The art of Yiddish storytelling

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

If you thought that Yiddish, by its very nature, is a storytelling language and, therefore, the art of storytelling must have come naturally to such infamous writers as Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Peretz, think again.

David G. Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture and professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is also the award-winning author of Yiddishlands: A Memoir and will deliver both the 2011 Itta and Eliezer Zeisler Memorial Seminar and the Zeisler Memorial Community Lecture in Vancouver next month, as well as lead a Shabbaton on storytelling at Congregation Har El.

In the promotional material for the Shabbaton, there is reference to “born-again storytellers” who “fashioned a new kind of folk narrative that was better than the original.” When asked what this meant, Roskies told the Independent, “When the first generation of Jewish intellectuals took up the pen to become writers, they had to learn everything from scratch, which means that they had to learn it from European languages and cultures because Jewish culture simply had lagged behind by hundreds and hundreds of years.

“They had to learn the difference between a lyric poem and an epic poem, and satire and short story, not to speak of such complicated forms as the novel, so that’s what they did,” said Roskies. “They began reading voraciously in other languages and trying to adapt that [way of writing] to Hebrew and to Yiddish, and that’s the beginning of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and that accounts for the first 40 years, let’s say from around 1860 to 1900, where there’s this mad effort to catch up on 250 years of European civilization.”

About how Jews got behind, Roskies explained, “It was a traditional society, studying Jewish texts in a very sophisticated way and Jewish forms of self-expression were sufficient for us ... and there was popular literature. It’s not as if everything was religious, there was also secular writing but, in a fairly modest, politically correct way, let’s say.... Now, where it gets more complicated is that, at a certain point, the same writers wake up one morning and discover that the pace of change is going so quickly that they may be throwing the baby out with the bath water and that, before you know it, there won’t be anything left of the traditional culture, that the new will have completely erased the old. That’s when they start casting a look backward and saying, ‘Oh, well, wait a minute, maybe we should be considering, well there’s such a thing as Yiddish folklore and Yiddish folksong and stories and fantasy and demonology and Chassidism and all kinds of things that we turned our back on. This is something we could actually rescue as part of our literary project,’ so that’s where the second act [begins].... I call them the ‘born-again storytellers.’

“What’s so interesting,” concluded Roskies, “is that we, coming very late to the story, always assumed that Yiddish was a language of storytelling and that, if Sholem Aleichem became a storyteller or [I.L.] Peretz writes stories about Chassidism, it was second nature to them. Well, it wasn’t, and that’s what I’m trying to demonstrate.”

The biennial Zeisler memorial events are endowed by Betty and Irv Nitkin, in memory of Betty’s parents.

“It is a lecture series because that format seemed to embody my parents’ philosophy about Yiddishkeit, which was heavily centred on education,”

Betty Nitkin explained. “They themselves were highly educated, both Jewishly and secularly, the latter being unusual for a Polish Jewish women in that prewar period. The subject matter can range over a very wide spectrum of Jewish life, except that we avoid the Holocaust, as that is already covered by another endowed local lecture series.”

The choice of speaker is made by the Nitkins and Richard Menkis, associate professor of modern Jewish history at the University of British Columbia.

“For my part,” Menkis told the Independent, “Roskies was a great choice because: (1) the mandate of the series is to do a topic in Jewish studies ... (2) Roskies is a leading scholar of Yiddish culture; (3) there is a Canadian angle, i.e. his youth, which should be interesting for the audience; (4) added bonus: there is a tie-in with Betty’s parents.”

For her part, Nitkin said about Roskies’ upcoming talks, “Since my parents are originally from Poland and spoke Yiddish with my uncles and aunts, it will be very interesting to hear from someone who is researching the culture of that lost world. His presentations about the Yiddish story on Friday and Shabbat will explore a topic that we have not yet covered, and should be of major interest to many in Greater Vancouver, as most are considered Ashkenazi, i.e. from eastern Europe.”

