Volume II Part 17 (2/2)

225.]

The noise of the new Jewish life, with its constantly growing problems, invaded the precincts of literature, and even the poets were impelled to take sides in the burning questions of the day. The most important poet of that era, Judah Leib Gordon (1830-1892), who began by composing biblical epics and moralistic fables, soon entered the field of ”intellectual poetry,” and became the champion of enlightenment and a trenchant critic of old-fas.h.i.+oned Jewish life. As far back as 1863, while active as a teacher at a Crown school [1] in Lithuania, he composed his ”Ma.r.s.eillaise of Enlightenment” (_Hakitzah 'ammi_, ”Awake, My People”). In it he sang of the sun shedding its rays over the ”Land of Eden,” where the neck of the enslaved was freed from the yoke and where the modern Jew was welcomed with a brotherly embrace. The poet calls upon his people to join the ranks of their fellow-countrymen, the hosts of cultured Russian citizens who speak the language of the land, and offers his Jewish contemporaries the brief formula: ”Be a man on the street and a Jew in the house,” [2] i.e., be a Russian in public and a Jew in private life.

[Footnote 1: See on the Crown schools pp. 74 and 77.]

[Footnote 2: _Heye adam be-tzeteka, wihudi be-oholeka._]

Gordon himself defined his function in the work of Jewish regeneration to be that of exposing the inner ills of the people, of fighting rabbinical orthodoxy and the tyranny of ceremonialism. This carping tendency, which implies a condemnation of the whole historic structure of Judaism, manifested itself as early as 1868 in his ”Songs of Judah”

(_s.h.i.+re Yehudah_), in strophes radiant with the beauty of their Hebrew diction:

To live by soulless rites hast thou been taught, To swim against life, and the lifeless letter to keep; To be dead upon earth, and in heaven alive, To dream while awake, and to speak while asleep.

During the seventies, Gordon joined the ranks of the official agents of enlightenment. He removed to St. Petersburg, and became secretary of the Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment. The new Hebrew periodical _ha-Shahar_ [1] published several of his ”contemporary epics” in which he vented his wrath against petrified Rabbinism. He portrays the misery of a Jewish woman who is condemned to enter married life at the bidding of the marriage-broker, without love and without happiness, or he describes the tragedy of another woman whose future is wrecked by a ”Dot over the _i_.” [2] He lashes furiously the orthodox spiders, the official leaders of the community, who catch the young pioneers of enlightenment in the meshes of Kabal authority, backed by police force. Climbing higher upon the ladder of history, the poet registers his protest against the predominance of the spiritual over the worldly element in the whole evolution of Judaism. He a.s.sails the prophet Jeremiah who in beleaguered Jerusalem preaches submission to the Babylonians and strict obedience to the Law: the prophet, dressed up in the garb of a contemporary orthodox rabbi, was to be exhibited as a terrifying incarnation of the soulless formula ”Law above Life.” [3]

[Footnote 1: See p. 218.]

[Footnote 2: The t.i.tle of a famous poem by Gordon, _Kotzo shel Yod_, literally ”the t.i.ttle of the Yod” the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The poem in question pictures the tragedy of a woman who remained unhappy the rest of her life because the Hebrew bill of divorce which she had obtained from her husband was declared void on account of a trifling error in spelling.]

[Footnote 3: The author alludes to Gordon's poem ”_Tzidkiyyahu be-bet hapekuddot_” (”Zedekiah in Prison”), in which the defeated and blinded Judean ruler (see Jer. 52. 11) bitterly complains of the evil effects of the prophetic doctrine.]

The implication is obvious: the power of orthodoxy must be broken and Jewish life must be secularized. But while unmasking the old, Gordon could not fail to perceive the sore spots in the new, ”enlightened”

generation. He saw the flight of the educated youth from the Jewish camp, its ever-growing estrangement from the national tongue in which the poet uttered his songs, and a cry of anguish burst from his lips: ”For Whom Do I Labor?” [1] It seemed to him that the rising generation, detached from the fountain-head of Jewish culture, would no more be able to read the ”Songs of Zion,” and that the poet's rhymes were limited in their appeal to the last handful of the wors.h.i.+ppers of the Hebrew Muse:

[Footnote 1: t.i.tle of a poem by Gordon, _Lemi ani 'amel!_]

Who knows, but I am the last singer of Zion, And you are the last who my songs understand.

