Introduction
This year marks the 150th birthday of I.L. Peretz, the Father of the Yiddish Renaissance. Playwright, poet, composer, essayist, and political organizer, Peretz, by the time of his death in 1915, was the most published Yiddish writer in history, and the most beloved.
Under his intellectual leadership, Yiddish was transformed, in less than a century, from a "kitchen jargon," to one of the great languages of the world, spoken by over 11 million people; a language which was capable of transmitting the ideas of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, to the Jews of Poland, Russia, and the United States. The Haskalah was initiated 100 years earlier by the great German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who demonstrated that a Jew could free himself from the parochialism of ghetto life, become recognized as the most profound thinker in the "outside" world, and still remain true the faith of his fathers. In a 1999 speech, Helga Zepp-LaRouche describes Mendelssohn in this fashion:
"Moses Mendelssohn is a good example of a world-historical individual. By breaking out of the containment of the Jewish ghetto, taking the best of humanist culture from Plato to Leibniz to Bach to everybody else, he is a model of what every oppressed minority can do today. Take everything mankind has produced so far, add your own creative contribution, and be part of the creation of a new Renaissance."(1)
I.L. Peretz and his collaborators did exactly that in the late-19th Century, and, as a result, a Yiddish Renaissance flowered.
But why is this worth looking at today? With the destruction of, especially, Polish Jewry, the assimilation of American Jews, and the creation of modern Hebrew, Yiddish is now, if not dead, then dying. Why then spend time studying its origins? This is not difficult to answer. Firstly, the Jews of Eastern Europe were the last national group in history to produce a Renaissance; a Renaissance with Warsaw at its center and literature as its primary creation. Yiddish literature: the stories, poems and plays of Mendele Moykher-Sforim, I.L. Peretz, Sholom Aleichem and others, is uniquely the literature of the Jewish Pale, but like all world-class literature, speaks universally to all of humanity.
And there is more. The creators of this "new" language, speaking, for the first time, for an oppressed and despised people, living under brutal political and economic conditions, were of course concerned with the well-being of their brothers, Jewish and Gentile. Yiddish became not only a literate language, but a political language of labor, unionism, and protest, and Yiddish-language organizations such as the Jewish Bund played an important role in the history of late-19th-Century Russia and Poland.
From a literary standpoint, the writers of the Yiddish Renaissance should be judged up against the great writers in European literature. Their stories are not "cute," and should never be read aloud with pseudo-Yiddish accents; that is, to do them justice, the musical "Fiddler on the Roof" is an insufficient model. These writers saw themselves in a brotherhood with Cervantes, Heine, Poe, and Pushkin. Many of them would have become great Polish writers, if the growing anti-Semitism had not frozen them out of civil society.
The general theme of their writing is the need for universal progress. The oppressed minority, of which they were the eloquent spokesmen, could never be free unless mankind was free. In this idea, they reflected the cataclysmic social changes brought on by the freeing of the Russian serfs in 1861, American slaves in 1863, the Polish Rebellion the same year, and the freeing of the Polish serfs the following year.
I.L. Peretz was born, lived, and died in this period, from 1852 through 1915, and can be understood only within its context. When Peretz died, on April 3, 1915, he had been the dominant figure in the Yiddish literary life in Warsaw for 25 years, and over 100,000 people attended his funeral. But Polish newspapers reported nothing of this event, as Poland was in the middle of a boycott of Jewish businesses. It was not always so in Poland. In fact, only 52 years earlier, during the 1863 Polish Uprising against the Russian Empire, Jews and Poles fought side by side against a common enemy. The history of Jewish immigration to Poland was, until the end of the 18th Century, basically a success story.
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The Beautiful City of Zamosc
Isaac Leib Peretz was born in eastern Poland, in the city of Zamosc, which was founded in 1580 by Jan Zamoyski, a Polish general, educator, and art lover. The Polish connection to Italy was strong in the 16th Century, and it stretched beyond the common religion. Zamoyski wanted to build a Renaissance city, so he imported an Italian architect from Padua, Bernardo Mirando. (Zamoyski, after attending the Sorbonne and the College de France, was the rector of the University of Padua.) The 20-year city-building project was both an architectural and a commercial success. This new city, whose great buildings included a Catholic church, Franciscan church, Armenian church, Orthodox church, synagogue, university, library, arsenal, public bath, town hall, a palace, and three market squares, became a great trading city, whose lively beginnings were fertilized by many cultures and peoples, Poles, Germans, Italians, Greeks, and others.
