Uncovering The Hidden

Uncovering the Hidden
The Works and Life of Der Nister

LegeNDa
egenda , founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of
the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities
Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to
contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern
humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, english, French, german, greek,
Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an editorial Board of
distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly
bodies such as the Society for French Studies, the British Comparative Literature
association and the association of Hispanists of great Britain & Ireland.
The Modern Humanities Research Association ( ) encourages and promotes

advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially
modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema.
It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different
disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of
increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the
publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.
Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the
humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest
thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including adorno, einstein, Russell,
Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, Mcluhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today
Routledge is one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities and Social
Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars,
instructors, and professional communities worldwide.
www.routledge.com
Editorial Board
Chairman
Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London
Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)

Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish)
Professor Anne Fuchs, University of Warwick (German)
Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish)
Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English)
Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret,
Queen Mary University of London (French)
Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian)
Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian)
Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics)
Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics)
Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese)
Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English)
Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (German)
Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian)
Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French)
Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish)
Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese)
Managing Editor
Dr Graham Nelson
41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK
www.legendabooks.com
Studies in Yiddish
Legenda Studies in Yiddish embrace all aspects of Yiddish culture

and literature. The series regularly publishes the proceedings of the
International Mendel Friedman Conferences on Yiddish Studies, which
are convened every two years by the European Humanities Research
Centre of the University of Oxford.
published in this series

1. Yiddish in the Contemporary World
2. The Shtetl: Image and Reality
3. Yiddish and the Left
ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
4. The Jewish Pope: Myth, Diaspora and Yiddish Literature, by Joseph Sherman
5. The Yiddish Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction
ed. by Joseph Sherman and Ritchie Robertson
6. David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism
ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh
7. Yiddish in the Cold War, by Gennady Estraikh
8. Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture,
ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
9. A Captive of the Dawn: The Life and Work of Peretz Markish (1895-1952),
ed. by Joseph Sherman, Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin, and David Shneer
10. Translating Sholem Aleichem: History, Politics and Art,
ed. by Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin, Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov
11. Joseph Opatoshu: A Yiddish Writer between Europe and America,
ed. by Sabine Koller, Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
12. Uncovering the Hidden: The Works and Life of Der Nister,
ed. by Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov
legenda@mhra.org.uk
www.legenda.mhra.org.uk
Uncovering the Hidden
The Works and Life of Der Nister
Edited by Gennady Estraikh,

Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

Studies in Yiddish 12
2014
First published 2014
Published by the
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
LEGENDA is an imprint of the

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2014
ISBN 978-1-907975-84-4 (hbk)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying,
recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the
publisher.
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Contents
❖
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: Der Nister, Real and Imaginary 1
1 Der Nister’s ‘Hamburg Score’
gennady estraikh 7
2 Der Nister’s Hebrew Nosegay
jordan finkin 27
3 Andersens Mayselekh and Der Nister’s Symbolist Agenda
kerstin hoge 41
4 A mayse mit a hon. Dos tsigele: Marc Chagall illustrating Der Nister
sabine koller 55
5 The ‘Political’ Writings of an ‘Unpolitical’ Yiddish Symbolist
daniela mantovan 73
6 Watch the Throne: Allegory, Kingship and Trauerspiel in the Stories of
Der Nister and Reb Nakhman
marc caplan 90
7 ‘Turning My Soul Inside Out’: Text and Context of The Family Mashber
mikhail krutikov 111
8 Symbolist Quest and Grotesque Masks: The Family Mashber as Parable
and Confession
roland gruschka 145
9 ‘The Feast Has Ended’: Time in The Family Mashber
harriet murav 161
10 ‘We are lacking “A Man Dieth in a Tent” ’: Der Nister’s Search for
Redemption in the Summer of 1947
ber (boris) kotlerman 174
Index 185
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
v
The editors wish to thank the Mendel Friedman Fund and the Faculty of Medieval
and Modern Languages, University of Oxford, for sponsoring the publication of this
volume. We offer warm thanks to Jack and Naomi Friedman for their generous and
extensive support of Yiddish studies at Oxford, which made possible the conference
at which this book was first conceived. Thanks are due to all participants at this
conference, and to St Hilda’s College, Oxford, which superbly hosted the event.
For archival assistance and advice, we are thankful to Dr Dmitrii Neustroev at
the Russian State Archives of Literature and Arts and Dr Galina Eliasberg at the
Russian State University for the Humanities; copy-editing of this book was skilfully
provided by Richard Correll. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the help, support
and expertise of Dr Graham Nelson, Managing Editor of Legenda Press, without
whom this book would have been poorer.
g.e., k.h., m.k., February 2014

Introduction
v
Der Nister, Real and Imaginary
Litterateurs whose early creative careers in the 1910s were associated with the Kiev
Group of Yiddish writers are clearly overrepresented in the Legenda Studies in
Yiddish book series. One can argue, perhaps rightly, that by paying special attention
to such writers as David Bergelson and Peretz Markish the editors of the Legenda
volumes reveal their skewed range of academic interest. At the same time, it is easy
to justify this interest, because, beyond any doubt, belletrists and critics of the Kiev
Group occupy an important place in the history of modern Yiddish literature and,
more generally, Yiddish culture. Furthermore, their complex relationship with the
state, their peers outside the Soviet Union, and non-Yiddish literary milieus left a
legacy of intriguing riddles, which have kept historians and literary scholars busy
since the later 1950s, when Israeli and American scholars, most notably Khone
Shmeruk, who for many years headed the Department of Yiddish at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, began to study Soviet Yiddish culture.
The present collection of articles, based on the papers presented at the Mendel
Friedman Yiddish conference held at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford,
in August 2012, revisits the rich and diverse legacy of the Yiddish writer Pinkhas
Kahanovitsh (or Kaganovich, 1884–1950), known by his penname Der Nister [The
Hidden One]. In the opening pages of his book Hoyptshtet [Capital Cities], which
includes portraits of Kharkov (Kharkiv in Ukrainian), Moscow and Leningrad,
Der Nister wrote: ‘loyt undzere binyonim vet undz di geshikhte mishpetn: vi
azoy undzer ordenung iz geboyt, un in vos far a politishe, sotsyal-ekonomishe un
kultur-shteygerishe formen si hot zikh ongekleydt’ [History will judge us by our
construction work: how our regime was built, on what kind of underlying moral
foundations, and in what kind of political, socio-economic and cultural-customary
forms it was shaped].1 During his lifetime Der Nister created a number of very
different literary ‘constructions’, which reveal different aspects of the regimes under
which he was destined to live. Although most of Der Nister’s works are available in
translation in different languages, and his major novel The Family Mashber enjoys a
canonical status in Yiddish literature, his life and literary legacy are surrounded by
mystery and myth. To quote Shmuel Niger, the leading American Yiddish critic of
the time, ‘er iz inem etsem tokh, nisht nor inem nusekh, fun zayn shraybn, geven
simbolistish soydesdik, nisterdik’ [in his very essence, not only in his style and
writings, he [Der Nister] was symbolist, mysterious, hidden].2 To a certain degree
this image was a product of his own making. Starting with his choice of pseudonym,
2 Introduction
Der Nister carefully crafted his image as a reclusive and ascetic aesthete, remote
from the mundane concerns and inexperienced in worldly affairs. At least in part,
this image undoubtedly ref lected his character.
The ‘Der Nister myth’, which is subjected to critical analysis by Gennady
Estraikh in this volume, leaves more questions than it provides answers to. The
main question, which is touched upon almost in every chapter of this book, is fairly
simple: how was it possible for this marginal and elusive person, an elitist artist and
dreamer who lived and worked under the difficult political, social and economic
circumstances of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to write and publish (both in the
Soviet Union and the United States!) a novel that was nearly universally praised
in all corners of the Jewish world by critics of opposing ideological persuasions?
Was he indeed as naïve and detached from the mundane concerns as some people
believe, or was he a skilful, experienced and worldly-wise professional litterateur,
who was able not merely to adjust to difficult situations but also to anticipate their
twists and turns? How was it possible for a provincial author, who often struggled
to feed his family and who was — unlike those fellow Kiev Group writers who had
been more successful and prominent, such as David Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, David
Bergelson and Peretz Markish — unknown outside the narrow and shrinking
Yiddish literary milieu, to make a spectacular come-back after being ostracized
and nearly expelled from the profession as the result of a critical campaign against
him in 1929? We will probably never be able to get full answers to these and other
questions about Der Nister’s personality and literary work because of the scarcity of
available sources. Yet we hope that this collection will throw some light on these
issues and stimulate further interest in Der Nister’s life and work.
Like many Jewish writers of his generation, Der Nister made his first literary
attempts in Hebrew. For about two decades of his life, mastery of Hebrew also gave
him an income — he worked as a Hebrew teacher in Zhitomir and other towns of
Ukraine. Jordan Finkin suggests a new reading of Pinkhas Kahanovitsh’s Hebrew
poems, which belong to the ‘pre-Der Nister’, or pre-Yiddish phase in his literary
career. As for the main, Yiddish stretch of his career, it can be divided, following
the classification of the Soviet literary historian and critic Hersh Remenik, into
three phases, each characterized by a particular genre or style: (1) symbolist poetry,
1907–17; (2) symbolist prose, 1917–29; and (3) realistic prose. Der Nister’s Yiddish
debut was welcomed by young writers and critics who subscribed to the ideology
of Yiddishism, which was aimed at Jewish nation-building and strived to develop
Yiddish into a language that could be used in all domains of contemporary life.
Der Nister spent most of his life in Ukraine, where he lived until the Nazi
offensive against the Soviet Union in June 1941. For five years (1921–25) he lived
outside Ukraine, spending time in Moscow, Malakhovka (near Moscow), Kaunas,
Berlin and Hamburg. His home town of Berdichev, known as ‘the Jewish capital
of Ukraine’, features prominently in Yiddish literary history. Yet it would be hard
to define Der Nister as a Ukrainian Yiddish writer or indeed as a Russian Yiddish
writer. Rather, his real ‘territory’ was the entirety of Yiddish literature. While such
writers as David Bergelson, Leyb Kvitko, David Hofshteyn and Peretz Markish
actively participated in events in Soviet literary life, including non-Jewish ones, Der
Der Nister, Real and Imaginary 3
Nister remained confined to the Yiddish literary ‘territory’. It is noteworthy that he

was the only significant Yiddish writer whose works did not appear in Russian or
Ukrainian translation during the entire Soviet period.
The year 1929 is known in the Soviet historiography as ‘The Year of the Great
Break’, when Stalin, after defeating his main enemy Trotsky, consolidated his grip
over the Communist Party and introduced a series of dictatorial policies, which
affected all aspects of life for every Soviet citizen. It also marks a clear watershed
in Der Nister’s life and literary career. Indeed, the two Columbia University
doctoral dissertations dedicated to Der Nister — Delphine Bechtel’s Der Nister’s
Work, 1907–1929: A Study of a Jewish Symbolist (1989) and Daniela Mantovan’s Der
Nister and his Symbolist Short Stories (1913–1929): Patterns of Imagination (1993) — both
deal with Der Nister’s earlier period, which dramatically ended that year. Western
scholars usually regard this period as more creative and original than the years that
followed, even though all of them recognize The Family Mashber as Der Nister’s
major achievement.
Der Nister’s work during the 1920s is dealt with in four chapters, which explore
the less studied aspects of his work. Despite his reputation as an enigmatic and
obscure writer, Der Nister produced over his lifetime a significant body of literature
for children in various genres and styles. Sabine Koller analyses the relationships
between the text and the image in Der Nister’s children works, while Kerstin
Hoge discusses his strategy for the translation and adaptation of Hans Christian
Andersen’s tales. Daniela Mantovan offers a reading of Der Nister’s symbolist stories
of the 1920s from a political angle, tracing connections that link them with his
later, realist period. Marc Caplan draws thought-provoking parallels between Der
Nister’s symbolist imagination and the mystical fantastic tales of the Hasidic Rabbi
Nakhman of Bratslav, seeking to establish correspondences with baroque aesthetic
principles.
The transition from symbolism to realism, which culminated in The Family
Mashber, still remains little studied and under-appreciated, waiting for detailed
analysis. During this period Der Nister was only allowed to do what he himself
described as ‘technical jobs’ for Yiddish publications in Kharkov, which was the
capital of the Soviet Ukraine until 1934. He produced a remarkable and diverse
output, encompassing journalism, translations and children’s literature, and did
a great deal of editorial work, which enabled him to master the craft of realist
writing. Mikhail Krutikov attempts to reconstruct the history of the creation of The
Family Mashber, using previously unknown archival documents that demonstrate
that Der Nister was involved in literary politics and well attuned to the evolution
of Soviet literary and historical discourse. Harriet Murav examines the structural
aspects of narrative time in the novel and their connection with the philosophical
concept of Henri Bergson, whose ideas had a powerful inf luence on both Russian
and Jewish modernist culture of the early twentieth century. Roland Gruschka
explores the symbolist subtext of Der Nister’s new realist style in The Family Mashber
by analysing the aesthetic and narrative devices and elements of composition that
are employed in the novel.
World War II and the Holocaust brought a great personal tragedy to Der Nister,
4 Introduction
which left a strong impact on the second part of the novel. He lost his beloved
daughter in besieged Leningrad and many members of his extended family in
Ukraine. Despite his depressed state, he became enthusiastic about the possibility of
Jewish revival in the Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidzhan, which he visited
with an trainload of new settlers from Ukraine in 1947. The reconstruction of this
remarkable journey by Ber Kotlerman reveals a new side of Der Nister’s personality
as a social activist pursuing his dream of national revival.
In 1947, Der Nister wrote an ‘official’ short autobiography in Russian for his file
at the Soviet Writers’ Union:
I was born on 1 November 1884 in Berdichev. I received a traditional Jewish
education at Jewish elementary and higher schools [heder and yeshiva]. From
the age of 17 I began to live independently, giving private lessons. In 1907 I
published my first book in Vilna, in 1910 the second one in Warsaw, and in
1912 the third one in Kiev. At that time, literary royalties did not provide me
with a means of existence, so I continued to give private lessons. I could not
publish my works during World War I, because the tsarist government did not
then allow the printing of Yiddish books. It was only from 1917 that my works
could once again appear in print in the press and in book form. In 1922 a Jewish
publishing house suggested I should print my books abroad. For this purpose I
went to Berlin, where two volumes of my writings came out [Gedakht (Berlin:
Yidisher literarisher farlag, 1922–23) and Mayselekh in ferzn (Berlin: Shveln,
1923)].
I was forced to remain longer in Berlin due to my family circumstances.
Being in material need, I worked for the [Soviet] trade mission. All my works
written during my stay abroad appeared in the Soviet Union in the journals
Shtrom (Moscow), Royte velt (Kharkov) and the miscellany Ukraine (Kiev).
In 1925 I returned to Kiev and began working as editor of the Popular Series
[Populere bibliotek] at the Kultur-Lige Publishing House. In 1928, after moving
to Kharkov, I combined working on my own writings with editing Yiddish
literary texts for the Central Publishing House. In Kharkov I also translated
literary pieces by Russian and Western European authors into Yiddish. In
1941 I evacuated with the Kharkov State Yiddish Theatre to Tbilisi and then
to Samarkand. Later I moved to Tashkent, following an invitation from the
Moscow State Yiddish Theatre to translate the Uzbek play Khamza. While in
Tashkent, I finished writing the second part of my novel The Family Mashber,
whose first part came out in 1939 in Moscow and its second edition appeared at
the beginning of 1941 in Vilnius. Concurrently, I had written a series of stories
devoted to the theme of the Great Patriotic War. Some stories of this series
came out as a separate book in Moscow [Korbones (Moscow: Emes, 1943)], while
the Jewish Antifascist Committee sent the entire series to America, where they
were printed in journals and as separate books [Hershl Ansheles (New York:
YKUF, 1943) and Der zeyde mitn eynikl (New York: YKUF, 1943)]. From the
evacuation I returned to Moscow. [...] In the summer of 1947, I undertook a trip
to the Jewish Autonomous Region.3
During the war Der Nister became a member of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. It
was not a voluntary organization open to anyone interested in fighting fascism. The
Committee’s membership was carefully selected and vetted by various departments
of the Communist Party and secret police apparatus. To be a member meant to be
Der Nister, Real and Imaginary 5
recognized as a prominent, reliable and useful cultural figure. Ultimately, however,

it also meant to be persecuted when, in the paranoia of the last years of Stalin’s rule,
the Committee was deemed anti-Soviet. Der Nister was arrested on 19 February
1949. On 4 June 1950 he died in a Gulag camp located in a subarctic area of Russia.
Writing two years after Der Nister’s death, but still uncertain about what happened
to him, Shmuel Niger assigned him a special place in Yiddish literary history: ‘in
the monotonous Soviet Yiddish literature Der Nister looked perhaps even more
unique, more original than in the Yiddish literature before the October revolution.
Yes, Der Nister was and remained — the Hidden One.’4
Notes to the Introduction

1. Der Nister, Hoyptshtet (Fartseykhenungen) (Kharkov: Literatur un kunst, 1934), p. 5.
2. Shmuel Niger, ‘Der Nister’, Zamlbikher, 8 (1952), 64.
3. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), file 3121–1-42. We are grateful to Dr
Galina Eliasberg for sharing this document with us.
4. Niger, ‘Der Nister’, p. 75.
Chapter 1
v
Der Nister’s ‘Hamburg Score’

Gennady Estraikh
Choosing Yiddish
The critic, editor and publisher Nakhman Mayzel, who was one of the founders of
the Kiev Group and later in his lifetime became a visible figure in Yiddishist circles of
Warsaw and New York, never stopped chronicling and analysing the literary careers
of his early friends. His attention was particularly directed to David Bergelson and
Der Nister, ‘whom the fate had brought together from their first steps in literature’.
Mayzel believed that, despite not knowing each other in the first two and a half
decades of their lives, the two writers had much in common: being born in Ukraine
in the same year, 1884, and seeing their first publications around the same time,
1907–09, they turned to writing literary works in Yiddish in the same social and
political environment formed in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian revolution. In
other words, as Jewish activists they belonged, to use Barry Trachtenberg’s term,
to the ‘generation of 1905’.1 Yet biographical parallelism did not make Der Nister’s
and Bergelson’s writings and worldviews similar. In Mayzel’s words, it was ‘hard
to imagine more different people than Bergelson and Der Nister’. Small wonder,
then, that they often disagreed or even quarrelled about various things, although
the two men, like all other ‘Kievers’, had an important point of agreement, which
was their dissatisfaction with the lowbrow nature of Yiddish literary products that
saw the light through the presses of Warsaw, the centre of Jewish book publication
and marketing.2
What did push young Ukrainian-born Jews of that generation to choose Yiddish
as the language of their literary attempts? Quite a few of them felt well enough
equipped linguistically and culturally to try their pens in Hebrew, Russian or
Ukrainian, and many certainly did. Thus, Pinkhas Kahanovitsh wrote Hebrew
poems before going into Yiddish literature under the name of Der Nister, while
Bergelson initially produced prose in Hebrew and Russian. Yet, Yiddish was hardly
an exotic choice. Biographies of many writers, including those associated with the
Kiev Group, demonstrate their turn to Yiddish after a period of experimentation
with other languages. For instance, David Hofshteyn began writing in Ukrainian,
Russian and Hebrew, while Peretz Markish initially wrote in Russian. For all that,
the vector of their creative language change ultimately pointed towards Yiddish
rather than from it.
At the turn of the twentieth century, a number of factors contributed to elevating
8 Gennady Estraikh
the status of Yiddish and making the decision to choose this linguistic medium
organic, especially as after the 1905 Russian revolution many intellectuals oriented
themselves to what was known as organic work, or activity in cultural, economic
and social development aimed at improvement of quality of life of underprivileged
ethnic and social groups.3 The remarkable expansion of Jewish civil society and
cultural milieu, both in late imperial Russia and in the immigrant communities
of such countries as the United States, Great Britain and Argentina, convincingly
transformed Yiddish from a language of parochial Eastern European settings into
a language used internationally in various domains of modern life. Concurrently,
a number of inf luential ideologists envisioned Yiddish language planning as
an important constituent of diasporic or territorialist varieties of Jewish nation
building.4 Although the 1908 Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference and its
recognition of Yiddish as ‘a Jewish national language’ has already become a trite
illustration of the raising prestige of Yiddish, the rather dysfunctional gathering in
the then Austro-Hungarian city indeed turned into a landmark event in Jewish
cultural and ideological life.5
Meanwhile, under the inf luence of economic, demographical, educational and
ideological factors, an increasing number of young people broke with traditional
shtetl or shtetl-like communities, but, given the restrictions imposed by the imperial
regime and their own worldview, struggled with entering the mainstream. Instead,
they would often join the population of the Jewish civil societal space, sandwiched
between the traditional Jewish and general Russian (or American, etc.) societies.
The new social territory — distinct in its life-style, social organization, values and
behaviour — was an important recruiting ground for various political and cultural
movements and groupings. Its inhabitants were known, in Yiddish, as khevrelayt,
singular khevreman, meaning ‘members’ of associations, organizations, etc. Even
such an innate recluse as Pinkhas Kahanovitsh belonged to the khaverlayt. In his
hometown of Berdichev, he frequented one of the hubs of freethinking, the f lat of
the teachers Leyb and Frida Brovarnik; but the couple soon moved to Kiev, where
Leyb Brovarnik worked in Jewish educational and cultural institutions until the
German invasion in 1941. In 1912, Der Nister and Rokhl Zilberfarb, whom he
married in 1912, also worked as teachers, in the town of Zhitomir and, for a while,
before World War I, in the shtetl of Golta.6 Such schools as the one in Golta, built
by a local dentist for the education of girls from poor families, were elements of
Jewish civil society fabric. In pre-World War I years, some Jewish schools for girls
began to introduce their students to modern Yiddish literature.7
The strong development of the Yiddish press and book market in the 1900s
had transformed Yiddish literary activity from a marginal occupation, often a
hobby of provincial self-educated intellectuals or, to use the term of that time,
‘semi-intellectuals’, into a proper, salaried and royaltied profession. By the time of
Der Nister’s entry into the already crowded, overwhelmingly masculine field of
Yiddish literature, authors such as Sholem Asch, Avrom Reyzen and Hersh Dovid
Nomberg, who were close to him in age, lived off literature and journalism. Writers
of this generation usually did not find it necessary to conceal themselves behind
literary pseudonyms, but Kahanovitsh chose to become Der Nister (or, in some
Der Nister’s ‘Hamburg Score’ 9
non-Yiddish publications, Nistor). We do not know if the use of this nom de plume
ref lected a lack of self-confidence or was a concomitant of his hiding from the draft
and being a nelem [disappeared one], a person who was not listed in the community’s
birth register. At all events, the pseudonym matched so perfectly with his character
and writing that the oppposition of nister [hidden one] and nigle [revealed one]
would be used to illustrate the differences between Der Nister’s symbolism-cum-
mysticism and, say, Bergelson’s impressionist realism.8 As for his character, Mayzel
recalled that, when they met around 1908, Der Nister
had delicate, refined manners and a modest way of walking and talking. He
looked smaller than he was. His handsome head with its fine shock of hair
was tucked between his shoulders as if he was ashamed to hold it up high.
He seemed to be walking on tiptoe and as if on side paths rather than on the
King’s Highway [i.e. derekh-hamelekh, or ‘main road’]. He had, too, another
characteristic: he walked softly and was very silent — a ruble a word — and
what he did say was cryptic, ambiguous and, moreover, spoken without stress
or resonance [...].9
As the story goes, Der Nister and Bergelson started writing in isolation from the
Yiddish literary circles of Warsaw, Vilna and Odessa and ‘came to literature through
a side entrance’. According to Mayzel, their literary tastes derived predominantly
from Russian and Hebrew authors (Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Andreev, Gorky,
Berdichevsky, Brenner, Gnessin) and, to a much lesser degree, from Yiddish
writers, such as Yitzhok Leybush Peretz and Sholem Asch.10 However, in a
different article, Mayzel wrote about the strong inf luence of three classic Yiddish
writers: Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem and, particularly, Peretz.11
Yiddish books and periodicals were certainly available in such cities as Zhitomir,
the administrative centre of the Volhynia Province, and even more so in Kiev,
Russia’s fifth-largest city, and just eighty miles from the former. In Kiev, in autumn
1903, a group of Jewish socialists formed the Vozrozhdenie [Renaissance] group,
espousing an ideology which combined Marxism with Jewish territorialism and
autonomism. The Vozrozhdenie activists saw Yiddish as an all-important pillar
of the multinational socialist commonwealth, which they envisaged as containing
Jewish territorial and cultural oases. Members of this group played central roles in
the attempts to establish Yiddish newspapers in Kiev: the first one, Dos folk [People],
was launched at the end of 1906 and survived only one month before it was closed
down by the authorities. Among the editors of another short-lived Kiev newspaper,
Dos yidishe vort [ Jewish Word] (1910) was the literary critic Moyshe Litvakov.12
In 1910, Der Nister came to Warsaw and, thanks to the writer, editor and
political activist A. Vayter (Ayzik-Meyer Devenishsky), had several life-defining
conversations with Peretz, the guiding spirit of Yiddish literature at the turn of the
twentieth century. Three decades later, Der Nister described this important episode
in his life. In particular, Peretz told the young writer that, if he wanted to achieve
something really significant in his life, he should leave the town of Zhitomir and
move to one of the cultural centres, such as St Petersburg, Warsaw or Berlin.
However, Der Nister did not follow the Master’s advice: ‘As I understood, rightly or
wrongly, my own character, it was better for me to live in a provincial hiding place
10 Gennady Estraikh
(oysbahaltenish), from where, as from a small room’s window facing a thoroughfare,

I could from time to time show my head, dreaming about the noise of a city.’13
This was a summary of the three decades of his life ‘in hiding’, between the few
evenings spent with Peretz in Warsaw and his head’s longer-than-usual appearance
in the proscenium of Soviet literary life, following his successful, even if painful,
transformation into a recognized Soviet writer — the recognition that came
particularly after the 1939 publication of his master novel The Family Mashber.
One of the Kievers

Writers can be seen as a group if they form an interactive and relatively long-
lasting aggregation of people responding to a shared set of stimuli and values. As
a rule, it also means that members of such groups have some degree of reciprocal
communication built around periodicals or institutions. In the case of Kiev Yiddish
writers, they initially leaned towards Vilna, whose ambience — of a sanctuary of
Talmudic scholarship and modern Jewish culture brokering — appealed irresistibly
to impressionable Kiev khevrelayt with literary ambitions. Both cities were known as
‘Jerusalems’: going back to the times of Napoleon, Vilna was known as the ‘Jerusalem
of Lithuania’ or ‘Jerusalem of the North’, while Russian Orthodox Christians
regarded Kiev as the ‘Jerusalem of Russia’. Significantly, the Kievers reinforced
the inchoate group of Vilna ideologists of modern Yiddish culture, especially as
Vilna then had few home-reared carriers of Yiddish literary talent. Denizens of
the Vilna–Kiev Yiddishist circle, which took shape during the pre-World War I
decade, displayed an almost missionary-like zeal for building, or dreaming about, a
Yiddish-speaking modern — essentially meaning secular — Jewish nation. In the
cultural landscape, they placed themselves as representatives of the ideology-loaded
nusekh Vilne, or ‘Vilna style’ (with a subsidiary role of Kiev), versus the commercial
nusekh Varshe, or Warsaw style. This divide also often ref lected different poles of
cultural gravitation: Russia and Poland.
The Kievers practised their own rituals. Der Nister, who would often come to
Kiev from Zhitomir, recalled in 1940, in his congratulatory letter to Bergelson
written on the occasion of the latter’s jubilee (thirty years since the publication
of his first work, At the Depot), that literary readings at Bergelson’s home would
take place as a solemn, candle-lit ceremony, emphasizing their — the Kievers —
difference from Warsaw, where, despite the presence of Peretz, Yiddish culture was
in the hands of business-minded entrepreneurs.14 Some elements of rituality were
preserved also when the group revived its activity (virtually frozen during the war)
after the 1917 revolutionary events, in the climate of the Kultur-Lige, or League of
Culture, established in 1918 as an organizational structure for pursuing essentially
the nusekh Vilne agenda. One of the league’s literary publications was titled Eygns,
thus emphasizing the almanac’s idiosyncrasy, Our Own. Israel Joshua Singer, who
lived in Kiev in 1918–20, recalled in his article published in the New York daily
Forverts [Forward] on 7 June 1942:
[There] was some kind of mystical intimacy among the [people of the Kiev]
group, as if they were members of a secret order. They would address each
other by their first names, even in their absence. They conversed in confidential
tones, always discussing some secret. They believed with all their hearts,
as convinced of their rightness as a provincial girl-student [kursistke], that
literature was sacred, the holy of holies, that the ‘Kievers’ were the only high
priests conducting the divine service, and that Kiev was Jerusalem [...]. I don’t
quite remember the poems in Eygns, but I do remember the prose published in
it. The only stories of artistic value were written by David Bergelson. The rest
of the works were ‘mystical’, graphomaniac outpourings, the well-known prose
in poems or poems in prose, which the Eygns theorists saw as the last word not
only in Yiddish literature, but — generally — in world literature. The place of
honour was occupied by Der Nister, a writer of pretentious tales about demons,
ghosts, daredevils and hobgoblins. [Yekhezkel] Dobrushin, the ‘theoretician’ of
the group, announced openly during one meeting that, had the writers of the
whole world been given a chance to read Der Nister’s work, they would have
broken their pens.15
Indeed, among the Kievers, Bergelson and Der Nister were the only writers who,
by 1917, had earned some literary reputation, although they also certainly did not
belong to the category of popular writers. Rather, their writings were known to Yiddish
literary faynshmekers, or connoisseurs, whose number was certainly not sufficient for
a publisher with profit-making in mind. Both Der Nister and Bergelson appeared in
print thanks to non-profit or simple vanity publications. It was particular difficult
to market Der Nister’s writings, though they were welcomed by some ideologists
of Yiddishism (most notably, the circle of the pioneering literary journal Literarishe
monatshriftn, or Literary Monthly, published in Vilna in 1908)16 as samples of authentic
highbrow Jewish literature which should, as these ideologists contended, ultimately
substitute the increasingly irrelevant written religious tradition. In other words,
they sought to transform the People of the Book into a People of Books. This
was the cornerstone of Yiddishism: sophisticated Yiddish culture ought to unify
secular Jews, thus assuming the nation-consolidating role hitherto played by the
religion. But high culture was needed not only for competing with religion which,
as the Yiddishists presumed, was dying any way. Rather, it had to provide cultural
fodder, sufficient to satisfy those intellectuals who otherwise ‘defected’ to other —
Russian, German, etc. — cultures. (In the 1940s, Der Nister reportedly summed
up the results of the Yiddish cultural project as it had been realized in the Soviet
Union: ‘We are left with nothing. We don’t have a god and we don’t have a bible.
Yiddish letters are the only thing that we are left with.’)17
This quest for high literature explains the enthusiasm of some ideologists for such
talents as Der Nister. At the same time, there were bitter critics of his writing. One
of his reviewers, Shmuel Rosenfeld, then a leading Yiddish journalist in Russia,
dismissed him as an ‘umgelumperter, farvolknter un shtok-fintsterer shrayber’
[absurd, hazy and pitch-dark writer]. Rosenfeld argued that such mystic literature
did as much harm as pornography and lamented the ecstatic acceptance of Der
Nister’s work by a relatively significant number of intellectuals. Rosenfeld’s review
appeared on the eve of World War I in the New York socialist monthly Tsukunft
[Future], an inf luential Yiddish journal whose 17,000 copies reached a readership
in many countries.18
12 Gennady Estraikh
The ‘Warsaw style’ of pandering to the essentially uneducated taste of the mass
readership that dominated the Yiddish press, and the Yiddish literary market
generally, continued after the war. As a result, outside the ‘mystical intimacy’ of the
Kiev Group, all its writers, apart from Bergelson, failed to find a place in the literary
mainstream. Their limited readership belonged predominantly to the educated
bourgeois class which ‘had been effectively swept away by the Russian Revolution,
and the majority of Yiddish readers [...] were little interested in writing that made
heavy intellectual demands on them. This was clearly proved by the sustained
failure of Der Nister’s heavily symbolic, stylistically innovative stories to gain any
kind of serious critical attention, let alone a significant readership.’19
The situation became particularly clear in the early 1920s, when several Kievers
decided to emigrate from Russia. In June 1920, David Bergelson, Leyb Kvitko and
several other activists of the Kultur-Lige signed an open letter to their American
colleagues. They wrote that their ‘strength and energy’ were ‘at an end’ and that
they were ‘unable to endure any longer want, hunger and the constant fear of
pogroms’. Therefore they appealed ‘to the friends of Jewish culture: Help! — help
us to come to a great Jewish settlement, to America’. We know that the New York
writers sent them (through the Joint Distribution Committee) money, including
$100 earmarked for ‘P. Cahanovitz’, that is for Der Nister.20 However, the Kiev
writers did not arrive to America. Instead, some of them moved — usually, as in the
case of Der Nister, after stints in Moscow and Kaunas — to Central and Western
Europe, notably Germany, or to Palestine and tried there to make a living from
writing. Moscow days were difficult memories for him. He recalled later that the
city was ‘half dead, a kind of Pompeii’. Der Nister worked as editor of children’s
literature at the publishing department of the Central Bureau of the Communist
Party’s Jewish Sections.21 He also taught at the home for Jewish children orphaned
by the pogroms. This children’s colony, named after the Third International, or
Comintern, was based in Malakhovka, a suburb of Moscow. Among his colleagues
there were Dobrushin, Marc Chagall and musicologist Yoel Engel. Like Der Nister,
the latter two did not stay long in the Russian ‘Pompeii’.
On 22 June 1922, the Berlin police reported on ‘Pinchus Kaganovicz’ as a
person working for the New York Yiddish daily Forverts. To all appearances, Jacob
Lestschinsky, who had been active in the Kiev Kultur-Lige and now headed the
New York newspaper’s Berlin bureau, provided Der Nister with a credential,
although in the reality Forverts did not publish his material. Earlier, on 12 January
1922, the Arbeiterfürsorgeamt der jüdischen Organisationen Deutschlands [Workers
Welfare Office of Jewish Organizations in Germany] petitioned for ‘Pinchus
Kaganovicz (Nistor)’, characterizing him as ‘eine der bedeutendsten Erscheinungen
der jüdischen Intelligenz’ [one of the most significant phenomena of Jewish intel
lect]. It was also explained that he had lived through harrowing times under the
Bolsheviks before managing to f lee Russia and that he had arrived to Berlin a
month earlier with a permit issued by the German passport authorities (Deutschen
Passstelle) in Kaunas.22
In the end, Der Nister and his fellow writer Leyb Kvitko, six years his younger,
could not make a living in Berlin and found nothing better than work at the Soviet
trade mission in Hamburg. It is hardly coincidence that Kvitko, Hofshteyn, Markish

and Der Nister did not remain long abroad, where their poetic talents turned out
to be of little marketable value, whereas Bergelson did find a niche in the Yiddish
literary market and resolved to repatriate himself only as late as 1934, prompted
by Hitler’s coming to power and overwhelmed by Soviet Jewish nation-building
projects, particularly in Birobidzhan. All of them believed that their return would
bring them to their readers, because the Bolshevized country possessed something
that the lands of capitalism lacked: a state that generously sponsored Yiddish (as
well as other ethnic) culture, scholarship and education. Suffice it to mention that,
in the early 1930s, about 50 per cent of all the Jewish children in Belorussia and
60 per cent of the Jewish children in Ukraine attended Yiddish day schools of
various levels.23
In Yiddish literary circles, Der Nister’s return in 1925 did not cause a stir, as
had happened when Markish, Bergelson or Hofshteyn came to the Soviet Union.
He was quietly welcomed by his like-minded colleagues, who, in the winter of
1926–27, founded in Ukraine a Yiddish literary group called Boy [Construction].
Writers of this tight-knit group — such as Leyb Kvitko, Lipe Reznik and Nokhum
Oyslender — were fully loyal to communism, but at the same time they continued
the tradition of the Kultur-Lige and aimed at further developing the tradition
of sophisticated national-revolutionary literature rather than proletarian mass
literature. (In December 1921, an attempt was made to re-register the Kultur-Lige
as a pan-Soviet organization with headquarters in Moscow and chapters in Kiev and
Minsk, but it was a stillborn project, because Lenin considered cultural-national
autonomy ‘absolutely impermissible’ and, therefore, education and the majority
of other domains of cultural activity had to be put under the direct control of the
overall state apparatus.)24 Although the Boy writers claimed to target all the strata of
toilers rather than only the proletarians, it was essentially an elitist group, because in
the broader social pool they wanted to seek out and cultivate only refined readers.
This group had under its control the best Soviet literary journal, the Kharkov-
based Di royte velt [Red World], whose circulation oscillated between one and two
thousand copies. Its audience remained small, because the vast majority of Yiddish
speakers were not up to reading serious literature, whether it was proletarian or non-
proletarian. The other Kharkov-based Yiddish literary journal, Prolit (Pro[letarian]
lit[erature]), had a similar circulation.25
The Soviet environment, especially in the 1930s, did not allow independent
publishing, therefore a critically unrecognized author could not release a book using
his own resources or those of his friends, as had been common practice abroad, and
even in tsarist Russia. As a result, writers were fully dependent on the state-run
publishing industry, which aimed at a broad and predominantly under-educated
readership. In 1927, Markish complained in a letter to a Warsaw-based fellow writer
that the ‘bit of Yiddishkayt that we have depends entirely on backwardness. The
less backwardness remains, the less Yiddish remains.’26 A survey among readers of
the Kharkov Yiddish daily Der shtern [Star], conducted in 1928, confirmed that the
vocabulary of many of them did not exceed the bounds of oral communication.27
This was not a purely Jewish problem. The Russian writer Konstantin Fedin wrote
14 Gennady Estraikh
in 1931 that an ‘ocean of illiteracy and literary Ersatz’ hindered access to proper
belles-lettres.28 The 1930 statistics of library lending gathered by Der Nister’s early
mentor Leyb Brovarnik, then director of the Kiev Jewish library named after Morris
Winchevsky, showed that Der Nister’s books were in particularly low demand —
just 58 loans compared with the hundreds for books by Sholem Aleichem (1,423),
David Bergelson (718), Sholem Asch (705), Mendele Moykher Sforim (644), Peretz
Markish (368) and Leyb Kvitko (280).29
To all appearances, the Boy group was not a strong organization, because the
same few writers sometimes would be characterized as ‘non-organized’ or ‘wild’
ones and were critically attacked by much better organized proletarian writers.30
David Hofshteyn, who joined the proletarian literary movement upon his return
from Palestine, deemed Der Nister hopelessly provincial despite his European
sojourn. He ridiculed Der Nister’s adherence to symbolism, which by that time
was long passé in Russian literature but continued to ‘reek’ (tshaden) in Yiddish
literature.31 Hofshteyn and other literati of the proletarian persuasion also criticized
another symbolist of the Boy, the poet Lipe Reznik.32 Ezra Fininberg and Moyshe
Khashtshevatsky, also poets of the Boy, were symbolists as well, at least until the
mid-1920s.33 Hard-line proletarian critics, most notably of the Minsk camp, such
as Yasha Bronshteyn and Khatskel Dunets, would come out aggressively against
symbolism in general, and ‘Nisterism’ in particular. The term ‘Nisterism’, coined
in the late 1920s, was one of several bones of contention between the ‘wild’ and
‘organized’ writers, while such former Kievers as Markish and Kvitko faced no less
criticism than Der Nister. In general, hardly any poet, novelist, playwright or critic
was left unscarred in the ‘civil war’ that raged in Soviet Yiddish literature in the
1920s and early 1930s. For instance, in 1934, Ukraine’s literary weekly Literaturna
hazeta recalled David Hofshteyn’s ‘recurrences of nationalism’ and Itsik Kipnis’s
‘nationalist mistakes’.34
Although Der Nister’s skin was thinner than that of many other writers, the
support of inf luential supporters apparently helped him to resist withdrawing into
silence. One of his champions, Shakhno Epshteyn, began his career of a Marxist
Yidd ish critic in pre-World War I America and wrote, in particular, the treatise
Y. L. Perets als sotsyaler dikhter [Y. L. Peretz as a Social Poet] that came out in 1916.
He edited early Soviet newspapers, including the Moscow daily Der emes [Truth],
and — as a Comintern agent — helped found the Yiddish communist press in New
York. In the journal Di royte velt, which Epshteyn edited upon his second return
to post-revolutionary Russia, he wrote that ‘Der Nister is one of our most original
artists, though his themes and style of writing demand explanation, because only
few intellectuals can understand them’. The literary scholar Isaac Nusinov, a key
figure in Soviet literary discussions, also weighed in in defence of Der Nister and,
generally, questioned the Russian Marxist theorist Georgii Plekhanov’s description
of symbolism as a form of artistic expression characteristic of capitalism in its death
agony. At the same time, Nusinov also maintained that Der Nister’s writings had
harmfully affected on a number of young writers, ‘distracting’ them from the ideo
logy of the October revolution.35 Epshteyn, too, discerned Der Nister’s inf luence on
Shmuel Godiner and M. Daniel, the promising younger Soviet Yiddish prose writers.36
Epshteyn’s substitute as Der emes editor, Moyshe Litvakov, always favoured Der
Nister’s work. In 1924, he wrote that while Bergelson, whose prose was set in
bourgeois environment, found himself in a creative crisis after the revolution, Der
Nister did not have such problems because his writing (Litvakov apparently meant
Der Nister’s folklore-derived fairy tales) had been always ‘intimately linked with
the popular masses’.37 Realism meant adherence to the Sholem Aleichem school
of writing, while, according to Litvakov, Nusinov and some other Soviet literary
critics, ideologically and aesthetically, Sholem Aleichem remained a problematic
writer.38 Symbolism, on the other hand, placed the writer in Peretz’s territory. It is
important to mention that Jewish socialism contained two main currents: one of
them was universalist, internationalist, while the second current preached a sort of
an ‘internationalism in due course’, arguing that one day Jews would certainly join
the classless, nation-less socialist society, but would do it together with other peoples
rather than before them. As a rule, realism was welcomed by internationalists, and
symbolism by those who envisaged a transitional phase of nation building. Litvakov,
who looked at literature through his prism of a nation builder, hailed Der Nister’s
writing, declaring him as a — if not the — successor to Peretz. Because Litvakov
associated Bergelson with the realistic tradition of Mendele Moykher Sforim and
Sholem Aleichem, he ranked him lower than Der Nister, whom he saw as the only
existing model for a revolutionary Yiddish writer.
It seems that Litvakov rejected realism because any realist work mirrored a world
he simply did not want to see. Instead, he preferred to dream about a socialist
Yiddish-speaking society, populated by sophisticated proletarians and genius
culture-bearers. Yekhezkel Dobrushin, who did not leave the country in the early
1920s but, like Litvakov, settled in Moscow, made explicit this concept of antirealism
and thus provoked fury in the proletarian literary camp: ‘In the periods of stormy
horror one has to register the palpitating thought in invented and fictitious images,
or in personages of extreme antiquity, moving thus far away from the too sharp
light of the blinding today.’39 In 1927, in a letter to the highly esteemed American
Yiddish poet H. Leivick, Dobrushin explained his dislike of another American
poet, Moyshe Nadir: ‘[If ] a writer has dismissive attitude to such people as Der
Nister and Leivick, it is a sign that he might have connection with literary activity,
but he certainly has no connection with literature proper’.40
In 1929, Litvakov wrote:
[Der Nister’s] symbolism reveals his ideological outlook with a clear attraction
towards the other world and mysticism. At the same time, however, symbolism
has a purely technical side, it has its technical methods to generalize things and
phenomena. Such methods are used by the bourgeois for removing those things
and phenomena from our contemporary world. Proletarian art, none the less,
can undergo transformation according to its own ways and needs, therefore it
can also use Symbolic methods of collecting, applying, and organizing lexical
material, and, as a result, enriching the intellectual and ideological vocabulary
of the language. By rejecting in Der Nister Der Nister’s ideology, I maintain
that from the point of view of word-interlacing (verter-geveb) and of striving
for artistic generalization, Der Nister represents a higher stage than Sholem
Aleichem.41
16 Gennady Estraikh
Even cornered by his nemeses’ vehement condemnation of symbolism, Litvakov

continued to support Der Nister. His argument clearly echoed the July 1925 decree
of the Politburo of the Communist Party’s Central Committee ‘On the Policy of
the Party in the Sphere of Artistic Literature’ which called on writers, inter alia, to
make use of ‘all the technical achievements of the old masters’ in working out ‘an
appropriate form intelligible to the millions’:42
Der Nister is a very talented writer, but — he is a symbolist. Der Nister has
always remained subjective in his attitude to the Jewish labour movement:
before the revolution [he was close] to the misguided part of the movement,
while after the October revolution he tried to come into close contact with
the communist ideology, but — he still remains a symbolist, and as a method
of creativity symbolism is not compatible with the revolutionary, particularly
communist, ideology. Indeed, Der Nister is a symbolist and his symbolism
is alien to proletarian methods of creativity. Nonetheless, he has brought to
literature certain new elements of literary technique, a certain technological
mastery. In his time, Plekhanov, speaking, for instance, about impressionists,
contended that even an ideologically f lawed method of creativity could enrich
the mastery of literary technique. As a result, I faced a difficult conundrum:
to dispraise Der Nister’s method, symbolism, but to leave him a chance to join
Soviet literature, allowing him, in principle, to regroup as an artist, and finally to
bring closer [to Soviet literature] also his method. This is number one. Second,
to reject Der Nister’s method, but at the same time to appreciate the mastery
of technique which he had brought to our literature and the inf luence, often
positive, which he in this sense had on our literature, including even Soviet
literature.43
Socialist Realism
Litvakov was not fated to live to see the full result of how his protégé would several
years later realize his dream of applying the accumulated mastery of technique
to realist prose writing, though some chapters of Der Nister’s novel The Family
Mashber appeared before Litvakov’s arrest in October 1937 and his execution — for
‘anti-Soviet terrorist activity’ — two months later. The publication of The Family
Mashber seemed to some people so ‘illogical’ that only a legend could provide a
cogent explanation for why the Moscow publishing house Der emes had done
it. According to that story, once upon a time, on a cold, snowy winter’s day, Der
Nister was assigned to go somewhere to bring paper for the Kharkov publishing
house where he worked. (In reality, he was a freelancer.) As the narrative continues,
he and the driver of the lorry took pity on a man, whom they saw standing at the
road-side, and gave him a lift to the city. This man was not Elijah the prophet in
disguise, but — as a secretary of Mikhail Kalinin, the titular head of the Soviet
state — he had leverage to recompense for the help rendered to him, and so
following this serendipitous event, the Yiddish writer’s masterpiece appeared in
print.44 The mentioning of Kalinin is significant in this tale, because, from the
mid-1920s onwards, he enjoyed a certain popularity among Jews, who associated
him with Soviet Jewish colonization projects in the Crimea and Birobidzhan and
with campaigns against anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.
In practice, in Der Nister’s case it was hardly crucial to have the support of a
person from Kalinin’s entourage. In the second half of the 1930s, publishers were
eager to get hold of manuscripts of historical novels, because the party leadership,
including Stalin himself, encouraged them to pay special attention to writings
dealing with Russia’s past, including novels portraying life of various social strata
and ethnic groups. The decree of the Soviet government and the Communist
Party’s Central Committee ‘On the Teaching of Civic History in the Schools of
the USSR’, issued on 16 May 1934, brought radical changes also into Soviet literary
life, which later that year was organized under the auspices of the Writers’ Union,
which Der Nister joined in the same year. From that time on, historical themes
were not deemed escapist any more. Rather, they were welcomed as works that
helped illuminate the ‘genealogy of the revolution’.45 As Der Nister wrote in his
introduction to The Family Mashber, he sought to show in old Jewish society the
‘seeds of great vitality which produced the enlightenment and later revolutionary
movement’.46 Paradoxically, the purges of 1937 and 1938 made the publication of
Der Nister’s novel easier, because the critics, such as Bronshteyn and Dunets, who
used to cast aspersions on his work, had been physically liquidated. Symptomatically,
several chapters of the novel came out in the Minsk journal Shtern [Star], previously
a forum for criticizing ‘Nisterism’.
In addition to historical belles-lettres, Der Nister tried his hand at other genres in
the 1930s. Thus, Soviet ideologists advocated the genre of documentary narratives,
called ocherk in Russian and fartseykhenung in Yiddish. As a result, Der Nister started
to write documentary narratives which began to appear in print in 1931, in Di royte
velt. In that year, the Minsk critic Leyb Tsart noted ‘numerous instances of writers
who, bankrupt in their ideology and hence in artistic creativity’, accepted a ‘social
assignment’ and turned to the genre of documentary narratives.47 In 1934, such
stories formed Der Nister’s book Hoyptshtet [Capitals]. The publisher characterized
it as the pioneering attempt in Yiddish literature to portray in the form of sketches
‘the socialist reconstruction of some big cities’ in the Soviet Union.48 Der Nister
will again turn to the genre of fartseykhenung in the 1940s, when he wrote on war
topics and about Birobidzhan for Eynikayt [Unity], the newspaper of JAFC.
In June 1935, the Warsaw Bundist periodical Vokhnshrift far literatur, kunst un
kultur [Weekly for Literature, Art and Culture] published a short note entitled
‘[Der] Nister showed up...’. It reminded the readers that Der Nister had established
his literary reputation before World War I, but later he published only a few
minor works which were criticized as nationalist and petty bourgeois. However,
the appearance of the book Capitals indicated that the writer had not fallen into
sterility. At the book presentation in Kharkov, where Der Nister had lived from
1928 (following a stint in Kiev as an editor at the Kultur-Lige publishing house),49
he tried to persuade the audience that he was no longer what they thought he was.
He spoke about the daunting challenge of ‘liberating himself ’ from his previous
literary style and characterized his sketches as an already accomplished stage in the
process of his artistic development, aimed at understanding of the ‘Great Epoch’,
whose ref lection he sought to create in his panoramic prose writing.50
Hersh (Grigorii) Remenik, the leading Yiddish literary historian and critic of the
18 Gennady Estraikh
post-Stalinist period, discerned the inf luence of Fyodor Dostoevsky, most notably
of his novel The Brothers Karamazov, in Der Nister’s realist prose. Significantly,
Der Nister wrote directly about Dostoevsky in Capitals (chapter ‘White Nights’),
because, according to Remenik, he could see that Dostoevsky, ‘like other great
writers in Russia and Western Europe, had foreseen the triumph of the revolution
and communism’.51 Der Nister’s turn to writing documentary stories ref lected a
break in his life, which took place around 1929, known as the year of Great Break
in the Soviet Union. ‘The eventful year 1929 marked the watershed between the
period of relative stylistic and thematic freedom and the new year of the ideological
dictate in Yiddish literature, which by 1934 had solidified into the doctrine of
socialist realism.’52
Khone Shmeruk, at whose hands Der Nister’s oeuvre became a subject of Western
academic enquiry, suggested a two-part periodization of Der Nister’s creative career
— before and after writing the 1929 story ‘Unter a ployt’ (‘Under a Fence’) —
whereas Hersh Remenik distinguished three phases of writing: (1) symbolist poetry,
1907–17; (2) symbolist prose, 1917–29; and (3) realistic prose.53 In any case, at some
point in the break period, Der Nister decided to direct his creative energy toward
writing a realistic novel. In 1934, in an oft-quoted letter to his younger brother,
Max Kaganovitch, an artist who gained prominence as a Paris-based art dealer and
collector, Der Nister revealed his frustration with the difficulties he encountered in
the process of shedding his ingrained symbolist mindset. He compared this process
with ‘being reborn’ and ‘turning the soul inside out’. Still, by 1934 he felt that he
already was on the right path and able to start writing a book, an important one.54
In the meantime, Der Nister did what many Jewish writers have done as their
bread-and-butter work — he translated stories and novels into Yiddish. His
translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (Yiddish: Notr-dam, 1929) and
Emile Zola’s Germinal (Yiddish: Koylngreber, 1930) came out in Kiev under the
imprint of Kultur-Lige. Apart from Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and Ukrainian, he
also knew German,55 but his renditions from other Western European languages
were ‘second-hand’ ones, made through pre-existing Russian translations. In 1933,
the Kharkov-based Publishing House for Ukraine’s National Minorities released his
translation from Ukrainian of Ivan (Israel) Kulyk’s story What Had Happened to Vasil
Rolenko (Yiddish: Vos hot getrofn mit Vasil Rolenke); Kulyk was a leading proletarian
writer in Soviet Ukraine and (from 1934) the first chairman of the republic’s
Writers’ Union. In 1934, the same publishing house issued Der Nister’s translation
of the story One and a Half Conversations (Yiddish: Onderhalbn geshprekhn) by Nikolai
Grigor’ev, a minor Soviet Russian writer.
The year 1935 was particularly prolific in Der Nister’s published hackwork: in
addition to his adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s Kinder-dertseylungen [Children’s
Stories], his translations of stories by Hans Christian Andersen, Jack London, Ivan
Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy came out as books for younger readers. He also wrote
children’s poetry. Some of his poetic fairy tales shaped his children’s books Dray
mayselekh [Three Tales] (1934), Mayselekh [Tales] (1935) and Zeks mayselekh [Six Tales]
(1939). On 5 April 1936, the Minsk newspaper Yunger leninets [Young Leninist]
published his 200-line poem ‘A mayse mit a foks’ [A Tale with a Fox], which
appeared also as part of his 1935 collection of tales. The fox goes to a village to hunt
chickens, but fails to realize that it is no longer the same village it had once been:
its dwellers have established a collective farm and thus created a safe environment
for their fowl:
Er meynt: s’iz a mol im!
Er meynt, s’iz vi frier:
der dakh iz in lekher,
a lokh in der tir.
[He thinks: it’s the old time!
He thinks, it’s as it used to be:
the roof is in holes,
a hole in the door.]
In the collectivized village there is a guard with a gun, and this gun brings death
to the politically retarded fox. Importantly, there is no mysticism or superstition in
this tale — in a country that lifted itself up out of darkness, tales were not supposed
to have such things.56 As a result, Der Nister could be praised as virtually the only
Soviet Yiddish continuer of Peretz’s fairy-tale tradition and, generally, a master of
this genre.57 His 1939 Six Tales also carries clear ideological messages. One of the
tales, set in China, is about a worker arrested and beheaded for illegally printing
leaf lets. Der Nister edifies his little readers (or the Chinese workers) by telling
them that at the time ‘when terror holds sway / and the enemy’s sword gleams’ it is
important to be part of the revolutionary movement, because ‘when a worker holds
back and is idle / it’s really not good but so ugly’. Another tale stages a mock trial
of a Trotskyite, with children invited to shout joyfully that he deserves being put
to death for his counterrevolutionary activity.58
Still, it was the novel The Family Mashber, rather than all the sketches, translations
and children’s poems, that was responsible for transforming Der Nister into a well-
established Soviet writer. In April 1940, the Kharkov chapter of the Writers’ Union
listed the novel among the top achievements of its members.59 Real recognition
of Der Nister as a leading Soviet Yiddish writer came after the publication of
Aron Gurshteyn’s lengthy article ‘The Book of Great Breath’ in Literaturnaia gazeta
[Literary Newspaper], the central periodical of the Writers’ Union. Gurshteyn
wrote that the ‘prominent Yiddish Soviet writer Der Nister, who has been active
in literature for over thirty years, is undeservedly little known to our public’
and that such poets as Kvitko, Reznik and Fininberg had developed their talents
under his inf luence. Gurshteyn attempted to give an ideological justification for
Der Nister’s initial choice of fantastic subject matters, combining the traditions
of Rebbe Nachman Bratslav’s Hasidic stories and modern symbolism: this fantasy
world served as the writer’s retreat from the ‘horrors and mindlessness of the
capitalist reality’. The revolution had liberated him from his own fantasies, but Der
Nister’s ‘internal tenacity’ made his way to realism very difficult. Ultimately, The
Family Mashber symbolized his artistic victory.60 Three decades later, the Soviet
literary specialist Moyshe Belenky developed further Gurshteyn’s thought: Der
Nister did not stop dreaming, but his dreams were now based on the realities of
Soviet life.61
20 Gennady Estraikh
Thanks to turning to the genre of historical novel, he could ‘hide’ in the relatively
safe past and thus protect, at least partly, his creative work from restrictions of
socialist realism. In 1934, Hofshteyn wrote:
What is your name?
It is not Muse!
......................
Sense and detect
that everything in my country
is being led and drawn to life and raising
only by the great love
and the great judgement!62
Indeed, for the majority of Soviet Yiddish writers whose works appeared in print
in the 1900s or 1910s, the period of their best muses came to an end in the 1930s.
Yet, according to the historian of Soviet literature Marietta Chudakova, it would
be wrong to state that Soviet ‘literature of the 1930s had been f lattened out under
the hammer of the regime which terrorized the country. [...] Clearly literature
continued to live, though it was at the end of its tether, desperate in its attempts
to find salvation.’63 Thus, the period of ‘the great judgement’ saw a remarkable
development in Der Nister’s creative career. He also moved up in the hierarchy of
the Soviet Yiddish literary guild, though until the beginning of the war in June
1941 he continued to live in Kharkov, which became a Yiddish cultural backwater
when the capital of the Soviet Ukraine’s was transferred to Kiev, in 1934. His
new status of a prominent writer was underscored when he was elected to — or,
ref lecting the reality of Soviet life, appointed to — classic Yiddish writers’ jubilee
committees. Although his name did not appear on the list of the All-Union Jubilee
Committee formed in November 1938 to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Sholem
Aleichem, the governing board of the Soviet Writers’ Union rectified this ‘blunder’
a couple of months later.64 At the beginning of 1941, Der Nister was listed among
the members of the all-union committee responsible for organizing festive events
on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of Y. L. Peretz.65 At the same time, Der
Nister’s works did not appear in translation. We do not know how keen he was to
see his writing being translated into Russian or Ukrainian. At the beginning of his
literary career Der Nister reluctantly agreed to submit his work for publication first
in Russian and only later in Yiddish, complaining that ‘to release first in Russian
something that was born and raised in Yiddish’ was like bringing a person’s ‘only
child to be baptized’.66 Whatever his attitude to translations later was, his readership
was not only small, but also potentially declining because by the beginning of 1939,
when The Family Mashber saw the light of day, Yiddish educational institutions had
been closed down in the European part of the country and survived exclusively in
Birobidzhan.
On 4 March 1942, Solomon Mikhoels, chairman of the Jewish Antifascist
Committee ( JAFC), and Shakhno Epshteyn, the committee’s secretary, wrote a
letter to the Communist Party’s Central Committee, suggesting inter alia that Der
Nister, ‘the outstanding Yiddish prose writer’, should be accepted for membership
of the JAFC, then in the making.67 In the byzantine state machinery, Yiddish
writers were supposed to function under the auspices of separate sections, situated
in Moscow, Kiev and Minsk, established by the Writers’ Union. However, the
JAFC had effectively taken over this function. At the beginning of 1943, Bergelson
characterized JAFC as ‘the organizer’ of Yiddish writers’ work.68 In Tashkent,
where Der Nister lived as an evacuee, he made a Yiddish rendition of the Uzbek
play Khamza, staged by the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (then based in Tashkent).
Der Nister’s link with JAFC and the theatre, both headed by Mikhoels, helped him
to move from Tashkent to Moscow (rather than to Kharkov), where he and the
actress Lena Sigalovsky, his second wife, occupied a very modest dwelling which
belonged to the Yiddish theatre.
Diogenes of the Soviet Literary World

The intriguing — and apparently indecipherable — question remained: what led
Der Nister to change his method of writing? Was it only the Procrustean bed of the
Soviet literary world? Or did he decide to retool himself as a realist because there
was no other way to remain a professional Yiddish author, whose works would be
published and read? Significantly, he was not the only writer making such a strategic
choice. By the end of the 1920s, Isaac Bashevis Singer came to the conclusion that
the only direction Yiddish belles-lettres could follow if it was to retain its essentially
conservative readership was that of the ‘epic-narrative’ about settings and situations
which the readers were familiar with and were able to share in.69
It also remains unknown whether Der Nister tried to square with the Soviet
ideologists’ views by focusing in his master novel on the Bratslavers rather than on
any other Hasidic group. According to Bernard Wasserstein, ‘he may have thought
that the Bratslavers would be more acceptable to the Soviet censor since they,
uniquely free of allegiance to a dynasty or court, had held closer than any other
Hasidic sect to the democratic wellsprings of the early phase of the movement’.
Wasserstein refers to Ilya Ehrenburg, who ‘had admired the Bratslavers when
he visited Poland in 1927’.70 In 1928, when the American Yiddish writer Joseph
Opatoshu visited Berdichev, he found that, although young faces rarely popped
up among the worshipers in local synagogues, youth remained visible among local
Bratslav Hasidim, whom local residents regarded as communists of sorts, because
the followers of Nahman of Bratslav valued yegia [work] and were toilers, such as
carpenters, smiths and house-painters.71
Der Nister’s ‘internal tenacity’, as well as his modest lifestyle at a distance from
the limelight of the Soviet literary world, generated deep respect among many of his
colleagues, who regarded him as a kind of a Diogenes of the Soviet Yiddish world.
In 1928, the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky coined the term ‘the Hamburg
score’, or the method of allowing participants to judge their own accomplishments,
and those of their peers. He described this method in a tale about circus wrestlers
who cheat in performance and allow themselves to lose a fight at the behest of the
organizers. But once a year wrestlers gather in Hamburg (where, coincidentally,
Der Nister spent a couple of years before moving to the Soviet Union) to have a
clean and honest fight among themselves.72 According to ‘the Hamburg score’, Der
Nister certainly came out a winner in the Soviet Yiddish literary ‘competition’.
22 Gennady Estraikh
In the 1950s and later on, many people in the West, especially outside overtly
pro-Soviet circles, were not ready to venerate as martyrs the writers murdered
in the last years of Stalin’s life, when the Soviet secret police regarded JAFC
membership as automatically suspect, lumping dozens of Jewish intellectuals in a
group of ‘closet nationalists’ and ‘anti-Soviet conspirators’.73 Isaac Bashevis Singer,
for instance, argued that the Soviet writers were ‘victims (korbones) of the regime’
but by no means ‘Jewish martyrs (kdoyshim)’.74 However, Der Nister, who always
remained an outlier, could be, and increasing was, seen as an embodiment of Jewish
non-conformism and even martyrdom. Delphine Bechtel, a student of Der Nister’s
oeuvre, has written: ‘In the 1950s, critics in the United States, confronted with
the tragic death of the Soviet writers, began to canonize Der Nister as a martyr
of Soviet dictatorship and toned down their former criticism. Der Nister was now
considered a master of Yiddish literature mainly because of Di mishpokhe Mashber, a
novel acclaimed unanimously.’75 Indeed, no other novel by a Soviet Yiddish writer
has been translated into Hebrew, French, English, German, Dutch and Russian.76
Der Nister’s words, reportedly said to the state security agents who came to arrest
him in February 1949, have become legendary: ‘Thank God, you came at last. I
have waited for you for so long.’77 By that time, the other leading Yiddish writers
had been already put in prison: David Hofsheyn on 16 September 1948, Itsik Fefer
on 24 December 1949, Leyb Kvitko and David Bergelson on 24 January 1949, and
Peretz Markish on 28 January 1949.
Scores of publications list Der Nister among the Yiddish writers executed on
12 August 1952, often misnamed as the ‘night of the murdered poets’ (only five of
the thirteen executed JAFC-associated personalities were professional writers).78
In reality, he did not attract much attention from the investigators, who focused
on the cases of the leading members of the JAFC, including Bergelson, Markish,
Fefer, Kvitko and Hofshteyn. Six months after his arrest on 19 February 1949, the
investigator, Lieutenant Colonel Tsvetaev, had found the writer guilty of ‘criminal
ties with nationalists and anti-Soviet agitation’, while Bergelson and other leading
members of the JAFC were also accused of ‘spying’. (The translator Chaika
Vatenberg-Ostrovskaya, one of the thirteen executed JAFC members, spoke about
Tsvetaev during the trial: ‘At the time when the investigation was being conducted
by Lieutenant Colonel Tsvetaev, it was so difficult that after that I had a great fear
of investigators in general and signed interrogation records that I considered to
be complete lies.’)79 The Special Board, an extrajudicial body established in 1934,
sentenced him to ten years in the labour camps, ‘calculating the term from 19
February 1949’. He died on 4 June 1950, in a camp near the settlement of Abez,
Komi Autonomous Republic.80 After all this, Remenik, himself an inmate of the
Gulag system in 1939–55, still characterized Bergelson’s and Der Nister’s choice of
becoming Soviet writers as a ‘fortunate’ one for them personally and for Yiddish
literature generally.81
Among Yiddish writers, Der Nister’s presence in belles-lettres and theatre has
few parallels. The protagonist of Elie Wiesel’s novel The Testament is incarcerated
in a Stalinist prison, where he — an immigrant Yiddish writer in the Soviet
Union — thinks: ‘Der Nister and his novel, The Mashber Family... I would have
liked to become better acquainted with that austere, reserved, almost ascetic man
who radiated the knowledge and fervor of Rabbi Nahman.’82 In Dara Horn’s novel
The World to Come, which (perhaps on purpose) contains historical inaccuracies
(thus, writing about Soviet Russia of the early 1920s, the author uses terms such as
‘socialist realism’ and ‘Birobidzhan’ which became current years later), Der Nister’s
problems are shown to be more acute than they were in reality: ‘once Der Nister
moved his family back to Russia, he had no chance at all of publishing his stories.
[...] His previously published work was panned, denounced in all the journals as
decadent and absurd. Even the children’s books he had written with Chagall were
gathered up and destroyed.’83 Such exaggeration was no doubt justified in order to
emphasize Der Nister’s martyrdom. A particularly distorted image of Der Nister
was presented in the 1982 opera Mikhoels the Wise (libretto by Mel Gordon), where
he is portrayed as a ‘Yiddish writer of the bizarre’, able to foresee the tragic death
of Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre.84
Der Nister appears as Pinkhas Mashberg in the novel Yizker [Memorial] by
Shmuel Gordon, who belonged to a younger generation of writers, but personally
knew Der Nister and, more generally, the entire circle of Soviet Yiddish litter
ateurs. In his literary memorial to those who had not survived the repression of
Yiddish culture figures in the late 1940s, Gordon brought together Der Nister
and Bergelson. Gordon’s Mashberg/Der Nister is the poorest among the Yiddish
writers, the chronicler and High Priest of the Jewish people. The protagonist of the
novel, the author’s alter ego, comes to Bergelson with a letter written by Mashberg,
who felt that their days were numbered and wanted to reassure Bergelson (Raphael
Okhrimov in the novel) that he never attempted to replace him on the Soviet
Yiddish literary Olympus.85 Indeed, it is hard to say which of the two, Bergelson
or Der Nister, can be crowned as number one in Soviet Yiddish literature. Both
writers have gained essentially the same ‘Hamburg score’ as grandmasters of
Yiddish letters.
Notes to Chapter 1
1. Barry Trachtenberg, The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917 (Syracuse, NY: Syra
cuse University Press, 2008), p. 16.
2. Nakhman Mayzel, ‘Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, Perets Markish’, Zamlbikher, 6 (1945), p. 427;
idem, Dos yidishe shafn un der yidisher shrayber in Sovetnfarband (New York: IKUF, 1959), p. 174.
3. Jeffrey Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2009), p. 21.
4. See Gennady Estraikh, ‘Yiddish in Imperial Russia’s Civil Society’, in Jews in the East European
Borderlands, ed. by Eugene M. Avrutin and Harriet Murav (Boston: Academic Studies Press,
2012), pp. 50–66.
5. For the most recent treatment of the conference, see Czernowitz at 100: The First Yiddish Language
Conference in Historical Perspective, ed. by Keith I. Weiser and Joshua A. Fogel (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2010).
6. Abraham Golomb, ‘Fun zeyer onheyb: zikhroynes’, Zamlbikher, 8 (1952), 249–59. In 1920, Golta
became part of the town of Pervomaisk.
7. Estraikh, ‘Yiddish in Imperial Russia’s Civil Society’, pp. 63.
8. Mayzel, ‘Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, Perets Markish’, p. 428.
9. Translated and quoted in Leonard Wolf, ‘Introduction’, in Der Nister, The Family Mashber, trans.
by L. Wolf (New York: Summit Books, 1987), p. 9.
24 Gennady Estraikh
10. Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn un der yidisher shrayber in Sovetnfarband, p. 173.
11. Mayzel, ‘Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, Perets Markish’, p. 419.
12. Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2005), pp. 11–13.
13. Der Nister, Dertseylungen un eseyen (New York: IKUF, 1957), p. 288. Unless otherwise indicated,
translations in English from Yiddish and Russian are my own.
14. Der Nister, Dertseylungen un eseyen, p. 293.
15. Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 31–32.
16. Shmuel Niger, Yidishe shrayber in sovet-Rusland (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1958),
p. 369.
17. Itzhak Yanasowicz, Mit yidishe shrayber in Rusland (Buenos Aires: Kiem, 1959), p. 95.
18. Shmuel Rosenfeld, ‘On a bodn: briv iber der yidisher literatur’, Tsukunft, 6 (1914), p. 663.
19. Joseph Sherman, ‘Radical Conservatism: Bashevis’s Dismissal of Modernism’, in 1929: Mapping
the Jewish World, ed. by Hasia R. Diner and Gennady Estraikh (New York: New York University
Press, 2013), p. 202.
20. ‘Translation of an Appeal, dated May 26, 1920, from a group of eminent Jewish writers and
artists now living in Kiev’, Archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, item
233297; ‘Letter from Acct. in Charge, Joint Distribution Committee to Jewish Writers Club’,
idem, item 210351.
21. Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 43.
22. Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin, files R121690 and 121691.
23. Elias Schulman, A History of Jewish Education in the Soviet Union (New York: Ktav, 1971), p. viii.
24. Abraham Abchuk, Etyudn un materyaln tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur-bavegung in fssr,
1917–1927 (Kharkov: Literatur un kunst, 1934), p. 18; Vladimir Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 19
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), pp. 503–07; Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the
Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 229. In February 1922,
the Kultur-Lige’s Central Organizational Bureau still existed in Moscow and even signed an
appeal to international Jewry which appeared in the Soviet press: ‘Spravedlivoe trebovanie’,
Izvestiia, 26 February 1922, p. 1.
25. Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 114–15, 127–28.
26. Melech Ravitch, Dos mayse-bukh fun mayn lebn: yorn in Varshe, 1921–1934 (Tel Aviv: Y. L. Peretz,
1975), p. 412.
27. Froyim Shprakh, ‘Der masn-leyener vegn der tsaytung-shprakh’, Di yidishe shprakh, 3 (1928),
pp. 15–20.
28. Quoted in Vladimir V. Perkhin, Russkaia literaturnaia kritika 1930-kh godov: kritika i obshchectvennoe
soznanie epokhi (St Petersburg: Petersburg University Press, 1997), p. 122.
29. Leyb Brovarnik, ‘Vos hot men geleyent in Kiever Vintshevski-bibliotek in 1930 yor’, Di royte
velt, 1 (1931), 220–21.
30. Itsik Fefer, Di ufgabes fun der yidisher proletarisher literatur in rekonstruktivn period (Kiev:
Ukrmelukhenatsmindfarlag, 1932), p. 11.
31. Briv fun yidishe sovetishe shraybers, ed. by Yehezkel Lifshits and Mordecai Altshuler ( Jerusalem:
Hebrew University, 1979), pp. 102, 103, 108.
32. Lipe Reznik, ‘A briv in redaktsye’, Der emes, 16 February 1929, p. 3.
33. Grigorii (Hersh) Remenik, Ocherki i portrety: stat’i o evreiskikh pisateliakh (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1975), p. 300.
34. Avrom Kahan, ‘Evreis’ka radian’ska literatura USRR za dva roky’, Literaturna hazeta, 1 May
1934, p. 2.
35. Isaac Nusinov, ‘Nistor’, Literaturnaia entsiklopediia, vol. 8 (Moscow: Kommunistisheskaia akade
miia, 1934), pp. 90–91; Yasha Bronshteyn, Farfestikte pozitsyes (Moscow: Der emes, 1934), pp. 250,
253. Hard-line proletarian critics labelled Nusinov’s enthusiasm about Der Nister as ‘rightwing
deviation’ from the Party’s general line — see, e.g., Moyshe Taytsh, ‘Der tsushtand un di
perspektivn fun yidisher proletarisher literatur’, Morgn-Frayhayt, 30 December 1929, p. 5.
36. Shakhno Epshteyn, ‘Na svitanku evreiskoï literatury’, Krytyka, 10 (1930), 79–80.
37. Moyshe Litvakov, ‘Nays fun der yidisher literatur’, Der emes, 26 April 1924, pp. 2–3.
38. Gennady Estraikh, ‘Soviet Sholem Aleichem’, in Translating Sholem Aleichem: History, Politics and
Art (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), pp. 64–65.

