Literary Passports

The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe

Shachar Pinsker

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804777247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Jewish Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literary Passports is the first book to explore modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. It not only serves as an introduction to this important body of literature, but also acts as a major revisionist statement, freeing this literature from a Zionist-nationalist narrative and viewing it through the wider lens of new comparative studies in modernism. The book's central claim is that modernist Hebrew prose-fiction, as it emerged from 1900 to 1930, was shaped by the highly charged encounter of traditionally educated Jews with the revolution of European literature and culture known as modernism.

The book deals with modernist Hebrew fiction as an urban phenomenon, explores the ways in which the genre dealt with issues of sexuality and gender, and examines its depictions of the complex relations between tradition, modernity, and religion.

Part I The European Cities of Modernist Hebrew Fiction

This metropolis, which at first seemed so fabled and bewitching; its pathways become more and more familiar and the dross of the rusting metal is slowly revealed, coming out of the hiding place.

— Gershon Shofman, Sof sof (“At Last”), Vienna, 1919

Perhaps the best definition of the city in its higher aspects is that it is a place designed to offer the widest facilities for significant conversation.

—Lewis Mumford, The City in History, 1961

Modernism looks quite different depending on where one locates oneself and when.

—David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1989

One Spatializing the Margins

Hebrew Modernism and the Urban Experience

The first three decades of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of Hebrew modernism. Crucial to the development of this body of work were several urban and metropolitan centers in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe, which incubated this new brand of modernism in various guises: as literary “centers,” enclaves, and satellites; as sites for contact and interaction with other literatures that were part of international (or “transnational”) modernism; and as settings for the shifting modernist literary representations of urban life. However, for various theoretical, methodological, and ideological reasons, the role of these urban spaces has not been, to date, directly addressed as a general phenomenon.

My aim in this first part of the book is to expand and spatialize the notion of Hebrew modernism as being a literature “on the margins”¹ by examining its actual centers and enclaves, as well as the ways in which these spaces were experienced, imagined, and represented in modernist Hebrew fiction. Although modernism is mostly associated with, and examined through, the ideas of time and history, I also invoke the concept of space. In so doing, I follow the direction of cultural geographers such as David Harvey and Edward Soja in order to promote the spatialization of history and historiography, as well as the reexamination of the relations between “center” and “margins,” the “real” and “imaginary” spaces that were so crucial in the city of modernity and the modernist urban literature.² Conceived in this way, the peculiarities and difficulties associated with the subject of the European cities and centers of Hebrew literature can be used as a springboard for exploring the complex relations among Jewish literature and culture, modernism, the city, and urban space.³

The city is the most frequently evoked context for understanding modernist literature, and there are a number of good reasons for the prominence of the city in critical and scholarly discussions of modernism. Important scholars of modernism such as Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane claim that “modernism was an art of cities,” and that it evidently found its “natural habitat in cities.” Most modernist writers tended to live and write in the great cities of Europe and America, using the city as a source of inspiration, a research tool, and a setting for their literature. City living fostered the formation of literary centers and coteries. The abundance of literary cafés, journals, and publishing houses encouraged the development of new styles of writing to meet new realities and needs.⁴

Cities were not only great centers for modernism and the myriad social realities against which it developed but also the very subject of shifting modes of literary representation. Needless to say, cities are not modern phenomena, and they have been described in literature since antiquity. The industrial modern city of the eighteenth century, for example, has been especially noted as an essential backdrop to the rise of the realist novel.⁵ Nevertheless, it is quite clear that a radical shift in the representation of cities in literature—coinciding with a shift in literary and aesthetic practices—took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century and intensified between 1890 and 1930, the period primarily identified with modernism.

