THE HISTORY OF YIDDISH LITERATURE

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE HISTORY
OF
YIDDISH LITERATURE
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

BY
LEO WIENER
INSTRUCTOR IN THE SLAVIC LANGUAGES
AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1899

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Norwood Press
J. B. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

To My Mother

PREFACE

A SUGGESTION to write the present book reached me in the spring of 1898. At that time my library contained several hundreds of volumes of the best Judeo-German (Yiddish) literature, which had been brought together by dint of continued attention and, frequently, by mere chance, for the transitoriness of its works, the absence of any and all bibliographies, the almost absolute absence of a guide into its literature, and the whimsicalness of its book trade made a systematic selection of such a library a difficult problem to solve. Not satisfied with the meagre details which could be gleaned from internal testimonies in the works of the Judeo-German writers, I resolved to visit the Slavic countries for the sake of gathering data, both literary and biographical, from which anything like a trustworthy history of its literature could be constructed. A recital of my journey will serve as a means of orientation to the future investigator in this or related fields, and will at the same time indicate my obligations to the men and the books that made my sketch possible.

From Liverpool, my place of landing, I proceeded at once to Oxford, where I familiarized myself with the superb Oppenheim collection of Judeo-German books of the older period, stored in the Bodleian Library; it does not contain, however, anything bearing on the nineteenth century. In London the British Museum furnished me with a few modern works which are now difficult to procure, especially the periodical Kolmewasser and Warschauer Jüdische Zeitung. Unfortunately my time was limited, and I was unable to make thorough bibliographical notes from these rare publications; besides, I then hoped to be able to discover sets of them in Russia. In this I was disappointed—hence the meagreness of my references to them. The Rosenthaliana in Amsterdam and the Imperial Library in Berlin added nothing material to my information. Warsaw was my first objective point as regards facts and books. The latter I obtained in large numbers by rummaging the bookstores of Scheinfinkel and Morgenstern. In a dark and damp cellar, in which Morgenstern kept part of his store, many rare books were picked up. In Warsaw I received many valuable data from Perez, Dienesohn, Spektor, Freid, Levinsohn, both as to the activity which they themselves have developed and as to what they knew of some of their confrères. In Bialystok I called on the venerable poet, Gottlober; he is very advanced in years, being above ninety, is blind, and no longer in possession of his mental faculties, but his daughter gave me some interesting information about her father. Wilna presented nothing noteworthy, except that in a store a few early prints were found.

In St. Petersburg I had hoped to spend usefully a week investigating the rich collections of Judeo-German in the Asiatic Museum and the Imperial Library. The museum was, however, closed for the summer, and the restrictions placed on the investigator in the library made it impossible to inspect even one-tenth of the three or four thousand books contained there. When about to abandon that part of my work the assistant librarian, Professor Harkavy, under whose charge the collection is, most generously presented me with one thousand volumes out of his own private library. In Kiev I had a long conference with S. Rabinowitsch and with A. Schulmann; the latter informed me that he is now at work on a history of Judeo-German literature previous to the nineteenth century; the specimen of his work which he published a few years ago in the Jüdische Volksbibliothēk gives hope that it will entirely supersede the feeble productions of M. Grünbaum. In Odessa I learned many important facts from conversations with S. J. Abramowitsch, J. J. Linetzki, J. J. Lerner, P. Samostschin, and depleted the bookstores, especially that of Rivkin, of their rarer books. Jassy in Roumania and Lemberg in Galicia offered little of interest, but in Cracow Faust's bookstore furnished some needed data by its excellent choice of modern works.

Thus I succeeded in seeing nearly all the living writers of any note, and in purchasing or inspecting books in all the larger stores and libraries that contained such material. In spite of all that, the present work is of necessity fragmentary; it is to be hoped that by coöperation of several men it will be possible to save whatever matter there may still be in existence from oblivion ere it be too late. The greatest difficulty I encountered in the pursuit of my work was the identification of pseudonyms and the settlement of bibliographical data. As many of the first as could be ascertained, in one way or other, are given in an appendix; but the bibliography has remained quite imperfect in spite of my efforts to get at facts. A complete bibliography can probably never be written, on account of the peculiar conditions prevailing in the Imperial Library, from which by theft and otherwise many books have disappeared; but even under these conditions it would not be a hard matter to furnish four or five thousand names of works for this century. This task must be left to some one resident in St. Petersburg who can get access to the libraries.

This history being intended for the general public, and not for the linguistic scholar, there was no choice left for the transliteration of Judeo-German words but to give it in the modified orthography of the German language; for uniformity's sake such words occurring in the body of the English text are left in their German form. All Hebrew and Slavic words are given phonetically as heard in the mouths of Lithuanian Jews; that dialect was chosen as being least distant from the literary German; for the same reason the texts in the Chrestomathy are normalized in the same variety of the vernacular. The consonants are read as in German, and ž is like French j. The vowels are nearly all short, so that ü, ie, i are equal to German i; similarly ä, ö, eh, ee are like German short e. The German long e is represented by ē, oe, ae, and in Slavic and Hebrew words also by ee. Ei and eu are pronounced like German ei in mein, while ēi is equal to German ee; ā and o are German short o; au sounds more like German ou, and äu and ō resemble German öi; aü is equal to German ai.

The collection of data on the writers in America has been even more difficult than in Russia, and has been crowned with less success. Most of the periodicals published here have been of an ephemeral nature, and the newspapers, of which there have been more than forty at one time or other, can no longer be procured; and yet they have contained the bulk of the literary productions written in this country. It is to be hoped that those who have been active in creating a Judeo-German literature will set about to write down their reminiscences from which at a later day a just picture may be given of the ferment which preceded the absorption of the Russian Jews by the American nation.

The purpose of this work will be attained if it throws some light on the mental attitude of a people whose literature is less known to the world than that of the Gypsy, the Malay, or the North American Indian.

Cambridge, Mass.,
December, 1898.

CONTENTS

CHRESTOMATHY

THE HISTORY OF YIDDISH LITERATURE
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

I. INTRODUCTION

THE literatures of the early Middle Ages were bilingual. The Catholic religion had brought with it the use of the Latin language for religious and ethical purposes, and in proportion as the influence of the clergy was exerted on worldly matters, even profane learning found its expression through the foreign tongue. Only by degrees did the native dialects manage to establish themselves independently, and it has been but a few centuries since they succeeded in emancipating themselves entirely and in ousting the Latin from the domain of secular knowledge. As long as the Jews have not been arrested in their natural development by external pressure, they have fallen into line with the conditions prevalent in their permanent homes and have added their mite towards the evolution of the vernaculars of their respective countries. It would be idle to adduce here proofs of this; suffice it only to mention Spain, whose literature would be incomplete without including in the list of its early writers the names of some illustrious Jews active there before the expulsion of the Jews in the fifteenth century. But the matter everywhere stood quite differently in regard to the Latin language. That being the language of the Catholic clergy, it could not be cultivated by the Jews without compromising their own faith; the example of the bilingualism was, however, too strong not to affect them, and hence they had recourse to the tongue of their own sacred scriptures for purposes corresponding to those of the Catholic Church. The stronger the influence of the latter was in the country, the more did the Jews cling to the Hebrew and the Jargon of the Talmud for literary purposes. It need not, then, surprise us to find the Jewish literature of the centuries preceding the invention of printing almost exclusively in the ancient tongue.

As long as the German Jews were living in Germany, and the Sephardic Jews in Spain, there was no urgent necessity to create a special vernacular literature for them: they spoke the language of their Christian fellow-citizens, shared with them the same conception of life, the same popular customs, except such as touched upon their religious convictions, and the works current among their Gentile neighbors were quite intelligible, and fully acceptable to them. The extent of common intellectual pleasures was much greater than one would be inclined to admit without examination. In Germany we have the testimony of the first Judeo-German or Yiddish works printed in the sixteenth century that even at that late time the Jews were deriving pleasure from the stories belonging to the cycle of King Arthur and similar romances. In 1602 a pious Jew, in order to offset these older stories, as he himself mentions in his introduction,[1] issued the 'Maasebuch,' which is a collection of Jewish folklore. It is equally impossible, however, to discover from early German songs preserved by the Jews that they in any way differed from those recited and sung by the Gentiles, and they have to be classed among the relics of German literature, which has actually been done by a scholar who subjected them to a close scrutiny.[2] On the other hand, the Jews who were active in German literature, like Süsskind, only accidentally betray their Jewish origin. Had they not chosen to make special mention of the fact in their own works, it would not be possible by any criterion to separate them from the host of authors of their own time.

Had there been no disturbing element introduced in the national life of the German Jews, there would not have developed with them a specifically Judeo-German literature, even though they may have used the Hebrew characters in the transliteration of German books. Unfortunately, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, a large number of Jews, mainly from the region of the Middle Rhine, had become permanently settled in Bohemia, Poland, and Russia. Here they formed compact colonies in towns and cities, having been admitted to these countries primarily to create the nucleus of a town population, as the agricultural Slavs had been averse to town life. They had brought with them their patrimony of the German language, their German intellectual atmosphere and mode of life; and their very compactness precluded their amalgamation with their Slavic neighbors. Their numerical strength and spiritual superiority obliterated even the last trace of those Jews who had been resident in those regions before them and had spoken the Slavic dialects as their mother-tongues. Separated from their mother-country, they craved the intellectual food to which they had been accustomed there; but their relations with it were entirely broken, and they no longer took part in the mental life of their German contemporaries. The Reformation with its literary awakening could not exert any influence on them; they only turned back for reminiscences of ages gone by, and hungered after stories with which their ancestors had whiled away their hours of leisure in the cities along the Rhine. And so it happened that when the legendary lore of the Nibelungen, of Siegfried, of Dietrich of Bern, of Wigalois, of King Arthur, had begun to fade away even from the folk books of Germany, it lived on in the Slavic countries and continued to evoke pleasure and admiration.

These chapbooks, embodying the folklore of past generations, were almost the first printed Judeo-German books, as they certainly were the most popular. That the early Judeo-German literature was intended mainly for readers in the east of Europe is amply evidenced by specific mention in the works themselves, as for example in the 'Maasebuch,' where the compiler, or author, urges the German women to buy quickly his book, lest it be all too fast sold in Bohemia, Poland, and Russia.[3] In fact, the patron of the 'Maasebuch,' or the author of the same, for it is not quite clear whether they are not one and the same person, was himself a native of Meseritz in Lithuania. Only after these story books had created a taste for reading, and in order to counteract the effects of the non-Jewish lore, the Rabbis began to substitute the more Jewish legends of the 'Maasebuch' and the 'Zeena Ureena,' and the ethical treatises which were intended to instruct the people in the tenets of their fathers. In this manner the Judeo-German literature was made possible. Its preservation for four centuries was mainly due to the isolation of the German Jews in Russia and Poland, where the German medievalism became ossified and was preserved intact to within half a century ago, when under favorable conditions the Russianization of the Jews began. Had these conditions prevailed but a short time longer, Judeo-German literature would have been a thing of the past and of interest only to the linguist and the historian. But very soon various causes combined to resuscitate the dialect literature. In the short time that the Jews had enjoyed the privileges of a Russian culture, then German medievalism was completely dispelled, and the modern period which, in its incipient stage, reaches back into the first quarter of this century, presents a distinct phase which in no way resembles the literature of the three hundred years that preceded it. It is not a continuation of its older form, but has developed on an entirely new basis.

The medieval period of Judeo-German literature was by no means confined to the Slavic countries. It reacted on the Jews who had remained in Germany, who, in their narrow Ghetto life, were excluded from an active participation in the German literature of their country. This reaction was not due alone to the fact that the specifically Jewish literature appealed in an equal degree to those who had been left behind in their old homes, but in a larger measure to the superior intellectual activity of the emigrants and their descendants who kept alive the spark of Jewish learning when it had become weakened at home and found no food for its replenishment within its own communities. They had to turn to the Slavic lands for their teachers and Rabbis, who brought with them not only their Hebrew learning, but also their Judeo-German language and literature. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century there was no division of the Jews of the west and the east of Europe; they took equal part in the common Judeo-German literature, however scanty its scope. What was produced in Russia was read with the same pleasure in Germany, and vice versa, even though the spoken form of the vernacular in Slavic countries was more and more departing from that of Germany.

Even Mendelssohn's teacher was a Galician Jew. But with Mendelssohn a new era had dawned in the history of the German Jews. By his example the dialect was at once abandoned for the literary language, and the Jews were once more brought back into the fold of the German nation. The separation of the two branches of the German Jews was complete, and the inhabitants of the Slavic countries were left to shift for themselves. For nearly one hundred years they had to miss the beneficent effects of an intellectual intercourse with the West, and in the beginning of our century the contrast between the two could not have been greater: the German Jews were rapidly becoming identified with the spiritual pursuits of their Gentile fellow-citizens, the Slavic Jews persevered in the medievalism into which they had been thrown centuries before. Only by slow degrees did the Mendelssohnian Reform find its way into Poland and Russia; and even when its influence was at its highest, it was not possible for it to affect those lands in the same way that it affected the districts that were more or less under German influence. The German language could not become the medium of instruction for the masses, whose homely dialects had so far departed from their mother-tongue as to make the latter unintelligible to them. In Russia it was a long time before the native literature could make itself felt, or before Russian education came to take the place of the German culture; so in the meanwhile the Judeo-German language was left to its own evolution, and a new literature had its rise.

In arriving at its present stage, Judeo-German literature of the nineteenth century has passed through several phases. At first, up to the sixties, it was used as a weapon by the few enlightened men who were anxious to extend the benefits of the Mendelssohnian Reform to the masses at large. It is an outgrowth of the Hebrew literature of the same period, which had its rise from the same causes, but which could appeal only to a small number of men who were well versed in Hebrew lore. Since these apostles of the new learning had themselves received their impetus through the Hebrew, it was natural for them to be active both in the Hebrew and the Judeo-German field. We consequently find here the names of Gottlober and J. L. Gordon, who belong equally to both literatures. Those who devoted themselves exclusively to creating a Judeo-German literature, like the other Mendelssohnian disciples, took the German literature as the guide for their efforts, and even dreamed of approaching the literary language of Germany in the final amalgamation with the Mendelssohnian Reform. In the meanwhile, in the sixties and still more in the seventies, the Jews were becoming Russianized in the schools which had been thrown open to their youths. In the sixties, the Judeo-German literature, having received its impetus in the preceding generation, reached its highest development as a literature of Reform, but it appealed only to those who had not had the benefits of the Russian schools. In the seventies it became reminiscent, and was in danger of rapid extinction. In the eighties, the persecutions and riots against the Jews led many of those who had availed themselves of the Russian culture to devote themselves to the service of their less fortunate brethren; and many new forces, that otherwise would have found their way into Russian letters, were exerted entirely in the evolution of Judeo-German. In this new stage, the Mendelssohnian Reform, with its concomitant German language, was lost sight of. The element of instruction was still an important one in this late period, but this instruction was along universal lines, and no longer purely Jewish; above all else, this literature became an art.

Poetry was the first to be developed, as it lent itself more readily to didactic purposes; it has also, until lately, remained in closer contact with the popular poetry, which, in its turn, is an evolution of the poetry of the preceding centuries. The theatre was the latest to detach itself from prose, to which it is organically related. These facts have influenced the separate treatment of the three divisions of literature in the present work. It was deemed indispensable to add to these a chapter on the Judeo-German folklore, as the reading of Judeo-German works would frequently be unintelligible without some knowledge of the creations of the popular mind. Here the relation to medievalism is even more apparent than in the popular poetry; in fact, the greater part of the printed books of that class owe their origin to past ages; they are frequently nothing more than modernizations of old books, as is, for example, the case with 'Bevys of Hamptoun,' which, but for the language, is identical with its prototype in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

In its popular form, Judeo-German is certainly not inferior to many of the literary languages which have been fortunate enough to attract the attention of the linguist and student of comparative literature. In its belleslettres it compares favorably with those of countries like Bulgaria, which had their regeneration at about the same time; nay, it may appear to the unbiassed observer that it even surpasses them in that respect. And yet, in spite of it all, Judeo-German has remained practically a sealed book to the world. The few who have given reports of it display an astounding amount of ignorance on the subject. Karpeles devotes, in his history of Jewish literature, almost thirty pages to the medieval form of it, but to the rich modern development of it only two lines![4] Steinschneider knows by hearsay only Dick, and denies the practical value of modern Judeo-German.[5] But the acme of complacent ignorance, not to use a stronger word, is reached by Grünbaum,[6] who dishes up, as specimens of literature, newspaper advertisements and extracts of Schaikewitsch, not mentioning even by name a single one of the first-class writers. It is painful to look into the pages of his work, which, apart from endless linguistic blunders of a most senseless character, has probably done more than anything else to divert attention from this interesting literature.

Much more sympathetic are the few pages which Berenson devotes to it in an article in the Andover Review;[7] though abounding in errors, it is fair and unbiassed, and at least displays a familiarity with the originals. Still better are the remarks of the Polish author Klemens Junosza in the introductions to his translations of the works of Abramowitsch into Polish; the translations themselves are masterpieces, considering the extreme quaintness of Abramowitsch's style. There are, indeed, a few sketches on the Judeo-German literature written in the dialect itself,[8] but none of them attest a philosophical grasp of the subject, or even betray a thorough familiarity with the literature. A number of good reviews on various productions have appeared in the Russian periodical Voschod, from the pen of one signing himself "Criticus."[9] To one of these reviews he has attached a discussion of the literature in general; this, however short, is the best that has yet been written on the subject.

It is hard to foretell the future of Judeo-German. In America it is certainly doomed to extinction.[10] Its lease of life is commensurate with the last large immigration to the new world. In the countries of Europe it will last as long as there are any disabilities for the Jews, as long as they are secluded in Ghettos and driven into Pales.[11] It would be idle to speculate when these persecutions will cease.

II. THE JUDEO-GERMAN LANGUAGE

THERE is probably no other language in existence on which so much opprobrium has been heaped as on the Judeo-German.[12] Philologists have neglected its study, Germanic scholars have until lately been loath to admit it as a branch of the German language, and even now it has to beg for recognition. German writers look upon it with contempt and as something to be shunned; and for over half a century the Russian and Polish Jews, whose mother-tongue it is, have been replete with apologies whenever they have had recourse to it for literary purposes.[13] Such a bias can be explained only as a manifestation of a general prejudice against everything Jewish, for passions have been at play to such an extent as to blind the scientific vision to the most obvious and common linguistic phenomena. Unfortunately, this interesting evolution of a German dialect has found its most violent opponents in the German Jews, who, since the day of Mendelssohn, have come to look upon it as an arbitrary and vicious corruption of the language of their country.[14] This attack upon it, while justifiable in so far as it affects its survival in Germany, loses all reasonableness when transferred to the Jews of Russia, former Poland and Roumania, where it forms a comparatively uniform medium of intercourse of between five and six millions of people, of whom the majority know no other language. It cannot be maintained that it is desirable to preserve the Judeo-German, and to give it a place of honor among the sisterhood of languages; but that has nothing to do with the historic fact of its existence. The many millions of people who use it from the day of their birth cannot be held responsible for any intentional neglect of grammatical rules, and its widespread dissemination is sufficient reason for subjecting it to a thorough investigation. A few timid attempts have been made in that direction, but they are far from being exhaustive, and touch but a small part of the very rich material at hand. Nor is this the place in which a complete discussion of the matter is to be looked for. This chapter presents only such of the data as must be well understood for a correct appreciation of the dialectic varieties current in the extensive Judeo-German literature of the last fifty years.

All languages are subject to a continuous change, not only from within, through natural growth and decay, but also from without, through the influence of foreign languages as carriers of new ideas. The languages of Europe, one and all, owe their Latin elements to the universality of the Roman dominion, and, later, of the Catholic Church. With the Renaissance, and lately through the sciences, much Greek has been added to their vocabularies. When two nations have come into a close intellectual contact, the result has always been a mixture of languages. In the case of English, the original Germanic tongue has become almost unrecognizable under the heavy burden of foreign words. But more interesting than these cases, and more resembling the formation of the Judeo-German, are those non-Semitic languages that have come under the sway of Mohammedanism. Their religious literature being always written in the Arabic of the Koran, they were continually, for a long period of centuries, brought under the same influences, and these have caused them to borrow, not only many words, but even whole turns and sentences, from their religious lore. The Arabic has frequently become completely transformed under the pronunciation and grammatical treatment of the borrowing language, but nevertheless a thorough knowledge of such tongues as Turkish and Persian is not possible without a fair understanding of Arabic. The case is still more interesting with Hindustani, spoken by more than one hundred millions of people, where more than five-eighths of the language is not of Indian origin, but Persian and Arabic. With these preliminary facts it will not be difficult to see what has taken place in Judeo-German.

Previous to the sixteenth century the Jews in Germany spoke the dialects of their immediate surroundings; there is no evidence to prove any introduction of Hebrew words at that early period, although it must be supposed that words relating purely to the Mosaic ritual may have found their way into the spoken language even then. The sixteenth century finds a large number of German Jews resident in Bohemia, Poland, and Lithuania. As is frequently the case with immigrants, the Jews in those distant countries developed a greater intellectual activity than their brethren at home, and this is indicated by the prominence of the printing offices at Prague and Cracow, and the large number of natives of those countries who figure as authors of Judeo-German works up to the nineteenth century. But torn away from a vivifying intercourse with their mother-country, their vocabulary could not be increased from the living source of the language alone, for their interests began to diverge. Religious instruction being given entirely in Hebrew, it was natural for them to make use of all such Hebrew words as they thus became familiar with. Their close study of the Talmud furnished them from that source with a large number of words of argumentation, while the native Slavic languages naturally added their mite toward making the Judeo-German more and more unlike the mother-tongue. Since books printed in Bohemia were equally current in Poland, and vice versa, and Jews perused a great number of books, there was always a lively interchange of thoughts going on in these countries, causing some Bohemian words to migrate to Poland, and Polish words back to Bohemia. These books printed in Slavic countries were received with open hands also in Germany, and their preponderance over similar books at home was so great that the foreign corruption affected the spoken language of the German Jews, and they accepted also a number of Slavic words together with the Semitic infection. This was still further aided by the many Polish teachers who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were almost the only instructors of Hebrew in Germany.[15]

We have, then, here an analogous case to the formation of Osmanli out of the Turkish, and Modern Persian out of the Old by means of the Arabic, and if the word Jargon is used to describe the condition of Judeo-German in the past three centuries, then Gibberish would be the only word that would fit as a designation of the corresponding compounds of the beautiful languages of Turkey, Persia, and India. A Jargon is the chaotic state of a speech-mixture at the moment when the foreign elements first enter into it. That mixture can never be entirely arbitrary, for it is subject to the spirit of one fundamental language which does not lose its identity. All the Romance elements in English have not stifled its Germanic basis, and Hindustani is neither Persian nor Arabic, in spite of the overwhelming foreign element in it, but an Indian language. Similarly Judeo-German has remained essentially a German dialect group.

Had the Judeo-German had for its basis some dialect which widely differs from the literary norm, such as Low German or Swiss, it would have long ago been claimed as a precious survival by German philologists. But it happens to follow so closely the structure of High German that its deviations have struck the superficial observer as a kind of careless corruption of the German. A closer scrutiny, however, convinces one that in its many dialectic variations it closely follows the High German dialects of the Middle Rhine with Frankfurt for its centre. There is not a peculiarity in its grammatical forms, in the changes of its vocalism, for which exact parallels are not found within a small radius of the old imperial city, the great centre of Jewish learning and life in the Middle Ages. No doubt, the emigration into Russia came mainly from the region of the Rhine. At any rate those who arrived from there brought with them traditions which were laid as the foundation of their written literature, whose influence has been very great on the Jews of the later Middle Ages. While men received their religious literature directly through the Hebrew, women could get their ethical instruction only by means of Judeo-German books. No house was without them, and through them a certain contact was kept up with the literary German towards which the authors have never ceased to lean. In the meanwhile the language could not remain uniform over the wide extent of the Slavic countries, and many distinct groups have developed there. The various subdialects of Poland differ considerably from the group which includes the northwest of Russia, while they resemble somewhat more closely the southern variety. But nothing of that appears in the printed literature previous to the beginning of this century. There a great uniformity prevails, and by giving the Hebrew vowels, or the consonants that are used as such, the values that they have in the mouths of German Jews, we obtain, in fact, what appears to be an apocopated, corrupted form of literary German. The spelling has remained more or less traditional, and though it becomes finally phonetic, it seems to ascribe to the vowels the values nearest to those of the mother-language and current in certain varieties of the Lithuanian group. From this it may be assumed that the Polish and southern Russian varieties have developed from the Lithuanian, which probably bears some relation to the historical migrations into those parts of the quondam Polish kingdom, and this is made the more plausible from the fact that the vowel changes are frequently in exact correspondence with the changes in the White Russian, Polish, and Little Russian. Such a phenomenon of parallelism is found also in other languages, and in our case may be explained by the unconscious changes of the Germanic vowels simultaneously with those in the Slavic words which, having been naturalized in Judeo-German, were heard and used differently in the new surroundings.

However it may be, the language of the Judeo-German books in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries is subject to but slight variations. It is true, the Blitz Bible printed in Amsterdam in 1676 seems to deviate greatly from other similar works, and the uncouth compound which is found there does, indeed, have all appearances of a Jargon. It owes its origin to the Polish Jews who but a few years before had been exiled from more than two hundred and fifty towns[16] and who, having settled in Holland, began to modify their Judeo-German by introducing Dutch into it. Although the Bible was intended for Polish Jews, as is evident by the letters-patent granted by John the Third of Poland, yet it has never exerted any influence on the dialects in Russia and Poland, for not one word of Dutch origin can be found in them. This older stage of the language is even now familiar to the Russian Jewish women through the 'Zeena Ureena,' the prayer book, and the special prayers which they recite in Judeo-German, and Jewish writers have recourse to it whenever they wish to express a prayer, as, for example, in Abramowitsch's 'Hymns' and 'Saturday Prayers.' This older stage is known under the name of Iwre-teutsch, Korben-ssider-teutsch, Tchines-teutsch, thus indicating its proper sphere in lithurgical works. This form of the language is comparatively free from Hebrew words.[17] On the other hand, Cabbalistic works become almost unreadable on account of the prevalence of Semitic over German words.[18]

In the beginning of the nineteenth century a Galician, Minchas Mendel Lefin, laid the foundation for the use of the vernacular for literary purposes.[19] This example was soon followed by the writers in Russia who became acquainted with German culture through the followers of the Mendelssohnian School at Lemberg, who comprise nearly all the authors from Ettinger to Abramowitsch, most of whom wrote in some southern dialect. The language of these abounds in a large number of idiomatic expressions for which one would in vain look in the older writings; words of Slavic origin that were familiar in everyday life were freely introduced, and an entirely new diction superseded that of the past century. At first their spelling was quite phonetic. But soon their leaning towards German literature led them into the unfortunate mistake of introducing German orthography for their dialect, so that it now is frequently impossible to tell from the form of a word how it may have been pronounced. Add to this the historical spelling of the Hebrew and the phonetic of the Slavic words, and one can easily imagine the chaos that prevails in the written language. And yet it must not be supposed that Judeo-German stands alone in this. The same difficulty and confusion arises in all those tongues in which the historical continuity has been broken. Thus Modern Greek is spelled as though it were Ancient Greek, with which it has hardly any resemblance in sound, while Bulgarian is still wavering between a phonetic, a Russian, and an Old Slavic orthography. Similar causes have produced similar results in Judeo-German.