40. Briv fun yidishe sovetishe shraybers, pp. 64–65
42. James F. Murphy, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 26–27. Murphy’s emphasis.
43. Moyshe Litvakov, Af tsvey frontn (Moscow: Tsentraler felker-farlag, 1931), p. 170.
44. Yanasowicz, Mit yidishe shrayber in Rusland, pp. 241–42.
45. Mark Serebrianskii, Sovetskii istoricheskii roman (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1936),
pp. 5, 16, 18, 156.
46. Der Nister, Di mishpokhe Mashber (Moscow: Emes, 1939), p. 4.
47. Khone Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister’s “Under a Fence”: Tribulations of a Soviet Yiddish Symbolist’, in
The Field of Yiddish. Second Collection, ed. by Uriel Weinreich (The Hague: Mouton & Co.:
1965), p. 265.
48. Der Nister, Hoyptshtet (Kharkov: Literatur un kunst,1934), p. i.
49. ‘Avtobiografiia i ankety Kaganovicha’, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI),
file 3121–1-42. I thank Dr Galina Eliasberg for providing a copy of this file.
50. ‘Nister hot zikh bavizn...’, Vokhnshrift far literatur, kunst un kultur, 6 June 1935, p. 8.
51. Hersh Remenik, ‘Dostoevsky and Der Nister’, Soviet Studies in Literature, 8.4 (1972), 407, 411.
52. Mikhail Krutikov, ‘Desire, Destine, and Death: Fantasy and Reality in Soviet Yiddish Literature
around 1929’, in 1929: Mapping the Jewish World, ed. by Hasia R. Diner and Gennady Estraikh
(New York: New York University Press, 2013), p. 218.
53. Remenik, ‘Dostoevsky and Der Nister’, p. 419.
54. See, e.g., Yankev Lvovski, ‘In togteglekhn lebn’, Sovetish heymland, 6 (1964), p. 142. On Max
(Motl) Kaganovitch (1891–1978), see Khudozhniki russkogo zarubezhia, 1917–1939, ed. by Oleg
Leikind, Kirill Makhrov and Dmitrii Severiukhin (St Petersburg: Notabene, 1999), p. 308.
55. ‘Avtobiografiia i ankety Kaganovicha’.
56. See Isaac Nusinov, ‘Der mishpet’, Af di vegn tsu der nayer shul, 4–5 (1924), 132–33.
57. Yekhezkel Dobrushin, ‘Der Nisters naye “mayselekh” ’, Literarishe bleter, 19 March 1937,
p. 192; Moyshe Khshtshevatski, ‘Dos yidishe kinder-bikhl’, Shtern, 5 (1939), 93; Buzi Miller,
‘Literaturnaia zhizn’ v Birobidzhane’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 10 May 1939, p. 6.
58. Daniela Matovan, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries of Genre: The Children’s Stories of the Soviet
Yiddish Writer Der Nister (1884–1950)’, Report of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies
(2006/2007), 47.
59. ‘Novyi presidium khar’kovskogo soiuza pisatelei’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 14 April 1940, p. 6.
60. Aron Gurshteyn, ‘Kniga bol’shogo dykhaniia’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 30 June 1940, p. 3.
61. Moyshe Belenky, ‘A vort vegn Dem Nister’, in Der Nister, Vidervuks (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1969), pp. 11–12.
63. Marietta O. Chudakova, Literatura sovetskogo proshlogo (Moscow: Iasyki russkoi kul’tury, 2001),
p. 344.
64. ‘Postanovlenie prezidiuma SSP’, RGALI, file 631–6-287, p. 5.
65. ‘Iubilei Peretsa’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 19 January 1941, p. 1.
66. Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul of the Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-Sky (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 155.
67. Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet v SSSR, 1941–1948, ed. by Shimon Redlich and Gennady
Kostyrchenko (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1996), p. 58.
68. David Bergelson, ‘Velt-tribune far yidish-sovetishe shrayber’, Eynikayt, 7 February 1943, p. 4.
69. Sherman, ‘Radical Conservatism: Bashevis’s Dismissal of Modernism’, p. 215.
70. Bernard Wasserstein, On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2012), pp. 271–72. See also Ilya Ehrenburg, Viza vremeni (Berlin: Petropolis,
1929), pp. 190–91.
71. Joseph Opatoshu, Gezamlte verk 13 (Vilna: B. Kletzkin, 1934), pp. 181–87, 231–32.
72. Viktor Shkvovskii, Gamburgskii schet (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), p. 331.
73. For the persecution of the committee, see, e.g., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, ed. by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
26 Gennady Estraikh
74. Itskhok Varshavsky [Isaac Bashevis Singer], ‘Iz emes az men hot farfolgt Sholem Ash?’, Forverts, 7
April 1963, section 2, p. 5; see also Gennady Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War (Oxford: Legenda,
2008), p. 70.
75. Delphine Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, 1907–1929: A Study of a Yiddish Symbolism (Bern: Peter Lang,
1990), p. 23.
76. Bet Mashber (Merhavyah: Sifriyot po’alim, 1947–51); La Famille Mashber (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1974),
The Family Mashber (New York: Summit Books, 1987), Die Brüder Maschber: das jiddisische Epos
(Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1990), De familie Masjber (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 2002), Sem’ia
Mashber (Moscow: Tekst, 2010).
77. Peter B. Maggs, The Mandelstam and ‘Der Nister’ Files: An Introduction to Stalin-era Prison and Labor
Camp Records (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), p. 11. For perhaps the first published description
of Der Nister’s arrest, see Sheine-Miriam Broderson, Mayn laydns-veg mit Moyshe Broderzon
(Buenos Aires: Tsentral-farband fun poylishe yidn in Argentine, 1960), p. 89.
78. Archival material on the case of the Jewish Antifascist Committee became accessible as late as
December 1989, following the publication of ‘O tak nazyvaemom “dele EAK” ’, Izvestiia TsK
KPPS, 12 (1989), 35–42. Cf. Avraham Greenbaum, ‘A Note on the Tradition of the Twenty-
Four Soviet Martyrs’, Soviet Jewish Affairs, 17.1 (1987), 49–52. See also, for instance, Chimen
Abramsky, ‘The Rise and Fall of Soviet Yiddish Literature’, Soviet Jewish Affairs, 12.3 (1982), 35;
Boris Draznin, Stepchildren of Mother Russia (Rockville, MD: Schreiber, 2004), p. 203.
79. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 297.
80. On Der Nister’s arrest and imprisonment, see Maggs, The Mandelstam and ‘Der Nister’ Files.
81. Hersh Remenik, ‘Notitsn vegn undzer proze’, Sovetish heymland, 1 (1965), 143.
82. Elie Wiesel, The Testament, trans. from the French by Marion Wiesel (New York: Schoken
Books, 1981), pp. 258–59.
83. Dara Horn, The World to Come (New York: W. W. Norton & Company: 2006), p. 138.
84. Libretto of the Jewish Opera Mikhoels the Wise. Isaiah M. Minkoff Papers. WAG 086. Robert F.
Wagner Labor Archives. Tamiment Library, New York University. See also ‘92d St. Y Offers
Jewish Opera “Mikhoels” ’, The New York Times, 11 May 1982, p. 17.
85. Shmuel Gordon, Yizker: di farmishpete shrayber ( Jerusalem: World Council for Yiddish Culture,
2003), pp. 135–66.
Chapter 2
v
Der Nister’s Hebrew Nosegay

Jordan Finkin
In the mid-1970s, a small sheaf of Hebrew poems was found in the archive
of Nahum Sokolov (1859–1936), the tireless editor of the Hebrew newspaper
Ha-tsefirah. Entitled Pirchei no’ar [Flowers of Youth] these poems had likely been sent
to Sokolov to consider for publication, which he seems to have declined. Such are
the conjectures, at any rate, since any correspondence between author and publisher
has yet to surface. We do not know what Sokolov thought about the poems, or
why he chose not to publish them; neither do we know whether this was the only
place the author submitted them, or what he thought about their failure to appear
in print. The one thing we do know is that the name on the twenty-four-page
collection was Pinchas Kahanovitsh.
Two of the poems are dated, 1901/1902, and Dov Sadan — the author of the
only critical work written about these poems1 — concludes that the collection was
likely composed around that time, when Kahanovitsh was eighteen or nineteen
years old, while living in his native Berdichev and working as a Hebrew teacher.
Half a decade later Kahanovitsh had chosen the mysterious penname by which he
would become known, Der Nister, and had begun to publish in Yiddish the first of
his major works: a number of poèmes en prose (Gedanken un motivn [Ideas and
Motifs]; 1907), a slender volume of stories (Hekher fun der erd [Higher than the Earth];
1910), and a collection of incantatory poetry (Gezang un gebet [Song and Prayer];
c. 1910).
It is tempting to analyse juvenilia for traces and embryonic inklings of a writer’s
future work. Are there core themes that are accepted and expanded upon while
others are rejected? What might be the author’s idées fixes, the keys to his or her
worldview, and what the sidelines and byways? And ultimately are such texts
important tools for understanding and subtilizing an author’s oeuvre, or are they
just curiosities and footnotes? Given the enigmatic nature of the work for which
Der Nister is best known, the great prose stories of the interwar period, and even
his massive novel The Family Mashber — work so often characterized as mystical,
ambiguous, hermetic — one may easily understand the desire to scour earlier
works, and especially lately discovered ones, for any interpretational keys, possible
tools to decode the enigma. That interpretive temptation is intensified in cases
of noteworthy changes in significant aspects of a writer’s production. Perhaps no
change is as instantaneously noticeable as the language an author has chosen to use,
and no such language change is more fraught than that of a Jewish writer in the
28 Jordan Finkin
early twentieth century choosing to move from Hebrew to Yiddish or from Yiddish
to Hebrew.
Scholarly debates about multilingual Jewish authors in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries have focused on whether the author’s choice of language
represented the choice of a different literature, each with its own distinct set of
values, motifs, audiences, and aesthetic and social goals, or whether these works
were simply idiomatic permutations of one and the same literature, no matter what
the language. Given this context, one naturally wants to ask, for example: why
did Der Nister choose Hebrew for these poems? And why did he choose not to
continue writing Hebrew? What do these poems accomplish and why might they
not have done so in Yiddish? While there may often be valid reasons for asking
such questions, in the case of Der Nister’s early Hebrew poetry these questions
are less productive, for one because we simply do not know the answer to some,
and moreover, if for no other reason than their paucity would make any answers
speculative at best.2 More interesting is whether the language option represented
a choice between varieties of literary affinity: realist neo-Romanticism, hermetic
symbolism, ‘high’ modernism, or even experimental avant-gardism. Yet these
questions of literary affinity are also difficult to answer because Der Nister, even
in these earliest literary attempts, tends to defy categorization. True, these Hebrew
poems often sound like other poetry of the period. Nevertheless, there are aspects
that mark them out as something a little different.
Less common than the utilitarian analysis of juvenilia are attempts to analyse
them neither as probative tools nor as dispositive diagnostics, but rather on their
own terms. Reading Flowers of Youth requires such an approach. The discovery of
these poems naturally prompted the question of how important this poetry is to
the understanding of Der Nister’s work and significance in general. I think one can
argue now that the answer is: not all that important. Nevertheless, no matter how
little attention we need to pay to it in order to understand the later Der Nister, the
poetry still offers important insights into Jewish literature, into the ways in which
Jewish literary language was experimented with in one of its periods of great f lux,
and that is why we ought not simply dismiss it, or ignore it.3
Our curiosity is further piqued moreover because the poems are so few (the
collection contains ten poems of greatly varying lengths); because they are unlike
almost anything else Der Nister wrote in Yiddish; because they are in Hebrew; and
because we know very little about them (paratext, provenance, history, etc.). And so,
as befits the work of a writer who would soon adopt so recondite a penname as ‘the
Hidden One’, these poems become a mill for conjecture and surmise. Dov Sadan
is explicit in his discussions of this text that the essential hypothetical questions are
whether (a) these Hebrew poems are the first steps in a road not taken, or whether
(b) they are precisely that, namely the first steps of the road actually taken by Der
Nister. Sadan asks, ‘Are we dealing already in Flowers of Youth with motifs that are
seeds of a later growth and development?’4
Some elements of the primary thematic inventory of these poems will indeed
filter through Der Nister’s later work. His use of stark opposition, his depiction
of eroticism and sexual taboo, and his concern with the work of creation (in its
Der Nister’s Hebrew Nosegay 29
Biblical form), especially as a token of generativity in general and the task of the
writer in particular, are all recognizable material, as I will explore later. Other
elements, however, do not. Old age and death, for example, regularly appear as
some of Der Nister’s intimate concerns in his Yiddish works. But while we see this
as a central motif as early as in the poem ‘On the Gates’ (from his Gezang un gebet;
c. 1910) and all the way through The Family Mashber (in which the recurrent totemic
image of the purchased shroud is unforgettable), Der Nister does not focus on that
in Flowers of Youth.
The poems of Flowers of Youth do not represent a possible ‘road not taken’
precisely because they represent only themselves: a single work of a single moment.
To be sure, they are in Hebrew, and it is interesting to wonder why; but investing
the decision with all of the weight of political ideological ‘path-choosing’ is, I
think, misplaced. As a Hebrew teacher himself, Der Nister may simply have felt
that his comfort with the language from the point of view of actually composing
in it was simply more practised and precise, especially for someone just starting out
as a writer.
Or perhaps he felt a pull towards the distinct prestige of Hebrew poetry, a prestige
that was removed from any but the most aesthetic associations. Hebrew poetry
was ‘high art’; to be published meant being a bona fide artist. And Der Nister’s
Hebrew does at times read like an attempt to prove a kind of mastery or f luency.
In vocabulary alone there are archaic elements, elevated poetic diction, Aramaic
words (to which I will return later), rabbinic and cabbalistic turns of phrase, as well
as clear interaction with the new Hebrew poetry of the Revival period. These many
strata, the reason for whose deployment is sometimes opaque, attest to Der Nister’s
deep engagement with Hebrew poetics.5 And this is not surprising in the context of
Hebrew letters at the turn of the century. Young intellectuals who left the precincts
of Jewish tradition, for the most part having been trained in traditional Jewish texts
and contexts, now entered the world of secular European letters by experimenting
with the linguistic materials at their disposal. Being able multilinguists, these
writers often tried their hands at composition variously in Yiddish and Hebrew and
Russian or Polish, for example. Literary politics were still sufficiently inchoate in
1901 to allow these kinds of experiments without requiring the language allegiance
that would soon dominate Jewish literature. And while there are ‘national’ moments
in Flowers of Youth, Der Nister’s choice of Hebrew does seem to be based on largely
aesthetic criteria.
Looking at the dominant thematics of the poems in this collection, Flowers
of Youth, as well as their diction and their form, we see an experiment in poetic
language. Der Nister seems to have been trying to match up the themes to which
he was attracted (only some of which would continue to be compelling to him for
much of the rest of his career) with a poetic language and a system of poetic forms
best able to capture them. It is tempting to surmise that for Der Nister Hebrew
was suitable as a language for these early experiments because of its historicized
component consciousness: classical Hebrew associated with the Bible, for example,
and Aramaic with rabbinic folklore and storytelling. Yiddish, on the other hand,
could operate in the interstitial mystical, and thus more symbolist, vein because
30 Jordan Finkin
it was understood as more ‘organic’ — more able to encompass that ‘earthiness’

(erdishkayt) seen as so central to Der Nister’s work6 — more natural and less tethered
to history and the text in the same way. It could orchestrate them without speaking
from within them. Der Nister’s experiments in poetic language began in an analytic
approach to Hebrew, eschewing the national project of a more organic, natural
literary language in favour of starker contrasts and a more self-conscious approach
to language.
Whatever the reason for his choice to write in Yiddish, it was not in order to
abandon experimentation with language. He clearly intended his early Yiddish
works — Gedanken un motivn and Gezang un gebet — as poetry. In them he plaits
together different techniques and forms, from poèmes en prose to lyric strophes to epic
stanzas, into a kind of Gesamtdichtwerk, so to speak.7 (Moreover, unlike in the prose,
where pursuing ‘narrative’ structure, while an interesting and sophisticated game,
can at times nevertheless be something of a false lead, no such option is available to
the early poetry.) His Hebrew poems, on the other hand, unlike the early Yiddish
poems, are not so formally adventurous. While Sadan rather erroneously calls the
first poem of the collection a ‘triolet’,8 none of the poems in the collection deviates,
except superficially, from traditional quatrains. (The only formally ‘marked’ poem
in the collection is the one entitled ‘Idyll’, though that is a designation indicating
content more than structure.) Moreover, eight out of the collection’s ten poems
are composed of quatrains with open rhyme scheme: xAxA xBxB, and so forth.
This form has its origin in folksong, and was literarily well worn in Yiddish.9
Short sequences of such open rhyme scheme quatrains, especially in iambics, were
also a favoured form among Russian Romantic poets. Equally noteworthy is the
variety of metres employed; several of the poems are written in amphibrachs.10
Taken together these details attest to a kind of creative experimentation in Hebrew
that defies reading these poems as conventional or derivative. That is, Der Nister’s
poems offer a complementary stream in Revival Period poetics. The shadow cast by
the doyens of Hebrew poetry — Bialik and Tshernikhovski, as well as others such as
Shneyur and Frishman — was long. While their works set a tone, the experimental
drive in contemporary Hebrew letters is sometimes downplayed; the (often modest)
attempts to come out from under that shadow are telling.11 If Der Nister’s poems
are to be seen in some sense as ground-laying, it is not for nothing that some of
Der Nister’s most acute critics and commentators, such as Nakhman Mayzel and
Nokhum Oyslender, note of his early Yiddish prose works their non-narrative
aspects such as musicality and his ‘erudite’ care for detail.12
While there are many possible points of entry into this corpuscle of poems, space
nevertheless precludes an exhaustive study. Rather, I would like to take a number of
features and motifs in order to explore what they are and how they actually work,
without reading them too far forward into the later Yiddish works. To that end in
what follows I will look at the use of Aramaic and at the deployment of opposites,
including erotic opposition.
Aramaic
The most conspicuous linguistic element — the use of Aramaic words — appears
in the very first line of the very first poem. Sadan points this out as well when he
observes Der Nister’s ‘insertion of the Aramaic term of whose use we are familiar in
its humorous aspect (Yalag, Frishman) but which here adds grace to the beginning
of the poem’.13 This untitled two-stanza poem presents the rather hackneyed
warning to springtime’s abundance and exuberance that chastening winter will
surely return.
Meseems: the Spring and all its appurtenances [abizrayhu] —
A smile of that ornery old man,
The winter that passed, as if to say: ‘Oh those mischievous ones,
They’ve gone wild, gone wild! I’m returning straightaway’!14
Pace Sadan’s assertion that the word (abizrayhu) adds a note of charm, it is a strange
way to begin a poem. The word is not needed for rhyme, since it occurs in a non-
rhyming line; and while it fits nicely in the poem’s amphibrachic structure, the
word is not a metrical necessity. The reason reveals itself thematically. The word
has something of a technical valence in rabbinic terminology. An ‘appurtenance’ in
this context refers to an accretion to the law made in order to ensure its adherence.
Most often the word has come to be used to refer to expansions of restrictions on
sexual relations so as to prevent serious transgressions and breaking of sexual taboos.
Der Nister intentionally foregrounds the sexual aspect of the rite of spring, but he
does so in the language of a prudish rabbinic scold. Using the cyclical vocabulary of
the seasons, two forces are therefore set in opposition, namely vitality and liberation
against senescence and restriction.
The metaphorical structure, however, begins to obscure, or at least complicate,
the traditional (perhaps even hackneyed) moralistic eat-drink-and-be-merry
message. The poet’s primary fictive conceit is the anthropomorphization of winter
as a hoary prophet of gloom.15 The secondary conceit, however, is to present the
codger’s words not as ‘real’ but as themselves an imaginative interpretation — ‘as
if to say’ — of that character’s enigmatic smile. Moreover, the poem opens with
‘Meseems’ (li nidmeh), which further blurs appearances and realities. What seems
to the poet as ‘the Spring and its appurtenances’ would appear to the reader as the
subject of the poem. Yet the use of the marked rabbinic term immediately in that
initial position transforms that topicalization into a kind of style indirect libre; it is
not the poet who would use that term, rather only Old Rabbi Winter would do
so. (And a generation of secularized writers and intellectuals reared on traditional
rabbinic texts would be primed ref lexively to understand the idiom.)
As Sadan notes, Der Nister does sprinkle Aramaic terms throughout this
collection. However, that sprinkling is actually rather illiberal. Many of the other
instances occur in the long poem ‘The Garden of Eden’, the most intricate of the
poems in the collection. It describes man’s creation, his placement in the Garden
of Eden, his rebellious choices, and his ultimate expulsion as a wanderer over the
earth. Der Nister complicates the simple formula of Genesis: rule (don’t eat the
Tree of Knowledge) — transgression — punishment. While Genesis mentions the
32 Jordan Finkin
existence of the Tree of Life, there is no explicit rule against consuming its fruit,
only that of the Tree of Knowledge. In Der Nister’s garden, however, God makes no
such prohibitions and is quite clear that the man he has created is to be utterly free;
indeed he commands: ‘Of the choice fruit of the Tree of Life be sated, / Be happy,
sing and live, my son, and live!’16 (One can hear the echoes of Tshernikhovski’s
vitalism.) What, then, is the Man guilty of? Of forswearing the Tree of Life and
eating from the Tree of Knowledge. If the ‘soul of creation’, in the poem’s words,
are freedom and vitality,17 then actively opting for anything short of that freedom
is itself a crime. God curses the Man accordingly:
God cursed him: ‘Cursed are you!
Oh Man, be a fugitive and a vagabond [nad ve-na]
Go the roundabout way, you will not approach my Garden of Eden
This is your portion forever, this this!’18 [da chelkekha le-‘alam, da da!]
Der Nister conf lates here two separate Biblical curses. The first is of course from
the end of Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden. The
second is from the end of Genesis 4, when Cain, in punishment for the murder of
his brother, is cursed further to be a harried wanderer over the earth (in Hebrew,
na ve-nad). The language of God’s curse in Der Nister’s poem is (intentionally) a
jumbled heap. The inversion of the familiar and fixed formula na ve-nad — which
had come to mean a wanderer colloquially both in Hebrew and in Yiddish —
into nad ve-na not only destabilizes the textual language, but sets the stage for a
significant rhyme.
The second section of the curse — ‘Go the roundabout way, you will not
approach my Garden of Eden’ (sechor sechor, le-gan edni lo tikrav) — as Sadan notes,
is itself taken from the Talmud. There the precept reads: ‘Oh Nazirite, go the
roundabout way, you will not approach the vineyard.’19 The Nazirite is forbidden
to consume grapes or wine (among other things; Numbers 6), and so the rabbinical
injunction intends to warn him off the temptation of even walking near a vineyard.
Structurally, the ‘vineyard’ and the ‘garden (of Eden)’ are suitably similar to motivate
the allusion. More importantly, the principle underlying ‘go the roundabout way’
(sechor sechor) looks like the same one that underlies the ‘appurtenances’ (abizrayhu)
of the first poem, that is, accreted law to provide further buffer against grievous
sin. The similarity, however, is not fortuitous. Rather, the rule about the Nazirite
comes as an elucidative principle within the larger context of permissible or imper
missible intimate contact to prevent incest and sexual impropriety.20 Der Nister’s
poems begin to fill out a concern with the erotic as essential ingredients to the
human experience and to the theme of freedom which is woven through many of
these poems. In the poem God’s punishment for the Man’s failure to revel in life’s
vigour, then, is prudery and shame in sexual matters. It is not for nothing that one
of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories which Der Nister translated and published
some twenty years later was ‘The Garden of Eden’ (Der ganeydn; Danish Paradisets
have),21 an erotically charged moralistic tale of pubescent awakening, temptation,
and punishment.22
God’s curse concludes with a line almost completely in Aramaic: ‘This is your
portion forever, this this!’ While this line was rendered above in the academic
standard transliteration, in the more accurate Ashkenazi version it reads: do chelkekho

le-‘olam, do do! The loftiness of God’s earlier paeans to freedom is lost in the
legalistic overtones of the Aramaic pronouncement. Moreover, while the Aramaic
demonstrative pronoun refers to the punishment, the Yiddish echo cannot but be
heard, in which do means ‘here’.23 The Garden of Eden, with its boundless pleasures
and its freedoms, is outside of time and space. Presence in time and in place is
therefore a curse. These various disjunctions in language, in vocabulary, diction and
intertext, are jarring, but thematically powerful.
And in this unusual disjointedness Der Nister seems to have been trying, at
least tentatively, to look toward a different path in Hebrew poetry, simultaneously
away from the Nusakh stylistics of a previous generation, from the experiments
towards a more organic tone of the neo-Romantics, and the international f lair of
the cosmopolitans. Sadan puts Der Nister the Hebrew poet squarely in the company
of the ‘new poetry’ of the Revival generation. While a decade younger than its
towering figures, Chaim Nachman Bialik and Shaul Tshernikhovski24 (their first
volumes came out only in 1898 and 1901 respectively), Der Nister was the immediate
contemporary of other notable figures including Ya’akov Shteynberg and Zalman
Shneyur, inter alia. For all that, as Sadan also admits, Der Nister’s poetry is rather
different from others of his Revival cohort.25
This is not to say that Der Nister did not share with his Hebrew poetic cohort
a concern for national issues. The way he expresses that concern, however, shows
a divergence from the main road. An untitled poem from the collection, which
begins ‘God’s strength is mine...’ (Gevurat-el li...), offers an anthemic vision of one
young man hastening to fight and die, self-sacrificially, ‘for our people and for
our land’, and later on ‘for our people and for our freedom’.26 Sadan sees in this
poem the inf luence of non-Jewish folksong, clothed in Hebrew.27 Reading the first
stanzas, for example, one does get that impression:
God’s strength is mine, the warmth of youth,
Many and mighty powers,
And from my mother I will receive a blessing. —
Whom will I fear! — To battle!
With me I have an amulet from my mother,
The warmth of my bride’s kisses,
And a priestly blessing — whom will I fear!
I laugh at fear with arrow and spear!
The re-gendering of the traditional parental blessing (at least from the point of
view of the biblical models on which the poetry of this period heavily drew) from
the father to the mother, a technique which will take on a more subversive cast in
later Hebrew modernism,28 finds its folk orientation in the amulet or magic charm
one encounters in folk sources, as well as the wonted bride’s embrace. The Jewish
element appears in the third talismanic symbol, the priestly blessing — a favoured
image for Der Nister.29
But more than folk sources one hears symbolist undertones.30 In Bar-Yosef ’s
wording, ‘Russian symbolism’s view of history often tended towards the
eschatological: national or social redemption is possible, but depends for its realization
34 Jordan Finkin
on an unavoidable outburst of violent instincts and cosmic bloodletting.’31 Der

Nister’s image of the youth heading energetically off to be among ‘the thousands
of the fallen and [...] a heap / Of dead corpses’ echoes this idea. But he expresses
that redemptive image less in the theosophical and historiosophical vocabulary of
the symbolists than in the vitalist tones reminiscent of writers like Tshernikhovski.
Der Nister’s hero, not given to self-doubt or introspection, asks ‘Will I die? No,
because I live, I feel.’
Oppositions
One of the important structural components of many of these poems is the
presentation of often stark oppositions. The relationship of spring and winter in
the first poem presents this theme in the vocabulary of nature. Others of the
poems describe different images of opposition. The poem ‘Friends’ (Re’im),32 for
example, consists of eight stanzas, the first four of which show one friend calling
on another to drink and celebrate life with him, and the final four stanzas show
that same friend calling for a shared lament over life’s miseries. Joy-drinking and
sorrow-drinking in one and the same seamless poem (like the Biblical marzeiach,
a cry of mourning ( Jeremiah 16. 5) and a cry of revelling (Amos 6. 7)) may be the
expression of ambivalent emotions in a single activity. (It is also possible that the
poem describes the stages of intoxication; in Der Nister’s much later novel The
Family Mashber he describes various kinds of inebriation with a skill only derived
of careful observation.)33
In another poem — ‘Inclinations’ (Yetsarim) — we find a mingling of opposition
and ambivalence, the kind of indeterminacy which would find fuller expression
in Der Nister’s later work. This short poem rests on the traditional rabbinic
presentation of man as beset by two inclinations, the good and the evil, between
which his life is a constant set of choices. In Der Nister’s version there are also two
inclinations, but they are nameless. Each of them enjoins the poem’s narrator to
‘work today, work tomorrow too. / Forever shall you work [...]’34 The difference is
that the first inclination promises a reward for that work (eventual immortalization
in verse), while the second says that there is no reward, that it is one’s destiny to be
forgotten.35
The touchstone of this opposition is the removal of the clear evaluative criterion
of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The narrator is simply beset, and the poem takes ambivalence
as its primary tone. In an essay disentangling the critical literary terminology of the
Revival period and the often confusing interchanges between (Neo-)Romanticism,
symbolism, and decadence — a morass in which Der Nister’s Yiddish work is also
often implicated — Hamutal Bar-Yosef sees in late nineteenth-century Hebrew
poetry ‘the vacillation between the desire for a distinctive national literature capable
of expressing the optimistic ideology of Zionism, the atmosphere of rebirth, and
the ethical superiority of the Jewish spirit, on the one hand; and the desire, on the
other hand, for a literature capable of integrating into, and honourable competition
with, a contemporary European literature saturated with an atmosphere of pessi
mism, subjectivism, and amorality’.36 As if mirroring this description, the reward-
inclination invokes Moses’ triumphal song of the sea (Exodus 15) while the
oblivion-inclination echoes other biblical texts (such as Job and Psalms) proclaiming
the fate of the wicked to be forgotten. One might draw from this intertextual
analogy of the benefits of faith in the nation’s God on the one hand and punishment
for iniquity on the other a clear inference of the poet’s preference. The ambivalence
derives, however, from the fact that the inclinations do not tell the narrator to do
drastically different, morally divergent things; again, they both command him to
work. Rather, they call on him merely to understand that action differently.
As we have seen, one of the more fraught oppositional spaces in these poems
is that of the erotic. The participants can be in an ethical opposition. Take, for
example, the untitled poem that begins ‘Did you not promise?’37 Though somewhat
opaque, the poem reads as the dialogue between a betrothed couple in which the
man breaks off the engagement for want of love. As the poem concludes:
‘Do you love me only as a sister?’
— As a sister! That’s my answer.
‘And not like a young man [loves] a young woman?’
— To your sorrow and to my ruin!
The confusion of categories of sibling affection and marital relations revisits the
issue of sexual taboos repeatedly gestured to in these poems.
Beyond this more straightforward ethical opposition there is what may be called
a literary or metaphorical opposition, one in which the poet paints the lovers at
loggerheads in the understanding their relationship. These poems echo the Song
of Songs for their stock or erotic vocabulary.38 In the untitled poem which begins
‘Your heart is a moist garden’39 two metaphors are employed by which to describe
the lovers’ relationship.40 In each of the poem’s two sections a first stanza proposes
the metaphor and the second stanza refutes or undercuts it. Sadan refers to this
structure as mashal–nimshal,41 that is, a form of rabbinic story-telling in which a
parable or allegory (mashal) is provided followed by its interpretation (nimshal).42
What marks this poem is that the second stanzas are not so much elucidations
as problematizations. So in the first case, the beloved and all her body parts are
likened to a garden (in Sadan’s words an eroticization of nature). If so, however, the
beloved then asks ‘But why is the poet so late?’ (akh madu’a koh boshesh ha-meshorer?)
And after her elaboration of her lover’s body, the ways in which the grove of trees
is sad, bent, and dejected — images whose metaphorical significance needs little
explanation — she calls ‘Let the nightingale come and sing his songs!’ (yavo vi-zamer
zemirotav ha-zamir!).
Both quoted lines are very alliteratively expressive. The latter echoes pre-modern
alliterative techniques and natural onomatopoeia, as for example in Yehudah
ha-Levi. The interaction between them is equally important. The first line is a near
quotation from the end of the Song of Deborah, where the enemy general Sisera has
been killed by Yael in her tent, and his mother back at home looks out the window
and anxiously wonders aloud: ‘Why is his chariot so late in coming?’ (madu’a boshesh
rikhbo la-vo; Judges 5. 28). In a nearly comic def lation, the accoutrement of martial
pride, the chariot, as a metonymy for the general, has been replaced by the poet.
Moreover, the verb ‘to come’ has moved from the quoted verse (la-vo) to the line
about the nightingale (yavo). In this verbal delay and the intervening imagery about
36 Jordan Finkin
the bent and dejected arbour, the sexual innuendo seems clear. The root of the word
for poet in Hebrew means ‘to sing’, a synonym for the meaning of the root being
played with in the final line (z-m-r), a hint at her desire that his role may yet be
fulfilled. Such an oppositional reading makes this poem something akin to Shake
speare’s anti-Petrarchan sonnet (Sonnet 130), which uses a trope to subvert it.
In the poem’s second section, the lover compares his beloved to the Temple (her
heart is the ark, her breasts the tablets, and so forth).43 Then comes the def lating
response: ‘But there is no priest in it’. As is typical of Der Nister, the poet and
the priest serve analogous functions.44 Through the eroticized reading, what we
encounter is a discussion in miniature of the tension between form and substance,
material and essence.
An Historical Conclusion
Fuller development of the theme of opposition comes in Der Nister’s early Yiddish
stories, those more elaborate cosmogonies in which primeval oppositions such as
God and chaos are worked out in the acts of creation (famously in such early stories
as ‘The Primeval Man’ (Der kadmen) and ‘The First Day and Night after Creation’
(Di ershte tog un nakht nokh mayse-breyshis) or in a poem like ‘Wanderer’ (Navenad)).45
And Der Nister seems genuinely curious about a mystical understanding of the
relationship between the poetic craft, as a kind of creation, and contemplative
Jewish traditions including cabbalistic interpretations of the work of creation
(ma’aseh bereishit). Ultimately, these creative speculations on creation would largely
give way in the great stories of the interwar period to folkloric esotericism,
complicated stories within stories, and so forth. In Flowers of Youth, however, we see
some indication of the interplay of opposition and ambivalence as one underlying
conceptual frame with which Der Nister experimented and which may have played
itself out in later works.
The image of the work of creation may have been important to Der Nister,
furthermore, because it is simultaneously (a) mystical (the whole is everything, but
the whole is only in the details);46 (b) elemental (archetypal) — that is, his early
works seen as one big work in endless variations and permutations (in Nakhman
Mayzel’s words, ‘he creates one work after another, variations on one and the
same principal motif and principal thought’);47 and (c) in some sense historical.
Returning to his poem, ‘The Garden of Eden’, before Man’s curse, he was
described as ‘understand[ing] “this world”, but into the present he did not enter, /
Nor did he look into the future, “the world to come”.’48 After his curse, however,
his timelessness becomes reconfigured. Once his eternal regimen of wandering was
undertaken the poem states:
And the Man did not remember... And he forgot
His dwelling-place, his whilom Garden of Eden
He did not lament, although he longed
For the glory of the past, for a Golden Age.49
There may be Romantic overtones here, the idea that revival can be effected by a
return to the past. Just as likely, however, there is also an understanding of history
itself as a spatiotemporal process: the forgetting of place and a yearning for time.
This idea represents a deep current in modern (and modernist) Jewish literary
thinking,50 and its use here, however inchoate, is significant.
Among some of Der Nister’s earliest Yiddish prose works are stories and other
‘sketches’ (as Nokhum Oyslender referred to them) on historical themes.51 As
Oyslender notes, ‘It becomes clear from Nister’s “historical” sketches that, as a
captive to the haste of distant, ancient events, Nister can give his attention to the
“historical” only as a cosmic motion, only as a cosmic phenomenon. It is no acci
dent that the feeling for cosmic movements in “time” brings him to the motif of
the Work of Creation, which Nister describes in his book Hekher fun der erd.’52 The
poems of Flowers of Youth indicate that it is perhaps indeed the other way around:
a deep contemplation of the Work of Creation produces a poetic understanding of
time and of history.
Ultimately, despite their sometimes powerful protean mix, it was perhaps these
poems’ scattershot heterogeneity in theme and, indeed, in quality that kept them
from the printed page. Der Nister ceased his experiments in Hebrew shortly after
these poems were written in favour of a different kind of linguistic experimentation
in hermetic, sometimes incantational, Yiddish. That is the familiar Nister. Flowers
of Youth, however, invites us to reconsider turn-of-the-century Hebrew not as the
French garden of Revival, but as an English garden of significant diversity.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. Dov Sadan, ‘Im shirei ha-no’ar ha-ivriim shel Der Nister’, Bechinot, 7 (1976), 127–33; Dov Sadan,
‘Tsu di onheybn fun Der Nister’, Yerushalaymer almanakh, 9 (1977), 158–70; this essay was later
reprinted as Dov Sadan, ‘Fodem un kanves’, in Dov Sadan, Toyern un tirn: Eseyen un etyudn
(Tel-Aviv: Farlag Yisroel-bukh, 1979), pp. 43–68; Dov Sadan, ‘May Der Nister’, in Dov Sadan,
A vort bashteyt: Shpatsirn tsvishn shprakh un literatur, vol. 2 (Tel-Aviv: Farlag Y. L. Peretz, 1978),
pp. 139–49.
2. In order to avoid confusion or excessive pedantry, I will throughout refer to the author as Der
Nister, even though strictly speaking Kahanovitsh would not adopt that nom de plume until half
a decade later.
3. In her important study of Der Nister’s early prose, Delphine Bechtel comments very brief ly on
these poems, opining that ‘These verses are very trite, written in the sentimentalist style of the
pre-Bialik, Hibat tsiyon poetry. His Hebrew seems cumbersome and bookish. In one poem, Gan
ha-eden, he uses cabbalistic images and Aramaic words, a device he will exploit further in his
early Yiddish poetry. Fortunately, Der Nister switched to Yiddish’ — Delphine Bechtel, Der
Nister’s Work, 1907–1929: A Study of a Yiddish Symbolist (Bern: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 2–3.
4. Sadan, ‘Fodem un kanves’, p. 45.
5. A consistent charge against Der Nister was that he was a ‘decadent’ writer, using that label as a
term of opprobrium. In an essay of 1925 Nakhman Mayzel writes:
Some critics have already even passed judgment: he is an imitator of Polish and
Russian decadents.
He — the most Jewish among the Yiddish writers — an imitator of foreign writers!
Nister is thoroughly steeped in Jewishness. In his youth he drank from the spring of
living Hasidism and Kabbalah, absorbing the quiet, Jewish, modest holiness and purity
that still hovered over the houses of the once sincere patriarchal Jewish Volhynia.
Nakhman Mayzel, ‘Der Nister’, in Nakhman Mayzel, Noente un vayte, vol. 2 (Vilne: B. Kletskin,
1926), pp. 138–45 (p. 139). Such an assessment would hold for his Hebrew poems as well.
38 Jordan Finkin
6. Nokhum Oyslender, ‘Der Nister (Shtrikhn)’, Shtrom, 1 (1922), 65–74 (p. 70).
7. When Marc Caplan says straightforwardly that ‘After unsuccessfully beginning his literary career
as a Hebrew poet, a gesture again typical of virtually all the Yiddish writers in his generation,
Der Nister settled on the medium of Yiddish fiction, as well as his provocative pseudonym, with
his 1907 debut Gedanken un motivn: lider in proze (‘Ideas and Motifs: Prose Poems’)’ (Marc Caplan,
‘The Hermit at the Circus: Der Nister, Yiddish Literature, and German Culture in the Weimar
Period’, Studia Rosenthaliana, 41 (2009), 173–96 (p. 176)) he rather misses Der Nister’s multiform
understanding of his own literary production; not only Gedanken un motivn but also Gezang un
gebet were works first and foremost of poetry. Moreover, to refer to these poems as a ‘gesture’,
as nothing but a pro forma rite de passage, certainly fails to give them their due.
8. Sadan, ‘Im shirei ha-no’ar’, p. 130. A triolet traditionally rhymes abaa abab, where the underlined
letters indicate a fully repeated line, something like a refrain. Der Nister’s poem, by contrast,
rhymes abcb dbeb, which is to say, xAxA xAxA.
9. Benjamin Hrushovski, ‘On Free Rhythms in Modern Yiddish Poetry’, in The Field of Yiddish:
Studies in Yiddish Language, Folklore, and Literature, ed. by Uriel Weinreich (New York:
Publications of the Linguistic Circle of New York, 1954), pp. 219–66 (pp. 224–27).
10. The amphibrach is generally an unusual metre (T. V. F. Brogan, ‘Amphibrach’, in The Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Roland Greene et al., 4th edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2012), p. 45), though it is more common in Russian verse as well as in Hebrew
poetry of the period.
11. My thanks to Naomi Brenner for her suggestions along this line, as well as her astute insights
into Hebrew literary history.
12. Oyslender, ‘Der Nister (Shtrikhn)’, p. 73; Mayzel, ‘Der Nister’, pp. 144–45.
13. Sadan, ‘Im shirei ha-no’ar’, p. 130.
14. Pinchas Kahanovitsh (Der Nister), ‘Pirchei no’ar’, Bechinot, 7 (1976), 134–45 (p. 134).
15. In the second stanza he uses an unusual verb form for purification taken from Isaiah 52. 11.
16. Der Nister, ‘Pirchei no’ar’, p. 137.
17. This vitality is marked by ‘joy, love’s nectar’ (p. 135); the word for ‘nectar’ (tsuf ) is the same one
used in the opening poem, the sweet sap of vernal revelry.
19. Nezira sechor sechor le-karma la tikrav (Shabbat 13a).
20. The Talmud notes that ‘Ula, when he came from the academy, would kiss his sisters on their
breasts, and some say on their hands. But [contradictorily] [...] Ula said, Any intimacy is
forbidden’, which then prompts the Talmud to insert its principle regarding the Nazirite.
21. Hans Christian Andersen, Andersens mayselekh, no. 7: ‘Der ganeydn’, trans. by Der Nister
(Warsaw: Kultur-Lige, 1921).
22. One also perceives the resonance of the eroticized garden imagery with the Song of Songs. In
the case of Der Nister’s poems, there is an interesting transformation of one set of connotations
(blossoming love, joining and separation, erotic play) into another (as I said, pubescent
awakening, temptation, and punishment) grounded in an earlier garden.
23. As Nokhum Oyslender notes, some of these themes receive further elaboration in the poema
‘Navenad’ in Der Nister’s volume Gezang un gebet (Nokhum Oyslender, ‘Nister — Der dikhter’,
Sovetish Heymland, 11 (1969), 66–73 (pp. 70–71)).
25. Sadan, ‘Im shirei ha-no’ar’, p. 129. There is perhaps something to the brilliant linguist Ayzik
Zaretski’s tantalizing conjecture at the end of his detailed, rigorous, and fascinating study of
Der Nister’s enigmatic stylistics (which focuses on the writer’s use of the word ‘and’): ‘Finally,
turning in quite a different direction, one ought to study the genesis of Nister’s idiosyncratic
“and”, its linguistic (stylistic) properties. Some analogies are themselves required (and at the
beginning of a phrase — in certain Hebrew styles; it is possible that both asymmetrical and
non-perspectival coordinations have their origin in Hebrew). But one must work through and
investigate those analogies systematically’ (A[yzik] Zaretski, ‘Nisters ‘un’ (gramatishe forshung)’
Shriftn, vol. 1 (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1928), 130–47 (p. 147)). In an article on Der Nister’s story
‘Unter a ployt’ Khone Shmeruk mentions Zaretski’s conjecture and quite rightly adds that ‘the
whole matter remains in need of detailed investigation’ — Khone Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister’s
“Under a Fence”: Tribulations of a Soviet Yiddish Symbolist’, in The Field of Yiddish: Studies
in Language, Folklore, and Literature (Second Collection), ed. by Uriel Weinreich (The Hague:
Mouton & Co., 1965), pp. 263–87 (p. 266 n. 9).
27. Sadan, ‘Im shirei ha-no’ar’, pp. 129–30.
28. A case in point is Avraham Shlonski’s famous poem ‘Labor’ — see Jordan Finkin, ‘Constellating
Hebrew and Yiddish Avant-Gardes: The Example of Markish and Shlonsky’, Journal of Modern
Jewish Studies, 8.1 (2009), 1–22 (pp. 7–10).
29. In the phrase Der Nister uses — birkat kohen — one recognizes the birkat kohanim, or priestly
benediction (Numbers 6. 24–26). The poet’s name — Kahanovitsh — means ‘son of the priest’,
which may then make the line a little joke. More importantly, though, the conclusion of the
biblical blessing is for a grant of peace, not a call for the vanquishing of enemies. What makes
the gesture to this blessing all the more interesting is that it appears in the Bible immediately
after the lengthy elaboration of the laws of the Nazirite, a subject as we have seen of no little
concern to Der Nister in this collection.
30. There is good reason to label Der Nister, the prose writer, a Yiddish symbolist. As David Roskies
notes, those aspects of symbolism most apposite in an appraisal of Der Nister’s work include ‘the
attempt to go beyond the denotative limits of language and achieve pure musicality through
repetition, connotative sound relationships, word inversions; his preference for myth, the occult
and the demonic; not to speak of his view of the poet as prophet...’ (David G. Roskies, ‘The
Re-education of Der Nister, 1922–1929’, in Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union,
ed. by Yaacov Ro’i (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1995), pp. 201–11 (p. 203)). Whatever symbolist
tendencies Der Nister displayed in his early Hebrew work, however, these are not they.
31. Hamutal Bar-Yosef, ‘Romanticism and Decadence in the Literature of the Hebrew Revival’,
Comparative Literature, 46.2 (1994), 146–81 (p. 154).
33. See, for example, Der Nister, Di mishpokhe mashber, vol. 1 (Moscow: Der emes, 1939), pp.
186–94, 232–45.
35. Sadan refers to this poem as a ‘light philosophical poem, structures on a thing and its opposite,
a battle between two urges’ (Sadan, ‘Im shirei ha-no’ar’, pp. 130–31).
36. Bar-Yosef, ‘Romanticism and Decadence’, pp. 150–51.
38. The Song of Songs will recur in Gezang un gebet, ‘Fun shir-hashirim: psukim’ (From the Song
of Songs: Verses; 26–30).
40. Sadan deals with this poem at length, especially exploring its philological intricacies (Sadan, ‘Im
shirei ha-no’ar’, pp. 132–33; Sadan, ‘Fodem un kanves’, pp. 45–51).
42. See Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, pp. 207–13, for the use of mashal–nimshal in Der Nister’s narrative
texts.
43. Sadan cites the motivation as similar imagery in the Midrash Shir ha-Shirim (Sadan, ‘Fodem un
kanves’, p. 49).
44. Again, that he is both poet and ‘son of the priest’ (Kahanovitsh) is an easy pun.
45. Der Nister, Hekher fun der erd (Warsaw: Progres, 1910), pp. 3–32, 48–53; Der Nister, Gezang un
gebet (Kiev: Kunst-farlag, [c. 1910]), pp. 33–81. See also Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, pp. 50–68;
Oyslender, ‘Der Nister (Shtrikhn)’, pp. 66–68.
46. Oyslender, ‘Der Nister (Shtrikhn)’, pp. 72–73.
47. Mayzel, ‘Der Nister’, p. 145.
50. This is part of an idea I address in my forthcoming book, An Inch or Two of Time: Time and Space
in Jewish Modernisms.
51. Oyslender, ‘Der Nister (Shtrikhn)’, p. 68. Oyslender refers to the works ‘Cleopatra’ and ‘Mary’
as typical historical investigations. Toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century
40 Jordan Finkin
Der Nister was at work on a triptych of what he called ‘dances’, two of which were published;
as Daniela Mantovan describes them, ‘ “Poylish” (Polish), which investigates sanctity through
a description of a Hasidic rabbi dancing with his granddaughter at her wedding, and “Kleo
patra” (Cleopatra), an exploration of passion. The third “dance”, which was to have illustrated
the theme of fortitude in the figure of a seventeenth-century Cossack, was never realized’
— Daniela Mantovan, ‘Der Nister (Pinchas Kahanovitch)’, in Writers in Yiddish: Dictionary of
Literary Biography. vol. 333, ed. by Joseph Sherman (New York: Thomson Gale, 2007), pp. 219–27
(p. 222).
52. Oyslender, ‘Der Nister (Shtrikhn)’, p. 69.
Chapter 3
v
Andersens Mayselekh and

Der Nister’s Symbolist Agenda
Kerstin Hoge
‘As for me, what kind of a writer am I?’: The Shaping Force of Symbolism
in Der Nister’s Oeuvre
In December 1947, at the time of Stalin’s increasingly virulent campaign against
so-called ‘bourgeois nationalists’, Der Nister wrote to his fellow Yiddish writer Itsik
Kipnis, posing the question as to what kind of writer he himself was:
There are certain eager folk who would be glad to see me not only not writing,
but not breathing altogether. [...] No matter what I give them, they want to
take its guts out. Well then, so I won’t dance with the bear. So, I sit on the
sidelines. Let Ivan blow. Let the Teifs, the Zilbermans, the Notovitshes write
prose, criticism and so on. As for me, what kind of a writer am I?1
The context in which this question appears suggests, on the one hand, that Der
Nister saw himself as a writer ‘on the sidelines’, who was ultimately unwilling to
bow to the reigning doctrine of socialist realism (‘I won’t dance with the bear’). On
the other hand, the letter openly refers to the futility of his attempts to conform
to Soviet artistic and cultural-political norms (‘No matter what I give them, they
want to take its guts out’), and the question of ‘what kind of a writer am I?’ thus
also assumes meaning against the background of Der Nister’s literary evolution and
the contortions and reinventions that he deemed necessary to ‘liberate himself ’
from his characteristic but officially denigrated literary style.2 What kind of a
writer is a writer for whom no style of writing remains in which he can write and
be published?
Commonly, it is Der Nister’s earlier works that are taken to represent his
characteristic literary style, and in particular the symbolist tales collected in Gedakht
(1922–23), in which ‘signifier and signified, objects and their representation,
reality and fantasy, are interchangeable’.3 Der Nister’s statement in a letter to his
younger brother, written in about 1934, that he had always been a symbolist (‘Un
ikh, vi dir iz bavust, bin fun ale yorn a symbolist’) leaves no doubt that he self-
identified with the symbolist movement;4 and the sentence is frequently quoted to
provide support for labelling Der Nister the chief representative of symbolism in
Yiddish literature. Notwithstanding the label customarily given to him, academic
scholarship of Der Nister has proposed to divide his literary career into distinct
42 Kerstin Hoge
periods, not all of which are characterized by a symbolist affinity. While different
scholars have suggested different periodizations,5 there is general agreement that
with the publication of the novella ‘Unter a ployt’ [Under a Fence] in 1929, which
provoked sharp attack by Soviet critics and silenced Der Nister for several years, the
‘period of [symbolist] creativity was sealed’.6 In other words, Der Nister’s literary
biography is standardly viewed as fragmented and his diverse output as shaped
by more than just symbolism: symbolist poetry, short stories and novellas in Der
Nister’s early period(s) gave way to realist novel writing with Di mishpokhe Mashber
[The Family Mashber], whose first chapter appeared in 1935. The transition from one
literary form to the other (referred to as a ‘conversion’ to Soviet socialist realism
by Joachim Neugroschel)7 is understood to be motivated by external and internal
pressures, accounted for largely by the political and cultural repression that sought
to obliterate all traces of elitist modernism in Yiddish literature (for which the term
‘Nisterism’ was coined in the late 1920s), but also by Der Nister’s ensuing creative
crisis and a possibly independent desire to leave his ‘symbolist tower’.8
External pressures are also adduced as an explanation for the other forms
of writing in which Der Nister engaged, in particular his journalistic work,
including the sketches published in Hoyptshtet [Capitals] (1934). Following the
official campaign against ‘Unter a ployt’ and, concomitantly, Der Nister’s literary
career and personality, the author could only support himself with what he called
‘technical’ rather than ‘original’ work (‘hob ikh zikh farnumen nor mit tekhnisher
arbet un nisht mit shraybn eygene, originele zakhn’) in the 1934 letter containing his
symbolist credo. The picture that — at least at first sight — appears to emerge from
these descriptions is one in which much of Der Nister’s literary output (including,
and most prominently, Di mishpokhe Mashber and Hoyptshtet) is unconnected to his
professed desire to carve out a space for symbolist writing in Yiddish literature.
It is possible to take the same line of argument when considering Der Nister’s
writing for children. The period between 1913 and 1926 may be regarded as Der
Nister’s most productive years of his symbolist career, but it also marks a time in
which Der Nister produced various works for children, which include both original
creations, such as the well-known A mayse mit a hon and Dos tsigele [A Story with
a Rooster; The Goat] (1917), illustrated by Marc Chagall,9 and translations, among
which are various fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. Der Nister’s pursuit of
writing for children does not sit altogether easily with his self-avowed commitment
to symbolism. In the words of Arthur Symons, who introduced Baudelaire to the
English-reading public, symbolism constitutes ‘an attempt to spiritualise literature’;10
it seeks to evoke rather than name and subscribes to an ideal of exclusive hermetic
meanings so that symbolist writing can only be ‘allusive, opaque and difficult’,11
none of which are qualities commonly judged to characterize or indeed befit
children’s literature. Yet Der Nister’s interest in children’s literature is not unusual
when considered in its socio-cultural context. It may be linked to the nationalist
project of developing Yiddish culture and education in the immediate wake of the
Russian Revolution, as well as to the use of children’s art as a source of inspiration
by Russian symbolists.
First, Der Nister’s symbolist writing can be understood to form part of what
A ndersens M ayselekh and Der Nister’s Symbolist Agenda 43
Kenneth B. Moss has termed the Jewish cultural project of creating a deparochialized
secular high culture, in which ‘the overriding goal [...] is to win for the nation and
its members the combination of complete expressive freedom and self-sustaining
national continuity’.12 Der Nister’s works for children, including his translations
of children’s classics, may be seen as contributing to the creation of a corpus of
Yiddish-language literature that served children’s aesthetic education, which was
deemed to be an essential objective, if not a precondition, for the realization of
Jewish nationalism. On this view, Der Nister’s motivation for writing and trans
lating children’s literature was his commitment to help overcome the Yiddish
children’s kleynshtetldikayt [small-town provincialism] and artlessness, to turn them,
in Moyshe Litvakov’s words, into ‘a living people, which speaks and thinks in a
living language’.13
Both Der Nister’s biography and his writings provide evidence for such a
commitment. In 1912, Der Nister started working as a teacher at a non-traditional
girls’ school of the Khevre Mefitse Haskole in the Ukrainian town Holte (Golta),
later moving to the progressive children’s colony Malakhovka, near Moscow,
where he worked alongside Marc Chagall and the writer Yekhezkel Dobrushin.14
In his recollections of Der Nister, the Yiddishist educator Abraham Golomb, who
overlapped with him at Holte, remembers the author as a ‘convinced Yiddishist’ (‘a
shtarker yidishist’) — and at the same time as a writer unusually reticent to speak
about his art (‘Mir iz — nisht frier nisht shpeter — keynmol nisht oysgekumen tsu
trefn a shrayber, vos zol azoy oysmeydn tsu redn vegn zayn shraybn’).15 Further
evidence for Der Nister’s belief in a ‘Jewish culturist ideology’,16 according to which
the future of a secular Jewish nation centred and depended on the cultivation of
a deparochialized high culture, can be found in his works aimed at children. As
first discussed by Khone Shmeruk, Der Nister departed from previous norms for
translations of children’s literature into Yiddish by refraining from Judaization,
instead retaining references to Christian realia and practices.17 For example, in Der
Nister’s translation of Hans Andersen’s ‘Little Claus and Big Claus’ (‘Der groyser
kloys un der kleyner kloys’) (1921), the reader encounters church bells ringing to
summon the villagers to worship, who f lock to church dressed in their Sunday
best with their prayer books in hand (‘Di glokn hobn tsum frimorgn gebet gerufn.
Di mentshn zaynen azoyne farputst geven und zaynen mit di gebet-bikhlekh in
di hent in kloyster gegangen dort di muser-rede funem galekh oystsuhern’).18 In
contrast, an earlier translation of the same fairy tale prepared by Ben-Ami (Chaim-
Mordechai Rabinovich) transposed the story to an entirely Jewish sphere, where big
Fayvl and little Fayvl (‘Fayvl der groyser un Fayvl der kleyner’) live in a village of
Jewish farmers.19 In summary, given his profession as a teacher and his commitment
to a social vision of expanding Jewish cultural horizons, which is supported by
his faithfulness to the source texts of Yiddish translations, Der Nister’s interest in
children’s literature in the period between 1913 and 1926 is fully consistent with and
may be explained as due to his engagement in Yiddishist pedagogical circles.
Second, it has been argued that Der Nister’s symbolism was inf luenced by the
Russian symbolist movement in its focus on aestheticism, decadence, pessimism
and mysticism.20 From this perspective, Der Nister’s turn to children’s literature
44 Kerstin Hoge
may be seen to parallel the Russian symbolists’ recourse to folk and fairy tales as
a treasury of mythical and fantastic elements. As Delphine Bechtel notes, Russian
Yiddish artists followed the model established by Russian symbolists when they
turned to folk and children’s art, praising the ‘primitivism of the lubok’, a form of
Russian folk print and genre of picture book.21 Der Nister’s turn to children’s art
can thus be regarded as receiving an impetus from Russian co-territorial culture,
which was strengthened by the interest of the Yiddish artists in the Kiev circle to
spread a secular Yiddish education.
In both of these lines of explanation for Der Nister’s activity in the field of
children’s literature, his interest in writing and translating for children is attributed
to the interest in children’s literature that was manifested by other writers, either
Yiddishists or Russian symbolists, and emerges as only indirectly related to the
symbolist enterprise with which he identified as a writer. According to the first
line of explanation, Der Nister wrote and translated for children as part of the
pedagogical programme of realizing a new, expansive vision of Jewish culture, to
which he clearly subscribed as both a Yiddish writer and a teacher (and, on a more
mundane level, a vision which created a ready market for such writing, thereby
providing Der Nister with a means to publish and earn an income). According to
the second account, Der Nister’s production of children’s literature was a by-product
of looking for sources of symbolist inspiration. Either way, Der Nister’s symbolist
writing and his writing for children is understood to be aimed at different audiences
and motivated by different objectives, so that Der Nister’s writing for children’s
emerges as yet another separate piece in the varied collection that constitutes Der
Nister’s literary output.
However, it might be time to question whether such a fragmentary reading of
Der Nister’s literary production is the only feasible interpretation of his works.
In fact, doubts have long been voiced over the appropriateness of describing Der
Nister’s output in terms of a clear break from symbolism to realism, following
the 1929 ostracism of ‘Nisterism’. As early as 1958, Shmuel Niger wrote about Di
mishpokhe Mashber that
[...] khotsh der Nister hot a sakh gelernt far dem fertl yorhundert bolshevizm,
hot er vintsik fargesn, un der ‘sotsyalistisher realizm’ fun zayn itstiker proze
iz nisht in gantsn oysgeleydikt gevorn fun zayn amoliker khsidisher und
folkistisher romantik. Es shmekt nokh alts fun zayne bilder un geshtaltn mit r’
Nakhman Braslavers mayses, azoy vi fun an oysgeleydikter esrog-pushke hert
zikh — esrog.
[[...] though Der Nister had learned much from a quarter of a century of
Bolshevism, he had forgotten very little and that the ‘socialist realism’ of his
present prose had not entirely vitiated his former folk and Hasidic Rom
anticism. The odor of the tales of Reb Nakhman of Bratslav still rose from his
characters and descriptions the way an empty esrog box still smells of the citron
it contained.]22
In Shmuel Niger’s opinion, Di mishpokhe Mashber is thus far from being written
in a solidly realist style, but rather displays stylistic elements characteristic of Der
Nister’s earlier stories, whose symbolism is ‘easily traceable to the [mystical] tales of
Rabbi Nakhman’ of Bratslav.23 This opinion is echoed in later scholarship: Harriet

Murav describes Di mishpokhe Mashber as a work that ‘interposes the “vertical,
otherworldly” axis onto the plane of everyday, ordinary life of the Jewish body
politic’, with the city of N., the setting of the novel, ‘a place where desire, eating,
drinking, drunkenness, buying, selling, spiritual longing, mystical and apocalyptic
visions, Jewish holiness and Jewish blasphemy, joy and despair, the grotesque
and the sublime are never far apart’;24 and Mikhail Krutikov points to both the
narration and the character of the stranger as a means by which the author manages
to ‘infuse conventional realism with elements of symbolism’ or provide ‘a symbolist
underlining’.25 If we follow the argumentation of these scholars, the conclusion to be
drawn is that there is less of a clear break and more of a continuous relation between
the periods of Der Nister’s creativity before and after 1929 than is suggested by the
official approbation that Di mishpokhe Mashber enjoyed in the Soviet Union.26
In a similar move, the central argument of this contribution is that there might
be a more direct connection between Der Nister’s symbolist output and his trans
lations for children than commonly assumed. More specifically, I will argue that
works like Der Nister’s translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales can be
viewed, and might have been intended, as creating a context in which to situate
and lend credibility to Der Nister’s symbolist prose. The argument is based on
stylistic features of the translations, showing Der Nister to employ, at the expense
of faithfulness to the linguistic spirit of the original text, grammatical features that
are commonly identified to be part of his idiosyncratic prose style. The thread of
stylistic continuity that binds Der Nister’s fairy-tale translations to his other works
may suggest that he did not envision them as being read only by children, which
corroborates an argument made by Daniela Mantovan concerning Der Nister’s
original writing for children.27 The present chapter then has a twofold agenda:
first, it seeks to establish that texts ostensibly designated for children form not only
a fuzzy but also a peculiarly subversive category, a veritable Trojan horse by which
existing cultural practice and discourse can be infiltrated and inf luenced; second,
it puts forward the idea that one answer to Der Nister’s question as to what kind
of a writer he was is to claim that he never lost his symbolist outlook and stylistic
repertoire, which surface even in writings that cannot be readily classified as
symbolist. Rather than presenting the literary historian with an assemblage of texts
from different periods that can only be read as unconnected to each other, Der
Nister is to be credited with an oeuvre shaped by symbolism, despite the changes
and contradictions that characterize his work. To sum it up in a polemical fashion:
you can take the author away from symbolism, but you can’t take symbolism away
from the author.
Andersens Mayselekh: From the Private and Personal to the Popular and
Political
Der Nister’s translations of Andersen’s fairy tales first appeared in book form in the
Kiever Farlag. The 1930 bibliographical almanac of the Institute for Yiddish Culture
at the Ukrainian Academy of Science (Biblyologisher zamlbukh, Institut far yidisher
46 Kerstin Hoge
kultur bay der ukrainisher visnshaftlekher akademye) records the 1919 publication of ten
booklets in a series entitled Andersens mayselekh [Andersen’s Stories], encompassing:
(i) Dos yam-tekhterl [The little mermaid], (ii) Broyzele [Thumbelina], (iii) Ole-luk-
Oye [Ole Shut-Eye], (iv) Di vilde shvanen [The wild swans], (v) Di shney malke [The
Snow Queen], (vi) Dem melekhs naye kleyder [The emperor’s new clothes], (vii) Hans
der nar [Hopeless Hans], (viii) Dos tenenboyml [The fir tree], (ix) Dos blayerne soldatele
[The steadfast tin soldier] and (x) A mayse mit finef arbeslekh [Five peas from the same
pod]. Editions of these stories f luctuated between 3000 and 4000 copies, with prices
ranging from 75 kopecks for Broyzele, the cheapest booklet in the series, to 2 roubles
and 30 kopecks for Di Shney Malke, which was not only the most expensive, but
with 80 pages also the longest booklet in the series.
Moreover, according to the Biblyologisher zamlbukh, translations of Andersen’s
stories by Der Nister were not confined to the Kiever Farlag series of Andersens
Mayselekh. Hans der Nar and Di blumen fun der kleyner Ida [Little Ida’s f lowers] had
already been published in 1918 as part of the Shulbiblyotek redagirt durkh der literarish-
pedagogisher komisye baym yidish-demokratishn lerer-fareyn [School Library edited by the
Literary-Pedagogical Committee of the Democratic Union of Yiddish Teachers].28
In 1919, there also appeared three large-format, richly illustrated deluxe editions: the
Kiever Farlag published Andersens Mayselekh in an edition of 3000 copies, priced at 10
roubles, while the Farlag ‘Onhoyb’ brought out Margaritke [Daisies] with illustrations
by Joseph Chaikov, as well as Finef arbeslekh. Both were available in editions of
3000 copies, each priced at 7 roubles. Finally, a considerably enlarged collection
of Andersens Mayselekh, comprising twenty-one tales, appeared under the auspices
of the Kultur-Lige in Warsaw, where it reached more than one edition in 1921.
Judging by the bibliographical information, Der Nister’s translations of Andersen’s
stories made popular reading for interwar Yiddish-language readers. The various
editions in which the translations appeared suggest that they were widely read both
in schools (as evidenced by their inclusion in the Shulbiblyotek) and at home (on the
assumption that the deluxe editions were aimed at more aff luent households). Most
likely, the popularity of Der Nister’s renditions of Andersen’s tales was helped by
an awareness of Andersen’s work on the basis of other translations. According to
Shmeruk, the acquaintance of Yiddish readers with Andersen’s work began in 1904,
when Ben-Ami published his adaptation of ‘Little Claus and Big Claus’ under the
title of ‘Fayvl der groyser un Fayvl der kleyner’ in a supplement to the St Petersburg
newspaper Der fraynd on the occasion of Purim.29 As the change in title suggests
(and as mentioned above), Ben-Ami’s version excised all Christian references —
a characteristic shared by other Yiddish translations of Andersen’s stories that
appeared before the First World War, such as L. Bromberg’s collection of Andersen’s
Geshikhten un legenden [Stories and legends], published in Warsaw in 1910, in which
all overt reminders of Andersen’s Christian cultural context are removed, so that,
for example, no mention is made of the decorated Christmas tree that features in
‘The Little Match Girl’.30
Although he was neither the first nor the only person to translate Hans Christian
Andersen into Yiddish, Der Nister himself apparently came to know Andersen’s
literary fairy tales in Russian translation. In his memoirs of Der Nister as a young
adult in Berdichev between 1902 and 1906, Yankev Lvovski recalls his voracious
reading in Russian and mentions Andersen along with E. T. A. Hoffmann as an
author with whose works he was already thoroughly acquainted at the time (‘mit
velkhe er iz shoyn demolt geven grintlekh bakent’).31 In fact, by the early twentieth
century most of Europe was thoroughly acquainted and enamoured with the fairy
tales written by Andersen, whose early translation into German had helped to
spread their fame.32 The first Russian translation of Andersen’s fairy tales appeared
at the end of the 1840s, less than five years after the publication of Andersen’s
original collection of Fairy Tales Told for Children in 1835.33 With Tolstoy and Gorky
championing the Danish author’s works,34 Andersen’s popularity in Russia grew
steadily throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth century; and in his study of the literary reception of Andersen, L. Yu.
Braude notes that by 1903 Andersen’s stories were regarded in Russia as ‘as well-
loved as the fables of Krylov’ (Russia’s best known fabulist) and ‘encountered in all
kinds of editions, both in the aristocrat’s drawing-room and in the book-shelves of
humble schoolchildren’.35
Given both his personal background and the co-territorial literary context, Der
Nister’s undertaking to translate Hans Christian Andersen into Yiddish appears an
obvious choice: the author was not only loved and valued by Der Nister himself, but
also enjoyed immense popular appeal throughout Europe, and was highly thought of
by Russian intellectuals and writers. Translating Andersen’s fairy tales into Yiddish
made it possible for Der Nister to share his pleasurable reading experience, turning
what was an individual rite of passage into part of a collective national education
and identity. It fulfilled the didactic purpose of introducing the Yiddish child to an
eminent representative of world literature, and thereby contributed to the creation
of a secular Yiddish children’s literature, which could include both translated and
original work. If, as David Roskies asserts, ‘Der Nister by war’s end had come to
view education as the frontline in the aesthetic revolution’,36 translating Andersen’s
fairy tales provided a means of furthering the cultural revolution by indulging
the passions of his younger self and of associating himself with the prestige of the
acclaimed and respected Danish author. The creation of a work like Andersens
Mayselekh thus suited both the personal and political needs of Der Nister.
Faithfulness and Faithlessness in Translating: Challenges and Opportunities

