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Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe

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Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe Culture Front JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS Published in association with the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania David B. Ruderman, Series Editor Advisory Board Richard I. Cohen Moshe Idel Alan Mintz Deborah Dash Moore Ada Rapoport-Albert Michael D. Swartz A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. Culture Front Representing Jews in Eastern Europe EDITED BY BENJAMIN NATHANS AND GABRIELLA SAFRAN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Martin D. Gruss Endowment Fund of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Copyright ᭧ 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4055-9 ISBN-10: 0-8122-4055-3 In memory of John Doyle Klier, 1944–2007 Scholar, teacher, friend Contents Preface ix David B. Ruderman Introduction: A New Look at East European Jewish Culture 1 Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran part i. violence and civility 1. Jewish Literary Responses to the Events of 1648–1649 and the Creation of a Polish-Jewish Consciousness 17 Adam Teller 2. ‘‘Civil Christians’’: Debates on the Reform of the Jews in Poland, 1789–1830 46 Marcin Wodzin´ski part ii. mirrors of popular culture 3. The Botched Kiss and the Beginnings of the Yiddish Stage 79 Alyssa Quint 4. The Polish Popular Novel and Jewish Modernization at the End of the Nineteenth and Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries 103 Eugenia Prokop-Janiec 5. Cul-de-Sac: The ‘‘Inner Life of Jews’’ on the Fin-de-Sie`cle Polish Stage 119 Michael C. Steinlauf part iii. politics and aesthetics 6. Yosef Haim Brenner, the ‘‘Half-Intelligentsia,’’ and Russian-Jewish Politics, 1899–1908 145 Jonathan Frankel viii Contents 7. Recreating Jewish Identity in Haim Nahman Bialik’s Poems: The Russian Context 176 Hamutal Bar-Yosef 8. Not The Dybbuk but Don Quixote: Translation, Deparochialization, and Nationalism in Jewish Culture, 1917–1919 196 Kenneth B. Moss 9. Beyond the Purim-shpil: Reinventing the Scroll of Esther in Modern Yiddish Poems 241 Kathryn Hellerstein part iv. memory projects 10. Revealing and Concealing the Soviet Jewish Self: The Desk-Drawer Memoirs of Meir Viner 269 Marcus Moseley 11. The Shtetl Subjunctive: Yaffa Eliach’s Living History Museum 288 Jeffrey Shandler List of Contributors 307 Index 311 Preface This volume originated in the 2002–3 academic year of study at the Cen- ter for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, orga- nized around the topic of East European Jewry. Benjamin Nathans of the University of Pennsylvania was the primary force in proposing the program, running its weekly seminars, and planning the concluding conference. We are all indebted to him and to his editorial partner, Gabriella Safran of Stanford University, one of our visiting fellows for the year, for conceptualizing the book at hand and for bringing it to completion. The twenty scholars in residence at the Center for all or part of the year included many of the major senior figures along with some of the most interesting younger people working on the history, arts, and cul- ture of the Jews of Eastern Europe. The group was, as always, an interna- tional one, with fellows from North America, Israel, and Europe, east and west. Most were historians, though there was significant representa- tion by scholars of Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian literature. The formal weekly seminars were supplemented by smaller reading groups, includ- ing one focusing on Yiddish literature and run entirely in that language. Some sixty years after the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe were almost eradicated by the Holocaust, the study of their culture and his- tory is thriving, and we all came to realize that the activities of the Center represented a celebration of this renaissance. Our scholarly exchanges, and the book that emerged from them, provide ample testimony to the field’s renewed vitality. I am most appreciative of all who participated in our year-long project and especially of those who have agreed to have their essays appear in this volume. David B. Ruderman Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History Ella Darivoff Director, Center for Advanced Judaic Studies University of Pennsylvania Introduction A New Look at East European Jewish Culture Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran For most of the last four centuries, East European Jewry constituted the deep reservoir of Jewish civilization, the most important repository and generator