Although the official town history praises the town as a center of "peaceful coexistence" among the various groups, over the years local Jews suffered those indignities, blood libel (2), starvation, forced conversions, and public hangings, which were quite "normal" in Europe over the last millennium. In addition, because of its location, Zamosc was constantly changing hands, as marching armies, through siege and slaughter, captured the city, despite its moat and high walls. During Peretz's lifetime, the city was ruled by Poland, Austria and Russia. By 1856, sixty percent of its population of 4,000 was Jewish.
Nevertheless, Zamosc was a special place, and Peretz, in his autobiography, makes that point very strongly: "The Jewish Enlightenment came to Poland, and outside of Warsaw, Zamosc was the most natural place for it to take root." But, says Peretz, the Jews of Zamosc were not assimilationists, for with whom could they assimilate?
The Polish middle class, as he describes it, was backward and ignorant. The peasants "were quiet submissive folk, just released from serfdom.... The younger ones, still unsure what to do with their freedom, submitted to their elders, who slapped them when they failed to fall on their knees before the landowner, cap in hand and face to the ground." Then there were the officers of the occupying Russian Army. Although they were educated and approachable, Peretz says, "We were flaming Polish patriots," who could never form any alliance with them, especially, "Not, God forbid, in any alliance against the Poles! How long had it been since we prayed for the success of the second Polish uprising?" (3) (This is a reference to the 1863 Polish rebellion against Russia.)
Among the Jews, were many accomplished figures. Moses Mendelssohn's rabbi and first teacher, Israel Samoscz, was from Zamosc. There was Dr. Shloyme Ettinger, a playwright, who wrote a Yiddish adaptation of Friedrich Schiller's poem, "The Song of the Bell"; Jacob Eichenbaum, who wrote Hebrew poetry and translated mathematical works into Hebrew; Alexander Zederbaum, who founded the first Hebrew weekly in Russia, in 1860, and its Yiddish supplement, two years later.
Peretz came from a long line of scholars and men of the world. His great-grandfather wrote Talmudic tracts, and it is reported that his great-grandmother studied the Talmud "like a man." His grandfathers were merchants in Danzig and Leipzig, and his father was a businessman, the owner of a whisky distillery.
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Family and Education
The character of Peretz's parents is lovingly revealed in his memoirs. Of his father, he writes:
"The word went out that the government would be drafting men into the army. He was a liberal, and something of an anarchist, and when people got frightened, his advice was not to be frightened and not to comply. People should just refuse to go.
"They said, 'We'll be whipped.'
"He said, 'They can't whip the whole world.'
" 'They will take us away in chains.'
" 'There aren't chains enough!'
" 'They'll put us in prison.'
" 'Only if they make the whole world a prison.' "(4)
And, of his mother:
"The guest took hold of our large double-eared copper rinsing cup in one hand, emptied it over the other hand, and then, switching hands, filled the cup again to the brim and repeated the process. This he did three times, each time with a full cup.(5) Our water carrier was Ayzikl, a tiny, frail man who supported his wife and eight children. He was paid by the week, not by the pail-full, refilling the barrel whenever it ran low. My mother, who was standing beside me, spoke softly to herself, but I could hear her words distinctly: 'Pious at Ayzikl's expense.' "(6)
Peretz writes, "My father's, 'They can't put the whole world in jail,' and my mother's, 'Pious at Ayzikl's expense,' were the two precepts that, once implanted in my youthful soul, took deep root there and later bore fruit in everything I wrote."(7)
Peretz received the standard Jewish education, studying, and memorizing huge sections of the Talmud and commentaries. He was quickly recognized as a prodigy, studying the Hebrew Bible at age three, and the Talmud at age six. By the age of 13, he was allowed to read, unsupervised, in the study house where he discovered Maimonides' rational approach to Jewish law. In fact, Maimonides' The Guide to the Perplexed is reported to be the first book he read from cover to cover. His reputation for brilliance led a local musician to give him the key to his library.