Burton Pike articulates this shift as a double movement: from stasis to flux, and from urban community as a representative of the city itself to the isolation of the individual within that urban space.⁶ From the mid-nineteenth century, “the crowd” in modernist literature became a metonym for the city, and a great deal of urban literature (as well as urban sociological study) is dedicated to the motif of the crowd in the modern city. One way of responding to the onslaught of the crowd, described by the sociologist Georg Simmel,⁷ is to become as indifferent to value as is the metropolis itself, and the challenge of the chaotic urban scene leads authors to develop innovative literary techniques. Another way of responding to the nervous stimuli of the city is embodied in Walter Benjamin’s famous description of the flâneur, who finds in the city streets a trigger for his own imagination and memory, and who makes urban life an object that is then internalized.⁸

Writers like Baudelaire, Flaubert, and their followers in the early twentieth century embody this move from an objective to a subjective view of the city, which is also the move from realism and naturalism to the variety of literary movements and practices we have come to know as modernism. In this process—at least in some versions of modernist literature—the city as a physical place gave way to the city as a state of mind.⁹ Urban space thus ceased to be merely an experiential domain and became a subject of modernist reflection. Bit by bit, urban space assumed the role of a psychological landscape, on which inner states are projected and where an actual event is always a psychological one as well. Thus, Peter Brooker articulates the task of the modernist artist who “writes the city” not only (or primarily) to find a way to somehow represent and convey the perplexing modern panorama of the city but rather “to render the shifting internal life of an individual consciousness, to present the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary.”¹⁰

According to Robert Alter, the way to understand how the urban experience impacts literary traditions is to examine the language of the modernist novel. In Alter’s account, the modernist breakthrough in narrative representation of the urban realm (which can be traced back to Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, published in 1869) was “to perceive the modern metropolis simultaneously as a locus of powerful, exciting, multifarious stimuli and as a spatial reality so vast and inchoately kinetic that it defied taxonomies and thematic definition.”¹¹ As Alter points out, one decisive development in the novel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the practice of building narrative through the moment-by-moment experience—sensory, visceral, and mental—of the main character or characters.

The fact that so much of the modernist representation of the city focuses on the interiority and inwardness of the protagonist, or “the perceiving subject” (which was a crucial part of the inward turn in modernist Hebrew fiction), is related to another central trope of modernism—”the stranger in the city.” Raymond Williams notes that “Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London, New York took on a new silhouette as the eponymous City of Strangers, the most appropriate locale for the art made by the restlessly mobile émigré or exile.”¹² In his landmark essay, “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism,” Williams identifies the relationship between modernism and the metropolis not so much in the thematic realm but rather in the position of modernist artists and intellectuals within the changing cultural milieu of the metropolis:

[T]he key cultural factor of the modernist shift is the character of the metropolis: in these general conditions, but then, even more decisively, in its direct effects on form. The most important general element of the innovations in form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis, and it cannot too often be emphasized how many of the major innovators were, in this precise sense, immigrants. At the level of theme, this underlies, in an obvious way, the elements of strangeness and distance, indeed of alienation, which so regularly form part of the repertory. But the decisive aesthetic effect is at a deeper level. Liberated or breaking from their national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practices.¹³

Thus, the restlessly mobile immigrant or exile is, in Williams’s view, both the paradigmatic writer and the protagonist of literary modernism. The conditions of the great polyglot metropolis enabled continuous motion across borders, the breaking of national or provincial cultures, and fertile interactions among different “native” languages. This is how “immigrants” and “exiles” became emblems of the modernist artistic universe.

In the context of Jewish history and culture, it has long been recognized that Jewish modernity is essentially the product of a long and gradual process of Jewish encounters with modern urban and metropolitan culture (primarily in Europe and America but also in the Middle East).¹⁴ Important statistical data, including the well-known census in the Russian Empire from 1897, tells us that most Jews in the East European Pale of Settlement lived in urban environments. They resided in cities (from small towns to metropolitan centers) within largely rural agricultural areas. Murray Baumgarten writes that “city life offers a setting for the exploration of the historical ambiguities of Jewish experience. In the process of emancipation, the city is also the bridge from tradition to modernity.”¹⁵ If we formulate modern Jewry as “the people of the city,” one result is that inasmuch as the “restlessly mobile émigré or exile in the city” is turned into an emblem of modernism, we all too often perceive “the Jew” as a prototypically modernist figure.¹⁶

