Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Mar 2009 by Wr�bel, Piotr

Mikhail Krutikov. Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001. 248 pp. Bibliography. Index. $55.00, cloth.

Literature has been frequently compared to a mirror. This comparison is particularly striking to a reader of the book under review. It shows, through a prism of Yiddish literature, the impact of the 1903-1905 events in Russia on its Jews, living in the tsarist empire and immigrating to America. Simultaneously, the book presents and analyses the encounter of Yiddish fiction writing with modernity between 1 905 and 1914, "perhaps the most eventful and dynamic decade in the history of Yiddish literature" (p. 210).

Mikhail Krutikov, a lecturer in Yiddish Literature at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies and the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, started working on the book during 1991-1995, when he studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and met several leading experts in Jewish literature and history. The book is divided into six parts. First, in an introduction, Krutikov shortly reviews the most important histories of Yiddish literature in the early 20th century and discusses the development of academic scholarship in this field. He explains why he decided to support his thesis with a particular selection of works of the classical writers Sholem Aleichem and Yitskhok L. Perete and their lesser-known contemporaries: Yankev Dinezon, Mordkhe Spektor, S. Ansky, Sholem Asch, David Bergelson, Itche-Meir Weissenberg, Leon Kobrin, David Ignatov, Joseph Opatoshu, Isaac Raboy, and Morris- Jonah Haimowite. However, most of the introduction is devoted to an explanation of Krutikov' s methodology, a combination of semiotic, structuralist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist positions. The author expresses his "special interest in the Marxist school, whose development was violently interrupted in the Soviet Union in 1 948" (p. 8) and declares that, "To some extent this work can be considered an attempt to continue this line of reasoning [of Soviet Yiddish scholars], but of course with moderation of the strict ideological presumptions of the Soviet Marxist school of the 1930s" (p. 9).

Chapter one, "The Economic Crisis," reviews shortly the impact of early 20th-century Russian economic transformation on the Jews. It shows how Yiddish literature reflected industrialization, the consequences of the Russo-Japanese War, migrations and legal problems of the Jews, and various hardships of a difficult accommodation of a traditional shtetl economy to the modern free market. Krutikov analyses various plot-generating symbols of the transition from the old to the new economic order, such as money, crisis, bankruptcy, and railways. He also describes new myths, such as a sentimental picture of the shtetl or a romantic vision of the past Polish- Jewish symbiosis, which were supposed to compensate both the readers and the participants of the actual events for the loss of stability.

Chapter two, "The Crisis of Revolution," constructed in the same way as its predecessor, first a review of historical facts and then an analysis of their literary representations, focuses on the consequences of the 1905 Revolution. It shows the politicization of the Russian Jewry, its different attitudes towards revolution, intellectual changes of the Jewish intelligentsia, a conflict between generations, and a transformation of the shtetl. Krutikov also explains how new topics, previously unknown in the Yiddish literature, required and generated new ways of writing.

Chapter three, "The Crisis of Immigration," is devoted to the origins of the American Yiddish novel or, in other words, to those Russian Jews who moved to the United States and wrote in a new and completely different environment. They joined millions of people who decided that emigration would be the best response to the economic and political crisis in Russia. In America, they faced and described new challenges. Some depicted emigration as a curse. They came to the conclusion that Yiddishkeit and the new environment were incompatible, and, following a romantic-sentimentalist or past-oriented paradigm, tried to stick to old values and ways of life. To others, characterized by Krutikov as presentoriented realists, immigration was not an end but a next chapter of Jewish history and required changes in Jewish life. Finally, to future-oriented modernists, loss of the old tradition meant freedom. They rejected "the sentimental idealization of the shtetl past, as well as the rejection of the capitalist urbanization and industrialization of the present" (p. 122) and associated the future with spiritual renewal of the Jews.

In chapter four, "Love and Destiny: The Crisis of Youth," Krutikov's analysis moves from literary representations of social group behavior to individuals and their psychological reactions and motivations. We can see here how the Yiddish fiction of 1905-1914 introduced new, previously unknown characters, such as a strong "new women" or a smart but assimilated North American allrightnik. Krutikov applies to the literary material analyzed by him the concept of two principles of narrative organization: "classification (cyclical organization with emphasis on the general stability of the order of things) and transformation (linear organization that stresses the uniqueness of the described events)" (p. 161) and shows interactions and parallels between the developing Yiddish and European literatures.