In the conception of interwar Yiddish cultural activists, the translation of world
literature was viewed as an essential stepping stone on the path of reforming the
nation, credited with the power of bringing the Yiddish-reading public (and especially
the young public) out of their narrow Eastern European world. As argued by Moss,
the Jewish culturist imagination of the period understood the encounter with world
literature and culture to entail the creation of a mature, modern reader who could
not only cope with a text unchanged for Jewish sensibilities but was entitled to have
‘access to the full range of human experience’.37 Tampering with source texts, as, for
example, when substituting Fayvl for Claus and omitting references to churches and
Christmas trees, was thus increasingly deemed to result in inadequate translations
48 Kerstin Hoge
that were useless as a tool for deparochialization and constituted improper fare for
an aesthetically emancipated reader. Yiddish translations gradually came to attempt
to convey the text as faithfully as possible, and Der Nister assumed a pioneering
role in preserving the meaning and cultural references of the texts he translated.
However, the concept of faithfulness in translation may be understood to cover
wider ground than the preservation of meaning. Arguably, it does not apply merely
to ‘faithfulness to content’ but also includes the faithful reproduction of the stylistic
devices and effects of the source text (‘faithfulness to style’). While Der Nister
chartered new paths in deparochializing Yiddish translations of children’s literature
by leaving them (largely) unadapted for content, his faithfulness did not extend to
faithfulness to style in the case of Andersens mayselekh.
Observing the principle of faithfulness to content forces a translator to make
decisions of varying impact. In Der groyser Kloys un der kleyner Kloys, all that was
needed to preserve Andersen’s cultural context was the inclusion of descriptive
detail about Sunday churchgoers in a Danish village. A more radical example of
faithfulness to content can be found in Der Nister’s translation of Andersen’s ‘The
Fir Tree’ (Dos tenebeyml), which charts the life cycle of a Christmas tree, so that the
very act of embarking on a translation of the story derails the possibility of a Yiddish
version that is devoid of Christian references.38 Finally, sometimes faithfulness can
only be achieved at a price that exceeds what is gained. Thus, even Der Nister
engaged in a degree of Judaization in Di shney malke. Here, the story’s heroine,
Gerda, who succeeds in finding and saving her companion Kai from the inf luence
of the Snow Queen, has her own song, which frames the tale, signalling both
peaceful beginning and the children’s safe return home. Andersen’s lines of ‘The
roses in the valley grow, where we the infant Christ shall know’,39 clearly went a
step too far for Der Nister, who renders the passage as ‘di royzn zey blien un vaksn,
vi sheyn; bay undz iz der zumer, der zumer aleyn’ [the roses, they bloom and grow,
how nice; summer is here, summer itself ].40 He also omits the quotation from the
Gospel of Mark, ‘Whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of Heaven as a little
child shall not enter therein’,41 which Andersen incorporated into his tale as the text
read by the grandmother at the very end of the story. In the Yiddish version, ‘The
Snow Queen’ closes with a scene which lacks Andersen’s moralizing tone and in
which the grandmother is simply sitting in the sun and reading a book out loud (‘oyf
der zun gezesn un oyfn kol a bikhl geleynt’).42 Since Der Nister does not reveal the
identity of the book, the grandmother’s act of reading becomes incidental and no
longer supplies the key to the story’s meaning. The absence of the New Testament
quotation thus complicates the story’s message, providing no straightforward or
simplistic resolution to the tale’s central theme of how to become an adult and
attain intellectual wisdom without losing the capacity for emotion and love. Der
Nister’s faithlessness to the cultural context evoked in ‘The Snow Queen’ alters the
interpretative possibilities of the story, re-writing its ending in both the literal and
metaphorical sense. If faithfulness to non-Jewish themes and contexts constitutes
the choice to create a secular literary space that can incorporate ‘the fundamental
motifs and moods, visions and images, symbols and figures, legends and myths of
the world poetry of all generations, peoples and languages’,43 faithlessness can be
seen not only as responding to the need for cultural accommodation but also as a
means by which the translator asserts his authorial power and creative freedom.
If Der Nister’s faithfulness in content to Andersen’s original text is only
occasionally superseded by the need or desire for faithlessness, faithfulness in style
proves to be a different matter. Part of Hans Christian Andersen’s success as a
writer of literary fairy tales derived from his innovative use of Danish vernacular
idiom. As Julia Briggs, a leading scholar of children’s literature in Britain, argues,
‘Andersen found in the Danish language of his day an irresistible energy and vitality
in its naïve idiom, particles and possible puns’.44 The English translators Jeffrey and
Diana Crone Frank credit Andersen with writing in a new kind of Danish, ‘utterly
unlike the formal “king’s Danish” or the Germanic Danish favoured by the young
Kierkegaard and the literary establishment’.45 Finally, Andersen himself expressed
to his fellow Danish writer Bernhard Ingemann his desire to write in the way that
people spoke.46 For Andersen, writing fairy tales purportedly aimed at children
afforded the opportunity to fashion a new linguistic medium for literary use,
whose oral quality and colloquialness could establish a more direct contact between
narrator and reader (which critical reception might well have judged as unsuitable
or inappropriate, had the intended readership not been designated as children).
Faithfulness to Andersen’s original text in style thus requires a recreation or
imitation of the orality of his language, which precludes use of the estranging
effects that characterize much of Der Nister’s literary output. In her list of the most
commonly encountered features in Der Nister’s symbolist prose, Bechtel names the
omission of articles, verbs and other ellipses: emes in der erd instead of dos emes iz in
der erd [the truth is in the earth]; the creation of abstract nouns: bargkaylekhdikayt
[mountain roundness]; neologisms: der nakht-dort-hiter [the night watchman at that
place]; the placement of adjectival phrases after the noun: vi an alt-keyver in a step a
groysn instead of vi an alt-keyver in a groysn step [like an old grave in a big steppe]; and
the constant use of un [and] as a syntactic link between constituents, even ‘where it
is unnecessary, agrammatical or creates an asymmetry’: un lesof un gefunen instead of
lesof gefunen [finally found].47
Bechtel further observes that Der Nister consistently places the predicate at the
end of the sentence, a feature which he defended strongly against the accusation
of daytshmerizm or using a Germanized Yiddish, thus writing in 1908 to Shmuel
Niger that ‘der predikat in sof fun zats iz nit nor keyn daytshe monopol [...] un
bikhlal rekhn ikh, az mit der privilegye nitsn zikh oys ale di vos pretendirn nisht
oyf fraze oyf geveyntlekher’ [the predicate at the end of the sentence is not just
an exclusively German feature [...] and in general I reckon that all those who are
after more unusual phrasing make use of this word order].48 As evidenced by this
quotation, Der Nister sought to distance his writing from ordinary language, with
its conventionalized pairings of form and meaning, signifier and signified, all
arranged in the expected word order. Like Hans Christian Andersen, Der Nister
rebelled against established linguistic conventions; but in contrast to Andersen, Der
Nister’s linguistic rebellion was directed against written as well as spoken models
of Yiddish discourse, resulting in the attempt to forge a style that was uniquely his
own and uncompromisingly elitist.
50 Kerstin Hoge
Even a cursory look at Der Nister’s translations of Andersen’s fairy tales shows his
drive for linguistic otherness to be insuppressible. While there is no evidence for
Der Nister making extensive use of the entire repertoire of linguistic idiosyncrasies
and innovations listed by Bechtel, Andersen’s Mayselekh display a number of his
syntactic idiosyncrasies. First, Der Nister, in line with his professed desire to reclaim
German-like word order as full-f ledged Yiddish, places the predicate almost
predominantly in clause-final position in these stories, as the following examples
from Di shney-malke and Ole-Luk-Oye show.49
Oysgetseykhnete landshaftn hobn in shpigl vi gekokhter shpinat oysgezen un
di beste menshn hob zikh vi di ernste mieskeytn gevizn oder zenen mit di kep
arop un on di gufim gor geshtanen.
[Exquisite landscapes looked like boiled spinach in the mirror and the best
people looked truly hideous or stood on their heads with no bodies.] (Di shney
malke, p. 3)
Un in mitn tsimer oyf a grobn goldenem blumen-shtekele zenen tsvey betlekh,
in der form fun lilyes, gehangen.
[In the middle of the room, two beds hung from a thick stem of gold, shaped
like lilies.] (Di shney malke, p. 37)
Itst lomir hern, vi azoy Ole-Luk-Oye iz amol in meshekh fun a vokh kesey
der ale baynakht tsu eynem a kleynem yingele vos m’hot hyalmar gerufn,
gekumen, ...
[Let’s hear about how Ole Shut-Eye came every day of the week to a little boy
that was called Hjalmar.] (Ole-Luk-Oye, p. 4)
Di lange tsveygn zeyere hobn iber di vent un biz tsu der same stelye azh
dergreykht, ...
[Their long branches reached across the walls as far as to the ceiling, ...] (Ole-
Luk-Oye, p. 4)
The two stories also provide numerous examples for adjectival phrases in postnominal
position, as illustrated in der shpigl der gantser [the whole mirror] (Di shney malke, p.
4); mit trit mit shtile [with quiet steps] (Ole-Luk-Oye, p. 3); and vos in der oyfgabe in der
aritmetisher [in the arithmetic exercise] (Ole-Luk-Oye, p. 5). Furthermore, we find
exemplified Der Nister’s unconventional use of un and the ellipsis of auxiliaries,
as in ‘Un er hot zikh mit zayn kishef-shpritser tsu hyalmarn tsugerirt, un hyalmar
hot ongehoybn alts klener un klener vern un biz er in lesof vi zayn mindster finger
gevorn’ [And he used his magic spray on Hjalmar, and Hjalmar started to become
smaller and smaller (and) until he was finally as tall as his little finger] (Ole-Luk-
Oye, p. 11).
The effect of linguistic defamiliarization may be somewhat subdued as compared
to Der Nister’s other works, but nevertheless Der Nister’s translations of Hans
Christian Andersen’s fairy tales cannot be called faithful to the model supplied by
Andersen and mediated by the Russian translation, which aimed to replicate the
characteristics of spoken discourse. The question arises why Der Nister would have
produced writing that bears his unique stylistic signature, when neither the original
text to be translated nor the genre to which the original and translated texts belong
endorse linguistic obfuscation and obscurity. Why write for children as if producing
symbolist literature aimed at adult readers?
The answer might lie in the fact that Der Nister sought to associate his symbolist
style with Andersen’s literary prestige. Translations of Andersen’s fairy tales were,
as shown by the bibliographical data, popular and guaranteed to be read, both by
children and adults, with the latter reading the fairy tales either on their own or in
their engagement with children as parents or teachers. Andersen’s fairy tales were
acclaimed literary works, endorsed with the stamp of international critical success.
If Yiddish readers could find commonalities in the experience of reading Andersen
and reading Der Nister, it created a familiar context in which to approach Der
Nister’s symbolist narratives, a literary precedent for Der Nister’s style of writing,
which might have been perceived to be less threatening and alien than Der Nister’s
own full-blown symbolist tales.
The proposed interpretation of Der Nister’s stylistic choices entails a view
of literary translation as a practice which not only introduces works of another
literary tradition to a receptor language and culture, but which also results in
an interdependence between translated and original works, altering the literary
landscape of the receptor culture. The role of children’s literature in shaping
and changing existing cultural practice is often ignored, although, arguably, it
is precisely the stealth afforded by the designation ‘for children’ that is the most
effective catalyst for change. Often seen as transitory and unimportant for the
formation of cultural identity, children’s literature provides a space that facilitates
experimentation and innovation, and it forms and develops the cultural tastes and
expectations of future generations. The Yiddishist ‘cultural project’ recognized the
centrality of children’s writing in national reformation, together with the dynamic
force of translation, when it hoped that introducing children to the ‘wider world’
by means of literature would alter the political and social space in which Jewish
diasporic life was lived.
For Der Nister, who aligned himself with this cultural project, Yiddish children’s
literature and adult literature were clearly interrelated — if not thematically, at least
stylistically.50 His proclamation that he was always a symbolist ought to be seen as
a realistic assessment of the intellectual and, crucially, linguistic sensibilities that he
brought to all of his writing, including his translations of so-called children’s stories.
Uncovering the thematic and stylistic ties that link Der Nister’s literary output not
only responds to the challenge of finding the ‘hidden’, but makes it possible to view
Der Nister’s diverse literary works as a more coherent whole than the fragmented
biography which has dominated the discourse on this author.
Notes to Chapter 3
1. Translated and quoted in Leonard Wolf, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Der Nister, The Family
Mashber, trans. by L. Wolf (New York: New York Review Books, 1987), pp. 7–25 (pp. 24–25).
2. Der Nister used the expression ‘liberate oneself ’ at a Kharkov book launch for Hoyptshtet
[Capitals] (1934) when commenting on his development from a writer of symbolist prose to one
of documentary narratives; ‘Nister hot zikh bavizn...’, Vokhnshrift far literatur, kunst un kultur,
6 June 1935, p. 8, quoted from Gennady Estraikh, ‘Der Nister’s “Hamburg Score” ’ in this
volume.
52 Kerstin Hoge
3. Delphine Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, 1907–1929: A Study of a Yiddish Symbolist (Bern: Peter Lang,
1990), p. 266. Note that Bechtel argues that Der Nister is not a pure symbolist but creates ‘a
hybrid system which participates both in symbolism and allegory’, best labelled as ‘allegorical
symbolism’; Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, p. 145.
4. The quotation appears in a letter written to his younger brother Motl (Max Kaganovitch);
letter to Max Kaganovitch, no date, RGALI, fond 3121, op. 1, ed. khr. 37, 1–3, cited from
Mikhail Krutikov, ‘Turning My Soul Inside Out: Text and Context of The Family Mashber’ in
this volume; see also Khone Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister’s “Under a Fence”: Tribulations of a Soviet
Yiddish Symbolist’, in The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature: Second
collection, ed. by U. Weinreich (London: Mouton, 1965), p. 285.
5. Shmeruk suggests that Der Nister’s work encompasses two distinct periods, with the publication
of the story ‘Unter a ployt’ (‘Under a Fence’) in 1929 serving as point of division (Shmeruk, ‘Der
Nister’s “Under a Fence” ’, p. 285). Bechtel distinguishes three periods in the work of Der Nister,
subdividing the period from 1913 to 1929 into two periods, demarcated by Der Nister’s return
to the Soviet Union in 1926 (Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, p. 105). Hersh Remenik also proposes a
ternary periodization, distinguishing between a period of symbolist poetry (1907–17), a period
of symbolist prose (1917–29) and a period of realist prose from 1929 onwards (Hersh Remenik,
‘Dostoevsky and Der Nister’, Soviet Studies in Literature, 8.4 (1972), 405–19 (p. 419)).
6. Avraham Noverstern, ‘Der Nister’, The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, <http://
www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Der_Nister>.
7. Joachim Neugroschel, ‘Notes’, Great Tales of Jewish Fantasy and the Occult: The Dybbuk and Thirty
Other Classic Stories, ed. and trans. by J. Neugroschel (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press,
1987), p. 698.
8. Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister’s “Under a Fence” ’, p. 285.
9. Der Nister, Mayselekh: A mayse mit a hon, Dos tsigele, illus. by Mark Chagall (Petrograd: Kletskin,
1917).
10. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899), p. 5.
11. Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), p. 47.
12. Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
13. Moyshe Litvakov, ‘Di system fun iberzetsungen II’, Bikher-velt, 4–5 (August 1919), 37–44; cited
from Moss, Jewish Renaissance, p. 101.
14. Holte: A. Golomb, ‘Fun zeyer onheyb: Zikhroynes’, Zamlbikher 8, ed. by J. Opatoshu and H.
Leivick (New York: Marstin Press, 1952), 249–56 (p. 249). Malakhovka: For a photograph
that shows Der Nister and other teachers (including Marc Chagall) at Malakhovka, see Zvi Y.
Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present,
2nd expanded edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 91.
15. Golomb, ‘Fun zeyer onheyb’, p. 249.
16. Moss, Jewish Renaissance, p. 21.
17. Chone Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Adaptations of Children’s Stories from World Literature’, in Art
and its Uses: The Visual Image and Modern Jewish Society, ed. by Richard I. Cohen, Studies in
Contemporary Jewry, 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 186–200 (p. 187). See
also David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 202; and Daniela Mantovan, ‘Der Nister and his Symbolist
Short Stories (1913–1929): Patterns of Imagination’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia
University, 1993).
18. H. Andersen, Mayselekh, trans. by Der Nister (Warsaw: Farlag Kultur-Lige, 1921), p. 47. See also
Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Adaptations’, p. 187.
19. Ben-Ami, Fayvl der groyser un Fayvl der kleyner, a mayse fun Andersenen ibergemakht far yidishe kinder
(Saint Petersburg, n.d.). The date of the censor’s permit is 12 February 1904.
20. See, for example, Daniela Mantovan-Kromer, ‘Nachwort’ in Der Nister, Unterm Zaun: Jiddische
Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1988), pp. 197–211 (p. 209); Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work,
pp. 42–43, 68; Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, p. 195; and Leah V. Garrett, Journeys beyond the Pale:
Yiddish Travel Writing in the Modern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), p. 68.
21. Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, p. 47.

22. Shmuel Niger, Yidishe shrayber in Sovet-Rusland (New York: Committee of the Congress for
Jewish Culture, 1958), p. 376. Translated and quoted in Wolf, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. 15.
23. Neugroschel, ‘Notes’, p. 698.
24. Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 259.
25. Krutikov, ‘Turning My Soul Inside Out’, see the section entitled ‘Between Symbolism and
Realism’.
26. Di mishpokhe Mashber was favourably reviewed not only in Yiddish-language publications, but
also managed to garner a review by Aron Gurshteyn, ‘a leading authority on the theory of
socialist realism’ (Mikhail Kruktikov, ‘Aron Gurshteyn’, The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern
Europe, <http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Gurshteyn_Aron>) in the Russian-
language weekly Literaturnaia gazeta (published 30 June 1940).
27. Daniela Matovan, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries of Genre: The Children’s Stories of the
Soviet Yiddish Writer Der Nister (1884–1950)’, Report of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish
Studies (2006/2007), pp. 25–48. Mantovan’s argument is based on the themes of the tales told in
Mayselekh in ferzn [Stories in Verse] (1918), Dray mayselekh [Three Stories] (1934) and Zeks mayselekh
[Six Stories] (1939), which centre on death, illness and cannibalism, presenting a ‘Darwinian view
of life’ (p. 43) with no happy endings.
28. The Democratic Union of Yiddish Teachers later formed the school section of the Kultur-Lige;
see Hillel Kazovsky, ‘Kultur-Lige’, The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, <http://
www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Kultur-Lige>.
29. The title page of Ben-Ami’s story includes the information that the story was a ‘Supplement to
issue no. 39 of Der Fraynd’ (stated in Russian), intended as a ‘Purim treat from Der Fraynd for
Jewish children’ (stated in Yiddish); see Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Adaptations’, p. 198 n. 7.
30. Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Adaptations’, p. 188.
31. Yankev Lvovski, ‘Der Nister in zayne yugnt-yorn’, Sovetish heymland, 3 (March 1963), 106–09
(p. 107).
32. Andersen’s fairy tales entered a number of European languages and cultures via German; see
Erik Dal, ‘Hans Christian Andersen’s World Fame: Quantity and Quality’, in Six Fairy Tales
by the Danish Writer Hans Christian Andersen: Published on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of
his birth, ed. by S. Dahl and H. G. Topsøe-Jensen (Copenhagen: Berlingske bogtr., 1955), p.
69. Cf. also Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen, Ugly Ducklings? Studies in the English Translations of Hans
Christian Andersen’s Tales and Stories (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004), p.
18, where the author notes that ‘the majority of English translators worked either directly from
the German, or used German translations as cribs’.
33. Lyudmila Yu. Braude, ‘Hans Christian Andersen and Russia’, Scandinavica, 14.1 (1975), 2. The
first fairy tale by Andersen to be published in Russian was ‘The Bronze Boar’, translated in 1844
by R. K. Grot, the sister of the Russian philologist and historian Ya. K. Grot.
34. Braude, ‘Hans Christian Andersen’, pp. 5, 6.
35. Braude, ‘Hans Christian Andersen’, p. 7. Braude attributes the observation to ‘a prominent figure
in Finnish culture, V. Humble, who spent many years in Russia’; V. Humble, ‘Skandinaviska
kulturströmnigar i Ryssland’ (Helsingfors, 1903), p. 3.
36. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, p. 201.
37. Moss, Jewish Renaissance, p. 205.
38. This act was not possible in the case of Andersen’s ‘The Jewish Maid’, which has a clear
missionary focus. See Mantovan, ‘Der Nister and his Symbolist Short Stories’ and also Roskies,
A Bridge of Longing, p. 384 n. 33.
39. Hans Christian Andersen, The Complete Fairy Tales (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1993), p. 263.
40. H. Andersen, Mayselekh: Di shney-malke, trans. by Der Nister (Mexico: Farlag kinder-literatur-
fond Shekhno Kaplan, 1955), p. 10.
41. Mark 10. 15 (King James Version).
42. Andersen, Mayselekh: Di shney-malke, p. 61.
43. Litvakov, ‘Di system fun iberzetsungen II’, p. 37, quoted from Moss, Jewish Renaissance, pp.
17–18.
54 Kerstin Hoge
44. Julia Briggs, Review of Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen, Ugly Ducklings? Studies in the English
Translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales and Stories (Odense: University Press of Southern
Denmark, 2004), Angles on the English-Speaking World, 6 (2006), 145–47.
45. Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank, ‘Introduction: The Real H. C. Andersen’, in The Stories of
Hans Christian Andersen, trans. by D. Crone Frank and J. Frank (London: Granta, 2005), p. 12.
46. Frank and Frank, ‘Introduction: The Real H. C. Andersen’, p. 12.
48. Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, pp. 102–03.
49. The page numbers given refer to the following editions: (i) H. Andersen, Mayselekh: Di shney-
malke, trans. by Der Nister (Mexico: Farlag kinder-literatur-fond Shekhno Kaplan, 1955); and
(ii) Andersens mayselekh, trans. by Der Nister, Booklet no. 4: ‘Ole-Luk-Oye’ (Warsaw: Kultur-
Lige, 1921).
50. Cf. also Roskies’s claim that ‘Der Nister’s translations and original verse for children were of a
piece with his fantasies for grown-ups’; Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, p. 202.
Chapter 4
v
A mayse mit a hon. Dos tsigele:

Marc Chagall illustrating Der Nister
Sabine Koller
Vaser-shtil un vaser-taykh,
eyner vet dem tsveytn,
afn gantsn kenigraykh
maysele tseshpraytn.
[Still and f lowing water,
one would spread to the next
a fairy tale
within the entire realm.]
Der Nister and the Magic of Folklore

Baba Yaga, a witch whose nose extends to the ceiling and whose breasts spill over
the threshold of her house built on chicken feet, whirls in a mortar through Russian
folktales. Disregarding all cultural boundaries, she sets out to annoy little Yisrulik
in Mendele Moykher Sforim’s Di klyatshe [The Mare] (1873).1 Baba Yaga’s f lights
through Russian and Yiddish literature are an inspiring and fantastic example for
Jewish-Slavic literary interrelations. In Der Nister’s A mayse mit a nozir un a tsig [A
Tale with a Hermit and a Goat], a sophisticated symbolist story published in 1913
under the deceptively simple title A mayse [A tale], a witch on a broom appears at
night, summoned by a billy-goat.2 Although this is not the Russian version of a
witch, Der Nister was certainly familiar with Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish fairy
tales. One powerful example is his fairy tale in verses of Mizele-Mayzele [Mizele-
Mousy] (1921), where a cat and a mouse participate in various Jewish festivities
like a bris [circumcision], while living, like Baba Yaga, in a house on chicken feet,
an image originating in Russian folklore.3 According to Nakhman Mayzel, Slavic
servants brought the folktales to Jewish homes.4 Of course, selective linguistic or
folkloristic borrowing went both ways: ‘from Slavs to their Jewish neighbors and
from Jews to their Slavic neighbors’.5
During the nineteenth-century national awakening in Central and Eastern
Europe, orality and folklore became preeminent factors in the development of
national literatures and philologies. In the wake of Herder’s search for a national
spirit, the volksgeist, tales and rites of indigenous foreign and native cultures attracted
56 Sabine Koller
writers and painters from different periods, from Romanticism to avant-garde.

Arina Radionovna, Pushkin’s nanny, had an important impact on the development
of the Russian Kunstmärchen, literary fairy tale. She enchanted Pushkin, the
undisputed genius of Russian Romanticism, with amazing tales. Aleksey Remizov,
a lesser-known and (until the perestroika) silenced symbolist author, artfully modelled
religious and pagan legends which he had collected in northern Russia. Wassily
Kandinsky undertook expeditions to the Vologda Governorate in the north of
tsarist Russia, and Kazimir Malevich was excited by Ukrainian folk art, its colours
and primitive forms. Parallel to the heyday of primitive art and folklore in modern
Russian art and literature, An-sky (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport) headed extensive
ethnographic expeditions to the shtetl in the Pale of Settlement from 1912 to 1914.6
Yehuda Leib Cahan, head of YIVO’s Ethnographic Commission and editor of its
folklore publications, compiled and examined Yiddish folklore and folk songs.
Tales, tunes and storytellers escaped the relentless stream of Lethe: Sonye Naymark,
called ‘Sonye di Khakhome’, Sonya the Wise, deeply impressed A. Litvin (Samuel
Hurwitz), an early collector of Jewish folklore, who was delighted with her gift for
storytelling.7
Slavic fairy tales such as those collected by Alexander Afanas’ev in the nineteenth
century or the Jewish ones collected during An-sky’s ethnographic expedition in
the beginning of the twentieth century were a source of inspiration for Yiddish
authors. Their vivid interest in folklore was accompanied by a desire to create
secular literature for children as a tool for educating future readers about the Jewish
cultural renaissance.8 Jewish folklore and folk art was the ticket to yidishkayt, as
was Hans Christian Andersen in Der Nister’s translation to Europeanization: ‘The
Danish writer’s pantheistic perception of nature, his peculiar brand of fantasy, and
even his predilection for the German Romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann matched Der
Nister’s sensibility.’9
Animal tales are Der Nister’s preferred genre. In his 1921 edition of Mayselekh in
ferzn [Rhymed Fairy Tales], a bear, a rabbit, a mouse, a cat, a dog, a he-goat made
out of snow, a rooster and a goat populate his tales. In Dos ketsl [The Little Cat],
the narrator, as in Der Nister’s story Der kadmen [Primordial Man] (1910), celebrates
the magic creation of man. Dos hintl [The Little Dog], on the contrary, is a tale of
disturbing cruelty. It seems as if the horrors of war and pogroms generated scenes
of sadism and cannibalism, disguised by Der Nister as animal tales.10 Be that as it
may, the rooster and the goat merit a special place in Der Nister’s literary zoo. A
mayse mit a hon [A Tale with a Rooster] and Dos tsigele [The Little Goat] appear in
Petrograd in 1917, illustrated by Marc Chagall. They mark the beginning of his
career as a children’s author.11
In Petrograd during World War I, the Yiddishist Nokhum Shtif was working
for the Vilna publisher Boris Kletskin. Shtif, who had been helping Jews forced to
leave their homes, took particular care to provide Jewish children with a spiritual
and cultural shelter through the publication of these children’s books.12 It may
have been Shtif ’s initiative which inspired Der Nister to write these two tales. Der
Nister was firmly involved in the circle of Kiev literati between 1915 and 1920.
He was then exempt from military service and worked in the timber industry in
A mayse mit a hon. Dos tsigele 57
the Kiev region. Later he was employed as a teacher in Yiddish secular schools as
well.13 Shtif invited Marc Chagall, who was working in a military office in the
renamed capital Petrograd at the time, to illustrate Der Nister’s tales. A productive
union was formed in 1917, with Der Nister providing the literary component and
Chagall the visual art. Thus, Shtif became the best man for a literary bride and a
visual groom that, from 1917 on, were living together in happy matrimony, even
though the paper they used for printing was of poor quality.14 This alliance was of
extreme importance for the Jewish cultural renaissance in Russia. It is Der Nister’s
contribution of ingenious simplicity to literary modernism. And it is here, in the
illustration of children’s books, that we see the birth of the Jewish avant-garde.15
Der Nister’s text and Chagall’s images exemplify a dynamic exchange, where
modernist thinking and the simple perspective of children intersect to effect a
creative transformation of Jewish cultural heritage. Folklore and folk art play a
major role in Der Nister’s and Chagall’s oeuvres. They are a treasure chest for the
Jewish cultural awakening of that time and inspire multiple poetical and aesthetic
experiments. Of equal importance is the fact that folklore acts as an integral link
between orality and scripturality.
The distinction between two ways of perception of the world, one mythical, the
other logical, was made by Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky, two major figures of
the Tartu School of Semiotics. In mythical thinking, world and thought (or language)
form a unit, while in the other case logical thinking and the object thought are
divided into two separate entities.16 Vladimir Propp, who surpassed the simplistic
ethnographic-historical approaches to oral tales with his seminal structural analysis
Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928), also anchors the folktale in primitive thinking.17
His work led to the realization that the folktale generates its own semantics of time,
space and plot. These elements are never abstract, but concrete. Children have
not yet grown out of the mythical thinking and magic perception of the world.
Children live within the tales and identify with their protagonists. Hence it is the
high level of emotional impact and element of fascination that makes fairy tales so
attractive to children.
Der Nister’s A mayse mit a hon and Dos tsigele

Der Nister’s first story is about a bobe, a grandmother, living alone with a rooster
in her little house. She takes care of him for years, until she falls seriously ill. As
the bobe is without relatives, the rooster takes over the human role, accompanying
her from the oylem ha-ze, this world, into the oylem ha-be, the world to come. The
rooster stands at the threshold between life and death — or eternal life. He leaves
the door open for a shtiler man [silent man] (p. 15), who after three days of the
bobe’s agony signals the rooster to crow. The grandmother has died. The narrator
concludes that from that moment on roosters have assumed the task of mourning
the dead.18
The story opens with the beginning of a folksong for children and ends with a
mourning custom practised by adults. In its closure, the story introduces children
to the Jewish religious practices of mazker-neshomes zayn, of remembering the dead
58 Sabine Koller
by prayers (p. 15). As a whole, the tale praises the friendship between man and
animal. This is done in harmonious verses and a regular metre: except for the first
strophe with rhyming couplets, Der Nister unfolds his narration with embracing
rhymes. An iambic meter with anacrusis and three or four stressed syllables with a
hiatus between the second and the third verse create a melodic scheme of narration,
a perfect order to house death. Der Nister’s main poetic device is repetition:
repetition of syllables, sounds, words, and meanings. A stanza about the rooster who
‘iz geshtanen lang azoy / ba bobe un ba bet / un geshvign lang azoy / un gornisht
nisht geredt’ [stood like that for a while / close to the grandmother’s bed / and was
silent for a while / and did not say a word] (p. 15) is not an awkward tautology.
It is an obligatory element within the aesthetic composition of the rhymed tale.
Der Nister’s style is, overall, a perfect example of the rigid economy of the tale.19
Lexical, syllabic and euphonic repetitions across the stanza boundaries vertically
organize the poem. The result is a melody in verse and rhyme much adored by
children.20 Of course, diminutives play a special part in this. Der Nister operates
within an aesthetic framework which highlights two features we will rediscover in
Chagall’s drawings: primitivism and minimalism.
Formally, the second tale, Dos tsigele, is similar to the first one: an iambic metre
with anacrusis and three or four stresses with masculine end rhymes is the basis for
the tale’s prosody. Once again, the rhythm within each strophe is built around a
hiatus between the second and the third verse.21 The tale starts in medias res with
a little white kid, who, like so many of Der Nister’s protagonists, has to fulfil a
mission: the goat is on its way to visit a little child, no bigger than a thimble, who
cannot fall asleep. At the end of its journey, wandering on narrow paths and — like
Der Nister himself — ‘ba zayt’ [astray] (p. 19), the little goat reaches a palace in the
middle of a forest. After reading a little note around the kid’s neck, the man at the
door of the palace allows him to enter. The mother of the ‘pitsele’ [the little child]
and wife of the ‘meylekh [...] af veldele un vint’ [king of the forests and winds] (p.
24) leaves the kid alone with her child. The child touches one horn, and confidently
closes one eye. After touching the second horn, the child closes the second eye, falls
asleep and ‘khropet’ [snores] (p. 30). The little goat eventually throws off its horns
so that the child can sleep on.22
There are several categories of kinder-mayselekh: didactic tales, lign-mayselekh, i.e.
nonsense tales, or tales told from a child’s point of view.23 Many of them evoke
common childhood terrors. Der Nister’s Mayse mit a hon and Dos tsigele, written
during World War I, are aimed at helping children overcome those terrors. The
first tale is about death, the second about falling asleep. In the first tale, the animal
is a true and constant companion to man, in the second it is his helper.24 Along
with his conviction that education is the ‘frontline in the aesthetic revolution’, Der
Nister’s motivation for choosing these themes seems clear.25 Refugees may have
been forced to leave elderly relatives behind: how will zeyde-bobe, the grandparents,
manage to go on living without their family? Who will take care of them, when
they die? Maybe the thunder of cannon fire prevented children from falling asleep.
The charm and warmth of this story may have alleviated their fear.
Like many Yiddish authors of that time, Der Nister is at the crossroads of
tradition and modernity, of Jewish and Slavic cultures. Folklore plays a special role:
it is the unconscious cultural archive, a treasure of fantasy and of magic imagination
where myth, religion, and aesthetic transformation meet. ‘Low’ folklore is a vital
element of ‘high’ literature, the aesthetically domesticated uncanny is attractive to
both the Christian and Jewish reader. The devils and demons in Gogol’s stories,
for example, told during the Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki [Evenings on a Farm
near Dikanka] (1831–32), give the real and the fictional reader the creeps like Der
Nister’s Sheydim [Demons] (1919) do.26 Der Nister’s symbolist stories, redolent with
references to ‘the Jewish mystical traditions and tropes’ are hermetic in content
and style.27 His erudition in Jewish mystical writings, the oral tradition, and mise-
en-abyme technique borrowed from Rabbi Nakhman of Bratslav’s tales all puzzled
his contemporaries and even Shmuel Niger, the head of the Olympus of Yiddish
literary criticism.28
Der Nister’s formal, mystical and ideational complexity and hidden polyvalences
are unsurpassed in Yiddish literature. His fairy tales form aesthetically fascinating
counterparts to his symbolist stories: They are simple, primitivist, lofty and of
an extraordinary musicality.29 Their linear logic is apt to convey magic, and
their pictorial language and the human-like behaviour of the animals is close to
children’s intuition.
In his important study on the Jewish Cultural Revolution, Kenneth Moss points
to the oscillation of Yiddish texts and artefacts between yidishkayt and deparo
chialization, between Jewishness and universalism. Der Nister makes an essential,
yet untranslated contribution to the European Kunstmärchen in prose and in rhyme.
His ‘broyzele’ in Dos tsigele echoes Andersen’s famous tale Thumbelina (1835) which
he translated in 1919, his verse and rhyme evoke Pushkin’s Zolotoi petukhok [The
Golden Rooster] (1835). At the same time, the Jewish character of his animals is
striking. Khayim Shloyme Kazdan emphasizes the yidishlekhkayt, the folk Jewishness
of the animal characters.30 The rooster and the little kid form part of Eastern Jewish
daily life, of Jewish religion and folklore. Little boys ride on roosters on Rosheshone-
greeting cards.31 A rooster serves as a favourite rhyme to end a tale: ‘A hun un a
hon / dos maysele heybt zikh on. / A kats un a moyz / dos maysele lozt zikh oys’
[A rooster and a hen / Now my story begins. / A cat and a mouse / Now my story
is done].32 A little kid is the protagonist of the Passover tale Khad gadye [The Little
Goat] and the ultimate symbol of Jewish history.33 ‘Unter Yidele’s vigele, shteyt
a klor vays tsigele...’ [Under Yidele’s cradle, stands a small white goat...] — every
Jewish child of that time knew the lullaby ‘Rozhinkes mit mandlen’ [Raisins
with Almonds], which the father of the Yiddish theatre, the haskole-writer Avrom
Goldfaden, integrated into his play Shulamis (1880).
A Tale about a Rooster — A Fairy Tale and its Mystical Subtext

An author like Der Nister, born into a Hassidic stronghold like Berdichev, cannot
but add hidden meanings to what appear on the surface to be simple children’s
stories. Taken together they make for an intriguing double lecture, a magic, ‘primi
tive’ one conceived for children and mythical thinking, and an intellectual one
60 Sabine Koller
for adults with rational thinking, without mutually excluding each other. I will
illustrate this with the example of the first tale.34
When, at the end of The Tale about a Rooster, the grandmother is in agony, a
silent man with wings comes in. Is it the malekh-hamoves, the Angel of Death,
who, according to the Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 20b, has to accompany
the mortals into the netherworld?35 Is it he who in Shivkhe ha-Besht [In Praise of
the Besht] cannot pass unnoticed before the vigil eye of the Baal Shem Tov?36 Der
Nister desists from describing the terrifying appearance of the Angel of Death
who in Peretz’ Ver es git lebn, git fun vanen tsu lebn [He who gives live, also gives
sustenance] (1897), in his Bam goyses tsukopns [At the Head of a Dying Man] (1904), or
in Itsik Manger’s Di vunderlekhe lebns-bashraybung fun Shmuel-Abe Abervo (Dos bukh
von Gan-eydn) [The Amazing Life Story of Shmuel-Abe Abervo (The Book of the Garden
of Eden)] (1939) fulfils his divine mission.
At midnight, after three nights with the grandmother in agony, the silent man
turns toward the rooster who crows and eventually turns red:
biz gekumen halbe nakht.
Geton zikh hot a drey
un tsu hon a vink geton...
un hondele — a krey.
Hot gekreyt dos hondele,
zikh ongegosn royt,
iz oyf bet dan shtil geven —
di bobele shoyn toyt... (p. 15)
[Midnight fell down / He turned around / And gave the rooster a sign. / And
little rooster — crowed. / Little rooster crowed / And little rooster turned red,
/ Silence at the bed / The granny has already died...]
According to the Zohar, a black rooster symbolizes God’s Strength, his mides-hadin.37
A black f lame beneath the rooster’s wings makes him crow; but this crowing can
only be heard by someone who is dying. The spirit of this dying person is elevated,
as God’s Judgment to leave this world, the oylem-haze, is upon him.38
God’s Strength ends at midnight. The second part of the night is dedicated to
God’s Mercy (mides-horakhmim); following the first crow after midnight, evil spirits
or demons lose their power.39 Tsadikim, righteous men, hearing the roosters’ crow
at midnight do tikn-khtsos, i.e. they recite prayers, chapters of Eykhe, of Jeremiah’s
lamentations, and tilim, psalms, to mourn the destruction of the Temple and the
death of righteous people. In Der Nister’s interpretation, all roosters pray and
remember the dead like the tsadikim: ‘... hondelekh zey tuen dan / neshomes-
mazker zayn’ (p. 15).
The Angel sending the f lame for the rooster’s wings is Gabriel, in Yiddish
Gavriel, the angel whose name means ‘my strength is God’ or ‘my hero is God’.
‘Gvar’, strong man, as one element of ‘Gavriel’ is etymologically close to the
Hebrew gever which is a synonym to hon, or rooster.40 Maybe Der Nister’s ‘silent
man’ incorporates several angels, i.e. the Angel of Death, the fallen angel Samael,
and the angel Gabriel.41
Death is perceived as something uncanny by both children and adults. In Jewish
folklore, the Angel of Death is defeated by humour or by God’s Greatness. In some

folktales he f lees a dying person and his job, whenever the wife of the person in
agony is nearby.42 At the end of the Haggadah-tale Khad Gadye, the Angel of Death
is judged and destroyed by God himself. Arthur Szyk visualized the malekh-hamoves
as the Grim Reaper who is also part of Russian fairy tales. El (Lazar) Lissitzky gives
an extraordinary avant-garde variation of this traditional theme.43
In both A Tale about a Rooster and The Little Goat, Der Nister omits the dark and
uncanny moments with which his carnivalesque-ambivalent symbolistic stories
are replete.44 He reintroduces the ‘ideational referent’ that he ‘deconstructs’ in his
symbolist stories:45 the signifiers ‘rooster’ and ‘kid’ refer to the signified animals and
are not part of grotesque and dazing metamorphoses. Both tales appear as a release
from the mystical struggling in his prose. Evil forces are discarded; and the Divine
ultimately prevails against Death. It is this inclination towards the fantastic, simple
and positive where Der Nister’s writing and Chagall’s illustrations meet.
The Tale about a Rooster as a Dialogue between Word and Image

In 1915 and 1916, when Marc Chagall was working in a Petrograd war office, he
provided Der Nister’s Mayse mit a hon and Dos tsigele with five and three illus
trations respectively, in India ink and opaque white on paper. Three major events
left an imprint on his paintings and sketches of that time. Firstly, World War I
overshadowed the Jewish cultural renaissance. Secondly, and at the same time,
Jewish art blossomed at Petrograd: the Evreiskoe obshchestvo pooshchreniia khudo
zhestv [ Jewish Society for Promoting Arts] organized major exhibitions with his
paintings.46 Chagall made etchings for a Jewish Middle School associated with the
Petersburg Great Choral Synagogue and located in the same building, which in
many ways correspond to his drawings for Der Nister. For example, a drawing for
Dos tsigele where the little kid is leaning against a pram echoes the watercolour The
Baby Carriage (1916/17).47 Moreover, the whole domestic atmosphere as well as the
protagonists of the first auctorial tale, i.e. the grandmother and the rooster, seem to
have emerged from the gentle watercolour. And thirdly, in 1916, Chagall’s daughter
Ida was born. The intimacy of living with a newborn child that Chagall captures
in his brilliant blue interior The Bath of the Child (1916) — an intimacy he f led at
the beginning — intensifies his fantastic creativity.48 Russian primitivism led by
Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova introduced folk-art devices from the
Russian lubok, a wooden pictorial broadsheet, and the Russian icon into avant-garde
painting. Chagall added his own primitivist version, enriched with carnivalesque
fantasy, colourful expression, high emotionality, and Jewish motifs.
The ‘Jewishness’ of a lot of Chagall’s paintings and drawings is undisputed; yet
art critics had difficulties in determining what exactly made his style folk-like or
folkloristic. In his 1923 book on Marc Chagall, the Russian-Jewish artist and art
critic Boris Aronson argued that ‘nobody has yet revealed the secret of national
[art]’, whereas Yekhezkel Dobrushin, Yisokher Ber Rybak, and Boris Aronson, in
1919, placed him at the centre of Jewish national art.49
Yekhezkel Dobrushin’s ref lections in ‘Kunst-primitiv un kunst-bukh far kinder’
62 Sabine Koller
[Primitive Art and Children’s Art Books] is particularly insightful in defining

Chagall’s relation to Jewish folk art, and his aesthetic affinity, his shutfes, with Der
Nister:
Chagall was the first to discover the folkloristic essence of Jewish art. [...]
He listened carefully to and understood the beautiful thing that it is to be a
Jewish primitivist, and thus justified his ‘fantasy for the sake of fantasy’, and,
undoubtedly, opened new, wide paths to Jewish illustrations in general, and, as
already mentioned, to children’s illustrations in particular [...].50
Marc Chagall’s drawings are minimalist, based primarily on the contrast of black
and white. They are non-mimetic and transgress reality in their simplicity and two-
dimensionality. This two-dimensionality, which Chagall borrows from the Russian
and Jewish folk art tradition of lubok or from Jewish paper cuttings (shvueslekh), is
a central aesthetic device, creating the opportunity for abstraction, spirituality, and
fantasy filled imagination. In his illustration of the first tale, Chagall introduces
a certain rhythm to line and plane, dash and hatching. He attentively observed
how his colleagues combined primitive representation and avant-garde techniques.
The image of a little boy in his bed, published in the Hebrew textbook Alef-
bet (Alphabet, 1916) written by Fanny Shargorodsky and illustrated by Nathan
Altman (one of Chagall’s most ardent rivals), is likely to have been the prototype
for Chagall’s sleeping grandmother (figs 1 and 2). Moreover, Chagall makes apt
use of the aesthetic potential of Hebrew letters: in the third illustration, the black
hatching under the stairs reminds us of a ‘shin’ (‫)ש‬, and the grandmother with her
hypertrophied hunchback of a ‘dalet’ (‫( )ד‬see fig. 3).51 According to Dobrushin
(and others), Hebrew letters as well as tombstones with their ornamentation are
basic elements in Jewish folk-art’.52 Indeed, the last of the five frames of Chagall’s
illustration is a tombstone, with two hands in the lower corners evoking the
hands of the kohanim, but also those of a mizrekh, an ornamental wall fixture indi
cating east, as drawn by Solomon Yudovin. Yudovin, An-sky’s nephew, carefully
copied decorative elements of those mizrakhim as part of his endeavour to preserve
the rich visual folk stylizations of the shtetl (figs 4 and 5). Chagall’s inscription ‘di
bobele iz geshtorbn’ [the grandma died] echoes Der Nister’s text and accomplishes
the verbal and pictorial narration. These summarizing words at the end create
a perfect symmetry with the beginning where Der Nister quotes a Yiddish
folk song:53
‘Eyns un eyns iz tsvey,
tsvey un eyns iz dray, —
hob ikh mir a lidele
lider-lider-ley.’ (p. 5)
[One and one is two / two and one is three, — / I sing a little song / ley-ley-lee.]
Chagall places this introduction on top of his first drawing. Children seeing the
numbers on the page will continue looking from the top to the bottom of the
picture. They subsequently become acquainted with the rooster and then with the
grandmother. This visual composition echoes Der Nister’s order in the first strophes
where the author presents first the rooster (str. 2) and then the bobe (str. 3; see fig. 6).
Fig. 1 (above). Marc Chagall, illustration for A mayse mit a hon.

© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014.
Fig. 2 (below). Nathan Altman, illustration for Alef-bet.
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014.
64 Sabine Koller
Fig. 3. Marc Chagall, illustration for A mayse mit a hon.

© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014
Fig. 4 (above). Solomon

Yudovin, Ornaments from a
Mizrakh from Voronovitsi.
Fig. 5 (below). Marc Chagall,
illustration for A mayse mit a
hon (Di bobele iz geshtorbn).
66 Sabine Koller
Fig. 6. Marc Chagall, illustration for A mayse mit a hon.

The sources for the illustrations in this chapter are as follows:

— Fig. 1, 3, 5 and 6: Marc Chagall, illustration for A mayse mit a hon, in: Marc Chagall.
Meisterwerke 1908-1922, ed. by Evelyn Benesch and Ingried Brugger (München/Berlin:
Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2008), p. 75-77.
— Fig. 2 and 4: Nathan Altman, illustration for Alef-Bet, in: Futur antérieur. L’avant-
garde et le livre yiddish (1914–1939), edited by Nathalie Hazan-Brunet (Paris: Skira
Flammarion, 2007), p. 77 and 90.
According to Yekhezkel Dobrushin, Chagall’s illustrations confirm the ‘abstract,

spiritual, so to speak, elevated character of the Jewish lubok’.54 Der Nister adds this
heightened rukhnies, spirituality, to his simple tales by introducing mystic topics of
the Zohar. Moreover, the writer refrains from providing any realistic depictions of
either the grandmother or the rooster, so as to stimulate the creative imagination.
Consequently Chagall is free to vary the appearance of both characters, whereas in
a Russian lubok, the figures are always depicted in the same way.55 As an aesthetic
equivalent of Der Nister’s verses for children, Chagall’s drawings stress the
relationship between Man and Animal. In most cases, they are facing each other. In
the second illustration, their familiarity is sustained by the aesthetic composition of
the drawing: the granny’s extended arm, her hunched-over posture, her headscarf,
alongside the rooster form a perfect symmetry of curving forms expressing
sympathy and compassion (fig. 3). In the last illustration, the rooster stands by the
headboard of the grandmother’s bed as the malekh-hamoves of Jewish mythology
does while conducting a vigil.
Like Der Nister’s text, Chagall’s drawings come close to an allegory. As is the case
in Der Nister’s literary imagination, the painter’s figures are located outside spatial
and temporal coordinates, but within childlike perception. From the perspectives
of cultural semiotics, the rooster appears as a symbol of Jewish culture. From a
child’s point of view, he is man’s companion, like the calf in Sholem Aleichem’s Motl
Peysi dem khazns [Motl Peysi, the Cantor’s Son] or in Mendele Moykher Sforim’s
Dos kelbele [The Calf ]. Children do not distinguish between dream and reality,
separating humans, animals and toys as distinct entities. For children, the rooster
and the young goat are vivid and human-like.
Der Nister’s text and Chagall’s drawings, the rhymes and the lines, literature and
art converge because of two main aesthetic features: primitivism and rhythm. In his
illustrations of Yiddish texts, Chagall is always very attentive to the literary devices
employed by the authors, including Yitzkhok Leybush Peretz, David Hofshteyn,
Avrom Sutzkever — and Der Nister. Chagall, for whom the air was filled with
figures from legends, myths and folk tales, hears the music in Der Nister’s tales:
all the alliterations, assonances, anaphors, and other rhetorical figures of repetition
reappear in the domain of visual art. Chagall elaborates in his drawings a corres
ponding subtle visual rhythm of black and white, of straight lines and curves, of
hatching and line, of coloured and empty space. The different frames of the illus
trations with its subtle punctuations and zigzags form a rhythm in itself.
Der Nister’s rhetorical repetitions, the paratactic, narrative structure, the onoma
topoeia, and the simple vocabulary create a melodious masterpiece of poetic
primitivism. Bal-Makhshoves (Yisroel Elyashev), the doyen of modern Yiddish
literary criticism, outlines these qualities as stimulating Yiddish language and
literature:
Thanks to Nister’s own language, whose main characteristic is its simplicity,
a simplicity bordering on primitivism, Nister eminently became a language
reformer who had a noticeable inf luence on contemporary poetry, growing and
blooming by the southern poets.56
Moreover, Bal-Makhshoves acknowledges the proximity between Der Nister’s
68 Sabine Koller
language and primitive art allowing him to open a new chapter in the history of
Yiddish literary tales:
Der Nister has demonstrated in some of his tales in prose and in rhyme for
children and adults a simplicity as regards the aesthetic means, and, at the
same time, a visual quality of the fairy-tale world so that, sporadically, they are
evocative of exemplary primitive artists. It is thanks to Der Nister that the
Yiddish fairy-tale world becomes something which exceeds all the efforts of
Peretz and his followers — and becomes a pure, autonomous creation steeped
in a special national mystic form and permeated with a special Jewish [Yiddish]
fairy-tale atmosphere.57
Chagall, on the other hand, while shifting from painting to etching and book illus
trations becomes a ‘philosopher of his own oeuvre’.58 In his drawings for Der Nister,
he expertly handles primitivist scales and Jewish overtones, with a unique visual
creation. With the primitive style of his illustrations, he brings the rich Jewish
folkloristic inventory — the ornaments, goats, roosters, and other animals — from
their religious use into art, from tradition into modernity. In Chagall’s art, symbols,
ornaments and themes of Jewish folklore are treated not merely as ethnographic
material, but, along with Lissitzky, Rybak, Altman, and others, are aesthetically
transformed into masterpieces of Jewish avant-garde painting. It is hard to accept
that after 1929 Der Nister’s tales were discarded ‘as so much decadent trash’ or
fell into oblivion; none of the beautiful verses of his fairy tales were set to music,
and — except for Chagall — Jewish artists never faced the challenge of illustrating
them.59
Conclusion
When the East European Jewish intelligentsia was propelled forward and landed in
one great leap in the twentieth century, Yiddish literature and art not only caught
up with European and Russian modernist trends, but also discovered their own
Jewish traditions, which they aesthetically transfigured.60 Der Nister’s impact on
this cultural revolution is of enormous importance. Creating Kunstmärchen at the
crossroads of Jewish folklore tradition and European achievements in this field, he,
the language and genre reformer, accomplished a task as significant as what Pushkin
achieved in the 1830s and 1840s, writing fairy tales which completely revolutionized
the Russian language. Like Pushkin or — in the field of Yiddish literature —
Yitzkhok Leybush Peretz, Der Nister was inspired by a Romantic attitude which
aimed at releasing cultural treasures from a state of oblivion.61 With Peretz, as Dan
Miron has shown, ‘folklore becomes a source of inspiration for Yiddish literature, a
deep well of symbolic truth, to be interpreted by the modern artist and adapted to
the spiritual needs of the modern Jew’.62 Peretz’ poeticized folktales overcame the
mostly didactic use of folklore in the Haskalah literature of Yitzkhok Meir Dik or
Israel Aksenfeld. With Der Nister, the folktale gained complete aesthetic autonomy.
Chagall’s striking drawings can be interpreted as the visual counterparts to a highly
modernist aesthetic self-sufficiency, committed only to the imagination, and to
Der Nister’s text. What follows, is an incredible blossoming of illustrated Yiddish
avant-garde literature not only for children: it is hard to imagine Lissitzky’s goat in
Khad gadye without thinking of Chagall’s, or Peretz Markish’s Galaganer hon [The
Boastful Rooster] (1922) without Der Nister’s rooster.
Oral tales have always acted as a concise and beautiful antithesis to grim realities
of everyday life. In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade recounts stories in
order to save human lives. The tales in Boccaccio’s Decamerone are told during the
plague. Der Nister’s stories might have been read to Jewish children during World
War I. (Perhaps Der Nister himself told them to Jewish orphans during his stay at
Malakhovka near Moscow at the beginning of the 1920s.) A mayse mit a hon and
Dos tsigele are not in the realm of Plautus’ or Thomas Hobbes’ homo homini lupus
est, but of humanized animals protecting man. Fairy tales have always been told or
written down to restore a violated world order.63 With their magic language, Der
Nister’s two tales are a fantastic and a fantastically charming Yiddish variation of
this. They and Chagall’s drawings are a ‘literary and artistic home’ for children,
and an aesthetically accomplished sort of tikn-oylem, of ‘repairing the world’, by the
‘high priest’ how David Roskies called Der Nister, ‘the Hidden One’.
Notes to Chapter 4
1. I would like to thank Lauren Ganz and Holger Nath for helping me with the translation of this
chapter into English.
2. After his prose collection Hekher fun der erd [Higher Than the Earth] and first book of poetry
Gezang un gebet [Song and Prayer], both published in 1910, this story marks the beginning of
Der Nister’s mature symbolist period; see Daniela Mantovan, ‘Der Nister (Pinchas Kahanovitch
[Pinkhes Kahanovitsh])’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 333. Writers in Yiddish, ed. by
Joseph Sherman (Detroit, MI: Thomson/Gale, 2007), pp. 219–27 (p. 222).
3. Der Nister, ‘Mizele-mayzele’, in his Mayselekh in ferzn (Warsaw: Kultur-Lige, 1921), pp. 46–48.
4. Nakhman Mayzel, ‘Der Nister — mentsh un kinstler’, in Der Nister: Dertseylungen un eseyen
(New York: YKUF, 1959), pp. 9–29 (p. 18).
5. Beatrice Silverman Weinreich, Yiddish Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 67;
Silverman Weinreich continues: ‘The great Romantic poet of Poland Adam Mickiewicz (1788–
1855), is said to have praised a certain Jewish coachman, with whom he had travelled for two
days, as an exquisite storyteller. Coachmen and shoemakers, peddlers and cattle dealers, loggers
and beggars, merchants and innkeepers were some of the many Jewish raconteurs who played a
significant role in the story-swapping tradition’ (pp. 67–68).
6. See The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, ed. by Gabriella
Safran and Steven Zipperstein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
7. Beatrice Silverman Weinreich, Yiddish Folktales, p. xxvi.
8. In his 1919 review published in the Kiev Journal Baginen [Dawn], Nakhman Mayzel stresses the
secular quality of Der Nister’s tales as part of an encompassing Yiddish folk epos; ‘Der Nister.
Mayselekh in ferzn’, Baginen. Ershter bukh, 1919 ( June), pp. 122–25 (pp. 123 and 125). Der Nister
also contributed significantly to these endeavours during the ‘heyday’ of Stalinism and Socialist
Realism: in 1935, his adaptations of Sholem Aleichem’s children’s tales Dos meserl [The Pocket-
knife], Getsl [Getzel], Dray keplekh [Three Little Heads], Mesushelekh [Methuselah], Rabtshik
[Rabchik] appeared in Kharkov. The same year, his translation of Turgenev’s Mumu, a classic
of Russian children’s literature, was edited in Kinder-farlag (publishing house for children).
Furthermore, Der Nister wrote an adaptation of Lev Tolstoy’s animal stories (Dertseylungen vegn
khayes), published 1935 in Odessa (Kinder farlag fun Osrar; see Daniela Mantovan, ‘Der Nister
(Pinchas Kahanovitch [Pinkhes Kahanovitsh])’, p. 220). For a detailed analysis of the Jewish
awakening in Eastern Europe see Kenneth Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
70 Sabine Koller
9. Daniela Mantovan, ‘Der Nister (Pinchas Kahanovitch [Pinkhes Kahanovitsh])’, p. 223; on

the striking similarity between Der Nister and H. C. Andersen see also Daniela Mantovan,
‘Der Nister and his Symbolist Stories (1913–1929): Patterns of Imagination’ (unpublished
PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1993), pp. 108–13. Der Nister translates twenty-one of
Andersen’s auctorial tales, among them Thumbelina [Broyzele], The Snow-Queen [Di shney-
malke] and The Steadfast Tin Soldier [Dos bleyerne soldatele]. They appear as Andersens mayselekh
[Andersen’s Fairy Tales] in 1921 (Warsaw: Kultur-Lige). Der Nister, in creating his own canon
of fantastic tales, resisted Judaizing Andersen’s stories; David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The
Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 202. For a
stylistic analysis of Der Nister’s translation see Kerstin Hoge’s chapter in this volume. Another
important source for Der Nister’s fantastic tales may have been Clemens von Brentano’s
Italienische Märchen [Italian Fairy Tales] (1805–11), especially Das Märchen von Gockel und
Hinkel [The Tale of the Rooster and the Hen] where, by the way, three Jewish characters appear
with a goat.
10. See Der Nister, Mayselekh in ferzn (Warsaw: Kultur-Lige, 1921), pp. 12–18 and 33–37. Der Nister’s
auctorial fairy tales deserve a separate study.
11. See Khone Shmeruk’s important article ‘Nokhem Shtif, Mark Shagal un di yidishe kinder-
literatur in Vilner Kletskin farlag 1916–1917’, Di pen, 26 (1996), 1–19 (p. 10).
12. Khone Shmeruk, ‘Nokhem Shtif, Mark Shagal un di yidishe kinder-literatur’, p. 3.
13. Daniela Mantovan, Der Nister and his Symbolist Stories, p. 22; Mayzel, ‘Der Nister — mentsh un
kinstler’, p. 23.
14. Futur antérieur. L’Avant-garde et le livre yiddish (1914–1939), ed. by Nathalie Hazan-Brunet (Paris:
Skira Flammarion, 2007), p. 103.
15. Shmeruk, ‘Nokhem Shtif, Mark Shagal un di yidishe kinder-literatur’, p. 19.
16. See Jury Lotman and Boris Uspenskij, ‘Mythos — Name — Kultur’, in Semiotica Sovietica 2.
Sowjetische Arbeiten der Moskauer und Tartuer Schule zu sekundären modellbildenden Zeichensystemen
(1962–1973), ed. by Karl Eimermacher, vol. 5.2 of Aachener Studien zur Semiotik und
Kommunikationsforschung (Aachen: Rader Verlag, 1986), pp. 881–907.
17. Vladimir Propp, Historische Wurzeln des Zaubermärchens (Munich and Vienna: Hanser Verlag,
1987), pp. 30–32.
18. I am quoting from the facsimile edition ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1983) of
the Petrograd edition, published by Boris Kletskin in 1917. The tales were reedited in Kiev
in 1919 (Kiever farlag) and in Warsaw in 1921 (Kultur-Lige), with two of Chagall’s drawings.
A fourth edition without illustrations was published in Berlin in 1923 by Shveln [Thresholds].
Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
19. Volker Klotz, ‘Einführung’, in Das europäische Kunstmärchen (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1987), pp. 1–30 (p. 4).
20. Der Nister’s poetry and prose are closely interrelated. His narrative texts are masterfully
composed and enriched with lyrical devices like repetitions, anaphors, alliterations to create
a special rhythm, see e.g. Delphine Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, 1907 — 1919: Study of a Yiddish
Symbolist (Bern: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 197–200. In his essay ‘Der Nister — mentsh un kinstler’,
Nakhman Mayzel points to Der Nister’s voice and his special gift for giving rhythm to his texts
while reading them to an audience (p. 15).
21. When the mother speaks, verses of six syllables alternate with those of eight (see str. 23–30).
22. The kid’s sacrifice is similar to that of the he-goat in Yitzkhok Leybush Perets’ neo-Hassidic
tale Hisgales oder di mayse fun tsignbok [Revelation or the Tale about a He-Goat] (1904). In this
parable about Nakhman of Bratslav, a goat which can reach heaven with his wonder-working
horns and offers gems to the poor Jews of the shtetl gives away his horns for snuff boxes; Di verk
fun Yitskhok Leybush Perets. Band 6: Khsidish (New York: Yidish, 1920), pp. 156–63.
23. Weinreich, Yiddish Folktales, p. 32.
24. In his classification of fairy-tale protagonists, Vladimir Propp distinguishes seven roles: hero,
opponent (villain), false hero, donor, dispatcher, princess, the princess’ father, and the helper;
Morphology of the Folk Tale, rev. and ed. with preface by Alan Dundes, 2nd edn (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1968), p. 21.
26. In an uncanny manner, Der Nister blurs the boundaries between narrative discourse and plot,
the real and the fantastic, and between the human and the devils’ world.
27. Moss, Jewish Renaissance, p. 116. After severe attacks on his obscure, multi-layered writings,
branded as nisterizm, Der Nister was forced to align his literary productions with Socialist
aesthetic doctrines. As a result, the allegorical-symbolist system ‘that formed the core of
his aesthetic beliefs before 1929’ disintegrated; Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, 1909–1929, p. 269.
Nevertheless, Der Nister adds hidden mystical elements to his writings even after Unter a
ployt [Under a fence] (1929), which is generally agreed to be his last symbolist piece; see, e.g.,
Sabine Boehlich, ‘Nay-gayst’: Mystische Traditionen in einer symbolistischen Erzählung des jiddischen
Autors ‘Der Nister’, Jüdische Kultur. Studien zur Geistesgeschichte, Religion und Literatur, 18
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), p. 165.
28. See Mantovan, Der Nister and his Symbolist Stories, pp. 19–21. Der Nister generally faced a rather
cool reception by literary critics, see Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with
Communism (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005), p. 21.
29. Nakhman Mayzel recalls his meetings with Der Nister who would read his fairy tales aloud: ‘I
remember well those weeks and months when Nister brought with him the superb, playful little
fairy tales from his “hiding place”, and how invigorating they were to all of us, and especially
to him. It was a new revelation from Nister, everybody was excited that Nister had discovered
new sources, was drinking eagerly from them and nourishes others with them’ (‘Der Nister —
mentsh un kinstler’, p. 18).
30. Khayim Shloyme Kazdan, ‘Der Nister mayselekh in ferzn’, Bikher velt: Kritish biblyografisher
zhurnal 4–5 (August 1919), pp. 90–92; see Daniela Mantovan, Der Nister and his Symbolist Stories,
p. 20, and ‘Der Nister (Pinchas Kahanovitch [Pinkhes Kahanovitsh])’, p. 223.
31. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. by Gershon Hundert, 2 vols (New Haven,
CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008), vol. ii, plate 41.
32. Weinreich, Yiddish Folktales, p. 32. Translated by Beatrice Silverman Weinreich.
33. For a discussion of Khad Gadya and its variations in other cultures, see Gal-Ed, Das Buch der
jüdischen Jahresfeste (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 57–67.
34. The Little Goat would equally be worth an analysis of intertexts, all the more, as the goat is an
important animal in some of Der Nister’s tales and was introduced by Chagall into modern art.
At the moment, I will limit myself to enumerating the intertextual (auto-)references to A mayse
mit a nozir un a tsig, where the goat appears as a ‘companion to happiness’ and incorporation
of love, to Rabbi Nakhman’s first story A mayse fun a farloyrener bas-meylekh [The Loss of the
Princess], written in 1806, to the legend Ayngang tsu a hoyl [Entrance into a Cave] and S. J.
Agnon’s literary adaptation Der Eingang zur Höhle oder Die Geschichte von der Ziege [Entrance
into a Cave or the Fable of the Goat], and Peretsen’s neo-chassidic tale Hisgales, oder di mayse fun
tsignbok [Revelation or the Tale about the He-Goat] is published in Cahan, Yidisher folklor, p. 147.
35. ‘It is said of the Angel of Death that he is all full of eyes. When a sick person is about to depart,
he stands above his head-pillow with his sword drawn out in his hand and a drop of gall hanging
on it. As the sick person beholds it, he trembles and opens his mouth [in fright]; he then drops
it into his mouth’; The Babylonian Talmud; Seder Nizikin translated into English with notes,
glossary and indices under the editorship of Rabbi Dr. I. Epstein, 4 vols (London: The Soncino
Press, 1935), p. 35.
36. Die Geschichten vom Ba’al Schem Tov. Schivche ha-Bescht. Teil I. Jiddisch mit deutscher Übersetzung, ed.
by Karl E. Grözinger, Jüdische Kultur, Studien zur Geistesgeschichte, Religion und Literatur,
2 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), pp. 35–36. In another tale, the Besht even intrudes in the
angel’s divine task; Die Geschichten vom Ba’al Schem Tov. Schivche ha-Bescht, pp. 101–02.
37. See the mystic exegesis to ‘Vayekhi’ (And he lived, 1. Moses 47,28–50,26); The Zohar: Pritzker
Edition, vol. 3, trans. and commented by Daniel C. Matt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2006), pp. 318–19 (esp. nn. 95 and 101).
38. According to cabbalistic symbolism, the colour of God’s judgment is red; Gershom Scholem,
‘Farben und ihre Symbolik in der jüdischen Überlieferung und Mystik’, in Judaica 3 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 98–151 (p. 114).
39. Gershom Scholem, Zur Kabbala und ihrer Symbolik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 195.
40. Ibid.
72 Sabine Koller
41. For the identification of the Angel of Death and Satan which dates back to the Babylonian
Talmud, see Folktales of the Jews, vol. 1: Tales from the Sephardic Dispersion, ed. by Dov Noy, Dan
Ben-Amos, and Ellen Frankel (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 2006), p. 249.
42. See the two amazing tales ‘Der Malekh ha-moves’ [The Angel of Death], in Yidisher folklor, ed.
by Yehuda Leib Cahan (Vilnius: Yiddisher visnshaftlekher institut, 1938), pp. 133–34.
43. See Aleksej Remizov, ‘Ligostai strashnyi’, in Dokuka i Balagur’ye (Moskow: Russkaya kniga,
2000), pp. 279–83. For Lissitzky’s cubist version from 1919 which is preceded by a more
folkloristic-modernist one in 1917 see Futur Antérieur. L’Avant-garde et le livre yiddish, pp. 132–34.
44. See Delphine Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, pp. 264–65, and Marc Caplan, ‘Performance Anxieties:
Carnival Spaces and Assemblages in Der Nister’s Under a Fence’, Prooftext, 18.1 (1998), 1–18.
46. In 1916, Chagall displays his illustrations of Der Nister’s fairy tales and Peretz’ Der kuntsn-makher
[The Conjuror] (1904) at the Nadezhda Dobychina’s exhibition Sovremennoe russkoe iskusstvo
[Contemporary Russian Art], see Mikhail Beizer, The Jews of St. Petersburg: Excursions through a
Noble Past (Philadelphia, PA, and New York: The Jewish Publication Society, 1989), p. 248.
47. In The Baby Carriage, Chagall shows himself sitting at a table on the right side painting a red
goat. The project of providing wall-paintings for the Jewish school was never realized, but the
preparatory works Sukkot, Purim (oil and sketch), and The Baby Carriage, similar to the water
colour Visit to the Grandparents, have survived, see Susan Compton, ‘Chagall’s Auditorium:
“An Identity Crisis of Tragic Dimensions” ’, in Marc Chagall and the Jewish Theater (New York:
Guggenheim Museum, 1992), pp. 1–13 (p. 6), and Alexander Kamenski, Chagall: Die russischen
Jahre, 1907–1922 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989), pp. 248, 258–59.
48. See Marc Chagall, Ma vie (Paris: Stock, 1972), pp. 210–13. Later paintings directly connected
with Ida’s birth are Bella and Ida (1915/16), Strawberries. Bella and Ida at the table, Bella and Ida by the
window (both 1916), and the famous portrait Bella with a White Collar (1917) as well as paintings
from his ‘blue period’, for instance Bathing of a Baby (1916), Window over a Garden (1917) or Interior
with Flowers (1917).
49. See Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Kultur-Lige’, in Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation, ed. by
Irena R. Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 197–217
(p. 204); Boris Aronson/Yisokher ber Ribak, ‘Di vegn fun der yidisher moleray’, in Oyfgang, 1
(1919), 99–124 (pp. 121–23).
50. First published 1919 in the Warsaw Journal Bikher-velt (issue 4–5), reprinted in Yekhezkl
Dobrushin, Gedankengang (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1922), pp. 115–19. Gennady Estraikh presumes
that Dobrushin developed his theory about Jewish primitive art under the impression of Oswald
Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The Decline of the West] (1918/22); In Harness, p. 29.
51. Cf. Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall: Leben und Werk, 2nd edn (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1968),
p. 246.
52. Dobrushin, ‘Kunst-primitiv un kunst-bukh far kinder’, p. 118.
53. Shmeruk, ‘Nokhem Shtif, Mark Shagal un di yidishe kinder-literatur’, p. 11.
54. Dobrushin, ‘Kunst-primitiv un kunst-bukh far kinder’, p. 117.
55. Ibid.
56. Bal-Makhshoves, ‘Dos doyrem-rusishe yidntum un di yidishe literatur in 19tn yorhundert’, in
Geklibene verk (New York: CYCO, 1953), p. 110.
57. Ibid.
58. Anatoly Efross, Jakov Tugendhold, Die Kunst Marc Chagalls (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1921), p. 71.
60. Cf. Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991),
p. 146.
61. Cf. Roman Jakobson and Petr Bogatyrev, ‘Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaffens’,
in Roman Jakobson, Selected writings IV. Slavic Epic Studies (The Hague and Paris: Mouton & Co,
1966), pp. 1–15 (p. 8).
62. Dan Miron, ‘Folklore and Antifolklore in the Yiddish Fiction of the Haskala’, in Studies in Jewish
Folklore, ed. by Frank Talmage (Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies, 1980), pp.
219–48.
63. See Klotz, Einführung, pp. 14–17.
Chapter 5
v
The ‘Political’ Writings of an

‘Unpolitical’ Yiddish Symbolist
Daniela Mantovan
The issue to be explored in this chapter, the politicity of Der Nister’s literary
practice, refers to the ways, if any, in which his works question the government’s
politics and legitimacy. Considering that Der Nister was a symbolist writer, who
developed and refined a highly complex manner of writing comparable, in literary
terms, to that of Kaf ka; considering that he deliberately created and fuelled his own
legend by his secretive behaviour, his mystical pseudonym (meaning: ‘The Hidden
One’),1 and the cryptic character of his tales; and finally considering that not one
of his contemporary literary critics ever engaged in a concrete textual analysis of
any of his symbolist stories, the question to be examined in this paper may seem a
rather odd one.
To shed light on the matter would require at least an in-depth study and
interpretation of the literary works of Der Nister in the context in which the author
operated, and a detailed reconstruction of his biography and personality. Even
though a number of studies on this author have appeared,2 at this stage we still have
only a fragmentary picture of his life and literary work, and of the Jewish/ Russian
cultural, political and linguistic context in which his literary work originated and
matured.
Research on Der Nister’s biography has relied essentially on Zalmen Reyzen’s
article on Der Nister in his Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, which
summarizes the author’s life and work up to 1926.3 Thereafter all biographies of
this author basically follow the trail of his publications and of his critics’ reactions.
Scattered data drawn mainly from his works, from his journalistic publications
of the 1930s or even from memoirs of his contemporaries provide us with a map
of his whereabouts.4 In more recent times a volume on the Stalin-era prison
and labour camps was published,5 which includes the documentation of Der
Nister’s imprisonment and death in 1950. Furthermore, Der Nister’s professional
correspondence with the literary critic Shmuel Niger,6 relating to the period from
1907 to 1923, has come down to us, as well as a few letters from Der Nister’s private
correspondence. Though this relatively meagre corpus of data does not allow for a
vivid reconstruction of Der Nister’s life and personality, it does offers many hints,
insights and fragments of a picture which certainly corresponds to the image of
the writer handed down in literary circles and one which presumably Der Nister
74 Daniela Mantovan
cherished, that of the most enigmatic and secretive writer of the entire Yiddish
literary world.
Literary criticism of the work of Der Nister during his lifetime was tersely
summarized by the literary critic Nokhum Oyslender, who, referring to the
complexity of Der Nister’s symbolism, wrote in 1924: ‘And so it happened that
because of the peculiarity of Der Nister’s early work, one did not even look closely
at his later production.’7 Again in 1948, two years before Der Nister’s death in a
camp hospital, Oyslender stated: ‘He [Der Nister] is still a vaguely outlined figure.
We do not know all the poetic works he published, and have not correctly evaluated
what we know he published.’8 However, and notwithstanding his ‘inaccessibility
by regular readers’,9 as Arn Tseytlin formulated it, Der Nister was unanimously
considered a master of literary Yiddish. Even Shmuel Niger, who did not spare
heavy criticism, eventually crowned him as the representative of symbolism in
modern Yiddish literature.
Der Nister seems to have attained a special position in the Yiddish literary
enclave because of his originality, his ‘inaccessibility’ and his mastery of literary
Yiddish which Bergelson, once phrased as ‘a beauty to be found only very rarely’.10
His peripheral position in the Yiddish literary arena is also evidenced by the meagre
critical resonance of his works during his lifetime. However, after his return to
Soviet Union in 1926, following a few years of residence in Germany, his symbolist
stories suddenly become the subject of political debate.
This critical interest in a Yiddish symbolist writer who was but little known
to the general Yiddish public and little read even by literary critics is explained
by a new strategy and involvement of the Evsektsiia, the Jewish sections of the
Communist Party, in the domain of literary activity. Marxist literary criticism was
mostly prescriptive in its argumentation, in particular its proletarian faction, and
rejected symbolism a priori. A product of this stance had been David Hofshteyn’s
ominous attack on Der Nister and on his symbolism in 1928.11 But the quarrel
gained a greater momentum with Avrom Vevyorke’s slating review of Der Nister’s
story ‘Unter a ployt’ [Under a Fence] published in the periodical Di royte velt in 1929.
Four articles of a similar tenor followed between 1931 and 1934. Der Nister, as was
his wont, did not comment on his own work.
The ongoing discussion in the press of Nister’s short story ‘Under a Fence’ was
characterized by opposing views that can be subsumed in these terms: was Der
Nister rejecting symbolism to embrace socialist realism, as Shakhno Epshteyn stated
and to a certain extent even Moyshe Litvakov conceded, or was he alluding to
the devastating effects of Soviet state power on, and control of, the intelligentsia,
as Yasha Bronshteyn to some extent implicitly suggested? Khone Shmeruk was
the first critic in 1960 to point to the latter conclusion, stating at the close of his
article that, ‘it seems that our analysis [...] brings to light a unique and original protest,
powerless though it was, of a fellow-travelling Soviet writer of the late twenties’.12 I
shall depart from Shmeruk’s conclusion, which points to a conscious and deliberate
‘protest’, for my analysis of Der Nister’s works and of their ‘politicity’, as it emerges
from some of his works dating from the late 1920s and the early 1930s.
The very limited contemporary critical reception of Der Nister’s two collections
The ‘Political’ Writings of an ‘Unpolitical’ Yiddish Symbolist 75
of symbolist short stories Gedakht and Fun mayne giter, published in 1929 in the
Soviet Union, did not go beyond ideologically motivated attacks, lacking any
concrete analysis of the texts, as Shmeruk stated in the case of ‘Under a Fence’.13
But if contemporary critics did not even mention the content of Der Nister’s
tales, preferring to attack his symbolism per se, they certainly read them and, by
labelling ‘Under a Fence’ ‘the most reactionary tale written by this author’,14 a
measure of criticism in his writings was indirectly recognized. As a concrete and
dire consequence of the dispute Der Nister was out of work. As a literary outsider,
though a respected personality, he was dismissed and totally sidelined by the Yiddish
literary establishment; as Litvakov phrased it ‘the problem Nister’ was no more on
the agenda. In the following years Der Nister just managed to survive thanks to
minor jobs but he did not give up his literary métier. Already at the beginning
of the 1930s his inevitable ‘turn to realism’ began to take shape. Of initial ‘failed
attempts’ in this direction and of a new attempt which seemed to be successful, Der
Nister wrote to his brother Motl: ‘I have begun to write a book — in my opinion [...]
an important book. [...] My whole generation is involved — what I have seen, heard,
experienced and fancied.’15
Der Nister was clearly referring to a novel centred on a period of time that
he himself experienced. When he wrote to his brother in 1934 asking him for
financial support, Nister was fifty years old, struggling to provide for himself in a
period in which the tightening grip of the Communist Party on Jewish institutions
and personalities was evident, and socialist realism had become the only accepted
literary form. From this perspective, his attempts at realism, focused on his own
youth and on the upheavals of 1905 — a revolutionary period already ‘canonized’ by
the Soviet State — could have offered a possibility, if not a guarantee, of re-entering
the literary arena. The attempt Der Nister was writing about to his brother was
most likely his unpublished novel Fun fintn yor [In the Year 1905], which appeared
posthumously in the Moscow Yiddish literary journal Sovetish heymland in 1964.16
Nister’s Turn to Realism: In the Year 1905

