Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, at The Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture

Weimar_10mm:Weimar_10mm 12/03/2010 19:33 Page 1
KRUTIKOV
ESTRAIKH AND
Berlin emerged from the First World War as a multicultural LEGENDA is a joint imprint
European capital of immigration from the former Russian Em- of the Modern Humanities
pire, and while many Russian emigrés moved to France and Research Association and
other countries in the 1920s, a thriving east European Jewish Routledge. Titles range from
community remained. Yiddish-speaking intellectuals and ac- medieval texts to
YIDDISH
tivists participated vigorously in German cultural and political contemporary cinema and
debate. Multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors and form a widely comparative
artists, invigorated by the creative atmosphere of the city, view of the modern
formed an environment which facilitated exchange between humanities.
the main centres of Yiddish culture: eastern Europe, North
IN
America and Soviet Russia. All this came to an end with the
WEIMAR BERLIN
Nazi rise to power in 1933, but Berlin remained a vital pres- STUDIES IN YIDDISH 8
ence in Jewish cultural memory, as is testified by the works of
Sholem Asch, Israel Joshua Singer, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi
Grinberg and Meir Wiener.
This volume includes contributions by an international team of

Yiddish in
leading scholars dealing with various aspects of history, arts and
literature, which tell the dramatic story of Yiddish cultural life in
Weimar Berlin as a case study in modern European culture. Weimar Berlin
Gennady Estraikh is Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies,
New York University. Mikhail Krutikov is Assistant Professor At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics
of Jewish-Slavic Relations at the University of Michigan.
and Culture
Edited by
Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
cover illustration: Yiddish theatre in Berlin: A scene

from the Vilna Troupe’s performance. From the archive
of the Forward Association, New York. Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
Yiddish in Weimar Berlin
At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture
legenDA
leenda , founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of
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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 Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish)
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 Ritchie Robertson, St John’s College, Oxford (German)
Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter (German)
Professor David Shepherd, University of Sheffield (Russian)
Professor Michael Sheringham, All Soul’s 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
legenda@mhra.org.uk
www.legenda.mhra.org.uk
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
legenda@mhra.org.uk
www.legenda.mhra.org.uk
Yiddish in Weimar Berlin
At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture
edited by
Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
Studies in Yiddish 8
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2010
First published 2010
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Contents
❖
Acknowledgements ix
Preface x
List of Illustrations xiv
Note on Transliteration xvi
Introduction: Yiddish on the Spree 1
gennady estraikh
1 Deciphering the Hieroglyphics of the Metropolis: Literary Topographies of
Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism 28
shachar pinsker
2 A Yiddish Poet Engages with German Society: A. N. Stencl’s Weimar Period 54
heather valencia
3 ‘Like fires in overgrown forests’: Moyshe Kulbak’s Contemporary Berlin Poetics 73
jordan finkin
4 Belarus in Berlin, Berlin in Belarus: Moyshe Kulbak’s Raysn and Meshiekh
ben-Efrayim between Nostalgia and Apocalypse 89
marc caplan
5 ‘The air outside is bloody’: Leyb Kvitko and his Pogrom Cycle 1919 105
sabine koller
6 A Warm Morning Gown and a Shawl from Berlin: Liebe Zaltsman’s
Yiddish Letters to Helene Koigen 123
verena dohrn
7 The Berlin Bureau of the New York Forverts 141
gennady estraikh
8 Max Weinreich in Weimar Germany 163
amy blau
9 Reports from the ‘Republic Lear’: David Eynhorn in Weimar Berlin 1920–24 179
anne-christin sass
10 Jewish Universalism, the Yiddish Encyclopedia, and the Nazi Rise to Power 195
barry trachtenberg
11 Yiddish, the Storyteller, and German-Jewish Modernism: A New Look
at Alfred Döblin in the 1920s 215
jonathan skolnik
12 Between Literature and History: Israel Joshua Singer’s Berlin Novel
The Family Carnovsky as a Cul-de-Sac of the German-Jewish ‘Symbiosis’ 224
elvira grözinger
13 Unkind Mirrors: Berlin in Three Yiddish Novels of the 1930s 239
mikhail krutikov
Index 263
list of contributors
v
Amy Blau is Visiting Assistant Professor of German, Whitman College, Walla

Walla, Washington
Marc Caplan is the Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Assistant Professor of Yiddish Litera
ture, Language, and Culture at the Johns Hopkins University
Verena Dohrn is a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin and the Coordinator of the
Research Project ‘Charlottengrad und Scheunenviertel.Osteuropäisch-jüdische
Mig ranten im Berlin der 1920/30er Jahre’ at the Chair of Eastern and Central
European History, Osteuropa-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
Gennady Estraikh is Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies, Skirball Department of
Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Jordan Finkin is the Cowley Lecturer in Post-Biblical Hebrew at the University of
Oxford
Elvira Grözinger is Lecturer in Yiddish at the Institut für Judaistik, Freie Universität
Berlin
Sabine Koller is a Dilthey-Fellow of the VolkswagenStiftung at the Institute of Slavic
Studies, University of Regensburg
Mikhail Krutikov is Assistant Professor of Slavic and Jewish Studies at the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Shachar Pinsker is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Literature and Culture at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Anne-Christin Sass is a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at the Chair of Eastern and
Central European History, Osteuropa-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
Jonathan Skolnik is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst
Barry Trachtenberg is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the University at
Albany, State University of New York
Heather Valencia is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Languages,
Cultures and Religions, University of Stirling, Scotland
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
v
Warm thanks are due to Jack and Naomi Friedman for their generosity, and to
members of the Editorial Board of Legenda Press for their vision, in supporting
the series ‘Studies in Yiddish’, the only academic book series devoted to this field
of research.
Dr Verena Dohrn, who co-ordinates the Research Project ‘Charlottengrad und
Scheunenviertel. Osteuropäisch-jüdische Migranten im Berlin der 1920/30er Jahre’
at Freie Universität Berlin (Osteuropa-Institut, Chair Prof. Gertrud Pickhan),
helped form the team of this volume’s contributors. In fact, half of the authors also
participate in the aforementioned project.
In gathering illustrations for this volume, a number of people have been singularly
generous with assistance. Essential help in selecting photographs and obtaining per
mission to use them came from Chana Pollack, Archivist at the Forward Association
in New York, Boris Budiyanskiy, Art Director of Yiddish Forward Newspaper, and
Jesse Aaron Cohen, Photo and Film Archivist at the YIVO in New York. Henning
Dohrn (Hanover), Alexander Ivanov (St Petersburg), and Anne-Christin Sass
(Berlin) made photographs of memorable sites in Berlin.
Dr Graham Nelson, managing editor of Legenda Press, and Dr Alastair
Matthews, the copy editor, worked wonders, transforming the chapters written by
the international group of contributors into a uniform text.
Preface
v
Long before the unification of Germany under Bismarck and Wilhelm I, Jews
created their own imagined Germanic realm, or Ashkenaz — a reinterpretation
of the rather obscure biblical toponym. This German Ashkenaz originated in the
medieval Rhineland or, perhaps, other German-speaking territories, and later spread
eastwards. The article on Ashkenaz in the Encyclopaedia Judaica describes it as a
cultural complex comprised of ideas, views, ways of life, folk mores, legal concepts,
and social institutions. Although one can debate the viability and the meaning of this
term, it has certainly played a significant role as an ideological construct, especially
among the European Jewish intelligentsia of the early twentieth century, which
was predominantly of Ashkenazi origin. For some of them, the imagined medieval
community of Ashkenaz became the historical foundation on which they developed
their concept of Yiddishland, or a modern extraterritorial Yiddish-speaking nation.
For a brief period in the 1920s, Berlin was the major European metropolis of that
imagined Yiddishland. Dominated by intellectuals and artists who grew up in the
Pale of Jewish Settlement of the Russian Empire or in the Austrian provinces of
Galicia and Bukovina, the capital of the Weimar Republic became a meeting ground
for champions of different ideologies, artistic styles, and literary movements. Despite
many disagreements, all of them shared — some more, others less consciously — the
sense of belonging to the Ashkenazic civilization which for them was synonymous
with Jewishness, or its eastern European variety, Yiddishkayt, in the broadest sense
of the word.
These doctors of philosophy and eternal students, many of whom were educated at
German-speaking universities, emerged as trendsetters in all major Jewish ideological
currents of post-World War I Europe. Some of these currents, such as autonomism,
Territorialism, or Yiddishism, are largely defunct today, whereas others, like Zionism,
remain part of today’s discourse. The Yiddishists envisioned the transformation of
eastern European Jewry into a modern Yiddish-speaking nation which would either
eventually find a territory for establishing its own statehood, or remain an ‘extra
territorial’ (some people called it ‘spiritual’) nation in Diaspora. Yiddishland was a
fluid concept. Its initial contours emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century
in the environment of civic and cultural organizations that took shape outside the
framework of traditional religious communities as a by-product of modernization.The
economic and social changes in eastern and central Europe, such as industrialization,
the spread of general education, mass migrations, and political mobilization, turned
millions of shtetl-dwellers into political activists, trade unionists, educationists, and,
above all, avid consumers and producers of ideas and culture production.
After the end of World War I and the ensuing collapse of the imperial order in that
part of Europe, accompanied by an unprecedented eruption of violence, hundreds
Preface xi
of thousands of Yiddish speakers streamed into the urban centres in and beyond the
borders of the former Russian Empire. By that time, smaller or larger immigrant
communities of Yiddish-speaking Jews already existed all over the world. In the
United States and Argentina, France and Canada, Great Britain and South Africa,
Lithuania and Palestine,Yiddish-speaking Jews became involved in various Jewish and
non-Jewish modern activities, from cabaret theatre to the anarchist underground. At
that fluid historical moment, a critical mass of European Jewish intellectuals found
refuge in Weimar Germany, as if symbolically reclaiming their Ashkenazi roots in
a country where, as some of them would argue, Yiddish had already been spoken
hundreds of years ago. Of course, there were other, weightier practical reasons to
choose Berlin, and Germany in general, as a place of residence. The authorities of the
newly established Weimar Republic were relatively tolerant to immigrants from the
east, while diplomatic and trade relations with Soviet Russia and the other countries
across the eastern border facilitated contact with the ‘old home’.
Thanks to its specific political and cultural location, Berlin can be described as
a ‘third space’ between west and east, where adherents of different ideological and
cultural views could communicate and interact. Atheists and Hasidim, communists
and liberals, champions of assimilation and Zionism, autonomists and Territorialists,
Yiddishists and Hebraists would meet informally in cafes or come to clubs for a
lecture, performance, or debate conducted in Yiddish, German, Hebrew, or Russian.
A cultural map of Jewish Berlin, similar to the one of Vienna provided by Edward
Timms in his biography of Karl Kraus,1 with cafes as reference points, would show
a network of personal and institutional connections linking, directly or indirectly,
people as different as Walter Benjamin and Leyb Kvitko (through Meir Wiener), Aron
Singalowsky and Alfred Döblin, David Bergelson and Albert Einstein, Else Lasker-
Schüler and A. N. Stencl, Raphael Abramovitch and Karl Kautsky.
Many Russian immigrants believed that one day, following the collapse or demo
cratization of the Bolshevik regime, they would be able to return to Moscow, Kiev,
or Minsk, where they had earlier built Yiddish cultural institutions along the model
of the Kiev Yiddish Kultur-Lige (Culture League). In Berlin, however, the local
Kultur-Lige failed to develop any significant mass activities. In general, the Berlin-
based Yiddishist intelligentsia had little contact with the large section of the Yiddish-
speaking immigrant population which had little taste for ideological debate and ‘high’
Yiddish culture. The difference in class and culture was matched by a difference in
place of origin: whereas the middle-class intellectual arrivals came mostly from the
largely Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine and Lithuania, the poorer working class
and petit-bourgeois immigrants hailed from predominantly Polish-speaking Galicia
and Congress Poland. As a result, Yiddish cultural life flourished predominantly in
relatively secluded enclaves in the fashionable western parts of the city, such as the
Romanisches Café on the Kurfürstendamm and the Sholem Aleichem Club on
Kleiststraße, while the shtetl Jews lived in the Scheunenviertel, a poor district to the
east of the historical centre of the city. Yiddish literati felt more at home among
German Jewish intellectuals or among Russian émigrés than among the Yiddish-
speaking common folk. In fact, some of them were more comfortable speaking
German or Russian than Yiddish.
xii Preface
Many Yiddish-speaking intellectuals in Berlin, even those without a German-

language education, had contacts in German-speaking circles. Yiddish socialists had
close links with German Social Democrats; a pro-Soviet position united communist
sympathizers from eastern Europe with like-minded Germans and German Jews. The
ORT (originally the Society for Promoting Artisanal and Agricultural Work among
the Jews in Russia), which after the Revolution moved its headquarters to Berlin
but operated mostly in eastern Europe, had a German-Jewish branch, which was
very efficient in fundraising. The Yiddish poet A. N. Stencl and the novelist Samuel
Lewin were better known in German translation than in the original Yiddish. Mutual
cultural influences through the press, books, art, cinema, and theatre complemented
personal contacts. To all appearances, the intensity of cultural interaction between
Yiddish immigrant intellectuals and their local counterparts in Berlin was stronger
than in other centres of the eastern European Jewish Diaspora.
Berlin housed the European or central headquarters of several Jewish relief
organizations in which Yiddish played an important role. The ORT was dominated
by Yiddishists, who were also active in the Jewish Territorialist movement, such as its
director Aron Singalowsky and the editor of its magazine Virtshaft un lebn (Economy
and Life, 1928–31), Ben-Adir (Abraham Rosin). In 1925, a group of intellectuals met
in Berlin to establish the Yiddish Scientific Institute (later the Institute for Jewish
Research),YIVO, which was to become the central institution of Yiddish culture and
scholarship outside the Soviet Union. Until 1933, some of its scholars and fundraisers
lived in Berlin. Yiddish journalists wrote from Berlin for newspapers published in
various countries, most notably in the United States and Poland. From Berlin, Jewish
public intellectuals and political activists participated in all the important debates
on politics, ideology, and culture during the 1920s and early 1930s. With the gradual
decline of Jewish Berlin in the late 1920s, the Jewish intellectual and cultural world
became increasingly fragmented along ideological and linguistic lines. In the absence
of common ground many artists and thinkers were forced to make hard ideological
choices and ally themselves with political camps, which often had an adverse effect
on their creativity.
The combined efforts of multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors, and artists,
who were invigorated by the creative atmosphere of Weimar Berlin, left an indelible
imprint on modern Jewish culture. Most of the chapters in the present volume deal
with poetry and prose written by authors who spent some time in the ‘Yiddish
Berlin’ of the 1920s, and later moved to other countries: Moyshe Kulbak, Leyb Kvitko,
Avrom Nokhem Stencl, Israel Joshua Singer, Sholem Asch, Uri Zvi Greenberg, David
Eynhorn, and Meir Wiener (Chapters 2 to 7, 9, 13, and 14). One figure who is relatively
little considered is David Bergelson, perhaps the most significant Yiddish author of
Weimar Berlin, mainly because his Berlin period has already been discussed in one
of the previous publications in Legenda’s ‘Studies in Yiddish’ series, David Bergelson:
From Modernism to Socialist Realism (2007), edited by Joseph Sherman and Gennady
Estraikh. Various aspects of the influence of Yiddish and German literature on each
other have been discussed in a number of books, including the volume The Yiddish
Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction (2005), edited by Joseph Sherman
and Ritchie Robertson, in Legenda’s ‘Studies in Yiddish’ series. This theme continues
Preface xiii
in Chapter 4 of the present volume, which offers a fresh view of Alfred Döblin’s
classic novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Hebrew-Yiddish literary interaction in the Berlin
context is discussed in Chapter 1. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 focus on the activity of the
Berlin-based journalists who wrote for the New York Yiddish daily Forverts (Forward).
Among them were such prominent figures as the demographer and economist Jacob
Lestschinsky, the socialist leader Raphael Abramovitch, the foremost Yiddish linguist
Max Weinreich, and the poet David Eynhorn. The last major intellectual project in
Yiddish that was initiated in Berlin was the comprehensive Algemeyne entsyklopedie
(General Encyclopedia), which remained unfinished and is discussed in Chapter 12.
Scores of highly talented, educated, and creative people contributed to the short
but intense period of flourishing Yiddish culture in Berlin. They left a large and
diverse legacy which has not yet been fully appreciated. It is our hope that Yiddish in
Weimar Berlin will arouse interest in that unique phenomenon and stimulate further
research on it.
Note to the Preface

1. Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 8.
list of illustrations
v
Fig. 1. Kalman Zingman. By kind permission of K. Zingman’s granddaughter Amalia

Goldberg (Kfar Menachem, Israel)
Fig. 2. 8 Ruhlaer Straße, in Berlin-Schmargendorf, near Grunewald, where Simon Dub
now lived in 1930–33. Photo by Henning Dohrn, 2009
Fig. 3. 34/35 Bleibtreustraße, Berlin, housed the ORT headquarters in 1921-26. Photo by
Alexander Ivanov, 2009
Fig. 4. At a Jewish art exhibition in the Sholem Aleichem Club (1928). From right to left:
(standing) Michael Wurmbrand (head of the Berlin office of the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency), Ben-Adir (Abraham Rosin), Nokhum Shtif, Jacob Lestschinsky, Gershon
(Herman) Swet, Zeev Wolf Latzki-Bertoldi, two unknown persons, Issachar Ber
Ryback, Nokhum Gergel, an unknown person, Meir Kreinin (a Jewish civil leader),
Mrs. Rebecca Tcherikower, Mrs. Deborah Shtrif, Elias Tcherikower; (sitting) Mrs. Leah
Swet, Mrs. Sonya Ryback, Mrs. Gergel. From the Archives of the YIVO, New York.
Fig. 5. Cover of the double issue of Albatros, edited and published in Berlin in 1923
Fig. 6. Avrom Nokhem Stencl. By kind permission of the Archiv Bibliographia Judaica,
Frankfurt am Main
Fig. 7. Cover of A. N. Stencl’s book Lider un gedikhtn (Songs and Poems), Leipzig, 1924
Fig. 8. Marc Chagall’s cover of David Hofstein’s Troyer. By kind permission of the Musée
d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris; © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009
Fig. 9. Joseph Tchaikov’s cover of Peretz Markish’s Di kupe. By kind permission of the
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris
Fig. 10. Joseph Tchaikov’s cover of Leyb Kvitko’s 1919. By kind permission of the Musée
d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris
Fig. 11. 3 Mommsenstrasse, Berlin-Charlottenburg, where Helene and David Koigen lived
in from 1928 to 1933. Photo by Henning Dohrn, 2009
Fig. 12. Abraham Cahan during one of his cross-Atlantic trips (undated). From the archive
of the Forward Association, New York
Fig. 13. Jacob Lestschinsky (undated). From the Archives of the YIVO, New York
Fig. 14. David Bergelson at home in Zehlendorf, Berlin, 1931. By kind permission of Lev
Bergelson
Fig. 15. Max Weinreich (undated), with newspaper designer’s marks. From the archive of
the Forward Association, New York
Fig. 16. 18 Oranienburger Straße, Berlin, whose Ressource-Saal was often used as a venue
for meetings of Jewish organizations, including the Berlin committee for the promo
tion of the Central Yiddish School Organization in Poland. Photo by Anne-Christin
Sass, 2009
Fig. 17. Cover of David Eynhorn’s Gezamlte lider 1904-1924 (Collected Poems 1904–1924),
published in 1924 in Berlin by the Jüdische Arbeiterbuchhandlung
List of Illustrations xv
Fig. 18. David Eynhorn (standing the seventh from left) with a group of Paris Bundists,
around 1930. From the Archives of the YIVO, New York
Fig. 19. Raphael Abramovitch (undated). By kind permission of the International Institute
of Social History, Amsterdam
Fig. 20. The first instalment of Sholem Asch’s novel Baym opgrunt (At the Abyss) in Forverts,
2 February 1935
Fig 21. Meir Wiener. By kind permission of Julia Wiener
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
v
Generally we have employed the Standard Yiddish Romanization system, also

known as the YIVO transcription system. Titles and quotes written according
to various orthographic codes have been respelled following the YIVO system.
Although Yiddish does not distinguish capitals from lower case, we have in trans
literation capitalized the first letter in titles and personal names. Forms which are
common in English publications are retained for some personal names, such as
Sholem Asch and Jacob Lestschinsky.
We use in this volume ‘Vilna’ rather than ‘Vilnius’, because the volume does not
discuss the post-1939 period, when the city became the Lithuanian capital. For the
same reason, Kaunas (the then capital of Lithuania) rather than Kovno, and Lwów
(then a city in Poland) rather than Lvov or Lviv, appears in most chapters.
Introduction
v
Yiddish on the Spree
Gennady Estraikh
1
Jacob Lestschinsky, the well-known Jewish demographer, economist, and journalist,
once observed that in urban terrain Jews often became conspicuous even in those
localities where their population was relatively small.1 Indeed, the few thousand
Yiddish-speaking eastern European Jews, or, in the somewhat contemptuous
German term, Ostjuden, formed a visible minority in Berlin at the turn of the
twentieth century: they looked different, often with dark curly hair and wearing
clothes that were unusual for a German city, they spoke a peculiar Germanic
vernacular, and they lived many to one house. These incomers usually migrated
to the city from the then-German territory of Posen (Poznań), as well as from
Russian and Austro-Hungarian Poland. They would converge on the proletarian
east of the city, above all the Scheunenviertel (Barn Quarter), sarcastically called
‘Jüdische Schweiz’ ( Jewish Switzerland), the slum quarter ‘a few blocks northeast
of Alexanderplatz, bounded by Linienstrasse to the north, Oranienburger Strasse
to the west and south and Landsberger Allee to the east’.2 The Scheunenviertel,
however, never functioned as a Jewish ghetto in the true sense of the word, because
Ostjuden lived there together with others who were outsiders twice over, being
both non-German and foreign-born. Thousands of full-bearded ‘caftan Jews’
and their families never acquired the assets for social mobility and stayed put in
the Alexanderplatz area, while many others would work their way up from the
lowest rung on the social ladder and move to more elegant districts, including
Charlottenburg, merging there with ‘real’ western Jews.3
Residents of other Berlin neighbourhoods experienced a culture shock walking
through the poverty-stricken Scheunenviertel streets with their military names:
Grenadierstraße, Dragonerstraße, and Artilleriestraße. On Dragonerstraße, the
Jewish People’s Home (Volksheim), founded by a group of German Jewish intel
lectuals, attempted to help culturally and socially disadvantaged children acquire
skills they needed to begin their lives in Germany.4 The whole area had a bad
reputation because its deprived inhabitants were, according to Joseph Roth, often
forced to ‘become black marketers, smugglers, and even common criminals’.5
Solicitation was legal in Germany, and Münzstraße, a street perpendicular to
Grenadierstraße, gained notoriety as a prostitutes’ hang-out.6 For all that, peddling,
petty trade, and buying up old clothing were among the most common sources
of income. Furthermore, migrants from Russia formed the majority of the city’s
cigarette rollers.7
2 Gennady Estraikh
Alexander Granach, who came to Berlin in 1906, where he gained his first
acting experience as a Yiddish actor and later established himself as a significant
German theatre and film actor, remembered, among other things, the community
life of the Alexanderplatz area: ‘The more pious had their synagogues. The
Zionists, Socialists, Social Revolutionaries, Bundists, and anarchists all had their
respective societies. [...] Posters with big letters and pictures advertised minor
actors and supernumeraries from the Yiddish theaters in Russia, Romania, and
Galicia as famous international stars.’8 As early as the late 1870s, local Yiddish
speakers could enjoy the antics of touring actors. From 1890, Yiddish cultural life
in Berlin was dominated by the brothers Anton and Donat (David) Herrnfeld,
whose theatre, where unsophisticated musicals by Abraham Goldfaden, Joseph
Latteiner, and other authors were performed, was popular among the inhabitants
of the Scheunenviertel.9 From time to time, some German Jewish intellectuals
would also visit Yiddish performances. Eastern European Jewishness attracted
them as the exotic, ‘genuine’ roots of their confused national identity and the
most reliable way of avoiding assimilation. The Berlin-based magazine Ost und
West (East and West, 1901–23), which at its height reached at least ten per cent of
the German Jewish population, published translations of Yiddish literary works
as part of its intention to construct a national ethnic identity that combined both
eastern European and western European forms of Jewishness. Romanticization of
the eastern European Jews had its roots also in the völkisch, neo-Romantic trend in
German and Austrian intellectual circles, which sought a return to ‘authentic’ ways
of life.10 Peretz Hirschbein, the rising Yiddish literary star who spent three months
in Berlin in 1907, came to the conclusion that ‘ethnography rather than real Jewish
life’ fascinated the German Jewish intellectuals.11
The 1908 Yiddish Language Conference, convened in Czernowitz, then part of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now Chernivtsi in Ukraine, became a mani
festation of pan-Ashkenazic symbiosis, especially as its main organizer, Nathan
Birnbaum, was a speaker of German.12 Yiddishism, or Ashkenazic nationalism,
found an intense following in the late Russian Empire and, to a lesser degree, in
other countries to which Yiddish speakers had turned. Pondering the shape of the
future Jewish nation, Yiddishists of various hues usually believed that non-covenantal
highbrow culture based on the eastern European Jewish vernacular should replace
or supplement religion and thereby secure the endurance of Ashkenazic civilization.
Echoing the historian Simon Dubnow’s postulate that the Jewish people embodied
the highest form of a cultural-historic or spiritual nation, Nathan Birnbaum saw in
Yiddish culture the main source of national pride.13
The Czernowitz conference placed advocates of the Hebrew language on the
defensive. In December 1909, a conference of Hebraists was convened in Berlin.14
Zionists regarded Berlin as one of their nerve centres. Local activists and visitors
would assemble in the Café Monopol, built in a Mauritanian style and situated
‘right in the hell, in the middle of Friedrichstraße, with all the dirt and immorality
of the three-million city streaming to this terribly tumultuous street’. Yet inside,
behind the heavy curtains, Jewish intellectuals found a gut-bruder-ort, an amiable
place, where Russia’s Pale of Jewish Settlement lay at the centre of the interests of
Introduction 3
the clientele, who discussed ad nauseam the future of Yiddishkayt, or the eastern
European model of Jewish life. Yiddish literary luminaries, such as Sholem Alei
chem and Sholem Asch, were among the visitors. People would ‘speak Hebrew
as a matter of principle and speak Yiddish as a matter of principle’. In Yiddish
usage at the turn of the century, the German term Stammgast, ‘regular customer’,
was modelled as shtam-gast (plural shtam-gest).15 Before the war, the Yiddish writer
Hersh David Nomberg, known for his sociability, had established a Yiddish
literary kibetzarnye, ‘talking shop’, at the Café des Westens, then the bohemian hub
of the city.16
Apart from global plans for modernizing Jewish life, Berlin-based intellectuals
sometimes tried to realize local projects. At the end of 1911 and the beginning
of 1912, Abraham Wieviorka, a young Yiddish story-writer and journalist from
Poland, published in Berlin Dos bukh (Book), which was conceived as a ‘monatshrift
far kunst un kritik’ [monthly for art and criticism] but was discontinued after its
second issue. Although the journal was published in Cracow, the imprint of its
first issue displayed the address of a Berlin editorial office. It contained an essay by
the critic Shmaryahu Gorelik, who saw Yiddish literature at a crossroads: either
it would succeed in achieving a level appropriate to the Jewish intelligentsia, or
it would continue producing conventional writings for the masses, akin to the
sought-after rugs from the Turkish town of Smyrna.17 From September 1912 to
May 1913, Berlin housed the satirical journal Der Ashmeday (Ashmedai is the king
of demons), whose editors, Abraham Margolin and Meir Grossman, later played
prominent roles in Jewish journalism.18
Both Margolin and Grossman were educated in Germany and belonged to the
category of Jewish students who came from Russia after they had finished secondary
school but been unable to gain access to an institution of higher education in their
own country following the introduction of a percentage-based numerus clausus
in 1887. This category of students began to outnumber the yeshiva-trained young
men who could also gain admittance to the German universities (the enrolment
procedures did not include checking the candidate’s educational credentials),
though only a minority of these essentially undereducated people from the yeshivas
would ultimately gain a degree. Oranienburger Straße, the main artery of the
Scheunenviertel, was the ‘Latin Quarter’ of Berlin, as this was where poor students
often rented rooms. Among the 533 Russian students who studied in Berlin in the
winter semester of 1912 to 1913, ninety-seven per cent were Jewish.19 One of the
students recalled, looking back to around 1904: ‘Even the poorest among us could
get by in Germany, so cheap and commodious was it there at that time. We could
study and breathe freely, we felt good living among the Germans.’ 20
2
After the beginning of World War I, the German and Austro-Hungarian armies
strove to persuade the Jews of Poland to welcome the coalition soldiers as their
liberators from ‘the yoke of Moscow’.21 Indeed, whereas the Russian army showed
a hostile attitude to the Jewish population of Austro-Hungary and even of its own
4 Gennady Estraikh
country, the German army did not usually commit atrocities against the Jews. In
German propaganda literature of the time, ‘Yiddish suddenly became evidence
of Jewish loyalty to the German language and culture rather than an example
of linguistic “mongrelization” ’.22 Numerous guides to Yiddish began to appear,
including Solomon Birnbaum’s Praktische Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache für den
Selbstunterricht (Practical Grammar of Yiddish for Self-Tuition; the author was the eldest
son of Nathan Birnbaum).23 In a witness’s account we read that because the German
troops were able to communicate with Jews to some extent, they ‘were somewhat
more lenient towards them’. Moreover, ‘the Jews were of the utmost importance
to the foreign occupiers, who were unable to communicate with the majority of
the local population and therefore relied on Jews to be the interpreters’.24 German
officers, who could not attend Polish performances, went to Yiddish operettas,
which sometimes starred German actresses imported to entertain the uniformed
audience.25 Some occupiers found Yiddish quaint, especially as it was the vernacular
that helped them to communicate with local women. Vilna and Kovno had the
reputation of towns with very pretty women.26
The linguistically and culturally assimilated German Jewish soldiers, who pre
viously had never heard Yiddish and knew (if at all) about shtetl-life from translations
of Yiddish writers published in Ost und West or Martin Buber’s German versions of
Hasidic stories, were often embarrassed when they saw the primitive conditions of
Jewish life in the occupied territories. Yet some of them admired eastern Europe
as the quintessentially Jewish habitat and discovered those living there ‘as a living
image of their lost cultural identity’.27 For German Jewish enthusiasts of Yiddish,
Vilna was particularly appealing, not least because it combined ‘shtetl authenticity’
with such urban conveniences as cafes and theatres and the presence of modern
educated people. Paradoxically, the occupation contributed to reinforcing the city’s
reputation as the ‘capital’ of Yiddish culture. The Germans’ suppression of Russian
education and culture diverted local activists’ energy into Yiddish-language organi
zations, publications, and cultural events, especially as many Russian speakers,
non-Jewish and Jewish alike, chose to evacuate to the areas under Russian control.
The Yiddish linguist and journalist Zalman Reisen and the prominent community
leaders Dr Cemach Szabad and Dr Jacob Wigodski were among those intellectuals
who did not evacuate; they used the new environment to ‘Yiddishize’ the nationalist
sentiments in significant segments of the local Jewish population. The Vilna Letste
nayes (Latest News), edited by Dr Eliyahu Olsvanger (who had gained his medical
degree in Germany), was one of the Yiddish newspapers sponsored by the German
occupying authorities.28
Sammy Gronemann, a Zionist functionary in pre-war Germany, served in the
German Army’s Eastern Supreme Command during the war as an officer with the
role of keeping tabs on Jewish cultural activities. He was particularly impressed
by the local amateur Yiddish theatre, known as the Vilner Trupe (Vilna Troupe),
established in February 1916. After seeing their performance, he wrote in a letter: ‘I
am sure that in Berlin these people would have made noise and had a full house!’.29
Several other German Jewish intellectuals, including the artist Hermann Struck
and the playwright Herbert Eulenberg, also enthusiastically supported the Vilna
Introduction 5
Troupe. Zalman Reisen explained that ‘for the western Jews, the troupe was a
kind of a spiritual revelation. In its performances they felt a representation of living
Jewish culture, which could appear only in such a nationally strong community
as the eastern European Jewry.’ The actors found in the moral support of the
German Jewish intelligentsia ‘a source of additional courage and hope. They could
no longer be satisfied with their success in provincial towns.’30 In 1921, Grone
mann was instrumental in bringing the Vilna Troupe to Berlin. Following its first
performances at the B’nai B’rith Lodge and the German Writers’ Union (with
Bernhard Kellermann’s introductory talk on Yiddish theatre), two theatrical entre
preneurs signed a contract with the Vilna Troupe. In September 1921 they opened
the season with Peretz Hirschbein’s play Di puste kretshme (The Haunted Inn).31
When Samuel Lewin, an aspiring Yiddish prose writer, came from Poland to
Berlin in 1920, he was supported by the German essayist and writer Fritz Mordecai
Kaufmann, who under the inf luence of Nathan Birnbaum became ‘passionately
interested in the life of the eastern European Jews and their language Yiddish’.
Lewin ‘found his [Kaufmann’s] Yiddish excellent. A little on the hard side, perhaps,
but nothing wrong with it.’ Kaufmann’s wife, a Russian Jewess, was a native
Yiddish speaker, and their daughter grew up with Yiddish as her first language.
Through Kaufmann, Lewin met Dr Fishl Schneersohn.32 A polymath, Schneersohn
pursued two careers: that of a distinguished psychologist and that of a Yiddish and
Hebrew man of letters.
More arrivals appeared in Berlin when Russia left the war after the signing
of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty on 3 March 1918. On 9 November 1918, the
German Republic was proclaimed by the leader of the Social Democrats, Philipp
Scheidemann. In August 1919, the new constitution, drafted in the city of Weimar,
was adopted by the German National Assembly. Meanwhile, at the beginning of
1919, German troops abandoned Ukraine, and a small group of Jewish entrepreneurs
from Kiev followed them, relocating themselves and portions of their wealth to
Germany.33 Earlier, during the war, thousands of Jews had come, or been brought
to Germany by force, from the occupied territories, when the economy needed
additional manpower to replace the men drafted into the army. Many of the
migrants chose to stay in Germany rather than to return to their countries, which
were stricken by the war and revolution.34
About seven hundred Berlin residents of eastern European Jewish origin formed
the membership of the Perez-Verein, the workers’ association named after the
popular Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. This organization had a stronger Bundist
contingent and a weaker Labour-Zionist contingent. The majority of members
came from relat ively well-off families but had turned to proletarian occupations
during the war. Many of them were familiar with contemporary Yiddish literature
and subscribed to newspapers: the Warsaw-based Bundist Lebnsfragn (Problems of Life)
had four hundred subscribers, and the Cracow-based Labour-Zionist Der yidisher
arbeter ( Jewish Worker) three hundred. In 1920, the police closed the association, but
it later reappeared as the Kulturverein Progreß (Progress Culture Association).35
By the end of 1920, there were 13,000 Jews from the former Russian and Austro-
Hungarian empires, as well as from Romania, in Berlin’s population of four million,
6 Gennady Estraikh
which included 137,000 Jews. In 1925, a quarter of the more than 172,000 Jews in
Berlin were immigrants.36 The Yiddish poet and essayist David Eynhorn described
Berlin in 1921 as the transit centre for the whole ragged Jewish emigration from
Europe, the place of refuge for
those Jewish emigrants who due to certain unfortunate circumstances have
found themselves cut off from the great stream of emigration that is f lowing to
America. Berlin houses those who were not allowed to embark the ship, those
who were rejected by their families, or those whose papers were stolen. Berlin
lures Jewish deserters from Poland, expelled Jewish workers from France, and
the Jews pushed out from [Miklós] Horthy’s Hungary. It’s a station for halutzim
[Zionist pioneers] heading for Palestine and for Jewish workers who want to
reach Soviet Russia.37
Two years later, Eynhorn told the reader of the New York Yiddish daily Forverts
(Forward) that walking along Friedrichstraße felt like being in Berdichev, reputedly
the ‘Jewish capital’ of Ukraine. ‘Broken Russian was heard from all sides — with
[ Jewish] intonation and gesticulation. There was also a good deal of Yiddish,
predominantly Volhynian and Lithuanian Yiddish.’ 38 Sholem Asch, the best-selling
Yiddish novelist, found in Berlin ‘all of Jewish St Petersburg, Jewish Moscow,
Jewish Kiev, and Jewish Odessa’.39
The appearance, in June 1921, of the Vilna Troupe, which remained in Berlin
until March 1923, symbolized the arrival of highbrow Yiddish culture, especially
as the Vilna actors performed in the premises on Kommandantenstraße previously
occupied by the Herrnfeld Theatre, known for its light repertoire.40 Alfred Döblin,
then one of the most popular German writers, welcomed the troupe as ‘genuine
Jewish theatre’. He praised them, though it was hard for him to follow the actors’
language: ‘I could hardly understand more than in the Russian theatre. [...] The
theatre was very badly attended in any case. [...] People who can understand this
natural Esperanto, the linguistic mixture of Yiddish, live around the Alexanderplatz
and don’t have any money.’41
The Farlag Yidish was the pioneer Yiddish publishing house in Berlin. Its imprint
initially appeared in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where it was established in 1917
by the novice Lithuanian-born writer Kalman Zingman (Singman). In addition to
his own and other authors’ literary works, he published two issues of the miscellany
Kunst-ring almanakh (Art Circle Journal), which he later reissued under the imprint of
the Kaunas-Berlin Farlag Yidish. At the end of 1920 Zingman moved to Kaunas,
now the capital of Lithuania, where he established himself as a publisher and a
man of letters. In 1921, his operation produced a dozen titles (including reprints
of Kharkiv editions), making Zingman the most prolific Yiddish publisher in pre-
1922 Berlin. However, this was the last year of his publishing activities in Berlin.
A possible explanation can be found in Zingman’s novel Oyfn shvindl-trep (On the
Winding Stairs), whose protagonist, a Kaunas publisher, fell deep into debt trying to
compete with private and state firms.42
At least two factors could inspire such people as Zingman to publish books in
Berlin. First, in the early 1920s Germany was a publisher’s paradise, guaranteeing an
ideal combination of low prices, high quality, and lax censorship. Dubnow punned
Introduction 7
Fig. 1. Kalman Zingman

By kind permission of K. Zingman’s granddaughter Amalia Goldberg
(Kfar Menachem, Israel)
8 Gennady Estraikh
that the inf lation of the German mark triggered the inf lation of Berlin-based
publishing. Many publishers targeted (usually misguidedly) Russia as a marketplace
for their production.43 Jewish books and periodicals could be produced at well-
established printing shops such as H. Itzkowski and Son (founded in Berlin in
1874).44 Second, Berlin boasted a glut of intellectuals who had f led the chaos that
had consumed the former Russian Empire. In 1925, there were over two hundred
foreign Jewish writers, editors, and artists living in Prussia.45
For his projects, Zingman recruited the artist Eliezer Lissitzky (who designed the
publisher’s logo) and the man of letters Herman Frank. Lissitzky came to Berlin in
1921 with the aim of establishing contacts between Soviet and German artists. In
post-1917 Russia, he was a central figure in the Moscow Circle of Yiddish Writers
and Artists.46 A scholar who had gained his doctorate at the Friedrich Wilhelm
University in Berlin with a thesis on the social and economic analysis of the Biały
stok Jewish community, Frank owned the Berlin-based Russian publishing house
Argonavty (Argonauts). In 1921, the Farlag Yidish published his Yiddish translation
of Martin Buber’s three speeches on Judaism: Dray redn iber yidntum. In 1923 Frank
moved to the United States, where he became a leading Yiddish journalist and
editor.
A much more significant publishing outfit — the Yiddish-Hebrew publishing
house Klal-Farlag (General Publishing House) — was set up at 73 Markgrafenstraße
in May 1921. Shai (Saul Israel) Hurwitz, Simon Dubnow’s relative and the central
figure among Berlin Hebraists, laid the foundation for this Jewish offshoot of the
German publishing firm Ullstein. The Yiddish department of the Klal-Farlag was
headed by the master literary critic and journalist Bal-Makhshoves (Isidor Elyashev),
and the august Hebrew poet Khaim Nakhman Bialik succeeded Hurwitz, after his
death in August 1922, as the chief Hebrew editor. The Klal-Farlag announced a
programme of providing wide Jewish circles with affordable quality books in all
fields of classical and modern literature. Zeev Wolf Latzki-Bertoldi, another key
person in this publishing undertaking, played a prominent role in post-1917 political
and cultural life in Kiev. For a short time he even took on the portfolio of Minister
for Jewish Affairs during the heyday of Jewish autonomy in short-lived independent
Ukraine, but he decamped to Berlin after Kiev became Soviet in 1920.47
All in all, Yiddish book production in Berlin had reached a level second only to
Warsaw. In 1921 to 1923, German, predominantly Berlin-based, publishers released
one hundred and twenty-six Yiddish books, or fourteen per cent of all the Yiddish
book titles produced in the world. Moreover, in terms of printed sheets, Yiddish
book production in Germany made up about forty per cent of the worldwide total,
because publishers in other countries often produced booklets.48
Introduction 9
3
After the end of the war, the Romanisches Café, situated on the Kurfürstendamm,
in the shadow of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, became ‘the adopted home
for Berlin’s bohemians’.49 Ben-Zion Hoffman (better known as Tsivion), a leading
journalist of Forverts who once studied in Berlin, highlighted the difference between
the roles that cafes played in Berlin and Paris: ‘in Paris people go to a cafe to eat and
to entertain themselves, whereas in Berlin people live in cafes. Cafes are Berliners’
second homes, perhaps even their most important homes.’50 Multi-talented Yiddish
men of letters, veterans, and young hopefuls, would visit various cafes, including
the Café am Nollendorfplatz, favoured by émigré Russian bohemians. They had
much in common, especially as Jewish intellectuals, professionals, and entrepreneurs
formed the organized core of the local Russian-speaking population. The Berlin
daily Rul’ (Rudder) was widely regarded as a ‘Jewish newspaper’.51 Yet the rarefied
community of Yiddish intellectuals was particularly drawn to the Romanisches Café.
Whereas studies and memoirs in German devoted to the Romanisches Café
consistently ignore its Yiddish shtam-gest,52 in Jewish writers’ portrayals the cafe
sometimes emerges as an almost entirely Yiddish place. In reality, only a few of
over a hundred tables in this nerve centre of bohemian life were occupied by
Yiddish-speaking patrons. ‘Each [ Jewish] group had its own table; there were the
“Yidd ishists”, “Zionists”, “Bundists” and so on, all arguing among themselves from
table to table.’53 The poet Abraham Nokhum Stenzel, whose Berlin stint, from 1921
to 1936, was one of the longest among Yiddish literati, knew the motley society of
the Romanisches Café well. He recalled that the Romanisches Café was ‘swamped
with prominent Jewish cultural and communal activists, well-known Jewish lawyers
from Moscow and St Petersburg, famous Jewish writers from Kiev and Odessa, and
ever-travelling party leaders — from the extreme left to the rightmost currents’.54
The place, notorious for its poor food and run-down interior, was known as the
rakhmonishes (or rakhmones) cafe, ‘Cafe of Pity’. This Yiddish-derived name mirrored
the depressive vibes among the cafe’s clientele, many of whom eked out a pitiful
existence. As in social life in other bohemian cafes, Jewish literati — uprooted,
wandering people — bivouacked among their colleagues because they often had
nowhere else to go or were fed up with being alone.55 The loneliness of an emigrant
who had retreated into fretful introspection appeared as a dominant motif in the
Yiddish literary output devoted to Berlin life. The Symbolist writer Der Nister
found Berlin the city where ‘the Jewish intellectuals, left without roots, rot one by
one and collectively’.56 Outside Germany, the Romanisches Café sometimes became
a byword for an ivory tower. In the words of the Warsaw poet Melech Ravitch,
its society represented ‘nothing more than deserters’ who looked on from afar as
other writers were ‘pulling the carriage’ of Yiddish culture. The highbrow journal
Milgroym (Pomegranate), whose six issues appeared in Berlin from 1922 to 1924,
epitomized the elitist inclinations of the denizens of the Romanisches Café.57
Although some observers argued that a concentration of scores of intellectuals
rather than of thousands of Yiddish speakers had created the environment for a
Yiddish cultural centre in Berlin,58 it was certainly a peculiar centre, which left
10 Gennady Estraikh
intellectuals with a limited choice of occupations. For instance, half of American

Yiddish writers earned their living from working for newspapers (forty per cent)
or schools (ten per cent).59 Berlin, however, had scarcely any long-standing local
Yiddish periodicals and no Yiddish schools. Thus, the lifestyle of the literati
usually depended upon their success in finding work as correspondents of a foreign
newspaper, and those favoured by fortune in this way formed the better-off group
among the shtam-gest of the Romanisches Café. Otherwise, the life of the Yiddish
literati in Berlin could be miserable, as it was in Stenzel’s bohemian existence.60 His
friend, the poet Moyshe Kulbak, who came to Berlin ‘to inhale Europe’, lived there
from hand to mouth for a few years (1921–23), finding casual income as a prompter
for the Vilna Troupe, for example.61 Der Nister and Leyb Kvitko, who were part of
the Jewish cultural f lotsam from Kiev, wound up in Hamburg, where both worked
at a Soviet foreign trade enterprise, because they had no stable journalistic income
and could not afford to stay in Berlin.62
Even so, for a number of Yiddish literati, journalism became the most important
standby on which they could fall back. For instance, Leon Chazanovitch, one of the
founders of Labour Zionism, brief ly ran the Berlin office of the American Labour
Zionist daily Di tsayt (Time).63 Yeshayahu Klinov wrote for the Yiddish newspapers
Morgn-zhurnal (Morning Journal, New York), Haynt (Today, Warsaw), Yidishe shtime
( Jewish Voice, Kaunas), and Yidishe tsaytung ( Jewish Newspaper, Buenos Aires), and the
Tel Aviv-based Ha’aretz translated his reports from Yiddish into Hebrew. He also
wrote for Russian newspapers. A committed Zionist, he however argued that no
movement had the right to monopolize Yiddish or Hebrew.64 Gershon (Herman)
Swet, whose forte was theatre criticism, became a Berlin correspondent of
Moment, but also wrote for Russian and German newspapers. Daniel Charney was
an accredited correspondent of the New York daily Der tog (Day). The New York
Forverts had the strongest group of Berlin-based contributors. Jacob Lestschinsky,
who served as head of its Berlin bureau and also pursued an independent research
career, is an example of a Yiddish man of letters who was successfully integrated
into his intellectual surroundings in Berlin.65
Some Berlin-based Jewish literati avoided appearing in the Romanisches Café.
One of them was Simon Dubnow, who preferred to receive guests at home. Nokhum
Shtif, the Yiddish linguist and organizer of Yiddish scholarship, also shunned the
cafe and satirized it.66 The shtam-gest, however, were addicted to cafe life and would
assemble virtually every evening to ‘pray a Romanisches evening service [ma’ariv]’.
The educator and journalist Israel Rubin portrayed the Yiddish prose-writer David
Bergelson as the toast of the cafe. A relentless talker, Bergelson would come there
because he used to ‘need an audience even during the process of crystallizing,
conceiving his ideas’, to ‘need listeners who would imbibe his thoughts, even if
only partly formulated ones, and follow the embryonic development of his new
brainchild’.67 Bergelson’s son, Lev, remembers his father’s regular visits to the cafe:
Although he was not a Caféhausliterat [cafe writer], he was drawn to the
atmosphere of that place, whose regular patrons included not only bohemians
but also many other figures of Berlin life. There he would frequently see his
Kiev friends. The Romanisches Café was not only a place for small talk. People
Introduction 11
Fig. 2. 8 Ruhlaer Straße, in Berlin-Schmargendorf, near Grunewald,

where Simon Dubnow lived in 1930–33. Photo by Henning Dohrn, 2009
12 Gennady Estraikh
wrote poems, read proofs, and played chess there. Thus, my father played a few
times with the world champion, Emanuel Lasker.68
A contemporary found the cafe similar to ‘a high-ceilinged, noisy waiting room at
a railway station’, where people would ‘read and write poetry, draw pictures, com
pose music, gossip, f lirt, argue, do business, have another cup of coffee, and smoke
another, and yet another, cigarette’.69
The cafe’s ‘Yiddish corner’ did not attract much attention from the German
bohemians. From time to time, outsiders would come to the Yiddish tables, but they
felt ‘like a goy [non-Jew] who joined a Jewish minyan [prayer quorum of ten male
adults]’ there.70 Else Lasker-Schüler would sometimes appear among the Yiddishists,
especially after she made friends with Stenzel and found him ‘an intimate heartfelt
poet’. Stenzel would never forget their initial meeting on 4 August 1922, especially
as it happened to be the day of the funeral of David Frischman, the pioneer Hebrew
writer and editor of the Berlin-based Stybel Hebrew publishing house.71 At the
cemetery four people eulogized the deceased: the Zionist diplomat Viktor Jacobson,
the Hebrew writer S. Ben Zion (Simhah Gutman), Khaim Nakhman Bialik, and
David Bergelson. The latter’s participation was somewhat controversial because
many Yiddishists felt hurt by the funeral’s organizers, who published information
about it only in Hebrew, German, and Russian.72 More importantly, Frischman
‘had a disdainful approach to Yiddish literature. To him, the Hebraist, Yiddish
was a low jargon. He did not have a friendly attitude to Yiddish writers, and in
particular everybody knew of his feud with [...] Peretz.’73
An important place among the regulars of the ‘Yiddish cafe’ belonged to writers
of the pre-war Vilna-Kiev ‘literary axis’. In late Imperial Russia, the high- and
middlebrow nusekh Vilne (Vilna style) of publication contrasted with the mass-
culture commercialism associated with Warsaw, the main centre of Yiddish
publishing. In 1917 to 1920, Kiev eclipsed Vilna, attracting scores of Yiddishist
activists who were inspired by the prospects of Jewish autonomy in independent
Ukraine. Cross-party spirit — a characteristic feature of the Kiev Yiddish heyday
— dominated cultural institutions formed under the umbrella of the Kultur-Lige,
or Culture League.74 Established in January 1918, the League aimed at developing
and promoting secular Yiddish culture based on democratic values. After a short,
if fruitful, period of intense activity, the functions of the League were diluted by
the appointment of Bolshevik functionaries, though it remained a latent presence in
the Soviet Yiddish cultural network. At the end of 1921, several recent activists of
the Kiev Culture League, led by Jacob Lestschinsky, established a similar league in
Berlin, but it did not become a viable organization. Its organizers soon realized that
Berlin was ‘a city where Yiddish culture and politics were produced for export’.75
Bergelson, who emerged as a Yiddish writer in 1909 with the self-sponsored
publication of his novella Arum vokzal (At the Depot), was the recognized literary
star among the Berlin-based holdovers of the Kiev Culture League. Lev Bergelson
remembers his father’s routine of writing in the morning and spending the
afternoon with his family or friends. Initially, such people as Wolf Latzki-Bertoldi,
Fishl Schneersohn, Der Nister, David Eynhorn, Jacob Lestschinsky, the poet Leyb
Kvitko, and the artist Issachar Ber Ryback formed his inner circle of friends. Later,
Introduction 13
his social set also included local intellectuals such as the writers Alfred Döblin and
Arthur Koestler, the actor Alexander Granach, the theatre director Erwin Piscator,
and the theatre critics Herbert Jhering and Alfred Kerr.76
Döblin wrote warmly about Bergelson’s stories, translated into German
by Alexander Eliasberg.77 Fascination with the Ashkenazic tradition brought
Bergelson, son of a small-town merchant and educated primarily by his voracious
appetite for books, together with Döblin, son of a Polish Jewish tailor who worked
his way through German academia. In 1924 Döblin spent two months in Poland,
visiting local Jewish communities. His travel diary, published the following year,
gave a sympathetic picture of Jewish life, particularly in Vilna, where the writer
came to the conclusion that the Jews were an ‘impressive nation’.78 Both Bergelson
and Döblin were friends with Aron Singalowsky, who was a remarkable figure even
against the backdrop of the many brilliant personalities in the circles of Russian
Jewish emigrants in Berlin.
A veteran member of the Zionist Socialist (Territorialist) party, committed to
building a Yiddish-speaking Jewish state outside Palestine, Singalowsky received
his tertiary education in Kazan, Halle, Berlin, and Zurich, and obtained a doctorate
in philosophy and law. In 1919 he edited the short-lived Berlin-based Yiddish
weekly Fraytag (Friday). A number of people could have introduced Bergelson to
Singalowsky. For instance, Nokhum Gergel, a leading Territorialist, knew both
Singalowsky and Bergelson. Gergel and Bergelson apparently met around 1910,
when Gergel was a university student in Kiev. Gergel later worked as the head of
the bureaucratic machinery in the Ministry of Jewish Affairs in Kiev. After settling
in Berlin in 1921, he was a functionary of the ORT, the Society for Promoting
Artisanal and Agricultural Work among the Jews in Russia, and later directed the
Berlin office of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO, the embryo of which was
created in Berlin in 1925.79 Shmaryahu Gorelik also knew both Singalowsky and
Bergelson. A literary critic for the German Jewish newspaper Jüdische Rundschau
( Jewish Review), he contributed to Fraytag in 1919. Bergelson was also Gorelik’s old
colleague; as early as 1910, they had co-edited a Yiddish almanac in Kiev.
In the early 1920s, Singalowsky became an inf luential figure in international
Jewish circles. This happened thanks to his clout in the ORT. On 31 July to 3
August 1921, the first post-war conference of the ORT was convened in Berlin,
transforming the hitherto Russian organization (established in 1880) into the World
ORT Union. Key roles in the restructured ORT were played by three lawyers:
Leon Bramson, a veteran of the ‘old’ ORT, and two leading Territorialists — David
Lvovich (Davidovich) and Aron Singalowsky. Yiddishists were trendsetters on
the new international governing board, chaired initially by Dr Cemach Szabad.80
Yiddish cultural activists were also well represented in other Berlin-based Jewish
organizations. For instance, the Berlin office of HIAS, the (American) Hebrew
Immig rant Aid Society, was headed by Ilja (Eliyahu) Dijour, a Yiddish man of
letters.
In the summer of 1923, Abraham Cahan, editor of the biggest New York
Yiddish daily, Forverts, saw many notables sitting around the Yiddish tables of the
Romanisches Café, including Dr Szabad and Jacob Lestschinsky.81 Apart from its
14 Gennady Estraikh
shtam-gest, the Romanisches Café also had many stam-gest, or casual customers. In
1930, when a Canadian Yiddish writer visited the cafe, he found an assorted group
of Jewish intellectuals there, such as the Zionist ideologue Jacob Klatzkin, the
actor Alexander Granach, the folklorist Immanuel Olsvanger, the popular Yiddish
novelist Israel Joshua Singer (who had just arrived straight from Warsaw), and
finally Daniel Charney and David Bergelson, who came together around 11 p.m.82
The holder of a Soviet passport and an active Yiddish man of letters in Moscow
between 1917 and 1924, Charney remained in Berlin because his health did not
allow him to emigrate to the United States. He soon established himself as the life
and soul of Berlin’s Jewish literary circle. Charney later recalled nostalgically that
through the cafe
had passed almost the whole of Jewish literature and almost all Jewish activists
from all corners of the world!
In the Romanisches Café there was born the good idea of establishing the
Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO [...].
In the Romanisches Café there was also born the good idea of creating the
General Jewish Encyclopedia [...].
The Romanisches Café was, in a sense, the transit point for the whole of
Yiddishland. Not a few writers became healthier in the cafe, they imbibed there
the energy of immortality.
‘The Romanisches Café is the best sanatorium for me!’, [Hersh David]
Nomberg would say, sitting and coughing over a cup of already cold coffee. ‘The
air is so filled with tobacco smoke that not a single bacillus can survive here.’
[...]. In the cafe I healed my lungs, applying to them generous amounts
of nicotine and caffeine, and I also learned important rules of the literary
profession.
Rule number one: don’t bore, God forbid, your readers, even if you don’t
know them personally. This is the first and, at the same time, the last rule of
the art of writing!
In the Romanisches Café you could not be a nudnik [bore]. The moment
anyone was recognized as a bore, his table would be immediately vacated,
deserted in a f lash.
As a result, all those who had ‘graduated’ from the Romanisches Café did
not become nudniks at their writing desks either.83
4
After the end of World War I, the Jewish intellectual centre in Weimar Berlin
developed, to a considerable degree, as part of the ‘capital’ for intellectual immi
grants from the former Russian Empire. However, the story of Charlottengrad (as
the Russian-populated area of Berlin, Charlottenburg, was often called) did not last
long — from the end of 1923 and the beginning of 1924, Paris began to function
as the main centre of Russian intellectual life in the West, where many emigrants,
particularly military men, had also settled earlier, because France was an ally in the
fight against the Kaiser’s Germany and, later, the Bolshevik regime.84 Thus, 1924
can be seen as the moment when the scholar of emigration from Russia detects a
change in the role played by Berlin that lasted until 1933: although its standing as the
Introduction 15
Russian intellectual centre had rapidly declined, it remained the main crossroads
on the whole landscape of the eastern European Jewish — most notably Yiddish-
speaking — intellectual diaspora.
The following factors contributed to the unprecedented development of Yiddish
cultural activities in Berlin. (1) Whereas the French language and French culture
were all-important in Russian intellectual life, the modernization of Russian Jewish
society followed predominantly German cultural models. Many Yiddish-speaking
intellectuals could therefore operate in German as well. (2) Many German Jewish
intellectuals developed a strong interest in eastern European culture and welcomed
cooperation with their Yiddish-speaking peers. (3) Jewish socialists had strong
links with German socialists. (4) Berlin housed the European (or even global)
headquarters of several Jewish relief organizations, such as the American Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee, the ORT, and the HIAS. (5) Berlin also housed
a significant colony of Jewish journalists, whose literati wrote for newspapers
published in various countries. (6) Several Jewish academic projects were based
in Berlin. (7) Diplomatic relations and lines of communication with directly or
indirectly neighbouring countries, including the Soviet Union, facilitated contact
with the ‘old home’ of Yiddish culture.
On 20 October 1923, the Berlin Russian Writers’ Club, established in 1922, held
its last meeting. By that time, only eight of its sixty-five members remained in the
city. Other club members had relocated to Paris or elsewhere, trying to find a place
with better economic conditions. In US dollar terms, life in Berlin was two times
more expensive in September 1923 than in January 1923.85 In addition, the Glavlit
(Soviet censorship office), established in June 1922, made it increasingly difficult to
export to Russia books and journals produced abroad, which severely affected the
entire Russian publishing and literary colony in Berlin.86 Berlin’s Yiddish publishers
faced similar problems with exporting their output across the Soviet border, but
they had a number of alternative markets, most notably in the United States. In
addition, numerous Jewish organizations and newspaper bureaus provided job
opportunities for dozens of literati. In any case, the Yiddish literary community did
not show signs of declining dramatically. Moreover, Yiddish literati formed a new
hub for their activities and leisure.
Apart from the Romanisches Café, Yiddish literati would meet on the premises
of the intellectual retreat called the Sholem Aleichem Club, situated in the western
part of the city, at 9 Kleiststraße, near the Jewish community headquarters. Opened
on 19 December 1924, the club was clearly modelled on the Literatn Fareyn, or
Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists, established in Warsaw in 1916 during
the German occupation. The club’s members were writers, artists, and political
activists of democratic orientation. It was essentially a men’s club because women
generally formed a very small minority among Yiddish literati. In Berlin, perhaps
only the poet Rosa Gutman broke the all-male homogeneity of the milieu.87
A number of the Kiev Culture League’s activists, including Bergelson and
Lestschinsky, served on the new club’s board. At the official opening of the club,
in January 1925, the key speakers were Bergelson and Singalowsky. In contrast to
the Culture League, outreach was not on the club’s agenda. Lectures and other
16 Gennady Estraikh
Fig. 3. 34/35 Bleibtreustraße, Berlin, housed the ORT headquarters in 1921-26

Photo by Alexander Ivanov, 2009
Introduction 17
events would usually be organized for its members and invited people only. The
club had a library with a reading room, and a cafe. Lev Bergelson remembers the
club situated in a set of spacious rooms on the second f loor of an apartment block.
Staple dishes of eastern European cuisine, such as Ukrainian borscht, esikfleysh
(sweet and sour meat), and gefilte fish, could be ordered there for a midday meal. In
the evenings, there were literary parties, discussions, and, from time to time, fund-
raising concerts. In one such concert, to which Lev Bergelson was allowed to come,
his father and Albert Einstein performed together as violinists.88
The newspaper Rul’ provided regular information about the club’s activities. For
instance, on 18 January 1925, the club opened an exhibition of works by the Kiev-
born artist Abraham Minchin on its premises. In the first half of 1925, the club
hosted such speakers as Moyshe Silberfarb, the former Minister for Jewish Affairs in
the Ukrainian government and chairman of the Kiev Culture League (11 January),
Daniel Charney (14 February), and Leon Chasanowitch (14 March). Some of the
lectures at the club were in German. Alfred Döblin gave a talk on modern German
literature (22 March), and the German journalist Hellmut von Gerlach spoke on
the provocative topic ‘Why I am not an Anti-Semite Any More’ (5 May);89 Berl
Locker, the Berlin-based leader of the Labour Zionists, shared his impressions from
after visiting the United States (4 June).
The club marked various anniversaries. Speeches by Bergelson and Shtif and
recitations by the artist Abraham Morewski were devoted to the tenth anniversary
of I. L. Peretz’s death (13 April). A lecture by the Reichstag deputy Eduard Bernstein
marked the hundredth anniversary of Ferdinand Lasalle’s birth (25 April). The
frame of the Sholem Aleichem Club was too narrow for the sixtieth anniversary of
the birth of Chaim Zhitlowsky, the New York-based Yiddishist guru. A committee
chaired by Leon Bramson prepared a gala held on 21 January 1926 in the Musiker-
Festsäle (31 Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße) with such speakers as Bramson and Bergelson.
Dubnow was also announced in the programme, but he decided to send a letter
rather than attend the gathering.90 Characteristically, the club marked the tenth
anniversary of Sholem Aleichem’s death not in its ivory tower but in a Jewish
school near the Alexanderplatz (30 Kaiserstraße), apparently expecting the common
people to participate.91 The club often invited Yiddish writers to read from their
new works. One such literary evening took place on 4 December 1927. The invited
writer, Samuel Lewin, was to all appearances a maverick among the Berlin-based
Yiddish literati. The success of German translations of his works was particularly
annoying to Yiddish purists. It is revealing that Zalman Reisen refused to mention
him when compiling his four-volume biographical Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur,
prese un filologye (1928–29).92 On 20 October 1928, the club marked the twentieth
anniversary of the Czernowitz conference. The keynote paper was presented by
a guest from Vilna — Max Weinreich, the head of the YIVO, spoke about the
transformation of Yiddish from a ‘jargon’ to a ‘language of culture’ recognized in
the world of literature and scholarship.93
18 Gennady Estraikh
5
The three main circles of Yiddish culture — American, Polish, and Soviet — as
well as smaller ones would meet in the ‘Yiddish corner’ of the Romanisches Café
or in the Sholem Aleichem Club. Although a no-compromise mentality reigned
in all the Yiddish circles (any move toward, say, communism, could only be at the
expense of ties with other circles), Berlin was the place where journalists writing
for ideologically and aesthetically rivalling dailies could be seen around the same
table. Thus, the editors of the journal Milgroym ‘wanted to create a Jewish republic
of art and letters that also engaged Jewish artists and writers all over, from Moscow
to Warsaw, from Palestine and New York’.94 An international, cross-party ideology
was characteristic of the activities developed by the Berlin-based offices of the
ORT, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and other Jewish relief
organizations. Visits to Berlin helped literati in Lithuania and other small fragments
of the former Russian Empire to overcome their feeling of isolation. In fact, this
feeling was characteristic of numerous bohemian circles in larger Yiddish-speaking
communities as well. From 1921 to 1923, Kalman Zingman published the literary
periodical Vispe (Islet) in Kaunas, and the journal Inzl (Island) was launched in
1925 in New York. In October 1927, in response to the fractiousness of Yiddish
literary circles, Israel Joshua Singer paraphrased Marx and Engels’s slogan in his
proclamation entitled ‘Yiddish Writers of the World, Unite’ and advanced the idea
of a non-geographical spiritual centre of Jewish life. In 1929, Daniel Charney and
the journalist, critic and translator Yehoshua Rapoport tried (unsuccessfully) to
publish a literary monthly whose title, Brikn (Bridges), would symbolize international
and inter-ideological ties.95
The journalist Yeshayahu (Shayke) Klinov, who toyed with an idea of publishing
a book devoted to ‘ten years of Yiddish literature in the Romanisches Café’, empha
sized the generally peaceful coexistence of the Berlin literati, though differing
political views did cause friendships to cool in some cases. He surmised that this was
due to the virtual absence of the mass activities which in other places antagonized
Jewish intellectuals.96 In addition, this circle of expatriates was so small that bitter
conf licts would have easily destroyed their fragile environment.97 For all that, it was
an argumentative place that saw serious confrontations from time to time. Thus,
in January 1926, Lestschinsky, Latzki-Bertoldi, and the historian Elias Tcherikower
formed a court of honour, which met several times discussing — and condemning
— sensational articles published by the Yiddish journalists Yehuda Hirsh Schajak
and Zvi Lukaschewsky.98 In October 1929, a Zionist court of honour chaired by
Sammy Gronemann took Khaim Nakhman Bialik’s side in his conf lict with the
veteran Hebrew and Yiddish essayist Reuven Brainin, who began to be regarded
as a ‘turncoat’ by his former fellow literati. Brainin, an enthusiast of Soviet Jewish
colonization projects, was accused of becoming a Soviet propagandist.99 A year
later, Bialik rattled some feathers by telling a Berlin audience that Yiddish had
already had its day and had no future.100
The most bitter confrontations took place between the camps of supporters and
enemies of the Soviet Union. In March 1927, when the leading Menshevik Raphael
Abramovitch (Rein) was invited to speak about the February 1917 Revolution and
Introduction 19
its inf luence on Russia’s Jews, his presentation was several times interrupted by
Communists. A particularly sharp response was given by Alexander Khashin (Zvi
Averbukh), who led the Communist faction of the Labour Zionist movement in
post-revolutionary Ukraine and later lived in Berlin (from the end of the 1920s to
his disappearance in the Gulag in the late 1930s he worked as a Yiddish journalist
in Moscow). The first round of the debates, on 13 March, had to be continued on
26 March, when only invited people were allowed to enter the club.101
Following the Treaty of Rapallo, signed by the Soviet and German governments
in April 1922, economic, political, and cultural ties were established between the
two countries, and business and cultural traffic between Moscow and Berlin was
intense. As early as 1920, Berlin housed a publishing outlet of the Comintern and,
from 1921, its Bureau for Information and Statistics; from 1924 the Comintern
published its German-language journal Inprekorr in Berlin.102 Berlin was the place
where émigré and Soviet literary circles fraternized more often than in any other
city where emigrants from Russia were concentrated.103 Pro-Soviet writers formed
circles that welcomed visitors from Moscow. Thus, when Boris Pasternak came to
Berlin in 1923, he, according to a Russian memoirist, preferred to mix with writers
who were planning to return to Russia, such as Aleksei Tolstoi, Viktor Shklovskii,
and David Bergelson.104
Bergelson developed overt pro-Soviet leanings a couple of years later when
he was attracted by the Soviet projects of Jewish land-settlement, initially in the
Crimea and southern Ukraine and later in Birobidzhan. Bergelson edited the new
journal, In shpan (In Harness), launched in 1926 at Boris Kletzkin’s publishing house
in Vilna. Its first issue carried Bergelson’s much-discussed article ‘Three Centres’,
in which he denied any future for modern Yiddish culture in its two non-Soviet
centres, New York and Warsaw, and hailed Moscow as the best place to be associated
with. Apart from Bergelson, the new journal ‘harnessed’ two other habitués of the
Romanisches Café: Alexander Khashin and Daniel Charney. Singalowsky was part
of the editorial group of In shpan, but as an ORT functionary he did not want to
see his name mentioned in the publication.105
In the early 1920s, the more market-driven environment of the New Economic
Policy (NEP) had improved the image of the Bolshevik regime. Lestschinsky later
succinctly characterized the NEP period, particularly the years 1922 to 1925:
Breathing spell, revival, the peasant starts to plow the fields again, and the city
begins to revive; production doubles inside a couple of years; Jews open stores
in the largest cities of Russia; the artisan resumes work and hires a helper; the
nationalized large factories begin to operate, and the non-Jewish workers, who
f led to the villages under military communism, go back to the cities; urban
industry grows apace, and so does the machinery of government. Jews f lock to
government jobs in great number; the spontaneous trend to agriculture gathers
momentum.106
The notable German Jewish politician and philanthropist Paul Nathan compared
the three models — Lithuanian, Polish, and Soviet — of contemporary Jewish
life in eastern Europe and came to the conclusion that the most promising was
the Soviet one. The well-developed Jewish autonomy in Lithuania resulted in
20 Gennady Estraikh
sharp conf licts with the Christian majority, whereas Poland, with her ostensible
constitutional guarantees for Jews, turned into the most anti-Semitic country in the
world. Nathan admitted that the Soviet environment had created serious obstacles
for Jewish religious life, but these restrictions were devoid of anti-Semitism because
all religious people in the Soviet Union faced similar problems.107
Pro-Soviet Yiddish activities in Berlin reached their climax in 1928, during the
successful guest-performances of the Moscow Yiddish theatre. Next year Solomon
Mikhoels, head of the theatre and the lodestar of the Soviet Yiddish stage, was
invited to play the central role in Piscator’s staging of Mehring’s play Der Kaufmann
von Berlin (The Merchant of Berlin). Although the Soviet authorities at some stage
allowed Mikhoels to spend the period from 1 August 1929 to 1 December 1929
in Germany, he never came to Berlin, and Piscator had to bring in the New York
Yiddish actor Paul Baratoff.108
1928 saw an attempt to establish in Germany an organization for supporting
Jewish colonization in the Soviet Union. The Denkschrift (memorandum) devoted
to this endeavour contains articles by Alexander Khashin, Ber Orshansky, and
Daniel Charney. Bergelson was the only representative of Yiddishist circles on the
new organization’s Initiative Committee (Initiativ-Komitee zur Unterstützung der
jüdischen Siedlungen in der Sowjet-Union), whose members included the German
writers Alfons Goldschmidt and Arthur Holitscher, the seasoned Communist
Eduard Fuchs, and the pacifist Helene Stöcker.109 This initiative was presumably
supported — or even advanced — by the Comintern apparatus, which created an
international network for the Soviet mother organization, the Association for the
Rural Placement of Jewish Labourers, known as OZET. Ber Orshansky, a Soviet
Yiddish writer and Jewish functionary in Belarus, was dispatched to Berlin, where
in March 1928 he spoke about a ‘Jewish republic in Soviet Russia’.110
Another Soviet guest, Prof. David Baturinsky, a leading member of the OZET,
came to tell Soviet supporters that a new phase of colonization was coming: the
‘Siberian project’. Baturinsky participated in the expedition sent to the Far East to
investigate the barely populated territory that soon became known as Birobidzhan.
In Berlin, he was invited to a tea party with a group of intellectuals at the house of
Prof. Adolf Damaschke, an advocate of agricultural reforms, and later addressed a
rally with about five hundred participants. Among other speakers were the writer
Walter Mehring, the American Yiddish writer Abraham Reisen, and the actors
Alexander Granach and Solomon Mikhoels. Baturinsky spent a few months in
Germany, speaking to various audiences in Berlin and other cities.111
The Birobidzhan project was on everyone’s lips in the Romanisches Café and
in Jewish circles generally. A Soviet correspondent reported that the project found
support in the northern, proletarian part of the city, whereas the Zionists and
other anti-Soviet activists were against creating a Jewish republic in the extreme
eastern part of Russia. In February or early March 1928, the Arbeiter-Kulturvereine
(Workers’ Cultural Societies), which eastern European Jewish labour activists had
set up in the early 1920s in a number of German industrial centres, including Berlin,
organized a rally whose participants were addressed by Bergelson, Khashin, and
Orshansky. Charney spoke on behalf of the Initiative Committee, declaring that it
Introduction 21
was apparently the first rally of Birobidzhan supporters outside the Soviet Union.
Some of the participants expressed their readiness to go to the Soviet Union.112
On 13 September 1928, Khashin, who went from Berlin to Moscow, reported on
the activities of the Initiative Committee to OZET leaders. He mentioned such
supporters as Theodor Wolff, editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, Georg Bernhard, editor
of the Vossische Zeitung, and Hellmut von Gerlach, editor of Die Welt am Montag.
Although the writers Döblin and Arnold Zweig were ‘somewhat inclined toward
Zionism’, they were also among the supporters of colonization. Birobidzhan created
a new dividing line among supporters of Soviet Jewish land-settlement: some
people were against the ‘Siberian exile’ and advocated colonization in the Crimea
and adjacent areas.113
The Berlin Workers’ Cultural Society continued its activities in 1929. The Soviet
Yiddish poet Itsik Fefer described his literary party, organized by the society as
part of a month-long programme devoted to the Soviet Union. Fefer was the first
official representative of Soviet Yiddish literature sent abroad and his visit was
covered by the German Communist newspapers Die Rote Fahne and Die Welt am
Abend.114 Soon after Fefer, the Workers’ Cultural Society had two other Soviet
guests, representing the Kiev-based Yiddish academic institute: Joseph Liberberg,
the institute’s director, and Nokhum Oyslender, head of its literary section.115 In
September 1929, the society, which drew audiences of several hundred people,
celebrated twenty years of Bergelson’s literary life.116
6
Following the demise of such highbrow journals as Milgroym and In shpan, the
Berlin literary colony did not make serious attempts to establish its own publishing
forums. In 1932, the Weimar-period history of the Yiddish press in the German
capital ended with the decline of the Berliner bleter far dikhtung un kunst (Berlin Pages
for Poetry and Art). It was edited by Yehoshua Rapoport, then an enthusiast of Soviet
Jewish colonization. By that time, several shtam- and stam-gest of the Romanisches
Café had settled in the Soviet Union. Among them were Alexander Khashin, Leyb
Kvitko, Der Nister, Eliezer Lissitzky, and Moyshe Kulbak. David Bergelson would
join them in 1934.
Meanwhile, the Sholem Aleichem Club had apparently become obsolete and
been amalgamated to all intents and purposes with the Russian-Jewish Public
Club, which was founded in June 1930 and had people such as the journalist Klinov
among its activists.117 Occasionally, however, the Sholem Aleichem Club would
re-emerge on the Berlin landscape, organizing separate cultural gatherings, as
happened on 9 March 1931, when Abraham Coralnik, co-editor of the New York
Yiddish daily Der tog, visited the city.118 Berlin, no doubt, still had an audience for
Yiddish cultural events. Characteristically, in February 1930 the cabaret Kaftan
was opened in Schöneberg (31 Martin-Luther-Straße) by the Jewish actor Maxim
Sakaschansky and his wife Ruth Klinger. Alfred Döblin’s brother, Hugo, a film
and theatre actor, starred in the cabaret’s 1930–31 programme. He would appear
carrying a heavy bag marked ‘107’, which was the number of National Socialist
deputies in the Reichstag.119
22 Gennady Estraikh
Fig. 4. At a Jewish art exhibition in the Sholem Aleichem Club (1928). From right to
left: (standing) Michael Wurmbrand (head of the Berlin office of the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency), Ben-Adir (Abraham Rosin), Nokhum Shtif, Jacob Lestschinsky, Gershon
(Herman) Swet, Zeev Wolf Latzki-Bertoldi, two unknown persons, Issachar Ber Ryback,
Nokhum Gergel, an unknown person, Meir Kreinin (a Jewish civil leader), Mrs. Rebecca
Tcherikower, Mrs. Deborah Shtrif, Elias Tcherikower; (sitting) Mrs. Leah Swet, Mrs.
Sonya Ryback, Mrs. Gergel. From the Archives of the YIVO, New York.
‘Finis Germaniae! This is the end of the free democratic republic where I
was happy to settle 11 years ago’, Dubnow wrote in his diary on 25 March 1933.
Around the same time, the right-wing German nationalist journalist Friedrich
Hussong felt victorious: ‘The Kurfürstendamm [...], it was the enemy. [...] Today,
the Kurfürstendamm is defeated and beaten.’120 In May 1933, the Berlin offices of
the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee were searched by the Nazis and
the Committee was forced to move its European headquarters to Paris.121 While
moving the ORT’s offices out of Berlin, Singalowsky even managed to transport
to Paris the library and furniture of Alfred Döblin, who had f led earlier. For a few
years, Döblin (and a few other émigré German Jewish intellectuals) would f lirt
with Yiddish and Yiddishist Territorialism.122 The vast majority of the Berlin-based
Yiddish literati f led Germany in 1933, moving to such places as Warsaw, Paris,
Riga, New York, or Tel Aviv.
In 1935 and 1936, the history of Yiddish publishing in Berlin came to an end
when Stenzel published (at the Fürst printing house, 26 Goltzstraße) a few of his
poetic collections and a pamphlet celebrating the centenary of the birth of Mendele
Moykher Sforim, known as the grandfather of modern Yiddish literature. One of
the last Yiddish literati to leave Berlin, Stenzel arrived in England in 1936, where
he would establish himself as Stencl, the eccentric ‘poet of Whitechapel’, who
Introduction 23
occasionally looked ‘back nostalgically to the poetic inspiration of the time in which
he had written poetry in the ambience of Else Lasker-Schüler and members of the
Milgroym group’.123 In the nostalgic memory of Jewish literati who once populated
the Romanisches Café and the Sholem Aleichem Club, Weimar Berlin remained a
unique example of an intellectual crossroads whose tolerant atmosphere contributed
immensely to the circulation of ideas, publications, and significant figures between
all centres of Yiddish culture, most importantly in the United States, Poland, and
the Soviet Union.
Ilja Dijour, who visited Berlin in 1946, wrote to Charney, who had been living
in America since 1940:
I cannot avoid thinking about you every time I pass the ruins of the Romanisches
Café. Only a person who, like you or I, had spent thousands of nights in the
Romanisches could understand the meaning that these ruins have for us.
A few thousand tons of stones and bricks cover the tables around which
there would sit Bergelson and Kvitko, Der Nister and you, Nomberg and
Latzki-Bertoldi, [the Jewish activist] Israel Efroykin and Jacob Lestschinsky,
Elias Tcherikower and Nokhum Gergel, Alexander Khashin and Y. Klinov, and
many others. The entrance terrace has survived almost intact. One even can see
part of the signboard on it: ‘Romanisches Ca...’.
And that’s all! There are no people there (with the possible exception of
those under the debris).124
Notes to the Introduction

Some topics in this Introduction were previously discussed in Gennady Estraikh, ‘Vilna on the Spree:
Yiddish in Weimar Berlin’, Aschkenas, 16.1 (2006), 103–27.
1. Jacob Lestschinsky, ‘Vos di antisemitn biln un vos di faktn zogn’, Forverts, 1 October 1921, p. 3.
2. Arthur Tilo Alt, ‘Yiddish and Berlin’s Scheuenenviertel’, Shofar, 9.2 (1991), 30.
3. Sammy Gronemann, ‘Remembrances’, in Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries,
ed. by Monika Richarz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 263.
4. Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish
Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), pp. 193–97.
5. Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920–33 (London: Granta Books, 2003), pp. 31–32,
38.
6. Doris Wieke, ‘Ein Viertel mit Ruf ’, in Das Scheunenviertel (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1994), p. 73.
7. Tomas Raschke, ‘Russisch-jüdische Zigarettenmacher’, in Das Scheunenviertel (Berlin: Haude
& Spener, 1994), p. 49; Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora, ed. by Nancy L. Green (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), pp. 52, 56, 218.
8. Quoted in Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora, ed. by Green, p. 218.
9. On Yiddish theatrical life in Berlin, see Peter Sprengel, Populäres jüdisches Theater in Berlin von
1877 bis 1933 (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1997); Heidelore Riss, Ansätze zu einer Geschichte des
jüdischen Theaters in Berlin 1889–1936 (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 2000); Ralf Kurtze, Das jiddische
Theater in Berlin um die Jahrhundertwende (Cologne: Teiresias, 2001).
10. David Brenner, ‘ “Making Jargon Respectable”: Leo Winz, Ost und West and the Reception of
Yiddish Theatre in Pre-Hitler Germany’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 42 (1997), 51–66; Sarah
Bailey, ‘Cultural Translation and the Problem of Language: Yiddish in Joseph Roth’s Juden
auf Wanderschaft’, Transit, 1.1 (2005) <http://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2005/curr.toc.html>,
article 50906 [accessed 10 October 2009], p. 6.
11. Peretz Hirschbein, In gang fun lebn (New York: Bikher-farlag, 1948), p. 134.
12. Joshua A. Fishman, Yiddish: Turning to Life (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1991), p. 265.
13. Nathan Birnbaum, ‘Di absolute idee fun yidntum un di yidishe shprakh’, Di yidishe velt, 1 (1912),
45–52.
24 Gennady Estraikh
14. See, for example, Barbara Schäfer, Berliner Zionistenkreise: Eine vereinsgeschichtliche Studie (Berlin:
Metropol, 2003), pp. 149–50.
15. Shmaryahu Gorelik, ‘Dos kafe “Monopol” ’, Der fraynd, 15 September 1913, p. 3; Stanley Nash,
In Search of Hebraism: Shai Hurwitz and His Polemics in the Hebrew Press (Leiden: Brill, 1980), pp.
169–72; Aschheim, p. 94. Translations in this chapter are by the author unless otherwise stated.
16. Tsivion [Ben-Zion Hoffman], ‘In der literarisher kibetsarnye fun Berlin’, Forverts, 29 July 1921, p. 3.
17. Shmaryahu Gorelik, ‘Di yidishe inteligents un di yidishe literatur’, Dos bukh, 1 (1911), 25–29;
Zalman Reisen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, 4 vols (Vilna: Kletzkin, 1928),
i, 989.
18. Yechiel Szeintuch, ‘Be-rei ha-Ashmeday’, Khulyot, 6 (2000), 397–418.
19. Shmarya Levin, Jugend in Aufruhr (Berlin: Jüdische Buch-Vereinigung, 1935), pp. 253–54; Scholem
Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1880–1940 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1959), p. 12; Norbert Kampe,
Studenten und ‘Judenfrage’ im deutschen Kaiserreich: Die Einstehung einer akademischen Trägerschicht
des Antisemitismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), p. 89; Giles MacDonogh, Berlin
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 90.
20. Vladimir Grossman, Amol un haynt (Paris: [n. pub.], 1955), p. 60.
21. ‘Tsu di yidn in Poyln’, Der Israelit, 10 September 1914, p. 3.
22. Aschheim, p. 158.
23. Christopher M. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-tongue Fascism, Race and the Science
of Language (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 195–96.
24. Hirsz Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War
II (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), p. 201.
25. Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press 1996), p. 214.
26. Aschheim, p. 148; Sammy Gronemann, Erinnerungen an meine Jahre in Berlin (Berlin: Philo, 2004),
p. 208.
27. Delphine Bechtel, ‘Milgroym, a Yiddish Magazine of Arts and Letters, is Founded in Berlin by
Mark Wischnitzer’, in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996,
ed. by Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 421.
28. For more see Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Vilna Yiddishist Quest for Modernity’, in Jüdische
Kulturen im Neuen Europa: Wilna 1918–1939, ed. by Marina Dmitrieva and Heidemarie Petersen
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004), pp. 101–04. See also Jacob Wigodski, In shturm: Zikhroynes fun
di okupatsye-tsaytn (Vilna: Kletzkin, 1926), pp. 39–40, 52.
29. Gronemann, Erinnerungen an meine Jahre in Berlin, pp. 279–80.
30. Zalman Reisen, ‘Der yidisher teater in Vilne’, in Vilner zamlbukh, ed. by Cemach Szabad, 2 vols
(Vilna: [n. pub.], 1916–18), ii (1918), 170–71.
31. David Eynhorn, ‘Di milkhome hot geshafn a yidishn folks-teater in Berlin’, Forverts, 7 August
1921, p. 6; Riss, p. 97.
32. Samuel Lewin, ‘Me Remembering: Autobigraphy. Translated from Yiddish by Joseph Leftwich’,
pp. 104–15. The unpublished manuscript is preserved as part of Samuel Lewin’s collection at the
Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
33. A. Vol’skii, ‘Russkie evrei v Germanii’, Evreiskaia tribuna, 9 September 1921, p. 3; Vernut’sia v
Rossiiu — stikhami, ed. by Vadim Kreid (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), p. 7.
34. Klara Eschelbacher, ‘Die ostjudische Einwanderungsbevölkerung der Stadt Berlin’ (unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin, 1920), p. 1; Ostjuden in Deutschland,
2 vols (Berlin: Philo Verlag, 1921), ii, 24–28.
35. Eschelbacher, pp. 79–83; Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Hamburg: Hans
Christians Verlag, 1986), p. 679; Ludger Heid, Maloche — nicht Mildtätigkeit: Ostjüdische Arbeiter
in Deutschland 1914–1933 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1995), pp. 486–91.
36. Adler-Rudel, p. 165.
37. David Eynhorn, ‘Tsvishn yidishe emigrantn in Berlin’, Forverts, 9 June 1921, p. 6.
38. David Eynhorn, ‘Di oyfgekumene gvirim fun oysland velkhe lebn a gutn tog in Berlin’, Forverts,
14 January 1923, p. 4.
39. Sholem Asch, ‘A briv fun Berlin’, Forverts, 21 May 1922, p. 8.
40. Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale
University Press 1996), p. 191; Riss, pp. 97–98.
Introduction 25
41. Alfred Döblin, Ein Kerl muß eine Meinung haben: Berichte und Kritiken 1921–1924 (Olten: Walter,
1976), pp. 36–37. On the Vilna Troupe and its Berlin tour, see also Joachim Hemmerle,
‘Jiddische Theater im Spiegel deutschsprachiger Kritik: Von der Jahrhundertwende bis 1928:
Eine Dokumentation’, in Beter und Rebbellen: Aus 1000 Jahren Judentum in Polen, ed. by Michael
Brocke (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Koordinierungsrat der Gesellschaften für Christlich-
Jüdische Zusammenarbeit, 1983), pp. 277–312.
42. See also Gennady Estraikh, ‘Utopias and Cities of Kalman Zingman, an Uprooted Yiddishist’,
East European Jewish Affairs, 36.1 (2006), 31–42.
43. Simon [Semen] Dubnow, Kniga zhizni: Materialy iz istorii moego vremeni (Moscow: Gesharim,
2004), p. 526.
44. ‘Tuet auf die Pforten’: Die Neue Synagoge 1866–1995, ed. by Hermann Simon (Berlin: Centrum
Judaicum, 1995), p. 177; Marion Neiss, Presse im Transit: Jiddische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften in
Berlin von 1919 bis 1925 (Berlin: Metropol, 2002), pp. 30–36.
45. Adler-Rudel, p. 109.
46. Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2005), pp. 39–41.
47. ‘Izdatel’stvo “Klal” ’, Rul’, 12 February 1922, p. 7; Maren Krüger, ‘Buchproduktion im Exil: Der
Klal-Verlag’, in Juden in Kreuzberg: Fundstücke, Fragmente, Erinnerungen (Berlin: Hentrich, 1991),
pp. 421–26; Michael Brenner, p. 202; Dubnow, p. 526.
48. Adler-Rudel, p. 108; Glenn S. Levine, ‘Yiddish Publishing in Berlin and the Crisis in Eastern
European Jewish Culture, 1919–1924’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 42 (1997), 85–108.
49. Roth, pp. 136–38.
50. Tsivion, ‘In der literarisher kibetsarnye fun Berlin’.
51. Karl Schlögel, Berlin Ostbahnhof Europas: Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert (Berlin: Siedler,
1998), p. 91.
52. See, for example, Jürgen Schereba, Damals im Romanischen Café ...: Künstler und ihre Lokale im
Berlin der zwanzigen Jahre (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1988); Michael Grüning, Der Architekt
Konrad Wachsmann: Erinnerungen und Selbstauskünfte (Vienna: Löcker, 1986), pp. 59–93.
53. Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox (New York: Jordan, 1978), p. 21.
54. Abraham-Nokhum Stencl, ‘Arop funem yarid ...’, Loshn un lebn, 10–11 (1968), 25.
55. See Steve Bradshaw, Café Society: Bohemian Life from Swift to Bob Dylan (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1978), p. 3.
56. From Der Nister’s letter quoted in Delphine Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work 1907–1929: A Study of a
Yiddish Symbolist (Berne: Lang, 1990), p. 15.
57. Bechtel, ‘Milgroym’, p. 423.
58. See, for example, Tsivion [Ben-Zion Hoffman], ‘Yidn un antisemitizm in Daytshland’, Forverts,
24 July 1921, p. 3.
59. ‘Khronik’, Literarishe bleter, 10 September 1929, p. 607.
60. Heather Valencia, Else Lasker-Schüler und Abraham Nochem Stenzel: Eine unbekannte Freundschaft
(Frankfurt: Campus, 1995), pp. 58–59; idem, ‘ “Dieser erstaunliche Jude”: Abraham Nochem
Stenzels Berliner Jahre’, in Verborgene Lesarten: Neue Interpretationen jüdisch-deutscher Texte von
Heine bis Rosenzweig, ed. by Renate Hener (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003), pp. 206–08.
61. Stencl, p. 25.
62. Estraikh, In Harness, p. 68.
63. Rachel Rojanski, ‘The Rise and Fall of Die Zeit (Di tsayt): The Fate of an Encounter between
Culture and Politics’, Jewish History, 14 (2000), 94.
64. Yeshayahu Klinov, ‘Monopolistn’, Di tribune, 12–13 (1922), 38–46.
65. Gennady Estraikh, ‘Jacob Lestschinsky: A Yiddishist Dreamer and Social Scientist’, Science in
Context, 20.2 (2007), 215–37.
66. Alt, p. 41.
67. Israel Rubin, ‘Bay di tishlekh fun romanishn kafe’, Literarishe bleter, 17 January 1930, pp. 53–54.
68. Lev Bergelson, ‘Erinnerungen an meinen Vater’, in David Bergelson, Leben ohne Frühling
(Berlin: Auf bau Taschenbuch, 2000), p. 284.
69. Herbert Günther, ‘Drei-Bühne der Zeit’, in Berlin zur Weimarer Zeit: Panorama einer Metropole
1919–1933, ed. by Ruth Glatzer (Berlin: Siedler, 2000), pp. 260–62.
26 Gennady Estraikh
70. Israel Rubin, ‘Bay di tishlekh fun romanishn kafe’, Literarishe bleter, 10 January 1930, p. 28.
71. Valencia, Else Lasker-Schüler und Abraham Nochem Stenzel, pp. 72, 84, 123.
72. Unzer bavegung, 13–14 (1922), 15.
73. Lewin, p. 123
74. See Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Yiddish Kultur-Lige’, in Modernism in Kyiv, ed. by Irena Makaryk
and Virlana Tkacz (Toronto: Toronto University Press, forthcoming).
75. ‘Grindungs-farzamlung fun “kultur-lige” in Berlin’, Unzer bavegung, 4 (1922), 11; ‘Berliner
“kultur-lige” ’, Unzer bavegung, 5 (1923), 12; Chronik russischen Lebens in Deutschland, 1918–1941,
ed. by Karl Schlögel and others (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), p. 85.
76. Zishe Weinper, ‘David Bergelson’, Oyfkum, 22 (1930), 18; Lev Bergelson, ‘Erinnerungen an
meinen Vater’, p. 284; Lev Bergelson, ‘Memories of My Father: The Yearly Years (1918–1934)’,
in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady
Estraikh (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), p. 85.
77. Alfred Döblin, ‘Ostjüdische Erzähler’, Vossische Zeitung, 24 August 1924, p. 3.
78. Alfred Döblin, Journey to Poland (New York: Paragon House, 1991), p. 102.
79. Nakhman Meisel, ‘Oyfn frishn keyver fun Nokhum Gergel’, Literarishe bleter, 27 November 1931,
pp. 889–90; Cecile Esther Kuznitz, ‘The Origins of Yiddish Scholarship and the YIVO Insti
tute for Jewish Research’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2000), p. 121.
80. Leon Shapiro, The History of ORT: A Jewish Movement for Social Change (New York: Schocken,
1980), p. 95.
81. Abraham Cahan, ‘Ir farshport tsu forn in Varshe, Vilne, Kovne, Rige oder Keshenev’, Forverts,
27 August 1921, p. 6.
82. Noah-Itskhok Gotlib, ‘A[n] ovnt mit D. Bergelson un D. Charney in Berlin’, Keneder odler, 8
August 1930, p. 3.
83. Daniel Charney, Oyfn shvel fun yener velt: Tipn, bilder, epizodn (New York: Marstin Press, 1947),
p. 36. ‘Yiddishland’ became a vogue word in the mid-1930s and, perhaps, was not used during
the heyday of Yiddish at the Romanisches Café.
84. See, for example, Robert H. Johnston, New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris and the Russian Exiles,
1920–1945 (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), pp. 5, 12–14; Vernut’sia v Rossiiu
— stikhami, ed. by Kreid, p. 8.
85. V. Nazimov, ‘Vozrozhdenie zhizni v Germanii’, Vremia, 8 October 1923, p. 1.
86. O. V. Bystrova, ‘Berlinskie izdatel’stva’, in Literaturnaia entsiklopediia russkogo zarubezh’ia: 1918–
1940, 4 vols (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999–2003), ii (2000), ed. by A. N. Nikoliukin, p. 30.
87. See Anat Aderet, ‘Di yidishe dikhterin Roza Gutman — ir lebnsveg un shafung’, Toplpunkt, 2
(2001), 36–38. In many cases, female names that appeared in Yiddish periodicals were pseudo
nyms of male journalists — see, for example, A. Almi, Momentn fun a lebn: Zikhroynes, bilder un
epizodn (Buenos Aires: Tsentral-farband fun poylishe yidn in Argentine, 1948), pp. 205–13.
88. Lev Bergelson, ‘Erinnerungen an meinen Vater’, p. 284.
89. On von Gerlach’s turn from anti-Semitism, see Franz Gerrit Schulte, Der Publizist Hellmut von
Gerlach (1866–1935): Welt und Werk eines Demokraten und Pazifisten (Munich: Saur, 1988), pp. 47–50.
90. Dubnow, p. 562.
91. ‘Desiatiletniaia godovshchina Sholom-Aleikhema’, Rul’, 12 May 1926, p. 5.
92. Delphine Bechtel, La Renaissance culturelle juive en Europe centrale et orientale 1897–1930: Langue,
literature et construction nationale (Paris: Belin, 2002), pp. 210–11. After moving to the USA in 1935,
Lewin found ‘that all the doors to publication’ were closed to him — see Samuel Lewin, Between
Two Abysses (New York: Cornwall Books, 1988), p. 15. See also Gennady Estraikh, ‘Shmuel
Levin, a yidisher shrayber farn daytshishn leyener’, Forverts, 28 November 2008, pp. 17–18.
93. M. W., ‘Wie weit sind wir in der jiddischen Kultur?’, Jüdische Rundschau, 26 October 1928, p. 598.
94. Francesco Melfi, ‘A Rhetoric of Image and Word: The Magazine Milgroym/Rimon, 1922–1924
and the Jewish Search for Inclusivity’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Jewish Theological
Seminary of America, New York, 1996), p. 3.
95. Estraikh, ‘Utopias and Cities of Kalman Zingman, an Uprooted Yiddishist’, pp. 36–37. Rapoport
lived in Berlin from 1922 to 1924, but he later moved to Warsaw.
96. Yeshayahu Klinov, ‘A briv tsu Daniel Charney’, in Daniel Charney-bukh, ed. by Moyshe Shalit
(Paris: Tsertta, 1939), pp. 166–67.
97. Weinper, pp. 18–19.
Introduction 27
98. Gennady Estraikh, ‘Vilna on the Spree: Yiddish in Weimar Berlin’, Aschkenas, 16.1 (2006), 120.
Similar ‘trials’ also took place in other Yiddish journalistic organizations. For instance, in 1931
Vilna journalists censured their colleague Aaron-Itshok Grodzenski for printing ‘bad’ material
— see ‘Vilner zhurnalistn-sindikat farurteylt di shund-prese’, Vokhnshrift far literatur, kunst un
kultur, 6 November 1931, p. 1.
99. Herman Swet, ‘Di nakht fun mides-hadin’, Der moment, 10 October 1929, p. 3; Yeshayahu
Klinov, ‘Khayim Nakhman Byalik un Ruvn Braynin farn efntlekhn gerikht’, Haynt, 11 October
1929, pp. 9–10; Moyshe Ungerfeld, ‘Ruvn Braynin un Nakhman Byalik un zeyer briv oystoysh’,
in Tsum hundertstn geboyrntog fun Ruvn Braynin, ed. by Nakhman Meisel (New York: YKUF,
1962), pp. 129–30, 133–35.
100. Yeshayahu Klinov, ‘Byalik git in Berlin aroys a[n] efntlekh gzar-din oyf yidish’, Haynt, 3
October 1930, p. 7.
101. ‘Doklad Abramovicha’, Rul’, 16 March 1927, p. 5; ‘Khronika’, Rul’, 25 March 1927, p. 4.
102. G. M. Adibekov, E. N. Shakhnazarova, and K. K. Shirinia, Organizatsionnaia struktura Kominterna,
1919–1943 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997), pp. 30, 77, 87.
103. Olga Demidova, Metamorfozy v izgnanii: Literaturnyi byt russkogo zarubezh’ia (St Petersburg:
Giperion, 2003), pp. 25, 32.
104. S. Arbatov, ‘Nollendorfplatskafe’, in Russkii Berlin, ed. by V. V. Sorokina (Moscow: MGU,
2003), p. 162.
105. Gennady Estraikh, ‘Arcadian Dreams of David Bergelson and His Berlin Circle’, Studia
Rosenthaliana, 41 (2009), 141–71.
106. Jacob Lestschinsky, ‘The Jews in Soviet Russia’, ORT Economic Bulletin, 2.2 (1941), 6.
107. Paul Nathan, Das Problem den Ostjuden: Vergangenheit — Zukunft (Berlin: Philo, 1926), pp. 17–35.
108. ‘Priglashenie tov. Mikhoelsa v Berlin’, Tribuna evreiskoi sovetskoi obshchestvennosti, 6 August 1929,
p. 31; Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 109.
109. Auf eigener Scholle: Das jüdische Siedlungswerk in der Sowjet-Union: Eine Denkschrift (Berlin:
Initiativ-Komitee zur Unterstützung der jüdischen Siedlungen in der Sowjet-Union, 1928).
110. ‘Khronika’, Rul’, 5 March 1928, p. 6.
111. ‘Die jüdische Kolonisation in Rußland’, Jüdische Rundschau, 30 September 1928, p. 3;
Leonid [Daniel Charney], ‘Zavoevanie simpatii Berlina k Ozetu’, Tribuna evreiskoi sovetskoi
obshchestvennosti, 1 January 1929, p. 27; ‘Nasha propaganda v Germanii’, Tribuna evreiskoi sovetskoi
obshchestvennosti, 15 March 1929, p. 20.
112. Leonid [Daniel Charney], ‘Biro-Bidzhan v Germanii’, Tribuna evreiskoi sovetskoi obshchestvennosti,
15 March 1928, p. 18.
113. ‘Germanskoe obshchestvo sodeistviia evreiskomu zemleustroistvu v SSSR’, Tribuna evreiskoi
sovetskoi obshchestvennosti, 1 October 1928, p. 21; Aleksandr Khashin, ‘Germanskoe evreistvo i
zemel’noe ustroenie trudiashchikhsia evreev v SSSR’, Tribuna evreiskoi sovetskoi obshchestvennosti,
15 October 1928, p. 21.
114. A. Margolin, ‘A briv fun Berlin’, Prolit, 2–3 (1929), 93–94.
115. Itsik Fefer, ‘In a khaverisher svive’, Oktyabr, 16 July 1929, p. 3.
116. ‘20-yoriker literarisher yubiley fun Dovid Bergelson’, Der shtern, 22 September 1929, p. 4; Berliner
bleter far dikhtung un kunst, 3–4 (1932), 33; Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora, ed. by Green, p. 223.
117. Chronik russischen Lebens in Deutschland, ed. by Schlögel and others, pp. 408–26; Adler-Rudel,
p. 111.
118. Chronik russischen Lebens in Deutschland, ed. by Schlögel and others, p. 441.
119. Ruth Klinger, Die Frau im Kaftan (Gerlinger: Bleicher Verlag, 1992), pp. 92, 98.
120. See Estraikh, ‘Vilna on the Spree’, p. 125.
121. Yehuda Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper: A History of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,
1929–1939 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), pp. 107, 125.
122. Alfred Döblin: Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Literaturarchivs im Schiller-Nationalmuseum, ed. by
Jochen Meyer (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1998), pp. 36, 38.
123. Siegbert Salomon Prawer, A. N. Stencl: Poet of Whitechapel (Oxford: Oxford Centre for
Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, 1984), p. 17.
124. Charney, p. 37.
Chapter 1
v
Deciphering the
Hieroglyphics of the Metropolis:
Literary Topographies of Berlin in
Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism
Shachar Pinsker
The knowledge of cities is a decoding of their images, ones uttered thought

