"Ich arbeit', un' arbeit', un' arbeit' ohn' Cheschben.Es schafft sich, un' schafft sich, un' schafft sich ohn' Zāhl,"
"Ich arbeit', un' arbeit', un' arbeit' ohn' Cheschben.Es schafft sich, un' schafft sich, un' schafft sich ohn' Zāhl,"
"Ich arbeit', un' arbeit', un' arbeit' ohn' Cheschben.Es schafft sich, un' schafft sich, un' schafft sich ohn' Zāhl,"
and we see the workman changed into just such an unfeeling machine. During the short midday hour he has but time to weep and dream of the end of his slavery; when the whistle blows, the boss with his angry look returns, the machine once more ticks, and the tailor again loses his semblance of a human being. What wonder, then, that tears should be the subject of so many of his songs? Even when the laborer returns home he does not find relief from his sorrows; his own child does not see him from one end of the week to the other, for it is asleep when he goes out to work or returns from it ('My Boy'). Not only the workman, but even the mendicant, who has no home and finds his only consolation in his children, has reason to curse the present system when he sees the judge take them away from him to send them to an orphan asylum,—a species of misdirected philanthropy ('The Beggar Family'). Sad are the simple words: 'Ich gēh' vardienen!' uttered by a girl before the break of day, hurrying to the factory,and late at night, following a forced life of vice ('Whither'). Even death does not come to the unfortunate in the calm way of Goethe's 'Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh'; not the birds are silenced, but the worms are waiting for their companion ('Despair'). Nay, after death the laborer arises from his grave to accuse the rich neighbor of having stolen the flowers from his barren mound ('In the Garden of the Dead').
Not less sad are his National Songs. In 'Sephirah' he tells us that the Jew's year is but a succession of periods for weeping. Most of his songs of that class deal with the tragical conflict between religious duties and actualities. Such is 'The First Bath of Ablution,' which is one of the prettiest Jewish ballads. The 'Measuring of the Graves,' which relates the superstition of the Jews who study by candles with the wicks of which graves have been measured, is especially interesting, on account of the excellent use of the language of the Tchines made in it. The unanswered question of the boy in the 'Moon Prayer' is one of many that the poet likes to propound. Perhaps the best poem under the same heading is 'On the Bosom of the Ocean,' which is remarkable not only as a sad portrayal of the misfortunes of the Jew who is driven out of Russia and is sent back from America because he has not the requisite amount of money which would entitle him to stay here, but also on account of the wonderful description of a storm at sea. The same sad strain passes through the poems classed as miscellaneous. Now it is the nightingale that chooses the cemetery in which to sing his sweetest songs ('The Cemetery Nightingale'). Or the flowers in autumn do not call forth regrets, for they have not been smiling on the poor laborer in his suffering ('Tothe Flowers in Autumn'). Or again, the poet compares himself with the bird who sings in the wilderness where 'the dead remain dead, and the silent remain silent' ('In the Wilderness').
The gloom that lies over so many of Rosenfeld's poems is the result of his own sad experiences in the sweat-shop and during his struggle for existence; but this gloom is only the accident of his themes. Behind it lies the inexhaustible field of the poet's genius which adorns and beautifies every subject on which he chooses to write. The most remarkable characteristic of his genius is to weld into one the dramatic action and the lyrical qualities of his verse, as has probably never been attempted before. Whether he writes of the sweat-shop, or of the storm on the ocean, or of the Jewish soldier who rises nightly from his grave, we in every instance get a drama and yet a lyric, not as separate developments, but inextricably combined into one whole. Thus, for example, 'In the Sweat-shop' is a lyrical poem, if Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' is one, but in so far as the poet, or operative, is turned into a machine and is subjected to the exterior forces which determine his moods and his destiny, we have the evolution of a tragedy before us. Similarly, the exact parallel of the storm on the ocean with the storm in the hearts of the two Jews in the steerage is no less of a dramatic nature than an utterance of subjective feelings.
Rosenfeld does not confine himself to pointing out the harmony which subsists between man and the elements that control his moods and actions; he carries this parallelism into the minutest details of the more technical structure of his poems: the amphibrachic measure in the 'Sweat-shop' is that of the tickingmachine, which in the two lines given above reaches the highest effect that can be produced by mere words. In the 'Nightingale to the Laborer,' the intricate versification with its sonnet rhymes, the repetition of the first line in each stanza with its returning repetition in the tenth line, the slight variations of the same burden in each succeeding stanza which saves it from monotony, are all artifices that the poet has learned from the bird along his native lake in Poland. These two examples will suffice to indicate the astonishing versatility of the poet in that direction; add to this the wealth of epithets, and yet extreme simplicity of diction which never strives for effect, the musicalness of his rhythm, the chasteness of expression even where the cynical situations seem to make it difficult to withstand imprecations and curses, and we can conceive to what marvellous perfection this untutored poet of the Ghetto has carried his dialect in which Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and English words are jostling each other and contending their places with those from the German language.
It was left for a Russian Jew at the end of the nineteenth century to see and paint hell in colors not attempted by any one since the days of Dante; Dante spoke of the hell in the after-life, while Rosenfeld sings of the hell on earth, the hell that he has not only visited, but that he has lived through. Another twenty-five years, and the language in which he has uttered his despair will be understood in America but by few, used for literary purposes probably by none. But Rosenfeld's poetry will survive as a witness of that lowermost hell which political persecutions, religious and racial hatred, industrial oppression have created for the Jew at the end of this our enlightened nineteenth century.
THEbeginning of this century found the Jews of the Russian Empire living in a state bordering on Asiatic barbarism. Ages of persecution had reduced the masses to the lowest condition of existence, had eliminated nearly all signs of civilized life in them, and had succeeded in making them the outcasts they really were. Incredibly dirty in their houses and uncleanly about their persons, ignorant and superstitious even beyond the most superstitious of their Gentile neighbors, dishonest and treacherous not only to others, but even more to their own kind, they presented a sad spectacle of a downtrodden race. The legislators made the effects of the maltreatment of previous lawgivers the pretext for greater oppression until the Jews bade fair to lose the last semblance of human beings. One need only go at this late hour to some small town, away from railroads and highways, where Jews live together compactly, in order to get an idea of what the whole of Russia was a century ago, for in those distant places people are still living as their grandfathers did. Only here and there an individual succeeded in tearing himself away from the realm of darkness to become acquainted with a better existence by means of the Mendelssohnian Haskala. In spite of the very unfavorable conditions of life, or rather on account of them, the Jews, although averse to all instruction, passed the greater part of their lives, that were not given to the earning of a livelihood, in sharpening their witsover Talmudical subtleties. When they came in contact with the learning in Germany, their minds had been trained in the unprofitable but severe school of abstruse casuistry, and they threw themselves with avidity on the new sciences, surpassing even their teachers in the philosophic grasp of the same. Such a man had been Salomon Maimon, the Kantian scholar; such men were later those followers of the Haskala who were active in the regeneration of a Hebrew literature, with whom we have also become acquainted in former chapters through their efforts of enlightening the masses; foremost of them, however, was J. B. Levinsohn, who wrote but little in Judeo-German. He was to the Jews of Russia what Mendelssohn had been half a century before to the Jews of Germany.
