To the Editor:
One cannot praise too highly the excellent contributions Mr. Judd Teller has been making to your magazine, and most recently his “Yiddish Litterateurs and American Jews” (July).
The decline of Yiddish literature is always explained on sociological grounds—the steep falling-off in the number of Yiddish-reading Jews. But this never quite satisfied me. There was something wrong in the writing itself, surely a literary decline also has a literary reason. And now Mr. Teller has pointed out the literary reason: modern Yiddish letters’ loss of relevance and reality. . . . It is a brilliant article.
Marvin Morris
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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To the Editor:
May I express my disappointment with Judd L. Teller’s lampoon of “Yiddish Litterateurs and American Jews” in your July issue? As history it is unrealistic, as criticism unfair, as humor too obviously time-serving to be moving. From the very outset one is startled to find that the “three recent deaths” which Mr. Teller in his lead endows with “special . . . significance” are not those of such colorful major figures as, say, Abraham Reisin, Mani Leib, or David Ignatoff, but of individuals whose importance is anecdotal. Thus a keynote of levity is struck which is, I think, out of keeping with COMMENTARY’S educational responsibilities.
There is no disputing the facts that Yiddish readership has declined substantially, that the level of technical excellence of Yiddish literature has never been higher than now, that the novel has been underemphasized to the advantage of poetry and the smaller forms of fiction. And yet:
- It is absurd to judge a literature by the antics of its bohemian fringe. The flourishing of the kibitsarnye, of which the majority of Yiddish readers has never heard, was no more an index of the state of health of Yiddish letters than its demise.
- Mr. Teller’s statistics contradict his thesis. A community which can boast that three and one-half per cent of its newspaper readers buy the books of one of its most sophisticated poets—an assertion made by Teller with regard to H. Leivick—would be the envy of the world’s literary giants.
- Mr. Teller’s theory that the formal experimentation, the aestheticism, the personal withdrawal and lack of communal interests on the part of writers between the wars, are to blame for Yiddish literature’s loss of reader-Ship in his country is farfetched. The departure from the traditionally didactic function of literature should have appealed to the Americanized Jew rather than estranged him. And despite the fact that today Yiddish writing overflows with “Jewish content,” it has not been regaining very much of the audience it lost in the United States.
- Mr. Teller’s analogy between weltliche yidishkeit and Reform Judaism is astigmatic, since these are opposite poles, not equivalents. The identification of secular Judaism with Yiddishism is an outright error of fact, since the most creative and dynamic wings of “Hebraism” and Zionism have also been varieties of weltliche yidishkeit. The old cliché, “language fetishism,” is as little applicable to Yiddishism as it is to the revival of Hebrew. I would have expected Mr. Teller to realize that Yiddishism was a major and brilliant development in Jewish cultural history, the creative self-discovery of a people, the return of a great part of Jewry to group sanity after a century of maskilic self-hatred. . . .
- The period of Yiddish literary history which Mr. Teller discusses was one in which a considerable number of talented individuals achieved a spiritual balance so steady and a cultural self-assurance so great that, for a few brief decades, they felt free to write of anything that interested them as human beings, yet to write it naturally in their own language without knuckling down linguistically to the environment. This was not an emptying of Jewish content, as Mr. Teller alleges, but a liberation from the bonds of traditional life (to which another cliché, namely “ghetto,” is so often applied); it was parallel to simultaneous developments in Palestinian literature where, for analogous reasons, the exclusive preoccupation with Jewish subject matter, characteristic of an earlier age, was also being abandoned. . . .
- Mr. Teller’s grossest fault is the treatment of American Yiddish literature as a self-enclosed body of writing. In all its mature years, Yiddish literature has been a world literature. American Yiddish authors wrote for readers in Eastern Europe and every other part of the world, and vice versa, just as Elyohu Bokher, writing his Yiddish poetry in 15th-century Italy, had in mind his audience in Germany or Poland, while little Holland in the 17th and 18th centuries supplied all of Jewish Europe with Yiddish books. It is no more possible to understand the history of Yiddish literature in America all by itself than it is to tell the full story of American English literature without reference to Great Britain. There is a legitimate place in our literature for the creative group to whom Americanization—which Mr. Teller praises as a supreme virtue—was an undesirable form of regionalization, of provincialism. (I am referring, of course, to their literary activities; in everyday life these people were as devotedly and intelligently American as the next person.) It is the world scale of Yiddish writing that is of lasting interest, not the long stale arguments about who is an “assimilationist.” . . .
The major contribution by America to this decline of readership is of course the dismal failure of Jewish education in the United States, not the aesthetic trends among the writers. The American Jew who “shed Yiddish” got rid not of “excess baggage . . . unnecessary to his Jewishness,” but of part of his Jewishness itself. . . .
Mr. Teller might have devoted a less cute and more significant article to the question of how an immigrant group that was barely literate in Western culture and that had never had the good fortune of studying its own language and literature in school nevertheless succeeded in bringing forth a group of literary artists who—as is being realized in ever wider circles—are the equal of any other contemporary literature.
Uriel Weinreich
Columbia University
New York City
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Mr. Teller writes:
- It is not true that I judged American Yiddish literature “by the antics of its bohemian fringe.” I judged it on its own merits and in terms of its relationship to the American Jewish community. The bohemian fringe nonetheless provides a gauge of sorts. Writers on the American literary renascence of the early decades of this century refer nostalgically to the Chicago and Greenwich Village bohemias. Why then is the Yiddish bohemia disclaimed like a purple past? Why are Yiddish writers prudishly outraged by its recall?
- Professor Weinreich implies that I have exaggerated the number of Yiddish book purchasers, and perhaps he is correct.
- Professor Weinreich, not I, introduces such indefinable terms as “Jewish content” and “nationalism” into the discussion. All I said was that American Yiddish letters, in the period under discussion, failed to relate itself to the contemporary American Jew, his interests, preoccupations, etc. One can argue endlessly whether a literature should be didactic or not. But that a vital literature belongs to and reflects time and locale, cannot be disputed. It is in this area that American Yiddish letters have failed.
- Weltliche yidishkeit is generally, and almost exclusively, related to Yiddishism. Hebraism related itself to centuries of literary and philosophic creativity, including the Talmud and other classic works of Hebrew literature. Zionism was rooted in Messianism and proposed to preserve Jewish identity by means of statehood. States are a classic form of self-preservation. Yiddishism alone banked on language and nothing else. (The failure, by the way, to relate oneself to one’s community is not necessarily cosmopolitanism; it may very well be provincialism. There was nothing parallel in this to “Palestinian literature.” Bialik, Agnon, Lamdan, Uri Zvi Green-berg, and even Tcernichovsky and Schneyur disprove Professor Weinreich’s contention.) Dr. Weinreich confuses Yiddishism with the Yiddish renascence, which was initiated by latter-day Zionists and Hebraist maskilim.
- My paragraph 3 above can serve as a reply to Professor Weinreich’s point 5.
- It is true, obviously, that American Yiddish literature is not a self-enclosed body of writing and that the period under discussion is not a self-contained time-entity. But do we not discuss British letters separately and American letters separately, although both are written in English? And in considering American literature, do we not often discuss the various regional schools?
The yeshivas did not aim to produce Yiddish readers. It was the Yiddishist schools that set themselves this aim. Yet it is generally conceded that the yeshivas have produced more Yiddish newspaper readers than the Yiddishist schools. Perhaps Professor Weinreich should blame the decline of Yiddish readership not on “the dismal failure of Jewish education in the United States,” but on the “dismal failure of Yiddishist education”?
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