There is no linguistic norm in the language as now used for literary purposes. The greater number of the best authors write in slightly varying dialects of Volhynia; but the Lithuanian variety is also well represented, and of late Perez has begun to write in his Polish vernacular.[20] German influence began to show itself early, and it affected not only the spelling, but also the vocabulary of the early writers in Lithuania. Dick looked upon Judeo-German only as a means to lead his people to German culture, and his stories are written in a curious mixture in which German at times predominates. This evil practice, which in Dick may be excused on the ground that it served him only as a means to an end, has come to be a mannerism in writers of the lower kind, such as Schaikewitsch, Seiffert, and their like. The scribblers of that class have not only corrupted the literature but also the language of the Jews.

Various means have been suggested by the writers for the enrichment of the Judeo-German vocabulary. Some lovers of Hebrew have had the bad taste to propose the formation of all new words on a Semitic basis, and have actually brought forth literary productions in that hybrid language. Others again have advised the introduction of all foreign words commonly in use among other nations. But the classical writers, among whom Abramowitsch is foremost, have not stopped to consider what would be the best expedient, but have coined words in conformity with the spirit of their dialect, steering a middle course between the extremes suggested by others. In America, where the majority of the writers knew more of German than their native vernacular, the literary dialect has come to resemble the literary German, and the English environment has caused the infusion of a number of English terms for familiar objects. But on the whole the language of the better writers differs in America but little from that of their former home. There is, naturally, a large divergence to be found in the language, which ranges from the almost pure German of the prayers and, in modern times, of the poems of Winchevsky, to the language abounding in Russicisms of Dlugatsch, and in Hebraisms of Linetzki, from the pure dialects of the best writers to the corrupt forms of Dick and Meisach, and the even worse Jargon of Seiffert, but in all these there is no greater variety than is to be found in all newly formed languages.[21] The most recent example of such variety is furnished by the Bulgarian, where the writers of the last fifty years have wavered between the native dialects with their large elements of Turkish and Greek origin, a purified form of the same, from which the foreign infection has been eliminated, approaches to the Old Slavic of a thousand years ago, and, within the last few years, a curious mixture with the literary Russian. Judeo-German not only does not suffer by such a comparison, but really gains by it, for all the best writers have uniformly based their diction on their native dialects.

In former days Judeo-German was known only by the name of Iwre-teutsch, or Jüdisch-teutsch. Frequently such words were used as Mame-loschen (Mother-tongue), or Prost-jüdisch (Simple Yiddish), but through the efforts of the disciples of the Haskala (Reform), the designation of Jargon has been forced upon it; and that appellation has been adopted by later writers in Russia, so that now one generally finds only this latter form as the name of the language used by the writers in Russia. The people, however, speak of their vernacular as Jüdisch, and this has given rise in England and America to the word Yiddish for both the spoken and written form. It is interesting to note that originally the name had been merely Teutsch for the language of the Jews, for they were conscious of their participation with the Germans in a common inheritance. Reminiscences of that old designation are left in such words as verteutschen, 'to translate,' i.e. to do into German, and steutsch, 'how do you mean it?' contracted from is teutsch? 'how is that in German?'

The main differences between Judeo-German[22] and the mother-tongue are these: its vocalism has undergone considerable change, varying from locality to locality; the German unaccented final e has, as in other dialects of German, disappeared; in declensional forms, the genitive has almost entirely disappeared, while in the Lithuanian group the dative has also coincided with the accusative; in the verb, Judeo-German has lost almost entirely the imperfect tense; the order of words is more like the English than the German. These are all developments for which parallels can be adduced from the region of Frankfurt. Judeo-German is, consequently, not an anomaly, but a natural development.

III. FOLKLORE

THERE can be no doubt that the Jews were the most potent factors in the dissemination of folk-literature in the Middle Ages.[23] Various causes united to make them the natural carriers of folklore from the East to the West, and from the West back again to the East. They never became so completely localized as to break away from the community of their brethren in distant lands, and to develop distinct national characteristics. The Jews of Spain stood in direct relations with the Khazars of Russia, and it was a Jew whom Charlemagne sent as ambassador to Bagdad. The Jewish merchant did not limit his sphere of action by geographical lines of demarkation, and the Jewish scholar was as much at home in Italy and Germany as he was in Russia or Egypt. Again and again, in reading the biographies of Jewish worthies, we are confronted with men who have had their temporary homes in three continents. In fact, the stay-at-homes were the exception rather than the rule in the Middle Ages. In this manner not only a lively intercourse was kept up among the Jews of the diaspora, but they unwittingly became also the mediators of the intellectual life of the most remote lands: they not only enriched the literatures of the various nations by new kinds of compositions, but also brought with them the substratum of that intellectual life which finds its expression in the creations of the popular literature.

The Jews have always possessed an innate love for story telling which was only sharpened by their travels. The religious and semi-religious stories were far from sufficient to satisfy their curiosity, and in spite of the discussions by the Rabbis of the permissibility of reading foreign books of adventure, they proceeded to create and multiply an apocryphal and profane folk-literature which baffles the investigator with its variety. Most addicted to these stories were the women, who received but little learning in the language of their religious lore, and who knew just enough of their Hebrew characters to read in the vernacular books specially prepared for them. Times changed, and the education of the men varied with the progress of the Hebrew and the native literatures; but the times hardly made an impression on the female sex. The same minimum of ethical instruction was given them in the eighteenth century that they had received in the fourteenth, and they were left to shift for themselves in the selection of their profane reading matter. The men who condescended to write stories for them had no special interest to direct the taste of their public, and preferred to supply the demand rather than create it; nor did the publishers have any more urgent reason why they should trouble themselves about the production of new works as long as the old ones satisfied the women. Consequently, although now and then a 'new' story book saw daylight, the old ones were just as eagerly received by the feminine readers. And thus it happens that what was read with pleasure at its first appearance is accepted as eagerly to-day, and the books that were issued from the printing presses of the sixteenth century may be found in almost unchanged hundredth editions, except as to the language, printed in 1898 in Wilna or Warsaw.

Time and space are entirely annihilated in the folklore of the Russian Jews. Here one finds side by side the quaint stories of the Talmud of Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian origin, with the Polyphemus myth of the Greeks, the English 'Bevys of Hamptoun,' the Arabic 'Thousand and One Nights.' Stories in which half a dozen motives from various separate tales have been moulded into one harmonious whole jostle with those that show unmistakable signs of venerable antiquity. Nowhere else can such a variety of tales be found as in Judeo-German; nor is there any need, as in other literatures, to have recourse to collections of the diligent searcher; one will find hundreds of them, nay thousands, told without any conscious purpose in the chapbooks that are annually issued at Wilna, Lemberg, Lublin, and other places. Add to these the many unwritten tales that involve the superstitions and beliefs of a more local character, in which the Slavic element has been superadded to the Germanic base, and the wealth of this long-neglected literature will at once become apparent to the most superficial observer.[24]

These stories have dominated and still dominate the minds of the women and children among the Russian, Roumanian, and Galician Jews. For them there exists a whole fantastic world, with its objects of fear and admiration. There is not an act they perform that is not followed by endless superstitious rites, in which the beliefs of Chaldea are inextricably mixed with French, Germanic, or Slavic ceremonies. To pierce the dense cloud of superstition that has involved the Mosaic Law, to disentangle the ancient religion from the rank growth of the ages, to open the eyes of the Jews to the realities of this world, and to break down the timeless and spaceless sphere of their imaginings—that has been the task of the followers of the Mendelssohnian Reform for the last one hundred years. In the pages of the Judeo-German works that they have produced to take the place of the story books of long ago, one meets continually with lists of superstitions that they are laboring to combat, with the names of books that they would fain put in an index expurgatorius.

It is not difficult to discern a number of distinct strata in the many folk-tales that are current now, even though the motives from various periods may be found hopelessly intertwined in one and the same story. The oldest of these may be conveniently called the Talmudical substratum, as in those older writings the prototypes of them can be found. Of course, these in their turn are of a composite nature themselves, but that need not disconcert us in our present investigation as long as the resemblance is greater to the stories in the Talmud than to the originals from which that collection has itself drawn its information. There is a large variety of subjects that must be classified in that category. Here belong a number of animal fables, of stories of strange beasts, much imaginary geography, but especially a vast number of apocryphal Bible stories.[25] One of the most interesting series of that class is the one that comprises tales of the river Sambation.[26] This river has rarely been discovered by poor mortals, although it has been the object of their lifelong quest. During the week it throws large rocks heavenwards, and the noise of the roaring waters is deafening. On the Sabbath the river rests from its turmoil, to resume again its activity at its expiration. Behind the Sambation lives the tribe of the Red Jews.

The best story of that cycle is told by Meisach. An inquisitive tailor sets out in search of the Sambation River. Of all the Jews that he meets he inquires the direction that he is to take thitherward; and he makes public announcements of his urgent business at all the synagogues that he visits. But all in vain. Three times he has already traversed the length and the breadth of this earth, but never did he get nearer his destination. Undaunted, he starts out once more to reach the tribe of the Red Jews. Suddenly he arrives near that awful river. Overwhelmed by its din, terrified at its eruptions, he falls down on the ground and prays to the all-merciful God. It happened to be a few minutes before the time that the river was to go to rest. The clock strikes, and, as if by magic, the scene is changed. The tailor finds a ford, passes on the other side, and, exhausted from his wandering, he lies down to sleep in the grass. The tribe of men that live there are a race of giants. One of them, noticing the intruder, takes him to be a new species of a grasshopper, picks him up, and slips him in his spacious coat pocket. He proceeds to the bathhouse to take his ablution, and thence to the synagogue, leaving the tailor all the while in his pocket. The giants begin to pray. At the end, while a pause ensues, the pious tailor unconsciously exclaims 'Amen!' Astonished to hear that mysterious voice, the giant brings the tailor to light and showers many signs of respect upon him, for even the giants know how to honor a pious man. The tailor liked it there so much that he never returned to his native home.

Abramowitsch has made a fine use of this story in his Jewish 'Don Quixote.' The hero of that novel has so long pondered about the Sambation River and the mysterious race of men that live beyond it, that he loses his reason, and starts out to find them. But he does not get beyond Berdichev. Another very fruitful class of stories belonging to that category is the one in which the prophet Elijah plays an important part.[27] According to the popular belief, Elijah did not die; he even now frequently comes to visit men, to help them in some dire necessity. His presence is surmised only when he has disappeared, generally leaving behind him a vapory cloud. So rooted is this belief in the visitation of Elijah, that during the ceremony of the circumcision a chair is left unoccupied for the good prophet. Elijah is not the only one that may be seen nowadays. Moses and David occasionally leave their heavenly abodes to aid their devotees or to exhort those that are about to depart from the road of righteousness. King David presides over the repast at the conclusion of the Sabbath, for it is then that a song in which his name is mentioned is recited. There are some who regard it as a devout act to celebrate that occasion with unswerving accuracy. To those who have made the vow of 'Mlawe-Malke,' as the repast is called, King David is wont to appear when they are particularly unfortunate. Unlike Elijah, he makes his presence known by his company of courtiers and musicians, and he himself holds a harp in his hands; and unlike him, he resorts to supernatural means to aid his protégés.

Most of the medieval legends cluster around the Rabbis of Central Europe, who have in one way or another become famous. The cities of Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Worms, Prague, Cracow, have all their special circle of wonderful tales about the supernatural powers of the worthies of long ago. But the king of that cycle of miracle workers is Rambam, as Maimonides is called.[28] His profound learning and great piety, his renowned art of medicine, his extensive travels, have naturally lent themselves to imaginative transformations. He has undergone the same transmogrification that befell Vergil. Like the latter, he is no longer the great scholar and physician, but a wizard who knows the hidden properties of plants and stones, who by will power can transfer himself in space, and who can read dreams and reveal their future significance. His whole life was semi-miraculous. When he had arrived at the proper age to enter an academy of medicine, he applied to a school where only deaf-mutes were accepted as disciples of Æsculapius. This precaution was necessary, lest the secrets of the art be disseminated, to the disadvantage of the craft. Rambam pretended to have neither hearing nor speech. His progress was remarkable, and in a short time he surpassed his teachers in the delicate art of surgery. Once there came to the school a man who asked to be cured of a worm that was gnawing at his brain. The learned doctors held a consultation, and resolved to trepan the skull and extract the worm. This was at once executed, and Rambam was given permission to be present at the operation. With trembling and fear he perceived the mistake of his teachers and colleagues, for he knew full well that the man would have to die as soon as the seventh membrane under the dura mater was cut away. With bated breath, he stood the pang of anxiety until the sixth covering had been removed. Already the doctors were applying the lancet to the seventh, when his patience and caution gave way, and he exclaimed, 'Stop; you are killing him!' His surprised colleagues promised to forgive his deceit if he would extract the worm without injury to the membrane. This Rambam carried out in a very simple manner. He placed a cabbage leaf on the small opening in the seventh covering, and the worm, attracted by the odor of the leaf, came out to taste of the fresh food, whereupon it was ousted.[29]

Of such a character are nearly all of his cures. The supernatural element of the later period, where everything is fantastic, is still absent from the Rabbi legends. There is always an attempt made to combine the wonderful with the real, or rather to transfer the real into the realm of the miraculous. The later stories of miracle-working pursue the opposite course: they engraft the most extraordinary impossibilities on the experiences of everyday life. Rambam's travels have also given rise to a large number of semi-mythical journeys. One of the legends tells of his sojourn in Algiers, where he incurred the hatred of the Mussulmans for having decided that an oil-vat had become impure because a Mohammedan had touched it, whereas another vat into which a weed had fallen was pronounced by him to be ritually pure. Knowing that his life was in danger, he escaped to Egypt, making the voyage in less than half an hour by means of a miraculous document that he took with him and that had the power of destroying space. In Cairo he became the chief adviser of the king, and he later managed to save the country from the visitation of the Algerian minister, who had come there ostensibly to pursue the fugitive Rambam, but in reality to lay Egypt waste by his magical arts.

The most interesting stories that still belong to that cycle are those that have developed in Slavic countries. Out of the large material that was furnished them by the German cities, in conjunction with the new matter with which they became familiar in their new homes, they have moulded many new stories in endless variety. The number of local legends is unlimited. There is hardly an inn on the highways and byways of Western Russia and Galicia that has not its own circle of wonderful tales. Every town possesses its remarkable Rabbi whose memory lives in the deeds that he is supposed to have performed. But none, except the town of Mesiboz, the birthplace of Bal-schem-tow, the founder of the sect of the Khassidim, can boast of such a complete set of legendary tales as the cities of Wilna and Cracow. In Wilna they will still tell the curious stranger many reminiscences of those glorious days when their Rabbis could arrest the workings of natural laws, and when their sentence was binding on ghosts as well as men. They will take him to the synagogue and show him a large dark spot in the cupola, and they will tell him that during an insurrection a cannon-ball struck the building, and that it would have proceeded on its murderous journey but for the command of the Rabbi to be lodged in the wall. They will take him to a street where the spooks used to contend with humankind for the possession of the houses in which they lived:—the contention was finally referred to the Gaon of Wilna. After careful inquiry into the justice of the contending parties he gave his decision, which is worthy of the wisdom of Solomon: he adjudicated the upper parts of the houses, as much of them as there was above ground, to the mortals, while the cellars and other underground structures were left in perpetuity to the shadowy inhabitants of the lower regions.[30] One of the Gaons at Wilna was possessed of the miraculous power to create a Golem, a homunculus. It was a vivified clay man who had to do the bidding of him who had given him temporary life. Whenever his mission was fulfilled he was turned back into an unrecognizable mass of clay.[31]

A special class of legends that have been evolved in Slavic countries are those that tell of the Lamed-wow-niks. According to an old belief the world is supported by the piety of thirty-six saints (Lamed-wow is the numerical representation of that number). If it were not for them, the sins of men would have long ago worked the destruction of the universe. Out of this basal belief have sprung up the stories that relate the deeds of the 'hidden' saints. They are called 'hidden' because it is the very essence of those worthies not to carry their sanctity for show: they are humble artisans, generally tailors or shoemakers, who ply their humble vocations unostentatiously, and to all intents and purposes are common people, poor and rather mentally undeveloped. No one even dreams of their hidden powers, and no one ever sees them studying the Law. When by some accident their identity is made apparent, they vigorously deny that they belong to the chosen Thirty-six, and only admit the fact when the evidence is overwhelmingly against them. Then they are ready to perform some act by which a calamity can be averted from the Jews collectively, and after their successful undertaking they return to their humble work in some other town where there is no chance of their being recognized and importuned.

One of the most perfect stories of that kind is told of a hidden saint who lived in Cracow in the days of Rabbenu Moses Isserls. The Polish king had listened to the representations of his minister that as descendant of the Persian king he was entitled to the sum of money which Haman had promised to him but which he evidently had not paid, having been robbed of it by the Jews. He ordered the Jews of Cracow to pay forthwith the enormous sum upon pain of being subjected to a cruel persecution. After long fasting Rabbenu Isserls told his congregation to go to Chaim the tailor who was living in the outskirts of the town and to ask him to use his supernatural powers in averting the impending calamity. After the customary denials, Chaim promised to be the spokesman of the Jews before the king. On the next morning he went to the palace. He passed unnoticed by the guards into the cabinet of his majesty and asked him to sign a document revoking his order. In anger, the king went to the door to chide the guards for having admitted a ragged Jew to his presence. As he opened it, he stepped into space, and found himself in a desert. He wandered about for a whole day and only in the evening he met a poor man who offered him a piece of dry bread and showed him a place of shelter in a cave. The poor man advised him not to tell of his being a king to any one that he might meet, lest he be robbed or killed. He gave him a beggar's garments, and supplied him with a meal of dry bread every day. At the expiration of a year, the poor man offered him work as a woodcutter with an improvement in his fare if he would first sign a document. The king was only too happy to change his monotonous condition, and without looking at it signed the paper presented to him. His trials lasted two years more, after which he became a sailor, was shipwrecked and carried back to Cracow. Just then he awoke to discover that his three years' experience had only lasted fifteen minutes by the clock. He abided by his agreement in the document which he had signed in his dream, and thus the great misfortune was once more warded off by the piety of a Lamed-wow-nik. The minister, the story continues, escaped to Italy and hence to Amsterdam, where he became a convert to Judaism. In his old age he returned to Cracow to make pilgrimages to the graves of Rabbenu Isserls and Chaim, the saint.

All the previous stories and legends pale into insignificance by the side of the endless miracles spun out by the Khassidim and ascribed to the founder of the sect and his disciples.[32] Nothing is too absurd for them. There seems to be a conscious desire in these stories to outdo all previous records, in order to throw the largest halo on their Bal-schem-tow, or Bescht, as he is called by his initials. Bal-schem-tow was neither the miracle-worker that his adherents would have him, nor the impostor that his opponents imagine him to have been. He was a truly pious man who sought a refuge in mysticism against the verbalism of the Jews of his days, in the middle of the eighteenth century. His followers, unfortunately mistaking the accidental in his teachings for the essentials of the new doctrine, have raised the Cabbalistic lucubrations of his disciples to the dignity of religious books, and have opened wide the doors for superstitions of all kinds. The realities of this world hardly exist for them, or are at best the temporal reflexes of that mystic sphere in which all their thoughts soar. Their rabbis are all workers of miracles, and Bescht is adored by them more than Moses and the Biblical saints. His life and acts have been so surrounded by a legendary atmosphere that it is now, only one hundred and fifty years after his life, not possible to disentangle truth from fiction and to reconstruct the real man. A large number of books relate the various miraculous incidents in his life, but the one entitled 'Khal Chsidim' surpasses them all in variety, and attempts to give as it were a chronological sequence of his acts.

In that book his grandfather and father are represented as foreshadowing the greatness of their descendant. His grandfather is a minister to a king, and Elijah announces to him that at the age of one hundred years his wife will bear him a son who will be a shining light. His father is a wizard and a scholar, and enjoins his son before his death to study with a hidden saint in the town of Ukop. After his studies were completed he became a teacher in Brody, and a judge. He marries the sister of Rabbi Gerschon, who takes him for a simpleton, and in vain tries to instruct him. No one knows of the sanctity of Bescht. He goes into the mountains accompanied by his wife, and there meditates a long while. At one time he was about to step from a mountain into empty space, when the neighboring mountain inclined its summit and received the erring foot of Bescht. After seven years of solitary life he returns to Brody to become a servant in Gerschon's household. Later his career of miracle-working begins: he heals the sick, exorcises evil spirits, brings down rain by prayers, breaks spells, conquers wizards, predicts the future, punishes the unbelievers, rewards the faithful by endowing them with various powers, and does sundry other not less wonderful things. When he prays, the earth trembles, and no one can hear his voice for loudness. He sleeps but two hours at night and prays the rest of the time, while a nimbus of fire surrounds him.

Not less marvellous are the deeds of his disciples as related in the 'Sseefer Maisse Zadikim' and other similar productions that are issued in penny sheets in Lemberg to impress the believers with the greatness of their faith. Many of these have sprung up from the desire to instill the necessity of observing certain religious rites, and this the authors think they can accomplish best by connecting a moral with some miraculous tale. For every imaginable vow there is a special story telling of the blissfulness that the devotee has reached or the misery that the lax follower of Khassidism has had occasion to rue. Every good deed according to them creates its own protecting spirits, while every crime produces a corresponding monstrous beast that pursues the sinner and leads him to destruction. Interesting also are those cases when a man has been as prone to sin as he has been to perform virtuous acts, for then the struggle between the beings of his creation leads to amusing results in which all depends on the preponderance of one kind of deeds over the other. The worst of men is not excluded from the benefits of mercy if he makes amends for his crimes by an earnest repentance which is followed by a long penance.

Of the latter class, the following is a typical story. Chaim has brought many misfortunes to Jewish families by denouncing and blackmailing them to the Polish magnate, the chief authority of the district. Once while on his way to the magnate he sees a half-starved beggar in the road, and he divides with him his bread and carries him to his house and takes care of him until he is well enough to proceed on his journey. Chaim has occasion after several years to denounce some one to the magnate. He goes to the cupboard to fill his wallet for the journey, when he sees a dead person in it. After he has collected himself from his fright, he steps up once more to the cupboard. The dead person tells him that he is the beggar that he saved from starvation some time ago, that he had heard in heaven that Chaim was to be given his last chance in life, and that he had come to warn him to repent his misdeeds. Chaim takes his advice to heart, and for seven years stays uninterruptedly in the synagogue, perfecting himself in his knowledge of the religious lore. On the eve of the Passover he allows himself to be tempted by Satan in the shape of a scholar, to eat leavened bread at a time when the Law prohibits it. As he steps out to the brook to wash his hands before tasting of the bread, the dead person once more appears to him and tells him that Satan has been sent to him to tempt him, because it was thought that his seven years' penance alone was not sufficient to atone for his many evil deeds; that all his labors have been in vain, and that he will have to do penance another seven years. This Chaim is only too ready to undergo, and he applies himself with even more ardor than before to get a remission of his sins. At the expiration of the allotted time Chaim dies and is at once taken to heaven.

The legends and folk-tales so far considered are of a strictly Jewish character, whatever their origin. They are in one way or another connected with the inner life of the Jewish community. They deal with the acts of their worthies and inculcate religious truths. But these are far from forming the bulk of all the stories that are current to-day among the German Jews in Slavic countries. Among the printed books of a popular character there are many that not only are of Gentile origin, but that have not been transformed in the light of the Mosaic faith; they have been reprinted without change of contents for the last four centuries, furnishing an example of long survival unequalled probably in any other literature.[33] Many of the stories that had been current in Germany long before the time of printing were among the first to be issued from Jewish printing presses. Stories of the court of King Arthur in verse, of Dietrich of Bern, of the 'Constant Love of Floris and Blanchefleur,' of 'Thousand and One Nights,' had been common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many of them may be found in editions of this century; but none of them has been so popular as the 'Bovo-maisse,' the latest edition of which is known to me from the year 1895. It is identical with the English 'Bevys of Hamptoun' and was done into Judeo-German by Elia Levita in Venice in the year 1501. It is, no doubt, related to some one of the many Italian versions in which Bevys is turned into Bovo. The popularity of this book has been second only to the 'Zeena-Ureena' which contains a very large number of folk-tales interwoven in a popular exposition of the Bible. There are also books that contain stories of 'Sinbad the Sailor,' or what seem to be versions of Sir John Maundeville's 'Travels,' and other similar fantastic tales.

These stories, having once been committed to writing and printing, have remained intact up to our times, except that they have undergone linguistic modernizations. But there is also an unlimited number of fairy tales and fables in circulation which have never been written down, which have therefore been more or less subjected to local influences; in these Hebrew, German, and Slavic elements meet most freely, causing the stories to be moulded in new forms.[34] It may be asserted without fear of contradiction that among the Russian Jews the investigator will find the best, most complete versions of most, if not all, the stories contained in Grimm's or Andersen's collections. The reason for it is to be sought in the inordinate love of story-telling that the Jews possess. They are fond of staying up late in the night, particularly in the winter, and whiling away the time with an endless series of stories. The stranger who is a good raconteur is sure of a kind reception wherever he may chance to stay; but his nights will be curtailed by the extent of his fund of stories, for his audience will not budge as long as they suspect that the stranger has not spent all the arrows from his quiver. The wandering beggar-students and tailors have the reputation for story-telling; it was by one of the latter that a large number of fairy tales were related to me. I choose for illustration one that is known in a great variety of versions.

The Fool is Wiser than the Wise

"Once upon a time there lived a rich man who had three sons: two of them were wise, while one was a fool. After his death the brothers proceeded to divide the property, which consisted mainly of cattle. The two wise brothers suggested that the herd be divided into three equal parts, and that lots be cast for each; but the fool insisted that corrals be built near the house of each and that each be allowed to keep the cattle that would stray into his corral. The wise brothers agreed to this, and to entice the oxen and cows they placed fresh hay in their enclosures; but the fool did not take measures to gain possession of cattle by unfair means. The animals were attracted by the odor of the new-mown hay, and only one calf strolled into the fool's enclosure. The fool kept his calf for eight days, and forgot to give it fodder during that time; so it died. He took off its hide, and placed it in the sun to get dry. There it lay until it shrivelled up. Then he took the hide to Warsaw to sell it, but no one wanted to buy it, for it was all dried up.

