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Three Narratives of Litvak Identity: Cahan, Brudno and Stone

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Three Narratives of Litvak Identity: Cahan, Brudno and Stone ISSN 1822-5152 tAUŠRA PAULAUSKIENĖ Three Narratives Of Litvak Identity: Cahan, Brudno And Stone Lithuanian and Jewish historiogra- Once formed, the Lithuanian Jew- phies share the myth of the Grand Duchy of ish community continued to evolve as an Lithuania, a Duchy that came into being in autonomous organism within the bor- the fourteenth century as a result of the uni- ders of historic Lithuania, with little re- fication of Lithuanian tribes and the annex- gard to Lithuania’s shifting political sta- ation of Byelorussia and parts of Ukraine. tus. Its Lithuanianism can be defined by The Encyclopedia Judaica continues to refer its attachment to the land where Lithua- to Lithuania as “grand duchy” after Lithua- nian Jews felt relatively safe and free to nia’s merging with Poland in the sixteenth evolve as a cultural group. The authors century, and sees it as distinct from but not of the Encyclopedia Judaica and the au- inferior or subordinate to Poland (13). thors of recent histories of Lithuanian Even after the partitioning of Polish- Jews unanimously agree that Lithuanian Lithuanian state, Lithuania existed in the Jews were a distinct group of Eastern Eu- memory of its indigenous Jewry. Masha ropean Jewry and that the Grand Duchy Greenbaum claims that “Lithuanian Jew- of Lithuania was a hospitable host to its ry maintained both its Lithuanian and its ethnic minority. Jewish identity under Czarist rule” (160). However, in American scholarship For Lithuanian Jews the Grand Duchy re- Litvak identity is not as conspicuous as mained intact until the emergence of three the umbrella identity of the Russian Jew. states after World War I: independent American Jewish writers of Litvak origin, Lithuania, Byelorussian Soviet Republic, Abraham Cahan for example, are identi- and Poland. Only then was Lithuanian fied as Russian Jews. Thus Cahan’s city Jewry divided among these three states. of childhood and youth, Vilna, becomes 110 OI K OS LIETUVIų MIGRACIJOS IR DIASPOROS STUDIJOS ISSN 1822-5152 a Russian city to Cahan’s biographers. nian language as a local peasant dialect. Upon reading American literary criti- Therefore, Russian culture, shunned by cism about Cahan, my first impulse was Lithuanians and the majority of Lithua- to protest Lithuania’s erasure and to in- nian Jews, became a desirable option for form American scholars that Cahan was Cahan. Does that mean that Lithuania a product of Lithuanian, not Russian gets no credit for raising this genius on culture or, at least, a product of Lithua- its soil? nian as well as Russian cultures. How- Abraham Cahan is the most famous ever, Cahan’s autobiography reveals that, transplant from Lithuania in American although born and raised in Lithuania, letters. He is well known as an author Cahan did in fact have very few contacts who recorded Jewish-American immi- with Lithuanian culture. Ezra Brudno’s grant experience in his two novels and a autobiographical novel demonstrates number of short stories. For almost half similar absence of Lithuanian signs. a century, forty-nine years to be exact, Goldie Stone’s autobiography, on the Cahan headed the Jewish Daily Forward. other hand, tells a different story of a Jew He ranks among the great American assimilated and acculturated to Lithua- newspaper editors, while “in the annals nian, not Russian, culture. In these au- of Yiddish journalism he continues to tobiographical texts, three peers, born in know no peer (Encyclopedia Judaica 14). the 1860s (Cahan) and the 1870s (Stone TheEncyclopedia Judaica calls him an in- and Brudno), record their formative years carnation of the “epic Jewish migration in Lithuania and their transplantation to from Eastern Europe to America” (14). the U.S. in early adulthood. There is no doubt that Abraham Cahan Cahan was born in a village near can be considered one of the most fa- Vilnius, the Eastern part of ethnic mous Jewish-Americans, and deservedly Lithuania, which held a considerable so. Lithuania should take pride in rais- Slavic, mostly Polish and Belorussian, ing such a talent on its soil, as it takes population. He spent his youth in Vilna, pride in raising Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a the Lithuanian metropolis, which shaped hero of the American Revolution, Adam Cahan as an urbanized and a modernized Mickiewicz, a world-famous poet, or Cz- Jew. The Vilna of Cahan’s time offered eslaw Milosz, the 1980 Nobel Prize win- him three possibilities: to become a rab- ner in literature. binical scholar, to follow the Haskala, or In “Dialogue about Wilno with To- to pursue modernization through accul- mas Venclova,” Milosz wrote, “The city turation. This latter option required an that I knew belonged to Poland and was adoption of a gentile