÌi’asaf opened its doors first and stood out for its publication of relevant works by Jewish scholars of the time, the dailies Ha-shiloaÌ and Ha-dor and children’s book such as Zikhronot le-beit David [Memoirs of the House of David] (1893-1985), by Friedberg. Tushiah (1896) specialised in the publica- tion of textbooks for Jewish students and in Hebrew literature — in 1904 it would publish, for example, the collection of short stories by Gnessin, ∑ilalei Ìayim [The Shadows of Life]. 39. Founded by Yankev Lidski, a publishing professional from Chicago, its first editor was Avrom Reyzen (see note 65). See G. J. ESTRAIKH, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism, Syracuse, 2005, p. 20-21. 40. See F. D. CRAWFORD, “Shaw in Translation. Part I: The Translators”, SHAW. The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 20, 2000, p. 194-195. 41. This five act play based on the Book of Ester was a modern version of Purim-shpil. It premiered in Warsaw in 1890. 42. At the turn of the century, Warsaw became an important centre of Yiddish theatre with the presence of three companies, that of Yankev Spivakovski (1852-1914), that of Sem Adler, and, lastly, that of Avrom Yitskhok Kaminski (1867-1918), with his wife Ester Rokhl as lead actress. N. WARNKE, “Going East: The Impact of American Yiddish Plays and Play- ers on the Yiddish Stage in Czarist Russia, 1890-1914”, American Jewish History, 92/1, 2004, p. 18. In addition to his work as a theatre director, Avrom Kaminski wrote various plays — among them his famous comedy, Yidishe aktyorn oyf der rayze [On the Pilgrimage of Jewish Actors] (Varshe, Ha-or, 1908) — and towards the end of his successful carrer he would broaden his professional pursuits with the direction of the first films with Jewish subject-matter produced in Poland.
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theatre company with its young and promising actress Ester Rokhl.43 The company quickly triumphed with its production of current hits: Shulamis, a romantic drama by the father of Yiddish theatre Avrom Goldfaden44, and Mirele Efros, by Y. Gordin45, and Kaminska became the mother of the Yiddish stage.
3. Literary Warsaw at the Dawn of the 20th Century
a. The Zyngers: From the Shtetl to the Capital of Poland
In the first decade of the 20th century the Zyngers, a singular family with outstanding intellectual talent, moved to the Polish capital city from Radzymin. Pinkhes Menakhem (Tomaszów, 1868-Stary Dzilów, 1929), the father of the Zynger family, came from a long line of rabbis and devout Jews, and, in addition to attending to his congregation, he wrote long religious books and lengthy commentaries on the sacred texts. The mother, Basheve — her maiden name had been Zylberman — (?, 1871-Jambul or somewhere in Kazakstan, 194?), was born in a small town in the Lithuanian region of Wo¥yn and spent most of her child- hood and adolescence in Bi¥goraj, where her father, Yankev Mortkhe Zylberman, a scholar of the Talmud who also came from a family of erudites and rabbis, was the spiritual leader of the community. It was he who conveyed to his daughter, a young rationalist and intellectual, a love for sacred literature and the books of philosophy and ethics. Pinkhes Menakhem and Basheve Zynger had married at the end of the 1880s and although she gave birth to many children, only four reached adulthood: Hinde Ester (Bi¥goraj, 1891-London, 1954), Yisroel Yehoyshue (Bi¥goraj, 1893-New York, 1944), Yitskhok-Hersh (Itshe) (Leoncin, 1904/2?- Surfside, 1991) — later known as I. Bashevis (Basheyvis) Singer — and
43. Ester Rokhl (Halpern) Kaminska (Porozowie, 1870-Warsaw, 1925) was already being compared to the Italian Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) and the queen of the French stage, Sara Bernhardt (1844-1923). One of the founders of the famed Vilna Trouppe, her repertory included, in addition to the great dramatic works by the best Yiddish playwrights, works by Dumas, Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw and Ibsen. In 1912, she starred in the first Jewish film ever made in Warsaw, Mirele Efros. 44. Avrom Goldfadn (see note 30) wrote his first Yiddish work in 1876. He began his theatre career in Romania and then worked in New York, Paris, London, Lemberg and Warsaw, where he directed his own company between 1885 and 1887. 45. The play by Yankev Gordin (Mirgorod, 1853-New York, 1909), Mirele Efros (1898), was a favourite of Jewish audiences in Eastern Europe for decades.
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Moyshe (Leoncin, 1906-Jambul or somewhere in Kazakstan, 194?). Liv- ing in a home full of religious books and also of the stories told by their parents, who were both masters of the oral tradition, all the Zynger sib- lings showed special talent and sensitivity for literature from a very early age. Before living in Radzymin, the Zynger family had lived in Bi¥goraj, a small city with a significant Jewish population (approximately 66%). This was where the two eldest of the family’s children were born. Then, at the end of the 19th century, they moved to Leoncin, the shtetl in the province of Warsaw where the Zyngers’ two younger children were born and where the father worked as the rabbi for the fourty Jewish families that lived in the village. The Zynger family would spend ten years in that isolated and dirty place where extreme boredom prevailed, caught in a kind of spiritual lethargy. And these were the formative years of Ester and Yisroel Zynger. Ester, being a girl, never went to school to receive primary education and she had to settle for learning the Yiddish alphabet in order to read and recite the religious works written by devout authors for women. Her brother, however, like most Jewish boys, went to the kheyder, the Jewish primary school where children learned about religious observance. So, while the writings by the eldest of the Zynger siblings contain no reference to school experiences — only to the trauma caused by their absence —, such experi- ences do form part of the literary memory of Yisroel Zynger, who in Fun a velt vos iz nishto mer [Of a World That Is no More] devotes a chapter to an ironic description of Jewish educational institutions. In it, not only does he give his own particular vision of the rigid school system based exclu- sively on religious studies — reading the book of prayers and memorizing the Toyre and the Talmud — but he also fiercely criticizes the — in most cases — strict melamdim [teachers] of the Jewish primary schools and their rather unconventional methods, as well as the fanaticism that many of them displayed.46 But there were too few kilometres separating this shtetl on the banks of the Vistula from the Polish capital to be able to resist the assimilationist, emancipationist, modernist and revolutionary ideas of Warsaw, or to remain indifferent to the profane texts of gentile and Jewish writers that reached Leoncin from the big city. Thus, with the arrival in the shtetl of zionism, socialism and the work of Warsaw artists, the rabbinical destiny of Yisroel
