Between the two world wars, Jewish Poland was the scene of competing cultural tendencies, where Yiddishist and Hebraist came to grips at every opportunity and on every level, through rival educational systems, publishing houses, political and social organizations, and in the folk, radical, and Zionist movements, where adherents of the two camps ran into the thousands. Partisanship was extreme; but an essential objectivity and humor, permitting all kinds of distortion and even personal malice when necessary, yet made it possible for the partisan of one ideology to be impressed by the devotion and integrity of his opponents.
It is against this general background of partisanship tempered with charity that the following excerpt may best be read. The author was himself a Marxian Bundist and a Yiddishist, at an opposite ideological pole from the old-fashioned rationalism and Hebraist “classicism” of Benjamin Katzenelson and his cronies; but though the author makes fun of their antiquated liberalism, it is always affectionate fun.
J. J. Trunk was born in Poland in 1887 and is at present living in New York City. This selection is from the sixth volume of his autobiographical work, Poland, of which the first three volumes have already been published and the fourth and fifth are now in the process of publication. Mr. Trunk is the author of numerous books of short stories, essays, poetry, literary, political, and cultural criticism. Benjamin Katzenelson, the subject of this memoir, was the author of a Hebrew satire, Olelot Ephraim, as well as of the poetic history, Judah Ha-Makkabi, to which Mr. Trunk refers.
The Hebrew journal Ha-Doar has pointed out in its issue of February 11, 1949 that Mr. Trunk’s memory betrayed him on some of the details of his account. The selection published here has been translated from the Yiddish by Jacob Sloan.—Ed.
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Reb Benjamin was the “idler,” if one may use the term, in this energetic household. He gave one the impression of being useless when it came to earning a living, and totally ignorant of everything that was going on in the house outside of his Hebrew verses which literally ran into the thousands, beautifully contrived according to the strict and merciless laws of meter and iambus.
Just how Reb Benjamin maintained his household before his children grew up and the Katzenelson school came into being was a mystery. Rumor had it that in his younger days Reb Benjamin Katzenelson had been a Hebrew teacher in Lodz, and his wife and children had been in dire straits. Apparently the arrow that sped so straight and true from his bow in the field of Hebrew hyperbole flew awry in the practical world. But who remembered those days? Only Madame Katzenelson—when she was in a good mood and well-disposed, all the household and the numerous guests requiring no attention for the moment—she was the only one who would pass a rare, shrewd comment revealing all that the family had gone through in Lodz when Reb Benjamin was the breadwinner.
But all that belonged to the past. At the time of which I am writing, the school was the source of a good living both for the Katzenelsons and their many friends, and Reb Benjamin was able to live entirely within the four walls of his rhymes.
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And that he did. Physiognomically, Reb Benjamin Katzenelson resembled the vestigial remains of one of those old Lithuanian maskilim in whom Torah and Enlightenment went hand and hand. He was a tall man, thin, gray-haired, and with a broad, scholarly brow. On his longish, pointed nose there almost always rested a pair of old, broken spectacles, over whose broken lenses Reb Benjamin was always peering—always, that is, except when he was reading or writing.
There was not a tooth left in his mouth. To make up for this lack he had a gray, reddish beard that shook constantly on his lower lip. Whenever Reb Benjamin spoke—and it so happened that he was fond of speaking, loud and violently—his beard would tremble in harmony with his words.
In this almost collectivistic household, Reb Benjamin was the only one who kept apart from all that was happening around him. It was no wonder; for Reb Benjamin was never unoccupied. In addition to his studies, he was busy on his gigantic life work: namely, the translation of Graetz’s (German) History of the Jews into perfect, classic Hebrew verse.