This library was a dark place, seldom used, with books scattered on tables, floors, and shelves. Peretz decided to read every book, one after the other. Reportedly, he read French novels, British moral philosophy, German poetry, Polish reformers, and the Napoleonic Code of Law, teaching himself German and Russian along the way. Very quickly he began to doubt all of the parochial beliefs which were instilled in him as an Orthodox Jewish youth. He says: "To whom could I talk about all this? To whom could I pour out my lament for the ruins in my mind and the corpses in my heart? To the people around me? I lacked the very language to speak to them. I couldn't express these things in Yiddish, because I had no words for these ideas in Yiddish. I couldn't even talk about them to myself when I tried."(8)
Perhaps as a result of his frustration with Yiddish, but certainly as a reflection of his Polish nationalism, his first published poems, written at the age of 22, were in Polish. Even later on, when he became editor of a Yiddish magazine, he always included reviews of Polish literature.
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'One Less Jewish Lawyer'
In 1878, at the age of 26, Peretz set up what would be a very successful law practice in Zamosc.
During the approximately ten years that Peretz practiced law, he continued to write: Hebrew poems for Russian periodicals, Yiddish translations of portions of the Bible, songs protesting both anti-Semitism as well as narrow Orthodox traditions. "One of the more popular ones, in typical maskilish fashion, ridicules the Zamosc Jewish communal institutions, such as the study house and the poorhouse, and complains about the continually rising tax on kosher meat."(9) He set up a night school for workers teaching reading, arithmetic, and Jewish history. Soon, the local Hasidim complained to the authorities that the school was "socialistic," and it was shut down. The same thing happened to a school he set up for the poor children of Zamosc.
Then, in 1887, the Tsarist government, without any explanation, and without the right of appeal, deprived him of the right to practice law. Peretz travelled to Warsaw, and then to St. Petersburg for a personal audience with the justice minister of the Russian Empire. After emotionally pleading his case, the minister off-handedly replied, "So, there will be one less talented Jewish lawyer in Russia."(10)
Without any means of support, Peretz fell back on his writing. Soon, news arrived in Zamosc that a young writer from Kiev, Sholom Aleichem, was publishing a collection of Yiddish writings called Di Yidishe Folks-Biblyote. Having just inherited a fortune from his father-in-law, this wealthy young man (who would soon lose everything in stock-market speculation) was paying top dollar for each literary contribution. In the initial communication between the two men, later to be called the father and grandson of the Yiddish Renaissance, we can see how distant the father, Peretz, was from Yiddish-language circles. He wrote two letters to Sholom Aleichem before admitting that he thought he was writing to Mendele Moykher-Sforim, who would later be called the grandfather of the Yiddish Renaissance!
For his collection, Sholom Aleichem selected Peretz's poem "Monish," about a young Jew's seduction by the Christian world, which leads to his destruction. In this poem, Peretz clearly states the problematic nature of Yiddish; its inability to discuss anything which transcends everyday life. Ironically, as it should be clear from the extract below, this lament of Yiddish banality is in itself a major step toward developing the power of the language:
"Differently my song would ring
If for gentiles I would sing,
Not in Yiddish, in 'Jargon'
That has no proper sound or tone.
It has no words for sex appeal,
And such things as lovers feel."
"Yiddish has but quips and flashes,
Words that fall on us like lashes,
Words that stab like poisoned spears,
And laughter that is full of fears,
And there is a touch of gall,
Of bitterness about it all."
"It is drenched with tears and blood,
That comes pouring like a flood
From the wounds that never cease,
Of our Jewish agonies.
In Yiddish I have never heard
A single warm and glowing word."(11)
A passionate man, Peretz often speaks of the difficulty of wooing in Yiddish. That he solved this problem is demonstrated not only by his later work, but by the reports of his many amorous liaisons.
It is interesting to note that Yiddish speakers, hearing literate Yiddish spoken for first time, are reported to have exclaimed about their own language, "Why, it is as beautiful as French!"
With the publication of "Monish," Peretz, now famous, moved back to Warsaw, where he lived an intellectual's bohemian lifestyle, with many creative friends, all of whom continued to converse and write in Polish.
