Outwitting History (16 page)

Alongside the Yiddish books was an equally dismaying sight: an extraordinary collection of books in Esperanto, the “universal language” invented in Warsaw in 1887 by a Yiddish-speaking Jew named L. L. Zamenhof. It is said that at the international Esperanto conferences held each year in Warsaw before the Second World War, papers were delivered in Esperanto but conversation in the halls took place in Yiddish—the only truly international language the delegates shared in common. From these shelves, too, books were missing, as though to mock the enlightened dream that had created them.

The administrator assured us that she was making arrangements for someone else to save the Esperanto collection; our job was to clear the shelves of books in Yiddish. We set to work, and as we did, a half dozen library workers, including several teenagers, came over to help. We finally left with almost twenty-five hundred volumes. Sharon and I were pleased that our guerilla operation had gone off so smoothly. But we were also indignant and sad: sad for the residents of Newark, whose crown jewel, this wonderful library, was being so diminished; and sad, too, for all those great books, in English, Esperanto, and a dozen other languages, that we left behind to an uncertain fate.

Early in 1985 I was invited to speak at the Yablon Center, a formerly communist (they now called themselves
linke,
leftist) Jewish culture club that met in a modest storefront directly across the street from the gleaming-white colossus of NBC’s “Television City” in Los Angeles. Seventy-five people were waiting for me, seated on folding metal chairs. There was only one other young person in the room: a reporter for the
Los Angeles Times,
who was writing a story about the Yiddish Book Center and the “Yiddish revival.”

I began my talk with a quick overview in which I mentioned, more or less in passing, that Yiddish had not died a natural death, that one out of every two Yiddish-speaking Jews was murdered in the Holocaust, and that increasing persecution in the Soviet Union had culminated on August 12, 1952, when Stalin ordered all of his country’s leading Yiddish writers shot on a single night. No sooner was this last statement out of my mouth than an old man in the back of the room jumped to his feet, waved his fist in the air, and shouted at me in a heavy Yiddish accent, “You’re a liar!”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I said you’re a
liar
!” repeated the old man, more vehemently than before.

I glanced at the reporter. “Um, I’ll be happy to take questions after the lecture.”

“It’s not a question, it’s a
fect
!” thundered the old man. “It never happened what you said, Stalin never killed those writers.”

The audience was growing restless.

“
Sha
!”

“Sit down, better!”

“We came to listen to the yungerman, not to you!”

The old man faced off against the crowd.
“Ikh vel nisht zayn keyn Bontsha Shvayg!
(I won’t be a Bontsha the Silent!)
”
he screamed, invoking the name of the long-suffering title character of a story by I. L. Peretz. “The yungerman is a liar. It never heppened, it’s all propaganda, Stalin never did it.”

A woman in the front row turned around to face him. “Okay,” she demanded, “if it never happened, then where are all the Soviet Yiddish writers today?”

“Where are they? They’re all
hiding,
to embarrass Stalin!”

Pandemonium ensued. Only the reporter was still in his seat; the others were on their feet—some were actually standing on their chairs— and everyone was yelling at once. Arguments, accusations, and epithets flew through the air. The old man gave as good as he got, holding his ground for ten minutes or more until, his face red and his body trembling with rage, he invoked several unprintable Yiddish curses on his erstwhile comrades and stormed out of the building, slamming the door behind him.

I tried my best to restore order and resume my lecture. I was concerned, naturally, lest the incident color the
Times
’s coverage, but I needn’t have worried: Much of the uproar had been in Yiddish, a language the young reporter didn’t understand. And even if he had understood, he wasn’t the least bit interested: He was there, he told me afterward, to write an “upbeat” article about the
joys
of Yiddish, and bitter political debate was simply not part of the story.