As a realist novel, In the Year 1905 is in many respects surprising. The main thread
of these seventy-three densely printed pages is a traditional love story, a theme Der
Nister had never dwelt upon in his previous work. The setting of the story is an
unnamed city; the time is shortly before the 1905 revolutionary uprisings. Reading
the text, the reader quickly realizes that Der Nister deliberately set out to write a
realist novel by following a given recipe. His heroes perfectly fit the iconography
prevalent in the 1930s: Leybl is a rebellious, modern revolutionary activist, Milye
an idealistic schoolgirl willing even to go to prison to share the fate of her beloved
Leybl. Leybl’s mother represents the ‘old’ failing order (to make the point, her
husband is called throughout the whole narrative ‘degenerate’); Milye’s mother,
on the other hand, is the icon of ‘mother courage’ dying in the front row of a
demonstration with a red f lag in her hands. Evidently Gorky’s novel The Mother
(1906/07) loomed large in Nister’s attempt at a realistic novel.17 In the Year 1905
also features in the background a peasant upheaval, demonstrations, terrorism,
76 Daniela Mantovan
arrests, tortures, strikes, a pogrom and finally, the people celebrating the ‘victory
of October’.
Der Nister did his ‘homework’ as it were — or as Elias Schulman put it, he even
‘overdid’ it.18 Certainly, while writing In the Year 1905 he must have realized that
he was walking on a tightrope and that his work, within the limited boundaries
of prescribed ideological constraints, could not equate to his artistic truth or to
historical accuracy. Possibly for this reason he did not turn his hand to this novel
again, nor did he seek to publish it. This could also be the reason why Der Nister
later decided to temporally locate his novel Di mishpokhe Mashber [The Family
Mashber] in a less politically ‘sensitive’ time, the second part of the nineteenth
century, and why he never wrote its sequel which should have included the
beginning of the twentieth century.19
From a different perspective, though, In the Year 1905 still makes interesting
reading. This novel marks Der Nister’s transition to ‘realism’20 — with the caution
that the use of this term demands — and evidences the formal difficulties a
change from symbolism to realism implied for its author. Except for the two main
protagonists, Leybl and Milye, the author persistently avoids proper names either of
persons or of places. In the context of a historical novel this regular feature of Der
Nister’s symbolist stories burdens the narrative with a number of periphrastic turns
of phrase (‘the city of which it is a matter here’, ‘the mother of ’, ‘the husband of
the neighbour of the mother of ’, etc.). Der Nister’s language in this novel, stripped
of its peculiar symbolism, is not only unnecessarily repetitive but at times also
melodramatic. Der Nister’s unease in creating a straightforward story defined by
a clear plot is also evident. The almost non-existent action of the story is in fact
often carried out in some other place and only brief ly re-told. An example of this
‘re-telling’ is the scene of a pogrom unleashed in a neighbouring town by an agent
provocateur who, during a demonstration, threw a stone at a portrait of the tsar.
This relatively brief passage reappears amplified as a key scene and becomes the
primary cause of Moshe Mashber’s financial and social decline in Der Nister’s later
novel The Family Mashber.21
But apart from some glimpses into the material re-worked in his later novel, what
is of particular interest is the ‘political landscape’ Der Nister draws in In the Year
1905. In the scene of a gathering of unnamed party leaders, for instance, mention
is made of ‘comrade Borekh-Ber, the leader of the Jewish territorial party’. This
figure, delineated physically and biographically in a fragmentary way, was easily
recognizable as Ber Borochov, one of the founders of the Zionist Labour party
(Poale Zion) and a noted Yiddishist, who died in December 1917.22 Nister describes
him ironically as a muddle-headed though genial person who, because of all his
learning, ‘iz bay im in kop gevorn a bisl plonter’ [had become a bit confused in his
head].23
In addition to Borochov’s only slightly disguised identity, Leybl, the main hero of
the story, is called in the same conspiratorial gathering Leybl-Lassalle, a cover name.
The name of Leybl-Lassalle, used only once in the novel, seems to point specifically
to a socialist /Bundist background for the protagonist.24 The main weight in the
political dimension of the novel lies, however, in the many meetings at the house
of the neighbours of Milye’s mother. The unnamed neighbour, ‘the leader of the
movement’, and his wife play host to revolutionaries and sympathizers to the new
ideas in their apartment, offering a place to stay as well as food and discussion. This
kind of secret gathering, often an occasion for political discussions among educated
people, is not infrequent in the pre- and post-revolutionary Yiddish literature. Der
Nister, though, seems to draw here on memories of his own life and of the political
interests of his youth.
The only description of Der Nister’s younger years was given by Yankev Lvovski,
a fellow townsman of the writer, who describes in his recollections the meetings
held at the Brovarniks’. The home Leyb Brovarnik shared with his wife was a
reference point and a meeting place for young people interested in discussing
politics, especially socialism and literature. Leyb Brovarnik, a teacher in Berdichev
and a fervid activist of Yiddish cultural life, was also a co-founder of the pioneering
secular Yiddish school in Demievka, then an outskirt of Kiev.25 Lvovski writes
about the meetings:
I would say that he (Der Nister) was one of the most active participants in the
discussions [...]. Der Nister’s socialist gezonen zayn, as we used to call it at that
time, his socialist way of thinking and feeling, the rich ideal world in which
he lived at that time, all undoubtedly had a strong impact on the shaping of his
mature Weltanschauung and of his artistic intentions.26
Lvovski’s description is entirely consistent with those of Der Nister of the meetings
at the neighbour’s house in In the Year 1905. Even the name of the hero Leybl and his
association with socialism, as hinted at by his cover name, seem to be based on the
figure of Leyb Brovarnik. Notwithstanding its limitations and taking into account
the pressure Der Nister must have been under while writing In the Year 1905, this
novel plainly conveys both the ideological constraints the writer felt in dealing with
the period of 1905 and, through his less obvious hints at real persons, the author’s
own political sentiment.
Der Nister’s socialist ‘gezonen zayn’ [sympathetic disposition], as Lvovski phrased
it in referring to pre-revolutionary times, seems plausibly to describe his own
personal political standing at the time. His elated response to the revolution
of 1917,27 his collaboration with the Moscow journal Shtrom while residing in
Germany, as well as his joining David Bergelson in dismissing collaboration with
the Western Yiddish literary journal Milgroym and their joint ‘penance letter’28 to
the Shtrom editorial board in order to ‘rehabilitate’ themselves, seem to ref lect if
not a clear-cut political commitment then at least the definite sympathy of a fellow
traveller.
Der Nister’s writings in the 1930s were limited to secondary, marginal sectors of
literary activity such as translations, adaptations, little stories for children, sketches
of Russian cities. His realistic novel, The Family Mashber, which appeared first in
1939,29 was temporally located in the 1860s and 1870s,30 a period sufficiently far
off to be ‘safe’. In fact, its publication was received by both Western and Soviet
literary critics as a ‘step in the right direction’. But while keeping at a relatively safe
distance from the Soviet Yiddish political and literary arena, Der Nister, a master
of oblique hints, indirect suggestions and allusions, kept pointing in his children’s
78 Daniela Mantovan
tales, published up to 1939, at a critical discourse which in fact he carried out in his
later symbolist stories.31
Der Nister’s Later Symbolist Stories and the Question of their ‘Politicity’
Two momentous years, 1928 and 1929, were in many respects crucial for Der
Nister’s professional life. In that period the political situation in the Soviet literary
arena, including that of the Soviet Yiddish, was swiftly changing. A new, belligerent
generation of Marxist literary critics was emerging, struggling for power. Their
brand of ‘proletarian’ criticism was officially supported by the Evsktsiia in 1927
and again, two years later, in 1929,32 thus considerably enhancing their aggressive
potential. In April 1928 there appeared the first issue of Prolit, the literary journal of
the proletarian hard-liners, on whose editorial board sat David Hofshteyn. One of
the first essays to appear in the journal was Hofshteyn’s savage attack on Der Nister
and his symbolism. Hofshteyn’s venomous article, while publicly displaying his
unconditional support of the party line on matters of style, was a way to side with
the loudest faction — the proletarian critics. The tone of critical literary debate in
1928–29 had become harsher and the consequences for the writers involved were
palpable. The wave of ideological attacks increased in 1929 when a number of
Yiddish writers were heavily criticized, and some of them were also dismissed from
their editorial positions.33
On 28 November 1928, the new volume of Der Nister’s symbolist stories Fun
mayne giter received censorship approval and in 1929 there appeared both Der
Nister’s revised edition of Gedakht,34 published in Kiev by the Kultur-Lige, and the
collection Fun mayne giter, published in Kharkov by the State Publishing House of
Ukraine. Only half a year later, after the uproar caused by the publication of Der
Nister’s story ‘Under a Fence’, it was almost certain that neither volume would then
have passed the censorship.35 In 1928, Nister was carefully planning the publication
in the Soviet Union of what amounted to his symbolist literary legacy; it is safe to
assume that in that ideologically raucous climate he was well aware that this would
be his last act as a symbolist writer.
While revising the Kiev edition of Gedakht in 1928, a reconsideration of Der
Nister’s best symbolist production up to 1923, he was also preparing his newest
and last volume of symbolist stories Fun mayne giter for publication. This volume
collects six symbolist stories written between 1923 and 1928, two of them not
previously published and four already published in the Soviet Union.36 Der Nister
was collecting stories written and published in a period of time that goes from his
return to the Soviet Union to the first massive attack on his symbolism. However,
he was not following strict chronological criteria in his choice, for he included
in the collection two early stories ‘Nay gayst’ [New Spirit] written in 1920, and
Tsigayners [Gypsies] published in 1923, which, if following a chronological order,
should have been part of the Kiev edition of Gedakht.
‘New Spirit’ was being published in the Soviet Union for the third time. Conspi
cuous also is the presence in the volume of the only three stories written by Der
Nister in which he himself figures as a protagonist (‘New Spirit’, as well as the two
previously unpublished stories: ‘A mayse mit a lets mit a moyz un mit dem nister
aleyn’ and ‘Fun mayne giter’). Furthermore, one of these three stories, ‘Fun mayne
giter’, gives the title to the collection. This remarkable and very suggestive title,
which could be translated as ‘From my Estate’ (or: legacy), stresses once again the
personal statement Der Nister makes with his volume, a statement endorsed by
his triple presence and a title that sounds like a testament.37 For a writer like Der
Nister who, in his visionary fiction, would time and again drop in a key word, a
little revelation — like scattered notes intended ‘to guide the reader’, as Tseytlin
shrewdly pointed out in 1923 — these are no small clues. Indeed, From my Estate
contains what can be called, if not an open political statement, then certainly Der
Nister’s political sentiment during the Russian revolution of 1917 and his indictment
of Stalin’s time.38
The earliest tale in the collection, ‘New Spirit’, was written in Malakhovka in
revolutionary times. Der Nister’s optimistic and joyful symbolism seems to ref lect
in this tale concrete expectations of a fulfilling and better future. The Soviet
literary critic Hersh Remenik commented in 1974:
In such half mystic, half prophetic, but transparent style Nister expressed his
connection to the historical events of the October Revolution. By means of a
religious, mystical and symbolic form he gives expression to his elation at the
revolution and also to his undefined understanding of its historical and socio-
political content.39
Even though Remenik’s patronizing comments come from an ideologically biased
position, he certainly had a point. Der Nister’s elation at the revolutionary events
taking place in Russia was hinted at, first of all, in the title of the story ‘New
Spirit’. The term ‘New Spirit’, as well as the expression ‘our new prophecy’, allude
in the story to a fundamental change, one from which a new kind of Yiddish
consciousness had arisen.
The same concept of a ‘New Spirit’ was formulated by the critic Yekhezkel
Dobrushin in his essay ‘Our Literature’, published in the first issue of the literary
journal Shtrom in 1922. In his article, Dobrushin foresees and describes a new
Yiddish literature that is open to the whole world, a literature produced — in an
almost mystical turn of phrase — by the ‘bafrayter veltbavustzayn fun dem yidishn
nay gayst’ [freed global consciousness of the Yiddish new spirit].40 This concept of a
Yiddish new spirit, as it was expressed both by Der Nister and Dobrushin, was more
than anything else an expression of faith in the new course of the not yet ratified
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.41 Dobrushin and Der Nister were friends
and colleagues who shared ideas and discussions. In 1920 they both participated in
another attempt at a Yiddish ‘New Spirit’ venture, that of the Yiddish Children’s
Republic, started by the pedagogue Borekh Shvartsman in Malakhovka in
November 1919. Yiddish language and culture were a fundamental part of this
educational new ‘beginning’.42
In his essay ‘Our Literature’, Dobrushin sought a creative response from within
Yiddish society, from its resources and traditions; based on his faith in the Yiddish
word (literature and culture), he attempted to maintain and re-define Yiddish
identity after the revolution. Der Nister voiced a similar hope in ‘New Spirit’. In
80 Daniela Mantovan
this story Nister figures as the High Priest who in 1920, a precise date given in
Jewish terms and ‘a few years since our new prophecy’, asks young prophets to go
‘among the masses’ to bring ‘the new prophecy to the people’; he exhorts them to
avoid isolation and to enter the community of people willingly, leaving aside all
kind of differences. Der Nister’s syncretism blends the language of mysticism with
a content patently alluding to a new community of people born out of dramatic
changes, in which values such as solidarity and openness will generate a friendlier,
better society and in which intellectuals will function as intermediaries between
the people and the new ‘prophecy’, just as priests once mediated between God and
man.43 This reading of ‘New Spirit’ which is hinted at in the story is confirmed by
Itzhak Yanasowicz, who quotes in his memoirs Der Nister’s own admission of his
initial belief in the new revolutionary course, something which he later considered
a mistake and for which he felt a responsibility in the 1940s.44 Even if the phrasing
is different, given as it was by two literary critics, Remenik and Yanasowicz,
at different ends of the political spectrum, in this case they do converge on the
substance.
Chronologically the second story of the collection, ‘Tsigayner: a mayse’ [Gypsies:
A Story], deals with the theme of marginality in a society that does not tolerate
minorities. The theme is not developed by the author as an absolute, meta-
philosophical problem rooted in a religious conception, as it was, for instance, in
two earlier tales dealing with the concepts of freedom and servitude,45 but in a
rather concrete fashion, stylistically articulated in the cast of a folk tale. The history
of the gypsy minority and their victimization at the hands of popular superstition
is depicted in Der Nister’s story against a farcical and grotesque backdrop, to good
effect. In this tale, gypsies are severely beaten, smashed up, their faces reduced
to pulp by people coveting gypsies’ teeth to be used as amulets; meanwhile, the
gypsies’ god, in a preposterous kind of Olympus, steals gold and silver from the
‘more important, the richer gods’ to support and feed his own people. This tale,
with its Grand Guignol impact, does not end with the glorious apotheosis of a new
mankind, with which ‘New Spirit’ closed. Instead it brings the reader back to the
initial narrative frame of the story, a ‘gathering, in a big city, of representatives
of people of all nations, tribes and languages’ in which the representative of the
gypsies, after he has finished telling his tale, disappears and with him disappear
the wristwatches of all representatives. Der Nister exposes here popular prejudice
and violence, the concluding lines being a mockery bordering on sarcasm: ‘until
something happens, until the Messiahs will come and until god will give, we will
have in the meantime to live off theft and watches’.46 The issue of the gypsy minority
presented in a fictional ‘assembly of united nations’ is cloaked in the grotesque garb
of a crude, gory tale; nonetheless its underlying reference to a concrete reality cannot
be overlooked. Societal power relationships between majorities and minorities are
effectively, though hopelessly, illustrated in Der Nister’s tale, in which not even the
gypsies’ god is spared an ‘inferiority status’.
The culmination of Der Nister’s ref lection on intellectuals and power is epito
mized by the story ‘Under a Fence’,47 as mentioned above, and by ‘From my Estate’,
which was, if not the last symbolist story he wrote,48 certainly the most ominous
one. It seems necessary as an introduction to the following analysis of the story ‘From
my Estate’ to recall that Der Nister’s narratives, with their multi-framed structure,
their polysemous wording and their complex system of open and hidden allusions
and references, are among the most challenging texts in modern literature. The
reader is required to ‘study’ the story, to ‘investigate’ it, in order to make sense of it.
Paradoxically, and yet very consistently, Der Nister seems to undercut the modern
relationship between author/narrator and reader in that he does not take his reader
by the hand, he does not ask for any implicit complicity or even trust, as was the
tradition of ‘classic’ Yiddish authors. Rather he displaces and unsettles the reader,
who is confronted with an apparently preposterous parallel universe, retreating into
his ‘hiddenness’ — a fitting metaphor for a secular tzimtzum (withdrawal) — leaving
behind a cryptic story whose meaning has, in the end, to be restored by the reader.
As in the ancient form of the parable, or more precisely of the Bratslavian tale,49
the quest for meaning and coherence is, as Dara Horn cogently formulated it, ‘the
reader’s quest’.50
‘From my Estate’, the story that gives the book its title, is written in the first
person as a kind of report by an unnamed narrator. It begins with the narrator being
suddenly hit by a patch of mud on his forehead. As he cleans himself, he discovers
a coin in the mud, and since he is hungry and has no place to live, he goes to a
good restaurant where he eats his fill. Later, while taking a stroll in the city, the
narrator sees booths and tents where books are sold, because ‘in gantsn land iz a
bilike bukh-vokh oysgerufn gevorn’ [a cheap book-week had been proclaimed all
over the country]. Meanwhile, the narrator notices that in the booths books are
also being raff led off; he then draws a raff le ticket and wins a book. The author of
the book is Der Nister, the title Writings of a Madman. The cover of the book shows
the picture of a pale figure standing, in the long shirt of an asylum’s inmate. At this
point the first introductory frame of the story is closed.
If we hypothesize that the story is a finely crafted and meaningful construction,
which it certainly is, this first part of the story gives the reader a few conspicuous
signals that will gain weight and momentum in its subsequent unfolding. The
first is the striking image of the mud patch in which a coin is concealed, a coin
which allows the needy and hungry narrator to eat. In what follows the ‘cheap
book -week proclaimed throughout the whole country’ seems to indicate — if
we take words at their face value — a centralized, monolithic state in which the
story takes place. The title of the raff led book, Writings of a Madman, cannot but
evoke for a Russian-Jewish reader the homonymous Notes of a Madman (1835) by
Nikolai Gogol.51 It is worth mentioning that Gogol’s gloomy short story is a bitter
satire on Russian bureaucracy and on its insatiable need for official and financial
recognition. In Gogol’s story, Poprishchin, a bureaucrat of low status who is the first
person narrator, is driven to insanity by his frustrated wish to attain more power.
Another interesting piece of information concerns a painting of Gogol’s character,
Poprishchin, completed in 1882 by the Russian painter Ilya Repin (1844–1930),
and featuring a pale man standing in the long shirt of an asylum inmate. Repin, a
renowned painter who was considered to be a model of realism in Soviet Russia,
enjoyed wide popularity in the late 1920s.
82 Daniela Mantovan
Der Nister’s story proceeds with the book won at the raff le, Writings of a Madman,
which tells the story of the fictional Der Nister, the Madman who had ‘ten bears
to feed’ until, reduced to utter misery and to begging, he did not have anything
to give them. He then looked at his fingers and said: ‘un ot dos hob ikh, und dos
farmog ikh, un mer — khotsh di neshome, un tut vos ir vilt mit mir...’ [And this
is all I have, and all I possess [but also: this is what I am capable of ]; in addition,
[I have] my soul, do what you wish with me...’).52 However, the bears then ate his
fingers too, their mouths filled with blood. Meanwhile, one of the bears, who had
accidentally been left hungry, threatened Der Nister with his paw, but Der Nister
‘bought himself out with a story’, the story of his ‘riches’.
This second part of the narrative — the introductory part of the raff led book
Writings of a Madman — begins with ten ravenously hungry bears waiting for Der
Nister to feed them. While the bear is generally taken as a symbol of Russia and
later of the Soviet Union, in Der Nister’s literary work it acquires in time an even
more specific connotation. It is present in his early stories In midber [In the Desert]
(1920) as the stern-ber, a passive observer, and in ‘New Spirit’ (1920) as a white bear
peacefully sharing his lair with a sheep; the bear reappears in ‘From my Estate’
(1929) in his most life-threatening representation, this time devouring the fingers
of (the fictional) Der Nister and threatening his life. In the narratives of this author,
characters as well as minor figures and even literary paraphernalia frequently cross
the boundaries between different stories, thus composing a network of multifaceted
representations which, like an implicit reciprocal commentary, enhance and clarify
their metaphorical value across the whole of Der Nister’s symbolist work. The bear,
indicative of the relationship between Soviet state and the author himself, is further
present in a remarkably similar wording in a letter Der Nister wrote to Itsik Kipnis
in 1947. Referring to the unbearable political pressure exerted by the censorship on
Yiddish authors, Der Nister wrote: ‘Ikh ken mer nit. Az vos ikh zol nit derlangen
vil men di kishkes derfun aroysnemen. Nu, iz nit getantst mitn ber. Muz ikh
opsitsn’ [I can’t go on anymore. For whatever I write, they take the soul out of it.
So, there is no dancing with the bear. I will have to sit out].53
Considering now the identity of name of the real author and the fictional Der
Nister, the author of the raff led book Writing of a Madman, this is an identity which
clearly underscores the self-referentiality of the narrative; it is of some significance
that this identity is not established with the real name of the author, as it was the
case in ‘New Spirit’ in which the narrator of the story was called ‘Pinkhes the son of
Menakhem’, but rather with his literary pseudonym, thus pointing to his function
as a writer. All the more striking is the image of Der Nister giving the bears his
fingers, the very tool with which he can express himself by writing, and adding,
while bargaining for his life, that beyond his fingers he has only ‘his soul’. The link
between life, writing and their relation to power is suggested and even reinforced by
what seems to be an allusion to some kind of Mephistophelian exchange. But when
Der Nister’s life is threatened by one of the bears, he escapes death, or at least post
pones it, by telling a tale — a writer’s trick, familiar in the classical literary tradition.
The third part of the narrative, the story of Der Nister’s riches, unfolds in a
typical Nisterian space defined as a ‘high place,’ one that he used to reach with a
ladder. Within that space, there are ‘good places’ and ‘bad places’. Der Nister went
from a ‘good place’ and a clean one, to a ‘bad one’ and a dirty one. In the dirty
place he could not bring himself to eat the muddy food everybody ate, until, looked
at askance by the local people and being at the point of starvation, he complied.
His body, though, could not keep down the muddy food. Sick, devoid of energy
and with nobody to rely upon, he reached the border to escape, pursued by angry
people throwing mud at him. On the other side of the border, in the ‘clean place’,
people looked at him in awe, and he realized that the mud he was covered with
had suddenly turned into shining gold. Looking at his body, he saw himself ‘a
durkhoysikn un a glantsikn, a goldenem un vi in a pantser mit goldene liskes’
[entirely golden and glittering, as if in an armour of golden scales]. He had suddenly
become immensely rich. Seized by desire, he went to stores and began to buy
things, then he bought houses and whole streets until he owned the entire place;
after that first place, he bought other places and cities as well. Even then his desire
was not satiated. He eventually became the king of an empire and to celebrate his
power he gave a lavish ball and ordered Ursa Major, the Great Bear, to come and
dance with him. The bear appeared and danced with him while an abyss opened at
their feet. Chastising Der Nister for his foolishness and arrogance and pushing him
down the abyss, back to the earth, the Great Bear ordered him to feed there ten of
her ‘earthy’ bears.
Hurled to the ground Der Nister found himself in his city, confused by his
experience, unable to decide whether it had been a dream or reality. Rubbing his
forehead he felt a patch of mud and believed he was still rich, but when he tried
to pay with the mud in a store, people looked scornfully at him, and soon he was
arrested as a lunatic and taken to an asylum. In that violent and silent place he was
beaten by the guardian, abused, held in chains, given only very little food, and
finally sedated into a silent emptiness. After a while he met there two inmates to
whom he confided his story, and related how, ‘walking in his own mind’ in huge
empty rooms and kingdoms and along alleys illuminated by candles, he came to
a palace and to a door ‘un s’dakht mir, take far mir aleyn iz ongegreyt di tir, un
zi efnt zikh aleyn’ [and it seemed to me that the door was meant for me alone,
and it opened by itself ]. In the room, sitting at a table, the bears were waiting for
him to feed them. He went on to tell the two inmates, that since he had nothing
but candles and candlesticks — the ‘lights’ of his kingdom — he had sold the
candlesticks to buy bread for the bears and he had fed them until he had nothing
more. His two fellow inmates understood and helped him, exchanging the moon
and the stars — his last ‘lights’ — for dried bread crusts. On the third and last
time that Der Nister saw the bears, the palace had turned into a crumbling hut, he
himself had nothing left, his kingdom was extinguished, and his world was dark.
He had only his fingers which the bears ate. One last time he managed to persuade
them to let him go. He then went back to the asylum where he consulted with his
two fellow inmates about what to do in the event that the bears appeared again.
‘In the end’, the story concludes, ‘it was agreed, and there was no other way out,
than to write everything down for the asylum doctor. [...] And Der Nister wrote
it and since he had no fingers left, he smeared for the doctor the whole story with
84 Daniela Mantovan
his blood and since then, he has been waiting for the doctor’s answer. And as long
as his heart keeps ticking... as long as his health lasts out... he will probably have to
wait a long time for the doctor’s answer’.54 The raff led book, Writing of a Madman,
is thus brought to an end and with it the whole narrative.
This apparently convoluted and enigmatic story undoubtedly has its method.
Among the images that recur throughout the story, that of the mud/mud patch
with the coin55 clearly links the initial unnamed narrator of the story to the same
fictional Der Nister (the author of Writing of a Madman), who in turn is identified
with the real author of the whole narrative. The splitting and multiplication of the
authorial presence, technically a strategy to set the story in motion, is also, at the
same time, a way to make a point, i.e. to emphasize in this case the author’s presence
while dissimulating and generalizing it into apparently different representations. But
if the protagonist of the story, Der Nister/the writer and his antagonist, the bear(s)/
Soviet power are pointed to, both concretely and in their metaphorical function, the
narrative of the wanderings in the ‘high places’ follows a more meandering path.
On a close reading, the story ‘From my Estate’ reveals hunger and neediness to
be a main thread, pervading the whole narrative. From the very beginning, when
we encounter the narrator saying of himself ‘And as I had long been going about
penniless, had not eaten, nor had a decent lodging’,56 and his investing the coin he
found in a meal, to the beginning of the raff led book Writings of a Madman, which
opens with a scene of hungry bears waiting to be fed by Der Nister, who had
nothing but his body to feed them with, hunger is the central theme, as it is also
the main theme of Der Nister’s ‘wanderings in the high places’. In the ‘bad place’
where dirt and mud cover people and things, a visitor coming from abroad is said
‘to suffer at the beginning, of course, and to grow hungry for not taking anything
to his mouth, but in the end, he usually does not resist, because one needs to eat,
and he gives in; like it or not, he must take part in their dirt-meals.’57 Der Nister
complies, too, but a deep revulsion for the dirt-food makes him very sick and
brings him close to starvation and death. Once he has escaped to the ‘good place’,
hunger becomes a metaphysical gnawing or craving for more; notwithstanding all
his riches, Der Nister says: ‘ikh hob zikh nisht gesetikt un bin fun guts nisht iberfult
geven, un venik hot dos shoyn mir oysgezen, un alts vos ikh hob gehat hot mikh
nisht bafridikt’ [I was not sated, I was not overfilled by all the good things, and
what I had, seemed to me to be little, and all what I had, did not satisfy me].58 Even
in the asylum the thread of hunger is not broken, and Der Nister tells not only of
the beatings and of the uncanny silence but also of the little food they give him,
of the bread crusts his fellow inmates keeps hidden under their pillows, and of the
hungry bears and of his search for food to feed them. The pervasive terminology of
hunger is laid out by the author in all its physical and metaphysical dimensions and
articulations, turning, in the ‘good place,’ into a figuration of an all-consuming,
unappeasable thirst for power.
Hunger and neediness function in the story as the coordinates in which the
initial narrator, as well as the fictional Der Nister, dwell and act. This condition, a
frequent occurrence in Der Nister’s life,59 and a recurrent theme in his last symbolist
stories, represents the ultimate reduction of humans to their naked bodily existence.
The reduction or even obliteration of human complexity and of any social role
implies at the same time the complete annihilation of human individuality, a
theme Der Nister obliquely addressed in the story ‘A mayse mit a lets mit a moyz
un dem nister aleyn’ [A Story with a Clown with a Mouse and with Der Nister
Himself ]. The dissonance between the ideal world Der Nister could still imagine
in ‘New Spirit’ (1920), in which ‘Pinkhes the son of Menakhem’ was the prophet
of a new ‘gospel’ to be brought to the masses, and on the other hand the erasure of
all spiritual aspirations in the mud- reality, in which the alternative to dirt-eating
is death, could not be harsher.
Der Nister’s concern with the writer and his role and function in society in the
story ‘From my Estate’ is manifest in a number of motifs: the writer/narrator with
his multiple identities, the raff le book, the literary trick of postponing death by
means of a story, the mention of a ‘poet’ as one of his two fellow inmates in the
asylum, the author’s ‘estates’ — symbolized by the candlelit kingdom he walks
through in ‘his own mind’,60 and finally the writing of the raff le book with the
narrator’s blood — all pointing to that focus of the narrative introduced by a literary
quotation, the title of the book homonymous with Gogol’s Notes of a Madman. This
title, which is more than a passing allusion to a kindred spirit,61 offers a basis for
consideration of the tale of Der Nister’s ‘wanderings in the high places’. Gogol’s
relentless polemics against Russian tsarist bureaucracy — a concrete reference and
a metaphorical construct of an inescapably destructive universe — and its corollary
of ‘dead souls’ is well known. His deep concern with the theme of art and its
corruption is at the centre of three of his most renowned narratives,62 one of which,
The Portrait, deals directly and specifically with the betrayal of art caused by the
artist’s craving for success, high social status and money, for which sake the artist
sacrifices his talent. The moral message of Gogol’s story is clear: complying with
market’s laws will deplete the artist’s creativity, and art itself will loose its high
finality to become a profane, mundane activity.63 Gogol’s concern in the first half
of the nineteenth century underlies Der Nister’s own concern with the role and
function of literati and of literature in the Soviet Union of the late 1920s, a society
in many respects at least as destructive of individuality and artistic creativity as the
tsarist one in Gogol’s time.
In Der Nister’s story hunger, a metonymical characterization of a marginalized,
degraded material and spiritual life, represents for the artist the drive leading to
the betrayal of art for the need for visibility, power and recognition — a real-life
circumstance Nister witnessed in 1928–29, both in the Soviet and in the Soviet-
Yiddish literary arenas. As in Gogol’s story, the artist’s betrayal of his true mission
cannot but lead to a catastrophe, all the more so when, as in Soviet times, the artist’s
recognition depended ultimately on the ‘dance with the bear’.
The politicity of Der Nister’s last symbolist works, as could be expected, does not
have a programmatic character. His exposure and indictment of power relationships
in the Soviet state is rather born from the perception of a sharp discrepancy between
an ideal world and Soviet reality. Nonetheless, cautious in his relationship with
Soviet power and censorship, Der Nister was fully aware of his role and of the
significance of his works. In ‘From my Estate’ his parabolic and enigmatic discourse
86 Daniela Mantovan
in a symbolist garb conceals and yet at the same time focuses on both Soviet reality
and on the intellectual’s betrayal of his true mission and of his art. The jocular final
sentence of the story, far from being a comforting folksy formulaic ending typical
of traditional tales, seems in fact to reveal a frightening future, while his story
intimates that its conclusion may well apply to the reader himself.
Notes to Chapter 5
1. On the meaning of the word Nistar see: Dov Sadan, A vort bashteyt (Tel-Aviv: Farlag Y. L. Peretz,
1978), pp. 139–49.
2. Most comprehensive studies on Nister and his works are those of Dov Sadan and Khone
Shmeruk in the 1970s, in the 1990s those of Delphine Bechtel and Daniela Mantovan, and that of
Sabine Boehlich in 2008. However, a full bibliography of studies, articles and memoirs dealing
with this author would contain today circa ninety titles.
3. Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye (Vilnius: Boris Kletzkin,
1926–29). Vol. 2 contains an article on Der Nister.
4. First settling in Kiev and then Kharkov after his return from Germany in 1925, Nister’s few
short travels in the Soviet Union of the 1930s are documented, as are his evacuation to Tashkent
during WWII and his return to Moscow after the end of the war.
5. Peter B. Maggs, The Mandelstam and ‘Der Nister’ Files: An Introduction to Stalin-era Prison and Labor
Camps Records (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1996).
6. ‘Der Nister’s Letters to Shmuel Niger’ (File 303 YIVO Archives), ed. by Avrom Novershtern,
in Khulyot, 1 (1993), 159–244.
7. Nokhum Oyslender, ‘Der Nister’, in his Veg-ayn — veg-oys: literarishe epizodn (Kiev: Kultur-Lige,
1924), p. 39.
8. Nokhum Oyslender, ‘Nister der dikhter’, Yidishe kultur, 6 (1959), 29. The article is dated Moscow
1948. Italics mine.
9. Arn Tseytlin, ‘Der Nister’, Bikher-velt, 1–2 (1924), 17.
10. David Bergelson’s letter to Shmuel Niger in Zamlbikher, 8 (1952), 100. The letter is dated 30
December 1912.
11. David Hofshteyn critique in his article ‘Vi: vegn undzer yunger sovetisher literature’ (‘How:
Regarding Our Young Soviet Literature’) was published in the Kharkov-based journal Prolit, 3
(1928), 45.
The Field of Yiddish, Second Collection, ed. by Uriel Weinreich (The Hague: Mouton & Co.:
1965), p. 285 (italics mine). Shmeruk again expressed the same opinion in his ‘Yiddish Literature
in the U.S.S.R.’, in The Jews of Soviet Russia, ed. by L. Kochan (Oxford: Oxford University Press:
1970), p. 264.
13. The only review of the collection Fun mayne giter is by Khatskel Dunets, ‘Vegn an opgeblakevetn
mundir on a general. Notitsn vegn Dem Nisters Fun mayne giter’, in his In shlakhtn (Moscow-
Karkov-Minsk: Tsentraler felker-farlag, 1931), pp. 127–41. The article is dated 1930.
14. ‘A bitere parnose oder a mayse noyre, vi azoy der Nister iz gevorn a ...materialist un “eynike
marksistn” zaynen gevorn oys materialistn. (An emese mayse funem literatur front.)’ [‘A bitter
experience or a mind-boggling story of how Der Nister became a ...materialist and “some
Marxists” ended up by not being materialists. (A true story from the literary front.)’] Yasha
Bronsjteyn, Farfestikte pozitsyes (Moscow: Der emes, 1934), p. 251. The article is dated November
1929.
15. The English translation of the letter in Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister’s “Under a Fence” ’, p. 285 (italics
mine). About the dating and the background of the letter see Khone Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister,
hayav veyetsirato’, in Der Nister, Hanazir vehagdiya ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1963), pp. 13–15.
16. Der Nister, ‘Fun finftn yor’, Sovetish heymland, 1 (1964), 3–73.
17. The Mother Courage topos was quite common at the time: another instance of the same figure
can be found for instance in Sholem Asch’s novel Farn mabl [Three Cities: A Trilogy] in the
volume Varshe, published in 1930.
18. Elias Schulman, ‘Arum Dem Nisters letstn roman’, in his Di sovetish-yidishe literatur: etyudn (New
York: CYCO, 1971), p. 165.
19. Der Nister originally planned a sequel of his novel The Family Mashber. The fragment Nokhvort
un forvort (published posthumously in Sovetish heymland, 2 (1967), 97–123) in fact links the end of
the novel to a planned new part; however, as Israel Serebriani wrote, and I share his opinion,
unfortunately Der Nister did not prove he had written his sequel book: Israel Serebriani, ‘Eynike
bamerkungen tsu der nayer oysgabe fun Mishpokhe Mashber’, Sovetish heymland, 8 (1975), 177.
20. Der Nister’s first attempt at realism, the short story ‘A tog-bikhl fun a farfirer’ [A diary of
a seducer] was published in 1910 when he was twenty-six years old. Considered one of Der
Nister’s early attempts to find his own style, the story appeared in Yudish, 2, ed. by Y. L. Peretz
(Warsaw: Farlag Progres, 1910), pp. 45–57.
21. In the revised version of the event in The Family Mashber, the Polish nobility gathers in an inn to
discuss financial obligations and while getting considerably drunk a Polish nobleman shoots at
a portrait of the tsar hanging on the wall. This material and its fresh re-working in The Family
Mashber indicate that Der Nister wrote the novel In the Year 1905 probably in the early 1930s,
since in the following years he was already working at The Family Mashber. Single chapters of
this novel were published in journals as early as 1935.
22. Leyzer Podriatshik, ‘Arum dem roman fun finftn jor’, Sovetish heymland, 1 (1964), 74–76.
23. Der Nister, ‘Fun finftn yor’, p. 27.
24. Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864) a writer and a socialist politician, was the initiator and the
president of the first Socialist Democratic Party in Germany, the Allgemeiner Deutscher
Arbeiterverein, founded in 1863.
25. Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (New York: Syracuse
26. Yankev Lvovski, ‘Der Nister in zayne yugnt-yorn’, Sovetish heymland, 3 (1963), 106.
27. In Nister’s letters to Shmuel Niger YIVO Archives File 330, letter no. 30. Also published in A.
Novershtern (ed.), Igrotav shel Der Nister el Shmu’el Niger, in Khulyot 1, Haifa 1992.
28. In Shtrom, 3 (1922), 83.
29. The first edition of the novel appeared in Moscow in 1938 or 1939. The volume, which contains
only the first part of the novel, bears on its cover the date 1938 while on the title page it has the
date 1939. For a precise assessment of the different editions of the novel and of their chapter’s
variants see Serebriani, ‘Eynike bamerkungen tsu der nayer oysgabe fun Mishpokhe Mashber’, pp.
176 –78.
30. The second edition of the novel, containing the first and second parts, appeared in Moscow in
1941; in this edition the temporal location is that of the 1860s and 1870s.
31. For the political dimension of Der Nister’s children’s tales see Daniela Matovan, ‘Transgressing
the Boundaries of Genre: The Children’s Stories of the Soviet Yiddish Writer Der Nister
(1884–1950)’, Report of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (2006/07), 25–48.
32. The resolution of the Jewish sections of April 1927 on literary matters was published in Di royte
velt, 5–6 (1927), 151–53; a later resolution of 30–31 May 1929, proposed by Moyshe Litvakov, was
published in Der emes, 2 July 1929. See Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Literature in the U.S.S.R.’, p. 257.
33. On the 27 May 1929, Moyshe Litvakov attacked Peretz Markish in the daily Der emes which he
chief edited; in that same year when Shmuel Halkin, Ezre Fininberg, Leyb Kvitko and other
less-known writers were attacked by proletarian critics, Kvitko was also dismissed from the
editorial board of the journal Di royte velt. Moyshe Kulbak’s Zelmenianer which was published in
the Minsk journal Shtern in 1929–30, was heavily criticized by the proletarian critics Bronshteyn
and Dunets.
34. The collection Gedakht was first published in Berlin in a two-volume edition in 1922–23.
35. An example of the ideological battle fought by proletarian critics is Bronshteyn’s article of
November 1929 ‘A bitere parnose’, in which the literary critic states that Der Nister’s Gedakht
‘should not have been published in the first place’ (Yasha Bronshteyn, Farfestikte positsyes
(Moscow: Der emes, 1934), p. 251).
36. ‘Shiker’ was first published in 1926 in the almanac Ukraine, ‘Tsigayner’ and ‘A mayse funem
grinem man’ appeared in Di royte velt in 1927 and 1926 respectively, and ‘Nay gayst’ was published
in the collection Geyendik (Moscow and Berlin,1923) and in issue 3 of Shtrom in 1923.
88 Daniela Mantovan
37. The appearance in 1929 of a collection of poetry Fun ale mayne veltn by the poet David Hofshteyn
should at least be mentioned. Hofsteyn’s poetry in this volume is characterized by a ‘strident
over-idealization of Soviet achievements in all fields’, a stance completely opposite to that of
Der Nister’s in Fun mayne giter. It is not known when Der Nister became aware of Hofshteyn’s
volume of poetry, therefore a possible ironic undertone in Der Nister’s choice of a title can
neither be excluded nor proved.
38. Apparently the story ‘Unter a ployt’ should also have been part of this collection, but since the
publication’s permit for the volume Fun mayne giter was given by the censor on 28 November
1928, no further story could be subsequently added. ‘Unter a ployt’ was then published in the
collection Gedakht.
39. Hersh Remenik, ‘Problemen fun dem Nisters shafn’, Sovetish heymland, 10 (1974), 137.
40. Yekhezkel Dobrushin, ‘Undzer literatur’, Shtrom, 1 (1922), 50.
41. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (in short, the Soviet Union) was ratified in December
1922.
42. See D. Mantovan, ‘The Yiddish Children’s Republic of Malakhovka: A Revolutionary Experi
ment in Education‘ (forthcoming in Aschkenas: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden).
43. In this context it is useful to note that the conception of poets and writers as ‘prophets’ was
very popular also in Russian literature, see for instance Pushkin’s poem ‘The Prophet’ (1826) in
which Pushkin used biblical language and motifs taken from Isaiah (6. 2–9) to stress the social
responsibility of poets. Pushkin’s poem was conceived as part of a cycle which because of its
reference to the execution of the leaders of the Decembrists’ revolt, was not completed.
44. In his memoirs Itzhak Yanasowicz recalls a meeting with Der Nister which took place after 1943.
Yanasowicz reports that Der Nister on that occasion admitted to have been for a period of time
a believer of that ‘falsehood’ (the Bolshevik revolution) from which he soon distanced himself.
Itzhak Yanasowicz, Mit yidishe shrayber in Rusland (Buenos Aires: Kiem, 1959), p. 238.
45. Der Nister dealt with the theme of freedom and servitude in his early stories ‘Der nar un der
vald-ruakh’ (1923) and ‘In untergrub’ (1919).
46. Der Nister, Fun mayne giter (Kiev: Melukhe-farlag fun Ukrayne, 1929), p. 147. Der Nister
addressed the gypsy theme again, though obliquely, in his unpublished novel Fun fiftn yor, in
which Leybl’s mother, a figure drawing together a host of negative traits, accuses Milye’s mother
of ‘stealing her son, as gypsies do’.
47. Der Nister, ‘Unter a ployt’, Di royte velt, 7 (1929), 8–34.
48. The date of publication both of the story ‘Unter a ployt’ and of ‘Fun mayne giter’ is 1929. It is
not known however, when each was written.
49. Reference is made to the Hasidic Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav (1772–1810) and to his tales
Sippurey ma’asiyot, published for the first time in 1815.
50. Dara Horn, ‘Der Nister’s Symbolist Stories: Adventures in Yiddish Storytelling and their
Consequences’, in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, ed. by Lara
Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren and Hannah S. Pressman (Detroit, MI: Wayne University Press,
2013), p. 23.
51. Nikolai Gogol’s short story Zapiski sumasshedshevo (usually translated into English as ‘The Diary
of a Madman’, literally: ‘Notes of a Madman’) was published in 1835.
52. Der Nister, Fun mayne giter, p. 8.
53. Khone Shmeruk, ‘Arba igrot shel Der Nister: letoldot sifro “Di mishpokhe Mashber”
vedfusotav’, Bekhinot, 8–9 (1977–78), 244.
55. The coin as the ‘beginning’ or the immediate cause of a series of events recurs also in the story
‘A mayse mit a lets mit a moyz un dem nister aleyn’. In this story, which in many respects is
tightly linked to ‘Fun mayne giter’, the little coin, thrown to Der Nister by a comet, has a
derisory value, enough to buy only the bug-infested fur around which the story revolves.
57. Ibid., p.11.
58. Ibid., p. 20.
59. The poverty Der Nister had to endure during most of his life has been mentioned by the author
himself as well as by many of his friends and acquaintances. Even in the medical forms, compiled
after his arrest on 19 February 1949, and again on 22 February 1949, ‘malnutrition’ is certified
by the Soviet medical prison’s officer. See Maggs, The Mandelstam and ‘Der Nister’ Files, K-7 and
K-10.
60. Der Nister addressed the theme of literature and literary practice in some of his symbolist
stories, most notably in the story ‘Shiker’ (‘Drunk’) published in 1926. In this story the almost
religious connotation he gives to literature is signified by candles accompanying and mourning
the demise of literary practice. As the metonymical embodiment of the nobility of literature
and tradition, as Der Nister wrote in his ‘A briv tsu Dovid Bergelson’ (1940) ‘likht un laykhter’
[candles and candlesticks] mean that ‘literatur iz yontev, literatur iz fayerlekhkayt’ [literature is
festivity, literature is celebration].
61. Gogol’s work had a particularly strong inf luence on the group of Russian writers known as
the Serapion Brothers, active in the 1920s. Der Nister’s connection with this group was first
evidenced by Khone Shmeruk in his essay ‘Der Nister’s “Under a Fence” ’. In my opinion, Der
Nister’s symbolist production shows a deep and first-hand knowledge of the work of Gogol, an
author whose inf luence on Der Nister’s work has not been addressed and which would require
a specific treatment.
62. To the narratives in question, Christmas Eve (1832), Nevsky Prospect (1835) and The Portrait
(1842) should be added Gogol’s project to write the Memories of a Mad Musician. Years later this
unrealized project inspired Gogol’s Notes of a Madman, a narrative still deeply connected to the
motif of art and creativity.
63. The same concern with the function of art and of writers was raised in Gogol’s time by noted
thinkers such as for instance Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘Über Schriftstellerei und Stil’, published
in his 1851 collection of essays Parerga und Paralipomena. Schopenhauer regarded remuneration
and royalties as the curse of literature: ‘It seems as if money lay under a curse, for every author
deteriorates as soon as he writes for the sake of money’, as he wrote, ‘Honorar und Verbot des
Nachdrucks sind im Grunde der Verderb der Litteratur. Schreibenswerthes schreibt nur wer
ganz allein der Sache wegen schreibt’ [Royalties and the prohibition to reprint are the curse of
literature. Only those who write exclusively for the sake of the argument write something worth
reading] in Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Über Schriftstellerei und Stil’ (Kapitel XXIII von Parerga und
Paralipomena II) Berlin A. W. Hayn 1851 § 272 (my translation). For the original text see <http://
aboq.org/schopenhauer/parerga2/stil.htm> [accessed October 2013].
Chapter 6
v
Watch the Throne

Allegory, Kingship and Trauerspiel in the
Stories of Der Nister and Reb Nakhman
Marc Caplan
Human beings in a mob
What’s a mob to a king?
What’s a king to a God?
What’s a God to a non-believer
Who don’t believe in anything?
Will he make it out alive?
Alright, alright, no church in the wild
— Jay-Z, & Kanye West1
Two years after a world war that had hastened the collapse of at least three dynastic
empires, Der Nister begins one of his most perplexing stories, A Bove-mayse oder a
mayse mit di melokhim [A Story of Bovve, or a Story of Kings] (1920), by describing
a monarch:2
Amol iz geven a melekh. A melekh, vi ale melokhim, mit a kroyn afn kop
un mit a shtul af tsum zitsn, un mit ale eygnshaftn un mit alts, vos s’geher tsu
melokhim. Iz der melekh yener krank gevorn. Zayn krankhayt iz bashtanen: —
Er hot far zayn kroyn un zayn shtul getsitert, er hot in zayn melukhe un in zayn
folk nisht gegleybt un af zayne harn un zayne noente nisht getroyet. Flegn zikh
im bashtendik un ale nakht samen un sharf-shverdn kholemen, farshverungen
un ufshtandn, merides un iberkerenishn groyse, f legt er bashtendik un in ale
shlofn viste shrek-zeyenishn zeyn, vos f legn im in kelt un in hits varfn, f legt
er zikh fun zey in der mit uf khapn, un keynmol keyn nakht un keynmol keyn
shlof nisht oysshlofn.3
[Once there was a king. A king like any king, with a crown on his head and a
throne to sit on, and all the qualities and everything that pertains to a king.
One day the king fell ill. And this is what was wrong with him: He trembled for
his crown and his throne, he no longer believed in his kingdom and his people,
nor did he trust his lords and near-and-dear. Every night, he would dream of
poisons and swords, plots and uprisings, revolts and upheavals. Always, every
time he slept, he would see wild and terrifying visions, that made him go cold
and go hot. He would wake up in the midst of them and never sleep a full night
or full sleep.]4
Watch the Throne 91
Monarchy as such is an anomalous subject for modern Yiddish literature, not only
because of the associations between this literature and radical political movements,
but also for its preoccupation with depicting the lives of its readers, often holding a
distorting mirror of satire, impressionism, or expressionism up to a world consisting
of quotidian social settings such as the shtetl, the marketplace, the heder, or the
yeshiva. Der Nister here, consistent with the deterritorialized and metaphysical
landscapes of the narratives he had been writing for nearly a decade before this
story, imagines the king not in the context of his political power but in a position
of singular isolation, paranoia and melancholy. If there is any monarch whom he
resembles, it would most likely be a Shakespearean one such as Lear or Hamlet;
what Der Nister introduces in this story is neither the elegy for a vanishing shtetl
culture nor the dissonance of urban modernity to be found in various forms among
his contemporary Yiddish (and Hebrew) modernists, but instead the ambiance of
kingly, ‘historical’ tragic drama, the Trauerspiel.
With an eye toward the characteristics of this genre, one can recognize in
psychological terms that Der Nister’s monarch functions as a king only for the
sake of imagining his own regicide. And being a product of this character’s
own imagination, the imagined plot is perhaps as much to be desired as feared.
Understanding the king’s predicament in psychological terms corresponds to his
generic origins in a proto-modern discourse rather than a classical one. As Walter
Benjamin, whose analysis of tragic drama provides the conceptual vocabulary for
this discussion, writes of the distinction between the genre of Trauerspiel [play of
mourning] and the archaic discourse of Tragedy:
Historical life [...] is its [the Trauerspiel’s] content, its true object. In this it is
different from tragedy. For the object of the latter is not history, but myth, and
the tragic stature of the dramatis personae does not derive from rank — the
absolute monarchy — but from the pre-historic epoch of their existence [...]. [I]t
is not the conf lict with God and Fate, the representation of a primordial past,
which is the key to a living sense of national community, but the confirmation
of princely virtues, the depiction of princely vices, the insight into diplomacy
and the manipulation of all the political schemes, which makes the monarch the
main character in the Trauerspiel.5
The significance of this distinction for Benjamin is not just the Trauerspiel’s
paradoxical secularity — the corporeality of the monarch and the limitations of his
claim to divine sanction, his protestations notwithstanding — but also its lapsarian
nature, its descent from an epoch of myth and symbol into the modern era of
history and allegory. At the centre of the genre are the contradictory faces of the
monarch, simultaneously a tyrant and a martyr: ‘[...] the tyrant and the martyr are
but the two faces of the monarch. They are the necessarily extreme incarnation of
the princely essence’.6 How one comes from seventeenth-century European courtly
drama to Yiddish modernism via this genre is a circuitous development, to say the
least: one that begins as much in Hasidic storytelling as the sociology of Yiddish
culture or the aesthetics of European modernism.
Although it may seem counter-intuitive to discuss Benjamin’s reading of the
baroque in the context of Yiddish modernism, given both the temporal disjuncture
92 Marc Caplan
this juxtaposition bespeaks as well as the radically different significance of baroque

aesthetics in Eastern as opposed to Western Europe,7 one might justify precisely this
temporal rupture with the baroque by considering an early remark of Max Weinreich
on the absence of new belletristic narratives in Yiddish during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries: ‘Ashkenazic Jewry [after the mid-seventeenth century]
experienced a period of decline that must have had an impact on its literature.
The light reading of this era was for the most part reprints: Bove-bukh, Zigmunt
un Magdalene, etc. [...]. The historical chronicle Sheyris yisroel (Amsterdam, 1743)
makes an altogether respectable impression [...] but this can scarcely be considered
belletristic [...].’8 The era in which French, German, Italian, or Spanish cultures
experienced what is commonly understood as a contemporaneous baroque was a
period in which no new Yiddish fiction was produced, an absence only rectified on
a significant level with the publication of Reb Nakhman of Breslov’s Yiddish and
Hebrew tale collection, Seyfer sipurey mayses (roughly, ‘The Holy Book of Stories’,
1815). With respect to this attenuated baroque, Benjamin offers an additional insight
about the echoes of the baroque in subsequent ages: ‘[...] towards the end of the
baroque era, the tyrant of the Trauerspiel tended increasingly to become that role
which found a by no means inglorious end in the Viennese farces of [ Joseph Anton]
Stranitzky [1676–1726]’.9 Like history itself, the baroque first asserts itself as Trauer
[sorrow], and repeats itself as farce.
The ensuing discussion of Der Nister with Reb Nakhman — focusing on the
seventh of Reb Nakhman’s thirteen collected stories, together with Der Nister’s
Bove-mayse [A story of Bovve] — aspires to consider the interrelationship between
these two distinctive writers and the Trauerspiel genre in three respects: thematically,
via their respective preoccupation with kingship and the breakdown of traditional,
yet worldly, presumably or apparently non-Jewish, authority; aesthetically, via
their respective use of allegory as Benjamin describes it, distinct simultaneously
from symbol and parable; and temporally, understanding in their affinity with one
another a means of understanding the anticipatory position of Yiddish allegories in
relation to other anti-mimetic aesthetic strategies. For both Reb Nakhman and Der
Nister, the use of allegory as first deployed in the Trauerspiel suggests a displacement
of mimetic values such as interiority and psychological motivation onto spectacle,
dream and hallucination, so that metaphor as such can be portrayed iconically, tac
tilely, thus performing the work of mimetic representation while critiquing the
rational modernity that mimetic representational techniques had been developed
to portray.
The transformation of metaphor into gesture is, of course, what allegory is and
what allegory does, and what Der Nister and Reb Nakhman accomplish by returning
to this strategy is at once a rejection of contemporaneous realist conventions — of
which Reb Nakhman, at least, was unaware — and the expression of mourning for a
(mythically) lost symbolic order in which the discourse of myth had provided unity
for a pre-modern culture. This combination of melancholy and critique signifies the
modernism of these two authors, since their deployment of allegory calls attention
to a genealogy of discourses beginning with the baroque and continuing with the
Gothic, symbolism and surrealism, each of which contributes to a larger history of
Watch the Throne 93
anti-mimetic discourse. It may be noted, indeed, that in narrative terms the one
genre that each of these discourses shares is the fairy tale, recognized as a literary
genre in seventeenth-century France, revived by German Romantics in the era
of the Gothic novel, further championed by symbolists throughout Europe, and
reformulated again in the practices of surrealism. ‘Fairy tale’ is the most accurate
description of Reb Nakhman and Der Nister’s preferred narrative genre, so that
by using it outside the conventional periods of the European avant-garde, Reb
Nakhman and Der Nister, much like Benjamin’s critical practice, connect its
fantastic discourse to a series of ruptures affecting conventional aesthetic decorum,
which in turn suggests the productivity of studying literature not only according to
historical categories, or taxonomies, but temporal and internal characteristics as well.
If the thematic connection linking the seventeenth-century-originated genres of
Trauerspiel and fairy tale can be identified with various members of the royal family
— the Trauerspiel devotes itself to kings and queens while the fairy tale focuses more
often on princes and princesses, so that the latter genre can be conceptualized as
child to the former — then this feature makes the attractiveness of both to Der Nister
and Reb Nakhman all the more unusual.10 Indeed, despite the fact that monarchy
was the only mode of governance for nearly all the lands in which Jews lived for
most of their history, and despite the ambiguous notion within Rabbinic thought of
a Davidic dynasty as constituting an essential prerequisite to the final redemption,
Jewish sources are notably resistant to the charms and pretentions of courtly life.
The proof-text for establishing a monarchy over Israel occurs in a passage from the
book of Deuteronomy. There Moses says to the Children of Israel: ‘When thou art
come unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and
shalt dwell therein; and shalt say: “I will set a king over me, like all the nations
that are round about me”; thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the
Lord thy God shall choose’ (Deut. 17. 14–15). Moses, who despises kingship as only
someone raised in a palace which he has come to reject could, suggests that the
Children of Israel’s desire for a king signifies a kind of covetousness, desiring what
other people have, and he responds to this by suggesting that the ideal king should
not amass wealth, wives, or horses, but should instead spend his days copying out
the law and judging the people — that is, the king should not behave like other
kings, but should instead behave exactly as Moses has done during forty years in
the desert.
The legacy of Moses’ admonition falls well short of his expectations. The
quintessential king in Jewish discourse is King David, an almost Clintonian figure
of inspired grace and carnal weakness, a poet uniquely positioned to praise God
and a politician always prepared to play his own press agent. Following David,
there are only three truly memorable kings in the Hebrew Bible:11 Ahab — the
prototype for Macbeth, a craven leader far less interesting than his wife Jezebel —
Saul, whom David supplants, and Ahasueras in the Book of Esther, perhaps the
most prominently depicted and interesting non-Jew in the Scriptures. Saul, it can
be summarized, is a study in tragic pathos, a figure of baroque grandeur, better
animated in George Frideric Handel’s eponymous oratorio than in the Book of
Samuel where he first appears. Ahasueras becomes in Jewish folklore a burlesque
94 Marc Caplan
contrast to Saul: a drunken, foolish, ultimately harmless figure, who redeems

the Jewish people and facilitates their return to the Land of Israel with the same
equanimity and obliviousness with which he had previously sold their fate to the
wicked Haman. Not for nothing does the Bible connect these two un-transcendent
characters by making the rescue of the Jews under Ahasueras dependent on two
direct descendants of Saul, Mordecai and Esther. Through this plot twist, the
Trauerspiel and the Purim carnival function as diametric inversions of one another.
Given that the primary literary form that Benjamin discusses in his study of
the baroque is, of course, drama, it is interesting to note that in the early modern
period the only native Yiddish theatrical form, the Purimshpil [Purim play], was
also referred to as Trauerspiel.12 This designation offers insight into the anticipatory,
if inverted, affinity that the Purim carnival possesses with the Trauerspiel, and the
consequent relationship that Reb Nakhman’s stories maintain with the Purim
narrative, nowhere more explicitly than in their respective preoccupation with
monarchy as both primary theme and setting.13 As Benjamin states, monarchy and
the kingly court are the native habitat of the Trauerspiel: ‘The disillusioned insight
of the courtier is just as profound a source of woe to him as it is a potential danger
to others. [...] In this light the image of this figure assumes its most baleful aspect.
To understand the life of the courtier means to recognize completely why the court
[...] provides the setting of the Trauerspiel. Antonio de Guevara’s Cortegiano contains
the following remark, “Cain was the first courtier, because through God’s curse
[he had] no home of his own” ’.14 Just this odd juxtaposition of homelessness and
melancholy with the carnival comedy of the Purimshpil accounts at least in part
for the disruptive and perplexing character of Reb Nakhman’s stories and their
ambivalent portrayal of kingship.
It is with these characteristics of ambivalence and anomaly in mind — the
combination of Saul’s gloom with the Purimshpil’s delirious levity — that one is
able to consider Reb Nakhman’s seventh story, mayse zayn [tale the seventh] in
the parlance of the Seyfer sipurey mayses itself, miz’vuv v’akovish [About a f ly and a
spider].15 This tale, narrated on 1 August 1807 (E 138), is the first story told after
Reb Nakhman realized that he was dying of tuberculosis, and as such marks the
beginning of the ‘second half ’ of this collection of thirteen tales.16 It begins, like
several of Der Nister’s stories, by describing a journey: ‘I will tell you about the
journey I took.’ Its homiletic portent, however, dissipates in the next sentence,
when Reb Nakhman states: ‘Perhaps you think that if I tell you everything, you’ll
be able to understand’ (Y 109; E 138).17 Such optimism, Reb Nakhman suggests,
is premature. Instead of offering his audience the travelogue of a physical journey,
he speaks metaphysically, metaphorically, of a king who fought many wars. He
conquered every enemy,18 and he celebrated his victories with an annual ball at
his palace. The centrepiece of the festivities is a comic performance in which
the customs of every nation were mocked — even the Turks, ‘and they probably
mocked the Jews as well’ (Y 109–10; E 140).19
By way of ethnographic verisimilitude, the king keeps a book in which all the
customs of the world’s peoples are inscribed. One day the king is sitting with this
book, when he notices a spider creeping across its pages, in pursuit of a f ly. Every
Watch the Throne 95
time the spider comes within striking distance of the f ly, a wind would blow,
causing a page of the book to fold over the spider, separating it from its quarry.
Finally trapped without escape beneath this page, the spider disappears entirely;
‘and regarding the f ly, I won’t tell you what happened to it’ (Y 112; E 143). Deeply
disturbed by what he has witnessed, the king falls asleep over the book, and dreams
that he holds a diamond in his hand. From this diamond, a myriad people emerge,
and the king throws the diamond away. The king’s portrait hangs over his throne
— ‘as is the accepted practice among kings’ (Y 112; E 144) — and on the portrait of
the king hangs his crown. The people who emerge from the diamond behead the
king’s portrait and throw his crown in the mud.20 They then attempt to assassinate
him, but he protects himself, like the f ly, with the page of a book. Still dreaming,
the king wants to find out which nation’s customs are inscribed on the page that
protects him, but he is afraid to look, and cries out in his sleep. He dreams further
that a high mountain comes to him and asks, ‘Why do you shout so? I’ve been
asleep for so long that no one could wake me, but you of all people have awoken
me’ (Y 114; E 145). The mountain tells the king that the same page that protects
the mountain from people who would climb it with impunity also protects the king
himself. Learning this, the king dreams that the people who had come out of the
diamond to rebel against him now repair his portrait and restore the crown to its
proper resting place.
With this act of restoration — simultaneously aesthetic and political — the king
wakes up. He immediately looks to see which page had protected the f ly, and it
proves to be the page that describes the customs of the Jews. Deciding to convert to
Judaism,21 the king undertakes a journey, like the narrator of this story,22 in search of
a wise man to interpret his dream. During his travels the king takes two assistants,
and disguises himself as an ordinary person — as Reb Nakhman himself apparently
had in his search for medical treatment during the spring and summer of 1807 (E
138; 149). Finding the wise man, the king reveals himself and tells his story. The
wise man prepares a mixture of drugs23 for the king to smoke so that the truth will
be revealed to him in a narcotic vision. Upon smoking this psychedelic mixture,
the king witnesses the cosmic events that occurred at the time of his conception.
When he was about to be born, his soul was paraded through the heavenly hosts,
who were asked to identify its defects. When no one could speak ill of him, the Evil
One24 shouted, ‘Lord of the Universe, listen to my plea! If this soul will descend to
the physical world, what will I do with myself? Why was I ever created?’ (Y 119;
E 150–51). It is decreed nonetheless that the soul will be born, and the Devil will
have to take care of himself. Upon reaching the last station before being born, the
Heavenly Tribunal, the soul is intercepted by a messenger from the Devil, an old
and feeble man. At this point, the king realizes why he was born as a non-Jewish
king instead of a Jewish tsadik, why he fought so many wars and captured so many
prisoners. ‘And more than this he didn’t tell. And there is furthermore much in all
of this. And the part about the prisoners at the end is not transcribed exactly as he
told it’ (Y 121; E 152).
What sort of narrative does Reb Nakhman create in the ‘Story of a Spider and a
Fly’? One can identify three principal components to this tale, each of which Reb
96 Marc Caplan
Nakhman renders elliptically to an unusual degree — even by his standards. The