Out of work again in 1891, his friends got him a job with the Community Council of Warsaw, where he worked for the rest of his life. Although the pay was low, his working hours, from 9 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon, allowed lots of time for writing. With his wife and son, he rented a three-room apartment at No. 1 Ceglana Street in Warsaw, and for the next 25 years, this tiny apartment became the center of the Yiddish Renaissance as visiting writers from all over the Pale were offered hospitality and encouragement or criticism of their work.
The Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, in his "My First Meeting with Peretz," describes the dynamic which Peretz created among young Jewish intellectuals in Poland:
"It is a curious fact that Mendelssohn's translation of the Bible into German, printed in Hebrew characters, opened the way to German classics for many a yeshivah bochur [boy who studies the Talmud], whose mental horizon had been bounded by Talmudic and rabbinic lore—opened the way to Schiller, Koerner, and Goethe, as well as to Shakespeare, in German translation. But these were, in the final analysis, only extraneous books. The lacunae left by loss of religious faith and belief in the Messiah still remained. There was no substance to cling to; no purpose to aim at. Hebrew, Polish grammar, the elements of arithmetic, German—these subjects were only means to an end. But what practical end was to be envisaged? Our hearts remained empty and gnawed by a vague longing. Yet we were young and craved for something to live by."
Asch continues, that just at this time, a young man arrived in his town with some of Peretz's stories printed in Yiddish, "jargon," "the kind servant girls and journeymen borrowed from book hawkers at three copecks a week.
"We read them and were powerfully affected by them. They taught me three things ... that there was no need of waiting until I could write grammatical German or Hebrew, but that I could say things now in the simple idiom that I and all others around me spoke. Secondly, I learned that the story need not deal with barons or princes, as in Schiller.... Why not a present-day story about people I knew and saw daily? Thirdly, and most important, I found that there was always an idea behind the story that Peretz wrote. He demanded, for example, some great act of justice for his heroes....
"From then on I longed for No. 1 Ceglana, Peretz's address."(12)
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Stories of the Yiddish Renaissance
Let us take a look, then, at two of these stories which created the Yiddish Renaissance.
'Bontshe the Silent'
There are many words in Yiddish for the unfortunates of this world, the losers, those for whom success is always beyond reach; shmo, shnuk, shlump, schlemiel, and schlimazel are a sampling. Leo Rosten in his Hooray for Yiddish! masterfully explains the different shades of meaning in words such as these, for example, "A schlemiel is always spilling hot soup—down the neck of a schlimazel." As you can infer from Rosten's definition, these words, though derisive and often dismissive, also have a hint of humor or even affection, as in: "My brother-in-law, such a schmo!" But in his 1894 story "Bontshe Shvayg" ("Bontshe the Silent"), Perez creates a character so pathetic, that even Yiddish had no adequate description.
Bontshe "was born in silence. He lived in silence. He died in silence. And he was buried in a silence greater yet.... When he died, the wind blew away the wooden sign marking his grave. The gravedigger's wife found it some distance away and used it to boil potatoes."
Bontshe lived as he died: nameless, suffering, hated, even beaten by his own children! But, through all this suffering, Bontshe remained silent. "Not once in his whole life ... did he complain to God or to man. Not once did he feel a drop of anger or cast an accusing glance at Heaven." And it is for this silence, this acceptance of fate, that Bontshe is obfered by the "Heavenly tribunal" not only a place in Heaven, but anything he wants: "All Heaven belongs to you. Ask for anything you wish; you can choose what you like." And what does Bontshe choose? "Well then," smiled Bontshe, "what I'd like most of all is a warm roll with fresh butter every morning."
Those familiar with this story always remember Bontshe's request for a "warm roll and fresh butter," but not the reaction of Heaven to this request. Depending on the translation, Peretz reports that the Holy Tribunal and the angels were "ashamed," "abashed," and "stunned" that a man had been reduced to so little. And in a final irony, the prosecutor, who had refused to present evidence against Bontshe, twists the knife, with a bitter laugh.
Ruth Wisse, in her book I.L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, writes, "When the story of Bontshe was dramatized in the Broadway production 'The World of Sholem Aleichem,' a halo of light was cast on him as he made this request." This suggestion of sainthood would not have occurred to Peretz's contemporaries, who understood that this story was a direct attack on the passivity of Jews in the face of oppression.