"He started for home and came to an inn where he wanted to stay over night. He found there twelve men eating, and drinking good wine. He asked the landlady whether he could stay there over night. She told him she would not keep him in the house for all the money in the world, and she asked him to leave the house at once. He did not like her hasty manner, and he hid himself behind the door where no one could see him. There he overheard the landlady saying to the men: 'Before my husband gets home you must go down in the cellar and hide behind the wine-casks. In the night, when he will be asleep, you must come up and kill him. Then I shall be satisfied with you!' After a short while her husband returned from the distillery with some brandy, and the men hurried down into the cellar. He unloaded the brandy-casks, and went into the house. He asked his wife for something to eat; but she said there was nothing in the house. Just then the fool stepped in and asked the innkeeper whether he could not stay there over night. The landlady got angry at him and said: 'I told you before that there was no bed here for you!' But the innkeeper said: 'He will stay here over night!' and the innkeeper's word was law. He told the fool to sit down at the table with him, and they started a conversation. The fool accidentally placed his hand on the hide, which being dry began to crackle. The innkeeper asked him: 'What makes the hide crackle that way?' and the fool answered: 'It is talking to me!' 'What does it say?' 'It says that you are hungry, and that your wife says that there is nothing in the house, but that if you will look into the oven you will find some dishes.' He went up to the oven and found there enough for himself and the fool to eat. Then the hide crackled again, and the innkeeper asked again: 'What does it say?' 'It says that you should start a big fire in the oven!' 'What is the fire for?' 'I do not know, but you must obey the hide.' So he went and made a big fire in the oven. Then the hide crackled again. Says he: 'What does the hide say now?' 'It tells to heat kettles of water.' When the water got hot, the hide crackled again. Then he asked: 'What does the hide say now?' 'It says that you should take some strong men with you to the cellar and pour the water behind the wine-casks.' And so he did. The robbers were all scalded, and they ran away. Then he came upstairs, and the hide crackled again. Said he: 'Why does it crackle now?' 'The twelve robbers wanted to kill you at night, because your wife ordered them to do so.' When the wife heard that, she also ran away. Then the innkeeper said: 'Sell me your hide!' The fool answered: 'It costs much money.' 'No matter how much it costs, I shall pay for it, for it has saved my life.' 'It costs one thousand roubles.' So he gave him one thousand roubles. The fool went home, and when the brothers heard that he had sold his hide for one thousand roubles, they killed all their cattle, and took their hides to Warsaw to sell. They figured that if their brother's calf brought one thousand roubles, the hides of their oxen ought to fetch them at least two thousand roubles apiece. When they asked two thousand roubles apiece, people laughed and offered them a rouble for each. When they heard that, they went home and upbraided their brother for having cheated them. But he insisted that he had received one thousand roubles for his hide, and the brothers left him alone.

"After a while the fool's wife died. The undertakers wanted one thousand roubles for her interment. But the fool would not pay that sum. He placed his wife in a wagon and took her to Warsaw. There he filled the wagon with fine apples and put the dead body at the head of the wagon all dressed up. He himself stood at some distance and watched what would happen. There rode by a Polish count, and as he noticed the fine apples, he sent his servant to buy some. The servant asked the woman several times at what price she sold the apples; but as she did not answer him, he hit her in the face. Then the fool ran up and cried, saying that they had killed his wife. The count descended from his carriage, and when he had convinced himself that the woman was really dead, he asked the fool what he could do to satisfy him. The fool asked five thousand roubles, and the count paid him. The fool paid the undertaker in Warsaw a few roubles, and he buried his wife. He returned home and told his brothers of his having received five thousand roubles for his dead wife. Upon hearing that, they killed their wives and children and took the dead bodies to Warsaw to sell. When they arrived in Warsaw, they were asked what they had in their wagons. They said: 'Dead bodies for sale.' The people began to laugh, and said that dead bodies had to be taken to the cemetery. There was nothing left for the brothers to do but to take them to the cemetery and have them buried.

"They wept bitterly, and swore that they would take revenge on their brother. And so they did. When they arrived home, they told him that they wished to make him a prince. They enticed him for that purpose into a bag, and wanted to throw him into the water. They went away to find a place where they could throw him in without being noticed. In the meanwhile the fool kept on crying in the bag that he did not care to be a prince, that he wished to get out of the bag. Just then a rich Polish merchant drove by. When he heard the cries in the bag, he stepped down from his carriage and asked the fool why he was crying so. He said: 'I do not want to be a prince!' So he untied him and said: 'Let me get into the bag and be made a prince! I shall make you a present of my horses and my carriage, if you will let me be a prince.' The rich man crept into the bag, and the fool tied it fast. He went into the carriage and drove away. The brothers came, picked up the bag, and threw it into the water. The fool watched their doings from a distance. The brothers were sure they had drowned the fool and returned home. The next morning they were astonished to see their brother driving around town in a fine carriage. They asked him: 'Where did you get that?' He answered: 'In the water.' 'Are there more of them left?' 'There are finer ones down there.' So they went down to the water's edge, and they agreed that one of them should leap in and see if there were any carriages left there, and if he should find any, he was to make a noise in the water, when the other one would follow him. One of them leaped in, and beginning to drown, began to splash the water. The other, thinking his brother was calling him, also jumped in, and they were both drowned. The fool became the sole heir of all their property; he married again, and is now living quite happily."

Corresponding to the diffusion of folklore among the Jews, their store of popular beliefs, superstitions, and medicine is unlimited. Their mysterious world is peopled with the imaginary beings of the Talmud, the creatures of German mythology, and the creations of the Slavic popular mind. These exist for them, however, not as separate entities, but as transfused into an organic whole in which the belief of Babylonia and Assyria has much of the outward form of the superstition of Russia, just as the spirits of Poland and Germany are made to be brothers to those of Chaldea and Egypt. To their minds the transmigrated souls of the Gilgulim, the scoffing Leezim, the living dead bodies of the Meessim, the possessing Dibukim, the grewsome Scheedim, are as real as the Riesen and Schraetele of Germany and the Nischtgute (niedobry), Wukodlaki (werewolf), Zlidne, Upior (vampyre), and Domowoj of Russia. The beast Reem of the Talmud, the Pipernātter (Lindwurm) of Germany are not less known to them than the fabled animals of Russian fairy tales. In case of sickness they consult with equal success the miracle-working Rabbi with his lore derived from Talmud and Cabbala, as the Tartar medicine man (znachar), or get some old woman to recite the ancient German formula for warding off the evil eye. There is not an incident in their lives, from their births unto their deaths, that is not accompanied by its own circle of superstitious rites and practices.[35]

Their literature, both oral and printed, is also full of evidences of that popular creative spirit which finds its expression in the form of maxims and proverbs. One can hardly turn the pages of a novel or comedy without finding some interesting specimens of this class. But little has been done to classify them, or even to collect them. The printed collections of Tendlau and Bernstein contain less than three thousand proverbs, while the seven thousand saws on which Schwarzfeld bases his generalizations in a Roumanian periodical (Anuarul pentru Israeliţi) have not yet been published by him.[36]

Equally rich would prove the harvest of popular anecdotes, either as told of separate individuals, as Herschele Ostropoler, Motke Chabad, Jōssef Loksch, the wise man of Chelm, and the like, or as applied to the inhabitants of certain Abderitic towns.[37] Many such collections are mentioned in the appendix, but they do not by any means exhaust the stories that are current among the people. Though they generally are of the same character as those told of Schildburg and Till Eulenspiegel, and are even borrowings from those German stories, yet they contain so much original matter, and have been welded into such new forms, that they deserve the attention of the student of folklore. They also bear excellent witness to that pungent wit for which the Jews are so justly famous.

IV. THE FOLKSONG

THE Jews have been preëminently inhabitants of towns; their very admission into Poland was based on the supposition that they would be instrumental in creating towns and cities, from which the agricultural Slavs kept aloof. Centuries of city life have incapacitated them for any other occupation than commerce and artisanship, and have entirely estranged them from nature. On the other hand, their civil disabilities and oppression have led them to cling more closely to the Bible and their religious lore than was customary among their coreligionists in other lands. It was in these Slavic countries that the Talmud was rediscovered and that it was introduced to the rest of Judaism. All these circumstances developed in them a strong retrospective spirit, so that in the centre of their intellectual horizon stands man in all his varying moods and vicissitudes of fortune. Consequently all their folksongs[38] have more or less of a lyrical tinge, and the consideration of nature is almost entirely absent from them; occasionally a flower, a natural phenomenon, finds a passing mention in them, but these are never used for their own intrinsic interest. Outside of himself, the Jew knows only his duties to God and his duties to man, as flowing from his duties to God. Not feeling himself as a constituent part of a nation, having no other union with his fellow-men except that of religion, he could never rise to the appreciation and formation of an epic poem, although the material for such a one was present in the very popular legend of the one-day king, Saul Wahl.[39]

The cradle songs reflect this spirit.[40] While babies of Gentiles hear meaningless nursery rhymes or comical ditties, Jewish infants are early made acquainted with the serious aspects of life. They are told of the ideal of their future occupation, which is commerce, they are spurred on to 'Tōre,' which is learning, mainly religious, and they are reminded that they must remain an 'ehrlicher,' i.e. an orthodox, Jew. The following poem is, probably, the most popular song in Judeo-German, as it is sung from Galicia to Siberia, and from the Baltic provinces to Roumania:

Hinter Jankeles Wiegele
Stēht a klār-weiss Ziegele:
Ziegele is' gefāhren handlen
Rožinkelach mit Mandlen.
Rožinkelach mit Mandlen
Sanen die beste S-chōre,—
Jankele wet lernen Tōre,
Tōre wet er lernen,
Briewelach wet er schreiben,
Un' an ehrlicher Jüd'
Wet er af tomid verbleiben.

Behind Jacob's cradle there stands a clear white goat: the goat has gone a-bartering raisins and almonds. Raisins and almonds are the best wares,—Jacob will study the Law, the Law he will study, letters he will write, and an honest Jew he will forever remain.

But commerce and learning are not for girls. They are generally incapacitated for the first by their onerous duties of home; and learning, at least a knowledge of the Sacred language and its lore, has never been regarded as a requisite of woman. She received her religious instruction and ethical training by means of Judeo-German books which owe their very origin to the necessity of educating her. The name of the script in which all these books of the past three centuries are printed is Weiberdeutsch, indicating at once the use to which it was put. The title-pages of the works generally tell that they are 'gar hübsch bescheidlich far frumme Weiber un' Maidlich,' or that 'die Weiber un' Meidlich di Weil damit vertreiben die heiligen Täg.' The Biblical injunction 'fructify and multiply yourself' invests family life with a special sacredness, throws a gloom over the childless home, and leads this people to regard motherhood as the ideal state of the Jewish woman. All these sentiments find frequent expressions in their songs, and while the infant boy is lulled to sleep with a recitation of his future manly virtues, the baby girl hears in her cradle, 'In the month of Tamuz, my little lady, you will become a mother!'

Childhood alone claims exemption from oppressing thoughts and gloom: childhood must have its merriments, its pranks, its wantonness, no matter how serious life is to become later, or how soon it is to be ended. With the Jew youth, indeed, lasts but 'an hour,' and in after-life he has many an occasion to regret its short duration:

Jāhren klēine, Jāhren schoene,
Wās sent ihr asō wēnig dā?
Ihr sent nor gekummen,
Me hāt euch schoen aufgenummen,
Un' sent nor gewe'n bei uns ēin Scho?

Jāhren junge, Jāhren g'ringe,
Wās sent ihr asō gich aweg?
Es seht euch nit kēin Äugel,
Es derjāgen euch nit die Voegel,
Ihr sent aweg gār ohn' ein Eck'!

Little years, beautiful years, why are there so few of you? You had scarcely come, you were well received, and you stayed but an hour with us!—Young years, light years, why have you passed so quickly? Not an eye can see you, not a bird can fly as swiftly, you have passed without return!

The number of ditties sung by children is very great. They do not in general differ from similar popular productions of other nations, either in form or content; some are evidently identical with German songs, while a few are Slavic borrowings.

But there are two classes of songs peculiarly Jewish: the mnemonic lines for the study of Hebrew words, and those that depict the ideal course of a boy's life. To the second belongs:

A klēine Weile wöllen mir spielen,
Dem Kind in Cheeder wöllen mir führen,
Wet er lernen a Pāar Schures,
Wöllen mir hören gute Pschures,
Gute Pschures mit viel Mailes,
Zu der Chupe paskenen Schailes,
's 'et sein gefällen der ganzer Welt,
Chossen-kale—a vulle Geld,
A vulle Geld mit Masel-broche,
Chossen-kale—a schoene Mischpoche,
Schoene Mischpoche mit schoenem Trest,
Ābgestellt auf drei Jahr Köst.

A little while we shall play, we shall lead the child to school; there he will learn a few lines, and we shall get good reports, good reports with many good things, and he will settle religious disputes upon his wedding day. The whole world will be satisfied,—bridegroom and bride—a purse full of money; full of money, may it bring blessings; bridegroom and bride—a fine family; a fine family with fine apparel, and at their house you'll stay three years.

The man's career used to run in just such a stereotyped manner: at a tender age, when children have not yet learned to properly articulate their speech, he was sent to the Cheeder, the elementary Jewish school; long before the romantic feeling has its rise in youth, he was betrothed and married; but unable to earn a livelihood for the family with which he prayed to be blessed, he had to stay for a number of years with his parents or parents-in-law, eating 'Köst,' or board; this time he generally passed in the Talmud school, perfecting himself in the casuistry of religious discussion, while the woman at once began to care for her ever-increasing family. Under such conditions love could not flourish, at least not that romantic love of which the young Gentiles dream and which finds its utterance in their popular poetry. The word 'love' does not exist in the Judeo-German dictionary, and wherever that feeling, with which they have become acquainted only since the middle of this century, is to be named, the Jews have to use the German word 'Liebe.' The man's hope was to marry into some 'schoene Mischpoche,' a good and respected family, while the girl's dream was to get a husband who was well versed in 'rabonische Tōre,' i.e. Jewish lore. While the boy, by his occupation with the Bible and the Talmud, was taught to look on marriage as on an act pleasing to God, the girl was freer to allow her fancy to roam in the realms bordering on the sensations of love:

Schoen bin ich, schoen, un' schoen is' mein Nāmen:
Redt män mir Schiduchim vun grōsse Rabonim.
Rabonische Tōre is' sēhr grōss,
Un' ich bei mein Mamen a züchtige Rōs'.
A Rōs' is' auf'n Dach,
A lichtige Nacht,
Wasser is' in Stub, Holz is' in Haus,
Welchen Bocher hāb' ich feind, treib' ich ihm araus!
Fischelach in Wasser, Kräppelach in Puter,
Welchen Bocher hāt mich feind, a Ruch in sein Mutter!

Pretty I am, pretty, and pretty is my name; they talk of great rabbis as matches for me. Rabbi's learning is very great, but I am a treasured rose of my mother's. A rose upon the roof, a clear night; water is in the room, wood is in the house,—If I love not a boy, I drive him away! Fish in the water, fritters in butter,—If a boy love me not, cursed be his mother!

But such an exultation of free choice could be only passing, as the match was made without consulting her feelings in the matter; her greatest concern was that she might be left an old maid, while her companions passed into the ordained state of matrimony. Songs embodying this fear are quite common; the following is one of them:

Sitz' ich mir auf'n Stēin,
Nemmt mir ān a grōss Gewēin:
Alle Maedlach hāben Chassene,
Nor ich bleib' allēin.
Oi wēh, Morgenstern!
Wenn well ich a Kale wer'n,
Zi heunt, zi morgen?
A schoene Maedel bin ich doch
Un' a reichen Taten hāb' ich doch!

I sit upon a stone, and am seized by great weeping: all girls get married, but I remain single. Woe to me, morning star! When shall I become a bride, to-day or to-morrow? I surely am a pretty girl, and I have a rich father!

In the more modern songs in which the word 'love' is used, that word represents the legitimate inclination for the opposite sex which culminates in marriage.

Now that love and love matches are not uncommon, it is again woman who is the strongest advocate of them; love songs addressed by men to women are rare, and they may be recited with equal propriety by the latter. The chief characteristic of woman's love, as expressed in them, is constancy and depth of feeling.

Schwarz bist du, schwarz, asō wie a Zigeuner,
Ich hāb' gemēint, as du we'st sein meiner;
Schwarz bist du, āber mit Cheen,
Für wemen du bist mies, für mir bist du schoen;
Schoen bist du wie Silber, wie Gold,—
Wer's hāt dich feind un' ich hāb' dich hold.
Vun alle Fehlern känn a Doktor ābhēilen,
Die Liebe vun mein Herzen känn ich var Kēinem nit derzaehlen.

Black you are, black as a Gypsy, I thought you would always be mine; black you are, but with grace,—for others you may be homely, but for me you are handsome; handsome you are, like silver, like gold,—let others dislike you, but I love you. Of all troubles a doctor can cure, the love in my heart I can tell to no one.

Many are the songs of pining for the distant lover; they show all the melancholy touches of similar Slavic love ditties, and are the most poetical of all the Jewish songs. They range from the soft regrets of the lover's temporary absence to the deep and gloomy despair of the betrothed one's death, though the latter is always tempered by a resignation which comes from implicit faith in the ways of Heaven. Here are a few of them in illustration of the various forms which this pining assumes:

Bei 'm Breg Wasser thu' ich stēhn
Un' känn zu dir nit kummen,
Oi, vun weiten rufst du mich,
Ich känn āber nit schwimmen!

At the water's edge I do stand, and I cannot get to you. Oh, you call me from afar, but I cannot swim!

Finster is' mein' Welt,
Mein' Jugend is' schwarz,
Mein Glück is' verstellt,
Es fault mir mein Harz.

Es zittert mir jetwider Eewer,
Es kühlt mir dās Blut,
Mit dir in ēin Keewer
Wet mir sein gut.

Ach, wās willst du, Mutter, hāben,
Wās mutschest da dein Kind?
Wās willst du mir begrāben?
Für wāssere Sünd'?

Ich hāb' kēin Nachas geha't,
Nor Leiden un' Kummer,
Ich welk' wie ein Blatt,
Wie ein Blum' Ssof Summer.

Wu nemm' ich mein' Freund
Chotsch auf ēin Scho?
Alle hāben mir feind
Un' du bist nit dā!

Dark is my world; my youth is black, my fortune is veiled, my heart is decaying.—Every limb of mine is trembling; my blood grows cold; I should feel well with you in one grave.—Oh, what do you want of me, mother? Why do you vex your child? Why do you wish to bury me? For what sins of mine?—I have had no joy, only suffering and sorrow. I am fading like a leaf, like a flower at the end of summer.—Where shall I find my friend but for one hour? No one loves me, and you are not here.

With the same feeling that prompts the Jewish woman to repeat the prayer, 'O Lord, I thank Thee that Thou hast created me according to Thy will!' while the man prays, 'I thank Thee that Thou hast created me a man,' she regards her disappointments in love as perfectly natural; and the inconstancy of man, which forms the subject of all songs of unhappy love, does not call forth recriminations and curses, which one would expect, but only regrets at her own credulity.

One would imagine that the wedding day must appear as the happiest in the life of the woman, but such is not the case. With it begin all the tribulations for which she is singled out; and the jest-maker, who is always present at the ceremony of uniting the pair, addresses the bride with the words:

Bride, bride, weep! The bridegroom will send you a pot full of horseradish, and that will make you snivel unto your very teeth,

inviting her to weep instead of smiling, and he follows this doggerel with a discussion of the vanities of life and the sadness of woman's lot. Even if her marital happiness should be unmarred by any unfaithfulness of her husband,—and Jewish men for the greater part are good husbands and fathers,—there are the cares of earning the daily bread, which frequently fall on the woman, while the stronger vessel is brooding over some Talmudical subtleties; there are the eternal worries over the babies, and, worst of all, the proverbial mother-in-law, if the wife chances to board with her for the first few years after marriage. The ideal of the Jewess is but a passing dream, and no one can escape the awakening to a horrible reality:

A Maedele werd a Kale
In ēin Rege, in ēin Minut,
Mit ihr freuen sich Alle
Die Freud' is' nor zu ihr.

Der Chossen schickt Presenten,
Sie werd gār neu geboren,
Wenn sie thut sich ān,
Wünscht sie ihm lange Jāhren.

Sie gēht mit'n Chossen spazieren
Un' thut in Spiegele a Kuck,
Stēhen Ōlem Menschen
Un' seinen mekane dem Glück.

Ot führt män sie zu der Chupe,
Un' ot führt män sie zurück,
Stēhen a Kupe Maedlach
Un' seinen mekane dem Glück.

Auf morgen nāch der Chupe,
Die Freimut is' noch in Ganzen:
Der Chossen sitzt wie a Meelach
Un' die Kale gēht sich tanzen.

Drei Jāhr nāch der Chupe
Der Freimut is schōn arāb:
Die junge Weibel gēht arum
Mit a zudrēhter Kopp.
. . . . . . . . . .
"Oi wēh, Mutter, Mutter,
Ich will vun dir nit hören,
Ich wollt' schōn besser wöllen
Zurück a Maedel wer'n!"

A girl is made a bride in a moment, in a minute,—all rejoice with her, with her alone.—The groom sends presents, she feels all new-born, when she attires herself, she wishes him long years.—She gets ready to walk with the bridegroom, and looks into the mirror,—there stands a crowd of people who envy her her good luck.—Now she is led to the baldachin, now she is led back again,—there stands a bevy of girls who envy her her luck.—The next day after the marriage,—the joy is still with them: the bridegroom sits like a king, the bride is a-dancing.—Three years after the marriage,—the joy has left them: the young woman walks around with a troubled head.... 'Woe to me, mother, mother, I do not want to hear of you,—I should like, indeed, to be a young girl again.'

Pathetic are the recitals of suffering at the house of her husband's parents, where she is treated worse than a menial, where she is without the love of a mother to whom she is attached more than to any one else, and where she ends miserably her young years:[41]

Mein' Tochter, wu bist du gewesen?
Bei'm Schwieger un' Schwähr,
Wās brummt wie a Bär,
Mutter du liebe, du meine!

Mein Tochterl, awu hāst du dorten gesessen?
Auf a Bank,
Kēinmāl nit geramt,
Mutter du liebe, du meine!

Mein' Tochter, awu hāst du dorten geschlāfen?
Auf der Erd,
Kēinmāl nit gekehrt, etc.

Tochterulu, wās hāt män dir gegeben zu Koppen?
A Säckele Hēu,
In Harzen is' wēh, etc.

Tochterulu, in wās hāt män dir geführt?
In kowanem Wāgen,
Mit Eisen beschlāgen, etc.

Tochterl, über wās hāt män dir geführt?
Über a Brück',
Kēinmāl nit zurück, etc.

Tochterulu, mit wās hāt män dir geführt?
Mit a Ferd,
Jung in der Erd',
Mutter du liebe, du meine!

My daughter, where have you been?—At mother-in-law's and father-in-law's, who growls like a bear, mother dear, mother mine!—My daughter, where did you sit there?—Upon a bench never cleaned, mother dear, mother mine!—My daughter, where did you sleep there?—Upon the ground, never swept, etc.—Daughter dear, what did they lay under your head?—A bag of hay, in my heart there is a pain, etc.—Daughter dear, in what did they drive you?—In a wagon covered with iron bands, etc.—Daughter dear, over what did they lead you?—Over a bridge, never back, etc.—Daughter dear, with what did they drive you?—With a horse, young into the earth, mother dear, mother mine!

Equally pathetic are the songs that sing of widowhood. This is a far more common occurrence among Jews than among other people and causes much greater inconveniences to the helpless woman. It is caused either by the natural occurrences of death or by self-assumed exile to escape military service which is naturally not to the tastes of the Jew, as we shall see later, or frequently by ruthless abandonment. This latter case is the result of early marriages in which the contracting parties are not considered as to their tastes; often the young man finds awakening in himself an inclination for higher, Gentile, culture, but he finds his path impeded by the ties of family and the gross interests of his consort. If he can, he gets a divorce from her, but more frequently he leaves her without further ado, escaping to Germany or America to pursue his studies. His wife is made an Agune, a grass-widow, who, according to the Mosaic law, may not marry again until his death has been duly certified to:

Auf'n Barg stēht a Täubele,
Sie thut mit ihr Pāar brummen,
Ich hāb' geha't a guten Freund
Un' kann zu ihm nit kummen.

Bächen Trähren thuen sich
Vun meine Äugen rinnen,
Ich bin geblieben wie a Spändele
Auf dem Wasser schwimmen.

Gār die Welt is auf mir gefallen,
Seit ich bin geblieben allēin,
Sitz' ich doch Tāg un' Nacht
Jāmmerlich un' wēin'.

Teichen Trähren thuen sich
Rinnen vun meine Äugen,
Ich soll hāben Fliegelach,
Wollt' ich zu ihm geflōgen.

Lēgt sich, Kinderlach, alle arum mir,
Euer Tate is' vun euch vertrieben.
Klēine Jessomim sent ihr doch
Un' ich bin ein Almone geblieben.

On the mountain stands a dove; she is cooing to her brood: I have had a good friend, and I cannot get to him.—Brooks of tears flow out of my eyes; I am left like a piece of wood swimming on the water.—The whole world has fallen upon me since I am left alone; I sit day and night and weep bitterly.—Rivers of tears pour forth from my eyes. If I had wings I should fly to him.—Lie down, children, all around me! Your father has been taken away from you: You are now young orphans, and I am left a widow.

As sad as the widow's is the lot of the orphan. Fatherless and motherless, he seems to be in everybody's way, and no matter what he does, he is not appreciated by those he comes in contact with. There are many songs of the dying mother who finds her last moments embittered by the thought that her children will suffer privations and oppression from their stepmother and from other unkind people. There are also beggar's songs which tell that the singers were driven to beggary through loss of parents. The following verses, touching in their simplicity, recite the sad plight of an orphan:

Wasser schaumt, Wasser schaumt,
Thut män ganz weit hören,—
Wenn es starbt der Vāter-Mutter,
Giesst der Jossem mit Trähren.

Der Jossem gēht, der Jossem gēht,
Der Jossem thut gār umsüst,—
Leut' schatzen, Leut' sāgen,
As der Jossem täug' gār nischt

Der Jossem gēht, der Jossem gēht,
Un' in Zar un' in Pein,—
Leut' schatzen, Leut' sāgen,
As der Jossem is' schicker vun Wein.

Bei meine Freund', bei meine Freund'
Wachst Weiz un' Körner,—
Bei mir Jossem, bei mir Jossem
Wachst doch Grās un' Dörner.

Gottunju, Gottunju,
Gottunju du mein,
Wās hāst du mich nit beschaffen
Mit dem Masel wie meine Freund?

Water foams, water foams, one can hear afar. When father and mother die the orphan sheds tears.—The orphan goes, the orphan goes, the orphan does all in vain. People judge, people say that the orphan is good for nothing.—The orphan goes, the orphan goes, in pain and in sorrow. People judge, people say that the orphan is drunk with wine.—With my friends, with my friends there grows wheat and grain. With me, orphan, with me, orphan, there grow but grass and thorns.—Dear God, dear God, dear God of mine! Why have you not created me with the same luck as my friends have?

The tender feelings of love, replete with sorrows and despair, are left almost entirely to women; men are too busy to sing of love, or less romantic in their natures. But they are not entirely devoid of the poetic sentiment, and they join the weaker sex in rhythmic utterance, whenever they are stirred to it by unusual incidents that break in on their favorite attitude of contemplation and peaceful occupations. Such are military service, the pogroms, or mob violence, and riots periodically instituted against the Jewish population, expatriation, and the awful days of Atonement. On these occasions they rise to all the height of feeling that we have found in the other productions, and the expression of their attachment to their parents, wives, and children is just as tender and pathetic. The Russian Jew is naturally averse to the profession of war. He is not at all a coward, as was demonstrated in the Russo-Turkish War, in which he performed many a deed of bravery; but what can be his interest to fight for a country which hardly recognizes him as a citizen and in which he cannot rise above the lowest ranks in civil offices or in the army, although he is called to shed his blood on an equal footing with his Christian or Tartar fellow-soldier? Before the reign of Nicholas he was regarded beyond the pale of the country's attention and below contempt as a warrior; he was expected to pay toward the support of the country, but was not allowed to be its defender in times of war. He easily acquiesced in this state of affairs, and learned to regard the payment of taxes as a necessary evil and the exemption from enlistment as a privilege. Things all of a sudden changed with the ukase of Emperor Nicholas, by which not only military service was imposed on all the Jews of the realm, but the most atrocious regime was inaugurated to seize the persons who might elude the vigilance of the authorities. A whole regiment of Chapers, or catchers, were busy searching out the whereabouts of men of military age, tearing violently men from wives, fathers from infant children, minors from their parents. The terror was still increased by the order of 'cantonment,' by which young children of tender age were stolen from their mothers to be sent into distant provinces to be farmed out to peasants, where it was hoped they would forget their Hebrew origin and would be easily led into the folds of the Greek-Catholic Church.[42]

This sad state of affairs is described in a long poem, a kind of a rhymed chronicle of the event; it lies at the foundation of many later lyrical expressions dealing with the aversion to military service, even at a time when it was divested of the horrors of Nicholas' regime. Under the best conditions, the time spent in the service of the Czar might have been more profitably used for the study of the Bible and commentaries to the same, is the conclusion of several of such poems:

Ich gēh' arauf auf'n Gass'
Derlangt män a Geschrēi: "A Pass, a Pass!"
A Pass, a Pass hāb' ich gethān verlieren,
Thut män mir in Prijom areinführen.
Führt män mir arein in ersten Cheeder,
Thut män mir aus mein' Mutters Kleider.
Och un' wēh is' mir nischt geschehn,
Wās ich hāb' mir nit arumgesehn!