lessly, as if in a dream [...]. Spatial images are the dreams of society. Wherever
the hieroglyphics of any spatial image are deciphered, there the basis of social
reality presents itself.
Siegfried Kracauer
Other cities are often mere ghosts of a better past; the hollow Berlin is possibly
— there is no other choice — the ghost of a better future.
Ernst Bloch
1
Berlin is a compelling city to explore in the context of Hebrew and Yiddish
modernism. From the beginning of the twentieth century, Berlin has been a small
but important enclave of Hebrew and Yiddish culture. In the Weimar period
(1919–33), especially in the 1920s, it was a major hub of literary activity, when a large
and very distinguished group of eastern European Hebrew and Yiddish writers
lived, wrote, and published in the city. This activity caught the attention of many
scholars, but they considered Berlin, for the most part, as a ‘temporary asylum’
for Jewish writers from eastern Europe; a mere ‘station’ on their way to the more
established centres of Jewish creativity (Mandatory Palestine, North America, or
the Soviet Union).1 More recently, scholars have studied the encounter with the
Hebrew and Yiddish writers in Weimar Berlin, and its role in the development of
a distinctive German-Jewish culture searching for ‘authenticity’.2
I want to shift the direction of enquiry by examining more closely the nature
of the charged but productive encounter with Berlin and to uncover the city’s role
in the development of modernist literature in the two Jewish languages. In order
to do so, I contend, we must abandon the tendency to study Berlin as an isolated
case and begin to understand it in comparison with other European enclaves of
Deciphering the Hieroglyphics of the Metropolis 29
Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the early twentieth century (in cities like Odessa,
Kiev, Vilna, Lwów, Vienna, London, Paris, and so on). Even more problematic is
the prevalent tendency to examine Berlin in the context of Hebrew and Yiddish
literature as if they were two different and isolated phenomena. In fact, in spite
of the growing political and ideological separation between Hebrew and Yiddish,
literature was created in Berlin side-by-side in the two languages by eastern
European émigré writers and intellectuals who were multilingual, and for whom
reading (and sometimes writing) in two or more languages — Hebrew, Yiddish,
Russian, and German — was natural. In an enclave of Jewish modernism within a
central European metropolis like Berlin, the points of contact between Hebrew and
Yiddish writers — which arose around short-lived experimental journals and ‘third
spaces’ such as literary cafes — were intensive and fruitful, as was interaction with
contemporary modernist German and Russian ( Jewish and non-Jewish) literature
and culture.
As émigrés and refugees, Hebrew and Yiddish writers with an attachment to
the shtetls and the urban centres of eastern Europe were nonetheless far from being
oblivious to the contemporary modernist discourse and preoccupations of Weimar
Berlin. They engaged with issues of body, gender and sexuality, surface (Oberfläche),
and visuality, which were inextricably linked not only to modernist ‘high culture’
(literature, art, and architecture of expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit), but also to
the new forms of ‘mass culture’ in the Berlin of this period (photography, cinema,
fashion, advertising, and so on). Scholars like Miram Hansen, Andreas Huyssen,
Dorothy Rowe, Janet Ward, and Sabine Hake have recently emphasized these
aspects of the culture of Weimar Berlin — which they have traced in the writing of
figures of Jewish origins such as Walter Benjamin, Sigfried Kracauer, Franz Hessel,
Ernst Bloch, Erich Mendelsohn, and Alfred Döblin, among others — as indicative
of Berlin modernity and modernism.3 The fact that all these aspects were crucial to
the encounter of Hebrew and Yiddish writers with Berlin becomes evident when
we read closely texts written in and about Berlin in the two Jewish languages.
There is a need, though, to study Hebrew and Yiddish texts in comparison, and
alongside modernist German and Russian texts written in Berlin during World War
I and the Weimar period.
Like many Jewish writers from eastern Europe, the poet, critic, and translator
Ya’acov Kopelovitz (known also by his adopted Hebrew pen-name Yeshurun
Keshet), came to Berlin to study and work, and he lived there during the 1920s.
In his memoirs, Kopelovitz evokes both the complexity and the allure of Weimar
Berlin in these terms:
Weimar Berlin was then, only three or four years after the end of World War
I, a prosperous city to all appearances [klapey hutz], a metropolis in which the
surface was very different from the core [she-eyn tokho ke-varo], because the city
was in fact stepping into the abyss. [...] Berlin was also a centre of scholarship
and science, of vibrant culture and arts. The transportation and communication
were extremely efficient, and it was possible to plan ahead and arrive promptly
at your destination, whether it was a lecture at an institution of higher
education, a concert hall, a play at the theatre, an exhibition in the museum,
or a motion picture at the cinema [re’ino’a], [...] you could catch a recital at the
30 Shachar Pinsker
Gedächtniskirche and then walk to the nearby famous Romanisches Café to

meet Ya’acov Shteinberg who lived in Berlin and used to spend his evenings in
the cafe [...] with ‘our people’ [...]. In those days Berlin was a temporary centre
for many [Hebrew and Yiddish writers], no doubt because of its location: the
cultural and economical metropolitan centre closest to the ‘east’, [...] the place
of the offices of the World Zionist Organization [...]. For the eastern European
Yiddish speakers, it was much easier to get adjusted to Berlin than to London
or Paris, cities that seemed like a totally strange world [...]. It is highly feasible
that the prominence of so many German-Jews, in the field of commerce and
intellect (especially in journalism) in this western capital was a crucial factor
as well.4
Keshet’s description captures well the manifold, even contradictory images of
Berlin at this time. Together with the observation that the Berlin of the 1920s was a
place ‘on the abyss’, he makes clear that for the eastern European writers who made
Berlin their home for a short or a long time, the city, which had became a modern
metropolis only recently, had much to offer in terms of transportation, communi
cation, architecture, and access to a vibrant scene of modernist art and culture.
Keshet’s observations about the tension between ‘surface’ and ‘depth’, between
visual appearance and what might be the ‘real’ meaning of Berlin, and the need to
decipher the metropolis as a kind of hieroglyph, were important features in Weimar
Berlin culture and in literary engagements with the urban environment in Hebrew
and Yiddish. Keshet’s account of meeting with Hebrew and Yiddish writers in
places such as the Romanisches Café or the new massive movie theatres (re’ino’a
in Hebrew, Kinotopp in German slang) reveals just how embedded Hebrew and
Yiddish writers were in the urban fabric of the city, including in what Janet Ward
has called ‘the culture (or cult) of surface’ in Weimar Berlin.5 This is in spite of, or
maybe because of the fact that these Hebrew and Yiddish writers felt very different,
as immigrants and exiles with a critical distance from local German culture, in
which they nevertheless participated quite intensively.
As Keshet also makes clear in his portrayal of Berlin, in order to understand
the nature of literary activity in the city and the representation of the cityscape in
modernist Hebrew and Yiddish literature, we must consider Berlin in a number
of different contexts which created powerful tensions and ruptures that made the
place, almost literally, explosive. The volatility was clearly an important part of
Weimar Berlin. In this context we must remember Peter Gay’s portrayal of Weimar
culture (and Weimar Berlin in particular) as ‘the creation of outsiders, propelled by
history into the inside for a short, dizzying, fragile moment’.6 When Gay writes that
‘Jews [...] making themselves at home in Berlin, transformed it and imprinted upon
it something of their rootlessness, their restlessness, their alienation from soil and
tradition, their pervasive disrespect for authority’,7 he surely does not have Hebrew
and Yiddish writers in mind. However, his analysis applies, at least in some ways,
also to the eastern European Jewish writers and intellectuals who were outsiders but
made Berlin a tentative, temporary home. Eric Weitz has more recently summed up
Weimar culture as spawning ‘so much creativity precisely because its artists, writers
and political organizers sought to unravel the meaning of modernity and to push it
in new directions’.8 This was true also of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism in Berlin
during the Weimar period, as well as for many years to come, after the writers who
encountered Berlin moved to very different locations and cultural contexts.
Not surprisingly, scholars paid much attention to the fact that Berlin in the 1920s
was the locus of a bustling publishing enterprise in Hebrew and Yiddish, which
has been well documented.9 The presence of so many Hebrew and Yiddish writers
in Berlin and the intensive publishing activity are probably the chief reason for
the tendency to expound, or to dismiss Berlin as a ‘centre’ of Hebrew and Yiddish
literature during the 1920s. However, the very question of centre was — and in
some sense still is — fraught with tensions and highly contested. From the early
years of the twentieth century, writers and critics of modern Hebrew and Yiddish
literature were forced to confront questions of geography that were entangled with
concerns about ‘homeland’, unstable geopolitical borders, and even the uncertain
future and viability of their languages. While Yiddish literature was continuously
created across Europe, America, and even Palestine, there were fierce debates on
where the ‘true centre’ was or should be located.10 In modern Hebrew literature
the issue of ‘literary centre’ is even more problematic. Our understanding of the
history of Hebrew literature seems to embody what is known as ‘the Zionist meta-
plot’, which has focused attention on territorialization, ‘negation of exile’, and the
search for a Jewish national home in Palestine.11 The persistent attempts to write a
historiography of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism as if it was a ‘normal’ national
literature, with its own ‘literary centre’ miss a crucial aspect of its modernism. It
conceals a dizzying, constantly shifting array of urban enclaves in which Hebrew
and Yiddish modernism developed.12
Berlin was one of these enclaves, and thus it is important to recognize the fact
that there was a huge difference between Berlin as a ‘centre of publishing’, and
Berlin as an enclave of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism. Publishing found a base
in Berlin mainly because the publication of Hebrew and Yiddish in the newly
established Soviet Union became difficult. The situation was also helped, strangely,
by the inf lation and deeply unstable economy of Weimar Berlin, because the
publishers’ capital was foreign currency. In 1925, when the inf lation was tamed,
figures such as Bialik, and others who came to Berlin mainly in order to advance
their publishing activities, left the city and abandoned the dream of a f lourishing
Hebrew and Yiddish ‘publication centre’.13
The literary and cultural significance of the encounter of Hebrew and Yiddish
writers with Berlin, and the city’s role in the development of modernism should
not be reduced, though, to economic forces or even to the highly important
existence of the publishing market in the city. The publishing activity in Berlin was
important for Hebrew and Jewish modernism only in journals such as Milgroym/
Rimon (Pomegranate, published in Hebrew and Yiddish in 1922 to 1924) and the
Berlin edition of Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Albatros (1923). Both of these short-lived
journals exhibited an unprecedented convergence of experimental literature and
artwork, as well as a fruitful collaboration between Yiddish, Hebrew, and German
modes of literary and artistic modernism.14
But in order to better understand the nature of the encounter of Hebrew and
Yiddish writers with Berlin it is necessary to trace its spatial, topographic aspects.
32 Shachar Pinsker
For example, we must explore sites such as the literary cafes to which writers and
intellectuals were highly attracted. We must remember that many Hebrew and
Yiddish writers lived in proletarian areas in the east of the city — most notably
in the Scheunenviertel and Alexanderplatz area — or in tiny rented rooms within
pensions (boarding houses) in the more aff luent western part of the city (mainly
in Charlottenburg). With this kind of transitory émigré existence, it is hardly
surprising that they were highly attracted to the local urban cafe, which was indeed
one of the emblems of Berlin modernity/modernism.
Far from being sterilized spaces, Berlin cafes were sites of consumption, leisure,
and the spectacle of commodity, but also a space in which the ‘bohemians’ displayed
their eccentricities, and a space in which significant modernist literary and artistic
activity occurred. Based on his first-hand lived experience of Berlin cafes of the
1910s and 1920s, Walter Benjamin articulated in his essay Berliner Chronik (1932)
what he called a ‘physiognomy’ or ‘physiology ‘of the cafe. In this essay he makes
an attempt to divide cafes into ‘professional’ and ‘recreational’ establishments, but
notes that this is a superficial classification since in most cases the two coincide
and collapse upon each other.15 Thus, Berlin’s ‘literary cafe’ should be understood
as what the cultural geographer Edward Soja has called a ‘thirdspace’ — a site of
negotiation between inside and outside, public and private, mass consumption
and the avant-garde, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, ‘the local’ and the
immigrant.16
I have shown elsewhere the crucial role of several ‘literary cafes’ in Berlin in
the intersections between German, Hebrew, and Yiddish modernism. The Café
Monopol near Friedrichstraße in Berlin’s Mitte (not far from the Scheunenviertel),
the Café-des-Westens, and above all the Romanisches Café in west Berlin were key
locations on the spatial map of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism in the metropolis.
Almost everybody who joined the Hebrew and Yiddish ‘colony’ in Weimar
Berlin attested to the allure of the Romanisches Café. Uri Zvi Greenberg, Ya’acov
Shteinberg, Daniel Charney, Yeshurun Keshet, Avrom Nochem Stenzel, David
Bergelson, Nahum Goldman, Henryk Berlewi, and numerous others all mention
the Café in their writing. In fact, some accounts create the false impression that the
Romanisches Café was a kind of a pan-Jewish urban space. In his characteristically
fragmented expressionist style, with expansive grammar and outrageous images,
Uri Zvi Greenberg writes in his essay on Else Lasker-Schüler that they ‘drank
together dark coffee in the Romanisches Café, and until midnight this bitter
drink was dripping into our hearts, and seeping through even deeper to the “inner
existence”, around the heart and beyond it like dark blood’.17
In Yeshurun Keshet’s writings, the cafe emerges as a kind of ‘Jewish urban
space’ but also as a place whose ‘regulars’ are a ‘cultural elite full of decadence,
smoke, and the syncopated rhythm of the metropolis’.18 The Hebrew and Yiddish
writer Ya’acov Shteinberg, highly attracted to this mixture of urban decadence and
syncopated rhythms, and to the modernist literary activity in which he participated
but from which he also held a critical distance, devoted to the Romanisches Café
an entire cycle of sonnets — Sonnets from the Café (1922), surely one of the great
achievements of modernist Hebrew poetry.19
The way Hebrew and Yiddish writers described the physiognomy and topography
of the Romanisches Café captures something important about their encounter with
the urban space of Berlin. On the one hand, Hebrew and Yiddish writers met most
figures of Berlin modernism in the Romanisches Café, and these experiences left
strong marks on their literary and intellectual development. On the other hand,
their experience of the cafe, which became a kind of hieroglyph — a concentrated
spatial image of Berlin — emphasizes both their participation in modernist Berlin
culture and their marginality, the commodity spectacle of ‘surface’ and the potential
inherent in it for artistic creativity, the undeniable energy of the metropolis as well
as its decadence, corruption, and sense of deep despair.
2
Once we realize that Berlin was not a centre but a small yet highly important enclave
of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism, we can better understand not only the nature
of the encounter of eastern European writers with the metropolis and its profound
impact on them, but also the literary representations of the urban experience and the
mental and physical topography of the metropolis. It is important to note that there
is a manifest difference between writers of the generation of Kh. N. Bialik, Shaul
Tschernichovsky, David Frishman, H. D. Nomberg, and M. Y. Berdichevsky (who
lived in Berlin for eleven years, but left almost no echo of the city in his literary
oeuvre), and the younger writers who arrived in Berlin at a point when their literary
style and voice was still evolving and changing. For writers like David Shimoni,
Uri Zvi Greenberg, Ya’acov Shteinberg, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, David Bergelson,
Moyshe Kulbak, and others, the encounter with Berlin was highly important,
regardless of the length of their stay in the city. This is best demonstrated in literary
representations of the city which are, not surprisingly, far from uniform, and also far
from painting an ideal picture of the hectic urban experience. Hebrew and Yiddish
writers arrived in Berlin with varied modernist tendencies, but in the German
capital they were exposed to, and participated in, intense debates surrounding
such literary and artistic trends as Symbolism, Expressionism, and the post-
expressionist Neue Sachlichkeit. All these different modernist trends are ref lected, in
one way or another, in the literary representations of the city in Hebrew and
Yiddish texts.
An interesting feature of Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish literature is that the
dominant genre in poetry was the poema (long narrative poem). Although the
genre of the poema, with its ancient epic roots, has been mainly associated with
the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic poetry of Pushkin, Byron, and
Heine, the poema was equally important in the development of modernism, as
can be attested by the symbolist, futurist, and expressionist poemas of the early
twentieth century in Russian, German, and other European languages.20
The modernist poema can be described as a ‘plotless novel’ that revels in lyric
digressions and rejects chronological order. There are frequent changes of focus,
rapid sequences of changing scenes, and an emphasis on fundamental problems
of human existence. The modernist poema’s compositional form is that of an
34 Shachar Pinsker
amalgamation of parts; it does not seek a unity of stylized reality. This makes
possible the integration of lyric, dramatic, descriptive, contemplative, rhetorical,
and linguistic elements without detracting from the poema’s loose narrative axis.21
A number of narrative poems written in and about Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish
between 1911 and 1933 are remarkable in the ways in which they were used by
their writers to explore new poetic territories and to record a spatial topography
of Berlin that is both physical and mental. A few years before the outbreak of
World War I, David Shimonovitz (Shimoni) wrote a number of poems that take
place in Berlin. Shimonovitz was a student of oriental philology and philosophy
in Berlin between 1910 and 1914. Together with Shay Ish Hurvitz he edited the
Hebrew literary collection Netivot (Paths, 1912), which published some important
modernist Hebrew texts written in this period. In Hebrew literary historiography,
Shimonovitz is usually seen as a (late) Romantic poet, part of the so-called ‘Bialik
generation’. But the narrative poems he wrote in Berlin show that Shimonovitz was
an experimental poet who took the traditions of Russian and German Romantic
poetry in modernist directions.
Two of Shimonovitz’s poemas merit attention as precursors to what was written
in Hebrew and Yiddish during the Weimar period. Although they appear to
be very traditional in form and structure, these narrative poems actually waver
between late-romantic, symbolist, and early expressionist poetics. The first poem is
entitled Chalom leyl choref (A Winter Night’s Dream, 1911) and the second Be-zohorey
drachim (In the Splendour of the Roads, 1913). In both of them, Shimonovitz maps the
topography of Berlin from the point of view of a young Jewish student and poet.
Like some Symbolist and expressionist poemas in Russian and German literature,
Shimonovitz retains the formal elements of the Pushkinian genre (he also translated
Pushkin’s poemas into Hebrew), but he employs it to present autobiographical
material in a highly ironic, self-conscious way.
Shimonovitz’s poemas trace the journeys of the speaker-poet, an impossible
search for what is left of heroism and freedom in a modern, urban age. Unlike
the epic and Romantic journey of the pre-modernist poema in Russian, German,
and Hebrew poetry, these modernist journeys end up mainly in paralysis and a
sense of ennui, and are written with a self-consciousness of their static nature. The
speaker, who is the anti-hero of the narrative poem, is in the midst of a dreamy
hallucination, and at the same time he is engaged in intense, solipsistic self-analysis.
Shimonovitz’s poemas of Berlin mix and contrast a pathetic naïveté with sharp wit,
a colourful theatrical imagination with mundane sobriety, and the world of nature
and myths with modern urban experience.22
Chalom leyl choref engages rather playfully with the tradition of the Romantic
Russian poema of Pushkin, but also Goethe’s ‘Winter Journey’ and Heinrich
Heine’s imaginary journey in Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (Germany: A Winter’s
Tale, 1844). The speaker is a poor poet without work who lives in dark rented rooms
in pensions (boarding houses) in Charlottenburg that belong to harsh and cold
women.23 The opening of the poem presents the speaker as a penniless student who
is about to be evicted from his room in the middle of the winter because he cannot
afford to pay the rent. While he is daydreaming in the small cold room, the Winter
Fig. 5. Cover of the double issue of Albatros, edited and published in Berlin in 1923
36 Shachar Pinsker
King is revealed to him and takes him to an ice cave in the North Sea, where he
joins Nimrod, the ancient legendary hunter. As part of his long imaginary travels
to the ‘secret world’, he is able to witness the city of Berlin from a new vantage
point. He is fascinated by the energy of the metropolis, with the rush of the crowds
and the hum of the machines, so different from the serenity of primordial nature.
But Berlin also emerges as a dark industrial city, where ‘pure snow’ immediately
becomes ‘black and dirty’. In the vast urban space ‘dreams and f lowers’ alike can
quickly die out. The city is described as ‘a cage of stone’ filled with taverns and
whores, full of illicit sexuality and devoid of human warmth. When a female
prostitute approaches the speaker he is revolted, and it is only the Winter King who
can save him and take him away. Following this experience, he decides to leave this
‘humanity in ruins’ and to become a hunter in the ice-ocean, only to awaken from
his dream back into the reality of Berlin in 1911.
The second poema, Be-zohorey drachim, uses the same narrative structure of a
mock-heroic journey. The speaker leaves his rented room in the pension, which
is being cleaned before the arrival of spring, and wanders in and around the city
of Berlin, observing the rush and rattle of the city. He watches the display of
commodity in shop windows with their promise of material abundance, as well as
the spectacles of street performers, and the f leeting young women who arouse his
desire before they disappear. He leaves Berlin and wanders around the forests that
surround the city. Here he laments the death of the God Pan (à la Nietzsche in The
Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, 1871), and at the same time realizes that
in modern Berlin, the ancient Pan is nothing but a local drunkard arrested by the
police. In the final part of the poema, he falls asleep in one of Berlin’s squares with
a fountain and a monumental statue of King Frederick the Great. In his dream,
the speaker has a tense conversation with the Kaiser about his long-lost shtetl and
about his existence as a stranger and émigré in the city. In spite of the Romantic
overtones and references, this is a distinctively urban poem with Symbolist and
early expressionist elements. It probes issues of gender and sexuality, surface and
‘depth’, home and homelessness, power and powerlessness, the monumental and
the everyday, and it ends with an ironic, meagre sense of hope that comes from the
speaker’s realization that he can continue wandering in the ‘splendour of the roads’
of urban modernity.24 Shimonovitz’s poemas of Berlin set a tone that later eastern
European Hebrew and Yiddish writers follow at the same time as exploring new
poetic and spatial territories.
A decade after Shimonovitz’s poemas, Uri Zvi Greenberg wrote some of the most
astonishing and innovative modernist poemas in Yiddish and Hebrew literature.
Greenberg wrote and published poetry and prose in Hebrew and Yiddish from 1912.
After World War I, he was an active member of the Warsaw-based Yiddish group
Di Khalyastre (together with Peretz Markish and Melech Ravitch) and the editor of
the avant-garde Yiddish journal Albatros, with its expressionist and Futurist poetics.
The official reason for Greenberg’s decision to move to Berlin were problems with
Polish censorship following the publication of his poem in prose Royte epl fun vey-
beymer (Red Apples from Pain Trees) in the second issue of Albatros.
The short period of less than two years (1922–24) in which Greenberg lived and
worked in Weimar Berlin was one of the most dramatic and important in his life. It
was here that he made the remarkable decision to switch from Yiddish to Hebrew,
and to bid farewell to Europe and emigrate to Palestine. Even so, the encounter
with Berlin became such a powerful experience which left a long-lasting impression
on Greenberg’s literary works precisely because of its tense, contradictory nature.
As Dan Miron writes about Greenberg’s experience in Weimar Berlin:
the time he spent in Berlin was one of the happiest in Greenberg’s life. The
city welcomed him, revealed its beauty to him, gave him the love of her
daughters, opened up for him treasures of art and intellect, and put him in
touch with important cultural and artistic sources of modernism [...]. At the
same time, Greenberg’s stay in Weimar Berlin revealed what seemed to him
a radical atrophy, a deterioration of urban European culture. It exposed to
him a perverse world of illicit sexuality, crime, and nihilistic breakdown of
all values [...]. The city seemed to him as if it materialized the apocalyptic
vision of Oswald Spengler in his inf luential book Der Untergang des Abendlandes
(1918–1923) [...]. Greenberg found a direct correlation between the city and ‘a
state of being’ in crisis, and the two became one.25
From a poetic and artistic point of view, Greenberg’s arrival in Berlin coincided
with the appearance of post-expressionistic trends that have become loosely known
as Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’) — as well as Neues Bauen (‘New Building’)
in architecture — which heralded a shift towards ‘surface’ in most spheres of social,
economic, and cultural life. If expressionism was characterized by the emotions of
the artist forcefully expressed through the work of art (poem, story, painting, or
building), Neue Sachlichkeit sought to minimize the focus on emotions coming up
from psychological depths. ‘New Objectivity’ would be ‘f lat’, evenly distributed
and on the surface of reality, appreciating and focusing on the way things (Sachen)
are structured and arranged. At the same time, as many critics have noticed, the
distinctions between expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit were never clear-cut, and
these artistic tendencies tended to blend with each other.26 Greenberg’s poetic
and artistic work in Yiddish and Hebrew in the mid-1920s exhibits his wavering
between the competing and partly overlapping modernist trends, as well as his active
participation in the debates between (late) expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit.27
This can be seen well in the double issue of Albatros (3–4), which Greenberg
edited and published in Berlin and was, as Avidov Lipsker has observed, ‘a milestone
in the integration of poetic, publicist, graphic and typographic values’.28 The
graphic configuration of the journal was created by Greenberg (under a pseudo
nym) together with the avant-garde Jewish artist Henryk Berlewi, who lived
in Berlin at roughly the same time as Greenberg and was exposed to the same
new trends in Berlin. Greenberg and Berlewi adopted new directions, especially
a combination of the stylistic and literary innovations pioneered in the German
expressionist journals (Der Action and Der Sturm) together with the ‘constructivist’
architectural and graphic elements associated with the surface-oriented (rather than
‘depth-oriented’) Neue Sachlichkeit.
Of course, the inf luence of Berlin expressionism and post-expressionism extended
from the graphic and typographic to the poetic sphere. In Albatros, Greenberg
published a number of poems and essays, including the groundbreaking poema In
38 Shachar Pinsker
malkhes fun tseylem (In the Kingdom of the Cross) and the poetic essay ‘Baym shlus’
(‘In Conclusion’). These texts, written in the most striking and ‘wild’ expressionist
mode, also engaged in a phenomenological examination of Sachen. Moreover, in
these texts, Greenberg came to the conclusion that the ‘Slavic lands’ (and perhaps
Europe as a whole) are the ‘kingdom of the Cross’, in which the Jews live with their
feet resting on a ‘volcanic Mount Etna’.29 This paradox of writing experimental
modernist texts that are in line with contemporary European modernist poetics,
and nevertheless denounce European modernity and the place of Jews within
it, became the dominant mode in Greenberg’s ideology and poetry. The city of
Berlin itself, though, begins to appear on a grand scale not in Greenberg’s Yiddish
writing, but in the ten monumental poemas that comprise his first Hebrew book,
Eima gdola ve-yare’ach (Great Trembling and a Moon, 1924). In these poems Greenberg
transformed the very shape and poetic function of the poema genre in Hebrew,
while further exploring new, expressionist and post-expressionistic themes and
modes of writing.
Three out of the ten poemas of Eima gdola ve-yare’ach were written and published
in Berlin in journals such as Milgroym and Ha-olam (The World). Most of the poema
Hakarat ha-yeshut (The Knowledge of Being) was written in Berlin, but was completed
and published in Tel Aviv. Eima gdola ve-yare’ach was written entirely in Tel Aviv, but
deals extensively with the urban experience of Berlin.30 The entire book is written
with an awareness of the fact that modern existence in the twentieth century (or as
Greenberg calls it, ‘the beginning of the sixth millennium’) is in essence, the urban
experience. The book begins with the words: ‘It has been decreed: Death to the
village. Cry to the f lute of the shepherd that was thrown to the grass and which
will not be heard any more [...]. The shepherd went wide-eyed to the metropolis.’31
The metropolis takes the place of the village, the factory with smoke takes the
place of the windmill, and the new urban era is the time of steam, wheels, industry,
electricity, telegraph, and radio. The city of Berlin appears as an emblem of the
modern western metropolis as well as a concrete urban place through the entire
book, mainly in Hakarat ha-yeshut and Eima gdola ve-yare’ach.
Hakarat ha-yeshut is a poema with especially long lines (sixteen to eighteen words
each). The structure of the sentences is ungrammatical and the style is ‘wild’ and
extreme. All these elements create a text that is very difficult to define — a kind of
poetic prose or prosaic poem.32 But the chaotic ‘wildness’ of the text, the esoteric
and at times uncommunicative nature of the images, and what appears to be a lack
of coherency between the stylistic and linguistic components, paradoxically work
together to create a new organizing principal. The ‘wild poetics’ actually ref lects
the main theme of the poema: the social and moral anarchy of Berlin in the early
1920s. Through the chaos that the poema creates, it is possible to trace a kind of
loose ‘narrative’ that outlines the process of the poet-speaker’s individual story, his
separation from his parents’ house and his move to Warsaw and Berlin. We hear
the story of the ‘poet with the red hair’ who was born in a poor house and ‘was
cursed to be the big wanderer’, and a leader of a rowdy ‘gang’. He becomes the wild
lover of licentious, lustful women in spite of the fact that he tries to be ‘a monk in
his closed room’. The poet-speaker appears in Berlin as a flâneur who wanders the
metropolis’s dark streets, amidst criminals and prostitutes who offer their services
in the public eye. In spite of his thirst for pureness, he frequently goes to brothels
around the city and thus sinks into the depths of despair, filth, and fear of death.
Towards the end of the poema, the speaker has reached the bottom of ‘existence’,
a place from which one cannot descend any further. At this point (in a separate
concluding chapter) he turns to the God in which he does not and cannot believe
any more. He stands ‘like a purifying prostitute who left the brothel’ and asks to
renew his dialogue with God.33
This idiosyncratic ‘story’ is actually framed in the poema (and the entire book)
as a mental and existential ref lection of modernity. The poema describes a number
of contradicting psychological and mental changes that are typical of modern urban
existence in ‘the sixth millennium’, developments that are accelerated in the urban
condition of the metropolis. One of them is the Nietzschean ‘death of God’ and the
loss of religious faith: ‘Faith has lapsed. The beast of the field raised its voice, for it
acknowledged God. But we said there is no God and there is no heaven, abode of
God. Blue emptiness and what is between, which are clouds.’34
The loss of faith has left the speaker, and with him all modern men, with the
existential awareness of the finality and inevitability of death and oblivion. This
deep knowledge makes his life full of fears that ‘poison his being’. The ‘death of
God’ is parallel to the loss of all traditional social structures (namely family and
community), and in fact the disintegration of all civilization, western and Jewish
alike. With the collapse of religious faith and western culture, the urban man turns
to orgiastic sexual activity. All man has got now is physical existence, and from this
pure physicality, he attempts — mainly by fulfilling his sexual urges — to reach
some kind of ecstasy or ‘drunkenness’ that might be able to tame, but will never
neutralize, the angst and fear of death.
At the same time, the radical ‘newness’ of the modern urban experience is also
linked to the ‘functionalist’, rational taming of nature with the power of modern
architecture, technology, and science. This power, emblematic of Weimar Berlin,
changes not only ‘nature’ and urban space, but also human consciousness. Like
Simmel, Kracauer, Bloch, and other contemporary critics, Greenberg’s speaker
identif ies the fact that swiftness, power, and control enabled by modern technology
become part of consciousness and ‘being’, and open new ‘perspectives’. These two
contradicting aspects of modern urban existence — the loss of faith and the disinte
gration of traditional civilization, and the rise of the new power of technology and
science — are incommensurable. They create apocalyptic tensions between deep
despair and optimistic vision that are at the heart of Greenberg’s poemas of 1924.
Thus, it is clear that in spite of Greenberg’s declarations of a ‘farewell to Europe’,
the speaker never cuts himself off from the European cultural context (both Jewish
and non-Jewish). Even the poemas that were written and published in Tel Aviv are
told from the perspective of the here and now, which is what the speaker calls ‘in
Berlin Mitte’. Here we can see not only how Greenberg fuses the personal with
the universal, but also how he turns the existence of the eastern European Jewish
‘outsider’/‘insider’ in Berlin into an emblem of his expressionistic and apocalyptic
vision of modern existence: ‘I am from the race of the Hebrews. No prayer shawl
40 Shachar Pinsker
is wrapped around me. Lacquered shoes. Perfumed hair. The pipe in my mouth. In
Berlin Mitte. Bridges. A journey under the base.’35
The urban space of Berlin is surely described as a chaotic place, violent, dangerous,
full of prostitution, illicit sexuality, and emptiness (like the ‘church in the middle
of Berlin after Jesus’s death’), and yet a space that is highly seductive to the ‘Jew
without a prayer shawl’. In another poema in the book, entitled Yerushalaym shel
mata (The Earthly Jerusalem), which deals mainly with the landscape of Palestine, the
speaker declares that ‘we must have left the solid metropolis’. However, at the same
time he confesses that
We really loved the smoky hours in the cafes. Opera. Frock coat. Perfumed
heads and dance halls. Opium. Ballet [...]. Boulevards and brothels. Hot
electron ... and the noise, the noise of the cities! The news now. Girls calling
you to their beds. Antique shops. Museums, and royal libraries.36
Berlin remained such a powerful locus in Greenberg’s poetic world for many years
because he created it as kind of hieroglyph, an extended mental and spatial image.
Greenberg calls Berlin ‘the gate’ and ‘the city of a hundred bridges’,37 because for him
it stands on the threshold of his own exit from Europe and his entrance to Palestine,
between the Galician world of his early years and the Zionist space which he
attempts to enter and create. The city is a ‘bridge’ because it is the emblem of Euro
pean urbanity and modernity, the very definition of life in the twentieth century.38
Shimonovitz’s and Greenberg’s narrative poems of Berlin are both similar and
different from the poema that Moyshe Kulbak, the Yiddish poet and novelist,
published in 1933. The book is an extended cycle of over sixty poems entitled Disner
Tshayld Harold (Childe Harold of Disna).39 When the poema was published, Kulbak
already lived and worked in the Soviet Union, but it is based on his experience
as a writer in Weimar Berlin from 1920 to 1923 and is clearly steeped in Berlin
modernist poetics and discourse. The poema is written as a mock-epic, and, not
unlike Shimonovitz’s poemas, it creates a highly ironic dialogue with Heine’s
Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen, as well as with the English narrative poem Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron (1818). However, unlike Shimonovitz’s more
traditional poetic form and style and more in line with Greenberg’s ‘wild poetics’,
Kulbak’s poema combines expressionist style and tone with unprecedented attention
to the cult and culture of visual surface that characterized Weimar Berlin.
In the poema, Kulbak adopts a dual narrative standpoint, that of the ironic
narrator and that of the semi-autobiographical character, the nameless lyulkeman
(‘the man with the pipe’, reminiscent of Greenberg’s narrator). The lyulkeman is a
young poet from a traditional eastern European Jewish background who arrives
in Berlin with a ‘bintl vilde lider’ [bundle of wild poems], but is eager to learn
about and to experience the German metropolis. What he finds there is a vast and
staggering landscape, and the majority of the poema is devoted to the physical
and mental topography of this urban landscape. The lyulkeman is an astute urban
observer, especially attuned to visual surface culture of Weimar Berlin: the ‘electric
advertisements’, so prevalent of the streets of the ‘New City’,40 seem to him as if
they are ‘written in the sky’; the new mass cinema and radio appear to shout and
announce ‘prosperity’; the rich Berlin men go to cabaret to see and to ‘buy the girls’.
The protagonist is also a social observer. He moves between the aff luent districts
of Kurfürstendamm and Tiergarten and that of working-class Wedding (known
in this period as ‘Red Wedding’). As if mirroring the dizzying spatial transitions
within a close proximity, the poema constantly moves between a criticism of the
consumerist mentality of Weimar Berlin (of what Kracauer has called ‘the mass
ornament’), and a fascination not only with the vibrancy of visual culture of Berlin
but also with the potential inherent in the massification of culture: ‘O country,
where electricity runs | in wires, and champagne in people’s veins; | where each
worker is a Marxist, | and each grocer a Kantian.’ Kulbak explores the high and
low modernist culture of Berlin with its cabarets, coffeehouses, street facades,
and visual images. Like Greenberg’s speaker, the speaker of Kulbak’s poema also
investigates the social, political, and mental reality behind the glittering surface as
a ‘lived experience’, when he comes to witness his own ‘corruption’ through drink
and women. Even the Berlin high culture which he sought as a naive young man
becomes in his experience an intriguing yet threatening mixture of ‘sweet terror: |
Spengler, Keyserling, and Lasker-Schüler [...]. Expressionism screams with red feet,
| Dada with pants fallen down.’ 41 The result of this strange mixture is not rejection
but a sense of ‘alienation, and sadness’.
Similarly, the end of the poema seems to offer a dramatic resolution of the
tensions when the speaker unites with the protagonist to declare:
Down with Beethoven and Goethe
and with the Cologne Cathedral!
The distant skies are grey
and we are grey with them;
we — the last wolves howling
among the ruins of the system.42
But even this dramatic ending is not as clear-cut as it might appear at first sight.
Note that the declaration is not to bring down Else Lasker-Schüler or Alfred Döblin,
but the Romantic music of Beethoven, Goethe, and the Monumental, neo-gothic
Cologne Cathedral. This rings very much not only of Futurist and expressionist
manifestos, but also like the ‘anti-ornament’ ideology of post-expressionism and
Neue Sachlichkeit prevalent in Weimar Berlin. Thus, even the final note of this vast
poema is not a triumphal one, but one mixed with strong resignation, which is
embodied in the sight of grey sky and the sound of the howling wolves.
In the writing of Shimonovitz, Greenberg, and Kulbak, the poema clearly
became an effective poetic tool. These narrative poems enabled these Hebrew and
Yiddish poets to create spatial images and explore topographies of Berlin, as well as
to successfully engage diverse and competing modernist artistic and poetic trends
which they encountered in Berlin. All these elements remained important to their
literary and artistic vision, long after the short but powerful period in which they
lived and wrote in the city.
42 Shachar Pinsker
3
The two writers of fiction whose encounter with Berlin was very significant, and
who captured Berlin in their fiction — in ways both similar and different — were
David Bergelson and Shmuel Yosef Agnon. Agnon arrived in Berlin in 1912, after
a short sojourn of three years in Palestine, where he published his first Hebrew
stories and a novella. Although Agnon sometimes claimed to have been ‘stuck’ in
Berlin because of World War I, he did not hurry to leave, but lived and worked in
Berlin and other German cities until 1924, when his house was burned down in an
accident. The twelve years which he spent in Berlin and Germany were, in more
than one way, the formative period in Agnon’s life and literary career.
David Bergelson arrived in Berlin in 1921 and lived there until 1933 (in 1934 he
settled in the Soviet Union). Before his Berlin period, Bergelson was an established
Yiddish writer, recognized as a master stylist and one of the great new voices of
Yiddish literature. He was active in Yiddish literary life in Kiev and Moscow, but
uncomfortable with some of the ideological rigidities of Moscow Yiddish activities,
and disappointed in the hope of launching a new literary journal, he decided to join
many other eastern European writers who emigrated to Berlin.43
Both Bergelson and Agnon had a successful and productive artistic life in
Berlin. Not long after Agnon arrived in Berlin, he found work in the Jüdischer
Verlag. Several of his stories and novellas were translated into German (by Ernst
Mueller, Max Strauss, and others) and received enthusiastically by German-Jewish
intellectuals such as Martin Buber, Aharon Eliasberg, Moshe Marx, Max Strauss,
Ernst Simon, Gershon Scholem, and Gustav Krojanker, among others, who encou
raged Agnon to remain in Germany and to establish his reputation there. In 1916,
Agnon met Salman Schocken, an aff luent businessman, who became an admirer
of the young Hebrew writer and his lifelong patron. Schocken supported Agnon
financially and helped him in the physical hardships of the war. In 1920, Agnon
married his German-born wife, Esther Marx; they had two children and built a
house in Bad Homburg, but Berlin remained the centre of Agnon’s literary and
intellectual activity.
Although Bergelson did not become the adored eastern European writer of the
same circle of German-Jewish intelligentsia, he did not do badly either. Together
with the Symbolist Yiddish writer Der Nister, Bergelson was the literary co-editor
of the inaugural volume of the journal Milgroym (1922). His novel Nokh alemen
(When All Is Said and Done, 1913) was translated to German by Alexander Eliasberg
and was reviewed favourably by Alfred Döblin (with whom he maintained a close
relationship) and others, in spite of its being very different from the German-Jewish
sense of ‘authenticity’ which made Agnon so popular. After a short sojourn in the
Moabit district, Bergelson and his wife and children lived quite comfortably in
white-collar Zehlendorf.44
What was the impact of Berlin and Weimar culture on the literary output of
Agnon and Bergelson? The question is not so easy to answer, because there were
different, contradictory aspects to this encounter. The impact was not necessarily
immediate but one that certainly left its mark, even if the writers themselves chose
to minimize it in the years in which they emigrated to the Soviet Union and to
Jerusalem. Bergelson’s search for new literary and artistic paths can be detected in
the two pieces which he published in the inaugural volume of the journal Milgroym
(1922): a short story entitled ‘Onheyb Kislev 5769’ (‘The Beginning of Kislev,
1919’), and a review essay-cum-manifesto entitled ‘Der gesheener oyf brokh’ (‘The
Awakening has Occurred’). The short story depicts the Revolution and the Civil
War pogroms that followed it in an expressionist style with ‘cinematic’ depictions
of landscape and colours, in which ‘f lashes of garish black, white and red mark the
omnipresence of death, innocence and blood in a landscape cumulatively depicted
through charged metonymic details’.45 The review essay, although dealing with
Yiddish poets in Russia, utilizes rhetoric and style that fuses Russian Futurism with
the expressionism that still f lourished in Berlin (which brings to mind some similar
images of Greenberg):
Hey you! [...] don’t look among the young poets of today for anything
conventional, for freshly polished shoes or the twirling cane of a fashionable
dandy. [...] they are one with the historical period we live in [...]. There are no
laws any more, no boundaries, no order. Things of the past!46
These two very different texts indicate the experimental nature of Bergelson’s
writing. Although he was far from being a novice, he was very open to new direc
tions and inf luences. He was highly attuned to, and in fact participated in debates
among modernist trends in Weimar Berlin. Bergelson’s works of the 1920s deal
mostly with contemporary life in Berlin, New York, and Moscow, rather than
with the fading life of the shtetl, which was the topic of his early works. Although
he never really abandoned his early modernist prose style, the fiction he wrote in
Berlin (at least until his ‘conversion’ to socialist realism) surely bears the mark of
the time.
The major trend in Agnon’s writing during the time in which he lived in Berlin
and other urban centres of Germany was its highly emphasized interest in the old
eastern European world. It is easy to conclude that what was on Agnon’s mind
during this period was the pre-modern Jewish world of Poland and Galicia in its
real or projected form.47 This was a real preoccupation of Agnon, but it was also
inf luenced by the encouragement of German-Jewish intellectuals who wanted to see
Agnon producing something that confirmed their notion of ‘East European Jewish
authenticity’.48 Agnon surely came up with the goods by seemingly remaining an
almost archetypal Ostjude, committed both aesthetically and intellectually to eastern
European Jewish life and tradition as it had been shaped for centuries.49 At the same
time, he dealt in his fiction with modernist issues of body and sexuality, space, and
the artistic process. This was well recognized by young German-Jewish intellectuals
such as Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin.50 Furthermore, during the time he
lived in Germany, Agnon became acquainted with much contemporary German
and European literature.51 As Maya Barzilai has shown recently, Agnon also caught
‘more than a glimpse of many of the popular and visual manifestations of mass
culture that f lourished during his lengthy stay in Berlin and Germany’.52
Both Agnon and Bergelson were actively interested in art, architecture, theatre,
cinema, photography, and fashion. They shared with many intellectuals active in
44 Shachar Pinsker
Germany during the World Word I and Weimar period (Walter Benjamin, Siegfried
Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, and Franz Hessel) a fascination with ephemeral, unnoticed,
and culturally marginalized phenomena of everyday life.53 This becomes most
evident when we examine the representation of the urban experience of Berlin in
stories and novels that Agnon and Bergelson wrote. Agnon reported that among
the manuscripts that were destroyed by the fire that consumed his house in 1924,
was a text he described as a ‘Berlin novel’ entitled Katte ve-Grete (Katte and Grete).54
More significant is the fact that Agnon had begun to write about his experience in
Berlin and Germany almost immediately after he moved to Jerusalem, but most of
his works were completed and/or published later. Between the late 1920s and the
late 1960s, Agnon published a large body of fiction of varied styles and modes that
describes the milieu of Berlin and other German cities.55
Of these texts, the most important is the novel Ad hena (To This Day).56 Agnon
worked during the 1940s (and probably even earlier) on a novel he called Bi-yemot
ha-milchama (In the Days of War), but the final version was published with the new
title only in 1952.57 Although critics have tended either to ignore the novel or to
dismiss it as an episodically meandering work that ends tritely,58 they have missed
the fact that Ad hena is one of Agnon’s most formally experimental, self-consciously
digressive, and abortive works. The novel is, on one level, a presentation of the
horrors of war as ref lected in the city of Berlin, from a vantage point that only
partially coincides with Agnon’s own experience at the time. Shmuel-Yosef, the
first-person narrator of the novella, is shown wandering around the streets of Berlin
(as well as Leipzig and other places in Germany) in a kind of ‘Kaf kaesque perpetuum
mobile’. In the course of his journey, the narrator ‘discovers that the country is in
total chaos, its streets crowded with cripples’ and with ersatz substitutes, its houses
filled with ‘bereaved and broken families’.59 However, it is important to note that
although Ad hena is a novel about World War I, it is infused with figures, events,
and perspectives that are more characteristic of the Weimar period. This can be seen
in the preoccupation, even obsession, with clothing and fashion, architecture and
cinema, physiognomy and other elements of visual surface that are described as an
opaque and highly elusive hieroglyph that requires (and defies) deciphering.
Ad hena could be better understood and appreciated, I contend, when compared
with Bergelson’s stories that depict the urban space of Berlin: ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’
(‘Among Emigrants’), ‘In pansion fun di dray shvester’ (‘In the Boarding House of
the Three Sisters’), ‘Tsvey Rotskhim’ (‘Two Murderers’), ‘Altvarg’ (‘Old Folks’),
‘Blindkayt’ (‘Blindness’), ‘Eyn nakht veyniker’ (‘One Night Less’), and ‘Far 12
toyznt dolar fast er 40 teg’ (‘For 12,000 Dollars He Fast 40 Days’). These stories
were published in 1926 to 1928 in Berlin, New York, and Moscow — some of them
with the apt subtitle ‘Berlin Bilder’ (‘Sketches of Berlin’) — and in the volumes of
Collected Works published by the Kletzkin Press in Vilna.60 Out of Bergelson’s Berlin
stories, ‘Tsvishn emigranten’ is the only one to have received critical attention,
while the others have been deemed, mistakenly in my opinion, as ‘strangely f lat and
uncompelling’.61 Like Agnon’s digressive and diffusive novel, these stories might
be described as ‘urban modernist miniatures’.62 They deal with the urban space of
Berlin from the vantage point of eastern European Jewish immigrants and with the
intersections of home and homelessness with body and sexuality, visual surface, and
mass culture. They are a fine product of the encounter of Bergelson with Weimar
Berlin.
The chief element which Agnon’s novel shares with Bergelson’s stories is the
engagement with the meaning of ‘home’ in the modern metropolis, especially
when it comes to the Jewish immigrant’s precarious life in pensions (boarding
houses). Most of Bergelson’s Berlin stories take place in pensions, and are presented
(not unlike the urban cafe) as a ‘third space’ that is constituted through the
provisional intimacy of strangers, at once public and private, inside and outside,
embedded within an urban, metropolitan culture, and yet called into existence by
the dislocation of transient masses.
Likewise, the main preoccupation of the first-person narrator in Ad hena is
finding and maintaining a room in a metropolis after he left it for a visit to Leipzig,
in an unsuccessful search for the Judaica library of Doctor Levi. At the beginning
of the novel, we find the narrator living in a small pension on Fasanenstraße.
Although the narrator initially does not think much of the small ‘chilly’ and ‘dark’
room in his pension, after he loses it and is engaged in an endless and unsuccessful
search for a substitute, he feels like ‘a man who had neither a country nor a room,
having left the land he lived in and gone to live in another, where he lost even the
four walls that he had’ (H 88, E 99).
In both Bergelson’s and Agnon’s fiction, the pension is presented not only as
a metonymic and metaphoric vehicle to express the existence of the individual
immig rant in the metropolis, but as a hieroglyph, or a mirror-house in which
visual surface — far from conforming to the realist conventions of correspondence
between visual appearance and psychological ‘depth’ — raises doubts about the
possibility of apprehension and interpretation of people and things.63 In Bergelson’s
story ‘In pansion fun di dray shvester’, the boarding house is described as a space
in which ‘everything you see around you elicits both suspicion and doubt that the
pension has been arranged deliberately to elicit some kind of suspicion, and then the
thought crosses your mind that you may be mistaken’ (Y 102, E 46). The intense
focus of Bergelson and Agnon on life in the pension should be understood also
in the context of the concerted attention given to hotels, motels, and pensions in
German and Austrian modernist fiction of the 1910s and 1920s by writers such as
Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Erich Kästner, and Vicki Baum.64 Also highly relevant
is Siegfried Kracauer’s insightful analysis of the social space of the ‘hotel lobby’ in
Weimar literary and visual culture:
The typical characteristics of the hotel lobby, which appears repeatedly in
detective novels, indicate that it is conceived as the inverted image of the house
of God [...]. In both places people appear there as guests. But whereas the house
of God is dedicated to the service of the one whom people have gone there
to encounter, the hotel lobby accommodates all who go there to meet no one
[...]. In the hotel lobby, equality is based not on the relation to God but on
a relation to the nothing. Here, in the space of unrelatedness, the change of
environments does not leave purposive activity behind, but brackets it for the
sake of a freedom that can refer only to itself and therefore sinks into relaxation
and indifference.65
46 Shachar Pinsker
Kracauer’s surprising depiction of the hotel lobby as an ‘inverted house of God’

is resonant with the fact that the pension in which the narrator of Ad hena lives is
located on Fasanenstraße. It was on this street in Charlottenburg that the Jewish
reform community of Berlin built its impressive synagogue — ‘the Temple of the
Enlightened’, as Agnon’s narrator refers to it.66 The name of the street thus evokes
the house of God which has been secularized and turned into the pension owned by
the German war-widow Mrs Trotzmüller and her three daughters. In Bergelson’s
stories the lobby of the pension, in spite of being a far cry from the luxurious
hotels of Weimar Berlin, is all about a visual facade that is extremely difficult to
decipher:
all around, from the walls of the open, warmly furnished room, pictures and
photographs of women peer down, with faces absorbed in pious thoughts, and
with averted heads and misty, passionate eyes. The shadowy corridor recalls
one such picture, a too naked image: you feel you are both in the city and
very remote and isolated from its millions of inhabitants. You instantly think
about the boarding house: ‘a decent place, definitely ...’ ‘Yet on the other hand’.
(Y 101, E 45)
In ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’, the setting of the pension is equally important to the narra
tive. This complex story within a story is about a young Jewish immigrant residing
in a pension who seems to recognize in one of its dwellers a notorious pogromist
whom he believes to have known and whom he sets out to kill. The narrator, to
whom this story is told, is actually living (like Bergelson himself ) in a comfortable
house. Thus, the dislocation of the protagonist who resides in the pension with the
alleged pogromist contrasts with the narrator’s existence in a private home, just as
the contingent nature of the protagonist’s living arrangements corresponds to his
social marginality and his psychological instability. In other words, the pension and
the young man who resides in it are parallel to each other, and both present to the
narrator a kind of riddle that requires deciphering. The young man tells the narrator
that everything has begun,
here in this city, in a squalid rooming house [a bilikn pansion]. I, in room number
3. He, in room number 5 — our doors facing one another. I’m a stranger here.
No one knows me. He doesn’t know me either. But I know him very well.
Sometimes we bump into one another in the corridor [...] and then, as he passes,
he glances at me. (Y 179, E 24)
The glances that these two men exchange convince the young Jewish immigrant
from Volhynia that his neighbour in the pension is none other than the pogromist
whom he knows from ‘back home’. He is convinced that the fact that the two of
them live in the same pension has some meaning, which is a call for action. But the
whole story seems to hang on this suspicious glance and its interpreted meaning.
Thus, as a number of critics have pointed out, it is impossible to tell whether the
entire story about the pogromist, or even his very existence in the pension, is a
reality or a figment of the obsessed man’s imagination, part of the story which he
almost admits to having made up.67
The pension in Agnon’s and Bergelson’s Berlin fiction, with its lobby and facade,
is also thoroughly gendered. The ‘guest’ or ‘boarder’ is always a male protagonist
and the pension in which he resides is figured as a ‘feminine space’. The interaction
of the protagonist is always with female owners (mother, daughters, and sisters)
and with the maids. But if the trope of ‘home’ and heymish (‘homely’) has been
feminized in Jewish tradition and modern literature as the domain of the wife
and the domesticated family, the provisional pensions of Berlin are precisely the
opposite. The suspicion and doubt that existence in the pension elicits are closely
related to illicit sexuality and the elusive presence of the female body, which appear
in these works as another example of visual surface that requires deciphering. Thus,
the entire plot of ‘In pansion fun di dray shvester’ evolves around the tense sexual
attraction that life in the pension elicits for the male dwellers. But is this sexuality
a mere facade that is being put on ‘display’ like the eponymous shop windows of
Weimar Berlin? Is it a part of a clever business scheme? The pension’s dwellers and
the readers never find out the answer.
In Agnon’s and Bergelson’s fiction of Berlin, sexuality and gender are presented
and scrutinized through visual means. The ‘body’ — in particular the female
body — is intelligible through its refractions in modern forms of image-making
(photog raphs, cinema, architecture), which are in turn further refracted in the
literary text.68 Agnon’s narrator in Ad hena and Bergelson’s narrators and prota
gonists are constantly watching, trying to decipher the meaning of faces, clothing,
facades, and buildings, both ‘in life’ and on the screen, the stage, and the page of
the newspaper.
In Ad hena, a significant part of the narrative is devoted to the narrator’s relations
with Brigitta Schimmermann, a former German theatre and film actress who in
wartime became a nurse, decorated by the Kaiser ‘for opening a nursing home
and caring for the wounded like a true sister of mercy [achot rachmania]’. But is
she really a sister of mercy, or is this transformation part of her ability to act and
charm? The narrator, who has been (and probably still is) sexually attracted to the
beautiful Brigitta, informs us that he knew Brigitta from her acting days when she
was an actress whose ‘talents were not great’, but who ‘had a charm that made the
critics treat her kindly [...]. Watching her in the theatre was like being in a living
room with a lovely and gracious young ingénue’ (H 14, E 27). Brigitta’s charm,
the narrator tells us, ‘caught the fancy’ of an extremely rich businessman, Gerhard
Schimmermann. After getting married, Mrs Schimmermann cut short her acting
career and became a housewife with a salon ‘open to artists and intellectuals’ and
was known for ‘charity soirees’ (H 15, E 28). Who is Brigitta, then, an actress, a
nurse, a society woman, a sister of mercy?
Both in Ad hena and in ‘In pansion fun di dray shvester’ the narrator proceeds to
give the readers a group portrait of three sisters who are the owners of the pension.
In the two texts, each one of the sisters (Lotte, Hildegard, and Gert in Agnon; Luba,
Simma, and Yulia in Bergelson) is given an appearance, a distinct set of facial and
bodily features, a combination of typical clothing and hairstyle; and yet at the same
time, the three are strangely akin to one another in their grotesque appearance. In
Ad hena, the grotesque, mechanical element is even further stressed by the use of
inanimate nouns to describe the three sisters’ physical characteristics.69 In Bergelson’s
story, the narrator tells us that the younger sister is the ‘opposite’ of the elder and
48 Shachar Pinsker
yet, somehow, they are grotesquely identical, as if to deliberately confuse the male
boarder who stares at them and wonders ‘who is more beautiful’.
The elusive nature of the female body as implicated in mass culture was an
important part of Weimar Berlin’s ‘cult of surface’, apparent not only in the new
architecture of the metropolis but also in cinema and theatre, and in the more tawdry
entertainments of the city’s working-class districts. Siegfried Kracauer noted in his
key essay ‘The Mass Ornament’ (1927) that the ‘change in taste’ in Weimar Berlin
that is associated with artistic movements like Neue Sachlichkeit cannot be separated
from mass cultural spectacles like the popular revue performances of the dancing
troupe ‘The Tiller Girls’.70 According to Kracauer, the Tiller Girls
are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble female units whose movements
are mathematical demonstrations [...]. Through weekly newsreels in movie
houses, they have managed to reach even the tiniest villages. One glance at the
screen reveals that the ornaments consist of thousands of bodies, sexless bodies
in bathing suits. The regularity of their patterns is acclaimed by the masses who
themselves are arranged in row upon ordered row.71
Franz Hessel, another prominent cultural critic of Weimar Berlin, noticed the
effects of Neue Sachlichkeit on new building projects springing up all over Berlin
when he observed that ‘as soon as a house becomes dilapidated or just in need of
repair, the young architects give it the page-boy haircut of a simple clear facade,
and clear away all the fancy curlicues’.72 In Kracauer’s and Hessel’s conceptions of
Neue Sachlichkeit, as in Agnon’s and Bergelson’s fiction, the image of female body
and sexuality became the signifier for representing Berlin’s modernity.
The connection between the depiction of the human body and the mass spectacles
of Berlin in Bergelson’s stories becomes apparent and thematized in ‘Far 12 toyznt
dolar fast er 40 teg’.73 Here Bergelson creates a story about a ‘fasting young man’,
who is ‘sealed under glass’ and ‘lives purely on seltzer and cigarettes’. The spectacle
of the boy who is attempting to fast for forty days takes place in a cheap Berlin cafe,
the Crocodile, and has been ‘the talk of every Berlin café and every Berlin home’.
The show is so popular that ‘tens of thousands of visitors’ are lining up, ‘waiting
to buy a ticket for a quarter US dollar and be admitted so that they could see with
their own eyes’. The narrator who is telling the story of the boy in order to get his
‘revenge’ on Yankl, the heretic from his shtetl, notices that this kind of spectacle can
take place only ‘in the very heart of Berlin’.
As in Bergelson, the narrator of Ad hena is extremely attuned to cinema, photo
graphy, clothing, and fashion. He is not only writing a book about clothing, but
even used to be the costume consultant of Brigitta Schimmermann when she was
an actress. But the narrator is also fascinated by questions of architecture and design
in Berlin of the 1910s and 1920s. The discourse of architecture, especially of Neues
Bauen, is introduced into Agnon’s novel through the figure of the architect Simon
Gabel, who was hired by the Schimmermann family to build a new wing for
Brigitta’s nursing home. The narrator tells us that ‘there were different opinions’
about Simon Gabel’s architecture and that there was a great deal of debate about him:
Some considered him a great modernist who had dealt a death blow to the
stultified architecture of the past by inventing new contemporary idiom, and
some thought him the evil genie of the nouveau-riche class that, lacking all
confidence in its own aesthetic judgments, was in thrall to the pretentiousness
of the self-proclaimed masters. (H 53–54, E 64–65)
The way in which the narrator presents Simon Gabel ref lects public discourse about
Neues Bauen and modernist architecture in Berlin. Is Gabel’s ‘functionalist’ archi
tecture an excellent example of the contemporary idiom that shuns the ornament
and elevates streamlined function, or is it a cold, lifeless design that suits the
nouveau-riche class? The narrator tells us that he had ‘no firm view of his own’.
But the debate is not just a theoretical one. Later in the novel we discover that the
narrator knows Simon Gabel very well:
This is how I met Simon Gabel, who was hired by the publisher to renovate the
building and redo its interior. Simon Gabel is a great architect. He was attuned
to the spirit of the times and understood its needs. There wasn’t a wasted
or an extra inch of space in anything designed by him. Whatever you saw
was there because it had to be. Different generations, different houses. Once
when people’s needs were smaller and their hearts were larger, they preferred
ornament to convenience; we, whose needs have grown as our hearts have
shrunk, like it the other way round. (H 93–94, E 103–04)
Simon Gabel, who appears not only in Ad hena but also in other texts that Agnon
wrote in the 1940s,74 is none other than Erich Mendelsohn, the most accomplished
architect of the Weimar period.75 Agnon met Mendelsohn soon after he arrived
in Berlin. When Salman Schocken became his patron, Agnon must have been
greatly impressed by the architect’s designs for the big Schocken department stores
during the twenties. When the narrator of Ad hena speaks about a publisher who
hired Simon Gabel to redesign his building, he refers to the famous Jewish Berlin
publisher Rudolf Mosse, who commissioned Mendelsohn in 1921 to rebuild Berlin’s
Mossehaus, the headquarters of the Mosse publishing company. Instead of the
sandstone-fronted historicist building, Mendelsohn’s new design, especially the new
streamlined facade of the Mossehaus, emerged as a typical example of Neues Bauen,
‘one of the most recognizable icons of Weimar modernism, a symbol of the new
spirit of mobility, functionality and adaptability’.76
The narrator of Ad hena, who has ‘no roof over his head’, recognizes the achieve
ment of Mendelsohn’s modernist architecture and at the same time casts a critical and
sceptical gaze upon it. The narrator’s remarks about the ‘coldness’ of Mendelsohn’s
functionalist architecture and its possible link to a bourgeois, nouveau-riche class
(‘lacking a confidence in its own aesthetic judgments’) shows how attuned Agnon
was to the culture of Weimar Berlin and to the ensuing debates about the social
and existential meaning of Weimar modernity. This is true also of Bergelson,
whose Berlin stories exhibit both an intense fascination with and an equally strong
criticism of Weimar modernity, with its spectacles of commodity entertainment
and cinema and its facade and surface architecture and art. In both Agnon’s and
Bergelson’s fiction, mapping the topographies of Weimar Berlin through the eyes
of the Jewish eastern European immigrants enables the creation of spatial images
that are both the dreams of modern, urban society and the ghosts of the past and a
possible, but mostly unrealized, present and future.
50 Shachar Pinsker
Notes to Chapter 1
A different version of this essay will also appear in Shachar Pinsker, Literary Passports: The
Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2010).
1. On Berlin in the context of Hebrew literature and culture, see Gershon Shaked, ‘Halevay nitna
lahem ha-yecholet le-hamshich’, Tarbitz, 51.3 (1982), 479–90; Zohar Shavit, ‘On the Hebrew
Cultural Center in Berlin in the Twenties: Hebrew Culture in Europe — The Last Attempt’,
Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 68 (1993), 371–80. On Berlin in the context of Yiddish literature, see
Delphine Bechtel, ‘Babylon or Jerusalem: Berlin as Center of Jewish Modernism in the 1920s’,
in Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, ed. by Dagmar C.
G. Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), pp. 116–23;
Heather Valencia, ‘Yiddish Writers in Berlin 1920–1936’, in The German Jewish Dilemma; From
the Enlightenment to the Shoah, ed. by Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel (Lewiston, NY:
Mellen, 1999), pp. 193–207; Gennady Estraikh, ‘Vilna on the Spree: Yiddish in Weimar Berlin’,
Aschkenaz, 16.1 (2006), 103–27.
University Press, 1996), pp. 185–212; Paul Mendes-Flohr, ‘Jews within German Culture’, in
German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 4 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–98),
iv: Renewal and Destruction: 1918–1945, ed. by Michael Meyer and Michael Brenner (1998), pp.
170–94.
3. Miriam Hansen, ‘Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer’, New
German Critique, 56 (1992), 43–75; Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s
Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin:
Sexuality and the City in Imperial and Weimar Germany (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003);
Andreas Huyssen, ‘Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces’, PMLA, 122.1
(2007), 27–43; Sabine Hake, Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar
Berlin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
4. Yeshurun Keshet, Kedma va yama (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 1980), pp. 144–45. Translations in this
chapter are by the author unless otherwise stated.
5. Ward, p. 2.
6. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. xiii.
7. Peter Gay, ‘The Berlin-Jewish Spirit’, in Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and
Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 171.
8. Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007), p. 4.
9. See Arthur-Tilo Alt, ‘A Survey of Literary Contributions to the Post-World War I Yiddish
Journals of Berlin’, Yiddish, 7.1 (1987), 42–52; Glenn S. Levine, ‘Yiddish Publishing in Berlin
and the Crisis in Eastern European Jewish Culture, 1919–1924’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 42
(1997), 85–108. On Hebrew publishing, see Shimon Rawidowicz, Sich.otai ‘im Byalik. ( Jerusalem:
Devir, 1983), pp. 42–45; Shavit, ‘On the Hebrew Cultural Center in Berlin’.
10. The debate about centres can be seen in the writing of David Bergelson, Melech Ravitch, Peretz
Markish, and others, for example Bergelson’s well-known essay ‘Dray tsentren’ (‘Three Centers’,
1926). There is an English translation of the essay in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist
Realism, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), pp. 337–56. For
a discussion of the question of centre and Bergelson’s essay, see Allison Schachter, ‘Bergelson and
the Landscape of Yiddish Modernism’, East European Jewish Affairs, 38.1 (2008), 7–19.
11. Gershon Shaked, ‘The Great Transition’, in Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt, The Great
Transition (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), p. 124; Zohar Shavit, ‘The Rise and Fall
of Literary Centers in Europe, and America and the Establishment of the Center in Eretz Israel’,
Iyunim bi-tkumat Israel, 4 (1994), 422–39.
12. For further discussion see Shachar Pinsker, Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew
Fiction in Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming).
13. Rawidowicz, p. 76; Shavit, ‘On the Hebrew Cultural Center in Berlin’, p. 378.
14. Delphine Bechtel, ‘Milgroym, a Yiddish Magazine of Arts and Letters’, in Yale Companion to
Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996, ed. by Sander L. Gilman and Jack
Zipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 420–26; Avidov Lipsker, ‘The Albatroses
of Young Yiddish Poetry: An Idea and its Visual Realization in Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Albatros’,
Prooftexts, 15.1 (1995), 89–109.
15. Walter Benjamin, Berliner Chronik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 46.
16. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996).
17. U. Z. Greenberg, ‘Dvorah be-shivya’, in U. Z. Greenberg, Kol-Ktavav ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik,
1990- ), xv (2001), p. 127.
18. Yeshurun Keshet, Maskiyot (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1953), p. 138.
19. Ya’acov Shteinberg, ‘Sonnetot mi-beit ha-kafe’, in Kol-Kitvei Ya’acov Shteinberg (Tel Aviv: Dvir,
1959), pp. 64–65.
20. In Hebrew literature the poema has been an important genre for the writers of the Haskalah,
for Bialik and his generation, as well as for the development of modernist Hebrew and Yiddish
poetry since the 1910s and 1920s. See Yehudit Barel, Ha-poema ha-ivrit me-reshita ve-ad reshit
ha-meah ha-esrim ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1995).
21. Binyamin Harushovsky [Benjamin Harshav], ‘Bi-ntiv ha-poema ha-ivrit ha-modernit’, Masa, 2
October 1952; idem, Ritmus ha-rachvut (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad, 1978).
22. Dan Miron, Bodedim be-mo’adam (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987), p. 510.
23. David Shimoni, Sefer ha-poemot, 2 vols (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1952), i, 3–32.
24. Ibid, p. 86.
25. Dan Miron, Akdamut le-atzag ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2002), p. 36.
26. The critic Franz Roh was the first to theorize, in 1925, the differences between expressionism
and Neue Sachlichkeit, which he called post-expressionism. On Neue Sachlichkeit, see Steve
Plumb, Neue Sachlichkeit, 1918–1933: Unity and Diversity of an Art Movement (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2006); Sergiusz Michalski, New Objectivity, Neue Sachlichkeit — Painting in Germany in the 1920s
(Cologne: Taschen, 2003); Ward.
27. Avidov Lipsker, ‘The Participation of Uri Zvi Greenberg in the Berlin Discourse of the 1920s’,
unpublished paper, 2007.
28. Lipsker, ‘The Albatroses of Young Yiddish Poetry’.
29. Uri Zvi Greenberg, Albatros, 3–4 (1923).
30. Ba-elef ha-shishi was published in Berlin in the journal Ha-olam under the title Mispar hato’im
ha-gdolim (A Number of Great Wanderers, 1923). In 1923 Ha-olam published Ha-dam ve-habasar
(The Blood and Flesh). In the same year, the poema Ba-m’avarv (In the West) was published in the
journal Rimon. See Tamar Woolf-Monson, Le-nogah nekudat ha-pelel ( Jerusalem: Zmora Bitan,
2005), pp. 13–33, 59–62, 107.
31. Uri Zvi Greenberg, Kol ktavav, i, ed. by Dan Miron (1990), p. 9.
32. Greenberg engages French symbolist prose poems like Baudelaire’s Le spleen de Paris and
Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer, to which Greenberg refers explicitly when he calls his experience
in Berlin ‘the season in hell’.
33. Greenberg, Kol ktavav, i, 29–41. See Miron, Akdamut le-atzatg, pp. 60–62, and Woolf-Monson,
pp. 107–21.
34. Greenberg, Kol ktavav, i, 34.
35. Ibid., p. 37.
36. Ibid., p. 66.
37. Ibid., p. 39.
38. Avidov Lipsker has observed that it is possible to read Greenberg’s depiction of Berlin as ‘the city
of a hundred bridges’ in two meanings. In the Hebrew expression me’at ha-gshrim, the word mea
can mean both ‘a hundred bridges’ and ‘a century of bridges’. Thus, Berlin is also what defines
the modernist twentieth century as a century of ‘bridges’, namely of threshold liminality. See
Lipsker, ‘The Participation of Uri Zvi Greenberg’.
39. Moyshe Kulbak, Disner Tshayld Harold (Minsk: Melukhe-farlag in Vaysrusland, 1933). Reprinted
in Moyshe Kulbak, Geklibene verk (New York: Cyco Farlag, 1953).
40. Ward, pp. 92–139.
52 Shachar Pinsker
41. Kulbak, Verk, pp. 238–39.

42. Kulbak, Verk, p. 263.
43. See Joseph Sherman, ‘David Bergelson: A Biography’, in David Bergelson: From Modernism to
Socialist Realism, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (London: Legenda, 2007),
pp. 25–36; Dafna Clifford, ‘From Exile to Exile: Bergelson’s Berlin Years’, in Yiddish and the
Left, ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2001), pp. 247–58.
44. See Lev Bergelson, ‘Memories of My Father: The Early Years (1918–1934)’, in David Bergelson:
From Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (London:
Legenda, 2007), pp. 79–88.
45. Joseph Sherman, ‘Bergelson and the Irony of Milgryom, Berlin 1922’, Zutot, 5.1 (2008), 81.
Mikhail Krutikov, ‘Narrating the Revolution’, in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist
Realism, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (London: Legenda, 2007), p. 169.
46. David Bergelson, ‘Der gesheener oyf brokh’, Milgroym, 1 (1922), 42.
47. Dan Laor, ‘Agnon in Germany, 1912–1924’, AJS Review, 18.1 (1993), 83–84.
48. Brenner, pp. 205–09.
49. The stories that he wrote and published during these years (sometimes in German translation
even before the appearance of the Hebrew original) include ‘Ha-nidach’ (‘The Banished One’,
1923), ‘Agadat ha-sofer’ (‘The Tale of the Scribe’, 1918) and ‘Hakhnasat kala’ (‘The Bridal
Canopy’, which was the basis of a later novel), and the cycle Agadot Polin (Legends of Poland).
50. Gershom Scholem, ‘S. Y. Agnon: The Last Hebrew Classic?’, in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis
(New York: Schocken, 1976), pp. 96–113.
51. See the correspondence of Agnon and Schocken in Sh. Y. Agnon — Z. Schocken: Chilufei igrot,
ed. by Emunah Yaron ( Jerusalem: Schocken, 1991), pp. 78–79.
52. Maya Barzilai, ‘Anatomies of Creation: Reviving the Golem in Times of War and Death’
(unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2009). My understanding
of Ad hena is informed by Barzilai’s forthcoming study of popular culture and visual surface in
Agnon’s novel.
53. See Hansen.
54. Laor, ‘Agnon in Germany, 1912–1924’, p. 82.
55. These include the important stories ‘Ba-derech’ (which eventually became part of ‘Sefer
ha-ma’asim’), ‘Panim acherot’, ‘Ferenhheim’, ‘Merutzat ha-sus’, ‘Bein shtei arim’, the novels Ad
hena and Shira, and a number of stories and texts written in the 1940s and which were collected
only posthumously. For a discussion, see Dan Miron, ‘German Jews in Agnon’s Work’, Leo Baeck
Institute Yearbook, 23 (1978), 265–80.
56. S. Y. Agnon, Ad hena, in Kol sipurav shel S. Y. Agnon, 8 vols (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Schocken),
vii (1960 [1952]), 5–170. The novel was recently translated into English by Hillel Halkin as S.
Y. Agnon, To This Day (New Milford, CT: Tobby Press, 2008). All references to the novel are
from these Hebrew and English editions and will be given in parentheses in the text, prefixed
by ‘H’ and ‘E’ respectively.
57. Dan Laor, Chaye Agnon (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1998), p. 417
58. Arnold Band, for example, deems the structure of the novel as ‘unintegrated and haphazard
without any clear justification’. Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968), pp. 347, 352–53.
59. Laor, ‘Agnon in Germany, 1912–1924’, pp. 90–91.
60. Dovid Bergelson, Shturemteg (Vilna: Kletzkin, 1928); idem, Velt ayn, velt oys (Vilna: Kletzkin,
1929). For the recent English translation by Joachim Neuregschel, see David Bergelson, The
Shadows of Berlin (San Francisco: City Lights, 2005). All references to Bergelson’s stories are from
these editions, prefixed in parentheses in the text by ‘Y’ and ‘E’.
61. Clifford, p. 253.
62. Huyssen.
63. Barzilai, p. 115.
64. Bettina Matthias, The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature
(Rochester: Camden Press, 2006).
65. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Hotel Lobby’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. by Thomas
Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 173–88.

67. Valencia, pp. 197–200; Sasha Senderovich, ‘In Search of Readership: Bergelson Among the
Refugees’, in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. by Joseph Sherman and
Gennady Estraikh (London: Legenda, 2007), pp. 150–66.
70. The Tiller Girls were a troupe which began performing in the Berlin Admiralspalast during the
period of inf lation, appearing in revues produced by Hermann Haller and Eric Charell. The
Tiller Girls even danced in the Großes Schauspielhaus under the direction of Max Reinhardt.
71. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, pp. 75–76.
72. Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin (Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1968); the English translation is
quoted in Rowe, p. 166.
73. The story, which was published in Forverts, was not republished in Bergelson’s collected works.
74. See S. Y. Agnon, Pitchey dvarim (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1973), pp. 121–23.
75. On Mendelsohn, see Kathleen James, Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, ‘Erich Mendelsohn:
From Berlin to Jerusalem’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, 1993).
76. Hake, p. 184.
Chapter 2
v
A Yiddish Poet Engages with German

Society: A. N. Stencl’s Weimar Period
Heather Valencia
In 1931 Thomas Mann wrote to Alfred Richard Meyer, the president of the Kartell
lyrischer Autoren (Association of Lyric Writers) in Weimar Germany, giving his
enthusiastic response to the publication of Fischerdorf (Fishing village), a collection of
Avrom Nokhem Stencl’s poems in German translation:
This extraordinary Jew with his instinct for form and his sure touch demolishes
all the common stereotypes about the ‘intellectualism’ of his race, for his
passionate poetic sensuality and his love for the ‘warm steaming earth’ are
obviously completely spontaneous; his eye and the power of his imagery would
arouse envy even in the prose writer. [...] I think we will hear more about this
new poet.1
Unfortunately the prediction was not fulfilled, for despite the promise of Stencl’s
literary debut in Weimar, he soon slipped into oblivion. His work is rarely considered
in studies of Yiddish cultural activity in Germany, and his name does not feature
in the major anthologies or reference works of twentieth-century Yiddish writing,
apart from a short entry in the Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur (Biographical
Dictionary of Modern Yiddish Literature), where the importance of his Weimar period is
not analysed, and, as Jeffrey Grossman has pointed out,2 the only critical evaluation
of his work is a quotation from Jacob Glatstein which damns with faint praise: ‘The
essence of Stencl’s writing is superabundance rather than selectivity, [but] within his
prodigality there is nevertheless sometimes something of worth.’3
From the perspective of Stencl’s whole oeuvre, Glatstein’s evaluation, despite
its excessive negativity, has a certain justification — Stencl was an extraordinarily
prolific writer who often failed to weed out weaker poetry; hence his work is of
uneven quality, which may have contributed to his being overlooked by literary
historians. Other major factors are undoubtedly that Stencl never associated with
any literary group and did not reside in any of the main centres of Yiddish literary
activity in eastern Europe or America,4 but f led from Germany in 1936 and spent
the rest of his life in London’s Whitechapel, one of the least prominent of the ‘minor
European centers’ of Yiddish literature.5
Once a writer has been omitted from the canon, later inclusion is difficult to
attain. In Stencl’s case, however, this should be attempted, for his poetic achieve
A. N. Stencl’s Weimar Period 55
ment was considerable. Furthermore, he is particularly interesting because he was

different from the majority of Yiddish writers in Weimar. Whereas most of the latter
were already established writers in eastern Europe, Stencl arrived in Germany in
1921 as a young, still unpublished poet, and he stayed longer than almost any of the
others, finally leaving in November 1936. His formative period as a writer therefore
took place in Germany, rather than in his Polish homeland, and he engaged with
and wrote about the German environment and Weimar society, both Jewish and
non-Jewish, more than any other Yiddish writer. He formed friendships outwith
Yiddish circles, particularly with the poet Else Lasker-Schüler and the German art
teacher Elisabeth Wöhler, with whom he lived for almost a decade. She translated a
considerable body of his work into German and acted as his de facto literary agent
(indeed, she devoted herself to promoting his work until her death in 1974).
Through Elisabeth Wöhler, Stencl moved in non-Jewish circles; he became
involved with the ‘freie weltliche Schule’ (free secular school) where she taught,
and with her radical colleagues, thereby broadening his horizons and strengthening
his own socialist convictions. As the political climate in Germany darkened, he saw
some hope in the enlightened ideas propagated by the school: ‘The teaching in the
“freie weltliche Schule” where Fräulein Wöhler worked, made one believe that the
world was going “forward” [probably an allusion to the titles of the socialist dailies
in New York (Yiddish) and Berlin (German)]; that the good in the human being
would in the end have the upper hand.’ 6 He contributed actively to the life of the
school, writing little stories for the children, which Elisabeth Wöhler translated into
German, as well as an article inspired by a children’s art exhibition at the school,
Wöhler’s translation of which was published in an educational journal.7
Through Else Lasker-Schüler and Elisabeth Wöhler, Stencl was also able to estab
lish fruitful contacts with prominent literary figures such as the novelist Arnold
Zweig (who negotiated with publishers on his behalf ), the critic Julius Bab, and
Alfred Richard Meyer, the satirical writer and president of the Kartell lyrischer
Autoren, and, from 1930 on, of the Notgemeinschaft des deutschen Schrifttums
(Association for the Support of German Writers). These intellectuals helped to
support his work, particularly its publication in German translation.
Stencl was extremely creative during his Weimar period, and his productivity
was of course fostered, as was the case for all the Yiddish writers, by the extremely
favourable publishing conditions, particularly during the early years of the Weimar
Republic.8 Between 1921 and 1936 he published ten volumes of poetry in Yiddish,
and became one of the relatively small number of contemporary Yiddish writers to
be translated into German.9 Apart from Elisabeth Wöhler, there were two competent
translators of his work, Abraham Suhl, an academic from Leipzig, and the anarchist
and educationalist Etta Federn-Kohlhaas; her 1931 translation of a selection of
poems from Stencl’s Fisherdorf (Fishing village) was published just before she left
Germany in 1932. In the same year, an attractive edition of Wöhler’s translation into
German of a series of poems by Stencl inspired by famous German poets and artists
was published as Ring des Saturn (Ring of Saturn) by V. O. Stomps’s Rabenpresse.
These two publications, as well as the poems and reviews which appeared in the
German-Jewish press — for example the Leipzig Jüdisches Wochenblatt, the Deutsch-
56 Heather Valencia
Jüdische Volkszeitung, and the famous periodical Die Weltbühne (The World Stage) —
enhanced Stencl’s reputation in Jewish cultural circles.
* * * * *
Stencl’s popularity should be seen in the context of the nostalgic fascination with
Ostjuden which began developing around the beginning of the twentieth century,
becoming most pronounced after World War I. Although the majority of German
Jews retained their suspicion of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants, whose high
visibility and otherness appeared to threaten their own hard-won integration into
German society, there was a significant change in attitude on the part of many
German-Jewish intellectuals, which several commentators, including Stencl, have
attributed at least partly to the encounter between German-Jewish soldiers fighting
in eastern Europe and the Jews of Poland and Russia: ‘No matter how assimilated
and Germanized he, the German Jew, may have been, in the occupied territories
of Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine he found his brothers, the eastern European
Jews. [...] He had discovered the “Ostjuden”.’10
In eastern Europe, rooted in their own culture, these Jews seemed to reveal a
wholeness and authenticity which urban westernized Jews perceived themselves
to have lost. This led to an enthusiasm for the Ostjude which Gershom Scholem
succinctly characterizes in his autobiography: ‘In every Jew from Russia, Poland, or
Galicia whom we encountered, we saw something like an incarnation of the Baal
Shem, or at least of the genuine essence of the Jewish soul, which fascinated us.’11
Stencl’s positive reception can indeed be partly ascribed to the fact that, at least in
the early part of his Berlin period, the personality he presented seemed to fit in with
the popular vision of the ‘authentic’ eastern European Jew: a naive, impoverished,
but idealistic young poet from a Hasidic background, a ‘kleynshtetldik shtibl- un
besamedresh bokherl’ [a shtetl lad from the prayer- and study-house], as he later
described himself, who, like Kulbak’s Childe Harold figure, possessed almost
nothing but ‘a bintl vilde lider’ [a bundle of wild poems].12 He was thus a perfect
candidate for the projection of romanticized images of ‘authenticity’.
Several written sources support this assertion. A long article by Stencl’s first
translator, Abraham Suhl, in the Leipziger Jüdische Zeitung contrasts the fresh and
original young poet Stencl with the assimilated Jews of western Europe.13 The ima
gery with which he characterizes the two types of Jew is significant. The western
Jews — among whom he counts himself — are an ‘altes Volk mit alten Köpfen,
schwer vom vielen Denken’ [old people with old heads, heavy from too much
thinking]. Their inability to connect with their true selves is characterized in an
image of stif ling, conventional clothing: ‘Oh, we Europeans are all covered in seven
layers of clothing, buttoned up, strangled by our collars, and stiff and proud, and
don’t know ourselves any more, our naked selves under our clothes.’14
It is interesting that he calls these Jews ‘Europeans’; this implies that the Ostjude
is an exotic stranger, which is indeed how Stencl is characterized. An exclamatory
deluge of imagery portrays the latter as a veritable force of nature:
And here is someone from our old race, who dances up to us, supple and
unconstrained, a cork on the waves of the sea; he dances — a child, a shepherd,
a faun. Naked, he comes to face life — the Philistine Goliath — with his
shepherd’s sling. And he also has a stringed instrument. — [...] Does our old
race actually still possess such innocent shepherds and visionaries?15
In the article, Suhl quotes five of Stencl’s early Weimar poems as an illustration
of this harmony within the soul of the poet. Mostly taken from Stencl’s Un du bist
Got (And You Are God, 1925), these expressionist poems in actual fact bear witness
instead to the poet’s inner turmoil and struggle to forge a sense of identity which
characterize his work of this period. As with much of shtetl-mythology, Suhl’s
viewpoint represents a tendency to overlook the modern element in Yiddish culture
for the sake of a preconceived ideal of harmony.
Suhl rejoices that the Jewish people have no need to seek a sense of belonging
in foreign folk cultures by such means as the black American jazz music which was
so popular in Weimar, since the ‘primitive Urklang’ [primal music] of Judaism is
manifestly still alive in such figures as Stencl. The article ends by reiterating its
writer’s sense of wonder that from the ancient ‘Volk mit schweren Köpfen’ [people
with heavy heads] a young David can still be born: ‘Die Wunder und die biblischen
Geschichten hören nimmer auf ’ [The miracles and Bible stories will never end].
With this combination of pastoral images conveying innocence and harmony
with nature, and the identification of the young poet as David, the bringer of the
redemptive Messiah, the writer expresses an idea of rediscovered authentic Judaism
which exemplifies the essence of the nostalgic ‘cult of the Ostjuden’ in Weimar.16
Several other contemporary reviews, though less emotional in tone, also have as a
theme or subtext the idea that the Yiddish language and culture exemplified in the
work and personality of A. N. Stencl are an essential component of the heritage of
German Jewry, and that Yiddish poets express the true Jewish soul.17
* * * * *
The poet Else Lasker-Schüler invested herself and her favourites among the Jewish
writers and artists with exotic names which fed her personal mythology of a
Romantic oriental Judaism. She developed a particularly intense relationship with
Stencl, whom she met in the Romanisches Café in August 1922 and immediately
named ‘Hamid’:18
Before we had finished our coffee, the ‘Herr Ober’ came over with a piece of
paper which he handed to Adler. On a paper serviette was a picture of me, a
good likeness, drawn with a few deft strokes, and underneath it said ‘Hamid’,
and, in large wild handwriting: ‘I want to meet him! Prince Jussuff.’19
The friendship, which, according to Stencl, lasted until her death in 1945, is docu
mented in his memoirs in Loshn un lebn and in letters and postcards which she
sent to him and to Elisabeth Wöhler from Switzerland and Palestine after 1933.
Significant aspects of the relationship also emerge through poems which the two
poets wrote about each other. This troubled and eccentric woman was often
regarded as mad, but Stencl seems to have had great sensitivity towards her. This is
evident in the cycle of poems which exists in Abraham Suhl’s German translation
as Meiner älteren Schwester Einfalt (To my elder sister, Simplicity), and in the short two-
58 Heather Valencia
part poem written after the death of Lasker-Schüler’s son, Paul, in 1927.20 Here,
as in his memoirs, Stencl reveals an instinctive understanding of her vulnerability
and emotional needs. More than many other friends of hers, he comprehended her
yearning for a mystical Judaism, which he could help to satisfy through his person
ality (as she perceived it) and his considerable knowledge of Jewish religion and
mysticism.
Her image of him can be clearly seen in the poem ‘Abraham Stenzel’, in which
she transposes their relationship into a primeval, fantasy world. There are two
typescript versions of the poem in the Lasker-Schüler archive in Jerusalem, one of
which was published in 1967.21 A copy of the other and in my view better version,
in Elisabeth Wöhler’s handwriting, dated 1 July 1924, is in the Wöhler collection
of the Archiv Bibliographia Judaica in Frankfurt am Main. Stencl is depicted as the
‘playmate’ of the poetic Ich in a mythical paradise:
Ich hing zwar noch am Baum
Im Schatten einer Cocospalme.
Mein Spielgefährte, Abraham Stenzel,
Gärte mit dem Mark im Stamm.
[I still hung on a tree | Shaded by a coconut palm. | My playmate, Abraham
Stenzel, | Bubbled up with the sap of the tree.]
Here the figure of Stencl is linked with Lasker-Schüler’s own yearning for this lost
world which his Yiddish can restore to her. Although she calls him the ‘Dichter
des Jargons, | Des Ghettoplatts’ [poet of jargon, | Of ghetto-dialect], this termi
nology as used by her does not have its customary negative connotations, but
conveys rather the idea of the innocent language of folk poetry: ‘Wenn er es spricht,
hilf los und rührend, | Pocht an mein Herz das Jugendvolkslied’ [When he speaks
it, touchingly helpless, | The folksong of my youth knocks at my heart]. In his
company, the Berlin streets around the Romanisches Café are transformed into the
Sahara Desert; the figure of the young Yiddish poet summons up images of the
ancient wilderness, the Jordan, and the ‘Erzväter’ [Fathers], and his verses are a form
of mystical writing: ‘Ich liebe seiner schönen Verse Kabala | Sie trägt sein frommes
Angesicht als Medaillon’ [I love the Kabbalah of his lovely verse. | It wears his pious
countenance as an amulet].
For her, Stencl embodies a childlike innocence which she as his ‘playmate’ shares,
and the ‘Unverfälschtheit’ [uncorruptedness] which, as Stencl’s memoirs and poetry
reveal, he also saw in her. Lasker-Schüler projected onto Stencl the image of the
eastern European Jew that responded to her needs, and glimpsed in his person and
poetry the mysterious, authentic Judaism which she strove to capture in her poetry
and life.
* * * * *
Stencl’s relationships with all these personalities — both Jewish and non-Jewish
— broadened his horizons and made him more firmly rooted in German society
than most of the other Jewish immigrant writers were. He lived mainly in Berlin,
keeping body and soul together, at least in the early years, by means of a series of
Fig. 6. Avrom Nokhem Stencl

