Among the poets most associated with that movement were Aaron Glantz-Leyeles (1889-1966), Yankev Glatshteyn (1896-1971), N. B. Minkoff (1893-1958), and Yankev Stodolsk (1890-1962). Starting around the time of the First World War, a new wave of immigration to New York brought fresh young writers who became part of a third wave of Yiddish poetry that reflected an acute split within the labor movement: between those who supported or at least had high hopes for the daring new Soviet experiment and those who opposed it early on as a deceptive evil. By the mid-1920s, the two camps had coalesced around two daily Yiddish newspapers.
Opponents of the Soviet Union were led by Abraham Cahan (1860-1951),
founding editor of the Forverts (the Jewish Daily Forward). The
pro-Soviets grouped around Moyshe Olgin (1878-1939), founding editor
of the Freiheit (Frayhayt). The Forverts had been around since the
spring of 1897. The Freiheit arose a quarter century later, in the
spring of 1922, as an enterprise of the pro-Soviet Yiddish movement,
and had positive attitudes toward (and affiliations with) the
American Communist Party, though most Freiheit writers and the vast
majority of readers were not members.
The literary quality of the Yiddish used and the sophistication of the literary criticism were palpably higher in the Freiheit. Rather than try to sell papers through sensationalism, the Freiheit taught tens of thousands of immigrant workers to appreciate the creativity of the most serious modern Yiddish culture. Unlike all the other Yiddish newspapers in New York, which stuck to the late 19th and early 20th-century Germanized spelling, the Freiheit adopted the mainstream modern spelling used by nearly all leading American Yiddish writers of the 20th century. The Freiheit did not adopt the radical Soviet spelling, or its “compromise” offshoot, the YIVO variant proposed in the late 1930s; a typical page of a 1930s issue of the Freiheit, as irony would have it, is spelled almost identically to a number of Orthodox publications in the early 21st century. The Forverts camp became known in Yiddish as Di Rekhte (“those of the Right”); the Freiheit camp as Di Linke (“those of the Left”). The twin mottos on the front page of every day’s Forverts, to either side of the name of the paper, were “Workers of the world unite!” and “The liberation of the workers depends on the workers themselves!” And that was the “rightwing” paper! This third period of American Yiddish poetry may be referred to as the “Left-Right Rift.” The strife between the camps was its constant feature and, not infrequently, its genuine inspiration. A sense of after-the-fact regret frequently accrues to that sharp divisiveness within Yiddish literature in America and all the “might have beens” about the differences unity could have made. Who knows? A counter-argument is just as potent: that the contentious spirit of the times, and the intense literary competitiveness engendered between the two camps, were stimulants that spurred these circles to make New York a magnificent center of Yiddish literary output in the interbellum period. Much of the output of Di Linke remains unknown today, however, even to the most serious students of Yiddish literature — due to American Yiddish political correctness. Between the world wars, the successes of Yiddish in the Soviet Union
were impressive. Here was a language, without a country or serious
ambitions for becoming the national language of a nation-state,
being given official status as one of a number of national languages
in areas where it was widely spoken; where the government financed a
system of education in Yiddish, from kindergarten through
university-level institutes; where post offices and courts “spoke in
Yiddish” in regions with dense Yiddish-speaking populations; where
Yiddish prose and poetry flourished and Yiddish writers were paid
for their work (true paradise, it would appear, for the poets of,
say, Delancey Street who worked in the garment industry and other
manual labor jobs to keep themselves alive).
By the 1930s, there was extensive Communist Party meddling in the content and form of literature, and in the later years of the decade the Yiddish school systems were dismantled. The late 1920s Birobidzhan experiment — establishment of a Jewish “homeland” in the Soviet Far East — was also ringing hollow by the later 1930s, while Jewish settlement in Palestine, by contrast, was succeeding ever more in building a viable state with the newly-minted Hebrew-based language as its medium. It would be easy to argue that history happened to go Abe Cahan’s way, not Moyshe Olgin’s, because Cahan was prepared to be more receptive to the Zionist cause than Olgin and the Communist Party were. But things are never that simple. Within New York Yiddish culture, the Freiheit took the lead in exposing Hitlerism for what it was from the first moment. Anti-Jewish laws and actions in Germany, even when directed against “capitalist Jewish institutions,” were exposed in front-page headlines. The unrelenting exposure of the fascist threat was no mean feat in the early and mid-1930s. Still, the balance of a rapidly evolving history was tipping in the direction of the Rekhte, a tilt encouraged, at least in part, by a number of concrete events, each of which led to the defections of major writers from the Linke to the Rekhte. First were the Arab riots in Hebron in 1929, which left sixty murdered and sixty-seven injured Jewish men, women, and children. For the Rekhte, the need to support the Jewish cause in these circumstances changed their attitude toward Zionism from negative to sympathetic. For Olgin and the Linke, the cues on such matters came from the Party line, which considered it necessary to see the Arab perspective and not reach conclusions based on one’s own ethnic background. After first blaming Muslim fanatics, the Freiheit reversed itself and adopted the Party line, which saw anti-imperialist virtue in the Arab riots. This led to the first major spate of defections to the Rekhte, including the masters Boraisha, Leivick, Raboy and Reisen, whose declarations were published in the September 27th, 1929 issue of Literarishe Bleter in Warsaw. The editor of that prestigious journal, Nakhmen Mayzl (1887-1966), wrote an editorial two weeks later begging Yiddish writers of all political stripes to foreswear the new internecine war of mutual destruction, boycotts, public disownings, and constant personal attacks in the press. A leftist himself, he noted with dismay how the Soviet press had suddenly turned the Freiheit resigners into “enemies of the people” after years in which they had been “heroes of the people.” A decade later, in August, 1939, the Hitler-Stalin pact engendered similar results in Yiddish New York: Moyshe Nadir was among the literary luminaries who walked away from the Linke. Others, however, saw the pact as a clever way to stop Hitler’s eastward advance that would open an opportunity for escape for as many Jews as possible — for after the dismemberment of Poland in September, 1939, the humiliation and ghettoization of Jews on the German-held side of the newly established border contrasted starkly with the situation in the Soviet-allotted territories to the east.