Führt män mir arein in andern Cheeder,
Thut män mir ān soldatske Klēider.
Och un' wēh is' mir nit geschehn, etc.

Führt män mir arein in Schul' schwören,
Giesst sich vun mir Teichen Trähren.
Och un' wēh is mir nit geschehn, etc.

Ēhder zu trāgen dem Kēissers Hütel,
Besser zu lernen dem Kapitel,
Och un' wēh is' mir nit geschehn, etc.

Ēhder zu essen dem Kēissers Kasche,
Besser zu lernen Chumesch mit Rasche.
Och un' wēh is mir nit geschehn,
Wās ich hāb' mir nit arumgesehn!

I walk in the street,—they cry: "A passport, a passport!" The passport, the passport I have lost. They take me to the enlisting office. They lead me into the first room. They take off the clothes my mother made me. Woe unto me that I have not bethought myself in time!—They lead me into the second room; they put on me a soldier's uniform. Woe unto me, etc.—They lead me into the synagogue to take my oath, and rivers of tears roll down my face. Woe unto me, etc.—Rather than wear the cap of the Czar—to study a chapter of religious lore. Woe unto me, etc.—Rather than eat the Czar's buckwheat mush—to study the Bible with its commentaries. Woe unto me that I have not bethought myself in time!

Other soldier songs begin with a detailed farewell to parents, brothers, sisters, and friends, after which follows a recital of the many privations to which the Jewish soldier will be subjected; in all of these, the forced absence from wife or bride is regarded as the greatest evil.

The cup of bitterness has never been empty for the Jews that inhabit the present Russian Empire; they had been persecuted by Poland, massacred by the Cossacks, and are now exiled from the central provinces of Russia. Each massacre, each 'pogrom,' has given rise to several poems, in which God is invoked to save them from their cruel tormentors, or in which there are given graphic descriptions of the atrocities perpetrated on the unwary. Like the soldier songs, they vary in form from the chronicle in rhymes to the metrical lyric of modern times. The oldest recorded rhymed chronicle of this kind is the one that tells of the blood bath instituted in the Ukraine in the middle of last century. The simple, unadorned recital of inhumanities concocted by the fertile imagination of a Gonto, a Silo, a Maxim Zhelezniak, produces a more awful effect than any studied poem could do.[43]

It is no wonder, then, that the Jew takes a gloomy view of life, and that whenever he rises to any generalizations, he gives utterance to the blackest pessimism. One such poem depicts the vanities of human life, into which one is born as into a prison, from which one is freed at best at the Biblical age of three score and ten, to leave all the gold and silver to the surviving orphans. There is but one consolation in life, and that is, that Tōre, 'learning,' will do one as much good in the other world as it does in this. And yet, under all these distressing circumstances, the Jew finds pleasure in whole-hearted laughter. His comical ditties may be divided into two classes,—those in which he laughs at his own weaknesses, and those in which he ridicules the weaknesses of the Khassidim, the fanatical sect, among whom the Rabbis are worshipped as saints and are supposed to work miracles. This sect is very numerous in Poland and South Russia, is very ignorant, and has opposed progress longer than the Misnagdim, to which sect the other German Jews in Russia belong. As an example of the first class may serve a poem in which poverty is made light of:

Ferd' hāb' ich vun Paris:
Drei ohn' Köpp', zwēi ohn' Füss'.
Ladrizem bam, ladrizem bam.

A Rock hāb' ich vun guten Tuch,
Ich hāb' vun ihm kein Bröckel Duch.
Ladrizem, etc.

Stiewel hāb' ich vun guten Leder,
Ich hāb' vun see kein Bröckel Feder.
Ladrizem, etc.

Kinder hāb' ich a drei Tuz',
Ich hāb' vun see kein Bröckel Nutz.
Ladrizem, etc.

Jetzt hāb' ich sich arumgetracht
Un' hāb' vun see a Barg Asch' gemacht.
Ladrizem bam, ladrizem bam.

Horses I have from Paris, three without heads, and two without feet,—ladrizem bam, etc.—A coat I have of good cloth,—I have not a trace left of it.—Boots I have of good leather, not a feather's weight have I left of them.—Children I have some three dozen,—I get no good out of them.—So I fell a-thinking and made a heap of ashes of them.

The sensuality, intemperance, and profound ignorance and superstition of the Rebe, or Rabbi, of the Khassidim, and the credulity and lightheartedness of his followers, form, perhaps, the subject of the most poems in the Judeo-German language, as they also form the main subject of attack in the written literature of the last forty years.

V. PRINTED POPULAR POETRY

THE author of a recent work on the history of culture among the Galician Jews[44] has pointed out how at the end of the last century the Mendelssohnian Reform, and with it worldly education, took its course through Austria into Galicia, to appear half a century later in Russia. This quicker awakening in the South was not due to geographical position alone, but in a higher degree to political and social causes as well. The language of enlightenment was at first naturally enough a modernized form of the Hebrew, for the literary German was not easily accessible to the Jews of Galicia in the period immediately following the division of Poland. Besides, although books had been printed in Judeo-German for the use of women and 'less knowing' men, the people with higher culture, to whom alone the Mendelssohnian Reform could appeal, looked with disdain on the profane dialect of daily intercourse. When, however, the time had come to carry the new instruction to the masses, the latter had become sufficiently familiar with the German language to be able to dispense with the intermediary native Jargon.[45] Consequently little opportunity was offered here for the development of a dialect literature.

While the Jews of the newly acquired provinces were becoming more and more identified with their coreligionists of German Austria, their Russian and Polish brethren in the Russian Empire were by force of circumstances departing gradually from all but the religious union with them, and were drifting into entirely new channels. Previous to the reign of Nicholas I., their civil disabilities barred them from a closer contact in language and feeling with their Gentile fellow-citizens, while their distance from Germany excluded all intellectual relations with that country. The masses were too downtrodden and ignorant to develop out of themselves any other forms of literature than the one of ethical instruction and stories current in the previous century. In the meanwhile the Haskala, as the German school was called, had found its way into Russia through Galicia, and such men as J. B. Levinsohn, A. B. Gottlober, M. Gordon, Dr. S. Ettinger, had become its warmest advocates. They threw themselves with all the ardor of their natures upon the new doctrine, and tried to correct the neglected education of their childhood by a thorough study of German culture. It was but natural for them to pass by the opportunities offered in their country's language and to seek enlightenment abroad: the Jews were a foreign nation at home, without privileges or duties, except those of paying taxes, while from Germany, their former abiding-place, there shone forth the promise of a salvation from obscurantism and spiritual death. Henceforth the word 'German' became in Russia the synonym of 'civilized,' and a 'German' was tantamount to 'reformed' and 'apostate' with the masses, for to them culture could appear only as the opposite of their narrow Ghetto lives and gross superstition.

The inauguration of the military regime by Nicholas was in reality only meant as a first step in giving civil rights to the Jews of his realm; this reform was later followed by the establishment of Rabbinical schools at Wilna and Zhitomir, and the permission to enter the Gymnasia and other institutions of learning. The Jews were, however, slow in taking advantage of their new rights, as they had become accustomed to look with contempt and fear on Gentile culture, and as they looked with suspicion on the Danaid gifts of the government. The enlightened minority of the Haskala, anxious to lead their brethren out of their crass ignorance and stubborn opposition to the cultural efforts of the Czar, began to address them in the native dialects of their immediate surroundings and to elicit their attention almost against their will. Knowing the weakness of the Jews for tunable songs, they began to supply them with such in the popular vein, now composing one with the mere intention to amuse, now to direct them to some new truth.[46] These poems, like the dramas and prose writings by this school of writers previous to the sixties, were not written down, but passed orally or in manuscript form from town to town, from one end of Russia to the other, often changing their verses and forming the basis for new popular creations. The poet's name generally became dissociated from each particular poem; nay, in the lapse of time the authors themselves found it difficult to identify their spiritual children. An amusing incident occurred some time ago when the venerable and highly reputed poet, J. L. Gordon, had incorporated a parody of Heine's 'Two Grenadiers' among his collection of popular poems, for a plain case was made out against him by the real parodist. Gordon at once publicly apologized for his unwitting theft by explaining how he had found it in manuscript among his papers and had naturally assumed it to be his own production.[47] Another similar mistake was made by Gottlober's daughter, who named to me a dozen of current songs which she said belonged to her father, having received that information from himself, but which on close examination were all but one easily proven as belonging to other poets.[48]

Most difficult of identification are now Gottlober's poems,[49] he having never brought out himself a collective volume of his verses, although he certainly must have written a great number of them as early as the thirties when he published his comedy 'Dās Decktuch.' Those that have been printed later in the periodicals are either translations or remodellings of well-known poems in German, Russian, and Hebrew; but even they have promptly been caught by the popular ear. The one beginning 'Ich lach' sich vun euere Traten aus,' in which are depicted humorously the joys of the Jewish recluse, has been pointed out by Katzenellenbogen as a remodelling of a poem that appeared in a Vienna periodical;[50] the sources of some of the others he mentions himself, while the introductory poem in his comedy is a translation of Schiller's 'Der Jüngling am Bache.' From these facts it is probably fair to assume that most, if not all, of his other poems are borrowings from other literatures, preëminently German. This is also true of his other productions, which will be mentioned in another place. Nevertheless he deserves an honorable place among the popular poets, as his verses are written in a pure dialect of the Southern variety,—he is a native of Constantin in the Government of Volhynia,—and as they have been very widely disseminated.

No one has exercised a greater influence on the succeeding generation of bards than the Galician Wolf Ehrenkranz, better known as Welwel Zbarżer, i.e. from Zbaraż, who half a century ago delighted small audiences in Southern Russia with his large repertoire. There are still current stories among those who used to know him then, of how they would entice him to their houses and treat him to wine and more wine, of which he was inordinately fond, how when his tongue was unloosened he would pour forth improvised songs in endless succession, while some of his hearers would write them down for Ehrenkranz's filing and finishing when he returned to his sober moods. These he published later in five volumes, beginning in the year 1865 and ending in 1878. While there had previously appeared poems in Judeo-German in Russia, he did not dare to publish them in Galicia except with a Hebrew translation, and this method was even later, in the eighties, adopted by his countrymen Apotheker and Schafir. Ehrenkranz has employed every variety of folksong known to Judeo-German literature except historical and allegorical subjects. Prominent among them are the songs of reflection. Such, for example, is 'The Nightingale,' in which the bird complains of the cruelty of men who expect him to sing sweetly to them while they enslave him in a cage, but the nightingale is the poet who in spite of his aspiration to fly heavenwards must sing to the crowd's taste, in order to earn a living. In a similar way 'The Russian Tea-machine,' 'The Mirror,' 'The Theatre,' and many others serve him only as excuses to meditate on the vanity of life, the inconstancy of fortune, and so forth.

'The Gold Watch' is one of a very common type of songs of dispute that have been known to various literatures in previous times and that are used up to the present by Jewish bards. They range in length from the short folksong consisting of but one question and answer to a long series of stanzas, or they may become the subject of long discussions covering whole books. In 'The Gold Watch' the author accuses the watch of being unjust in complaining and in allowing its heart to beat so incessantly, since it enjoys the privilege of being worn by fine ladies and gentlemen, of never growing old, of being clad in gold and precious stones. Each stanza of the question ends with the words:

Wās fehlt dir, wās klapt dir dās Herz?

The watch's answer is that it must incessantly work, that it is everybody's slave, that it is thrown away as useless as soon as it stops. So, too, is man. Upon this follows what is generally known as a Zuspiel, a byplay, a song treating the contrary of the previous matter or serving as a conclusion to the same. The Zuspiel to 'The Gold Watch' is entitled ''Tis Best to Live without Worrying.' There is a series of songs in his collection which might be respectively entitled 'Memento mori' and 'Memento vivere.' Such are 'The Tombstone' and 'The Contented,' 'The Tombstone-cutter' and 'The Precentor,' 'The Cemetery,' and 'While you Live, you Must not Think of Death.' The cemetery, the gravedigger, the funeral, are themes which have a special fascination for the Jewish popular singers, who nearly all of them have written songs of the same character.

Another kind of popular poetry is that which deals with some important event, such as 'The Cholera in the Year 1866,' or noteworthy occurrence, as 'The Leipsic Fair,' which, however, like the previously mentioned poems, serves only as a background for reflections. There are also, oddly enough, a few verses of a purely lyrical nature in which praises are sung to love and the beloved object. These would be entirely out of place in a Jewish songbook of the middle of this century had they been meant solely as lyrical utterances; but they are used by Ehrenkranz only as precedents for his 'Zuspiele,' in which he makes a Khassid contrast the un-Jewish love of the reformed Jew with his own blind adoration of his miracle-working Rabbi. These latter, and the large number of Khassid songs scattered through the five volumes, form a class for themselves. The lightheartedness, ignorance, superstitions, and intemperance of these fanatics form the butt of ridicule of all who have written in Judeo-German in the last fifty years, but no one has so masterfully handled the subject as Ehrenkranz, for he has treated it so deftly by putting the songs in the mouth of a Khassid that half the time one is not quite sure but that he is in earnest and the poems are meant as glorifications of Khassidic blissfulness. It is only when one reads the fine humor displayed in 'The Rabbi on the Ocean' that one is inclined to believe that the extravagant miracles performed by the Rabbi were ascribed to him in jest only. Owing to this quality of light raillery, the songs have delighted not only the scoffers, but it is not at all unusual to hear them recited by Khassidim themselves.

Ehrenkranz also has some songs in which are described the sorrows of various occupations,—a kind of poetry more specially cultivated by Berel Broder. Of the latter little is known except that he composed his songs probably at a time anterior to those just mentioned, that he had lived at Brody, hence his name, and that he had never published them. They were collected by some one after his death and published several times; however, it is likely that several of them are of other authorship, as is certainly the case with 'The Wanderer,' which belongs to Ehrenkranz. As has been said above, he prefers to dwell on the many troubles that beset the various occupations of his countrymen, of the shepherd, the gravedigger, the wagon-driver, the school teacher, the go-between, the usurer, the precentor, the smuggler. They are all arranged according to the same scheme, and begin with such lines as: 'I, poor shepherd,' 'I, lame beadle,' 'I, miserable driver,' 'I, wretched school teacher,' and so forth. The best of these, and one of the most popular of the kind, is probably the 'Song of the Gravedigger.' Of the two songs of dispute, 'Day and Night' and 'Shoemaker and Tailor,' the first is remarkable in that each praises the other, instead of the more common discussions in which the contending parties try to outrival one another in the display of their virtues.

The style of these two Galicians and their very subject-matter were soon appropriated by a very large class of folksingers in Russia who amuse guests at wedding feasts. Before passing over to the writers in Russia we shall mention the two other Galicians who, writing at a later time, have remained unknown beyond their own country, but one of whom at least deserves to be known to a larger circle of readers. The one, David Apotheker, in his collection 'Die Leier,' pursues just such aims as his Polish or Russian fellow-bards and is entirely without any local coloring. The poems are written in a pure dialect, without any admixture of German words, but their poetic value is small, as they are much too didactic. Of far higher importance and literary worth are the productions of his contemporary, Bajrach Benedikt Schafir. Being well versed in German and Polish literature, he generally imitates the form of the best poems in those languages and often paraphrases them for his humble audiences. His language is now almost the literary German, now his native dialect, according as he sings of high matters or in the lighter vein. In the introduction to one of his earlier pamphlets written in a pure German, he says that in Germanizing his native dialect it has been his purpose so to purify the Jargon that it should become intelligible even to German Jews. The most of his songs were collected in 'Melodies from the Country near the River San.' These he divided into four parts: Jewish national songs, songs of commemoration, songs of feeling, and comical songs,—the first three, with an elegy on the death of Moses Montefiore, forming the first part, the comical songs the second part, of the collection.

The most of the comical songs are in the form of dialogues in which a German, i.e. a Jew of the reformed church, discusses with a Khassid the advantage of education; in others he describes the ignorance of the latter. Many of them do not rise above the character of theatre couplets, but in the lyrical part the tone is better, and in some of his songs he rivals the best folksingers of Russia. His 'Midnight Prayer' and 'Greeting to Zion' are touching expressions of longing for the ancient home, just as 'Przemysl, You my Dear Cradle,' and 'Homesickness,' are full of yearning for his native country. Of the four songs of commemoration, two deal on the famous accusation, in 1883, of the use of Gentile blood by the Jews in the Passover ceremony, one describes the fire in the Vienna Ring theatre, while another narrates a similar catastrophe in the town of Sheniava.

As early as 1863[51] there was printed in Kiev a volume of songs under the name of 'The Evil-tongued Wedding-jester,' by Izchak Joel Linetzki. Before me lies a somewhat later edition of the book: it is published in a form of rare attractiveness for those days and bears on the title-page a picture of two men, one in European dress, the other in the garments of a Khassid, in the attitude of discussion. This illustration has appeared on all the subsequent editions of the same work; it expresses the author's purpose, which becomes even more patent in his prose works, to instruct the Khassidim in the advantages of culture, however, the few poems in the book devoted to this differ from the usual unconditional praise of reform, in that they point out that the servile imitator of the Gentiles is no better than the stubborn advocate of the old regime. Two of the poems are versified versions of the Psalms, and there are also the usual songs of reflection, and a song of dispute between the mirror and the clock. Two of the poems sing of the joys of May, presenting the rare example of pure lyrics at that early time. These alone will hold a comparison with the best of Ehrenkranz's songs; the others are somewhat weak in diction and loose in execution.

Few poets have been so popular in Russia as Michel Gordon and S. Berenstein were in the past generation, the first singing in the Lithuanian variety of the language, the second in a southern dialect. Both published their collections in Zhitomir in 1869, and Gordon wrote an introductory poem for the book of his friend Berenstein. In this he indicates the marked contrast that exists in the productions of the two. While the first writes to chide superstition and ignorance, the other sings out of pity for his suffering race; while the one sounds the battle-cry of progress, the other consoles his brothers in their misery; the one, fearing prosecution from the fanatic Khassidim whom he attacks, sent his poems out into the world anonymously, the other signed his name to them. And yet, however unlike in form and content, they were both pervaded by a warm love for their people whom they were trying to succor, each one in his own way.

Gordon's[52] poems are of a militant order:[53] he is not satisfied with indicating the right road to culture, he also sounds the battle-cry of advance. The keynote is struck in his famous 'Arise, my People!' 'Arise, my people, you have slept long enough! Arise, and open your eyes! Why has such a misfortune befallen you alone, that you are asleep until the midday hour? The sun has now long been out upon the world; he has put all men upon their feet, but you alone lie crouching and bent and keep your eyes tightly closed.' In this poem he preaches to his race that they should assimilate themselves in manners and culture to the ruling people, that they should abandon their old-fashioned garments and distinguishing characteristics of long beard and forelock, and that they should exchange even the language in which he sings to them for the literary language of the country.

Assimilation was the cry of all the earnest men among the Russian Jews before the eighties, when the course of events put a damper on the sanguine expectations from such a procedure. Many of his other poems are of a humorous nature and have been enormously popular. In 'The Beard,' a woman laments the loss of that hirsute appendage of her husband, who, by shaving it off, had come to look like a despised 'German.' 'The Turnip Soup' and 'I Cannot Understand' are excellent pictures of the ignorance and superstitious awe of the Khassidim before their equally ignorant and hypocritical Rabbis; other poems deal with the stupidity of the teachers of children, and the undue use of spirituous drinks on all occasions of life.

Two of his earliest poems are devoted to decrying the evil custom of early marriages, in which the tastes of the contracting parties are not at all considered. In the one entitled 'From the Marriage Baldachin,' he paints in vivid colors the course of the married life of a Jew from the wedding feast through the worries of an ever-increasing family, and the helplessness of the father to provide for his children, with the consequent breaking up of the family ties. The catching tune to which the poem is sung, and all folksongs are naturally set to music, generally by the authors themselves, and the lifelike picture which it portrays, have done a great deal to diminish the practice; while the other, 'My Advice,' addressed to a girl, advising her to exercise her own free will and reasonable choice of her life's companion, has helped to eliminate misery and to introduce the element of love in the marital stage.

In his advocacy of reform, Gordon had in mind the clearing of the Jewish religion from the accumulated superstitions of the ages which had almost stifled its virgin simplicity, not an abandonment of any of its fundamental principles in the ardent desire for assimilation. True culture is, according to him, compatible with true piety, and a surface culture, with its accompanying slackness of religious life, is reprehensible. When he saw that so many had misunderstood the precepts of those who taught a closer union with the Gentiles in that they adopted the mere appearances of the foreign civilization and overthrew the essential virtues of their own faith, he expressed his indignation in 'The True Education and the False Education,' of which the final stanza is:

True culture makes good and mild,
False culture makes bad and wild.
The truly-cultured is a fine man,
The falsely-cultured is a charlatan.

Gordon has also written a ballad, 'The Stepmother,' which has given rise to a large number of popular imitations. In this he tells of a mother whose rest in the grave is disturbed by the tears of her child. Upon learning that the child has been maltreated by his stepmother, she sends up her voice to God, interceding in her son's behalf, and then addresses herself to her weeping child, assuring him that God has heard her prayer.

Berenstein was no less cultured a man than Gordon. His acquaintance with German literature is evidenced by his motto from Körner, an occasional quotation from Schiller, and his several epigrams which he frankly acknowledges as translations or adaptations of German originals. Thus it happens that Schiller's 'Hoffnung' has been popularized among the Russian Jews in the form of a stanza of a long poem, 'The False Hope.' Except for these literary allusions, Berenstein wrote in the true popular vein. His 'The Cradle,' in which he makes use of the well-known verses, 'Hinter Jankeles Wiegele,' has become as universal as the oral cradle song. Its last stanza enjoins the child to sleep well in order to gather strength for the sufferings of the next day, and this pessimistic view of life becomes ever after the prevailing tone in the many cradle songs that have been written by younger men.[54] 'The Sleep' is a variation on the motto from Körner's 'Tony,' which is put at the head of it: 'Der Schlummer ist ja ein Friedenhauch vom Himmel—Schlummern kann nur ein spiegelreines Herz.' 'Young Tears' is one of the very few love lyrics that appeared in print before the second half of the eighties. In 'The Bar of Soap' Gordon shows that with soap one cannot wash off the blot from his brow, the sorrow from his heart. 'The Empty Bottle' describes the loneliness of him who has lost his wealth, and with it his friends. As a 'byplay' to it follows a pretty lyric, 'Consolation.' A 'byplay' bearing the same name follows an elegy upon the death of an only son. Several of the poems are devoted to the praise of the Sabbath, and only two are given to sarcastic attacks on the Khassidim. In the latter, the words are put in the mouth of a Khassid, who prays to God that he may send again darkness instead of the victorious light in order that his kind may the more securely shear their sheep.

Another very popular poet of the sixties was Abraham Goldfaden,[55] who, in 1876, became the founder of the Jewish theatre. His literary activity may be roughly divided into the period before, and the period after, the establishment of the theatre. The first only is the subject of our present discussion. Like the other two, he published his works in Zhitomir, which, on account of the Rabbinical school opened there in the forties, had come to be the rallying ground of all those who were advocating a progressive Judaism. As the title of his first collection, 'The Jew,' indicates, his poems are all devoted to strictly Jewish matters. Although he occasionally has recourse to the method of Ehrenkranz, or, foreshadowing his future career, even descends to the use of theatre couplets, yet the most of his poems have an individual character, differing from all of his predecessors. He treats with great success, and in a large variety of rhymes, the allegorical and the historical song, sometimes as separate themes, more often by combining them.

One of the best allegorical poems is the triad, 'The Aristocratic Marriage.' In the first part, 'The Betrothal,' he tells us how the humble Egyptian slave, Israel, was betrothed to his aristocratic bride on Mount Sinai. God was the father who gave away the Law to his son, and Moses was the Schadchen, the go-between, the never-failing concomitant of a Jewish marriage. The second part describes a typical Jewish wedding—Israel's entrance into Jerusalem; while the third shows how Israel has misused his opportunity while living in the house of his wife's father during the years that immediately follow the marriage. He committed adultery with idolatry, and God drove him out of his home, but out of regard for his pious ancestry He allowed him to take his wife along with him on his wanderings, and promised him that after ages of repentance He would send him the Messiah to restore him to his former home.

A similar triad, but of a historical nature, is his well-known 'That Little Trace of a Jew,' in which he successively portrays the virtues, the sufferings, and the vices of his race. The last part is identical in sentiment with Gordon's 'Arise, my People,' and inculcates tolerance for the various religious parties of the Jews and love of worldly learning. 'The Firebrand' relates the destruction of the Temple; 'Rebecca's Death' gives a Talmudical version of the event; and 'Cain' tells of his wanderings over the face of the earth after his killing of his brother, and his vain search of death. The latter is the most popular of his Biblical songs. Among the other poems, many of which are of sterling worth, there must be mentioned his lullaby, whose widespread dissemination is only second to Berenstein's cradle song.

The poems which Goldfaden has written during his lifetime would fill several large volumes; they can be found scattered through various periodicals which have appeared in the last thirty years, and in the greater part of the dramas which he has composed for the stage which he has created. Most of these are mere street ballads, but there are some of a serious nature; of these mention will be made in the chapter on the theatre. To the best productions of his first, the most original period of his poetical activity, belong the poems touching women, contained in the volume entitled 'The Jewess.' From the contents we learn that one of them is a translation from Béranger, the other from the Russian. It is also characteristic of the history of Jewish folk-music that one of the songs, as we are informed in the same place, is to be sung to the tune of a well-known Russian lullaby, the other with a Little-Russian melody, while for a third, is mentioned one of M. Gordon's songs.