46. Y. Y. ZYNGER, Fun a velt vos iz nishto mer [Of a World That Is no More], New York, 1946, p. 69-71.
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Zynger began to teeter and his passion for painting was unveiled47; more- over, the forbidden literature penetrated the walls of the very house of the rabbi, full of sacred books, and Ester Zynger, educated only to be a yidishe mame, became a passionate reader of profane literature, teaching herself German, Polish and Russian, and learning by heart the poems of August Heinrich Hoffman von Fallersleben and also Goethe’s Erlkönig in its entirety. In her father’s tiny rabbinical court she came into contact with students who secretly circulated pamphlets and subversive readings and she spent her teen years reading the extensive work of the German phi- losopher, Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, and the writings of Mikhail Bakunin and various of the intellectuals associated with Russkoe Slovo.48 Later, Pinkhes Menakhem Zynger and his family spent a year in Radzy- min. Although the city was just a few kilometres from the capital and had a population of nearly 4500 — more than half of whom were Jews who had settled there in the 19th century and lived on the brink of poverty, working mostly in commerce (haberdasher’s shops, textile mills, tobacco, construction material) — it was a great disappointment to the two eldest children. Jewish life in Radzymin revolved around the court of the rebe Aaron Menakhem Mendel — who came from a well-known dynasty of Òadiqim — and his renowned yeshive. A suitable redoubt of holy men, miracles and destitution where the young Itshe and Moyshe Zynger would be able to begin a few years later their religious studies but that repre- sented a spiritual and intellectual prison for Ester and Yisroel, who were already demonstrating that the sacred house of their father, the rabbi Pinkhes Menakhem, was sown with heresy. She had been plagued for some time now with “madness for reading”; he dreamed of abandoning his Torah and Talmud studies and escaping to the Polish capital, where the supernatural events that occurred were very different from those found in that Hasidic court.49 It thus comes as no surprise that Ester and Yisroel were overjoyed to find out that their father had obtained a position as rabbi in Warsaw. Years later it was described by the firstborn of the Zynger clan in her biographical novel, Der sheydim tants, as follows: Devoirele — the author’s literary double — “did most of the work, and all the while her mind was feverish
47. C. SINCLAIR, The Brothers Singer, London-New-York, 1983, p. 27-28. 48. Radical magazine founded in 1860 in Saint Petersburg, Russkoe Slovo was the means of expression of the Russian nihilists, among whom Dimitrij Ivanovic Pisarev and Varfolomei Aleksandrovich Zaitsev were especially important. 49. Y. Y. ZYNGER, op. cit., p. 42.
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with extravagant pictures of what Warsaw would be like, although even at this late hour she could not settle down to the thought that it was where they were really going to live”.50
b. A Trayf City
The capital, situated in the great prairies of Poland and watered by the Vis¥a River, between a dense landscape of forests and marshland, was a city of mansions and tall buildings, palaces and gardens, of steam boats navigat- ing the river and a bustle of pedestrians coming and going along the cobble- stoned streets packed with carriages and trams. At the end of the first decade of the 1900s, Warsaw, one of the largest cities in Europe, was under Russian sovereignty and had a high degree of industrial development. It had become the heart of the Jewish community of the Old World. It was home to the largest Jewish population in all of Europe, with numbers nearing 350,000, more than a third of the city’s inhabitants. Most of the Jewish community lived in the large neighbourhood known as Nalevkes [Nalewki], in the north-western part of the city’s old quarter. Warsaw was different; it was a trayf — impure — city. Thus, Yisroel and Ester Zynger arrived with hopes of freeing themselves and breaking the bounds of the traditional Jewish life of Radzymin; they were in search of liberty and new prospects for their artistic, spiritual and political interests. At the age of seventeen, Ester Zynger yearned to immerse herself in the city’s cultural life. Her brother Yisroel thought that moving to Warsaw meant fulfilling an important part of his dream, in that there he could be a bohemian artist, a revolutionary, a deserter, an itinerant salesman… any- thing other than what he was destined for, becoming an erudite rabbi. And even for Yitskhok, the third Zynger child and still a little boy, the new city did not just offer the possibility of continuing his religious studies in a good Jewish school; the atmosphere of the streets of Warsaw could also open his eyes to the world and awaken the childlike mind of little Itskhele, who would perhaps begin to look into what it meant to be human, into what nature and God were, something quite unusual for a Hasidic youngster. The Zyngers moved into no. 10 Krokhmalna Street, which itself was like a big city where Jews lived, prayed and died; a yiddishe gas smelling of tsholnt, tar, rotten fruit and holiness, where rabbis (official rabbis and low- level ones, orthodox and Hasidic rabbis, those expeditious in divorces and those who specialised in listening to ordinary women’s concerns about the