When it was that Reb Benjamin began this translation and where the first dozen reams of this work were, was something that neither Reb Benjamin nor anyone else in the world knew. It was impossible to orient oneself in the vast sea of paper and verse. The beginnings of his opus must have been lying somewhere in an attic or under the mountains of dust behind the bookcase. Complete generations of mice must have satisfied their hunger with Reb Benjamin’s verses, and probably knew them all by heart. Everyone had long ago forgotten reams of what he had written—including Reb Benjamin himself. He had no time to remember them. For, aside from the fact that this was Reb Benjamin’s life work, he had just begun on Graetz. It’s no light matter, this turning of a weighty sage into fine Hebrew measure. The years haste on in full career. Meanwhile, Reb Benjamin becomes a grandfather many times over. He dares not spare the quill. He sits over his work, literally day and night, days at the window, nights at the lamp. The half-broken spectacles rest on his nose. The house might be in a turmoil—Reb Benjamin is oblivious. He writes on and on—and the perfectly measured verses run swiftly from his pen, like hens let out of a coop.
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Every once in a while Reb Benjamin would feel an urge to see his verse in print. He would see his son Isaac’s work published; although he must have known that Isaac was a greater poet than himself, he would be moved to submit his verses to the public eye, as well.
To have printed all that Reb Benjamin wrote would have required the decimation of forests and the establishment of huge printing presses. But during the time when I used to visit the Katzenelsons a fragment of Reb Benjamin’s titanic translation of Graetz did see the light of day. His children published a small pamphlet of Reb Benjamin’s sonorous verses. There were only about fifteen or twenty pages in all, but Reb Benjamin made up for the brevity of the selection by composing a preface and postscript, full of apologies to the honored reader for the translator’s parsimony. In these appendices Reb Benjamin reckoned with the critics, sharply and in advance. Should they be so bold as to plunge their teeth into his labor of love, Reb Benjamin belabored them beforehand. The critics were described as “the filth of the human race,” “pissers against the wall,” and “daubers with whited plaster.” Every execration that the Prophets had meted out in the Bible to those who denied the living God, Reb Benjamin hurled at the audacious heads of the critics.
Yet, although he seemed always to be immersed in the superior realms and never troubled a fly in this inferior world of ours, Reb Benjamin had enemies—one might put it, enemies to the death. In the very midst of his composition, when one might have imagined that thunder and lightning could not have penetrated Reb Benjamin’s ears, it was enough for someone in the house merely to breathe the names of his two enemies. Reb Benjamin would at once begin to quiver. His bearded lip would shake, and he would scream with rage.
The names of Reb Benjamin’s two enemies were Feodor Dostoevsky and Melech Ravitsh. He never did forgive Dostoevsky as long as he lived. For Dostoevsky had made it seem in his House of the Dead that Jews wear phylacteries on Sabbath eve. Reb Benjamin could not stomach such ignorance and ill manners in a Gentile. Dostoevsky could very well have asked a rabbi, or looked into the Talmud or the Shulhan Aruch, before undertaking to describe Jews wearing phylacteries!
Reb Benjamin had a score to settle with Melech Ravitsh, too. Someone had once done a foolish thing and showed Reb Benjamin a copy of Melech Ravitsh’s long poem entitled “The Jewish People: Songs of Love and Hate.” Reb Benjamin didn’t notice the word “love,” but the “hate” immediately caught his eye. That was the end of Melech Ravitsh, as far as Reb Benjamin was concerned. The moment he heard a mention of Ravitsh’s name, he would begin to pound the table and shout, “Meshugener! (Madman!).”
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He had a name for me, too—treyfener beyn (rascal). That was because of my Bundism. Reb Benjamin Katzenelson argued that a Jew who knew Hebrew and wasn’t a complete ignoramus when it came to the Talmud, either, and could talk himself into being a Bundist, was nothing more nor less than a treyfener beyn.
Very rarely, when he was in a particularly good mood, Reb Benjamin would relax from his prodigious labors, and write Yiddish poetry. One hot summer day I came to visit Isaac Katzenelson. It so happened that old Madame Katzenelson was not in Lodz at the time. She had suffered from a severe siege of rheumatism, and the doctors had ordered her to Tzechoshinek to take the famous mud baths. In the hall I encountered Reb Benjamin. He took me cautiously by the hand, led me into a side room, closed the door behind him, and said, “Treyfener beyn, now I shall read you what I’ve written in jargon.”
