#yiddishkeyt

And do I believe in those things? No, but I think I might need them. 

When I was a kid I went to Hebrew school and we talked about how to worship G-d, and we never mentioned the little things we still do at weddings or when babies are born-- those times when you can’t be too careful, when you have a happiness worth protecting with new and with old ways. 

And I grew up with Jewish religion, but absorbing Christian superstition, and I didn’t learn until much later that we had our own Jewish superstitions, and Jewish names to give our fears, and Jewish ways to make ourselves feel safe from them. 

As a mostly-secular American Ashkenazi Jew, a lot of what’s been passed to me has come to me from institutions: my synagogue, which naturally tends to capital ‘R’ Religion; and political and cultural organizations, that tend to focus on the rationality and the potential universality of ethical values. And I think it’s worth thinking about what isn’t transmitted that way, and what gets lost, and maybe making more space for embracing our own particular weirdness and irrationality. 

[...] To be in exile, in Rosenfeld’s “Goles,” means to have one’s tradition or language misunderstood in his ironic sense: the “Torah” is considered a symbol of “plunder,” when it is in fact the nations of the world who have helped themselves to Hebrew’s resources, as biblical translation created a literary tradition of one’s “own.” Exile for Rosenfeld means to have one’s tradition misunderstood; to depart from that slavery means recognizing the “curse” of the Jews as an excuse for textual robbery, rediscovering the potential for textual and human exchange that “unser Thore” actually represents.

This “blessing” to be found in the “enemy’s curse” centers on “unser Nomen,” or “our name.” Here transforming the “curse” placed on the foreign means a recognition of Hebrew and its potential for change. In the biblical text it is Jacob who will have his name changed to “Israel” after struggling with the angel; he will be granted the name of the nation only after recognizing the angels as translator figures—as a series of messengers, traveling on a “stairway” between different realms, who cannot be mastered by a single “Jakob,” no matter how strong (Gen. 28:12, 32:29). In Kafka’s New York, the Uncle Jakob who undergoes a similar name change conveys this same Hebrew sense of difference as the essential principle that is required for human growth. Changing “Jakob” from his first name to his last, Karl’s uncle becomes more “original” in the biblical sense, identifying with the “Israel” whose identity was founded in a vision of continuous exchange. In Kafka’s New York novel, getting one’s “nomen” changed means reversing the curse, as Rosenfeld suggests, and discovering the origin of tradition in forms of exchange. Uncle Jakob has therefore given up what the text calls his “Taufname,” or baptismal first name, and with it the notion that his sinful, “other” identity must be shed.

Then you have encountered Rotwelsch, an ancient language of the road, spoken by vagrants and refugees, merchants and thieves since the European Middle Ages. This tongue was based on a combination of German, Yiddish, Hebrew, a smattering of Romani (the language of Sinti and Roma, pejoratively known as Gypsies), Czech, and Latin—and was incomprehensible to all but initiates.

I was inducted into this strange language during my childhood in Southern Germany. My earliest memories were of strange figures, dressed in long coats that had lost their original colors, who showed up at our door with bags slung across their backs. When it rained, they smelled, and my mother wouldn’t let them inside the house. “I know what you want. Wait. I’ll be right back,” she would say.

Lingering near the door, I would hear noises from the kitchen, my mother fixing open-faced sandwiches. While they ate, she remained standing on the threshold, guarding the house, trying to make conversation. I had trouble understanding them because they spoke a strange dialect, mixed with words I didn’t know. When they had finished, my mother would take the empty plate from their hands and close the door, relieved that the encounter was over.

“Who are they?”

“They don’t have a home. We’re giving them something to eat.”

That didn’t answer my real questions. I wanted to know why: Why didn’t they have a home; why were we giving them something to eat; and why did they have such a strange way of talking?

Later, I asked my father about these men and their language. “They are Travelers,” he said.

I didn’t understand. “Where are they going?”

“They are people of the road, escaping to nowhere.”

My uncle eventually figured out why these travelers kept showing up at our house. One day, he found a sign discreetly carved into the foundation stone, a cross with a circle around it, which meant that there was bread to be had here. The signs were called zinken, a word derived from the Latin signum. But the language was Rotwelsch, also known as kochemer loshn, an adaptation of the Hebrew khokhem, which means a wise person and loshn, tongue, or language.

With my holy poem Clenched between my teeth From my wolf cave—my hole, my home— I go out and I roam From street to street: As a wolf with a wretched bone Clenched between his teeth alone. There is prey enough in the street to sate a wolven hate, and sweet is the humid blood that drips from flesh, but sweeter still is the dry dust settling down on jammed lips.

PAULA VOGEL, the Pulitzer-prize winning dramatist of How I Learned to Drive, has again collaborated with director Rebecca Taichman in Indecent. Taichman, who just won the 2017 Tony for best direction of a play, is billed as “co-creator” of Indecent, having worked with Vogel to devise the play’s highly theatrical presentation. The play is at once a compressed history of a daring Yiddish play, God of Vengeance, written by the Polish novelist Sholem Asch in 1907, and a celebration of the stagecraft that makes theater distinct from film.

[...]

Scandalous in its time, God of Vengeance was nevertheless celebrated in St. Petersburg and Moscow and in other European capitals. On first hearing play, the founding father of Yiddish literature I. L Peretz advised Asch to “burn it.” Peretz and other naysayers were reacting as much to the implicit critique of Jewish life as to the idealistic yet carnal presentation of two young women in thrall to each other. Asch’s depiction of flawed, complex Jews and his willingness to approach lesbianism in his play may well have been the very ingredients that allowed sophisticated theater-goers before the Great War to find God of Vengeance worthy dramatic fare.

[...]

Sitting out World War I in New York, Asch visited Europe after the Great War and was deeply shaken by the depredations visited upon Jewish communities. Back in New York, his devoted wife was alarmed at his increasing depression and his quick temper. An English-language production in Greenwich Village in 1922 was another success, but the play’s move uptown to Broadway encouraged the producer to cut the crucial “rain scene” with its joyous lesbian kissing and embraces, and to shift the lesbian relation to one of female manipulation. The troupe protested this desecration of the text, but Asch yielded to the producer’s reading of the uptown audience. Even with the cuts, however, the entire cast and the producer were indicted for obscenity and found guilty at trial, although the verdict was overturned on appeal.

Living in America, Asch seemingly abandoned his play, refusing future performances of God of Vengeance in the wake of Nazi restrictions on Jewish life. However, Vogel shows a group of desperate Jews, confined to the Lodz ghetto, performing the Asch play under the leadership of the original stage manager, a character here called Lemml. Vogel uses Lemml as a distant echo of Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager in Our Town, a “narrator” who breaks the fourth wall and introduces us to the world of the present drama and the past history of Asch’s play.

[...]

The poet reads lines about the credences of summer. The glass in his hand hides And rekindles a small fire; a delicate wisdom flares; the beauty of things cannot be exhausted.

Spanning the last two centuries, Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature by Anna Elena Torres combines archival research on the radical press and close readings of Yiddish poetry to offer an original literary study of the Jewish anarchist movement.

Torres examines Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russian proletarian immigrant poets through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers. The book also traces Jewish anarchist strategies for negotiating surveillance, censorship, detention, and deportation, revealing the connection between Yiddish modernism and struggles for free speech, women’s bodily autonomy, and the transnational circulation of avant-garde literature.

Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critique of the border. Jewish deportees, immigrants, and refugees opposed citizenship as the primary guarantor of human rights. Instead, they cultivated stateless imaginations, elaborated through literature.