The light of the Haskala entered Russia in two ways: through Galicia and through Poland. Galicia was the natural gateway for German enlightenment, as its Jews were instructed by means of works written in Hebrew, which alone, outside of the native dialect, could be understood in the interior of Russia. But this influence was only an indirect one, for soon the German language began to be substituted and understood by the people of Galicia, whereas that has never become the case in the southwest of Russia, that is, in the contiguous territory. The case was different in Russian Poland and Lithuania, for there were many commercial relations between these countries and Germany, and there existed German colonies in that part of the Empire. Consequently the ground was here better prepared for the foreign culture. The seats of the Haskala of these more northern regions were such towns as Zamoszcz in the Government of Lublin, and Warsaw. Roughly speaking, the geographicallyfavored portion of the Jewish Pale was inhabited by the Misnagdim, or strict ritualists, while the southwest was the seat of that fanatical and superstitious sect of the Khassidim against whom nearly all of the satirical literature of the last seventy-five years has been directed.
As early as 1824 there was published a periodical in Warsaw in which the German language, or a corrupt form of it, written with Hebrew characters, was employed to serve as an intermediary of German culture. In the same year B. Lesselroth used this form of German in writing a Polish Grammar[74]for the use of his co-religionists. As has been pointed out before, this mixture of Judeo-German was to serve only as an intermediary for the introduction of the literary German which at that time appeared as the only possible alternative for the homely dialects of the Russian Jews. This mixed language has unfortunately remained the literary norm of the northwest up to the present time, if one may at all speak of norm in arbitrary compounds. In the southwest the dialects were, in the first place, much more distant from the German than the varieties of Lithuania, and the greater distance from German influence made the existence of that corrupt German less possible. At about the same time two books were published in Judeo-German, one in the south by Mendel Lefin, the other in the north by Chaikel Hurwitz, which became the standards of all future publications in the two divisions of the Jewish Pale. The first, by adhering to the spoken form of the dialect, has led to a normal development of both the language and the literature.The second, being unnatural from the start, has produced the ugliest excrescences, culminating in the ugliest productions of Schaikewitsch and his tribe and still in progress of manufacture.
Hurwitz[75]was only following the natural tendencies of the Haskala when he chose what he called a pure Judeo-German for his literary style. In the introduction to his translation of Campe's 'Discovery of America' from his own Hebrew version of the same he says: "This translation of the 'Discovery of America' I have made from my Hebrew version. It is written in a pure Judeo-German without the mixture of Hebrew, Polish, and Turkish words which one generally finds in the spoken language." It must however, be noted that he uses German forms very sparingly, and that but for his avoiding Slavic and Hebrew words, his language is really pure. It is only later, beginning with the writings of Dick, that the real deterioration takes place.
This book was published in 1824 at Wilna. Its effect on the people was very great. Previous to that year there were no other books to be had except such as treated on ethical questions, or story-books, which had been borrowed from older sources two or three centuries before. Books of instruction there were none. This was the first ray that penetrated the Ghettos from without. The people had no knowledge of America andColumbus, and now they were furnished not only with a good story of adventure, but in the introduction to the book they found a short treatise on geography,—the first worldly science with which they now became acquainted. It is interesting to note here by way of parallel that a few years later the regeneration of Bulgaria from its centuries of darkness began with a small work on geography, a translation from an American school-book, published at Smyrna. It is true that to the disciples of the Haskala works on the sciences were accessible in Hebrew translations, but these were confined to a very small circle of readers, and their influence on the masses was insignificant. If the followers of the Haskala had not accepted blindly Mendelssohn's verdict against the Judeo-German language, which was true only of the language spoken by the Jews of Germany, but had furnished a literature of enlightenment in the vernacular of the people instead of the language of the select few, their efforts would have been crowned with far greater success. By subscribing unconditionally to the teachings of their leader, they retarded the course of events by at least half a century and widened the chasm between the learned and the people, which it had been their desire to bridge. English missionaries proceed much more wisely in their efforts to evangelize a people. They always choose the everyday language in which to speak to them, not the tongue of literature, which is less accessible to them. Mainly by their efforts the Modern Armenian and Bulgarian have been raised to a literary dignity, and with it there has always followed a regeneration of letters and a national consciousness that has in some cases led to political independence. The missionaries have not always reaped a religious harvest, but their work has borne fruit inmany other ways. In the beginning of this century they also directed their attention to the Christianization of the Jews of Poland. The few works that they published in the pursuit of their aim, especially the New Testament, are written in an excellent vernacular, far superior to the one employed by Hurwitz and Lesselroth. It is a pity the Jewish writers of the succeeding generations, particularly in the northwest of Russia, did not learn wisdom from the English missionaries.
'The Discovery of America' has had edition after edition, and has been read, at first surreptitiously, then more openly, by all who could read, young and old, men and women. But Hurwitz was not forgiven by the fanatics for descending to write on worldly matters, and after his death it became the universal belief that the earth would not hold him for his misdeed and that he was walking around as a ghost, in vain seeking a resting-place.
In the south the first impulse for writing in Judeo-German was given by the translations of the Proverbs, the Psalms, and Ecclesiastes by Minchas Mendel Lefin. Of these only the Psalms were published in 1817; Ecclesiastes was printed in 1873, while the Proverbs and a novel said to be written by him have never been issued. To write in Jargon was to the men of the Haskala a crime against reason, and Lefin was violently attacked by Tobias Feder and others. He found, however, a sympathizer in Jacob Samuel Bick, who warmly defended him against Feder, and by degrees some of the best followers of the Haskala followed his good example. Ettinger and Gottlober are known to have received their first lessons in Judeo-German composition through the writings of Lefin, while by inference one may regard him also as the prototype of Aksenfeld andZweifel. It was not so easy to brave the world with the despised Jargon, and up to the sixties not one of the works of these writers appeared in print. They passed in manuscript form from hand to hand, until the favorable time had come for their publication; and then they were generally not printed for those who wrote them, but for those who possessed a manuscript, so that on the first editions of their works their names do not appear at all.
Lefin's translations mark an era in Judeo-German literature. He broke with the traditional language used in story-books and ethical works of previous centuries, for that was merely a continuation of the language of the first prints, in which local differences were obliterated in order to make the works accessible to the German Jews of the East and the West. It was not a spoken language, and it had no literary norm. In the meanwhile the vernacular of the Slavic Jews had so far departed from the book language as to make the latter almost unintelligible to the masses. Lefin chose to remedy that by abandoning entirely the tradition, and by writing exactly as the people spoke. He has solved his problem in a remarkable way; for although he certainly knew well the German language, there is not a trace of it in his writings. He is not at a loss for a single word; if it does not exist in his dialect, he forms it in the spirit of the dialect, and does not borrow it from German. As linguistic material for the study of the Judeo-German in the beginning of this century the writings of Lefin, Aksenfeld, Ettinger, Levinsohn, and Gottlober are invaluable. But that is not the only value of Lefin's writings. By acknowledging the people's right to be instructed by means of an intelligible language, he at the same time opened up avenuesfor the formation of a popular literature, based on an intimate acquaintance with the mental life of the people. In fact, he himself gave the example for that new departure by writing a novel 'The First Khassid.' In the northwest the masses were not so much opposed to the new culture as in the south, hence the writers could at once proceed to bring out books of popular instruction clad in the form of stories. But the Khassidim of the south would have rejected anything that in any way reminded them of a civilization different from their own. In order to accomplish results among them, they had to be more cautious and to approach their readers in such a way that they were conscious only of the entertainment and not of the instruction which was couched in the story. This demanded not only the use of a pure vernacular, but also a detailed knowledge of the mental habits of the people. As their conditions of life in no way resembled those of any other people in Europe, their literature had to be quite unique; and the works of the earlier writers are so peculiar in regard to language, diction, and style as to baffle the translator, who must remodel whole pages before he can render the original intelligibly. Of such a character are the dramas of Aksenfeld, Ettinger, and J. B. Levinsohn.