Except, of course, that it
was
part of the story, and a central part at that. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia in 1881, reactionary decrees forced large numbers of Jews out of the countryside and into the cities, where they found work in factories: sewing clothes, tanning leather, or rolling cigarettes. They were not exactly the sort of proletariat Marx had dreamed of. A typical Jewish factory might consist of two workers and an owner, all three working side by side, bent over their machines sixteen hours a day. Class conflict in the Pale, according to one observer, meant the struggle of
kaptsn kegn dalfn,
the pauper versus the destitute. Still, in a country as overwhelmingly agrarian as Russia, Jews comprised a significant percentage of the urban population in the Pale and were pretty much the only urban proletariat there was. By the early 1890s young Marxist revolutionaries seeking to organize the workers (as opposed to the peasantry) had no choice but to turn to these poor Jews as the vanguard of the revolution.

At first their organizing efforts were comical. The early revolutionaries were mostly intellectuals from wealthy, highly assimilated Jewish families, and their idea of agitation was to teach the workers
gramota,
Russian grammar. The few workers who, after a long day at work, managed to stay awake quickly put their newfound knowledge to good use, leaving the factories altogether. Eventually the revolutionaries realized—just as Hebrew writers had realized a few decades before— that the only way to reach the Jewish masses was to speak to them in Yiddish, the only language they understood.

Since many of the revolutionaries didn’t speak Yiddish themselves, they mobilized a homegrown cadre of what they called
halb-inteligentn,
“half-intellectuals,” who in turn organized
Zhargon Komitetn,
Jargon Committees, making use of the nascent Yiddish literature to spread revolutionary consciousness among their fellow workers. The Jewish poor, schooled in the tradition of social justice espoused by the Hebrew prophets, oppressed both as workers and as Jews, rallied to the cry. The Jewish Workers’ Bund of Russia and Poland, founded in 1897,
quickly became one of the most powerful forces in East European Jewish life. It played a key role in launching the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1898, in precipitating the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1903, and in fighting the Revolution of 1905. After that revolution failed, the tsarist authorities sought to redirect popular discontent by unleashing a wave of anti-Jewish violence. The Bund responded with armed resistance, and then, as reaction and disillusionment took hold, by turning inward, transforming what until then had been a utilitarian expedient—the use of Yiddish to reach the Jewish masses—into a far-reaching cultural program rooted in Yiddish language and literature.

And the Bund was not alone. Ber Borochov, a professional Yiddish linguist, synthesized Marxism and Zionism, giving rise to an influential Labor Zionist movement. Territorialists championed Yiddish-speaking Jewish settlements outside of Palestine. Jewish Communists threw in their lot with the new Soviet Union, while other Jews allied themselves with Polish socialist movements. Together, these groups challenged the political status quo, reshaped Jewish culture—and expended considerable energy fighting among themselves.

When all was said and done, however, the most powerful social movement of all was emigration. Between 1881 and 1924, when the United States effectively closed its doors, some 2 million East European Jews packed up their meager possessions and made the long journey across the sea to
di goldene medine,
the Golden Land, seeking economic opportunity and an escape from violence and oppression. Like Mrs. Ostroff, many of those immigrants were, at least at first, bitterly disappointed. Population density on the Lower East Side of New York exceeded that of the worst slums of Bombay. Living conditions in the dark, airless tenements almost defied description, and working conditions in the sweatshops were even worse. In 1911 fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, at the edge of Washington Square.
“In the eighteen minutes it took to bring the fire under control, one hundred and forty-six workers, most of them Jewish and Italian girls, were burned to death,” Irving Howe recounts in
World of Our Fathers.
The factory owners had locked the doors to keep out union organizers, and the only way the girls could escape the flames was to jump nine floors to the street below. The Lower East Side was plunged into mourning—a mood captured in a Yiddish poem by Morris Rosenfeld that appeared on the front page of the
Forward:

Over whom shall we weep first?
Over the burned ones?
Over those beyond recognition?
Over those who have been crippled?
Or driven senseless?
Or smashed?
I weep for them all.

Now let us light the holy candles
And mark the sorrow
Of Jewish masses in darkness and poverty.
This is our funeral,
These our graves,
Our children, . . .

For many Jews, there was nothing left to do but organize. They joined unions, such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. They struck for better wages and shorter hours, they walked the picket lines and stood up to the thugs, they suffered setbacks, went hungry, and through victories large and small, they changed the face of the American labor movement forever. In 1914 the Lower East Side elected Meyer
London, a Yiddish-speaking socialist and trade union lawyer, to the United States Congress.