By kind permission of the Archiv Bibliographia Judaica, Frankfurt am Main
60 Heather Valencia
odd jobs (two of the most colourful of which were stamping down the earth on fresh
graves and, together with a ‘business partner’, collecting horse dung to manufacture
manure). He also travelled widely, spending time in Leipzig, in the Harz mountains,
and in Pomerania, where he worked as an agricultural labourer on a Junker estate.
He attended Professor Klott’s Volksuniversität (people’s university) in the Baltic
resort of Prerow, and in 1926 spent several months in the village of Neuendorf
on the Wolin peninsula in the far north-east of Germany (now part of Poland).
The poetry which Stencl produced during his fifteen years in the Weimar
Republic is characterized by tension between his inner struggle to come to terms
with his abandonment of his religious past in Poland for a modern, secular life on
the one hand, and the concerns of his new self on the other: his immersion in the
tumult of life in Berlin, his distress and anger at the poverty and social injustice he
saw around him, his fascination with nature and the rural environment. The two
strands of his poetry, the past and the present, interact with each other in constant
f lux and tension. This inner struggle persists throughout his years in Germany,
being particularly vivid in the early poems of Un du bist Got and in the powerful
sonnet cycle from 1934, Fundervaytns (From afar), which Stencl wrote on hearing of
the death of his father.22 The eighteen sonnets evoke the son’s relationship with his
pious father, who is depicted as constantly striding towards God, in contrast to his
son, who has ‘shattered Him on the stones of the street’ [im tseshmetert in f laster fun
shtot]. At the end of the cycle the poet manages to justify his own Weltanschauung
from a humanist standpoint: ‘Vi du, tate, bist antkegn Got geshtanen, | Vil ikh
shteyn yedn mentsh antkegn’ [ Just as you, father, stood before God, | So will I
stand before every human being].
The inf luence of Stencl’s traditional background persists throughout his Weimar
period. Funderheym (From home, the title of which is a counterpart to that of Funder
vaytns), was one of two collections published as late as 1936.23 It consists of a series of
longer narrative poems focusing on figures from a venerable Jewish folk and mystical
tradition: the Baal Shem Tov, Sore Bas Tuvim, Reb Nakhman Bratslever, and
others. It is all prefixed by a poem written in 1922 beginning ‘Shik mir, mame, dayn
tkhinele’ [Send me, mother, your Yiddish prayer book]. Funderheym draws on the
tradition of the Tsene urene, or women’s Bible, with its retelling of devotional stories.
It is a present to his widowed mother, through which the son returns to his roots.
Jewish themes are also the focus of Stencl’s Mazl tole (The Sign of the Ram), a
collection of fifty-five poems focusing on biblical events and figures.24 Stencl may
have been inspired by Else Lasker-Schüler’s Hebräische Balladen (Hebrew Ballads, 1913),
which he certainly knew: in a speech he wrote in 1936, celebrating her supposed
fiftieth birthday (it transpired after her death that she was six years older than
she claimed), he calls her ‘the poet of the Hebrew Ballads’ and quotes several lines
from the work. Although Else Lasker-Schüler pursued her own romantic ideals of
love and fulfilment through biblical figures, the fundamental elements of Stencl’s
biblical poems, by contrast, are the social and psychological dimension, and the
ambivalence and complexity of the relationship between God and the human being.
In his biblical cycle, in contrast to Lasker-Schüler’s, Stencl’s thorough grounding in
the Tanach and traditional Jewish knowledge is evident.
A deep concern with the darkening political situation and the troubled identity
of a Yiddish poet in Weimar informs much of Stencl’s work. His 32. In darser vald
baym yam (32. In the forest of Darss by the sea) is a series of thirty-two short poems
written when Stencl was in Prerow in 1932.25 Here he explores the peace which
he experiences in the natural environment in the light of his consciousness of the
suffering of the poor in the city. These contrasts are conveyed through a strange
shifting and interweaving of imagery from the two spheres, so that the city with
its ugliness is always present in his perception of the beauty of nature, constantly
reminding the poet of his own vulnerability in this idyllic environment. The
underlying question is whether he has a right to witness this beauty while other
human beings suffer in the poverty and chaos of the city.
This theme of the fragility of his own existence becomes more intense in Tsvishn
himl un erd (Between heaven and earth), the other book of poetry published in 1936.26
The work is dedicated to the Tiergarten, the park in the centre of Berlin which
Stencl loved, and combines delicate evocations of different f lowers and trees with
poems of dark foreboding which voice his grief at impending parting and loss and
the destruction of Weimar society.
* * * * *
Two series of poems focus almost entirely on the German environment and
demonstrate the extent of Stencl’s involvement with Weimar society. Fisherdorf and
the Sonetn tsu der shtot (Sonnets to the city) are contrasting works which depict the lives
of the peasants and fishermen on the northern coast of Germany and the turmoil
of life in Berlin respectively. The poems set in the fishing village of Neuendorf on
the peninsula of Wolin on the Baltic, which Stencl visited in 1926, are gathered
into two volumes: Fisherdorf, which was published in Yiddish in 1933, and Mayn
fisherdorf (My fishing village), a shorter collection of poems which appeared in 1935.27
Forty-four of the eighty-three poems which comprise the first volume appeared
in Etta Federn-Kohlhaas’s German translation with a preface by Arnold Zweig in
1931, giving rise to the unusual situation of a Yiddish work becoming known in
translation and being reviewed in Germany before it was printed in the original
language.28
The reception of the work in Germany was very positive; like Thomas Mann,
all the critics were impressed by the naturalness of the verse and the poet’s ability
to capture the life of the small rural community. Arnold Zweig’s comment is
typical: ‘After all the verbose and effusive poets, here is one who speaks with the
slow tongue of someone with a true vocation, who can transform everything he
experiences into something which is vivid, striking, and rhythmical.’29
Several reviews use imagery from the visual arts to characterize the poems: the
Prager Presse (25 August 1931) describes the poems — with a touch of hyperbole — as
‘pictures which no painter has yet been able to create’, and the critic of the Vossische
Zeitung (8 November 1932) speaks of them as ‘formed by the hand of a sculptor’.
Stencl himself used the term ‘still lifes’ to characterize Fisherdorf,30 and the visual
metaphor does indeed ref lect the strong pictorial impact of the poems. From the
anguished expressionism and introversion of his earlier work (Un du bist Got, for
62 Heather Valencia
example), Stencl has moved beyond the self, and these poems are like Impressionist
paintings: through small details and gestures, the essential qualities of a scene are
captured and eternalized.
Jewish themes are completely absent from this work; instead, the poet immerses
himself in the life of the peasants and fishermen. Toil and rest are the two essential
aspects of their lives, and so the two sections of Fisherdorf are entitled ‘Arbet’ [Work]
and ‘Menukhe’ [Leisure]. Stencl depicts with sensitivity but without sentimentality
the dignity of labour. In ‘Nokh der arbet’ (‘After Work’, p. 26) he describes the
peasants and their animals resting after a day in the fields. The slow and stately
rhythm adds dignity to the theme:
Oyfn shvel fun der vayser khate
roykhert s’poyerl zayn letste fayke
un varft arayn a getseylt vort.
Un zayn opgearbet ferdl in shtal
zupt groyse zupn
un kratst mit a vakldiker podkeve.
S’brekht azoy mekhayedik in di beyner,
azoy menukhedik gut,
Un dem hunts oyfgeshtelte oyern
khapn oyf shtiklekh shmuesn
mekoyekhn morgndikn veter ...
[On the doorstep of the white hut | The old farmer smokes a last pipe | And
throws in his measured word. | And the weary horse in the stable | Mouths up
big sips of water | And scratches with a shaky shoe.
Something burns so joyfully, | So peacefully in those bones, | And the dog’s
pricked-up ears | Catch little snatches of talk | About tomorrow’s weather ...]
(HBW/SW, p. 89)
The attention to little details like the dog pricking up its ears to hear the fragments
of conversation brings the scene to life. Often the essence of a human being or
animal is captured by such small characteristic gestures, as in the moment when
one horse lays its head gently on the neck of another in ‘Oyf der lonke’ (‘In the
Meadows’, p. 58), or in ‘Hoyf mit botshan’ (‘Farmyard with Stork’, p. 8) with its
f luttering doves, melancholy horse pulling the creaking threshing machine, and the
unexpected humorously and affectionately observed stork on the roof:
Blaybt er shteyn, der groyser botshan
oyf zayn oysgebetn shtroydakh,
hoybt oyf a langn, darn fus
tsu zayn nideriker rie
un trakht tsu a harblekhn inyen.
[The big stork stays standing | On its roof of padded straw | And, lifting a
long, thin leg | To its myopic eye, | Ref lects on a difficult matter.] (HBW/
SW, p. 83)
Stencl understands the complex relationship between elemental nature and the
lives of these working people. This interconnection is often conveyed in extended
metaphors in which images of the land or sea are fused with images of humans and
the animals which are an essential part of their existence, as in the poem ‘Felder in
vint’ (‘Fields in the Wind’, p. 18):
Gefroyrene pastekher, oysgeshtrekte,
ayngehilte in tserisene lakhes
mit aroyskukedikn hoyln layb,
shteyen beymer, tseshoyberte,
tsvishn tvue-felder, fule un shvere,
un traybn zey vi shepsn-stades
mit heyzerikn ‘hoy’ un ‘voy’,
aheymtsukumen nokh farn geviter.
Yogn di felder vi di vilde
mit dershrokene, farshtekte kep,
arayngedreyt zeyere gedreyte herner
in farplonterte volene baykher,
un zey shtoysn zikh un plontern zikh,
yogn iber eyne di tsveyte
un faln fun di farmaterte fis —
[Like frozen shepherds, | Taut and wrapped in torn rags, | With protruding
naked patches, | Dishevelled trees are stood there | Amid full and heavy fields
of grain. | They drive them like herds of sheep | With a hoarse ‘hoa’ and
‘whoa’, | So as to get home before the storm.
The fields are f lailing like wild ones | With their frightened, hidden heads,
| Their curly horns curved inwards | And tangled with their belly-wool, |
And they push and become entangled, | Push-pulling one with the other |
And tripping over their own tired feet — ] (HBW/SW, p. 87)
Such interweaving of animate and inanimate nature is a frequent technique of
Stencl’s, and its effect is to create a double image in the reader’s mind: the trees and
grain being blown in all directions by the approaching storm are simultaneously the
ragged shepherds driving the madly stumbling sheep to safety. Through this double
perspective a subtle picture emerges of the intimate connection between humans
and landscape, and the human being’s dependence on the elements.
The potentially destructive force of nature is always present in the consciousness of
these people, and is ref lected in Stencl’s poems. In ‘Fisher-shtub in geviter’ (‘Fisher
man’s Cottage in a Storm’, p. 34), the raging storm threatens the vulnerable dwelling:
Un di vent vartn op, vos derfun vet vern —
oyf der ander zayt vant
geyt es oyf toyt un oyf lebn!
Un dos khorkhlen, un dos dershtikn,
un dos dershtikte geshrey
hert oyf a rege nit oyf —
[And the walls wait to see what will happen — | On the other side of the wall
| It’s a matter of life and death!
And the gasping, and the choking, | And the muff led scream | Never ceases
for a moment — ]
The power of nature is particularly evident in the sea-poems, such as ‘Dos
shturem-lid’ (‘Storm-Song’, p. 90) with its wild tone reminiscent of the pirate
64 Heather Valencia
poems of the early Brecht. Even on calm days, the latent power of the sea is evident,
as in ‘Yam in zun’ (‘Sea in the Sun’, p. 14), where the ocean is a buffalo which
‘Grizhet [...], un zhgayet | Mit farslunene vayse leftsn’ [nibbles and slurps with |
White salivating animal-lips], then turns over,
shleferdik un grepsndik,
tseglantst in zayn gefaldeveter fel,
mit an oysgeboygenem, glantsndikn rukn.
[Sleepy and belching, | Gleaming wildly in its wrinkled folds, | Its back
hunched and shiny.] (HBW/SW, p. 85)
Sometimes danger and fear are subtly evoked in a small gesture, as in the picture of
the ‘Netsshtrikerin’ (‘Woman Mending Nets’, p. 32), who suddenly looks up from
her work:
Oyf hoybndik di oygn fun di netsn
dershrekt zi zikh
far di tsvey groyse vaser-shtivl
vos glotsn oysgeshmirt in vinkl.
[Raising her eyes from the nets | She starts with fear | At the two big oiled
fisherman’s boots | Which gape at her from the corner.]
This woman mending her husband’s nets is in fact one of a series of ‘genre paintings’
— portraits of fishermen, peasants, and their womenfolk — which are some of
the most impressive poems in the series. Rather than romanticizing these subjects,
Stencl often employs grotesque, startling imagery, which evokes the ravages of old
age after a life of toil. The old fisherman’s bony frame is visualized as a sack full of
empty bottles in ‘Der alter fisher’ (‘The Old Fisherman’, p. 38):
Zayne beyner tsekrikhn zikh unter zayn tsearbeter hoyt,
leydike f lashn vos lign in a shmoln zak.
Un di bakn-beyner un di byedres
startshn shoyn vi tsebrokhene sharbns.
[His bones mapped beneath exhausted skin | Like empty bottles lining a tiny
sack. | And his cheek-bones and his ribs | Already sticking out like broken
shards.] (HBW/SW, p. 91)
The description of an old woman selling bilberries in ‘Di balade fun der borevke-
bobe’ (‘The Ballad of the Bilberry Seller’, p. 48) is both vivid and disturbing. The
old woman’s hands are ‘aroysgerisene kushakes mit vortslen’ [Like shrubs with
torn-out roots] (HBW/SW, p. 93). This image of dry roots gives the old woman’s
hands a dehumanized quality, and Stencl emphasizes the violence of the image: the
torn-out shrubs/hands are bleeding, and the bilberries — her livelihood — are the
drops of blood. Her life story is hinted at in the second stanza:
Ven zi iz a yung-blut geven,
hot zi shoyn ire ershte milkh farkoyft in shtot,
yener, vos hot ir dem boykh gemakht,
hot zi ahingefirt vi a fule milkh-kan!
[When she was still a blood-young girl | She’d already sold her first milk in
town, | The one who had made her belly big | Led her there full as a frothing
churn!] (HBW/SW, p. 93)
The word ‘blood’ echoes the image of the first stanza, but there is an ironic contrast
between the picture of suffering suggested by the first occurrence of the word and
the idea of the woman as a ‘yung-blut’. The hint of carefree youth is immediately
dispelled, however, by the reality of her situation: her exploitation by her lover. The
representation of the woman as an inanimate object, the milk churn, reinforces the
idea of dehumanization which was implicit in the first stanza, and this is developed
further in the final stanza, where her sunken cheeks make of her simply ‘a blekhene
milkh-kan a tseboygene’ [a tin milk-churn, a dented bent one] (HBW/SW, p. 93).
Stencl’s direct and unsentimental treatment of the lives of the poor characterizes
Fisherdorf and also his later London poetry.
The underlying motif of the whole cycle is nature, and there are poems which
simply celebrate the poet’s joy in the countryside and his freedom from the city in
evocative images of the landscape:
Rakhves un ru un loyterkeyt —
f latern farzilberte
faln meves in royshike veln
vi shtern in sof-zumernekht —
Vos nokh kon ikh mir vintshn?! (p. 53)
[Spaciousness and quiet and lucidity — | Fluttering, silvery | Seagulls fall into
the roaring waves | Like stars in late summer nights — | What else could I
wish for myself?!] (HBW/SW, p. 97)
* * * * *
In the poems of Fisherdorf there is a sense of timelessness and an unchanging way
of life, which may well have particularly appealed to Stencl because, though totally
different in many ways, it reminded him of the rootedness of traditional Jewish
society in Poland, which he had forfeited for ever. By contrast, the milieu of Sonetn
tsu der shtot is the modern, secular, ever-changing metropolis where the immigrant
is helplessly tossed about.
These sonnets are virtually unknown. Except for a fragmentary one which
mentions the May demonstrations of 1929, they are undated, though it is obvious
from their general content that they date from the late 1920s or the beginning
of the 1930s. It is unclear how many there were. There are fifteen sonnets in
Stencl’s sometimes indecipherable handwriting in the Archiv Bibliographia Judaica
in Frankfurt, together with Elisabeth Wöhler’s German translations of them.
Eighteen appeared in the first two issues of the journal Berliner bleter far dikhtung un
kunst (Berlin Pages for Poetry and Art, of which only three issues were published), in
November and December 1931. Of the published poems, only three overlap with
the manuscript collection, so in all, at least thirty poems are extant. The second
selection in the Berliner bleter, however, is subtitled ‘Part eight of Sonnets to the city’,
so there may have been many more.
66 Heather Valencia
Fig. 7. Cover of A. N. Stencl’s book Lider un gedikhtn (Songs and Poems), Leipzig, 1924
Written in the midst of the darkening political situation, when most of the
Yiddish writers were leaving, these poems ref lect the chaos of the time. The poet
does however impose some thematic order on the two groups of sonnets published
in the Berliner bleter. The first sequence of eight poems, called ‘Baginen’ [Dawn],
evokes the waking city; the second, ‘Bay rogn’ [On Street Corners], consisting of
ten poems, explores the life of Berlin from the point of view of the observer on the
street. The opening poem of the whole sequence is a personification of the city,
and whereas in the almost contemporaneous Disner Tshayld Harold (Childe Harold
of Disna) Kulbak portrayed the topographically familiar Berlin of the 1920s, Stencl
presents a nameless metropolis. His treatment of the theme has striking affinities
with the surreal imagery of Georg Heym, Jakob van Hoddis, and other German
expressionists. A significant difference, however, is that whereas their metropolis
is usually demonic and destructive, Stencl often equates the city itself with its
suffering, anonymous poor. In the opening poem (Berliner bleter, 1 (November 1931),
1), the city is personified as a helpless, injured victim:
In shines ligt ir tsebrokhener rukn,
gebundn un gepentet tsuzamengevaksn
s’ponem fun yesurim tsekramft in faksn.
[Her broken back lies between rails, | Bound and fettered, fused together, |
Her face twisted in agonized grimaces.]
The ‘vilde gef lekhtn’ [wild tangles] of bridges and railway lines which support
her broken body are screaming ‘A mayse zikh onton!! | Alemen dershekhtn!!’ [Kill
yourselves!! | Murder everyone!!], and the plaster is already being prepared for her
death mask; the city, though, has an indomitable will to survive:
Haltn zey ir shoyn far der noz a feder,
un mishn gips in groyse feser,
di toytn maske ir oystsugisn.
Un ot khapt zi zikh gor oyf un s’iz ir gor beser.
[They hold a feather to her nose, || And mix plaster in huge barrels, | To pour
her death mask. | But suddenly she springs up, alert and revived.]
This imagery of sickness and decay is reminiscent of the Morgue poems of Gottfried
Benn: In one of Stencl’s unpublished sonnets in the Wöhler archive the city is
putrefying while still alive: ‘un tseaytert un tsefresn iz alts [...] un a reyekh geyt fun
ir oyf mayln vayt’ [and everything is full of pus and eaten away [...] and her stench
can be smelled for miles around], and night, waiting like death at her bedside, is
‘oysgeshternt mit lues un gonokokken’ [starred with syphilis and gonorrhoea]. The
city of Stencl’s sonnets has two faces: it is at once a murderous tormentor and a
doomed victim, like the anonymous human detritus in its streets and hospitals.
The poetic ikh appears very rarely, but in the opening poem of the second
sequence (Berliner bleter, 2 (December 1931), 1) Stencl sets out his poetic credo for
the time. He voices his determination that his word shall be heard in defiance of
the murderers who are seizing power:
68 Heather Valencia
S’vet mayn vort zikh nit farkrikhn, vi a shtshur in a lokh,

vayl gas iz tseploydert mit has un mit mord,
mit robeven, mit rotskhenen, mit raysn di bord.
S’vet mayn vort zikh nit farslinen mit akh un mit brokh.
[My word will not hide itself away, like a rat in a hole, | Just because the street
is filled with hatred and murder, | With robbery, barbarity, and tearing out of
beards. | My word will not drool: ‘Oh woe is me!’.]
He has a clear vision of his function as a poet, namely to depict ‘dem kamf tsvishn
orem un raykh | un shraybn tsu mayn folk an extra “yedidi-brivl” ’ [the battle
between rich and poor, | And to write an extra ‘love-letter’ to my people]. In the
two tercets of the sonnet, the poet’s words are bizarrely personified as butchers’
boys lying in wait for someone with a full stomach, ‘a boykh mit shvimendike fish’
[a belly full of swimming fish]. With their sticks they will fish out the ‘karpn in
yontefdikn hiner-shmalts [...] afile fun a yidishn haldz’ [carp in festive chicken-fat
[...] even from a Jewish throat]. This striking poem ref lects both the growing Nazi
menace to the Jewish people (as the reference to the tearing out of beards signals)
and the underlying social theme which unifies all the Sonetn tsu der shtot — the
conf lict between rich and poor which transcends group loyalty: the wealthy, as in
the poem just mentioned, can have a ‘yidishn haldz’.
This theme of social inequality is explored in both published sonnet groups. In
the section ‘Baginen’ (‘Dawn’), factory workers and industrialists respectively are
characterized in two consecutive poems. The fifth poem (Berliner bleter, 1 (Novem
ber 1931), 3) shows the dark, anonymous mass of workers trudging towards the
factory:
Oyf beyde zaytn in shvartse reyen
geyt un hust a makhne a shtume,
trogt dem nepl oyf pleytses krume
tseshrokene fun sirenen geshreyen.
[On both sides in black rows | A silent mass walks along, coughing, | Carrying
the fog on their crooked shoulders | Startled by the screaming sirens.]
The contrasting capitalist figure of the sixth sonnet (Berliner bleter, 1 (November
1931), 3) has all the attributes of a George Grosz painting with his red face, folds
of fat, gold teeth, fat cigar, and padded shoulders like military epaulettes. Stencl
develops the military image in the final two tercets of the sonnet, picturing this
industrialist as a horse-rider with the wires of the telephones as his reins and his
voice the whip:
Zitst er azoy oyfn drey-shtul oysgefresn,
vi er volt in a zatl in a festn gezesn,
mit telefonen vi mit leytsn in di hent —
Alts arum im dibom tsetsaplt un tsebrent!
In eyn zayt hert er un redt in der tsveyter,
un knalt mit verter, vi mit a rayt-baytsh a rayter.
[So he sits, gorged, on his revolving chair, | As if in a firm saddle, | Telephones
like reins in his hands —
Everything around him is rearing up, trembling, on fire! | He listens in one

direction and speaks in the other | And his words crack out, like the whip of
a rider.]
The overall tone of these social sketches is satirical, but in the poems of the second
sequence, where Stencl turns his attention to the Jews of Berlin, the mood darkens.
In parallel with his treatment of the industrialists and workers of the first section,
here the wealthy German-Jewish capitalists are contrasted with the poor Jewish
immig rants. Stencl juxtaposes religious imagery with images of secular Berlin
life: the ‘gevirim’ [rich men] in the third poem (Berliner bleter, 2 (December 1931),
2) manage to keep their wheeling and dealing separate from their religious life:
‘Gesheft blaybt gesheft un got blaybt got!’ [Business is business and God is God!’].
They shout as raucously in the bourse as when they buy aliyes (the privilege of
reading from the Torah scroll) in the synagogue, but nevertheless, even in their
obscene jokes, the nikudes (vowels) of the Hebrew script can still be perceived.
The young immigrant peddlers of the sixth poem (Berliner bleter, 2 (December
1931), 4) still retain the noble Tanachic tradition from which they have come: they
still dream of Laban, Jacob, and Rachel, and talk of Isaiah’s prophecy of the wolf
and the lamb lying down together — even in their present degraded existence as
they ‘vartn, az a goye zol koyfn a kam’ [wait for a gentile woman to buy a comb].
Stencl’s use of this religious imagery in these two poems makes the point that these
two groups of Jews have a shared history and tradition, thus emphasizing the gulf
which now exists between them.
In the depiction of the Jewish immigrants, the narrative perspective moves from
‘they’ to ‘we’; in the fifth poem (Berliner bleter, 2 (December 1931), 3) Stencl identifies
himself as one of those eastern European Jews who have come to Berlin with their
heads full of music — an image of innocence and optimism, which contrasts starkly
with the violence of the city which ‘nemt [...] undz oyf mit ire nagaykes’ [receives
us with its whips].
Here the fate of the immigrants in Berlin is depicted as a kind of suicide:
Undzere kep tsezungene un baroyshte,
[...]
varfn zikh aleyn do unter tramvay-reder
fun velt un fun zikh baleydikt un antoyshte.
[Our heads, intoxicated with melodies, | [...] | Throw themselves under the
tram wheels, | Full of bitter disappointment with the world and themselves.]
Again, religious imagery symbolizes what has been lost: this ‘death’ is that of an
improperly slaughtered animal (‘Yeder fun undz oyf treyfe a gekoyleter!’ [Each of
us slaughtered in an unkosher manner!]), and the memories of the immigrants’ lost
Polish shtetls roll around in their heads like copper coins rattling in the traditional
‘tsedoke pushkes’ [charity boxes] — the juxtaposition of these traditional Jewish
references with the degradation of the immigrants’ fate in the city evokes the
immensity of their dislocation.
The two poems before the last descend into a despairing vision which fore
shadows with uncanny accuracy what is to come: a vision of skeletons begging with
outstretched hands, beards f luttering like ravens pecking up the last crumbs off the
70 Heather Valencia
street, and the poet’s foreboding that ‘fartik iz alts | Un fartilikt iz dayn “farsholtene
rase” ’ [everything is finished, | And annihilated is your ‘accursed race’] (Berliner
bleter, 2 (December 1931), 5). This last phrase is set in inverted commas and thereby
marked as Nazi terminology.
Stencl, however, felt the need to end the sonnets on a more positive note, and in
the final poem (Berliner bleter, 2 (December 1931), 6) the gloom of his vision gives
way to a utopian dream of an egalitarian society which will come after the struggles
are won:
Es vet dokh hobn geloynt der blutiker veg,
der gantser Got un gelt geyeg
far a velt on noyt, on ‘ikh’ un on ‘du’.
[It will have been worth treading the bloody path, | Enduring the hunt for God
and money, | For a world without need, without ‘I’ and ‘you’.]
Apart from this somewhat unconvincing final sonnet, the sequence of poems is
a dark and powerful counterbalance to the vision of an intact and fundamentally
harmonious world in Fisherdorf.
* * * * *
In February 1937 the celebrated critic Shmuel Niger published an article about
Stencl’s Funderheym. Niger laments the demise of Berlin as a great centre of Yiddish
culture, from which all the eastern European writers have now f led because of the
Nazi ‘plague’, apart from Stencl, whom he depicts as the heroic last Jewish poet in
Germany:
Only one Jewish poet, A. N. Stencl, has remained. Remained to guard the
ruins, just as the angel in The Fire Scroll guarded the last burning ember on
the destroyed tombstone. A. N. Stencl will not allow the f lame of Yiddish
creativity in Germany to be extinguished.31
Sadly, by the time Niger’s article appeared, Stencl too had been forced to f lee under
the protection of Christobel Fowler, an English Quaker who helped many Jews to
escape from Germany. Stencl’s departure truly marked the end of Berlin’s short but
vigorous f lowering as a Yiddish ‘city and mother in Israel’.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. Postcard in the Elisabeth Wöhler collection, Archiv Bibliographia Judaica, Frankfurt a. M.
(hereafter ABJ). Translations from German and Yiddish in this chapter are by the author apart
from those attributed to HBW/SW, which are taken from A. N. Stencl, All my Young Years:
Yiddish poetry from Weimar Germany, trans. by Haike Beruriah Wiegand and Stephen Watts
(Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2007). Page numbers of the Yiddish texts refer to the
original 1933 edition of Fisherdorf.
2. Jeffrey Grossman, ‘Far vos ignorirn di literatur-historiker A. N. Shtentslen?’, Oksforder yidish, 1
(1990), 92.
3. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 8 vols (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture Inc.,
1956–81), viii, ed. by Berl Kahan, Ezriel Naks, and Eloyhu Shulman (1981), p. 644.
4. Grossman, p. 92.
5. The phrase is used in the title of the chapter ‘Minor European Centers’, in Sol Liptzin, A History
of Yiddish Literature (Middle Village, NY: David, 1972), pp. 354–76.
6. A. N. Stencl, Loshn un lebn (Language and Life), February/March 1973, p. 23. This was the journal
produced by Stencl in London from 1940 until his death in 1983. His memoirs of the Berlin years
were published in the journal between 1967 and 1974.
7. A. N. Stenzel, ‘Was geh’n den Spitz die Gänse an?’, Zeitschrift der entschiedenen Schulreformer, [n.d.]
(ABJ), 204–06.
8. On Yiddish publishing in Weimar, see L. and R. Fuks, ‘Yiddish Publishing Activities in the
Weimar Republic, 1920–1933,’ Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 33 (1988), 417–34; Glenn Levine,
‘Yiddish Publishing Activities in Berlin and the Crisis in Eastern European Jewish Culture’,
Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 42 (1997), 85–108; Maria Kühn-Ludewig, Jiddische Bücher aus Berlin
(1918–1936), 2nd edn (Nümbrecht: Kirsch-Verlag, 2008).
9. Other twentieth-century Yiddish works which appeared in German translation were H. D.
Nomberg, Fliglman und andere Erzählungen und Bilder, trans. by Abraham Suhl (Leipzig, 1924);
Samuel Lewin, Chassidische Legende, trans. by Arno Nadel (Berlin: Rathenau und Horodisch,
[1925]); Samuel Lewin, Gesichte, trans. by Etta Federn-Kohlhaas (Berlin: Horodisch und Marx,
1928); David Bergelson, Das Ende vom Lied, trans. by Alexander Eliasberg (Berlin: Jüdischer
Verlag, 1923). Generally, the classics of Yiddish literature were much more popular in Weimar
Germany than modern texts (cf. Delphine Bechtel, La Renaissance culturelle juive en Europe centrale
et orientale, 1897–1930 (Paris: Belin, 2002), p. 121).
10. Loshn un lebn, February/March 1967, p. 35.
11. Gershom Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 60.
12. Moyshe Kulbak, Disner Tshayld Harold, in Moyshe Kulbak, Geklibene verk (New York: CYCO,
1953), p. 229.
13. A. Suhl, ‘A. N. Stenzel’, Leipziger Jüdische Zeitung, 10 February 1924, pp. 4–5.
14. Suhl, p. 4.
15. Suhl, p. 4.
16. Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish
Consciousness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 185.
17. See various newspaper cuttings, often unnamed and undated, in the Elisabeth Wöhler collection
in the ABJ.
18. According to Stencl, he first met Lasker-Schüler on the day of the poet David Frishman’s funeral
(he died on 4 August 1922). For a detailed depiction of the relationship between Lasker-Schüler
and Stencl, see my monograph Else Lasker-Schüler und Abraham Nochem Stenzel: Eine unbekannte
Freundschaft (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 1995).
19. Loshn un lebn, May/June 1968, p. 26. Jankl Adler was a Polish Jewish artist who later lived in
Glasgow and London.
20. Both works are in the Elisabeth Wöhler collection at the ABJ. Only one poem of the cycle
Meiner älteren Schwester, Einfalt is extant in Yiddish; it was published in the Berlin Poale Zion
journal Unzer bavegung, 17/18 (November 1922), 9. Another poem appeared in Suhl’s translation
in Die Weltbühne, 9 February 1926, p. 221. The two-part poem ‘Für Else Lasker-Schüler’ (‘For
Else Lasker-Schüler’) was translated by Elisabeth Wöhler and published in Ring des Saturn
(Berlin: Rabenpresse, 1930), in Anthologie als Alibi (Berlin: Rabenpresse, 1967), and in Else
Lasker-Schüler: Ein Buch zum 100. Geburtstag der Dichterin, ed. by Michael Schmid (Wuppertal:
Hammer, 1969), p. 226. Only the first part is extant in the original Yiddish in the Elisabeth
Wöhler collection at the ABJ.
21. ‘Wiederentdeckte Texte Else Lasker-Schülers III’, ed. by Margarete Kupper, Literaturwissenschaftliches
Jahrbuch der Görres-Gesellschaft, 8 (1967), 178.
22. A. N. Stencl, Un du bist Got (Leipzig: Shemesh Farlag, 1925); A. N. Stencl, Fundervaytns (Berlin:
Fürst, 1935).
23. A. N. Stencl, Funderheym (Berlin: Fürst, 1936).
24. A. N. Stencl, Mazl tole (Berlin: Fürst, 1935).
25. A. N. Stencl, 32. In darser vald baym yam (Berlin: Energiadruck, 1933).
26. A. N. Stencl, Tsvishn himl un erd (Berlin: Mass, 1936).
27. A. N. Stencl, Fisherdorf (Berlin: Energiadruck, 1933); A. N. Stencl, Mayn fisherdorf (Berlin: Fürst,
1935).
28. A. N. Stenzel, Fischerdorf, trans. by Etta Federn-Kohlhaas (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Kartell Lyrischer
72 Heather Valencia
Autoren, 1931). This phenomenon is also seen in the case of Shmuel Levin, whose literary life in
Berlin shows interesting parallels with Stencl’s (cf. Gennady Estraikh, ‘Shmuel Levin, a yidisher
shrayber farn daytshishn leyener’, Forverts, 28 November 2008, pp. 17–18).
29. Arnold Zweig, ‘Hinweis auf A. N. Stenzel’, foreword to Fischerdorf.
30. Loshn un lebn, July/August 1971, p. 26.
31. ‘A dikhter-grus fun Daytshland’, Frayer folksblat, 31 February 1937, p. 9. Megillat ha’esh (The Fire
Scroll) is a mystical prose poem in Hebrew by Khayim Nakhman Bialik, published around 1909;
Di fayer-megile, the Yiddish prose translation by Y. Y. Shvarts, was published in 1909.
Chapter 3
v
‘Like fires in overgrown forests’:

Moyshe Kulbak’s
Contemporary Berlin Poetics
Jordan Finkin
Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937), the talented Yiddish poet, novelist, and teacher, has
been a curiously little- and under-studied artist. This neglect offers us the oppor
tunity to add a ‘new’ and distinctive voice to the polyphony of the émigré com
munity in Berlin, a polyphony which grows louder with the increasing scholarly
interest in such communities in recent years. Though not altogether incorrect, it is
at least somewhat problematic to think of Berlin as a Yiddish literary ‘centre’. It is
true that in the Weimar period a relatively large number of Yiddish and Hebrew
writers passed through and sojourned there, some even for lengthy stays. Their
participation in cultural activities, both Jewish and non-Jewish, has been remarked
on regularly. The theatrical scene, for instance, was active — the arrival of the
Vilner Trupe, or Vilna Troupe, in 1921 is but one well-known example — and the
vibrant cafe life is noteworthy.1 Nevertheless, brilliant writers do not on their own
constitute a culture; and it is culture in the wider sense which sustains writers as
much as the reverse is true. The case of Kulbak is instructive because on the one
hand he clearly found aspects of Berlin stimulating, as we see in a letter written a
few months after arriving in Berlin: ‘Making a living is difficult for me; nevertheless
I will not leave Berlin. I study, and it pleases me greatly that nearly everything
interests me.’2 However, on the other hand, like some of his fellow expatriates,
his penury was constant and extreme. In a series of letters to the American critic
Shmuel Niger, Kulbak writes repeatedly for whatever assistance there may be for
his writing. On sending Niger his recently completed long poem (poema) Raysn
(Belarus), Kulbak writes: ‘I ask that I not be “exploited” for the poema, and maybe
it is possible that I be sent the honorarium when it is accepted (if it is accepted!) and
not when published? Every moment is expensive.’3 To make ends meet, one of his
steadiest jobs was as a prompter for the Vilna Troupe’s performances, to be sure not
a well-remunerated position.4
Whatever stimulation he found in Berlin, and whatever support was to be had
from Jewish community and philanthropic organizations (many of them German),
it was ultimately in eastern Europe where a Yiddish writer could not only make a
living around Yiddish literature — after moving to Vilna in 1923 (and to Minsk in
74 Jordan Finkin
1928) Kulbak would work as a beloved teacher at Yiddish schools and would lecture
on Yiddish literature — but also work as a writer. The Yiddish social, cultural, and
intellectual infrastructure actively supported by state funding, as Khone Shmeruk
has noted,
created for Yiddish literature and its writers unprecedented possibilities.
Neither in scope nor in effort could parallels be found in the centres of Yiddish
literature outside the Soviet Union. Indeed, the f lourishing of Yiddish cultural
activity in the Soviet Union attracted some highly competent men from abroad
and also brought back a large part of the Eygns [Kiev Culture League] writers,
as well as others including Kulbak.5 The future tragedies were beyond the horizon;
it seemed clear to many that the Soviet Union offered what Berlin could not.6
Despite Kulbak’s relatively short time in Berlin (about two years), and despite
his poverty and homesickness, his time in the city was productive. A play, a novel,
at least one long poem, and many shorter poems can all be counted among his
achievements while in Berlin. All of these are useful points of access to eastern
European Jewish life and Yiddish literary productivity in Berlin. However, each of
them highlights different aspects of Kulbak’s own experimental and idiosyncratic
style and take on Yiddish cultural life in Berlin. In selecting the texts in what
follows, I will focus only on poetry actually composed while in Berlin. (This means,
for example, paying less attention to the prose work Meshiekh ben-Efrayim (Messiah
Son of Ephraim), even though it was written in Berlin.) The core of my interest is
the volume Naye lider (New Poems, 1922), which is composed of three sections: lyric
poetry, the long poem Raysn, and the long poem Lamed-vov (Thirty-six, written
before Kulbak came to Berlin). I will largely confine myself to the lyric poems,
almost all of which were written during his time in the city. The fifteen poems of
the lyrical section are very different from one another in tone, genre, and formal
structure. Indeed, unlike many collections of this period, there seems to be little
structural rationale behind how the poems were included. Despite the great variety
in composition, there does however seem to be a kind of overall thematic coherence:
the valorization of nature as the site of true, authentic individual experience. That is
where the sensory world is deepest and most meaningful, and where the perceiver
is best able to make sense of his perceptions undiluted. The heterogeneity of the
forms and genres ref lects Kulbak’s experimentation with providing Yiddish with a
poetic diversity equal to the European literatures with which he was in increasing
contact in the metropolis. These short works offer among other things a fine-tuned
depiction of one poet’s means of escape from the city, rather than an exploration
of a bewildering new urban landscape. The focused question I have set myself here
is: what does it mean for a poet who built his reputation to some extent on urban
themes and images to write such profoundly non-urban poems while living in one
of the world’s largest metropolises, and what does that poetry actually look like?
Unlike many of the poets whose works have been dealt with in greater depth,
Kulbak defies the kinds of categorization generally applied to those other poets.
From almost the moment he began publishing Yiddish poems (he also experi
mented with Hebrew verse),7 his poetry was popular. A modernist, he fused
elements of expressionism with folk themes and images, often emphasizing his
Moyshe Kulbak’s Contemporary Berlin Poetics 75
Lithuanian dialect, along with puns and inventive sound-play. As Kenneth Moss
has noted, Kulbak was ‘one of his generation’s most creative manipulators of folk
sources and motifs in a modernist literary framework’.8 One of his most important
early works, and one which brought him critical acclaim among engagé intellectuals,
was the poema Di shtot (The City), fragments of which were first published in New
York in 1919, and which was published in full in an anthology in Vilna in 1920.
Showing his own ‘commit[ment] to revolutionary politics’,9 in strong expressionist
tones it depicts a great metropolis as it moves from sunset to sunrise. Yet as is typical
of Kulbak, the poem is as much about ambivalences as it is about praise of the
Revolution. Kulbak, who grew up in the town of Smorgon, near Vilna, and who
was familiar with its motley assortment of bear trainers and wood merchants,10 had
a lifelong attraction to nature and natural landscapes, forests, and farmland. The
tensions in Di shtot are between the idyllic calm of such places and the tumult and
clamour of the city, attractive as they may be in some ways.11
The bringing together of small town and big city — taking the geographically
discontinuous and making it literarily contiguous — is an important subtext in
these early works. On one hand we note the reminiscence of the poet Arn Leyeles
who says Kulbak’s poetry was characterized by the ‘joy of life’ (lebnslustikayt) and a
‘modern, big-city tone’.12 This reaction is based not only on the importance of Di
shtot but also on Leyeles’s situation as a Yiddish poet in and of New York who not
only lived there but also wrote some of the most sophisticated Yiddish poetry about
it. A more typical assessment describes Kulbak’s ‘earthiness’ (erdishkeyt),13 which,
again according to Leyeles, ‘is in particular really surprising. It is not abstract, but
remarkably concrete — bound to a particular place.’14 Kulbak’s rootedness in that
place is on full display in a letter to Niger from Berlin:
Vilna grows closer the further away it is. [...] When it’s a little more settled all
those who love it must return to it. I especially like Lamed-vov because in that
poema I am a true Vilnian. A Vilnian among Vilnians [a vilner shebevilner], and
all are Shmuel-Itse chimney-sweeps to me here. We, Vilnians.15
The confrontation with Berlin’s urban space seems almost inevitable.
This almost nostalgic view of himself is however more complicated. In citing his
own long poem, Lamed-vov (written before he moved to Berlin, but published in
Naye lider), he professes solidarity with the Shmuel-Itse chimney-sweep, referring to
the name of that poem’s protagonist. There Shmuel-Itse travels from town to town,
not in the city, plying his craft. So even the most Vilnian of characters is anything
but urban. Indeed, the poem’s action itself takes place as Shmuel-Itse wanders in
the forest one night. This state of wandering is a fairly consistent preoccupation
of Kulbak, certainly in this period; many poems are peopled by peripatetic souls,
out on the road, in a tavern, by the wayside, or in a forest. As the opening section
concludes: ‘Praised be the pious Jew who endures a wandering life!’ [Geloybt iz a
kosherer yid, vos geyt oprikhtn goles!].16 In Kulbak’s self-identification — ‘in that
poema I am a true Vilnian’ — we see the adoption of an autobiographical persona
which will also become, as I will return to later, a lyric persona.
Prior to Berlin, Kulbak’s experience of cities had been Vilna, Kaunas, and
Minsk. How much greater a fortiori must the shock have been on coming to
76 Jordan Finkin
Berlin, one of the largest cities in the world at the time.17 What is so intriguing is
that his Berlin lyrics (those of Naye lider) almost never deal directly with the city.
To be sure, almost a decade after he left Berlin he would write the famous poema
Disner Tshayld Harold (Childe Harold of Disna), which is explicitly indexed to Berlin
geography, including references to a large number of specific places in the city.
That was at a time when the memory of his experiences had had a chance to settle.
The lyrics from the years when he was physically present in Berlin are decidedly
non-urban. In his discussion of traditional literary representations of the shtetl, Israel
Bartal notes:
The tendency to reduce the size of the Jewish town, a tendency that gains
momentum as it turns from a real historical venue into a mythical site, is found
both in literature and in the nostalgic collective memory. The miniaturization
of the Jewish urban entity makes it possible to present a world that is simpler,
more homogeneous, and more Jewish.18
Kulbak for his part figuratively reconstitutes his familiar geography on foreign soil.
However, his native experience of shtetls and cities has been so miniaturized as to be
minuscule or non-existent. The disorientation of Berlin seems to have occasioned
a reorientation of his creative, and re-creative, geography. To be sure, not every
absence is a presence. Yet in this case, the fact that we do have an observant record
of that very city in an important later work makes the absence of the trottoirs and
tramways from earlier ones noteworthy.
Up to and during his time in Berlin Kulbak was not given to writing program
matic or essayistic works. As he himself notes, replying to Shmuel Niger’s apparent
suggestion that he should submit articles to a newspaper for pay, ‘Your proposal that
I should send articles to [the New York daily] Tog would be good if I knew the work
[involved in writing such articles]. I write an article once in a long while. One of
these days I’ll send Tog an article.’19 This admission notwithstanding, he did write
one important essay which has subsequently been collected and reprinted several
times. The essay ‘Dos yidishe vort’ (‘The Yiddish Word’) was published originally
in 1918 in the New York journal Veker (The Awakener).20 In it Kulbak tries to give
an account of modern Yiddish literature, a sense of its historical innovations and
what he calls its primary ‘styles’, as well as an indication of where it has yet to go.
Implicit of course is his own place in that structure.
In effect, Kulbak’s reading of modern (and contemporary) Yiddish literature is
that it has undergone three primary moments of ‘polishing’ (shleyfn): (1) Mendele’s
creation of an epic style (‘R. Mendele created the first epic style in the mother-
tongue. Yiddish received its first internal aesthetic reconstruction’),21 which Kulbak
also attributed in a different way to David Bergelson, another Berlin émigré; (2)
Yitskhok Leybush Peretz’s creation of a lyrical style (‘Yiddish was tested for a second
time by Peretz as earlier by Mendele, and also for the second time it endured the
trial. Peretz created the first lyrical style in Yiddish’);22 and (3) a nascent trend of
‘tenderness’ (tsertlekhkeyt) typical of Sholem Asch and David Eynhorn. Knowing
his positive appraisal of each of these, I believe that what we find in Naye lider is
Kulbak’s first attempt not exactly to synthesize the three elements, but to layer them
together in a single multivalent work. In this way, for example, the short poems
are lyrical, and Raysn is epic in a way which makes heroes out of working men and
farmers — in the words of one analysis: ‘He forges classical heroes out of everyday
village Jews who, according to Abraham Reisen, “exude the raw, redolent scent of
fields, forests, and rivers”.’ 23 All of these are then bound together by precisely that
tenderness he shows for his native elements.
The lyrical pieces and Raysn offer the f lipside of Kulbak’s previous urban poetics,
namely that of The City. In presenting the city’s dynamic changes in the move
from night to dawn, the primary thematic axis in that poem is temporal. For Naye
lider, spatial or locative orientation is dominant. Particularly in Raysn, though not
exclusively so, the people, places, colours, sounds, and smells of his native White
Russia are evocatively recreated in detail (and in dialect). Overall, the thematic
material is additive: work (an extended family of Jewish peasants in the lumber
trade, rafting their wares down the Nieman River) and nature combine to paint a
portrait of men and women at one with nature by means of their life and labour. It
is described frankly as a hard life, but a life which is in its way frank and free. The
spatial orientation of the poem is emphasized by David Roskies in a discussion of
the landkentenish movement:
This know-your-land movement contributed a profound sense of place to the
stories told by Polish Yiddish writers. Moyshe Kulbak, for one, turned White
Russia into the semilegendary meeting ground of Slavic paganism, popular
Christianity, Jewish muscle, and Jewish messianic dreams. He did it in a long
narrative poem about Jewish rafters on the Nieman River (1922) [...]. What
better way for this revolutionary cadre of east European Jewish writers to
decenter the universe than to invent a newly grounded landscape?24
Kulbak’s landscape was not exactly ‘newly grounded’; rather, he sought to reground
his work in non-urban soil, an antidote to a disorientation deeply felt. One can
understand in this context the attraction of the sounds of his home dialect.
Connected to this comforting sound landscape, in his essay ‘Dos yidishe vort’,
is the central position he gives to the folk song ( folkslid) as a reservoir not only of
linguistic creativity but also of the very spirit of the literature. It is no accident
that his Lithuanian dialect comes to the fore so often and that Slavicisms tend to
recur.25 This is certainly the case in Naye lider. To Kulbak’s mind the folk song is
in essence the raw material for the language of literature, certainly for poetry; it is
a language which the ‘folks-gayst’ [folk-spirit] works on and which ‘vert geshlifn
umbavustzinik’ [is unconsciously polished] by it.26
Naye lider opens with the poem ‘Ikh bin a bokher a hultay’ (‘I am a lad, a rogue’).
Outwardly it is a folk song, composed of five four-line rhymed stanzas (abab), in
Lithuanian dialect; and not only are there significant Slavicisms but even a whole
line in another language. (In fact, in a collection of Kulbak’s works published in
1976, this poem appears with music.27)
Ikh bin a bokher a hultay
hob ikh mir a shtekn,
tray-ray-ray, ray-ray-ray
kh’shpan in alde ekn.
78 Jordan Finkin
kum ikh tsu a kretshme tsu

klap ikh on in toyer,
‘ver bistu? ver bistu?’
entfer ikh: a geyer.
— leydikgeyer azoy fri!
khutspenik farshayter ...
tri-li-li, tri-li-li
un ikh gey mir vayter.
kum ikh tsu a brunem tsu
kh’trink zikh on mit vaser,
shtey ikh in dem morgn-groy,
vi a hon a naser ...
fort a poyerl farbay:
‘tso tshibatsh na svetshye?’
veys ikh nisht un tu a bray:
svetshye? — petshe metshe ...28
[I am a lad, a rogue | So I’ve got me a stick, | Tray-ray-ray, tray-ray-ray | I
stride in every far-f lung place.
So I come to a tavern | I knock on the gate, | ‘Who are you? Who are
you?’ | I answer: a wanderer.
— An idler so early! | Licentious insolent person ... | Tri-li-li, tri-li-li |
And I go further on my way.
So I come to a well | I drink my fill of water, | I stand in the morning-
grey, | Like a wet rooster ...
A little farmer drives by: | ‘What does one hear of the world?’ | I don’t
know and start to chat: | World? — petshe metshe ...]
Considering these folk-song elements — especially in light of the forceful position
Kulbak takes in ‘Dos yidishe vort’– including the centrality of the ‘I’ (ikh) not only
as the first word but throughout the poem, as well as the adoption of this particular
‘roguish’ identity, I would argue that, as the very first poem of the collection, this
functions as a kind of manifesto. The use of this kind of introductory credo in the
voice of an outspoken persona is not unheard of in this period. In a similar fashion
Kulbak’s contemporary poet Peretz Markish opens his first volume of poems (Shveln
(Thresholds, 1919)) with a thematic manifesto, ‘Ikh zegn zikh mit dir’ (‘I take my
leave of you’),29 which sets out Markish’s philosophy of ‘nowness’ (atsindikayt).
Unlike the temporal layering of Markish’s manifesto, Kulbak’s is squarely locative,
marking out-of-the-way places and their inhabitants. These locations include the
inn or tavern, the well, and the road with its little farmer. In so many of these
poems of Kulbak, temporality is displaced by spatiality, both dynamic and static.
Among the many things for which the poetry of Kulbak’s Berlin period is notable
is the recycling and permuting of a set of themes and images. The novel Meshiekh
ben Efrayim, an enigmatic work set in the White Russian woods, in many ways reads
as a novelistic elaboration in poetic language of the poem Lamed-vov, especially
given their shared interest in the image of the lamedvovnik (the thirty-six righteous
people for the sake of whose goodness the world is maintained), whose modesty and
anonymity resonate with Kulbak’s own fascination with simple honest folk doing
simple honest work (itself the primary image of Raysn). At one point in the novel
the strange itinerant ‘philosopher’ Gimpele passes along the road, and the song in
his habitually tuneful mouth is precisely this poem, ‘I am a lad, a rogue’. In this
context the poem is actually presented as a folk song and displays the versatility in
which Kulbak puts great stock in ‘Dos yidishe vort’. What is more, the contact zone
between lyricism and folk creativity is further demarcated by a description of one
of the down-on-his-luck characters in Meshiekh ben-Efrayim:
Simkhe plakhte geyt in dem vald dem hilkhikn, di hent farleygt af hintn.
dem kop ufgehoybn.
un er tralalayket tsu.
un er tsimblt mit der tsung.
un er bomblt mit di fis.
tralala un tralala!
der yid hot nit gevust fun keyn bushe.
otazoy hot er gelebt aleyn in vald. 30
[Simkhe Plakhte enters the echoing forest, his hands crossed behind him. | His
head lifted up. | And he tra-la-las. | And he makes noises with his tongue. |
And he dangles his feet. | Tra-la-la and tra-la-la! | The Jew knew no shame. |
Thus he lived alone in the forest.]
The slippage between the two — that is, the tri-li-li of the rogue and the tra-la-la of
Simkhe Plakhte, so to speak — is the difference between independence and solitude.
What they share is the primacy of individual lyrical (or musical) expression.
It is thus safe to say that just as important as the locations is the nature of the
characters who populate them, or who come into contact, however transiently, with
them. The self-defined persona of the geyer (wanderer) encountered in ‘I am a lad,
a rogue’ is one of the early permutations of Kulbak’s fascination with peripatetic
or marginal types. The tavern-keeper’s automatic linguistic conversion of geyer
into leydikgeyer (‘idler’), of movement into stasis, and thus of positive self-definition
into pejorative socially imposed category, is the stif ling inertia which the rogue’s
persona is meant to combat. Indeed, if the social setting of a wayside tavern can so
frustrate the ideal of free self-definition Kulbak cherishes, how much more stif ling
a fortiori is a metropolis likely to have been.
We do encounter however other characters than the rogue or wanderer. There
are, for example, also the denizens of the tavern. The tavern scene will recur later
in Naye lider with the poem ‘In shenk’ (‘In the tavern’), the importance of which
resonates with other famous tavern scenes in Yiddish and Jewish eastern European
literature.31 In Kulbak’s ‘In the tavern’ we find the following stanza:
In vinkl aleyn bay a tish iz a geyer gezesn,
geshvign, geshoklt zikh koym un gemurmlt on verter:
o, zogt mir, ver hot mikh in ergets a shenkl fargesn,
kh’darf zitsn baym leydikn tish nor ikh veys nit tsuvos,
mistome geyt um mayn bevorer in andere erter,
mistome bin ikh do a shotn — farlorn fun zayn balebos ... lekhayim!
a khevre hultayes fartrinken dos bisele tsayt, lekhayim
shikurim faryogt un fartribn fun got un fun layt, lekhayim!32
80 Jordan Finkin
[Alone at a table in the corner a wanderer sits, | Silent, hardly shaking, and
murmuring without words: | Oh, tell me, who forgot me somewhere in a little
tavern, | I must sit at the empty table and I don’t know why, | My protector is
probably walking about in other places, | Here I am probably a shadow — lost
by his master ... to life! | A group of rogues passing a little time in drink, to
life! | Drunkards chased and driven away by God and men, to life!]
Kulbak ventriloquizes his own anxieties through the persona of the geyer which
he adopted for himself in the folk-song manifesto ‘I am a lad, a rogue’. Here the
‘wanderer sits’, that is, he is static, made into the dreaded idler. And as the coup de
grâce in this humiliation, the wanderer’s status as ‘rogue’ has been decoupled from
him and applied to others at a separate table in the tavern. His own self-definition
therefore cannot hold. This is one of the dangers of the margins (and, as we will
see, Berlin was for Kulbak a city on the periphery of his chosen world). The list
of Kulbak’s characters on the margins also contains the Childe Harold figure and
the lyulkeman (man with a pipe) in Disner Tshayld Harold, and the highwaymen and
brigand figures from the story ‘Bunye un berye afn shlyakh’ (‘Bunye and Berye on
the Road’, 1927) and the play Boytre gazlen (Boytre the Robber, 1936).33 That Kulbak
was himself a geyer in Berlin makes the statement resonate that much more.
The complicated identity Kulbak chooses, the ‘rogue’ (hultay), takes on a different
hue under Kulbak’s lamp. As Shmuel Rozhanski notes, ‘the hultay that Kulbak
celebrates in song is not a hefker-yung, but rather a happy lad who does not want to
embitter his life. He can “get drunk” on a drink of water.’34 (The implications of
this attempt at happiness are, as we were given a taste of in the tavern, far less free
and easy.) The hefker-yung is a licentious youth, but, more importantly for the time
and place in which Kulbak was writing, a reference to the kind of poetic identity
chosen, for example, by Markish; this identity is that of the utterly free and carefree
new man whose sense of freedom is concentrated in the word hefker (‘licentious,
let loose’; this word is ultimately derived from the rabbinic term for chattels whose
ownership cannot be determined). In another manifesto-like poem (Markish was
fond of the genre), whose themes connect directly with the poem ‘Ikh zegn zikh
mit dir’ mentioned earlier, Markish’s persona cries out ‘kh’bin hef ker’ [I am hefker]
and expresses his desire for his hands to ‘derlangen zey di velt fun eyn ek bizn
tsveytn’ [smack the world from one end to the other].35 This is an assertive sense of
freedom, which one contemporary critic unf latteringly called ‘barbaric’.36 Kulbak’s
sense of freedom, however, is f leeting, retreating. His response to the world is not
a slap but rather to sing ‘tri-li-li’ and go on his way. The test comes when that way
is blocked by a city.
In this context the manifesto is effective as a beginning to Naye lider. In a sense,
Kulbak positions Berlin as the diasporic way station par excellence to test out the
ideas of the poem ‘I am a lad, a rogue’, not as one might expect by describing the
contact between wanderer and the city but rather by eliding it altogether. The city
might as well be the tavern. Shmuel Rozhanski lists two typical Kulbakian motifs:
‘vanderlust, heymvey’ [wanderlust and homesickness].37 This comment points out
one of the foci of Kulbak’s poetic interest, namely the inherent and often painful
or dispiriting tension between these two themes. While his biographical wanderlust
may have found expression in his Berlin sojourn, it was a lyrical homesickness
which was translated into a far different set of creative images.
The lyrical section of Naye lider contains some fifteen poems. In what follows I
propose to focus on a few themes and how they function in this scheme of structured
tensions. As I have noted several times, there is an immediately noticeable absence
of urban spaces from these poems. In fact, human habitation in general is sparsely
represented. As we have seen, the poem ‘In the tavern’ is set in a tavern, yet this
seems not to be of the urban variety, but rather somewhere on the road. The only
arguably urban scene is found in ‘A bal’ (‘A ball’) with its hall, orchestra, and richly
dressed dancers. In this scene, however, the people are presented as mute and
mechanical, and in this way inhuman, whereas the instruments of the orchestra
become themselves the organs of speech.
Apart from this scene, there is only one explicit mention of cities. The poem
‘Hengt aroys di shvartse fonen’ (‘Hang out the black banners’) is an expressionist
evocation of revolutionary sloganeering and menace, dense with thematic and
sound patterning. In the middle stanza we read the lines:
In khoyshekhnish fargosn, shtum, farshtsemete in vey,
aroys af shtet un felder,
shtum!
shtum!
shtum!
zol brenen tif in hartsn der geshrey,
vi sreyfes in farvaksene velder ...38
[Poured out into darkness, mute, clenched in pain, | Out upon cities and fields,
| Mute! | Mute! | Mute! | The scream shall burn deep in your heart | Like
fires in overgrown forests ...]
This is the only place where the word ‘city’ occurs. In linking it so concretely to
‘fields’ Kulbak connects the two poles of his poetic landscape. As was mentioned
earlier, his poema Di shtot was also a revolutionarily oriented work, full of both
defiance and ambivalence. Those ambivalences are just as strongly felt here. The
dramatic pairing up of muteness with screaming — a very loud silence — is one of
many powerful deformations of sensory perception (a technique I will return to in a
moment). What is revolutionary for Kulbak is sometimes as aesthetic as it is political.
The effect in this stanza is heightened by the orchestration of fricative and sibilant
sounds in order to produce a synaesthetic sound of silence. This is encapsulated in
Kulbak’s use of the unusual word khoyshekhnish, ‘darkness’. The word khoyshekh on
its own means ‘darkness’, but here it has been ‘fattened-up’ by analogy with the
much more common and unmarked word for darkness, finsternish.39 This phonetic
‘fattening’ is augmented by a semantic one: khoyshekh is also the Hebrew word for
the plague of darkness which aff licted the Egyptians in Exodus. This association,
along with the blackness of the banners, the pain, and the abundance of sibilant
sounds, make this call for ‘silence’ an ominous command indeed.40
The setting, directness, and harshness of ‘Hang out the black banners’ make it
stand apart from the other poems. The majority of the other lyrics are located in
natural settings or involve an inventory of natural images; and beyond that, for
82 Jordan Finkin
Kulbak nature becomes the primary metaphorical nexus for understanding not only
the self but also language. By foregrounding nature, Kulbak further emphasizes the
primary spatial orientation of these poems. An instructive example is the book’s
second poem, ‘A levone-nakht’ (‘A moonlit night’):
In vayter shtilkayt shvimt di malkes-shvo,
es finklen in der nakht der kiler ire shleyern —
khaloymes fun dem himl-blo ...
un opgeloshene levone-likht
trift zaftik-kil
af yedn derfele, vos dremlt indershtil ...
un s’rirt zikh um a veykher shtral,
vos bindt tsunoyf:
dos hindele in hoyf,
dos fishele in zayn geveser,
un s’vayse lemele in shtal —
in vayter shtilkayt shvimt di malkes-shvo
fun ire tsiterdike mirml-shleser ...41
[In the distant stillness f loats the Queen of Sheba, | Her veils sparkle in the
cool night — | Dreams of the sky-blue ...
And extinguished moon-light | Drips juicily-cool | Upon every little
village that dozes silently ...
And a soft beam moves around, | Binding together: | The little dog in the
yard,
The little fish in his pool, | And the little white lamb in the stable —
In the distant stillness f loats the Queen of Sheba | From her trembling
marble-castles ...]
Kulbak again recreates non-urban realities while living in the urban sphere. The
scene presents incompatible sensory data — for instance, extinguished moonlight
cannot shine — which disturbs our expectations about the natural world and our
perception of it. It is as if Kulbak wants to highlight the irreality of nature, and
of village life, in the city. Ultimately, the dominant reverie of the poem is the
‘trembling marble-castles’ f loating in the sky. As in the Soviet Yiddish poet Ezra
Fininberg’s image of the ‘mirml-heym’ [marble-home],42 Kulbak too imports the
connotation of something at once refined and expensive, as well as a link to the
distant classical past. Very early in Kulbak’s essay ‘Dos yidishe vort’, he moves in
rapid succession from the importance of a new Yiddish translation of Homer’s Iliad
to the particular refinement which characterizes the folk song.43 This contiguity
(not to mention seeming incongruity) is not fortuitous; it is reconfigured in this
poem as the binding property of the moonbeam, harnessing nature to culture.
Implicit, then, in the connection between the essay and how he formulates its ideas
in the poem is the poet’s own relationship to language, something which is at once
organic and polished by culture.
The two primary features I have just described — the image of nature and
the incompatibility of sensory data — are themselves permuted and reconfigured
throughout the rest of the book. Central to this strategy is the poem ‘Di heyl’ (‘The
cave’). Loaded with strange sensory combinations, including unusual synaesthesia,

it depicts on the surface level a solitary individual ‘I’, here an image of the poet,
wandering in nature. At the core of its regularly rhymed stanzas are two sections,
one characterized by upward motion, where the poet climbs up the mountain, and
the other characterized by downward motion, where he descends into a cave. In
the first part we are met with the increasingly familiar lyricism of the natural, in
response to which:
Kh’hob oysgeshrien: hert, kh’bin ayer zinger!
es hobn zikh tseklogt in vald di robn,
‘du narish-trop!’ hot oysgebrumt a heyl.44
[I cried out: Hear, I am your singer! | The crows have wept in the forest, |
‘You fool!’ a cave bellowed out.]
This is not the poet (‘singer’) as prophet but as the reverse, the ostensible voicer of
the voiceless; this is not a revelation of God to man, but of nature to itself. However,
from the mouth of a cave the response is ambiguously either the response of nature
itself or the distorted echo of the poet’s own voice in the cavernous space. A singer
becomes a fool.
In Lamed-vov Shmuel-Itse wanders the forest at night. On coming across an oak-
shaded well he peers into its moonlit depths. ‘Un s’brumt aroys a shvere shtim fun
grunt fun brunen: | — her, ver bistu, briye?’ [And a stern voice booms from the
bottom of the well: | Who are you, creature?].45 In this case it turns out that the
well disgorges the devil Sammael. There is an overall parity between the scene in
‘The cave’ and the one in Lamed-vov; the primary difference is the fact that the voice
in ‘The cave’ is the poet’s own voice rather than that of the demon. There is a trend
in modernist cityscapes to accompany the city’s vertical architectural ascent with
a figurative infernal descent. Whether ‘The cave’ has any of the demonic tones of
Lamed-vov can be debated. Nevertheless, the image of the cave offers a tantalizing
inversion of a city’s upward trajectory.
In ‘The cave’, the poet next descends into the echoing cavern:
Ikh bin aropgekrokhn shtilerheyt in grobn,
groys un finster. s’finklen in der nakht di shteyner ...
ikh hob dem kop arayngeshtekt in heyl. gezen ... derzen —
s’hot mir a ker geton dos harts a temper bren:
‘es darf di heyl mikh hobn! ...’ 46
[I crept down silently into the holes, | Great and dark. The stones sparkle in
the night ... | I stuck my head into the cave. Saw ... Perceived — | My heart
spun me with a dull burning: | ‘The cave must have me! ...’.]
Where above ground the primary sensory medium is auditory, below ground it
is visual. There is clear irony in using visual perception in a cave at night. In this
instance the metaphors Kulbak deploys are experiments with a figurative vocab
ulary, a vocabulary which is minutely attuned to ambiguity, confusion, disorient
ation, anxiety, to ‘wanderlust and homesickness’.
A similar interplay between nature and the sensory world can be found in the
poem ‘Shtumkayt’ (‘Silence’). The ‘I’ of the poem sits in the silence of his room,
84 Jordan Finkin
with an old piano standing as a sign of culture. The speaker, however, imports only
the images of nature to deal with his loneliness. The silence he perceives — and
one should note that this poem comes immediately after the ‘loud’ call for silence
of the poem ‘Hang out the black banners’ — is likened to ‘a mokhike shteyn’ [a
mossy stone].47 Moss (mokh) recurs in at least four lyric poems in this collection,48
making it a noticeable element in the poet’s lyric inventory. For Kulbak it is an
emblem of the natural world. Even more than that, it becomes a kind of natural
force, representing the temporal stasis of nature; that is to say, an object needs to be
still long enough for moss to grow on it. This is the natural corrective to the whirl
of the city, and to the gloom or sorrow of solitude in the room.49
In Raysn Kulbak pairs the stilling force of moss with other natural phenomena.
In the case of the poema’s sixth section — ‘Der feter avrom pashet di ferd’ (‘Uncle
Abraham feeds the horses’) — the night-time sky becomes the playground for
strange events which are ref lected and inverted in the mundane terrestrial activity
of grazing horses. In this case a troupe of stars sparkles in the radiance of the moon,
and one of them stands out in its green brightness.
Nor plutsling dos shterndl hot zikh gegebn a tsapl
a f li dan geton inem bloyen geveb fun di shtraln
azoy vi a funk f lit aroys fun a bloyen shvartsapl ...
in mokhikn vald iz der shtern aruntergeforn.50
[But suddenly that little star gave a start | Flying into the blue web of the rays
of light | Just as a spark f lies forth from a blue pupil ... | Down into the mossy
forest the star fell.]
The deformations of reality caused by Uncle Abraham’s drowsy night reveries are
described as unexpected sensory data similar to what we saw in ‘The cave’. The
palette of yellows, blues, and greens adds an eerie glow to this highly visual scene.
It is light which enters the eye to allow sight. In this scene, however, the strange
motion of a supposedly fixed luminary is likened to light (a spark) leaving the eye.
This apparent impossibility is highlighted by the ‘blue pupil’. Pupils of course are
not blue; they are black. In fact, the word for pupil in Yiddish translates literally as
‘black-apple’, thus making a ‘blue black-apple’ into a startling image. However, in
this transgressive cosmology a green star in the yellow light of the moon turns what
is black blue. It is all f leeting, though. These dynamic optical illusions are quenched
by the ‘mossy forest’ into which they disappear. Once again, moss is the force of
stasis and balance. And the human witness is again left alone.
In the poem ‘Silence’, the poet continues:
Kh’zits finster-aleyn. mayn onheyb iz lang mitn khoyshekh tsuzamengegosn,
mayn sof hot bay mir zikh in brust, vi a loyterer tog oysgeloshn,
un ikh bin fun epes a shtumkayt a groyser geborn gevorn ...51
[I sit darkly alone. My beginning is poured together for a long time with the
darkness, | My end has been extinguished in my breast like a bright day, | And
from some kind of a great silence I was born ...]
In this poem, we see that the ‘I’ is dominated by visual metaphors, while the
env ironment is largely an auditory one. These two poems (‘The cave’ and ‘Silence’),
then, show how Kulbak experiments with metaphorical inventory in order to

describe with precision not the world and nature as such, but his own perception
of it, his own insight. In choosing his particular spatial parameters, Kulbak seeks to
limit the power of the city.
Because of the acclaim for Di shtot, a share of whose success was connected
to its outspokenly metropolitan thematics — a success it should be noted among
intellectuals whose own experiences were largely urban — Kulbak would surely
have recognized the commercial potential of capitalizing on this now Kulbakian
theme. (Remember, it was no less than Leyeles who noted Kulbak’s ‘modern,
big-city tone’.) This was, after all, a time when he was by his own admission
oppressively poor. His near-obsessive rural or natural turn in this period, and
especially in this lyrical material, needs to be accounted for; this essay has sought
to provide a preliminary sketch of such an account. To maintain that focus on the
natural while living in one of the world’s largest metropolises at the time, a city
which would have offered limitless poetic potential to as sensitive and perceptive
a writer as Kulbak, cannot but have taken an active and concerted effort. This
latter part of my argument, namely that Kulbak was trying in some way to ‘limit
the power of the city’ is admittedly speculative. The gaping absence of big-city
imagery however is far too noticeable to ignore. As Rachel Rubinstein has noted,
it is not untoward to labour under ‘the conviction that absences, silences, and gaps
are important shapers of meaning, and that what a text seems to suppress can in turn
become a reigning textual logic’.52
That being said, the absence of the urban, though palpable, is not the ‘reigning
textual logic’ of this corpus; it serves a different function. We have noted far too
many shared positive features in these poems for that to be the case. Instead, the
naturalism, folklorism, synaesthesia, to name just a few of these notable features,
are set in sharper relief by that absence. As a simple example, take the notable
Kulbakian theme of wandering (which he shared to some degree with others,
including Markish and Hofstein). Cities are peripheral to the sustaining nature of
the wandering of such figures as the lad/rogue or the various other geyers in the
lyrics, Shmuel-Itse in Lamed-vov, the numerous characters in Meshiekh ben-Efrayim, or
eventually the heroes of ‘Bunye un berye afn shlyakh’ (1927). Even one of Kulbak’s
more famous wanderers, the protagonist of Disner Tshayld Harold, whose wandering
does bring him to a city, offers a critique of the city and therefore provides a tonal
counterpart to the lad/rogue’s far more positive appraisal of wandering.
Beyond these images of the wanderer, taking up those other nascent positive
poetic impulses we have seen played out in the foregoing, Kulbak would go on to
draw out these images and impulses simultaneously in several directions (most often
in various combinations): his high modernism (expressionism) dominant in Disner
Tshayld Harold; his folklorism, mysticism, and symbolism in Meshiekh ben-Efrayim;
his long-line lyricism in an almost direct path from Raysn to one of his most famous
poetic sequences, Vilne (Vilna, 1926). The latter is important for many reasons, not
least of which for the present purpose is the fact that it shows Kulbak’s willingness
and ability to employ an urban poetics, in this case specifically about a city in which
he was living at the time he wrote the poems. This casts into even sharper relief
86 Jordan Finkin
how, using substantially similar if not the same resources, his Berlin poetics distilled
a remarkably different set of experiences.
The foregoing raises more questions than it answers. For a fuller understanding of
these works far more needs to be explored, not only clearly about Kulbak, but also
about the connection between the Yiddish literary community and other groups of
writers as well as other literatures. The example of Kulbak and his specific poetics
of this brief period must be fitted into our understanding of a Jewish outsider’s
experience of Berlin. Given the absence of cities from the poems themselves, this
erasure of the metropolis can give us some insight into both the positive and the
negative power of that experience. Kulbak’s own retrospective appraisal in Disner
Tshayld Harold will ultimately need to be included in this analysis. For the moment,
Kulbak’s contemporary disorientation and dislocation, and the nuances of his
particularly spatialized poetic response, offer the cautionary tale of the magnetic
pull of the city.
Notes to Chapter 3
1. See, for example, Gennady Estraikh, ‘Vilna on the Spree: Yiddish in Weimar Berlin’, Aschkenas,
16 (2006), 112–16; Shachar Pinsker, ‘Ahavnu me’od she’ot he-ashan be-vatei ha-kahvah: Ve-ha-
ra’ash, ha-ra’ash bi-khrakhim!’, Haaretz, <www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArtPE.jhtml?item
No=986340&contrassID=2&subContrassID=5&sbSubContrassID=0> [accessed 24 May 2008].
2. Letter of 17 December 1920, in Moyshe Kulbak, ‘Finf briv fun m. Kulbak tsu Sh. Nigern’,
Sovetish heymland, 21 (1981), 101. Translations in this chapter are by the author unless otherwise
specified.
3. Letter of 27 November 1921, in Moyshe Kulbak, ‘Finf briv’, p. 102.
4. Estraikh, p. 117.
5. Chone Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Literature in the U.S.S.R.’, in The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917, ed.
by Lionel Kochan, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 244.
6. See David Bergelson, ‘Dray tsentern (kharakteristik)’, In shpan, 1 (April 1926), 84–96.
7. Moyshe Kulbak, ‘Umbakante lider in yidish un hebreish’, Di goldene keyt, 27 (1957), 191–201.
8. Kenneth B. Moss, ‘Not The Dybbuk but Don Quixote: Translation, Deparochialization, and
Nationalism in Jewish Culture, 1917–1919’, in Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe,
ed. by Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2008), p. 215.
9. Robert Adler Peckerar and Aaron Rubinstein, ‘Moyshe Kulbak’, in Writers in Yiddish, ed. by
Joseph Sherman, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 333 ([Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007]), p. 122.
10. Peckerar and Rubinstein, p. 123.
11. See Jordan Finkin, ‘The Lighter Side of Babel: Peretz Markish’s Urban Poetics’ (forthcoming).
12. Arn Leyeles, ‘Moyshe Kulbak’, in Moyshe Kulbak, Oysgeklibene shriftn, ed. by Shmuel Rozhanski
(Buenos Aires: Ateneo Literario en el IWO, 1976), p. 305.
13. Peckerar and Rubinstein, p. 124 (citing Zalmen Reyzen) and p. 125 , where the authors refer to
a ‘Kulbak-style philosophy of earthiness, which sings the praises of the physical, the mundane,
and the body’.
14. Leyeles, pp. 306–07.
15. Letter of 17 December 1920, in Kulbak, ‘Finf briv’, p. 102.
16. Moyshe Kulbak, Naye lider (Warsaw: Farlag Kultur-Lige, 1922), p. 48.
17. Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. by Richard
Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), p. 181: ‘A symbolic moment occurred in 1920,
when, with the creation of metropolitan “Greater Berlin” as an administrative entity, the city’s
population became 4.3 million, making it the third largest in the world after New York and
London.’
18. Israel Bartal, ‘Imagined Geography: The Shtetl, Myth, and Reality’, in The Shtetl: New
Evaluations, ed. by Steven T. Katz (New York: New York University Press, 2007), pp. 188–89.
19. Letter of 17 December 1920, in Kulbak, ‘Finf briv’, p. 101.
20. See Moyshe Kulbak, ‘Dos yidishe vort’, in Kulbak, Oysgeklibene shriftn, pp. 298–304; Moyshe
Kulbak, ‘Dos yidishe vort’, Sovetish heymland, 21 (1981), 97–100 (subsequent references will be
given to this version).
21. Kulbak, ‘Dos yidishe vort’, p. 98.
22. Kulbak, ‘Dos yidishe vort’, p. 99; emphasis in original.
23. Peckerar and Rubinstein, p. 125.
24. David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge: Harvard
25. Leyeles, p. 307.
26. Kulbak, ‘Dos yidishe vort’, pp. 97–98.
27. Kulbak, Oysgeklibene shriftn, p. 31.
28. Kulbak, Naye lider, p. 7.
29. Peretz Markish, Shveln (Kiev: Idisher Folks Farlag, 1919), p. 5.
30. Moyshe Kulbak, Meshiekh ben-Efrayim (Berlin: Wostok, 1924), p. 24.
31. Jeremy Dauber reminds us of the importance of taverns (focusing on the detail of the Baal
Shem Tov’s having been a tavern-keeper at one point) as markers of narrativity. Jeremy Dauber,
‘Looking Again: Representation in Nineteenth-Century Yiddish Literature’, Prooftexts, 25
(2005), 279–80.
33. Astrid Starck, ‘Cross-cultural Relationships and Their Impact on Literary Production: The
Brigand Character in Kulbak’s Work’, paper given at the First Heidelberg International
Conference in Modern Yiddish Studies (‘Yiddish Poets and the Soviet Union: 1917–1948’),
Hochschule für Jüdische Studien, Heidelberg, 1–3 December 2008.
34. Shmuel Rozhanski, ‘Moyshe Kulbak, der bazinger fun primitiver erdishkayt un yidishn mitos’,
in Kulbak, Oysgeklibene shriftn, p. 12.
35. Markish, pp. 23–24; see Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary
Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 202–08. The translations of the
phrases are from Kronfeld.
36. Nokhum Oyslender, Veg ayn — veg oys (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1924), pp. 112–13.
37. Rozhanski, p. 12.
39. In Lamed-vov, too, the word appears, except that while elsewhere in the poem the word finstern
ish is used, khoyshekhnish is said by Sammael, the demon king, making it even more ominous
(Kulbak, Naye lider, p. 57).
40. It is tempting to hear in the exclamation ‘Mute!’ Kulbak’s own averred frustration at the poor
pace of his acquisition of German as an impediment to his desired university matriculation in
Berlin.
42. See Ezra Fininberg, Otem (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1922).
43. Kulbak, ‘Dos yidishe vort’, p. 97: ‘The translations of Homer in every people do not only show
a certain spiritual maturity in that people but also the artistic maturity of the language into
which Homer can be translated.’ Kenneth Moss situates Kulbak’s attitude toward this translation
of Homer in a larger contemporary debate about the nature and function of translations of
European and Western literature into Yiddish and Hebrew. A Hebrew or a Yiddish Iliad,
for example, would ‘insert belated foundation stones beneath the rising edifice of modern,
expansive Hebrew and Yiddish literary languages’. This, in turn, was part of a larger project
‘to remake Hebrew and Yiddish literature as typical European literatures’ (Moss, pp. 203–04), a
project in which Kulbak was surely a participant.
88 Jordan Finkin
48. Kulbak, Naye lider, pp. 9, 10, 14, 24.

49. Moss also occurs twice in Lamed-vov, there rather more ominously (Kulbak, Naye lider, pp.
50, 53). In Kulbak’s Meshiekh ben-Efrayim the sad decline of the old miller’s life is ref lected in
the reversion of his home to a state of nature: ‘Di mil is farvaksn gevorn mit mokh un mit
kraytekhtser’ [His mill was overgrown with moss and weeds] (Kulbak, Meshiekh, p. 7).
52. Rachel Rubinstein, ‘Joyce’s Yiddish: Modernism, Translation, and the Jews’, in Arguing the
Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse, ed. by Justin
Cammy and others (Cambridge: Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University, 2008), p. 487.
Chapter 4
v
Belarus in Berlin, Berlin in Belarus

Moyshe Kulbak’s Raysn and Meshiekh ben-Efrayim
between Nostalgia and Apocalypse
Marc Caplan
The achievement of Moyshe Kulbak’s Berlin writings, as well as the phenomenon

of Yiddish literature in the Weimar context generally, falls at two distinct crossroads
in the history of Yiddish literature and European modernism: a chronological cross
roads between aesthetic periods, and a geographical crossroads between the ‘organic’
setting of the eastern European shtetl and the emerging concentration of modern
Yiddish culture in metropolises such as Moscow, Warsaw, New York, and Buenos
Aires. This coupling of dislocated, transformative juxtapositions suggests an ana
logous preoccupation in these writings with what the editors of a recent collection,
Jewish Topographies, have identified as a tension between place and space:
Jewish place is defined by location, Jewish space by performance. Both can be
congruent or overlap, and the difference between them is not so much defined
by where one can find them, but lies in their function, or [...] in the different
roles they play.1
Following this distinction, the radically divergent aesthetics of Kulbak’s most
significant publications while in Berlin, the episodic poem Raysn (New York, 1922)
and the experimental narrative Meshiekh ben-Efrayim (Berlin, 1924), suggest an effort
to decouple place from space; the dialectic that emerges from considering these
dissimilar works as examples of Berlin modernism consists of the poem’s depiction
of place without space, and the narrative’s description of space without place. Both
in turn are a consequence of the author’s own dislocation, summoning a Belarusian
mythos — indeed, more than one — from the Berlin metropolis.
Two conceptual terms that can expose the complicated relationship between place
and space in this context are ‘nostalgia’ and ‘apocalypse’; although both will prove
essential to the ensuing discussion, the specific implications of nostalgia require
critical consideration before the subsequent comparison can commence. Svetlana
Boym, in her fin-de-vingtième-siècle study The Future of Nostalgia, thus observes of
nostalgia’s typical territoriality that ‘curiously, intellectuals and poets from different
national traditions [...] claim that they had a special word for homesickness that was
radically untranslatable’.2 Boym then discusses German, French, Spanish, Czech,
Russian, Polish, Portuguese, and Romanian terms — concluding, persuasively,
90 Marc Caplan
that these various terms convey a ‘desire for untranslatability’ that is as generic and
prototypical as the concept of home itself.3 In this context, it is worth pointing
out that the Yiddish words for homesickness and nostalgia, by contrast, are
benkenish — longing without reference to place — and nostalgye, easily recognized
as an internationalism. The inference is obvious: Yiddish has no ‘special’ word for
homesickness because it has no fixed concept of home.
However unremarkable the lexicon of nostalgia is in Yiddish, the emotional
or psychological phenomenon of nostalgia is nonetheless a central component of
Yiddish modernist aesthetics — one that distinguishes the development of Yiddish
modernism from the preceding ‘classic’ period of the nineteenth century, in
which the lost home of the shtetl was seldom mourned because it was only excep
tionally and incompletely depicted as abandoned — because in temporal terms it
provides the alternative to apocalyptic imagery that would otherwise be figured,
progressively, as utopia. As Avrom Novershtern demonstrates in his treatment of
apocalyptic themes in modern Jewish literature, the foundation of the apocalyptic
motif at the beginning of the twentieth century tends to exclude the terminology
of redemption, along with utopia or even connotations of harmony.4 For Yiddish
apocalypticism, the future can be conceived only in negative, destructive terms;
like Walter Benjamin’s now overfamiliar angel of history, its only view of paradise
is a backward glance from the maelstrom. Nostalgia therefore becomes indicative,
symptomatic, of a larger phenomenon of conf licted temporalities — a problem
dramatized through a number of strategies in Meshiekh ben-Efrayim and deferred
in Raysn through its use of a suspended temporality, a permanent present tense
signif ying an organic, cyclical notion of time uninterrupted by history, change, or
modernity but closed off definitively by death.
In this regard, Kulbak’s major Berlin writings offer contrasting and interconnected
strategies for conceptualizing specifically Yiddish notions of nostalgia and apo
calypse. Although Raysn and Meshiekh ben-Efrayim portray from the distanced and
distancing perspective of Berlin Kulbak’s origins in rural Belarus, they represent
this theme from almost opposite aesthetic and psychological points of view. Raysn,
an old Yiddish name for the land of Belarus or White Russia, is a sequence of
twelve short narrative poems using conventional metres and rhyme schemes to
depict the speaker’s extended family of two grandparents and sixteen uncles against
the backdrop of a rural landscape. Meshiekh ben-Efrayim (Messiah Son of Ephraim,
or Messiah of the House of Joseph), whose title refers to an apocalyptic precursor of
the final, redemptive Messiah of the House of David,5 is a formally anomalous
and structurally fragmented jumble of prose and poetry set in an unidentified past
— one in which signs of modern technology are nowhere visible, and where the
Polish aristocracy still wields local power and prestige — that combines both Jewish
and Christian imagery as well as low comedy with mystic abstraction to confront
the crisis of values, beliefs, and social identities of the pre-revolutionary Pale of
Settlement. Together, these two works, each of which is constructed along principles
of dislocation and contiguity, in turn establish a dialectical relationship with each
other out of their respective formal and thematic ruptures and connections.
To the extent that Raysn presents a nostalgic view of the old Belarusian home
Belarus in Berlin, Berlin in Belarus 91
Kulbak had left for Berlin, it does so in terms quite counter-intuitive to the Yiddish
literature that precedes it: instead of the shtetl synagogue, marketplace, or bathhouse
that constitute the privileged spaces for nineteenth-century Yiddish literature,
Raysn, in common with contemporaneous prose descriptions by, for example,
Der Nister and David Bergelson, but to a much more exclusive degree, presents
as prototypical an eastern European landscape that consists of woods, rivers, and
the farm on which the speaker’s family lives. Although its second poem introduces
the tribal family in propitiously symbolic terms (the rapidity with which they
take to the day’s work is likened to a mizmer (psalm), and the speaker repeats their
total number of eighteen men, equated numerologically, of course, with life),6 the
poem’s only subsequent references to the Jewish religion, aside from the names of
the speaker’s uncles, are to a non-Jewish love interest as a goye, or gentile (p. 55),
the honorific term olev ha-sholem (‘rest in peace’, pp. 43, 49) following mention of
the speaker’s late grandparents, the description of his grandmother’s corpse as a
bar-menen (p. 49), and the final, ritualistic confession or vide that the grandfather
makes before his aptly patriarchal deathbed speech (p. 60). This address itself is
noteworthy, not only because it invokes the blessings of Jacob and Moses at the
end of Genesis and Deuteronomy respectively, but also because it overturns their
prophetic significance by wishing the sons prosperity in White Russia, not Israel!
This benediction is essential to the significance of nostalgia in Raysn: by blessing his
sons with prosperity in and through the land, the grandfather elevates Belarus to the
status of home, thus giving the speaker an address for his longing. Paradoxically, the
location of desire in the Belarusian landscape serves to relegate Jewishness in Raysn
to the realm of the absent, the dying, or the dead.
Indeed, the poem distinguishes itself from the conventions of Yiddish literature
by focusing on the archetypal Slavic landscape, rendering it in deliriously overripe
imagery of superabundant life: ‘Es rinen di zaftn fun dr’erd, az a shikres nemt
durkh ale glider’ [ Juices run from the ground, so that a drunkenness runs through
every limb] (p. 43). This intoxicated romance with the land stands in contrast not
with a critique of Jewish tradition, as one might expect from nineteenth-century
Yiddish satire, but instead with a studied, self-conscious avoidance of references to
the Jewish ritualization of everyday life through prayer, Torah study, the religious
calendar, and so on. This deliberate exclusion of ritual, tradition, and cosmological
memory from Raysn stands in contrast both with the intensive engagement with
ritual and cosmology in Meshiekh ben-Efrayim, and with the circumstances of
Kulbak’s own upbringing, which did occur in the vicinity of ‘Jewish’ Belarus —
Smorgon, Kaunas, and Minsk — but included education in a modern heder and
yeshivas in addition to a Russian-language Jewish elementary school.7 To the extent
that Kulbak tempts the reader to see Raysn as an autobiographical work, it might
be likened to the classic Woody Allen joke in which Allen sees his life f lash before
his eyes, only to stop himself in the middle of the reverie, realizing, in fact, that
it’s not his life.8
Following Boym’s terminology, one can suggest, provisionally, that Raysn, with
its foregrounding, unusual for Yiddish literature, of a specific, geographic location,
counts as an example of ‘restorative nostalgia’, defined by its preoccupation with
92 Marc Caplan
‘place’ and the possibility of recovering what has been lost, with Meshiekh ben-
Efrayim serving as an example of ‘ref lective nostalgia’, characterized by a focus on
the more abstract connotations of ‘space’, acquiescing in this abstraction to what
is unrecoverable and relegating it to the apocalyptic. In this regard, Meshiekh ben-
Efrayim opens with a reconfigured description of the same rural, peasant Jews that
figure in Raysn, only now described in the mystical terminology of the lamed-vovniks,
the thirty-six hidden, righteous Jews on whom the existence of the world depends:9
‘Di ale, vos hobn zikh oysgemostn mitn vort yud-key-vov-key, di lamed-vov, geyn
arum opgezunderte un elnte bam breg fun der velt’ [All those who have set their
souls on the word yud-key-vov-key, the Lamed-vovniks, go about at the edge of the
world, alone and isolated] (Y 13; E 268).10 At the same time as the author inserts
these figures in an explicitly Jewish context mostly absent from Raysn, he excludes
himself from their company by referring to their religious devotion using the
sacred Tetragrammaton forbidden by Jewish tradition in all but the most sanctified
contexts. The use of this term is radically subversive of both the conventions of
modern Yiddish literature and the subject matter of religious speculation; it serves
to alert the reader here not necessarily to God’s uniqueness and indivisibility, but
to the audacious originality of Kulbak’s literary experiment.
In narrative terms, Meshiekh ben-Efrayim resembles Raysn in so far as it consists
less of a linear plot than of a series of associations built around the juxtaposition of
contrasting character types: at the centre of the narrative stands Reb Benye, an old
and isolated Jewish peasant, tormented by sexual desires, whom the other characters
in the story invest with desperate messianic expectations. Among the cast Kulbak
assembles are a trio of lamed-vovniks; their Christian counterpart Kiril the bathhouse
attendant; Benye’s miserly brother, Leyvi; Leyvi’s messiah-seeking daughter,
Leahle; the discredited Hasidic rabbi Simkhe Plakhte, who takes up with Leahle;
the Polish nobleman Pan Vrublevksy, who pursues Leahle; the unnamed daughter
of another aristocrat, Pan Lubomirsky, who joins Kiril on his religious quest; and
Gimpele, an enigmatic, perhaps mad philosopher. Each of these characters — who
dramatically parallel one another in precisely arranged contrasts, and who all
resemble, inversely and parodically, aspects of Benye’s own character — converge
at the failed apotheosis of Benye, when he rejects his redemptive calling and in turn
is murdered, apparently, by his mob of would-be disciples.
Meshiekh ben-Efrayim, like much of Kulbak’s writing, though distinct significantly
from Montik (Monday), his next major prose narrative, is thus distinguished by its
contrasting perspectives of collective and individual destinies; this contrast is repre
sentative of Yiddish literature from Berlin, and also serves to distinguish this writing
from much of its avant-garde German counterparts which tend, with perhaps the
notable exception of the Lehrstücke in contemporaneous epic theatre, to focus on the
individual, the ‘lonely man in the crowd’, at the heart of urban modernism since
the era of Baudelaire. The group for Kulbak — the lamed-vovniks in Meshiekh ben-
Efrayim, the family in Raysn, and eventually the tribe in his Soviet-era masterpiece
Zelmenyaner — is characteristically as indivisible as the individual protagonist,
whereas individuals highlighted from within this framework are as conf licted and
self-contradictory as larger conglomerations.11 In this tension, Kulbak’s writing is
simultaneously ‘pre-modern’, in its embrace of the collective, and ‘post-modern’,

which is to say ‘modernist’, in its depiction of individual consciousness as an
irresolvable assemblage of contradictory drives and desires. The unharmonized
instability between the pre-modern collective and the post-Freudian individual
demonstrates that temporality as such is seldom stable in Kulbak’s writing, but
always conf licted so that neither generic categories nor narrative modes ever remain
constant or self-contained. For works such as Raysn and Meshiekh ben-Efrayim
specifically, Kulbak’s conf licted temporality portrays a larger rupture both between
Berlin and Belarus and between the old Pale of Settlement and either the newly
established Polish Republic or the equally new Soviet Union.
In keeping with the stark, typological structuring of the characters and frag
mented dramatic pacing of Meshiekh ben-Efrayim, Kulbak’s prose consists of brief,
declarative sentences:
Es iz geven a man a milner in land Raysn.
Di vayb zayne iz geshtorbn, un dem zun hot men opgegebn in soldatn.
Di mil iz farvaksn gevorn mit mokhn un mit kraytekhtser [...].
Der milner hot nisht gevust, vos er zol onheybn tsu ton.
Er iz arayn in shtal un hot oysgefunen, az nor zayn beheymele iz im
ibergeblibn fun dem gantsn farmegn zaynem.
Demolt hot er zikh avekgezetst fun groys elentkayt afn shvel fun zayn shtub
un er hot zikh biterlekh tseveynt.
Men hot im gerufn Reb Benye.
[Once there was a miller in the land of White Russia. | His wife died and his
son was taken off into the army. | The mill was overgrown with mosses and
weeds [...]. | The miller didn’t know what to do. | He went into his stable
and saw that of all his livestock only his cow was left. | He felt so lonely and
miserable that he sat down on the threshold of his house and wept bitter tears. |
His name was Benye] (Y 17; E 268–69).
This technique departs both from the chatty, theatrical discourse of classic
Yiddish fiction, modelled on oral performance, and from the more contemporary,
introspective, free indirect discourse of Kulbak’s fellow Berlin residents David
Bergelson and Der Nister (however distinct their respective styles are from each
other). The use of these bardic sentence-paragraphs, a style that Carole Ksiazenicer-
Matheron attributes to the inf luence of, among others, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also
Sprach Zarathustra,12 combines the compression of verse with the telegraphic rhythm
of journalism, in a manner that anticipates Kulbak’s German-language counterpart
Joseph Roth, another Weimar writer whose work is preoccupied with, conf licted,
and determined by the pull of western modernity and nostalgia for eastern Europe.
Moreover, Kulbak’s writing is not only distinctive in its pacing and syntax, but the
uses to which he puts these simple statements similarly contribute to the analogical
associations out of which the fantastic elements of his story emerge; as Novershtern
states, ‘parataxis, the coordinated clause, is the distinguishing characteristic of
Kulbak’s style, which is explicitly concerned with coupling very heterogeneous
materials’.13 Parataxis therefore provides the grammatical structure through which
metonymy functions, and establishes a framework through which the metaphorical
in Meshiekh ben-Efrayim can be read literally.
94 Marc Caplan
The imperative to read metaphors literally in turn is the foundation for fantastic
narrative. The primary and most celebrated instance of this effect occurs when
Benye lies down on the ground and vegetation begins to grow out of his body:
‘Ot azoy iz er gelegn mitn barg un im hot zikh gedakht, az er hot zikh mitn barg
tsuzamengeshotn, un oyb es vet vu aroysvaksn a grezele, kon es aroysvaksn durkh
im, fun zayn pleytse arum’ [He lay there with the hill and it was as though he had
been poured into it; and if a blade of grass were to spring up anywhere, it would
grow out through him, out of his back] (Y 27; E 274). Here the figurative intimacy
of Raysn’s characters with the land becomes explicit, absurd, and grotesque. As
Ksiazenicer-Matheron writes of this passage,
First reduced to the level of animal, he proceeds little by little to a vegetal state,
then mineral, before congealing into the dust of the earth, an inert form having
renounced the prestige of the human to return to the simplicity of the machine
[...] and an elemental passivity.14
In the folkloristic terms from which Kulbak derives this imagery, Benye’s status in
this passage between machine and primordial, pre-Adamic dirt functions as a sort of
golem, the legendary homunculus made Kabbalistically out of clay;15 he has willed
himself, reluctantly, to become clay and then to become life — an internalization
and reversal, in fact, of the actual golem legend, which originated as a culturally
specific tale about the Maharal of Prague (c.1520–1609) and is thus connected with
the origins of urban modernity, but also with the contemporaneous embrace of the
primordial by the Yiddish-language Kiev Group, as well as the ‘post-Nietzschean’
Russian avant-garde.16
Nonetheless, from the parodic connection of the Jewish peasant with the land,
Kulbak embarks, by way of Leyvi’s experience of the same mystical ‘connection’
with gold instead of clay, on a discussion of the ten Sephirot (Y 36; E 279), the most
abstract and esoteric motif in classical Kabbalah;17 the sudden juxtaposition of the
physical with the abstract, of literal meanings with figurative ones, is characteristic
of Meshiekh ben-Efrayim’s poetics, and it encourages a radical reconsideration of
the conventional structuralist understanding of poetry’s alignment with metaphor
and the alignment of prose with metonymy:18 just as it is nearly impossible to
differentiate where poetry ends and prose begins in this narrative, so too is there a
constant challenge to distinguish metaphorical meanings from metonymical ones,
in keeping with a more general shift from metaphorical connotations to abrupt
metonymies in the poetics of modernism. If this is the case, the ambiguous position
of the narrative between Berlin and Belarus, between nostalgia and apocalypse —
two strategies for politicizing past and future, respectively, from the standpoint of a
present time and place in f lux — serves to mobilize these uncertainties. Nostalgia,
as Boym underscores, is one consequence of dislocation. Kulbak’s narrative utilizes
nostalgia, distinct here from ‘sentimentality’, by incorporating dislocation as its
primary structural principle.
To underscore the significance of dislocation as a structuring device, Kulbak
traverses the poetic and prose sections of Meshiekh ben-Efrayim with Gimpele’s
interjections of a negationist, contrarian philosophy, which present themselves not
so much as ideological positions but as a strategy of reading premised on contingency
and paradox. As Kulbak writes, ‘ “Ir hot mikh ufgefodert derklern aykh di sistem
fun dem nisht-farniftikn denken ...” Un plutsling lakht er zikh funander azoy, az
Reb Benye hot shoyn ongehoybn shmeykhln’ [‘You have asked me to explain the
system of irrational thinking ...’ And he burst out laughing, and laughed so hard that
Benye began to smirk] (Y 52; E 289). Laughter is Gimpele’s philosophical system,
and it unmakes that system at the same time; the narrative’s philosophy cancels
itself out in deformative, derisive, disruptive laughter, a gesture in keeping with
expressionism’s elevation of psychological extremes and representations of chaos,
while undermining the apocalyptic doom it seeks to cultivate. ‘Beshas mir zogn
zikh op fun farnunft,’ Gimple continues, ‘geyen unter mit dem di kategoriyes fun
farninftikn denken: roym un tsayt’ [While we reject reason, we also do away with
the categories of rational thinking: space and time] (Y 52; E 289). This rejection of
space and time in fact parallels and figures the dislocation that nostalgia produces —
the longing for an abandoned place cannot bring the nostalgic subject back in time;
it can only dislocate him or her from the present moment he or she inhabits.
With respect to Gimpele’s anti-philosophy as interpretive strategy, the entire
narrative can be summarized as a generative exercise in misreading: the lamed-
vovniks misread Benye’s capacity for redemptive action, men and women misinter
pret one another’s intentions with respect to amorous and spiritual love, Jews and
Christians confuse one another with the mutually exclusive means by which they
read common signs in religious texts, icons, and the landscape itself. As the climax
to this series of misreadings, Benye’s rejection of the redemptive role attributed to
him, like Gimpele’s anti-philosophy, becomes a subversive strategy of overturning
interpretive conventions by repudiating the role of ‘Messiah, son of Ephraim’, a
role in which the redeemer must sacrifice himself for the sake of a subsequent
and definitive redemption. In fact, Benye’s repudiation derives explicitly from his
acceptance of Gimpele’s world-view. As he says, ‘Ot gey ikh tsu der erd ... Der
bokher Gimpele — gerekht ... Es iz nishto keyn Got ...’ [I’m going to the earth ...
Gimpel is right ... There is no God ...] (Y 117; E 320). Significantly, Benye says ‘to
the earth’ (‘tsu der erd’), not ‘in the earth’ (in d’r erd) or ‘go to hell’, as colloquial
Yiddish would express it. The fractured idiom ref lects the function of fantastic
discourse in the narrative; in a world without God, spiritual metaphors can be
rendered only physically, parodically, literally. Yet this reversal and disavowal of
mystical imagery reanimates the symbols of religion as symbols — granting them,
like Gimpele’s philosophy, a dramatic purpose in the absence of a theological one.
Benye thus creates a discourse of death and self-abnegation — ‘Shtarbt, tayere,
shtarbt!’ [Die, my dear ones, die!], he tells his would-be disciples (Y 145; E 344)
— that comes to determine the fate of the other characters as well as their decision
finally to annihilate him. He moreover demonstrates that this burden of death
cannot be displaced onto another person: just as he refuses to die for the sake of
other people, a refusal that paradoxically ensures his ritualized destruction, so too
does he suggest that redemption cannot be displaced onto an external redeemer.
In terms characteristic of the mythic dimension of the work, Benye’s annihilation
becomes a self-valorization and vindication, a single contradictory action that like
the ‘crowning’ and ‘de-crowning’ of the carnival king must be understood as
96 Marc Caplan
indivisible in its unification of opposites. Furthermore, moving from the mythical

to the historical, Benye’s simultaneous rejection and apotheosis of the folk serves
to represent the lingering commitments and ruptures between Kulbak in Berlin
and the native land he had abandoned, temporarily, but could not sever from his
imagination.
Meshiekh ben-Efrayim is therefore ‘mythical’ in the structural sense that its images
combine antinomies in a way that resists logical, linear analysis. Raysn, similarly,
is ‘mythical’ in a more colloquial sense of projecting an idealization of Kulbak’s
native land that could only have been produced, nostalgically, from afar. Nostalgia
also provides a motivating structure for Raysn, but if the object of nostalgia, distinct
from apocalypse, is return and restoration, what could function as the desired object
in this poem? To answer this question provisionally, one should consider the origins
of the modern Yiddish ballad: the first significant narrative poem in Yiddish is Y.
L. Peretz’s Monish, first published in 1888; it tells the ironic, tragicomic story of its
eponymous hero, who falls from the summit of rabbinic learning via the seduction
of two demons — one disguised as a modern, German Jew, and the other as his
conspicuously ‘Aryan’-looking daughter. These demons personify the cultural and
linguistic foreignness of modernity to the traditional world of shtetl and yeshiva, to
which the ballad form is equally foreign as the German language or non-Jewish
sexuality. For Kulbak, by contrast, poetic form becomes a means of locating the
family depicted in the poem firmly in and of the eastern European ‘firmament’,
even though the author himself was living and studying in Berlin at the time. By
using in the 1920s a neo-Romantic poetic form, in a literature that otherwise lacks
a Romantic tradition, Kulbak, like previous Yiddish neo-Romantics such as Peretz,
Avrom Reisen, or Leyb Naydus, seems to express a desire not for a reconstituted
territorial past, but for the ‘pure form’ of the standard metres and regular rhymes
through which he constructs this sequence.
For what, other than formal purity, itself atavistic in the context of Kulbak’s
engagement at the time with urban expressionism, could be restored following
Raysn’s blueprint? Even the name Raysn — a homonym, of course, of the verb raysn
(‘to rip or tear asunder’) — is so archaic that it seldom, if ever, appears in the classic
Yiddish literature of the nineteenth century; few Yiddish speakers in Kulbak’s day,
and far fewer today, even recognize the place to which it refers. One can conjecture
that, instead of a return to the rural landscape, what Kulbak is in fact striving for
is the ability to apostrophize its loss in poetic form, which itself is an anachronistic
yet characteristically modernist desire in the context of contemporaneous avant-
garde experimentation, but nonetheless a productive enough use for the nostalgic
impulse. More broadly considered, nostalgia can express itself only in formal terms,
since its content is always announcing itself as absent, empty, and fantasized. Kulbak
thus performs a feat comparable to what the Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka
achieved when he began the lectures collected as Myth, Literature, and the African
World by stating: ‘I shall begin by commemorating the gods for their self-sacrifice
on the altar of literature.’19 Just as Soyinka could consecrate this ‘self-sacrifice’
only in the context of Cambridge University, where he delivered his lectures, so
could Kulbak commemorate Belarus only from Berlin; in both cases the ongoing
reality of the spaces and places represented by these authors would have proven too
resistant to their mythologizing poetics when confronted too closely.
Poetic form, by contrast, is a far more amenable object of displaced desire for
Kulbak than contemporary White Russia. Indeed, what had been radical for
Peretz in 1888 now can be seen as nostalgic for Kulbak, only thirty years later, thus
revealing that another characteristic of nostalgia is to render quaint, to neutralize,
precisely what had been most formidable for a previous generation. Connected
to the Romantic preoccupation with pristine form — a preoccupation that
distinguishes the major currents of poetry from nearly every other literary mode in
the early nineteenth century — is the status of language in Raysn. In this regard,
one should consider the line ‘Es shpart zikh a lebn a shtumer durkh grezer, durkh
vortsln un tsvaygn’ [A silent life presses on through grasses and roots and branches]
(p. 43). Silence is key to the poem’s rhapsodic character; silence figures the absence
of Jewish content, which could be constituted only through speech acts such as
prayers, interpretations, and descriptions. The poem’s silence, therefore, is one of
contemplation and reverie, out of which grows the poet’s evocation of an idyllic
vision of absent nature and an imaginary home. Moreover, when the beauty of the
landscape motivates the grandfather in this passage to speak finally, he utters a Slavic
curse rather than a Hebrew prayer (p. 43), an inversion that further underscores the
absence, perhaps the repression, of religious reference.
If Raysn’s romance with pure form originates, however circuitously, with Peretz’s
introduction of the ballad form to modern Yiddish poetry, Peretz also looms large
behind the inspiration for Meshiekh ben-Efrayim, both in its formal eclecticism and its
ideological despair. As the critic Y. Y. Trunk once wrote, ‘Kulbak is ideologically a
follower of Peretz. But he takes his privileged Jewish characters from the same reality
that provides the source for Yiddish naturalism.’20 At the heart of Kulbak’s aesthetic
repudiation of this naturalist tradition and its claims for an ‘organic’ connection
between Jews and the territory of eastern Europe, a claim ostensibly valorized by
Raysn, is a critique of ideologies advocating, alternately, Jewish integration into
modern nation-states such as the brand-new Polish Republic, as well as the more
radical aspirations of Jewish autonomy in eastern Europe advocated, in varying
degrees, by movements such as the Territorialists, Seymists and the Yiddish-
Socialist Bund. Though first incorporated as a formal ideological organization, the
Jewish Society for Knowledge of the Land, in 1926,21 each of these movements
for doikayt (‘presence in the land’) embraces a concept that came to be known as
Landkentenish, the notion of ‘knowing the land’ as an essential prerequisite — one
shared by cultural nationalists of the Diaspora, liberal integrationists, as well as
Zionists in Mandate Palestine — to claiming the land as territory. As the historian
Samuel Kassow explains in his study of the Landkentenish movement in Poland:
The second source of the Landkentenish idea was the Jewish cultural revolution
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, symbolized by the Yiddish
writer Yitzhak Leybush Peretz, the writer and folklorist S. Ansky, and the
historian Simon Dubnow. This cultural revolution [...] nurtured the ideal
of Landkentenish by highlighting the central role of the people, rather than
traditional religious texts, in the survival of the Jewish nation.22
98 Marc Caplan
Among these figures, the most inf luential spiritual godfather of Landkentenish is
Peretz.
And yet, already a decade before Meshiekh ben-Efrayim, Peretz himself, in a move
characteristic of his ambivalent position between proto-modernist poetics and
secular cultural ideology, had previously offered a parody of what can subsequently
be identified as Landkentenish in his most experimental work, the expressionist verse
drama Ba nakht afn altn mark (At Night in the Old Marketplace), where the notion of
becoming one with the land, whether in a Polish-territorialist sense (figured by
Peretz as Yiddishism) or a Zionist version of this ideal (figured as ‘the land of milk
and honey’), is presented as a drunken old man rolling obscenely in the dirt:
Vi zis di erd shmekt ...
Honik mit milkh!
On hent, vi a mame glet zi
On loshn, mame-loshn redt zi.23
[How sweet the earth smells ... | Honey with milk! | Without hands, like a
mother she caresses | Without language, in the mother-tongue she addresses.]
Peretz’s graphic, nihilistic rejection in Ba nakht afn altn mark of the various move
ments of Jewish nationalism for which he had served, willingly, as an inspiration
in his public role as polemicist and spokesperson, counts in expressionist terms as
an example of what otherwise remains a characteristic function of earlier Yiddish
comedy as an inverted ideological critique; the most sophisticated examples of Yiddish
satirical parody, particularly in the writing of Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sholem
Aleichem, and Peretz himself, undermine not just the features of traditional shtetl
life that earlier, maskilic comedy had eviscerated, but also many of the beliefs of
the author’s own progressive, culturally nationalist faith in rationality, collective
destiny, and political liberalism.24
An additional motif from Peretz’s drama reappears in Kulbak’s narrative in the
scene describing Pan Vrublevsky’s ball, where the entertainment is provided by
Jewish klezmorim, including Wolf, one of the lamed-vovniks who initiate Benye’s
messianic tribulations. In the ‘back story’ of Peretz’s play, the protagonist had served
as a badkhn (ceremonial jester) performing with three klezmorim at a non-Jewish ball,
after which the three drunken musicians had drowned in a well on stage. Where
Peretz uses the story of the drowned klezmorim, seemingly, as a warning against the
over-intimate proximity of Jews to non-Jewish culture, for Kulbak, precisely this
intimacy is essential to the syncretic apocalypticism that motivates his writing. The
implications of this juxtaposition can be observed in Kulbak’s description of the
lamed-vovnik: ‘Volf iz geshtanen faroys mit tsugemakhte oygn, ongehoybn shpiln af
der fidele. Zayn veykhe hant hot farmatert aribergefirt mit dem fidlboygn, geglet,
geveynt, fartayerterheyt. | Di tfile fun an oreman, vos iz fartayet gevorn, | Un far
Got tut es oysgisn zayn harts’ [Wolf, who was standing in front with closed eyes,
began playing a fiddle. His soft, tired hand guided the bow, stroking, weeping
secretly. | The prayer of a poor man which was hidden | And he poured out his
heart to God] (Y 101; E 317). This passage, which mixes poetry with prose to depict
the contact of Jews with Christians, conveys, beyond what Peretz would depict as
the exclusive modalities of Jewish and non-Jewish sensibility — since, after all, the
Christian ‘Lamed-vovnik’ Kiril is also present at the Belshazzarian banquet (Y 105;