It is interesting to reflect on Lyndon LaRouche's recent discussion of the underling, drawn from Cassius's famous speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." LaRouche writes:
"The fight for freedom, now as before, is essentially a fight within the individual. It is a fight to uplift him, or her, from the habit of thinking like an underling. If you give them freedom for a moment or two, but do not remove the habit of being an underling from them, they will shuck off newly gained freedom, as it were this January's torn Christmas wrappings."(13)
So, poor, pathetic Bontshe Shvayg, offered anything by the tribunal, is unable to even conceive a desire for his own humanity, the greatest treasure that can be granted.
This was exactly the understanding Peretz's readers took from this story. Soon after it was published, Bontshe Shvayg became a major recruitment tool for the Bund, the Jewish Socialist organization for which Peretz had great sympathy. It placed the responsibility for Jewish oppression on young Jews themselves who acceded to that oppression. The story was read at clandestine Bund meetings in the same way that "We Shall Overcome" was sung at Civil Rights meetings in the 1960s. To the young Jews of Poland, the story almost shouted out, "Fight now for your humanity, or you will be reduced to something so low it will shock the Heavens!"
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'The Three Gifts'
This story is, along with Bontshe Shvayg, the best-loved of Peretz's stories, and is so poignant that I hesitate to summarize it, knowing that I will do it an injustice. Once read, it will never leave your thoughts.
A Jew dies—"after all, you can't live forever"—is buried, the prayers are said, and his soul arrives at "the celestial court" to be judged. To the amazement of the presiding angels, when the poor soul's good and bad deeds are compared, they are found to be of equal weight! As his good deeds are not greater than the evil he has done on Earth, he cannot be allowed into Heaven; on the other hand, he cannot be sentenced to Hell; he must remain a "vagabond," wandering the universe, homeless.
An angel takes pity on our poor soul, and tells him that, times being what they are, even the angels can be bribed. That if the soul finds three rare and beautiful gifts for the angels, the gates of Heaven will be opened. And so our soul wanders the Earth searching for gifts, rare and beautiful, but encountering only mediocrity and wretchedness.
Despairing of ever changing his fate, he spies a rich Jew being robbed by bandits, who threaten to kill him if he mutters a word while they take his gold and jewels. The old Jew remains silent, thinking to himself, "The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord! You're not born with it, and you can't take it with you." He remains silent until the thieves reach into a secret hiding place and take out a small bag. He attempts to scream "Don't touch that!" and is summarily murdered. The bandits greedily open the sack expecting to find the most valuable booty of all. "But they were bitterly mistaken. The blood was shed in vain. There was no silver, no gold, no jewelry in the bag.... Just a little soil. From the earth of Palestine, for his grave."
This was the first gift our poor soul gave the angels.
The second gift is a mere pin, but such a pin! Our poor soul removed it from the battered body of a beautiful young Jewess who is horribly executed for walking past a church on Sunday. When given a last wish, she asks only for a pin, with which she pins her dress to her flesh, so that her modesty is preserved as her body is torn to pieces.
The last gift is a skullcap taken from the body of an old Jew who is forced to walk the gauntlet for crimes nobody remembers. Barely surviving the beating, he realizes his skullcap has fallen off half way through. Without hesitation, he goes back through the gauntlet, retrieves it, and dies, bloody and battered from the beating.
What is the intrinsic value of these three gifts? A bag of dirt, a bloody pin, and a torn skullcap are less than worthless, yet valuable enough to buy a ticket to Heaven. From the narrowest standpoint, our poor soul is the Jewish people who, forced to roam the Earth, will only find peace if they maintain their relationship to their history, their individual dignity in the face of the worst possible oppression, and to God.
Is this not a universal message? Is it only the Jewish people for whom this formula will succeed? Or, is this not the key to humanity's successful future? The "Three Gifts," in particular, demonstrates what I emphasized in the Introduction: that the writers of the Yiddish Renaissance in general, and I.L. Peretz in particular, are powerful, world-class writers with a universal message. All three characters are faced with a horrific death, yet none grovel before their tormentors, and none of them are victims.
