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Yiddish Warsaw Becomes a Metropolis

Warsaw. Whose history spreads over 600 years began to crystalize as a large metropolis of Polish Jewry in the last quarter of the 19^th century.

It acquired the signs of an influential capital city not only because of her strong and growing Jewish community and not only for its economic and spiritual influence but also because of the character of the new transcendental times. The new historical period with its new technological outlook, socio–economic dynamic, sharpened class differentiation, and national excitement managed to tear the Jews away from being confined, provincial onlookers, and bring them closer to mainstream demands, to the crossroads of modern history.

Growing capitalist exploitation called out for the growth of social consciousness and pressure of Czarist imperialism summoned the counter–pressure of nationalism among Poles and Jews. The Jews not only had to endure attacks of the Czarist Judeophobes, but also the active hatred of oppressive Polish anti – Semitism, notwithstanding the fact that Polish Jewry, especially the Jews of Warsaw had been displaying devotion and Polish patriotism for 100 years.

Jews of Warsaw played an active role in the uprisings of 1794, 1830 and 1863 and had cardinal praise for Polish culture. The tradition of the Polish romantic and revolutionary struggle “[f]or yours and our freedom” was deeply rooted in Polish [Jews] and especially Warsaw Jews which had throughout history participated and excelled in all the desperate challenges of war of unfortunate Poland. The long tradition of Jews fighting for a free Poland resonated again in 1905, in the slogans of the ghetto uprising, and the battles of the new Polish division that in 1944 freed the suffocated half of the country.

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During the last quarter of the 19^th century, the Jewish Enlightenment attempted to make the Jewish streets of Warsaw the centre of the Jewish renaissance movement. But the rigid and false methods resulted in complete bankruptcy and eventually to assimilation. During the last few decades the folk awakened and the first social political movements were founded. “Jargon” quickly became the instrument used to uplift the culture and the Jewish folk masses stopped stammering and began to speak Yiddish.

In 1888 Mordkhai Spector began his pioneering, devoted effort to publish the first modern Yiddish journal in Warsaw, House Friend, an anthology and collection. The same year, Y.L. Peretz settled in Warsaw.

The year 1888 can be seen concretely as the beginning of modern Yiddish literature in Warsaw, as well as the birth of the Peretz era, from the approximately 25–year–mother–era of Yiddish literature in Poland and from the completely new Yiddish literature in general.

Together with the Yiddish literature that had to be created, the reader also had to be created. The folk– reader was raised on Shomer, medieval novels, Eliyahu Bakhur's rhymes, and miraculous stories from oriental [Sephardic] folklore as well as moral fables from the old Yiddish Grandmother's Tales [known as “Bove Mayse” or “Bube Mayse” or “Mayse Bukh”]. Hidden behind a wall of religious books was a second type of reader; and a third type, the intellectual–nationalist,

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who believed that a Jewish literature can only be created in Hebrew.

On the other hand, the assimilated enlightened people looked at Polish to reach the people with their “productive” and “educational” ideas. They were embarrassed by “Jargon”, so in their practical way they felt that there was no choice but to use this “unclean” tool, not as a literary language, God forbid, but as a temporary demon that would later be discarded as a potato peel and garbage.

The creators of the new Yiddish literature and the assimilated cultured philanthropists came from different directions to the one and the same national source – to Yiddish. Not only did they arrive at the same source, from the beginning they joined together as partners in the same work that had a different meaning for each side.

The founders of the new Yiddish literature wanted to cultivate a new reader, while the enlightened assimilated positivists wanted to propagandize their ideas of handiwork and spread general knowledge. Both goals could be quickly reached through popular Yiddish journals. The first collections of modern Yiddish literature in Warsaw were subsidized by patrons of the assimilated bourgeois which tried to put their enlightened stamp on published materials.

To be perfectly honest we must say right from the start that Peretz, in contrast to Spector had less faith in the literary – intellectual weight of Yiddish as we can clearly see in his letter (1891) to the writer Yokhnehoz. But as he intimately and creatively delved into Yiddish he felt the original taste and all seven charms of our folk language. Within the boundaries of his vast Hebrew – Polish – Russian – German culture Yiddish was not only immediately vindicated, it took first and most revered place.

Due to remarkable historic gatherings between assimilated enlighteners and the beginning of modern Yiddish literature, Spector's The House Friend and Peretz's The Yiddish Library were supported by Polanized patrons. However this unnatural match could not last long.

The assimilationists quickly realized they were actually being let down, that Yiddish literature in the collections was cleverly transforming Yiddish from a helping tool into an independent entity.

When they saw the language of “Berl and Shmerl” being transformed by the hands of Peretz and Spector, and noticed the high quality

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of literary Yiddish in the subsidized journals, they really shuddered and began to rant and protest in their Polish journals.

In connection to Spector's The House Friend, they wrote that the Yiddish literature which is sprouting from “Jargon” is a “reactionary phenomenon”…They complained that the works Peretz published in his The Yiddish Library were “too artistic”, that he permitted “eternalization of Yiddish literature” and through this wants to “eternalize Jargon”…

Peretz's leftist love for a respected Yiddish and a respected literature led to the fact that the patrons' help ran out right after the publication of the second volume of The Yiddish Library.

Both of these first pioneering organs of Warsaw literary journals, were in total published eight times: The House Friend, five – and The Yiddish Library, three.

The first Peretz period which ended at the end of the 1890s was distinct not only in its literary and linguistic pioneering, but also with the bold avant–garde ideas of Peretz which created a springtime in Yiddish Warsaw, and not only in Warsaw.

The more Peretz distanced himself from the assimilationist benefactors and approached the awakened workers, the more his volcanic feelings and thoughts developed.

The crossover was not that quick. After his difficulties with his “Library” Peretz, for a few years suffered from dark moods and he even considered emigrating together with his literary adjutant Dinezon, to Argentina which now had a reputation for agricultural colonization. He attempted to work with the Hebrew publication The Siren but he suffered so much humiliation he would eventually refer to the publication as a “whore” and its editor, Kh. Z. Slonimskin a “foolish dog”.

Finally he saw the inevitable – the revolutionary movement for the Jewish proletariat and progressive learning. With the help of his new friend and more importantly from his own efforts, he created the collections Literature and Life and The Arrow and the periodical Holiday Pages which earned a place in history for Jewish socialism and for Jewish literature about struggle.

The holiday theme of the work that Peretz published from 1894–1896 was merely a mask for the Czarist censor, but for the workers, it was, in fact, a holiday, so the title was not actually camouflage or one of hidden meaning.

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This organ, which was published in honor of the Jewish religious holidays was in fact a chronical of the sharpest anti–clerical and anti–bourgeois attacks. It did not only attack Jewish religious hypocrisy and the exploitation of the hardworking masses, but also European capitalism and the entire establishment.

Here Peretz expresses how he feels about bourgeois Europe of the day [60 years ago in Czarist Russia!]:

Y. L. Peretz

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Here is Peretz' conclusion: “the old system is falling to pieces, and the ax is being raised over an altar of blood and sweat…the ax descends lower and lower and the altar, today or tomorrow, will burst in the air…

The Jewish workers received Peretz's words with great enthusiasm. A. Litvak wrote the following about it: “When I read Peretz's work aloud for the workers, I did not have to explain what Peretz meant.

Photo: Y. L. Peretz

There was fire in everyone's eyes, and someone with an excited smile exclaimed: A person who writes like this no longer has any fear (“Red Chronicles” pp. 115–116).

On the other hand, as Peretz “no longer ha[d] any fear”, the agitated authoritarian gang brought up an offensive against him on three fronts: Petersburg, Warsaw and Vilna.

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The Petersburg Yiddish lackeys of Czarism shot at Peretz with their artillery of denunciation from their organ HaMeilitz (“The Defender”). This is what they said about Peretz's publication:

“There is now a new problem in Jargon literature: a bunch of small booklets filled with poison, whose only power is to shame Judaism, its Rabbis, its educated, its writers…to instill hatred among various classes. According to what is said in these booklets, Judaism is worth nothing and European civilization is not any better…this is the teaching of these booklets. The writers of these holy books have another goal”…(HaMeilitz 1894, Vol. 156).

The suggestion of “another goal” was a clear hint. The Jewish censorship gendarme studied the Yiddish press and no one had to explain what was meant by “another goal”. By the way, even today the reaction to the Yiddish progressive word is that they have “another goal”…

Peretz felt this reaction smelled of revolution, was provocative, and impacted the sponsors of his publications, making them feel they should distance themselves from these “harmful theories”: “it's shameful these booklets are published at the expense of good people. We hope these philanthropists will repent, then we will not have to mention their names”.

The low denunciation of Peretz's supporters illustrated the spy–like gendarme face of the Yiddish reaction and showed how Peretz's words disturbed the traditional calm.

The same year, in the same volume of HaMeilitz (vol. 179) the publicist A. Zinger wrote the following words about Peretz: “The author for cooks and maids wants us to talk about him, – What does he do? He leaves the oven and stove and violates holiness. Now all the cooks will come out against him with drums and dances”.

Even Dubnov did not like Peretz's publications. This is what he said then: “From 1888 we have not seen respectable journals. The attempt to connect the vanished with surrogates ([that is] the publications of Mr. Peretz) appeared for the non–successful and for the ephemeral (Critique “Voskhod” Vol. 6, 1894).

Criticism of Peretz took off in Warsaw with special pamphlets and with “sewer” epithets by the tidy, elegant, well–mannered cavalier Dovid Frishman. About Peretz and the literary circle that grouped around him, this Holy–Tongue speaker, Europeanized beautiful spirit (Dovid Frishman^[a]) wrote the following: “they create poems, write novels, skits, reviews and critique and don't realize how little it takes for the healthy reader to faint from this babble, and from there, with respect for the informant, flatulate from the mouth.” (Lokshn, p.15)

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When writing about Peretz's story “Bontshe the Silent” the pampered expert turned up his nose: “This story is a piece of “sacred interpretation” for the workers and contains no artistry. The same goes for “The Shtreiml” – actually a bad joke about the times of enlightened heretics”. (Collected Works, Vol 3, p. 127).

About Peretz's Yiddish Library this same gentleman and esthete had this opinion: “Who is the rich man? – The one who has the toilet near his table. Now it is done differently. Now they deliver a new Yiddish library and now that is what is laying on the table – and that is enough.” (Lokshn p. 26)

In Vilna they threw the Jewish functionary guards and grenadiers into the battle. They were more progressive than everyone. Instead of discussing and moralizing, they, at the suggestion of the town preacher, brought in a battle tactic which in the mid–20^th century was practiced and crystallized in the big city of Buenos Aires– they banned Peretz's Holiday Pages and issued a warning about them in the schools…

Peretz's revolutionary and passionate literature of struggle provoked such a commotion and filled the young Jewish workers with courage and pride. In the secret circles, clandestine rooms and forests at the edge of town, Peretz's works agitated more effectively than the illegal Polish literature, which was largely Russified, stiff, and raw. Peretz's cleaned up the Yiddish political language editing all the Russian and Polish slogans and gave it a new folks–style, a natural manner of self expression.

