In Their Surroundings E-Book

• Herausgeber: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 413

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

From the second half of the nineteenth century through to World War II, Eastern Europe, especially the territories that formerly made up the Pale of Settlement in the Tsarist Empire, witnessed a Jewish cultural flowering that went hand-in-hand with a multifaceted literary productivity in the Hebrew and Yiddish languages. Accompanied and sometimes directly affected by the dramatic political ruptures of the era, many authors experimented with various modernist poetics in the context of a culturally and literarily closely interwoven milieu. This beautifully illustrated catalogue presents for the first time some of the key figures of the era, including in each case a portrait of the author and a close reading of selected texts, including Yosef Ḥayim Brenner, Leah Goldberg, Moyshe Kulbak, and Deborah Vogel. Of particular interest here is the productive entanglement of cultures and literatures, of cultural contact and transfer, and the significance of space and place for the development of modern Jewish literatures.

Leseprobe

Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow

Efrat Gal-Ed, Natasha Gordinsky, Sabine Koller, Yfaat Weiss (eds.)

In Their Surroundings

Localizing Modern Jewish Literatures in Eastern Europe

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

This publication is financed by the Saxon State government out of the State budget approved by the Saxon State Parliament.

Diese Maßnahme wird mitfinanziert durch Steuermittel auf der Grundlage des vom Sächsischen Landtag beschlossenen Haushaltes.

The funding of this publication was generously supported by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF).

© 2023 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Robert-Bosch-Breite 10, 37079 Göttingen, Germany, an imprint of the Brill-Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany; Brill Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria)

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This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International license, at https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666306112. For a copy of this license go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Any use in cases other than those permitted by this license requires the prior written permission from the publisher.

Cover illustration: Reading room of the Strashun Library in Vilna, 1939. © From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

Language editing: Jana Duman

Layout and typesetting: textformart, Göttingen | www.text-form-art.de

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com

ISBN: 978-3-647-99337-9

Contents

Efrat Gal-Ed, Natasha Gordinsky, Sabine Koller, Yfaat Weiss

Preface

David Frishman

Naomi Brenner

Hebrew Critic Par Excellence: David Frishman

Lilah Nethanel

The Threshold of Sensibilities: David Frishman’s Introduction to the Hebrew Translation of George Eliot’s Novel Daniel Deronda (1893)

Uri Nissan Gnessin

Dekel Shay Schory

The Shadows of Death: Uri Nissan Gnessin

Natasha Gordinsky

Staging Provincial Poetics: A Close Reading of Uri Nissan Gnessin’s Ha-ẓidah (Sideways, 1905)

Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner

Matan Hermoni

Between Here, Now, and Then: Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner

Roni Henig

Troubled Speech, Hebrew Subjects, and the Problem of Meaning-Making: Speaking Hebrew in Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner’s Shkhol ve-kishalon(Breakdown and Bereavement, 1920)

Dvoyre Fogel

Anastasiya Lyubas

A Yiddish Modernist from Lwów: Dvoyre Fogel

Anna Maja Misiak

Now Is Before and After: The Suspension of Time in Dvoyre Fogel’s Cycle Mide kleyder (Tired Dresses, 1925–1929)

Moyshe Kulbak

Frieder von Ammon

The Poetics of Birdsong: Moyshe Kulbak

Efrat Gal-Ed

A Delicious Cooing and Chirping: Reading the First Chapter of Moyshe Kulbak’s Munye der foygl-hendler un Malkele zayn vayb (Munye the Bird Seller and Malkele His Wife, 1928)

Ḥayyim Lenski

Enrico Lucca

Always Far from the Center: Ḥayyim Lenski and Hebrew Poetry in Russia between the Wars

Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan

Hebrew Verse and the End of St. Petersburg: A Close Reading of Ḥayyim Lenski’s Ha-yom yarad (The Day Came Down, ca. 1930)

Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky

Tetyana Yakovleva

“I Am the Child of My Time”: Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky

Svetlana Natkovich

A Rhetoric of Evasion: Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky’s Sipur yamai (Story of My Life, 1936)

Dovid Hofshteyn

Werner Nell

Vessels of Verse on Waves of Destruction: Dovid Hofshteyn

Sabine Koller

Names Written on the Ruins of Tyranny …: Dovid Hofshteyn and His Translation of Aleksandr Pushkin’s K Chaadaevu (To Chaadaev, 1938)

Leah Goldberg

Annette Wolf

Rooted and Uprooted: Leah Goldberg in Europe

Sivan Beskin

Visit to Aunt Zlata: Reading a Scene from Ve-hu ha-or(And This Is the Light, 1946) by Leah Goldberg

Yiddish Cultures in Their Surroundings

Daria Vakhrushova

The Soviet Yiddish Literati on Culture: Between Modernism and Sovietism

Gil Weissblei

Milgroim: Unmasking the Hebrew Identity of a Yiddish Journal

Glossary of Spelling of Writers’ Names

Picture Credits

Efrat Gal-Ed, Natasha Gordinsky, Sabine Koller, Yfaat Weiss

Preface

‫”אין דער אמת‘ן זיינען מיר אינאיינעם מיט אונזערשפּראַך און ליטעראַטור און אונזער גאַנצען גייסטיגען פארמעגען —פּאָליטעריטאָריאַל, ד. ה. מיר שוועבען ניט אין דער לופטען, מיר זיינען ניט אפּגעריסען פון באָדען, נאר, פערקעהרט, מיר ציהען די חיונה פון פארשיידענע באָדענס, געפינעןזיך אונטער דעם איינפלוס פון פארשיידענע קלימאַטען, פארשיידענע סביבה‘ס. זייערע אַלעמענס ווירקונגען בעגעגענען זיך, קומען זיך צונויף, שטויסען זיך צוזאַמען אדער בעהעפטען זיך אין אונזער אַלגעמיין נאַציאָנאַלען שאַפען.“‫

“In truth we are, along with our [Yiddish] language, our literature, and our whole intellectual capacity, polyterritorial, that is, we are not afloat in the air, not uprooted from the ground; on the contrary, we draw nurture from various soils, are under the influence of various climate zones, various surroundings. The effects of these all meet one another, join together, come into conflict or unite with our common national work.”