50. E. KREITMAN, Deborah. A Novel, London, 1946, p. 130.
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laws of purity and food51), Hasidic rebes, tailors, shopkeepers, cobblers, tinsmiths, slaughterers, students of the Talmud, from the gymnasium or from the university; kheyder children with peyes and school children from the government-run schools; Jews with long frock coats and Jews with Euro- pean-style suits and ties; Jewish women with the wig worn by pious women and young girls wearing modern clothes; idlers, thugs, mafiosos, and the prostitutes of the many houses of ill-repute that could be found along the entire street52: The uproar out-of-doors became more and more deafening. More and more children came pouring out of their squalid, overcrowded homes and refused to return until long after sunset. All day long they played games in the courtyards, all day long their shouts and cries resounded through the length and breadth of the city. Their shrill voices, happy and carefree now that dreary winter was over, almost stupefied the grown-ups, who were pretty noisy themselves. And there was still the endless procession of ragged men and women that were still as eager as ever to sell hot cakes and buy old rags and mend broken windows. The massive towering walls trembled under the impact of their assaults. Then the music! No sooner did the scratchy strains of a gramophone record issue forth from one of the windows, than inevitably a beggar turned up in the cour- tyard and set up his own gramophone in opposition. Military marches and arias, waltzes and ragtimes blared away at each other, striving with might and main to drown one another, and as they wrestled furiously, first one would come out on top, then the other. During the interval an old beggar woman might enter and burst into song like a nightingale.53
This was Warsaw and its modern Babel, the Nalevkes neighbourhood, was like a piece of Baghdad transplanted into the Western world.54 In its streets Yiddish, Russian, Polish and Hebrew could be heard and they were the right place for restless hearts and minds such as those of the Zynger teenagers. On the very borders of the Jewish neighbourhood, on Novolipki street, the Bresler Library opened its doors to profane literature with hun- dreds of books, poems, stories and novels by gentile writers such as Tagore, Pushkin, Heine…55 A deposit of gentile erudition56, a place of emancipa- tion where souls that had formerly been trapped in a spiritual ghetto could reach ecstasy.
51. See P. WRÓBEL, “Jewish Warsaw Before the First World War”, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, 3, The Jews of Warsaw, 2004, p. 160. 52. I. B. SINGER, More Stories from My Father’s Court, New York, Farrar, 2000, p. 170. 53. E. KREITMAN, op. cit., p. 153-154. 54. I. B. SINGER, La familia Moskat, Barcelona, 1985, p. 284. 55. M. MOSELEY, “Life, Literature: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland”, Jewish Social Studies, 7/3, 2001, p. 22. 56. I. L. PERETZ, My Memoirs, New York, 1964, p. 183, cited in C. SINCLAIR, op. cit., p. 27.
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In the streets, young Jews from all over Congress Poland, like Ester and Yisroel Zynger, knew that they had the opportunity to begin a new life. Here the poetry floating in the air and the new literature strolling down the sidewalks inspired dozens of fledgling literati. In these early years of the 20th century Warsaw had sped up its growth as the Jewish literary capital and its press and publishing houses were disseminating a large part of the renewed Hebrew literature produced in Ashkenazi Europe. Collections such as the Bibliotekah ‘Ivrit by the Tushiah publishing house, offered readers the works of the most important Hebrew figures of the times, writers such as Frishman, Brenner, Brainin, Shofman and Kabak.57 During these years the Polish capital was home to many of the new Hebrew literati that would later leave for Palestine to found the new Hebrew literature in EreÒ-Isra’el. Authors such as the neo-romantic Mika Yosef Berdichevsky, Shlomo Zemakh, the critic Fishel Lakhover, or the great poet of the Jewish national renaissance, Hayyim Nakhman Bialik, whose first collection of verse, Shirim [Poems], appeared in the Polish capital in 1901, published by Salkovitsh. Bialik, who while in Warsaw composed some of his best verses, extraor- dinary love poems, was representative of that entire generation of writers of the literary apostasy.58 His work always reflects the tension between these two forces that attract him: tradition and the call of the new ideals. This conflict appears with special intensity in his poem Levadi [Alone]. However, the Warsaw that the Zyngers moved to was not only the Jewish capital of Europe and the greatest printing centre of Hebrew books; it was also turning into a literary Varshe of readers of Yiddish and, at long last, of writers of Yiddish, who together could aspire to constituting in the future
57. The Bibliotekah ‘ivrit le-khol beit Yisrael was published between 1898 and 1907, with the collaboration of many young Russian, Byelorussian and Lithuanian writers. During the early years of the decade following 1910, the Bibliotekah gedolah of the same printing house also published several of these important signatures. The Pole David Frishman (Zgierz, 1859-Berlin, 1922), one of the greatest Hebrew-language writers, came to Warsaw in 1895 and, combining his creative work with translation projects, he contributed to local Yiddish periodicals and to Bibliotekah gedolah; two selections of his texts appeared in Warsaw in 1899-1905 and 1909-1912. The catalogue of publications by Tushiah includes among many others, some of the first writings by Yosef Hayyim Brenner (Novy Mlini, 1881-Abu Kabir, 1921); PereÒ ben Mosheh Smolenskin: Ìayaw u-sefaraw [Perets ben Moshe Smolenskin: Life and Writings] (1896), by the Yiddish-Hebrew critic and writer Reuven Brainin (Liady, 1862- New York, 1939); the stories by the writer Gershon Shofman (Orsha, 1880-Haifa, 1972), Sipurim we-Òiyurim [Stories and Drawings] (1902); and the first novel by the Lithuanian Aaron Abraham Kabak (Smorgon,1880-Jerusalem, 1944), Levadah [By Herself] (1905). 58. A. MINTZ, “Banished from Their Father’s Table”: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Auto- biography, Bloomington-Indianapolis, 1989, p. 4.
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one of the most relevant literary centres in all of Yiddishland. The Nalevkes neighborhood was witnessing the consolidation of some small artistic and political circles that also organized various literary events, and the appear- ance of some small café-theatres. New periodicals appeared regularly, with ever shorter publishing intervals and ever growing readership. But, above all, different artistic salons have formed and several literary families have settled in the city. In the former, artists, journalists, writers and other intellectuals met, motivated by the sole wish of joining forces to promote Yiddish litera- ture. The personality and charisma of their hosts, almost all of whom had come to the city from other regions in the final decades of the 19th century or the early years of the 20th, managed to bring together the writers now living in the city and the disperse Varsovian literature of the 1890s. The literary salons were like profane yeshives that attracted countless literary adolescents to the capital, who visited the salons with their notebooks and drafts of their writing and found an inspirational atmosphere there; others are ordinary young people who are discovered to be the great talents of the new generation of Yiddish letters. In addition, writers of known prestige moved to the city and turned their homes into the workshops and editorial offices of the newspapers and other publications that they promoted and supported with their names, infecting their children with the enthusiasm they felt for Yiddish literature and involving them in Warsaw’s literary activities.