The rich Jew's bag of dirt is not some "blood and soil" relationship to Palestine, but the understanding that there is an historic basis for his life, that others have lived so he may live. The young Jewess preserves her modesty not for herself, as she will soon be ripped to pieces, but to demonstrate that she remains human whilst surrounded by once-human beasts. And the old man, who dies for his skullcap, is refusing to relinquish his relationship to the Creator, a relationship which is, after all, the source of the past, present, and the future.
"The Three Gifts" is a brilliant work in the Jewish idiom which is capable of ennobling any audience.
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Essays and Social Writings
To the world around him, the educated Jew seemed a conundrum. Cultured, conversant in many European tongues, familiar with the literature and music of Europe—why then maintain an identification with the teeming ghetto or the impoverished shtetl? Even the great Moses Mendelssohn was asked, in his time, why did he not convert to Christianity!
But to thinkers like Peretz, it was not difficult to imagine a Poland where every religious and language group flourished, yet a nation was built. Addressing the world federalists of his day, Peretz wrote, "We too hope for a common humanity, but we shall never attain it your way. We shall never get to it by destroying languages, or by annihilating separate peoples, or by extirpating differing civilizations."(14)
Peretz loved his people, the Jews. He loved them as a patriot loves his nation above all other nations, but not to the detriment of other nations. He thought his religion and cultural traditions beautiful, and worth preserving; a rare jewel of historic and intrinsic value, not just for the Jews, but for the outside world as well. He was willing to enter into social and intellectual discourse with the thinkers of the world, but always he remembered his father's "They can't put the whole world in jail" and his mother's "Pious at Ayzikl's expense."
The fight therefore, was to progress as a people, to break out of the ghetto, to act in the wider world, but to preserve traditions and religion.
In his essay "Education," Peretz outlines his program:
"Our program is education. We want to educate our people. We want to transform fools into sages, fanatics into enlightened human beings, idlers into useful, decent workers who live by labor and thereby benefit our entire community.
"Our enemies speak of all Jews as parasites, criminals, rascals. Our detractors say that the Jewish brain is a rotten weed, the Jewish heart is made of flint, the Jewish skin is in a state of decay, and all our limbs are crooked and lame.
"Our chauvinists, on the other hand, maintain that Israel is God's only beloved child, that his cradle is faith, his pillow is trust, his swaddling-clothes are parchments from Solomon's Temple.
"We simply say: Jews are human beings just like all others. We have our good qualities and we also have our faults. We are not gods, and we are not devils, merely human beings. We hold that human beings need education, need to learn unceasingly, need to grow daily in wisdom, goodness, and refinement.
"Although we Jews are, by nature, like other peoples, nevertheless we do somehow behave differently, because our historic experience has made us different. We have had as our schoolmaster—the Galuth" (from the Hebrew galut, meaning exile, banishment; the Diaspora).(15)
Jews, wrote Peretz, must know at least three languages. "As Jews we must know Hebrew; but as educated people, as living active human beings, we must also know the language of the land. Hebrew is the tongue of our religion and nationality, but we also need the tongue of the state we dwell in, the tongue of our general education and of our daily affairs."
As for Yiddish, "The question is answered by the reality about us. The third language exists. Three million people speak it. If we want to educate these three million Jews, we cannot wait until they acquire a thorough knowledge of other tongues."(16)
Peretz did not regard Yiddish as sacrosanct, but rather as a tool which must be developed to serve a purpose. In the essay "What Is Missing in Our Literature?," Peretz excoriates the Yiddish writers who simply copied their contemporaries in Europe, creating a cold, sterile language. "The supreme form of will power for [the Yiddish writers] must be their own distinctive character, original form. We must get out of the ghetto and see the world—but with Jewish eyes."(17)
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Politics
I.L. Peretz was a socialist. This meant in late 19th-Century Poland that he was a member of the Jewish Socialist Bund. His interest in socialist politics began shortly after he arrived in Warsaw and continued during the 1890s. The Bund was an underground movement whose clandestine meetings were often broken up by Tsarist police, its members sent to prison or exile.