Shmuel Niger, 19221

‫”לבחור לשון כמי שבוחר לו טבעת. הזכות הזאת לבחור בלשון כבטבעת קידושין ולברך עליה, הרי את מקודשת.“‫

“Choose a language as one chooses a ring. This privilege of choosing a language as one does a wedding ring, chanting: with this ring you are my sacred.”

Leah Goldberg, 19462

‫”די יודישע ליטעראַטור געהט חלילה נישט צו גרונד. זי איז איינע און איהר נאָמען איז איינער. נור זי קומט צום לעזער אין צוויי געשטאַלטען, און ווי די שאָלען אויפ׳ן וואָגשאָל שאָקלען זיי זיך איינער אַנטקעגען דער אַנדערער. און אַזוי ווי אין דער נאַטור איז קיין זאַך נישט אַבּסאָלוט — בעוועגען זיך די שאָלען אַרויף און אַראָבּ.“‫

“The Jewish literature is not deteriorat­ing, heaven forbid. It is one and its name is one. Rather, it appears to the reader in two forms, and like the swaying plates of a scale, up and down against each other. And just like in nature, where there are no absolutes, so the scales sway up and down.”

Bal-Makhshoves, 19103

When, in 1910, eminent critic Bal-Makhshoves (“Man of Thoughts,” pen name of Isidor Elyashev) coined the image of two plates (two languages) being part of one scale (one literature) in his article Tsvey shprakhen—eyn eyntsige literatur (Two Languages—One Literature), he aptly promoted the unity of a dynamic bilingual Jewish literature. Bal-Makhshoves is a sagacious and reliable voice when tracing the formation of modern Jewish literatures.4 This profound and far-reaching process began in the second half of the nineteenth century in Eastern Europe, primarily in provincial capitals and towns located in the historical region of the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. The historical, political, and sociocultural constellations of the time had a crucial impact on Jewish literary thinking. Jewish culture in Eastern Europe evolved in close connection with the Central and Eastern European imperial and minority languages specific to the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian cultures. The development led, on the one hand, to the participation of Jews in the intellectual and literary achievements in these languages. On the other hand, it generated a flow of aesthetic ideals and political ideologies from the surrounding majority cultures into the Jewish discourses in the Yiddish and Hebrew languages. The “two forms,” i.e. the literatures in Yiddish and Hebrew, in their polylingual environments were decisive for the evolution of Jewish secular culture from the turn of the nineteenth century onward. While literary works were preoccupied with the existential dilemmas of the Jewish people, they nevertheless relied on the philosophical apparatus of Russian and German literatures and thought (Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aleksandr Pushkin, Fëdor Dostoevskiy, Lev Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Aleksandr Blok, Anna Akhmatova, and many more). The keen interest of early Hebrew and Yiddish writers in Russian and German cultures made way for the Europeanization of modern Jewish literatures.5 An important dimension of this development was the continuing endeavor of translating German and Russian literary and philosophical writings into Hebrew and Yiddish, thereby preserving their humanistic legacy.

Within a vibrant polylingual and multicultural atmosphere, an eventful history marked by revolutions, the breakdown of empires, the rise (or reappearance) of young nations (partly with an inflated sense of nationalism), and mass migration to the New World, a modern Jewish literary thinking took shape. Numerous processes of cultural transfer played a major role in forging the concept of Europe for Eastern European Jewish intellectuals. In Hebrew literature, Uri Nissan Gnessin, Gershon Shofman, or Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner, among others, modelled their literary writings in imagined and real contact zones where European and Russian modernist trends were inspiring paragons. In Gomel, they avidly read and translated Chekhov, admired Charles Baudelaire, discussed the differences in the poetics of Maksim Gor’kiy and Andrey Belyy, and studied German. Whereas at the same time in other places, be it a Volhynian shtetl, Lithuanian Vilna, or the metropolis of Kyiv, their Yiddish-writing colleagues—Dovid Bergelson, Moyshe Kulbak, Perets Markish, and others—were eager to get hold of journals, almanacs, anthologies, or books of Russian Symbolist poetry, Russian and Ukrainian Futurist verse, or German Expressionism.

This concept of European culture was disseminated in the literary imagination of Jewish writers and expanded with the emergence of modernist movements in Europe. Based mainly in Eastern and Central European metropolises, Jewish literatures offered new aesthetic forms through which to understand, and come to terms with, modernity. Jewish intellectuals became the messengers of “travelling concepts,” be they radical political ideas or literary norms and conventions. Their acculturation to hegemonic cultures was accompanied by the adaptation of narrative models and critical paradigms that brought about fundamental changes in the conceptualization of history, Jewish collectiveness, Jewish spaces, and literature itself. However, the encounter of Jewish intellectuals with hegemonic cultures took place in specific regional contexts and through contacts with other, nonimperial cultures. As a result, Eastern European Jewish literatures faced different and even contradictory tendencies: universalism vs. particularism, Russification/Germanization vs. Jewish nationalism, and localism vs. cosmopolitanism.

While Hebrew and Yiddish literatures evolved employing similar strategies, a dominant dynamic between them was the battle between Hebraists and Yiddishists, pursued with much political and ideological vehemence and resulting in considerable bitterness, particularly on the side of the Yiddishists. Nevertheless, looking across the Hebraist-Yiddishist divide from today’s point of view, it could be argued that the two young literatures shared the same vision of what literature ought to be and achieve, and how it should do that. As polyglot intellectuals, some Jewish authors decided to use a single language, while others wrote in both Hebrew and Yiddish. The emerging literatures in the two Jewish languages thus formed one multilingual system, which was constituted by dynamic interactions and linguistic crossovers that could include Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, German, and other languages.