c. No. 1 Tseglana and Other Literary Circles in the City
Shortly after the publication of Monish59, an almost fourty-year-old Yitskhok Leybush Perets had settled permanently in Warsaw. During his first year in the capital, Perets made repeated visits to various shtetlekh in the province of Tomaszów to gather material about rural Jewish life and the customs of Polish villagers, their language and folklore.60 In the 1890s the writer had begun to lead an intellectual, bohemian life, surrounded by friends and artistic disciples, so almost two decades later, when the Zyngers arrived in the city, in that literary Warsaw in which Jewish printing houses, press workshops, bookshops and libraries were proliferating, the Perets
59. First Yiddish-language work by Yitskhok Leybush Perets, this ballad appeared in the first volume of Di yidishe folksbibliotek [The Yiddish Popular Library] (Kiev, 1888-1889), published and edited by Aleykhem. 60. The product of this intense fieldwork was the publication in 1891 of his Bilder fun a provints rayze [Impressions of a Journey through the [Tomaszow] Region]. See M. CAPLAN, “The Fragmentation of Narrative Perspective in Y. L. Peretz’s Bilder fun a Provints-Rayze”, Jewish Social Studies, 14/1, 2007, p. 63-88.
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residence61 in the Nalevkes neighborhood was without a question “The Writer’s House” of Jewish artists, the home of Yiddish letters. Perets, an maskl influenced by European Neoromanticism and Symbolism, engaged in frenetic literary and political activity in Warsaw. In the last dec- ade of the 19th century, as he became renowned as a classic author of poetry, essays, critical articles and, especially, stories — unique pieces which would bring him the consideration of the Chekhov of the Yiddish short story — he began, along with Spektor, Epelberg and Dinezon, to give cohesion to the Yiddish literary scene in the capital. The effort and determination of these four visionaries had given rise to the first Varsovian Yiddish-language liter- ary group, still small in number but so vital, committed to the city and of such high quality that as early as the beginning of the 20th century they put Warsaw on the map of Yiddish letters and earned recognition of the city’s cultural significance. In just a few years Warsaw would be competing with Vilna — the symbolic capital of Yiddishland62 —, Odessa and Saint Peters- burg for the literary hegemony of Eastern Europe. The four of them, all born within a ten year period, had received similar intellectual training and had moved to the city at almost the same time. For all of them except Spektor, their arrival in Warsaw had meant the begin- ning of their literary careers in Yiddish with the beginning of a period of passionate cultural activity in the city. During the final decades of the 19th century, in addition to their own yearbooks, Spektor and Epelberg — and also Dinezon — had collaborated with Perets in bringing to life their different publications63 and together they had contributed a great deal to the advancement of theatre in Warsaw. In 1908, the Perets home made the street on which it was located the most important street, without a doubt, in all of artistic Varshe; the starting point of any literary route through the city. The home had already been visited by many Hebrew and Yiddish writers, both religious and secular, renowned,
61. Upon his arrival in Warsaw, Perets took up residence at No. 1 Tseglana (Ceglana in Polish), and this soon became his home, his workplace and also a place to meet with his friends, comrades and disciples. 62. For decades Vilna was the world center of Yiddish culture, attracting the youngest and most noteworthy writers and giving rise to some of the most important literary groups of Yiddish literature. J. SHANDLER, “Imagining Yiddishland: Language, Place and Memory”, History and Memory, 15/1, 2003, p. 131-132. 63. Three publications came to life in Warsaw under the direction of Perets, Di yidishe bibliotek: a zhurnal fir literatur, gezelshaft un ekonomye [The Jewish Library: A Journal of Literature, Society, and Economics] (1891, 1892 and 1894), the yearbook Literatur un lebn. A zamlbukh far literatur un gezelshaft [Literature and Life. A Selection for Literature and Society] (1894) and the seventeen numbers of Yontev bletlekh [Holiday Pages] (1894-1896).
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well-known or recently discovered, but mostly by beginners who, encour- aged by the man who had unwittingly become a leader and master, had left behind Polish and Russian poetry and the Hebrew short story to begin writ- ing in the vernacular language. Internal and external immigration to Warsaw towards the end of the 19th century had brought to the Perets home, among many others, Yehoyesh, Pinski and Opatowski, before they emigrated to America and became renowned writers of Yiddish literature.64 With the arrival of the new century, other writers called in at the Perets home and his three room apartment on Tseglana Street became too small to host so many young talents of the Yiddish letters. The intellectual leader’s enormous prestige attracted, until the Great War broke out, highly-esteemed visitors such as Avrom Reyzen and Aleksander Kapel — with whom he would initiate new literary projects65; apprentices in their twenties such as