All the above-mentioned poets belong to what might be termed the German school. These men were more or less intimately acquainted with German literature, and frequently borrowed their subject-matter from that source. They all were active at a time when the conflict between the old religious life of the Russian Jews and the modern tendencies was at the highest. They looked for a solution in the reform which, since the days of Mendelssohn, has become the watchword of progress in Germany. They hoped finally to substitute even the German language for the Judeo-German, which they regarded as a corrupted form of German, and, therefore, named Jargon, an appellation that has stuck to it ever since. In the meanwhile, the better classes were receiving their instruction in Russian schools that alienated them alike from the German influence and from a closer contact with their humble coreligionists. Even such men as had begun in the forties and fifties as folk-poets, were abandoning their homely dialect for the literary language of the country. Jehuda Loeb Gordon, the Hebrew scholar and poet, had given promise of becoming the greatest of popular singers. Yet, in the seventies, he wrote only in Hebrew and Russian, and it was only in the eighties, when the riots and expatriations of the Jews had destroyed all hopes that had been placed in assimilation, that he returned to compose songs for the consolation of his humble and unfortunate brothers.[56] J. L. Gordon has written but few Judeo-German poems, and, of these, not more than nine or ten are folksongs; but they represent the highest perfection of the older school of the popular bards. He has not been surpassed by any of them in simplicity of diction, warmth of feeling, and purity of language. Two of his oldest poems, 'A Mother's Parting,' and 'A Story of Long-Ago,' relate, the first, the hardships of a Jewish soldier in the forties; the second, the horrors of the regime of Chapers, the dishonesty and inhumanity of the Kahal, the representative body of the Jewish community. The newer poems are all of a humoristic nature, except the one devoted to the praise of 'The Law Written on Parchment' that has been the consolation of the Jews during their many wanderings and persecutions.

Parallel with the German school, now overlapping its territory, now pursuing its own course, ran the class of poetry that had for its authors the Badchens or Marschaliks[57]—the wedding jesters. In medieval times the jester's function was to amuse the guests at the wedding, while the more serious discourses were delivered by the Rabbi and the bridegroom. In Russia he had come to usurp all these functions. He improvised verses upon the various stages of the marriage ceremony, delivered the solemn discourses to bridegroom and bride, and furnished the wit during the banquet. His improvisations were replete with Biblical and Talmudical allusions, and cabbalistic combinations of the Hebrew letters of the names of the married couple. His verses were mere rhyming lines, without form or rhythm, and his jests were often of a low order and even coarse. The name of 'badchen' came to be the byname of a coarse, uncultured jester. A change for the better was made in the second half of the fifties by Eliokum Zunser,[58] then but in his teens, who had conceived the idea of making the badchen a singer of songs, rather than a merry person. He was, no doubt, led to make this innovation through the many new folksongs, by Gordon, Ehrenkranz, and Berel Broder, that were then current among the people, and that were received with so much acclamation, both on account of their pleasing contents and the excellent tunes to which they had been set. In 1861, he published eight of his songs which he had been singing at weddings. One of these, at least, 'The Watch,' is merely a differently versified form of Ehrenkranz's 'The Gold Watch,' which must have reached him in its oral form, as it was printed only in 1865. Zunser possessed an excellent voice, and had received a good musical training, and his songs and tunes spread with astonishing rapidity throughout the whole length and breadth of Russia, wherever Jews lived, and became also popular in Galicia and Roumania. This innovation came to stay, and, within a short time, the host of badchens throughout the country began to sing songs at wedding feasts. Whoever could, composed songs of his own; whoever was not gifted with the power of versification, sang the songs of others. These badchens were the most potent factors in the dissemination of the songs of the above-mentioned poets, long before they were accessible in a printed form.

Since it was the badchen's business to amuse, it was natural for Zunser to adopt the manner of Ehrenkranz and Berel Broder, rather than that of his countrymen, Gordon and Goldfaden. But to the Russian Jew, that is amusing which gives him food for reflection, and nature and its manifestations are interesting to him only in so far as they interpret man in all his aspects of life and vicissitudes of fortune. It is this facile power of dissolving external facts in the alembic of his introspective imagination, that has brought Zunser so near to the people, and that has made him so popular. He does not possess the poetical instincts of his contemporaries, Gordon and Ehrenkranz; and many of his poems are mere plagiarisms from other singers. Yet they have become better known in the form in which he has sung them than in their original verses.

All the characteristics of the poets whom he imitates are repeated in Zunser: we have the dispute in 'The Countryman and the Townsman,' 'The Old World and the New,' 'Song of Summer and Winter.' The best of his songs of reflection is 'The Flower,' in which the Jew is compared with a neglected flower; other poems of the same category are 'The Railroad,' 'The Ferry,' 'The Iron Safe,' 'The Clock,' 'The Bird.' There are also songs in which he scourges the hypocrite, the usurer, the inordinate love of innovations and fashion, and some give good pictures of various incidents in the life of a Russian Jew.

Zunser has had many imitators, and their name is legion; few of them have been so versatile or have become so popular as he. They delight in their vocation of badchen, and take pains to mention their profession on the title-pages of the pamphlets which they publish, and frequently they try to make their publications more attractive by giving them the title of 'The Lame Marschalik,' 'The Marschalik with One Eye,' and so forth. Many of the improvisations of the badchen never see daylight, but pass in manuscript form to their brothers in the profession. Although, in the eighties, there has arisen a new class of singers who sing in the manner of the poets of the literary languages, yet the badchens still recite in the old style, frequently, however, reflecting the new conditions of life in their poems. A strange departure has taken place in the badchen's profession in America, where, under more favorable conditions of existence and increased well being, there has come to be a greater demand for amusement; the wedding day is no longer the one day of joy, but the 'jester' is now invited to entertain companies at any and all pleasurable meetings. He is now no longer required to create new poems, but to sing well the current couplets of the day.

VI. OTHER ASPECTS OF POETRY BEFORE THE EIGHTIES

THE popular poem, i.e. the tunable song, had only two purposes, to amuse and to prepare a way for the Reform. But these did not exhaust all the possibilities of poetic compositions and, in fact, were not the only ones to task the powers of the Judeo-German versifiers. An opportunity for more extended themes was given the badchens in their songs of contemplation, in which the moralizing tendency needed only to be developed at the expense of the allegory, in order to change the song into a rhymed sermon. Nor was the public unprepared for serious matters, for the greater part of all Judeo-German literature had been merely treatises of an ethical character in which the element of sadness caused by centuries of suffering predominated. The perfection of art is to the mind of a Jew its ability to move to tears. It is expected of the violinist that he shall play the saddest tunes in the minor key, such as will make his hearers weep like 'beavers'; the precentor's reputation depends on his powers to crush his audience, to call forth contrition of spirit, to make the hearts bleed; and the author who can make his reader dissolve in tears, no matter how absurd the story, is sure to become popular with a Jewish public. We have seen how the badchen at the marriage ceremony bade the bride to weep, and it has also been mentioned that he delivered the more serious discourses upon that occasion. It was then that he would spin out hundreds of stanzas upon such subjects as 'The Unhappy Man,' 'Pity,' 'Dialogue of the New-born Soul with the Angel of Life,' 'Sorrow,' and the like.

In the meanwhile, the old rhymed moral treatises continued in force and gave rise to compositions of a more regular structure. Two authors must here be specially mentioned, S. Sobel and Elieser Zwi Zweifel. The first published, in 1874, a book under the title of 'Destiny, or Discussions for Pleasant Pastime,' in which he makes use of the popular method of disputes between various objects in order to inculcate a series of moral truths. He excels in the use of a vigorous, idiomatic language, while Zweifel has shown what strength there lies in the employment of the simplest words for a similar kind of literature. Zweifel's[59] older productions, only two in number, are, one, a translation from the Hebrew, the other probably an imitation of a foreign model. The first contains a series of aphorisms, while the other teaches the wisdom of life in the testament of a dying father. These verses, like his prose works, belong among the most cherished writings of the Russian Jews and have been reprinted in a large number of editions. After his death another one of his poems was published which differs from its predecessors in that it is somewhat more elaborate and is entirely original.

Considering the love of verse on the one hand and the great demand on the other for a Judeo-German prayer-book for women, which has never ceased to be a necessity, the book-firm Eisenstadt and Schapiro had the happy idea to ask the then famous author Abramowitsch[60] to make a trial translation of a part of the Psalms in verse. This appeared to them so successful that they had him proceed with the Sabbath-prayers and the hymns, which were then printed in 1875 at Zhitomir. By the machinations of the great firm of Romm, in Wilna, who were afraid that such an excellent translation might seriously interfere with their sale of their old, stereotyped form of the prayer-book, Abramowitsch was made to desist from finishing the meritorious task that he had begun, and even the two books printed were for a long time kept out of circulation. The Sabbath-prayers he gave not merely in a versified form, but the most prosaic passages, by slight additions and remodellings, he so changed that they resemble the songs in a Gentile hymn-book. Still greater has been the work that he had to perform in making poetry out of the laconic hymns, for that could be accomplished only by amplifying them to ten and twenty times their original size. For this purpose he has availed himself of the current commentaries to the hymns, and this he has done in such a way that the hymns, in their original form, occur as conclusions to the poems. Except for a certain monotony of the masculine rhymes which are employed in them, they are masterpieces of religious poetry, and it is only a pity that the author has not published yet a translation of the Psalms, which certainly lend themselves more easily to poetic diction.

While these sacred poems were being printed in Zhitomir, there appeared in Warsaw another poetical production by the same author, in its way the most remarkable work in the whole range of Judeo-German literature. It bears the title of 'Judel, a Poem in Rhymes,' and in about four thousand verses tells the unfortunate course of the life of Judel,—the Jew. When examining it closely, one discovers that, like Goldfaden's 'The Aristocratic Marriage,' it is an allegorical story of the historical vicissitudes in the development of Judaism and of the sufferings of the Jew through the centuries. Not only is the story told unobtrusively, so that one does not at all suspect the allegory, but the wonderment increases when upon a second and third perusal one becomes aware of the wealth of Biblical allusions upon which alone the whole plot is based. The future commentator of this classic will, when it shall be fully appreciated, find his task made much easier by the many references to Biblical passages which Abramowitsch has himself made in footnotes. The value of this gem is still more enhanced by the refined language used in it,—a characteristic of all of Abramowitsch's works.

Ten years later Goldfaden returned to the allegory of his 'Aristocratic Marriage,' completing it, after the example of Abramowitsch, in a poem of about six hundred lines, entitled 'Schabssiel, a Poem in Ten Chapters (Thoughts after the Riots in Russia).' The master's influence on this poem is not to be mistaken, for it serves as a pendant to the previous work; it is as it were a continuation of it. Abramowitsch's poem ends with the futile attempt of Mephistopheles to tempt Judel to a course of vice, when he discovers Judel's wife, i.e. the Law, faithfully by his side. In Schabssiel, the sufferings of the Jew are ascribed to his having departed from the Law, to his having desecrated the Sabbath. Though somewhat fantastic in its plot, and far from reaching his predecessor's philosophic grasp of the Jew's history, his work is full of fine passages and may be counted among the best of his productions. At about the same time, another young writer, M. Lew, made use of the form of 'Judel' in a poem whose title 'Hudel' seems to indicate its obligation to the prototype. There is in this even less of a philosophical background than in the verses just mentioned, and by its subject-matter it clearly belongs to the following period, for it describes not a purely Jewish theme, but one of a more general character, namely the fall of an orphan who is left to shift for herself in the world. It is, however, given in this place as being, at least in outward form, a direct descendant of Abramowitsch's 'Judel.' While not of the highest poetic value, it is written in a good style and gives promise of better things should the author choose to proceed in his poetic career. Mention must here also be made of a versified story, 'Lemech, the Miracle Worker,' by M. Epstein, to which we shall return later.

Like the allegory, the fable has been a favorite subject of imitation among the writers from the beginning of this century. We possess such, partly translations or adaptations, partly original, from Suchostawer, Dr. Ettinger, Gottlober, Reichersohn, Katzenellenbogen. Of Suchostawer's, only one, a translation of one of Krylov's fables, 'The Cat and the Mice,'[61] has come down to us. It was written in 1829, and, like the fables by Ettinger, circulated in the thirties and forties, is far superior to any translation from Krylov that has appeared before 1880. The most original production is that by Gottlober called 'The Parliament,' a poem of more than one thousand lines, in which he gives an explanation why the lion had been chosen king of all the animals. While some of the matter contained in it is unquestionably borrowed from other sources, yet the whole is moulded in so novel a form, with such a pronounced Jewish setting and biting wit, that it occupies a place by itself in the history of fables. After the candidacy of all the beasts, from the donkey to the wolf, had been rejected as incompatible with the highest security of the rest, the lion appears on the scene, and by his majestic presence at once silences the contending parties; and he is at once and unanimously chosen to his high post. "He rules in fairness, does no wrong, not a sigh is heaved by any of the animals against him; the forest is ruled as of yore: the weak lie still, the strong go free, the great are great, the humble are humble: well to him who has sharp teeth! It has been so of old, and you cannot change the course of things. But no one need complain of the lion as long as he feels no hunger in his stomach, for then he is all peace and rest,—God grant there be many such!"

The whole of Krylov was translated into Judeo-German, though with but moderate success, in 1879 by Zwi Hirsch Reichersohn, and more weakly still in 1890 by Israel Singer. Two of the fables have been admirably rendered by Katzenellenbogen, who has also produced a number of excellent poems in the popular style which surpass those of Goldfaden in regularity of structure. He has also translated a few poems from the Russian and Hebrew, all with the same degree of care displayed in the renderings from Krylov. His songs have not been disseminated among the people, the most of them not having been published until quite lately.

The most unique person in Judeo-German literature of the first half of this century is Dr. Ettinger.[62] All that is known about him is given in the scanty literary recollections by Gottlober. He there says that Dr. Ettinger had studied medicine at Lemberg, where he became acquainted with the Judeo-German writings of Mendel Lefin, who is regarded as the first man of modern times to use the dialect of everyday life for literary purposes. He then settled in Zamoszcz, which had been a seat of Hebrew learning of the Haskala. Being prohibited to practise medicine with his foreign diploma, he became a colonist in the newly formed Jewish colonies of the South, but not being successful there, he finally settled in Odessa. This is all that is given of his biography. It is further known that he wrote his comedy 'Serkele' in the twenties and that he composed a large number of poems, a few of which were published in the Kol-mewasser in the sixties, a few in the Volksblatt in the eighties. In 1889 his family issued a volume of his poetical works which forms the basis of our discussion. In this book are contained sixty fables, a number of poems of various character, and epigrams. About one-half of the collection consists of translations from the German; among these are fables and epigrams by Lessing, ballads and poems by Schiller, Blumauer, and others. The other half is made up of original compositions. All are of equal excellence both as to the language used in them and the more mechanical structure of the verses.

In all these poems there is nothing specifically Jewish except the language, and they might as well have been written in any other language without losing the least part of their significance. Dr. Ettinger is thus an exceptional phenomenon among his confreres, but exceptional only in appearance, as the cause for it is not far to seek. From the few data of his life we have learned that he received his training in the beginning of this century in Galicia, where at that time the influence of the Mendelssohnian school was most potent. He brought with him to Russia not only a love for enlightenment, but also what then was a necessary concomitant of that culture, a love for German learning; hence his exclusive imitation of German originals. At first the privileges of Western education were not only enjoyed by a small number of learned men, but there was no attempt made at introducing them to the masses at large, for that would have been a hazardous occupation for those who entered in an unequal combat with the superstitious people. It was only after J. B. Levinsohn had pointed out in his Hebrew works the desirability of educating them, and after he had undertaken to do so single-handed, that the other writers, late in the thirties and in the forties, began to approach the masses in the least offensive manner, by means of the folksong. Dr. Ettinger's activity, however, fell in the period preceding the militant energy of the Haskala. If he wished at all to write in Judeo-German, he could appear only as the interpreter of German culture to a public imbued with a love for it. What in the beginning was only a pastime of his leisure hours, soon became a passion to try his ingenuity, and he proceeded in writing original poems, and continued that practice even at a time when the main purpose of Judeo-German literature was to educate the people.

Judeo-German poetry has developed in Russia in precisely the opposite direction from the one generally taken by that branch of literature among other nations. Whereas the usual course would have been to pass from the simple utterings of the folksong to more and more elaborate forms, the process among the Jews in Russia has been inverted. The first poetical expressions were those of Dr. Ettinger, who may be regarded as a dialectic continuator of Schiller and Lessing. After that followed the school of popular poets of the Gordons, Goldfaden, Linetzki, Ehrenkranz, Berel Broder. In the seventies a few traces of that school are still to be found, but the majority of songs produced then smack of the badchen's art, while Goldfaden himself has deteriorated into a writer of theatre couplets. The explanation of this is found in the fact that in the sixties the efforts of the folk-singers were crowned with success. The Rabbinical schools had graduated several classes of men trained in the Reform, the Gymnasia and Universities had been thrown wide open to the Jewish youths, and in the next decade a large number of them had availed themselves of the highest advantages offered in these institutions of learning. The cloud of a stubborn ignorance had been successfully dispelled, the light shone brightly over the whole land. The bard's task was done; he had no need to spur the people on to progress, for that duty was now devolved on the large host of younger men who had tasted the privileges of a Russian education. But these had been identifying themselves with Russian thought, with Russian ideals. For them German culture had little of significance, except as it appeared in universal literature, or had affected Russian ideas. Still less were they interested in Jewish letters, whether in Hebrew, or in Judeo-German. On the contrary, they were trying hard to forget their humble beginnings. Neither for these nor by these could the Judeo-German language be employed for any literary purposes. The masses had become accustomed to look with favor on the new education, and one by one the better elements were disappearing from the narrow world of the Ghetto. There was still left a large proportion of those who could not avail themselves of the benefits offered them. They knew no other language than the homely dialect of their surroundings, and they were still thirsting for entertainment such as the folk-singers have offered to them. The older men, the champions of the Haskala, were dead, or too old to write; the younger men had other interests at heart, and thus it was left to a mediocre class of writers to supply them with poetry. This part naturally fell to the badchens. Another quarter of a century, and Judeo-German literature would have run its course; even the badchen would have been silenced. But it suddenly rose from its ashes with renewed vigor after the riots against the Jews in 1881.

VII. POETRY SINCE THE EIGHTIES IN RUSSIA

THE latest blood-bath was instituted against the Jews of Russia in 1881. In the same year there was started in St. Petersburg a weekly periodical, Jüdisches Volksblatt, by the editor of the Kol-mewasser which had gone out of existence ten years before. The purpose of the new publication was to focus all the available forces that had been dispersed in the decade preceding through the agencies that made for assimilation, and to prepare the way for a renewed activity among the people. These no longer needed to be urged on to progress, but had to be comforted in the misfortunes that had befallen them, and in the dangers that awaited them. In the first number of the new periodical there appeared the poem of J. L. Gordon on 'The Law written on Parchment,' while the second brought one by the same author, outlining his plan to sing words of encouragement to his suffering, hard-working brothers and sisters. However, very soon after all singing ceased. The year 1882 had been one of too much suffering, when even consolation is out of place. Two years later S. Rabinowitsch, who was destined by his unresting energy and good example to cause a revival of Judeo-German literature, justly exclaimed in the same weekly[63] in a poem 'To Our Poet': "Arise, thou Poet! Where have you been all this time? Send us from afar your words of wisdom! For what other pleasure have your brothers if not your sweet and consoling songs?"

While no other singers were forthcoming, Rabinowitsch composed himself a series of songs, although he was preparing himself to be a novelist. His heart was with the poetry of the Russian Nekrasov, and his native Judeo-German gave him Michel Gordon for a model. He imitated both, taking the structure from the Russian, and the manner of the folksong from Gordon. When his talent was just reaching its fullest development, he abandoned this branch of literature to devote his undivided attention to prose. Only twice afterwards he returned to the use of rhythm, once in a poem, entitled 'Progress, Civilization,' an imitation of Nekrasov's 'Who lives in Russia Happily,' and at another time in a legend in blank verse. The first has never been finished, the other appeared in a collective volume of poetry published in 1887 by M. Spektor, his friend and rival in the resuscitation of Judeo-German letters.

That volume, named 'Der Familienfreund,' was intended as an attempt to bring together all those who wrote poetry; but we find in it only names that had been known to us from the previous period: M. Gordon, Zunser, Goldfaden, Linetzki.[64] To these must be added the name of Rabinowitsch just mentioned, and of Samostschin, who had furnished a few poems to the Kol-mewasser nearly twenty years before. In the Volksblatt there were published in the meanwhile a few songs by various authors, most prominently by Moses Chaschkes. He also printed in 1889 a volume of his poems at Cracow, under the name of 'Songs from the Heart,' in which are contained a number of reflections on the riots in Russia. There are some good thoughts in them, although the technique is not always faultless. He, too, belongs to the older type of folk-singers.

The Jews had at that time furnished three names to Russian poetry: those of Nadson, Vilenkin (Minski), and Frug. Of these the first had a Christian mother and died at the early age of twenty-four, in 1886. The second had begun his poetical career in the seventies, after having received a thorough Russian education. There was only Frug left, who had not entirely broken with his Jewish traditions, for he had gone directly from the Jewish farmer colony where he had been born to St. Petersburg to engage in literary work. His first Russian poem was published in 1879. In 1885 he began to compose also in Judeo-German, continuing to do so to the present time.[65] Like many other Jewish writers he had become convinced that his duties were above all with his race, as long as it was oppressed and persecuted, and his energy was thus unfortunately split in two by writing in two languages. For the same reason such poets as Perez, Winchevsky, Rosenfeld, have taken to Judeo-German, which is understood by few and which in a few decades is doomed to extinction, except in countries of persecution. They adorn their humble literature, but they would have been an honor to other literatures as well, and from these they have been alienated.

When Frug began to write in his native dialect, he had already acquired a reputation in a literary language. He had passed the severe school of the poet's technique, had been trained in the traditions of his vocation. One could not expect that in descending to speak to his coreligionists in their own tongue, he would return to the more primitive methods of the popular bard. He simply changed the language, but nothing of his art. By this transference he only gains in reputation, although he loses in popularity, for the accusation frequently brought against him, that he confines himself to too narrow a sphere, falls to the ground when he intends that that narrow sphere alone should be his audience. Half a century had gone by since Dr. Ettinger had introduced the form and subject-matter of German poetry, and since those days no such harmony had been heard to issue from the mouth of a Jewish poet. There were no literary traditions to fall back upon, except the folksong of the preceding generation; there scarcely existed a poetical diction for Judeo-German, and a variety of dialects were striving for supremacy. What he and the people owed to Michel Gordon, he expressed in two poems entitled 'To Michel Gordon' and 'On Michel Gordon's Grave'; both collectively he named 'One of the Best.' In an allegorical series, 'Songs of the Jewish Jargon,' he sings of the history of the language which is identical with that of his downtrodden race. The prologue is a model of beautiful style. The Slavic dactyllic diminutives, grafted on German stems, the gentle cadence of words, the simplicity of the diction, remind one rather of mellifluous Italian than of a disorderly mixture which, in the poem, he compares to the bits of bread in a beggar's wallet, or which, according to another part in the same allegory, excludes the deceased Jew from heaven, as the angel at the gate cannot understand him.

There are a few poems in his collection in which he bewails the lot of a Jewish poet who has only tears for his subject, but the most deal with incidents in the life of his oppressed coreligionists, now painting pictures of their misery, their poverty, their lack of orderliness, now giving them words of consolation. He never passes the narrow frame of his people's surroundings, no matter what he sings. Even when he chooses nature of which to sing, it appears to him transformed under a heavy cloud of his own sufferings superinduced by the persecution of his brethren. The best of his poems are those entitled 'Night Songs,' in which he depicts a few night scenes. Here is the way he describes the Melamed, the teacher of children in those miserable quarters called a school: "Behold the palace, oh, how beautiful, how magnificent: ivory and velvet, silk, leather, bronze, cedar wood ... here lives a Jewish teacher.... Of velvet is his skullcap—it glistens and shines from afar; the fescue is made of ivory; his girdle is of silk; the candelabrum is of bronze; the knout is of leather; the stool, the stool is cut out of cedar wood!" One can easily see that the rest of the picture is in keeping with the glory just described. There is gloom everywhere in his songs. And how could it be otherwise? It was proper for Ettinger to smile and to jest, for he was active at the dawn of better days; it was natural for the poets of the thirties and fifties to battle against superstitions and to sound the cry of progress; for the poets of the eighties there was nothing left but tears.

It has been Frug's ambition to be a continuator of the bards who sang for the masses, to be a folk-poet, and the people look upon him as such, although he hardly appeals to them in the manner of the older bards. He is entirely too literary to be understood without previous training, and his allegory is not so easily unravelled. His greatest faults are, perhaps, an absence of dramatic qualities and a certain coldness of colors. Nevertheless, he is one of the best poets in Judeo-German literature, who may also claim recognition by a wider class of readers.

The year 1888 is momentous in the history of Judeo-German literature: it gave birth to two annuals, Die jüdische Volksbibliothēk and Der Hausfreund, around which were gathered all the best forces that could be found among the Jewish writers. The first, under the leadership of S. Rabinowitsch, started out with the purpose of clearing away all rubbish from the field of Jewish letters and to prepare it for a new, a better harvest; the second set out to serve the people with the best existing literary productions. The latter was doomed to a certain mediocrity on account of the bounds which it had placed around itself; the first, in exercising a severe criticism on the productions presented for publication, and in purifying the public taste, attracted from the start the best talent obtainable and encouraged young promising men to try themselves in Jargon letters. In the Volksbibliothēk appeared the firstling from the pen of Leon Perez, the poet and novelist, who must be counted among the greatest writers not only of Judeo-German literature, but of literature in general at the end of the nineteenth century. If he had written nothing else but 'The Sewing of the Wedding Gown,' his name would live as long as there could be found people to interpret the language in which he sings. But he has produced several large volumes of admirable works in prose and in verse.

Leon Perez, or Izchok Leibusch Perez, as he proudly prefers to be called, was born in 1855 in Zamoszcz, the city which has been the birthplace of so many famous men in Hebrew and Judeo-German letters, the home of Zederbaum and Ettinger. He obtained his education in a curious way. In his town there had lived a surgeon's assistant who, on becoming rich, had collected a library on all kinds of subjects, numbering nearly three thousand volumes. There came reverses to him, and his books were stored away pell mell in the loft. Perez somehow got hold of the key to that room, and without choice took to reading, until the whole library was swallowed up by his omnivorous appetite. He read everything he could get hold of, and he learned German through a work on physics which he had discovered in the loft. Then he passed on from science to science, all by himself. Then he studied Heine by heart, then Shelley, and then he became a mystic. This history of his education is also the history of his genius. There is reflected in it the subtleness of the Talmud, the wisdom of the ancients, the sparkle of Heine, the transcendency of Shelley, the mysticism of Hauptmann. He has treated masterfully the Talmudical legend, has composed in the style of the Romancero, and has carried allegory to the highest degree of perfection.

Perez is even less of a popular poet than Frug. He has entirely parted company with the people. Although he started with the avowed purpose of aiding his race to a better recognition of itself, yet his talents are of too high an order, where language, feelings, and thoughts soar far above the understanding of the masses. He can hardly be properly appreciated even by those who enjoy the advantages of a fair school education, not to speak of those who are merely lettered. It is only an unfortunate accident, the persecutions of the Jews, that has thrown him into so unpromising a field as that of Judeo-German letters, where to be great is to be unknown to the world at large and to be subjected to the jealous attacks of less gifted writers. He could easily gain a reputation in any other language, should he choose to try for it, but, like many of his predecessors, he is pursued by the merciless allurements of the Jewish Muse. Her enchantment is the more powerful on her devotees since she appears to them only in the garb of their own weaving. They spend so much work in creating the outer form and fashioning a poetic diction that they get fascinated by their creative labor, and stick to their undertaking, even though they have but few hearers for their utterances.