It was illegal to publish a newspaper during this time without the approval of the censor. As the censor would not approve a Yiddish-language newspaper, Peretz and friends proposed a flyer for the Jewish holidays which was approved. As there was a Jewish holiday almost every month, Peretz was able to publish 17 issues between 1894 and 1896 of Yontef Bletlekh (Holiday Pages), but filled with political articles!
The newspaper became extremely popular and was distributed all over Poland. Soon, the police began to suspect Peretz, as they found his newspaper, and his other works, in almost every worker's house they raided. As I mentioned earlier, his story "Bontshe Shvayg," was often read aloud at secret meetings, and was particularly effective in recruiting young workers. In 1895, his house was searched, but nothing "incriminating" was found.
Finally, in 1899, Peretz was arrested while attending a meeting which had been approved by the police because they were told it was an engagement party. The meeting was raided, and Peretz was sent to the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel, a prison for political prisoners.
After his imprisonment, Peretz continued a rocky relationship with the "movement." He announced in his 1906 essay "Hope and Fear":
"My heart is with you.
"My eye cannot have its fill of your flaming flag. My ear never tires of listening to your sonorous song.
"My heart is with you. Sated should every man be and his home flooded with light. Free should every man be, free to fashion his life, free to choose his work.
"When you clench your fists at those who would stifle the free word in your throat and still the burning protest on your lips—I rejoice: I pray to God to sharpen your teeth. Yea, when you march upon Sodom ready to rend and tear, my soul is with you. Sureness of our victory fills me with warmth and makes me drunk as old wine.
"And yet....
"And yet I have my fear of you."
His fear is that his socialist comrades will submerge the cultures of Europe, and particularly Jewish culture, in one great, gray bureaucracy:
"With real joy I see you tear down the walls of Sodom. But my heart trembles lest you build on its ruins a new, worse Sodom—more cold, more gloomy!
"True, there will be no homes without windows, but the souls will be shrouded in mist.
"True all bodies will be well fed, but spirits will go hungry.
"True, no wail of woe will be audible but the eagle—the human spirit—will stand with clipped wings at the same trough beside the cow and ox."(18)
No idle fear, as many of his comrades from this movement played major roles in the Russian Revolution, and were later liquidated by Stalin.
Despite his trepidation, Peretz continued his relationship with the Bund. To give you a flavor of the times, let me quote to you, in full, a description of Peretz's 50th birthday party and 25th jubilee as a writer:
"The guests were in an elevated mood when there was a ring at the door and two young, unknown personages let themselves in. They were poorly dressed workingmen. They spoke quietly with Peretz and asked him to go with them into another room. Peretz excused himself from the committee and went into another room with the two young people. A few minutes later he emerged with his face alight with enthusiasm; in his hand was an old book. The workers quietly left and then Peretz called out, 'Do you know who that was? A delegation from the Bund. They sent me an official greeting with this gift.' The Polish-speaking guests grew pale with fright and looked towards the door. In the word 'Bund' they smelled Siberia and the gallows. Dineson [Peretz's associate] calmed them down with a quiet act. The official greeting of the Bund he cautiously removed from Peretz's hand and burned in the lighted candle on the table. He gathered the ashes carefully on a piece of paper and threw them into an ashtray. The book, a copy of Peretz's Yiddish Library, Peretz hid deep among his most precious documents that he held dear his whole life.
"The book, greasy, smeared, torn-up from use, came from the Tenth Pavilion, where it has been secretly circulated from one political prisoner to the next. Many single letters were underlined with pencil which encoded messages from one prisoner to the next. After this event Peretz would write with deep sincerity, 'I belong to no party, but I feel closest to the Bund.' And years later he would say, 'I found my Socialism in the Prophets of the Bible.' "(19)
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Conclusion
Yes, it is true that the Yiddish Renaissance was the flowering of a language, once mere jargon, resulting in great literature, but it is more than that.
Look back at what Sholem Asch wrote in his "My First Meeting with Peretz." Young Jewish men and women throughout the Pale of Settlement and in Russia had absorbed the lessons of the maskilim, the Jewish Enlightenment. Eagerly they studied German and Polish, read Schiller and Shakespeare, and loved what they read. But, and this is the nub of the matter, they asked, "What about us? What do we contribute? We Jews, with our history, religion, folkways, our sense of humor, what do we contribute?" It was I.L. Peretz, along with a few others, who answered the question for them.
