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.