When Menahem Boraisha died in 1949, he had finally achieved the artistic statement of “a faith that is whole” for which he struggled his entire life. His Der Geyer, an epic poem published in two volumes in 1933, describing the spiritual and physical journeys of an itinerant Jewish penitent during the 19th century, had gained him both critical and popular renown. He had, in his forty-fifth year, in the phrase of his early master, I. L. Peretz, grown strong wings and flown high.
The account that follows, from Boraisha’s volume A Dor (“A Generation”), published in 1947, is important both for its honest insight into his own limitations as poet, and for the light it sheds upon his milieu and the problems of his generation. Boraisha was certainly not alone in sensing the dilemma of a period between faiths—he was preceded and followed by Jewish authors describing the same dilemma in Hebrew and Yiddish, and, latterly, in the European languages as well. As he notes, the Jewish intellectuals and artists of the 19th century came to the Emancipation later than the rest of Europe, and Jewish religion had been a stronger force over a longer period—hence, the peculiarly violent reaction of Jews to the Enlightenment. Hence, too, the persistence of the problem of faith for modern Jews as a social phenomenon, not only a personal one. Judaism, as Boraisha puts it, is an imperative heritage from our forefathers; taken on its own terms, it has to be either accepted or rejected. Read from this vantage, as a self-conscious literary rebel’s statement of a common, almost mass feeling, Boraisha’s testament assumes new dimensions. The translation from the Yiddish is mine.—Jacob Sloan
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The eight years I studied under Peretz, he derived—I think—more sorrow than joy from my work. He was a patient master with a vast fund of warmth. At times we actually fell in love with one another—then would come a reaction, and he would deliberately turn away and ignore me, as though to punish both of us. But the separation hurt him, and he could never hold out for long. . . . Still, it came hard for him, drumming the laws of literature into my head. In the beginning he used to rework my poems himself. I literally held my head reading his “revisions.” Then he stopped. I was supposed to “improve” myself. But I kept coming back to him with material he just couldn’t digest. Once it was a long prose poem about death, full of abstractions and pathos. Peretz heard me out patiently—after his manner. Then he took me to a wall where a group of Leviton’s landscapes hung. He stopped before one of them, a painting of naked trees, a cold pond, and a hut surrounded by a fence. Peretz said, “You see—this is death, and life, and everything.”
I understood exactly what he meant. But I couldn’t go along with Peretz. I continued to follow my own bent.
Peretz had a much easier time with the other writers, who took the high road. He never knew where he stood with me. Once he said in a public survey of the young writers: “Menahem will either grow strong wings and fly high, or nothing will come of him.” And he kept urging me: “Study! Study! Others may not need it. But you do! You’ve got to study a lot.” . . .
Reviewing those forty years, I can see that mine was a tremendous generation. The people I sat down to table with—from Mendele Mocher Seforim, Isaac Leib Peretz, Sholom Aleichem, Chaim Rachman Bialik, to the merest tyro—what a wonderful blossoming of talent! But between me and them stood barriers. The barriers were inside me; at first I couldn’t, and afterward I didn’t want to break them down.
I came on the scene at a time when many of my generation were freshly drunk with the revolution that Europe had experienced generations before: the liberation of man—that is, man’s liberation from the yoke of the Divine. In Spinoza’s pantheism man was still inextricably joined to the Divinity. By the time of Kant, man had advanced to the center of the stage, and God was a kind of symbol for ethical perfection. To Auguste Comte man sat on the Divine throne. Man was the beginning and man was the end. In art the liberation from theology began during the Renaissance. By the time the state finally separated from the church, art had long been free of that bondage. This was true of Christianity in Europe. But even under the harshest dictatorship of the church, man was able to “live as himself” far more freely in Christian Europe than he ever could under our Jewish regime of a “whole faith.” So the revolution went much deeper with us.
In terms of society, my generation was able to tie itself to new faiths, social and national, to which they carried over their forefathers’ devotion, their total immersion, and their intolerance. But this immersion in new faiths was followed by a powerful stream of individualistic liberation, the construction of a new cult, the cult of man, of the self, of the unfettered personality. This cult was the basis for the new literature of our day. For the first time since the Bible and Aggada, Jewish writing concerned itself with the individual, his experiences, visions, longings. This was in narrative literature. In poetry, particularly the lyric, the cult of the self opened two doors that had always been closed to the pious, unassuming Jew before: doors leading to nakedness and to egocentricity. If the world can best be seen through the self, and the self is the center of all things, then inevitably everything that takes place in the self is raised to the stature of a cosmic event, and he who possesses the power to sing of these events becomes creation’s elect and may kneel at his own feet.
This leap to the self, the act of placing oneself at the center of creation, was one I could not make. My feeling for my forefathers made me shiver at the thought that people could turn themselves into mirrors in which to regard the heavens and the earth. I was ashamed of the nakedness and revolted at the egocentricity. That does not mean that I did not share my generation’s drive to write poems about self. I used to think out such poems, but not write them down. Or else I used the device of writing self-poetry disguised as folk literature. It was not until years later that I conceived the idea of adopting pseudonyms and writing lyric poetry under the names of Zavel Rimer and Noach Markom. The little I published under my own name involved me in psychological traumas: it came as hard as crossing the Red Sea.
The critic Baal Machashovos said I was sick. What was I sick from? Looking at my generation from the distance of forty years, I can see it now: most of them left God with a light heart and achieved their personal salvation. To me the departure was like a sharp break, and I never got over it. Never! In the poetry of my generation, the word “God” became a metaphor. Never to me. I never lost my awe of God. I longed to place myself back in a system of faith that was whole, integrated, and though the center of such a system was gone, I never lost the sense of “place,” where the center ought to be. The center absent, all the impulses and themes flowing from the surface of the self were bound to the here and now. You might as well write popular librettos, if that was all. I was driven to search for that which lies above and beyond the here and now, and I preferred the foolish attempt to scale a blank wall, preferred to fall and be injured time and again—rather than to take the “safe and sound” king’s highway. In a loyal master like Peretz this called forth doubt and sorrow. In others—derogation and mockery. But I had no choice. Scaling blank walls was in me, it was my imperative heritage from forefathers who demanded I achieve a faith that was whole.
[A second selection from this essay will follow.]
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