Ettinger, the first modern Judeo-German poet, has also written a drama under the name of 'Serkele, or the False Anniversary.' His bias for German culture shows itself in the general structure of his play, which is like that of Lessing's dramas. The plot is laid in Lemberg, and represents the struggle of German civilization with the mean and dishonest ways of the older generation. Serkele has but one virtue,—that of an egotistical love for her only daughter, the half-educated,silly Freude Altele. In order to get possession of some jewels deposited with her by her brother for his daughter Hinde, she invents the story of his death. She is anxious to marry her daughter to Gavriel Händler, who is represented to her as a rich speculator, but who is in reality a common thief. He steals the casket containing the jewels. When the theft is discovered she throws the guilt on Marcus Redlich, a student of medicine, her daughter's private teacher, and Hinde's lover. Hinde, too, is accused of complicity, and both are taken in chains through the town. They pass a hostlery where a stranger has just arrived, to whom Händler is trying to sell the jewels. The stranger is Hinde's father. He recognizes his property, and seizes the thief just as his daughter and her lover are taken by. A general recognition follows, and all is righted. He finally forgives his sister, gives a dowry to Freude Altele, who marries the innkeeper, while his daughter is united to Marcus Redlich.
As in all the early productions of Judeo-German literature, there are in that drama two distinct classes of characters: the ideal persons, the uncle, Marcus Redlich and Hinde, and the real men and women who are taken out of actual life. On the side of the first is all virtue, while among the others are to be found the ugliest forms of vice. A worse shrew than Serkele has hardly ever been depicted. Her speeches are composed of a series of curses, in which the Jargon is peculiarly inventive, interrupted by a stereotyped complaint of her ever failing health. She hates her niece with the hatred that the tyrant has for the object of his oppression, and she is quick to accuse her of improper conduct, although herself of very lax morals. Nobody in the house escapes the fury of her tongue, and her honestbut weak husband has to yield to the inevitable. The other characters are all well drawn, and the play is an excellent portrayal of domestic life of seventy-five years ago. It was written early in the twenties, but was printed only in 1861, since when it has had several editions.
In 1828 J. B. Levinsohn wrote his Hebrew work, 'Teudo Beisroel,' by which the Haskala took a firm footing in Russia. About the same time there circulated manuscript copies of a Judeo-German essay by the same author, in which a sad picture of Jewish communal affairs was painted in vigorous and idiomatic words. This essay, called 'The World Turned Topsy-Turvy,'[76]is given in the form of a conversation by three persons, of whom one is a stranger from a better country where the affairs of the Jews are administered honestly. The other two in turn lay before him an array of facts which it is painful to regard as having existed in reality. It is interesting to note that the stranger, who is Levinsohn himself, advocates the formation of agricultural colonies for the Jews, by which he hoped to better their wretched condition and to gain for them respect among those who accused them of being averse to work.
The most original and most prolific Judeo-German writer of this early period was Israel Aksenfeld.[77]He was born in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and had passed the early days of his life in the neighborhoodof the Rabbi of Braslow, a noted Khassid, being himself a follower of that sect. Later in life, in the fifties, he is remembered as a notary public in Odessa. He was a man of great culture. Those who knew him then speak in the highest terms of the kindly old man that he was. They also like to dwell on the remarkable qualities of his cultured wife, from whom he is supposed to have received much inspiration.[78]That is all that is known of his life. Gottlober mentions also in his 'Recollections' that he had written twenty-six books, and that according to Aksenfeld's own statements they had been written in the twenties or thereabout. Of these only five were printed in the sixties; the rest are said to be stored away in a loft in Odessa, where they are held as security for a debt incurred by the trustee of his estate. Although this fact is known to some of the Jews of that city, no one has taken any steps to redeem the valuable manuscripts. This is to be greatly regretted, as his books throw light on a period of history for which there is no other documentary evidence except that given by the writings of men who lived at that time.
Of the five books printed, one is a novel, the other four are dramas. The first, under the name of 'The Fillet of Pearls,' shows up the hypocrisy and rascality of the Khassidic miracle-workers, as only one who has himself been initiated in their doings could relate them. The hero of the novel is Mechel Mazeewe. He is discovered eating on a minor fast day, and the Rabbi uses this as anexcuse for extorting all the money the poor fellow had earned by teaching little children and young women. His engagement to one of his pupils, the daughter of the beadle, is broken off for the same reason. Disgusted with his town, he goes away from it in order to earn a living elsewhere. Good fortune takes him to Breslau, where he, for the first time, discovers that there are also clean, honest, peaceful Jews. He is regenerated, and returns to his native town, where in the meantime the miracle-working Rabbi has succeeded in rooting out the last vestige of heresy. At the house of the Rabbi, Mechel has an occasion to prove the falseness of his pretensions to the assembled people. Mechel is reunited with his bride.
This bare skeleton of the plot is developed with great care, and is adorned with a variety of incidents, each forming a story within the story. The biting satire, the sharp humor, the rapid development of situations, are only excelled by his dramatic sense, which makes him pass rapidly from descriptions, without elaborating them to the form of dialogue. His mastery of the dialect is remarkable; for although one can here and there detect his intimate acquaintance with German literature, there is not a single case where he has been led under obligations to the German language in thought or a word: German is as foreign to him as French or Latin. Of his dramas it will be sufficient to discuss one to show their general structure. The most dramatic of these is the one entitled 'The First Recruit' and tells of the terrible time in 1827 when the Ukase drafting Jewish young men into the army had for the first time been promulgated. To the ignorant masses it seemed as though the world would come to an end. To avoid the great misfortune of having their sonstaken away from them, they married them off before they had reached their teens; finding that that did not prevent the 'catchers' from seizing them, maimed, halt, sickly men were preferred as husbands to their daughters; in short, all was done to avert the unspeakable calamity of serving the Czar. As in the novel, there are plots within the plot, and didactic passages are woven into the play without in the least disturbing its unity.