If in Europe many Jews still clung to tradition, in America the flood of change was unstoppable. When my sixteen-year-old grandmother arrived in America, she took a job sewing muffs in a sweatshop. “We worked fourteen hours a day, Saturday included,” she remembered. “The first time I had to work on Shabbos I cried so hard I soaked every muff I sewed.”

Torn from their traditional moorings, Jews turned to new, secular Jewish institutions.
Landsmanshaftn
were mutual aid societies for immigrants from the same city or town. The Workmen’s Circle provided everything from health insurance to burial plots. The old political movements staked out new ground on American soil—socialists, communists, anarchists, Zionists—each with its own Yiddish newspapers, radio stations, publishing houses, libraries, lecture halls, musical groups, schools, and summer camps. They skirmished constantly with one another, and held only two things in common: Yiddish and the dream of
a besere un shenere velt
—a better and more beautiful world for their children.

It is impossible, today, to understand how important these old Yiddish organizations once were. They attracted hundreds of thousands of members, shaped American Jewish culture, and exercised enormous political influence. Yet they were not to last. For all their proletarian solidarity, Jewish workers couldn’t wait to escape the sweatshops and move their families away from the stifling streets of the Lower East Side. They scrimped, they saved, they took in boarders, they did whatever they had to until they had enough money to move uptown, to Harlem or the Bronx. Many went into business. If they did remain factory workers, it was almost certain that their children would not. And why should they? After all,
they
were Americans, they spoke English without an accent, they were educated, they became professionals,
they moved to the suburbs. What need did they have for unions or radical Yiddish organizations?

There was one other factor. In Eastern Europe many Jews were swept up in the spirit of nationalism, seeking to create a new, modern Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish (or modern Hebrew) instead of religion. In America it was different: Rather than Minority Treaties we had a melting pot. Religious differences were okay; cultural and linguistic differences were not. Upwardly mobile Jews were quick to redefine their identity: not as nationalism, not as culture, but as religion—exactly as assimilating Jews had done in Germany several generations before. It didn’t take long before membership in America’s Reform and Conservative synagogues outnumbered the membership of all Yiddish cultural and political organizations combined. Even those who remained in the Yiddish organizations tacitly acknowledged that America was different. They created many Yiddish afternoon schools in this country but, unlike in Eastern Europe, unlike in Canada, Mexico, and Argentina, not a single Yiddish day school. No matter how rich and varied the Yiddish cultural life they built for themselves, deep in their hearts they must surely have known that their own children wouldn’t or couldn’t follow. To quote Michael Chabon, Yiddish in America became “a tin can with no tin can at the other end of the string.”

Arriving as I did very late in the game, I felt for these once proud Yiddish organizations. For five decades or more they had watched as their members died and were not replaced. They saw the spotlight of history grow dim, they saw themselves marginalized and then forgotten, until, inevitably, their idealism gave way to disappointment, their disappointment to resentment, their resentment to bitterness. They were mad at their children, mad at America, and—because no one else was listening—they were mad at one another. By the time I came along, anarchists wouldn’t speak to socialists, socialists to communists, communists to Zionists. I marveled that Yiddish still existed at all, since
it seemed everyone I met who spoke the language refused to speak with everyone else.

For my generation the personal was political; for many of the older Yiddishists, the political was intensely, even frighteningly, personal. I once received a call from the widow of a distinguished Yiddish writer. Many years before, her husband had had a political falling out with Sholem Asch, the most widely translated Yiddish writer of his day. Asch had now been dead forty years, her husband nearly ten years, and still the widow couldn’t give it up. “Mr. Lahnsky,” she said on the phone, “I have the most wonderful news. I just read a memoir which I obtained from the Yiddish Book Center, and I want you to hear what the writer had to say. I quote: ‘I used to get up early in the morning to have more hours in the day to hate Sholem Asch.’ I ask you, have you ever heard a more beautiful passage?”