The dynamic multicultural and polyphonic literary life outlined above was the object of investigation of the research project “In Their Surroundings: Localizing Modern Jewish Literatures in Eastern Europe,” funded by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (2017–2019). The project, based in Düsseldorf, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Regensburg, explored important developments in Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in the first decades of the twentieth century in the Eastern European context, utilizing the research possibilities that emerged following the political earthquake of 1989/90. Adding local and spatial perspectives to a comparative study of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in Eastern Europe, it aimed at capturing their regional and transnational impact. The project further examined the dynamic interactions between Jewish literatures and Eastern European literatures as a history of what Mary Louise Pratt calls “contact zones.”6 Written against the backdrop of the dramatic political events of the end of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century, Yiddish and Hebrew works posed radical questions about the future of Jewish culture on the European continent. The discriminatory conditions that encumbered their authors’ cultural ties to the European world required “transversal” thinking;7 a constant resituating of the minority culture and eventual clarification of the relations between the Jewish and European paradigms. What in the historical-ideological process tended toward exclusion and homogenization, acquired an impressively dynamic, pluralizing, and diversifying effect in literature. This arose from a belief not only in the interconnectedness of Jewish literary life but also in its close affinity to the surrounding world, as reflected, for example, in the Yiddish concept of doikayt (“hereness”). For these reasons, the concept of space adopted in this volume is not based on an essentialist and precarious conjunction of nation, language, and territory, but stresses notions of fluidity, permeability, movement, and geographical knowledge. Thus, the project traced literature and cultural knowledge on the move not in terms of homogenization but with respect to their dynamics, productive differences, and pluralism. It explored “sites and relations of [literary and cultural] translation.”8 Guided by the idea of a provincialized, i.e. decentralized, fluid and multifarious modernity, the space was approached from a translational perspective, in an attempt to discern the powerful interactions and the interconnectedness of Jewish literatures with a multicultural envisioned emphasis on space (Eastern Europe) and sites (Gomel, Kyiv, etc.). However, once pointed out on a map, these sites cannot be retained. Although being geographically the same, they are constantly on the move, shifting between the imaginary and the real, as well as between political entities and various languages. In the worst case, places may simply disappear while still represented on a map.

This catalogue is the outcome of a conference which took place from 23 to 25 October 2018 at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in the city of Leipzig. The aim of the conference, entitled “Shared Space—Contact Zones: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in Eastern Europe,” was to bring together different perspectives on Yiddish and Hebrew literatures beyond overly rigid concepts of one national literature, one national literary history, one literary canon. While enabling the encounter of different scholarly traditions, the multilingual conference created a productive Babel-like situation, in which scholars from Israel, Germany, and the United States discussed together Hebrew and Yiddish literary texts in their original and in translation. One of the challenging questions the conference addressed was how this extremely dynamic field of literary contacts, contexts, and intertextual dialogues can be accessed today. The hermeneutic approach at the core of both conference and catalogue might be described with Rita Felski’s recent concept of “transtemporal communities.” It foregrounds the collective dimension of critique as an act “that draws strength from a communal ‘we’ extending across time as well as space.”9

The methodological focal point of the conference was close reading, a “reading in slow motion”10 of Yiddish and Hebrew texts reflecting the following interrelated topics:11 Eastern European urban sites as a poetic space in Jewish literary imagination; literary representations of migration; and relations between Eastern European literatures with Hebrew and Yiddish literature respectively. Within this realm of “contact zones,” the catalogue discusses the transformations of chronotopes and epistemes concerning genres, literary norms, motifs, and ideologies. Itamar Even-Zohar’s idea of literary polysystems, Dan Miron’s integral literary bi-/multilingualism,12 Mieke Bal’s “travelling concepts,” Samuel N. Eisenstadt’s “multiple modernities,” and Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zones” all provide the frame of reference for a multilingual encounter of modern Jewish literatures with manifold cross-references and entanglements.13 The literary scholar and translator Benjamin Harshav once suggested viewing the encounter between early twentieth-century Yiddish and Hebrew writers and the European literary tradition in the following way:

“[T]he history of European literature was discovered by Jewish writers at the end of its development, when it was challenged from within. For the exultant discoverers, that history appeared not as a history but as a synchronic ‘imaginary museum’ where all displays were placed in adjacent rooms, from which they could pick models and influences with no historical order.”14

The structure of this catalogue mirrors one of its essential goals, namely to familiarize the reader with the polyphony of significant Yiddish and Hebrew literary voices that arose in the first half of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Each voice, i.e. each author and one of their literary works, with its “after-life” in diverse cultural contexts, is discussed in an introduction and in a close reading written by two different scholars. Inter alia, the catalogue features texts by Israeli writers Sivan Beskin and Matan Hermoni, thus creating an intriguing dialogue between contemporary literati and modernist prose.

The variety of literary genres—the lyrical poem, short story, novella and novel, ego document—as well as literary translations were crucial for the development of Jewish Eastern European modernism, as they embodied what Mikhail Bakhtin called the creative memory of genre. His assertion that “genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning”15 is especially relevant for the different genres presented in this volume as they adopt and creatively transform European literary models. The decision to explore these texts through the lens of close reading allows for greater attention to these poetic transformations as well as to the texture of literary writings. Furthermore, the renewed practice of reading, as Mieke Bal suggests, may reflect and offer a potential bridge between the “microscopic view”16 and the larger cultural issues that are at stake—in this case, the continuous cultural negotiation between, and juxtaposition of, the minor and major literatures and the intimate connection of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures with their Eastern European surroundings. In these desperate times, may this catalogue make a modest contribution to the long journey through fascinating literary landscapes, some of which have already vanished and others that are on the verge of destruction.

At the end of this preface, we would like to thank all those who have paved the way for our project and, ultimately, for this publication. We extend our deepest gratitude to the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF) for their support and generous funding at different stages of this project. Our special thanks go to the contributing authors who willingly embraced our concept and made their research available to us. We gratefully acknowledge the help of our colleagues in archives and other institutions, above all the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, the National Library of Israel, and the Gnazim Archive—Hebrew Writers Association, who served our requests for text sources and images with the utmost commitment. We moreover wish to express our sincere gratitude to Yael Levi, who initiated the communication with authors and collected much of the text material, Tim Corbett, David B. Greenberg, and Lawrence A. Rosenwald for their English translations, Margarita Lerman for her assistance in reproducing and editing the Hebrew source citations and bibliographic references, and Jana Duman for the language editing of the volume. She did an excellent job. Last but not least, it was our great pleasure to work with our colleagues from the Editorial Department of the Dubnow Institute, namely Petra Klara Gamke-Breitschopf, Carolin Piorun, and, in the final weeks, Felix Müller. Their work has made an invaluable contribution to the final shape and form of this Digital Catalogue.