However, the history of modern Hebrew literature seems to embody an opposite version of modernism. We mostly associate Hebrew literature with what has been known as the “Zionist meta-plot,” which revolves around the tropes of territorialization, “negation of exile,” and the search for a national “home.”¹⁷ Seeing Hebrew literature through this trajectory is at least one of the reasons for the acute lack of research into the role of European cities in the development of Hebrew modernism.¹⁸ According to the standard historiography, Hebrew literature in the first half of the twentieth century moved rather smoothly from post-haskalah Odessa to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Gershon Shaked, the Israeli scholar who has written the most comprehensive historiography of modern Hebrew fiction, echoes this common assumption: “to write in Hebrew implied support for the Zionist conviction that Jews could have no permanent home outside of Palestine.” Similarly, he maintains that “Hebrew emerged as the literary language of the Jews, and Eretz Israel as the center of the production and publication of Hebrew writing.”¹⁹ Shaked is surely aware of the Hebrew literary activity that blossomed in a variety of European centers and cities, but he views them solely in hindsight, from the vantage point of their “failure” and then destruction in World War II: “The Hebrew literary centers in the diaspora have been destroyed. It was a long and gloomy process: spiritual decline, physical destruction, followed by a vacuum which was never filled.”²⁰

Zohar Shavit, who deals with these historical developments through structuralist methods and what is known as “polysystem theory,” is even more firm in her refusal to grant any significance to the Hebrew literary and cultural activity throughout Europe. She argues that the only “genuine” center of Hebrew literature in the twentieth century was Eretz Israel. On the other hand, she maintains, the centers or enclaves of Hebrew literature in Europe and America were in fact “dead” even before they were killed in the great violent sweep of the twentieth century.²¹

Thus, whether seen from a structuralist or a historicist viewpoint, what we get is a linear and teleological account of the history and geography of Hebrew literature (from Galut to Eretz Israel).

But what the accounts of Shaked, Shavit, and so many others conceal is a dizzying, and constantly shifting, array of urban centers, satellites, and enclaves of Hebrew literature in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe. Indeed, at the fin de siècle, there were two large urban centers of Hebrew literature in Eastern Europe. The most well known was in Odessa and the other was in Warsaw. Between 1900 and 1930, in addition to these two “centers,” there was a great deal of literary activity in other European cities that we need to consider as enclaves of Hebrew modernism: Homel, Lvov (Lemberg), Vilna, Kiev, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris, and other locations (including, of course, enclaves in Palestine and the United States that spun out of Europe). Despite the historical upheavals in these years, a challenging and fascinating Hebrew literature emerged, strengthened by a rich network linking all these disparate sites of creation.

How could scholars have missed or ignored the potency of this urban realm for so long? I believe that part of the explanation stems from the peculiarity of modern Hebrew literature. It is a literature, after all, that developed “on the margins,” without a vernacular language and a territorial base. As a result, it is difficult to examine the role of these cities and centers with the terms we use to study the more established and “normal” national literatures. Hebrew literature (and this is equally true for Yiddish, but in a different way) sharply raises the question of how to define a “literary center.” Is it a general term for a literary school or group that develops in a specific location; is it the social arena for literary production, bringing together readers, writers, and publishers; or is it both? In short, how can we do justice to a literature without a center; produced by immigrants and exiles, who work alone or in small groups across many metropolitan centers; and whose readers are dispersed across an even broader swath of the globe? These questions are especially difficult in the context of Hebrew literature in the early decades of the twentieth century, because the writers and their audience were a small group and constituted a minority within a minority. ²²

Thus, many of the “typical” and “stable” elements of literary production in European cities are dynamic and unstable when applied to the history of Hebrew literature. For example, the important publishing house Shtybel and its journal Ha-tekufa (both crucial for the development of Hebrew modernism after World War I) were established in 1918 in Moscow and later moved to Warsaw, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Such frequent (and intercontinental) movement is hard to imagine for a comparable American or European publishing house. Likewise, it is impossible to understand the development of Hebrew modernism without looking at the provisional and often short-lived “little magazines” that were edited and publis...