Yiddish in Weimar Berlin

At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture

Gennady Estraikh

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367603694
• eBook ISBN: 9781351193658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Berlin emerged from the First World War as a multicultural European capital of immigration from the former Russian Empire, and while many Russian emigres moved to France and other countries in the 1920s, a thriving east European Jewish community remained. Yiddish-speaking intellectuals and activists participated vigorously in German cultural and political debate. Multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors and artists, invigorated by the creative atmosphere of the city, formed an environment which facilitated exchange between the main centres of Yiddish culture: eastern Europe, North America and Soviet Russia. All this came to an end with the Nazi rise to power in 1933, but Berlin remained a vital presence in Jewish cultural memory, as is testified by the works of Sholem Asch, Israel Joshua Singer, Zalman Shneour, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi Grinberg and Meir Wiener. This volume includes contributions by an international team of 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 the modern European culture."

CHAPTER 1
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 thoughtlessly, 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 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 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, communication, 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 inflation and deeply unstable economy of Weimar Berlin, because the publishers’ capital was foreign currency. In 1925, when the inflation 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 flourishing 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. For example, we must explore sites such as t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• List of Illustrations
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction: Yiddish on the Spree
• 1 Deciphering the Hieroglyphics of the Metropolis: Literary Topographies of Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism
• 2 A Yiddish Poet Engages with German Society: A. N. Stencl's Weimar Period
• 3 'Like fires in overgrown forests': Moyshe Kulbak's Contemporary Berlin Poetics
• 4 Belarus in Berlin, Berlin in Belarus: Moyshe Kulbak's Raysn and Meshiekh ben-Efrayim between Nostalgia and Apocalypse
• 5 'The air outside is bloody': Leyb Kvitko and his Pogrom Cycle 1919
• 6 A Warm Morning Gown and a Shawl from Berlin: Liebe Zaltsman's Yiddish Letters to Helene Koigen
• 7 The Berlin Bureau of the New York Forverts
• 8 Max Weinreich in Weimar Germany
• 9 Reports from the 'Republic Lear': David Eynhorn in Weimar Berlin 1920—24
• 10 Jewish Universalism, the Yiddish Encyclopedia, and the Nazi Rise to Power
• Yiddish, the Storyteller, and German-Jewish Modernism: A New Look at Alfred Döblin in the 1920s
• 12 Between Literature and History: Israel Joshua Singer's Berlin Novel The Family Carnovsky as a Cul-de-Sac of the German-Jewish 'Symbiosis'
• 13 Unkind Mirrors: Berlin in Three Yiddish Novels of die 1930s
• Index