Düsseldorf/Haifa/Regensburg/Jerusalem/LeipzigFall 2022

1Shmuel Niger, Di gegent-frage in der idisher literatur. An entfer Bal-Makhshovesn [The Territorial Question in Yiddish Literature. A Response to Bal-Makhshoves], in: Di Tsukunft [The Future] 27 (1922), no. 5, 308–314, here 308. Unpublished translation by Yaakov Herskovitz.

2Leah Goldberg, Ve-hu ha-or [And This Is the Light], Merhavia 1946, 205. Unpublished translation by Yaakov Herskovitz.

3See Bal-Makhshoves, Tsvey shprakhen—eyn eyntsige literatur [Two Languages—One Literature], in: idem, Geklibene shriften [Selected Writings], 2 vols., here vol. 2, Vilna 1910, 63–71, here 65. Unpublished translation by Yaakov Herskovitz.

4Dan Miron offers a critical revision of this concept, replacing Bal-Makhshoves’ slogan by “One text (written in two languages)—two totally separate literatures.” See idem, From Continuity to Contiguity. Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking, Stanford, Calif., 2010, 224f. and 282 (quote).

5For the role of the German language in the making of modern Jewish culture, see Marc Volovici, German as a Jewish Problem. The Language Politics of Jewish Nationalism, Stanford, Calif., 2020.

6See Mary Louise Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone, in: Profession (1991), 33–40.

7See Wolfgang Welsch, Vernunft. Die zeitgenössische Vernunftkritik und das Konzept der transversalen Vernunft, Frankfurt a. M. 1995, 762.

8James Clifford, Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass., 1997, 23.

9Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, Chicago, Mich./London 2015, 49.

10Reuben A. Brower, Reading in Slow Motion, in: idem/Richard Poirier (eds.), In Defense of Reading. A Reader’s Approach to Literary Criticism, New York 1962, 4–21.

11On the reappraisal of the concept of “close reading” and its relevance for the study of modernism, see David James (ed.), Modernism and Close Reading, Oxford 2020.

12See Itamar Even-Zohar, Polysystem Theory, in: Poetics Today 1 (1979), no. 1–2, 287–310; Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity, chap. 9, esp. 287–295.

13Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide, Toronto 2002; Samuel N. Eisenstadt, Multiple Modernities, in: Dædalus 129 (2000), no. 1, 1–29; Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone.

14Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, Stanford, Calif., 1993, 28.

15Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and transl. by Caryl Emerson, with an introduction by Wayne C. Booth, Minneapolis, Minn., 1984, 105.

16Mieke Bal, Close-Ups and Mirrors. The Return of Close Reading, with a Difference, in: idem (ed.), The Practice of Cultural Analysis. Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation, Stanford, Calif., 1999, 137–142, here 138.

In Their Surroundings | doi.org/10.13109/9783666306112.21

Map of Europe in the Rand, McNally & Company’s Indexed Atlas of the World, Chicago, Ill., 1898.

David Frishman

Naomi Brenner

Hebrew Critic Par Excellence: David Frishman

David Frishman was the preeminent critic of Hebrew literature in Eastern Europe during the last years of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. He advocated passionately for the creation of a distinctly European Hebrew literature and rarely hesitated to castigate writers who failed, in his view, to develop lyricism and other aesthetic features he argued were essential. As a translator, he created Hebrew versions of many European fictional and philosophical works held in high regard, including texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, George Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. As an editor, he wielded power at many publishing venues for Hebrew writers young and old, such as Ha-Dor (The Generation), Ha-Boker (The Morning), Ha-Tekufah (The Era), and the Stybel publishing house. His literary work in Hebrew and Yiddish, however, was often overshadowed by his other literary pursuits. Still, Frishman’s extensive efforts as a cultural agent left a lasting mark on the development of modern Hebrew literary culture.

Born in Zgierz, near Łódź, in 1859,1 Frishman spent time in many of the centers of Jewish culture of the time: Warsaw, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Odessa (fig. 1). He started publishing poems, translations, and articles in Hebrew at a young age in a variety of Eastern European Hebrew periodicals. By the late 1880s, he was writing for the Yiddish press as well; his first Yiddish poem, Oyfn bergl (On the Hill), appeared in 1888. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Eastern European Yiddish newspapers such as Yudishes Folks-Blat (Jewish People’s Newspaper), Der Yud (The Jew), Der Fraynd (The Friend), and Haynt (Today) were publishing his lyric poetry, stories, and feuilletons on a regular basis.2 ­Frishman also took the first of many positions as editor at the daily newspaper Ha-Yom (Today, 1886–1888) in St. Petersburg, which allowed him to start shaping the kind of Hebrew periodical he believed his time needed. The growing press was essential to the development of Hebrew literature, as most writers began their literary careers publishing in various newspapers and periodicals. Frishman’s editorial positions at Hebrew outlets and publishing houses granted him immense influence over the selection of writers and texts for publication.

Fig. 1: David Frishman, undated.

