Menahem Boraisha’s autobiographical essay on his career as a poet falls into two parts, the first of which we presented last month. In it he discusses his own stubborn clinging to traditional Jewish values, as against the newer “cult” of the individual practiced by his fellow writers. Here, in the last half of the essay, Boraisha describes a second obstacle between himself and his contemporaries, the “cult of art.” Of particular interest are Boraisha’s reference to Judah Halevi as the ideal Jewish poet writing in an “alien” milieu; and his oblique criticism of his own mentor, Judah Leib Peretz, for exploiting figures from the past to create the illusion of integrated faith. Both selections (in my translation from the Yiddish) are printed with the permission of the author’s widow and literary executor, Mrs. Sarah Boraisha.—Jacob Sloan

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The controversy between Judaism and Hellenism was not, in reality, concerned with beauty or form. If it is a question of writing, the Bible stands as a remarkable monument to style. . . . Nor did the controversy revolve around the applied arts, which aim to give a holiday decorativeness to everyday life. Rather, Judaism took issue with Hellenism where it perceived that beauty represented an attempt to overwhelm or expunge entirely the other attributes of Divinity. For Judaism, the injunction against making graven images is in effect a warning lest those creations of art should become gods, and art itself idolatry.

It was inevitable that in my time the cult of the liberated self should be coupled with the cult of art. Both were part of the Emancipation, of secularization. Bereft of religion, men looked for values and guidance to intellectuals—to party leaders. The artist supplanted the master of miracles—the charismatic man imbued with the spirit of holiness. All liberation movements, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, social as well as national, have handed over to the artist this important dominating role. But it may be said that we Jews have had the deepest need to slake our thirst for charisma and holiness.

Then, too, it was relatively easier for us to raise up the cult of art. It was, in the first place, only a continuance of the older cult of letters. Secondly, the cult of art was introduced gradually, in easy stages: we moved from pious morality books to enlightened morality books, thence to folk literature and from there to revolutionary literature. In general, the cult of art had become part of the new secular life; but to the Yiddish writers of my generation it became a priestly vocation. . . . They wrapped themselves and the vessels with which they conducted their sacred service in mantles of untouchability; they became a caste.

Judah Halevi is the prime example of a Jewish poet writing in a milieu of a thoroughgoing secular culture. Halevi, in the content and the form of his writings, made his due obeisance to secularism; yet essentially he remained a national and religious poet who was at the same time, inseparably, a builder and defender of his faith. We in our time have had four writers in the tradition of Judah Halevi—Peretz, Bialik, Liesin, Yehoash. . . . In the writings of each of these, the secular and individualistic strand parallels the traditional, nationalist strand. . . . It was not until this group of direct inheritors of Judah Halevi’s eclecticism had gone that the strict demands of pure art began to make themselves felt. . . .

The world-wide intellectual upheavals, the social revolutions of our time, national catastrophes, settlement of new continents, messianic tempests and movements, all have thrust pure poetry into the role of poetry of idea; all life has tended to generalize the personal. Poetry that insisted on remaining stubbornly individualistic was isolated, provincial in the wide country of literature. . . .

On the other hand, art took the position that general ideas and motifs should be sieved through emotion and individual experience; art must transform ideas by its image and vision into song, must purify and refine away all the crudities in its particular vessels—diction, rhythm, verse, rhyme. . . . Never leaving its ivory tower, art nevertheless retained complete sovereignty. And it almost managed to keep out the third element of Judah Halevi’s triad—faith—completely.

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Now, the literature that my generation produced . . . contains a wealth of sacred and visionary elements. In the lyric poetry, these derive from the poet himself. But in the epic and dramatic poetry, and in the prose writings, they are expressed in dramatic characters which antedate the break with the synagogue. Peretz was the first to slake his own thirst for faith by constructing figures of great believers from the Hasidic prayer rooms and the rabbis’ courts; the other writers then imitated him. The stronger tradition’s imperative became—the imperative of a whole faith—the more the poet went back to history, to his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather. Perhaps in the future someone will take all the religious elements shining through our literature and put them together into a systematic whole.

My generation could not accomplish that task. Not that we lacked vision. Rarely has a generation had so much collective vision as the one that produced the new Jewish literature. But something stood in the way, preventing a synthesis between the generation and its realization of its vision. What stood in the way was not only intellectual differences of opinion: it was the idolatry of pure art. We dared not put a foot outside the limits of the territory where art reigned supreme. . . .

I remained outside the grand mansion of art. . . . My first conscious reply to the “pure” poets was my book Sand. It had a national idea, clearly impressed on every page. Nothing more or less than a morality book. The critic S. Niger put it gently when he spoke of my book as a reversion to the “congregation of Israel.” He really showed me mercy. For here was a man deliberately reverting, in this day and age, to tendentiousness and moralizing. Here was a man who was using art to preach an idea. Had he succeeded? How could he have! It was the first attempt in the poetry of that time to represent Judaism not through the whole faith of our grandfathers but in the atomized faith of their grandchildren. It did not succeed because the canvas was too large, the individual figures never came to life; the morality and lyricism were constantly clashing; and, perhaps most important, it could not succeed because my generation could not abide the idea of a conspiracy against art.

But for me this was the beginning of a war against art, a war that derived from the deep-rooted conviction that the Jewish concept of art had to be different from that of the rest of the world, just as our faith and our passage through history were different. . . . Year after year, I received blows and dealt them. I learned that to defeat art you have to use its own arsenal, transforming language and character. But at bottom I fooled no one, neither the dedicated priests in the temple of art nor myself. For me the war would never end until—with or without the vessels of art—I could see before my eyes the full vision of my spiritual journey in the modern world, just as my great-grandfather saw his spiritual journey through his world. . . . Perhaps a later generation will attribute more significance to my stubborn journey toward the unachieved than to my clumsy blundering.

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