The raging reaction in all corners of the land and the joy of working class showed already in the 1890s that Peretz was becoming a leading figure among the Jewish masses.

In those years he did not confine himself to writing. He also personally took part in illegal work, in the direct socialist education of the narrow minded, hidden Jews. His three months in jail in 1899 was the Czarist regime's recognition of his influence on the masses…

He could not have had a Marxist path at that time; therefore, later he often would be controlled by various moods, hesitations, wanderings, dreams which, on the eve of the storm, blew in from all directions. Peretz wrote about his moods:

“These are temporary moods, a sort of epidemic, the effect of the surrounding whimpering, and a belch of intelligent weakness. Among our brothers

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there is a sort of weakness, but you my friend, pay no attention. This shall pass like every epidemic”.

However there were narrow sectarian critics who learned about Peretz's declining moods and wanted to declare him unfit. The most correct is what Shakhne Epshteyn wrote about Peretz' vacillations:

“The fact that Peretz vacillated is not exceptional. Many of the artists and writers of the past were the same, even the most radical. It was not uncommon for a Marxist thinker, who looks at things dialectically and historically to deny the positive progressive meanings of the writer, even his contemporaries.”

For us, throughout the years, it is still valid what Peretz said about himself:

“I stood, still stand and plan to stand until I take my last breath in the ranks of those who fight for radical–progressive Jewish thought”.

And equally valid is Peretz's call to his people:

“My people! Go! Go further and further! With all the liberators, with all future fighters, with all Sodom's revolutionaries!”

The first two literary figures of the Peretz period were Spektor and Dinezon.

On the soil of Warsaw, Spektor was only episodic, although very important. Because of his pioneering Warsaw House Friend, he placed the barbaric, Germanized Tzederboym press in the shadows. Also, together with Dovid Pinsky, he helped Peretz edit the Holiday Pages.

As Peretz was entirely holiday, Spektor was entirely weekday.

When they both started to edit the Holiday Pages, Spektor felt he was like a foreigner using a foreign tongue, when he read Peretz's highly spiritual, glowing allusions and slippery double meanings, where everything was star filled with so many profound points…The Czarist censor forced Peretz's revolutionary thought to be even more sublime and Spektor, whose spirit was as corporal as his body was confused by Peretz's masked symbolism. He quickly broke with Peretz's Holiday Letters

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and within a short time published his own Weekday Letters.

This episode characterizes Spektor through and through. He was a primitive realist and did not want to know from anything except the obvious and concrete. He took concrete content so far that he did not even have a sense for what is most characteristic or interesting.

The significance of Spektor was he took his primitive–realistic talent and brought the reader from Shomer, trash literature, to his own concrete folk–life. His simple language, his folksiness, his brotherliness, and his phenomenal talkative style were perfect for the newspapers where he described simple situations without peppered melodrama, but rather with an honest picture of Jewish provincialism as well as new themes: the village, Jewish life in the big cities, education, and economic problems.

Opposite to Spektor, from the very beginning until the very end, Dinezon completed the entire Peretz era. He was the most visible companion of Peretz during this period; he was the most important constituent of Peretz's 25–year literary career.

His own literary passion was transformed into a Peretz cult. Therefore, we remember him as Peretz's adjutant, as an attachment, as a supplement to Peretz – and only after as Yakov Dinezon the writer.

He was second to Peretz, but not to Peretz's literary realm, to his life. His persona was practically lost in the shadow of Peretz. He became a satellite to Peretz; he shone like the moon shines because of the sun, even though he had his own significant merit.

Dinezon's friendship with Peretz was the definition of the sentence “Love your brother as you love yourself”. He loved him so much that he neglected his own personal presence and literary work. Peretz did not love himself as much as Dinezon loved him.

For the first time in Yiddish literature the vulgar one jealous of authors became a true lover of authors; [it was] a friendship between an eagle and a swallow. These two different personalities lived peacefully and joyfully together. Sholem Aleichem called Dinezon Peretz's mother.

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Peretz himself wrote in a letter to Dinezon: “You without me is a zero, and I am even less: a minus. When will you arrive so that something can add up from minus and zero”.

This friendship was so moving, that its greatness and intimate details did not lose a sliver of mutual devotion during the twenty–seven years it lasted, and due to Peretz's death, [was] ruptured for four years. In 1919, Dinezon was united with Peretz for eternity. From then on, they have been resting peacefully under one stone together, with another close witness of this great brotherly love, – Sh. Ansky.

In his literary works, Dinezon was a quiet, whisperer, a consoler and morality preacher, one who pitied. He described Jewish life with sentimentality and passion. He was a sigher, the biggest crier in Yiddish literature.

He moved the heart of the emerging Yiddish reader who was primitive and sentimental and vulnerable. The people responded to him in the most sincere way: with real tears. No one drew more tears from Yiddish readers 55–65 years ago than Dinezon. Every copy of his book Yosele became a container of folk–tears. The remaining stains on the pages are witness until today of the hot tears that poured into the book. The first edition of the book was released with ten thousand copies followed by many other editions.

Dinezon's sentimentalism was neither cheap nor vulgar. It was a motherly blend of belief in the success of your child, an extremely honest sympathy, and a naïve self–assurance. Life's path should be determined, not by power, but by reasonable integrity and brotherly agreements.

He recognized the large social differences in Jewish life, but he did not offer social liberation from these contrasts in his writings. His heroes believe in fate and he, himself, in tolerance. Understanding was more important to him than battle. He forces his heroes not to be provocative, [to be] non–demonstrative, in order for them to understand their situation in society as more passive in the face of fate than socially active.

Indirectly however, through artistic strength of description, the bony ugliness and piously dressed corruption of the wealthy and dark customs of fantasy gush from his work.

As in primitive folk stories he leads his good and bad heroes to far reaching extremes.

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The innocent is completely practical and has no speck of human imperfection. The evil character is completely dishonest and his corruption is exclusive and excessive. Ignoring these extremes, Dinezon believes in peace between them because…his weakness of heart and optimism are great. Therefore Peretz says this about Dinezon: “The artist is a moralist”.

In praise of Dinezon it must be said he managed to present artistic good endings in his novels. In almost all his works the subject rolls into a tragic epilogue which in a natural way disturbs the reader. Ignoring his exaggerations, he presents a truth which sends sad greetings from a battered life.

Ignoring the socially undefined and naïve aspects of Dinezon's work, they reveal an awakening and educational points that attracted a large number of readers into the literary sphere.

Except for this, his works are independent of their personal literary imperfection and archaic language, almost a model of external harmonious constructions. Alter Katzizne was delighted by Dinezon's novel architecture and even presented it as a model for our modern novelists.

Spektor with his loquacious realism and Dinezon with his heartrending sentimentalism were both so to speak, the introduction to modern Yiddish literature, although actually chronologically distinct, they were contemporaries of Peretz. The Yiddish reader entered the home of the Yiddish classic writers through the homey front room of their work, in a natural way.

At the end of the last and the beginning of the new century a literary movement was developing around Peretz. Peretz became the magnetic centrer for the rising generation, the “Peretz nest” at 1 Tseglane Street became a literary check in, a literary salon, a literary school, l and most of all – the touchstone for every aspiring writer who voluntarily stood before the literary “draft board”.

There was not one aspiring writer in those days who did not go through the procedure of going up to Peretz on his tip toes and experience his heart pounding at Peretz's door. The majority of aspirants arriving with pounding hearts did not dare to cross the threshold of Peretz's house because they were overcome with fear. The majority of those who dared stand face to face with the highest

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judge, the master, the God of literary ministering angels, heard the thunder of their own hearts louder than the verdict of the great master.

In the stream of aspirants who flowed to the dam at 1 Tseglane Street, Peretz looked for carp, not small fish. When he sensed the true scent of a carp, he made an effort to ensure the small carp would become a full–grown carp.

However, in his appraisal he was never an outsider nor [was he] indifferent. He was a passionate participant. His heart pounded and sang as he poetically in a friendly way accompanied everyone. His involvement in everything was so deep, that beginner writers would not recognize their own work after Peretz made corrections because fundamentally, he would not merely correct he would “Peretzify”…

Peretz, the father and teacher of the young literature, the problem seeker and goal setter, felt within a natural obligation to direct the entire literature. This direction was not only for the well developed new talent, and not only for discovering the “divine spark” of the many literary beginners. The main purpose was to establish Yiddish norms and provide a cultural–historical, social and aesthetic direction for the fresh, fermenting young passionate literature that was growing from short small townhouses.

The drive of the youth in general and particularly the young writers was to tear away from generations– long suffocation and jump, with the all the impatience of youth, into modern Europeanism. Too hastily [this] may end in crisis. The radical tear from the past did not yet mean an entrance to new times. The hastiness created too large a gap between old and new, and those who rushed too quickly to abandon the old world did not enter the new world, rather a new emptiness.

Peretz did not want the abandonment of old ways to be abrupt and did not want entry into a new life to be rushed. He looked for a harmonious crossover in order to avoid a crisis. He wanted to build a bridge between old and new.

Few of those who left did so with pseudo–revolutionary resolve, leaving everything behind, including original folk words from their cultural inheritance. In such cases, however, when “when the old are no longer enthusiastic and the new are not yet enthusiastic” as Peretz explains, no original works are created, rather we see “phrases, points, contrary scenes, literary shadow games and spiritual masturbation”. At such a moment “there are no voices or characters; lust but no desire. No great love, no hatred…(only) flirting, easy relationships”…

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The desire to rip into newness while naked, without generations of cultural inheritance, is what Peretz called “impotent evil”…

Peretz's main worry was “to lead the Yiddish step in our form” meaning to conserve the national form before new content. This is why Peretz was against the extreme “revolutionaries” and proponents of holiness, who only yesterday were up to their necks in conservative–reactionary Jewishness, and today, in a suspicious way, shake off everything: “And the little Messiahs are, as we say, on the shoemaker street; where the Yeshiva boys are learning to ride on the Jewish people”.

Peretz wanted to save progressive words from old Yiddish and not prosecute them unnecessarily: “Jewishness is not standing water, or a swamp; we call it “fresh water”. –––Jewishness cannot become static, it must be dynamic – in its development, throughout the Jewish world at all times”.