The tragedy consists of eight scenes. The first opens with a noisy meeting at the house of Solomon Rascal, a Parnes-Chōdesch (representative of the Jewish community), on a Saturday afternoon. The cause of the disturbance is the order to furnish one recruit from their town, which had just been brought in from the capital of the district by two soldiers. The assembled kahal are wondering whether it is incumbent upon them to sign the receipt of the order, while the infuriated mob without is clamoring that the Ukase will be ineffective as long as not signed by the representatives of the Congregation. The kahal is divided on the subject, and the women take a part in the discussion, making matters lively. Upon the advice of one of the men, the meeting is adjourned to the house of Aaron Wiseman, the honored merchant of their town of Nowhere, where they expect to get a satisfactory solution in their perplexity. The second scene is the ideal scene of the play. Here is depicted the happy and orderly home life of the cultured merchant,—the reverse of the picture just portrayed. Jisrolik the Ukrainian arrives and announces the decision of the kahal to refer the matter to him. Aaron Wiseman explains how the Emperor had not intended to bring new misfortunes upon the Jews by the mandate, but how by imposingon them the honorable duty of defending their country, he was investing them with a new privilege upon which greater liberties would follow. This he farther elucidates in the next scene before the assembled representatives of the Congregation. The fourth scene is laid in the inn, where we are introduced to Nachman the Big, the practical joker and terror of the town. In the following scene, Aaron Wiseman advises the kahal to use a ruse by which Nachman will voluntarily offer himself as a soldier, thus freeing the town from the unpleasant duty of making a more worthy family unhappy. Wiseman explains that Nachman has been a source of trouble to all, and that military service would be the only thing that would keep him from a possible life of crime. The ruse is accomplished in the following manner: it is known that Nachman has been casting his eyes on Früme, the good and beautiful daughter of Risches the Red, the tax-gatherer. It is proposed to send a schadchen to Nachman, pretending that Früme's parents seek an alliance with him, and that Früme loves him, and that she wants to get a proof of his affection in his offering himself up as a soldier. The apparent incongruity of the request is amply accounted for in the play by the fact that he who has lost his heart also loses his reason. In the next two scenes the plot is carried out, and Nachman becomes a soldier. The last scene contains the tragic denouement. Chanzi, the go-between, comes to the house of Früme and tells her of the fraud perpetrated on Nachman. But, alas, Früme actually loves Nachman, and she silently suffers at the recital of the story. The climax is reached when her father arrives and tells of Nachman's self-sacrifice, how he has given himself up for the love he bears her, how they put him in chains andtook him away. Früme bears her secret to the last, but her heart breaks, and she dies. The sorrow of her parents is great. During the lamentation Nachman's blind mother arrives, led by a little girl. She has learned of Chanzi's treachery, and breaks out in loud curses against those who took part in the plot. As she steps forward, she touches the dead body of her whom Nachman had thought to be his bride. She addresses her as though she were alive and consoles her that she need not be ashamed of Nachman, who had been an inoffensive, though somewhat wild, boy. While speaking this, she faints over her body.
The characters are all admirably delineated, and how true to nature the whole play is one can see from a matter-of-fact story, by Dick,[79]of the effects of the Ukase on the city of Wilna. Except for the tragic plot, the drama may serve as a historical document of the event, and is a valuable material for the study of the Jewish mind in the beginning of Nicholas's reign. This must also be said of the other plays of Aksenfeld, which all deal with conditions of contemporary Jewish society.
Similar to Aksenfeld's subject in 'The Fillet of Pearls' is the comedy 'The Marriage Veil' by Gottlober, which he wrote in 1838. Jossele, a young man with modern ideas, is to be married to a one-eyed monster, while his sweetheart, Freudele, is to be mated on the same day with a disfigured fool. By Jossele's machinations, in which he takes advantage of the superstitions of the people, he is united under the marriage veil to Freudele, while the two monstrosities are married to each other. This is found out too late to be mended. This plot is only an excuse to showup the hypocrisy and rascality of the miracle-working Rabbi in even a more grotesque way than in 'The Fillet of Pearls.' A much finer work is his story 'The Transmigration,' which, however, is said to be based on a similar story in the Hebrew, by Erter. In this a dead soul, previous to finding its final resting-place, relates of its many transmigrations ere reaching its last stage. The succession of mundane existences is strictly in keeping with the previous moral life of the soul. It starts out with being a Khassidic singer, who, like all the followers of the Rabbi, is represented as an ignorant dupe. After his death he naturally is turned into a horse, the emblem of good-natured stupidity according to the popular Jewish idea. Then he is in turn a Precentor, a fish, a tax-gatherer, a dog, a critic, an ass, a doctor, a leech, a usurer, a pig, a contractor. By far the most interesting and dramatic incident is that of the doctor, who is trying to pass for a pious Jew, but who is caught eating lobsters, which are forbidden by the Mosaic Law, and who dies from strangulation in his attempt to swallow a lobster to hide his crime. The story is told in a fluent manner, is very witty, and puts in strong relief the various characters which are satirized.
Like the poetry of the same period, the prose literature of the writers previous to the sixties is of a militant nature. It had for its aim the dispersion of ignorance and superstition, and the introduction of the Haskala and Western civilization among the Jews of Russia. The main attack of all these early works was directed against the fanaticism of the Khassidic sect, against the hypocrisy of its miracle-working Rabbis in whose interest it lay to oppose the light at all cost. But the authors not only attacked the evil, they also showedthe way for a reform: this they did by contrasting the low, sordid instincts of the older generation with the quiet, honest lives of the new. Of course, the new generation is all German. The ideal characters of Ettinger's drama, Aksenfeld's hero in 'The Fillet of Pearls,' Gottlober's Jossele, have all received their training in Germany. At the same time, in accordance with the Mendelssohnian School, these ideal persons are not opposed to the tenets of Judaism; on the contrary, they are represented as the advocates of a pure religion in place of the base substitute of Khassidism. Outside of the didactic purpose, which, however, does not obtrude on the artistic development of the story, the Judeo-German literature of that period owes its impulse to the three German authors, Lessing, Schiller, Jean Paul Richter. As regards its language, the example set by Lefin prevails, and all the productions are written in an idiomatic, pure dialect of the author's nearest surroundings. There is but one exception to that, and that is 'The Discovery of America,' which, being mainly intended for a Lithuanian public, is written in a language which makes approaches to the literary German, whereby it opened wide the way to misuses of various kinds.
ZEDERBAUM,[80]the friend and fellow-townsman of Ettinger, began in 1863 to publish a Judeo-German weekly under the name ofKol-mewasser, as a supplement to his Hebrew weekly, theHameliz. This was the first organ of the kind for Russia, for the one edited in Warsaw forty years before was not written in the dialect of the people. Let us look for the cause of such an innovation.
The advocates of the Haskala regarded it as one of their sacred duties to spread culture wherever and whenever they could do so. This they did through the medium of the Hebrew and the Judeo-German. The first was a literary language, the other was not regarded as worthy of being such. If, therefore, there was some cause to feel an author's pride in attaching one's name to productions in the first tongue, there was no inducement to subscribe it to works in the second. It was, to a certain extent, a sacrifice that the authors made in condescending to compose in Judeo-German, and the only reward they could expect was the good their books would do in disseminating the truth among their people. The songs of M. Gordon and Gottlober, and the works of Ettinger and Aksenfeld, were passed anonymously throughout the whole land. The books were not even printed, but were manifolded in manuscript form by those who had the Haskala at heart. Afew years before the issue of theKol-mewasser, the efforts of these men began to bear ample fruit. It was no longer dangerous to be called a 'German,' and many Jewish children were being sent to the gymnasia, to which the Government had in the meanwhile admitted them. The Rabbinical schools at Wilna and Zhitomir, too, were graduating sets of men who had been receiving religious instruction according to the improved methods of the Haskala. It was then that some of the works written decades before, for the first time saw daylight, but more as a matter of curiosity of what had been done long ago, than with any purpose. It would even then have been somewhat risky to sign one's name to them for fear of ridicule, and no native firm would readily undertake their publication. Thus the first two works of Aksenfeld were issued from a press at Leipsic in 1862, while Ettinger's 'Serkele' had appeared the year before at Johannisburg. Only the following year Linetzki's 'Poems' were published at Kiev, and, by degrees, the authors took courage to abandon their anonyms and pseudonyms for their own names. The time was ripe for a periodical to collect the scattered forces, for there was still work to be done among those who had not mastered the sacred language, and they were in the majority. At that juncture, Zederbaum began to issue his supplement to theHameliz.