He took out a sheet of paper and began to read. It was a long poem in the old-fashioned style, à la Song of Songs. A shepherdess was tending her sheep in the field of Sharon. A shepherd was sitting somewhere off on a high hill, longing for his love and playing on the flute.
When Reb Benjamin had finished reading, he asked me, “Well, treyfener beyn, and what do I mean by this?”
“The meaning is clear,” I replied. “The shepherdess is your wife. The fields of Sharon are the mud baths of Tzechoshinek. You yourself are the heartsick shepherd. The flute is the poem in jargon.”
Reb Benjamin’s beard began to shake vehemently. He looked at me over his half-broken spectacles and said hastily, “Treyfener beyn, you hit the nail on the head!”
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The doors of the Katzenelson household were always open, and it was the scene of several literary salons. All the young authors of Lodz, including even the “Young Yiddishists” headed by Moses Brozerson, who were in the midst of a bitter campaign against the “classicists,” came to see Isaac Katzenelson. An armistice had been proclaimed in the Katzenelson household.
There was a literary salon surrounding Reb Benjamin, too. It consisted of the old maskilim, one-time Hebrew writers who still wrote in the magazines Ha-Magid and Ha-Melitz—names that had been on every tongue during the period of the Enlightenment. The generation that had worshiped them lay buried in the cemeteries of Poland and Lithuania. The current of the times had borne these authors to Lodz; they were like the trunks that remain in a ravaged forest. Old, desolate, forgotten, they came to the Katzenelsons to drink a glass of tea and talk about the old bygone days and to engage in dialectics with Reb Benjamin over a question of grammar or the interpretation of a difficult biblical verse or a moot question in the Talmud.
One of these forgotten men and one who would sit at the Katzenelsons for days on end and into the night, and practically belonged to the household, was Meyer Funner.
It was as hard to tell exactly how old Meyer Funner was as it is to tell the age of a mummy at a glance. Meyer Funner resembled a drowned body rescued from a watery grave where it has been lying for generations. He was the embodiment of the vanity of all human hopes for survival; his whole physiognomy was a revelation of the meaning of human decline and the proof of mortality. All the vital juices had dried up in him, as in a shrunken tree. His dark skin was drawn taut like parchment over the skeleton of his body, which was no more than a collection of bones. The longish shard of a head resembled a skull which some archaeologist had dug up in a remote sandy wilderness. The few gray hairs which still grew on his skull added to the grotesqueness of his appearance. Funner had a gray, sparse beard and two pointed, rotten teeth in the front of his sunken mouth. He was almost always coughing and groaning. Whenever Funner spoke he coughed as though everything inside him was falling to pieces. His hands were long and green-black with age—his fingers were long, and when Funner slept they seemed to point at the air. His clothes appeared to be rotting, as though they had come out of a grave. Everything hung awkwardly on him. His shoelaces were always untied, so that he scuffled when he walked . . .
But Meyer Funner was full of literary ambition.
Funner wrote dramas, mostly on Biblical themes. It is hard to tell whether these dramas had any value whatsoever. What was remarkable was the fact that Funner, who was a learned man and versed in Hebrew and Hebraic metaphor, wrote a wooden and clumsy style. He had been writing constantly from his earliest youth, and he did not let off till the last day of his life. Before committing his dramas to paper—i.e., while he was still pregnant with them—Funner would act out the most dramatic scenes for us. When I first visited the Katzenelsons and heard Funner bursting with passion as he recited lines out of his play, I was literally terror-stricken. As he acted his body shook with prolonged, damp coughs. Funner stretched out his long, bony, dark fingers, like a ghost out of the world of chaos.
Meyer Funner considered himself the Hebrew Shakespeare. Though as he shuffled through the Katzenelson household in unlatched shoes he knew that every day might be his last, he steadfastly awaited the recognition of his great talents. He was fond of describing the theater that would be erected in his name in Jerusalem, where his dramas would eventually come into their own in the presence of vast audiences.