Peretz tried to show how the Europeanization of Yiddish should not be “cosmopolitainization” or imitation it should not automatically take on something foreign: “I am not speaking about locking ourselves into a spiritual ghetto; we will leave the ghetto, but with our own spirit, with our own spiritual fortune, and change: give and take, not beg. The ghetto is impotent, cultural crucifixion – the only possibility for human development. The man should arrive who will be the synthesis, the total the quintessence of all national cultural forms and world understanding. “Take but don't lose yourself” is the main thing and the most difficult among the weak and non–independent nations…Therefore we should demand more from Yiddish writers. This is the original, actual character, the original form – the highest form of will power”.

Peretz had visions in two directions, a vision of the folksy return and a vision toward the progressive push forward, and with both visions wanted to present a complete modern Jewishness. This was in fact one global vision, a vision that uses both eyes and does not fail to see all the historic and national human connections at one time. He fought against a ready made European literature in Yiddish, which would have only been a surrogate of a literature. He wanted the Europeanization to come from within, from the Yiddish schools, from broadening life's interests, uplifting intelligence, through modernizing life and not through importing the pre–made foreign Europe into the ghetto…so this is what he said:

“People arrive from Berlin… Berlin, where the stone–like Bismarck with tin boots, the victory avenue with the marble noblemen market –noblemen…absorbing the beauty of the soft and gold trimmed

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carriages and overgrown king whiskers, excited by the power that comes from the police and beer–cadet, these people come to our ghetto and ask about Europe…we are not lacking Europe…Yiddish is lacking, Hebrew is lacking…”

Peretz was strict with the Yiddish writer and demanded from him challenges and the embrace of Yiddish. When the foundation of Yiddish literature was deposited by all three classic writers, when Asch, Nomberg and Visenberg had already contributed their characteristic works, when the even younger writers “arrived with colours, the sea, sun rises, peasants, gypsies and thieves”, Peretz still believed that in literature we were still impoverished. He came out with the following complaint: “But where are (described in our literature) the Sephardic Jews? Where are the Amsterdam diamond cutters, colonists in Argentina and Palestine? How is Rothschild in Paris and Luzzato in Rome?”

Peretz wanted to see all this in the literature before 1910. The work was just beginning and he already demanded a roof over its head. They already collected literary treasures, but he was still missing half of the Jewish world.

He was ironic when someone spoke about writing “a history of Yiddish literature until 1890”, because even in 1910 he felt Yiddish literature was not yet worthy of a history, not because he thought he did not appreciate what had been accomplished so far, but because he demanded so much more. In his large vision of Yiddish literature there was still a lot of space available for more achievement and then – a history!

Peretz never wanted to make any literary conclusions, not in general and, even less so, about himself. At the many gatherings and banquets that were organized in his honor, the speakers would draw conclusions about his writing, giving overall critiques or general characterizations. This would anger him. Until the last years of his life he would say about himself that he was only beginning, that he was just beginning to write and it is too early to balance the equations…

Peretz, who fought against the haphazard literary atmosphere and against the manner of estranging oneself from your own origin, demanded dynamic inherited traditions in form and inclusion of Yiddish progressiveness in themes.

In connection with this, he placed categorical demands on Yiddish literary critics that did not open the eyes of the writer and did not encourage the public to be selective. All of the critics, according to Peretz, were too one–sided, not very truthful and were popularizers. Peretz said:

“We have a garden, but no gardeners; no one used to be good,

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pushes away the weak, makes the thirsty drunk. There are young searchers; no one helps them find their way; no one shows them the difference between clean and unclean, – he poisons himself. And once in a blue moon when a more serious and deeper thing arises no one can explain or popularize; they just speak out against it, against everything that is presented bigger and outlandishly snobbish, and pointing out mistakes. And the greenish yellow sickly jealousy is growing, angry impotence, and when they see a child with rosy cheeks they run, twist his ear – in anger!”

On the other hand Peretz tore away from the “It doesn't move me” complex of writers. His hyper–sensitivity toward unfavourable criticism, his intolerance of open opinions about him were an excuse that they were interfering in his private life. Peretz scoffed at the plain and clear:

“What do you mean by private life? Private life is a man in a desert. Private life is a recluse in the forest, perhaps a former idler under the oven in the house of study. A man among men is never private. One who does something, especially a writer, lives socially, open. He must be either useful or harmful, and can and must evaluated. –––Everyone must be openly criticized especially writers! Whoever talks to the public, belongs to the public! The public had a right to demand that from time to time we remove the prayer shawl from the man standing at the Bimah and show him who is asking for him, who is blowing the Shofar!”

Peretz classifies the writers of yellow journalism: “everyone has his corner, his speciality. One sings, one recounts stories a third writes wisdom, the fourth tells joke, the fifth, sixth and maybe the seventh give us garbage!…we need that too! It happens that those who write garbage sometimes write lovely poetry as well”…

Peretz pointed out ironically that thanks to yellow journalism readers will be able to differentiate between good and bad and that press, in its first stage, can even be revealing through its tearing away from the thus far sanctified silk coats of private life. He offered this sarcastic legitimation:

“Let it scramble up in the garbage – I mean in private life, it won't do any harm! Only the old timers' morale can oppose the spring–bolt locks and draped windows. The ethics was only a protection from flattery, hypocrisy, holiness and anger. But the old lady with the young sins differentiated between “the public domain”, “openly in public”, and “under four eyes”, “under great secrecy”…

Peretz also tried to heal the chronic disease of bourgeois writers – the eternal disunity among them,

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their lack of ideas and their morality of “Grab in front of the line and eat, grab in front of the line and drink”. With pain he calls out: “why are we dispersed and divided like sheep? Have we not interests, moral or economic around which we should rally?”

To sum it up, Peretz wanted to establish an ideological and societal order in Yiddish literature and journalism and tear away the foreign straw wings of Yiddish modernism, develop educational literary critique, and honor the writer by protecting him from trash and awaken in him the general feelings of responsibility and worthiness.

In later years Peretz fought a second literary battle: against the fashion of vulgar, dried out, soulless realism, against the harsh realistic doctrine which said that “we don't have to climb far, we neither have to love nor hate, we neither have a purpose nor substance; everything is good; topics lie all around like wood! Wherever you are, whatever you see – describe! If you live in Vilna – describe the mud; if you are lying in the house of study under the oven – study the cockroaches”…

In this photographic non–capricious, non–selective realism, Peretz did not see art, only imitated art. He realized the reader demanded more realism and interpreted it as a reaction against non–fictition foolishness, clever old wives tales, and utopian dreams in which the literature was lost. The normal reader cannot tolerate when the living reality becomes successively wrapped in a fog or a naked naturalistic, exterior realism, without an idea, without soulful internalization, without pertinent selectiveness, without appeal to the masses and besides this, is far from art.

Peretz recognized “the material for art is reality–––but this has to be seen through the eyes of the artist and artists do not see reality as it is, rather much more real as he sees the inner content, the relation – dependence of the soul of the world and that which takes place behind the scenes away from the world, dependent on his artistic comprehension of the world.–––Art is a surrogate of life, but very often deeper, higher and more authentic”.

Between raw realism and mystical romanticism, Peretz sought reality – penetrated within the artists' soul and animated with his spirit, but never caught by the dead lens of the camera, or noted in historic chronicles, or written about in dried out protocols.

Peretz practiced his literary theories in his writing.

In the transparent traditional surroundings

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and the old–fashioned scenarios of his novels, skits and dramas, he brings forth social, moral, and even economic problems of real life. On the other hand, his realism is filled with psychological warmth, ideological awareness, with romantic sparks and his own soulful participation.

The reality he described had a cultural–historical nucleus and his realism had romantic undertones, a soulful subtract. His feelings and thoughts are brought together on one surface, the highest of the old Yiddish morale and sharpest of the radical progressive attitudes of the living reality.

In the middle of the Peretz era, between one century and the next, on the eve of the youthful revolutionary years and new times, the literary surroundings were filled with fresh literary images where the Jewish small–town hinterland appeared in Peretz's Warsaw.

The new writers from the start were not similar to one another even though they were all hatched in Peretz's nest. They also did not heed Peretz's revolutionary romanticism, social struggle symbolism, nor fathom the moral cleanliness of the past folksy life. They arrived with lively pieces of life, and carried that same life in a diverse way in the young Yiddish art of words.

The first passionate celebrator Sholem Asch emerged from a small Jewish town. The drooling lyrical singing of his work was the first expression of bourgeois romanticism in Yiddish literature. The real small town with its sharp class distinction and great suffering as Peretz describes in his Travel Notes is described by Asch as a large ideal, wealthy bourgeois celebration. On one hand Asch's wealthy celebration is far from Peretz's revolutionary symbolic Sabbath and holiday feeling. On the other hand, [it is] far from the social–flinching time. It was a hymn of praise to the overstuffed wallet of the merchant, to his pleasures, to his appetite, to his weaknesses and lusts…The town and even the surrounding nature were merely a golden frame of a portrait of the powerful small town Jewish bourgeois…and these works were published in 1904 and 1913 when in the cities and towns there was already an active process of social innovation. However, Asch did not want to disturb the rich man's contentment of being a Reb Yekhezel's or Reb Shloime's.

Even years later, when in his trilogy

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Before the Flood he described the time that coincided with the October revolution, he showed no interest in the revolutionary ideal or in the young socialist powers, who with naked hands built a new world. He continued to sing the praises of the established city bourgeois which unfortunately had to lose its life support and great historic struggle…

In the city as well as the small town, Asch always sided with the rich and was the romantic of the Jewish bourgeoisie.

When Asch came from his small town to Warsaw he discovered the problems among the bourgeois and petty–bourgeois families where God, money, hypocrisy, and often amorality dramatized the conflict. He was also fascinated by the inept, anti–societal redemption–seekers after the so–called definitive revolutionary challenge of 1905…

Drawing of Sholem Asch

After Asch switched from the small town ideal to the tragic conflicts within the bourgeois Jewish family, he once again idealized his small town wealthy Reb Shloime and ended his Warsaw period with the beginning of a series of emigrant stories. The small Jewish town, city,

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America –were his thematic places during his Warsaw creative period.

Even later, Asch would sporadically draw from Warsaw life in order to tap Polish Jewishness, but often these visits would bring about societal confrontations due to his lack of tactfulness, suspicious connections, and uncontrolled flaunting of his opinions.

His quick youthful success often confused Asch. He had an inclination for poetry, for egoistic “independence” and public speaking in his own name…Not being a personality in the true sense of the word, his public addresses often astounded people with their absurd assertions. We could list an entire series of Asch's scandals, awkward moments, fights, and conflicts…

Already in his Warsaw period Asch was a widely published author even though he showed no artistic interest in the hard working Jewish masses. His writing greatness did not pair with word artistry or master sentence structure. His language is disheveled, overflowing, and suffers periodically from defective sentence building. Asch lacks the ability to cultivate the word, to sharpen his language instrument, and this is really incomprehensible for a significant writer. It is impossible to quote even one example of verbal inventiveness or verbal accomplishment. He looks and feels artistic, but he does not have any subtle artistic sense.