This new weekly was not only the crowning of the work of the past generation of writers, it became also the seminary of a new set of authors. It fostered the talents of those who, for want of a medium of publication, might have devoted their strength entirely to Hebrew, or would have attempted to assimilate to themselves the language of the country. In the second year of the existence of the periodical, there appeared in it'The Little Man,' the first work of Abramowitsch, who was soon to lead Judeo-German literature to heights never attempted before by it, and with whom a new and more fruitful era begins.
Solomon Jacob Abramowitsch[81]was born in 1835, in the town of Kopyl, in the Government of Minsk. He received his Jewish instruction in aCheeder, and later in aJeschiwe, a kind of Jewish academy. He consequently, up to his seventeenth year, had had no other instruction except in religious lore. His knowledge of Hebrew was so thorough that, at the age of seventeen, he was able to compose verses in that language. He lost his father early, and his mother married a second time. When he was eighteen years old, there arrived in his native town a certain Awremel the Lame, who had been leading a vagabond's life over the southern part of Russia. He told so many wonderful stories about Volhynia, where, according to his words, there flowed milk and honey, that many of the inhabitants of Kopyl were thinking of emigrating to the south. Awremel also persuaded Abramowitsch's aunt to go with him in search of her absent husband. That she did, taking her nephew along with her. It soon turned out, however, that Awremel was exploiting them as objects of charity, by collecting alms over the breadth and length of the country. For several months he kept zigzagging in his wagon from town to town, wherever he expected to find charitable Jews, until at last they arrived a certain distance beyond Kremenets. Here they passed a carriage from which proceeded a voice callingAbramowitsch by his given name. They stopped, and Abramowitsch was astonished to discover his friend of his childhood, who had, in the meantime, become a chorister in Kremenets. The latter invited his youthful friend to go back to town with him, promising to take care of him. This the young wanderer was only too glad to do, for he wished to be rid of Awremel, who had been tantalizing him with his almsbegging. The Precentor, who was in the carriage with the chorister, paid off the driver, and Abramowitsch started with them back to town, where a new period began in his life.
His thorough acquaintance with the Talmud and the Hebrew language soon gained him many friends, and he was able to make a living by teaching the children of the wealthier inhabitants. One of his friends advised him to make the acquaintance of the poet Gottlober, who, at that time, was teaching in one of the local Jewish schools. The old man who was giving him that counsel added: "Go to see him some evening when no one will notice you, and make his acquaintance. He is an apostate who shaves his beard, and he does not enjoy the confidence of our community. Nor do we permit young men to cultivate an acquaintance with him; but you are a learned man, and you will know how to meet the statements of that heretic. He is a fine Hebrew scholar, and it might do you good to meet him. Remember the words of Rabbi Meier: 'Eat the wholesome fruit, and cast away the rind.' I'll tell the beadle to show you the way to the apostate."
On the evening of the following day, Abramowitsch betook himself, with a copy of a Hebrew drama he had composed, to the house of Gottlober. The latter smiled at the childish attempt of the young Talmudist, but hedid not fail to recognize the talent that needed only the fostering care of a teacher to reach its full development, and he himself offered his services to him, and invited him to be a frequent caller at his house. Here, under the guidance of Gottlober's elder daughter, he received his first instruction in European languages, and in the rudiments of arithmetic. He swallowed with avidity everything he could get, and soon he was able to write a Hebrew essay on education which was printed in theHamagid, and which attracted much attention at the time. His fate soon led him to Berdichev, "the Jewish Moscow," where he married for a second time, and settled down for many years. In 1859 his first serious work, still in Hebrew, was published. In 1863 began his Judeo-German career, in which he still continues, and which has made him famous among all who read in that language.
The tradition of the Haskala came down to Abramowitsch in an uninterrupted succession, from Mendel Lefin through Ettinger and Gottlober. He, too, started out with the set purpose of spreading enlightenment among his people, and in his first two works we find a sharp demarkation between the two kinds of character, the ideal and the real. But he was too much of an artist by nature to persevere in his didactic attitude, and before long he abandoned entirely that field, to devote his undivided energy to the production of purely artistic works. Even his earlier books, in which he combats some public nuisance, differ materially from those of his predecessors in that they reflect not only conditions of society as they actually existed at his time, but in that his characters are true studies from nature. No one of his contemporaries reading, for example, his 'The Little Man,' could be in doubt of who was meantby this or that name. The portrait was so closely, and yet so artistically, copied from some well-known denizen of Berdichev that there could be no doubt as to the identity. There are even more essential points in his stories and dramas in which he widely departs from his predecessors. While these saw in a religious reform and in German culture a solution out of the degraded state into which their co-religionists had fallen, he preached that a reform from within must precede all regeneration from without. While they directed their attacks against the Khassidim as the enemies of light, and their Rabbis as their spiritual guides, he cautiously avoided all discussions of religion and culture, and sought in local communal reforms a basis for future improvements. To him the physical well-being of the masses was a more important question than their spiritual enlightenment, and according to his ideas a moral progress was only possible after the economical condition had been considerably bettered. His precursors had looked upon the Haskala as the most precious treasure, to be preferred to all else in life. Abramowitsch loves his people more than wisdom and culture, and the more oppressed and suffering those he loves, the more earnest and the more fervent are his words in their behalf. He is the advocate of the poor against the rich, the downtrodden against the oppressor, the meek and long-suffering against the haughty usurper of the people's rights. He is, consequently, worshipped by the masses, and has been hated and persecuted by those whose meanness, rascality, and hypocrisy he has painted in such glaring colors. He had even once to flee for his life, so enraged had the representatives of the kahal become at their lifelike pictures in one of his dramas. His love for the people is an all-pervading passion, for man is hisGodhead. There is a divine element in the lowest of human beings, and he thinks it worth while to discover it and to bring it to light, that it may outshine all the vices that have beclouded it. He turns beggar with the beggar he describes, becomes insane with him who ponders over the ills of this earth, and suffers the criminal's punishment. He at all times identifies himself with those of whom he speaks.