E 320) — the irreconcilable domains of physical pleasure and spiritual aspiration,
as well as a metaphysical reconfiguration of the class struggle in eastern Europe.
A banquet for the aristocrats is an occasion for weeping among the poor Jewish
klezmorim, yet this weeping in turn becomes an additional source of entertainment,
for the party revellers but also for the reader. Incompatibility becomes the mode of
interaction, the structural principle by which ethnicity, religion, gender, discourse,
and genre are deployed throughout the work.
The pervasive resistance to harmonization in Meshiekh ben-Efrayim in turn under
scores the artificial, disembodied discourse of the poems constituting Raysn; these,
too, count as instances of extreme stylization, deriving, like the Landkentenish
ideology itself, as much from the precedent of German and Slavic or Baltic
Romanticism as from the contemporaneous imperatives of Yiddish territorialist
secularism. Moreover, Raysn’s atavistic loyalty to poetic form, though in fact
consistent with much of Kulbak’s lyric verse, stands as explicitly in contrast to the
formal experimentation and generic mutability of Meshiekh ben-Efrayim as nostalgia
relates to and inverts apocalypse: the two works form an ideal interconnectedness
not because of their similarities, but because of their conscious and schematic
differences. Indeed, the formal ambivalence of Meshiekh ben-Efrayim generates not
only its thematic preoccupation with apocalypse — the fragments out of which it
is constructed resemble the remnants of a narrative after a cataclysm — but also
its characteristically modernist resistance to linear development and mimetic des
cription. In lieu of psychological or dramatic development, Kulbak presents the
contiguity of genres and their affective moods, tempos, and associations, structuring
the progression of episodes analogically rather than logically.
It is perhaps to be expected that one of the most productive sources of ambivalence
in Kulbak’s writing is the conf licted relationships between men and women in
them, and the formal treatment of gender as such. In Raysn, the primary female
figure is the grandmother, described in the third section as
A mayster fun a kindlerke — a kind tsu yedn friling
Un gring, un gor on veyen, punkt vi hiner leygn eyer
Hot zi geleygt di tsvilingen — a tsviling nokh a tsviling. (p. 40)
[A master of mothering — a new child every spring | And easily, without any
birthpains, like a hen lays an egg | She hatched the twins — a twin following
a twin.]
This description renders the grandmother as a figure of supernatural fertility, even
inverting and dispensing with the curse of Eve by giving birth without physical
pain, yet also as a figure beyond humanity, comparable to chickens laying eggs. The
imagery is at once animal and metaphysical, hence mythical, for an eastern European
archetype as ostensibly pagan as it is Jewish: femininity in Raysn, therefore, is also
figured beyond the frame of conventional Jewishness, in conspicuous contrast to the
masculine designation of the tribe as such.
Nonetheless, her death (p. 49) is narrated immediately after the first reference
to uncle Avrom’s non-Jewish love-interest Nastasia, who appears in the previous
section as a kind of water-nymph, with green brows and green eyes, embraced by
100 Marc Caplan
the waves of the river (p. 45). The limits of the grandmother’s status as Earth Mother
coincide with the boundaries separating Jew from non-Jew, however cryptically
the poem itself signifies these distinctions. Moreover, at her funeral her sons, the
sixteen uncles, appear to give vent to their own culpability in her death: ‘Dan hobn
zikh tseshrien, nebekh, mayne feters | Vi di rotskhim far der t’liye’ [Then they
cried out, pathetically, my uncles | Like murderers before the gallows] (p. 49). In
this figuration, the sons whom she bore so effortlessly have killed her, with the
inference that their attraction, or at least Avrom’s, to a non-Jewish woman is the
culprit. Sexuality therefore serves simultaneously as the only limit that separates
the Jewish world from the non-Jewish one in this poem, and also as the means
by which that limit is trespassed. By extension, the mythical ‘Raysn’ extends only
so far as the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, analogous to the boundary
between tradition and modernity, are observed. Once this border vanishes, with
the appearance of Nastasia, ‘Raysn’ becomes ‘Belarus’, and as such is no more idyllic
than Berlin.
A similar fault line between eros and death, youth and old age, motherhood
and virginity, as well as Jews and non-Jews, circumscribes the figure of Leahle in
Meshiekh ben-Efrayim. As the target of Pan Vrublevksy’s erotic pursuit (Y 122–23; E
329–30), which occurs in the course of enacting her own eroticized and syncretic
aspirations for redemption, she becomes the parody of a Madonna figure who in
succumbing to an erotic encounter supposedly brings about the coming of the
Messiah. The danger and temptation she embodies therefore become the pivot that
serves to dramatize the otherwise diffuse motifs and themes Kulbak introduces.
Furthermore, in keeping with the principle of contrast that structures the narrative,
Pan Vrublevsky’s assault on Leahle — interrupted by Simkhe Plakhte, who apparently
becomes involved with her thereafter — finds an echo in Benye’s grotesquely
parodic temptation by the archetypal succubus Lilith.25 The fault line between
Benye and Lilith lies between the human and spirit world just as Leahle’s liminal
status separates and conjoins the Jewish and non-Jewish. These correspondences
create a series of complementary narrative functions: the anxiety about Jewish
and non-Jewish exogamy stands in the domain of realistic narrative analogous to
the metaphysical anxiety on which all of Benye’s acts are predicated, between the
animate and inanimate world, and between the human and the demonic world.
Benye’s respective proximity to both the inanimate and the spiritual domain in
turn anchors his fate, parodically, in the realm of myth invoked in Kulbak’s use of
fantasy, so that Leahle’s motif connects the realistic and tragic elements of the work
as a whole to the fantastic and parodic element of Benye’s fate.
Contrasting with her status as a parodic virgin mother, Leahle remains a no less
legendary, or parodic, lost daughter — a figure in classical Jewish mysticism for the
Shekhinah, or Divine Immanence that vanished with the destruction of the Temple
at Jerusalem, and known to modern Jewish literature through the stories of Reb
Nakhman of Breslov — and in this capacity she prompts her father Leyvi to become
like a lamed-vovnik in his pursuit of her. By smashing the objects in his home and
breaking his windowpanes (Y 124; E 330), Leyvi divests himself of his possessions,
coming to the belated recognition that love, and not gold, is all that can sustain him,
a lesson that corresponds to Benye’s rejection of the messianic calling; as brothers,
like the biblical twins Jacob and Esau, Leyvi and Benye serve as inversions that
reinforce each other through their own reversal, and the love that Leyvi seeks by
the end of the story acquires a far more redemptive connotation than the sacrifice of
a putative messiah figure. Benye’s death scene at the end of the narrative, in which
‘es hot zikh opgeton fun im di neshome un mitamol iz er gevorn groys, shtark vi di
erd’ [his soul left him, and all at once he became as big and as strong as the earth]
(Y 145–46; E 344), therefore collapses the narrative motifs that had determined his
fate from the beginning, by culminating his fantasy of return to ‘the dust of the
earth’. Similarly, the concluding prayer, which elevates ‘dem leym, vos im iz beser
far alemen’ [the clay, which is better off than anything else] over ‘mayn hant, vos
iz mir iberik | [...] mayn harts, vos iz mir iberik’ [my useless hand | [...] my useless
heart] (Y 147; E 345), unifies the motifs and fragments on which the narrative as a
whole has been structured by equating the stasis of death with the stability of prayer
as a speech act: the irony of pure form here contributes to the ambivalence, the
mythical contradictions, that motivate and propel the work to its end.
By way of a premature conclusion that itself signifies the same temporal disloca
tion that produces nostalgia, one should return to another remark by Boym: ‘The
nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local
and universal.’ 26 In Meshiekh ben-Efrayim and Raysn, Kulbak has chosen an aesthetic
to convey the productivity of nostalgia as a mediating phenomenon; the form of
Meshiekh ben-Efrayim, or rather its formlessness, is a means of affiliating Kulbak
simultaneously with expressionism, then in its last moment as the dominant
modernist discourse in central and eastern Europe, and with the Jewish culture of
a just-vanished Pale of Settlement. Where Meshiekh ben-Efrayim evokes and drama
tizes this double-identification as ‘space’, Raysn, precisely through its embrace of a
pseudo-oral, conspicuously Romantic poetic form, performs the same function as
‘place’, signified in Raysn ultimately in negative terms of absence, silence, and death.
One can thus suggest that Kulbak’s perspective while he was in Berlin is as
crucial to the ambivalence of his ideological critique as it is to the articulation of
his ironic nostalgia for the Belarusian landscape; this ambivalence, predicated on
the reader’s recognition that nothing is more German than a Jew’s nostalgia for his
abandoned countryside, in turn suggests a pattern in which the Berlin sojourn for
Kulbak and many of his contemporaries becomes a critical means of renegotiating
their relationship to a Heimat that in any event had changed and would change again
to a nearly unrecognizable degree over the course of their respective absence. This
process of mediation and dislocation, one should hasten to add, is distinct from what
occurs in the more celebrated Yiddish writing contemporaneously appearing in
New York, precisely because of the relative proximity of Berlin to eastern Europe
and German to Yiddish. The common denominator for nearly all the ‘Berlin
Yiddishists’, therefore, is the way in which the Berlin experience — the experience
of a metropolis, the mediation of German, the encounter with various modernist
aesthetics such as expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, and the Marxist aesthetics that
would eventually emerge as socialist realism — distorts and reconfigures the
perception of what previously had been the ‘natural habitat’ for Yiddish culture,
the eastern European shtetl.
102 Marc Caplan
Thus the sickness of nostalgia — its algia — is the displacement of space onto
place, the superimposition of a spatial significance onto an absent place. This con
fusion results in an additional dislocation: the suggestion, essential to both nostalgia
and apocalypse, that time, from the perspective of Berlin, has been suspended in
eastern Europe. Raysn demonstrates the symptoms of nostalgia in its commitment
to form, whereas Meshiekh ben-Efrayim resists nostalgia by resisting the strictures
and conventions of form. Both works are, like so many Yiddish works about
eastern Europe written in Weimar Germany, at both places and at neither, at the
same time.
* * * * *
This article was researched and written under the auspices of a fellowship in the
Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg at the University of Constance, Germany; the
Kolleg, its staff, and my colleagues there have my sincere gratitude for their support
of my work. Drs Anna Lipphardt and Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, as well as Professors Uwe
Hebekus, Shimen Neuberg, Avrom Novershtern, and David Roskies additionally
offered substantial material and intellectual support as well as prompt and friendly
responses to the many questions that arose during my research. Particular thanks
are due to Professor Sara Nadal-Melsió for her thoughtful and perceptive reading
of this essay in draft form.
Notes to Chapter 4
1. Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke, ‘Exploring Jewish Space: An Approach’,
in Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, ed. by Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt,
and Alexandra Nocke (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), p. 4 (italics in original). In addition
to my thanks to Anna Lipphardt for making a copy of this collection available to me, I wish
to acknowledge my student Mozelle Foreman for calling it to my attention in her paper on
Meshiekh ben-Efrayim for a graduate seminar I conducted at Johns Hopkins in the spring 2009
semester.
2. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 12.
3. Boym, p. 13.
4. See Avrom Novershtern, ‘Tsvishn morgnzun un akhris-hayomim: Tsu der apokalyptisher
tematik in der yidisher literatur’, Di goldene keyt, 135 (1993), 116. More expansively, see Avrom
Novershtern, Kesem ha-dimdumim ( Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003).
5. For more on the relationship between these two messianic figures see, of course, Gershom
Scholem, ‘Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism’, in Gershom Scholem,
The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books,
1971), pp. 1–36.
6. See Ale verk fun Moyshe Kulbak, 4 vols (Vilna: Kletzkin, 1929), ii, 38. Subsequent references to
this edition are incorporated as page numbers in parentheses in the text; translations are my own.
7. See Avrom Novershtern, ‘Moyshe Kulbak’, trans. by Marc Caplan, in The YIVO Encyclopedia
of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. by Gershon David Hundert, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2008), i, 952.
8. See, or better yet, hear Woody Allen, ‘Down South’ (1964), Standup Comic, Rhino Records R2
75721; 1978, 1999. For an online transcription, see Woody Allen — Standup Comic <http://www.
ibras.dk/comedy/allen.htm> [accessed 9 November 2009].
9. For historical sources on the legend of the lamed-vovniks, see Gershom Scholem, ‘The Tradition
of the Thirty-Six Hidden Just Men’, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish
Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 251–56.
10. Moyshe Kulbak, Meshiekh ben-Efrayim & Montog (Buenos Aires: Lerman, 1950), p. 13 (subsequent
references by page number are marked as ‘Y’ in the text); translations are drawn from The
Great Works of Jewish Fantasy and Occult, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel (Woodstock, NY:
The Overlook Press, 1986), p. 268 (subsequent references by page number are marked as ‘E’
in the text; the translations given in this chapter will on occasion deviate from the published
edition).
11. It is precisely because of the collective function of the family in Raysn and the lamed-vovniks in
Meshiekh ben-Efrayim — as well as the origin of both works in Berlin — that this comparison
concentrates on Meshiekh ben-Efrayim and Raysn, rather than on what would be a more logical
thematic pairing of the narrative with Kulbak’s poem Lamed-vov. According to Novershtern,
in his major study of Meshiekh ben-Efrayim (published in Di goldene keyt, 126 and 127), the poem
was first published in Di tsukunft, New York, 1920 (see Di goldene keyt, 126, p. 203 n. 19). It was
thus written before Kulbak’s Berlin period, and its relative formal equilibrium ref lects this. In
schematic terms, Lamed-vov signifies both a precursor to and a partial rationalization of Meshiekh
ben-Efrayim’s radical experimentation; it is a metrically f lawless yet generically adventurous mix
of standard lyric sequences, poetic lines extended almost to the status of rhymed prose — itself
a fixture of pre-modern Yiddish writing — and the internalized drama of the protagonist
Shmuel-Itse’s Jobian dialogue with Samael. Raysn, by contrast, not in spite but because of its
ostensibly ‘pure’ commitment to poetic form, is a much stranger achievement: why does Kulbak
use such a fixed form to represent such oddly ‘unrepresentative’ figures as the tribe of Jewish
peasants? In a sense, one can suggest that Raysn anticipates the mock-epic, mock-socialist realist
novel Zelmenyaner just as Lamed-vov prefigures and reconfigures Meshiekh ben-Efrayim. Yet
Meshiekh ben-Efrayim, at the centre of Kulbak’s creativity, divides its thematic preoccupations
between collective and individual destinies, a topic of ultimate significance for a writer cut
off from the main social currents of his native land yet bound to its culture linguistically and
temperamentally.
12. Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron, ‘Présentation’, in Le Messie fils d’Éphraïm, ed. and trans. by Carole
Ksiazenicer-Matheron (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1995), p. 14 (translations from the French
are my own).
13. Avrom Novershtern, ‘Moyshe Kulbak’s “Meshiekh ben-Efrayim” ’, Di goldene keyt, 126 (1989),
199. Translations from the Yiddish are my own.
14. Ksiazenicer-Matheron, pp. 22–23. On the negative animal imagery characterizing Benye and
the lamed-vovniks, see Avrom Novershtern, ‘Moyshe Kulbak’s “Meshiekh ben-Efrayim” ’, Di
goldene keyt, 127 (1989), 153.
15. Indeed, according to legend, the golem was created by manipulating the Tetragrammaton,
which Kulbak had invoked at the beginning of Meshiekh ben-Efrayim.
16. I am greatly indebted to Mikhail Krutikov not only for pointing out the connections between
Kulbak’s imagery and that of his Yiddish- and Russian-language contemporaries, but also for
his sympathetic and constructive editorial attention in general.
17. As Mikhail Krutikov has pointed out to me, however obscure the language of the Sephirot in
fact is, it would already be familiar to a Yiddish readership thanks to the popularization of
Kabbalistic concepts in Hasidic culture. Nonetheless, not even the stories of Reb Nakhman
of Breslov present this terminology so explicitly and centrally in a work of Yiddish fiction as
Kulbak does here.
18. On the relationship of metonymy to metaphor, see Roman Jakobson, ‘Two Aspects of Language
and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, in Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Harvard, 1987), p. 114: ‘The principle of similarity (metaphor) underlies poetry
[...]. Prose, on the contrary, is forwarded essentially by contiguity (metonymy).’ Boym similarly
recalls and complicates this alignment in connection with her two divergent modes of nostalgia
(Boym, p. 362 n. 2).
19. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1976; 1992), p. 1.
20. Novershtern, ‘Moyshe Kulbak’s “Meshiekh ben-Efrayim” ’, Di goldene keyt, 126 (1989), 189.
21. This organization was known both by its Yiddish name, Di Yidishe Gezelshaft far Landkentenish,
and, perhaps more popularly, in Polish as Żydowskie towarzystwo krajoznawcze or ZTK (see
104 Marc Caplan
Samuel Kassow, in Jewish Topographies, ed. by Brauch, Lipphardt, and Nocke, pp. 260–61 n.
2). The two equivalent names indicate the intention to appeal to both Yiddish-autonomous
aspirations as well as Polish-integrationist strategies. The apparently greater popularity of the
Polish-language wing suggests a more general linguistic and cultural dynamic among Polish
Jews at the time.
22. Samuel Kassow, in Jewish Topographies, ed. by Brauch, Lipphardt, and Nocke, p. 243.
23. Di verk fun Yizkhok Leybush Perets, ed. by David Pinski, 13 vols (New York: Idish, 1920), ix,
18; for a better edition, see Peretses yiesh-vizye: Interpretatsye fun Y. L. Peretses ‘Ba nakht afn altn
mark’ un kritishe oysgabe fun der drame, ed. by Chone Shmeruk (New York: YIVO, 1971). The
translation into English is my own.
24. To extend this argument brief ly, one can contend that comic writing becomes truly political
through the act of ideological inversion: it is at the limits of ideology, where even, especially,
the author’s own ideological convictions can be stood on their head, that the political emerges
as a space for contention, debate, experimentation, and exchange. Although this understanding
of comedy’s relationship with the political — as well as the inverted, dialectical correspondences
between politics and ideology — goes beyond the present discussion of Kulbak, it is one I
intend to pursue in work in progress on the history and function of comedy in modern Jewish
culture.
25. For more on this episode, see Novershtern, ‘Moyshe Kulbak’s “Meshiekh ben-Efrayim” ’, Di
goldene keyt, 126 (1989), 192.
26. Boym, p. 12.
Chapter 5
v
‘The air outside is bloody’:

Leyb Kvitko and his Pogrom Cycle 1919
Sabine Koller
for Petra, Doris, and Katja
Yiddish Berlin: A New Home for Chagall, Ryback, and Kvitko

The last disastrous earthquake in Japan that had destroyed the capital and
many other cities, directed my thoughts towards the cosmic, the realm most
dangerous for the balance of the mind. From these icy heights, my thoughts
were torn towards the utter hell of the Ukraine of 1919 to 1920. Over the past
few days, I have been reading a terrifying volume of [the Hebrew annual]
Reshumot. One of the accounts (about the carnage in Teplik) was particularly
appalling: the typical history of a Ukrainian shtetl in 1919, a model of the
horrors that hundreds of shtetl had to go through ... Reading about the raging
of the forces of humanity I cannot but think: how much luckier are the Japanese
who were annihilated by the forces of nature! While tremors of the cosmos
darken the mind, tremors caused by human beings violate the soul.1
Simon Dubnow’s ref lections in his diary for 11 September 1923 (Rosh Hashana
5684) might just as well have come from Leyb Kvitko (1890/1893–1952). This
Yidd ish author wrote his poem cycle 1919 in commemoration of the ‘hell of the
Ukraine’; the bipartite cycle was published in 1923 in Berlin — a city at that time
inundated with Russian and eastern European Jews.2 Berlin became a place of
refuge for Kvitko just as it did for such writers as David Bergelson, Moyshe Kulbak,
and Der Nister.3 Their dream of a Jewish-Yiddish cultural renaissance in Russia
that would ultimately result in an autonomous secular Jewish culture, had failed to
come true.4
Kiev, which for a short time had been one of the most important centres of Jewish
culture in eastern Europe, was shaken to the core by the Russian Civil War, the
Ukrainian struggle for independence, and the Russian-Polish War in 1920.5 The big
three poets of the Kiev Group, David Hofstein, Peretz Markish, and Leyb Kvitko,
were forced to move to other centres of Yiddish publishing activity, where they
bore witness to the f lourishing of Yiddish literature — and to the disappearance
of eastern European Jewish culture. Peretz Markish published his pogrom cycle
Di kupe (The Heap or The Mound) in Warsaw in 1921 (a second edition appeared
in Kiev in 1922); this was followed by the publication of David Hofstein’s Troyer
(Grief ) with illustrations by Marc Chagall in Moscow in 1922.6 Leyb Kvitko’s cycle
106 Sabine Koller
1919, published by the Yidisher Literarisher Farlag Berlin (Berlin Yiddish Literary
Publishing House), completes this sequence of pogrom poems. Whereas Markish’s
and Hofstein’s verse shows the inf luence of German Expressionism and Russian
Futurism, Kvitko’s poetry has an earthy, folkloristic touch.7 It is from Berlin, this
last ‘Mecca’ of Yiddish modernism with its broad spectrum of journalistic and
publishing activities, that Kvitko’s lider (lid means ‘poem’ as well as ‘song’) resound
with a combination of enchanting imagery and devastating content.8
In 1923, the Berlin publishing house Shveln (Thresholds) published Issachar Ber
Ryback’s cycle of drawings Shtetl, mayn khorever heym, a gedekhenish (Small Town,
My Destroyed Home, A Commemoration). In the same year, twenty illustrations by
Chagall, who had moved to Berlin only the year before, were published by the
Paul Cassirer Verlag. These illustrations were meant to accompany the translation
of Chagall’s originally Russian autobiography My Life; they were, however, pub
lished without the accompanying text since the translation of Chagall’s alogical
imagery confronted the translators Bella Chagall and Walther Feilchenfeldt with
insurmountable problems.9 Whereas Ryback strives in his drawings for a coherent
aesthetics and composition, Chagall employs a combination of dense hatching and
delicate dotting in the new etching technique Hermann Struck taught him; his
spatial composition leaves room for a wide range of associations. Whereas Ryback
unfolds a cubistic panorama of stylized shtetl life (the kosher butcher, the rabbi, the
glazier, the water-carrier, and so on), Chagall creates highly subjective images of
his hometown, Vitebsk, viewing Jewishness through an autobiographical prism.
Where Ryback visualizes the Sabbath as such, Chagall pictures the Sabbath at his
parent’s house.10 Unlike Kvitko’s literary representation, Ryback’s and Chagall’s
visual representations of eastern European Jewish life are free of violence.11
Leyb Kvitko’s cycle of poems will be analyzed in this wider aesthetic literary
and visual context. His lyric ‘I’ tries to cope with the cruel reality of persecution,
violence, and murder by means of strong metaphors. As is typical of his ‘poetry of
black and white’ (Y. Dobrushin), Kvitko heightens the tension between — lost —
paradise and the hell of the pogroms by means of aesthetic devices.12 Consequently,
his poetic voice casts a shadow over the utopian vision of the ‘Jewish Awakening’,
at a time when Jewish-Yiddish art and literature f lourished for the last time in the
Berlin of the Weimar Republic.13
From Hell to Hell: Kvitko’s Pogrom Cycle 1919, Part One

How deeply must the Ukrainian pogroms of 1919 have traumatized the poet for
him to have the lyric I of the cycle deal with expulsion, violence, and death in a
total of fifty-six poems? And, on the other hand, how deeply must he have believed
in mankind in order to allow the themes of love and reconciliation into the second
part of the cycle?
The first part of 1919, consisting of thirty-three poems, is a veritable descent into
hell. The lexical and semantic components of the first poem, ‘Farmishte trotuarn’
(‘Confounded Pavements’), set the tone for the rest of the cycle:
farmishte trotuarn
kalemutner ovnt,
shotn-shtot.
vos blonket ir um,
yunge layt — yugnt?
un glit in shotn oyf,
un lesht in zun zikh oys
vi dine sharfn?
[...]
kalemutner ovnt
zetst zikh op
oyf farmishte trotuarn.
mir vaksn tsurik,
mir geyen ayn.14
[Confounded pavements, | dreary evening, | city of shadows.
Why are you wandering | young people — youth? | And glowing in the
shadow, | and going out in the sun, | like thin scarves?
[...]
A dreary evening | descends | on confounded pavements. | We are shrink
ing, | we are dying.]
The lyric I takes us directly to a realm of darkness (‘shotn-shtot’ [city of shadows],
‘shvartse yor’ [black years]) and extinction (‘mir geyen ayn’ [we are dying]). But not
only the world has fallen into darkness, but also the human spirit: ‘shotn’ [shadow],
‘meshuge’ [crazy], and ‘dul’/‘dulenish’ [mad] are key words of the entire cycle.15
In combination with other leitmotifs of the cycle, these images of darkness form
semantic centres. A network of meanings centring on violence, death, and pain
spreads across the borders of the individual poems, breaking up their individual
hermetical structures and hermeneutics. Through this form of intertextuality,
remin iscent of rabbinic exegesis, the poems begin to echo one another; together,
they become an adequate and appropriate representation of the forced silence of
the victims. ‘Toyt’ [death], ‘blut’ [blood], and other terms associated with death,
for example ‘meysim’ [dead people] (p. 91), ‘harugim’ [slaughtered people] (p.
26), ‘derharget’ [slaughtered] (pp. 64, 91), and in particular the feminine noun
‘misemeshune’ [unnatural death; murder] — which in ‘Zi shnoret shoyn vider’
(‘Once Again, She is Begging’, pp. 22–24) emerges before the eyes of the reader
almost as realistically as death must have confronted the Ukrainian Jews — evoke a
scene of horror and destruction. The vocabulary of death forms an unholy alliance
with the lexemes for body parts, commonly associated with life, like ‘kop’ [head],
‘oygn’ [eyes], and ‘harts’ [heart] — the latter already a leitmotif in Kvitko’s first
poem cycle, Trit (Steps, 1919).
Similarly, the author increases the emotional tension of the poem by juxtaposing
the semantics of death with those of nascent life: the majority of the poems deal
with children — neglected children, children hiding in basements, orphaned or
dead children, but also with unborn children or those who have been or will be
saved. Again and again, the lyric I focuses its attention on them and emphasizes
108 Sabine Koller
its own youth and its right to remain alive. In ‘Halb nakht. Zitst a shverer yokh’
(‘Midnight. A Heavy Burden is Sitting’, pp. 40–44) the lyric I (in a cruel inversion
of Goethe’s ‘The Erlking’) confronts the reader with the infinite loneliness of a
child that has awoken next to the corpse of its father. The mother had asked the
father to hide their child in a mill — in eastern Slavonic mythology a place of
doom — where he was robbed and murdered. With the greatest possible concision,
the lyric I describes the actions of the child as it wakes up, touches its father, and
tries to speak to him. The intensity of the child’s efforts to communicate with its
father and the utter impossibility of a reply enter into an unequal struggle that is
mirrored in the density of the text: a number of verbs, mostly in asyndetic order,
in syntactically parallel constructions and without corresponding subjects, stand
for the actions of the child. The father, on the other hand, is present only in the
dative-case personal pronoun ‘im’ [him], and later in the vocative ‘pa-pa’ and
the form of endearment ‘va-ve-nyu’ (properly pa-pe-nyu) — in addresses, that is,
which go unheard and unanswered. The verbs, representing the young being bent
on life, and the lexemes of death (blutik, ‘bloody’; vund, ‘wound’) stand in sharp
contrast, culminating in a tragic paradox: the child is listening to a heart which has
stopped beating,
hert zikh ayn
hert zikh ayn
mit kaltn oyerl
bay tatns blutiker vund. (pp. 43–44)
[is listening | is listening | with a cold ear | to its father’s bloody wound.]
Warmed by the morning sun, it is ignorant of the fact of its father’s death.
The lyric I, in the omnipresence of death and terror, constantly faces the danger
of losing its mind (cf. the poem ‘Zun’ (‘Sun’), pp. 80–81). Confronted with the sight
of makeshift gallows for children, erected from the pieces of broken cradles, it cries
out, itself a tormented child: ‘ikh bin nokh klor!’ [I am still in my right mind!] (pp.
35–37). The delirious I in ‘Loz di kinder nit arayn tsu mir’ (‘Don’t Let the Children
in to Me’, pp. 65–67) sums up the paradoxical philosophy of the Jews threatened
by pogroms: freedom lies in captivity.16 Whereas the outside (the street, the shtetl)
is the realm of death (cf. ‘In shtub farhakter’ (‘In a Barricaded Room’), pp. 14–15),
the indoors is the stronghold of life, survival, and ref lection. For it is indoors that
the victims can develop a perspective on the pogroms. Captivity and concealment
are recurrent topoi of the cycle, as is perception as a means of overcoming the
barrier between the inner and the outer world, and, consequently, between being
and non-being. Kvitko emphasizes this aspect by means of recurrent analogies
between people and buildings: all the houses, windows, doors, walls, basements,
and attics in 1919 are connected with the semantic field of confinement, captivity, or
concealment. In analogy to houses with covered windows and barricaded doors, the
perception of people in the cycle is limited — the horrors they have witnessed have
turned them blind and deaf (toyb).17 In ‘In mayn invelt, in mayn oysvelt’ (‘Inside
of Me, Outside of Me’, pp. 82–83), one of the most important poems of 1919, this
analogy is most pronounced:
hob ikh toybe trit,

toybe glider, blut.
toybe oygn, oyern —
s’iz gedikht farshtopt mayn hoyz,
di tir un toyern. (p. 82)
[My steps are deaf, | numb my limbs, blood. | Deaf eyes, ears — | barricaded
is my house, | the door and the gates.]
But this ultimate (actual and psychophysical) limitation of the individual becomes
a wellspring of power: perception turns into language that ultimately transcends
death — thus becoming a bulwark against extinction and destruction. The weapons
of poetry are positioned against the weapons of the murderers.
The enormous importance that Kvitko accorded to the writing of poetry becomes
apparent when one looks at the arsenal of poetic devices he uses in this particular
cycle. Through the combination of metaphors, figurae etymologicae, oxymora, and
figures of repetition such as anaphorae, epiphorae, inversions, or refrains, with the
main principle of composition — lexical, syllabic, and phonetic similarities — the
first part of the cycle turns into a polyphonic outcry of the soul.18
The author juxtaposes strong metaphors with depictions of violence: anthropo
morphized metaphors, for example the personification of grief carelessly bathing
his hand in the lyric I’s blood (p. 83), contrast strongly with the songlike ease of the
verse. Repeated personifications of violence and death highlight the utter impo
tence of the victims. The concretizing metaphor ‘zitst a shverer yokh | dem shtetl
oyfn kop’ [A heavy burden | is sitting on the head of the shtetl] (p. 40) evokes Marc
Chagall’s pictorial realization of metaphors involving the head, as for example his
Ale far der tsayt farshnitene (To All Those Slaughtered Before Their Time), an illustration
for Hofstein’s pogrom cycle Troyer that shows the face of a child carrying a house
on its head.19
The oxymoron is another of Kvitko’s poetic devices. In ‘Royte vent’ (‘Red
Walls’, pp. 70–73), the lyric I is faced with the sight of a limited sky:
kuk ikh farblutikt tsum firek dem himl —
royte vent arumgeshtelt
arum mir. (p. 70)
[I am looking up, covered in blood, at the four-cornered sky — | surrounded
by red walls | red walls around me.]
Although the oxymoron evokes an idyllic counter-world, the ‘sunny rain’ [zuniker
regn] (p. 71) and the shivering summer (‘dort, fun yener zayt | tsitert der zumer’
[There, on the other side | the summer is shivering], p. 71) are unattainable,
nothing but ideal images of nature evoked by longing. In contrast to this rare posi
tive use, nature in the cycle is mostly — in the wake of the maelstrom of death —
used in a negative sense. In the poem ‘Oyf gloz fun oysgezetste fenster’ (‘On the
Glass of Removed Window Panes’, pp. 68–69), for example, the root is deaf and
the heart dead. This rhetorical inversion of connotations (such that connotations of
life become associated with death) corresponds to the total inversion of values in a
carnivalesque world of pogroms and annihilation.20
110 Sabine Koller
Against the background of darkness and despair, the figura etymologica — as a

rhetorical figure that represents the genetic link between words notwithstanding
the semantic value of its respective components — becomes a harbinger of light:
when the lyric I in ‘Ikh hob dir nit vos ontsuzogn’ (‘There’s Nothing I Have to Tell
You’, pp. 31–32) contemplates the fact that it belongs to the Jewish people, its heart
‘suffers the suffering’ of all Jews: ‘ongeveytikt hot mayn harts | yeder zayns a vey’
(p. 32). In ‘Ale, ale zaynt ir mayne’ (‘All of You, All of You Belong to Me’, p. 49),
the lyric I uses a double figura etymologica:
in mayn neshome shotnt ayer shotn,
in mayn blutik leyb
blutikt, ekbert ayer vey.
[in my soul your shadow is casting a shadow, | into my bloody body | your
pain is bleeding, is boring.]
This use of the figura etymologica in the context of the Jewish people is no coincidence.
And it is equally no coincidence that it is used again in the second part of the cycle
in what is a key image of life: ‘kvelndiker kval, mayim-khayim kval’ [springing
spring, spring of fresh water] (p. 133). The productivity of Yiddish, represented
by the figura etymologica, withstands the extinction of its speakers and procreates
itself.
To Write is to Forgive: Leyb Kvitko, 1919, Part Two

Although the first part of 1919 is permeated with darkness and death, the very first
poem of the second part, ‘Opgetreyslt zikh’ (‘I Shook Off ’, pp. 97–100), strikes a new
tone of hope. According to Hersh Remenik, who wrote a detailed, yet ideologically
highly biased review of Kvitko’s work, ‘this poem constitutes a new song of youth,
which for Kvitko always stands for what is “most precious” ’.21 Although the
poems focusing on expulsion and extinction do not disappear completely, they
are, however, counterbalanced by images of light, love, and hope.22 Kvitko has
witnessed too many atrocities to still cherish the illusion of a world full of good.
On the contrary, he is aware of the fact that there is no love without hate and no
life without death: ‘ikh un du oyf vanderdiker erd | krig un libe trogn mir’ [I and
you in a wandering world | we carry war and love] (pp. 132–34) — these two lines
contain the emotional spectrum of 1919 in a nutshell.
New leitmotifs that counterbalance the omnipresence of blood and death are the
above-mentioned ‘kval’ [spring] or ‘kvelkhl’ [little spring] (pp. 108, 135–36, 161),
‘freyd’ [joy] (pp. 98–99, 144, 147), ‘psure’ [good news] (pp. 98, 113), and, above all,
‘loyterkayt’ [lucidity, purity] (pp. 99, 101, 107, 108, 143, 163). ‘Lucidity’ is a key word
in David Hofstein’s poem ‘Vos toyg zi mir, di loyterkayt di klore’ (‘What is it Good
For, the Clear Lucidity’);23 but while Hofstein’s speaker rejects it as futile when he
comes face to face with ruins, these memorials to death and destruction, lucidity is
a source of moral strength in Kvitko’s cycle. No matter how much blood and death
the lyric I may have witnessed, it is — after the devastating realization ‘mir geyen
ayn’ [we are dying] in the very first poem — convinced that the Jewish people will
draw strength from its suffering: ‘mir zenen in layd geloytert. | mir vaksn aroyf
inem loyter’ [We are purified in pain. | We are growing in what is pure] (p. 140).
Toyt (dead) and toyb (deaf ) are the depressing leitmotifs of the first part of 1919,
not least on account of their metaphorical potential. In ‘In mayn invelt, in mayn
oysvelt’, one of the key poems of the cycle, they are correlated. The poetic structure
of this poem ref lects hopelessness and despair and, at the same time, brings them
to a dead end:
shpant arum a toyt fun toybenish,
molt un farbt mit toyber toytenish,
mit blutik toybenish. (p. 83)
[a death of deafness is walking around | painting and colouring with a deaf
deadness, | with a bloody deafness.]
The grammatical variations on toyt and toyb, which are set in parallel by means of
syntax and alliteration, cannot but intensify the unchanging meaning; and the final
chiasmus cannot change the finality of death.
In the second part of the cycle, however, toyt and toyb interact on account of their
phonetic structure with two positively connoted terms: toyvlen (‘to perform the
ritual purification of the body’) and toy (‘dew’) are strong semantic counterparts of
toyt and toyb. In ‘Un felker mit klumeklekh’ (‘And Peoples with Bundles’, pp. 105–
07), the traditional scapegoat function of the Jews is reinterpreted: other nations
purify themselves in the breath that the Jews hold in:
ir toyvlt zikh
un loytert zikh
in unzer ayngehaltenem otem! (p. 107)
[you immerse yourselves | you purify yourselves | in the breath we are holding!]
The reinterpretation is highlighted by the phonetic similarity of toyvlen and loytern.
The balance on earth is preserved, while, at the same time, the Jews are summoning
up their strength for an insurrection that will end their scapegoat function. In the
context of an entirely positive nature poetry in ‘S’vet azoy nit zayn’ (‘It Won’t
Be Like That’, pp. 136–37), toy is associated with purity and a new beginning: at
the break of dawn, the Jews will be the first to walk in the morning dew on the
mountain where the spring of life has its source. The setting of the first poem of the
second part is even more full of hope and joy: the dew, in juxtaposition with other
terms from the semantic field of ‘life’, for example frukhtik (‘fertile’) or zere (‘seed’),
defies the omnipresence of death. The lyric I brings tidings of great joy — of the
birth of the first child after the end of the pogroms:
a frukhtiker kum ikh atsinder
mit zere, mit toy un mit vint,
ikh trog aykh di psure di groyse
fun ershtn, fun likhtikn kind! (p. 99)
[Fertile, I am coming | with seeds, with dew and with wind, | I am bringing
you the great news | of the first, of a radiant child!]
In the first part of 1919, a child calls out for its parents and caresses the battered
112 Sabine Koller
Fig. 8. Marc Chagall’s cover of David Hofstein’s Troyer

By kind permission of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009
corpse of its father. This image of the utmost loneliness is counterbalanced in the
second part of the cycle by this newborn child that, in spite of all the horrors, ‘ruft
aykh shoyn “tate” und “mame” | un kusht ayer payn’ [already calls you ‘daddy’ and
‘mummy’ | and kisses your grief ] (p. 100).
The two principal semantic axes of the cycle, the extinction of life and its
continuation — the extremes of death and life, desperation and hope as existential
factors of human existence — unite in the theme ‘child(ren)’. Apart from its
aesthetic function, this main theme, which, like that of blindness, is anticipated in
the author’s poetic debut, Trit,24 has yet another function. As in Hofstein’s Troyer,
children are at the centre of ethical and theological ref lection. Face to face with
children, victims and perpetrators of crimes alike have to ref lect and justify their
anthropological disposition.
‘Mir zenen vider a folk fun kinder’ [Once again, we are a nation of children]
(p. 140) — Kvitko might have ended his cycle on this note of hope. That way,
however, an essential aspect would have been missing from the text and its ethical-
aesthetic density would have been diluted.25 The insistent request ‘zay moykhl zey,
zay moykhl zey. | ver kon nokh azoy moykhl zayn, vi du!?’ [Forgive them, for
give them. | For who is able to forgive like you!?] (pp. 158–59, 163) concludes the
last poem, ‘Mekhile’ (‘Forgiveness’), an intertextual allusion to Khaim Nakhman
Bialik, and consequently the entire cycle. The request to forgive the (Ukrainian)
culprits is directed at the lyric I and annuls all previous invocations of hate. This
repeated plea for forgiveness comes from a ‘shtil geshtalt fun mayne oves’ [silent
apparition of one of my ancestors] (p. 158), an apparition — prefigured in the
poem ‘Fun di koymenes’ (‘Down from the Chimneys’, pp. 138–41) — that evokes
the tragic history of Ukraine in its struggle for independence. The ‘got’ [god]
(p. 158) that is worshipped, before he is killed by being tied to the tail of a horse,
is a reference to the Cossack Hetman Mazepa (1687–1708), a key figure in the
Ukrainian struggle for autonomy.26
On an ethical plane, this very last poem surpasses all others; the moral fortitude
that Bal-Makhshoves admired in Trit is fully developed in this later cycle.27 A
number of equivalences on the level of lexemes and motifs mean that the text
is interwoven with the other poems of the cycle. This network of analogies and
equivalences is foregrounded in a comparison between the first and the last poems
of the cycle, a comparison that evokes an outside world full of danger and an inner,
emotional world dominated by fear and hate. The ‘city of shadows’ of the first
poem with its ‘confounded pavements’, on which Jews and Slavs walk alike, is in
the last poem observed from the safety of a hiding-place.28 The word ‘shadow’ is
again used in a metaphorical context in the last poem, thus correlating the town (as
the place where violence is perpetrated) and the heart (as the place where violence
has its seat): the lyric I considers whether to penetrate into the very hearts of the
culprits in order to look for ‘dem shotn fun sakone’ [the shadow of danger] (p.
160). Additionally, the first and last poems are bound together by the lingering
suspicion (khshad) that horrors await every Jew who talks to a goy (‘non-Jew’).29
The prevailing atmosphere of danger and hatred as a wellspring of the pogroms is
intensified through the use of the lexeme klole (‘curse’) in a concretizing metaphor:
114 Sabine Koller
in the first poem, mouths hurl ‘shtiker shteynerdike kloles’ [pieces of stony curses,
p. 13], an image that immediately evokes the stones thrown at the prophet Jeremiah
and, at the same time, the ‘kamen’ia brani’ [stones of insult] in Sergei Esenin’s
‘Ispoved’ khuligana’ (‘Confessions of a Hooligan’, 1920), which in turn echoes
Michail Lermontov’s ‘Prorok’ (‘The Prophet’, 1841), a poem with which Kvitko
was familiar.30 The ‘stony curses’ of the first poem become ‘vunden-reykhes fun
klole’ [the wound odour of curses] (p. 158) in the last poem. Ultimately, the curses as
verbal precursors of physical violence are banished by means of another metaphor:
the apparition of the forefathers ‘tsetraybt, tsetraybt | di luft fun shverer klole!?’
[banishes, banishes | the air full of heavy curses!?], thus transforming the curses
into forgiveness.
The ancestors avenge the act of forgetting. The apparition begs the lyric I, who
is young and talented, never to forget — and always to forgive. As the bearer of the
memory of pain (part 1) and of hope (part 2) it has — once more — been taken to
the shelter of an attic, where it can ref lect on the ethics of its own people in isolation
from its people. After all the shouting that went unheard ‘in oylem-hatoyu’ [in a
world of chaos] (the title of the last poem of the first part of the cycle, pp. 91–94)
and after the unbearable silence in the hiding-places, the last poem of the cycle ends
on a dialogic note: the act of forgiving demands the presence and interaction of
another human being. The cycle ends with the word ‘du’ [you], thus transcending
the internal communication of the poem (between the apparition of the forefathers
and the lyric I) and appealing to the ( Jewish) reader to turn the act of reading into
an act of forgiveness.
Yiddish, a Reason for Extinction and a Reason to Write: On Kvitko’s

Poetry
blutik iz di luft in droysn,

m’kon aykh veln nokh derkenen. —
zet-zhe redt nor nit keyn yidish. (p. 39)
[The air outside is bloody, | they still might want to recognize you. — | Be
careful and don’t dare speak Yiddish.]
It was fortunate that David Bergelson recognized Leyb Kvitko’s talent and supported
him; even more fortunate could be the fact that Kvitko failed to follow the advice
of the speaker in his poem ‘Royte stenges, grine stenges’ (‘Red Ribbons, Green
Ribbons’, pp. 38–39) from the cycle 1919: don’t speak Yiddish. On the contrary,
Yiddish became the very vehicle of the author’s art. The Yiddish language,
stigmatized as a harbinger of doom in the poem, turns into a bearer of hope in the
cultural renaissance of eastern European Jewry. Kvitko’s poetry is deeply rooted
in orality and folklore, thus continuing the incorporation of folklore into modern
Yiddish literature that began with the Haskalah.31 In particular, the traditional
refrains in the first part of the cycle — which all but disappear from the second
part, thus creating a formal tension within the cycle — illustrate Kvitko’s familiarity
with the world of the (Ukrainian and Yiddish) folksong. Kvitko combines this
Fig. 9. Joseph Tchaikov’s cover of Peretz Markish’s Di kupe

116 Sabine Koller
folkloristic element with modernist techniques in the tradition of the Symbolist

Der Nister.32 But where Kvitko’s earlier collection Trit was still rooted in a more
conventional aesthetics, the images used by the author in 1919 break up the verse:
as in Markish’s refined poetry, the use of free verse and the dynamics of syntax
and punctuation in the tradition of Russian Futurism (Mayakovsky) create a strong
tension between tradition and innovation.
This inherent tension surfaces even more clearly in the rivalry between imagery
and verse: the metaphorical power of Kvitko’s language ultimately subordinates
verse and metre.33 It is in the originality and forcefulness of his verbal images (of
comparisons and metaphors) that Kvitko’s art is at its best.34 His metaphors bind
the concrete to the abstract (‘a krants fun toyt’ [a wreath of death], p. 59) as well as
the abstract to the concrete (‘mit di loglen | ful mit got un ful mit vayn’ [with the
wineskins | filled with God and filled with wine], p. 140).
Leyb Kvitko, who was well versed in Russian and Ukrainian poetry and folklore,
subtly incorporates a number of foreign elements into his poetry. The frequent
use of Slavicisms, for example ‘fartukh’ (from Ukrainian fartukh (‘apron’), p. 124)
or ‘aroysslinen’ (‘to drool’, from Ukrainian slina (‘saliva’), p. 130), ref lects the
enormous potential of this kind of cultural and poetic translation. The regional, in
form of the Volhynian colouring of Kvitko’s Yiddish, which left its indelible mark
on the rhymes in Trit,35 meets a universal modernist and avant-garde aesthetics.
Another feature of Kvitko’s pogrom cycle is the integration of elements of the
drama into poetry (cf. ‘Untn shnoren um di gest’ [‘Downstairs the Guests are
Begging’], pp. 59–62). The dialogic word, as a key element of the cycle, breaks
up the characteristic intimacy of poetry. This translation between genres in turn
leads to the integration of narrative elements: episodes of violence in a dialogic
vein alternate with descriptive passages, and poems dominated by epic elements are
followed by passages of introspection. Despite the numerous dialogues focusing on
persecution and violence, the entire cycle constitutes an outcry of life and vitality.
The talk of death and destruction is always — whether it has an addressee or not
— permeated by the creativity of Kvitko’s poetic language. His poetry as a whole
revokes the advice of his speaker to abjure Yiddish; the circumstances that lead
to an extinction of the Jewish world are transformed into the indestructible world
of poetry.
Postscript: Pogrom Poems and their Pictorial Counterparts

With the publication of Kvitko’s 1919, the suffering of the Ukrainian Jews is
transferred to Berlin, where the Russian-Jewish cultural renaissance is in full bloom
— and about to wither. The German capital, on which the title ‘ir va’em be’yisrael’
[city and mother in Israel] (ii Samuel 20. 19) had been bestowed,36 was a gathering
place for artists and writers of the Jewish-Russian emigration and the nascent Soviet
culture. It was there that western and eastern Jewry met and the assimilated western
Jews’ cult of romanticizing eastern European Jewry collided with the project of a
Jewish renaissance in post-revolutionary Russia, a project that had failed on account
of the Civil War and the centralistic structures of the young country.37 The German
capital at the beginning of the Weimar Republic was not prepared for this last act of
rebellion of the Russian-Jewish cultural renaissance, and it was even less prepared for
the reception of Kvitko’s poem cycle 1919. Alexander Eliasberg, Nathan Birnbaum,
Theodor Zlocisti, and Berthold Feiwel, whose translations from Yiddish otherwise
made an enormous contribution to the mediation of Jewish culture, ignored the
text. As a result, the voice of this author can still be understood by Yiddish speakers
alone; the enormous mnemonic potential of the text with regard to the Ukrainian
pogroms of 1919 remains untapped — a potential that is matched only by Hofstein’s
Troyer. Just like Hofstein’s Troyer, Kvitko’s text to this day awaits translation.38
Fortunately, all three pogrom cycles were published with covers that refer to the
literary pre-text and are accessible irrespective of the language of the recipient. The
Marc Chagall designed the cover and seven illustrations for Hofstein’s Troyer (fig. 8).
The 1922 edition of Markish’s Di kupe (fig. 9) and Kvitko’s 1919 (fig. 10) were
illustrated by Joseph Tchaikov (1888–1986).39 Chagall’s cover shows a thin diagonal
line (a sword? a parodistic inversion of Malevich’s suprematistic ascending diagonal
compositions? the orthodox St Andrew’s cross, referring to the denomination of
the perpetrators?)40 piercing a body with two heads and the faces of David Hofstein
and Marc Chagall. Tchaikov, who like Chagall was well versed in the western
European and Russian avant-garde, chose the first poem of the cycle as the literary
pre-text for the cover of Di kupe: the ribald poem is written from the perspective
of a heap of Jews slaughtered during a pogrom in Horodishtsh on the River
Dnieper in 192o (5681).41 Tchaikov’s cover shows a man and a woman carrying
one more corpse to the heap that is represented by the Yiddish title of the poem,
Di kupe (‘The Heap’). The upside-down avant-garde letters follow the outline of a
circle — a design that evokes the circular form of the picture-poem ‘Zun-fargang’
(‘Sunset’) from Hofstein’s Troyer. A black triangle penetrates the circle from above in
a reference to El Lissitzky’s poster Klinom krasnym bej belych (Beat the White with the
Red Wedge, 1919/20).42 By means of this strong analogy with the propaganda poster
that mobilized the masses for the Soviets during the Russian Civil War, Tchaikov
indirectly includes the perpetrators of the pogroms in his design — the Jews in the
Pale of Settlement were killed by opponents of the Soviets and by Red Army soldiers.
In the cover for Kvitko’s pogrom cycle, Tchaikov highlights the date 1919 as
the year that has found entrance into the Yiddish language as the khurbn Ukraine
(‘total destruction in Ukraine’).43 The number ‘1919’ contrasts strongly with the
letters that can be found on the covers of both Hofstein’s Troyer and Markish’s Di
kupe. Above the date, a bearded old Jewish man and a woman with a heavily lined
face are cowering. One of the Jew’s eyes is open, the other one closed, in reference
to Chagall’s and Ryback’s pictures of Jews with an open and a closed eye.44 In
Tchaikov’s design, the boundary between the human bodies and the gravestones
has disappeared; the absence of spatial depth in combination with the geometrical
structure of the design is most puzzling: where does the human being (life) end and
the gravestone (death) begin? The intertwining of the geometric and the human
is reminiscent of Der Jude im Schwarz-Weiss (The Jew in Black and White) of 1914,
the epitome of Chagall’s portrayal of Jews; tallit and tefillin are, however, missing.
After the fateful year 1919 the Jews have ceased to pray.
118 Sabine Koller
Fig. 10. Joseph Tchaikov’s cover of Leyb Kvitko’s 1919

The symmetry of the date 1919 is destroyed; not only is the second part of the
date depicted at a diagonal angle to the first, but also in white on black — as a
negative of the first part. This inversion of colours, just like the contrast between
object (gravestone) and human being (man and woman) and between the open and
the closed eye, invokes the primordial opposition of death and life.45 The static
quality of this design stands in strong contrast to the greater dynamics of the cover
for Di kupe. The latter depicts survivors who carry a corpse, but the cover for 1919
is permeated by death and nothing but death. ‘Fun nit-zayn tsu nit-zayn’ (‘From
Non-being to Non-being’, pp. 119–20) is the title of a poem from the second part
of the cycle. Between non-being and non-being there is, the lyric I says, nothing
but a life that is doomed to death. The omnipotence of death surfaces in the picture
as it does in the cycle as a whole. Vitality and visual representation are mutually
exclusive.
Fortunately, the poems of 1919 — just like those of the earlier collection Trit
— display ‘a kvitkoisher viln’ [Kvitko’s will] to rid himself of the yoke of man’s
basic instincts and to face life on his own terms.46 This evolution from instinct to
consciousness culminates in the vitality of Kvitko’s verbal images that aesthetically
transcend and overcome death, violence, and hatred.
Notes to Chapter 5
I would like to thank the VolkswagenStiftung for the Dilthey-Fellowship that makes it possible for
me to explore the representation of eastern European Jewry in art and in literature. My special thanks
go to Yitskhok Niborski, who always has an open ear for my numerous questions, and to Petra Huber
for lending me a hand in translating this article into English.
1. Simon M. Dubnow, Kniga zhizni: Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia: Materialy dlia istorii moego vremeni
(St Petersburg: Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 1998), p. 498. The massacre of Teplik, a town
west of Uman, is one of about one thousand two hundred pogroms perpetrated in 1919 on the
territory of contemporary Ukraine; cf. Simon Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes: Von
seinen Uranfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 10 vols (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1925–29), x (1928), 525–30.
Translations are my own unless otherwise stated.
University Press, 1996); Karl Schlögel, ‘Berlin: “Stiefmutter unter den russischen Städten” ’,
in Der große Exodus: Die russische Emigration und ihre Zentren 1917 bis 1941, ed. by Karl Schlögel
(Munich: Beck, 1994), pp. 234–59; Ilya Ehrenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn’: Vospominania v trekh
tomakh, 3 vols (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), i, 382–422.
3. Kvitko’s stay in Berlin and Hamburg is ref lected in his novel Riogrander fel (Skins from Rio
Grande, 1928). Cf. Delphine Bechtel, ‘L’œuvre de Leyb Kvitko à Hambourg: Entre politique,
science-fiction et espionnage’, in Mélanges du centre de recherche français de Jérusalem, ed. by Jean
Baumgarten and David Bunis (Paris: CNRS, 1999), pp. 247–71.
4. Seth Wolitz portrays the disastrous striving of Yiddish literature for aesthetic autonomy in
‘The Kiev-Gruppe (1918–1920) Debate: The Function of Literature’, Studies in American Jewish
literature, 4 (1978), 97–106.
5. Ilya Ehrenburg, who lived in Kiev from autumn 1918 to November 1919, gives a memorable
description of this time of turmoil in Liudi, gody, zhizn’, i, pp. 281–97.
6. David Hofstein, Troyer (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1922). Cf. Seth Wolitz, ‘Chagall’s Last Soviet
Performance: The Graphics for Troyer’, Journal of Jewish Art, 21/22 (1995), 95–115 and Sabine
Koller, ‘Das Leiden im Angesicht der Kinder — Marc Chagall illustriert David Hofshteyns
Gedichtzyklus Troyer (1922)’, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 64 (2010; forthcoming). On Markish’s
Di kupe, cf. David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish
Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 97–101. Ukraine as a ‘country of
120 Sabine Koller
pogroms’ is depicted in David Bergelson’s narrative Tsvishn emigrantn (Among Emigrants, 1928);
cf. Heather Valencia, ‘Yiddish Writers in Berlin 1920–1936’, in The German-Jewish Dilemma from
the Enlightenment to the Shoah, ed. by Eward Timms and Andrea Hammel (Lewiston: The Edwin
Mellen Press, 1999), pp. 193–207.
7. Despite the fact that Hofstein and Markish draw on the same material and experiences, their
poetics differ radically: whereas Hofstein tends to be elegiac, Markish is provocative and drastic.
Berlin became a centre of pogrom research when a predecessor of the YIVO, the Eastern Jewish
Historical Archive, founded in Kiev in 1919, was transferred to the German capital in 1921
(cf. Bechtel, p. 248). In 1920 an account of the pogroms perpetrated in Ukraine was published
in Berlin: Der yidisher khurbm in Ukrayne: Materyaln und dokumentn redagirt un baarbet fun Leon
Khazanovitsh (Berlin: Judäa, 1920).
8. On the f lowering of Yiddish literature in Berlin, cf. the groundbreaking paper of Leo and
Renata Fuks, ‘Yiddish Publishing Activities in the Weimar Repulic 1920–1933’, Leo Baeck
Institute Year Book, 33 (1988), 417–34; see also Glenn S. Levine, ‘Yiddish Publishing Activities
in Berlin and the Crisis in Eastern Jewish Culture 1919–1924’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 42
(1997), 85–108; Susanne Marten-Finnis and Heather Valencia, Sprachinseln: Jiddische Publizistik
in London, Wilna und Berlin 1880–1930 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999); Andrea von Hülsen-Esch and
Marion Aptroot, Jüdische Illustratoren aus Osteuropa in Berlin und Paris (Düsseldorf: Heinrich
Heine Universität, 2008); and, in particular, Maria Kühn-Ludewig, Jiddische Bücher aus Berlin
(1918–1936) (Nümbrecht: Kirsch-Verlag, 2008).
9. The Russian text is currently lost. The later Yiddish version bears the title Eygns (About Myself ).
Cf. Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt and Marcus Brandis, Paul Cassirer Verlag: Berlin 1898–1933: Eine
kommentierte Bibliographie (Munich: Saur, 2005), pp. 101–05. For the English translation of Eygns,
see Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative (Stanford: Stanford
10. Annette Weber outlines points of comparison between the two works in ‘ “Womöglich gefällt
mir das Zeug!” — Chagall in Deutschland und sein Publikum von 1933 bis heute’, in Chagall und
Deutschland: Verehrt — verfemt, ed. by Georg Heuberger and Monika Grütters (Munich: Prestel,
2004), p. 55.
11. The works of Kvitko and Ryback are closely linked through their common theme — the
pogroms in Ukraine in 1919. A comparison between Ryback’s pogrom pictures (today at the Ein
Harod Museum in Israel) and Kvitko’s 1919 will form part of a detailed study of the rendition of
violence in pictures and texts.
12. On Kvtiko’s ‘poetry of black and white’, cf. Yekhezkl Dobrushin, ‘Dray dikhter’, Oyfgang,
1 (1919), 84. Shmuel Niger characterizes Kvitko along the same lines as a ‘poet of the night’
with reference to his predilection for darkness and chaos and his literary strategy of darkening
meaning by using complex images. Cf. Shmuel Niger, ‘Leyb Kvitko’, in Yidishe shrayber in sovet-
Rusland (New York: Alveltlekher yidisher kultur-kongres, 1958), pp. 41–48. According to Bal-
Makhshoves, Kvitko’s fascination with darkness stands in strong contrast with David Hofstein’s
optimism; cf. Bal-Makhshoves, ‘Dray lirishe poetn’, in Bal-Makhshoves, Geklibene verk (New
York: Cyco, 1953), pp. 302–06.
13. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, in outlining the history of the Russian-Jewish avant-garde, puts it in a
nutshell: ‘the Russian Jewish art revival can be said to have blossomed in Paris and withered in
Berlin’ (‘The Jewish Awakening: A Search for National Identity’, in Russian Jewish Artists in a
Century of Change (1890–1990), ed. by Susan Tumarkin Goodman (Munich: Prestel, 1995), p. 64).
14. Leyb Kvitko, 1919 (Berlin: Yidisher literarisher farlag, 1923), pp. 11–13. Subsequent references
will be given as page numbers in parentheses in the text.
15. Cf. the poems ‘Tog vert finsterer’ (‘Day is Getting Darker’, pp. 25–26) and ‘Loz di kinder nit
arayn’ (‘Don’t Let the Children in to Me’, pp. 65–67). The lexeme dul creates an intertextual
link with Markish’s Di kupe, in the first poem of which the speaker gives the ‘dul-vint’ [crazy
wind] free rein over the heaps of victims. In the poem beginning ‘toyterhayt vel ikh arayngeyn’
(‘Dead I will enter’) an entire city has gone crazy and roams the heart of the lyric I (‘oyf mayn
harts geyt dul a shtot oys’); cf. Peretz Markish, Di kupe, in A shpigl oyf a shteyn: Poezye un proze
fun tself farshnitene yidishe shraybers in ratn-farband, ed. by Benjamin Harshav and others ( Jerusalem:
The Magnes Press, 1987), pp. 414–15.
16. ‘di fenster nor farheng, | tir fun droysn-zayt farbind | un fray bistu — | oyb gut iz dir tsu fray
zayn’ [Take care to cover the windows | barricade the doors from the outside | and you will be
free — | provided it is good for you to be free] (p. 66).
17. The limitation of sight and hearing is likewise a central topos in the earlier collection Trit; cf.
Bal-Makhshoves, p. 305.
18. Here is an example of a syllabic parallel: ‘zey khapn tsurik shoyn | di zeydene oyerlekh, |
tseshtokhn, tseblutikt, | fun prisek tsef lamt’ [already they draw back | the little silken ears, |
pierced, bloodied, | set afire by the embers] (p. 23).
19. Similarly, the verbal image ‘iber mir — volkn-khayes | shpiln zikh in farbn’ [above me —
cloud animals | playing in colours] (p. 157) could be attributed to Chagall. On Chagall’s play
with Yiddish idioms, see Benjamin Harshav, ‘The Role of Language in Modern Art: On Texts
and Subtexts in Chagall’s Paintings’, Modernism, modernity, 1/2 (1992), 51–87. Kvitko was a
contributor to the Yiddish literary journal Shtrom (Stream), whose first issue in February 1922
was published with a cover by Chagall; see Joseph Sherman, ‘Leib Kvitko (Leib Kvitko)’, in
Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 1978- ), cccxxxiii, Writers in Yiddish,
ed. by Joseph Sherman (2007), p. 133.
20. For a very prominent example of the paradoxical transvaluation of values in the world of
pogroms, cf. the poem ‘Tog vert finsterer’ (‘Day is Getting Darker’, pp. 25–26): not the act of
killing is ‘meshuge’ [crazy] but the will to live.
21. Hersh Remenik, Shtaplen: Portretn fun yidishe shrayber (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1982), p. 45.
Remenik has a clear ideological agenda and reads Kvitko anachronistically from a socialist-
realist point of view, that is, in a thoroughly optimistic vein. He justifies the inclusion of 1919
in his review as follows: ‘It is, however, a work that must not be ignored, since without it the
artistic development of the poet could be traced only with great difficulty’ (p. 47).
22. Ibid., p. 47.
23. Hofstein, p. xxi.
24. Cf. Dobrushin, p. 88; Niger, ‘Leyb Kvitko’, p. 42.
25. In his foreword (pp. 7–9), Kvitko cautions the reader against misinterpreting 1919 as mere
pogrom poetry. The historic events were too complex to attribute them solely to anti-Semitic
aggression. And, equally, the interconnection of ethics and aesthetics in the text is too complex
for the cycle to be read as a mere literary rendition of the pogroms of 1919.
26. The historical figure Mazepa inspired works by Byron, Hugo, and Pushkin. Tchaikovsky based
his opera Mazepa (1884) on Pushkin’s poem Poltava (1829).
27. Bal-Makhshoves, p. 305.
28. In this instance, the perspective of the fugitive speaker of Kvitko’s cycle and that of Marc Chagall
overlap. For, as a child, Chagall loved the view that his attic window provided of Vitebsk and
its inhabitants — a view that inf luenced a great number of his pictures. Cf. Marc Chagall, Moia
zhizn’ (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 1994), p. 33.
29. In the first poem, there is mention of the highly suspicious act of ‘shmuesn’ [smooching] (p.
12), but in the last poem, a concrete dialogue between Jews and non-Jews occurs: ‘iz vos-zhe?
— ven ikh hob tsugezen, | vi yidn patshn heys in hent | un goyim entfern farshlofn — | hob
ikh badarft zey khoyshed zayn?’ [So what? — When I watched | how Jews clapped their hands
| and non-Jews answered sleepily — | why should I have been suspicious?] (p. 160).
30. Cf. Bal-Makhshoves, p. 304. On the intertextuality between Esenin and Lermontov, cf.
Oleg Lekmanov and Michail Sverdlov, Sergej Esenin (St Petersburg: Nova Vita, 2007), p. 258.
Lermontov writes in his poem: ‘V menia vse blizhnie moi | Brosali besheno kamen’ia’ [At
me all those close to me | Threw stones as if out of their minds] (Sochineniia, 2 vols (Moscow:
Pravda, 1988–90), i (1988), 224).
31. Remenik and Dobrushin stress the folkloric vein that Kvitko shares with Sholem Aleichem; cf.
Remenik, p. 37, and Dobrushin, p. 82. However, a significant semantic evolution in the use
of folklore has to be taken into account; cf. Mikhail Krutikov in his forthcoming study From
Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir
Wiener: ‘In contrast to the writers and intellectuals of the previous generation, such as Sholem
Aleichem, Peretz and An-sky, who celebrated Jewish folk creativity as a repository of moral
values and spirituality, Kvitko was attracted to the dark and irrational side of the collective folk
psyche’ (Stanford: University Press, 2010). Meir Wiener, whom Kvitko befriended in Berlin,
122 Sabine Koller
examined the entry of folklore elements into Haskalah writing in his studies of Yiddish folklore
during his Soviet period. For Wiener, it is the vernacular, the language spoken by the people,
that grants the continuity of Jewish folklore; see Mikhail Krutikov, ‘Soviet Yiddish Scholarship
in the 1930s: From Class to Folk’, South African Year Book for Slavic, Central and East European
Studies, 7.10 (2001), 223–51. This creative power of Yiddish as a vehicle of folklore unfolds
in Kvitko’s 1919 — and it is the common ground shared by Wiener the critic and Kvitko the
poet.
32. Shmuel Niger in his 1922 review of Trit repeatedly points out the inf luence of Der Nister on
Kvitko; cf. Niger, ‘Leyb Kvitko’, pp. 43, 45–46. The inf luence of Russian Symbolist poetry,
especially Alexander Blok, and of Der Nister on Trit is marked; cf. Sherman, p. 132.
33. Cf. also Dobrushin, p. 87.
34. Immediately, Sergei Esenin, the great ‘folk poet’ of Russian literature, comes to mind. Much
more important, however, than the stylization of both poets as ‘poets of the village’ are the
marked poetological similarities between the two writers, which should be the subject of a
comparative study considering, for example, the inf luence of the Russian or Yiddish folk song,
the use of colours, or the form and function of their frequently anthropomorphic metaphors
and of the sun and its changing connotations as a leitmotif. Gennady Estraikh points out
Esenin’s importance for Kvitko in ‘The Kharkiv Yiddish Literary World, 1920s-Mid-1930s’,
East European Jewish Affairs, 32 (2002), 74. As in Esenin’s case, Kvitko’s initial enthusiasm for
the Revolution turned into disappointment and grief. All traces of the euphoria that permeate
‘Royte gasn’ (‘Red Alleys’) from Trit and ‘In roytn shturem’ (‘In the Red Storm’) — a poem
that Yiddish-Soviet literary criticism had hailed as the first revolutionary poem (see Bechtel, p.
250) — have disappeared from the poem ‘Royte stenges, grine stenges’.
35. Niger, ‘Leyb Kvitko’, p. 48.
36. Marten-Finnis and Heather, pp. 103–20.
37. Inka Bertz, ‘Eine neue Kunst für ein altes Volk’: Die Jüdische Renaissance in Berlin 1900–1924 (Berlin:
Berlin Museum/Museumspädagogischer Dienst, 1991), p. 39.
38. A commentated Yiddish-German edition of David Hofstein’s poem cycle Troyer is planned.
Markish’s Di kupe was translated into French by Charles Dobzynski as Peretz Markish, Le
monceau (Paris: Edition L’improviste, 2000).
39. Henryk Berlewi designed the cover of the first, 1921 edition of Di kupe. Cf. the comment of
David Mazover: ‘Berlewi devised a striking gold-on-black composition in which the massive
stone-like blocks of the title letters rise organically and almost imperceptibly out of a stylised
landscape of mountain peaks’ (‘On Henryk Berlewi’, The Mendele Review, vol. 09.005 <http://
yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr09/tmr09005.htm> [accessed 28 July 2009], section 2).
40. Wolitz, ‘Chagall’s Last Soviet Performance’, p. 100.
41. Markish, p. 414. As they were killed on Yom Kipur, they were not buried; cf. Hillel Kazovsky’s
description of Tchaikov’s cover in Futur antérieur: L’avant-garde et le livre yiddish (1914–1939), ed. by
Natalie Hazan-Brunet (Paris: Skira Flammarion, 2009), p. 170.
42. Cf. the reproduction in Russische Avantgarde von Marc Chagall bis Kasimir Malewitsch, ed. by
Antonio del Guercio (Herrsching: Schuler Verlag, 1988), plate 49.
43. Benjamin Harshav, ‘Introduction: Herman Kruk’s Holocaust Writings’, in Herman Kruk, The
Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944,
ed. and intro. by Benjamin Harshav, trans. by Barbara Harshav (New Haven: YIVO Institute
for Jewish Research, Yale University Press, 2002), p. xxiii.
44. Examples are Chagall’s The Jew in Bright Red (1914), Wounded Soldier (1914), Old Man and Old
Woman (1914) and some of Ryback’s pogrom pictures. The pattern of the lines above the Jewish
man that resemble the structure of wood evoke the work of another central figure of the
Yiddish-Jewish renaissance movement of avant-garde art: Nathan Altman and his Portrait of an
Old Jew (1913); cf. Amishai-Maisels, pp. 57–58. Another picture that comes to mind is Samuel
Hirszenberg’s Cmentarz (The Graveyard, 1892), which depicts Jewish women among gravestones
bewailing their dead.
45. Cf. Hillel Kazovsky’s description of the picture in Futur antérieur, ed. by Hazan-Brunet, p. 170.
46. Dobrushin, p. 87.
Chapter 6
v
A Warm Morning Gown and a

Shawl from Berlin
Liebe Zaltsman’s Yiddish Letters
to Helene Koigen
Verena Dohrn
The estate of the cultural philosopher and sociologist David Koigen (1879–1933)
contains a bundle of letters, neatly folded and pressed together in an envelope,
marked as ‘letters from parents and brothers’. These words are written in the hand
of Helene Koigen, the philosopher’s wife. Helene Koigen, née Zaltsman (1883–
1953), kept the letters to the end of her life, together with other personal documents,
photographs, correspondence, fragments of diaries, and manuscripts from her
husband. Following David Koigen’s death in Berlin, a few weeks after the National
Socialists seized power in Germany, she began putting his legacy in order, preparing
it for posterity. But she did not live to see even part of this legacy reach the general
public. After her death in Jerusalem, the city to which she had f led and where she
spent her final years close to her son and his family, the documents were found in
an attic and taken to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People. The
Archives returned the personal part of David Koigen’s legacy to the family of his
granddaughter in Tel Aviv — the concert singer and musicologist Mira Zakai —
who is now in possession of this bundle of ‘letters from parents and brothers’.
David and Helene Koigen were among those eastern European Jews who had
moved back to revolutionary Russia from western Europe full of hope, but who
left again, disappointed and disillusioned, after the Bolshevik seizure of power. Like
many others in their situation, the Koigens first sought safety in Kiev, capital of
then-independent Ukraine, not far from their birthplace in Volhynia, in the hope of
seeing a democratic state and civil society emerge from the ashes of war, revolution,
and pogroms. But Ukraine’s independence was short-lived. After the Bolsheviks
took power in 1920, following a period of rapidly shifting rule, the Koigens f led to
Germany via Bessarabia and Romania in the winter of 1920 to 1921 and settled in
Berlin-Schmargendorf, not far from where they had lived before World War I.1
Eastern Europeans, including Jews, formed the majority of the immigrants who
settled in Berlin after the war. Intellectuals like the Koigens made up only a small
percentage — barely a few thousand — of the immigrant population of the city.
124 Verena Dohrn
By far the greatest number of those who wound up in Berlin were traditional,
usually quite destitute proste yidn, ordinary Jews, from the Ukrainian, Belarusian,
Polish, Galician, and Romanian provinces, who spoke Yiddish and settled, or spent
a short period of time, in the city’s poor Scheunenviertel district. Background and
memories were all they had in common with the educated Russian Jews, most of
whom lived in the western part of Berlin and had managed to integrate much more
easily into public life.
The ‘letters from parents and brothers’ date from the 1920s to 1935 and document
a family correspondence between migrants living in Germany, Palestine, the US,
and those left behind in the old world. They were written in Yiddish and Russian
and addressed to David and Helene Koigen and their son Georg (whom they called
Gusil or Gisel), first in Kiev and finally to Helene in Palestine, but by far the most
were addressed to the Koigens in Berlin. The letters came from Kiev and from the
Volhynian town of Starokonstantinov, as well as from Brooklyn and Tel Aviv. Most,
though, were sent from southern Russia. They came from Rostov-on-Don, the
centre of the White Movement during the Russian Civil War; from the Black Sea
port city of Novorossiysk about 330 kilometres to the south; and from Belaya Glina,
a village in the Krasnodar region, quite close to Novorossiysk. The writers were
Helene’s parents, Scholom and Liebe Zaltsman, as well as her brothers Meyer and
Matus (also called Mates or Matis) and their wives, Polya (Pulye, Poyle, Pulitshke,
Pule) and Lelya (Lale); there are also several letters from other relatives and close
friends, from Tante (Aunt) Rotsi Scheynfeld in Kiev, David Koigen’s sister Eydl in
Starokonstantinov, or Tante Sheyndl (Rapoport) in Brooklyn. As yet, some of the
names in the letters have not been identified.
The core of the collection consists of thirty-five letters from the parents and
brothers, as the inscription on the envelope suggests. Of these, twenty-three were
written in part or entirely by Helene’s mother, Liebe. Although her father —
Scholom — and her brothers and sisters-in-law generally wrote in Russian, her
mother wrote in Yiddish. This means that Helene and David Koigen could read and
understand Yiddish, though for them Russian was the first and German the second
language of education and colloquial communication. They corresponded with
each other in Russian until the mid-1920s at least; then they switched to German,
the language of their adopted home. They also spoke German with their son.
Four languages dominated the eastern European Jewish circles in Berlin:
Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and German. The Koigens were among those middle-
class, liberal Russian-Jewish migrants who had studied at German-language uni
versities before the war, and as migrants they had no difficulties with the local
tongue, unlike those patriotic migrants who clung to Russian, the Yiddishists of
various persuasions who spoke Yiddish with one another, and the cultural Zionists,
who nurtured the Hebrew language.
Like pieces of a puzzle, these letters provide fragmentary information about the
lives of Helene Koigen’s parents and brothers before the Revolution and in their
first years in the Soviet Union, as do occasional hints in other documents from
Koigen’s legacy. The Zaltsman family came from Starokonstantinov, where they
belonged to the merchant class. There are several indications that Helene’s parents
A Warm Morning Gown and a Shawl 125
were relatively well off before the Revolution, both in material and in social terms.
Scholom Zaltsman and his wife, Liebe, spent some time in Warsaw during World
War I (letter 7), after which they did business in the southern Russian industrial city
of Ekaterinoslav (today Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine),2 before heading further south-
east to Novorossiysk, where they experienced the consequences of the Bolshevist
seizure of power. Thanks to their two sons, who had remained with them and who
were assimilated into the Soviet system, they managed to survive. One son, Meyer,
made a decent living as manager of a mill, and their second son, Matus, a doctor in
the Red Army, was stationed in Belaya Glina. Meyer was the one who moved from
Novorossiysk to Rostov first; Matus, who had been released from military service,
followed him and then went back for their parents. Helene and David were not the
only ones in the immediate family who had left Russia. Another brother, Maks
(also known as Matke, Motke, or Mate), was living in the US. An uncle, Abdye
(also called Abde, Abdya; Russian Avdey), who is often mentioned in the letters,
left in 1924 and pursued business over the following years in Europe and Palestine;
judging by greetings sent to him in the letters to David and Helene, he stayed with
the Koigens in Berlin rather often. When Scholom and Liebe Zaltsman arrived in
Rostov in the autumn of 1924, they had been ruined both financially and in terms
of their health, as well as emotionally demoralized. Liebe, the mother, died on 28
November 1925 following a kidney operation. The father, Scholom, died of cancer
on 22 June 1926.
By today’s standards, and given the conditions of the time, the missives had
to cross long distances between the Soviet hinterland, the German metropolis of
Berlin, Palestine, and the US, and they had to overcome many obstacles, starting
with police controls in Germany and postal censorship in the Soviet Union, up to
and including the inferior infrastructure and insecure transport routes in the Soviet
provinces. From 1919 to 1939, there was officially no postal censorship in Germany
for private postal traffic; in the Weimar Republic, it was legal to check mail in the
interests of taxation and for economic reasons.3 As far as private foreign-language
correspondence to and from other countries was concerned, the wartime language
restrictions had been lifted since the spring of 1920, but eastern European Jewish
migrants were still asking the Foreign Ministry for permission to send Yiddish and
Hebrew texts in the early 1920s,4 and the sending of money was officially checked.
In the Soviet Union, the political police (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission
within the Headquarters of State Political Administration) exercised extensive
control over the civil population, without any legal basis, from the early 1920s
on, including private mail traffic with foreign countries.5 Apparently, that is why
only telegrams, postcards, and open letters were sent via the official mail route;
many letters, and especially goods or money, were preferably carried personally by
travelling messengers. In her letters, Liebe often refers to the address of a relative as
a secure drop-off point for valuable post: Fanya Kolodner (Russian Kolodnaya), the
sister of her daughter-in-law, in the capital city of Moscow, 1200 kilometres from
Rostov (letters 2, 8, and 10).
The journey of the Zaltsman-Koigen letters from Berlin to the Soviet provinces
and back to the German capital may also have been arranged through diplomatic
126 Verena Dohrn
Fig. 11. 3 Mommsenstrasse, Berlin-Charlottenburg, where Helene and David Koigen

lived in from 1928 to 1933. Photo by Henning Dohrn, 2009
and Comintern channels. David’s elder brother Fishl (Fishel, Fishle) Koigen-Ionov
and his wife, Debora (Dore), were employees of the Russian Embassy in Berlin;6
both had Soviet citizenship and were considered committed Bolshevists. Their
daughter, Isabella (b.1900), whom Liebe addresses in her letters as Lizetshke (or
Libetshke), also had Soviet citizenship, and she worked for the Comintern.7 Her
husband, Aleksandr Ėmel’ (Moishe Lur’e), worked in Berlin for the Moscow-based
Marx-Engels Institute. Both later returned to the Soviet Union, where they were
ultimately sentenced at one of the Stalinist show trials in 1936 and shot in Karelia.8
Fishl, who had headed the embassy’s consular department, had already died in 1923,
but there are documents showing that Debora and her daughter lived in Berlin
until at least the mid-1920s. Debora was kept under surveillance by the secret
service, both as a Communist and as a member of the staff at the Soviet Embassy.9
For quite a while, the Koigen-Ionovs sublet a f lat in Berlin-Schmargendorf, in
the neighbourhood of David and Helene, just a few houses away on the same
street as them (Misdroyer Straße). The brothers — David and Fishl — did not
share the same political outlook: one was an opponent and the other a supporter
of the Soviet regime. Family connections, though, were apparently stronger than
political convictions. The family network had taken over basic functions that
helped members survive in extreme situations. Aside from Fishl, Debora, Isabella,
and Uncle Abdye, for whom the German metropolis served as a base for extended
business trips, this network contained other close relatives whom Liebe greeted
in her letters — including David’s sister Dina and her husband Manasse Berl
Kup(p)erberg and their son Viktor. Dina and her husband, like Helene and David,
had left eastern Europe in their younger days, studied in Berne, and then moved
straight to Berlin. After the pair separated in the mid-1920s, David took his sister
and nephew under his wing.10
Holiday greetings were one occasion for writing, in particular around the time
of the new year, personal celebrations, and family occasions. The Koigen family in
Berlin-Schmargendorf regularly received mail from abroad — more than once per
month — especially from Soviet Russia. There were references to the loss of letters
and to difficulties in the posting of money (letter 10). In all, the letters preserved in
the estate bear witness to intensive personal contact. They may have been addressed
to the entire family, to David and Helene as well as their son Georg, but they were
really intended above all for Helene. This was particularly so in the case of the
Yiddish letters written by Liebe Zaltsman. They represent the only extant part of
the correspondence between mother and daughter. The Yiddish letters give no
more than indirect indications about the content of Helene’s letters to her mother.
Liebe’s letters are urgent pleas to her daughter for help. She addressed Helene as
Henile (letter 8); in her Russian documents she was called Henya Feyge.11 These
letters must have transported Helene back to eastern Europe, at least in her thoughts
and emotions — to the world of her childhood and the traditional Jewish life that
had been destroyed. At the same time they confronted her with the conditions
of life under the new, Soviet rule. Her mother’s letters referred to conditions and
touched on events of the past. They placed demands on Helene Koigen and attacked
her. They did not really ref lect the worries and plans of this migrant in Berlin,
128 Verena Dohrn
who generally spoke German in everyday life, saw herself, as did her husband, as a
European, and was anxious to build a middle-class existence in her new homeland.
Unlike most eastern European Jewish migrants, David and Helene Koigen and their
son applied for and received German citizenship in the autumn of 1927.12
Helene Koigen, née Zaltsman, was a modern woman. At the age of seventeen
she left her parents’ home, the town of her childhood Starokonstantinov, and
the Russian Empire, and went to university in Berne, Switzerland.13 There, she
was one of those Russian students who provoked the more conservative Swiss
citizens with their headstrong, unconventional, and self-confident behaviour.14 She
studied philosophy, linguistics, and literature at the University of Berne with the
philosopher Ludwig Stein and the literary scholar Oskar Walzel, but she did not
complete her studies, despite several attempts.15 Like Albert Einstein’s future wife
Mileva Marić in Berne, Helene Koigen, this ambitious student who was ahead of
her time, found her plans thwarted by the birth of a child in 1904 — her daughter,
Maria (Marusja).16 Unlike Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić, David and Helene
Koigen were already married at the time, and their daughter remained with them.17
Helene was very interested in the ‘life reform’ movement (Lebensreformbewegung),
based in Ascona, and in Berlin she became involved in the Zionist movement.18 The
Koigens also had contacts with the bohemian world of Berlin.19 Helene, though,
was never as anti-bourgeoisie as her countrywoman, the anarchist and Trotsky
translator Alexandra (Anja) Ramm-Pfempfert in Berlin,20 and she was no radical
proponent of women’s rights like her former fellow student Helene Stoecker.21
Instead, she had a middle-class self-image and stood by her husband, whom she
adored, as wife and colleague.
David saw Helene not simply as his wife, but also as his spiritual partner.
He publicly expressed his appreciation by dedicating two works to her: as ‘my
childhood friend’ in Ideen zur Philosophie der Kultur (Ideas on the Philosophy of Culture,
1910) and as ‘my companion on these difficult journeys’ in Apokalyptische Reiter
(Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1925). The extent of their intellectual collaboration is
as yet unclear. At any rate, Helene was also seen within their circle of friends and
acquaintances not only as the wife of David Koigen but also as a cherished con
versation partner, as is clear from an entry in the diary of the philosopher Aaron
Steinberg, from recollections and a letter by Simon Dubnow, and from the proto
cols of the philosophical association, Koigen’s private college.22 The body and spirit
of this young woman had to bear the early death of Marusja, her daughter, at the
age of nine in St Petersburg in the autumn of 1913,23 half a year after Georg’s birth,
and the bitter experiences of privation and disenchantment during World War I
and after the 1917 October Revolution in Petrograd, which were followed by the
battles for Kiev and the drawn-out, three-month-long winter f light from Ukraine
to Germany.
Her worries continued in Berlin. Here, though, they were primarily of a finan
cial nature, for David was not appointed a professor or a lecturer and could not
earn enough to live on as a Privatgelehrter (independent scholar). As an associate
professor in Kiev, he had taught in several colleges, in the university, and in the
city’s commercial college; he had taught courses for women, and also taught at a
private university, but he had been forced to augment his earnings for a time by
working as an expert appraiser for the Ukrainian Ministry of Nutrition.24 In Berlin
he immediately re-established his pre-war connections with the economist Werner
Sombart, the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, and the Social Democrat politician
Eduard Bernstein. He gave lectures and published books — in the early years, Der
moralische Gott: Eine Abhandlung über die Beziehung zwischen Kultur and Religion (The
Moral God: A Treatise on the Relationship between Culture and Religion, 1922) and his
memoirs, Apokalyptische Reiter (1925). In 1922, he was co-founder and chairman
of the Russian Scientific-Philosophical Society in Berlin. In 1925, he published
the first issue of the magazine Ethos with the psychologist Fishl Schneersohn and
educationalist Franz Hilker.25 In the autumn of that same year he was recommended
as a corresponding member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie.26 But none
of this brought in the necessary funds. The family was on an insecure financial
footing and dependent on various forms of assistance. Until the currency reform
of early 1924, migrants who had foreign currency could still afford the basic costs
of living, but afterwards, costs climbed steeply. Despite this unstable income,
Helene, who was in her early forties during her time in Berlin, regularly went on
summer holiday trips to Hahnenklee and Benneckenstein in the Harz Mountains,
to the Baltic Sea, and to Göhren on the island of Rügen to heal her poor health.
It was in this state that she received the letters of her ill and aging mother, who
addressed her with particular emotional intensity as she was the only daughter
among four children.
Helene’s mother lived in a completely different world and had an entirely different
self-image. She was the very model of the traditional Jewish woman, with set ideas
and principles about what ‘good children’ were — and especially of what a ‘good
daughter’ was. Children were seen as the focus of life and as guaranteeing provision
for old age. Traditionally, daughters in particular were expected to care for and nurse
their parents. In her younger years, this wife of a successful businessman had been
a well-travelled woman, even visiting Berlin (letter 10). But in her letters she now
seemed interested only in health, family occasions, and the family’s material comfort
and clothing. She left themes like David’s work and Georg’s Jewish upbringing and
education to her husband, who wrote his letters in Russian. Now, her existence was
broken. Old, sick, and destitute since the dispossession of her property, she regarded
herself as an ibergeblibn, a relic from the past (letter 9). She expected her daughter’s
messages to support her, emotionally and materially. She incessantly demanded post
from her daughter so that this lifeline would not be broken.
From the summer of 1924 until Liebe’s death at the end of 1925, there was at
least one exchange of letters each month between Liebe — first from Novorossiysk,
later from Rostov — and her daughter in Berlin. Even so, the mother continues
to complain that she does not hear enough from her daughter. She expresses
doubts that her many letters ever reach her daughter. She writes in a grandiose
style, bringing the age-old arguments of a Jewish mother to bear on her daughter
in order to maintain and intensify the connection, for she so desperately needed
her daughter during this wretched and dismal time of hunger, deprivation, and
inf lation. Inf lation ruled in the early years of the Soviet Union, as in the early years
130 Verena Dohrn
of the Weimar Republic, from the return to a monetary economy to the currency
reform of 1924. In 1923, millions were required to meet daily needs. From October
1922, there were two currencies in the Soviet Union: in addition to the soaring
rouble, there was the chervonets, an independent banknote that was equivalent to 10
roubles and (on 1 January 1924) 21.60 Rentenmark, and that had established itself
as a transitional currency to the new gold rouble after the reform of March 1924.27
One really must know this in order to fully comprehend Liebe’s complaints about
financial troubles (letter 12).
In order to emphasize and underscore the legitimacy of her demands, Helene’s
mother referred to Helene’s two brothers living nearby, who took care of their
parents regularly (letters 3, 4, 7, 9, and 13), and to the one son living far away,
who regularly supported them materially by sending money (letters 4, 5, 7, 8, 9,
10, and 13). All that the parents received from Helene, in comparison, were letters,
sometimes even only telegrams or postcards, and very rarely money or a packet
with warm clothing. The Koigens in Berlin were struggling themselves, and the
Zaltsmans knew this. In their letters there are references to the fact that they wanted
to have their daughter in Berlin exchange old gold roubles (gildene marken) and silver
spoons for dollars (letter 12), and that they eventually expected to leave her mother’s
jewellery to her as well.
Often, and in many places, the process of migration and the technical and
political challenges of communication carried with them the danger that connec
tions of family and culture between the old and new world would be severed. For
migrants, this risk could also provide the chance for a new beginning: supplied
with a new identity, they found the first steps toward integration easier and had
a more pleasant life. Helene, though, was forced by her correspondence with her
mother to live in both worlds. It created a link between mother and daughter
that covered vast distances and crossed national boundaries, and it was part of the
migrants’ communication space between the old and new worlds. Since Helene’s
correspondence with her mother was marked by obligations, it produced a space of
social interaction in which the family — despite ideological differences — formed
a network of mutual support. In the course of a centuries-old Diaspora, the Jews
had formed a social ethics oriented around and geared toward the dangers of
migration, with an emphasis on the duty of preserving family cohesion over great
distances. The contact with the old world was also a link to a Jewish tradition to
which the Koigens in Berlin felt drawn once again, following their disillusionment
at the course of the Russian Revolution, and given their experience as strangers in
a strange land.
The Yiddish letters that Helene Koigen’s mother, Liebe Zaltsman, wrote to her
in Berlin from Rostov-on Don during her last year of life, are presented below as
translated by Roberta Newman.
Yiddish Letters to Berlin
No. 1: Rostov, autumn 1924

My dear, beloved children, and also dear Gusil,
Regards and kisses from us to you, my dear children. With joy we received your 2
postcards [and the money?]. [Blessed] be God that you feel well and are happy. May
God grant that you will always have, my good children, good health. Yesterday, we
arrived in Rostov and blessed be God that he has blessed us with such dear children.
[...] I would describe for you, my dear daughter, how many troubles we have lived
though since Abde left, but I don’t have any strength to describe them, especially
the last month, when we finally lost strength altogether.
When Matus came to us to take us away, we brought everything, whatever
we still have to our names. Let us be near our children. May God gladden them
with good health and good fortune, so that they won’t, God forbid, let us perish.
We have gone through enough troubles this year. I am at Matus’s and Papa is at
Meyer’s until we get a room. We would, thank God, be very happy if we could
be finished with so many troubles. It’s been a hideous year, so certainly God will
[word obscured] help so that my children will be healthy and very fortunate so that
they will, God forbid, not forsake us. I wish you a healthy, happy new year, my
dear children [..?..]
Liebe
[...]
No. 2: Rostov, 17 November 1924
My dear beloved children and also my dear child dear Gisel,
I kiss and greet you. My dear ones, certainly you must have received our letter long
ago. Now I am writing to you, my daughter, that we’ve received your package, the
scarf and also the apron, and via Moscow, we received the housecoat for which I
thank you, my dear daughter, very much. The serge also delighted me. It is very
warm and I was left so with nothing to wear. It sat for so long in Moscow and the
scarf and the apron were immediately received from a female student from Rostov.
Thank you very much, my daughter. Now I can tell you that we have finally
changed f lats, a small, warm little room and it is very close to, near Meyer and also
not far from Matus. We are very happy. It is impossible to get a f lat and it costs us,
with service, 4 chervonets a month. Dear Meyer and Mates come every day. Blessed
be God that God has blessed us with such dear children. May God grant that they
should only have good health and be very happy and I simply can’t describe for you
how we came to Rostov, what was done for us, especially by Matus and his parents-
in-law. Also very good and refined people. Dear Meyer is at a job, very busy from
7 in the morning until 7 in the evening. He is in charge of a mill. And he is, sadly
[..?..]. May God grant them good health and success that they will receive a good
judgement for what they have done for us. We have gotten a letter from Mate and
also have received money from him. Please, my daughter, write letters more often.
132 Verena Dohrn
You leave us waiting a long time until we get a letter from you. I expect that you
will have regards from us in person via one of Matus’s sisters-in-law, Lalitshke’s
sister, who lives in Moscow, Madame Kolodner, a very lovely [..?..] intelligent lady.
She is now in Rostov and is travelling with a sister who lives in Warsaw, and so the
mother and Madame Kolodner will come see you. They are going to Danzig [..?..]
and only Madame Kolodner will come to Berlin because her mother-in-law is now
living in Berlin, and so we can also get a greeting from you, my dear children, and
may we also see you, my daughter during our lifetime. This is our wish now. I will
end my letter with sincere love,
Your devoted mother,
Liebe
Best regards to Abde. Why doesn’t he write to us? It’s very hard for Papa to write.
He came from Novorossiysk sick and remained in bed several weeks and to this day
he feels in very poor health.
No. 3: Rostov, 22 December 1924

My dear daughter and also David and my dear child Gusil,
Many greetings and kisses from me to you. I am really wondering why this is the
third month that we haven’t any letter from you, my daughter. I am actually already
very anxious. But all this time that has gone by has brought us to the point that one
is forgetting the other.
As far as we are concerned, I can tell you, my daughter, that since we came
to Rostov, we have both been sick. Papa has been lying in bed in poor health at
Meyer’s, sick, and I was sick at Matus’s. But I held on until I moved to a new f lat
and fell ill and lay there sick until Matus brought a professor and he said that if I
immediately had an operation it would be good and could still save me, and if not
I would, God forbid, be lost. But one must not wait. He was there to see me on
Monday, and Tuesday they took me to the hospital and on Tuesday evening they
did the operation, it couldn’t be put off. [...] I am still weak enough. But blessed
be God for his kindness to me for enabling me to survive such an operation, and
certainly God will continue to help us so that one will finally be whole. To be sick
is very difficult in old age.
Write to me, my daughter, about how you are. We have had a letter from Mate
and in it he sent us merit. May God grant that he will be healthy and happy. And for
what Meyer and Matus have done on our behalf since we came here, taking care of
us when we were sick, may God repay them for it. May God bring them happiness
so that they can bear the burden.
I am ending my letter with sincere love.
Your devoted mother, who hopes to be gladdened by a good letter from you.
Liebe
Best regards to Abdye
No. 4: Rostov, 29 January 1925