Of course, all of this discussion is colored by the fact that the culture which spawned these questioning youth was destroyed; their institutions blasted and burned, and the next generation of poets and writers exterminated.
Yet, if one takes seriously the beautiful notion that each of the world's people is an invaluable gem on a single necklace, then it is a powerful memorial to these writers that, despite the obscuring veil of translation, their efforts still sparkle and glisten.
In the two great centers of Jewish life today, the U.S.A. and Israel, the Yiddish language is almost gone, a victim of American assimilation and modern Hebrew. Yet, if we look back on the best of America in the 20th Century—the trade union movement, the New Deal, the Civil Rights movement, musical performance, and scientific progress—it is to I.L. Peretz's credit (and that of his collaborators) that the children and grandchildren of his contemporaries played so important and critical a role in all these areas. And this holds true for Israel as well. I.L. Peretz and his friends would have recognized, in the martyred Yitzhak Rabin, a soulmate; and in Ariel Sharon, an inveterate enemy. As Peretz wrote,
"[B]ecause we are externally unhappy guests forced to eat at the tables of other peoples, we aspire all the more toward one world, humanity is our holiest ideal, and sheer egoism compels us to the purest love of mankind as a whole. For, we rightly feel that as long as universal love does not triumph over envy, hatred, discord, and war, we shall not prosper. Hence, our constant prayer is for peace on Earth; our hearts are like a sponge, receptive to all the newest humanitarian ideas; and our sympathy goes out to all the unfortunate, all the exiled, all the oppressed."(20)
It is sad, but true, that on the 150th birthday of I.L. Peretz, his original Yiddish writings can be read only by an aging population which diminishes with each passing year. Nevertheless, efforts should be made to keep the Yiddish Renaissance alive, if only through translation, not only to preserve a great literature, but because, as Lyndon LaRouche wrote in his 1999 essay, "Music, Judaism, and Hitler":
"[T]he Yiddish Renaissance of Germany and eastern Europe bequeathed to posterity great gifts to which posterity must turn fond attention whenever the name of 'Jew' is spoken. With that, every Christian bearing the legacy of Augustine must concur. To deny the Jews hated by Adolf Hitler their claim to that honor, is to subject those who suffered to a virtual second Holocaust, a holocaust of deadly silence, a virtual denial that those millions of victims ever existed except as a mass of nameless dead."(21)
Happy Birthday, Isaac Leib Peretz. Mazel Tov!
Notes
1. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, "What It Takes To Be a World-Historical Leader Today," Fidelio, Summer 1999, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 26.
2. The "blood libel" is the accusation that Jews use the blood of Christian children as part of the Passover service.
3. Ruth R. Wisse, ed., The I.L. Peretz Reader, "My Memoroirs" (Schocken Books, New York, 1990), p. 308.
4. Ibid., p. 270.
5. This is a description of the ritual washing of hands performed by Orthodox Jews before each meal.
6. Wisse, Op. cit., p. 295.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 346.
9. Marvin Zuckerman and Marion Herbst, eds., The Three Great Classic Writers of Modern Yiddish Literature (Pangloss Press, Malibu, Calif., 1991), p. 29.
10. Ibid., p. 31.
11. Ibid., p. 113.
12. Ibid., p. 57.
13. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Freedom vs. 'Democracy': How 'Democracy' Became Diseased," EIR, March 22, 2002, Vol. 29, No. 11, p. 59.
14. "Education," Three Classic Writers, p. 348.
15. Ibid., pp. 345-346.
16. Ibid., p. 348.
17. "What Is Missing in Our Literature?" Three Classic Writers, p. 358.
18. "Hope and Fear," Three Classic Writers, p. 352.
19. Ibid., p. 43.
20. "Education," Three Classic Writers, p. 346.
21. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. "Music, Judiasm and Hitler," Fidelio, Fall 1999, Vol. VIII, No. 3.
Note on translations: The translations of Bontshe Shvayg and The Three Gifts are taken from Wisse, Peretz Reader; Leo Rosten, Hooray for Yiddish!; and Zuckerman and Herbst, Three Great Classic Writers.