In the more external form of composition there is again a vast progress from the writings of Lefin to the style and diction of Abramowitsch. Lefin was the first to show what vigor there was in the use of the everyday vernacular. Ettinger, Aksenfeld, and Gottlober have well adapted that simple, unadorned speech to the requirements of literary productions; but it was only Abramowitsch who demonstrated what wealth of word-building, what possibilities of expression, lay dormant in the undeveloped dialects of Judeo-German. He was peculiarly fitted to enrich the language by new formations, for having passed the first eighteen years of his life in Lithuania and passing the greater part of his later years in the Southwest, he was enabled to draw equally from the source of his native Lithuanian dialect and the spoken variety of his new home. He has welded the two so well that his works can be read with equal ease in the North and in the South, whereas the language of Aksenfeld offers a number of difficulties to the Lithuanians and even the Polish Jews whose dialect the Southern variety resembles. In diction he differs from his masters in that he substitutes a regular prose structure for the semi-dramatic utterances of the older narration, without affecting the natural speeches of the characters wherever these are introduced. In these cases he becomes so idiomatic as to baffle the besttranslator, who must be frequently satisfied with mere circumlocutions. He also abandons the anonym of the former generation for a pseudonym, Mendele the Bookpedler, which is, however, but a thin disguise for his real name, for his writings are of such an individuality that there can be no doubt about their authorship. Beginning with Abramowitsch style is regarded as an important requisite of a Judeo-German work.
Now we shall turn to the discussion of his several books. The subject of his first, 'The Little Man,' is an autobiography of a man, who, by low flattery, vile servility, and all dishonest ways, rises to high places of emolument which he uses entirely in order to enrich himself at the expense of the people. Such men had been the bane of Jewish communities in the middle of our century. In Berdichev it was, at the time of the publication of the book, Jacob Josef Alperin, who by similar means had come to be the right hand of the Governor General, Bibikov; but far more vile than he was Hersch Meier Held, who stood in the same relation to Alperin that the latter occupied to the Governor General. That flunky of a flunky is personified as the hero of the story, Isaac Abraham Takif. In this work we still have the ideal persons of the older writers. We are introduced there to a poor, honest, and cultured family, in whom one cannot fail to recognize his master and friend, Gottlober, and his daughter.
If this work made him a host of friends among those who were the victims of Alperin and Held, the next drama he wrote endangered his stay in Berdichev, for the persons attacked in it, the representatives of the kahal, would not shrink from any crime to rid themselves of a man who, like Abramowitsch, had come to be a power and a stumbling-block to their incrediblerascalities. The greatest curse of the Jewish community in Russia had ever been the meat and candle tax, which all had to pay, nominally to support communal institutions, but the greater part of which went into the pockets of the representatives of the kahal to whom the tax was farmed out. No meat and no candle could be purchased without that arbitrary imposition by the members of the kahal, who in their fiendish craving for money increased the original cost of meat several fold, and who spared no means, however criminal, to silence any opposition to their doings. It is these men that Abramowitsch had the courage to hold up to the scorn of the people in his 'The Meat-Tax, or the Gang of City Benefactors.'[82]He had to flee for his life, but the drama did its work. It even attracted the attention of the Government, which tried to remedy the evil. It became the possession of the people, and many of its salient sentences have become everyday proverbs. The revolt against that Gang of City Benefactors of Berdichev was so great that Moses Josef Chodrower, whom all recognized as the prototype of the arch-rascal Spodek in the play, and who had been a prominent and wealthy merchant, was soon driven into bankruptcy by the infuriated population that refused to support him. That was the first time that a literary production written in Judeo-German had become a factor in social affairs. A Russian troupe that was then playing at Berdichev wanted to give a Russian version of the drama, but was restrained from doing so by the machinations of the kahal. The book had done its work thoroughly.
In the same year there appeared his story from the life of the Jewish mendicants, 'Fischke the Lame.'[83]This psychological study of the impulses of the lowest dregs of society is probably unique in all literature. It is a love story from the world of the lame and the halt that constitute the profession of mendicants in the Jewish part of every Russian town in the West. But it is not merely the love of Fischke the Lame for a beggar girl and the jealousy of his blind wife, who tyrannizes over him in spite of her affliction, that we are made acquainted with in that remarkable book. We are introduced there to a class of people with entirely different motives, different aims in life, from those we are accustomed to see about us. They hide from daylight and have a morality of their own; but yet they are possessed of the passions that we find in beings endowed with all the senses and enjoying the advantages of well-organized society. One must have lived among them, been one of them, so to reproduce their language, their thoughts, as Abramowitsch has done in this novel; and one must have broad sympathies with all humankind to be able to find the divine spark ablaze even in the lowest men.
His next work,'The Dobbin,'[84]is the most perfect of his productions. It unites into one a psychological study of a demented man, with a delicate allegory, in which the history of his people in Russia is delineated, thus serving as a transition from the pure novel in his former production to the composite allegory in his poetical work 'Judel' which was published a few years later. It combines a biting satire with a tragic story; it is a prophecy and a history in one. If the 'Meat Tax' had made him the favorite of the masses whosuffered from the oppression of the members of the kahal, 'The Dobbin' was calculated to endear him with all who professed the Jewish faith; for while the first pointed out an internal evil which could be remedied, the second painted in vivid colors their sufferings in the present and the misfortunes which awaited them in the future, which were entirely of an external nature over which they had no control. It showed them more graphically than anything that had been said heretofore how helpless they were to meet the charges which were continually cast against them by the Gentiles and the Government. Abramowitsch foresaw that the turning-point in the inner life of his race was near at hand, that the call to progress of the early writers had availed them little in righting them with the world without, that his own productions acquainting them with their weak points from within were now out of place, and that soon they would need only words of consolation such as are uttered when a great calamity overtakes a people.
In 1873 hardly any one dreamed of the possibility of the riots against the Jews that were to be inaugurated eight years later, for it was just then that the highest privileges had been granted to them, and the assimilation had been going on to such an extent that Judeo-German literature would have been a thing of the past, had not the writers of the previous decade continued now and then to issue a volume of their works. But Abramowitsch saw that the reforms of Alexander II. were not conceived in the same liberal spirit as had been proposed by Nicholas I., and that sooner or later they would be followed by retrenchments such as would throw the Jews back into conditions far worse than those they had been in half a century before; for they would find no avenues for their many new energieswhich they had developed in the meanwhile. It is this coming event that the author has depicted in his fantastic story, 'The Dobbin.' Jisrolik has made up his mind to acquire Gentile culture, and he is preparing himself for an examination in the Gymnasium. He falls in with a Dobbin that is pursued by everybody, and this so affects him, together with the worry over his examination, that he becomes demented, and he imagines that the Dobbin is talking to him. After that the animal is introduced as a transmigrated soul that tells its biography. The Dobbin is the personification of the Jewish race. The book was very popular, and although there was a demand for new editions, the Russian Government would not permit them, as even this veiled allegory appeared to it as too open an accusation of its acts. Only sixteen years later the censor relaxed and allowed a second edition to appear.
In 1879 there was published by Abramowitsch a volume entitled 'The Wanderings of Benjamin the Third,'[85]which is an excellent pendant to Cervantes's famous work and which has therefore been called by its Polish translator 'The Jewish Don Quixote.' The subject of his caricature was a real fellow, named Tscharny, who had been employed by some French society to undertake a scientific journey into the Caucasus, but who was entirely unfit for the work, as he had a very superficial knowledge of geography. For his more immediate purpose Abramowitsch copied a crazy fellow who was all the time citing passages from a fantastic Hebrew geography he had been poring over. Out of this Abramowitsch evolved the story of the Quixotic fellow who starts out to discover the mystic river Sambation and the tribe of the Red Jews, but who never gets anyfurther than the town of Berdichev and its dirty river Gnilopyat.
