Modernism and the Yiddish Imagination: A Conversation with Gennady Estraikh

Gennady Estraikh

YIVO’s Director of Education, Jennifer Young, sat down with Gennady Estraikh, YIVO’s inaugural Albert B. Ratner Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish Literature, to ask him about the evening class he will be teaching at YIVO, “Modernism and the Yiddish Imagination.” The class will meet for six sessions on Tuesday evenings, 6:30-8:30, beginning October 28th. Click here for more information, and to register.

JY: This class is for a general audience, using Yiddish works in translation. What would you say to people who haven’t read Yiddish literature before, but are interested in doing so?

GE: There is a remarkable gap between the high quality of numerous Yiddish literary works, including those that are accessible in English translations, and the extremely low number of their readers. I rest the blame for this on Jewish educators and Jewish editors and journalists. Or even on the old generation of Jewish intellectuals who trained the educators and journalists of our day, leaving them chronically ignorant in relation to everything related to our Eastern European heritage. Nowadays the challenge is not so much to educate people “beyond” Sholem Aleichem and Peretz as to explain that Yiddish literature really exists. In 2003, when I began to teach at New York University, the vast majority of students never read Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, but they usually recognized their names. This name recognition has almost disappeared since then. Speaking about the authors “beyond” the Yiddish classic writers, I can promise—and this promise is based on my almost 30-year-long experience of working in Yiddish literature and teaching it—that reading of their works will bring two pleasures: of aesthetic enrichment, and of knowledge, most notably knowledge of Jewish cultural heritage.

JY: Are you teaching any of your favorite texts in this class?

GE: I always tend to be selfish when I compile a curriculum for a literary class. Luckily, we have a significant corpus of English translations, so I can choose the works that I really like. As a rule, students also like them. David Bergelson is one of my “favorites,” perhaps because for many years he has been a protagonist in my academic studies.

JY: How important were the various movements of literary modernism to Yiddish literature? What writers do you consider fit most into the model of European modernism? How did they innovate within this genre? What conventions or boundaries did they push?

GE: Over a century ago, when Bergelson published his first literary text, some literary critics accused him of betraying Jewish literary traditions. In a somewhat different context, David Roskies coined the term of “creative betrayal.” Indeed, departure from what was considered to be “quintessentially Jewish” often defined the route chosen by Yiddish modernists. For their time, a century or so ago, it was really revolutionary. When I read for my research socialist Yiddish publications of the turn of the 20th century, I can feel particularly clearly the iconoclasm of Yiddish modernist writers’ move beyond the conventions and boundaries. I feel it because even socialists, who were afraid to detect in themselves any trace of what they perceived as nationalism, wrote their articles in a some sort of a magedish (“preacherish”) style, using the vocabulary and allusions of their audience, which continued to live in their essentially traditional world, binary divided into “Jewish” and “goyish.”

JY: You will be teaching my all-time favorite Yiddish modernist novel, Dovid Bergelson’s Nokh alemen, recently translated by Joseph Sherman as “The End of Everything.” This novel is noteworthy for its strong female protagonist. Would you say that there are specific issues Yiddish writers had to address in terms of gender? What does it say that novels like Nokh alemen came from Bergelson, and not from a female author?

GE: To a considerable degree, Yiddish literary circles, especially in the early 20th century, represented “gentlemen’s clubs.” Men were the first to discuss gender-related issues. They felt that the position of women was a very important, or even the most important, test for any society. Let alone that the same “test” was characteristic of writers in other languages. We have to remember that many Jewish intellectuals, including Yiddish writers, came out of “Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s kheyder.” His Russian novel What Is to Be Done had shaped their views on many things, including the role and the rights of women.

JY: Like Bergelson, Moyshe Kulbak chose to live and write in the Soviet Union. While he benefited from state support of his work, the results were ultimately tragic. Yet works like Zelmenyaners (in a new translation by Hillel Halkin) are indelible. How would you describe Kulbak’s prose? Is there something in Kulbak’s ironic, tragic humor that is particularly Soviet in style or theme?

GE: This is one of the perennial questions: Why did Kulbak (and Bergelson, etc.) return to the Soviet Union and how would their life and creativity have developed outside of Stalin’s empire? My answer is a short one: I don’t know. Perhaps they would have joined many other Yiddish literati, who were chronically unhappy, embittered, and would finally die of natural causes rather than in Soviet prisons and camps. It is clear to me that they felt unhappy in such places as Vilna, Berlin, and New York and sincerely believed that the Soviet Union formed the best environment for their Yiddish literary activities. Kulbak would not have written Zelmenyaners in Vilna or anywhere else outside the Soviet Union. This is a Soviet work.

JY: Hillel Halkin has said, “…to translate a great master - Agnon, Sholem Aleichem - it's like being the dance partner of the greatest dancer: your job is to keep up with that person.” How does translation change Yiddish literature? What are the biggest challenges you find in teaching Yiddish in translation?

GE: We know that translations certainly lose some qualities of the original. Still, they are in the language which students can read. Unfortunately, many interesting authors/works remain inaccessible in English. This is the biggest challenge.

JY: As the inaugural Albert Ratner Chair here at YIVO, you will be conducting research as well as teaching. What project are you working on at the moment?

GE: In May, I finished writing a book on Yiddish literary life in Moscow. This will be my first monograph written in Russian. According to my contract with the publisher, it will be out by mid-February 2015. This book had interrupted my other project, a book on American Yiddish socialists’ relations with Bolshevism. During the summer I returned to this topic. It would be difficult to find a better place for working on it than at YIVO, which has such rich collections of publications and archival materials on both America and the Soviet Union.