Notwithstanding the
dismantling of cultural and educational institutions in the
religious, Hebrew and mainstream Yiddish spheres, the Soviet side
provided physical safety, the development of Soviet Yiddish culture,
and, for the first time in these regions, anti-racist laws that even
imposed a fine for the use of racial slurs. With all the faults of
the Soviet system, the Nazi regime on the west side of the new line
made life on the Soviet side look pretty good. And after the Germans
attacked the USSR and overran the Soviet-held areas in late June,
1941, the Soviet communists became close allies of the Americans and
British, and the Freiheit’s position was strengthened for some
years. The Holocaust struck a devastating blow to all Yiddish writers, and
it is hardly a surprise that many (by no means all) wrote much of
their most original work before its full scope became widely known.
The calamitous realization that the civilization in which their
language was native had been destroyed in a mostly successful war of
annihilation was, for the majority, demoralizing beyond description.
But one moral issue hit the Linke harder than the Rekhte in the late
1940s and the decades that followed: With the age-old Jewish
religious life of Eastern Europe, all those rabbis, yeshivas and
God-fearing people that the Linke had rebelled against, savagely
annihilated by the Nazis and their local collaborators, there could
be little appetite for pursuing the old “anti-clericalist” line any
longer. Nevertheless, the Linke and their institutions continued to work tirelessly for modern Yiddish culture. The Freiheit was published until 1988, and the Zhitlovsky Foundation continued to publish fine Yiddish books throughout the 1990s (and through to 2006). The magazine Yidishe Kultur (Yiddish Culture), edited by the universally beloved, redoubtable Itche Goldberg, continued to be one of the best Yiddish literary journals in the world (it was last published in 2004). Goldberg, who celebrated his 102nd birthday this year, denounced Stalin’s crimes only slightly later than the Rekhte did, but like many others, elected to continue leading and working for a distinct branch of secular Yiddish culture in America — and he survived all the rest. Considering all that happened, it is not particularly surprising that the 1950s anthologists were petrified at the thought of including Linke writers who would be considered “disloyal” or “un-American.” As they saw it, to do so would undermine the entire enterprise of winning acceptability for Yiddish in America. Moreover, they themselves were bitter enemies of the Linke, so they didn’t really need much encouragement to exclude them. But one problem was insurmountable. Like Eliezer Greenberg, one of the major anthologists, many of the fine anti-communist writers were themselves former “fellow travelers.” The phenomenon was so important in the history of Yiddish culture in America that Yiddish developed a special ironic term for such persons: gevézener (literally, “former one”; feminine and plural, gevezene). The word acquired the character of a Cain-like stamp on the forehead. In the mid-1950s, the Rekhte, in their own literary publications, particularly the Tsukunft, were applying unwritten rules that can be summarized with a simplicity so stark that it is almost embarrassing: Whoever left the Linke for the Rekhte after the Hebron riots of 1929 was completely kosher; whoever left after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 was sufficiently kosher; whoever waited until confirmation of the Moscow murders of 1952 was treyf, banished from the canon; and whoever stayed with the Linke after that was not ever to be mentioned. So it came to pass that the canon of American Yiddish literature in
English translation that thrives to this day was a creation, in
part, of 1950s American political conformity. The same handful of
authors get translated, anthologized, taught at universities, and
endlessly analyzed in dissertations and conferences, while many
hundreds of writers, many of them women, remain untouched and
undiscovered, not in desert papyruses or manuscripts lost in war,
but in printed journals and books that are easily found in major
Yiddish collections. This essay was continued in our Jan-Feb 2007 issue. |