Of the other works[86]of Abramowitsch the most important is his drama 'The Enlistment,' which deals with the same subject as Aksenfeld's 'The First Recruit,' but referring it to more modern times. After a long silence the author has again resumed his pen, and one may look forward for some new classics in Judeo-German. He has also written a number of popular scientific articles, which have been widely circulated by means of calendars which he has edited. His popularity as a writer is best illustrated by the fact that for a series of years his income from his books and calendars has amounted to three thousand roubles a year. Considering the poverty of the reading public, for whom cheap editions have to be issued, and the general custom of borrowing books rather than buying them, this will appear as a very great sum indeed. Many of the younger authors lovingly refer to him as the 'Grandfather,' although no one has attempted to imitate him either in manner or style. He forms by himself a school, and would have been the last to write in the dialect but for the occurrences of the eighties that have been the cause of a new set of writers who have no reason to follow the authors of the period of the Haskala, but who dip their pens in the blood that has been shed in the riots, or who from the same cause speak to their brethren, though not of them.
IN1867 theKol-mewasserbegan publishing a serial story by Linetzki[87]under the name of 'The Polish Boy.' Its popularity at once became so great that to satisfy the impatient public the editor was induced to print the whole in book form as a supplement long before it had been finished in the periodical. The interest in the book lay not so much in the fact that it was written with boundless humor as in its being practically an autobiography in which the readers found so much to bring back recollections of their own sad youth. They found there a graphic description of the whole course of a Khassid's life as no one before Linetzki had painted it,—as only one could paint it who had himself been one of the sect, standing in an even nearer relation to their Rabbis than had been the case with Aksenfeld. While the latter had been a follower of one, Linetzki had narrowly escaped being a Rabbi himself, had suffered all kinds of persecution for attempting to abandon the narrow sphere of a Khassid's activity, and knew from bitter experience all the facts related in his work. The story of his own life, unadorned by any fiction, was dramatic enough to be worth telling, but he has enriched it with so many details of everyday incidents as to change the simple biography into a valuable cyclopedia of the life and thoughts of his contemporaries, inwhich one may get information on the folklore, games, education, superstitions, and habits of his people in the middle of our century.
Linetzki was born in 1839 in Vinitsa, in the Government of Podolsk. At the age of six he was far enough advanced in Hebrew to begin the study of the Talmud. At ten he had passed through all the Jewish schools, and there was nothing left for his teachers to teach him. He was anIlui, an accomplished scholar, but his father, who was a Khassidic Rabbi, was not satisfied with his mere scholastic acquirements; he wanted him to be initiated in all the mysteries of the Cabbala which would make of him a fanatical Khassid. He was put for that purpose in the hands of a few of his blind followers, who did not spare any means to kill the last ray of reason in him, even if they had to resort to violent punishments, with which they were very liberal. Instead of curbing his spirit, they only succeeded in nurturing an undying hatred toward themselves and everything connected with their doctrine. But finding it impossible to tear himself away from their tyranny, he finally feigned submission and openly professed adherence to his sect, while he secretly visited the few intelligent people that the town could muster up and borrowed from them works that told of the Haskala or that gave some useful instruction. These books he would take with him to uninhabited houses, or to the empty synagogues, and pore over them until their contents had been appropriated by the precocious boy. His father began to suspect that something was wrong with his son, so at the age of fourteen he married him to a girl who, he hoped, would take him back on the road of Khassidism. But finding that, contrary to his expectations, she agreed in everything with her child-husband,the father managed to divorce her from him. Linetzki's patience had come to an end; he threw off the thin mask he had been wearing, and began to make open attacks on the fanatics. He was again forced into marriage, but with the same result as before. The Khassidim now wanted to get rid of him at all cost, and in a dark night he was seized by them and thrown into the river. He was saved as if by a miracle. After that he was carefully guarded by the police, and his enemies did not dare to lay hands on him again. At the age of eighteen he escaped to Odessa, where he eked out his existence by teaching Hebrew to children, all the time perfecting himself in worldly sciences. He was again pursued by the Khassidim of the city, who got away with a box full of his manuscripts, and he decided to leave Russia, to take a course at the Rabbinical Seminary in Breslau. What was his surprise when, upon arriving at the Austrian frontier, he was put in chains by the Rabbi of the border town, who threatened to present a forged despatch from Odessa in which Linetzki was named as a dangerous criminal. He again pretended to repent, and was taken back to his father, from whom the forged despatch had emanated. The latter compelled his son to do penance at the house of the Rabbi of Sadugora. After that he was divorced from his second wife, as it was hoped that it would conciliate him to free him from the ties which had been hateful to him. Linetzki, however, took the first occasion to escape again. This time he went to Zhitomir, where at the age of twenty-three he entered the third class of the Rabbinical school, as his insufficient knowledge of Russian made it impossible for him to attend a higher class. His schoolmates were about twelve years old, and ridiculed the man who was sitting on the same bench with them. He left the institutionand went to Kiev, where in 1863 his Judeo-German literary career began by his volume of poetry discussed in a previous chapter. His next work was 'The Polish Boy,' which has gained him a reputation as a classic writer.
Were it not for the many didactic passages which the author has interwoven in the second part of his story, it might easily be counted among the most perfect productions of Jewish literature. These unfortunately mar the unity of the whole. Except for these, the book is characterized by a truly Rabelaisian humor. Its greatest merit is that it follows so closely actual experiences as to become a photographic reproduction of scenes. There is hardly any plot in it, and it is doubtful if Linetzki would have succeeded so well had he attempted a piece of fiction, for in his many later works he is signally defective in this direction. The mere photographic quality of the story, the straightforward tone that pervades it, the grotesque, unbounded humor which one meets at every turn, have made it acceptable to the Khassidim themselves, who grin at their caricatures but must confess that it is absolutely true. The copy of the book in my possession was sold to me by a pious itinerant Rabbi, who had treasured it as a precious work.
Linetzki was misled by his early success to regard his unchecked humor as his special domain, and into cultivating it to the exclusion of the finer qualities of style and sound reason. The farther he proceeds,[88]the less readable his works become, the coarser his wit. Later, in the eighties, he abandons entirely originalwork to devote himself to the translation of German books. We have from his pen versions of Lessing's 'Nathan the Wise' and Graetz's 'History of the Jews.' The first is rather a free paraphrase than an artistic translation, while the second is not as carefully done as one might have expected. But once has he returned to the style of his 'The Polish Boy,' in his 'The Maggot in the Horseradish,'[89]but that is but a reflection of his great work. Linetzki's reputation is based only on his first novel, which will ever remain a classic.