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The relationship between Meyer Funner and Reb Benjamin Katzenelson was a very curious one. Funner considered Reb Benjamin old-fashioned, and often gave him a good talking to on that subject The two of them never conversed on any subject other than the Torah and the Enlightenment. In this respect they were both well-equipped. The climax of their conversations occurred when they arrived at the subject of Hasidism. Reb Benjamin Katzenelson was probably the last of the Polish disciples of the Vilna Gaon. He still regarded the Hasidim and Hasidism through the eyes of the Vilna Gaon and the bygone maskilim. Hasidim to him were either traitors to the Torah or fanatic children of darkness. Meyer Funner, on the other hand, in his role as the eternal avant-gardist and revolutionary, ardently defended the Hasidic way. Reb Benjamin Katzenelson would brandish his strongest weapon, shouting, “How can an intelligent man possibly oppose the Vilna Gaon?” Funner would begin to cough and retort that he considered the Vilna Hon (hen) no authority.
That was all he needed to say. Reb Benjamin’s beard would begin to tremble like a tree in a storm. He would pound his fists on the table and let fly at Funner with quotations from the sages. Funner would fly right back with other quotations from the sages. The upshot would be that no one would be able to make out a word they were shouting. Reb Benjamin would wave his fists and sit down to resume his compositions. Funner would be shaken by a siege of coughing in which he threatened to cough up his innards. Eventually, Madame Katzenelson would placate Funner with a glass of hot tea, which she would set before him with a good-humored smile. Then he would shuffle into Isaac Katzenelson’s room to meet the young Yiddish writers.
It was a source of great satisfaction to Funner to sit down with Moses Broderzon and the “Young Yiddishists.” Though he thought their poetry trash, Funner was always impressed by extravagance and the principle of contrariety. He couldn’t take much part in their fiery conversations, but his eyes would burn in his dark skull when he finally succeeded in diverting the conversation to talk of bygone days. Then, coughing and groaning, he would speak of women whose hearts he had once broken, peppering his reminiscences with tidbits of literary gossip.
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The second of Benjamin Katzenelson’s dose friends, Karlofsky, came very seldom. He was a paralytic elderly bachelor who was bedridden. Every once in a while, his disciple and aide, Shemayah Zimmerman, would dress him, carry him downstairs, set him in a droshke, and drive him off to the Katzenelsons.
To Karlofsky, his visit to the Katzenelsons was the one happy day in his paralyzed year, one which he looked forward to from the pillows of his bed. But Reb Benjamin, despite his delight at the infrequent visits of an old friend who had been a brilliant scholar in the yeshiva in Volozhin, it was a painful occasion. He didn’t dare to scream or pound the table, though every word Karlofsky spoke threw him into a rage. Reb Benjamin knew that Karlofsky was a paralytic who doctors said would be placed in mortal danger by the slightest excitement. Karlofsky might, God forbid, breathe out his last in Reb Benjamin’s house if Reb Benjamin were to utter a word in opposition—and Reb Benjamin might have in his old age to bear a human life on his conscience, God forbid. Reb Benjamin spent most of the visit biting his tongue, as he listened to Karlofsky, sitting opposite him on a chair converted into a bed, hurling brimstone and fire at the Jewish faith and people.
Apparently the paralytic’s tongue was steeped in the sayings of the sage of blessed memory, whom he reviled and mocked. For every Amora or Tana that came to Karlofsky’s lips was subjected to another invidious appellation. In addition, he poured forth a constant stream of angry invective at the Jewish people. Reb Benjamin Katzenelson would practically burst. He would bite his fists to keep quiet. At the height of his rage, Karlofsky would subside into a faint, and his eyes would glaze over, as though he were on the verge of death. Then his disciple, Shemayah Zimmerman, would wrap him in a warm blanket, both winter and summer, drive him home in a droshke, and lay him back in bed, where he would remain until next Yom Kippur or the next visit to the Katzenelsons. . . .
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