My dear children and also my dear, beloved child Gusil,
[...] My dear daughter, I have begged God enough that you will, God forbid, not be
judged for the troubles and tears that have been shed at night. For 2 months I didn’t
have a letter. And such an operation that I lived through! Because I was dangerously
ill so that it couldn’t be postponed, done later. If it wasn’t done, the professor said, I
would be lost, and if we did it and I survived it, I could hope to remain alive, and
since the blessed Lord helped me to survive it. And I was lying in the hospital for
2 weeks and when I finally came home, I had to suffer so many troubles because
there was no letter. Praised be God that I survived everything, blessed be God, and
my dear children, who have done so much for us, so that we are already feeling
much better.
And we hope to God that Papa, who has for three years suffered so many
problems from his nerve on the shoulder, so that, poor thing, he can’t lie on the
shoulder. He has suffered so much because of his shoulder. And thanks to our good
son Matus for taking this on and may the blessed God repay my good children,
especially Matus. Papa will now heal completely on the shoulder and I too now feel
a lot better and hope to God that I will receive [a letter].
You, my dear daughter, write letters often so that I don’t have to imagine all
sorts of things and so that we should only be helped, my dear children, by getting
good news from you, my dear daughter. I wrote to Mate that he should buy a black
shawl for me, a very inexpensive one, and send it, maybe to you, and you will send
it to me when you have a chance so that I will get it faster. I [would] wear it every
day on my head. You’ve given me great pleasure with the morning gown. It’s very
warm. Thank you very much for it. And from Maks, we often have a letter. He is
a very good child, sends us, every month [words obscured].
We have to pay for the f lat. It costs us 4 chervonets a month and we pay the
servant 2 chervonets. We’re very happy. In every letter, he writes that he would like
to send us a package but we don’t want it because maybe it is a hardship for him. But
the shawl I really need, but sending it direct will maybe cost a lot of duty and I can’t
lend it to him. I expect that you, my daughter, will have the opportunity, maybe,
[to send it] to Moscow, and from Moscow it can easily be forwarded. Moving on,
what else should I [write]? The children are very good to us and come to us every
day when the weather is good and we still go to them. And may God only grant
happiness to the children, that they will be healthy and happy. And may he be
able to help us out so that we will finally be healthy and that we will yet have the
privilege in our lifetimes of seeing you, my daughter, and Maks. This is our request
to God. I am ending my letter.
From me, your devoted mother,
Liebe
[...]
134 Verena Dohrn
No. 5: Rostov, 23 February [1925]

My dear beloved children,
Best regards to you as we wonder a lot why we haven’t had a letter from you in so
long. My daughter, it is not right of you to grieve us so much with your letters. It
leaves us constantly very worried. When one writes, it arrives right away but if one
doesn’t want to write to us parents, it creates constant anxiety. It’s about 20 kopeks
to send a letter. It’s not right of you. We didn’t expect this from you, dear daughter.
It’s the truth. Your parents have grown old and also sick and broken and woe is to
us what we have survived in our old age. Blessed be God that God has blessed us
with good sons who do whatever they can on our behalf. [...] I ask God that you not
be judged severely. Please write often and about everything that is going on with
you in terms of health and about how Gusil is. From Mate we, and also Meyer, and
also Mates, have had separate letters. He is a dear son. He sends as much as he can.
Above all, he doesn’t let us worry so that we have to be anxious. As far as we are
concerned, I can tell you that we are, thank God, in good health. Papa’s shoulder
is better and I would also be better if I didn’t have to worry so much. I am ending
my letter with sincere love.
Your devoted mother, who is once again asking you not to leave me worrying so
much,
Liebe Zaltsman
Kisses to Gusik and I ask him to please write to me.
Best regards from Papa
No. 6: Rostov, 16 March [1925]

My dear children and also dear Gusil,
[...] I am constantly in a state of worry and when there is no letter, I fantasize about
your health, my daughter, and am left very anxious. What can I do when it’s in my
nature to be this way? I can no longer change the way I am. May dear God help us
already, that you, my dear children, will finally be healthy and happy always and
that I will be gladdened with good letters. And I will hope to God we will finally
merit being able to see each other again. About us, I can tell you that we are, thank
God, better. And we hope that it will become completely good for you. May God
only help it happen that our dear children will be healthy and very happy.
And please, my daughter, write to me right away what you, my daughter, have
suffered with. From Abdya we have had a postcard from Palestine that he will
already have arrived in Berlin on 5 March and by Passover he expects to return
to Palestine. He doesn’t write to us anything at all about how it’s going for him,
whether he is doing any business. Let dear God help him to have good health and
great success.
We often have letters from Mate. May God grant that he will be healthy and very
happy. I end my letter.
From me, your devoted mother, who is made happy by frequent good letters,
Liebe Zaltsman
[...] I expect that our letter will arrive on the eve of Passover and so I hope, my
dear children, that you will spend the holiday with enjoyment and in good health.
And may God grant that we will have a good summer, that we will finally become
healthy and that our dear children will have good health [..?..] that we will be able
to endure. For us, there is already nothing to hope for. And may we, my dear
daughter, live to see each other.
This, nowadays, is our hope.
Best regards to Abdye. May God grant him the good fortune of good health and
success in business.
No. 7: [Rostov, after 18 April 1925]

My dear children, also dear Gusil,
Greetings and kisses to you, my dear children. Thank you very much my dear
daughter for your letter. You simply can’t imagine, my daughter, the good deed
you did for us when you gave us pleasure with your dear letter. We have received
the courage and strength to hope that God can still help us so that we will be able
to see you, my daughter, also dear Gusil, and David in our lifetime. This is our
hope. I ask God every day that we will be still permitted in our lifetime to see our
dear children. We are old and sick and for what our children do for us, may they
be repaid by the blessed God. They do things, poor things that are beyond their
strength. [...] Matye sends 5 chervonets every month that we give, sadly, for the f lat,
4 chervonets for a small room. We are very happy. It is not far from the children and
with such fine people and we have a very good servant. Since I had the operation,
I am not supposed to do anything myself, and indeed, I am not in any condition
to do it. And the servant does everything for me. May we be, thank God, happy.
And God has granted that we feel better. My daughter! Thank you very much for
writing that you have a few things for me and that you will send them on to me.
I really am in need of everything since we, sadly, left Warsaw. It’s been 10 years
already and we haven’t made a single kopek but still before the tragic departure
from Novorossiysk we had so much taken from us. Blessed is God that we remain
with our lives. I am ending my letter with sincere love.
Your devoted mother
[...]
Liebe
No. 8: Rostov, 9 June 1925
My dear children, Henile, David, Gusil,
Regards and kisses from me to you. We received your dear letter with joy. Thank
God that you are also feeling well. Also many thanks for the picture of Gusil. He is
really very good-looking. May God grant that he will always be healthy and grow
up happily and that we will live to be able to see him. Oy, my dear daughter, this
is always my request to dear God that we will merit seeing our children in our
lifetimes. [...]
About us, I can tell you, my daughter, that we are, thank God, better, and we
had a very dear letter from Mate. And he enclosed material for a summer dress (I
am sending you a swatch) and I immediately sewed it and he enclosed also four
136 Verena Dohrn
[packages of tobacco?], 1 pair of shoes, and a karadash to save. Everything he did

is very precious to me. May God only grant him happiness and that he always be
healthy in reward for not forgetting us and his brothers. He also sent material for a
dress to Lale and Poylye, very fashionable and nice material for both dresses. It cost
15 roubles duty and [they were very pleased to get it?]. May God help that we will
have joy from all our children. You wrote to me, my daughter, that you have a few
things to send to me. If, maybe, you have the chance, send them via Moscow to
Kolodner’s address, and I will receive it right away. You sent me the warm morning
gown and I wore it all winter. It really brought me pleasure and it is still in perfect
shape. We haven’t had a letter from Abde for a really long time. Give him our best
regards and ask him to write to us often. You simply can’t imagine, my daughter,
what a good deed your dear letter was. Papa and I read your letter all the time.
Papa says that he has already read your letter 5 times. Since it is hard for him to go
out (the weather isn’t good) there is nothing to do and so he reads your letters and
also Mates’s letters sometimes. May God grant, my dear children, that we will be
gladdened by good, happy letters from you. And we will hope to God also to see
you again. I am ending my letter with warm [love].
Liebe
[...]
You think, my daughter that I wrote to Mate asking him to send me something, but
several times he has asked me if he should send us things and I have thanked him but
wrote to him that he doesn’t need to send anything. You sent me a morn ing gown
and a shawl, but he is so good that he took it upon himself to send me something.
May God bring him good fortune so that he can send us the 5 chervonets because
we really need it and we pay 4 chervonets every month for the f lat.
No. 9: Rostov, 9 July [1925]

My dear children and also my dear child Gusil,
Many kisses and greetings from me to you as I really wonder, my daughter about
you forgetting us and leaving me to further worry and wonder during my bad nights
that it must be, my daughter, that you are still not in good health and therefore
can’t pull yourself together to write, since you were always good to us and would
regularly and frequently write to us. I really didn’t need so many worries about
your letters, since our situation here was very bad and [..?..], my daughter, that after
the holidays, we had a few cards, also 1 letter. It’s already been three months since
we have had any news from you. I console myself and want to hope that I will be
gladdened by a good letter from you, my daughter.
From Mate, may he live long with healthy, happy years for taking care of us in
our sick old age, because we get punctually every month 5 chervonets for the rent
and 7 chervonets go, sadly, for prescriptions, more or less. But Abdye, may he live,
sends us the few dollars and dear Meyer also helps as much as he can and Matus,
poor thing, can’t at all. He earns very little but we also cost him enough. He covers
the cost of the prescriptions as much as he can. May he indeed be judged well for
how much he does for us. Dear Meyer has also helped enough as much as he can,
since Poyle also brought misfortune upon herself in good Novrossiysk when they
had a really good f lat, and brought upon herself terrible rheumatism and then had
to, unfortunately, travel to Sochi to bathe. The professors told her that she was to
go only to Sochi. We suffered a lot this winter. May God grant that we will have
the correct treatment and remedy. I can tell you that it is better for us since we
arrived. But may God finally help us so that we won’t have to have the doctors and
the prescriptions. And enough with poor health. But we must hope to God that he
will help us.
Please, my daughter, write to us immediately about how you are feeling in terms
of your health so that we will not worry so much. Believe me, my daughter, we are
old and sick and we are only relics. I have enough worries and I really don’t need
to worry about a letter. May God help you, my daughter, that you will always be
healthy and happy and that you will pull yourself together and gladden us with good
news. And I keep on asking God that we will still live to see you, my daughter,
and also David and Gusik. Maybe we will for sure ask God for this? I won’t be
considered a sinner before God because he has blessed me with such dear, good
children? May God grant them happiness and good health and great success so that
they might take care of us in our old age. I am ending my letter with sincere love.
Liebe
[...]
No. 10: Kazanskaya ulitsa 83, Rostov, 2 August [1925]
My dear children, also dear Gusil,
Best regards from me to you. Yesterday, we received your dear letter, my daughter,
and enough pain, enough tears shed, and enough bad things have passed over my
head. But blessed be God that it is finally better for you and may the blessed God
help us always to be gladdened with good, happy news from you, my dear children.
If only we get letters more frequently, because I am too weakened by ill health to
be able to always be burdened with so much worry. When I don’t get any letters, I
right away start to worry that you, my daughter, aren’t feeling well.
[...]
Thank you very much, my daughter, for writing me that you are planning to
send [the things]. When you send me everything, I will ask you, my daughter, that
maybe you and Lizetshke can send me a black shawl to wear on my head. My shawl
that I once bought in Berlin cost me [11?] marks and it was stolen from me and I
don’t have any hats. And I really need it so, my daughter, please send it to me. In
Rostov, I have already tried to buy a shawl for myself and one can buy one for 11
roubles. This is too expensive for me. I don’t need a really expensive one. I really
need it. When the holidays come, I have nothing to go to synagogue in. Please, my
daughter, send it to me. I am sure that you have the address in Moscow to send it to,
to Kolodner’s address, and they will forward it to me right away. I want to request
of you, my daughter, if it’s difficult to write, let David write me a postcard so that
I don’t have to worry so much. I am ending my letter with sincere love.
138 Verena Dohrn
Your devoted mother who still hopes to God to see you, my dear children, in our
lifetime,
Liebe
[...]
No. 11: Rostov, 12 September [1925]
Many regards from me to you. We received your dear letter, my daughter, with
great joy. Oy, my daughter, I ask God that you won’t, God forbid, be judged for
how much I suffered and how many tears I shed before I was granted the privilege
of seeing your letter. What can I do, since I am always worrying and beset with
troubles, when I myself am sick and then have the additional worry of not having
any letters? But a new year is beginning and I hope to God that you, my daughter,
will finally be healthy and strong and that you will write to me often so that my
heart might finally not be so beset with worry about the letters and that [you will
finally permit yourself?] to make us happy with good, frequent letters. And now in
the new year, may it come about that as I ask always, my children, for God’s sake,
that my dear children become healthy. And that we will merit to see [this?] in our
lifetimes.
About us, I can tell you that we are feeling better and may be finally be healed
in the new year, with a cure, it should finally really [..?..]. Thank you, my daughter,
for the pictures. You don’t look well, my daughter. But I hope to God that you will
finally look better. In the meantime, I am delighted to receive the picture.
I hope to God, my daughter, that I will live to see you. Thank you very much,
my daughter, about writing that you will send me the shawl with Lizetshke. I really
need it, my daughter. I am happy that the blouse was sent back because Lale and
Poyle, thank God, both together [aren’t lacking anything?]. It wouldn’t have been
pleasant for me. If I give it to Lale will Poyle resend it? Maybe, my daughter, you
need it for yourself. But for me can be bought a warm woollen jacket to wear, a
coat. Lale brought one from Riga and Poyle also has something. Only I really lack
such a thing. I don’t have anything to wear and winter is on the way. I really need it
and I’m always cold. And it is very good to have among one’s clothing such a jacket
but a short one [not from lamb?]. If you can, please send it to me. I would be very
grateful, my daughter. Send it to Moscow and it will immediately be [forwarded?]
to Rostov. He [Maks?] writes to me also that my shawl will be sent out to me. He
writes that he expects for me
[Rest of letter missing]
No. 12: [Rostov], 13 October 1925

My dear children, also the dear child Gusil, dear,
Many greetings and kisses from me to you and thank you for your dear letter about
which I was very anxious. I am anxious about everything when I don’t have a letter
from you. [Then it seems to me?], my dear daughter, that you are in poor health.
Please, my dear daughter, write to me immediately about how you are feeling. I
understand that nothing good is going on now and everywhere it is sad. But as the
new year begins, I hope to God that he has heard my request that I have asked on
your behalf many times, my dear children, that he will grant you good health and
good fortune and we will also have pleasure from our dear children.
[...] Daughter, the 2 spoons that you were sent and the fork. The two spoons have
not been tested. They are 84 [percent pure silver]. I had 6 spoons tested and tested
them in Warsaw. They are 84 but he wanted a high price for the test so I only did
it for one and the rest remain untested.
There is no news here. The shortages here are like in Berlin. 700 million roubles
for meat, 99 million for butter, 50 million a bottle, there aren’t two [glasses].
Potatoes 15 million roubles for a pound. It’s good that we can’t buy anything. May
God help us nonetheless make a living. It is now also not good, our earnings are
very bad. It’s a small place and there are too many businesses. But we hope to God
that he won’t, God forbid, forsake us
[Rest of letter missing]
No. 13: Rostov, 2 November 1925

Regards and kisses from me, my dear children. I received your letter and also the
package from Moscow. Thank you very much, my good daughter, for what you
sent me. Everything was needed very much and now it is cold and I finally have
something to wear. Everything you sent is good. I wear the [mohair?] every day
because it is very warm. May God repay you, my dear daughter, with happy, good,
long years and the merit that you have not forgotten us. But you should write more
frequent letters, my daughter, because one of the few things left to me is that I
should hear good, happy news in letters from my children and that we should merit
being able to see you again in our lifetime.
[...] My daughter, I also know that Gisel, may he live, becomes this year [bar
mitzvah] and I am very happy about what you write to us that he goes to the
rabbi every week. May God grant that Gusil will be healthy we hope to have
great pleasure from him and that we will merit the opportunity to see him in our
lifetimes. Oy, I have only one request of the blessed God that we will write.
With warm love, your devoted mother,
Liebe.
[...]
Notes to Chapter 6
1. Verena Dohrn, ‘ “Wir Europäer schlechthin”: Die Familie Koigen im russisch-jüdischen Berlin’,
Osteuropa, 58 (2008), 211–32.
2. Information about the family is gleaned from letters in the possession of Mira Zakai.
3. Karl Kurt Wolter, ‘Zur Geschichte der Postzensur, 3’, Archiv für deutsche Postgeschichte, 18 (1970),
30–33; Klaus Petersen, Zensur in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), pp. 31–32.
4. Berlin, Politisches Archiv Auswärtiges Amt, Abteilung III, Abteilung für Jüdische Ange
legenheiten — Presse 24 March 1920–30 December 1922, R78670 L333079-L333095.
5. Vladlen Izmozik, Glaza i ushi rezhima: Gosudarstvennyi politicheskii kontrol’ za naseleniem Sovetskoi
Rossii v 1918–1928 (St Petersburg: Izdat. Sankt-Peterburgskogo Univ. Ekonomiki i Finansov,
1995), pp. 110–13.
140 Verena Dohrn
6. ‘Koigen, Debora’, file from the Reichskommissariat für Überwachung der öffentlichen Ord
nung (Moscow, special archive at the Rossiiskii Gosudarsvennyi Voennyi Archiv, f. 772, op. 3,
d. 525). Many thanks to Markus Wolf, who showed me the file.
7. See the entry ‘Koigen, Isabella’ in the biographical database, compiled mainly by Olaf Kirchener,
supplied on a CD-ROM with the Biographisches Handbuch zur Geschichte der Kommunistischen
Internationale, ed. by Michael Buckmiller and Klaus Meschkat (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007).
8. Rita Pawlowski, ‘Frauen — die namenlosen Emigrantinnen? Oder: Eine Liste gegen das
Vergessen’, in Jahrhundertschicksale: Frauen im sowjetischen Exil, ed. by Simone Barck and others
(Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2003), p. 237; Wladislaw Hedeler, ‘Zwischen Wissenschaftlichkeit and
Stalinschem Machtanspruch: Schicksale der Mitarbeiter des Marx-Engels-Lenin-Instituts
(1931–1938)’, in Stalinismus und das Ende der ersten Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (1931–1941), ed. by
Carl-Erich Vollgraf and others (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2001), pp. 161–65.
9. File ‘Koigen, Debora’.
10. Dohrn, pp. 217–18.
11. Archive of Mira Zakai. Birth certificate of Georg-Mark Koigen, St Petersburg, 30 July 1914.
12. Archive of Mira Zakai. Citizenship documents of David Koigen and family, Berlin, 1 October
1927.
13. Berne, Stadtarchiv, E 2.2.1.3.108 (No. 175 Lit. K, No. 122 Lit. S) (Fremdenregister Aufenthalter
— Einzelpersonen FR VIII, 1899–1902); E 2.2.1.4.004 (No. 324) (Interims-Anmeldungskontrolle
IC, 1902–1903); E 2.2.1.4.005 (No. 249) (Interims-Anmeldungskontrolle IC, 1904–1905).
14. Franziska Rogger, Der Doktorhut im Besenschrank: Das abenteuerliche Leben der ersten Studentinnen
— am Beispiel der Universität Bern, 2nd edn (Berne: eFeF-Verlag, 2002), pp. 16–17; Daniela
Neumann, Studentinnen aus dem Russischen Reich in der Schweiz 1867–1914 (Zurich: Rohr,
1987), pp. 163–82.
15. Entries on Henia Koigen in the cash book of the University of Berne. Berne, Staatsarchiv Bern,
BB III b 766, 769, 772.
16. Photographs of Marusja in the archive of Mira Zakai. Marusja’s death is recorded in St
Petersburg, Tsentral’nyi Gosudarsvennyi Istoričeskii Archiv Sankt-Peterburga (TsGIA), f. 422,
op. 3, d. 500, l. 18 ob.
17. Ze’ev Rosenkranz and Barbara Wolff, The Persistent Illusion of Transience: Albert Einstein, ed. by
the Albert Einstein Archives ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2007), p. 34.
18. Dohrn, p. 225. Tamar Or, Vorkämpferin und Mütter des Zionismus: Die deutsch-zionistischen Frauen
organisationen (1897–1938) (Frankfurt on Main: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 199, 213.
19. Susanna Poldauf, ‘Lasker und die Berliner Boheme’, Karl: Das kulturelle Schachmagazin, 1 (2008),
18–22.
20. Julyjana Ranc, Alexandra Ramm-Pfempfert: Ein Gegenleben (Hamburg: Edition Neutilus, 2003),
pp. 31–38.
21. Entries on Henia Koigen in the cash book of the University of Berne, Berne, Staatsarchiv Bern,
BB III b 769.
22. Dohrn, p. 218.
23. See note 16.
24. David Koigen, Apokalyptische Reiter: Aufzeichnungen aus der jüngsten Geschichte (Berlin: Reiss,
1925), p. 106.
25. Dohrn, pp. 226–32.
26. Berlin, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, VI HANL Werner Sombart (Allgemeine
Korrepondenz), No. 2b, 2, fols 186–88, 200.
27. Karl Elster, Vom Rubel zum Tscherwonjez: Zur Geschichte der Sowjet-Währung ( Jena: Fischer, 1930),
pp. 161–229.
Chapter 7
v
The Berlin Bureau of the

New York Forverts
Gennady Estraikh
In his 1921 article entitled ‘Save yourself the trouble of travelling to Warsaw, Vilna,
Kaunas, Riga, or Kishinev’, Abraham Cahan, the statesmanlike editor of the
biggest New York Yiddish daily, Forverts (Forward), argued that, for Jews, Berlin
was ‘in a sense, the most significant city in the world’; the German capital played
the role of ‘the main marketplace for ideas in the Jewish world’, though it was not
a seedbed for them. Cahan also assigned great importance to the use of Berlin as a
communication hub, especially given the political barriers established in eastern and
central Europe after the map of the continent was redrawn following the war. As
a result of these changes, a letter mailed from Warsaw to Kaunas would arrive in a
fortnight at best. Communication links between New York and Berlin proved to
be far more reliable and faster than links with such capitals as Kaunas and Riga. A
Warsaw-dweller found it less cumbersome to have a meeting with his Riga-based
counterpart in Berlin than to face the red tape of obtaining a visa for going to
Latvia. In addition, German was, in Cahan’s words, ‘almost Yiddish’. Although this
was an overstatement, Yiddish-speaking immigrants and visitors could linguistically
survive in the city.1 Significantly, Berlin housed the offices of a number of Jewish
organizations, such as the ORT (Society for Promoting Artisanal and Agricultural
Work), the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and the HIAS (Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society), whose activities were regularly covered by Forverts.
The journalists who had gathered around Cahan at Forverts formed a clan of
their own, with elements of ideological (socialist) groupthink but also with signi
ficant leeway in representing different views on Jewish and general issues. For all
of them, Berlin was the Mecca of socialism. It is no coincidence that the title of
the newspaper, Forverts, launched in 1897, was modelled on the title of the Berlin-
based central organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Vorwärts (Forward),
established in 1891. In fact, the word forverts never became fully idiomatic in
Yiddish, and Cahan initially demurred at the suggestion to choose this German
name.2 Ultimately, the word entered Yiddish usage as part and parcel of German-
derived socialist terminology, including the term of address genose (from the
German Genosse, ‘comrade’). According to Tony Michels, a historian of American
Jewish socialism, German socialists ‘served as the midwives of the Jewish labor
movement’ in the United States.3 During World War I, solidarity with German
142 Gennady Estraikh
socialists was one of the main reasons for the pro-German stance of Forverts; this
policy even brought the newspaper to the brink of closure in April 1917, when the
United States joined the anti-German coalition and, as a result, Forverts was deemed
hostile to the state.4
In contrast with English-language periodicals, Cahan and other American
Yiddish editors did not have to dispatch their journalists to Europe in order to
establish local offices of their newspapers. Rather, they could recruit local literati
who sought to work for an American periodical. In Berlin, international journalism
was an important stand-by for scores of Russian Jewish expatriates, especially as
their chances to write for local publications were very limited in the city, which
never had a Yiddish daily. Although over thirty Yiddish periodicals started to appear
in Weimar Berlin, the majority of them were ephemeral house journals of locally
based relief organizations and political groups.5 As for the few weeklies that targeted
the general reader, they would go out of print soon after appearing on the news-
stands. Many eastern European Jewish immigrants were arrivals from the Austrian
provinces of Galicia or Bukovina and often knew German well enough to read the
mainstream press. In addition, the affinity of Yiddish with German helped Yiddish-
speakers switch over to reading German periodicals. Characteristically, Vienna,
with its even more numerous Yiddish-speaking population, never had an unbroken
Yiddish press scene either.6 Committed Yiddishist activists would get newspapers
from abroad, most notably from Poland, though the Labour Zionists sporadically
published their literary and political journal Unzer bavegung (Our Movement) and a
group of Bundists produced several issues of the newspaper Morgnshtern (Morning
Star).7 In addition, the great Warsaw Yiddish dailies Haynt (Today) and Moment
reached Berlin a day after publication.8
In September 1921, Vladimir Grossman, a journalist with experience of working
in the Yiddish, Russian, Danish, and Norwegian press, suggested himself as
co-editor for a new Berlin-based Yiddish newspaper planned by Jacob Lestschinsky,
who appeared in Berlin in the summer of 1921. Thanks to Jurgis Baltrušaitis,
the Lithuanian ambassador to Moscow and a prominent Russian Symbolist poet,
Lestschinsky did not belong to the category of stateless refugees. Instead, he was
a citizen of one of the new independent countries, Lithuania. A whole group of
intellectuals who similarly gained Lithuanian citizenship would live in Berlin
during the Weimar period, including the historian Simon Dubnow and the writer
David Bergelson. Lestschinsky (1876–1966) was born in the province of Kiev, where
he spent the first two decades of his life. As in many similar life stories of shtetl-born
intellectuals, Lestschinsky’s break with religious traditions began when the winds
of modernity brought secular Hebrew books to his Ukrainian-Jewish corner of the
Pale of Jewish Settlement. In 1896 he moved to Odessa, where, in his own words,
he ‘for the first time realized that apart from the Talmud there was also another
kind of scholarship’. In 1901 he studied at the University of Berne and, by and by,
underwent a political awakening. Initially, Lestschinsky was ready to relinquish
Yiddish for the sake of the ideal of restoring Hebrew as a living language, but later
he became a committed Yiddishist. In 1906, he came to Berlin and for six months
lived there a cloistered life, writing his Marxist analysis, Der yidisher arbeter in Rusland
The Berlin Bureau of the Forverts 143
Fig. 12. Abraham Cahan during one of his cross-Atlantic trips (undated)
From the archive of the Forward Association, New York
(The Jewish Worker in Russia). This treatise became an ideological cornerstone of the
Zionist Socialist Workers’ Party, whose embryo Lestschinsky helped establish in
1903. By 1921, Lestschinsky was known as an insightful analyst of Jewish economic,
social, and cultural life, and an experienced Yiddish newspaperman.9 Thus, it
was logical for him to try his hand at establishing a newspaper in the German
capital. However, the arrival of Abraham Cahan in Berlin completely changed the
trajectory of Lestschinsky’s life.
* * * * *
Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), without whom the whole history of the Yiddish press
might have been very different, was several persons in one body. A recognized
Yiddish and English man of letters, he also remained an admirer of Russian
culture, a sworn enemy of Russia’s monarchic regime, and a devotee of German-
style socialism. Although his numerous transatlantic trips always had the practical
purpose of establishing new contacts and writing about the political, cultural, and
daily life of Europeans, he also obviously enjoyed his sojourns, most notably in Paris
and Berlin, where he, essentially a European intellectual, could feel himself in his
element. For all that, his trips in 1915 and in 1918 to 1919 were, no doubt, more
challenging than pleasant.
In mid-February 1915 he went, via Amsterdam and Berlin, to eastern European
territories under German and Austrian control and reported on the situation in the
area. His two-month-long visit was facilitated by the German War Press Office
(Kriegspresseamt) and the prominent German Social Democrat leader Philipp
Scheidemann, who regularly wrote for Forverts.10 Cahan’s dispatches resulted in
an increase of the circulation of Forverts from 176,124 at the beginning of 1915
to 200,267 by the time of his return to New York. Two of his articles described
the situation in Berlin proper. He emphasized that the city bore few traces of the
war. The bread rations and the Kriegsbrot (‘war bread’, containing potato f lour and
other additives), introduced in Berlin in January 1915, did reveal the exigencies
of wartime, but Cahan praised the government for regulating food distribution,
first suggested by the German Social Democrats. He argued that the Russians did
not implement similar measures because it was in the Russian character to allow
unregulated bread consumption even if it would ultimately lead to severe food
shortages.11 In general, the Russians, particularly the marauding forces of Cossacks,
appeared in his write-ups as a wild, barbaric horde that left behind a trail of total
devastation in Jewish life.12
In December 1918, Cahan went to Europe as the only representative of the
Jewish press among the more than fifty American journalists who covered the Paris
Peace Conference. During his journey, which lasted until October 1919, he visited
several countries, most notably France, Belgium, Austria, Hungary, and Poland. As
Forverts reported on its front pages on 31 July and 1 August 1919, Cahan was twice
apprehended by the Polish authorities in Vilna, the town of his childhood and
adolescence, where he had graduated from the Jewish Teacher Training Institute in
1881. While travelling in Europe, he made arrangements with several intellectuals,
establishing a network of correspondents for his paper. On 10 February 1920, the
Forward Association, which owned and published the newspaper, opened a separate
bank account for paying the foreign correspondents.13 In the same year, Forverts
began to allocate whole pages to ‘Briv fun unzere eyropeyishe korespondentn’
[Letters from our European Correspondents]. One of them, Nahman Shifrin (1893–
1984), emerged as a correspondent in Copenhagen, where (due to Denmark’s neu
trality during the war) many newspapers had their offices. In 1921 or even earlier,
in the second half of 1920, Shifrin moved to Berlin to head the Forverts bureau.
Cahan returned to Europe in the summer of 1921, spending some time in Berlin.
In his portrayal of Jewish intellectual life in the German capital he paid special
attention to the Romanisches Café, the bohemian hub of the city. At the beginning
of August, Cahan had a chance to see there a range of Jewish notables who lived in
Berlin or came to participate in various gatherings there. Lestschinsky, according
to Cahan, was a person who had ‘recently moved to Berlin and had made a name
for himself as a researcher of pogroms in Ukraine’.14 On 2 September 1921, Forverts
came out with an announcement of the forthcoming publication of three articles
by Lestschinsky containing ‘masses of extremely important statistics, facts, and
episodes, summing up the carnage in Ukraine’ in the years of the civil war that raged
there after the Bolshevik Revolution. In reality, Elias Tcherikower, also a Jewish
activist in post-1917 Ukraine, was the main historian of that period of violence. In
1921, he was the head founder of the Eastern European Historical Archive, est
ablished in Berlin to preserve and publish documents about the pogroms.15
Tcherikower and Lestschinsky were friends, and both of them belonged to the inner
circle of Simon Dubnow.16 They had many things in common, including their lack
of university qualifications and, as a result, an inability to take up a mainstream
academic post.
During his summer 1921 visit, Cahan was looking for a person who could replace
Shifrin as head of the Berlin bureau. Lestschinsky, a journalist, scholar, and socialist,
apparently met Cahan’s requirements better than Shifrin, who later owned large
photo agencies in Berlin and, after 1933, established a similar business in Palestine.17
Nine years later, Cahan recalled in one of his letters to Lestschinsky how the latter
had performed successfully in the interview conducted by Cahan at a small hotel
not far from the Bahnhof Friedrichstraße station in Berlin.18 By that time, Forverts
already had two journalists in Berlin: Max Weinreich (1894–1969), best known
as the central figure in Yiddish scholarship, and David Eynhorn (1886–1973), an
established Yiddish writer.
Weinreich was born and grew up in Latvia, where his merchant family preferred
German and Russian, but he came under the inf luence of the Bund and Yiddishism.
In 1907, at the age of thirteen, he began his journalistic career with occasional essays
and translations. In 1910, he (as S(arah) Brener) published his programmatic article
‘Der kamf far Yidish’ (‘The Struggle for Yiddish’) in the St Petersburg Yiddish
fortnightly Unzer tsayt (Our Time) and, in the same year, used his real name to
defend Yiddish in an opinion piece written for the German-language newspaper
Rigasche Rundschau (Riga Review). Isidor Elyashev (Bal-Makhshoves), the master
Jewish literary critic and, at that time, editor of the Riga Yiddish daily, Di yidishe
shtime (The Jewish Voice), characterized Weinreich as ‘a convinced Yiddishist’. After
Fig. 13. Jacob Lestschinsky (undated)

From the Archives of the YIVO, New York
the 1917 Revolution, Weinreich was active in politics and edited several Bundist
newspapers, but in 1919 he moved to Germany. There he continued his tertiary
education, which he had started in 1913 at the University of St Petersburg. In
1923 he received his doctorate from the University of Marburg and soon settled in
Vilna.19 From 1920, his articles, usually signed Sarah Brener, regularly appeared in
Forverts. Successful in finding stories, he tended to concentrate on events in Berlin
and German life in general, most notably on high-profile criminal cases, though
in April 1920 he also covered the Genoa Conference, convened to discuss the
monetary economics of the post-war world.
Like Weinreich, Eynhorn was a scion of a well-off family (his father was a
military doctor) and he also became absorbed in Bundism. Both Eynhorn and
Weinreich would eventually distance themselves from their early ideological affilia
tion, probably because of many Bundists’ ‘neutralist’ view on Yiddish, based on
the belief that history rather than political movements would define the destiny
of the language.20 From 1904, Eynhorn’s poems were published in Yiddish labour
periodicals. By 1909, he was recognized as a promising modern Yiddish poet. In
1912, following his arrest and imprisonment in Vilna, he left Russia and spent five
years in France and Switzerland. His poems and essays appeared in various Yiddish
publications, especially in the organs of the Bund. He came to Warsaw by the end
of the war and lived there for a couple of years before moving to Berlin, where he
began writing for Forverts. To Eynhorn, Berlin was a
shtot on traditsye
on romantic
shtot mit a groyer vilhelmisher fargangenhayt,
kulo kegnvart
in dervartung oyf der tsukunft.21
[city without tradition, | without romance, | city with Wilhelm’s grey past, |
by the end of the present, | in expectation of the future.]
In 1922, Eynhorn and Weinreich joined with the Jewish journalist Shmaryahu
Gorelik (1877–1943) in producing a miscellany whose title, Der onheyb (The Begin
ning), was an emblem for the dawn of Berlin-based Yiddish literary activity.
However, Eynhorn and Weinreich soon left Berlin. Paris became the main place
of Eynhorn’s residence, whereas Weinreich moved to Vilna, where he would built
the renowned academic centre called the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO). In
the pre-World War II period and later, when Eynhorn and Weinreich lived in New
York, they continued their collaboration with Forverts.
In the early 1920s, Forverts also published articles by two other Berlin-based
contributors: Yitshak Eliezer Leyzerovitch (1883–1927), a career journalist, and
Yitshak Charlash (1892–1973), a Bundist activist and educator. Leyzerovitch’s reports
appeared under the byline of Abi-Ver (‘anybody’), and Charlash’s pseudonym was
Ben-Baruch (‘Baruch’s son’). It is not entirely clear what form the relationship
between the Berlin correspondents and their superior Lestschinsky took when he,
from 1 December 1921, began to function as the head of the Berlin bureau. Most
likely, Lestschinsky facilitated organizational and financial links between the main
office in New York and the journalists, rather than being directly in charge of
them. In his numerous letters to Lestschinsky, Cahan, a hands-on editor, instructed

his Berlin representative on how to overcome various teething problems in running
the bureau. The directives included nuances of the newspaper’s political stance, its
attitude to other correspondents and contributors, and financial details of royalties,
communication fees, and so on.22
In addition to the few Berlin-based literati with stable arrangements as Forverts
correspondents, Lestschinsky also worked with figures who did a smaller amount
of writing for the newspaper. On 31 January 1923, the historian Simon Dubnow
noted in his dairy that Lestschinsky had come to him on behalf of Cahan and
asked him to write several essays for the literary department of the newspaper.
Dubnow could not turn down the financially lucrative offer of twenty-five dollars,
or one million German marks, per article. He wrote two articles, published on
8 and 15 April 1923, about the anti-Jewish violence in Alsace at the time of the
French revolutions in 1789 and 1848. Later, Cahan was not interested in Dubnow’s
contributions, deeming them abstruse for his readers, so Dubnow serialized his
memoirs in the New York Yiddish daily Der tog (The Day); they were published
in book form in 1929 under the title Fun zhargon tsu yidish (From Jargon to Yiddish).
Even so, this would not stop Cahan from visiting Dubnow, as he did on 15 July
1931, when he came to the historian together with the Yiddish lexicographer (and
Forverts contributor) Alexander Harkavy.23
Among the Forverts authors was Hersh David Nomberg, one of the most respected
Yiddish writers. Although Nomberg lived in Warsaw, he frequently visited the
German capital and was regarded as a habitué of the Romanisches Café.24 Abraham
Coralnik, a columnist of Der tog (his sister, Leah, was Jacob Lestschinsky’s wife),
ridiculed Cahan’s description of his meeting with Nomberg in Berlin to discuss
with him chances of becoming a contributor to the Forverts. And with the
artless naivité which is his style and his idiosyncrasy the American editor relates
to Nomberg, ‘I have read some of your articles in the Moment and found that
you have opinions about literature’.
Coralnik could ‘visualize the ironic smile with which Nomberg received this
“compliment” ’, whereas Cahan was ‘not at all ashamed of never having read any
of Nomberg’s writings’.25 Indeed, Cahan paid little attention to developments in
modern Yiddish literary life, arguing (in a letter to Lestschinsky) that talented
writers had ‘relatively few readers’ and that the newspaper created ‘new readers for
them, not the other way around’.26 In 1921, Vladimir Medem, the leading Bundist,
wrote about the ‘psychological puzzle’ of Cahan, whose outlook combined a f lat
dismissal of Yiddishism with a momentous contribution to the development of
Yiddish culture.27
Forverts also published numerous articles by the Social Democrat theorists and
politicians Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein was widely respected
among eastern European Jewish emigrants, hundreds of whom were able to settle
in Germany thanks to the veteran socialist’s letters of reference and other forms of
generous support.28 For Bernstein, it became vital to write for Forverts when he
retired from political life in 1928 and subsequently lost his Reichstag salary, which
had been a major source of income.29
* * * * *
On 11 November 1923, Forverts featured on its front page the following telegram:
‘Berlin, 10 November. My husband, Jacob Lestschinsky, has been arrested for send
ing to Forverts details about the anti-Jewish pogrom in Berlin. Mrs Lestschinsky.’
The editors immediately informed their readership that they had contacted the
leaders of the German Social Democrats. Next day the paper wrote that Lestschinsky
had been released, but the commandant of Berlin ordered that he be re-arrested.
Lestschinsky was placed in the Moabit prison, accused of defaming Germany in
his descriptions of the unrest in Berlin. On 14 November, Forverts wrote about the
support of the Berlin Vorwärts: the central organ of the German Social Democrats
held the authorities responsible for clamping down on journalistic freedom. On 15
November, Lestschinsky was able to send a telegram informing the editors that he
had been released after spending six days in prison. According to him, his release
was a result of the pressure put on the government by the Social Democrats and the
Foreign Press Association (Verein der ausländischen Presse).30
Although contemporary chroniclers wrote about the Jewish targets of the Berlin
riots and lootings (of the two hundred and seven looted shops, sixty-one were
Jewish-owned), some of them, including Alfred Döblin, played down the impor
tance of the anti-Semitic side of the violence.31 On 1 December 1923, Forverts
published an article entitled ‘The Forverts correspondent portrays in detail the
pogrom in Berlin’ and signed by ‘our special correspondent B. Keiter’. The piece
was written by Lestschinsky in everything but name, but after his arrest he was
wary of using his real name when describing the unrest, which he saw as a fallout
of the effects of the severe economic crisis in Germany. The deteriorating living
conditions created a pre-pogrom atmosphere, which Lestschinsky, a survivor of
Ukrainian pogroms, could detect when the price of a standard loaf of bread jumped
from 25 billion marks on Saturday 3 November to 140 billion marks on Monday
5 November. In the meantime, vitriol against the Jews (especially the residents
of the Scheunenviertel) was mounting while rumours spread about unscrupulous
Jewish speculators, who ostensibly were instrumental in creating hyperinf lation.
Lestschinsky met Sholem Asch on Sunday and told him about his worries that the
German fascists would not miss the opportunity to organize anti-Jewish pogroms
and that the authorities might be interested in giving the population a chance to
vent its frustration. However, Asch, who frequently visited Berlin, ridiculed this
foreboding as the overreaction of a Ukrainian Jew and argued that ‘Germany is not
Ukraine!’.32
In his article published on 7 January 1924, Lestschinsky clarified the real cause
of his incarceration. The following ‘interventionist comment’ that appeared in his
telegram sent to Forverts on 7 November 1923: ‘If American Jews do not intervene,
it will put in danger all eastern European Jews in Berlin.’ As a result, the authorities
accused Lestschinsky of ultimately inviting a foreign government to interfere in the
internal affairs of Germany. In addition, one of his previous telegrams contained a
similar passionate phrase, quoting a Jew who had f led Munich, being terrified by
the atmosphere in the city (where a Nazi putsch would take place on 9 November).
Lestschinsky praised the head of the American desk at the German Foreign Office,
who did his best to convince the top brass that it was counterproductive to keep the
representative of such an inf luential newspaper in prison.
Lestschinsky maintained that he always ref lected the grim reality of life in
Germany, where inf lation reached its climax in mid-November 1923, and ‘never
accepted the tactics of denying that we had profiteers and currency speculators,
and that, indeed, a bunch of them were immigrant Jews, who deserved only one
befitting definition: criminals!’. Yet he was appalled by the police’s behaviour
when they turned a blind eye to thuggish violence against the Jewish population.
Moreover, policemen obviously sympathized with the attackers. Lestschinsky was
adamant that his reports did not exaggerate the scale of the violence. He wrote
about the several wounded and humiliated (by being forced to undress) Jews, but he
was not ready to draw direct parallels between the Berlin events and the Ukrainian
pogroms. Echoing Asch’s argument, he also exclaimed: ‘At the end of the day, it is
Berlin, not Kiev or Proskurov!’. All in all, he drew two lessons from his November
1923 experience: first, the American Jewry should not hesitate to voice their
concern about the situation in Europe; second, it was important to blame only the
real culprits rather than to slur the whole population.33
Although events in Germany remained inside the scope of Lestschinsky’s
journalistic and scholarly attention, eastern Europe and especially the Soviet Union
continued to be the central topic of his Forverts articles. In fact, it was only in the
1930s that the American Yiddish press began to keep a watchful eye on political
events in Germany, whereas Soviet Russia and its projects of Jewish colonization
were the craze of the 1920s.34 No doubt, this focus of attention ref lected the outlook
of both writers and readers of the Yiddish press, which essentially remained an
immigrant forum. In a letter to Cahan on 9 April 1924, Lestschinsky agreed with
him that Germany was ‘badly covered’ by the numerous journalists who lived in
the country. Yet the Berlin journalist community continued to recycle newspaper
reports and rumours from the world’s first Communist state.
Forverts had correspondents in several Soviet cities, and Lestschinsky was partly
responsible for contact with them, including those authors who did not want to
reveal their names. In 1934, Bergelson, then already a Soviet writer, ridiculed
Forverts and other foreign newspapers for publishing ‘anonymous letters “with the
pure truth” about the Bolsheviks’.35 In addition to unnamed amateur reporting,
the paper regularly published articles that had bylines, such as Leyb Yakhnovitsh
(1887-?) from Odessa and A. Kiever (Dov-Ber Slutski, 1877–1955) from Kiev.36 Both
literati also contributed to Soviet Yiddish periodicals, and Yakhnovitsh even edited
the Odessa newspaper Komunistishe shtim (Communist Voice). From 1923 to 1936,
Forverts published hundreds of articles by Zalman Wendroff (1879–1972), whose
peripatetic youth included a job in Yiddish journalism in the United States. In 1908,
he returned to Russia as a reporter for Morgn-zhurnal (Morning Journal), the second-
largest New York Yiddish daily.
On 30 March 1923, Cahan wrote to Lestschinsky that he realized how difficult
it must be for the Soviet literati to write political articles aimed at the essentially
anti-Soviet readership. (In the conditions of the Soviet state, no doubt, Wendroff
and his likes could not operate without the authorization of the secret police. It is
illuminating that Wendroff had to get special permission even to receive copies
of the newspaper by mail.)37 Cahan therefore suggested that they concentrate on
more neutral topics, describing mundane details of everyday life in various Soviet
localities. Indeed, when Wendroff summed up his first three and a half years of
writing for Forverts in a letter to Cahan on 27 September 1926, he could mention
only a small number of political articles among his two hundred pieces.38
* * * * *
Initially, Cahan and the majority of the Forverts staff welcomed the Bolshevik
Revolution. Max Goldfarb (Lipets), the labour editor of the newspaper, returned
to Russia after the 1917 Revolution and made himself an impressive career in the
Soviet apparatus. Tsen teg, vos hobn oyfgerudert di velt (1920), the Yiddish version of
John Reed’s euphoric first-hand portrayal of the Revolution, Ten Days that Shook
the World, was published under the imprint of Forverts in a translation by Moyshe
(Moissaye) Olgin, then one of the newspaper’s foremost writers. In October 1921,
Olgin was the leading figure in the breakaway group of Forverts journalists who
joined the American Communist movement and, in April 1922, established the
Communist daily Frayhayt (Freedom).39 Nonetheless, Communism remained a
fringe current among American Jewish socialists because the majority of them did
not want an authoritarian Bolshevik order. Instead, they strengthened the unions,
which provided workers with protection for their economic and civil rights. In
the meantime, Cahan continued to lend his paper’s support to the new Russian
regime, though he was an opponent of the Third International, or Comintern,
and its American stablemates. David Shub, a Forverts writer and a socialist activist,
explained this ideological conundrum in his informative memoirs:
A portion of the American socialists, for a certain time even the majority of
American socialists, tried to draw a demarcation line between the Comintern
(Communist International) and the Soviet government. They condemned the
Comintern, but the Soviet government they regarded as a labour government
and did not want to criticize it openly. [...] In the first few years after the split,
Forverts and [its sister journal] Tsukunft [Future] [...] also had this attitude to
Soviet Russia. As late as 1923, both Forverts and Tsukunft published pro-Soviet
articles and reports from Russia.40
In his letter of 3 April 1922, Cahan asked Lestschinsky to send the following
instructions to Wendroff and other Soviet correspondents:
[Their] reports don’t have to represent a straightforward apologia for the
Soviet government or its Jewish institutions. Indeed, we are not Bolsheviks,
but Forverts is a friend of the Soviet leadership and we want to help them; we
want to help them despite all the silly shenanigans [shimperayen] of [Abraham]
Merezhin [the leading functionary in the Soviet Jewish apparatus] and his ilk
or of the local [American] left-wingers. Yet, we can’t, and don’t want to, create
an impression among our readers that we select telegrams and articles with the
intention to promote Soviet Russia and its advocates.
At the end of 1926, someone even circulated spurious rumours that the newspaper’s
editors were planning to turn Forverts into a pro-Soviet forum.41 In reality, the
relations of Forverts with the Soviet regime developed in two directions: although
ideologists in the Jewish sections of the Soviet Communist Party treated the New
York paper as a major enemy, a modus vivendi had been established with other,
often more inf luential constituents of the Soviet apparatus which valued the
significant contribution of the Forverts milieu to the fundraising campaigns aimed
at helping Soviet Jews. Thus, Sholem Asch, the honorary chairman of the Yiddish
PEN Club and star writer of Forverts, was severely criticized in the Soviet Yiddish
press, particularly when he visited the Soviet Union in 1928.42 Yet, in 1929 to
1930, a Moscow publishing house released Asch’s multi-volume collected works,
translated into Russian. A Russian translation of Abraham Cahan’s novel The Rise
of David Levinsky was published in Leningrad in 1927. Israel Joshua Singer, also a
leading Forverts writer, was, no doubt, pleased to have a Russia translation of his
novel Shtol un ayzn (Steel and Iron), about the Russian Revolution, published in
Moscow in 1930 under the title Iosif Lerner.
The letter to Lestschinsky dated 7 September 1926 reveals Cahan’s satisfaction
with Joseph Stalin and his group’s victory over the ‘wild, bloodthirsty tactics and
rhetoric of Zinoviev and Trotsky’. According to Cahan’s fallacious analysis, it
augured well for improving the Soviet government’s relationship with the socialist
movement and leading the country into the democratic fold. An impressionable
man of letters rather than a profound political analyst, Cahan next year visited the
Soviet Union and came back convinced that the Communist regime constituted the
‘dictatorship of a minority’.43 Nonetheless, until 1928, when the Kremlin stopped
advocating cooperation with social democracy, Cahan apparently comforted himself
with the belief that the Soviet Union would eventually return to democracy, which
he considered an indispensable feature of socialism. Thereafter, mainly in the
early 1930s, Forverts redefined its politics and became ‘the only really outspoken
[American Yiddish] anti-Communist paper’.44
Cahan’s ideological transformation left its mark on his relations with Raphael
(Rein-)Abramovitch (1880–1963), a leading figure among the Mensheviks and
Bundists. Cahan first met Abramovitch in 1907 or 1908, when the latter visited
America as a representative of the Bund, and valued him as ‘a highly developed and
sympathetic socialist, a tactful, clever, and cultural person’. In 1913 to 1915, when
Abramovitch lived in Vienna, he contributed to Forverts.45 Although Abramovitch
from time to time cooperated with Lenin before 1917, he became an opponent of
the Soviet regime, which, he argued, compromised the basic ideals of socialism. In
August 1920 he left Russia and settled in Berlin. Cahan wanted to have such a high-
calibre socialist among his paper’s contributors and passed on an invitation through
Frank Rosenblatt, the representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee who earlier headed the Workmen’s Circle, an American Jewish fraternal
organization closely associated with Forverts.46 In the 1920s, Forverts emerged as a
sponsor of Russian socialists who lived as émigrés. Apart from paying royalties,
which formed the primary source of income for people such as Abramovitch, the
Forward Association contributed money to the Berlin-based journal Sotsialisticheskii
vestnik (Socialist Herald), the main forum of non-Bolshevik Russian socialists,
published twice monthly in Berlin under Abramovitch’s editorship.
For all that, Cahan initially did not agree with Abramovitch, who, for instance,
characterized Stalin as a person who ‘would not have problems with shedding blood’
and maintained that Lenin’s physical decline reinforced the Kremlin’s descent to ‘a
despotic-military, non-socialist, anti-democratic, alien-capitalist tyranny (Bona
partism!)’.47 Some of Abramovitch’s articles had a podkove (‘horseshoe’, or editorial
comment), such as: ‘The Bolsheviks deserve to be forgiven for many things. They
have been standing at the helm during a very difficult period. The whole world
united against them and only an iron hand of discipline could help the skipper to
save his ship from a disaster.’48 Cahan wrote to Lestschinsky on 16 January 1922,
asking him to tempt Abramovitch into writing memoiristic essays about his Bundist
past rather than commenting on the Soviet regime.
In the summer of 1923, when Cahan once again visited Berlin, he was very
impressed by the group of people with whom he had dinner at the Abramovitches’
f lat. Among the guests were the Kautskys, the Georgian scholar and socialist
Mikheil Tsereteli, and the Berlin correspondent of Italian socialist newspapers
Gustavo Sacerdote. The latter explained that ‘Sacerdote’, the Italian for ‘priest’,
ref lected his belonging to the kohanim (descendents of the first priest, Aaron, the
brother of Moses), similar to the meaning of ‘Cahan’. According to Cahan, the
whole atmosphere of the dinner was typically German, apart from the tea served to
those of the guests who did not want to drink coffee. Abramovitch knew German
very well from his student years in Riga. Cahan, however, could speak, in his own
words, only a ‘tsoresdiker daytsh’ [tormented German], or (apparently) the ‘almost
German’ Yiddish.49
Communists were vitriolic about Abramovitch, an inf luential figure in the
Second (or Socialist) International. In Stalin’s words, Abramovitch was a ‘Bundist
capitulationist’.50 In 1925, when Abramovitch toured the United States, the Com
munists formed special ‘battle units’ whose members provoked scandals during
his lectures.51 Similarly, in March 1927, his lecture in Berlin was interrupted a
few times by Communists.52 In 1931, the propaganda machinery of the American
Communist Party published a pamphlet entitled The Workmen’s Circle Helps
Organize a War against the Soviet Union: The Role of Abramovitch and the Workmen’s
Circle in the Interventionist Conspiracies against the Proletarian Fatherland, which among
other things accused Abramovitch, ‘the leader of Russian socialists in emigration’,
of visiting the Soviet Union illegally in 1928 in order to deliver instructions and
money to the socialist underground.53 Despite Abramovitch’s categorical denial
of this illegal visit, it formed a ‘basis’ for persecuting people in the Soviet Union,
especially during the 1931 ‘Menshevik trial’, which was one of the show trials staged
in Moscow in the 1930s.54
Abramovitch initially did not belong to the intransigent wing of the Menshevik
emigration. As a leader of the Vienna (or 2½) International, he tried unsuccessfully
from 1921 to 1923 to overcome the differences between the Second International
and the Comintern, trying to restore the unity of the socialist movement and to
secure some space for socialists in Soviet society.55 By 1923, the Vienna group,
including the Mensheviks, had realized that the gap was unbridgeable and joined
the Second International. Yet even a decade later Abramovitch identified himself
with the Right Socialists, represented by Forverts, mainly because the Left Socialists
tended to sympathize with the Communists. At the same time, he was unhappy
with some aspects of the political stance of Forverts, especially with Cahan’s
turn, in the second half of the 1920s, to giving ‘perfectly vulgar’ support to the
Zionist project.56
Much more uncompromising was Shmuel (Semen) Portugeis (1880–1944), better
known as Stepan Ivanovich. The leading representative of the right-wing Menshe
viks, Portugeis had left the Menshevik Party and formed a separate organization
of staunch anti-communist socialists. He also lived in Berlin, where in the 1920s
he began to write articles for Yiddish periodicals, first for the journal Veker (The
Awakener), a sister title of Forverts, and later for the newspaper Forverts proper. Although
Portugeis grew up in a poor Yiddish-speaking family in Kishinev, his articles had
to be translated from Russian or, when he later learned to write in Yiddish, heavily
edited for publication. Even so, Portugeis was popular among Forverts readers,
and Cahan asserted that Portugeis’s 1922 book Piat’ let bol’shevizma (Five Years of
Bolshevism) opened his eyes to the dictatorial nature of the Bolshevik regime.57
The material in Forverts that was critical of Soviet Jewish Communists also
included essays by David Bergelson (1884–1952), who settled in Berlin in the
second half of 1921. By that time, Bergelson was known in Yiddish literary circles
as a talented writer whose prose appealed to intellectual readers. Together with
Lestschinsky, he was active in Kiev during the short-lived period of Ukrainian
independence and later worked for several months in Soviet Jewish cultural
institutions in Moscow. It was a measure of the esteem in which Bergelson was
held that, in a 1922 advertisement for Forverts celebrating twenty-five years since
the founding of the newspaper, his name, printed in bold, appeared among those
of such leading contributors as Sholem Asch, Yona Rosenfeld, Vladimir Medem,
and three Berlin-based authors of stature: David Eynhorn, Eduard Bernstein, and
Karl Kautsky.58
In his Forverts articles, Bergelson criticized Soviet Jewish Communists, comparing
them — particularly Moyshe Litvakov, also a former Kiev activist and now the
cantankerous editor of the Moscow Yiddish daily, Der emes (The Truth) — with
‘wild Cossacks’ and with leaseholders who failed to cultivate the parcel of land
allotted to them by the Kremlin.59 In the autumn of 1922, Bergelson sought to
travel to Russia as a Forverts correspondent, but this idea elicited a negative response
form Cahan, who wrote to Lestschinsky on 1 December 1922 that the ‘expenses for
such a journey would be too high considering its actual significance at the present
time’. In general, Bergelson had problems establishing a rapport with Cahan.60 He
did not play a prominent role in the newspaper’s literary section and, to add insult
to injury, in 1923 he was eclipsed in prominence in Forverts by Israel Joshua Singer,
whom he had known in Kiev and Moscow as a literary apprentice. Ironically,
Singer’s successful career at Forverts began with the publication of a story that had
been rejected by Bergelson’s literary circle.61 In his letter written to Cahan on
21 May 1924, Bergelson made it clear that he, a seasoned ‘ongezeener shrayber’
[eminent writer], would not put up with that kind of attitude to his writings.
As a Forverts writer, Bergelson was publicly ridiculed by Communists, including
Moyshe Lurye, known as one of ‘Moscow’s eyes’ in Berlin and the translator
into Yiddish of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Goethe’s The Sorrows
of Young Werther (both translations were published by the Berlin-based Yidisher
Kultur Farlag).62 Bergelson’s recantation in 1926, when he severed his relations
with Forverts and started writing for its arch-rival, Frayhayt, and other Communist
periodicals, therefore sent shockwaves through Yiddish literary circles. In his letter
of resignation to Cahan, dated 1 May 1926, Bergelson was at pains to play down
ideological reasons for his break with Forverts. Instead, he spoke of his constant
frustration at the fact that some of his stories and articles were not published in the
newspaper. Hence his decision ‘to find another newspaper, whose spirit corresponds
better to the work I write and will write’. At the same time, Bergelson’s article ‘His
kosher lips’ (which appeared in Frayhayt on 22 May), with its condemnation of the
anti-Sovietism of Raphael Abramovitch, signalled an ideological motivation for his
change in allegiance.63 As in most cases of such reorientation, though, it is hard
to distinguish the decisive component in the combination of ideology, hubris, and
peer inf luence that urged him to join the ranks of those intellectuals who believed
that the Soviet Union was the epitome of a new civilization.
The whole affair caused pain to Cahan, though (as he wrote to Lestschinsky
on 1 June 1926) it did not come as a complete surprise given that he had detected
Bergelson’s Communist sympathies as early as 1923. Cahan, who apparently
developed a personal dislike for Bergelson, delivered an ad hominem attack on him,
arguing that the writer’s ‘real’ motives for reorientation were mercenary: malicious
rumour had it that the writer sought to cash in on the opportunities created by
Russia’s New Economic Policy by establishing a publishing business or continuing
his family tradition of timber trading. Interestingly, rumours in the Soviet literary
circles gave a different explanation for why Bergelson had jumped onto the Soviet
bandwagon: the writer had left Forverts because he felt that the newspaper was ready
to ‘spit him out’.64
Bergelson later wanted to return to Forverts, and Mendel Osherowitch, a veteran
Forverts journalist, spoke on his behalf with Cahan. These negotiations took place
during Bergelson’s American sojourn in 1928 to 1929, but brought no results. At
the end of 1930, Lestschinsky, too, tried to convince Cahan to renew Bergelson’s
contract with Forverts. However, Cahan made plain that he did not want any con
tractual obligations toward the prodigal writer.65 (When Cahan liked a writer
he could act as a father-figure and a great motivator. Thus, his 1931 meeting in
Berlin with I. J. Singer played a decisive role in the writer’s life, helping Singer to
overcome his creative crisis and return to literature.)66 According to Lev Bergelson,
his father’s ‘friendship with Lestschinsky began in Kiev, but later they had fierce
ideological arguments and eventually their friendship came to an end: Lestschinsky
was growing more and more right-wing, whereas Bergelson was moving to the
left’.67 Several other literati also distanced themselves from Bergelson, as did, for
instance, Shmaryahu Gorelik.68
In September 1929, Bergelson, understandably, was not invited to the banquet
thrown in Cahan’s honour by the ‘Jewish Berlin’, when the sixty-nine-year-old
Forverts editor and his wife spent some time in Berlin on their way to Palestine.
Following toasts by representatives of Jewish organizations and the local Jewish
Fig. 14. David Bergelson at home in Zehlendorf, Berlin, 1931

By kind permission of Lev Bergelson
community, socialist leaders, and Yiddish writers, Cahan spoke about the
international role of American Jews, who, according to him, were not stereotypical
money-minded people. Rather, they were generous souls ready to help their
brothers and sisters all over the world. Cahan also praised the American variety of
socialism, which — compared to European socialism — was ‘less Romantic and
more practical’.69
* * * * *
Like all Yiddish periodicals, Forverts paid attention to the growing menace of Nazism
and condemned the anti-Jewish pronouncements and violence in Germany. Yet
there was a large element of wishful thinking among many journalists, who believed
that the Nazi storm would soon blow over and the Social Democrats would be able
to prevent Hitler’s party from coming to power.70 Vladimir Grossman describes a
conversation with Jewish journalists (presumably in the Romanisches Café) during
a short stopover in Berlin. None of them believed that the German President, Paul
von Hindenburg, would appoint Hitler as Chancellor. This conversation took place
a day before that appointment took place with far-reaching consequences on 30
January 1933.71 Nonetheless, on 23 February 1933, Forverts published Lestschinsky’s
article ‘Hitler will break his head against the iron wall of the united German
workers’.72 Less than a fortnight later, by 6 March 1933, following the arson attack
on the Reichstag building in Berlin on 27 February 1933, the Nazis had closed
down all Communist and socialist publications.73 On 11 March, the Berlin Jewish
journalist colony was shocked by Lestschinsky’s arrest.
Lestschinsky’s colleague, Yeshayahu Klinov, who wrote for several newspapers
including the Warsaw daily Haynt, telephoned London and arranged the sending
of a telegram to alert Forverts. In addition, the Lithuanian Consul and the Foreign
Press Association attempted to inf luence the authorities. The situation was particu
larly complicated because Joseph Goebbels, the newly appointed Minister of Propa
ganda, announced that he would boycott the Foreign Press Association, whose
chairman, the American journalist Edgar Ansel Mowrer, had just published his
anti-Hitler book Germany Puts the Clock Back. In August 1933, Mowrer would resign
from his post and depart in return for the release of the Austrian Jewish journalist
Paul Goldmann, the first chairman of the Foreign Press Association (founded in
1906). In March 1933, however, the Association did not have the clout to rescue
Lestschinsky. The Social Democrats, who had helped Lestschinsky in November
1923, were now themselves in danger of obliteration. Even so, as a result of pressure
from the American State Department, Lestschinsky was released after spending
four days in prison, but was given orders to leave Germany in two weeks’ time.74
On 20 March 1933, Abramovitch wrote to Cahan from Paris:
With a lot of effort, I managed to get away from Germany before it was too
late. I tried to stay there as long as it was possible, but at some moment I had
received a tip-off which immediately forced me to ‘make a move’. Otherwise,
I could have stayed in Germany for an indefinite amount of time and ended
up in a concentration camp. In addition, there was a very unpleasant prospect:
I found out that the Hitlerists had a plan to put on ‘trial’ the ‘traitorous’ links
between the German Social Democrats and the ‘Jewish’ Second International.
In such a ‘trial’, I would have been a very ‘convenient’ figure for the Nazis: a
Jew, a Russian, a correspondent of a Yiddish newspaper, and a member of the
Socialist International’s Bureau, who always had friendly relations with leading
German Social Democrats.
[...]
I spoke to Lestschinsky before my departure. By accident, I also was in the
police headquarters at the moment when he was arrested there. He appeared
to be in good spirits and said that the police had behaved toward him in a very
decent manner. Now he has 14 days to liquidate his business, then he’ll move
to Karlsbad [Karlovy Vary] (Czechoslovakia). There he’ll have more freedom
and it’ll be easier to send telegrams about Germany. It goes without saying that
until he is in Germany he won’t be able to write and send telegrams: he had to
sign [a statement that he wouldn’t do so].75
After 28 March 1933, when the Nazis initiated an anti-Jewish boycott, many Jewish
literati feared the worst and decamped to Paris or elsewhere. Shmuel Mayzlish,
also a Berlin-based Yiddish newspaper journalist, was arrested and deported by
the Gestapo.76 Meanwhile, following Mowrer’s resignation, the Nazis stopped
boycotting foreign journalists. The Yiddish writer Daniel Charney, known for
his extreme sociability and therefore referred to as ‘the Yiddish ambassador to
Berlin’, even attended several receptions thrown by the Nazi leaders for the foreign
journalist colony. According to Charney, the Nazis simply did not realize that
he, the younger brother of the prominent labour leader and manager of Forverts
Baruch Charney Vladeck, represented the New York daily newspaper The Day,
which was, in fact, the Yiddish Der tog.77 On the other hand, a few ‘undisguised’
Yiddish journalists, such as Josef Lanczener, Nuchem Goldrosen, and Itsik Mayer
Glücksmann, continued to live in Berlin and remained members of the Foreign
Press Association after 1933. By October 1938, Glücksmann was the only Yiddish
journalist listed among the Association’s members.78
Forverts, however, never re-established its presence in Berlin. Lestschinsky settled
in Poland, where he continued to write for Forverts. In 1937, following articles that
exposed the pogrom atmosphere in Poland, the Polish authorities did not allow
him and his family to return from their vacation in Karlovy Vary. In November
1938, after sojourns in Switzerland and France, the Lestschinskys, with the help of
Forverts, arrived in New York.79 The ‘Raphael Abramovitch group’ of socialists was
brought to America in September 1940 by the Jewish Labor Committee, in which
Forverts played a central role.80 In the 1940s and 1950s, Abramovitch performed the
role of one of the newspaper’s main political journalists, expressing ‘in the clearest
and deepest way the stance of the newspaper in its attitude toward the problems
and events of international politics’,81 whereas Lestschinsky’s newspaper articles
appeared only occasionally. Although Cahan and other editors had decided that
Portugeis’s articles written in America were not suitable for publication, he received
a weekly salary from Forverts.82
During the Nazi period, Forverts had at least one reader in Berlin: Johann Pohl,
curator of Hebraica and Judaica at the Prussian State Library, who participated in
the looting of Jewish libraries in occupied Europe.83 In 1944, the Frankfurt Welt-
Dienst-Verlag published his pamphlet Streiflichter: Aus dem New Yorker jiddischen
‘Forwerts’. This expert, who studied in Jerusalem in 1933 and 1934, quoted the
Yiddish newspaper’s articles as indicators of the ‘world Jewish conspiracy’.
The Berlin Forverts bureau remains a unique case of such an inf luential outpost
of a Yiddish newspaper. Although several Jewish newspapers had permanent corres
pondents in Berlin, the Forverts bureau remained the strongest Yiddish journalistic
body for the whole Weimar period. The bureau’s establishment was part of the
general development of infrastructure which was characteristic of the 1920s, the
heyday of Forverts and the Yiddish press in general. In 1922, Baruch Charney
Vladeck was proud to inform readers that their newspaper employed thousands
of people and that no other newspaper in the United States could boast the same
number of local offices.84 Prestige, rather than pure practicality, motivated Cahan
and his circle to invest money in the outpost in Berlin. It was also a way of paying
due tribute to German social democracy, which had shaped the outlook of the older
generation of American Jewish socialists.
Notes to Chapter 7
1. Abraham Cahan, ‘Ir farshport tsu forn in Varshe, Vilne, Kovne, Rige oder Keshenev’, Forverts,
27 August 1921, p. 6. Translations in this chapter are by the author.
2. Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mayn lebn, 5 vols (New York: Forverts, 1926–31), iii (1926), 457.
3. Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2005), p. 43.
4. Joseph Rappaport, ‘Jewish Immigrants and World War I: A Study of American Yiddish Press
Reactions’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 1951), pp.
88–99.
5. See, in particular, Y. Yanilovitsh, ‘5 yor yidishe prese (1926–1930): Statistishe sakhaklen’, YIVO
bleter, 2.1–2 (1931), 105.
6. Nakhman Meisel, ‘Dos yidishe Vin vornt’, Literarishe bleter, 12 July 1929, pp. 537–38; Mendl
Naygreshl, ‘Di yeride fun yidishn kultur-lebn in Vin’, Oyfkum, 12 (1930), 32–36.
7. Sarah Brener [Max Weinreich], ‘Dos yidishe Berlin’, Morgnshtern (Warsaw), 22 April 1921, p.
4; Marion Neiss, Presse im Transit: Jiddische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften in Berlin von 1919 bis 1925
(Berlin: Metropol, 2002), pp. 130–44.
8. Kurt R. Grossmann, Michael Wurmbrand: The Man and His Work (New York: Philological
Library, 1956), p. 17.
9. See Gennady Estraikh, ‘Jacob Lestschinsky: A Yiddishist Dreamer and Social Scientist’, Science
in Context, 20.2 (2007), 215–37.
10. Philipp Scheidemann, ‘Vi es lebt zikh itst in Daytshland’, Forverts, 14 April 1915, p. 5; Rappaport,
p. 108; David Shub, Fun di amolike yorn: Bleter zikhroynes (New York: CYCO, 1970), pp. 421,
475.
11. Abraham Cahan, ‘In Berlin’, Forverts, 28 April 1915, p. 4; idem, ‘Der milkhome-gayst in Berlin’,
Forverts, 20 April 1915, p. 4. See also Keith Allen, ‘Sharing Scarcity: Bread Rationing and the
First World War in Berlin, 1914–1923’, Journal of Social History, 32 (1998), 371–93.
12. For an overview of Cahan’s dispatches and articles, see Gennady Estraikh, ‘Di “vilde kozakn”,
oder “Forverts” in der ershter velt-milkhome’, Forverts, 27 March-2 April 2009, pp. 12–13.
13. Minutes of the Forward Association’s meetings, 1920, p. 234 (New York, archive of the Forward
Association).
14. Cahan, ‘Ir farshport tsu forn in Varshe, Vilne, Kovne, Rige oder Keshenev’.
15. See, for example, Joshua M. Karlip, ‘Between Martyrology and Historiography: Elias
Tcherikower and the Making of a Pogrom Historian’, East European Jewish Affairs, 38 (2008),
257–80.
16. Simon [Semen] Dubnow, Kniga zhizni: Materialy iz istorii moego vremeni (Moscow: Gesharim,
2004), p. 533.
17. Ruth Oren and Guy Raz, Zoltan Kluger, Chief Photographer, 1933–1958 (Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel
Museum, 2008), pp. 18–23.
18. Abraham Cahan’s letter to Jacob Lestschinsky, 10 May 1930 (New York, YIVO archive,
collection RG339, box 1, folder 16).
19. Sarah Brener [Max Weinreich], ‘Der kamf far Yidish (diskusyons-tezisn)’, Tsayt-fragn,
supplement to Unzer tsayt, 26 June 1914, pp. 3–4; I[sidor] E[lyashev], ‘Gefunen dem ort (tsu der
polemic tsvishn h’ Vaynraykh un h’ Tavyev)’, Di yidishe shtime, 1 September 1910, p. 2; Lucy
S. Davidowicz, The Jewish Presence: Essays in Identity and History (New York: Rinehart and
Winston, 1977), pp. 164–65; Eleanor Gordon-Mlotek and Shmuel Goldenberg, ‘Hoysofe tsu der
Maks Vaynraykh-bibliografye’, YIVO bleter, n.s., 3 (1997), 370–72. See also the reprint (prepared
by Jerold G. Frakes) of Weinreich’s 1923 dissertation: Geschichte der jiddischen Sprachforschung
(Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993).
20. See Hillel Rogoff, Der gayst fun ‘Forverts’: Materyaln tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher prese in Amerike
(New York: Forverts, 1954), p. 216; Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 2 vols (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), i, 291, A287.
21. David Eynhorn, Fun Berlin biz San-frantsisko (Warsaw: Kultur-Lige 1930), p. 19.
22. YIVO archive, collection RG339, box 1, folders 15 and 16.
23. Dubnow, pp. 533, 585, 642–43.
24. Herman Swet, ‘ “Her doctor Naumberg”: Nomberg in Berliner “Romanishn kafe” ’, Moment, 25
November 1927, p. 9.
25. Abraham Coralnik, Across the Great Divide: The Selected Essays (New York: iUniverse, 2005),
p. 34.
26. Ellen Kellman, ‘Uneasy Patronage: Bergelson’s Years at Forverts’, in David Bergelson: From
Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (Oxford: Legenda,
2007), pp. 192–93.
27. Vladimir Medem, ‘Di shtelung fun sotsialistn tsu tsionizm’, Forverts, 11 May 1921, p. 4.
28. Raphael Abramovitch, ‘Der mentsh un sotsyalist’, in N. Chanin (New York: N. Chanin Jubilee
Committee, 1946), pp. 110–11. On Eduard Bernstein’s and Karl Kautsky’s attitude to Forverts see
Jack Jacobs, On Socialists and ‘the Jewish Question’ after Marx (New York: New York University
Press, 1992), pp. 26–28, 67.
29. Jacobs, p. 194.
30. ‘ “Forverts”-korespondent arestirt in Berlin far keyblen nayes vegn pogrom’, Forverts, 11
November 1923, p. 1; ‘Leshtshinski bafrayt un vider arestirt farn pogrom barikht’, Forverts, 12
November 1923, p. 1; ‘Berliner “Forverts” protestirt kegn arrest fun Leshtshinski un tsenzur
oyf yidishe nayes’, Forverts, 14 November 1923, p. 1; ‘Berliner “Forverts”-korespondent, Yakov
Leshtshinski, vert bafrayt’, Forverts, 16 November 1923, p. 1. The Association of Berlin-based
Yiddish Writers and Journalists, formed in January 1926, was to all intents and purposes a
stillborn organization — see Gennady Estraikh, ‘Vilna on the Spree: Yiddish in Weimar Berlin’,
Aschkenas, 16.1 (2006), 120.
31. David Clay Large, ‘ “Out with the Ostjuden”: The Scheunenviertel Riots in Berlin, November
1923’, in Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History, ed. by Christhard
Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press: 2002), pp. 123–40.
32. B. Keiter, ‘Der “Forverts”-korespondent shildert di eyntslhaytn fun dem pogrom in Berlin’,
Forverts, 1 December 1923, p. 3.
33. Jacob Lestschinsky, ‘ “Forverts”-korespondent fun Berlin, Yakov Leshtshinski, shraybt far vos
men hot im arestirt’, Forverts, 7 January 1924, p. 2.
34. Charles Cutter, ‘The American Yiddish Daily Press Reaction to the Rise of Nazism, 1930–
1933’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1979), p. 245. See also Gennady
Estraikh, ‘Arcadian Dreams of David Bergelson and His Berlin Circle’, Studia Rosenthaliana, 41
(2009), 141–71.
35. David Bergelson, Birobidzhaner (Moscow: Emes, 1934), p. 95.
36. Dov-Ber Slutski was an old friend of Lestschinsky — see Estraikh, ‘Jacob Lestschinsky’, p. 217.
37. On 24 October 1924, Wendroff reported this in a letter to David (Meir) Liberzon at the
management department of Forverts: YIVO archive, collection RG 1139, folder 74. In 1957, he
intimated in an interview to a Paris Yiddish daily that he began to work for the Jewish Telegraph
Agency in 1922 and was soon invited to write for Der tog and, later, Forverts. The Soviet
authorities allowed him to do so, and this cooperation continued until 1936. See G. Kenig, ‘Z.
Vendrof, veteran fun di yidishe shrayber in FSSR’, Di naye prese, 5–6 January 1957, p. 7.
38. YIVO archive, collection RG 1139, folder 74.
39. See Michels, pp. 219–34.
40. Shub, p. 612.
41. Shub, p. 716.
42. Hersh Smolar, Fun ineveynik: Zikhroynes vegn der ‘yevsektsye’ (Tel Aviv: Peretz, 1979), pp. 288–
90.
43. Daniel Soyer, ‘Abraham Cahan’s Travels in Jewish Homelands: Palestine in 1925 and the Soviet
Union in 1927’, in Yiddish and the Left, ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford:
Legenda, 2001), p. 75.
44. Simon Weber. Transcript of an interview (New York, William E. Wiener Oral History Library
of the American Jewish Committee, New York Public Library Oral Histories, box 229, no. 6
(1984), pp. 1–32).
45. Leksikon fun Forverts-shrayber, ed. by Elyahu Shulman and Simon Webber (New York: Forward
Association, [1987(?)]), p. 1.
46. Abramovitch accepted this invitation in his letter to Cahan on 24 September 1920 — YIVO
archive, collection RG 1139, folder 35. See also Michael Beizer, ‘Restoring Courage to Jewish
Hearts: Frank Rosenblatt’s Mission in Siberia in 1919’, East European Jewish Affairs, 39.1 (2009),
36.
47. Raphael Abramovitch, ‘Ver farnemt dervayle Lenins plats?’, Forverts, 13 August 1922, p. 2.
48. ‘Notitsn fun “Forverts”-redaktsye: Artiklen fun R. Abramovitsh’, Forverts, 12 February 1922,
p. 4.
49. Abraham Cahan, ‘An interesanter oylem tsugast in a privat-hoyz’, Forverts, 29 July 1923, p. 2.
50. Mikhail Vaiskopf, Pisatel’ Stalin (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), p. 265.
51. Shub, p. 649.
52. ‘Doklad Abramovicha’, Rul’, 16 March 1927, p. 5; ‘Khronika’, Rul’, 25 March 1927, p. 4.
53. Der arbeter-ring helft organizirn milkhome kegn sovetn-Rusland: Di rol fun Abramovitshn un dem arbeiter-
ring in di interventsye-farshverungen kegn proletarishn foterland (New York: International Workers
Order, 1931), p. 3.
54. ‘Mensheviki Call Their Chief a Liar: Outbursts in Moscow Trial are Aroused by Abramovitch
Denial of Stories from Exile’, The New York Times, 5 March 1931, p. 11. See also, for example,
‘Zametaiut sledy’, Izvestiia, 4 March 1931, p. 4; ‘Vstrechi i besedy s Abramovichem’, Izvestiia, 6
March 1931, p. 4.
55. See, for example, Raphael Abramovitch, ‘Di Berliner konferents fun di sotsialistishe
internatsionaln’, Forverts, 2 May 1922, p. 5.
56. André Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 221. See also Jewish Socialists in the United States: The Cahan
Debate, 1925–1926, ed. by Yaakov N. Goldstein (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1998).
57. Shub, pp. 614–15, 717, 950–51. For an analysis of Portugeis’s criticism of the Soviet regime, see
Aleksei Kara-Murza, ‘Pervyi sovetolog russkoi emigratsii: Semen Osipovich Portugeis’, Polis, 1
(2006), 122–40.
58. Bikher-velt, 2 (1922), 223–24.
59. David Bergelson, ‘Yidishe komunistn in Rusland bashlisn, az es iz shoyn mer nito keyn yidn
oyf der velt’, Forverts, 4 March 1923, p. 12; idem, ‘Yidishe komunistn fun Rusland makhn vider
pogromen oyfn yidishn gas’, Forverts, 15 December 1923, p. 4.
60. See, in particular, Kellman, pp. 183–204.
61. Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Old and the New Together: David Bergelson’s and Israel Joshua Singer’s
Portraits of Moscow Circa 1926–27’, Prooftexts, 26 (2006), 53–78.
62. Yehoshua Rapoport, Zoymen in vint (Buenos Aires: Argentiner Opteyl fun Alveltlekhn Yidishn
Kultur-kongres, 1961), p. 386. Moyshe Lurye later worked as a lecturer at the Moscow State
University; he was executed during the purges of 1936.
63. David Bergelson, ‘Zayne koshere leftsn’, Frayhayt, 22 May 1926, p. 4.
64. Kellman, p. 194; Gennady Estraikh, ‘David Bergelson in and on America’, in David Bergelson:
From Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (Oxford:
Legenda, 2007), p. 209.
65. Estraikh, ‘David Bergelson in and on America’, pp. 212–13.
66. Anita Norich, The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (Bloomington: Indiana
67. Lev Bergelson, ‘Memories of My Father: The Early Years (1918–1934)’, in David Bergelson: From
Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (Oxford: Legenda,
2007), p. 85.
68. Shmaryahu Gorelik, Eseyen (Los Angeles: Mayrev, 1947), p. 344.
69. ‘Ab. Kahan hot geshprekhn mit vikhtike sotsialistishe firer in Eyrope’, Forverts, 11 September
1929, p. 9.
70. Cutter, p. 249.
71. Vladimir Grossman, Amol un haynt (Paris: [n. pub.], 1955), pp. 66–67.
72. Jacob Lestschinsky, ‘Hitler vet brekhn dem kop on der ayzerner vant fun di fareynikte daytshe
arbeter’, Forverts, 23 February 1933, p. 4. Raphael Abramovitch wrote in a similar vein as late
as May 1934, when he already lived in Paris — see Anna-Christin Saβ, ‘ “Wenn die Nazi-
Verbrecher nach Hause kommen” — Dovid Eynhorns Berichte über die nazionalsozialistischen
Verbrechen im New Yorker Forverts 1940–1945’, PaRDeS: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische
Studien, 14 (2008), 77.
73. Peter de Mendelssohn, Zeitungsstadt Berlin: Menschen und Mächte in der Geschichte der deutschen
Presse (Berlin: Ullstein, 1959), p. 329.
74. Jacob Lestschinsky, ‘Forverst-korespondent Leshtsinski dertseylt vi azoy di hitleristn hobn im
arestirt’, Forverts, 13 April 1933, p. 4; Y. Klinov, ‘Di “zibete melukhe” firt milkhome mitn “dritn
raykh”: Vi azoy arbetn un lebn itst yidish-oyslendishe zhurnalistn in Berlin’, Haynt, 23 July 1933,
pp. 9–10; The American Jewish Year Book, 36 (1934), 160.
75. YIVO archive, collection RG 1139, folder 37.
76. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 8 vols (New York: CYCO, 1956–81), v (1963), 587.
77. Daniel Charney, Di velt iz kaylekhdik (Tel Aviv: Peretz, 1963), pp. 336–38.
78. See Mitgliederliste: Verband Ausländischer Pressevertreter, published in Berlin by the Verband
Ausländischer Pressevertrer (May 1933, January 1935, April 1936, May 1937, October 1938).
79. Estraikh, ‘Jacob Lestschinsky’, p. 231.
80. Catherine Collomp, ‘The Jewish Labor Committee, American Labor, and the Rescue of Euro
pean Socialists, 1934–1941’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 68 (2005), 124.
81. Rogoff, p. 202.
82. Shub, p. 952.
83. Alan E. Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 77, 115.
84. B. Vladeck, ‘A por interesante zakhn vegn Forverts als biznes’, Forverts, 23 April 1922, section 3,
p. 2.
Chapter 8
v
Max Weinreich in Weimar Germany

Amy Blau
Although there was an active community of Yiddish writers in Berlin in the

early 1920s, relatively little of their writing depicted their experiences in Berlin
or a ‘Berlin experience’ more generally (David Bergelson’s ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’
(‘Among Emigrants’) and Moyshe Kulbak’s Disner Tshayld-Harold (Childe Harold of
Disna) are well-known exceptions).1 The journalistic writing for the New York
Yiddish daily Forverts (Forward) by its Berlin correspondent Sore Brener for the
most part did not focus directly on the experiences of Ostjuden in Germany, but
tried instead to explain modern life, politics, and culture in Germany in general to
an American Yiddish-speaking audience. Brener was the pseudonym of renowned
Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich, who lived in Germany as a university student
from 1919 to 1923.2 Under his own name, Weinreich wrote extensively on Yiddish
philology and in Yiddish (sometimes both) during this time, but very few of his
writings as Brener from Germany address the status of Yiddish in Weimar Germany
or the communities of Yiddish writers in Berlin in the early 1920s. Weinreich’s
most direct commentary on Yiddish circles in Berlin appears in an article attributed
to Sore Brener in the Warsaw Morgnshtern (Morning Star) on 22 April 1921.3 This
article, entitled ‘Dos yidishe Berlin’ (‘The Jewish Berlin’) presents a classification
of Jews in Berlin; at the end of the article, Weinreich mentions the small circle of
Yiddish writers in Berlin to be found in the Café des Westens (including David
Eynhorn, Hersh David Nomberg, Zalmen Shneour, Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky,
and Shmaryahu Gorelik, among other writers and political and cultural tuers, or
activists) and two specific Yiddish presses (Wostok and Velt-Farlag).4 In the early
1920s, Yiddish writers such as Melech Ravitch and Peretz Markish who lived in
eastern European centres of Yiddish cultural production expressed ideological
opposition to Berlin as a centre of Yiddish culture.5 Weinreich’s point of view as
expressed in his article was more measured; contemporary Yiddish Berlin was
currently a mix of peoples, without traditions, without a community atmo
sphere, without the feeling of mutual control and responsibility. But if the
Yiddish community in Berlin is granted long life, then it can be imagined that
in the heart of Germany’s moribund Yiddishkayt, in that place where Moses
Mendelssohn celebrated the victory of assimilation over the Jewish people,
a new cultural fortress of Yiddish democracy will develop. And that will
certainly bring about a national revolution for the German Jews as well.6
While criticizing German-Jewish assimilation as a kind of cultural death, Wein
164 Amy Blau
reich presented a thriving and self-sustaining Yiddish centre in Berlin as a future

possibility, should circumstances allow its growth and development over time.
Following the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, Weinreich had moved from
St Petersburg (where he had been a student) to Vilna, where he edited a Bundist
newspaper until his departure for Germany.7 Weinreich’s decision to move back to
Vilna in 1923 in order to be directly involved in Yiddish education and research,
and the later lack of substantive support for the establishment of the main branch of
YIVO in Berlin in contrast with the enthusiastic backing it received from Yiddish
activists including Weinreich in Vilna,8 seem to confirm the conditional tenor of
Weinreich’s evaluation: the pull of German assimilation and the consequent lack
of a direct connection to the Yiddish folk made Germany ultimately unsuitable
for sustained Yiddish cultural production despite the importance of the German
scholarly tradition as a model for Yiddish scholarship. The journalistic treatment
of contemporary issues in Germany from an explicitly Yiddish point of view as
contained in the literary output of Sore Brener, however, offers new insight into
life in the Weimar Republic for the Ostjuden who were there temporarily, and a
new perspective on the relevance of German politics and culture for Jews both
in America and in eastern Europe; Weinreich’s popular writing under the name
of Sore Brener and his correspondence with Abraham Cahan concerning it offer
valuable new information about Weinreich’s own life and studies in Germany.
Max Weinreich was a prolific scholar, writer, and translator; in addition to
completing his dissertation (in German) on the history of Yiddish scholarship in
Germany, he published a number of works in Yiddish under his own name while
in Germany, including an adaptation and extension of his dissertation research in
the philological compilation Shtaplen (Steps), a translation of a story by Max Brod
together with a philological article on Megilas Vints (the Scroll of Vincent) in the
miscellany Onheyb (Beginning), which he co-edited with Eynhorn and Gorelik,
and translations from the Russian of two history textbooks; all of these works
were published by the Berlin Yiddish publisher Wostok.9 Under the pseudonym
Sore Brener he also published the Morgnshtern article mentioned above, over one
hundred articles for the New York Yiddish Forverts, and translations of two plays
by the German playwright Ernst Toller; the second of these translations was also
published in Berlin.10 Although Weinreich was obviously involved in the Yiddish
cultural sphere in Berlin, his work for Forverts and his Toller translations focused
on larger issues of socialism and modernity in German culture, especially as they
affected Jews and the working class. His examinations of the fate of the worker in
post-war and post-revolutionary Europe reveal Weinreich’s strong identification
with the socialist movement and condemnation of the anti-Semitic and anti-
democratic forces at work in Germany in the first phase of the Weimar Republic.
Weinreich saw in Toller’s plays a clear connection between the struggles faced by
Toller himself and the Germans in general in confronting war, nationalism, and
revolution, and the struggles facing eastern European Jews.
The centrality of Toller’s plays to the concerns of Weinreich’s journalistic activity
for Forverts in Germany arises from Toller’s involvement in and literary commentary
on contemporary events in post-World War I Germany, especially the German
Max Weinreich in Weimar Germany 165
Revolution of 1919. Ernst Toller (1893–1939) was the youngest child of a middle-
class Jewish family in Samotschin, in the eastern province of Posen, Germany (now
Szamocin, Poland). Following his education at a regional Realgymnasium, he began
his university studies at the University of Grenoble in February 1914. He returned
to Germany on news of the German mobilization at the beginning of World War
I and enlisted. He fought on the Western Front, where his patriotism faded and his
pacifist convictions were formed. After he was discharged from active service in the
army early in 1917 following hospitalization for a physical and nervous breakdown,
he enrolled in university classes, first in Munich and subsequently in Heidelberg.
His pacifist activism brought him into contact with socialist political groups. He
took a leading role in the general strike against the war on 31 January 1918, after
which he was arrested and imprisoned for three months. Toller returned to stay with
his family in Landsberg an der Warthe (Gorzów Wielkopolski) after a short stint in
the army reserves; he hurried to Munich after the 7 November proclamation of the
Revolutionary Republic of Bavaria and was increasingly involved in political events
and the leadership of the Independent Socialist Party (USPD). After Kurt Eisner’s
assassination (21 February 1919), Toller opposed the proclamation of the Bavarian
Soviet Republic, but was persuaded to support it in the interests of working class
solidarity, and became Chairman of the Central Council. As the Republican Guard
tried to take over Munich and the Communist party rose up against it, Toller
became a commander in the Red Army, despite his pacifism, out of his desire to
support the workers. Toller led fighting against counter-revolutionary forces, but
refused to carry out various attacks and orders of execution. He went into hiding as
the Revolution ended and its leaders were killed. Toller was sentenced to five years
in prison; he wrote most of the works that made him famous during that time.11
Following his release from prison in 1924, he travelled widely, continued to write
plays, essays, and political journalism, and advocated amnesty for political prisoners
and other causes. His home remained in Germany until he went into exile in 1933;
he committed suicide in New York City in 1939.12
Even the briefest summary of Toller’s first two plays, Die Wandlung: Das Ringen
eines Menschens (Transformation: The Struggles of a Man) and Masse-Mensch: Ein Stück
aus der sozialen Revolution des 20. Jahrhunderts (Masses and Man: A Fragment of the
Social Revolution of the Twentieth Century), demonstrates the connections between
Toller’s writing, his political convictions, and the events that shaped his life and
times, connections that would make these plays popular in Germany and of interest
to Weinreich and his Yiddish audience.13 Toller began writing the expressionist
‘Stationsdrama’ Die Wandlung in the summer of 1917 and revised and completed
it during his first prison sentence. The form of the ‘Stationsdrama’ adopted by
expressionist playwrights takes the protagonist through a series of encounters or
confrontations.14 Toller’s play shows the progression of a young Jewish student,
Friedrich, from rootless alienation to blind patriotism to a belief in humanist
equality. The play ends with Friedrich’s call for revolution — a revolution led by
peaceful marchers in defence of humanity. Masse-Mensch, written in 1920, captures
the ethical struggles of the Woman (Sonja Irene L.), a leader of the workers in
a general strike, when confronted with the option of using force against the
166 Amy Blau
Fig. 15. Max Weinreich (undated), with newspaper designer’s marks