All the personal, technical and ideological shortcomings in Asch's writing were not blatantly obvious during his Warsaw period because he was first and foremost occupied with his new, bold and broad themes. In the young Warsaw writer's circle he was the first to compete, and was immediately noticed by all which pushed him to the foreground of this growing literature.

H.D. Nomberg also emerged from a small Jewish Polish town, but he arrived in Warsaw without small town sentimentalism and no literary small town baggage. To the contrary, a strong hatred burned in him toward everything the small town represented in traditional, customary and romantic ways. He arrived with an inner revolutionary anti–small town attitude and, through education, wanted to break away from everything that tied him to that life.

With his extreme, provocative expressionism, he tried to compensate for his old life–style and the entire old Jewish way of life. In a demonstrative way he desecrated the Sabbath on the pious Galevke Street. He enthusiastically spoke without stopping about

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land and productivization. He threw himself into populist politics and tried to make amends for his religious study years by dancing and playing billiards in the non–Jewish cafes on the aristocratic Marshalkovsky Street…

Erase the old and become a new man – this was his drive. Formally this was successful, but in actuality, he felt the unhealed break his entire life. The break he made as a young man which he often tried to soften with bohemianism and confusion…

Also in his writing he often described broken people, rootless and lacking, psychologically powerless and their longing which had no strength to become reality.

The majority of his characters are immature intellectuals that immersed themselves in the tragedy of

Tombstone of H.D. Nomberg

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their own lack of confidence, wanting to transcend normal life, but continued to lag behind.

His hero Wingman, the man with broken wings, entered the family of Jewish types that literature borrowed from the terminology of Jewish concepts. In truth, his literary skepticism was not always categorical and desperate. We can also find in his writing the good natured and tender, especially when describing women, but in general the characters in his few belletristic works are dissatisfied, resigned and hopeless.

He correctly captured the decaying tendency of the asocial characters and the morally empty bourgeois family, but he did not see a way out and, therefore, the tone is of waste and withering.

His essays of societal

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criticism were more constructive and confident, defining audaciousness and anger, often resorting to irony and common sense. Through 25 years of large journalistic works, his work influenced and established norms.

The enthusiastic Avrom Reyzen arrived in Warsaw from a far away Lithuanian town. His verse immediately moved to music. The folksy melodic musicality of his verse was the magical staple with which the poet broke even the armoured Jewish ears, which locked away the words of the Yiddish poet. With the inner and outer strength of the musicality of his verse he blew in quiet winds of sadness and joy, emotions and agitation in Jewish hearts, and evoked not only respect but sentiment toward the rising Yiddish poetry.

Avrom Reyzen

From the beginning there were various motifs in Reyzen's poetry: social elegy, individual sadness, romanticism of Jewish loneliness, youthful despair, dreamy love, and social turmoil. More than anything else Reyzen wrote social protest songs which became hymns for parties and movements, hymns about freedom which secretly carried the

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colorful aspirations of the Jewish masses who did not want to be choked by Russian paws.

Reyzen's poems are not overdone and, therefore, often give the impression of stylized folk material. This is where they gain their melodiousness and their connection to music.

Reyzen's short breathed four line verse which dances under its light feet can be recognized from far away. They don't drag you into curly locks and we also don't see any innate dishevelling. His poems are always cut short, so short that we don't have to look to see where the reader's thoughts or feelings can wander to find what Reyzen is trying to express. The purpose of each poem is clear for everyone.

Reyzen's simplicity and correctness, his search for the detail in life, and his devotion to individuality have naturally wandered from the poem to the story and found a parallel prosaic path for his experiences and the freer unloading of his feelings. His stories are marked by their fine ideas, ironic thoughtful humour, which walks on tippy toes among the lines with poetic inspiration which is often present.

Reyzen's folksy lyric and his melodic melancholy, his quiet fighting spirit and his social ethical positions have from the beginning reached the spirit of the Jewish public which felt the original emotional trend in Reyzen's writing, the good devoted and familiar Reyzenisms which seem as natural as speaking your mother tongue.

This same poet surprised everyone with a non–poetic trait: from his early years he was an initiator, not for personal reasons and not for personal gain, but for the benefit of society to see the new, barely standing Yiddish word which began prodigiously to grow but was still weak in the elbows…

His founding in Warsaw of The Twentieth Century, at the very beginning of that century was only the beginning. Later this small town young man opened his arms: in four countries over 20 years he founded eight serious weekly periodicals. It can be said that no other Yiddish writer, not even Peretz or Sholem Aleichem made such an effort and gave so much of themselves for the organization of a Yiddish periodical system and for the elevation of a serious literary tribune.

In truth, the destiny of all these publications was unlucky. Reyzen did not have the authority to transform them to weekly important journals

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and did not have the material means to protect their young bones from quick demise, and not to disappoint himself by searching for a societal connection between Literature and Life. This was a testimony to Reyzen's confidence in the Yiddish word, his literary enthusiasm, and enterprising apprehension.

The first realist to emerge from the small towns of the Polish–Yiddish hinterland was Y. M. Visenberg who presented a Polish Jewish town in Yiddish literature exactly as it was with its natural appearance, with its social disgraces, with its severe class distinction, and most importantly with the pre– revolutionary mood which shook the false communal harmony and the so–called ideological serenity of the dark and handsome Jewish town…

Drawing of Y. M. Visenberg

The intensifying class struggle of the proletariat youth face to face with the authoritarian coalition of the boss's clique and the Czarist satrap (Provincial governor), is one of the main points in Visenberg's social realism. Visenberg was the first to bring the revolutionary pre–spring into Yiddish literature, direct from life and the young–hearted idealism of the new fighting generation.

Together with his folk characters Visenberg also brings in their folksy Jewishness – the loud and juicy Yiddish from the small Jewish town deep in Poland. This was not stylized charm nor a hunt for folkloristic and, for sure not, naturalist delight with rare language. He simply without a special effort literarily united the folk language, not making it more poetic than it was in real life and not abusing it with “interesting” mixtures.

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Visenberg's work had a weird shadiness to it. I don't mean the enlightened teaching or tempting stories with from which he began to step away with his firm realistic way, but his applying himself to problem searching.

Not being a consistent progressively aware person, in his colourless dramas and his complicated novels, he crawled deep into metaphysics, philosophical speculation, chaotic thought acrobatics, and as a result removed all the attributes of his artistic language from his core realism which was the opposite of abstract “eternity” and from over thought “deepness”.

In this uncharacteristic portion of his work, he wanted to be the spokesperson, the deliverer of his own thought process. At the time when the power of his work was rooted in his personal words he realistically showed the truth of the simple surroundings.

In life he held the position of an individual sectarian struggle against everything and everyone. In an unsocial way he isolated himself from other writers in Warsaw and led a bitter struggle against the Lithuanians and not against the true bourgeois cynical unworthiness of the literary community and confined his power to a personal phonetic spelling which was seen in his spiteful organ Our Hope.

The periphery of Visenberg's work is his way of reacting to various manifestations but not changing a hair on his realistic contribution to Yiddish literature in Poland and the authentic artistic picture of the Jewish town.

Among other writers who appeared a little later on in the Peretz era was the Peretz enthusiast Efraim Kaganovsky, who was one of the less authentic Warsaw writers of those who originated in small Jewish towns. In a playful, spirited and psychologically light manner, he depicted the poverty of Warsaw, the underworld, and petty bourgeois through a line of characters showing the truth in their transparency, comfort, and clarity and how they affect an early morning waltz or Caucasian wine.

Peretz said that Moishe Gilbert “carried 2000 years of Jewishness on his hunched back” and who the handlers of the “Iron Gate” looked upon as a righteous man. His entire life he struggled with a heavy mystical–traditional cultural inheritance and with tuberculosis.

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In his elegiac and subtle novels he tried to put forth honest, quiet people facing communal injustice, exploitation, and aggressiveness. He provided us with lovely fresh descriptions of Polish villages. At every opportunity, wholeheartedly, he took the side of the underprivileged. Later he became involved in the occult and spirituality which practically tore him away from Yiddish literature.

Yoel Mastboym was a fruitful yet disheveled and chaotic writer. Filled with themes and bubbly enthusiasm, he did not have a literary culture yet he had the ambition to give, with a European scope,

Photo: Nomberg, Zhitlovsky, Asch, Peretz and Reyzen at the Chernovitz conference.

huge chunks of Jewish life: his novel Three Generations was considered a literary psychological crosssection through the most dynamic and complicated period of modern Jewish life; also Nokhemke's Wandering – a work which unfolds in a faraway small town and ends with nothing less than Buenos Aires's pimps.

The interesting, detailed material which filled Mastboym's works would have been more impressive in the hands of a better artist, master of the language, and literary architect. He lacked the sense for selection, vocabulary, and stylistic brevity, for specific compositional photo montage, and for experienced and intelligent divisions of life which he often combined with drawn–out visions, dreams, and a slice of memoires and experiences.

The writers who grouped around Peretz did not create what was expected of a “literary school,” adhering to certain fundamental ideas and principles concerning writing styles or even content.

They were not even connected by a concrete ideological

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relationship that the Peretz atmosphere and Peretz mood created. There was a communal idea of a large literary renaissance and a strong love for the phenomenal growth of Yiddish, their mother tongue, which with all of their help, received the attestation at Chernovitz as a national language. Besides this, from the beginning, each one had sympathized with the new historic period, and with its revolutionary avant–garde, although later on, after the revolution, many of them experienced the fashionable intellectual search for God, narrow psychological and symbolic investigations, and distancing oneself from the present in the name of eternal beauty or Jewish eternity…

The imperialistic war, the October Revolution, and the rise of an independent Poland, with their unusual geographic, demographic, social, and national changes had a sharp impact on Jewish life and pushed the Jews closer to the forefront of the new history.

Everything seemed so cheerful, so subversive, so fast forward moving. The fall of Czarist tyranny, the revolutionary heroic romanticism of October, the national accomplishments of the generations' long dream of Polish independence, the fiery proclamations of freedom for citizens and the international recognition of the rights of the national minorities – all warmed the mood of the Jewish youth and raised their pure idealistic enthusiasm.