'Monisch' is the name of the ballad with which Perez made his debut ten years ago.[66] It is the old story of Satan's recovery of power over the saint by tempting him with an earthly love. But the setting of the story is all new and original. The fourth chapter, beginning with

Andersch wollt' mein Lied geklungen
'ch soll far Goim goisch singen,
Nischt far Jüden, nischt Žargon

(My song would sound quite differently, were I to sing to Gentiles in their language, not to Jews in Jargon)

is the best of all. He describes there the difficulty of singing of love in a dialect that has no words for 'love' and 'sweetheart'; nevertheless he acquits himself well of his task to tell of Monisch's infatuation, for which, of course, a saint and a Jew can only become Satan's prey. Perez has written a number of stories in verse. Some of them are mosaics of gems, in which the unity of the whole is frequently marred by a mystic cloud which it is hard to penetrate. Such, for example, is his 'He and She,'[67] a story of the Spanish inquisition, and 'Reb Jossel,'[68] the temptation of a teacher of children by his hostess, the wife of a shoemaker. The latter poem is very hard to grasp at one reading, but the details, such as the description of the teacher, his pale and ailing pupil with his endless school superstitions, the jolly shoemaker, are drawn very well. Much more comprehensible are his 'The Driver'[69] and 'Jossel Bers and Jossel Schmaies.'[70] The first is a sad picture of a Jewish town in Poland, in which the inhabitants have lost, one after the other, their means of subsistence after the railroad had connected them with Warsaw. The drivers, the merchants, the artisans who throve at their honest professions before, have become impoverished and are driven to despised occupations, only to keep body and soul together. It is a very sad picture indeed. In the other, the author tells of two boys who had been fellow-students out of the same prayer-book, but who soon separated at the parting of the roads. The one, a faithful believer in all the teacher told him, becomes a Rabbi; the other asks for facts and reasons to fortify the statements of his mentor, and subjects himself to many privations in order to acquire worldly wisdom in the gymnasium and the university. The final picture is placed in Roumania (or Russia, had the censor permitted it), where the student is driven through the streets by a mob, while the Rabbi, unconscious of the outer world, is somewhere thinking hard over the solution of a question of ritual.

The shorter poems are either translations from the Russian poet Nadson, or imitations of Heine. They are well done, though some suffer somewhat by their veiled allegory, at least at a superficial reading. The best of these are those that deal with social questions, or describe the laborer's sufferings. Preëminent among them is 'The Sewing of the Wedding Gown.'[71] If Thomas Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' is to be compared to a fine instrument, then this poem is a whole orchestra, from the sounds of which the walls of Jericho would fall. Instead of a criticism, a short review of the story will be given here. The scene is at a dressmaker's; the cast: the modiste, two dressmakers, and sewing-girls. The modiste tells of the care with which the wedding gown has to be sewed. The choir of sewing-girls sing the song of the prison. The first dressmaker speaks of the beauty of the gown, and compares the bride to an angel from heaven, whereupon the choir sings of the misery at home, of asking the 'angel' to advance a rouble on the work, of the 'angel's' cruel refusal, of the pawning of her silks for a loaf of bread, and of the girl's arrest by the 'angel.' "And the angel has taken care of me during the great frosts, and for three months has provided me with board and lodging." The second dressmaker compares the rustle of the silk to the noise made by her tired bones, speaks of the diamond buttons that will be sewed on the gown "as large as tears of the poor," and bids the wheel of the machine to drown the noise of her breaking bones. The choir sings the song of the grave, where no sewing is done, where all go down in a shroud forever. The second dressmaker continues the song, whereupon a girl, named 'Fond-of-Life,' protests, telling of her good health, of her desire to pass her youth in pleasure. The choir chides her with the Ragpicker's song, in which 'Fond-of-Life's' future is portrayed, and the conclusion to the song is given by the first dressmaker. The first dressmaker contrasts the luxury of the bride's bed with her straw bed on the floor, the bride's splendor of light in her parlor with the two candles at her head when she is dead. The modiste, oppressed by the sad songs that portray their own unhappiness, bids them sing of other people's happiness. To this the choir responds by singing the happiness of the bride, but the modiste sees in this only the girls' jealousy, whereupon the choir tells of the obedient daughter who is advised by her mother to scorn sweetness, getting the promise of a gilded nut if she behaves properly. When the nut is brought and cracked it is found to be wormy and bitter. Of course, that is a picture of a match made by the parents for their daughter. The modiste answers that happiness does not always dwell in high places; and the first dressmaker tells the story of labor, which is quite unique: There lived two brothers happily together. A stranger, who is no other than the Biblical serpent, visits them; he is clad in diamonds and costly stones, and dazzles the older brother with his splendor. He, too, would like to be rich. He follows the stranger out into the woods, and seats himself at his side to inquire of the manner of acquiring such wealth. "What a fool you are to allow your opportunities to slip by," says the serpent. "You do not know that the sweat of your brother is nothing but diamonds, the tears are brilliants, his blood pearls." The elder brother returns home, beats his younger brother to elicit blood and sweat and tears. His wealth grows, but not his happiness, for he suffers as much from fear of his hoarded riches as his brother sighs under tears. They finally fall to blows,—but here the poet purposely breaks his story, for he will not undertake to tell the end of their hostility. The choir sings the ten o'clock song, when all must go to rest: "You are rested, and at times you dream of—a loaf of bread! The clock strikes ten, the work is done,—good night, madame!" The modiste answers: "Be back early in the morning!"

This is the bare skeleton of the poem, of whose painful beauties nothing but a perusal in the original can give an adequate idea. There is the making of a great poet in one who can sing like that; but Perez has chosen, like Rabinowitsch, to devote his best energies to prose, and to this part of his activity we shall return later. Of the minor poems of this period there might be mentioned those by David Frischmann, Rosa Goldstein, M. W. Satulowski, M. M. Penkowski, W. Kaiser, Paltiel Samostschin. Frischmann has produced but a few poems, but they are all of excellent quality. His best is a ballad, 'Ophir,'[72] but he has also written some clever satires in verse. Samostschin,[73] who had begun composing in the sixties, has translated several poems, especially from the Hebrew of J. L. Gordon, and has written some clever feuilletons in rhymes. Minchas Perel has published a small collection of poems on the Fall of Jerusalem, of which the first, 'The Night of the Destruction of Jerusalem,' is a very spirited and dramatic story of the event. Another good book of poems is 'The Harp,' by G. O. Hornstein. Although some of them are in the style of the coupletists, others betray original talent that might be well developed. The best of these is the ballad, 'The Cat and the Mouse,' an allegory of Jewish persecutions, in which the Jew is represented as a mouse living on the fat of the oil candelabrum in the Temple at Jerusalem, and the Romans and other nations are represented as cats who drive the mouse out of her abiding place.

The riots of the early part of the eighties affected the whole mental attitude of the Jews of Russia by rousing them to a greater consciousness of themselves and by rallying them around distinctly Jewish standards. For hundreds of thousands life had become impossible at home, and they emigrated to various countries, but mostly to America, where, under the influence of entirely new conditions, Judeo-German literature, and with it poetry, developed in new channels.

VIII. POETRY SINCE THE EIGHTIES IN AMERICA

JUDEO-GERMAN poetry has developed in two directions in America,—downwards and upwards. Many of the poets left Russia in the beginning of the eighties, together with the involuntary emigration of the Russian Jews, to escape the political oppression at home; but once in America they came in contact with conditions not less undesirable than those they had just left; for, instead of the religious persecution to which they had been subjected there, they now began to experience the industrial oppression of the sweat-shops into which they were driven in order to earn a livelihood. At the same time, the greater political liberty which they enjoy makes it possible for them to give free utterance to their feelings and thoughts, without veiling them in the garb of a far-fetched allegory. However, they have not all suffered who have come here. Many have found on the hospitable shores of the United States opportunities to earn what to their humble demands appears as a comfortable income. With the increased well-being, there has come a stronger desire to be entertained. The wedding day, Purim, and the Feast of the Rejoicing of the Law no longer suffice as days of amusements, and Goldfaden's theatre, which had been proscribed in Russia, has found an asylum in New York. Soon one theatre was not large enough to hold the crowd that asked for admission; and three companies, playing every evening, were doing a good business. But qualitatively the theatres rapidly deteriorated to the level of dime shows. The theatre, as established by Goldfaden, has never been of an elevated character even in Europe, except as it treated the Biblical and the historical drama. Still, it reflected in a certain respect the inner life of the Ghetto. In the New World, the Jewish life of the Russian Ghetto is rapidly losing all interest, and that part of New York which in common parlance is known as the Ghetto, deserves its name only in so far as it is inhabited by former denizens of other Ghettos. There is taking place a dulling of Jewish sensibilities which will ultimately result in the absorption of the Russian Jews by the American people. This lowered Jewish consciousness finds its expression in poetry in the development of the theatre couplet in imitation of the American song of the day. As in Russia, the plays are written by a host of incompetent men, not so much for the purpose of carrying out a plot as in order to weave into them songs of which Jews have always been fond. Nearly all the plays are melodramas, in which the contents go for nothing or are too absurd to count for anything. But the couplets have survived, and are fast becoming street ballads or folksongs, according to the quality of the same. Goldfaden's songs, in which there is always a ring of the true folksong, are giving place to the worthless jingles of Marks, Hurwitz, Awramowitsch, Mogulesco, and the like, and the old national poems are being superseded by weak imitations of 'Daisy Bell,' 'Do, do, my Huckleberry, Do,' 'The Bowery Girl,' and other American ballads. Now and then a couplet of a national character may be heard in the theatres, and more rarely a really good poem occurs in these dramatic performances, but otherwise the old folksong is rapidly decaying.

I. Reingold, of Chicago, is a fruitful balladist who at times strikes a good note in his songs; but in these he generally painfully resembles certain passages in Rosenfeld's poetry, from whom he evidently gets his wording if not his inspiration. Side by side with this deteriorated literature there goes on a more encouraging folk-singing. Zunser, who now owns a printing-office in New York, continues his career as a popular bard as before, and has written some of his best poems in the New World. It is interesting to note how America affects his Muse, for he sings now of the 'Pedlar' and the 'Plough.' The latter, a praise of the farmer's life, to which he would encourage his co-religionists, has had the honor of being translated into Russian. Among his later poetry there is also one on 'Columbus and Washington,' in which, of course, both are lauded. The Stars and Stripes have been the subject of many a song by Judeo-German poets, which is significant, since not a single ode has been produced praising Russia or the Czar.

Goldfaden, too, has written some of his songs in America, and Selikowitsch has furnished two or three translations and adaptations that may be classed as folksongs. Still more encouraging is the class of poetry which has had its rise entirely in America or in England, for among these poets it has received the highest development yet attained.

The volume entitled 'Jewish Tunes,' by A. M. Sharkansky, contains a number of real gems in poetry. Sharkansky has a good ear for rhythm and word jingling, and in this he always succeeds. But he is not equally fortunate in his ideas, for he either over-loads a picture so as to bury the meaning of the poem in it, or else he does not finish his thought, leaving an impression that something ought to follow. Now and then, however, he produces a fine song. Among his best are 'Jewish Melodies,' in which he says that they must always be sad, and 'Songs of Zion,' of similar contents. 'Jossele Journeys to America,' which is a parody on Schiller's 'Hektor and Andromache,' and 'The Cemetery,' a translation of Uhland's 'Das Grab,' give evidence of a great mastery of his dialect. It is hardly possible to suspect the second poem of being a translation. Sharkansky has for some reason ceased to sing, which is to be regretted, for with a little more care in the development of his ideas he might have come to occupy an honorable place among the best Judeo-German poets.

New York is the place of refuge not only of the laboring men among the Russian Jews, but also of their cultured and professional people. These had at home belonged to liberal organizations, which in monarchical countries are of necessity extreme, either Socialistic or Anarchistic. Such advanced opinions they shared in Russia with their Gentile companions, with whom they identified themselves by their education. Their relations to the Jewish community were rather loose, for the tendency of the somewhat greater privileges which the Jews enjoyed in the sixties and the seventies had been to obliterate old lines of demarkation between Jew and Gentile. They had almost forgotten that there were any ties that united them with their race, when they were roused from their peaceful occupations, to which they had been devoting themselves, to the realization of their racial difference. They then heard for the first time that they were pariahs alike with the humblest of their brethren. The same feeling which prompted the Russian poet Frug to take up his despised Judeo-German, drove many a man into the Judeo-German literary field, who not only had never before written in that language, but who had hardly ever spoken it. In England and America such men could only hope to be understood by a Jewish public, and those who felt themselves called to write poetry wrote it in Judeo-German. But with them the language could only be the accidental vehicle of their thought, without confining them to the narrow circle of their nation's life. Their interests, like those of young Russia in general, are with humanity at large, not with the Jew in his Ghetto, and their songs would not have lost a particle of their significance had they been written in any other tongue. They suffer with the Jew, not because he is a Jew, but because, like many other oppressed people, he has a grievance, and they propose remedies for these according to their political and social convictions.

David Edelstadt was the poet of the Anarchistic party, as Morris Winchevsky represents Socialistic tendencies. The influence of both on their respective adherents has been great, but the latter has been a power for good among a wider circle of readers, within and without his party. Both show by the language which they use that it was mere accident that threw them into the ranks of Judeo-German writers, for while usually the diction of the older poets abounds in words of Hebrew origin, theirs is almost entirely free from them, so that one can read their productions with no other knowledge than that of the literary German language.

Edelstadt mastered neither his poetical subjects nor the dialect. The latter is a composition of the literary German with dialectic forms, and his rhythms are halting, his ideas one-sided. There is not a poem among the fifty that he has written that is not didactic. Many of these are in praise of Anarchists and heroes of freedom who have fallen in the unequal combat with the present conditions of society. There are poems in memory of Sophia Perovskaya, Louise Michel, John Brown, and even Albert Parsons and Louis Ling. He sings of the eleventh of November, the Fall of the Bastile, of strikes, misery, and suffering. Most of these are a call to war with society. They are neither of the extreme character that one generally ascribes to the Anarchists, nor do they sound any sincere notes. They seem to be written not because Edelstadt is a poet, but because he belongs to the Anarchistic party. In all his collection there is one only in which he directs himself especially to the Jews, and one of its stanzas is significant, as it lies at the foundation of much of Rosenfeld's poetry: it tells that they have escaped the cruel Muscovite only to be jailed in the dusky sweat-shops where they slowly bleed at the sewing-machine.

Morris Winchevsky is a poet of a much higher type. He is a man of high culture, is conversant with the literatures of Russia, France, Germany, and England, is pervaded by what is best in universal literature, follows carefully all the rules of prosody and poetic composition, and above all is master of his dialect. His Socialistic bias is pronounced, but it does not interfere with the pictures that he portrays. They are true to life, though somewhat cold in coloring. His mastery of Judeo-German, nearly all of German origin, is displayed in his fine translation of Thomas Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' and some of Victor Hugo's poems. His other songs show the same care in execution and are as perfect in form as can be produced in his dialect. Winchevsky began his poetical career in England, where he was also active as a Socialistic agitator. The small collection of his poetical works (unfortunately unfinished) contains almost entirely songs which were written there. His American poems appeared in the Emeth, which he published in Boston in 1895 and in other periodicals. Although he has tried himself in all kinds of verses, he prefers dactyllic measures, which in 'A Broom and a Sweeping' he uses most elaborately. The poems all treat on social questions and describe the misery of the lower strata of society. He speaks of the life of the orphan whose home is in the street, of the eviction of the wretched widow, of the imprisonment of the small boy for stealing a few apples, of the blind fiddler, of night-scenes on the Strand, of London at night. A large number of songs are devoted more strictly to Socialistic propaganda, while a series of forty-eight stanzas under the collective title 'How the Rich Live' is a gloomy kaleidoscope through which pass in succession the usurer, the commercial traveller, the journalist, the preacher, the cardplayer, the lawyer, the hypocrite, the old general, the speculator, the lady of the world, the gambler at races, the man enriched by arson, the dissatisfied rich man, the doctor, the Rabbi. Winchevsky has also written some excellent fables, of which 'The Rag and the Papershred' and 'The Noble Tom-Cat' are probably the best. In all those the language alone is Jewish, everything else is of a universal nature, and the freeing of society from the yoke of oppression is the burden of his songs.

The most original poet among the Russian Jews of America is Morris Rosenfeld. He was born in 1862 in a small town in the Government of Suwalk in Russian Poland. His ancestors for several generations back had been fishermen, and he himself passed many days of his childhood on the beautiful lake near his native home. He had listened eagerly to the weird folktales that his grandfather used to tell, and as a boy had himself had the reputation of a good story-teller. At home he received no other education than that which is generally allotted to Jewish boys of humble families: he studied Hebrew and the Talmud. But his father was more ambitious for his son, and when he moved to the city of Warsaw he provided him with teachers for the study of German and Polish. However, Rosenfeld did not acquire more than the mere rudiments of these languages, for very soon his struggle for existence began. He went to England to avoid military service, and there learned the tailor's trade. Thence he proceeded to Holland, where he tried himself in diamond grinding. He very soon after came to America, where for many weary years he has eked out an existence in the sweat-shops of New York. He learned in them to sing of misery and oppression. His first attempts were very weak; he felt himself called to be a poet, but he had no training of any kind, least of all in poetic diction. For models in his own language he had only the folk-singers of Russia, for Frug began his activity at the same time as he, and Perez published his 'Monisch' some years after Rosenfeld had discovered his own gifts. A regular tonic structure had not been attempted before in Judeo-German, and a self-styled critic of Judeo-German literature in New York tried to convince him that his dialect was not fit for the ordinary versification. One of his first poems, published in the Jüdisches Volksblatt in St. Petersburg, was curiously enough a greeting to the poet Frug, who had just published his first songs in Judeo-German; however warm in sentiment, it is entirely devoid of that imagery and word-painting which was soon to become the chief characteristic of Rosenfeld's poetry.

Rosenfeld has read the best German and English authors, and although he knows these languages only superficially, he has instinctively guessed the inner meaning contained in their works, and he has transfused the art of his predecessors into his own spirit without imitating them directly. One cannot help, in reading his verses, discovering his obligations to Heine, Schiller, Moore, and Shelley; but it is equally apparent that he owes nothing to them as regards the subject-matter of his poems. He is original not only in Jewish letters but in universal literature as well.

Himself in contact with the lower strata of society and yet in spirit allied to the highest; at once the subject of religious and race persecutions and of industrial oppression; tossed about among the opposition parties or Anarchists, Socialists, Populists, without allying himself with any; by education and associations a Jew, and yet not subscribing strictly to the tenets of the Mosaic Law,—he voices the ominous foreboding of the tidal wave which threatens to submerge our civilization, he utters the cry of anguish and despair that rises in different quarters and condemns the present order of things. Rosenfeld does not scoff, or scorn, or hate. He is one with the oppressor and the oppressed; if he sings more of the latter, it is only because he sees more of that side of life. He is a sensitive plate that reproduces the pictures that arise before his mental vision, and the gloom of his poems is rather that which he sees than that which he feels; for he has also written songs of spring and happiness in the few intervals when the sky has looked down unclouded on the Ghetto in which he has lived so long.

We shall confine ourselves to the small volume of his poetry, 'The Songs from the Ghetto,' even though it contains but one-tenth of all the verses that he has written. Who can read his 'Songs of Labor' without shedding tears? We enter with the poet, who is the tailor himself, the murky sweat-shop where the monotonous click of the sewing-machine, which kills thought and feeling, mysteriously whispers in your ear:—

"Ich arbeit', un' arbeit', un' arbeit' ohn' Cheschben.
Es schafft sich, un' schafft sich, un' schafft sich ohn' Zāhl,"

and we see the workman changed into just such an unfeeling machine. During the short midday hour he has but time to weep and dream of the end of his slavery; when the whistle blows, the boss with his angry look returns, the machine once more ticks, and the tailor again loses his semblance of a human being. What wonder, then, that tears should be the subject of so many of his songs? Even when the laborer returns home he does not find relief from his sorrows; his own child does not see him from one end of the week to the other, for it is asleep when he goes out to work or returns from it ('My Boy'). Not only the workman, but even the mendicant, who has no home and finds his only consolation in his children, has reason to curse the present system when he sees the judge take them away from him to send them to an orphan asylum,—a species of misdirected philanthropy ('The Beggar Family'). Sad are the simple words: 'Ich gēh' vardienen!' uttered by a girl before the break of day, hurrying to the factory, and late at night, following a forced life of vice ('Whither'). Even death does not come to the unfortunate in the calm way of Goethe's 'Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh'; not the birds are silenced, but the worms are waiting for their companion ('Despair'). Nay, after death the laborer arises from his grave to accuse the rich neighbor of having stolen the flowers from his barren mound ('In the Garden of the Dead').

Not less sad are his National Songs. In 'Sephirah' he tells us that the Jew's year is but a succession of periods for weeping. Most of his songs of that class deal with the tragical conflict between religious duties and actualities. Such is 'The First Bath of Ablution,' which is one of the prettiest Jewish ballads. The 'Measuring of the Graves,' which relates the superstition of the Jews who study by candles with the wicks of which graves have been measured, is especially interesting, on account of the excellent use of the language of the Tchines made in it. The unanswered question of the boy in the 'Moon Prayer' is one of many that the poet likes to propound. Perhaps the best poem under the same heading is 'On the Bosom of the Ocean,' which is remarkable not only as a sad portrayal of the misfortunes of the Jew who is driven out of Russia and is sent back from America because he has not the requisite amount of money which would entitle him to stay here, but also on account of the wonderful description of a storm at sea. The same sad strain passes through the poems classed as miscellaneous. Now it is the nightingale that chooses the cemetery in which to sing his sweetest songs ('The Cemetery Nightingale'). Or the flowers in autumn do not call forth regrets, for they have not been smiling on the poor laborer in his suffering ('To the Flowers in Autumn'). Or again, the poet compares himself with the bird who sings in the wilderness where 'the dead remain dead, and the silent remain silent' ('In the Wilderness').

The gloom that lies over so many of Rosenfeld's poems is the result of his own sad experiences in the sweat-shop and during his struggle for existence; but this gloom is only the accident of his themes. Behind it lies the inexhaustible field of the poet's genius which adorns and beautifies every subject on which he chooses to write. The most remarkable characteristic of his genius is to weld into one the dramatic action and the lyrical qualities of his verse, as has probably never been attempted before. Whether he writes of the sweat-shop, or of the storm on the ocean, or of the Jewish soldier who rises nightly from his grave, we in every instance get a drama and yet a lyric, not as separate developments, but inextricably combined into one whole. Thus, for example, 'In the Sweat-shop' is a lyrical poem, if Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' is one, but in so far as the poet, or operative, is turned into a machine and is subjected to the exterior forces which determine his moods and his destiny, we have the evolution of a tragedy before us. Similarly, the exact parallel of the storm on the ocean with the storm in the hearts of the two Jews in the steerage is no less of a dramatic nature than an utterance of subjective feelings.

Rosenfeld does not confine himself to pointing out the harmony which subsists between man and the elements that control his moods and actions; he carries this parallelism into the minutest details of the more technical structure of his poems: the amphibrachic measure in the 'Sweat-shop' is that of the ticking machine, which in the two lines given above reaches the highest effect that can be produced by mere words. In the 'Nightingale to the Laborer,' the intricate versification with its sonnet rhymes, the repetition of the first line in each stanza with its returning repetition in the tenth line, the slight variations of the same burden in each succeeding stanza which saves it from monotony, are all artifices that the poet has learned from the bird along his native lake in Poland. These two examples will suffice to indicate the astonishing versatility of the poet in that direction; add to this the wealth of epithets, and yet extreme simplicity of diction which never strives for effect, the musicalness of his rhythm, the chasteness of expression even where the cynical situations seem to make it difficult to withstand imprecations and curses, and we can conceive to what marvellous perfection this untutored poet of the Ghetto has carried his dialect in which Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and English words are jostling each other and contending their places with those from the German language.

It was left for a Russian Jew at the end of the nineteenth century to see and paint hell in colors not attempted by any one since the days of Dante; Dante spoke of the hell in the after-life, while Rosenfeld sings of the hell on earth, the hell that he has not only visited, but that he has lived through. Another twenty-five years, and the language in which he has uttered his despair will be understood in America but by few, used for literary purposes probably by none. But Rosenfeld's poetry will survive as a witness of that lowermost hell which political persecutions, religious and racial hatred, industrial oppression have created for the Jew at the end of this our enlightened nineteenth century.

IX. PROSE WRITERS FROM 1817-1863

THE beginning of this century found the Jews of the Russian Empire living in a state bordering on Asiatic barbarism. Ages of persecution had reduced the masses to the lowest condition of existence, had eliminated nearly all signs of civilized life in them, and had succeeded in making them the outcasts they really were. Incredibly dirty in their houses and uncleanly about their persons, ignorant and superstitious even beyond the most superstitious of their Gentile neighbors, dishonest and treacherous not only to others, but even more to their own kind, they presented a sad spectacle of a downtrodden race. The legislators made the effects of the maltreatment of previous lawgivers the pretext for greater oppression until the Jews bade fair to lose the last semblance of human beings. One need only go at this late hour to some small town, away from railroads and highways, where Jews live together compactly, in order to get an idea of what the whole of Russia was a century ago, for in those distant places people are still living as their grandfathers did. Only here and there an individual succeeded in tearing himself away from the realm of darkness to become acquainted with a better existence by means of the Mendelssohnian Haskala. In spite of the very unfavorable conditions of life, or rather on account of them, the Jews, although averse to all instruction, passed the greater part of their lives, that were not given to the earning of a livelihood, in sharpening their wits over Talmudical subtleties. When they came in contact with the learning in Germany, their minds had been trained in the unprofitable but severe school of abstruse casuistry, and they threw themselves with avidity on the new sciences, surpassing even their teachers in the philosophic grasp of the same. Such a man had been Salomon Maimon, the Kantian scholar; such men were later those followers of the Haskala who were active in the regeneration of a Hebrew literature, with whom we have also become acquainted in former chapters through their efforts of enlightening the masses; foremost of them, however, was J. B. Levinsohn, who wrote but little in Judeo-German. He was to the Jews of Russia what Mendelssohn had been half a century before to the Jews of Germany.

The light of the Haskala entered Russia in two ways: through Galicia and through Poland. Galicia was the natural gateway for German enlightenment, as its Jews were instructed by means of works written in Hebrew, which alone, outside of the native dialect, could be understood in the interior of Russia. But this influence was only an indirect one, for soon the German language began to be substituted and understood by the people of Galicia, whereas that has never become the case in the southwest of Russia, that is, in the contiguous territory. The case was different in Russian Poland and Lithuania, for there were many commercial relations between these countries and Germany, and there existed German colonies in that part of the Empire. Consequently the ground was here better prepared for the foreign culture. The seats of the Haskala of these more northern regions were such towns as Zamoszcz in the Government of Lublin, and Warsaw. Roughly speaking, the geographically favored portion of the Jewish Pale was inhabited by the Misnagdim, or strict ritualists, while the southwest was the seat of that fanatical and superstitious sect of the Khassidim against whom nearly all of the satirical literature of the last seventy-five years has been directed.

As early as 1824 there was published a periodical in Warsaw in which the German language, or a corrupt form of it, written with Hebrew characters, was employed to serve as an intermediary of German culture. In the same year B. Lesselroth used this form of German in writing a Polish Grammar[74] for the use of his co-religionists. As has been pointed out before, this mixture of Judeo-German was to serve only as an intermediary for the introduction of the literary German which at that time appeared as the only possible alternative for the homely dialects of the Russian Jews. This mixed language has unfortunately remained the literary norm of the northwest up to the present time, if one may at all speak of norm in arbitrary compounds. In the southwest the dialects were, in the first place, much more distant from the German than the varieties of Lithuania, and the greater distance from German influence made the existence of that corrupt German less possible. At about the same time two books were published in Judeo-German, one in the south by Mendel Lefin, the other in the north by Chaikel Hurwitz, which became the standards of all future publications in the two divisions of the Jewish Pale. The first, by adhering to the spoken form of the dialect, has led to a normal development of both the language and the literature. The second, being unnatural from the start, has produced the ugliest excrescences, culminating in the ugliest productions of Schaikewitsch and his tribe and still in progress of manufacture.