Even before his rise to authority in literary circles, Frishman made a name for himself in Hebrew letters with his scathing criticism of Jewish cultu­ral institu­tions, including the venerable Russian Jewish weekly Ha-Meliẓ(The Advocate). In 1883, for example, the young Frishman published a small pamphlet entitled Tohu va-vohu (Chaos), which attacked several of the most prominent Hebrew writers and critics of the time. Ha-Meliẓ(1860–1904) published the works of most Hebrew writers active in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century and was an important platform for many prominent maskilim, proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). By the 1880s, Ha-Meliẓsupported ḥibbat ẓiyon (Fondness for Zion), a pre-Zionist nationalist movement advocating for Jews to settle in Palestine.Frishman begins his essay by dramatically narrating his shock when he received a telegram informing him of Ha-Meliẓ’s plan to start publishing twice a week. In elegant, biting prose, Frishman launches into an extended critique of the newspaper and some of its best-known contributors, arguing that the paper featured self-serving and derivative journalism. Attacking prominent writers such as Saul Israel Hurwitz and Yehalel (Yehuda Leib Levin), as well as Aleksander Zederbaum, the long-time editor of Ha-Meliẓ, Frishman ridicules what he saw as their facile imitation of European literary ideas, sardonically noting Hurwitz’s confusion of Auguste Comte with Immanuel Kant. Referring to Ha-Meliẓ’s contributors as “frogs” who infested various periodicals, he writes, “their idioms are dreadful, the words that issue from their lips are wanting, and their entire power emanates from the noise and storm of their words that a simple man like me cannot, for the world, understand.”3 Not surprisingly, Frishman made a lot of enemies within the Hebrew literary establishment, especially since this was only one of the first of what would be many controversies provoked by his critical essays.

Frishman’s Tohu va-vohu is often regarded as a rejection of the maskilicideas espoused by many of these writers, as part of a broader transition from the Haskalah to a new phase called the teḥiya, the national revival, in the wake of Russian pogroms in the early 1880s. While Frishman’s Hebrew aestheticism differs from maskilic approaches to Hebrew literature, his critique of Ha-Meliẓis driven by his rejection of Zionism, a stance that came to define Frishman’s writing. Iris Parush delineates two related themes that begin to emerge in texts like Tohu va-vohu: Frishman’s belief that the creation of a national homeland was both impossible and inadvisable.4 Frishman was deeply invested in questions of national revival, but he rejected both political and spiritual Zionism as solutions to the challenges facing Jews in the modern world. In 1899, only two years after the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Frishman writes in a letter to Mordecai (Marcus) Ehrenpreis: “I have never felt myself as lonely and solitary as now […]. The few friends that I had are leaving me one by one, day by day, going to one place—Zionism, and I am left alone and lonely.”5 Despite the power Frishman maintained as an editor, he was convinced that his politics, namely his resistance to Zionism, curtailed his influence and his status in Hebrew literature.

While Frishman’s harsh rejection of Zionism changed later on in his career—scholars still debate whether his poetry and essays of the time cautiously embrace Zionist ideas or if he essentially modulates his opposition6—he remained committed to his own national cultural vision in his numerous essays and feuilletons. From the 1880s on, Frishman argued that literature was an essential foundation for national revival. As he wrote in 1913, “All of my hopes have always been in literature—and only literature. It has been a life-saver for me, the only one that we have left … National revival begins with literary revival.”7 Belletristic literature, he argued, was the only way to rehabilitate the Jewish soul.

Frishman’s goal, however, was not the creation of a particularistic, nationalistic Hebrew literature, but rather a modern, universal literature in Hebrew. His understanding of “universal” was strongly oriented toward Europe, since he regarded classical and modern European thought and literature as both inspiration and raw material for his cultural project. While he criticized contemporary writers for their shallow imitations of European literary trends, Frishman envisioned the creation of a modern Hebrew literature that was thoroughly European in its sensibilities. His focus on individual sensibilities cultivated in and through literature represents a significant contrast to the collectivist mentality that came to define twentieth-century Hebrew Zionist culture.

Frishman’s strong inclination toward European literature is evident in his essays and many translations. Starting in the 1890s, after Frishman spent four years at the University of Breslau, he translated a remarkable number of literary texts into Hebrew, including German, Russian, French, and English poetry, prose and plays by Goethe, Aleksandr Pushkin, Heinrich Heine, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Hans Christian Andersen, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, George Eliot, and more. While these works demonstrate Frishman’s supple Hebrew and stylistic command, his commentary—in prefaces to his own translations, letters, and reviews of other people’s translations—provide great insight into the cultural and political work of translation. For Frishman, both the act and the product of translation were, in Danielle Drori’s words, “an arena of cultural battles,” in which intellectuals shaped and revealed their distinct aesthetic and ideological visions.8 In his introduction to the Hebrew translation of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1893), Frishman posits translation as a way of constructing a modern Hebrew subject, as he attempts to balance widespread Zionist interpretations of the novel with his own political reservations. In the preface to his translation of Byron’s Cain (1900), he seeks to mediate between European Romanticism and Hebrew literature, calling attention to the Romantic themes that he held in high esteem, such as tragic heroes and their moral and metaphysical rebellions.9

These translations, in addition to Frishman’s other writings, continued at a remarkable pace during and after World War I. As the founding editor of the Stybel publishing house and the highly regarded literary quarterly Ha-Tekufah, Frishman facilitated the publication of many translations into Hebrew and served an instrumental role in Stybel’s efforts to promote the development of a cosmopolitan Hebrew culture. Under his stewardship, the press embarked on an ambitious program of translation, focusing on a list of European and world literature chosen by Frishman. Kenneth Moss argues that Frishman’s editorial efforts represented a major shift from translation as a means of reeducating the Jewish reader to one of reinventing Hebrew culture as part of a pan-European literature.10

Frishman was not alone in his efforts to expand and transform Hebrew literature through European literary tradition. The 1890s saw confrontations between Aḥad Ha-Am and a group of younger writers over the suitability of European literary values for Jewish literature, and debates over the desirability and adequacy of Hebrew translations of European works by the Tushiyah publishing house. Frishman’s rejection of Jewish particularism, however, drew a great deal of attention as it highlighted what was perceived as the radical nature of his aestheticism. In 1908, Frishman attacked Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, who was recognized by many contemporaries as the Jewish national poet. Frishman dared to criticize Bialik’s “prophetic” early-twentieth-century poems that adopted an authoritative and often wrathful prophetic voice, advising Bialik to return to his earlier lyricism.11

Fig. 2: David Frishman (left) with Ḥayyim NaḤman Bialik (right) in conversation, drawing by Leonid Paster­nak, 1921 or 1922.