The fact that the rebirth of Poland was weakened by chauvinism, anti–Semitism, pogrom agitations, and hatred from the nobility radicalized the majority of Jewish youth and refined and

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reinforced their ideal of an humanistic Poland for the people. At the same time the Jewish bourgeoisie was casual about the historical changes. During the honeymoon months of the Balfour Declaration the bourgeoisie appeared to be “Messianically” intoxicated but later left all practical Zionism in the care of the poor young pioneers; as for assimilation, it was so isolated within the boundaries of big city life, and went unnoticed among the Jewish masses.

Warsaw transformed from a provincial city in a satrap (Russian provincial) empire to a capital of an independent country. In its new position, it also became the center of Jewish life and consequently Jewish culture.

The large Jewish communities in Lithuania, Ukraine, and White Russia (Belarus) which fell into the web of the new empire, together with authentic Polish Jewry, formed the new Jewish community of over 3 million Jews. The distinct components that existed within these communities and made them different from each other were customs, cultural , and even their Yiddish. Over the course of time they began to unite and Warsaw understandably played a central role in this internal Jewish cultural matter.

Yiddish cultural workers concentrated in Warsaw did not only come from all corners of the new Poland but also from Russia, Lithuania and Austria. Groups and individuals arrived in the capital to the newly formed large Jewish settlement, including the Kiev Cultural League which soon after its arrival in Warsaw in 1921 played an important organizational role in Jewish cultural life.

It is important to mention precisely that these periphery non–Polish and foreign groups were energetically creating a base for world Yiddish culture, scholarship, and literature. They brought with them a passion and dynamic for Polish–Yiddish coziness and thoughtfulness.

Warsaw quickly became the cultural center publishing 300 books a year, 15 daily newspapers, and 30 weeklies, with hundreds of Yiddish publishing houses, cultural centers, and libraries. With this came a readership and a youth whose soul and interests had no other language of expression except Yiddish.

Warsaw, together with other large subsidiary centres in Vilna, Lodz, and Lemberg, right from the start felt the new mass consumption and passion for Yiddish culture. Therefore,

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one of the first cultural organizations, the Cultural League, formulated its goals in its first manifest:

“We have created for Jews a broad, modern culture, with all its colours and nuances, with all its achievements and quests for the Jewish masses who are emerging from behind dark ovens to the sunlit modern world culture;” in other words: “to draw creative powers from the Jewish masses and provide an opportunity for the talented to flourish”.

Warsaw also became the international center for Yiddish literature together with Moscow and New York. Writers from the Soviet Union and North America would appear and sometimes gather in Warsaw, and writers from Poland emigrated to the Soviet Union (of course for pure ideological reasons) and to North America (due to their desire for literary profits).

The Warsaw–Jewish–Polish center, the junction of a young, culturally dynamic community, existed between two worlds: capitalist and socialist. The familiar poverty and growing lack of rights did not prevent the millions who lived and spoke Yiddish to believe in new times. Especially in the large capitalist New York, Yiddish culture, at the beginning of the 1920s, stood facing the new East, so far as all the precious Yiddish writers contributed to Tomorrow's Freedom and the proletariat Hammer.

In the early years of the new Poland, Yiddish literature with its tiny petty bourgeois steps remained backward, not keeping up with new times. They could not even discuss a vision for the new era.

The two important writers who remained from the Peretz period, Nomberg and Visenberg, were far from willing or able to be the spokespersons of Yiddish or artistic norms. Nomberg's belletristic possibilities were already exhausted and, even if they were not exhausted they would not have coincided with the hopes and with the passionate confidence of the new generation. His bourgeois feuilletons could not win or warm anyone. As for Visenberg, his deep social–naturalism was cooling down. On the other side, he was immersed in his petty senseless anti–Lithuanian battle…

There were other writers who inhabited Yiddish literature long before the war and began to have a wider impact in the post war years.

One of these was Z. Segalovitch even though no positive indication of the new period penetrates his work.

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He totally crawled into the turtle shell of his personal feelings, longings, and disappointments, isolating himself and his autobiographical works and his heroes from communal problems and zeitgeist.

“Their world is their noise” – He called for [attention to], in “The Anarchist Girl”, the social–political life questions and the general interests of people. In “Our Woman” he says clearly and openly:

“When I look through my glasses, I have to tell you, I am egotistically indifferent to all revolutions and upheavals. I'm a world of my own. I don't believe in any Messiah. People are good or bad by nature. As fire and water will remain, so will these two feelings. This has already been said, I, a simple person am only repeating”.

He always remained isolated, “an eternal loner,” who never changed his “glasses”… creating exactly the kind of shady figures who never emerge as types or characters because this bringing out people by Segalovitch was superficial, sentimental, psychologically raw, artistically weak, and torn from an influential surrounding. He does not portray the woman as fully a valuable person, but as a creature who is always dominated by instinct, by unstable love reflexes, and from unanticipated whims.

Even in one of his last novels, “The Weaver's Daughter”, which is supposed to depict the revolution of 1905 of the Bialystok proletariat, the revolutionary days are almost absent form the book. We don't see the revolutionaries, they are more talked about like frightened shadows than people who “fell from the sky” or “strange figures”…

Segalovitch won the hearts of the under–developed, undemanding folk reader with his sentimental novels. Some of his books had 25,000 copies printed. However the conscientious youth and the literary critics did not like him. He was virtually ignored by higher cultural circles, even among the bourgeois, and Yiddish schools.

Y. Perle, an energetic flexible writer, was the first, in an artistic and non–artistic way, to depict erotic sexuality in the intimate bourgeois family as well as the elemental sexuality of an animal (“Girl”, “Sin”, and “The Every Day Jew”).

He published these trashy serialized stories in newspapers under the pseudonym Three Stars. These trashy novels brought him dishonour and insults.

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These stories earned him money, but he eventually drifted away and wrote serious artistic belletristic works including “The Every Day Jew” and “The Golden Peacock” where he describes his own life in a small Jewish town in Poland.

It is the small town at the beginning of the century that is shaken due to the expansive young capitalism and slowly loses its generation's long economic base. It is the town of the last tragic patriarchal figures and of a youth searching for big city proletarian purpose.

Perle does not present the sharp class distinction. His realism is not a realism of conflict, rather mostly detailed descriptions of customs, which is far from Asch's one sided idealization, but possesses a lot of cheerfulness and folksy lyric. Even his city revolutionaries of 1905 are too mild and good spirited, and not characteristically resolute.

Perle had a sharp artistic eye for detail, penetrating the erotic and complicated concealments of human and animal creatures, and brought out elements of Jewish life with a lot of folksiness and love but he did not capture a pre–eminent spot in Yiddish literature in Poland. His failure to deal with essential life problems and his avoidance of absolute originality in his social themes and in his style of expression prevented him from moving forward, even though in his last works he grew quite quickly.

A surprising and literary sensation in the early 1920s was “Smugglers” by E. Varshavsky.

Varshavsky brought forth the old familiar scenario of all the Yiddish classics, romantic and realistic descriptions [of] the tiny Jewish town, torn apart and sunken in deep moral catastrophe. It is a town that loses its Jewish charm and replaces the traditional virtues with sin and deception; it is a border town where the war years prove to be catastrophic economically and “rebuilds” the entire economy based on smuggling and consequently non–kosher whisky distilling, drunkenness, prostitution, and debauchery.

Not specific individuals but the entire town, with all the good, fine Jews was broken. Debauched instincts, which for centuries had been buried, quickly broke through the “ancient Jewish morality” and rolled everyone into one band of smugglers, criminals, and anyone chasing dirty money. And while one crime led to another, people were making more and more concessions and Jewish modesty no longer applied to these heroes.

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It was not only the simpleton shirking morality, but also a respected Jew like Reb Yidl, who does not hesitate to send his own daughter to the quartermaster…and if the old judge does not go out to smuggle, it is only because his feet were sore.

In the midst of this moral inflation, in the midst of this darkness, one pale light shines through: the love between the sick smuggler Mendl and the prostitute Natshe. Two broken people who together lift themselves from the muck, this is one exception in the dark atmosphere of this town which is sinking deeper and deeper into degradation and wants the situation of debauchery to continue forever…

In Varshavsky's emotional and brutal descriptions there is no intentional naturalism, only the natural naturalism of the extreme situation brought upon by the German occupation.

These bold realistic descriptions of Jewish town life are testimony to how far morality is dependent on material circumstances, how much morality is a result of living conditions and not of “everlasting categories”. Even such a solid thing as “Jewish morality” falls to dust when external conditions lead us to another “morality”. True these conditions were temporary; they could have avoided these results and not consent to moral concessions, but this was only possible in societies that possessed a higher social idealism.

The sinning townspeople have to know deep in their hearts they are guilty. They are aware they could have been strong and not sink so morally low because of the temporary repugnant conditions; in fact they dream that this smuggling period would lose its temporary character and free them from guilt and [they dream that they would] be able to tell themselves they could resist the temptation of something temporary but, [during] a long lasting situation – impossible…they were looking for legitimization of their easy and unanchored life.

The poet A. Zak began his literary career with poetry, memoirs, and journalism, all with lyrical sentimentalism, daily rhymes, and war memories. He was an epigon (inferior imitator) of Leyb Naydus but never reached Naydus's poetic flight, well–constructed elegant verses, [which were] flexible and picturesque. He lacked artistic strength to establish a personal tone, and, besides this, he did not feel or express the new times.

Dissonantly to the young historic and fresh time, the refined Aharon Zeitlin published his poem “Matron” which combined Kabbalistic mysticism practiced outwardly with the rules of modern poetry.

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Through this metaphysical cloud of smoke, he wanted to explain the long road of history, up until the present day. It should be said, that humanity evolved not in agreement with historic materialistic, social evolution and dialectic principles, but according to a dictation of a firm and deep Godly will.

The new period and the modern artistic means of expression did not wait long to appear in Yiddish literature. The stormy journals, The Gang and Albatross, where Peretz Markish and U.Z.Greenberg flashed, thundered, and hailed, and Literary Pages which in a lively, modern panoramic way tried to embrace the entire literature, pairing the new Yiddish word with modern times and created among the literary youth an awareness that Yiddish literature was not behind the times.

From the Ukraine which was soaked in Jewish blood emerged Peretz Markish with bold, sharp beauty in his words.

His great poetic rebelliousness trembled like the pre–October Dnieper which sprayed its power over fields and river beds. The new Soviet art had not yet shown its stormy winds. He arrived with a collection of poems whose titles were “Ordinary,” “Idle,” and he found himself “In the Middle of the Road,” just like the title of his poems.

Instead of birches, willows and shrubs, his poems resounded with entire forests. His poetry was a combination of his youthful enthusiastic diction, the revolutionary form of new Russian verse, his language inventiveness, his rich scenic images, his joy for life, his original rhyme technique, and his far sighted outlook of the world, nature and man. He quickly became the ideal prototype for a first class Yiddish poet.