language and cul- called Wilno. .. Your city was the capi- ture. In Tsarist Russia that language and tal of the Lithuanian SSR and was called culture happened to be Russian. Lithua- Vilnius . .. Nonetheless, it is the same nian culture of the time was perceived as city: its architecture, the landscape of the a regional folk culture and the Lithua- surrounding region, and its sky shaped 111 us both” (Milosz 23). Abraham Cahan the governmental wealth that contrasted knew the same city when it belonged to with the poverty of Vilna’s Jews. Not sur- the Russian empire and called it in Yid- prisingly, the “sparkling silver buttons and dish--Vilna. He, like Milosz and Ven- galloons” of gymnasium students fascinat- clova, matured in Vilna/Wilno/Vilnius ed adolescent Cahan, who walked in his and he, like the other two, chose a life of “old brown drab” coat. (75). Seventeen- exile in America. Even if Cahan did not year-old Cahan feels as if his “dearest wish, claim his Lithuanian roots, who can deny [his] fondest hope” was finally fulfilled: “I the fact that Cahan was born, raised and am a student at the Vilna Teacher Train- educated in Lithuania? ing Institute--eating government meals, Despite the undeniable facts that wearing a government uniform” (105). Abraham Cahan came from Lithua- According to Sanders, Cahan was nia and that he was of Litvak stock, his of a small “class of Russified Jews” that American biographers have had grounds was “coming into being” in the nine- to claim a Russian element in his iden- teenth-century Russia (27). Cahan’s Rus- tity. I believe Ronald Sanders put it best sification makes him a minority among when he identified Cahan as “thoroughly Litvaks, especially among small-town a Litvak longing to be a Russian” (29- Litvaks. Urban Vilna facilitated his as- 31). The Education of Abraham Cahan simlation to Russian culture, but even (1969) reveals a tension between Cahan’s among Vilna Jews it was rare. Russifica- Litvak roots and his desire to become a tion implicitly meant rejecting “a good Russian. The Education of Abraham Ca­ many of the practices that had made the han is the English translation of the first Polish and Russian Jews distinctive for so two volumes of Cahan’s autobiography many centuries” (12) ?. Cahan’s desire to written in Yiddish in 1926. Abraham be a “Russian” implies his unwillingness Cahan belonged to a small minority of to be a Litvak. The Education reveals that Litvaks who chose Russification as a way Lithuania was largely invisible to Cahan. to modernization. In his translated autobiography The Education abounds in evidence Cahan records only one encounter with of Cahan’s infatuation with all that is Rus- Lithuanians. While traveling in a hired sian. While Cahan’s parents worked to- cart to “Malat” (Moletai) on a socialist wards ensuring proper religious education mission , he got caught in a heavy rain for their only son, the nine-year-old spent and sought refuge in a tavern: three pennies a week for Russian lessons The tavern . was crowded with from another Jewish youngster who was perspiring, pipe-smoking peasants who taught Russian at school. In the 1870s the spoke Lithuanian. I could hardly breathe. number of Jewish gymnasium students I couldn’t understand a word of what was rapidly increasing: “All Vilna seemed they were saying (159). to sparkle with their silver buttons and Later he passed peasant women who galloons” (74). A big attracting force was were “walking barefooted in the rain, car- 112 OI K OS LIETUVIų MIGRACIJOS IR DIASPOROS STUDIJOS rying their shoes cradled in their arms” geographical and social distance. A Jew (159). These meager memories suggest of the Pale, a poor and provincial Litvak almost no points of contact between Ca- from the Vilna Jewish ghetto was now han and the native population of ethnic an insider among city-bred, gymnasium- Lithuania. He is a recent graduate of a and university-educated Kiev, Kremen- colonizer-run educational institution chug or St. Petersburg Jews, who spoke and an ardent newly converted socialist Russian as if it was their native language. with an underground mission visiting a In America, Cahan became a “Russian” “backward village” where peasants walk Jew in two meanings of the term. First, barefoot in the rain, smoke pipes in an he achieved a greater degree of accultura- overcrowded tavern and speak a totally tion into Russian culture than he had in unfamiliar language. Lithuania. Second, he fit into the con- However, displacement made Ca- struct of a “Russian” Jew that was used han more aware of his Lithuanian roots. by Americans to identify the Jews from An outsider to Lithuania and Lithua- Russian Empire and to draw a line be- nians, Cahan the emigrant perceives tween them and the German Jews. How- himself as an insider to Lithuanian Jew- ever, the narrative of Cahan’s identity did ishness. Cahan’s ethnic awareness was not stop there.
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