first describes the king’s custom of holding balls to celebrate his military victories,
culminating in the chase of the spider and the f ly. The second is the king’s dream,
culminating in his dialogue with the mountain. The third describes the journey
promised at the story’s preamble in search of an interpretation of the king’s dream.
The interpretation, however, is not forthcoming, and indeed the story ends, as is
progressively typical of Reb Nakhman’s stories, with an admonition against analysis
as such. In the absence of interpretation, one is left with the structure of the story
itself. In this respect, each of the three components in the story suggests a different
storytelling genre: in the broken parable of the spider and the f ly, Reb Nakhman
offers a parodic version of the Trauerspiel. At the end, when the King’s ‘cosmic’
heritage is revealed to be Jewish, the story resembles contemporaneous conventions
of the Gothic, which hinge typically on the revelation of a secret paternity in a
closed space: a castle, a monastery, or a convent.
Reb Nakhman, by echoing themes found in the Gothic novel in a story of
about five pages, makes explicit what the genre’s preoccupation with closed spaces
opening up to horrified revelations signifies: the process of internalization essential
to the psychology of modernity — in an era only about a generation before the
concept of psychology had been formulated — is sublimated into the spatiality
of the Gothic novel, whereas for Reb Nakhman this process becomes explicit
through the psychic journey that the king undertakes, a journey in turn re-enacted
by the storyteller for and with his audience. Moving from the mysteries of the
Trauerspiel in the first section to the revelations of the Gothic in the third obligates
the quest narrative of the second section, a motif Reb Nakhman reconfigures for
Jewish narrative from the Yiddish adaptations of medieval romance, such as Dos
Bove-bukh, that had constituted the most familiar source of entertainment and
folklore among his original audience. In the quest, turned inward into a search
for self-awareness and consciousness, Reb Nakhman negotiates a turn from the
psychic and spatial world of the seventeenth century, directly into the themes and
concerns of the nineteenth century — a consequence, simultaneously, of his radical
experimentation with narrative form and the compressed, propulsive historical
context in which he lived.
Thus, in this elliptical Trauerspiel, the king is both hunter and hunted, a tyrant and
a martyr; his courtiers are both servants and assassins. The only route of escape is
through dreams, but in dreams, too, the story repeats itself, only with the difference
that here the significations regroup into a cosmic drama that cannot be completed,
not merely because the completion itself suggests heresy, but also, as Arthur Green
has observed, because the irresolution of the story stands as a charge to Nakhman’s
own Hasidim: a challenge to recognize the falseness of all conclusions.25 The story
is finally a rejection of all explanations that fail to expand the ever-widening gyre
of ambivalence that Reb Nakhman sets into motion, like Der Nister, through the
ever-dynamic act of narration itself. Mayse zayn is simultaneously a tale about two
animals and a narrative about a king who moves perplexedly from tyrant to martyr
to tsadik. The king is at once an animal (both spider and f ly) and a victim of his
own courtly machinations. In its fragmentary references and literary structure,
Watch the Throne 97
moreover, Mayse zayn goes beyond a conf lict of power and desire to approach the
limits of the conf lict between speech and silence, between what must be declared
and what it is forbidden to reveal.
The question therefore remains as to what Reb Nakhman would reveal in this
story, and why he is unable to do so completely. Equally central is the compulsion
among his Hasidim toward self-censorship — their refusal to transcribe in full
even the elliptical rendition of this story that the Rebbe is willing to provide.
This mystery can be clarified provisionally by considering the role of concealment
generally in Reb Nakhman’s thought and self-image. As Joseph Weiss writes, ‘The
hidden Saddik remains in his paradoxical situation, a misunderstood and therefore
even persecuted man, until the day breaks and his true character can be revealed
within the framework of the all-inclusive messianic revelation [...]. During the
period of concealment he kept hidden his most important characteristic: Nahman’s
secret messianic nature’.26 Stated directly, the secret at the limits of silence and
speech — the desire that dare not speak its name — is the evident heresy that Reb
Nakhman himself is, or at least might be, the Messiah. The apocalyptic implications
of this suggestion correspond precisely with the disruptive, radical motivation of
Reb Nakhman’s stories, as he explains: ‘In the tales which other people tell [...]
there are many secrets and lofty matters, but the tales have been ruined in that they
are lacking much. They are confused and not told in the proper sequence: what
belongs at the beginning they tell at the end and vice versa.’27 Reb Nakhman’s
solution to the problem posed by folklore is not to repair the stories of the nations
but to fracture them further out of all structural or generic recognition. Because
Reb Nakhman re-orders and dis-orders the logic of European folklore, his stories
exert a similar effect of subversion and sublimation on what a Jewish story might be.
Understanding the story as a mere corollary to Reb Nakhman’s eschatological
aspirations makes the task of interpretation hermetic: the wandering, melancholic
king is Reb Nakhman; the messianic destiny ostensibly reserved for this character
signifies the actual spiritual status of his creator. The Rebbe’s Hasidim, moreover,
are simultaneously the king’s loyal courtiers, and the traitorous myriads that
conspire against him, smiling in his face and stabbing him in the back. In this
sense, the Hasidim are loyal courtiers in so far as they recognize Reb Nakhman’s
kingship, his messianic status, but they are treacherous in their refusal to act on
this recognition, either because of their self-censorship, or their failure to live up
to his ideals — an inevitable failure in an unredeemed world, a failure of which
Reb Nakhman as the messiah would be equally culpable. It is therefore entirely
appropriate that Reb Nakhman begins and ends this tale with a warning against
interpretation; taking this story to the limits of its implications would not only be
heresy, it would threaten to undo forever the relationship between the Rebbe and
his Hasidim, and in so doing would undermine the only communal structure, the
only tangible hope for redemption, that the Hasidic movement can hope to offer for
Jews on earth. Mayse zayn is thus a ‘failed’ story, the failure of which is redeemed
when the reader understands that it is a story about failure — Reb Nakhman’s failure
as a putative messiah — but this failure is, at the same time, the event that saves Reb
Nakhman and his movement from heresy.
98 Marc Caplan
But just for this reason, the associations that Reb Nakhman cultivates must be
dislodged from conventional hermeneutics, since the purpose of the story must be
dissimulated to the same extent and for the same reason that its characters are. In
cultural terms, the components of the tale are neither original nor adapted, but
somehow, as he advertises in his project of subversive reconstruction, corrupted.
They thus function not as moral lessons, nor as folklore, but as icons, stranded in
their status between tableau vivant and nature mort — a fitting tension, given the
means of their composition between oral storytelling and written narration, as well
as their linguistic status as bilingual texts in sanctified Loshn-koydesh and vernacular
Yiddish. Reb Nakhman simultaneously justifies and conceals the motivation for this
disrupted messianic parable by offering, seemingly, a single autobiographical clue
when he describes the final trial of the king’s soul in the heavenly tribunal before
his birth; speaking for the prosecution, the Devil, is an old and feeble man (Y 120;
E 151). Both Hasidic and academic commentators28 concur that the man referred to
here is Reb Aryeh Leyb of Shpole (1725–1812), a venerable Hasidic leader known as
der Shpoler zeyde (the grandfather of Shpole). The Shpoler zeyde was Reb Nakhman’s
primary opponent during the last ten years of Reb Nakhman’s life — essentially for
the entirety of his career as a rebbe.29 At this point, therefore, the story becomes
not just a metaphysical representation of Reb Nakhman’s frustrated messianic
ambitions, but also a political satire about the fate of the Hasidic movement. If the
King Who Fights Many Wars is indeed Reb Nakhman, then the empire over which
he attempts to exert his authority is the Hasidic movement itself.
It is thus of critical significance to consider the revelation in mayse zayn that
the royal protagonist was meant to be born a Jew, but through the machinations
of the devil — represented, apparently, by the Shpoler zeyde — entered the world
merely as a non-Jewish king. In simultaneously political and metaphysical terms,
Reb Nakhman is stating here explicitly that the real drama of human creation is
to be fought out over the meaning and practice of Jewishness; a Jew, therefore,
automatically commands a higher cosmological status than even the most powerful
non-Jew in the world. The story acknowledges how unlikely this assertion is
through the catalytic motif of the ball at which the various cultures of the world,
except, presumably, the king’s own, are mocked. Without this indulgence in ‘ethnic
humour,’ the king could never have learned of his supernatural connection with
the Jewish people. In an era, or a regime, that mocks and diminishes all nations
without discrimination, Reb Nakhman makes a case not only for the specific,
mystical properties of the Jewish people, but perhaps also the value of ethnic
difference against the imperatives of empire, even the fictive one ruled by Reb
Nakhman’s king, to subordinate the nations in its domain. Moreover, the Jews in
this story are related metonymically to the f ly: the f ly seeks protection under the
page that describes, signifies and parodies their culture, and like the f ly, they are
small, hunted, and despised, yet they triumph over their persecutors in the as yet
unrevealed end.
The political metaphysics of this story, unfortunately, undermine whatever
homiletic unity the exegete would presume to impose, for if the king was meant to
be born the messiah, but instead was born a non-Jewish aristocrat, then he cannot
Watch the Throne 99
symbolize Reb Nakhman, who may have been meant to be the messiah, but was
certainly neither a non-Jew nor an aristocrat — except in the ineluctably Jewish
world of Hasidism.30 Moreover, if Reb Nakhman depicts himself in this story as a
non-Jewish king, why is the Shpoler zeyde, whose power over non-Jewish monarchs
was marginal at best, invoked without comparable metaphorical camouf lage?
Instead of a parable about Reb Nakhman as king, or the king as messiah, mayse
zayn can more accurately be described as an allegory in which kings and tsadikim, to
say nothing of courtiers and assassins, or spiders and f lies, each appear as metaphors
in a private struggle between Reb Nakhman’s messianic desires and the repressive
threat of heresy. Indeed, one can say that in the deliberately bizarre contours of this
story, Reb Nakhman has found an ideal structure for describing heresy as such;
the story is structurally incoherent precisely to the extent that heresy undermines
the theological coherence of the world. And if the inconvenient factors considered
in this discussion destroy the exegetical unity of this relentlessly diffuse narrative,
they nonetheless acknowledge the contradictory impulses that more conventional
readings short-change.31
Thus, although conventional exegesis, both in the academic world and the Hasidic
context, have typically read Reb Nakhman’s stories as allegories, they function as
such only in the particular, peculiar sense that Benjamin suggests in his study of
the Trauerspiel: ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm
of things’.32 For Benjamin, allegory connects with the philosophy of history that
preoccupied his thought from beginning to end, via the status of object; Benjamin
makes of allegories not mere ruins, but relics, and this is the significance of allegory
to his understanding of the baroque. According to Benjamin, the allegory represents
what modernity will abandon or supersede, and so allegory for the moment of
proto-modernity, in contrast to its medieval or scholastic manifestations, becomes
a rationalizing strategy for containing the instability and ambiguity of metaphor.
By yoking metaphorical language to conceptual language — ‘the lightning of
calumny’, ‘the poison of Vainglory’, ‘the cedars of innocence’, ‘the blood of
friendship’ are among the examples Benjamin offers33 — allegory negotiates the
ambiguities between figurative and literal meanings in language, but at the same
time it preserves these ambiguities, as if in amber. In the process of preserving
these qualities in suspension, it furthermore figures the temporal transition between
historical epochs by making an obsolescent mode of signification both a mode of
representation and an object to be represented.
Allegory makes of language an object, which allows concepts to be represented
visually, but in this representation, the allegory becomes simultaneously literal and
figurative, text and image. As an object, allegory signifies the mythical potential
of speech that modernity as a social, psychological, rhetorical construct must
regulate, systematize and suppress. Allegory therefore is mythical and it isn’t. It is a
reification of what myth is, in that it takes the place of what myth does, and in this
instantaneous transformative process — the Midas alchemy of turning an animate
concept into a gilded icon — baroque aesthetics come into being. Allegory is in fact
exactly the opposite of what it claims to be; it is the production and proliferation
of metaphor posing as a repudiation of the metaphorical and the collapsing of the
100 Marc Caplan
figurative as literal: when the pageant of the Trauerspiel, precursor of the ballet,34
performs the meaning of the play as physical gesture, it makes metaphor corporeal
by reducing the body of the performer to the status of the figurative. Similarly Reb
Nakhman’s King Who Fights Many Wars acts in the tale not as character nor as
symbol but as function, a narrative component within the allegory that does not
produce meaning but consumes it. Allegory as a representational strategy is always
inadequate to the task of signification because it loses itself between concept and
illustration, and as such it can only hold attraction to the melancholic who can only
be attracted to antiquated vessels and defunct vehicles. And what concept better
connects Benjamin with Reb Nakhman than melancholy?
Of course, identifying a conceptual affinity between Reb Nakhman and
Walter Benjamin, however tenuous, only serves either thinker in the context of
an intellectual or aesthetic history. Designations such as allegory, the baroque, or
modernism cease to function merely as taxonomies when they help to provide a
context in which these descriptions can be enlisted to identify a larger cultural
phenomenon — in this instance, the subterranean interstices among various
strains of the non-mimetic avant-garde, which in this analysis serves as an index
of modernist critique running parallel to and challenging the primary (mimetic)
narrative logic of modernity commonly assumed to describe the rise of realist
verisimilitude as narrative discourse and the novel as a distinct narrative form.
As this discussion takes for a given, Reb Nakhman in this context serves as an
anticipatory modernist, so that by reading his tales, belatedly, against the Trauerspiel,
one can identify which strain of modernist aesthetics his stories anticipate most
vividly: the symbolism of Der Nister.
The affinities between the Trauerspiel and symbolism, indeed, have already been
remarked upon with respect to their respective attachment to the fragment and the
ruin as constituents of a totality, a world conjured exclusively by aesthetic means;
as Gilles Deleuze notes in his own treatment of the baroque: ‘It is well known that
the total book is as much Leibniz’s dream as it is Mallarmé’s, even though they
never stop working in fragments.’35 Not only does this remark guilelessly suggest
the affinity that Benjamin’s most intensive and recurring literary preoccupations
— the Trauerspiel, symbolism and surrealism — maintain with one another, but
also it shares with Benjamin’s study a sense that allegory links the Trauerspiel with
symbolism precisely because they each depend on the inadequacy, fragmentation
and indeterminacy of language as such. Symbolism thus functions as another mode
of allegory, now lacking an external referent, creating poetry out of signifiers
disconnected from external signifieds, since for the symbolist artist nothing exists
outside the mind, a praxis of Hegelian philosophy and the linguistic logic of
modernity, driven to almost parodic extremes.36 This perhaps explains the affinity
of symbolist poetics with structural analysis, since symbolism properly understood
constitutes itself as a series of signifiers signifying only themselves.
In this respect, allegorical strategies connect Reb Nakhman and Der Nister as
modernist storytellers, and this accounts for their unique but related role within
Yiddish literature, which thanks to their use of allegory appears only uncannily,
spectrally proximate to its ‘natural’ habitat in the world of a traditional Jewish
Watch the Throne 101
culture, abruptly opening up to modernity; they are the only Eastern European
Yiddish authors of note whose tales dispense with the shtetl, the heder, or the yeshiva
as their settings.37 Though we know of Reb Nakhman as a profound and original
religious thinker, both the homiletic purpose and any reference to Jewish sources
in most of his stories remain elusive, intangible, as much as in the cosmopolitan,
politically radical milieu of Der Nister’s writing. And yet for both storytellers, the
implications of Jewishness in the newly modern world remain as animating as they
are for writers like Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Moykher Sforim, Y. L. Peretz, or,
in the intimately adjacent Hebrew context, Sh. Y. Agnon. Similarly, although these
are almost the only Yiddish narratives for which the categories of Trauerspiel, the
Gothic, or even the Surreal might be invoked without the mediation of shtetl parody
or satirical irony, their achievement radiates darkly, like an X-ray, illuminating both
the aesthetic logic of Yiddish modernism and its subterranean, structural affinities
with the larger developments in modern literature.
What these stories enact, of a small, closed narrative form opening itself up to
the grand historical gestures of modernist critique, is precisely what the classic shtetl
satire dramatizes about the encounter — its dangers and its discontents — of the
closed Jewish space with the wider modern world. For Reb Nakhman, as much
as Der Nister, storytelling is a response to the recurring crisis in Jewish autonomy
that these historical circumstances engender, both personally and in the larger
culture of the nineteenth century; such crises can be understood politically as
the relationship of Jewish power structures with the empires in which they were
embedded, or in social and religious terms as the relationship between specifically
Jewish sectarian and ideological movements.38 These crises were as much a problem
of narration, representation and idiom as of politics or culture: as Yiddish came
to be concentrated over the course of the eighteenth century more exclusively in
the East, the old Yiddish genres of interpolation and mediation ceased to function
as vehicles of expression, even though new forms or idioms had yet to appear.
Though Reb Nakhman is the first storyteller to step into a new fictional universe,
at a distance he appears to follow the cues of the older, interpolated genres. But the
manifestations he presents are unlike anything seen before in Jewish narratives, and
though much imitated, not quite like anything seen since, although Der Nister and
his contemporary Agnon come closest in distinctive respects.
If Reb Nakhman cultivates the chaos of narrative apocalypse in order to change
the times in which he was living (and dying), Der Nister came of age in an era
when apocalypse was no longer an act of the imagination. Indeed, this juxtaposition
illustrates the function of an anticipatory modernism: because modernity itself
is experienced in peripheral cultures as a catastrophe, the response to this
phenomenon anticipates the historical crisis that engulfs modernity as a whole
in the heyday of high modernism, to which Der Nister remains as much on the
periphery as Reb Nakhman had been over a century before. A hundred years later,
Der Nister’s narratives pick up where Reb Nakhman’s stories had left off — even
if Reb Nakhman’s direct inf luence on Der Nister is inarguably mediated through
the secularizing example of Peretz’s literary folk tales — incorporating both Reb
Nakhman’s refraction of baroque aesthetics as well as later trends of the Gothic
102 Marc Caplan
imagination, symbolism and other avant-garde narrative techniques. In this respect,

Reb Nakhman provides a model for understanding Der Nister’s symbolist stories.
If Reb Nakhman’s belated baroque aesthetic allows his readers to recognize how
this earlier style functions as an inversion of the Gothic novel that developed almost
contemporaneous to his tales, then Der Nister’s equally belated symbolism, as well
as expressionism, stand on the opposite side of the same fence as surrealism, and thus
Der Nister stands at a crossroads of global modernism.
As can be recognized in one of the preeminent achievements in Der Nister’s early
writing, A Bove-mayse, the author takes his cues in both style and tone from Reb
Nakhman’s story of the spider and the f ly, along with the prototypical pre-modern
Yiddish romance Dos Bovo-bukh, from which the colloquial expression bobe-mayse
[old-wives’ tale] originally derives. Where the Bovo-bukh, however, Judaizes several
aspects of the medieval chivalric tale in order to neutralize the danger of importing
a foreign narrative into a still-traditional, though dynamic, culture, Der Nister here
divests his writing of essentially all overt references to Jewishness except for the
Yiddish language itself: the Jewish significance of Der Nister’s writing therefore is
not absent, but concealed — just beneath the surface and requiring the revelation of
a sensitive and culturally attuned audience. Like Reb Nakhman, Der Nister offers
hermetically opaque parables to devotees and adepts willing to devote their lives to
deciphering them; unlike Reb Nakhman, Der Nister never actually recruited any
Hasidim to the task.
Nonetheless, the close, intense affinity between Der Nister’s writing with the
precedents of the Bovo-bukh and Reb Nakhman’s stories indicates that like all great
modernists — Reb Nakhman included — an agonistic sense of the past, tradition
and memory animates Der Nister’s imagination on what can only be described as
the subconscious level. Where history is one of the rationalizing discourses that
signifies and constitutes modernity, the incorporation of the past as a spectral,
unspeakable presence characterizes modernism in all its manifestations. As in Reb
Nakhman’s story, Der Nister brings the reader into a world where characters and
actions are at once overly familiar but also torn from their expected functions, a
world neither fantastic nor realistic but somehow functioning parallel or perhaps
inverted from the conventions of logic, history and narrative form. If the solution
that Der Nister offers to the broken world of the King’s consciousness is storytelling,
it does not seek to repair the world, a task Reb Nakhman’s stories had resisted from
a theological perspective at the dawning of an Ashkenazic modernity, so much as
to bypass it. At a moment when avant-garde Yiddish poets as much as German
filmmakers were cultivating an aesthetic of expressionism, Der Nister reaches back
to a cultivation of the archaic and the pristine, not as a programme for remaking
the future in the image of an idealized past — kings and knights in shining armour
and enchanted forests, plainly, belonged no more to the Jewish experience in Der
Nister’s day than they did in the era of the original Bove-mayse — but instead as a
path of continuous escape. The fairy tale for Der Nister, like Reb Nakhman, serves
as a weapon to subvert everyday reality, not to transform it.
As Der Nister continues his transmogrified Trauerspiel, a wanderer comes to the
palace of a morbid king to tell him the story of a wanderer named Bovve betrothed
to another king’s daughter, and when the daughter grows ill and approaches death
he goes wandering in search of a cure and encounters another wanderer who had
formerly served a king whose son had been struck with a debilitating madness by a
beggar emerging from the lake in the royal garden; in a dream Bovve encounters
one of his mentors, a stargazer, who instructs him on how to approach the prince
in order to cure him:
Un do hot zikh in hant bam shtern-zeyer der shtern-shteyn, vos er hot Bove’n
in veg arayn mitgegebn, bavizn [...] hot er im azoy a vayle gehaltn, hot zikh
dernokhdem far Bove’n a kinder-tsimer un in a melekh-palats zikh bavizn, iz
dos tsimer shtil un mit gardinen farhangen geven, hot zikh durkh di fenster
dan a shayn durkhgeshlogn, a shtile un vi a farnakhtike, a tsugeshlogn, a shtile
un vi a khoyle a shtiln. Iz demolt take farnakht geven, hot zikh ba a vant ba
eyner a betl bavizn, a vays-gebets un a tsikhtik-zoybers, un afn bet mit a koldre
fardekt iz a yingling a yunger, a tsertlikher un a melekh-kind geleygn, un mit
oygn ofene un in tsimer aroys ufgeefnte, mit farglotste un mit onzinike mit
groyse [....] Iz der melekh iber dem azoy shitl geven, hot der shtern-zeyer dan
dem shteyn in di hent genumen un tsum tsufusns fun betl un antkegn di ofene
prints-oygn tsugekumen, hot er dem shtern-shteyn un punkt antkegn zayn
farglivert-blik ongeshtelt un a vayle azoy im gehaltn. (Y 191–92)
[And the stargazer held in his hand the star-stone that he had given Bovve
to take on his journey. And he held it up [...] and then a nursery appeared to
Bovve’s eyes, a nursery in a royal palace, and it was still and hung with drapes,
and a glow came in through the windows, a quiet evening-glow, as if for a quiet
patient. It was evening now indeed, and a bed appeared by a wall, with bedding
white and clean and tidy, and on the bed, lay, covered with a blanket, a young
boy, tender and frail, a prince, with open eyes staring into the room, bulging
and big and senseless [...]. And as the king sat there in stillness, the stargazer
took the stone in his hands and approached the foot of the bed and stood before
the prince’s open eyes and put the star-stone before his motionless stare and held
it for a spell.] (E 490)
In Der Nister’s aesthetic, there is no fixed distinction between dreaming and
waking reality, and like his contemporary Sigmund Freud he suggests that
storytelling serves as a bridge between these levels of consciousness — but one that
doesn’t negotiate their differences so much as erase them. Unlike Reb Nakhman’s
story of the spider and the f ly, which resists literary structure by assembling itself as
a sequence of fragments, each story within the Bove-mayse resembles all the others so
closely that they blur into one another, like a work of minimalist music structured
not out of melody but resonances that are swallowed by an infinite echo. And
like minimalist music, Der Nister’s writing can exert on his readers the sensation
that time is standing still. Unlike the immediacy of Reb Nakhman’s storytelling
voice, still present in the written transcriptions of his narratives, and really all of
his writings, Der Nister’s work derives energy from a labyrinth of deferral, delay
and digression.
In structural terms, therefore, Reb Nakhman’s story and Der Nister’s writing
are not only illustrations of fundamental distinctions between oral and written
narration, they are also inverted examples of narrative technique. In the Bove-mayse,
beggars and kings are constantly reversing position with one another — exactly as
104 Marc Caplan
Reb Nakhman’s king hovers structurally between the position of spider and f ly —
and these schematic reversals suggest a structure of power and desire in a constant
state of mutual deconstruction and decomposition. The kings in Der Nister’s story,
as in Reb Nakhman’s, are curiously passive and powerless; they have the authority
to enforce capricious rules governing their own narrow domains, but it is the
beggars in this story who can see the future, relieve aff liction, transport themselves
through walls, and command the stars. When Bovve brings a king’s stillborn
child to life (Y 242; E 517–18), he refuses all the rewards that the king offers him:
‘I don’t need any presents, and I don’t require anything. For what does a beggar
want after all?’ (Y 245; E 520). Of course, the beggar desires nothing, at least not
in the purely metaphysical world of Der Nister’s story! This reversal of expectation
is itself evidence that what is depicted here is not monarchy as a political ideal:
if Shakespeare’s Henry IV says ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,’ both
Reb Nakhman and Der Nister make the crown so heavy that it renders its wearer
immobile and a little ridiculous. The cosmic audacity of Reb Nakhman’s claims,
that Jews can be superior to non-Jewish kings, and their potential to redeem the
world here recur in a sublimated fashion among knights, beggars and wanderers —
the figures originally Judaized in the Bovo-bukh and the same prototypes for Reb
Nakhman’s stories.
With respect to his storytelling motifs, therefore, Der Nister like Reb Nakhman
inhabits a unique position in Jewish literature between the non-Jewish world of
folkloric motifs from which he adapts his stories and a belief in the exceptionality
of Jewish difference — perhaps identifiable in this instance only by the choice
of language in his writing — that animates the moral and narrative logic of his
writing. In the tension between metaphysical presence and physical absence,
between writing in a Jewish language about characters otherwise unmarked by
Jewish experience, one discovers the natural habitat for allegory. Just this tension
can be observed in a passage that indicates the proximity of Der Nister’s neo-
baroque strategies to contemporaneous examples of modernist writing:
Un Bove iz tsu der hoypt-shtot gekumen, un far ir toyer keyn shomrim nisht
bagegnt, un der toyer iz gor ofn geshtanen, un keyner hot nisht bavakht zayn
arayngang. Hot er zikh farvundert un nisht farshtanen di shomrim, hot er vegn
zeyr nakhlesikayt un vegn zeyr shlekht hitn gedenkt, vayl nisht gevoynt iz er
geven azoy a melekh-shtot un nisht gehit tsu trefn; hot er zi ober dokh azoy
getrofn, hot er ba keynem un vegn dem tsu keynem un vegn dem tsu fregn
nisht gehat, un vegn dem tsu keynem tsu vendn zikh nisht gezeyn, hot er nisht
gefregt, un iber toyer un iber der shvel ibergetretn, un azoy un nisht geshtert un
nisht opgeshtelt fun keynem, iz in hoypt-shtot un af ire gasn gekumen (Y 209).
[And Bovve came to the capital, and he met no guards at the gates, and the gates
were standing ajar, and no one guarded the entrance or his entrance. Bovve was
astounded, he couldn’t understand the guards, and he wondered about their
negligence and their unwatchfulness, for he wasn’t used to finding a royal city
unguarded thus; but he did find it thus, and he saw no one to talk to about it,
so he didn’t ask, and he stepped across the threshold and through the gates, and
thus, and undisturbed and not stopped by anyone, he came into the capital and
into its streets.] (E 499, emphasis in original)
It is difficult to avoid recognizing in this description a serendipitous similarity

with Franz Kaf ka’s parable ‘Before the Law,’ however dissimilar these two authors
otherwise are.39 Specifically, in Kaf ka’s story, each person apparently has a gate
leading to the judgment and to justice, but this gate is blocked by one and possibly
by fifty guards, each more fearsome than the previous. For Der Nister, by contrast,
the gate and the whole city have been abandoned, open and exposed.
Whatever ‘the Law’ might signify for Kaf ka, for Der Nister the gate is
unattended, desolate and empty — but no less mysterious. Is this a distinction
between a German Jew’s reaction to a tradition and a concept of justice too remote
to be apprehended, in contrast to a child of Hasidic Jews who experienced not only
his own only partially complete secularization but also the collapse of the whole
social order built around that same tradition? Reducing either of these writers to
such a one-dimensional reading deprives them of their artistic agency as well as the
complexity of their cultural and narrative achievement. Nonetheless, their dramatic
deployment of space, and specifically Der Nister’s use of a de-peopled landscape
that his stories share in Yiddish literature, uniquely, with Reb Nakhman, is a
redeployment of baroque and Gothic motifs within the poetics of modernism; the
structures of law, wisdom and power that the Enlightenment had promised would
be universal, accessible and rational have become for Der Nister palimpsests, ruins
and snares; the unguarded city that Bovve enters provides him with another avenue
for his journeying, and another story through which the author can continue
spinning his tale.
Indeed, Der Nister’s Bove-mayse distinguishes itself from Kaf ka’s writing as
well as Reb Nakhman’s tale of the spider and the f ly, not only by its ability to
reach an eventual conclusion, but to make it a happy one at that: the return of the
beggar-knight Bovve to his kingdom and his princess, whom he weds in the last
paragraph of the story. One might say that this happy ending is perhaps the most
authentically secular gesture in all of Der Nister’s writing, because unlike Reb
Nakhman’s stories, Der Nister’s story represents salvation in this world, in real time.
If Reb Nakhman’s tale is a Purimshpil superimposed onto a Trauerspiel, Der Nister’s
Bove-mayse is a Trauerspiel redeemed at the last minute as a fairy tale when the hero
weds the princess. And yet, as much as Der Nister offers a rectification for Reb
Nakhman’s broken stories and fragmented theology, he too is unable to remain
content with the graven image he has carved.
What in subsequent tales upsets the equilibrium of narrative form at work in the
Bove-mayse is the presence of the crowd that must necessarily bear witness to the
courtly pageant: baroque spectacle comes to disrupt the harmony of Der Nister’s
symbolism, but in so doing it rescues these narratives from the false comforts of a
fictive salvation. As Der Nister continues to write stories in his symbolist period,
the crowd, the collective, the mob, increasingly fills the narrative void with its
disruptive presence. These stories illustrate a visceral consequence of allegory as a
rhetorical strategy; when the hermetic façade of the allegory cracks — as, according
to the logic that Benjamin deduces from it, it inevitably must — what rushes
into the gap is the wider world of history and its discontents. This increasingly
preoccupies the stories Der Nister writes during the 1920s, which as segments
106 Marc Caplan
of a larger assemblage enact an allegory about the unfinished and dissipating

secularization of Yiddish culture. Although their progression from symbolist fantasy
toward materialist burlesque — the genre with which Der Nister affiliates the last
of these stories, Unter a ployt [Under a Fence] (1929) by attaching to it the Cabaret-
inf lected subtitle A revyu [A Revue] — suggests an internalization of modern
disenchantment, their simultaneous dystopian aspiration toward an aestheticized
communism indicates how the author sought to substitute a new faith for the pieties
of religion and art he had abandoned. What follows in the remainder of Der Nister’s
life is a new phase in his writing, but also a political role that would be marked
at its end by intrigue, public allegiances and private betrayals, and the caprices of
absolute power: a Trauerspiel in which the tragic element would be signified by its
absence of allegory.
Notes to Chapter 6
1. See (hear!) Kanye West & Jay-Z, ‘No Church in the Wild,’ Watch the Throne (Track 1), Roc-a-
Fella Records, 2011. For a transcription, with invaluable commentary, of the lyrics, cf. <http://
rapgenius.com/Kanye-west-no-church-in-the-wild-lyrics#note-356508>.
2. In addition to the early version of these remarks I debuted at the Oxford conference on Der
Nister in August 2012, I have had the great good fortune to present subsequent drafts of this
work-in-progress at a public lecture sponsored by the YIVO Institute; a symposium sponsored by
the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto; the biennial German-Jewish Studies
Workshop at Duke University; the 2013 conference of the American Comparative Literature
Association (ACLA); and a Yiddish-language seminar at Monash University. The audience at
each of these venues has my thanks for their attention and response to my research. Thanks as
well to Lindsey Blank of the Naomi Foundation, Rachel Seelig at the University of Toronto,
Steffen Kaupp at Duke University, Marketa Holtebrinck, who co-organized my seminar at
ACLA, and Hinde Ena Burstin at Monash for lending so much support to my research. Thanks
foremost and unceasingly to my colleague and comrade Kata B. Gellén for her insightful and
generous engagement with my work since we first met at Duke.
3. Der Nister, Gedakht, Tsveyter band (Berlin: Jüdischer Literarischer Verlag, 1923), p. 135.
Subsequent references incorporated in text as ‘Y.’ I owe thanks to my friend and colleague Dov-
Ber Kerler for making this extraordinarily rare edition available to me.
4. ‘A Tale of Kings’, ed. & trans. by Joachim Neugroschel, Great Tales of Jewish Fantasy and the Occult
(Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1976; 1997), p. 460. Subsequent references incorporated into
text as ‘E.’
5. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso,
1998), p. 62.
6. Benjamin, p. 69.
7. For this distinction I am humbly indebted to my friend Mikhail Krutikov, who in personal
correspondence regarding my work in progress cautioned me against identifying the baroque
too exclusively with Benjamin’s idiosyncratic and Western, German-centred understanding
of the period. Baroque architecture, as he counselled, was a dominant architectural style in
Poland and the Ukraine, and it was by no means experienced in these regions as either belated
or ruinous, as Benjamin understands it. Kingship, similarly, was not synonymous with tyranny
in the Commonwealth of Poland — which was dismantled over the course of Reb Nakhman’s
youth, from 1772 to 1795 — since kings were chosen by the consensus of an aristocratic
oligarchy.
8. Max Weinreich, Bilder fun der yidisher literaturgeshikhte: fun di onheybn biz Mendele Moykher-Sforim
(Vilnius: Farlag Tomor, 1928), pp. 273–74. The translation is my own, and taken from my
book How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 37. By way of more recent scholarship, Jean
Baumgarten’s Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. by Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), offers little to contradict Weinreich’s assessment; his chapter on
‘Yiddish Narrative’ (pp. 296–327) focuses primarily on the 1602 compilation Dos Mayse-bukh,
itself a reworking of multiple, mostly venerable, sources; the following chapter, ‘Terrestrial
Suffering in a Topsy-Turvy World,’ confirms the historical, rather than belletristic, character of
baroque-era Yiddish writing: ‘Contrary to any static conception of “popular literature”, early
Yiddish texts remain at all times firmly anchored in history and thus themselves function as
direct responses to the tribulations experienced by the Jews’ (p. 328).
9. Benjamin, p. 68.
10. Y. L. Peretz, of course, is the mediating figure between Reb Nakhman and Der Nister, and he
wrote fairy tales, among other storytelling genres, in pursuit of a neo-Romantic aesthetic. Such
tales, however, include an ironic rhetoric that connects them as much to shtetl satire as to, for
example, the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. Moreover, unlike Reb Nakhman
or Der Nister, Peretz’s stories are explicitly Judaized, a localizing and often bathetic gesture that
contributes to their humour, their poetics, and their political implications. Not inconsiderable is
his designation of these stories as folkshtimlekh [in the manner of folklore] rather than fairy tales
(vunder-mayses).
11. Of course, King Solomon — characterized traditionally as the author of at least three books
of the Bible: Song of Songs, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes — might be offered with considerable
justification as an additional candidate for this pantheon. And yet, isn’t it precisely the success of
his reign, avoiding most of the pitfalls of his father’s legacy and achieving almost all his father
had failed to accomplish, that accounts for how anomalous his story is in the context of Jewish
kings?
12. I owe this insight to Professor Shlomo Berger. In his book Producing Redemption in Amsterdam:
Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2013), he notes, for example,
the 1780 publication of a Purimshpil with the title Er retung der Yudn durkh Ester und Mordkhe,
Troyer shpil und fraydlekhes ende (p. 69).
13. Of the thirteen stories that comprise the Seyfer sipurey mayses, eleven of them make explicit use
of monarchy as a central motif or preoccupation.
14. Benjamin, p. 97.
15. The edition of the Seyfer sipurey mayses quoted here was published in Jerusalem by Makhon
‘Toyres haNetsakh’ Breslov in 1991 — in citations here referred to as ‘Y.’ There are two primary
translations of the complete stories in English: the translation published by the Bratslav Hasidim
themselves is Rabbi Nachman’s Stories, trans. by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan (New York: Breslov
Research Institute, 1983); a more straightforward edition is Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales, trans.
by Arnold J. Band (New York: Paulist Press, 1978). Although I will translate citations myself
from the Yiddish, page numbers will be taken from the Kaplan translation, elsewhere referred
to as ‘E,’ unless otherwise stated.
16. At the same time that Reb Nakhman created this story, he made the fateful decision to destroy
one of his books before it could be published. According to both Joseph Weiss and Arthur Green,
the decision to burn this work was connected with the diagnosis of his terminal condition: Reb
Nakhman believed that his tuberculosis was a punishment for the ideas expressed in the burned
book. Although the content of this book, of course, is lost to history, both Weiss and Green offer
the persuasive hypothesis that this book argued for Reb Nakhman’s status as the messiah. See
Joseph Weiss, ‘Sense and Nonsense in Defining Judaism: The Strange Case of Nahman of Brazlav’,
in Studies in East European Jewish Mysticism & Hasidism, ed. by David Goldstein (London: Littman
Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997), pp. 266–67; Arthur Green, Tormented Master: The Life and
Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav [1979] (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing,
1992), pp. 233–44. The fragmentary nature of mayse zayn, similarly, seems to be connected to
the fate of the burned book, and therefore, to what Weiss refers to as ‘an acute crisis of identity
in Nahman’s life’ (Weiss, p. 267). For more (much more!) on Reb Nakhman’s suppressed and
apocryphal manuscripts, see Zvi Mark, The Scroll of Secrets: The Hidden Messianic Vision of R.
Nachman of Breslav, trans. by Naftali Moses (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010.)
17. This story’s elliptical preamble actually recapitulates the opening of the first story in the
collection, In veg hob ikh dertseylt a mayse. vos ver es hot zi gehert hot gehat a hirhur tshuve un dos iz di
108 Marc Caplan
mayse [On the way I told a story, and whoever heard it had instantaneous thoughts of repentance,
and this is the story] (Y 1). This reworking of the first — and equally fragmentary — story’s first
sentence not only suggests that the seventh story should be read as initiating a new phase in the
development of these narratives, but since it occurs at the beginning of the book’s second half,
it also calls attention to the ultimately symmetrical structure of the collection as a whole, not in
spite of its frequent recourse to fragmentation, but all the more so because of it.
18. In Yiddish, er hot af zikh gehat kame milkhomes shvere un hot zey koyvesh geven. The verb koyvesh
zayn [to conquer], an apparent neologism of Reb Nakhman’s own coinage, forms a word play
with akovish [spider] in the story’s title.
19. The custom of masquerading in the clothing of other nations figures prominently in Nikolai
Gogol’s early story ‘St John’s Eve’; describing Cossack wedding festivities, Gogol writes, ‘They
used to dress in disguises — my God, they no longer looked like human beings! [...] How is it
now? They just copy the Gypsies or the Muscovites. No, it used to be one would dress up as a
Jew and another as a devil, and first they’d kiss each other and then grab each other’s topknots
[...] God help us! You had to hold your sides from laughter. They’d get dressed up in Turkish
or Tartar costumes: everything blazes like fire....’; see The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans.
by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1999), pp. 13–14. In
both of these stylized tales, an ostensibly ethnographic observation about the authors’ shared
Ukrainian environment conveys anxiety about the disparity between appearance and reality,
and foreshadows the fantastic destabilization of identity that characterizes the main action of
the story.
20. The King’s dream serendipitously echoes a passage from Andreas Gryphius’s drama Leo
Armenius, which Benjamin cites as representative of the Trauerspiel genre: ‘Er zagt vor einem
schwerdt. Wenn er zu tische geht, | Wird der gemischte wein, der in crystalle steht, | In gall
und gift verkehrt. Alsbald der tag erblichen, | Kommt die beschwärzte schaar, das heer der
angst geschlichen, | Und wacht in seinem bett. Er kan in helffenbein, | In purpur und scharlat
niemahl so ruhig seyn | Als die, so ihren leib vertraun der harten erden. | Mag ja der kurtze
schlaff ihm noch zu theile werden, | So fällt ihm Morpheus an und mahlt ihm in der nacht
| Durch graue bilder vor, was er bey lichte dacht, | Und schreckt ihn bald mit blut, bald mit
gestürztem throne, | Mit brandt, mit ach un [sic] tod und hingeraubter crone’ [‘He quails
before his own sword. When he dines, the mingled wine that is served in crystal turns to gall
and poison. As soon as the day is over the sabled throng, the army of dread creeps up and lies
awake in his bed. In ivory, purple, and scarlet he can never be so peaceful as those who entrust
their bodies to the hard earth. And if he should still be granted a short sleep, then Morpheus
assails him and paints before him, at night-time, in gloomy pictures, what he thought by day,
terrifying him with blood, with disenthronement, with conf lagration, with woe and death and
the loss of his crown’]; original and translation in Benjamin, pp. 143–44.
21. As my friend and colleague Miriam Udel has suggested to me, when the king wished to mock
the Jews, they were a nation like any other; when he wishes to join them, he decides to convert
to Judaism, religiously, in a manner quite different from, say, ‘converting’ to German, English,
or Chinese. Reb Nakhman’s sense of the anxiety that Jewishness raises in its ambiguity as both
a religion and a nation is yet another indication of how presciently modern his storytelling
preoccupations are.
22. Benjamin similarly attributes ‘the melancholic’s inclination for long journeys’ (p. 149) to a
combination of astrological and pre-modern medical theories that form the intellectual basis for
the Trauerspiel’s understanding of melancholy. These factors in turn call to mind the degree to
which Reb Nakhman’s worldview, shaped in every respect by the late-medieval/Renaissance
conceptual vocabulary of cabbala, remains tied to the intellectual constellations of pre-modern
and proto-modern epochs, even though when he depicts these ideas in narrative form, he
initiates a critique of modernity that anticipates both the style and substance of later modernist
aesthetics.
23. In Yiddish, sammoney hakatores — literally, the ‘herbs of incense’ (Y 118).
24. In Yiddish, Samael, referred to by the Loshn-koydesh abbreviation samekh-mem.
25. Green quotes from two sources, Khayey MoHaRa”N II 2:42 and Shivkhey HaRa”N II 35: ‘The
end of knowledge is (the realization) that we do not know.’ See Green, p. 294. For a very
different, ultimately persuasive, interpretation of Reb Nakhman’s dictum, see Zvi Mark,
Mysticism and Madness: The Religious Thought of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (London: Continuum,
2009), particularly Chapter 7, pp. 218–46. In Mark’s reading, this statement is not so much
a license for intellectualized agnosticism as it is an imperative for a faith that surpasses the
intellect and the capacity for rational understanding. To a certain extent, although his book only
examines a single story from the Seyfer sipurey mayses, and that incompletely, Mark’s explanation
of this concept complements the experience of The King Who Fought Many Wars in this tale.
26. Weiss, pp. 258–59.
27. As quoted in David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 26. Roskies’ source is Arnold Band’s translation of the
sipurey mayses, pp. 32–33.
28. See, for instance, E 147 and 151; Weiss, pp. 265–66.
29. Biographical evidence suggests that the feud between Reb Nakhman and the Shpoler zeyde was
almost entirely of Reb Nakhman’s own making. Not only did he choose to settle at the onset
of his career in proximity to Reb Aryeh Leyb’s sphere of inf luence — literally infringing on
his turf, in violation of the protocol that obtained among Hasidic leaders of the day — but he
engaged in personal attacks on the zeyde’s integrity, apparently without justification. On this
subject, see Green, pp. 100–02. Once the battle was joined, however, Reb Aryeh Leyb proved to
be a fierce and relentless opponent, and it was largely because of his efforts that Reb Nakhman
remained such a marginal figure, both during his day and subsequently, in the development of
Hasidism as a whole. Despite the genuine and well-documented mutual antipathy between the
two tsadikim, Joseph Weiss describes a dream recorded in Reb Nakhman’s writings about a year
before his death in which the Shpoler zeyde figures in a positive light, apparently vindicated as
a proper reprover of Reb Nakhman’s transgressions, rather than a slanderer or provocateur. See
Weiss, pp. 261–66.
30. By the same token, an equally valuable, though elusive, allegorical clue to the story can be
identified in Reb Nakhman’s description of the King’s ‘Book of Customs’ as a seyfer rather than
a bukh; as any student of Yiddish recognizes, the term seyfer in Yiddish is reserved exclusively
for a sacred Jewish text, whereas a bukh would refer to any non-sacral or non-Jewish text.
The King Who Fought Many Wars relies on a seyfer that in turn brings him to a Mountain.
Within the Jewish tradition, the most significant figure who comes of age believing himself to
be a non-Jewish aristocrat is the Biblical Moses, who received the Book of Books, the Torah,
on a mountain, Sinai. This in turn suggests that the seyfer from which the king learned the
customs of all people is the Torah itself, since altsding shteyt in toyre [everything is included in
the Torah]. However compelling this homiletical reading might seem, it certainly constitutes a
reordering of the original narrative: instead of Moses bringing the Torah to the Jewish people,
in Reb Nakhman’s version, the Torah brings Moses to discover his own Jewishness! Moreover,
identifying the king with both Moses and Reb Nakhman raises interesting prospects for
what Weiss among other commentators have imputed as the crypto-messianic implications of
Reb Nakhman’s thought, but in exegetical terms it suggests that instead of a single homiletic
explanation, Reb Nakhman offers a proliferation of allegories.
31. In this regard, a word on methodology is perhaps in order: following a presentation of this
argument in its early stages, my teacher Dan Miron stated that hearing my interpretation as it
then stood, one might never recognize that Reb Nakhman was a religious leader intensively
engaged in a life of traditional Jewish learning, and dedicated to guiding his followers in a
path informed by cabbalistic sources in order to maintain the religious traditions they had
inherited. As ever, his critique was well-taken, and I hope that in this version Reb Nakhman’s
religious motivations and commitments are clearer than they had been. Nonetheless, part of the
experiment to which this interpretation is dedicated is to see what can be learned by reading
Reb Nakhman’s stories not just as a compendium of his rabbinic and mystical learning — an
objective pursued essentially by every previous commentator — but as narratives, subject to
the same conventions of literary structure, language, and aesthetic logic as any other work of
fiction.
32. Benjamin, p. 178.
33. In the original German, provided with the translation, Verleumbdungs-Blitz, Hoffahrts-Gifft,
110 Marc Caplan
Unschulds-Zedern, Freundschaffts-Blut (Benjamin, p. 198); all of these examples are taken from
Johann Christian Hallmann’s Mariamne (1670).
34. Thus Stéphane Mallarmé writes in a feuilleton, ‘the dancer is not a woman dancing, for these
juxtaposed reasons: that she is not a woman, but a metaphor summing up one of the elementary
aspects of our form: knife, goblet, f lower, etc., and that she is not dancing, but suggesting, through
the miracle of bends and leaps, a kind of corporal writing what it would take pages of prose,
dialogue, and description to express, if it were transcribed: a poem independent of any scribal
apparatus.’ See Divigations, trans. by Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007), p. 130 (emphasis in original). Benjamin picks up on Mallarmé’s suggestive incorporation
of allegorical significance onto the body of the dancer by suggesting that the pictorial element
of baroque poetry — the juxtaposition of image, text, and gesture that constitutes allegory —
results in the dissipation of baroque drama and its supersession by the ballet (p. 95).
35. Gilles Deleuze: The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 31.
36. In this regard Valery Bryusov, a leading representative of the Russian symbolists from whom
Der Nister at the beginning of his career took some of his primary cues, wrote in 1905: ‘It was
enough to realize that all the world is in me, and our modern understanding of art was born. Like
the realists, we recognized life as the only subject of art. But while the realists sought life outside
themselves, we sought it only within ourselves.’ Quoted in Delphine Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work,
1907–1929: A Study of a Yiddish Symbolist (Bern: Peter Lang, 1990), p. 40 (emphasis in original).
37. Der Nister, of course, returns to these conventional settings in his Socialist Realist phase,
particularly the novel Di Mishpokhe Mashber. There, Reb Nakhman’s inf luence is displaced from
questions of form and allegory to thematic content. It nevertheless never disappears entirely, but
only finds another avenue for hiding in plain sight.
38. As David Roskies richly suggests: Bridge of Longing, p. 26.
39. As my most perceptive interlocutor in this project has pointed out to me, the guards in ‘Before
the Law’ are not baroque courtiers, but act more like bureaucrats, functionaries, Angestellten.
Their authority rests in a rational, if inscrutable, institution, not in monarchy or divine rule;
the capriciousness of this order is a consequence of modern indecipherability, not baroque
mysticism. By contrast, if one were to seek a German-Jewish modernist preoccupied with the
baroque themes of kingship, nostalgia for the old order, and melancholy in the face of imperial
collapse, a better choice might be Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch (1932). This parallel, and the
larger question of Roth’s complicated relationship to both modernism and his own Jewishness
— each symptoms of a temporal, cultural, and linguistic peripherality that he both embraced
and repressed — is a subject worth considering at far greater length and depth than can be
undertaken here.
Chapter 7
v
‘Turning My Soul Inside Out’:

Text and Context of The Family Mashber
Mikhail Krutikov
Getting out from ‘Under a Fence’

Considering Der Nister’s reputation as an elitist modernist with an inclination to
mystical symbolism, it may come as a surprise that in the 1920s he was celebrated
by some leading Soviet critics as a harbinger of new revolutionary art. In his
symbolist tales Der Nister rediscovered the ‘cosmic materiality of the world’, wrote
Nokhum Oyslender in 1924. Der Nister’s poetic version of mayse breyshis — the
mystery of the creation of the world — was not a mystical vision, but a ‘symbol
of the awakening historical raw matter, the symbol of the continuing cosmic
happening’. In his symbolist tales Der Nister depicted the world in the process of
creation — which, as Oyslender claimed, could also be interpreted as the world
in the process of the revolution. Another key trope of Der Nister’s symbolist tales,
the figure of a wanderer in pursuit of a mysterious quest — an obvious homage
to the Hasidic image of the Tsadik — was reinterpreted by Oyslender as a proto-
revolutionary hero who is ‘deeply rooted in active optimism and closely connected
with the socio-historical experience’. Thus, Oyslender enthusiastically proclaimed,
the wanderer motif could ‘rightfully become the departure point of a new tradition
in modern Yiddish literature’.1
Another admirer of Der Nister was Moyshe Litvakov, the inf luential Communist
critic and the powerful editor of the Moscow newspaper Der emes [The Truth], the
Yiddish equivalent of the Russian Pravda. In 1926 Litvakov declared: ‘Der Nister is
one of the deepest phenomena in our literature. He has come from the depths of
popular Hasidism, and he draws his literary and artistic nourishment from Peretz.
The origins of his art are buried in the remote age of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav.’2
Litvakov then offered a remarkable insight into the nature of the writer’s art:
He is searching, Der Nister — he is searching for the secret of the world, of
the human world order, of the individualized meaning of the people, of his
own artistic ‘self ’. He is an indefatigable ‘wanderer’ from his own works, and
on his way he generously distributes tales and parables, legends and riddles full
of fantastic characters from Hasidic folklore [...] This is an original, thoroughly
Jewish poet who searches for a way to artistic universalism.3
Like Oyslender, Litvakov tried to reinterpret the metaphysical Hasidic quest for
divine truth in a radically secular sense. According to the opinion of these Soviet
112 Mikhail Krutikov
critics, the Jewish cultural heritage need not be discarded. It had only to be
thoroughly cleansed of its religious meaning, and the resulting material would then
be usable for the building of a new secular and communist Yiddish culture. Litvakov
concluded his assessment of Der Nister’s work on a hopeful note: ‘we follow him
arduously, hoping with fast-beating heart that any moment the nister (hidden one)
can become a nigle (revealed one), that he would reveal to us the hidden secret of
ideas and the social meaning of the Hasidic element, that we will be dazzled by
the sun-beams of Hasidic-folkstimlekhn universalism.’4 Litvakov referred here to a
Hasidic concept, according to which the first part of the genuine tsadik’s mission
was to remain hidden from the world and engage in wandering for the duration of
his spiritual search. Only after that could he reveal himself through miracles and
establish his presence in the world. Had he lived, Litvakov would certainly have
admired The Family Mashber as the revelation of Der Nister’s hidden realistic genius,
but he perished in the Gulag in 1937, two years before the publication of the first
part of the novel.
Apart from Oyslender and Litvakov, Der Nister had other inf luential supporters
among the members of Soviet literary establishment who played a decisive role in
the success of The Family Mashber. Isaac Nusinov, a professor of world literature at
several prestigious Moscow universities, was the editor of the first part, published
in 1939, while the prolific critic and literary theorist Aron Gurshteyn served as the
editor of the second, 1941 edition. In his introduction to Der Nister’s collection
Gedakht (1929), which included the novella ‘Under a Fence’ along with other
symbolist stories and was published in the prestigious Yidishe shrayber [Yiddish
Writers] series by the Kiev Kultur-Lige press, Nusinov defended Der Nister’s
right to use symbolist style, as long as the writer remained loyal to the communist
regime: ‘his way of understanding our reality remains the way of symbolic exegesis,
of interpretation through symbolic images. But it is up to Der Nister that this
interpretation should serve the revolutionary “New Spirit”.’5
The publication of the dark and obscure novella ‘Under a Fence’6 enraged the
zealots of proletarian literature, most of whom were associated with the Soviet
Yiddish cultural and academic institutions in Minsk. They attacked Der Nister for
‘reactionary and petit-bourgeois morals’, and ‘empty metaphysics, mysticism, ideal
ism, and ubiquitous reaction’.7 Although Der Nister was the primary target and
victim of this ideological critique, the whole campaign was part of a wider struggle
between Yiddish cultural institutions in Kiev and Minsk for political domination
over Soviet Yiddish culture. Yet it would be simplistic to explain Der Nister’s
creative crisis at the turn of the 1930s solely by the external circumstances such as the
intensifying political pressure or economic hardships. By that time symbolism as a
creative method had by and large exhausted itself, giving way either to more radical
forms of avant-garde such as expressionism or to the more traditional psychological
realism. As Khone Shmeruk points out, in ‘Under a Fence’ ‘Der Nister himself had
predicted that he would abandon the symbolist’s tower’.8 Between 1929 and 1935
Der Nister was not able to publish his original fiction and had to earn his meagre
living by what he described as ‘technical jobs’ such as translation, editing and journal
ism. But this was also a time of intensive creative search for new literary forms.
‘Turning My Soul Inside Out’ 113
Writing the Novel: The Personal Story

In 1934 Der Nister decided to write a letter to his brother Motl (Max Kaganovitch)
who by that time already owned a prominent art gallery in Paris. Without a further
ado, he came to the point: ‘Tayerer Motl, ikh vil zikh nit farentfern far dir, far
vos ikh shrayb dir nit di gantse tsayt, vayl ikh kon zikh nit farentfern [...] ikh volt
oykh itst nit geshribn, ven nit eyne a vikhtike zakh, vos tsvingt mikh tsu dir zikh
vendn. S’handlt zikh vegn mir’ [Dear Motl, I do not want to apologize for not
writing to you all this time [...] I would not write to you even now, if it were not
for an important issue that forces me to turn to you. It’s about myself ]. Der Nister
explained his predicament: Kharkov, where he lived, had ceased to be the capital of
the Soviet Ukrainian Republic. As a result, the publishing houses which provided
him with occasional jobs were moving to Kiev. For him, however, ‘forn keyn
Kiev iz ummeglekh, vayl a dire dort tsu krign inem itstikn moment iz oysgeshlosn’
[moving to Kiev is out of question, because to get an apartment there is impossible];
this was due to the shortage of housing there and the high prices.
Der Nister went on to explain his position in Soviet literature:
Az du vest fregn: far vos hob ikh zikh farnumen nor mit tekhnisher arbet un
nisht mit shraybn eygene, originele zakhn? — Vel ikh dir entfern, az dos, vos
ikh hob geshribn biz aher, iz bay undz itst shtark opgefregt, s’iz zeyer a geshlogn
artikl. Simbolizm hot in ratnfarband keyn ort nit. Un ikh, vi dir iz bavust, bin
fun ale yorn a simbolist — ibergeyn fun simbolizm tsu realizm iz far a mentshn,
vi ikh, velkher hot a sakh gehorevet af tsu farfolkomen zayn metod un oyfn fun
shtaybn — zeyer shver. Dos iz nisht keyn frage fun tekhnik, do muz men vi af
s’nay geboyrn vern, do muz men iberkern di neshome af di andere zayt.
[And if you ask: why have I been doing only technical jobs and not writing my
own original works? — I will answer that what I have written until now is very
much unsalable, it’s a very stale merchandise. There is no place for symbolism in
the Soviet Union. And I, as you know, have for all these years been a symbolist.
To switch from symbolism to realism for someone like me, who has worked
so hard to perfect his method and style of writing, is very difficult. This is not
a question of technique, for this one has to be born anew, one has to turn his
soul inside out.]
After a long period of ref lection Der Nister finally found himself ‘aruf af a veg’
[on his way]: ‘Ikh hob ongehoybn shraybn a bukh, loyt mayn meynung un loyt
der meynung fun noente bakante, a vikhtikn. Ikh vil dem bukh vidmenen ale
mayne koykhs, vos ikh farmog. S’handlt zikh vegn mayn gantsn dor — fun dem,
vos ikh hob gezen, gehert, ibergelebt un oysgefantazirt’ [I have started writing a
book, according to my opinion and to the opinion of my close acquaintances, an
important one. I want to dedicate all my energy to this book. It’s about my entire
generation — about what I saw, heard, experienced and imagined]. Writing this
book was for Der Nister a question of life and death: ‘un shraybn mayn bukh muz
ikh, oyb nit, bin ikh oys mentsh, oyb nit, ver ikh oysgemekt fun der literatur, un
fun lebedikn lebn’ [and I must write my book. If I don’t, it will be the end of me
as a human being. If I don’t, I will be erased from literature and from the life of
the living]. Writing for Der Nister was equal to living — ‘vos s’heyst a shrayber,
velkher shraybt nit [...] dos heist, er ekzistirt nit, er iz nito af der velt...’ [What is a
writer who does not write [?] [...] it means that he does not exist, he is not part of
the world...].9
Being away from the new capital and its institutions could liberate him from
the routine work and enable him to concentrate on his book project. But he
needed money to live on, and this was the reason for writing the letter. Altogether
Der Nister asked Motl for a sum equivalent to fifty pounds sterling, to be paid
in instalments over two years while he was writing his novel. During this time
he hoped to ‘shteln zikh oyf di fis als shrayber’ [get on my feet as a writer]. The
decision to ask his brother for help was not easy for Der Nister. He called their
whole family ‘aristokratishe kaptsonim’ [aristocratic paupers] who were not used to
asking for help, even in the direst circumstances. But after a long deliberation he
came to a conclusion that it was merely ‘narishkayt un puste gayve, un az gezunte
mentshn tuen nisht azoy, vorem iber nishtike gadles iz nisht keday keyn lebns tsu
farshpiln’ [silliness and empty pride; healthy people do not behave like this because
it is not worth losing one’s life over vain self-importance]. The only condition that
Der Nister made was that this help should not come at the expense of their mother,
and he also insisted that neither she nor their sister Khana, who lived in Kiev, should
know anything about his ‘bad time’.10 The problem of Der Nister’s poverty was also
discussed by his Moscow colleagues; the critic Meir Wiener wrote to Gurshteyn in
1935: ‘[I] have received news that Nister is literally starving in Kharkov. It’s a shame
on all of us.’11
From the following letters we learn that Motl was sending some money to his
brother, although not as frequently as Der Nister hoped. Der Nister thanked Motl for
the cheques and provided information about his work and their mother’s condition
but without much personal detail. He was dreaming of a reunion with the brother:
‘akh, vi s’volt zikh gevolt zayn mit dir, mit dir a groysn shmues ton far azoyfil yorn
zikh nit zen: vos yederer fun undz hot durkhgelebt, vos durkhgemakht?’ [Oh, how
much I would like to see you, to have a long conversation with you after so many
years that we have not seen each other: what each of us has been through in his life,
what he has done].12 But in his response to Max’s inquiries about life in the Soviet
Union Der Nister was careful not so say anything that departed from the official
Party line: ‘Ikh volt dir gerotn leyenen undzer prese tog-teglekh. Di “Pravda” un di
“Izvestie”. Yeder numer iz a lid, a poeme. S’vert dort dertseylt fun undzere virklekhe
kolosale derfolgn af ale gebitn.’ [I would recommend you to read every day our press,
Pravda and Izvestia. Every issue is a song, a poem. They tell about our real colossal
successes in all areas].13 This letter appears to have been written in the late spring of
1935, since Pinkhas recommended his brother to follow the International Writers’
Congress for the Defence of Culture which took place in Paris in June 1935. Der
Nister also reported that the publication of the first chapters of the novel was received
well by Kiev writers: ‘in der gantser yidisher prese iz geven gemoldn derfun vi fun
maynem a groysn derfolg un az dos vet opshpiln a hipshe rol in der nayer sovetisher
yidisher literatur’ [the entire Yiddish press reported on it as my great success,
pointing out that it will play a significant role the new Soviet Yiddish literature].14
The beginning of the correspondence between the brothers coincides with

several important events which not only made the publication of the novel possible
but also contributed to its critical success. The formation of the Soviet Writers’
Union in 1934 consolidated the ideological monopoly of the Communist Party
over literature, while also providing consistent material support for many writers.
Although Der Nister remained close to the bottom of the Soviet literary hierarchy,
he also benefitted from his membership of the Writers’ Union: soon after the mass
migration of the Ukrainian literary elite from Kharkov to Kiev he was able to move
into a free apartment in the writers’ cooperative, Slovo. He could also make use
of the Union’s recreation facilities, where writers would get subsidized board and
lodging. Yet his financial situation remained dire even after the publication of the
novel, aggravated by the deteriorating health of his daughter Hodl, who lived in
Leningrad.
The publication of the novel, which was appearing in chapters and in book form
between 1935 and 1941, created a great deal of anxiety for its author. Immediately
after the publication of the first part as a book in the summer of 1939 he began
preparing the next edition. On 31 August 1939 he wrote to his friend Aron
Gurshteyn, who was the editor of the second edition (the first part was edited by
Nusinov):
Ikh hob tsu aykh a bakoshe. Mayn materieler shtand is aykh bavust: shof l, vos
shof ler kon nit zayn. Dos eyntsike, vos kon mikh rateven, iz aroysgebn a tsveyt-
oyf lage fun ‘Mashber’ (di ershte hot mir gezogt Finkelshteyn, iz shoyn tsegan).
[...] Tsit tsu dem eysek Nusinovn, Markish, u. a. v. Zogt zey, az on dem iz mayn
lebn keyn lebn. Ikh bin shoyn mir mid fun kaptsones. Der yakres vert vos a tog
greser un mayne fardinstn kon ikh aroysbakumen nor fun ot der oyf lage.15
[I have a request for you. You are aware of my material situation: it’s so low
that it can’t be lower. The only thing that can save me is the second edition of
Mashber (the first one, I was told by Finkelshteyn, is already sold out) [...] Ask
for help from Nusinov, Markish, and so on. Tell them that without it my life is
not a life. I am already tired of poverty. Prices go up every day, and I can only
get my income from that edition.]
In case Der emes press turned down the second edition, Der Nister intended to turn
to the Ukrainian National Minorities Press (Ukrnatsfarlag). He planned to add eight
new printer’s sheets, counting on an honorarium of up to one thousand roubles per
sheet.16 The intervention by prominent figures probably helped, and Der emes took
on the publication of the second edition. In November 1939 Der Nister promised
to send Gurshteyn eleven new printer’s sheets for editing, urging him anxiously: ‘Ir
veyst nit, in vos far a shtand ikh bin itster. Ikh farloz zikh oyf ayere getraye hant,
az ir vet nit onrirn dem binyen, vos hot mikh gekost azoyfil mi un markh. Ikh
farloz zikh oyf ayer tsikhtikn gevisn, vos vet aykh unterzogn az oyb m’vet mir itst
makhn shverikaytn, shteyn in a gefar mayn gore vayterdike arbet afn gikh’ [You
don’t know what a state I am in now. I rely on your steady hand, [hope] that you
will not touch the building that has cost me so much labour and marrow. I rely on
your clear conscience, which will tell you that if someone creates problems for me
now, then my entire future work is in danger].17
Der Nister was very anxious about the possible actions of his enemies:
Ikh bin azoy, oykh vild arufgeshroyft — aleyn nor fun der doyerndiker un
mifuler arbet, bifrat fun dem, vos oysvurfn un karyeristn-grafomanen viln mir
tsushraybn dos, vos kh’hob in lebn nit in zinen gehat. Gedenkt eyns, tayerer:
far azoyne vi di Orshanskis, vil ikh shoyn keynmol nit yoytse zayn. S’geyt zey
nit in ideologie, s’geyt zey in mayn ekzistents, vos iz zey azoy a dorn in oyg.
Zey voltn gevolt nisht farginen dos lebn nisht aykh, nisht Markishn, Kvitkon,
Bergelsonen un keynem fun undzere, nor benegeye ale andere iz zeyer geven
tumpik, benegeye mir — vos kost zey onshraybn vuhin me darf az ikh idealizir,
klompersht, vos m’darf nit, u. a. v.18
[I am so wildly wrought up — from the long and hard work alone, but especially
from those bastards and careerist graphomaniacs who want to attribute to me
something that I never had in my mind. Remember one thing, my dear: for
those like Orshanski I will never be innocent. They don’t care about ideology,
they care about my existence, I am for them like a thorn in the eye. Never
in their life will they forgive you, Markish, Kvitko, Bergelson, or anybody
else from our lot, but they are too weak to reach the others; but when I am
concerned — what does it cost them to drop a line to the ‘right place’ [the secret
police] that I allegedly idealize what should not be idealized, and so on.]
He was clearly fearing another round of the ideological campaign that silenced him
ten years earlier, which had been initiated by the Minsk camp of the proletarian
writers. Now Ber Orshanski was one of the very few veteran survivors of that camp
after the purges of 1936–37. In the letter Der Nister clearly identifies with the Kiev
Group as undzere [our lot], and appeals to their group solidarity. The political climate
in 1939 was markedly different from 1929, and the Kiev Group now dominated
Soviet Yiddish literature. An important signal of the change was the rehabilitation
of Y. L. Peretz, a somewhat peculiar side effect of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
which accorded the eastern parts of Poland to the Soviet Union. In the new political
situation Yiddish culture was mobilized for the task of Sovietization of the Jewish
population in the new territories, and the figure of Peretz, the third founding father
of the Yiddish canon, signified the incorporation of Polish Yiddish literary tradition
into the Soviet canon.19 Responding to the news about the upcoming celebration of
Peretz’s ninetieth anniversary, Der Nister wrote to Gurshteyn on the last day of 1939:
‘An ek mitn kherem oyf aza gvaldiker kraft, vi Perets! Oys bafelshte sotsiologie, un
oys monen bay eynem dos, vos er hot nit, un nit bamerkn, vos er farmogt yo! [...]
tsvantsik yor hobn farshidene idsekishe shlek in literatur gehaltn unter a shlos aza
shtik shrayber!’ [An end to the ban (kherem) on such a mighty force as Peretz! No
more fake sociology, and no more demands that one deliver something he does not
have instead of appreciating what he does have! [...] For twenty years the literary
pests of Evsektsiia [ Jewish sections of the Communist Party] have kept such a great
writer under lock and key!].20
Der Nister interpreted the rehabilitation of Peretz as the official repudiation of
the ‘sociological’ approach to literature which created so many troubles for Der
Nister who was widely known as Peretz’s follower. ‘Kh’bin avade shuldik Peretsn’
[I certainly owe it to Peretz], he wrote to Gurstheyn in response to a request to
write an article on Peretz. In the end, however, he wrote nothing, explaining
that he was too exhausted and depressed to take on any other work in addition to
finishing the novel.21 Der Nister was probably hoping that he, like Peretz, would
be appreciated not for what he did not have, but for what he did have. Der Nister
relied on Gurshteyn’s support for the novel and eagerly awaited his review of the
first part. He urged him to publish the review not only in the Yiddish press but
also in the Russian Literaturnaya Gazeta: ‘dos iz dos beste ort. Ale leyenen zi [that’s
the best place. Everyone reads it].22 Der Nister was very pleased when the review
appeared, in June 1940, and mentioned it to Gurshteyn, referring to a letter from
Markish saying that it had made a good impression on Moscow writers (except
for Bergelson, for whom the praise of Der Nister’s novel apparently created some
‘shvere iberlebung’ [emotional distress].23 Der Nister was especially pleased that the
review was addressed to the general Russian readership.
Despite the intrigues of the grafomanisher moser [graphomaniac informer]
Orshanski and the katsev-yung [butcher boy] Fish, ‘vos zey darfn fun mesires tsien
zeyer khayune, vi verim fun kez’ [who feed on denunciations like worms on
cheese],24 and the problems with paper shortages,25 the publication of the second
edition proceeded, thanks to the support from Nusinov and Gurshteyn as well as
‘hundreds and thousands of readers’ who, according to the reports from various
libraries, were reading the novel with great interest.26 But the final composition and
the size of the second edition were probably affected by the machinations of people
such as Orshanski and Strongin, the director of Der emes. Der Nister was upset
that not all of his finished chapters had been included in the book. In February
1941 he discussed another denunciation (mesire) by Berl [Orshanski]: ‘epes filt mikh
di literatur, vayzt oys, vi a fremd-kerper, vemen zi darf oysshpayen un opsharn in a
zayt. Andersh kon ikh zikh mayn literarishn mazl nit derklern. [...] un efsher geyt es
fun Kiev — fun der Fefer-Kiever bande, velkhe iz oyfgetrogn biz blut af Nusinovn
un vil im durkh mir derlangen’ [somehow literature senses me an alien body that
it has to spit out and set aside. Otherwise I cannot explain my literary fortune. [...]
Maybe it comes from Kiev — from Fefer’s Kiev gang, which is thirsty for Nusinov’s
blood and wants to get at him through me].27 Here Der Nister again surmised —
supporting Gurshteyn’s assessment of the situation — that the attacks were directed
not merely against him but against ‘dos gantse Moskver bintl shrayber’ [the entire
Moscow bunch of writers], amongst which he apparently counted himself as well.28
Over and over again Der Nister bitterly complained about his poverty, which
bordered on starvation and general depression: ‘fregt zikh, iz tsu vos leb ikh? Ver
darf aza lebn? Un oyb ikh zol afile zayn a riz, vel ikh den aza mase ibertrogn un
zikh nit unterbrekhn [?]’ [a question: what do I live for? Who needs such a life? And
even if I were a giant, how can I carry such a heavy load and not break down?].29
The second edition of the novel appeared in print a few days before the German
invasion of the Soviet Union. According to the publication data on its back page,
it went to press in Vilnius on 13 June 1941 and had a print run of six thousand
copies. Der Nister did not see this edition until the liberation of Vilnius in 1944,
when it turned out that a few hundred copies of the book had survived the German
occupation.30 This edition is not listed in the comprehensive bibliography of Soviet
Jewish publication, and is absent from libraries outside the Soviet Union. In the
early 1980s, I was lucky to find a copy among discarded Yiddish books in the
Moscow synagogue. In his last letter to Gurshteyn, which was written in Russian
ten days after the outbreak of the Soviet–German war, Der Nister asked Gurshteyn
to take the advance copy of the second edition from the press and deposit it in the
Moscow Literary Museum, and to arrange for the honorarium to be sent to his
daughter in Leningrad. He concluded: ‘Don’t forget about me, write frequently and
in detail about everything and everybody. I especially ask you to reply to this letter
within the next few days, in Russian.’31 Within a month or so Gurshteyn enlisted
in the Writers’ Volunteer Unit and was killed in action defending Moscow. Der
Nister managed to escape from Kharkov and was evacuated to central Asia, from
where he came to Moscow in 1944.
Der Nister settled in Moscow where his wife was an actress at the State Yiddish
Theatre. A year earlier the first part of the novel had appeared in the New York
Ikuf Press as a reproduction of the Moscow 1939 edition in the Soviet (phonetic)
spelling. In a letter to Nakhman Mayzel, one of the founding members of the
Kiev Group who now became one of the leading figures in Ikuf (Yiddish Cultural
Union, a left-wing cultural association closely but not directly affiliated with the
American Communist Party), Der Nister complained that Mayzel had not con
sulted him before reprinting the first part and asked for his honorarium to be
transferred to him in Moscow. He wrote that for the 1939 edition he had received a
honorarium of 25,000 roubles, which was sufficient for him to live on for two years,
and he requested an adequate compensation for the American publication (he also
noted that he did not want it in cash but in ‘goods’ — probably in items of clothing
or household objects). His tone was firm:
Mit eynem vort: ikh mon oytor-rekht. Ershtns, ir zolt nit drukn on mayn
derloybenish; tsveytns, far dem, vos iz shoyn opgedrukt — aza sume honorar,
vif l ikh volt bakumen, ven di zakh volt gedrukt zayn bay undz, in ratn-farband.
Vegn tsveytn teyl vil ikh hobn fun aykh a geshribenem opmakh: vif l denkt ir
drukn un vos vel ikh derfun hobn.32
[In short: I demand my author’s rights. First, you shouldn’t publish without
my permission; second, for what has already been published — an amount
of honorarium equivalent to what I would have received if the book were
published here, in the Soviet Union. And I want to have a written contract for
the second part: how many copies you want to print and what shall I receive
for it.]
Der Nister further promised to send the text of the second part chapter by chapter,
contingent upon receiving a detailed response to all his demands, and concluded:
‘vegn zikh perzenlekh iz mir shver tsu shraybn: mir hobn zikh shoyn nisht gezen
a yor 25, iz fun vos heybt men on?’ [It’s difficult for me to write about myself: we
haven’t seen each other for about 25 years, so where does one start?].33 Although in
the following letters Der Nister’s tone softened somewhat, he remained reluctant to
offer information about himself: ‘vegn shraybn aykh a yedidey-brivl, vi ir zogt, iz
bimeynu oysgeshlosn. Vayl vey-vey, mir lebn dokh itst iber dem grestn khurbn fun
undzer geshikhte’ [in our days it’s impossible to write to you as to an old friend.
Because we live now through the greatest catastrophe of our history].34 Only the
conclusion of the letter sounded vaguely promising: ‘S’volt geven a yoysher mir zoln
zikh a mol konen zen un zikh oysredn far azoy fil yor. Tsi iz dos ober meglekh —
anu, pruvt, Nakhmen, un khapt zikh ariber fun ayer meever-leyam’ [It would be
the right thing to do for us to see each other some time and to get a load off our
minds for so many years. Is it possible — why don’t you, Nakhman, try and get
over here, overseas?].35
Der Nister’s attempts to get the new edition of the novel published in the Soviet
Union were not successful. In a letter to the writer Itsik Kipnis in Kiev in December
1947 Der Nister openly discussed his problems:
Ir vilt a ekzemplyar ‘Mashber’. Mit fargenign volt aykh gegebn, nor kh’hob
aleyn nit. Batrakht: in plan fun farlag ‘Emes’ gefin ikh zikh shoyn fun 44tn yor
on. Ot iz aykh 44, 45, 46, 47, un itster iz bald dos 48te un ikh bin nor alts in
dem ‘Emes’, un hashem yoydeye ven ikh vel aroyskrikhn. Faran, heyst es, gute
fraynt, vos mien zikh far mir, un zeyer mi vert gekroynt mit derfolg. Zey hobn
mikh derfirt tsu dem, az ikh hob gezogt: moykhl, kimat vi bimey VUSPP.
Zol zayn azoy. A ekzempliar fun ‘Mashber’ tsveyte fargreserte uf lage, vos iz
aroys in Vilne 1940 [sic], un vos fun ir iz geblibn nisht mer, vi a por hundert
ekzempliarn, velkhe zaynen shoyn, natirlekh, oysfarkoyft — vil ikh nit ir zolt
hobn. Vayl dos tsugekumene tsu der uf lage di dray kapitlen ‘demlt iz getrofn’,
‘tsvey toytn, eyn khasene’ un ‘bankrot’ bin ikh itst klal nit goyres. Kh’hob zey
ingatnsn ibergearbet. Ven ikh zol konen oyskoyfn di farblibene ekzempliarn
volt ikh es gern geton.36
[You want a copy of Mashber. I would have given it to you with pleasure, but I
don’t have one myself. Just think: the book has been in the publication plan of
Der emes since [19]44. So it’s been 44, 45, 46, 47, and soon it will be 48, and I am
still in Der emes, and God knows when it will crawl out.37 There must be some
good friends who are taking care of me, and their efforts are crowned with
success. They have brought me to a state where I have said: all right, now it’s
like in the days of VUSPP [All-Ukrainian Association of Proletarian Writers].
Let it be. As to a copy of the second expanded edition of Mashber, which came
out in Vilnius in 1940 [sic], and of which not more than a few hundred copies
are left, which are already, naturally, sold out — I don’t want you to have it.
Because I am not happy with the three additional chapters in this edition [...] I
have reworked them completely. If I could buy up all the remaining copies, I
would have gladly done this.]
The full version of the novel never appeared in the Soviet Union. The two post
humous Soviet publications of 1974 and 1985 made a compromise between this
version and the New York version by adding one more chapter to the Soviet 1941
edition. The Russian translation by Moisei Shambadal, made sometime in the 1960s
but unpublished until 2010, was based on the American version but had significant
omissions.
The Novel: Composition and Historical Background