He was first introduced to Warsaw with his pogrom poem “The Heap” where he lashes out with his neo–prophetic anger at the guilty white guards of the blood soaked region of pre–revolution Ukraine, and where he throws his bold blasphemy against everything holy, in a view filled up with martyrs' blood and heaped with Jewish corpses. It can be said, in this stormy Markish protest elegy, instead of the old Jewish “blessing for the dead”, there is a sort of “cursing the liar.”

His artistic prose was no less transporting than his poems, which dealt with problems and people with sharp audacity and in language where each word danced ballet.

Pro–fascist Poland and the cultural social relations in Jewish Warsaw forced him to return to his homeland, on the eve of the first Five Year Plan.

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His electrifying poetry helped to build that land and encourage the born–again man with such artistic works as “Not Worried”, “Anshl Zaliaznik”, “Brothers”, “Past Generation and New”, “Death to Cannibals” and “War”.

From Uri Zvi Greenberg came the simple call for literary modernism, for formalized modernism, which in post–war western Europe allowed for anti–social acrobatics, futurism, Dadaism, and egocentric expressionism.

In his manifesto “Albatross,” he threw out the slogan “introspective achievement and depression of free, naked personal expression”, which meant, he preached, from raw expressed introspectivism, that one must bring out the “cruelty in a poem, the chaos in a scene, the assertion of blood”.

Greenberg, who revolted against his youthful religious life, called out, in his book Mephisto, his despair and disappointment in everything and everyone because

“Gods die, nations expire,
The highest mountains fall into the abyss,
Fruitful gardens become steppe;
However, Mephistopol lives and laughs at all.”

Greenberg's all powerful Mephisto devil, who even laughs at God, in antithesis to Goethe's Mephisto, fools the poet of youth and his gentle dreams, and [this devil] has the same charm as a inaccessible love for a woman, an erotic passion. The poet extinguishes his burning spirit in champagne and is convinced he must remain trampled on until Mephisto resigns, and Mephisto, the ruler of all worlds, will never resign.

Greenberg's screaming emptiness had to lead him to this demonic resignation, and later he went even further: he threw away the “Language of the liqueurs” and in his Hebrew poetry written in Israel, busied himself with anti–socialist, revisionist hooliganism, with racism, with trash, and with open provocation of war. During his younger years in Galicia he already wrote that death in war gives a special enjoyment, a sort of gentle happy sensation.

It appears, then, that Greenberg was actually correct in his Mephisto: the devil is his darling life companion.

After the journal Book World began in a serious academic way to become the critical bibliographic spokesman and word supplier of modern Yiddish literature, the weekly played a celebratory role in presenting the new Yiddish word. It lasted 15 years until its life was cut short by the plague of Hitler.

This journal was published by the Kletzkin Publishing House and received its youthful, fresh stately appearance

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thanks to the creative collaboration between N. Mayzel, M. Ravitch, P. Markish, Y.Y. Singer, A. Katzizne, and other writers from near and far.

The journal Literary Pages became the white holiday tablecloth of Yiddish literature in Poland, a tablecloth that was set with tasty homemade and foreign dishes.

As the years passed and the majority of editors and contributors moved away, this literary tablecloth began to lose its original white holiday spirit of the early years, becoming calmer, more common place and bourgeois, though the young revolutionary poets of the 1930s occasionally accessed the pioneering, now traditional publication.

For 15 years, Nakhman Mayzel remained at the helm of Literary Pages – a lover and believer in Yiddish literature, an industrious scholarly compiler, collector, always finding connections between various writers and an energetic leader in collective literary and publishing plans, as he demonstrated from the start, by replanting the ideas and methods of the Kiev Cultural League in the then idle Warsaw.

Vienna's contribution to Yiddish literature in Poland was Meylekh Ravitch. He embodied the most solid poetic culture and his poetic interests spread across the broadest borders: from prehistoric landscapes to the cosmos, until the stars of the universe.

His poetic emotional world was successively connected to scholarly thoughts. Inspired by Spinoza's philosophical structures, he was always devoted to meditations about the fate of man and beast, Jewishness and worldliness. It can be said his poetry was intellectually loaded; it was not only emotional but also thoughtful.

His poetry is marked by sincerity which often leads to nakedness (see Naked Poems), but right from the start we can see a modern dualism: the poet according to Ravitch is the conscience and the joy of the world. He is the world judge who is not biased, but his truth can destroy the most powerful and burn ancient forests to ash. This is in principle, but in practice the same poet is a tiny crushed worm, which trembles to crawl, and the only thing keeping him alive are his dreams. [T]his dualism, this theory of powerless omnipotence, meandering through his later work led him.

His verses are filled with the deepest compassion and passive protest (this is probably when he became a vegetarian) but never

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actively opposing evil. At [the very] least the poet feels he could ignite the black forests with his word, nevertheless he does not.

Ravitch's original word becomes enthusiastic and categorical in his literary critique and social polemic prose. Together with Markish's ringing, fringed essays, Ravitch's analytic and elegant articles belong to the most pleasant reading material in the early spring like years of Yiddish literature in Poland.

Y.Y Singer [Yisroel Yeshue Zinger, also known as I.J. Singer], the strongest, most realistic prose writer of the newly emerging literature, tried seriously, in a poetic fiery style, to capture the new revolutionary times in a drama called Earth Anguish [Erd–Vey] when he was still living in the Ukraine, land of slaughter.

His attempt to promote the new period and become its spokesperson was not successful because fundamentally he stood aside and his temperament was far from poetic or prophetic.

Singer was one of the finest carvers of the common life's novella. In building his characters, he put in a great amount of fine detail and sharp observation, for example in the bloodsucking cheap money spider Morritz Shpilreyn (“Pearls”) and even the dog with the cut off tail (“Lyuk”).

His first novel Steel and Iron appeared sewn together. Singer's art watered down episodes from the war years. The critics openly pointed out these weaknesses and Singer who was already a contributor to the Forward and was in the middle of black literary work in Ab. Kahan's editorial kitchen, reacted in a provocative authoritarian manner. He announced that “from this day on I am not longer connected to Yiddish literature” and that “writing Yiddish is disgusting work.” He divorced Yiddish literature and betrothed himself to the Forward becoming more and more a “complete” Forward man…

His literary conscience apparently did not allow him to rest and he, before crossing over definitively to Forward land, wrote a novel called Yoshe Kalb where he executed a destructive overview of Hasidism. It must be mentioned that here Singer cheated with erotic and sentimental trash which suits a novel serialized in the Forward.

It should be mentioned that independent of the two historical novels Singer wrote in America, he sunk deeper and deeper ideologically. In his Comrade Nakhman all the socialist ideals are ridiculed and torn apart, and in one of his last novels At the Black Sea he “symbolically” poked fun at the October

[Col 530]

Revolution like this: “Outside the rooster made a mistake in the lit night which he mistook for day and began to crow loudly, filled with rooster–like confidence and tidings.”

As you can see, the Singer Earth Anguish form sunk deeper and deeper into Forward earth.

Alter Katzizne

He began with long confusing poems and poetic–dramatic etudes which reached relative maturity in his work “The Spirit the King,” but still not quite mature and clear. He was tormented by promiscuous themes and various visions which argued together in his poetic verses.

Later, in his accessible Arabesques, he wrote a few dramas, among which was the scenic, successful, and literary mediocre Duke, the artistically distinguished tragedy Herod, and among other scenic works he also dramatized Granakh's [portrayal of] Sholem Shvartzbard's heroic assassination of the pogrom ‘dog’ Petluria. In his literary activity we must also include his big city Warsaw novel Strong and Weak.

Together with Polish fascism, when many Yiddish writers were comfortable with the theory of “not getting involved”, Katzizne's social awareness and civil spirit grew. He headed the daily progressive revolutionary organ The Friend even though the moral reaction pointed an accusatory finger at him. In his newspaper column “My Talking Film,” he boldly and shrewdly wrote about life's problems and did not stop mixing in. He later published a journal called My Film, where

[Col 531]

he alone fought, through all literary and journalistic genres, against the poisonous and slimy fascism.

The old “Peretzist” was in touch with the new times.

Sh. Horontshik consolidated his place in literature with four socialist novels.

He described a period of about thirty years divided into four phases: the economic deterioration of the Jewish town and the “proletarization” of the declassified social class (Amid the Noise of the Machines), the first revolutionary turbulence (1905), the flickering and demoralized town of the occupation period (Entangled Roads), and the emerging smuggling business in the postwar towns (Swamp).

His works are collections of facts of life which are detailed and often naturalistically unwrapped. However he often mechanically separates his heroes into good and bad. From the first page, his negative characters are judged and sealed. The majority are disgusting types; however, their negativity does not increase with artistic and psychological progression.

At every opportunity Horontshik illustrates an open picture of class struggle in cities and towns. His works are populated with actively mobile people and characters that give a precise presentation of Jewish communal life in the small towns and the social process in the first quarter of the century.

Horonchik lacked writing culture, language style and discipline, and an artistic sense for selection. His pen was not stingy. Therefore there was a lot of junk in his work, drawn out and confusing. This was due partly to an abundance of material and a desire to draw out as quickly as possible an onslaught of facts, scenes, and characters as well as collected misery.

The newer Polish town of the 1930s and from just before the Holocaust introduced M. Burshtin to literature through his novels Over the Destruction of Ployne and By the Rivers of Mazovie.

It was the destruction of the petty bourgeois, the now grown–up youth, the fruitless intelligentsia, the crisis, fascism, and the boycott forced people to emigrate.

The sorrow of the flickering youth was painful. Daughters of Ployn's up and coming bourgeois “did not have big demands; they only wanted a bit of joy and luck ––––years were quickly passing without love, without joy – for the sake of five hundred dollars, a furniture set, feelings I exchanged for small change”.

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The perspective was run away, escape, – not only because there was no way out but because the raising of Hitler's ax was becoming a reality.

Burshtin successfully, without great artistic means, captured the sorrow and fear in the pre–Holocaust life of the shaken petty bourgeois on the eve of the biggest and bloodiest destruction.

In the early 1930s, I[saac] Bashevis [Singer] appeared – a fine belletrist with an original tone and style, with rhythm in his words, with artistic comprehension of sight and sound and with an old–Yiddish culture, but his bizarre themes were unfamiliar, stuck in historic God forsaken places and in a psychological labyrinth.

The Kabbalistic mystic and bitter reactionary, Aharon Zeitlin, characterized Bashevis's book Satan in Goray, published in 1935 with the subtitle “A Story From Antiquity”, like this

“When you ask me: what is the main idea of this work, I would say asceticism––––in today's Yiddish literature, which is loyal to the proletcultural order, works like Bashevis' are splendidly anachronistic”.