But it was Frishman’s second public repudiation of Bialik that demonstrated his own approach to the Jewish cultural past and future. In 1913, Bialik presented an ambitious project of cultural ingathering (kinus), arguing that Jewish texts must be collected and translated into Hebrew (fig. 2). Bialik insisted that a vibrant modern Hebrew culture had to preserve the masterpieces of Jewish tradition and that “national artists” must create a new literary corpus from historical Jewish linguistic and literary reservoirs.12 Frishman countered Bialik’s project with a proposal of his own: to provide financial support for writers to produce new literary works in Hebrew and attract young readers. His plan was far less developed than Bialik’s, but it represented a fundamental difference in historical perspective and cultural values. Bialik looked to the past to craft a Jewish national culture, seeking to balance European influences with Jewish particularity. Frishman found little of value in the Jewish cultural past and in historical categories more generally, arguing that Hebrew literature needed to emulate European literary traditions instead of resuscitating Jewish literary traditions. He stressed that the new generation of readers, no longer educated in the traditional heder or yeshiva, needed new literature in Hebrew that resonated with their modern sensibilities, otherwise they would abandon Hebrew for other languages. In a clear rebuke of Bialik, Frishman proclaimed, “We need not the book, but literature, not the dead library, but living creation […]. Our ancient literature is our genius. But we must show our sons not our genius […], but our strength to give birth, to create and to create no less than others do.”13

While this sense of urgency drove Frishman’s work in the last decade before his death in 1922, it is striking that his own creative efforts—in poetry and prose—have received far less attention than his criticism. Menuḥa ­Gilboa traces the evolution of Frishman’s poetics, and argues that, by the last decades of his career, Frishman combined the Romanticism that had defined much of his writing, particularly in poetry, with expectations for realism in fiction, championing lyric pathos within a Realist literary framework.14 Perhaps most notable in the context of his political and aesthetic views are a series of nine stories that Frishman published in Hebrew and Yiddish from 1909 onward and which appeared posthumously, in 1923, in the Hebrew collection Ba-midbar (In the Wilderness). Given Frishman’s comments about the Jewish literary tradition, the engagement of the stories with the Hebrew Bible, specifically the Israelites’ experience in the wilderness, might be surprising. In the short story published in Hebrew as Meḥolot and in Yiddish as Der tants (Dances and Dance respectively), a woman mourns the loss of her lover, rumored to have returned to Egypt, as she moves with her tribe from site to site in the desert, culminating in a frenzied scene, as the high priest creates the golden calf. The protagonist is estranged from the collective, though she ultimately capitulates to the pressures of a misguided collective will. Sorer u-moreh and Der soyrer umoyre (Rebellious Son) narrate the fate of a young man who dies standing up for the poor and downtrodden and against the corruption of the priests, blaming his murder on their hunger for power and misguided mob justice. Frishman’s stories are set in biblical times and recounted with flourishes of neo-biblical language, but speak to modern sensibilities and feature searing critiques of Eastern European Jewish society. They valorize men and women who rebel against the authority of the priests and the law given at Sinai, combining a biblical facade with distinctly European concepts: Schopenhauer’s idea of art as a visionary medium, Nietzsche’s perspective on the supremacy of aesthetics, and Anatole France’s reimagining of historical narratives as spiritual redemption.15 The stylized desert becomes, in Frishman’s lyrical prose, a space for the critique of Eastern European Jewish life and the imagination of alternative modern Jewish subjectivities.

Fig. 3: The literary journal Ha-Teku­fah, edited by ­David Frishman from 1918 to 1922.

Several of these stories appeared in Ha-Tekufah, the literary journal Frishman edited during the last four years of his life, along with a variety of poems; new installments in his series on Hebrew literature, Mikhtavim ḥadashim al davar ha-sifrut (New Letters on Literature); translations of works by Rabidranath Tagore, Goethe, Heine, and Byron; and many assorted essays and reviews (fig. 3). This remarkable range of publications—just a fraction of his immense corpus—demonstrates Frishman’s instrumental role in developing modern Hebrew literature and his sustained commitment to lyricism as the foundation for a culture that he argued could be both Hebrew and universal.

Literature

Danielle Drori, A Translator against Translation. David Frishman and the Centrality of Translation in Early 20th-Century Hebrew Literature and Jewish National Politics, in: PaRDeS 25 (2019), 43–56.

David Frishman, Kol kitve David Frishman [Collected Works of David Frishman], 9 vols., ed. by Lili Frishman, Warsaw/New York 1937.

MenuḤa Gilboa, Bein re’alizm le-romantikah. Al darko shel David Frishman ba-vikoret[Between Realism and Romanticism. On David Frishman’s Path in Criticism], Tel Aviv 1975.

MenuḤa Gilboa (ed.), David Frishman. MivḤar ma’amare bikoret al yeẓirato[David Frishman. A Selection of Critical Articles on His Work], Tel Aviv 1988.

Iris Parush, Kanon sifruti ve-ide’ologiya le’umit. Bikoret ha-sifrut shel Frishman be-hashwa’ah le-vikoret ha-sifrut shel Klozner ve-Brener[Literary Canon and National Ideology. Frishman’s Literary Criticism in Comparison to Klausner’s and Brenner’s Literary Criticism], Jerusalem 1992.

Author

Naomi Brenner is an associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on Jewish literary multilingualism and translation, the emergence of popular fiction in Hebrew and Yiddish, and the feuilleton and modern Jewish cultures. Selected Publications: David Bergelson in Hebrew. Translation as Literary Memorialization, in: Prooftexts. A Journal of Jewish Literary History 37 (2019), no. 3, 642–655; The Many Lives of Sabina. “Trashy” Fiction and Multilingualism, in: Dibur. Literary Journal 7 (2019); Translation as Testimony. Hebrew Translations of Yiddish Literature in the 1940s, in: East European Jewish Affairs 48 (2018), 263–283; Lingering Bilingualism. Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact, Syracuse, N.Y., 2016.