These lines were penned on the threshold of the new era of the eighties.

The exponent of Jewish self-criticism lived to see not only the horrors of the pogroms but also the misty dawn of the national movement, and he could comfort himself with the conviction that he was destined to be the singer for more than one generation.

The question ”For whom do I labor?” was approached and solved in a different way by another writer, whose genius expanded with the increasing years of his long life. During the first years of his activity, Shalom Jacob Abramovich (born in 1836) tried his strength in various fields. He wrote Hebrew essays on literary criticism (_Mishpat Shalom_ [1] 1859), adapted books on natural science written in modern languages (_Toldot ha-teba'_, ”Natural History,” 1862, ff.), composed a social _Tendenzroman_ under the t.i.tle ”Fathers and Children” (_Ha-abot we-ha-banim_, 1868 [2]); but all this left him dissatisfied. Pondering over the question ”For whom do I labor?,” he came to the conclusion that his labors belonged to the people at large, to the down-trodden ma.s.ses, instead of being limited to the educated cla.s.ses who understood the national tongue. A profound observer of Jewish conditions in the Pale, he realized that the concrete life of the ma.s.ses should be portrayed in their living daily speech, in the Yiddish vernacular, which was treated with contempt by nearly all the Maskilim of that period.

[Footnote 1: ”The Judgment of Shalom,” with reference to the author's first name and with a clever allusion to the Hebrew text of Zech. 8.16.]

[Footnote 2: Written under the influence of Turgenyev's famous novel which bears the same t.i.tle. See above, p. 210, n. 1.]

Accordingly, Abramovich began to write in the dialect of the people, under the a.s.sumed pen-name of _Mendele Mokher Sforim_ (Mendele the Bookseller). Choosing his subjects from the life of the lower cla.s.ses, he portrayed the pariahs of Jewish society and their oppressors (_Dos kleine Menshele_, ”A Humble Man”), the life of Jewish beggars and vagrants (_Fishke der Krummer_, ”Fishke the Cripple”), and the immense cobweb which had been spun around the dest.i.tute ma.s.ses by the contractors of the meat tax and their accomplices, the alleged benefactors of the community (_Die Taxe, oder die Bande Stodt Bale Toyvos_, ”The Meat Tax, or the Gang of Town Benefactors”). His trenchant satire on the ”tax” hit the mark, and the author had reason to fear the ire of those who were hurt to the quick by his literary shafts. He had to leave the town of Berdychev in which he resided at the time, and removed to Zhitomir.

Here he wrote in 1873 one of his ripest works, ”The Mare, or Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” (_Die Klache_). In his allegorical narrative he depicts a homeless mare, the personification of the Jewish ma.s.ses, which is pursued by the ”bosses of the town” who do not allow her to graze on the common pasture-lands with the ”town cattle,” and who set street loafers and dogs at her heels. ”The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” (the Government) cannot make up its mind whether the mare should be granted equal rights with the native horses, or should be left unprotected, and the matter is submitted to a special commission.

In the meantime, certain hors.e.m.e.n from among the ”communal benefactors”

jump upon the back of the unfortunate mare, beat and torment her well-nigh to death, and drive her for their pleasure, until she collapses.

Leaving the field of polemical allegory, Abramovich published the humorous description of the ”Travels of Benjamin the Third” (_Ma.s.se'ot Benyamin ha-Shelis.h.i.+_, 1878), [1] portraying a Jewish Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, who make an oversea journey to the mythical river Sambation--on the way from Berdychev to Kiev. A subtle observation of existing conditions combined with a profound a.n.a.lysis of the problems of Jewish life, artistic power matched with publicistic skill--such are the salient features of the first phase of Abramovich's literary activity.

[Footnote 1: A famous Jewish traveller by the name of Benjamin lived in the twelfth century. Another modern Jewish traveller by the name of Joseph Israel, who died in 1864, adopted the name Benjamin II.

Abramovich humorously designates his fict.i.tious travelling hero as Benjamin III.]

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