A number of men with less talent than those heretofore mentioned have attempted imitations of this or that popular book. Among these writers the attacks against the Khassidim still continue at a time when they have lost their power to sting, when the best authors have abandoned that field for more useful works. However, some of the minor productions are quite creditable performances. Such, for example, is the well-told story in verse by M. Epstein, entitled 'Lemech, the Miracle-worker,' published in 1880. It tells of Lemech the tailor who leaves his wife, and turns miracle-worker, which he finds more profitable than his tailoring. He settles in a distant town and persuades one of the wealthy men to give him his daughter in marriage. The miracle-worker must not be refused, and the daughter's previous engagement with Rosenblatt, her lover, is broken off. Just as the rings are to be exchanged which would unite Lemech with Rosenblatt's former bride, Rosenblatt steps up with Lemech's wife, who has been travelling about to find her unfaithful husband, whom she knows only as a tailor. The story is developed naturally, and the reflections interwoven in it are well worth reading. An earlier one-act dramaby the same author, 'The Drubbing of the Apostate at Foolstown,' relates also in verse of the punishment inflicted by the Rabbi on the Jew who had been found reading one of Mendelssohn's books. Another, 'The Conversation of the Khassidim,' by Maschil Brettmann, gives in the form of a dialogue the best exposition of the tenets of that sect, and shows how the various stories of miracle-workings originate. The introduction contains a short historical sketch of this strange aberration of miracle-working, written in an excellent prose.
While these writers had in view the eradication of some error and the dissemination of culture by their works, the ancient story-telling for the mere love of amusing still continues to attract the masses. The better class of authors were too serious to condescend to compete with the badchen in their efforts to entertain. The lighter story was consequently left to an inferior set of men who frequently had no other excuse for writing their stories than the hope of earning a few roubles by them. Of such a character are 'Doctor Kugelmann,' 'Wigderl the Son of Wigderl.' There is, however, a wide difference in these from similar story-books of the previous generation. The older chapbooks were based mainly on the romantic material of the West, generally reflecting nothing of the Jewish life in them. The newer stories of the Southwest of Russia have this in common with the works of the classical writers, that they reproduce scenes of contemporaneous Jewish life. At times these tales are well told and well worth reading. Such is the amusingquid pro quoin 'A Jew, then not a Jew, then a Good Jew [i.e.a Khassid], and Again a Jew,' by S. Hochbaum. Still more interesting is the charming comedy 'The Savingsof the Women' by Ludwig Levinsohn.[90]Its plot is as follows: Jekel, a Khassid, returns late at night to his house, where he is awaited by his wife Selde. To silence her torrent of invectives he invents a story that the decree of Rabbi Gershon, by which monogamy had been introduced among the Jews of Europe in the eleventh century, was about to be dissolved in order that by marrying several wives the Jews of the town might get new dowries with which to pay the arrears in their taxes. His wife spreads this news throughout the community, to the great terror of the women. They resolve to avert the calamity by offering up their savings stored away in stockings and bundles. These are brought to the assembled brotherhood of the Khassidim, who, of course, use the money for a jollification. There are many amusing incidents in the play. The servant of Selde is dreaming of the time when she shall be married to Jekel and when she will lord it over her former mistress; the scene in the women's galleries when the news of the impending misfortune is reported is very humorous, and the attempt of the Rabbi's wife to learn the truth of the fact from her husband who had not been initiated in the story by Jekel is quite dramatic. It is one of the best, if not the best, comedy written in Judeo-German.
A number of witty stories in a semi-dramatic form have been produced by Ulrich Kalmus; the most of these are disfigured by coarse jokes, but a few of them it would well pay to rearrange for scenic representation. One of his best is a version of the Talmudical legend of the devil and the bad wife; it is almost preciselythe same that Robert Browning has versified in his 'Doctor ——.' A good story, resembling Linetzki's 'The Polish Boy,' but with much less bitterness and humor, is given in 'Jekele Kundas,' by one who signs himself by the pseudonym Abasch. Translations from foreign tongues are not uncommon in this period. Some Russian stories are rendered into Judeo-German; also a few German dramas, such as Lessing's 'The Jews'; from the English we have Walter Scott's 'Ivanhoe' and Longfellow's 'Judas Maccabæus'; and from the French we get for that time Massé's 'The Story of a Piece of Bread,' and from the Hebrew one of Luzzato's dramas. To other useful works of a scientific character we shall return later.
There is a marked difference in the development of Judeo-German literature in the Khassidic Southwest and the Misnagdic North. While the first gave promise of a natural growth and a better future, the second showed early the seeds of decay. The nearness to Germany explains the deterioration of the literary Judeo-German of Lithuania, but the cause for the weaker activity in the literature itself is to be sought in the whole mental attitude of the Misnagdim, who as strict ritualists did not allow the promptings of the heart to interfere with their blind adherence to the Law. The very origin of Khassidism was due to a protest against that cold formalism which excluded everything imaginative. Unfortunately this protest opened the way to the Cabbala and admitted the wildest excesses of mysticism in the affairs of everyday life, and this soon gave rise to that form of the new sect with which we meet so frequently in the descriptions of the early authors of the Southwest. These, however, in tearing themselves away from their earlyassociations abandoned only their degraded religious faith, not the love for the fanciful which, if properly directed by a controlling reason, would lead to an artistic career. The Misnagdim, on the contrary, in breaking with their traditions were predisposed to become rationalists with whom utilitarian motives prevailed over the finer sentiments. Their advocates of the Reform, who took to writing in the vernacular of the people, set about from the very start to create a useful, rather than an artistic, literature, to give positive instruction rather than to amuse. The outward form of language and style was immaterial to them; the information the story carried was their only excuse for writing it. Foremost of that class of writers was Aisik Meier Dick,[91]who in the introduction to one of his stories[92]speaks as follows of his purpose in publishing them:
"Our women have no ear and no feeling for pure ethical instruction. They want to hear only of miracles and wonderful deeds whether invented or true; they find delight in the story of Joseph de la Reyna, or of Elijah's appearance in the form of an old man to be the tenth in the Minyan on the eve of the Atonement day; they are even satisfied with the story of Bevys of Hamptoun and the Greyhound, with the Horse Drendsel and the Sword Familie, and with the beautiful Princess Deresna, or merely with a story of a Bride and Bridegroom.
"This sad fact, dear readers, I took deep to heart, and I resolved to make use of this very weakness for interesting stories for their own good by composingbooks of an entertaining nature, which would at the same time carry moral lessons. Thanks to God I have succeeded in my undertaking, for my stories are being read diligently, and they are productive of good. Several hundred stories of all kinds have been so far issued by me, each having a different purpose. Even every witty tale and mere witticism teaches something useful. I am sure a great number of my readers do not suspect my good intentions, and read my stories, just as they read Bovo, for pastime only, and will accuse me, the writer of the same, as being a mere babbler who distracts the attention from serious studies, and as writing them for the money that there is in them. I know all that full well, and yet I keep on doing my duty, for even greater men than I have been treated in no better way by our nation; our prophets have been cursed by us, and beaten, and pulled by the hair, and spit upon, and some have even been killed. I am proud to be able to say that I am not making my living from my writings, and I should have been repaid tenfold better if I had passed my time in some more profitable work. But I do it only out of love for my nation, of whom the most do not know how far they are removed from mankind at large, and what a miserable position we occupy in these enlightened days among the civilized nations.... We must, whether we wish or not, enter into much closer relations with the outside world than our parents did. We must, therefore, be better acquainted with the world, that we may be tolerated by our fellow-men (the Gentiles), who surpass us in civilization.... Consequently, I regard it as a great favor to speak to you by means of my books, and as a still greater favor that the famous firm of Romm is willing to print them, for the publication of prayers is moreprofitable than that of story-books that are only read in circulating libraries or merely borrowed from a friend."