This praise characterized Zeitlin and the book. Zeitlin made the blessing over the “splendid” outdated and antiquated style of Bashevis' work not because he liked the historic themes, but because of the mystic and satanic shadows of the book.

The book, with a forward by Zeitlin was published in 1935, when the period was already stiff like an open wound; when a million Jewish youth stood at the abyss of departure, waiting for a new, unlocked, broken open word, when all of Europe already began to sense the hidden unpleasant breath of [the] Nuremberg [Laws].

Bashevis went from these turbulent times to other turbulent times. He did not capture real societal problems of the era in which he secluded himself, but rather the mystical which lead to his literary scenes and all the paraphernalia of spirits, demons, devils, clowns, imps, evil demons, which define a large portion of the fate of his main characters.

In his book he describes the Shabbtai Zvi debacle in a town but does not penetrate deeply into the psychological impact of the Shabbtai Zvi period. The occultism in the book, the superstitious jumble, the mysticism, and the perverse debauchery, are clearly exaggerations of litter from this historical episode and a product of subsequent sick fantasies.

The artist in Bashevis, however, here and there,

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rebelled against the mystical dreamer. Here and there he dove out of the mystical darkness and illustrated town reliefs and customs of Jewish life from 150 years ago, but in general the Dybbuk (Spirit), the mysterious hidden spirits, dominated.

We have to admit, Zeitlin provided the best characterization of Bashevis: he refers to him as the “poet from a dark world, the poet of grotesque horror.” Understandably, he does not want to shame him, rather to praise him. Regardless of what he meant, this definition is not bad.

It must be added that in parallel with portraying the historic “dark world”, Bashevis wrote actual trashy novels for the journal Express and later delivered some peppered trash stories to the Forward.

One of the first women to appear in social–sensitive poetry and children's literature was Kadya Molodovsky.

The life of a working girl, Dzika Street, the spying of the fascist terrorists on impulsive youthful thoughts, the radiant Yiddish word, the life of an entire generation, filled her tender verses with aromas of struggle and with the aspirations of the times. Her playful, satiric and light children's motifs became the holiday readings in all the Yiddish schools in the country.

Unfortunately in America she was broken in half. Already there she “made the blessing for wine over a cup of poison.” She sensed that “the letters were crumbling, the words were becoming pale”, and nevertheless she tried, with the crumbling and pale words to dance into the nationalist God–searching circle dance of the bourgeois regressive poetry of Israel.

Y. Kirman was a sensitive talented poet whose themes included hardship, suffering, and proletariat pain in his masterful, short deeply emotive poems.

A wanderer with heavy thoughts and wrapped in contradictions was the poet Yisroel Shtern, who had genuine poetic potential and vividness with words; however, he stood to the side of everyone and everything, with religious moods at times and with an undefined half sung sadness.

Y.Y.Trunk went from writing belletristic exotic pure descriptions of nature to deep intellectual essays. He buried himself in “eternal” fundamental problems of life and art, later approaching concrete Yiddish cultural questions and revealing their tight connection to socialism. However he later turned to philosophical literary research, using a language

[Col 534]

that was often too compact, too academic, and too complicated.

With his excellent literary parodies and his linguistic and psychological humorous success, Der Tunkeler (The Dark One) captured first place in comic literature.

He had no belletristic ambitions and was mainly an episodic humorist, a humorist for the sake of humor and not like a writer who is interested in humor as a method in writer's art, in the manner of Sholem Aleichem, for example.

The following contributed to literary critique, social–cultural work in the various weeklies, monthly journals, and literary sections of daily newspapers: Sh. Kazdan, M. Zilberfarb, Y. Pat, Sh. Mendelson, Sh. Lev, L. Finklshteyn, A. Berman, M. Nayman, M. Flakser, and many more who brought out the various social tendencies in this beautiful literature.

Someone who excelled with great erudition as a critic and magnificent translator was Y. Rapaport. He was a pedant and a strict plaintiff. He went around embittered and with resentment that other people's main ideas about literature were not like his. One of his main polemic goals was to make mud out of N. Mayzel to whom he always addressed pamphlets, biting articles, and angry jokes. As a writer with an anti–progressive position, he acted toward the young proletarian literature in Poland with hatred and often fought against it with his sharp wit.

Right before the war, he founded a journal The Critic attracting Y. M. Visenberg. Both were unhappy, even though they were so different. Don Quixote united their lances.

It must be mentioned, Dr. Y. Shifer played an important role in the founding of old Yiddish literature; in the field of historic literature, Dr. E. Ringlblum; and Dr. R. Mahler, in the field of popular science; Y. Yashunsky in the field of dialectical research, language and the history of Yiddish; – the tireless N. Prilutsky, – an expert in oral Yiddish, the greatest expert of spoken Yiddish in all of its dialectical subtleties.

It is superfluous to mention in detail how the now historic Yiddish culture looked in Poland when the magnificent Jewish millions still lived.

If in the economic sphere there was obscene discrimination,

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the cultural sphere was even worse. Not only was it run by official indifference and ignorance, but also a malevolent opposition from the hooligan state. Yiddish culture felt the fist of the police on its neck and the gendarme's fingers around its throat. However it was choked but not strangled. The youth which sunk into hopelessness searched for uplifting support and spiritual compensation in the Yiddish word. They hungered for culture like wolves.

The majority of Yiddish cultural workers and middle–aged writers who were conformist, “leave me alone” people, wrapped up in their fatalistic Jewish “life's wisdom” did not know how to satisfy the idealistic youth. In the early years of the 1930s, a new generation of young writers emerged from this young group. Their fighting words were distributed among the sighing petty bourgeois and their lives and works reflected their ideals.

Their writing tables were often in prisons and the youngest, the profound literary critic and poet

A.L Germanishsky (A.L. Gorin), was tortured to death in Kartuz–Bereze. There [this was a labour camp] they enforced harsh suppressions, but neither the Polish fascists nor the writers remained silent.

They did not simply write stories and articles, and certainly did not trash in Yiddish as many of their colleagues were stable, established people. They, like sons of prophets, carried with them, wherever they went, the bullet of their word which harnessed their eagle–sized creations to the heavy Yiddish wagon. Their purpose was to help not merely with a “giddy–up” but actually, “move the wagon.”

Yiddish cultural life that existed among the older bourgeois stunningly capitulated. From one side, it crept into forced Polanized assimilation, but on the other side, their own young blooded redeemer, the well–aware youth that understood that its Jewish spiritual elevation and freedom are connected, not to passive enjoyment of collected cultural values, but most importantly with the cultural battle, and that a true cultural battle is an identical manifestation of a political battle.

The police and the bear hats were not silent, and, because they were not silent, the youth could not be silent. They did not stop presenting, through the written word, their dramatic battle.

How were these young people received in the general literary environment? And was there actually a Yiddish literary environment?

In truth is the writers of the 1920s had no literary environment, if by environment we mean

[Col 536]

a broad collective, intimate familiar friendship that strengthens the communal optimism and stimulates creativity.

Professional competition, jealousy, boastfulness, egoistical calculations, partisan accounting, as in any bourgeois society, prevented a harmonious, brotherly writing environment to exist. What did exist were party or interest gangs, and even though they all swore allegiance to the ideal of a Yiddish secular culture, this steamy and non–committed ideal was too weak to connect everyone in a true sense of environment.

Now we will try to show that such an environment did exist, and the striking example was 13 Tlomackie [also Tlomatske] Street!

It is a familiar phenomenon that after every great tragedy, people have the tendency to romanticize about everything that existed before the tragedy and exaggerate the meaning of things and situations. This kind of romanticizing and idealization, when they are merely emotional, can be understood and tolerated even when their falsehood is obvious but they come together with a set meaning, with the intention to show how the past times were good and the present is useless, at a time when it is actually the opposite, it must be indicated subjectively and tendentiously.

Tlomackie 13 – the former union of Yiddish writers and journalists in Warsaw – it wanted to be seen as more than the centre of Yiddish cultural work spreading Yiddish culture in Poland; it wanted to be seen as the centre of the creativity and freedom, opposite to its later “left wing” decadence and to the regimented political restraints of similar unions under other regimes. They even wanted to make the impression that 13 Tlomackie was a modern continuation of 1 Tzegalne.

What in reality actually flourished at 13 Tlomackie?

This can be easily found in Segalovitch's Song of Songs for the “Bude” (a nickname given to the literary union). When you remove all the sentimentalism from Segalovitch's description, the melodramatic outpouring of the heart, the half lyrical digressions and all the more or less significant points, we see that 13 Tlomackie Street, in essence was a literary meeting place of mockers, a petty bourgeois literary club, where the main attractions were, according to Segalovitch who repeats it many times, were the grotesque writer Hershele, Fifi the cat, and the hoarse record player.

The cultural activity of the literary union in the capital of the country where three and a half million Jews lived was expressed only in installed sporadic and absolutely

[Col 537]

accidental lectures in its small locale. Perhaps the literary union which could not alone transform into a cultural federation took the initiative for a culture congress. Did they do anything for the defense of so–called Yiddish culture in Poland?

No! In the most dramatic moments of Jewish life in Poland at the end of the 1930s was when the union began to fall to pieces because “foreign, unnecessary elements were smuggled into the locale.” (Segalovitch).

Who were they? It was the young generation of radical writers that wanted to bring life, content and ideas to 13 Tlomackie, instead of the established gossip and habits of the brotherly bohemia. Instead of getting closer to them, Segalovitch and his friends were not even interested in who they were. He mentioned sarcastically “that they say they are writers”, among them were: Binem Heller, Moishe Shulshteyn, Dovid Mitzmakher, Dovid Spord, Hersh Zaromb, Kalman Lis, Mikhl Natish, M. Mirsky, the Olitskys and tens of other talented writers.

The older colleagues, beginning with the assimilationists, left 13 Tlomackie in the late 1930s and joined the central “Cafes” because what kind of life is it if the “elements smuggled in” seriously complained that “they were not permitted to turn on the record player” (Segalovitch).

There was a lack of spirit and abandonment among the bourgeois writers. They slowly began to capitulate to the not legally recognized “destructive elements”; one by one they left the “Bude” and 13 Tlomackie Street rolled to its “left wing” last breath.

Tens of other writers, besides Segalovitch, also tried to fiddle their sentimental notes into a serenade about 13 Tlomackie Street. The “deepest” meaning of all these love songs is there was once a literature in Poland and its Holy Temple was 13 Tlomackie Street; now though, everything is gone; gone, gone and gone, and the main thing – it will never be!

This is how the false romanticism of 13 Tlomackie came to be. The political task of this romanticizing is clear: try to show with this over blown literary balloon the present Yiddish, state–socialist cultural reality in the new Poland.