The long and dramatic history of the novel’s writing and publication shows that its
concept and composition underwent significant revisions between the publication of
the first chapter in 1935 and the final New York edition of 1948. The first Moscow
edition of 1939, subtitled as Part One, consisted of twelve chapters. It was followed
by the second edition in1941, which contained fifteen chapters and was divided into
two parts: Part One included Chapters 1–9, and Part Two had Chapters 10–15 (that
is, the last three chapters of the 1939 Part One edition were now moved to Part
Two). This text now reads as a straightforward story of Moshe’s bankruptcy. Part
One depicts the course of events that prepared his misfortune, whereas Part Two
describes his economic downfall.
As follows from the letters to Mayzel, Der Nister continued working on the
novel after his return to Moscow in 1944. In its final published version, the New
York edition of 1948, Part One reproduced the twelve chapters of the Moscow 1939
edition (apart from changing the spelling to the Ikuf norm, close to the YIVO
standard), while the extended Part Two consisted of ten chapters. In other words,
after the 1941 publication Der Nister added to his novel seven more chapters, as
well as substantially editing some of the chapters already published, and restored
the initial division between the two parts (although this might have happened
without his knowledge, because Part One was apparently reprinted in New York
without his agreement). At some point before the war he had probably intended
to write a three-part novel. In the May issue of 1941 of the Kiev journal Sovetishe
literatur, which turned out to be the last one because of the outbreak of the war,
there appeared a fragment of what was later to become Chapter 5 of Part Two of
the New York edition (following the chapter ‘Beyzviliker bankrot’ [Fraudulent
Bankruptcy], which was meant to be the last chapter of the 1941 Moscow edition,
but in the end was not included). This publication was provided with a footnote:
‘from the third part of The Family Mashber’.38 In the end, what was intended to be
Part Three became part of the extended Part Two.
The novel ends with a promise: ‘And now we take the narrative back from
Mayerl and we undertake to report what is to come in our own fashion and in the
style that is unique to ourselves. [...] And with this, we believe that our first book
is finished’.39 As Shmeruk suggests, The Family Mashber could have been planned as
the first part of a series of novels that was to cover the second half of the nineteenth
century up to the revolution of 1905.40 Nakhman Mayzel’s brief introduction to
the 1948 edition of Part Two concludes on an optimistic note: ‘We are waiting
for further volumes of this interesting and inspiring work. Let us hope that the
pause between the first and the second volume will not be so long this time.’41
A handwritten list of unpublished works in Der Nister’s archive includes two
items related to the continuation of the novel: ‘Nokhvort un forvort’ [Afterword
and Foreword], consisting of fifty-four typewritten pages, and ‘A kapitl fun a
vayterdikn teyl “Mashber” ’ [A Chapter of a Following Part of Family Mashber],
consisting of twenty-six handwritten pages with additions.42 A possible sequel,
from which only a few fragments survived and were published posthumously in
Sovetish heymland, probably depicted the period of the 1890s, and a draft of the final
novel in the series, Funem finfnt yor, was also published in Sovetish heymland.43 The
exact plan of the ambitious multivolume project remains unclear, and even less
clear is its feasibility under the strict Soviet ideological regulations of the time. The
Yiddish critic Yehoshua Rapoport suggested that had Der Nister actually written
a further instalment of The Family Mashber, it would most likely have turned out
a ‘profanation’, because he would no longer have been able to maintain the same
delicate balance between his creative imagination and restrictive self-censorship
that was possible in his depiction of a more remote and ideologically safe period of
the 1860s–70s.44 The published version of Funem finftn yor shows that Rapoport’s
insight was not far off the mark. In the final analysis we should consider The Family
Mashber as an essentially complete novel, although, perhaps not quite finished to
the author’s satisfaction. Der Nister would probably have revised his text again if it
had been published by the Emes press, but his life was cut short by the new wave
of Stalin’s terror which destroyed Soviet Yiddish culture.
The Family Mashber opens with a city portrait that remains unsurpassed in
Yiddish literature in its precision, richness and depth. The narrator depicts the town
of N. with great care, building up step by step the symbolic structure of the urban
space. The city emerges as divided into three concentric rings, each one with a
distinct architectural face that ref lects its social character. The first ring encloses the
commercial centre which is the heart of the town’s life. The second ring includes
the middle-class residential area, and the third ring is the territory of the poor
underclasses. Money reigns supreme in the first ring, where profit is worshipped by
all means possible, including ‘lying labels, false seals’ (E 39). Numerous synagogues
and houses of study in the second ring ref lect the variety of spiritual dispositions
of the prosperous and established segment of society. Theirs is the religion of ‘a
wandering and an exiled God’ (E 43) which is rooted in the permanent state of
anxiety of Diaspora Jewry caused by the tension between an illusory stability of
everyday life and the profoundly insecure existential condition of exile.
When Der Nister began working on his novel, the Soviet theory of historical
development was dominated by the concepts of the Marxist historian Mikhail
Pokrovskii, who interpreted the historical process in abstract and rigidly deterministic
materialist socio-economic categories. Several books by Pokrovskii were translated
into Yiddish, including his textbook of Russian history and a popular history
of ancient Israel. According to his conception, the main driving force of history
from the Middle Ages to Modernity was ‘mercantile capital’, while all institutions
of state and society were merely its functions. The economic foundation of the
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian state was the export of grain that
was produced by large feudal estates using serf labour, but by the mid-nineteenth
century mercantile capitalism was forced to give way to more advanced forms of
industrial capitalism.45 Read from the perspective of Pokrovskii’s conception, the
story of Moshe Mashber’s bankruptcy presents a case study of the transition from
feudal to capitalist economy. Elements of this scheme are visible in the structure
of the last Soviet edition of 1941. Chronologically, the two parts of that version
are separated by the autumn holiday of Rosh Hashanah ( Jewish New Year). This
symbolic moment of drawing up a spiritual balance of the sins committed during

the past year can be interpreted from a materialist Marxist socio-economic point
of view as a religious foil for mundane stocktaking of material goods. The focus on
Moshe’s economic downfall and ensuing imprisonment highlights the deterministic
vision of history as a struggle of economic forces, to which the moral and spiritual
aspects are subordinated.
By and large, the economic mentality of N. remains mercantile and pre-
capitalist. Investors are interested not in seeking new areas of investment and
developing industry but in securing the safety of their deposits. Money still carries
a mystical aura, which is supported by the unquestionable link between business
and religion: ‘[t]heir faith in these financial establishments was on a par with their
faith in God’ (E 290). Inspired by nineteenth-century French realist novelists such
as Balzac and Zola, Der Nister elaborates on the minute details of commercial
and financial operations, chronicling with great care the effects of capitalism on
the everyday life of the town. The inf luence of Balzac (whose marriage to the
Polish countess Évelina Hanska, which took place in Berdichev cathedral in 1850,
shortly before the great writer’s death, left a lasting imprint on the town’s collective
memory) is particularly evident in the manner of representation of the entangled
net of personal and commercial interests in the business community of N. After
the defeat of the Polish uprising of 1863–64, Berdichev, like Paris after the fall of
Napoleon, was undergoing a transition from a feudal economy dominated by the
landed aristocracy to the capitalist system based on the circulation of money and
investment in profitable new enterprises.
No less significant is the inf luence on Der Nister of the classical Yiddish
literature, in particular of Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sh. Ya. Abramovitsh), who
resided in Berdichev during the 1860s. In his portrayal of N., Der Nister draws on
the symbolic imagery of Glupsk, the fictive counterpart of Berdichev in the cycle
of Mendele’s novels. Abramovitsh satirically portrays Glupsk as a quintessentially
commercial and Jewish town, since trade has been the main preoccupation of Jews
in exile from time immemorial. ‘Where there are Jews, there is Mercury the angel,
the overseer of trade’, Mendele informed the reader of his most comprehensive
Glupsk novel, The Magic Ring.46 Der Nister takes up this ironic reference to Greek
mythology in the first chapter of The Family Mashber by telling his reader that after
a prolonged delay the wandering god Mercury, the symbol of commerce ‘has finally
arrived here [in N.] out of ancient times’ (E 42). The forgotten image of Mercury has
recently been reinvented and popularized as a symbolic figure of Jewish modernity
by the historian Yuri Slezkine in his popular book The Jewish Century. But contrary
to Slezkine’s postmodern celebration of Jewish ‘mercurianism’, Yiddish writers,
in accordance with the ideology of the Haskalah ( Jewish Enlightenment), tended
to view the commercial activity of Glupsk negatively because its inhabitants were
not involved in productive activity and had no understanding of the mechanisms
of trade and commerce. Dan Miron explains the main problem of Glupsk in his
introduction to the translation of Mendele’s works: ‘In Glupsk, the connection
between cause and effect, effort and product, gesture and response, has been
severed. People run but they do not get anywhere; they buy and sell but they do
not prosper; they act but they do nothing.’47 As a representative of the old business
culture, Moshe Mashber has no understanding of modern economy. He cannot see
the advantages of a business partnership over a family-owned business, and has little
interest in new investment or business opportunities beyond traditional enterprises
such as the wholesale grain trade and lending money to Polish noblemen. His
downfall comes about when Polish landowners lose their economic and political
power in the western provinces of the Russian empire after the liberation of serfs
in 1861 and the defeat of the 1863–64 uprising.
The culmination of the commercial activity in N. is the Prechistaya Fair,
which takes place around Assumption Day, during the harvest season. From the
late eighteenth century, when Berdichev emerged as a local grain trading centre,
peasants and squires from the surrounding area had came to this fair to sell their
produce, make purchases, and arrange loans. During the days of the fair the whole
town seems to be devoted to the worship of mammon. The synagogues and kloyzn
remain nearly deserted, and little or no time is devoted to prayer and Torah study.
Rabbis are busy resolving disputes between partners, using the opportunity to
complement their meagre budget. ‘But the fair was something more than a fair. It
served as a sort of holiday for everyone’ (E 223). During the fair, the town is filled
with people and merchandise, the air is laden with strong odours and ‘thousands of
voices’ (E 221). Ukrainian folksingers are as busy making money as Jewish merchants
and Polish gentry. Despite its apparent anarchy, the commercial carnival, with its
gluttony, cheating, swearing, and merrymaking, does not affect the hierarchical
structure of the town. The fair runs according to a strict order of its own, whereby
each market is dedicated to a special kind of business. The upper and lower classes,
Jewish traders, Polish nobles, and Ukrainian peasants interact economically but do
not mix socially even in the moments of great excitement. Each group has its own
class of taverns for socializing where it follows its own carnival customs.
The ‘Polish Problem’

An important ideological dimension of the novel has to do with of Russian–Polish
relationships. The age-old conf lict between Russia and Poland did not end with
the defeat of the 1863 uprising. When the Polish Republic was finally reconstituted
in 1918 by the Treaty of Versailles, it quickly became the key segment of the
so-called cordon sanitaire which was meant to separate Europe from Soviet Russia.
In the summer of 1920 the Red Army conquered large parts of today’s western
Ukraine and Belarus and nearly captured Warsaw in an ambitious attempt to
spread the world revolution, but it was soon outmanoeuvred and thrown back
by a Polish counter-attack. This first defeat of the Red Army led to a radical
revision of ambitious plans of the Bolshevik leadership to carry out the revolution
by military means. Eventually the Soviet leadership abandoned Trotsky’s radical
doctrine of ‘export of the revolution’ in favour of Stalin’s more practical concept of
‘socialism in one country’. Nevertheless, during the two interwar decades Poland
was a painful reminder to Stalin of the dramatic defeat for which, as a military
commander, he was partly responsible. The ‘Polish Question’ was ‘solved’ one more
time in September 1939, when Poland was again divided, this time between Hitler’s
Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Not surprisingly, Poland had a bad reputation in pre-war Soviet literature. One
of the earliest and most famous examples of this anti-Polish attitude is Isaac Babel’s
Red Cavalry (1926). Yiddish literature generally followed suit: such novels as David
Bergelson’s Measure of Judgment (1929) and Note Lurye’s The Steppe Calls (1935)
depicted Poland as the source of political and military danger for the Soviet state.
Generally following this trend, The Family Mashber also projected a strong negative
image of Poland. The suppressed Polish past looms dangerously through the ruins
of the fortress and the town hall, which are the material reminders of the ‘important
government function for which in its time the ancient city has had a need’ (E 196).
The glorious image of Old Poland lives in the memories and fantasies of Polish
landowners of family estates around N. Even though Volhynia was not the main
battlefield of the 1863 uprising, the local nobles, the narrator tells us, ‘manifested
considerable sympathy for the anti-government movement and aided it with money
and various other forms of help’ (E 229).
Der Nister’s grotesque depictions of Polish nobility borders on caricature, which
was not unusual in the Soviet historical fiction. The catalogue of the vices of the
Polish squires in Chapter 7 reads like an anamnesis of a pathological social and
biological disease. Degradation runs in the families, such as that of the Count
Kozeroge: ‘it was enough to know the old man to guess at the sort of man the son
was’ (E 232). The narrator’s diagnosis is clear: ‘all of them noble parasites’ (E 235).
The only clear-minded person among this collection of degenerates is Lisitsin-
Sventislavski, a man of no definite ethnic identity who provokes an incident
involving shooting at the Tsar’s portrait, an act which gets the drunken Polish nobles
into trouble and eventually brings about Moshe Mashber’s downfall. The ambiguity
of this character is highlighted by his double Russian-Polish name, the Russian part
of which means ‘fox man’. This frightening figure of a secret police agent provocateur
could have had more than a purely historical meaning for Der Nister’s readers in
the Soviet Union in the 1930s, reminding them of the daily danger of provocation
and denunciation that was the backbone of Stalin’s terror, in which members of
ethnic minorities, including Poles and Jews, figured prominently mostly as victims
but sometimes as perpetrators.
The shooting episode brings to the fore the age-old mutual dependency of Jews
and Poles. In connection with this episode, the town rabbi Reb Dudi, who is
introduced in the novel together with the warden of the Polish Catholic Carmelite
cathedral in the opening chapter, reminds the Jewish community leaders about
the ancient link between Polish security and Jewish prosperity: ‘if the noblemen
are carried off, you may as well say good-bye to the sums they owe you’ (E 248).
Remarkably, the Russian investigators of the incident show no hostile feelings
towards Jews. Der Nister is careful to portray the Russian authorities not as anti-
Semitic but as anti-Polish, demonstrating an astute feeling of the political climate
of his time. The Russian authorities regard Jews as mere accomplices, not the main
culprits in the political criminal activity of the Poles. The lesson to be derived from
this episode is that closeness to the Poles can be dangerous for Jews, as is the case
for Moshe Mashber and his family. When the Polish landowner Rudnitski refuses
to pay his debt it undermines Moshe’s financial stability, and the urgent need
to contribute towards bribing the Russian officials involved in the investigation
further drains his resources. And finally, ‘the best and the wisest doctors in town’
(E 362), as the narrator ironically characterizes the two Polish doctors Yanovski and
Pashkovski who first treat Moshe’s daughter Nekhamke and then Moshe himself,
turn out to be as worthless as their noble compatriots — they can merely confirm
the fatal illness of their patients but not cure them.
The Polish–Russian conf lict occupies an important place in the narrative, yet the
real historical event that provided the factual base of the novel had little to do with
this issue. As was discovered by the Yiddish literary scholar and critic Dov Sadan,
the plot of The Family Mashber is based on an episode that took place in Berdichev
in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the struggle within the Jewish
community between the maskilim, the adherents of the Western-oriented ideology
of Haskalah ( Jewish Enlightenment), and the traditionally minded Hasidim reached
its height. According to the local Hasidic chronicler Rabbi Osher Pritsker, the
wealthy Hasidic banker Reb Yankev Yoysef Halpern mounted a successful counter-
attack against a group of radical Galician maskilim and nearly drove them out of
town. But when his banking business experienced temporary financial difficulties,
the maskilim bribed Halpern’s accountant to disclose his commercial secrets, and
then deliberately pushed him into bankruptcy by setting his creditors against him.
Unable to pay back all the deposits at once, Halpern was sent to prison, where
he soon fell ill. He was eventually released but died at home shortly after. Rabbi
Pritsker portrays him as a martyr: ‘He died as a saint, the victim of the Berlin
Haskalah’.48
The powerful personality of Yankev Yoysef Halpern (in Russian sources he was
known as Izrail or Iosif Izrailevich Gal’perin) commanded respect beyond Hassidic
circles. In the essay ‘Polish Jews’, which was published in the progressive Russian
journal Sovremennik in July 1858, the Russian mayor of Berdichev, S. S. Gromeka,
wrote: ‘this is the only Jew in the world who is addressed by his first name and
his father’s name. He holds no official position, no authority is delegated to him
personally, yet his power is very strong. [...] I have not seen another Jew who
loves his coreligionists more than he does and takes a greater part in their public
interests and needs. During cholera epidemics, fires and other mass calamities his
house is always surrounded by the victims, and not one of them goes away without
help.’49 Menashe (Mikhail) Morgulis, a friend of Sh. Ya. Abramovitsh, left a lively
portrait of Halpern in his memoirs: ‘Having studied the spirit of the masses and
their psychology, he [Halpern] realized that in order to enjoy mass popularity one
has to be an inveterate supporter of tsadikism [Hassidism]. As a secular protector of
Hasidism, he became very useful. The tsadikim of the entire South-Western Region,
who commanded a tremendous religious authority among the masses, showed him
their respect: all capitals [...] were directed to his cash-desk.’50
Halpern’s bank was one of the biggest in Berdichev, which by the mid-nineteenth
century had become the financial capital of the Russian south-west. Polish
landowners used the services of Jewish financiers in their dealings with Russian and
foreign customers: ‘Although there was neither telegraph nor railway, the capital
[Berdichev] knew about everything before time. All political information was very
accurate. Keeping track of trade and exchange rates, one had also to follow politics
— and each broker was a walking newspaper: while making a deal, he talked about
politics, the coming war, the power of Napoleon [the Third] and about everything
that was of interest for the business world.’51 The porch of Halpern’s house on the
main ‘Golden’ street was the focal point of business life in the city. When he made
his appearance on that porch, the whole street stopped and followed his smallest
gestures. As a maskil, Morgulis was critical of Halpern’s conservative stand in the
conf lict between the Hakalah and traditionalism, but he had as much compassion
for the sorrows of Halpern’s last days as Rabbi Pritsker: ‘Nobody except me can
understand the whole tragedy of that situation. I. I. [Halpern] died as heroically as
he lived.’52 Morgulis could not forgive his fellow maskilim for pushing Halpern into
bankruptcy, together with many of his creditors: ‘Who was guilty of such an end of
a man who deserved a wreath of laurels, not of thorns? Of course, the enlightened
party! One of its members and his business companions in Kiev cunningly spread
rumours that his [Halpern’s] situation was shaky; everyone immediately began to
demand their payments and deposits back. He had repaid as much as he could, but
then the machine stopped. The fall of such a pillar caused the collapse of many
businesses and bankruptcy of thousands of people. I. I. was declared insolvent, and
merciless creditors threw him into prison.’53
Der Nister moved this episode, which must have taken place in the late 1850s,
to the later period of the 1870s, when the confrontation between Hasidim and
maskilim in Berdichev had already cooled down. In his fictionalization of Halpern’s
story, the maskilim have nothing to do with the downfall of the pious Hasid Moshe
Mashber, which was caused by a combination of objective social, economic, and
political reasons as well as by an inner spiritual crisis. By contrast to the real story,
the Haskalah is a side issue in the novel.54 The chief maskilic figure in N. is Yosele
‘the Plague’, an independently minded and rather prosperous young man who has
made his reputation as a moral critic of the community. The Haskalah is presented
as an ideology of the liberal middle-class intelligentsia, which has little to do with
the concerns and aspirations of the masses. Indeed, Haskalah can even be dangerous
for the lower classes, as is demonstrated by the example of the Hasid Mikhl
Bukyer, whose decision to succumb to the ‘man of Dessau’ (Moses Mendelssohn)
leads eventually to mental illness (E 333). The mainstream Soviet Yiddish culture
of the 1930s, including such prominent scholars as Meir Wiener and Max Erik,
interpreted the Haskalah not just as a positive and progressive movement but also
as the ideological precursor to socialism among East European Jews.55 By sidelining
the Haskalah in his novel, Der Nister seems to follow Litvakov, who criticized the
maskilim for being aloof from the concerns of the Jewish masses. Like Litvakov, Der
Nister portrayed the Haskalah as the ideology of the Jewish bourgeoisie, one which
was alien to the simple people. Instead of enlightening the medieval mentality of
a simple Jew like Bukyer, the ideology of Haskalah brings about a violent spiritual
upheaval with disastrous consequences for his mind. The novel seems to convey the
message that the spontaneous protest of the masses found its authentic expression
not through the rationalism of the Haskalah but through the anarchic mysticism of
radical Hasidic sects, such as the Bratslav Hasidim.
The Family Mashber and the Soviet Historical Novel

Der Nister was working on his novel during a transitional period in the Soviet
ideology, when, as the historian of socialist realism Evgenii Dobrenko explains, ‘the
principle of class character [klassovost’] that was central in the revolutionary culture
[...] was replaced by the principle of national character [narodnost’].’56 This change
took place gradually between 1934 and 1938 and left its impact in the text of the
novel. Soon after Pokrovskii’s death in 1932 his concept of history was criticised for
its ‘abstract sociologism’ and replaced by a new, Stalinist concept which emphasized
the role of great leaders and the ‘people’. As Dobrenko explains, the new
historiography had to be ‘concrete’ and ‘entertaining’, consisting of ‘the illustrations
of individual ideologemes that were specifically formulated in the Party’s invectives
addressed to historians’.57 The new scheme of Russian history presented ‘an attempt
to resolve the main problems of Stalin’s epoch: those of personal power, of coup
d’état, of economic leap, of strengthening of the state power, centralization and
expansion of the state, its internal unity, struggle against internal and external
enemies.’58 Historical fiction, film and drama which began to be produced in large
quantities after 1935 were usually little more than a mere ‘historical masquerade’,
representations of contemporary ideological issues in historical guises. ‘During
the second half of the 1930s the image of the past is being filled with such values
as heroic spirit, state, patriotism’, Dobrenko continues.59 This new statist concept
of history, which highlighted the continuity of state power between the Russian
Empire and the Soviet Union, pushed out the previous revolutionary scheme with
its emphasis on the class struggle and the radical break between the Soviet and the
Tsarist regime.
By the mid-1930s the historical novel came to occupy a prominent position in
the genre system of socialist realism. Without openly violating the general socialist
realist guidelines which regulated the representation of history in Soviet literature,
Der Nister was able to adjust them to the specific case of the Jewish writer. Indeed,
as Shmeruk admits, ‘[t]he changes in Party policy in the thirties enabled him to
find a new writing pattern by which to remain true to himself.’60 Der Nister’s own
notion of the mission of the Jewish writer was a peculiar fusion of socialist idealism
and romantic nationalism. He expressed it in his 1940 essay entitled ‘Letter to David
Bergelson’:
Everthing that the people have experienced in a certain time, the most joyful
as well as the most painful, should be recorded and embodied in types and
half-types which are created by the artist’s writing. This writing is the people’s
witness, which is unearthed from the people’s deepest innermost treasures,
polished and clarified with the help of all means that the people’s artist and
plenipotentiary representative is endowed with.61
The artistic work is a mirror in which the people can contemplate its collective
ref lection, with all its merits and defects. The artist, continues Der Nister, is not
simply the creator of his people’s collective portrait, but also a spiritual leader who
envisions the way into the future. Der Nister regarded the writer as a prophetic
figure, a visionary capable of conveying his vision to his readership by way of
verbal images. Although this concept may sound like an echo of Y. L. Peretz’s
neo-Romanticism of the early twentieth century, it is in fact close to the concept
of ‘plebeianism’ which was developed by Georg Lukács in the 1930s and applied
to the historical novel. Lukács believed that ‘when a writer is deeply rooted in
the life of the people, when he creates on the basis of his familiarity with the
decisive questions of popular life, he can penetrate through to the genuine depths
of historical truth.’62 The concept of narodnost’ or folkstimlekhkayt — ‘plebeianism’ is
probably the most adequate English equivalent — was the core of the socialist realist
theory of the historical novel, according to which each moment in history is to be
represented artistically as an episode in the incessant struggle of the masses against
their oppressors for a better life, a struggle that is predestined to culminate in the
final victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie.
The main theme of the Soviet historical genre was formulated by the critic
Mark Serebrianskii as the ‘genealogy of the revolution’.63 Perhaps responding to
this demand, Der Nister formulated the ‘essential goal’ of his novel in his 1939
preface: ‘to reveal the hidden strength’ of the ‘vital seed’ from which ‘would emerge
first enlightenment and then the revolutionary movement’ (E 32). In this novel,
the author explains, the doomed classes will ‘proceed quietly on their historically
necessitated way toward the abyss’, while revealing ‘the hidden strength of those
who lay, profoundly humiliated, in the “third ring” ’ (E 32), the lower-class suburbs
where the ‘vital seed from which would emerge first enlightenment and then the
revolutionary movement was already ripening.’ As Shmeruk perceptively observed,
Der Nister avoids describing his realist method as ‘critical’, let alone ‘socialist’;
instead, he declares his adherence to ‘the principle of artistic realism’ and pronounces
himself the follower of Goethe (E 31). As Der Nister states in the preface, the seeds
of the future were hidden in the rebellious and anarchic underworld and in the
marginal Hasidic sects of the third ring. The latent discontent of the poor could
occasionally turn into an open confrontation between courageous individuals and
the financial-religious oligarchy, but it would never lead to anything more serious
than a public scandal, let alone threaten the foundations of the political order.
Moreover, the spontaneous social protest of the Jewish masses does not appear in the
novel to be connected with the broader Russian revolutionary movement, as was
required by the doctrine of socialist realism. A social conf lict among Jews seems to
follow certain rules of the game: a lot of shouts and threats, but little violence. Both
the communal oligarchy and the masses are represented as politically reactive rather
than pro-active, as if still living in the static medieval world where politics was the
prerogative of the nobility. In contrast to The Family Mashber, the draft of Funem
finftn yor is much closer to the ideological prescriptions of socialist realism.
The representation of the Jewish community as a static corporation that stays
outside the mainstream of political progress of society at large has its roots in the
ideas formulated in Karl Marx’s essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, which were applied
to nineteenth-century Russia by Litvakov. Litvakov believed that the backward state
of social development of the Jewish people precluded them from active participation
in the Russian revolutionary movement. According to him, the Jewish social
protest expressed itself in the medieval forms of religious heresies and messianic
movements, one of which was Bratslav Hasidism, rather than as open rebellions
of the poor against the rich.64 At the beginning of Chapter 3, Der Nister portrays
the Bratslav congregation as a proto-communist cell, all members of which share
their meagre possessions and earnings ‘because, as they put it, money “is neither
mine nor yours, but God’s” ’ (E 100–01). But the impulse of social protest is quelled
by the strict Hasidic religious discipline that regulates their lives in the minutest
detail. The narrator clearly disapproves of their fanaticism, calling it frumkayt un
meshugas (literally ‘piety and madness’, translated as ‘fanatically religious’ (101)).65
This reduction of the spontaneous feelings of social protest to the futile religious
sectarianism can be seen as an indication that Der Nister still followed Litvakov’s
historical scheme at the time when Litvakov himself was probably no longer alive.
The novel contains only a few vague references to the future time when ‘the finest
youth of the town’ (E 59) will come to the third ring to teach the poor and to
learn from them. Jointly they will ‘participate in historically pleasing events’ (E 59),
but this prediction is left unsubstantiated. ‘That will happen much later’ (E 59), the
narrator promises at the end of Chapter 1, leaving this development for another
story. As the novel progresses, the narrator’s vision of the future of N. and its
inhabitants becomes more pessimistic, while his attitude towards the characters
grows tender. Der Nister’s realistic perception of his own time was getting ever
gloomier as Europe was sinking into the abyss of World War II — following the
same pattern of gradual darkening as his symbolist fiction during the 1920s.
Between History and Family

The genre of the Jewish family novel became particularly prominent in during the
1930s and 1940s and counted among its practitioners such prominent authors as I. J.
and I. B. Singer, David Pinsky, A. A. Kabak and Yehoshua Bar-Yosef. In discussing
the genre, the Israeli scholar Malka Shaked remarks: ‘The sense of catastrophe
was a central impetus in the creation of family saga novels, whether or not they
described its direct inf luence on the family. The sense of catastrophe developed
in these authors a capacity for observation and summing up the history of the
Jewish family.’66 She further argues that in those novels — among them The Family
Mashber — ‘[t]he historical background is very much in evidence. [...] Here the story
becomes a kind of paradigm of what actually happened in history, undisguised by
the fiction [...] Here history does not serve as the background behind the family
chronicle, mentioned from time to time in order to give it credibility. Rather
history directs the entire development, in general and in the details.’ In Shaked’s
view, ‘[t]he foreground position occupied by the historical narrative on Jewish
family saga novels apparently derives from the shock of history which overwhelmed
Jewish authors at the time of writing, for all these novels were written after the
advent of Nazism, during a total change in Jewish history.’67
While this perceptive observation is certainly true for the Singer brothers, the
case of Der Nister seems to be more complicated. It is clear that history plays
an important role in the novel, but it is less clear what that history is. Was it the
socio-economic history of Berdichev in the aftermath of the two momentous
historical events, the liberation of serfs in 1861 and the Polish uprising of 1863–64,
which profoundly affected the Jewish economy but can be hardly described as a
catastrophe? Or the ideological and political changes in the Soviet Union during
the 1930s which forced Der Nister to change his literary style but also eventually
helped produce one of the best Yiddish novels? Or was it indeed, as Shaked suggests,
the rise of Nazism and the imminent destruction of the East European Jewry?
Der Nister’s available letters and writings show little concern with that particular
issue until the German invasion of the Soviet Union, even as Poland fell under the
Nazi occupation in 1939. One can of course assume that Der Nister felt it unsafe
to discuss these themes in correspondence. The situation changes dramatically
after June 1941, when Der Nister produces a series of stories ‘From Nazi-occupied
Poland’, reworking in a highly stylized manner the information he received from
Polish Jewish refugees in Central Asia. This ‘shock of history’ becomes visible in the
parts of the second part of the novel which were written during and immediately
after the war years.
In the review of Part One, which appeared in the Russian Literaturnaia gazeta of
30 June 1940, and made apparently a strong impression on Der Nister’s colleagues,
Gurshteyn interpreted the book as moving in the direction of the historical novel:
‘On the outside, Der Nister’s novel is the history of one family, but this history is
given against a wide background of different social groups and their interactions.
Der Nister draws a vivid picture of the lifestyle, social relationships and spiritual
quests of that time. The author spreads a really large historical canvass.’68 Yet,
Gurshteyn continued, this task could not be accomplished within the limits of the
family novel genre: ‘Whether the author likes it or not, the novel that has come out
is a historical novel! Having tackled this sort of theme and problems, the author must
(if he wants to remain a significant artist) provide the correct historical solution to
the questions that he touched upon. He must clarify for himself, and show to the
reader, the moving forces of the depicted age. When Engels wanted to define the
characteristics of future art, he identified, among other things, “the awareness of
the historical meaning”. And this requirement of the “awareness of the historical
meaning” we are especially justified to apply to a work which portrays a large and
completed historical age.’69 However, Der Nister did not agree with this inter
pretation. In a letter to Gurshteyn he argued: ‘zogt ir dort, [...] az der roman iz a
historisher. Ikh halt, az neyn. Mayne motivn zaynen aykh bavust: s’iz keyn eyn
historishe figur nito. S’iz nor do historishe luft, kolorit’ [you say there [...] that
the novel is a historical one. I think it is not. You know my motivations: there is
not a single historical figure [in the novel]. Only the air, the colouring [kolorit] are
historical].70 Here again Der Nister is in agreement with Serebrianskii’s statement
that any work of historical fiction must have real historical characters, ‘otherwise a
novel or a novella should not be called historical’.71
In accordance with his concept of the novel as a family history, in the American
version Der Nister shifted the focus away from the historical narrative toward family.
He restored Part One according to the 1939 Moscow version, which ends on the eve
of Alter’s engagement, an important family event that foreshadows the final disaster,
rather than on the Rosh Hashanah holiday, as in the second Moscow edition.
Whereas that version (which, as we have seen, Der Nister disliked) emphasized the
socio-economic aspect of the family relationships, the later expanded version of Part
Two in the American edition was organized around a period in the family story,
bringing it to a logical closure, with one main character, Moshe, dying peacefully
after having suffered and atoned for his sins, and the other, Luzi, leaving N. for
good. The seven chapters that were added in the American edition tell the story of
Moshe’s imprisonment and repentance, softening the harshness of objectivist socio-
economic critique and offering sentimental ref lection on the futility of worldly
aspirations. In the final version the novel reads like an elegy for the past world rather
than its condemnation.
As we have seen, in 1934 Der Nister already described the future novel in a
letter to his brother as a story of his ‘entire generation — of what I have seen,
heard, experienced and imagined’. Factually speaking, this is not accurate: Der
Nister was born some fifteen or twenty years after the events that are described
in the novel, so he could not be part of the story, even as a child. However, the
dark and catastrophic mood that becomes especially prominent in the second
volume certainly ref lects Der Nister’s perception of the unfolding catastrophe of
the Holocaust. During the war years, which he spent in evacuation in Central Asia,
he lost contact with his brother, but reconnected with him via the Jewish Anti-
Fascist Committee soon after the war. In his first post-war letter he gave a detailed
account of the losses of their extended family. He concluded his report: ‘Vi du zest,
tayerer Motl, iz undzer mishpokhe-boym geblibn on bleter, a naketer, a hoyler. Vi
azoy ikh leb nokh dem, vos s’hot mikh getrofn, veys ikh nit. [...] S’iz geblibn nor
eyns: tsu sheltn dem fashizm, vos hot undz gebrakht azoyne bitere umglikn. Undz,
vi dem gantsn folk undzern, azoy vi der gorer mentshheyt’ [as you see, my dear
Motl, our family tree is left without leaves, it’s naked and hollow. How I live after
what happened to me, I don’t know. Only one thing is left: to curse fascism which
has brought to us such bitter misfortunes to us, as well as to our entire people and
to the whole humankind]. Der Nister also mentioned his novel and its success in
the Soviet Union and America, and advised his brother to enquire about it among
Yiddish writers in Paris. He sounded somewhat doubtful, however, that his brother
still remembered enough Yiddish to read the novel (despite the fact that the letter
was written in Yiddish!)72
Voices of Narration
In a brief digression in Chapter 8 the narrator explains the logic of the two-part
structure of the novel: in the first part ‘we have undertaken to describe only people’,
and only in the second part is it that ‘we intend to describe events’ (E 264–65).
Indeed, the novel gets off to a very slow start. The actual events that set the action
into motion — Rudnitski’s refusal to pay his debt to Moshe, Zisye’s work accident,
and the resulting quarrel between the brothers — do not occur until Chapter 5,
by which time we are already thoroughly familiar with the setting and the main
characters. According to the dual logic, there are two different narrative perspectives
in the novel. One is represented by the collective ‘we’, which identifies the narrator
with his contemporary readership for whom the narrated events are part of the
old historical past. The ‘we’-narrator often sees the past reality through the eyes
of a ‘stranger’, a ghostlike figure that helps the reader to visualize the lost world in
the smallest detail. Mostly the ‘we’-narrator is omniscient, in conformity with the
conventions of nineteenth-century realism, but occasionally he gets confused about
the motivations and personal reasons for characters’ actions, bringing in elements of
a modernist style. Commanding full control of the story, he tells it according to a
certain plan, which, as the reader gradually becomes aware, includes some degree of
manipulation of the chronology and the speed of the narration. These manipulations
become evident, for example, in Chapter 5, where the narrator chooses to pass over
some important events, such as the conversations between Luzi and Sruli, because,
as he explains, retelling them now ‘would delay us for an unnecessarily long time’
(E 175). The missing part is revealed only at the end of Chapter 6, when the reader
is already prepared for it by the long digression about Sruli’s origins. The other
narrative perspective is established in Chapter 2 through the childhood memory
of Moshe’s grandson Mayerl, the future family chronicler. The inner life of the
family is shown through the eyes of this sensitive and intelligent teenager, who, as
Shmeruk argues, has a lot in common with Der Nister.73 On the realistic plane, his
vision is limited and fragmented due to the natural constraints of his age and his
position. But these limitations are overcome by Mayerl’s remarkable intuition, the
‘gift of foreknowledge’ which runs in the family (E 358) and occasionally manifests
itself in dreams and forebodings of its most sensitive members. Mayerl’s perspective
adds a symbolist underlining to the dominant realist narration, revealing to the
reader the inner side of the events.
By adopting a position above the stream of events, the ‘we’-narrator can claim
the privilege of the wisdom of hindsight, which enables him to pass stern definitive
judgments about the meaning and significance of the events from the perspective of
historical materialism. Yet as the narrative progresses this objectivist critical mode
becomes more subjective and personal, and the narrator shows more sympathy for
his characters and their problems. Occasionally, however, he seems to realize this
‘weakness’, and tries to go back to the objectivist tone. Thus, in a short digression
at the end of Chapter 8 the narrator appears for a moment to evoke the mood of
Der Nister’s early symbolist tales by visualizing with great expressive force ‘all
those things that are mentioned in books’, such as fairy-tale animals and creatures,
‘prophets, seers, wanderers, pilgrims with ashes on their heads and dust in their
eyes. In a word, everything that is touched on in those marvellously begun and
incomplete tales and half tales, forming a fantastic arabesque of God’s Name braided
with f lowers and with the dead’ (E 273–74) But this homage to Der Nister’s early
style gets interrupted by the censoring voice of the of the 1930s, who feels obliged
to condemn all ‘those wildly imagined writings whose authors, with evil intent or
because they are themselves misled, have written to blind or to deceive the world’
(E 274). These occasional lapses into judgmental tone notwithstanding, the tone of
sentimental nostalgia prevails in the later parts of the novel.
As Rapoport observes, the narrative voice acquires distinctly yidishlekh intonations

when the narrator sometimes addresses the reader directly.74 The turn towards a
tenderer mood is evident in small stylistic revisions that Der Nister introduced for
the American edition: for example, he changed ‘fort iz dokh demlt dos lebn nokh
primitiv gegangen’ [the way of life in those days was still primitive]75 to say ‘fort hot
men zikh nokh demlt gefirt a hipsh bisl urfoterish un altfrenkish’76 [‘But in those
days people still maintained the archaic manners of their ancestors’ (E 478)]. The
replacement of the harsh and judgmental adverb primitiv with the quaint altfrenkish
in the later version illustrates the shift in the narrative tone which ref lects the
overall revision of the novel’s concept which took place during the war years. The
personal tragedy could have also had its effect on the style, transforming the novel
from a critical historical account into a eulogy for the world lost to the destruction.
The second part, published in New York in 1948, bears a dedication to ‘My child,
my daughter, Hodele, tragically dead. Born in July 1913 in Zhitomir, died spring
1942 in Leningrad. May your father’s broken heart be the monument on your lost
grave. Let this book be dedicated as an eternal and holy memorial to you. Your tate
— the author’ (E 29, translation slightly adapted).
Although The Family Mashber is not an autobiographical novel — after all, Mayerl
was born about twenty years prior to Der Nister — it contains certain references
to the author’s life. Mayerl, a passive observer in the beginning, matures during
the eventful nine-month time span of the action into an active and responsible
character. The pre-war 1941 Soviet edition ends with the gesture of Mayerl joining
hands with Moshe and Gitl, as if symbolically accepting responsibility for the future
of the Mashber family and stressing the active aspect: ‘It was then that Mayerl,
finding himself between them, took his grandfather’s hand and joined it to Gitl’s,
uniting them both in their mute sorrow’ (E 509). The last section of the novel in
its final, post-war form, in which Mayerl takes over the narration as the family
chronicler, recasts him as a more passive figure of the custodian of the past, and
concludes the story on a much more pessimistic note.
Between Symbolism and Realism

The ‘stranger’ figure appears as early as the second paragraph of Chapter 1 and
accompanies the reader through the entire narrative. A detached and objective
observer, he occasionally offers a critical opinion explaining the meaning of events
in the light of the Marxist theory of historical materialism. This ‘supposititious
stranger’, as the English translator Leonard Wolf calls this narrative device, is
dismissed by some critics, including Wolf, as a mere ‘loyalty oath’, ‘the price
Der Nister paid so that he could get on with the work at hand.’77 In fact, the
‘stranger’ is a more complex artistic construction, which enables the author to
infuse conventional realism with elements of symbolism. At one level, the stranger
functions as a realistic feature, a repository of critical historical consciousness,
which, not unlike the didactic voice in Tolstoy’s novels, enables the author to
produce the effect of objectivity by creating a sense of estrangement between the
reader and the event. But at another level, the stranger can be seen as a new guise
for the traditional symbolist figure of the ‘wanderer,’ a guest from the future or
from the world to come who sees but is not seen, not unlike the Messenger in
An-sky’s Dybbuk. Placed in the midst of the events, the stranger alone has the ability
to foresee the ‘disaster, hanging over the place’ (E 48) as well as to discern the
first signs of the dawn of redemption arising from the third ring. This wandering
stranger was a popular figure in Yiddish modernism of the early twentieth century,
such as the works of Y. L. Peretz or S. An-sky’s The Dybbuk. Dan Miron traces the
origins of that figure, which sometimes appears as a ‘minor messiah’ in the shtetl
fiction, back to the biblical prototypes.78 In The Family Mashber, the realistic-critical
and the symbolist-messianic aspects merge, creating a fusion of Jewish religious
tradition, Yiddish modernism, and secular communist messianism.
Shmeruk sums up the connection between Der Nister’s symbolist and realistic
periods: ‘the anonymous images which had populated his previous fantastical
visions and tales descended in The Family Mashber to the real world, acquiring
historical presence.’79 By historicizing the abstract images of his symbolist fiction,
Der Nister achieved the desired synthesis between realistic veracity and symbolic
generalization. Yet this synthesis was also a compromise. As Dov Sadan pointed
out, the main characters of the novel were psychologically out of tune with the
historical period where the author placed them: ‘whereas the town and the events
are firmly embedded in the remote age, a few generations back, and ref lect that
historical situation, the characters — and the main characters in the first place,
all their connections to the historical frame notwithstanding — belong to a more
recent time, one generation ago [Sadan was born in 1902] and ref lect the author’s
half-native, half-adopted family, his brothers and even the author himself.’80 Sadan’s
insight corresponds to Der Nister’s own concept of the novel as a story of his own
generation.
Indeed, each major character in the novel experiences a profound crisis, which
is caused either by external, socio-economic, events (Moshe, Sruli) or by internal,
psychological and spiritual problems (Luzi, Alter). For portraying the inner worlds
of his characters Der Nister employed elements of the technique he used in his
visionary symbolist tales. A detailed realistic depiction of an environment helps him
prepare ground for a deeper introspective exposition of the character’s troubled self
through symbolic means. Firmly situated in a concrete place and time, the characters
often reveal their most intimate thoughts and feelings in long monologues addressed
to an imaginary listener. As Sadan noted, Der Nister’s perplexed characters bear
more resemblance to the turn-of-the-century Jewish intellectuals than to mid-
nineteenth-century middle-class Jewish businessmen. The action of the novel
revolves around two poles embodied in the brothers Moshe and Luzi Mashber. As
a character firmly immersed in the socio-economic reality, Moshe, unlike Luzi and
Sruli, has no obvious predecessors in Der Nister’s symbolist writing. Yet his realistic
nature notwithstanding, Moshe inhabits a world that is saturated with symbolist
meanings. Bad omens accompany him as soon as we first meet him in Chapter 2,
where he is depicted visiting the cemetery in order to acquire a burial plot. Moshe’s
story, as much else in the novel, can be interpreted on two levels: on the material
level he is sentenced to the economic extinction as the representative of the old
order by the objective laws of social development, whereas on the spiritual level he
bears responsibility for his punishment because of his sins.
Unlike Moshe, Luzi has a number of prototypes among various ‘dispersed and
wandering’ types which captured Der Nister’s imagination during his symbolist
period.81 In contrast to his well-established brother, Luzi is permanently on the
move, searching for a better place and a more spiritual environment. He also
personifies the family’s illustrious genealogy (yikhes) and carries on the tradition of
learning and asceticism that goes back to the age of the exile from Spain. After the
death of his beloved rebbe, Luzi is driven by his spiritual quest from one Hasidic
court to another, until he finds his place among the Bratslav Hasidim of N. His
arrival and the unexpected elevation to the position of the leader of the Bratslav
Hasidim in N. coincides with the beginning of his brother’s economic decline.
From the beginning of the novel, the two brothers represent two different paths
in life. Moshe seeks the stability and respect that would place him at the centre of
the Jewish community of N. In the conceptual scheme of the novel this path leads
to death, first spiritually and then physically. In contrast, Luzi’s restless discontent
with his own personality and unquenchable spiritual thirst keep him constantly
alive and on the move. Spiritual alertness enables him to anticipate the destruction
which is about to fall first upon his brother and then upon the whole town of N.
In the end he leaves the doomed place and goes into a perpetual exile, returning
to his position on the periphery of the social and geographical hierarchy. The third
brother, Alter, has a smaller role in the action. His main quality is his supernatural
sensitivity which makes him a barometer of upcoming changes in family and
society as well as in weather. Alter is the most ‘symbolist’ figure in the novel whose
fantasies and dreams evoke the mystical landscapes of Der Nister’s early works, full
of esoteric erotic references to the Song of Songs and cabbalistic books. Alter’s lust
for Gnessya is the only motif in the novel that can be remotely associated with
love in a romantic sense. In this The Family Mashber differs from most European
novels. A love story, the traditional backbone of the European novel, cannot be as
prominent in a Jewish novel drawing on the traditional life of the Jewish middle
classes, because of the highly ritualized form of relationships between sexes in
Judaism. One the whole, Alter is probably the saddest figure in the novel, the
absolutely innocent victim of the punishment inf licted on the family. Unable to
cope with the fate himself, he nevertheless shows the way out to Mayerl by helping
him to develop the talent of creative writing.82
Alter’s passivity, dependence, and weakness are counteracted by Sruli Gol’s
activity, will power and apparent strength. Sruli carries himself as a Jewish Robin
Hood, a noble savage who terrorizes the rich and is benevolent to the poor. His
mesmerizing power over people finds its expression in music and dance. And yet, in
spite of all his apparent confidence, he is a deeply trouble personality, ‘a somewhat
mad, contradictory person’ and difficult to understand (E 140). Sruli certainly
belongs to the Dostoyevskian set of types, a man of extremes who longs for spiritual
heights but is drawn to the depths of life by a certain f law in his character. He
plays an ambivalent role of the agent of fate in Moshe’s life. Confrontational and
sometimes aggressive, Sruli nevertheless operates as a mediator between different
social and religious groups. He is the only character in the novel who feels equally
at ease among wealthy Jewish merchants, lower-class artisans, Jewish villagers and
Ukrainian peasants. A vagabond with no place of his own, Sruli resembles a type of
talush, an uprooted and alienated man, which acquires prominence both in Hebrew
and Yiddish literature of the turn of the twentieth century.
The only elaborate folk character in the novel is Mikhl Bukyer, a lower-class
version (and something of a caricature) of the symbolic figure of the spiritual
searcher. His association with the biblical Job introduces a motif that has key
significance for the philosophical concept of the novel. A product of his time and
social environment, Mikhl is ill-prepared for the challenges of modernity. His
transformation from a Hasid into a maskil turns into a painful and violent spiritual
upheaval. As an innate mystic, he interprets the Haskalah as a new variety of the
radical folk myth. Objectively, from the point of view of the Marxist historical
materialism, Mikhl’s progress from religious prejudice to rational scepticism should
have a positive significance as an example of the awakening class consciousness
of the Jewish masses. Instead, Der Nister portrays Mikhl as a mentally disturbed
person. This deviation from the normative Marxist line can indicate Der Nister’s
scepticism regarding the value of Enlightenment for the Jewish masses. In Mikhl,
Der Nister shows us both the light and the dark aspects of the folk psyche: on the
one hand, the quest for social justice and a better life, on the other hand, the dark
destructive impulse. It is left to the reader to speculate to what extent the latter can
be linked with the orgy of Stalinist terror in the time of the writing of the novel.
Some of the female characters also serve as mediators between the different male-
dominated groups within the family as well as in the world at large. Devoid of any
social or religious authority of their own in that traditional male-dominated world,
women possess considerable resources of emotional power, the skilful use of which
could make them more efficient than men in a time of crisis. Women are the glue
that keeps social structures together, and a carefully crafted collective portrait of
the women of the community of N. in Chapter 9 stresses their role in preservation
of the tradition and the family. Gitl’s dance with her two daughters in Chapter
2 metaphorically conveys her determination to keep her family intact. Trying to
mend the ruptures between the brothers within the family, she brings Luzi back to
Moshe and re-establishes contact with Alter. In her final heroic act, she rescues her
bankrupt husband from the angry crowd of his creditors. Service to her husband
was the sense of her life, and with Moshe gone nothing was left for her in this
world. Gitl’s lower-class counterpart is Malke-Rive, the mother of Moshe’s poor
employee Zisye, whose illness initiates the chain of Moshe’s misfortunes. Having
lost her husband and five sons, she, like her class brother Mikhl Bukyer, develops ‘a
diminutive Job in her character’ (E 176). This reference to the biblical Job suggests
a spiritual dimension in Malke-Rive’s tragedy, yet her social behaviour is far from
meek and submissive. Her forceful demand for social justice from Moshe initiates a
series of public outbursts of social protest, which eventually brings about Moshe’s
downfall. In accordance with the structural pattern of the novel, the initially
positive motif of the woman leading social protest is reversed further in the text. In
Chapter 7 of Part Two we see Pesye, the wife of a poor Bratslaver Hasid, lead the
mob against Luzi in an outburst of protest, which turns out to be orchestrated by

the crook Yone, the tavern keeper (E 608–11), on behalf of the city oligarchy. Here
again Der Nister sends us a veiled warning about the destructive potential of the
unleashed energy of the masses, in particular when they are led by a woman.
The family-centred narration unfolds in a slow chronological order, interlaced
by f lashbacks, dreams, visions, and other digressions that add symbolic depth and
illuminate the characters’ inner world. The author deliberately limits his use of
the full repertoire of the European realistic novel, especially when it comes to
the relationships between the sexes. Intense erotic undercurrents that run beneath
the middle-class propriety are either suppressed and disguised through symbolic
imagery, or displaced to the lower-class environment of the third ring. The effect
of slow pace is achieved by the intensive use of repetitions at several levels: as the
repetitive syntactic structure of phrases, as repetition of images (such the portrait
of the Tsar in the tavern and in brothel), and as duplication of events (for example,
Sruli first helps Malke-Rive and then Mikhl in the same fashion; Mikhl comes
twice to Reb Dudi to reaffirm his renunciation of community; Sruli pays two
visits to Brokha, etc.). Some events replicate others, thus creating the sense of
symmetrical order in the world of the novel, and certain details stress this aspect
of repetition and replication. For example, when Sruli comes to Moshe’s house for
the second time, now as its owner, he sits down looking into the same corner of
the dining room where he had put his knapsack during his previous visit in this
house, when he was driven out of it (E 447). The installation of Mikhl Bukyer’s
widow with her family in Moshe’s house by Sruli represents a compensation for
the expulsion of Sruli by Moshe in the beginning of the novel. The same logic is
also visible in the chronological structure of the novel: the Yom Kippur season in
Chapter 9 of Part One is mirrored by the Purim season in Chapter 9 of Part Two
(in the American edition), and Moshe’s fall is offset by his release. This structural
scaffolding organizes the narrative and adds certain symbolist gravity to the realistic
story. Deer Nister, as Leonard Wolf puts it, ‘has created a realistic novel and
compelled it to serve his symbolist imagination’.83
Fire, Exile and Redemption

The symbolic fire motif accompanies the reader through the entire novel. Fire
is first mentioned in the preface, where Der Nister speaks about the generation
of children ‘who later would turn away from the ancestral traditions and would
destroy by fire the mold accumulated in previous centuries’, and then reappears in
several dreams and visions, which bear great symbolic importance for the overall
concept of the novel. Moshe’s dream in Chapter 2 portends his future: his late father
comes to his house with a message: ‘A spark has been kindled. Part of your house
is on fire’ (E 79). Indeed, Moshe sees a small fire but does nothing to put it down
or cry for help. Within the novel’s symbolic framework this dream augurs Moshe’s
imminent bankruptcy, but in the larger historical scheme it can be interpreted as a
sign of the future destruction of the entire commercial community of N. in the fire
of revolution and civil war. Fire grows bigger in the dream of Mikhl Bukyer (Part
One, Chapter 3), where it envelops the entire town, until it reaches apocalyptic
dimensions in the vision of Luzi (Part One, Chapter 8), where people voluntarily
go into the f lames to die for the sanctification of God’s name (E 272–73). Although
both scenes belong to the first part of the novel published in 1939, in retrospect they
may seem like a prediction of the mass murder of Berdichev Jews in 1941.84
As Dan Miron tells us, the motif of fire devouring the town is the core element
of the comprehensive metaphor of the Jewish shtetl and is closely linked with the
motif of exile and wandering. The multiple fires in Yiddish literature ‘are presented
as ref lections and duplications of the one great historical fire that lay at the very root
of the Jewish concept and myth of galut (exile): the fire that had destroyed [...] both
the First and Second Temples of Jerusalem.’85 In some of Der Nister’s earlier works,
such as the story ‘A Tale of Kings’ based on Rabbi Nahman’s tales, an abstract
wanderer comes to a big town and leaves it again, while the townspeople go about
their business. Although in The Family Mashber the town and the wanderer are
depicted in the realistic manner, their symbolic core remains essentially the same
as in Der Nister’s earlier texts. In the vision of Luzi Mashber (Part One, Chapter
8) the town of N. appears as a replica of the archetypical eternal city, an East
European mock-up of Rome. Der Nister refers to the medieval Jewish legend about
the Messiah sitting at the gate of Rome disguised as a leprous stranger beggar. The
inhabitants, preoccupied with their business, pass by and spit at the man, without
noticing his radiant features (E 271). This symbolic vision turns into reality in the
final chapters of Part Two, where the mob, instigated by the crooks in the service
of the community oligarchy, drives Luzi and Sruli out of town. Exile, Der Nister
suggests to his contemporary reader, is both curse and salvation. It turns into a curse
if we get too deeply involved with the vanity of the world as represented by the
busy city life. But it can also save us, once we disengage from the temptations of
world and set off on the eternal path of searching the truth.
By endowing the architectural imagery with the symbolism of exile and
redemption, Der Nister incorporates the first two rings of N. into the grand
narrative of Jewish history. But the third ring does not fit so neatly into the age-
old narrative. The third-ring Jews have religious concepts of their own, which in
many respects deviate from the strict normative Judaism of the first and the second
ring: ‘their customs are the same, but their laws are not those of the town’ (E 54).
Here observance is more relaxed, knowledge of the law less thorough, and the
yearning for Jerusalem less intense. Despite their visible material insecurity, the
third-ring Jews seems to be more comfortable with their exilic condition. Bratslav
Hasidism is shown as an authentic product of the third-ring religious creativity. Der
Nister’s fascination with this branch of Hasidic movement originated during his
early symbolist period from the fusion of his personal experience with the literary
worldview of the Russian modernism with its longing for the transformation
of life. The young Der Nister, David Roskies tells us, ‘was able to reclaim the
Hasidic master thanks to the prophets and poets of Russian renewal’.86 Following
the trendsetters of Russian modernism in literature and art, Der Nister drew his
inspiration from folk mythology and religion, transforming religious Hasidic
imagination into artistic tales.
The young Der Nister was not alone in his attempts to apply the general
aesthetic and philosophical principles of Russian modernism to the specific Jewish
case. Another representative of this trend was his older colleague Hillel Zeitlin, a
Jewish thinker whose return to Judaism was facilitated by his interest in Russian
religious philosophy (Zeitlin was soon to renounce modernism in favour of neo-
traditionalism). All the difference between Der Nister and Zeitlin in ideology,
temperament, and age notwithstanding, Zeitlin’s 1911 essay ‘Among Bratslaver
Hasidim’ reads as if it were written by Der Nister during his early, symbolist
period:
[I]f someone wants to hear a melody that comes after the deepest and hardest
grief; [...] if someone wants to see ecstasy that comes not from enthusiasm and
excitement, but from the deepest and clearest knowledge; if someone wants to see
for real how people can walk around on earth and yet be not here — let him
make an effort and measure Berdichev’s mud with his feet, follow all the little
crooked streets, pass by the Old Cemetery, the large and desolate field where
night-shadows lie on the orphaned little hills [...]. Let him then pass by the
‘Living Synagogue’ [...], let him absorb the entire Jewish forlornness and Jewish
broken spirit that one feels especially acutely in Jewish towns when the Sabbath
shekhinah is about to part with its children, and dark reality comes out with
its staring eyes. Let him then turn to the shtibl of Bratslav Hasidim, bringing
with him his whole brokenness, and stand in a dark little corner, listening to a
krekhts after krekhts of a few Bratslav Hasidim who sit around the table and listen
to the words of Torah, let him feel in their krekhtsn, as their speaker puts it, ‘a
yearning for God so strong that it becomes unbearable,’ [...] Let him hear the
essence, hear the tone: the greatest humility, which has merged with the greatest
knowledge [...] Let him hear the world-grief, which, when the inner redemption
comes, must turn into the world-joy. Let him sense the hovering spirit of the
great Reb Nahman, which elevates people from the deepest and darkest hell
to the brightest eternal light, let him thereafter see how the Hasidim quietly
leave the table one after another, take one another’s hands, make a circle and
start dancing. One cannot notice a single coarse movement because every
turn, every touch, every bow is polished, refined and sanctified to the highest
degree. [...] These seemingly simple people, Jews of little or no learning, who
look like artisans and porters, show such inner strength, such depth of feeling,
such clarity of thought, such spirituality in every movement, in every position
of their foot, in every sound of melody that cannot be found anywhere else.87
Der Nister’s naturalistic depiction of the Bratslav sect gathering in the same Living
Synagogue at the entrance of the Old Cemetery sounds very different from Zeitlin’s
neo-Romantic representation:
it was there that they were already gathered very early on Saturday morning,
when the sun had just risen and the town was still pleasantly sleeping. All of
them had been to the ritual bath, and their heads and beards were still damp
and uncombed; they were pale from a whole week of poor nourishment (nor
was what they had on the Sabbath any better or more pleasing). They all wore
their one vaguely black Sabbath caftan, faded from its original hue and frayed
from long years of use. (E 109)
Unlike Zeitlin, Der Nister emphasizes not the spiritual ‘essence’ of the Bratslav
Hasidim, but their physical ugliness, dire poverty, and the crudeness of their
manners. In his realistic stylistics the neo-Romantic clichés become replaced by
concrete details that help to stress the heavy materiality of the Hasidic way of life.
There is little beauty in their movements and behaviour. During prayer, some
Hasidic clap their hands, some stamp their feet, some scream, some vibrate in silent
ecstasy.
The contrast between Zeitlin’s neo-Romanticism and Der Nister’s realism
becomes especially evident if we look at the depiction of the Hasidic dance in the
novel:
And then, as was their custom, they danced. For a long while and on empty
stomachs, and until they forgot themselves in the residue of the pure joy they
still felt from their prayers. Forming a circle around the reading desk, the whole
congregation danced heartedly, passionately, hand in hand, head to shoulder,
unable to tear themselves away from each other — engrossed as if there were
no real world. (E 111)
The ecstatic dance of the poor Bratslavers is contrasted by the orderly dance of
middle-class Hasidim at Moshe’s party: ‘The Hasidim danced with each other, hand
in hand, or head to shoulder or clinging to their neighbor’s waistband with their
hands. Merchants danced apart: prosperous, polite and quiet folk. It was easy to see
that the paces of dance did not come easily to them’ (E 87). Thus, the manner of
dance reveals not only the dancers’ inner feelings but also their social status.
The discovery of the dance motif as a link between the material and spiritual
worlds belongs in Jewish literature to Peretz. In his story ‘Mishnas khsidim’ [The
Teaching of Hasidim] (Hebrew 1894, Yiddish 1902) he represents the dance of a
Hasidic rebbe as a mystical revelation, a way of mediating the mysteries of the
Torah without words.88 Der Nister developed Peretz’s neo-Romantic vignette into
a full-scale realistic device. Through the individual manner of dancing each major
character of The Family Mashber reveals deepest aspects of his or her personality.
The ritualized and restricted traditional Jewish way of life left little for the external
expression of emotions and feelings, which in turn imposed limitations on the
realistic means available to the artist for the representation of strong passions. Der
Nister’s extensive depictions of dances form part of a metaphoric language that
enables him to convey the nuances of social behaviour, the intensity of spiritual
quest, and the tenderness of romantic sentiment, without overstepping the borders
of realist representation. Dances take place at critical moments in the characters’
lives, offering a metaphoric commentary to the real events.
The fusion between realism and symbolism enabled Der Nister to overcome the
artistic impasse that he reached by the end of 1920s. In her study of Der Nister’s
symbolist period, Delphine Bechtel points to the situation of loss of meaning in his
late symbolist works: ‘The reader of the stories, like the hero, searches for a system
of interpretation, for values, but there is no frame of reference, we are lost in a forest
of symbols without the possibility of transcending them.’89 In The Family Mashberi
Der Nister creates a new frame of reference by setting his symbolist tale in a realistic
historical context. Like his other works, the novel is a parable about spiritual quest.
In this parable the main character is not Moshe, the protagonist of the realistic
novel, but Luzi, the eternal symbolist wanderer. Luzi’s quest leads him from his
middle-class origins to the masses, where the social and religious discontent is
slowly ripening. Luzi paves the way for Mayerl, the future writer, who will soon
join the masses in their eternal struggle for a better life. Past and future may appear
separated on the realistic plane, but they are interlinked on the symbolist one. The
town of N. with its elaborate social and religious hierarchy is doomed to extinction
by the fire of history, but the Jewish people are immortal. This is the message of
the novel written at the time of the catastrophe of East European Jewry. Those who
follow the quest have to leave the town and might escape its destruction, but those
who stay behind, holding to their status and possessions, will perish in f lames.
Notes to Chapter 7
1. Nokhem Oyslender, Veg-ayn — veg-oys: literarishe epizodn (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1924), p. 40.
2. Moyshe Litvakov, In umru: tsveyter teyl (Moscow: Shul un bukh, 1926), p. 69.
3. Ibid., p. 70.
4. Ibid., p. 70.
5. Der Nister, Gedakht (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1929), p. xviii. Nusinov refers to Der Nister’s early
symbolist story ‘Nay-gayst’ (1920), which can be read as an embrace of the revolutionary utopia.
For a detailed analysis of this story see Sabine Boehlich, ‘Nay-gayst’: Mystische Traditionen in
einer symbolistischen Erzählung des jiddischen Autors ‘Der Nister’ (Pinhas Kahanovitsch) (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 2008).
6. The novella appeared in print twice: in the Kharkov journal Di royte velt, 7 ( July 1929), 8–34, and
in Gedakht (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1929). It was translated by Seymur Levitan as ‘Under a Fence:
A Review’, in Ashes out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet Yiddish Writers, ed. by Eliezer Greenberg and
Irving Howe (New York: Schocken, 1977), pp. 193–218.
7. Delphine Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, 1907–1929: A Study of a Yiddish Symbolist (Bern: Peter Lang,
1990), p. 19. This novella and the ensuing campaign received considerable critical attention:
see also David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 225–29; , Khone Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister’s “Under a
Fence”: Tribulations of a Soviet Yiddish Symbolist’, The Field of Yiddish, Second Collection (The
Hague: Mouton, 1965), pp. 263–87; Marc Caplan, ‘Performance Anxieties: Carnival Spaces and
Assemblages in Der Nister’s “Under a Fence” ’, Prooftexts, 1 (1998), 1–18; Mikhail Krutikov,
‘Desire, Destiny, and Death: Fantasy and Reality in Soviet Yiddish Literature around 1929’, in
1929: Mapping the Jewish World, ed. by Hasia Diner and Gennady Estraikh (New York: New York
University Press, 2013), pp. 217–21. On the campaign against Der Nister see Gennady Estraikh,
In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
2005), pp. 130–31.
9. Letter to Max Kaganovitch, no date, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), file
3121–1-37, pp. 1–3.
10. Ibid., p. 4. It is not exactly clear which book Der Nister means here. Daniela Mantovan in her
chapter (p. 000) argues that it was what later became the unfinished draft titled Funem finftn yor
[In the Year 1905]. Yet one can also argue that Der Nister means The Family Mashber, which, as
he insisted, was not a historical novel. See the more detailed discussion of this issue below.
11. Letter from Wiener to Gurshteyn of May 20, 1935, RGALI, file 2270–1-104, p. 22.
12. Letter to Max Kaganovitch, no date, RGALI, file 3121–1-37, p. 15.
13. Ibid., p. 21.
14. Ibid., p. 18.
15. Letter to Gurshteyn of 31 August 1939, RGALI, file 2270–1-154, p. 8.
16. The official fixed exchange rate was RUB5.3 for US$1
17. Letter to Gurshteyn of 3 November 1939, RGALI, file 2270–1-154, p. 10.
18. Ibid.
19. This is discussed in more detail in Mikhail Krutikov, From Kabbalah to Class Struggle:
Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 187–89.
20. Letter to Gurshteyn of 31 December 1939, RGALI, file 2270–1-154, p. 14.
21. Letter to Gurshteyn of 28 January 1941, RGALI, file 2270–1-154, p. 33
22. Letter to Gurshteyn of 31 August 1939, RGALI, file 2270–1-154, p. 9.
23. Letter to Gurshteyn of 22 July, 1940, RGALI, file 2270–1-154, p. 30.
24. Letter to Gurshteyn of 15 March 1940, RGALI, file 2270–1-154, p. 18.
25. Letter to Gurshteyn, early June 1940, RGALI, file 2270–1-154, p. 26.
26. Ibid.
27. Letter to Gurshteyn of 18 Feb 1941, RGALI, file 2270–1-154, p. 36.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. As Der Nister reports to Nakhman Mayzel in a letter, Khone Shmeruk, ‘Arba igrot shel Der
Nister: letoldot sifro “Di mishpokhe Mashber” vedfusotav’, Bekhinot, 8–9 (1977–78), 239.
31. Letter to Gurshteyn of 2 July, 1941, RGALI, file 2270–1-154, p. 38.
32. Apparently he did not receive a contract that would satisfy him because in a letter written
around 1948 he raised the same issue again, see p. 242.
33. Shmeruk, ‘Arba igrot shel Der Nister’, pp. 235–38.
34. Ibid, p. 239.
35. Ibid., p. 241.
36. Handwritten copy of the letter to Kipnis of 7 December 1947, RGALI file 3121–1-38, p. 2. This
letter was published, with significant lacunae, in Shmeruk, ‘Arba igrot shel Der Nister’, pp.
243–45.
37. The forthcoming publication of the novel by Der emes was announced in January 1947 by the
Warsaw Yidishe shriftn and in August 1948 by the Moscow Eynikayt. See Shmeruk, ‘‘Arba igrot
shel Der Nister’, p. 229, nn. 16, 17.
38. This fragment, titled ‘Luzis tsoymen oyfgebrokhn’ [Luzi’s Fences Broken], differs slightly from
the final book version titled ‘Luzis vog in vaklung’ [Luzi off Balance]. See Sovetishe literatur, 5
(1941), 8–29.
39. Der Nister, The Family Mashber, trans. by Leonard Wolf (New York: Summit Books, 1987),
p. 688. All further references to the novel are given according to this edition, unless indicates
otherwise.
40. Shmeruk, ‘Arba igrot shel Der Nister’, p. 230.
41. N[akhman] M[ayzel], ‘Tsum leyener’, in Der Nister, Di mishpokhe Mashber, vol. 2 (New York:
Ikuf, 1948), p. 8.
42. RGALI, file 3121–1-41.
43. On that novel, see Daniela Mantovan’s chapter in the present volume as well as Mikhail Krutikov,
‘Writing between the Lines: 1905 in the Soviet Yiddish Novel of the Stalinist Period’, in The
Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews, ed. by Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelson (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 212–25.
44. Y[ehoshua] Rapoport, ‘Notitsn vegn Dem Nisters “Di mishpokhe Mashber”’, Di goldene keyt 43
(1962), 69.
45. M[ikhail] N. Pokrovskii, Russkaia istoriia v samom szhatom ocherke (Moscow: Partizdat, 1934),
pp. 75–83.
46. Mendele Moykher Sforim, Geklibene verk, vol. 4 (New York: Ykuf, 1946), p. 131.
47. Dan Miron, ‘Introduction’ to Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler (New York: Schocken, 1996),
p. lv.
48. Dov Sadan, ‘Vegn Dem Nister’, in Toyern un tirn: eseyen un etyudn (Tel Aviv: Yisroel-bukh, 1979),
pp. 64–65.
49. Quoted in M[ikhail] Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, Voskhod, 2 (1895), 114.
50. Morgulis, ‘Iz moikh vospominanii’, p. 115.
51. Ibid., p. 116.
52. Ibid., p. 127.
53. Ibid., p. 128.

54. The marginalization of the Haskalah in the novel was noticed already by Nakhman Mayzel. He
expressed his surprise that Der Nister left out the significant group of maskilim who were active
in Berdichev during the 1860s–70s, among them Sh. Ya. Abramovitsh and Menashe Morgulis.
See Nakhman Mayzel, Forgeyer un mitsaytler (New York: Ikuf, 1946), p. 357.
55. More on the Soviet interpretation of the Haskalah in Mikhail Krutikov, ‘Soviet Yiddish
Scholarship in the 1930s: From Class to Folk’, Slavic Almanach: The South African Year Book for
Slavic, Central, and East European Studies, 7.10 (2001), 223–51.
56. Evgenii Dobrenko, ‘ “Zanimatel’naia istoriia”: istoricheskii roman i sotsialisticheskii relizm’, in
Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, ed. by Hans Günther and Evgenii Dobrenko (St Petersburg: Akademi
cheskii proekt, 2000), p. 892.
57. Ibid., p. 876.
58. Ibid., p. 883.
59. Ibid. p. 886.
61. Der Nister, Dertseylungen un eseyen (New York: Ikuf, 1957), p. 290 (my translation). In a letter
to Gurshteyn Der Nister explained: ‘had this letter been addressed to Bergelson personally, it
would have been a thousand, a million times more interesting. But keeping in mind that this
is an open letter [...] I was caught in trembling, as happens every time when I have to speak
publicly.’ Letter to Gurshteyn of 31 August 1939, RGALI, file 2270–1-154, p. 8.
62. Quoted in David Pike, German Writers in Soviet Exile, 1933–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 282. For a more detailed account on the theory and practice
of the Soviet Yiddish historical novel see Mikhail Krutikov, From Kabbalah to Class Struggle:
Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 283–309.
63. Mark Serebrianskii, Sovetskii istoricheskii roman (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1936),
p. 54. Serebrianskii specifically points out that historical novels had to be written in various
national languages of the Soviet peoples.
64. Moyshe Litvakov, In umru, vol. 1 (Kiev: Kiever farlag, 1918), pp. 41–42.
65. Der Nister, Di mishpokhe Mashber, Part One (New York: Ikuf, 1948), p. 99.
66. Malka Magentsa-Shaked, ‘Singer and the Family Saga Novel in Jewish Literature’, Prooftexts, 9
(1989), 27–42 (p. 28).
67. Ibid., p. 29.
68. Aron Gurshteyn, Izbrannye stat’i (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1959), p. 156.
69. Ibid., p. 159.
70. Letter to Gurshteyn, early June, 1940, RGALI, file 2270–1-154, p. 26.
71. Serebrianskii, Sovetskii istoricheskii roman, p. 13.
72. Letter to Max Kaganovitch, no date, RGALI, file 3121–1-37, p. 25.
73. Chone Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister, khayav veyetsirato’, in Der Nister, Hanazir vehagdiya ( Jerusalem:
Mosad Bialik, 1963), p. 39.
74. Rapoport, ‘Notitsn vegn dem Nisters “Di mishpokhe Mashber” ’, Di goldene keyt, 43 (1962), p.
74.
75. Der Nister, Di mishpokhe Mashber (Moscow: Der emes, 1941), p. 480.
76. Der Nister, Di mishpokhe Mashber, Part 2 (New York: Ikuf, 1948), p. 144.
77. Leonard Wolf, ‘Introduction’, in The Family Mashber (New York: Summit Books, 1987), p. 24.
78. Dan Miron, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 31.
79. Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister, khayav veyetsirato’, p. 36.
80. Sadan, ‘Vegn Dem Nister’, p. 60.
81. Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister: hayav veyetsirato’, pp. 36–37.
82. The autobiographical aspect of the connection between Alter and Mayerl is mentioned by
Shmeruk in a footnote to his introduction. According to Der Niser’s brother Motl, Alter has a
prototype in Uncle Tsadek, their mother’s mentally unstable brother, who lived in their house in
Berdichev and with whom Pinye and his brother Aron spoke ‘common language’. See Shmeruk,
‘Der Nister, khayav veyetsirato’, p. 52, n. 4.
83. Wolf, ‘Introduction’, p. 17.