64. Yehoyesh (see note 33), one of the pioneers of the so-called “Classical Period” of Yiddish literature, sent, at the urging of Ben Avigdor, his first Yiddish poems to Perets, who, confident of the promising future of the young writer, included them in one of his publications. They included his first Biblical translation, Psalm 18, but not until 1909 would the writer begin to devote most of his time to the complete translation of TeNaKh, which would appear in serials in New York’s Der tog [The Day]. The Byelorussian Dovid Pinski (Mogilev, 1872- Haifa, 1959) — who while still an adolescent had written some short stories in Russian — would make his debut in Yiddish poetry just a few months after his arrival in the city in 1892. As one of the early disciples of Perets, the relationship with the writer from Zamosc made him change his plans to become a doctor and he started collaborating with Epelberg and Spektor’s yearbooks, also helping, along with the latter, in the publication of Yontev bletlekh by Perets. Pinski left Europe forever in 1899 and made his home in New York, where with time he would become prominent as one of the most original and brilliant Yiddish playwrights. Son of the pioneer of the Jewish Enlightenment in Poland, Dovid Opatowski, Yoysef Meir Opatowski (M¥awa, 1886-New York, 1954) had spent a short time in the Polish capital before moving to New York in 1907. This visit to the city and his contact with Perets coincide with his first attempts to be a Yiddish writer. Shortly thereafter, when Opatowski begins to write his first short stories, he would adopt the pen name with which, years later, he attained fame and recognition, Yoysef Opatoshu. 65. Avrom Reyzen (Koidenov, 1876-New York, 1953) came to Warsaw at the end of the century and resided in the city for over a decade. The poet and short story writer began writing while still a boy and in the 1890s had published letters and some of his texts in the yearbooks prepared by Perets and Spektor. However, his arrival in the city gave a major boost to his literary career and there he began a great friendship with Perets, met new writers, contributed to various publications, published leaflets and started to work at Progres. His activity in the city began in 1900 with the publication of a compilation of essays about literature, science and criticism, which would boast the participation of not only Reyzen himself, but also Perets and Pinski, among many others. One year later he published, through the publishing company Progres, his first collection Tsayt lider [Poems of the Age], to be followed by Dertseylungen un bilder [Stories and Scenes] (Varshe, Progres, 1903), Yidishe motivn [Jewish Motives] (Vienna, Tsien, 1904), Der deklamator: a literarishe zamlung [The Reciter: A Literary Anthology] (Varshe, Bikher far ale, 1908) and a collection of poems and stories, Shriftn [Writings] (Varshe, Progres, 1908). During his years in Warsaw, Reyzen polished his literary style, composed musical poems and stories set in those sleepy Lithuanian shtetlekh so far from the
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Sholem Ash, Hirshbeyn and Hershele66, who, impressed by the talent and charisma of the master, in the role of advisor, judge and, for most of them, friend, entrust their first manuscripts to Perets or make their debut with the help of their tutor. He was also visited by still younger pupils, such as Menakhem Boraysho, Leo Koenig and Zalmen Shniur, the latter a precocious literary talent who at the age of 16 worked for some time as the personal secretary of the great master.67 Although several of his friends and novices-become-writers had left, Spektor, Epelberg and his loyal comrade and collaborator Dinezon contin- ued in the Perets circle; also remaining was his little group of Warsaw-born writers, which, although still not numerous, included the names Herman and
big city where he lived. Aleksander Kapel (Lekhevitsh, 1878-Paris, 1958), came to Warsaw for the first time in 1903 and before World War I he would live there on two other occasions — the last in 1913. A young man with an impressive traditional and also modern education, his relationship with Perets would help him enter the city’s literary circles and have his first works published, becoming, at the age of just thirty, a well-known intellectual and political activist, an outstanding member of the capital’s Jewish literary association and the first Yiddish theatre critic. 66. The three young men, admirers of his short stories, travelled from different corners of Poland to the capital city to meet him personally and show him their first texts and poems. Perets encouraged them to write in Yiddish. Thus Sholem Ash (Kutne, 1880-London, 1957), a young man in his twenties, from a Hasidic home, who had been reading European literature for some years and had written various sketches in Hebrew, decided, after his first meeting with Perets, in 1900, to devote himself to literature, making his debut shortly after his arrival in the city in the weekly Der yid [The Jew] (1899-1902) with a story named “Moyshele” [Little Moses]. It did not take long for Ash to be considered one of the most brilliant of the master’s disciples. Perets Hirshbeyn (Mielnik, 1880-Los Angeles, 1948), however, had already published some Hebrew dramas when, in 1904, he made the acquaintance of Perets and through him, of Bialik. Over the next few years, which he spent travelling through cities like Vilna, Berlin, and Odessa, he visited Perets repeatedly, forming part of his circle of writers and producing his first Yiddish works. In 1908 he finally founded Hirshbeyn Company in Odessa. The third, Hersh Danilevitsh (Lipno, 1882-Warsaw, 1941) — who took the pen name of Hershele — premiered in 1904 in a Zionist newspaper of ™ódz. From then on his work — children’s literature, poetry, folklore songs, and short stories — appeared in periodicals in ™ódz, Vilna, Warsaw, London, and Saint Petersburg. 67. M. Boraysho — whose real name was Goldberg — (Brest-Litovsk, 1888-New York, 1949), came to Warsaw in 1905 and lived there for four years. Three years after the publi- cation of his first story in Der veg [The Way], Leo Kenig (Odessa, 1889-Kibbuts Hatserim, 1970), who worked as an advertising agent and art critic, would leave Europe to study in EreÒ-Isra’el, where he settled permanently in the 1950s. Zalkind Zalmen Shniur (Shklov, 1886-New York, 1959), a descendent of the illustrious Hasidic dynasty of Liady, had begun to write Hebrew and Yiddish poems at the age of just eight. Five years later he left his parent’s home to settle in Odessa, where the young prodigy would study and mingle with the city’s literary circles. When he moved to Warsaw at the turn of the century, he brought letters of recommendation from Bialik and Mendele, which opened the doors to the Perets home and also the pages of Spektor’s publications, where he made his debut with poetry in 1901. Until he returned to his native city in 1903, Shniur was under the tutelage of the Zamosc-born master and the critic from ™ódz, Dovid Frishman.