It was not in vain that the yellow circle of deserter writers on 9 Rue Paten in Paris called themselves Tlomackie 13, and it was not in vain that the Yiddish literary reaction in Buenos Aires together with imported deserters also founded a sort of club named after the “Bude.”

The generation of writers from the 1930s in contrast to the postwar generation, was almost completely

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immersed, ideologically and emotionally in the progressive–revolutionary attitudes of the new era.

The young literature was born with anti–fascist words on their lips, and this active literary anti–Fascism was so striking the various Zeitlins and Naymans were really frightened and continuously warned against proletariat literature and danger.

Book titles such as The Anxiety of Our Days, Between the Walls, and Bread and Lead, were characteristic of the content of most published songs and stories, and warned of a new fashion in Yiddish literature. It is no wonder that certain old fashioned writers and worms in horseradish shuddered. [After I.B. Singer's reference to a Yiddish proverb, “To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish.”]

The artistic fighting words the young writers began to use around 1925 did not find open doors or offer words of welcome from the bourgeois press and were certainly not eagerly greeted. A group of young writers, not necessarily pronounced progressives, came up with their own publication which was called Sprouts. They sprouted for a short time and managed to bring together around twenty new writers.

Later Literary Pages would from time to time open a small window for these new words, and so what if a supplement in the daily press could squeeze in a young word through the eye of a needle. The Bundist Weekly for Literature which was sure the police would not bother them, often paraded the poetic avant– garde in order to show how bold and proletarian they were.

In all the literary shelters, the true avant–garde writer could not find a corner.

Finally the Marxist Literary Tribune was established. However just like a red cloth that provokes the bull, it immediately attracted the wild police horns. Persecuted, this heroic publication did not last long. It escaped to Tchenstokov and other cities

The later weekly The Friend for a while offered wide open perspectives of the persecuted word, but this was quickly suppressed.

And this how it proceeded (did not proceed…) continually. Until the first explosion of Hitler's bombs the anti–fascist word was homeless, but never without spirit and certainly not hopeless.

Around the Warsaw core of the young artistic generation

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writers began to gather from all over Poland: from Volhynia and Lithuania, from Crown Poland and Galicia. They all found themselves within the boundaries one literary ideal.

Volhynia brought springtime lilacs to Warsaw, summertime jasmine, autumn dahlias. All the poets from Volhynia brought their dawns with them, their sheaves, haystacks, and wheat – and Borukh Olitsky brought more than anyone. He came with berries, Jadwigas and Vasils, fields and pastures, aromatics and herbs, rainbows and sunsets, as well as the village sorrow from the oppressed that languishes under the fist of oppressor and the dark reality of “lame towns, without crutches and without bread”. And therefore, he immediately shouted: “I carry turbulence from window panes in my singing blood.”

This village poet wandered around Warsaw for a long time which “murmured without stopping: provocation, prostitution, gunpowder and fear.” Here, in the tough city, he began to long for a land of dawn” and he was sure “total darkness rocks in its cradle to a light new moon; this is a cup from a pure revenge on the palm of later…”

Mikhal Natish came from Vilna, Lithuania with village pastimes, accordions, bells from farmer's , and daily pain from poor agricultural work. At the same time, in his Hirsh the Bricklayer he brought forth an intelligent folk philosophy from a witty laborer who performs an autopsy on the aristocracy with instruments from Tevye the Dairyman and shows us at the same time the present world synthesized in a drop of small town life.

B. Shlevin brought forth the Jewish and White Russian pain from the east in his books Between the Walls and A March Toward Brisk. The paws of the Polonizing colonial regime and the fascist proponents were expressed in all the events in his work, which were filled with turbulence and the revolt of oppressed people with masterful widely diluted descriptions of the surroundings.

Moishe Shulshteyn emerged from a tailor's workshop and instead of “turning pants inside out” he “turned his small world inside out.”

He quickly collected in his expressive verse all the pain, all the injustice and all the longing of the proletarian masses. But he became a leading figure not only in Muranov and Stov, but also in the deep hinterland and in the entire avant–garde literature.

Lead versus blood, moles versus fighting youth, bayonets versus the worker's flag, swollen profits versus swollen hunger, kerosene versus blood,

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imperial intervention versus socialism, and above all – reinforced belief in the red of morning versus the tyranny of the crucial today – these were the motifs in his poems.

The language – vivid, dynamic and scenic, goal oriented – interpreted exactly how tens of thousands were feeling; therefore, inclusion in the repertoire of recitation was always open to his verses which carried light strokes of his pen to inevitable ultimate goals.

The Warsaw poet Binem Heller using his quiet lyricism to connect his intimate experiences with the social suffering of his class and with the rebellious situation as “the generation climbs, climbs up the tower with a flag and hair shampooed in the storm”.

He is not simply a describer and singer of poetic events or shocking situations, but a direct participant, an insider. All of his personal experiences, the most familial, the most personal, do not carry a locked private character, but drive through The Anxiety of Our Days, through a prism of these smoky times.

Their subtle feelings are paired with revolutionary resolve and are wrapped in a familiar simple linen language.

D. Spard, one of the most important intellectual culture theorists from the literary avant–garde, began with heartfelt poetry and with belletristicm. He switched to Marxist literary critique, cultural essays, and dealing with societal problems, displaying fine erudition in Yiddish cultural treasures, and the freshly grown literary work and Marxist knowledge applied to literature and social knowledge.

On the same line as unbounded devotion to folk life and to frenetic love of the humanist ideal

Moishe Shulshteyn

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of the young revolutionary world, the following contributed: the novelist and fable poet L. Olitsky, the prose writers, D. Mitzmakher, Sh. Berlinsky, M. Dzialovsky; the poets, Kalman Lis, Y. Zilbershteyn, Y. L. Kohn, Sh. Vulman, B. Gelman, and more and more, among whom were tens of youngsters.

Besides the stream of young writers who flowed toward spring, others publishing were Y. Lerer's “My Home”, and L. Rashkin's “The People From Godlbozhitz”, where once again we see in poetic poems and analytic prose the small Jewish town which was crumbling and melting like snow. Generally in the young literature of the mid 1930s, the spirit of struggle dominated, with the spirit of belligerence and of active participation in the march for a leading humanity.

We can estimate that in all of Poland, approximately one hundred writers between the ages of 18 and 40 voluntarily mobilized to create anti–fascist literature, which began with “Young Vilna” and spread through Warsaw, Lodz and all the way to Lemberg.

The anti –fascist literature strengthened the sad hearts of the Yiddish–Polish youth who were later in the ghettos and among the partisans in the forests and continued with the same determination and the same pride, but now more with gunpowder and blood…

Many of the defenders of this literary line remained under the ruins, and very few betrayed and chose Kravtcherginsky's^[1] shameful route, and the rest carried on with state Yiddish culture in socialist Poland and with single cultural challenges in Yiddish France.

During the 50 years leading up to the Second World War Jewish life came to the line of historic resolutions.

These were years of hasty ups and downs, from economic, social, national, political, revolutionary war shocks; years in which renaissance and death, humanism and regress did not stop wrestling with each other. In the fire of this modern struggle between good and bad, Jewish life modernized and justified the bourgeois. But the small town economic structure was crumbling, the class differentiation was sharpening and aggressive anti–Semitism was becoming more and more beastly.

At the dawn of this period. the awakened emancipated folk language of the Jewish masses was uplifted in a magnificent way. The next

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50 years experienced a phenomenal growth in the shadow of Yiddish creativity of the past 700 years.

Warsaw, as the center of Polish Jewish life and the seat of the majestic literary patriarch Yitzkhak Leybush Peretz and the metropolis of future literary generations, played a vital role in this spiritual success.

These 50 historic years can be divided into four periods:

1. The last ten years of the 19^th century when the young Peretz opened Warsaw for Yiddish literature and boldly unfurled the social avant–garde brand, his militant fight for “radical progressive Jewish thought,” and his passionate striving for his “Sodom overthrow”.
2. The 15 years before the war when the first large general literary creative process began. Its beginning gave light to the revolutionary dawn of 1905 and its social pathos slowly subsided until it disappeared.
3. The 15 years of war and post war when Yiddish literature grew very quickly, both in quantity and artistically, but not enough ideologically in order to satisfy the new world emotions and hopes of the millions of highly idealistic youth.
4. The last decade under pro–fascism when a young literary generation arose, a generation that stepped with the times, along a definite line of struggle and displayed literary creativity in avant–garde socialist forms.

Everything that chokes,
Stresses,
Lives from plunder
And becomes idolized, We must be smashed.
He goes, the new person, the hero,
For God and world,
For prisons and chains;
I hear him from far,
I see his spread arms;
He is riding in full gallop,
He's going, the new person, he's coming!

The excessive Sodom from the last decade was felt in a Peretz manner like a literary obligation,

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as if they helped to turn over the chopped up super Sodom. They are now building in Poland a world of those people who lived a national dream fifty years ago.

The young worldly Poland, the newly born Warsaw, embraced with brotherly folk love the Jewish remnants and strove for Jewish life, which in lordly times grew with its head down, to grow freely and stately holding its head high. And even though the pain from the horrific cutting cannot soften, the state did everything to ensure the present Jewish existence would be filled with joy.

Can we even imagine what kind of ascension, what stratospheric heights Yiddish culture would have reached in Poland, if the millions killed had not been murdered, but lived to see the present conditions of social and national liberation? In view of the tragic unaccomplished possibilities it can be said, that our tragedy in Poland is large, not only because of the physical extermination of over 3 million Jews, but also because these millions, through their death,

[Col 544]

failed to meet the historic conditions of the new state order in Poland. It is now ten years since the surviving tens of thousands enjoy the magnificent Yiddish cultural possibilities. It is enough to present one example: 5,500 Yiddish books are published in Poland, which means four times more than in pre–war Poland which had fifty times more Jews! And it's not only the present–day Yiddish–Polish literature being published, [but] also parts of the cultural inheritance. The best fifty literary years are found now in a publishing house in Poland.

Yiddish literature, which in the new Polish reality found a secure state resting place, has entered with all its energy into a constructive phase of life with Yiddish in competition with all Polish literature. With inherited enthusiasm from the murdered millions, with the received progressive traditions of the last fifty years and with socialist optimism, it is building, in a cultural manner, the humanistic folk art of a new society.

Original footnote:

1. Dovid/David Frishman, more about the writer is found in the Book of Zgierz, where he was born into a wealthy mercantile family and was a child prodigy, perhaps explaining his attitude and sentiments to the more “common, bourgeois” writers. He graduated from the University of Breslau and died in 1922 in Berlin. Return

Translator's note:

1. The author may have been referring to Shmerke Katcherginsky but cynically refers to him as Kravtcherginsky. Return

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