From the archive of the Forward Association, New York
oppressors. She is from an intellectual bourgeois background and has difficulty

convincing the workers, who have been inf luenced by a nameless provocateur, that
her ethical constraints are in the best interests of the masses. Her final martyrdom
(she refuses to escape from prison because it would mean killing a guard, and is
therefore executed) inspires other prisoners to recognize their common humanity.
This play, also written in an expressionist style, intercuts scenes of the Woman
planning and reacting to the revolution with dream sequences depicting, for
example, bankers dancing around the stock exchange, prisoners awaiting execution,
and a single prisoner (with the Woman’s face) confronting her guilt.
In the two-article series in the Forverts in which Weinreich discusses Toller’s first
two plays, Weinreich identifies Toller’s protagonists as aspects of the author’s own
inner situation and revolutionary development: ‘Both dramas together are Toller’s
poetic autobiography. Not like other life descriptions, which go step by step and
don’t leave out even the smallest boring details, but the way a biography ought to
be. It lets the particular pass by and concentrates on the essence.’15 The essence of
Toller’s life, then, lies in his ethical response to the revolutionary movement rather
than the factual details of his birth, education, or work. Moreover, the emotions
and process of coming to terms with the moral demands of social justice are not
just those of the leaders, and of Toller himself, but of all workers and all who are
concerned about fairness.
But there are works where the writer cries out his own soul for you. You see
how it shudders in pain, because it doesn’t know its path through the confusion
of life. The border between art and reality is erased. In the poet’s suffering is
also your suffering, the reader’s pain. The poet stands in the same battle as you,
he is plagued by the same doubts.16
By explicitly linking the struggles of the revolutionary author with those of the
reader confronting modern life, Weinreich presents the play as a way of better under
standing contemporary social questions. Because Toller is ‘an extraordinary man
and an extraordinary poet’, he is able to give voice to these common concerns, and
is therefore beloved ‘by the German working class and by all honest and respectable
people’. This equivalence between ‘the German working class’ and ‘all honest and
respectable people’ takes for granted the commonality of interests between German
workers and eastern European or American workers; if the essence of the poet’s
autobiography is his internal ethical response to pressing social issues, rather than
the specifics of his life, it is easy to see why all these readers of Forverts, faced with
parallel concerns of modernity, should respect Toller’s writing.
Weinreich’s translations of Toller’s plays, Mase mentsh, a drame fun sotsialer revolutsie
fun 20-tn yorhundert (Masses Man, a Drama from the Social Revolution of the Twentieth
Century, 1922), and Der iberker, der gerangl fun a menshn (The Reversal: The Struggle of a
Man, 1923), were published in Warsaw and Berlin respectively.17 In fact, Weinreich
translated the plays in chronological order soon after they appeared: Die Wandlung
had appeared in print by July of 1919 (it premiered in Berlin in September 1919)
and Weinreich translated it at the beginning of 1920, as a note following the text
in the Yiddish translation Der iberker indicates and as his correspondence with
Cahan confirms.18 Masse-Mensch premiered in Nuremberg on 15 November 1920
168 Amy Blau
and was published in early 1921.19 In his letter of 1920 to Cahan that inaugurated
his reporting for Forverts, Weinreich wrote from Berlin that although he had been
sending enquiries to American Yiddish organizations about having his translation
of Die Wandlung published, he had since made plans to have it published in Europe:
‘I am in negotiations with a Yiddish publisher here, and I will probably sell the
translation here.’20 The delay in publication of Der iberker until 1923 and the fact that
it was published by the Yidisher Literarisher Farlag in Berlin (which had published
nothing before 1922) suggests that an earlier arrangement had either fallen through
or been transferred to the new publisher. The publication of Mase mentsh with
Farlag ‘Di Velt’ in Warsaw has a Berlin connection; Menachem Birnbaum, who
had begun working with the Welt-Verlag in Berlin as a designer, also designed the
frontispiece of Mase mentsh.21 (Given his activity as a book designer and graphic
artist in Berlin,22 and his friendship with Weinreich, Birnbaum may also have
designed the frontispiece for Der iberker, but it is uncredited in the translation
itself.) The fact that Weinreich translated the plays so quickly after they appeared
suggests that one of his primary motivations was the contemporary relevance of the
books for him and their (potential) readers; the appearance of his articles on the
plays in Forverts underscores the importance of relevance to readers. Weinreich’s
article on Toller and Die Wandlung that appeared in Forverts in October 1921 draws
heavily from the contents of his initial letter of enquiry. Although the background
information on Toller’s life and political accomplishments at the beginning and end
of the article is new, the description of the play itself is built closely on the earlier
version, with many identical sentences; the quotations from the play are also nearly
identical, only slightly shortened and changed in the Forverts article.23 Without
archival evidence from the Warsaw Farlag ‘Di Velt’ or other potential publishers in
Poland or Germany, it is impossible to say whether Weinreich’s analysis of Masse-
Mensch, which appeared in a separate article the following week, similarly echoed
his book proposal for the translation of that play, or indeed served as a model for
it.24 Apart from variant spelling consistent with the Forverts style, the quotations
from the play in the article are almost identical with those that appear in the later
published translation; presumably, Weinreich completed the translation, if not the
transactions with the Warsaw publisher, before submitting his series on Toller
to Forverts.
Eastern European reviews of Weinreich’s Toller translations stressed their effec
tive treatment of contemporary issues. Nakhman Meisel’s 1924 review of both Der
iberker and Mase mentsh in the Literarishe bleter (Literary Journal) for the most part
summarizes the plots of both plays; he characterizes them both as ‘the cry of pain
of our time. The pains of war and revolution. Contemporary dramas’, but he does
not evaluate the Yiddish versions per se and does not offer any detailed critique of
characterization or style.25 In contrast, Michael Weichert’s 1923 review of both plays
in Bikher-velt (The World of Books) criticizes Toller’s Die Wandlung for its expressionist
‘Stationsdrama’ form (and explicitly brings out the association of the term
‘Station’ with the Stations of the Cross, which Weichert says is not clearly enough
addressed in the Yiddish translation).26 Weichert finds the character of Friedrich
unconvincing and his development forced, and sees the entire content of the play
as an illustration of the path of the German-Jewish artist from rootlessness through

nationalism to revolution. Weichert is also particularly critical of the choice of ‘der
iberker’ (‘reversal’, ‘upheaval’) as a translation of ‘Wandlung’ (‘transformation’).
Weichert sees Mase mentsh, on the other hand, as a play with a genuine conf lict and
f luid, rhythmic dialogue. In general, Weichert approves of the translations — Sore
Brener, unlike some Yiddish translators, knows both German and Yiddish well,
and stays very true to the original text. Weichert writes further that ‘translations
that are carried out not at the request of the publisher, translators who have any
kind of relationship whatsoever to the translated work, are a rarity for us’ — the
translations of Toller’s plays, that is, were made because of the translator’s love of
the text, not for money, and that is already a worthwhile aspect of the translations.
The additional fact that the translations were approved by the author is a cause for
wonder: ‘when did anyone ever hear of a Yiddish translator asking for permission
from the author?’. Weichert concludes his review with the contention that Mase
mentsh would also find its place in Yiddish theatres; as the director of an acting
school in Warsaw between 1922 and 1924, he did his part to bring this about, having
students perform fragments of the play as part of their graduation performance.27
To the best of my knowledge, no other Yiddish theatre performed Weinreich’s
translations Mase mentsh or Der iberker. Nonetheless, the Yiddish interest in Toller
was broad enough to support further translations by others of Toller’s plays Die
Maschinenstürmer (The Machine-Wreckers), Hinkemann (Brokenbrow), and Hoppla, wir
leben! (Hoppla!), and performances of the Yiddish translation of Hinkemann around
the world.28 Weinreich’s articles for Forverts bringing Toller to the attention of a
mass Yiddish audience may have helped to pave the way for the subsequent interest
in Toller’s plays.29
Although Weinreich did not translate Die Maschinenstürmer into Yiddish, he
wrote an article about it for Forverts after this, Toller’s third play, was published in
Germany, and his treatment of it sets up an even clearer social context for the play.
Weinreich begins his article with a personal address in a pessimistic tone: ‘Do you
feel good when you think about the face that the world wears today? I don’t. Where
are the rose-coloured hopes of five years ago?’.30 Weinreich finds hope in how the
workers’ situation has progressed between past and present conditions: ‘One cannot
fall into despair if one considers for just a minute where the workers once were and
how far they have come now.’ Weinreich takes Toller’s depiction of weavers in early
nineteenth-century England as an example of the earlier condition of the workers.
The greater part of the article summarizes the play, including a few examples of
dialogue, as in Weinreich’s 1921 articles on Die Wandlung and Masse-Mensch. In the
play, Luddite weavers destroy the steam engine that threatens their livelihoods.
Weinreich concludes: ‘Whoever looks at the path we have come must say: today
or tomorrow, there is no social goal that the working class cannot attain.’ The
programmatic optimism of this conclusion does not really extend to Weinreich’s
political coverage of Weimar Germany — Weinreich often drew optimistic
conclusions from his analyses in earlier years, but as conditions deteriorated in
1923, he presented very realistic critiques of the lack of socialist unity in the face of
monarchist and reactionary forces and parties.31
170 Amy Blau
Weinreich’s translation of the Toller plays and his coverage of Toller’s literary
works for Forverts emphasized the relevance of contemporary German treatments
of larger international issues of pacifism and the revolution of the working class
to Yiddish-speaking audiences in America and eastern Europe. The significance
of Toller’s writings for Weinreich’s journalistic activity in Germany is shown
symbolically in the origins of the latter’s work for Forverts: Weinreich’s activity as a
correspondent for Forverts began with a misdirected letter of enquiry regarding his
translation of Ernst Toller’s play Die Wandlung. Weinreich had meant to send a letter
of enquiry describing his translation of the play to a federation (presumably the
Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies), but, not knowing the
correct address, sent it to that of Forverts, where it was received by Abraham Cahan.32
Weinreich’s references to Cahan’s reply to the initial letter of enquiry indicate that it
must have been a kind rejection letter, explaining that Forverts did not publish plays,
recalling a meeting with Weinreich in Vilna in 1919, and probably suggesting that
Weinreich send articles more appropriate for a foreign correspondent to Forverts.33
Weinreich accordingly sent sample articles with his letter of 24 March 1920, asking
Cahan to read them over and to let him know whether they were appropriate for
Forverts (and if not, requesting him to send them on to Tsukunft (Future) or Naye
Velt (New World)). Clearly, Cahan found them acceptable, as the reports from Sore
Brener (which Weinreich mentioned explicitly as his old pseudonym from before the
war) began to appear with an article on the general strike against the Kapp putsch
that was published on Friday, 28 May 1920. (The general strike itself was called on
13 March in response to the putsch of 12 March, and its end was announced on 20
March 1920 — thus the first, sample article on the general strike is consistent with
the time frame of Weinreich’s letter to Cahan.) The article itself acknowledges the
time lag between its writing and its publication: ‘When the laggardly post brings
you this letter, you will already know from the telegrams how the “revolution” of
Ludendorff, Kapp, and Lüttwitz ended. Indeed, you will know more than we know
here today.’34 Weinreich frequently acknowledged this difficulty of responding to
current events for a readership that would not receive his analysis until weeks later;
with some exceptions, he did not so much report on current events as produce
feuilleton-style coverage of the politics or economics of everyday life, or ‘recent
scandals’ in the German papers, as the time frame in which such analysis would be
relevant was more forgiving.
The earliest articles that Weinreich wrote for Forverts were all on political
subjects: the general strike in response to the Kapp putsch, German political parties
and their difficulties in forming a government, socialism and Bolshevism in the
context of an Italian delegation to the Soviet Union; and important figures in
German politics such as the industrialist Hugo Stinnes. Several of these early articles
also, very explicitly, place Brener (i.e. Weinreich) geographically and politically as
a socialist who witnessed the Russian Revolution at first hand:
I myself was in Russia fifteen months ago and I remember what we ‘counter-
revolutionaries’ often said among ourselves: the Bolsheviks ruined industry,
they unnecessarily instigated the civil war; Russia starves, Russia is naked
and barefoot. That is a complaint not only about Bolshevism (which assuredly
deserved it) but about all socialism. Will not every European worker say: if that
is socialism, thank you but no thanks?35
In his concern that the results of Bolshevism will discourage European workers
from identifying with socialism at all, Weinreich sets up his own identification
with socialism — no surprise for Weinreich, who had served as editor of a Bund
newspaper in Vilna prior to coming to Germany, nor for the openly socialist
Yiddish Forverts.
The first article for Forverts that does not focus exclusively on politics (though
politics enter into the discussion) is a description of a railway journey from Berlin to
Vilna and back.36 This article was published after an exchange between Weinreich
and Cahan in which Cahan must have suggested that Weinreich expand his range
of subjects. Weinreich replied, ‘Your suggestion that I write for you not only about
politics — not only do I accept it, but I do so with pleasure.’37 The continuation
of Weinreich’s letter demonstrates that Cahan specifically suggested writing about
sensational events — trials and so forth — which went on to become a frequent
subject of subsequent reports from Berlin. Weinreich replied, ‘I have no fear of
“sensations” — I am not a naive Talmud student [ikh bin nit keyn yeshiva-bokher].’
He bolstered this assertion by adding that he was working on the most sensational
story possible: a son’s murder of his father and marriage to his mother, namely,
the translation of Oedipus Rex from Greek into Yiddish! It is difficult to classify
Weinreich’s articles in Forverts definitively because so many of them fall into several
categories (economic analyses contain political elements, political analyses include
depictions of everyday life, and so forth). A few trends do emerge: the earlier years
have a distinct emphasis on political events and analyses, and feature an assortment
of other types of article including cultural reports on literary works, theatrical
performances, and movies; economic analyses; travel accounts; and discussions of
‘sensational’ crimes and trials. The coverage of literature, theatre, and culture was
at its height in 1921 and dwindled to almost nothing by 1923, when more articles
filed from Berlin had to do with ‘sensations’ — various trials for murder or theft,
reports on notorious criminals, and the like — than with current political events.
Weinreich’s travel scenes drew from his personal travels to places such as Leipzig,
Dresden, Frankfurt am Main, and Marburg, and also occasionally described visits
to Vilna, including one made together with Abraham Cahan.38 Weinreich also
travelled on a few longer assignments for Forverts; most notably, he sent a series of
articles from the international Genoa Conference in 1922 and another series from
the Labour and Socialist International at Hamburg in 1923.
The articles are written to present Germany to an American audience, and
Weinreich frequently makes the distinction clear, presenting himself as a foreigner
(from Vilna) living in Germany who addresses ‘aykh Amerikaner’ [you Ameri
cans]. In a way, however, there is a link between the author and the audience that
essentially skips over Germany: the connection with Yidishkayt through the Yiddish
language which the readers of the Yiddish Forverts share with him and with the
eastern European Jews. The contrast between German Jews and ‘yidishe yidn’
[ Jewish Jews] evident in the Sore Brener Morgnshtern piece written for a Warsaw
audience, appears in various Forverts articles as well. In several articles on a journey
172 Amy Blau
to Vilna (inf luenced by Sholem Aleichem’s railway stories), Weinreich underscores

the difference between German Jews and ‘authentic’ Jews; he refers to German Jews
in Frankfurt am Main as ‘nothing more than Germans in yarmulkes’ and opines,
‘When one has been in Germany for a few years and longs for Jews — for true
Jews — Frankfurt offers no remedy.’39 This distinction between German Jews and
Yiddish ( Jewish) Jews is heightened in Weinreich’s single examination under his
Brener pseudonym of Yiddish in Germany.
Apart from his contribution on the history of the Yiddish language under his
own name for the anniversary edition of Forverts,40 Weinreich wrote only one
article for Forverts during his time in Germany that specifically addressed the status
of the Yiddish language in Germany. He did so on the occasion of the establishment
at the University of Hamburg of the first modern chair of Yiddish at a German
university, held by Dr Solomon Birnbaum.41 This article by Sore Brener presented
a short history of the Yiddish language in Germany and specifically of how it was
taught in Germany to non-Jews (scholars, priests and missionaries, merchants,
tradesmen, and bureaucrats), thereby framing the content of Weinreich’s scholarly
dissertation research for a popular audience. Weinreich (as Brener) emphasized that
German Jews had themselves spoken Yiddish until a hundred years earlier, and
that German-Jewish scorn for Yiddish was therefore a pretension: ‘Where would
the yehudim [assimilated German Jews] get the idea that they would speak our
language? Precisely that is the issue, that their entire proud heritage [yikhes] is not
even a hundred years old.’ 42 He cited examples of schools in Germany in the last
hundred years that had tried to stop children from speaking Yiddish; in light of
earlier antagonism, ridicule, and assimilation, the teaching of Yiddish at a German
university took on not only a higher status through scholarly recognition, but also
an element of revenge: ‘Is that not a bit of revenge for us Yiddish [ Jewish] Jews
who speak a “half-animal language”?’.43 Weinreich mentioned the reappearance of
Yiddish as a university subject after one hundred and fifty years in his dissertation
as well — significantly, as a footnote to his contention that in order to carry out the
many future projects that he proposed for Yiddish research (a dictionary, a grammar,
an atlas of dialects), a central institution for Yiddish research had to be established.
Weinreich’s commentary on the return of Yiddish to German universities manages
to be a veiled criticism even in its praise:
Hamburg University has announced Yiddish language classes for the 1922–23
winter semester and appointed Dr Salomo Birnbaum to teach them. Yiddish
has been taught at a number of universities in the United States for some time;
now, after 150 years, this language has become worthy of study [universitätsfähig]
in Germany as well.44
The term universitätsfähig parallels the more common term salonfähig, used to describe
words or topics acceptable for discussion in proper society. Weinreich’s words here
are appropriate for a scholar defending his area of expertise, as indeed Weinreich
was, but they do resonate with his more direct, populist support for and promotion
of Yiddish as seen in the Brener article for Forverts.
Although the Yiddish language was not a primary theme of Weinreich’s political
and cultural coverage of Germany, anti-Semitism certainly was. An American
Jewish (Yiddish) audience might be expected to be especially interested in coverage

of European anti-Semitism. As Weinreich presented it, there was no shortage of
anti-Semitic feeling in Germany, especially in the political programs of the DVP
and newly founded NSDAP; there were attacks on Jews and even on people merely
suspected of being Jewish. Nevertheless, Weinreich personally seems to have found
Germany reasonably safe and unthreatening; in a description of the city of Dresden,
Weinreich described the reaction of a young woman from Warsaw afraid to go hiking
in the Sächsische Schweiz because of her experiences with Polish anti-Semitism:
Everyone who has been privileged to spend time in Poland has had the same
feeling [of fear of anti-Semitic discrimination or violence]. But when one lives
for a number of years in a free country, one begins to believe that it cannot be
otherwise: and one forgets that elsewhere there are people who suffer and die
for their Jewishness [Yiddishkayt]. It’s not bad to be reminded of this now and
then.45
The escalating xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments of the right-wing parties,
especially in Bavaria, was nonetheless visible throughout Weinreich’s political
coverage. Indeed, his coverage of Hitler as a leader of the reactionary forces seems
prescient in retrospect: ‘You must remember the name Hitler, because it is easy
to imagine that soon he, together with Captain Erhardt and other sinister big
shots [shvartse hekht] will lead a new reactionary uprising.’ 46 This prediction points
directly toward Hitler’s failed putsch attempt of 8–9 November 1923, but from
today’s perspective takes on an even more ominous tone.47
Weinreich’s coverage of political events, as mentioned above, has a strong
left-wing point of view. He includes memorials to many of the socialist and
communist leaders who were assassinated between 1919 and 1923: memorials to
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on the anniversaries of their deaths, and
particularly interesting coverage of foreign minister Walter Rathenau’s murder.
Because of the time lag due to the international postal service, two articles which
Weinreich had written just prior to the murder appeared in Forverts with explanatory
headlines after Rathenau’s death.48 In these articles, Weinreich described German
depression about the contemporary situation in Germany, in comparison to which
the authoritarian, monarchist past looked rosy. Weinreich wrote that the Germans
blamed all of their political problems on Jews and socialists. Actions against the
Republic, especially by the Nazi party, were almost threatened openly in Bavaria;
hundreds of progressives and revolutionaries had been murdered since 1919; there
had been a recent attempt on the life of the prominent Social Democrat politician
Philipp Scheidemann (4 June 1922); and all of the right-wing attackers were given a
mere slap on the wrist or were allowed to escape. Weinreich concluded his picture
of a very gloomy outlook in the run-up to the 28 June anniversary of the hated
Versailles treaty with the question, ‘Where are the masses of workers, where are
the twelve million organized members of the socialist unions?’.49 His disappointed
answer was that the socialist parties were fighting among themselves. In an article
written after Rathenau’s murder, Weinreich returned to this thought: ‘The greatest
tragedy for Germany is that a nation of sixty million, half of whom are workers,
can tolerate such a situation.’50
174 Amy Blau
In addition to their coverage of politics, culture, and everyday life in Weimar

Germany, Weinreich’s Forverts articles give some indication of Weinreich’s own
experiences in Weimar Germany. The correspondence with Forverts, however,
offers more specific information about events and circumstances in Weinreich’s
own life; the letters bring together Weinreich’s connections in Vilna, in Germany,
and in America. Indeed, the correspondence in the Abraham Cahan archive
continues into 1937, offering additional information about Weinreich’s subsequent
travels and life in Vilna. Weinreich’s letters from Weimar Germany to Cahan, and
especially his letters to the Forverts editorial staff rather than to Cahan directly,
indicate the extent to which he relied upon this source of income in dollars at a
time of rampant inf lation of the German mark. Weinreich brought up the matter
of payment in his first letter directed to Cahan, accompanying the sample articles:
‘I don’t need to remind you that if it will be printed, I would be interested in
receiving an honorarium, in accordance with your standard practice. For a poor
student it can’t hurt.’51 The average payment per article appears to have been fifteen
dollars. Weinreich found fault with the record-keeping of Forverts when it missed or
delayed payments, although he expressed this frustration very politely:
I know very well that you have business aside from me — but nevertheless I
ask you to do me the favour of sending the honorarium. With as few delays as
possible, because I need it to live on, not to build up capital.52
A series of letters from the spring of 1922 recounts the various accounting errors in
the payment of his honoraria; Weinreich sent a very detailed invoice from Marburg
after his return from covering the Genoa Conference.53 The last few letters from
Germany outline a new system of payment to begin when Weinreich returned to
Vilna: at that point he was to begin drawing a weekly stipend of forty dollars for an
average of six articles per month.54
Germany’s inf lation and then hyperinf lation, which made the publication of
so many Yiddish books and periodicals possible in Berlin, also negatively affected
Weinreich’s ability to publish in German. In a letter to Cahan, Weinreich mentioned
that he had completed his dissertation and wanted to publish it, but no German
press would take it, because it would not sell to a mass audience. He wondered,
therefore, if Cahan knew of an organization that would subsidize its publication. If
he could publish it in English in Germany, it would cost less than a quarter of the
price elsewhere, and Weinreich would be willing to forgo an honorarium if that
would enable publication.55 Weinreich stressed that his dissertation was a work of
scholarly research, but he felt that it was accessible to a broader audience as well:
‘The whole thing does not read like a newspaper article, but because of my many
years of newspaper work, where one must always write so that the reader can
follow, I think I have learned to write scholarly works more understandably, too.’56
Weinreich’s willingness to attribute clarity in his scholarly writing to his experience
of popular writing brings out the importance of his journalistic writing to his entire
oeuvre. Finally, Weinreich’s correspondence with Cahan offers insight not only into
the course of Weinreich’s studies but also into his wife Regina Szabad Weinreich’s
graduate study of botany at the University of Frankfurt am Main. Weinreich sent
various updates on her studies in his correspondence, and toward the end of his
time in Germany also sent an urgent request that Cahan exercise his inf luence on
her behalf at a point when her high school graduation certificate from Vilna was
insufficient to allow her to complete her studies in Frankfurt.57 The request that
Cahan’s associates in Germany provide ‘protektsye’ also demonstrates the inter
connected relationships between Jews in eastern Europe, Germany, and America.
Max Weinreich’s translations of Ernst Toller’s plays and his coverage of them
in Forverts bring German literary and political culture into a Yiddish context for
a Yiddish-speaking audience. Weinreich’s descriptions of life, politics, and culture
in Weimar Germany from the explicit point of view of an eastern European Jew
writing for American Jews illuminate shared political concerns about socialism
and anti-Semitism. They also demonstrate interesting connections between his
popular and his scholarly writing, specifically relating to his abiding desire to
establish the legitimacy and relevance of Yiddish scholarly research in Yiddish. In
an essay that appeared in Forverts in the week following his essay on Toller’s play
Die Maschinenstürmer, Weinreich included a scene depicting how he acquired his
copy of Toller’s latest book.58 Weinreich wrote that, in contrast with a bookseller in
Vilna, who had to look on every shelf to find the particular book that a customer
might want, German booksellers had an orderly system of classification. However,
when Weinreich (Brener) asked for Die Maschinenstürmer by name in a bookstore
in Frankfurt am Main, the bookseller assumed that because the title included the
word ‘machine’, the relevant classification would be engineering — Weinreich
had to speak up and say that the book was a drama. The conclusion he drew from
this incident underscores the contrasts he made elsewhere between German (and
German-Jewish) precision and a less orderly but more human way of doing things
at ‘home’ in Vilna: ‘I was ashamed of myself as I left the store and I asked myself:
which is better, the Vilnian mish-mash or the system that makes machines of
men?’.59 Weinreich’s contrast between the eastern Jewish and German booksellers
in this anecdote brings back the question of the relative value of German culture
(and cultural norms), especially for the cosmopolitan Yiddishist. Weinreich made
frequent reference to the advantages of the German university system and the
thoroughness and precision of German scholarship in his articles as Sore Brener, and
not only in the context of the university system itself — the possession of German
grintlekhkayt (‘thoroughness’) was high praise in Weinreich’s articles.60 These
references correspond to Gabriel Weinreich’s observation that Max Weinreich had
placed his faith in the German academic system and scholarly values, making the
later complicity of German academia with Nazism a heavy blow for him.61 In sum,
the articles and translations attributed to Sore Brener and the correspondence with
Forverts relating to them help us to contextualize not only Max Weinreich’s life in
Weimar Germany, but also the tensions and fruitful cross-fertilizations between
Yiddish and German cultural spheres in the years after World War I.
* * * * *
Many thanks to library and archive staff and to fellow researchers at the Center
for Jewish History and the New York Public Library for their helpful suggestions,
especially to Fruma Mohrer and Chana Gordon-Mlotek of the YIVO Institute for
Jewish Research.
176 Amy Blau
Notes to Chapter 8
1. See Delphine Bechtel, ‘Milgroym, a Yiddish magazine of arts and letters, is founded in Berlin by
Mark Wischnitzer’, in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought, ed. by Sander L. Gilman and
Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 420–26; idem, ‘Babylon or Jerusalem:
Berlin as a Center of Jewish Modernism in the late 1920s’, in Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and
Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, ed. by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), pp. 116–23.
2. Sore (Sarah) Brener had been Weinreich’s pseudonym before the war in Russia; his reasons
for choosing a female pseudonym, and this one in particular, are unknown, but he specifically
mentioned it when corresponding with Abraham Cahan about writing for Forverts. Max
Weinreich to Abraham Cahan, 24 March 1920, Abraham Cahan papers RG 1139, folder 70,
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York (MK 498, frame 182). All correspondence
between Weinreich and Cahan or Weinreich and Forverts staff referred to in this essay comes
from this collection, which was accessed in microfilm form at YIVO in New York, and will
subsequently be cited by microfilm and frame number.
3. Gennady Estraikh’s article ‘Sore Brener un “ihre” artiklen’, Forverts, 29 May 2009, reprints
this essay from the Warsaw Morgnshtern as well as Weinreich’s 3 July 1922 Forverts article ‘A
daytsh shtetl mit an universitet iz vi a yidishe shtetl mit a yeshive’. Estraikh’s analysis and the
reprinted Forverts article are available on the Forverts website; unfortunately, the reprint of the
Morgnshtern article is not (<http://yiddish.forward.com/node/2106> [accessed 2 July 2009]). For
‘Dos Yidishe Berlin’, see Morgnshtern, 22 April 1921, p. 4.
4. Weinreich also refers to gatherings of Yiddish writers at the Romanisches Café in a letter to
Abraham Cahan, 4 January 1923, MK 498, frame 215. See also Delphine Bechtel, ‘Jiddische
Literatur und Kultur in Berlin im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik’, in Jüdische
Sprachen in deutscher Umwelt: Hebräisch und Jiddisch von der Aufklärung bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, ed.
by Michael Brenner (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2002), pp. 85–95; Heather Valencia,
‘Das Romanische Café und die jiddischen Intellektualen’, in Heather Valencia, Else Lasker-
Schüler und Abraham Nochem Stenzel: Eine unbekannte Freundschaft (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus,
1995), pp. 60–71; idem, ‘Yiddish Writers in Berlin 1920–1936’, in The German-Jewish Dilemma
from the Enlightenment to the Shoah, ed. by Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel (Lewiston, NY:
Mellen, 1996), pp. 193–207. On Yiddish publishing in Weimar Germany, see Leo and Renate
Fuks, ‘Yiddish Publishing Activities in the Weimar Republic’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 33
(1988), 417–34; Glenn S. Levine, ‘Yiddish Publishing in Berlin 1919–1924’, Leo Baeck Institute
Year Book, 42 (1997), 85–108. See also Arthur Tilo Alt, ‘A Survey of Literary Contributions to
the Post-World War I Yiddish Journals of Berlin’, Yiddish, 7.1 (1987), 42–51.
5. Levine, pp. 92–94; Bechtel, ‘Jiddische Literatur und Kultur in Berlin im Kaiserreich und in der
Weimarer Republik’, pp. 90–91.
6. All translations from the Yiddish are my own; emphasis in the original here.
7. See ‘Maks Vaynraykh’, in Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologie, ed. by Zalmen Rejsen,
4 vols (Vilna: Kletzkin), i, 3rd edn (1928), pp. 951–54. On Weinreich’s life, see also Lucy S.
Dawidowicz, ‘Max Weinreich (1894–1969): The Scholarship of Yiddish’, in American Jewish Year
Book, 70 (1969), 59–68.
8. Cecile Kuznitz, ‘The Origins of Yiddish Scholarship and the YIVO Institute for Jewish
Research’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2000), p. 66.
9. See Leybl Kahn, ‘Bibliografye fun Maks Vaynraykhs verk’, in For Max Weinreich on his Seventieth
Birthday: Studies in Jewish Languages, Literature, and Society (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), pp. 287–305.
10. See the following invaluable bibliography of Weinreich’s journalistic writing: Chana Gordon-
Mlotek and Shmuel Goldenberg, ‘Hesofe tsu der Maks Vaynraykh-bibliografye’, YIVO bleter,
n.s., 3 (1997), 370–440. All articles in Forverts cited in this chapter, unless otherwise indicated,
are by Max Weinreich under the pseudonym Sore Brener.
11. See Ernst Toller, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by John M. Spalek and Wolfgang Frühwald, 5 vols
(Munich: Hanser, 1978), ii: Dramen und Gedichte aus dem Gefängnis 1918–1924.
12. Biographical information on Toller is drawn from Richard Dove, He was a German: A Biography
of Ernst Toller (London: Libris, 1990). Toller’s autobiography also provides information on his life
during the German Revolution and his imprisonment. See Ernst Toller, Gesammelte Werke, ed.
by John M. Spalek and Wolfgang Frühwald, iv: Eine Jugend in Deutschland.
13. Masse-Mensch was translated into English by Vera Mendel as Masses and Man: A Fragment of
the Social Revolution of the Twentieth Century (London: Nonesuch Press, 1923) and by Louis
Untermeyer as Man and the Masses (Masse Mensch): A Play of the Social Revolution in Seven Scenes
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1924). See John M. Spalek, Ernst Toller and his Critics:
A Bibliography (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1968),
pp. 95–97. Die Wandlung: Das Ringen eines Menschen appeared in English in a translation by
Edward Crankshaw in Ernst Toller, Seven Plays (London: John Lane, 1935).
14. For discussion of the stations and structure of Die Wandlung, see Manfred Durzak, Das express
ionistische Drama: Ernst Barlach, Ernst Toller, Fritz von Unruh (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlags
handlung, 1979), pp. 107–17. For further discussion of Weinreich’s translation of Die Wandlung
in the context of Yiddish translations of German World War I literature, see Chapter 4 of Amy
Blau, ‘Afterlives: Yiddish Translations of German Weltliteratur’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005).
15. ‘A revolutsionerer dikhter a yid, mit velkhn es klingt itst Daytshland’, Forverts, 30 October 1921,
p. 2.
16. Ibid.
17. Ernst Toller, Der iberker, der gerangl fun a mentshn, trans. by Sore Brener [Max Weinreich] (Berlin:
Yidisher Kultur-farlag, 1923); Ernst Toller, Mase mentsh: A drame fun der sotsialer revolutsie fun 20-tn
yorhundert, trans. by Sore Brener [Max Weinreich] (Warsaw: Farlag ‘Di velt’, 1922).
18. Max Weinreich to Abraham Cahan, 24 March 1920, MK 498, frames 182–83.
19. Spalek, pp. 45–47, 80–81.
20. Max Weinreich to Abraham Cahan, 24 March 1920, MK 498, frame 182.
21. The Welt Verlag was a German press with a focus on Jewish topics; a Yiddish branch, the Velt-
Farlag, was active in 1921. I know of no explicit connection between the German Welt Verlag
and the Warsaw Farlag ‘Di Velt’.
22. Georg Schirmers, ‘Zum Leben und Werk von Menachem Birnbaum’, in Menachem Birnbaum:
Leben und Werk eines jüdischen Künstlers: Katalog zur Ausstellung der FernUniversität/GH Hagen, ed.
by Dieter Schmauss (Hagen: FernUniversität Hagen, 1999), pp. 7–37.
23. Letter from Max Weinreich, 4 January 1920, MK 498, frames 186–88.
24. The first German edition of Masse-Mensch (three thousand copies, printed in 1920) did not have a
hyphen between the two words; Toller corrected the title for subsequent editions. As the second
edition appeared only in 1922, Weinreich translated from the first edition — logically, therefore,
he would not have used a hyphen. See Spalek, p. 47.
25. Nakhman Meisel, ‘Milkhome un revolutsye-veyen’, Literarishe bleter, 6 June 1924, p. 4.
26. Michael Weichert, review of Der iberker and Mase mentsh, Bikhervelt, 3–4 (1923), 234–36. Emphasis
in the quotations is in the original.
27. Michael Weichert, Zikhroynes, 3 vols (Tel Aviv: Farlag Menoyre, 1960–63), ii: Varshe 1918–1939
(1961), p. 84.
28. Di mashinentseshterer, trans. by Dovid Taytlboym (Warsaw: Naye kultur, 1927); Der blutiker
gelekhter, trans. by Liliput [Herman Gabriel Kretchmer] (New York: Frayhayt, 1924); Hopla, mir
lebn!, trans. by L. Dasin [Leybl Goldin] (Warsaw: Avan-garde, 1929). See Spalek, pp. 117–19.
29. Chaim Lieberman’s study in Yiddish of the first four plays by Toller, which appeared in 1924,
noted the publication of Hinkemann in Yiddish as Der blutiker gelekhter, but made no mention of
the earlier Brener translations; this suggests that the Brener translations themselves had limited
distribution in the United States and little direct inf luence on the Yiddish reception of Toller
in America. See Chaim Lieberman, Ernst Toler — di tragedye fun a zukhenden gayst (New York:
Farlag ‘Feder’, 1924).
30. ‘A naye pyese fun dem daytshn revolutsyoner, velkher shraybt zayne verk in gefengnis’, Forverts,
31 December, 1922, p. 2.
31. The optimism in Weinreich’s discussion of Toller’s third play also runs counter to Chaim
Lieberman’s 1924 analysis of Toller’s dramatic oeuvre up to that point; Lieberman identifies a
pessimistic progression in Toller’s works, a successive loss of idealism. See Lieberman, pp. 97–99.
178 Amy Blau
32. Letter from Max Weinreich, 4 January 1920, MK 498, frames 186–88.
33. Max Weinreich to Abraham Cahan, 24 March 1920, MK 498, frames 182–83.
34. ‘General “strayk” kegn general Litvits’, Forverts, 28 May 1920, p. 3.
35. ‘Farvos nit-bolshevistishe arbeter helfn di bolshevikes’, Forverts, 1 August 1920, p. 2.
36. ‘Forverts korespondentin fort fun Berlin in Vilne un tsurik’, Forverts, 25 October 1920, p. 3.
37. Max Weinreich to Abraham Cahan, 27 August 1920, MK 498, frames 184–85.
38. ‘Gen. Ab. Kahan bazukht di hoyz in der kleyner shtetele vu er iz geboyren gevorn’, Forverts, 16
August 1923, p. 4.
39. ‘Vi azoy ikh bin geforn keyn Vilne’, Forverts, 4 November 1922, p. 3.
40. ‘Vi azoy iz oyfgekumen un oysgevaksn di yidishe shprakh?’, Forverts, 23 April 1922, p. 6.
41. ‘In’m univerzitet fun Hamburg vet men lektshurn vegn yidish’, Forverts, 10 September 1922,
p. 3.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Max Weinreich, Geschichte der jiddischen Sprachforschung (dissertation, University of Marburg,
1923), ed. by Jerold C. Frakes (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), p. 306 n. 157.
45. ‘Drezden — di sheyne hoypt-shtot fun dem roytn “Zaks” ’, Forverts, 23 January 1922, p. 3.
46. ‘President Eberts adres veys men nit, Vilhelms yo’, Forverts, 5 December 1922, p. 5.
47. For additional coverage of Hitler, see ‘Ver iz der firer fun di daytshe fashistn’, Forverts, 17 March
1923, p. 10.
48. ‘A briv fun Berlin erev Rathenaus mord’, Forverts, 5 July 1922, p. 4; ‘Di shrek far a naye
iberkerenish in Daytshland’, Forverts, 6 July 1922, p. 4.
49. ‘Di shrek far a naye iberkerenish in Daytshland’, p. 4.
50. ‘Far vos iz di daytshe republik azoy shvakh?’, Forverts, 18 July 1922, p. 3.
51. Max Weinreich to Abraham Cahan, 24 March 1920, MK 498, frame 182.
52. Max Weinreich to Gottlieb, 6 March 1922, MK 498, frames 202–03.
53. Max Weinreich to Forverts, 22 May 1922, MK 498, frames 205–10.
54. Max Weinreich to Forverts, 28 August 1923, MK 498, frames 220–21.
55. Max Weinreich to Abraham Cahan, 4 January 1923, MK 498, frames 211–15.
56. Ibid., frame 212.
57. Max Weinreich to Abraham Cahan, 1 February 1923, MK 498, frames 216–17.
58. ‘Etlekhe interesante zakhn fun etlekhe lender’, Forverts, 6 January 1923, p. 3.
59. Ibid.
60. Weinreich’s approval of German scholarship is apparent in ‘A daytshe shtetl mit a universitet
iz vi a yidishe shtetl mit a yeshive’, Forverts, 9 July 1922, p. 3, and also in an earlier article on
the sound archive in Berlin, ‘Zey hobn tsunoyfgeklibn di shtimen, gezangen un tents fun ale
felker’, Forverts, 15 July 1921, p. 5. An example of his more general attribution of exactness and
thoroughness to the Germans can be found in ‘Moving piktshurs in Daytshland’, Forverts, 24
April 1921, p. 2.
61. Gabriel Weinreich, ‘Zikhroynes vegn Maks Vaynraykh’, YIVO bleter, n.s., 3 (1997), 343–46.
Chapter 9
v
Reports from the ‘Republic Lear’:

David Eynhorn in Weimar Berlin 1920–24
Anne-Christin Saß
During the past decade many scholars in various fields of the humanities have
devoted increased attention to the trans-territorial and transnational character of
Jewish history. Although one may disagree with Yuri Slezkine’s description of
the twentieth century as ‘the Jewish century’,1 there is no doubt that the specific
social und mental conditions of the western and eastern European Jewries are of
‘seismographic importance’ for an understanding of Europe’s history in the twentieth
century.2 In particular, the broad European processes of national homogenization
with their different mechanisms of exclusion and the implications of the crises of
the interwar period can be clearly deduced from the living conditions of Jewish
minorities in the newly established nation states after 1918. The increased Jewish
migration from the former empires in the east to western Europe and overseas, and
the related questions of immigration laws, citizenship, and nationhood, play an
important role in this context.
The Jewish migrants who left their homes during World War I have largely
been examined as refugees, expatriates, and ‘unwelcome strangers’ in the countries
through which they passed and into which they immigrated. In the case of Weimar
Germany, for example, the social and political status of Jewish migrants from
eastern Europe, changing attitudes towards them, and their significance for the
self-conception of German Jewry have been studied exhaustively.3 By contrast, the
prospects and possibilities of the migrants’ situation have long been neglected.
Against the background of his own exile experiences, the émigré and philosopher
Vilém Flusser emphasizes ‘the freedom of the migrant’. According to Flusser,
migrants can function as a window on the world for the residents of the countries
they adopt. Beyond that, migrants are mirrors in which the residents see an image
of themselves, albeit a distorted one.4 For these reasons the complex experiences
of migrants should not be overlooked by an ‘integrated European historiography’.5
Equally, a historiography of Weimar Germany is incomplete without the perspective
of its eastern European Jewish migrants.
This chapter is an attempt to look at the first years of Weimar Germany from the
perspective of an ‘unwelcome stranger’. The external view of a Jewish émigré living
in the young Weimar Republic during the years of inf lation (1920–24) will be traced
through the example of the Yiddish poet and journalist David Eynhorn (1886–1973).
180 Anne-Christin Sass
Initially the focus is on his experiences of otherness in Weimar Germany and the
migrant milieu in Berlin. His observations of social and political life in Weimar
Germany are then presented. Examining his journalistic work in particular, I will
ask to what extent his opinions correspond to contemporary debates in German
society and in what ways they differ from those debates.
* * * * *
On his arrival in Berlin in autumn 1920, David Eynhorn already had several years
of travel behind him. Due to his political engagement for the Algemeyner Yidisher
Arbeter Bund (Bund), Eynhorn had to leave Russia after six months of imprisonment
at the age of twenty-six in 1912. After a short stay in France he went to Switzerland.
During this time he continued publishing poems in Yiddish newspapers and started
to write journalistic articles about his journey through western Europe. In 1915
he settled in Warsaw, where he worked for the Yiddish journals of the Bund.6
Two years later, in March 1917, he married Genia (Gussie) Zissmann, who was
a student at the University of Berne. The difficult living conditions for Jews in
the re-established Polish state and what Eynhorn called the ‘army-atmosphere’, a
mixture of reaction, anti-Semitism, local patriotism, Bolshevism, and socialism,
finally led Eynhorn to leave Warsaw in September 1920.7
In Berlin Eynhorn met old friends and acquaintances from Russia, Switzerland,
and Poland. He soon became active on the intellectual eastern European Jewish
migrant scene centred on the Romanisches Café.8 Among other things, he worked
as a translator for the publishing house Wostok and produced a Yiddish miscellany,
Der onheyb (The Beginning), in association with the journalist Shmaryahu Gorelik
and the linguist Max Weinreich. In addition, he edited the survey on Yiddish
literature in Martin Buber’s periodical Der Jude. Significantly, Eynhorn was one
of the few authors in Berlin who was a regular correspondent for the New York
Yiddish newspaper Forverts (Forward).9 His regular contributions to Forverts allowed
him to reside in Berlin without major financial difficulties and to rent a f lat in
Charlottenburg near the Kurfürstendamm, where the bulk of Russian-Jewish
migrants lived.
So far, Eynhorn’s stints in Berne and Warsaw, as well as his activities in Berlin,
were representative of the substantial group of Yiddish writers, scholars, and
klal-tuer (political and social activists) who moved to Weimar Germany after the
war. These migrants brought their own culture, literature, political beliefs, relief
organizations, and research projects. Together they formed a Jewish colony in the
western part of Berlin, and the Romanisches Café functioned as its ‘parliament’.10
Although Eynhorn, as an established Yiddish writer, took an active part in some
of its literary and journalistic projects, he soon felt uncomfortable in the limited
framework of the intellectual migrant scene.
Similar to the Warsaw-based writers Peretz Markish and Melech Ravitch,
Eynhorn criticized the ‘coffee-house culture’ of the Jewish migrants.11 Although
the criticism formulated by Markish and Ravitch focused on the betrayal allegedly
committed by the migrants who sat around in the west instead of actively rallying
for the rights of Yiddish culture on its historical ground in eastern Europe, Eynhorn
David Eynhorn in Weimar Berlin 181
Fig. 16. 18 Oranienburger Straße, Berlin, whose Ressource-Saal was often used
as a venue for meetings of Jewish organizations, including the Berlin committee
for the promot ion of the Central Yiddish School Organization in Poland.
Photo by Anne-Christin Sass, 2009
condemned the bourgeois lifestyle of the migrants. In his opinion the prominent
migrants would sit at the ‘marble tables’ in the Romanisches Café, clustering around
the ‘rich pots’ of Jewish philanthropy, drinking coffee, and pretending that from
there they could save the whole Jewish nation, or klal yisroel. In so doing ‘they count
the murdered victims of the Ukrainian pogroms like their own possessions, each
night they establish new relief committees, film our sorrows, and expose our shame
at the movies’.12
Eynhorn’s harsh criticism should not be misinterpreted as a negative response to
the examination of the pogroms in Ukraine by the Eastern European Historical
Archive under the guidance of the historian Elias Tcherikower or as a complete
rejection of relief actions; Eynhorn himself supported a Berlin committee for the
promotion of the Central Yiddish School Organization in Poland. In reality, he
opposed a certain inteligentish attitude, which resulted, according to Eynhorn, in
the intelligentsia’s estrangement from the Jewish mass in eastern Europe and the
ordinary Jewish migrants in Weimar Germany. He could not fathom why the
representatives of the main Jewish aid organizations, ORT and OSE (Society for
the Protection of the Health of the Jews), which had moved their headquarters to
Berlin, prepared strategies and plans for promoting handicrafts and agricultural
works among the Jews in eastern Europe, but ignored the Jewish workers who
lived only nine hours away in the Ruhr area. In addition Eynhorn criticized
the Jewish intellectuals for setting up publishing houses, Yiddish journals, and
other literary projects, of which only very few would reach a wider audience.13
In contrast, Eynhorn belonged to the very few eastern European Jewish writers
who maintained steady contacts with ordinary migrants, particularly with Jewish
workers, in Berlin, the Ruhr district, Mecklenburg, and Saxony. He also supported
several literary Jewish worker organizations, for example the Jewish Workers’
Cultural Association ‘Light’ (Yiddisher Arbeter-Kulturfareyn ‘Likht’), in Essen and
the Peretz Association (Perets Fareyn) in Berlin.14
His commitment to ordinary Jewish workers did not merely derive from his
Bundist orientation but ref lected instead a basic conviction. Born in 1886 in
Karelichy (Belarus) as the son of a military doctor, Eynhorn grew up in the small
town of Rubezhevichi (near Grodno). As an adolescent he experienced the demise
of the traditional shtetl culture at first hand, the ‘great drama of Jewish concussion’
at the turn of the century.15 At the same time he came into contact with socialist
Jewish workers. Fascinated by the ethical idea of social equality, he became
absorbed in Bundism. Yet although he was soon considered a Bundist writer,
Eynhorn’s lyric and journalistic work cannot be attributed to any clear political
affiliation. On the one hand, he maintained a longing for traditional Yiddishkayt
throughout his life. This encompassed a positive concern for Jewish traditions and
religion — and might be the reason for his eventual alienation from the Bund.
On the other hand, Eynhorn felt a strong connection to the working class and was
an enthusiastic proponent of work as ‘the most worthy activity of the free man’.16
Eynhorn’s commitment to traditional Yiddishkayt and to modern industrial workers
seems contradictory only at first glance. His thinking was above all shaped by
Jewish tradition and religion, in particular the biblical prophets. For that reason his
Yiddishkayt, his religion, and his socialism have to be understood first and foremost
as ethical and moral viewpoints.17
Thus, the failure of the Kultur-Lige established along the Kiev model in Berlin
was all the more disappointing for Eynhorn. At first, Jewish workers warmly
welcomed the foundation. Like David Eynhorn, many of them hoped that Berlin
would gradually develop into a cultural centre for uprooted Jewish workers in
Germany. This hope was strengthened by the pledge of several Yiddish writers,
artists, and intellectuals who did not wish to act on behalf of a single group or
party. Therefore they strongly supported the establishment of a non-party Kultur-
Lige. Even so, three meetings were needed to choose a managing board to represent
all proletarian groups. It also included four Yiddish writers and artists. Instead of
starting to organize various activities, a number of meetings followed where the
members heavily disputed what kind of culture should be promoted. The proposals
ranged from Jewish culture in general to secular Yiddish culture to non-Jewish
proletarian culture. A year and a half later the Kultur-Lige was disbanded.18
At a time when ideologies, social utopias, and party politics played an important
role, Eynhorn’s refusal to side with a certain party, literary style, or cultural group
made it impossible for him to feel at home in the intellectual eastern European
Jewish microcosm of Berlin. In a review of his Berlin years, Eynhorn argued that
the failure of the Kultur-Lige revealed the lack of ideas and the inability of the
eastern European Jewish intelligentsia to deal with the challenges of migration.19
Instead of using the time to learn from the European host cultures and to give
something to the Jewish masses in eastern Europe, most of the intellectuals suffered
from the ‘emigration disease’, living for years in a foreign country ‘in expectation
that tomorrow the Messiah will come and bring them home’.20 For Eynhorn they
resembled a caravan which had lost its way. As he saw it there was little difference
between the camps they set up in the Romanisches Café and in the Parisian Café de
la Rotonde and, therefore, it was irrelevant in which country the emigrants lived.
* * * * *
In Eynhorn’s view the ‘emigration for the short term’ was first and foremost
a problem of the intellectuals. While the intelligentsia had the opportunity to
cultivate their emigration culture, ordinary migrants were forced to come into
contact with everyday life in their host societies sooner, be it in the factory or in the
shop. To avoid the ‘emigration disease’, Eynhorn himself spent a lot of time on the
streets of Berlin. He tried to get into conversation with ordinary people, attended
diverse cultural events, and participated in meetings and mass demonstrations of the
German workers. His letters and reports from Germany for Forverts, which I discuss
in the following section, include a wide range of topics and reveal him to be an
attentive observer of political and social life in Berlin.
David Eynhorn himself was relieved to find refuge in Berlin after overcoming
the vicissitudes of the ‘Great War’ in eastern Europe, the everyday anti-Semitism
in Poland, and a variety of stations in the course of his migration. Although, in
Eynhorn’s view, post-war Europe was ‘so desolate that there is no space for foreign
sorrows’,21 Weimar Germany seemed to be a safe place. In a letter to his wife, who
had to wait in Warsaw for her permit to enter Germany, Eynhorn described his first
impressions of Berlin in October 1920: ‘Berlin is a city of a defeated country, where
deep mourning fills every place. But one has to admire the fact that people are good
towards strangers — you do not feel any mean hatred. I sense that the deep, tragic
atmosphere which prevails in Germany will bring forth great poets and, possibly, a
new direction in religion.’22
* * * * *
After a short period of orientation and settling in Berlin, Eynhorn started to write
articles for Forverts with a report on the Jewish migration from Poland to Germany
and his own migration experiences.23 During the first year, his reports were still
dominated by the fate of individual migrants and the complex relations between
the eastern European Jewish workers and the German Jewry. But parallel to his
increasing discontent with the intellectual migrant scene and his own adaptation
to German society, Eynhorn’s articles became more immersed in the social and
political life of Weimar Germany. He treated not only crucial political occurrences
but also seemingly ordinary incidents. Above all, his articles dealt with the German
working class, political and social developments in Weimar Germany, and his
observations on daily life during the years of inf lation.
At first, Eynhorn’s descriptions of German workers and the German Social
Democratic Party were filled with high regard for the merits of German socialists
and respect for the achievements of the working class in Germany.24 In contrast
to the problematic relationship between Polish and Jewish workers, Eynhorn
experienced comradely cooperation between eastern European Jewish workers
and German Catholic workers in the Ruhr district. His almost effusive report of
peaceful and fraternal cooperation between both groups in the local working-class
housing estates, which he understood as an indication of the realization of the
socialist dream,25 stands in sharp contrast to the conf licts evident in the portrayal
of the German workers in Berlin.
Eynhorn sympathized with the claims of socialist workers and depicted them as
a cornerstone of the young Republic. Although he was convinced that the Com
munists in Germany had no real chance, because of the strong tradition of the Social
Democratic Party, he followed the mass demonstrations and general strikes of both
socialist and communist groups in Berlin with a mixture of sympathy, fascination,
and alienation. Thus he felt like ‘a drop in the ocean of the endless lines of the
workers’ demonstrations’ and experienced ‘the mystery of labour and solidarity’
at the mass meetings.26 Yet at the same time he sensed the tense atmosphere of a
menacing civil war. Eynhorn’s contradictory assessments of German workers in
Berlin and the Ruhr area can be explained on the one hand by the brevity of his
visits to the smaller cities, in contrast to his years of everyday experience in the
capital of Weimar Germany, and on the other hand by his ambivalent attitude
towards the metropolis. Every true social movement, he was convinced, would be
washed away in the tremendous mass of the metropolis.27
Apart from this general dislike of big cities, Eynhorn was aware of the dangers
which arose from the fragmentation of the international socialist movement
Fig. 17. Cover of David Eynhorn’s Gezamlte lider 1904-1924 (Collected Poems 1904–1924),
published in 1924 in Berlin by the Jüdische Arbeiterbuchhandlung
following the wartime split. Attending the International Socialist Conference in

Hamburg, Eynhorn witnessed not only how ‘the body of immaculate socialism
was carried to its grave’, but above all the deep gap between socialist leaders and
German workers.28 The increasing discontent, Eynhorn feared, would blaze the
way for Communist and anti-Semitic ideas.
After the assassination of the liberal ( Jewish) Foreign Minister Walther
Rathenau in June 1922 by ultra-nationalist army officers, Eynhorn’s conf licting
impressions of the German labour movement were strengthened. In his view the
workers’ demonstrations in Berlin had degenerated into a standardized ritual. The
demonstrations on the occasion of Rathenau’s violent death along the Kurfürsten
damm were indeed impressive, but after five hours, ‘at six o’clock in the evening,
according to the regulations of German punctuality, they [the workers] took down
the f lags, put them into the boxes, and went home’.29 By late evening the daily
routine dominated the Kurfürstendamm again. Although the democratic parties
closed ranks after the Rathenau assassination, in Eynhorn’s view a frightening
atmosphere still prevailed. The Republic would be celebrated during the daytime,
but by night the Republic was torn to pieces. The murderers would go unpunished
and hide among the people who stood faithful to the Republic.30 It seemed to
Eynhorn as if the parties involved reacted not to a particular political event but
followed a compulsory and predictable rite in which Jews were all too frequently
the chosen victims.
* * * * *
In January 1924 David Eynhorn evaluated the first years of the Weimar Republic.
Germany, he declared, was similar to Shakespeare’s King Lear.31 But while the
audience in the theatre might feel sympathy for King Lear, the world would laugh at
the tragedy of Germany. Five years ago, when the ‘Republic Lear’ was in possession
of authority, the Republic had divided power among its three daughters. Whereas
the old monarchist circles and the industrialists would get most of its power, the
third and good daughter, Cordelia, here the proletariat, was put to rout. Now,
the Republic with its small group of true servants would walk between the two
scheming daughters and be jostled from every side.
Eynhorn doubted that a real German Republic had ever existed. The people did
not yearn for the Republic, and the ‘cup of freedom’ was filled not with the blood
of the tyrant but with that of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Furthermore,
the memorials of the German emperors were still untouched. The bronze statue
of the emperor Friedrich Wilhelm in parliament was an obvious indication of the
still powerful Prussian-Wilhelmine heritage, which limited the Social Democrats’
scope of inf luence. Eynhorn was convinced that, until November 1918, the German
people had not wanted a revolution. During the following years they had longed
not for freedom, but first of all for bread, margarine, and a stable currency. For that
reason the Republic was for Eynhorn ‘not the face of the German people, nor a
mask for foreign countries’.32
Eynhorn’s critical description of the political situation corresponds with the
reports of other foreign journalists in Berlin. For example, Eugeni Xammar,
a liberal Catalonian journalist and vice-president of the Verband ausländischer

Pressevertreter (Association of Foreign Journalists) in Berlin, shared Eynhorn’s
scepticism regarding the future prospects of the Republic during the years of
inf lation.33 Xammar, whose attitude towards Germany was shaped by his Spanish
origins and many years spent in Great Britain, was dismayed by the reactionary
trends in German society. Like Eynhorn, he analysed the weakness of the Weimar
constitution. But his articles also show a high regard for the minor virtues of the
Germans. In addition, his belief in the political sense of the ordinary German
people was very strong. Eynhorn was less optimistic. In January 1924 he noted in
resignation that no political consciousness existed among the German people. They
were in his eyes driven only by varying moods and circulating rumours.34
Eugeni Xammar and David Eynhorn were both interested in ‘unimportant
persons’, as Xammar ironically described his interest for ordinary people. Although
Xammar used everyday encounters as a corrective or counter-example to the
politics of the day, Eynhorn drew from his everyday experiences in portraying a
society which was scarred by World War I and inf lation. His articles covered the
effects of inf lation on German society, the problem of foreign speculators, and the
increasing number of suicides, as well as the psychological and mental consequences
of the war.
When inf lation began, Eynhorn sympathized with the majority of the working
and the lower middle class. Moreover, he showed an understanding of their dis
content towards foreigners. He also criticized the arrogant behaviour of some
moneyed migrants in Berlin because he was aware of the dangers which arose
from this small cohort for all eastern European Jewish migrants in Germany.35 But
Eynhorn described not only ‘the closing down sale of the middle-class home in the
pawnshops’ and the struggles of the distressed population.36 He also looked at the
correlations between financial emergencies, cultural conf licts, and social changes.
In contrast to the often one-dimensional explanations in the daily newspapers —
where suicides were concerned, for example — Eynhorn’s reporting did not make
hasty generalizations.37 As a writer who was interested in individual human fates
he did not merely trace suicides back to the economic crisis, the capitalist system,
or national defeat. He looked beyond these factors to the existential hardships, the
personal sufferings, and the individual breakdowns that might in the end lead to
suicide.38
Often, apparently minor incidents induced Eynhorn to ref lect on the state of
Weimar society. Using the story of a Berlin tavern where, as a result of pilfering,
guests were no longer given cutlery, Eynhorn analysed the major cultural and
social changes in German society and their impacts on the individual.39 While on
the surface everybody seemed busy coping with everyday life, he believed that,
secretly, one of the most terrible revolutions was under way. This revolution, he
was convinced, would be one of despair, frustration, and doubt, a conspiracy of all
citizens, classes, and political tendencies, which would be directed against the state.
In Eynhorn’s view, one of the most dangerous trends in society was the loss of
confidence in the existing order as well as the all-pervasive attitude of acquitting
oneself of public duties and state control. The erosion of norms and values in private
and public life because of the war threatened not only the foundations of German
society but also other European countries. From the destroyed and defeated
countries in central Europe, Eynhorn saw a new philosophy arising, which he
termed ‘passive anarchism’.
Above all, the young generation which grew up during the war with thoughts of
hatred and murder was endangered by that philosophy. Eynhorn noticed its impact
in three dominating characteristics of young people in post-war Europe: first, the
victims of the age who were not able to cope with the trauma of war; second, the
young people for whom cynicism and disdain became a way of life; and third, the
passive people who kept on going but had no ideas and no strength to look for a
change.40 In Weimar youth novels one can find two very common youth characters
that correspond to Eynhorn’s description: the type of a ‘resigned onlooker in
his father’s world’ and the youth who ‘espoused a revolution for new authority’
in the form of commitment to a group and its leaders.41 In each case the loss of
educational and parental authority was linked to the wider crisis of Weimar society,
but Eynhorn took a more pessimistic view than most of the German publicists and
novelists concerning the impacts of this loss.
As early as the beginning of the 1920s, Eynhorn felt very clearly that many young
people and young adults were predisposed to fascist and racist ideas. In that point he
differed not only from most of the German journalists, but also from the majority
of foreign correspondents in Berlin. Eugeni Xammar, for example, who had the
opportunity to interview Hitler on the eve of the Munich putsch in November
1923, covered the meeting with cutting irony. His sarcastic description of Hitler as
‘the most stupid human being we ever had the pleasure to meet’ originated from
his liberal lack of concern that Hitler’s political program would ever be realized.42
In contrast Eynhorn followed the Munich putsch with great anxiety because he was
aware of the sinister attraction of the National Socialist movement.
To obtain first-hand impressions, Eynhorn went to the places in Berlin where
the NSDAP held its meetings. Even if Eynhorn himself could not participate, he
looked at the people who went to the gatherings, and asked a German comrade to
attend a meeting.43 Experiencing the worked-up mass, Eynhorn was convinced that
the danger which arose from the Nazi movement could not be overestimated. He
saw that the despairing and impoverished people were especially attracted by the
anti-Semitic propaganda. In view of the position of the Jews in Germany, Eynhorn
stressed the increasing anti-Semitism, which was widespread not only throughout
monarchist circles, but just as much among socialist and communist workers. That
anti-Semitism, Eynhorn was convinced, was ‘ready to kill all Jews at the first
opportunity’.44
Eynhorn understood the Nazi movement and the increasing anti-Semitism as
only two manifestations of the wider crisis in German society. In fact, political
disintegration and social upheavals were widespread phenomena in post-war
Europe, but they did not have such strong effects as in Weimar Germany. Inspired
by the performance of a danse macabre in St Mary’s Church near the Alexanderplatz,
Eynhorn drew a depressing picture of Berlin in January 1924:
In Berlin they are skilled at the dance of death. Thousands of workers and clerks
are thrown on the dole. Prices increase, wages fall. The starved were forced
to work unduly, the unemployed to starve unduly. The people are desperate
enough to commit suicide. [...] Here leap the hundreds fallen of hunger who
were found in the streets of Berlin in recent months. There are mainly workers
and intellectuals, and on all sides children, children, children.45
The dangers which would arise from the disruption of German society were not
predictable in 1924. Nevertheless, Eynhorn tried to alert his readers to possible
threats by describing the German soul:
The German soul is an entangled one. From everywhere it sees dark and
sinister spectres; and when it gets wild, Death will dance forth from the hidden
corners. Behind the white curtains and homely f lowerpots a bloodbath will be
created, the likes of which have never been seen in the world! No communism,
no revolution, but a dance of death will appear.46
In retrospect, Eynhorn’s portrayal of the German soul seems like an early description
of the coming terror of the Nazi regime. But in 1924 neither Eynhorn nor his
contemporaries could foresee that his anticipated ‘dance of death’ would become
appalling reality only a decade later. Experiencing 1923, the year of crisis in Weimar
Germany, Eynhorn distanced himself more and more from German society. His
initial, optimistic view of Berlin as a place of refuge was disproved in November
1923 at the latest by the anti-Semitic riots which took place in the Scheunenviertel,
the quarter of the eastern European Jewish migrants in Berlin. The increasing
alienation from Jewish migrant culture and his commitment to Jewish workers
reinforced Eynhorn’s decision to leave Berlin. In autumn 1924 Eynhorn followed
the bulk of eastern European Jewish workers from Germany and settled in Paris.
Returning to Berlin for a short visit in December 1924, Eynhorn summarized
the ambiguity of his experiences in a poem which reconstructs the reality of Berlin
in a succession of single words. Eynhorn is known for his critical attitude towards
modern city poetry and his sentimental shtetl poems; ‘A gedank un a bild’ (‘A
picture and a thought’) is an exceptional piece in his literary work and an indication
of the strong impact of the Berlin years on him.47 The poem, which uses a poetic
form he usually avoided and did not feel heymish with, can be read as a description
of the migrant’s situation and its creative transformation.
Melukhe,
natsyon,
organizatsye,
gemeynshaft,
f likht,
dray-ek,
elipse,
kub,
kubizm,
futurizm,
ekpresyonizm,
abstrakte form,
primitiv,
Aynshteyn,
relativitets-teorye,
Froyd,
psikho-analyze,
ratn-makht,
komunizm,
diktatur,
demokratye,
republik.
Dan hob ikh plutsling derzen di lange umendlekhe gas ful mit mentshn.
Zibn hundert toyznt,
akht hundert toyznt,
tsu tsen in a reye,
rukns un potilnitses.
Zey hobn marshirt iber der abstrakter linye mit ritmishe trit.
Eyns, tsvey, dray,
eyns, tsvey, dray,
aroyf tsum horizont,
royte fener,
shvarts-vays-royte fener,
shvarts-vays-goldene fener,
transporantn,
oyfshriftn,
lozungen:
shtot,
raykh,
natsyon,
klas,
gemeynshaft,
f likht,
kategorisher imperativ,
Kant-shtrase.48
[State, | Nation, | Organization, | Duty, | Triangle, | Ellipse, | Cube,
| Cubism, | Futurism, | Expressionism, | Abstract form, | Primitive, |
Einstein, | Theory of relativity, | Freud, | Psychoanalysis, | Soviet regime,
| Communism, | Dictatorship, | Democracy, | Republic. | Suddenly I saw
the long, endless street alive with people. | Seven hundred thousand, | Eight
hundred thousand, | Ten in every row, | Backs and necks. | They marched
over the abstract line with rhythmic steps. | One, two, three, | One, two,
three, | Up to the horizon, | Red f lags, | Black-white-red f lags, | Black-red-
golden f lags, | Banners, | Inscriptions, | Slogans: | City, | Reich, | Nation, |
Class, | Community, | Duty, | Categorical imperative, | Kant Street.]
Living in Berlin during the uncertain years of Weimar Germany, Eynhorn wit
nessed not only inf lation, the occupation of the Ruhr, and the Munich putsch
in 1923. He also gained a deep understanding of the social upheavals in German
society. Like other journalists Eynhorn ref lected in his articles on the major social
and political difficulties of the young Republic. In this he differs little from much of
the coverage of his time. But what sets his articles apart from the general perception
of Weimar Germany in Europe is his exceptionally perspicacious analysis of the
distortions in German society. As comparison with Eugeni Xammar has shown,
Fig. 18. David Eynhorn (standing the seventh from left) with a group of Paris Bundists,
around 1930. From the Archives of the YIVO, New York
the diverging assessments of Xammar and Eynhorn resulted in large part from their
different backgrounds and positions in society.
In contrast to Xammar, who lived in Berlin as a reporter for the main Spanish
newspapers, Eynhorn was forced to live a migrant’s life. On coming to Berlin in
1920, Eynhorn had already lived as a migrant in different countries for several years.
With the demise of the traditional shtetl in eastern Europe he had lost his heymland,
his homeland, long before World War I. His twofold experience of foreignness in
Weimar Germany — becoming alienated from the Jewish migrant culture and
remaining a stranger in German society — was therefore a manifestation of his
general homelessness. His longing for traditional Yiddishkayt can be understood
as an attempt to overcome the all-encompassing feeling of being a stranger in the
post-war era.
Eynhorn’s life in Berlin was shaped by the tensions between involuntary entry
into the migrant situation and the ‘freedom of the migrant’. He distanced himself
from the Jewish migrant culture in Berlin, but nevertheless took an active part in
the migrant scene and used his connections to express his socio-political and ethical
beliefs. He had to live in the Berlin metropolis, although he was critical of modern
city life. Indeed, his ‘soul belonged to the shtetl on Lithuanian soil’,49 but he knew
how to exploit the potential of the big city. Eynhorn lived through the uncertain
years of Weimar Germany, but he was not bound to a certain group.
His ambiguous experiences allowed him to adopt the position of an outsider in

his observations on the struggles of the young Weimar Republic. In addition, with
his roots in the biblical principles of humanity and his refusal to side with a certain
party or group, he was more sensitive to the destructive conf licts between liberal
utopias, totalitarian ideas, and the selfish safeguarding of interests. As a Jew from
eastern Europe, he was aware of the limited possibilities for a stranger to participate
in German society. His trans-territorial background and experiences of pogroms in
eastern Europe furthermore enabled him to see clearly the menacing danger of the
widespread anti-Semitism in Weimar Germany.
Although Eynhorn’s articles were almost certainly not read by a German audience
in the 1920s, they represent a notable source for historians today. They function as
a window onto the early years of Weimar Germany and help us to understand
the tensions between the cosmopolitan cultural traditions and nationalist Prussian
heritage in Weimar Berlin.
Notes to Chapter 9
1. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
2. See Dan Diner, ‘Geschichte der Juden — Paradigma einer europäischen Historie’, in Annä
herungen an eine europäische Geschichtsschreibung, ed. by Gerald Stourzh (Vienna: Verlag der öster
reichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002), pp. 85–103. Translations in this chapter are by
the author.
3. See S. Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1880–1940: Zugleich eine Geschichte der Organisationen,
die sie betreuten (Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck), 1959); Steven Aschheim, Brother and Strangers: The
Eastern European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Hamburg:
Hans Christians Verlag, 1986); Jochen Oltmer, Migration und Politik in der Weimarer Republik
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005).
4. Vilém Flusser, Von der Freiheit des Migranten: Einsprüche gegen den Nationalismus (Hamburg:
Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2007), pp. 8, 30.
5. See Annäherungen an eine europäische Geschichtsschreibung, ed. by Gerald Stourzh (Vienna: Verlag
der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002).
6. See Zalman Reyzen, Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, prese un filologie, 4 vols (Vilna:
Kletzkin, 1927–29), i (1927), 81–86; A. Vayter, David Eynhorn, and Z. I. Anokhi, Fun dor tsu dor
(Buenos Aires: Josef Lipshits Fond Literarishe gezelshaft baym YIVO, 1974), pp. 80–82.
7. David Eynhorn, ‘David Eynhorn shildert vi men loyft fun Varshe’, Forverts, 5 December 1920.
8. For details of the Jewish Migrant scene centred on the Romanisches Café, see Heather Valencia,
‘Yiddish Writers in Berlin 1920–1936’, in The German-Jewish Dilemma: From the Enlightenment to
the Shoah, ed. by Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1999), pp. 193–
207; Gennady Estraikh, ‘Vilna on the Spree: Yiddish in Weimar Berlin’, Aschkenas — Zeitschrift
für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden, 16.1 (2006), 103–27.
9. On the Berlin bureau of the New York Forverts see the eponymous chapter by Gennady Estraikh
in this volume.
10. Avrom Nokhem Stencl, Loshn un lebn, October/November 1968, p. 24.
11. On the criticism put forward by Markish and Ravitch, see Delphine Bechtel, ‘Jiddische Literatur
und Kultur in Berlin im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik’, in Jüdische Sprachen in
nichtjüdischer Umwelt, ed. by Michael Brenner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), pp.
85–95.
12. David Eynhorn, ‘Daytshe yidn barimen zikh mit di yidishe koylngreber’, Forverts, 28 June 1922.
13. Eynhorn especially criticized the translation of Gerhart Hauptmann’s novel Der Ketzer von Soana
(Berlin: Fischer, 1918) by Eliah Olshvanger. For an overview of the f lourishing Yiddish press
and numerous book projects in Berlin see Marion Neiss, Presse im Transit: Jiddische Zeitungen und
Zeitschriften in Berlin von 1919 bis 1925 (Berlin: Metropol, 2002); Maria Kühn-Ludewig, Jiddische
Bücher aus Berlin (1918–1936): Titel, Personen, Verlage (Nümbrecht (Bruch): Kirsch, 2006).
14. On the Peretz Fareyn in Berlin, see Jack Jacobs, ‘Written Out of History: Bundists in Vienna
and the Varieties of Jewish Experience in the Austrian First Republic’, in In Search of Jewish
Community: Jewish identities in Germany and Austria, ed. by Michael Brenner and Derek Jonathan
Penslar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 115–33.
15. Shmuel Rozhanski, ‘Yidishe shrayber tsvishn konf liktn fun doyres’, introduction to Vayter,
Eynhorn, and Anokhi, p. 16.
16. This view was expressed in several articles. See David Eynhorn, ‘Ver zaynen zey, di yidishe
mayners fun Daytshland?’, Forverts, 29 June 1922; idem, ‘Daytshe yidn barimen zikh mit di
yidishe koylngreber’; idem, ‘Der dikhter un der arbeter’, Forverts, 6 July 1929.
17. See Hillel Rogoff, Der gayst fun ‘Forverts’: Materyaln tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher prese in Amerike
(New York: Forverts, 1954), pp. 217–18.
18. See ‘Grindungsfarzamlung fun der “kulturlige” ’, Unzer bavegung, 3 February 1922, p. 6;
‘Di grindung fun der “kulturliga” in Berlin’, Unzer bavegung, 1 April 1922, p. 12; ‘Berliner
kulturlige’, Unzere Bavegung, 1 May 1923, p. 12.
19. David Eynhorn, ‘Farvos yidn bazetsn zikh itst azoy fil in Pariz’, Forverts, 15 November 1925.
20. Ibid.
21. David Eynhorn’s letter to Gussie Zissmann, 19 September 1920, YIVO Archive, New York,
collection RG 277, box 1, folder 60.
22. David Eynhorn’s letter to Gussie Zissmann, 17 October 1920, YIVO Archive, collection RG
277, box 1, folder 60.
23. Eynhorn, ‘Dovid Eynhorn shildert, vi men loyft fun Varshe’; idem, ‘Endlikh aroys fun poylishn
gehenem un arayn in a nayes — in Dantsig’, Forverts, 8 December 1920.
24. See, for example, David Eynhorn, ‘Midber zaynen farvandlt gevorn in prakhtfule gardner’,
Forverts, 25 September 1921.
25. Eynhorn, ‘Daytshe yidn barimen zikh mit di yidishe koylngreber’.
26. David Eynhorn, Fun Berlin biz San Frantsisko (Warsaw: Kultur-Lige, 1930), p. 20.
27. David Eynhorn, ‘Di blofn fun undzer literatur: Shtot un shtetl’, in Vayter, Eynhorn, and
Anokhi, pp. 285–99.
28. ‘Brif fun tsvey “Forverts” korespondentn baym sotsialistishn kongres in Hamburg’, Forverts, 5
June 1923.
29. David Eynhorn, ‘Reaktsionere mordn un arbeterdemonstratsyes in Berlin’, Forverts, 9 August
1922.
30. Ibid.
31. David Eynhorn, ‘Daytshland iz itst geglikhn tsum oremen “Kenig Lir” ’, Forverts, 20 January
1924.
32. Ibid.
33. See the articles in Eugeni Xammar, Das Schlangenei: Berichte aus dem Deutschland der Inflationsjahre
1922–1924 (Berlin: Berenberg, 2007).
34. Eynhorn, ‘Daytshland iz itst geglikhn tsum oremen “Kenig Lir” ’.
35. David Eynhorn, ‘Di oyfgekumene gvirim fun oysland velkhe lebn a gutn tog in Berlin’, Forverts,
14 January 1923.
36. David Eynhorn, ‘Etlekhe bilder fun der kranker Berlin’, Forverts, 16 December 1922.
37. On the perception of suicides see Moritz Föllmer, ‘ “Good-bye diesem verf luchten Leben”:
Kommunikationskrise und Selbstmord in der Weimarer Republik’, in Sehnsucht nach Nähe:
Interpersonale Kommunikation in Deutschland seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, ed. by Moritz Föllmer
(Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004), pp. 109–26. See also Christian Goeschel, Suicide in Nazi Germany
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 11–55.
38. David, Eynhorn, ‘Lustikes un troyrikes fun Berlin teglihkn lebn’, Forverts 20 June 1924.
39. David Eynhorn, ‘Der poet Dovid Eynhorn shildert dos itstik gedrikte lebn in Berlin’, Forverts,
25 April 1923.
40. David Eynhorn, ‘Tragishe geshtaltn tsvishn dem hayntikn yungn dor’, Forverts, 28 April 1927.
41. Katherine Larson Roper, ‘Images of German Youth in Weimar Novels’, Journal of Contemporary
History, 13 (1978), 499–516.
42. Xammar, p. 145.

43. David Eynhorn, ‘Der itstiker antisemitism in Daytshland’, Forverts, 22 June 1924.
44. Ibid.
45. David Eynhorn, ‘A nayem tants tantst itst Berlin — dem toytn tants’, Forverts, 30 January 1924.
46. Ibid.
47. See Eynhorn, ‘Di blofn fun undzer literatur: Shtot un shtetl’; Bechtel, pp. 93–94.
48. Eynhorn, Fun Berlin biz San Frantsisko, pp. 17–18.
49. David Eynhorn, ‘Mayn heym’, in Vayter, Eynhorn, and Anokhi, p. 84.
C h a p t e r 10
v
Jewish Universalism,
the Yiddish Encyclopedia,
and the Nazi Rise to Power
Barry Trachtenberg
The brief but active Yiddish cultural scene in Weimar Berlin came to a near-halt
in the middle of the 1920s. By the end of the decade, its heyday was over, and the
vibrancy that at one time had contributed to the rise of publishing houses with
names such as Yidish, Wostok, and Klal, had brought together the literary circles at
the Romanisches Café and the Sholem Aleichem club, and had laid the foundations
for the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) was long gone.1 The stabilization of the
economy meant that Berlin was no longer a financial bargain for those with foreign
currency and that therefore Yiddish publishing (intended primarily for export) was
no longer a profitable enterprise. The political turmoil and violence in post-war
eastern Europe that had caused so many to take refuge in Berlin had stabilized
and new economic and cultural opportunities in Poland, the Soviet Union, and
the United States enticed many away. The ‘golden age’ of Weimar Yiddish ended
before it emerged from infancy.2
The remaining years of Weimar Berlin did not see a total collapse of Yiddish
cultural activity, however. The city remained home to the Historical Section of the
YIVO as well as to the writers David Bergelson and Daniel Charney, the historian
Elias Tcherikower, the demographer Jacob Lestschinsky, the Territorialist leader
Abraham Rosin (whose pseudonym was Ben-Adir), the philosopher and translator
Aaron Steinberg, and the Menshevik leader and journalist Raphael Abramovitch.
Indeed, one of the most ambitious and long-lasting projects in the Yiddish language
was founded in Berlin in the first years of the 1930s. Di algemeyne entsiklopedye (The
General Encyclopedia; Berlin, Paris, and New York, 1932–66) was to have been the
first encyclopedia to bring universal knowledge to Yiddish readers around the world.
The Entsiklopedye was originally planned as a ten-volume set on general subject
matter with an additional eleventh volume dedicated to Jewish life and culture.
However, the Nazi rise to power — and then later World War II and the Holocaust
— repeatedly forced the Entsiklopedye’s editors to reformulate (and relocate) their
project on account of the rapidly changing circumstances in Europe.
An examination of the founding of Di algemeyne entsiklopedye complicates the
history of what became the final years of Weimar Germany and the Jews who
196 Barry Trachtenberg
resided there at that time. In retrospect, it is common to look at the beginning of

the 1930s with deep pessimism — as the start of an era of steep decline that soon
ended in outright disaster for all Jews in Germany (nationals and foreigners alike).
However, the early years of Di algemeyne entsiklopedye point to the fact that the lived
experiences and aspirations of many Russian Jews there were far more hopeful.
What is most striking is that at a time when large sections of German society
(and then Europe) were on the cusp of fundamentally repudiating their Jewish
inhabitants, the leading figures of Berlin’s Russian Jewish émigré community
were embarking on a project with the explicit aim of deepening Jewish communal
integration within the European order.
The tendency towards Jewish universalism stood in stark contrast with that of
German Jews during this period. The Weimar era was a time when many began to
reassess the choice made by their forebears to distance themselves from religious and
cultural expressions of Judaism as a necessary step towards their inclusion in German
society. As the historian Michael Brenner has commented, for late nineteenth-
century German Jews ‘Jewishness had become a rather curious hereditary relic
to be preserved in some way, but not imbued with any concrete content’.3 The
Weimar years saw a profound reconsideration of this stance towards Judaism,
and many figures, such as Martin Buber, Franz Kaf ka, Berta Pappenheim, Franz
Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem, began to fashion what was to them a more
authentic identification with Judaism. A result of this was a burst of cultural activity
dedicated to reviving the German-Jewish community that included Buber and
Rosenzweig’s translation of the Bible — which was an effort to reengage German
Jews with the Hebrew original — and the Lehrhaus movement — which brought
Jewish education to adult audiences. On a more widespread level, it resulted in
increased religious observance, greater affiliation with Jewish communal, cultural,
and athletic organizations, and for many, an embrace of Zionism.
The renewed interest in Jewish learning also prompted the establishment of two
German-language encyclopedia projects dedicated to conveying specifically Jewish
knowledge in a modern and secularized form, with the hope of fending off further
Jewish assimilation. Brenner has shown that both the four-volume Jüdisches Lexikon
( Jewish Lexicon, 1927–30) and the never-completed Encyclopaedia Judaica (1928–34)
were attempts to (re)familiarize German Jewry with Jewish learning:
The aim of the editors of German-Jewish encyclopedias was threefold: first, to
restore the treasure of Jewish culture to the Jewish community (and to illustrate
it to the non-Jewish world); second, to consolidate the leading role of German
Wissenschaft des Judentums among international Jewish scholarship; and third,
to create a modern Jewish consciousness among German-speaking Jews by
redefining the contents of Judaism.4
Presenting Judaism to a post-religious Jewish audience was no easy task and required
a thorough reconsideration of what a ‘learned Jew’ should know. Rather than
lengthy Talmudic discourses on matters of scripture and law, the Jüdisches Lexikon
and the Encyclopaedia Judaica offered studies drawn largely from literary studies and
linguistics, and from the social sciences, such as sociology, economics, and history.
If the two German-language Jewish encyclopedias were ‘aimed at restoring Jewish
Jewish Universalism 197
knowledge’ in a non-Jewish language (and in part, for non-Jewish audiences), Di

algemeyne entsiklopedye by contrast was focused primarily — though not exclusively
— on conveying universal knowledge in a Jewish language, and was thus strictly
for a Jewish readership.5
The plan for an encyclopedia of universal knowledge in Yiddish stemmed from
an impulse among Russian Jewish émigrés that was very different from that of their
German-Jewish counterparts. Quite comfortable with their sense of themselves as a
distinct cultural nation, they held an outlook that was increasingly more expansive
than it was particularistic, and they endeavoured to strengthen the Jews’ ties to the
modern world. For many of them, the post-war move to Berlin was made not only
because of the relative stability to be found in that city, but also because it was an
opportunity to take part in a dynamic cultural and intellectual European centre.
Efforts to modernize the Jews by means of cultural production in their mother
tongue were part of a project that went back at least a quarter of a century — to
the days following the 1905 Revolution in Russia. The failure of that revolution to
bring about the political emancipation of the Jews accelerated a national movement
along cultural lines, which occurred in both Yiddish and Hebrew. For example, the
introduction to the journal Literarishe monatsshriften (Literary Monthly, 1908), which
was the first significant attempt to bring European literary modernism to Yiddish-
reading audiences, asserted that ‘the conviction is growing that the Jewish folk has
the same rights as all other people to create its own culture, to express its national
self in original forms, and to bind its own unique page into the great book of the
world’.6 Whereas German Jews were beginning to feel as if they had relinquished
too much of their distinctiveness in their attempt to join German society, as late as
1930 many Russian Jews by contrast still had their sights set on engaging fully with
the world around them.
Most of the scholars associated with Di algemeyne entsiklopedye were part of the
first generation to take Yiddish seriously as a medium for scholarly work. By the
end of World War I, Yiddish was no longer dismissed as a jargon, the rejection of
which was a prerequisite for Jews entering the modern world. Instead, it stood —
alongside Hebrew — at the centre of the developing Jewish cultural renaissance.
Soon, the Yiddish language became the dominant medium for the high and popular
culture of eastern European Jews. It was the language of secular school systems,
cultural organizations, and thousands of periodicals. Along with the Vilna-based
YIVO, scholarly institutes devoted to Yiddish scholarship were founded in the
Soviet Union, training students, hosting conferences, standardizing the language,
creating pedagogic materials, and producing scholarly journals. What set Di
algemeyne entsiklopedye apart from most other cultural works in Yiddish — and
why it was praised in many circles — was not only the fact that it was the first
significant attempt to produce an original encyclopedia in Yiddish, but also the fact
that its primary focus was on general knowledge and would not be limited strictly
to Jewish subjects. In this way, it stood to mark a new era for the Yiddish language
and its millions of speakers, indicating that they were ready to join the community
of nations on an equal footing. In many respects, Di algemeyne entsiklopedye was to
serve as a monument to their generation’s success at creating a Yiddish language and
culture mature enough to carry the knowledge of the entire world.7
* * * * *
The plan for Di algemeyne entsiklopedye was conceived amidst celebrations marking
two anniversaries in 1930: the fifth year of the creation of the YIVO (founded
in Berlin but based primarily in Vilna) and the seventieth birthday of the great
historian of Russian Jewry, Simon Dubnow.8 Within a few years of its founding
in 1925, the YIVO quickly established itself as a dominant force in the Yiddish
intellectual world. It created a vast repository of Yiddish cultural material, launched
a network of volunteers to gather folk materials, and created an archive and library.
Its various scholarly sections — Philological, Economic-Statistical, Historical, and
Psychological-Pedagogical — supported and published academic research, trained
teachers, and sought to set new standards for Yiddish scholarship. By 1930, however,
the worsening economic situation (which coincided with a plan to create a new
headquarters) contributed to a financial crisis that took several years to resolve.9
At seventy years of age, the historian Dubnow was at the height of his stature
and inf luence. He had left the Soviet Union in the spring of 1922 in order to escape
the increasingly oppressive Soviet regime. After brief stays in Riga and Kovno
(Kaunas), he settled in Berlin by late summer.10 In the eleven years that he spent in
that city, Dubnow published his magnum opus, the World History of the Jewish People,
wrote his memoirs, and completed a three-volume History of Hasidim.11 In spite of
his increasing reclusiveness, Dubnow remained a close confidant and mentor to
many of the Yiddish scholars and writers in the Russian Jewish émigré community.
To commemorate his seventieth birthday, the YIVO sponsored celebrations in
Berlin and Vilna; Tcherikower, Lestschinsky, and the literary critic Shmuel Niger
published tributes in the Yiddish press; and a Festschrift in his honour was presented
to him.12
By 1930, Dubnow’s career had stretched over more than half a century. Although
he was initially a journalist and book critic in the Russian-language Jewish press, he
soon turned his attention to questions of Jewish history, writing on the development
of Hasidism and developing what he referred to as his ‘sociological’ approach to
Jewish history. In his conception, Jewish history was best understood by charting
the development of its various hegemonic centres that rose and fell over time. This
understanding of the Jewish past fitted well with his insistence on the integrity
of the Jewish Diaspora in light of attacks by Zionists who argued in favour of a
Jewish territorial homeland. Although many Yiddishists in the generation that came
after Dubnow initially found themselves as youths in opposition to his politically
moderate autonomist Folkspartey movement (in favour of more revolutionary
stances), the vastness of his scholarly oeuvre, his respect for and engagement with
Yiddish intellectual culture, and his commitment to a thoroughly modern Jewish
Diasporic existence elevated him to the most eminent position in the Yiddish
scholarly world — in spite of his having composed relatively little material in
Yiddish. A general encyclopedia in the Yiddish language was, therefore, a fitting
tribute to Dubnow, who had spent his much of his life’s work agitating on behalf
of the Jews’ right to join the world’s community of nations.
Although it remains unclear who exactly was first to propose the idea of
publishing a Yiddish encyclopedia in Dubnow’s name, the Yiddish scholars Moyshe
Shalit, Nakhman Meisel, and A. A. Roback had been agitating for a Yiddish lan
guage encyclopedia for some time.13 In their conception, a Yiddish encyclopedia
would be established on the model of other Jewish encyclopedias, such as the
twelve-volume English-language Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–06), the sixteen-volume
Russian-language Evreiskaia entsiklopediia (St Petersburg, 1908–13), and the four-
volume Jüdisches Lexikon. A few weeks after Dubnow’s September 1930 birthday
celebrations, at a meeting held on 14 to 16 October in Vilna, the YIVO assumed
primary responsibility for the project and launched a Berlin-based publishing
company called the Dubnow-Fund to oversee its fundraising and organization.14
By early 1931, Leon Bramson was named chairman of the Dubnow-Fund. As
head of the ORT, the Society for Promoting Artisanal and Agricultural Work
among the Jews in Russia, Bramson lent the organization a large measure of stature
and his prodigious fundraising experience. Born in Kovno in 1869, Bramson grew
up in a family that supported both the Jewish enlightenment as well as early Zionist
efforts, although he was an opponent of Zionism for most of his life.15 In his early
twenties he was an attorney, an editor at the Russian Jewish journal Voskhod (Dawn),
a founder with Dubnow of the Historical-Ethnographical Commission (1892), and
an active member of liberal Jewish circles that agitated for equal rights for Russian
Jewry. During the 1905 Revolution, he joined the Union for the Attainment
of Full Equality for the Jewish People, which drew heavily upon Dubnow’s
Autonomist principles in its demands for equal rights and cultural independence
for Russian Jewry.16 He was elected to serve in the first Russian Duma following
the 1905 October Manifesto. In 1909, he began working for the ORT, and he was
elected executive head in 1911. During the 1917 revolutions, as a member of the
Trudovik party, he was active in the efforts to establish the Constituent Assembly.
In December, he was tried by the Bolsheviks as an enemy of the Revolution. Soon
after his conviction, he left the country. After several years travelling on behalf of
the ORT, he settled in Berlin.
* * * * *
Despite the rapid maturation of Yiddish over the prior decades, the early 1930s in
Berlin were hardly an opportune moment to be launching such a bold venture.
Along with the global collapse of the financial markets that severely hampered
efforts to raise the sizeable funds necessary to publish the planned volumes, the
political situation in both Germany and the Soviet Union was becoming increasingly
tense. In a diary entry written just a week before his birthday celebration, Dubnow
wrote of the stunning electoral strength of the Nazi party, up more than fifteen
per cent from the previous election: ‘Their slogans are: bloody hatred of France,
revanche, anti-Semitism, dictatorship, fascism, the power of the fist. Together
with the strength of the German National Party [German National People’s
Party (DNVP)] they number more than a third [of the total vote] — anti-Semitic
brutes.’17 Dubnow was increasingly worried that gains by fascists on the right and
communists on the left would forestall any coalition that might be forged by the
increasingly fragile moderate centre. Having f led the extremism of one autocratic
regime, he was loathe to be present at the arrival of another. Complicating matters
even further, March 1931 was the beginning of Stalin’s first significant show trials
of figures accused of being Mensheviks, the culmination of an internal crackdown
against former social democrats and political dissidents that had begun in 1929. As
a leader of the Mensheviks-in-exile, Abramovitch — who would soon be a central
figure in the Entsiklopedye’s editorial work — was heading the opposition in the
West against the trials.18
In spite of these daunting conditions, the supporters of the Entsiklopedye forged
ahead with their project, holding their first major meeting on 14 to 15 February
1931.19 The gathering, chaired by Bramson and attended by many leading figures
in the Berlin Russian Jewish community as well as representatives from the YIVO
in Vilna, was the first major organizational meeting for the project. Shalit pressed
his argument for an encyclopedia that met the highest standards of scholarship and
presented the latest findings from the fields of general and Jewish knowledge. Other
debates centred on questions of whether the YIVO would be able — financially and
organizationally — to assume responsibility for the task, how to raise the substantial
funds that would be required to underwrite the project, and how responsibilities
would be divided between the YIVO in Vilna and the newly established Dubnow-
Fund in Berlin.
The meeting also featured an address by Dubnow entitled ‘How We Went from
a Jewish Encyclopedia to an Encyclopedia in Yiddish’.20 In it, Dubnow relayed
his gratitude at the honour of having the Entsiklopedye dedicated to him, calling
it a ‘great cultural undertaking’, and, in what he called a ‘historical introduction’,
recalled his involvement in the ‘first genuine preparatory efforts for a Jewish
encyclopedia’. He told those assembled of Isidore Singer’s plan of forty years earlier,
in 1891, to recruit Dubnow and others to create a Jewish encyclopedia first in
German and then in French. Singer asked Dubnow to be responsible for sections
on Jewish history. According to the historian Shuly Schwartz, Singer’s encyclopedia
was to have focused on conveying the accomplishments of Jews in general society
as well as containing articles on Jewish history and culture.21 After this plan fell
through, Singer eventually migrated to the United States, where he published his
English-language Jewish Encyclopedia, for which Dubnow served as a consulting
editor. A few years later saw the creation of the Russian Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, a
monumental compendium dedicated to all facets of the development of Jewish life
and culture, for which Dubnow likewise served as an editor. At the Berlin meeting,
Dubnow also related how, in the days after the October Revolution, there was talk
in St Petersburg (then Petrograd) of creating an encyclopedia for the first time in
Yiddish.22 According to Dubnow, this was a serious attempt led by Abramovitch
and Yisroel Efroykin, a Yiddish writer, member of Dubnow’s Folkspartey, and
Jewish communal activist. The political and economic situation — a ‘time of
hunger and terror’ — made it impossible to see the project through. He concluded
his address by saying that the time was finally ripe and the Jewish people were ready
for the project to come into being:
This is our best opportunity — how important and necessary it is to have an
encyclopedia now in Yiddish. Unlike in 1917 [sic], we must not now cease even
though the time is difficult. An encyclopedia is a people’s-book, and each nation
must have one. A people, ten million of whom speak in Yiddish, must have an
encyclopedia in their own language. Moses Mendelssohn gave us the Bible in
German. We must give an encyclopedia, what will be the bible of a new age,
in Yiddish. I hope that those who believe in the people will understand the
enthusiasm that the idea of an encyclopedia will generate among them. Let us
all join together to help to realize the plan of the encyclopedia in Yiddish.23
By the end of the meeting, several resolutions had been passed, including decisions
to publish ten volumes (approximately twenty-five million characters), primarily of
general knowledge, to raise the estimated budget of $50,000 by selling shares at $50
each, and to have the editorial work of the encyclopedia conducted in Vilna and
the administrative and financial tasks made the responsibility of the Dubnow-Fund
in Berlin.24
Following the February meeting, planning of the Entsiklopedye quickly got
underway. Abramovitch, Ben-Adir, Tcherikower, and Lestschinsky became inti
mately involved with the project. Avrom Kihn, once active in the Kultur-lige and
the Klal-Farlag, was hired as secretary. By April, an office on Uhlandstraße in
the Charlottenburg district had been established, letterhead printed, and requests
sent out to potential supporters, asking whether they would be willing to serve
as contributors to the volumes. According to one such letter, sent to the Austrian
Social Democrat theoretician Karl Kautsky by Abramovitch and Lestschinsky, the
plan for the Entsiklopedye was to publish two volumes a year over the coming five
years, with the first scheduled to appear in early 1933.25 At that rate, the project
would be completed by 1938. Nokhum Gergel, a Territorialist active in the ORT
and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, was sent to the United States in late
April to solicit donations. By the summer of 1931, the American Committee of
the Yiddish Encyclopedia had been formed, led by the Yiddish playwright David
Pinski, with fellow theatre activist Mendel Elkin as its administrator. With the
support of several major figures in the Yiddish cultural scene in the United States,
including the managing editor at the New York Yiddish daily Forverts (Forward)
Borekh Charney-Vladek, the poet Avrom Reisen, the historian Jacob Shatsky, and
the Diaspora Nationalist leader Chaim Zhitlowsky, members of the Committee
were expected to act as fundraisers and subscription-gatherers among Jews in North
America. However, the economic situation (and a midsummer heatwave) made
these efforts extremely onerous and few funds seem to have been raised.26
In May, the first public announcement about the Entsiklopedye was issued, a
pamphlet sent to potential subscribers, supporters, and contributors. The project
was heralded by its creators as marking the culmination of changes in Yiddish
language, literature, and scholarship over the preceding generation. As the Central
Committee of the Dubnow-Fund put it: ‘Our social and cultural development in
recent years has prepared the ground, has made the need more apparent, and has
made it possible to realize this important national accomplishment.’ The goal was
to provide a new sort of encyclopedia, ‘not only of “Jewish studies”, Jewish history,
or “Judaism”, but of general knowledge in the Yiddish language’.27 They intended
the Entsiklopedye to be both revolutionary and enlightening by providing the tools
for the masses of Yiddish speakers to shape the Jewish nation: ‘This process not only
involves the highest strata as in earlier periods, but also penetrates to the lowest
layers of the folk, which comprise the working masses and the folk-intellectuals. It
must [...] lead to the growth of our modern national culture’.28 The Dubnow-Fund
also saw the Entsiklopedye as marking a new era in the efforts of the Jewish people
in its quest to attain equal footing with other European nations:
Indeed, before our eyes our poor mame-loshn [mother tongue] has transformed
into a refined cultural language. It was only a few decades ago that there did not
exist even a single daily newspaper in Yiddish — and now we possess hundreds
of periodicals and tens of daily papers that are read by millions. It was only a
few decades ago that Yiddish literature made its first uncertain steps, and now
it takes its place as one of the younger European literatures; a great camp of
writers who work in the various fields of literature, art, science, and publishing
has grown, and together they are constructing the multi-storey building of
modern Yiddish culture. Forty years ago there did not exist among us a single
modern school — and now our modern educational institutions number two
thousand with nearly two hundred thousand students.
Even more important is that [...] there is a new generation that expresses its
culture in Yiddish; a generation that has received its upbringing and education
in the Yiddish language. For them, Yiddish culture is a necessary part of life —
not a simple luxury item.
For this great contingent that uses and benefits from modern Yiddish
culture, a general encyclopedia is a basic necessity.29
The members (actual and ceremonial) of the Dubnow-Fund included many lumi
naries of the Jewish world, including Albert Einstein; the German Social Democrat
leader Eduard Bernstein; Dubnow; the head of the YIVO, Max Weinreich; and
Zhitlowsky. Contributors were to include the editor of Forverts, Abe Cahan; the
historian Emanuel Ringelblum; and the physician, political activist, and co-founder
of the YIVO Cemach Szabad.
On the heels of this announcement came endorsements in the Yiddish press. The
New York Socialist party organ Der veker (The Awakener), for example, showed great
enthusiasm for the project:
In Berlin there will appear a very interesting project that will make a great
impact on the leading circles of the Jewish community in Poland and all of
Europe. There will be a general encyclopedia in Yiddish. This will not be a
Jewish encyclopedia, but in fact an encyclopedia of general knowledge, in a
popular but strongly scholarly form. It will engage with questions of Jewish
history, economics, culture, literature, and the workers’ movement [...]. Its
significance is indeed great.30
* * * * *
A long memorandum written by the Warsaw-based scholar Yosef Yashunsky
in December 1931 laid out the many challenges that faced the encyclopedia’s
initiators.31 Before World War I, Yashunsky had worked on Russian-language
encyclopedias published by Brockhaus and Efron, and in the post-war period he had
unsuccessfully sought to organize a Yiddish-language scholarly encyclopedia.32 He
also worked with the ORT in the 1920s and for a brief period was director of the
Jewish Realgymnasium in Vilna. In his memorandum, published in the YIVO bleter
(YIVO Journal) in two parts in the winter of 1931 to 1932, he addressed many of the
tensions that were present among those associated with the encyclopedia. As well
as raising technical questions such as cost, typeface, and distribution, he focused in
particular on two fundamental and unresolved concerns: whether the encyclopedia
would be popular or scholarly in its orientation and whether it would be Jewish or
general in its content.
In terms of the first concern, Yashunsky disagreed with those such as Shalit
who argued that the Yiddish encyclopedia should be addressed to a scholarly
audience. Shalit had argued: ‘We want to create scholarly knowledge in Yiddish,
not popularizations.’33 In response, Yashunsky argued on behalf of a popular
encyclopedia that could be held to scholarly standards. He countered that Shalit
and others were arguing for an outmoded nineteenth-century model that was no
longer practical in the present day. Nineteenth-century encyclopedias, he argued,
were typically very broad in scope and took a very long time to publish. He pointed
to Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (Universal
Encyclopedia of Sciences and Arts), which ran to one hundred and sixty-seven
volumes and lasted nearly eighty years before it was abandoned in 1889. Given that
knowledge was growing too vast and was too diverse, such colossal projects were
entirely untenable in the twentieth century.34 Instead, Yashunsky argued that what
was needed was a popular encyclopedia that followed the lead of other national
projects and would take no more than five years to complete. He identified the
Brockhaus, as well as the British Britannica and the French Larousse, as models for the
Yiddish undertaking. In addition, he argued that the planned encyclopedia should
be organized not alphabetically but thematically, so that information in a particular
area would stay consistent and timely.
Yashunsky likewise disagreed sharply with those who argued that the Yiddish
encyclopedia should be modelled on existing encyclopedias that catered to Jewish
audiences by providing Jewish subject matter. Instead, he argued that what was
needed — again following the Brockhaus, Britannica, and Larousse — was a general
encyclopedia for a Yiddish-reading audience. In the second part of his memorandum,
published after a meeting in late December 1931 at which it was decided that thirty
per cent of the content would be focused on Jewish subject matter, Yashunsky
argued that such a large percentage of space would only detract from that needed
for general knowledge. He believed that no more than fifteen per cent should be
given over to Jewish material. Furthermore, he argued in support of a proposal by
Weinreich that the Jewish content be contained entirely in a supplementary volume
so as not to confuse the character of the main work.35
* * * * *
A probeheft (sample volume) was slated to be mailed to potential subscribers
and supporters in autumn 1931.36 However, in a pattern that would haunt the
Entsiklopedye for its entire history, its release was postponed. Although in the future
delays could be often attributed to external causes, in particular the rise of Nazism
and World War II, at this point the administrative difficulties were purely internal
affairs. Along with the sudden death in November of the fundraiser Gergel, an
organizational split between the YIVO and the Dubnow-Fund in the last days of
1931 set the probeheft back by several months.
The exact causes of the rift between the two groups is not fully known, but they
released a joint communiqué outlining a separation agreement reached at a gathering
held in Berlin on 26 and 27 December.37 At the meeting, Simon Dubnow served as
chair, and representatives of the Dubnow-Fund included Abramovitch, Bramson,
Ben-Adir, Charney, Kihn, the ORT leader Aron Singalowsky, Steinberg, and the
historian, editor, and Jewish communal activist Mark Wischnitzer. Representing
the YIVO were the director of the Joint Distribution Committee in Poland,
Yitzhak Giterman; Jacob Lestschinsky; the linguist Zalman Reisen; Tcherikower;
and Yashunsky. Weinreich remained in Vilna due to illness. The first day was
organizational in nature, and it was decided not only to make the Entsiklopedye
informational, covering all branches of knowledge, but also to give it a decidedly
pedagogical function in order to meet the particular needs of the Jewish reader. It
was also agreed that thirty per cent of the material would be dedicated to Jewish
matters, with the bulk of this appearing in a special eleventh volume entitled Yidn
( Jews). The second day of the meeting was dedicated to administrative issues. It was
decided that the prior arrangement of having two managerial units — one housed
at the YIVO in Vilna and another housed with the Dubnow-Fund in Berlin —
would be scrapped. According to the communiqué, this decision was taken due
to economic reasons: the current financial crisis would not allow the Entsiklopedye
to have two homes. As of this meeting, the Entsiklopedye became a project of the
Dubnow-Fund in Berlin alone, and the YIVO agreed to lend public support and
encouragement to the project.
Despite the apparent conviviality between the two parties, the memorandum
from Yashunsky and the correspondence from Abramovitch to Zhitlowsky and
Shatsky in the United States suggest that there was more to the split than pure
economics. Yashunsky’s memorandum spoke of the general disagreements between
contributors over the scope and size of the project. Abramovitch’s January 1932
letters asking Zhitlowsky and Shatsky to contribute to the now-delayed probeheft,
refer to ‘differences of opinion and questions of competence with the YIVO’ that
made it necessary to dissolve the formal relationship.38 Nevertheless, members of
the YIVO in both Berlin and Vilna remained intimately associated with the project,
participating in editorial matters, contributing entries, and promoting its volumes.
In April 1932, the long-awaited probeheft was finally sent to potential subscribers.
A thirty-eight page, softcover booklet, the issue was intended to give readers a
sense of the projected ten-volume Entsiklopedye. As it contains sample entries that
span the entire Hebrew alphabet — alef through sof — it provides us with the most
accurate indication of what the full Entsiklopedye would have looked like had the
original mission been fulfilled and the editors not repeatedly changed its contents
in subsequent years. In the introduction, in what was probably one of the last
expressions of Jewish optimism about the future of European Jewry (indeed, the
Entsiklopedye’s introductions never again spoke in such hopeful terms), the Dubnow-
Fund proposed a wide range of practical and pedagogical uses for the Entsiklopedye.
They envisioned their potential audience as being comprised of industrious,
modern Jews who were searching for information to learn about and to enable them
to participate in the political, social, and cultural debates of their time:
We read in a newspaper about international events that are boiling over in
the world, about the conf licts between China and Japan, about war in India,
about elections in Germany or France — and we want to obtain accurate
information about these countries, about their general situation and political
structure; we hear on the radio an account about reparations, international
debts, or a disarmament conference, and we lack the necessary information
about these issues; we have listened to a lecture about a crisis, unemployment,
or about Soviet Russia — and we want the basic facts and figures. We attended
a discussion about Zionism and we want to get more news about Palestine and
Jewish emigration; we visited a theatre, an art gallery, we read a new novel —
and we want to be informed about the painter and author whose work has made
an impression on us, about the various movements in poetry and art; our child
comes from school and asks us a question from history or geography — and
we cannot give the right answer; we are interested in a medical discovery or
technical finding about which we have seen a brief report; we find in a book a
foreign word or a Hebrew word or a name that we do not know; we want to
write an article, give a speech, take part in a debate — and we lack the necessary
facts or statistical data.
Where can we find the essential information, the rigorously verified news, explanations,
interpretations, facts, figures?39
The solution to these informational quandaries was ‘a good scholarly encyclopedia’
that would provide practical answers to the everyday questions faced by the Yiddish-
speaking, Hebraically challenged modern Jew. Representing the cumulative
efforts of ‘a hundred Jewish scholars and writers’ and drawing on ‘all branches of
knowledge’, the committee promised a rich encyclopedic set that would comprise
ten full-sized volumes and include approximately forty thousand entries, five
thousand columns, and ‘thousands of drawings, diagrams, illustrations, geographic
maps, artistic pictures, black and white and in colour’. The Dubnow-Fund promised
its customers that the Entsiklopedye would be a handy reference work not only for
‘those Yiddish readers who do not know any foreign language’ and thus live entirely
within a Yiddish cultural world, but even for those busy, overwhelmed Jews
who know other languages and who live in cities with comprehensive libraries:
‘Considering the rapid pace of our lives, the difficult struggle for existence, how
many people have the opportunity and the desire to sit themselves down for hours
in a library and immerse themselves in specialized books about the problems that
occupy them?’.
Mathematics and astronomy, philosophy and anthropology, ethnography and
geography, political economy and statistics, history and literature, law and
public policy, cultural movements and pedagogy; art: music, theatre, painting
and sculpture; politics, social, national and communal movements — all fields
of modern human creation will be represented in our encyclopedia. The reader
will find answers to all questions. All necessary information will be found
there.40
An additional eleventh volume entitled Yidn was also to be included with a

subscription. What did the Yiddish reader who wants ‘scholarly illumination on all
questions’ need to know about his or her own brethren? No longer was a learned
Jew one who knew Torah and Talmud or Jewish laws and rituals, but rather one
who was familiar with ‘Jewish history, with the socio-economic position of Jews
from various lands, with political and communal movements, with literary and
cultural creations of the Jewish masses’:
From the prophets to the Tanaim and Gaonim, from Rambam and Besht to
Herzl and Medem, from Elye Bokher to Peretz, Ash, and others, from the
struggle between the artisans and the Parnasim in the old kahal to the rise
of the modern classes and modern class struggle — this is the scope of the
encyclopedia in its Jewish section.41
The Dubnow-Fund concluded its sales pitch by asking the reader to participate in
the project:
We understand clearly the singular importance of the task that we have to fulfil,
and the difficult responsibility that is before us. We will employ all efforts in
order to raise our encyclopedia to the level of the best European and American
encyclopedias of the same type, and we turn to all circles within the Jewish
community that have a deep and true interest in Yiddish mass culture in the
hope that they will participate in this great and important cultural undertaking.
No one should decline to help us in this difficult task; each according to his
strength and ability should carry the bricks for this monumental building.42
With a Committee for Editorial Affairs comprised of Abramovitch, Ben-Adir,
Wischn itzer, Tcherikower, and Lestschinsky, and contributions from dozens of
major Yiddish scholars and journalists both young and old (including the lexico
grapher Alexander Harkavy, the poet David Eynhorn, and the historian Emanuel
Ringelblum), the Entsiklopedye promised to be the most comprehensive overview of
human knowledge ever produced in the Yiddish language.
What would the Entsiklopedye have looked like had it followed its original plan?
Judging from the probeheft, it would have been as comprehensive as advertised
and popular in format. Entries, including photographs, reproductions of artwork,
drawings, tables, and maps, ranged in length from a few sentences to many columns
and included terms from general knowledge such as ‘obelisk’, ‘Insulin’, ‘Armana’,
‘Archimedes’, ‘William James’, ‘dinosaurs’, ‘homeopathy’, ‘Abraham Lincoln’,
‘Mikhail Lermontov’, ‘motors’, ‘Montessori schools’, ‘saxophone’, ‘empirio-
criticism’, ‘Esperanto’, ‘Easter Island’ (‘Peysekh-inzl’), ‘guilds’, ‘credit-cooperatives’,
‘coffee’, and ‘X-rays’. Entries on specifically Jewish topics — which included ‘hevl-
havolim’ (‘vanity of vanities’), and ‘peshat’ (‘literal interpretation’) — were relatively
few in number, not close to the thirty per cent of all entries that had been discussed
at the December 1931 meeting; however, a disproportionately high number of the
multicolumn entries were on Jewish topics. In addition to the relatively short entries
in the probeheft, Abramovitch contributed a lengthy piece on unemployment, the
linguist Noyekh Prilutski on orthography, Dubnow on Hasidism, Lestschinsky on
Jewish demography, Tcherikower on Cantonists ( Jewish youths who served in the
Russian Tsarist army), Zalman Reisen on the poet Hersh David Nomberg, Ben-
Adir on the Zionist leader Max Nordau, Aaron Steinberg on Friedrich Nietzsche,
and the Berlin ORT director and Social Democrat Gregory Aronson on pro
fessional associations.
Although the probeheft was designed primarily as an advertising document, it
was significant enough an achievement to garner its own reviews in the Yiddish
press. Reactions to it were generally favourable, but not without reservations.
In the Warsaw daily Haynt (Today), for example, the Berlin-based journalist and
Revisionist Zionist Yeshayahu Klinov published a review of the probeheft that was
largely positive but wary of some of the editors’ choices. As a fellow member of
the Russian Jewish émigré community in Berlin, but with very different political
colours from the contributors to the Entsiklopedye, he had a critical perspective on
the effort and intimate knowledge of its context.43 He began by asking:
How significant is it when there appears a volume from a leading publishing
house, printed on beautiful rare equipment and with interestingly chosen
content?
In truth — not much. In our days, [...] everything is depressed, [...] one
wanders around feeling like a refugee, [...] on one side there is material
poverty and on the other side — the slaughtering knife of the black Nazi
hangman.44
And yet, Klinov argued, even in such times the appearance of the probeheft was
cause for celebration. It was ‘the first step to a genuine cultural undertaking — the
first steps of a people’s work’. Klinov went on to describe the small community of
Russian Jews who had gathered in Berlin at the end of World War I and expressed
concern over their relatively thin cultural legacy: ‘What is the result of this
decade-long work? There exists among us a profound pessimism.’ He saw in the
Entsiklopedye the potential for validating the émigrés’ intellectual efforts in the city:
‘If the probeheft is not left uncompleted, and if there appears in Berlin the entire
encyclopedia, this, in and of itself, will justify our entire Ostjuden Diaspora in Berlin
[ost-yidisher goles-berlin].’45
Despite his general enthusiasm for the Entsiklopedye, he was not without appre
hension, including his worry that it was too ambitious an undertaking:
It is the first encyclopedia not only of ‘Yiddishkayt’, but a general encyclopedia
of universal knowledge. Alongside ‘Hasidism’ there is ‘insulin’, and next
to ‘Nomberg’ — ‘Lermontov’. Along with ‘Max Nordau’ — the ‘Erfurt
Programme’, and next to the word ‘Cantonists’ — ‘X-rays’. Is it possible in the
ten volumes that are planned to contain so much material without it having a
superficial character?46
He raised questions as to whether Berlin was the proper place to house the project
and wondered whether Vilna would be a more appropriate place in which to
produce it.
Most significantly, however, his greatest criticism concerned the relative lack of
ideological diversity among the contributors. Given that Dubnow, Abramovitch,
Tcherikower, Lestschinsky, Ben-Adir, and the others belonged to similar political
camps (pro-Yiddish and pro-Diasporist), Klinov was concerned that the Entsiklopedye
risked becoming an ideologically narrow project that would only ref lect the ideas
of the initiators and contributors rather than meet the needs of the Jewish people.
He acknowledged that while it would of course not be a Zionist encyclopedia, the
Zionist point of view should nevertheless be fairly represented, and by someone
with intimate knowledge of the movement: ‘An article about Max Nordau — it
seems to me — should be written by a man who was politically close to Nordau’s
Jewish frame of mind, and certainly not Ben-Adir, who is not in the Zionist camp.’
He went on to ask why, given that there were Polish, Russian, German, and Yiddish
authors who were the subject of biographical entries, did the editors ‘not find it
necessary to provide in the probeheft even one biography of a Hebrew author?’.
Reminding them of their commitment to scholarly objectivity, he concluded his
review by saying, ‘Let us hope that that wish will be realized. And let us give the
editors our best and most heartfelt wishes.’ 47
In a review for the Warsaw daily Moment, the Berlin-based journalist Herman
Swet began by asking the question, ‘Is a such a monumental work in Yiddish really
necessary?’.48 He went on to say that given the existence of the English-language
Jewish Encyclopedia, the Russian Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, the ten-volume Hebrew
Otsar Yisrael (New York, 1906–13), and the Jüdisches Lexikon, ‘one must concede
that our national need for a Jewish encyclopedia has been more than satisfied.’49
However, in spite of his initial hesitation, Swet was impressed by the fact that what
marked the project as unique was the fact that it was not a Jewish encyclopedia,
but rather an encyclopedia in a Jewish language. ‘It will not be, as those up to
now have been, an encyclopedia for khokhmes hayehhudis [the study of Judaism] or
only dedicated to Yiddishkayt and Jewish problems, but a work that encompasses
“all branches of knowledge”.’50 This fact made the project worthwhile for Swet,
who saw it as a potentially substantial contribution to contemporary Jewish life.
He was likewise impressed by the physical form of the probeheft, and remarked that
its ‘great appearance, printed on fine paper, clear type, clear and distinct’ conveyed
the seriousness of the project. His only concern was that some of the entries, like
Prilutski’s contribution on orthography, might be too sophisticated for the average
reader and would come across as incomprehensible.
The remainder of 1932 was taken up by organizational work in support of volume
1. Decisions had to be made regarding the various sections of content and their
editors, while fundraising and marketing efforts proceeded apace. It was decided
that for the general subject matter, Di algemeyne entsiklopedye would be based on
the model of the German-language encyclopedia published by Knauer, but would
also draw from the examples provided by Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, the Malaia
sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Little Soviet Encyclopedia), and encyclopedias in the United
States, Poland, and elsewhere. For the Jewish entries, the Evreiskaia entsiklopediia
would serve as the model.51 The entries themselves, however, were to be original
works of scholarship and not reproductions from other texts.
* * * * *
The Nazi takeover of power in Germany in January 1933 meant that the original
plan for Di algemeyne entsiklopedye could not be realized.52 As foreign Jews working
for the political left, the people associated with the Entsiklopedye were now among
the most vulnerable in the country. In the days leading up to the appointment
of Hitler as Chancellor on 30 January, Dubnow wrote in his diary: ‘it is certain
that there will be a cabinet of Hitler-Papen-Hugenberg. Hindenburg, who first
promised that he would remain true to the oath to the Republic, is now appointing
a government of the most bitter enemies of the democratic Republic. Recent days
bring the same old fears: coup d’état, a dictatorship of the right, an uprising from the
left, panic, pogroms.’53
By mid-February, Abramovitch and his Menshevik comrades made the decision
to leave Germany; they had settled in Paris by March.54 Joining them in the French
capital were Tcherikower, Ben-Adir, Kihn, Bramson, and others. Lestschinsky
was detained for several days by German authorities before moving to Warsaw.55
Dubnow, to many people’s surprise, moved to Riga, the Latvian capital, settling
there by mid-summer.
Unlike the Encyclopaedia Judaica, which was forced to stop publishing on account
of Nazi rule, it was possible, albeit with great difficulty, to re-establish Di algemeyne
entsiklopedye in Paris, where it was published until spring 1940. The transition was
possible because of the ways in which Di algemeyne entsiklopedye differed from the
Encyclopaedia Judaica: (a) nearly everyone associated with the Yiddish encyclopedia
already understood themselves as living in exile and understood that their project
was not tied to the fate of any one country; and (b) their audience, contributors,
and supporters were located not primarily in Germany, but in eastern Europe and
the United States.
As subsequent years would show, however, the transition made by Di algemeyne
entsiklopedye and its planners was far more than geographic. Not only did subsequent
volumes appear at a much slower rate than was originally planned (an average of
one per year during the Paris years, with the first appearing in December 1934);
its content also went through a slow but radical shift as well. Volume 1 contains
1100 entries, beginning with the letter alef and ending with ‘Atlantic City’ and
covering a mixture of general and specifically Jewish terms. However, by the later
1930s, with the appearance of volumes 3 (1936) and 4 (1937), the editors’ often-
stated commitment to publishing work focused primarily on universal knowledge
began to give way to concerns raised by the worsening crisis facing European
Jewry. Volume 3, which begins with the entry ‘Intra’, ends with a lengthy five-
part monographic article under the heading ‘Anti-Semitism’. The entry, written by
the editors Ben-Adir, Tcherikower, and Abramovitch, traces anti-Semitism from
the Greco-Roman period through the contemporary Nazi period and ends with a
discussion of organizations that were combating it then. Similarly, volume 4, which
begins with ‘Antiseptic’, ends with the long article ‘Erets-yisroel’ (‘Land of Israel’) by
Ben-Adir, Avrom Menes, and others. This entry takes a rather sympathetic stance
towards Zionist aspirations to create a Jewish state. With little mention of the
Palestinian presence, the entry highlights the increasing Jewish population, Jewish
contributions to the economy, Jewish agriculture, and sacred Jewish sites. The
fact that these two monographic entries — deliberately placed at the end of their
respective volumes — were edited by staff who as youths were at least ambivalent
towards Zionism if not active opponents of it, suggests that the rising anti-Jewish
Fig. 19. Raphael Abramovitch (undated). By kind permission of the International

Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
sentiment in Europe was forcing a reconsideration of the Diasporist project in

favour of the Zionist one as well as causing them to rethink the original mission of
the Entsiklopedye.56
Di algemeyne entsiklopedye would continue to be published until 1966. In 1939 and
1940, two volumes under the heading Yidn were released, the second justified by the
editors as necessary given the deteriorating situation. Yidn: Beys (vol. 2) was released
weeks before the Nazi invasion of Paris. After f leeing southward to Toulouse and
then to Marseilles, Abramovitch, Tcherikower, Kihn, and others made their way
through Spain and reached Lisbon by the end of August 1940. With the help of the
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Bund, and the
Emergency Rescue Committee, they were able to obtain visas that allowed them
entry to the United States in September 1940.57 Many of the contributors to and
supporters of the Entsiklopedye would not be so fortunate. The following year, for
example, Dubnow was killed by German soldiers in Riga; Bramson died of illness
in Marseilles; and Prilutski was killed by the Gestapo in Vilna.
Reconstituting Di algemeyne entsiklopedye was no easy task. Although most
copies of Yidn: Beys had been lost at sea, a small number of copies sent through
the regular post arrived via London at the New York offices of the Entsiklopedye’s
representatives. In December 1940, the Central Yiddish Culture Organization
(CYCO) reprinted the volume in its entirety and eventually agreed to house the
project. With their arrival in the United States and the loss of the major portion
of their readership, the editors of Di algemeyne entsiklopedye radically restructured
the project away from its original mission of edifying Yiddish-speaking Jewry. In
all, twelve volumes in Yiddish were composed, only five of them according to the
original vision of providing general knowledge. (The last of these was published
in 1944, part of the way through the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, beys.)
Instead, seven volumes with the heading Yidn were eventually published. Volumes
published during and immediately after the war described the historical, cultural,
and political development of eastern European Jewry. A later volume described
Jewish life in the Americas, and the final ones were accounts of the Holocaust. In
addition, the four-volume English-language Jewish People Past and Present (1946–55)
brought translations of many of the Yiddish essays (as well as original contributions)
to English-reading audience.58
The optimism about the future of both European Jewry and modern Yiddish
culture that was present in the original planning of Di algemeyne entsiklopedye could
not be sustained beyond the release of the 1932 probeheft. The aim of creating a
universal encyclopedia in the Yiddish language was ultimately thwarted, less by
the nationalist aspirations of its critics than it was by the near-total devastation of
the communities that it was once to have supported. Unable to provide a means
by which Yiddish-speaking Jews could further engage the world around them, the
Entsiklopedye became a record of that community’s destruction.
* * * * *
Barbara Schmutzler and Marisa Elana James of Jerusalem and Nick Block of the
University of Michigan provided expert research assistance. Gunnar Berg of the
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (New York), and the staff of the International
Institute for Social History (Amsterdam) were especially helpful in accessing archival
materials. Support for this research was generously funded by the National Endow
ment for the Humanities, the University at Albany’s Center for Jewish Studies, and
the University of Michigan’s Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies.
Notes to Chapter 10
1. For a comprehensive overview of Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, see Gennady Estraikh, ‘Vilna on
the Spree: Yiddish in Weimar Berlin’, Aschkenaz — Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden,
16 (2006), 103–27.
2. A parallel phenomenon occurred with Berlin’s Hebrew literary culture. See Arnold J. Band,
‘From Diaspora to Homeland: The Transfer of the Hebrew Literary Center to Eretz Yisrael’, in
Studies in Modern Jewish Literature (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003), pp 143–56.
4. Ibid., p. 112.
5. Ibid., p. 7.
6. Shmarye Gorelik, A. Vayter, and Shmuel Niger, ‘Tsu di lezer’, Di literarishe monatsshriften: Fraye
bine far literatur un kunst, 1 (February 1908), 7–8. Translations in this chapter are by the author.
7. See Barry Trachtenberg, The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917 (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2008). See also Barry Trachtenberg, ‘From Edification to Commemoration:
Di Algemeyne Entsiklopedye, the Holocaust, and the Collapse of Eastern European Jewish Life’,
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 5 (2006), 285–300.
8. According to Brisman, the idea had been circulating among YIVO members since the later
1920s. See Shimeon Brisman, A History and Guide to Judaic Encyclopedias and Lexicons (Cincinnati:
Hebrew Union College, 1987), p. 62.
9. Cecile Esther Kuznitz, ‘YIVO’, in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. by
Gershon David Hundert, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), i, 2090–93.
10. Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov: Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish
History, ed. by Jeffrey Shandler, trans. by Judith Vowles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991), p. 186.
11. Simon Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes: Von seinen Uranfängen bis zur Gegenwart,
trans. by Aaron Steinberg (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1925–30) (this was written in Russian but
published first in German); idem, Dos bukh fun mayn lebn, 3 vols (Buenos Aires: Aleveltlekher
yidisher kultur-kongres, 1963); idem, Toldot Ha-Hasidut (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1930–31).
12. Festschrift zu Simon Dubnows siebzigstem Geburtstag, ed. by Ismar Elbogen, Josef Meisl, and Mark
Wischnitzer (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930).
13. ‘Barikhtn: Entsiklopedye af Yidish’, YIVO bleter, 1 (March 1931), 285–86; Yosef Yashunsky, ‘Tsu
der diskusye vegn an algemeyner entsiklopedye af Yidish’, YIVO bleter, 2 (December 1931),
289–307; Brisman, p. 62.
14. ‘In association with Simon Dubnow’s jubilee, a special Dubnow-Fund with the purpose of
publishing scholarly work and supporting young researchers was established’, Yedies fun YIVO,
34 (3 July 1931). According to Brisman, the committee was initially comprised of Meisel, Shalit,
Tcherikower, and Yosef Yashunsky (Brisman, p. 395 n. 144).
15. The biographical information on Bramson is taken from Y. Kh[arlash], ‘Bramson, Leon’, in
Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 8 vols (New York: Aleveltlekher yidisher kultur-kongres,
1956–81), i (1956), ed. by Shmuel Niger and Jacob Shatsky, cols 439–41; Leon Shapiro, The
History of ORT: A Jewish Movement for Social Change (New York: Schocken Books, 1980).
16. Christoph Gassenschmidt, Jewish Liberal Politics in Tsarist Russia, 1900–1914: The Modernization of
Russian Jewry (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 21–23.
17. Dubnow, Dos bukh fun mayn lebn, iii, trans. by Y. Birnboym, p. 99.
18. André Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge: Harvard
19. Dubnow, Dos bukh fun mayn lebn, iii, trans. by Y. Birnboym, p. 101; Nakhman Meisel, ‘Fun
troym tsu virklekhkayt: A baratung vegn a yidisher entsiklopedye, Berlin 14–15 februar’, Litera
rishe bleter, 27 February 1931, pp. 157–60.
20. Simon Dubnow, ‘Vi azoy zaynen mir gekumen fun yidishe entsiklopedye tsu an entsiklopedye
in Yidish’, Jerusalem, Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People, Simon Dubnow
Papers, folder 1.
21. Shuly Rubin Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America: The Publication of the Jewish
Encyclopedia (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1991), p. 26.
22. He also noted an attempt in 1903 in St Petersburg to create a ‘Little Jewish Encyclopedia’ [Kleyne
yidishe entsiklopedye].
23. Dubnow, ‘Vi azoy zaynen mir gekumen fun yidishe entsiklopedye tsu an entsiklopedye in
Yidish’. Dubnow also mentions the post-Revolution plan in his diaries, although it is dated
1919. See Dos bukh fun mayn lebn, ii, trans. by Y. Rapaport, pp. 281, 288. My thanks to Arndt
Engelhardt of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture for alerting me to
this reference. Meisel’s February 1931 report in the Literarishe bleter quotes Dubnow as giving the
timeframe of 1919 to 1920.
24. Meisel, pp. 159–60.
25. Letter to Karl Kautsky from Raphael Abramovitch and Jacob Lestschinsky, 12 May 1931.
(Amsterdam, archives of the International Institute for Social History, Karl Kautsky Papers,
DI/24). See also the letter to Chaim Zhitlowsky from Raphael Abramovitch and Jacob
Lestschinsky, 4 May 1931 (New York, YIVO archives, Chaim Zhitlowsky Papers, RG 208,
folder 1076).
26. See the letter to David Pinski from Nokhum Gergel, 11 July 1931 (YIVO archives, David Pinski
Papers, RG 204, folder 226). See also the letter to Simon Dubnow from Raphael Abramovitch,
18 April 1934, discussing Abramovitch’s disappointment with the American Committee’s efforts
(archives of the International Institute for Social History, Raphael Abramovič Papers, folder
IV). This lack of financial assistance from the United States’ Jewish community echoed the
experience of Nahum Goldmann, who had travelled to the United States to raise money for the
Encyclopaedia Judaica, and returned unsuccessful. Brenner, p. 116.
27. Tsentral-komitet fun dubnov-fond, Algemeyne entsiklopedye (Berlin, 1931), p. 3.
28. Ibid., p. 4.
29. Ibid.
30. Der veker, 16 May 1931.
31. See Yosef Yashunsky, ‘Tsu der diskusye vegn an algemeyner entsiklopedye af Yidish’, and
‘Farnem un kharakter fun der yidisher entsiklopedye’, YIVO bleter, 3 (1932), 121–39.
32. Y. Kh[arlash], ‘Yashunsky, Yosef ’, in Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 8 vols (New York:
Aleveltlekher yidisher kultur-kongres, 1956–81), iv (1956), ed. by Efroyim Oyerbach, Yitskhok
Kharlash, and Moyshe Shtarkman, cols. 228–31. See also Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel H.
Dresner, ‘Heschel in Vilna’, Judaism, 43 (1998), 282.
33. Yashunsky, ‘Tsu der diskusye vegn an algemeyner entsiklopedye af Yidish’, p. 289. He also cites
Shalit as saying: ‘The Yiddish encyclopedia must become the centre around which the scientific
and spiritual creations of all cultural strengths should be concentrated’ (ibid.).
34. Ibid., pp. 289–92.
35. Yashunsky, ‘Farnem un kharakter fun der yidisher entsiklopedye’, p. 136.
36. See the letter of the American Committee of the Yiddish Encyclopedia, 25 September 1931
(YIVO archives, Chaim Zhitlowsky Papers, RG 208, folder 1076).
37. ‘Komunikat fun dubnov-fond un yivo’ (in YIVO archives, Chaim Zhitlowsky Papers, RG 208,
folder 1076, and YIVO archives, Jacob Shatsky Papers, RG 356, folder 32).
38. Letter to Chaim Zhitlowsky from Raphael Abramovitch, 23 January 1932 (YIVO archives,
Chaim Zhitlowsky Papers, RG 208, folder 1076). See also letter to Jacob Shatsky from Raphael
Abramovitch, 23 January 1932 (YIVO archives, Jacob Shatsky Papers, RG 356, folder 32).
Meisel’s February 1931 report in the Literarishe bleter indicates that, even at the outset, there
was concern over whether the YIVO would be able to dedicate the necessary time and energy
to such a large undertaking. ‘Will not the encyclopedia paralyze the work of YIVO?’ (Meisel,
p. 158).
39. Tsentral-komitet fun ‘dubnov-fond’, Algemeyne entsiklopedye: Probeheft (Berlin: [n. pub], 1932),
unpaginated (emphasis in original).
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Klinov had been present at the February 1931 meeting. See Meisel, p. 158.
44. Yeshayahu Klinov, ‘Shehekheyonu’, Haynt, 2 May 1932.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Herman Swet, ‘Der ershter aroysfor fun der dubnov-entsiklopedye’, Moment, 13 May 1932.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Letter to Chaim Zhitlowsky from Abraham Rozin, 20 October 1932 (YIVO archives, Chaim
Zhitlowsky Papers, RG 208, folder 1076).
52. As Brisman remarked, ‘The work on the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye began at the wrong time and
at the wrong place’ (p. 63).
53. Dubnow, Dos bukh mayn lebn, iii, trans. by Y. Birnboym, p. 115. Franz von Papen was the recently
ousted Chancellor who convinced President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. Alfred
Hugenberg was head of the DNVP.
54. Liebich, p. 217.
55. Gennady Estraikh, ‘Jacob Lestschinsky: A Yiddishist Dreamer and Social Scientist’, Science in
Context, 20 (2007), 215–37.
56. On Territorialists’ reconsideration of Jewish Diasporist ideologies in the late 1930s, see Joshua
M. Karlip, ‘At the Crossroads Between War and Genocide: A Reassessment of Jewish Ideology
in 1940’, Jewish Social Studies, 11(2005), 170–201.
57. See the archives of the Jewish Labor Committee (New York, Tamiment Library & Robert F.
Wagner Labor Archives), in particular boxes 32, 38, and 39.
58. Jewish People Past and Present, ed. by Salo W. Baron and others, 4 vols (New York: Jewish
Encyclopedic Handbooks, 1946–55).
C h a p t e r 11
v
Yiddish, the Storyteller, and

German-Jewish Modernism
A New Look at Alfred Döblin in the 1920s
Jonathan Skolnik
This chapter is an attempt to examine Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz

(1929) as the intersection, so to speak, of German-Jewish and Yiddish modernism.
A central episode in the early chapters of the novel involves an encounter that Franz
Bieberkopf has with two eastern European Jews. Later, as Bieberkopf suffers setbacks,
loss, and injury, he refers back to his experience with the Jews as a milestone in his
attempt to re-establish himself as a free man in the metropolis and to transform his
life. Franz Bieberkopf is a hapless, freshly released prisoner, a veteran of the world
war who is baff led by a modern city which now feels unfamiliar to him. Apparently
unable to process the f lood of noisy impressions, rapid movements, and dramatically
changed political and social relations, Bieberkopf collapses. He regresses into an
infant-like state where he seeks the shelter of a warm, dark hallway. Bieberkopf can
no longer even speak coherently: he groans and aches, sings patriotic war songs,
recites fragments of random prison regulations. Franz Bieberkopf is picked up off
the ground by Nachum, a Yiddish-speaking, bearded immigrant, and taken inside
the latter’s dingy apartment. Seemingly too poor to offer Franz food, medicine,
or a bed, Nachum begins to entertain his guest with a story. Nachum presents his
tale as both a distraction from hunger and an inspirational moral lesson, a practical
example that Bieberkopf might learn from. And so Nachum, the red-bearded Jew,
begins his tale of ‘Zannovich, Stefan Zannovich’.1
Nachum’s story is, on one level, a stark contrast to the narrative of Berlin
Alexanderplatz. Döblin’s novel (as Walter Benjamin noted in his 1930 review) bears
comparison with Dadaist montage.2 It glides rapidly from sentence to sentence,
leaping from fragments of dialogue to subjective impressions to memories rendered
in free indirect discourse to snippets of random texts such as newspaper headlines,
advertising slogans, or technical manuals for the city’s infrastructure. The reader
is granted only momentary, partial glimpses into the life of Franz Bieberkopf.
Nachum’s tale, on the other hand, is both a classic example of ‘traditional’ oral story
telling and a parody of the folksy homespun tale. The spoken word is emphasized,
all the more so because Nachum’s grammar is a mixture of Yiddish and German,
in contrast to Bieberkopf ’s Berlin dialect.3
216 Jonathan Skolnik
On one level, Nachum’s tale seems to provide everything that is lacking from
Bieberkopf ’s own story in Döblin’s modernist novel: family history, chronological
order, place names that provide orientation and direction, character development.
The story of Stefan Zannovich begins with a journey back across generations: ‘Who
was Zannovich? Who was his father? Who were his parents? Beggars, like most of
us, hawkers, peddlers, tradespeople. Old Zannovich came from Albania and went to
Venice.’ 4 On the other hand, there is no small amount of irony in Döblin’s chapter
heading, ‘Instruction through the Example of Zannovich’.
Nachum’s tale tellingly lacks the consumable moral of a fable, parable, or fairy
tale, and does not provide a model of personal growth like the Bildungsroman either.
Zannovich the elder, it turns out, was a merely a moderately successful card cheat,
who moved from town to town and wanted his children to rise in the world. Stefan
Zannovich, however, is neither Horatio Alger nor Pip from Great Expectations: he
profits from his education and charm by impersonating an aristocrat and swindling.
Nachum’s tale is interrupted when a second Jew, the brown-bearded Eliezar, arrives
and angrily reminds Nachum of Zannovich’s ignoble end in prison. The two Jews
begin to argue, and Bieberkopf leaves, thanking his host for his hospitality and,
especially, for the story. Yet Bieberkopf has ‘learned’ nothing and the promise of the
chapter heading is thus unfulfilled. Although Bieberkopf feels that he has somehow
absorbed an important lesson, the reader observes that he is as dissolute as before.
Indeed, as Berlin Alexanderplatz progresses, the reader understands that the only
media capable of really inf luencing Bieberkopf and steering his course of action (if
only temporarily) are those that symbolize the new mass culture: pornography and
Nazi political rhetoric. In Döblin’s novel, Nachum’s story stands for precisely that
kind of narrative that no longer seems possible in modernity.
Although Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘Der Erzähler’ (‘The Storyteller’) revolves
around an analysis of the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, its
arguments are apposite to Berlin Alexanderplatz, and many critics have detailed the
ways in which Döblin’s novel exemplifies a ‘Benjaminian’ literary practice centred
on the impossibility of ‘narrating’ the modern city in the sense of the traditional
‘novel of urban life’.5 For Benjamin, the storyteller belongs to the past and is
something of an embarrassment for the modern narrator. Yet just as Benjamin, in
another central essay from the 1930s, is ambivalent about the concept of the ‘aura’
which surrounds the unique work of art and is destroyed in the age of mechanical
reproducibility, so too is the antiquated figure of the storyteller in no way an
unequivocally positive sign of the triumph of the avant-garde. For Benjamin, the
storyteller is no longer able to speak to the modern reader because the latter has
been more damaged than liberated by modernity. The storyteller is no longer ‘a
force today’, writes Benjamin, because we have lost our capacity for ‘experience’
(Erfahrung).6 For the writer of an earlier age, argues Benjamin, the storyteller’s
ability to recount experience, to transmit it through a well-crafted tale, emerges
from his proximity to the figure of the traveller, the trader, the journeyman. But,
for Benjamin, the devastation of World War I and its aftermath has diminished if
not destroyed the capacity for the slow-paced life-long collection of experience
upon which the storyteller’s craft depends. In his words, ‘never has experience been
more thoroughly belied than strategic experience was belied by tactical warfare,
Yiddish, the Storyteller, and Modernism 217
economic experience by inf lation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral

experience by those in power’.7 For Benjamin, the challenge for modern literature
is to create possibilities for experience through memory, uniting ‘remembrance’
(Gedächtnis) with ‘reminiscence’ (Erinnerung).
In a recent essay, however, David Roskies has argued forcefully that Walter Ben
jamin’s concept of the storyteller is wholly unsuited to modern Yiddish writing.
For Roskies, it is reductive and schematic to oppose ‘traditional’ narration to
modernist writing strategies. This is demonstrated, he argues, by the creative
literary experiments of Yiddish modernists:
Benjamin [...] tells us precious little about the revival of Jewish storytelling in
modern times. Modern Yiddish storytelling achieved a synthesis that Benjamin
thought impossible: between the layered world of experience and the alienated
world of facts, between communal listening and solitary reading, between oral
tradition and live performance, between rural and urban, the Old World and
the New.8
David Roskies’s illustration of the ways in which classic Yiddish writers such as
Mendele and Sholem Aleichem (who in fact can be seen as belonging to the same
world as Leskov) successfully combine modernity with storytelling traditions old
and new is convincing. I would argue, however, that one need not wholly reject
Benjamin’s thought in relation to Jewish storytelling. The notion that, in modernity,
the storyteller can no longer claim a central position can certainly be productive
for understanding German-language Jewish modernists such as Döblin, and might
also open new avenues for understanding their relation to the younger generation of
Yiddish-language modernists active in Berlin at the same time — Döblin’s contem
poraries such as David Bergelson. The author of Berlin Alexanderplatz engages with
similar questions about the storyteller and the communal audience, about modern
alienation, and also about the role of the Jewish writer. In order to explore these
questions, I will re-examine Döblin’s narrative of his 1924 trip to Poland with an
eye to how the narrative strategies developed in it anticipate some of his work in
Berlin Alexanderplatz.9 I will then contrast Döblin’s use of the figure of the Jewish
storyteller in Berlin Alexanderplatz with one of David Bergelson’s short stories from
his Berlin period.
Döblin was no stranger to the Yiddish culture which f lourished in Berlin in
the early 1920s. He wrote appreciatively of the Vilna Troupe, a Yiddish theatre
ensemble based in Berlin from 1921 to 1923, and was friendly with David Bergelson,
reviewing the German translation of Nokh alemen (The End of Everything) in 1924.10
Döblin’s review praises Bergelson’s sparse, efficient use of language and character,
and Döblin understood Bergelson’s novel as a Yiddish-language contribution to
Western literary modernism, rather than — in Döblin’s words — a ‘jiddische
Originalarbeit’ [a wholly original Yiddish work]. For Joseph Sherman, Döblin’s
review of Bergelson’s novel ref lects ‘the false criteria by which Yiddish writing
was evaluated by German-Jewish readers in search of authenticity’.11 Yet, might
it be possible to understand Döblin’s view of Yiddish not as a sentimental longing
for an idealized world he found lacking in Bergelson, but rather as a ref lection of a
common project of literary modernism?
To better understand eastern European Jewry, Döblin felt he needed to leave

Berlin and travel to Poland. His interest in Ostjuden became keener after a small
but ugly anti-Jewish riot in the immigrant quarter of Scheunenviertel in 1923. He
travelled through Warsaw, Vilna, Lwów, Drohobych, Poznan, and many smaller
towns in October and November 1924. Döblin, of course, was hardly the first
western European Jewish intellectual who became interested in eastern European
Jewry in the wake of World War I. Much has been written about the ‘rediscovery’
of eastern European Jews by German Jews during the war. Döblin’s Reise in Polen
( Journey to Poland) follows on the heels of Arnold Zweig and Hermann Struck’s
inf luential illustrated volume Das ostjüdische Antlitz (The Face of East European Jewry),
the memoirs of Sammy Gronemann, and Joseph Roth’s Juden auf Wanderschaft
(Wandering Jews).12 Moreover, Döblin’s image of Polish Jewry as a repository of
national wholeness and authenticity echoes Heinrich Heine’s ref lections of his
own travels to Poland, written just over one hundred years before Döblin’s book.
For Heine, Polish Jewry serves as a foil to acculturated western Jews, though the
latter may consider themselves superior. In a typically ironic move, Heine writes
disparagingly of Polish Jews in their ‘barbarous’ shabby fur hats and the ‘still more
barbarous’ thoughts which fill their heads, then turns around to assert that he
prefers them to western Jews who wear Bolivar hats and think of contemporary
German writers like Jean Paul, in other words Heine himself.13 One hundred years
before Döblin, Heine grafts his vision of Polish Jewry onto a familiar historical
schema: an unrelenting Romantic conf lict between a lost old world of wholeness,
darkness, and mystery and a lifeless, disenchanted modern world where freedom
and embourgoisement (symbolized by the Bolivar hat, now become a fashionable
sign of progress) are tempered by an overwhelming loss of communal feeling and
alienation. A century later, Döblin sees a different kind of modern divide. To
Döblin’s eyes, the Jews in interwar Poland are an image of national wholeness not
because of their communal beliefs, but because their presence seems all the more
threatened in an age of modern nationalism and mass politics. Everywhere Döblin
notes the patriotic militarism of the new Polish nation, where the status of minorities
seems all the more alien. For Döblin, Jewish life in eastern Europe is anything
but ‘whole’. Sensitive to the intricacies of intra-Jewish conf licts over religion and
language, Döblin argues that the Jews form a ‘community of fate’ because they
are out of step with the threatened triumphalism of the Polish nationalists, who
celebrate ‘dwelling in their own houses’ (1) while anxiously eyeing Lithuanian,
Ukrainian, German, and Jewish minorities.14
Döblin describes crowds rather than individuals, glides between movie theatres,
university halls, churches, and trains packed with Jewish pilgrims seeking blessing
from the Hasidic rebbe of Gura Kalwarja, and he amplifies his descriptions with
statistics, the hundreds of thousands of Jews massacred in the wake of the Russian
Civil War. There is a poignant moment when Döblin wanders through the rows
of graves in a military cemetery which contains both Russian and German crosses.
The order of the human markers of memory and the eerie quiet of the long grass
cannot contain the agony of the dying. Döblin feels an overwhelming sense of guilt,
feels the need to ask forgiveness for having lived.
Döblin’s Journey to Poland is in many ways a personal journey. Although he lived

continuously in Berlin since 1888, Döblin had been born in Stettin in 1878. His
parents came from the Poznan vicinity, though they had grown up as German
speakers rather than Yiddish speakers. But for Döblin, nostalgia and sentimentality
are foreign. Where Heine was moved by the power and pathos of medieval Jewish
prayers in Poland, filled with longing for a wholeness lost in modernity, in Döblin’s
tale all semblance of chronology is gone. In Döblin’s account, place changes
are rarely noted, events and themes are often interrupted and returned to later,
and Döblin is uninterested in providing readers with an orderly itinerary which
would help them to orient themselves in the diverse impressions and ref lections.
This chaotic, panoramic view implicitly disrupts any notion of history based on a
neat opposition of the pre-modern to the modern, precluding any nostalgia for a
return to earlier, simpler times. Jewish religious customs appear strange to Döblin.
Whereas an image in a church of the Virgin Mary atop a crescent moon strikes
Döblin as a wonderful unity of the deity and nature, Jewish customs appear to
him as ‘atavistic’ remnants of an Asia both noble and terrifying. Yet to understand
Döblin’s notion of time is to recognize that his apparent rejection of tradition is
not a rejection of history but rather a reordering of its planes: the present is not
the space where the past is renewed and made concrete. Instead, ritual appears as
a breakthrough, a negation of the present as stasis through a vital connection to a
striving for the future. Döblin observes the celebration of Succoth in Warsaw, with
huts built on balconies:
A strange feast for this nation. Do they realize what they are preparing here?
There are remnants of a nature festival. What a drab memory for a nation of
peddlers and thinkers. No soil, no country, no state. No sowing, no harvest,
no nature. (70–71)
But Döblin does not note this alleged disconnection from nature as an indictment
of a ‘rootless’ people. Instead, he finds in the ritual a confirmation of historical
optimism and spiritual striving: ‘They are now going to celebrate a feast of nature in
the dark courtyards of the metropolis, next to garbage cans, on roof-high balconies.
It looks like a gesture of the indestructible masses: despite everything’ (71).
If the Polish nationalists are now content to ‘dwell in their own homes’ (71) then
Döblin feels that Poland’s Jews have also retained a vital, creative sense of dwelling
that can never be conventional: ‘Wandering through the millennia, reeling, driven,
they are a symbol of the one thing that carries the future [...] such a tremendous
experiment cannot really end in the normal way,’ writes Döblin, ‘with some
cozy fireside happiness’ (71). There is a strong political agenda to Döblin’s travel
narrative. The book is prefaced with a quote from Schiller’s William Tell: ‘Every
border wields a tyrant’s power.’ Döblin’s radical challenge to the notion of time
as a generational or national-historical continuum leads him to question divisions
based on geography or social class. In this sense, Döblin’s notion of memory seems
more wide-reaching that what Benjamin suggests in his essay on the storyteller:
remembrance is a collective affair which extends beyond the boundaries of the
individual. Indeed, in the larger context of Döblin’s thought, the national group is
important only as the basis of a transcendent connection with nature.
Döblin is a keen observer of the language struggles in interwar Poland. Not only
does he record the tense politics of the Vilna region, where Polish, Lithuanian,
Russian, Yiddish, and German stand in an uneasy relation within newly drawn
borders; he is also aware of the complex mixture of religious, class, and political
interests within the Jewish community in the struggles over the uses of Hebrew,
Polish, and Yiddish. But to what extent did Döblin’s sensitivity to the politics of
language in transition have an impact on his own literary work? Döblin, of course,
positions himself as an outside observer. His language is German; as he travels, he
often finds it easier to speak French than to understand Yiddish (which his parents
understood and was a growing presence in Berlin), let alone Polish. Everywhere,
he is accompanied by an interpreter, about whom the reader learns almost nothing.
And, of course, his literary medium is German. Whether we read this as a personal,
introspective book or an address to a wider German and German-Jewish audience,
we are struck by Döblin’s emphatic denial that this is a journey to reconnect with
lost roots or find spiritual renewal through identification. ‘I’, writes Döblin, ‘am not
here.’ His opening paragraph is deceptive, and revealing:
In the long railroad car, I sway over the tracks. The train zoomed off from
Berlin like an arrow. The rails are endless. Now, I whizz along, jog along,
with a wood and iron structure inside a gurgling tube, into the night. The cars
bounce. A chaos of noises has begun: a rhythmic thrusting from the wheels, a
vibrating, a rolling, a clattering of windows, a buzzing, a hollow grinding, a
sliding, a brief, sharp slamming. I — am not here. I — am not in the train. We
pelt across bridges. I — have not f lown along. Not yet. I am still standing in
the terminal, Schlesischer Bahnhof. (1–2)
Before he has even left the train station in Berlin, Döblin cautions his readers to
be wary of identification. The ‘I’ is not part of the ‘we’. The ‘I’ disappears behind
the machinery of modern life, can misleadingly fantasize itself into becoming a
part of it. If Döblin’s ‘I’ cannot be relied upon to narrate, the reader relies upon it
to register impressions and information. And Döblin spends the next two hundred
pages gathering diverse facets of a story: a new-old nation shaped messily out of
heterogeneous regions, a changing social order where ancient identities persist
alongside democratic, revolutionary, and reactionary politics. Prominent among
them are stories of the type Nachum tells Franz Bieberkopf in Berlin Alexanderplatz:
Hasidic parables, folksy tales of small-town Jewish politics where rival rabbinical
pretenders attempt to align themselves with various outside powers to secure
positions, contorted melodramatic plots culled from Sholem Asch’s Motke ganef
(Motke the Thief ). Döblin’s ‘I’ rarely draws conclusions from these tales; he often
claims not to understand them; sometimes they stand alone without any commentary.
Yet it is in the montage, the juxtapositions, that Döblin’s new style of narration is
visible. One such tale comes from a booklet of speeches by the Gerer Rebbe,
alluding to the mystical world to come, from which he quotes without comment.
Döblin’s chapter ends here, yet his travels continue. We see him transported not to
the next world, but rather on to Vilna, Poznan, and back to Berlin. The effacement
of the narrative ‘I’ in this travelogue, where Döblin uses it on nearly every page, is
apparent in the lack of commentary on the tale, but it is no mystical loss of the self.
When Döblin’s ‘I’ disappears, we are left with a panorama of impressions. A beggar
collapsed in front of a church. The shabby but enthusiastic devotees of the rebbe,
the columns of young Polish soldiers off to guard new borders against powerful,
grudge-bearing neighbours. It is not a direct identification with the people of this
land that the reader gleans from these disjointed observations, but a general sense
of human empathy. If identity can be constructed only upon the sure foundations
made possible by what Walter Benjamin termed ‘experience’, then Döblin can
nonetheless impart a sense of community and solidarity with Poland’s Jews.
The ‘story’ told by the eastern European Jew in Berlin Alexanderplatz similarly
dissolves into a field of impressions. It is incapable of being the moral parable it
announces itself to be. The rise and fall of Stefan Zannovich is heard alongside
echoes of Franz Bieberkopf ’s wartime and prison experiences, alongside fragments
of the book of Esther and rabbinic commentary (is it Nachum’s thoughts we read
when Bieberkopf is delirious?) and the sights and sounds of Berlin. How are these
snippets of classical Jewish sources to be understood alongside the Zannovich tale
and the myriad other elements of Döblin’s montage? Alfred Döblin’s relation to Jews
and Judaism has been controversial among critics.15 Recent scholarship, however,
has paid more attention to the ways in which Döblin took a renewed interest
in Jewish culture in the 1920s, ‘inspired in part by his own deracinated Jewish
identity, German postwar anti-Semitism and Zionism’, as one historian has put it.16
Interestingly, one prominent contemporary Jewish critic perceived Döblin’s Berlin
Alexanderplatz in similar terms. For Bertha Badt-Strauss, who reviewed the novel in
the Jüdische Rundschau ( Jewish Review) in 1930, Alfred Döblin bears comparison with
Jonah, who attempted to f lee from his prophetic mission only to be awakened to a
new sense of suffering humanity. The Jewish characters in Döblin’s novel, argues
Badt-Strauss, take their seat at a general assembly of all humanity: Berlin’s poor
Jewish refugees from eastern Europe allow the downtrodden Bieberkopf to be seen
as a part of a community of suffering fellow men.17
Yet the Jewish storytellers in Döblin’s novel do more than function as realistic
details of life in 1920s Berlin or as mirrors for Bieberkopf ’s human travails. It is
notable that Badt-Strauss reviewed three other books alongside Döblin’s Berlin
Alexanderplatz, including a history of the Purim holiday. Critics have been divided
on how to understand Döblin’s biblical references in Berlin Alexanderplatz. For
David Midgely, Döblin’s biblical motifs cannot provide any structuring meaning
for the tale, for, like everything else in Berlin Alexanderplatz, they ‘change their
complexion according to circumstances’.18 Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, on the other
hand, notes the symbolic resonance of the Esther story for a tale set in Berlin as
violence from Communists and National Socialists is escalating and destabilizing
the fragile democracy: a tale of assimilation and threatened extermination hovers
over the novel with this reference.19 The Jewish characters themselves become
projections of the political turmoil, with the red beard and the brown beard being
symbolic of the political shadows cast over the German capital city by Nazism and
Communism in the Weimar Republic’s final years.
Döblin’s novel thus shares on a basic level some concerns of modernist writers
working in Jewish languages: the relation of traditional sources to modernity, and
the possibility and meaning of Jewish identity on an individual and group level in
an era of political upheaval. A comparison of Döblin with David Bergelson’s short
story ‘Tsvishn emigrantn’ (‘Among Emigrants’, 1927) bears this out. In Bergelson’s
story, a would-be assassin confronts not his target (a pogromist now living in a
Berlin f lophouse) but a Jewish writer, a fellow refugee. The narrator of Bergelson’s
story cannot be, refuses to be the storyteller that the protagonist wishes him to
be.20 The would-be assassin imagines the narrator as all-powerful — capable
of providing him a weapon with which to avenge his people — yet Bergelson’s
modernist storyteller resigns and lets the protagonist’s impotent anger be echoed by
disturbing silence.
The novel of the traditional storyteller may no longer be a desirable option, yet a
new kind of narrative may emerge. In Döblin’s case, Bakhtin’s idea of the polyphonic
narrative and the central place of the carnival may be an alternative way to think
of his insertion of carefully chosen Jewish themes. Indeed, the carnival is brought
up in the Purim theme mentioned above, and the traditional indulgence in revelry
is a parallel to Bieberkopf ’s stupor. The ‘Jewish’ narrative in Berlin Alexanderplatz
may be one small strand among many, but it has its place within a multi-voiced tale
where none can predominate. The stories of Nachum and Eliezar — misunderstood
because they are incapable of being interpreted and absorbed in any traditional sense
— are soon drowned out by the city that itself becomes a narrator.21
Notes to Chapter 11
1. Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Bieberkopf, trans. by Eugene Jolas (New
York: Continuum, 2003), p. 15.
2. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Crisis of the Novel’ (review of Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1930), in Walter
Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1996–
2006), ii.1: 1927–1930, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. by
Rodney Livingstone and others (1996), pp. 299–304.
3. On the context of Döblin’s use of ‘literary Yiddish’, see Matthias Richter, Die Sprache jüdischer
Figuren in der deutschen Literatur (1750–1933) (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1995), p. 130.
4. Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 15.
5. This is the thesis of the thoughtful article by Klaus R. Scherpe, ‘The City as Narrator: The
Modern Text in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz’, in Modernity and the Text: Revisions
of German Modernism, ed. by Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989), pp. 162–79. See also Ulf Zimmermann, ‘Benjamin and Berlin
Alexanderplatz: Some Notes Towards a View of Literature and the City’, Colloquia Germanica, 12
(1979), 256–72.
6. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Benjamin,
Selected Writings, iii: 1935–1936, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. by
Edmund Jephcott and others (2006), p. 143.
7. Ibid., p. 144.
8. David G. Roskies, ‘Yiddish Storytelling and the Politics of Rescue’, in Jewish Literature and
History: An Interdisciplinary Conversation, ed. by Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen (Bethesda:
University of Maryland Press, 2008), p. 21.
9. My reading of the relationship between these two texts, as well as the role of Jewish themes
in Berlin Alexanderplatz, has benefited greatly from Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer’s pioneering essay
‘ “Ghettokunst. Meinetwegen, aber hundertprozentig echt”: Alfred Döblins Begegnung mit dem
Ostjudentum’, in Im Zeichen Hiobs: Jüdische Schriftsteller und deutsche Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. by
Gunter E. Grimm and Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer (Königstein: Athenäum Verlag, 1985), pp. 161–77.
10. See Marline Otte, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 131, and Joseph Sherman, ‘David Bergelson: A Bio
graphy’, in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. by Joseph Sherman and
Gennady Estraikh (London: Legenda, 2007), pp. 30, 32.
11. Sherman, p. 32.
12. See Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-
Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), and Sander
Gilman, ‘Die Wiederentdeckung der Ostjuden: Deutsche Juden im Osten, 1890–1918’, in
Beter und Rebellen: Aus 1000 Jahren Judentum in Polen, ed. by Michael Brocke (Frankfurt a. M.:
Deutscher Koordinierungsrat der Gesellschaften für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit,
1983), pp. 11–32; Delphine Bechtel, ‘Cultural Transfers between Ostjuden and Westjuden:
German-Jewish Intellectuals and Yiddish Culture, 1897–1930’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 42
(1997), 67–83.
13. See the discussion of Heine’s Über Polen in Siegbert Solomon Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy: A
Study of His Portraits of Jews and Judaism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 62.
14. Alfred Döblin, Journey to Poland, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel, ed. by Heinz Graber (New
York: Paragon House, 1991). Quotations from this edition are marked in parentheses in the main
text.
15. See the essay by Klaus Müller-Salget, ‘Döblin and Judaism’, in A Companion to the Works of Alfred
Döblin, ed. by Roland Dollinger, Wulf Koepke, and Heidi Thomann Tewanson (Columbia, SC:
Camden House, 2004), pp. 233–46.
16. John M. Efron, ‘The Zionist World of Arnold Zweig’, in Nationalism, Zionism, and Ethnic Mobili
zation of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond, ed. by Michael Berkowitz (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 207.
17. Bertha Badt-Strauss ‘Jüdische Motive in neuen Büchern: Alfred Döblins Alexanderplatz’,
Jüdische Rundschau, 35 (1930), 214.
18. David Midgley, Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918–1933 (Oxford: Oxford
19. Cf. Bayerdörfer.
20. See the interpretation of ‘Among Refugees’ in Sasha Senderovich, ‘In Search of Readership:
David Bergelson among the Refugees’, in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism,
ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (London: Legenda, 2007), pp. 150–66.
21. Döblin’s chapter ‘The Rosenthaler Platz is busily active’ (perhaps better translated as ‘The
Rosenthaler Platz speaks’), is a masterpiece of depersonalized storytelling where tram
regulations, weather forecasts, imagined destinies of passers-by, and street maps are recounted
from a perspective that diffuses the omniscient narrator.
Ch a p t e r 12
v
Between Literature and History

Israel Joshua Singer’s Berlin Novel
The Family Carnovsky as a Cul-de-Sac
of the German-Jewish ‘Symbiosis’
Elvira Grözinger
German Jews wanted to be Jews in the house and gentiles in the street but life
turned this ambition completely topsy-turvy. The fact is that we have become
gentiles in the house and Jews in the street.
Reb Ephraim to David Carnovsky
Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944), the ‘Other Singer’ (Irving Howe) and now far
less well known than his younger brother Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize
winner, is often called ‘a pessimistic chronicler’, a ‘realist’, and an excellent depicter
of milieus, and compared to Utrillo, the painter of the Paris streets, and so on. All
this can be confirmed by his three major novels, Yoshe Kalb (Yoshe Calf, 1932), and
the historical family sagas Di brider Ashkenazi (The Brothers Ashkenazi, 1935) and
Di mishpokhe Karnovski (1943; English The Family Carnovsky, 1969). Whereas some
critics dismiss the latter as being on the verge of sensational or trashy literature,1
told in a traditional but thrilling manner and lacking the modernist experiments
that generally prevailed at the time, it nevertheless has a historical and political
dimension, and this article will concentrate on its value in this respect.2 The family
novel, painting-like and conceived as a triptych, renders a panorama of events and
Jewish experience over three generations during the upheavals in the first half of the
twentieth century, beginning in fin-de-siècle eastern Europe and taking place mainly
in Berlin before and after World War I, depicting the stormy years of the Weimar
Republic and ending in New York after the onset of the Hitler era.3 The novel is
constructed as a sort of Bildunsgroman, but Singer as an omniscient author never leaves
the readers in doubt about the fact that there is not going to be a happy ending —
things are inevitably heading for an anticlimax, and he guides the readers on their
way towards it by repeatedly inserting conspicuous ominous remarks, comment
ing on the respective states of affairs like the chorus in an ancient classical drama.
In his youth Singer showed a remarkable talent for drawing which is clearly
discernable in the style of his novels — but then chose a literary career. Stemming
Between Literature and History 225
from a Hasidic milieu on his father’s side and the Haskalah movement on his
mother’s, he had a traditional religious education and was expected to become a
rabbi. But, like many young eastern European Jews of his generation, he rebelled
early against the limitations and confinements of the shtetl by becoming a secular
journalist and novelist. This private struggle of the author for acculturation into
the non-Jewish world is echoed in his novel The Family Carnovsky. In 1918, lured
by the ideals of the Russian Revolution, he went to Kiev ‘to participate in the
dawn of what he believed would be a new age for the Jews of Eastern Europe’.4
But ‘after a bruising experience in Kiev and Moscow, where he felt betrayed by
the modernist mandarins Der Nister and Bergelson’,5 and having witnessed the
atrocities and hatred directed at Jews during the Russian Civil War, he became
critical of Bolshevism and returned to Warsaw in 1922. After Cahan engaged him
as his Warsaw correspondent in 1923, Singer became a well-known figure in the
literary circles of Warsaw, travelled abroad, and watched world politics beginning to
change as Fascism emerged in western Europe. In 1926, again in the Soviet Union,
his critical attitude towards Bolshevism seems, contrary to the view often expressed
by critics and his brother’s account in Lost in America, to have become less extreme,
as Gennady Estraikh shows: ‘Singer’s “Moskve” belongs to relatively unbiased and
even sympathetic Soviet travelogues of that time.’6 But it is described as a highly
ambiguous city, representing the Soviet regime: a mother and a stepmother, a city
of light and of darkness, wealth and poverty, where men and women (also Jews)
have all their rights but where there is prostitution and crime. His reports about Nay
Rusland (The New Russia, 1927) and the novel Shtol und ayzn (Steel and Iron, 1927)
about his experience of the effects of the German occupation in Poland in World
War I, however, were not well received by the critics (even declared to be shund),7
which led to a creative crisis: in 1928 Singer ‘forswore the writing of fiction,
declaring that under prevailing conditions Yiddish could no longer nurture the
creative imagination, that “it was impossible to write Yiddish now” ’.8 He changed
his mind after a meeting with Cahan in Berlin in 1931, which is said to have been
decisive for his further development as a Yiddish writer, dramatist, and journalist.
From then on he portrayed Jewish life in a plastic manner which is reminiscent of
works of art — tableaux — starting with his native Poland in the dramatic novel
Yoshe Kalb, which made him famous and was also staged in the United States,9
after which he was later compared by Communist critics to Dostoyevsky and Leo
Tolstoy.10 His visits to pre-Hitler Berlin must have been brief, but nevertheless
important for the genesis of The Family Carnovsky. Singer’s novel Yoshe Kalb rejects
the mystical Hasidic shtetl as full of prejudice and backwardness hostile to life, and
his historical family sagas Di brider Ashkenazi and Di mishpokhe Karnovski present
Jewish fate and history in both eastern and western Europe as doomed and transmit
a feeling of crisis in the Jewish community.11
In the Carnovsky saga, Singer traces the destiny of three generations of Polish
Jews who, starting with an immigrant to Berlin, David Carnovsky (in this case
an enlightened Ostjude, disciple of Moses Mendelssohn, and rebel against the
conservatism of the traditional religious Jewish way of life), live through the first
half of the twentieth century in Berlin and finally find their way to the United
226 Elvira Grözinger
States as refugees from Hitler’s Germany. A master of historical fiction, Singer sets
his plot against the background of real events, inventing characters that bear all the
traits of the zeitgeist, which he renders with remarkable insight, though, as critics
complained, without psychological depth and garnished with erotic scenes.
Singer proves to have been a keen reader of Russian, Polish, German, and
other literatures. His novels written as family chronicles and milieu studies were
certainly inspired by Buddenbrooks (1901) by Thomas Mann, an author well known
in the Yiddish-speaking literary circles of pre-World War II Poland. Singer could
have been inf luenced by Charles Dickens as well.12 He must also have known Lion
Feuchtwanger’s family novel Die Geschwister Oppermann (The Oppermanns), set in
Berlin in the years 1932 to 1933 and picturing the racial discrimination against the
Jews at the end of the Weimar Republic. Feuchtwanger wrote this novel in his exile
in Sanary-sur-Mer in southern France.13
In 1933, on the occasion of the theatrical production of Yoshe Kalb, Singer went to
America but did not stay there. However, being disillusioned about the possibility
of developing a ‘normal’ Jewish life in eastern Europe, his feeling of despair became
stronger when Hitler came to power, which also affected the life of Jews in Poland.14
Therefore, when Cahan invited him to come to America again, he gladly took the
opportunity to leave Europe for good. He urged his reluctant younger brother,
Isaac Bashevis, to follow him to the United States, which he did in 1935, thus saving
his life. Singer did not live long enough to see the extent of the annihilation, but his
last work, the memoir of childhood and youth Fun a velt vos iz nishto mer (Of a World
which is No More, published posthumously in book form in 1946), which evokes the
then destroyed realm of eastern European Jewry, must have been connected with
his foreboding about the catastrophe. In spite of being critical about Jewish life in
‘Old Europe’, Singer, like other Jews in America, felt that there was a climate of
hostility to Jewish immigrants from Hitler’s Europe — in 1939 the magazine Fortune
published an opinion poll according to which eighty-three per cent of Americans
were against letting Jewish refugees in.15 Singer knew about the tragedy of the ship
St. Louis in June 1939, whose passengers, after having been turned away from Cuba,
were not allowed into the United States; after the ship involuntarily returned to
Europe, many of those aboard later ended up in Auschwitz. Shortly before his death
Singer therefore even considered going to Palestine.
The Family Carnovsky, which was published in book form in 1943, one year
before Singer’s death, while Nazism was erasing the civilization he had grown up
in, should be read as a recognition of the fiasco of Jewish assimilatory tendencies
in nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Germany and as an epitaph of Jewish life
in Europe without the solace of the chance of a better life in America. At the time
when Singer wrote the novel he was deeply concerned about the fate of his own
relatives — his mother and youngest brother were left in Poland — and he died
without gaining knowledge about that fact that both had perished.16 The Family
Carnovsky ends almost at the moment of its publication — in 1940 to 1941:
Toward the novel’s end, all sense of historical distance ends and, given the
events it depicts, the present becomes disturbingly immediate. With no possi
bility of knowing exactly where current horror would lead, but with an almost
paralyzing hopelessness, Singer tried to come to terms with the early moment
of what we now call khurbn, or Holocaust. His inability to do so may well be to
his credit, since it points to his unwillingness to either romanticize or condemn
Jewish life in response to its incomprehensible fate.17
The American government had ignored Jewish victims in Europe for a long time,
until 1944. The news of what had been happening was spread by the refugees
from Europe who came to the United States shortly before or after the outbreak
of the war. Among the main sources of information about the situation in Europe
transmitted by immigrant intellectuals in the United States was the painter and
creator of caricatures and political drawings Artur Szyk (born in Lódz in 1894,
died in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1951). Szyk was already a close observer
of political developments in 1919, co-authoring with Julian Tuwim his first
illustrated political book, Rewolucja w Niemczech (Revolution in Germany), a satirical
and witty attack on post-World War I German society. He sensed the growth of
anti-Semitism very early, and since 1933 his drawings began to address both the
threat to the European Jews and the whole new political order that emerged with
National Socialism. As early as 1934 (during a brief visit to the United States, the
year of Singer’s immigration), Szyk was quoted saying that ‘an artist and especially
a Jewish artist, cannot remain neutral in these times’. In 1940 he emigrated to the
United States, where he was called a ‘one-man army’ by the American press because
of his personal war against Hitlerism.18 His output as a painter and cartoonist was
enormous; his numerous anti-Axis cartoons appeared in newspapers and magazines.
Not long after Szyk’s arrival in the United States — five months before the country
entered the war — his book The New Order was published there and almost
immediately his work earned general acclaim. From then on, Szyk’s art was nearly
everywhere in the United States, the country he loved and called ‘the home I have
always searched for’, although he hated the Ku Klux Klan. Szyk, a (critical) Polish
patriot, never loved the Soviets, but the Committee on Un-American Activities
initiated an investigation of him as a suspected Communist. This led to Szyk dying
— as was the case in Singer’s sudden death — of a heart attack. It is most unlikely
that Singer remained unaffected by this omnipresent compatriot, whom he might
even have met in his lifetime.
The Family Carnovsky consists of three main parts, each dedicated to one of the
main male figures symbolizing a particular epoch — Book 1 is about David, Book
2 about his son, Georg, and Book 3 about his grandson, Jegor. The central part is
dedicated to the family’s destiny in Berlin. The triptych unfolds the life of David
Carnovsky, a late nineteenth-century emigrant from the Galician old-world shtetl of
Melnitz in Greater Poland to its counterpart, Berlin. He had to emigrate not, like
many of his peers, for political reasons — due to opposition to the Tsar or trying
to avoid military service — but because he became a pariah in his community as a
young man after being caught reading Mendelssohn’s Pentateuch in the synagogue,
an unheard-of heresy for the orthodox in eastern Europe at that time. Taking his
wife Leah along, David leaves the old world behind him, starting by trimming his
beard and casting off his old clothing before heading for Germany, the promised land
of Mendelssohnian disciples like himself. The young couple settles down in Berlin,
and Singer moves freely to and fro in a remarkably faithfully drawn topography of
the city, ranging from the better streets of the Jewish quarters in the east around
the then-busy Landsberger Allee and the representative Oranienburger Straße, to
the poorer Jewish neighbourhood on the Linienstraße or the Dragonerstraße in the
‘Scheunenviertel’ (the Polish or Galician Ostjuden-area, mockingly called Jewish
Switzerland), to the proletarian German areas in Neukölln where Jewish inhabitants
were rather rare.
These were the first typical outward signs of assimilation, and Singer continues
to paint his tableau with broad brushstrokes, so to speak, using strong contrasts,
stereotypes, and schemata. David’s wife experiences a culture shock — she is
homesick and lonely in this new society: ‘Although she was companionable, good-
natured, and liked to laugh, Leah could not make friends with the respectable ladies
from the synagogue.’19 David Carnovsky, on the other hand, adapted himself and
pursued an exemplary career very fast; he learned f luent German, succeeded in
business, completed a course in the Gymnasium, and became a respectable member
of the long-settled German synagogue community. Thus he achieved his goal
and fulfilled his dream;20 also, his ‘elegant apartment located in the front house
on Oranienburger Strasse became a gathering place for savants and scholars’. And,
when three years later his son was born, David gave him two names:
Moses after Moses Mendelssohn, a name by which the boy would be called up
to the Torah when he grew older; and a German name, Georg, a corruption of
his father’s name, Gershon, a name with which he could go among people and
use in business: ‘Be a Jew in the house and a man in the street’, upon which Dr.
Speier, the rabbi commented: ‘a golden mean. A Jew among Jews and a German
among Germans’.21
The boy soon developed a feeling for what is necessary for assimilation, and the
language switch indicates that: he did not like to be called Moshele, only Georg,
by his mother, whom he called ‘Mutti’ in High German, and he made fun of his
mother’s Hebrew and Yiddish prayers, following the best route to committing the
blasphemy she dreaded so much. This could not end well, as readers at the time
of the publication of the book suspected — Singer’s fiction does indeed reject ‘the
solace of messianic or mythic alternatives as illusory and deeply destructive’,22 even
self-destructive.
The old rebel I. J. Singer is rejecting this assimilatory attitude and showing that
there is no alternative to accepting one’s own identity with dignity. The life of
Georg in the pre-World War I period is depicted by stereotypes with the effect that
the reader has a déjà-vu experience. Georg, who was meant by his father to be a
Jew at home and a German on the street, ‘to his Christian neighbors, was merely
another Jew’,23 often accused by class comrades of being a Christ-killer, but he
will grow to be a successful German-Jewish physician, Dr Georg Carnovsky, after
graduating at twenty from the Gymnasium with honours. Before Georg pursued
his medical studies, he tried himself unsuccessfully at philosophy after he rejected
his father’s plans for making a commercial career. As in Alfred Döblin’s novel
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), and echoing Heinrich Heine’s merry Berlin times
one hundred years earlier, Georg submerged himself in the exuberant nightlife of
Berlin’s underworld, enjoying his new freedom from his father’s supervision but
spending his money:
He drank more than necessary [...] and also did his best to sleep with as many
waitresses and shopgirls as possible to maintain his reputation as a true German
university student. He quickly got to know all the bars, cafés, and pastry shops
around Unter den Linden where couples like to meet. [...] His incredible success
with women made him popular with the older students.24
After a while, Georg found the company of poor students who were ‘shabby and
wild-haired coreligionists from Russia who had come to Berlin to study’ more
interesting, also out of spite, because they were avoided by Jewish (‘black-haired’)
students from the west, just like the latter were avoided by their fair-haired
colleagues. He became close friends with one of them, Judah Lazarovitch Kugel,
who had studied natural science in Berne, law in Basle, classical literature at the
Sorbonne, and sociology in Liège, and was now taking philosophy courses in Berlin,
living on a monthly allotment from the Aid Society of Kommerzienrat Kohn. This
was the sort of Russian-Jewish intellectual who in the 1920s turned Berlin into
‘Charlottengrad’ and, for a while, a cultural centre of Europe that attracted artists,
painters, and writers from all over the world.
A new era in Georg’s life began in the apartment block owned by his father, ‘in
the workers’ quarter of Neukölln’ where the apartments ‘were narrow, crowded, and
noisy’.25 There he met the only Jewish tenant, the leftist physician Dr Fritz Landau,
trying to collect the rent. After Georg met Elsa, the doctor’s emancipated daughter
and medical student, he fell in love with her and his life changed altogether: he
quit philosophy and enrolled at the medical school. With the outbreak of World
War I, Georg obtained his medical diploma and was assigned to a field hospital
on the Eastern Front while hard times began for the Russian- and Polish-born
Jews in Berlin, considered enemy aliens despite the loyalty they displayed to the
Austrian Emperor and German Kaiser. David Carnovsky, as ‘a disciple of Moses
Mendelssohn, Lessing and Schiller’, was shocked when he was ordered to report to
the police and told that he would be interned with other Russians. His former close
acquaintances such as Rabbi Dr Spier refused to help him now, and
passing Grosse Hamburger Strasse where the small monument of Moses
Mendelssohn stood, he raised his eyes to the bronze figure of the philosopher
who was the reason for his coming to the city of culture and light. Some generation
you have spawned, he thought bitterly, a fine bunch of sages and scholars!26
Surprisingly enough, only Georg, his son, interceded on his part with the police,
and David, as the father of an only son who was a German officer at the front, could
thus be saved from being interned. The first third of the novel closes with that,
indicating that David’s role and the old times are over.
Part 2 of the novel is dedicated to the Weimar period, which Singer depicts
realistically in a ruthless and harsh manner. Georg, the central figure, had survived
the war and come back home physically unharmed. Personal destiny is now more
strongly interwoven with historical events than in the first part of the book.
Georg’s parents, his fifteen-year-old sister, and Elsa Landau, like her father an active
member of an unspecified workers’ party and a physician herself, awaited him. Yet
Elsa turned down his marriage proposal:

If he expected her to act like a typical female, he had the wrong girl. She would
never be anyone’s slave, not of any man living, and this was precisely the reason
she would never marry. For her, her medicine, her Party, and her laboratory
were enough. She neither had the time nor the urge to become someone’s
wife.27
Soon she was elected to the Reichstag and pursued a rapidly rising political career.
Georg had no chance to compete with the political engagement of his lover. On Dr
Fritz Landau’s repeated advice, and with his help, Georg took a decisive new step
in his life and became an obstetrician in the renowned clinic of Professor Halevy in
order to ‘sow after the harvest’, that is, to help bring new children into the decimated
population. In the clinic he fell in love with a young gentile nurse, Teresa Holbeck,
marking the onset of new times — the mark of the eastern European past had now
been erased definitively by Georg, who refused to obey the rule of being ‘a Jew at
home and a man in the street’ and made no distinction between the two spheres any
more. This step seems to have been regarded as calamitous by the author, too.
The often idealized ‘German-Jewish symbiosis’ reaches deadlock in the clash of
the two worlds — Teresa’s and Georg’s — and is described by Singer in an almost
tragicomic as well as very plastic way, like a cartoon, on the occasion of Georg’s first
‘official’ visit to Teresa’s mother, a widow of an anti-Semite who in a photograph
resembled ‘a cow’. It disturbed Georg and, in the first phase of his visit, Georg did
not show his best manners:
Widow Holbeck was horrified. Finally she decided to talk about his profession.
‘Herr Doktor’s practice is large?’ she asked diffidently, hoping that this time he
would answer. He spun around quickly. ‘I work like a horse. It seems that all
Berlin is making babies. They’re speeding up the production that lagged during
the war. But the product is a poor one, a cheap imitation of the real thing.’
Georg’s description of matters sacred to her made Frau Holbeck blush, and
Teresa’s eyes beseeched him to behave more prudently. He stopped smoking
furiously and spoke about infant mortality, birth control, the veneral diseases
the returning veterans had brought back, and even about the high rate of
illegitimate children born while the men were away at the front.28
A further contrast between the two worlds of the dark-haired and dark-skinned
Georg and Teresa’s family is described when he meets her brother Hugo, an anti-
Semitic ex-German officer — Oberleutnant — now unemployed, who served on
the Western Front and whose health was damaged in the trenches. Hugo has a
German shepherd dog, a pale ‘poker face’, a Prussian accent, and ‘his language
was dry and colorless. Each time a word failed him he cursed.’ This caricature of
a German candidate for joining the Nazis could have been borrowed from Artur
Szyk. Hugo and Georg dislike each other from the first moment. Although Georg
is a captain, Hugo does not respect him, calling him a ‘lousy kike’ in his absence.
Bearing in mind Singer’s plastic manner, Hugo and his father can also be seen as
a perfect reminder of the figures in the paintings of Georg Grosz (1893–1959)29
or Otto Dix (1891–1969),30 the famous artists and representatives of the radically
critical culture of the Weimar Republic. It is most probable that Singer saw the
retrospective exhibition of Grosz’s works in the Museum of Modern Art in New

York in 1941, for the affinity between his text and the anti-Nazi paintings of the
time is distinct.
Teresa’s mother, on the other hand, ‘although amazed that her daughter would
even consider defiling a bloodline that went back for generations’, now recalls all
the positive stereotypes about Jews:
Like most Berliners she had a high opinion of Jewish doctors. She was also
sure that like all Jews he made a lot of money. Naturally, she would have felt
differently if her husband were still alive and if a dowry were available for Teresa.
But under the circumstances, Teresa was quite lucky to become a doctor’s wife,
even though the doctor was a Jew. She also knew that Jewish husbands were
generous, did not beat their wives, didn’t drink or run around.31
Readers have a foreboding that the offspring of this marital bond, theoretically
bound to be a model of German-Jewish symbiosis, will turn out to be a fatal failure.
This premonition will of course be confirmed — that is how this novel works.
The torrent of the new age breaking into David’s world is described in the
‘showdown’ between father and son: David, Georg’s father, still hoped his son
would marry a respectable daughter of a genuine German Jew (‘excellent matches
with girls from the best homes in West Berlin’), for which there were good
prospects according to the marriage-broker in his synagogue, but his son does not
cooperate any more. Georg’s choice to ‘run around with a shiksa’ infuriated him.
After hours of quarreling with his stubborn son in Georg’s f lat ‘near Kaiserallee’,
in the aff luent western part of Berlin, far away from the ‘ghetto’, David dropped
back into the habits of a Jew in the Old World and ceased to be the presumedly
enlightened German Jew:
‘In that case, choose between the shiksa and your father’ [...]. When he reached
Grosse Hamburger Strasse he stopped to look at the sculptured features of
his idol, Moses Mendelssohn. ‘Rabbi Moshe’, he said to himself silently, ‘our
children are going away from us ... and their way leads to apostasy ...’32
Despite his father’s and her brother’s opposition, Georg and Teresa got married
after all — not under the wedding canopy in the synagogue, but at least he did
not convert as so many others did. Whereas Georg’s mother and sister remained in
contact with the young couple, especially after Teresa got pregnant, father and son
drifted physically and mentally more and more apart. David stubbornly kept away,
and after having been disappointed by the German Jews, he now often thought
about the Melnitz rabbi who was the cause of his emigration but had been right
after all:
He was not so positive now about the vileness of Melnitz and the spirituality of
Berlin. Deeply hurt by the ‘enlightened’ Jews of Berlin, David Carnovsky was
even more disappointed by its gentiles. During the war and now in the postwar
period he had suffered much degradation at their hands, even though he spoke
the purest German and kept himself immaculate. He was often mocked and
insulted, particularly when he went around collecting rents from his tenants in
Neukölln. Lawless bands of youths now roamed the capital’s streets screaming
for Jewish blood. They included not only the usual loafers and street brawlers
but also university students from good German homes. They swarmed over
streets named for Kant and Leibnitz and promised dire revenge against the
traitors to the Vaterland. [...] Sitting alone in his large book-lined study, he
realized that he was the last of a generation. No one would bother with the vast
library he had so painfully accumulated. The whole great Jewish world that had
taken thousands of years to evolve [...] all would be forgotten and wiped away.
After he died his treasures would be sold to a junk dealer or burned.33
A new era began while David was pondering over the past. His grandson was
born but, despite Georg’s hope that David would come to the boy’s circumcision,
the stubborn David did not show up, and so on the eighth day Georg circumcised
his son contrary to ritual and by himself.
To compensate Teresa for having made a Jew of her son, Georg named the boy
Joachim, after her father. Teresa added the middle name of Georg, and, just like
his names, the boy seemed a mixture of his two strains. His eyes were blue and his
complexion fair like the Holbecks, but his brow and hair were raven black and the
nose prominent and stubborn like a true Carnovsky.34
The boy was called Jegor — nomen est omen — and a substantial psychological
conf lict was indicated by the two opposing elements in his name. Alongside the
private developments in the Carnovsky family, Singer renders the gradual and
ominous political shifts in German society towards polarization between and
growing radicalization of the Nationalists’ ‘New Order’ represented by Hugo
Holbeck on the one hand and the leftist ‘Party’-people represented by Elsa Landau
on the other. Georg’s son grows up in this atmosphere, being attracted to Hugo
rather than to his parents and Jewish grandmother Leah, whom he ridicules. In
this respect Leah is a helpless figure from the past who never succeeded in finding
her place in the New World represented also by her own family. Singer sketches
the economic crisis which led to the political one. As the financial crisis broke out,
money and real estate became worthless. Teresa’s mother and Georg’s father sold
their houses, being lucky to still get foreign currency for them. At that time Georg
took Professor Halevy’s place as clinic director after the latter had suffered a stroke;
his practice was booming and he now bought a house in Grunewald, the most
exclusive area of Berlin, and was a frequent guest at the house of Rudolf Moser, the
inf luential newspaper publisher.35
Singer’s portrayal of the political events and of his characters is equally schematic:
Moser was a convert, and in his drawing room prominent Jews and gentiles met
regularly, among them Dr Siegfried Klein and his former classmate Dr Siegfried
Zerbe, now enemies, both failed poets — the one writing satire, the other ‘Teu
tonic mystical poems’, becoming the idol of ‘the jack-booted young fanatics of
the new National Socialist movement whom he proclaimed in his publications as
the future saviors of the Vaterland’.36 The cultivated atmosphere of the upper-class
social meetings rendered so well is marred by unresolved problems of identity, by
subliminal animosities and tensions, anti-Semitic resentments, envy, and sexual
promiscuity. The description of Moser himself by Singer oscillates between respect
and disdain: he is presented as extremely liberal and ‘was always diplomatic. This
was probably the reason he had risen so high in his profession. His credo was com
prom ise and moderation’;37 he, a convert and the publisher of a respected German
newspaper, must be more careful. Moser was very uneasy about extreme opinions
uttered in his drawing room.
The drift towards National Socialism is, as was to be expected, represented by
Hugo Holbeck, a typical member of Berlin’s lower class, who ‘tried a number of
occupations. He sold vacuum cleaners, he sold shoes, he was an agent for hunting
guns and held other jobs, none of which he was able to keep.’ He also founded
‘Ex-Oberleutnant Hugo Holbeck’s Imperial Riding Academy’ with the American
dollars (‘oyslendishe banknotn’) his mother handed to him, but when inf lation
came ‘no place was more deserted’ than that. Hugo visited his sister’s house where,
out of envy, he emptied his brother-in-law’s excellent cigarette box and French
cognac bottles. Besides, he spent much time with Jegor, who adored him. Hugo
told the boy:
Of course your papa is German. Wasn’t he born in this country? But he isn’t
completely German, because he was born a Jew, nicht wahr? But it has nothing
to do with you, lad. You are a pure German, a Holbeck. [...] He, Jegorchen,
would do better to learn how to shoot, ride a motorcycle, ride horseback, and
fence so that he would grow up to be a good soldier.38
And this became Jegor’s ideal — but not only his: Rebecca, Georg’s exalted sister,
also fell in love with that ‘tall blond officer who was so elegant, knightly, and
gallant. Even his inability to find himself seemed so romantic and tragic. ‘ “He is
like a big baby ... so artless in a naïve, Christian-like way”, she whispered.’ 39 Hugo,
feeling uncomfortable in the presence of such an intellectual young girl, usually f led
to a bar after having received some pocket money from his brother-in-law. In
Schmidt’s Bavarian Brauhaus on Potsdamer Bruecke he felt like himself again.
Here many ex-officers gathered, along with university students and their
girls. The beer was good, the sausages tasty and the sauerkraut sour and salty.
[...] When the students finished drinking and began their discussions, the
atmosphere grew lively and spirited. The men were here mostly of the new
breed. They spoke of the struggle for an aroused Germany, of revenge on
France and on the traitors from West Berlin, the Jewish money-bags who so
treacherously had thrust a dagger into the back of the brave army. Although
Hugo did not take part in the discussions, he enjoyed the brave talk.40
Elsa Landau, on the other hand, the political extremist on the left, has traits of Rosa
Luxemburg, striving against the ‘New Order’,41 which, agitating at that time in
the direction of the establishment of Hitler’s regime, was both the fruit and grave-
digger of the Weimar Republic. Elsa’s new experiences in her political activity
illustrate the growing political tensions between the parties. She finds no solace in
being a lonely woman: having sacrificed her love for Georg for the ‘Party’, she is
unhappy because she had not listened to her father’s warning: ‘Someday you will
regret your choice, but by then it will be too late ...’. And indeed, ‘She had traded
away her chance for happiness.’ 42 It is not clear whether Singer implies here that the
career Elsa chose was also doomed to fail because the place of a Jewish woman was
at her husband’s side, or whether he, now an anti-leftist, was making her mistaken
decision to pursue political engagement responsible for her failure. His female
figures are very ambivalent:
Each day brought new troubles for Dr. Elsa Landau, North Berlin’s representative
in the Great Reichstag. ‘Go back to Dragonerstrasse!’ the deputies of the New
Order [deputatn fun di oyfvakhndike layt] shouted. ‘Back to Jewish Switzerland
with your Galician friends, the profiteers, counterfeiters, speculators, and
Bolsheviks!’ Others dispatched even farther. ‘Go back to Jerusalem! No Jews in
a German Reichstag!’ [...] She got an even worse reception when she addressed
workers’ group in the provinces. Students, veterans, unemployed workers,
street loafers, drifters, Gymnasium graduates too lazy to look for jobs, and all
kinds of rowdies sent by the New Order whistled, brayed, hooted. [...] Besides
her Semitic origin, the youths in the boots also attacked Dr. Landau’s virtue.
‘Red Jew-whore!’ they chorused, drowning out her words.43
When the ‘New Order’, represented by men in boots and brown uniforms, took
over, Jegor was enthusiastic and joined the crowds after having bought the insignia
of the ‘New Order’. When the crowd sang ‘Wenn vom Judenblut das Messer spritzt
dann geht’s nochmal so gut, so gut’ [When the knife drips with Jews’ blood all is fine],
Jegor — a self considered ‘pure Holbeck’ — made no connection between the
Jewish blood they meant and the blood in his own veins. The Jewish holders of the
Iron Cross First Class were one by one harassed, attacked, and deprived of their
property. The Nazis forbade Georg to practise medicine, and Georg was reconciled
with his father (‘No more reason to be angry, Father. Now we are all Jews alike.’).44
Dr Siegfried Klein, the editor of the satirical weekly, was slain by the Nazis, Rudolf
Moser had to leave the country, and Dr Zerbe ‘had risen to a position of great
importance’ in the New Order, just as Hugo became a ‘respected member of the
New Order’ and lost interest in his nephew. Things reached their dramatic climax
when Jegor was degraded to a Jew by his teacher and later headmaster at the Goethe
Gymnasium (ironically named after the great German writer whose fame had been
spread by mainly Jewish admirers — women and men — since the beginning of the
nineteenth century),45 who, when officials from the Ministry of Education visited
the school, performed a demonstration of his favourite racial theory by using Jegor
as an example. In front of the large audience, he measured Jegor’s skull, concluding
that it was ‘Negroid-Semitic’, outweighing the Nordic component (blue eyes), and
finally obliged him to undress. When Jegor refused, a Storm Trooper tore off his
clothes and Jegor bit his hand. However, after being punched in the face, Jegor was
too weak to resist and was carried naked onto the stage — the audience roared and
Jegor was humiliated to the core and shocked. At home, he refused to tell what had
happened and fell seriously ill. His parents and grandmother Holbeck were taking
care of him — the latter ‘ashamed of her country, of her people, of her son Hugo,
who was a part of the New Order [vos iz geven eyner fun di naye layt], but especially of
herself for having harbored hatred against the Carnovskys and their kind. [...] Yes,
she had been tricked into voting for the New Order and she was ashamed.’46
The worlds of the Holbecks and the Carnovskys remain apart, despite the official
familiar bonds; this is also indicated by the use of language. For example, Georg
addresses his mother-in-law very formally as ‘gnedike froy’ (this distance is not so
clearly shown in the translation as ‘dear lady’, which omits the author’s following
remark that ‘er hot zi shir nisht ongerufn mekhuteneste’ [he just did not call her
by the familiar Yiddish expression for mother-in-law]).47 Although Jegor’s physical
health was restored, he was still in mental disarray — he was deeply depressed, and
his self-hatred for being a Jew had increased. Georg’s decision to leave the country
like some old Berlin acquaintances, relatives, and even Elsa Landau, who had
already emigrated to the United States, was mainly caused by his concern about his
son’s negative development, so incomprehensible to his parents.
As described in Book 3, nevertheless, the shadows of the Weimar Republic
followed them overseas, too, especially Jegor, the central figure in this last act of the
drama. Jegor’s adolescence makes him rebellious like most young people, but the
conf licts with his father are constant and extreme, and he means to insult him whom
he hates by calling him a ‘Jew’. His refusal to adapt to the new country and accept
the fact that he is a Jew is a grave problem for the whole family from the first day
after their arrival, when Jegor makes a scene while meeting their American relatives
(‘I’ll never come here again, I hate them!’). Georg Carnovsky interpreted this ‘first
day in the new country as an omen of the evil that hovered, ready to descend with
all its fury on the family Carnovsky’.48 This is what inevitably happens, as the
self-hating Jegor continues to consider himself a German, chooses to call himself
Joachim Georg Holbeck, and finds new friends among the German colony in
Yorkville where he settles down in a hotel. The tragedy takes its course when Jegor
writes to Dr Zerbe, begging him to help him return to his Vaterland, and meets
him, a mediocre nationalist poet, former guest of Rudolf Moser in Berlin, and
now Head of the Press Bureau of the German Diplomatic Corps. The propagandist
Zerbe, who ‘managed to win, if not sympathy [...] at least understanding for the
German people with every weapon in his intellectual arsenal’,49 is actually a minor
spy who uses Jegor as a defector ‘from the enemy camp’ in order to fight leftist
emigrants, especially Dr Elsa Landau, the former Reichstag deputy who never
stopped agitating against the ‘New Order’, thus undermining the harmless picture
of Nazi Germany as drawn by German propaganda in the United States. Towards
the end of the novel, events follow one another in quick session: being paid for
his efforts to spy by Zerbe, who outs himself as a homosexual, Jegor — now a
‘German’ — is accompanied by a ‘friend’, the brute Ernst Kaiser, lives in a rented
furnished room, goes to German movies, drinks his beer in Bavarian coffee houses,
attends the German youth club, has a first love affair with a German girlfriend, and
occasionally carries out pro forma spy work among the refugees in Washington
Heights whom he hates to visit. Jegor sometimes meets his mother secretly in the
street, but he lies to her and to Zerbe — because of a lack of substantial material, he
begins to fabricate information. After Zerbe fires him, Jegor, beaten and deserted
by his anti-Semitic German ‘friends’, roams some cities, looks unsuccessfully for
work, and returns penniless to Zerbe one night in order to demand from him what
he had promised at the beginning: to make Jegor ‘an Arian’ and help him go back
to Germany. This encounter ends in bloodshed because Zerbe tries to make love
to him and the disgusted Jegor kills him with an ebony figure in an act of self-
defence. This is a symbolic gesture of liberation and shaking off the shadows of Nazi
Germany, but, in a state of shock, Jegor shoots himself with Zerbe’s stolen pistol in
front of his parents’ house, to which he has returned. This symbolizes a return to his
Jewish roots and the end of his so painfully maintained efforts of Germanization.
The triptych-like structure of the novel, showing the three phases of immigration,
assimilation, and emigration, culminates in the realization that the German-Jewish
illusion of a ‘symbiosis’ is lost forever, just as Gershom Scholem had maintained
since as early as 1934.50 While Jegor’s father, with Teresa’s assistance as at the
beginning of their relationship, operates on him in order to save his life, Jegor and
his father are finally reconciled, but Georg knows: ‘Nothing would have surprised
him, so certainly had his intuition foretold this calamity.’ Singer leaves the ending
open — readers hope that Jegor stays alive and that the ‘New Order’ might end like
its representative, Dr Zerbe. Unfortunately, the author did not live to see it.
Notes to Chapter 12
1. Itsik Fefer, for instance, who attacked most of his Yiddish ‘capitalist’ contemporaries, called I.
J. Singer ‘a rabbinical pornographer’; cf. Sol Liptzin, A History of Yiddish Literature (New York:
Middle Village, 1972), p. 225.
2. Reception of the book has been limited to individual scopes of interest, as in the case of Sander
L. Gilman, ‘Madness and Racial Theory in I. J. Singer’s The Family Carnovsky’, Modern Judaism,
1 (1981), 90–100, who maintains that ‘of all Yiddish prose fiction dealing with the Nazi horror,
none seems, in retrospect, quite as f lawed as Israel Joshua Singer’s The Family Carnovsky. Written
in the United States in 1943, it appears to suffer even more than most novels of the early forties
which presented contemporary events from a myopia imposed on it by its place and time of
creation. Read superficially, the work seems to be an attack on the German Jews for having
brought the Holocaust upon their own heads through their apostasy.’ Gilman does, however,
defend the novel against superficial condemnation by pointing out Singer’s ‘adaption of two
paradigms, one literary, the family novel, and the other quasi-scientific, the nature of Jewish
racial identity as understood by contemporary medicine. Both paradigms are presented through
the medium of the fictionalized psychology of the central figures in the work. If Singer’s
restructuring of both the literary and the scientific paradigm is overlooked, as it has been in the
past, the novel is reduced to a work of questionable value. Taken in context, the work proves
to be one of the major Yiddish attempts to deal with the myth of race and its application to the
stereotype of the Jew.’
3. In 1981 another of the rare essays dedicated to this novel was published by Susan A. Slotnick with
a focus on urban spaces: ‘Concepts of Space and Society: Melnits, Berlin and New York in I. J.
Singer’s novel Di mishpokhe Karnovski’, German Quarterly, 54.1 ( January 1981), 33–43. She depicts
the German big city (Breslau or Berlin) as ‘a most suitable place for enlightenment’. And indeed,
such cities have traditionally attracted Jews hungry for and receptive to intellectual learning.
4. Joseph Sherman, ‘Singer, Israel Joshua’, in Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century, ed. by Sorrel
Kerbel (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003), p. 545.
5. David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 273.
6. Gennady Estraikh, ‘The Old and the New Together: David Bergelson’s and Israel Joshua Singer’s
Portraits of Moscow Circa 1926–27’, Prooftexts, 26 (2006), 53–78, with a translation of Singer’s
text into English. Nevertheless, Singer’s novel Comrade Nakhman (Khaver Nakhmen, published in
English translation as East of Eden in 1938) shows that he must have been negatively inf luenced
again, certainly by Stalin’s trials in the late 1930s, as it criticizes the extreme post-revolutionary
poverty and famine in Poland and Russia.
7. Anita Norich, The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (Bloomington: Indiana
8. Quoted in Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture
(New York: The Free Press, 2000), p. 140.
9. Liptzin, p. 264, claims: ‘The rise to fame of I. J. Singer beyond the boundaries of his native land
must be ascribed in large measure to the dramatization of his novels by Maurice Schwartz.’ But
it was also due to the fact that Yoshe Kalb was serialized both in Forverts and in the Warsaw Haynt
and translated shortly after its publication into English under the title The Sinner. Cf. Charles
A. Madison, Jewish Publishing in America: The Impact of Jewish Writing on American Culture (New
York: Sanhedrin Press, 1976), p. 201.
10. See for instance Stanisław Wygodzki’s afterword to the Polish edition of Yoshe Kalb (Israel Jozue
Singer, Josie Kałb (Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1961), p. 298).
11. Mikhail Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 (Stanford: Stanford
12. Dorothy Rabinowitz in Commentary, February 1970, argues that ‘though he is more often
compared with Thomas Mann than with Dickens, there is the Dickensian in him very much
more, in his insistence on the meaning of social detail, and on its moral meaning precisely’. Isaac
Bashevis Singer translated Mann’s Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) into Yiddish. Eric Pace, in
his obituary on Isaac Bashevis Singer (‘Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Laureate for His Yiddish
Stories, Is Dead at 87’, The New York Times, 26 July 1991, p. B5) maintains falsely that ‘he was
also the author of a Yiddish translation of Thomas Mann’s ’Buddenbrooks” ’.
13. The novel was first published in Amsterdam under the title Die Geschwister Oppenheim in 1933.
Singer could also have been inf luenced by Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Erfolg (Success, 1930),
which prophetically depicted the decline of German democracy and which included several
figures with real-life models, including Bertolt Brecht, Feuchtwanger himself, ministers, and
industrialists.
14. Aaron Zeitlin, Israel Joshua Singer’s friend and literary colleague, quoted his often repeated
remark before he left Poland: ‘We are lost people, Zeitlin, lost people.’ Cf. Norich, The Homeless
Imagination, p. 11.
15. Cf. Eva Schweitzer, Amerika und der Holocaust: Die verschwiegene Geschichte (Munich: Knaur,
2004), p. 59.
16. Anita Norich, ‘Israel Joshua Singer (1893–1944)’, in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers
and Their Work, ed. by S. Lillian Kremer, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 2002), ii, 1173–75.
17. Norich, The Homeless Imagination, p. 50.
18. Irvin Ungar, ‘Artur Szyk: Soldier in Art’, in Artur Szyk: Drawing Against National Socialism and
Terror, ed. by Katja Widmann and Johannes Zechner (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum,
2008), pp. 10–33 (exhibition catalogue of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin).
19. All English quotations are from I. J. Singer, The Family Carnovsky, trans. by Joseph Singer (New
York: Harrow Books, 1969), here p. 11. The English text is a somewhat simplified version of
the Yiddish original, interpreted by the translator as appropriate for an American non-Jewish
reader.
20. Ibid., p. 6.
21. Ibid., p. 7. This was the famous and often ridiculed slogan of liberal Jews, especially the German
Jews until the Holocaust; ever since it has been the motto of the Haskalah.
22. Norich, The Homeless Imagination, p. 11.
23. Singer, The Family Carnovsky, p. 20.
24. Ibid., p. 52.
25. Ibid., p. 67.
26. Ibid., p. 92 (italics in original).
27. Ibid., p. 84.
28. Ibid., p. 121.
29. Grosz, born in Berlin in 1893, was a Dadaist and in the 1920s a leader of the Neue Sachlichkeit
movement. He had his first American exhibition in 1931. Invited to the United States in 1932,
he emigrated to America in 1933 after the Nazis raided his atelier and his apartment, and became
a United States citizen in 1938. In 1937 his works were declared ‘entartet’, and two hundred and
eighty-five of his works were confiscated. In 1959 he returned to Berlin, where he died. He
was a sharp critic of post-World War I conditions in Germany. His paintings and drawings are
travesties of the types around him, the military, the bourgeoisie, and the underworld.
30. Dix (1891–1969), was a veteran wounded several times in World War I, and many of his paintings
deal with the brutality of war. Like Grosz, he is noted for his criticism of Weimar society. Along
with Georg Grosz he is considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit
movement (1918–33). He was one of the first professors of art who were expelled from their
universities after Hitler came to power in 1933 and lived in so-called inner emigration. In 1937
his paintings and drawings were declared degenerated art — war cripples (as in a painting by
that name of 1920, depicting in caricatured style four badly disfigured veterans of World War I,
then a familiar sight on Berlin’s streets) were a bad example for the new, Fascist ideal of men.
32. Singer, The Family Carnovsky, p. 122. This statement was true and not without irony because
most of Mendelssohn’s children and grandchildren converted to Christianity, for example his
oldest daughter Brendel, baptized Dorothea Friederike, mother of the Nazarene painters Jonas
and Philipp Veit, married the German Romantic writer Friedrich Schlegel in a second marriage;
his son Abraham, who converted to Protestantism and took on the name Bartholdy, was the
father of the musicians Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.
33. Ibid., pp. 128–29. This, written later, alludes of course to the Nazi burning of books at what was
then the Opernplatz in Berlin and in twenty-one other German cities in March 1933. It may
also be an echo of Heinrich Heine’s famous prophetic quote: ‘This was merely a prelude, where
books are burned at the end human beings will be burned’ (Almansor, 1823).
35. This figure is modelled on Rudolf Mosse, the German-Jewish publisher and philanthropist
(1843–1920) who at the time described by Singer was not alive any more. The type of a Jewish
converted trend-setting intellectual was not rare in Germany in those years.
37. Ibid., p. 157.
38. Ibid., pp. 163–64.
39. Ibid., p. 166.
40. Ibid., p. 168.
41. The ‘New Order’ was a topic of discussion in the United States at the time. See, for example,
this essay by Paul Mattick, most probably a Communist: ‘How New is the “New Order” of
Fascism?’, Partisan Review, 8.4 ( July/August 1941), 289–310.
42. Singer, The Family Carnovsky, pp. 170–71.
43. Ibid., pp. 168–69; Di mishpokhe Karnovski fun I. I. Zinger, in Spetsyele “Forverts”-oysgabe (New
York), 1943, p. 248.
45. This is the so-called Goethe-cult, spread by German Jews such as Rahel Levin-Varnhagen,
Hermann Cohen, Friedrich Gundolf, and so on. Cf. Wilfried Barner, Von Rahel Varnhagen bis
Friedrich Gundolf: Juden als deutsche Goethe-Verehrer, ed. by the Lessing-Akademie (Göttingen:
Wallstein Verlag, 1992).
47. Di mishpokhe Karnovski, p. 293.
49. Ibid., p. 288.
50. Cf. Gershom Scholem, Judaica 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), and elsewhere.
Ch a p t e r 13
v
Unkind Mirrors: Berlin in