Hurwitz[75] was only following the natural tendencies of the Haskala when he chose what he called a pure Judeo-German for his literary style. In the introduction to his translation of Campe's 'Discovery of America' from his own Hebrew version of the same he says: "This translation of the 'Discovery of America' I have made from my Hebrew version. It is written in a pure Judeo-German without the mixture of Hebrew, Polish, and Turkish words which one generally finds in the spoken language." It must however, be noted that he uses German forms very sparingly, and that but for his avoiding Slavic and Hebrew words, his language is really pure. It is only later, beginning with the writings of Dick, that the real deterioration takes place.

This book was published in 1824 at Wilna. Its effect on the people was very great. Previous to that year there were no other books to be had except such as treated on ethical questions, or story-books, which had been borrowed from older sources two or three centuries before. Books of instruction there were none. This was the first ray that penetrated the Ghettos from without. The people had no knowledge of America and Columbus, and now they were furnished not only with a good story of adventure, but in the introduction to the book they found a short treatise on geography,—the first worldly science with which they now became acquainted. It is interesting to note here by way of parallel that a few years later the regeneration of Bulgaria from its centuries of darkness began with a small work on geography, a translation from an American school-book, published at Smyrna. It is true that to the disciples of the Haskala works on the sciences were accessible in Hebrew translations, but these were confined to a very small circle of readers, and their influence on the masses was insignificant. If the followers of the Haskala had not accepted blindly Mendelssohn's verdict against the Judeo-German language, which was true only of the language spoken by the Jews of Germany, but had furnished a literature of enlightenment in the vernacular of the people instead of the language of the select few, their efforts would have been crowned with far greater success. By subscribing unconditionally to the teachings of their leader, they retarded the course of events by at least half a century and widened the chasm between the learned and the people, which it had been their desire to bridge. English missionaries proceed much more wisely in their efforts to evangelize a people. They always choose the everyday language in which to speak to them, not the tongue of literature, which is less accessible to them. Mainly by their efforts the Modern Armenian and Bulgarian have been raised to a literary dignity, and with it there has always followed a regeneration of letters and a national consciousness that has in some cases led to political independence. The missionaries have not always reaped a religious harvest, but their work has borne fruit in many other ways. In the beginning of this century they also directed their attention to the Christianization of the Jews of Poland. The few works that they published in the pursuit of their aim, especially the New Testament, are written in an excellent vernacular, far superior to the one employed by Hurwitz and Lesselroth. It is a pity the Jewish writers of the succeeding generations, particularly in the northwest of Russia, did not learn wisdom from the English missionaries.

'The Discovery of America' has had edition after edition, and has been read, at first surreptitiously, then more openly, by all who could read, young and old, men and women. But Hurwitz was not forgiven by the fanatics for descending to write on worldly matters, and after his death it became the universal belief that the earth would not hold him for his misdeed and that he was walking around as a ghost, in vain seeking a resting-place.

In the south the first impulse for writing in Judeo-German was given by the translations of the Proverbs, the Psalms, and Ecclesiastes by Minchas Mendel Lefin. Of these only the Psalms were published in 1817; Ecclesiastes was printed in 1873, while the Proverbs and a novel said to be written by him have never been issued. To write in Jargon was to the men of the Haskala a crime against reason, and Lefin was violently attacked by Tobias Feder and others. He found, however, a sympathizer in Jacob Samuel Bick, who warmly defended him against Feder, and by degrees some of the best followers of the Haskala followed his good example. Ettinger and Gottlober are known to have received their first lessons in Judeo-German composition through the writings of Lefin, while by inference one may regard him also as the prototype of Aksenfeld and Zweifel. It was not so easy to brave the world with the despised Jargon, and up to the sixties not one of the works of these writers appeared in print. They passed in manuscript form from hand to hand, until the favorable time had come for their publication; and then they were generally not printed for those who wrote them, but for those who possessed a manuscript, so that on the first editions of their works their names do not appear at all.

Lefin's translations mark an era in Judeo-German literature. He broke with the traditional language used in story-books and ethical works of previous centuries, for that was merely a continuation of the language of the first prints, in which local differences were obliterated in order to make the works accessible to the German Jews of the East and the West. It was not a spoken language, and it had no literary norm. In the meanwhile the vernacular of the Slavic Jews had so far departed from the book language as to make the latter almost unintelligible to the masses. Lefin chose to remedy that by abandoning entirely the tradition, and by writing exactly as the people spoke. He has solved his problem in a remarkable way; for although he certainly knew well the German language, there is not a trace of it in his writings. He is not at a loss for a single word; if it does not exist in his dialect, he forms it in the spirit of the dialect, and does not borrow it from German. As linguistic material for the study of the Judeo-German in the beginning of this century the writings of Lefin, Aksenfeld, Ettinger, Levinsohn, and Gottlober are invaluable. But that is not the only value of Lefin's writings. By acknowledging the people's right to be instructed by means of an intelligible language, he at the same time opened up avenues for the formation of a popular literature, based on an intimate acquaintance with the mental life of the people. In fact, he himself gave the example for that new departure by writing a novel 'The First Khassid.' In the northwest the masses were not so much opposed to the new culture as in the south, hence the writers could at once proceed to bring out books of popular instruction clad in the form of stories. But the Khassidim of the south would have rejected anything that in any way reminded them of a civilization different from their own. In order to accomplish results among them, they had to be more cautious and to approach their readers in such a way that they were conscious only of the entertainment and not of the instruction which was couched in the story. This demanded not only the use of a pure vernacular, but also a detailed knowledge of the mental habits of the people. As their conditions of life in no way resembled those of any other people in Europe, their literature had to be quite unique; and the works of the earlier writers are so peculiar in regard to language, diction, and style as to baffle the translator, who must remodel whole pages before he can render the original intelligibly. Of such a character are the dramas of Aksenfeld, Ettinger, and J. B. Levinsohn.

Ettinger, the first modern Judeo-German poet, has also written a drama under the name of 'Serkele, or the False Anniversary.' His bias for German culture shows itself in the general structure of his play, which is like that of Lessing's dramas. The plot is laid in Lemberg, and represents the struggle of German civilization with the mean and dishonest ways of the older generation. Serkele has but one virtue,—that of an egotistical love for her only daughter, the half-educated, silly Freude Altele. In order to get possession of some jewels deposited with her by her brother for his daughter Hinde, she invents the story of his death. She is anxious to marry her daughter to Gavriel Händler, who is represented to her as a rich speculator, but who is in reality a common thief. He steals the casket containing the jewels. When the theft is discovered she throws the guilt on Marcus Redlich, a student of medicine, her daughter's private teacher, and Hinde's lover. Hinde, too, is accused of complicity, and both are taken in chains through the town. They pass a hostlery where a stranger has just arrived, to whom Händler is trying to sell the jewels. The stranger is Hinde's father. He recognizes his property, and seizes the thief just as his daughter and her lover are taken by. A general recognition follows, and all is righted. He finally forgives his sister, gives a dowry to Freude Altele, who marries the innkeeper, while his daughter is united to Marcus Redlich.

As in all the early productions of Judeo-German literature, there are in that drama two distinct classes of characters: the ideal persons, the uncle, Marcus Redlich and Hinde, and the real men and women who are taken out of actual life. On the side of the first is all virtue, while among the others are to be found the ugliest forms of vice. A worse shrew than Serkele has hardly ever been depicted. Her speeches are composed of a series of curses, in which the Jargon is peculiarly inventive, interrupted by a stereotyped complaint of her ever failing health. She hates her niece with the hatred that the tyrant has for the object of his oppression, and she is quick to accuse her of improper conduct, although herself of very lax morals. Nobody in the house escapes the fury of her tongue, and her honest but weak husband has to yield to the inevitable. The other characters are all well drawn, and the play is an excellent portrayal of domestic life of seventy-five years ago. It was written early in the twenties, but was printed only in 1861, since when it has had several editions.

In 1828 J. B. Levinsohn wrote his Hebrew work, 'Teudo Beisroel,' by which the Haskala took a firm footing in Russia. About the same time there circulated manuscript copies of a Judeo-German essay by the same author, in which a sad picture of Jewish communal affairs was painted in vigorous and idiomatic words. This essay, called 'The World Turned Topsy-Turvy,'[76] is given in the form of a conversation by three persons, of whom one is a stranger from a better country where the affairs of the Jews are administered honestly. The other two in turn lay before him an array of facts which it is painful to regard as having existed in reality. It is interesting to note that the stranger, who is Levinsohn himself, advocates the formation of agricultural colonies for the Jews, by which he hoped to better their wretched condition and to gain for them respect among those who accused them of being averse to work.

The most original and most prolific Judeo-German writer of this early period was Israel Aksenfeld.[77] He was born in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and had passed the early days of his life in the neighborhood of the Rabbi of Braslow, a noted Khassid, being himself a follower of that sect. Later in life, in the fifties, he is remembered as a notary public in Odessa. He was a man of great culture. Those who knew him then speak in the highest terms of the kindly old man that he was. They also like to dwell on the remarkable qualities of his cultured wife, from whom he is supposed to have received much inspiration.[78] That is all that is known of his life. Gottlober mentions also in his 'Recollections' that he had written twenty-six books, and that according to Aksenfeld's own statements they had been written in the twenties or thereabout. Of these only five were printed in the sixties; the rest are said to be stored away in a loft in Odessa, where they are held as security for a debt incurred by the trustee of his estate. Although this fact is known to some of the Jews of that city, no one has taken any steps to redeem the valuable manuscripts. This is to be greatly regretted, as his books throw light on a period of history for which there is no other documentary evidence except that given by the writings of men who lived at that time.

Of the five books printed, one is a novel, the other four are dramas. The first, under the name of 'The Fillet of Pearls,' shows up the hypocrisy and rascality of the Khassidic miracle-workers, as only one who has himself been initiated in their doings could relate them. The hero of the novel is Mechel Mazeewe. He is discovered eating on a minor fast day, and the Rabbi uses this as an excuse for extorting all the money the poor fellow had earned by teaching little children and young women. His engagement to one of his pupils, the daughter of the beadle, is broken off for the same reason. Disgusted with his town, he goes away from it in order to earn a living elsewhere. Good fortune takes him to Breslau, where he, for the first time, discovers that there are also clean, honest, peaceful Jews. He is regenerated, and returns to his native town, where in the meantime the miracle-working Rabbi has succeeded in rooting out the last vestige of heresy. At the house of the Rabbi, Mechel has an occasion to prove the falseness of his pretensions to the assembled people. Mechel is reunited with his bride.

This bare skeleton of the plot is developed with great care, and is adorned with a variety of incidents, each forming a story within the story. The biting satire, the sharp humor, the rapid development of situations, are only excelled by his dramatic sense, which makes him pass rapidly from descriptions, without elaborating them to the form of dialogue. His mastery of the dialect is remarkable; for although one can here and there detect his intimate acquaintance with German literature, there is not a single case where he has been led under obligations to the German language in thought or a word: German is as foreign to him as French or Latin. Of his dramas it will be sufficient to discuss one to show their general structure. The most dramatic of these is the one entitled 'The First Recruit' and tells of the terrible time in 1827 when the Ukase drafting Jewish young men into the army had for the first time been promulgated. To the ignorant masses it seemed as though the world would come to an end. To avoid the great misfortune of having their sons taken away from them, they married them off before they had reached their teens; finding that that did not prevent the 'catchers' from seizing them, maimed, halt, sickly men were preferred as husbands to their daughters; in short, all was done to avert the unspeakable calamity of serving the Czar. As in the novel, there are plots within the plot, and didactic passages are woven into the play without in the least disturbing its unity.

The tragedy consists of eight scenes. The first opens with a noisy meeting at the house of Solomon Rascal, a Parnes-Chōdesch (representative of the Jewish community), on a Saturday afternoon. The cause of the disturbance is the order to furnish one recruit from their town, which had just been brought in from the capital of the district by two soldiers. The assembled kahal are wondering whether it is incumbent upon them to sign the receipt of the order, while the infuriated mob without is clamoring that the Ukase will be ineffective as long as not signed by the representatives of the Congregation. The kahal is divided on the subject, and the women take a part in the discussion, making matters lively. Upon the advice of one of the men, the meeting is adjourned to the house of Aaron Wiseman, the honored merchant of their town of Nowhere, where they expect to get a satisfactory solution in their perplexity. The second scene is the ideal scene of the play. Here is depicted the happy and orderly home life of the cultured merchant,—the reverse of the picture just portrayed. Jisrolik the Ukrainian arrives and announces the decision of the kahal to refer the matter to him. Aaron Wiseman explains how the Emperor had not intended to bring new misfortunes upon the Jews by the mandate, but how by imposing on them the honorable duty of defending their country, he was investing them with a new privilege upon which greater liberties would follow. This he farther elucidates in the next scene before the assembled representatives of the Congregation. The fourth scene is laid in the inn, where we are introduced to Nachman the Big, the practical joker and terror of the town. In the following scene, Aaron Wiseman advises the kahal to use a ruse by which Nachman will voluntarily offer himself as a soldier, thus freeing the town from the unpleasant duty of making a more worthy family unhappy. Wiseman explains that Nachman has been a source of trouble to all, and that military service would be the only thing that would keep him from a possible life of crime. The ruse is accomplished in the following manner: it is known that Nachman has been casting his eyes on Früme, the good and beautiful daughter of Risches the Red, the tax-gatherer. It is proposed to send a schadchen to Nachman, pretending that Früme's parents seek an alliance with him, and that Früme loves him, and that she wants to get a proof of his affection in his offering himself up as a soldier. The apparent incongruity of the request is amply accounted for in the play by the fact that he who has lost his heart also loses his reason. In the next two scenes the plot is carried out, and Nachman becomes a soldier. The last scene contains the tragic denouement. Chanzi, the go-between, comes to the house of Früme and tells her of the fraud perpetrated on Nachman. But, alas, Früme actually loves Nachman, and she silently suffers at the recital of the story. The climax is reached when her father arrives and tells of Nachman's self-sacrifice, how he has given himself up for the love he bears her, how they put him in chains and took him away. Früme bears her secret to the last, but her heart breaks, and she dies. The sorrow of her parents is great. During the lamentation Nachman's blind mother arrives, led by a little girl. She has learned of Chanzi's treachery, and breaks out in loud curses against those who took part in the plot. As she steps forward, she touches the dead body of her whom Nachman had thought to be his bride. She addresses her as though she were alive and consoles her that she need not be ashamed of Nachman, who had been an inoffensive, though somewhat wild, boy. While speaking this, she faints over her body.

The characters are all admirably delineated, and how true to nature the whole play is one can see from a matter-of-fact story, by Dick,[79] of the effects of the Ukase on the city of Wilna. Except for the tragic plot, the drama may serve as a historical document of the event, and is a valuable material for the study of the Jewish mind in the beginning of Nicholas's reign. This must also be said of the other plays of Aksenfeld, which all deal with conditions of contemporary Jewish society.

Similar to Aksenfeld's subject in 'The Fillet of Pearls' is the comedy 'The Marriage Veil' by Gottlober, which he wrote in 1838. Jossele, a young man with modern ideas, is to be married to a one-eyed monster, while his sweetheart, Freudele, is to be mated on the same day with a disfigured fool. By Jossele's machinations, in which he takes advantage of the superstitions of the people, he is united under the marriage veil to Freudele, while the two monstrosities are married to each other. This is found out too late to be mended. This plot is only an excuse to show up the hypocrisy and rascality of the miracle-working Rabbi in even a more grotesque way than in 'The Fillet of Pearls.' A much finer work is his story 'The Transmigration,' which, however, is said to be based on a similar story in the Hebrew, by Erter. In this a dead soul, previous to finding its final resting-place, relates of its many transmigrations ere reaching its last stage. The succession of mundane existences is strictly in keeping with the previous moral life of the soul. It starts out with being a Khassidic singer, who, like all the followers of the Rabbi, is represented as an ignorant dupe. After his death he naturally is turned into a horse, the emblem of good-natured stupidity according to the popular Jewish idea. Then he is in turn a Precentor, a fish, a tax-gatherer, a dog, a critic, an ass, a doctor, a leech, a usurer, a pig, a contractor. By far the most interesting and dramatic incident is that of the doctor, who is trying to pass for a pious Jew, but who is caught eating lobsters, which are forbidden by the Mosaic Law, and who dies from strangulation in his attempt to swallow a lobster to hide his crime. The story is told in a fluent manner, is very witty, and puts in strong relief the various characters which are satirized.

Like the poetry of the same period, the prose literature of the writers previous to the sixties is of a militant nature. It had for its aim the dispersion of ignorance and superstition, and the introduction of the Haskala and Western civilization among the Jews of Russia. The main attack of all these early works was directed against the fanaticism of the Khassidic sect, against the hypocrisy of its miracle-working Rabbis in whose interest it lay to oppose the light at all cost. But the authors not only attacked the evil, they also showed the way for a reform: this they did by contrasting the low, sordid instincts of the older generation with the quiet, honest lives of the new. Of course, the new generation is all German. The ideal characters of Ettinger's drama, Aksenfeld's hero in 'The Fillet of Pearls,' Gottlober's Jossele, have all received their training in Germany. At the same time, in accordance with the Mendelssohnian School, these ideal persons are not opposed to the tenets of Judaism; on the contrary, they are represented as the advocates of a pure religion in place of the base substitute of Khassidism. Outside of the didactic purpose, which, however, does not obtrude on the artistic development of the story, the Judeo-German literature of that period owes its impulse to the three German authors, Lessing, Schiller, Jean Paul Richter. As regards its language, the example set by Lefin prevails, and all the productions are written in an idiomatic, pure dialect of the author's nearest surroundings. There is but one exception to that, and that is 'The Discovery of America,' which, being mainly intended for a Lithuanian public, is written in a language which makes approaches to the literary German, whereby it opened wide the way to misuses of various kinds.

X. PROSE WRITERS FROM 1863-1881: ABRAMOWITSCH

ZEDERBAUM,[80] the friend and fellow-townsman of Ettinger, began in 1863 to publish a Judeo-German weekly under the name of Kol-mewasser, as a supplement to his Hebrew weekly, the Hameliz. This was the first organ of the kind for Russia, for the one edited in Warsaw forty years before was not written in the dialect of the people. Let us look for the cause of such an innovation.

The advocates of the Haskala regarded it as one of their sacred duties to spread culture wherever and whenever they could do so. This they did through the medium of the Hebrew and the Judeo-German. The first was a literary language, the other was not regarded as worthy of being such. If, therefore, there was some cause to feel an author's pride in attaching one's name to productions in the first tongue, there was no inducement to subscribe it to works in the second. It was, to a certain extent, a sacrifice that the authors made in condescending to compose in Judeo-German, and the only reward they could expect was the good their books would do in disseminating the truth among their people. The songs of M. Gordon and Gottlober, and the works of Ettinger and Aksenfeld, were passed anonymously throughout the whole land. The books were not even printed, but were manifolded in manuscript form by those who had the Haskala at heart. A few years before the issue of the Kol-mewasser, the efforts of these men began to bear ample fruit. It was no longer dangerous to be called a 'German,' and many Jewish children were being sent to the gymnasia, to which the Government had in the meanwhile admitted them. The Rabbinical schools at Wilna and Zhitomir, too, were graduating sets of men who had been receiving religious instruction according to the improved methods of the Haskala. It was then that some of the works written decades before, for the first time saw daylight, but more as a matter of curiosity of what had been done long ago, than with any purpose. It would even then have been somewhat risky to sign one's name to them for fear of ridicule, and no native firm would readily undertake their publication. Thus the first two works of Aksenfeld were issued from a press at Leipsic in 1862, while Ettinger's 'Serkele' had appeared the year before at Johannisburg. Only the following year Linetzki's 'Poems' were published at Kiev, and, by degrees, the authors took courage to abandon their anonyms and pseudonyms for their own names. The time was ripe for a periodical to collect the scattered forces, for there was still work to be done among those who had not mastered the sacred language, and they were in the majority. At that juncture, Zederbaum began to issue his supplement to the Hameliz.

This new weekly was not only the crowning of the work of the past generation of writers, it became also the seminary of a new set of authors. It fostered the talents of those who, for want of a medium of publication, might have devoted their strength entirely to Hebrew, or would have attempted to assimilate to themselves the language of the country. In the second year of the existence of the periodical, there appeared in it 'The Little Man,' the first work of Abramowitsch, who was soon to lead Judeo-German literature to heights never attempted before by it, and with whom a new and more fruitful era begins.

Solomon Jacob Abramowitsch[81] was born in 1835, in the town of Kopyl, in the Government of Minsk. He received his Jewish instruction in a Cheeder, and later in a Jeschiwe, a kind of Jewish academy. He consequently, up to his seventeenth year, had had no other instruction except in religious lore. His knowledge of Hebrew was so thorough that, at the age of seventeen, he was able to compose verses in that language. He lost his father early, and his mother married a second time. When he was eighteen years old, there arrived in his native town a certain Awremel the Lame, who had been leading a vagabond's life over the southern part of Russia. He told so many wonderful stories about Volhynia, where, according to his words, there flowed milk and honey, that many of the inhabitants of Kopyl were thinking of emigrating to the south. Awremel also persuaded Abramowitsch's aunt to go with him in search of her absent husband. That she did, taking her nephew along with her. It soon turned out, however, that Awremel was exploiting them as objects of charity, by collecting alms over the breadth and length of the country. For several months he kept zigzagging in his wagon from town to town, wherever he expected to find charitable Jews, until at last they arrived a certain distance beyond Kremenets. Here they passed a carriage from which proceeded a voice calling Abramowitsch by his given name. They stopped, and Abramowitsch was astonished to discover his friend of his childhood, who had, in the meantime, become a chorister in Kremenets. The latter invited his youthful friend to go back to town with him, promising to take care of him. This the young wanderer was only too glad to do, for he wished to be rid of Awremel, who had been tantalizing him with his almsbegging. The Precentor, who was in the carriage with the chorister, paid off the driver, and Abramowitsch started with them back to town, where a new period began in his life.

His thorough acquaintance with the Talmud and the Hebrew language soon gained him many friends, and he was able to make a living by teaching the children of the wealthier inhabitants. One of his friends advised him to make the acquaintance of the poet Gottlober, who, at that time, was teaching in one of the local Jewish schools. The old man who was giving him that counsel added: "Go to see him some evening when no one will notice you, and make his acquaintance. He is an apostate who shaves his beard, and he does not enjoy the confidence of our community. Nor do we permit young men to cultivate an acquaintance with him; but you are a learned man, and you will know how to meet the statements of that heretic. He is a fine Hebrew scholar, and it might do you good to meet him. Remember the words of Rabbi Meier: 'Eat the wholesome fruit, and cast away the rind.' I'll tell the beadle to show you the way to the apostate."

On the evening of the following day, Abramowitsch betook himself, with a copy of a Hebrew drama he had composed, to the house of Gottlober. The latter smiled at the childish attempt of the young Talmudist, but he did not fail to recognize the talent that needed only the fostering care of a teacher to reach its full development, and he himself offered his services to him, and invited him to be a frequent caller at his house. Here, under the guidance of Gottlober's elder daughter, he received his first instruction in European languages, and in the rudiments of arithmetic. He swallowed with avidity everything he could get, and soon he was able to write a Hebrew essay on education which was printed in the Hamagid, and which attracted much attention at the time. His fate soon led him to Berdichev, "the Jewish Moscow," where he married for a second time, and settled down for many years. In 1859 his first serious work, still in Hebrew, was published. In 1863 began his Judeo-German career, in which he still continues, and which has made him famous among all who read in that language.

The tradition of the Haskala came down to Abramowitsch in an uninterrupted succession, from Mendel Lefin through Ettinger and Gottlober. He, too, started out with the set purpose of spreading enlightenment among his people, and in his first two works we find a sharp demarkation between the two kinds of character, the ideal and the real. But he was too much of an artist by nature to persevere in his didactic attitude, and before long he abandoned entirely that field, to devote his undivided energy to the production of purely artistic works. Even his earlier books, in which he combats some public nuisance, differ materially from those of his predecessors in that they reflect not only conditions of society as they actually existed at his time, but in that his characters are true studies from nature. No one of his contemporaries reading, for example, his 'The Little Man,' could be in doubt of who was meant by this or that name. The portrait was so closely, and yet so artistically, copied from some well-known denizen of Berdichev that there could be no doubt as to the identity. There are even more essential points in his stories and dramas in which he widely departs from his predecessors. While these saw in a religious reform and in German culture a solution out of the degraded state into which their co-religionists had fallen, he preached that a reform from within must precede all regeneration from without. While they directed their attacks against the Khassidim as the enemies of light, and their Rabbis as their spiritual guides, he cautiously avoided all discussions of religion and culture, and sought in local communal reforms a basis for future improvements. To him the physical well-being of the masses was a more important question than their spiritual enlightenment, and according to his ideas a moral progress was only possible after the economical condition had been considerably bettered. His precursors had looked upon the Haskala as the most precious treasure, to be preferred to all else in life. Abramowitsch loves his people more than wisdom and culture, and the more oppressed and suffering those he loves, the more earnest and the more fervent are his words in their behalf. He is the advocate of the poor against the rich, the downtrodden against the oppressor, the meek and long-suffering against the haughty usurper of the people's rights. He is, consequently, worshipped by the masses, and has been hated and persecuted by those whose meanness, rascality, and hypocrisy he has painted in such glaring colors. He had even once to flee for his life, so enraged had the representatives of the kahal become at their lifelike pictures in one of his dramas. His love for the people is an all-pervading passion, for man is his Godhead. There is a divine element in the lowest of human beings, and he thinks it worth while to discover it and to bring it to light, that it may outshine all the vices that have beclouded it. He turns beggar with the beggar he describes, becomes insane with him who ponders over the ills of this earth, and suffers the criminal's punishment. He at all times identifies himself with those of whom he speaks.

In the more external form of composition there is again a vast progress from the writings of Lefin to the style and diction of Abramowitsch. Lefin was the first to show what vigor there was in the use of the everyday vernacular. Ettinger, Aksenfeld, and Gottlober have well adapted that simple, unadorned speech to the requirements of literary productions; but it was only Abramowitsch who demonstrated what wealth of word-building, what possibilities of expression, lay dormant in the undeveloped dialects of Judeo-German. He was peculiarly fitted to enrich the language by new formations, for having passed the first eighteen years of his life in Lithuania and passing the greater part of his later years in the Southwest, he was enabled to draw equally from the source of his native Lithuanian dialect and the spoken variety of his new home. He has welded the two so well that his works can be read with equal ease in the North and in the South, whereas the language of Aksenfeld offers a number of difficulties to the Lithuanians and even the Polish Jews whose dialect the Southern variety resembles. In diction he differs from his masters in that he substitutes a regular prose structure for the semi-dramatic utterances of the older narration, without affecting the natural speeches of the characters wherever these are introduced. In these cases he becomes so idiomatic as to baffle the best translator, who must be frequently satisfied with mere circumlocutions. He also abandons the anonym of the former generation for a pseudonym, Mendele the Bookpedler, which is, however, but a thin disguise for his real name, for his writings are of such an individuality that there can be no doubt about their authorship. Beginning with Abramowitsch style is regarded as an important requisite of a Judeo-German work.