With respect to that background, Roskies, in an interview with the Forward, described Yiddish as the “language of secrets.” He told the Independent, “I meant it in two ways: one, intergenerational and, the other, historical. In so far as Yiddish was the language of the older generation ... all their life experience was locked away in that language and, when their children and grandchildren had no access to it, it was as if there were family secrets, which they could not carry on, pass on.

“One dramatic example of that is the Holocaust,” he continued. “There is a widespread belief that, after the war, there was a conspiracy of silence and that nobody spoke about the Holocaust, and the truth is precisely the opposite, that everyone spoke about the Holocaust. It’s just that it was the survivor generation talking to each other about their experiences and their children couldn’t understand what they were saying, or were embarrassed that their parents were speaking this language called Yiddish, which made them look like greenhorns, like foreigners, so they didn’t want to listen.

“And that’s tied into the second [meaning], that Yiddish is the language of the Jewish historical experience of the last hundreds of years. The majority of Jews in the world were Yiddish speaking and much of that [past] can only be accessed in Yiddish, so it’s as if that whole historical experience of immigration and transformation and struggle between tradition and modernity, and so on and so on, that’s locked away, as if it were a secret.”

However, not much of it is a secret to Roskies, who grew up in Montreal, where, he explained, there was a particular wave of Jewish immigration around the First World War. These labor Zionists had a specific ideology, he said, which was “socialist, but they also had a cultural program, and the cultural program was that Jewish life in the present must be conducted in Yiddish; that’s our national language and it’s a sign of our faith and our group solidarity that we continue to not only speak this language, but we have to write in it, publish in it and transmit it to the next generation, it’s not going to happen by itself. So it [that generation] created these amazing institutions, a Yiddish daily newspaper, a labor movement and a network of Yiddish schools, and they sent their kids to these schools, and I’m proof that, for about 50 years, that educational system was very powerful.”

Roskies’ Yiddishlands is described as “the story of modern Yiddish culture as told through the lens of family history and the medium of Yiddish song,” but, said Roskies, “It’s a portrait mainly of my mother, and it’s her tenacity and her personality and her charisma that drove my interest.... I was just captivated by this woman who kept me literally spellbound at the table three times a day for 17 years, telling me about her experiences in the past. To flip back to what I said at the beginning [about secrets], I was exposed to too much information. I didn’t know what to do with all of these stories because it was like a constant barrage and, what made it so powerful, is that my mother was still at war with the past.

“It wasn’t as if she said, ‘Dovidl, let me tell you a story.’... It never went that way. It always started with something in the present, something that ticked her off ... and when she was good and angry, she would remember something that had happened 50 years before and then the story would begin.... And it wasn’t only Yiddish, she actually grew up speaking Russian, but she told the stories in Yiddish, so she mediated everything to us in Yiddish, Yiddish was the language of our home, so, as far as we were concerned, these were Yiddish stories, this was Yiddish ‘live,’ and it was not only live but alive, because she acted these things out and she was still angry and unreconciled. These things were still playing themselves out in her head and she was struggling with what did it mean and was it the right thing and how could they do something like that, and what an injustice. This was a lot more interesting than anything I was learning at school ... and none of it was age appropriate.”

Roskies will be bringing some of these childhood stories to the West Coast. The lecture called Mothers, Motherlands and the Mother Tongue will focus on Roskies’ memoir – “I meant very literally mother, not as a metaphor,” he said, laughing – and in the seminar, he will discuss Gimpel the Fool as “an example of one of the greatest stories and I’m going to give three different readings of it: I’m going to read it as a love story, I’m going to read it as a monologue in five voices and I’m going to read it as a religious parable, as a story about faith.”

Roskies’ seminar will take place on Thursday, Feb. 3, 3 p.m., at the University of British Columbia, Buchanan C203. The community lecture on his memoir will be later that day, at 7:30 p.m., at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture. Roskie leads the Shabbaton at Har El on Feb. 4-5, for which there will be a dinner ($22) before the presentation Friday night. The deadline to register for the Shabbaton is Feb. 2 at 9 a.m. to 604-925-6488, ext. 4.

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