of Jewish culture and the inspiration for the Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnov’s influential theory of ‘‘hegemonic centers’’ in Jewish history. Among the Jews of Poland, Lithuania, Galicia, European Russia, Romania, and Ukraine—the broad swath of territory between the Baltic and the Black Seas, known since the Enlightenment as ‘‘East- ern Europe’’—there developed many of the currents that transformed modern Jewish (and not only Jewish) life. From the ranks of East Euro- pean Jewry emerged mass movements of religious awakening (most visibly, though not exclusively, under the rubric of Hasidism), of revolu- tionary change (via various forms of socialism), and of national redemp- tion (Zionism and Autonomism). In Eastern Europe, Jews produced a print culture in Jewish languages (Yiddish and Hebrew) without equal in the modern history of their diaspora. From East European Jews and their offspring arose the dominant Jewish centers of the twentieth cen- tury in Israel and North America, the lion’s share of their political and cultural elites, as well as their characteristic forms of public life. That East European Jews should have come to occupy the forward ranks of Jewish history was by no means a foregone conclusion. On the contrary, influential nineteenth-century writers like the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz routinely referred to ‘‘the demoralized and barbarous state’’ of their counterparts in Eastern Europe, aligning the Jews with the Enlightenment’s larger mental map of Europe as divided into a ‘‘civilized’’ West and a ‘‘barbarous’’ East.1 The ‘‘Ostjuden,’’ the ‘‘Eastern Jews’’ whose backwardness was occasionally recast by fin-de- sie`cle observers as a form of Jewish authenticity, remained icons of prim- itivism, their ‘‘easternness’’ refracted through an orientalizing gaze. It is thus one of the paradoxes of Jewish history in Europe that, as Gershon Hundert has recently argued, a kind of precocious modernity 2 Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran emerged precisely among Jewish communities long regarded as anchors of tradition.2 Such a paradox cannot be dissolved simply by appealing to a dialectical model whereby particularly immobile traditions generate unusually radical attempts to break free of them. For with its increasing diffusion of printed texts, its social antagonisms, and its extraordinary demographic vitality, tradition in Jewish Eastern Europe was anything but immobile. Nor can the paradox be understood simply as a response to especially inhospitable surroundings, for despite the well-known flashpoints of collective violence visited upon East European Jews across the centuries, we still know relatively little about the consequences of that violence and even less about the longue dure´e of nonviolent relations between Jews and the gentile societies in whose midst they lived. Paradoxes invite intellectual ferment. So too does the opening of long-inaccessible archives. With the collapse of Communist govern- ments across the Soviet bloc at the end of the 1980s, an extraordinary range of historical documents relating to the history of East European Jewry became available to scholars around the world. And scholars them- selves became more accessible to each other across what had been the Iron Curtain of postwar Europe. Inspired by these developments and by the sense that new ways of thinking about East European Jewry were tak- ing shape, in 2002 the leaders of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania decided to convene a year-long seminar on the theme of ‘‘Jewish History and Culture in Eastern Europe, 1600– 2000.’’ Several dozen scholars from North America, Europe, and Israel converged in Philadelphia with a shared ambition: to pool their exper- tise in the disciplines of history, literature, religious studies, folklore, and allied fields in order to take stock of the cumulative insights con- tained in the new scholarship. In the uniquely hospitable setting of the CAJS, a dialogue took shape among scholars, disciplines, and texts. Our year together culminated in a conference in May 2003, the annual Mar- tin Gruss Colloquium, which allowed us to add distinguished colleagues from Eastern Europe and elsewhere to the conversation. From the year- long seminar and the Gruss Colloquium emerged the present volume. Several broad debates structured the work of the seminar over the course of the year. Have the motifs of crisis and catastrophe unjustifiably monopolized the interpretation of East European Jewish history and cul- ture? Have scholars fully come to terms with Salo Baron’s influential cri- tique of the ‘‘lachrymose conception’’
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