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Nomberg68, for whom Perets was an undeniable literary father. All of these were joined around this time by Vaysenberg, a recently-premiered Katsizne and Likhtenshteyn.69 But in no way was Tseglana a gathering place open only to male writers. The talent and experience of the master also captivated some women who, fascinated by secular literature, found at the writer’s home the appropriate atmosphere for nourishing the literary spirit vibrating inside them. One of the first to arrive at his salon had been the Hebrew writer Hava Shapiro70,
68. During the final decade of the 19th century a relevant group of writers born in the province of Warsaw takes shape, but many of them emigrate to other Polish cities and especially the countries of Western Europe or America, where they truly develop their artistic careers. This is the case of the playwright Mark Arnshteyn (1878-1943) and the short-story writers Yankev Meyer Sendatsh (1875-1917) and Dovid Elimelekh Shtiber (1875-?). Nonetheless, the group of local writers in Warsaw includes names such as the religious author Yitskhok Zaler (1868-1936), Yehuda Leyb Morgenshtern (1869-191?), who produced Hasidic stories, Feliks Zaks (1876-1938), the playwright Noyekh Davidzon (1877-1928) — one of Perets’ closest friends —, and the journalist Meyer Sadovski (1871-1937). Although almost an excep- tion, among these new writers there are a few women’s names, such as the playwright Paula R. (Warsaw 1876-Vilnius, 1941). More about her in the second part of this article, forthcoming. However, Hersh Dovid Nomberg (Amshinov, 1876-Warsaw, 1927) and Nosn Dovid Herman (Warsaw, 1876-New York, 1937) would be the main figures of this Varsovian literary gen- eration. Around 1895 Nomberg moved to Warsaw with his first Hebrew manuscripts, turning in his Hasidic overcoat for the attire of an Enlightened Jew, his sacred shtetl for an impure city and his faith for socialism. Following his first meeting with Perets he began to write in Yiddish and shortly thereafter, at the Perets home, he met some newly-arrived writers who soon became close companions, Avrom Reyzen and Ash. The inseparable trio would bring fame to the Tseglana circle because along with their mentor they undertook numerous literary projects in the city. For almost a decade the three young writers formed a perfect literary conjunction that combined the lyricism of Reyzen, the incisive language of Nomberg and the enviable prose of “little” Ash. However, shortly after 1910, the trio came to an end, when Reyzen left the Old World for America. The mingling at No. 1 Tseglana of local writers with those from other places gave way to close alliances, tied by bonds of friendship and respect, like the triad formed by the master himself, Mukdoni and Dovid Herman. The latter, a student of Hasidic origin at a drama school in the city and a member of the illegal party Bund, had created since the turn of the century various drama circles in Warsaw. This group’s hard work in favour of the Yiddish stage in the city brought about the first Yiddish drama school in all of Congress Poland. 69. In the first decade of the 20th century a new wave of young writers came to the city, differentiated from previous ones by their long-term residence in Warsaw and thier uninter- rupted decades-long relationship with the city and its artistic circles. In this newly-arrived group, where Perets finds new talents of Yiddish literature and other good friends, is Yitskhok Meyer Vaysenberg (Zelechów, 1881-Legionowo, Warsaw, 1938) — who debuts in Yiddish literature in 1904, in Di yidishe bibliotek —, Alter Shloyme Katsizne (Vilna, 1885-Tarnopol, 1941) and Yisroel Likhtenshteyn (Kowal, 1883-™ódz, 1933). 70. Hava Shapiro (Slavuta, 1878-Theresienstadt, 1943), Hebrew fiction author who wrote under the pseudonym Em kol Ìay [Mother of all living]. Her literary debut took place in the Polish capital — which she left in 1904 —, and in Warsaw in 1909 QoveÒ Òiyurim [Anthology of Portraits] was published, a compilation of her stories. One year later she would obtain her doctorate from the University of Bern. The ten years that Shapiro resided in Poland were her
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who found in Perets a mentor and confidant.71 Even as a child, the Holy Language had been her great passion, and becoming a Hebrew writer was her only ambition. Her arrival in 1895 in Warsaw, that lively city of poetry and letters where she would come into contact with new trends and aesthet- ics and with many other young Hebrew writers who gathered at the salon on Tseglana Street, made her artistic debut possible: in December of 1901 her first Hebrew story, Ha-shoshanah [The Rose] appeared in the literary weekly Ha-dor [The Generation] (1901-1902), published in Cracow by the Hebrew-Yiddish critic, David Frishman. It was too soon to perceive it but this young lady had begun to give something to Hebrew letters that it lacked. From the beginning of her literary endeavours, Shapiro stood out over the rest for the depth of the characterisation of her female characters, whose psychological complexity would be a transcription of the existential crisis that the author herself experienced as a woman writer in a man’s literary world. At the time Warsaw was receiving its first women writers, women who on the banks of the quiet waters of the Vistula River were engaged in a battle between their female identity — constructed in a restrictively patri- archal society —, their creativity and their desire to be free in a literary kingdom which for too long had been exclusively masculine. The successive publications promoted by Perets offered great possibilities to the young female Yiddish writers who, having come from all corners of Poland, entrusted him with their first texts, and their names began to be heard throughout the city. One of them was that of Roza Yakubovitsh, in whom the master Perets immediately recognised the talent and poetic voice of a modern writer woven with Jewish thread.72 Warsaw’s intellectual
most prolific years; starting in 1910 she would write only essays and journalistic articles. See C. B. BALIN, op. cit., p. 51-83 and W. ZIERLER, op. cit., p. 221-228. 71. See C. B. BALIN, op. cit., p. 52. 72. As the daughter of a rabbi, the spirit of Roza Groybart (Przasnysz, 1889-Warsaw, 1942) was influenced, starting in childhood, by the atmosphere of holiness and solemnity reigning at her home, by the long conversations she held with her father and by the stories he told her about the Jewish people. The result of all this was the awakening in the little rebetsn of a great love for her people and a desire to know and to contemplate. See E. KORMAN, Yiddishe dikhterins. Antologye, Chicago, L. M. Shteyn, 1928, new edition by National Yiddish Book Center, p. 344. Having first gone to a Russian school in Siedlce and then to a Polish school in Bendin, she also studied Hebrew. But during adolescence, the young woman discov- ers modern Yiddish literature and shortly thereafter she begins to write poems that she signs as Roza Y. Her poetic debut was a magnificent one; her “Tsu mayn taten” [To my father] is included in Yiddish: a zamelbukh — poetry collection published by Progres in 1910, which contained the writing of neophyte poets of the no. 1 Tseglana Street circle, also from outside of the city, like Roza herself. These verses, in which the poet recognises the personification of God in the piousness of her father, demonstrate that the writer has an enormous and har- monious expressive ability, necessary to reflect all the tensions experienced by the new