1There is uncertainty among critics about when Frishman was born. Getzel Kressel lists 1859 in his lexicon, other lexicons suggest 1863, and Frishman himself writes in a letter he was born in 1865. See idem, Leksikon ha-sifrut ha-ivrit ba-dorot ha-aḤaronim [Lexicon of the Hebrew Literature of Recent Generations], Merhavia 1967, 668f.; Eliezer Malakhi, Igrot David Frishman. Im temunoto ve-eẓem ketav yado [Letters from David Frishman. With a Picture of Him and the Manuscript Itself], ed. by Lili Frishman, New York 1927, 7; Shalom Kramer, Frishman ha-mevaker [Frishman the Critic], Jerusalem 1984, 11.

2For a detailed description of Frishman’s Yiddish work, see Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye [Lexicon of Yiddish Literature, Press, and Philology], 4 vols., here vol. 3, Vilna 1929, col. 204–228.

3David Frishman, Kol kitve David Frishman [Collected Works of David Frishman], 9 vols., here vol. 4, ed. by Lili Frishman, Warsaw/New York 1937, 43.

4Iris Parush, Kanon sifruti ve-ide’ologiya le’umit. Bikoret ha-sifrut shel Frishman be-hashwa’ah le-vikoret ha-sifrut shel Klozner ve-Brener [Literary Canon and National Ideology. Frishman’s Literary Criticism in Comparison to Klausner’s and Brenner’s Literary Criticism], Jerusalem 1992, 19.

5Cit. in Parush, Kanon sifruti ve-ide’ologiya le’umit, 27.

6Many critics have analyzed Frishman’s relationship with Zionism. For example, see David Fishelov, Tirgumo shel Frishman le-“Kayin” me’et Byron, u-mashma’utaw [Frishman’s Translation of “Cain” by Byron, and Its Meaning], in: MeḤkerei Yerushalayim be-sifrut ivrit/Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 24 (2011), 125–142; Kramer, Frishman ha-mevaker, 28–32; Parush, Kanon sifruti ve-ide’ologiya le’umit, 17–32.

7Frishman, Kol kitve David Frishman, vol. 8, 54.

8Danielle Drori, A Translator against Translation. David Frishman and the Centrality of Translation in Early 20th-Century Hebrew Literature and Jewish National Politics, in: PaRDeS 25 (2019), 43–56, here 44 and 52.

9Fishelov, Tirgumo shel Frishman le-Kayin me’et Byron u-mashma’utaw, 130.

10Kenneth B. Moss, Not The Dybbuk but Don Quixote. Translation, Deparochialization, and Nationalism in Jewish Culture, in: Benjamin Nathans/Gabriella Safran (eds.), Culture Front. Representing Jews in Eastern Europe, Philadelphia, Pa., 2008, 196–240, here 207f.

11Frishman, Kol kitve David Frishman, vol. 5, 170–178.

12See Ḥayim NaḤman Bialik, Ha-sefer ha-ivri [The Hebrew Book], in: idem, Kol kitve Ḥ. N. Bialik [Collected Works of Ḥ. N. Bialik], Tel Aviv 1971, 194–199; and his description of Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher Sforim) as “the first national artist” in idem, Mendele ve-shloshet ha-krakhim [Mendele and the Three Volumes], in: ibid., 242–245.

13Frishman, Kol kitve David Frishman, vol. 8, 58f.

14MenuḤa Gilboa, Bein re’alizm le-romantikah. Al darko shel David Frishman ba-­vikoret [Between Realism and Romanticism. On David Frishman’s Path in Criticism], Tel Aviv 1975, 170.

15Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination, Ithaca, N. Y., 2005, 44.

In Their Surroundings | doi.org/10.13109/9783666306112.21

Lilah Nethanel

The Threshold of Sensibilities: David Frishman’s Introduction to the Hebrew Translation of George Eliot’s Novel Daniel Deronda (1893)

This article presents a new reading of David Frishman’s 1893 introduction to his Hebrew translation of the novel Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. Frishman was a pivotal cultural agent of modern European Hebrew literature, which his translations most beautifully reveal as a culture caught in between, in motion, and in constant reconfiguration. He welcomed the influences of neighboring book cultures. In fact, he believed that Jewish cultural particularism could only be affirmed through the dialogue with other cultures, by means of translation and adaptation.

In what follows, I will discuss Frishman’s cultural vision and concept of modern European Hebrew literature, with a focus on his early translations. Based on the introduction to his translated work Daniel Dironda, I will explore his conflictual position on this particular translation. The last section of the article is dedicated to Frishman’s interpretation of the revival of Jewish national culture as a late “age of sensibilities.”

David Frishman’s Cultural Vision

The symbolic assets of modern Jewish literature are to be located beyond the borders of the cities where its authors, publishers, and readers were based. While the majority of Frishman’s early Hebrew works were printed in Warsaw, his literary and critical output expresses a complex composition of cultural influences.

As a Hebrew author under the influence of a rising new Jewish subjectivity, Frishman incorporated in his works Romantic themes and narratives, the questions of revolt and tradition, alienation and origin. He experimented with a modern performative literary expression, drawing on Jewish thought and biblical themes, on the one hand, and the urban and industrialized European literary sphere, on the other. One of his early works, published in 1900, is a Hebrew translation of George Gordon Byron’s play Cain. Byron’s romantic return to the biblical ancestry of the sin is transformed by Frishman into a complex cultural gesture of restoring the biblical Hebrew language. He developed this cultural gesture further in a cycle of biblical short stories entitled Ba-midbar (In the Desert). A modern interpretation of the exodus of the People of Israel from the Book of Numbers, Frishman uses the themes of exile and return to tell a romantic legend of fear and longing, lyric perceptions, and transgressive figures, following Byron’s model.1

Fig. 1: The writers David Frishman, Sholem Abramovitsh, and Yankev Dinezon (second row, third to fifth from left) together with the teachers of the Jarocziński Trade School in Łódź, 1909.

