The I.L. Peretz Reader     by Isaac Loeb Peretz, Translated by Ruth Wisse Original language: Yiddish Published by Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: June 1, 2002 Format: Paperback, 384 pages Dimensions: 1.19 x 8.28 x 5.56 in. ISBN: 0300092458 List Price: $16.95, £10.78 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £10.78 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.87 Published by Schocken Books Pub. Date: 1990 Not available for ordering

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Sholem Aleykhem popularised Yiddish writing more than any other writer, but I L Peretz (1852-1915) raised its literary status more than any other writer of his generation, and perhaps of subsequent generations as well. His great contribution was to fix Yiddish into the matrix of modern European culture, to adapt to prevailing literary influences and to produce a literature for the Jewish world of Eastern Europe that was undergoing radical modernisation.

The dilemma for Peretz, and the Jews in general, was that Europe both welcomed Jews and rejected them and that in turn Jews were attracted and repelled by what was on offer. The same world called for assimilation on the one hand but saw the spread of Pogroms* in Russia and the rise of anti-Semitic movements throughout the rest of Europe.

Although he later cared for and sought to influence his public, Peretz claimed that he began writing ’for my own pleasure and only according to my mood’. Eminent writer on Yiddish Ruth Wisse said that he turned to literature as a result of his dilemma, and turned his dilemma into literature. He was very dissatisfied with the limitations of the Yiddish language. In his early poem Monish (1888) for example, in which a handsome and brilliant young scholar sells his soul for fame, fortune and sex, Peretz complains that Yiddish lacked a vocabulary for the erotic.

Peretz developed a compressed, shorthand style, his sentences often unfinished. His style was direct, often didactic. His characters were more agents for his moral and social purposes, vehicles for expressing his ideas rather than for the display of the human condition or elaborated for their own sakes. He rejected humour, because it dissipated anxiety rather then harnessing it to social reform. Later on, occult elements entered his work, because here he believed he was drawing on elements of Jewish folk culture, and his work and personality became the battleground for warring forces of modernism and Jewish tradition. When he did deal with Jewish religious values, however, he sought to humanise them, and they were expressed with irony and scepticism.

The transcendent impulse was used as another means to improve the real world. Hence one of his most famous stories, Bontshe the Silent, can be interpreted in radically different ways. Bontshe is a worker who has led a bleak life, exploited and abused by his employers and his family, but who never complains. When he dies, however, he is immediately received into heaven, and even the Devil’s Advocate is reduced to silence by the example of Bontshe’s life. Bontshe is asked by the divine powers to name his reward, and all he asks for is a buttered roll to be provided every morning. Was Bontshe the holy fool, saintly Jewish martyr, uncorrupted even when faced with the delights of the next world? Or is he a revolutionary worker who knows that even the demand for the most basic needs will upset the prevailing order? Is he the oppressed human being who failed to articulate his needs during his life and is therefore unable to do so after his death? In that case there is no reward in the hereafter for the suffering in this life, and all should not be accepted as ’God’s will.’

Peretz criticised Jewish society for its treatment of women. In his poem The Three Seamstresses which later became a popular song he depicts the oppression and the anger of the three women. Again, in the story A Woman’s Fury published in 1893 he exposes a sexual division of labour, where the woman had to bear the physical burden of caring for the children and providing a livelihood, whilst the man bore the relatively weightless spiritual burden of religious duties and study.

Peretz was himself imprisoned for revolutionary activities in 1899 but nevertheless expressed his suspicion of the socialist future in his essay Hope and Fear published in 1906; ’There will be no empty stomachs, but souls will go hungry.’ After his imprisonment, and absorbing neo-Romantic influences from European literature, he was drawn to Hasidism*, with its supernatural and mystical elements. For him Hasidic values themselves were spiritual and democratic, accessible to ordinary people, even if the actual Hasidim of his day he considered corrupt and obscurantist.

Sometimes these positive values had to be used even in revolt against God himself if he colluded in human oppression. In his play The Golden Chain (1906) the Hasidic Rabbi refuses to accept the end of the Sabbath, as this represents the world of freedom which is denied him and his followers in the workaday world. In consequence, he is replaced by his son and authority is restored. Later stories originally collected as Hasidic Stories in 1908 and Folktales in 1909 were based on traditional stories and seemed simple on the surface, but with a clear ideology underlining them — the ethic of liberalism replaced the divine imperative, Jewish morality triumphed over Christian authority and the powerless triumphed over the powerful. Emotionally, however, Peretz himself seems to have become increasingly seduced by the traditional values he sought to reject intellectually, and his writing inevitably lost some of its cutting edge. Nonetheless, for the 25 years before his death in 1915, when he lived in Warsaw, he was at the centre of the web of contemporary Jewish intellectual life.

’Here on earth the death of Bontsha the Silent made no impression at all. Ask anyone: Who was Bontsha, how did he live, and how did he die? Did his strength slowly fade, did his heart slowly give out — or did the very marrow of his bones melt under the weight of his burdens? Who knows? Perhaps he just died from not eating — starvation, it’s called.

If a horse, dragging a cart through the streets, should fall, people would run from blocks around to stare, newspapers would write about this fascinating event, a monument would be put up to mark the very spot where the horse had fallen. Had the horse belonged to a race as numerous as that of human beings, he wouldn’t have been paid this honor. How many horses are there, after all? But human beings — there must be a thousand million of them!

Bontsha was a human being; he lived unknown, in silence, and in silence he died. He passed through our world like a shadow. When Bontsha was born no one took a drink of wine; there was no sound of glasses clinking. When he was confirmed he made no speech of celebration. He existed like a grain of sand at the rim of a vast ocean, amid millions of other grains of sand exactly similar, and when the wind at last lifted him up and carried him across to the other shore of that ocean, no-one noticed, no-one at all.

During his lifetime his feet left no mark upon the dust of the streets; after his death the wind blew away the board that marked his grave. The wife of the gravedigger came upon that bit of wood, lying far off from the grave, and she picked it up and used it to make a fire under the potatoes she was cooking; it was just right. Three days after Bontsha’s death no one knew where he lay, neither the gravedigger nor anyone else. If Bontsha had had a headstone, someone, even after a hundred years, might have come across it, might still have been able to read the carved words, and his name, Bontsha the Silent, might not have vanished from this earth.

His likeness remained in no-one’s memory, in no-one’s heart. A shadow! Nothing! Finished!’ (Bontsha the Silent)