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circles absorbed young people from well-off families who moved to the city to finish their education and others who left their shtetlekh to work in the capital. They were looking for an opportunity and, especially, patronage and approval by the master. Along with the Hebrew writer Hava Shapiro, Beyle Fridberg (Izabella) and Salomea Perl had been some of the female pioneers in the Yiddish literary circle that met on Tseglana Street (see notes 73 and 74). The pen of Spektor’s wife, Izabella, had not gone unnoticed by the master and several of her stories had appeared in Perets publications, such as Di yidishe bibliotek. The writing of Perl had also caught the interest of Perets, who encouraged her to write stories in Yiddish that were published, in the 1890s, in his Yontev bletlekh.73 But at the end of the 19th century there were still very few women writing in the city. Moreover, all of them had come from elsewhere and were isolated from each other within what was for them the immense literary world of men. They do not form a group or a literary trend and individually none of them has a long career or writes prolifically.74
woman. See K. HELLERSTEIN, “Canon and Gender: Women Poets in Two Modern Yiddish Anthologies”, in J. R. BASKIN (ed.), Women of the Word. Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, Detroit, 1994, p. 143. 73. The gestation of Warsaw as an important nucleus of women’s Yiddish literature in Europe begins in the last two decades of the 19th century, under the cape of the first Varsovian Yiddish literary group. Beginning to compete with other centres such as Odessa, which through the Qol-mevaser [A Voice of Tidings] had been a platform for female writers between 1862 and 1872 (see N. COHEN, “The Yiddish Press and Yiddish Literature: A Fertile but Complex Relationship”, Modern Judaism, 28/2, 2008, p. 150), the various periodicals by Perets and also Spektor will be an important vehicle allowing the debut or collaboration of many young women who at the end of the 19th century would become the bridge that links religious literature to modern women’s literature, providing continuity to women’s Yiddish literary history. They also helped women writers from outside of the city become known. Like Yakubovitsh through Yiddish, from much further away, the Ukrainian Roze Goldshteyn (born in the oblast of Poltava in 1870), published several of her poems in Di yidishe bibliotek. For more information about Goldshteyn’s writings, see N. ORCHAN, art. cit. 74. Izabella (see note 36), for example, a writer with considerable talent, proves that at the end of the 19th century a woman could publish — writers and publishers invited them to participate in their publications — and perhaps even be successful, if she was married to a literato, but without masculine support, female talent could end in ostracism. After her sepa- ration from Spektor, Fridberg moved to Odessa, where she continued writing in Russian, under the name of Isabel Grinevskaya — poetry and mostly plays, some of which appear to have been put on the stage in Saint Petersburg and other Russian cities —, although it seems that this part of her work was never published. Another example is that of Salomea Perl. Born in ™omza in 1869, the young woman, whose formal education was truly exceptional for a woman of her generation — she had studied at University and had traveled to Paris and London to further her studies —, started writing stories in Russian when she was barely twenty. A short time afterwards, within the Perets circle, Perl saw the publication of her Yiddish writing in various publications promoted by the writers of the Tseglana Street group. But when the writer died, in 1916, although she had been writing more than two decades, she had not published
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However, with the turn of the century women artists become more visible in the writer’s salon and starting in 1905, in addition to Perl, the women who visit the Perets home include Yente Serdatski, Avrom Reyzen’s sister, Sore, the niece of the writer, Roza, and the actresses Totsy Artsishevska and Tsipure Estrin. Warsaw was becoming a city of small opportunities for the new Jewish woman, a place where women with children and literary interests, but who found themselves lost in day after day of domestic routine like the beads on a necklace, such as Yente Serdatski, could find a suitable job as a member of the staff of one of the many publications that were founded during these years. So, for two years, she was able to breathe freedom and soak up the literary atmosphere of the city, and give voice to her artistic impulses. For this reason, just a few months after her arrival in the capital, she would see her first work published, Mirl, a story that created great expectations and drew the attention of Perets. He would bring the writer into his circle and, impressed by her smooth, velvety prose, he would encourage her to keep writing her little stories.75 Three years after Serdatski came Sore Reyzen.76 Now aged 23, she had been obliged to work as a sewing apprentice in Minsk while furthering her studies but had also had some of her Russian poems published at the begin- ning of the century. The young woman, who came to the city with her husband, Dovid Kasel77, also a writer in the making, was introduced to the
any books. Her delicate health may explain this in part but the truth is that upon analysing female literary production from the period it becomes apparent that between 1890 and 1910 the Yiddish periodicals of Warsaw may have been opening up to women’s participation, but publishing companies were not. This indicates that one thing was to fill the pages of magazines and quite another was to agree to publish books. The greatest consequence of such exclusion would be the “fleetingness” of many female artists and their subsequently falling into oblivion. For more information about the writings by Izabella and Perl, see N. ORCHAN, art. cit. 75. A native of Kaunas, Yente Serdatski (Aleksot, 1877-New York, 1962) — born Raybman — moved at the age of twenty-eight to the city on the banks of the Vistula to try to “turn into” a writer. She had been raised in a home which had instilled in her a love of literature and where, in her youth, she had been able to see and hear the city’s young poets. Also, she had received a good education: after finishing the kheyder for children, she had studied with a group of yeshive students and she could read Hebrew, Russian and German. When she was thirteen she had begun an apprenticeship in a sewing workshop, where she entered into contact with the workers’ movement. But later, probably following her wedding, her life only had hours during which to be a housekeeper, wife and mother, and to work in the shop the family owned. 76. Sore Bashe Reyzen (Koidenov, 1885-New York, 1974), the daugher, sister and wife of writers, wrote poetry and stories and translated great works of universal literature. In 1908 she arrived in Warsaw. Here she would live for over six years, during which she contributed her first poems and children’s stories to various of the city’s publications. 77. D. Kasel, born in Minsk in 1881, had begun to publish his first poems at the turn of the century and shortly thereafter he had begun to write stories for children. In Warsaw