Rather than an exemplary novelist or poet, Frishman was mainly a cultural agent, a translator and editor, drafting the structure and outlines of the library of modern Hebrew writings (fig. 1). As such, his work gave rise to a most intriguing Jewish particularism, which could only be established and recognized on a semi-global scale, that is, in between other national cultures, in correspondence with them and under their influence.2

Frishman’s documented conflict with Zionism reveals the fundamental principles of his national cultural vision.3 Significantly different from the symbolic assets of modern nationalism, Frishman’s literary activity was not based on narratives but on sensibilities.4 He envisioned the creation of a modern European Hebrew literature, mainly by means of translation. Far from encouraging direct imitation—in fact, he resented the Hebrew authors of his time who facilely emulated the style of European authors—he strove to achieve a unique Hebrew performance of the European literary canon and to develop a far more complex model of cultural influence.5 His vision was to expand the Hebrew literary expression, since literature was, in his understanding, crucial for the conception of a new modern Jewish subjectivity, the only language capable of representing the social and cultural issues of the time: alienation and banishment, the meaning of ancient cultures and the origins of culture, the quest for a modern Jewish identity.

Frishman added detailed introductions to several of his early translations in which he presented the original literary work and its author and argued for the necessity and importance of the translation. These texts are important sources from which to draw a picture of Frishman’s cultural vision and notion of influence.

Frishman’s Introduction to Daniel Dironda

First published in 1893, Frishman’s translation of Daniel Deronda by George Eliot appeared around fifteen years after the original English version of 1876.6 With a maze of national identities at its center, the novel recounts the revelation of Daniel Deronda’s Jewish origins and reflects on the decadent nationalism of the nobility in mid-nineteenth-century England. It presents two narratives: that of the English nobility, embodied in the female protagonist, Gwendolen Harleth, and of the Jewish minority, whose increasing embrace of modern nationalism is viewed through the eyes of Daniel Deronda (fig. 2).7

The publication of the novel’s Hebrew translation followed the rise of the Zionist movement and was received by the public as a proto-Zionist literary work. Frishman shortened the first half of the original text, beginning with Gwendolen’s early life and ending with her romance and engagement to the wealthy Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt.8 As a result, the translation is marked by a much greater focus on the figure of Daniel Deronda and his quest for answers about his Jewish identity.

Far from a mere transmission of the original material, the Hebrew translation constitutes a cultural performance, radically altering the ­novel’s narrative center and thematic scope. This cultural performance was encouraged by political tendencies within both, the Hebrew literary field, above all editors and publishing houses, as well as the public, i.e. potential readers. The initial publisher of the translation, Aḥiasaf in Warsaw, was in fact a Zionist institution, founded by Ben-Avigdor (Abraham Leib Shalkovich), himself a novelist and literary agent.9

In the publisher’s foreword of the 1893 edition, the Zionist perspective is made explicit (fig. 3). It is presented as primary justification for the publication of the Hebrew translation: “Since the novel is distinguished, marvelous and most of its content is dedicated to the Jewish people, their merits and aspirations […], who would refuse to admit that this admirable book should be translated into Hebrew for the Hebrew readership?”10

Fig. 2: Gwendolen ­Harleth at the roulette table.

The author indicates that “most of the novel” is dedicated to unique traits and hopes of the People of Israel. This perception is reinforced in the translated version by omitting much of the story’s first part and focusing on its second “Jewish” part. Frishman’s introduction follows and underpins the publisher’s foreword, stressing the political leaning of the novel toward Jewish national revival. As if to give his formal consent to the Zionist interpretation, Frishman writes: “Upon its publication, critics said about this book that ever since Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, nothing like it had been written about the Jewish people [the People of Israel] and their faith, their tribulations and futures, and everything else concerning it, as well as its legacy.”11

Fig. 3: Title page of the Hebrew translation of Daniel Deronda.

But in the following sentence, Frishman expresses his reservations about the political role contributed to the novel: “And this is not merely a book about philosophy, as the book Lessing wrote: It will capture the reader’s interest not only because of its scholarship, but through the many imaginative scenes the narrative includes.”12 Frishman’s cultural aspiration in translating Daniel Deronda into Hebrew differs from its presumed political affinity with the Jewish readership: Eliot’s philosemitic approach and her support of the rising Jewish nationalism. By pointing at the importance of “the story which allures the reader’s heart,” Frishman suggests that the literary condition of the national revival belongs to the emotive order rather than the rational or “philosophical” one.13 Looking at the translated version, it seems that Frishman worked against this argument, by consenting to omit many of the “attractive images” the novel contains. In the following paragraph from the introduction, he discusses this editorial decision (figs. 4 and 5):

“Why has this wonderful story not been translated until now? It is because the first part of the story does not deal at all with Jewish and Hebrew matters only, but with life in general and that of the English aristocracy and their families. And so the translators—fearing that this first part would be taxing for the Hebrew readership and cause them to lose patience, while waiting for the other parts—refrained. This was on the mind of the present Hebrew translator as he offers you his translation, and this is what moved him to write this short introduction. The [novel’s] first part, [like the rest] too, by means of its rich imagery, and especially its many reflections based on psychology and causality, extends much wisdom to any reader, any human. But for any reader who wishes to read this novel as a Hebrew, the translator felt obliged to adjust and abridge this first part.”14

The abridged translation placed Frishman in a conflictual position. In the thriving Hebrew book culture of late nineteenth-century Warsaw—with the translation of contemporary European literature and the popularization of modern Hebrew reading—the fundamental question of Jewish modernization resonated once more: What was the designation of Jewish particularism and how did it relate to the European idea of universalism? Frishman’s distinction between the reader as a human being and as a national “Hebrew” evoked a remotely similar notion held by maskilic author Naphtali Herz Wessely (1725–1805). In Wessely’s 1782 manifest Divre shalom ve-emet (Words of Peace and Truth), he articulated the rise of Jewish modernity by distinguishing between secular and religious knowledge. This distinction was further elaborated by Eastern European Jewish thinkers throughout the nineteenth century, until it reached a significant culmination in the national revival period. By conjuring a universal image of the reader, “the reader as a human being,” Frishman leads the discussion beyond the maze of national identities, to the question of Jewish subjectivity. To him, this was the hallmark of particularism.

Figs. 4 and 5: Fragment of David Frishman’s preface to Daniel Dironda.