Three Yiddish Novels of the 1930s
Mikhail Krutikov
In the short story ‘A Guide to Berlin’, which appeared in the Berlin Russian news
paper Rul’ around Christmas of 1925, Valdimir Nabokov pondered on the nature
of literary imagination: ‘I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to
portray ordinary objects as they will be ref lected in the kindly mirrors of future
times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity
will discern and appreciate in the far-off times.’1 The peaceful melancholic mood
of Nabokov’s ref lection, written when the worst times of post-war political and
economic upheaval and disastrous hyperinf lation had already been left behind, and
Berlin was apparently becoming a ‘normal’ European city, stands in stark contrast
to the images of Weimar Berlin in the Yiddish novels written after 1933.
It is only in the 1930s that the image of Berlin as a whole acquires clear and
distinct contours in the Yiddish literary imagination. Much of the literary output
of Berlin’s numerous Yiddish presses (there were over seventy Yiddish imprints,
although many of them published only a few titles) dealt with real or imagined
landscapes of eastern Europe, which the authors had left behind after the disastrous
cataclysms of 1914 to 1921. The best source of contemporary impressions of
Jewish Berlin are the reports and essays in the Polish and American Yiddish press,
written by numerous correspondents who congregated in coffee houses and clubs,
supporting the bohemian infrastructure with their honoraria in hard currency. Bal-
Makhshoves (Isidor Elyashev, 1873–1924), the doyen of Yiddish literary criticism
who had studied medicine in Berlin before World War I, was back in town as an
editor with the Klal-Farlag, an ambitious Jewish publishing enterprise affiliated with
Ullstein, one of three largest publishing conglomerates of the Weimar Republic. In
his Berlin essays Bal-Makhshoves sketched a collective portrait of new emigrants
who were streaming into central Europe from Soviet Russia:
These are people who escaped from blessed Russia, leaving behind houses,
breweries, factories and mills, nice furniture, Persian rugs, paintings and
statues. For years they had to rot there in various commissariats, going hungry
around the factories where workers had plundered machinery piece by piece;
had to do all kinds of tricks to bring home a pack of f lour or a salted herring;
had to come up with various schemes to obtain leather, heels, and laces to make
shoes; had to exchange sets of sackcloth clothing for garlic, parsley, or sugar.2
240 Mikhail Krutikov
Although physically many of these emigrants had already been in Berlin for a few
years, they were still haunted by the memories of the nightmares of wars, pogroms,
revolutions, and terror that they had had to endure in eastern Europe. This state
of mind is masterfully reproduced in the short stories of David Bergelson, whose
characters are so engrossed in their past that they barely notice the Berlin reality
around them. The action of these stories takes place in the transitory spaces of
pensions and rented f lats, which are, as Marc Caplan points out, ‘the ideal setting
for stories describing the spiritual, psychological, and linguistic homelessness
of displaced East European Jews living in Weimar-era Berlin’.3 In Bergelson’s
stories the large city of Berlin is reduced to small rooms, narrow corridors, closed
courtyards, short stretches of streets, and public parks. Sasha Senderovich describes
Bergelson’s Berlin as a ‘space of uncertainty in which familiar models of interaction
between displaced persons — and between displaced writers and readers — fail’.4
The city serves as a stage set for the epilogues of dramas that started in faraway
places long ago and under very different circumstances.
The broader picture of Berlin as a bustling metropolis with its own tensions and
pressures emerges later, as its former residents and visitors, who have moved to
other places, recreate their past in their literary imagination. Viewed in retrospect,
Weimar Berlin gains in size and depth as the actual Berlin experience turns into
memories which are ordered and narrated from a certain, usually ideologically
motivated, vantage point. These narratives are put together from fragments of
the authors’ reminiscences mixed with information acquired from other sources,
written or oral. The overall direction of these narratives is predetermined by the
fatal turn taken by the course of German history in January 1933.
The Ostjude as a Model and a Scarecrow: Reality and Symbolism in

Grenadir-shtrase
The liberal Jewish bourgeoisie, which invested its energy and resources in the
economic and cultural development of the German Empire, had a special attach
ment to its capital. The rapidly growing metropolis was the beacon which showed
the backward provinces the way towards modernity and progress. Walter Rathenau
argued, on the eve of World War I, that the world was no longer divided along
national borders; instead, the division ran between the cosmopolitan network of
big cities and the backward provinces: ‘In their day-and-night play, the world
cities throw balls to one another: they exchange their moods, fashions, passions,
favourites; their pleasures, joys, and arts, their sciences and works, and they find
pleasure in this exchange.’5 But urbane and cultured Jews such as Rathenau, who
imagined themselves as the vanguard of the new civilization, had their own
backward provincial ‘other’ embodied in the collective image of Ostjudentum, whose
long shadow reached the very heart of modern Berlin. The ‘unwelcome brothers’
from eastern Europe began to f lock to Berlin in the late nineteenth century with
the first wave of emigration from Russia as peddlers and petty merchants, servants,
students, and transit migrants. Their presence in Berlin and other big German cities
was perceived by the acculturated German Jews, many of whom were children and
grandchildren of migrants from smaller provincial communities, as a threat to their
Unkind Mirrors: Berlin in Yiddish Novels 241
newly achieved status as ‘Germans’, as Ritchie Robertson explains: ‘Feeling their

own position in Germany to be precarious, they transferred their aggression from
the sacrosanct Germans to the poor Eastern Jews who represented an image of the
Jew from which Westerners wished to dissociate themselves.’6 The agitation against
Ostjuden was, as the prominent German Zionist Rabbi Joachim Prinz put it, ‘fear
of the mirror, fear of the past’.7
The complex attitude of German Jews to Ostjuden, which combined fear and
admiration, has been explored in great detail by social and cultural historians.
They drew their information primarily from German-language sources, which
expressed the opinions prevalent among German Jews and non-Jews. At the same
time, eastern European Jewish intellectuals, writers, and artists formed their own
view of the problem and shaped their image of the German Jews, which can be
found in Yiddish publications around the world. One of the works dealing with the
issue of Ostjudentum as the identity problem of German Jewry is the Yiddish novel
Grenadir-shtrase by Fishel Schneersohn (or Fishl Shene’urson, 1887–1958). Born into
the prominent Hasidic family closely related to the Lubavicher Rebbe, Schneersohn
was a child prodigy. He received his rabbinic ordination at the age of sixteen, passed
the high school examination at the age of eighteen, and went on to study medicine
at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin. He spent the war years in Russia, but
in the early 1920s he was back in Berlin. He developed his own psychological theory
of traumatic experience, which had its roots in Hasidic teaching about the spiritual
core of the human psyche, and applied it in practice by treating young victims of
war violence and pogroms in Poland. He lived in Berlin, Warsaw, and New York,
and. from 1937 on, in Tel Aviv. Along with numerous articles on philosophical and
medical themes in several languages, he wrote a number of novels which dealt with
spiritual problems of modern life.
Grenadir-shtrase, subtitled ‘A Novel from Jewish Life in Germany’, appeared in
Warsaw in 1935 with the imprint of the leading literary periodical Literarishe bleter.
It tells the story of the spiritual quest of an assimilated German-Jewish intellectual,
which is symbolically represented as his life-journey towards Grenadierstraße.
Located in the Scheunenviertel, a poor area east of central Berlin which had been
popular since the late nineteenth century among Jewish immigrants from eastern
Europe, Grenadierstraße acquired a derogatory significance among German Jews as
a collective label for poor, backward, and traditional Ostjudentum. Schneersohn turns
this negative stereotype on its head into a kind of holy grail, a symbol of authentic
and ancient oriental Jewish spirituality, which is hidden at the very heart of the
modern western metropolis. But, somewhat paradoxically, the physical locality
has no real presence in the novel. In spite (or maybe because) of his fascination
with Grenadierstraße, the novel’s protagonist, Johann Ketner, never actually visits
the area until the final episode of the novel, where he and his wife accidentally
witness the arrival of a Hasidic rebbe from Galicia at the Alexanderplatz station
and then decide to follow the crowd of his excited followers who take him to
Grenadierstraße.
This encounter occurs at some point in the early 1920s and is described both in
the opening and the closing chapters of the novel, between which the entire story of
Ketner’s spiritual rises and falls is sandwiched. His spiritual awakening is triggered
by his mother’s nervous breakdown, a ‘neshome-katastrofe’, which develops into
a mental illness and eventually leads to her death. Reinterpreting the Freudian
concept of the Oedipus complex, Schneersohn highlights the spiritual rather than
the libidinal aspect of the bond between mother and son. Instead of representing the
object of her son’s suppressed desire, Johann’s mother embodies Jewish spirituality,
oriental in origin, which has been suppressed by her rationalist and pragmatic
husband, a successful banker who personifies the westernized German Jewry. The
father has internalized the Prussian values of order, discipline, and service to the
nation, combining them with the ‘liberal’ notion of Judaism, purged of all spiritual
meaning. The liberal Jews of his circle demonize Grenadierstraße as the main threat
to their secure status in German society, which they have achieved by the hard
labour of acculturation. Hans’s mother comes from a Hamburg family with eastern
European roots and has been never able to adjust to the stern Prussian ways of her
husband, but was too weak to protest.
The traumatic childhood experience of witnessing his mother’s mental and
physical deterioration under the pressure of the Prussian sense of order, which was
exacerbated by her inhumane medical treatment and complete isolation from the
world, has a strong effect on Johann’s character. His rebellion against his father’s
austere ‘liberalism’ fits the paradigm described by Carl Schorske in his study of fin-
de-siècle Vienna as the ‘emergence of psychological man from the wreckage of the
old culture’.8 Yet Schneersohn’s interest is not purely psychological. He is searching
for the new spiritual man whose personality would combine western psychological
complexity with oriental spiritual depth. To depict this transformation in his novel,
he draws on the teaching of the Habad school of Hasidism, which he modifies in
accordance with modern psychological theory.
Johann’s first encounter with Russian Jews takes place at the University of Berlin’s
faculty of medicine, a popular destination for hundreds of Jewish students excluded
from higher education at home by the restrictive admission quotas for Jews.
Johann admires their passion for learning, which has its roots in their traditional
upbringing, but becomes gradually alienated from them by their aggressive and
intolerant politics. However, when the Jewish students from Russia are attacked
by German Christian students in an outburst of violence against the dominance of
‘foreigners’ in German universities, he comes out firmly on the side of the Ostjuden.
Unlike other German-Jewish students who want to stay away from the conf lict,
Johann recognizes that this attack against Russian students is an early indicator of
the surge in anti-Semitism which will eventually hit German Jews as well.
Unsatisfied by the positivist scientific approach to nature, Johann switches from
medicine to the humanities, hoping that he will better understand the world around
him and find his own place in it. He meets Helena, his cousin on his mother’s
side, who becomes his substitute mother and protects him from depression and
loneliness. Financially secure thanks to the family wealth, the young couple sets
off on a journey around the world, which gets interrupted by the outbreak of the
war. Back home Johann suffers a nervous breakdown and becomes hospitalized,
but is brought back to life by Helena’s caring love. When the economic crisis wipes
away his fortune, he begins to earn his living by portrait-painting. At his personal
exhibition he displays a Symbolist painting which reproduces the mysterious vision
of a caravan travelling through an endless desert that he saw during his journey to
the Orient. The desert symbolizes ‘naked eternity’, where there is no distinction
between good and evil, whereas the caravan signifies faith as the only way of
overcoming the total collapse of civilization after the war.
Other characters in the novel (most of them are members of Johann’s extended
family) personify, in a rather schematic way, various intellectual and ideological
trends popular among German Jews. The father’s side collectively represents the
‘German’ option. Cousin Fritz (partly modelled on Walter Rathenau), an extra
ordinarily gifted and ambitious entrepreneur, wants to beat the Germans on their
own turf by excelling both in study and in sports. He marries the daughter of an
aristocratic Prussian noble family, for which he is nearly killed by her enraged
nationalist brother and his former friend. Johann’s uncle is a champion of the
Frankfurt school of Neo-Orthodoxy, which he regards as a way of combining
Judaism with European modernity. Echoing Hermann Cohen’s critique, this uncle
argues that the more traditional eastern European Judaism is too rigid and unable
to adjust to modernity, and therefore most of the Jewish students who come to
Germany from eastern Europe abandon religion altogether and turn into political
radicals.9 The mother’s side of the family represents the eastern European opposition
to the German (more precisely, Prussian) kind of Judaism followed by the father.
Johann’s uncle and father-in-law Oskar Grinshteyn is a left-wing Hamburg lawyer
who reaffirms his loyalty to his eastern European roots by joining the Zionist
movement; his rebellious son Richard becomes a radical socialist who comes to hate
his wealthy cousin Johann for taking away his beloved sister, mirroring the conf lict
between Fritz and his German brother-in-law.
The option of complete assimilation by way of adopting a liberal world-view is
exemplified by a professor of anthropology, the son of converted Jews, who proclaims
the essential equality of all cultures regardless of their degree of ‘civilization’. But
being a great expert in all kinds of ‘primitive’ cultures, he has no interest in con
temporary Jews. Traditional eastern European Yiddishkayt is represented by the
Graniver Rebbe, who once visited a German Orthodox synagogue dressed in
German dress and passed his scathing verdict: ‘This synagogue is a true photo
graph of Yiddishkayt — not a hair is missing, only there is no life. A beautiful
photog raph, the Almighty will want to have it.’10 That same rebbe appears in the
opening episode of the novel which has such a strong effect on Johann and Helena.
The weak rebbe vehemently protests when Johann attempts to photograph him at
the Alexanderplatz station, a gesture which acquires significance in the light of the
great popularity of photography in Weimar Germany, particularly among Jews. The
rebbe’s dislike of photography finds its distant echo in Walter Benjamin’s statement
in his famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’: ‘In
photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line.’11
Baym opgrunt: Inf lation and the Rise of Nazism

Lecturing at Princeton in 1942, Thomas Mann declared that ‘a straight line runs
from the madness of the German inf lation to the madness of the Third Reich’.
Commenting on this statement, Bernd Widding explains: ‘For Mann, people’s
longing for irrational revenge and for adventures beyond the codes of a civilized
society was born during the inf lation and could later be lived out without any
reprisal during the Nazi period.’12 Elias Canetti went even further in this direction,
arguing that the hyperinf lation of 1922 to 1923 provided a blueprint for the Final
Solution:
In its treatment of the Jews National Socialism repeated the process of inf lation
with great precision. First they were attacked as wicked and dangerous, as
enemies; then they were more and more depreciated; then, there not being
enough in Germany itself, those in the conquered territories were gathered in;
and finally, they were treated literally as vermin, to be destroyed with impunity
by the million.13
On the other hand, the historian Gerald Feldman warns us against reading the
artistic representations of inf lation as objective evidence, arguing that writers and
intellectuals were one of the groups which directly suffered from inf lation: ‘Little
wonder, therefore, that most of the writings on the inf lation concentrate on prob
lems of moral and social decline, the foibles of the new rich and the plight of the
middle class’.14 He points out that today’s historians view German inf lation as a more
complicated and nuanced phenomenon than is apparent from its literary treatment.15
Whereas Mann and Canetti spoke about the link between inf lation and Nazism
at a time when the deadly nature of National Socialism was already fully revealed,
the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch set out to explore this cause-and-effect relationship
in a novel which he began writing right after the Nazi electoral victory. Baym
opgrunt (At the Abyss) was an ambitious (if not very successful) attempt to reach out
to an international audience and alert it to the dangerous evolution of German
society after World War I.16 Written in a studio designed in the style of a besmedresh
(an eastern European Jewish study house) in the comfort of the newly acquired Villa
Sholom in Nice, the novel conveys the sense of confusion and anxiety of that time.
By the early 1930s Asch had already established his international reputation as the
foremost Yiddish novelist with his epic novels, such as the trilogy about the Russian
Revolution and Tilim-yid (Salvation). A best-selling author in many languages, he
even received a decoration from the Polish state for his descriptions of the ‘Polish
landscape’ (which stirred up controversy in Yiddish literary circles).17 But Hitler’s
victory in 1933 was a painful reminder of the fundamental vulnerability of Jews in
Europe, even though the scope of the coming catastrophe was still far from clear.
Asch had many friends among German writers, and now some of them, such as
Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, and Franz Werfel, came to Nice as refugees, whereas
Gerhart Hauptmann, whom Asch greatly respected, went back to Germany on
Hitler’s invitation. Stefan Zweig wrote from London in September 1935 to his wife
Fridericke that Asch ‘seems well but below the surface, like all of us, is a little (or
very much) upset; also only wants to work, in order to save himself from life’.18
Fig. 20. The first instalment of Sholem Asch’s novel

Baym opgrunt (At the Abyss) in Forverts, 2 February 1935
Berlin during the hyperinf lation period of 1922 to 1923 provided a fitting
setting for a large-scale social novel aimed at exposing the roots of the catastrophic
development. The novel opens in a Ukrainian shtetl ravaged by the Civil War,
where we meet Aron Yudkevich, a shady petty dealer who is ready to do business
with anybody, including Petlyura’s pogromists. He escapes from the Red Army to
Danzig, where he quickly learns the secrets of financial speculation and procures
himself a wife by buying her from his partner, a hapless Hasidic businessman who
gets entangled in a cunningly designed financial arrangement. Yudkevich then
moves to Berlin, where he establishes himself as a real-estate speculator under the
cover of a respectful Bodenheimer firm, which he gradually buys from its German-
Jewish owners. But the business success brings him no happiness in family life.
Esther, once a modest Hasidic wife with whom he fell in love in Danzig, turns
into a wanton and cruel dominatrix. Following the Berlin fashion, Yudkevich
encourages her to open a salon, which is filled by shady bohemian characters,
mostly immigrants from Russia. Unable to satisfy his wife sexually, Yudkevich has
to endure all kinds of humiliation from her and her various friends and lovers. As a
sort of psychological compensation for his inferiority complex, he develops a pecu
liar sympathy for communism, presenting his speculative activity as a fight against
the capitalist economy. Yet at the height of his financial success, which is achieved
by reckless borrowing at high interest rates and buying real estate with the rapidly
depreciating mark, the monetary reform suddenly arrives, which stabilizes the
German currency and ruins speculators like Yudkevich.
Hans Bodenheimer, the positive counterpart to Yudkevich, is a more complex and
ambivalent personality. He is the only heir to the banking firm which had amassed
its capital under the leadership of his grandfather Rudolf by financing the real estate
boom in Berlin’s western part in the late nineteenth century. Hans’s father Max,
the current head of the firm, is a more reticent type than Rudolf, concerned about
preserving the firm’s reputation rather than increasing its profits. Hans’s mother
Liesl comes from a patrician family from Hamburg. In order to marry her beloved
Max, she had to comply with his parents’ condition and convert to Judaism, but her
attitude to religion and life has remained decidedly German Protestant. Max’s two
brothers typify two different intellectual attitudes common among the second and
third generation of the urban German-Jewish bourgeoisie. Heinrich is a publicist
who extols in his articles the glory of Germany and Christianity, yet refuses to have
himself baptized. A self-hating Jew, he neglects his devoted Jewish wife and pursues
a platonic affair with an ‘Aryan’ actress who drains him of his family money. But
his strategy of ‘identification with the aggressor’ ends in failure, for he is no longer
able to accommodate his liberal German patriotism with intellectual Nazism, a new
fashion in the salon of his beloved actress. Max’s other brother Adolf is a failed artist
turned connoisseur and collector of modern art. He began collecting the French
post-Impressionists in Paris before the war and became ‘one of the founders of the
Berlin Secession and a pioneer of German Expressionism’ (a trait he shares with the
prominent German-Jewish art dealer Paul Cassirer). But his Paris collection was
confiscated by the French government after the outbreak of the war, and since then
he has been living in bohemian poverty surrounded by a few exquisite cherished
art pieces and oblivious to the harsh reality of post-war Germany.
Hans’s sense of identity is complicated by the fact that he was baptized as a child
because his parents wanted to spare him from difficulties. Now he has to struggle
with this ambiguous identity in the situation of increasing social, economic, and
ethnic polarization in post-war German society. Educated in the liberal Protestant
tradition, he takes his Christianity seriously as moral and spiritual guidance, which
leads him to identification with the Jews as the victims of racist persecution by
the emerging Nazi movement. He finds his soulmate in Lotte, the daughter of
an impoverished Prussian Junker and the owner of one of the houses built by the
Bodenheimers. Lotte and Hans search for a ‘neutral’ place where they could live
free from the pressures of family and society, but their happy life together is cut
short. Soon after Lotte discovers that she is pregnant, she is murdered by her Nazi
brother, who cannot forgive her for living with a Jew. Driven by despair, Hans goes
to seek death in Munich, the ‘asylum for all the patriotic murderers of Germany’,
but recovers his spiritual balance after a conversation with Adolf (E 490). In the final
episode we see Adolf leaving for Paris on the same train as Yudkevich and his wife,
which probably ref lects Asch’s view of France as a ‘safe haven’ for Jews in Europe
at that time.
As several critics pointed out, Baym opgrunt is written in the same epic style as
Farn mabl (Three Cities, 1927–32), a trilogy about the Russian Revolution — the
first Yiddish book to become an international bestseller. Taking Tolstoy’s War and
Peace as his model, Asch strives to create a broad collective portrait of a nation
against the backdrop of a large historical cataclysm, interlacing episodes from the
life of different social groups with lengthy moralistic and philosophical digressions.
Similarly to Tolstoy, Asch introduces some real historical figures into his fictive
world, creating memorable, even though clearly biased, images of the people who
captured the popular imagination of the time.19 The most prominent among these
characters is the industrial and financial magnate Hugo Stinnes (1870–1924), the
sinister ‘man with the black beard’:
This one man controlled enterprises which might have served for thousands
of industrialists, might have given employment to hundreds of thousands of
middle-class clerks and draughtsmen, and could have fed millions of workmen.
He had the power of a State within a State. (E 121)
In Asch’s interpretation, Stinnes obtains free rein over Germany after the murder
of Walter Rathenau, the only man who could offer a viable liberal alternative to
the conservative alliance of the industrialists with the Nazis. Rathenau’s death in
June 1922 sealed the fate of Germany, opening way to power for Hitler and his
followers. The hyperinf lation is presented as a part of Stinnes’s megalomaniac plan
to take over the entire German economy by manipulating the nationalist feelings
of the population.20
The growth of Berlin as the imperial capital created a great business opportunity
for many Jewish entrepreneurs like Rudolf Bodenheimer:
At the end of the nineteenth century Berlin was growing at incredible speed
and spreading on every side. To the west rose the long, wide avenues which
begin behind the Gedächtnis Kirche. The Kurfürstendamm was extending to
Charlottenburg. At the center of the city, in the Leipzigerstrasse, enormous
edifices were erected such as had never been seen before. Round the Alex
anderplatz a whole working-class quarter rose from the ground. New suburbs
appeared round the Tiergarten. (E 92–93)
Asch is critical of the eclectic architectural style which projected the aggressive
impudence of the new empire but also anticipated future collapse:
Everywhere rose colossal edifices with enormously huge cornices, false pillars,
countless useless angles, bow windows set at a dizzy height, aggressively
thrusting towers. [...] Anyone passing beneath one of these cornices could not
help feeling that the whole thing must fall upon him in a moment. (E 93)
The architectural style of Wilhelmine Berlin ref lects the ‘conservative in principle,
liberal in spirit’ world-view of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie. This special
German-Jewish variety of liberalism combines excessive self-esteem with a sense of
insecurity vis-à-vis the Germans:
The Jews of that time, indeed, probably outdid the rest of Germany in
chauvinism, because they were not yet sure of their newly won freedom and
had not acquired the courage to formulate their own opinions and take up their
own attitudes. (E 94)
The Bodenheimer family, as the name suggests, has deep roots in the German soil.
Their origins are in the Rhineland area, where one can still see ‘huge [ Jewish]
gravestones built into the walls of ancient farmhouses’, an image which meta
phorically conveys the precariousness of the German-Jewish symbiosis. Contrary to
the provincial Germans, whose collective mentality remains essentially medieval and
therefore susceptible to mass hysteria, the German Jews form the most progressive
and dynamic element in German society. The founder of the Bodenheimer firm,
Reb Samuel Löb, came to Berlin after 1848, when ‘a stream of Jews began to f low to
the Prussian capital from the Rhineland and the provinces of Posen and Pomerania’
(E 90). Reaping the fruits of the hard labour of their grandfather and father, the
third generation of the Bodenheimers live comfortably in modern Berlin. To
maintain their token Jewishness they still meet in Max’s new villa in the Tiergarten
every Friday night for a family dinner, and in the hard post-war years the formal
decorum covers up the scarcity of food. The ironic depiction of a formal dinner on
ersatz products brings to mind Thomas Mann’s masterful portrayal of the inf lation
Villenproletariat in his novella ‘Unordnung und frühes Leid’ (‘Disorder and Early
Sorrow’, 1925) as a possible source of inspiration for Asch. On one of these occasions
Max introduces Yudkevich to the family as a new shareholder. For Yudkevich,
the association with the Bodenheimers offers not only access to their money and
connections, but also an entry into the world of German culture and the German
economy, which he regards as the epitome of prestige, success, and stability. A
genuine respect for the Bodenheimers does not prevent him from taking over their
firm, while preserving its name as a sign of solidity, when the old-fashioned and
overcautious Max disagrees with the strategy of reckless borrowing and acquisition
that involves betting on the high depreciation of the mark.
The property built by Rudolf Bodenheimer in the Kurfürstendamm area
includes a large apartment block on Rankestraße, which serves as a location for
several family stories in the novel that exemplify the major social trends in post-war
Berlin society. The current owner of the house, the Prussian Junker and independent
Goethe-scholar von Sticker, has bought it from the Bodenheimer Bank with the
money he received by marrying the widow of an East Prussian landowner. Neither
his economic connection with the Bodenheimers nor his refined cultural interests
diminish his innate anti-Semitism. When he finds out that his daughter Lotte has
befriended Hans Bodenheimer, he refuses to ever let her back home. Hans’s parents,
on the other hand, feel f lattered by this friendship, which offers a chance for him to
marry into the nobility. One of von Sticker’s tenants, the mechanic Albert Spinner,
is a typical member of the Berlin proletariat. A Social Democrat not so much by
conviction as by his class status, he ‘took his ideas of the current state of the world
from his party newspaper’ (E 143). But, as his economic situation deteriorates,
so does his trust in the Social Democrat government, and he begins to vacillate
between two extreme ideologies, Bolshevism and Nazism, which attract him — as
well as many other workers — with their straightforward explanations and clear
images of the enemy.
Whereas the large solid house block on Rankestraße represents a cross-section of
Berlin’s Gentile society, exposing the deep layers of class and racial prejudice as the
thin veneer of modern liberalism and socialism cracks and peels under the pressures
of inf lation, the Jewish characters reside in fragmented, niche-like places, which
ref lect their precarious situation in the German capital. Adolf lives in a small studio
on Kurfürstenallee in Charlottenburg,21 keeping minimal contact with the outside
world, while his brother Heinrich spends most of his time in the salon of his actress
friend. Even the comfortable Tiergarten villa of Max and Liesl offers no security
and protection when Hans leaves the family to be with Lotte and Max commits
suicide after his bank has been taken over by Yudkevich. The first encounter of
Hans and Lotte takes place on the grand premises of the Zirkus Busch, where they
both come to audition for the chorus in the grandiose Electra production by the
celebrity theatre director Gotthard (an ironic reference to Max Reinhardt).22 The
choice of the play might have some symbolic bearing on the story, perhaps by way of
contrasting the two tragedies: whereas Electra inspired her brother Orest to murder
their mother in order to avenge the death of their beloved father Agamemnon,
Lotte is murdered by her brother after being expelled by her parents.
With the rise of hyperinf lation the centre of business activity shifts away from
the central areas to the less glamorous districts such as Kreuzberg. The modest
cafe Baym libn Oygustin on Oranienstraße,23 known by its inhabitants as the
‘Kurfürstendamm des Ostens’,24 serves as a ‘Black Exchange’:
In the café an international clientele came and went. All nations without
distinction sent their contingents to this great gathering of profiteers. Not only
were all races and all religions represented there, but one might even assert that
all vocations, all professions, all classes were represented as well. (E 147)
Although Kreuzberg at that time had a significant eastern European Jewish
population, Jews, contrary to the widespread stereotype, are not conspicuous in
the cafe’s black market, which is controlled by a German war veteran with an Iron
Cross.
In the final chapters of the novel the action moves to Munich, which is presented
as the medieval dark shadow of modern Berlin. Bavaria is portrayed as home to
the dark medieval forces of nationalism and reaction waiting for their revenge
over modernity behind the Gothic facades of quaint old buildings. To stress this
message Asch employs imagery from Peretz’s Symbolist play ‘A Night in the Old
Marketplace’:
The streetlamps lit up the innumerable niches and arches in which stood
the menacing figures of Teutonic kings armored in coats-of-mail from head
to foot. In that dim light they looked as if they had come to life again, as
if they were emerging from their remote past to inaugurate the dark ages
of medievalism once more on earth. The obsessive hatred of Jews which
dominated the German Middle Ages remained frozen in stone waiting for the
‘Death’s Prophet’ to come and bring them back to life, and now they ‘all come
to loose the Middle Ages on earth again. (E 506)
Not mentioned by name (perhaps in compliance with the disclaimer that all
characters are purely imagined), Hitler appears as the sinister figure called ‘Death’s
Prophet’ who addresses a crowd of his supporters during the failed Munich putsch
in November 1923:
Here was a man for whom the times were ripe: all he had to do was to wait, and
Time would realize for him every one of his fantastic dreams, hatching them
out of the hatred and despair that filled mankind. (E 500).
The strength of Nazism lies in the bond between the leader, the ‘wooden Golem’,
and the crowd, which readily falls under his spell. The Nazi ideology attracts
individuals from different walks of life: Lotte’s evil brother, lieutenant Wolfgang
von Sticker, a Prussian Junker who refuses to recognize Germany’s defeat in the war
and keeps fighting against external and internal enemies, embodied by the French
occupying forces in the Ruhr and the Jewish liberals in Berlin; Dr Schreiner, a salon
intellectual and an ‘expert’ on Judaism, who preaches a return to German pagan
worship as a liberation from the two thousand years of Jewish dominance under
the veil of Christianity; as well as a simple Berlin postman who dreams of robbing
Jews and distributing their wealth among the ‘Aryans’.
By linking the rise of Nazism to inf lation Asch suggests a parallel between
Yudkevich and Hitler, which might strike a contemporary reader as improper:
A whole generation had run off the rails; a stray Jew from the East, for instance,
had eventually been able to strip Hans’s father of his whole inheritance. In the
same way, the man on the platform was cashing in on the inf lation. (E 500)
They are, in the words of the Yiddish critic Shmuel Niger, the ‘devils who play
their dark play in the bog of inf lation and catastrophe’.25 The inf lation intensifies
the struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, sharpening the
contrast between the black and the white:
Yudkevich is a shadow, whose task is to make even brighter the light of Hans
Bodenheimer. [...] Yudkevich has been seduced by Satan and is drawn to the
dark abyss [opgrunt], but the novel Baym opgrunt and its author are fighting against
Satan.26
It seems, however, that Niger is too harsh on Yudkevich, who loses his infernal
character with the end of inf lation and turns into a hapless middle-aged refugee
Ostjude who is driven from one European country to another. This undermines any
parallel between Yudkevich and Hitler, who only begins to gather momentum after
the end of inf lation.
Baym opgrunt, the longest of Asch’s many novels, is far from being his best. Louis
Kronenberger opened his lukewarm review in The New York Times by comparing
this book with Three Cities as a ‘genuine social novel, a novel which aims at more
than the drama of individual lives’, but ended with the conclusion that ‘it is simply
not in the same class with it as fiction’, because ‘if the moral note of the book is
vibrant, the human note is shrill’. 27 The major f law of the novel was aptly captured
by Niger: ‘This is a book that deserves to have been written with more care; this
is a novel that would have deserved more effort being put into its refinement from
the point of view of language and style.’28 Niger lists examples of poor writing and
points out inconsistencies in composition and character portraits, but concludes
that all these defects are of little relevance to the main theme of the novel, which
is represented in a concentrated form through the struggle of the forces of light
and the forces of darkness as personified by Hans and Yudkevich. The simplicity
of Yudkevich as a literary character can be attributed to the role he plays the
Manichaean scheme of the novel. As Kronenberger remarks, another novelist, more
inclined to social criticism, such as I. J. Singer, would have developed Yudkevich
into a full-bodied character, but ‘Asch, the moralist, the humanitarian, the man
of ideas, turns from this crude if powerful symbol of capitalism’ to the spiritual
character of Hans, shifting ‘the emphasis from the economics of the inf lation to
the ethics’.29
Like some other ambitious Yiddish novelists (Sholem Aleichem among them),
Asch is out of his depth when he tries to portray the ‘high society’ in the drawing
rooms of villas of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie or in bohemian artistic salons.
One can only regret that he chose to ignore the milieu of Yiddish-speaking
immigrants in Berlin, which he knew better and where he could demonstrate his
impressive artistic skills by creating lively and convincing characters rather than
schematic stereotypical figures of German Jews who speak a cumbersome and
unidiomatic Yiddish.30 Asch probably wrote Baym opgrunt with a broader, German
and English audience in mind, and wanted to avoid what he perceived as Jewish
‘parochialism’. Today this novel, like some of his other works, has historical rather
than aesthetic value as a piece of evidence from that precarious moment in European
history when the direction of its fatal turn towards a coming catastrophe, the size
of which was not yet clear, had already become apparent. Unlike Tolstoy, who
created his epic about the Napoleonic wars from the safe distance of post-Reform
Russia, Asch hastened to capture the precarious atmosphere of Berlin during the
hyperinf lation year from an extremely volatile vantage point — at the time of the
consolidation of Nazi power. His artistic weakness itself may be a valuable witness
to the confusion and perplexity among European Jewish intellectuals and artists in
the face of looming destruction.
Desire, Jealousy, and Communism: Berlin’s Jewish Bohemia in Meir

Wiener’s Unfinished Novel
If the pre-Weimar past has a strong presence both in Schneersohn’s and Asch’s
novels, providing a clear chronological framework, it is conspicuously absent from
the novel which Meir Wiener (1893–1941) was writing in the Soviet Union during
the 1930s. Born in Cracow into a traditional middle-class family and educated at
the universities in Basle and Zurich, Wiener spent the years after World War I in
Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, where he moved in the circles of Yiddish, Hebrew, and
German literati. He made a name in the German literary world with his translations
from medieval Hebrew poetry, essays on Jewish mysticism, and critical articles on
contemporary German-Jewish literature. In Berlin, where he most likely worked
for Ullstein and the Klal-Farlag as an editor in charge of Jewish literature, he met
the Soviet émigré writers Leyb Kvitko, Der Nister, and Peretz Markish. Possibly
under their inf luence, he began writing in Yiddish, turned from Zionism to
communism, and in 1926 emigrated to the Soviet Union, where he reinvented
himself as a Yiddish writer and Marxist literary scholar. Although he managed to
publish most of his shorter fiction, his major work, a novel about Berlin in the early
1920s, remained unfinished and unpublished.31
The typescript of the novel, four hundred and fifty pages long, with numerous
authorial remarks, presents an advanced draft that offers a fairly good idea of the
work as a whole but leaves some important issues unresolved. The typescript has
no date, but it is reasonable to assume that Wiener was preoccupied with this
work for several years well into the 1930s. It contains parts which probably ref lect
different stages of the novel, with a potential for different directions of plot and
character development. On the whole, the novel portrays the world of the déclassé
Jewish intellectuals and artists in European cities familiar to Wiener: Paris, Zurich,
Vienna, and Berlin. The first section introduces the main character, the artist Slovek
Lagodny, partly based on Wiener’s friend, the Polish Jewish artist Marcel (Marceli)
Slodki (1892–1943), whom he may have met in Zurich during World War I; on one
occasion, probably due to an authorial slip, he is referred to as Slodki (słodki means
‘sweet’ in Polish, whereas łagodny means ‘mild’, ‘gentle’). Born in Lódz, Slodki
studied art in Munich and Paris, and moved to Zurich in 1914, where he became
part of the Dada movement. He designed the first poster for Cabaret Voltaire in
1916, which announced the first artistic event of the group. He lived in Berlin from
1920 to 1923, working for the radical revolutionary theatre group Wilde Bühne,
and settled in Paris in 1923 or 1924. In 1937 he went back to Poland, but at the
outbreak of the war he returned to France to join his wife; they were denounced to
the Gestapo in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz.32 Slodki’s name appears frequently
in Wiener’s papers during the 1920s, and a separate notebook of 1925 contains
numerous but, unfortunately, barely legible pencil notes about Slodki’s life in Paris.
Like Lagodny, Slodki’s mother died when he was young, and he was raised by his
sisters.33 The historian of Polish Jewish art Yoysef Sandler specifically mentions
Slodki’s interest in the life of the working class and his ability to find a common
language with workers in different countries. There is, however, no reason to
assume that the love story depicted in the novel is based on Slodki’s life.34
The first two, short parts of the typescript take place in Paris and Vienna. What
can be described as a separate ‘Berlin Novel’ begins after page 51, but after page
83 the pagination changes, apparently signifying some kind of new beginning.
Stylistically, the Berlin part of the manuscript is more accomplished than the
previous material. Wiener’s Yiddish prose might seem dry and devoid of idiomatic
colour, but this serves a clear artistic purpose. He does not indicate which language
— German, Polish, or Yiddish — is actually spoken in a particular situation,
although one can assume that all of these languages were within the capabilities of
the Jewish characters. As opposed to the unidiomatic Yiddish, the German spoken
by some of the Gentile characters (reproduced in Yiddish script) bears clear traces
of Berlin dialect, placing them firmly in geographical and social space. Parts of
the novel are written in the form of an indirect inner monologue by Lagodny, a
technique that was introduced into Yiddish literature by David Bergelson but is also
reminiscent of the Hebrew style of Wiener’s friend David Vogel. The deliberate
absence of Yiddish idioms and localisms from the novel ref lects the alienation of
the Jewish characters, all of whom are emigrants with no roots in Berlin, and their
estrangement from their surroundings.
Like Baym opgrunt, Wiener’s novel is set during the hyperinf lation period.
But contrary to Asch (whom he intensely disliked both as a person and as a
writer), Wiener rarely ventures outside the milieu of émigré intellectuals, artists,
businessmen, and professionals into the broader world of German Berlin, and when
he does, he depicts the poor rather than the rich. Lagodny and Menter, a character
who is probably based on Wiener himself, personify two different types of creativity,
the intuitive and the cerebral. Lagodny is an artist struggling for a way to engage
with reality in the most direct fashion. His artistic quest leads him to communist
ideology, which he perceives as a tool that can strip off the veneer of bourgeois
conventionality and reveal ‘true’ reality through immediate contact with the lower
classes. He is both attracted to and suspicious of Menter, who accepts the idea of
communism as an intellectual but has little human sympathy for the proletariat. In
contrast to Lagodny, little is known about Menter’s background and private life. He
usually appears at social occasions, in conversations with his friends and colleagues.
Like Wiener himself, Menter works for a publishing house and meets with writers
as part of his job. He is known to be a writer, and ‘even though nobody has ever
seen a single line written by him, no one has any doubts about the importance of his
writings’ (324). This remark might also support the identification of Menter with
Wiener, who at that time was not able to publish his Yiddish works.
Menter and Lagodny belong to a circle of people with links to revolutionary
Russia. One of their close friends is Yume Kevitsh, a Yiddish poet from Russia
with a naive childish face and friendly manners, a character possibly based on
Kvitko. Menter and Kevitsh, like Wiener and Kvitko, are engaged in an ongoing
conversation, which Wiener, in hindsight, describes with self-irony:
A conversation developed. One of those cordial discussions of old, in which
Menter spoke a bit contemptuously, but nevertheless responded with great
interest and sincerity to each of Kevitsh’s naive observations and conclusions,
which were imbued with life and natural enthusiasm. (153)
Fig 21. Meir Wiener. By kind permission of Julia Wiener

Yet despite the sympathy that Kevitsh feels for Menter, there is something in
Menter’s appearance and manners that alienates and attracts Kevitsh at the same
time: ‘It could happen sometimes that Kevitsh, for no obvious reason, would give
him a look as a stranger, from the side, as if inquiring, and would often meet his
look, as if it were strange and attractive’ (322). In response to the disapproval of
Kevitsh, who makes fun of the good suit and white cuffs in which he attends a
communist rally, Menter produces an elaborate explanation which might elucidate
the logic that brought Wiener to his decision to emigrate to the Soviet Union:
What a bad feeling a bourgeois must have who has reached, by means of
merciless logic, the conclusion that the fate of the bourgeoisie is completely
hopeless. How helpless must a fighter for the class interests of the bourgeoisie
feel when he realizes that the current of history f lows against his class? And how
bitter must it be for him, when the logic of his own thinking leads him to class
suicide — forcing him, against his upbringing, desire, and will, to fight against
his own class? He cannot stand by and passively watch this grandiose struggle,
and yet he hasn’t the courage to give up and go over to a camp which he finds
strange and repulsive. (324)
Although Lagodny likes and respects Menter, he passes a judgement on him which
probably ref lects Wiener’s own attitude to his pre-Soviet past, by calling Menter
merely a transitional figure who has no place in the communist future (326).
Two other characters associated with Soviet Russia seem rather dubious. One is
Nokhem Kizling/Kizler (possibly based on Daniel Charney),35 an emissary who has
arrived from Russia via Riga on a false passport with a cultivated air of secrecy and
importance about him. He reports the recent news from Russia, dropping the names
of his important Moscow contacts, Zinoviev and Radek.36 Menter instinctively
dislikes his commercial traveller’s manners and suspects him of lying, although he
is also scared by Kizler’s apparent ability to read his thoughts. Urban space, usually
unfriendly and dehumanized, serves as the objective correlative of the psychological
state of the characters. Wiener is usually accurate in his description of a particular
locality, providing street addresses and the names of coffee houses, in which much
of the action takes place. Some of them are famous for their role in literary and
cultural history, such as Café Central in Vienna, Café des Banques in Zurich, and
the Romanisches Café in Berlin; others are inconspicuous coffee houses with a
local clientele. The cafe space serves primarily as an arena for the ongoing rivalry
between male egos, competing for sexual, ideological, and artistic conquests, but it
also offers an opportunity — often illusory — for escape from solitude.
The occasional mention of the name of an establishment can trigger a whole
chain of cultural associations. For example, when someone mentions a dance club
named Griner kakadu (Green Cockatoo), a reader familiar with Austrian culture
will catch an allusion to Arthur Schnitzler’s play Der grüne Kakadu (1898), which
satirizes the bourgeois fascination with the working class and revolution. A street
address can provide an important clue to the personality of a character, which in
turn can become an instrument of control and domination. Menter lives in the
fashionable district of Lichterfelde in the western part of the city in an elegant
apartment, furnished in the Biedermeier style; the well-to-do engineer Izbitski,
who has profitable contracts with Soviet Russia, has a newly acquired apartment
near the Alexanderplatz; and Lagodny’s atelier is located in a decent but more
modest area near the Bayerischer Platz.
Street life occupies a prominent place in the novel. We see it mostly through the
eyes of Lagodny, who frequently takes long walks out of habit or lack of money for
transport. The view of people walking along Berlin streets adds to the confusion
of his mind: ‘The big, healthy Germans infuriate him. They all have such robust
overcoats and sensible shoes. He is, of course, already soaked to the bone, but wet
shoes are the worst. They make him nervous’ (290). As an artist, he is attracted
by the changing scenery and occasional interesting characters. Thus, noticing a
young man near the Alexanderplatz whom he promptly identifies as a galitsyaner,
Lagodny is intrigued by his miraculous ability to keep his shiny shoes clean of mud
under the pouring rain. Following this young man, who turns out to be the son
of an inf lation profiteer, Lagodny comes to Izbitski’s apartment, and ultimately the
inevitable scandal ensues.
In contrast to the tense, withdrawn aff luent districts, the working-class neigh
bourhoods are friendly and open, especially in the evening: ‘Boys were playing
various games, scenes from family life were being played out publicly between men
and women. A drunkard was certainly not such a rare phenomenon here as in the
districts of Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf ’ (392). Subconsciously drawn to the
warm and human proletarian area, Lagodny comes to see the communist worker
Franz Heineke (who makes a cameo appearance in the beginning of the Berlin
section), who explains to him the crucial importance of the Communist Party’s
practical work. He also tells Lagodny that his jealousy is a problem of the exploiting
classes, and has little to do with communists: ‘ “For this reason, they are keen to get
nasty chest pains, to go crazy, to get ill and even hang themselves. Well, let them
all hang themselves out of jealousy or for other romantic reasons” — he finished
cheerfully and laughed in his low voice’ (402).
While the ideological tensions between the male characters constitute the intel
lectual dimension of the novel, its emotional dimension is shaped by Lagodny’s
relationship with two female characters, Anna and Lena. The intert wining of Eros
and class, jealousy and communist ideology, alienation and belonging, are the central
issues of the novel. Wiener re-examines the major concerns of Austrian modernist
literature under the lens of Marxist ideology. Sexuality and class consciousness
are closely interrelated in the world of the novel. Usually, women in Wiener’s
fiction have a destabilizing impact on male personality, exposing its psychological
volatility and driving men to extreme actions. Women are usually represented
through the eyes of men, who perceive them as erratic, irrational beings. Women
appear to be naturally attracted to each and every man, creating an atmosphere of
tension, competition, and jealousy around themselves. Dependent on men for the
satisfaction of their material, cultural, and sexual needs, women try to manipulate
them but often become self-destructive. In his distrust of women, Wiener shared
the cultural prejudice embedded in the Viennese modernist tradition, which found
its clearest expression in Otto Weininger’s notorious misogynist and Judeophobic
treatise Sex and Character.
One day, during one of his long and apparently aimless walks through the
streets, Lagodny finds himself at the Stettiner Bahnhof, the major Berlin hub for
eastward rail traffic. The authorial remark that ‘a station is a point where one’s life
is divided into two, between one location and the other’ (10), acquires a deeper
personal meaning in the light of Wiener’s personal experience, his fateful departure
from Vienna’s Nordbahnhof in 1926. At the station Lagodny meets Hans Getschke,
a shady character who introduces himself as an unemployed musician. In a burst
of affection Lagodny treats Getschke to a meal and gives him the address of his
atelier, and a few days later Getschke begins to visit him regularly. After several
visits he brings his sixteen-year-old daughter Lena and leaves her with Lagodny,
disregarding his vocal protests. The father-and-daughter couple of Getschke and
Lena are modelled on the similar couple of Marmeladov and Sonia in Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment, an allusion that plays a certain role in Wiener’s novel.
Lagodny lets Lena stay, and eventually becomes attracted to her. The detailed
depiction of their troubled relationship occupies the greater part of the novel. At
first, Lagodny is mildly curious about Lena’s unhappy childhood, but gradually
this curiosity develops into an obsession. He tries to find out the truth about her
past, suspecting there has been much violence and abuse. He is attracted by her
kindness and naivety, but at the same time distrusts her, wondering whether she
had many lovers before him. He wants to possess her wholly, and yet he feels there
is something that escapes him:
She had the sort of face that changes its expression instantly and, on occasion,
radically — especially when she was still a young girl. The slightest feeling
was immediately ref lected in her face. Sometimes he liked her very much and
sometimes not at all. He immediately began correcting her face, her entire
essence, according to his taste. (157)
Yielding to his pressure, Lena recounts, bit by bit, a story of a miserable childhood,
even though Lagodny, as well as the reader, remains unconvinced in the end that
she is telling the truth rather than feeding his greedy imagination with sensational
tales. She needs him as her only bulwark against the hostile world, and is prepared
to do whatever is necessary to keep his affection for her, but she also sincerely adores
him: ‘She believed in him as one believes in a god, saw in him the wisest and best of
men’ (159). Her entire life is centred on him: ‘Wherever he was, she turned herself
towards him like a f lower towards the sun’ (170).
As a woman and a proletarian, Lena is a double ‘other’ for Slovek. Desperate
to find out the ultimate ‘truth’ about her, he must also recognize that some
things will always remain beyond his comprehension: ‘He always felt that she was
hiding something from him’ (180). His obsessive jealousy produces uncontrolled
outbursts of anger alternating with periods of remorse and submission. Any man
that he sees around Lena provokes fantasies about some secret relationship that
Lena might have had in the past. In contrast to Lena’s sympathy, naturalness,
and sincerity, Lagodny is portrayed as a man at war with himself, deeply in love
yet hopelessly unhappy, always suspicious of other people’s words and intentions.
Their relationship degenerates into a downward spiral of scandals, punctuated by
moments of remorse and reconciliation. The more he questions her, the less certain
he is: ‘What can he believe about her? Nothing. My God, who knows who she
is? Is she really Getschke’s daughter? Even this he doesn’t know for sure. Even
whether her name is Lena Getschke. He knows nothing for sure’ (238). Under his
unrelenting pressure she reveals stories of abuse and seduction by middle-class men
who had some authority over her: an officer, a dentist, a foreman in a workshop.
These stories excite and depress Lagodny, but do not resolve his doubts as to who
she really is: ‘Perhaps all of her “lies” are due only to compulsion on his part — he
awkwardly forces her into them because she cannot cope with the complexities of
his tormented nerves’ (269).
Having apparently reached the bottom of Lena’s multilayered story, Slovek
discovers her most guarded secret: her mother, who died soon after her birth,
was Jewish. She came to Germany with her father from eastern Europe on the
way to America, but they were turned away in Hamburg because of her father’s
eye problems, and decided to settle in Berlin. Lena remembers her kind Jewish
grandfather, a watchmaker on Grenadierstraße. His shabby cellar workshop gave
her refuge and comfort in the face of the abuse and violence she suffered at home
from her sadistic father. Although Lagodny admits to Lena that he is also Jewish,
their shared belonging to the Jewish people does not bring them closer to each other
because it is class, not ethnicity, that is the defining feature of human personality.
In the end, as becomes clear from his conversation with Heineke, Slovek’s view
of the world is shaped by the conventions and prejudices of bourgeois culture. His
perception of reality is mediated by literature and art, which serve only as formid
able barriers between him and the ‘real’ Lena. When he thinks about her, he also
thinks of Dostoevsky as an author who portrayed her type: ‘Did not Dostoevsky
write about this kind of women?’ — to which he responds, desperately: ‘Away with
literature ...’ (287).
Conclusion: Novels as Tinted Mirrors

Despite all their stylistic and ideological differences, the three novels have a
common leitmotif. Their main character is a young European Jewish intellectual in
search of a deeper meaning in the world after the Great War. The real city of Berlin
forms a metaphorical landscape which represents various temptations and side-paths
leading away from the way to the ‘truth’. The nature of the quest and its outcome
are different in the three novels. Schneersohn leads Johann and Helena towards
Grenadierstraße as the symbolic home of authentic oriental Yiddishkayt, which is
personified in the figure of the Graniver Rebbe. Slovek Lagodny in Wiener’s novel
overcomes the anxieties of petty bohemianism and embraces communism as an
ideology which liberates him from jealousy by joining the victorious class of the
proletariat. Incidentally, his quest also brings him to Grenadierstraße, where he
discovers Lena’s roots in the immigrant underclass rather than Hasidic spirituality.
Hans Bodenheimer finds his truth by reclaiming his Jewish heritage as the Judeo-
Christian foundation of European humanism, which gives him the strength to
stand up to the rising forces of darkness embodied in Hitler and his followers.
The mirrors in which Berlin is ref lected in these three novels are heavily
coloured by the ideological inclinations of the authors. Asch’s anti-communism
comes through in his caricature depiction of ‘salon communists’ around Yudkevich,

although he shows some respect, but no sympathy, for Yudkevich’s brother Misha,
who comes to Berlin as the head of a Soviet trade delegation with the additional
mission of recruiting former Tsarist officers to the service of Soviet Russia. Salon
communists, along with inf lation profiteers, make their appearance in Wiener’s
novel as well, provoking Slovek’s public outrage. Remarkably, none of the authors,
all of whom grew up in the traditional eastern European environment, is interested
in portraying their fellow Ostjuden in Berlin. Asch and Schneersohn are eager to
demonstrate their knowledge of the life of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie, even
though their characters often look schematic and are not artistically convincing,
and the dialogues sound unidiomatic if not ungrammatical. Wiener depicted the
milieu of émigré bohemian intellectuals and artists from Russia and Poland, which
he knew well and to which he belonged. Unlike Asch and Schneersohn, he has no
German-Jewish characters in his novel, although of all three authors he was perhaps
the one most integrated into German-Jewish cultural life.
Two themes are common to all three novels: love and art. Schneersohn and
Asch portray love in a similar fashion, as a spiritual bond between two idealistic
young people who offer each other support and protection against the hostile
environment. Wiener presents a different picture: the relationship between Slovek
and Lena is an ongoing painful struggle of two very different personalities. Slovek
is consumed by apparently unfounded jealousy, which can be viewed as a product of
psychological anxiety related to his deep dissatisfaction with his situation in terms
of class struggle. His sexual and aesthetic attraction to Lena can be interpreted, in
an inverted Freudian manner, as a sublimation of his suppressed desire to join the
working class. In all three novels women play the role of supporting men. They
are needed to give them the courage and love necessary for the fulfilment of their
mission. None of their unions produce children; Asch even feels it necessary to
dispose of Lotte altogether when she becomes pregnant. Art has a positive function
in each novel, but each author treats it according to his own ideological orientation.
Schneersohn values modern art for its rediscovery of a powerful oriental metaphorical
language free from European clichés. Asch, through his mouthpiece Adolf, sees art
as a powerful force which produces images and metaphors and helps people to
imagine themselves and reality around them in a positive way; at the same time,
he has a clear preference for French art over German, especially the old masters,
such as Dürer, whom he suspects of harbouring dangerous medieval prejudice. For
Wiener, art is a means of social connection, a link between the alienated middle-
class intelligentsia and the ‘authentic’ life of the working classes.
Seen from these three different perspectives, informed by the awareness of the
collapse of the Weimar Republic, Berlin appears as a landscape full of potential and
actual dangers. The city is treacherous, seductive, hostile, and, above all, disorienting
and alienating. The overall sense of anxiety and alienation is already present in the
texts written in Berlin during the 1920s, when the direction of historical events was
not yet clear. In comparison with those shorter pieces, the large novels of the 1930s
convey a clear ideological message which helps organize the fragmented vision of
the city into an ordered and cohesive image. In contrast to many depictions from the
1920s, which highlighted the illusory nature of Berlin, in the 1930s the same Berlin
is reconstructed as a real, solid unity. Neighbourhoods, streets, parks, buildings, and
apartments are often described with great attention and care. Each detail acquires
its significance in the larger scheme of things. What this image lacks, however, is
‘fragrant tenderness’: seen retrospectively from the 1930s, Weimar Berlin is very far
from Nabokov’s melancholic notion of the writer as a kind and tender antiquarian
who lovingly recreates the past in its minute details.
Notes to Chapter 13
I gratefully acknowledge the support I received from Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft while working
on this article as part of the Research Project ‘Charlottengrad und Scheunenviertel. Osteuropäisch-
jüdische Migranten im Berlin der 1920/30er Jahre’ at Freie Universität Berlin.
1. Vladimir Nabokov, ‘A Guide to Berlin’, in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Knopf,
1995), p. 157.
2. ‘Emigrantn’, in Bal-Makhshoves, Untern rod (Berlin: Bal-Makhshoves komitet, 1927), pp.
238–39. Unless otherwise indicated, translations in this chapter are by the author.
3. Marc Caplan, ‘The Corridors of Berlin: Proximity, Peripherality, and Surveillance in
Dovid Bergelson’s Boarding House Stories’ (abstract), <http://www.oei.fu-berlin.de/projekte/
charlottengrad-scheunenviertel/teilprojekte/hebraeische_literatur/projekt_caplan/index.html>
[accessed 26 August 2009].
4. Sasha Senderovich, ‘In Search of Readership: Bergelson Among the Refugees (1928)’, in David
Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh
(Oxford: Legenda, 2007), p. 161.
5. Walther Rathenau, Zur Kritik der Zeit (Berlin: Fischer, 1912), p. 16.
6. Ritchie Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939: Emancipation and Its
Discontents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 405–06.
7. Cited by Robertson, p. 406.
8. Carl Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), p. 22.
9. On Cohen’s views, see Robertson, p. 405.
10. Fishl Shneerson, Grenadir-shtrase (Warsaw: Literarishe bleter, 1935), p. 176.
11. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 225.
12. Bernd Widding, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001), pp. 10–11.
13. Quoted in Widding, p. 229.
14. Gerald D. Feldman, ‘Weimar Writers and the German Inf lation’, in Fact and Fiction: German
History and Literature 1848–1924, ed. by Gisela Brude-Firnau and Karin J. MacHardy (Tübingen:
Francke, 1990), p. 182
15. Feldman, p. 176.
16. Baym opgrunt was serialized in the Saturday issues of Forverts from 2 February 1935 to 22
February 1936. I am very grateful to Ellen Kellman for this information. The German edition
entitled Der Krieg geht weiter (The War Goes On), translated by Siegfried Schmitz, was published
in Amsterdam by de Lange; the English translation (from the German) by Willa and Edwin
Muir was published as The War Goes On by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York and as The Calf
of Paper by Victor Gollancz in London. All these translation came out in 1936, a year before the
book publication of the original Yiddish. References to the translation in The War Goes On will
be marked by ‘E’ followed by a page number in the text.
17. Ben Siegel, The Controversial Sholem Asch (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University
Popular Press, 1976), p. 104
18. Quoted by Siegel, p. 114 (Siegel mistakenly attributes this quote to Werfel); Stefan and Friderike
Zweig, Their Correspondence, 1912–1942, trans. and ed. by Henry Alsberg (New York: Hastings,
1954), p. 274.
19. The American translation (but not the Yiddish edition) has a disclaimer stating: ‘In writing the
book, I have had no living person in mind. I have never met, or seen, or heard of, any person
who could fit one of my names or characters, all of whom have been taken, as types for my
book, from my own imagination.’ This statement, probably aimed at protecting the author and
the publisher from libel accusations, is obviously not accurate because some of the characters,
most notably the industrialist Hugo Stinnes, have clear real prototypes. Hitler, however, is not
mentioned by name but is portrayed as a sinister symbolic figure called ‘Death’s Prophet’.
20. The literary representations of Hugo Stinnes are analysed in great detail by Widding,
pp. 134–65, but Asch’s novel is not mentioned.
21. Sholem Asch, Baym opgrunt (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1938), p. 285. Now Hertz Allee; in the English
translation (E 206) the street is Kronprinzenallee in Dahlem, which is not a likely address for
someone who lives near the Zoologischer Garten station.
22. Reinhardt staged König Oedipus (1910) and Die Orestie (1911) at the Zirkus Schumann in Berlin
1910 (Max Reinhardt in Berlin, ed. by Knut Boeser and Renata Vatková (Berlin: Hentrich, 1984),
pp. 331–32); König Oedipus was also performed at the Zirkus Busch in Vienna in 1911.
23. In the English translation this is the Oranienburger Straße, the central street in the Scheunen
viertel.
24. Juden in Kreuzberg: Fundstücke, Fragmente, Erinnerungen (Berlin: Hentrich, 1991), p. 57.
25. Shmuel Niger, Dertseylers un romanistn (New York: Bikher-farlag, 1946), p. 477.
26. Ibid. Emphasis in original.
27. Louis Kronenberger, ‘Sholem Asch Dramatizes Germany’s Years of Inf lation’, The New York
Times Book Review, 15 November 1936, BR4.
28. Niger, p. 476.
29. Kronenberger.
30. Asch’s notoriously poor Yiddish style was regarded as a big f law by Niger, but this view was
not shared by everybody. Asch’s secretary Shloyme Rosenberg cites in his (admittedly biased)
memoirs a somewhat ironic remark by Isaac Bashevis, whom he met in Warsaw in 1933: ‘You
know, Rosenberg, maybe if Asch wrote in a grammatically correct Yiddish, his artistic breath
would evaporate’ (Shloyme Rosenberg, Sholem Ash fun der noent (Miami: Shoulzon, 1958), p. 175).
31. On Wiener, see my forthcoming book, From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism
and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
The typescript is located in the Meir Wiener Archive, Manuscript Department of the Jewish
National and University Library, Jerusalem, 1763/16. References will be given to page numbers
in the text.
32. Yoysef Sandler, Umgekumene yidishe kinstler in Poyln (Warsaw: Yidish Bukh, 1957), pp. 231–34.
33. Hersh Fenster, Undzere farpaynikte kinstler (Paris: Fenster, 1951), p. 163.
34. Sandler, p. 231.
35. I am grateful to Gennady Estraikh for this suggestion.
36. Karl Radek (Sobelson, 1885–1939) and Grigorii Zinoviev (whose real name was Radomyslskii,
1883–1936) were high-ranking Soviet officials purged by Stalin in 1936 to 1937. Kizler is
portrayed as a two-faced man, and after 1937 an association with Radek and Zinoviev would
clearly mark him as a potential traitor, which can be taken as an indication of the time when
the novel was written.
index
❖
Abramovitch (Rein), Raphael xi, xiii, 18, 152–53, Benn, Gottfried 67

155, 157–58, 161–62, 195, 200–01, 204, 206–07, Berdichev 6
209–11, 213 Berdichevsky, Mikhah Yosef 33, 163
Adler, Jankl 57, 71 Bergelson, David xi, xii, 10, 12–15, 17, 19–21, 23,
Agnon, Shmuel Yosef 33, 42–49 32–33, 42–50, 76, 91, 93, 105, 114, 142, 150, 154–
Albatros 31, 35–37 56, 163, 195, 217, 222, 225, 240, 253
Allen, Woody 91 Bergelson, Lev 10, 12, 17, 155
Alexanderplatz 1, 2, 6, 17, 32, 188, 241, 243, 248, 256 Berlewi, Henryk 32, 37, 122
Altman, Natan 122 Berlin dialect of German 215, 253
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 15, 18, Berlin-Schmargendorf 11, 123, 127
22, 141, 152, 201, 204 Berliner Tageblatt 21
Amishai-Maisels, Ziva 120 Berne, University of 127, 128, 142, 180, 229
Ansky (Rappoport), S. 97 Bernhard, George 21
anti-Communism 20, 150, 152, 154, 155 Bernstein, Eduard 17, 129, 148, 154, 202
anti-Semitism 209 Bessarabia 123
in Germany 17, 149, 164, 172, 173, 175, 186, 188, Bialik, Khaim Nakhman 8, 12, 18, 31, 33–34, 51, 113
189, 192, 199, 221, 227, 230, 232, 235, 242, 249 Białystok 8
in Poland 20, 180, 183 Bikher-velt (The World of Books) 168
Argonavty (Argonauts), publishing house 8 Birnbaum, Menachem 168
Aronson, Gregory 207 Birnbaum, Nathan 2, 4, 5, 117
Artilleriestraße 1 Birnbaum, Solomon 4, 172
Asch, Sholem xii, xvi, 3, 6, 76, 149–50, 152, 220, Birobidzhan 19, 20, 21
244–45, 247–48, 250–53, 258–59, 261 Bismarck x
Ashkenaz x, xi, 2, 13 Bloch, Ernst 28–29, 39, 44
Austro-Hungarian Empire x, 1–3, 5, 142, 229 Blok, Alexander 122
Averbukh, Zvi 19, 20, 21, 23 Bokher, Elye 206
Bolshevism xi, 14, 19, 123, 125, 127, 145, 150, 151, 154,
Baal Shem Tov (Besht) 60, 87, 206 184, 170, 171, 180, 199, 225, 249
Bab, Julius 55 Boym, Svetlana 89, 91, 94, 101, 103
Badt-Strauss, Bertha 221 Brainin, Reuven 18
Bal-Makhshoves, see Elyashev, Isidor Bramson, Leon 13, 17, 199, 200, 204, 209, 211
Baltic Sea 60, 61, 129 Bratslever, Rabbi Nakhman 60, 100, 103
Baltrušaitis, Jurgis 142 Brecht, Bertolt 64, 237
Baratoff, Paul 20 Brener, Sore see also Weinreich, Max 145, 147, 163–64,
Bartholdy, Abraham 238 169–72, 175–77
Barzilai, Maya 43 Brod, Max 164
Baturinsky, David 20 Buber, Martin 4, 8, 42, 180, 196
Baudelaire 51, 92 Buenos Aires 10, 89
Baum, Vicki 45 Bukovina x, 142
Bayerdörfer, Hans-Peter 221–22 Bund 2, 5, 9, 97, 142, 145, 147, 148, 152, 153, 164, 171,
Beethoven, Ludwig van 41 180
Belarus (also White Russia) 20, 89–102, 124, 182 Byron, George Gordon 33, 40, 121
Belgium 144
Ben Zion, S., see Gutman, Simhah cabaret theatre xi, 21, 40, 41
Ben-Adir, see Rosin, Abraham cafes xi, 4, 9, 29, 32, 40, 45, 48, 73, 229, 249, 255
Ben-Baruch, see Charlash, Yitshak Café des Banquers (in Zurich) 255
Benjamin, Walter xi, 29, 32, 43–44, 90, 215–17, 219, Café Central (in Vienna) 255
221, 243 Café am Nollendorfplatz 9
264 Index
Café de la Rotonde (in Paris) 183 Dürer, Albrecht 259

Café des Westens 3, 163
Café Monopol 2, 32 eastern European Jews (see also Ostjuden)
Cahan, Abraham xiv, 13, 26, 141–45, 148, 150–55, 157– during World War I 56
59, 164, 167–68, 170, 171, 174–76, 202, 225–26 in Germany xii, 1, 2, 5, 20, 30, 39, 69, 105, 128,
censorship 6, 15, 36, 125 142, 179, 180, 183, 184, 187, 189, 249
Canetti, Elias 244 romanticization of 2, 5, 56, 58, 64, 116, 124, 218, 227
Caplan, Marc 240 transformation of 10
Chagall, Bella 106 Eastern Jewish Historical Archive 120 n. 7, 145, 182
Chagall, Marc xiv, 105–06, 109, 112, 117, 121 Efroykin, Israel (Yisroel) 23, 200
Charell, Eric 52 Ehrenburg, Ilya 119
Charlash, Yitshak 147 Einstein, Albert xi, 17, 128, 190, 202
Charlottenburg 1, 14, 32, 34, 46, 126, 180, 201, 247, Eisner, Kurt 165
249, 256 Eliasberg, Aharon 42
Charney Vladeck, Baruch 158–59, 201 Eliasberg, Alexander 13, 42, 117
Charney, Daniel 10, 14, 17–20, 23, 32, 158, 195, 255 Elkin, Mendel 201
Chasanowitch, Leon 10, 17 Elyashev, Isidor (also Bal Makhshoves) 8, 113, 120, 145,
Civil War in Russia 43, 105, 116, 117, 124, 145, 170, 239
184, 218, 225, 246 Emel’, Aleksandr (see also Moishe Lur’e) 127
Cohen, Hermann 238, 243 Engels, Friedrich 18, 127
Cohen, Jesse Aaron ix Esenin, Sergei 114, 121–22
Communist (Third) International (also Comintern) 19, Estraikh, Gennady xii, 1, 122, 141, 225
20, 127, 151, 153 Eulenberg, Herbert 4
Communist movement 18, 19, 151 Expressionism 29, 32–41, 43, 51 n. 26, 57, 61, 67, 74,
in Germany 189, 190, 221, 246, 252, 253, 258 75, 81, 95, 96, 98, 101
Copenhagen 145 Eynhorn, David xii, xiii, 6, 12, 76, 145, 147, 154,
Coralnik, Abraham 21, 148, 160 163–64, 179–80, 182–92, 206
Cracow 3, 5, 252
Crimea 19, 21 Farlag Yidish 6, 8
CYCO (Central Yiddish Cultural Organization) 211 Fasanenstraße 45, 46
Czernowitz, Yiddish Language Conference in 2, 17 Federn-Kohlhaas, Etta 55, 61
Fefer, Itsik 21, 236
Damaschke, Adolf 20 Feilchenfeldt, Walther 106
Dauber, Jeremy 87 Feiwel, Berthold 117
Denmark 145 Feldman, Gerald 244
Der Ashmeday 3 Feuchtwanger, Lion 226, 237
Der emes (The Truth) 154 Fininberg, Ezra 82
Der Nister 9, 10, 12, 21, 23, 42, 91, 93, 105, 116, 122, Flusser, Vilém 179
225, 252 folklore 58, 74, 85, 94, 106, 114, 116, 121–22 n. 31,
Der tog (The Day) 10, 21, 148, 158, 161 n. 37 215, 220
Der yidisher arbeter (The Jewish Worker) 5 Folkspartey 198, 200
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie 129 Foreign Press Association (Verein der ausländischen
Di tsayt (The Time) 10 Presse) 149, 157, 158
Dickens, Charles 226, 237 Forverts (Forward) 6, 9, 10, 13, 53 n. 73, 141–64, 167–
Die Rote Fahne 21 78, 180, 183, 184, 201, 237 n. 9, 245, 260 n. 16
Die Welt am Montag 21 Fowler, Christobel 70
Die Weltbühne 56 Frank, Herman 8
Dijour, Ilja (also Eliyahu) 13, 23 Frankfurt am Main 171, 172, 174, 175
Dix, Otto 230, 237 Frayhayt (Freedom) 151, 155
Döblin, Alfred vii, xi, xiii, 6, 13, 17, 21, 22, 29, 41, 42, Fraytag (Friday) 13
149, 215–23, 228, Frederick the Great (King of Prussia) 36
Dobrushin, Yekhezkl 106, 121 French revolution 148
Dos bukh (The Book) 3 Friedrichstraße 2, 6, 32, 145
Dostoevsky, Fedor 155, 257–58 Friedrich Wilhelm University 8, 241
Dragonenstraße 1, 228, 234 Frishman, David 33, 71
Dresden 171, 173 Fuchs, Eduard 20
Dubnow-Fund 199, 201, 202, 204–06, 212 n. 14 fundraising xii, 17, 152, 199–201, 204, 208, 213 n. 26
Index 265
Futurism 33, 36, 41, 43, 106, 116, 190 Heine, Heinrich 33–34, 40, 218–19, 228, 238
Herrnfeld, Donat (David) 2
Galicia x, xi, 3, 40, 43, 56, 124, 142, 227, 228, 234, 241 Herrnfeld Theatre 2, 6
Gay, Peter 30 Herzl, Theodor 206
Genoa Conference 147, 171, 174 Hessel, Franz 29, 44, 48
Gergel, Nokhum 13, 22–23, 201, 204 Heym, Georg 67
Gerlach, Hellmut von 17, 21, 26 HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) 13, 15, 141,
German Foreign Office 125, 150 211
German Jews xii, 1, 2, 4, 5, 15, 22, 28, 42, 43, 56, 57, Hilker, Franz 129
163, 171, 172, 175, 195, 217–20, 241 Hindenburg, Paul von 157, 209, 214
German War Press Office 144 Hirschbein, Peretz 2, 5
Gilman, Sander L. 176, 236 Hirszenberg, Samuel 122
Giterman, Yitzhak 204 Hitler, Adolf 23, 157, 173, 178 n. 47, 188, 209, 214,
Glatstein, Jacob 54 224, 226, 233, 244, 247, 250, 251, 258, 261
Glücksmann, Itsik Mayer 158 Hoddis, Jakob van 67
Goebbels, Joseph 157 Hoffman, Ben-Zion (also Tsivion) 9
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 34, 41, 108, 155, 234, Hofstein, David 85, 105–06, 109–10, 112–13, 117, 120
238, 249 Holitscher, Arthur 20
Goldfaden, Abraham 2 Horthy, Miklós 6
Goldfarb, Max (Lipets) 151 Howe, Irving 224
Goldman, Nahum 32, 213 Hurwitz (Hurvitz) Shai (Saul Israel) 8, 34
Goldmann, Paul 57 Hussong, Friedrich 22
Goldrosen, Nuchem 158 Huyssen, Andreas 29
Goldschmidt, Alfons 20
Goltzstraße 22 In shpan (In Harness) 19, 21
Gorelik, Shmaryahu 3, 13, 147, 155, 163–64, 180 inflation 8, 31, 129, 149, 153, 174, 179, 184, 187, 190,
Granach, Alexander 2, 13, 14, 20 217, 233, 239, 244–57, 259
Greenberg, Uri Zvi xii, 31–33, 36–41, 43, 51 Inzl (Island) 18
Grenadierstraße 1, 241, 242, 258
Grenoble, University of 165 Jacobson, Viktor 12
Grodno 182 jazz music 57
Grodzenski, Aaron-Itshok 27 Jewish autonomy 8, 12, 19, 97
Gronemann, Sammy 4, 5, 18, 218 Jewish colonization (land-settlement) 18–21, 150
Grossman, Jeffrey 54 Jewish People’s Home (Volksheim) 1
Grossman, Meir 3 Jewish Society for Knowledge of the Land 97
Grossman, Vladimir 142, 157 Jewish Workers’ Cultural Association 182
Grosz, Georg 68, 230, 237 Jhering, Herbert 13
Gundolf, Friedrich 238 journalism 3, 10, 30, 93, 142, 150, 165
Gutman, Rosa 15 Judaism 8, 57, 58, 196, 208, 242, 243, 246, 250
Gutman, Simhah 12 Jüdische Volkszeitung 56
Jüdische Rundschau 13, 221
Ha’aretz 10 Jüdisches Wochenblatt 55
Hake, Sabine 29
Halle 13 Kafka, Franz 44, 196
Haller, Hermann 52 Kaiserstraße 17
Hamburg 10, 119 n. 3, 171, 172, 186, 242, 243, 246, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche 9
258 Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße 17
Hansen, Miram 29 Kaunas (also Kovno) xvi, 4, 6, 10, 18, 75, 91, 141, 198,
Ha-olam (The World) 38, 51 199
Harkavy, Alexander 148, 206 Kassow, Samuel 97
Hasidism xi, 4, 56, 92, 103 n. 17, 198, 206, 218, 220, Kästner, Erich 45
225, 241, 242, 246, 258 Kaufmann, Fritz Mordecai 5
Haskalah 51, 114, 122 n. 31, 225, 237 n. 21 Kautsky, Karl xi, 148, 153–54, 160, 201
Hauptmann, Gerhart 192, 244 Kazan, University of 13
Haynt (Today) 142, 157, 207, 237 n. 9 Keiter, B. see Lestschinsky, Jacob
Hebraists xi, 2, 8, 12 Kerr, Alfred 13
Heidelberg, University of 165 Keshet, Yeshurun see Kopelovitz, Ya’acov
266 Index
Keyserling 41 Leskov, Nikolai 216–17

Kharkiv 6 Lestschinsky, Jacob xiii, 1, 10, 12–13, 15, 18–19, 22–23,
Khashin, Alexander see Averbukh, Zvi 142, 144–55, 157–58, 160, 195, 198, 201, 204,
Kiev: 206–07, 209
after 1917: 8, 123, 128 Letste nayes (Latest News) 4
Jewish entrepreneurs 5 Lewin, Samuel xii, 5, 17, 26
Jewish institutions xi, 21, 183 Leyzerovitch, Yitshak Eliezer (Abi-Ver) 147
University of 13 Liberberg, Joseph 21
Yiddish writers 9, 10, 12, 15, 42, 74, 94, 105, 150, Liberzon, David (Meir) 160
154, 225 Lieberman, Chaim 177
Kihn, Avrom 201, 204, 209, 211 Liebknecht, Karl 173, 186
Kishinev 141, 154 Lincoln, Abraham 206
Klal-Farlag (General Publishing House) 8, 195, 201, Linienstraße 1, 228
239, 252 Lipsker, Avidov 37
Klatzkin, Jacob 14 Lissitzky, Eliezer (El) 8, 21, 117
Kleiststraße xi, 15 Lithuania xi, xvi, 6, 18, 19, 56, 142, 191
Kletzkin, Boris 19, 44 Litvakov, Moyshe 154
Klinger, Ruth 21 Locker, Berl 17
Klinov, Yeshayahu (Shayke) 10, 18, 21, 23, 157, 207, London 29, 30, 54, 65, 71 n. 6 and n. 19, 157, 211, 244
214 Lukaschewsky, Zvi 18
Koestler, Arthur 13 Lur’e, Moishe (see also Emel, Aleksandr) 154, 161
Koigen, David 123–28, 130 Lwów xvi, 29, 218
Koigen, Helene (née Zaltsman) 123–28, 130 Luxemburg, Rosa 173, 186, 233
Koigen-Ionov, Debora (Dore) 127 Lvovich, David (Davidovich) 13
Koigen-Ionov, Fishl (Fishel, Fishle) 127
Kolodner, Fanya 125, 132, 136 Maharal of Prague 94
Kommandantenstraße 6 Malevich, Kazimir 117
Komunistishe shtim (Communist Voice) 150 Mann, Thomas 54, 61, 226, 237, 244, 248
Kopelovitz, Ya’acov (also Yeshurun Keshet) 29, 32 Marburg 147, 171, 174
Kracauer, Siegfried 28–29, 39, 41, 44–46, 48 Margolin, Abraham 3
Kraus, Karl xi Marić, Mileva 128
Kreuzberg 249 Markgrafenstraße 8
Krojanker, Gustav 42 Markish, Peretz 36, 50, 78, 80, 85, 105–06, 115–17, 120,
Kronenberger, Louis 251 163, 180, 192, 252
Krutikov, Mikhail 103, 121, 239 Martin-Luther-Straße 21
Ksiazenicer-Matheron, Carole 93–94 Marx, Esther 42
Kulbak, Moyshe xii, 10, 21, 33, 40–41, 56, 67, 73–87, Marx, Karl 18, 41, 101, 127, 142, 252, 256
89–101, 103–05, 163 Marx, Moshe 42
Kultur-Lige (Culture League) xi, 12, 15, 17, 74, 183, 201 Marx-Engels Institute 127
Kunst-ring almanakh (Art Circle Journal) 6 Marxism 41, 101, 142, 252, 256
Kup(p)erberg, Manasse Berl 127 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 116
Kurfürstenallee 249 Mayzlish, Shmuel 158
Kurfürstendamm xi, 9, 22, 41, 180, 186, 247, 248 Mazepa, Ivan 113, 121
Kvitko, Leyb xi, xii, 10, 21, 23, 105–22, 252–53 Mazower, David 122
Medem, Vladimir 148, 154, 206
Lanczener, Josef 158 Mehring, Walter 20
Landsberger Allee 1, 228 Meisel, Nakhman 168, 199, 212
Lasker, Emanuel 12 Mendele Moykher-Sforim (S. Y. Abramovich) 22, 98
Lasker-Schüler, Else xi, 12, 23, 32, 41, 55, 57–58, 60, Mendelsohn, Erich 29, 49
71 Mendelssohn, Brendel (Dorothea Friederike) 238
Lasalle, Ferdinand 17 Mendelssohn, Moses 163, 201, 225, 227–29, 231
Latteiner, Joseph 2 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Fanny 238
Latzki-Bertoldi, Zeev Wolf 8, 12, 18, 22–23 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix 238
Lebnsfragn (Problems of Life) 5 Menes, Avrom 209
Leipzig 44, 45, 55, 60, 171 Mensheviks 18, 152–54, 195, 200, 209
Leipziger Jüdische Zeitung 56 Merezhin, Abraham 151
Lermontov, Michail 114, 121, 206–07 Meyer, Alfred Richard 54, 55
Index 267
Midgely, David 221 Olsvanger, Immanuel 14

Mikhoels, Solomon 20 Oranienburger Straße 1, 3, 181, 228, 261
Milgroym (Pomegranate) 9, 18, 21, 23, 31, 38, 42, 43 Oranienstraße 249
Minchin, Abraham 17 Orshansky, Ber 20
Minsk xi, 73, 75, 91 ORT (Society for Promoting Artisanal and Agricultural
Miron, Dan 37 Work among the Jews in Russia) xii, 13, 15, 16,
Misdroyer Straße 127 18, 19, 22, 141, 199, 201, 180, 203, 204, 207
modernism 28–33, 37, 49, 85, 89, 90, 92, 94, 106, 197, OSE (Society for Protection of the Health of the Jews)
215, 217 182
Moment 10, 142, 148, 208 Osherowitch, Mendel 155
Morgnshtern (Morning Star) 142, 163, 164, 171, 176 Ostjuden 1, 56, 57, 163, 164, 207, 218, 228, 240, 241,
Morgn-zhurnal (Morning Journal) 10, 150 242, 259
Moscow xi, 6, 9, 14, 18–21, 42–44, 89, 105, 125, 127, Oyslender, Nokhum 21
131–33, 136–39, 142, 152–54, 225 OZET (Association for the Rural Placement of Jewish
Moscow Circle of Yiddish Writers and Artists 8 Labourers) 20, 21
Moscow Yiddish Theatre 20
Morewski, Abraham 17 Palestine xi, 6, 13, 18, 28, 31, 37, 40, 42, 57, 97, 124,
Moss, Kenneth 75, 87 125, 134, 145, 155, 205, 226
Mosse, Rudolf 49, 238 Pappenheim, Berta 196
Mowrer, Edgar Ansel 157–58 Paris:
Munich 149, 165, 188, 190, 247, 250, 252 as a centre of eastern European immigration 14, 15,
Münzstraße 1 30, 120 n. 13, 147, 189, 191, 252
mysticism 58, 60, 72, 85, 90, 92, 94, 95, 100, 220, 232, cafes in 9, 183
252 in and after 1933: 22, 157, 158, 209
Nazi invasion of 211
Nabokov, Valdimir 239, 260 Paris Peace Conference 144
Nathan, Paul 19, 20 Pasternak, Boris 19
National Socialism 21, 123, 188, 221, 227, 232, 233, 244 PEN Club 152
Naydus, Leyb 96 Peretz Association 5, 182, 193 n. 14
Naye velt (New World) 170 Peretz, Isaac Leyb 5, 12, 17, 76, 78, 96–98, 206, 250
Nazism: philanthropic (relief) organizations xii, 15, 18, 73, 142,
growing danger of 68, 157, 173, 188, 189, 195, 199, 170, 180, 182
203, 207, 221, 230, 244, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251 Pinski, David 201
in and after 1933 22, 70, 157, 158, 175, 208, 209, Piscator, Erwin 13, 20
226, 234, 235 pogroms and pogrom atmosphere:
invasion of Paris 211 in Berlin 149, 150, 209
putsch 149 in Poland 158, 241
language of 70, 216 in Ukraine 43, 46, 105–19, 123, 145, 182, 222, 240,
Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’) 29, 33, 37, 41, 48, 246
51 n. 26, 101, 237 n. 29 Poland:
Neuendorf 60, 61 anti-Semitism in 20, 158, 173, 183
Neues Bauen (‘New Building’) 37, 48, 49 during World War I 3, 56, 225
New York Yiddish intellectuals 17–22, 75, 89, 241 immigrants from xi, 1, 5, 6, 184
New York Yiddish press xiii, 6, 10, 13, 18, 55, 76, publishing in 142, 168
141–59, 163–66, 180, 201, 202 police 5, 36, 125, 150, 151, 158, 229
Nietzsche, Friedrich 36, 39, 93–94, 207 Pomerania x, 248
Niger, Shmuel 70, 73, 75–76, 86, 96, 120, 198, 250–51, Portugeis, Shmuel (Semen; Stepan Ivanovich) 154,
261 158
Nomberg, Hersh David 3, 14, 23, 33, 148, 163, 206–07 Posen (Poznań) 1, 165, 218–20, 248
Nordau, Max 207–08 Prerow 60, 61
Novershtern, Avrom 93, 102 Prilutski, Noyekh 206, 208, 211
Novorossiysk 124, 125, 129, 132, 135 Prinz, Joachim 241
Proskurov 150
Odessa 6, 9, 29, 142, 150 pro-Sovietism xii, 19, 20, 151, 152
Olgin, Moyshe (Moissaye) 151 Prussia 8, 186, 192, 230, 242, 243, 247–50
Olshvanger, Eliah 192 pseudonyms of Yiddish journalists 26 n. 87, 37, 147,
Olsvanger, Eliyahu 4 150, 163, 164, 170, 172, 176 n. 2 and n. 10, 195
268 Index
publishing 6, 8, 12, 15, 21, 22, 31, 49, 55, 105, 106, 152, Sakaschansky, Maxim 21
180, 182, 195, 199, 239, 253 Schajak, Yehuda Hirsh 18
Pushkin, Alexander 33–34, 121 Scheidemann, Philipp 5, 144, 173
Scheunenviertel (Barn Quarter) xi, 10–13, 32, 124,
Rabinowitz, Dorothy 237 149, 189, 218, 228, 241
Radek 255, 261 Socialist (Second) International 153, 158
Rambam 206 Scheynfeld, Rotsi 124
Ramm-Pfempfert, Alexandra (Anja) 128 Schlegel, Friedrich 238
Rankestraße 248, 249 Schmitz, Siegfried 260
Rapoport, Sheyndl 124 Schneersohn, Fishel (Fishl) 5, 12, 129, 241–42, 252,
Rapoport, Yehoshua 18, 21, 26 258–59
Rathenau, Walter 173, 186, 240, 243, 247 Schnitzler, Arthur 255
Ravitch, Melech 9, 36, 163, 180 Schocken, Salman 42, 49
Reed, John 151 Scholem, Gershom 42–43, 56, 196, 236
Reinhardt, Max 52, 249 Schwartz, Shuly 200
Reisen, Abraham 20, 77, 96, 201 Senderovich, Sasha 240
Reisen, Zalman 4, 5, 17, 20, 86 n. 13, 204, 206 Shalit, Moyshe 199, 200, 203, 212–13
Remenik, Hersh 110, 121 Shatsky, Jacob 201, 204
Revolution in Russia (1917) xii, 18, 43, 75, 122 n. 34, Sherman, Joseph xii, 217
123–25, 128, 130, 145, 147, 151, 152, 164, 170, 199, Shifrin, Nahman 145
200, 225, 244, 247 Shimonovitz, David (Shimoni) 34, 36, 40–41
Rhineland x, 248 Shklovskii, Viktor 19
Riga 22, 138, 141, 145, 153, 198, 209, 211, 255 Shmeruk, Khone 74
Rigasche Rundschau 145 Shneour, Zalmen 163
Ringelblum, Emanuel 202, 206 Sholem Aleichem 98, 172, 217, 251
Roback, A. A. 199 Sholem Aleichem Club xi, 15, 17–19, 21–23, 195
Robertson, Ritchie xii, 241 Shveln (Thresholds), publishing house 106
Roh, Franz 51 Shteinberg, Ya’acov 30, 32–33
Romania 2, 5, 123, 124 Shtif, Nokhum 10, 17, 22
Romanisches Café xi, 9, 10, 12–15, 18–21, 23, 30, 32, Shub, David 151
33, 57, 58, 145, 148, 157, 176 n. 4, 180, 182, 183, Shvarts, Y. Y. 72
192 n. 8, 195, 255 Silberfarb, Moyshe 17
Romanticism 2, 33, 34, 36, 41, 57, 96, 97, 99, 101, 157, Simon, Ernst 42, 48
218 Singalowsky (also Syngalowski), Aron xi, xii, 13, 15,
Rosenberg, Shloyme 261 19, 22, 204
Rosenblatt, Frank 152 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 224
Rosenfeld, Yona 154 Singer, Israel Joshua xii, 14, 18, 152, 154–55, 224–30,
Rosenzweig, Franz 196 232–33, 236–37, 251
Rosin, Abraham (Ben-Adir) xii, xiv, 22, 195, 206, 207, Slavicisms in Yiddish 77, 116
208, 209 Slezkine, Yuri 179
Roskies, David 77, 102, 217 Slodki, Marcel (Marceli) 252
Rostov-on-Don 124, 125, 129–39 Slotnick, Susan A. 236
Roth, Joseph 1, 45, 93, 218, 244 Slutski, Dov-Ber (A. Kiever) 150, 160
Rowe, Dorothy 29 Smorgon 75, 91
Rozhanski, Shmuel 80 Social Democratic Party of Germany xii, 5, 129, 141,
Rubin, Israel 10 144, 148, 149, 157–59, 173, 184, 186, 201, 202,
Rubinstein, Rachel 85 249
Ruhr 182, 184, 190, 250 socialist realism 43, 101
Rul’ (Rudder) 9, 17, 239 Soja, Edward 32
Russian Empire x, xi, 2, 8, 14, 18, 128 Sombart, Werner 129
Russian-Jewish Public Club 21 Sore Bas Tuvim 60
Russian Scientific-Philosophical Society 129 Soviet Embassy 127
Russian Writers’ Club 15 Soyinka, Wole 96
Ryback, Yissachar-Ber 12, 22, 105–06, 117, 120, 122 Spengler, Oswald 37, 41
Stalin, Joseph 127, 152–53, 200, 236, 261
Sacerdote, Gustavo 153 Starokonstantinov 124, 128
St Petersburg 6, 9, 128, 145, 147, 164, 200, 213 n. 22 Stein, Ludwig 128
Index 269
Steinberg, Aaron 128, 195, 204, 207, 212 Vilna Troupe (also Vilner Trupe) 5, 6, 10, 73, 217
Stencl, Avrom Nokhem (Stenzel, Abraham Nokhum) Virtshaft un lebn (Economy and Life) xii
xi, xii, xiv, 9, 10, 12, 22, 54–70, 71, 72 Vispe (Islet) 18
Stinnes, Hugo 170, 247, 261 Vitebsk 106, 121 n. 28
Stöcker, Helene 20 Vogel, David 253
Stomps, V. O. 55 Vorwärts 141, 149
Strauss, Max 42 Vossische Zeitung 21, 61
Struck, Hermann 4, 106, 218
students in Berlin 3, 34, 163, 242 Walzel, Oskar 128
Stybel, Hebrew publishing house 12 Ward, Janet 29, 30
Suhl, Abraham 55, 56, 57, 71 Warsaw:
Swet, Gershon (Herman) 10, 22, 208 during World War I 125, 135, 139, 147, 180
Symbolism 9, 33, 34, 36, 42, 85, 116, 142, 240, 243, literary images of 173, 218, 219
250 publishing in 5, 8, 10, 12, 105, 142, 167, 168,
Szabad Weinreich, Regina 174 177 n. 21
Szabad, Cemach 4, 13, 202 Yiddish intellectuals in 9, 14, 15, 18, 19, 22,
Szyk, Artur 227, 230 25 n. 95, 36, 89, 148, 169, 209, 225, 241
Weber, Annette 120
Tel Aviv 10, 22, 38, 39, 123, 124, 241 Wedding 41
Tchaikov, Joseph 115, 117–18 Weichert, Michael 168–70
Tcherikower, Elias 18, 22–23, 145, 182, 195, 198, 201, Weininger, Otto 256
204, 206–07, 209, 211 Weinreich, Max xiii, 17, 145, 147, 163–80, 202–04
Teplik 105, 119 n. 1 Weitz, Eric 30
Territorialism x, xi, xii, 13, 22, 97, 99, 195, 201, Wendroff, Zalman 150–51, 160
214 n. 56 Werfel, Franz 244
Tiergarten 41, 61, 248, 249 Widding, Bernd 244
Timms, Edward xi Wiener, Meir xi, xii, 121–22, 252–59
Toller, Ernst 164–65, 167–70, 175, 177 Wieviorka, Abraham 3
Tolstoi, Aleksei 19 Wilde Bühne, theatre group 252
Tolstoy, Leo 225, 247, 251 Wilhelm I x, 147
Tönnies, Ferdinand 129 Wilmersdorf 256
Treaty of Rapallo 19 Wischnitzer, Mark 176, 204, 206
Tsukunft (Future) 151, 170 Wöhler, Elisabeth 55, 57–58, 65, 67
Trotsky, Lev 128, 152 Wolff, Theodor 21
Trunk, Y. Y. 97 Wolitz, Seth 119
Tschernichovsky, Shaul 33 World Zionist Organization 30
Tsereteli, Mikheil 153 Workers’ Cultural Society 21
Tuwim, Julian 227 Workmen’s Circle 152, 153
Uhlandstraße 201 Xammar, Eugeni 186–88, 190–91

Ukraine xi, 2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 17, 19, 56, 105–25, 128, 129,
142, 145, 149, 150, 154, 182, 246 Yakhnovitsh, Leyb 150
Unzer bavegung (Our Movement) 142 Yashunsky, Yosef 202–04
Unzer tsayt (Our Time) 145 Yiddish translations of European literature 8, 82,
151, 155, 164, 167–71, 175, 177 n. 14 and n. 29,
Veit, Jonas 238 192 n. 13, 237 n. 12, 260 n. 16
Veit, Philipp 238 Yiddishism x-xii, 2, 9, 12, 13, 17, 20, 22, 98, 101, 124,
Veker (Awakener) 76, 154, 202 142, 145, 148, 175, 198
Velt-Farlag, publishing house 163, 177 n. 21 Yiddishkayt x, 3, 163, 173, 182, 183, 191, 207, 208, 243,
Vienna xi, 29, 142, 152, 153, 242, 252, 253, 255, 257 258
Vienna (or 2 ½) International 153 Yidishe shtime (Jewish Voice):
Vilna: in Kaunas 10
during World War I 4 in Riga 145
literary images of 13, 75, 172, 175, 218, 220 Yidishe tsaytung (Jewish Newspaper) 10
publishing in 13, 75, 172, 175, 218, 220 YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute) xii, 13, 14, 17, 147,
Yiddish intellectuals in 12, 29, 75, 144, 147, 164, 164, 195, 197–200, 202, 204, 212 n. 8, 213 n. 38
171, 174, 204
270 Index
Zakai, Mira 123 court of honour 18

Zaltsman, Liebe 123, 125, 127, 130, 134 halutzim (Zionist pioneers) 6
Zaltsman, Scholom 124 in Berlin 2, 9, 12, 14, 20, 128, 207
Zehlendorf 42, 156 Labour Zionists 5, 10, 17, 19, 142
Zeitlin, Aaron 237 Zionist Socialist Workers’ Party 13, 144
Zhitlowsky, Chaim 17, 201–02, 204 Zlocisti, Theodor 117
Zingman, Kalman 6–8, 18 Zurich 13, 252, 255
Zinoviev, Grigorii 152, 255, 261 Zweig, Arnold 21, 55, 61, 218
Zionists: Zweig, Stefan 45, 244

Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, at The Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture

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Yiddish in Weimar Berlin, at The Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture

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Weimar_10mm:Weimar_10mm 12/03/2010 19:33 Page 1

This volume includes contributions by an international team of

cover illustration: Yiddish theatre in Berlin: A scene

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

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 2010

ISBN 978-1-906540-70-8 (hbk)

Amy Blau is Visiting Assistant Professor of German, Whitman College, Walla

Many Yiddish-speaking intellectuals in Berlin, even those without a German-

Note to the Preface

Fig. 1. Kalman Zingman. By kind permission of K. Zingman’s granddaughter Amalia

Generally we have employed the Standard Yiddish Romanization system, also

Fig. 1. Kalman Zingman

intellectuals with a limited choice of occupations. For instance, half of American

Fig. 2. 8 Ruhlaer Straße, in Berlin-Schmargendorf, near Grunewald,

Fig. 3. 34/35 Bleibtreustraße, Berlin, housed the ORT headquarters in 1921-26

Notes to the Introduction

The knowledge of cities is a decoding of their images, ones uttered thought­

Gedächtniskirche and then walk to the nearby famous Romanisches Café to

Kracauer’s surprising depiction of the hotel lobby as an ‘inverted house of God’

41. Kulbak, Verk, pp. 238–39.

66. Barzilai, p. 143.

A Yiddish Poet Engages with German

ment was considerable. Furthermore, he is particularly interesting because he was

Fig. 6. Avrom Nokhem Stencl

S’vet mayn vort zikh nit farkrikhn, vi a shtshur in a lokh,

Everything around him is rearing up, trembling, on fire! | He listens in one

‘Like fires in overgrown forests’:

kum ikh tsu a kretshme tsu

cave’). Loaded with strange sensory combinations, including unusual synaesthesia,

then, show how Kulbak experiments with metaphorical inventory in order to

48. Kulbak, Naye lider, pp. 9, 10, 14, 24.

Belarus in Berlin, Berlin in Belarus

The achievement of Moyshe Kulbak’s Berlin writings, as well as the phenomenon

simultaneously ‘pre-modern’, in its embrace of the collective, and ‘post-modern’,

indivisible in its unification of opposites. Furthermore, moving from the mythical

Christian ‘Lamed-vovnik’ Kiril is also present at the Belshazzarian banquet (Y 105;

‘The air outside is bloody’:

Yiddish Berlin: A New Home for Chagall, Ryback, and Kvitko

From Hell to Hell: Kvitko’s Pogrom Cycle 1919, Part One

hob ikh toybe trit,

Against the background of darkness and despair, the figura etymologica — as a

To Write is to Forgive: Leyb Kvitko, 1919, Part Two

Fig. 8. Marc Chagall’s cover of David Hofstein’s Troyer

Yiddish, a Reason for Extinction and a Reason to Write: On Kvitko’s

blutik iz di luft in droysn,

Fig. 9. Joseph Tchaikov’s cover of Peretz Markish’s Di kupe

folkloristic element with modernist techniques in the tradition of the Symbolist

Postscript: Pogrom Poems and their Pictorial Counterparts

Fig. 10. Joseph Tchaikov’s cover of Leyb Kvitko’s 1919

A Warm Morning Gown and a

Fig. 11. 3 Mommsenstrasse, Berlin-Charlottenburg, where Helene and David Koigen

Yiddish Letters to Berlin

No. 1: Rostov, autumn 1924

No. 3: Rostov, 22 December 1924

No. 4: Rostov, 29 January 1925

No. 5: Rostov, 23 February [1925]

No. 6: Rostov, 16 March [1925]

No. 7: [Rostov, after 18 April 1925]

The knowledge of cities is a decoding of their images, ones uttered thought