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writer’s circle by her brother Avrom — who had been given the opportunity to publish in Yiddish in Dos yidishe vort [The Jewish Word]. The group enabled her to make contacts with many other young Yiddish poets and she had the chance to meet some of the city’s most important publishers.78 Sore Reyzen, during her last years in Warsaw, coincides at the writer’s house with Roza Perets79, who is almost ten years her junior. The latter, the daughter of a cousin of the Zamosc-born writer, had moved to Warsaw at the beginning of the 1910s to continue her studies. Like Reyzen, she had begun writing poetry in Russian but as she combined her studies with the conver- sations at her uncle’s salon, the literary ambience there, the Perets personal- ity and the love shown by some of the writers in the circle for Yiddish led her to also become entranced with that language and, with time, to make it her language of creation.80 Around the same time, Artsishevska and Estrin arrived in the city.81 The former was a Ìasidah who left her home to study drama in Warsaw, where she soon debuted as Miryam Izrael — a name chosen by Perets himself. The latter, who had come to the city with her family, would work, after finishing drama school, for Perets Hirshbeyn’s theatre company. The two women would get to know Warsaw’s Yiddish-language stage by performing in an act organised by Perets. Later, when the writer, in his sixties, had moved to no. 83 Aleja Jerozo- limskie Street, he continued receiving travellers who wanted to meet him, Polish writers who visited when passing through Warsaw, the “old regulars”
he gave his writing to various of Spektor’s publications and performed various jobs within the publishing world. 78. Sore Reyzen is one of the first women writers in the period to have a book published, Kholem un vor [Dream and Reality], published by Progres in 1911. However, she is the excep- tion in that up to the World War I we find very few women’s names on the volumes published by Warsaw’s publishing houses. If at the end of the 19th century some works by enlightened Jewish women are published, starting at the beginning of the 20th century, for most writers of Reyzen’s generation, at least a decade or a decade and a half must pass between their literary debut and the appearance of their writing in book form. 79. Born in 1894 in Pu¥awy, in the province of Lublin, she attended Jewish school and then, in Plotsk, a public school, where she began to write. It appears that at least some of the poems she wrote as an adolescent were published in a Russian newspaper in Vilna. She would live in Warsaw between 1911 and 1923, and it is here that she would begin to write in Yiddish. 80. Both Yente Serdatski and Roza Perets would later publish a biography of Y. L. Perets and their memories of his work and his literary circle in Warsaw. 81. Totshe (Tea) Artsishevska (1890?-1962), from Mlave, and Estrin (1892-1966), from Moscow, both arrived in Warsaw during the first decade of the 20th century to study at Polish drama schools. They moved in circles close to that of Perets, frequenting his literary salon and spending time with a number of the playwrights in the writer’s circle.
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who used to frequent his salon and sometimes returned to pay him a visit and, especially, those young people for whom Perets seems to have a sixth sense for discovering literary talent and also those who reveal only that they will be true literatn. The new residence was now the witness of the intense work that the writer continued to engage in and also of one of its main fruits: the constant appearance of new Varsovian writers. Almost at the onset of World War I, Kaganovski and Mendelson82 are the first figures to appear from an expectant generation of Warsaw-born poetry and prose writers who were to come into their own during the twenties and thirties. Also participating were some of the children of those faithful followers of Perets, who, out of esteem and admiration for him, sent, from all corners of the province or from any Polish city, their offspring to visit the master: Glatshteyn and Trunk83 represent in this incipient generation the mark of the Perets charisma, the most subjective part of the legacy of the writer from Zamosc. Thus, during the twenty-five years that Perets would reside in the capital, a countless number of Yiddish artists visited his home and his salon, despite the passage of time, maintained its youthfulness thanks to the new writers that were never missing from it. With Perets a good part of the new gen- eration of Yiddish literature would be formed. Over the years and having reached literary maturity, many of the artists of this circle, in Polish lands or beyond, would continue along the lines of the realism introduced by their master in those stories of his full of humble Jews, almost mythical heroes, like “the silent Bontshe”; others, however, would experiment with forms and themes of European Naturalism, Neoromanticism, Symbolism and
82. Efroim Kaganovski (Warsaw, 1893-Paris, 1958) and Moyshe Mendelson (Warsaw, 1896-New York, 1948) met Perets and began to frequent his circle while still adolescents. The former was barely sixteen years old and had just made his debut as a writer of stories in the city’s press; Mendelson, who had received a very strict religious education, had just become one of the first students of the gymnasium of the educator and journalist Magnus (Yankev) Krinski, attending Warsaw’s first institution of Jewish teaching in Russian. 83. Yankev Glatshteyn (Lublin, 1896-New York, 1971), the son of a man enamoured of Yiddish literature, was sent by his father to Warsaw at the age of just thirteen so that he could complete his education and meet the much admired Itskhok Perets. At the writer’s home, the young man also began a close relationship with Reyzen and Nomberg, both in their thirties, whom Glatshteyn takes as examples to follow. Soon, like them, he would begin to participate in Yiddish literature as an unpublished writer. More on the youth of the writer can be found in J. HADDA, Yankev Glatshteyn, Boston, 1980, p. 1-8. Yekhiel-Yeshaye Trunk (1887-1961) came from a Hasidic family living in a Warsaw shtetl. His father, a very cultivated man and a great admirer of Perets, sent him to the capital to meet the writer. Perets not only encouraged him to write in Yiddish, he also instilled in the young Trunk the sentiment of the mame loshn as the true language of life, of the people, thus awakening in him an interest in studying Jewish folklore.
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Decadence.84 His charisma and leadership cross the borders of Congress Poland and even of the continent itself. Young Russian artists just emigrated to North America recognise him as a genuine literary influence in the geneal- ogy of the recently formed Di Yunge [The Young Ones] movement.85 This is proof that the new Yiddish cultural centre that would take shape in New York in the first decade of the 20th century had roots in the European Warsaw of the turn of the century.86
Alicia RAMOS-GONZÁLEZ [email protected]
84. K. MOSS, “Jewish Culture between Renaissance and Decadence: Di Literarishe Monatsshriften and Its Critical Reception”, Jewish Social Studies, 8/1, 2001, p. 158. 85. SHMERUK, art. cit., p. 151. 86. More on this group of poets and novelists concerned about the aesthetics of art and grouped around publications such as Yugnt [Youth] (1907-1908), Literatur [Literature] (1910), Dos naye land [The New Land] (1911-1912) and Shriften [Writings] (1912-1926), among others (see L. PRAGER and A. A. GREENBAUM, “Yiddish Literary and Linguistic Periodicals and Miscellanies. A Selective Annotated Bibliography. Introduction: Modern Yiddish Litera- ture and the Modern Yiddish Press”, http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/reference/Biblio/introduc.htm), can be found in R. RUBINSTEIN, “Going Native, Becoming Modern: American Indians, Walt Whitman, and the Yiddish Poet”, American Quarterly, 58/2, 2006, p. 431-453.
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