84. Russian writer Vassily Grossman described the destruction of his native Jewish community in
his reportage ‘The Berdichev Tragedy’, which was later included in Black Book, edited by him
and Ilya Ehrenburg.
85. Miron, The Image of the Shtetl, p. 18.
87. Hillel Zeitlin, R’ Nakhman Braslaver: der zeer fun Podolye (New York: Matones, 1952), pp. 296–
97.
88. Translated by David Aberbach as ‘The Missing Melody’, in The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. by Ruth
Wisse (New York: Schocken, 1990), pp. 196–200.
89. Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, 1907–1929, p. 266.
Chapter 8
v
Symbolist Quest and Grotesque Masks

The Family Mashber as Parable and Confession
Roland Gruschka
From early on, Der Nister’s novel The Family Mashber was universally and enthu
siastically praised. At the same time, the monumental epos about the decline of a
prosperous mid-nineteenth-century Jewish family always stunned and even puzzled
the literary critics: did the enigmatic Yiddish author actually ‘transform’ himself,
or did he remain faithful to his symbolist creed?1 Today, most scholars agree with
Khone Shmeruk and Ruth Wisse that Der Nister adapted and developed further his
literary style, and that the genre of the socialist-realist novel was just the outward
cover of something still genuinely symbolist.2
However, the concrete aesthetic and narrative devices and other elements of
composition employed in novel, their relation to what might be called Der Nister’s
symbolist world view in the shape it took in the late 1930s, still remain a largely
unexplored field. Ruth Wisse noted, for instance, that the realist setting allowed the
author to ‘introduce Jewish mystics and their visionary quest as a legitimate part of
the historical canvas’, 3 in other words, to transpose the symbolist imaginary to the
psychic realm of the figures, to the world of dreams, visions and even madness and
paranoia. By the same token, of course, it is possible to trace the use of mystical and
cabbalist motifs through the entire novel and to uncover a significant continuity
with Der Nister’s previous works.4 It goes without saying that we just named
only the two most visible facets of an extraordinary complex mosaic not yet fully
deciphered.
In the following, I will demonstrate that Nister’s symbolist attitude extends not
only to the plot and the metaphors, but is inherent in the author’s use of narrative
perspectives, his concept of narrative space and time. Moreover, I will focus on the
composition of the characters of the novel in order to unfold the outlines of Der
Nister’s tragic and highly ambivalent vision of human life and the world as well has
his latest confessions as a Yiddish symbolist. My analysis is based on the authorized
ikuf edition, which comes closer to what Der Nister might have envisioned as the
‘definitive’ version of the novel than those editions issued in the Soviet Union.5
146 Roland Gruschka
Symbolist Attitude
Der Nister displays a symbolist attitude in his dealing with historical realia. It was
definitely not his aim to evoke what a true romantic would have called the ‘spirit
of the bygone era’ or what a positivist novelist would have regarded as an accurate,
analytical model of life in the past. As we will see, Der Nister’s references to actual
historical events are not only highly selective, but he also often disregards central
aspects or even deliberately modifies or alters them.
Scene: The ‘City of N.’

The scene of the novel is a nameless shtot N. [N. town] somewhere in Ukraine. Both
Soviet and non-Soviet Yiddish critics have pointed out that this ‘city of N.’ was
obviously modelled on the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, which in the 1860s was
one of the region’s largest centres of trade and commerce, with a Jewish majority
(c. 70% of the population), but dominated by Polish nobility.6 And indeed, the
references could hardly be overlooked.7
However, Der Nister’s original narrative concept can be comprehended more
fully if one takes into account not only the picturesque elements which he did
integrate into the novel — the fairs, churches, synagogues, various Hassidic sects,
the nameless river, or the mud of the streets — but also, and more importantly,
those historical realia which the author chose to re-write, to tone down, to conceal
or to leave out.
Although Der Nister recreated the spatial dimensions and characteristic sites of
the historical Berdichev with, as had been noted, ‘the precision of a chronicler’,8
the literary techniques employed by the author charge the historical town with
symbolic meaning (if they do not make it an entirely symbolic space). Already
the naming of the scene is significant. Noteworthy, Der Nister did not choose an
allegorical name like Mendele’s Glupsk or Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke, because
social satire was not his main concern; nor did he invent a token name to create a
realist illusion. The shtot N. — consistently written with a Latin capital letter in the
Yiddish text — is obviously an allusion to the gorod NN. of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead
Souls, which, in some respect, may well have served as one of Der Nister’s initial
inspirations for his epic project. As is known, this Gogolian abbreviation became an
established means in Russian literature to mark the scene of a novel as a provincial
any-town, removing it from any specific geographic context.9 Der Nister also drew
on this tradition. The naming served as a clue ex ante for readers versed in Russian
literature (that is, most of his contemporary readers) to anticipate the part played
by the prototypic ‘Jewish towns’ of the Pale of Settlement in the epic drama of the
novel: even the historical Berdichev, with its important economic role, with all
its prosperity and radiance as a centre of Jewish religious life, was situated at the
periphery of world history and was thus semi-parochial, at the very least. In the end,
this world had to been brought to extinction by the revolutionary storms.
In the novel, the capitals and metropolises are far-away places, rarely mentioned,
but it is essentially their politics which affects the situation of the town which, together
Symbolist Quest and Grotesque Masks 147
with the bad harvest, causes the crisis that brings about the fall of Moshe Mashber.
The rural hinterland, on the other hand, retains some idyllic qualities. It is there
in the villages that the mysterious Sruli Gol seeks recreation from his self-imposed
task to plague the rich and powerful (although he well senses the backwardness and
narrow horizons of both the Jewish farmers and Christian peasants).10 Moreover, at
the end of the novel it is through the hinterlands that Sruli Gol and Luzi Mashber
will cruise in their aimless wanderings.11 This predominantly rural area figures
as another symbolic space, which, in a way, resembles the archetypal landscape-
settings of Der Nister’s early stories.12 In the works of classic Russian literature, the
provincial is normally defined as belonging neither to the ‘authentic’ rural nor to
the all-too-distant capital (figuring as the epitome of culture, social organization
and governance), and therefore, as ‘void’.13 Of course, Der Nister did not simply
follow this model, but employed its semantics to create his own unique vision of
the prototypical Jewish commercial town in the Pale.
On close examination, the town’s architecture of the ‘three rings’ displays itself
as a narrow sphere of outwardly civilized respectability, religious industry and
economic wealth, which is embedded into a static pre-modern class society imbued
with latent aggression. The shopkeepers on the market and in the streets are rude
and uncouth, and the clerks make coarse jokes at the expense of local cranks.14
The thugs of the third ring amuse themselves with public excesses of violence.15 In
a number of episodes and scenes, the ‘city of N.’ amalgamates certain features of
the topos of the ‘Jewish town’ (as opposed to the shtetl proper) known from classic
Yiddish literature, for instance, the chaotic bustle recalling Abramovitsh’s Glupsk.16
For the suburbs of the ‘third ring’, Der Nister conceived mock-names in the manner
of Abramovitsh’s fictitious geography, such as ‘Peygerivke’ (cf. Yiddish peygern ‘to
perish, to croak’).17
Historical ‘Reality’
Throughout the entire novel, references to the general historical chronology of
events are rare and vague. Only once, when introducing the reader to the fateful
events at the ‘Prechistaya Fair’ that lead to the ruin of the Mashber family, does the
narrator give an exact year — 1863, the year of the second Polish uprising — in
order to explain the repressive political climate and Polish nationalist ferment during
‘the seventies of the last [i.e. nineteenth] century’.18 Against this background, it is
significant that so many other key narratives of contemporary ‘all-Soviet’ or Soviet
Yiddish historiography find no echo in Der Nister’s novel. There is hardly any
reference to the rapid industrialization that took place in Berdichev during the 1860s.
The telegraph and the railway line brought to the town in 1870 are mentioned only
in passing, while political troubles such as the emergence of the narodniki movement
are simply absent. As David Malouf put it, ‘despite a reference here and there to
telegraphy and trains, we get no sense here that we are in the nineteenth-century
fictional world of Zola or Tolstoy or Balzac’.19 From a narratological perspective,
however, one could say that the scene of the novel is largely removed from absolute
historical chronology and transposed into essentially legendary times.
148 Roland Gruschka
This tendency becomes all the more obvious where the Haskalah movement
is concerned. In the early nineteenth century, the Haskalah had gained a strong
foothold in Berdichev, and some maskilic figures such as Yisroel Rotenberg and
Moyshe Itshe Horvits were even able to exercise a certain inf luence on local politics
— against the resistance of the traditional elites.20 In The Family Mashber, however,
the maskilim appear as side figures, playing a minor role. They are effectively
involved only in a sub-plot of the novel. Most strikingly, there is literally no
reference to Sholem-Yankev Abramovitsh, who resided in Berdichev just at the time
of the novel and began to earn recognition as a writer in these years.21 If Nister
had wanted to, he could have made great use of this historical fact. He could have
depicted the ‘Grandfather of Modern Yiddish Literature’ as a progressive Jewish
hero who was fighting Kahal oligarchy, obscurantism and Tsarist oppression with
his sharp pen, and who lived to welcome the outbreak of the Russian Revolution,
so to speak, on his deathbed. In so doing, Der Nister would have succeeded not
only in keeping with official Soviet Yiddish literary history, but also in fulfilling
the formulaic scheme of the Soviet historical novel, which emerged during the
Stalin Era. However, not one single fictitious character in the novel bears any
resemblance to Abramovitsh (as he was understood by Yiddishists or Soviet Yiddish
scholars).22
Instead of taking one of these opportunities, however, Der Nister preferred to
evade them with a brief and astute remark in his preface: Both ‘enlightenment and
then the revolutionary movement’ would only in the future ‘emerge’ from that ‘vital
seed which [...] was already ripening’ in the 1870s.23 Even if we admit that neither
movement was a mass phenomenon in those years and that insofar Der Nister’s view
was accurate, he nevertheless did have the choice to expand or diminish their role
in relation to their historical significance.
The Narrator
A symbolist attitude is displayed in Nister’s unique and highly sophisticated style of
narration. On one hand, Der Nister as narrator is at work in virtually every line of
the novel, even at places where he does not address the reader personally and makes
an effort not to expose himself as the intermediary, the storyteller, the commentator,
the picture maker or as the guide to the extinct world of the past.24 On the other
hand, Der Nister’s narrative technique is nothing less than a way of constantly
dismissing the authority of an omniscient narrator, of the primacy of the narrator’s
perspective or any prerogative of interpretation of the action or the figures involved
in it. At the same time, Der Nister subtly questions the contemporary reader’s belief
in the possibility of framing a ‘documentary picture’ of ‘objective reality’ in realist
prose. Moreover, the author is able to evade the restrictions of a fixed ‘realist’ setting
of time and space.
Let me now give the most characteristic features of Der Nister’s style of narration.
The narrator frequently introduces a hypothetical ‘stranger’, ‘bystander’ or ‘someone’
to witness a particular scene in his or the reader’s stand, speculating on what kind of
interpretation or account he would give of it. Instances of such phrases as ‘should a
stranger have approached, he would have seen’ or ‘had there been a bystander there
then, he would have seen a rare sight’ are abundant in the book.25
On the one hand, the narrator makes a point of demonstrating his ‘lack of
knowledge’. Compare, for instance, his comment on the runaway of the kitchen
maid:
It was Gnessye. We have no idea where she went that morning [...] We don’t
know whether it was to some acquaintance, or to an agency for servants, or
whether she simply wandered off somewhere without goal and purpose. But
we do know the effect her leaving had on Moshe Mashber’s household and we
will say a few words about it.26
On the other hand, however, Der Nister provides the reader with that kind of
details which only an omniscient narrator could know. For instance, he depicts the
hallucinations which the old Gentile porter Mikhalko experiences during the hour
of his lonely death, when he is accompanied only by his mute watchdog keytl-zeyger
[chain watch].27 This description is given in the factitive mode: ‘Er hot ayngedremlt
un gezen: [...]’ [He dozed off and saw] — which is not the same as: ‘he might have
seen’ etc.28
Another narrative device is to offer not just one, but two or three plausible
explanations or reasons for a given event or action — which in some instances even
contradict each other — and to discuss them to no end, with plenty of unmarked
switches between direct and free indirect discourse.29 Compare the following
example:
There is reason to think that this is what happened. In any case, Sventislavski [a
Tsarist agent provocateur] dropped from sight for some little while and it was
rumoured that he was arrested. Who knows? That, too, might have been a trick
of some kind. Or it may be that the arrest was intended by the higher authorities
to avert the suspicions of the noblemen from him. To create the impression, that
he, too, was under suspicion, that he, too, might be in danger.30
As a consequence, the author effectively disclaims his responsibility for his characters
and effectively avoids taking too outspoken a stance towards the world he evokes.
To a certain extent, he seems to be ambiguous towards the conduct of his figures.
The author himself is at least wary of making explicit, definitive judgements from
the vantage point of an omniscient narrator. Instead, he prefers to let the figures
judge each other. Their views, stances, opinions, sayings and letters, subsidiary as
they may seem to be, are vital elements of the overall narrative scheme.
Der Nister’s multifaceted play with authorial presence and the power of
interpretation transcends by far what is familiar from genuine nineteenth-century
Romantic fiction, to the extent that the implied ‘romantic irony’ ceases to be
either romantic or ironic. Needless to say that, measured against the standards
of positivism and naturalism, it could be labelled as outright ‘anti-realistic’. The
various narrative modes and voices are, perhaps, best understood as an ensemble
of masks employed by Nister the author in order to create a highly intimate vision
of the world in its relativity, without actually revealing himself. In this respect,
Der Nister may have been inspired by the literary theories of Russian symbolist
prose writers such as Fyodor Sologub, who defined his role as an author as that of a
150 Roland Gruschka
hidden master of the performance wearing various ‘masks’.31 It should be mentioned

here that Sologub’s concept of an author’s ‘mask’ embraced not only characters
proper, but also narrative perspectives or the choice of a genre.32
However, The Family Mashber is not a full-f ledged polyphonic novel in the
Bakhtinian sense, by which the narrator would allow one of his characters to have
the definite final word or to disagree with him. Even the investment of one of the
characters of the novel, Moshe Mashber’s son Meyerl, as a future chronicler of the
Mashber family, or the narrator’s occasional recurrence to hearsay and lore are no
exception to the rule.33 In one way or another, the narratives of Meyerl and other
purportedly independent voices in the novel are in fact always intermingled with
what Der Nister as the narrator tells the reader ‘in our fashion’.34 In principle, this
hidden monologism, so to speak, applies to the whole cast of figures. As the critic
Yoshue Rapoport observed,
A khisorn iz ober dos, vos ale reydn mit der zelber shprakh, mitn zelbn stil
[...] Nister der liriker hot nit farmogt di greste mayle fun a beletrist — tsu lozn
aleyn reydn zayne parshoynen, — er, der Nister, helft zey aroys, er bazorgt
shoyn dos reydn.
[But a fault is that all figures talk with the same language, in the same manner
[...] Nister the poet did not possess the highest quality of a genuine novelist —
the ability to let one’s characters talk alone — he, Der Nister, assists them, he
already does the talking.]35
What appeared as a shortcoming in Rapoport’s critical view, was in fact an
outgrowth of Der Nister’s symbolist attitude inspired by the Russian novelists of
the Silver Age. This leads us to the question of how the characters of the novel are
composed.
The Characters
In contrast to the static archetype-like figures of the early symbolist short stories
and mayselekh, the novel comes up with vivid portraits of complex personalities,
who are entangled in their social and economic sphere, subject to the twist of fate,
but may undergo some (however limited) process of social change which unfolds
their personality. Khone Shmeruk and Dov Sadan have convincingly demonstrated
that the central characters of the novel are to a certain extent modelled on or at
least inspired by real-life figures — members of Der Nister’s family, his friends
and acquaintances, as well as prominent figures of Berdichev’s Jewish history. As is
known, the figure of Luzi was modelled on Nister’s oldest brother Aaron, Moshe
Mashber on the unlucky Berdichev Hassidic merchant and moneylender Yankev
Yoysef Halpern, who in the 1860s was driven into bankruptcy by a plot hatched by
local maskilim.36 In the persona of Meyerl, who also figures as a subsidiary narrator,
Der Nister gave a portrait of himself as a little boy.37 Nevertheless, the core of most
of the characters is emblematic, but in an ambiguous, multifaceted, multi-valued
and over-determined way. Not unlike the protagonists of Dostoevsky’s famous
‘novels of ideas’, they epitomize various sides of human nature (such as innate
drives), or, rather, they are manifestations of human personality; and they may
also stand for philosophical or religious ideas proper. At the same time, they are
invested with certain traces, features or attributes of the archetype-like figures of
Der Nister’s early symbolist stories. Thus the author creates each of his figures as
an open field of associations centred on a carefully composed bundle of emblematic
symbols. In all this, they are, to a certain extent, also projections of Der Nister’s
own complex personality. In other words, there is no single character that figures
as his definite alter ego; rather he ‘delocalizes’ his views and passions behind a
number of characters that he uses as masks. The role of the emblematic characters
in their entirety is to orchestrate what may be regarded as Der Nister’s vision of the
drama of the world, or, in other words, to mirror the conditio humana in the form
of a symbolist parable.
We can see this in the complex but mysterious figure of Sruli Gol.38 Unruly and
blasphemous, this character lives up to his aptronym (Sruli — ‘Israel’, Gol — ‘gall’ in
Ukrainian Yiddish). Sruli Gol personifies the spirit, or rather, the force of anarchic
revolt and anger. He is the protector and avenger of the suppressed, of the innocent
sufferers, always ready to castigate the rich and to elevate the poor and decent. Born
to a rich orthodox family as an illegitimate child, and rejected by his grandfather,
he has been an outcast, a vagabond and drifter. Therefore, he is familiar with the
mentalities of both the upper and the lower classes in the traditional Jewish world,
and knows from personal experience what it means to be ‘down and out’. As a
failed prodigy in the fields of traditional Jewish wisdom, he realizes the vanity of
the elites’ ideological constructs, but is unable to develop an alternative, let alone a
utopian vision. Instead he takes any chance ‘to pluck the rod from the wielder’s hand
— from fate’s’39 — and acts in decisive moments of the novel as a deus ex machina.
He does not take any pleasure from an inherited fortune, but spends it solely on his
mission.40 If Der Nister had not taken care to burden this character with a number
of fixations, mental illnesses and weaknesses, Sruli would have emerged as an
incredible pulp-fiction-style superhero, falling out of place. To a certain extent, he
resembles the archetype of the benevolent (but physically abnormal) good demon or
auxiliary in fairy tales and legends, who saves the innocent from harm or assists the
human hero on a quest. Within the ensemble of characters, Sruli frequently acts as
the opponent of the most powerful figure in a scene, in particular, where, given a
realist setting, no ‘natural adversary’ would be present or able to intervene.
Luzi Mashber personifies an ascetic, hermitic spiritualism and social quietism.
His fortune and his being unmarried allow him to stand aloof of worldly matters.
What really distinguishes Luzi from the people around him is not so much his
moral integrity and compassion, but his alliance with Sruli Gol. Sruli and Luzi are
composed as a symmetrical pair. Both are wanderers (one of Der Nister’s favourite
archetypes)41 on a lifelong quest by which they expiate the sins of a grandfather and
father (or mother, respectively). Luzi with his ‘stately look’, a tall, well-dressed man,
makes an impression everywhere; Sruli with his lost teeth and his shabby cloth is a
strange sight.42 We see them use their gifts, which symmetrically comply with each
other, for the good of others: both are, in their way, skilful dancers.43 Luzi elevates
his audience with his holy sermons; Sruli enchants them by playing the shepherd’s
pipe, a Gentile instrument with pagan connotations.44 Neither is afraid to speak his
152 Roland Gruschka
mind to those more powerful or of a superior social position. Luzi shies away from
political activism, whereas Sruli, at least here and there, intervenes on behalf of the
downtrodden. In his youth, Sruli was a vagrant musician; later, at the Prechistaya
Fair, he almost joins a band of blind Ukrainian bandurists.45 Luzi, in his prayers for
redemption, is compared by the narrator with one of these blind singers.46 In a way,
Sruli figures as Luzi’s material-sensual ‘double’. Both are artists ‘of some sort’, and
one may thus assume that in dealing with these figures, Der Nister also ref lected
on his own social role as a writer.
Other main characters need hardly to be explained. Yossele Brilliant, called
‘mageyfe’ [plague], is an epitome of the maskil, rationalist and positivist, a financially
independent but largely isolated intellectual, and in no way a radical revolutionary or
utopian.47 As he finds among the Jews no allies for his enlightened-positivist reform
projects, he acts out his zeal in his writings published in diverse newspapers, and in
occasional digs against the powerful oligarchic leaders of the Jewish community.
Moshe Mashber personifies the successful down-to-earth businessman and Jewish
paterfamilias. His knowledge of traditional Jewish wisdom is average. He is no
intellectual or prodigy, but gifted with a practical judgement. His f laws (which will
contribute to his fall) are ‘typical’ for his class: greed and self-complacency. Of all
characters in the novel, Moshe Mashber comes closest to the classical role of a tragic
hero, whose errors in time of crisis ruin the family and leave him unable to stand
up to machinations and political intrigues more powerful than him. His decline is
the main line of the plot, around which all other, more or less subsidiary characters
are arranged — ref lecting, confronting or fighting each other. In the end, Der
Nister connects the fates of these figures not so much through knitting the threads
of an entirely developed scheme in terms of human psychology or socio-historical
determinism (let alone class struggle), but in a more associative manner, through
exposing the mutual antagonism of their symbolic signifiers. Some figures may
be grouped into alter-ego doubles, antagonist pairs, even triads (such as the three
brothers of the Mashber family). At certain moments in the story, the author may
split his characters, employing the motifs of intoxication, dream or mental illness.48
This, however, is only a minor function of those motifs. In symbolist fiction,
hallucinations, visions and dreams all figure as extended states of consciousness,
in which, for a moment, ‘reality’ is unmasked and genuine revelations of truth
may shine forth.49 In the novel, Der Nister followed this tradition in a most
systematic way. All images appearing in the dreams, fantasies and visions of any
figure are meticulously composed and integrated into the plot. The most menacing
chimeras are also the most significant, and they occur to figures on the verge of
madness. Moreover, the negative or destructive aspects of a number of characters
(or of whatever the figures epitomize) are associated with grotesque features, which
transcend their use as ordinary corporal or other metaphors, or with grotesque turns
of action subtly integrated into the plot.
The subplot around the figure of Mikhl Bukyer may serve as an illustration. Mikhl
Bukyer is the restless brooder among the Bratslaver Hasidim, but a weak character
with an unstable psyche, unable to lead his group and unable to cope with life. He
is gradually loosing his faith, even though the ancestral belief system had been a
meaningful realm abundant in symbolic and emotional wealth for him, and even
though he himself is incapable of bearing the intellectual burden of freethinking.50
For his apostasy, he is ostracized by the rigid Jewish community and pays for this
with pauperization, illness, and death.
Within the camp of social dissidents, Bukyer is an antipode to both Luzi Mashber
and Yossele Brilliant. His fate illustrates the futility in seeking redemption solely
in Metaphysics of any kind, and, all the more, it shows that non-conformism,
resistance or revolt is not for everyone, let alone for a poverty-stricken father and
breadwinner of a large family. Der Nister depicts him as a failing anti-Job figure:
Bukyer poses the ‘Problem of Evil’,51 but has no answer for it; he does not remain
steadfast to God, he renounces him and perishes. However, this is only the one
minor facet of his role.
On close examination, Mikhl Bukyer appears as a grotesque caricature of
a philosophizing apostate and spiritual seeker, and in the end as a grotesquely
decaying prophet of the God-dethroning Nietzschean Übermensch. Already his
first juvenile attempt at an outbreak from his milieu — a hasty effort to run away,
during which he had only his mother’s shirt (mistakenly taken for his own) and his
phylacteries with him52 — was doomed to fail, and his last attempt became fatal.
Early on in the novel, the reader is subtly led to realize that Bukyer suffers from
an incurable mental disruption and is fated to ‘finish badly’.53 Bukyer hides slightly
bizarre fantasies of destruction, ‘negation’ and committing blasphemy.54 Still as a
would-be neophyte among the enlightened Jews, the strange visionary dreams born
of his suppressed doubts and his fervid spirituality remain meaningful to him as a
kind of revelation.55 (Read as a confession of Nister the author, of course, these
are in fact significant.) As a whole, Bukyer’s dreams vacillate between prophetic
visions, representations of unconscious desires and the hallucinations of a sick man.
In creating this ambiguity, Der Nister obviously adapted a literary technique from
Russian symbolism.56 For all its bitter and tragic side, the account given by Mikhl
of his familial sorrows or the depiction of his decline, should not be read merely
as an element of ‘social realism’ (although such severe hardships are, of course, part
of social reality), but as attributes of his role as a failing anti-Job figure and, all the
more, as metaphors of mental illness and dis-ability. After all, one may ask if the
author did not intentionally heap these plagues onto his tragic character in order to
evoke a grotesque effect.57 In any event, in creating grotesque figures, Der Nister
seems on a modest scale to have recourse to stylistic means already excessively
employed in his ‘revue’ ‘Under a Fence’ of 1929.58
It should be mentioned here that Der Nister’s use of grotesque elements is not
reserved solely for emblematic character-painting. The motif of the Tsar’s portrait,
for instance, appears at least twice in a grotesque context: one (pulp and kitschy)
copy is shot at during revelry by bizarrely decadent nationalist Polish noblemen;
another one, showing as motif ‘a braver rusisher kayser’ [a gallant Russian emperor]
in a phallic pose and with phallic symbols (sword) as attributes, is hanging in a
shabby bordello run by Jews.59 Given the fact that, in the 1930s, iconic portraits of
Stalin had an almost ubiquitous presence in the Soviet Union, one must regard such
jokes as double-edged at the very least.
154 Roland Gruschka
Politics, Art and Power

In playing with his emblematic characters, Der Nister situates himself, in an encoded-
symbolic way, within the world depicted in his novel. Hiding himself behind the
various masks of his figures, he takes his stance as a Yiddish writer and intellectual
towards those contemporary ideologies which personally affected him most.
Although his literary vision also embraces (to no small extent) the field of politics,
the author in his novel does not opt for a specific political programme, not even
implicitly or in a camouf laged way. No doubt, Nister’s formulaic condemnations of
the past, which are woven into the astute and smart rhetoric of his preface, may well
be regarded as loyalty oaths to the Soviet regime — sworn with crossed fingers,
so to speak. But within the story itself, in dealing with his characters, Der Nister
expressed a subtle ironic scepticism with respect to any ideology, to any political or
religious way of life, and, above all, to the issue of power.
His attitude towards Jewish Enlightenment and pragmatist positivism (epitomized
by Yossele Brilliant) is one of mild irony; he does not really challenge it. Yossele
and his fellow maskilim are but side figures. In fact Der Nister takes issue more
with the traditional orthodox religious establishment (personified foremost by Reb
Dudi), but for him it seems to belong to the past: at the end of the novel, Reb
Dudi dies a natural death on ‘a day unfit for sorrow’.60 However, Reb Dudi fails
tragically both as a political and a spiritual leader, not at least through ostracizing
the dissident Mikhl Bukyer. Seemingly overextended with his tasks, Reb Dudi
in the end becomes a comically outraged figure.61 The grotesque superstitious,
uneducated fanatics surrounding him, as well as the lower-class facilitators of the
establishment, who on occasion may all merge into a violent mob, are depicted as
blatantly dumb.62
Der Nister’s ironic criticism becomes more intimate and confessional when
turning to the sensitive visionary ‘secretly brewing’ characters suffering from the
world. That is to say, his scepticism does not even exempt Luzi and his fellow
Bratslavers, whom he portrayed with more sympathy. It has to be mentioned here
that in the novel the Bratslaver sect is multi-faceted symbol. On one hand, this group
figures indeed as a substitute for a Jewish class-conscious Proletariat: the deprived
Bratslavers are housed in the ‘third ring’, they share their earnings like Brethren,
and their contempt for worldly matters and wealth is intuitively regarded by Moshe
Mashber as a form of social protest against an ‘essential principle’ of the world.63 On
the other hand, of course, Bratslav Hasidism, as epitomized by the historical Reb
Nakhman, embraced refined artistic creativity and cabbalist mysticism. And third,
Der Nister portrayed the Bratslavers’ way as an elitist one which required much
devotion and strong virtues. In other words, with the last two symbolic layers, Der
Nister projected into the group of men around Luzi those ideals which to him as a
symbolist artist appealed most. At the same time, he expressed in a symbolic way
his scepticism in the sustainability of these (or any) ideals in the realm of ‘real life’.
As his mouthpiece, he chooses the figure of Sruli Gol.
Under the impact of Mikhl Bukyer’s mental and physical collapse, Sruli faces
Luzi with his own responsibility in that tragedy, arguing that the Bratslavers’
way of contemplative asceticism and reclusion is not for paupers who have to take
care of families — for those poor following Luzi and relying on him.64 In an
even more ardent rebuke, Sruli confronts Luzi’s idealism with the fundamental
question of power, as if to warn him against the dangers of self-complacency or
self-righteousness:
Vorem vos iz den der khilek tsvishn Luzin un di, vos er halt zey far kegner? Vos
iz far an untersheyd tsvishn Luzis shite un art gloybn un di shites un gloybns-
artn fun andere, oyb der eytsem-tokh fun alerley shites iz aza, vos fodert bay
ale di, velkhe haltn zikh in der zeyeriker, az ale andere zoln bay zey geglikhn
zayn tsu shtoyb, af velkhn me meg tretn? [...] ober neyn, der khilek tsvishn di
un yene iz nor in tsol, ober nit in eytsem, in mer makht oder veyniker, ober nit
in eygnshaft. [...] Yo, s’iz nit oysgeshlosn — hot Sruli, kukndik af Luzin hart un
harb a zog geton — az afile aza, vi er, Luzi, mit zayn dervayl nokh shvakh bisl
mitgeyer volt nit aroys mit der hekhster drap-melokhe, ven zey zoln oysvaksn
in tsol un af a por shtapl mer makht arufshtaygn.65
[What is the difference between you and those who oppose you? What is the
difference between your forms of belief and theirs? Since the root of all belief
systems is that those who share the belief in one system are permitted to regard
those who believe in the other system as dust that may be trampled on. [...] But
the truth is, the [difference] is a difference in numbers, not in kind, a difference
in degrees of power, not in essence. ‘Who knows,’ said Sruli with a harsh and
bitter glance at Luzi, ‘what you and your followers, for the time being small in
number, will become if your numbers were to increase.’]66
In the fictitious, bygone world of the novel, Sruli’s words refer only to religious
movements. This may explain why it was possible to publish a fragment with an
earlier version of the chapter in 1941 in the May issue of the Kiev journal Sovetishe
literatur [Soviet Literature].67 This early version, remarkably enough, is more frank
with respect to the psychological dimensions of power than the passage of the 1948
ikuf edition quoted here, but avoids the use of abstract terms such as shite (‘school
of thought, system of belief ’) or gloybns-artn (‘ways of belief ’), which may apply to
any ideology, in favour of a more unspecific gloybn (‘belief ’) with strong religious
connotations. Against the historical context of 1941, however, there can be no doubt
that Nister the author here deals in an encoded way with the contemporaneous
militant political belief systems which ruled in his days.
Nevertheless, a narrow explanation of this episode as just a dig against Bolshevism
would fall short of the author’s universalist-philosophical outlook on life: In the
end, all religions and ideologies are susceptible to fanaticism; all sects and organized
movements are capable of exercising terror and oppression, all the more so the
formerly oppressed that become rulers. This stance, by analogy (Luzi as ‘a singer of
some sort’, see above), implies also a renunciation of Art and artists, wherever they
strive for political power and pretend to work for some higher good. It seems to be
a logical consequence that Der Nister in the end lets his hero Luzi withdraw from
the town N. and resort to hermitic wandering.
A crucial figure for deciphering Nister’s understanding of his role as a writer is
Mikhl Bukyer. In a phantasmagoric dream, Mikhl Bukyer encounters the bal-dover
(Satan), who reveals himself as a kind of God’s double, almost on equal terms with
156 Roland Gruschka
God and thus for Mikhl indistinguishable from him.68 Satan is worshipped by f lies
with conjurations resembling the Christian Lord’s Prayer, and crowned with the
first line of the Ten Commandments, slightly altered: ‘Anoykhi hashem (hasamael)
eloyheykho’ (I am the Lord (Samael) Thy God).69 In a grotesque turn, the Evil
One abdicates and disappears, f linging himself into the abyssal sea; but beforehand
he gives Mikhl a new fundamental truth to preach to Mankind: Everyman is his
own god. The entire dream is a biting satire on various aesthetic and metaphysical
key-concepts of Russian symbolism, such as the concept of the Evil as the aesthetic
or Mephistophelian ‘double’ of the Good, an aesthetics of Satanism, the new God-
like Man, a Universal Mythology, the idea of all-Unity, and so on, which are all
ridiculed as the bizarre vision of an insane individual.70 This becomes all the more
obvious in Satan’s new credo for mankind (which subverts itself through ironical
contrasts implemented by Nister the author):
Ikh bin ikh, ver ikh zol nit zayn, tsi groys, tsi kleyn, tsi mindst, tsi pitsl... ikh
— aleyn mayn shefer, mayn got, mayn har, mayn heypekh, mayn tseshterer un
mayn gezetsgeber.71
[I am I. No matter who I am, great or small, [least or tiny], I am my own
creator, my own God, my own Lord, my own opposite, my own destroyer, my
own lawgiver.]72
This ‘credo’ not only mocks the young Valerii Briussov’s solipsism of ‘all the world
is in me’ and his ‘first command’ ‘Love thyself ’, or Nikolai Minskii’s ‘God —
that’s me’, but all the more alludes to Max Stirner’s radically egoist individualism
or Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas of the death of God and the Übermensch.73 In early
twentieth-century Russia, the inf luence of Nietzsche and Stirner extended well
beyond the symbolists into other utopianist (even purportedly Marxist) groups
such as the so-called ‘God-builders’.74 Therefore it is fair to say that Bukyer and
his visions stand for any intellectual radicalism of this kind (maybe even including
Marxism), and for the dangers and destructive forces related to it.
After Bukyer’s inevitable death, it takes a joint effort of Luzi, Sruli, and Yossele
to secure for him a decent burial in the Jewish cemetery. Of course, this episode
may be read as a concerned symbol for Mankind’s way into Modern Age. However,
there is another visionary dream in the novel, which obviously encodes a more
personal confession. Sruli sees Luzi as ‘the owner of a large garden’ fenced like a
prison; Luzi is liberated by Mikhl Bukyer; afterwards Bukyer dies of exhaustion.75
Man’s (or Nister’s) artistic creativity (personified by Luzi) first had to be unbound
from tradition by fantastic, heaven-assailing Promethean symbolism and/or
freethinking (Mikhl); but then this stage has ultimately to be left behind. Here
again, Der Nister seems in part to renounce an intellectual credo of his youth, but
it remains somewhat open as to what to follow.76
To return to history and politics proper, the subplot around Bukyer may give
us an idea of Nister’s unsentimental, pessimist and rather tragic world-view at the
beginning of the 1940s: life in the past is no better and no worse, the forces of
decline and corruption are constantly at work, fate rules. As a natural response to
such a world, the outstanding characters are ‘wrestling with God’, so to speak, but
in the end only temporary victories over fate or isolated symbolic acts of heroism
are possible. The virtue of enduring is put to hard tests: visionary moments such
as Luzi Mashber’s prophetic speech are instantly followed by harsh reality, in our
example, by f lying stones.77 No radiant future or final redemption shines forth
‘on the distant horizon’ of world history, quite contrary to Der Nister’s political
declarations given in the preface and interspersed in the novel.
Given the catastrophes, which Der Nister had witnessed in his lifetime, it is not
surprising that he developed such a pessimistic, complex and tragic vision of the
world. However, although he may have been ambivalent about his aesthetic credo
at the end, it was precisely a developed form of this symbolism which provided him
with the concepts, the literary techniques and means to give an impressive voice to
that vision in his epic novel.
Notes to Chapter 8
1. For contrary views, cf. e.g. Shmuel Niger, ‘Der Nister’, in Yidishe shrayber in sovet-rusland, ed. by
H. Leiviek (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1958), pp. 368–80 (pp. 376–80); Moyshe
Dubilet, ‘Der Nister’, Sovetishe literatur, [3]/5 (1940), 152–67 (pp. 160–67).
The Field of Yiddish, vol. 2, ed. by Uriel Weinreich (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), pp. 263–87 (pp.
270–71, 285–87); Idem, ‘Der Nister: Ḥ ayav vi-yetsirato’, in Der Nister, Ha-nazir veha-gediyah,
trans. by Dov Sadan ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1963), pp. 9–52 (pp. 33–46); Ruth R. Wisse,
‘Lured by the Master’, The New York Times Book Review, 12 July 1987, p. 15.
3. Wisse, Ibid.
4. Cf. e.g. Sabine Boehlich, ‘Nay-gayst’: Mystische Traditionen in einer symbolistischen Erzählung des
jiddischen Autors ‘Der Nister’ (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), pp. 165–70.
5. Der Nister, Di mishpokhe Mashber, ed. by Nakhman Mayzel, 2 vols (New York: ikuf, 1943–48).
In the present chapter, the respective volumes of this edition are referred to as Y1 and Y2.
An English translation based on the ikuf version is Der Nister, The Family Mashber, trans. by
Leonard Wolf, with an introduction by David Malouf (New York: NYRB, 2008; repr. of 1st
edn New York: Summit Books, 1987). In the following, this edition is quoted as E. In the Soviet
Union, only incomplete versions were issued: Der Nister, Di mishpokhe Mashber, vol. 1 (Moscow:
Der emes, 1939); Der Nister, Di mishpokhe Mashber, ed. by M. Belenki (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1974; 2nd edn 1985); a bibliography published in Sovetish heymland also lists Der Nister,
Di mishpokhe Mashber: ershter un tsveyter teyl (Moscow: Der emes, 1941), see Abe Finkelshteyn and
Mendl Rozenhoyz, ‘Dem Nisters verk’, Sovetish heymland, 1 (1970), 150–52 (p. 151); this second
Soviet edition is extraordinarily rare, see Mikhail Krutikov’s chapter in the present volume (pp.
117–18). After volume 1 of Di mishpokhe Mashber had appeared in 1939, Der Nister managed to
publish the first four chapters of the second part more or less in chronological order, in various
places: ‘Demlt hot getrofn’, Sovetish: literarisher almanakh, 9–10 (1939), 143–241; ‘Tsvey toytn, eyn
khasene’, Shtern, 15 (1939), 5–38; ‘Bankrot’, Sovetishe literatur, [3]/3 (1940), 44–90; ‘Beyzviliker
bankrot’, Shtern, 16 (1940), 56–83; followed by a fragment of chapter 5: ‘Luzis tsoymen
ufgebrokhn’, Sovetishe literatur, [4]/5 (1941), 8–29. The second (Soviet) edition of 1941 comprised
the complete first part and three of these chapters — ‘Demlt hot getrofn’, ‘Tsvey toytn, eyn
khasene’, and ‘Bankrot’, cf. Der Nister’s letter to Itsik Kipnis (7 December 1947), published by
Khone Shmeruk, ‘Arba igrot shel Der Nister’, Behinot, 8–9 (1977/78), 223–45 (pp. 243–45), also
quoted in Mikhail Krutikov’s chapter in the present volume (p. 119). The post-war edition of
the novel which was produced under the auspices of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1974, added
only one more chapter, ‘Beyzviliker bankrot’, to the 1941 version, cf. also Shmeruk, ‘Arba igrot
shel Der Nister’, pp. 227, 231. Before sending the manuscript of the second part (in portions) to
Nakhman Mayzel in New York, Der Nister reworked several chapters of the novel entirely, cf.
‘Arba igrot shel Der Nister’, pp. 228, 231–32, 239, 245. Because of posthumous censorship, the
Soviet post-war editions of Di mishpokhe Mashber are not a reliable source of information for any
stage of the author’s work, see ibid., p. 233.
158 Roland Gruschka
6. Cf. e.g. Avrom Yuditski, ‘Vegn Nisters nayem historishn roman’, Shtern, 15 (1940), 52–70 (pp.
53–55); Nakhman Mayzel, Forgeyer un mittsaytler (New York: ikuf, 1946), p. 353.
7. Cf. Mikhail Krutikov, ‘Berdichev in Russian-Jewish Literary Imagination: From Israel Aksenfeld
to Friedrich Gorenshteyn’, in The Shtetl: Image and Reality, ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail
Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 91–114; Benjamin Lukin, article ‘Berdychiv’, in The
YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. by Gershon D. Hundert et al. (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 149–51.
8. Cf. Krutikov, ‘Berdichev in Russian-Jewish Literary Imagination’, p. 103.
9. The most famous examples for this tradition in twentieth-century Russian literature are, of
course, Ilya Il’f and Yevgenii Petrov’s Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev [Twelve Chairs] (1927) and Leonid
Dobychin’s Gorod En [The Town of En] (1936). On the naming of parochial towns in Russian
literature, cf. e.g. Christina Parnell, Ich und der/die Andere in der russischen Literatur: Identität und
Alterität in Selbst- und Fremdbildern des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2002), p. 52.
10. Y1 145–51 / E 142–46. Note that, upon leaving town, Sruli often poses one or more obscene figs
towards it. He never does such a thing to the village when leaving the countryside. His attitude
to the city is hatred, to the village it is mild despise.
11. Y2 440–46 / E 683–88.
12. On Nister’s literary concepts of space, cf. e.g. Daniela Mantovan, ‘Der Nister and his Symbolist
Short Stories: Patterns of Imagination’ (doctoral thesis, Columbia University, 1993, UMI Order
No. 9412809), pp. 75–77, 104–06.
13. On the topos of provincialism in Russian literature, cf. Anne Lounsbery, ‘ “To Moscow, I Beg
You!”: Chekhov’s Vision of the Russian Provinces’, Toronto Slavic Quarterly, 9 (2004), <http://
www.utoronto.ca/tsq/09/lounsbery09.shtml > [accessed 1 March 2013]. Idem, ‘“No, this is
not the provinces!” Provinciality, Authenticity, and Russianness in Gogol’s Day’, The Russian
Review, 64 (2005), 259–80. However, see also idem, Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne,
and Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Russia and America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008), p. 155.
14. Y1 24–25, 29–30 / E 37, 41.
15. Y1 47–48 / E 56.
16. Cf. Y1 26–27, 41–42 / E 38–39, 51. On Abramovitsh’s Glupsk, cf. Krutikov, ‘Berdichev in
Russian-Jewish Literary Imagination’, pp. 94, 95–99.
17. Y1 44 / E 53–54.
18. E 229 / Y1 247.
19. David Malouf, ‘Introduction’, in E vii–xvii (p. xiv).
20. Cf. Alexander Zederbaum, Di geheymnise fun Berditshev (Warsaw: [n.pub.], 1870), p. 31; Dov
Sadan, ‘Shtrikhn tsu “Di mishpokhe Mashber” ’, in Toyern un tirn ( Jerusalem: Yisroel-bukh,
1979), pp. 60–68.
21. Cf. Mayzel, p. 357.
22. For Soviet accounts of Mendele’s life and work, see e.g. Isaac Nusinov, ‘Mendele-Moikher-
Sforim’, Literaturnaia entsiklopediia, 11 vols (Moscow 1929–1939), vii (Moscow: Sovetskaia
Entsiklopediia, 1934), cols 150–57; Avrom Abtshuk, Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sh.Y. Abramovitsh):
zayn lebn un zayne verk (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1927); Shmuel Klitenik, Mendele Moykher-Sforim: tsu
zayn hundertsn geburtstog (1836–1936) (Moscow: Emes, 1936).
23. E 32 / Y1 22.
24. Cf. also Malouf, pp. xiii–xiv.
25. Cf. e.g. Y2 259 / E 355–56; Malouf, p. xiii, xv; cf. also Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister’, p. 40.
26. E 474–75 / Y2 140–41.
27. Y2 108–10 / E 451–53.
28. Y2 108 / E 451 (my emphasis).
29. Cf. also Malouf, pp. xiii–xiv.
30. Y1 312 / E 284.
31. Cf. e.g. Christa Ebert, Symbolismus in Rußland: Zur Romanprosa Sologubs, Remisows, Belys (Berlin
[GDR]: Akademie-Verlag, 1988), pp. 72–108. Der Nister himself was acquainted with Sologub’s
works, cf. Boehlich, pp. 134–35.
32. Ebert, pp. 102–03.
33. Cf. Y2 430, 439–46 / E 676, 683–88.

34. E 688 / Y2 446. For instance, both Meyerl and the narrator illustrate their narrative with
allusions to Scripture, cf. Y1 389; Y2 439 / E 347, 683. At the beginning of Chapter 2, ‘Family
Chronicle’, the narrator retells in his own words ‘what one child [Meyerl] remembers’, see E 60 /
Y1 51.
35. Yeshue Rapoport, ‘Notitsn vegn dem Nisters “Di mishpokhe Mashber” ’, Di goldene keyt, 43
(1962), 69–76 (p. 75).
36. Cf. Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister’, pp. 10, 39; Sadan, pp. 63–65.
37. Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister’, p. 39.
38. In the following, cf. Y1 136–50, 222–34 / E 133–46, 207–17.
39. E 413 / Y2 52.
40. E 212 / Y1 228.
41. Cf. Dubilet, passim; Delphine Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, 1907–1929: A Study of a Yiddish
Symbolist (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 8.
42. E 75, 182 / Y1 68, 194.
43. Cf. Y1 143, 292–94; Y2 139 / E 139, 267–69, 474.
44. Y1 142; Y2 75–80 / E 138, 428–31.
45. Y1 229, 282–83 / E 212–13, 259.
46. Y1 296–97 / E 270–71.
47. Y2 9–16, 37, 271–88 / E 383–88, 402, 563–75.
48. Cf. Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister’s “Under a Fence” ’, pp. 270–71.
49. Cf. Ebert, p. 100.
50. In the following, cf. Y1 105–07, 111–14, 116–26, 369–72; Y2 9, 16–33, 60–72, 215–20, 262–76 /
E 106–09, 111–14, 116–25, 332–34, 383, 388–99, 419–27, 528–30, 558–66.
51. Cf. Y1 111–12, 370–71 / E 112, 333.
52. Y1 106 / E 107.
53. As a narrative device, this information is relayed to the reader through Luzi Mashber’s reasoned
impression of Bukyer, see Y1 121–22 / E 121.
54. Y1 115–21 / E 116–21.
55. Y2 24–27 / E 392–94.
56. Cf. e.g. Aage Hansen-Löve, Der Russische Symbolismus: System und Entfaltung der poetischen Motive,
2 vols (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1989–1998), ii, 424.
57. Cf. Y1 369–70 / E 333–34.
58. Cf. Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister’s “Under a Fence” ’. For a Bakhtinian reading of this story, see Marc
Caplan, ‘Performance Anxieties: Carnival Spaces and Assemblages in Der Nister’s “Under a
Fence” ’, Prooftexts, 18 (1998), 1–28.
59. Y1 249–50, 263–69; Y2 55 / E 231, 242–47, 415.
60. E 660 / Y2 408.
61. Y1 84–101 / E 435–46.
62. See e.g. Y2 37–38, 317, 339–42 / E 403–04, 597, 614–15.
63. Y1 89, 98–99, 164 / E 92, 100–01, 158. Cf. also Dubilet, p. 166.
64. Y2 224 / E 533.
65. Y2 221–22.
66. E 532. Note that Leonard Wolf ’s English translation of this passage omits a number of phrases
and is rather free. In the Yiddish original, the last line says literally: ‘The possibility cannot be
excluded that even he, Luzi, and his, for the time being small number of followers, should not
initiate the worst oppression [literally: drap-melokhe ‘scratch-work’] [...].
67. ‘Luzis tsoymen ufgebrokhn’, pp. 14–15. I am grateful to Mikhail Krutikov for providing me with
a copy of this rare text.
68. In the following, cf. Y2 24–27 / E 392–94.
69. In the Yiddish original, the f lies address Satan with the words: ‘Oy, har, oy, foter undzer’ [O,
Lord, O, Our Father], cf. Y2 24. Leonard Wolf ’s English translation omits this phrase, cf. E 393.
70. On these and other concepts of Russian symbolism and their ref lection in poetry, cf. e.g.
Hansen-Löve, in particular vol. i, 92–94, 100, 441, 443.
71. Y2 27.
160 Roland Gruschka
72. E 394. Wolf ’s translation omits the phrase ‘tsi mindst, tsi pitsl’ [least or tiny].
73. Cf. Hansen-Löve, i, 370–77, 421; Max Stirner, The Ego and its Own, trans. by Steven T. Byington,
ed. by David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; German original: Der
Einzige und sein Eigenthum, 1845); Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. by Adrian Del
Caro and Robert Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; German original: Also
sprach Zarathustra, 1883–1885), p. 232.
74. Cf. e.g. Irina Gutkin, ‘The Legacy of Symbolist Aesthetic Utopia: From Futurism to Socialist
Realism’, in Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. by Irina Paperno and
Joan Delaney Grossman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 167–96.
75. E 560–61 / Y2 266–67.
76. On Nister’s ambivalence towards symbolism in the late 1920s, cf. Bechtel, pp. 255–69.
77. E 431–32 / Y2 78–80.
Chapter 9
v
‘The Feast Has Ended’:

Time in The Family Mashber
Harriet Murav
On 20 September 1937, Literaturnaia gazeta [The Literary Gazette], the leading

journal of the Soviet literary establishment, published several articles on historical
fiction. These included a positive review of Lion Feuchtwanger’s historical novel The
False Nero and a general call for more works of historical fiction, especially from the
national minorities.1 The interest in history ref lected a larger campaign of patriotic
nationalism that in turn served as an ideological weapon against fascism. The review
of Feuchtwanger opened with a discussion of the rise of Nazism in Germany, the
burning of ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ writings in Berlin in 1933, and the vandalizing of
Feuchtwanger’s apartment in Munich.2 The same issue of Literaturnaia gazeta also
contained an article about Sir Walter Scott by George Lukács, who was living in
Moscow at the time.3 Other mainstream literary journals published lengthy essays
by Lukács on same theme, which later appeared as his study, The Historical Novel.
Revolutionary disdain for the past, which had prevailed in the 1920s, gave way in
the 1930s to a new concern with the ‘prehistory of the present’, as Lukács put it.4
Soviet Yiddish authors, as if anticipating this trend, had been working on their
own historical novels. Serial publication of both Der Nister’s Mishpokhe Mashber
[The Family Mashber] and the second volume of David Bergelson’s Baym Dnyepr [At
the Dniepr] had begun in 1935. A complete edition of the first part of The Family
Mashber was published in Moscow in 1939. The novel’s publication history is com
plicated. Some chapters from the first volume began appearing serially in the Soviet
Union in 1935. Chapters from the second volume began publication in Soviet
Yiddish journals in1939 and continued in 1940. The second volume was published
in its entirety in New York in 1943 and 1948.5 Der Nister’s novel describes the life of
a Jewish family in Berdichev in the 1870s. Moshe Mashber is a wealthy financier and
capitalist, his brother Luzi is the leading member of the local Bratslav sect, despised
by everyone else in the Jewish community, and the third brother, Alter — ‘nisht
keyn bruder, nor an umglik: an umnormaler’ [not a brother, but a misfortune: not a
normal person] — suffers from epilepsy and lives a confined life in the upper storey
of Moshe’s house (1: 128).6 Another kind of aberration, in addition to Alter’s illness,
also mars the Mashber family history. The brothers’ grandfather was an adherent of
the false messiah Shabtai Zvi, a sin for which Luzi Mashber performs penance.7 By
the end of The Family Mashber, Moshe’s younger daughter has died; Moshe himself
162 Harriet Murav
is imprisoned and dies; his wife Gitl also dies, and Luzi, together with his associate
Sruli Gol, leaves the city to embark on a life of wandering.
This essay explores the temporal structure of The Family Mashber. As the title of
the novel and the chapter titles indicate, crisis (‘mashber’), sudden change, rupture,
break and collapse are key to the chronological map of the work. This emphasis
corresponds closely to Lukács’s argument about the historical novel, in which ‘crisis’
and ‘contradiction’ play a central role.8 Nonetheless, the sense that the catastrophe
has already occurred pervades both volumes, even though both are set before the
outbreak of the Second World War. The crisis is about to come and yet it has already
happened, and the characters in the novel find it difficult to act in the rubble and
ruin left behind. And yet hope is not lost.
Time falls out of sync in The Family Mashber. In Volume 2, Moshe and his wife
Gitl are left immobile by illness; they lose the capacity to respond to the people and
things around them. It is at these moments in particular that Der Nister creates a fork
in the plot, describing what could have happened, but did not. I will argue for the
significance of the temporal fork in relation to the novel’s overall temporal structure
and as an expression of Der Nister’s thinking on the possibility of redemption in
history. The temporal disjuncture reveals both the threshold of disaster and the
possibility of salvation. Gilles Deleuze’s study of time and film, Cinema 2: The
Time Image provides the theoretical point of departure for my argument.9 Deleuze
identifies two tendencies in cinema, one oriented toward the representation of
action, and the other, toward the representation of time itself, hence, the ‘time
image’. The shift from the first to the second comes after World War II, but the
emphasis on time emerges even earlier. Instead of a linear relation between cause
and effect, the second type of cinema subordinates action to time. The characters
in films of the second type no longer know how to react to the world that they
confront. Multiple disparate time arcs co-exist simultaneously, and dream and déjà
vu replace action. The use of Deleuze in relation to Der Nister may initially seem
farfetched.10 However, Deleuze’s insights into post-war cinema, guided by his
readings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), illuminate how Der
Nister both responds to and creates time that is out of joint.
A brief introduction to Bergson will be helpful for the broader discussion that
follows. He was the most widely known philosopher in Europe, Russia, and America
in the first decades of the twentieth century. His work was translated into Russian
and Yiddish, and the Yiddish journal Di yidishe velt, in which Der Nister’s work also
appeared, published articles about the French philosopher in 1913.11 Bergson argued
that our perception of the objects around us is usually limited to our utilitarian aims
with regard to the object: the projection of the action we are going to take with
regard to the object determines our image of the object. The projection arises from
our already lived experience; hence both memory and anticipation create our image
of the object. There is a time lag even in our habitual motor responses to the data
given by our senses. In the performance of the action, the past ‘expires’, as Bergson
puts it.12 All the possible past images of the object condense into the point of action.
When, however, we stop reacting automatically, along the track already laid down
by the sensory motor link, when, for example, we are daydreaming or sleeping,
‘The Feast Has Ended’ 163
the single point of contraction opens out, expanding more and more widely to
encompass multitudes of memories, ‘thousands of different planes of consciousness’,
as Bergson writes.13 Immobility in space makes possible duration in time and the
future realization of the not-yet acted upon potentialities of the past.
It is highly likely that Der Nister was familiar with the Bergsonian concepts on
which Deleuze bases his argument about the two types of cinema, and especially,
the second type, in which film represents the multiplicity of time itself. Bergson’s
theories about time’s f low were well known and were directly referred to by artists
in Kiev at the time that Der Nister was associated with the Kiev Kultur-Lige.14
Bergson was among the philosophers who inf luenced the Russian symbolist author
Andrei Bely, who in turn, inf luenced Der Nister.15 Visual artists in Europe’s capital
cities in the 1910s and 1920s engaged with Bergson’s ideas about duration and the
rhythm of time; Der Nister’s brother, Motl (Max) Kaganovitch, was a sculptor in
Paris; in addition, Der Nister spent time in Berlin, where he was involved with
the art and literature journal Milgroym. Scholars have noted the musicality of Der
Nister’s work, and his rejection of simple causality in favour of an ‘accumulation’ of
phenomena.16 Music is key to understanding Bergson’s concept of duration, because
in music, as in time, one quality penetrates, or, ‘leans over’ into the next one,
making clear-cut distinctions between past, present, and future nearly impossible.
An example of Bergsonian duration can be seen in the opening pages of The
Family Mashber, in the description of the ‘old’ synagogue. So many congregants
gathered there that their heated breath ‘un ot der otem in shul hot zikh gefilt afile
ven zi iz leydik geven, — der otem fun fil mol do gevezene groyse masn, velkhe
hobn af a gevisn afn gevise gesheenishn durkhgelebt’ [could be felt even when
it was empty — the breath of great masses of people who had been there many
times, and who had experienced the memorable events of their lives there] (1: 36).
Time and space are freighted with the emotions and memories of those who were
there before; time and space are not empty and uniform categories through which
we experience reality. Instead time and space are heterogeneous and full, densely
textured with our own and others’ memories.
Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson moves beyond the conventional emphasis
on subjectivity, the inner experience of time, and the individual recapturing of
the past as in the famous example of Proust and his madeleine. Deleuze radically
de-emphasizes subjectivity, emphasizing instead the way that individuals are
bearers of a time that transcends them: the past that ‘gnaws’ on the present (to use
Bergson’s language). In the passage from Der Nister’s novel quoted above, the past
experience of other people exerts a physical force on the experience of individuals
in the present. Deleuze uses the theory and history of cinema to develop Bergson’s
work on time, memory, and consciousness. I touched on these points earlier, but
since they are important for my argument, I elaborate them further here. In Cinema
2: The Time Image, Deleuze argues that the overwhelming events of the Second
World War loosened the sensory motor linkage necessary for action: ‘the post-war
period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react
to’.17 Post-war cinema focuses on time itself, in contrast to classic cinema, which
is focused on action. Characters in post-war cinema are stunned by situations that
164 Harriet Murav
‘outstrip [their] motor capacities’. 18 They are no longer agents, or, authors of their
own actions, but more resemble ‘seers’, witnesses, who see and hear ‘what is no
longer subject to the rules of a response or action’.19 Deleuze quotes Antonioni in
a line that corresponds to the temporal structure of the aftermath, which, I argue,
is central to The Family Mashber: ‘when everything has been said, when the main
scene seems over, this is what comes after’.20
Der Nister, of course, could not have read Deleuze, but he was likely to have seen
at least some of the Soviet films that Deleuze discusses, including, for example, the
work of Sergei Eisenstein, and Fridrikh Ermler’s 1929 Oblomok imperii [Fragments of
Empire], about an amnesiac in the early years of Soviet power. Time itself overwhelms
the hero, a former officer in the Tsarist army; in one scene a cigarette box labelled
Epokha [epoch] sets in motion a series of images, including a sewing machine whose
parts move faster and faster, a speeding train, the face of his wife, his commanding
officer, and Jesus on the cross with a gas mask over his face. Immobilized by his loss
of memory, and out of sync with time, he fails to recognize the new Soviet reality
and instead ‘sees’ fragments of the past that overtake the present.
Clearly, Der Nister does not use the same repertoire of technological and
political images in The Family Mashber; his vocabulary is drawn from other sources,
including the Bible and Jewish mystical texts. His approach, however, is similarly
modernist and cinematic; indeed, Arn Tseytlin, a Yiddish poet and critic, wrote
that Der Nister’s early work had the quality of ‘a feverish dream or a movie’.21 I
argue that these features can also be found in The Family Mashber, in which illness,
dream, and hallucination, and the fork in the path disrupt linear time. The present
may indeed be the aftermath of great destruction, and yet the alternative, the fork
in the path that leads to redemption — is not foreclosed.
I begin with Part 1, focusing first on its frame device, then turn to a discussion
of its dreams and visions. The figure of Alter is particularly significant for the two
volumes taken together; Alter, like the hero of Ermler’s Fragments of Empire, lives
in his own time and space, cut off from everyone else, and yet he sees what no one
else can. I read Alter in light of Lukács’s argument about the centrality of crisis to
the historical novel. The concluding section of this chapter focuses on the temporal
fork in Volume 2.
Beginning with the End

In the first paragraph of Volume 1, Der Nister tells his readers:
Di velt, vos vert geshildert in dem dozikn bukh, iz shoyn shpurloz farshvundn
mit ir gorer ekonomisher baze un bemeyle shoyn mit ale ire gezelshaftlikhe un
ideyishe konf liktn un interesn. Mir iz geven gants shver uftsuvekn, uftsulebn
un makhn zikh bavegn yene parshoynen, vos virkn in dem bukh. (1: 21)
[The world, depicted in this volume, with its entire economic base and, by the
same token, all its social and ideological conf licts and interests, has disappeared
without a trace. It was very difficult for us to revive and set in motion the
people acting in this book.]
The opening words of The Family Mashber position the present moment as taking
place after an entire world has ‘disappeared without a trace’. Whether this moment
is in the late 1930s, or whether the author imagined it as occurring at any moment
whatsoever — whenever a reader began to read the book — is left ambiguous. Der
Nister does not explicitly state the causes for the destruction of an entire world;
he presumably means to suggest the establishment of Soviet power. The author
goes on to note the ‘der gvaldiker mehalekh [...] vos teylt op undzer virklekhkayt
fun yener’ [enormous distance [...] separating our reality from theirs], adding that
this distance was achieved in a ‘tseyt-apshnit’ [brief time span] (1: 21). The vast
gulf separating the past from the present can be read in two ways: both as praise
for the accomplishments of Soviet power, and shock at the utter loss of this ‘entire
world’ that Soviet power destroyed. The disproportionally brief interval that it
took to create this great distance suggests mourning over a cataclysmic loss and
not praise for the titanic achievements that made this former reality obsolete so
quickly. Unlike other Yiddish historical novels written and published in the same
time period, including David Bergelson’s Baym Dnyepr, for example, which returns
to the past in order to look forward to a bright future, Der Nister provides few, if
any, hints about the positive future of socialism in The Family Mashber. He writes
in the introduction that his method was ‘realism’ in the manner of Goethe —
without adding the qualifying term ‘socialist’, as in ‘socialist realism’, the only
officially sanctioned aesthetic in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Der Nister says
that he undertook the resurrection of these people from the past not in order to
‘struggle’ against them, but rather to ‘zey gelozt aleyn shtil un pamelekh geyn tsu
zeyer ongetseykhnter bashertkayt, tsu zeyer geshikhtlekh-noytvendikn letsn gang
— tsum apgrunt’ [let them quietly and slowly go to the fate designed for them, to
their historically necessary last step — to the abyss] (1: 21).
This is not a narrative that depicts the overcoming of obstacles and progress
towards a goal, as we might expect from a novel published in the Soviet Union
in 1939. From 1932 onward, Soviet writers were to fulfil the aesthetic dictates of
socialist realism, namely, to ‘depict reality in its revolutionary development’. Der
Nister, in contrast, tells us a story that begins with the abyss and ends with the
abyss; everything that takes place in between the two deaths is merely a momentary
reprieve that the author creates by telling the tale; in a manner reminiscent of
Scheherazade, the longer the story takes, the more the end is deferred.
The Crisis
Lukács’s analysis of the historical novel emphasizes the significance of ‘crisis’ and
‘collision’.22 The overarching contradictions and collisions of a particular epoch in
the life of a people must emerge in the interconnected lives of individuals. Lukács
writes: ‘the split of the nation into warring parties always runs through the centre of
the closest human relationships’.23 In his article on Sir Walter Scott for Literaturnaia
gazeta Lukács praises Scott for his skill at linking his protagonist’s life with the great
crises of his historical time. Whether he was reading Lukács or not, Der Nister
seems to have taken this characterization as a prescription for the plot of The Family
Mashber, in which ideological divisions and the contradictions of nascent capitalism
166 Harriet Murav
come to a head in the quarrel between the brothers Luzi and Moshe and in and
Moshe’s financial crisis, with its far-reaching implications for the entire family.
It is in the figure of Alter that Der Nister concentrates all the force of the family
crisis. Alter is associated with a particular kind of space, which Bakhtin identifies
as the defining characteristic, or, chronotope, of crisis: the threshold.24 In Part 1 of
The Family Mashber, in the dramatic scene of Mosyhe and Luzi’s quarrel, Der Nister
uses the word ‘threshold’ (shvel) eight times (1: 194–95).25 Alter’s sudden appearance
at the threshold here ‘as if from the grave’ — points to disastrous change. Long
cut off ‘from any contact with anything that could link even those such as he with
the surrounding world’, he is incapable of responding to the objects and people
around him (1: 397). He is not the agent or author of his own action, but rather
is acted upon by his illness, which causes him to scream wildly, ‘vos s’dakht zikh,
az ot bald-bald vet er di kishkes fun ineveynik durkhn haldz aroysgebrengen fun
geshray’ [as if the scream would pull his intestines out through his throat ] (1: 131).
Alter’s body tries to tear itself apart; the dramatic gesture his body makes against
his will parallels the split in time in the novel as a whole. His body makes a sharp
thud he when he falls to the f loor in the grips of his first epileptic attack (‘mit a
shtarkn klap in pol anidergefaln’, 1: 195). The same sharp thud sounds again when
Moshe’s creditor pounds his fist on the table (‘mit aza zets geton’) so loudly that
everything in the house echoed the noise and everyone in the house was terrified.
Alter’s acoustic image — the sound of his fall — anticipates the acoustic image of
Moshe’s financial fall, the sound of his creditor’s pounding fist.
In the rare moments when he is free from violent pain, Alter writes letters to
Nebuchadnezzar and other people from the Bible, including God. Near the end of
the first volume, Alter reawakens, recognizing himself in the mirror, remembering
the titles of books and recalling how to read them, and experiences sexual desire.
But by the end of the second volume he sinks back into his illness. In The Family
Mashber as whole, Alter sees, hears, says, and experiences what no one else does, as if
responding to another world, a world that is unbearable and overwhelming, which
in Volume 1, no one else sees, but which, by the end of Volume 2, nearly everyone
comes to know. Alter’s last lucid act, which takes place in Volume 2, is to write
a letter to God, with the request that he not survive his brother Luzi’s death. He
imagines hurling himself into a great fire, like a piece of paper on which his plea to
God is written. Alter’s vision at the end of Volume 2 continues and develops Luzi’s
from Volume 1. It also recalls the martyrdom of R. Hananiah, the second-century
scholar who was burned with a Torah scroll wrapped around his body, proclaiming
that the letters would ascend to God. For a post-1945 reader, Alter’s vision anticipates
the fate of Jews burned in Nazi crematoria. Alter is the embodiment of the crisis
and rupture that has already taken place and will take place again in the Mashber
family and in the Jewish community more generally.
Dreams and Visions