Now we shall turn to the discussion of his several books. The subject of his first, 'The Little Man,' is an autobiography of a man, who, by low flattery, vile servility, and all dishonest ways, rises to high places of emolument which he uses entirely in order to enrich himself at the expense of the people. Such men had been the bane of Jewish communities in the middle of our century. In Berdichev it was, at the time of the publication of the book, Jacob Josef Alperin, who by similar means had come to be the right hand of the Governor General, Bibikov; but far more vile than he was Hersch Meier Held, who stood in the same relation to Alperin that the latter occupied to the Governor General. That flunky of a flunky is personified as the hero of the story, Isaac Abraham Takif. In this work we still have the ideal persons of the older writers. We are introduced there to a poor, honest, and cultured family, in whom one cannot fail to recognize his master and friend, Gottlober, and his daughter.

If this work made him a host of friends among those who were the victims of Alperin and Held, the next drama he wrote endangered his stay in Berdichev, for the persons attacked in it, the representatives of the kahal, would not shrink from any crime to rid themselves of a man who, like Abramowitsch, had come to be a power and a stumbling-block to their incredible rascalities. The greatest curse of the Jewish community in Russia had ever been the meat and candle tax, which all had to pay, nominally to support communal institutions, but the greater part of which went into the pockets of the representatives of the kahal to whom the tax was farmed out. No meat and no candle could be purchased without that arbitrary imposition by the members of the kahal, who in their fiendish craving for money increased the original cost of meat several fold, and who spared no means, however criminal, to silence any opposition to their doings. It is these men that Abramowitsch had the courage to hold up to the scorn of the people in his 'The Meat-Tax, or the Gang of City Benefactors.'[82] He had to flee for his life, but the drama did its work. It even attracted the attention of the Government, which tried to remedy the evil. It became the possession of the people, and many of its salient sentences have become everyday proverbs. The revolt against that Gang of City Benefactors of Berdichev was so great that Moses Josef Chodrower, whom all recognized as the prototype of the arch-rascal Spodek in the play, and who had been a prominent and wealthy merchant, was soon driven into bankruptcy by the infuriated population that refused to support him. That was the first time that a literary production written in Judeo-German had become a factor in social affairs. A Russian troupe that was then playing at Berdichev wanted to give a Russian version of the drama, but was restrained from doing so by the machinations of the kahal. The book had done its work thoroughly.

In the same year there appeared his story from the life of the Jewish mendicants, 'Fischke the Lame.'[83] This psychological study of the impulses of the lowest dregs of society is probably unique in all literature. It is a love story from the world of the lame and the halt that constitute the profession of mendicants in the Jewish part of every Russian town in the West. But it is not merely the love of Fischke the Lame for a beggar girl and the jealousy of his blind wife, who tyrannizes over him in spite of her affliction, that we are made acquainted with in that remarkable book. We are introduced there to a class of people with entirely different motives, different aims in life, from those we are accustomed to see about us. They hide from daylight and have a morality of their own; but yet they are possessed of the passions that we find in beings endowed with all the senses and enjoying the advantages of well-organized society. One must have lived among them, been one of them, so to reproduce their language, their thoughts, as Abramowitsch has done in this novel; and one must have broad sympathies with all humankind to be able to find the divine spark ablaze even in the lowest men.

His next work,'The Dobbin,'[84] is the most perfect of his productions. It unites into one a psychological study of a demented man, with a delicate allegory, in which the history of his people in Russia is delineated, thus serving as a transition from the pure novel in his former production to the composite allegory in his poetical work 'Judel' which was published a few years later. It combines a biting satire with a tragic story; it is a prophecy and a history in one. If the 'Meat Tax' had made him the favorite of the masses who suffered from the oppression of the members of the kahal, 'The Dobbin' was calculated to endear him with all who professed the Jewish faith; for while the first pointed out an internal evil which could be remedied, the second painted in vivid colors their sufferings in the present and the misfortunes which awaited them in the future, which were entirely of an external nature over which they had no control. It showed them more graphically than anything that had been said heretofore how helpless they were to meet the charges which were continually cast against them by the Gentiles and the Government. Abramowitsch foresaw that the turning-point in the inner life of his race was near at hand, that the call to progress of the early writers had availed them little in righting them with the world without, that his own productions acquainting them with their weak points from within were now out of place, and that soon they would need only words of consolation such as are uttered when a great calamity overtakes a people.

In 1873 hardly any one dreamed of the possibility of the riots against the Jews that were to be inaugurated eight years later, for it was just then that the highest privileges had been granted to them, and the assimilation had been going on to such an extent that Judeo-German literature would have been a thing of the past, had not the writers of the previous decade continued now and then to issue a volume of their works. But Abramowitsch saw that the reforms of Alexander II. were not conceived in the same liberal spirit as had been proposed by Nicholas I., and that sooner or later they would be followed by retrenchments such as would throw the Jews back into conditions far worse than those they had been in half a century before; for they would find no avenues for their many new energies which they had developed in the meanwhile. It is this coming event that the author has depicted in his fantastic story, 'The Dobbin.' Jisrolik has made up his mind to acquire Gentile culture, and he is preparing himself for an examination in the Gymnasium. He falls in with a Dobbin that is pursued by everybody, and this so affects him, together with the worry over his examination, that he becomes demented, and he imagines that the Dobbin is talking to him. After that the animal is introduced as a transmigrated soul that tells its biography. The Dobbin is the personification of the Jewish race. The book was very popular, and although there was a demand for new editions, the Russian Government would not permit them, as even this veiled allegory appeared to it as too open an accusation of its acts. Only sixteen years later the censor relaxed and allowed a second edition to appear.

In 1879 there was published by Abramowitsch a volume entitled 'The Wanderings of Benjamin the Third,'[85] which is an excellent pendant to Cervantes's famous work and which has therefore been called by its Polish translator 'The Jewish Don Quixote.' The subject of his caricature was a real fellow, named Tscharny, who had been employed by some French society to undertake a scientific journey into the Caucasus, but who was entirely unfit for the work, as he had a very superficial knowledge of geography. For his more immediate purpose Abramowitsch copied a crazy fellow who was all the time citing passages from a fantastic Hebrew geography he had been poring over. Out of this Abramowitsch evolved the story of the Quixotic fellow who starts out to discover the mystic river Sambation and the tribe of the Red Jews, but who never gets any further than the town of Berdichev and its dirty river Gnilopyat.

Of the other works[86] of Abramowitsch the most important is his drama 'The Enlistment,' which deals with the same subject as Aksenfeld's 'The First Recruit,' but referring it to more modern times. After a long silence the author has again resumed his pen, and one may look forward for some new classics in Judeo-German. He has also written a number of popular scientific articles, which have been widely circulated by means of calendars which he has edited. His popularity as a writer is best illustrated by the fact that for a series of years his income from his books and calendars has amounted to three thousand roubles a year. Considering the poverty of the reading public, for whom cheap editions have to be issued, and the general custom of borrowing books rather than buying them, this will appear as a very great sum indeed. Many of the younger authors lovingly refer to him as the 'Grandfather,' although no one has attempted to imitate him either in manner or style. He forms by himself a school, and would have been the last to write in the dialect but for the occurrences of the eighties that have been the cause of a new set of writers who have no reason to follow the authors of the period of the Haskala, but who dip their pens in the blood that has been shed in the riots, or who from the same cause speak to their brethren, though not of them.

XI. PROSE WRITERS FROM 1863-1881: LINETZKI, DICK

IN 1867 the Kol-mewasser began publishing a serial story by Linetzki[87] under the name of 'The Polish Boy.' Its popularity at once became so great that to satisfy the impatient public the editor was induced to print the whole in book form as a supplement long before it had been finished in the periodical. The interest in the book lay not so much in the fact that it was written with boundless humor as in its being practically an autobiography in which the readers found so much to bring back recollections of their own sad youth. They found there a graphic description of the whole course of a Khassid's life as no one before Linetzki had painted it,—as only one could paint it who had himself been one of the sect, standing in an even nearer relation to their Rabbis than had been the case with Aksenfeld. While the latter had been a follower of one, Linetzki had narrowly escaped being a Rabbi himself, had suffered all kinds of persecution for attempting to abandon the narrow sphere of a Khassid's activity, and knew from bitter experience all the facts related in his work. The story of his own life, unadorned by any fiction, was dramatic enough to be worth telling, but he has enriched it with so many details of everyday incidents as to change the simple biography into a valuable cyclopedia of the life and thoughts of his contemporaries, in which one may get information on the folklore, games, education, superstitions, and habits of his people in the middle of our century.

Linetzki was born in 1839 in Vinitsa, in the Government of Podolsk. At the age of six he was far enough advanced in Hebrew to begin the study of the Talmud. At ten he had passed through all the Jewish schools, and there was nothing left for his teachers to teach him. He was an Ilui, an accomplished scholar, but his father, who was a Khassidic Rabbi, was not satisfied with his mere scholastic acquirements; he wanted him to be initiated in all the mysteries of the Cabbala which would make of him a fanatical Khassid. He was put for that purpose in the hands of a few of his blind followers, who did not spare any means to kill the last ray of reason in him, even if they had to resort to violent punishments, with which they were very liberal. Instead of curbing his spirit, they only succeeded in nurturing an undying hatred toward themselves and everything connected with their doctrine. But finding it impossible to tear himself away from their tyranny, he finally feigned submission and openly professed adherence to his sect, while he secretly visited the few intelligent people that the town could muster up and borrowed from them works that told of the Haskala or that gave some useful instruction. These books he would take with him to uninhabited houses, or to the empty synagogues, and pore over them until their contents had been appropriated by the precocious boy. His father began to suspect that something was wrong with his son, so at the age of fourteen he married him to a girl who, he hoped, would take him back on the road of Khassidism. But finding that, contrary to his expectations, she agreed in everything with her child-husband, the father managed to divorce her from him. Linetzki's patience had come to an end; he threw off the thin mask he had been wearing, and began to make open attacks on the fanatics. He was again forced into marriage, but with the same result as before. The Khassidim now wanted to get rid of him at all cost, and in a dark night he was seized by them and thrown into the river. He was saved as if by a miracle. After that he was carefully guarded by the police, and his enemies did not dare to lay hands on him again. At the age of eighteen he escaped to Odessa, where he eked out his existence by teaching Hebrew to children, all the time perfecting himself in worldly sciences. He was again pursued by the Khassidim of the city, who got away with a box full of his manuscripts, and he decided to leave Russia, to take a course at the Rabbinical Seminary in Breslau. What was his surprise when, upon arriving at the Austrian frontier, he was put in chains by the Rabbi of the border town, who threatened to present a forged despatch from Odessa in which Linetzki was named as a dangerous criminal. He again pretended to repent, and was taken back to his father, from whom the forged despatch had emanated. The latter compelled his son to do penance at the house of the Rabbi of Sadugora. After that he was divorced from his second wife, as it was hoped that it would conciliate him to free him from the ties which had been hateful to him. Linetzki, however, took the first occasion to escape again. This time he went to Zhitomir, where at the age of twenty-three he entered the third class of the Rabbinical school, as his insufficient knowledge of Russian made it impossible for him to attend a higher class. His schoolmates were about twelve years old, and ridiculed the man who was sitting on the same bench with them. He left the institution and went to Kiev, where in 1863 his Judeo-German literary career began by his volume of poetry discussed in a previous chapter. His next work was 'The Polish Boy,' which has gained him a reputation as a classic writer.

Were it not for the many didactic passages which the author has interwoven in the second part of his story, it might easily be counted among the most perfect productions of Jewish literature. These unfortunately mar the unity of the whole. Except for these, the book is characterized by a truly Rabelaisian humor. Its greatest merit is that it follows so closely actual experiences as to become a photographic reproduction of scenes. There is hardly any plot in it, and it is doubtful if Linetzki would have succeeded so well had he attempted a piece of fiction, for in his many later works he is signally defective in this direction. The mere photographic quality of the story, the straightforward tone that pervades it, the grotesque, unbounded humor which one meets at every turn, have made it acceptable to the Khassidim themselves, who grin at their caricatures but must confess that it is absolutely true. The copy of the book in my possession was sold to me by a pious itinerant Rabbi, who had treasured it as a precious work.

Linetzki was misled by his early success to regard his unchecked humor as his special domain, and into cultivating it to the exclusion of the finer qualities of style and sound reason. The farther he proceeds,[88] the less readable his works become, the coarser his wit. Later, in the eighties, he abandons entirely original work to devote himself to the translation of German books. We have from his pen versions of Lessing's 'Nathan the Wise' and Graetz's 'History of the Jews.' The first is rather a free paraphrase than an artistic translation, while the second is not as carefully done as one might have expected. But once has he returned to the style of his 'The Polish Boy,' in his 'The Maggot in the Horseradish,'[89] but that is but a reflection of his great work. Linetzki's reputation is based only on his first novel, which will ever remain a classic.

A number of men with less talent than those heretofore mentioned have attempted imitations of this or that popular book. Among these writers the attacks against the Khassidim still continue at a time when they have lost their power to sting, when the best authors have abandoned that field for more useful works. However, some of the minor productions are quite creditable performances. Such, for example, is the well-told story in verse by M. Epstein, entitled 'Lemech, the Miracle-worker,' published in 1880. It tells of Lemech the tailor who leaves his wife, and turns miracle-worker, which he finds more profitable than his tailoring. He settles in a distant town and persuades one of the wealthy men to give him his daughter in marriage. The miracle-worker must not be refused, and the daughter's previous engagement with Rosenblatt, her lover, is broken off. Just as the rings are to be exchanged which would unite Lemech with Rosenblatt's former bride, Rosenblatt steps up with Lemech's wife, who has been travelling about to find her unfaithful husband, whom she knows only as a tailor. The story is developed naturally, and the reflections interwoven in it are well worth reading. An earlier one-act drama by the same author, 'The Drubbing of the Apostate at Foolstown,' relates also in verse of the punishment inflicted by the Rabbi on the Jew who had been found reading one of Mendelssohn's books. Another, 'The Conversation of the Khassidim,' by Maschil Brettmann, gives in the form of a dialogue the best exposition of the tenets of that sect, and shows how the various stories of miracle-workings originate. The introduction contains a short historical sketch of this strange aberration of miracle-working, written in an excellent prose.

While these writers had in view the eradication of some error and the dissemination of culture by their works, the ancient story-telling for the mere love of amusing still continues to attract the masses. The better class of authors were too serious to condescend to compete with the badchen in their efforts to entertain. The lighter story was consequently left to an inferior set of men who frequently had no other excuse for writing their stories than the hope of earning a few roubles by them. Of such a character are 'Doctor Kugelmann,' 'Wigderl the Son of Wigderl.' There is, however, a wide difference in these from similar story-books of the previous generation. The older chapbooks were based mainly on the romantic material of the West, generally reflecting nothing of the Jewish life in them. The newer stories of the Southwest of Russia have this in common with the works of the classical writers, that they reproduce scenes of contemporaneous Jewish life. At times these tales are well told and well worth reading. Such is the amusing quid pro quo in 'A Jew, then not a Jew, then a Good Jew [i.e. a Khassid], and Again a Jew,' by S. Hochbaum. Still more interesting is the charming comedy 'The Savings of the Women' by Ludwig Levinsohn.[90] Its plot is as follows: Jekel, a Khassid, returns late at night to his house, where he is awaited by his wife Selde. To silence her torrent of invectives he invents a story that the decree of Rabbi Gershon, by which monogamy had been introduced among the Jews of Europe in the eleventh century, was about to be dissolved in order that by marrying several wives the Jews of the town might get new dowries with which to pay the arrears in their taxes. His wife spreads this news throughout the community, to the great terror of the women. They resolve to avert the calamity by offering up their savings stored away in stockings and bundles. These are brought to the assembled brotherhood of the Khassidim, who, of course, use the money for a jollification. There are many amusing incidents in the play. The servant of Selde is dreaming of the time when she shall be married to Jekel and when she will lord it over her former mistress; the scene in the women's galleries when the news of the impending misfortune is reported is very humorous, and the attempt of the Rabbi's wife to learn the truth of the fact from her husband who had not been initiated in the story by Jekel is quite dramatic. It is one of the best, if not the best, comedy written in Judeo-German.

A number of witty stories in a semi-dramatic form have been produced by Ulrich Kalmus; the most of these are disfigured by coarse jokes, but a few of them it would well pay to rearrange for scenic representation. One of his best is a version of the Talmudical legend of the devil and the bad wife; it is almost precisely the same that Robert Browning has versified in his 'Doctor ——.' A good story, resembling Linetzki's 'The Polish Boy,' but with much less bitterness and humor, is given in 'Jekele Kundas,' by one who signs himself by the pseudonym Abasch. Translations from foreign tongues are not uncommon in this period. Some Russian stories are rendered into Judeo-German; also a few German dramas, such as Lessing's 'The Jews'; from the English we have Walter Scott's 'Ivanhoe' and Longfellow's 'Judas Maccabæus'; and from the French we get for that time Massé's 'The Story of a Piece of Bread,' and from the Hebrew one of Luzzato's dramas. To other useful works of a scientific character we shall return later.

There is a marked difference in the development of Judeo-German literature in the Khassidic Southwest and the Misnagdic North. While the first gave promise of a natural growth and a better future, the second showed early the seeds of decay. The nearness to Germany explains the deterioration of the literary Judeo-German of Lithuania, but the cause for the weaker activity in the literature itself is to be sought in the whole mental attitude of the Misnagdim, who as strict ritualists did not allow the promptings of the heart to interfere with their blind adherence to the Law. The very origin of Khassidism was due to a protest against that cold formalism which excluded everything imaginative. Unfortunately this protest opened the way to the Cabbala and admitted the wildest excesses of mysticism in the affairs of everyday life, and this soon gave rise to that form of the new sect with which we meet so frequently in the descriptions of the early authors of the Southwest. These, however, in tearing themselves away from their early associations abandoned only their degraded religious faith, not the love for the fanciful which, if properly directed by a controlling reason, would lead to an artistic career. The Misnagdim, on the contrary, in breaking with their traditions were predisposed to become rationalists with whom utilitarian motives prevailed over the finer sentiments. Their advocates of the Reform, who took to writing in the vernacular of the people, set about from the very start to create a useful, rather than an artistic, literature, to give positive instruction rather than to amuse. The outward form of language and style was immaterial to them; the information the story carried was their only excuse for writing it. Foremost of that class of writers was Aisik Meier Dick,[91] who in the introduction to one of his stories[92] speaks as follows of his purpose in publishing them:

"Our women have no ear and no feeling for pure ethical instruction. They want to hear only of miracles and wonderful deeds whether invented or true; they find delight in the story of Joseph de la Reyna, or of Elijah's appearance in the form of an old man to be the tenth in the Minyan on the eve of the Atonement day; they are even satisfied with the story of Bevys of Hamptoun and the Greyhound, with the Horse Drendsel and the Sword Familie, and with the beautiful Princess Deresna, or merely with a story of a Bride and Bridegroom.

"This sad fact, dear readers, I took deep to heart, and I resolved to make use of this very weakness for interesting stories for their own good by composing books of an entertaining nature, which would at the same time carry moral lessons. Thanks to God I have succeeded in my undertaking, for my stories are being read diligently, and they are productive of good. Several hundred stories of all kinds have been so far issued by me, each having a different purpose. Even every witty tale and mere witticism teaches something useful. I am sure a great number of my readers do not suspect my good intentions, and read my stories, just as they read Bovo, for pastime only, and will accuse me, the writer of the same, as being a mere babbler who distracts the attention from serious studies, and as writing them for the money that there is in them. I know all that full well, and yet I keep on doing my duty, for even greater men than I have been treated in no better way by our nation; our prophets have been cursed by us, and beaten, and pulled by the hair, and spit upon, and some have even been killed. I am proud to be able to say that I am not making my living from my writings, and I should have been repaid tenfold better if I had passed my time in some more profitable work. But I do it only out of love for my nation, of whom the most do not know how far they are removed from mankind at large, and what a miserable position we occupy in these enlightened days among the civilized nations.... We must, whether we wish or not, enter into much closer relations with the outside world than our parents did. We must, therefore, be better acquainted with the world, that we may be tolerated by our fellow-men (the Gentiles), who surpass us in civilization.... Consequently, I regard it as a great favor to speak to you by means of my books, and as a still greater favor that the famous firm of Romm is willing to print them, for the publication of prayers is more profitable than that of story-books that are only read in circulating libraries or merely borrowed from a friend."

This passage fully characterizes Dick's activity, which lasted from the fifties until his death, in 1893. He was not a man of deep learning, and did not produce any masterpieces, such as the other writers of the time were printing in the South. But he atoned for this by his great earnestness and good common sense, which led him to choose the best subjects for his stories, such as would be of the most immediate good for his humble readers. He translated or imitated the leading popular books of his time, not limiting himself to such as were taken out of Jewish life, but independently of their religious tenor. Among his translations we find the works of Bernstein, Campe, Beecher-Stowe; there are imitations of Danish, French, Polish, and Russian books; and many subjects, not easily traceable now, have been suggested to him by other literatures. He has also written many stories taken from the life of the Lithuanian Jews. He ascribes great importance to biographies, devoting several introductions to impress the necessity of reading these. But he treats just as frequently geographical and historical themes; among the latter he has even dared to give an impartial discussion of the Reformation.

At first Dick's books were small 16mos of rarely more than forty-eight pages, and up to the year 1871 the abbreviation AMD, for his name, occurs but twice. After that all his works bear the initials, or even the name in full. The small size of the books is due to his desire to make them accessible to the poorest of his race; this necessitated a retrenchment of nearly all the works which he translated. Only in the eighties, when reading had become universal and more expensive works could be published, did he issue octavos of considerable thickness, some of them being four-volumed books. Dick had no talent as a writer, and his style is but a weak reflection of the originals which he translated. The language he uses is a frightful mixture of Judeo-German with German, the latter frequently predominating over the first, so that he is often obliged to give in parentheses the explanation of unusual words. And so it happened that, although his purpose had been a good one, and his influence had at first been salutary on a very large circle of readers, he has set a bad example to a large host of scribblers who have taken all imaginable liberties with the language and the subjects they treated of, and have produced a flood of bastard literature under which the many better productions are entirely drowned. He has destroyed all feeling for a proper diction, and has cultivated only a passion for reading, so that it was necessary for his followers to write 'ein höchst interessanter Roman' on the title-page, and parade the book with crumbs of German words unintelligible to the public, in order to find a ready sale.

One of the first to write in the style of Dick was M. R. Schaikewitsch,[93] who began his prolific career in 1876, since which time he has brought out more than one hundred books, the most of which are of bulky proportions. At first he was satisfied to tell stories from the life of his immediate surroundings, but soon he aspired to higher things, and began to drag in by the hair scenes and situations of which he did not have the slightest conception. As long as he wrote of what he had himself seen he produced books that, without doing any particular good, were to a certain extent harmless. He certainly has a better talent for telling a story than Dick; his language is also nearer the spoken vernacular, and in the beginning he avoided Germanisms. He might, therefore, have developed into one of the best Jargonists, had he chosen to study, and had he worked less rapidly. In an adaptation of Gogol's 'The Inspector,' he has shown what he might have been had he had any earnest purpose in life. But he lacks entirely Dick's straightforwardness, and writes only to make money. The common people devoured his stories with the same zeal that formerly they showed towards the productions of Dick, and unwittingly they have imbibed a poison which the later authors of a nobler nature, who have the interests of the people at heart, are trying to eradicate. These try to point out directly by accusation, and indirectly by writing better novels, how dangerous and immoral Schaikewitsch is in his books. They go too far in their anxiety to bias the mind of the masses against him when they speak of his proneness to immoral scenes, for in that he is not worse than many of the better class of authors. The deleterious effect is produced not by these, but by his introducing a world to them that does not exist in reality, that gives them a most perverted idea of life, without teaching them any facts worth knowing. In his many historical novels, for example, he uses good sources for the fundamental facts on which he bases his tale, but the men and women are such as could never have existed at the period described and that do not exist now: they are monstrosities of his imagination as they appear to him in his very narrow sphere of experiences. His treatment of these historical themes is not unlike the one given to the stories of Alexander and other ancient works during the Middle Ages. The resemblance is still further increased by his extravagant, romantic conception of love, on which he dwells with special pleasure, to the great joy of his feminine public.

A much better attempt at transferring the method of Dick to dramatic productions had been made as early as 1867 and the following year by J. B. Falkowitsch. His two dramas 'Chaimel the Rich' and 'Rochele the Singer' were at one time very popular in the South. The second is an adaptation of some foreign work; the first is probably original. They are written in a good vernacular, but are devoid of interest, as the didactic element outweighs the plot, and the latter is very loosely developed. Schaikewitsch has had many imitators, all of whom try to rival him in quantity. Among these are to be counted Blaustein, Beckermann, Seiffert, Budson, Buchbinder; the latter, a writer without talent, has at least given some useful translations, and has also written some articles on the popular belief of the Jews. Outside of Dick, the Northwest has produced two important writers, one in the beginning, the other at the end, of the period. The first is Zweifel, whom we already know from his poetical works; the other is Schatzkes, the author of 'The Jewish Ante-Passover.' Zweifel has produced several small works of aphorisms which have been very popular and have been frequently reprinted. Their fine moral tone, the purity of the language used in them, the simple style in which they are composed, place them among the best books of Judeo-German literature. He has also written a story, 'The Happy Reader of the Haphtora,' which is a discussion on piety and honesty clad in the form of a tale. The other, M. A. Schatzkes, has written but one book, which is not properly called a story, but an invaluable cyclopedia of Jewish customs, particularly such as directly or indirectly refer to the Passover, strung together in chronological order as a consecutive action. With the exception of Linetzki's 'The Polish Boy,' there has been written no one work that treats so comprehensively of the beliefs and habits of the Jews in Russia. Schatzkes is an indifferent story-teller, and his work is full of repetitions, but, nevertheless, 'The Jewish Ante-Passover' must be counted among the classics of the period under discussion. It is a sad picture that is portrayed in it; in a straightforward manner, without exaggeration, he tells of conditions that one would hardly believe possible as existing at the end of the nineteenth century.

Neither of these men has told stories in the manner of the Southern writers, for neither of them cared as much for the form as for the contents in which they told them. They differ from Dick in that they at least did not use a corrupt language in their works. All the other writers have no excuse for writing at all. This inferior literature had its rise in the seventies, when the better forces had been alienated from the people and had received instruction in Russian schools. The men who had been writing for the Haskala, finding their efforts crowned with success, had ceased to write; many of the older men had passed away. The newer generation had no reason to proceed in the path of the older men. There were only the lower classes left, who had had no advantages in the foreign education, and who were craving for reading matter of whatsoever kind. It was to these alone that the newer writers spoke, and they were not animated by any high motives in addressing them. They were left to themselves to do as they pleased, for the seventies are characterized by an absence of all criticism. No one cared what they did or how they did it. All felt and hoped that the last hour for the Jargon had come, and it was immaterial to them what was produced in Judeo-German literature before its final decay. But Abramowitsch's prophecy in 'The Dobbin' was fulfilled,—the assimilation that had been going on peacefully had not produced the desired result, and one morning those who had had time to forget the language their mothers had been talking to them awoke to the bitter consciousness that they were despised Jews, on the same level with the most lowly of their race. Among these arose a new school of writers who introduced the methods of the literary languages into their native dialect. The next period, the present, is signalized by a spirit of sound criticism.