The consequence of living in the time that comes after great destruction is the
inability to act. To use Bergson’s fundamental premise, the motor response does
not follow upon the sensory stimulus. In the gap between the received motion
and the motion that follows, various kinds of images appear to consciousness. It is
true that the characters in the first volume perform the everyday actions of eating,
prayer, work, trade and depending on what circle of the city they inhabit — the
list expands to include drinking, crime and revelry. According to Deleuze, the
predominance of the time image does not depend on complete inactivity, but
rather, the subordination of movement to time. The activity in the first volume of
Mishpoke Mashber, even when it reaches a fever pitch, is not a response to the fate
that hangs over the characters, to which they fail to react. When action fails, dream,
vision, and nightmare take over. The insertion of lengthy visual elements, which in
Mishpoke Mashber are fantastical and spectacular, suspends the forward motion of the
plot. These include Moshe Mashber’s vision of his brother Luzi surrounded by fire,
Mikhl Bukyer’s nightmare of the world turned upside down, Sruli Gol’s imagined
double of himself, Luzi’s visions, including one of the Messiah at the gates of
Jerusalem, and at the end of Volume 1, Mayerl’s dream of ‘zeygers mit mentshlekhe
pnimer, vi zey shteyen far oreme bentsh-likht, un durkh di finger, mit velkhe zey
farshteln zikh di oygn, kapen zey di trern’ [clocks with human faces, as they stand
before cheap Friday night candlesticks, the fingers with which they cover their eyes
are drenched through with tears] (1: 408). Time itself weeps.
The longest single sequence of visions belongs to Luzi, who takes on the role
of ‘seer’ in Deleuze’s sense. He sits alone in the synagogue that looks out on the
cemetery, like one of the blind singers at the fair, ‘blind in his own way’ (1: 296). What
he ‘sees’ has nothing to do with what his gaze falls upon looking out of the window;
instead, his vision comes from within. According to Bergson, representation is
stopped up by action; when action ceases, as is the case in this scene from The Family
Mashber, representation has the chance to appear to consciousness. Luzi ‘klogt af
zayn opgelebtn ofn der opgelebtkayt funem folk’ [laments in his own exhausted
way the exhaustion of his people] (1: 297). Their fate is to suffer; the emblem of their
fate is their legend of their Messiah who sits at the gates of Jerusalem binding and
unbinding his wounds (1: 297). The people wait for their Messiah and their Messiah,
according to the Talmud, unbinds and binds his wounds one a time so as to be
ready to go to his people. The people and their Messiah wait for each other. The
emphasis in this passage is on belatedness and anticipation; the Jewish people have
already lived out their time and now they are obsolete; there is nothing for them to
do but wait. This moment in the text resonates with Deleuze’s characterization of
the time image in post-war cinema, only for Der Nister the sense of the aftermath
comes earlier, even before World War II. Monumental, overwhelming destruction
has already taken place; to quote the author’s introduction once again: ‘the world
depicted in this volume has disappeared without a trace’ (1: 21).26 The epigraph to
the second volume, as I will later show, addresses the violence of World War II.
Luzi’s temporary inability to act opens out what Bergson describes as ‘thousands
168 Harriet Murav
of planes of consciousness’, expanding beyond the limits of his own individual

memory. From Luzi’s meditation on the Jewish people emerge three ‘images’, the
first, of a great city into which and out of which stream multitudes of people of all
kinds, including beggars, cripples, and ‘painted whores’, who spit on the Messiah
(1: 297). From this image come ‘quotations and half-quotations’ that Luzi cries
aloud, as he feels himself to be the despised and spat-upon Messiah. The next frame
is of a great mass of people seeking and not finding comfort or one another, who
eventually throw themselves into a terrible fire, to their death, to the ‘unavoidable
abyss’ referred to in the very opening of the book. The final piece of Luzi’s vision
consists of words and images from the Zohar coming to life, including ‘bears who
speak in human voices, birds who bind together with their messages one end of the
world to another ... grasses that heal and kill ... children that look like old men ... the
fantastic arabesques that authors have thought up to confound’ their readers (1: 300).
What begins as a realistic scene — Luzi Mashber looking out at the cemetery from
within the synagogue — metamorphoses into a series of apocalyptic, Messianic, and
fantastic images, culminating in the description of the arabesque, the self-repeating
and ever-widening pattern that also encompasses this text itself, The Family Mashber
in its entirety. There is no clearly drawn distinction between the time-frames of
the past, present, and future; instead, the legendary past merges with the possible
future as one image transforms itself into another. Fragments of time collide and
coalesce. In the same way, there is no clearly drawn distinction between figure and
ground. The text circles back on itself, like the characters in it, who begin in the
‘abyss’, undergo reanimation at the hands of the author, and end back where they
started, in the abyss. The first volume of the novel does not add up to a clear-cut
past out of which a unified, positive future could emerge, a future fulfilled by
Soviet socialism.
Forking Paths
In the dedication to the second volume, as in the introduction to the first, Der Nister
situates the book’s temporal position as being in the aftermath of overwhelming
destruction. The volume is a memorial to his daughter, Hodl, a poet, who died in
1942 during the siege of Leningrad:
zol dayn tatns tsebrokhn harts zayn di matseyve af dayn farloyrenem keyver; zol
ot dos bukh zayn gevidmet dayn eybik heylikn far mir ondenk. (2: iv)
[let your father’s broken heart be the stone for your lost grave; let this book be
dedicated to your eternal memory.]
Taken together, the frame devices of the two volumes speak to irredeemable loss;
the second volume is a verbal memorial that takes the place of a gravestone. By the
end of the second volume of The Family Mashber three members of the Mashber
family have died, Moshe’s financial ruin and imprisonment having played a role in
his wife’s and his own death. These events, however, do not in and of themselves
create the sense of a disjuncture in time particular to this part of the novel: the
sense of possibility that did not come to pass, the missed opportunity, the fork in
the road that was not taken. The first volume also uses the forking path, when,
for example, the narrator describes how the city would have reacted to the quarrel
between Moshe and Luzi had it not been distracted by the annual fair. In the second
volume, in contrast, the focus is on missed salvation. Der Nister repeats sequences
of events that could have lead to redemption, or, reprieve (yeshue) — but did not
do so.
An especially compelling example of this type of sequence begins with Moshe
Mashber’s imprisonment. The town worthies petition for his early release on the
grounds of illness. The narrator comments ‘ober vos kumt aroys, az di yeshue iz
shoyn gekumen a bisl tsu shpet’ [but it turned out that the release came a little too
late] (2: 363). The Hebrew term yeshue, which I have translated as ‘release’, is not a
neutral term; it also carries the connotation of ‘redemption’ or ‘salvation’. What is
striking here is the paradox that in Moshe’s case early ‘release’ came too late. The
yeshue in the sense of release did not bring yeshue in the sense of redemption. That
moment had already passed.
This temporal gap repeats itself in the events that follow upon Moshe’s early
release. Upon returning home, his first act is to enter the room where his wife Gitl
lies paralysed, the victim of an apparent stroke that befell her when Moshe left for
prison. Der Nister offers two possible outcomes of his unexpected return:
S’zol geshen eyns fun di tsvey: oder zi zol mit amol uftsitern fun iberrashung un
a vildn oysgeshrey ton: ‘Moshe!’ vos volt batayt an iberbrukh un an uf leyzung
fun ir krenk [...] oder farkert, fun umgerikhtn uftsaplen volt zi azoy shtark
untergerisn ire vortslen ... un shoyn mitn gorn lebn opgezegnt. (2: 368)
[One of two things could happen; either she would suddenly begin to shake
from the shock and give a wild shriek: ‘Moshe!’ which would mean a break
and a cure from her illness [...] or, the opposite, from the unexpected shock she
would be torn from her very roots ... and would soon bid farewell to life.]
The narrator proceeds to argue for the greater likelihood of the first possibility,
Gitl’s cure, and describes how Gitl would throw her arms around her husband’s
neck, even though such a gesture would not be fitting for a pious woman. It is at
this point that the narrator abandons the rosier of the two possibilities: ‘yo, s’volt,
ot-ot gekont geshen, s’iz ober nit geshen’ [yes, it could have happened, but it did not
happen] (2: 368; emphasis in original). Gitl, paralysed, cannot respond to the event
of Moshe’s return.
Soon Moshe also falls into a state resembling paralysis. He too fails to respond to
yet another opportunity for release, reprieve, and redemption. It is Purim and Luzi
Mashber and the members of the local Nakhman circle come to the Mashber house
to celebrate the holiday:
Zey hobn gezungen un getantst mit aza kavone un fardveyketer ufrikhtikayt, az
mir zaynen zikher, az ven Moyshe Mashber ... zol geven zayn in mindstn shtand
khotsh a mindstn kuk ton un a her ton ot di parshoynen, azoy volt er khotsh af
a rege, alkolponem, mit a mindst shtikele bager tsu zeyer avoyde zikh fareynikt
un s’volt im, alkolponem, a kleyn shtikele fargenigter shmeykhl in ponem un
in di oygn zikh gevizn. Vayl yo, s’iz dokh tsu zen geven, az yene hobn getantst
un gefreyt zikh nisht fun iberfultkayt fun esn, trinken ... nor der iker take fun
groysn nes, vos hot getrofn zey un zeyere eltern ... Yo, ven Moyshe Mashber
170 Harriet Murav
zol geven zayn khotsh vi nit iz umshtand ... er iz ober nit geven. (2: 388–89;
emphasis in original)
[They sang and danced with such concentrated intention and pious sincerity
that we are sure that if Moshe Mashber ... would have only had the slightest
inclination to look at and listen to these people, if even only for a minute, at
least with the slightest desire to join them in their service to God, at least a small
smile of pleasure would have appeared on his face and in his eyes. Because it
was clear that they danced and rejoiced not from too much eating and drinking
... but first and foremost from the great miracle that they and their ancestors
had encountered. Yes, if Moshe Mashber had looked regardless of his situation
...he, however, did not.]
In some other alternative reality, Moshe’s early release would have saved his life; had
one fork in the path been pursued instead of another, Moshe’s early release would
have saved Gitl as well; in yet another permutation Moshe would have responded
positively to the Purim celebration. The paths that were not taken remain open,
however, as possibilities, even though in this particular realization of the plot
they were not fulfilled. The dismantling of cause and effect reveals the failure
of knowledge and the separation from the world; the proliferation of alternative
pathways signals the loss of the world but also its possible recovery. Not fulfilled in
the here and now, the forking path leading to reprieve and redemption remains as
a ‘virtuality’ that has not yet expired, to use Bergson’s language.
The virtual plot of redemption suggests an alternative to the model of causality
and time that Der Nister evokes in the introduction to the novel in Volume 1: the
‘historical necessity’ that the people ‘reanimated’ in The Family Mashber take their
last step into the ‘abyss’. Marxist logic may require the elimination of unproductive
elements of society, the destruction of capitalism and capitalists, the overcoming of
religious belief, and the abandonment of religious practice in the service of progress
and the establishment of socialism, however, this iron-clad necessity may give way
to other possibilities, other forks in the path not yet determined.
The fork in the path, a spatial metaphor, foregrounds time; it is time that gets split
into two, as Deleuze points out in his analysis of Borges’s 1941 story, ‘The Garden
of the Forking Paths’, which can be described as a work that combines Bergsonian
theories of time with an espionage plot. 27 Der Nister had previously used the
spatial fork in one of his early stories, ‘Der Kadmen’ [The Beginning], published
in 1910. The story is a metaphysical ref lection on the universe before creation, in
which qualities of space and time are personified. At one point in the story, the title
character, The Beginning, realizes that he has forgotten something: ‘the Beginning’s
brain saw limitless paths and roads leading to what was forgotten’.28 He sets off on
one path only to end up where he began. The spatial image of multiple, even
infinite, pathways indicates multiple possibilities in time: this and this and this, and
so forth, could have happened and might still happen. In ‘Der Kadmen’, nothing has
happened yet. The image corresponds to what Bergson describes as the ‘thousands
of planes of consciousness’ available when there is no action, as is the case in ‘Der
Kadmen’. In the realist framework of The Family Mashber the possibilities are not
limitless, but the effect of time’s doubling and multiplying is similar. What might
have happened but did not happen might happen: the contradictions co-exist;
they do not cancel one another out, as in Marxist causality. In creating alternative
pathways in The Family Mashber Der Nister suspends the single axis of historical
necessity, replacing it with a vision of open-ended potentiality, most importantly,
including the potentiality for redemption.
In his introduction to an anthology of stories by Der Nister published in 1929,
the Soviet critic Isaac Nusinov defended the author against the charge that his
symbolism cut him off from historical reality. Nusinov also argued that symbolism
did not necessarily indicate despair and deep pessimism. Before Der Nister, ‘Yiddish
literature knew only one symbolist, Y. L. Peretz’.29 Peretz’s symbolism was optimistic;
according to Nusinov, it led to the idea that ‘di velt muz un vet oysgeleyzt vern’ [the
world must and will be saved].30 It was true that the failed revolution of 1905 led Der
Nister to cut himself off and assume the role of a recluse. Nonetheless, Nusinov goes
on to say, Der Nister’s symbolist aesthetic and his imagery, seemingly religious and
mystical, are, like Peretz’s, ‘deeply optimistic’, and indicative of ‘an onzog af nayem
lebn, af eybig banaytn lebn’ [new life, eternally renewed life].31 Clearly, Nusinov
attempts to bring Der Nister’s symbolism into the orbit of socialism: it is Marxism
and the new Soviet socialist society that make renewal and redemption possible.
Leaving aside the issue of Marxism and socialism, however, Nusinov’s observation
about Der Nister’s optimism holds true for his work of 1929 and 1939, although in
modified form. Notwithstanding his language about the ‘abyss’ in the introduction
to The Family Mashber, renewal and redemption are not precluded.
Near the end of Volume 2, Sruli Gol prepares a bag for his and Luzi’s departure
from the city. In one of strangest scenes of a novel filled with bizarre descriptions
and unexpected visions, Sruli dreams that in the bag are:
neshomelekh, mit hoyle penimlekh, on gufim, zaynen vi kreln af a shnirl
ofgetsilt; zey zeeyn oys tsekrimt un laydndik; ober oyser dem oysdrukn fun
laydn, tut nokh fun zey aropshaynen epes a min dervartung af a geule — un
nisht nor far zey aleyn, nor far ale, ale dakht zikh, af der velt. (2: 360–61)
[little souls, bodiless and with hollow faces, like beads on a string; they were
contorted with suffering, but in addition to the expression of suffering, they
emanated a kind of waiting for redemption, and not only for themselves, but
for everyone in the world.]
The image of the pilgrim’s sack filled with souls suggests male pregnancy and recalls
Peretz Markish’s 1932 poem ‘Say di / vos kh’er zikh op fun zeyer brokh’ [Both
those, from whose death I turn away], which also imagines a pilgrim with a sack
filled with souls about to be born. In the Markish poem, however, the souls do not
survive; they are stillborn, bloodied in the poet’s womb. In The Family Mashber, in
contrast, the souls not yet born wait for birth and those already born, and those
already dead, even, wait for rebirth and redemption. The potential for redemption
left unfulfilled by Moshe and Gitl may yet be fulfilled, and the ‘prehistory of the
present’ may be traced along multiple pathways. Even though the ‘reanimated’
people in The Family Mashber return to the abyss from which the author has
temporarily redeemed them, the alternative reality to Marxist necessity still remains
open. Der Nister’s historical novel, while using Lukács’s motif of the crisis, stands
the premises of the historical novel on their head. The world of the past may have
172 Harriet Murav
disappeared without a trace, as Der Nister himself says, but it nonetheless remains
unfinished and undead; the futures it contains are virtual realities which may yet
be realized.
Notes to Chapter 9
1. Andrei V. Shestakov, ‘Istoricheskie temy sovetskoi literatury’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 26 September
1937, p. 6.
2. Ia. Metallov, ‘Lzhe-Neron L. Feikhtvangera’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 20 September 1937, p. 5.
3. George Lukács, ‘Val’ter Skott’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 20 September 1937, p. 5. ‘Istoricheskii roman
na zapade’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 26 September 1937.
4. George Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. by Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1962), p. 337.
5. For discussions of the work’s publication history, see, in addition to Mikhail Krutikov’s chapter
in this volume, Krutikov, ‘Skrytyi klassik evreiskoi kul’tury’, Lekhaim 10, no. 210 (2009) and
Leonard Wolf, ‘Introduction’, in The Family Mashber (New York: Summit Books, 1987), pp.
7–25.
6. All quotations taken from Der Nister, Di Mishpokhe Mashper, 2 vols (New York: Ikuf, 1948),
henceforth referred to parenthetically in the body of the text by volume and page number.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
7. This is chronologically impossible, since Shabtai Zvi lived in the seventeenth century and the
grandfather, presumably, in the eighteenth.
8. Lukács used these terms, for example, in his article on Sir Walter Scott; see Lukács, ‘Val’ter
Skott’.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. by Hugh Thomlinson and Robert Galatea
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
10. For a discussion of ‘Under a Fence’ that uses Deleuze, see Marc Caplan, ‘Performance Anxieties:
Carnival Spaces and Assemblages in Der Nister’s “Under a Fence”, Prooftexts, 18.1 (1998), 1–18.
11. See, for example, Sh. Rudnyanski, ‘Anri Bergson vegn estetik’, Di yidishe velt, 8 (1913), 82–88. I
am indebted to Gennady Estraikh for directing me to these articles.
12. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul and William Scott Palmer
(New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 78.
13. Ibid., p. 241.
14. For a discussion of the role of Bergson in Les Kurbas’s film, see Irene Rima Makaryk and Virlana
Tkacz, Modernism in Kiev: Jubilant Experimentation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).
For the Kultur-Lige, see Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Yiddish Kultur-Lige’, in Modernism in Kyiv:
Jubilant Experimentation, ed. by Irene Rima Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz (Toronto University of
Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 197–219.
15. For Bergson and Bely, see Hilary L. Fink, ‘Andrei Bely and the Music of Bergsonian Duration’,
Slavic and East European Journal, 41. 2 (1997), 287–302. For Bely and Der Nister, see David G.
Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
16. Daniela Mantovan discusses accumulation and musicality in ’Der Nister and his Symbolist Short
Stories (1913–1929): Patterns of Imagination’, (unpublished PhD thesis, Columbia University,
1993), p. 34 ; and see also Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, p. 195.
17. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, p. xi.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 3.
20. Antonioni, Cinéma 58, September 1958, cited by Ibid., p. 7.
21. Arn Tseytlin, ‘Der Nister’, Bikher-Velt, 1924 cited by Mantovan, ’Der Nister and his Symbolist
Short Stories (1913–1929)’, p. 29.
22. See for example Lukács, The Historical Novel, pp. 41, 53, 94, 97, 101.
23. Ibid., p. 41.
24. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 248.
25. ‘Shvel’ was one of the key words of the Kiev modernist Yiddish poets; Peretz Markich titled his
first poetry collection Shveln. I am grateful to Mikhail Krutikov for pointing this out to me.
26. I have omitted a few words; for the full citation, see p. 164 of the present chapter.
27. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, p. 49.
28. See Der Nister, ‘Der Kadmen’, in his Hekher fun der erd (Warsaw: Progres, 1910), pp. 10–11.
29. Isaac Nusinov, ‘Der Nister’, in Der Nister, Gedakht (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1929), p. x.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., p. xv.
C h a p t e r 10
v
‘We are lacking

“A Man Dieth in a Tent” ’
Der Nister’s Search for Redemption in the
Summer of 1947
Ber (Boris) Kotlerman
The ‘Historic Journey’, Vinnitsa — Moscow — Birobidzhan

On 9 June 1947, the Jewish migrant train from Vinnitsa to Birobidzhan stopped in
Moscow. On the platform to greet the ‘Birobidzhanians’ stood the entire presidium
of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee ( JAFC) headed by Solomon Mikhoels,
along with other Soviet Yiddish culture activists. In the crowd that day was also
the writer Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, known as ‘Der Nister’. In contrast to most of his
Moscow colleagues, he did not bid farewell to the future builders of ‘Soviet Jewish
statehood’ but boarded the train and took his place in one of the compartments.
Travelling together with him were also Ilya Lumkis, a correspondent for the JAFC
newspaper Eynikayt [Unity], a photographer from the newspaper by the name of
Pikus, and, in another car, the poet Yosef Kerler with his family.
This was a special train with forty-five cars and about one thousand passengers
(a third of them orphaned children), termed in military jargon ‘echelon’. This
immigrants’ train was the second to have been organized in Vinnitsa, and after
it there was to be one more from there, a total of three out of twelve such trains,
which were organized primarily in the Ukraine, but also in Crimea and Samarkand,
Uzbekistan.1 In 1947–48, they conveyed thousands of Jewish survivors of the
Holocaust to Birobidzhan, far from the valley of slaughter, after it was decided in
Moscow in early 1946 to unfreeze the Birobidzhan project.2 It was Vinnitsa and
environs, Khmelnik, Bershad and Murafa, in particular that supplied approximately
a quarter of the total number of immigrants, since it was in this specific region
of Podolia that there had been a worrisome increase of anti-Semitic disturbances
and the authorities were interested in calming things down. As it was told to the
author of these lines by the Yiddish writer Misha Lev (who passed away in 2013 in
Rehovoth, Israel), who had accompanied that train from Vinnitsa to Moscow, the
atmosphere was very grim. People were hungry, they did not have enough food for
the trip, everyone had lost family members in the war, and some of them had not
succeeded in taking back the dwellings they had lived in before the war.
‘We are lacking “A Man Dieth in a Tent”’ 175
The train was delayed for an entire day in Moscow, with Der Nister inside,
making the acquaintance of his fellow travellers. It was there that he made friends
with a representative of Birobidzhan named Abram Hershkov, who was in charge
of transferring the Jewish orphanage from Vinnitsa to Birobidzhan.3 On 10 June,
the train set out on its long, almost three-week journey (19 days) towards the Pacific
Ocean, with prolonged delays all along the trans-Siberian track. Lumkis would
report from every station to his paper Eynikayt with bounding optimism about the
progress of the ‘historic journey’, about the inhabitants of the ‘echelon’, and later
about the reception in Birobidzhan and the placement of the immigrants in the
new location.4 Der Nister mainly watched from the sidelines and drew his own
conclusions.
This trip does not easily fit into Der Nister’s way of life. Ever since he returned
from Germany in 1925, he was careful to keep a distance from Soviet social life,
including not participating in activities of the Yiddish publication editorial boards,
whose tone in the 1930s and 1940s was set by his colleagues Peretz Markish, David
Hofshteyn, Itsik Fefer, Izi Kharik, David Bergelson, and others. Likewise he never
took part in the Birobidzhanian propaganda effort, and he never showed any open
interest in the subject.5 Unlike the abovementioned Yiddish men of letters, he had
never travelled there previously, including the famous trip in honour of the First
Convention of Soviets of the newborn autonomy at the end of 1934.6 It seems that
Der Nister’s only connection with Birobidzhan before the war was an open letter
that he sent in 1940 to David Bergelson, who was considered the in-house writer of
Birobidzhan (even though he did not live there regularly). The letter was published
in the Birobidzhan almanac Forpost [Outpost] as part of the thirtieth anniversary of
Bergelson’s literary activity.7 Nonetheless, the autonomy is presented in this letter
only obliquely.
And now suddenly in the summer of 1947, Der Nister initiated a trip to
Birobidzhan. He did this in a completely independent way, although arranging for
a letter of recommendation for himself from the JAFC of which he was a member
(later, at the JAFC trials, Itsik Fefer ‘confessed’ that Nister was sent to Birobidzhan
by him and Mikhoels to ‘set up a network of nationalistic activity’).8 Considering
the shaky state of his health and the prolonged emotional crisis he suffered after
he had lost his daughter in besieged Leningrad in wartime, this initiative seems
quite strange. From the journey itself, several accounts have survived, such as
various notes published by Eynikayt and Birobidzhaner shtern, or the pamphlet by
Lumkis Eshelonen geyen keyn Birobidzhan [The echelons are going to Birobidzhan], but
for the time being, at least, there are only four major sources that can shed light
on the matter of Der Nister and Birobidzhan: his own published notes, poet Yosef
Kerler’s memoirs,9 protocols of the interrogations of the Birobidzhan writers which
were discovered by Mark Miller, son of author Buzi Miller, and, in particular, the
memoirs of the poet Israel Emiot (Goldvasser), who was in Birobidzhan at the given
time and held deep discussions with Der Nister.10
176 Ber (Boris) Kotlerman
Head Spinning
In the second half of the 1940s, none of the prominent Soviet Yiddish writers took
the trouble to visit Birobidzhan, although the Birobidzhan leadership again raised
the possibility of declaring a Jewish republic and signalled left and right that it
was very interested in public support.11 And yet Der Nister, like Meir Alberton
in 1928 just after resettlement in Birobidzhan was announced,12 underwent the
uncomfortable conditions of a slow migrant train, nearly twice as slow as a regular
passenger train, not to mention the express train which his colleagues usually
used. It is therefore possible that he had anticipated the enthusiasms of the people
of Birobidzhan, for they gave him a royal welcome indeed. In any event, this was
not what drove Der Nister to make the arduous trip. His choice of the migrant
train stemmed from his decision to participate fully in the ‘historic’ event of
manifold significance. That is the impression given by his notes from the journey
published immediately, in two parts, in the Yiddish press both in the USSR and
USA.13 The second part, under the title ‘Mit ibervanderer keyn Birobidzhan’ [With
the Resettlers to Birobidzhan], was included after his death in the collection of
his stories and of essays by Nakhman Mayzel published by Ikuf (the New York
publishing house Yidisher Kultur Farband). In these notes one feels the almost
ecstatic exuberance over the renewal of resettlement in Birobidzhan after the
Holocaust. According to the writer, there, in Birobidzhan ‘Vayibone bays be-Yisroel
— zol vider geboyt vern dos hoyz fun folk far kinder un far kinds-kinder’ [A house
in Israel will be built — for the children and the children’s children].14 He based
the sentence on the final Messianic phrase of the Jewish daily prayer Shmoney-
esreh: ‘May it be your will... that the Holy Temple be rebuilt.’ It was very easy
for participants in the discussion of this text at the Soviet Writers’ Union and after
them, the people at Agitprop (Department for Agitation and Propaganda, part of
the Central Committee of the Communist Party) to define him later as ‘being of a
Zionist nature’.15
Reconstruction of the events of Der Nister’s days in Birobidzhan helps us to
understand his psychological and emotional state as he wrote his notes. When the
train approached the territory of the Jewish autonomy in late June of 1947, the local
intelligentsia went all the way out to the border of the Region to greet the guests. The
last 200 kilometres to the capital of Birobidzhan they travelled together, in a warm
and high-spirited atmosphere. At every station along the way musical ensembles
played, while in the capital itself an entire festive programme that last several hours
awaited the newcomers, in the presence of crowds of people. The Region heads
mounted the improvised dais — the first secretary of the Region Communist
Party Committee, Alexander Bakhmutsky, the chairman of the Region Executive
Committee Mikhail (Moyshe) Zilbershtein, cultural figures, representatives of
the workers, and so on. Schoolchildren in the red scarves of the Young Pioneer
movement showered the guests with garlands of f lowers, accompanied by joyous
Jewish music performed by the municipal band. Lumkis was also among the
speakers and he called upon creative intellectuals from all over the country to take
a hand in building Soviet socialist Jewish culture in Birobidzhan.16
This royal welcome was held in honour of hundreds of re-settlers who came in
the ‘echelon’ from Vinnitsa, yet Der Nister’s presence raised the level of festivity.
According to Emiot, such a reception, the likes of which was matched maybe only
by that for David Bergelson in the 1930s,17 truly sent Der Nister’s head spinning,
and it in this perspective that we must evaluate the entire period of his stay in
Birobidzhan. ‘It seems, that throughout his entire lifetime in Russia, Der Nister
had never received such adulation...’, wrote Emiot.18 Nonetheless, at the reception
at the train station, Nister preferred to remain silent and to watch from the
sidelines. He hurried to his room at the Hotel Birobidzhan in the centre of town,
which had been arranged by the local officials, and there he lay, enervated, for two
days. The hosts arranged for a cook just for him, who was in charge of a special
dairy diet. It was only on the third day that Nister went out to the city and was
received at once, together with Yosef Kerler, by First Secretary Bakhmutsky. This
meeting, which lasted nearly two hours, was very encouraging, for Bakhmutsky
had demonstrated openness and he agreed to support Nister’s projects. The latter
apparently had showed up with a full list of suggestions and requests, whose official
purpose was concern for the new emigrants. ‘You must treat them with at least
half of the attention that you are giving me!’, he pleaded with the Region’s leader.
However, there was an unofficial purpose too: to guarantee as much as possible the
Jewish character of Birobidzhan, a yidishe heym, according to Kerler’s memoirs.19
Among other requests, Nister asked for support for the schools whose language of
instruction was Yiddish, the establishment of a Yiddish publishing house, and an
expansion to the format of the newspaper Birobidzhaner shtern [Birobidzhan Star].
A short time afterwards, Der Nister began to receive guests in his residence,
both representatives of the intelligentsia and of the greenhorn re-settlers. The latter
asked him primarily to help them stay in the Region centre and not be sent to
settlement in the distant kolkhozes. Emiot himself was a frequent visitor to the
Hotel Birobidzhan. A gifted poet from Poland who was close to the Mizrachi
movement, he had f led to the Soviet Union at the beginning of the war, and just
before he went to Birobidzhan in 1944, he had met Der Nister in Moscow. Likewise
the writers Heshl Rabinkov, Luba Vasserman and Buzi Miller (the latter was long
familiar with Nister, who in the beginning of the 1930s edited his first book of
prose in Kharkov).20 In the mornings, Der Nister tried to jog a few kilometres
towards the Bira River and back to his hotel, and Emiot occasionally joined him.
The intimate atmosphere that was created in his meetings with Der Nister helped
Emiot evaluate his mood. Since it was at that time that Der Nister was writing his
emotional Birobidzhan notes (when he worked, he closed himself up in his room
and demanded that the hotel staff stop all phone calls), Emiot’s detailed notes on
Der Nister are of special importance.
Russian Jewish Devotion on Hasidic Background

The two spoke about many things, such as the delay in publishing the second half of
Der Nister’s novel Di mishpokhe Mashber [The Family Mashber] by Emes Publishing in
Moscow, the writer’s joy over the translation of this novel into Hebrew in the Land
of Israel, etc. From the local Sholem Aleichem Library, which since the days of the
first immigrants had accumulated many publications that were difficult to find in
the Soviet Union (they were destroyed almost totally several years later, as part of
the struggle against ‘rootless cosmopolitism’) Emiot brought to the hotel Heinrich
Graetz’s work History of the Jews, the studies of Leopold Zunz, and the Hasidic
studies of Martin Buber in the German original. According to Emiot’s account,
Der Nister would quote from memory from Likutei Moharan of Rabbi Nahman of
Bratslav. He also mentioned a Hasidic folktale about the founder of the Przyscha
Hasidic court, Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak, all of whose teeth fell out because of fear of
God, except one tooth. R. Yaakov Yitzhak who was known by the nickname ‘The
Holy Jew’, would call this tooth a roshe [the evil one]. ‘Ot dos... kharakterizirt di
groyse, gute yidn’ [This is what characterizes the great, righteous Jews], Der Nister
would philosophize in the Hotel Birobidzhan in early July of 1947.21 It is possible
that it was the origins of Emiot, who saw himself as a descendant of ‘The Holy
Jew’, which encourage Der Nister in these conversations. The reference to ‘The
Holy Jew’ might also have come up in the context of Buber’s most recent novel Gog
U’Magog in which R. Yaakov Yitzhak is at the centre. Der Nister, as a member of
the JAFC, had access to non-Soviet editions and press, including from Israel, and
he could read passages from the novel in the Tel Aviv based Davar newspaper (the
novel was published there since 1941) or from its first Jerusalem edition.22 We can
deduce that he did faithfully follow publications in Israel from his complaints to
Emiot that they gave unbalanced reviews to his novel The Family Mashber, while
calling him personally ‘Balaam’.23
Der Nister’s preoccupation with the Hasidic righteous men while he was in
Birobidzhan seems highly symptomatic. ‘Zey hobn nit geshpilt mit yidishkayt,
zeyer yede rege iz geven a geyn tsu der akeyde...’ [They didn’t play at Yiddishkayt.
Every moment they were prepared to be sacrificed to God [like Isaac]], he said to
Emiot, revealing his innermost heart. ‘Mir, di moderne yidn, haltn in eyn stilizirn
yidishkayt. Es kost undz gants veynik. Es felt undz der “odom ki yomus baohel”. In
ohel-toyre darf men kenen shtarbn, darf men kenen zikh makriv zany’ [We modern
Jews are always busy with a simulation of Judaism. It doesn’t cost us much. We are
lacking “a man dieth in a tent” [Num. 19. 14]. We have to learn to die in the tent
of Torah, we have to know how to sacrifice ourselves].24
In this way Der Nister actually explained the motive for his trip to Birobidzhan.
Similar to the custom among the Hasidim of ‘going into exile’,25 he also went into
‘Birobidzhan exile’. In the case of Der Nister, several of the conditions enumerated
by the Beer-Sheva University’s scholar Haviva Pedaya were fulfilled: the personal
drive for tikkun, the severe trauma of the Holocaust, and the death of his only
daughter in besieged Leningrad, and perhaps also the possibility of transforming
the journey with the help of the media into a ‘symbolic ritual’. Therefore, his
Birobidzhan notes must be analysed in the light of ideas of the exile of the soul
(galut ha-neshama) and the exile of the Divine Presence (galut ha-shekhina), ideas
which were close to Der Nister’s heart. We will repeat that before this, he had had
no connection with Birobidzhan, and he had never corresponded with anyone from
there, so that this was actually a journey into the unknown. The previous world
had been destroyed to the foundation, and in this context, the train becomes, in
his words, a kind of ‘a min Noyakhs teyve, stil modern, dos heyst, nit afn vaser a
teyve, nor af der ayznban, un nit in keyn mabl, nor nokh a rizikn veltkrig, vos iz nit
beser fun a mabl...’ [a modern Noah’s ark, —— that is, it moved not on the water
but on railroad tracks, and not in a f lood but after a tremendous world war, which
was no better than a f lood...].26 To his joy, the train filled up with representatives of
the younger generation who possessed ‘yene Dovid-shtolts, yene Dovid-virde [the
pride of [King] David] and ‘libe tsu zeyer folk, tsu zeyer [...] hoyzgezind [...] kedey
keyne, keyne Golyasn zoln keynmol nit shreklekh zayn...’ [love for their people and
their household [...] whom no Goliath could intimidate]. But this could come to
realization only in ‘that place’, the ideal locus, ‘ort fun folks-sheferisher onzamlung,
fun nay-geburt’ [the place of the creative folk ingathering, the new birth], as he
wrote.27 The promise of the ‘new birth’ is enhanced by describing the wedding of
two Jewish orphans on the train.
There is no doubt that the exhilarating reception in Birobidzhan contributed to
intensifying his faith in the possibility of tikkun and into transforming an ‘exilic
trip into a redemptive trip’, in the terminology of Pedaya. In other words, a voyage
made out of personal distress became a public mission, where no one sent Der
Nister on this mission, so clearly impossible under the Soviet conditions. In parallel,
apparently his willingness to risk himself and to challenge the authorities, come
what may, also grew stronger. Thus along with support of the local authorities,
Der Nister was shown impressive expressions of admiration: at the many literary
evenings at which he appeared he aroused tumultuous applause, as the audience
rose to their feet. In his tours of the province there was a dimension of making an
inventory of the Jewish legacy: for example, he saw fit to visit the remnants of the
‘Icor’ commune which was founded by the immigrants from abroad in the early
1930s.28 In his honour, the local Yiddish theatre dramatized his story ‘Der zeyde
mitn eynikl’ [The Grandfather with the Grandchild] which was written at the
beginning of the war.29 The hero of the story, an old rabbi from an occupied Polish
shtetl, is marching on Yom-Kippur at the head of his community straight to the
gallows. Like his medieval predecessors during times of pogrom, the rabbi, cloaked
in a tallis, is holding an ancient Torah scroll. At the same time, his communist
grandson is being led to the gallows. To the calls of the Nazi executioners, ‘Heil
Hitler’, the Rabbi responds ‘Shma Yisroel’. Later on he refuses to desecrate the
portrait of Lenin, while his grandson refuses to desecrate the Torah scroll. After
this symbolic triumph of the spirit, the grandfather and grandson are hanged one
next to the other, and thus they sanctify God’s name. This was, it seems, the only
instance where a literary work of Der Nister was staged in the theatre.30
The common notion regarding official Yiddish literary creation in the Soviet
Union can easily make use of this story, just as Der Nister’s voyage to Birobidzhan
can serve as an enlightening example of the pathetic hybridization of the two types
of ethos, the Soviet and the Jewish. That is precisely how the Davar writer Yitzhak
Yatziv saw the later work of Bergelson — as a mishmash of ‘Soviet devotion and
Jewish devotion’ (dvekut, in Yatziv’s ironic quasi-Hasidic expression).31 Another
Hebrew author, Shmuel Friedman (the future Israeli Ambassador to Moscow,
Shmuel Elyashiv), called Der Nister’s war stories ‘strange and weak’ and described
him together with Bergelson and Peretz Markish, in the Tel Aviv literary journal
Moznayim, as ‘mitkahashim lilvavam’ [deceiving their own heart], someone who
suppressed his nationalist sentiments.32 In fact, Der Nister never entered into a
confrontation with the Soviet regime and he also admired Russian culture. On
his table, along with Graetz, Buber, and some cabbalistic works he brought with
him,33 was also Chekhov. When Emiot wanted to surprise him with a Yiddish
literary anthology that was published in Warsaw in the 1920s in which the poet
and essayist Israel Shtern participated, Der Nister expressed disdain for the style
of Shtern, ‘who didn’t read Belinsky’. Emiot, who was born in Poland, also found
it hard to accept this ‘Russian devotion’, which was quite sincere. But contrary to
Friedman-Elyashiv, Emiot did know how to appreciate the fact that even despite
this, most of Der Nister’s activity was an unwavering struggle against assimilation
among the Jews. Accordingly, the renewal of Jewish immigration to Birobidzhan in
1946 was perceived by Der Nister not as a gesture toward the Jews (as his colleagues
had frequently emphasized in the 1930s), but as a promise of a small victory overt
the assimilationist trends, even if only under the conditions of an esoteric Jewish
autonomy in the Russian far east.
Act of Truth
However, for Emiot these expectations were nothing more than false illusions. Der
Nister suffered from a failure to understand the nature of Soviet regime, Emiot
maintained, and he was naïve enough to believe in the power of the traditional
Jewish shtadlones [lobbying] and the abilities of the lower-ranking government
bureaucrats. One expression of this naiveté, according to Emiot, was collecting
signatures of Jewish parents who were in favour of continuing to educate their
children in Yiddish, which Der Nister organized in Birobidzhan. Confounding
Emiot’s expectations, Der Nister’s activities turned out be moderately effective.
Already in August 1947, in the wake of his petition, the first secretary Bakhmutsky
announced a detailed programme of Yiddish education in the Region as ‘one of
the very important goals in the further development of the Jewish Soviet culture’.
The programme included an expansion of the network of the Yiddish schools, a
state university with Yiddish teaching, with the aim of attracting Jewish professors
and students from all over the country, and the transfer of the Cabinet of Jewish
Culture from Kiev to Birobidzhan.34 In addition, in the next school year (1947–48)
Yiddish studies were instituted for non-Jewish students in the school affiliated to
the teachers’ seminary in the city of Birobidzhan, as well as in the primary school of
the village of Valdheim.35 It seems that Der Nister did understand the regime under
which he was living and he did not delude himself — at least according to Kerler,
who cites his rather cynical expressions toward the Birobidzhan ‘bigwigs’, such as
when he remarked that ‘gib got, az der penkher, zol nit platsn’ [God allow that the
bladder [i.e. Bakhmutsky] should not burst].36
It seems that one must seek an explanation for this ‘hyperactivity’ Der Nister,
generally remote from any kind of activism, not in the realm of ‘understanding the
regime’ but in the spirit of the Hasidism that pulsated within him. In the concepts
used in Hasidism, Der Nister’s journey to Birobidzhan, and the other steps he took
during the six weeks of his stay there which could be perceived as naïve, constituted
an emese mayse [an act of truth]: primarily as personally charting a path to voluntarily
leaving behind the centres of anti-Semitism and slaughter (according to Kerler, Der
Nister really planned to remain in Birobidzhan).37 He was not alone in such an
approach: before him, in November 1946, there came to Birobidzhan Aleks Shtein,
former director and actor of the Vilna Troupe, who did not want ‘to breath the
stinking air’ of the West, where ‘the Nazis had exterminated Jewish men, women,
and children’.38 This was Der Nister’s original protest against ‘the cheap simulation
of Judaism’, of which in Emiot’s presence, he accused the ‘modern Jews’. Whom
did he really mean? Certainly not the assimilationists, who were not particularly
interested in Judaism or in simulating it. More probable, that he was speaking
generally about the Soviet Yiddish cultural activists, maybe even including himself,
who were required to make too many compromises. ‘In ohel-toyre darf men kenen
shtarbn’ [In the tent of Torah, you must know how to die], Der Nister pleaded with
his interlocutor, the refugee from Poland who understood the fine print. This was
no theoretical statement but a quotation from the well-known Talmudic passage: ‘...
words of Torah are upheld by one who kills himself for it’ (BT, Berachot 63b) as a
condition for continued Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. As Misha Lev attested
in a private conversation, Birobidzhan was for Der Nister a ‘last straw’, a last hope.
He believed with perfect seriousness that he was commanded to grasp this straw
in the sea of cheap simulation when at every moment he was prepared to sacrifice
himself.
Material from the interrogations of the Birobidzhan writers two years later
reveals a series of additional ‘naïve’ steps that Der Nister took in Birobidzhan in
opposition to all accepted rules of conduct. In an evening in his honour at the
Birobidzhan Sholem Aleichem library, he spoke of ‘the special role of Birobidzhan
in Jewish history’. At a meeting of people from the theatre, literature and education,
he accused his hosts of not doing anything to expand the network of Yiddish
schools. He fearlessly rebuked the Birobidzhaner shtern for not writing enough about
the live of Jews but instead being overly preoccupied with matters of industry
and agriculture. In private conversations he even got carried away with stressing
the need for affirmative action towards the Yiddish schools, as compared to the
other schools in the Region, and he emphasized that ‘the most important figure in
developing Jewish culture is the Jewish teacher [...] and all the work of the writers
and the journalists of the Region must be made subordinate to this’.39
For three years before that, in a very emotional essay ‘Has’ [Hate], published
in Eynikayt on 29 June 1944, Der Nister had called, half-metaphorically, for the
rebuilding of ‘yene khurves oyf undzer barg, vu frier [...] hobn umshpatsirt di
shakaln’ [those ruins on our mountain, where previously [...] roamed the jackals].40
By drawing a parallel with the famous Talmudic story of R. Akiva, who laughed at
the sight of a fox (or a jackal) coming out of the ruins of the Temple in Jerusalem
(BT, Makot 24b), Der Nister expressed his hope for the restoration of the Jewish
‘national building’ ( folks-binyen in the original text) after the Holocaust. As
Shlomo Perlmutter — then a sixteen-year-old child-partisan who had met the

writer personally and to whom the essay ‘Hate’ was dedicated — recalled in his
memoirs, Der Nister clearly meant the Land of Israel as an appropriate place for
this ‘building’.41 Now, both by his Birobidzhan notes which continue the theme
of ‘Hate’ and by his statements, he attempted to use Birobidzhan as an ‘emphasis’
to express his hard-won wishes, though even there was always a different rhetoric
there that dominated and tended to camouf lage the ‘Yiddishkayt’. However, his
attacks on the Birobidzhan intelligentsia reveal his bitterness at the existing situation
there. Emiot recalled Der Nister’s last meeting with the Birobidzhanians in Buzi
Miller’s f lat in August 1947. Although the writer spoke enthusiastically about the
options that had just opened up, the atmosphere was suffused with bitterness and
sorrow.42 Both to him and to others it was already clear that this was not the ‘ideal
locus’ they dreamed about, but maybe the last place in the Soviet Union were one
could still talk publicly about some kind of the Jewish national restoration.
Der Nister remained at the centre of the public discourse in Birobidzhan until his
arrest on 19 February 1949. A year later he was one of the first to realize the option
of ‘a man dieth in a tent’ in both senses of the phrase. However even afterwards,
his words and deeds inf luenced the fate of his hasidim in Birobidzhan, who were
accused of nationalist organization around him and were sent to forced labour
camps for many years.
Notes to Chapter 10
1. For the list of these trains see Yaacov Lvavi (Babitzky), Hahityashvut hayehudit be-Birobidzhan
( Jerusalem: The Historical Society of Israel, 1965), pp. 103–05.
2. Two government decisions became the official signal for the revival of the Birobidzhan project
after World War II. On 26 January 1946 the RSFSR Soviet of People’s Commissars adopted a
special decree, ‘On Measures to Strengthen the Further Development of the Economy of the
Jewish Autonomous Region’, and a day later the All-Union Soviet of People’s Commissars was
adopting Decree No. 1016, on the construction in the Region of a number of large industrial
enterprises. See ‘Di mosmitlen tsu farfestikn un vayter antviklen di virtshaft fun der Yidisher
avtonomer gegnt’ and ‘Ukaz num. 1016,’ Eynikayt, 28 February 1946. See also Benjamin Pinkus,
The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–1967: A Documented Study (Cambridge: Cambridge
3. See interrogation of Semen Siniavsky-Sindelevich who was in charge of the Jewish migration
to the JAR from the Ukrainian SSR, within the investigation case No. 68, MGB Board in
Khabarovsk Territory, vol. 5, handwriting after p. 222, num. 254 (hereinafter: Khabarovsk MGB
Investigation Case 68). Excerpts of the case were in the possession of Mark Miller, son of the
writer Buzi Miller, and were passed to the author of these lines after Mark Miller’s death in
Kiryat-Yam, Israel.
4. See Ilya Lyumkis, Eshelonen geyen keyn Birobidzhan (Moscow: Emes, 1948).
5. See, for example, Khone Shmeruk, ‘Der Nister: hayav u-yetsirato,’ in Der Nister, Hanazir
ve-hagdiya: sipurim, shirim, maamarim, trans. by Dov Sadan ( Jerusalem: Mosad Byalik, 1963), pp.
15–17.
6. The First Regional Convention of Soviets was held in Birobidzhan on 18–21 December 1934.
The Yiddish writers Yekhezkel Dobrushin, Shmuel Godiner, David Hofshteyn, Peretz Markish
and Izi Kharik were invited as guests of honour to this event, which completed officially
the organizing process of the Jewish Autonomous Region. See Lvavi, Hahityashvut hayehudit
be-Birobidzhan, p. 60.
7. ‘A briv tsu Dovid Bergelson,’ Forpost, 2–3 (1940), 34–38, also Der Nister, Dertseylungen un eseyen
(1940–1948) (New York: YKUF, 1957), pp. 290–96.
8. See Khabarovsk MGB Investigation Case 68, vol. 5, p. 81 (7) (Copy of the protocol of the
interrogation of Fefer in Moscow).
9. Yosef Kerler, Geklibene proze (eseyen, zikhroynes ̀, dertseylungen) ( Jerusalem: Yerusholaymer
almanakh, 1991), pp. 109–24.
10. These memoirs were written in Jerusalem in August to October 1958 at the request of the
Historical Society of Israel and preserved in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish
People (CAHJP), Jerusalem. They were published partly in Yisroel Emiot, ‘Der Nister in
Birobidzhan (a bintl zikhroynes),’ Di goldene keyt, 43 (1962), 77–83, and ‘Der Nister in Biro
Bidzhan (a bintl zikhroynes), in his In mitele yorn: eseyen, dertseylungen, lider (Rochester, NY:
Jewish Community Council in Rochester, 1963), pp. 7–14.
11. State Archives of the Jewish Autonomous Region (GAEAO), f.1-P, op.1, d.432, l.60.
12. On Alberton’s travel to Birobidzhan see Ber Boris Kotlerman, In Search of Milk and Honey: The
Theater of ‘Soviet Jewish Statehood’ (1934–49) (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2009), pp. 39–40.
13. See Der Nister, ‘Mitn tsveytn eshelon,’ Eynikayt, 30 August 1947, pp. 2–4; ‘Oyfn veg keyn
Birobidzhan,’ Eynikayt, 4 November 1947, pp. 18–20; ‘Mir ibervanderer keyn Birobidzhan,’
Heymland, 1 (1947), 108–18; ‘Mitn echelon keyn Birobidzhan,’ Naylebn, 10 (1948), 9–11.
14. Der Nister, ‘Mit ibervanderer keyn Birobidzhan,’ in his Dertseylungen un eseyen (New York:
YKUF, 1957), pp. 257–78 (hereinafter: Nister, ‘Mit ibervanderer’).
15. See Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia. Dokumenty TsK RKP(b) — VKP(b), VChK — OGPU
— NKVD o kul’turnoi politike. 1917–1953, ed. by A. N. Yakovlev, comp. by A. N. Artizov, O. V.
Naumov (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘Demokratiia’, 1999), pp. 789–90, n. 45.
16. See Robert Weinberg, ‘Jewish revival in Birobidzhan in the mirror of Birobidzhanskaya zvezda,
1946–49,’ East European Jewish Affairs, 26.1 (1996), 35–53 (p. 43).
17. On Bergelson in Birobidzhan see Boris Kotlerman, ‘ “Why I am in Favour of Birobidzhan”:
Bergelson’s Fateful Decision’, in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. by
Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), pp. 222–35.
18. Emiot, ‘Der Nister in Biro Bidzhan,’ p. 12.
19. Kerler, Geklibene proze, pp. 109–24.
20. Buzi Miler, Kolvirtishe hiner (Kharkov: Melukhe-farlag far di natsyonale minderhaytn in USRR,
1933).
22. Martin Buber, Gog u-Magog: megilat yamim ( Jerusalem: Tarshish, 1943–44).
23. Der Nister mentioned at least two articles by the same author, Shmuel Friedman, ‘Hamitkahashim
lilvavam (‘im sifro shel D. Bergelson ’Al gdot ha-Dnyepr)’ and ‘Birkat Bil’am (‘im sifro shel
Nister ‘Beyt Mashber),’ Moznayim, 19 (1945), 111–15 and 248–51.
25. See Haviva Pedaya’s illuminating study on this subject Halikha she-mi’ever le-trauma: mistika,
historia ve-ritual (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2011).
26. Nister, ‘Mit ibervanderer,’ p. 258.
27. Ibid., p. 278.
28. Efim Kudish, ‘Der Nister — gost’ smidovchan (o priezde v 1947 g. v Birobidzhan izvestnogo
evreiskogo pisatelia Der Nistera),’ Birobidzhaner shtern, 20 November 1993.
29. Der Nister, ‘Der zeyde mitn eynikl,’ Dertseylungen un eseyen, pp. 48–79.
30. Sh. Shenker, ‘Bagegenish mitn sovetishn yidishn shrayber Dem Nistern’, Birobidzhaner shtern, 5
August 1947. See also Kotlerman, In Search of Milk and Honey, p. 212. While in Tashkent during
the war Der Nister translated from Russian into Yiddish the Uzbek drama Hamza, which the
Moscow GOSET staged in 1943. See Hateatron hayehudi bevrit hamo’atsot, ed. by Mordechai
Altshuler ( Jerusalem: Center for Research and Documentation of East European Jewry, The
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1996), p. 44.
31. Yitshak Yatsiv, ‘Hahevel haavtonomi’, Davar, 23 August 1946.
32. Friedman, ‘Hamitkahashim lilvavam,’ p. 111.
33. According to Kerler, Geklibene proze, p. 112.
34. Aleksandr Bakhmutski, ‘Kardinale tog-fragn,’ Eynikayt, 28 August 1947.
35. GAEAO, f. 1-P, op. 1, d. 382, l. 182.
36. Kerler, Geklibene proze, p. 119.
37. Ibid., p. 120.

38. M. Carr, ‘The Julia Flaum Story,’ Israel Magazine, 2.11 (1970), pp. 21–41 (p. 31).
39. Khabarovsk MGB Investigation Case 68, vol. 5, pp. 110–11.
40. Der Nister, ‘Has’, in A shpigl oyf a shteyn, ed. by Khone Shmeruk ( Jerusalem: The Magnes Press,
The Hebrew University, 1987), p. 220.
41. Shlomo Perlmuter, ‘Pirkey Moskva 1944–1946: miyomano shel partizan yehudi ts’ayir’, Yalkut
moreshet, 33 (1982), 18–21.
42. Emiot’s memoirs, CAHJP, pp. 47–48.
INDEX
❖
Abez 22 Bolshevism 12, 13, 44, 123, 155

Afanas’ev, Alexander 56 book illustrations 46, 57, 61–68
Aksenfeld, Israel 68 Borochov, Ber 76
Alberton, Meir 176 Boy 13–14
Altman, Nathan 62, 63, 68 Bratslav also Breslov, see Hasidism
Andersen, Hans Christian 3, 18, 32, 41–54, 56, 59, Bratslav Hasidim 21, 107 n. 15, 127, 129, 135, 136, 138–
70 n. 9, 107 n. 10 40, 152, 154, 161; see also Nakhman of Blaslav
Andreev, Leonid 9 Braude, Lyudmila Yu. 47
An-sky, S. 56, 62, 134 Brenner, Yosef H.ayim 9
Aramaic 29–33, 37 n. 3 Briggs, Julia 49
Arbeiterfürsorgeamt der jüdischen Organisationen Bronshteyn, Yasha 14, 17, 74, 87 n. 33 and n. 35
Deutschlands [Workers Welfare Office of Jewish Brovarnik, Frida 8
Organizations in Germany] 12 Brovarnik, Leyb 8, 14, 77
Aronson, Boris 61 Bryusov, Valery 110
Asch, Sholem 8, 9, 14, 86 n. 17 Buber, Martin 178, 180
avant-gardism 28, 56, 57, 61, 62, 68, 69, 93, 100, 102, Bund 17, 76
112
Cabinet of Jewish Culture at the Ukrainian Academy
Baal Shem Tov 60 of Sciences 180
Baginen [Dawn] 69 n. 8 Chagall, Marc 12, 23, 42, 43, 52 n. 14, 55–72
Bakhmutsky, Alexander 176, 177, 180 Cahan, Yehuda Leib 56
Bakhtin, Mikhail 150, 159 n. 58, 166 Central Publishing House (Kharkov) 4
Bal-Makhshoves 67 Chekhov, Anton 9, 180
Bar-Yosef, Hamutal 33, 34 Children’s Colony in Malakhovka 12, 43
Bar-Yosef, Yehoshua 129 children’s literature 3, 13, 18, 19, 23, 42–44, 47–49, 51,
baroque 3, 91–94, 99–102, 104, 105 56, 57, 59, 87 n. 31
Balzac, Honoré de 122, 147 Chudakova, Marietta 20
Bechtel, Delphine 3, 22, 37 n. 3, 44, 49, 50, 52 n. 5, ‘civil war’ in Soviet Yiddish literature 14
86 n. 2, 140 Columbia University 3
Beer-Sheva University 178 Communist Party (USSR) 3, 4, 75, 115, 127
Belenky, Moyshe 19, Central Bureau of the Communist Party’s Jewish
Belinsky, Vissarion 180 Sections, also Evsektsiia 12, 74, 78, 116
Ben-Ami 43, 46 Central Committee 16, 17, 20
Benjamin, Walter 91–94, 99, 100, 105, 106 n. 7, Department for Agitation and Propaganda
108 n. 22, 110 n. 34 (Agitprop) 176
Berdichev 2, 4, 8, 21, 27, 47, 59, 77, 122–23, 125–26, Polibiuro of 16
130, 138, 139, 143 n. 54, 143 n. 82, 144 n. 84, 146, Communist Party (USA) 118
147–48, 150, 158 n. 7, 161 Crimea 16, 174
Berdichevsky, Micah Joseph 9 Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference 8
Bergelson, David 1, 2, 7, 9–15, 21–23, 74, 77, 116, 117,
124, 127, 143 n. 61, 161, 165, 175, 177, 179, 180 Daniel, M. 14
Bergson, Henri 3, 162, 163, 167, 170 Davar 178, 179
Berlin 2, 4, 9, 12, 161, 163 Deleuze, Gilles 100, 162–64, 167, 170
Bialik, Chaim Nachman 30, 33 Demievka 77
Bible 11, 29, 39 n. 29, 48, 93, 94, 107 n. 11, 164, 166 Der emes (newspaper) 14–15, 87 n. 33, 111
Birobidzhan 4, 13, 16, 17, 20, 23, 174–84 Der emes (press) 4, 16, 115, 117, 119, 121, 142 n. 37,
Birobidzhaner shtern 175, 177, 181 177
Boccaccio, Giovanni 69 Der fraynd 46
186 Index
Der Nister (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh): folklore 15, 29, 55–57, 59, 61, 68, 93, 96–98, 107 n. 10,
his arrest, imprisonment and death 5, 22, 89 n. 59, 111
182 Forpost 175
his daughter Hodl/Hodele 4, 115, 118, 133, 168, Forverts 10, 12
175, 178 Friedman, Shmuel 179, 180
his siblings 18, 41, 75, 113–15, 131, 134, 143 n. 82, Frishman, David 30, 31
150, 163
his translations 4, 18, 19, 43, 47 Gnessin, Uri Nisan 9
his wives 8, 21, 118 Godiner, Shmuel 14, 182 n. 6
his writing: Gogol, Nikolai 59, 81, 85, 89 n. 61–63, 108 n. 19, 146
Capitals 17, 18, 42 Golomb, Abraham 43
children’s poems and stories 18, 19, 23, 42–44, Golta 8, 23 n. 6, 43
47–51, 56, 57, 59, 62, 77 Goncharova, Natalia 61
In the Year 1905 75–78, 141 n. 10 Gordon, Mel 23
symbolist poetry 2, 18 Gordon, Shmuel 23
symbolist prose 2, 3, 18, 39 n. 30, 41–51, 55, 59, Gorky, Maxim 9, 47, 75
61, 69 n. 2, 71 n. 27, 73–76, 78, 80, 84, 85, Graetz, Heinrich 178, 180
89 n. 60, 102, 111–13, 129, 132, 134, 135, Great Patriotic War see World War II
138–40, 150–52 Grigor’ev, Nikolai 18
The Family Mashber 1, 3, 4, 10, 16, 17, 19, 20, 27, Gulag 5, 22, 112
29, 34, 42, 76, 77, 111–41, 145–57, 161–72, Gurshteyn, Aron 19, 112, 114–18, 130, 143 n. 61
177, 178
‘Under a Fence’ 18, 42, 74, 75, 78, 80, 106, 112, 153 Halkin, Shmuel 87 n. 33
Der shtern (Kharkov) 13 Halpern, Yankev Yoysef 125, 126
Deutsche Passstelle (German Passport Authority) 12 Hamburg 2, 12, 21
Di royte velt 4, 13, 14, 17, 74, 87 n. 33 and n. 36, Handel, George Frideric 93
141 n. 6 Hasidic folklore 111, 178
Di yidishe velt 162 Hasidic storytelling 91
Dik, Yitzkhok Meir 68 Hasidism 21, 37 n. 5, 44, 96–100, 102, 111, 125–29,
Dobrenko, Evgenii 127 135, 181; see also Bratslav Hasidim
Dobrushin, Yekhezkel 11, 12, 15, 43, 61, 62, 67, Haskalah 68, 122, 125–27, 136, 143 n. 54 and n. 55,
72 n. 50, 79, 182 n. 6 148, 154
Dobychin, Leonid 158 n. 9 Ha-tsefirah 27
Dobychina, Nadezhda 72 n. 46 Hebrew University, Department of Yiddish 1
Dos folk 4, 9 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 55
Dos yidishe vort 9 Hershkov, Abram 175
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 9, 18, 150 Hitler, Adolf 13, 124, 179
Dunets, Khatskel 14, 17, 87 n. 33 Hoffman, E.T.A. 47, 56
Hofshteyn, David 2, 7, 12–14, 20, 22, 67, 74, 78,
Ehrenburg, Ilya 21 86 n. 11, 88 n. 37, 175, 182 n. 6
Eisenstein, Sergei 164 Holocaust 3, 131, 174, 176, 178, 181
Emiot, Israel 175, 177, 178, 180–82 Horn, Dara 23, 81
Engel, Yoel 12 Horvits, Moyshe Itshe 148
Engels, Friedrich 130 Hugo, Victor 18
Epshteyn, Shakhno 14, 15, 20, 74
Erik, Max 126 IKUF Press 4, 118, 120, 145, 155, 157 n. 5, 176
Ermler, Fridrikh 164 Ingemann, Bernhard 49
Evreiskoe obshchestvo pooshchreniia khudozhestv Institute for Yiddish Culture at the Ukrainian Academy
[Jewish Society for Promoting Arts] 61 of Science 45
Eygns 10–11 International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of
Eynikayt 17, 174, 175, 181 Culture 114
Israel 178, 182
Fedin, Konstantin 13
Fefer, Itsik 22, 117, 175 Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAFC) 4–5, 17, 20–22,
Feuchtwanger, Lion 161 26 n. 78, 131, 174, 175, 178
Fininberg, Ezra 14, 19, 87 n. 33 Jewish Autonomous Region (Birobidzhan) 182 n. 2
First Conventions of Soviets (Birobidzhan) 175 and n. 3
Index 187
Jewish Middle School at the Petersburg Great Choral maskilim 125, 126, 136, 143 n. 54, 148, 150, 152, 154;
Synagogue 61 see also Haskalah
Mayzel. Nakhman 7, 9, 30, 36, 37, 55, 70 n. 20,
Kabak, A. A. 129 71 n. 29, 118, 120, 143 n. 54, 157 n. 5, 176
Kafka, Franz 73, 105 Mendele Moykher Sforim 9, 14, 15, 55, 67, 101, 122,
Kaganovitch, Max (Motl) 18, 113, 163 146, 158 n. 22
Kalinin, Mikhail 16, 17 Mendelssohn, Moses 126
Kaunas 2, 12 Mikhoels, Solomon 20, 21, 23, 174, 175
Kazdan, Khayim Shloyme 59 Milgroym 163
Kharik, Izi 175, 182 n. 6 Miller, Buzi 175, 177, 182, 182 n. 3
Kharkov 1, 3, 4, 13, 16–21, 51 n. 2, 78, 86 n. 4, 113–15, Miller, Mark 175, 182 n. 3
118, 177 Minsk 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 112, 116
Khashtshevatsky, Moyshe 14 Minskii, Nikolai 156
Khevre Mefitse Haskole (Society for Promotion of Miron, Dan 68, 109 n. 31, 122, 134, 138
Enlightenment among Jews) 43 Mizrachi movement 177
Kerler, Yosef 174, 175, 177, 180, 181 modernism 28, 33, 42, 57, 91, 92, 100–02, 105,
Kiev 1, 4, 7–9, 10–14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 56, 57, 78, 110 n. 39, 134, 138, 139
86 n. 4, 112–20, 163, 173 n. 25, 180 Morgulis, Menashe (Mikhail) 125, 126, 143 n. 54
Kiev Group 1, 2, 7, 10–12, 56, 116, 118 Morris Winchevsky Kiev Jewish Library 14
Kiever farlag 45, 46, 70 n. 18 Moscow 1, 2, 4, 12–15, 21, 24 n. 24, 86 n. 4, 114,
Kipnis, Itsik 14, 41, 82, 119 117–20, 161, 174–75, 177
Krylov, Ivan 47 Moscow Literary Museum 118
Kulbak, Moyshe 87 n. 33 Moss, Kenneth B. 43, 47, 59, 69 n. 8
Kultur-Lige 4, 10, 12–13, 24 n. 24, 53 n. 28, 78, 163 Moznayim 180
Kultur-Lige (press, Kiev) 17, 18, 78, 112
Kultur-Lige (Warsaw) 46, 70 n. 18 Nadir, Moyshe 15
Kulyk, Ivan (Israel) 18 Nakhman of Bratslav (Rabbi, Rebbe, Reb) 3, 19, 21,
Kvitko, Leyb 2, 12–14, 19, 22, 87 n. 33, 116 44, 45, 59, 81, 88 n. 49, 111, 178
Nazism 2, 129, 130, 161, 166, 179, 181
Larionov, Mikhail 61 Niger, Shmuel 1, 5, 44, 49, 59, 73, 74
Leivick, H. 15 neo-Romanticism 28, 33, 54, 107 n. 10, 128, 139, 140
Lenin, Vladimir 13, 179 New York 118, 120, 133, 161
Leningrad 1, 4, 115, 118, 133, 168, 175, 178; see also Nietzsche, Friedrich 153, 156
Petrograd; St Petersburg Nomberg, Hersh Dovid 8
Lev, Misha 174, 181 Notovitsh, Moyshe 41
libraries 14, 117, 178, 181 Nusinov, Isaac 14, 15, 112, 115, 117, 171
Lissitzky, El (Lazar) 61, 68, 69
Literarishe monatshriftn 11 Odessa 9, 69 n. 8
Literaturna hazeta 14 Onheyb (press) 46
Literaturnaia gazeta 19, 117, 130, 161, 165 Orshanski, Ber 116, 117
Litvakov, Moyshe 9, 15, 16, 43, 74, 75, 87 n. 32 and n. Oyslender, Nokhum 13, 30, 37, 74, 111, 112
33, 111, 112, 126, 128, 129
Litvin, A. 56 Pale of Jewish Settlement 56, 146, 147
London, Jack 18 Paris 18, 113, 114, 131, 163
Lotman, Yuri 57 Passover 59
Lukács, George 128, 161, 162, 164, 165, 171 Peretz, Yitzhok Leybush 9, 10, 14, 15, 19, 20, 60, 67,
Lumkis, Ilya 174–76 68, 101, 107 n. 10, 111, 116, 117, 128, 134, 140, 171
Lurye, Note 124 Petrograd 56–57, 61; see also Leningrad; St Petersburg
Lvovski, Yankev 47, 77 Plekhanov, Georgii 14, 16
Pokrovskii, Mikhail 121, 127
Malakhovka 2, 12, 43, 52 n. 14, 69, 79, 88 n. 42 Poland 21, 106 n. 7, 116, 123–24, 130
Malevich, Kazimir 56 Populere bibliotek 4
Malouf, David 147 Pravda 111
Markish, Peretz 1, 2, 7, 12–14, 22, 69, 87 n. 33, 115–17, Pritsker, Osher 125, 126
171, 175, 180, 182 n. 6 Prolit 13, 78
Marxism 9, 14, 74, 78, 121, 122, 128, 133, 136, 156, Propp, Vladimir 57, 70 n. 24
170, 171 Proust, Marcel 163
188 Index
Publishing House for Ukraine’s National Minorities 18 Library edited by the Literary-Pedagogical
Pushkin, Alexander 56, 59, 68, 88 n. 43 Committee of the Democratic Union of Yiddish
Teachers] 46
Rabinkov, Hershl 177 Shvartsman, Borekh 79
Rapoport, Shloyme Zaynvl see An-sky, S. Shveln 4
Rapoport, Yehoshua/Yeshue 121, 133, 150 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 21, 22, 129
realism 3, 9, 15, 19, 44, 45, 75, 76, 81, 87 n. 20, 112, Singer, Israel Joshua 10, 129
113, 128, 132, 133, 140, 165 Slovo (writers’ cooperative) 115
Red Army 123 socialist realism 18, 20, 23, 41, 42, 44, 53 n. 26,
Regional Communist Party Committee (Birobidzhan) 69 n. 8, 74, 75, 127, 128, 165
176 Sokolov, Nahum 27
Regional Executive Committee (Birobidzhan) 176 Sologub, Fyodor 149, 150
Remenik, Hersh (Grigorii) 2, 17, 18, 22, 52 n. 5, 79, 80 Sovetish heymland 75, 121
Remizov, Aleksey 56 Sovetishe literatur 120, 155
Repin, Ilya 81 Soviet of People’s Commissars of RSFSR 182 n. 2
Reyzen, Avrom 8 Soviet Trade Mission, Hamburg 12
Reyzen, Zalmen 73 Soviet Writers’ Union 4, 17, 19, 20–21, 115, 157 n. 5,
Reznik, Lipe 13, 14, 19 176
Rosenfeld, Shmuel 11 Stalin, Josef 3, 5, 17, 22, 41, 73, 79, 121, 123, 124, 127,
Rosh Hashanah 121, 131 148, 153
Roskies, David 39 n. 30, 47, 54 n. 50, 69, 110 n. 38, Stranitzky, Joseph Anton 92
138 State Publishing House of Ukraine 78
Rotenberg, Yisroel 148 State Yiddish Theatre, Kharkov 4
Roth, Joseph 110 State Yiddish Theatre, Moscow (GOSET) 4, 21, 23,
Rybak, Yisokher Ber 61, 68 118
Strongin, Lev 117
Sadan, Dov 27, 28, 30–33, 35, 86 n. 2, 125, 134, 150 surrealism 92, 93, 100, 102
St Petersburg 9, 46, 61, 72 n. 46; see also Leningrad; Sutzkever, Avrom 67
Petrograd
Samarkand 4, 174 Talmud 10, 32, 38 n. 20, 60, 72 n. 41, 167, 181
Satanism 156 Tashkent 4, 21, 86 n. 4, 183 n. 30
Scheherazade 69, 165 Teif, Moyshe 41
Schulman, Elias 76 Tolstoy, Leo 47, 69 n. 8, 133, 147
Scott, Walter 161, 165 Trachtenberg, Barry 7
Serapion Brothers 89 n. 61 Trotsky, Leon 3, 19, 123
Shabtai Zvi 161, 172 n. 7 tsadik 60, 95, 96, 99, 109 n. 29, 111, 112, 125
Shaked, Malka 129, 130 Tsart, Leyb 17
Shakespeare, William 36, 91, 104 Tseytlin, Arn 74, 79, 164
Shambadal, Moisei 119 Tshernikhovski, Shaul 30, 32–34
Shargorodsky, Fanny 62 Tsukunft 11
Shklovsky, Viktor 21 Turgenev, Ivan 18, 69 n. 8
Shlonski, Avraham 39 n. 28
Shmeruk, Chone/Khone 1, 18, 38 n. 25, 43, 46, Ukraine 2–4, 7, 13, 14, 18, 20, 78, 106 n. 7, 123, 146,
52 n. 5, 74, 75, 86 n. 2, 89 n. 61, 112, 120, 127, 184
128, 132, 134, 145, 150 Ukraine (miscellany) 4, 87 n. 36
Shneyur, Zalman 30, 33 Uspensky, Boris 57
Sholem Aleichem 9, 14, 15, 18, 20, 67, 101, 146, 178,
181 Valdheim 180
Sholem Aleichem Library (Birobidzhan) 178, 181 Vasserman, Luba 177
Shtein, Aleks 181 Vatenberg-Ostrovskaya, Chaika 22
Shtern (Minsk) 4, 17, 87 n. 33 Vayter, A. 9
shtetl 8, 56, 62, 91, 101, 134, 138, 147, 179 Vevyorke, Avrom 74
Shteynberg, Ya’akov 33 Vilna/Vilnius 4, 9, 10, 11, 117, 119
Shtif, Nokhum 56, 57 Vinnitsa 174–75, 177
Shtrom 4, 77, 79 Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance) group 9
Shulbiblyotek redagirt durkh der literarish-pedagogisher VUSPP (All-Ukrainian Association of Proletarian
komisye baym yidish-demokratishn lerer-fareyn [School Writers) 119
Index 189
Warsaw 4, 7, 9–10, 12, 17, 46, 123 Yidisher literarisher farlag 4

Wasserstein, Bernard 21 YIVO 56, 120
Weinreich, Beatrice Silverman 69 n. 5 Yudovin, Solomon 62, 65
Weinreich, Max 92 Yunger leninets 19
Weiss, Joseph 97, 107 n. 16, 109 n. 29 and n. 30
Wiener, Meir 114, 126 Zaretski, Ayzik 38 n. 25
Wiesel, Elie 22 Zeitlin, Arn see Tseytlin, Arn 74, 79, 164
Winchevsky, Morris 14 Zeitlin, Hillel 139, 140
Wisse, Ruth 145 Zilberfarb, Rokhl 8
Wolf, Leonard 133, 137 Zilberman, Khaim 41
World War I 4, 8, 10, 11, 14, 17, 46, 56, 58, 61, 69, 90 Zhitomir 2, 8, 9, 10, 133
World War II 3, 4, 129, 162, 163, 167 Zionist Labour Party (Poale Zion) 76
Writers’ Volunteer Unit 118 Zohar 60, 67, 168
Zola, Émile 18, 122, 147
Yanasowicz, Itzhak 80, 88 n. 44 Zunz, Leopold
Yatziv, Yitzhak 179

Uncovering The Hidden - The Works and Life of Der Nister

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Uncovering The Hidden - The Works and Life of Der Nister

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Works and Life of Der Nister

The Modern Humanities Research Association ( ) encourages and promotes

Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)

Legenda Studies in Yiddish embrace all aspects of Yiddish culture

published in this series

Edited by Gennady Estraikh,

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

LEGENDA is an imprint of the

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2014

ISBN 978-1-907975-84-4 (hbk)

g.e., k.h., m.k., February 2014

Der Nister, Real and Imaginary

Nister remained confined to the Yiddish literary ‘territory’. It is noteworthy that he

recognized as a prominent, reliable and useful cultural figure. Ultimately, however,

Notes to the Introduction

Der Nister’s ‘Hamburg Score’

(oysbahaltenish), from where, as from a small room’s window facing a thoroughfare,

One of the Kievers

trade mission in Hamburg. It is hardly coincidence that Kvitko, Hofshteyn, Markish

Even cornered by his nemeses’ vehement condemnation of symbolism, Litvakov

Diogenes of the Soviet Literary World

39. Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 56–57.

Der Nister’s Hebrew Nosegay

it was understood as more ‘organic’ — more able to encompass that ‘earthiness’

standard transliteration, in the more accurate Ashkenazi version it reads: do chelkekho

on an unavoidable outburst of violent instincts and cosmic bloodletting.’31 Der

Andersens Mayselekh and

Rabbi Nakhman’ of Bratslav.23 This opinion is echoed in later scholarship: Harriet

Faithfulness and Faithlessness in Translating: Challenges and Opportunities

21. Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, p. 47.

A mayse mit a hon. Dos tsigele:

Der Nister and the Magic of Folklore

writers and painters from different periods, from Romanticism to avant-garde.

Der Nister’s A mayse mit a hon and Dos tsigele

A Tale about a Rooster — A Fairy Tale and its Mystical Subtext

folklore, the Angel of Death is defeated by humour or by God’s Greatness. In some

The Tale about a Rooster as a Dialogue between Word and Image

[Primitive Art and Children’s Art Books] is particularly insightful in defining

Fig. 1 (above). Marc Chagall, illustration for A mayse mit a hon.

Fig. 3. Marc Chagall, illustration for A mayse mit a hon.

Fig. 4 (above). Solomon

Fig. 6. Marc Chagall, illustration for A mayse mit a hon.

The sources for the illustrations in this chapter are as follows:

According to Yekhezkel Dobrushin, Chagall’s illustrations confirm the ‘abstract,

9. Daniela Mantovan, ‘Der Nister (Pinchas Kahanovitch [Pinkhes Kahanovitsh])’, p. 223; on

The ‘Political’ Writings of an

Nister’s Turn to Realism: In the Year 1905

Watch the Throne

this juxtaposition bespeaks as well as the radically different significance of baroque

contrast to Saul: a drunken, foolish, ultimately harmless figure, who redeems

Nakhman renders elliptically to an unusual degree — even by his standards. The

imagination, symbolism and other avant-garde narrative techniques. In this respect,

It is difficult to avoid recognizing in this description a serendipitous similarity

of a larger assemblage enact an allegory about the unfinished and dissipating

‘Turning My Soul Inside Out’:

Getting out from ‘Under a Fence’

Writing the Novel: The Personal Story

The beginning of the correspondence between the brothers coincides with

The Novel: Composition and Historical Background

symbolic moment of drawing up a spiritual balance of the sins committed during

The ‘Polish Problem’